Human vulnerability

Where human vulnerability most revealed itself was when the attack came by surprise. This was very different from the conditions prevailing among animals. Not only is it more difficult among most animal species to get close to a rival without being noticed, because of more acute senses, but it is also more difficult to finish off your fellow man in one stroke even if surprise is achieved.

An animal’s ‘weapon’ is its body, and that body is very strongly built. Such a weapon is always ready for use. By contrast, if humans are caught unarmed they are at a serious disadvantage and are extremely vulnerable. Humans thus became quintessential first-strikers. As with other animal species, they normally did not seriously fight fellow humans on the open battlefield for fear of being hurt themselves. However, unlike other animals, they were able to kill adults of their own species by ambushing the unarmed and vulnerable.

Fighting among hunter-gatherers

And kill they did. Reported estimates of hunter-gatherer mortality rates in fighting are inherently tenuous, but those we have show a remarkable agreement across time and space. For the Murngin of Australia’s Arnhem Land during a period of 20 years, Warner estimated this rate at 200 men of a total male population of 700. This amounts to about 30 percent of the fighting population.

Pilling’s estimate of at least 10 percent killed among Tiwi Aboriginal men in one decade comes within the same range. Kimber’s estimate, for a generation, of 5 percent mortality in fighting in arid areas and about 6.5 percent in well-watered ones refers to violent mortality in relation to the entire population’s overall mortality rates.

The Plains Indians showed a deficit of 50 percent for the men in the Blackfoot tribe in 1805 and a 33 percent deficit in 1858. Even among the Eskimos of the central Canadian Arctic, who lacked group warfare, violent death, in so-called blood feuds and homicide, was estimated by one authority at one per 1,000 per year, 10 times the US peak rate in 1990. As Jean Briggs has revealingly written: “Readers of Canadian Inuit ethnography, my own Never in Anger (1970) in particular, have sometimes concluded that Inuit are always and everywhere pacific. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Fighting among agriculturalists

The data for early agriculturalists tells much the same story as it does for hunter-gatherers. About 15 percent of adult Yanomamo died as a result of inter- and intragroup violence: 24 percent of the males and 7 percent of the females. The Waorani (Auca) of the Ecuadorian Amazon hold the registered world record: more than 60 percent of adult deaths over five generations were caused by feuding and warfare. In highland Papua New Guinea independent estimates are again very similar: among the Dani, 28.5 percent of the men and 2.4 percent of the women have been reckoned to have died violently.

Among the Enga 34.8 percent of the men were estimated to have met the same fate; Meggitt had records of 34 wars among them in 50 years; among the Hewa, killing was estimated at 7.78 per 1,000 per year; among the Goilala, whose total population was barely over 150, there were 29 (predominantly men) killed during a period of 35 years; among the lowland Gebusi, 35.2 percent of the men and 29.3 percent of the women fell victim to homicide; the high rate for the women may be explained by the fact that killing was mainly related to failure to reciprocate in sister exchange marriage.

The Balkans

Violent death in tribal Montenegro at the beginning of the twentieth century was estimated at 25 percent. Archaeology unearths similar finds. In the late prehistoric Indian site of Madisonville, Ohio, 22 percent of the adult male skulls had wounds and 8 percent were fractured. In a prehistoric cemetery site in Illinois, 16 percent of the individuals had met a violent death.

All this suggests that average human violent mortality rates among adults in the ‘state of nature’ may have been in the order of 15 percent (25 percent for the men); extremely sparse populations living in areas where resources were diffuse probably occupied the lower part of the scale, but not by a very wide margin.

Furthermore, as Meggitt observes of both Australian Aborigines and New Guinea Enga highlanders, most of the men carried wound marks and scars, and regarded them as a matter of course. Chagnon says the same of the Yanomamo. In this respect Hobbes was closer to the truth than Rousseau. (129-131)

You’ve spent 10,000 years getting there. It’s not pretty but it’s yours—the swamp, the forest, the tree house where you live. Bigger and stronger tribes drove you down from the better land higher up the slopes, so you retreated to a godforsaken place thick with reptiles, insects, and malarial encephalitis. Southern Papua’s rain forests are hell; but at least you feel safe and alone.

Then Zurück in die Steinzeit comes along—a party of Germans looking for tourism’s outer edge, an unknown and uncontacted tribe, a forest fastness to outfast any other. They have their cameras ready and this is what they’ve come for (Zurück in die Steinzeit means Back to the Stone Age)—stark naked little guys with bows and arrows and funny-looking penis sheaths and living in trees. They’re up there on a kind of platform gesticulating: even at $8000 a seat this show is worth the price.

Ethno-tourism

It seems that everywhere today people spend lots of time staring at other people. In some Third World villages they do it because time hangs heavy on their hands. In First World cities they do it because time hangs heavier—the rich, who read less and play more and suffer a surfeit of channels as well as food, are often bored out of their minds. So the bolder of them go on tour to the ends of the earth where “extreme ethno-tourism” can be enjoyed by venturing into the last strongholds of tribal man.

In his book about the tourists now exploring such domains Lawrence Osborne describes them as “a sophisticated variant of the ecotourist.” He concedes in The Naked Tourist that “they are not anthropologists by any means,” but goes on to claim that “they share the anthropologist’s ethos: subtle, invisible contact with fragile and remote peoples, extreme sensitivity, a light touch.”

Now one doesn’t want to be picky. Mr Osborne writes well, is funny, and is highly informative. For all of this we can be grateful. Besides, he unsparingly describes his own motives for joining one of these adventure groups. But in all seriousness, is it possible—is it even imaginable—that a commercial tour operation run by a one-time tennis player from Wisconsin, who inveigles his way into tribal territory, and marches up to the foot of somebody’s tree house in Papua so his customers can meet its occupants, actually represents the “anthropological ethos” with its subtlety, sensitivity, and ‘light touch?’

Who said they wanted to be touched anyway? And even if the touch was light—and a recent BBC film about the man in question, Kelly Woolford, throws some doubt on this—why on earth do westerners imagine they have a right to behave in this way? Would they like a prying cameraman to kick in their own front doors and walk through the house?

How come the little brown tree-dwellers have come to be considered as suitable objects for staring at as if they were architectural ruins like Greek temples, or geological oddities like Monument Valley? In other words, as exotic extras on the global stage of commercially theatricalised tourist spectacle?

For broken and ruined cultures, as in much of Aboriginal Australia, it may be best to put aside the old-time way of life and move on. For some other marginalised tribal groups in industrial societies that seems to me equally true. But it’s not the case here. These inaccessible old-time Papuan cultures are in working order. If the Indonesian government is leaving the people alone, if they’re harming no-one and are happy enough with their lives, why should they be treated as a legitimate target for overripe, underworked, idle, escapist voyeurs?

For that’s what Lawrence Osborne self-confessedly is. He suffers from ennui—compounded with the slothful disease of the spirit called accidie. Work of some kind might be a cure, but that’s not what he wants. He wants out of New York. He wants to escape. He knows intimately what it is to be distracted from distraction by distraction and he’s had enough. An Englishman of middle age who lives on Manhattan, “It came upon me quite suddenly,” he says, “like a mental disorder unknown to psychiatry: the desire to stop everything in normal life, to uproot and leave.” And as one of the city’s permanent transients this wasn’t hard.

Osborne recalls Baudelaire observing that “life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds,” and from this we can see the therapeutic role the far-away Papuans in their tree-houses are supposed to play. But Osborne’s main reason for travelling so far from home is that the journey itself is an adventure. That’s what Back to the Stone Age offers—exoticism beyond compare, well-organised deals

“touristified and packaged for visitors like myself, the harried escapists of a hemisphere so rich it no longer knows what to do with itself but move.”

The tourist trade

Tourism has a long history. The term “Grand Tour” was first used in a book by Richard Lassels called The Voyage of Italy in 1670. It described, writes Osborne,

an informal journey through the Continent for young British aristocrats, who were usually accompanied by a tutor called a bear leader as they made their way through a galaxy of cultural attractions in France, Switzerland, and Italy. The Tour, as it came to be known, arose because of the new wealth of the English, which made them Europe’s most affluent tourists, but it also expressed an uneasy inferiority complex, a need to Europeanise the manners of their uncouth progeny—their ‘raw boys,’ as Tobias Smollett called them.

For many years the preferred destination was Italy. But some Grand Tourists were less interested in the Colosseum or the marvels of Florentine painting than in the excitements of Venice and Naples: these cities “were the Bangkok and Manila of the Age of Enlightenment”, writes Osborne, and the entertainment they offered had little to do with ruins. The Tour not only improved the mind, it acquainted the body with the diversions pointed to by Daniel Defoe when he wrote in 1701: “Lust chose the Torrid Zone of Italy, Where Blood ferments in Rapes and Sodomy.”

The author claims that Italy’s development into “the world’s first truly tourist nation” could never have happened without prostitution, or without “the reputation for sexual ease that eventually lured English women as well.” Yet Italy’s two most lasting contributions were more mundane: the infrastructural model for the tourist trade it provided (hotels, restaurants, theatres, brothels), and the experiential possibility of personal growth and development in other cultures and balmier climes. One might like to think that it also helped young men mature, but Boswell’s Italian experiences merely confirmed his rackety ways. In Naples, he wrote, “My passions were violent. I indulged them; my mind had nothing to do with it.”

Historically, perhaps, the author of The Naked Tourist doesn’t go quite as far back as he might. Long before Thomas Nugent wrote a guidebook called The Grand Tour in 1749, and long before Richard Lassels wrote The Voyage of Italy in 1670, Pausanias, sometime in the second century AD, wrote a Guidebook to Greece. Mary Beard tells us in her useful little book The Parthenon (2003) how by that date Athens was both a university town and “a notable high spot in the ancient ‘heritage trail’; its monuments were tourist attractions almost as much as they are today.”

Monuments of course can stand anything. Monuments don’t care. Voyeurs may stare rudely at a monument forever without giving offence. But living people are different. Certainly something altogether different is involved in marching onto their turf and staring voyeuristically at the last stone age populations on the planet. Do the tree-dwellers in southern Papua need harried western escapists? Or would they rather be left alone?

East to Papua

From New York the author skips eastwards port by port—to Dubai, to Calcutta, to the Hedonopolis of Bangkok, to Bali, and finally to Papua itself. In Dubai the resident sheik is building an Arabian folly—several follies in fact—with endless villas on miles of artificial water frontage to house thousands of billionaires. In the contrasting poverty of Calcutta Claude Levi-Strauss had found only filth and vultures, but Osbourne revels in nostalgie de la boue: “I felt I was inside a nightmare to which I had taken a liking. No relatives, no friends, no phones ringing, no connection to anything: just a city teeming with birds and goats, with millions of strangers sleeping outdoors.”

Economy class visitors to Bangkok find its medical services unignorable (the Thais have “reinvented medicine to make it something it has never been in all its short if illustrious history: a pleasure”). A million patients a year come to Bumrungrad, the biggest private hospital in Southeast Asia and a complex where along with restaurants, shops, and galleries, hundreds of treatments are gathered under one roof, including a Cosmetic Surgery unit famous for its “sex reassignment surgery”. After thirteen cowardly years Osborne decides it’s time for dental repairs, gets surgery that would have cost $8000 in New York for $383, and notes appreciatively that the female staff were “hand-selected for attributes little associated with the rigors of dentistry.”

And so to Papua’s people in the trees—and to Mr Kelly Woolford, the man whose trekking company Papua Adventures runs First Contact tours. Lawrence Osborne finds him a generally attractive figure and I think he’s right. Though naively boyish, Woolford certainly knows what he’s doing. Long ago Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock foresaw an expanding recreational industry in which “the experience-makers will form a basic—if not the basic—sector of the economy”. Identities would be consciously refashioned, and leisure would be redefined in therapeutic and experiential terms.

Transforming experiences for the too-comfortable and the bored is exactly what Woolford sells. He tells Osborne that his last client had been a British investment banker who “thanked him afterward for changing his life.” They’d met the Kombai, and the miracle-working combination of hardship en route, and authentic tribals to stare at on arrival, worked wonders. This, says Woolford talking to Osborne, often happens with the very rich:

Because everywhere is like everywhere now. It’s all a bore.

So they want a transformation?

Don’t we all?

In the course of their therapeutic tour the visitors inevitably change the tribal people themselves, the very ones they have come to see. Even though the Korowai and the Kombai are interested in modern clothes, and some wear them whenever they can, Osborne realizes that “eventually it must always occur to an indigenous people that their primitivity is what is most valuable about them in the eyes of outsiders. Primitivity—always naked and in feathers—is the one economic asset they possess.” If they appear in ragged jeans they will seem corrupted; and corrupted primitives could never provide the needed therapy.

Adventure tales always require An Ordeal. Osborne struggles through dense sago palm swamps, miles of thick slime crossed over a network of fallen logs. “Soaked in a toxic mix of sweat, DEET repellent, and black mud smelling of fermenting beer—the rotting sago palms”, he stands on an unstable log and crashes into the swamp, to lie there like a stricken animal under lashing rain… But after these excitements the key question we asked at the beginning remains: what exactly will be the relation of the voyeur to the viewed? How is it negotiated?

There’s supposed to be a protocol for visiting tree houses, “a delicate diplomacy whose rules must be followed to the letter.” Emissaries are sent with gifts, usually tobacco, asking permission to enter the premises. But if they do not receive permission what then? Or if the people are found to be less than pure and pristine, wearing western clothing or ornaments—not “uncontacted”—how will Woolford respond? His clients have paid $8000 each for their tour. He has boldly claimed to introduce them to natives who have “never seen a white man before”. Won’t everyone be compromised if the claims are not true? And what are the stories of others who have been on First Contact tours?

Michael Behar’s report

Outside is a magazine about travel, gear, bodywork, and exotic cultures. On its website you can read about the no-fall zone on Everest, all-mountain jackets, the Djidji River in Gabon, Reinhold Messner and eco-friendly jeans and killer squids. One of its contributors is the writer Michael Behar, a former editor at Wired and National Geographic. Last December he was holding forth about sex in space (‘The Zero-G Spot’), but more to our purpose is a report he wrote in February 2006 about a Woolford trek.

Well-researched, it contains facts and opinions from prominent anthropologists who know the region. But readers of Outside magazine don’t want too much of that. For a teaser Behar describes Woolford’s hazardous inaugural trek in 2003 when “eight tribesmen emerged and pointed arrows at their heads.” Questioned later as to why he went along, an Austrian veterinarian says “I like to see things that other people haven’t—I guess that’s a problem I have. My wife tells me to leave the natives alone. Sometimes I wonder why I go.” So it appears that for this man ethno-voyeurism is a form of trophy hunting. His wife disapproves, and says so, but it makes him look good back in Vienna.

Behar himself joins the second trip in 2004. They’re going into the same region, and he wonders aloud if the tribe they’re planning to meet are the same guys who in 2003 “chased you out of the jungle.” Yes, says Woolford, “But the hope is we can soften them up with tobacco, then convince them to take us farther upriver to the next tribe.” One remembers Osbourne’s “ subtle, invisible contact with fragile and remote peoples.” It doesn’t sound like that. It sounds more like old-time trinket-trading. It is knowing and guileful: suck one in, then suck the rest. “If we make friends with these guys from last year,” says Woolford, “they will be able to take us to the location of the other guys… You can’t just barge right in and bust into their camp. They’ll be angry and we’ll lose everything.”

That’s how they proceed, cautiously day by day, until suddenly

All hell breaks loose. There’s hysterical screaming and shouting. It’s the natives, who leap through the back of the bivouac. Twigs are snapping in every direction. I hear bare feet slapping the mud, more yelling, and bursts of frantic, hyperventilated babble.

Within seconds the natives have surrounded us, almost entirely camouflaged by the jungle. They’re about 40 feet away. To my right I see one lean out from behind a tree, then pull his bowstring taut and release it. I wince, then exhale. The bow is empty: no arrow.

Another man does the same to my left. Then two others move to within 20 feet and twice more pull and release their bowstrings. It’s a show of force—they could have shot us dead already if that was their goal.

Enter the BBC

But is it a hoax? Maybe the arrowless bows indicate a set-up? Did Kelly Woolford organise the whole thing in advance? Is this in fact a piece of engineered showbiz right at the last frontier? A new documentary by Indus Films for the BBC, First Contact, allows those of us who can only stare at natives vicariously on television make some sort of judgment for ourselves. It contains video from the 2003 trip (which looks very convincing), accompanies the engaging Englishman Mark Anstice into the jungle, and follows Woolford step by step on another venture.

It also has interviews examining the ethics of the whole operation, and here George Mionbot of The Guardian, Fiona Watson of Survival International, and I myself, are broadly in agreement. Each of us are interviewed, and our comments are edited here and there into Mark Anstice’s Papuan journey, alongside his own doubts and ruminations. None of us are comfortable about what is going on. We all see serious risks—Ms Watson emphasizing the well-known fact that visitors bringing diseases no more serious than the common cold have in the past wiped out whole tribal populations.

Yet everyone from Osborne to Mark Anstice finds Woolford sincere and likeable, a romantic nature-boy genuinely in love with the terrain and its people. This comes through strongly in the film. His naivete is however a worry. And when push comes to shove—when in the BBC film he fails to persuade the Papuans to allow him to visit their village—it starts getting a little ugly.

He speaks with annoyance to his loyal Papuan assistant and claims to have been let down. He looks with irritation at one of his hosts wearing a necklace of plastic beads, then roughly fingers it, making the helpless little man shake with terror merely because his chosen ornament doesn’t fit Woolford’s vision of Uncorrupted Primeval Man. The plasticized necklace also doesn’t fit what Woolford has told the BBC he will deliver, and he evidently feels it makes him look like a fraud. Yet this is only because what he is offering his clients, a once-only never to be repeated eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, is essentially absurd.

Consider the following. The BBC show Woolford’s party of visiting tourists handing on surplus clothing to the Papuan tribal people, much of it bright red, warm, and useful at the colder altitudes in the interior. Chances are this will be traded with people further up into the mountains (just as the plastic necklace was traded)— the self-same pristine people Woolford may be looking to visit next year. And if he does visit them? With another party of tourists at $8000 a head? Then he’s going to be disappointed yet again. These “uncontacted” tribal people may indeed never have stood eyeball to eyeball with visiting Europeans, but they will have certainly heard of them, and will already have been corrupted—standing there in Woolford’s very own discarded clothing!

Their world, our stage

Much is made in the BBC documentary First Contact of the possibility that the whole thing is a hoax, a conspiracy between the tribal people and Kelly Woolford himself. He himself regards such suspicions and accusations as entirely crazy—and I must say I agree. The notion that either this amiable American or anyone else could direct, control, and manage these independent tribal people—let alone do it conspiratorially or invisibly from afar—deserves all the mockery he throws at it.

His onsite Papuan agents speak the language of the bush people only awkwardly, if at all. Elementary misunderstandings continually occur. The people themselves do not use a calendar or daily timetable, and every field anthropologist knows how extraordinarily difficult it is to know what is going on, or where, or when. Confusion builds upon confusion—as indeed it does when, contrary to Woolford’s initial understanding, the people refuse to allow the BBC party to proceed.

What the entire “first contact” tourist operation provides is yet another illustration of our insatiable need for theatricalized versions of life to take us out of ourselves, and the commercialization of exotic “experiences” for harried urban escapists willing to pay for their pleasures in Bangkok or beyond. In brief, we demand the world as spectacle, life as theatre, existence as exhibition—with more and more people staring at more and more people, directly as live tourists or indirectly through a thousand screens, while voyeurismo takes over the world.

Roger Sandall (assisted by Sir Francis Galton)

Most of us are herd animals. Nothing wrong with that of course—or not at first sight. Our sociability makes us happy to walk an extra mile to help a friend, makes us keen for teams and political parties, and makes us fiercely protective of kith and kin. Not only that: tribal solidarity of the more noble and high-spirited kind has led men to sacrifice themselves altruistically in wars again and again.

But there are disadvantages too. A herd animal who wakes up one morning to find the rest of the mob have folded their tents and vamoosed is a sorry sight. He wanders listlessly, clutches his heart in despair, then runs around in circles looking for any collective whatever he can join. Upon finding one he gratefully embraces everybody, and by nightfall calls them his new best friends.

* * *

Fate however made some of us differently, and the difference may be in our genes. Awaking at dawn to find the herd has departed we breathe a sigh of relief. The fact is (speaking personally) I never saw a herd I liked. Individuals yes—lots of them. Herds never. To men of my sort a room filled with a hundred people is a cause for dubiety. A room with a hundred like-minded people is a cause for alarm. A room filled with a hundred people “of one mind” is deeply implausible in itself and almost certainly a sign of intimidation.

I once attended an event at the Sydney Opera House where some 2500 people had gathered. A Danish percussion group were performing and they wanted the crowd to participate. Their leader stood and gave orders—clap, shout, stand, pat your knees—and 2500 men and women obeyed his commands. I myself declined to take part, but the elderly woman beside me, with shining eyes, followed every movement as though she had been waiting eighty years for instructions. She would have stood on her head if they asked.

Philosophical implications

An aversion to crowds and the herd mentality goes deep—much deeper than is generally understood. If Ernest Gellner is right it has philosophical implications, for when René Descartes wrote in the 17^th century that “We ought never to allow ourselves to be persuaded of the truth of anything unless on the evidence of our reason” he intimated (for those able to understand) that the emotionally held collective beliefs of culture, imbibed and imposed and punitively enforced from infancy, are not to be trusted.

Descartes himself did not use the term “culture”. He spoke of “custom and example”. But the herd thinking of cultural collectivities is exactly what he had in mind. There are any number of synonymous phrases for “custom and example”—the way things are usually done, social precedent, traditional authority, accepted belief, customary thought, conventional wisdom—but cognitively they amount to much the same thing: all of them are sources of error.

In Gellner’s words, what Descartes challenged was the possibility that “the shared assumptions of an entire society, built into its way of life and sustained by it, should be deeply misguided. Entire societies are committed, with fervour and often with arrogance and with infuriating complacency, to blatant absurdities.” Epitomising what he sees as Descartes’ view, Gellner writes:

So individualism and rationalism are closely linked: that which is collective and customary is non-rational, and the overcoming of unreason and of collective custom are one and the same process…

Error is to be found in culture; and culture is a kind of systematic, communally induced error. It is of the essence of error that it is communally induced and historically accumulated.

It is through community and history that we sink into error, and it is through solitary design and plan that we escape it. Truth is acquired in a planned and orderly manner by an individual, not slowly gathered up by a herd. (Ernest Gellner, Reason and Culture, p3. My emphasis, RS)

All this was of course long before anthropology was an academic subject, and before the study of tribal life was even dreamed of as a discipline. But of one thing we can be sure. If Descartes had ever encountered the kind of old-style traditional societies to be found in Africa, the Pacific, or the Amazon basin, he would have regarded them as miniature monarchies of unreason—veritable reigns of error.

Emerson and Galton

While uncommon, a sharp rejection of the herd mind and collectivism more generally was a striking feature of both the American Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Englishman Sir Francis Galton. Emerson’s thoughts may be found in his essay “Self Reliance.” There he sets out a severely individualistic doctrine not unlike Mrs Thatcher’s—especially in its hostility toward the claims of “society”—with echoes of Gellner’s interpretation of Descartes:

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue most in request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and custom.

* * *

As for Galton, after observing cattle in South West Africa in 1850 (modern Namibia), his inclusive view of animal and human behavior encouraged him to analyse the factors favoring gregariousness, on the one hand, and the contrasting factors favoring independent initiative on the other.

Herd behavior among the cattle of Damara land, he wrote in 1871, resulted from aeons of evolutionary selection that produced a mentality given to timidity, caution, and fear. Independence and self-reliance had been “bred out” of cattle in the wild. As a result, finding a temperamentally suitable ox for leading a team to pull a wagon was difficult. The apparent “solidarity” of the animals as a herd was not because they liked and respected each other and were inspired by a spirit of mutual aid. Not at all. It was the practical recognition that there was safety in numbers, and that with all the lions and leopards and hyenas prowling about at night the safest place was right in the middle of the mob, attracting as little attention as possible. With regard to their social instincts, he wrote,

they are deficient; they are not amiable to one another, but show more expressions of spite and disgust than of forbearance or fondness… Yet although the ox has so little affection for, or individual interest in, his fellows, he cannot endure even a momentary severance from his herd.

If he be separated from it by force he exhibits every sign of mental agony; he strives with all his might to get back again, and when he succeeds, he plunges into its middle to bathe his whole body with the comfort of closest companionship.

By analogy, Galton speculated that much the same understandable but ignoble impulses underlay a lot of human behavior too, and explained the “slavish aptitudes” to which the generality of men were prone.

Galton’s political blindness

Yet he plainly pushed his argument too far. While one can see what he meant by equating the gregarious instinct with a slave mentality, it needlessly demeaned the social bond. Galton seriously underrated both the value of collective behavior and a communal ethic in human life—each of them universally observed and noted by anthropologists—while overrating intransigent individualism. From the harebrained eugenic utopia described in his unpublished novel Kantsaywhere it is obvious that he had little political common sense (and this despite the acute observations about tyranny at the end of the essay that appears below). In the personality of such a man the social bond itself is unduly weak, while the drive toward radical autonomy is over-strong.

But while his political proposals were naïve, his insight into the disadvantages of group-think and group-action in herd societies was profound. Galton prized human genius, self-reliance, originality, and leadership. In his view the full development of self-reliant men and women was essential to human progress. But in much of the world it was fatally handicapped by the herd mentality. Original thought was always in danger of being suffocated by the collective, and his sense of the dangers of group thinking and the behavior of men en masse echoed Tocqueville’s earlier doubts about democracy.

The problem he pointed to is real enough. Men in herd societies overanxiously look to each other for reassuring definitions of the good, the beautiful, and the true. (Anything ambiguous and unclassifiable goes both unrecognised and unacknowledged.) Like the bovine herd, the human herd is much given to timidity, caution, and fear. Tribalistic people feel there is nothing worse than to be ostracised, and are terrified that social rejection will strip them of all meaningful identity. They have an overwhelming need to belong and are reluctant to take risky initiatives.

The result is that countries with an overdeveloped gregariousness are tiresomely unoriginal and conformist. These failings tend to be aggravated, in places like Australia and New Zealand, by the insularity of provincial intellectuals. Such people are little inclined to independent thinking and rarely have an original idea in their lives. In the long run this has a paralysing conservative effect, and the danger of this effect on both cultural life and social leadership is what Galton’s discussion of the herd instinct warns against.

[Originally appearing in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1871, the essay first bore the title “Gregariousness in Cattle and in Men.” With minor alterations it was then reproduced in his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development with the more provocative title “Gregarious and Slavish Instincts.” Lightly edited, this is the later text.]

Gregarious and slavish instincts

by Sir Francis Galton (1883)

Introductory

I propose in this chapter to discuss a curious and apparently anomalous group of base moral instincts and intellectual deficiencies, that are innate rather than acquired, by tracing their analogies in the world of brutes and examining the conditions through which they have been evolved. They are the slavish aptitudes from which the leaders of men are exempt, but which are characteristic elements in the disposition of ordinary persons.

The vast majority of persons of our race have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility of standing and acting alone; they exalt the vox populi, even when they know it to be the utterance of a mob of nobodies, into the vox Dei, and they are willing slaves to tradition, authority, and custom. The intellectual deficiencies corresponding to these moral flaws are shown by the rareness of free and original thought as compared with the frequency and readiness with which men accept the opinions of those in authority as binding on their judgment.

I shall endeavour to prove that the slavish aptitudes in man are a direct consequence of his gregarious nature, which itself is a result of the conditions both of his primeval barbarism and of the forms of his subsequent civilisation. My argument will be, that gregarious brute animals possess a want of self-reliance in a marked degree; that the conditions of the lives of these animals have made a want of self-reliance a necessity to them, and that by the law of natural selection the gregarious instincts and their accompanying slavish aptitudes have gradually become evolved.

Then I shall argue that our remote ancestors have lived under parallel conditions, and that other causes peculiar to human society have acted up to the present day in the same direction, and that we have inherited the gregarious instincts and slavish aptitudes which have been needed under past circumstances, although in our advancing civilisation they are becoming of more harm than good to our race.

Differences between wild and tame cattle

It was my fortune, in earlier life, to gain an intimate knowledge of certain classes of gregarious animals. The urgent need of the camel for the close companionship of his fellows was a never-exhausted topic of curious admiration to me during tedious days of travel across many North African deserts. I also happened to hear and read a great deal about the still more marked gregarious instincts of the llama; but the social animal into whose psychology I am conscious of having penetrated most thoroughly is the ox of the wild parts of western South Africa.

It is necessary to insist upon the epithet ‘wild’, because an ox of tamed parentage has different natural instincts; for instance, an English ox is far less gregarious than those I am about to describe, and affords a proportionately less valuable illustration to my argument. The oxen of which I speak belonged to the Damaras, and none of the ancestry of these cattle had ever been broken to harness. They were watched from a distance during the day, as they roamed about the open country, and at night they were driven with cries to enclosures, into which they rushed much like a body of terrified wild animals driven by huntsmen into a trap.

Their scared temper was such as to make it impossible to lay hold of them by other means than by driving the whole herd into a clump, and lassoing the leg of the animal it was desired to seize, and throwing him to the ground with dexterous force. With oxen and cows of this description, whose nature is no doubt shared by the bulls, I spent more than a year in the closest companionship.

The unamiable temperament of wild cattle

I had nearly a hundred of the beasts broken in for the wagon, for packs, and for the saddle. I travelled an entire journey of exploration on the back of one of them, with others by my side, either labouring at their tasks or walking at leisure; and with others again who were wholly unbroken, and who served the purpose of an itinerant larder.

At night, when there had been no time to erect an enclosure to hold them, I lay down in their midst, and it was interesting to observe how readily they then availed themselves of the neighbourhood of the camp fire and of man, conscious of the protection they afforded from prowling carnivora, whose cries and roars, nor distant, now near, continually broke upon the stillness.

These opportunities of studying the disposition of such peculiar cattle were not wasted upon me. I had only too much leisure to think about them, and the habits of the animals strongly attracted my curiosity. The better I understood them, the more complex and worthy of study did their minds appear to be.

But I am now concerned only with their blind gregarious instincts, which are conspicuously distinct from the ordinary social desires. In the latter they are deficient; thus they are not amiable to one another, but show on the whole more expressions of spite and disgust than of forbearance or fondness…

Yet although the ox has so little affection for, or individual interest in, his fellows, he cannot endure even a momentary severance from his herd. If he be separated from it by stratagem or force, he exhibits every sign of mental agony; he strives with all his might to be back again, and when he succeeds, he plunges into its middle to bathe his whole body in the comfort of closest companionship.

This passionate terror at segregation is a convenience to the herdsman, who may rest assured in the darkness or in the mist that the whole herd is safe whenever he can get glimpse of a single ox. It is also the cause of great inconvenience to the traveller in ox-waggons, who constantly feels himself in a position towards his oxen like that of a host to a company of bashful gentlemen at the time when he is trying to get them to move from the drawing-room to the dinner-table, and no one will go first, but every one backs and gives place to his neighbour.

Lead oxen are hard to find

The traveller finds great difficulty in procuring animals capable of acting the part of fore-oxen to his team, the ordinary members of the wild herd being wholly unfitted by nature to move in so prominent and isolated a position, even though, as is the custom, a boy is always in front to persuade or pull them onwards.

Therefore, a good fore-ox is an animal of an exceptionally independent disposition. Men who break in wild cattle for harness watch assiduously for those who show a self-reliant nature, by grazing apart or ahead of the rest, and these they break in for fore-oxen. The other cattle may be indifferently devoted to ordinary harness purposes, or to slaughter; but the born leaders are far too rare to be used for any less distinguished service than that which they alone are capable of fulfilling…

The conclusion to which we are driven is, that few of the Damara cattle have enough originality and independence of disposition to pass unaided through their daily risks in a tolerably comfortable manner. They are essentially slavish, and seek no better lot than to be led by any one of their number who has enough self-reliance to accept that position. No ox ever dares to act contrary to the rest of the herd, but he accepts their common determination as an authority binding on his conscience.

Safety in numbers

An incapacity of relying on oneself and a faith in others are precisely the conditions that compel brutes to congregate and live in herds and, again, it is essential to their safety in a country infested by large carnivora that they should keep closely together in herds.

No ox grazing alone could live for many days unless he were protected, far more assiduously and closely than is possible to barbarians. The Damara owners confide perhaps 200 cattle to a couple of half-starved youths who pass their time dozing or grubbing up roots to eat. The owners know that it is hopeless to protect the herd from lions, so they leave it to take its chance; and as regards human marauders they equally know that the largest number of cattle watchers they could spare could make no adequate resistance to an attack; they therefore do not send more than two youths, who are enough to run home and give the alarm to the whole male population of the tribe.

Consequently, as I began by saying, the cattle have to take care of themselves against the wild beasts, and they would infallibly be destroyed by them if they had not safeguards of their own, which are not easily to be appreciated at first sight at their full value. We shall understand them better by considering the precise nature of the danger that an ox runs.

When he is alone it is not simply that he is too defenceless, but that he is easily surprised. A crouching lion fears cattle who turn boldly upon him, and he does so with reason. The horns of an ox or antelope are able to make an ugly wound in the paw or chest of a springing beast when he receives its thrust in the same way that an over-eager pugilist meets his adversary’s ‘counter’ hit.

Cows and calves

Hence it is that a cow that has calved by the wayside, and has been temporarily abandoned by the caravan, is never seized by lions. The incident frequently occurs, and as frequently are the cow and calf eventually brought safe to the camp; and yet there is usually evidence in footprints of her having sustained a regular siege from the wild beasts; but she is so restless and eager for the safety of her young that no beast of prey can approach her unawares.

This state of exaltation is of course exceptional; cattle are obliged in their ordinary course of life to spend a considerable part of the day with their heads buried in the grass, where they can neither see nor smell what is about them. A still large part of their time must be spent in placid rumination, during which they cannot possibly be on the alert. But a herd of animals, when considered as a whole, is always on the alert; at almost every moment some eyes, ears, and noses will command all approaches, and the start or cry of alarm of a single beast is a signal to all his companions.

To live gregariously is to become a fibre in a vast sentient web overspreading many acres; it is to become the possessor of faculties always awake, of eyes that see in all directions, of ears and nostrils that explore a broad belt of air; it is also to become the occupier of every bit of vantage ground whence the approach of a wild beast might be overlooked. The protective senses of each individual who chooses to live in companionship are multiplied by a large factor, and he thereby receives a maximum of security at minimum cost of restlessness.

Isolation brings panic

When we isolate an animal who has been accustomed to a gregarious life, we take away his sense of protection, for he feels himself exposed to danger from every part of the circle around him, except the one point on which his attention is momentarily fixed; and he knows that disaster may easily creep up to him from behind. Consequently his glance is restless and anxious, and is turned in succession to different quarters; his movements are hurried and agitated, and he becomes a prey to the extremest terror.

There can be no room for doubt that it is suitable to the well-being of cattle in a country infested with beasts of prey to live in close companionship, and being suitable, it follows from the law of natural selection that the development of gregarious and therefore of slavish instincts must be favoured in such cattle.

It also follows from the same law that the degree in which those instincts are developed is on the whole the most conducive to their safety. If they were more gregarious they would crowd so closely as to interfere with each other when grazing the scattered pasture of Damara land; if less gregarious, they would be too widely scattered to keep a sufficient watch against wild beasts.

Why are so few oxen independent?

Why is only one ox out of fifty independent enough to serve as a leader? Why is it not one in five or one in five hundred? The reason undoubtedly is that natural selection tends to give but one leader to each suitably-sized herd, and to repress super-abundant leaders.

There is a certain size of herd most suitable to the geographical and other conditions of the country; it must not be too large, or the scattered puddles which form their only watering-places for a great part of the year would not suffice; and there are similar drawbacks in respect to pasture. It must not be too small, or it would be comparatively insecure; thus a troop of five animals is far more easy to be approached by a stalking huntsman than one of twenty, and the later than one of a hundred.

We have seen that it is the oxen who graze apart, as well as those who lead the herd, who are recognised by the trainers of cattle as gifted with enough independence of character to become fore-oxen. They are even preferred to the actual leaders of the herd; they dare to move alone, and therefore their independence is undoubted.

The leaders are safe enough from lions, because their flanks and rear are guarded by their followers; but each of those who graze apart, and who represent the superabundant supply of self-reliant animals, have one flank and the rear exposed, and it is precisely these whom the lions take.

Looking at the matter in a broad way, we may justly assert that wild beasts trim and prune every herd into compactness, and tend to reduce it into a closely-united body with a single well-protected leader…

The size and dispersal of tribal societies

If we look at the human inhabitants of the very same country as the oxen I have described, we shall find them congregated into multitudes of tribes, all more or less at war with one another. We shall find that few of these tribes are very small, and few very large, and that it is precisely those that are exceptionally large or small whose condition is the least stable.

A very large tribe falls to pieces through its own unwieldiness, because, by the nature of things, it must be either deficient in centralisation or straitened in food, or both. A barbarian population is obliged to live dispersedly, since a square mile of land will support only a few hunters or shepherds.

On the other hand, a barbarian government cannot be long maintained unless the chief is brought into frequent contact with his dependants, and this is geographically impossible when his tribe is so scattered as to cover a great extent of territory.

It must not be supposed that gregarious instincts are equally important to all forms of savage life. But I hold, from what we know of the clannish fighting habits of our forefathers, that they were every whit as applicable to the earlier ancestors of our European stock as they are still to a large part of the black population of Africa.

The tyranny of tribes and nations

There is an extraordinary power of tyranny invested in the chiefs of tribes and nations of men, that so vastly outweighs the analogous power possessed by the leaders of animal herds as to rank as a special attribute of human society, eminently conducive to slavishness.

If any brute in a herd makes itself obnoxious to the leader, the leader attacks him, and there is a free fight between the two, the other animals looking on the while. But if a man makes himself obnoxious to his chief, he is attacked, not by the chief single-handed, but by the overpowering force of his executive.

The rebellious individual has to brave a disciplined host; there are spies who will report his doings, a local authority who will send a detachment of soldiers to drag him to trial; there are prisons ready built to hold him, civil authorities wielding legal powers of stripping him of all he owns, and official executioners prepared to torture or kill him.

The tyrannies under which men have lived, whether under rude barbarian chiefs, under the great despotisms of half-civilised Oriental countries, or under some of the more polished but little less severe governments of modern days, must have had a frightful influence in eliminating independence of character from the human race.

National character and forms of government

I hold that the blind instincts evolved under these long-continued conditions (i.e., under despotic conditions of government) have been ingrained into our breed, and that they are a bar to our enjoying the freedom which the forms of modern civilisation are otherwise capable of giving us.

A really intelligent nation might be held together by far stronger forces than are derived from the purely gregarious instincts. A nation need not be a mob of slaves, clinging to one another through fear, and for the most part incapable of self-government, and begging to be led; but it might consist of vigorous self-reliant men, knit to one another by innumerable ties, into a strong, tense, and elastic organization.

Those who have been born in a free country feel the atmosphere of a paternal government very oppressive. The hearty and earnest political and individual life which is found when every man has a continual sense of public responsibility, and knows that success depends on his own right judgment and exertion, is replaced under a despotism by an indolent reliance upon what its master may direct, and by a demoralising conviction that personal advancement is best secured by solicitations and favour.

By the same token, however, a report like this raises more general questions about modern life and modern expectations. Gypsies (or as they now often call themselves, Travellers) have been a feature of the European social landscape for 500 years, and both their persistence as a cultural group and their strong resistance to assimilation make them of unusual interest. No other ethnic community has shown such ambivalence toward the contemporary world—an ambivalence moreover shown by nomads toward settled townspeople for millennia. Supposing the BBC report to have any foundation in fact, can Gypsy unpopularity in Europe be seen as marking the outer limits of multicultural toleration?

18^th century England

It is a remarkable thing that their reputation, both for better and worse, has changed very little over the centuries. About the same time that my attention was drawn to the BBC news item, I happened to be reading Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne. This 18^th century bird-watcher’s observations on magpies, blackbirds, and jays contained an unexpected Gypsy reference. In a letter to his fellow naturalist Thomas Pennant in October 1775 he wrote that

“We have two gangs or hordes of gypsies which infest the south and west of England, and come round in their circuit two or three times in the year.” He gives their names (Stanley and Curleople), notes that Gypsies are called in French ‘Bohemians’, and in Italian and modern Greek ‘Zingani’, and then comments on their stoicism braving “the severities of winter, and in living sub dio the whole year round.”

Last September was as wet a month as ever was known; and yet during those deluges did a young gypsy-girl lie-in in the midst of one of our hop-gardens, on the cold ground, with nothing over her but a piece of blanket extended on a few hazel-rods bent hoop-fashion, and stuck into the earth at each end, in circumstances too trying for a cow in that condition: yet within this garden there was a large hop-kiln, into the chambers of which she might have retired, had she thought shelter an object worthy her attention.

White was not to know that the girl may well have agreed with him that the hop-kiln would be a good place to go and have her baby, and may even have wanted to go there; but that strongly held Gypsy beliefs about pollution (and especially about the polluting female organs of reproduction) forced her to go outside in freezing conditions unfit for cattle.

Here we should notice something enduringly true of the Gypsy situation—namely, that the young woman’s predicament is a result of the beliefs and practices of her own culture. She is not being excluded by the wider society. She is not being persecuted. Nobody is preventing her taking shelter in cold weather. Nothing is keeping her out of the hop-kiln except the fears and taboos of her fellow-Gypsies. In 1775 Gilbert White finds the whole thing astonishing, but knows it would be foolish to intervene.

His attitudes are fairly typical—both of the 18^th century when he lived and of many people today. On the one hand White is no Gypsy-lover: he says gangs of them “infest” the south and west of England, and he is disturbed that “Europe itself, it seems, cannot set bounds to the rovings of these vagabonds.” They may not be the most hated; but they are certainly unloved. On the other hand he finds something to admire in the sheer toughness of their vagabondage and their will to survive. Perhaps, too, he silently respected the Gypsy devotion to nomadism, a way of life romantics always find appealing.

The open road

The reason for the appeal of nomadism is fairly obvious. Homo sapiens is not by nature a sedentary animal. Given half a chance he leaves hearth and home to travel, to wander, sometimes to lose himself on fateful journeys without end… and if this means life on the edge, far out on the margins of society—even as a pariah caste—well, some people like to live like that. At least it’s a long way from the boredom of being stuck—whether in the mud of a traditional village or in the airless tomb of a city office tower.

Such is the romantic view of nomadic wandering, and it finds regular literary expression. Jack Kerouac’s 1957 On the Road included material gathered in New York, and at sea, and from Mexico, Tangier, France, London, and San Francisco. Together with the movie Easy Rider it did for American bohemia in the 1960s what The Wind in The Willows had done for the children of England’s genteel middle classes fifty years before. Both Kerouac and Mr Toad share an exultant joy in “the open road—here today and gone tomorrow!”—though Mr Toad is searching for green fields, while Kerouac and his friends appear to have been more interested in grass.

We should notice something else too: both Kerouac and Mr Toad are ersatz nomads, men (so to speak) who have consciously adopted what they see as a Gypsy lifestyle in contrast to the educated world where they originated and more naturally belong. Jack Kerouac went to Horace Mann School on Manhattan, and later attended Columbia University. Mr Toad is the proud owner of an English manor house, with every appurtenance, and when he took to the roads in a horse-drawn caravan he provided a striking Edwardian example of primitivist affectation, a mental disorder that became common after 1970.  The illustrations in The Wind in the Willows usually make a big feature of the bright yellow caravan Toad sets out with—a gaily painted conveyance that defined, in a single image, the idealised pre-1914 view of Gypsy existence.

Gypsy life on the road was central to this romantic vision. Gypsy racial separatism, expressed in their strong disinclination to marry gaujos (or gajos or gajes or gorgios, i.e., all variations of a word for non-Gypsy outsiders) added another element.  Not only had they different customs, and not only were they nomadic, but they looked visibly foreign too (Gilbert White was sure they came “from Egypt and the East”), and in Western Europe this exotic appearance was an added fascination. David Mayall writes in Gypsy-travellers in nineteenth-century society (Cambridge, 1988), alluding to the works of Sir Walter Scott, George Borrow, Charles Dickens and D. H. Lawrence, that—

…foreign origin was the basis around which images were drawn of a romantic people, living an idle, natural, al fresco life, camped in secluded woods and forests. Physically they were dark, supple, agile and handsome, possessing a temperament that was wild, fierce and defiant.

“The beauty and grace of the bewitching Gypsy maiden attracted many admirers in a variety of stories. The use of the male stereotype of the lithe and handsome Gypsy was adopted less frequently, though perhaps most familiarly in D. H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy. Romance and adventure among an exotic people formed the main themes.

Mayall then comes to George Borrow, whose Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857) reinforced the image of “a foreign people with their own language and laws, determined to maintain their separateness from non-Gypsies…” Borrow was intermittently acquainted with Gypsies for upwards of thirty years, mastered their language, and wrote a good deal about them.

In Mayall’s words his writings showed a people in steadfast opposition to “the forces of progress and advance, resisting the crushing organization of society and the routine and restraints of civil life. They stood for freedom against the tyranny of law, for nature before civilisation, and for simplicity before complexity. This instinct for liberty was held as the symbol for the aspirations of all who challenged the repressive forces of modernisation.”

Here a kind of romantic anarchism (all law is tyrannical) overlaps with more recent anti-modern sentiment (industrial work is oppressive). In the resulting intellectual brew, Gypsies are seen to nobly reject assimilation and incorporation; they stand proudly and deliberately apart; despite pressure to accept modernity and industrial wage-labor Gypsies will have none of it. They resist and they endure. All in all this depicts Gypsy culture as worthy, admirable, and perhaps also unique.

The darker side

But then there’s the unmentioned dark side of the picture, and any reader of George Borrow will soon find plenty of reasons for regarding his companions with unease. We first meet them on page 45 of Lavengro in an idyllic rural setting. A green lane carpeted with trefoil and clover, and lined with ancient oaks, contains tents where a twist of campfire smoke is curling upward. A man is carding plaited straw; a woman sits rubbing something with white powder.

Suddenly a rider gallops up on horseback and shouts a warning, and after hurriedly giving him a bag of coins the encampment packs and scatters to avoid the police. It appears the man and woman have been forging money (the author says there was a lot of ‘bad money’ in circulation at the time). The unknown rider then

Departed at a tremendous rate, the hoofs of his horse thundering for a long time on the hard soil of the neighbouring road, till the sound finally died away in the distance. The strange people were not slow in completing their preparations, and then, flogging their animals terrifically, hurried away seemingly in the same direction.

Borrow ends the chapter gazing after the retreating company, and wondering who this “strange set of people can be”. Things get stranger and somewhat more dangerous as time goes by. At first his encounters are innocuous: he witnesses a highly profitable pea-and-thimble trick being played at a country fair… until the police arrive. Then somewhere along the way he offends a Gypsy woman named Mrs Herne.

When next they meet, Mrs Herne bakes poisoned cakes, and using a diabolically cunning 13-year-old girl as her instrument manages to get Borrow to eat one. In a violent scene this sixty-five-year-old grandmother then tries to poke out his eye while he lies drugged and semi-helpless in his tent. A dog is turned on him; a sinister “song of poison” is sung by the grandmother and the child; but largely because the tent collapses protectively around him, Borrow somehow survives, listening to the conspirators talk about their undying hatred of all gorgios meanwhile.

In his later book The Romany Rye we haven’t even reached page 50 before there is more talk of poisoning—though this time it’s about poisoning pigs. The  Gypsies would call unannounced at a farm. Out of sight of the farmer they would slip one of his pigs a fatal dose, and next day, after the animal died, offer to relieve him of the burden of the poisoned corpse. (If properly cleaned inside it was edible.) At a family dinner where pork is being served to the sound of a fiddle playing, Mrs Chikno sings “Poisoning the Porker”, of which the first verses (rendered in Romany in the main text, but translated at the foot of the page) run as follows:

Listen to me ye Roman lads, who are seated in the straw about the fire, and I will tell you how we poison the porker, how we poison the porker.

We go to a poison-monger and buy three pennies’ worth of bane, and when we return to our people we say we will poison the porker, we will poison the porker.

Then we make up the poison, and we take our way to the farmhouse, as if to beg a bit of victuals, a bit of victuals.

We see a jolly porker, and we say in Romany, “Fling the bane yonder among the dirt, where the porker will find it, the porker will find it.”

After the song has finished and the fiddler has put away his instrument the Gypsies deny to Borrow that anything like this still goes on—anyway they claim not to have been “lately engaged” in the practice. And Borrow reasonably adds that songs about villainy of one kind or another are common among many peoples: “Look at the poetry of Scotland, the heroic part, founded almost entirely on the villainous deeds of the Scotch nation; cow-stealing, for example, which is very little better than poisoning farmer’s pigs.”

It is possible that Borrow may have enjoyed presenting himself as living dangerously in association with petty criminals, romanticising them in much the same way as others in the early 19^th-century, including Lord Byron, romanticised banditti. He began his writing life attending and reporting Newgate hangings. Yet it is surely revealing that in two books intended as a testimonial to the vitality and enduring value of Gypsy life, based on the direct experiences of a sympathetic observer and meant to serve the Romany cause, most of the economic activities he writes about involve lies, trickery, and fraud.

Has anything changed?

Borrow describes what he saw in the 1820s and 1830s. It would appear from what he says that the relation of the Romany to the wider society from which they make a living is twofold. On the one hand the Gypsies need the gorgios economically, and provide at least some beneficial services as tinkers, metalworkers, horse-traders, and casual laborers. On the other hand this relationship to the society around them is largely exploitative: they despise their gorgio employers and will take them for every penny, lawful or unlawful, they can get. This is socially and ethically an exclusive and hostile tribal relationship: the Romany regard all gorgios—townsmen, villagers, or farmers, young and old, rich or poor—as culturally alien, as the enemy, and with contempt.

In addition to David Mayall’s book there have been other anthropological studies of Gypsies from reputable publishers in recent years. A notable work by Sir Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Blackwell, 1992; 2001) is valuable for their history in western Europe since arriving in the years after 1417. What is the picture these authors paint, and does it differ much from George Borrow’s report 150 years ago? The answer is—not much.

* * *

In Gypsies, Tinkers, and Other Travellers (Academic Press, 1975) there is an essay by Judith Okely, ”Gypsies Travelling in Southern England.” Gypsy identity is expressed, she says, by “the ideological contrast they made between themselves and the gorgio.” Generally speaking gorgios were viewed “with suspicion and some contempt.” This meant that marriage outside the group was strongly disapproved, and “the few gorgios married to Gypsies were treated as anomalous members of the community.”

Okely notes that in their economic dealings, “while in most cases the Gypsies provided a genuine service, they were out to get what they could in cash or goods. The ability to get the better of outsiders was admired. ‘Trickster’ stories were much embellished.” In dealings with fellow Gypsies some dishonesty was allowed, but “there were few if any rules in an exchange with a gorgio.” In short, when dealing with gorgios almost anything goes.

In the same collection of essays Anne Sutherland begins her discussion of the economic arrangements of the American Rom in California as follows: “Misleading the gaje is one and only one technique of survival.” She is talking about the unreliability of many reports of Gypsy life—social investigators may be told anything at all. But “misleading the gaje” is a good overall characterization of the central dynamic of Gypsy culture.

She goes into the technical details of “living off welfare” while drawing income from other sources—too many details to re-examine here. In the community she studied, “many families were on welfare the year round, but spent several months in the summer camping in fields and picking crops along with other migrant laborers for extra income.” One group of families alternated between Hawaii and San Francisco. In San Francisco in the summer they combined welfare cheques with farm labor. “In the autumn they would fly to Hawaii where they were able to make a good living fortune-telling. The occasional bujo helped them get their tickets back to the mainland.” (A bujo is glossed by Sutherland as “a swindle involving a large amount of money from a gullible fortune-telling customer”.)

Sutherland states the rules governing economic relations between Romany and gaje/gorgio as follows: “The first and most basic rule is that the code of economic relations among Rom must be viewed in opposition to the code of economic relations with gaje. The opposition is simply that between co-operation between Rom to Rom and exploitation Rom to gaje.”

In other words, the traditional old-time Rom regarded it as his right to deceive and fabricate, while seeing it as the reciprocal duty of the gaje to play the role of the dupe, the mark, the pigeon, the sucker, the butt, the victim, the gull. And when dealing with suckers or gulls it’s no holds barred.

Nomads versus villagers

And today? For the last forty years there have been endless arguments in the UK about where Gypsies should camp, about whose responsibility it is to provide sites and pay for their maintenance, about how many sites should be provided, and so on. Behind this is an unvoiced fear of the pigsties that result when scrap-metal gathering and used-car dealing takes place on the margins of picturesque English villages. What were once fair green fields end up as rubbish dumps. Village greens, commons, playing fields, racecourses, all are likely to be camped on and abused. Typical recent UK news reports read like this:

A group of French travellers, living on land at Cheltenham Racecourse, have left after the threat of an injuction from racecourse managers. The Gypsy families promised racecourse managers they would move from the site by Sunday. Around 90 travellers set up camp on a field next to the car park at Prestbury Park a week ago. (BBC 26.06.05)

A trail of debris left by a group of travellers at a Birmingham park will cost £20,000 to clear up, according to city councillor Mike Olley. About 20 caravans, which were set up at Pype Hayes Park in Erdington two weeks ago, left the site on Friday morning, following a county court order. Mr Olley says the park is now in such a poor state it could pose a health risk. Some of the debris left at the site includes an abandoned caravan, used gas canisters and about 20 tons of rubble. (BBC 27.05.05)

Its village green is surrounded by listed cottages and is overlooked by a 15th-century church. High Ham has views across the Somerset Levels, boasts Britain’s only thatched windmill and at first glance is the archetypal English village. However, in the past week it has fallen victim to an unwelcome rural phenomenon – an invasion of Irish travellers. Within the space of three hours, 29 mobile homes – equipped with satellite dishes and Calor gas – were moved on to a field at the edge of the village, swelling High Ham’s 300-strong population by a quarter. Since their arrival last Thursday, the new residents have been seen asking for scrap metal and trying to sell power tools. They have no running water and have attempted to obtain it from garages. They have no waste facilities and locals have complained about litter, including nappies. (Daily Telegraph 16.06.04)

Senior police officers worry too much about the human rights of gipsies whose camps make life a misery for people living nearby, ministers were told yesterday. Andrew Mackay, a former Tory frontbencher, gave details of a series of cases in which police took no action against groups of travellers who vandalised sports fields and left them covered in human waste. He detailed cases in his constituency of Bracknell, Berks, last summer when 17 caravans occupied playing fields in the town. The police refused to act despite threats and vandalism from the travellers. The town clerk had written to Sir Charles Pollard, the Thames Valley chief constable, providing details of widespread fouling by the travellers. (Daily Telegraph, 16.01.02)

A manageable relationship

This may not be enough to explain why Gypsies should be described as ‘Europe’s Most Hated People’, but it surely explains why the average citizen in a country town might regard their arrival with only moderate enthusiasm. Yet the number of anti-social Gypsies is comparatively small and there are lots of other more dangerous scam artists with far more clout. It might be argued that it would be absurd to single Gypsies out for special treatment, and that it is misusing police time to hunt Gypsies instead of bigger game. Every web-user, every day, is approached by ambitious scammers trying to get bank accounts and credit-card numbers, and with fifty different ways of robbing you blind.

Looking at the wider picture we see a people with particular gifts who have made their own historic contribution to European culture—minor, perhaps, but distinct. The musically uninformed, looking at the countless tzigane in compositions from central Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, might well imagine that Gypsy melodies were the main source of European folk music. Today, economically, I am told that in Iberia Travellers usefully bring cheap clothes and knick-knacks to rural villages at lower prices than any other source, while they also meet changing needs for casual labor at harvest time.

At a Wiltshire village recently—a village near one of England’s leading public schools—Gypsies contributed to an event known as the “mop fair”. The broad High Street was taken over for a week, carnival joyrides were set up along with numerous stalls, and everyone had a good time. One might wonder what the village common looked like afterward; but my informant couldn’t tell me about that. George Borrow saw a horseman gallop over the horizon while the Gypsy camp hastily packed and hurried after—“flogging their animals terrifically”. I think it’s unlikely that around 1820 they first buried their rubbish and thoughtfully disposed of any human wastes, and we can be pretty confident that the lane where they were camping was left in a mess.

Yet that’s what free-loading means; that’s what free-loaders do. Travellers live according to the situational ethic of the nomad—which is opportunistic, lawless, and much influenced by the fact that although they are here today they will be gone tomorrow. And as long as the more visible proportion of the Gypsy population do not feel bound by the laws of sedentary citizens, or the obligations of tax-payers and others who have to meet a variety of household expenses (ordinary citizens who must buy their electricity and water and maintain their homes), I suspect that despite their undoubted gifts and many talents Gypsies as a group will remain unloved. Especially if they resort to EU human rights law to help them defy the conventions of the settled, rate-paying, urban world.

From the point of view of many UK townspeople they are probably seen as a nuisance to be put up with. There is often tension, and sometimes worse than that. But despite the gloom of the BBC report it remains a relationship which should be manageable—with a modicum of goodwill from both sides.

Funny word, “tribe”. Karl Popper used it a lot but you don’t hear it much today. Around 1960 the feeling arose in progressive circles that it was denigratory, and it fell into disuse, probably in relation to developments in Africa and the winning of independence by many African states. (See Terminological Note below.)

Yet there is now an aggressive effort to redefine the Native Hawaiian population as a “tribe”. Whether the Akaka Bill with its attempt to break up Hawaii by introducing positive apartheid for “natives” will founder on the floor of the Senate, or will lead to political independence and Hawaii’s secession from the Union, remains to be seen. Suffice to say that to many people it looks like a new and spectacular demand for special privileges in the name of race-based ethnic separatism.

What privileges? There is to be a special autonomous Native Hawaiian Governing Entity alongside existing governmental structures. How much autonomy it will have is unclear, but it raises the prospect that anyone having “one drop” of native blood will not have to pay state or federal taxes. At the same time, while avoiding the obligations of their fellow citizens, Native Hawaiians will continue to enjoy all the benefits of national defense, public health, education and welfare.

A critical commentary by Senator Jon Kyl describes the Akaka Bill as authorizing race-based government for Native Hawaiians “by shoehorning the Native Hawaiian population, wherever located, into the federal Indian law system and calling the resulting government a ‘tribe’”. He then points out that the Supreme Court has held that “Congress cannot simply create an Indian tribe. Only those groups of people who have long operated as an Indian tribe, live as a separate and distinct community (geographically and culturally), and have a pre-existing political structure can be recognized as a tribe. Native Hawaiians do not satisfy any of these criteria.”

Yet Hawaii’s Governor Linda Lingle, the legislature, and congressional delegation, all support the bill, and this despite the jurisdictional chaos and heightened social tensions that its passage is more than likely to bring about. There appears to be widespread sentiment that those able to claim any Polynesian descent whatever, being related by blood to the original occupants of this island territory, deserve special compensatory status apart from and above its other inhabitants. DNA will no doubt be used to establish that the one drop of blood required is present.

Tribalism in ‘the open society’

The attempt, in 2005, to redefine a heterogeneous people of mixed ancestry in the middle of the Pacific as a “tribe”, let alone an Indian tribe, a people moreover who have known little but modern American institutions for at least a hundred years, might seem surprising. But one man who would not have found it surprising is the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies, for the persistence of tribal yearnings in the midst of the modern world was the underlying theme of Karl Popper’s important 1945 book.

The words ‘tribe’, ‘tribal’, and ‘tribalistic’ occur forty-two times in the chapter that presents his main argument—Chapter 10—and his discussion of related matters continues in voluminous footnotes at the end of the book.

Popper’s main purpose in writing The Open Society was to try and explain the whole political, intellectual, and emotional phenomenon of Nazism. What Hitler represented was “arrested tribalism”, and the more Popper thought about the matter the more he saw an atavistic yearning for the past—closed, pre-rational, taboo-ridden, undemocratic, militaristic, and fearful of liberty—as something deeply menacing.

“Arrested tribalism” in political life was the same as “arrested development” in the life of an individual; it indicated a failure to grow, adapt, and deal maturely with a changing world. Change, as Heraclitus said long ago, is something we just have to put up with, like it or not: but the Nazis wanted to turn back the clock. And in order to understand the phenomenon of Nazism historically, it was also necessary to understand the deep roots it had in the past, and to see it in terms of a persistent reaction against social change that has been continually with us since the conflict of Athens and Sparta in classical Greece.

The shock of the new

As Popper told the historical story, in the 5^th and 6^th centuries BC the tribal world of the old-time Greeks was breaking down. Everywhere there was change and decay—or change that looked like decay. And it is the anxiety and distress felt by men and women in this situation that leads them to try and freeze all change and return to the tribal past. He thought Plato’s thinking exemplified this. Disturbed by the way Socrates had shaken the world’s foundations, suffering personally “under the political instability and insecurity of his time”, Plato recommended in The Republic and The Laws “the arrest of change and the return to tribalism.” According to Plato “all social change is corruption or decay or degeneration.”

In Greece old ways of life were dissolving, old legends were disbelieved, old authorities were treated with contempt, and it was the fear of these trends getting out of hand that drove Sparta to “attempt to retain and to arrest tribalism by force.” In the account presented in The Open Society Sparta was seen as a proto-totalitarian state in antiquity. But perhaps the most succinct statement of Popper’s argument appears on his opening page where the unending historic conflict between ‘tribalism’ and ‘civilization’ is set forth. His book, he wrote,

sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization—a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humaneness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind.

It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth—the transition from the tribal or ‘closed society’, with its submission to magical forces, to the ‘open society’ which sets free the critical powers of man.

It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism. And it suggests that what we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself.

Popper’s terminology

But what exactly did Popper mean by “tribalism”? While the term contained a lot of what anthropologists study under the rubric of culture, and a lot of what most of us mean if or when we use the term, it also contained much more. It was in fact half of a global dichotomy—with “tribalism” on the one side and “civilization” on the other—and was therefore very loose and inclusive.

If civilization “set forth the critical powers of man”, tribalism included whatever opposed this development. At its most general it contained everything from taboo to hereditary chieftainship, from human sacrifice to the divine right of kings, from sorcery to papal infallibility.

As a philosopher Popper naturally placed great emphasis on the life of the mind: the closed society is primarily unacceptable because it submits man’s reason to “magical forces”. Yet this intellectual submission is part of an inescapable pattern of social and political subordination too.

In his account of Heraclitus, a philosopher whose motto was “everything is in flux, and nothing is at rest”, Popper claims that the very idea of ubiquitous change was “revolutionary”. At the time, hardly anyone thought of culture in this way, especially given “the stability and rigidity of social life in a tribal aristocracy.” Where hierarchic settings of this sort prevailed, everything “is determined by social and religious taboos; everybody has his assigned place within the whole of the social structure; everyone feels that his place is the proper, the ‘natural’ place, assigned to him by the forces which rule the world; everyone ‘knows his place’”.

It might be useful to point out that this exactly fits every Polynesian culture ever known, including that of old-time Honolulu. Before the retribalization of Hawaii gets much further its advocates should perhaps take a look where they’re heading. But joking aside, the fact is that an intense conservatism regulated and controlled an entire hierarchic social order, just as Popper said it did, and because of this social change took place very slowly—and rarely as a result of rational discussion. True, change did sometimes occur, but “the comparatively infrequent changes have the character of religious conversions or revulsions, or of the introduction of new magical taboos.”

He thought there was something of this quasi-religious character to be seen in the rise of Nazism and Communism too. Both grew from the same socio-psychological roots as the political theorising of men like Plato over two thousand years ago—the “strain of civilization”, a generalised anxiety about the drift of events, a feeling that cultural breakdown is imminent, that familiar things are disintegrating, that everything known and valued is about to collapse and we won’t be able to stop it.

“I suppose that what I call the ‘strain of civilization’”, Popper wrote in a footnote, “is similar to the phenomenon which Freud had in mind when writing Civilization and its Discontents.” Thinking about the intellectual attraction of Nazism and Communism he asked:

Why do all these social philosophies support the revolt against civilization? And what is the secret of their popularity? Why do they attract and seduce so many intellectuals? I am inclined to think that the reason is that they give expression to a deep-felt dissatisfaction with a world which does not, and cannot, live up to our moral ideals and to our dreams of perfection… the revolt against civilization may be… a reaction against the strain of our civilization and its demand for personal responsibility.

Personal responsibility

Personal responsibility was important. Whereas individual responsibility in a world of individuals is central to modern ethics, the blurry environment of old-time communal life provided a thousand excuses for evading responsibility. Sometimes this took the form of hiding behind the mysteries of causation. In the traditional Polynesian world, for example, there was no clear place for personal responsibility when things went wrong—culpable acts could always be explained away by sorcery, witchcraft, or fate. At other times group solidarity was invoked. A malefactor would be shielded by his family, his clan, his tribe, his confederation, always on the solidary basis that as “one of us” he could do no wrong.

At the ethical center of both tribalism and totalitarianism was the ideal of unity, of conformity, of groupthink carried to a point where the interests of the individual barely existed. In his discussion of “totalitarian justice” Popper pointed out that for both Plato and modern totalitarians there was only one ultimate standard—the interest of the state. “Everything that furthers it is good and virtuous and just; everything that threatens it is bad and wicked and unjust. Actions that further it are moral; actions that endanger it immoral… This is the collectivist, the tribal, the totalitarian theory of morality: ‘Good is what is in the interest of my group; or my tribe; or my state.”

This so-called morality would be enforced by state officials, which was another way of saying that a citizen’s conduct would be more a matter for the police than a matter of conscience. Those who advocated such a program “apparently do not see that this would be the end of the individual’s moral responsibility, and that it would not improve but destroy morality. It would replace personal responsibility by tribalistic taboos and by the totalitarian irresponsibility of the individual.”

In contrast to both tribalism and totalitarianism, in free societies modern men and women are held personally accountable for their acts—while sorcery is regarded as deeply implausible. As Popper put it, “In our own way of life there is, between the laws of the state on the one hand and the taboos we observe on the other, an ever-widening field of personal decisions, with its problems and responsibilities; and we know the importance of this field”. Throughout his book, he added,

the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.

Uncompromising on assimilation

Is there anything to be said for tribes and tribalism? Popper’s deep suspicion of the entire collectivist project meant that he could rarely think of anything to be said in their favor. This does not mean that he was entirely untouched, at least intellectually speaking, by the emotional plight of those distressed by the break-up of the communal world. He wrote with sympathy of those affected by “the strain of civilization” induced by the inner conflicts those still drawn to collective life had to endure.

In Volume 2 he wrote that a fact “which raises grave political and institutional problems is that to live in the haven of a tribe, or of a ‘community’ approaching a tribe is for many men an emotional necessity (especially for young people who… seem to have to pass through a tribal or ‘American Indian’ stage).” Grownups however should put such childish things behind them and become critical rationalists in a rationally critical world. To the dismay and disgust of many Jews his assimilationist creed was entirely uncompromising with regard to Judaism too.

“Aside from the early Greeks,” writes Malachi Hacohen in his biography, Popper believed “the Jews were the tribe par excellence.” As a result he thought “Zionism was a colossal mistake, and Israel a tragic error (that) retarded solution of the Jewish question and incited a national conflict between Jews and Arabs.” Elsewhere Hacohen writes:

He regarded the Hebrew Bible as the fountainhead of tribal nationalism. Oppressed and persecuted, he said, Jews in the Babylonian exile created the doctrine of the ‘Chosen People’, presaging modern visions of chosen class and race. Both Roman imperialism and early Christian humanitarianism threatened the Jews’ tribal exclusivity. Jewish orthodoxy reacted by reinforcing tribal bonds, shutting Jews off from the world for two millennia. The ghetto was the ultimate closed society, a ‘petrified form of Jewish tribalism’” (The Open Society, Vol 2, Chapter 11, n.56)

To Hacohen it was shocking that Popper, of Jewish background himself, should hold such views and should have argued so intransigently for assimilation. But it was consistent with Popper’s overall view of the need for a transcendent cosmopolitanism in modern life.

Open borders too?

So an ‘open society’ was everywhere and always superior to either petrified or arrested tribalism. But is an ‘open society’ also supposed to be an ‘open polity’ with open borders too? Popper’s is a theory of society, not a theory of the state—and his book offers no clear account of the political entity in which an ‘open society’ can both flourish and be properly defended too. A minimal state of the kind Hayek advocated is steadily implied, but never adumbrated. Is there a Coast Guard? Are the borders secure? What role should the army play?

We can all be glad we live in nations that are commercially prosperous, cosmopolitan, and democratic. We can agree that a free-trading nation in a free-trading world, with representative government, an independent judiciary, and liberty of thought, association, and expression, is a very fine thing indeed. Popper more than once appeals to the stirring oration in which the Athenian leader Pericles proudly boasted that “Our city is thrown open to the world; we never expel a foreigner…”

But what do you do after you have thrown your city open to the world, only to find you have let in enemies who not only decline to assimilate, but want to destroy it? When these same destroyers have been given all the rights of law-abiding citizens—including the cultural right to be as disagreeably hostile as they wish? When the relation of a number of sinister tribalistic enclaves to the ‘open society’ around them is a conspiratorial blend of dissimulation and treachery?

It is a curious fact that there is no mention of Islam in The Open Society, and no indication whatever that it might emerge as one of the ‘enemies’ of open societies in the years to come. But Popper would have had no trouble recognising what is happening in Europe now. Metastasising cells of unassimilable jihadis, often united by language and ethnicity, driven by irrational resentments, galled by their failure to cope with modern life and feeling “the strain of civilization” in their bones, hating an imagined exclusion and fearing a suspected inferiority, inspired by a debased fundamentalism more concerned to kill than convert, fortified by prophecy, and aggressively promoting a sacred text containing all one needs to know… this manifestly represents “arrested tribalism” in its current form today.

Terminological note

Since “tribalism” is such a fraught term in public discourse today some questions might be asked about the emphasis it bears in The Open Society. Why did Popper use such a controversial word? How did a major work of social philosophy get published without it being editorially softened or euphemized? It seems to me the answers to these questions are roughly as follows.

When he arrived in New Zealand as a German-speaking refugee from Austria in 1937, Karl Popper was largely a stranger to the English-speaking world, and also to the nuances of English itself. One must assume that the concept of an antithesis to civilization had been clearly in his head in German for a long time. Then, at Canterbury College, writing in English, he seems to have struck upon the English word ‘tribalism’ as the blanket term he wanted, and those who helped him with English in New Zealand saw no reason to change it. (These were an economist, Colin Simkin, and an assistant in both Classics and English, Margaret Dalziel.)

It is well known that Popper had a bitterly hostile relationship with his senior colleague in New Zealand, I. L. G. Sutherland, a man always identified as a psychologist. Sutherland had certainly qualified in psychology. He did indeed lecture in psychology. But his main interests had for many years been anthropological, and he was especially concerned about the welfare of the Maori people. If, as is possible, Popper assumed a stark dichotomy between ‘tribalism’ and ‘civilization’ when talking to Sutherland, the first condemned as Bad and the second applauded as Good, it would certainly have antagonized the latter. The differences between the two men are usually described as personal, not intellectual; but on this issue I think rather more was involved.

As to how the text of The Open Society could have appeared with its heavy negative emphasis on tribalism unaltered, the reasons are two. At the time, in 1945, the words “tribe” and “tribalism” were only beginning to be shadowed by a suspicion of insensitivity. They would have therefore seemed uncontroversial to the editors. Secondly, those who saw the manuscript through to publication were far removed from the world of ethnic revivalism, anthropology, or identity politics. Two of them were scholars in the field of art: Herbert Read and Ernst Gombrich. The other was an ex-Austrian economist whose general outlook was similar to that of Popper himself—Friedrich Hayek.

* * *

It was only after the 1950s that reference to the word “tribe” became risky in polite company. And after 1960 especially. That was the year in which many African states became independent, and the overwhelming question in many minds was this: could they function as modern states at all, or would “tribalism” undermine any attempt to organize their political and economic life at a higher and more inclusive level?

Not only about Africa was this question being asked. Would Burma make a viable polity? And what about the Middle East? Whether “tribalism’ was a discussable subject in the post-colonial period became a classic instance of the clash between idealists and realists. In the case of the idealists on the Left they did what they so often do—unable to change the world, they forcefully altered the language in which we talk about the world. If tribalism was an uncomfortable reality, then by vetoing the words “tribe” and “tribalism” you might at least relieve the discomfort. And you could pretend that nothing else needed to be changed.

For their part the realists maintained that tribalistic loyalties would tend to destroy any wider political entity. You could build Houses of Parliament and Congressional Assembly Halls throughout Africa. You could erect air-conditioned Ministries of Trade and Foreign Affairs in every capital city from Lusaka to Abidjan. You could have elections, and appoint ministers and secretaries and under-secretaries… But the whole thing would tend to be a kind a charade, a Potemkin false front, a theatrical presentation behind which membership of tribe or clan would ultimately decide the distribution of wealth and power.

History has yet to prove the realists wrong.

The entire episode illustrates the political backwardness of this struggling country. But can these events, which included the attempted poison-murder of the ultimately successful candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, also be read more positively? Karytnycky thinks so—but I wonder. Do they indicate, as he believes, that a responsible middle class now exists in sufficient numbers to influence things for the better? Or are the underlying problems far more intractable, and deeply a part of traditional pre-modern cultures more generally?

For years throughout the Soviet era we witnessed the comedy of mock “elections” in which the winning party regularly got about 98% of the vote. Nothing more startlingly illustrated the primeval political mentality of the Soviets. One can imagine the smiling arguments that went on among the Party directorate as to whether the opposition should be allowed 2% of the vote, or only 1.5%. But who cared? Everywhere in the Soviet world so-called “elections” took place as if the outside world wasn’t looking, mainly because in one-party states the “electorate” could do absolutely nothing about it.

Not surprisingly, Ukrainians expected something better last year. So when Mr Yanukovich was declared to be getting 92% of the vote in the eastern Donetsk it was all too obvious what was going on—Grand Vote Theft on a huge scale. Karatnycky reports that according to the non-partisan Committee of Voters of Ukraine, which had 10,000 monitors on the ground, no less that “85,000 local government officials helped perpetrate the fraud, and at least 2.8 million ballots were rigged in favor of Yanukovich.

Clans and corruption

But why? How in this new and open era could such a brazen political hijack possibly succeed? And how could so many officials be involved? These questions lead to a conspicuous feature of Ukrainian political life—the primitivism of a society strongly built around clans, with loyalty to clan outweighing other loyalties and responsibilities, especially in the eastern part of the country. I emphasize the clan system first, because all over the world people are talking about “corruption” as if it is something to be considered by itself and on its own. For example, we are told over and over that Africa’s leaders are “corrupt”.

In ethnic affairs in various other places, from Canada to New Zealand and Australia, the same accusation is made—and it’s often true as far as it goes. But if critical analysis ceases with the charge that there’s “corruption at the top” or that there are “corrupt elites”, and that nepotism is rampant, we are not going to make much progress understanding the problem—let alone dealing with it.

It is certainly true that corruption went right to the top in Ukraine: in 2000, President Kuchma’s former bodyguard leaked hundreds of hours of transcripts of his private conversations. Karatnycky writes that “On the tapes, Kuchma is heard dispensing favors, paying massive kickbacks, and conspiring to suppress his opponents—making it clear that the president sat at the head of a vast criminal system.”

Now it would be wrong to suggest that this “criminal system” was coextensive in the strictest sense with the “clan system”. Yet it is obvious from Karatnycky’s discussion that the clan system, with its strong territorial connections (Kiev, Donetsk, Transcarpathia), was certainly the social and political foundation of the criminal system he describes. In this milieu, as in Africa, corruption is not something between A and B, occurring in private and alone. Nor is it something between one oligarch and one sub-oligarchic client.

Nor can it be dealt with simply by condemning or even removing the individuals involved. It involves vast extended “families” of beneficiaries, and almost equally vast armies of enforcers, all of them determined to protect what westerners may call “ill-gotten gains”, but which clan members see as perfectly legitimate claims. After describing how a number of “oligarchic clans” came to dominate Ukrainian politics in the early 1990s, Karatnycky writes:

Each interest group established its own political party in parliament. The Kiev clan ran the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine. The Donetsk oligarchs created the Party of Regions, the ranks of which included a local governor who later became prime minister: Yanukovich. The Dnipropetrovsk group created and backed the Labor Party.

For a decade after 1989 everything ran smoothly. Prominent clan members divided the spoils of privatisation among themselves—steel mills worth billions were got for a few million; energy companies sold for a song; while the manipulative control of taxation, by inspections and fines enforced by what are in effect state-supported standover men, was used by rival clans to harass or force out of business their opponents.

Then toward the end of the 1990s the criminal/clan/oligarchic system began to unravel, with other Big Men growing powerful enough to threaten President Kuchma, and the nasty murder of an investigative journalist being traceable to Kuchma himself.

New man, old culture

We know the upshot. A new election produced a new “clean” leader in Mr Yushchenko—a man whose persistence in the face of his own attempted murder and the disfiguring sickness of dioxin poisoning, concerted harassment throughout the campaign including denial of landing rights to his aircraft, constant denigration in the media controlled by his opponent, road barriers plus an attempt to cause a fatal accident by forcing his car into a ditch, amounts to heroism on a truly Churchillian scale.

His triumph was magnificent. No-one can take that away. But it might be timely to stand back a little and recognise that this has been the easy part. For it is surely true that the structure of Ukraine’s clan-dominated society remains much the same as before. This means first of all that many Ukrainians, especially in the east, do not expect to earn a livelihood as autonomous citizens independently creating wealth; they hope to enjoy the spoils of office by using whatever pressure and influence their “family” connections allow.

Secondly, it means that whatever entrepreneurial activity takes place will have to be within the severely constraining framework of the clan system. Mr Karatnycky talks in his first paragraph, as optimistic Americans often talk, about “the rise of a powerful civic movement”, about “a skilled political opposition group”, and about the “determined middle class” that resisted the Kuchma regime. And he reports that

The Yushchenko camp has stated its gratitude for the long-term efforts of the U.S. Agency for International Development to support free media, the rule of law, civil society, and civic election monitoring there.

But exactly what laws will be imposed by those who rule? Will they allow a hair-dresser to set up on the corner and ply her trade? Will a man be able to build a delicatessen nearby? Will another man be able to set up a timber yard, or an automotive repair shop, and will they be able to obtain the secure title to their properties they need in order to safeguard their investments? Or will they be everlastingly shadowed by one clan or another, and subject to obstruction, harassment, standover men, extortionists, all of them connected with this mob or that and making up the law as they go? One would like to know.

It’s the culture, stupid

As we said before, the clan problem is not confined to the Ukraine. Far from it. It’s a common problem in traditional, pre-modern cultures, and is of course conspicuous in Africa. And wherever it is found, corruption and nepotism—or what is called corruption by all media commentators, and by many others who should perhaps think more deeply—is routinely associated with it. Something else we see is that the journalists who point this out often strongly imply that the removal of someone at the top, or of some small and corrupt clique, is all that is needed to produce a thriving modern democracy. Such people may even imply that “regime change” induced by guillotine or firing squad recommends itself as an attractive quick fix.

The outpouring of recent commentary on Africa has brought a great deal of this sort of thing. In an article in the British Spectator for June 25, 2005 Aidan Hartley tells “How African leaders spend our money”. It’s a funny and biting survey of the Wabenzi and their taste for big and expensive cars, arguing that aid hasn’t worked, and quoting a Merrill Lynch report which estimates that 100,000 Africans own $380 billion (most of it siphoned from international aid) while 300 million others live on 50 pence a day. Hartley concludes that “The West needs to help Africans get better leaders before it increases aid.”

But how exactly would you “help” Africans to do that? Would regime change do it? An entertaining Max Boot tirade in the LA Times for July 7, 2005 goes further. Ridiculing the rock-and-roll activities of Live-8, and claiming that in Africa what Bob Geldof himself has called “corruption and thuggery” is the main problem, he ends with the following politics-by-numbers suggestion: “Use the G-8’s jillions 2 hire mercenaries 4 the overthrow of the 6 most thuggish regimes in Africa. That would do more to help ordinary Africans than any number of musical extravaganzas.” Ordinary Africans, we are to understand from this, have quite different values from the men at the top.

In the Wall Street Journal for July 5, 2005 an economically more responsible contribution from Moeletsi Mbeki (a brother of South African president Thabo Mbeki), a man who is by no means an ordinary African and who is at the University of Witwatersrand, writes that “at the root of Africa’s problems are ruling political elites that have squandered the continent’s wealth and choked its productivity over the last 40 years.” In the case of each of these writers, the main thing you have to do is remove a dictator, overthrow a regime, or displace and neutralise a sinister “ruling political elite”… Then everything will be just fine.

So you remove the corrupt leader—what then?

But let us try a little thought experiment. Let us remove Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, and any of a dozen others you care to name. Let us then see what happens next as we start with what is optimistically called a “clean slate.”

Assuming you’re not going to install an outsider, who shall be appointed and where do you find him? If he or she is going to simply be a member of the same tribe and clan-based cultural milieu that produced the original despot, working in the same context of ambiguous and unenforceable law, and gravely imperfect or rudimentary political institutions, how are you to get a replacement with better ideas about politics, economics, and social life?

Why is it assumed that the mere decapitation of a political body will in itself bring improvement? Are the political genes that made the body utterly different from the political genes that made the head —if you will pardon the metaphor? “Regime change” is a splendid phrase; but it looks rather less splendid if it means that you must be prepared to appoint, staff, direct, and manage each new regime yourself—all of this while under fire.

Then there’s that word “corruption”. Of course I use it myself to describe the conduct of certain political leaders, in Africa and elsewhere. But at the same time I also realise it is a moralistic term that assumes certain norms regarding business practice and truly belongs in a western context. In brief, it belongs in prosperous countries where politicians, business leaders, public figures, and notables of one kind or another, are not supposed to enrich themselves by means of bribes and kickbacks.

But what if this kind of enrichment is expected? One doesn’t have to be a moral relativist to see the inappropriateness of the word “corruption” in certain contexts. Is it appropriate to use it in a scornfully moralistic tone of Africa (or of the Ukraine for that matter) where bribes, kickbacks, under-the-table payments, ‘sweeteners’ and so on, are all part of the normal way in which the wealth of society is distributed. In such places they are payments made to those with power and influence for services rendered. That is how “blat” was used in the strange, quasi-feudal, pre-modern society of Soviet Russia—and that is how it is doubtless used in much of Russia today. What we call corruption is simply daily life: it’s the culture, stupid!

It also seems to me unhelpful to classify such payments as part of the “informal economy” as economists are inclined to do. Both those who are forced to offer bribes, and those who demand them, simply assume that that is how life is lived, and that is how things get done if they are going to be done at all. Call it formal, informal, whatever. It is in short “the culture”—the ubiquitous culture of backward dysfunctional lands lacking all effective social, political, and economic institutions. In other words it is part of a comprehensive pattern of values, expectations, conduct and consequences that have always made the traditional world go round.

Does this mean that I take a relaxed view of such behavior, or condone it in the modern world? Not at all. In America, Australia, and New Zealand 99% of the people are literate, are entirely westernised, and the law on corruption is known and accepted. Nor in such places is poverty an incentive to corruption. The ethnic minority in these countries who try to exploit remnant traditions of clan and tribe for their own advantage, and act corruptly within this or that government bureaucracy (their usual means of access to large cash funds), deserve to be vigorously prosecuted and appropriately punished.

But where 99% of the people live under quite different conditions, where lawlessness prevails and the judicial system is a joke; where poverty is universal; and where the provision of basic services to one’s farm or house or office may take years of effort and countless bribes to countless officials—plainly a rather different attitude is required.

Social evolution and remnant traditions

In the early world—once upon a time, in some remote sociological Eden—All was One and All was Unity. Political power, economic activity, religious belief, social mores, and the definitions of good and evil and true and false by which we live, were all facets of a compound unity bound together by relations of kith and kin—the kinship of family, clan, and tribe.

If the tribe said evil was good, then it was good; if the tribe said black was white, then black was white. And if the chief or priest of the tribe said evil was good, or black was white, no-one dared say him nay. For westerners that world is irrevocably past, and has been since the Renaissance; and to yearn for it today, as many anthropologists urge us to, is just silly. Modernity means that politics, economics, religious belief, social mores, and what each of us call good and evil are all separated; and this differentiation is a defining feature of modern life. We do not allow clan leaders to define right and wrong. We do not allow chiefs to determine justice. We do not allow priests to define scientific truth and falsehood. And we do not allow clan leaders, chiefs, or priests to run our economic affairs. In political life, and in American judicial practice, this differentiation is most familiar in terms of the separation of powers.

But throughout much of the rest of the world, remnant shreds and patches of traditional cultural patterns persist, as they do throughout Africa, and in parts of Asia, and as they still do even on the periphery of the West itself in Ukraine and other Slavic nations. In such places political, economic, and judicial authority may be strongly influenced by clan affiliation. In Africa, where modernity has never really taken root, this fact virtually defines the human world, and it is surely sensible for the West to adopt policies that take account of this fact.

One practical consequence is that we should stop pretending that although there are evil men at the top, everyone else is like you and me. They are not. Nor are they evil. Many are perfectly nice people to visit, to share a beer with, or to dance with to the intoxicating rhythms of local bands. But it is equally true that they necessarily think pretty much the same way as the men at the top think, and whatever they may say in private, they will behave the same way if put in a position of leadership, because they will experience just the same clan- and family-based cultural pressures and constraints.

Another consequence we must face up to concerns aid, for the expectation of beneficial effects in such societies is bound to be disappointed. Whatever Blair and Bush say at Gleneagles, only the infinitely rich, the entirely blind, and the pathologically optimistic will say it makes sense to persist in voluntarily throwing billions of good money after bad. As numerous pessimists have argued year after year, it is the economic equivalent of pouring water straight onto desert sands. But it’s not water—it’s your money and mine.

Following on from this is the even more serious matter of vaguely military fantasizing to be found among people like Max Boot, Aidan Hartley, and Moeletsi Mbeki—about forcefully removing despots, annihilating cliques, neutralising elites, etc. Much blood and treasure may be lost trying to do this, as in Iraq today, but the outcome is doubtful. Only where most people are well-educated, literate, and already largely westernised (as they appear to be in Ukraine) and represent, in Adrian Karatnycky’s words, a clear electoral majority favoring “free media, the rule of law, civil society, and civic election monitoring”, does there seem to be a better than even chance of success.

Mead forcefully set out these views in the introduction to her 1956 book New Lives for Old. The “new lives” were those being embraced by the people of Manus Island off the coast of New Guinea in the wake of World War II, while the “old lives” were those she had seen when she first visited Manus in 1928. As she makes abundantly clear—and as the great majority of Manus Islanders recognized themselves—the old culture was inimical to modern life, and there was no way it either could or should have been preserved. The only question was how to handle the process of modernization in a humane and practical manner.

Her view of social change grew from her understanding of both western civilization as a whole and of its distinctive American offshoot. American civilization progressed by accepting change, learning to live with change, and welcoming it in the belief that “men have only to see a better way of life to reach out for it spontaneously.” They must first, however, be able to clearly grasp its manifest advantages; and the relevance of this philosophy to global developments in recent years is not hard to see. In what follows, passages from the first pages of New Lives for Old alternate with brief interpolated commentary.

The situation in 1928

Mead says that the story she brings from New Guinea is about a people who since 1928 ‘have traversed in the short space of twenty-five years a line of development which it took mankind many centuries to cover’:

It is a story of a particular tribe of the Admiralty Islands—the Manus—whom I saw in 1928, a mere two thousand nearly naked savages, living in pile dwellings in the sea, their earlobes weighed down with shells, their hands still ready to use spears, their anger implemented with magical curses, their morality dependent upon the ghosts of the recently dead. It is the story of a people without history, without any theory of how they came to be, without any belief in a permanent future life, without any knowledge of geography, without writing, without political forms sufficient to unite more than two or three hundred people.

The situation in 1953

It is also the story of a people who had become, when I returned to visit them in 1953, potential members of the modern world, with ideas of boundaries in time and space, responsibility to God, enthusiasm for law, and committed to trying to build a democratic community, educate their children, police and landscape their village, care for the old and the sick, and erase age-old hostilities between neighbouring tribes.

Optimism versus pessimism

The author places her argument for cultural change in the primitive world within the wider context of postwar pessimism regarding the value of modern life, and of pessimism about the American way of life in particular. Her argument challenges this entire negative cast of mind.

This book is set firmly against such pessimism. It is based on the belief that American civilization is not simply the last flower to bloom on the outmoded tree of European history, doomed to perish in a common totalitarian holocaust, but something new and different. American civilization is new because it has come to rest on a philosophy of production and plenty instead of saving and scarcity, and new because the men who built it have themselves incorporated the ability to change and change swiftly as the need arises. This book is based on the belief that Americans have something to contribute to a changing world which is precious, which can be used with responsibility, with dedication…

This precious quality which Americans have developed, through three and a half centuries of beginning life, over and over, in a virgin land, is a belief that men can learn and change—quickly, happily, without violence, without madness, without coercion, and of their own free will. For three centuries, men of vastly different ways of life have come to America, left behind their old language, their old attachments to land and river, their betters and subordinates, their kin and their icons, and have learned to speak and walk, to eat and trust, in a new fashion.

As we have learned to change ourselves, so we believe that others can change also, and we believe that they will want to change, that men have only to see a better way of life to reach out for it spontaneously. Our faith includes no forebodings about the effect of destroying old customs, and calls for no concentration camps or liquidation centres such as have been used in totalitarian states by those with the desire and the power to change others. We do not conceive of people being forcibly changed by other human beings. We conceive of them as seeing a light and following it freely.

Doubts about the US among refugees

Mead notes how recent immigrants from Europe, many of them displaced by war and oppression, have been uncomfortable with the plainness and uniformity of life in the US, and have contrasted American civilization unfavourably with ‘the dignity of living all one’s life in a distinctive setting, even though in mortal terror of the gibes and jeers which kept one firmly fixed and so secure in the position in which one was born.’ This attitude, she says:

has been fostered by the presence in America of refugees who did not come freely, but who were driven out from countries which they still prefer. It has been fostered by the moves and counter-moves inspired by Communism, which has incorporated the standard Russian myths about European civilization. It has been manipulated by the leaders of non-European countries who confuse the retention of various outmoded forms of feudal power with a defence of ancient civilizations against the ‘vulgarities’ of the American way of life, a vulgarisation which makes it possible for a simple laborer to buy articles of good design in Woolworth’s.

So today there is a great doubt in the land, a doubt of our distinctive heritage, a doubt as to whether we have anything to give to the rest of the world, even a fear that we may be—as our ready critics, especially the ready critics within our doors, are so quick to tell us—offering nothing to the world except the cheap and the destructive, or soft drinks seen not against a poverty which could afford neither bottled drinks nor shoes for their children, but only as beverages lacking in genuine intoxication, fit only for children…

Old world critics v. new world values

Between 1918 and 1950, in response to tumultuous events in central and eastern Europe, the US acquired a ready-made alienated intelligentsia hostile to many aspects of American life. The critical disdain of this new intellectual elite, many of them disgruntled and reluctant refugees voicing an essentially European critique, increasingly prevents Americans themselves from understanding their own ‘priceless inheritance of political innovation and flexibility.’

In accepting this negative image of America, we often feel we are getting closer to, reaching a better understanding with, our sophisticated and cultivated European and Asian friends. Actually we are depriving them of finding something here to value, something that they, who are searching rather more busily that we for ways of change, could use. And we deprive them either way, whether we slavishly agree that America is a dreadful country in which drugstores and conformity contrast in sorry fashion with the ubiquitous culture of the Old World, or whether, still reacting to their negative image, we insist that everything in the United States is better, brighter, and nearer perfect than anywhere else.

American complacency and bumptiousness was born of just such doubts two centuries ago. It is the voice of the immigrant assuring the relatives he left behind, and himself, that America is better than Europe. So, in every foreign capital today, the emissaries of American diplomacy, the Point Four men, the journalists, jostle one another in their laments and counter-laments, seeing America through this smoke screen of the feared judgement of other, older countries, in turn denying and truculently defending our institutions.

Meanwhile our genuine heritage, our personal knowledge of change is denied and forgotten, as false prophets seek to change our priceless inheritance of political innovation and flexibility into some untouchable fetish of unchangeableness.

Change and civilization: the relevance of New Lives for old

This book—the record of a people who have moved faster than any people of whom we have records… of men who have skipped over thousands of years of history in just the last twenty-five years—is offered as food for the imagination of Americans, whom the people of Manus so deeply admire. It is no accident that a people who represent a civilization built on change should catch the imagination of a primitive people intent on changing. Every mile of both my voyages to Manus is relevant to the whole problem of what American civilization—a civilization dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, created with a right of equal access to all that men have learned and made and won, a civilization made of men who changed after they were grown—has to give, to Americans and to the peoples of the world with whom we work. (End of quoted material.)

The Roosevelt Indian Reservation in the Amazon rain forest is not a happy place. Last year the Cinta Larga Indians slaughtered 29 miners there, and in October the Brazilian who was trying to mediate the conflict was murdered at a cash machine. Neither of these events represented anything new. The reserve, located 2,100 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro, and named for Theodore Roosevelt when he visited Brazil in 1913, is also where a notorious massacre of Cinta Larga by rubber tappers took place in 1963; only one child in the village survived.

The immediate cause of the recent violence is not rubber but diamonds. The Roosevelt Indian Reservation may be sitting on one of the world’s largest deposits, and no one wants to leave it in the ground—neither the Indians, nor the itinerant diggers (garimpeiros), nor the government. But under present Brazilian law no one is free to begin digging. And this brings us to the deeper cause of murder and mayhem in the region.

Under Brazil’s constitution the country’s Indians are not full citizens. Instead they are legal minors, with the status of a protected species. This has one singular benefit for the Indians: the twelve Cinta Larga responsible for last year’s killing of 29 wildcat prospectors may enjoy immunity from prosecution and never face jail. But there is also a down side. As wards of the state, the Indians are denied the right to mine their own land.

As for outsiders, they must apply for permits to dig, and face endless bureaucratic delays that more often than not lead nowhere. The outcome is predictable. Frustrated in their own wishes, and hard-pressed by the impatient diggers, Indians make private deals, which then go sour—and the shooting starts.

At issue here is not just the law; the law is itself the product of an idea, or a set of ideas, that form its underlying assumptions. What should be done about endangered enclave societies situated in the midst of a modern nation? Can they, or their land, or their minerals be cut off and preserved, frozen in time, pristine and inviolate, forever? Or should they be?

The Figueiredo report

The massacre of the Cinta Larga in 1963 gave rise to a Brazilian state inquiry that became known as the Figueiredo Report (after the official in charge of the investigation). The inquiry was meant to find out about the shockingly grave deficiencies and abuses that were then being tolerated by the Indian Protection Service, including the use of individual Indians as slaves. Once it was completed, the old agency was closed down, and a new one created to replace it.

There the matter might have rested had not the London Sunday Times caught a whiff of scandal. The paper dispatched the travel writer Norman Lewis to Brazil; though he did not meet any Indians, he found all he needed in the Figueiredo Report. “By the descriptions of all who had seen them,” Lewis reported, “there were no more inoffensive and charming human beings on the planet than the forest Indians of Brazil.”

Having established a scene of primal innocence, Lewis proceeded to tell of the atrocities against the Cinta Larga, warning that they were being pushed to the brink of extinction and that there might not be a single Indian left by 1980. He concluded: “What a tragedy, what a reproach it will be for the human race if this is allowed to happen!” Reprinted all over the globe, his sensational article had profound and lasting effects.

The first of these effects was to enshrine a form of extreme protectionism, not only as a temporary means to an end–the human and cultural survival of the indigenous peoples of Brazil–but as an end in itself. Soon, all those working for Indian interests were of a single opinion: the only way to protect these tribal peoples was to create inviolable sanctuaries where they would “live their own lives preserving their own culture on their own land.”

The second effect was to galvanize a number of English explorers, writers, and anthropologists into setting up a permanent international lobby. The name of this flourishing body is Survival, self-described as “the world’s leading organization supporting tribal peoples.” Two men who have been associated with it from the outset are John Hemming and Robin Hanbury-Tenison.

Hemming, who served for two decades as the director of the Royal Geographical Society, has written a number of books about South America, among them an indispensable three-volume history of the impact of civilization on Brazil’s indigenous peoples–Red Gold, Amazon Frontier, and Die If You Must, the last installment of which appeared in 2003. Hanbury-Tenison, Hemming’s long-time friend, was also a founder of Survival and is today its president. Less well-known but also important is the documentary filmmaker Adrian Cowell, who has spoken up on behalf of the Amazonian Indians for nearly 50 years.

According to a recent article by Hemming in the British monthly Prospect, the campaign to ensure the survival of the Amazonian peoples appears to have succeeded. This is also the gist of the final chapter of Die If You Must, where he wrote:

The Indians will survive physically. Their populations have grown steadily since a nadir of near-extinction in the mid-20th century. Having fallen to little more than 100,000 in the 1950’s, they have more than tripled to some 350,000 and are generally rising fast.

The health of the Indians is basically good, Hemming reported in Die If You Must. The killers of yesteryear–measles, TB, pneumonia, cholera, and smallpox–are rare. Their land is also secure: “a remarkable 11 percent of the land-mass of Brazil is now reserved for Indians. The 587 indigenous areas total almost 105 million hectares–an area greater than France, Germany, and Benelux combined.” Environmentalist ideals and indigenous interests have apparently been reconciled: “From the air, [one reservation] now stands out as an immense rectangle of verdant vegetation framed by the dismal brown of arid ranch-lands.”

Explorers up the Amazon

It was in the 1950’s and 60’s that Hemming, Hanbury-Tenison, and Cowell, three young men from Oxford and Cambridge, launched themselves on the world. They were talented and energetic, they had good connections, and above all they shared a boyish taste for adventure. At Eton they probably read about Lawrence of Arabia; at Oxford, where Hemming and Hanbury-Tenison roomed together, they already knew that “exploring” was what they wanted to do most. They regarded the rain forests of Brazil as a natural field for their endeavors, and in no time they were paddling up the Amazon in canoes.

Adrian Cowell was a Cambridge man, and his precocity as an explorer makes an impressive tale in itself. As a student in 1954 he joined a university Trans-Africa Expedition. The following year he was in Asia. Then, as he relates in The Heart of the Forest (1961), “the Oxford and Cambridge Expedition to South America . . . brought me to the Amazon forest.” Thereafter he joined the Brazilian Centro Expedition, an enterprise associated with the creation of the new national capital of Brasilia. Its purpose was “to canoe down the Xingu River and burn an airstrip at the exact geographical center of Brazil.”

It was all tremendous fun and very romantic–a word that occurs spontaneously in the books of Hanbury-Tenison, who has written voluminously about his explorations and today runs a booking agency for exotic locations. Here, from his website, is a typical passage about adventuring in Afghanistan:

A sound like distant thunder made me look up at the rich blue cloudless sky before I turned to see twenty wild horsemen in turbans and flowing robes bearing down on me. They carried long-barreled rifles and had daggers in their belts. Beside their spirited horses loped large, hairy hounds. With their Genghis Khan moustaches and fine, aquiline noses they were almost caricatures of the bandits we had been warned about. I should have been frightened, but all I could think was that if I had to go I could not have found a more romantic end.

This tells us quite a bit about the attitude of all three men toward indigenous cultures. In light of it, Hanbury-Tenison must have been somewhat taken aback when, in 1971, he called on the anthropologist Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History in New York to tell her about Survival International (as Survival was then called), and she gave him a piece of her mind. Mead at the age of seventy was a very different person from the idealistic young woman who had visited Samoa in 1926. By 1971, she was fiercely unromantic, and the spectacle of yet another young Oxford “explorer” embarking on yet another “expedition up the Amazon” must have set her teeth on edge. With sturdy good sense she tried to talk him out of his fantasies.

In his 1973 book A Question of Survival, Hanbury-Tenison describes this “small, beady-eyed dumpling of a lady who sailed into the attack as I came through the door”:

The main point that annoyed [Mead] was the concept, unstated by me, that primitive peoples were any better off as they were. She said she was “maddened by antibiotic-ridden idealists who wouldn’t stand three weeks in the jungle” . . . and the whole “noble savage” concept almost made her foam at the mouth. “All primitive peoples,” she said, “lead miserable, unhappy, cruel lives, most of which are spent trying to kill each other.” The reason they lived in the unpleasant places they did, like the middle of the Brazilian jungle, was that nobody else would.

There was much talk in those days of the pharmaceutical benefits of rain forests, and Hanbury-Tenison and his friends were sure that the Amazon was about to make a huge contribution to the world’s health. (This was a little before the discovery of the supposed wonders of jojoba oil.) But Mead was having none of it:

She said that to protect [the Indians] on the grounds that they could be useful to us or contribute anything was nonsense. “No primitive person has ever contributed anything, or ever will,” she said. She had no time for suggestions of medical knowledge or the value of jungle lore.

The only grounds on which Mead relented were broadly humanitarian. For one thing, the Indians’ “art, culture, dancing, music, etc. was pleasant and attractive and their grandchildren might thank us for trying to preserve or at best record it now that we have the proper technical means–tape and film–for doing so.” For another thing, “it was bad for the world to let these people die, and the effort to prevent their extermination was good for mankind even if it failed.”

For the rest, however, Mead vehemently denied that the Indians

had any special reasons for being protected, as she denied any advantage of one race over another. She also claimed emphatically that they all wanted one thing only, and that was to have as many material possessions and comforts as possible. Those still running away in the jungle were the ones who had encountered the most unpleasant savagery from Europeans, and even though they might be having no contact now, if they could possibly get hold of any aluminum pots they would use them.

A history of atrocity

Although faithfully recorded by Hanbury-Tenison, Mead’s argument was as lost on him in 1971 as it is lost on legions of like-minded people today who mouth the slogans of multiculturalism. What Mead herself failed to grasp was that, naive though he may have sounded, Hanbury-Tenison and his friends had been radicalized, and they were never going to accept her bleak view of the tribal world. It was not that they had been reading Marx; instead, they had been reading Norman Lewis’s digest of the worst parts of the Figuereido Report, including Figuereido’s judgment that “the Indians [had] suffered tortures similar to those of Treblinka and Dachau.”

Torture, indeed, was too tame a word for what had taken place. In 1963 there had been massacres of the Cinta Larga tribe in Rondonia. One gunman’s taped testimony describes how an employee of a rubber company named Chico Luis

gave the chief a burst with his tommy gun to make sure, and after that he let the rest of them have it. . . . [A]ll the other guys had to do was finish off anyone still showing signs of life. . . . [T]here was a young Indian girl they didn’t shoot, with a kid of about five in one hand, yelling his head off. . . . Chico shot the kid through the head with his .45 and then grabbed hold of the woman–who by the way was very pretty. “Be reasonable,” I said, “why do you have to kill her?” In my view it was a waste. “What’s wrong with giving her to the boys? They haven’t set eyes on a woman for six weeks. Or we could give her as a present to de Brito. [their boss]”

But Chico would not listen:

He tied the Indian girl up and hung her head downward from a tree, legs apart, and chopped her in half right down the middle with his machete. Almost with a single chop I’d say. The village was like a slaughterhouse. He calmed down after he’d cut the woman up, and told us to burn down all the huts and throw the bodies into the river

This is unbearable: but it is not essentially different from what had happened to many Indians in Latin America after 1492. The lawless frontier was for centuries a refuge for loners, criminals, and violent psychopaths who had nothing to lose and could act with impunity. Those who went searching for El Dorado in the 1540’s behaved like packs of ravening wolves, seizing food from the same Indian villagers whom they then enslaved as porters, and who were tortured or killed when they failed to cooperate. As one soon learns from Hemming’s three-volume work, this sort of thing has had a very long history indeed.

Colonial nations fashion their heroes from the timber at hand, much of it twisted and full of knots. Australia, for example, invites its citizens to admire an unappealing Irish bandit named Ned Kelly. But the Kellys smell sweet alongside Brazil’s much romanticized bandeirantes. What are often referred to as expeditions of “pathfinders” from Sao Paulo into the interior in the first half of the 17th century were mostly slave raids aimed at catching, chaining, and marching back to the coast as many Indians as a group of well-armed and ruthless men could seize.

To be sure, there was sometimes a genuinely exploratory aspect to such forays. In Red Gold, Hemming offers a balanced account of this phase of Brazilian expansion inland, and fairly describes the ordeals of the bandeirantes themselves. Since slave-raiding was a central feature of traditional Indian culture, too, the journeys engaged whites, Indians, and those of mixed ancestry (mamelucos) in a common enterprise:

The Indians contributed their forest skills and geographical knowledge. They soon grasped the purpose of the mission and became expert enslavers of other natives. Although brutalized and worked hard by the captains of the bandeiras, the Indians probably enjoyed service on them. It was quite normal for Tupi warriors to make long marches through the forests to attack enemy tribes.

In the course of his own periodic visits to Brazil, Adrian Cowell seems to have come rather closer to the realities of Amazonian Indian life than either Hanbury-Tenison or Hemming. Although aware of the horrors long endured by Indians at the hands of slavers, settlers, and frontier psychopaths, he was also more prepared to face up to the grimmer aspects of the native cultures themselves, and to the horrors Indians had long inflicted on each other.

In The Heart of the Forest (1961), Cowell writes in idyllic prose of the partnership he formed with an Indian hunter, carrying his friend’s gun and studying his craft, teaching himself to decoy wildfowl by imitating their calls. But he also reports how, in 1958 on the Xingu River, there were continual killings of itinerant Brazilian rubber tappers (seringueiros) by Indians, and of Indians by seringueiros. A Juruna Indian told him how

first we lived lower down the Xingu and worked for the seringueiros, but they killed many [Indians] with rifles. So we came up here past the great rapids and lived till the seringueiros say they are friends and gave us rifles. So we went downriver again and worked for the seringueiros till they killed more Juruna. Then we killed many seringueiros and came back here and killed Trumai and Kamayura Indians. Then the Txukahamae tribe came and killed almost all of us so that we are only twelve now.

The Villas-Boas brothers

That is the way things were and always had been. And this, too, was a seemingly ineradicable aspect of the culture that Cowell thought worthy of being saved. Back in 1967, he had joined the brothers Claudio and Orlando Villas-Boas in an attempt to contact and “pacify” the elusive Kreen-Akrore. But violence in the camp was making it hard to manage a community where different tribal groups had been brought together for their own safety. The captions on a page of photographs in Cowell’s 1973 book, The Tribe that Hides from Man, read like the list of casualties on some exotic war memorial: “Above. Javaritu, a Trumai killed by Tapiokap. Above. Pionim, a Kayabi, killed Tapiokap to avenge his brother-in-law.” And so on.

Much has been written about the endeavor of the Villas-Boas brothers to establish the Xingu Indian refuge and entice the tribal remnants of the Kayabi or Txikao or Suya to join it. A passage from The Tribe that Hides from Man offers a glimpse into the thought processes of Claudio, a “Marxist philosopher” in the Latin American manner:

Look around this camp and you will see Indians are more loving than we are. But the expression of their love is confined to the limits of this society. They cut a hole in the wilderness to contain their family, but outside this camp is the jungle where they kill meat for food, kill bamboo for arrows, kill bushes for leaves for their beds. Killing is the essence of forest existence, and if you stopped it, the forest and the Indian would die. Within the Indian mind there is a complete division between the duties within the group and the absence of duty in the land of killing outside.

At one time, Claudio suggested that Indians should feel free to kill white seringueiros or any other uninvited marauders who came into the Xingu Park. While warning them of the inevitable costs of this practice as a permanent way of life, he understood that, according to the tribal code, revenge killing was natural, habitual, and inevitable.

Nor was this the only aspect of Amazonian Indian culture that was hard to reconcile with modern life. Strict rules of seclusion were found among all the upper-Xingu tribes. Women were subjected to draconian punishments for violations of taboo. In a British television documentary from the 1970’s, a young Mehinacu woman was asked what would happen if she were to glimpse, even accidentally, the sacred flutes played by the men. She would be gang-raped, she replied, smiling sadly as if in recognition that in the genteel world of her white interviewer, such sexual punishments—culturally authorized, approved, indeed mandatory—were unthinkable.

Horrors that had to go

Hemming’s account of Amazonian life is hard on the efforts of Christian missionaries, and especially hard on the Jesuits (“fanatical missionaries intent on replacing native society and beliefs with their own Christian model”). One line of grudging appreciation will be followed by the word “but” and ten lines of disparagement. As his impressive study proceeds from volume to volume, he becomes ever more severe, his language becomes more tendentious, and an austere secularism dictates his judgment of religious matters. In his recent article in Prospect, he approves only of the politically radical priests who began to appear in the 1960’s–“trained anthropologists who did not try to undermine indigenous beliefs and ceased to be aggressive proselytizers”–but his view of Catholic missionary activity before that point is mainly negative.

But what exactly were the religious authorities to do when they first arrived from Portugal and had to deal, for example, with the Tupinamba? Did they not have a clear obligation both to undermine and to prohibit certain indigenous beliefs? In modern times, we have seen the rise of whole political cultures gripped by pathology, with hideous consequences; so, too, sick ethnic cultures evolved historically in the tribal world. Few quite so sick as the Tupinamba have been recorded before or since.

They loved human flesh. Prestige and power centered on the ritual slaughtering of prisoners. In an account prepared by Alfred Métraux for the Smithsonian’s Handbook of South American Indians (1948), we read that the killing and eating of these prisoners (who were fattened for the purpose) “were joyful events which provided these Indians with the opportunity for merrymaking, aesthetic displays, and other emotional outlets.” Métraux then describes what took place at a cannibal feast after the victim’s skull was shattered:

Old women rushed to drink the warm blood, and children were invited to dip their hands in it. Mothers would smear their nipples with blood so that even babies could have a taste of it. The body, cut into quarters, was roasted on a barbecue, and the old women, who were the most eager for human flesh, licked the grease running along the sticks. Some portions, reputed to be delicacies or sacred, such as the fingers of the grease around the liver or heart, were allotted to distinguished guests.

That Portuguese settlers in the 16th century did not cope very well with this aspect of the Indian tribal world is probably true. That the missionaries who came after them did not handle the situation as they might have done is also likely. But if they had been around at the time, would John Hemming, or Robin Hanbury-Tenison, or Adrian Cowell, or the entire staff of Survival have done much better? Would any of us?

“All primitive peoples,” Margaret Mead had said to her young Oxford visitor, “lead miserable, unhappy, cruel lives, most of which are spent trying to kill each other.” She was overdoing it, but she had a point–a point largely lost sight of in today’s systematic sentimentalizing of the Stone Age.

The Indian prospect

Of course, as we have seen, Mead also acknowledged that certain aspects of Indian culture—“their art, culture, dancing, music, etc.”—deserved to survive, for the enjoyment of the people themselves and for the admiration of humanity as a whole. That, indeed, is more or less what has happened today in the Xingu Park and places like it elsewhere. On display in such places is a pacified, defanged, and somewhat feminized version of Amazonian culture, of the kind that middle-class travellers from the West like to see: a theatrical world where dressing-up in feathered regalia, and ritual ceremonies, and communal dancing never stop.

Hemming, who welcomes the prospect of self-determination, claims that “modern indigenous policy seeks to empower tribes to manage their own affairs.” Yet both self-determination and empowerment imply literacy and modern education; and here the picture is less clear. Officially, the children are learning to read and write, and in the last chapter of Die If You Must—a chapter with the title “Present and Future”—Hemming makes three rather perfunctory references to schooling. But at the same time, he strongly implies that in his vision of the future it does not matter whether the children learn to read and write or not, because others will be there to do things for them.

Who are these others? According to Hemming, the external political affairs of the Indians on the Xingu reserve are “supported by a remarkable contingent of 33 non-government organizations, a tireless band of missionaries, anthropologists, well-wishers, journalists, doctors, and lawyers, both in Brazil and abroad.” As for their internal welfare, that is served by a “resident tribe of whites, composed of social scientists, doctors, teachers, nurses, biologists, and agronomists from all parts of Brazil.” With friends like these, who needs self-determination?

What Hemming is describing is the fruit of the inviolable-sanctuary approach to cultural survival. This rests on what might be called fortress theory, and has two cardinal principles: that “culture” and “people” and “land” should be seen as indivisible, and that they can be kept this way forever in a suitably constructed territorial redoubt. Whatever is happening in the world around them, ethnic cultures should as far as possible be preserved unchanged. With the help of an army of administrative personnel, custodially responsible for seeing to it that they go on wanting the same things they have always wanted, their cultural heritage will be kept alive. Social change is bad—at least as it affects these picturesque tribal peoples—and should be stopped.

Among the Xingu Park Indians, it is in fact safe to say that the older generation remains strongly attached to its remote lands, and intends to go on living there, hunting animals and gathering fruits. But what do younger Indians want to do with their lives? If there is one thing we have learned from modern history, it is that individuals often outgrow their ethnic cultures, find life in a fortress claustrophobic, and choose to move on. In contrast to museum exhibits, real human beings have a way of developing ideas and ambitions and desires–including for aluminum pots–beyond the ken of conservators. Fortress theory, multicultural “essentialism,” and the enduring cult of the noble savage are the enemies of those ambitions and human desires.

In the final paragraph of Die If You Must, Hemming wonders uneasily whether the pessimists might have the last laugh after all–whether the Amazon’s “beautiful, ancient, and intricate cultures will be maintained only artificially as curiosities for tourists, researchers, or politically correct enthusiasts.” That is quite possible. But it is not the only undesirable eventuality.

Preserving ancient cultural patterns is laudable, but it is not enough. No society in history has ever stood still, and however beautiful, and ancient, and intricate ancient cultures may be, it is wrong to lock people up inside them and throw away the key. Uprooting the dishonest and patronizing cult of the noble savage is the work of generations; but as far as today’s Amazonian Indians are concerned, the main priority must surely be to ensure that those among them who do not want to play the obliging role of historical curiosities, endlessly dressing up for visitors whose expectations they feel bound to fulfil, are able to find something else to do in the modern world–on the reservation or off it. In that quest we can only wish them well.

Life gets better, but people feel worse. In seven short words that’s what Gregg Easterbrook’s book is about. The Progress Paradox (2003) is a revealing survey of modern discontents ranging widely in the social sciences and medicine, and it’s certainly interesting that ten times as many people may now suffer from depression as did half a century ago. But Easterbrook is broad rather than deep, and seems largely unaware that people have been complaining about progress, and looking nostalgically back at the past, for as long as there’s been a past to look back at. How depressed they felt when they did so is hard to say—as often as not they seem to have got into a towering rage—but the progress paradox has been with us for thousands of years.

Primitivist fantasy: as old as civilization itself

One of its most striking sentimental manifestations is a widespread admiration for the tribal world. Anyone who thinks this began with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18^th century is deeply mistaken. We mentioned Lucretius in this connection last month, citing A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas’s Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, but this book also makes plain that there were numerous other thinkers from 2000 years ago who admired the simple life. And none of them liked stuff.

In fact, they all believed that less stuff was better than more. Socrates said that man’s basic requirements were few and easily satisfied, and Epicurus agreed. Diogenes once talked a prosperous Athenian into turning his agricultural land into sheep pastures—pastoralism has always had a special appeal with its visions of rustic tranquillity—and persuaded him to throw his money into the sea. Plato’s Republic dwelt fondly on the idyllic picture of an earlier communal society, while any number of Greek thinkers were convinced that the savage Scythian tribes, somewhere beyond Thrace along the shores of the Black Sea, exemplified primitive virtue in contrast to degenerate Athens.

Reaching back a bit further we find that as early as 700 BC the Greek poet Hesiod felt humanity’s heroic days were past and that he lived in an era of lamentable decline. In the Golden Age (which Hesiod says was long before his own time) men were naturally peaceable, and for that reason there was no war. Nor was there any foreign trade or travel to confuse us with luxuries: everyone stayed home happily knitting their own sweaters, and no-one fussed about Paris or Pierre Cardin. Among other attractive features of the Golden Age, the people were vegetarians, made everything out of wood, and because they were naturally good their communal society was free of conflict and required no lawyers.

Notice that from the Golden Age all the way down through a series of inferior ages (Silver, Bronze, and Iron) this is a story of degeneration. Not a story of progress, but of regress. It is virtually certain that Hesiod did not live like a savage: he used a spoon and slept in a bed. But paradoxically—as Easterbrook might say—he hated progress. And notice also what is admired above and beyond all these particularities: the social and economic virtues described are only to be found in an imagined community where xenophobia and group hostilities had been vanquished and universal love prevails. In all these idealistic visions communal order was an implied prerequisite: some tight-knit form of collectivity was thought to be inseparable from the social virtues portrayed.

One last thing should be mentioned in this connection. In Scientific American Discovering Archaeology for Jan/Feb 2000 evidence was presented from 8,500 years ago of a cult in Cyprus that, somewhat incredibly, wanted to turn the clock back. According to the author, there were people at that time who found the decadence of Anatolian life intolerable, so they sailed across the sea to Cyprus, and gave up pottery, individualism, and sex. It must be added, however, regarding this intriguing article, that extrapolating from stones and bones to what people may have thought or believed eight and a half thousand years ago is a less than exact science.

But from these many examples one is forced to conclude that romantic primitivism has been with us for a very long time. In round figures, it looks as if people have been gazing nostalgically backward for nearly ten thousand years. And that is highly significant. Because the last ten thousand years is exactly the epoch in which civilization itself emerged; and what it suggests is that idealizing earlier and more primitive ways of life is a fixed mental tendency, a psychological constant if you will, inseparable from the rise of civilization itself.

From xenophobia to xenophilia

For anyone who doesn’t have them, it is obvious that the most important features of civilization are soap and toilet paper. These are the items that distinguish civilized from precivilized life, and distinguish barbarism from the dark abyss of unwashed and unwiped prehistory.

Yet today, surprisingly, many nice, clean, sweet-smelling middle class folk have somehow persuaded themselves that the tribal world, where there is no soap, no toilet paper, no shampoo, no deodorant and certainly no tampons, represents a better way of life than their own. No doubt if you pressed them about this after a good dinner they might concede that the pre-civilized world lacks amenity; but that it is morally superior and altogether more virtuous they feel in their bones to be true. And the deep reason for feeling this way about early human society is always the same: it is more communal, more collectivist, more committed to the solidarity of the group.

The reason for this persistent attraction to the tribal lies, I believe, somewhere in the complicated moral evolution of humanity—in the historical passage and shift in moral judgement from xenophobia to xenophilia. To grasp this it is necessary to be clear about these contrasting attitudes and psychological types. A xenophobe is one who holds that the humanly foreign, the Other, the culturally unseen and unknown—perhaps some vaguely reported and misunderstood tribe across the sea—is really a bit sus, and definitely not what we want at home in our living room. A xenophile on the other hand holds that the foreign, the remote, the exotically Other, precisely because it is only vaguely apprehended, and just because it radically differs from ourselves, is something wholesome and admirable that should be warmly embraced.

Of course in evolutionary terms xenophobia is probably as old as the hills—it is certainly as old as the apes. Go back a million years or so and one finds that xenophobia was the primordial attitude regulating the association of bands of violent prehumans, or low-browed protohumans, virtually everywhere you looked. Xenophobia taught that while the inhabitants of your own country were generally okay, the inhabitants of the adjacent territory were a disgraceful and unmanageable bunch who were always trying to invade your land, seize your wife and children, burn down your house, laugh at your gods, and defile all you held sacred.

The primaeval xenophobic attitude was once illustrated in a cartoon showing two English rustics, about 1890, leaning on a farm gate when a toff from London walks by.

First Rustic: “Who’s him?”
Second Rustic: “Dunno”
First Rustic: “Chuck a brick at him.”

Given a spontaneous tendency on the part of rustics to toss bricks at passing strangers, xenophobia is clearly a social problem, and quite possibly a moral problem, and it is clear that civil society cannot allow it to flourish unrestrained. At the same time it is hard to see it as an intellectual problem. There is nothing at all puzzling about it, nothing mysterious to be explained, nothing that some anxious academic commission should be asked to look into. It is obviously an expression of the same unaccommodating instincts we share with countless other animals, including chimpanzees, and goes far back into the primate past.

But the modern phenomenon of anti-civilizational xenophilia is an intellectual problem. The adoration of cultures other than our own, the worship of gods other than those we were brought up with, a devotion to all religions other than the one our parents believed—what A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas call in their book the “revolt of the civilized against civilization” with its admiration for pre-civilized social forms and a love of the exotic, the strange, and the outré—this is indeed a genuine puzzle. It is by no means obvious how it arose. What is clear at the outset, however, is that it involves an inversion of much that is natural, normal, and universal in social life.

Moral rules: from Freud to Mary Midgley

Freud’s psychology may be of help here. First and most simply, he tells how the calm exterior of every man and woman conceals a tumult of instinctual desires and drives. Second, in order for the human animal to live peaceably with his fellows these instincts must be tamed, diverted, redirected—sublimated is the usual term—and made compatible with peaceful collective life. Human cultures invent moral rules to do this, the male impulse to aggression being subject to a variety of restraints on bad behaviour.

Then with the rise of civilization it becomes subject to such difficult rules as ‘Love thy Neighbour’, and the even more counterintuitive ‘Love thy Enemy’. Third, although conscience as an internal system of control is erected on the basis of these rules, those bad old violent and aggressive drives just won’t go away. They cannot and will not be eradicated. They are overlaid by the artificial rules of the super-ego, but though overlaid they won’t lie down. In the darkest subterranean levels of the human psyche they persist, producing anxiety, guilt, and neurotic symptoms up on the surface.

Now my argument is that romantic primitivism, which we have seen is a recurrent feature of western civilization for about 3,000 years, and possibly much longer, is part of a guilt complex involving moral rules idealizing the communal way of life. This idealization is deeply inscribed in conscience; and guilt arises because of the claims of this communal social conscience on the one hand, and the opposing need in civilized societies to assert oneself individualistically against the communal, against the collective, against the claustrophobia of the tribe, against the tyranny of the human herd.

Freud’s relevant statements appear in a number of places. In Totem and Taboo, for example, he states as an axiom that “where there is a prohibition, there must be an underlying desire.” This of course makes sense. Why prohibit something we have no wish to do anyway? The only reason for having a speed limit is that we want to go faster. The only reason for having a rule like “Love thy enemy” is that we want to xenophobically beat the enemy to a pulp and would like to do so.

This is the instinct which the moral norms of civilization arise to counterract: the wish to aggress, to fight, to kill. We began by saying that the normal relation of tribe to tribe is territorially xenophobic—fearful, hostile, and ready to strike and destroy: “Chuck a brick at him.” By way of reinforcing this proposition consider what Mary Midgley has to say in her book Beast and Man:

War and vengeance are primitive human institutions, not late perversions; most cosmogonies postulate strife in Heaven, and bloodshed is taken for granted as much in the Book of Judges as in the Iliad or the Sagas. There may be nonaggressive societies, as anthropologists assure us, but they are white blackbirds and perhaps not so white as they are painted.

It seems possible that man shows more savagery to his own kind than most other mammal species… Abimelech, the son of Gideon, murdered, on one stone, all his brothers, to the number of three score and ten (Judges 11:5). An animal that did anything remotely similar would (surely rightly) be labelled ‘dangerous’.  (pp28–29)

War before civilization

It is frequently claimed either that war did not exist before civilization, or that it was relatively trivial with little loss of life, or that it was ritualised and involved no serious levels of death or injury, or that when conflict has been recorded between tribal societies it grew solely out of their clash with civilization itself. There is alas nothing to support these views. We are here presenting speculative moral psychology: we don’t have much space for empirical evidence. But on the subject of precivilized tribal warfare you should know there’s a lot of evidence around, especially in two recent books which show the folly of trying retrospectively to pacify the human past.

One of them is Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization (Oxford, 1996). The other is Steven LeBlanc’s Constant Battles: the Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, 2003. Keeley tells us that whether comparison is made between the frequency of war in primitive and civilized society, the scale of massacres, the proportion of those of the general population actively involved, the toll of dead and injured, in each case the surprising thing—and it certainly surprises me—is that the tribal world looks both more bloody and more deadly. As to frequency: Keeley notes that the early Roman Republic initiated a war or was attacked only about once every twenty years, while the average modern nation-state between 1800 and 1945 went to war about once in a generation.

Compare this with pre-state, preliterate, precivilized tribal societies: 65% were at war continuously, while 55% were at war every year. As to massacres: at the site of Crow Creek in South Dakota, in what seems to be the year 1325 according to archaeological dating, more than 500 men, women, and children were slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated, and all this well before anything remotely resembling civilization was available locally—and long before Columbus. Regarding the toll of dead and injured, Keeley writes that “the proportion of war casualties in primitive societies almost always exceeds that suffered by even the most bellicose or war-torn modern states.”

Traditional Australian Aboriginal life is presented as blandly pacific, the standard image used over and over again by the Australian Broadcasting Commission showing a family group wading thoughtfully into a lily pond, with flowers between their teeth. But it wasn’t quite like that in the old days. The convict William Buckley, who escaped in 1803 and lived with Aborigines on the southern coast for thirty-two years, provides a rare glimpse, from the inside, of the level of conflict among his people. One day, he writes, “we were unexpectedly intruded upon by a very numerous tribe, about three hundred. Their appearance coming across the plain, occasioned great alarm… On the hostile tribe coming near, I saw they were all men… In a very short time the fight began. Men were fighting furiously, and indiscriminately, covered with blood, two of them later were killed in this affair”.

He goes on to say that the battle ended with three killed, and then describes the counterattack that his people staged the following night: “ finding most of them asleep, laying about in groups, our party rushed upon them, killing three on the spot, and wounding several others. The enemy fled, leaving their war implements in the hands of their assailants and their wounded to be beaten to death by boomerangs.”

In pre-civilized war the beating, stabbing, or spearing to death of the wounded was routine. It may be appropriate here to mention that in accounts of the battle of Culloden, near Inverness in 1746, writers often wax indignant about the “atrocities” which followed the fighting. It is said that about 1,200 Highlanders of the Macdonald and Cameron clans lay dead or dying, and (in one author’s words) “what happened next was completely foreign to the rules of war…” Apparently the Duke of Cumberland “ordered his soldiers to spare no one, not even the wounded lying in the fields and woods. Hundreds of the fallen were shot or stabbed where they lay. Some were even buried alive. And so on.

But this is how it has always been in tribal fighting. A 12-year-old girl who was taken captive by the Yanomamo in South America in the 1930s recalled later of one fight she witnessed, “then the men began to kill the children; little ones, bigger ones, they killed many of them. They tried to run away, but they caught them, and threw them on the ground, and stuck them with bows which went through their bodies and rooted them to the ground. Taking the smallest by the feet, they beat them against the trees and rocks. The children’s eyes trembled. They killed so many.”

The social contract

Returning again to our wider moral speculations, it would seem that if this is how bad things were for the last million years or so, then there would seem to be a strong case for strong authority to stop it. And what Freud himself says is close to contract theory in more ways than one. For example, Freud writes that “Man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes the programme of civilization.” In Civilization and Its Discontents he tells us, “I adopt the standpoint that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man . . .  (and) constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.”

The fact that instinctual aggression is such a huge impediment must have been recognised quite early on, many thousands of years back. Once this happened, and reasonableness and the values of rationality attained critical mass, then a deal was done. “Human life in common”, he writes, “is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ‘right’ in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force’ (and) this control represents the decisive step of civilization”.

It’s a pretty picture. Reasonable chaps meet other reasonable chaps and agree to behave better. But the raw material of many men and women is not reasonable. It is deeply instinctual, driven by the sort of animal desires which regularly end up in the more sensational newspapers. Sublimation is an unending social process. The work of taming instinctual impulses must be undertaken again and again with every new recruit to the social order. In brief, each individual conscience must be newly built, newly constituted, and newly installed in each individual, year after year, generation after generation, because (in Freud’s words) without this “civilization is perpetually threatened with disintegration”.

Freud employs a vivid metaphor to describe the setting up of conscience as a mechanism of moral control. “Civilization”, he writes, “obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.”

What has been conquered is the instinctual city of dreadful night, the city of sinful homicidal wishes. What is set up like a garrison in the city is conscience, for without it collective life of a kind embracing millions of people living together could not take place. And that of course is what civilization is: not a family, not a hunting band, not a clan, and certainly not a tribe. It is a wholly new and unprecedented form of collective social life in which hundreds of millions somehow rub along together, largely anonymously.

Beyond Freud

We will soon have to go beyond Freud. But let us first agree with Freud in stressing just how extraordinarily important the civilizational blocking of aggressive drives has been. He himself believed that in the evolution of civilization nothing was more psychologically important than the suppression of powerful animal instincts, socially destructive instincts representing a constant “hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle.” And nothing showed how important was the spread of wider and wider forms of peaceful association than that amazing injunction—so totally counterintuitive, so downright bizarre—“love thy enemy”.

But at the same time something else went completely unnoticed by Freud. Who was not, of course, an economist. This being that modern civilization as a whole, is not and cannot be along old-style communal lines. Yes, indeed: we can agree that the suppression of individualistic aggressive drives is necessary for the wider form of human association we call civilization. There Freud got it right. But after this we have to say no. Wider forms of association, the form of human association Hayek called ‘the extended order’ involving hundreds of millions of people, cannot be based on the communal arrangements of older, more primitive social units, simply sustained by the moral rule that it is desirable to “love thy neighbor”.

There Freud got it wrong. This is of course the classical collectivist delusion. In fact, the lines on which peaceful, modern, spontaneously cooperative organization is built are broadly those of the free market—as indeed, from the 1930s on, people like Mises, Hayek, and Michael Polanyi tried patiently to explain—and these spontaneous forms of large-scale social order consist of vast self-regulating systems utterly different in their dynamics from tight little fraternally bonded communes.

So what have we here? A contradiction which splits many minds and many societies quite profoundly. It also produces loads of guilt among those who have deeply internalised the communal injunction “love thy neighbor as thyself”. From that guilt in turn comes a determination to uphold, to idealise, to promulgate as desirable and preach and promote the ancient communal ideal, come what may. But where can we find a living example of this ideal? The answer for many people is that we can now only find it in concrete form, incarnated so to speak, in those small-scale tribal societies that modern civilization has marginalised or actually swept away.

And the very fact that modernity has destroyed them deepens the feeling of guilt, and adds to the determination to overcompensate by honouring their memory, to atone for the sins of modernity by presenting them as worthy and admirable, to seek expiation by rehabilitating them as uniquely sympathetic cultural forms. And in everything we say about them, by morally transfiguring the primitive world so that all traces of violence and war have been tastefully air-brushed away. This, I suspect, is what underlies much romantic primitivism today.

(This essay originated as a talk for Blackheath Philosophy.)

Who were the noble savages? And where did they come from? In the history of political ideas, are they an original invention, or should we consider them a sort of Lost Tribe wandering in the forests of the human mind for centuries, to be rediscovered by that intrepid explorer of the democratic psyche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

The polemical advantages they offered are well known. Naked and unashamed, the artless simplicity of natural man contrasted with the insincerities of the overdressed Bourbon court: on the one hand seeming innocence and virtue; on the other, hypocrisy and vice. But what Rousseau found most useful for his libertarian political project was really something else—a way of imagining how humanity would look if the more onerous constraints of civilization were stripped away.

Man was born free, announced The Social Contract, but is everywhere in chains. This was a dramatic way of saying that freedom is always curtailed by social rules and conventions, and that power, privilege, and prestige have been unevenly distributed in every society ever known. Rousseau found this intolerable, and the Discourse on Inequality was a thought experiment in which he tried to imagine a human condition, as far from Versailles as anything could be, where no-one would ever be humbled by anyone else; where each man or woman, alone and in solitude, was psychologically safe from invidious comparison, from being rated, from feeling bad about their inadequacies—whatever those inadequacies might be.

The primordial state of nature

The fable of social evolution his Discourse on Inequality supplied, with its primordial green “state of nature” and its original naked human specimens standing about under the trees—each under his own tree, blissfully free or all social pressure and satisfied with nothing more than a bed of leaves to lie on and a handful of acorns to eat—presented the earliest men and women as isolates. And though supposedly happier than at any time since, they could hardly be said to be either moral or amoral. They just were, in a world without tribes or clans or families. In this hypothetical prelapsarian epoch solitary men and women came together for the purposes of copulation, parted, and silently went their mysterious ways—silently because language had yet to be invented.

The primordial world wasn’t perfect. Wild beasts had to be fought in the woods, water had to be found in the desert, and hunters had to go out daily to pursue and kill the deer and antelope they ate for food. All this was hard work. Doubtless some hunters were energetic and some were not, some men rose early each morning, while others were layabouts who kept putting things off. But a lazy hunter who starved had no-one to blame but himself. At least (thought Rousseau) even the most dilatory and irresolute savage, still loitering shiftlessly at the mouth of his cave when the sun went down, could not complain of

Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes…

In the absence of “society” Hamlet’s frustrations would never arise. In the woods nobody would seek distinction or pridefully put on airs, nobody would be intimidated into trying to satisfy social expectations instead of fulfilling themselves, and everyone would be self-sufficient and free. Taken as the imaginative vision of a hypersensitive thinker trying to invent a world where nobody’s self-esteem would ever suffer, and even the most psychologically fragile would be shielded from mental hurt, this was not uninteresting. Taken as anything more it was risky. Taken as a guide for the egalitarian reform of society it was madness.

Where did it come from?

But whence the beatific vision? To whom do we owe this picture of primeval and presocial man? In their indispensable 1935 book Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas tell us that in the De rerum natura there are several intriguing parallels between the French thinker and Lucretius, and suggest that key elements in Rousseau’s account of primordiality may well have been borrowed from the Roman poet.

Anticipating Rousseau, primeval man in De rerum natura was also solitary, roving, and asocial, a creature whose way of life was crude, who mated casually, and who spent much of his time struggling against wild beasts. Both Lucretius and Rousseau see the invention of metallurgy and agriculture as bringing the downfall of this more-or-less idyllic Golden Age. And for both of them it is the latent military potential of these developments that ushers in an epoch of feuds and wars between tribes and states and empires.

But some elements in this account of social evolution were widespread in antiquity, and Rousseau could have found them almost anywhere. Much more significant, and a specific feature that points more strongly to direct borrowing from Lucretius, is the explanation in Book V of De rerum natura of why man fell from egalitarian grace into the world of ubiquitous ranking, the world of incessant rivalrous striving for distinction and power—of life lived in the mirror of social regard while pursuing wealth, honor, status, and prestige.

Here is Lucretius:

Men desired to become distinguished and powerful, so that their fortunes might remain established upon a firm foundation… (But this was in vain) since envy, like a thunderbolt, usually strikes the highest places and whatever things are raised up above others.

From which it follows that it is far better to be a subject and live in peace than to seek dominion in the state and to rule kingdoms. Let those, then, who struggle along the narrow path of ambition sweat blood and weary themselves in vain, since for them things have savor only through the mouths of other men and they pursue objects only because of what they have heard others say, rather than from their own feelings. (My italics, RS)

Lovejoy comments that here we can see Lucretius adumbrate “Rousseau’s account of the inner psychological causes” of the fall of man: “man’s amour-propre or fureur de se distinguer, and his strangely factitious desires, his tendency to crave things, not because they of themselves give him pleasure or serve his real needs, but because, under the corrupting influence of social suggestion, they seem to him necessary for the gratification of his self-esteem”. In Rousseau’s words:

Le sauvage vit en lui-même; l’homme sociable, toujours hors de lui, ne sait que vivre dans l’opinion des autres, et cest pour ainsi dire de leur seul jugement qu’il tire le sentiment de sa proper existence.

Blame Lucretius, not Rousseau

There are other indications that Rousseau may have found De rerum natura a useful source, and at one point in the Discourse on Inequality there is an allusion to what “the poet says” that appears to be pointing to Lucretius himself. They can all be found on pages 240 to 242 of Lovejoy and Boas’s book.

But does it matter? And why should we care? Let me suggest one reason why identifying Lucretius as the original discoverer of autonomous, solitary, self-sufficient savages might appeal to Rousseau’s defenders and devotees.

If we ask what single doctrine, phrase, and cliché is most publicly associated with their hero, and is normally regarded by ordinary people as his own original conception, the answer must be the Noble Savage. And if we then also ask what conception is widely regarded as the most ridiculous, the answer would be the same. Right from the start the Noble Savage was more a liability than an asset. It has been a cause for mockery and scorn ever since Voltaire annotated his copy of the Second Discourse with the comments “pitiful!” “ridiculous!”, and “what an idea!”

Naked simplicity looks entirely appropriate when presented by Lucretius in its poetic context, far away and long ago; but two thousand years later it is contradicted by all science tells us about the social life of the prehuman primates on the one hand, and of tribal societies on the other. Indeed, the picture it paints of mute human solitaries scattered through the woods, each sovereign unto itself, a picture elaborated by Rousseau solely to promote his view that all forms of society fatally corrupt the sincere, autonomous, free and radically independent self, amounts to one of the strangest images in all utopian speculation.

That is a pity. Elsewhere the Discourse on Inequality contains much psychological insight, historical erudition, and interesting personal observation; and if ordinary political commonsense is somewhat lacking, it does contain original political thought. In contrast, the vision offered of asocial primordiality needlessly strains the credulity of readers and damages the author’s credibility. One wonders, might it not help the philosopher’s reputation if it were bruited about that we needn’t blame Rousseau for these implausibilities at all? That the inarticulate and solitary Noble Savage wasn’t even his idea—he may just have lifted it in a momentary fit of authorial absent-mindedness from the work of a Latin poet of around 60BC?