War & The Noble Savage
The latest book from my friend and fellow traveller, Gyrus, is subtitled “A Critical Inquiry into Recent Accounts of Violence amongst Uncivilized Peoples”. Over the past few years a debate has been raging… quietly raging, but raging nonetheless… regarding the nature of pre-civilized human society. In this slim but incisive volume, Gyrus summarises the debate and adds to it. Signficantly, in my view.
There is a tendency within our culture (perhaps within humanity, though anthropology suggests that it’s not universal, merely rather prevalent) to reduce everything to a kind of oppositional dualism. To polarise every debate. The baddies and the goodies. Yin and Yang. Male and female. Left and Right. I find this tendency rather unsatisfactory as it often (usually!) ends up simplifying issues to the point of uselessness.
The debate regarding pre-civilized cultures; specifically regarding the questions of whether they are/were more or less violent than civilized cultures and whether they are/were more or less ecologically conscientious than civilized cultures; has followed that general tendency and become polarised. On the one hand there’s the view — generally attributed to Rousseau — that pre-civilized peoples were “Noble Savages”. On the other hand there’s the view expressed by Hobbes that primitive life was “nasty, brutish and short”.
These two positions (both of which appear to have started life as thought-experiments, rather than deeply held convictions) have led to various kinds of caricature. The post-Hobbesians paint a ridiculous Dances With Wolves-esque idyllic utopia — minus the inter-tribal warfare scenes — picture of the other side, and insist they are guilty of nostalgia and wishful thinking. This is of course compounded by New Age primitivists with their Back to Nature rhetoric. On the other hand, the post-Hobbesians are themselves painted as deluded apologists for progress; desperately trying to portray the past as hellish even as civilisation destroys the future.
Where Gyrus, characteristically, succeeds is by refusing to be taken in by the propaganda of either established camps and instead casting a genuinely critical eye over the claims of both. In doing so, I believe he likely comes as close to the truth of the matter as we’re going to get — given the difficulties involved in establishing facts when discussing prehistoric societies and/or modern indigenous societies prior to our contact with them.
War & The Noble Savage is accessible, educational and well-written enough to be described as entertaining. It serves as a fine rebuttal to the recent tendency to view the past through a Hobbesian lens while never succumbing to the seduction of nostalgia or primitivism. I’m pretty much going to insist that my few regular readers (and the rest of you too!) buy it (think of it as returning the favour for the excellent service I’ve been providing here for several years, ahem). It’s privately published and costs a paltry four pounds (including P&P… people outside the UK add a quid for postage). Even if this isn’t a subject that traditionally you’d be interested in (though you’ll be surprised at how relevant it is to all manner of other areas of debate), you should still buy it in order to support the kind of independent research and publishing that the author, and others, undertake.
Overall, War & The Noble Savage is an important contribution to an important debate. For those interested in an introduction to the subject (while you’re waiting for the book to be delievered) Gyrus has given some talks on this subject, one of which was recently turned into a Slidecast which you can listen to on his website for free.
I’ve read a few things about this over the last few months. First of all, George Monbiot touches on the issue in this post: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/08/18/should-we-seek-to-save-industrial-civilisation/
OK. He’s extrapolating into the future rather than deciphering the past, but there does seem to be something in what he has to say about how things would go if we were to revert to a more primitive state. To paraphrase:
When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over. Instead of gathering as
free collectives of happy householders, the survivors of this collapse will be
subject to the will of people seeking to monopolise remaining resources. This
will is likely to be imposed through violence. Political accountability will be
a distant memory. The chances of conserving any resource in these circumstances
are approximately zero. The human and ecological consequences of the first
global collapse are likely to persist for many generations, perhaps for our
species’ remaining time on earth.
Secondly, Jared Diamond, talking about pre-industrial societies in New Guinea, points out that when strangers meet, they talk, and if they cannot find any common ancestry, they will try to kill each other.
Once again, it’s the State, with it’s framework of rules, adhered to by custom, and backed up by the threat of violence and incarceration, that allows us to function without seeing everyone we meet as a potential threat.
January 11th, 2010 | 10:27pm
by Paul
That’s a very common belief. It is, for instance, the standard interpretation of Freud’s thesis as expressed in Civilization and Its Discontents. I’m not so sure, however. Not only do I question those who interpret Freud in that way (I think his position was far more nuanced than most give him credit for, but that’s a discussion for another day), but I don’t think the actual evidence supports it.
It hardly needs pointing out that the emergence of State powers has not led to an end to violence. As Gyrus points out in War & The Noble Savage, those who claim that States have made the world more peaceful even if not entirely so, are arguably playing quite fast and loose with the statistics.
Beyond that, I find it troublesome that this discussion seems to get reduced to hunter-gatherer / pre-civilised / primitive / pre-State cultures on one side. Versus civilisation / States on the other. As though you can lump the Yanomami, the !Kung, the Iatmul, the Sioux and the Balinese in together. Or indeed, lump the Athenian City State, Mussolini’s Italy, modern Ireland and post-war Japan together.
I suspect, for instance, that if one were to compare Hitler’s Germany with pre-European-contact Bali it would paint a radically different picture to a comparison between the Yanomami and modern Belgium. The Soviet Union and 21st century Sweden share some basic characteristics that allow us to describe them both as “States”, while the Iatmul and the !Kung share some basic characteristics that allow us to identify them as pre-State. But there are also very significant differences. Certainly significant enough to affect the debate regarding the relative violence of State Vs. non-State cultures.
Gregory Bateson’s fieldwork in Bali provides a startling insight into a culture where war is almost non-existant (see Bali: The Value System of a Steady State, one of the essays in Steps to An Ecology of Mind). He writes…
Similarly, even within villages, such mutual avoidance is practiced when there is friction between individuals…
Bateson was obviously extremely interested to discover what it was about this culture that suppressed violence relatively effectively. If I’m reading him correctly, he attributes it to several environmental and cultural factors which work together to all but eliminate what he calls “schismogenic sequences” (cumulative sequences ending in climax). It’s a fascinating essay and I heartily recommend it.
Unfortunately however, one of the environmental factors that he identifies as of having great importance is that of an abundance of food.
I say “unfortunately”, because it is my belief that our own culture is entering a period of resource scarcity and even if we were to engineer a series of hypothetical cultural changes to reduce our own propensity for violence, environmental factors may not be on our side.
January 11th, 2010 | 11:15pm
by Jim Bliss
Jim, er… thanks for the plug! (Cheque’s in the post ;-).)
Paul, I should mention one of the few actual conclusions I got to in the book. Jim’s caveats about lumping “roughly similar” peoples and nations together are important, which is why I usually refer to comparing “modern” cultures to “primitive” cultures as “a game”. I think it’s worth doing, and calling it “a game” is tongue-in-cheek, because of course it’s something our whole world’s built on, like contrasting “culture” to “nature” is a foundation of most human societies. But I find it worth bearing in mind all the time that comparing quality of life between cultures will never be – at least, never should be – a science. We know what’s down that road.
Anyway, this conclusion I mentioned is related to the title of a key study in the field, War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley. If the “game” we’re playing is weighing up “modern” vs. “primitive”, where we draw the line between the two is crucial. To take “primitive” (I know, a contested word, and we’re being obscenely simplistic, but bear with me) as “pre-state” is, I think, a terrible distortion for the debate on violence & ecology. If you look around for writers who seriously posit primitive culture as more harmonious than modern culture (and by “seriously”, I mean they’re not naive enough to think that primitive culture is entirely peaceful), you’ll be hard put to find anyone drawing the dividing line there. It’s usually drawn across the advent of agriculture, sedentarism, social complexity, this sort of thing – which all happened around the end of the last ice age, thousands of years before civilizations.
So, aside from the general issues of lumping different socities together, the basic mistake to avoid in this debate is to lump pre-state nomadic hunter-gatherers together with pre-state settled, agricultural, or pastoral people. The gulf there, from my reading, is at least as big as that between agricultural and industrial societies, and probably bigger than between pre-state and state-based societies.
I agree with Monbiot. There’s no going back. I think there was what you might call an “original anarchism” for most of our species’ life, before agriculture, where social scales were small enough for everyone to have a say. It wasn’t Eden, but our image of it is distorted by Keeley & Steven Pinker sometimes as much as it is by New Agers. But recognizing this is no reason to be blasé about the current situation. Even though the evolutionary pedigree of the forager lifestyle (i.e. how long it kept the species going) makes ours seem non-existent, the forager lifestyle doesn’t work for a planet of billions. We need to keep chipping away at the least bad way for ourselves – which may gain inspiration from past socities, of course. As Hakim Bey says, “A return of the primitive, not a return to the primitive.”
Good to see Monbiot round up the “lest we forgot” facts in the wake of Avatar, too:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/01/11/the-holocaust-we-will-not-see/
As a side-note about Jared Diamond’s comment, New Guinea societies are one of the “poster people” for anyone trying to debunk the Noble Savage (whether they do it well, as Diamond does, or badly). They rank along with the Yanomami as yeah, pretty violent, but also, over-used as Hobbesian ammo. They’re also both sedentary or semi-sedentary, and semi-agricultural – very far from representative of anything in our history before around 12,000 years ago.
January 12th, 2010 | 1:03am
by Gyrus
This is a crucial point, Gyrus. During his first significant fieldwork (with the Iatmul of New Guinea) Bateson developed a conceptual tool “to get a sharper understanding” of the culture. He called this tool “ethos” (though he later regret that he hadn’t coined a new term to avoid confusion between his specific definition of the term and the pre-existing one).
The purpose of ‘ethos’ was to try and separate (as far as possible, bearing in mind that Bateson is the ultimate proponent of integrated / ecological / systems thinking) the various values and cultural mores of a society from the practical / logistical ways of life.
Always bearing in mind the inherent connection between ethos and practice, and therefore the limited distance one can separate the two, he believed that while it is clearly absurd to suggest that modern civilisation could adopt the living practices of pre-civilised cultures, it might nonetheless be possible to adopt some of the ethos. And this would, not solve the problems of unsustainability, but perhaps provide a signpost towards such solutions.
January 12th, 2010 | 3:00pm
by Jim Bliss
I always feel a bit lost for concrete examples of applying a primitive “ethos”, looking at my life (though I think the value of background “ambient” inspiration with such resonant topics holds, nevertheless). I think some are invisible to me, but one just struck me reading a piece on Pierre Clastres (by a very interesting ayahuasca-focused scholar I’ve just discovered, Steve Beyer):
I think this bit of primitive ethos definitely resonated with me, and strongly informs my life. I work less than I might, because I don’t need as much money for junk as many people seem to (while also knowing I’m lucky to be able to cover rent without full-time work). We’ve been living in overabundance for a while, and squandered it, working longer to satisfy manufactured desires. We have the long-term unemployed and the long-term overworked. I guess the “non-surplus” ethos is spreading, what with The Idler and the “Slow Movement”. Definitely a leaf to take from the forager book, even if we have to OCR it into a different context.
January 13th, 2010 | 12:58am
by Gyrus