Posted on 07/18/2006 7:45:03 AM PDT by Pokey78
Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps.
But the passage that really stopped me short was this:
"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."
That's Lawrence Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois. And the phrase that stuck was that bit about artificially pacifying the past. We've grown used to the biases of popular culture. If a British officer meets a native -- African, Indian, whatever -- in any movie, play or novel of the last 30 years, the Englishman will be a sneering supercilious sadist and the native will be a dignified man of peace in perfect harmony with his environment in whose tribal language there is not even a word for "war" or "killing" or "weapons of mass destruction." A few years ago, I asked Tim Rice, who'd just written the lyrics for Disney's Aladdin and The Lion King, why he wasn't doing Pocahontas. "Well, the minute they mentioned it," he said, "I knew the Brits would be the bad guys. I felt it was my patriotic duty to decline." Sure enough, when the film came out, John Smith and his men were the bringers of environmental devastation to the New World. "They prowl the earth like ravenous wolves," warns the medicine man, whereas Chief Powhatan wants everyone to be "guided to a place of peace." Fortunately, Captain Smith comes to learn from Pocahontas how to "paint with all the colours of the wind."
In reality, Pocahontas's fellow Algonquin Indians were preyed on by the Iroquois, "who took captives home to torture them before death," observes Nicholas Wade en passant. The Iroquois? Surely not. Only a year or two back, the ethnic grievance lobby managed to persuade Congress to pass a resolution that the United States Constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation -- which would have been news to the dead white males who wrote it. With Disney movies, one assumes it's just the modishness of showbiz ignoramuses and whatever multiculti theorists they've put on the payroll as consultants. But professor Keeley and Steven LeBlanc of Harvard disclose almost as an aside that, in fact, their scientific colleagues were equally invested in the notion of the noble primitive living in peace with nature and his fellow man, even though no such creature appears to have existed. "Most archaeologists," says LeBlanc, "ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years Mayan records have been deciphered. Contrary to archaeologists' wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents.... The large number of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money."
And on, and on. Do you remember that fabulously preserved 5,000-year-old man they found in a glacier in 1991? He had one of those copper axes the experts assured us were an early unit of currency. Unfortunately for this theory, he had it hafted in a manner that suggested he wasn't asking, "Can you break a twenty?" "He also had with him," notes professor Keeley, "a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change." Nonetheless, anthropologists concluded that he was a shepherd who had fallen asleep and frozen peacefully to death in a snowstorm. Then the X-ray results came back and showed he had an arrowhead in him.
Not for the first time, the experts turn out to be playing what children call "Opposite Land." There's more truth in Cole Porter's couplet from Find Me A Primitive Man:
I don't mean the kind that belongs to a club But the kind that has a club that belongs to him.
Although Porter was the kind that belongs to a club, the second line accurately conveys his own taste in men. He'd have been very annoyed if Mister Primitive had turned out to be some mellow colours-of-your-windiness hippy-dippy granola-cruncher.
Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."
Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? And to the point of pretending a bunch of torturing marauders devised the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. We do it for the same reason we indulge behaviour like that at Caledonia, Ont. We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.
I was interested to read Wade's book after a month in which men raised in suburban Ontario were charged with a terrorist plot that included plans to behead the Prime Minister, and the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River. The Mexican drug gangs weren't Muslim last time I checked, but evidently decapitation isn't just for jihadists anymore: if you want to get ahead, get a head. A couple of years back, I came across a column in The East African by Charles Onyango-Obbo musing on the return of cannibalism to the Dark Continent. Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo (four million dead but, as they haven't found a way to pin it on Bush, nobody cares) had been making victims' relatives eat the body parts of their loved ones. You'll recall that, when Samuel Doe was toppled as Liberia's leader, he was served a last meal of his own ears. His killers kept his genitals for themselves, under the belief that if you eat a man's penis you acquire his powers. One swallow doesn't make a summer, of course, but I wonder sometimes if we're not heading toward a long night of re-primitivization. In his shrewd book Civilization And Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes:
"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary."
It's worse than Harris thinks. We're not merely "forgetful." We've constructed a fantasy past in which primitive societies lived in peace and security with nary a fear that their crops would be stolen or their children enslaved. War has been the natural condition of mankind for thousands of years, and our civilization is a very fragile exception to that. What does it say about us that so many of our elites believe exactly the opposite -- that we are a monstrous violent rupture with our primitive pacifist ancestors? It's never a good idea to put reality up for grabs. You can bet your highest-denomination axe on that.
He along with Voltaire are buried in the Panthéon, which to me is man's greatest work of architecture. I spend many hours in there or in the cafe outside whenever I am in Rome.
Eckert's book on Tecumseh is exceptional.
Much of his Shawnee tribe and Cherokee relatives (mother's tribe) revered him deeply in his day.
Very good points.
Especially important when you consider the relatively small size of the Roman state at the time.
Hannibal killed something like 150,000 to 200,000 Roman and allied soldiers in two years. That's out of a total population of perhaps 5M. That's equivalent to America losing perhaps 12M to 15M in two years.
Great Article!
Oops, wrong Pantheon.
Great article, as always.
T.S. Eliot, writing years ago about permissive education, said that moderns fear that they are going to "repress" their children - but there are some things that should be repressed!
Another great Mark Steyn - btw, for people who aren't familiar with the Lee Harris book, it's definitely worth a read.
The great anthropologists like Marvin Harris (as opposed to the intellectual pygmies we find in academe today) were unafraid to tackle the issue of war in primitive societies. In Harris's 'Cannibals and Kings' he devotes a chapter to the "Origin of War". Significantly, Harris found that anthropologists had found only a handful of societies that ostensibly did not make war. However, Harris found that those usually mentioned (Andaman Islanders, Shoshoni, Yaghan of Patagonia, Tasaday of the Philippines) were really refugee cultures. He notes that warfare is as old as time, and even the famous Peking Man had his skull smashed at the base, an indication of warfare.
That is a great article. Completly true. I have read a lot of James Fenemore Cooper, most notably, "The Leatherstocking Tales," and he portrays the Indians as a bunch of warring saveges.
I will have to check that out! Tecumseh was very popular in the area I grew up in, except among the Native Americans. Don't remember exactly why.
A small mesa, sure. As at Acoma.
I'm speaking of the large mesas such as at Mesa Verde, which are really more like a plain or plateau cut by canyons. Once the enemy was on the mesa, which was much too large to control access to, the pueblos were definitely not defensible without changing their entire character. Rather than build castles, the Anasazi logically moved into the cliff dwellings.
Oh, good grief! Why must everything end up having to do with the Palestinians?
And the Huron were known to be some of the fiercest, and barbarically cruel, of the tribes.
No group of peoples has a lock on inhumanity to man - If only two people were left on the face of the earth, I suspicion they would be at one another's throats...
Why the facts that the aborigines of the Americas warred with another is supposed to be largely unknown is merely the supposition of someone who has not read the histories and documentations.
It always amuses me when someone learns something for the first time themselves, they assume no one else ever knew either...
:o)
Calling: Donner...party of five...Donner...party of...
...uh, four...
There also seems to be an elitist bias that automatically attributes being poor with having been victimized by society. In many cases its the result of their own laziness or shiftlessness. Great article. Thanks for posting.
I took an anthropology course a while back and had to watch a video serious called, "A Poor Man Shames us all". It was all about how great and good these indiginous tribes were versus our Western hegemoney. It was sickening, and every single paper I had to write about every episode I broke down the BS that the producers of this garbage were trying to sell. I did make some points with the young mush heads in the class with me.
If there were enough of us left, we would go to war against them, but in today's climate, your suggestion would probably work better.
Debate is good; dogma bad. Let's then just say that the Zooarcheological evidence indicates that the late Pleistocene mass extinctions (in say, the Americas) strongly coincided with arrival of skilled human hunters. Whether aboriginal overkill or ecological change brought on by the burning of fire-sensitive vegetation is the cause of the disappearance of large mammals, it still gives lie to the silly notion that the "natives" live in harmony with Mother Nature.
I guess that's what comes of establishing your civilization in a swamp -- shortage of protein.
But we should take a page out of their book, you know, the Noble Savage and all ...
I don't remember any European civilization that practiced cannibalism as a routine matter. But that must be because I'm seeing history through a Eurocentric prism ...
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