Monday, January 04, 2021
Over-primitivizing
I noted in previous item that Eliza Morton, writing in 1893, tended to over-primitivize the primitives. This was a widespread habit, practiced by 'progressives' like Darwin and 'conservatives' like Morton.
And we're still doing it. Or more precisely we're split between stupidly romanticizing the Noble Savages and stupidly primitivizing them.
There have always been some experts who remained objective. In the '30s those objective experts were published and respected, eg in the WPA Guides. Those writers treated the old tribes appropriately, describing the massive wars and empires AND the scientific approaches to agriculture and medicine.
Objective experts are still around, still expanding our knowledge of ancient science. We know now that even the Neanderthals used pharmaceutical plants and surgical methods that were lost later on.
Some people are still stuck in the over-primitive style of thinking. This article by Donald Boudreaux misdescribes the ancients, which unfortunately devalues his CORRECT description of modern witchcraft.
Centuries ago, to be sure, people lived simply – if by “simply” is meant life, generation after generation, occupied with unchanging dull routines, and consumption limited almost exclusively to those tiny numbers of goods and services that can be produced from scratch by a few dozen villagers. Such ‘simplicity,’ alas, enables only subsistence. And human beings trapped in subsistence do not escape ignorance and superstition. Let’s stop mistaking dull routines and the absence of complex patterns of production and consumption as evidence of lives lived in harmony with nature. It’s a myth – we might say an urban myth – that pre-industrial peoples lived with nature harmoniously, or more harmoniously than we today live with nature. Nature devastated our pre-industrial kin. Nature mercilessly plowed them relentlessly into early graves. Our ancestors’ failure to produce much material wealth was a reflection, not of their harmony with nature, but of their deep ignorance of – and, hence, conflictual relationship with – nature. To dance to imaginary rain gods or to chant for a child dying of bacterial infection is not to live harmoniously with nature; it is to live with nature most inharmoniously. Nature all along did its thing – for example, it occasionally failed to water crops, and it often grew lethal bacteria within children’s lungs – while human beings who were as ignorant of nature as nature is of human beings, chanted, danced, built totems, burned leaves and twigs, sacrificed animals, all in fruitless efforts to solve the problems.The ancient tribes didn't do those things. They had a repertoire of healing methods, partly pharmaceutical and partly spiritual. Both methods are NECESSARY for healing. Using solely the spiritual, while doing everything wrong in the areas of sanitation and pharma, was a European invention and specifically a Catholic invention. The rest of the world, from Persia to China to the Americas, was still using traditional part-physical medicine with some success. Only Rome kicked out all the physical knowledge and treated disease by burning heretics. We've returned to the Roman tradition now in precise detail. Sprenger and Kremer wrote the textbook for Fauci and Ferguson. ¶ 9:12 AM
