Following Marshall Sahlins’s then-recent Stone Age Economics, Clastres maintained that competition for scarce resources cannot account for Amazonian violence and warfare, since indigenous peoples lived, not in the scarcity posited by Marx, but rather in overabundance. Indigenous peoples, he said, have no markets because they have no surplus; but the lack of a surplus — pejoratively labeled a subsistence economy — was due not to an inferior technology, but to a technology that was precisely calibrated to give the society just what it needed. “In other words, far from exhausting themselves in the attempt to survive,” Clastres writes, “primitive society, selective in the determination of its needs, possesses a machine of production capable of satisfying them.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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…

… war was thought of as containing large elements of mutual avoidance. The village of Bajoeg Gede was surrounded by an old vallum and foss, and the people explained the functions of these fortifications in the following terms: “If you and I had a quarrel, then you would go and dig a ditch around your house. Later I would come to fight with you, but I would find the ditch and then there would be no fight.”

Similarly, even within villages, such mutual avoidance is practiced when there is friction between individuals…

[The] culture includes definite techniques for dealing with quarrels. Two men who have quarrelled will go formally to… the representative of the Rajah and will there register their quarrel, agreeing that whichever speaks to the other will pay a fine or make an offering to the gods. Later, if the quarrel terminates, this contract may be formally nullified. Smaller — but similar — avoidances are practiced, even by small children in their quarrels. It is significant, perhaps, that this procedure is not an attempt to influence the protagonists away from hostility and towards friendship. Rather, it is a formal recognition of the state of their mutual relationship, and possibly, in some sort, a pegging of the relationship at that state.

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.

It is immediately clear… that the driving force for cultural activity is not either acquisitiveness or crude physiological need. The Balinese, especially in the plains, are not hungry or poverty-stricken. They are wasteful of food, and a very considerable part of their activity goes into entirely nonproductive activities of an artistic or ritual nature in which food and wealth are lavishly expended. Essentially we are dealing with an economy of plenty rather than an economy of scarcity.

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.

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.