PROMETHEAN ANTAGONIST

It's taught in schools and colleges. It's depicted in blockbuster films (i.e. Avatar and Pocahontas). And, it's yearned for daily in discussions, blog posts, and internet commentary... The noble delusion that we can all return to Eden, where everyone shares (and presumably no one leeches), everyone cooperates (and presumably no one's a slacker), and no one is crushed into submission by the desire to make the noted dream Real.

On my Facebook site recently an acquaintance had a link to an article about a tribe of people in Africa who are noted for their collectivist values and lifestyles (1000 points already, right?). In the article, "researchers" (who we know, of course, never have a personal agenda or propaganda point to make) simply presented a game to tribal children in which they could run to a tree where a basket of fruit was placed. The first child to reach the basket would "win" the desired treat. Of course these were non-westerners and appropriately non-capitalist pure spirits, so they all - supposedly - ran together hand in hand because of their pronounced sense of communal fairness. Out of curiosity, I later found that the "Xhosa" people are named for the local language's word for "fierce," or "angry" (subdued laughter now appropriate).

I don't call into question the "researches" conclusions (really). Maybe their appraisals were accurate. I don't doubt the possibility that this tiny group of children have been raised with an extra dose of good manners and even selflessness.

Some people don't like it when one is skeptical regarding such stories. After all, what socialist wants it to rain on their perpetual parade of the fanciful. Some of my skepticism arises from the recurrence of this meme among some academics. Margaret Meade famously told us of the pure souls of Samoa, leading to the disappointment of later research that found Samoans to have, among other human flaws, one of the highest incidences of rape in the world. That's right, they were flawed like all of us lowly products of western science, technology, and individualism.

I touched on some of these same issues before in a post regarding James Cameron's movie, "Avatar."

I don't think it would be a bad thing if people were generally more kind and voluntarily shared and cooperated (as many already do, in spite of what Hollywood tells us). Contrary to caricatures of conservatives, designed by the delusional clowns of leftdom, conservative philosophy has no gripe with people striving for social improvement and moral goodness. It's the restrictions or abolition of the voluntary part of the equation that gets a most of us concerned. Any society or political apparatus can order one to be "selfless" - not really all that impressive. Pretending that the lifestyle of a tiny tribe of people can be mimicked by modern techno-industrial societies of millions is far-fetched. Worse still to imagine that a return to cave or jungle would be a desirable path. A modern financial consultant may be stressed and notably competitive but I can't see the world being a better place if he or she had elephantiasis or a knowledge of science that was summed up in a few folk tales.

Rousseau was probably the first modern intellectual to begin this recurring nonsense that primitive people are better people and that our moral failures somehow emerge from our unwillingness to be pulled into some "natural " state of obedience to collective hierarchies.

I took a primate behavior class in college (highly recommended) and was amazed at how Chimpanzees and gorillas etc. had - in nascent form - so many of the things that leftists attribute to social conditioning or capitalism. I particularly loved one experiment in which a chimp was made privy to the location of some bananas and how he waited until the others were ferried away before he accessed them - for himself (I guess he didn't get the memo).

There will no doubt always be people who yearn for the imaginary times of the past or see some acts of communal behavior amongst more primitive peoples and think we could, or should, do the same because it would be "what's best for us. "

The children noted at the beginning of this essay are the equivalent of Bambi; cute, nice, ideal, but definitely not us. In the long stretch of human history and the variety of ways we can live, there is no evidence that "sharing" on a mass scale is possible let alone desirable.

If it's selfishness that some are so put off by, they may want to consider the possibility that their perpetual demand that others "sacrifice" and "share" on command may be one of the most selfish acts humans have contrived - and there's a body count to backup my argument.

"The noble savage" is a delusion. All humans have a bit of nobility and savagery within them and some choose one side with greater allegiance, but the most truly noble among us are those that freely choose to be so. Those who idealize some isolated examples of altruism as a template worthy of imposing on the rest of us are bound to disappoint (they always have).

Subservience is hardly noble but it most assuredly is savage.

# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ 11:38 AM