The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

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Apollonius
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The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

A bit of nostalgia:


Your favorite Spengler
http://spengler.atimes.net/viewtopic.php?t=6124



Mr. Perfect wrote:I'm interested in getting a thread going on your favorite Spengler essay.

For me, it is a slam dunk. I think we've all had the experience of having some thoughts we've never really sat down to work out, and then you read someone else who has put the whole thing better than you ever could have. For me, as far as Spengler is concerned, this was;


The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HG04Aa02.html


My whole life I've found myself getting irritated at upper middle, to upper class folks running to the far reaches of the globe talking about the inner peace they found in some hut somewhere, but for some reason they come back home to make money. If you found something that valuable, wouldn't you stay? What kind of game are you playing with yourself? Anyway, thanks Spengler for the article I've passed along more than any of your others.




I found this essay to be thought provoking evoking even though I didn't agree with it, and still don't. It did motivate me to spend some time doing more research.

From what I understand, a forum crash renders retrieval of the discussion of that essay impossible, however some aftershocks were still being felt two years later:



Shivering in Chicago ...
http://spengler.atimes.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8752




foot soldier wrote:I don't agree with your assessments with my experience living in such traditional societies. Every aberration or abnornamilty in a person's behavior which have veered of the societies orbit is brought back to it's rightful place by social forces like shame, violence etc.

There may be no book to refer to like Koran or Bible but no individualism is tolerated. Ask the homosexuals how they are treated in such societies. A man who does not marry by 30 is viewd as an aberation. Society take the view then - that there must be something wrong with the man, may be he is some physical problems. The man's siblings are shunned and may not be able to marry at all. Everyone is tied to the social fabric. Every unwritten law is made such as to preserve or increase their tribal or sub tribal standings. They are more corrupt too because everyman tries to get the maximum for his family,friends,tribe... from the others.

I think you have a very utopian view of traditional societies.

But looking at the long term good versus bad, I still prefer traditional societies. There is more order in personal life compared to free Modern societies.



Apollonius wrote:Actually, it's the 'traditional' Christians here who have a very un-nuanced view of culture and history. I don't romanticize traditional cultures, but neither do I make false claims or inappropriate analogies about them.


Take Spengler's assertion that all primitive societies were more violent than our modern ones, something he continues to imply or directly assert, as in his agreement with Nicholas Wade's apparent endorsement of the idea (see, 'The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity'). Spengler obviously read this book in haste because Wade himself is more circumspect about human violence than Spengler. In any case, the assertion is flat-out wrong. Some primitive societies were very violent, others less so.

For example, there are a few primitive societies, usually those at the most basic survivalist hunter-gatherer stage of development, in which warfare was completely absent and even murder was almost unheard of. The Ojibwa of the central sub-arctic in Canada were such a society. Physical violence of any kind towards others was avoided at all costs.


Next, to your example of life patterns and expectations in primitive society. Even the most primitive societies had people who were different. One very common phenomenon was for those with homosexual tendencies to become shamans. Their polymorphic sexuality was thought to give them special insight into spiritual matters. The priestcraft of more sophisticated religions, especially Christianity, which obsesses so negatively about everything sexual, have always regarded homosexuals with disdain and contempt borne, I think, at least in large part, of competition. There are quite a few societies in which homosexuality is not only tolerated, but encouraged, sometimes even enforced.


This blanket statement that all traditional societies were more rigid than anything we have today simply doesn't stand under even minimal scrutiny. Some primitive societies were very authoritarian; others were incredibly lax. Technological developments have given us options but removed many freedoms as well.



Spengler wrote:Apollonius,

Your comment is very poor informed. Did you read Wade? He thinks that humans may be evolving to become less violent; a fortiori he thinks primitive society is MORE violent.


Apollonius wrote:I've got the book in front of me at this very moment.

Yes, he suggests that humans are evolving to become less violent (nothing to do with Christianiy per se, since he sees this trend in many places and also considers rapid evolution a distinct possibility -- so that, for example, Swedes and Danes, once fierce predators, have recently (no, not after the Vikings, more recently, after the eighteenth century) become peaceable).

If you read through the text very carefully, you'll find that he contradicts himself regarding human violence. In general, he wants to believe that humans are becoming less violent (I'd like to believe it too), but even his own examples don't always bear this out. If you review the anthropological literature (which I realize you have about as much respect for as I have for the Bible), you'll find lots of diversity of opinion on this matter and many of the specific examples that Wade draws upon (the Yanomomo, the New Guinea highlanders) are not only unrepresentative of primitive peoples in general, but written up in the anthropological press in different ways, depending on who is analysing the evidence.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

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Spengler's essay was ostensibly a review of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, a survey of genetic, linguistic and archeological research on early man, but he also manages to to pan "Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which attributes civilization to mere geographical accident, made a best-seller out of a mendacious apology for the failure of primitive society. Wade reports research that refutes Diamond on a dozen counts, but his book never will reach the vast audience that takes comfort in Diamond's pulp science."




In retrospect, I admit that my views have evolved, certainly in terms of detail. I'm also more confused about what Goldman was trying to say than I was back when he wrote the essay. It seems like an odder and less well thought out position now than it did even back then (of course in the meantime the man has lost all pretense of even being interested in the subject).



Recently I've been reading through:



The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire - Ken Flannery and Joyce Marcus (Harvard University Press, 2012)
http://www.amazon.com/Creation-Inequali ... 0674064690



I notice where Amazon lumps it together with the book by Jared Diamond, with customers encouraged to buy both. Some of you may remember (probably not) that although there are some useful concepts in Guns, Germs, and Steel, 'Spengler' is not the only one to have given it a bad review. I have roundly criticized it on several accounts, including non-originality, since Marvin Harris gave a much fuller treatment of geographical determinism thirty years earlier. Diamond also has an over-arching didactic style which is almost as tedious and one-sided as David P. Goldman's, obsessed with certain cultures as opposed to other entire continents which he completely passes over, resolved to be recognized as the most politically correct anthropologist of all time. I admit to having lost all patience with people who quote this book.



The book by Flannery and Marcus is far superior. It doesn't try to tell you why one civilization comes to dominate over another, how could it-- the authors are conversant enough to realize that this happens all the time, in many places and in many ways, but rather offers capsule ethnographies / histories of over 60 societies from the prehistoric Gravettians to the historic Inca. It is not arranged chronologically, but rather, in order of how advanced the organization of these various cultures are, a strategy that makes for some compelling reading and many remarkable insights.


If there is anyone left who wants to glorify Noble Savages, they'll be changing their tune after they read this. Slavery, war, and cannibalism were part of human history as soon as people started organizing themselves into clans. Many of the details are just plain gruesome, the stuff of horror movies.

The authors actually start with Rousseau and keep coming back to him. Of course he even didn't have access to the knowledge of people living in his own time, much less archaeology or deciphered hieroglyphics, historical linguistics or DNA analysis.





In the end, even after hundreds of pages of grotesque details of early stratified societies is revealed, the question is still left unanswered as to whether this was all inevitable.

The authors do stress that the earliest human societies were nothing like chimpanzees or our other hominid relatives with their alpha males and killer ape troops. The authors theorize that at the very dawn of humanity, religion played a vital role in establishing that gods and spirits are the only alphas, thus projecting onto them the greatest powers, and avoiding all the worst nastiness of internecine conflict within small groups of primitive humans that produce the rigid pecking order of dominance we find in other primates.
Last edited by Apollonius on Mon Feb 18, 2013 6:22 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

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Ken Flannery and Joyce Marcus wrote:Religious conservatives have long argued that secular laws are derived from ultimate sacred propositions. They will be pleased to learn that their view is supported by what we know of foragers. They may be less pleased to learn that ultimate sacred propositions are not eternal and unchanging. In the Aranda view of Creation, humans were once told that initiation required the knocking out of a tooth. They later decided that they had been told to circumcise initiates. Still later, they decided that they had been told to create sections and subsections. Religions transmitted by word of mouth changed constantly to keep up with innovations and altered circumstances.

There is, therefore, nothing wrong with religion per se. Its role in establishing the morals, ethics, values, and stability of early human society is well documented. What bothers some leading scientists is that many of today's huge multinational religions refuse to take significant scientific information into account.

One roadblock preventing these major religions from adjusting to social and scientific progress is the fact that their sacred propositions are now set in type. Several of the world's great monotheistic religions preserve, largely unaltered, the ultimate sacred propositions of Aramaic-speaking societies that lived too long ago to have hear of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Crick, and Watson. Had those sacred propositions been passed on by word of mouth instead of in printed texts, religious cosmology might very well have changed slowly over time to keep pace with scientific cosmology. What no one could have foreseen was the invention of the printing press and the fossilization of a pre-Copernican view of the world. So if today's multinational religions sometimes seem resistant to social and scientific breakthroughs, Gutenberg will have to share some of the blame.
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What if foragers were in charge?

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Ken Flannery and Joyce Marcus wrote:What if foragers were in charge?

Archaeologists are frequently asked two questions about inequality. One, which we have tried to answer, is: How did it arise in the first place? The second is: How can we get rid of it?

Rousseau had his own ideas about the second question. He believed that people could only be happy and free in a community simple enough to be intelligibile to them and small enough to enable them to take a full and equal part in government. In a huge society with a complex economy, there would, out of necessity, be hierarchy and inequality; the majority of what Rousseau called "passive citizens" would be controlled and exploited by the active few". Some of Rousseau's reader's took this to mean that hereditary privilege in eighteenth-century France could only be overturned by a bloody revolution.

The perspective taken in this book, however, allows for alternatives to bloody revolution. If inequality is the result of incremental changes in social logic-- and if those changes can be reconstructed-- might we not be able to return to equality just as incrementally, beginning with the most recent changes and working back?


[...]


Let us briefly consider what our life would be like if we were to leave it in the hands of egalitarian hunter-gatherers or achievement-based farmers. To begin with, there are a few things that probably would not change. Even after our society had been turned over to the people mentioned earlier, a certain degree of sexism and age-based discrimination would remain. Not all egalitarian societies believed that women had the capacity to be as virtuous as men. And few of them considered young men to possess the virtue of older men.

Our society would also retain its ethnocentrism. Our treatment of other groups, however, would no longer include religious proselytizing. Foragers and achievement-based farmers believed that each ethnic group had been created by different celestial spirits, received its own instructions for living, honored its own ancestors, and could not expect other groups to share its beliefs. If our neighbor's dress, religion, and behavior were different from ours, it would not be because they were wicked but because their origins were different.

Our societes tolerance of variation would extend to marriage. A man with two or more wives, a wife with two or more husbands, or even a foursome such as the one in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice would be accepted. We would permit same-sex weddings, such as those involving Native American 'two-spirit' people. Marriage would not be seen as a match made in heaven but as an economic partnership in which maximum flexibility was desirable.


Since many foragers practiced infanticide, our new leaders would not outlaw abortion. Because of their belief in reincarnation (a view that survives even among twenty-first century Americans), foragers felt that every 'spirit child' would have multiple opportunities to be born.

Tribal societies had no laws preventing child labor. For our teenagers there would be not as many hours of video games and hanging out at the mall, just lots of chores. It is likely, however, that our teenagers' frenzied music and dancing would bring on the same awe-inspiring high that tribal societies experienced.


... Our belief in the separation of church and state would surprise them. At the same time, whenever their cosmology interfered with the adoption of a useful scientific or technological innovation, they would change the cosmology.

Foragers had an ethic of sharing that would alter business as we know it. They would never allow CEOs to earn thousands of times what assembly-line workers earn. Achievement-based villagers, for their part, would pressure management into throwing huge feasts for the workers and their families. They would also insist on a safety net for the less-fortunate, such as the Tewa distribution of food to poor families.

Hunters and gatherers would admire philanthropists. At the same time, they would keep those generous millionaires from getting too pleased with themselves. They would rely on sarcastic comments such as, "You call that charitable donation? The check was hardly worth cashing".

As for people who have the opposite problem-- those who have accepted so much from others that they cannot pay it back-- achievement based villagers would have a solution. Such people would be turned into servants or slaves, forced to work off their debt through hard labor. Don't tell Master Card.

Then there are thieves who take others' property with no intention of returning it. Traditional foragers reacted angrily to theft and had little patience with repeat offenders. They believed in capital punishment and had no concept whatsoever of long-term imprisonment. If it were left up to the Basarwa, Bernie Madoff would simply have been lured into the wilderness and shot with poisoned arrows.

How would foragers handle the problem of illegal immigration? They would establish hxaro exhanges or namesake partnerships with as many families on the other side of the border as possible. When times were hard, they would allow those partners to share in the bounty of their territory. On the other hand, strangers who showed up without having establied a prior relationship might be driven away.

Our drug policies would change. Many foragers and small-scale horticulturalists used narcotic and hallucinogenic plants, so they would not believe in criminalizing them. At the same time, they would not want to see drugs used merely for "recreation". They considered them sacred plants, because they possessed the power to open a window in the spirit world. Such drugs would therefore be used exclusively in the context of ritual.

While many achievement-based villagers were willing to massacre their enemies, burn their villages, poison their wells, and turn them into slaves, they never engaged in anything resembling nation building. They found it implausible that an enemy society, with its different supernatural ancestors and social logic, could ever be turned in a replica of their own.

Consider, for example, Mesopotamia. We have seen that it developed ranked societies more than 7,000 years ago. It has had monarchies or oligarchic states for at least 5,000 years. Never once in all its millennia of ensfs, lugals, sheiks, emirs, sultans, warlords, and military dictators has Mesopotamia voluntarily created a democracy.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

Spengler isn't really on about much in that essay except his usual hatred for pre-Christian religions and post-Christian Europeans, and his glee at the extinction of cultures not his own. My entire life I've heard people ranting about how "Indians (or cavemen or whatever pre-modern group) weren't all peaceful and lovey-dovey!" Except I never heard anybody arguing that they were. Its an answer to a question nobody asked. His not-so-subtle covert motive is to excuse Jewish and Christian genocide as still better than prehistoric levels of atrocity, thereby justifying those on record and those he's like to see in the future. In short, his typical chickenhawk tribalism.



Ken Flannery and Joyce Marcus wrote:Consider, for example, Mesopotamia. We have seen that it developed ranked societies more than 7,000 years ago. It has had monarchies or oligarchic states for at least 5,000 years. Never once in all its millennia of ensfs, lugals, sheiks, emirs, sultans, warlords, and military dictators has Mesopotamia voluntarily created a democracy.
A rather stupid observation. Ancient and early modern democracies were as riddled class distinctions as any other system of government. It isn't until after the Second World War that we see anything approaching a real egalitarian society. If it wasn't property or overt class requirements for "democratic" participation it was gender or race used as justification for excluding people. Even absent any other form of permissible discrimination and exclusion we use wealth as a means of maintaining class and hierarchy.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by noddy »

i recently watched bits of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Natives:_USA and while it suffered a bit from american perspective it was not such a bad thing to show the realities of the tradeoffs and nuances involved in these issues.

it was about melanesians whom i spent time with and really like - i think some of it is on youtube.

while some would have a good laugh at the cargo cult around "tom navy" from the world war 2 interactions it does show that extra detail around how these people take interactions and stories seriously and it isnt the pathetic dumb brutal native stereotype.

their approach to housing and food and keeping everyone involved and useful puts most western groups to shame.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

noddy wrote:while some would have a good laugh at the cargo cult around "tom navy" from the world war 2 interactions it does show that extra detail around how these people take interactions and stories seriously and it isnt the pathetic dumb brutal native stereotype.
I've always been struck by the essential similarity of all human culture. "Civilized" living(i.e. farming, settled living, specialization) vs. pre-civilization cultures is the biggest gap, and it still isn't so large.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Endovelico »

Not being an anthropologist I'm not very sure of my reasonings. But I tend to think that societies were naturally led to adopt whatever customs favoured their immediate survival. Which depended on their immediate environment. So we find all sorts of behaviours and should not attempt drawing any global conclusions as to what is more or less "natural". Take violence, for instance. Violence which helps establishing an efficient leadership and the survival of the group against predators of all sorts, would be seen as desirable. But if such violence became excessive and contributed to the weakening of the group, both physically and mentally, than such violence would be seen as undesirable. Striking a balance between the two has always been the hardest trick to achieve in any society, including ours. And the problem becomes more serious because evolution led to certain behaviours becoming genetically transmitted, and instinctive behaviours are particularly hard to change. Inequality and the use of force were for long essential to our common survival, and it is only recently that we began to realize that more equality and less use of force could open the way to better living for all. Paradigmas are changing rapidly but our genetic make-up is not. This transition will therefore be a very long one, in which aggressiveness and inequality will remain with us long after we intellectually realized that they should be abolished. This is a struggle between genes and memes and although I believe the latter will prevail, I cannot expect to see the outcome.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

Endovelico wrote:Not being an anthropologist I'm not very sure of my reasonings. But I tend to think that societies were naturally led to adopt whatever customs favoured their immediate survival. Which depended on their immediate environment.
IIRC that's Dawkins' version of behavioral "evolution." He calls these acquired cultural habits, which he says could be genetically transmitted, memes. He's not an anthropologist either, and I think he's a pretty huge a$$hole, but this is a reasonable way of explaining some cultural differences, especially North vs. South, and desert/steppe vs. littoral.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by noddy »

i dont like evolution as a word in so much as many people think of it as improvement rather than the more droll version which is change.

i also find the amusement in the dissonance between the modern craving for the cohesion and respect of the small village - primitive authenticity - against the truth of that being massively friends/family orientated and the indifference those same people tend to have towards the responsibilities of friends/family.

the flipside of course being these small villages arent very globalist, the opposite in fact ... so if your not friends and family all bets are off... a lovely bit of dissonance in that aswell.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

noddy wrote:i also find the amusement in the dissonance between the modern craving for the cohesion and respect of the small village - primitive authenticity - against the truth of that being massively friends/family orientated and the indifference those same people tend to have towards the responsibilities of friends/family.
Indeed. There isn't one aspect of "primitive" living that you couldn't recreate in any modern society, and many that nobody wants to recreate anywhere. The fact that people project their aspirations onto the past or into fantasy worlds says something about modern consumer culture and the recent manufactured search for "authenticity," but nothing about ancient cultures whatsoever. Spengler was commenting on one interesting current cultural trend, but it took him down his usual path to blood-soaked tribalism.

The question of what people are looking for when they say their looking for authenticity is more interesting. Pity to short-circuit it by answering "my religion, obviously" and then bashing everything else.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Endovelico »

The only "authenticity" I can think of is living in accordance to one's values, whatever they may be. More interesting is finding out what shapes those values. The need to survive must be taken into account, but also the shape and level of our consciousness and self-awareness. We know we exist, but we don't know why or what for. We need to find our place in the universe and are unable to do so. We are aware of the self but also of the others and need to establish how we relate to each other. Our genes dominate much of what we do, but for very long we didn't even know genes existed. We look for harmony within ourselves, between ourselves, and between ourselves and the universe. Each culture has its own answer to that and thus its authenticity. Regularly we find out that we aren't happy with the way we live, and thus we try to find a better way... And so on, and so forth...
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

Reviewing Spengler's latest essay reminds us of the widespread belief in witchcraft.



The Creation of Inequality documents this well.


Years ago, while posting about the Ojibwa, I noted how they considered all sickness to be the result of witchcraft, and that the only thing you could do about it was more and stronger witchcraft,

This is actually more or less universal amongst primitive peoples. The book I've been reading through even noted that some peoples deny that any death can be "natural", that is, if it weren't for witchcraft, you could live forever.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Torchwood »

Well, lingustics expert Steven Pinker agrees that violence is on a long term declining trend. Late medieval England (where there were good homicide statistics) had a murder rate of about 15 per 1000 which is similar to Colombia today - by 1900 it was down to 1-2 per 1000. It went up to 3-4 per thousand between the 1950s and 1980s (the downside of the 60s social revolution) but is now falling again. There are probably fewer wars on the go nowadays than at any time in history.

As to primitive authenticity, I blame Rousseau. I am suspicious of so called peaceful tribes - unless those around them are similarly peaceful, then how do they survive? I looked up the history of the Ojibwe, and it seems they fought with other tribes like others, indeed they got the English to give them guns in the mid 18C so they go kill the Dakota more effectively.

It probably was more peaceful in the early palaeolithic when there were fewer humans around to fight (but then, what happened to the Neanderthals?) , then the people got more numerous, the game got scarcer (chapter 1 of the Great Anthropocene Mass Extinction) and the story changed... just speculation. Still, we needn't feel bad about it being merely human, chimpanzees raid other groups, kill the males and steal the females. Civilisation is largely about overcoming your genes.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

Apollonius wrote:Reviewing Spengler's latest essay reminds us of the widespread belief in witchcraft.
Spengler's anti-Erdogan ranting becomes increasingly desperate at Israel's isolation increases, but that's to be expected.



The Creation of Inequality documents this well.

Years ago, while posting about the Ojibwa, I noted how they considered all sickness to be the result of witchcraft, and that the only thing you could do about it was more and stronger witchcraft,

This is actually more or less universal amongst primitive peoples. The book I've been reading through even noted that some peoples deny that any death can be "natural", that is, if it weren't for witchcraft, you could live forever.
Sounds like a combination of the "healing power of prayer" and futurist projections of scientifically provided hyperlongevity. Oh those silly primitives.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

Torchwood wrote:As to primitive authenticity, I blame Rousseau.
Its literally the only person to blame. Maybe him and Grey Owl. Otherwise its only ever brought up as a straw man for white supremacists to defend colonialism.
I am suspicious of so called peaceful tribes - unless those around them are similarly peaceful, then how do they survive? I looked up the history of the Ojibwe, and it seems they fought with other tribes like others, indeed they got the English to give them guns in the mid 18C so they go kill the Dakota more effectively.
Who ever claimed the Ojibwe were peaceful?


It probably was more peaceful in the early palaeolithic when there were fewer humans around to fight (but then, what happened to the Neanderthals?) , then the people got more numerous, the game got scarcer (chapter 1 of the Great Anthropocene Mass Extinction) and the story changed... just speculation. Still, we needn't feel bad about it being merely human, chimpanzees raid other groups, kill the males and steal the females. Civilisation is largely about overcoming your genes.
Is it? I thought it was about providing material and personal security. Its self-interested, which is the most genetically compatible thing there is.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

Torchwood wrote:As to primitive authenticity, I blame Rousseau. I am suspicious of so called peaceful tribes - unless those around them are similarly peaceful, then how do they survive? I looked up the history of the Ojibwe, and it seems they fought with other tribes like others, indeed they got the English to give them guns in the mid 18C so they go kill the Dakota more effectively.

Noble savage-Origin of the term
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_sava ... in_of_term


In English, the phrase Noble Savage first appeared in poet Dryden's heroic play, The Conquest of Granada (1672):

I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.


The hero who speaks these words in Dryden's play is a Spanish Muslim, who, at the end of the play, in keeping with the requirements of a heroic drama, is revealed to have been, unbeknownst to himself, the son of a Christian prince (since heroic plays by definition had noble and exemplary protagonists).

Ethnomusicologist Ter Ellingson believes that Dryden had picked up the expression "noble savage" from a 1609 travelogue about Canada by the French explorer Marc Lescarbot, in which there was a chapter with the ironic heading: "The Savages are Truly Noble", meaning simply that they enjoyed the right to hunt game, a privilege in France granted only to hereditary aristocrats.[10]

Dryden's use of the phrase is a striking oxymoron. However, in his day it would have been less so, for in English the word "savage" did not necessarily have the connotations of cruelty we now associate with it, but only gradually acquired them. Instead it could as easily mean "wild", as in a wild flower, as it still does in its French and Italian cognates, for example.[11]

In France the stock figure that in English is called the "noble savage" has always been simply "le bon sauvage", "the good wild man", a term without the any of the paradoxical frisson of the English one. This character, an idealized portrayal of "Nature's Gentleman", was an aspect of 18th-century sentimentalism, along with other stock characters such as, the Virtuous Milkmaid, the Servant-More-Clever-than-the-Master (such as Sancho Panza and Figaro, among countless others), and the general theme of virtue in the lowly born.[12] Nature's Gentleman, whether European-born or exotic, takes his place in this cast of characters, along with the Wise Egyptian, Persian, and Chinaman.[13]

He had always existed, from the time of the epic of Gilgamesh, where he appears as Enkiddu, the wild-but-good man who lives with animals. Another instance is the untutored-but-noble medieval knight, Parsifal. The Biblical shepherd boy David falls into this category. The association of virtue with withdrawal from society — and specifically from cities — was a familiar theme in religious literature.

Hayy ibn Yaqdhan an Islamic philosophical tale (or thought experiment) by Ibn Tufail from 12th-century Andalusia, straddles the divide between the religious and the secular. The tale is of interest because it was known to the New England Puritan divine, Cotton Mather. Translated in to English (from Latin) in 1686 and 1708, it tells the story of Hayy, a wild child, raised by a gazelle, without human contact, on a deserted island in the Indian Ocean. Purely through the use of his reason, Hayy goes through all the gradations of knowledge before emerging into human society, where he revealed to be a believer of Natural religion, which Cotton Mather, as a Christian Divine, identified with Primitive Christianity.[14] The figure of Hayy is both a Natural man and a Wise Persian, but not a Noble Savage.

The locus classicus of the 18th-century portrayal of the American Indian are the famous lines from Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man" (1734):

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, a humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.



To Pope, writing in 1734, the Indian was a purely abstract figure—"poor" because uneducated and a heathen but also happy because living close to Nature. This view reflects the typical Age of Reason belief that men are everywhere and in all times the same as well as a Deistic conception of natural religion (although Pope, like Dryden, was Catholic). Pope's phrase, "Lo the Poor Indian", became almost as famous as Dryden's "noble savage" and, in the 19th century, when more people began to have first hand knowledge of and conflict with the Indians, would be used derisively for similar sarcastic effect

Note also:


Erroneous Identification of Rousseau with the noble savage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_sava ... ble_savage





The authors of The Creation of Inequality quote Rousseau a lot. In their preface they begin:


Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus wrote:In the autumn of 1753 the celebrated Academy of Dijon proposed an essay competition. The prize would go to the author who best answered the question "What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by Natural Law?"

An iconoclast from Geneva named Jean-Jacques Rousseau took up the challegne. His entry, "A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men." did not win, but 250 years later it is the only one still remembered.
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Apollonius
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Apollonius »

Some reviewers have noted that the authors of the book I've been writing about on this thread have the irritating habit of following the example of Jared Diamond by writing to a specifically American audience, and occasionally they cannot resist drawing a lesson for them, hence for example, the comment I quoted earlier about the folly of intervention in Iraq.

They are, however, not so steeped in a political program that they cannot formulate the question the other way around. Here is an excerpt from their discussion of the rise of the Zulu kingdom:


Shaka, whose genealogical credentials were shaky, worried constantly about being usurped. He often said that a king "should not eat with his brothers, lest they poison him". Shaka kept many concubines but was so afraid of being overthrown by a son that he executed any lover who became pregnant. He would leave no heir.

In 1827 Shaka's beloved mother, Nandi, with whom he had endured so much abuse in childhood, passed away. In order to mourn her properly, Shaka ruled that for one year no crops would be planted, no cows would be milked, and no married couples would engage in sex. He executed 7,000 of his own subjects who did not appear to be grieving sufficiently.

This "year of hell" caused such grumbling in Natal that two of Shaka's half borthers, Dingane and Mhlangane, were pesuaded to assassinate him. At a meeting with them in 1828, an unsuspecting Shaka was fatally run through with a spear. Dingane was then named king of the Zulu.

[...]

From time to time we hear one of our colleagues say, "Wasn't so-and-so the worst president in the history of this country?" After listening politely, we add, "but at least he didn't execute 7,000 of his own citizens because they refused to mourn the death of his mother".




Torchwood wrote:It probably was more peaceful in the early palaeolithic when there were fewer humans around to fight (but then, what happened to the Neanderthals?) , then the people got more numerous, the game got scarcer (chapter 1 of the Great Anthropocene Mass Extinction) and the story changed... just speculation. Still, we needn't feel bad about it being merely human, chimpanzees raid other groups, kill the males and steal the females. Civilisation is largely about overcoming your genes.


Ever since Spengler's essay I've re-emersed myself in the literature of early humans. At the time when Goldman wrote his piece I objected to the gross generalizations and over-simplifications that he indulged in. No one disputes that once humans got to organizing themselves into clans, all hell broke loose. It's the earlier and more primitive mode of human existence that remains elusive. Even some well known hunter-gatherers from history, like the Australian Aborigines are not good examples since although their subsistance patterns were relatively pristine, their tribal organization was not. The Inuit of the Arctic and the San of the Kalahari are two of the best examples, but since they had been pushed into such extreme environments, the conclusions we draw from their way of life cannot be regarded as conclusive.


You are definitely on to something, though, when you mention that there were fewer humans to fight in the Paleolithic. Another interesting thought that the authors of The Creation of Inequality write about is that differences in both language and religion were almost certainly consciously developed in order to distinquish in-groups from out-groups, with special vocabularies for the initiated, and many historical linguists propose that language differentiation did not really begin in earnest until about 15,000 years ago.
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Torchwood
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Torchwood »

I am intrigued by Spengler's vituperative dislike of Jared Diamond, because he thinks that he is a geographical determinist, and for Spengler culture is all. That is not the case - all that Diamond does is make a plausible that case that settled agriculture was more likely to develop easily in the Eurasia than the Americas, because of the greater abundance of easily domesticated plants and the fact that such techniques can be transmitted on the same latitudes (impossible in the Americas). And the best place of all - hey presto, the Fertile Crescent! It doesn't say what sorts of culture would arise in these regions, just that they would get a head start.

In any case, Spengler's beloved YHWH seems to agree with Diamond - he placed his Chosen People in the Fertile Crescent (removes tongue from cheek).

I do miss Spengler's nutty but imaginative ideas which you could lay into. He never goes to the ATOL forum any more, sic transit etc.
Ibrahim
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

Torchwood wrote:I am intrigued by Spengler's vituperative dislike of Jared Diamond, because he thinks that he is a geographical determinist, and for Spengler culture is all. That is not the case - all that Diamond does is make a plausible that case that settled agriculture was more likely to develop easily in the Eurasia than the Americas, because of the greater abundance of easily domesticated plants and the fact that such techniques can be transmitted on the same latitudes (impossible in the Americas). And the best place of all - hey presto, the Fertile Crescent! It doesn't say what sorts of culture would arise in these regions, just that they would get a head start.

In any case, Spengler's beloved YHWH seems to agree with Diamond - he placed his Chosen People in the Fertile Crescent (removes tongue from cheek).

I do miss Spengler's nutty but imaginative ideas which you could lay into. He never goes to the ATOL forum any more, sic transit etc.
I encounter a lot of hostility to Jared Diamond from many different quarters. Though I've never read his most famous book so I can't speak to his theories in detail, I suspect that you're right about the reason for Spengler's hostility. Diamond's model seems morally neutral. "This happened for these material reasons." Spengler wants to infuse everything with a moral dimension, to justify past and future events. "It was right that this happened, this should happen in the future."
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Miss_Faucie_Fishtits »

What David is on about is that some cultures are superior to others and it's because G_d came down and touched those people and through them, that divine spark diffuses throughout all human life. Wherever it's allowed to go. It's disarmingly simple, almost childlike and infuriatingly difficult to argue against.....'>.......
She irons her jeans, she's evil.........
Ibrahim
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

Miss_Faucie_Fishtits wrote:What David is on about is that some cultures are superior to others and it's because G_d came down and touched those people and through them, that divine spark diffuses throughout all human life. Wherever it's allowed to go. It's disarmingly simple, almost childlike and infuriatingly difficult to argue against.....'>.......
You're %90 there, but the other part is that the lesser, untouched cultures can, will, and should hurry up and die. His most famous essays, which attracted the most of his attention and blogger-level fame, are the ones on that subject.
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by noddy »

re: jarod diamond, before i became aware of him it seemed quite obvious to me that people living in a season-less tropical environment can pretty much deal with every day as it comes, minimalist style and people living in an extreme season environment like the top of europe/asia need to be highly organised during the goodtimes to make sure they have enough stored for the bad times and this will have cultural effects.

part of me suspects that the modern workaholic madness is just the make-hay-while-the-sun-shines thing gone mad as those people moved away from the bad winter that used to give them a break :P
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Ibrahim
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by Ibrahim »

noddy wrote:re: jarod diamond, before i became aware of him it seemed quite obvious to me that people living in a season-less tropical environment can pretty much deal with every day as it comes, minimalist style and people living in an extreme season environment like the top of europe/asia need to be highly organised during the goodtimes to make sure they have enough stored for the bad times and this will have cultural effects.

part of me suspects that the modern workaholic madness is just the make-hay-while-the-sun-shines thing gone mad as those people moved away from the bad winter that used to give them a break :P
I've always thought this reasoning was sound enough, but then again civilization began in warm climates, in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus, and the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. Places that seldom see snow. The coldest places in Europe and East Asia were some of the last places to be "civilized."
noddy
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Re: The Fraud of Primitive Authenticity

Post by noddy »

Ibrahim wrote:
noddy wrote:re: jarod diamond, before i became aware of him it seemed quite obvious to me that people living in a season-less tropical environment can pretty much deal with every day as it comes, minimalist style and people living in an extreme season environment like the top of europe/asia need to be highly organised during the goodtimes to make sure they have enough stored for the bad times and this will have cultural effects.

part of me suspects that the modern workaholic madness is just the make-hay-while-the-sun-shines thing gone mad as those people moved away from the bad winter that used to give them a break :P
I've always thought this reasoning was sound enough, but then again civilization began in warm climates, in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus, and the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. Places that seldom see snow. The coldest places in Europe and East Asia were some of the last places to be "civilized."
true - the extremes have very short fertile seasons and didnt allow for this model - i mis-used the word "extreme" in my dribble above, it should have been "variable" :)
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