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.
How did your professor take that?
CA....
Then why isn't SanFran the center of the universe?
One swallow doesn't make a summer, of course [...]
Oh, well maybe that's why.
They 'killed' for protein and put on a nice dinner show.
Interesting post (#42). I accept your criticism of the word "need." It has been many years since I read Marvin Harris, but I think that he (or someone else) indicated that the Aztec agriculture was inadequate. I "need" to revisit the research..... Relavent in a way now since the professors of Aztlan want to revisit [sic] their paradise on California etc.
He'd probably been out hunting with his Vice-Chieftan.
This is just another great article popping the PC bubble of Rousseau's primitive lovelies. The Left really are the nancy-boy pacifists who would get us all killed by their delusional thinking. Thank God for Bush, Cheney, Rummie and boy would we need some more Pace's and a few Pattons thrown in.
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I couldn't agree more.
Steyn continues to belt these out of the park...
IMO, science, wonderful as it is, often contains far more speculation that we'd like to admit.
Great point. I wonder if Rove shared that tidbit with La Raza when he met with them?
I can't believe La Raza and like minded people want to go back to that? And Che? Puh-lease. They can go to Cuba or Venezuela and become workers for the state. It would be quite an eye opener. It's a shabby excuse to try to impose some kind of socialist revolucion on us. But, shhh, we aren't supposed to know that.
The Clovis overkill hypothesis is that human hunters arrived in America about 12,000 years ago and promptly killed off all the large mammals.
Two major problems:
1. Evidence is growing all the time that humans have been in the Americas for much longer, as far back as 20,000 or 25,000 BP.
2. A great many other animals went extinct at the same time, including ones unlikely to be hunted by people, implying that there were other causes involved.
I have a very open mind on the subject. Something happened then, and humans moving in may have been a part of it, but they are probably not the whole story.
Agree that the idea of "native Americans" living in harmony with nature is hooey.
If Hobbes and Steyn were contemporaries, Hobbes might have quoted Steyn.
I'm sure there are some hard people all around us, but the Frontiersmen and Indians of that era were the definition of hard.
The Aztecs ate the "sacrifice" victims because they needed protein. Antropologist Marvin Harris writes of this. Aztlan.
And for the 'mystical' properties - the different parts gave them strengths. It wasn't just the famine issues that came later. And the sacrificing in such massive numbers, I've read 20,000 at some 'festivals' (checking for source, also was taught this in school), was surely more than those present could feast upon and dwindled the local 'supply' forcing them to travel further to conquer more people to fuel the insatiable sacrificial fires.
Columbus decided to keep what he found secret, writing a secret letter to the Pope. The Pope endeavored his church to save the savages' souls.
Which they did. They weren't perfect either, but the massive, 'sacrificial' bloodfests were brought to a halt. I was taught this in Catholic grade & high school, as well. Ironically, it is absent, or told in very different ways, from my son's textbooks, same school system.
Then I came to this passage:
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.
Suddenly, I realized Steyn had said everything he needed to about Lebenon... Though I wish he had included Hindu and Buddha as well, just to round it out...
Actually, you need beans, maize and squash - and if you had a bad harvest on any of 'em, or otherwise couldn't get all three, you were in bad shape.
Human meat was a luxury item, reserved for the upper class, and commoners could advance in rank by capturing it for 'em....
Thank goodness for Cortez.
Living in harmony? I don't know if I'd call it that, either. Many nations certainly were very knowledgeable about their surroundings and frugal with their supplies. But that probably had as much or more to do with sustaining life (food, clothing, clean water, medicines) and safety (travel light, avoid war or be able to spring an attack), as it did with living in 'harmony' with nature.
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