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.
Good grief! Horses and gunpowder, Elsie!
The horse arrived in the New World with the Spanish settlements in the southwest. We tend now to picture the Indian on horseback (at least the Western tribles like the Sioux and Cheyenne, less so the Eastern groups like the Algonquins and Iroquois). However, even in the western cases, their "traditional" lifestyle had changed radically only a few generations before.
Gunpowder was a European import as well. Prior to these innovations, the native Americans were very limited in their ability to kill buffalo, especially on the open plains where the herds thrived in the greatest numbers. Think about it. You're on foot. You have a bow and arrow. There's a buffalo herd over there. It's wide open country. You see them. They see you.
You and your buds do tricks like trying to slowly, slowly crawl up to them while cloaking yourselves in the hides of dead buffalo. Once in a while it might work. You're not going to have a big impact on a prairie that's loaded to capacity with buffalo.
This is your defense? To discredit the dictionary? To discredit ALL of them??? Wow! It seems odd that the publishers wouldn't contact an authority like you when they were compiling them, given your regal prerogative of invalidating their conclusions on a whim. It's lucky for Sam Johnson you weren't around when he was putting his Lexicon together. He'd have looked the fool without checking with YOU first!
You'd better drop a line to those gangstas at the Oxford English. A homedawg cain't hawdly unnastan DOSE homies.
It becomes feelings and emotions because that doesn't require any precision.
Interesting sentence. "It" -- being a singular pronoun -- hardly seems adequate to take a compound predicate nominative ("feelings and emotions"). And the subject of your independent clause ("THAT doesn't require any precision"), which serves to modify that compound plural, is also singular.
Your construction leaves some abiguity as to what exactly doesn't require any precision: emotions and feelings? or the act of "it" becoming "emotions and feelings"?
One might almost think that this sentence lacked grammatical precision.
I would hope that a conservative would not allow the Left to determine his language because that gives the argument to the Left because they, with perfect sincerity, will insist that you have said exactly the opposite of the words you used as you understood those words and if you have accepted the Left's linguistic principles they will have the best of the argument because you let them define the words you use and their definitions are always only conditional.
Samuel Johnson could define "liberal" as "enlightened," but if we all know it means "vacuous and sophomorically idealistic," then Doctor Johnson's meaning is at best irrelevant, a mere parlor exercise.
ALL dictionaries are therefore "descriptive" rather than "prescriptive" (your terms). And it is no more valid for me to accept your arbitrary devotion to obsolescence than it is for me to let the Left define my terms for me.
I KNOW the meaning I intended when I used the word "decimate." That usage was perfectly in keeping with modern understanding, so my use of it communicated exactly what I wanted it to. That is the value of words. They are not pretty objects to sit on a mantel gathering cobwebs; they are meant to be taken down and used. Sometimes in their use, they acquire a scratch or two. And some just plain wear out. Others wear down but are then refinished and served up anew.
By the way, you might want to consult any credible English textbook and scan the section dealing with "Run-On Sentences."
There is no such thing as the "noble savage", its liberal myth.
I won't further argue with you. It is fruitless to argue with someone whose words are capriciously transmorphic.
Not much of an 'impact' on ANY of the large animals the poster I was responding to said the proto's wiped out.
Aw, c'mon. Is that the REAL reason?
Put away your thesaurus and get out a dictionary. You're not impressing anyone but yourself. If I'm capricious, then so is the Oxford English Dictionary, and every other lexicon known to modern grammarians. And since that prevalence defines the status quo, it can hardly be capricious now, can it?
On the other hand, this grammatical quibble HAS hijacked the intent of this thread, so maybe we WOULD be better off letting the subject lapse.
As we've seen, a myth that's only half correct.
Maybe they were getting away from pollution? Ya know...higher in the skyscraper./s
Exactly...how do you make change for a copper axe? /s
Not very many of the bison were in central Mexico.
Thanks for bringing up the chronology. My long term memory may have blurred..
I was shown the eroded areas and told the story while crossing the Rockies (NYC to CA actually) with a naturalist in 1969. I think I remember him saying that the dynamite harvesting was near the end of the 19th century and well past the era of the mountan-men and Indian trappers and that it wasn't profitable any more to trap. There were old photographs of the area before it was eroded and desertified (if that is the right word) in a restaurant that we stopped at.
Whatever the beavers were used for 5 or more decades after the hat craze ended I have no idea. The original Astor was long dead and I can find no evidence that his heirs got back into the fur business. That is probably my memory confounding two different stories, or perhaps I was misinformed.
Anyway the idea of the furry engineer being a keystone species that supported a whole web of life stayed with me. On the Central CA coast I am told that there were very large beavers that were killed of at the approximate time of the Siberian invasion and like the areas in the West that I was shown the rainfall is all in the winter. I'm trying to get permits for ponds on farm.
Not on the Pacific coast which was the context of my post that you pulled a segment out of. Yet still perhaps I should have been more detailed--or stated a caveat against categorical reading.
Large areas of the midwest where the buffalo roamed were not well populated with humans due to a lack of iodine in the soil although some prehistoric tribes of mound builders were believed to have trade routes for seasalt. Some tribes consumed the ashes of their dead as a condiment, presumably for minerals.
An excellent, although PC-leaning book I read recently, 1491, is based on the premise that 90 to 95% of the Indians died off by 1600, and that they were the major keystone species in the Americas, having been such for 10,000 years or more.
The result was massive ecological disruption, even without the introduced species. One theory is the huge "virgin forests" of the eastern half of the country, the massive herds of bison and flocks of passenger pigeons were a consequence of this disruption.
IOW, the wilderness the white man found wasn't really wilderness at all. It was more like an overgrown graveyard.
I don't believe all of it, but much of it is interesting, and it blows giant holes in the "white man is bad" theory, often without meaning to. It appears that the natives weren't so inherently great at living in tune with the land. It's just that almost all of them were dead, which makes it a lot harder to be ecologically criminal. Almost a post-holocaust novel type of thing.
In an environment where there are limited resources (like good hunting grounds), the way to get the resources to feed your own kids, is to take them away from somebody else
I'fn I was hungry; I'd go to where the FOOD is; NOT some other direction.
How about wooly mammoths?
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