Fear of Nature

 Keeley, Lawrence. War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Oxford University Press, 1996.


- This book could be grouped with S. Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), S. LeBlanc’s Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful Noble Savage, 2003., and J. Keegan’s A History of Warfare, 2012.

- Having read some of Pinker’s work and all of this one, I am still skeptical that going strictly by statistics, numbers, and per capita ratios (20% of Yanomamo die of violence vs .3% of Americans during WWII, or 4% of Japanese in WWII, or 2% of American population during Civil War, for instance) gives us an accurate picture of reality. There is always an issue of quantity vs. quality, i.e. the violence of modern civilization could literally end human life on this planet. That cannot be said of primitive warfare.

LeBlanc (Constant Battles) points out that in the bloodiest battle of the Napoleonic Wars (Waterloo), 48,500 men were killed or wounded, out of 200,000 soldiers engaged.  And this casualty number represents less than one-tenth of one percent of adult males of Europe at the time.  Then he quickly mentions the presumed commonly accepted number of 10-20 percent warfare deaths in tribal societies.  A typical example would be the famous Yanomamo, “the fierce people of the Amazon,” who might suffer 10-20 killed or wounded out of 100 in a battle.  The implication is that even at 10 per cent, the Yanomamo are then 1000 times more violent than the bloodiest of civilized warfare.  So by bare percentages, there is no question how much more violent primitive societies were.  But of course, common sense tells us, and we can’t quite get the image out of our head, that there is something qualitatively different in 10 dead bodies vs 48,500.  

Moreover, something that neither Keeley nor Leblanc dive into is number of deaths and/or disease by what I would call “indirect war.”  For instance, the widely cited number of 500,000 child deaths in Iraq in the 1990s due to US imposed sanctions.  Also under “indirect war” would be the countless clandestine operations going on all the time in our modern era (see Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Operations since WWII, W Blum). And finally, we’d have to consider the economic warfare that occurs in modern industrial society. The rich get richer at the expense of the poor. Poorer communities suffer such things as inadequate housing, malnutition, poor water quality, poor access to medical care, etc, all resulting “casualties” of economic warfare. The rich, who continue to go to fancy colleges and purchase brand new vehicles every year or two and go on luxurious vacations, do not care about, and are not connected to the poor communities that they may live only a few city blocks away from. Primitive cultures, on the other hand, are known for being egalitarian, where such hierarchical inequalities are typically unknown.

- Somewhere on that citadel of YouTube, Chomsky mentions something about Pinker’s analysis although being thorough and informative, “is almost certainly wrong,” Ha! When in doubt, side with Chomsky.

- That said, I do not believe that primitive, nature-based life was/is “peaceful.” Unless killing and dismembering animals’ bodies for food on a daily basis could be considered peaceful. But there is a difference in authenticity between hand to hand combat with war clubs and bows and arrows and dropping fire bombs from airplanes upon cities of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a single campaign. And the people who decide to do this are rich old white men in air conditioned buildings drinking coffee, halfway around the planet from the horror. Global politics and its unfathomable levels of bureaucratic muck makes things very messy when comparing modern war to primitive war (see the documentary The Fog of War for a memorable summary of American fire bombing of Japan in WWII, for instance).

- And see note for (119). The US has “declared war” only 12 times in it’s existence. BUT it has been “at war” for 93% of it’s existence. We can find stats/numbers to support either side of the argument of who is more violent, primitive people or civilized people.

Any thorough anthropologist could find 20 impressively warlike cultures of the past and conclude that humans have always been warlike, and past humans were even more warlike than present humans. At the same time, someone else could find 20 relatively peaceful cultures all around earth’s past, and conclude that past people were less violent than present humans. The point here is that we almost always lose sight of the endless diversity of past cultures and particularly primitive cultures. The average American likely understands no difference between the Iroquois, the Comanche, and the Ohlone, they all simply being Indians. But they were probably more culturally different from each other than current Americans, Chinese, and Nigerians are from each other. In my opinion, this is not something the average modern person (including myself) can accurately appreciate or comprehend.



Preface

(viii) My first excavations, as a college freshman, were on a prehistoric “shell mound” village site on San Francisco Bay, where we uncovered many burials of unequivocal homicide victims. It never occurred to me or my fellow students that the skeletons with embedded projectile points we excavated evidenced a homicide rate that was extraordinarily high. This brutal physical evidence we were uncovering never challenged our acceptance of the traditional view the the native people of California had been exceptionally peaceable.


Ch 1. The Pacified Past: The Anthropology of War

(4) Recorded history represented less than half of 1 percent of the more than 2 million years that humans have existed. In fact, prehistory ended in some areas of the world a mere thirty years ago [some still exist today]. At the dawn of the European expansion (1500 CE), only a third of the inhabited world was civilized; all of Australia and Oceania, most of the Americas, and much of Africa and north Asia remained preliterate and tribal. These long chapters in humanity’s story and all the recent “peoples without history” are the special focus of anthropology - of the archaeologists who study the former and of the ethnographers who have observed the later.

(5) Hobbes envisioned the original or natural condition of humanity as being “the war of every man against every man.” In this primeval state, men lived in “continual fear and danger of violent death;” and in his most famous phrase, their lives were therefore “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” He claimed vaguely that “savage people in many places in America” still lived in this violent primitive condition, but gave no particulars and never pursued the point further [Leviathan, 1651].
Humans escaped this state of war only by agreeing to covenants in which they surrendered much of their liberty and accepted rule by a central authority (which, for Hobbes, meant a king)…All civilized ‘industry’ and the humane enjoyment of its fruits depended on a peace maintained by central government; the ‘humanity’ of humans was thus a product of civilization.
His argument was certainly intended as an apology for absolute monarchy…Whatever his views on the ideal form of the state, the point of central relevance here is that Hobbes considered the inertial ‘natural’ state of humanity to be war, not peace.

(10) A Study of War, Q. Wright, 1942, and Primitive War, Turney-High, 1949.
Wright thought primitives “resemble more the apes and the ants” than they did civilized men. Turney-High drew a very sharp line, literally a “military horizon,” above which real warfare was conducted by states and below which occurred only the sub military combat of primitives. He spoke of primitive warfare as being childish, “reflecting the ways of human infancy.”

- i.e., “the modern way is more complex, better, more advanced”…how convenient for us to come to that conclusion!


Ch 2. The Dogs of War: the Prevalence and Importance of War

(28) In a study of western North American Indian tribes and bands, only 13 percent of the 157 groups surveyed were recorded as ‘never or rarely’ raiding or having been raided - meaning in this case, more than once a year. Of these 21 relatively peaceable groups, 14 gave other evidence of having conducted or resisted occasional raids, presumably only once every few years. This leaves only 7 truly peaceful societies (4.5 percent of the sample of 157) that apparently did not participate in any type of warfare or raiding. All these were very small nomadic bands residing in the driest, most isolated regions of the Columbia Plateau and the Great Basin. Again, we find the most peaceful groups living in areas with extremely low population densities, isolated by distance and hard county from other groups.

(29) Many small band societies that are regarded by ethnologists as not engaging in warfare instead evidence very high homicide rates. For example, the Kung San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert are viewed as a very peaceful society; indeed, one popular ethnography on them was titled “The Harmless People.” However, their homicide rate from 1920 to 1955 was four times that of the United States and twenty to eighty times that of major industrial nations during the 1950s and 1960s.

- See Nisa: The Life and Words of a iKung Woman, 1981. Wife battering and deaths. Headman decides victim’s family deserves five goats for the crime of beating wife to death.

(33) Historic data on the period from 1800 to 1945 suggest that the average modern nation-state goes to war approximately once a generation. Taking into account the duration of these wars, the average modern nation-state was at war only about one year in every five during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even the most bellicose, such as Great Britain, Spain, and Russia, were never at war every year continuously (although nineteenth century Britain comes close). Compare these figures from the ethnographic sample of non state societies discussed earlier: 65 percent at war continuously; 77 percent at war once every five years and 55 percent every year; 87 percent fighting more than once a year; 75 percent at war every two years. [sample of 50 societies, from Keegan.]

- “at war one year out of every five..” so at war 1/5th of the time?
- Modern war destroys more quantity of infrastructure, therefore, there is no need to battle again, say, within a generation (i.e. there is nothing left to bomb.). Larger wars will have more time between them. Therefore, could be interpreted as “less war happening.”
- Also the time to organize, plan, mobilize resources necessitates more time between larger wars.
- Generally, how can we compare a week long battle between two primitive cultures of 200 people each, with a generation-long world war? Considering them the same thing grossly misinterprets reality. “..goes to war once a generation”… for a 20 year war? or a 2 day war?
- “total destruction war” of modern age vs. “sport warfare” of Yanomamo where the aim is to “kill one or two people, and steal a woman,” Demonic Males, pg 67.
- see note for (119), i.e. the U.S. being at war 93% of its existence.
- Finally, how do we count covert coup operations? Secret assassinations? (See Killing Hope: US CIA and Military Interventions since WWII. Endless violence that we may not consider “war” if we don’t want to).

(35) In Napoleon’s army, about 58 to 77 percent of soldiers were ‘effectives.’ The rest were convalescing, in training, garrison troops, or members of support units. During WII, only about 40 decent of American servicemen served in combat units. The others were involved in administration, logistical support, and training; and an even smaller percentage carried a rifle, sailed on a warship or flew in a warplane. The ‘tooth to tail’ ration between combat and support troops was 1:14 for the US army in Vietnam and is now about 1:11…by contrast, in ancient armies and primitive war parties, almost every participant was an effective.

- but one “missile button pusher” does more damage than 1,000 bows and arrows, so how are these numbers relevant? The damage of the cluster bombs are “less violent” cause it only takes one person to launch it? Even the numbers in support it takes to drop bombs makes these numbers skewed and difficult to compare across the board.

(35) Males in non state societies are far more likely to face combat than is the average male citizen of a modern nation.

- Tribe, S Junger. Is staying away from battle always a good thing?
- The authenticity that is involved in participating in direct conflict, rather than having elected officials and insanely bureaucratic processes shield you from it so you can enjoy your cheeseburger and TV show as if no conflict is even happening.

(38) Ofnet Cave in Germany. 34 human skulls arranged like “eggs in flat baskets,” all facing setting sun. Dated to 7th century BCE, Mesolithic, I.e., the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic (hunter gatherer to agriculture).

(39) Peace was a scarcer commodity for members of bands, tribes, and chiefdoms than for the average citizens of a civilized state.

- Again, which existence is more authentic?
- Most simply, the US is now constantly at war. Does this make the average US taxpayer less violent? When 25% of those taxes goes to military operations..


Ch 3. Policy by Other Means: Tactics and Weapons

(43) As Turney-High noted, only states con devote time and resources to training officers and drilling soldiers to obey their orders, and “only men with the patience of civilization will submit to it.” It is not a mystical patience that makes civilized men easier to reduce to strict subordination and military discipline; it is their habituation to hierarchy and obedience as a result of being raised in a state, which by definition is a polity with class stratification and monopolized coercive powers…The weak command systems common in primitive warfare merely reflect the prevailing level of social organization.

- “patience of civilization..” bah!! what is “patient” about genocide and global warfare and conquest??
- “social organization..” why is more complex social organization better, especially when it results in bureaucratic BS?

(47) All the supposed tactical deficiencies of prestate warfare have been a direct consequence of the weaker authority of leaders, more egalitarian social structure and values, lower level of surplus production, and smaller populations of nonstate societies. Hence the gradualistic differences one finds in the conduct of warfare as preserved in ethnographic and historical records are not traits reflecting the sophistication of military knowledge or technique, but features almost exactly mirroring social organization, economic efficiency, population size, and the cultural values correlated with them. To argue that the warriors or war making of a village society is ill-disciplined, weakly led, constrained by inadequate logistics, “unprofessional,” disorganized, and so on is to state a tautology: these terms describe not how they make war but how they live. There is as much simple truth as hyperbole in Turney-High’s declaration: “warfare is social organization.”

- to take it even further, “sophisticated” military strategy is only needed in “civilized” wars. The need for “sophisticated” strategies is not a sign of better minds planning war, it is a sign that society itself is too complex, which in no way means that it’s “better.” In fact, the more “sophisticated” a military plan needed, the more society is likely over reaching itself in terms of political, technological, economic, and social goals, which, as we are seeing, results in global environmental devastation.

(49) An Aztec warrior could decapitate a Spanish horse with a single blow of his obsidian-edged sword club.

(51) Arrows can kill at a maximum distance from 50-200 meters depending on their weight, point type, and the power of the bow.

(51) The atl-atl, or spear thrower, can deliver a javelin a dart with a higher impact force but over a shorter range than an arrow. The Australian spear thrower was deadly within a range of 40 meters, and permitted a maximum cast of 80-100 meters [in use since 20k-30k years ago].

(53) Initially, the musket’s great advantage over the bow was that, once drilled volley fire was instituted, it required less skill, briefer training, and little strength to use. The smooth bore musket also delivered a missile with greater impact force, which at short range inflicted very damaging wounds. But its effective range was no greater than the bow (80-100 yards), it had a slower rate of fire, and it was incredibly inaccurate. Indeed, the command given to infantry until the rifled musket appeared in mid-nineteenth century was “level!” and not “aim!” because aiming was useless…The decisive advantage of hand held gunpowder weapons over the bow came only with the breech loading rifle…until the late nineteenth century, civilized soldiers were at a slight disadvantage in fire weaponry when acing primitive bowmen.

(55) The narrowness of the conditions under which artillery is genuinely lethal were well observed by a party of a Sioux visiting Washington, DC, in 1970. To emphasize the White Father’s might, government officials took them to see a huge coastal artillery gun firing into the Potomac. The Sioux were unimpressed: it was a monstrous weapon, all right, but “nobody with any brains would sit on his pony in front of it.”

- one of the unnecessary complexities of sedentary, agricultural, urban life is the absurdly complex weaponry to defend (and/or destroy) it.


Ch 4. Imitating the Tiger: Form of Combat

(59) The forms of combat used by nonstate people have varied tremendously, but they can be divided roughly into formal battles, small ambush raids, and large raids or massacres. For most primitive groups, small raids have been the most and massacres the least frequent form of combat.

(68) Yanomamo case in which 15 of 115 were killed in a single day. The approximate average loss in these various instances was 10 percent. To put such massacre mortalities in perspective, this level of population loss would be equivalent to killing over 13 million Americans in 1941 or over 7 million Japanese in 1945 in a single air raid.

- by percentage only, this 10% casualty rate of primitive raids is “worse” than the the 330,000 to 500,000 civilians killed by US air raid bombings of 67 Japanese cities in WWII. Or US sanctions in Iraq in the 1990s that resulted in the estimated death of 1 million children. These numbers don’t even take into account the endless damage to infrastructure/economy. How can theses numbers/ratios/percentages be compared?
- also, the number of “primitive tribes” far outnumbers nation-states in written history.

(68) Prehistoric evidence of mass killings:

- Crow Creek: South Dakota, 500 men, women, children, mass grave. ~ 1325CE
- Talheim: Germany, 34 dead mass grave. ~5000BCE
- Roaix: France, 100 men, women, children mass grave. ~4000BCE


Ch 5. A Skulking Way of War: Primitive Warriors Versus Civilized Soldiers

(78) As the ecological historian Alfred Crosby points out, European conquerors of the “brave new worlds” of the Americas, Australia, the Pacific islands, and the isolated extremities of the Old World were aided by invisible but overpowering allies. These silent partners include viruses, bacteria, seed plants, and mammals that disseminated death and triggered ecological transformations that decimated native manpower and disrupted traditional economies. These insidious conquistadors spread far more rapidly and were many times more deadly than the human conquerors who followed in their wake. The deaths meted out by the measles, influenza, and (especially) smallpox far exceeded in magnitude the deaths inflicted by the weapons of the Europeans. For example, the highest estimates for the number of Aztecs killed in combat during the Spanish conquest (mostly by the Spaniard’s Indian allies) are about 100,000, whereas in the decade following, introduced diseases killed at last 4 million and perhaps more than 8 million central Mexicans. Many groups in these new worlds commonly lost a third to a half of their populations just in the initial epidemic…Crosby concludes that the celebrated victories of the small armies of Cortez and Pizarro over the populous Aztec and Inca civilizations were “in large part the triumph of the virus of smallpox.”

- why didn’t the indigenous people have their own “viruses” to give to the conquerors?? why did it only seem to go one way??

(81) Primitive tactics are [often] superior, since civilized forces must adopt most of them - despite already possessing an often stupendous superiority in weapons, manpower, and supplies - in order to triumph over primitive or guerrilla adversaries. Remarkably, the armies of civilization inevitably suffer some severe and embarrassing defeats before these truths dawn on their commanders. In two full decades of determined fighting, neither the French nor the Americans cold defeat the guerrillas of Southeast Asia. But together in the Persian Gulf War, with but a fraction of the strength they employed in Indochina, they decimated one of the largest and best-equipped conventional armies in the world in just three months. In contrast to the Iraqi army’s performance in the Gulf war, the Apaches survived civilized military pressure for almost 300 years and were defeated only by primitive methods - literally by other Apaches wearing US Army uniforms.

- And General Crook’s decision to use rudimentary mule pack trains for easy mobility - the closest he could get to their mobility.


Ch 6. The Harvest of Mars: The Casualties of War

(88) The most notorious massacres of North American Indians, such as those at Sand Creek and Camp Grant, and the only actual genocides (that is, complete extinction of a tribe primarily by homicide) during the Europeans conquest were all inflicted by local militias.

- this is not the actual definition of “genocide,” but ok.
- Sand Creek: 150+ dead, 2/3 of which were women and children, Colorado, 1864.
- this was done by US Army colonel J. Chivington and the Third Colorado Calvary, only partially a “local militia.”
- Camp Grant: 144 dead, 136 of which were women and children. Aravaipa Canyon, AZ, 1871.

(89) Two-Thirds of deaths suffered by the Union armed forces during the Civil War were due to disease. Such disease casualties are included in the war death rates for civilized states but not in those of primitive groups.

(90) Percentage of deaths due to warfare:

Jivaro (upper Amazon) 32% (59% of male deaths)
Yanomamo-Shamatari (Amazon) 21% (37% of male deaths)
Mae Enga (New Guinea) 18% (34% of male deaths)
Murngin (Australia) 28% (male deaths only)
Ancient Mexico 5%
France 19th C 3%
Western Europe 17th C 2%
US and Europe 20th C <1%

British Columbia 500-1774 CE 27%
Illinois 1300 CE 16% (35% of make deaths)
Ukraine (mesolithic) 16%
Northeast Plains 1325-1650 15%
Denmark 4100 BCE 13.6%
Kentucky 2500-3000 BCE 5%
Central California 1500 BCE - 500 CE >5%

- civilized/states in italics
- how does this account for 95% of Indigenous people in North American dead by the hands and disease of Europeans within a 400 year period? Is Colonial Conquest not “war”?
- i.e. North America 1500-1900 95%
- more by disease than by violent death. but is conquest and genocide “warfare”?

(91) Thousand year old skeletons in California prehistory show that about 5% contain embedded arrowheads.

(94) In an average Civil War battle, 12 to 15 percent of the combatants were killed or wounded; even at Gettysburg, the Union forces lost 21 percent and the Confederate lost 30 percent to death or wounds. On the terrible first day of the Somme battle in 1916, about 40 percent of the thirteen attacking British divisions became casualties. The scant available evidence, then, indicates that, at least in formal battles, tribal warriors were wounded about as often as soldiers in the bloodiest modern battles. [I.e. the very worst battles of modern history seem to be equivalent to normal losses in many primitive cultures. See (90) table].


Ch 7. To the Victor: The Profits and Losses of Primitive War

(99) In Tahiti, a victorious warrior, given the opportunity, would pound his vanquished foe’s corpse flat with his head war club, cut a slit through the well crushed victim, and don him as a trophy poncho.

(108) Of course, few tribal groups ever admitted they were fighting for territory. Like modern and ancient states, they invariably claimed to be fighting to avenge or redress various wrongs…but the victors nevertheless acquired more territory or choice resources with striking regularity..

- see Demonic Males pg 190…power for it’s own sake, or “abstract power,” but can broken down into (1) territorial expansion (including resources) and (2) genetic expansion (mating rights, i.e. us vs them). Power for it’s own sake could also be phrased as The Unconscious Desire for Growth.


Ch 8. Crying Havoc: The Question of Causes

(115) In Minnesota, the Chippewa fought for over 150 years with the Dakota Sioux over use of hunting territories and wild rice fields.

(119) Because modern civilized states seem to go to war less frequently and to suffer proportionately fewer deaths as a result than did many primitive societies, it is at least theoretically possible that as human population density increases, the frequency of warfare and percentage of war casualties actually decline.

- BUT the U.S. has been “at war 93% of it’s existence,” [https://www.globalresearch.ca/america-has-been-at-war-93-of-the-time-222-out-of-239-years-since-1776/5565946]. Are the Yanomami and Mae Enga [most violent primitive cultures] at war 93% of the time?
- “go to war” is different than “being at war,” which is part of Keeley’s many misleading premises.

- The larger the state, and the more larger states there are, the less frequently they will go to war. For example, the “United States,” in it’s huge geographical expansion, has “fought 12 major wars,” [https://www.factmonster.com/world/war/united-states-war]. Compare to being at war “93% of the time.” (How does the joke go, “67% of statistics are meaningless…made up..”?)

- Compare this to the hundreds of “nations” that existed in this geography before 1492. At least 300 different languages (therefore 300 distinct cultures). Those hundreds of nations would have seen hundreds of wars. Geographically, what is more violent, a bunch of small tribal wars, or one giant world war by one country taking up the same space?


Ch 11. Beating Swords into Metaphors: The Roots of the Pacified Past

(164) Historian John Keegan notes that WWI persuaded only the victors that “the costs of war exceeded its rewards,” whereas WWII convinced “the victors and vanquished alike of the same thing.”

(165) Once “mutually assured destruction” became technologically possible in the 1960s, the concepts of victory and defeat, “good guys” and “bad guys” lost their significance. War was seen as more than just stupid or cruel; in its atomic form, it was suicidal lunacy - a lunacy that western civilization had induced and could not cure.

(166) Inherited mental inferiority “explained” the intractable resistance to European civilization by “primitive races.” The lives of savages were “nasty, brutish, and short” because the humans who lived them were both culturally and genetically limited. Late nineteenth century imperialists thus discovered a moral duty and a biological right to wrest dominion of the earth from such less favored peoples.
If prewar European imperialism encouraged a view of war and conquest as normal and right, WWII and its aftermath severely challenged it. One especially shocking aspect of WWI was that the Nazis attempted to do to fellow Europeans what the latter had long been doing (less efficiently and less brutally) to non-Europeans. The Nazis justified genocidal “clearances,” the grossest forms of labor exploitation, and tyrannical government over conquered peoples by an uncomfortably familiar reference to a self proclaimed superiority of race, technology, and culture. After the Nazis, warfare and conquest looked less like noble crusades or direct expressions of a law of nature and more like the basest of crimes. After four centuries of Western European imperialism, the sauce for the goose had finally been applied to the gander.

- Nazi “genetic purity” as a concentrated example of one of the two aims of male aggression: genetic expansion (the other being territorial expansion, both representing the unconscious desire for growth).
- “self proclaimed superiority of race, technology, and culture..” How is this different than the conservative right in America?

(167) As cynics often observed in the United States during the nineteenth century, the nobility of “savages” was directly proportional to one’s geographic distance from them.

(167) Once the natives were safely reduced to living on reservations, Westerners were just as inclined to become sentimental about them as Easterners…This change from fearful hatred to nostalgia as distance in time or space increases is not peculiar to the United States.

(168) The great shock of WWII savagery, atomic fear, the ex post facto awakening to the evils and indignities of imperial conquest, and the later spread of ecological sensitivity eroded all that remained of the Western myths of progress and civilized superiority. Attacks on these moribund notions have reached frenzied proportions in the past few decades. Industrial expansion and technological advance are now regarded merely as harbingers of ecological disaster and more destructive wars, while advances in medicine have only encouraged over population and further misery. Mass communications and cheap transportation are regarded as having eroded human linguistic and cultural diversity while bringing the commercial corruptions of the West to every doorstep. These accusations imply some rather drastic cures - technological regression, depopulation, deindustrialization, decreasing human mobility, and censorship or suppression of global communication. Ironically, these prescriptions, taken simultaneously, resemble less Rousseau’s golden age and more the post-apocalypse world envisioned in science fiction. These Neo-Rousseauian arguments curiously imply that we are only a nuclear winter away from a springtime of human equality and harmony.
Cynics have observed that those who have benefitted the most from “progress” - the citizens of the First World - are the people most inclined to disdain it. The privileged few who eat better, lead longer and more stimulating lives because of modern agriculture, medicine, education, mass communications, and travel, and are most cushioned from physical discomfort and inconvenience by industrial technology are the most nostalgic about the primitive world.

- “nostalgia” is only available to those with the comfort of “free time.”

(169) As ever, when faith in the myth of progress declines, the myth of the golden age finds new adherents.

(170) A wise writer once noted that “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

- eschewing the tension of opposites/paradox with the comfort of ideological certainty and/or unconscious male violence.


Ch 12. A Trout in the Milk: Discussions and Conclusions

(174) The raw subject matter of anthropology - the origins of humans and their various cultures, social life before cities, states, and historical records - are in every culture but our own the province of mythology.

- mythology turns to anthropology with globalization - information overload.

(177) Contrary to common sense, neither the intensity nor the frequency of war or other violent behavior is correlated with human population density. Another surprise is that trade and intermarriage between societies increase, rather than decrease, the likelihood of war between them.

(179) If Westerners have belatedly recognized that they are not the crown of creation and rightful lords of the earth, their now common view of themselves as humanity’s nadir is equally absurd.

- the conservative right has not recognized this (esp Dominion Theology as in American Fascists, Chris Hedges).
- “humanity’s nadir,” the narcissistic, myopic idea that evolution has ended with us.