Where Is the Nobility?

When I was much younger, I used to think that the native inhabitants of Australia, who were pushed out by my European ancestors, were largely peaceful people living in harmony with nature. I suspect this view is common among some groups today. But is it right?

In "An Anthropologist’s War Stories", Nicholas Wade reviews the recently published Noble Savages by anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon, in which Chagnon relates both his painstaking discovery of the sex that is at the heart of the traditionally violent Yanomamö tribes of the Amazon and his battles to correct well-established opinions amongst his fellow anthropologists, who proved most unwilling to admit those facts and their explanation.

I've been waiting to write this blog post for a couple of weeks. As you can see from the reference citation below, my source was published in The New York Times almost three weeks ago, which is a bit beyond the limitation I've imposed on you that your BBC News source be published within the last seven days. But because it's so close to the essay we've been working on, I didn't want to share my responses, so couldn't really write this. But your final revisions are in now and the final corrections are being made, so I need not wait any longer.

Although I have long ago given up the cute but dangerously false notion that primitive peoples were less violent, bloody and generally less vicious than more developed civilisations, Chagnon's latest book presumably details the solid evidence that shows my former belief to be false. It reminds of a similar belief I first had when I arrived in Thailand: I thought that Thai society was more peaceful, less violent, than my own Western society. I was a bit surprised to find, on checking, that the facts just don't support this belief. The murder and violent crime statistics clearly show that Thai culture and society is more violent even than the US, and that is much more violent than Australia. So much for my nice beliefs untested by checking against the relevant evidence. In fact, Thailand, like many other countries, is becoming less violent as it becomes more Western in culture, as the falling violence statistics reflect.

I've already bought and started reading Chagnon's book, not only for the mass of evidence that gives us a more accurate view of reality, nor only for the value of his explanation of how sex is at the bottom of much of it (not so surprising, really - I think that the simpler and less developed a culture or society, the greater the role that sex competition between men for available women must play. I'm hoping that Chagnon will provide more solid evidence). No, I am also deeply interested in Chagnon's battles with the prevailing ideology based, rather than fact based, false beliefs of the American Anthropological Association. In fact, I think that many anthropologists, and others in the social sciences, and far too many teachers, cling for very bad reasons to another dangerously false notion: the idea that all cultures are of equal value and that moral right and wrong is determined by culture, so that if a culture accepts something it must be right. This moral relativism is false, and worse, it is immoral because it actively supports the continuation of great evil as dictators and despots of all sorts use it as an excuse to refuse to listen to the moral arguments of their opponents, labelling them as "foreign", which merely adds dishonesty and deliberate ignorance to their list of evils. Some leaders might argue, for example, that their society accepts that women are inferior to men and must be locked away at home: the anthropological understanding of this way of thinking is certainly important, but that only means we can understand their ideas, it does not and cannot make it right. If such a view were correct, then every evil would be OK if people believed it: slavery would be a good thing, for example, as it was practised by almost every culture over thousands of years, and they were all wrong to do that. The slave owners and condoners were all acting immorally, however understandable their actions and beliefs might have been.

Oddly, amongst the most likely experts, this warped notion of what makes something moral or not, philosophers who study ethics and moral philosophy, such a view is not the consensus, it is among highly intelligent and very well educated people in other fields that this moral relativism, that all cultures are equal, is popular, although I think, I hope, it is rapidly dying out as the toxic influence of Marxism also washes away.

And the Dogon? I think the sooner their old traditions die out the better. They should certainly be preserved, but only in museums and books, along with the record of human slavery, religious crusades, blasphemy laws, suppression of free speech to protect elites, anti-gay laws and social sanctions, the treatment of women as inferior creatures owned and controlled by men, and many other ugly traditions that our ancestors passed down for far too long. Progress is much better than staying the same, and if sustainable means "staying the same", then sustainability is also a bad thing.

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Reference

Wade, N. (2013, February 18). An Anthropologist’s War Stories. The New York Times. Retrieved March 10, 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/napoleon-chagnons-war-stories-in-the-amazon-and-at-home.html?_r=0