“Cool” is remarkably enduring as a word. It comes from the West African concept,
according to Robert Faris Thompson (Jessica Ogilvie, “You Know It,” LAT, Nov.
10, 2012, p.E7). Chevere is South
American Spanish for “cool.”
Traveling light….
The train done gone and the Greyhound bus don’t
run
But walkin’ ain’t crowded and I won’t be here
long.
Traditional
blues verse
Got the key to the highway, I’m booked out and
bound to go,
Gone to leave here runnin’ cause walkin’ is mo’
slow
Traditional
blues verse
REAL WISDOM
The absolute basics:
Nyach gava yuk vayuk yabek yak hak wak vak wak yuka!
(When you see people needing help, help them!)
Paul Talieje,
Walapai elder
Look upon all living beings, thinking them as it were
Buddhas; join palms and worship them, as if venerating the World-Honored One;
also look upon all living beings, thinking them all as it were great
bodhisattvas and good acquaintances.
Huisi, 6th
C AD
Lord, grant me the patience to bear the things I
cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know
the difference.
St. Francis of Assisi
(attrib.). Still the best advice; the
wisdom part is, alas, the rarest.
Almost as important:
The most important time in your life is NOW; the most important person in your life is WHOEVER YOU’RE WITH; the most important thing to do in your life is
BE GOOD TO THEM
Tolstoi, from the ending of the
short story “The Three Questions,” in Fables
and Fairy Tales, pp. 82-88; the whole story is worth looking up
Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass; life is about
learning to dance in the rain.
Vivian Greene
We don’t see the tears of those who walk in the rain.
Alexis
Alvarez (Facebook posting, Sept. 2, 2019)
In the coming world, they will not ask me: “Why were you not Moses?” They will ask me: “Why were you not Zurya?”
Rabbi Zurya of Annopol (quoted by Martin Buber)
Take what you want, then pay for it, says God.
Mediterranean
proverb
God gives the pretext for buying but does not say how much it
costs.
Persian
variant, cited by Evliya Çelebi, p
261
When doomsday comes, if someone has a palm shoot in his
hand, then he should plant it.
Muhammad
(Foltz 2003:254)
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but
by the seeds you plant.
Robert
Louis Stevenson
The idea that some lives matter less is the root
cause of all that is wrong with the world.
Paul
Farmer
Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.
John
Wesley (attributed only, but no reason
to doubt the ascription);
unfortunately begs the question of what is good, so see Paul
Talieje above. Also needs the additional
clause of saying you should, when there is a choice, do best at what you do
best, not just try to “do good in all the ways you can.”
Lord, make of me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon; where there is
doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy. O divine
master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be
understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, in
pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born to eternal life.
St.
Francis of Assisi
You cannot prevent the bird of sorrow from flying over your
head, but you can prevent him from nesting in your hair.
Arab
proverb
Live as though you would live forever, and as though you
would die tomorrow.
Muhammad
“My son, everyone has two wolves inside them. One is a good wolf, courageous and social,
always trying to protect and help. One
is a bad wolf, always trying to hurt, destroy, and harm. And you too have those wolves within you.”
“Father, that’s disturbing. Which wolf
wins out?”
“The one you feed.”
Folktale,
allegedly Native American but probably too Manichaean to be pre-Columbian;
absolutely the most insightful line ever spoken about humanity
I will unite with everybody to do right and with nobody to
do wrong.
Frederick
Douglass
Quotes from Edmund Burke:
No one made a greater mistake than
he who did nothing because he could do only a little. [This one has been probably the most valuable
piece of advice I ever got.]
Never despair; but if you do, work
on in despair. [Close second. Maybe first.]
All that is necessary for evil to
triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Better to be despised for too
anxious apprehensions, than to be ruined by too confident security. (Reflections,
p. 9)
Society cannot exist unless a
controlling power on will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it
there is within, the more there must be without.
Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it the
more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things it may
come and sit softly on your shoulder.
Henry
David Thoreau (sometimes quoted, instead
of “if you turn your attention to other things,” to say “if you stand still”)
Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
John Lennon
A long-lost New Yorker
cartoon that captures much, if not all, that I have learned about
life. It showed a baseball box score;
each of the nine innings had the score Realists 1, Idealists 0. The final score of the game was Realists 0,
Idealists 1.
“There are people who do not live their present life; it is
as if they were preparing themselves, with all their zeal, to live some other
life, but not this one. And while they
do this, time goes by and is lost. We
cannot put life back into play, as if we were casting another roll of the
dice.”
Antiphon the
Sophist (quoted Pierre Hadot 2002:188)
Your talent is your gift from God; how you use it is your
gift to Him.
Traditional
American
We cannot be sure of life for one moment;
We can, by force and self-discipline, by many refusals and a
few assertions, in the teeth of fortune assure ourselves
Freedom and integrity in life or integrity in death. And we know that the enormous invulnerable
beauty of things
Is the face of God, to live gladly in its presence, and die
without grief or fear knowing it survives us.
Robinson
Jeffers (poem, “Nova,” worth looking up)
The wise learn from the mistakes of others, but fools learn
only from their own.
Proverb quoted by
a student in a class paper; I wish I knew the source
“Let us now praise famous men….
There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that
their praises might be reported.
And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished,
as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been
born; and their children after them.
But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not
been forgotten….
Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not
be blotted out.”
Ecclesiasticus 44:1, 8-13
The noble nature devotes itself to wisdom and love, of which
the first is a mortal god, the second immortal.
Epicurus (Sent. Vat. LXXVIII, quoted McEvilley 2002:621). Epicurus—who lived around 300 BC—got the idea
of brotherly love from contemporary cynics.
His was a missionary philosophy, active till 4th C AD. Relationships to Buddhism are many and
close. Fairly atheistic about the gods,
he recognized a First Principle.
The tyrant fears the laugh more than the assassin’s bullet.
Robert
A. Heinlein, in the short story “Our Fair City”
Variations on a theme:
No hay peor lucha que
la que no se hace. (“The only real
failure is not trying.” Literally,
“there is no worse struggle than the one not done.” “Struggle,” though, gives the wrong tone in
English.)
There are no stupid questions; the only stupid thing is not
asking.
Traditional
Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved
at all.
Shakespeare
If you want to travel fast, go alone; if you want to travel
far, go together.
African
proverb
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore
we must be saved by hope. Nothing true
or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
therefore we are saved by faith. Nothing
we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by
love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the point of view of our friend
or foe as from our own; therefore we are saved by the final form of love, which
is forgiveness.
Reinhold Niebuhr (from
The Irony of American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)
Courtesy costs so little and is worth so much that I’m
surprised it is not more popular; but courtesy with encouragement is manna from
heaven. Courtesy not only uplifts the
promising, but inhibits the truly dreadful—much more effectively than abuse. The arrogant actually love abuse and feel
obliged to return it with knobs on.
Editors need to know this.
Martin
Carver (“Editorial,” Antiquity,
334:967-972, p. 967)
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Traditional;
the most practical advice of all time.
Cyrus cylinder:
Propaganda by Cyrus the Great after conquering Mesopotamia, but states
very clearly his religious and ethnic tolerance policies, shown by his
treatment of the Jews and other religions.
See British Museum translation online.
The first known statement of religious tolerance in the world.
When you sit with good company, sit long, for God does not
count against your lifespan the time spent eating in good company.
Attributed
to Ja’far ibn Muhammad as-Ṣadīq, the Sixth Shi’a Imam, but not reliably nailed
to him in any source I can find. This is
not only a wonderful quote, it is literally true. There is an excellent correlation between
longevity and time spent relaxing with friends.
The most important question in the world is, ‘Why
is the child crying?’
Alice Walker (q by Goff et al, psych file, p. 526)
We do not find meaning lying in things nor do we
put it into things, but between us and things it can happen.
Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (NY: MacMillan, 1947, p.
36)
The great Jewish theologian Dov Baer once said: “I went to my teacher not to hear him explain
the Torah, but to see how he tied his shoes.”
When called on this rather cryptic remark, he explained: “Anyone can talk about the Torah. With him, his slightest act was the Torah.” Retold from Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim (I forget the name of the teacher…because
somehow this says something about the teacher, but much more about Dov
Baer.)
When the great Hasid, Baal Shem Tov, the Master of
the Good Name, had a problem, it was his custom to go to a certain part of the
forest. There he would light a fire and
say a certain prayer, and find wisdom. A
generation later, a son of one of his disciples was in the same position. He went to that same place in the forest and
lit the fire, but he could not remember the prayer. But he asked for wisdom and it was
sufficient. He found what he
needed. A generation after that, his son
had a problem like the others. He also
went to the forest, but he could not even light the fire. “Lord of the Universe,” he prayed, “I could
not remember the prayer and I cannot get the fire started. But I am in the forest. That will have to be sufficient.” And it was.
Now, Rabbi Ben Levi sits in his study in Chicago with his head in his
hand. “Lord of the Universe,” he prays,
“look at us now. We have forgotten the
prayer. The fire is out. We can’t find our way back to the place in
the forest. We can only remember that
there was a fire, a prayer, a place in the forest. So, Lord, now that must be sufficient.” (Story told by Shmuel the Tailor, quoted
Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days, 1978,
p. 112; this is the most consoling story I know)
Some lines from the Baal Shem Tov himself: “What does it mean, when people say that
Truth goes all over the world? It means
that Truth is driven out of one place after another, and must wander on and
on.”
And:
“Alas! The world is full of
enormous lights and mysteries, and man shuts them from himself with one small
hand.” (Quoted from Rabbi Israel ben
Eliezer of Mezhizh, the “Baal Shem Tov,” by Martin Buber)
Remember that life…is often the choice among lousy
alternatives. The key to functioning, to
wisdom and to life itself is often to choose the least lousy alternative that
is practicably attainable. (Edwin
Shneidman 1981:153; the most trenchant statement of the world’s leading expert
on suicide, on how to view life to keep you from suiciding)
Marx,
Karl. 1972. The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte. Translated by C. P. Dutt and International Publishers. (German orig. 1869.) New York: International Publishers. P. 15.
The
original edn was 1852; a third edited by Engels appeared in 1885.
When the last tree is cut, the last fish is eaten,
and the last stream is poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.
Alanis
Obomsawin (Native American; some slightly different versions exist, and the
line has been otherwise attributed, but at least one form of it has indeed been
traced to Obomsawin, Abenaki writer and filmmaker)
And if, amid the cataclysms that clamour round us
everywhere nowadays, you declare that all this babble about beauty and flowers
is a vain impertinence, then I must tell you that you err, and that your
perspectives are false. Mortal dooms and
dynasties are brief things, but beauty is indestructible and eternal, if its
tabernacle be only in a petal that is shed tomorrow.
Reginald
Farrer, plant explorer and botanist (from Rainbow
Bridge, written not long before he died in the remote mountains of Tibet on
a plant expedition)
Savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour pouvoir. (Know in order to predict, predict in order
to be able to do something.) —Auguste
Comte (19th century) on the goals of sociology.
A popular Government, without popular information, or the
means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps,
both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; And a people who mean to be
their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge
gives.
James
Madison, in letter, 1822 (quoted Ross, oil, p. 245).
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Benjamin
Franklin (in a strictly local PA context….)
Better in modified form: Those who give up liberty for
security will have neither.
They divide us by our color
They divide us by our tongue
They divide us men and women
They divide us old and young
But they’ll tremble at our voices
When they hear these verses sung
For the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever,…
Classic
labor union song
If you’re worthy (jun)
there’s room for others
If you aren’t there’s none for you
Praising the adept and consoling the inept
A disciple of kindness finds his place
[lit. one who goes with humanity [ren] is in the place of
virtue [de]]
Han
Shan, paraphrasing Zizhang, tr. Red Pine, p. 139
Don’t mourn. Organize!
Organize!
Last
words (according to legend) of the great labor organizer Joe Hill
We must always take sides.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the
tormented.
Elie
Wiesel
I have not failed. I have only found 10,000 ways that won’t
work.
Thomas
Edison
He drew a circle that shut me out,
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout;
But Love and I had the wit to win,
We drew a circle and took him in.
Edwin
Markham
We have careful thoughts for the stranger,
And smiles for the sometime guest,
But how oft for our own the bitter tone,
Though we love our own the best.
Margaret
E. Sangster (1838-1912)
One can always give straw for the cow, a leaf for God, food
for the hungry, and kind words for all.
Proverb,
India
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?
Robert
Browning (from “Andrea del Sarto,” an otherwise forgettable poem, 1855)
One Ainu phrase for death is “to have space for thought”
(Batchelor 1901:548)
If you don’t like the news, go out and make your
own.
Graffito
on a Berkeley newspaper rack, ca. 1968
Only dead fish go with the flow.
American
saying
The Value of Money
With money, we can buy:
A bed but not a dream
Books but not intelligence
Food but not appetite
Adornments but not beauty
A house but not a home
Medicines but not health
Luxuries but not joy
Illusions but not happiness
A crucifix but not a Savior
A church but not belief.
Mexican
folk wisdom (my translation, from a sign in a Mexican restaurant in Redding,
CA).
There’s more (shared by Adolfo Tovar Verduzco
online, my trans again):
A position but not respect
A watch but not time
Blood but not life
Sex but not love
I am traveling, I,
I go round the world.
I cause the mist.
When I climb the mountaintops
I cause clouds, I cause the rain.
Long live Coyote! He
will always be.
This song cures sadness and
relieves bad times. Life is a dream, and
the world is a banquet.
Old Man Coyote,
from the Chumash of Fernando Librado (T. Blackburn, December’s Child, pp. 226-227)
The Scythian nomad Anacharsis found himself in Greek lands,
where he had a conversation with the super-rich Lydian king Croesus. ‘Croesus launched a discussion among the
court sages as to who was the bravest of beings. Anacharsis said: “The wildest animals, for they alone would
willingly die in order to maintain their freedom.” The conversation turned to the most just, and
Anacharsis said “The wildest animals, for they alone live in accordance with
nature, not in accordance with laws.
Since nature is a work of God, while law is a ordinance of man, and it
is more just to follow the institutions of God than those of men.” Croesus rather sarcastically asked if the
beasts were also the wisest, to which Anacharsis replied that they were,
because “wisdom consists in showing a greater respect to the truth than to the
ordinance of the law.” ‘
Diodoros
Sikeliotes (Diodorus Siculus), via Knauer 1998:14
Those who love their parents do not dare to hate those of
others;
People who respect their parents do not dare to be negligent
toward those of others.
From
the Xiao Jing (Classic of Filial Piety), tr. By Sabine Wilms, slightly modified
Jai yen yen: “Cool
heart,” a Thai ideal
We are all kernels on the same corncob
Tewa
proverb (quoted Cajete 1994:165)
One thing you can’t recycle is wasted
time.
Anonymous
The master has failed more times than the beginner has even
tried.
Stephen
McCranie
Every fire is the same size when it begins.
Seneca
proverb
It’s not where you’re bred but where you’re fed. (Doğduğu yerde değil, doyduğu yerde.)
Turkish
proverb
A table without vegetables is like an old man devoid of
wisdom.
Medieval Arab
proverb, quoted Ahsan 1979:13
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and
you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard
Feynman; widely quoted
Angels never fight at all; people quarrel
but reconcile without delay; demons fight and remain unreconciled all day or
more.
Ancient
Greek (see Dawes and Baynes, Three
Byzantine Saints, p. 225)
Is it as plainly in our living shown,
By slant and twist, which way the wind hath
blown?
“Progress, far from consisting in change,
depends on retentiveness. When change is
absolute there remains no being to improve, and no direction is set for
possible improvement; and when experience is not retained, as among savages,
infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George
Santayana, from The Life of Reason (NY
1905), vol. 1, p. 284.
“He who does not forget the past is master
of the future. This is why the man of
superior attainments (chun-tzu), when
he handles the state, observes it in the light of antiquity.”
Jia Yi,
ca 170 BCE, quoted Bodde, p. 87.
“Those who do not know history are
condemned to repeat it, but those who DO know history are condemned to
stand by helplessly while the others
repeat it.”
New
Yorker cartoon (showing a couple of historians talking), 2013
Like to the falling of a star,
Or at the flights of eagles are;
Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue
Or silver drops of morning dew;
Or like a wind that chafes the flood
Or bubbles which on water stood;
Even such is man, whose borrowed light
Is straight called in, and paid to night.
The wind blows out; the bubble dies;
The spring entomed in autumn lies;
The dew dries up; the star is shot;
The flight is past; and man forgot.
Henry King, ca. 1640. (Interesting is the classic Buddhist
description of human life: “Like a
dream, like a vision, like a bubble, like a shadow, like dew, like lightning.” It is hard to believe Henry King didn’t
somehow get a look at that line. The Metaphysical Poets, p. 111.)
How far you go in life depends on your
being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the
striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in your life you will have
been all of these.
George
Washington Carver
The rabbi noticed that a girl left the
synagogue to go into the woods to pray.
He followed her, found her praying, and said “Why do you go outside to
pray?” She answered: “Outside, I feel closer to God.” The rabbi said: “Don’t you know that God is
the same everywhere?” The girl answered,
“I know, but I’m not.”
Hasidic
story
Advice by the Iroquois to a missionary (in
1634) who became ill: Look on nature,
for “Thou wilt become cheerful, and if thou art cheerful thou wilt recover”
Missionary
friar Le Jeune, 1634, as quoted by Eleanor Leacock, in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 6, p. 193.
God put the fever in Europe and the quinine in
America in order to teach us the solidarity that should prevail among all the
peoples of the earth.
South American Native
guide, quoted in Whitaker, A. 1954. The
Western Hemisphere Idea. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press. P. 58.
The difference between Indigenous and settler mentality in a
nutshell: “A native [Nuxalk] store-keeper
once ruefully commented on the fact that he would gain no advantage from the
goods on his shelves, since he hoped merely to sell them, not to give them
away.” T. F. McIlwraith, The Bella Coola Indians, vol. 1, p. 179
Living only for the moment, savoring the moon, the
snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking sake,
and diverting oneself just in floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent
poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the river
current: this is what we call ukiyo.
Asai
Ryöi, from Ukiyo Monogatari, ca. 1661
Never doubt that a small, committed group of people can
change the world. Indeed, it is the only
thing that ever has.
Attrib.
Margaret Mead; not in her published works but so typical of her thought that it
is accepted as something she said. It
also appears to be literally true, as least of beneficial changes.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur
Schopenhauer.
Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.
Scottish
saying, attrib Scott Skinner
Get it! Get it
better, or get it worse! No middle
ground or compromise.
Thomas
Eakins (the great artist) to his student Henry Tanner, the first great
academically-trained African-American artist, when Tanner was discouraged by
the racism he encountered in the art world; Eakins had no patience with racism
or with the possibility of Tanner giving up because of it. Tanner eventually moved to France because of
racism in the US, and, tragically, his work is still extremely undervalued, with racism as one sadly obvious
reason.
Leadership is about submission to duty, not elevation to
power.
Gordon
Tootoosis, Native American, 1941-2011
Do the most perfect thing that can be done by you.
Immanuel
Kant, paraphrasing Christian Wolff (Kuehn, p. 138).
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Theodore
Roosevelt
Do your best at what you do best.
Old
Man Coyote
To avoid criticism, be like the oyster: do nothing, say
nothing, be nothing.
Theodore
Roosevelt (attrib)
Life is not easy, and almost everything worth having is
hard-won. Therefore, what matters is not
happiness or tranquility, but how you manage the bad parts, and above all
making sure that the bads are in service of the good. Working hard for peace or justice is well
done even if it kills you. An easy life
is best left to oysters.
Old
Man Coyote
Everyone should learn a musical instrument, because doing so
teaches that nothing worthwhile comes easily; it has to be learned by slow,
gradual stages.
Old
Man Coyote
Nor can it be but touch of arrogant ignorance, to hold this
or that Nation Barbarous, these or those times grosse, considering how this
manifolde creature man, wheresoever hee stand in the world, hath alwayes some
disposition of woorth….
So that it is but the clouds gathered about our own
judgement that makes us think all other ages wrapt up in mists, and the great
distance betwixt us, that causes us to imagine men so farre off to be so little
in respect of our selves. Wee must not
look upon the immense course of times past as men overlook spacious and wide
countreys, from off high mountains and are never the neere to judge of the true
nature of the soile, or the particular sight and face of those territories they
see…. the best measure of man is to be taken by his owne foot.
Samuel Daniel,
1603 (A Defense of Ryme, from Daniel’s
Poems and a Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Sprague. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963. Vol. 4, pp. 49, 51-52)
Man proposes, God disposes.
Age-old,
with Biblical, Greek and Latin ancestry
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and
convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of
equal talent have died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Stephen
Jay Gould (New Scientist, March 8, 1979, p. 777)
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work,
but neither are you free to abandon it.
From
the Talmud
There’s no failure in life until you try to be something
you’re not.
Modern
Native American saying, as related by Luke Madrigal
Two answers to an “I am a scientist because…” tag:
“…there are moments when I learn something in the lab and
think, I’m the only human that knows this right now!” Brian D. Ackley
“…science turns ‘I don’t know’ into ‘I don’t know…yet’ and
you won’t find anything more empowering than that.” Chad Orzel
Advice by a famous ancient Greek sculptor, asked for the
secret of his success:
“Make the nose too big and the eyes too small.”
(Working with marble, you can make the nose smaller but not
bigger, and the eyes bigger but not smaller.
In other words, make your mistakes in the direction you can fix. A modern equivalent would be: Know when to make Type I vs Type II errors.)
Another (originally) ancient Greek
line about sculpture: “The bear was in
the stone already; I merely set him free.”
A version of the line is found in pseudo-Diogenes the Areopagite, p.
195. Recently recycled, with claims it
was said by Inuit and other Native American carvers.
Another oft-quoted ancient Greek
line on carving a bear is “First you take a stone. Then you cut away everything that isn’t a
bear.”
The people strive
to imitate all the actions and mannerisms of their prince. It is thus very true that no one harms the state
more than those who harm by example…. The bad habits of rulers are harmful not
only to themselves but to everyone.
Petrarch (quoted Sarah
Kyle, Medicine and Humanism in Late
Medieval Italy, p. 157.)
…It was not in nature’s plan for us her chosen children to
be creatures base and ignoble—no, she brought us into life, and into the whole
universe, as into some great field of contest, that we should be at once
spectators and ambitious rivals of her mighty deeds, and from the first
implanted in our souls an invincible yearning for all that is great, all that
is diviner than ourselves. Therefore
even the whole world is not wide enough for the soaring range of human thought,
but man’s mind often overleaps the very bounds of space…. And this why nature prompts us to admire, not
[only]
the clearness and usefulness of a little stream, but the Nile, the
Danube, the Rhine, and far beyond all the Ocean; not to turn our wandering eyes
from the heavenly fires, though often darkened, to the little flame kindled by
human hands, however pure and steady its light; not to think that tiny lamp
more wondrous than the caverns of Etna…”
Longinus
(Havell 1890:68)
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school
metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does
it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No.
Does it contain any experimental
reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No.
Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry
and illusion.
David
Hume (Selections, ed. by Charles
Hendel, Scribners’ 1927, p. 193)
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience often
comes from bad judgement.
Variously
attributed, most delightfully to the fictional Near Eastern trickster and joker
Mulla Nasruddin.
This life of ours: A
man fell off a cliff. He managed to grab
a small bush and hang onto it. Below was
a huge drop with a tiger and a bear waiting at the base. Two mice, one black and one white, were
slowly gnawing away the roots of the bush.
The man saw a berry on the bush, reached out, picked it and ate it. How sweet it tasted!
Widely
known folktale (the mice are our days and nights)
There was a village woman whose son died. She was heartbroken, and went to the local
holy man in hopes that he could bring her son back to life. The holy man said: I am sorry, but there is no way to bring the
dead back. They are in peace, and we
must remain here to deal as we can. She
persisted, and said: Holy man, you
surely must be able through all your religion to do something. Finally, he replied: All right, I will try, but first you must
bring me water from a house in the village in which no one has died. The woman went from house to house. In the first, the mother sobbed, saying she
lost her father just last year. In the
second, a father said he had just lost his wife in childbirth. And so it went. The subject of the story got sadder and
sadder. Soon, in tears, she realized what
the holy man had really been teaching her….
She devoted her life to helping the bereaved.
Indian
folktale
Oh body, be held now by whom you love.
Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible
stars,
when dirt’s the only animal that will sleep with you
& will touch you with
its mouth.
Aracelis
Girmay
Long ago, a young king of Persia became obsessed with
history. He assembled a team of the
greatest historians, and commissioned them to write a history of the
world. They went to work, and years
later came to him with a hundred-volume encyclopedic work. The king was delighted, but said “I would
love to read this, but I’m afraid I am very busy with ruling the realm; can you
condense this?” They went to work, and
in a year or two came back with a ten-volume edition. By this time the king was old, and said “I
may not live to finish reading this; can you get it down to one volume?” Back they went, but when they returned with
one volume the king was aged and on his deathbed. He said, “Friends, I am deeply grateful for
all you have done; you have been wonderful workers; but unfortunately now I am
about to pass on. To get at least a
little final benefit from all you’ve done, I’m afraid I have to ask you to get
it down to a sentence.” The head
historian, himself deeply grateful for the king’s unfailing and devoted
support, had known this was coming, and was prepared: “Certainly, sire. Man was born, he suffered, and he died.”
And it is
said that the king died content.
Folktale,
unknown origin
CHINESE WISDOM
Once, when I was not yet born, how could I
know life’s delight? Now I have not yet
died; how can I know that death is not delightful?
Last
words of an ancient Chinese philosopher (from Zhuangzi—I think)
A way of looking is also a way of not looking.
Chinese Taoist
saying (ascribed—I can’t find the source; it seems to be a free translation; at
any rate, it’s a thoroughly Taoist idea).
If I don’t know a foot and make a sandal, I still won’t make
a basket…. Tastes are similar: they have the same sense of taste. Yi Ya [the great chef] got it about what we
like to eat;…dogs and horses do not have our tastes in food, being different
kinds; but people all have tastes like Yi Ya’s…. why should their minds not be the same?
Mencius
(my trans; 6A, chp 7), illustrating the point that people should all approve
the same moral qualities
“One adept at learning is like the king of Qi who, when
eating chicken, was satisfied only after he had eaten a thousand feet; if he
were still unsatisfied, there would always be another chicken foot to
eat.” -Lü Buwei, from his Lüshi Chunchiu, Tr. John Knoblock and
Jeffrey Riegel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ca. 220 BCE (Lü
2000:129).
When people bring up your flaws, you resent them for it; but
when a mirror reflects your ugliness, you consider it a good mirror.
Huai Nan Tzu (“The
Tao of Politics,” p. 75)
Zigong asked: “If
everyone in the village likes someone, how is that?” Confucius said: “That’s not enough.” “If all in the village hate him, how is
that?” Confucius said: “Not enough. It’s better if the good people in the village
like him, and the bad ones hate him.”
Analects
13:24, tr. D. C. Lau, slightly revised
Someone asked, “What do you think of the idea of returning
good for an injury?” Confucius
said: “How would then pay back the
good? Return justice for injury; return
good for good.”
Analects
14:36, tr. James Legge, revised
If you care about someone, you care about even the crows on
his roof.
Proverbial
A journey of 1000 li begins with a single step.
Proverb
“There is a saying that the pelt of one fox will not make a
costly robe of fur, one limb of a tree will not do for the rafters of a tall
pavilion, and the wisdom of one man alone cannot bring about the great ages of
the Three Dynasties of old.”
Sima
Qian (tr. Burton Watson; Han 1, p. 246.)
Even the greatest fool is right once in a hundred times;
even the wisest sage is wrong once in a hundred times.
Chinese
proverb, going back to Confucius or his time.
(For the rest of us, that last part is more like one in two.)
The millipede has many legs, but the snake is
faster.
Chinese
traditional (see Huainanzi p. 526)
There are no thousand-year-old states, no hundred-year-old
households, and no ten-year-old abilities.
Mu He, a tomb text from 168 BCE
(Shaughnessy, I Ching, p. 247, retranslated).
Perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but the message is clear: your
talents, and you, are not long for this world; do what you can while you can.
We have not followed a path made by a single footprint, nor
taken advice from only one viewpoint, or allowed ourselves to be trapped or
bound by things; thus we have not advanced or shifted with the age.
Good
advice from the authors of the Huainanzi,
proudly summing up their accomplishment; tr. Major et al, slightly revised
Whenever people don’t live out their lives or their life is
cut short, it is always caused by not loving or cherishing themselves, they
exhaust their emotions, push their sense of purpose to the extreme, pursue fame
and profit, collect poisons and damage their spirit, internally damaging the
bone and marrow and externally spoiling the sinews and flesh. Qi and blood perish, the channels and network
vessels become congested….
Sun
Simiao, tr. Sabine Wilms
One day Master Huai-jang asked Ma-tsu, “why are you
practicing meditation?” And Ma-tsu answered,
“I’m trying to become a buddha.” Huai-jang picked up a brick next to Ma-tsu’s
hut and started to grind it on a rock.
When Ma-tsu asked what he was doing, Huai-jang replied, “I’m trying to
make a mirror.” Ma-tsu said, “But how
can you make a mirror by grinding a brick?”
Huai-jang answered, “And how can you become a buddha by practicing
meditation?”
Red
Pine (Han-Shan p. 102), from the Chuantenglu. The expression “No matter you much you polish
a brick, you can’t make a mirror” has become proverbial in Chinese, like “you
can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear” in English, specifically in regard to
people—you can’t change a fool.
The superior person, in treating others, would rather
emphasize the positive than insist on perfection.
Ouyang Xiu (Historical Records of the Five Dynasties,
p. 273, tr. Richard Davis, slightly corrected)
Looking at flowers from horseback.
Proverb;
means contemplating a situation from too far off to get it. Often said of officials looking at the
people’s situation.
“If he does not recite and chant (=study) as a child, does
not analyze and discuss as a youth, and does not instruct and admonish as an
elder, then it can also be said he has become a person without a legacy.” Da Dai Liji
“When someone in antiquity who was gripped by an obsession
for flowers heard speak of a rare blossom, even if it were in a deep valley or
in steep mountains, he would not be afraid of stumbling and would go to
it. Even in the freezing cold and the
blazing heat, even if his skin were cracked and peeling or caked with mud and
sweat, he would be oblivious. When a
flower was about to bloom, he would move his pillow and mat and sleep alongside
it to observe how the flower would go from budding to blooming to fading. Only after it lay withered on the ground
would he take his leave…. This is what is called a genuine love of
flowers….” Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610), tr.
Judith Zeitlin, in “The Petrified Heart: Obsession in Chinese Literature,” Late
Imperial China 12:1-26, 1991, p. 3.
A Chinese painter stopped at an inn for one night. He planted bamboos. Someone asked: “You are staying here only one night. Why are you planting bamboos?” The painter turned to the bamboos and said: “What is the use of talking to such a
person?”
Chinese
folktale
“When asked how his family managed to reside together for
nine generations, Zhang Gongyi (fl. 665) wrote on a piece of paper the
character ren…more than a hundred
times.” Keith Knapp, 2003. Selfless
Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, p. 17,
citing the Jiu Tang Shu by Liu Xu (887-946).
Ren literally
means the way two people should naturally act toward each other. In China, that normally implies concern,
tolerance, civility, respect, mutual accommodation, and just plain being decent
because you want to be a decent person in a decent world. Originally the word ren “person” was simply extended to the moral quality, exactly as
“human” was extended to “humane,” and then the “two” was added to mark the
moral quality, exactly as we have added “-ness” but with a lot of added
semantic force.
When I was in China in 1978, I noticed that almost every
hotel had a large painting of a pine in the reception area, labeled
“welcoming-guests pine.” I realized
there must be a story, so I asked about this.
I learned that, according to folklore, there was an artist who was so
poor that he could not afford a servant, but so absorbed in his painting that
he often missed a knock on the door. He
thus painted a pine (symbol of integrity, evergreen against the storm) and
labeled it “welcoming-guests pine” to serve the function. This started a tradition.
There once was a kingdom and in the kingdom
a body of water, called the Spring of Madness. Of the people in the kingdom who
drank from this spring, none was not mad.
Only the king, who dug a well to draw his own water, did not become
afflicted. Since all the people were mad, they considered the ruler’s lack of
madness to be madness. Hence they
plotted together, seized the king, and treated his illness of ‘madness’ with
moxibustion, acupuncture, and medicinal herbs—there was not one that was left
out. The king could not bear the suffering;
hence he went to the spring, drew water, and drank it. After drinking it, he became mad. The king and his subjects, high and low—their
madness appeared to be the same and all were now happy…. Like the rest I shall
try to drink this water.
Yuan
Can (421-478), tr. Wendy Swartz (Swartz et al. 387)
Highest loyalty and considerateness is like the earth: it
creates all things and makes no boast of it.
Highest honor is like the seasons: they change all things without any
obligation to do it. The loyal person
does not lie. The honest person does not
weasel out. The good person is like
this: not forgetting the living or turning his/her back on the dead.
From
a text found in a tomb at Guodian, dated ca 300 BC; my translation, after Scott
Cook’s superb workup in The Bamboo Texts
of Guodian, Cornell UP, 2012, vol. 1, p. 577. The whole text is short but extremely
powerful.
“Living
with good people is like staying a room with orchids; you get sweet-scented.
Living with bad people is like living in a dried-fish shop.” (My rephrasing
from Keith Knapp, Selfless Offspring,
2003, p. 71.)
“If I am stabbed with a knife yet remain
woodenlike, it must be because I am dead.
So it is if people are dying from deprivation yet I just stand by like a
block of wood. Doing good is like
drinking when thirsty and eating when hungry….. There are two roads: to be
humane, the road to life; and to be inhumane, the road to death.”
Gao
Panlong, ca. 1593; tr. Joanna Handlin Smith (2009:60)
Sad rather than wise:
Yin Hao, a famed general, lost a key battle with terrible loss of
soldiers. For the rest of his life, he
was in a daze, writing with his finger in air the words “duo, duo, guai
shi”—“oh, oh, strange happening” (Liu Yiqing, Shishuo Xinyu, pre-Tang). Thoroughly believable PTSD.
Two variants of a Chinese traditional formula for happiness
(both from folklore):
If you would be happy for three hours, get drunk.
If you would be happy for three days, kill a pig and eat it.
If you would be happy for three months, get married.
If you would be happy for a lifetime, plant a garden.
–and—
If you would be happy for an hour, take a nap.
If you would be happy for a day, go fishing.
If you would be happy for a month, get married.
If you would be happy for a year, inherit a fortune.
If you would be happy for a lifetime, help others.
A single leaf blocking the view of Mt. Tai.
(Proverb. A prejudice or petty concern keeps you from
seeing even the biggest of big pictures.)
A bird in a whole forest can perch on only one branch.
Very
widespread saying, with many meanings and implications.
Bargaining with a tiger for his skin (yu hu mou pi)
Proverb,
with sense of “very bad idea”
Cha-bo-gina-a, ku
chhai mia; cha-bo-gin-a, lu chhai chi mia—”a girl child, a chive’s fate; a
girl child, a mustard seed’s fate.” Cut
down or mashed without thought (Crook and Hung A Culinary History of Taipei, p. 14).
(So stingy that) “if he were to eat a flea, would save a
hind leg for later.”
Proverbial,
in Feng Menglong, vol. 2, p. 494. Cf
Texan saying: “So stingy he’d skin a
flea for its hide and tallow.” Great
minds do think alike….
“…the important thing is to do good deeds before thinking of
claiming credit for them.”
Ibid.,
p. 740. Cf. Charles Lamb, “The greatest
pleasure I know is to do a good deed by stealth and have it found out by
accident.”
The 10 essentials for a Lothario or Don Juan: “First, act wild. Second, don’t begrudge time and effort. Third, be generous with sweet, honeyed
words. Fourth, be soft and gentle. Fifth, be persistent. Sixth, put the lance to good use. Seventh, act the fool [presumably means be
playful and humorous]. Eighth, have
friends [wingmen!], Ninth, dress well.
Tenth, be all affability.”
Feng
Menglong, vol. 2, p. 657.
If you don’t want to have something you did found out, don’t
do it in the first place.
Proverb,
very frequently quoted by Feng Menglong
Water’s nature is to flow downward, humanity’s nature is to
go higher.
Proverb
The twisted tree lives out its life, the straight tree ends
up as a board.
Proverb
Chinese proverbs (Rohsenow, John. 2002.
ABC Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press)
He doesn’t blame his household’s short rope, he blames the
community for having a deep well (B128)
Don’t value a foot of jade, but value an inch of time (B131;
to understand this you have to realize the Chinese used sundials—the shadow
advanced about an inch an hour. Usually
translated “an inch of time is worth more than a foot of jade.”).
Mend the roof in fine weather, and when not thirsty start
digging a well (B150)
This one
led to a medical saying: “Waiting for an
illness to appear before taking medicine is like waiting until you’re thirsty
to dig a well.” (Red Pine tr., Han-Shan
p. 102, from the Suwen Ssuchi Tiaoshan Taolun.)
Don’t fear being slow, just fear stopping (B162; bu pa man, jiou pa zhan)
A man once cheated by a candy seller will not trust a sweet
mouth again (C24; that would go great in Southern dialect, double meanings and all:
I got took by the candy man and I ain’t trustin’ no sweet mouth no more.)
Lighting up a seven-storey pagoda is not as good as lighting
an ordinary lamp in a dark place. (D151)
East gate, carrying-pole lost; west gate says there’s a
revolution!. (By the time the story
travels that far, it’s grown that much. Dongmen shi tiao biandan, ximen shuoshi zaofan.)
(D179)
Do more, more mistakes; do less, fewer mistakes; do nothing,
no mistakes! (D 222) (Teddy Roosevelt
said this even better: “To avoid all
criticism be like the oyster: do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”)
Feng sheng feng, long
sheng long, laoshu sheng de hui da dong.
(The world’s greatest poem. Lit. Phoenixes
bear phoenixes, dragons bear dragons, rats bear ones that can make holes. F49)
A white-washed crow isn’t white for long.
In a melon patch don’t tie your shoes; under a plum tree
don’t adjust your hat. (G167. Don’t do
things that will obviously arouse suspicion.)
Guan fang lou, guan ma
shou, guang zhong tangwu ji shi chou.
The public hall leaks, the public horse is thin, and in the public hall
the chicken shit stinks. (G124; a
typical bit of wry Chinese folk poetry.)
The face is easy to wash, the heart more difficult (L96)
Sharp knives cut, the wounds may heal; evil words hurt, the
hatred never dies. (L99)
When hunters enter the mountains they see only game; when
herb gatherers enter the mountains, they see only medicinal herbs (L103)
Whole life without slander, no competence. (L123) (The only people who go through their whole
lives without slander are those who can’t do anything.)
Running water is never stale and door hinges are never
worm-eaten. (L133; a classic Daoist line)
Dragons many, no water control; hens many, no laying eggs.
(L140; dragons control water. Too many
cooks spoil the broth.)
Better one mouthful of heavenly peach than a whole basket of
rotten apricots. (N50)
Better a dog in time of peace than a human in time of war.
(N77; this is the nearest real Chinese proverb to Jose Luis Borges’ wonderful
“Chinese curse,” “May you live in interesting times.”)
A fur robe worth a thousand gold is not made from a fox’s
armpit. (Q40)
When people hit bad luck, a mouthful of cool water will get
stuck in their teeth. (R31)
People when many can eat a wolf, wolves when many can eat
people. (R47)
When people have pure hearts, dogs won’t eat shit. (R223; or, just as cynical, “When the
millennium comes, dogs will still eat shit and wolves will still eat people.” Cantonese equivalent I heard: When a cop has a conscience, a penis will
have bones in it.)
A snake may enter a bamboo tube, but in its heart is
wriggling. (S178)
The river may rise, but it won’t rise over the little ducks.
(S329; ordinary people survive all!)
Low people talk and don’t do, middling people talk and do,
top quality people do and then talk. (X3; variant of ending, “…and say
nothing.”)
If the country has no muddy legs, in the city starvation
kills the oily mouths. (S35; an answer to those who look down on farmers for
being dirty)
In the shallows you can catch shrimp and fish, but enter the
deep water and you can catch flood dragons. (X99)
Students like cow hairs, successes like unicorn horns. (X196; reference is to the relative numbers;
certainly true in my experience as a teacher.)
One day no work, one day no food. (Y254; a classic Zen line, to counter the
idea that Buddhist monks should not work.
I posted it on the refrigerator when my kids were young.)
Lots more good ones—see the book.
Another good one, this time from Katy Biggs: One real dragon is better than a bucketful of
lizards (sheng yitiao zhen long, shengguo
goumushe yi dong—“dog mother snake” being a colloquial term for lizard)
And some from Donia Zhang (some a bit retranslated):
A thousand cups of wine are not enough when friends meet;
half a sentence is too much when unpleasant people are talking.
Rather quarrel with a sensible person than speak a word with
a fool.
One monk fetches water to drink; two monks carry water to
drink; three monks have no water to drink.
(Let George do it.)
WRY WISDOM
When the axe comes to the forest, the trees say “The handle is
one of us.”
Armenian
proverb
If anything can go wrong, it will.
Traditional;
Murphy’s Law
An orphan has to cut his own umbilical cord. [If you’re alone without help, you must get
used to doing everything for yourself.]
Turkish
proverb (Levi and Sela p. 256)
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Alexander
Pope, from “An Essay on Criticism,” 1711
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, p. 462.
A fool can drop into a well a rock that a hundred wise men
cannot remove.
Russian
proverb
Work loves fools.
Russian
proverb
The cheese mites asked how the cheese got there,
And hotly debated the matter;
The orthodox said that it came from the air,
And the heretics said, from the platter.
British,
traditional
They say princes learn no art truly, but the art of
horsemanship. The reason is, the brave
beast is no flatterer. He will throw a
prince as soon as his groom.
Ben
Jonson (from Timber, or Discoveries, 1640)
I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides the pig likes it.
George
Bernard Shaw
I try to argue myself out of one deeply-held belief every
morning, to keep my mind exercised.
Anonymous (and possibly misremembered; attributed to
George Bernard Shaw but not in his quotes; at any rate it’s about the best
advice I ever had, and I try hard to live by it).
Vale mas un pregunta pendeja, que un pendejo que no
pregunta.
Mexican
saying.
“Were one to go round the world with the intention of giving
a good supper to the righteous and a sound drubbing to the wicked, he would
frequently be embarrassed in his choice, and would find that the merits of most
men [and women] scarcely amount to the value of either.”
David Hume, “Of the
Immortality of the Soul,” in Writings on
Religion, Anthony Flew, ed., pp. 29-38; quote on p. 34,. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court.)
“I have never been impressed by the
argument that, as complete objectivity is impossible in these matters (as, of
course, it is), one might as well let one’s sentiments run loose. As
Robert Solow has remarked, that is like saying that as a perfectly aseptic
environment is impossible, one might as well conduct surgery in a sewer.”
Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Chapter
1, page 30
Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this,
namely: all my means are sane, my motive
and my object mad.
Herman Melville, Moby
Dick, chapter 41, p. 202 of Penguin 2001 edn.
Man’s greatest good…is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize
his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his
gelding, use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and support, gazaing upon
and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as sweet as the
berries of their breasts.
Attrib
to Genghis Khan (by folklore, recorded by Rashid al-Din; from “Collected
Chronicles,” quoted by Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis
Khan, p. 153)
“Cleopatra’s nose:
Had it been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been
changed.” (Modern readers may need this
explained. Short noses were considered
ugly in Pascal’s time. If Cleopatra had
been ugly, she would not have seduced Caesar and Mark Antony; the Roman
republic might have survived, and thus Rome never fallen; we might all be
speaking Latin now…. This is Pascal
being sarcastic about conjectural history.)
Pascal
(tr. Roger Ariew; 2005:6)
We run carelessly over the precipice after covering our eyes
to prevent our seeing it.
Pascal
(ibid. 52 but reworded)
We are so presumptuous that we would like to be known
throughout the world, even by people who will come when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or
six people close to us pleases and satisfies us.
Pascal
(ibid. 33)
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
William
Blake. (A bit exaggerated surely, but
thought-provoking)
Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a
way that he looks forward to the trip.
Winston
Churchill
All-purpose advice for down times, from a Macedonian
folksong. A son jilted by his girlfriend
sings to his mother:
”The same as your glass is full of wine
My heart is full of sorrow.
Let me drink dear mother till I get drunk
As I’d like to stop this sorrow.”
[His mother responds:]
”Listen to me my dear son.
Fill up your glass and drink.
Then take your gun, my son, and leave for the green
mountains,
There you’ll find faithful friends.”
I.e., go and
become a bandit and join a bandit group!
I learned this in Croatia in 1988 from a Macedonian folklorist and
singer. Becoming a bandit sure beats
many of the other ways of dealing with the blues.
The purest and most ritually careful imam in town had spent
hours dressing and purifying himself for the Friday service. Just as he came to the mosque, a filthy,
unclean, impure street dog came rushing past and ran right into him. He closed his eyes, turned his face toward
heaven, and slowly said: “If Allah wills…it
was a cat.”
Near
Eastern folktale
Mi ddarllenais ddod yn rhywfodd
I’r byd hwn wyth ran ymadrodd,
Ac i’r gwrangedd, mawr lles iddynt,
Fynd a saith o’r wythran rhyngddynt.
“They say there are
eight parts of speech, and they say the women, God bless them, went off with
seven of them.”
Welsh folk
rhyme (from A People’s Poetry, Hen
Benillion, Glyn Jones, p. 108)
“The only thing anyone ever learned from the study of
history is that no one ever learned anything from the study of history.” G. W. Hegel (as quoted by Hayden White,
1987:82)
The shortest refutation of environmental determinism: “Where the Greeks once lived, the Turks now
live, and there’s an end on it.” Georg
Hegel (quoted Geertz 1963:6).
“The tree of humanity forgets the labour of the silent
gardeners who sheltered it from the cold, watered it in time of drought,
shielded it against wild animals; but it preserves faithfully the names
mercilessly cut into its bark.” Heinrich
Heine, 1833 (as quoted in Gross 1983:323)
“Humankind cannot bear
very much reality”—T. S. Eliot (from “Four Quartets”)
It is better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to
open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln
A good teacher should inspire the gifted, inform the
mediocre, and entertain the rest.
Anonymous
(probably a perversion of a line by William Arthur Ward)
“Had I only been a better writer, I could have saved the
world!”
–Supposedly
the last words of a famous French sage, but I have never found an actual
reference, and this appears to be academic folklore. However, “if it isn’t true, it’s a good story”
(si non e vero, e ben trovato) as the
Italians say, and it certainly is exactly the way I feel on some mornings.
Some ancient Greek tried to lure Diogenes, the cynic who
lived in a barrel, back into consumerism, so they lured him down to the Athens
city market—extremely busy and active in those days. They said:
“There, what do you think of that?”
His answer was: “Behold, how many
things there are in the world that Diogenes does not need.”
Exactly my sentiments in Macy’s or Target….
“Nequiquam, quoniam medio de fonte leporum
Surgit amari aliquit quod in ipsis floribus angat”
Lucretius, Book IV, lines 1133-1134, on the sorrows of
love—even having sex with passionately loved ones ends, and leaves some guilt
or grief. (Incidentally, in the standard
translation of this, the translator has some fun—in other passages—translating
Lucretius’ sarcastically over-learned Greek words as French.)
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Great men are
almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not
authority: still more when you add the
tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority.” Lord Acton, 1887, commenting on the then-new
idea of Papal infallibility
“We may see the small value God has for riches by the people
he gives them to.” Alexander Pope
(Gross, Oxford Book of Aphorisms, 1983:102).
In my childhood this had become proverbial in the
Midwest: “If you want to know what God
thinks of money, look at whom he gives it to.”
I like this phrasing better than Pope’s.
Related was a sarcastic Midwestern line on tasteless McMansions: “Shows what God could do if He had money.”
Explanations exist; they have existed for all
time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat,
plausible and wrong.
H.
L. Mencken (from “The Divine Afflatus,” New
York Evening Mail, Nov. 16, 1917,
reprinted in Prejudices,
second series, Alfred A. Knopf, 1920, pp. 155-179; on p. 158). The article is on inspiration and simplistic
explanations for it; Mencken’s sarcastic one was that it’s all from
indigestion.
Puritanism:
The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.
L. Mencken, from A Book of Burlesques,
1916
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural
inferiority. The more uncivilized the
man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is
wrong. All human progress, even in
morals, has been the work of men who doubted the current moral values, not the
men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical
and tolerant.
H.
L. Mencken (ironically, he became an intolerant, dogmatic man in his old age)
The answer is What’s your question?
Sign
in a Denver restaurant
To be old and wise, you must first be young and stupid.
Folk
wisdom
“The problem with quotes on the Internet is you can never be
certain they’re authentic—Abraham Lincoln.”
Quote
(anonymous) on the Internet
“Here is the familiar paradox that all general theories of
the relativity of truth must brand themselves as biased or erroneous.”
Max Black, “Linguistic Relativity: The Views of Benjamin Lee
Whorf,” in Theory in Anthropology: A Source Book, R. A. Manners and D.
Kaplan, eds. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul. Pp. 437
“Well, the best recipe for apple pie can’t be eaten but it
would be odd to regard that as an inadequacy.”
Same, p. 444.
“I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the
usual four stages:
1. This is worthless
nonsense,
2. This is an
interesting, but perverse, point of view,
3. This is true, but
quite unimportant,
4. I always said so.”
J.
B. S. Haldane, reviewing a book for Journal
of Genetics, 58:464 (review title “The Truth About Death”)
“One might recall…an anecdote of Darius. When he was king of Persia, he summoned the
Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what they would
take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers.
They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and
through an interpreter, so that they could understand what was said, he asked
some Indians, of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents’
dead bodies, what they would take to burn them [as the Greeks did]. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him
to mention such a dreadful thing. One
can see by this what custom can do, and Pindar, in my opinion, was right when
he called it ‘king of all.’” (Herodotus
1954, orig. ca. 400 BCE)
“What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a
power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument” (C.
S. Lewis; quoted by Peter Coates 1998:46 from Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, Oxford University Press, 1944, p. 28).
Baladi mish baladak,
‘arnab yakul waladak.
This is not your land; here the rabbit might eat
your child.
Ababda Beja (nomads of E. Egypt) proverb to
discourage outsiders
The fox having urinated into the sea, “the whole
of the sea is my urine,” he said.
Sumerian proverb,
from cuneiform. Amazing how things like
this never end: in my youth, the way I
heard it from Midwestern men was “Every little bit helps, as the whore said
when she pissed in the ocean.”
If you’re poor, even the dogs piss on your
leg.
European
saying, which I learned from my Finnish relatives; a classic German cartoon
illustrates it via a dachshund. Family
advice was and is to carry some cash at all times, “so the dogs don’t piss on
your leg.”
Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
English
proverb (in the old days, everyone knew how to do that; so, don’t insult your
elders by assuming they’re dopes).
Memorably rewritten by some nameless sage:
Teach not thy parent’s mother to extract
The content of the egg by force of suction;
The agèd lady can that deed enact
Without the need of incident instruction.
Related is the bear’s advice to the young wolves:
If you find that the Bullock
can toss you, or the heavy-browed Sambhur can gore,
Ye need not stop work to
inform us: we knew it ten seasons before.
From “Maxims of Baloo,” in Rudyard Kipling, Jungle
Book 1 (p 46). I often think of that
verse when my students tell me that they have just discovered people can be
mean, or that history is often inaccurate.
If we contrast the rapid progress of this
mischievous discovery [gunpowder, and military technology in general] with the
slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a
philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of
mankind.
Gibbon,
Decline and Fall, Penguin edn, vol.
3, p. 863
La ley de San Garabato: Comprar caro y vender
barato.
Mexican
saying, recorded from Maya in Yucatan
What the farmer buys is too high yet,
What he has to sell is too low to make a hit.
Uncle
Dave Macon
The most important protection of the good is that
bad people can’t resist being bad even to each other. The good love to argue with each other, thus
failing to present a united front against evil, but then the evil people not
only argue but fight with each other, saving the day.
Old
Man Coyote
I read the history of mankind, age after age,
And little find therein but treachery and slaughter.
No pestilence, no fiend could inflict half the
evil
Tor half the desolation that man brings to man.
Anonymous,
undated Arabic poem, used by Wendell Phillips as the summary of his book Oman: A History (Longmans 1967, p. 24)
The good old rule sufficeth them, the simple plan,
Let him take who has the power, and let him keep
who can.
Robert
Burns (from “Rob Roy’s Grave”)
You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their
prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by appealing to logic.
Robert
A. Heinlein
The tyrant fears the laugh more than the
assassin’s bullet.
Robert
A Heinlein (from the story “Our Fair City”)
Everyone describes the fair according to how well
he did there.
Spanish
proverb on what is now called the Rashomon effect
Failure is an orphan, success has a hundred
fathers.
Anonymous folk wisdom
If you make people think they think, they’ll love
you; but if you make them think, they’ll hate you.
Anonymous
folk wisdom
When you’re up to your ears in alligators, it’s
hard to remember you set out to conserve the wetland.
Traditional
(slightly updated)
Don’t try teaching a pig to sing; you merely waste
effort and annoy the pig.
American
proverb
Futile argument is like shearing a pig: you get
too much squealing and too little wool.
Russian
(rough equivalent to preceding)
Reality is what refuses to go away when I stop
believing in it.
Anonymous
folk wisdom
You can’t fix yourself by breaking someone
else. –Spirit Science
No, but most people are less interested in fixing
themselves than in defending their unfixedness by breaking someone else. –Old Man Coyote
On trying to hurry things up by doing a lot at
once: “You can’t make a baby in one
month by impregnating nine women.”
More anonymous folk wisdom
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be
explained by stupidity.
More folk wisdom
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a
mistake.
Napoleon
Bonaparte (attrib. Though if the mistake
will involve you as a victim, say if he is planning to blow up the world, you
may want to make an exception.)
What can’t be cured must be endured.
Anonymous proverb,
to which Old Man Coyote adds: what can’t
be cured must be uninsured. (Obamacare
briefly made this partially obsolete.)
People will always do what is rational, once they
have exhausted all other possibilities.
Old
Man Coyote
Life is too serious to take seriously.
Old Man Coyote
Never give up necessary luxuries for the sake of
dispensable necessities.
Old
Man Coyote
The need for control is the only human need that
is never satisfied. Since understanding
is the only form of control that is good in large quantities, the wise will
seek understanding instead of other forms.
Old Man Coyote
Whether one thinks the glass is half full or half
empty may depend on whether it is filling or emptying.
Old
Man Coyote
Growing up in a family gives to human life the
tension between fair-and-equal and hierarchic-and-respectful. As adults, if we don’t go primarily with the
former, we regress to childhood and ultimately babyhood.
Old
Man Coyote
Happiness is failing at something worth failing
at;
Unhappiness is succeeding at something not worth
doing.
Old
Man Coyote
Self storage.
Riverside
sign—by a cemetery
“The young scholars soon fell into a way of traveling from
one school to another, as the contemporary saying went, seeking the liberal
arts at Paris, law at Orleans, medicine at Salerno, magic at Toledo, and
manners and morals nowhere”
George Whicher, The
Goliard Poets, p. 3. The universities in
question were the leading ones in those fields at that time. This proves that nothing ever changes….
Los Angeles Times, health section (p 1, 7), Mar 17 2003,
notes that married people are happier than single ones not because marriage
makes you happier but because happier people get married and stay so—this from
prospective studies. And (later)
widows/widowers often happier than when married. So much for marriage.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing perfectly.
Kristin
Hawkes (“The Optimizer’s Epigram,” in her article “Why Hunter-Gatherers Work,” Current Anthropology 34:31-362, p. 342)
Without taste, genius is but sublime folly.
Attributed to various people, most often Chateaubriand but no
one is sure.
Lord, I thank Thee for denying me the gift of
taste.
Old man coyote
Modern version of St. Francis’ Prayer (see above):
God grant me the coffee to change the things I can, and the wine to bear the
things I cannot change.
From
the Internet; “wisdom” of course has dropped out, being not even a concept in
the contemporary world.
On prohibition:
“If you were to forbid people to roll camel dung into little balls with
their fingers, people would do it, because they would assume there must be
pleasure in it.”
Arabic proverb (attributed, not very believably, to Muhammad)
The first novel by Alexandre Dumas, of Three Musketeers fame, did not
sell. So under a false name he wrote a
review of it in a leading journal, saying it was a shocking book that would
corrupt the morals of the young. It
promptly became a best-seller.
–folktale; maybe true!
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight
thing was ever made. (Aus so krummen Holtze, der Mensch gemacht
ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden.)
Immanuel
Kant, tr, Isaiah Berlin and made famous from his book title The Crooked Timber of Humanity; from
Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with
a Cosmopolitan Purpose; deriving apparently from:
Consider the work of God; for who can make straight,
what he hath made crooked?
Ecclesiastes
7:13.
I’m losing money on every skin, and if it weren’t
for the turnover I’d go broke.
Alleged
remark by anonymous 19th-century fur trader who was a bit challenged
on economic theory
I said, “I will keep watch upon my ways,
So that I
do not offend with my tongue.
I will put a muzzle on my mouth
While the
wicked are in my presence.”
Psalm
39 (Episcopal version)
Alle Leute recht getan
Ist eine Kunst die niemand kann.
(Doing well by everybody is an art known to
nobody.)
German
proverb, as quoted by my anthropologist friend Gabriela Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi
I against my brother, my brother and I against our
cousin, my cousin, brother and I against our village, and our village against
the world.
Middle
Eastern proverb; a slightly different Afghan version is quoted by Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy, p. 256
I never borrowed his pot, and anyway I returned it
to him in perfect condition, and anyway it was cracked when he loaned it to
me!
Folk
wisdom (or sarcasm) from India
Malay proverbs:
Where
there’s a will there’s a thousand ways, where there’s no will there’s a
thousand excuses.
Better
a wise man for a foe than a fool for a friend.
Where
there are no eagles, the grasshoppers say, We are eagles.
Even
if ten ships come, the dogs have no loincloths but their tails. (The ships are assumed to be bringing costly
imported fabrics.)
More than the setting of the Pleiades,
More than hidden reefs and lightning at sea
I fear the man who stays sober
And thus remembers in the morning
What we said last night.
Antipater
of Thessaloncia, ca 11 BCE; my more vernacular recap from translation by Sam
Hammill in Washburn and Major, World
Poetry p. 134
Ulrich, Johannes; Joachim I. Krueger; Anna Brod; Fabian
Groschupf. 2013. “More Is Not Less: Greater Information
Quantity Does not Diminish Liking.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 105:909-920.
P. 917: “We believe
[there is]
a tendency among social psychologists of seeking to prove naïve folk
psychologists wrong…. A related epistemological tendency in this field is to
identify a psychological bias in the minds of ordinary people and to hold it
responsible for a host of irrational, incompetent, or undesirable
behaviors…leaving researchers in wonder ‘how people manage to get out of the
door in the morning, let alone fly to the moon’ (North & Fiske, 2012, p.
88).” North, M. S., and S. T.
Fiske. 2012. “A History of Social Cognition.” In Handbook
of the History of Social Psychology, A. W. Kruglanski and W. Stroebe,
eds. New York: Psychology Press. Pp. 81-99.
Old Man Coyote says: Well, two people have walked on the moon,
eight billion can’t get their lives together….
Quantum mechanics…delivers much, but does not
really bring us any closer ot the secret of the Old one. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not
play dice.
Albert
Einstein (the actual quote usually summarized as “God does not play dice”)
Belize proverbs:
Don’
call di halligator [crocodile] “long mout’” till you cross di riba. (“Long mouth” is presumably insulting to
crocodiles.)
Wat
di jankro do befo di jekass die? (Said
of a person who flaunts and shows off his money, especially if his money was
gotten by less than noble methods.
“Jankro” is phonetic spelling of “John Crow,” the Caribbean nickname for
vultures. The proverb means “What did
the buzzard do before the jackass died?”
I think this gets it absolutely perfectly for most of our corporate
rich.)
The world is like a huge guitar. –William of Conches, tr. G. Dufy (Cathedrals, p.77)
THAT TRUE RELIGION
“Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart” Deut. 10:16
“And the Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the
heart of thy seed” Deut. 30:6
“Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, and take away the
foreskins of your heart, ye men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem; lest my
fury come forth like fire, and burn that none can quench it, because of the
evil of your doings.” Jer. 4:4
“…and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in the heart.”
Jer. 9:26
“…ye have brought into my sanctuary strangers, uncircumcised
in heart… No stranger, uncircumcised in heart, nor uncircumcised in flesh,
shall enter into my sanctuary” Ezekiel
44:7, 9
“and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and
not in the letter” Rom. 29
The world’s first recorded complaint about the food: “We remember the fish, which we did eat in
Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and
the garlick; but now our soul is dried away; there is nothing at all, beside
this manna, before our eyes. And the
manna was as coriander seed…and the taste of it was as the taste of fresh
[olive]
oil.” Numbers 11:5-8
And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt
see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen. Exodus 33:23
So ye shall not pollute the land…. Defile not therefore the land which ye shall
inhabit, wherein I dwell; for I the LORD dwell among the children of Israel.
Numbers
35:33-34 (referring to blood in revenge killings, but general enough)
“Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with divers[e]
seeds: lest the fruit of thy seed which thou hast sown, and the fruit of thy
vineyard, be defiled. Thou shalt not
plow with an ox and an ass together.
Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers[e] sorts, as of woollen and
linen together” (Deuteronomy 22:9-11).
This is the same “no unusual mixing” logic that led to banning
homosexuality, so one is free to point this verse out to anti-gay Republicans
wearing polyester blend suits.
And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your
land, ye shall not vex him. But the
stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one bornamong you, and
thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Leviticus
19:33-34.
Thus saith the Lord…: go and smite Amalek, and utterly
destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman,
infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass…..
Saul smote the Amalekites…and he took Agag the king of the
Amalekites…, but Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep,
and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and
would not utterly destroy them…. [for which] the Lord hath rejected thee from
being king over Israel…and given it to a neighbour of thine, that is better
than thou.” (1 Samuel 2:28]
(A bit of context, though: in Samuel 8, the Israelites
demand a king, which neither Samuel nor the Lord likes one bit, for all the
right reasons—a terrific text for anarchists to quote. So they get stuck with Saul, and this is only
one of the dubious things that follow.)
“But King Solomon loved many strange women…. And he had seven hundred wives, princesses,
and three hundred comcubines; and his wives turned away his heart…after other
gods…. For Solomon went after Ashtoreth
the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the
Ammonites…. Then did Solomon build an
high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for Molech, the
abomination of the children of Ammon.
And likewise did he for all his strange wives….” 1 Kings 11:1-8.
“And he [Elisha] went up from thence unto Beth-el; and as he
was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and
mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.
And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the
Lord. And there came forth two she bears
out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.”
II
Kings 2:23-24; where right-wing “Christians” get their morality!
And a letter unto Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest,
that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the palace…and for
the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall enter into. Nehemiah 2:8, N speaking
I am like a pelican in the wilderness: I am like an owl of
the desert.
I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.
Psalm
102:6-7 (pelican is “vulture” in modern translation)
Psalm 104 has a lot from Akhenaton’s Hymn to the Sun (or at
least a lot of phrases are shared by both)
As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman
which is without discretion.
Proverbs
11:22
Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox
and hatred therewith.
Proverbs
15:17
Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than an
house full of sacrifices with strife.
Proverbs
17:1
Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a
fool in his folly. [I.e., better to meet
a bear robbed of her cubs than a fool in his folly]
Proverbs
17:12.
Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest
him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou
shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.
Proverbs
23:13-14—Shame! The OT at its worst.
I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and
create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
Isaiah 45:7. (From context, looks
like evil is done by and to enemies of Israel, but still, what a confession)
As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his
folly. Proverbs 26:11
The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that
was washed to her wallowing in the mire.
II Peter 2:22.
But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl
also and the raven shall dwell in it….
Isaiah 34:15
But Rabshakeh said, hath my master sent me to thy master and
to thee to speak these words? Hath he not sent me to the men that sit upon the
wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?
Isaiah
36:12, from the Assyrian’s insulting speech to Judah. (The whole story in Isaiah 36-37 is striking;
the Lord sent a plague that smote the Assyrians.)
I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that
plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spotting.
For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint,
and I know that I shall not be ashamed.
Isaiah 50:6-7
Note Isaiah 61:1-4 is a source for the Sermon on the Mount.
“Wherefore thus spoke the LORD God of hosts, Because ye
speak this word, behold, I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and this
people wood, and it shall devour them.”
Jeremiah
5:14. (Take that, literalists)
“The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire,
and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to
pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger.”
Jeremiah
7:18. Interesting that the “queen of
heaven” was a rival of Jehovah then.
“For the mountains will I take up a weeping and wailing, and
for the habitations of the wilderness a lamentation, because they are burned up,
so that none can pass through them; neither can men hear the voice of the
animals; both the fowl of the heavens and the beast are fled; they are
gone.” Jeremiah 9:10
I will also take of the highest branch of the high cedar,
and will set it…. In the mountain of the
height of Israel will I plant it: and it shall bring forth boughs, and bear
fruit, and be a goodly cedar; and under it shall dwell all fowl of every
wing…. Ezekiel 17:22-23 (a lot more fine
ecology in Ez 16 through 19)
Jerusalem “lusted after the Assyrians…. And the Babylonians
came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their lust; and
after she defiled herself with them, she turned from them in disgust. When she carried on her whorings so openly
and flaunted her nakedness, I [God] turned in disgust from her…. Yet she increased
her whorings, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in
the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members wer elike
those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of stallions. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your
youth, when the Egyptians fondled your bosom and caressed your young
breasts.” And so on….
Ezekiel 23:12, 17-21; see also Ez 16, which is even worse
The Lord to Ephraim for worshiping Baalim: “Therefore I will be unto them as a lion: as
a leopard by the way will (I observe them: I will meet them as a bear that is
bereaved of her whelps, and will rend the caul of their heart, and there will I
devour them like a lion; the wild beast shall tear them.”
Hosea 13:7-8. (Lots
more like this in Hosea and Joel)
Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit
be in the vines; the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield
no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd
in the stalls:
Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my
salvation.
Habakkuk
3:17-18 (the pinnacle of defiant courage in faith; “faith is the victory”)
“And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and
destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness.
And flocks shall lie down in the midst of her, all the beasts of the nations;
both the cormorant and the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it;
their voice shall sing in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds:
for he shall uncover the cedar work….
Her princes within her are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves;
they gnaw not the bones till the morrow.”
Zephaniah 2:13-14, 3:3 (NRSV
makes this “….the desert owl and the screech owl shall lodge on its capitals;
the owl shall hoot at the window, the raven croak on the threshold…” and the
wolves “leave nothing until the morning.”
Admits the owl ID’s are “uncertain.”)
There was a little city, and few men within it; and there
came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against
it: Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered
the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man. Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength;
nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard.
Ecclesiastes
9:14-16
“Let us now praise famous men….
There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that
their praises might be reported.
And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished,
as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been
born; and their children after them.
But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been
forgotten….
Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not
be blotted out.”
Ecclesiasticus
44:1, 8-13 (quoted above also)
Jesus emphasized on 10 occasions that he spoke in parables
(echoing Ezekiel 20:49). So much for literalism.
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and
broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in
thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto
life, and few there be that find it.
Jesus
(Matt. 7:13-14)
He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth
his life for my sake shall find it.
He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me
receiveth him that sent me….
And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little
ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you,
he shall in no wise lose his reward.
Jesus
(Matt. 10:39-42.
Many are called but few are chosen.
Jesus
(Matt. 22:14)
“And when he [Jesus] was demanded of the Pharisees, when the
kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God
cometh not with observation: neither
shall they say, Lo here! Or lo there! For, behold, the kingdom of God is within
you.”
Luke 17:20-21.
I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.
Jesus
(John 12:47)
He will separate people…as a shepherd separates the sheep
from the goats.
Jesus
(Matt. 25:32)
He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love.
1
John 4:8
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become
the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.
John
1:12
I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the
most High.
Psalm
82:6
Jesus answered them, Is it not written in you law, I said, Ye
are gods?
John
10:34
Romans 1:26-27 is the sole NT condemnation of homosexuality,
but it introduces a whole section of condemnations, all the rest of which apply
in spades to right-wing Christians, and then concludes in 2:1: “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man,
whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou
condemnest thyself: for thou that judgest doest the same things.”
Romans 7:14-8:17 is the real source of the anti-flesh
idea—Paul being Platonist. Recall Romans
was written BEFORE any of the Gospels.
And then in 8:14-17, this time the RSV because it’s much
better: “All who are led by the Spirit
of God are children of God. For you did
not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a
spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba!
Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are
children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with
Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with
him.”
The whole of Romans is a pretty stunning text.
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take
heed that ye be not consumed one of another….
Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these:
Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft,
hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings,
murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like… But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy,
peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance….” Galatians 5:14-23
After a review of Old Testament people of trust from Moses
through Abraham to Sarah, “These all died in faith, not having received the
promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and
embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the
earth.” Hebrews 11:13. The whole chapter is the main grounding of
Kazee’s Faith Is the Victory and one
grounding of a lot of (other) existentialist theology, to say nothing of the
magnificent old hymn “Standing on the Promises.”
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and
sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater
strictness. James 3:1, RSV; KJV
continues “For in many things we offend all” (3:2).
“The God that holds you above the pit of Hell, much as one
would hold a spider, or some loathesome insect, above the flame, abhors you,
and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath toward you burns like fire.”
Jonathan
Edwards, “Sermon on Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” 1741.
(That’s just Murphy’s Law in typical Edwards family
rhetoric. –Old Man Coyote)
Significantly, Edwards was a direct ancestor of Barbara
Anderson….
“How many, even amongst us, will be found
upon enquiry, to fancy him [God] in the shape of a Man, sitting in Heaven; and
to have many other absurd and unfit conceptions of him?” (Locke 1975 [1697]: 94)
Preach the Gospel at all times…by voice if neceessary.
St.
Francis of Assisi
St. Barbara’s day is Dec.
4; wintercress is available then, hence its scientific name, Barbarea. (It is a watercress-like wild vegetable.)
St. Onuphrius’ Day is June 12. St. Onuphrius, after whom San Onofre, CA, is
named, was abandoned at birth in the Egyptian desert and raised by the
wolves. He grew a long, shaggy coat of
fur. At 15 he was instructed and given
communion by an angel, who kept visiting him to provide communion. He never saw a human till, at 80, he was
discovered by one Paphnutius, who recorded the story in his book Peregrinatio Paphnutii (“Paphnutius’
Travels”). You wouldn’t distrust someone
named Paphnutius, would you?
St. Guinefort: the
dog that became a saint in medieval France.
A local churchman named Stephen thought he had eliminated the cult in
1220, but it continued into the 20th century and the tomb is well
known, near the beautiful town of Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne north of Lyon. (See The
Holy Greyhound by Jean-Claude Schmitt, 1987; he relocated the tomb.)
Be thou comforted, little dog, thou too in Resurrection
shall have a little golden tail.
-and-
The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be
esteemed if it were not so common. Our Lord
God has made his greatest gifts the commonest.
-and-
Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog [his pet] watches
the meat! All his thoughts are
concentrated on the piece of meat.
Otherwise, he has no thought, wish, or hope.
-and-
Even though I knew that tomorrow the world would go to
pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
[I wonder if he knew Muhammad’s saying.]
Martin
Luther
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman
world, were all considered by the people, as equally true, by the philosopher,
as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.
Edward
Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, vol. 1, p. 56 (Penguin edn.)
The Buddha and his charioteer (who explained death and
religion to him when he was young) were made saints in the Christian church
under the names Barlaam and Josaphat. (See David Lang, The Balavariani, U. of California Press 1966, especially the
wonderful poem by Israel Zangwill quoted at the beginning. Their saints’ day is Nov. 27. I tried hard to get married on that day, but
we had to miss in the end—our anniversary is Nov. 28.)
Other saints to remember: St. Roch, who when struck by
plague was fed by his dog, who brought bread; and St. Philomena, known only as
an anonymous young female skeleton in the Catacombs of Rome, identified as a
virgin martyr named Philomena by a medieval savant who apparently learned it in
a vision.
St. David the Dendrite was a holy
fool who lived in 6th-century Byzantium (died 540). He was so sought by people wanting words of
wisdom (or foolishness) that he went to live in an almond tree for three
years. He left it to petition the
emperor to defend Thessaloniki, so he is worshiped as their patron saint today. His day is June 26.
“Religious distress is at the same
time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real
distress. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of
spiritless conditions. It is the opium
of the people….
“Criticism has torn up the imaginary
flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain
but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower” (Marx
1986:301-302; italics eliminated).
Various Irish saints included one
who stood meditating with his arms out so long that a bird built a nest in his
hand; he was constrained to stand there till the young fledged and flew
off. Another had a pet fox and a pet
badger. The fox guarded him but once
stole a fish. The saint sent the badger
after it, and the fox had to go through a full penance—which it did with
hanging head.
St. Brigit was a good old farm girl
saint, whose miracles including giving to a dog some pork she was cooking for
guests, and having the pork miraculously restored, and having a cow give three
times as much milk as usual. When a dog
stole a piece of bacon, the dog was too shamed to eat it, and the bacon was
found untouched at the dog’s sleeping place.
Best of all, when she gave away all the beer saved for company, she
miraculously changed the bath water to beer!
The guests couldn’t bathe, but they could get drunk, so everyone was
happy. With miracles like that…!
St. Melangell was a beautiful girl
found by a king when he was hunting hares.
The hare fled to her for protection.
She said she was the daughter of an Irish king, who had come to the
remote Welsh wilderness to meditate and stay pure. The king gave her the land and she stayed
there protecting hares; her medieval life story tells that “the hares, which
are little wild creatures, surrounded her every day of her life just as if they
had been tame or domesticated animals” (Celtic Spirituality, pp. 221-223, quote
p 222).
St. Expedit: A bunch
of religious stuff sent from Italy
to France
100+ years ago was marked “expedito.”
Nuns took this to be the name of the saint to be worshiped with the
stuff, and started a shrine to St. Expedit.
This cult spread to Reunion, where he is now the saint officiating over
voodoo, which somehow (probably via Haitian slaves) got there from Haiti or Dahomey. See Lonely Planet guide to Mauritius etc.
The only real person as interesting as these was St. Martin
of Porres, a black servant in colonial Peru, who—according to local tradition
there—had a pet rat, a cat, and a dog, so peaceful that they fed together from
the same dish.
Yet it was the schoolboy who said “Faith is believing what
you know ain’t so.”
Mark
Twain (Following the Equator, chap.
12)
The protestants have dwelt with malicious pleasure on these characters
of “Anti-Christ” [the popes], but to a philosophical eye, the vices of the
clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.
Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 3 of Penguin edn,
p. 139
There are no atheists in foxholes.
Folk
wisdom, WWII origin; earlier, “we have no atheists in the trenches,” in
WWI. Similar ideas go even farther
back. Kurt Vonnegut memorably added
“People think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it’s a much better
argument against foxholes.”
The folk museum in Taormina,
Sicily, has the most ridiculous exvotos I ever saw—my level of art—and for
bizarre reasons—one woman shown being attacked by 15 rabid cats! She miraculously survived. Apparently cats are a problem in Sicily, because 3 cooks
were miraculously saved from enraged fish-grabbing cats in another
miracle. Several miracles of people
falling and surviving, often because they fell on other people. One was a head nun falling on other nuns—the
art so bad that it was hilarious. One
wonders why God would do a miracle at the expense of the other nuns. One father accidentally shot his son, who
miraculously survived—again the art was as bad as the (doubtless drunk)
father’s judgement.
Chalices of wood, priests of gold,
Ireland had in the church of old;
Things today are not so good—
Chalices of gold, priests of wood.
Irish
folk poem, my trans.
Comparable to the holy fools of
Christianity are the Malāmatiyya Sufis of early medieval Islam; they were like
St. Francis in performing silly acts to maintain humility and avoid too much
respect.
Weshparkar—Sogdian wind
god
The
sage Nagarjuna was close friends with a king, and the king could use the sage’s
immortality, a reward for virtuous life, to live indefinitely himself.
Eventually a prince (born after hundreds of years) got to thinking it was
time for a change, and tried to kill Nagarjuna so the king would also die.
Of course he failed, but Nagarjuna apparently felt it was indeed time for
a change, and revealed that there was one way the prince could kill him:
cut off his head with a blade of sawgrass. The prince did so.
It turned out that in Nagarjuna’s saintly life there was one blip:
as a child he had been a bad boy and cut off a worm’s head with a blade
of sawgrass. The prince was a reincarnation of the worm and the sawgrass
he used grew from the same tuft. Nagarjuna’s
head was thrown far off and turned to stone; it is slowly moving toward the
body (presumably also stone) and when they join the city of Gaya (the king’s
city?) will be destroyed by a demon. Nagarjuna
will revive and teach the true faith.
(In real life he was the founder of Madhyamika.) (Vaidya Bhagwan Dash, Tibetan Medicine, p.
60.)
Vastu—Indian temple planning—is being hyped as India’s answer
to fengshui.
My other vehicle is the Mahayana.
Bumper
sticker, Seattle (where else?)
Jingu—Japanese goddess of childbirth. She was the empress, 170-269 AD. Emp died, troubles occurred, so she kept the
heir in her womb for 3 years. Great way
to start.
In ancient Sumer: “The constellation of Orion was identified
with the god Sib-zi-an-na, ‘true shepherd of the sky,’ who was identified with
Dumuzi” (Joseph Fontenrose, Orion,
1981:233).
Luis Weckmann, The Medieval Heritage of Mexico, NY: Fordham Univ.
Press, 1992 (tr Frances Lopez-Morillas; Sp orig 1984). December 24 was the original Xmas and also
was originally the winter solstice. The
date of Christmas was shifted to Dec 25 by Council of Nicaea; the solstice by
later calendar change. June 24 was originally
St. John’s Day
and the summer solstice (202-3).
Posadas come from Masses of
Aguinaldo, the word is a Celtic one, originally meaning “bindweed,” then,
later, a Christmas bonus or celebration; see p 204-5. And the pinata is from Italian: pignatta, pine-cone-like vessel.
The friars included many who wore
hair shirts (one made from “the bristles of the filthy hog”) and worse, and
mortified themselves bloodily. Bristle
or wire/chain shirts or girdles kept down “desire.” Not surprisingly, they saw lots of
visions. Sometimes even their fellow
friars thought they had gone mad. One
(celibate, remember!) had so many visions of the Eleven Thousand Virgins that
he learned the names of all of them (231).
In those days, a Doctor (any
sort—JD, PhD, etc.) was socially equivalent to Knight in old Spain! And liberal arts got the name because
knowledge liberates.
Buddha teaching a student:
“In the transmigration of beings you have been born and died and
suffered innumerable sorrows. Not the
smallest spot of land remains on earth where you have not already been born and
died. And there will remain in the world
not a single being that you have not murdered and not a single being that has
not murdered you.” (Jens Peter Laut,
2006:306, from an old Turkic text)
Vinayaki or Ganeshini: the female avatar of Ganesha. Same elephant head, rat vahana, etc. Rarely represented, but from at least 500 CE.
The Egyptians think it sin to root up, or to bite
Their leeks or onions, which they serve wsith holy rite;
O happy nations, which of their own sowing
Have store of gods in every garden growing.
Juvenal
(Satire 15, lines 9-11), tr. Sir Walter Raleigh
Summing it all up:
Pierre-Simon de Laplace to Napoleon, on God: “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.”
DOGS AND OTHER LIFE FORMS
“The first art of man thus has been the education of the dog
and the fruit of this art [has been] the conquest and peaceful possession of
the Earth.” Buffon, quoted Glacken
1967:676
“There is a saying among hunters that he cannot be a
gentlemen [sic] which loveth not hawking and hunting, which I have heard old
woodmen well allow as an approved sentence among them. The like saying is that he cannot be a
gentleman which loveth not a dog.” The Institucion of a Gentleman (anon,
1568, quoted Almond, p 33)
William James, in VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE (p.
281), quoting what is surely the world’s most beautiful dog story, from a
Polish religious source:
“Towianski [was] an eminent Polish patriot and mystic…
‘one day one of his friends met him in the rain, caressing a big dog which was
jumping upon him and covering him horribly with mud. On being asked why he permitted the animal
thus to dirty his clothes, Towianski replied:
“This dog, whom I am now meeting for the first time, has shown a great
fellow-feeling for me, and a great joy in my recognition and acceptance of his
greetings. Were I to drive him off, I
should wound his feelings and do him a moral injury. It would be an offense not only to him, but
to all the spirits of the other world who are on the same level with him. The damage which he does to my coat is as
nothing in comparison with the wrong which I should inflict upon him, in case I
were to remain indifferent to the manifestations of his friendship. We ought,” he added, “both to lighten the
condition of animals, whenever we can, and at the same time to facilitate in
ourselves that union of the world of all spirits, which the sacrifice of Christ
has made possible.”’”
Hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are cleped
All by the name of dogs….
Macbeth,
act III, scene I (a shough is a type of curly-haired lapdog, a water-rug is a
curly-haired water-dog)
(Of the hare in a hare hunt:)
She riseth from her nest, as though on earth she flew,
Forced by some yelping cute to give the greyhounds view.
Michael
Drayton, ca. 1600, from Polyolbion;
he explains that “cute” was a local dialect word for “a cur,” i.e. a mongrel
dog.
Lord, help me to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.
Book
of Not Very Common Prayer
The pup for the puddle, the old dog for the long walk home.
Irish proverb,
from our Seattle neighbor Mike Mulvihill
St. Guinefort’s Day is Aug. 22.
Even if ten ships come, the dogs have no
loincloths but their tails.
Malay proverb (the implication is that the ships are bringing
fine imported textiles)
Marten tails too few, dog tails will do.
Chinese proverb (Roh
D152)
It uludu, kerwan yürüdü
The dog barked, the caravan moved on.
Turkish
proverb.
It urede, karawan koshede in Kazakh. The proverb also exists in Hindi, Persian and
Arabic, and has been borrowed into English—it’s even in Gone with the Wind. Arabic tanbaḥ al-kilāb wa tasīr al-qafīla.
It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of
the fight in the dog.
American
proverb
If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
American
proverb
Related but even more delightfully cynical, and thus more
accurate, Caribbean proverb:
Behind dog it is dog, before dog it is Mr. Dog.
quoted E. Tylor, Primitive Culture
Dogs traded their longer lifespan to people in exchange for food
and care—so don’t beat them.
Naxi wisdom (Cai
Hua, pp 179-181).
Seattle
as of 2006 has 125,000 dogs and only 90,000 children (2000 census; Seattle
Times, Aug. 2, 2006). Childless and
“pupwardly mobile” people here! But
Seattle then had only 1 dog per 5 people, while Austin has 1 per 2!
Kienzle, Beverly. 2007. “The Bestiary of Heretics: Imaging Medieval Christian Heresy with
Insects and Animals.” In A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics. Paul
Waldau and Kimberley
Patton (eds.). New York: Columbia
University Press. Pp. 103-116.
“in Burgundian law, …stealing a valuable dog incurred [!]
the penalty to kiss the dog’s posterior in public.” And the old line about heretics kissing cats
under the tail gets full treatment. Also
covers moths, moles, etc.
Luis Weckmann, The Medieval Heritage of Mexico, NY: Fordham
Univ. Press, 1992 (tr Frances Lopez-Morillas; Sp orig 1984), p. 191, citing
Mendieta. “The Devil” was worshiped
“under the name of Zaualcoiotl and in the shape of a coyote, in Tepetlaoztoc.” From Karttunen, Zahua means “fast,” so this
is apparently the same as Nezahualcoyotl.
There was also an Aztec god Xolotl who took the form of a
dog (presumably a xoloitzcuintli).
“By dog’s precious wounds, that was a whoreson
villain!” –coarse character in playlet
in Harleian ms., early 16C; quoted in OED to show “dog” as folk euphemism
“Fighting a dog’s fight”—skirmishes and rearguard
actions. Mongol; from de Rachewiltz, p
117. Lots of other dog lore in
here.
Not all meat is qazi
[horsemeat sausage]
, not all dogs are tazi
[fine hunting hounds]
.
Kazakh
proverb
In Iranian [Zoroastrian] ritual the presence of a dog was
essential in certain ceremonies. Not
only was the dog a sacred animal, but his gaze on a polluted object was thought
to remove the demon of defilement.
Cyrus
Elgood, A Medical History of Persia,
p. 9.
How cruel it is, I think, that men will take the name of
“dog” in vain,
When of all creatures dogs will least forget good deeds.
Surely, if some person makes you cross enough to curse,
The proper insult is “You man, son of a man”!
(and in another poem)
I set off with Qatmir [Kitmir], my dog, a fellow traveler
Whose presence warmed my heart along the way.
For every time I paused to rest, he’d pause by me,
Regarding me with looks of love and tenderness.
Fulfilling all the dues of good companionship,
As if he were of all friends the most true.
And this while my own people—of the human race—
All treat me with a meanness that’s insatiable….
Abu’l-Barakat
al-Balafiqi, medieval Andalusian; tr. Tim Mackintosh-Smith
The name Caleb is from Hebrew for “dog” (cf kelb)
A bad poet can only ruin something good,
And he certainly can’t turn a flaw to good effect
In his poems. A dog can overturn
A pile of pots, but can it stack them neatly?
Nannecoda,
ca 12th century, from Classical
Telugu Poetry byVelcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, UC 2002. P. 69
Every dog has its day, and every duck has its website. –Old Man Coyote
dogaressa—female doge
(Venice: “leader.” Cognate with
“Duke” in English)
Great Dog Fish Turtle—a king of Pa’Chan (El Zotz, Guat.)
Og dog—Danish for “although” or something like that;
Norwegian for “although” or “however”
Me and my white dog started walkin’ out in Jackson Park;
It would take a man’s appetite, Lord, to hear my white dog
bark.
Traditional
blues verse (of course, Jackson Park is in Memphis)
Blue laid down and died like a man
Now he’s chasin’ possums in the Promised Land
When I hear old Blue bark
Blue treed a possum in Noah’s Ark.
Early
African-American lament for a hound who lived a long good life. A survival in the US of the West African
praise-song tradition of assimilating the praised individual to the Divine
Beings.
Nuskwuplxmx, “one who knows how to track and can seize the
right opportunity to act”—the name of the girl dog in the Nuxalk version of the
Dog Mother story. Perfect dog name—if
you can pronounce it!
Canina eloquentia:
eloquent nastiness, like barking dogs. Classical Latin tag.
On a physician can evaluate a patient’s home: “He anticipates that where there are many
dogs there can be importunate and annoying barking.”
–Arnau of Vilanova, ca 1300, tr. Faith Wallis. (From Arabic sources. Wallis, p. 218.)
Warrantless canine sniffing is allowed in public
places…. (U.S. v. Place, 1983).
From
sign in Ontario Airport warning of canine checking
Dogs are banned in the Teanaway wilderness area because
“they frighten wildlife, cause sanitation issues, and shatter the tranquility
of wilderness by their barking.”
Sign at the
wilderness border. (Apparently the
screaming of cougars, roaring of bears, belling of stags, howling of coyotes,
crying of eagles, yowling of wildcats, etc., don’t matter.)
She hath more qualities than a water-spaniel—which is much
in a bare Christian.
Launce
(the comic-relief character) in “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” part of a long
passage of very half-hearted praise of his truelove.
If St. John had been a border collie….
In the beginning was the Dog, and the Dog was with God, and
the Dog was God.
He that loveth not knoweth not Dog, for Dog is Love.
t`ms`n-u
1. (Dog) Investigate, smell. 2. Look for, be on the look out for,
feel around for. 3. Infiltrate, worm one’s way in (spy). t`m`sk`
1. (Dog) investigated, smelled. 2. Sought, looked out for. 3.
(Spy) Infiltrated. 4. Pounding, pounding at (e.g., sheep).
Kazakh, from Buell’s
Kazakh dictionary.
Under capitalism it’s dog eat dog, under communism
it’s just the reverse.
East
European saying from communist times, but a general comment on all schemes to
make things better
Fenrir was the son of Loki! See Elder Edda.
“And then Coyote, because he is Coyote, he started
thinking up things.”
From
Colville origin myth, as told by Peter Seymour, tr. Anthony Mattina and
Madeline DeSautel
…It was Old Man Coyote.
All over this earth was water. He
was going about. He came, he reached two
small red-eyed ducks. “Well, my younger
brothers, in this going around of yours have you suspected that something
exists?” “Why, elder brother, in this
our moving about we have not suspected anything.” It was the ducks that were talking. “Even though that is so, have you any
suggestion to make?” It was the ducks:
“Well, we do not know, yet something our heart believes.”
From the
Crow creation story, told by Yellow-brow, tr. Robert Lowie
Coyote he considers as worthy of the highest respect,
despite the ridiculous and lascivious sides of his character; and with him he
is strongly inclined to identify the Christ of the whites, for both he and
Coyote lived many generations ago, and appeared in this world in order to
better th lot of mankind.
Edward
Sapir, describing the Wishram elder Louis Simpson, who told Sapir coyote
stories back in 1905
“And you will be one
who goes around houses picking up scraps with your muzzle!” –old woman, while changing mythic coyote to
actual coyote. Mirror and Pattern p. 148
Variant: “You will be
coyote, one who goes around houses picking up scraps with his muzzle”! 151
[The Hero-Twins said:] “We traveled east this day…we saw an animal
with a dull brownish coat and a pointed snout, which we tried to shoot. But before we could cast an arrow at him he
took flight.”
“Beware!”
said their mother. “That is Coyote
you saw! You must never try to follow
him. And you must not follow his
ways. He makes great mischief, and he
brings disorder wherever he goes.”
–Navaho creation myth, as translated by Paul Zolbrod
The Crow Old-Man-Coyote was “wallowing in grossness and
buffoonery” (Lowie, Primitive Religion,
p. 21).
A Turkic chief on the eve of battle in 1097 “arose when it
was midnight and rode away from his army.
He began to howl like a wolf and a wolf answered him and many wolves
began to howl,” foretelling victory, which did indeed occur. –Peter Golden, in An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples, quoted in
Findley’s The Turks in World History,
p. 51
In bocca di lupo: Italian wish for good luck—even in the
mouth of the wolf.
Input: Egyptian
jackal goddess, female counterpart of Anubis (who was “Inpu” or “Anpu” in
Egyptian; the –t is a feminine ending), worshiped mainly in 17th
nome. See Richard Wilkinson, Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient
Egypt, Thames and Hudson,
2003, p. 190, under “Mammalian Deities.” Obviously the goddess of computer workers!
Wepwawet was definitely a jackal, not a dog.
Set(h), however, was at least sometimes a humanoid aardvark
(see Dietrich Wildung, EGYPT, Taschen 2001, p. 62). It takes some cool to worship an aardvark.
Fox’s bridal procession:
Japanese idiom for will-o-the-wisp and for strange light effects of sun
shining through drizzle or rain. A
superb, moving print in the Freer has will-o-the-wisps turning into a
procession of foxes dressed as soldiers, porters and maids, with all the boxes
and sedan. It appears out of the mist
and is headed for a misty fox castle with fox welcomers at the gate. A touching series of pictures in the San
Francisco Asian Art Museum shows a sequence from wedding to bathing the first
baby, a tiny adorably-cute little fox pup.
A fox dies with its head pointed to its home hill.
Chinese proverb, meaning that a person
late in life thinks of his/her original home
The fox buries and the fox digs it up.
Chinese
proverb, in Mathews Dictionary
Hotter’n a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire.
Texas folk
idiom
Grenjuthu berserkir, guthr vas theim a sinnum,
emjuthu ulhethnar, ok isörn duthu.
Howling the berserkers, swords clashing,
Yelling the wolfcoats, battle in full swing.
From
medieval Norse battle song; Nora Chadwick/Kershaw, Anglo-Saxon and Norse Poems,
p 90-91. (th’s all eths ex theim has a
thorn)
“Why hast thou robbed him of victory when thou knewest him
to be valiant?”
“Because it cannot be clearly known,” replied Othin, “the
grey wolf is gazing upon the abodes of the gods.”
Another
song; p. 97. Apparently the latter is a
proverb meaning you can’t predict misfortune.
The wolf of Fenrir will be let loose upon the homes of men
before so good a prince shall succeed to his vacant place.
Another;
from a lament for a good leader slain; p. 108.
“The basic nature of the liver is wild and urgent like that of a
bear.”
From
a commentary on the Yellow Emperor’s Classic, Unschuld-Tessenow tr, p. 180
Panjurli Bhuta:
Keralan boar spirit (assimilated to the Boar Avatar of Vishnu)
Temple in Yunnan:
Zhutian Si. “The characters read
‘All Heavenly Sons,’ homophonic with ‘Pigs Heaven’ [tian zhu zi], as known to
most of the local residents who associate the temple with the spirit of pigs….
[A rich man] wished to build a temple for the local community: he picked a scenic site in the mountains, and
ordered building materials…. One day,
the timbers…vanished; a litter of pigs was seen to have pushed the logs down
the hill using their snouts; half way down the hill there stood a giant tree
bearing a slight resemblance to a pig’s head.
It dawned on the man of fortune that the pigs were immortals; he then decided
that the temple be built by the giant tree, and was so named Pigs Heaven.” Xiaolin Guo, State and Ethnicity in China’s Southwest (Brill 2008), p. 175.
May the sheep find the
wormwood left behind by the donkey.
Kazakh proverb (from Buell)
Music hath charms to
soothe the savage beast. –Wm. Congreve
True, but the music that charms them is howling, roaring and
squeaking! –Old Man Coyote
The ant-eater, or
aardvarken (myrmecophaga), digs large
holes in the earth, in which in the day time he lies secure from his
enemies…. It digs very
expeditiously. The flesh of it is eaten,
and especially the hams, when hung up and dried.
Carl
Peter Thunberg, Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia,… vol. 1, p. 137.
“The wild goose gradually advances to dry land, and its
feathers can be used as an emblem—it is auspicious.” Line from the Book of Changes. It led to a
particularly inept and tasteless funeral inscription line a few centuries later: “He served as the feathers of the gradually
advancing wild goose” (from an Eastern Han stele). K. E. Brashier, “Text and Ritual in Early
Chinese Stelae,” in Text and Ritual in
Early China, Martin Kern (ed.)., pp. 249-284; pp. 251, 253.
“It is generally agreeable to be in the company of
individuals who are naturally animated and pleasant. For this reason, nothing can be more
gratifying than the society of Woodpeckers in the forest.” –J. J. Audubon (Birds of America, vol. 4, p.
282)
Oodham: Say’s phoebe
is “Wind’s Grandchild” (because it was, in myth); phainopepla is “mesquite
master (/owner).” A person with an
animal or other nature spirit power is a namkam,
one who meets(namk, “meet”), as ban namkam “coyote meeter.” Amadeo Rea, Pima ornithology
According to Hindu sages, “330 million…gods live in every atom
of the cow’s body.” –
Lance Nelson, “Cows, Elephants,
Dogs, and Other Lesser Embodiments of Ātman,
in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics.
Paul Waldau and Kimberley
Patton (eds.). New
York: Columbia University
Press. Pp. 179-193. From p. 180. Includes the story of
Yudhisthira who wouldn’t abandon his dog.
But see fn on p 193 about Indian meat-eating now. –p. 188.
You aren’t a desert rat when you start talking to lizards,
you’re a desert rat when lizards start talking to you.
Old
saying from our deserts; current in Riverside County in my youth
The sage Jājali was immobile while a bird nested in his hair
and raised the young, and even after they fledged, for a while, in case they
came back; “Cyavana, while meditating under water, was hauled up by fishermen’s
nets along with a multitude of fishes.
Seeing that great slaughter of fish surrounding him, the sage declared
that he had lived with the fish for so long that he could not abandon them, and
thus he should either die with them, or the fishermen should sell him along
with the catch.” –p. 198.
Edwin Bryant, “Strategies of Vedic Subversion.” In A
Communion of Subjects: Animals in
Religion, Science and Ethics. Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton (eds.). New York: Columbia
University Press. Pp. 194-203.
Ooligan is haalmmoot “savior” in Tsimshian; the same word
was used for Jesus! Susan Neylan, The
Heavens Are Changing (McGill-Queen’s UP 2003), p 167.
Verethragna:
Zoroastrian/ Mithraic deity of victory who can appear as a horse, bull,
boar, etc.
Tempitzaton: “It has
a slender little muzzle.” (“Mouse,” Florentine
Codex, 12, p 17.)
Palms: The biggest
leaves in the plant kingdom are on the raffia palm Raphia regalis: to 83 feet
long! Biggest inflorescence, talipot
palm Corypha umbraculifera, to 33’
with millions of flowers. Biggest seed,
coco-de-mer, to 44 lb. Hardest seed,
ivory palm.
Acrofolia: bitterly
pungent plants. Used in medieval and
medical Latin
“When someone in antiquity who was gripped by an obsession
for flowers heard speak of a rare blossom, even if it were in a deep valley or
in steep mountains, he would not be afraid of stumbling and would go to
it. Even in the freezing cold and the
blazing heat, even if his skin were cracked and peeling or caked with mud and
sweat, he would be oblivious. When a
flower was about to bloom, he would move his pillow and mat and sleep alongside
it to observe how the flower would go from budding to blooming to fading. Only after it lay withered on the ground
would he take his leave…. This is what is called a genuine love of
flowers….” Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610), tr.
Judith Zeitlin, in “The Petrified Heart: Obsession in Chinese Literature,” Late
Imperial China 12:1-26, 1991, p. 3.
A Chinese painter stopped at an inn for one night. He planted bamboos. Someone asked: “You are staying here only one night. Why are you planting bamboos?” The painter turned to the bamboos and
said: “What is the use of talking to
such a person?”
Chinese
folktale
When I was in China in 1978, I noticed that almost every
hotel had a large painting of a pine in the reception area, labeled
“welcoming-guests pine.” I realized
there must be a story, so I asked about this.
I learned that, according to folklore, there was an artist who was so
poor that he could not afford a servant, but so absorbed in his painting that
he often missed a knock on the door. He
thus painted a pine (symbol of integrity, evergreen against the storm) and labeled
it “welcoming-guests pine” to serve the function. This started a tradition.
And if, amid the cataclysms that clamour round us
everywhere nowadays, you declare that all this babble about beauty and flowers
is a vain impertinence, then I must tell you that you err, and that your
perspectives are false. Mortal dooms and
dynasties are brief things, but beauty is indestructible and eternal, if its
tabernacle be only in a petal that is shed tomorrow.
Reginald
Farrer, plant explorer and botanist (from Rainbow
Bridge, written not long before he died in the remote mountains of Tibet on
a plant expedition)
NEAT PHRASES AND QUIRKS
In addition to eros, philia, and agape, the Greeks had
philautia (loving self), ludus (playful love), and pragma (longstanding love).
Nihik’inizdidláád, “cessive-straight-faraway-in
a line-light,” “luminescence all around as during female rains.” The poet loved the similarity of the cessive
particle nihi- to nihi- “our.”
Webster, Anthony.
2010. “On Intimate Grammars, with
Examples from Navajo English, Navlish, and Navaho.” Journal of Anthropological Research
66:187-208. P. 200.
“Rival” is from rivus,
Latin for “riverbank,” for the obvious reason (fights over irrigation water)
Climbing fool’s hill:
Old-time phrase (cited by Buell Kazee) for young people trying out more
than they know how to manage.
C. T.: In Berlin,
people are so universally late that they routinely use the phrase C.T., from
Latin cum tempore, “with time,” to
indicate things will start predictably late; I gave a lecture there at 6:00
C.T., which meant in reality that it started at 6:20.
Homeoteleuton: A text
error produced by the scribe missing a line of text (e.g. “Tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow, and all our yesterdays…”).
Liu Bang had captured the capital of Chu, “had seized
possession of its treasures and beautiful women, and was spending his days in
feasting and revelry.” [Old-time war in
a nutshell. Of course this set him up to
be all too successfully attacked by Xiang Yu, Chu’s warlord—a moral lesson from
Sima.]
Sima
Qian (tr. Burton Watson; Han 1, p. 37.)
Bimaru states: Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and UP—a pun on the
acronyms and bimar, “sick.”
Meat-eating and Human Evolution reveals that the
Hadza forage seeds out of baboon shit.
New idea for the original human niche?
Would fit. (“…the Hadza separate
the ripe seeds from the fruit in baobab and other large-seeded fruits and also
collect them from baboon dung.” -p. 187
in Margaret Schoeninger, Henry T. Bunn, Shawn Murray, Travis Pickering, and Jim
Moore: “Meat-Eating by the Fourth
African Ape.” M-e and H E pp.
179-195. OUP 2001.)
Los Angeles Times, health section (p 1, 7), Mar 17 2003,
notes that married people are happier than single ones not because marriage
makes you happier but because happier people get married and stay so—this from
prospective studies. And (later)
widows/widowers often happier than when married. So much for marriage.
Ellison, Peter T.
2009. “Evolutionary Biology for
Doctors” [review of Principles of
Evolutionary Medicine by Peter Gluckman, Alan Beedle, Mark Hanson; OUP 2009]. Science 325:1207. Lots of people have “endorsed the
incorporation of evolutionary principles in medical curricula. And yet one can probably count on the digits
of a three-toed sloth the number of medical schools currently offering such
instruction.”
The clarinet was so identified with female, erotic stuff in
classical music that the archbishop of Salzburg
banned Mozart from using it in any composition to be performed in that
city! (Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought,
Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 630.)
When Woppy killed Philip:
old Jamaican figure of speech. It
happened so long ago that nobody knows who they were or what the fight was
about. Thus it means an incalculably
long time back, as in “I’ve been here since Woppy killed Philip.”
From de Rachewilz:
quda, Mongol kinterm for parent of son- or da-in-law
Bella gerant alli, tu felix Austria
nube;
Namque Mars aliis, dat tibi regna Venus.
Pseudo-Classical version of the old line “let others fight;
thou, happy Austria, marry.” Henry Serruys
sent him this one. P 332 (The Austrian
Empire was put together by selective marrying of princesses of other kingdoms.)
Anthropology triumphant: Alpha Oumar Komare, anthropologist, saved
democracy in Mali and built it up, and Eduardo Mondlane, BA anthro (Oberlin)
and Soc (Northwestern), was the father of independence in Mozambique.
Agonothete:
head of Olympic Games
Megalopsychia:
greatness of soul—noble ambition and scope.
Great names—Wulfthryth, Aelfthryth, etc. (see Edgar
in Saints) and on a pleasanter note St. Emerentiana. –thryth app is the –dred(a) of later Eng and
got assimilated to the –trudis of
Latin.
CLASSIC PUTDOWNS
Ipu-Wer, 2200 BCE: “Why really, the land spins
around as does a potter’s wheel. The
robber is (now) the possessor of riches….
Why really, all maidservants make free with their tongues….. I show thee the son as a foe…and a man
killing his (own) father. Every mouth is
full of ‘Love me!’ and everything good
has disappeared…. I show thee the undermost on top…. It is the paupers who eat
the offering-bread, while the servants jubilate…”
Wilson, John A. 1951.
The Culture of Ancient Egypt.
Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. Pp. 107-8.
The priest who is desirous of…knowledge…begins to investigate the causes and
dependence of form, as follows: When
this body comes into existence, it does not arise in the midst of nymphaeas,
nelumbiums, lotuses, and water-lilies, etc., nor of jewels, pearl-necklaces,
etc.; ut ill-smelling, disgusting, and repulsive, it arises between the stomach
and the lower intestines, with the belly-wall behind and the back-bone in
front, in the midst of the entrails and mesentery, in an exceedingly
contracted, ill-smelling, disgusting, and repulsive place, like a worm in
rotten fish, carrion, or rancid gruel, or in a stagnant or dirty pool or the
like.
From the
Visuddhi-Magga, an ancient Buddist text; tr. Henry Clark Warren, Buddhism in Translation (Harvard
University Press, 1953; reprint of 1896 work), p. 242
If the Tiber reaches the walls, if the Nile does
not rise to the fields, if the sky does not move or the earth does, if there is
famine, if there is plague, the cry is at once, “The Christians to the lions!”
Tertullian
(ca. 155-240), from Apologeticum
Also: “The first reaction to truth is
hatred.” He also started the “Credo quia
absurdum” line.
Prime Minister Li Si explaining to the future Qin Shi Huang
Di why Qin needed to get some civilization and culture:
“Now the beating of earthen jugs, knocking on jars,…and striking on thigh
bones, the while singing and crying “Wu! Wu!”…such indeed was the music of
Ch’in.”
Tr.
Derk Bodde, in Twitchett and Loewe, p. 32.
And more fun with good music:
“When music is seductive and wild so as to be nefarious, the
people will be indulgent and indolent, iniquitous and base. Dissipated and indolent, they will cause
disorder; iniquitous and base, they will cause conflict.”
Xunzi,
as quoted in Erica Fox Brindley, Music,
Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China, p. 46.
“Sometimes such items as onion, ginger, jujube
fruit, orange peel, dogwood berries or peppermint are boiled along with the
tea…. Drinks like that are no more than
the swill of gutters and ditches.”
Lu
Yü, 8th century (tr. Francis Carpenter; 1974:116)
“The bone of a man long since dead and decomposed, is to be
admitted, forsooth, within the precincts of the Imperial Palace!”
Han
Yu on a Buddha relic, to the Emperor, Tang Dynasty; Tr. Herbert Giles (Gems of Chinese Literature: Prose, p.
127)
Genghis Khan’s mother, on his already-bad-dude character
after in childhood he and a brother killed another brother: “The other was like
the wild dog (khasar) that devours its own afterbirth. You are like the panther that dashes itself
against the cliff-side, like the lion that cannot quell its wrath, like the
boa-constrictor that swallows its prey alive, like the falcon that flings
itself at its own shadow, like the pike that gulps silently, like the randy
he-camel that bites the heels of its own young, like the wolf that works havoc
under cover of the snow-storm, like the mandarin-duck that eats the ducklings
that cannot keep pace with her, like the jackal guarding its lair, like the
tiger that with no second thought pounces on its prey, like the wild barus [giant; ogre] that dashes into
things at randon! With no friend but
your own shadow, no whip but your own tail,..now you must needs do a thing like
this!”
(From
an early Chinese version of the Secret History of the Mongols, as translated by
Arthur Waley; The Secret History of the Mongols and Other Pieces, London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1963, p. 228.)
The most outrageous regional putdown AND the greatest
be-careful-what-you-wish-for line in history—written by the great Turkic
emperor Babur after conquering India (16th century) and taking a
long look at what he had won:
“The people of Hindustan have no beauty; they have
no convivial society, no social intercourse, no character or genius, no
urbanity, no nobility or chivalry. In
the skilled arts and sciences there is no regularity, proportionality,
straightness or rectangularity. There
are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, no muskmelons or first-rate
fruits, no ice or good water, no good bread or cooked food in the bazaars, no
hammams, no madrasas, no candles, no torches, or candlesticks.” (From the Babur-nama; tr. Stephen Dale, in The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans,
Safavids, and Mughals, p. 73)
“Fiscal administration in those days [Southern Sung] must
have been superior to ours by myriads and millions of times.”
Sheng Te-fu
(1578-1642), on fiscal management at the end of the Ming Dynasty; tr., Ray
Huang, 1969. “Fiscal Administration during the Ming Dynasty.” In Chinese
Government in Ming Times: Seven Studies, Charles O. Hucker, ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Pp . 73-128, p. 126. The hyperbole is bad enough, but the real
bite is that Sheng and his readers knew that Southern Sung fiscal management
was notably poor!
John Randolph, ca 1820, on the brilliant but
incredibly evil Henry Clay (LAT, Dec. 3, 1995):
“Like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, shining and
stinking.”
The Ming princes in the early 1400s “were in
general a loutish collection of arrogant and violent men, fond of high living
and low scheming.”
Frederick
Mote, Imperial China 900-1800, p. 606
Fujiwara no Michinaga (966-1027)’s father told him and his
brothers, speaking of an accomplished and powerful aristocrat, “you couldn’t
even get close enough to him to tread on his shadow.” To which Michinaga replied, “I may not tread
on his shadow, but I’ll walk all over his face.”
Brown,
Delmer. 1993. “The Early Evolution of Historical
Consciousness.” In The Cambridge History of Japan.
Vol 1: Ancient Japan, Delmer Brown, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 504-548.
Michinaga did indeed eventually take the aristocrat down.
“The remark, that in Professor Hall’s theory of
the origin of mountains the elevation of mountains is left out, was made by me
in volume xlii of the last series of this Journal (p. 210, 1866)…and not
without due consideration.”
The
great geologist J. Henry Dana, all too accurately assessing another’s theory,
American Journal of Science, 1873, p. 347.
Oscar Wilde on an English gentleman hunting a
fox: “The unspeakable in full pursuit of
the uneatable.”
From
his play “A Woman of No Importance.”
C. D. Darlington’s remake to describe badly-done
plant ecology: “Pursuit of the
incomprehensible by the incompetent.” (Cited in Making Eden by David
Beerling, p. 80.)
A pretty but somewhat airheaded woman (in the
liberated Edwardian era) once propositioned George Bernard Shaw by saying “We
should have a child together—think if it had my beauty and your brains!” Shaw calmly replied: “Yes, my dear, but think
if it had my beauty and your brains?”
Folkloric.
When Winston Churchill was campaigning against Clement Attlee in the 1940s,
Churchill was at his usual self-promotion and putting down Attlee; finally one
staffer got fed up and said something to the effect of “At least Mr. Attlee is
modest.” Churchill didn’t turn a hair;
he simply fired back “Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. Indeed he has a lot to be modest about.”
(Seems too good
to be true, but he really did say that.)
So low he’d need a ladder to harvest potatoes.
So low he’d have to rise up on his hind legs to
kiss a snake’s ass. (My all-time
favorite. From an Oklahoma ex-Marine
friend of mine.)
So low she sucked a earthworm’s dick.
So low he has to carry an umbrella to keep from
pissing on himself. (Thanks to Sue
Trowbridge for that one.)
Lower than whale shit at the bottom of the ocean.
So crooked that when he dies they’ll have to screw
him into the ground. (Thanks to Peter Golden for that one.)
American folk sayings
Smells like two skunks fucking in an onion patch.
African-American
comparison
Persecutors must expect the hatred of those whom they
oppress; but they commonly find some consolation in the testimony of their
conscience, the applause of their party, and, perhaps, the success of their
undertaking. But the hypocrisy of
Michael [Paleologus of Byzantium], which was prompted only by political
motives, must have forced him to hate himself, to despise his followers, and to
esteem and envy the rebel champions by whom he was detested and despised.
Gibbon,
Decline and Fall, Vol. 3 of Penguin
edn., p 754
And on land-and-water houses: “we may not perhaps, without flattery,
compare them to the architecture of the beaver…[but the humans are] an animal
less cleanly, less diligent, and less social than that marvellous quadrupede.”
Gibbon
(again), vol. 2, p. 691
Vincent Cronin on the Santa Caterina church, Palermo: product of a “frenzied mind…throwing out
powerful and extravagant images before tumbling over the verge of
madness.”
The church is
actually extremely beautiful and tasteful.
Cronin must have been drinking the local wine when he wrote that.
May the wings of the Angel of Death pass over your house, and the owl of
misfortune hoot above your door.
Arab curse
My daughter thinks the world of him, but he’s a sluffed-up sack of Siberian
sheep shit, to me.
Texan father,
overheard by a folklorist (from Texas
Crude by Ken Weaver, illus. R. Crumb, Plume, 1984)
A fish rots from the head.
Very widespread
proverb
A shackeroon, a ragnell….
From Edward
Taylor; neither is in the OED, but “shackerell” is there, defined as “a
vagabond,” and “ragnell” is easily figured out.
Like an ant crawling up an elephant’s ass yelling “Rape!”
American folk
idiom for vaunting ambition.
The opposite is seen in the Mexican poem:
Con paciencia y salivita
El elefante lo metio el chile en la hormiguita.
(“with
patience and a little spit the elephant got it up the little ant”—a great
metaphor for getting the work done.)
Most tasteless thing I’ve ever seen:
In Victoria, BC, stacked bumper stickers on the back of a car,
successively reading:
This car protected by a pit bull with AIDS
This car protected by a poodle with PMS
PMS hell, this is one of my better days.
Gary Snyder, who had a rather scraggly beard, told that when he worked in
the woods a woods boss once said to him: “Snyder, you cultivate that thing? I
got better hairs than that growing wild around my ass.”
This colourful collection of Irish insults dates from the
Early Medieval era and is primarily based on the period’s satirical poetry and
prose. The insults are sourced from the electronic
Dictionary of the Irish Language which in this instance relies
heavily on Róisín McLaughlin’s ‘Early Irish Satire.’
Note, if you can read Gaelic, that most of them fit classic Irish verse
forms, #11 being particularly hilarious doggerel.
1 ‘you moulting desert ram‘ (a reithi folta fasaigh ar
fiadh)
2. ‘you ugly, case-carrying, cold-handed bag carrier!’ (a
thíagánaig étig aitig úarlámaig!)
3. ‘you grandson of a ploughman [who is] filthy like a
badger’ (uí airim brocṡalaig)
4. ‘you flea-ridden woodcock‘ (a chrebair chuilig)
5. ‘you son of a stammering, surly, puffed-up foreign woman‘
(mac ro boí oc gaillsig goit grúcbuirr)
6. ‘you sallow … bog-barren one‘ (a apaide acaite anachluim)
7. ‘you greedy voracious ox‘ (a chonadmairt chícaraig)
8. ‘you comb of a castrated cockerel, smoky-coloured, bent
and crooked‘ (a ulcha gaillín detbudánaig cúarlúpánaig)
9. ‘you pitch on the rim of a goblet‘ (a bí ar burd ardáin)
10. you ‘boiled cow’s udder‘ (uth bo bruithi)
11. you are ‘dark and crooked, harsh and wrinkled, harsh and
pot-bellied‘ (doburlúpánaig bodurgrúcánaig bodurmétlánaig)
12. you ‘horn of an infertile cow‘ (adarc bó rodraige)
Some modern Gaelic curses (Michael Newton, The Nauty Little Book of Gaelic, Cape Breton University Press, 2014—he
gives the Gaelic)
May you suffer the death of the raven!
(Its young kill it—in folklore)
May you go into the mountain pass of destruction! (or) May you travel an evil mountain pass!
The sleep of the sheep in the brambles to you!
May you have the black burning of your disaster!
May the black arrow of wounding enter your side!
–and many more—
SHEER SILLINESS
“We would like to thank the Journal [of
Public Health Research] for highlighting mental health as a chronic disease in
the December 2010 issue.”
From a letter
to said journal, 2013
Title of session at American Anthro Assn meeting, years ago: “Mental Health Promotion and Prevention”
Opening line to a student paper turned in to my daughter Amanda Sigala:
“Often times communication is never really talked about.”
“Traditional culture and customs, such as those that have
facilitated cohabitation with the Giant Pandas in our study area for generations…”
from a manuscript
I refereed for an ecology journal
A real expert is someone who knows how much dynamite to
shove up a bull’s ass to blow off his horns without bringing tears to his eyes.
From
Rex Hull; family wisdom
“El chingo de vocales que tiene este ingles” tr. “the many
vowels in the English language” (recorded, and translated, by my friend Alicia
Re Cruz in Urban Anthropology; the
humor here is that Alicia was too genteel to translate it right—it really means
“what a fucking lot of vowels English has!”)
More cool Spanish that Alicia recorded in Denton, TX: “Yo no te voy a dar rides si quieres ir a
trabajar” (“I’m not going to give you ‘rides’ [in English’ if you need to get
to work”; lousy husband to wife who wanted to work and needed him to give her a
ride) (ibid)
From the code of conduct for the Sequim bus service: Prohibited are “drugs or alcohol, smoking, fighting,
spitting, possession of strong odors, playing audible music, swearing, or
otherwise behaving in an unruly or harassing manner…. Refrain from eating.”
Refrain from breathing, while you’re at it.
The universe is 83% dark matter. Small galaxies have proportionately much
more. Some small galaxies are as little
as 0.2% ordinary matter. (Bhattacharjee,
Yudhijit. 2010. “Inventory Asks: Where Is All the Non-Dark Matter Hiding?”
Science 327:258.)
Thought for the day:
“When a buffalo invades your village, you cannot waste time blaming
others, whining, or wishing it hadn’t happened.” Vincent Muli Wa Kituku, “Overcoming Buffaloes
at Work and in Life”
Truly outrageous proverb:
“Set a beggar on horseback and he rides to the devil.” Fortunately untrue.
Life: A sexually
transmitted condition, invariably fatal.
Folk
cynicism
Useful words from BBC Online (Oct. 10, 2008)…. Mallemaroking: The carousing of seamen on icebound ships.
Tmesis: breaking a
word up, as in “in-fucking-credible.”
Best of all, kakistocracy, rule by the worst.
“Negotiate” is from “neg-otium,” “opposite (or negation) of
leisure”! Perfect word for the concept.
Accent marks matter in Spanish: Mi papá tiene 47 años, my father is 47 years
old; mi papa tiene 47 anos, my potato has 47 assholes. (From the internet)
More silly Spanish:
Te quiero mucho, como la trucha al trucho. (From the Oxford Sp Dictionary! “I love you much, as the she-trout loves the
he-trout.” There is no such word as
“trucho” in Spanish.) I can add, from LA
street Spanish, “ponte trucha!” (“Make
like a trout,” i.e. “be careful,” the trout being a notoriously wary fish.)
Another great bit of street Spanish is referring to stray
dogs as “perros eléctricos.” They are,
in proper Spanish, perros corrientes, “dogs running around,” and corrientes
also means electric currents.
An Ice Age man hunted the mastodon,
But its skin he was always the last to don;
He said “I will wear
The hide of a bear,
The mastodon is too low class to don.”
PUNS AND WORSE
Pun: an argumentum ad
homonym. –anon.
Helen Waite is our credit manager. If you want credit, go to Helen Waite.
Sign
posted in a million cheap bars and lunchrooms, back in the day (mid-20th
century). Variants: …our complaints
manager, etc.
Great thoughts from Stephen Wright:
Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
My psychic girlfriend left me before we met.
You need either good manners or fast reflexes.
When everything’s coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.
Energizer Bunny was arrested for battery.
Corduroy pillows make headlines.
Quantum mechanics:
the dreams stuff is made of.
As the amoeba said, “I encyst on it!”
Some of my own:
locust of control, alleycategory (allegory + category…and think
“dogagory,” etc.), cape-abilities, pomme de terrorist, cur-vile-linear. A Thoreauvian tooth doctor is a transcen-dentalist,
and his shoes believe in the oversole.
After a day of dealing with student requests (many of them
absurd), Barbara said: “I have to turn
down the soup.” I immediately replied
“Why? What did it ask for?”
The first failure of information technology occurred when a
Sumerian servant bringing the beer fell and spilled the beer all over the baked
clay tablets, dissolving them. And to
this day information technologists say “the server is down.”
All Puns Intended
1. Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The
ceremony wasn’t much, but the reception was excellent.
2. A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘I’ll serve you,
but don’t start anything.’
3. Two peanuts walk into a bar, and one was a salted.
4. A dyslexic drunk walks into a bra.
5. A man walks into a bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm, and says
‘A beer please, and one for the road.’
6. Two cannibals are eating a clown. One says to the other: ‘Does this
taste funny to you?’
7. ‘Doc, I can’t stop singing ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home.’
‘That sounds like Tom Jones Syndrome.’ Is it common?’ ‘Well, It’s
Not Unusual.’
8. Two cows are standing next to each other in a field. Daisy says to
Dolly, ‘I was artificially inseminated this morning. ”I don’t
believe you,’ says Dolly. ‘It’s true; no bull!’ exclaims Daisy.
9. An invisible man marries an invisible woman. The kids were nothing to
look at either.
10. Deja Moo: The feeling that you’ve heard this bull before.
11. I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day, but I couldn’t
find any.
12. A man woke up in a hospital after a serious accident. He shouted,
‘Doctor, doctor, I can’t feel my legs!’ The doctor replied, ‘I know you
can’t – I’ve cut off your arms!’
13. I went to a seafood disco last week…and pulled a mussel.
14. What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh.
15. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. The one turns to the other and
says, ‘Dam!’
16. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the
craft. Unsurprisingly it sank …proving once again that you
can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
17. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel, and were standing
in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an
hour, the manager came out of the office, and asked them to
disperse. ‘But why,’ they asked, as they moved off. ‘Because,’
he said, ‘I can’t stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer.’
18. A woman has twins, and gives them up for adoption. One of them
goes to a family in Egypt, and is named ‘Ahmal.’ The other goes to a
family in Spain; they name him ‘Juan.’ Years later, Juan sends a picture
of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her
husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds,
‘They’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Ahmal.’
19. Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which
produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very
little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad
breath. This made him….. (Oh, man, this is so bad, it’s good) ….. A
super-calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
20. And finally, there was the person who sent twenty different puns to
his friends, with the hope that at least a couple of the puns would make them
laugh. No pun in ten did.
Better to be appalled than to be a pall-bearer. –Zee (at an elderly relative’s funeral where
he was the latter, when somebody was “appalled” by something)
Buddhist at hot dog stand (surely a vegetarian one): “Make me one with everything!” But when he paid and asked for change, the
vendor said “Change comes from within,” and gave him nothing.
The count of Riverside County must be Noah Count.
Dear Algebra, don’t ask us to
find your x. She left you and we don’t
know Y.
Sign
observed in a store in Montana
26 more:
1. The fattest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference. He
acquired his size from too much pi.
2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be
an optical Aleutian.
3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.
4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a
weapon of math disruption.
5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.
6. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.
7. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in LinoleumBlownapart.
8. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
9. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into
it.
10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
11. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
12. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the
other: ‘You stay here; I’ll go on a head.’
13. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
14. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: ‘Keep off the Grass.’
15. The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at
large.
16. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned
veteran.
17. A backward poet writes inverse.
18. In a democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count
that votes.
19. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.
20. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you’d be in Seine.
21. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess
looks at him and says, ‘I’m sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per
passenger.’ (Variant: What does a vulture do when he takes a plane
trip? He takes his carrion luggage.)
22. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says ‘Dam!’
23. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire
in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have
your kayak and heat it too.
If they’d done it 2000 years ago, it would prove we can’t
have archaic and eat it too.
24. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, ‘I’ve lost my electron.’ The other says
‘Are you sure?’ The first replies, ‘Yes, I’m positive.’
25. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal?
His goal: transcend dental medication.
A past, present and future went into a bar.
It was a tense situation.
Big blowout tire sale!
Sign
on a San Bernardino tire dealer (the pun was clearly intentional)
Bear with me.
Opening
line of an economist’s discussion of a collapse of the Chinese stock
market. I’m pretty sure the pun was
intended.
You can’t run through a
campground, you can only ran, because it’s past tents.
Alastair
Clark (posting on internet)
A psychiatrist’s client told
him: “Doctor, I keep thinking I’m a
wigwam, then thinking I’m a teepee.” The
doctor: “Why, man, you’re too tense!”
Another patient told him: “Doctor, you must help me—I have this awful
recurrent dream that I’m having sexual intercourse with small pieces of dry
bread!” The doctor: “Why, man, you’re fuckin’ crackers!”
The best Elizabethan pun: a book of songs for the virginal (the
ancestor of the piano) was given the Greek title Parthenia (“for virgins”).
Then they wanted to add parts for viols…so the next book was Parthenia Inviolata. (This is a true story. Look them up.)
A dog’s life:
Did you hear about the
millionaire who owned a beautiful bay but put an ugly boat on it?
His barque was worse than his
bight.
Did you hear about the Arabic
dog who had a nice house but whose blessings were only so-so?
His barak was worse than his
bayt.
When you have petted a dog, you
have only scratched the surface.
Every dog has his day and every duck has its
website.
An Indian
restaurant is a nan profit organization—and this explains why Indian religions
equate existence and nonexistence.
To which
my daughter Tamar replied: I don’t want
any more of your nan scents.
Studies
of genocide find that once killing is started, almost everyone joins in. People suddenly change from peace and order
to violent murder, and often back to peace when the dictator falls. This can be explained only by the existence
of both potentialities within people. Human
evil is here defined as gratuitous harm to people and other lives. It very often comes from simply following
orders or doing a job, or from “greed” (gain by predatory taking from others),
but most often it comes from hatred and defensiveness. At worst—and very commonly—it causes people to
hurt themselves simply to hurt disliked others. At root, it can be traced to irrational,
overemotional responses to fear and threat.
These are common among people abused as children and subsequently, and
among people raised in disempowering, oppressive, intolerant environments. They become resentful, frustrated, and
personally weak—lacking in self-efficacy.
They often bully or scapegoat others, usually even weaker persons. Social hate is especially damaging, seen in
genocide, bigotry, warfare, allowing people to starve or die of disease when
they could have been saved, and other mass destruction. Empowerment, rational coping with stress, and
comprehensive morality based on “we’re all in this together” are the major
cures. These general cures can be
applied to specific social issues.
**
“Son, it’s
time to teach you the most important lesson about life and people. It is that everyone has within him, or her,
two wolves: a good wolf that wants to
help everyone and do what’s best for all, and a bad wolf that wants to do evil
and hurt people and the world.”
“Father,
that’s scary. It really worries me. Which wolf wins out in the end?”
“Son: the
wolf you feed.”
Native American folktale
**
Preface
This
story—perhaps more Manichaean than Native American—captures much of what I have
learned in my life. I was raised to
think people are good, and that evil is merely ignorance. The people around me gave the lie to
that. They were often quite deliberately
bad. Many ordinary people, perhaps most
at one time or another, hurt themselves just to hurt others. They ruin marriages and friendships because
of imagined or trivial slights. They vote their own destruction by electing
people who promise to crush “the others.”
They sacrifice their lives for violent and extremist causes. Humanity has a sorry record. Despite claims of moral progress, the
genocidal dictator and the suicide bomber are the emblems of the late 20th
and early 21st century.
Yet,
obviously, many people are good, some are saintly, and almost everyone is good some
of the time. Even mass murderers and
psychopaths usually have a history of decent behavior when not having a
psychotic break.
Jesus
said: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but
if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be
cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men” (Matthew 5:13). The salt of the earth—as opposed to sea
salt—came from salt springs, and was contaminated with ordinary dirt or
carbonate. Over time, aerial moisture
would leach the salt out, leaving only the residue. Natural human goodness and sociability is
subject to similar leaching. This was,
of course, Jesus’ real message. (One
wonders what Biblical literalists make of verses like this one.)
Most
people are in a rather neutral, everyday state most of the time, not thinking
of acting saintly or demoniacal, but they are still torn between virtuous
ideals of helping, sheltering, and caring, and vicious ideals of excluding, ignoring,
and hurting. They are either working for and with people, or working against
people. We are constantly forced to
decide. As Pascal Boyer (2018:33) says,
“Observers from outside our species would certainly be struck by two facts
about humans. They are extraordinarily
good at forming groups, and they are just as good at fighting other groups.”
The
nature and promotion of good have been addressed by every religious writer in
history, as well as countless psychologists and other scientists. Covering this literature is neither necessary
nor possible in the present brief essay.
Evil is less well studied.
Outside of religious imprecations against sin, there are rather few
studies, mostly by psychologists. Of
these, particularly valuable are Roy Baumeister’s Evil (1997), Aaron Beck’s Prisoners
of Hate (1999), Alan Fiske and Taj
Rai’ Virtuous Violence (2014), Ervin
Staub’s books (1989, 2003, 2011), the Sternbergs’ The Nature of Hate (2008), and James Waller’s Becoming Evil (2002) and Confronting
Evil (2016). Simon Baron-Cohen’s Zero Degrees of Empathy (2011), Steven
Bartlett’s The Pathology of Man (2005),
Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear (1997),
Fiske and Rai’s Virtuous Violence (2014),
Robert Sapolsky’s Behave (2017), and Kathleen Taylor’s Cruelty (2009) cover some important
psychological terrain. Zeki and Romaya
(2008) review the physiology of hate.
Albert Bandura’s book Moral
Disengagement (2016) exhaustively treats that aspect of evil.
Most
of these books, as well as the literature on genocide, spice up their texts
with horrific stories. Baumeister is
especially graphic. I have absolutely no
interest in transmitting such stories here.
If you need to know how bad people get, seek out those sources.
By evil, I mean a very specific thing:
deliberate harm to people simply because one wants to harm them, because of
what they are or might be. It is the
state described by words like “murderous,” “malevolent,” and “cruel.” Ordinary everyday selfishness is bad enough,
but it is part of the human condition; most of us give ourselves the benefit of
the doubt, cutting corners, being stingy, cutting ourselves some slack. This is no doubt deplorable most of the time,
but it is not what I am considering in this book; I have devoted two previous
books (Anderson 2010, 2014) to the problem of overly narrow and short-term
planning and acting, and need not go into it here. Selfishness becomes more evil as it moves
into violent robbery, gangsterism, and raiding.
There is obviously a transition zone.
Similarly, violence in defense of self and loved ones is not evil, and
is often praiseworthy. A transition zone
exists between clearly necessary violence—resisting Hitler in 1941, for instance—and
clearly excessive use of force, as when police gun down an unarmed boy and
claim “defense.” Transition zones make
moral decisions difficult—“hard cases make bad law”—so I will confine this book
to issues like genocide and intimate partner violence that are clearly
unacceptable in functioning societies.
**
Part I.
Human Evil in Context
Starting with Genocide
Visiting
Cambodia together, we saw the relics of genocide and the devastation it had
wrought. We resolved to study genocide
seriously.
At
that time, little was known about genocide in general. Thousands of historical sources covered
Hitler’s Holocaust, and a much smaller but still important literature covered
the mass murders by the Young Turks, the USSR leadership, and Mao Zedong. Much more recent genocides, such as those in
ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Cambodia itself, were only beginning to be visible
in scholarly sources.
Very
few generalizations had come out of this work.
Rudolph Rummel had just written a book, Statistics of Democide (1998; see also Rummel 1994), arguing that
genocide was the natural result of totalitarian regimes. His oft-repeated conclusion was direct: “Power
kills, and absolute power kills absolutely” (Rummel 1998, passim; a rephrasing
of Lord Acton’s famous quote about corruption.)
We
quickly realized that this was not far wrong, but that it was not quite true or
adequate. Hitler was democratically
elected, though he committed genocide only after taking total power. Several other notorious genociders have been
democratically elected. They usually
seized absolute power in the process of killing, but often not until the
killing was under way. We thus set off
on a long voyage of discovery, comparing all documented genocides since 1900 to
find common themes.
When
science reaches this stage—several teams working on a problem—one expects
simultaneous discoveries, and they occurred in this case. Barbara Harff (2012) and ourselves (Anderson
and Anderson 2012, 2017), and shortly after us Hollie Nyseth-Brehm, developed
broadly the same model of genocide, and James Waller, in his great work Confronting
Evil (2016), has developed it further.
Gregory Stanton’s well-known list of traits (2013) is another
independent invention of a similar, but more developed, model.
It is quite a simple
one. A would-be leader wins by
developing a whole ideology based on ethnic or ideological hate, but going
beyond mere hate to promise a utopian world—usually, harking back to a lost golden
age and promising to recall it and improve it–if we can only eliminate
“certain people.” He often flourishes
only when difficult and uncertain economic times give people economic
incentives to look for radical solutions, but many such leaders take power in
good times; mobilizing antagonism is always available as an easy and
straightforward way to win in politics. All that is required is that the existing
administration is either fighting a war and not doing well (as in Russia when
Lenin took power), or widely perceived as corrupt and incompetent. People then work for change. Most commonly, the country in question had a
long record of ethnic and political killing, but this was not always the case.
Many dictators simply
rode popular movements to victory, but many were installed by large economic
interests, almost always rentiers—landlords, natural resource owners, and
others who make their money from controlling primary production rather than
from enterprise. Oil has been the
greatest single backer of modern autocratic states, from fascist (several in
Africa and elsewhere) to feudal (Saudi Arabia) to socialist (Venezuela). We will examine this link in due course. In the early 20th century, most
dictators were puppets installed by fascist or communist regimes when they
conquered countries, and in the mid-20th the United States installed
or backed several genocidal fascist regimes, most notably in Guatemala and
Chile (on the history of 20th century genocides, see Anderson and
Anderson 2012; Kiernan 2007; Rummel 1994, 1998; Shaw 2013). Since then, however, genocidal and autocratic
regimes have come to power through coups, local wars, or, very often,
elections. Corrupt and weak regimes
create conditions where many will vote for strongmen.
John Kincaid says of
American far-right politics, “right-wing movements are successful when they
deploy rhetorical frames that synthesize both material and symbolic politics”
(Kincaid 2016:529), and this finding summarizes a fact that seems well
documented worldwide. Oliver Hahl and
collaborators (2018) have shown that “lying demagogues” succeed with
disaffected voters who feel disrespected by elites and cultural brokers; lying,
violating norms, openly expressing widely-held prejudices, and economic
populism are a particularly successful (and deadly) combination. Trump in the United States was only one of
many leaders who triumphed in the early 21st century by using this
technique.
When
he (such leaders are male, so far) takes over, he quickly moves to consolidate
power. He can usually bring about a brief return of prosperity, by cracking
down on crime and by “making the trains run on time” (as the proverb claims for
Mussolini), but the prosperity may be illusory or short-lived. Alternatively, the leader may take over during
a war, in which case he may lead the people to victory—or may simply make
things even worse, as in Cambodia. He
suspends whatever democratic or institutional checks exist, and becomes a
dictator or functional equivalent. Many
small genocides have taken place in democracies, but, in almost all such cases,
the victims were not citizens and were under de facto authoritarian rule. Native Americans in the 19th
century constitute a prime example.
A
dictator begins by consolidating his power.
As Rudolph Rummel often reiterated, “power kills, and absolute power
kills absolutely.” Almost inevitably, a
dictator begins to consolidate his rule by killing “certain people”—whether
they are Jews, bourgeoisie, political enemies, educated people, “heretics,” or
any other salient group that seems opposed in some way to the new order. I term these “structural opponent groups.” The savagery and scope of the killing sometimes
depends on the number of targeted groups, which in turn depends on the
extremism of the dictator. Hitler’s
indiscriminate hatred extended from Jews to handicapped people to gays to
modern artists, totaling over six million dead. The Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia included
people defined by ethnicity, education, foreign influence, and other broad
variables. The Rwandan genocide began
with Tutsi, but quickly moved on to eliminate many Hutu (Nyseth Brehm 2017b). At the other extreme are mass political
killings that eliminate the opposition and anyone related to it, but at least
stop there, such as Agustin Pinochet’s in Chile, which killed about 10,000
people. These political genocides blend
into the sort of mass political elimination characteristic of medieval empires.
Usually,
there is then a lull in the killing. The
leader has his power. However, eventually,
unrest challenges his position. In some
cases, he is forced out by popular movements.
Dictators often fall. Frequently,
they come to believe their own personality cult, think they are infallible and
can do anything, and decline into something hard to tell from madness (Dikötter 2019). Often, however, a leader meets the new
challenge by another wave of mass murder.
The challenge is often external war, as in Hitler’s Germany and the
Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia. Sometimes it is
power jockeying within the ruling party, as in the USSR and Mao’s China. Sometimes it is civil war or revolt, as in
the Indian subcontinent when successive episodes of violence accompanied the
breakaway of Pakistan from India, the later breakaway of Bangladesh from
Pakistan, and the failed revolution of the Tamils in Sri Lanka.
The
most important thing to note is that the people go along. Humans are prone to anger and hate, and
even the most incompetent politician can whip up hatred and direct it against
enemies.
This
simple model—exclusionary ideology, dictatorship, consolidation, and
challenge—turns out to be 100% predictive.
We concentrated on genocide under the strictest construction of Raphael
Lemkin’s definition of the term—actual mass murder of innocent citizens or
subjects by their own government—as opposed to general killing of civilians in
war. Some of the best work on genocide
has used that wider definition (e.g. Kiernan 2007, Shaw 2013). Our model does
not work for this extended use of the term.
One would have to have a predictive model of all war—something that has
so far defied scholarship, despite literally thousands of attempts. Wars are notoriously multicausal; it usually
takes several reasons to make leaders decide to go to war. Economic gain (or plain loot), political
power of the state or its leaders, land, ethnic and religious conflicts,
maintaining warrior culture, and other factors all operate.
By
contrast, genocide is usually rather simple: when autocratic leaders feel they
are in a shaky situation, they kill.
Very often—famously with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—they come to depend
more and more on the level of hatred of their backers, and thus must whip up
more and more hate to stay in power; this makes them take still more power and
kill still more minorities, to provide red meat to their “base.”
There are four ways to
hate: hate upward (hating the elites), down (hating the less fortunate, from
the poor to the less abled to the minorities), laterally (real enemies or
social rivals), or not at all. Bad
leaders, and often even relatively good ones, move more and more toward getting
their followers to hate downward—to hate the weak, the powerless, the
minorities. Even those who took power by
marshaling upward hate, such as the Communists, soon find it pays better to get
their followers to hate downward.
A
marginal sort of genocide is “cold genocide”:
Slow and not very sure elimination of an ethnic group by selective
killing over a long time, coupled with every effort to destroy the group as a
distinguishable entity possessing its own culture or ideology. The term “cold genocide” was coined by Kjell
Anderson to describe the Indonesian pressure on West Irian (West Papua). It has been applied to the far larger and
bloodier repression of the Falun Gong movement in China since the late
1990s. This movement, a spiritual
discipline that by all accounts except the Chinese government’s was utterly
inoffensive, seemed dangerous to the Communist leadership, because of its size
and rapid growth. Suppression included
propaganda wars, but also mass torture, imprisonment (“reeducation” in
“camps”), and killing by extracting body parts for transplantation or the
international black market (Cheung et al. 2018, citing a huge literature). The Falun Gong has become the major source of
hearts, livers, and other vital organs in China, a practice that may seem even
more ghoulish than most genocidal atrocities.
The
Chinese government has now expanded its reach to include the Muslim Uighurs of
Xinjiang. Approximately a million have
been placed in concentration camps (“vocational training centers”) and
subjected to intense pressure to acculturate to Han majority norms (Byler
2018). Children have been removed from
homes and parents, and educated according to Han patterns. Islam is attacked in particular. The Uighurs’ sin appears to have been
agitating for minority rights guaranteed by the Chinese constitution. The Chinese government has accused them of
ISIS-style terrorism because of a very few extreme individuals. Recently, government agencies in Uighur
territory have been ordering thousands of clubs, stock probes, tear gas
canisters, spiked clubs, handcuffs, prison uniforms, and other instruments of
suppression and torture (SBS News 2018).
This constitutes “culturocide,” the form of genocide that involves
destruction of an entire culture by restriction of personal freedoms and forced
removal and re-education of children—one of the forms of genocide specifically
addressed by Lemkin.
Most
genocides have been propagated by elites: ruling governments or powerful groups
that whip up hatred to consolidate their power.
However, these groups may have started as small popular movements, like
the original fascists. Moreover, settler
genocides are largely bottom-up phenomena, and so are many small-scale
religious massacres and revolutionary bloodlettings like the French Terror.
Mobs, genocides, and wars do not just happen,
and they are not the result of blind forces.
They are invoked by individuals.
People do not spontaneously go into orgies of murder, unless some leader
or leaders are profiting in important ways.
Whipping up hatred in others is not confined to leaders—anyone can do
it—but ordinary people doing it at grassroots levels can do only so much
damage, though if they form a large organization like Hitler’s Nazis or the Ku
Klux Klan they can have devastating effects.
Further
work since 2012 has extended the models backwards, to look at the factors
behind the final extreme abuse of autocratic power. From Waller’s Confronting Evil, Frank
Dikötter’s How
to Be a Dictator (2019), among other books (cited below), we learn that the
vast widely-targeted genocides of modern times accompany the decline of
traditional societies and communities and the rise of mass communication and
mass top-down society. Links evolve from
networks of local people, only somewhat influenced by governments, to
top-to-bottom chains of authority by huge governments that take more and more
power, even in peaceful and democratic societies. When a dictator seizes control in such a
mass society, he can quickly draw on his power, on loyalty, and on the lack of
countervailing horizontal forces. He can
rapidly turn a peaceful, orderly society into a killing machine.
He
will do it only if he has not only public but also financial support, and many
genocides are enabled by specific firms or economic interests. These turn out to be primary-production
interests—extractive, often rentier, often export-oriented—in most cases (see
below, part 3). Large agrarian
interests—landlords—are often involved, and more recently the oil industry has
been notorious (Auzanneau 2018).
Sometimes industries come on board, as in Nazi Germany. Some communist genocides have taken place
with support from peasants and workers rather than giant firms, but some others
had the support of giant state-owned economic interests.
The
dictators who invoke genocides are also a special selection (Dikötter 2019). Many genocidal leaders fall into two types. Most are elites, often military, but a
surprisingly large number of them are marginal—subalterns or regional-derived,
educated in metropoles or big cities, and educated in contexts that are also
somewhat marginal, ranging from military academies (very often) to extremist
mentoring by other radicals or lovers of violence (for details, see, again,
Anderson and Anderson 2012; Waller 2016; this has been noted before, e.g.
Isaiah Berlin noted a correlation with origin in border regions; Rosenbaum
2019:7). The range is from Napoleon
(Corsican), Stalin (Georgian), and Hitler (Austrian) to Mao (educated in Japan)
and the Cambodian genocide leaders (educated in Paris with mentoring by the
Egyptian Samir Amin). Very many of the
genociders have been military men: Napoleon the corporal, the Argentine
colonels, General Rios Montt in Guatemala, Idi Amin in Uganda, and many
more. Leading in mass killing is, of
course, the job of military officers.
Usually,
the ideologues of these exclusionary ideologies are not themselves
killers. Karl Marx dreamed revolution,
but actually spent his time studying and writing in the magnificent reading
room of the British Museum. Friedrich
Nietzsche for Germany and Gabriele d’Annunzio for Italy were the major thinkers
behind fascism, but they led scholarly lives.
It was left to lieutenants, and lieutenants of lieutenants, to become
the hard-nosed opportunistic toughs that led the movements and were also the
initial followers and fighters. They
were often animated more by hatred and ambition than by attention to doctrine.
These
leaders all shared a quite specific ideology of the purity and superiority of
one group over the abysmal badness of another, with the further concept that
all members of each group have those respective essences. This can be broken up into 20 specific ideas,
carefully extracted from an enormously extensive analysis of the rhetoric of
genocide leaders in 20 of the major historic cases by Gerard Saucier and Laura
Akers: “tactics/excuses for
violence, dispositionalism/essentialism, purity/cleansing language,
dehumanization, dualistic/dichotomous thinking, internal enemies, crush-smash-exterminate-eliminate
[language]
, group or national unity, racialism in some form, xenophobia/foreign
influence, uncivilized or uncivilizable, attachment/entitlement to land, body
or disease metaphor, revenge or retaliation language, traitor talk (treason,
treachery, etc.), conspiracy, subversion, something held sacred,
nationalism/ethnonationalism, threat of annihilation of our people” (Saucier
and Akers 2018:88).
They
add some other frequent themes, including “placing national security above other
goals,” wanting to move fast and thoroughly, and thinking “individuals must
suffer for the good of the collective” (Saucier and Akers 2018:90). They find
all of these in many cases, from Hitler’s and Stalin’s rhetoric to the less
widely known writings of the Serbian and WWII-Japanese leadership and the
propaganda of mass murderers of Indigenous people in Australia and the United
States. Dehumanizing terms like “rats,”
“cockroaches,” and “insects” appear to be universal. One can, for instance, note the Communist
Chinese leadership’s invocations against Falun Gong and dissidents as “rats”
and “subversives” (Cheung et al. 2018).
The
worst genocides are usually associated with extreme ideologies: Leninist
communism, fascism, extremist religion, or nationalist and ethnic
fanaticism. Extremist ideologues must be
a strange combination to succeed: ideologically zealous, yet utterly amoral and
opportunist in the ways they take power (Dikötter
2019 provides valuable case studies).
More pragmatic military dictators like Egypt’s, and economic hardliners
like Pinochet in Chile, usually kill their opponents and anyone suspected of
opposition, but do not engage in the vast orgies of extermination that almost
always follow from ideologues taking power.
They too are opportunist and amoral, but they usually make little secret
of it.
On
the other hand, the people must be susceptible.
As Mao Zedong used to say, “a spark can ignite a prairie fire,” but that
depends on the availability of dry grass.
Humans are easily enough turned to evil to give any credible leader a
chance. Understanding such events
involves working back from the event to the direct perpetrators and their
mindsets, and then on to the back stories.
The casual tendency of modern historians and other scholars to attribute
causes of historical events to abstractions (“the economy,” “politics,”
“culture,” “climate”) is wrong. Marx is
often blamed for it, because of vulgarization of his theory of history, but he
was careful to specify that real people must lead the revolution, even if it is
“inevitable” sooner or later because of economic forces. Marx was also aware that those economic
forces were themselves caused by the choices of real people. Other thinkers from Ibn Khaldun to Max Weber
and Anthony Giddens (1984) have made the same general point: structures emerge
from individual actions and interactions.
There is no definite link
between genocide and any particular economic system, organization, interest, or
condition. Capitalist, socialist, and
communist countries have all done it.
Claims that genocide is most likely during economic downturns or is
associated with deprivation do not hold up (Anderson and Anderson 2012; Nyseth
Brehm 2017a, 2017b). International war
generally dominated mass bloodshed before 1945, but since then genocide has far
overshadowed it, causing more deaths than all wars, murders, and crimes
combined. One suspects this has
something to do with the dispensability of labor. Kings of old could not afford to decimate
their own work force. Now, with rapid
population growth and machines displacing workers, governments can deal with
problems by thinning out their own people, saving the price of war.
Genocides fall into three
types: settler, consolidation, and crisis genocides (our classification, but see
Waller 2016 for much fuller but similar typology). Settler genocides occur when a large,
powerful society takes over land from small or scattered groups, especially
when the powerful society is technologically advanced and the smaller victim
groups are less so (“Whatever happens, we have got / the Gatling gun and they
have not”—Hilaire Belloc; also quoted as “Maxim gun”). The most famous cases are the United States
(Dee Brown 1971; Madley 2016), Brazil (Hemming 1978), and Australia (Pascoe
2014), but the same story can be told of societies from Russia to China to
Japan (Kiernan 2007). It goes far back
in time. Ancient Babylon and Assyria
exterminated captives. The Romans and medieval
Europeans exterminated rebellious subject peoples and took their
possessions. The Bantu took southern
Africa from the Khoi-San with attendant exterminations. Settler genocides depended on convincing a
large part of the citizenry to kill the Indigenous peoples, and to threaten
protectors and dissidents into silence.
A particularly good study of this is Benjamin Madley’s study of
California in the 19th century (Madley 2016).
This counts as genocide
only if the victims had been conquered and subjected. Extermination of enemies who are fighting
back with everything they have is normal war, not genocide. The dividing line is obviously blurred, but
extremes are easy to see; the wars with the Apaches and Comanche (Hämäläinen 2008) in the
United States and Mexico in the 1870s were initially fair fights with little
quarter given by either side, and thus not genocide, but the extermination of
the Yuki in California in the mid-19th century was genocidal
massacre of helpless conquered people (Madley 2016; Miller 1979).
Modern genocides fall
into four categories: communist, fascist, military dictatorship, and random
cases of rulers who lack ideology. The
last are usually military, since military men have an advantage in seizing
power, but almost as often they are democratically elected politicians. Sometimes an initially able ruler becomes
more and more extreme (or even demented) with age. The one common thread is that they come to
power by marshaling hate.
Some genocides have
direct corporate backing. American
corporations acting through the CIA established genocidal regimes in Guatemala,
El Salvador, and Chile. European
colonial powers sometimes established murderous successor regimes in liberated
colonies, or, conversely, set up a hopeless government that soon fell to
genocidal rebels. Former colony status
is a fair predictor of genocide.
Many genocidal regimes
have survived and flourished despite mass murder because states support
business interests that are benefited by the regimes in question. Cases range from early fascist Italy under
Mussolini to more modern states such as Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea. The oil industry is notorious for this, but
armaments merchants are interested, for obvious reasons. One also recalls “blood diamonds,” blood
coltan (columbium-tantalum ore, source of conflict in DR Congo), and other
commodities deeply stained.
Plantation slavery or
serfdom is one back story. Developed in
ancient Mesopotamia, it was the first institution based on cruel treatment of
disenfranchised multitudes by ruling elites.
It grew steadily, especially in the west, peaking in the Atlantic slave
trade and the indentured-labor plantations of Asia in the 18th and
19th centuries. It led to a vast amount of murder.
Consolidation genocides
are the commonest and often among the worst.
They occur when a rather shaky totalitarian regime based on exclusionary
ideology takes over full control of a country.
They usuallyoccur in that
situation, but the kill totals range widely, from rather small-scale
politicides (like Marcos’ in the Philippines and Pinochet’s in Chile) to vast
mass murders like Mao’s in China. The
scale depends on the extremism of the new government, especially its
exclusionary ideology. Ideology was not
a huge factor in the pragmatic (though murderous) Marcos government; at the
other extreme, the indiscriminate hatreds of the Nazis led to the vast
massacres of the Holocaust.
Crisis genocides occur
when genocide is brought about or exacerbated by war, either international or
civil. Very minor local rebellions can
serve as excuses for already-planned genocides, as in Guatemala in the 1980s
(where violence continues; Nelson 2019), or international war can vastly
escalate already-ongoing genocides, as in Hitler’s Germany in the 1940s. Sometimes consolidation and crisis occur
together, as in Cambodia in the late 1970s, producing the most extreme of all
genocides.
Almost all genocides fall
into one of these three types. The only
exceptions are cases in which an extreme (if not downright psychopathic)
dictator continues to kill whole populations without let or stay. Stalin and Mao are the major cases in
history, but other apparently demented monarchs from Caligula to Tamerlane
might be mentioned.
Genocides
range greatly in the numbers and percentages of people killed. The Cambodian genocide, which killed perhaps
¼ of the total population, is unique.
Rwanda’s genocide killed 10% of the population—a million people—in only
100 days, a rate of killing calculated at 333.3 murders per hour, 5.5 per
minute (Nyseth Brehm 2017b:5). Most
genocides are fortunately smaller; many are “politicides,” confined to classes
of political enemies of the dictator.
Mere political killings do not count as genocides, but mass political
murders by people like Agustin Pinochet of Chile and Ferdinand Marcos of the
Philippines threw far wider nets. Not
only actual opponents, but families of opponents, ordinary protestors, children
who seemed somehow opposed to the regime, and random suspects were killed. The scope of genocide depends on the size and
range of targeted groups, which in turn depends on the extremism of the
exclusionary ideology of the leaders.
Hitler targeted a huge and, at the end, almost random-looking assortment
of peoples. Pinochet narrowly targeted
suspected liberals and leftists.
Recent
attacks on “social media” for being platforms that amplify hatred (e.g. Zaki
2019:146-150) made me aware of an important and previously neglected fact: the
greatest genocides, the ones in which whole nations seem to have gone mad and
collapsed in orgies of blood, were propagated by print media and radio. The first, the Turkish massacre of the
Armenians and other Christian minorities, was even prior to radio. The others—notably Germany and central Europe
under Hitler, the USSR under Stalin, China under Mao, Nigeria in the Biafra
War, and the Indonesian, Cambodian, and Rwanda-Burundi genocides—were driven by
newspapers, radio, and public appearances.
Social media allow discussion, argument, persuasion, and grassroots
movements. Radio in totalitarian
societies is the ultimate in faceless, top-down communication to people who
have no way of answering or commenting on any scale. Public appearances by
leaders, and propaganda pictures and films, are not much better: they show the
leader in crisp uniform, from a distance, generally high above the masses. It is surely significant that there have been
no huge, out-of-control genocides in societies with good social media. The worst recent genocide in terms of mass
participation by ordinary people is that in Myanmar, where access to modern
media is limited. Even TV has the value
of showing the leader up close, making him look less than respectable. But the real value of Facebook, Twitter, and
the like is that allow us to answer back.
They are often compared to face-to-face encounters, to the disadvantage
of the social media, but the real comparison is with the passivizing and
alienating radio and its cousins.
Genocides
have become much commoner and bloodier since 1900. Earlier genocides were largely religious
persecutions (such as the Inquisition) or settler genocides. Since 1900, genocides have targeted wider
groups, often huge segments of society.
This tracks the decline of community and the rise of mass hierarchic
society, as we have noted.
Through
history, genocidal regimes just kept killing till conquered by outsiders or
popular movements. Then they often
returned to bad ways unless they underwent decisive political changes—sometimes
forced on them by conquest, as with Germany and Japan after WWII. Slavery, though not
genocide by our definition, is very close to it, and requires a similar
mentality: the basic idea that one whole group of humans does not deserve human
consideration. By establishing that
mind-set, it helped the progress to modern genocide. The slave trade was notoriously bloody.
Genocide
and war always include far more than mere killing. Victims are routinely tortured. Women and girls are almost always raped. People are burned or buried alive. The deliberate sadism goes beyond anything an
ordinary creative torturer could devise; there have been instruction books on
torturing for centuries, and there are now websites on the “dark web.” Ordinary people are as prone to do all this
as the leaders themselves. Similar
findings are common in studies of warfare, criminal gangs, and perhaps above
all the whole history of heresy persecution in religions. Even domestic violence often involves
unspeakable torture and humiliation of spouse, children, or other family
members.
Ordinary people caught up
in even the most mundane street gangs soon learn to commit unspeakable acts
without second thoughts. Psychological
explanations of this range from direct explanations in terms of conformity,
anger, learned hate, and social antipathy (Baron-Cohen 2011; Baumeister 1997)
to the elaborate Freudian-Lacanian framework of Edward Weisband (2017,
2019). Animal models (of which there are
many in Clutton-Brock 2016, esp. chapters 8 and 13) suggest that competition
for control of resources and of mates and mating bring out the worst in all
mammal species, turning otherwise meek and inoffensive animals into
demons. Human domestic violence usually
(if not always) turns on control and relative power issues (B. Anderson et al.
2004). Rage over shakiness of control
certainly lies behind much genocide and genocidal behavior. Exploring the full scale of this phenomenon,
and of other causes for rage, remains an urgent task for the future.
The universality of the
phenomenon, especially perhaps in street gangs, suggests that it is all too
normal a part of human potential, but many of Weisband’s cases (such as the
Nazi death camp leaders) seem to be genuinely psychotic or brain-damaged. Whatever the explanations, the performative
sadism of human violence is a particularly horrific thing to find so
universally.
Genocide
(aside from settler genocide) is a particularly interesting case because ethnic
genocide is a relatively new form of evil.
Outside of religious persecutions—the real font of genocide–huge-scale
elimination of vast numbers of peaceable fellow citizens, simply because they
fall in some arbitrary category, is new enough that people have not adjusted to
it as a matter of ordinary life since time immemorial (as slavery was
considered to be). Conforming to
genociders is, or was in the early 20th century, a new way to be
bad.
The
Enlightenment gave rise to ideas of peace and freedom. War was reduced, and slavery slowly but
surely was outlawed everywhere. However,
the Enlightenment was founded not only on rapid expansion of trade, commerce,
communication, and science, but also on the slavery and exploitation that it
eventually fought.
As
the world filled up in the 20th century, problems of overpopulation,
pressure on resources, and competition for goods became more salient. Leaders by this time tended to be old and not
battle-hardened, so they did not always deal with such problems by
international war, as almost everyone had done before 1800. Often, either during war or instead of war,
the modern leaders turned on sectors of their own people, waging genocide
campaigns. Wars and slaving were
partially replaced by internal mass murder.
Genocide developed from religious persecution and settler colonialist
practices.
Genocide,
like other violence, must ultimately reduce to hatred. The government must be able to whip up mass
hatred, to get support and help in its project of mass murder. To the extent that people are hateful and
angry, they are susceptible to this persuasion.
On the other hand, they may simply be “following orders” and “doing
their job,” becoming callous to the whole enterprise (Paxton 2005, Snyder
2015). The genocidal leader or leaders mobilize an insecure or downward-mobile
majority, or fraction of the majority, against the most salient or disliked
minorities.
Genocide
seems to sum up the other forms of violence.
Like war, it is often about loot and land (Kiernan 2005). Like intimate partner violence, it always
involves some issues of control and insecurity about control and power. Like civil war, it often begins with
rebellion, driven by class or religious or ethnic conflict. Finally, leaders of genocidal regimes are
often classic bullies, a point elaborated below.
Mass
Killing in General
The
forms of mass killing are international war, civil war (which differs from
interpolity war in causes and usual course; see Collier and Sambanis 2005),
revolution and rebellion, genocide, structural violence on large scales, mass
poisoning by pollution, denial of medical care, and mass starvation through
refusing to take action on agriculture, welfare, or food security (on famine as
mass murder, see Howard-Hassman 2016). Large-scale
human sacrifice, once a major part of religion and kingship, has fortunately
been eliminated, but sacrificing millions to the cults of guns, automobiles,
and oil continues. These form something
of a continuum. Genocide sometimes grows from bureaucratic neglect.
These
all have different risk factors.
International war is hard to predict and almost always multicausal. The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1748) was not
just about Jenkins’ ear. Usually, desire
to capture a neighbor’s territory and resources, a desire to support one’s own military
machine and sometimes one’s armaments industry, pressure by hot-headed males
hungry for glory and loot, claims of wounded national pride, and ideological
differences with the enemy are all involved.
Traditional or manufactured hatreds are always conspicuous. Small incidents are typically taken as
excuses. (In the case of Jenkins’ ear,
the war was a complex fight between Britain and Spain over New World
territories and other issues). Nations
such as the medieval Turks and Mongols may have war as their major economic
activity and even their whole lifeway.
Rivalries within families forced rivals to compete to see who could
amass the most loot and glory (Fletcher 1980:238).
War seems to have been
around forever, if one counts the local raids and small wars typical of
small-scale societies. War seems to have
been especially common in chiefdoms and early states. Population growth, rivalry for land and loot,
and hierarchic institutions had run ahead of peace-keeping mechanisms. Typically, neighbors come into conflict over
land and resources, but such conflicts can almost always be settled by
negotiation. When they get out of
control, however, traditional rivalries may develop, as between France and
England through much of history. Then,
honor, nationalism, and eventually real hatred come into play, increasing the
danger. Specific histories are almost
invariably complex and highly contingent on hard-to-predict events.
With
the state, maintenance of order slowly developed. Even so, the incidence of violence and war
varied widely within tribal and early state societies. Just as there are violently aggressive people
and saintly ones, there are bloodthirsty and pacific groups. Particularly interesting are profound changes
over time. Scandinavians changed from
Vikings to democratic socialists (Pinker 2011).
English changed from Shakespeare’s blood-drenched warriors to today’s
peaceable folk. Germany changed from the
most demonic country in history to leader of a peaceful Europe in only one
generation. Most dramatic was Rwanda,
where gradual increase in hate and violence built up to the genocide of 1994
that killed 1/10 of the population—but then ended suddenly and was followed by
amazingly peaceful, tranquil, well-regulated recovery (as shown by brief
research there by ourselves, and much more detailed ongoing research on the
ground by Hollie Nyseth-Brehm).
Lies
are universal in war; “truth is the first casualty,” and George Orwell’s
analyses remain unsurpassed. People
believe lies against all evidence when their political beliefs are served
thereby, as several modern studies have shown (Healy 2018). Patiently pointing facts can work, but only
when the truth is inescapable and unequivocal (Healy 2018). The endless circulation of repeatedly
discredited fictions about Jews and blacks is well known.
The ability of people to
change dramatically from war mode to peace mode, from bad wolf to good wolf, is
truly astounding. Recent studies have
shown that this is heavily contingent on social pressure. Michal Bauer and coworkers (2018) found that
in an experimental setting, Slavic high school students in Slovakia were twice
as likely to play hostile toward Roma in a game than toward other Slavic
students—but only if someone started it.
They would all play peacefully unless someone made a hostile move, but
if that happened all the Slavic students generally joined in. It was easy to flip the group from tolerant
to ethnically discriminatory.
Today,
a range of violent engagements are common.
International war is still with us, though current ones all grew from
local civil wars. Civil wars abound, and
merge with local rebellions. Civil wars
stem from rebellion, revolution, or coup, or—very often—from breakaway
movements by local regions, as in the United States’ Civil War (Collier and
Sambanis 2005).
Criminal gangs dominate
whole countries; the governments of Honduras and El Salvador are particularly
close to their gangs. Gangs kill for
loot, rivalry, “honor,” turf, women, and other usual causes. Individual murder for gain, revenge, or hate
blends into gang killings and then up into militias, armies, and nations; there
is no clear separation. A murder in a
gang-dominated country like El Salvador may have individual, gang, and national
overtones.
Finally, ordinary,
everyday murders are usually over issues of control. The commonest murders are within the family;
next, within the neighborhood. The mass
murders of unknown (though usually local) victims that dominate the media are
relatively rare, though much commoner in the United States than in most
countries.
Genocide continues, in
Myanmar, Sudan, South Sudan, and several other countries. China is committing genocide against its
Uyghur population; it has imprisoned a million and killed countless more (Byler
2018; Stavrou 2019). China is also
repressing Tibetans, Mongols, Kazakhs, and Hui, apparently for no reason other
than a desire to crush religious and cultural minorities, since China’s
world-leading security and surveillance system has surely established these
minorities are not a security risk. Turkish
repression of Kurds and Brazilian massacres of Indigenous people have now
reached genocidal proportions. Violent, genocidal
or potentially genocidal regimes now control about 1/6 of the world’s
countries. It is highly contingent. In many cases, the dice could easily have
rolled the other way. Evil ranges in
extent; Hitler had real power, his American imitators very little before 2017. The degree of evilness is not well correlated
with its success.
Today, with warfare
constant and technologically sophisticated, militarism is on the increase,
dictatorships are becoming common again (as in the mid-20th
century), and whole societies are becoming militarized. An important special issue of Current Anthropology, the leading
anthropological journal, is devoted to this; an important introduction by the
issue editors, Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteson (2019), details the rapid
rise and current pervasiveness of the new hi-tech militaristic world and
worldview. Military bases around the
world have led to virtual slavery of local hired workers, as well as
dispossession of local farmers and others (see also Lutz 2019; Vine 2019). Besteman’s article (2019) details the
progressive conversion of the world into an armed camp, with the rich routinely
attacking the poor nations—no new thing that, but more and more a worldwide
unified effort, rather than a country-by-country issue. Gusterson (2019) recounts the use of drones to
create terror; there is no one to fight—only a strange, buzzing object that
brings random death and chaos. As
Gusterson shows, drones are claimed to hit actual individual terrorists and
military targets with pinpoint accuracy, but of course they do no such thing;
they are used to terrorize whole populations with large-scale random strikes on
soft targets. Militarized cultures
develop in zones of war and conflict, as they have throughout time (e.g. Fattal
2019; Hammami 2019).
Another
set of cases of people turning violent and destructive is provided by the
well-known cycles of empire. Every
preindustrial state had cycles of rise and fall, usually at vaguely predictable
intervals, with a 75-100 year period and a 200-300 year period being
common. The great Medieval Arab thinker
Ibn Khaldun (1958) first isolated, described, and explained these. Recently, Peter Turchin (2003, 2006, 2016;
Turchin and Zefedov 2009) and I (Anderson 2019) have elaborated on Ibn Khaldun’s
theory. There is thus no reason to go
into it here; suffice it to say that internal processes make dynastic crises
inevitable, over the long run, in such societies. At such times, rebellion, local wars,
banditry, and sometimes international wars break out, and societies often
dissolve into chaos. Basically, it is a
process in which a society based on positive-sum games (cooperation,
law-abiding) dissolves into negative-sum games, in which groups and power brokers
try to take each other out.
On rare occasions, a
whole empire may completely collapse, as Rome did in the 5th
century. This represents yet another
society-wide set of cases of fairly rapid change from peace and order to
violence and mass death.
Slavery
At
the slave museum in Zanzibar, built on the old slave quarters there, one can
see the hellholes were slaves were confined, read their stories, and see many
excellent exhibits with contemporary accounts, drawings, and even
photographs. The most disquieting, and
the most pervasive, message is that the slave trade was an ordinary business,
like selling bananas. Hundreds of people
routinely raped, murdered, tortured, brutalized, and oppressed their fellow
humans, for eight hours a day (or more), simply as a regular job. These slavers no doubt felt like any other
workers—bored, annoyed by trivial problems, angry at the boss every so often,
but indifferent to the subjects of their effort. They were not singled out for being violent,
or psychopathic, or intolerant; they were simply locals who happened to be
available. Anyone could do it.
Mistreatment
of enslaved people involves minimalizing them—not denying their humanity, but
denying that it matters. They can be
treated brutally because they do not count.It is perhaps harder to imagine the
mind-sets of people who worked in the slave trade, day after day, for a whole
working lifetime, than to imagine the mind-sets of genociders. Today, most people in developed countries are
repelled even by bad treatment of farm animals.
I remember when people treated animals worse than they do today, but
even in my rural youth, animals were never treated as badly as slaves were
treated in Zanzibar, Byzantium, the American South, and other places where
slavery occurred. The animals needed to
stay healthy to turn a profit. By
contrast, the whole goal of slaving is to reduce humans to helpless, terrified
victims, through intimidation and brutalization. Their health was a secondary concern at
best. It was easier to get new slaves
than to deal with well-treated ones.
Slavery
has cast a long shadow over America, influencing American politics profoundly
to this day (Acharya et al. 2018). Many,
possibly half, of Americans believe slavery was happy blacks playing banjos and
occasionally picking a bit of cotton under the benevolent eyes of the
plantation owners. The rest usually
think of slavery as the work of a few utterly evil men, like Simon Legree of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The fact is that slavery involved thousands
of men and women brutalizing other men and women, simply as a regular job,
carried out with varying degrees of racist hate but with little thought about
the whole issue. In America the
brutalizers were white and the victims black, but in most of history—and today
in countries like Thailand and Ukraine—the slaves were the same race and very
often the same culture and society as their oppressors. Roy Baumeister, in his book Evil, comments on how repugnant most
people find evil acts, but how quickly they get used to them and see them as
routine. There is no evidence that
slavers found even the initial phases of their work particularly
unpleasant. They put in their eight
hours (or more) of rape, torture, and murder with a “just doing a job”
mentality.
John
Stedman wrote a classic 18th-century account of the horrors of
slavery in Surinam (Stedman 1988 [1790]).
Stedman was a mercenary in the service of the plantation owners, so at
first he was biased in favor of slavery and against slaves; his horror at what
he saw convinced him that slavery was an evil practice. He reports a great deal of real hatred by
slaveowners of their slaves, and a great deal of torture simply for torture’s
sake, often because of extreme (and not wholly unjustified) fear of slave
rebellions, and the fear-driven belief that only brutality could prevent
those. His writings became foundational
to the antislavery effort, first in England, then worldwide. Most interesting, though, is his extremely
extensive documentation (confirmed by every other early report) of the
matter-of-fact, everyday, routine brutality.
It simply never occurred to most people of the time that this was
monstrous.
One
also recalls John Newton’s conversion, at about the same time, from slaving
captain to extremely repentant Christian; after years of depression, he felt
divine forgiveness, and wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace,” which, somewhat
ironically, became a favorite of African-American churches. As with resisters of pressure to commit
genocide, repenters of slaving are rare in the archives.
Slavery
in traditional societies (from the Northwest Coast of North America to
pre-slave-trade Africa), was sometimes less murderous and torture-filled. But it was never other than cruel and
oppressive. All records from all
societies speak of rape, terrorizing, and brutalizing. Yet, no one in history—not Buddha, not
Confucius, not Jesus—opposed slavery as an institution, until the Quakers in
the 18th century concluded it was against God’s law. The tide then turned with striking speed. Enslavement of Europeans was basically over,
outside the Turkish Empire, well before 1800.
Enslavement of Native Americans was theoretically banned in the Catholic
countries, and was actually reduced to a rare and local phenomenon by
1800. Enslavement of Africans continued
well into the 19th century, being legally abolished between 1820 and
the 1880s.
Illegal slavery continues today. The Council on Foreign Relations (2019)
estimates that there are 40.3 million slaves in the world. Few are chattel slaves like those in
Zanzibar; most are forced prison laborers (e.g. in North Korea), persons
enslaved for debt, or sex slaves (including forced marriage sufferers). Sex slavery, with all the attendant horrors, is
carried out in the familiar spirit of “all in a day’s work,” by thugs and pimps
from Thailand to Hollywood. Reading
reports of child sex slavery shows how low humans can sink, all the time
thinking they are doing what culture and economics require. As always, there is no evidence that most of
these people are especially evil to begin with.
Some child-sex slavers are clearly psychopathic, but others simply drift
into the life and do what they believe is necessary. Many were sex slaves themselves.
Structural Violence and Callousness
Millions
of deaths today come simply from the bureaucratic attitude that people are
merely things to move around, like rocks.
One of the most chilling books I have read is The Future of Large Dams by Thayer Scudder (2005). Scudder spent his life studying refugees from
huge dam projects. In almost every case,
people displaced by big dams were simply ordered to move. Their homes were bulldozed, their livelihoods
flooded. There were usually token
“relief” efforts, but these were so trivial as to be more insulting than
helpful. Millions of refugees were left
to shift for themselves, and in poorer nations that meant many of them
died. Scudder bends over backwards to be
fair, which makes the stories sound even worse; one cannot write him off as
biased.. The bureaucrat perpetrators are
cut from the same cloth as the cold “doing my job” slavers and Nazi
executioners. There is a huge subsequent
literature on dams and displacement; suffice it to cite Sunil Amrith’s Unruly Waters (2018), which puts India’s
and China’s megadams in historical context while describing their social and
ecological devastation. Almost always,
the displaced are poor, and often from minority groups, while the benefits go to
the relatively rich: landlords, urban power-users, and the like.
Similarly, pollution is
generated by giant firms producing for the affluent, but the pollution is
almost always dumped on the poor and vulnerable (Anderson 2010 covers this
issue in detail). The populations
sacrificed for the greater good of the giant firms are the stigmatized ones; Erving
Goffman’s classic work Stigma (1963)
is highly relevant.
Related
are the horrific famines invoked by governments against their own people, as
described in State Food Crimes by
Rhoda Howard-Hassmann (2016) and for specific, particularly horrible cases by
Anne Appelbaum (2017) for Ukraine in the 1930s and Hazel Cameron (2018) for
Zimbabwe in 1984. Not only totalitarian
governments, but the British in 1840s Ireland and 1940s Bengal, and most
settler societies in their campaigns to get rid of colonized peoples. In the Irish potato famine, aid was denied
although Ireland was exporting food and England was rich (Salaman 1985;
Woodham-Smith 1962) Many countries have deliberately
invoked famine as a form of state policy.
The Holodomor in the Ukraine and Russia in the 1920s was an extreme case
(Howard-Hassman 2016). America’s 19th-century
extermination of the buffalo was explicitly done to starve the Native
Americans, and thus was genocidal.
Johan
Galtung (1969) coined the term “structural violence” to describe destruction by
the cold workings of the social system, ranging from the results of
institutionalized bigotry to bureaucratic displacement and refusal to provide
famine relief. Structural violence is
usually a matter of passing public costs onto those held to deserve no better,
usually poor and vulnerable people.
Again, ethnic and religious hate is very often involved. The targeted victims—selected to pay the
costs of industrial development, public works, crop failures, and the like—are
almost always poor, and very often from minority groups. Robert Nixon has used the term “slow
violence” for this.
There
is, however, a range from clearly and deliberately murderous and unnecessary structural
violence, such as the Holodomor and the Ethiopian famine under the Derg, down
to the tragic results of incompetent and irresponsible planning. Famines before 1900 were usually due to
genuine crop failures in societies that did not have adequate safety nets, and
often could not have had. The gradation
from such tragedies to deliberate mass murder by starvation is not an easy one
to unpack. There will always be
controversial cases. Lillian Li’s
classic Fighting Famine in North China (2007) goes into detail on a
society that was desperately short of food but did have a well-developed safety
net; the famines reflected a complex interaction of crop failures, local
violence, and government success or failure at deploying their extensive but
shaky relief infrastructure. Such cases
remain outside the scope of this book, which deals only with cases such as the
Holodomor and the buffalo slaughter, in which famine was deliberately created
for genocidal reasons. On the other
hand, massive displacement of people without preparation for resettlement or
rehabilitation is herein considered intrinsically genocidal, even if done—or
supposedly done—for good economic reasons.
I
hereby introduce the word “bureaupathy” to describe the associated attitude and
mindset. It is a mental state as sick
and destructive as psychopathy and sociopathy.
It is quite different from greed; the bureaucrats are usually following
orders or truckling to rich clients, rather than enriching themselves. It does, however, merge into corporate
murder-for-gain, which is done with similar cold-blooded indifference. Tobacco companies continue to produce a
product that causes up to ¼ of deaths worldwide, and no one in those companies
seems to feel either genocidal hate or moral compunction. Similarly, big oil and big coal preside not
only over thousands of pollution-caused deaths per year, but over the creation
of a global-warmed future that will lead to exponentially increasing deaths. Unlike the innocent, uneducated rural
American voters, oil executives know perfectly well that climate change is
real, and what it will cost. They read
the journals and are trained in science.
Many documents, leaked or quite open, show they are aware. They continue to produce oil and lie about
its effects on health and the ecosystem.
Hate vs. Greed
This
alerts us to two very different kinds of harm.
Hatred causes genuinely gratuitious harm: no one benefits. In fact, the hater usually harms himself or
herself just to hurt others; suicide bombing is the purest case. It is a negative-sum game: both sides lose. Selfish greed, however, does benefit the
doer; by the definition used here, it harms the other people in the transaction
more than it benefits the doer or doers.
Big dams benefit the rich and urban, but usually hurt the displaced
people and the total economy more. The
cost-benefit ratios of big dams are notoriously bad. More pure cases of selfish greed, such as
drug gang violence and medieval Viking raids, are even clearer: the thugs get
some loot, but the entire polity suffers, especially but not only the looted
victims. Professional gambling is
another case in point: the house always wins in the end, since it is there to
make a profit. Casino owners get
rich. They do it at the expense of victims,
often nonaffluent and often compulsive, who are ruined and often commit
suicide. The total cost-benefit ratio is
negative. But the victims choose to
gamble, so it is hard to stop the industry.
In this case, as in “the right to bear arms” and many others, individual
liberty is traded off against social costs.
Simple
rationality—ordinary common sense—would stop hate as a motive for harm. Stopping greed is more difficult, especially
when the greedy have the power to force their will on the rest of society, as
oil interests do today. From a
regulator’s point of view, there is also the problem of defining exactly where
reasonable cost-benefit ratios turn to unreasonable ones. Big dams do sometimes benefit the whole of
society, or at least they have in the past.
Simple morality directs that displaced persons should be compensated,
but other cases of “takings” are less clear.
If some suffer because they were selling poisons and the poisons are
finally banned, should those sellers be compensated? Or penalized for selling the poisons in the
first place? Much of politics is about
such issues, which seriously problematize the whole issue of evil.
In
war, genocide, and murder that most harm is usually clear-cut. So much, however, is due to greed—the entire
tobacco economy, most of the oil economy, most of the dam-building, and so
on—that looking far more seriously at cost-benefit accounting is a major need
for the future. On the other hand, the
role of hate, or at least of infrahumanization, in even these cases cannot be
underestimated. The case of dams is,
again, the best example: those displaced are almost always poor and rural, and
thus “do not count.” They can be ruined
and even reduced to starving to death, without any of the rulers or engineers
or construction bosses caring—sometimes without even noticing. The oil industry, also, typically dumps its
pollution on poor rural areas, such as rural Louisiana and the Indigenous
communities of Canada. When oil pollutes
a well-to-do urban area, there are protests and political and legal
action. Moreover, oil, tobacco, and
other harming industries have made it a practice to whip up hatred to get the
public to oppose valid science, as will be discussed below. Thus, hate, or at least discounting whole communities,
is central to the wider and more general applications of greed.
How Much Violence?
Several recent studies
attempt to quantify deaths by violence in human societies. Stephen Pinker (2011) famously concluded
people kill much less than they used to.
This is apparently wrong (Fry 2013; Mann 2018), but small-scale
societies kill at a relatively high rate.
Many small-scale farming societies, especially chiefdoms, are
particularly bloody. The human average
seems to be about 1% dying by violence per year, but it varies from insane
meltdowns like the 100 Years War, the fall of Ming, and the Khmer Rouge
genocide to total lasting peace.
In
a recent comparative study of war, Kissel and Kim (2018) define it as organized
conflict between separate, independent groups.
They note that the terms “aggression” and “war” cover a vast range of
very different behaviors. “Coalitionary”
killing of enemies is confined to ants and people and chimpanzees and maybe a
few other mammals; only humans do it on any scale. The genetics of aggression are as ambiguous
as ever. They note some archaeological
massacres, including one in Kenya 10,000 years ago, and cannibalism evidence in
many areas of the world—possibly during famines. They see a big change after agriculture and
settlement growth, but more in the size and organization of war than in the
commonness of aggressive killing. They
see war as cultural.
A
recent study by Dean Falk and Charles Hildebolt (2017) finds a wide range, from
small-scale societies that have essentially no violent killings to those where
a large percentage of deaths are violent.
Variation is much higher than among state-level societies. In general, it appears that small-scale
societies do have a somewhat higher percentage of violent deaths than large
state societies, but the margin is not great (if it exists at all). The genocides, slaving deaths, and mass
murders of modern states go well beyond Pinker’s estimates (Mann 2018). In few societies is murder and war the norm;
such a society would quickly self-destruct.
In fact, there are records of societies that did so. Something very close happened to the Waorani,
but they were persuaded by missionaries to become more peaceful (Robarchek and
Robarchek 1998). There is a range in states from Afghanistan and ancient
Assyria to relatively peaceful Tokugawa Japan and Yi Korea, or, today,
Scandinavia and Switzerland. Most states
through history have been undemocratic and repressive, with many political
murders.
Among the Enga, one of
the most violent societies in Falk and Hildebolt’s sample, powerful self-made
leaders—“big men”—often whip up war for their own advantage, but may also make
peace for the same reason; the oscillation from peace to extreme violence that
has characterized Enga society is heavily determined by these self-aggrandizing
maneuvers (Wiessner 2019). Popular will
often forces peace on disruptive young men or would-be leaders, however.
An “average” is hard to
calculate and probably meaningless, since most societies swing back and forth
between war and peace, conflict and stability.
The average may be close to urban America’s less privileged
neighborhoods.
Since
death is forever, the consequences of murder are irreparable, while good is
easily undone. (The same goes, in
general, for environmental damage; it is rarely, if ever, fully reversible.) A society requires countless small good acts
to make up for a terminally bad one.
Human nature must average positive to keep societies functional.
Human
tendencies to defend social position, defend the group, and defend or seize
land and resources continue to keep violence at a high level in most
societies. From the books cited above, a
clear pattern emerges of why people kill.
As individuals, if not killing in simple defense of self and loved ones,
they kill either for gain (as a paid job or for loot) or for social
control. Most often, they kill to
maintain social position: control over a spouse, “honor” in local societies,
revenge on a neighbor, dominance over minority members, or control of a personal
position of some kind. Even psychopaths
who kill compulsively usually wait for such opportunities. Probably most killing is done for
“defense.” Even aggression in war
becomes “preemptive strikes.” Genocide
is occasioned by extreme fear of minorities.
Targets
change over time. In agrarian societies,
the groups were very often rival branches of ruling families, clans, or
lineages. There was also, usually, an
opposition of “us” versus “barbarians,” i.e. semiperipheral marcher states or
semiperipheral invasive groups. In the
west, intolerant monotheist religions powered up hatred of other religions and
of “heretics,” and this tended to spill over into hate of all “others.” Opposition of men vs women, old vs young, and
rich/powerful/elite vs poor always create tension points. Toxic conformity takes over.
Gavin
de Becker (1997) provided many accounts of psychopaths and mass murderers. All turn on the obsessive need of the killer
to control someone—the woman he is stalking, the parents who have tortured him
growing up, the owner of a valued good who has tried to protect it.
Killers
in such situations either commit suicide or are fairly easily caught, but
gangsters who kill randomly may not be.
In particular, many gangs in the United States and elsewhere require a
new recruit to commit a murder, as a rite of passage. Such initiates seek out homeless mentally ill
individuals who will not be missed (or even identified, in many cases) and
whose death will not be investigated seriously.
This murder-for-position leads to further crime. In the United States, a killer usually is
jailed eventually, but in much of Latin America he (or sometimes she) will
often be accepted by society and escape the law.
As
groups, humans kill largely to maintain the power of the group over perceived
and hated rivals. These structural
opponent groups may be traditional enemies, new rivals, or ideological or
ethnic opposites. The hatreds lead to
international war, religious strife, civil war (most often between regions),
ideological murders and genocides, and other types of group violence. War for land is also extremely frequent. This led Ben Kiernan to title his great study
of warfare and genocide with the old Nazi phrase Blood and Soil (2007); he saw identity and land as the two great
reasons for mass killing. Nationhood and religion, both sources of a fictive or
socially constructed identity, are deadly, much more so than actual blood
relationship. I am far from the first to
remark on the human tendency to kill real people in the service of vapid
dreams.
War
for loot (portable wealth) seems largely limited to Viking raids, Turkic wars, Caucasus
Mountain feuds, and banditry in general.
It is the moral norm, and often the livelihood, of classic “barbarians,”
for whom it is a way of life rather than considered an evil or an exception. On
the other hand, wars to acquire land and mineral resources, to help one’s
national armaments industry, and to support its military, are universal throughout
history. Still, group hatred remains one
great reason for war, just as individual social control is apparently the
commonest reason for murder. Greed, even
for land, is controllable; the deadly mix of social fear, social hate, and need
for social control is the real “heart of darkness” within humans.
People Almost All Join In
One
thing is common to all genocides and wars:
Some individual or individuals whip up hatred, and the public goes along.
Usually, the leaders are desperate for power and are not particularly
restrained by morals. The masses,
however, can be almost anyone, anywhere, any time, though most sources agree
that genuinely threatening and unsettled conditions make it easier for tyrants
to whip up enmity. There are on occasion
mobs that spontaneously riot and destroy minority neighborhoods, but even these
normally have a single instigator or small group of instigators.
Normally,
this involves a flip from peaceful, economically rational behavior to
behavior that is violent, destructive, and economically, personally, and
morally irrational according to normal standards of the group and of
humanity. The bad wolf suddenly takes
over. Genocide leaders are men—they
are almost all men—who are geniuses at making people do this psychological
flip. They can manipulate social
fear, using a mix of charisma and exaggerated group rivalry. They can whip up the hatred that is latent in
people, and mobilize it. They are
masters of redefining groups to make them smaller, tighter, more defensive,
more closed. They can get people to
circle the wagons. They can make people
see it is an “exception” when moral rules are broken to harm a rival group,
something people all too often figure out without help (Sapolsky 2017,
summarized p. 674). The human ear and
brain reduce their processing of ordinary peaceful messages, and become more
sensitive to ominous messages and less sensitive to people or to rational
considerations; people can be reduced to blind rage (Monbiot 2019).
It
is particularly clear that a certain type of narcissistic, cocksure, extremist
leader can often manage to take advantage of human loyalty, religion, or
ideology to reduce a whole nation to near-hypnotism, adulating him (he is
always male—so far) with worshipful adoration.
Frank Dikötter
(2019) has investigated this in the case of several 20th century
dictators, including Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, and found many common
threads. All consolidated power
ruthlessly and came more and more to depend on a cult of personality. They became strongmen, above the law, above
tradition, above any restraint—even the restraints of their own claimed
ideologies. The more they did, the more
the loyal citizens adored them, until they miscalculated and caused actual ruin
through war or economic collapse. The
sad fact is that the tendency of humans to conform with society and follow its
leaders—usually useful traits, preventing chaos—can be and often is misused in
the most horrific ways.
In
all genocides, the mass of the population is susceptible to messages of hate. It is astonishingly easy to make ordinary
“decent” citizens into mass murderers.
People go along with the evil leaders. The public follows the leaders as loyally as
they do in international wars or in actual defense of the nation. The leaders are power-hungry and hateful
individuals, but their followers are not; yet their followers do appalling
things on command. Detailed interviewing
over time in Germany, China, the USSR, Rwanda, and other states showed that
people were swept away by the rhetoric, and then strengthened in murderous
resolve by the fact that everyone else was involved in the killing. Most people simply did what they were told, or
what their neighbors were doing. They
often took a sort of pleasure or satisfaction in doing it, but often found it
simply a job that had to be done. It is
often pointed out that Hitler killed only one person: himself. It was the people “just following orders”
that did the real work.
This
mass conformity is very extensively documented. (Particularly good recent reviews of it are
found in Paxton 2005, Snyder 2015, Staub 2011, Tatz and Higgins 2016, and
Waller 2016.) It seems particularly
common where hatreds are traditional, as with the Jews in “Christian” Europe,
but it is reported everywhere. The same
is true of criminal gangs, slave procurement, police work in less lawful parts
of the world, and indeed every situation where ordinary people get caught up in
violence. They almost always conform
(see esp. Baumeister 1997; Waller 2016).
Finally,
the testimony of many anthropologists (e.g. Atran 2010, 2015), psychologists
(Baumeister 1997), criminologists (De Becker 1997), and other experts all confirm
that perfectly normal people can and do become terrorists and murderers in any
social situation that puts a high value on such behavior as serving the
group. Scott Atran’s accounts of Islamic
terrorists are particularly revealing: the terrorists and suicide bombers are
usually young persons who have experienced traumatic events in their own small
worlds. They are not particularly
violent, certainly not psychotic. They
are very often recruited through intensive influence by leaders of local extremist
organizations—leaders who rarely endanger themselves.
Otherwise,
worldwide, accounts of recruits to violent gangs often speak of neighborhoods
where the only alternative to membership in a violent gang is being killed by
one. Criminals who are not part of gangs
are far more apt to be genuinely demented—usually psychopathic. Even among such loners, however, writers like
Roy Baumeister and Gavin De Becker stress the number who seem superficially
normal. For the record, the pirates,
smugglers, and sometime killers I knew on Asian waterfronts in my youth were
largely a perfectly normal lot; they got caught up in an ugly world and had few
or no alternatives. By contrast, the one
American mass killer I have known was a deeply troubled individual, bullied and
treated cruelly for his obvious mental issues until he finally snapped.
There
are, in short, some people whose inner demons drive them out of control—though
they can be identified and stopped (De Becker 1997). Far more common are ordinary individuals: we
normals who have within us the two wolves, waiting for food. The relevant works are surprisingly silent on
what makes one or the other wolf take over.
The old Victorian clichés—coming from bad seed or a broken home, falling
in with bad company, taking to drink—are echoed to this day in one form or
another. They have much truth, and we
now know more, but there is still much to learn.
Older
literature often described such behavior as regression to “animal” or “savage”
behavior, but no other animal does anything remotely close. Nonhuman animals fight and kill when
threatened or when vying for mates or territory (Clutton-Brock 2016), but they
rarely kill without those immediate motives, they rarely torture (though cats
and many others will toy with prey, cruelly by our standards), and they
certainly do not make social decisions to starve millions of their fellows to
death.
“Savages” in the old sense of the term do not
exist and never have. The small-scale
societies of the world do about the same things that modern states do, but on a
very much smaller scale, and they lack the technological ability to carry out
the mass tortures and murders so common now.
They could not force mass starvation on their societies even if they
wanted to. Claims of greater violence
among early, small-scale societies and early states, e.g. in Pinker (2011), are
based on outrageous sampling bias (Fry 2013; Mann 2018). Pinker compares the most warlike of
documented small societies with the most peaceful modern ones, which does show
we are capable of being better than we often are, but says nothing about what
social levels are most murderous.
In
fact, virtually anyone can be converted,
rather easily, into a monster who will torture, rape, and murder his or her
neighbors and even family members for reasons that no rational person could
possibly accept after serious consideration. Religious wars over heresies provide extreme
cases. In such conflicts as the
Albigensian Crusade, the 13th-century genocide that gave rise to the
infamous line “kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out,” probably not one in a
thousand participants could explain the differences between Catholic and
Albigensian Christianity (see Anderson and Anderson 2012). Yet the murders of neighbors and friends went
on for decades. The same endures today,
as in the persecution of Shi’a by ISIS (Hawley 2018).
Such
phenomena raise the question of how and why normal, peaceable human beings can
so easily flip into genocidal states, and then back into peaceful states after
the genocide is stopped. Many of the
most horrible genocides were committed in countries long known for the
tranquility, peacefulness, cooperativeness, and even tolerance of their
citizenry. Cambodia and Rwanda were
particularly clear examples. On the
other hand, some genocidal countries had a long and bloody history of
independence and conflict. No pattern
emerged from this line of enquiry.
In
most genocides, those who resisted and worked to save victims were
astonishingly few. Tatz and Higgins
(2016) have recently collected the data from the Holocaust and other genocides. They find that even when there was no penalty
for refusing, ordinary people went along with mass murder. This was as true in the United States and
Australia in the 19th century as in Hitler’s Gemany and Pol Pot’s
Cambodia. It is sobering for modern
Americans to read how otherwise normal, reasonably decent, “Christian”
Americans could perform the most unspeakable and unthinkable acts on Native
Americans—often neighbors and (former) friends—without a second thought (see
e.g. Madley 2016). Colin Tatz’ harrowing
summary of settler genocides in Australia reveals the same (Tatz 2018). Nor did more moral citizens do much to
restrain the killers. The “Indian
lovers” like Helen Hunt Jackson and James Mooney who agitated to protect Native
Americans in late 19th century America were few.
Hollie
Nyseth Brehm (2017b), in a particularly thorough analysis of the Rwandan
genocide, found that killing was clearly top-down-directed, with a
concentration around the capital and major cities and among well-educated (and
thus elite) people, but also was commoner in areas with low marriage, high
mobility, concentration of Tutsi, and political opposition—especially by Hutu
themselves—at the grassroots. The areas
in and around the capital, Kigali, were far more deadly than areas at the
northern margins of the country. This is
the opposite of the pattern seen in settler genocides, where murder was far
commoner on borders where settler populations were expanding at the expense of
Indigenous people.
Accounts
from China’s Cultural Revolution indicate that people were swept up in mass
hysteria, but were also afraid of appearing to be neutral, since lack of
enthusiasm in persecuting victims led to substantial trouble, up to being made
a victim oneself. A few of the many
memoirs indicate that the writers were unreconstructed Maoists, but the vast
majority worked under orders, from fear or social pressure or conformity. Many repented, and write agonizing stories of
their internal sufferings as well as the sufferings they inflicted and endured.
Anyone, Anytime, Can Turn Evil
The alternation between peace and
rage is typical of animals, especially carnivores; we see it often in dogs and
cats. Chimpanzees show it too. Humans are different in two ways. First, many humans are always “on the fight”
or “in your face,” seemingly looking for imagined slights, threats to their
honor, and excuses for a fight. This is
both individual and cultural.
Arguably the biggest cause of
slights, anger and hate is ranking out: arrogance, putting others down, open
insulting superiority. This is particularly touchy if A really does outrank B
and has to show it, as in the military, in hierarchic business firms, and in
traditional societies with hereditary nobility.
A display of modesty can go too far, but a display of arrogance is
disastrous. Soldiers and bureaucrats
have to game this. It is a minefield,
even more than romance, let alone ordinary civility. Every day brings new outrages by minorities
insulted—sometimes unintentionally—by people in power. The sheer advantage of the priviledged, in
everyday discourse, makes even “niceness” seem a putdown. As with other forms of slight and offense,
the Scottish ballads and Shakespeare’s plays are full of this: people are
outraged at failures to recognize superior status, but even more outraged at
having their noses rubbed in someone else’s social superiority.
Some cultures and
subcultures teach violent response to offenses as normal behavior (Baumeister
1997). Such “honor cultures” always track
societies with a bloody, unsettled, poorly controlled past. Killing, however, goes far beyond such
societies. Humans fall into rage states
not only when fighting immediate rivals for food or territory or mates, as dogs
and cats do, but also over issues that do not directly concern them: war with
remote enemies, malfeasance in distant countries, terrorist attacks in far-off
cities, political injustices to other groups of people. Humans specialize in offense, outrage,
antagonism, and hate, and will take any excuse.
Antagonism
is the opposite pole to Agreeableness on the Agreeableness scale of the widely
used Big Five personality test.
Worldwide, people range between the two extremes, and there is a
substantial inherited component, though much (I believe most) of one’s level of
agreeableness/antagonism is learned.
Highly antagonistic people are, of course, heavily overrepresented among
doers of evil, and are very susceptible to inflammatory rhetoric (Kaufman
2018).
People,
even quite antagonistic ones, are usually peaceful in ordinary everyday life,
and even helpful, generous, and tolerant.
Many are curmudgeons, even snappish or bigoted, but at least not
violently cruel. It takes some effort to
make them do deliberate harm to those who have not harmed them.
However,
it does not take much effort. Following
discovery of this fact among Nazi survivors, psychologists experimented with
students, seeing how easy it was to make them be cruel to other students. Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments with
faked electric shocks, Philip Zimbardo’s with students acting as jailers and
prisoners, and many subsequent experiments showed—to the horror of
psychologists and the reading public—that it was very easy indeed.
Zimbardo’s
experiment with a mock prison, at Stanford, had to be stopped within a week,
because the students took their roles too seriously (Blum 2018 criticized this
experiment, but has been effectively answered by Zimbardo, 2018). This led to major reforms of experimental
ethics, as well as to much soul-searching (Zimbardo 2008). Contrary to published accounts, Zimbardo did
not initially allow the “prisoners” to leave the experimental situation, and in
any case privileged white and Asian young men (as these students were) hardly
provide a realistic prison situation, given America’s racist and brutal prison
system (Blum 2018). However, Zimbardo’s
main finding stands: people, even the “best” young men, can turn into evildoers
with astonishing ease if they are following orders.
People
flip easily from a normal state—mild and peaceable—to an aroused state of
anger, hatred, aggression, brutality, or rage.
There is a continuum, but phenomenologically it often feels as if we are
dominated by either the good wolf or the bad one—not by an intermediate,
neutral wolf. Our enemies are not always
external. Suicide is the commonest
homicide. Next most common is killing family members.
We
have a choice. We must choose to be
angered, and can always choose to “turn the other cheek.” A punch in the face is hard to ignore (though
some can manage it), but by far the most anger we feel is over trivial slights
that can easily be ignored, or over social issues that may not concern us
directly. I am much more frequently
angered by reading about injustice, murder, or war in places I have never been
and involving people about whom I know nothing than I am by threats to myself. Reading the political literature, one
realizes that some people are outraged by the very existence of
African-Americans somewhere, or by the fact that not everyone worships the same
way. An excellent column by Ron
Rolheiser (2018) talks with some ironic detachment about the human proclivity
to moral outrage. Humans love to work
themselves up into anger, or even hysteria, about perfectly trivial issues
irrelevant to their own lives. Most of
us in the scholarly world know teachers who turn red in the face at such things
as bad grammar in student papers.
Indeed,
almost all the evil discussed herein is deliberately
chosen because of outrage over something that does not directly or seriously
concern the chooser. The Jews were
not really destroying Germany, nor were the Tutsi causing much trouble in
Rwanda, nor were the victims of Mao’s purges doing anything remotely worthy of
national outrage and mass murder. All of
us have encountered a great deal of everyday prejudice, bigotry, and open
hatred of people for being what they are, as opposed to what they may have
done. This too has been studied; Gordon Allport
(1954) reviewed early sources. Since
then a huge literature has accumulated (see below).
Robert
Louis Stevenson’s story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is uncomfortably compelling. We sense, somehow, that we could all go
there. Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase
“the banality of evil” (Arendt 1963) is also compelling. Indeed, evil is banal, for the very good reason
that it is usually done by the kid next door, or his equivalent.
Peace
came to Colombia after more than 50 years of conflict between the
government—often via paramilitary gangs—and FARC, which began as a rebel
organization but became largely a cocaine ring.
The paramilitary groups were little if any better. Both sides accommodated to and dealt with the
organized drug cartels. Thousands of
people were involved, and they committed the usual torture, rape, and murder
associated with such activities. With
peace came rehabilitation. Sara Reardon
(2018) investigated the process. She
quotes one of the rehabilitation psychologists, Natalia Trujillo: “I realized
not all of them are sociopaths. I realized most of them are also victims.” In
fact, it is obvious from Reardon’s account that the vast majority were closer
to victimhood than to pathology. They
were local people, some originally idealistic, swept up in a nightmare. Many were forced to fight to save themselves
and their families. Most of the combatants
have returned to ordinary life with varying degrees of success; some have been
killed by revengeful farmers and others who were devastated or had loved ones
murdered. Unfortunately, but predictably, the peace did not hold.
The way that ordinary people
can be caught up in senseless civil war is clearly shown. Similar stories from Liberia, Sierra Leone,
and other civil wars, back to the United States’ own, show this to be typical.
In
short, the vast majority of killing and harming in the world is done by people
“just following orders.” They range from
people mindlessly conforming, or even hating what they do, to enthusiastic
perpetrators who needed only the excuse.
Especially successful are orders to kill or oppress minorities or to
ignore their suffering when displaced.
Orders or requests to care for people and help them meet far more
resistance. The United States has faced
continual protests and objections over its exiguous and miserable government
safety nets, but no trouble finding soldiers for wars in the Middle East, and
Trump had no trouble whipping many of his followers into frenzies of violence
and hate. For better or worse—usually
for worse—people are easily mobilized by antagonism, but difficult to mobilize
by religious teachings of love and care for fellow humans. People are too apt to be spontaneously
antagonistic and destructive, simply due to overreaction to the negative. They hate trivial enemies, callously neglect
valuable but less-noticed people, and take too little account of the good.
The average human is
pleasant, smiling, friendly, and civil most of the time, but when threatened or
stressed he or she becomes defensive.
This usually begins with verbal defense or with passive-aggressive
sulking. It escalates if the threat escalates—usually
matching the threat level, but often going beyond it, in preemptive strike
mode. This is a necessary and valuable
mechanism when genuine defense is needed.
The differences between
people and cultures then matter. The
average human seems easily persuaded to wad up all frustrations, irritations,
threats, and hurts into a ball, and throw that ball at minorities and
nonconformists. This displacement and
scapegoating comes up over and over again in all studies of human evil,
especially genocide.
The
world is far from perfect. Wars, crimes,
and genocides happen. We must deal with
them. We are rarely equipped with
perfect ways of doing this. Cool,
rational action in the face of hostility requires both courage and the
knowledge of what to do.
Failing
that, action is difficult. The most
available and simple option is to follow the orders of those who do know, or to
conform with cultural norms that provide strategies for dealing with problems. The next most available option is to maintain
a front of hostility: to be touchy, aggressive, or fearful. Ideally, one can seek out the knowledge to
cope better, but this requires effort and time.
One can also flee, hide, become a hermit, act as virtuous as possible in
the hopes that virtue will prevail, or simply die.
Recognizing
this choice matrix makes the victory of the bad wolf more understandable. Facing a hostile world, people are prone to
let the bad wolf roam, or to follow the orders of those who do.
The model that
emerges, then, is one of ordinary people dealing with ordinary everyday
frustrations, slights, trivial hurts, and difficulties, who can easily be
persuaded by extremist leaders to direct their frustration at scapegoats. Scapegoating minorities to maintain control
by venting diffuse anger is the food of the bad wolf. Violence comes from directing diffuse
hate to a specific target. This is the
common theme of the books on evil listed at the beginning of the present
work.
Such violence sums up
into war and genocide when human agents with their own damaged agendas are
swayed evil leaders who are willing to go beyond normal social rules. This is the human response that evil leaders
from Caligula to Hitler to Trump have whipped up. The immediate cure is minimizing offense-taking,
but the ultimate cure is finding enough good in the world to balance out the
offenses.
Often, though not always,
these leaders, in turn, are the creatures of landlord or rentier elites wishing
to maintain control over income streams and resources. The deadly combination of propertied
interests, evil leaders, and frustrated masses is the common background of
modern mass killings.
Part II. Roots of
Human Evil
1. Human Nature?
Speculations
on human nature have taken place throughout the ages. The classic Christian and Buddhist views are
that people everywhere are basically good; evil is a corruption of their nature
by bad desires. The problem, according
to Buddhist theology, is giving way to greed, anger, and lust. The Christian tradition is similar; “love of
money is the root of all evil,” according to Paul (I Timothy 10). Most Confucians follow the great Confucian
teacher Mencius in seeing people as basically prosocial, corrupted by bad or
inadequate education. Many small-scale
and traditional societies hold that people are basically sociable and
well-meaning, but must develop themselves through spiritual discipline and
cultivation. Quakers speak of the “Inner
Light.” Modern biologists and
anthropologists have found it in the social and proto-moral inclinations now
known to be innate in humans.
Conversely,
the commonest western-world view is probably that of Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas
Hobbes and Sigmund Freud: people are basically evil, selfish, competitive, and
out for themselves at the expense of others.
This view goes back to the ancient Greeks; Marshall Sahlins (2008)
provides a full history of it. Social
behavior must be forced on them by harsh training. Hobbes saw “man in his natural state” as
being in a permanent condition of “warre of each against all” for resources
(Hobbes 1950 [1657]:104). Freud had a
darker view: Innate human nature was the
Id, a realm of terrifying lust, murderous hate, and insatiable greed. Both men thought “savages” showed “man in his
natural state”; they believed travelers’ tales rather than real descriptions,
and thought “savages” were bloodthirsty, cruel, and driven by the lusts of the
moment, with no thought of the future.
In fact, even without modern anthropology, they should have known from
actual accounts that small-scale societies are about as peaceful and orderly as
our own.
These dark views come
from traditional folk wisdom, which incorporates a good deal of cynicism based
on the common observation of people hurting themselves to hurt others
more. A worldwide folktale tells of a
man who is granted one wish (by an angel, godmother, or other being) but on the
condition that his neighbor will get twice what he gets; if the man wishes for
a thousand dollars, his neighbor gets two thousand. The man thinks for a while, then says “Make
me blind in one eye!”
Machiavelli,
Hobbes, Freud, and their countless followers assumed that society will force
people to act decently through powerful discipline. This is impossible. One cannot make mountain lions form social
contracts, or teach crocodiles to cooperate.
An animal that is naturally individualist, each animal competing with
others, cannot create a society capable of enforcing rules. Joseph Henrich (2016), among many others, has
pointed out that only an animal with cumulative culture, natural sociability,
and an innate tendency to cooperate could have social norms and expect
conformity to them. Hobbes, Freud, and
others expected far too much of human rationality. Rationality is notoriously unable to restrain
emotion. Ask any teenager, or parent of
one.
A
serious cost of the Hobbesian view is that by assuming people are worse than
they are, Hobbesians excuse their own tendencies to act worse than they
otherwise would. Hobbesian views have
always been popular with hatemongers.
The
other classical and mistaken view of humanity is the rational self-interest
view. The briefest look at humanity
instantly dispels that. People do not
act in their self-interest, and rarely act rationally in that restricted sense
(see e.g. Kahneman 2011). The
“irrational” heuristics that people use can be highly useful as shortcuts,
creating mental efficiency (Gigerenzer 2007; Gigerenzer et al. 1999), but they
constantly cause trouble when cool reason is needed. Human limits to rationality are now so well
documented that they need no further notice here.
The
rationalist view is a far more positive view of humanity than Hobbes’ or
Freud’s. It does not give much space to
evil; evil would occur only when it really pays in material terms, which is not
often. Unfortunately, irrational evil
appears much commoner in the real world.
Tyrants may often die in bed, but they often do not. Suicide bombers and other front-line fighters
for the wrong are obviously not advancing their rational self-interest. Straightforward shortsighted but “rational”
calculation does explain some bad acting, but does not explain people going far
out of their way to be hateful and cruel, or the common human tendency to resist
improving themselves and their surroundings.
Over the 5000 years of recorded history, countless people around the
world have chosen, over and over, to suffer and work and make themselves
miserable simply to hurt others.
Technology has often developed for war.
Rational choice could be believed as a general motive only because hate,
vengefulness, overreaction to slights, and irrational hate of nature are so
universal that they are not even noticed, or are considered “rational.”
The contrasting view also goes back to the
ancient Greeks, who wrote of human abilities to love, cooperate, and found
democracies. Christianity later built on
a view that people could love each other; the line “love thy neighbor as thyself”
goes back to Moses. However, few could
see humanity as innately good, or believe in virtuous utopias. There were always a few, but on the whole
belief in a “noble savage” view is largely a straw man. Rousseau did not believe any such thing (the
phrase actually comes from John Dryden), nor do most of the others accused of
having it. In so far as it is taken
seriously, it does not survive the many accounts of war in small-scale
societies. Even relatively “noble”-believing
sources (e.g. Fry 2013) cannot gloss over the frequency of killing in almost
all societies.
A
more realistic, but still dubious, take on humans comes from the
Zoroastrian-Manichaean tradition. This
tradition sees correctly that people are a mix of well-meaning, helpful,
prosocial good and cruel, brutal evil.
It further holds, less believably, that the good comes from the
immaterial “spirit” realm, evil from the flesh.
This view, which entered Christianity with St. Paul (see his Letter to
the Romans), lies behind the extreme Puritanism of much of western society—the
view that sees sex, good food, good wine, and dancing as Sins with a capital
S. Everything of the flesh tends toward
corruption. Good sex is the door to
hell. “The fiddle is the devil’s riding
horse,” according to an old American saying.
I was raised in a time and place when this view was widespread. The social revolution of the 1960s cut it
back sharply, but it keeps resurfacing. Yet, a great deal of human good comes via
those “sins.” Condemning these is
regularly used to distract people from the real sins: cruelty, oppression,
gratuitous harm, selfish greed, hatred.
A
deeper problem with the Manichaean view is that people are usually neither
saintly nor demonic. They are just
trying to make a living and then get some rest and relaxation. Their forays into proactive goodness or
proactive evil are extensions from ordinary low-profile getting along. This
leaves us with the Native American folktale: the two wolves, like the “good and
bad angels” that folk Christianity took over from Manichaean belief, are
symbols of the prosocial and hostile sides of humanity, of working with people
versus working against them.
In this sense, people are
not bad or good; they are good to kin and culturally constructed fictive kin,
bad to rivals, and neutral to everyone else.
There is a very slight positive bias, enough to have saved the human
race so far. But people will kill vast
numbers of distant strangers without thinking much about it, as King Leopold of
Belgium did—indirectly—in the Congo.
In general, people are far
better than the savages of Hobbes and Freud, but not as good as idealists or
rationalists assume. The hopeful dreams
of “positive psychology” and “humanistic psychology” have turned to dust. Ordinary everyday human life is full of
minor slights and disrespects, and of misfortunes interpreted as personal
attacks when they were not meant as such.
It is also full of minor kindnesses and helpful moves. From this constant low-level evil and good,
it is easy to move suddenly and unexpectedly to much greater evil or good. We
are always poised near the edge of flipping into violence or heroism. Everyday hurt and disrespect can be exploited
by evil leaders who whip up hate and deploy it against their victims—usually
the weak. Everyday good and care can be
stimulated by situations or by moral suasion, and people can be heroic. Often
the contrast is between “realism”—the cynical realism of evildoers—and hope,
often the unrealistic idealism of the best. People must often choose the ideals
or be lost to the cynics.
At
worst, intergroup competition leads to cruelty, viciousness, nastiness, greed
(here defined, recall, as hurting others by taking their goods for oneself,
without fairly compensating them), and other vices. We are still not sure how much these are inborn
tendencies—like minimal morality—and how much they are learned. Most authorities think they are learned. Others concentrate on the learned aspects. However, broad capacities to fight, hate, and
destroy are clearly innate in all higher animals. Humans seem to have more of these innate
cruel tendencies than do other animals, at least as far as “proactive” violence
goes. But real wolves—as opposed to the
ones inside us—have their own fights; normally peaceful and calm, they erupt
into violence when a new wolf threatens an established pack, or when a bear or
human or other enemy attacks (Clutton-Brock 2016). Dogs, domesticated descendants of wolves,
still engage in “resource guarding”; an otherwise peaceful dog, especially if
leashed, will attack anyone that seems to menace its owner. We are a predatory mammal; we can be expected
to act accordingly.
We
are gifted by our mammalian heritage with the ability to love, care, fear,
hate, and fight. These we share with all
higher mammals. We are also gifted with
the uniquely human ability to form complex, diverse social and cultural systems
that construct care, fear, aggression, and other natural drives in ways that
can amplify both good and evil out of all bounds.
People
are abjectly dependent on their societies.
We live in stark terror of rejection and ostracism. They therefore overreact, negatively, to any
challenge to their social standing.
Therein lies the problem of the human condition.
2. Evolution?
Any
animal must divide its attention between avoiding threat and getting
necessities of life. Thus, all animals
have a fight-flight-freeze response repertoire for dealing with the former, and
ways of dealing with the latter to obtain food, shelter, territory, reproduction,
and other needs with minimum danger.
They may be jealously protective of mates and homes. Animals compete for these, and social animals
compete for place in the group. Humans,
with far more complex social lives than other animals, add socially constructed
identifications with groups, their basic principles, and their identifying
flags (from skin color to religious beliefs).
Overreaction to threat is
selected for; thinking a poisonous snake is a rope is far less adaptive than
thinking a rope is a snake (to use the classic Indian example). Failure to find food in a day means a better
hunt tomorrow, but failure to identify a deadly threat means no tomorrow ever
again, for oneself and often for one’s genetic investment in young. Even plants react with fear; a chainsaw can
end in a few minutes a few centuries of investment in growth.
This is the ultimate
biological substrate of human reactions, including the human tendency to
overreact to perceived (and even imagined) threat. Humans seem about half dedicated to crushing
opposition, from criticism to competition, and half dedicated to peacefully
obtaining what they need and wish.
Feedback in perceived threat—deadly spirals—is made probable by the need
to react to even mild threat as potentially serious. Contingent variation in personal,
situational, and cultural factors prevents better prediction than a rough
50-50.
It is now well
established that humans are innately “moral,” in the sense that they have
natural predispositions to fairness, generosity, tolerance, welcoming,
acceptance, sociability, friendliness, and other social goods. (There is now a huge literature on this; see
e.g. De Waal 1996; Bowles and Gintis 2011; Henrich 2016; Tomasello 2016, 2019.) It is basically a rediscovery of what Mencius
knew in the 4th century BCE. People
are naturally interested in the world and the other people in it. More neutral are anger at real harms, and
desire to satisfy basic wants, including a desire for pleasure and beauty. Bad traits that appear universal, but
possibly not inborn, include hatred of nonconformists and structural opponents,
a tendency to grab desired stuff from others, a tendency to resent real or
imagined slights, and above all weak fear.
Excessive need for
control is notably a part of the picture, especially in intersex violence. In many species of mammals, will kill other
males and even their own female companions to maintain it (Clutton-Brock 2016:
Heid 2019 for applications to humans).
Intraspecific aggression and violence are universal in higher animals,
highly structured, and shaped by evolution (Clutton-Brock 2016). Even meerkats,
regarded by many humans as particularly cute, are murderous to rival groups;
females will hunt out and kill pups of neighboring packs (Clutton-Brock 2016:303).
The rapid transition from harmony, empathy, playfulness, and cooperation to
cold-blooded murder of weaker “others” is not confined to humans, or even to
large predators like wolves.
A few recent writers have
made important contributions to the study of human nature as producing good
(prosociality and cooperation) and evil.
Two stand out in particular for very recent work: Michael Tomasello and
Richard Wrangham.
Michael Tomasello, in A
Natural History of Human Morality, postulates that morals evolved in three
steps. First came natural sympathy,
developed from the loving emotions that all higher mammals feel for their
mothers and siblings; these are extended to other kin and ultimately to any
close associate, in human society.
Infants display this from birth.
Second, as humans evolved cooperative hunting and foraging, they learned
to respect, help, share with, and support their partners. Apes do not do this; they may co-hunt but
they do not share or cooperate more than minimally. Wolves and meerkats do, however. Third, and uniquely human, all social groups
have cultural moral repertoires. They
have long lists of “oughts,” almost always said to be divinely sanctioned.
Tomasello follows almost
everyone in arguing that the human tendency to cooperate evolved in
foraging. Cooperative animals could hunt
big game, find isolated honey trees and share the news, and work together to
catch fish. A bit of evidence he misses
is the parallel with wolves. Canids
scaled up from fox-like animals to hunt big game. However, their need to run fast denied them
the chance to develop the formidable claws that allow cats to be solitary
hunters of big animals. Wolves thus
learned to cooperate to chase and bring down large animals. This skill is seen today in the incredible
skills of herding dogs at coordinating their efforts. They not only have to know exactly what each
other dog is thinking and planning; they have to put themselves in the
positions of the humans and the sheep. I
once watched two shepherds and some muttish sheepdogs negotiate a herd of sheep
through a difficult traffic intersection in the Pyrennees. The shepherds did almost nothing; the dogs
had to work together, trusting each other to keep order in a deadly environment,
while understanding what the shepherds wanted and what the sheep would do. They managed this three-species balancing act
perfectly.
A good Kantian, Tomasello
looks to abstract rules founded on basic principles of cooperation and
mutualism. Tomasello is fond of citing
Christine Korsgaard for this approach, and she does indeed argue powerfully for
the Kantian view (Korsgaard 1996).
Kantian “deontological” ethics deduce rules from basic principles. In contrast, utilitarian “assertoric” ethics
hold that ethics are practical solutions to everyday problems (see e.g. Brandt 1979). It is fairly clear, ethnologically, that both
these methods of creating moral rules happen in the real world, and every
culture has a mix of high abstractions and pragmatic rules-of-thumb. Moral philosophers tend to emphasize one or
the other.
No other animals have
anything remotely like cultural rules that regulate whole large groups that are
not only not face-to-face but many involve millions of people who never meet at
all. As Tomasello points out, children
raised in human families learn these rules very early, but family pets do not
(Tomasello 2016:154, 2019; pets do learn to act differently in different
cultures, but only through simple training).
Tomasello admits that he emphasizes conformity and cooperation and that
people are frequently immoral (Tomasello 2016:161), but does not take into
account the actual alternatives within moral systems that allow people to
murder each other for purely moral reasons, from Aztec human sacrifice to
capital punishment. In a later
publication (Tomasello 2018) he admits that conflict must have had something to
do with shaping human moralities. Tomasello’s
Rousseauian view keeps him from addressing hatred, but one can assume, from his
work, that nonhuman animals can’t really hate; it takes too much long-view and
abstraction.
Tomasello sharply
contrasts apes and human infants. Even
before they can talk, human infants show a vibrant sociability more complex
than chimpanzees. By the time they are
three, children have reached not only a level of social sensitivity that
outdoes the ape; they also can thnk morally, reason according to what they see
others doing and thinking, and react on the basis of knowing that others will
expect moral or conventional or socially appropriate responses. Apes barely do anything like this; they show
awareness of others’ thoughts and fear of punishment and domination, but they
do not understand abstract social rules.
By the age of six, human children are rational, reasonable beings who
know how to apply the moral and pragmatic rules of their cultures (Tomasello
2019).
In fact, going Tomasello
one better, those of us who have raised children in other cultural settings are
aware that children know by three that there are other sets of social rules,
and by six they are masters of language-shifting, rule-shifting, and
norm-shifting depending on what group they are with. It was almost spooky to watch my young
children quickly learn that a mass of undifferentiated words must be separated
into “Chinese” (tonal, rhythmic, spoken with those outside the family) and
“English” (a very different-sounding language used with the family and a few
friends).
Tomasello continues to
see humans as basically cooperative, helpful, generous, and moral (according to
their societies’ codes, but never normalizing hurt or cruelty). They show astonishing levels of fairness by
three years of age, in contrast to apes, who simply grab anything they want
from weaker apes. He has plenty of
evidence, and has shown that such virtues are universal among children. However, much of his sample derives from child-care
centers in college towns, and this gives it a rather irenic balance. We who grew up in what my wife calls “the
real world” are aware of less harmonious child environments. They force children to choose right from the
start between the two wolves.
Recently,
Richard Wrangham has brought this issue to the foreground in his book The Goodness Paradox (2019). He contrasts reactive aggression—ordinary
anger and rage leading to violence—with proactive aggression, which evidently
started out as hunting, but was retooled far back in our evolution to become
planned, deliberate, often cool-headed violence. Compared to other primates, humans have much
less reactive violence. We are far less
violent than chimpanzees, in particular.
Even the peaceable bonobos rival us.
On the other hand, we display far more proactive violence—our raids,
wars, genocides, organized crimes, and the like are at least planned and
premeditated, at worst truly cold-blooded rather than passionate.
He then questions how we
could have evolved to do this. His
answer lies in our ability to cooperate to take down excessively violent
individuals. Even chimpanzees do this to
some extent. Humans do it quite
generally. Anyone reading old
ethnographies and accounts is aware of the extreme frequency of stories of a
psychopathic or hyperaggressive man (it is almost always a man) being quietly
eliminated. Often, four men will go out
hunting, three will return, and no questions are asked. Wrangham follows Christopher Boehm (1999) in
seeing this sort of take-down of a dominant or domineering individual as basic
to traditional societies.
Wrangham hypothesizes
that this happened enough to influence human evolution. It selected against reactive aggression, but
selected for proactive aggression. Other
factors, such as the needs of foraging and food preparation, selected for
cooperation. Once cooperation was
established and used in proactive aggression, it was available to allow a group
to devastate the neighboring group that shows less solidarity in war.
This theory is neat,
consistent, and plausible, but there is no real evidence for it. No one has counted the number of males
eliminated by cooperative execution.
Moreover, Wrangham weakens his argument by showing that cooperative
execution is very often—perhaps usually—invoked against nonconformists, often
meek and innocent ones, rather than against bullies and psychopaths. In fact, it appears from the accounts that
bullies and psychopaths very often invoke the violence themselves, and execute
the weak—especially weak potential competitors.
This would select for violence,
not against it. It seems that we will
have to get better data, and to explore other possibilities.
In any case, Wrangham
seems to have at least some of the story.
Truly inborn is a strong tendency to form coalitions that act against
each other and, in the end, against everyone’s best interests. Samuel Bowles and others have explained this
as developing in feedback with solidarity in war. Those who stand together prevail, wipe out
the less cooperative enemy groups, and leave more descendants (Bowles 2006,
2008, 2009; Boyer 2018; Choi and Bowles 2007).
This is known as “parochial altruism.”
Individuals may not be locked in “warre of each against all,” but groups
very often are. Richared Wrangham
(2019:133-134) dismisses this, finding too little evidence of self-sacrifice
for the group or large-scale pitched battles in hunter-gatherer warfare. This is not exactly relevant. The only requirement is for groups to be
solidary and mutually supportive; individuals do not have to go out of their
way to sacrifice themselves. Moreover,
Wrangham has not adequately covered the literature. There is much evidence for large-scale
raiding, small but bloody battles, and defensive aggression among hunter-gatherers
(see e.g. Keeley 1996; Turney-High 1949).
Serious and dangerous war is found in all the well-studied sizable
nonagricultural groups, such as the Northwest Coast, Plains, and California
Native peoples. Wrangham was apparently
misled by his focus on tiny hunter-gatherer bands that do not have the manpower
to support large wars.
A different view is
provided by Samantha Lang and Blaine Flowers (2019). They begin from the other extreme: the
phenomenon of individuals caring for others who have terminal dementia and thus
can never pay back any debts (material or psychological) to their
caregivers. The vast majority of such
caregiving is within the family—60.5% from children, 18% from spouses, most of
the rest from other relatives—but even this is “irrational” in economic terms,
and even in biological terms, since it costs the caregivers and prevents them
from investing more in their children.
Moreover, the residual 5% of care is often given by devoted volunteers,
who simply want to help others. They note
that all this can simply be seen as an “exaptation” from inclusive fitness—if
we are selected to care for kin, we have to care for all kin—but also note that
no nonhuman animal is known to do this (though there are some anecdotal records
of group-living predators supporting disabled members).
Yet another view comes
from work of Oliver Curry, Daniel Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse (2019). They hold that people evolved through
cooperation, and that cooperation was then constructed as morality. In their “morality-as-cooperation” theory,
there are seven basic values:
“Allocation of resources to kin (family values)…, coordination to mutual
advantage (group loyalty)…, social exchange (reciprocity)…, contests between
hawks (bravery) and doves (respect) [that is two things]…, division
(fairness)…, possession (property rights).”
These they break down into a list of specific values that are very
widely held; for instance, family values start with “being a loving mother,
being a protective father, helping a brother, caring for a frail relative,”
(Curry et al. 2019:54). They look at 60
societies around the world, finding all that are well reported have some form
of all these, except for fairness, which is spottily attested.
To a biologist, the only
reasonable explanation is that selection originally operated as it does in all
higher animals, through inclusive fitness:
mutual care is deployed among families to maximize genetic success over
time. This then can be extended along
ever-wider kinship lines, and to increase in scope to include in-marrying
spouses (typically women, in traditional human societies, though in many
agricultural societies it is the men that move). Then further increase of scope takes in whole
communities, perhaps via in-laws and distant cousins. The defining moment (or long period) in the
history of humanity was when we extended kinship to include culturally
constructed relatives. This in turn
derives, at least in critical part, from the need to marry out—not only to
prevent inbreeding but to build solidarity with neighbor groups.
By this time—the time in
the past when kinship extended so widely—the link with genetics is essentially
lost. The huge groups characteristic of
modern human societies can form. We can
freely adopt strangers’ children, marry people from other countries, and devote
our lives to helping humanity. However,
perhaps the most universally known social fact is that we continue to privilege
close family members, and to build solidarity by self-consciously using family
terms: Bands of brothers, church fathers and mothers, sisterhoods, fellow children
of Adam and Eve. A very widely known
proverb (I have heard and seen it in countless forms) summarizes the normal
human strategic condition: “I against my brother; my brother and I against our
cousin; my cousin, brother, and I against our village; and our village against
the world!” The closer we are to others,
the more solidary we feel with them.
Aggregating along kinship lines allowed Genghis Khan and his followers
to build world-conquering armies by widely extending kin claims and tolerance
of difference. On the other hand, the
closer we are to others, the more they can hurt and anger us. They are around us more, and we are
psychologically involved with them.
Their opinions matter, and their help is necessary.
Solidarity
in the face of attack by an enemy group is a human norm. It is probably an evolved behavior, selected
for by that situation occurring frequently over the millions of years. Samuel Bowles (2006, 2008) held that it came
from the tendency of larger groups to kill out smaller ones. Since these groups had cores of relatives,
kin selection operated, and gradually wider and wider circles of kin would be
solidary, as people evolved or learned the ability to demand loyalty, detect
disloyal members, and punish them. By
that model, violence against outgroups would have evolved along with detection
and punishment of nonreciprocity within groups.
So long as it is actual defense against an attacking enemy, group
loyalty in violent confrontation is a matter of necessity.
Most
groups are peaceful internally but often at war with neighbors. These are impossible to explain from old,
simplistic models of human behavior. How
could Hobbesian savages or Freudian ids differentiate so cleanly? How could virtuous “noble savages” be so
bloody to their neighbors? The only view
of humanity that allows it is one in which humans are usually living ordinary
low-key lives, but can easily be motivated to support their group in conflict,
and somewhat less easily motivated to be peaceful and proactively helpful.
This
makes evolutionary sense. Groups need to
exchange mates, to avoid inbreeding.
This means that selection cannot totally favor one’s own genetic
investment all the time. In fact, there
is a paradox: one can maximize one’s own genetic advantage only by having
children with a genetically quite different mate. The classic arguments for genetic
determination of selfishness all founder on this rock. On the other hand, groups also compete for
scarce resources, such as hunting grounds.
If there is enough food, larger groups will outcompete smaller ones, and
will also have enough genetic diversity within themselves to allow
endogamy. The ideal group size seems to
be around 50-100, which, in fact, is the size of the usual human face-to-face
group (Dunbar 2010). Such groups tend to
be parts of larger associations, typically around 500, a figure consistent from
the number of speakers of a given language in hunting-gathering societies to
the number of Facebook friends that a moderately sociable person has; very
often, the groups of 50 are exogamous, but the groups of 500 are largely
endogamous (Dunbar 2010).
In
modern societies, groups cross-cut each other, and an individual may have one
reference group that is “neighbors,” another for “workmates,” another for
“religious congregation,” another for “hobby,” and so on. This makes it possible to shift groups and
loyalties, a point highly relevant to genocide, where an individual can
suddenly change from highlighting “neighbors” to highlighting “ethnicity” and
killing such neighbors as are suddenly shifted from one to the other. Such individuals often shift back after the
genocide. This is notably attested for
Rwanda (see e.g. Nyseth Brehm 2017a, 2017b).
Recently,
Mauricio González-Forero and
Andy Gardner (2018) set out to test what model fit best with what we know of
the evolution of the human brain, which more than tripled in size in a mere 2
million years—incredible speed for the evolution of a basic organ. These authors needed to take into account the
origin and dispersal of humans from east Africa between 150,000 and 70,000
years ago. Their enterprise was highly
speculative, involving assumptions that may be wrong, but at least they had
considerable data on the genetics, dispersal rates, and behavior of the humans
in question. They conclude that
conflictual models of human evolution are not supported. Conflict is too costly. Animals that fight all the time would not
develop large brains—in fact, they probably would not survive at all. Human conflicts are indeed costly, reducing
cooperation even against the others (Aalerding et al. 2018; see also De Dreu et
al. 2016).
Simple sociability as a cause of
complex behavior is even less well supported.
They found that highly social animals generally have smaller brains than
closely related, less social species. Care
substitutes for thinking. They conclude
that only ecology can account for it. A
positive feedback loop exists between finding more and better food and having a
bigger, better brain. More brain enables
us to find, select, and prepare highly nutritious food. Humans have adapted increasingly over time to
seek out rich patches of good food.
Graeber and Wengrow (2018) hold that
humans probably evolved in larger and more complex groups than usually thought,
and that problems of equality and conflict are endemic to such groups, which
then develop ways to cope. Such coping
may be successful or may not be. As I
have pointed out (Anderson 2014), an animal that can find rich patches of food
can support a large group. Best of all,
we can talk, and thus tell the group that there is a dead mammoth behind the
red hill, or a lion in wait beyond the stream.
González-Forero and Gardner have
not explained how humans became so violent.
The obvious answer, avoiding the high costs of conflict, is that humans
evolved to move rapidly into new habitats, displacing smaller groups they found
in the way. The resulting gains would
outweigh the costs of conflict. This has
happened countless times in history; it surely happened countless times in
prehistory. Human hatred of opponent
groups and disregard for nature must come in part from predatory expansion.
People also have rather poor innate
controls on killing off their food supply.
Most human groups have learned how to manage sustainably, but they often
overshoot, and in any case the learning was originally done the hard way, if
local myths and stories are any guide.
Traditional peoples usually have tales of overhunting and then starving. Children are told such stories with the
morals clearly spelled out.
The
nearest to a common thread in the evolution of human badness is “my group and I
at the expense of others.” One’s group
usually comes first. Cross-cutting and
nested allegiances make groupiness problematic, however, affording hope for
more solidarity.
The imperative human need
for society—without which we cannot normally survive—makes ostracism and
rejection the most frightening of possibilities. People become defensive at the slightest
hint of it. Antagonism, aggression, and
stark fear result. Anger and insecurity
lead to defensiveness and sour moods.
3. Human Variation
All humans must satisfy
basic physiological needs, including genuine physical needs for security, control
of our lives, and sociability. Beyond
that, people are highly variable. They
vary along the now-classic five dimensions of personality—extraversion,
openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neurosis—from total introverts
to total extraverts, from rigid closure to expansive risk-taking, and so
on. Some of this is known to be highly
heritable. Much is caused by culture and
environment. Early trauma actually
changes gene activity (epigenetics).
Even gut microbiota are credited for affecting behavior.
From what has been said
above, one would expect the most relevant variation to be in weakness, insecurity,
and tendency to anger, and that is what we find. The combination makes people defensive. They become the people who “have a chip on their
shoulder” and “have an attitude.” Being
weak and insecure makes one highly reactive to threat or harm, and apt to be
passive-aggressive about it. Being
insecure and angry leads to the barroom brawler and similar folk characters. Being weak, insecure, and angry, whether
dispositionally or situationally, leads to overreaction: escalation of
defensive behavior, often to violence. Note that “situationally”; individuals
can be very different at different levels of threat and harm. Yet disposition always matters. Some people have enough strength of character
to stay unbroken in tyrants’ prisons. At
the other extreme, the tyrants themselves are often living proof that a weak,
insecure, hostile person who has assumed total power will still be weak,
insecure, and hostile.
Beyond that, whether they
are violent are not depends on what they have learned—culturally, socially, and
personally. Individuals violently abused
in childhood very often become violent adults.
Mass murderers and major bullies are virtually 100% certain to have been
abused physically (see Batson 2011; Baumeister 1997; Zaki 2019; and other
sources on the good). Similarly,
cultures constructed by people who have long been weak, insecure and subject to
abuse (and thus anger) naturally put a high value on defensiveness and
“honor.” Such is the history of the
border-warrior cultures at the fringes of old and oppressive civilizations, of
oppressed subcultures within dominant cultures, and of subcultures of anomie
and alienation.
Conversely, the more
people are self-confident, secure, and self-controlled, whether dispositionally
or situationally, they can damp down responses to challenge, and react
rationally and coolly. The human average
seems to be toward the more weak, insecure, and angry end, if only because we
all start that way as infants.
Self-efficacy (Bandura 1982) must be learned and developed.
Competitive distinction
is challenged easily, and social disrespect and slighting become pretexts for
revenge up to and including deadly force.
Anti-intellectualism follows when people insecure about their own lack
of self-improvement and education are rendered really uncomfortable about it,
either by direct insults or by seeing better-qualified but “inferior” people
rise. Much of America’s all too
well-known anti-intellectualism and anti-“elitism” comes from people in dominant
groups who see people from less prestigious groups moving up the educational
and cultural ladders.
Deviation from the
mythical-average person described above occurs because of cultural and social
teachings, specific insecurities, general perceived level of threat, and
personality traits such as openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. More specific learned themes, such as how to
show anger, how to be violent, and whom to hate, then come in as the final
stage of shaping the bad and good wolves.
A
few resist the pressures to kill during mass genocides. They have strong internal controls on
aggression. Others are less constantly
moral, but most humans have a great deal of innate empathy—abilities to feel
others’ emotions and sensations, understand them, and act accordingly (Denworth
2017).
Some
few, on the other hand, seem genuinely evil.
They seem almost incapable of acting without harming someone. These are generally called sociopaths or
psychopaths: people who appear to have
been born without a moral compass and without a way of acquiring one. Others seem moral enough most of the time but
apt to lapse into uncontrollable violence.
These are not insensitive individuals.
Unlike autistic people, who are usually well-meaning despite lack of
social abilities, psychopaths and hyperaggressive persons often seem to have
preternatural social skills. “A person
with autism spectrum disorder has little ability to assume the perspective of
someone else. Psychopaths, on the other
hand, understand what others are feeling but have a profound lack of empathetic
concern” (Denworth 2017:61; cf. Baskin-Sommers et al. 2016). They may have anomalies in neural connections
in the brain. Serious killers may be far
more troubled than ordinary psychopaths.
The one mass murderer I have known was both mentally deficient and
severely disturbed. By contrast, people
I have known who killed in war were perfectly normal. They were also traumatized by the
experience.
Sociopaths
seem residents of a different world.
They lie without a second thought, and, even when it clearly is against
their better judgment, they seem to prefer dealing treacherously and unfairly
with others. Ordinary rational
self-interest simply does not work for them.
I have known several who regularly wrecked their lives by wholly
gratuitous betrayal. They simply could
not understand why betraying others brought outrage. On the other hand, one of
the sociopaths I knew was a prominent politician, and—though rather notorious—has
never been singled out as being worse than many colleagues.
Psychopaths
and sociopaths are, in fact, notoriously successful in business and
politics. Published descriptions of
genociders make many of them seem psychopathic, but tests are obviously lacking.
There
are also extremely aggressive individuals, sadists, and others who verge on
psychopathy; most have a background of brutal abuse in childhood, by parents
and peers, or of major trauma. Some may
simply be “born that way,” others appear made by environment; a harsh, hostile,
critical environment worsens all.
Mass
shooters are so common in the United States that profiles of them have been
assembled by researchers. The shooters
are very often white supremacists targeting ethnic minorities (Cai et al. 2019). Jillian Peterson and James Denaley (2019)
report a more specific set of findings: “First, the vast majority of mass
shooters in our study experienced trauma and exposure to violence at a young
age. The…exposure included parental
suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence and/or severe
bullying….Second, practically every mass shooter…had reached an identifiable
crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting.” This included things like job loss and
relationship failure (often, I take it, related to progressive alienation of
the shooter). Third, most of the
shooters had studied the actions of other shooters”—they were diligent
students. “Fourth, the shooters all had
the means to carry out their plans.”
They could get guns, including illegal guns, though most simply bought
guns at the store or used ones already in the home. “Most mass public shooters are suicidal, and
their crises are often well known ot others before the shooting occurs. The vast majoirty of shooters leak their
plans” but are not taken seriously, nor are they reported to authorities.
Most
people, however, are peaceable, empathetic, and reasonable most of the
time. We can arbitrarily guess that at
most 10% of humanity are deeply evil—not always acting badly, but doing evil on
a regular enough basis to produce serious net harm to their communities. This 10% figure is supported by crime rates,
vote totals for extremist candidates, and common experience. Others show social dominance orientation (see
e.g. Altemeyer 2010; Guimond et al. 2013), looking favorably on high levels of
social and economic inequality in society and to patriarchal social
organization. Dominance is not a human
need, but certainly is a widespread want, and the simple desire for it is a
major source of evil. Most mammals have
dominance hierarchies. Humans are
notably lacking in innate tendencies in that direction (Boehm 1999), but very
often develop them anyway, especially via top-down hierarchic systems.
These
dubious actors can be balanced by the best 10% or so: the individuals who never say an unkind word,
are unfailingly sensitive and considerate, give gifts and donations freely and
save little for themselves, and devote their lives to careers in healing,
teaching, charity, and aid. The sad
evidence of the genocide literature suggests that even such people can be
corrupted, though only with difficulty.
The reasons for such variation in mentality are partly unknown, partly
developmental. The latter shall be
discussed below.
The
other 80% (approximately) of us are the people within whom the two wolves
constantly compete. Common experience
suggests that there is a straight and unbroken continuum from the most evil
through the bloody-minded to ordinary middling souls, and then to the 10% who
are near sainthood. There are continua
from acceptance to rejection of groups, from positive to negative-sum gaming,
from laudable ambition to power-madness, from necessary defense against enemies
to defensiveness based on cowardly fear.
It is hard to cut these continua.
Defensiveness attenuates
as it moves up toward actual strength and reasonableness, the cures. It also attenuates if people collapse into
total fear. It moves outward to callousness
and then thoughtlessness. The core mood
is more or less that of a child’s temper tantrum: a mix of violently negative emotions from
which fear, anger, and rage slowly differentiate as the child grows or as the
adult gets better control.
The
common ground is simple: wanting social and economic security, especially in
social acceptance and position. What
matters is how rationally and cooperatively one seeks to satisfy those wants.
One
might think of a continuum from a clearly demented psychopath (like Mexico’s
drug-gang leaders) to an ordinary criminal gangster, then to a schoolyard bully
grown up to be a spouse abuser, then to an ordinary person who grumbles and
scolds and occasionally fights but rarely harms anyone, and then onward to a
basically good and honorable soul who loses her temper on frequent occasions
but does no worse than that, and finally to a truly virtuous individual—say,
the leader of a charitable medical group.
I have observed this continuum everywhere I have been, and through
literature and psychological studies we can be sure it is essentially
universal. People everywhere range from
very bad to very good, as they range from passive to active and from weak to
strong (the classic three dimensions of agentive evaluation; Osgood et al. 1957).
Common
experience also teaches that those of us in the 80% tend to weasel good and
bad. We drive too fast. We eat at cafes that underpay their staff. We take advantage of cheap deals when we know
there is some dirty game on. We skimp on
public commitments. We spend too much
time giving nibbles to the bad wolf while trying to serve the good one. We shirk, laze, dodge responsibilities, and
commit the “deadly sin” of sloth. We
are, in short, frail and fallible humans—and require strong social standards backed up by law to keep us on the
straight and narrow path (as discussed at length in Henrich 2016). Religious and moral ideals must be enforced
by social conventions. Most of us have
experienced life in communities where traffic laws were laxly enforced, and
have seen ordinary “good” people slip into more and more dangerous driving
until accidents make the police take better note.
Allow that people are, on
average, 50% good and 50% bad. (Again,
these are guesses. We have no real
measures.) The worst 10% can win by
mobilizing the 40% who are worse than average but not totally evil, and then
getting enough of the relatively good to make a majority. In fact, Hitler was elected with a bare
plurality, not a majority, and the same is true of many elected evil
leaders. Trump was elected by 25.7% of
the voting public, with almost half of registered voters not bothering to vote
at all.
Half good, half bad
predicts the institutions we see in societies: they are meant to preserve the
good, and to redirect the bad to fighting “the enemy” rather than the rest of
us. And they never work perfectly.
People
vary from best to worst along several dimensions. The most important of these from the point of
view of explaining evil are agreeableness vs. hostility, tolerance vs. hatred,
peacefulness vs. violent aggression, help vs. gratuitous harm, reasonable vs.
unreasonable, open-minded vs. closed, and charity vs. greed. Behind these are deeper continua: Individual
to group; weak to strong; attacking weak to attacking strong; courageous to
cowardly; greed to defensiveness; rational to irrational. People can hate those richer and more
powerful, or—more usually—the weaker.
They can be cold and callous or savagely furious.
All these are related. All are consistent with the “Big Five” and
“Hexaco” personality theories. The Big
Five personality dimensions—extraversion, openness, conscientiousness,
agreeableness, and neuroticness—are predictive: individuals low on
agreeableness and high in neuroticness are more apt to do evil than those who
are the reverse. People very low in
openness become conservatives, and thus often involved in fascism; those very
high in openness may become left-wing rebels.
There are, however, good or evil persons who are at the best or at the
worst ends on many or all measures. Social
pressures as well as personality are determinative. The Big Five (or Six) do not directly predict
levels of violence, aggression, competitiveness, or hatred. Genocide and other extreme mass-level evils
come from hatred, so it must be considered the worst of the lot, and though it
is probably commoner among the less agreeable and more neurotic it is well
distributed over the human species.
Degree of scapegoating, and targets of scapegoating, are also hard to
predict from basic personality factors; they are social matters, largely
learned, though the tendency to scapegoat others seems part of human nature.
Greed
is often regarded in the US as the worst of sins, a belief going back to Paul
on love of money. However, selfish greed
succeeds in mass politics only when it marshals support through whipping up
hate. The few rich must have the support
of millions of less affluent; these can be persuaded to act and vote against
their self-interest only by making them sacrifice their own self-interest out
of intemperate hate. We have seen this
in every genocidal campaign in history, as well as in almost all wars, and many
political and religious movements.
Moreover,
greed is often a social hatred issue; it is not really about material wealth,
but about rivalry for power—for control of people and resources. The normal expectation if one wants a
material item (for itself) is to cooperate with others to work for it, or at
least to work for others in a peaceful setting.
Smash-and-grab is not the normal or widely approved way to get goods. Neither is crime, ordinary or white-collar. The rich who desire endless wealth are not
after wealth; they are after social position and social adulation.
Really
extreme, high-emotion evil thus usually comes from social hatreds—whether due
to psychosis, greed for position, “honor,” extreme defensiveness, extreme need
to control others, extreme sensitivity to slights, or—most common and deadly of
all—displacing hatreds and aggressions onto weaker people or onto defenseless
nature. When not feeding from those troughs, the bad wolf tends to go to sleep,
leaving the field to the good wolf.
In
other words, people will kill in competition for goods, but more usually
negotiate; they kill for land in wars, but tend to negotiate there too. They kill in competition for power, which is
more dangerous since positions of power are necessarily limited. Above all, they kill for reasons of social
standing and honor.
Genocidal
killing goes further: it is usually focused on religion or political
ideology—givers of fundamental morals and of security. Where ethnicity is more the source of basic
values, ethnicity is the ostensible cause.
A pathological leader, or indeed almost any dictator, will be sure to
stress the links, identifications, group memberships, and reference groups that
provide the best opportunity for stirring up hatred and violence. This is the secret to extremist leadership:
make the most deadly links the most salient.
Recruiters for jihad, for instance, stress the Islamic, and specifically
Wahhabist, identification of people who might otherwise see themselves as
French, or Moroccan, or factory workers, or soccer players, or any of the other
cross-cutting loyalties we all have. A
genocidal leader will also do best to appeal to a majority that feels itself
threatened or downwardly mobile.
The
reasons for violence and evil are, in order, security, power, greed,
prestige/standing, and psychopathy (or basic aggressiveness), plus the critical ingredient: violence
and/or cruelty as preferred coping strategy. Anger and hate are the mediators, and hatred
is generally defensive. Even callous
bureaupathy has to start with someone who makes a deliberate choice to destroy
poor people to give more money to rich people.
Personal factors involved
are concerns of power, control, social place, and greed and other wants. The social and cultural contexts are
all-important, telling individuals whom and how much to hate. The worst individuals seek out each
other. They also seek out the worst
cultural and social values and attitudes.
This produces a strong multiplier effect, highly visible in right-wing
social movements. Cowardly
defensiveness, gain (not just greed but even routine jobs), power and control
needs, and innate aggression levels all play into such attitudes.
The same individual who is an
angel of help and mercy within his or her group can be a formidable soldier, a
suicide bomber, or a crazed killer when group defense is involved. In fact, the same individual can be
alternately angel and devil to his or her own significant other, as many
stories of domestic violence tell us.
Revenge
is often the most terrible of motives.
People tend to be at their very worst when thinking they are revenging
selves for slights, disrespect, or actual harms. This is when they cheerfully torture and
murder. Thus all genociders wind up focusing on a story of their group being
victimized by the opponent group or groups.
This is absolutely key to understanding genocide and extreme violence.
Revenge
is often for betrayal. Betrayal is
another common response of the human animal to threat and fear. Suspected betrayal can bring about real
violence. A vicious cycle can be
established, as in Shakespeare’s Othello.
Finally, different forms of violence
seem to accompany different personality profiles. Mass shooters are typically alienated young
males, usually right-wing. Domestic
violence is associated with high control need, as noted. Bullying, as we have seen, is associated with
glorification of physical strength and devaluing of intellectual qualities as
well as weakness. Sheer aggressiveness
can be a separate personality trait, as can the closely related “oppositional
personality disorder.” Spread over these
types are the general qualities of alienation, excessive control need,
excessive antagonism, resort to violence as first resort, and brooding or
ruminating about real and imagined wrongs.
These are the real foods of the bad wolf—the human qualities that we
must address to give the good wolf a chance.
4. Cultural Variation
Cultures
also vary. “Culture” is a general term
for learned, shared knowledge and behavior within social groups, above the
family level. Cultural knowledge is
constructed over time by interaction between group members. It can change rather fast, as when a
particularly violent period such as WWII forces people to confront issues they
often try to avoid.
Since humans will
inevitably compete for scarce resources, conflict is inevitable. All societies know theft, violence, and
treachery. All condemn these and have
mechanisms for coping with them. Especially
touchy are issues with affection, social support, and control. These may or may not really be limited, but
people often perceive them so. Power is
particularly problematical, since there is less and less “room at the top” as
one ascends a hierarchy. Conflicts,
especially over power and control, tend to escalate, creating fear and
stress. These in turn make people
defensive, leading to still more conflict.
We need not be Hobbesian to see that conflict is likely in the human
condition.
This being the case, all
cultures include a great deal of shared and often widely-accepted knowledge
about anger, violence, conflict, conflict resolution, and other relevant
matters (Beals and Siegal 1966). All
cultures include canonical rules for dealing with conflict and violence. All cultures have storylines and plans about
these matters. All cultures include
stories people tell to provide models of how to deal with violent conflict. Children are raised on stories explaining how
to defuse a fight. Adults go on to Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s history plays, China’s Three Kingdoms Story, Japan’s Tale
of the Heike, and on down, from these epic works to the latest Hollywood
action movie. People constantly refer
back to these model cases. Genocide
stories, especially the story of Hitler’s Holocaust, have become part of the
world’s knowledge pool.
Knowledge
from one realm is freely adapted to others.
We draw on knowledge of ancient history to understand modern war. We draw on knowledge of animal conflict to
understand the deepest roots of our own.
Drawing with the best judgment on the widest set of data is an ideal to
strive for, but biases—often culturally constructed—interfere. Clearly, changing cultural plans for dealing
with violence, dissent, and conflict is basic to understanding such processes
(Beals and Siegal 1966).
A pattern broadly visible
in eastern Asia is one in which both individuals and societies can flip from
extremely peaceful to extremely violent and back to peace. Chinese dynasties exhibit this pattern:
during times of strong government, they were very peaceful and orderly, but in
dynastic breakdown periods, violence became universal and appalling. Japan had similar flips, for example from the
rather calm Ashikaga shogunate to the civil wars of the 16th century
and then the peaceful and orderly Tokugawa shogunate. A modern case is Cambodia. The Cambodians were famously peaceful. They dropped rapidly back to peaceful
behavior after the meltdown in the 1970s that killed some 25% of the
population. Rwandans moved from genocide
to peace and order with surprising ease.
Like Cambodians, they are usually gentle and tolerant people, far from
the western media stereotypes of “savage tribal Africans.”
Still
other societies have chronic low levels of violence, fluctuating but never very
high. Still others, especially in the
Middle East and northern Africa, have fluctuated over time from constant
low-level violence to major outbreaks.
Some few, such as the Waorani of South America, are or were almost
continually violent. Clayton and Carole
Robarchek studied the Semai of Malaysia, among whom violence is condemned and
virtually nonexistent, and then for comparison studied the Waorani, who were
rapidly killing themselves out until missionaries persuaded them to be more
peaceful (Robarchek 1989; Robarchek and Robarchek 1998). The societies turned out to be strikingly
similar in economy, child-rearing practices, and other behaviors; they differed
in that the Semai dealt with conflict by flight and avoidance, the Waorani by
almost immediately escalating to violence.
Mountainous
borderlands tend to be famous for violence.
Think of the Caucasus and the Appalachians. Fertile plains are more easily pacified, both
because farmers have more to lose and because control is easier to exert. People in any setting may change. The Scottish borders that were once infamous
for violence—immortalized in some of the world’s greatest ballads—are now among
the most peaceable places on earth. We
have already noted the example of the Vikings, to say nothing of the
now-peaceful Waorani. When threats from
stronger neighbors were constant, and internal problems could not be solved
because of constant trouble, these societies were violent. When security within and without was
possible, they pacified.
A different way of
looking at society and culture concerns the form of economy. Overall, rentier societies, especially those
with servile labor, produce right-wing politics; ones dominated by secondary
and tertiary industries and hopeful workers often produce left-wing
activity. The United States has generally
been hopeful, so votes progressive in bad times, but often right-wing in good
times, to keep taxes low and industries growing. The rise of southern-style politics in the
United States, and its spread to the northern midwest, tracks the rise of
primary production and declining but still powerful heavy industry, and the
rise of giant firms vs decline of small ones.
In short, cultures and
societies, like individuals, respond to insecurity by becoming more defensive,
and to physical threat by becoming more violent. With confidence and security—from strength
and from secure leadership—they can and will change rapidly in more peaceful
directions. Of course, such facts deal a
death blow to the myth of “human nature.”
If Hobbesian devils can convert to Rousseauian angels in a few years,
and if whole societies can suddenly become violent and as suddenly stop, where
are the primal drives?
Societies must also find
ways to deal with the formation of sub-societies with different rules: feuding,
mafias, corruption, etc. Then there are
two variables: how well the society can enforce the rules, and how well its
members want to. The rich and powerful
are above the law to some extent in most societies, and they may be perfectly
happy to let mafias terrorize the general populace. On the other hand, a society as totally at
the mercy of gangs as El Salvador and Honduras are today, or as riven by
religious and tribal conflicts as Afghanistan, cannot long survive with a
crisis.
Social
differences are often in the cultural construction of bullying, power-jockeying,
and hatred. These can become idealized
and culturally taught, via religion and other ideologies. Nazism is the most obvious and extreme case
of a culture constructed from such bases, but it is only the most extreme of
many movements. World religions
eventually construct power via hierarchies, initiations, and other
institutions. All cultures construct
aggression through ideas about war and defense.
Religion usually includes peace, harmony, and nonviolence among its
ideals, but it is also the source of foundational beliefs and foundational
morals for many or most societies, and the most important source of security
for many believers. Devout believers who
depend on religion for both certainty and security often feel deeply and
directly threatened by challenges to their faith. The same goes for true believers in any
comprehensive ideology, from communism to fascism. Gods are usually either benign or a
human-like mix of creative good with all-too-human foibles (like Zeus and
Coyote), but all religions also postulate a vast host of evil spirits who mean
nothing but harm: demons, devils, bad winds, ghosts, demiurges, and countless
more. These projections of human fear
and hate into the supernatural realm fit Durkheim’s view of religion as the
collective representation of the community (Durkheim 1995 [1912]); they are the
community’s worst—and most often hidden—feelings, displaced outward.
Many
of the cultural groups that committed the worst genocides were famous for their
obedience to authority: Cambodians, Rwandans, Chinese, Germans, Indonesians…the
list is long. Many warlike and
independent groups also became genocidal, but the link with obedience is clear
enough to be thought-provoking The great
genocides—ones in which the populace in general seems to have gone mad with
blood—were generally in such societies, though the Turks and several other
exceptions can be mentioned.
Since
overreaction to negatives is the general problem, it follows that culture can
establish the idea that one should overreact. This regularly occurs in cultures of “honor”
(Baumeister 1997; Henrich 2016).
Defensiveness can seem moral in highly unstable societies.
Cultures
provide scripts and storylines and schemas for action. These cultural models (to use the
technical term) provide canonical ways to deal with or adapt to life. Most of them are adaptive and valuable, but
every bad type of action has its model too.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism drew on centuries of pogroms and massacres, well
scripted and following a set of plotlines.
Contemporary Islam provides accessible models for suicide bombing. In the United States, there is now an all too
well-known cultural model for mass shooting, followed in one form or another by
hundreds of alienated, angry, often sulking individuals—most of them young men
and many of them white supremacists or similar right-wingers (Cai et al. 2019). There is another cultural model for spouse
abuse; similar models of mistreatment exist in most other cultures. Other cultural models exist for criminal gang
behavior, robbery, suicide, and other violent acts. A desperate person needs only to activate the
model. He or she will learn what weapons
to use, how to obtain them, how to deploy them, and what to do next. Planning is simple and kept to a minimum.
We
have also seen above how social and cultural pressures act on everyone—even the
least alienated, and indeed especially the most conformist and
well-socialized—to get the vast mass of individuals to go along with genocide. Here, direct social pressure, including
threats of ostracism or worse, is added to the cultural models.
In
ordinary everyday violence, the bad wolf wins when a particularly susceptible
individual—aggressive, alienated, or simply angered beyond bearing—is subjected
to social pressure to act violently, and has an available cultural model of how
to do it. In war and genocide, everyone
is expected to join in and do their bit, and almost everyone does. In bullying, terrorism, and domestic
violence, only some do; they are alienated or desperate for control, and they
nurse their sorrows until an available cultural model becomes salient. Terrorists are usually persuaded by intense
pressure from their social group. In all
cases, violence depends on a prior development of anger, hate, and need to
assert control. Individuals get into a
tighter and tighter spin of negative emotions.
An agent-based approach (in the tradition of Ibn Khaldun and Max
Weber) allows us to see that humans do not just reflect their culture. They balance family, cultural group,
subcultural group, father’s people, mother’s people, spouse’s people, immigrant
neighbors, and last but not least their own interests as individuals. People are constantly faced with moral
choices of whom to go with and how much to cheat selfishly.
The hardest problem is how to deal with social criticism and
disrespect. The descendant of
territorial defensiveness in animals is human defensiveness about social place
and social position—“honor,” “face,” etc.
(Humans are not territorial in the sense most mammals are. We socially construct space in all manner of
free-form ways; see Lefebvre 1992.)
The great Greek tragedies, the best of the medieval epics, the
Scottish tragic ballads, and equivalent literature around the world (including
many Native American tales), reveal people in crisis situations, where they are
forced to reveal their deepest selves.
In the crises when ordinary life is disrupted, individuals are forced
into extreme good and evil behavior.
Many of these dramas turn on inescapable conflicts between two loyalties. Often, as in Scottish ballads and many Native
American stories, the drama turns on loyalty to true love versus loyalty to
family. The heroes and heroines are powerful, but
have the costs of their virtues, the fatal flaws that comes with their
power.
These stories may be the best ways to understand humanity and its
conflicts. Great literature strips off ordinary everyday conformity and reveals
the bare human in full glory or vileness.
Greek tragedies do this. So do
Medieval epics, Chinese classical stories, and other great works. Folk literature always contains such stories.
They are critically important for understanding humanity. First, they show that people are agents, not
mindless slaves of genes or culture or society; everyone has to deal with and,
hopefully, resolve such conflicts. Second,
they show that cultures are not homogeneous, and mindless conformity cannot
work indefinitely. There are cultural
models of different loyalties: loyalties to different groups that often come
into conflict. There are tradeoffs
between long-term and wide-flung interests and short-term narrow ones. There are conflicts over allocating
resources.
An inevitable conflict often
recorded in song and story is between security and advancement. Advancing in society requires taking some
risks. People usually and naturally act
to minimize risk for maximum advancement, but there are plenty of exceptions,
and they are often the leading entrepreneurs and inventors. Managing to try to make advancement
opportunities more secure is a major part of economic behavior for many of
us. Cutthroat competition is thus
stressful.
The conflict most relevant to the
present book is the one between loyalty and morality. When dictators whip up their populations to
commit genocide, this conflict becomes agonizing. Most people choose loyalty, as we have
seen. Many are perfectly happy with
it—they wanted to eliminate the minorities anyway—but many are not at all
happy, and have to be steamrolled into it.
Already noted is the inevitable conflict over rank and the resulting
problems with arrogance, humility, ranking out, and insult.
These songs and stories turn on
courage and on failure, on individuals against the world, and on opportunity
and challenge. They are the corrective
to dismissing and devaluing people. The
hero powerful against the storm, especially if the hearer or reader can
identify with that hero, is humanity in compelling form and inescapable
predicament.
In modern society, traditional folk
and elite societies, communities, and cultures are thinned down or extirpated. People are left to the tender mercies of
vast, impersonal governments and firms.
This not only disempowers them; it also robs them of those canonical
stories that once modeled behavior in conflicted times.
This out-of-control
inequality, and above all the sheer bigness, makes people feel weak, out of
control of their lives, and lacking in self-efficacy. They become timid, and succumb all the more
easily to toxic conformity and obedience.
Lost are such empowering and strengthening cultural forms as great art
and literature, and even ordinary civility and decency. Weakness and fear makes people desperate for
security, including material security; the result can look like greed, but is
actually cowardice.
6. Explaining
It: Fight, Flight, Freeze
People
are usually sociable, but react to threat as all large, strong animals do, by
fighting back. They are stressed not
only by direct threat, but by threat to their social position, and their sense
of control of their lives (Bandura 1982, 1986; Langer 1983).
The
fight-flight-freeze response is wired into the nervous systems (Sapolsky 2017,
2018). Faced with superior strength and
an escape route, an animal will flee; with no escape, it will freeze; if it is
cornered and attacked, it will fight, even against superior strength. This response is mediated through the ancient
limbic system in the lower back part of the brain. A threat is first processed by the amygdala,
which recognizes and catalogues it (the amgydala being also a center of memory,
as well as the center of much emotionality).
A message goes to the hypothalamus, where the center of the
fight-flight-freeze response occupies a small group of nuclei that release
aggressive behavior, including speeding up the heart, raising blood pressure,
and directing blood toward appropriate muscle and nerve systems (thus away from
functions like digestion). This area
sends messages down to the pituitary gland, attached to the bottom of the
hypothalamus. Hormones are released from
the anterior pituitary, and circulate through the body, stimulating—among other
things—release of adrenaline and cortisol from the adrenal glands (Fields
2019). Adrenalin and the bone-derived
hormone osteocalcin drive the actual physiological responses that are the core
of the fight-flight-freeze response (ScienceBeta 2019).
All this is under varying
degrees of control from the frontal and prefrontal cortex—very little in a
lizard, a great deal in a well-socialized human. In a human, “the frontal cortex makes you
do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do” (Sapolsky 2017:45,
emphasis his). That can mean doing what
is reasonable (foregoing a reward now for a bigger one later) or what is social
(foregoing a theft because it is morally wrong). Conversely, stress disorients. Sustained stress and fear lead to chronic
biologic responses that impair judgment and lead to heightened responses
(Sapolsky 2017:130-1360).
Under such conditions,
animals and people can flip almost instantly from peaceful, calm behavior to
extreme violence. This is the
biological substrate of the change from good wolf to bad wolf.
Humans have considerably
complicated the response. We are faced, more than other animals, with a
tradeoff between reacting emotionally and rationally. The medial frontal cortex, home of social
emotionality, dominates empathetic and sensitive choices, and—with other
regions—cognitive empathy (Kluger et al. 2019; Lombardi 2019). The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is more
involved with “cool, utilitarian choices” (Kluger et al. 2019:12). The ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrates
many of these, and processes morality and its social applications, as well as
cognitive interaction choices. It is
conspicuously absent in reaction of psychopaths to others’ pain (Lombardi
2019:20). More interesting, in
psychopaths, is their lack of connection between the reward processing center
of the brain—the ventral striatum—and the center for examining outcomes and
consequences, including emotional ones, in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex
(Lombardi 2019:29). A quite different situation is found in people on the
autism spectrum, who may be socially challenged but are generally well-meaning,
trying hard but often failing to be social; damage to the anterior cingulate
cortex is suspected. It seems that
differences in brain regions and connections lie behind a great deal of human
good and evil. This does not explain why
the same individual can transition so rapidly from one to the other.
In people, because of the
necessity to prioritize dealing with threat, hate is all too often stronger
than love, viciousness stronger than caring, defensive resistance to change
stronger than greed or desire for self-improvement. Chronic threat and stress crystallize the
fight response into hatred, the flight response into escapism, and the freeze
response into conformity or apathy. One
result is that polls often mispredict how people will act: people generally
answer that they want more wages, or better health care, or other positive
things, but then vote or act their hate.
This led to massive misprediction of the 2016 election results.
Flight can thus be into
video games and daydreams, freezing can be labeled “depression” or “laziness”
by psychologists or judgmental peers, and fighting is usually verbal rather
than violent. Still, all the limbic
responses are there, underlying the prefrontal plans and cultural instructions
that introduce the complexity. (Much of
what follows is derived from, or at least agrees with, Beck 1999 and Staub
2011; Gian Caprara [2002] has critiqued Beck’s model for being too narrow and
not covering a wide enough range of situations and contexts, so the model is somewhat
expanded here, following Caprara.)
The
most basic root of aggression is fear (on which see LeDoux 2015). Any animal capable of fighting will fight
when threatened or attacked, if there is no alternative. Animals also fight for resources: for mates above all, but also food, space,
and other necessities. This may involve
fear of loss of necessary resources, but often—especially with mates—it is
simply fighting to win desired goods.
Sheer discomfort—sickness, hunger, loss—can also make most animals more
aggressive or fight-prone. The order
is: Stressors; feeling of inadequacy or
frustration; defensiveness; then, if the bad wolf wins, hatred and aggression.
Grief
can also be a source of stress and thus of violence. The role of grieving in motivating suicide
bombing has been addressed by Atran (2010).
In many cultures, from Appalachia to New Guinea, grief over previous
killings leads to revenge, and is expected to do so.
The
human difference is that humans are compulsively and complexly social (Henrich
2016). They live by, through, and for
their social systems: families, communities, neighborhoods, networks, and—in
the modern world—states. Humans feel
fear when these communities are threatened.
Even humans not at all involved in a community will often feel fear or
anger over seeing it attacked. People
willingly die for their communities. We
routinely observe the heroism of soldiers sacrificing themselves in war,
parents dying to save children, suicide bombers blowing up supposed enemies
(Atran 2010; Bélanger et al. 2014), and even gutter punks dying for their drug
gangs.
Such
fighting, fleeing, and freezing are structured along social lines. The usual human condition, socially
constructed on the innate bases described above, seems to be kind, friendly,
and warm to one’s in-group, hospitable to strangers, hostile to opponent groups
in one’s own society, and deeply hostile to individuals in one’s own society
who seem to be a threat to one’s control or to society’s most fundamental beliefs.
The real problem is threat to social place and position, which can lead to
anything partner abuse to international war, depending on the scale. Threats to social beliefs lead to savage
persecution of “heretics.” Heretics and
minority religions are the victims of many of the very worst massacres. They usually live mixed in among the orthodox. Perhaps the intimacy is related to the
extreme violence of such persecutions. Cognitive dissonance can make people act worse
than they might.
It
is also universally known that people are most easily united by being
confronted with a common threat, especially a human threat—an invading army, looting
gangs, or simply those “heretics.”
Leaders and would-be leaders thus tend to seek or invent enemies.
Existential
threat—simple fear of death—also exacerbates hatred. In a fascinating study, Park and Pyszczynski
(2019) found that making fear of death salient to experimental subjects made
them become more defensive about their group identification and core values, and
more intolerant and antagonistic toward others.
They found, moreover, that mindful meditation could reduce this, and
eliminate it in practiced meditators, providing a rather unexpected and
potentially important weapon against hate.
Thus,
natural human tendencies to deal with fear by fighting or escaping can be
mobilized by leaders. All they need to
do is mobilize fear—whether it be fear of war, or economic problems, or change,
or minority groups getting ahead, or any other stress—and convince an increasing
sector of the population that this problem can be handled by removing some
group. Typically, people will redirect
anger they feel against targets unsafe to criticize, or even just anger from
stubbing their toes or having problems with the house, into hatred. Hate of the strong is unsafe to act out, so it
is displaced onto the weak. Scapegoating—hating
people or groups through displacement—is the most cowardly of the defense
mechanisms. Intolerance is a close
second. Denial, rigidity, and low-level
escapism are among others.
Doğan and collaborators (2018)
have found, studying modern Ethiopian societies, that war is much less likely
in egalitarian groups, because everyone is at risk and no one gets a huge chunk
of the spoils. In hierarchic societies,
the leaders are less at risk (young men do the dying) and yet get
disproportionate shares of the loot, as well as increased power. So they are happy to invoke war. The current world situation, where national
leaders are not only safe from fighting but often have never served in the
military, is an extreme case of this.
There is a whole
decision tree in the fight-flight response.
Responding to stress, people must decide—at some level, usually
preattentive—to fear it or not. They
then decide which of the three possibilities to choose, and at what level of
response—from verbal confrontation to murderous attack. They must then decide where to direct their
efforts. If they fight, they can direct
action against actual enemies, as in war and revolution, or displace action
against weaker parties instead of against the actual threat. This is a strikingly common response among
some animals, notably baboons. It is
clearly related to human bullying, and thus to the hypertrophied bullying that
is genocide.
The
basic principles of a cognitive-emotional explanation of evil can be summarized
as follows. First (and in this case
going back to Freud’s defense mechanisms), people tend to blame other
people—not fate, not the structures of the economy, not the weather, and most
certainly not themselves—for whatever goes wrong in their lives. The root of much evil is the belief that we
can fix our problems by controlling or eliminating other people, rather than by
rational means. This is particularly
true of people who have weak confidence in their control of their lives and
situations. (See especially Bandura 1982
on self-efficacy, and the rational-emotional psychology of Albert Ellis, e.g.
1962; the cognitive-behavioral work on evil of Aaron Beck 1999; also Baumeister
1997; Maslow 1970.)
Antagonism is the general cover term for
the usual sources of evil. It is usually
mindless, coming from culture, conformity, or orders. Its natural basis is the normal “fight”
response to threat, but it is increasingly distorted by weak fear, especially
when weakness is part of cultural norms.
The daily kibble of the bad wolf is frustration, resentment of trivial
or imagined slights, everyday irritation, rejection, disempowerment,
harassment. This is especially true if
one assumes the slights and minor rejections are due to malignant intent (Ames
and Fiske 2015). The raw red meat that
gives it strength and power to take over is social hate.
Political anger—which
appears to be the main anger in modern societies—is most certainly decided on:
one learns who to hate and persecute and how angry to get, and one must decide
to follow the leaders in this. The steps
one’s mind goes through in dealing with stress involve decisions at every
point. First, one must identify
something as a threat. Then one must
decide whether to react with flight or fight.
One must decide how much flight or fight to apply.
This requires attention
to what is actually causing the threat.
If one is being chased by a bear, no questions need be asked, but
dealing with widespread social problems is something quite different. Reasonable alternatives include distancing
oneself, resenting silently, turning the other cheek, being as pleasant or
fearless as possible, and just bearing hardship. From there, the next step is to actual
caring: helping, enjoying, working.
A more important
realization is that we are dealing with two phenomenologically different kinds
of emotionality. The fight-flight-freeze
response, and the fear and anger that are part of it, are normal. Quite different is the weakness and
consequent out-of-control fear that comes from personal lack of confidence,
lack of support, and lack of courage. Cowardly
emotions differ from these normal equivalents.
Honest fear in the face of a real threat is not the same as irrational
panic in the face of a trivial one. Real
anger—wrath at actual injury—is different from the fearful anger of a person
who has no confidence in his or her ability to control a situation, and
therefore hysterically overreacts.
Carelessness from sheer inattention to detail is not the same as defiant
sloppiness or toxic irresponsibility.
Love is not the same as dependence and controlling clinginess,
especially since the latter competes psychologically with real caring interest
in the other person.
In violence in general,
but especially in genocidal movements, these play out in different ways. The initial leaders and revolutionaries are
hard-nosed fighters, animated by hatred and opportunism but not scared of
anything. Very often they have been
devalued through no fault of their own: they are poor, or from marginal regions
(Napoleon’s Corsica, Hitler’s Austria, Stalin’s Georgia), or they are short or
disfigured, or something of the sort (cf. Dikötter 2019 for several cases). Far-right-wing acquaintances of mine (I have
known hundreds, over a long life) follow a pattern: they arr males, from the
dominant reference group (white in the US, land Cantonese in Hong Kong, and so
on), but neither affluent nor well-educated nor very successful. Accounts suggest that this is typical. Such people, from Napoleon to my
acquaintances, become resentful toward society, and make up in anger and
oppositional stance what they lack in social prestige. They are anything but weak and fearful. (This compensation theory of problematic
behavior has a long history and literature.
It has been abundantly qualified and nuanced; the simple form is not a
total explanation. See our usual
sources, notably Baumeister 1997, Beck 1999.)
The vast majority of
genociders and other killers, however, are weak and defensive—low in
self-efficacy, in Albert Bandura’s terms.
(See the thorough and insightful discussion of such matters in Bandura
1982, 1986.) They are the conformists
who require only social pressure from the leaders to turn murderous. Individual sense of weakness is much less of
a problem if the self-doubting person feels he or she has family or community
support. This should be obvious, but
requires some reflection. The kind of
support, the areas in which one is supported or not, and the people doing it
(family or friends or the wide world), all matter greatly. We all are weak at times, and defensive at
times. Most, perhaps all, of us feel
weak and defensive in the face of overwhelming threat or stress. It always sets a limit on our coping.
An important and
thoughtful recent study by Robert Bornstein (2019) puts this in real-world
situational perspective. Studying
domestic abuse (my prime model for genocide), Bornstein found sky-high rates in
two mutual dependence situations. First,
when a man is dependent on a woman for personal validation and she is dependent
on him for emotional and financial support, he feels a powerful need to control
her and she finds it very hard to escape.
Second, when adult children are dependent for financial support on an
elder who is dependent on them for physical care, elder abuse is highly
likely. In these cases, the problems of
lack of control and desperate need to assert it become obvious.
My sense is that the real
back story of genocide and similar mass killing is precisely this weak
defensiveness. Ordinary fear and harm
lead to the ordinary fight-flight-freeze responses. Weak defensiveness leads to a quite different
cluster of behaviors: above all
scapegoating and bullying, of which more below, but also to passive-aggression,
taking extreme offense at trivial or imagined slights, extreme jealousy and
envy, petulance, silent resentment, and similar mechanisms. Brooding about these is the real food of
the bad wolf. If I am right, the
back story of mass violence is the ability of strongman leaders who brag of
being above the law to mobilize latent weak defensiveness, resentment, and
frustration, and turn it against scapegoats.
They are the constituency that votes for such men, the passive citizens
that allow coups by such men, and then the obedient subjects of such men.
The worst of it is that
the more overwhelming the situation, the more weak and defensive we all
get. Hard times and strongmen bring out
the weakest and most defensive side of people.
This is the key reason why they are so easily mobilized to break from
passivity to hatred of scapegoats. The break point where the good wolf gives
way to the bad wolf, in every studied case of large-scale genocide and mass
murder, comes when the leaders get enough power and social visibility to
exploit weak defensiveness and other hatreds to flip the masses into genocidal
mode. As so often, Rwanda provides a
particularly well-studied case (see Nyseth Brehm 2017a, 2017b, and references
therein).
This explains the rarity
of people like Oscar Schindler standing firm against genocide. It requires a level of self-confidence,
self-control, and community-supported morality that very few of us have.
This is one half of the
explanation for political extremism. The
other will be discussed below: the conflict between groups that feel they are
downwardly mobile and those that are moving up.
This classic Marxian conflict drives much of world politics today.
It
is notoriously easier to unite people against a perceived enemy than for a good
cause (Bowles 2006; Henrich 2016). Thus,
evil tends to win, in the “real world.”
The larger the organization the more dangerous this tendency
becomes. An empire or a giant firm will
attract the power-hungry, and they will often rise rapidly, since they are
unencumbered by the scruples that restrain most of us. Since people follow their leaders, history
shows that people are considerably worse in aggregate than they are as
individuals.
People often unite more
easily against good others than against evil ones, because it is easier to go
after weaker and milder than against the powerful and brutal. Moreover, being good tends to be a small-scale,
personal activity, while hatred gets extended to whole classes of people. The weaker, more salient, and more physically
and socially close perceived enemies are, the easier to go after them. So evil often starts with domestic
violence. Even more often, it starts
with attacks on weaker neighbors or on oppressed minorities. Actual enemies are often the last to be
attacked, since they will fight back. It
is easy to unite people through conformity to exclusionary norms (Henrich 2016). Tolerance and openness, however, are a bit of
a psychological luxury; they sharply decline when people feel their mental
energy is exhausted (Tadmor et al. 2018).
Still more of a luxury is actual enjoyment; one must be out of threat
zone to relax enough to cultivate the arts of life.
The worst problems occur when power-mad
people figure out how to use morality to sell their drive for power. Religious hatred is the commonest way,
but nationalism, militarism, and communist and other revolutionary ideologies
have done as well. In the United States
we have seen hatred justified by opposition to illegal immigrants, by appeals
to law and security, and even by opposition to “hate speech,” which seems always
defined as strong speech by one’s opponents.
The
rich often want power and status, not money per se. (What follows is a skeletal outline of
material on power reviewed in Anderson and Anderson 2012, 2017; see also
Traverso 2019.) They thus will play
zero-sum and negative-sum games with the rest of us, because they want relative
positions. They want to be powerful more
than they want money (not that they mind having more of it also). Critical
is that Success, or Power and Control, or Wealth and Status, is their whole life
involvement, not just one thing they want.
Thus
we may say that evil is usually done for four reasons: callousness toward people who “don’t count”;
anger toward people who do count—very often loved ones and family that one
wishes to control but cannot control; hatred toward specific groups, almost
always scapegoated minorities; and hatred of actual enemies. Greed as a factor may lie behind these, but
it generally acts through them; the selfishly greedy dehumanize or disregard
their victims. This produces some
ambiguity. In a war, one must maximize
killing of the opposition, including civilians and ordinary unfortunates
drafted by evil but personally safe overlords.
Another
major background factor in evil is negative-sum gaming. This often involves seeing the world as
steadily declining, such that one can do better only by taking from
others. It views resources as
limited. This view tends to come from a
focus on social power and status, where positions really are limited and one is
controlling or controlled; economic welfare is more easily spread or increased
for all, but it too often involves competition over limited goods. Often, people who feel the world is getting
worse see themselves as hopelessly downward-bound; they see no way to slow this
except by taking more and more from weaker people and groups. This was visible in much of the voting for
Donald Trump. His backing was
concentrated among people who saw their groups as downwardly mobile. They saw their best hope in getting what they
could, while they could, at the expense of other groups. Fear is abundantly obvious in such cases. The resulting policies are hardly helpful;
taking oneself down to take others down even more—the suicide bombers’ logic—is
ruinous in the long run.
Hate
is successful at unifying society, blinding people to ripoffs and corruption,
getting otherwise unmotivated people to fight for their exploiters, and
otherwise allowing evil people to get the mass of ordinary people on their
side. The main generalization is that
the more deeply important a social identification is, the more hatred it can
mobilize. Religion so often leads to
especially irrational and extreme violence because it is about basic
issues. Yet, far less important matters
can cause fighting; even sports team rivalries may lead to war (Anderson and
Anderson 2012).
The
range of behaviors goes on to touchiness about “honor,” overattention to
negativity, holding people to ridiculous standards, rage, overcontrolling,
dominating, domineering, general antagonism, inimical attitude, and finally
violence and murder. Common or universal
is an attitude that everyone’s bad traits are what count; their good does
not. People become rigid and judgmental.
Minor slights become cause for murder. These can be at individual or group levels. Mass shooters fit the profile: alienated,
usually young, males, dealing with threats to personhood or social place by
indiscriminate murder-suicide. Ability
to think rationally or morally suffers in proportion. Ability to enjoy and love suffer too (Bandura
1982, 1986).
The
common ground here is insecurity leading to irrational levels of harm to the
“threatening group” or “the competition.”
The worst and commonest reason is direct threat to one’s personhood. Following that come desire for wealth, power,
control, prestige, status, lifestyle.
Always, in group hate,
there is either a massive devaluing of certain groups or a general
defensiveness, and usually both. The
front story is actual evil or good; the mid story is the emotions and feelings
that motivate; the real back story is destructive competition versus
cooperation. The ultimate back story is
individual defensiveness, weakness, neurosis-psychosis, and other psychic
factors.
Sidebar
The basic axioms of
authoritarianism are:
Since I’m in power, I’m
better than you.
My first need is to
keep you under control.
Your differences from
me—especially in such basic matters as religion and ethnicity—are bad:
threatening, inferior, inappropriate, offensive.
You must be kept weak.
Since raw fear is the
easiest and most straightforward way to do this, torture and cruelty are
central elements of power and discipline.
But, since those attract resistance, in time they must be softened by an
ideology of “good” and “ideals” plus development of a socio-political-economic
structure that keeps the weak down.
The rulers, or would-be
rulers, are the Chosen People.
“Progressives” are often as bad in this regard as other bigots.
I’m more powerful than
you, so I make the rules. This holds all
the way from “I’m the mom, that’s why” up to the dictator level.
If
people learn rational or common-sense ways of coping with fear and threat, they
are less likely to fall into hatred and toxic conformity. If they do, however, they may become
authoritarians. The “authoritarian
personality” created by Freudian mechanisms (Fromm 1941) has not stood the test
of time, but “authoritarian predispositions” leading to an “authoritarian
dynamic” are now well attested and studied (Duckitt 1994, 2001; Stenner
2005). They are called up or exacerbated
especially by normative fear: fear of the breakdown of the social norms that
give what the authoritarian mind considers necessary structure to society. These norms typically involve norms that keep
minorities and women “in their place,” and otherwise create a rigid top-down
order. Learned helplessness (Peterson et
al. 1993) often leads to toxic conformity.
Authoritarian
predispositions and behaviors may include devotion to strongmen, hatred and
fear of homosexuals and other norm-benders, love of stringent punishment for
lawbreakers (especially those low on the social scale), militarism, and similar
conditions. There is, however, a great
range of ideology here, from the near-anarchist violent right wing to the
genteelly hierarchic older businessmen of a midwestern suburb. It seems likely that we are dealing with
several different responses to weakness in the face of threat, the common
denominators being a need for a strong-man leader and a need for underlings to
blame and oppress. Authoritarianism is
surprisingly common within societies and surprisingly widespread over the world
(Stenner 2005).
This
rests on several observations about human responses to threat and stress. Three other important ones deserve
attention: People hate in others what
they dislike in themselves (especially if they feel guilty about it); they like
in others what they want for themselves; they use their strengths to make up
for their deficiencies. These are all
involved in bullying and authoritarianism.
Bullying can have permanent negative effects on bullied children’s
brains (Copeland et al. 2014).
The
problems usually follow from cowardice and hostility, which reinforce each
other. In an isolated person, they come
out as giving up, or as setting oneself against the world. In the far commoner case of a social person,
they come out in displacing aggression against the weak. Fear forbids aggressing against actual
offenders (if there are any); antagonism is displaced downward, to
scapegoats. This usually leads to
bullying them. Of course, as Robert
Sapolsky points out, “You want to see a kid who’s really likely to be a mess as
an adult? Find someone who both bullies and is bullied” (Sapolsky
2017:199). That probably describes
virtually all serious bullies.
Bullying involves
belittling them: regarding them as low or worthless. Underlings use malicious gossip to get back
at powerful bosses. “I’m better than you” and “I’m worse than you” are bad
enough, but the worst is “I’m worse than you, so I have to pretend I’m better,
and if in power I have to bully you.”
The classic bully is resentful toward the world at large. He attacks both the weak (“contemptible”) and
those in authority; he revels in breaking laws and conventions (Sapolsky
2017:199). Bullies resent civility; it
interferes with their activities, and they brand it as “weakness.” They resort to lying and “gaslighting” as
routine methods of manipulating others, and to insults. They tend to be violent and unpredictable.
A
standard bullying routine is to insult the victim, then take any response as an
“offense” and “slight” that justifies attack.
Imagined slights are quite adequate.
The genociders’ version of this is the attribution of all manner of
horrific but imaginary sins to the targeted group; Hitler’s claims about the
Jews are the most famous in this regard, but all genociders—at least all those
with a recorded history—do it. Genocide
is bullying writ large.
Another
very common aspect of bullying is that bullies are adulated as “strong” and
“independent” by those who would love to be bullies but are too personally
weak. They become groupies, followers,
toadies. Women who are afraid to be
violent themselves, but would love to be bullies, find male bullies irresistible,
leading to a remark attributed to Henry Kissinger, “power is the best
aphrodisiac.”
Evil
people, from ancient Greek demagogues to Hitler and Trump, can most effectively
get the least competent of the tier-just-above-bottom to hate the bottom
tiers. Failing that, they can always
whip up nativistic hate of foreigners, especially immigrants.
Most
movements that end in authoritarianism and genocide start by recruiting bullies
and haters, then gather momentum. Not
until they win, and succeed in turning the polity into a dictatorship or
turning a local community into one defined by hate, can they recruit the vast
mass of ordinary people. However, there
are cases in which many followers are genuine idealists, not bullies, and then
the picture is complicated by the restraint introduced by the idealists. Stalin in the USSR was infamous for purging
his movement of these idealists, leaving only those who were either bullies or
saw repression as simply a necessary job to do.
Following,
again, Baumeister (1996), Baron-Cohen (2011). Beck (1999) and others, we can
identify several subtypes of persons who despise or hate downward. The widest and most general category is those
who simply believe in the necessity of hierarchies and of maintaining those
hierarchies through keeping those below firmly in their place (as described by
Haidt 2012, and argued, in effect, by Aladair MacIntyre 1984, 1988). An extreme form is the strongman philosophy
that argues for rulers being above the law, or being the law, and often acting
outrageously simply to show they have the power; this was the classic attitude
of European royalism, and is similar to the politics of modern strongmen. At the other end of power distribution are the
weak and timid souls who desperately try to maintain their position by keeping
firmly down anyone that seems to be below them.
Opposed
to these views are two types of philosophy.
First comes abjuring all anger and negative judgment, as advocated by
many religions. The second is directing
one’s anger against the powerful, especially the powerful and lawless or
harming, as advocated by revolutionaries.
This latter allows anger to be directed upward rather than scapegoated
downward in a social hierarchy. This is
not necessarily a good thing, as we know from the sad ending of many
revolutions.
We
have now come to the core of what feeds the wolves. The bad wolf is fed by fear socially
channeled into scapegoating and bullying; by culture and society based on
top-down power that is poorly restrained; and by personal grievance and offense
coming out in hate and irrational harm.
This may be deployed in the service of greed, sadism, defense, or
“honor,” but the basic animal is the same.
The good wolf is fed by the opposite: dealing with problems as
rationally and peacefully as possible, in a society where equality and
tolerance are values. This too may be
deployed for gain or defense or any other purpose. The rest of this book will be dedicated to
unpacking that simple formula.
Fear
and fight lead to three overarching social vectors: ingroup versus rival group;
general level of hostility; and minimizing. These are called “othering” today, and often
considered to be a part of human nature.
This is not correct. The actual
direct causes of evil appear to be cowardice, hostility, and minimizing or
infrahumanization. The first two are
overreaction (overemotional reaction) to fear, threat, and hurt, with
structural opponentship (not just difference) seen as a threat. The common ground is seeing people, or some
people, as bad or unworthy. All or some people are to be bulldozed,
dominated, or preyed on—even family
and friends, let alone real opponents. (On discrimination, see Kteily, Bruneau,
et al. 2015; Kteily, Hodson, and Bruneau 2016; Parks and Stone 2010; Rovenpor
et al. 2019.)
The
third is failure to consider people as fully human, or even failure to consider
people at all. People become Kantian
objects (Kant 2002): mere numbers on a spreadsheet, dirt to be bulldozed out of
the way of construction projects, or underlings to be disregarded.
Such
minimizing can be aggressive. It can be
cold and calculating. It can be simply mindless—just not thinking of the
problems of the servants or workstaff.
It involves devaluing people: maintaining that they are unworthy of
attention, concern, or care. Sometimes
it involves not noticing people at all.
It tends to go with callous indifference, as opposed to hostility and
anger. Anger shows at least some respect
for the opponent; the opponent is worthy of being noticed and hated. Not infrequently, the opponent is even
considered superior, as when revolutionaries attack the state, or a David goes
up against a Goliath.
Othering
without much hostility is typical of traditional people; they know the “others”
are different, but have little to do with them.
Usually, strangers and travelers are welcomed, often very warmly. My wife and I have traveled the world and
almost never run into hostile reactions, nor have our students of all
backgrounds and economic situations.
Exceptions are neighboring groups, often traditional rivals for land and
resources. Hostility without much
othering—without displacing it to an outgroup—produces gangsters and aggressive
loners.
The
human norm seems to be occasional anger and aggression against even one’s
nearest and dearest, great aggressiveness against structural-opponent groups,
and indifference to the rest—the unknown multitudes out of one’s immediate ken.
One consoling lie that such people
tell themselves is that we live in a just world (Lerner 1980), in which people
get what they deserve. The poor are
lazy, the rich worked for their wealth.
People displaced by dams somehow deserve to be displaced. Genociders come to believe fantastically
overstated lies: the people they hate are truly evil, subhuman, the sources of
all ills. Thus, to the totally other,
evil is done from callousness: coldly planned aggressive war, bureaupathy. There is then a continuum through “different”
members of one’s own society—internal others—to family members. The closer people are socially, the more
hatred is necessary, or at least usual, before harm is done.
The
most clearly established fact is that infants are born with some degree of
innate fear of strangers, and the more different those strangers look and act
from the parents, the more the fear. Thus, some degree of “othering” on the
basis of appearance and voice sound is normal.
On the other hand, infants show acute interest in other people,
especially faces, toward which they orient (Tomasello 2019). They seem innately primed to recognize the
more universal emotional expressions: smiles, angry looks, and so on. Moreover, people differ at birth in how shy
they are and how aggressive they are.
These vary independently, apparently.
Infants react quickly to
smiles, reassurance, gentle touch, and other marks of friendship, and react in
the opposite way to frightening stimuli like shouts and rapid, dramatic
movement. Infants also look to their
parents for signs of how to treat the stranger.
They are extremely reactive to parental moves and voices; the parents
may be completely unaware of how strongly they are signaling the infant.
From
birth, people can react along a whole spectrum of ways, from initial fear but
quick reassurance and friendliness to initial fear made worse by scary
stimuli. This is rapidly exacerbated by
the reactions of parents, siblings, and soon other family members and
friends. Culture enters in right from
the start, by conditioning the reactions of all these important people in the
infants’ lives. By three or four,
children already know that certain recognizable groups are liked while others
are disliked. They learn gender roles,
clothing associations, and other quite complex cultural messages to a striking
degree (Tomasello 2016, 2019). Much of
this was learned quite unconsciously, with no one intending to teach, and
without the children realizing they were learning.
This
means that any group of people will show a variety of reactions, not notably
predictable. The most predictable thing
is that every group will have its structural opponent groups: groups that they
feel are competing with them for power, land, jobs, resources, social
recognition, political sway, poetry, art motifs, foods, and anything else that
people compete about. The word “rival”
literally means “sharer of a river bank” (Latin rivus, riverbank), in recognition of the universality of arguments
over water, especially for irrigation; in the western United States, “whiskey’s
for drinking, water’s for fighting,” as Mark Twain said. In the United States, the classic divide has
been white vs black, and in much of the US today “race” and “diversity” means,
basically, that antagonism. In Canada,
the same “worst structural opponent” attitudes are white vs Native American
(First Nations to Canadians). Blacks in the US and Native Americans in Canada
are notably overrepresented in “hard case” stories in the media. (This struck me when I compared Seattle and
Vancouver, BC, newspapers in the 1980s.)
Stories of substance abuse, crime, and welfare dependence often feature
photographs of them, even where they are a very small percentage of such “hard
cases.”
Going
back in history, one recalls the love-hate—mostly hate—relationship of England
and France, of France and Germany, of Germany and Poland, of Poland and Russia,
and so on forever. And throughout Europe
the Roma are victims of vicious prejudice; they are often the ones in the
hard-case stories in the newspapers, even when they are a microscopic
percentage of the national population.
To
my knowledge, every culture has prejudices like this. Moreover, as we all know, different
stereotypes go with different groups. To
white racists, blacks are “inferior” and “dumb,” “Mexicans” (by which they
generally mean anyone with a Latin American heritage) are “rapists” and
“criminals,” and so on. To many American
blacks, all whites are suspect and all or almost all are racist and
dangerous. These views are variously
nuanced. We have probably all
encountered racists who hate “blacks” but sincerely like their close friends
and neighbors who happen to be black: “He isn’t really a black guy, he’s old
Joe.”
One
reason for such self-contradictions is the degree to which “old Joe” conforms
to local norms and morals. A complex
field experiment in 28 German cities showed considerable bias against helping
hijab-wearing women, but the same woman without the hijab but still obviously a
Middle Easterner got about as little hate as a clearly native German woman.
Moreover, and more importantly, if the hijab-wearer helped protest littering
(by a confederate of the experimenters, of course!), she was helped in turn at
the same levels as the non-hijab-wearers (Choi et al. 2019). The general conclusion is that foreigners who
mark their “difference” from the host society are accepted if they mark their
“similarity” to the host society by proactive behavior.
Typically,
individuals who regard a group as low or despicable put up with its members as
long as they “keep their place,” but not when they try to assert equality or
rights. Racists who tolerate “old Joe”
do not tolerate Al Sharpton. Misogynists
may love their docile wives (in a patronizing way), but hate feminists. When I worked with fishermen in Hong Kong, I
found the same phenomenon: fishermen were regarded as lowly by most of the rest
of society, but were tolerated unless they tried to assert full equality. The psychology seems essentially universal in
stratified societies.
Relations
of power notoriously exacerbate hatreds.
This is so extreme, so obvious, and so universal that no one misses
it. Less obvious is the effect of
specific kinds of power. Blacks are notoriously
in a particularly bad place in American society because they were
enslaved. “Mexicans,” however, are the
structural opponents who are most devalued by South Texas white
racists, because of Texas’ history of breakaway
from Mexico and later oppression of Mexican workers.
Hard
times sometimes make hatreds worse, but sometimes draw the country together and
thus make hatreds recede somewhat; the Depression gave us Hitler in Germany and
the New Deal in the US. Good times can
make hatreds worse, especially if a large percentage of the majority is left
behind watching a tiny group get richer and richer, as in the US in the 1920s
and since 2016.
This
being the case, it is inevitable that politicians invoke hatreds and usually do
everything possible to whip them up and make them worse, the better to “lead”
the “people” against the “foe.”
To foreigners from realms
too distant to be actively stereotyped, most people worldwide are welcoming and
friendly. There is a range from
incredibly hospitable to quite suspicious and unfriendly. The former is usually found in stable, secure
communities. The latter response is
common in highly ingrown communities like the stereotypic European peasant
villages, but also in highly unstable and insecure communities
A
common claim is that religious hatreds are often the worst. This seems true especially in the
monotheistic “Abrahamic” religions, though it is more widespread than
monotheism. In so far as it is true (it
seems to be untested), the reason probably is that religion is about the most
basic values, hopes, dreams, and beliefs that people have. (It is not about how the world started! The world-origin stories are there just to provide
some validation.) In China and historic
Central Asia, much less intolerance was observed, because religions were not
given such narrow and dogmatic interpretation, and value sets existed
independently of faiths. On the other
hand, many of those who are extreme in religious hate are not deeply
knowledgeable about their religion (see e.g. Atran 2010 and Traverso 2019 on
Islam), and may fight only for meaningless tags instead of content, as Edward
Gibbon accused Christians of doing in the war between homoousia and homoiousia.
A
final generalization is that othering relationships and stereotypes change
fast. We have observed immigrant groups
to the United States get stereotyped by the media within a few years. We have observed the rapid demonization of
Muslims in the US.
The common theme of all
these matters, and of all evil, is rejection of people simply for being what
they are. In Paul Farmer’s oft-quoted
remark, “the idea that some lives matter less is the root cause of all that is
wrong with the world.” (This line is
very widely quoted, but I have not found a source citation.) They are condemned
simply because they are poor, or Jewish, or female, or black-skinned, or rich,
or any of the other things that give hateful people an excuse to dismiss whole
categories of humanity. However, extreme
rage and hate are very often deployed against wives, husbands, children,
parents, close friends, and other loved ones.
Family violence seems, in fact, to be a strikingly accurate small-scale
model of genocide. Assassination is even
farther from Farmer’s general case; it involves targeting people because they are important. Thus, while usually the targets of evil are
downvalued, sometimes they are targets specifically because they are highly
valued.
Othering
takes many forms. One recalls the
British stereotypes of “foreigners” and “savages” in the days of the British
Empire: French ate frogs and snails and were effeminate, Germans drank beer and
were big and dull, Italians were dirty and noisy and smelled of garlic, and so
on for every group the British contacted.
American stereotypes of the 20th century were usually
similar, though less well defined.
Children’s books reveal these stereotypes most clearly, and were one of
the main ways they were learned.
Political cartoons often trade on them to this day.
The
same general rules apply to hate and disregard for other lives—for animals and
plants. Cruelty to animals and
destruction of nature are common. The
mindset seems to be the same: either uncontrolled rage at the familiar, or
displacement of hate and fear to weak victims, or sheer indifference backed up
by social attitudes. The Cartesian idea
that animals are mere “machines” that have no real feelings has justified the
most appalling abuses.
Summing
up, evil occurs in four rough attitudinal clusters: negative stereotypy; callousness (cold
indifference, selfish greed, cold callousness, etc.); anger, rage, and hate,
variously directed; and psychopathy-sadism.
A
final part of the back story is that humans everywhere dislike
foldbreakers—people who conspicuously resist conforming to basic social
rules. Even people who are unusually
good may be disliked because being so good is “different” (Parks and Stone
2010). Usually, enforcing conformity
serves to make cantankerous or poorly-educated people fall in line. Very often, however, it simply makes people
hate anyone conspicuously unlike the herd.
Individuals (including geniuses and artists) or groups (Jews in
Christian countries, black people in white countries, and so on) are
targeted. A further cost is that
members of devalued groups lose their sense of autonomy in proportion to the
level of devaluing and repression of the group (Kachanoff et al. 2019). They become less able to help themselves,
precisely when they most need to do so.
Groups cope with
foldbreakers by trying to covert them, by ostracizing them, or by learning to
live with them (Greenaway and Cruwys 2019), but all too often by killing them
(Wrangham 2018). The group may even
break up, if foldbreakers form a large faction (Aalerding et al. 2018;
Greenaway and Cruwys 2019). All groups
experience conflict, all have conflict resolution mechanisms (Beals and Siegal
1966), but when mechanisms are ineffective genocide often results. Intergroup competition makes for solidarity—in
fact it is famously the best way to develop that—but intragroup competition is
deadly to solidarity, and must be resolved for a group to function, so
available methods are sure to be used—even if fatal to minorities. Intragroup deviants can be hard to spot,
which makes them particularly frightening to the more sensitive group members
(Greenaway and Cruwys 2019).
Particularly in danger are highly salient groups that seem relatively
wealthy or successful to majorities, especially if the majorities feel themselves
stressed or downwardly mobile. Jews in
Depression Europe, Tutsi in Rwanda in the difficult 1980s and early 1990s, and
any and all educated people in Cambodia in the 1970s serve as clear examples.
The level of sensitivity to intragroup variation varies
enormously from person to person, society to society, and culture to culture,
something little studied.
Anthropologists have documented intolerance to deviance and consequent
occasional breakup of communities among the Pueblo tribes of the southwestern
United States, among small southeast European villages, and among Middle
Eastern village societies, among others, while high levels of tolerance are
documented for some—not all—urban trading and commercial communities. More confusing still is a pattern, notable
among some religious communities, for extreme tolerance of many kinds of
behavior but extremely rigid observance of defining traditions of the
group. Intragroup deviance is a matter
that needs more theoretical attention. All religions attack the major evils,
but people do evil and then claim their religions made them do it. There are always excuses. Morality is never enough. But, with laws, people can create peaceful communities.
Evil is not necessary. It can be
reduced to low levels.
Critically
important is awareness that there is a
continuum from good to evil, and specifically from actual enmity to utterly
unprovoked genocide: from treating people with antagonism, as enemies, because
they actually are so, to treating them as enemies because they might really be
a threat, to treating people as enemies because they seem different and
numerous enough to seem a threat to fearful leaders, to treating any different
group as a threat simply because its difference is obtrusive or because it is in
the way of settlement or “development.” This
tends to correspond very closely with the continuum from courageous fighting
against attacking force to increasingly cowardly displacement of aggression to
ever weaker targets.
People
may believe that a currently weak group is secretly powerful, or might become
so, and could be a threat. Preemptive
strikes then occur. The Jews were a
small, innocent, relatively defenseless minority. Hitler directed against them all the anger
stirred up in Germany by the loss of WWI and the Depression, and then revived
and greatly extended the old image of the Jews as all-powerful and
all-destroying.
A
more local example is intimate partner violence. This almost always involves a man, usually the
physically stronger of the pair, beating a woman because he feels that he is
somehow losing control of her (B. Anderson et al. 2004). Very often, he feels generic anger against
the world, or against stronger people in his life, and takes it out on the most
vulnerable available person: wife, child, older parent. Domestic violence is extremely close to
genocide—it might even be called the individual-level equivalent (Anderson and
Anderson 2012, 2017).
Roy
Baumeister, in his book Evil (1997),
documents at length the unexceptional nature of people who do evil things. He also documents the degree to which they
self-justify: they think they are doing the right thing, or the reasonable
thing, or the expedient thing. They
rationalize to avoid guilt, and they use carefully disinfected language. Most commonly of all, they think or say that
they are only doing what everyone does.
In genocides and slave camps, they are right; everyone in their
situation is indeed doing it.
Baumeister
demolishes the old idea that evil people are those with low self-esteem; it
appears that the worst problem in that area is with people who have “high but unstable self-esteem” (Baumeister
1997:149; his emphasis). They are often
bullies, because they think highly of themselves but are insecure enough to be
wounded by challenges. People need some
degree of self-esteem and self-regard, so they concentrate on their strong
points and minimize others’ lives and endowments.
He
also debunks the idea that evil people dehumanize their victims. They most often see their victims as fully
human—just not deserving of normal consideration. In recognition of this, Castano (2012)
suggests the term “infrahumanization.”
Baumeister runs through the standard explanations for violence (“greed,
lust, ambition…” on p. 99—the classic land, loot, women, and power—as well as
sadism and psychopathy), only to show how inadequate they are; crime rarely
pays much, lust turned evil does not feel particularly good, and ambition
served by evil rarely ends well. Greed
to the point of ripping others off, or crushing them, is not usually profitable
in the long run. It is normally done
when society forces people into evil ways of making a living, such as raiding
in Viking days or slaving in the 18th century. He sees “egotism and revenge” as more
important (Baumeister 1997:128-168).
People committing evil are often showing off their ability to maintain
their power. “Threatened egotism”
(Baumeister 1997:377; Baumeister et al. 1996) is the deadliest of the factors
he lists.
This,
however, results from two things: basic predisposing factors of personality
(threatened egotism, sadism, psychopathy) and immediate triggering factors
(greed, idealism). Moreover, “greed” is
not desire for material goods; it is willingness to get material goods at the expense of other people, harming them
in the process. The same goes for
social position, social acceptance, and even desire for power and control. They are not bad in themselves, because they
can be, and often are, used for good.
They become evil and cause harm when they are won at the expense of others.
Those
triggers do not cause evil in people who are not in a state of hatred,
bullying, or overcontrolling others. In
people who have fed the good wolf, desire for material goods is satisfied by
working with others for the common good, or at least by healthy competition of
the Adam Smith variety; desire for social acceptance and approbation is
satisfied by being nice enough to be genuinely liked; desire for power and
control is satisfied by being a good leader and administrator. We all know people who are not particularly
nice or pleasant people, but who make good administrators anyway, simply
because it is the reasonable thing to do.
People are notoriously sociable, and do not need Immanuel Kant to
explain that good social strokes are, in the end, more rewarding for most
people than inordinate wealth or power.
We are left no closer to an explanation of why ordinary people without
the basic personality factors of a psychopath become genocidal or become
slavers.
Baumeister
also points out that much evil is done in the name of good—of idealism. He is, like Ames and Fiske (2015), far too
quick to believe that murderous “good-doers” (from the Inquisition to the Khmer
Rouge) believe what they say. My rather
wide experience of those who talk good but do evil is that they are usually,
and consciously, hypocrites. At best,
their willingness to do real harm in the name of imaginary good is hardly a
recommendation for their morals.
Idealism that involves little beyond torturing people to death hardly
deserves the name of idealism. It is not
an explanation for evil; it simply raises the question of why people sometimes
think that torturing is idealistic, or that idealism can reduce to murder.
On
the other hand, idealism that necessarily costs lives but really is for the
greater good, like the fight against fascism in WWII, can be genuine. Similarly, defensive war against invaders is
often a good thing. Of course, idealism can get corrupted fast, as
in the French and Russian revolutions. The boundary between good and evil is the point
at which a reasonable person, independently judging the situation, would judge
that there is clearly gratuitous harm occurring. Rationality is hard to achieve in this
world, but necessary in this case.
(Influence by Immanuel Kant, esp. 2002, and John Rawls, 1971 and 2001,
is obvious here; I am following them on “rationality” in this context, thus
avoiding the need to explain it.)
Acting
reasonably good seems the default option for most people most of the time. It is even difficult to make people into
killers. Not only the Nazis, but also
armed forces everywhere, have always had trouble accomplishing this (Baumeister
1997:205-212).
However,
even the most trivial differences in feeding eventually allow the bad wolf to
take over from the good one. The
strongest desire of humans is social belonging; therefore, people feel strong
needs to conform to social norms and to whatever social currents are flowing
(see e.g. the studies of Kipling Williams [2007, 2011] on ostracism). The currents are not always good ones.
Albert
Bandura’s book Moral Disengagement (2016)
points out that evil is often done for alleged moral reasons (as in religious
persecutions), or for openly immoral ones (as when a sadist psychopath kills),
but most evil involves some degree of moral disengagement: minimizing,
excusing, or justifying what is done.
Bandura covers the individual agency involved in this, and also the way
society magnifies that by marshaling euphemisms, blaming others, playing the
“you do it too” card, minimizing damage, dehumanizing or partially dehumanizing
victims, personally disengaging and becoming callous or escapist, causal
displacement, attribution of blame to the victims or to the wider society, and
above all justifying one’s behavior by claiming a higher morality. Bandura covers recent newsworthy events: gun
violence and gun culture, terrorism, banking crimes, pollution and
environmental damage, capital punishment, and others. He thus spares us (most of the time) the
citing of Hitler that tends to let moderns off the hook.
Moral
disengagement, victim-blaming, and self-justification are indeed typical of
almost all human activities that do harm and of almost all humans that harm
others. The problem with Bandura’s book
is that he lumps evil morality (fascist ideology, Communist extremism) with
disengagement, which is surely wrong.
Still, Bandura has done an extremely important task in covering with
great thoroughness the ancillary mental gymnastics that allow people to harm
and kill without much guilt. Moral
disengagement leads to bureaupathy.
Alan
Fiske and Taj Rai (2014) have argued that almost all violence is moral: it is
justified by the moral teachings of the society in question. They point out that violent behavior such as
blood revenge, horrific initiation rites, war, raiding, human sacrifice, brutal
discipline, and physical punishment have all been considered not only moral but
sacred duty in literally thousands of societies around the world. Steven Pinker (2011) reminds us that revenge
killings, duels, killing of one’s own disobedient children, rape and killing of
slaves, and many other forms of mayhem were not only accepted but approved in
western society—including the United States—well into the 19th
century. Disapproving of such behavior is
very recent. Antiwar sentiments are also
recent. Taking over land by
exterminating its occupants was universal, and broadly accepted, until the
mid-19th century.
Fiske
and Rai see societies as displaying relational models. These come in four kinds, which can all be
combined in one society:” communal sharing: unity… authority ranking:
hierarchy…equality matching: equality [Rawlsian fairness]… and market pricing:
proportionality” (Fiske and Rai 2014:18-21).
There are six “constitutive phases” of moral violence: “creation [of
relationships]… conduct, enhancement, modulation, and transformation [again of
relationships]….protection; redress and rectification…termination…mourning”
(sacrifices, self-mutilation, and the like as mourning rituals) (Fiske and Rai
2014:23-24). Violence follows the
models: a result of group solidarity (usually against other groups) in
unity-driven societies; keeping people in their place in hierarchic ones;
maintaining equity in egalitarian societies; and “an eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth” in market-driven ones.
Complex societies can be expected to have all four types of relational
models operating inside people’s heads and in the cultural spaces, and thus to
have violence for all those reasons and more.
Genocide,
as we have seen, is moralized as necessary to eliminate the loathesome and
hated groups within society. Aggressive
war is moralized by a felt need for land and loot—Hitler’s lebensraum, American settlers’ manifest destiny. Murder is moralized as honor killing, or
revenge, or any of many dozen other motives.
Brutal punishment is moralized as necessary to keep people in line and
maintain proper behavior.
Fiske
and Rai deal largely with cultural groups and cultural norms. Unusual events like genocide are not quite in
the picture, though, for example, Europe’s massacres of Jews go back many
centuries. Exceptional murder and
violence for gain or from psychopathy or sadism are explicitly exempted from
their theory, being immoral even to the perpetrators.
The
problems with this work are numerous.
First, and most obvious, there is no explanation of where such morals
come from, beyond the idea (almost universally agreed) that violence is
necessary to maintain any social order at all.
We are left wondering why honor killings, cruel initiation rites, rape,
incest, and the like are found in some places and not others. (As for the rites: John and Beatrice Whiting showed decades ago
that they are found in societies where all children, including boys, are raised
almost exclusively by women, and must transition to men’s roles at
puberty. They occur in almost all such
societies and in few, if any, others.
See Whiting and Child 1953.)
Second,
all societies, and especially all those more complex than a hunting-gathering
band, have multiple moral alternatives.
One does not have to be a violent barroom brawler in the modern United
States, even in the working-class white south (cf. Nisbett and Cohen 1996 on
honor and violence in that milieu). Very
few Middle Eastern Muslims become terrorists or suicide bombers, despite
western stereotypy. Intimate partner
violence is normal in some societies—19% of world societies, according to Fiske
and Rai (2014:160), a strangely precise figure—but is uncommon and a “marked
case” in most.
Third,
Fiske and Rai do not distinguish between genuine cultural rules, individual
moral poses, and outrageously lame excuses.
It is certainly a cultural rule almost everywhere to kill attackers who
are trying to kill you and your family.
It is a cultural rule in all civilizations that if you are a soldier you
must kill enemies when ordered. It is a
rule in all medically competent societies that surgeons can and should commit
“violence” to save their patients (as noted by Plato and Aristotle). It is an individual choice, not a rule, to
beat your wife and children, murder your rival, or commit suicide. Doing such things is sometimes done for
deeply held moral reasons (murdering your wife’s lover in many societies) but
is usually done for reasons that do not play well in courts of law.
Political
violence often is clearly due to hatred, however cloaked in rhetoric. Much becomes clear when one listens to playground
bullies (the following lines come from my own childhood): “He was littler than me, so I beat him
up.” “I’m torturing this squirrel to
death because it’s a varmint, it ain’t good for nothin’.” “I hit my little sister to make her shut
up.” Fiske and Rai quote a number of
young peoples’ justifications for killing that are no more persuasive, but
sounded moral in some sense. The
grown-up forms of such excuses, “all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men”
as G. K. Chesterton put it (in the poem “O God of Earth and Altar”), are no
less lame for being suave and phrased in proper political language.
My
personal experience with violence—and I have known murderers, pirates,
criminals, and other assorted perpetrators—is that almost all violence except obvious
self-defense or defense of one’s country and loved ones is justified by excuses,
and most of them are as lame as the schoolyard bullies’ offerings. Reading the genocide literature is
particularly revealing. The actual sins
of the Jews, Tutsi, Hutu, urban Cambodians, and so on were trivial or
nonexistent. The hatred was whipped up
deliberately for the basest reasons. The
high moral justifications were blatant lies.
How many followers believed them remains unclear. People usually say after a genocide is over
that they conformed out of fear. They
are usually unwilling to admit any further belief in the propaganda, though a
surprising number—including men of the calibre of Martin Heidegger and Ezra
Pound—stayed faithful to fascism all their lives, and there are similar loyal
Maoists in China today. (On the case of
Heidegger, see Pierre Bourdieu’s important work, 1991.)
We
are left with the near-universality of moral justifications for violence, but
with a range from genuine, deeply held moral belief through serious but
not-very-moral personal grievance down to the skimpiest of fig leaves covering
crude hatred, rage, and greed. Fiske and
Rai have done a major service in focusing on these justifications and on the
social poses that evoke them. The claim
that such moral arguments actually motivate violence must be evaluated case by
case.
The
roots of evil have a genetic component.
Psychopathy, sociopathy, and aggressiveness seem to run in families. The fight-flight-freeze response is universal
among higher life forms. In humans,
however, most evil is learned, as the enormous person-to-person, time-to-time,
and group-to-group variation shows. (Most
of what follows is derived from or paralleled in Beck 1999 and Ellis e.g. 1962,
with specifics about evil from Baron-Cohen 2011, Bartlett 2005, Baumeister
1997, Tomasello 2019, and other previously noted sources, tempered by my
experience as a parent. See also
Sapolsky 2017:222 for coverage of this material.) Most bad behavior is done in conformity with
one’s immediate social group. Most
humans start out neutral: tending to wind up about half good and half bad, but
actually winding up according to how they were trained. This, of course, is the
real message of our two-wolves story.
There
is a clear genetic drive in infants to explore, engage, learn, socialize,
communicate, and even create. Babies are
surprisingly interactive, and mostly in a positive way, trusting and smiling. They cry a lot when they are uncomfortable,
and can fear strangers, but they are basically a rather positive set of
humans. Allowing them to explore and
interact in a secure, supportive environment is the key to feeding the good
wolf pup.
“Learning”
may be too narrow a word for environmental influences. Trauma even generations ago can affect the
brain, via epigenetics. Trauma in the
womb and during birth can more directly injure brain tissue. One common result of such trauma is reduction
in control over violent emotions and actions.
It does not occur in all cases, but it is not rare. The exact location of the trauma matters, but
trauma is usually widespread enough to affect at least some relevant brain
centers. Fear is focused in the
amygdala, aggression more widely in the limbic system, but interpretation of
stimuli as frightening and reaction to fear by rational or irrational means are
distributed over the brain, typically following neural pathways from the
amygdala and other basal structures to the frontal lobes and the motor
centers. Eventually, all the brain is
involved. Any trauma can impact the
fear-aggression pathways somewhere. (See,
again, Beck 1999; Bandura 1982.)
However,
humans are tough. They can adapt to
terrible conditions, at least if they have support. Werner and Smith (1982, 2001) studied children
growing up resilient or otherwise. They
found that about ¾ of children raised in poverty and rough surroundings in
rural Kaua’i in the mid-20th century did perfectly well. These were the ones who had strong, reliable
families. Half the rest were redeemed by
institutions—good schools, the military, and the like. The final fourth were products of broken
homes, and usually of abuse and neglect.
Abuse teaches children to abuse, and neglect teaches them to
neglect. Those children lived rough
lives.
Resilience
comes at a cost. Further studies have confirmed Werner and Smith’s findings
about effective prevention, but have found that such resilience is accompanied
by emotional fragility, physical stresses of all sorts including cardiovascular
problems and metabolic syndromes, and sometimes a failure of resilience in key
areas. All are proportional to the
difficulty of coping with the stresses in question. Interventions are now able to help, but no
one gets away unscathed from a harsh background (Hostinar and Miller 2019; see
also Reynolds et al. 2019).
Infants have several
states, including sleep and rest; fretting and whining; temper tantrums; and
dependent loving and caring, combined with an exploratory interest in the
world. Adults break the fretting state
into whining and complaining. The
temper-tantrum state develops into fear, anger, and hate. Empowerment is always needed in education.
Infants start by feeling
generalized discomfort when scared, wet, cold, hungry, or otherwise needy. They cry for what they want. Failing in that, they can bear it or become
frustrated. Over the first two years of
life, frustration turns to anger. Good
parents teach children to bear when needs cannot immediately be met; bad
parents punish the child for whining. Young
children quite normally throw temper tantrums if they are tired, frustrated,
uncomfortable, scared, or in need of affection or a sense of control. Ignored, these taper off; punished, they turn
to lifetime anger. This turns to hate if
the child learns to hate from parents and peers. Meanwhile, better-raised children learn to
help, share, and be sociable.
Adults usually acts from
fear of losing social place, but the babyish causes—fatigue, discomfort, and
the rest—still operate. On the other
hand, children learn to reason, to think things through, to obey, to be
considerate, and to conform (for good or ill) at the same time they learn to
throw temper tantrums (Tomasello 2019). Security, especially security within a
supportive circle of family, is the child’s greatest social need. Children denied acceptance or other social
validation lose security and become fearful, often acting out fear through
anger.
A
human child with poor parenting may overcompensate, using learned but
ineffective coping mechanisms to deal with weakness and fear, because of
failure to learn other (and more appropriate) coping mechanisms. Since humans are supremely social animals,
the child learns to fear isolation, abandonment, hate, scorn. Physical fears become less important; in
fact, they are easily handled by a child or adult who feels that her social
group “has her back.”
Abusive
childrearing produces adults who make up for felt deficiencies by using what
they do have to bully others. The unintelligent
but physically strong schoolyard bullies beat up “smart kids” as a way of using
what they have—strength to deal with ego threats caused by what they lacked. The converse is the intellectual arrogance of
many a physically less-than-perfect academic. Weak fear due to failure to learn good coping
mechanisms leads to abject conformity, especially conformity to ego-reinforcing
notions like the superiority of “my” group to “yours.” White supremacists are often those who fear
or know that they have nothing else to feel supreme about. Children, especially if female, may be
exposed to sexual harassment, which is a form of bullying. (It is not
a form of romance or normal sexuality.
Men do it to dominate, control, and demonstrate power, not to be
affectionate.)
In
short, people begin as scared babies, who then, to varying degrees and in
varying areas of their lives, grow up. Most of us partially succeed and partially
fail, and that is a dangerous combination.
We are fearful and defensive because of the remaining weakness and
failure. We use our strengths to
defend—often to overdefend, and often to deflect our hostility downward, to
those weaker than we are. Caring for others is innate, but must be
developed, and ways to be caring and considerate must be taught (see esp. Tomasello 2019). All
cultures have rules about this, and all cultures have alternatives, including
“nice” ones for everyday and less nice ones for dealing with actual threats and
enemies. The capacity to harm is also innate, and can be developed; harsh,
unpredictable, gratuitously cruel environments bring it out. Children as adults pay it forward: they
often treat others the way they were treated as children. This tends to be a default option.
Learning when to use the appropriate
coping mechanism is thus crucial.Anything that empowers the growing child
to take care of her own problems, by teaching proper and effective responses,
feeds the good wolf. This means that the
child must be taught what to do—preferably as the situation unfolds; backed up
for doing it; and backed up further in case the response is inadequate.
If
the parent, peer, teacher, or elder then criticizes the child and takes over,
“fixing” the situation that the child has “ruined,” the bad wolf gets a huge
meal. Few things feed the bad wolf better than deliberately
weakening a child by telling her she can’t cope. The resulting frustration and weakening turn
into aggression eventually. Widespread
rejection follows, leading to still more anger.
Being
raised by one highly critical parent and another parent who retreats and
becomes passive is one common formula for producing a scared and defensive
child. Weakness and hypercritical
judgment very often go together, either in the same parent or in a couple; perhaps
hypercritical people attract weak spouses.
These couples can raise children who are hypersensitive and defensive,
feeling that even the tiniest slight is a total attack on their personhood. By contrast, if both parents are punitive but
reasonably strong as persons, the child usually turns out well enough, but can
become a bully; if both mild and gentle, the child becomes well-adjusted but
often frail in the face of the world’s harshness. Firm, but accommodating and open about communicating,
seems to be the ideal parenting stance, but research is ongoing.
A critically important point made by the
psychologists is that a typical young child comes to depend especially on one specific
immature defense mechanism, which then becomes the most stubborn and
intractable problem in adulthood—the one thing most resistant to psychotherapy
and life experience, and the one hardest to bring to full consciousness and
self-awareness. The bigot’s hatred and
overreaction to threat are often the products of such deeply entrenched
immature mechanisms. Psychologists also
find that it is challenges to precisely the most relied-on defense mechanism
that bring out the greatest fear, anger, and reactive defensiveness in
people. If your favorite coping
mechanism is racism, for instance, you will be more defensive about your racism
than about other defenses. Risk factors
include a Manichaean worldview, and the idea that hierarchy is automatically
appropriate and top-down control necessary.
In short, in ordinary life, much of the problem is that the default is
always to stay with early-learned responses instead of self-improving, and with
initial support groups instead of expanding one’s field to all humanity (on the
above matters, the classic works of Ellis 1962 and Maslow 1970 remain useful).
Conversely,
nothing feeds the good wolf better than praising the child for doing what she
could, while instructing her how to do even better next time. Wolves
feed on empowerment: empowering and supporting the child feeds the good wolf,
empowering other people at the expense of the child feeds the bad wolf. Empowerment means, among other things,
teaching coping strategies that work (Cattaneo and Chapman 2012). To work, they must be reasonable, which
random violence and other evil behaviors are not. (Adults can be coldly and rationally evil,
but that usually comes later.)
Self-confidence and self-control, in particular, are the basic
necessities to manage the weakness, insecurity, and anger that we have seen to
be basic in hyperdefensive and scapegoating reactions.
Somewhere
in between is providing support without teaching proactive coping
strategies. A child who knows her
parents have her back is in good shape.
But for coping methods she must rely on whatever methods are available. She must copy or improvise. These are rather random and unsatisfying
methods, especially since copying without real instruction is not often
successful. The essential pieces of the
strategy can easily be missed, or underemphasized.
Growing up with adult authority makes people tend
to defer, adulate, and obey upwards in the age and status hierarchy. This tends to cause them to displace hate
downward, scapegoating the younger and weaker.
Abusive, erratic, cruel raising leads to adulating strongmen; usual
parent-dominant tradional upbringing leads to conservatives. Good parenting leads to children who develop
into adults who can treat others as equals, and who are self-respecting and
self-reliant.
Supportive
and considerate parenting vs unsupportive and harsh parenting can be set up as
a 2 x 2 table. Supportive and
considerate is ideal. Supportive and
harsh was the traditional European and frontier American way; it worked, in its
way, for the time. Unsupportive and
undirecting yet gentle is more or less the classic “spoiling.” Unsupportive and harsh is the abusive
parenting that produces brutes.
The normal order of
learning a new skill is a very good one: from most simple and direct to most
abstract. Children learn to walk, talk,
play musical instruments, and do homework by gradual steps, from simple and
direct to abstract and complicated. This
is the way to learn civil behavior: from politeness formulas to basic
considerateness and sharing, then to basic principles. The simplest virtues are carefulness,
civility, mutual aid, sociability, considerateness, and generosity. Then they can move on to more abstract
virtues. Teenage angst and misbehavior can be cured or alleviated by giving
rights in proportion to responsibilities. In teaching, exposure to real (and realistically
taught) contexts (laboratories, field, great art) works; books and schoolrooms
are slightly above neutral. The result
is that raising a child to be caring and sociable, but also to bear stoically
the discomforts of life, feeds into a sense of justice, fairness, compassion,
and social decency. The family creates
the basic psychodynamics. The peer group
provides the ways to express those—whether through bullying, random violence,
and cruelty or through mutual help, support, and kindness (J. R. Harris 1998).
Finally,
in a situation where control is lost, or where evil people are in control,
everyone seems to regress not only into “following orders,” but into the
combination of cowardice and hostility that drives brutality in the first place. Post-traumatic stress disorder is very common
among former soldiers, and more so among victims of genocide, and probably
perpetrators also. Post-traumatic stress
is a risk factor for violence, but most PTSD sufferers do not become
violent.
Working back from a given
violent act, we see it is grounded in anger, hatred, or callous
doing-the-job. The wellsprings are, most
often, desires for material gain, or power and control, or social acceptance
and respect, or desire to protect these, or—perhaps above all-desire to protect
one’s group and self. Sheer desire to
kill can be a factor, in psychopaths and similar damaged persons. Social pressures are extremely important and
often determinant. Cultural biases and
cultural models of coping are also often determinant. Factors exacerbating the situation can
include anything from economic hard times to unsettled and chaotic social
periods to ordinary irritants like hot days, smog, and confinement; these are
outside our scope here. Lest this all
sound dauntingly complex, note that most evil can be explained by desire for
goods, control, and respect, combined with unnecessarily harmful and hateful
coping mechanisms taught by society or incorporated in cultural models. The ramifications and manifestations of these
are complex, but the basic framework is not inordinately so.
One
social and cultural force is pressure on young men to prove themselves by acts
of social daring or self-sacrifice. In
warlike or violent societies, and sometimes even in peaceful ones, young men
are under extreme pressure to be soldiers, fighters, or just “bad dudes.” Young men are high in aggression and
testosterone with or without cultural pressure, but they are peaceful enough in
peaceful societies; their activity is used in work, or sports, or community
service, or studying. But in warrior
societies it becomes “toxic masculinity.”
Status
emulation guarantees that the upper classes, elders, and superiors have more
effect on this than the rest of us do. “The
people strive to imitate all the actions and mannerisms of their prince. It is thus very true that no one harms the
state more than those who harm by example…. The bad habits of rulers are
harmful not only to themselves but to everyone.” Petrarch (as quoted by Sarah
Kyle, 2017:157.)
People
clearly have a strong innate tendency to become hateful, cruel, and violent. It is not a mere ability that society trains
into us. The generalized cognitive
abilities to make computers, drive cars, and trap fish in weirs are all innate,
in that any trained human of reasonable intelligence can do them; but humans do
not have any innate tendencies to carry those specific tasks. They do not make computers unless taught,
within a society with a long history of technological development. Evil is different. Every known cultural and social group in the
history of the world has had its cruel, brutal, murderous individuals, and the
horrible record of wars and genocides proves that almost every human will act
with unspeakable cruelty under social pressure.
As long as humans are social animals with strong fight-flight-freeze
responses, the chain from defense to hostility to evil is sure to be
reinvented, and to become popular wherever displaced aggression is socially tolerated. As long as human childrearing is imperfect,
leading to weak but resentful children and adults, evil leaders will take
advantage of that weakness and resentment. Evil
is not inevitable, and can be prevented, but it takes over when given even a
small chance, due to the human fight responses to threat and stress. Almost any person will become evil if
pressured enough, but almost any person can be kept from evil if pressured in
that direction. Culture usually provides
both good and bad models and teachings.
All societies have three
processes always operating: negative feedback loops maintaining the situation
without change; cycles; and positive feedback loops producing slow progress or
decline over long periods of time.
Progress has generally dominated throughout history, despite long
declines like that of the Roman Empire.
Human groups in ancient times were generally patriarchal lineages with
in-marrying women. These developed into
the vast fictive-ancestor lineages of nomad and mobile people from the Mongols
to the Scots. Much later, sedentary
agriculture led to more association based on place, eventually leading to the
nation-state. It also led to many
societies becoming matrilineal, with much more power to women, and often with
the men doing the marrying-in.
Over the last 50,000
years, there has been progress in science, arts, lifespan, food production, and
other areas. Complex large societies
arose; they needed markets and government as well as norms—markets and
political structures supplement norms in organizing at huge scales (here and
below, see e.g. Christian 2004; McNeill and McNeill 2003; Morris 2010; Turchin
2006, 2016).
Unfortunately, there has
also been advance in the technology and practice of war, cruelty, and
repression. War is somewhat less common
than it was in early civilizations (Pinker 2011), but bloodier and more
technologically sophisticated. Many technological
advances were developed for war, and only later applied to civilian use. More effort and money have gone into war than
into almost any other sector of social action.
Violent death rates were always high (Wrangham 2018:238), ranging from
less than 1 per thousand in peaceful modern societies to as many as 200 or more
in some highly stressed tribes. Wars and
murders seem to have become less frequent (Pinker 2011; Wrangham 2018), but
wars are far vaster in scope, and genocide has appeared as a major cause of
death. Evil leaders can appeal to group
hate in a way not easily managed (though not unknown) in ancient
societies.
Also increasing is the
extent and inequality of hierarchic social relations. For countless millennia, people lived in
small bands with little differentiation except by age and gender (Boehm 1999). With the rise of complex societies came the
rise of more and more unequal social relations, climaxing in the kings and
emperors of old and the heads of state and CEOs of today. This causes rapidly increasing competition
for scarce positions of power, and more and more defensiveness on the part of
those who gain such positions.
In agrarian societies,
resentment and antagonism is directed against bandits and barbarians, as well
as coups and religious deviants. Early
trade and commerce led to mercantilism and then freedom and democracy as the
alternative, so the hopeful revolutions.
Early but full industrialization produced socialism and communism. Later industrialization produced fascism,
because elites were entrenched and powerful and good at oppressing and at
divide-and-rule. Resource squeezes made
everyone worse off and less hopeful, thus easily turned to hate.
It thus becomes clear
that hatred is a natural human response, but is socially engaged, manipulated,
and deployed by the powerful to advance their own interests. The most obvious case is war for gain—predatory
invasion of the weak by the strong. From
the Assyrians to the European settlers of the Americas, and from the
“barbarians” sacking Rome to the wars over oil in Africa in the 1980s and
1990s, loot has been the driver of war.
However, it is not the only one.
Family politics, religious hatred, and even minor slights can push a
tense situation into outright war. In
the modern world, where genocide and civil war are commoner than international
war, it is most often the giant primary-production interests that mobilize hate
and decide who shall be the victims.
They usually go after local weaker minorities, but anyone can be fair
game. On the other hand, class hate,
dimly related to Marxism, may be the driver, as in Venezuela today. The
point is that hate does not exist in a vacuum.
It is deliberately manipulated and targeted by the powerful.
Warfare in premodern
times took place between rival claimants to the throne (often different
branches of the royal lineage), between rival states and empires, between rival
ethnic groups, and between religious factions.
In Europe, for instance, we see a progression from warring tribes to
city-states to the Roman Empire with its frontier generals and barbarians. After the fall of Rome, rival nobles
assembled loyal knights and dragooned peasants into being arrow fodder. Then the wars of religion dominated until the
Treaty of Westphalia substituted nation-states for religious factions, and war
became a battle of nations rather than of faiths. Meanwhile, racism and ethnic hatred became
dominant. The wars of empires and
nations at least call forth courage and self-sacrifice; ethnic, religious, and
class hatred seem largely mean spite.
Playing over this goes
the more general tendency of humans to be too tightly social, leading to group
hate, or too individual, leading to selfish greed and corruption—Kant’s
principles of aggregation and differentiation applying to public morality. We can see that the racism and religious
bigotry paralyzing America today are merely the latest in an endless sequence
of powerful, evil people taking or maintaining power, control, and wealth by
marshaling their troops through antagonism and hate.
Religious
hate grew out of identification of religion with rival powers, and then crushing
the conquered people, and thus hating and repressing their religion. Conquered Persian dualists, Jews, and then
Christians were harassed in Roman Empire times.
After Constantine, Christians crushed non-Christians and
“heretics.” Racism as a visible, significant
force (beyond simple ethnic prejudice) began by the late Roman Empire, but was
not serious until the 16th Century, with the conquest of the
Americas and much of Africa. The
expansion of the slave trade drove racism to a high point in and after the 18th
century.
Haves
vs have-nots is a permanent opposition in society, as Marx pointed out, but
real classes arose only with fully developed ancient civilizations, and did not
get serious till highly developed empires appeared. In China, hate was mobilized along kinship
(especially within imperial families), political sectors, and to a lesser
extent region and ethnicity. Improvement
in rationalizing bureaucracy, terror, and surveillance help explain the
increase in longevity of Chinese dynasties, notably the success of Ming and
Qing against all odds. It is
increasingly difficult to expect revolution to succeed. Eventually, the elites will turn on each
other. If they are evil leaders, since
they are amoral and only hate and greed hold them together; they betray each
other the minute they can. This happened
repeatedly in historic times (Ibn Khaldun 1958).
Traditional
societies rarely committed genocide in the modern sense. Tyrants killed political rivals and their
families. Wars were total, with
civilians not excepted. But wiping out
whole groups of non-offensive subjects of one’s own government was not common, except in cases of religious
crusades against “heretics.” Typically,
a dynastic cycle ended when the rulers had grown so weak and corrupt that no
one could put up with them any longer, at which point a general or invader or
popular leader would mobilize popular discontent and bring down the
regime. This happened over and over in
Europe, west Asia, China, and elsewhere, and is well understood (Anderson 2019;
Ibn Khaldun 1958).
Actual
genocides were rarer, and generally confined to religion. They tended to occur when forces of modernity
directly challenged the landlords and rentiers of the old order. Not only did a
new economy threaten them; new ideologies and sciences challenged their whole
self-justifying worldview. Genocide,
based on hate and fear, is thus quite different from (even though it may grade
into) normal warfare and dynastic cycling.
Those latter phenomena are based on rivalry, especially for power, also
for land and loot. They always include
hate of the enemy, but not usually hate of one’s own weaker groups. Indeed,
they may unite the whole polity against the common foe.
Large-scale
killers were often highly selective about their massacres. The Mongols and other Central Asian
conquerors were famously indifferent to religion, and even ethnicity (at least
outside their own); they were equal-opportunity massacrists. The Americans of the 19th century
committed genocide against Native Americans and repressed African-Americans,
but were fiercely independent otherwise; the Cossacks of old Russia were similar,
hating minorities while triumphing in indepencence. Today, independence is neither so desired nor
so possible. Voters motivated by hatred
vote for strongmen, and put themselves under a yoke of tyranny, from the
Philippines and India to the United States and Brazil. This deadly mix has appeared before in times
of rapid change.
The late Roman Empire saw
violent repression, first of and then by Christians. Later, Europe, challenged
by aggressive spread of trade, commerce, and new scientific knowledge from the
Islamic world, resorted to the Crusades and persecution of heretics in the 12th
and 13th centuries. Spain’s
Reconquista descended into genocide after the final conquest of the Muslims in
1492. Then Europe’s own progress and
religious ferment challenged old regimes in the 16th and 17th
centuries, leading to vast religious wars that involved genocidal murder of
opposing religious communities (including the Irish Catholics in Ireland). In the 19th century, following the
Industrial Revolution and its political revolutions, the forces of modernity
rolled into eastern Europe, where the result was anti-Jewish pogroms and Tsar
Nicholas II’s persecution of serfs and minorities, and into China, where
rebellions ensued and the Qing Dynasty met these with reactionary measures. In the early 20th century, new
ideas, arts, and sciences challenged primary production, leading—among other
things—to fascism.
These periods elevated
tyrants such as Philip the Fair, Ferdinand and Isabela,Oliver Cromwell, and
Empress Cixi. They represented landlords
and other rentier elites against the forces of change. As in later centuries, such negative leaders
were often marginal persons: individuals coming from remote regions, and often
subjected to poverty and hardship when young.
Genghis Khan, Zhu Yuanzhang (the leader who drove the Mongols from
China), and several Roman emperors fit this pattern.
Following Adam Smith
(1910/1776) and other political economists, and oversimplifying them somewhat
for convenience, we find that improvements on this warlike pattern developed in
expanding economies, especially those dominated by the trade, commerce, and
human resources sector of the economy.
That sector must invest in people to survive; it depends on skilled
workers and innovation. Economies
dominated by rentier primary production—plantation agriculture, mining, fossil
fuels, and the like—are regressive, and often repressive. Agrarian societies from the Inca to Sumer to
China wound up the same: city, king, court, bureaucracy, vast mass of farmers
from rich to landless.
Between enlightened
traders and reactionary plantation owners are the majority of people—the
ordinary workers and businesspersons who have to make a living today. They are thus more concerned with whether the
immediate economy is going up or down than with vast forces of Progress or
Return to the Old Days. Especially if
they are in business, they default conservative, but can shift rapidly and
easily rightward or leftward.
Class is also, famously,
a relevant factor; it has diminished from great importance in the mid-20th
century in American voting to near irrelevance now, with almost equal shares of
rich, middling, and poor voting Democrat or Republican. This has tracked the rise of social issues
such as racism and medical care at the expense of concern for immediate
economic returns.
In many traditional
societies, “honor” and distinction came from killing and looting, not from
honest work or trade. Not only warlike
but even quite peaceful agrarian societies shared this attitude. Fighting was honorable, compromising and
peacemaking dishonorable.
One can predict with
considerable accuracy the amount of evil in society by assessing the amount of
rentier or primary-production-firm dominance of the political economy and the
level of warlikeness of the culture. Within
equally agrarian societies, Afghanistan, rampant with landlordism and steeped
in a heritage of violence already noted by Alexander the Great, compares with
more peaceable Bhutan. The other
dimension—from agrarian to late-industrial—is seen in the conversion of
formerly warlike societies to currently peaceful ones. The Vikings, ruled by landholding and
slaveholding earls, contrast with their peaceable descendants in modern
Scandinavia’s world of trade, commerce, and education.
The ancient Greeks saw a
cycle: democracy gave way to autocracy (monarchy or oligarchy), which gave way
to tyranny, which collapsed and left the way open for democracy. This proved less than predictive, but cycles
from relatively open to relatively totalitarian societies and back do appear in
many historical records (Ibn Khaldun 1958).
Really new good ideas
spread from rich cores of trade and communication-based systems. Military technology seems to spread fastest
of all innovations. Next come
innovations in communication; people want to be in touch. Then comes ordinary production. Last comes the spread of morality. Then in the twentieth century, primary
production, especially fossil fuel production, took over, and now rules most of
the world.
Critical
to progress were several steps, mostly taken in Europe or China. One was rapid discovery science, foreseen by
the ancient Greeks, then developing between 1100 and 1600 in Europe. Rationalized property rights and freer
markets followed, for better or worse, in the 17th century. The Enlightenment then emphasized law and
recourse, with ideals of free speech, press, religion, assembly, and
conscience. (It is not mere coincidence
that this took place at the same time as the explosion of slavery.) Equality before the law for full citizens,
and expansion of the citizen concept, came a bit later in the 18th
century. The logic led to a rapidly
growing movement to end slavery, beginning in the mid-18th century
and continuing till slavery was legally ended, though not ended de facto, in
the late 19th.
The Enlightenment
succeeded not just because of the rise of trade, commerce, and science. Another key was the development of world
trade too fast for any nation-state to control it. Opportunity exploded, and traders managed it
themselves, through international networks.
They had to deal, without government supervision, with people of very
different cultures, faiths, and technologies.
This was one breeding ground of concepts of liberty, self-governance,
tolerance, freedom of conscience, and personal responsibility. One can compare the rapid rise of
enlightenment in multinational Europe with its relative failure in East Asia
during the centuries when the Qing Dynasty imposed its crushing weight on the
East Asian world-system.
The Enlightenment did not
invent the rule of law or welfare-oriented governments; Europe and China
already had those. What the
Enlightenment brought were science and participatory democracy coupled with the
ideal of freedom of conscience.
Another milestone was free public education,
an idea from the early 19th century.
Through all of this, popular demand by people rising in society but left
out by the elites was the usual cause.
It was always a fight: entrenched interests always opposed good changes,
and religious elites were often the worst.
When self-interest combined with needs for fairness and equality,
progress occurred. The more normal human
tendency to weather down and adapt to the system was always used by the elites
to repress the masses. So were hatreds
of all kinds, as we have seen.
2 American
Ideas
The Founding Fathers worked with a strong
sense that we are all in this together and
that my rights stop where yours start, sometimes
phrased as “your right to swing your arm ends at my nose.” Finally, they were aware that a society and
its laws and economy exist within a moral shell, and that shell must be
embodied in the laws and indeed in the whole system. (They got this thoughtful perception from
Adam Smith’s writings on morals.) These
basic principles lie behind the Constitution.
This led to emphasizing freedom of
conscience, thus of speech, religion, ideology, assembly, and voting. It meant free enterprise, within reason. It also meant freedom from torture,
warrantless search, and other abuses of government power. It meant equality in justice, opportunity,
and law, with protection in oppression.
It meant rule of law, not of men.
It meant presumption of innocence, protection of all, and mutual
defense.
These were seen as necessary because evil so
often wins unless actively stopped. A
polity must have balances of power, equality before the law, universal voting
rights, full recourse (rights to sue, etc.) in the event of direct harm, and
the other rights the Founding Fathers thought—wrongly—that they had guaranteed
in the Constitution. It is amazing how
easily Republicans now get around those rights.
The United States failed at the beginning,
in allowing slavery and in refusing citizenship to Native Americans while
taking their land. It failed again in
the Reconstruction by not enforcing full civil rights, and by letting the
carpet-baggers cream off wealth from the south.
These ills were eventually corrected, but not the lingering racism and
power abuses that resulted. These
failures have led cynics to dismiss the entire American program, equality,
freedom, and all. This is not a helpful approach.
The Depression was much better
managed. Fairness and, eventually, civil
rights followed from bringing some degree of justice to the economy.
While the world was wide-open, when
exploration and colonization were running wild, and then as long as technology
was increasing wealth faster than population, freedom and Enlightenment values
flourished. Today, with closing
frontiers, people are rushing to make all they can. Failing that, they support and follow the
powerful, in hopes of at least holding onto something. The poor have given up hope of getting rich;
they can only hope to cut other, weaker groups down and take what little those
groups have. This is a negative-sum
game. Some cultures are much more prone
to see the world as a zero-sum or negative-sum game than are others (Róźycka-Tran
et al. 2015; Stavrova and Ehlebracht 2016).
The United States was formerly rather moderate in this regard, but
negative-sum thinking has increased. Reform in US history has been strongly
cyclic.
The course is highly consistent. A few idealists will see a problem and a
solution. If they are right, and if the
problem gets worse, more and more people will be attracted to the cause, until
a majority is on board and can prevail.
This happened with the Enlightenment values that drove the Revolution
and the US Constitution. The next major
crisis was slavery: anti-slavery was early dismissed as crackpot, but with the
progressive damage to the whole US economy by plantation agriculture with
enslaved workers, anti-slavery prevailed (through war). Next came the mounting criticism of
deforestation and wildlife loss in the late 19th century, climaxing
in Theodore Roosevelt’s environmental reforms.
The next crisis was the Depression, which led to massive economic
reforms. Then came environmental and
food production crises in the 1960s, dealt with (inadequately) by laws in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. Visionaries
are always proposing new reforms, but these are picked up by the majority only
if they are immediately practical ways of addressing real and worsening
problems. On the other hand, the
opportunity allows the visionaries to pass many measures that the majority
would probably not support otherwise.
The Bill of Rights, for instance, was added to the Constitution by
Enlightenment visionaries; the Bill probably went beyond what the majority
wanted at the time.
All the crises after independence were
caused by the reactionary behavior of the plantation and big-resource-firm
sector. Slavery at its worst led to the
Civil War; suicidal levels of environmental destruction led to massive reform
campaigns in 1890-1910 and 1955-1975; cutthroat speculative and rentier
capitalism led to the Depression and resulting New Deal.
3
Progressive Erosion of Old Society
The
steady rise of giant firms has been noted, and protested, since the 1870s, but
it continues. It has had a steadily more
distorting effect on the economy and on politics (this and what follows is
largely common knowledge, but otherwise follows Anderson 2010; Anderson and
Anderson 2012, 2017; Putnam 2000; Turchin 2016; Snyder 2018).
As
folk society and traditional elite society collapsed with the decline of local
communities and the rise of mass society (Putnam 2000), people became more and
more dependent on giant corporations to integrate their worlds. Politics became less and less public and more
corporate. A worldwide shift from
lateral and community-wide association to top-down hierarchies, separate or competing,
appeared.
The
broad contours of politics in the early 20th century made sense: the
Republicans were the party of business, ranging from family farms to local
businesses and up to large firms; the Democrats were the party of labor. This led to reasonable dialogue (though also
plenty of bullying and cruelty by bosses).
The change beginning in the 1920s, but not serious till the 1970s, was
toward a Republican party uniting racism and giant reactionary firms, and
eventually a Democratic party also becoming absorbed with identity politics more
than with economic issues. This has led
to nothing but hatred, largely Republican racism and religious bigotry, but
also some real reverse racism on the left.
Serious discussion of economic issues is increasingly contaminated or
lost in a welter of mutual accusations.
One
of the first effects of the shift from a farm-and-small-business America to an
urban one dominated by giant firms was the disappearance of folk society. The old-time world of folk, elite, and town
forced people to work hard, cooperate, and toughen up. Now, life is easy but frustrating, especially
for those who aren’t succeeding. Bereft
of the support of old-time communities and the opportunity to work with
different types of people, humans become alienated, weak, and hence
cowardly. This leads to fascism.
In
traditional agrarian society, life was short and usually ended violently. People tended to escape into religion. They also had songs and folk literature to
teach them that individuals mattered—that life and death need not be in vain. Now, few are in that position, so political
action is commoner. In small-scale
societies, religion was about spirit power, since controlling the
uncontrollable was desirable and any control of anything helped. Now, fear and overoptimism are the
problems. So, pragmatic proactive help
become the main alternative to giving up.
The
decline of that world also led to the decline of folk and traditional culture
after 1950, and then to the dominance of popular culture and passive
consumption. Arts deteriorated. Great literature made people confront
tragedy, intense emotion, and social and personal complexity; it became less
and less appreciated. The burgeoning
interest in nonwestern cultures that taught people tolerance and mutual
appreciation in the 1960s and 1970s waned, leading to increasingly dispiriting
identity politics after 2000.
Perhaps
most interesting has been the disappearance of the self-improvement
agenda. The humanistic psychology and
personal development movements of the 1960s-1970s collapsed and left little
trace, outside of improvement in counseling practices. They succumbed to a backlash by people who
relied on thinking they were tough, and often on outright bullying, to maintain
their self-image. Weak and defensive
individuals were threatened by the whole notion of self-improvement. They attacked it with a vengeance.
The
arts succumbed to dominance by giant “entertainment” corporations. They became dominated by faddism, conformity
with the widest number, enjoyment as simply watching TV and playing video games. The Depression and WWII led to a lullaby
culture, the soothing and mindless pop culture of the early 1950s. That gave way to a range of developments,
from rich and complex to trivial, but ultimately mass culture settled on
“action” movies, video games, and other superficiality. Much of ordinary life settled on the least
emotionally and cognitively involving forms: mindless music, wallpaper art,
fast food.
Political
organization peaked in the 1930s and again in the 1960s with the civil rights
and antiwar movements; solidarity, voter drives, demonstrations, teach-ins, and
other forms of resistance thinned out.
Utopian experiments such as communes had a silly side, but they at least
expressed hope; they are few and far between now. Only the Great Depression and
WWII solidified people around progress toward the good. The 60s got most people motivated, but not
enough.
This
preceded political decline. Traditional
culture had kept Enlightenment values, including the Founding Fathers’ values,
alive. As traditional cultures and
educational forms disappeared, and Hollywood filled the gap, American politics
shifted rapidly from democratic to fascist.
What
happened in politics was similar to what happened to food. Decline of food traditions and rise of
agribusiness corporations led to the rise of sugar, salt, and soybeans, with
resulting heart trouble and diabetes. The
same rise of giant corporations led to the discovery, first in the plantation
sector and then in the fossil fuel world, that political power came from a mix
of lobbying and whipping up hatred to get right-wing votes. This led to a rise of racism, religious
bigotry, intolerance, and incivility—not just in the United States, but
worldwide. Face-to-face community has
been largely replaced by virtual communities.
Among the casualties are newspapers, local helpfulness, and Robert
Putnam’s bowling leagues—Putnam’s book Bowling Alone (2000) used their
decline as a marker of the widespread decline of civic and civil culture in
America. With folk and community
cultures dead and ideas of artistic quality gone, people collapse into a
mass—Tocquevillian “subjects” as opposed to “citizens,” as Putnam puts it.
The
result is a pattern in which environmentalism, concern for fine arts, liberal
politics, and community all decline.
Real wages and returns to labor decline.
Deaths of despair—suicide, drug overdoses, and the like—increase. Conversely, even in recent years, science
progresses; medical treatment improves, but not access to it; comforts of
ordinary life continue to increase.
Sexual
mores and other Old Testament values relaxed as old-time farming and rural folk
society disappeared. This has certainly
had its good sides, but also has led to a constant renegotiation of norms, not
an easy task.
In
short, the traditional world of rural and small-town America, of Christian
churches and local folksingers, of factories and workshops, is gone or
fading. Its economic underpinnings are
dissolving, as hi-tech and smart machines replace workers and farming becomes
concentrated in a few corporate hands.
It had its wonderful side, but also a very dark side. The worst features of it—racism, religious
bigotry, class oppression, and gender biases—are still very much with us. Increasingly, older and less educated whites
take refuge in those pathologies of the older world. So do ordinary suburban older whites, who see
their privileges challenged by upwardly mobile minorities.
All
this would be manageable if the hatred were not used by the giant but
downward-bound productive interests, especially the fossil fuel
corporations. They have funded much of
the hatred and anti-science activity of the last few decades.
The
Republican party has been captured completely by these corporations, and has
become a vehicle for subsidizing big oil, big coal, big agribusiness, the
military procurement and arms industry, and their allies. It has thus become a party of white supremacy
and military right-wing Christian religious agitation. The Democrats have moved from the party of
the working class into a position as the party of relatively upwardly-mobile
groups: minorities, women, urban young people, the education and health establishments,
and to some extent the hi-tech world.
This
new party alignment gives the Republicans a perfect platform to mobilize the
weak defensiveness considered above.
Everyone, progressive or regressive, has some weak defensiveness within,
if only because we all start as babies and never quite get over it. We never take full control of our lives and
eliminate all babyish crumbling in the face of out-of-control reality. The Republicans, however, are placed to take
advantage of it, via scapegoating and repression. The Democrats only lose by it. Weak defensiveness takes the form of lashing
out at “whites” and “males,” censoring right-wing speech, and otherwise playing
into Republican hands. Democrats will
have to be the party of self-control or they will lose all.
4 Decline
from 2000, collapse from 2016
The
real key to what happened next was the rise of corporations that live by
out-of-date production processes and by deliberately harming humans and the
environiment: big oil, big coal, toxic
chemicals, munitions and “defense,” and the shady sectors of finance and
gambling. These are the home industries
of the funders and leaders of the political right. The core has been the linkage of big oil and
the munitions-arms-military procurement industries. They support each other. They naturally attract those rich from
gambling, shady finance, private prisons, the mafia, and similar interests. They naturally defend themselves. They have defined themselves into a state of
war with the American people. They
flourish only by polluting, selling guns, resisting clean power, digging up
mountains, and generally damaging the public interest.
Leaders in the United
States include the great oil barons such as the Kochs, who funded global
warming denial as well as the Tea Party, ALEC, and other Republican agendas
(see e.g. Abrams 2015; Auzanneau 2018; Cahill 2017; Folley 2019; Hope 2019; Klein
2007, 2014; Mayer 2016; Nesbit 2016; many of these sources detail the enormous
sums paid to congresspersons for special favors). Even more extreme are the Mercers, who fund
the major white supremacist and far-right hatred organizations and media (Gertz
2017; Silverstein 2017; Timmons 2018), and the Princes, including Trump’s
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. These
and their allies are the people who have most to gain from a government that
lives by war and repression. They are
also the most heavily dependent industries on federal subsidies, contracts,
sweetheart deals, loopholes, giveaways, and failure to enforce laws. They are also the most in danger from a
government that cares about people.
Big oil, in particular, would
be uneconomic without government support, because the costs of cleaning up
pollution and dealing with damages would be insupportable (see Oil Change
International 2017). The CEOs would be
in danger of prison time for their shady lobbying and deliberate release of
pollution. These industries that invest
heavily in lobbying and campaigns. Their
fears and defensiveness are thoroughly understandable. Fossil fuels receive over $649 billion in
federal subsidies every year (Ellsmoor 2019; figures from International
Monetary Fund), and plow a good deal of that back into the system via political
donations, effectively bribing legislators to provide even more subsidies. A vicious spiral is created. They create another vicious spiral by
investing much of the money in anti-science propaganda, from racism to global
warming denial, and in whipping up hatreds.
They have been able to divide the voters and eliminate the chance of
unity against the common threat that fossil fuels present. Big Oil, and especially the Koch brothers,
have spread their tentacles throughout the world. Najib Ahmed, writing in Le Monde
diplomatique, shows how “US climate deniers are working with far-right racists
to hijack Brexit for Big Oil,” which “exemplifies how this European nexus of
climate science denialism and white supremacism is being weaponized by US
fossil fuel giants with leverage over Trump’s government” (Ahmed 2019).
With
this went an explosive increase in rent-seeking, quick money games, and
financial shenanigans, leading to monumental inefficiency in the economy
(Mazzucato 2018). Corruption in
government has greatly added to this.
The situation in which everyone is out for what they can get, at the
expense of the system, is characteristic of the end phases of political cycles.
Another
casualty has been traditional conservatism.
The old union of small-government advocates, hierarchic law-and-order
defenders, patriots, and security advocates has disappeared. Most of them at least had some sense of honor
and honesty. They were also
pro-environment, an attitude totally reversed now (as extensively documented by
Turner and Isenberg 2018). The current “conservatives” favor big government
interfering continually in people’s private lives (in sex, drugs, religion,
media, and more), are indifferent to hierarchies (though loving strong-men),
and make covert deals with Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and other countries
against America’s obvious interests.
Their main concerns are using racism and religious bigotry to whip up
support for the giant primary-production firms.
As to honor and honesty, one may allow the record to speak.
The
decline of cultures and their ideals came before the political decline, and
before any economic effects. Economic
growth continues. It seems that the last
thing to be affected by a change in economic organization is the economy
itself.
All
the worst things that progressives and liberals feared over the last 50 years came
together in a perfect storm in the Trump administration: attacks on democracy,
freedom, equality before the law, the environment, science, minorities, the
press, the poor, the workers. One main
driver has been the rise of inequality—especially the rise in power and wealth
of the rich. The rich are literally
above the law; it is almost impossible to convict them of anything, given their
ability to pay lawyers and bribe politicians.
Nazism and fascism have been revived, with even more focus on Big Lies
than in Hitler’s Germany, and with even more fawning surrender of America to
the most reactionary of the giant corporations. There is no question that Trump is directly
copying Hitler; Burt Neuborne has listed eleven pages of close, highly specific
similarities (Neuborne 2019:22-33).
Trump kept Hitler’s speeches by his bed for years (Neuborne 2019:20),
and sometimes uses Hitler’s literal words. The Big Lie and other fascist
methods of rule and control are manifestations of weak fear and take advantage
of it. Since 2016 they have become the
government. Nor is the United States unique; this is a worldwide movement (Luce
2017; Snyder 2018).
The
worst of that process is that it allows truly evil people, who are often
motivated by extreme greed and hate, to get ahead. Contrary to tropes of “the 1%,” most rich
people are reasonable enough. The
problem is that the few evil, sometimes downright psychopathic, rich—the Kochs,
Mercers, Princes, Trumps, and their ilk—are highly motivated to seek power. Since they are ruthless and not restrained by
morals, they outcompete others easily, and then become more and more lawless
and thus more competitively successful. When they get power, they use it
vindictively. They do not merely
increase their wealth; they attack the rest of us. True Trump supporters channel all their fear,
frustration, resentment, anger, and spite against the less fortunate. The segment of the left that is racist and
sexist (hating whites and males) differ only in that they are secure and
privileged enough to hate up, not down. Democrats should realize that the right
wing now represents only the reactionary fraction of the super-rich. They do not want economic growth; it would
lessen their control by making their industries more and more obsolete. They want a decline from which they can
benefit.
Evil
ideology in the United States perfectly tracks economic evils. The slave-based plantation world began
it. Continued decline of the rural south
has made it more toxic. It has spread
first into other declining rural areas, then into declining manufacturing ones. The “Southern Strategy” of Lee Atwater and
Karl Rove was perfectly timed to take advantage of this. The situation appears to be comparable in
other countries. The ties to
giant-corporate primary production are clear.
Extreme hierarchy of power and wealth, and economic and social
stagnation, are endemic to such systems.
Much of this is direct,
face-to-face politics. Investigative
journalism (e.g. Mayer 2016; Rich 2018) reveals that Trump was tied directly to
McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn; that the Koch brothers started the Tea
Party and other right-wing organizations; that all these are directly connected
by personal ties, and are also tied to powerful Democrats. The extent of actual friendship and
mentorship on the far right is far too little studied and appreciated. This is not “conspiracy”; it’s long-standing
networks of friendship, political aid, mentorship, and power-sharing, going
directly back to the pro-Hitler activists of the 1930s via such ties as the
Koch and Coors family interests.
The political conversion
of the border south, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas from “blue” to “red”
between 1970 and 2016 came with the decline of labor unions and small farms and
the rise of giant primary-production firms in those states. It was directly precipitated by a steady
stream of right-wing propaganda telling people that their problems were not due
to economic unfairness or mismanagement but to minorities. This led to a massive flip, especially in
2016, from voting self-interest to voting hate.
Many seem to have become convinced that the minorities rather than the
system (or the rich) were the source of their problems; others thought there
was no hope except to keep the minorities down; but surveys and comparisons
reveal and many or most simply voted because hysterical hatred had been whipped
up against particular groups and persons.
People who had been feeding the good wolf were feeding the bad one.
One must go back to
Hitler and Stalin to find anything comparable in terms of the sheer number of
groups attacked by the Republicans in the 2016 and 2018 campaigns. It results in cruelty—deliberately going
after not only the poor and weak, but everything that helps people: education,
medical care, sustainable resource use, etc.
These new leaders support and are supported by the war and gun industry
and the fossil fuels producers, the mega-polluters, and almost no one
else.
Trump voting has been
analyzed by Bob Azarian in Psychology
Today (2019). He sees, among other
things, immediate concerns over morality; sheer fear, conservatives being
relatively fearful; overestimating of expertise by voters; authoritarian
personality; Trump’s ability to engage people as celebrities do; and, of
course, racism and bigotry. One can add
a real fear of immigrants and Muslims, due to exaggeration and lies by
Republicans, and a real fear of change and process, especially among less
educated white males, who see themselves threatened by the rise of other
groups. Immigrants, who tend to be
highly motivated and enterprising, do present a threat to such persons. So do upwardly-mobile women and minorities
freed from open discrimination in hiring.
So does the steady decline in community and folk society in the rural
United States. The Trump voters have
their reasons to want to stop and reverse progress. Diana Mutz (2018) reports similar findings;
perceived threat to economic and social position dominated Trump voting.
Current
problems in the United States include a full-scale frontal attack on democracy:
on free press, voting rights, civil rights, civility, and equal protection
under the law. Brian Klaas, in his book The Despot’s Apprentice (2017), provides
a thorough account of these attacks, with many important and thought-provoking
comparisons to tyrannies and despotisms around the world. This attack is supported by the Big Lie
technique, by exploiting religious and racial bigotry, by attacks on the poor,
and by anti-scientific lies and misrepresentations. Huge subsidies and special favors for giant
corporations are now the rule, in a climate of corruption. Clearly, American democracy and freedom are
doomed unless Americans unite to save their best traditions (see Klaas 2017).
The
United States saw regime change in 2016-17, with the collapse of the
240-year-old Enlightenment traditions and the commencement of a regime
dedicated to eliminating those.
Corruption in the modern United States guarantees collapse. Most of it is legal. Firms donate as they wish to politicians who
vote on the issues that are critical to those firms. Legislators vote on subsidies for firms that
fund their campaigns. The interests that
depend heavily on subsidies and that also harm the general good through
pollution or dangerous speculation become the biggest donors.
In
general, the more socially tightly bound and the more hierarchic a society is,
the more people unite in hating and lowest-common-denominator social
presentation. Progress and individual
tastes divide. The far right has learned
to unite followers not only by arousing bigotry, but also by providing
lowest-common-denominator entertainment (video games, trash music, and the
like) that debase individuals and make them conform at a bottom level. George Orwell foresaw this in 1984 and commented extensively on it in
his essays.
The war on science and
public truth gets more serious as the Trump administration gains more and more
control of departments and agencies, and censors speech, cuts funding for
science, and denies scientific facts (Friedman 2017; Sun and Eilperin 2017; Tom
2018). Many Republicans have come to
hate and fear education, especially higher education; a poll show that most
oppose and distrust it (Savransky 2017).
The few giant firms that
support right-wing politics to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a
year now control the United States, through the Republican Party. The 2017 tax cuts, opposed by 75% of voters
and appealing only to the rich, show this dominance clearly.
Suicide,
opiate abuse, and Trump voting are all strongly correlated; they are at high
levels in the same places, including rural counties in Appalachia and the
northern Midwest (Snyder 2018). They
indicate a level of despair in these downwardly-mobile areas. Since these areas are overwhelmingly white,
much of the despair translates to anger against minorities who are supposedly
taking the livelihood or at least the social status of the white workers. Diana
Mutz (2018) found that voting for Trump tracked perceived threats to group
status, not economic woes. The
suicidal tip of the iceberg reveals the degree to which rational self-interest,
as normally understood, fails to explain right-wing attitudes, in
the United States and elsewhere. Mass
shootings, suicide bombings, genocides, and voting for amoral strongmen are
manifestations of a self-destructive level of hate and fear.
In
short, the United States faces a unique crisis, involving a shift far to the
right of anything seen before except in the Confederacy before 1861. Racist and religious prejudice financed by
giant firms are taking over politics (Beauchamp 2018; Lopez 2017; MacLean 2017;
Metzl 2019). From the farthest right,
there are calls for civil war and mass killings (Nova 2017). Justice is corrupted at the highest levels
(Eisinger 2017; Neuborne 2019).
Democracy is suffering from increasing distortion (Browning 2018). The human costs are far worse than most
people realize. For example, American
children are 76% more likely to die before reaching 21 than children in other
developed countries; high infant mortality and enormous levels of gunshot
deaths are the main causes (Kliff 2018).
Even Francis Fukuyama, famed for his overoptimistic views of the future,
has recognized the darkness (Fukuyama 2016).
Politics becomes more emotional, more
passionate, and less civil, as shown by Lilliana Mason in her book Uncivil Agreement (2018). An increasing number of young, uneducated
white men have flocked to Trump’s standard.
They are frightened by the rise of minorities and immigrants, and of
more educated workers, all of whom compete directly for economic position. In a world where memories of the 2008
recession are still fresh and where wages are stagnant, these fears are
expectable.
An
economic downturn or fear of losing the 2020 elections could precipitate
dictatorship and its inevitable result (Neuborne 2019:227-228). It is possible that the Republican
administration will crack down around 2020, declare a state of emergency,
suspend the Constitution, and begin full-scale genocide (on this possibility
see Goitein 2019). The Republicans, like
Hitler (and apparently copying him), have engaged in widespread hatred. Trump, in campaigning and in tweets, has
attacked Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, African-Americans, Native Americans,
liberals, poor people, feminists, and others beyond counting. Followers have added their voices, sometimes
advocating extermination of gays (as preacher Kevin Swanson and several other
right-wing “Christians” have done).
The centrists, liberals,
and moderate-conservatives of the United States have very little time to unite
and stop this. Without unity, it is
unstoppable. The stalwart unity of the reactionaries
and disunion and mutual criticism on the left are expectable and typical of
periods of declining empire. The people
who were dominant want it all back, and what should be the rising and
progressive fraction are despondent and easily set against each other.
The
center and left in the United States have recently fallen back on being “the
opposition”—opposing rather than proposing.
We need to borrow a leaf from parliamentary systems of government. These usually have a
government-in-opposition: a shadow cabinet made up of opposition figures who
discuss policy and plan what to do if they cycle back into power. The United States now needs a Democrat group
who can develop policy and unite the party around it, via opposition figures
serving as virtual cabinet ministers, heads of agencies, and the rest of the
government machinery. History teaches
that people must go against something to unite successfully. We can only do that in the name of a higher,
nobler, more inclusive goal. Even Hitler
knew enough to do it. We certainly
should.
We
have seen how certain “progressives” of the 2010s failed disastrously by
opposing their antagonism toward men and whites to right-wing antagonism toward
women and minorities. One does not fight
fire with fire in a gasoline storage depot.
5. A Dark
Future
We
have a new mode of production, that unites China, North Korea, and Venezuela
with the United States despite alleged differences between “communism” and
“capitalism.” The new mode is one in which giant
primary-production corporations, especially oil, coal, and agribusiness,
control the economy. They are tied
closely to government by subsidies and special favors and rules as well as by
bribery and corruption. In other countries,
they are actually a part of government.
Big oil and big coal—the reactionary energy-suppliers that should now be
displaced by solar and wind power—have an especially distorting effect, because
they are in such desperate need of maintaining political reaction and fighting
environmental protection. Their role is
like that of slavery and the slave trade in past times, not only the Atlantic
trade of the 18th and 19th centuries but also the
Byzantine and Genoese slave trade from the Black Sea region in the Middle
Ages. All these had enormous distorting
effects on politics and culture, driving reactionary and anti-Enlightenment
views and policies. The thousand-year
cultural stagnation of the Byzantine Empire seems due to this. Relying on reactionary and harmful methods of
getting basic energy is culturally fatal.
Capitalism
in the narrow sense—control of society by capitalists—is dead. If “neoliberalism” ever existed, it does so
no more. (The term has been used so
loosely that it has no established meaning; it once meant the extreme
free-market view.) Giant firms working
through tyrannical governments are the future, or at least the foreseeable
future. Since the rapid growth of these
extractive industries cannot go on much longer, a hard limit will be set within
100 years (and probably within 50), leading probably to mass starvation,
hopefully to some search for solutions.
Even
the dinosaur firms are somewhat horrified at what is happening in the US,
Turkey (Altınay 2019), Hungary, and elsewhere, but they cannot escape it now. They depend on racists, religious fanatics,
and other extremists. The right wing worldwide has abandoned
traditional conservatism in favor of an agenda that is anti-intellectual,
anti-education, anti-science, anti-environment, anti-health-care, anti-poor,
anti-young, anti-old, anti-minority, religiously bigoted in favor of extremist
right-wing beliefs, anti-women, militarist, gun crazy, violent, pro-corporation
and anti-taxpayer, corrupt, pro-unequal treatment and inequality, opposed to
all human and civil rights, pro-dictatorship, anti-freedom of conscience,
strongly hierarchic. In their world, the
powerful can do what they please and are above the law, the weak do what they are
told.
Primary
production by itself is not the predictor of evil. Evil does come from the primary-production end
of the economy, but only from the fraction of it that is controlled by powerful
landlord or corporate interests. The
evil done in the world for the last 200 years has been largely at the bidding
of plantations, fossil fuel companies, agribusiness, and related
interests. The driver is the
slave-worked plantation and its modern descendants: an economy based on a tiny, rich, powerful
elite ruling a vast servile labor force of which most are expendable and can
thus be killed in unlimited numbers to maintain discipline or simply for
convenience. Very different were the old
monarchies, even tyrannies, which could not kill at will—they usually could not
spare so much labor.
In
the future, worldwide, concentration of power and wealth will go on, while
resources diminish and global warming runs on apace—unless the human race sees
fit to stop fighting and hating and start working for the common good. The economy remains one of throughput, as
opposed to efficiency and recycling.
The
Republicans, and equivalent parties in other countries from Russia to Turkey to
Brazil, are now trapped. They depend
financially on a handful of giant corporations that are increasingly acting against
the interests of the majority, and are increasingly dependent on bribing
politicians for support—including exemption from laws, especially laws
protecting people against physical damage.
China’s tobacco industry operates with the full support of the government,
though tobacco kills 1.2 million Chinese a year, because the government depends
on tobacco taxes and many individual politicians depend on bribes (Kohrman et
al. 2018). The oil interests occupy a
similar position in the United States.
The
future after 2030-2050 is clear enough: the world will move toward emulation of
existing top-down primary-production systems.
These are recapitulating the society of the old agrarian empires. Some 20% of the population will be starving, 65%
barely surviving, 10% secure but not well off, 4% well off, 1% ruling and super
rich. There will be a steady downward
sift as population falls, first from starvation, then from disease as health
care gets cut back.
The
world has made a collective decision to have one final orgy of consumption,
rather than converting to sustainability and assuring a future for our children
and grandchildren. This appears in the
rise of fanatically anti-environmental regimes in the United States, Brazil
under Jair Bolsonaro, and elsewhere. The
rise of strongmen—individuals who specifically and explicitly violate laws and
morals to show they are above such things—has given us fascist leaders feeding
on hate not only in those cases but also (currently) in Hungary, India, Israel,
Kazakhstan, Philippines, Poland , Russia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and elsewhere. Such strongmen above the law are recorded in
the most ancient texts; Nebuchanezzar was an early one, followed by a whole
list of Roman emperors, then such conquerors as Tamerlane and Henry VIII. The Greek and Roman historians already had
the type thoroughly described. They
always have the support of publics who feel threatened by change and progress,
especially the poorer members of majorities, but also the primary-production
and rentier interests. Today, big oil
and urban mobs take the place of a team formerly made up of rentier landlords
and rural laborers.
Today’s
strongmen share a whole range of characteristics. First and foremost, they sanction their rule
by appeals to extremist religion or its ideological equivalent (especially
communism). This religion is virtually
identical whether called “Christian,” “Muslim,” “Jewish,” “Buddhist,” or
“socialist.” It sanctions total power in
the hands of the ruler; repression of women, often to the point of rendering
them passive vessels of men; violence in defense of the faith; denial of equal
rights to those not in the specific cult in question; and extreme opposition to
the messages of peace, love, harmony, forgiveness, and charity that are the
hallmarks of the actual faiths claimed.
Second, they lead attacks on weaker minorities, whether political,
ethnic, religious, or lifestyle.
Juntas with similar
amoral characteristics, but lacking the strongman image, control another few
dozen countries. Democracy is on the
wane worldwide. Strongmen sometimes
limit themselves to military dictatorship (as currently in Egypt) but more
often invoke full-scale fascist regimes, with ethnic hatred, fusion of
government and giant corporations, militarism, glorification of force, and
other fascist principles. They are
skilled at mobilizing otherwise peaceful, passive majorities against
minorities.
In
all cases, the fundamental ideology is one of rigid hierarchy, with respect or
adulation due to superiors and stronger individuals, contempt and oppression
due to those below. Callousness or
contempt of the poor and of less powerful miorities shades over into outright
sadistic treatment, of which the ultimate form is full genocide. This ideology follows from the “conservative”
reading of Nietzsche (which I accept as the correct one). Nietzsche did not
inspire it—he properly credited it to the more authoritarian side of ancient
Greek thought—but he expressed it, and his expression inspired the Nazis, the Randians,
and others who went well beyond his glorification of power into outright
glorification of mass deaths.
This form of thought
animates many a weak bully, who invariably calls out his opponents as “weak” or
“snowflakes.” It goes with dismissal of
all well-meaning public projects as “fantasy,” but glorification of the
military and of warlike adventuring. It
also, as pointed out repeatedly by George Orwell, goes with ferociously
anti-intellectual, anti-nature, and anti-art attitudes. Orwell’s portrayal of destruction of high
culture and promotion of pop trash in 1984 and Animal Farm is
expanded in most of his essays. It
turned out to be eerily predictive of the Republican preference for a
reality-TV star and public buffoon over a whole slate of veteran politicians.
The difference from the
old days is that with better means of surveillance and massacre, monitoring and
genocidal elimination of dissidents will replace the wars and campaigns of
old. North Korea, China, Iran, Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan, and several Middle Eastern countries already display this
regime. Turkey, Thailand, India, the
United States, Israel, Venezuela, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and several
other countries are moving rapidly toward it.
Many of these are oil countries; most have powerful primary-production
interests dominating their politics.
Interesting exceptions include Hungary and Israel, which have
diversified and progressive economies but have gone fascist. More interesting are the countries with powerful
primary-production interests that are not going fascist. Norway and Canada depend heavily on oil, but
are developed countries, so are more diversified. Bolivia, Zambia, and a few other countries
are anomalously liberal for countries dominated by extraction.
The
“base” for the leaders of these countries seems largely the same, especially in
the cases of the United States, Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, and Russia, and it is
similar to Hitler’s base in Germany.
Older people of the dominant ethnic and religious group, especially if
involved in traditional occupations like farming and small business, make up
most of it, so that rural areas are solidly right-wing even if cities are
solidly liberal. The big businessmen in
dinosaur firms and the rootless young men (and some women) of the dominant
groups are heavily involved. Puritanical
religion, as opposed to liberal or social-oriented religion, is heavily
involved. Less educated or more
traditionally trained individuals from the dominant ethnic and religious groups
are overrepresented. The young, the
minorities, and the occupants of socially oriented or new-type occupational
roles are less involved.
The
common thread seems to be that wealth is rapidly increasing but is being
captured by the top 1%, while the masses stagnate economically. The most frustrated and resentful are the
less progressive fractions of the majority ethnic groups, and they are the
drivers of the fascist trend, as they often were in the earlier fascist wave of
the 1930s (a point made by Edsall 2018).
Really rough times have sometimes led to fascistic or psychopathic
leaders taking over, but real hardship often tends to make people unite behind
a capable leader rather than a merely evil one.
The breakdown of the United States in 1860 gave us Lincoln; growth
appropriated by the rich while working-class whites lost out gave us Trump.
Democracy,
in the end, may prove unstable—a brief interlude between the monarchies of the
past and the fascist tyrannies rising in the present. Resource crunches may simply make it
impossible for the good to prevail.
However, this is not necessary at present. We can stop the downward slide.
There
is one striking conclusion that emerges from all: Evil is
almost always due to power challenged. Rulers
consolidating dictatorship, totalitarian rulers under threat, schoolyard
bullies dominating weak but smart kids, insecure and inadequate husbands
beating wives, politicians facing trial, oil company bosses facing better
energy generation and consequent loss of power and position, druglords facing
upstart thugs all have this in common, and above all majorities facing imagined
challenge by immigrants and minorities.
The only hope lies in eliminating total
power and restraining by law and superior force those who abuse power. This will not be adequate, but it is the
basic first step.
6. A Final
Note
Many
people of the younger generation now appear to be giving up, saying “The United
States has always been like this.” They
can point to a bloody history of slavery, genocide of Native Americans,
internment of Japanese and (some) Germans, Jim Crow laws, denial of the vote to
women, the Texas Rangers and their institutionalized harassment of Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans, anti-gay violence, and much more.
However,
those ills have always been challenged and all were eventually stopped, or at
least made illegal. Slavery and racism
go on, but underground. The campaigns to
stop them were widely supported, and involved much heroism and sacrifice. Slavery was stopped by a bloody war. The women’s suffrage movement, the labor
movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and other
movements involved a great deal of bloodletting. They prevailed in the end.
Most communities and states have
systems of checks and balances. It is
when these break down, or are deliberately dismantled, that the psychopaths and
hatemongers take over, and genocide can begin.
We have observed above that the two commonest reasons for murder,
whether genocide or individual, are desire for power and desire for acceptance
and approval. Frustration of these leads
to escalating conflict, especially when someone with an unusually high lack of
perceived control or of perceived approval feels frustrated in those needs. The more the perceived weakness and failure,
and the more the frustration, the more the overreaction to a slight, and the
more the resulting conflict spins out of control.
Throughout history, people have had
to cope with human evil. Religion has
been by far the main and most important way, over and above ordinary community
solidarity. Religion has produced
countless saints, sages, holy men, holy women, teachers, and meditators, many
of whom were genuinely virtuous people—though many were not, at least by most modern
standards. Religion has been the carrier
vehicle for most of the moral messages in human history.
However, religion has, notoriously,
been the excuse for many of the most horrific mass murders. No religion has a notably better track record
than any other. Christianity became the
excuse for the Crusades. Islam moved all
too quickly from a call for unity and peace to a call for jihad. Monotheistic religions appear to have a worse
record than others, but the others are far from perfect. Classical Greek stoicism and related
philosophies of ataraxia (suppressing desire) became excuses for expanding the
Greek and Roman empires. Even Buddhism,
which explicitly bans violence and teaches compassion to all beings, became the
religion of the samurai, and has been the excuse for countless killings over
time, including two of the worst genocides in modern history: the
long-continuing campaigns to exterminate the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the
Rohingya Muslims in Burma. There are
many other cases in history. The
Rohingya massacres should end the stereotypes about peaceable Buddhism and
violent Islam widely current in American society.
The basic problem with religion is
that it claims to have the one absolute truth.
This leads to intolerance for other claims, even obviously correct ones
(see the fate of evolution by natural selection, as a theory, in religious
societies). Moreover, organized
religions generally have organized hierarchies, often with a single apical
leader, and such hierarchies inevitably reprise Rummel’s principle: “Power kills, and absolute power kills
absolutely” (Rummel 1998). The same
dismal fate occurs with religion-like ideological systems, notoriously
including communism and fascism.
Since all cultures and traditions include alternative morals and
moral codes, religions that are founded on impeccable principles of love, care,
justice, and empathy always develop countertraditions that teach hate, cruelty,
and butchery, from human sacrifice to burning heretics at the stake. These are then often held-especially by
rulers consolidating power—to be the highest of moral goods, superior to the
everyday care and help. Ordinary selfish
greed can be handled; sadism considered as highest morality is harder to
control.
The alternative is not abandonment of religion or of truth, but
of expanding the basic principle of intelligent enquiry: we are searching for
truth but have not found it all, and the more people cooperate in searching for
truths, the better we all do.
There is a common theme of religion
turned evil: it is obsessed with control, especially control over the more
vulnerable and less dominant members of society. The clearest and most obvious common theme of
religions that harm is that they focus on harming and oppressing women. This is the distinguishing feature between
right-wing and liberal Christianity, extremist and ordinary Islam,
ultra-Orthodox and reform Judaism, extremist and ordinary Buddhism, and so on
throughout the world’s religions.
Repression of women usually carries over to repression and abuse of
children (“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” a folk version of Proverbs
23:13-14). Degree of intolerance for
heresies, including the most minor and trivial divergences from practice, also
tracks religion turned harmful; the opposite is ecumenism or tolerance.
Religions all seem to fall into the
trap of seeing ordinary innocent need-satisfaction and fun as “sin,” while
social jockeying for position and control is taken for granted, and even put to
evil use to promote the faith. No
religion seems to face the obvious fact that most evil in the world is done to
maintain social position or control. Religions
have hierarchic orders, organized monasteries and priesthoods, and so on, thus
leaving themselves open for the worst sins of all while fighting the trivial
ones.
Killing desire, the goal of some
religions and philosophies, frequently succeeds in killing desire for the
morally good, while leaving hatred intact.
At best, it allows people to avoid confronting the world, including its
evils.
Some argue that religion is “the
problem,” but the alternatives do not have a good track record. Nationalism, fascism, capitalism, and
communism are the leading ideologies developed as alternatives. Stalin and Mao repressed religion (all
religion) with even more sadistic enthusiasm than Christians in the 17th
century demonstrated in repressing heretics.
The problem is clear: all these are
social, all of them define groups, and it is social group hatred that is the
main and usual problem. Religions
usually blame greed and lust, but cannot get rid of them. The real problem is social hate, and the religions
do not even try to get rid of it. They
often cause it. Religion and its
imitators provides communitas, but also unreal abstractions and unprovable
visions. People then commit to those,
and carry out real murders in support of them. In short, grand ideological frameworks are not
going to save us.
2. First
Steps to Policy: Evaluating What Helps
From
what went before, it appears that the current problems facing the world are
best conceptualized under five heads, from more specific and immediate to
general and deep-rooted:
Saving
the environment, especially from dinosauric interests such as Big Oil and Big
Agribusiness. This means protecting
biodiversity, switching immediately and thoroughly to renewable energy, and
being as sustainable as possible—by whatever measure is useful.
Restoring
the rule of law, at the expense of the fascistic despots that now run all the
largest nations and many of the smaller ones.
Fighting
racist, religious and ideological bigotry and hatred, by teaching tolerance,
valuing diversity, and social solidarity.
Getting
people to stop, think, learn, and make reasonable decisions, instead of going
with exaggerated media-driven overreactions.
Above
all, the real back story: dealing with the chronic social fears and stresses
that create most of the problem. This
requires fair, responsive, responsible governments and leaders. Such are now exceedingly rare, and the worst
sort of strongman leaders control dozens of countries. Restoring fair, equitable governance is
clearly basic to security and thus to reassuring people, reducing threat,
making individuals feel capable of dealing with threat, and thus greatly
reducing the drive to hate and harm.
We
also desperately need an educational system that will create and foster self-confidence,
self-control, concern for quality of life, and dedication to
self-improvement. These are necessary to
blocking hatred and defensiveness.
People need to see themselves as independent agents improving the world,
or at least their own lives, rather than followers and mindless conformists.
Obviously, we also need
to increase such basic amenities as medical care, education, and justice.
To do all this, we will
have to work on technology, ideology, morality, and praxis. What follows, for most of the rest of this
book, is heavily moral. It will sound
sententious to many, but I believe there is a need to establish an agreed moral
ground as well as dealing with practical issues and stopping violence.
The
rest of this section will be largely devoted to my ideas on these topics. I claim no great originality, but will not be
citing literature except where I am directly using someone else’s ideas.
In
general, social change comes from individuals working within existing
structures, often modifying those structures in the process. There is a front story of individual
decisions, a mid story of human context, and a back story of demography,
climate, existing rules and laws, and historical contingencies that create a
“path dependent” situation. Charismatic
or brilliant leaders succeed, but only in hopeful times. They cannot do much in reactionary times and
regimes. Democracy helps, but
reactionary democracy does not.
Good
behavior does not come easily. One must
not only be moral, but—more importantly—able to deal rationally and as coolly
as possible with actual harms and stresses. The innate impulses toward
developing morality stem from human needs for warm sociability. As we have seen, developing these requires at
least some support, empathy, and empowerment of children growing up, and
self-efficacy among adults. Since people
being much worse than many of us once thought, we need stricter laws and sanctions. Recent events worldwide have proved that we
most especially need laws against malicious lying for political reasons. We also need much stricter sanctions against
betrayal, bullying, and hate crimes. We
need far better civil rights protection.
The Founding Fathers lived at a time when politically active people
could be assumed to be at least somewhat brave and responsible. Not now.
Violence normally
requires weakness and irrationality to drive it, so strength and reasonableness
help. However, there are
exceptions. Violence is the default
recourse and first recourse in warrior cultures, though mostly in intergroup
relations. Culture enters in to tell
individuals when to be violent. In any
society, violence can be dealt with only by strict, fair laws, with no
corruption. A wider moral shell is
necessary, but not sufficient. There
must be law and order with firm, impartial enforcement; norms of peace;
conflict resolution mechanisms, formal and informal, general and specific. Experience teaches that there must also be
something adventurous but nonviolent for young men to do. Ordinary sports appear to fail at this, but
exploring, seafaring, and the like are available. Peace is also helped by an expanding economy
that raises all boats, or at least prevents groups from sinking. This need not be ecologically ruinous; we can
expand into sustainable energy and services instead of mass-produced bulk
goods.
Recall that it is easier
to unite people against a common enemy, and to get them to follow orders if
those orders involve destroying a hated or despised group, than to unite people
in the cause of love and care. People
are sociable, and usually loving and caring to their close kin and friends, but
fear and hate dominate public interaction unless rigidly combatted.
The one thing that almost
everyone agrees on, in politics, is that the first requirement for a government
is that it protects its people. Until
now, that has been interpreted as military protection, with economic protection
added to the list in the 20th century. Today, the dangers to a given citizenry are,
first, environmental (especially climate change); second, genocide and related
corrupt and violent internal politics; third, preventable diseases and health
risks. The first and third were not
manageable by government when the Founding Fathers wrote. The second was, but was far less a problem
than external invasion; such is no longer the case.
The citizenry also has a
right and a need to be protected from hatred and hate crimes, and from major
loss in quality of life, as by loss in aesthetic opportunities, nature, historic
monuments, and the like. Protection of
economic benefits by managing the economy well is clearly necessary, but now
less important than preventing the catastrophic disasters that climate change
and pollution are bringing about.
3. A different
kind of civilization
An
ideal to strive toward is a civilization depending on growth in environmental
and cultural amenities rather than mass-production of manufactured goods. We currently measure economic growth and
development by the amount of value created by human activity, rather than by
the amount of value overall. Mining,
manufacturing, and any form of resource-transforming count—even if all they are
doing is producing pollution (Anderson 2010). Often, this means that pure
destruction is highly valued on paper, though it brings nothing but harm to
actual people. Preserving nature,
allowing environments to recover, and creating personal amenities not traded in
the market do not count. Art and craft
production does not count unless it is counted in the manufacturing and sales
statistics. Singing songs for one’s
children does not count, but polluting the air with hideous electronic music
does.
An
opposite model of how to run a civilization existed in old Southeast Asia. Nobody assessed economic growth, though the
governments did tax value created. What
mattered was saving forests and fruit trees, growing rich and complex crop
assemblages, creating beautiful arts, living happily, and letting others live
as they wished. Societies were ruled by
kings, but were astonishingly free and open.
The landscapes were beautiful, and got richer, lusher, and more diverse
over time, because agriculture was devoted to producing human food rather than
industrial goods. There was some war and
killing, but nothing remotely like what we have seen in the past 100 years in
the world. The one great problem was
disease, which was rampant, but with modern medicine this has been stopped, and
lifespans are comparable to the west.
The problems now are rapid population growth in a context of even more
rapid shift to western industrialization and destruction. Similar, if less materially successful,
cultures existed in other areas worldwide.
The Maya of Mexico and Central America have been notably good at maintaining
ecosystems, for instance.
We
are not going to return to Southeast Asia in 1900, but we can use their design
principles: a world where people are helped by moving toward the more natural,
more simple, more beautiful, and more sustainable. Our current industrial civilization sets all
its incentives, subsidies, and accounting in the opposite direction: valuing
destruction of nature to make vast and complex amounts of ugly stuff by
unsustainable practices.
We need to value trees, grasses,
gardens, birds, fish, landscapes, clean water, health, good food, beautiful art
and music, and other amenities, rather than sheer throughput of materials. Bhutan, basically a Southeast Asian state in
economy and ecology though culturally and linguistically Tibetan, has in fact
done this, measuring its “gross domestic happiness” via such indices. They show a genuine alternative, a way out of
our rush to collapse.
4.
Education
To recapitulate: the most direct and basic cause of evil is
anger turning to hate and hate turning to violence. This usually comes from strong reaction to
social slights, threats, and harms.
Escalating anger leads to fighting.
In such cases, the food
of the bad wolf is brooding on insults and personal offenses. Weak and defensive individuals, especially
those that have physical power (often in the form of guns) but lack of
perceived self-efficacy in social life, are the most avid consumers of that
food, and the most dangerous of people.
On the wider scale,
genocides and mass killings occur when ruthless leaders take power through
extremist ideologies, using those ideologies to whip up hatred that unites
masses against victims. In this case,
there is an initial coterie of zealots and then a vast mass of weak, conformist
followers who allow their everyday frustrations and resentments to be mobilized
in the cause of destruction. Once again:
the food of the bad wolf is ruminating on minor slights and harms, in this case
leading to weak and defensive persecution of scapegoats. The weak and defensive conformists are the
voters who vote for vicious dictators, the passive enablers of dictatorial
coups, and then the easily-swayed subjects of brutal regimes.
Part of this food for the
bad wolf is the insidious thought that some people don’t matter. Education must also teach people to control
hostility and aggression, the real problems in cases of hatred. Teaching students that hatred and unprovoked
aggression are unacceptable—morally wrong and socially destructive—is obviously
necessary. To feed the good wolf, we need to feed the irenic and full-person
sides of human nature. The best food for
good wolf is reflecting that every being is important, and every human deserves
consideration. Common decency and
honesty would be enough to keep the good wolf fed and the bad one at bay. Surely schools, media, and public life can
teach that much.
Education therefore needs
to talk at length about domestic violence, bullying, genocide, and war. All educators—including parents and, indeed,
everyone—must teach young people not to hate, not to brood about trivial
slights, and not to escalate conflict.
Anger and fighting have their place, but overreaction and hatred do not.
People need to be taught about bullies
and the strongmen who are bullies writ large.
They also need to grow up in a world of enforced laws against such
behaviors, to get a sense of the need for the rule of law.
Conflict resolution is
thus important. Children and adults need
to learn how to deal with conflicts other than by angering and fighting. This should be combined with teaching them
not to displace their fear, stress, and aggression. Specifics include better parenting and better
advice and counseling.
Education must return to teaching civics and basic civil morality—not
elaborate or puritanical rules, but simple common decency. American history must go back to teaching the
ideals that founded the nation and have continued to improve over time. American education has suffered terribly from
both jingoistic idolization of America, denying its past of racism, genocide,
and slavery, and hypercritical focus on such ills at the expense of recording
the ideals and the progress toward them.
One would hope for education in the great literature and arts of the
past—the whole world’s past—but teaching the “classics” did not save Europe
from fascism and communism, so perhaps something was missed in the old days of
liberal education.
More serious is the need to require and demand that public and private
education teach verified science and absolutely ban global warming denial,
anti-evolution, anti-vaccination propaganda, and other outright lies propagated
for the purpose of harm. We are not
policing education at all well. When it
teaches hateful lies, we are corrupting the nation. Freedom of speech absolutely must not extend
to freedom of schools to teach lies.
This is among the most immediate and critical of needs.
Schools need to change
profoundly, to teach civility and ordinary decency and to deal with
values. Today, schools have come
increasingly to drill students mindlessly in basic skills, to be assessed by
endless standardized tests that kill thought and destroy creativity. Some students report writing stories and
poems surreptitiously because the schools discourage such behavior. We need to go back to older ideals. The most important thing to teach is civil
behavior, not STEM skills. Teaching
students how to learn, how to do
research or at least find out accurate information, is vital also. Teaching truth is important, teaching how to
tell truth from lies is even more so, but teaching students how to find out for
themselves and improve their
knowledge and accuracy of knowledge is most important of all.
Traditional education,
worldwide, usually taught skills through doing, in an apprentice role. It taught values and abstract principles
through stories and songs (see Kopnina and Shoreman-Ouimet 2011, especially my
essay therein, Anderson 2011). It taught
ordinary declarative knowledge through taking young people out in the world and
letting them experience what they were learning. That last is no longer adequate—knowledge is
not just local any more—but should be pursued as much as possible. Certainly we need to return to these
principles. They worked; our modern
system does not teach well, except when it uses them. Nobody expects students to learn sports, or
musical instrument playing, or doctoring, through lectures. Nobody should expect morals to be learned
without songs and stories.
The other point, building
self-efficacy to prevent weak defensiveness and conformity to dictators,
involves teaching students to do their own thinking and acting—to be
independent and creative. This involves
making students (and everyone) do their own work, rather than rote memorizing
and taking tests. It also means moving
people away from radio, television, and other passive-listener media, toward
active interchange. Even video games at
least involve some effort. Messaging,
email, and the social media may yet save us.
People also need to know
that someone, somewhere, is backing them up.
Education needs to deal with issues of alienation, isolation, prejudice,
rejection, and marginalization. This is
a widely recognized point, but widely ignored in a world that will not spend
money on schools or psychological help.
Clearly, education,
therapeutic enough to cure people of weak defensiveness, hatred, and
scapegoating, is the most important need in combatting evil. Now that we know the basics of feeding good
and bad wolves, we need to reform educational systems accordingly.
5. Some
Moral Principles
The Seven Deadly Sins are all too
well known, as identified by the early Christian church from late Greek
thought, but no one seems to recall the matching set of Seven Virtues. They are: Faith, hope, charity, justice,
prudence, temperance, fortitude. This
seems as reasonable a place to start as any, but the following will highlight
justice-as-fairness, following John Rawls, and tolerance, following none of the
Seven. Intolerance was not a bad thing
in ancient times.
If people were really selfish, they would want
what we know people really enjoy: happy, cooperative, mutually beneficial, warm
societies and communities above all else—not self-aggrandizement at the expense
of their friends and families and communities.
If people were not mean, they would hate disease and misery and
unnecessary suffering—not each other or science or nature. If they were interested in actual control
rather than power to bully others, they would hate autocracy and unnecessary
hierarchy.
Caring is the nexus, the
alternative for which we strive. We seek
especially the broad sense: wanting good for others and wanting a good and
harmonious society (even infants want that).
The Bible calls this agapé
or caritas.
Buddhists call it compassion. Humans
being so prone to domination by the bad wolf, we must err on the side of
caution, caring, helping, reching out, and empowering.
Viktor Frankl noticed
that survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps were those that had something
deeply important to live for and be responsible for. Usually, this would be either families or
work that was a real Calling rather than a mere job. Sometimes it was religion. He spent his life extending this observation,
learning that almost all people need or want a deep meaning of this sort in
their lives (Frankl 1959, 1978). This is
one basic counter to living for hate.
Unfortunately, and perhaps ironically, group conflict is one of the most
powerful ways to give meaning to life (Rovenpor et al. 2019). Nothing is more meaningful to people than
fighting for a cause. One must use caution in deploying the classic
“work and love” in support of tolerance.
The
other counters are the opposites of excessive anger: reasonableness and
peacefulness. The opposites of hatred
are tolerance and valuing diversity. The
opposites of callousness are responsibility, but above all empathy and
compassion, which may in the end be the most important qualities for all
good-doing. The daily kibble of the good
wolf is support, empowerment, caring, compassion, mutual aid, mutual
responsibility, mutual respect, and mutual concern. The red meat that gives it strength to win is
conscious work to create and build social solidarity.
In
dealing with evil, we need to attack it directly: to oppose rational truth to
hatred, political lies, oppression, cruelty, abuse of power, and the summation
of all these in fascism and similar political ideologies. We need to call out such things directly,
constantly, and explicitly.
Above
all, we need to drive rational, reasonable thinking and behavior against the
irrationality (sometimes downright insanity) of murderous harm.
Nothing
helps except dealing directly with it.
When your baby throws up all over you, all you can do is clean it
up. Prayer doesn’t help, good thoughts
don’t help, meditation doesn’t help. You
keep loving the baby and do what is necessary.
The only direct way to stop murder
and mass violence is through appealing to reason and rational discourse while also
enforcing strict laws within a rule of law.
This,
by itself, is not enough. We need to oppose
evil with cultural and social teachings of help and unity, sustained by the
innate moral or premoral sense of mutual aid and generosity that seem to inhere
in humans. Directly relevant, also, are
natural interest—especially active warm interest—and curiosity, and the urge to learn more in order to
improve. Natural toughness and
innocent enjoyment are reasonable and useful.
The reason that advancing the good
so often fails is not mere selfishness.
It is antagonism to cooperating and to working with others as equals,
especially as seen in refusal to learn, change, and self-improve as part of the
process.
The cure is seeing all people as worthwhile
and that we are all in this together. The long first part of this book demonstrated
at length that the root problem is rejecting people for reasons of “essence”:
the false belief that “race,” ethnicity, religion, and the like are somehow
basic essences that condemn whole groups of people. The only cure is seeing all as not only
tolerable but worthy of help and of civil behavior. Ideally, they are all equal before the law,
and equal in opportunity—a hope not approximated in modern societies.
Seeing
all as worthy requires checking excessive anger. It also requires proactive compassion and
empathy, to avoid callous bureaupathy and similar evils. Studies on how to further such goals exist
(Batson 2011; McLaren 2013; Zaki 2019).
Our authors, notably Beck (1999) and Maslow (1970), provide ideas and
experiences.
The
task is to minimize both the level of anger and number of things that arouse
it. A fascist dictator will try to
find as many reasons for anger as he can, finding ways to include almost everyone
in the violent movement (see e.g. Traverso 2019 on recent successes and
failures at whipping up hatreds in Europe).
I recognize the drawbacks
of utilitarian calculation, but I cannot see any way to evaluate policies and
politics except by net help to people and the environment versus net harm to
same. Things like peace and freedom must be calculated within that shell. There are times when peace is wrong, such as
when one’s country is invaded. There are
necessary limits to freedom, such as denying people the right to bully others. Proactive effective help is good, by
definition, but can be worse than nothing when it is badly planned, or unneeded
and intrusive. The usual
social-conformity measures are usually helpful, keeping society together, but they
can be bad: being too conformist, going along to get along, and the like.
Helping
requires self-efficacy, reasonableness, self-control, self-confidence, and
courage (i.e. ability to go into unknown and risky, where self-confidence
fails). Obviously, parents and schools
need to do everything possible to develop these. Self-confidence, including confidence in
one’s moral principles and above all confidence in one’s control of one’s life,
is the key virtue for preventing collapse into blind conformity, including
conformity to genocidal leaders. It also
prevents collapse into domestic violence and other individual violent
acts.
The
countervailing forces are indifference (resulting in callousness) and actual
hate. Hatred in particular must be
fought wherever and whenever it arises.
If it becomes pervasive in society, violence becomes inevitable. Genocide is the ultimate case of hatred spun
out of control; it can only be stopped in advance by fighting hate and
displacing evil leaders.
The usual moral
touchstone, the Golden Rule, does not work perfectly. My neighbors do not take well to being
treated to Brussels sprouts, Scottish murder ballads, or displays of Chinese
art. Granted that such individual
preferences are probably not what was intended by the Golden Rule, where do we
draw the line? I do not inflict my
rather old-fashioned Christian morality on my kids, let alone the world at
large. Conversely, I would not accept
the hierarchic social morality that works in and is highly popular in Singapore
and China. We simply cannot use
ourselves as measures of all things and all people.
The
only reasonable touchstone is helping people.
But what helps? Is it help in
their terms, or in mine? One hopes for
easy cases—things that are recognized by almost everyone as helping, such as
feeding the hungry. Not all cases are
easy. If I were in Singapore (where I
lived and worked for a while many years ago), would I work to advance its quite
popular but rigid moral code, which—then at least—banned chewing gum, rock
music, and Playboy? Or would I work to advance
freedom and liberty of conscience, according to my own view of helping? Such cases can only be decided by detailed
consideration and consultation.
As David Hume said,
“Reason is, and must ever be, the slave of the passions” (Hume 1969
[1739-1740]:462). Reason is a good
slave. It is the only way to get things
right so that we can survive. It is the
only possible route to change and improvement.
But it matters more to get the passions right, such that reason is a
slave to the good ones. It is at least
as competent and hard-working a slave to evil as to good.
One opposite to evil is
the “universal positive regard” of the psychologists (Rogers 1961), but that is
a process goal, not achievable in the real world. Checking evil often involves direct fighting
against real enemies, so life cannot be free from harming others. This multiplies the need for rational
thought, since any irrationality can lead to harming the wrong people.
The cure for misdirected
aggression and rejection is action that is as helping as possible. Most religions have come up with this idea,
but only certain forms of the religion feature it. It has been termed the “Social Gospel” in
Christianity. It also characterizes
reform Judaism, Ahmadiyya, the Three Teachings tradition in China, various
forms of Buddhism, and other traditions.
There needs to be a Goddess of Common Sense.
The Southern Poverty Law
Center has listed ten ways to fight hatred: Act, join forces, support the
victims, speak up, educate yourself, create an alternative, pressure leaders,
stay engaged, teach acceptance, dig deeper.
Desire for wealth, power, status, standing, and sociability can lead to
positive-sum games and thus to goodness and progress, but all too often desire
leads to zero-sum or negative-sum playing.
Then, when others push back, conflict escalates, eventually spinning out
of control unless damped down. To be
evil, this must—by my definition, at least—reach irrational levels.
Damping must start with
desire (as religions have always taught).
It cannot end there. We must
teach and invoke policy to get people to play positive-sum games and to be
reasonable. We must put in place
conflict-resolution mechanisms (Beals and Siegal 1966). We must teach a morality of peaceful behavior
instead of vengeance and predation. Finally, we must outlaw actual harming,
including indirect harms that are currently accepted, such as pollution
damage. Damping down conflict is the
most immediate and direct need, however. The greatest problem in conflict, always, is
escalation. Really successful ways to
damp that down, all the way from playground fights and intimate partner
violence to international conflicts and genocides, are not always deployed, and
more research on them is seriously needed.
As we have noted above, the ordinary small-scale tensions, problems, and
slights of daily life keep people in a state that allows sudden
positive-feedback loops to emerge and lead to exploding conflict.
Since cowardice and
self-doubt lie behind so many of the problems, there is a serious need to
promote self-efficacy, self-reliance, and ability to act—notably including the
knowledge of how to de-escalate conflict.
People are often too busy
or defensive or simply lazy to work hard for the good; we cannot expect
everybody to do it. Dealing with
indirect problems like environmental woes is especially difficult. People discount the future, are too
optimistic, and hate the endless small adjustments that fixing the environment
entails. It is easier to go for one big
fix, such as a war.
Since overreaction and
misreaction are root problems, the start of the cure is facts. We have to get science back to a place where
people will accept scientific findings.
After that, the clearest intervention needed is demanding civil rights
and civil behavior.
This
provides a guide for a moral shell involving solidarity with others above all,
especially tolerance and valuing diversity, but also concern for
self-improvement and quality of life, including a return to the civility,
mutual respect, responsibility, and patience that we are losing.
Reasonableness
is inadequate. People cheat on their own
morals; they fall short and provide excuses.
They fail to reason correctly, and err in predictably self-serving
directions.
Even
without that, people must sacrifice to make community work. They need to make up for cheaters, and they
must be heroic in emergencies. We cannot
expect everyone to love and care much beyond the family and friendship circle.
(What follows draws heavily on John Rawls’ doctrine of fairness as justice
[Rawls 1971, 2001] but is informed by a range of ethical positions, from
Kantian [Kant 2002] and neo-Kantian [Korsgaard 1996] to neo-utilitarian [Brandt
1979, 1992, 1996] to Aristotelian virtue ethics [Aristotle 1953]; see also
Anderson 2010).
Thus,
every society on earth has had to develop a morality of self-sacrifice and
service to others, enforced it by public opinion. This was memorably argued by Adam Smith, who
correctly saw it as a necessary shell around his economic utopia of free
small-scale competition (Smith 1910, 2000).
They must conform up, to higher standards of behavior, rather than down
into toxic conformity to evil norms.
This requires personal strength.
From
what has gone before in this book, we conclude that evil is due to extreme
individuals—psychopaths, sociopaths, and the like—who often become leaders; to
cowardice and failure to cope with hurt, stress, and threat; and to conformity
with orders from people suffering from those two conditions. Ordinary selfish greed is also a huge
problem, but rarely gets out of control unless the other three conditions hold. People are notably good at stopping each other
from selfish greed. Studies show that
humans are good at “cheater” detection, and at stopping cheaters by shaming,
ostracism, and outright punishment (Tomasello 2016; Wrangham 2019). Ordinary people develop a conscience that
restrains them from cheating even when they can get away with it, and a concern
for people that makes them want to help others and do right by them. It is hard to separate these good mental
states from sheer fear of shame and punishment; all combine to keep most people
only somewhat selfish. We all cheat a
bit, but most of us limit it to fairly innocuous matters. The psychopaths are those who cheat in spite
of being attacked, writing off the attacks as unfair and hypocritical.
It is worth briefly
noting that some “sins” are not what they seem: gluttony is a matter of eating
disorders, themselves caused by problems usually apart from food; “sloth” is
usually hatred for dull work, or physical illness, or psychological inanition
due to fear and stress; and so forth.
Many early moralities foundered on the rock of condemning reasonable and
normal desires, rather than the irrational reactions to fear and stress that
made people seem sinful or immoderate in their desires. It seems likely that puritanical condemning
of normal desires did more damage by creating fear, stress, and guilt than it
brought benefit to anyone.
We
must maintain a consistent, oft-repeated ideology of unity, solidarity, mutual
aid, mutual care, and tolerance. From a
general sense of “we’re all in this together,” the first personal virtues are
openness, warmth, interest in the world, self-confidence, and ability to enjoy
life. These were highlighted by Aristotle
(1953), but they have been amazingly neglected since his 4th-century-BCE
days. These imply a set of learned
personal orientations: compassion, respect, responsibility. These in turn entail civility,
reasonableness, courage, patience, and hard work. Social attitudes include empathy and
egalitarianism—both equality before the law and the rough-and-ready sense that
we are all here and thus have to take care of each other and take people as they
are.
Empathy
and altruism are linked; psychological studies have unpacked both. Humans are wired for empathy in ways unknown
among other animals, and can build on that by learning to be much more
empathetic than is “natural” from the genetic base. We are experts at putting ourselves in
others’ places, feeling what they feel, and understanding how they could react
to situations. Daniel Batson (2011), a
leading expert on empathy, points out that these are different things. Understanding others’ feelings, matching
those feelings, and understanding how our own feelings can be different from
others’, are all different agendas. Lack
of empathy is, of course, far too typical of bureaucrats and governments, and
of many ordinary people who have either never learned real empathy or have
suppressed what they know (Baron-Cohen 2011).
Batson went on to show that altruism goes beyond this: we need to value
others. We have seen that understanding
the feelings of others can make cruelty worse; the sadist can use understanding
and sensitivity to devise the most fiendish tortures. This is well known from the annals of both
crime and Hitler’s death camps (Baumeister 1997).
Batson
further points out that empathy and altruism are not enough. They can make people unfair. One naturally has more empathy to one’s
family and friends than to strangers, and thus tends to skew altruism. The extreme is reached in those super-rich
families that take care of their own very well indeed while giving nothing to
charity. Batson, a Kantian who follows
Kant and Rawls into a realm of absolute ethics of fairness and principle,
opposes such narrow empathy to his general principles of fairness. However, in a particularly thoughtful passage
(Batson 2011:220-224), he traces the limits of extreme fairness: not only can
we not really do it—family ties are generally too strong—but we are also
masters at rationalizing, excusing, justifying, and otherwise weaseling out of
our principles, when emotions are strong.
Jamil
Zaki, in The War for Kindness (2019), takes up where Batson left
off. Summarizing Batson’s work, he goes
on to detail a number of programs for dealing with real-world problems
involving various kinds of empathy: reforming criminals, teaching police to be
community servants rather than “warriors,” teaching autistic children, and
simply helping ordinary people with problems.
We have the tools; we can go well beyond the remedies for hatred and
lack of empathy suggested by Beck (1999) and our other basic sources. The only problem is that all these remedies
involve intensive one-on-one work, “saving the world one person at a
time.” Meanwhile, strongman leaders whip
up millions with hateful rhetoric. It is
all too easy to turn nations of peaceable Germans or Cambodians into killers. Fortunately, peace did reverse that process in
those and other countries.
Recall
what was said earlier: the real food of the wolf is personal weakness or lack
of self-efficacy, leading to taking offense easily, brooding on it, and
escalating it in response. The cure is
to minimize offense-taking, but then to find morality, empathy, beauty, care,
compassion, and goodness in the wide world and in humanity. Both dealing with evil and separately
appreciating and respecting the good seem needed.
Religions
have tried for millennia to make people love all humans, or have compassion for
all living things. This is
difficult. People love or at least feel
solidary with their reference groups, which can be very large; many Chinese
feel deep solidarity and passionate loyalty to their billion and a quarter
compatriots. But genuine love for all
humans is rare indeed. Unfortunately, it
is demonstrably far easier to learn hate for targeted groups, even groups whose
members the haters have never met.
The
only philosophy that seems to have addressed this problem squarely is
Confucianism. Confucianism generally
holds that people are innately compassionate, helpful, and prosocial. However, first, they also have tendencies in
other directions, particularly in the direction of selfish greed. Second, they naturally and necessarily
privilege family over strangers (Confucians long anticipated Darwin here). Third, they do indeed rationalize away moral
conflicts. Thus, Confucianism sought to
define what each category of people owes others, with family, friends,
neighbors, the nation, and all humanity as the relevant categories. Debate still rages among Confucians about the
perfect balance, but the real message is that humans in the real world need to
accommodate different levels of empathy and be as fair as possible under such
circumstances. (See Mencius 1970; I have
benefited greatly from discussions with Neo-Confucian thinkers, especially Ben
Butina, Dean Chin, Bin Song, and Tu Weiming.)
All
these result in ability to be socially responsible, and to carry out mutual
aid, a highly desirable end-state (Smith 2000).
Basic to this are what I would consider the leading interpersonal moral
needs: caring, compassion,
considerateness and civility, reasonableness, respect, and responsibility (4
C’s and 3 R’s). It includes the values
that create peace and unity in society: solidarity, tolerance, valuing
diversity, mutual aid, and empowerment; thus, for society, peace, justice,
fairness, equality, truth, and inquiry (as argued by Rawls 1971). On these are built leadership, civic action,
mutual aid, and social responsibility in general. The short summary of all this is valuing
people (Batson 2011; Zaki 2019), or at least taking them seriously, as fellow
travelers on the planet.
The
main stem of this runs from caring to actual help. Ancillary to this stem are self-efficacy and
learning. Self-efficacy involves
self-control, not trying to control
others, courage, industry, and loyalty.
It includes self-improvement in appreciation, knowledge, and
psychological functioning (Bandura 1982, 1986).
Learning,
knowledge, and wisdom are obviously necessary, and critical, for this
enterprise. That involves keeping an
open mind about new findings, but no
open mind about hatred or cruelty. It
also requires self-control (including giving up the attempt to overcontrol
others), patience, and courage, but above all the ability to work hard, in
focused and thorough way, for the common good.
Hypocrisy and toxic conformity are banished. Education must follow accordingly.
It pays to look at this with a
medical gaze: see exactly what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what is the
cure. Moralizing in the abstract is of
less use, though also necessary.
“Process goals” are
goals that can never be fully reached, but that make the world better the
closer we approach to them. The classic
example is health. Perfect health is
impossible in this flawed world. We
could always be a little better off. But
striving for better and better health is obviously worth doing. Similarly, we will never be able to feed
everyone, but the FAO’s goal of secure, healthy, nourishing, accessible food
for everyone in the world is a goal worth striving for; the closer we get to
it, the better off we are. Other such
goals include learning, appreciation of diversity and beauty, and cooperation. We might even list cleaning, fixing, and
maintenance.
Freedom, tolerance, and
wealth all stop at moderation. Tolerance
must stop before it reaches tolerance for rape, murder, and theft. One should never be intolerant of persons as
such, but certainly we must be intolerant of evil acts. We must also frequently oppose actual
enemies, even though they are persons and deserve respect and fair treatment as
such. Inequality and excessive wealth are notorious
social evils.
There is a difference
between goals that must be intrinsically moderate, like drinking (assuming one
drinks at all) or exercising, and goals where the issue is targeting rather
than moderation per se. Tolerance is
such a targeting goal: being tolerant of ordinary differences is close to a
process goal (though it always requires some moderation), but being tolerant of
Nazism is intolerable—the classic “tolerance paradox.” Similarly, wrath is usually a bad thing, but
wrath against leaders of genocide is appropriate and commendable.
This gives us morals in pairs:
Caring vs indifference; courage vs. cowardice; peace vs. hate and
hostility; proactive help vs. laziness; responsibility vs. irresponsibility;
reason vs. irrationality; carefulness vs. carelessness; respect vs. scorn. Courage comes before hate, though hate is the
Problem, because hate comes from fear and thus courage is a prior and more
basic virtue.
Another need is for proactive positive action, and that requires
a vision of the Good and an ability to enjoy.
Cowardly defensiveness destroys enjoyment; it causes anhedonia. If one can openly enjoy something, one is
already moving toward the good. It is
natural for the social animals we are to want others to enjoy and to share in
our enjoyments. Puritans and constant
complainers are notoriously easy to delude into genocidal evil. Puritanism about anything—not just sex or
alcohol—feeds the bad wolf.
We
need a new moral order (Anderson 2010), based on keeping the good wolves fed
and the bad ones starved. Morality
exists because people are compulsively and necessarily social, and yet get
offended and angry and then hateful and aggressive. In this case, it should be the opposite of
hatred, callousness, and irrationally violent response to perceived threat.
Following
Kant, the first rule of morality is to take all people, and ultimately all
beings, as important, to value them (again following Batson), and to accept
them as valid beings—fellow travelers on this planet. As Kant said: they must be subjects of
concern, not objects to be used.
This
is one of the messages of epics like the Iliad, of the classic Scots ballads,
and of great literature the world over.
The extreme opposite of the typical Hollywood “action movie,” in which
cardboard characters are killed by dozens without anyone’s concern. The slide from traditional literature to
Hollywood thrillers is clearly related to the rise in genocide and violence;
the latter tracks the former and other pop cultural forms that teach
indifference to life. The rise of inequality,
especially the rise in power of giant multinational firms, is a much more
obvious driver of indifference to people and of taking them as Kantian objects
(Kant 2000).
Great
cultural productions can thus be used for self-improvement and for learning
about the humanity and sensitivies of others.
If they are simply read for schoolwork, however, they do very
little. The depressing lack of empathy
and humanity among well-educated leaders has often been noted. Particularly sad is learning of the number of
extremely intelligent, highly educated, creative people who sympathized with
the fascists in Europe in the 1930s. The
most famous cases were Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, and Leni Riefenstahl, but
there were countless more. Poets from T.
S. Eliot to e. e. cummings were sympathizers early on, and wrote viciously
anti-Semitic poetry, though they cooled when they saw what was happening. Fortunately, no significant thinkers or
writers have seen fit to approve of fascism in recent decades (see Travserso
2019 for the nearest-to-exceptions).
The
main pillars of that are caring, charity, and peace. These can take us on to active help: feeding
the hungry, healing the sick, and the other standard social goods. We are called to be nice to all, but for life
work do your best at what you do best to help.
St. Paul’s “gifts differing” (Romans 12:6) is a watchword: people have
different strengths, and this allows a complex society to exist and to be far
more productive and efficient than one in which everyone had the same
skills.
Long-term,
wide-flung interests should prevail above short-term, narrow ones. In the real world, the short term must be
considered, because failure to attend to immediate threats and concerns can
kill before the long term is reached.
However, the world is now sacrificing more and more long-term interest
to shorter and shorter benefits. A
classic case is overfishing. At current
rates of fishing, there will be no wild commercial fisheries by 2050 (Worm
2016; Worm et al. 2006). This occurs
largely because of overcompetition among fishers and subsidies by governments. Another problem is the opposite: overplanning
and top-down control.
A
final need is more integrity. Never
humanity’s strong point, it has declined for the usual reasons, especially the
loss of community to the rise of giant corporations and their
passivity-creating media. Ordinary lies
are common enough now. Even more common
is a broader failure to keep commitments, as modeled all too well by our
political leaders. The highest integrity
is working single-mindedly for more quality in life and thus real improvement
of the world. Quality ranges from better
music to better environment to better leadership; everyone has some particular
skill or calling, and can work for some cause, depending on innate and learned
abilities. The Japanese have a word, ikigai,
“life value,” for living one’s calling in a satisfying way.
Within
this moral shell, the most important thing to do is avoiding hatred and
rejection of people or any other beings on the basis of prejudice: imagined
“essence” that is somehow bad. Tolerance
and valuing diversity are essential. The
costs of prejudice are substantial.
Subtly foregrounding “maleness” made African-American boys do better on
tests, while foregrounding “blackness” made them do worse, because of
internalized stereotypes (Cohen et al. 2006).
Similar results have turned up over a wide range of stereotypes, e.g.
foregrounding “Asian” vs. “women” makes Asian-American women do better or do
worse, respectively, on math tests (Clark et al. 2015). A part of this is realizing that there are no
pure races and no pure cultures, and there never have been. The racist and culturist appeals to purity
are major sources of evil. Recently,
even “progressives” have been seduced by pure-culture theories, as in the more
naïve theorizing about decolonialization and cultural appropriation. Decolonialization means fixing social
inequalities, not rejecting all cultural change. Cultural appropriation is bad when it
involves insulting stereotypes of others, or stealing their livelihood—not when
it is simply normal borrowing. Some
progressives are being lured into genuine right-wing thinking—the old fascist
lies about pure cultures and their need to remain pure. In fact, a social morality for the future
would involve, critically, learning the best from all the world’s traditions
about how to manage the environment, reduce conflict, and keep societies moral. Every culture and society on earth has
experiences with these problems and has something to teach us.
Direct
action should be to help, not harm unnecessarily; work for a living and some
material comforts, but, beyond minimal personal comforts, only to share with
others and help others in the world; constantly work to learn more, find more
truths, and abandon more wrong views; defend, but only against real direct
threats, not imagined or trivial social slights or indirect or potential
enemies. Morals thus cover social
interaction, self-efficacy and self-control, learning, and public values.
Religion
teaches us to be as good as possible to sinners and lure them into a warm,
supportive community. Religions all
idealize helping, concern, and peace, but often fail to encourage the interest,
engagement, and love of beauty that are also necessary for the common
good. Puritanical religions in fact fear
these, since they tend to make people think independently and want to change.
Practical
concerns and economic adjustments are not going to do all the lifting. Economics has followed culture and ideology
in the past, and will no doubt continue to follow. Obviously, in the future, we will have to set
up a society based on sustainable use of the earth, equality of opportunity,
substantial public sector, and controls on inequality, but the immediate need
is to unify behind a set of principles that will stop fascism and restart
progress in those directions.
The
first step, since the root problem is hatred (in the broad sense—including
deliberate dismissal), is to shore up civil and personal rights to provide
maximal protection from abuse of minorities, women, children, and other
vulnerable groups, and maximal recourse for those groups in case of
injury. Hate crimes (to say nothing of
genocide) must be condignly suppressed.
That includes deliberate incitement to hate crime.
Ideally,
we will have physical neighborhoods held together by strands of mutual aid, co-work
on projects, mutual responsibility, and general neighborliness. Virtual and dispersed communities are also
valuable and need all the encouragement they can get, but there is no
substitute for face-to-face contact and mutual aid. This requires promoting
tolerance; all traditional small communities had their experiences of
intolerance and violence.
We
need to make our current values far clearer, but we also need to combine them
with emotional and personal appeals, as religions do. This takes us back to education and the
media. It also requires some
resolutions, at the political level, about what kind of society we want. The rapid descent of the Republicans from a
party of business to a party of hate has been terrifying to watch. It is similar to the evolution of fascism in
Europe, and communism in the USSR and China.
The
old ideas of “economic determinism” do not work. We have now seen genocide and other evils
arising in every type of economic situation and every type of economic
regime. The classic modes of production
are not helpful. “Socialism” covers
everything from Denmark and Norway to North Korea to Venezuela. “Capitalism” covers everything from Germany
to Equatorial Guinea. This does not get
us far.
We
have, in fact, seen genocide arise in every type of system except true
democracy with equality before the law and full equal rights for everyone. And even true democracy has proved unable to
get rid of war, violence, gangsterism, and everyday crime. Obviously, we need all the laws we can have,
to outlaw harming others gratuitously, but laws exist in a moral shell, and we need
to work on that as well as on making the laws apply to all equally.
The nexus, always, is caring for and about others. Only powerful self-interest combined with
social pressure can lead to doing good.
Morals exist to drive people to do good even when scared.
The
morality enshrined in the Constitution is based on the theory of equal rights.If
people recognize the need for equality before the law and equal opportunity
under law, they must work from this principle above all. Then, the clear moral order for the world is
saving nature, promoting responsibility and mutual aid (with the more fortunate
or strong helping those less so), promoting learning and truth, and
nonviolence.
It is important to understand that both this
and other moral views can go with economic growth, wealth accumulation, and the
other things that developers currently consider “good.” There is no reason to pick one over the other
except for common human decency. In
the long run, the Trumpian view is unsustainable, because it leads to
dinosauric interests pushing the system into collapse, but in the short run, we
have seen the lack of any real break from Obama’s growth economy to
Trump’s. “Capitalism,” whatever it is,
can be range from rather benign to utterly malignant. The socialist alternative is equally
ambiguous; Norway and Venezuela are both “socialist” in some ways, but Norway
has a morality based on social decency, Venezuela has a moral order based on
Trump-style dictatorial violence and bullying.
It
is depressing to read how the British and Americans, good Christians and lovers
of Shakespeare and Milton, ran most of the world slave trade that killed
perhaps 100,000,000 people in the 18th and early 19th
centuries. It is similarly depressing (though
less bloody) to read the sorry history of religious movements, communes,
idealistic communities, grassroots utopias, and the hippie movement. Good intentions not backed up by firm social
rules led only to collapse.
People
being imperfect, progress comes from outlawing the bad and forcing minimal
civil decency. Appeals to inner virtue
are not enough. Historically, help has
come from science and education, relative economic freedom within moral limits
(as Adam Smith argued), and the Enlightenment program. That program of democracy, equality, rule of
law, separation of church and state, and civil rights has done wonders. So has the idea of promoting people according
to their knowledge and ability rather than according to their birth. Meritocracy has a bad name recently, but any
acquaintance with history shows that the alternatives were worse.
Comparing
societies and communities that minimize violence and cruelty with those torn by
it shows that only strict and specific
rules help. Rights are general; if
they are not backed up by specific laws and court judgments, they are empty. All societies outlaw murder, and that ban has
real effect, depending on how many ancillary rules are passed. Above all, it depends on how much the
societies in question frown on violence as a way of solving problems. Some societies regard violence as the only
“manly” or “honorable” way to deal with problems, and they have murder and
warfare rates that are many times—sometimes orders of magnitude—greater than
the rates in societies that privilege peaceful methods of coping (Baumeister
1997; Pinker 2011; Robarchek and Robarchek 1998).
The
Founding Fathers of the United States were aware of the problems of hatred,
autocracy, lack of checks and balances, and lack of recourse. They instituted participatory democracy in
hopes that people would pick the best, or at least the less awful. They created a mesh of checks and balances
that distributed power fairly well. They
separated church and state, to prevent the awful conflicts that had driven many
of their ancestors from Europe. Most
important, they established a rule of law rather than a rule of men. This worked well for a long time, but then
the genocidal demagogue Andrew Jackson took over and began a long, bloody
process of consolidating power in the hands of the president and then using
that power to bad ends. This process has
now reached the very edge of fascist dictatorship, and American democracy may
not long survive.
Absolutely necessary is the right to
recourse. People who are injured
must be able to sue, to protest, to speak out, to vote evil leaders out, and to
defend themselves in any reasonable way.
The success of democracies at preventing genocide and famine is notable,
but even more important is the realization that in such democracies, only
actual citizens avoid being killed or starved (Anderson and Anderson 2017;
Howard-Hassmann 2016). Noncitizens, such
as Irish in the British Isles in the 1840s and Native Americans in the United
States before 1924, are starved and killed without compunction.
Communities
must have written and unwritten (customary) laws that strictly and thoroughly
regulate violence and callousness. These
laws must be based on a principle of equality before the law, which requires at
least some degree of economic equality, because otherwise the rich will simply
buy their way out of enforcement. Laws
must be based on the principle that violence is the last resort in dealing with
any problem other than direct personal attack.
They must also strictly forbid activity that destroys many solely to
benefit a few, such as big dams, engineered famines, and exposure of
impoverished workers or families to pollution.
There must be legal requirements to rehabilitate both victims and
lawbreakers.
Communities
must extinguish specific bad behaviors by specific rules, but they go on to
encourage general good behaviors and ideals by more broad appeals to morality.
Above
all, concentration of power in the hands of one person is always
dangerous. Even a long run of good
administrators or autocrats comes to an end.
Sooner or later a bully or psychopath takes over. I have seen this process on small scales in
academia, where chairs and deans usually have enough power to devastate their
units, ruin careers, destroy students, and corrupt or block research. Academia usually picks better leaders, but
one bad one does incalculable harm.
There are benevolent despotisms in the world—Singapore and Oman occur to
mind—but they rarely last.
On
national scales, the takeover of democracies by tyrants has been noted ever
since ancient Greece, and the results were known to be awful even then, as
Aristotle’s Politics tells us. Democracy works only so far as a way of picking
good leaders; again, the ancient Greeks already knew of charismatic demagogues—in
fact, they coined the words. Participatory democracy seems still the best way
of picking leaders, but then they must be restrained by a mesh of laws that
create checks and balances and prevent corruption. The United States is hopelessly behind in
these regards. The extreme corruption
and tyranny of the Trump presidency came after a long downward slide, visible
since the Nixon presidency. Similar
devolution from Hungary and Brazil to Turkey and the Philippines characterizes
politics in the 21st-century world.
Today, to the classic
rights, we need to add the right to a livable environment; a right to good
education, at least to the point of literacy, basic science, basic math, and
competence with technology; a right to free enquiry; a right to government
honesty, with full recourse if the government knowingly circulates lies; and a
right to decent medical care at little or no cost. These all follow as entailed corrolaries of our
natural rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
From what has gone before, the needs center on three areas: damping
down conflicts caused by desire for wealth, power, and approval; balancing
power so that it is distributed as widely and evenly as possible, with checks
and balances at the top and equality before the law for all; and a widely
distributed search for truth—science in a broad sense—instead of religious or
ideological claims for absolute truth or nihilistic denial of truth’s
existence.
In the United States, and increasingly in other countries, the rule of
law has collapsed, and the first need if we can take the country back would be
to restore that rule. Second would be
some sort of truth and reconciliation agenda for dealing with the hatred that
has spun out of control in recent years, and not only on the right. Rational and civil discourse must replace
increasingly unhelpful confrontation and in-your-face insult. Hate speech up to a point is protected as
free speech, for the very good reason that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”
(see below). What needs to be stopped is
actual incitement to violence. Also,
hateful lies should be checked by false-advertising laws. I thouroughly agree with the proposal to make
campaign statements and public speeches by leading politicians sworn testimony,
with mandatory jail sentences for deliberate lies.
The simplest, cleanest model of mass violence is that a strongman
backed and funded by sunsetting industries whips up hatred of minorities that
have long been salient as weaker rivals or enemies. Obviously, action must start by preventing
evil leaders from rising, and preventing them from leading a charge by
deploying ever more vicious rhetoric.
Individual violence is more complex, but turns on issues of greed, power,
and social acceptance and respect.
Individuals are not, however, violent because of those motives; they are
violent because they have learned that violence is the best way to get those
goals under existing circumstances.
Alternatives to violence thus become needed. Peterson and Denaley’s findings (see above,
p. 33) show that mass shooters have a characteristic background, involving
abuse, and usually announce their plans in some way before they act. Proactive prevention of abuse and proactive
listening, reaching out, and treating young people with violent and suicidal or
murderous ideology is obviously needed.
From a wider social context, several obvious things need doing in the
United States to accomplish any of these goals.
Among these are: making campaign statements sworn testimony to prevent
outright lying, ensuring voting rights, ending gerrymandering and voter
suppression, getting big money out of politics and making all political money
fully transparent, fighting corruption, saving the environment, and cracking
down on hate crimes and incitement of them.
We need an entire new civil rights movement, focused immediately on
putting a total end to gerrymandering, voter suppression, partisan purging of
voter rolls, new Jim Crow laws, and similar games. We need to limit money in politics, starting
with a Constitutional amendment to end dark money, demand full disclosure, and
force politicians to recuse themselves from voting to help, subsidize, or act
in support of any direct economic interest (as opposed to public-interest and
worker groups, and even trade organizations) that funded their campaigns.
Freedom of speech must be defended, but does not include direct
incitement to violence, or libel, or false advertising. These provide enough of a platform to allow
us to ban campaign lies, Fox News-style public lying for evil ends, and direct
rabid hatred that cannot help but lead to violence. A great deal of “hate speech”—ordinary racist
rhetoric, for instance—must be protected, because if it is banned then those in
power will ban anything that annoys them.
This is a “slippery slope” argument that is quite true. We have hundreds of years of experience, in
every realm from religion to education to politics to community “civility” and
“political correctness,” to prove it. The
principle is, once again, my rights stop where yours start.
A major part of this must be vastly increasing research on social
problems, especially evil as herein defined.
Both scientific research and investigative reporting are required. The great newspapers are a shadow of their
former selves. We desperately need much
more exposure of dark places.
We must ban subsidies as much as possible, and certainly ban subsidies
to maintain dinosaur industries that cost more than they produce. We must block
the chain from lobbyist to “regulator”; those who lobby for a polluting
industry can never be allowed to regulate it.
Above all, we must take actual social and environmental costs—the hard
cash people lose—into account in all social and political accounting. Oil is profitable only because its real costs
are passed on as externalities. Many
calculations have shown that gasoline would cost hundreds of dollars per gallon
if those costs were internalized. (For
more, see Anderson 2010.)
The only way to get these goals accomplished is the tried and true
combination of mass peaceful demonstrations, teach-ins, media campaigns with
new media dedicated to the task, proposals for comprehensive legislation, and
above all getting people voted into office at all levels of government from
waterworks boards on up (see Chenowith and Stephan 2012 on what succeeds in
people’s campaigns). These are the
measures that worked for the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the
antiwar movements, the environmental movement, and every other popular cause
that got beyond shouting. Voting and
media attention without demonstrations and other active measures are not
enough.
Social pressures,
leadership, and social behavior are critical, motivating most of the good and
evil behavior; cultural models are critical in providing plans for how to act;
and individual personality and environment factors finally determine what a
given person will do. The social,
political, and economic environment provides a back story, but the direct
motivation is typically social pressure by leaders and peers. Improving bad situations requires full social
change. Revolutions rarely work; they
simply bring other violent leaders to the fore to replace earlier ones. Social and cultural change requires deeper
and more systematic, and therefore more gradual, evolution. This requires personal commitment. The oft-heard argument that changing oneself
is a waste of time because only vast social changes matter is
self-defeating. Without changing
ourselves, unless we are already committed actors, we will never have the
courage or drive to change anything.
Bringing
about all those changes will depend on teaching and otherwise carrying the
word, on contributing to organizations that fight for justice and truth, and on
modeling civil behavior. People need to
choose reasonably what groups to join and what groups to prioritize. Joining extremist political groups is the
order of the day. We need centrist
groups, community organizations, aid associations, and other groups that will
bring people together to help and to meet each other—groups that will be
unifying rather than divisive.
One cannot keep a totally
open and tolerant mind. As in eating and
drinking, moderation is advised. The
ills I am addressing in this essay—genocide and its small-scale correlates such
as bullying, callousness, and domestic violence—do not deserve “open minded”
assessment. They must be stopped.
Very few ways of feeding
the good wolf have worked in the past, but those few have worked very
well. Unsurprisingly (given the human
condition), they largely add up to empowerment of individuals through provision
of human rights. We also need to go back
to civility in society, as long argued by Jurgen Habermas (1987), and stop
fighting each other over every change.
By
far the best way has been guaranteeing civil and human rights, equal for all,
before the law, and enforced strictly by executive and court action. This has eroded disastrously in the United
States, but grown steadily in much of western Europe.
Gandhi,
Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela exemplify the most important:
appealing to solidarity and natural human social goodness in the face of
oppression. Next most important and
effective has been empowerment. Doing
scientific research to find out what improves the human condition is a strong
third. Forthrightly opposing evil is a
long fourth, but still needs to be done.
Group
hatred has traditionally been addressed by getting the groups together in
positive situations, giving them common goals or working with the common goals
they already have, affirming irenic and tolerant values, stressing the
advantages of diversity, looking for common ground, striving to make groups as
equal as possible (at least in opportunity and before the law), stoutly
defending civil rights and explaining why those are beneficial to all, and other
well-known methods.
All
this does work, but not perfectly. The
most notorious case of failure was the heroic attempt made in Yugoslavia to get
the various nationalities in that “united Slav” (“Yugo-“Slavia”) country to get
along. Unfortunately, it was
counterproductive; the well-meaning majority tried too hard, alienated a
vicious and noisy minority, and faced breakup, war, and genocide when
Yugoslavia threw over communism (these insights come from my own questioning
and observation in Croatia in 1988).
“Multiculturalism” in the United States has had some similar problems;
when it emphases the classic American e
pluribus unum, it works, but too often it emphasizes differences and even
antagonisms without emphasizing the common ground and common goals. It often
fostered the deadly mistake of seeing subcultures and ethnic communities as
closed, steel-walled spheres, completely cut off from each other. That view directly causes and fosters ethnic
hatred.
Some
traditional societies have dealt with potential religious conflicts for
centuries, and managed them by a number of social rules and strategies. The people of Gondar, an Ethiopian city that
is a traditional stronghold of Christianity but has a large Muslim population,
have learned to get along, and have taken ISIS in stride, partly by casting it
as non-Muslim or otherwise aberrant (Dulin 2017). Similar accommodations have worked until
recently in many countries, but the breakdown of very old and long-established
ones in Iraq, Syria, and China bodes ill for the future.
The
standard methods of increasing happiness—gratitude, good thoughts, reaffirming
values, and other mindfulnesses (Lyubomirsky 2007)—are also of some use, but
never transformed a society. Only
uniting economic incentives, charismatic leaders, and common morality ever
works to improve conditions. We need
positive and inclusive dialogue that is factual yet hopeful. We need healing and rejuvenation. Recall, also, that mindful meditation reduces
existential fear and thus defensiveness and intolerance (Park and Pyszczynski
2019).
Wayne Te Brake (2017), studying
the decline of religious war in Europe, found that nation-states had to
facilitate the process of getting people to live in harmony. The bottom line was that people who were
neighbors had to get along. Where the cuius regio, eius religio rule held, the
country had only one religion, and intolerance kept right on, but in areas
where pluralism was established, governments finally realized they had to
guarantee rights to religious minorities—ushering in the Enlightenment, by slow
degrees. It appears that government
peacemaking led to philosophers and politicians coming up with ideas of
religious freedom, which eventually led to ideas of liberty of conscience. Something similar happened with civil rights
in the modern United States in the 1950s and 1960s, but the results have been
less satisfactory so far. State and
local governments have dragged their feet.
Still, the model is there.
The
good wolf is fed by empowerment, which brings confidence and hope, and allows
rational assessment and coping. Weakness
and fear feed the bad wolf. They lead to
scared and defensive reactions, including sudden breakdowns into terror, rage,
and violence, and allowing strongmen above the law to rule the polity. Society,
especially social leaders protecting their stakes, almost always do the actual
feeding.
For having a decent world, and for having a
future for the world, we must make moral choices, not simply economic
ones. We must make a moral choice to
help people rather than hurt them. That
involves honesty with ourselves about the ways that weakness, resentment,
overreaction to trivial or imagined slights, and overreaction to trivial harms
combine to feed the bad wolf and thus feed displacing resentment onto weaker
people and onto the natural world.
Then we must work to feed the good
wolves, all of them, everywhere, out in the world. The food of good wolves is caring and
consideration for all, especially as shown through empowerment by decent,
supportive, respectful behavior.
Freedom
of speech is most at risk. The Trump
administration is attacking the media in exactly the way Hitler did in the
1930s. Unfortunately, some of the
misguided “progressive” camp is going after the media too, in the name of
suppressing “hate speech.” There are
classic problems with this, all identified by the Founding Fathers, and by Tom
Paine and John Stuart Mill.
Since
the people in power will naturally be the ones doing the censoring, all
opposition to those in power will soon be censored, and everything that
supports them will be permitted, no matter how vile it is. This is, in practice, the greatest reason why
censorship is generally bad.
Hate speech is in the eye of the beholder. No definition can be tight enough to stop
people from insisting that what they say is not hate speech, and what their
opponents say is always hate speech no matter how nicely phrased. (Politeness can be a way of subtly
maintaining white privilege, for instance.)
Hate speech can be educative–if not the speech itself, then from the
fact that people say it, believe it, and act on it.
Suppressing
speech drives it underground, where it spreads like wildfire—as censored things
always do—and is attractive simply because it was suppressed. There is an Arab saying that “if you forbid
people from rolling camel dung into little balls with their fingers, they would
do it, because they would think that if it is forbidden there must be something
good about it.” Moreover, suppressing
speech makes the suppressed people into instant martyrs, no matter how unsavory
they seemed before.
Last,
it is immoral to shut other people up because you happen to dislike what they
say. They have a right to their opinions
and their mouths.
If
what they say is downright libel, or a direct call to violence, or a lie that
directly leads to physical harm to people (like a con game, or incitement to
murder), that is something else. Lying
under oath is properly forbidden. It has
been suggested that campaign speech should be sworn testimony, at least when
facts are stated, and thus lies like Trump’s would be illegal. We also have no freedom to disclose
proprietary secrets, or to plagiarize.
Freedom is not a matter of absolute freedom; it is a matter of
considering others’ rights. However, the
wise activist errs on the side of liberty.
All
this we learned in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 1960s, but it
has all been said before, ever since Voltaire and Jefferson.
Similar
conclusions apply to freedom of press, assembly, and religion. However, religion has now been so thoroughly
abused as a cover for political campaigning and even for money-laundering and
profiteering that it must be restricted.
Taxing the churches seems an inescapable necessity if the US is to
flourish. Politics is probably protected
speech, up to a point, but outright campaigning by churches—with donations of
laundered or illegally-gained money—is banned in the US by the Johnson
Rule. It is inappropriate for churches
and temples.
Preachers
who are clearly in it for the money rather than the souls are all too common,
and tax laws must recognize this. The
problem is not just one of politics; the rapidly escalating religious hate that
has swept the world, and notably the United States, in the last generation is
to a very large degree a product of preaching for money. Corrupt and evil men posing as preachers find
that the easiest way to make it pay is to preach hate and right-wing
politics. This is the story of ISIS and
the Taliban as well as of Trump’s preacher claque.
Thus,
cleaning up the institution of
religion would seem to be a part of assuring liberty of conscience. Above all, though, liberty of conscience must
be preserved.
Tolerance,
the most desperately needed and vitally important civic virtue, is also under
an astonishing amount of attack from the left as well as the right.
It
really should need no defense. Many of
the same considerations as those above will apply.
If
you do not tolerate others, they will not tolerate you. They may not even if you do tolerate them,
but, in general, hate breeds hate, acceptance breeds acceptance.
We are all in this together. A functioning society must grow, change, and
build, and can do that only by unified effort, mutual aid, and solidarity. The alternative is mutual destruction. The dominant group may win for a while by doing
others down, but it merely hurts itself—first by losing those other groups and
whatever they can offer, but second by starting a spirit of hate and rivalry
that inevitably tears up the dominant group itself, in due course of time.
As
usual, there are limits. Obviously, we
do not want to tolerate rape, murder, or robbery. The argument is for tolerating people as
individuals—the essential personhood behind whatever unacceptable behavior they
may sometimes present. They deserve
fairness and consideration, but if they are acting to harm others, they must be
stopped. Toleration of ideas is a good;
we need to argue and negotiate and work them out. Toleration of specific behaviors is allowable
only in so far as those behaviors do not actively and unnecessarily harm
people. Not all harm to people is
bad. Plato and Aristotle were already
pointing out 2400 years ago that surgeons “harm” people for their own
good. One wants to minimize hurt, but
some pain is necessary.
In
short, tolerance is a major goal, but must be qualified by common sense. None of
this affects tolerating people as human beings, or, for that matter,
tolerating other life forms. Essential
acceptance of living beings, simply because they are fellow travelers on the
planet, is the basic and essential need
of a functioning society.
It
is therefore unacceptable to hate or reject anyone because of skin color,
ethnicity, language, history, or the like.
No morality can justify that.
Total personal rejection of anyone for any reason is unacceptable. We may have to kill a person in self-defense,
but we are not given license to hate that individual simply for being. We are also not given license to kill off his
entire ethnic group just because he attacked us. We know that “races” are not biological
entities, and that all human groups are pretty much identical in potential, but
even if we did find a group that was—say—less intelligent by some measure than
the average, we would morally have to pay them the same respect and treatment
as everyone else.
This
is the real underpinning of the classic Enlightenment virtues: liberty,
equality, fairness, justice as fairness, and civil behavior in civil
society. Never mind that the
Enlightenment was financed by slavery and colonialism. The point is that much of its content was
explicitly directed against slavery
and class discrimination. No one in the
history of the world had opposed slavery in general until 18th-century
religious thinkers, largely Quakers, did so.
Fairness means serious attention to disadvantaged groups, not just
even-handed treatment of all. Equality
before the law has been in sorry shape under Trump, with flagrant favoring of
whites and rich people over the rest.
Racism
and religious bigotry are more open now than they have been since the 1960s or
perhaps even the 1920s. However, the
real underlying problem seems to be a more general increase in hostility and
antisocial aggression. We have mass
shootings in which the victims are country music fans (Las Vegas), Baptist
churchgoers (Texas), Walmart customers, and other ordinary Americans. By far the greatest number of mass-murder and
terrorist killings in recent years have been of this sort; very few are either
Islamic-extremist or otherwise religiously or racially motivated. Ordinary murders are also increasing again
after years of decline.
It
thus seems that there is a major need for calming speeches and for ideas on how
to reduce violence and antagonism in general.
Certainly, we still need to combat racism, and to defend freedom of
religion, especially freedom from bullying in the name of religion. We need even more to combat overall
hostility.
This
brings us to solidarity: Mutual aid,
mutual support, mutual empowerment and strengthening. It worked for the labor movement and for the old-time
Democrats; disunion, carefully nurtured by the right wing and now by the far
left, has led to the decline of both those institutions. The war between Clinton and Sanders
supporters took down Clinton in 2016, and will guarantee a Republican win in
2020 if it is not resolved.
A
major part of this is civility. We are
getting farther and farther from civil discourse. The right wing is usually the leader and
always the most successful in extreme, exaggerated, intemperate, and insulting
remarks, and we should leave that to them.
We always lose if we try that tactic.
This
brings up science and environment. The
Trump administration, including the Republicans in Congress, have launched a
full-scale war against both. They do not
stop with dismissing science that is embarrassing to their corporate donors,
such as research on climate change and pollution. They have attacked everything from
conservation science to Darwinian evolution.
This is perhaps the area where the Republican base—giant primary-production
firms, racists, and right-wing religious extremists—shows itself most
clearly. “Scientific” racism and
creationism are now supported; the genuine science that disproves these is
attacked. Budget cuts to basic science
and to science education are planned; they are serious enough to virtually
destroy both. Republicans realize that
promoting such a wide anti-scientific agenda—climate change denial, claims that
pesticides are harmless to humans, anti-vaccination propaganda,
anti-evolutionism, racism, and so on—can only succeed if the entire enterprise
of science is attacked. The whole
concept of truth is a casualty, with the calls for “alternative facts.” Ideas of proof, evidence, data, and expertise
are regarded as basically hostile to Republicanism.
Clearly,
it will be national suicide ot allow this to go on. Not only is further scientific research
necessary to progress; a government that makes policy in defiance of the facts
of the case will not survive. We have
already been afflicted with Zika, MRSA, and a host of other germs because of
indifferent attention to public health.
Rising sea levels are eating away at coastlines. Bees and other critically important insects
are disappearing. Foreign policy made in
a fact-free environment has devastated the Middle East. The future will be incalculably worse. Attention to science education, moral
education, and humanistic education remains small.
Part
of this is environmental concern, and there we need to draw on traditional
moralities. Most cultures, worldwide,
have solved the problems of sustainability—usually by teaching respect for all
beings. Children absorb this at a very
young age. They go on to remember that
trees, fish, grass, and future humans all need to be regarded as worthy of
consideration—to be used only as necessary and to be protected for future uses
or simply to keep them alive. The
western world has long been an outlier, worldwide, by treating resources as
things to destroy without a second thought.
With
a proper spirit of respect, we will be able to preserve species and
environments and to avoid destroying the environment with pollutants and
excessive construction. In the short
run, we will have to fall back on laws.
The framework existing as of 2016 was inadequate but was a good start;
it is now lost, and we will have to start from scratch, hopefully with better
laws to be designed in future. There are
countless books on solving the environmental crisis, and to go further into it
here would be tedious. What matters is
recognizing that we must think of sustainability and respect.
The
Endangered Species Act has been under permanent attack by Republicans since it
was proposed. The ostensible reason is
that the act saves worthless weeds and bugs at the expense of human interests. The real reason is that it protects habitat
that corporate interests want to use.
Balancing
environmental protection against immediate use is always difficult, and
requires much more attention than it usually receives, but in this case there
should be no question. “Extinction is
forever.” Once a species is extinct, it
can never be brought back (despite recent claims for reconstruction through
DNA—still merely a vision). Most of the
species proposed for protection are economically and ecologically valuable. A few “weeds and bugs” do get protection, but
they are probably more important than they look. We still have no idea what is important in
nature. Sometimes, loss of an apparently
minor species has caused meltdown of a whole ecological system. Beyond mere utility, there is an issue of
respect for life and living things.
Individuals can be replaced; species cannot.
We
also need a mechanism for moving quickly to protect species that collapse
suddenly. A new pesticide, an epidemic,
a rampantly multiplying introduced pest, or an ill-considered human action can
rapidly change a species from common to endangered.
The
need for environmental protection and conservation is now obvious to everyone
except certain giant corporate interests, who persist in seeing everything
natural as a problem to be eliminated.
Even far-right activists admit a need for some action. Sustainability of resource use is obviously
necessary when at all possible, given the rapid expansion of US population and
economic activity. Some things will
inevitably be lost; we need to restore a great deal to make up for that.
Anti-pollution
rules, wise use rules, and conservation in general are under full and total
attack by the few corporate interests, however.
This has led to some extreme rhetoric on all sides. Always, the worst problem is the fossil fuel
industry, which not only causes most of the pollution and global warming, but
is fighting for its life against cheaper, more efficient, ecologically
preferable energy sources. It now
survives thanks to enormous taxpayer subsidies, so it plows vast sums into
lobbying and into spreading disinformation.
The amount this industry spends on those activities could very possibly
finance a full-scale conversion to clean energy.
One
huge problem that is widely ignored is loss of farmland. Soil conservation has been quite effective in
the US in recent years, leading to complacency.
The real problems now are urbanization and pollution. Vast areas of productive soil and waters are
lost to these. California has urbanized
almost a third of its farmland, including almost all the very best land, in the
last two centuries. Within my memory,
“Silicon Valley” (the San Jose Valley) was probably the most productive orchard
land in the world. It now has no
orchards at all. Nothing is being done
to halt the steady conversion of the best land to suburbs and parking
lots. Other states suffer less, but the
problem is nationwide (and worldwide).
Conversely,
there are some reasons to pull back on Obama’s new national monuments, and
rather more reasons to look for more due process in future. Obama declared vast areas of mixed-use land
as national monument, without local consultation or input, and with some
disregard for established interests. In
general, one can only sympathize with land protection, but more local input is
highly desirable for both pragmatic and democratic reasons.
Forestry
has also suffered from a see-saw battle between lock-down preservation and
totally destructive and wasteful clearcutting.
Wiser solutions (reforestation, controlled burning, thinning, etc.) have
been well known for over 100 years. They
are too rarely invoked today. A scan of
satellite photographs of Oregon is instructive:
tiny pockets of overcrowded locked-down preserves, surrounded by vast
moonscapes of badly recovering clearcuts.
Oregon has lost most of its songbirds, as well as its forestry
futures. There is a desperate need to
maintain more wilderness, for reasons that have filled many whole books, but
that would need to include some burning to preserve actual wild conditions.
Specific
conservation areas of major concern:
Biodiversity and endangered species preservation
Forest management: sustainable logging, controlled
burning, disease control, etc.
Grasslands, wetlands and streams, brushlands,
deserts: sustainable management
Agriculture: getting away from deadly chemicals,
continuing to fight soil erosion, saving farmland from urbanization, reducing
meat and increasing vegetables, etc.
Pollution
Urban sprawl and urban crowding; urban blight;
lack of parks, markets, etc.
Aesthetics
Park and recreation areas that are actually
accessible to everyone
Environmental education
Regulating imports: banning endangered species and
hunting trophies, controlling dangerous pest importation, banning palm oil,
banning or discouraging other ecocidal crops, etc.
There
is now no question that the world is
warming rapidly, and that human-released greenhouse gases are the main
reason. The outright denialist positions
are now apparently monopolized by public-relations people working for fossil
fuel corporations. (There is a long list
of books and articles documenting this.)
Since not only all scientists, but all persons who have spent much time
outdoors over more than a couple of decades, must admit that global warming is
occurring, the denialists have fallen back on saying that it’s happened
before. Indeed it has; we know the
causes, which were either the earth changing its tilt in regard to the sun (so
the sun more effectively warmed the earth) or natural releases of greenhouse
gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane.
The most dramatic well-known episode of that was a massive outpouring of
CO2 from volcanoes, about 50 million years ago.
The Eocene world warmed rapidly and dramatically, and stayed warm for
about 200,000 years. Then it cooled so
fast that trees growing in the high Arctic froze in place. Explorers unthinkingly used some of them for
firewood, only later discovering that their firewood was 50 million years
old. We are now releasing quantities of
greenhouse gases comparable to those released by the volcanoes.
The
immediate consequences include slow but sure sea level rise, and increase in
global temperatures to the point where major changes in biota and in human
lives will occur. In a bit of karma, the
world’s main oil producing region, the lowland Middle East, will become
uninhabitable in a few decades, as air temperatures soar into the 180s. No one knows where this will end. There is no reason to expect that the earth
will not suffer the fate of Venus, with surface temperatures in the hundreds of
degrees.
The
fastest and most effective way to deal with this is by leaving or restoring
natural vegetation, especially forests.
That alone could blot up 20% of atmospheric carbon, given quite possible
scenarios. Other agricultural changes in
the direction of less fuel-intensive, more biointensive farming would greatly
help also. There is a long literature on
this, some reviewed in:
Griscom, Bronson; Justin Adams; Peter Ellis; Richard Houghton; Guy Lomax; et
al. 2017. “Natural Climate Solutions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 114:11645-11650.
Ultimately, the solution
must extend to clean power; power generation for electric grids,
transportation, and industry accounts for the other 80% of greenhouse gas
release.
The denial industry has
been financed by the large fossil-fuel corporations, who have hired
public-relations firms and in-house scientists.
The Koch brothers are the most conspicuous organizers and funders of the
effort, but ExxonMobil, Shell, and other firms have been involved.
Health
All
other developed countries, and many less developed ones, now have government
health care systems: socialist, single-payer, or government-insured. All these systems work better than the US
system, but every normal measure: life expectancy, days lost to work, maternal
mortality, infant mortality, and coping with illnesses in general. The US mix of government, private insurance,
and private or religious health care is a disaster. American pay twice as much as Europeans for
vastly inferior care. The only
reasonable solution is to expand Medicare and Medicaid to cover everyone, while
also expanding the CDC and other government agencies that deal with
health.
Health
education is another problem, as is the level of nutrition in virtually all environments
in the US (and, in this case, most of the rest of the world also).
Research
should add more work on prevention and education to the ongoing research on
actual pathology and treatment. We are
not doing enough to prevent conditions like substance abuse. We are not doing enough to stop pollution
and clean up polluted environments.
Education
Another
value in extreme danger under the Trump administration is education. His Secretary of Education opposes the whole
idea of education, in the usual sense, and totally opposes public
education. She is systematically
planning to minimize schooling and turn it into indoctrination in right-wing
views. We need the exact opposite:
education to produce genuinely better people—people who are not hateful bullies,
but who want to help others.
Americans
are not getting the type of education they need. This would be one that 1) teaches civics,
including the Constitution and a non-whitewashed US history; 2) teaches actual
science and how one can tell falsehoods and investigate truth; 3) teach the
young about the depth and complexity of human emotions.
Humanistic
education these days runs too heavily to comic books and other media that may
be well enough in themselves, but do not have the sustained engagement with
human feelings and thoughts that one gets from Shakespeare, Cao Xueqin,
Dostoievsky, Thomas Mann, or Toni Morrison.
Serious music seems to have disappeared from most people’s lives; again,
whatever is true or not about “quality,” music of Victoria or Beethoven engages
much more deep and complex emotions than the popular stuff. Whatever one likes or feels is appropriate,
people need more insights into humanity than they get from American popular
culture. A reasonable order of teaching
children would be starting them with civil behavior (considerate, respectful,
sharing; responsible reasonable), then going on to teach compassion and
helpfulness because we are all in this together and must follow something like
the Golden Rule. This should be done along
with reading, writing, history, and math, if we are to survive.
The
Republican tax cuts have caused a massive and steadily increasing flow of
wealth from the poor and middle class to the super-rich. Cutting tax deductions that the middle class
uses, while maintaining those for the rich, accompanies huge cuts to the
highest brackets of taxing and trivial and temporary cuts to the rest of
us. The resulting rise in national debt
will be managed by cutting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other
programs that transfer wealth to the less fortunate. The worst problem with that, from an economic
point of view, is that money in those programs is immediately spent—it goes
directly into circulation, to buy goods and services. The rich, in contrast, hoard their money,
waiting for ideal investment possibilities.
This
is bad enough in the current good times, but Republican policies will certainly
cause a depression in the near future.
At that point the less affluent will lose their jobs and savings, and
the rich will have every incentive to move their wealth offshore—investing in
other countries or stashing their money in tax shelters like Bermuda and the
Cayman Islands. Other countries will be
developing while the US is depressed; hence the rich will invest in the other
countries.
By
that time, also, education will have been devastated by Republican policies and
funding cuts (see Kansas, currently leading in that area). There will be no pool of young, educated
people to re-grow the economy. The
depression will feed on itself, bringing the United States down, and letting
other nations pick up the lead.
The
Democrats must unite, first of all, before doing anything else. The current disunion (routinely described in
the media as a “circular firing squad”) is suicidal. Democrats will never win any close elections
until they at least vote for each other.
Then,
obviously, appealing to the former base—the great working class—is the next
most important thing to do. Democrats
are perceived, with much reason, as having forsaken the workers to pursue other
issues, many of which are of interest mainly to well-to-do, educated
urbanites. Populist issues like health
care and tax fairness should be foregrounded.
Third
is getting out the vote. This should be
obvious, but Democrats have failed to do it for the last several
elections. Money is spent on lavish
media campaigns—not terribly effective—instead of the proven doorbell-ringing
and precinct phoning and activism.
Fourth
is a concentrated fight against voter suppression and gerrymandering. Again, this should be obvious, but Democratic
officials have been surprisingly quiet about it.
Fifth
is more aggressive calling out the Trump administration on their constant lies
and misrepresentations, and above all naming names of their funders and backers
who are really calling the dishonest shots—the Koch brothers on global warming,
for instance.
There
are many other issues I could name, but those five, in order, seem to me the
key ones. Without attention to these
five, the Democratic party is finished, and the US will be a one-party nation.
First,
the standard freedoms, including all human and civil rights, guarantee of
impartial justice (especially impartial to dollars) and rights to
organize. Explicitly, money is not
speech.
Next,
full rights to a decent environment—minimal pollution and waste, no subsidies
for primary production, preservation of as much of nature as possible given the
need to maintain a decent standard of living.
Next,
no offensive war; war only to defend the country from direct attack, but that
can cover going after terrorists abroad.
Then,
firm graduated tax rate, written into the constitution. No tax exemptions except for legitimate
business and work expenses, and actual, effective charities. No exceptions for
churches, for “charities” that do not spend over 80% of their incomes on actual
charity work (as opposed to “overhead” and administration), or political
outfits masquerading as “non-profits.”
Offshore tax havens and the like would be absolutely illegal, with
extreme penalties.
No subsidies, no favoring specific businesses,
minimal restriction of business and trade, but firm regulations such that harm
and cheating do not happen.
Free
universal health care (free up to a point—small deductibles possible, and no
free discretionary treatment such as plastic surgery for looks).
Free
universal education with arts as well as sciences in the schools.
Savage
penalties for corruption, which would be defined to include donating campaign
funds beyond a set low limit.
Universal
national service: a year in the military, a year doing environmental work, then
a year of social work. Lifetime
emergency call-up, as in Switzerland.
Discouragement
of hate and hate speech. Citizens see
their duty as opposing it and damping it down.
No penalties, but extreme, savage penalties for violating civil rights
and for hate crimes.
Campaign
fund regulations, especially in sensitive things like judicial elections.
Aesthetics
encouraged; national conservation in museums, sites, etc.
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Northwest Coast: Traditional Indigenous Relationships with
Plants and Animals
E. N. Anderson
Draft of March 2019
This is a book in progress.
It is about half done. What is
needed is a search through old collections of “myths and texts” to find as much
documentation as I can of traditional conservation and sustainability
ideas. I have also only begun work on
the art section and some other sections.
I have been working on this book off and on for over 30 years, and at 78
I fear I will not live to finish it. The
press of events has made it impossible to work for the immediate future. So here is half of it, for anyone that wants
that much!
You are free to use it, but cite it fully and list as “work
in progress.”
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Nature
2. Traditional
Culture Areas
3.
Cultural-Ecological Dynamics
4. Traditional
Resource Management
5. White Settler
Contact and Its Tragic Consequences
6. Resource Mismanagement
Since 1800
7. The Ideology
behind It All
8. Respect
9. Worldviews
Underwriting Knowledge
10. Teachings and
Stories
11. The Visual Art
12. Conclusions
Appendix 1. A Note on
Languages
Appendix 2. The Old
Northern Worldview
Appendix 3. The
“Wasteful” Native Debunked
Preface
This work
tells the story of traditional management of plant and animal resources by
Native peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America. There, management strategies are rooted in
practice developed over thousands of years of living off the land. A broad ideology of conservation, wise use,
care, and respect has evolved.
There are
many similarities between Northwest Coast views and those of other hunting and
fishing peoples of the northern hemisphere, and one feature of this book is to
trace resemblances and relationships—more suggestively than systematically, but
at least with some grounding.
The book is the product of many
years of thinking about experiences, many of them long ago. I first visited the Northwest in 1960,
driving major highways through Washington and Oregon. Work exigencies have taken me back to the
area, for at least flying visits, in most years since. I did field research on the Northwest Coast
in 1983-87, primarily in 1984 and 1985.
I lived in Seattle from 2006 through 2009.
My research was rather varied in
nature, and in the end focused largely on the writings of Wilson Duff, an
anthropologist active in the mid-20th century (Duff 1996). However, I did field work on ecological and
environmental issues for about several months in 1984 and another three in
1985, largely among the Nuu-chah-nulth and Haida. I have driven or hiked through every part of
the region treated, covering every mile of major highway in Washington, Oregon
and California, and a fairly thick sampling of British Columbia and
southern Alaska. I can also draw on a great deal of field
experience in Mexico and some in Mongolia, where I could live with Indigenous
people who still fully maintained beliefs and ontologies similar to the ones
described herein.
This book
is also a belated fulfillment of a promise:
to help Native people get fair treatment in their land claims. Aboriginal title to land and rights to manage
resources were not recognized in Canada.
They were finally given some standing from the late 1990s, but use and
management rights are still controversial.
In the United States, Native peoples were recognized as “dependent
nations” from the earliest years of the republic, but the interpretations of
this have fluctuated, depending on whether “dependent” or “nations” was being
foregrounded. Treaty rights to fisheries
were disregarded in Washington state, for instance, until Judge Boldt in 1978
ruled that they had to be enforced. Title to land was recognized, but was signed
away (often at gun point) through unequal treaties, or was simply stolen or
acquired by duplicity. Various claims
and compensation have resulted, but in both Canada and the United States there
is a long way to go. In 1985 I promised
to Haida friends that I would write what I could that would be useful. I have since written several items about
Northwest Coast human ecology, notably my introduction to Wilson Duff’s
writings (1996) and relevant sections in my books Ecologies of the Heart (1996) and Caring for Place (2014), and the time has come to bring all
together.
Earl Maquinna George,
Nuu-chah-nulth scholar, has written: “The
work of a non-native is colored by the inability of the outsider to experience
the context of the information collected…there are many parts of native life
that have never come out in their work” (George 2003:38). Of this I am painfully aware, and I am in no
position to do any better. Fortunately,
I can often rely on quoting George and other First Nations writers. Many Indigenous persons are now leading
scholars of their traditions, and I will have much occasion to refer to them
below.
The position of a person who has
devoted his life to being a cross-cultiural interpreter is never easy. Recently, people like me have been criticized
far more severely than Earl George would do.
The point under it all is that we really do not have the lived
experience of people who grew up with the label “Native American.” We do not have the specific experiences of
oppression, stereotyping, prejudice, and disenfranchisement. On the other hand, we can use the data, and
we can bring some comparative focus to the enterprise. We can also bring a real desire to understand
and help. Above all, we can help get the
word out. I try to quote as much as
possible, from both early collections and modern works.
There is a
serious issue with making use of traditional stories recorded in collections of
texts. Many of these were recorded with
full permission, for publication, and were told by people who had the rights to
tell them. Many were not. I have tried to confine my citations of
traditional stories to material in the first category, but to do anything like
a proper job, I must cite materials that may be in the second. I have, however, consciously tried to avoid
using distorted, “edited,” bowdlerized, or otherwise “settler”-altered
materials, and materials clearly recorded from shaky sources or published
without even the pretense of permission. I ask forgiveness for errors. I believe that the traditional teachings of
the Northwest Coast are so important that they should be made available to the
wider world if they are already out there in published form.
In usage, I
prefer the term “Native American,” though it has drawbacks. Most of the people in question call themselves
“Indians,” but often prefer to be “Native Americans” in formal contexts. In Canada “First Nations” is now the polite
term of reference. “Indigenous” is a
vexed term, but cannot be avoided.
“Local” and “traditional” have their usual vague meanings. I am quite aware that while some traditions
are thousands of years old, some are only a generation old; if their bearers
think of them as “traditions,” I am not going to object.
Similarly, we are stuck with
“supernatural” to refer to spirit beings, though they are considered perfectly
natural on the Northwest Coast, and include the immortal essences of ordinary
animals, these having been “supernaturals” in ancestral times. I try to avoid making irrelevant
discriminations such as “natural” and “supernatural” (see Miller 1999), but
most sources use the word, and better recent coinages like “supramundane” are
just not current usage. Finally, the
term “authentic” has become so polarized in Northwest Coast studies that I try
to avoid it altogether. It has been
especially problematic in art, where modern Native American works were often
criticized in the past for not being like those of a hundred years earlier,
these latter being somehow more “authentic.”
I apologize for any offense given by particular usages.
Native
terms are spelled as they are in the sources I quote. I am not a professional linguist, do not
speak any Northwest Coast languages, and am in no position to decide what is
“correct,” in a land with dozens of languages and hundreds of local
variants. Many different systems of
linguistic transcription are in use, and many Native people prefer the old
missionary syllabary system, despite its unsavory origins and implications,
because it has been so familiar for so long.
See Appendix 1 for a quick guide to languages.
I am
grateful to a wide range of people, but owe a special debt to my coworker in
the 1980s Evelyn Pinkerton, who is not only the finest ethnographer I have ever
seen at work but a superb scholar and human being. I have also had special help and support over
the years from Marnie Duff, Leslie Johnson, Joyce LeCompte-Mastenbrook, Nancy
Turner, and many other scholars. My
contacts with First Nations people were all too short, usually confined to
brief interviews, but I need to acknowledge in particular Guujaw (Gary
Edenshaw), Ki-Ke-In (Ron Hamilton), Nelson Keitlah, the late Ray Seitcher, and others. For particularly valuable advice in the field
work years and since, I am grateful to Ron and Marianne Ignace. I thank also many people whose names I
withhold for various reasons of privacy.
Introduction
The
Northwest Coast of North America is of interest for many reasons, not least
being the careful management of plant and animal resources by Indigenous
peoples there. Thanks to care backed by
an ideology of respect, the Native people supported dense populations with rich
artistic traditions and complex stratified societies. The environment was not just sustainably
managed; it was managed to get better over time. Burning for berries, stocking fish,
cultivating root crops, and other techniques exemplified in real time the
visionary goal of “sustainable development” that seems so hard to imagine in
today’s world.
The characteristics of the
Indigenous Northwest are so well described in so many books that it would be
tedious to go into detail; see the classic cultural summaries in the
Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of
North American Indians, Northwest Coast volume (Suttles 1990).
Defining
the region is, however, briefly necessary.
The Smithsonian Insititution Handbook is divided into volumes by culture
areas. My “Northwest Coast” overlaps
their Plateau (Walker 1998) and Subarctic (Helm 1981), and even makes
incursions into California (Heizer 1978).
The problem is that the Indigenous people did not divide themselves into
neat culture areas. The classic
Northwest is defined by large plank houses, monumental visual art, ranked
societies with chiefs, commoners and slaves, dependence on fish for
subsistence, and heavy use of wood in this thickly-forested environment. The Plateau is defined by large pit houses,
use of riverine fish (anadromous or not), heavy use of roots dug in semidesert
lithic plains, less strongly ranked societies, and smaller settlements. The Subarctic is a land of small
lightly-built houses, seminomadic societies made up of small bands or groups,
and heavy use of mammalian prey (though fish remained staple in many
areas).
Obviously, there will be border
groups that partake of two or three cultural areas—sharing one trait with one
area, another with another. The
Tsetsaut, Wetsuweten and other Athapaskan-speaking groups shared varying amounts
of Northwest culture while being Subarctic in other ways, including linguistic
affiliation. The Wasco and Wishram along
the Columbia mediated between Coast and Plateau; so did some other groups. The little-known Calapuya and Molalla of
Oregon do not seem to fit comfortably into any category. The Yurok, Karok and their neighbors in
California neatly bridge the gap between Northwest and California. The Klamath and Modoc might be considered
Northwest Coast, Plateau, California, or even Great Basin. The areal classifications are modern constructs,
not some sort of cast-iron reality.
Given this ambiguity, I see every
reason to draw examples and principles from the farthest extent possible. Essentially, any group in a drainage basin
whose outlet is on the Pacific is within my purview. This lets me go far inland up the Columbia
and Skeena rivers. I will, of course, usashamedly
take examples from even farther afield, where they are relevant (largely in the
case of Athapaskan groups that are in other drainages but are very similar in
culture to the ones in my area of focus, but also from as far afield as east
Siberia).
Using river drainages to define
areas has the advantage that the drainages are biologically real and important
things, unlike the culture areas, which are somewhat arbitrary classification
schemes imposed originally by museum scholars.
Moreover, the rivers provided trade and communication corridors. Northwest Coast trading was long-range and
extensive. Routes led for hundreds of
miles, and individuals often traveled hundreds of miles themselves. Heavy-loaded canoes went up and down the
coast, and there was even regular canoe traffic across Hecate Strait between
Haida Gwaii and the mainland; this is such dangerous water that off-season
kayakers are often lost today, and many a big boat has been wrecked. Rivers unified peoples. Individuals of totally unrelated languages
could, and frequently did, meet at major fishing areas, trade, exchange ideas, and
frequently marry. It was evidently
rather rare, in anything close to a border zone, to speak only one
language. Many people grew up with two
languages in the home.
The boundary between America and
Asia is similarly meaningless culturally.
Since Franz Boas, anthropologists have realized that the northeast
Siberian Indigenous peoples were culturally similar to the Northwest Coast
ones, though the languages were different (except for Yuit, shared across
Bering Strait). Boas persuaded the
wealthy New Yorker Morris Jesup to fund a major “expedition” to study societies
on both sides of the Strait. It was not
an expedition in the normal sense, but funding for ethnographers and
archaeologists to spend months or a year in a given area, finding all they
could about it. Some of the great
classics of ethnography resulted, and some shall be considered below.
Since then, studying the two sides
of the North Pacific as one area has been an agenda pursued by William Fitzhugh
and his associates (see esp. Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988), Ben Colombi and James
Brooks (2012), and others. Even farther
afield, I encountered attitudes and practices in Mongolia that were essentially
the same as what I have seen in the Northwest, and the connecting links via the
Siberian societies prove a continuous cultural pattern, not independent
invention. I shall thus introduce Asian
examples as occasion affords.
More tenuous are connections across
the Subarctic to old Europe. The Jesup
Expedition found no lack of evidence of continuity. Such things as skis/snowshoes, dogsleds,
complex harpoons, skin tipis, and particular forms of sewn skin clothing prove
conclusively that there was a “circumpolar” cultural area. Since we also observe the same patterns of
belief and practice in regard to hunting and animals prevalent throughout this
area, we can safely assume that there has been at least some sort of ongoing
contact, however indirect, thin, qualified, and tentative. I have thus defined an “Old Northern
worldview,” based on these patterns. I
have, however, relegated it to an appendix (Appendix 2), in the rather confident
expectation that I will be challenged for vast overgeneralization. Time will, hopefully, tell how much sharing
matters in this case.
Finally, I cannot stress strongly enough that all
groups within this vast area are different, and the families and
individuals within them are different from each other. Generalizing at the level found in this
volume is at a very general level
indeed. It blurs out countless major
differences and minor nuances. I am concerned with very broad principles of
environmental management. These can be
safely generalized, but only if they are kept at a high level of
abstraction. In what follows, I will
make distinctions where necessary, but readers should remember that extensive quotes from individuals apply, in
the last analysis, only to that individual and, hopefully, his or her
ethnic group. I quote to illustrate very
broad and general points about northwestern North America or even the Old
Northern worldview in general, but the quotes will have nuances and specific
details relevant to the quoted individual’s own life and experience.
I,
personally, am struck by the similarities across this vast area—the reverence
for salmon and wrens that stretches from ancient Ireland to Haida Gwaii, the
personhood of moose by the Yukaghir and Beaver—but readers should be aware that
the ancient Irish are otherwise not much like the Haida, nor are the Yukaghir
the Beaver in disguise. We have had more
than enough of the ascription of “shamanism” to all Indigenous peoples, of the
myth of the Noble Savage (Ellingson 2001), and of the stereotype of the
“primitive in harmony with nature.” I
am quite conscious of both the differences between groups and of the extreme
danger of essentializing and overgeneralizing.
I am trying to tease out particular themes that are both widespread and
valuable from a maze of cultural specifics.
Readers are warned not to take anything I say as essentializing some
mystic unity among these groups.
I am not
alone, though, in finding commonalities.
The Haida have been compared for over 100 years with the Vikings, and
this has been put on a systematic footing by Johan Ling, Timothy Earle and
Kristian Kristiansen (2018). They define
a type of society, the maritime chiefdom, based on seafaring, trade,
slave-taking, and some on-shore production of goods and food. They see close similarities between early
Bronze Age and Viking Scandinavia, which is hardly surprising, but then observe
that societies from the Haida to the Solomon Islanders display similar
patterns: chiefdoms made up of fiercely independent people, united behind
leaders of descent groups, living by fishing and seafaring, trading
extensively, and taking, trading, and using slaves. They compare these with nomadic herding
peoples, who often have similar patterns of high mobility and extensive
trading.
On the
Northwest Coast, the Haida are certainly the best example. Some of the Kwakwala-speaking groups, such as
the Lekwiltok, come close. The Nuu-chah-nulth,
Makah, and other coastal groups are more local, less trade- and slave-oriented,
more satisfied with producing for themselves.
There is, in fact, a smooth gradation from the Haida through these
groups to the Salish peoples, perhaps more often targets of slaving than
slavers themselves, and much more local in their journeys. The interior groups often traded and had some
slaves, but did not take long sea journeys.
This gradation from sea-raider to local producer makes one dubious of
the value of inventing a “maritime mode of production” (as Ling et al.
do). One may better speak of a natural
adaptation to local circumstances. Be
that as it may, the comparison stands.
Northwest Coast people and
neighboring Siberians share certain ideas, just as westerners share ideas of
individualism and individual rationality without losing cultural identity
thereby. These ideas are worth attention,
but do not diminish cultural and personal uniqueness. These groups also share
much more specific things: details of shamanism and vision quests, specific
folktales and songs, specific traits of material culture, even games and
clothing styles. Also, trade kept links
open; Anastasio (1972:169) provided a list of 53 classes of goods regularly
traded in the Plateau, from abalone shells to yew wood for bows, and even that
list is incomplete. Turner (2014:137ff)
similarly discusses the effects of trade on language; words were borrowed
freely all over the region. The cultural
links are real and multifarious.
However, I could write a whole book
about the differences between all, and about the dangers of essentializing.
This is not that book, but it is written with a lively awareness of that issue.
1. Nature
The northwest corner of North
America is a land of vast forests and high mountains. It is difficult country for making a living,
especially for hunter-gatherers. Most of
the biomass is tied up in wood.
Moreover, the trees are living chemical factories, producing compounds
that discourage insects and other herbivores.
Thus, compared to the deciduous forests of eastern North America or the
tropical rainforests, they are quite poor in wildlife. One can hike for miles without encountering
anything more than a squirrel or two and a flock of chickadees and nuthatches. Old-growth mixed forests develop a richer
fauna, but much of the region is covered with Douglas fir, famously well
protected by its hardness and its chemical defenses against herbivores of all
types. After living in Doug-fir woods
for years I am convinced it is about the most inedible tree on earth. Nothing bothers it.
Food, from a human standpoint,
concentrates along the rivers and coasts.
The fish resources are legendary, and even now have to be seen to be
believed. The major fish resource is anadromous
(sea-running) salmonids of seven species.
Five species are called “salmon” by Anglo-Americans, two others are
“trout.” The “salmon” are—in rough order
of popularity as food—the chinook or king (Oncorhynchus
tschawytscha), sockeye (O. nerka),
pink (O. gorbuscha), coho (O. kisutch), and chum or keta (O. keta). The “trout” are the rainbow, which when
sea-running is the “steelhead” (O. mykiss)
and the cutthroat (O. clarki), which
very locally sea-runs too. Several other
trout and char species occur, and a few of them occasionally sea-run. (The Great Book on Pacific salmonids is
Thomas Quinn’s The Behavior and Ecology
of Pacific Salmon and Trout, 2nd edn. 2017, a must-read for all
those interested in Northwest ecology. Among
many good accounts of salmon and Native salmon fisheries are Grabowski 2015,
Hunn 1990, and Ross 2011 for the Columbia.)
Large rivers may have several runs
of the major species, each run coming at a different time and being slightly
different genetically from other runs of the same species in the same
river. Salmon smell and taste their way
home; the young imprint on their place of rearing, and can detect the scent of
their native river far out to sea. Once
in the river, they smell their way up to their origin stream. Magnetic sense allows them to navigate by
that method too. They evidently
recognize bodies and currents of water.
They often do, however, pioneer new homes, especially if—as often
happens—landslides or other events have made old homes unreachable. Salmon are famous for their ability to cross
many obstacles—swimming up major waterfalls—but they cannot deal with a really
high waterfall. Also, making a river
harder to negotiate may cause them to starve before they reach home. Each run has evolved to store exactly the
amount of fat it needs to swim upriver—they do not feed once in the rivers. In the past, landslides sometimes blocked
rivers and at least temporarily stopped runs.
Modern dam, railroad, highway and other construction that make rivers
faster, rockier, more barriered, or otherwise more difficult lead to
elimination of runs, through this unfortunate mechanism.
The amount of fish was enormous in
the old days. The Fraser River sockeye
run was estimated to be around 160,000,000 fish in 1901, though in 1904 it was
down to 6,500,000 due to cyclic variations.
Runs are subject to disastrous accidents that depress that year’s run
for a long time without affecting other years’ runs. The total Fraser salmon run may have produced
3 million to 60 million kg of fish (figures from Michael Kew as summarized by Ignace
and Ignace 2017:515). The Columbia and
Yukon systems had many more. Smaller but
still enormous runs negotiated the other rivers. Even tiny creeks had their own tiny
runs. The large rivers had runs of all
six or seven species. Smaller streams
often had fewer. Steelhead were
particularly adaptible (even tiny California creeks have steelhead runs), Tales of streams that appear “more fish than
water” abound from the old days, and a photograph in Thomas Quinn’s book (p.
434) shows that this can be only a slight exaggeration for some streams even
today.
Salmon must die after spawning,
because their decaying bodies fertilize the water and provide the necessary
nutrients for the young. This sacrifice
of life for the newborn is widely noticed and emotionally appreciated by Native
peoples, who—in most areas—quickly learned to return all bones to the water to
sustain the runs. Bears take enormous
quantities of salmon and eat them on the banks, thus fertilizing those banks as
well as the water; thus, incredibly lush vegetation develops along the
rivers. Closing the cycle, much of that
vegetation has evolved to dispersed by bears—typically, the bears eat the fruit
and then excrete the seeds packaged in fertilizer. Humans, by managing berry and root resources,
took this natural cycle to a new level of sophistication.
The odd scientific specific names
of the salmon are Siberian local names for the species; “sockeye” is a straight
borrowing from a Salishan language into English. All the Native languages have different terms
for each species. Few have a general
term for “salmon,” though some do (me
in Kwakwala, for instance). Many indigenous
people find it ridiculous that Whites lump such dissimilar fish under one term. Settler societies, in fact, soon acculturate,
and refer to “pinks,” “sockeyes,” and so on, never using the word “salmon”
again except in broad economic-statistical contexts. Northwest Coast people are apt to laugh at
outsiders naïve enough to refer to a given fish as a “salmon.” The odd “Latin” species names of the salmon
are the Siberian local names, showing that Siberia too has different names for
all.
These species are ecologically
differentiated. Chinooks become huge,
especially in the Columbia River drainage, where early-running “springs” were
known as “June hogs” from their enormous size.
They run far up the rivers.
Sockeye are smaller, and spawn in small streams draining into lakes, and
the young fish rear in the lakes before moving to sea. Some populations have evolved to spend all
their lives in lakes, never growing large or going to sea; these are known as
“kokanee salmon.” They are particularly
typical of lakes far from the ocean. Pinks
run into the lower courses of rivers in enormous numbers. Coho, usually rather small, run very far up
into small tributaries and streams; they need particularly cold and clean
water, and are thus rapidly dying out in drought-stricken California. Chum salmon stay in wide lower river courses
and estuaries. Steelhead run into even
smaller and more marginal streams than coho, and were the widest of all in
distribution, with runs all the way to southern California.
The earliest known use of salmon by
humans in North America occurred in central Alaska some 11,500 years ago; the
salmon were chum (Halffman et al. 2015).
It is interesting that salmon had already reached that northern drainage
by then; it had been totally frozen and unusable not many thousand years
before. Salmon generally return to their
native rivers, but are also fast at pioneering when new habitat is available.
Recently, the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) has become a ranched or
farmed fish in the Northwest, with locally disastrous consequences; it has
escaped locally and competes with the native fish, but far more serious are the
diseases and pests it brought with it, which have totally wiped out the pinks
and decimated other species in the areas of farming (largely southern British
Columbia).
Salmon were the key resource
everywhere that major rivers or their tributaries ran. Closely related fish, including trout and char
of the genus Salvelinus and many
whitefish of the genus Coregonus,
abound in streams and lakes but do not normally enter the ocean. They are locally the staple fish, especially
in colder inland areas. Interestingly,
one thing the entire world seems to agree on is the superior eating quality of
salmonids. They are the height of
gourmet dining more or less everywhere they occur, including areas where they
have been recently introduced—notably the southern hemisphere, which has few of
its own but which has taken to farming salmonds on a huge scale.
A conoisseurship of salmon exists
on the Northwest Coast, among both Native people and settler societies. True salmon gourmets can not only tell the
species, they can tell which river a salmon came from and sometimes even which
run in a particular river. (At least
they claim this. I have not seen a taste
test done.) One learns to tell the
rich, subtle flavor of chinook from the deep, oily meatiness of sockeye and the
ethereal, evanescent fragrance of fresh-caught pink. Cohos and farmed Atlantics
are more modest but still excellent food, though true Northwesterners tend to
abstain religiously from farmed salmon.
Chum or dog salmon is less flavorful, as the names imply; it was saved
for use as chum (bits of fish thrown out to lure other fish to be caught) or
for feeding the dogs. Recent attempts to
rehabilitate it as “keta salmon” have not met with much success. Still, it was highly valued by groups like
the Nuu-chah-nulth because it was abundant and easy to dry. It is said to develop a fine flavor when
properly dried.
Other riverine resources included
sturgeon, which, like the salmon, are anadromous. The white (Acipenser transmontanus) and green (A. medirostris) occur. Both
are large; the white can be mammoth, reahing 20 feet and 1200 pounds. Both have suffered from overfishing even more
than most river fish.
Another very important resource,
especially in the Columbia River drainage, was “eels” (lampreys, Lampreta or Entosphenus, formerly called Petromyzon). Especially important is the the Pacific
lamprey Entosphenus tridentata. These too are anadromous. They have proved less popular with settler
societies, possibly because of their strange appearance, but they are said to
be superb eating. Many Native groups
still relish them and want to manage them for recovery, though they are
notorious predators of salmon (see Jay Miller’s very important article on
lampreys, 2012). They too needed
respect; Miller quotes Patricia Phillips on Oregon usage: “Night eels were only
supposed to be cut with a knife made from freshwater mussel shell, otherwise
the eels would feel insulted and fishermen might not catch any more of
them.” (Lampreys caught at night were
supposed to be better and healthier than day-caught ones. Miller 2014:130.)
Many other fish species occur, with
suckers being locally very important, especially well inland where anadromous
fish are available only during major runs.
Some suckers have huge spawning runs of their own, into shallows or
spring areas, and these runs may be critically important to local groups. The Lost River Sucker of the
Oregon-California border, now acutely endangered, was so important to the Modoc
that it was a religiously important fish.
The Achomawi similarly revere the suckers of Big Lake in northeastern
California, and they have been able to get some protection for this run.
An important article by Virginia
Butler and Michael Martin (2013) points out that, at least in the Columbia
River drainage, salmon were far from the only important fish. They were probably the most important single
resource, but, locally, other species could outweigh them in total importance. Many small freshwater fish occur and could be
used, but were probably insignificant resources (on fish in the Northwest, see
Hart 1973; McPhail 2007; Wydoski and Whitney 2003). In the Pend Oreille drainage, for instance, a
wide range of local trout, whitefish and other species was important. Kevin Lyons (2015) provides a very valuable
study with complete lists, catching technologies, and life history data.
Elsewhere, open seacoasts afforded
sea fish, sea mammals, and shellfish. Marine fish abound, and many strictly
freshwater species are common enough to support indigenous communities around
lakes in the interior. Even the rivers
had shellfish, including the formerly abundant, valuable, and easy-to-harvest
freshwater mussels (Jones 2015).
The candlefish (Thaleichthys pacificus), a smelt so rich
in oil that dried ones can literally be used as candles, was a staple food,
specifically an oil source. It was so
important that it is known on the coast as “eulachon,” pronounced and
frequently spelled “ooligan,” from Tsimshian halimootxw, “savior”—the same term now used for Jesus (Daly
2005:113, 193). Getting oil from it
originally involved letting the fish decay in cold water till the water could
be heated to cook the fat out. This properly
aged ooligan grease is an acquired taste (as the present author can attest).
Ocean fish were at least as
important as salmon for the more maritime groups. Herring were especially abundant, gathering
to spawn in bays. The roe was almost as
important a resource as the herring themselves.
Halibut, rockfish, “cod” (a general term for fish, mostly not cod), and
other marine fish were important. The
Haida, living on islands with small and generally poor salmon streams, depended
more on sea fish than on anadromous ones.
Other marine resources were
extremely important too. The Northwest
Coast is absolute paradise from a shellfisher’s point of view. Rocky shores provide attachment for abalones,
mussels, chitons, and limpets. Chitons,
now a little-noted resource, were very popular because of their excellent
flavor (Croes 2015; I can confirm both their popularity among the Haida and
their excellent flavor in Haida Gwaii).
Sandy beaches and, above all, the vast mudflats of the bays and
estuaries provide clam habitat. Shifting
bars in bays and estuaries were ideal for oysters, which require this
environment. The cold, nutrient-rich
waters are moved by currents that carry enormous amounts of nutrients to these
relatively passive feeders. Shellfish do
not offer many calories, and a day of hard gathering in cold wet conditions may
involve more expenditure of calories than it brings in, but shellfish were so
common on the coast that they usually paid well. Vast shell middens thus dot the coastline,
and in fact shellfish are still an enormously important commercial resource in
the Northwest. Seaweeds were also major
resources, though less well known because they do not preserve archaeologically
and have only occasionally been well documented as foods. (On these types of sea resources, see Lamb
and Hanby 2005 for fine photographs and general accounts).
Marine mammals once abounded. Seals and sea lions were important meat
sources. Some Northwest Coast peoples
did extensive whaling—quite an accomplishment for people in open dugout canoes
(Colson 1953; Sapir 2004; Sepez 2008). The
importance of sea mammals has been underestimated, because heavy whaling,
sealing, and sea otter hunting depleted these resources before anthropologists
got to the area. Protection has allowed
the gray and humpback whales to recover somewhat, and many now frequent the
sounds of wesern Vancouver Island, where they allow such close approach that
people sometimes pat them on the head.
Whaling could pay well under such circumstances, though it was still
difficult enough to demand incredible levels of ceremony and magic (Sapir
2004). Sealing was so extensive that the
seal resource base was reduced even before European contact, at least in
California (Kay and Simmons 2002) and possibly all along the coast. Deward Walker (2015) has provided an
extremely thorough and detailed account of riverine seal and sea lion hunting
along the coast from Washington to California.
Seals and sea lions used to come
far inland along the rivers (Walker 2015).
Here they ate a great deal of fish, which evidently did not endear them
to the local people, who hunted them when possible. White settlers exterminated them from the
rivers, but with protection they are now back, eating enormous quantities of
fish, including endangered runs and rare, declining species such as
sturgeons. This is a source of some
concern (Walker 2015). Restoring Native
hunting would be a very good way to handle the situation.
Land mammals are numerous: moose (very locally), deer, elk, mountain
goat, mountain sheep, and smaller animals such as marmots and squirrels. The land was generally rather poor in game,
but many areas were exceptions: lush
mountain meadows, lowland prairies, riparian strips, and wetlands.
Birds were locally important. As usual, water was more productive than
land. Millions of ducks, geese, swans,
cranes, alcids, and other waterfowl flocked to the coasts, lakes, and
marshes. On land, grouse were locally
common, especially in forest openings and prairies.
A final note about animals from the
human point of view is that some were food:
fish, shellfish, herbivorous mammals.
Some were competition: bears, wolves, mountain lions and other predators
all of which consumed humans on occasion, but, more importantly, competed for
the same foods. Some animals were
neither very edible nor dangerous, but were respected for their intelligence
and thus their presumed role in creating the world: coyotes, ravens, mice, many
others locally. The complexities of
these relationships will appear in due course.
Plant foods concentrated in
meadows, glades, and wetlands: Many
species of berries, roots, tubers, stems, shoots, leaves, even flowers. Many trees had edible inner bark, gathered
when soft in spring and eaten ground up or in long strands like noodles. Some fungi and lichens were edible. In most of the region, these plant and fungal
foods did not supply many calories compared to fish or mammals, but they were
often essential and always valuable for nutrients. In the interior parts of Washington and
Oregon, root foods were extremely important.
Increasingly as one goes south through Oregon into California, plant
foods such as acorns became more abundant, being about as important as fish to
the California groups.
Berries were among the more
important plant foods in most of the area.
Huckleberries and blueberries (Vaccinium)
are especially common and widespread, especially in the mountains. They tend to be fire-followers, which is
important for reasons that will appear.
Highbush cranberries (Viburnum)
are locally common. Blackberries and
raspberries (Rubus) occur in many
species. Particularly common and
important in the coastal northwest is the salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis), a raspberry of indifferent flavor but extremely
high bearing; it also has edible shoots that are like bitter celery.
With berries, as with fish, humans
compete with bears for the resource.
Many tales recount the problems thus occasioned. A hungry grizzly can supposedly eat 100,000
berries a day. I have watched a grizzly
pick up whole huckleberry bushes and pass them through her teeth, pulling off
berries, leaves and twigs and swallowing all together. Berries are a plant’s way of getting birds
and mammals to disperse (and fertilize) its seeds, and bears probably take much
credit for distributing berries around the landscape.
Critical in all the above is the
extreme contrast between fantastically rich waters—shoreline and sea—and
usually poor land resources, especially at high altitudes. On land, there were similar if less extreme
contrasts between berry and root patches—mostly openings, prairies, and
plains—and the forests, which were very poor in foods that humans could
exploit. Not only are they minimally
productive of edible material; most of what they do produce is tens or hundreds
of feet up, out of normal human reach.
Even in the water, there are differences. At one extreme are choke points where falls
and rapids delay salmon migration and concentrate the fish ascending the river;
the most famous one is The Dalles on the Columbia, but there are similar if
less dramatically productive cascades in most large rivers. At sea, certain points where currents meet
and upwelling zones appear are particularly productive.
The commonest tree is Douglas
fir. Its superior wood now makes it a
staple of world trade, but it was of less use aboriginally; the hard wood is
difficult to work, though it makes excellent firewood. A useful statistic is that a mature Douglas
fir may have 70,000,000 needles, a fact not at all surprising to the present
author, who spent years sweeping a deck under a grove of them. (For this, and for more useful information
about forest management conflicts, see Satterfield 2003.) Since Douglas fir grows only in sun and
usually only in disturbed habitats, it is naturally a follower of fire, flood,
and blowdown. It is thus the ideal tree
for management by clearcut-and-replant, and therefore dismal cornfield-like
stands of “Doug fir” cover most of the accessible Northwest today.
Much more useful to Native people was
the red cedar (Thuja plicata, technically
a cypress, not a cedar). Its wood is
softer and easy to work, but extremely durable, making it the preferred
material for canoes, totem poles, and woodwork in general. One can carve, split, or bend it with
convenience, and it is very tractable and cooperative—few knots or splinters or
checks or splits. It grows to enormous
size—only the redwoods are much bigger—and thus a single log can make a dugout
big enough to carry a whole crew and several tons of freight. Dugouts are still made of cedar today, mostly
for show but sometimes still for use.
Cedars invaded the Northwest rather
slowly after the glaciations, not becoming common in more northern areas till
about 6000 years ago; cedar and spruce are still spreading northward. Cedars could be overharvested. On Anthony Island in Haida Gwaii, where the
red cedar is at the very edge of its range, cedars decline dramatically from
about 500 AD, when the island became the site of a large village with many
canoes and totem poles (Lacourse et al. 2007).
The related yellow cedar replaces
the red in cold and wet areas. Its wood
is useful, and its shreddy bark makes perfectly serviceable clothing. Another useful tree was the red alder (Alnus rubra), much smaller but with hard
wood. The Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia) provided the best bows
(as the European yew did in old England).
Many small trees with distinctive characteristics exist, such as the
Oregan crabapple (Malus fusca), a
true apple with extremely hard wood and small fruits that are sour but good
(see long, detailed study by Reynolds and Dupres 2018). Much commoner and more visible are the true
firs, Abies species. Many species exist, some of which grow to
250’. Despite priority over the name,
they have lost it to the Douglas fir in the Northwest. It is not a fir (it may
be closer to pines), but is far commoner and has much better wood, so it has
usurped the name “fir.” In western
Canada, true firs are called “balsams.”
In the northwestern US, they are “true firs.”
Old-growth coastal forests in the Northwest
are quite incredible sights. (Vaillant
2005 gives a stunning and romantic description.) Many species of evergreens grow to 200’ or
more, some over 300’. The redwoods of
northwestern California can reach 379’; they are by far the tallest trees in
the world. The only other trees on earth
conclusively known to break 300’ are the Douglas fir and Sitka spruce. Possibly other Northwest Coast trees (grand
fir, sugar pine, and red cedar) broke 300 in the past. The sheer amount of wood is incredible. Wildlife is thin, and mostly far up in the
canopy. Stands were often over 500 years
old, since fire and other catastrophes are rare.
Soil fertility was maintained by
nitrogen fixation by lichens, and also—more exotically—by bears dragging salmon
up from streams. The bears would eat
some salmon, scavengers would eat more, and the fish and bear-dung would
fertilize the land, sometimes as heavily as a modern farmer fertilizing a crop
(Gende and Quinn 2006). This kept alive
many trees that needed much nitrogen and could not get it otherwise, such as
Sitka spruce.
The interior is different: fires are much more frequent, and the
dominant trees are the fire-following pines and Douglas firs. (On forest fire regimes, see Agee 1993.) These do not grow under their own shade, and
thus are slowly replaced by shade-tolerant hemlock, cedars, balsam firs, and so
on if the fires do not return. This can
take a while. Douglas firs can live hundreds
of years. Replacement is just beginning
in the 100-year-old forests around Seattle.
Soil has much to do with it.
Replacement is far along on rich, deep soils, but barely starting on
barren ridgetops. In the drier and more
lightning-prone parts of the interior, fire intervals are much more common than
this, so pine and Douglas fir remain dominant indefinitely.
Douglas firs do not tolerate
extreme cold, though they can take a lot, and they are replaced in high
mountains and north of central BC by spruces of various species. The interior north is dominated by white
spruce, with black spruce on wet sites. Middle
mountain slopes and plateaus that burned often were occupied by lodgepole
pine. Resources are few in pine forests,
but include a wide range of fungi (some now commercially valuable) as well as
edible cambium and a few herbs.
The typical replacement situation
involves alder or cottonwood coming in first.
Alder normally comes in first, especially in less fertile areas, because
it fixes nitrogen, as beans do, using symbiotic root bacteria (Rhizobium). Faster-growing but nitrogen-demanding
cottonwood and willow take over in very fertile sites. Maples, wild cherries, and several other
species of trees occur as minor components in the forests.
The extensive openings created by
wetlands, prairies, high mountain meadows and tundras, coastal barrens, and the
like are covered by a wide variety of grasses, composites, herbs and
bulbs. Most of these are useful to
humans for food, medicine, basketry, cordage, bedding, and many other
purposes.
The vast lava plateaus of interior
Washington and Oregon were originally covered by grassland or sagebrush. These environments were rich in edible roots
and bulbs, as well as other plant resources, plus deer and pronghorns. Root crops are low in calories and take a lot
of work, so fish remained the main resource in most of the region.
Productivity
of the seas and waters was almost uniformly high, but the land was uneven in
this regard. Vast areas of rugged, high
mountains were almost worthless to early humans except for hunting marmots and
mountain goats, and a few other resources.
Much of the forested area was thin on resources, and fire to produce
openings was welcome. At the other
extreme of productivity were the mouths of the major rivers. Here the nutrients of a large percentage of
North America were concentrated. Tens of
millions of salmon and countless lesser fish swarmed in the waters. The extensive mud banks were veritable
factories of clams and oysters. Waterfowl
in millions flocked there. The rich
alluvial soil produced roots, berries, and herbs, as well as fast-growing
trees. Bits and pieces of this riverine
richness still exist along the lower Skeena, Fraser, Skagit and Columbia, but
so terribly hurt by mismanagement that we can form no real idea of what it was
like 300 years ago.
2. Traditional
Cultural Areas
In this study I discuss the region
classically defined as the “Northwest Coast” (Suttles 1990) and “Plateau”
(Walker 1998) cultural areas, as well as neighboring Athapaskan-settled areas
linked by rivers and trails to the coast.
Roughly, this comprises what is today the panhandle of Alaska; most of
British Columbia; all of Washington, and Oregon; northwestern California; and
small neighboring bits of Yukon and Idaho.
Operationally, I am largely defining my topic area as the region where
salmon are common enough to be a major resource. This basically means the Pacific-slope
drainages from the Klamath to Alaska.
However, I exclude Alaska itself, except for the panhandle, because it
is culturally so different as to require a separate discussion. I also exclude most of Idaho and western
Montana, where the rivers run to the Pacific but the fish are few enough to
make the people adapt to other resources, and thus the cultural ecology is
different indeed.
Within this area, most of the basic
ideas I am considering are broadly similar:
respect for animals and plants, taking them as people (“other-than-human
persons”), managing them for conservation but cropping them heavily, and so
on. Since I am concerned with cultural
representations of conservation, it is these similarities that matter to my
immediate project, and thus I feel comfortable about treating in one book a
range of societies that are fantastically different in many other ways. However, the differences matter too. One notable example is the contrast between
the spectacular totem poles and housefronts of the northern Northwest and the
unobtrusive, low-key, but exquisitely detailed arts of the other regions.
The classic Northwest Coast was the
realm of large permanent villages and highly complex societies dependent on sea
fisheries and salmon. They are the
creators of the great art objects and ceremonies that makes the Northwest so
famous.
The Athapaskan groups ranged from
small mobile bands hunting big game and camping seasonally for fish to groups
bordering on and culturally close to the Northwest Coast tribes. The Athapaskan groups share a particular and
striking epistemology that will be of major concern below.
The Plateau peoples are the most
varied ecologically, ranging from the Shuswap and Lakes in the northern forests
to the Yakima on the sagebrush deserts of interior Washington. They lived on a varied diet of fish, game,
roots, berries and other plant foods.
Their usual houses were substantial pit houses: the foundation was dug out two or three feet
deep into the ground, large logs were set up in a square, and substantial
timbers were put over these to make a domed roof; the whole was then covered
with sod. These large, comfortable,
well-insulated houses were ideal for the climate, and they hardly changed for
5,000 years. The Plateau people were
highly mobile, at first in canoes, later on horseback, and their mobility
patterns have locally persisted to this day; they may suddenly disappear from
one place and reappear in another they supposedly “abandoned” decades before,
to the surprise of Euro-American settlers (Ackerman 2005; Pryor 1999).
Humans entered North America from
Asia, probably about 16,000 years ago, give or take a millennium. Earlier dates are suggested by equivocal but
interesting evidence from both North and South America. The stock that came in at these early times
was similar to recent finds in south-central Siberia at 24,000 and 17,000 year
old levels. These finds have been
genetically sequenced (Raghavan et al. 2014) and prove to be somewhat
intermediate genetically between Europe and East Asia; they have many resemblances
to earlier Chinese finds and to European and west Asian populations. The split between east Siberians and Native
Americans is about 20,000-23,000 years old; the Athabascans separated later,
about 13,000 years ago (Raghavan et al. 2015). There is no believable evidence of early
contact from Europe to the Americas (despite some claims in the media). There is no question that Native Americans
entered the Americas via the Bering Strait within the last few tens of
thousands of years. Native Americans now
hold that “we have always been here,” but this applies to their existing
languages and societies, not to their ultimate genetic ancestors—as their
origin myths generally show, since most relate migrations, or tell of times
before humans, when the animals were the people.
Archaeological finds in the
Northwest go back to about 12-15,000 years ago, but the area must have been
settled before that. Humans were in
South America by 13,000 years ago. They
must have gone through the Northwest to get there. An early site, On Your Knees Cave on the
Prince of Wales islands in Alaska, goes back to 10,300 years ago, has obsidian
from Mt. Edziza, on the mainland some 200 km away (Moss 2011; Turner 2014-1:57;
on Mt. Edziza, see Reimer 2018). A
wetsite on Haida Gwaii has even preserved wooden tools that look like recent
ones but are over 10,000 years old (Moss 2011:90). Now-extensive archaeology has turned up a
long record of gradual learning to use the land more and more efficiently. There are few, if any, sharp breaks in the
record; apparently, people and societies have been developing rather smoothly
(Moss 2011), with no evidence of the vast migrations and sudden cultural
intrusions that delight archaeologists of Asia.
It is now widely agreed that the
main early route into the Americas was along the Northwest Coast. The famous “Plains corridor” between the
Cordilleran and eastern Canadian ice sheets probably did not open early enough
to be a competitor, though evidently people came down it as soon as they could. The Pleistocene glacial maximum, which
covered Canada with ice from Atlantic to Pacific and made travel impossible,
was earlier than we used to think—more like 19,000 than 16,000 years ago (Clark
et al. 2009). Thus, people could
probably have come down the coast by 15,000 BC.
But what was then the coast is now 300 feet deep, the sea levels having
risen. So we know nothing of the
earliest migrants.
By 10,000 years ago, however,
people were established in Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) and elsewhere
along the coast. There is total cultural
continuity in Haida Gwaii; apparently the ancestral Haida settled there and
never moved. They were drying salmon in
large villages 7000 years ago (Cannon and Yang 2006), e.g. at Namu, where
occupation goes back to 11,000 yeas ago.
Salmon and shellfish increases there from 6000 years ago (Moss 2011; Turner
2014-1:84).
The Archaic period lasted from
before 10,000 BCE to about 4400, and was characterized by small, mobile groups
wandering the landscape, hunting and fishing.
After 4400, the Pacific period set in, lasting until contact with
European settlers. Settled life rapidly
advanced, with “storing large volumes of food; increased population density,
sendentism, [increasing] household
and community size; escalated warfare; development of canoe-based land-use
patterns; more institutionalized social status differences,” and more intensive
management of resources (Sobel et al. 2013:31).
Pit houses appear in the interior by very early dates, and were common
everywhere by 3000 years ago (Turner 2014-1:85). By this time also, high-elevation sites were
occupied, evidently for berrying and other resource extraction (Turner 2014-1:97).
Development
was fairly slow in early millennia, though large pit houses appear quite early
in the record. Very large, complex
societies were established by 1000 BCE.
In the Fraser River canyon, truly astonishing developments existed by
1800 years ago. At Bridge River, a
ttributary that joins the Fraser just north of Lillooet, by 1400-1300 BP there
was a huge village with dozens of house pits, some large enough to imply houses
holding some 50 people (Prentiss, Cross, et al. 2008; Prentiss, Foor, Hogan, et
al. 2012; Prentiss, Foor, Cross, et al. 2016).
Also notable was the rapid rise of inequality; there were chiefs and
commoners—more accurately, high-ranked and lower-ranked lineages—and they were
very different indeed in the archaeological record. This village, and other large villages on the
middle Fraser, were abandoned around 1000 years ago. This appears to be due to overhunting,
overfishing, and presumably the Medieval Warm Period’s negative effects on fish
(the water may have grown too warm for healthy runs). People reverted to more egalitarian and
nomadic lifestyles.
Prentiss and her collaborators
review several possible reasons for the rise of inequality in a village like
this. Social learning and imitation is
expectably involved. Self-aggrandizing
individuals probably arose; “competitive signaling” by feasts and donations presumably
occurred, as it did later. Presumably
some coercion was involved. There must
have been rebels, surely. Inequality
could emerge partly through competition between individuals—presumably their
families would slowly evolve into ranked lineages. Prentiss tends to favor a more moderate
situation, in which “house size evolves to solve problems to do with labor
management, kin relations, and defense” (Prentiss et al. 2012:544). One assumes
some ideological and ceremonial reflection of this (ibid.), but no obvious
evidence suggests itself. Fishing, and
control of good fishing spots, was the basis of it all.
Further research showed diminishing
returns to hunting and fishing as the site grew more populous. More and more mouths had to be fed from less
and less available food. This would have meant competition, with the better
providers winning out. Powerful lineages
could have arisen as the more successful families consolidated their hold. Thus in their 2018 paper, the Prentiss group
opts for Malthusian pressure as the driver of inequality, social complexity,
and bigger, better-built villages. It
would not be the first or only time in history when food problems drove
hierarchy and dominance. When the
fishery declined sharply around 1000-900 CE, the population dispersed and the
village was abandoned. It was reoccupied
just before settler contact, but abandoned for good in the 1850s, as gold
rushes drove Indigenous people away from the Fraser.
Pit houses got larger in early
millennia. On the coast they began to
give way to plank houses by 4000-5000 years ago; square house-floors a thousand
years older may indicate even earlier ones (Ames and Sobel 2013:131; Moss 2011). One survives (as an archaeological ruin) from
800 BCE (Sobel 2013:31). Many were found
at the Ozette site. A single house could
contain 35,000 board feet of planks and a village could have a million board
feet tied up in housing (Ames and Sobel 2013:138), to say nothing of the amount
used for containers, tools, and fuel. Houses
400 and even 1200 feet long are claimed in early explorers’ accounts,
especially for the Lower Columbia and Lower Fraser areas, where resources were
really rich. These would have been
adjacent “townhouse” units housing whole villages.
In fact, the whole Northwest Coast
shows remarkable continuity, with in-situ development of cultures. The best-known areas are, unsurprisingly,
those nearest the archaeology faculties of the University of British Columbia
and the University of Washington. Here,
fairly complex cultures are already known by 3000 years ago, and the modern
cultures seem to have been established well over 1000 years ago. Something of a cultural peak was reached in
the Marpole phase along the lower Fraser River and in neighboring areas,
2000-3000 years ago (for Fraser culture history see Carlson et al. 2001). This may correlate with drier conditions that
changed resource availability (Lepofsky, Lertzman et al. 2005). Major stone fortifications in this area show
a great deal of warfare was present in the late prehistoric period (Schaeper
2006). The global altithermal from
around 9000 to 4000 years ago gave way on the Coast, as elsewhere, to a cold
period about 3800-2600 (Moss 2011:138).
The same correlation of drying with
reduced salmon, more diverse exploitation, and resultant rapid rise in cultural
complexity was independently noted for the interior Plateau (Prentiss et al.
2005). There, complexity of village life
increased sharply around 2500 years ago when drier conditions set in. It reached almost modern levels about 1100
years ago at the start of the Medieval Warm Period, a relatively warm period
from the 900s to 1300 CE. Some increase
took place thereafter, in spite of the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1800.
A more recent site is Sunken
Village, on Sauvie Island in the Columbia at Portland. Here, vast acorn processing and storage
facilities exist. Acorns and hazelnuts
were staples. “The acrorn-leaching
technology and baketry of Sunen Village show marked similarities to those of
much more ancient Jomon period acorn-processing sites throughout Japan” (Turner
2014-1:101), with similar basket and bag techniques; this is independent
invention rather than diffusion.
Another revealing, though tragic,
find was of a young man who apparently fell and froze some 300 years ago at the
edge of a glacier in British Columbia near the Alaska border. Recent melting revealed his body. He had eaten salmon, crab, and coastal
vegetables, so he was evidently coming from the coast. Particularly interesting was a magnificent
spruce-root hat he wore, a masterpiece of basket technology (Turner 2014-1:105
shows a photograph). Apparently he not
only has living relatives, but is probably an individual remembered in local
oral tradition (Moss 2011:142-144). He
was cremated and his ashes scattered near where he was found.
By the time the white voyagers and
traders reached the area in the mid-18th century, an incredible
linguistic diversity existed in the northwest.
This evidently dates back to the very early settlement. There was maximal opportunity for unrelated
groups to establish themselves, and for related peoples to diverge so much that
their original relationships are now untraceable. Many high-level linguistic linkages have been
postulated (e.g. between Haida and Na-Dene and between Wakashan and Salishan),
but I am unconvinced (not dogmatically so; just skeptical) after looking at a
fair amount of evidence. One fairly
well-documented, though still controversial, relationship is striking, however: Na-Dene has now been argued to be related to Ket,
a rarely-spoken language within a group of very closely related “Yeniseian”
languages spoken along the central Yenisei River in Russia (Vajda 2004). It is not really surprising, given histories
of migration and contact, to find a large language family whose closest
relationships are in the Old World rather than next door in the northwest.
There were six very different
language phyla along the coast: the
Haida on their islands; the Na-Dene (Tlingit and Athapaskan) on the northern
coasts and throughout the northern interior; the Tsimshian in the lower Skeena
and Nass drainages and neighboring coast; the Wakashan (including Haisla,
Heiltsuk, Kwakwala and Nuu-chah-nulth) along most of the rest of the coast, the
Salish along the “Salish Sea” coasts and much of the interior; and the tiny
Chemakuan language family on the Olympic Peninsula. Haida has often been argued to be a part of
the Na-Dene group, but the evidence is poor; most of the resemblances seem to
me to be either clear borrowings (e.g. yel
??? for raven in northern Haida; raven is yel in Tlingit, gagak in
southern Haida CHECK THIS) or fairly
likely ones. If there is a true
relationship, it is at a very deep level.
There were several additional
language groupings in the interior. Theoretically
related to Tsimshian in a huge “Penutian” phylum, but the evidence for
relationships among these languages does not convince me. One group includes Cayuse and Molalla in Oregon. It is not obviously related to Tsimshian, or
indeed to any other group. Also
“Penutian” are the Sahaptian languages of the middle Columbia River in
Washington and Oregon, and the Chinookan languages of the lower Columbia
River. None of these show overwhelmingly
obvious relationships to the group originally called “Penutian” languages,
which occur in California. Further
research on relationships is needed.
People and groups could easily
switch languages, and bilingualism was frequent. The Gitksan may be an Athapaskan group that
switched to a Tsimshianic language fairly recently (Miller 1982) or may include
descendents of many Athapaskans. The
Inland Tlingit of southwest Yukon were certainly Athapaskan-speakers till
recently, and preserve some memory of the change.
These languages were usually
grammatically and phonologically complex.
The Salish languages are among the most difficult in the world for
outsiders to pronounce. Nancy Turner has
shared with many of us a word from Nuxalk (a particularly difficult Salishan
language): čłp’xwłtłpskwč’, meaning
“he had in his possession a bunchberry plant” (just the simple word p’xwłtłhp “bunchberry” with a third
person possessive).
In spite of the difficulties,
practically every adult knew at least two, often completely unrelated,
languages, and many knew three or four.
A kaleidoscopic variety of languages was jammed into a very small
space. War, raid, trade and
intermarriage were all constant.
Intermarriage guaranteed that many people spoke two languages from
birth, and in some areas it was said that the very concept of having only one
native language was strange. There was
thus little barrier to the spread of even the most difficult-to-communicate
knowledge, including technical trainings, myths, songs, and religions.
Tragically, all these languages are
disappearing, and some are long gone.
One aspect of this has been the loss of the higher style registers. Chiefs could speak in extremely formal,
rhetorical, arcane styles. Wilson Duff’s
notes, which I studied in the 1980s, record that the last speakers of the
highest level of chiefly rhetoric passed away in the 1960s. This left Florence Edenshaw Davidson, one of
the more impressive women in Native American history (Blackman 1982), as the
last fluent speaker of apparently somewhat less arcane, but still highly
aristocratic, Haida. I was fortunate to
meet her and one or two other elders before their passing, but heard no
speeches. (John Enrico recorded an
enormous amount of data from Ms. Davidson, but has not seen fit to publish much
of it.) I was more fortunate among the
Nuu-chah-nulth, where fine speechmaking in elite style is still extant among
the elders. If what I heard there is any
sample (and I am sure it is), we have lost an incredible amount in losing the
old elite registers and speeches.
In historic times, the climax of
cultural richness and complexity was in the north, among the Haida, Tsimshian,
and their neighbors. In prehistoric
times, however, the climax may well have been around the Salish Sea. This is the body of water whose Canadian
portion is the Gulf of Georgia, whose American portion is largely Puget Sound,
and whose shared portion is the Juan de Fuca Strait. Since it is geographically and ecologically
one, with its core area stretching from the Fraser River delta to central Puget
Sound, it has recently acquired the much more apt name of Salish Sea. The international border runs right through
it, splitting a major ecological, linguistic, and cultural focus in two.
Contact
across the Bering Strait or even directly across the North Pacific—at least via
lost and wrecked boats from Asia—maintained cultural connections. The Bering Strait comprised a cultural
highway, as Boas pointed out long ago (Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988). One language, the Eskimoan Yupik, was and is
spoken on both sides of the strait.
Songs, tales, and other lore were found to link the Siberian Chukchi and
Koryak with the American Tlingit and others.
Metal came to the Northwest by
trade and in the wrecks; the Northwest people also learned to work naturally
occurring copper from the Copper River (Alaska) and elsewhere (see excellent
review by Acheson 2003). The earliest
Boston and English traders brought more, up to tons per voyage (Acheson 2003:229). All this helped greatly with the woodworking,
especially iron from wrecks and later from traders. This metal spread far inland, being often
traded for interior products such as furs and “clamons”—elk hides prepared for
armor (Cooper et al. 2015). These hides
can be made so tough that they will stop arrows and even long-shot musket
balls.
A final
note on language is the rise, tremendous flourishing, and final decline of
Chinuk Wawa, known as Chinook Jargon in English (and thus in most of the
literature). This is a drastically
simplified form of Chinook, with many loanwords from other languages. These are largely Nuu-chah-nulth and
Washington Salish languages, but include English and French. The Wawa developed within and for the fur
trade in the late 18th century.
It probably had some degree of ancestry in widespread and presumably
somewhat altered Chinook spoken before contact with the whites. The Chinook language was the most important
of a small group of closely related languages spoken on both sides of the lower
Columbia River. The Chinook people,
situated at the mouth of that great corridor, naturally became major traders,
and their language was widely known far up the Columbia and up and down the
coasts. It was thus well placed to
become the substrate for a trade jargon.
Chinuk Wawa uses a simplified phonology and drastically simplified
grammar. It was spoken throughout the
Northwest Coast, though not commonly north of central British Columbia, and
many whites were fluent speakers, though virtually no whites ever learned any
of the traditional languages. George
Lang (2008) has provided a delightful and scholarly history of Wawa. It survives in countless loanwords and
placenames, though it has more or less died out as a spoken language.
3. Social and Cultural-ecological
Dynamics
Society consisted of lineages
ranked in some sort of order of power or nobility. Within these were hereditary
chiefs, ordinary people of status, and commoners. There were rather few of the last; this was a
world where there were more elites than masses.
This is, however, probably a post-European-settlement phenomenon, due to
mass population decline and consequent shortage of people to fill the ranks of
the titled (see Boelscher 1988:52 for the debate on this idea). Below this were slaves, a distinctly separate
class, made up largely of captives from other tribes and their
descendents. Raiding for slaves was
universal and important. Slaves could be
killed, and sometimes were (de Laguna 1972 has particularly interesting
accounts, though scattered through a huge book, and hard to find; see also
Boelscher 1988:59-62).
Viola Garfield’s description of the
Tsimshian can stand for the whole northern coast: “Chiefs delegated work to their immediate
relatives, wives, children and slaves and set a goal of the quantities to be
collected. They supervised men’s work
while their senior wives supervised the labor of younger women and female
slaves. Feasts. Potlatches and ajor
undertakings like the building of a new house, were planned several years in
advance and surpluses were accumulated in accordance with such long range plans…all
resource properties belonged to lioneages or their titular heads. However, the privilege of using areas
belonging to a[n individual] man were extended to his sons during his lifetime”
(Garfield, Barbeau and Wingert 1950:15, 17). This latter custom conflicts with
the normal rule of matrilineal inheritance, and was at the discretion of the
chiefs.
There has been debate on whether
the Northwest Coast was a “class society.”
The slaves were clearly a lower class.
There remains a question of whether there was a major distinction
between chiefs and commoners, or the chiefs were merely primi inter pares. Certainly
some of the great chiefs of the mid-19th century were rulers of
villages and had large bands of followers, but they were to some extent a
product of the settlers’ fur trade.
Scholars who have worked with more egalitarian groups like the Gitksan
tend to think pre-fur-trade chiefs merely gave symbolic leadership to families
(Daly 2005:196). Scholars working with
the more powerful groups of the outer coast, such as the Haida and Tsimshian,
are more open to the “class” word (Garfield, Barbeau and Wingert 1950:28; Roth
2008). Certainly noble families were
acutely aware of their status, as all ethnographies and Indigenous writers of
the truly coastal groups agree. Class”
is rather an ambiguous concept at best, and also the Northwest Coast’s more
powerful groups were in process of change and differentiation, making their
societies “boundary phenomena” in many ways.
Societies were also organized into
“houses.” The actual houses were usually
large, and had names. The house as a
named institution, however, was more than that: it was often coterminous with
the lineage, or with the group of close bilineally-reckoned relatives typical
of central coast First Nations. Houses
thus became quite comparable to the “houses” of Europe, as in house of Windsor,
house of Tudor, or house of Gotha—though obviously on a smaller scale. This comparison was first taken seriously by
Claude Lévi-Strauss (e.g. 1982), and has been much discussed since, especially
by Jay Miller (2014, passim).
A particularly interesting
institution was the name (Miller 2014, passim).
A child would have a personal name, but anyone of substance eventually
succeeded to a hereditary title within his or her lineage, and new names could
be created. Names were honored titles
comparable to those of feudal Europe. As
Macbeth was first addressed as Cawdor, later as Glamis, and finally as
Scotland, so a Northwest Coast person would be addressed by the latest and
highest name he or she had acquired. The
difference was that Macbeth took over the estates with those names, whereas
Northwest Coast names are strictly personal titles; they imply decision-making
power over lineage estates or other property, but they are not the actual names
of properties. Unlike many aspects of
Northwest Coast culture, nametaking goes on today, and is increasingly important. One of the most obvious immediate reasons for
a potlatch is taking a new name. This
could have interesting kinship ramifications; among the matrilineal Gitksan,
the father and his family had the work of producing and assembling spiritual
and material wealth for a child’s naming ceremonies (Adams 1973:38-39).
Many chiefly names that are
mistakenly considered to be personal names in some of the literature are
actually more comparable to titles.
Examples include Shakes in Tlingit Alaska, or Legaix among the Tsimshian
near Prince Rupert. One could be, for
instance, the Capilano of North Vancouver, just as Shakespeare’s MacBeth became
successively Cawdor, Glamis, and King when he took over those titles. (Capilano—Salish keypilanoq—was the title of the head chief of the village near
which Capilano Community College now stands.)
The hereditary chiefly name
Maquinna, passed on for centuries on northern Vancouver Island, inspired an
excellent discussion of this whole concept by the current Maquinna, Chief Earl
George of Ahousaht (George 2003). A
trained anthropologist, he explains in anthropological terms the cluster of
rights and responsibilities that the name actually labels. As Maquinna, he has major responsibilities
spread over the central west coast of Vancouver Island. Another autobiography with enormous and
fascinating detail on names and rank is that of the wonderful and impressive
Kwakwakawakw noblewoman Agnes Alfred (2004).
Among outsider accounts,
Christopher Roth’s account of Tsimshian naming (Roth 2008) and Boelscher’s of
Haida (1988:151-166) are particularly thorough and excellent. A very detailed section of W. W. Elmendorf’s
ethnography of the Twana of Puget Sound (1960) describes naming in the more
southerly reaches. Roth points out that
a name has a reality of its own, and the bearer of a name comes in a real sense
to be the name—complete with all its
duties and responsibilities. Again,
readers of Shakespeare’s Macbeth will
(at least partially) understand. Macbeth
did not just get the letters “Cawdor” and “Glamis” after his name, let alone
the word “King” in front; he became a very different social entity as he took
over those titles. Inheritance,
marriages, and house traditions are similar to those of old Europe. As Jay Miller reports for the Tsimshian: “Today, Northwest natives are well aware of
such parallels between the dynbastic marriages of European and of Tsimshian
noble houses” (Miller 2014:97). Some
assimilation to European norms has probably taken place since white settlement,
but the parallels go back long before contact.
Like kingship in medieval Scotland,
Northwest Coast names are often spiritual and religious. God appoints kings and kingship is a divine
duty. The ancestors are involved in the
appointment of a new Legaix, and some names are so spirit-linked that they
convey direct spirit power. Names thus
are unique; only one person at a time can have a specific name. They are confined to their descent
groups. There are male and female names,
chiefly and nonchiefly names, and names that go with particular functions.
Names are not all formal hereditary
titles of this sort. Ordinary names
include casual personal monikers, but even these usually have stories attached
to them. Family histories describe the
origins of names identified with particular descent lines. These follow from tales that often involve
meeting supernatural beings and getting spirit powers, but may merely
commemorate secular events. These latter
events can be minor or even silly, but once they become grounds for a name,
they are canonical stories for the group (see Roth 2008, esp. pp. 40 ff.; cf.
royal nicknames in medieval Europe, which conveyed respect even when
intrinsically disrespectful like “Charles the Fat”).
An individual may take many names
during life: a youthful personal name,
an adult name, and then any number of titles.
Taking a new name of any status, as well as any other change of status
such as a marriage (at least between nobles), must be recognized with a potlatch. This—plus a laudable desire for hospitality
and fun— keeps the potlatch alive and flourishing today. Even groups whose native language has died
out often maintain names. Names were
often taboo when the wearer died. All
the Puget Sound languages have one name for the mallard duck, except for one
group, the Twana, that calls them “red feet,” because a chief within historic
time had had a name sounding like the usual “mallard” word (Elmendorf
1960:393). Puget Sound Salish has
special words for various types of naming taboos.
Residence on most of the coast was
in very large plank houses that contained whole lineages or large
families. These could be enormous; a
house reportedly 500 feet long existed on the lower Fraser just after 1800. In front of these, among the northern and
central groups, were the famous “totem poles,” which displayed family crests
and portrayed historically interesting family stories or other events.
Most of these events were
mythical. Rarely, however, they were
recent, or not even local events;. Abraham Lincoln was carved on one pole. A fascinating bit of evidence on what
constituted as an event occurred in 1825, when a small group of Gitksan on a
party of retaliation against a murder stopped at the first trading post in west-central
British Columbia, kept by a Mr. Ross.
“Here they observed the white man, his possessions, and his strange
ways, for the first time, and considered their adventure in the light of a
supernatural experience. They marveled
in particular at the white man’s dog, the palisade or fortification around his
houses, and the broad wagon road.” One,
Wa-Iget, took this dog as a crest, and had it carved on his totem pole at
Kisgagas, under the name of ‘Auge-maeselos
(“dog of Mr. Ross,” r being
pronounced l; Barbeau 1929:103). Another took the palisade, and built a small
palisade around his totem pole (Barbeau 1950:10).
Southward, these were replaced by
large carved house posts among the Nuu-chah-nulth and Salish. South of northern Washington there was little
or no large-scale carving.
The interior groups lived in large,
but not very large, semisubterranean houses.
To build one, a large circular pit was dug down a few feet into the
ground, with level floor and often a bench ring along the side. Four large pillars supported a log frame roof
that was then covered with lighter materials and then with earth. Such a house was warm in winter, cool in
summer, and resistant to all weathers.
It is very ancient in the region.
Similar houses were once constructed all over western North America and
northeastern Asia. (Versions of them
often survive as ceremonial structures, such as the kivas of the Pueblos and
the ceremonial houses of the Navaho and the central Californians.) Semisubterranean houses were replaced by
lighter, more portable or easily-built dwellings in most regions in the last
few millennia.
Inland, away from the great fishing
stations, society rapidly became less complex and rich. In the north, the deep interior was a world
of hunters of large mammals. They had
exactly the opposite dynamic: they had
to be sparse on the ground and highly mobile, with few possessions. Farther south, in the Plateau region, root
foods became more important, and were managed intensively. This was less divisive, and in any case
salmon were important there too, if less so than on the coast. Societies intermediate in size and complexity
arose. Intermediate complexity also
characterized the first tier of Athapaskan groups in Canada and Alaska.
The traditional explanation for
this is that the groups “borrowed” ideas from the Coast, presumably late. However, current archaeology suggests that
the complexity developed slowly throughout the region. The Athapaskans and Plateau peoples were not
latecomers, but were always part of the process. The more concentrated the subsistence base,
the more complicated life and communities became.
Throughout the Northwest, the
relative importance of fishing at set places for anadromous fish is a good
predictor of social complexity and village size. This pattern was established by at least 3000
years ago.
Interestingly, in the southern part
of the coastal region, the fish were as common as in the north, but the
societies were generally simpler; the reason appears to be that the rivers (and
therefore the runs) were smaller, while the landward resources—seeds, nuts,
game—were richer. Evidence occurs in
northwest California: The Klamath River
system is a large system that once had huge fish runs, in an otherwise rather
barren area; and, as the model predicts, the groups along it had highly complex
societies and large towns. Elsewhere,
people could and did scatter out in small villages near more varied productive
sites.
The Northwest Coast people were
generally a highly warlike set of societies, though there was a range. The Haida and the Lekwiltok Kwakwakawakw
enjoyed reputations as particularly fierce and terrifying warriors, at least in
the 19th century. Tsimshian groups
conquered along fur trade routes, developing powerful chiefs. By contrast, many of the southern groups—from
southwest British Columbia south along Puget Sound and the coast—seem to have
been relatively peaceful, but perhaps only relatively. Fairly typical for most of the region is the
following paragraph about the people of the Fraser River area in southern
British Columbia:
“Relations
[of the Lillooet]
with the Chilcotin were generally hostile, and stories are
common of their raiding the Lillooet for salmon and attacking isolated hunting
parties and wandering children for slaves….
The Halkomelem on the Lower Fraser River…engaged in warfare with the
Lower Lillooet over elk hunting in the Pitt and Harrison river areas, and
hunters of both tribes were massacred.
In the distant past, the Lillooet made war on the coastal people and
took many slaves. Sometime earlier, the
Shuswap waged war on the Lower Lillooet, driving them from their lands and
fisheries between Anderson Lake and Birkenhead River…. The lower Lillooet in the early 1800s were
subjected to frequent raids by the Thompson.
Allied forces of Thompson, Shuswap, and Okanagan attacked the Lake
Lillooet but remained friendly with the Fraser River Band of Lillooet…”
(Kennedy and Bouchard 1998a:176). All
this action and violence took place in an area of only about 10,000 square
miles. Within that area—and, to
generalize—within most of the Northwest Coast—all groups were at least
occasionally hostile to each other.
Peace could
be maintained by scattering eagle or swan down over participants in a
ceremony. This insured peace at the
ceremony, and if done properly or in a treaty ceremony would insure peace
between fighting elements, potentially for all eternity (though reality
interfered with that vision). Potlatches
often involved a peace-treaty or truce component, with down being
featured. Thus, warlike tendencies were
not uncontrolled or uncontrollable, and peace—necessary to maintain trade and
management—was guaranteed most of the time for most communities.
War, strong chieftainship, and
highly localized resources went together.
If a group was focused on a single river with a huge run of fish, they
desperately needed to protect it, and they needed slaves to help process the
fish during the run—any and all labor was valuable. They thus tended to be warlike: making
themselves secure, and then raiding outward for slaves. Other groups had to be warlike to defend
themselves, and so the process continued,
Even so, in
the more evenly productive landscape of Puget Sound, warfare and strong
chieftainship seems rather subdued.
Groups could spread widely over the country and maintain large—and thus
more secure—populations. This may be
part of the explanation for the individualism and personal freedom noted for
these societies (Angelbeck 2016; Angelbeck and Grier 2012; Miller 2014). Bill Angelbeck notes that the highly
individualized quest for personal guardian spirits was a key part of this. Each boy and many if not all girls went on a
vision quest at puberty or in early teens, seeking guardian powers. These were not usually spoken of openly. They allowed a person to avoid irksome social
duties by saying “my spirit doesn’t like/permit that” (Angelbeck 2016). Since others did not really know what one’s
spirit was, or what it wanted, this was hard to counter. Angelbeck and Grier (2012) even use classic
anarchist theory (as in Kropotkin 1904) to explain Sound Salish and nearby
dynamics, and James C. Scott did for northern southeast Asia (Scott 2009). The result seems a bit overdone—most
hunting-gathering societies are individualist and free, and it is the northern
Northwest Coast societies that are the anomaly.
One need not really invoke political theory. Still, the point is worth making, and the
high levels of individualism in the Northwest—not only Puget Sound—is worth
remembering.
The social requirements of
chieftainship in a warlike world are great.
Chiefs had to attract and keep warriors through generosity. A pattern of competitive feasting and wealth giveaways
is sure to develop.
Feasts come in many forms. The Tsimshian word liligit, “calling people together,” includes occasions memorably
listed by Joan Ryan, who holds the Sm’ooygit Hannamauxw title of the Gitksan
people:
“[S]ettlement feasts (which occur
after funerals); totem pole- or gravestone-raising feasts; welcome feasts (to
celebrate totem pole-raising events); smoke feasts; retirement feasts; divorce
feasts; wedding feasts; restitution feasts; shame feasts; reinstatement feasts
(pertaining to Gitksan citizens who have disobeyed Gitksan laws [but
repented]); first game feasts; welcome feasts (to celebrate births); graduation
feasts (to celebrate recent achievements, either academic or spiritual);
cleansing feasts (to restore spirits after serious accidents); and coming out
feasts (to mark the transition from teen years to adult years). The feast system is a vehicle by which the
Gitksan Nation carries out activities and transactions that affect the daily
lives of the House members” (Ryan 2000:ix).
And this is not even a totally complete list. Similar occasions entail feasts elsewhere on
the coast. Note that almost all of these
involve marking some significant change in status of an individual, said change
requiring announcement, recognition, and validation by the whole
community. The purpose of many
potlatches is in effect to get an actual vote on the change. If it requires community acceptance, having
everyone show up for the feast shows that the change is indeed accepted. If few or no helpers will contribute to the
feast, or if few show up, or if they show up but insult the host, the change is
obviously not approved. Few indeed would
give a potlatch if this were a risk, but it did happen in the past, and
occasioned fighting or actual war.
Among many accounts of potlatches,
we may single out the Tsimshian chief William Beynon’s 1945 account of a series
of potlatches by the Gitksan (linguistically close to the Tsimshian; Beynon
2000). Potlatching was illegal at the
time, but the Gitksan country on the Skeena was remote, and Beynon was hardly about
to be excluded. His account remained
unpublished until 2000. Beynon’s father
was Welsh, his mother Tsimshian, which made him one of the lucky ones: White by
Canadian law (patrilineal), Tsimshian by matrilineal Tsimshian law.
The high point of feasting is the
familiar potlatch of the Northwest Coast.
(The word comes from a Nuu-chah-nulth word meaning “to give.”) Generosity was such a high value, and so
useful in society, that Thomas McIlwraith recorded: “A native store-keeper once ruefully
commented on the fact that he woiuld gain no advantage from the goods on his
shelves, since he hoped merely to sell them, not to give them away” (quoted
Kramer 2013:738). This certainly
reverses most Anglo-American attitudes!
The reasons for the potlatch have
been debated. Some rather strange ideas
have been floated, including the stereotypic-racist one that it was just
craziness on the part of ignorant savages.
Better known and more reasonable is the hypothesis of Wayne Suttles and
Stuart Piddocke (Piddocke 1965; Suttles 1987) that the potlatch arose to even
out resources. A group would give a
potlatch in good times, and thus in bad times would be able to call on
reciprocity from more fortunate people. However,
this hypothesis did not hold up well (Adams 1973; John Douglass, interview,
1984). It turned out that potlatches
would not work for this, because they have to be planned years in advance,
before scarcity or abundance would be known.
Ordinary reciprocity works instead for the purpose (as Adams and
Douglasss both emphasize). On the other
hand, Suttles’ data show some evidence for redistribution and evening-out in
his major research area, Puget Sound and the Salish Sea (Wayne Suttles, 1987,
and interview, 1984).
Potlatches may locally have served
to equalize resources, but this has never been proved, and seems definitely
unlikely in many cases. Suttles (1987)
has discussed the whole controversy, with pros and cons. Since he wrote, the equalization theory has
been abandoned by writers familiar with the region (Daly 2005:59-60). One problem with it is that the potlatching
group all gets together to finance the enterprise, and relatively poor
individuals must often give up quite a bit; even guests may have to give more
than ethnographies usually imply. And a
potlatch takes months to years to plan and stage, whereas local resource
shortages tend to appear suddenly.
People needing assistance disperse to kin rather than waiting for the
next potlatch somewhere.
The ostensible purpose of most
potlatches is to mark ritually a major change in status: taking a new name (and
thus a new position), coming of age, getting married, or dying. Funeral potlatches have been the most
important and widespread potlatches in recent times, but in the past nametaking
was apparently the most important.
Still, other cultures around the
world mark such transitions without spectacular giveaways. The giveaways, demonstration of powers and
possessions, and feasts powerfully increase and mark the status of the
potlatchers, and this is clearly their most important reason (Adams 1973). John Adams (1973) showed that they also can
serve indirectly to redistribute population, notably from larger but troubled
groups to smaller and cohesive ones, because of shifting after the potlatch.
In early times there was a much
more compelling reason to potlatch. Philip
Drucker and Robert Heizer showed some time ago (1967) that the root purpose was
organization and mobilization for conflict, including—focally—competition for
warriors or for chief-status allies. A
successful chief wins loot by fighting.
This he can donate to warriors directly, or can translate into wealth
for the whole group, thus organizing and leading his own people. Either way, he can thus attract more warriors
to his side or form alliances with neighboring groups. A less successful chief must either defer or
attempt to do better. If he cannot be
generous enough, his warriors defect, and he is as good as dead.
Similar patterns of competitive
feasting and generosity are well known for West Africa, highland Southeast
Asia, early-day Afghanistan (Robertson 1896), and many other areas of the
world. Often, professional poets—the
bards of Ireland, scops of Anglo-Saxon society, griots of Africa, song leaders
on the Northwest Coast—sang the leader’s praises at such feasts.
Particularly close to the Northwest
Coast is the society of medieval Ireland (Europe’s northwest coast!)—as
reflected in the epic “Cattle Raid of Cooley” (Kinsella 1969). Society there depended heavily on salmon
runs. Chiefs competed to attract
warriors by giving feasts and distributing wealth and booty. Bards sang the praises of the generous. Warfare included slave raiding and
head-hunting. Chiefs were called ri, usually translated as “king,” but
that is a bit of Irish hyperbole—though the word is indeed cognate with Latin rex. Chieftainship was based in the kinship group,
and hotly contested. This often led to
the competitive feasting pattern, as in the Northwest.
Some astonishing parallels
occur: the wren is a powerful bird for
both Irish and Haida (and also the Quileute), because although it is tiny, it
sings in the worst winter storms, and its song rings cloud and clear above the
howling of the wind. In societies that
share a belief that song gives spirit power, this makes the bird a truly
powerful being (Lawrence 1997 for the Irish; my own research on Haida). Among the Nuu-chah-nulth the wren is the
source of reliable words, “One Who Always Speaks Rightly” (Atleo 2004,
2011:98). The belief in the magic power
of song is shared all across Europe and Siberia, along with several folktales
(such as the Swan Maiden and “Orpheus” myths) and a number of religious
practices including reverence for tree spirits, but the Irish and Haida respect
for the wren seems to have been a genuine independent development. Moving to Scotland, we may add the clan
crest, closely parallel to Northwest Coast concepts. (The Anderson clan crest is an oak tree
surrounded by a leather belt, which seems quite close to Haida and Tsimshian
themes.)
Singers and tale-tellers graced
potlatches also. We know little of their
professional status, but the major songs, dances, and masks were lineage
property. We also are somewhat unclear
on the range of chiefly power; the great chiefdoms in which one man extended
dominion over several villages seem likely to be products of the fur trade (as
among the Tsimshian) in the early post-contact period (Matson et al.
2003). Chiefs could be powerful, and there
was an ideology of this; the Nuu-chah-nulth related chiefs and whales (Harkin
1998; Sapir 2004). As Nuu-chah-nulth
anthropologist Ki-Ke-In points out: “[T]he Nuuchaanulth [sic] people
historically had policing, a judiciary system, and a most sophisticated and
inclusive system of ownership and title….the entire sea and land territory and
everything in it are vested in the Taayii Ha’wilth,” the head chief(Ki-Ke-In 2013:29). He did not have European-style autocratic
control, but he acted as leader of his wide, kin-linked community. The value of the term “chiefdom” has thus
been challenged (see Miller 2014:94), but the chiefs had enough power over
enough area to make the term useful, even though the Northwest Coast chiefdoms
were small in extent and low in population compared to the great chiefdoms of
old Polynesia or Mesoamerica.
The survival of potlatching for 200
years after pacification of the northwest shows that it had other purposes than
mere war mobilization. The direct reason
for a potlatch was and is usually succession to a great name. Sometimes it was defense of that name, as
when a potlatch was given to wipe away shame because a holder of a high title
had—for example—stumbled at a feast, or been insulted. (Potlatches could, by
the same token, shame an opponent.)
The potlatching person or group
will invite everyone in their personal networks. Those who actually attend are showing their
support for the new title. Their very
presence is essentially a vote for the new status. They normally provide gifts of their own,
also, and these show support for the title-holder. In the old days this was a life-and-death
matter; such exchanges made loyalty bonds that were expected to hold in war. (Again, the Irish institution is so similar
that one can usefully apply the explanations in The Tain, Kinsella 1969.)
Today, in the actively political and community-oriented world of the
Northwest’s First Nations, such support is only slightly less vital. Potlatching is the cement and mortar that
holds the tribal organizations and political alliances together. Those who condemned the potlatch as wasteful
or irrational had obviously never studied the institution.
Potlatches are about giving away
vast amounts of food and other useful goods, but they are also about displaying
what can never be given: names, crests,
dances, sacred possessions (Roth 2008:102ff).
A potlatcher may point out that the food shared out is the product of
the potlatcher’s titled endowment property (Daly 2005:59, citing Philip Drucker
as well as Daly’s own work). Once again
this institution recalls medieval Ireland and England. The king could and did feast his followers
and give away gold and coin, but he could not give away the crown jewels, the
ritual sword and mace, or the intangible names and titles. As on the Northwest Coast, many of the
material possessions had supernatural qualities. A Tsimshian inherited copper is not just a
piece of copper sheeting, just as Excalibur was not just a sword.
A particularly common and
widespread type of potlatch was the memorial potlatch, held first when a
high-born person died, and then again when his or her totem pole—today,
headstone—was raised (see notable discussion in Fiske and Patrick 2000). This was the occasion to validate the
succession: the name-taker had to host
the potlatch, feeding and giving lavish gifts to those who came. Chiefs and others of status had to give
potlatches for marriage, to call everyone to witness and support the
couple. Assumption of any new name or
title provided other occasions for name-taking. A girl reaching puberty, and
thus the age when arrangements for marriage can begin, has a “coming-out
potlatch.”
Potlatches still abound, for all
these latter purposes. Name-taking has
replaced war. Competitive gift-giving
can replace physical conflict; “fighting with property,” as Helen Codere (1950)
famously called it. It can also be
simple ambition, or lack thereof. A
friend of mine was in line to be a hereditary chief in one of the
Nuu-chah-nulth groups, but did not want the responsibility at the time, so let
his younger brother potlatch for the position; later the younger brother got
tired of it, so my friend potlatched and took over the job.
The demographic collapse on the
Northwest Coast led to a pile-up of titles:
there were too few people competing for too many names. This, plus the availability of trade goods,
caused potlatching to spin into heights of lavish expenditure that horrified
the Protestant missionaries. They
managed to get the potlatch outlawed in Canada from 1884 to 1953. Potlatching continued anyway, but covert and
somewhat distorted. This was a major
psychological blow to the people (Atleo 2011).
All the missionaries accomplished was giving a couple of generations of
Native people a contempt for the overt racism in settlers’ law.
Potlatching became extremely
competitive among the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutlan) peoples. This was partly because of the pile-up of
titles. It was partly because their
complex system of descent does not produce clear lineages, so many people have
a chance at inheriting a name and set of privileges. It was also partly because the central
location of the Kwakwaka’wakw made them a crossroads for wealth, opportunity,
and communication. Their potlatches were
the spectacular ones involving vast destructions of property, such as huge
fires of burning whale and seal oil (highly precious commodities). North and south of them, potlatches and
feasts were calmer, more routine, and more concerned with actual orderly succession—not
that that prevented politicking and gossip (cf. Boelscher 1988 for Haida, Roth
2008 for the Tsimshian). Boelscher (1988) pointed out that in potlatching as in
other matters involving rhetoric, oratory, and public presence, there is a
tremendous amount of individual jockeying for position, often by denying one’s
own position with exaggerated modesty.
Rhetoric is highly formulaic and stereotyped, but people manage to
assert individuality through practice.
As so often, autobiographies are particularly useful sources (e.g.
Alfred 2004; Blackman/Davidson 1982; Spradley/Sewid 1969).
Devotees of potlatch literature
will note that I am downplaying the gift/obligation side—so famously studied by
Marcel Mauss (1990) and debated ever since—of the institution. Complicated and highly variable rules of
reciprocity, with or without interest, are reported. All this is not particularly relevant to my
purposes here, but quite apart from that I tend to find the gift exchanging
rather secondary. (See Daly 2005; Roth
2008; and other sources cited above, but I am also going with my own research
observations here.) Potlatching is war
mobilization, social glue, name and title validation, status-change validation,
validation of land ownership, and much else.
Gift transactions, however defined and managed, are more means than
ends. They are necessary and obligatory,
but it is what they show—what they communicate—that matters. The gift-giver is
rewarding guests for recognizing—some even say voting for—a due adoption of a
new name and station in life. The names
and privileges, not the rewards, are what matter. And in the old days of intergroup warfare,
the rival power of chiefs mattered even more.
The social
structure of Northwest Coast peoples was thus based heavily on kinship—extended
very widely, to include adopted kin, animals and mountains that were reckoned
as kin, mythologically related groups descended from a mythic ancestor, and kin
related by wide-flung marriages. Position
within the social system was all-important.
Social positions were loci of power, not only political but
spiritual. “A traditional chief had a
moral and religious obligation to transform chaotic cosmic energy into socially
useful power by being a conduit for it down throiugh his spine, ceremonial
cane, or totem pole, which, above all, was the ‘deed’ to ‘his’ rank, name,
house, and territory” (Miller 2014:96).
Northwest Coast society was made up
of kinship groups: patrilineages or
patrilineal kindreds in the south, matrilineages in the north and northern
interior, and various intermediate accommodations—including something close to
double-descent—in the middle (especially among Wakashan speakers).
The Na-Dene, Tsimshian and Haida
peoples are all matrilineal, and in fact their combined territories make up
largest matriliny-dominated area on the planet.
The Haida, Tsimshianic groups, and Tlingit had large and powerful
matrilineages, and are among the most strongly matrilineal societies in the
world. (This disproves, among other
things, the old idea—sometimes still heard—that matriliny is the result of hoe
agriculture). As late as the late 20th
century, Canada’s strongly patrilineal and patriarchal legal system conflicted,
often dramatically, with Indigenous law and practice. A person with a Native mother and
Anglo-Canadian father was a full member of both societies, and could move
easily in both worlds. An individual
with a non-Native mother and Native father was a rootless person, not really
part of either world. When I did
research on alcoholism in British Columbia, I found a disproportionate
percentage of such individuals to be alcoholic.
Fortunately, since those days, Canadian law has become less narrowly
patriarchal. The point is that kinship
really gives identity and personhood on the Northwest Coast; one is a member of
one’s family in a way incomprehensible, or at least alien, to many
non-Indigenous people. We will later see
how relevant this is to environmental actions.
These matrilineages are further
grouped into larger groupings: the Eagle
and Raven moieties among the Haida, three or four comparable phratries among
the Tlingit and Tsimshian. One must
marry outside one’s group. All have
Eagle and Raven groups, and a Haida Eagle cannot marry a Tsimshian one.
Lineages
are involved in resource ownership.
Among the Haida, for instance, lineage “members share rights to
ancestral villages, to fishing, hunting, and gathering locations, including:
–major salmon-spawning rivers
–halibut and cod banks off shore
–important berry patches (especiallyi cranberry and
crabapple)
–bird nesting sites (particularly species of sea gull,
Cassin’s auklet, and ancient murrelet)
–rights to stranded whales on the coastline near
lineage-owned lands
–trap and deadfall sites for land mammals along rivers
–access to house sties in ancestral villages” (Boelscher
1988:35).
Poaching on someone else’s land,
even to take small items, was cause for fighting.
Especially in the northern coast,
lineages (matrilineages in the north) had crests: natural (or supernatural) things that were
symbols and that provided some supernatural power for them. Usually these were impressive animals, such
as killer whales, grizzly bears, sharks, wolves, sealions, eagles, frogs and
dragonflies (these being spiritually powerful beings), ravens, and the
like. Some plants were crests, as well
as weather (Haida crests incuded cumulus and cirrus clouds), the moon, and
various spirit beings. People could add
crests when interesting events involving crest-type beings happened to their
families. These crests were typically
shown on totem poles, blankets, and even the person; a Haida man would have his
lineage crest tattooed on his body (Boelscher 1988:142).
Almost equally important were
lineage rights to particular songs, dances, designs, and other intellectual
property. Lineages and phratries even
had their own origin myths, very different from other lineages’ stories. In fact, laws regarding intellectual property
were complex and sophisticated, rather like modern copyright legislation. A song could be unowned and available for
everyone to sing, or owned by the moiety or phratry, or by the lineage, or by a
family or an individual. Whoever owned
it could allow someone else to sing it, but a substantial payment or exchange
was required. This could be indirect;
lineage A might generously allow someone from lineage B to sing a lineage A
song, but of course lineage B was expected to do something equivalently generous
for lineage A at some point. Showing off
one’s lineage dances, songs, and arts was—and in many areas still is—an
integral part of potlatching and feasting.
Often it involved competitive display; at other times it was closer to
an arts festival.
Thomas McIlwraith, in his early
days as ethnographer of the Nuxalk, inadvertently sang a song belonging to one
family, whereupon an elder of that family had to adopt him on the spot to spare
everybody serious shame and difficulty (quoted in Kramer 2013:737).
Individuals owned the products of
their own labor, especially things like bows and arrows, clothing, food, and
personal articles, but also songs they composed and the like. An individual might pass songs and crests on
to his or her children; a man could even pass them to his children among the
matrilineal Haida (Boelscher 1988:38), though that could be a touchy
proposition. Normally, privileges
including songs and crests were the property of matrilineages in the northern
coast, and passed on accordingly.
Among the matrilineal societies,
women had great authority, and owned property.
Chiefs were generally (but not always) male, being the brothers of the
women who were the hereditary heads of the lineages; but women had real
power. There is a famous story of a
Haida chief taking refuge on a fur trader’s boat because he had dared to sell
some furs belonging to his wife. She and
her brothers were out after him. He had
to stay on the boat, under protection of the trader, for months before he could
work out an arrangement to go home. Like
other matrilineal societies worldwide, these were not “matriarchies,” but did
give more power to women than patrilineal societies generally do. On the other hand, among the patrilineal
societies of the southern Northwest Coast, women were by no means meek or
oppressed; they held their own and had considerable real power, partly through
controlling access to and management of plant resources, many shellfish
resources, and other subsistence matters.
These societies were organized in
moieties; among the Tsimshian, the moieties had split into two parts, giving a
four-phratry system, but the original moiety structure was still identifiable
(Miller 1982). Crest privileges and
their artistic expression were taken so seriously that upper-class artists
“worked in great secrecy, punihing with death any unqualified person
unfortunate enough to stumble on their workshops hidden in the forest” (Miller
1982; if this runs true to Tsimshian form, however, the threat was enough and
killings were very rarely carried out).
In general, ownership among the
Northwest Coast peoples was extremely highly developed and complex—as far from
the old idea of “primitive communism” as one could possibly get. Few have doubted that this was related to the
need for control over, and management of, resources. Even the ownership of songs and art motifs
could be seen as related to maintaining group solidarity and identity for
defense of hard goods—although it was very much more than that, being integral
to all aspects of social life.
The patrilineal societies were
largely in the southern areas—Washington and Oregon, and the Fraser River area
in British Columbia. They were not so
extremely lineal-oriented as the matrilineal groups; they tended toward
bilateral reckoning. The lineage system
was comparable, however,
A different matter was the
situation in the middle: the Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw, and some immediate
neighbors. Here reckoning was equally
through father’s and mother’s line. “The
immerdiate family grouping (derived from four grandparents) is technically
called a kindred, while the huge
extended family, which was and is transnational or intertribal (throiugh eight
great-grandparents), is technically called an intersept” (Miller 2014:79). Names, titles and privileges were taken up by
any member of the kindred who wanted to potlatch for them and could get enough
support and resources to do so.
Individuals thus often had, and still have, titles inherited through the
father’s line and others through the mother’s. Among the Nuu-chah-nulth this
accompanied a kinship terminological system similar to that of the Hawaiians,
with every relative in one’s own generation being “brother” or “sister,” and
every one in the parent generation being “father” or “mother.” This still persists for the parent generation,
with the slight transformation that relatives other than actual mothers and
fathers become “uncle” or “auntie.”
Since virtually all Nuu-chah-nulth can trace at least some degree of
relationship to all others, the terms wind up being extended to all Nuu-chah-nulth
in the generation above one’s own.
It should be emphasized that family
and traditional title are still important everywhere. Kinship remains the basis of society, and
large, close, mutually supportive families are the rule.
4. Traditional
Resource Management
The Northwest Coast has always
seemed anthropologically anomalous. Despite
being “hunters and gatherers,” the Native peoples maintained high populations,
lived in large villages, and had a complex social organization (Coupland et al.
2009; Matson et al. 2003). Noble
families led large populations of relative “commoners,” and a large population
of slaves (captured in wars and raids) provided a hard-working underclass. Unlike the incidental slaves used for
household services in many small-scale societies, the slaves of the northwest
were a genuine population of critically important servile workers. They cut and carried wood, drew water, and
processed the fish that were the basis of subsistence.
The Northwest Coast has turned out
to be much less anomalous now that we have better data on nonagricultural
populations elsewhere in the world.
Complex nonagricultural populations with large settlements and
complicated ownership rules extended all along the Pacific Coast, even into
Baja California, and were characteristic of southern Florida and several other
parts of the New World, as well as of northern Australia and Mesolithic
Europe. All these societies depended to
a great extent on sea and riverine foods, often anadromous fish.
Moreover, we now realize that the
Northwest Coast groups practiced extensive horticulture. They managed, increased, transplanted, and
selectively harvested plants, and had at least one or two domesticated species. (Tobacco was the only widespread one—which
says something about human preferences.)
Of this more anon. More and more
authorities are now referring to the Northwest Coast people as
horticulturalists, rather than hunter-gatherers.
Above all, however, they were
exploiters of the aquatic world. Fish
runs are highly concentrated in time and space, forcing the people that depend
on them to concentrate in large social agglomerations on a regular basis. This in turn requires some sort of
comprehensive social organization, with strong authority structures provides by
kinship groupings or chieftainship or—usually—both. Also, the best fishing stations are well
worth fighting for, and the resulting conflict forces even more tight military
organization on the people. Last, the
enormous but brief salmon runs of the Northwest require huge bursts of labor,
since people need to develop a virtual assembly line of filleting and drying
the catch for preservation through the rest of the year. Slavery becomes economic under such
circumstances. Raiding for slaves adds
to fighting for fishing sites as an economically important activity.
Complexity has traditionally been
explained by the “rich” or “abundant” resources of the Northwest, but this is a
false claim. The resources consist
largely of fish, which are not always easy to catch. The great salmon runs of the major rivers are
indeed incredible, but one must average out the productivity of the rivers over
the thousands of square miles of barren mountains and food-poor forests that
make up 99% of the area in question. In
the southern areas—from central Washington and extreme southern British
Columbia southward—root crops, berries, and nuts become increasingly abundant,
but do not become common enough to be major staples till one gets to the lower
Columbia River. Moreover, salmon runs
sometimes fail, especially in the north.
When a run failed, all the people could do was move away, hopefully
finding some relatives to stay with.
This meant that, for instance,
maintaining the population of eight to ten thousand on Haida Gwaii was no easy
undertaking. The land was rather poor in
berries and roots (though not as poor as it is now; see below). There were few large game animals, only a
tiny herd of caribou. There were not
even any large salmon streams. The
people had to carry out dangerous open-sea fishing for halibut and hunting for
sea mammals. Even more fearful was the
need to cross the wide and treacherous Hecate Strait to trade for oil and other
goods with the less-than-friendly Tsimshian.
The Haida needed formidable toughness and intelligence, and it is
reflected in their stunning art and oral literature. Similar cases could be made for other groups
along the coast and into the deep interior.
The Nuu-chah-nulth and closely
related Ditidat and Makah of the outer coasts of Vancouver Island and the
Olympic Peninsula depended to varying degrees on whaling. The Makah got up to 80-90% of their food from
whales and much of the rest from seals, and some Nuu-chah-nulth groups were not
far behind (MacMillan 1999). They could
stay out in canones for days, keeping small fires on stone or other fireproof platforms
in the canoes (Reid 2015:143-145).
Earlier authors tended to believe the Indigenous groups could not have
caught many whales, but excavations at the Ozette site in Washington proved the
contrary, and further historical scholarship by Joshua Reid and others has
shown that the Native groups took not only the docile grays but also humpback,
sperm, and other whales, even blues and orcas (Reid 2015:144-145). Ozette was a village covered by a landslide
on the Olympic Peninsula coast about 300 years ago. Ozette also revealed a great deal of fine
art, like that historically known, as well as large houses, and a complex use
of plant materials, including all the common woods (see Turner 2014-1:108-110
for lists).
Whaling from an open canoe is very much like
the whaling Herman Melville so graphically described in Moby Dick. The difficulty of
striking a swimming whale with an enormously heavy harpoon from an open boat is
made clear by a famous photograph; an early photographer, Asahel Curtis,
managed to immortalize the moment when Makah whaler Charles White struck a
whale, and the picture has been reproduced countless times (see e.g. Reid
2015:175; a huge blowup of the picture decorates the Makah Cultural and
Research Center in Neah Bay). It is not
surprising that whalers resorted to magical practices that could involve months
of ritual preparation (Drucker 1951; Jonaitis 1999; Reid 2015:150).
On a more practical note, these
groups had to be prepared for finding themselves far out at sea. A harpooned whale could run seaward, towing
the harpooner’s canoe on what Melville’s whalers called a “Nantucket
sleighride.” They could take days to
paddle back to shore (Drucker 1951). If
the night was clear, they could “steer by the pole star,” but fog was typical: “Combinations of regular swell patterns and
winds enabled them to fix their approximate location, even in the regular fogs
that conceal the coast. Experienced
Makah mariners also used the water’s appearance and the set of the riptide to approximate
their location when out of sight of land,” and they could also predict the
weather (Reid 2015:142). They thus had a
navigational science similar to that of the Micronesians and other deep-ocean
voyagers.
The Makahs also developed a
commercial sealing industry in the late 19th century, even
purchasing and running some long-distance-voyaging schooners (Reid
2015:177-196). Unfortunately,
overfishing by settlers’ industrial craft virtually wiped out the whale and
seal resource by the early 20th century.
Whale and seal products were traded
widely, and these groups often had to depend on trade relationships for
necessary food items; they were, to a significant extent, specialized
whalers. Such dependence on trade for
staple food is unusual, to say the least, among hunter-gatherers. The westcoast pattern developed from about
3000 to 2000 years ago, but dependence on whaling probably increased after the
latter date. The Nuu-chah-nulth naturally yearned to possess the safer living
of salmon streams, and fought many a war to acquire such.
On the other hand, sea mammals are
not only bigger than fish, they average much fatter. A seal or whale obviously equals a lot of
salmon, and produces an enormous amount of oil as well as meat. It is quite possible that some Northwest
Coast groups got most of their calories from sea mammals, not fish, as was
certainly the case for Aleutian and other island Alaskan Native groups (see
e.g. Jolles 2002).
David Arnold (2008:24) estimates
that the Tlingit consumed about 6 million pounds of fish a year in aboriginal
times, given the very conservative estimate of 500 pounds of fish per
person. In fact they could well have
required twice that. 500 pounds would
represent only about 1200 calories of fat salmon, and only half as many of lean
fish. The Tlingit had little but fish to
eat. They did take many sea mammals and
birds, but 500 pounds of fish per year is still a very conservative estimate.
Indeed, at the other corner of the
region, the average Spokan ate almost 1000 lb. of salmon in a year. (Ross 2011:359; I think the figure better
applies to all fish.) This would be
about 1,400,000 pounds per year for the whole tribe, representing well over
100,000 fish (Ross 2011:359, citing Allan Scholtz). And this though the Spokan, unlike the
Tlingit, got half their calories from plant foods. The Tlingit got their salmon at river mouths,
where they were fat, while the Spokan caught fish far upriver, where they had
used most of their fat reserves fighting their way up the Columbia. Even so, 1000 lb. may be exaggerated, since
the Spokan got half their almost calories from plants and some more from
game. A reasonable guess for the
Northwest Coast as a whole would be two pounds of fat fish or three of lean per
day.
Fish are low-calorie fare. Three hundred calories per pound is typical
for fish like halibut and rockfish.
Salmon fatten up for their runs up the rivers, and a fat salmon entering
a river could be four times that rich in calories, but otherwise even salmon
are not high in calories. Herring and
oolichans are high to very high in fat, but not available except during brief
runs. And the Native people lived hard
outdoor lives—calorie consumption was extremely high. The Tlingit would need up to twice Arnold’s
estimate. Other groups would need
similar amounts. Bears and other
predators took a huge number of salmon also, and the pressure on the resource
base was high.
Under the circumstances, it is not
surprising that all possible resources were used. This provided, and still provides, an
incentive for managing the entire landscape sustainably. Worldwide, the higher the percentage of
natural resources that are used, the more people need to maintain the
ecosystem. Conversely, when people
depend on a handful of non-native foods (as in the United States) there is no
incentive to maintain the natural environment, and, indeed, every incentive to
destroy it. The wide spectrum of foods
and industrial resources used by Indigenous peoples in the Northwest contrasts
strikingly with the extreme poverty of crops grown on any significant scale by
white settlers.
Not only were salmon and sea fish
important, but river fish now neglected, such as suckers and lampreys, were
major resources. The three local species
of lampreys (Lampreta spp., formerly
placed in the genus Petromyzon),
called “eels” in the Northwest though not related to true eels, are now almost
extinct. They were major resources once. Temain favorite foods—though now very hard to
get (Miller 2012). Two were parasites on
salmon and other fish; the third was a small nonparasitic species. Suckers were key resources in many inland
areas, from the Columbia to the northeast California plateau. Again many species are endangered, including
the Lost River sucker, whose runs used to sustain the Modoc; diversion for
irrigation has almost dried up its river.
Suckers remain important in the Pit River area, among other places.
Fish were always carefully managed,
as will appear below. Social groups had
depended on the fish for millennia, and knew what they could take and how to
maximize returns. They used a variety of
gears, traps, weirs, and other devices, including stone weirs to catch fish on
receding tides (Menzies 2016).
Conservation was generally effected by limiting days of fishing,
permitting escapements, and improving breeding conditions, rather than by
limiting gears or daily takes. Improving
spawning success included things such as clearing redds, returning fish wastes
to water for nutrients recycling, and protecting spawning streams.
Shellfish were also carefully
managed by developing breeding grounds and enforcing limits. Charles Menzies (2010; 2016:119-130) has
described abalone management by the Tsimshian.
Populations collapsed after settler contact and overfishing. This led to ethnographic erasure of the
importance of abalone in precontact times.
Menzies’ archaeological work turned up massive amounts of abalone
shells, leading to new realization of its former importance. The same could be said of many other resources
and foods that we now are beginning to realize were once important.
Marine and freshwater resources
were managed carefully. The high point
was the creation of “clam gardens”:
Rock-barriered areas where beaches could upgrade or be developed to maximize
clam production. We will discuss these
below.
Northwest Coast knowledge of the
environment was as thorough, detailed and comprehensive as one would expect
from 15,000 or more years of continuous occupation of and dependence on the
land. Ethnobiology of most groups has
been documented in detail. The most
comprehensive work is Nancy Turner’s five-foot shelf of classic ethnobotanies,
many of them coauthored with First Nations people, climaxing in her enormous Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge (2014;
see esp. vol. 2, pp. 198-244). The most
comprehensive work on animals and places has been done by Eugene Hunn,
especially in N’Chi Wana (1991), and
his students such as Thomas Thornton, whose book Being and Place among the Tlingit (2008) goes beyond ethnobiology
to discuss major ontological and epistemological points.
Knowledge can be something as
simple as knowing bird songs that announce plant seasons. In spring, when salmonberries flower and set
fruit, the woods are suddenly full of Swainson’s Thrushes returning from their
winter homes. Their exquisitely
beautiful songs sound everywhere: woodily woodily woodily woodily, rising
up the scale. The Saanich (Wsáneć) of Vancouver Island hear
this as “weweleweleweleweś”—“ripen, ripen,
ripen.” (Turner and Hebda 2012:103. Such playful wording of bird songs is
widespread in North America; I have encountered similar Maya stories.)
Northwest Coast peoples managed the
environment extremely well (Alberta Society of Professional Biologists 1986;
Deur and Turner 2005 Hunn 1990; Kirk 1986; Menzies 2006; Miller 1999, who gives valuable
comparative materials and seasonal rounds; Turner 2005). The basic principle was to use and value
everything, or almost everything.
Total-landscape management resulted.
The whole region was managed to some degree, and productive areas were
intensively managed. But since almost
everything was useful, the first rule of management was to keep
everything. Since management was by
village or extended family, it was also necessary to manage for long-term,
wide-flung payoffs. Short-term payoffs
depleted the resource for one or a very few people. That made short-term exploitation a selfish
crime against society, and it was correspondingly condemned.
They were the first to admit that
they were far from perfect; every, or almost every, group has tales of
overharvesting followed by famine. The
fact that these tales were retold with cautionary import is what matters. There was a learning curve, and everyone knew
it. Many individuals, moreover, tell of
overharvesting themselves and getting social sanctions applied in no uncertain
terms (e.g. Atleo 2011:50). Such stories
are far more revealing of how management really accomplished than are the
romantic stereotypes of the “Indian at one with nature.”
Fish management was notably careful. Not only were spears and hooks universal, but
very effective netting was done. Trawl
nets and set reef nets were used in the Salish Sea, and seines, weirs, scoop
nets, and other nets were used everywhere.
Nettles might be grown especially for making nets, or tough grass traded
in from other areas (Miller 2014:83). It
was easy to take all the fish from a small river or creek.
Thus, strict limits were set on
fishing, and this was usually religiously represented—there were strong
religious rules and ceremonies relating to fishing. This is well documented all the way from the
Tlingit in the north (Arnold 2008) to the Yurok in the far south (Swezey and
Heizer 1977), and for most groups in between, e.g. the groups along the Skeena
(Morrell 1985). The first fish was
subject to ceremonies; often it had to be taken by a religious leader. (The best account is in Swezey and Heizer
1977, but similar practices were universal on the coast.) People waited until the season was thus
opened. This allowed leaders to provide
for escapement, for spawning or for the tribes upriver. Swezey and Heizer (1977) report for the
Klamath River tribes that the latter was a motive; not allowing enough fish to
get through the lower river weirs was cause for the upriver tribes to make war
on those downstream. Ceremonies thus not
only allowed escapement for breeding, but also kept the peace.
Other areas too had a fish leader
to start the season. The Lakes and
Colville Salishans fished at Kettle Falls, and the Lakes scholar Lawney Reyes,
recalling his childhood, reports:
“During the salmon harvest, the
head authority at the falls was the appointed Salmon Chief. Before any nets or traps were set or
fishermen were positioned, he stood near the lower falls, facing downriver, and
prayed. The Salmon Chief welcomed the
arrival of the chinook [salmon]. He
apologized and thanked those salmon that would be separed or taken in the
traps. HE assured the hcinook that most
would be allowed to go upriver to spawn and bring forth their young….
“It was the responsibility of the
Salmon Chief to see that the closely related tribes…shared equally in all
salmon that were caught. Other tribes
that came to fish at the falls were also treated fairly…. According to Sin-Aikst [Lakes] tradition, the
first Salmon Chief was chosen by Coyote…. [who] made Beaver the Salmon Chief
[and told him]
…. ‘You must never be greedy and you must see to it that no one
else is greedy.’” (Reyes 2002:46-47).
The Lakes and their neighbors had,
in fact, such a supervisor for all hunting and fishing activities—there was a
hunting chief as well as a salmon chief and other fishing leaders. Such leaders of hunting and fishing had a
special title, xa’tús, from a word
for “first”(Kennedy and Bouchard
1998b:241; Miller 1998:255). The salmon
chief was locally called “salmon tyee” (Miller 1998:255), tyee being Chinook Jargon for “chief.”
The tight grounding of conservation
in religion, including origin myths, is found everywhere in the region. It goes a long way to disprove the occasional
claim that conservation is actually a new idea, learned from the Whites. Many early ethnographers segregated
“religion” and “subsistence” in separate parts of their ethnographies; it would
be better to take the religion-environment-subsistence interaction as the basic
unity, with “religion” and “subsistence” being artificial categories imposed
from outside.
The Nuu-chah-nulth and Tlingit, at
least, and probably other groups, stocked eggs and fry in salmon streams (see
e.g. Deur and Turner 2005:19; George 2003:74).
Gilbert Sproat describes this from the early 19th century
(Sproat 1987 [1868]). Since Sproat was
the first European to visit the areas he described, this was evidently a
pre-contact practice. A Saanich origin
myth of salmon, and of the use of wild parsley (Lomatium) as “medicine” to lure it, talks of the creator
hero-twins stocking salmon as they went around Vancouver Island (Turner and
Hebda 2012:132). Earl Maquinna George
describes the process in detail, and also points out that the Nuu-chah-nulth
would clear choking vegetation out of streams but leave enough to keep the
stream healthy; salmon need some logs for shelter and protection. The Nuu-chah-nulth also understood that bears
were people too, and needed and deserved their fair share of the catch, for all
to cooperate and consent (Atleo 2011:100-101).
Fish populations throughout the Northwest
Coast region were carefully managed (Johnsen 2009). The European settlers found fish incredibly
abundant—rivers during runs were said to be “more fish than water.” Some of this abundance is surely due to
population recovery after Indian fishing was reduced in the contact period
(Ames 2005:84), but an extremely important and little-remarked fact is that
even the tiniest and most insignificant streams had runs at contact. Even normal natural processes would have
exterminated some of these small-stream runs.
Such streams have few fish and short run-times. More to the point, one man with a net can
easily “rob a creek” (take all the fish in it) in a couple of weeks of fishing.
Since most salmon run eventually into
creeks small enough to rob, overfishing can quickly wipe out even a huge
river’s salmon stocks. We know that
Indian fishing was heavy. Only stocking
combined with careful conservation could have maintained the runs.
Limiting fishing was, of course,
the major and most necessary way to manage this. It was done by many means, e.g. not fishing
before a certain date or before a large escapement, and these limits were
ritually enforced. The classic account
is by Swezey and Heizer (1977) for the Klamath River, but parallels exist
throughout the region. Competition and
cooperation over resources drove protection of one’s tribal resource base
(Johnsen 2009). As usual, there are
equivalent stories from other regions; Erich Kasten quotes Indigenous elders on
Kamchatka as counseling leaving salmon and opening weirs (Kasten 2012:79). One elder remembered asking, as a child, why
some fish were spared and being told those were females that would reproduce
the fish. Today, the runaway market in
Russia for caviare has doomed the female fish, which are often simply stripped
of caviare and left to rot, to the horror of traditional persons. Kasten recommends reviving traditional ways
of conserving before it is too late. Comparable accounts from Siberia make it clear
that conservation was general there (e.g. Koestler 2012; Wilson 2012). Tsimshian
anthropologist Charles Menzies records stories of overhunting and overfishing
told as cautionary tales, with conservation morals drawn (Menzies 2012, esp. p.
165). The Alutiiq conserved and managed
fish until settler societies forced overfishing (Carothers 2012).
Another conservation measure was
returning inedible parts of the fish to the water. Salmon die on spawning because the young
depend on the nutrients from their parents’ bodies; this enormous import of nutrients
from the sea to the river headwaters allows the fantastic productivity of
Northwest Coast streams, which would otherwise be extremely nutrient-poor. (Coniferous forests make oligotrophic
streams.) The Native people know this,
and some at least see it as equivalent to human parents feeding their children
(Gottesfeld 1994b). We will consider
some teaching stories about this, below.
Returning the bones to the water seems to be universal along the acidic,
oligotrophic streams of the coast, but on the Plateau the bones were more often
ground up for human consumption (e.g. Ross 2011:429), probably because the
streams are richer in nutrients and do not need the addition.
The Tlingit of Alaska not only
stocked or restocked streams and took out beaver dams that were blocking these
streams. They also excavated shallow
pools (ish) in small spawning
streams, to prevent drying in summer, freezing in winter, and excess
predation. They devised a complex trap
system to divert salmon fry while trapping dolly varden trout, which eat salmon
eggs. They not only prevented
overfishing, they were careful to take about three males for every one female
from the upriver runs, to maximize spawning.
This was done with the usual recognition of salmon as people deserving
and requiring respect. Steve Langdon
calls this an “existencescape of willful intentional beings.” Following Viveiros de Castro (2015) he speaks
of “relational ontology” and “abductive reflexivity” (Langdon 2016).
In addition to stocking salmon, at
least some Northwest Coast groups (specifically the Kwakwaka’wakw and nearby
Salishan-speaking groups) protected clam beaches by creating low rock walls
along the seaward side to prevent beach erosion (Williams 2006). These “clam gardens” have now been the subject
of major research by Dana Lepofsky and her colleagues and students (Augustine
et al. 2016; Lepofsky et al. 2015; Moss 2011).
With the help of First Nations advisors and of Randy Bouchard and
Dorothy Kennedy, experts on the ethnography of the local Salishan groups,
Lepofsky and her group have found large numbers of rock walls separating,
marking off, shoring up, and preserving large areas of clam beaches. More, they learned that local people had been
painstakingly clearing the beaches of large boulders, cobbles, and logs for
countless centuries. Also, clam
digging—which was rigorously managed for sustainability—broke up the substrate,
which otherwise became too hard for easy clam establishment. The group tried these various techniques on
sample beaches and found that the number of clams was increased
severalfold. They recommend that these
techniques be introduced to modern beach management.
Given what we know of plant and
fish management, and the importance of clams and other shellfish in the diet,
it would be surprising if no enhancement of shellfish was done. It is very easy to overharvest shellfish, and
indeed many Native American groups did, as early as several thousand years ago
(Rick and Erlandson 2008, 2009). Huge
shell middens stand up as islands or bars in marshy areas, and cover up to
hundreds of acres along rivers and coasts in the Northwest; some were several
metres deep. As with fish, only diligent
conservation and management could keep the shellfish resource flourishing in
near-settlement locations.
In fact, what Lepofsky and her
group found is really clam farming—as intensive and demanding as the oyster and
mussel farming now practiced widely in Washington state. It is at least as labor-intensive and
landscape-changing as anything done on the Northwest Coast, and is quite
comparable in both labor needs and results to the horticulture of many Native
American groups in more easterly parts of North America. Along with the emerging knowledge of plant
management, it changes our idea of the Northwest Coast peoples; they were more
like proto-agriculturalists than “hunters and gatherers.”
Birds too were carefully managed,
with seabirds and their eggs being taken in a self-consciously sustainable way
(Hunn et al. 2003), as is archaeologically confirmed by continued abundance of
the birds on even very vulnerable islands (Moss 2007).
Game management is less easy to
evaluate. Overall, there are few
declines demonstrated in the archaeological record—in fact, none was found in a
major review by Virginia Butler and Sarah Campbell (2004; Butler 2005). They did not even find a shift in
exploitation from big game to lower-ranked resources. Elk were as common 200 years ago as 5000
years ago. Locally, the situation gets
more interesting, with patterns of local decline or scarcity contrasting with
considerable abundance (Kay and Simmons 2002, and see below). The fact remains that the Northwest Coast was
rich in game when first contacted by White settlers, and unlike the situation
in California (Preston 2002), this first contact came before introduced disease reduced the population and allowed game
numbers to rebound.
Game was conserved by conscious
choice to shift hunting grounds when game became depleted, and by the whole
complex of ideas associated with respect for animals (see below): not to take
too many, to kill with a shot (rather than wound and allow escape), to use all
of an animal, and other restrictions.
Explicit conservation was common.
This stands in marked contrast with, for example, June Helms’ careful
description of the ecology of the northeastern Athapaskas (Helm 2000). They not only shot what they could, they
opposed government conservation ideas explicitly and at length, with the result
that game was drastically depleted around settlements.
Apparently, in the old days, the
population of humans was so thin and mobile that it did not much affect local
populations, and if it did people simply moved elsewhere. Firearms and population growth created a
problem that eastern Dene culture apparently could not solve (Helm 2000, esp.
pp. 66-68, 79-84). The contrast with the
Northwest is similar to the contrast in South America between sparse groups
like the nonconserving Machigenga/Matsigenka and more careful groups that are
more populous and settled (Beckerman et al. 2002).
Among the Spokan of eastern
Washington, “[l]and mammals were never stalked or taken at springs, as this was
disrespectful and, if violated, was believed to be the main reason for game
leaving an area” (Ross 1998:273)—naturally enough, as waterhole hunting is the
surest way to wipe out local game. Possibly less directly useful was the same
group’s way of dealing with bears; “the successful hunter…sang the bear’s death
song” and observed “three days of strict behavioral and dietary taboos to avoid
dreaming of the bear or being burned later by fire or struck by lightning”
(Ross 1998:273, 2011:314). But this
shows both respect for the bear and awareness of interaction and
interdependence in ecology—though bears and lightning would not be associated
by most peoples. The Spokan were
competent enough hunters to wipe out the game, using tricks like taking scent
glands from animals and luring them with the scents (Ross 2011:307-308). It is worth noting that the Spokan lived on
fish and plant materials (mostly berries and roots), about 50% each; game was a
rare treat (Ross 2011:311).
Wet sites that preserve many types
of remains for archaeologists have given us new insights into the
Northwest. At Ozette in Washington
state, whaling was far more important than anyone realized, and wooden arrows
without stone points were far more common than stone-tipped ones (Croes 2003),
showing that hunting was far more important than the relative rarity of classic
“arrow point” discoveries had suggested.
Baskets show cultural continuity and adaptability over long time
periods, and reveal the extreme importance of transporting and storing food
(Bernick 2003; Croes 2003).
Plant Resource Management
The Northwest Coast peoples, like
other western American hunter-gatherers, managed plant resources by
cultivating, pruning, transplanting, fertilizing, and indeed all gardening
activities short of actual domestication.
Many authors have surveyed these practices for the Northwest (e.g. Blukis
Onat 2002; Deur and Turner [eds.], 2005, esp. Lepofsky, Hallett et al. 2005 and
Turner and Peacock 2005 therein; Gottesfeld 1994b; Kirk 1986; Turner 2005). In addition, Kat Anderson’s great study of
Californian Native plant management practices (M. K. Anderson 2005) not only
covers the extreme southern end of the region, but describes many techniques
used throughout. Jay Miller’s statement
that “While women did encourage the growth of certain wild plants, they did
this unobtrusively” (Miller 2014:21) is an odd observation. Burning, planting, massively selective
harvesting, and other techniques were far from unobtrusive. They were also very successful, and carefully
done. In fact, in the same book, Miller
more accurately says “this cultivating was intense—much more than a light or
selective tending of ‘wild’ species (Blukis Onat 2002) . Not quite farming, it was definitely
gardening” (Miller 2014:131, from a previously published paper). Women used digging sticks, and had
appropriate prayers and formulae for working with them and with plants in
general.
At least the Secwépemc (Shuswap)
had recognized resource stewards; stewardship was a named office (Ignace and
Ignace 2017:193-194). They watched over
fish, game, and plant stocks, organized and timed burning for berries and other
resources, maintained trails, and oversaw conservation. They appear to be a development from the
“fish chiefs” and “game bosses” reported generally over western North America.
Burning was by far the most
important method of managing the environment (Agee 1993, esp. p. 56; M. K.
Anderson 2005; Stewart et al. 2002). The
Northwest forests do not burn easily, but they do burn. Clearings, meadows, and brushfields burn much
more easiliy. The old idea that burning
had little effect on resources is disproved by the rapid recent changes in
environments the Native Americans managed by fire. An idea that burning was relatively recent
has been rendered unlikely by pollen studies and Native cultural traditions,
though natural burning was common in the drier and higher areas and must have
had much role in maintaining berry fields.
(They did, after all, evolve over millions of years before people were
there to burn.) The pollen records
indicate localized burning going back at least several thousand years (Sobel et
al. 2013:37). Plateau forests burn much
more easily, and were regularly burned for berries, to eliminate pests, and to
renew the landscape and kill insect pests and ticks (Ignace and Ignace 2017:192;
Ross 2011:267-272, citing an enormous literature as well as his own field
work). There was even special spirit
power for burning (Ross 2011:271).
Burning for berries was simple and
productive (Joyce Lecompte-Mastenbrook, ongoing research; Ross 2011, esp.
344ff; many other writers). The major
berries of the northwest—huckleberries, blackberries, raspberries of various
sorts, and so on—are basically fire-followers, and all the Native groups
learned exactly how often and when to burn to maximize production.
Root crops also grow largely in
burned-over prairie and grassland habitats.
Fire suppression has made them rare or absent in many areas, and indeed
the forests reclaim unburned areas rapidly.
The oak forests found from California (commonly) to Washington (locally)
to British Columbia (only around Victoria) require burning for maintenance;
those of BC are now succumbing rapidly to invasion by palnts favored by fire
suppression. They once supplied numerous acorns, which were a staple in
California and probably close to one in the Willamette Valley. Acorns had to be leached, and in Oregon they
were often buried in mud for the winter, thus becoming “Chinook olives” (Gahr
2013:74).
However, in at least one area, pollen
records show less burning in the last
2500 years, after Native cultures became complex (Walsh et al. 2008). This seems to accompany a local wet phase,
but it is a confusing finding. Probably,
small local fires reduced the chance of major fires that would have left a
clearer signature in the record.
Berries “were closely tended and
maintained by fire clearing until government prohibited this practice. Today …due to lack of burning, they have
changed in such a way that inferior species and subspecies of berries have
replaced the quality species of the past (Art Mathews in Daly 2005:221; Gitksan
data, but applicable everywhere in the Northwest). I might chalk this up to “good old days”
rhetoric if I had not observed it myself throughout much of western North
America over the last 60-odd years.
Almost everywhere, the favorite berry patches of my youth have grown up
to forests, brush, or grassland.
Invasion by inferior species is bad enough, but a far worse problem (and
one thing Mathews was talking about) is the fact that shading and crowding make
berry plants produce fewer and sourer fruit.
Every home gardener who has let trees encroach on his berry patch knows
this, but it is rarely mentioned in the ecological literature.
Sugar also occurred in sweet sap
and conifer cambium, and from Douglas firs, which sometimes exude a
trisaccharide sugar from their twigs and branches; it gathers like snow on the
twigs. It was so loved in the interior
that it was known as “breast milk” in some groups (Turner 2014-1:215). Pit-cooking of roots such as camas turned the
indigestible inulin to fructose, thus making them sweet; European sweets and
starches were accepted quickly and seen as parallel (ibid. and many references
cited there). Balsamroot was similarly
prepared not only for food but for medicine; it contains strongly antibiotic
chemicals (Turner 2014-1:431).
The only domesticated plant
acknowledged in most of the literature was tobacco. Tobacco cultivation was certainly
pre-Columbian, but not necessarily in all groups where it is known (Moss
2005). One species (Nicotiana attenuata) was grown by the Haida and probably their
neighbors, and also was grown widely in California and probably into
Oregon. It seems likely that other
groups grew it but stopped doing so before anthropologists reached them. N.
quadrivalvis, a plant from the central part of the continent, was
occasionally farmed in its area of origin, and may have spread into our region
at some time.
Root crops were harvested in ways
that propagated them: large tubers were
taken, small ones replanted; roots might be cut and the stem replanted.
Harvesting was done such that weeds were eliminated. Particularly favored crops show what appears
to be actual selection from thousands of years of this care.
Camas (Camassia quamash and C.
leichtlinii; the latter may be simply a form of C. quamash) was particularly important, and has been for a long
time (Lyons and Ritchie 2017). It seems
to have been at least partially domesticated.
It shows several traits characteristic of domestic crops, including
large showy flowers (compared to its close relatives), large edible structures,
and extremely good adaptation to gardens and gardening (personal observation,
from garden cultivation of it by myself and many other persons I know). Douglas Deur says it is a “cultivated plant”
in the coastal forests, being maintained there only by human activity. Presumably it was introduced from inland (see
Deur and Thompson 2008:51; Gahr 2013:70).
Turner and Hebda (2012:120-121)
quote a detailed account by Marguerite Babcock of camas management in southeast
Vancouver Island; it was clearly cultivated, and if not domesticated then very
close to it. Turner (2014-2:167-176)
provides an extremely detailed account—unique in the ethnographic literature—of
how much yield was obtained from various plant resources by Indigenous
harvesting efforts. Few resources
yielded high. Anyone with experience
picking berries, which have changed less under domestication than most plants,
will have a good idea of effort involved.
Domestic berries yield higher than unmanaged wild stands, but no higher
than burned and cultivated wild stands (my considerable personal experience
confirms Turner here).
Roots were managed by harvesting
with digging sticks, thinning stands and allowing selection of particular
sizes. Balsamroot (Balsamorrhiza spp.) produces edible roots that develop over years
into huge, woody, inedible taproots; these were left to reproduce, and very
small roots were left to grow.
Carrot-sized roots were harvested (Ignace and Ignace 2017:190).
Wetland resources such as yellow
pond lily nuts (the wokas of the
Klamath; Colville 1902) and the wapato or “Indian potato” (Sagittaria; see Gahr 2013:69) were similarly managed. They too may well have been on the road to
domestication. This sort of root
management gave the Native people the ability to shift rapidly to cultivating
potatoes. The Haida were trading
potatoes in bulk with English and “Boston” ships well before 1800. In fact, potatoes have been a staple on the
coast about as long as they have in Ireland.
The potato was introduced by the Spanish. Surviving traditional potatoes of the Ozette
and Makah types are still genetically South American (Ignace and Ignace 2017:515;
Turner 2014-1:198-200), presumably from direct and early introduction by the
Spanish.
The root foods, including other
managed ones ranging from glacier lilies (Erythronium)
and frilillary (Fritillaria spp.) to
clover (Trifolium, especially T. wormskioldii), were baked for long
periods in earth ovens, to break down the long-chain polysaccharides,
especially inulin, into digestible short-chain sugars. As experimenters with cooking such roots may
be painfully aware, the long-chain molecules can cause acute digestive distress
if ingested without breakdown. Nancy
Turner’s five-foot shelf of books give the best and fullest information on these
roots and their preparation; she and her students have devoted lifetimes to the
research.
We know that fruit trees like
Oregon crabapple, Indian plum, hawthorn, and moutain ash were managed, but we
do not know much about it. Techniques
included pruning around them, opening land for them, and otherwise encouraging
them. They were often transplanted into
new areas, and local orchards established.
Were the seeds planted? Probably,
but we do not know. Hazelnuts are better
known; they were carefully managed throughout the Northwest, with trees
carefully tended, pruned, and probably transplanted locally (Armstrong et al.
2018).
Fibre crops were also managed. The Secwépemc, for instance, “carefully
tended” patches of Indian hemp (Apocynum
cannabinum) “by removing brush and undergrowthnear the patch to encsure
straight and thick growth of the perennial hemp shoots” (Ignace and Ignace 2017:191). Cutting the shoots for fibre made the new
ones grow out straight and tall. This is
typical of Indian hemp management all over western North America (see e.g. M.
K. Anderson
2005). Indian hemp was sometimes
transplanted to new areas in California and presumably in the Northwest Coast
region as well.
Bow staves were taken off living
yew trees in the coastal forests, junipers and other trees in the Basin and
probably the Plateau. This indicates
major forbearance and the working of conscience. Yews and junipers produce few straight
branches. Staves are best taken off the lower part of a branch, to get the
compression wood. The branch very slowly
regrows. With junipers, only one stave
in about twenty years can be taken (Wilke 1998), and for yews the figure is
probably about the same. This means that
people must be restrained by their conscience; no one can patrol all the few
trees with straight branches. All over
the Northwest, one sees yew trees with the characteristic scars, indicating
that people saved their bow trees. (For
the same reason—bow staves—yew trees were planted thickly around castles in the
British Isles in the middle ages. Many of them are still growing, providing a
thick shade.)
Similar “culturally modified trees”
or “CMT’s” include cedars used for bark or planks. Cuts were made near the foot of the tree and
then about 20 or 30 feet up, the cuts being shallow for bark and deep for
planks. The bark was pulled off in long
strips. The planks were sometimes split
off, but it was easier to let the tree grow until the stresses of growth split
the plank off without human effort. The
scars, again, show that people took only enough for their needs, without
killing or greatly harming the trees.
The scars healed and bark could be taken again (see e.g. Schlick
1998:59).
The only true domesticate was the
dog. In some groups, it was subject to
serious selective breeding—most unusual for small-scale societies. A wool-bearing variety of dog was developed
by the Salish. The painter Paul Kane
managed to see and draw one; it looks rather like a lamb. It sadly became extinct in the mid-19th
century, but biologist Russell Barsh (pers. comm., 2007) is trying to breed it
back. Another endangered special variety
is the Tahltan bear dog, developed for bear hunting by the Tahltan people of
northern British Columbia. It somewhat
resembles the Karelian bear dog of Finland.
Other groups apparently also had special hunting breeds in the old days.
Moreover, wild animals were
probably tamed on more than a few occasions.
Early accounts speak of Salish women trapping mountain goats in spring,
when they were shedding their winter coats.
The women pulled the loose fur off the goats and let them go. The wool was then spun with the dog wool, and
woven on sophisticated native looms to make the beautiful traditional
blankets. Mountain goats are notoriously
tameable—they became pests in Glacier National Park, begging for food from
tourists—and it is fairly obvious that the Salish tamed their goats. Goat hunting did go on, but I suspect it was
done as an unobtrusive cropping of semi-managed herds. The rifle has changed game hunting in
America; bow hunting required a close approach.
The sensible thing to do with the smaller, more tameable animals, like
mountain sheep, mountain goats, and deer, was to keep the herds as tame and
unsuspecting as possible, taking laggards and easily-shot animals but never
taking enough to alarm the group. This
is why archaeology reveals a “poor management” practice of taking many females
and young rather than concentrating on the conspicuous, wary adult males, as a
modern rifle-hunter would. (On hunting
in western North America in general, see Frison 2004; Kay and Simmons 2002. Frison was a rancher and an expert hunter,
and draws on his knowledge.)
The Northwest Coast Native peoples
were formidable hunters, and certainly kept game populations down. Respect was a needed, and not always
adequate, check on overhunting. Stories
warned people to take no more animals than they needed, or even a specific small
number. For the Shuswap, “’Stinginess’
[in distributing fish and game…invited bad luck for the future….Most of all, resource management was carried
out through a value system that enforced the use of all parts of killed animals
and sanctioned individuals who were wasteful” (Ignace 1998:208).A major origin myth of the Coeur d’Alene
instructs hunters to take no more than two deer per hunt (Frey 2001:4, and
subsequent discussion throughout book).The
Kaska “do not kill animals needlessly,” realize that “animals are best saved
for times when they are most useful” (Nelson 1973:155), are averse to using
poison because animals eating the poisoned animals will die in turn, thus
killing needlessly (ibid, 244), and in short “have a well-developed conservation
ethic” (ibid, 311).
The same could be said for all the
other Northwest Coast groups, so far as ethnography goes. In fact, these rules
are common worldwide among hunting groups, including European ones.
Clearly, the Native peoples knew
overhunting all too well, and knew exactly what its effects were and how much
hunting would be suicidal (see Kay and Simmons 2002).These stories make no sense at all unless
people had overhunted, had found out the consequences to their cost, had
consciously learned better, and had even more self-consciously developed a
stern morality of conservation!The fact
that this morality was taught so diligently, with so many stories, proves that
it met a felt need.Historians routinely
use the existence of a law as proof that the outlawed activity was common
enough to be a problem.The same can be
said here. The Chinook and their neighbors had rules about taking no more than
necessary, but supplying the Anglo-American settlers made this a negotiable
issue, and one hunter supposedly took 20 to 30 deer per day in one early-19th-century
winter (Gahr 2013:66; I am fairly sure several hunters were involved, but in
any case the toll was unsustainable).
Martin and Szuter (1999, 2002)
found that “no man’s lands” between warring tribes were rich in game, while
village areas were not.(Similar
findings are reported from South America to Vietnam, and I have found the same
thing in Mexico).Martin and Szuter argue
that the game was killed out near settlements, though bothering and disturbing
may have had more to do with driving them away. Of course the game animals are smart enough to move to safe places.We can observe this today throughout the
world.
In short, Native people had good
sense but were not infallible, and they created morals accordingly.Contra the old stereotypes, they are not
wantonly wasteful killers (pace Krech 1999, last chapters; see Appendix 3 below),
not natural conservationists (pace Hughes 1983), and most certainly not mere
animals with no impact on nature (see appalling quotes from Anglo settlers in
Pryce 1999:85-90, and her excellent discussion of this whole issue).
The role of cultivation was underplayed
by early anthropologists.This was
partly because they wanted to emphasize the sophistication of “hunter-gatherer”
societies as a way of disproving evolutionary schemes.Douglas Deur and Nancy Turner (2005) point
this out, but they exaggerate the case.It
remains true that the NorthwestCoast
peoples were hunting-gathering societies, without significant domestication or
agriculture.Most hunter-gatherer
societies manage the environment, often intensively.Early anthropologists knew that, and had no
reason not to make the hunter-gatherers seem even more sophisticated by
emphasizing it.
Much more true is Deur and Turner’s
point that women were rarely taken seriously by early ethnographers.Indeed, what Fiske and Patrick say of the
Babine could be said of almost all Northwest Coast peoples:“We do not have reliable accounts of women’s
lives, property, or social obligations for the early contact or precontact
eras.All the available fur trader and
missionary accounts are full of contradictions and replete with biases” (Fiske
and Patrick 2000:238).
Deur and Turner (2005:33) note that
the famous fish dependence of the Northwest Coast peoples must have been
overstated, because living on fish would cause unhealthy overconsumption of
protein and perhaps of vitamin D.The
peoples in question had to have been eating a lot of carbohydrates.Records show diet breadth was always great;
people worked to maintain diversity in all matters.
On the other hand, it should never
be forgotten that roots, berries, and shellfish are all low to extremely low in
calories, and the Northwest Coast people could not have gotten much of their
subsistence from them.What has been
missed is not so much the plant foods but the importance of oil, both from
ooligan fish and from mammals (sea lions, whales, deer, elk, and so on).Early accounts stress the enormous importance
of oils in trade, feasting, and food. The Makah used to compete to see who could
drink the most whale oil at feasts (Colson 1953).People were desperate for oils.Suffice it to say that “ooligan” is derived
from a Tsimshian word meaning “savior,” now used for Jesus.Watertight boxes of oil from the ooligan
(oolichan, eulachon), a smelt that is mostly fat by dry weight, were traded all
up and down the coast. The Haida sailed
their great canoes over tens of miles of some of the most dangerous waters in
the world, and traded their most valuable possessions, to get these boxes of
oil.The biggest ooligan run was on the
Columbia River, where the commercial catch in the peak year, 1945, was over 5.5
million pounds—and the noncommercial (including Indigenous) catch at least as
high (Reynolds and Romano 2013).The
fish is almost extinct in the Columbia drainage now, thanks to dams and pollution.
Oil provided necessary
calories.In the Northwest, clothing is
not much barrier against the constant rain, which soaks or trickles through
anything.Thus oil was used externally
as “clothing,” as well as being consumed internally to keep metabolism up.Anyone who has lived and worked with Native
people on the outer coast is aware of the incredible calorie needs that working
in that climate entails, and of the incredible amounts of food that have to be
eaten to keep body warmth while carrying out any task.Early descriptions of people paddling for
four continuous days in cold rain (Drucker 1951; Sproat 1987 [1868]
) may be
hard to match now, but I have seen many feats of sustained effort in cold rain
that at least make the old stories thoroughly credible. They are possible only if the workers are
eating heavily.
Today, the old oil sources are
largely gone, and drinking oil straight is no longer in vogue, so recent
writers have generally missed the importance of this in the past.
An account of a typical meal was
provided by William Clark around 1805, in his famously creative spelling. He “was invited to a lodge by a young Chief”
of the Clatsop in Oregon, and received
“great Politeness, we had new mats to Set on, and himself and wife
produced for us to eate, fish, Lickorish [shore lupine, Lupinus littoralis], & black roots [edible thistle, Cirsium edule], on neet Small mats, and
Cramberries [Vaccinium oxycoccos]
& Sackacomey beris [kinnikinnik, Arctostaphylos
ua-ursi[, in bowls made of horn, Supe made of a kind of bread made of
berries [cf. salal, Gaultheria shallon]
common to this Countrey which they gave me in a mneet wooden trancher, with a
Cockle Shell to eate it with.” (Quoted
in Gahr 2013:65, from Lewis and Clark 1990:118; her notes in brackets). The dominance of fish and berries is notable,
and the few plant foods were roots.
An obvious question is how many of
the cultivation techniques of the Northwest were learned from early European
settlers. By far the most important
management technique, burning, was certainly aboriginal; every Native American
group in a burnable environment used this method, as did hunters, foragers, and
horticulturalists around the world. Unlike
the equivocal situation in California, where natural fire is so common that it
makes aboriginal burning difficult to assess, historic and archaeologically
evidenced burning on the Northwest Coast can usually be safely ascribed to
Native activity. Natural fire is
exceedingly rare west of the Cascades in Oregon and Washington and the Coast
Range crest in Canada (see Lepofsky et al. 2005).
Intensive root-digging was
certainly pre-contact, and indeed goes back far in the archaeological record,
and the diggers must have known the effects of their cultivation on the
crops. Otherwise, Wayne Suttles (2005), James
MacDonald (2005), and Madonna Moss (2005) have considered the matter, coming to
rather little resolution. Intensive pruning and transplantation and at least
some fertilizing are recorded, but are very possibly post-contact. Clearing, weeding, fencing, sowing,
transplanting, mulching, and fertilizing are all documented (Turner 2014-2:193).
Enormous quantities of plant foods
were gathered. A tribe of a thousand
people could easily run through a million camas bulbs in a year, and a single
family might eat 100,000 to 200,000 salal berries in a year (Deur 2005:14). Salal is the commonest berry bush over much
of the Northwest, and its bearing capacity, especially when periodically burned
over, is incredible—thousands of families gathering on that scale would not
make a dent in its yield.
Boas records a no-nonsense
conservation belief among the Kwakwaka’wakw:
“Even when the young cedar-tree is quite smooth, they do not take all of
the cedar-bark, for the people of the olden times said that if they should peel
off all the cedar-bark…the young cedar would die, and then another cedar-tree
near by would curse the bark-peeler so that he would also die” (George Hunt,
ed./tr. Franz Boas, 1921:616-617; several other conservation-related beliefs
and prayers are given in this section of Boas’ ethnography).
On the other hand, as we have seen,
overharvesting cedars was known to occur, though in a different group with less
cedar to manage (Lacourse et al. 2007).
More general, and perhaps more
valuable, was asking permission of a tree or plant to take its bounty (see
below). Native persons still ask a tree
for permission to take some bark, and then thank and praise the tree. Boas and others recorded many praises and
requests of this sort (Turner and Peacock 2005).
As discussed earlier, resources
were owned in the Northwest Coast, according to complex rules and ownership
systems. Nancy Turner et al. (2005;
Turner 2014, vol. 2, passim) provide a review, but the full complexity defies
summary, and must be found in the old ethnographies, and especially in Richard
Daly’s ethnography of the Gitksan and Witsu’weten. The latter was based on trial evidence of
ownership, and thus has an extremely full, detailed and accurate account. It applies only to the two groups mentioned,
but broadly similar ownership patterns exist throughout. They are generally even more precise and
self-consciously maintained along the coast itself, least precise and tightly
enforced in the deep interior.
Along the coast and up the major rivers, every
fishing spot, productive cedar grove, and berry patch was tightly owned. Good hunting grounds for localized species
like marmots and mountain goats were also.
Widely necessary goods that were locally abundant but otherwise
nonexistent, notably mineral resources, might be open to all (Daly 2005:263). Complex arrangements for sharing, loaning,
and even renting are widely reported, especially for fishing sites. If a run failed or a slide blocked a stream,
a group would be in desperate straits, and neighboring groups would then allow
fishing access. Daly (2005) reports
boundary markers, special passes (braided straps and the like) used by people
borrowing access, and other highly specific ownership applications. Male ethnographers underappreciated the
importance of female ownership of plant resources, which was incredibly complex
and detailed (Turner 2014-2:90-91), quite comparable to land rights of
intensive farmers. Rights were loaned,
land was opened, usufruct was differentiated from outright ownership, and
sharing was subject to complex rules and norms.
Generosity was always idealized, but ownership strictly enforced.
Finally,
the region had few food taboos. Animals
that ate carrion—including those famous tricksters, ravens and coyotes—or were
otherwise more or less disgusting were avoided. The Haida did not eat killer whales, because
humans (especially males, and most especially those who die by drowning) are
reincarnated as killer whales and killer whales that die are then reborn as
humans. Killer whales are easily
identifiable as individuals by their patterns, and, at least as of the 1980s,
Haida would discuss which local killer whale was which recently deceased Haida
man (I have heard people do this, and Boelscher 1988:183 also notes it). The Haida word for “killer whale,” sgaana, also means “spiritual
power.” (A shaman is sgaaga, one who has power; one
high god figure was Sins Sgaanaa,
“power of the shining heavens”; Boelscher 1988:172-173.) The Haida also regarded some foods as high
status, some as low; the former were foods that came from large animals—whales
being particularly high—or that were taken by collective effort, like salmon
and berries. Low foods were those that
involved individual and unobtrusive collecting:
shellfish and similar beach foods, especially (Boelscher 1988; I also
noted this
in Haida Gwaii, though some shellfish, such as chitons, were
so well liked that they had a certain degree of status). There seems little comparable information on
other groups, except the general observation that salmon and large land mammals
are highly regarded everywhere. Whales
were certainly special among the whaling groups.
Studying this successful management
reveals a fascinating truth. The Native
Americans managed superbly on the basis of an ontology that postulates spirits
in everything from salmon to mountains, and that leads to a practical
conclusion that vision questing and contacting spirits through soul-voyages
will provide the deepest and most valuable information about the world. Modern settler societies introduced the idea
of hard-headed, pragmatic, rational science, and promptly devastated the
resources of the region through incredibly stupid behaviors. It simply did not occur to these rational,
scientific invaders that if you catch all the fish you will have no fish
left. It did not occur to them that if
you cut all the trees there will be no trees.
When, belatedly, they came to realize these subtle facts—occasionally by
1880, usually not until well into the 20th century—they had no way
of motivating change toward better management.
The result today is rapid extinction of fisheries, with yet another
river going out of production almost every year; loss of forest resources,
often permanently; loss of berries, roots, and game; and a landscape which in
many cases has become a moonscape.
Counter-trends—restored fish, successful farming (far more productive
than pre-Columbian root-crop cultivation), sustainable forestry—have come from
counter-traditions. Either the Native
Americans have regained some control of their resources (as in Haida Gwaii) or
“counter-cultural” settler groups have had their way. Of these latter, small-scale and mixed
farming remains fairly widespread, but organic farming, community forestry,
fish restoration by dam removal, and other successful interventions are rare
and sporadic.
In short,
mystical spiritism and “irrational” vision-questing outperform economic
rationality to the point of total contrast.
This is, obviously, a huge embarrassment for those who still hold that
Western Man has some special pipeline to divine wisdom.
The reasons
for the failure of rational scientific management are clear. The direct reason is the “steep discount
slope”: people discounted the future. It
could take care of itself; only today, or next year, matter. This has been elaborated into various forms
of corporate logic: shareholder payouts, government tax bases, imperative
demand, and the rest. The result is
always the same: maximize profit now and forget the long term. This led to massive accumulation for a while,
supporting thousands of people. But now
the landscapes in question are ruined for the foreseeable future, and the
short-term profits were usually not reinvested very productively. Over even the medium term, Native management
wins out hands down. There are more people
now than there were once, but that is because the current population gets its
food largely from elsewhere. The areas
that supported dense Native populations from local resources are now in many
cases deserted. Some farmland
areas—especially the Willamette, Columbia, Yakima, Okanagan and Snake
valleys—produce enormous amounts of food, far more than aboriginally, and this
may make up for the loss of fish and other foods, but does not excuse the
overall damage.
The reasons
for the success of spirit beliefs (“animism” if you will) are not so
clear. Being less than convinced of the
reality of sentient, agentive wills within bushes and clouds, I tend to think
the reasons are fourfold. First, animism
leads people to respect their environments.
Second, spirit vision questing validates individual knowledge and
experience; people learn to take seriously their experience-based perceptions
of the world. Third, Northwest Coast
religions are intensely social. The
spirits are part of society, but, more to the point, life is with other
people. One has to be responsible toward
them, including the children who will need fish and trees and roots 50 or 100
years from now. Fourth, respect for
everything means that everything should be used—it is disrespectful to ignore a
being that is offering itself to you—but that nothing must be overused; that
too is disrespect. Thus, the landscape
was used comprehensively but lightly.
Everything had some sort of use, down to the most insignificant scraps
of vegetable tissue. Nothing was
overused; monocropping was not a concept.
(The vaunted reliance on salmon has been exaggerated in the literature,
as will appear.) There was an overall,
light pressure on the landscape.
Many readers of this book—if it
reaches its intended audience—will see plants, salmon, and rocks as conscious
agents who decide what to do for their human friends. (And not all those believing readers are
Native American. I personally know
several anthropologists who were converted to Northwestern spirit beliefs by
experiences in the field.) I have no
quarrel with this conclusion, or with others that will appear below. What matters is that we understand that
Native management was sustainable in important ways, while settler management
has not been, and that this is a problem in need of exploration.
5. White Settler
Contact and Its Tragic Consequences
Endemic local dissention probably
explains the ease of European conquest, as well as Jared Diamond’s “guns, germs
and steel” (Diamond 1997). From Cortes
and the Pizarros onward, Europeans immediately learned that they could take
advantage of Native rivalries to set Indians against Indians and clean up on
the result. In the rare cases when
Indigenous people could unite and stay united, they generally held their
own. On the Northwest Coast, the
successes of the Tlingit and Tsimshian in early fighting stand as examples, but
solidarity never reached beyond the “tribal” level, and the Native people never
forged a united front. Even the rare
unity showed by the Nez Perce in the Nez Perce War did not save them; they were
harrassed by other tribes and eventually betrayed by Blackfoot warriors.
The total population of the
Northwest Coast in precontact times was at least 200,000-250,000 and very
likely more, quite high given the resource base. White man’s diseases, local wars, and
massacres reduced the population about 95% by 1900, as established by Robert
Boyd (Boyd 1999; Boyd and Gregory 2007; Trafzer 1997). In one particularly horrendous case, the
peoples of the lower Columbia River area, as Boyd relates, “plummeted from in
excess of 15,000 to just over 500 survivors” between about 1770 and 1855 (Boyd
2013a:247), a decline of 97%. Perhaps
most serious from California north into Washington was the malaria epidemic of
1830-33 (Boyd 1999; Boyd et al. 2013 passim).
Conversely, some of the tribes of the interior, where malaria was rare
or absent, may have lost “only” 75% or so between 1770 and 1900. They lost population in the 20th
century, when—for instance—the 1918-19 and 1928 influenza epidemics wiped out
whole communities. However, the most
extremely remote suffered no major long-term declines in population from
introduced diseases, since the epidemics—these flu events being apparently the
worst—reached them along with modern medicine (see e.g. Helm 2000:120-123,
192-219).
Boyd notes depression and despair
after epidemics; this has been underestimated in the past. We now know how utterly devastating the loss
of even one or two loved ones can be to a community, particularly to children. The loss of 95% of one’s society is, to
moderns, unimaginably horrible, except to those who have gone through
genocides. I suspect it colors the
often-gloomy myths and tales of western North American Native people. One recourse, but a surprisingly rare one,
was to blame the whites, who had inadvertently or deliberately introduced the
disease and who sometimes threatened to unleash it on the Native population
(Boyd 2013a). This blame was a
contributing factor to some killings of settlers; aboriginally, unexplained
deaths were assigned to witchcraft, and witches were sought out and
killed. Often these victims were
medicine persons, since it was assumed that those who had curing power might
well have killing power too.
Boyd and others rightly stress
disease as the major killer, but the role of war, massacre, hard usage, denial
of hunting and gathering options and of relief food, and other directly brutal
behavior need more emphasis than they usually receive. Catherine Cameron and others have recently
established, in an important volume (Cameron et al. 2015), that disease was
less important, especially early in contact, than has been alleged in most of
the literature, and that declines were often due to direct violence. Boyd certainly establishes the importance of
disease in the Northwest, but it is certainly true that other causes of
mortality were highly important. Small
wars around the edges of the region—the Rogue River War in southwest Oregon,
the Modoc War in northeast California, the Bannock War in Idaho, the Nez Perce
war of 1877 fought from Idaho to Montana, the Chilcotin War in central British
Columbia, and others—led to many casualties.
Of course these were wholly one-sided, and usually started by openly
genocidal settlers. Governments
collaborated to varying degrees. The
Rogue River War of 1855-56 was extreme, in that troops and settlers indulged in
mass murder, leaving few survivors (Beckham 1996). The Bannock War of 1878 was also notably
one-sided as to fatalities. These two
conflicts resemble genocide more than actual war; there was some serious
fighting, but inevitable victory by troops was followed by indiscriminate
killing.
Wars wound down after this, but starvation,
exposure, and other forms of mistreatment continued to kill many Native people
on and off reservations. Alcoholism and
suicide have taken a grim toll. Suicide,
especially among young people caught between cultures and feeling they do not
belong, reached epidemic levels in several cases, leading to some of the
highest rates in the world. These
effects of conquest and racism deserve to be placed with disease as major
causes of fatalities.
Native populations began recovering
around 1900, and are now close to early levels.
Marriage into settler societies has contributed to this. However, parts of the Northwest have fewer
people now than in 1700. The languages
and cultures suffered blows from which many have never recovered.
The natural environment did not
fare any better. Clearcutting has
destroyed almost all the old-growth forest and created many landscapes where
good forest is not recovering. The fish
resources, especially the salmon, are a tiny fraction of what they were, and
fish populations are still declining. In
addition to the standard problems of overfishing, dams, and pollution, new
problems continue to arise. Farmed
Atlantic salmon have introduced diseases and parasites that are rapidly wiping
out the native species in southern British Columbia.
The Native people were rapidly
dispossessed of their fisheries and other resources, often despite treaties. They were urged to follow the “white man” and
take to farming, but when they did their lands were routinely seized by greedy
whites; one well-studied case study is the life of Arthur Wellington Clah
(Brock 2011), who initially succeeded very well in the settler world, but was
chased off parcel after parcel until he died in poverty. (He figures in this book in a less direct but
very important way: his son Henry Tate and grandson William Beynon became the
great chroniclers of Tsimshian society, Beynon in particular being a superb
ethnographer.) In the 1980s I studied
the ways the previously very successful Native fishery in British Columbia was
systematically cut to pieces by right-wing governments and shady practices. The Columbia River, once the richest salmon
stream, has suffered from both dispossession of Native rights and destruction
of the vast majority of its fish resources.
It will probably lack anadromous fish of any kind by 2100. (Excellent studies include Dupuis et al.
2006, Ulrich 2001; see also Grijalva 2008 for the general problem of
environmental justice and Native Americans).
Forced acculturation and active
repression of Native traditions further devastated the cultures. The boarding schools, in particular, were
sites of major problems. Fortunately,
both the people and their cultures began to get some measure of attention
around 1900, allowing a reversal of population decline, and, to some extent, of
cultural decline. A standard history on
the United States side of the border is Alexandra Harmon’s Indians in the Making (1998); a British Columbia equivalent is John
Lutz’ Makúk: A New History of
Indian-White Relations (2008); for a notably temperate, dispassionate,
thoughtful Indigenous view, see Richard Atleo’s Principles of Tsawalk (2011).
The clear writing and sober, understated tone make all these books
noteworthy. Harmon’s is better for
political machinations that created “tribes” and blood quanta; Lutz’ book is
outstanding for its superb history of Indian labor, with discussion of the ways
the Indians were forced out of logging, fishing, trapping, and other activities
that formerly gave them a good living
The modern “tribes” and “nations”
are creations of settler government policy.
From the start, the settler groups needed clear polities and clear
leaders to negotiate with. Finding fluid
polities and leadership systems, the settlers simply created clear-cut
“tribes.” Sometimes “tried to create” is
more accurate; groups remained cantankerously independent and fluid. The process has been described many times,
notably in Alexandra Harmon’s and John Lutz’ books and in Andrew Fisher’s Shadow Tribe (2010). It has left us with most unclear
understandings of earlier arrangements, at least on the United States side of
the border, where change and population decline came earlier. The high population density and extensive
trade show that there was some way of organizing life above the village level,
but we do not really know what it was.
Native Americans were not even
citizens until 1924 in the United States, 1961 in Canada. Significantly, though, British Columbia had
defied the national government by giving Indians provincial voting rights in
1949. By this time the land was almost
completely alienated. In the United
States, at least some large reservations and solid treaty rights obtained, but
Canada has been much less accepting of Native title and rights. The Indians in British Columbia have only
tiny reserves and few subsistence rights.
On the American side, having treaties and reservations has not made the
Native people much better off than their Canadian neighbors. A classic study concerns the Okanagan, whose
territory was split in half by the border.
Canadians thought the Canadian Okanagan were better off, United States
writers thought those on the US side were, but in fact the Okanagan were in the
same desperate poverty and want on both sides (Carstens 1991; there is a
similar study of the Blackfoot).
In the early 20th
century, less direct cruelty and rapacity was seen, but jobs were scarce for
Native people. Economic depression often
led to psychological depression. Many
communities dealt with aimless, disordered lives by heavy drinking. Others did what they could, especially by
maintaining the old hunting, gathering, and fishing ways for sheer survival.
Similar findings occur for tribes
split by the Alaska-Canada border. “In
recent years…the Canadian Han have enjoyed far better subsistence hunting and
fishing rights than their Alaskan counterparts” (Mishler and Simeone
2004:xxii-xxiii). This is a very recent
situation, and subject to possible change in future. Conditions for Indigenous hunters, and for
game, have rapidly deteriorated in Alaska with a series of Republican governors
backed by the oil industry and representing affluent White constituencies,
including rich sport hunters who decimate animals needed by Native people for
subsistence.
Conversely, the Canadian situation
improved dramatically when courts began recognizing Native rights in the
1990s. In 1991, in the case of Delgamuukw vs. the Queen, a British
Columbia court handed down an infamous decision that denied the existence of
Native land title, basically because the Natives had no written records and
therefore their obvious occupation of the land for 12,000 years or more did not
count. This was overturned by the
Canadian Supreme Court in 1997, and Native title recognized, at least under
some circumstances. This led to the
Nisga’a signing a treaty in 2000 that ceded official title of their lands (and,
allegedly, some neighbors’ land too) in exchange for money and use rights. Other tribes still contest their cases. It should be noted that Canada had recognized
at least some native claims from the beginning of British rule in 1763, and
thus most of the nation was covered under signed treaties. However, British Columbia had been a separate
colony (not officially part of Canada) for many years, and had not done so,
except for a very few in the far northeast and southwest, involving very small
areas of land.
The reservations were bones of
contention, because treaties were often unfair, and in any case the United
States Congress rarely ratified treaties made with Indians. This led to feelings of betrayal, and
consequently to some violent outbreaks by people who had been promised larger
and better lands. The reservations were
often treated as concentration camps until the 1930s (or even later). However, the fact that reservations really
helped was made clear by the “termination” of the Klamath tribe in the 1950s
(Stern 1966). The reservation was
privatized; almost all the land was taken even before the Indians got their
shares, and then the Indians were cheated out of most of what was left. They have been trying ever since to get a bit
back.
Repression of culture and language
were comparable in both countries. The
United States’ lack of a safety net has cut deeply; Canadian Native peoples can
expect (though they do not always get) better health care and other
services. Racism remains widespread and
extremely virulent. Let not the reader
be fooled by the genteel parlor-liberalism of Vancouver and Seattle; the rural
Whites are unreconstructed, and they are the ones the Native people must deal
with on a day-to-day basis. When I asked
one rural British Columbian why he thought the Indians created so much fine
art, his reply was “They are too lazy to work.”
Land claims, treaty rights, and
aboriginal title have been the subject of many lawsuits, some successful, in
the last 30 years, and the situation has improved somewhat; the problem is so
fiendishly complex that discussion must remain outside the scope of this book,
even though this book owes everything to that exact question. For a particularly good story of the movement
that inspired my work, see Ian Gill’s All
That We Say Is Ours (2009), a biography and history of the Haida struggle
to maintain land claims and fisheries.
More directly relevant is the
destruction of traditional culture. An
amazing amount survives, but the languages are almost gone everywhere; very few
tribes have any speakers under 50, and those few have a bare handful. Nowhere is there a viable linguistic
community of young people, except among the most remote groups of the far north. Some 40% of the Indigenous languages of North
America are gone, with another 40% spoken only by older people. Stories, knowledge, art, and experience
persist after the language is gone, but usually become rapidly
impoverished. Sad experience from more
heavily impacted parts of the continent, to say nothing of Celtic languages in
Europe, shows that all eventually will die out, unless current attempts at
reclaiming traditions and educating the young are much better funded. Language and cultural loss is an
environmental disaster as well as a humanistic one. Knowledge of the environment and of managing
it is encoded in the language used to talk about it, and when the language
goes, the knowledge diminishes with it, as has been shown in many studies (see e.g.
Hunn 1990).
Language revitalization movements
rarely work, partly because they tend to be school-based, often using the
familiar rote-drill method that convinced my generation that we could not learn
languages. Native American writer Barbra
Meek in We Are Our Language (2010)
provides an account of one of the more hopeful, but typical, ones (from just
outside our area), and a full review of the relevant literature. Successes are rare; the lifelong work of Nora
and Richard Dauenhauer (e.g. 1987, 1990) among the Tlingit is exemplary but,
alas, atypical. The rural environments
in which many Native people live are conducive to the mindless claim that
people can learn only one language well.
In fact, the more languages one knows, the better one is at learning
more languages, and also at thinking and learning in general. (In my experience, those who claim otherwise
do not know their own languages well.)
Certainly, those Native Americans who have become fluent in both Native
and settler tongues have tended to do well.
But the foolish claim persists, and still prevents many children from
getting a fair chance at important learning opportunities.
It also remains to be seen whether
heritage languages learned as second languages in school will preserve the (formerly)
accompanying environmental knowledge.
Teachers are aware of the concern, but traditional ecological knowledge
is generally passed on in the bush, or similar settings, and in some cases can
only be passed on in such contexts. The
knowledge may be more easily passed on in English in the bush than in a
heritage language in a settler-style classroom.
Some recent writers, Native and
white, have attacked the “myth of the vanishing Indian” because the Indians did
not in fact vanish (see e.g. Harmon 1998).
True, but their populations were reduced by an average of 95% in the
Northwest, as in the rest of the New World (Boyd 1999; Boyd and Gregory 2007;
Trafzer 1997). As of the 1890s, there
was every reason to believe that the Indians as a separate people would cease
to exist in a very few years. Many
groups did vanish entirely, at least as linguistic and cultural entities. In the Northwest, the grim roll includes the
Tsetsaut, the Chemakum, and several Chinookan groups. (Many groups elsewhere on the continent were
completely gone before 1800). The many
people who forecast the final extinction of the “race” had every reason to do
so.
The convenient argument that
“introduced diseases” did all the damage is dishonest. Massacres, one-sided “wars,” and deliberate
denial of health care were almost as bad.
Some groups were subjected to outright genocide—merciless attempts at
total extermination by the United States.
Among Northwest Coast groups, this was especially the case in the Rogue
River “war” of the 1850s (Beckham 1996; Youst and Seaburg 2002). The Athapaskan and Takelman peoples of the
Rogue River drainage had resisted invasion of their lands, and when miners and
settlers flooded in, violence quickly spiraled out of control. There was some actual fighting—it was not
pure massacre—but the hopelessly outnumbered Rogue people soon lost, and the
genociders moved in. Local
“exterminators”—that was the word used at the time—with the often-grudging aid
of the United States Army killed almost all, and exiled the few who were not
slain. An area that had supported at
least 10,000 people was left with virtually no Native American
inhabitants.
The survival of the last 5% of the
Native Americans of the Northwest was due to heroism on the part of the
survivors and their few White allies.
The fact that the Indians did not vanish is due most of all to the
incredible toughness of the survivors.
Anthropologists and historians have collected or reconstructed several
stories of Native American individuals who not only survived but led their
people through the fires of hell. These
make some of the most deeply moving reading one can find in this world. (Notable examples include Ford 1941; Sewid
1969; and Youst and Seaburg 2002. The
first two are recorded autobiographies, the last an amazing job of
reconstructing a long and eventful life from scattered and fragmentary
records. See also Atleo 2004, 2011;
George 2003; and Reyes 2002 for later-period accounts.)
Changing white settler attitudes
were also involved. “Indian lovers” were
hated and despised in the 1870s and 1880s, but gradually prevailed, and shamed
the nations into changing their ways somewhat.
Anthropologists were leaders in this from the beginning. Unfortunately, many pro-Indian individuals,
including some anthropologists (notably Alice Fletcher), backed breaking up the
reservations into individual allotments, in a misguided attempt to make the
Indians into Anglo-style small farmers on family-owned holdings. This proved disastrous; the Native peoples lost
almost all their land (see e.g. Stern 1966 for the Klamath). The million and a half acres of the Siletz
Reservation in Oregon dwindled to a few scattered plots, and the Grande Ronde
suffered similarly (Youst and Seaburg 2002).
Ironically, gambling is saving it: casino earnings are used to buy back
a few acres at a time.
Bad enough to deny the
near-extinction of the Native people, and the total extinction of many groups
and more languages. Worse to say,
blandly, that the Indians kept right on going, and thus write the heroism of
the survivors and the villainy of their persecutors out of the human record.
We need to remember the grim
record. We need to teach it in history
courses, just as Europe teaches Hitler’s holocaust. We need to do everything we can to prevent
such genocides in future, and denying them is the worst possible course.
Racism continued through the 20th
century, and even the tolerant and successful Sin-Aikst (Lakes) scholar and
artist Lawney Reyes had bitter memories of insults, persecution, and ill
treatment in youth (Reyes 2002). I remember noting in the 1980s the way the British
Columbia newspapers, when highlighting “social problems” such as crime,
substance abuse, and dependence on welfare, usually picked a Native family to
foreground in any story. The
corresponding Washington state media almost always picked a Black one. The proportions of Black and Native people in
these polities was about the same in both, and was quite small. White Anglos had by far the most “social
problems,” in actual numbers.
Also disastrous have been many of
the missionary institutions, which not only attacked Native religion and even
family and kinship, but also forcibly removed children into boarding schools
that were, in fact, often nothing but sex slave camps where the children were
violently abused by beatings and rampant sexual molestation. Little attempt was made to teach. The Catholic church, in Canada and in Rome,
knew about the rampant sexual molestation in Catholic schools throughout North
America and Europe for decades and did nothing about it. The Church, and the Anglican church, have now
made some apologies, but few amends.
Native languages were banned. A whole “stolen generation” (to borrow an
Australian phrase) has resulted. In my
research on alcoholism treatment on the Northwest Coast, I found that all
people I interviewed who had been through the residential schools had been
active alcoholics for at least some of their lives. The percentage of alcoholism was much lower
among those who had escaped this brand of welfare.
The churches and missionaries got
the potlatch outlawed from 1884 to 1953 as a heathen institution incompatible
with the modern state; apparently the missionary mind is such that mass
organized sexual abuse of minors was regarded as more properly compatible
therewith. Ironically, the first legal
potlatch in 1953 was the one organized by Wilson Duff and Kwakiutl artists to
inaugurate the totem pole park at the British Columbia Provincial Museum (now
Royal British Columbia Museum; see Hawker 2003:138).
Treaty rights to fishing and
whaling were guaranteed in the United States and eventually enforced (though
not until the late 20th century), but Canadian First Nations still
struggle for similar recognition (see e.g. Coté 2010).
Conditions on the reservations and
reserves slowly improve. However,
bureaucracy enters, insidiously, in even the best-intentioned situations. Displacement of Native peoples was followed
by waste and misuse of resources by settlers of all sorts. The Canadian government has had to intervene
to save many Northwest Coast groups from starvation and disease, as well as from
the alcoholism and violence that followed destruction of livelihood and
culture. Even the welfare system that
results has its negative effects. In
their detailed major study of bureaucracy and law in a colonial Canadian
context, Fiske and Patrick state: “It
[i.e., the welfare system]
sustained the hierarchy of state/nation relations
that circulates limited resources within the nation while disempowering the
extended family…and…has aggravated relations of dependency” (Fiske and Patrick
2000:119). Even the most benign
extension of alcoholism treatment, nursing services, and the like has the
effect of rubbing in the “problems” and “difficult situation” of the indigenous
peoples. They do not love this (Fiske
and Patrick 2000, e.g. p. 182).
However, thanks to anthropologists
as well as Indigenous people, the languages and cultures are at least recorded
and available for study. Some Native
people have denounced such recording, but sufficient refutation is found in the
marvelous picture of Nuu-chah-nulth elder Hugh Watts reading to his grandchildren
from the texts that Edward Sapir collected from Hugh’s great-grandfather,
Sayach’apis, in the early 20th century—and the photo is presented by
Charlotte Coté, also a descendent of Sayach’apis (Coté 2010:83). Sayach’apis’ texts represent one of the
greatest literary documents in any culture worldwide, let alone one that was
reduced almost to the vanishing point in his time. We are more than lucky to have them, and to
have Sapir’s warm and respectful biography of Sayach’apis (Sapir 1922)—a
tribute and acknowledgement far ahead of its time, and even of ours.
6. Resource
Mismanagement Since 1800
The Northwest has been as
devastated as the rest of the world by foolish exploitation in the last 150
years. Overlogging has decimated the
forests. Careless plowing and grazing
have led to ruin of the soil in many open areas. The game is shot out.
The mentality was classic pioneer:
maximize initial drawdown of all resources, meanwhile hoping to move on to the
next open area, or, at worst, build up a replacement in the form of agriculture
or the like. The worldview has been
unkindly but accurately summarized as “rape, ruin and run.” This mentality is not confined to
Anglo-Americans (Anderson 2014). It has
been detected archaeologically in the settlement of Polynesia and in the Bronze
Age and Iron Age Mediterranean. It
characterized the Japanese spread into Hokkaido. The Russians and Chinese both acted it out in
Siberia. But the Anglo-Americans had an
extreme form of the ideology, one that typically considered all nature to be an
enemy, to be utterly destroyed as soon as possible and replaced with a
Europe-derived artificial landscape. And
they had the tools: guns, steam engines, fish wheels, machines of all sorts.
Another and more insidious and
deadly difference from the Native Americans was and is that the settlers were
interested in only a very few resources.
They depleted the game. They
mined gold and later coal and other minerals.
They logged the forests. They
concentrated on salmon and later on other fish.
Gone was the sensitive total-landscape management that concerned itself
with berries, roots, bark, grasses, small animals, and other resources. The white settlers not only drew down the
immediately saleable resources with little thought of sustainability; they
destroyed the other resources without even considering them.
White individualism contrasts with
Native American sociality, but is really a lesser problem in this case, since
the Whites tended to stand as a united front against Native Americans.
The worst damage is to the fish
resource, especially the river-running species.
Indian management was displaced over time and replaced with far worse
Anglo-American management (excellent histories of this exist: Arnold 2008; Harris 2008; Schreiber
2008). Salmon are at least a concern
even to Whites, but lampreys, sturgeon, suckers, and other species have almost
disappeared without much attention paid to them. (Sturgeon survive only in a few of the
biggest rivers.) Dams, overfishing,
pollution, and the other usual factors have wiped out the salmon from much of
their original range and reduced them to low abundance everywhere. The final “unkindest cut” has been farming
Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar). Parasites—notably “fish lice,” parasitic
copepods—from these fish escape and decimate the local salmon, which have no
resistance. A small salmon-farming
industry in the waters east of Vancouver Island has led to total extermination
of pink salmon throughout the region—millions of wild self-reproducing salmon
sacrificed for a few thousand high-cost alien ones. Naturally, Native people have objected to fish
farming (Schreiber 2002; Schreiber and Newell 2006—the latter contrasts correct
but “spiritual” Native knowledge with either incredible blindness or outright
lying by the White managers).
The fate of the Northwest Coast
fisheries shows something about ownership regimes. The White settlers prefer private property,
and, failing that, national government ownership and control: National Parks and Forests in the US, Crown
lands or provincial and national parks in Canada. The national governments lease out most land
outside parks for forestry or mining by giant corporations. The Native people, by contrast, universally
vested property rights in localized kinship groups—communities, in a word.
For farming, individual ownership
has its points, but experience shows that fisheries don’t work that way. Native control allowed exquisitely careful
management of stocks—using the most efficient methods to get the exact number
of fish that could be safely taken, and then stopping the fishery. Western control has led to individual or
national development that was incompatible with fish—dams, for instance—and to
virtually uncontrolled overfishing at all levels. State and national governments simply do not
have the necessary focus, attention, or priority structure. They have other things to do, like use the
rivers to generate hydroelectric power or to dispose of pollution. They are also subject to voter pressure by
fishermen desperate to take just a few more and let the future take care of
itself. There is simply no way to
prioritize the fishery while simultaneously regulating it tightly enough to
preserve it.
British Columbia and Washington are
the worst cases, with their fisheries devastated. Alaska still has enough Native and local
control to keep some fisheries healthy, but mining interests are closing in
fast. Oregon has, ironically, saved some
of its fish thanks to powerful sport-fishing lobbies. The sport fishers are not dependent on
fishing for survival, like the commercial fishermen, and thus are more willing
to let some fish escape now to make sure there will be fish tomorrow. Long and detailed studies of the resulting
biological, cultural and social disasters are legion.
Andrew Fisher’s excellent study of
the devastation of the Columbia River Indians and their salmon is one example
(Fisher 2010). Dams and overfishing
wiped out the salmon; racism and oppression did not succeed in exterminating
the Indians, but reduced them to greater and greater poverty over time. Fisher quotes some racist comments from
settlers, over time, that are too revealing to leave out here. The local Indian agent, John D. C. Atkins,
opined in 1886 that the Indian “must be imbued with the exalting egotism of
American civilization so that he will say ‘I’ instead of ‘We,’ and “this is
mine’ instead of ‘This is ours’” (p. 90).
A textbook used in Oregon schools in the first half of the 20th
century said that “the Indian vanished because he could not learn the ways of
the white man. He could not survive in
competition with the dominant race” (144).
This at a time when thousands of Native Americans were trying
desperately to survive, and by and large succeeding, in the face of genocidal
racism.
A case study, perfect for our
purposes because it shows the whole situation in microcosm, is Charles Menzies’
study of the abalone fishery of northern British Columbia (Menzies 2010, 2016). As he summarizes it: “In the face of aggressive overfishing of bilhaa (abalone) by non-Indigenous
commercial fishermen, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans closed
all forms of harvesting of bilhaa” (Menzies 2010) in spite of the fact that the
Gitxaala (Tsimshian) and probably other groups had been harvesting these
shellfish with extreme care for sustainability for thousands of years. This caused some hardship for the
Gitxaala. Menzies documents their caring
regime, and advocates a return to a controlled fishery; but it may be too late.
California’s major bit of Northwest
Coast scenery, the Klamath drainage, provides a particularly revealing case. The Klamath Basin at the headwaters was
settled early on by farmers and stockmen, displacing the Indians in the
genocidal Modoc War. More recently,
drought has reduced the Klamath flows, while irrigation has expanded in the
farming areas. There is no longer enough
water for both farms and fish.
This came to a head in 2003. The U. S. Bureau of Reclamation had disposal
over most of the upstream water, and it was subjected to intense lobbying by
the upriver farmers and downriver fishers.
The farmers are largely well-to-do Republicans. The fishermen downriver are less affluent and
very often vote Democrat, and they include large Native American groups. 2003 being a year of Republican national and
state governments, the water went to the farmers, and the fish died. (Much of this is from my own research; see
e.g. Service 2003 for a neutral account; Williams 2003 for an unabashedly
pro-fish position; Carolan 2004 for a broader overview, but he incredibly
misses the political dimension, thus his account is of rather limited
worth. See Swezey and Heizer 1977 for
the far superior pre-contact management system.)
The conflicts above thus involve
political power as well as property regimes.
Decisions essentially always go to Whites over Indians—racism being
severe in the Northwest, particularly in the 19th and early 20th
centuries—and to giant corporations over everyone and everything else. Some dramatic exceptions have occurred,
however, starting with Judge Boldt’s decision in Washington state in 1974 to enforce
the treaty rights giving the Native people an equal share of the fish
resource. Since then, Canada has had to
recognize at least some Native title to lands.
Other decisions have restored many community management regimes and
ownership systems in both nations.
Significantly, the classic claim
that humans go for the main chance—material or financial maximization—is
massively disproved by this history.
Throughout the last 200 years, White authorities have decided for regimes
and stakeholders that were devastating the resource base with extremely low
returns to themselves or society. The
potatoes and barley raised by the White farmers up the Klamath were worth far
less than the fish would have been if the runs had been maintained. Political power—from votes, campaign
donations, skin color, and actual political position—trumps financial benefit
(except to the giant corporations, and even then often only in the short
run).
An interesting case is the
evolution of the MacMillan Bloedel
timber corporation. H. R. MacMillan and
Charles Bloedel brought scientific sustainable forestry practices to British
Columbia and Washington, respectively.
They appear to have been quite idealistic and to have run their
companies well. Eventually they joined
forces. At first all went well, but long
before MacMillan died in 1976, the logging was out of control. By the 1980s, after decades of corporate
mergers and political shenanigans, “Mac and Blo” became a worldwide byword for evil
and irresponsible logging. Things have
improved since, especially since Mac and Blo fell on hard times and were taken
over by Weyerhauser in 1999. However,
the sustanable forestry of the original founders is still a dream (the
literature on this is huge and need not concern us; see Vaillant 2005 for a
dramatic but accurate popular account).
An interesting comparison comes
from the Russian coast closest to the United States. Anna Kerttula (2000) describes Russian
mismanagement and waste of resources.
The Yup’ik villagers there had been sustanably and efficiently hunting
sea mammals, birds, and fish while the Chukchi herded reindeer on the
tundra. Russians brought wasteful
hunting and herding practices (throwing away much of the meat). They also damaged the tundra seriously by
construction and driving heavy vehicles, and caused rampant pollution. This was totally uneconomic; it was
subsidized by the state as a way of “civilizing” the “natives,” whom the
Russians despised openly and treated as utter inferiors. When the USSR collapsed, this artificial and
destructive economy collapsed with it, and the local people were thrown back on
their traditional subsistence economy—much damaged by Russian environmental
abuse. It is interesting to see how
clearly foolish and culture-bound the Russians’ “superior” practices were. We in America are so used to Anglo settler
mismangement that we tend to forget just how awful it is, and how much it is
driven by culture rather than economics.
The Russian way is culturally different enough to be striking in that
regard.
The result of these bad management practices, and above all of the
politics that creates them, has been widespread economic ruin in the rural
Northwest, especially the Native communities.
Today, global warming is causing
even more widespread damage. It has
caused millions of acres of forest to die; pine beetles give the coup de grace, but the real problem is
warm winter that spare the beetles from freezing, followed by hot dry summers
that weaken the trees. Fish, root crops,
and other resources are succumbing to increasingly hot and dry conditions.
However, in recent years,
comanagement of resources has come in, with local Native communities
cooperating with government agencies (Natcher et al. 2005; see above). One notable area is the west coast of
Vancouver Island (Goetze 2006; Pinkerton 1989; Pinkerton and Weinstein
1995). This does not always work well,
especially when the government ignores Native input—as is often the case (e.g.
Nadasdy 2004). Obviously, comanagement
works only if it is in fact comanagement.
Perhaps it
is best to leave the last word to Snuqualmi Charlie, talking to Arthur Ballard
in the 1920s. He concluded a long story
of Moon’s creation and transformation of the world:
“Moon
said, ‘Fish shall run up these rivers; they shall belong to each people on its
own river. You shall make your own
living from the fish, deer and other wild game.’
“I
am an Indian today. Moon has given us fish and game. The white people have come and overwhelmed
us. We may not kill a deer nor catch a
fish forbidden by white men to be taken.
I should like any of these lawmakers to tell me if Moon or Sun has set
him here to forbid our people to kill game given to us by Moon and Sun”
(Ballard 1929:80).
7. The Ideology
Behind It All
Native
American biologist Raymond Pierotti has written: “A common general philosophy and concept of
community appears to be shared by all of the Indigenous peoples of North
America, which includes: 1) respect for
nonhuman entities as individuals, 2) the existence of bonds between humans and
nonhumans, including incorporation of nonhumans into ethical codes of behvior,
and 3) the recognition of humans as part of the ecological system” (Pierotti
2011:198-199). These indeed fully apply
on the Northwest Coast, where they are considerably elaborated.
Thanks to
early and superb ethnographic research, we can understand the Northwest Coast
ideologies of management in a way we cannot do for other parts of the
world. Enormous record of myths, texts,
tales, and instructions, compiled by early and more recent ethnographers,
allows us to see exactly what people said in traditional times.
Some of the
Northwest Coast ethnographic collaborations are particularly impressive. The Tsimshian chief William Beynon collected
materials for several ethnographers. All
too predictably, he never got authorship credit for this, though he did most of
the work; his first major publication under his own name came out in 2000, 42
years after his death (Beynon 2000). He
was in fact the real ethnographer in many cases (Halpin 1978). Incredibly impressive also is the work of
Edward Sapir with Tom Sayachapis and other Nuu-chah-nulth elders, of Franz Boas
with George Hunt, and of James Teit with many interior Salish. Teit became a major activist for Native
American rights as well as an ethnographer, and his story—forgotten until a
stunning recent biography (Thompson 2007) saved him from oblivion—is one of the
most impressive in the history of “action anthropology.”
More recent collaborations, such as
Nancy Turner’s “five foot shelf” (much of it written with Native coauthors) and
the collaboration of Eugene Hunn (1991) and James Selam, carry on the great
tradition. Just out of our region, but
very close and sharing the same ideology, are the Yupik of Alaska, whose
ethical relations with the animal persons has been described in exquisite
detail by Ann Fienup-Riordan (1994, 2005).
She quotes elders at enough length to fill several books. Many Northwest Coast groups remain sadly
little known, but at least we have excellent work by many ethnographers for
representative groups from every region.
No other part of the world except the American Southwest and the central
desert of Australia has been so well documented in terms of ecological and
environmental beliefs. We do not have a
single account of local knowledge and conservation in a modern American town
that is as good as the work of Turner or Hunn or Fienup-Riordan.
One major component was attachment
to place. Northwest Coast groups had
lived where they were for countless years; the Haida seem to have occupied
Haida Gwaii for over 10,000 years, continuously. Knowledge of and devotion to one’s immediate
habitat is at a level possibly unparalleled in the world. On the Skagit River, the local version
universal Northwest Coast story of the boy left alone who must re-create his
slain tribe includes a passage that says it all: the people he revives from
bones “had no sense…so the boy made brains for them from the very soil of that
place” (Miller 2014:70-1). That line
really says it all.
There are, however, several crucial
beliefs lying behind this. These beliefs
are the keys to conservation in Northwest Coast ideology, and all the resources
of the collective representation of community are deployed to make people
accept them.
A good place to begin is with seven
“fundamental truths” of Northwest Coast ecological thinking, as abstracted by Frank
Brown and Kathy Brown (2009:folder, p. 2) of the Heiltsuk Nation:
“…1. Creation:
We the coastal first peoples have been in our respective territories (homelands)
since the beginning of time.” (This
might be interpreted as “since the beginning of our peoples as identifiable
cultural and linguistic entities,” since in fact much migration has occurred,
and many of the origin myths actually recount it. But, for instance, archaeology demonstrates
cultural continuity in Haida Gwaii for well over 10,000 years. The Haida and the other major groups of the
Northwest certainly or almost certainly emerged in their present homelands and
have been there since the glaciers.)
“2.
Connection to nature: We are all
one and our lives are interconnected.
“3.
Respect: All life has equal
value. We acknowledge and respect that
all plants and animals have a life force.”
“4.
Knowledge. Our traditional
knowledge of sustainable resource use and management is reflected in our
intimate relationship with nature and its preictable seasonal cycles and
indicators of renewal of life and subsistence.
“5.
Stewardship: We are stewards of
the land and sea from which we live, knowing that our health as a people and
our society is intricately tied to the heath of the land and waters.
“6.
Sharing. We have a responsibility
to share and support to provide strength and make others stronger in order for
our world to survive.
“7.
Adapting to Change:
Environmental, demographic, socio-political and cultural changes have
occurred since the creator placed us in our homelnds and we have continuously
adapted to and survived these changes.”
More specific rules for food
gathering are listed by Inez Bill of the Tulalip of northwest Washington state:
“Taking and gathering only what you
need so Mother Nature can regenerate her gifts to us.
“Remembering to not waste any of
our traditional food.
“Sharing what you gather with
family, friends and elders that are not able to go out and gather whenever
possible.
“Including prayer and giving thanks
when gathering.
“Preparing local native foods at gatherings.
“Preparing food with a good heart
and mind so when you serve your meal, people will enjoy their meal.
“Providing nourishment for our
people and their spirits, but also the spirit of our ancestors. We will strive to continue this way of life” (quoted
Krohn and Segrest 2010:42).
There is some obvious modernization
and settler society influence here (“Mother Nature…”) that may divert attention
from two critically important traditional ideas: prayer and thanks while gathering, and having
a “good heart and mind” when preparing and distributing. Throughout the Northwest Coast and onward to
a great deal of North America and Siberia, these are vital points for
maintaining good relations with the spirits of plants and animals, and indeed
with the spirit powers in general. One
may contrast the Euro-American food rules for the Muckleshoot school, a few pages
later in the same folder: “No trans-fat
and hydrogenated oil. No high fructose
corn syrup,” etc. (Krohn and Segrest 2010:49).
The contrast of spiritual and chemical is significant.
Rodney
Frey, writing on the Coeur d’Alene of northern Idaho, also (and with
appropriate modesty and tentativeness) identifies five basic principles, but
they are somewhat different: “…the
understanding that the landscape is spiritually created and endowed…that the
landscape is inhabited by a multitude of ‘Peoples,’ all of whom share in a
common kinship…. That… [humans have an] ethic of sharing [which includes the
animal people too]….that…the gifts [of nature] are also to be respected and not
abused…and…one is to show thanks for what is received… The fifth and final teaching encompasses…the
ethic of competition” (Frey 2001:9-12).
The last is particularly interesting.
Humans do not simply wait around for the gifts to come to them. They must work, compete with each other and
with other beings, and compete with the powers of weather and geography. Life is not easy, and nothing comes without
major effort.
Richard
Atleo (2011:143-144) sees unity as basic, but coming from reconciling
complementary polarities. He sees
individual identity as “an insignificant leaf” (144) in face of basic
unity. He elaborates a philosophy of haḥuuƚi, “land” in the sense of
communally owned and managed place (cf. Australian Aboriginal “country”),
deriving from the idea of unity.
Marianne and Ron Ignace
explain the Secwépemc (Shuswap)
foundational belief thus: “…ce ntral to
the relationship between an animal and the fisher or hunter who ‘bags’ the
animal is the concept that the animal gives itself to the fisher or
hunter…. Plants as sentient beings also
give themselves…. Therefore, the harvesting of all things in nature presupposes
prayer that thanks the Tqelt Kúkwpi7 (Creator) for providing the animals or
plants…as well as thinking th eanimals or plants for giving themselves…. All
parts of the Secwépemc land and environment are …thought of as a ‘sentient
landscape.’” (Ignace and Ignace 2017:382 ).
This belief appears to be universal throughout northwestern North
America and eastern Siberia. More
specific to the Shuswap is a tradition of painting one’s face red or black at
power places, such as lakes and mythic spots, but other groups have similar
ways of paying respect to spiritual sites.
This general custom extends through much of east Asia, where such sites
may be tied with sacred cloths, circled clockwise on foot, and otherwise
revered.
I believe
all these principles apply to all northwestern cultural groups, with varying
emphasis in varying areas. All these themes
can be identified in folktales and teachings throughout the region, and indeed
throughout all northern North America.
Countless authors have pointed out
for decades that the Northwest Coast people, and indeed most North American
indigenous groups, consider plants and animals to be people—“other-than-human
persons,” in the standard phrase, apparently introduced by A. Irving Hallowell
from his studies on the Native peoples of central Canada (1955, 1960). Like humans, these people have spirits that
are conscious and have agency and language. All have a life force. The Nuu-chah-nulth anthropologist Ki-Ke-In
relates that there are many ch’ihaa,
spirits, in the world, which draw closer in winter; that humans and other
beings have a life force, thli-makstii, which
goes ultimately into the stars after death, eventually ending in the
Taa’winisim (Milky Way; Ki-Ke-In 2013:28).
Plants were people, and as such critical in ceremonies and in the search
for guardian spirits (Turner 2014-2:324-350).
Other-than-human persons can take
human or humanoid form when in their own world; salmon, for instance, are
people who live in houses at the bottom of the ocean, and don their salmon
skins only to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their relatives on shore. (This represents Philippe Descola’s ontology
of shamanism [Descola 2013], being the same belief that he reports from his
South American researches.) The Katzie
Salish, living where the most sturgeons spawn, in the lower Fraser drainage,
believed the Creator had two children; the boy was the ancestor of the Katzie, the
girl of the sturgeons. Whenever they
caught a sturgeon, it was their beloved sister sacrificing herself for them
(Jenness 1955). Widely believed among
Salishan groups is the idea that all living resources are human-like in their
own homes, donning outer coverings for human use. Berries are like small babies in their
real—spiritual—state (Miller 1999). For
the Sahaptin, “waqayšwit ‘life’ [is]
an animating principle or ‘soul’ possessed by people as well as animals,
plants, and forces of nature. The
presence of ‘life’ implies intelligence, will, and consciousness. This is the basis for a pervasive…morality,
in which all living beings should respect one another and are involved with one
another in relations of generalized reciprocity” (Hunn and French 1998:388).
Thus, the basic or original being
that became an animal, or was transformed into one by the Transformer, was
incarnated in all subsequent animals of that kind, or—alternatively—remained as
master of them. Thus, mythic Raven is
incarnate in all ravens, or else exists in the spirit world as the guardian of
all ravens. The former version of the belief seems to prevail in the north. The latter prevails in some parts of the
coast (being e.g. reported for the Puget Sound Salish by Miller
1999:10-11). It is the standard form in
many areas to the south, including Mexico. (This belief reaches to the Maya of Quintana
Roo. The deer god Siip, Zip in old
literature, still has some role in overseeing deer today; the “leaf-litter
turkey,” a giant ocellated turkey, is the eternal master of wild turkeys,
punishing hunters who take too many of them; see Llanes Pasos 1993. Versions of the same belief extend into South
America [Blaser 2009; Descola 2013]). The
Yukaghir have spirits of the animals, overall game-guardian spirits, and
locality spirits (Willerslev 2007). Even
farther afield, so do the Khanty of northwest Siberia, for whom an excellent
ethnography by Andrew Wiget and Olga Balalaeva (2011) is now available.
The leading character in creation
myths was a Transformer who changed ambiguously humanlike persons, and more or
less formless supernatural beings, into the humans, animals, trees, and
geological formations of today. This
story is known from Alaska (e.g. the Han people; Mishler and Simeone 2004) to
California and beyond (see comparisons, mostly for the central coast, in Miller
1999; and many stories in Boas 2003 and Thompson and Egesdal 2008). People who are broadly humanlike but have
some animal-like characteristics became the animals they resembled. Formless supernaturals became rivers and
mountains.
Usually the Raven is the
transformer on the coast, Coyote the major one in the interior. (The missionaries originally used the Chinook
word for “coyote” for God; Lang 2008:70.)
A being without specifically known form does the job farther north and
east. The Gitksan Transformer, Wegyet,
can be either raven or humanoid, apparently at will; similar shape-shifting is
found in several other creator figures throughout North America. The Tsimshian had a high god known as gal (Miller 2014b:42) and the Haida seem
to have regarded the Shining Heaven as a high god.
In the Columbia Plateau region also,
there was a widespread concept of a high god who oversaw the animal
spirits. Coyote may have been the
immediate creator of much that we have here, but he was under control of a
higher power. (The old idea that
“primitive” people lack a high god and have only animistic spirits was
disproved a century ago; Lowie 1924.)
For the Colville of northeast Washington, the creator was originally a
sort of Power-in-process, a being whose existence was the flow of his
creation. Eventually “the ‘chief’ who
made the world and all its creations decided thereafter that he would have no
body, legs, or head, and would instead become Sweatlodge for the continued
benefit of human beings” (Miller 2010:47; cf. Ray 1933). He lives on, instantiated in every sweatlodge
created since.
Also reported from the Plateau and
not from other areas is a concept of sacred spaces with sacred deer: “Near my home is a sacred area—about one
acre—where sacred deer used to live. One
adult deer would always present itself only to a young man just before he was
about to get married. But only to a
young man who, before starting his hunt, had for three days sweated while
singing his power song, of course fasted,” and been virtuous. He would shoot the deer, give the meat to his
intended-wife’s mother to redistribute, and make the hide into a robe for the
new wife or (in due course) their baby (Ross 2011:145, quoting an unfortunately
unnamed elder recorded in Ross’ field notes).
Not only plants and animals, but
also mountains and rivers, were people, and were owed consideration
accordingly; “we…talked to the river, so we could get some fish from it without
hurting the river at all,” as an Elder woman told First Nations student Johnnie
Manson (2016).
Such kinship with all being
obviously made conservation a great deal more compelling. Even people who care little for unrelated
fellow humans will care for their own kin.
This implies that animals are not
just killed by humans; they offer themselves voluntarily to their human
relatives. Their spirits then
reincarnate in new members of the species, just as human souls reincarnate
within a descent group.
Today as in the past, a new baby
will be examined to see which recently-deceased elder has reincarnated. The Khanty (Wiget and Balalaeva 2011) and
Yukaghir have the same belief, and the ever-perceptive Rane Willersley (2007:50ff.)
points out for the latter that, while the essence of the person is
reincarnated, the new child is his or her own person—not just a recycled
relative. This is so strikingly like
genetic reality that one assumes the indigenous peoples noticed that descent
produces great similarities in appearance and basic personality and yet
considerable differences in the final result.
Like Aristotle realizing that heredity must be a “pattern” conveyed from
parent to child, rather than a tiny homunculus or divine intervention, the
Northwest Coast people recognized the inheritance of traits and reasoned an
explanation based on their worldview.
If the souls of previously hunted
animals were treated with respect, new (newly reincarnated) individuals of that
species will offer themselves. Of this
much more below, but at this point we must quote Richard Atleo’s point that
Northwest Coast people pray for the animals to make themselves available, but
when European “religious people pray to God for a supply of meat…the meat has
no say in the matter” (Atleo 2004:85). The
key here is respect, as will appear below.
Under special circumstances, humans
can visit the salmon people, or the bear or mountain goat people, and see them
in human or humanoid form. Countless
Northwest Coast stories recount such adventures (see e.g. Andrade 1969 [1931],
with tales of visits to shark people, seal people, and others). Unsurprisingly, there is also a Yukaghir one: (Willerslev
2007:89-90). Humans can marry animals,
plants, or even stars, and many Northwest Coast kinship groups are descended
from such unions. Totem poles typically
show the animal ancestors of the sponsors of the pole. Hunting involves the hunter leaving the human
realm and entering into animal worlds. This often requires a great deal of ritual, in
which the hunter’s wife is often essential, especially in hunting for large
animals from whales to deer (see S. Reid 1981 for a detailed description of
Kwakwaka’wakw ideology in this area).
Many a local crest derives from
such visits. Some members of the
Tsimshian Blackfish phratry “met Nagunaks” when they “inadvertently anchored
over his house” at the bottom of the sea; “he sent bglue cod, one of his
slaves, to investigate…. The steersman was annoyed by the splashing of the
fish, caught it and broke its fins,” which caused the sea-guardian Nagunaks to
take them to his house, warn them never to harm animals unnecessarily, and then
release them with privileges and songs, sending them off in a fast-speeding copper
canoe. They thought they had been gone
for four days, but they were gone four years.
The privileges became lineage crests and emblems (Garfield, Barbeau and
Wingert 1950:42). This is a version of a
story known not only throughout the Northwest Coast but through much of North
America and Eurasia. The sequence of
offense, warning, release with teachings and privileges, and days that were
really years is canonical.
This is a form of the Native American theory that Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro defines as “’perspectivism’: the conception according to which the
universe is inhabited by different sorts of persons, human and nonhuman, which
apprehend reality from distinct points of view.
This conception was shown to be associated to some others, namely:
The
original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality, but
rather humanity;
Many
animals species [sic], as well as other types of ‘nonhuman’ beings, have a
spiritual component which qualifies them as ‘people’; furthermore, these beings
see themselves as humans in appearance and in culture, while seeing humans as
animals or as spirits;
The
visible body of animals is an appearance that hides this anthropomorphic
invisible ‘essence,’ and that can be put on and taken off as a dress or
garment;
Interspecific
metamorphosis is a fact of ‘nature.’
…the
notion of animality as a unified domain, globally opposed to that of humanity,
seems to be absent form Amerindian cosmologies.” (Viveiros de Castro
2015:229-230).
The Northwest Coast people,
however, do not so often seem to see the anthropomorphic form as the real or
essential one; in many cases, it seems that animal persons have two forms,
equally their own.
Animals have powerful spirits, and
are in fact spirit beings, able to move back and forth between our everyday
world and the spirit realm. For the
Spokane, “[a]nimals are in touch with, and move between, the two worlds. That sensitivity allows certain animals to
foretell eveents, such as weather, death, or the arrival of a guest. They can see into the spirit world…. Through
animals, man can obtain a vision into that other world; through them, he finds
his spirit power….” (Egesdal 2008:140.)
Animals have many powers. In the northern Northwest Coast, the land
otter (the river otter, Lutra canadensis)
can lure one to drowning and then take over body and soul and turn the person
into an “otter-man,” a zombie-like being.
This is still a matter of concern, and on Haida Gwaii the fear has
spread to the Anglo-Canadian settlers, who can be quite nervous about the
“gogeet” (Haida gagitx, otter-man;
Anderson 1996). Otters move easily in
both the great realms of life, land and water (de Laguna 1972; Halpin 1981a; Jonaitis
1981, 1986); they even enter the underworld (they live in burrows). Moreover, they play a lot, and even
incorporate humans into their play. Most
daunting of all, they often try to lure people into the water to play with
them, as I have personally experienced on several occasions. Significantly, otters abound in shamanic art
(charms and the like) but are largely absent from public art (totem poles and
crest art; Jonaitis 1981, 1986, and my personal observation), though a few
appear on Gitksan poles (Barbeau 1929:73, 88).
Barbeau recorded a shaman’s otter song, for curing, among the Tsimshian
(Garfield, Barbeau and Wingert 1950:122).
The bukwus or “wild man” took
the place of the otter, to some extent, in Kwakwaka’wakw tradition (Halpin
1981a).
At least among the Tahltan, mink
and weasel have some similar magical powers (Albright 1984). For the central Salish groups, the fisher, a
very otter-like animal, has magic curing powers, and passing a stuffed fisher
over a person is part of healing (Lévi-Strauss 1982).
The dog is
ambiguous, as in most of the world (Amoss 1984; for the Yukaghir, Willersley
2007:76; the Tłįchǫ Dene are descended from a dog who took human form and
married a human woman). As the only
aboriginal tame animal, it moved in the human and the nonhuman realms, as the
otter moves in three worlds. It is singularly
absent from myths and art on the Northwest Coast, though obviously not
elsewhere. (The Tłįchǫ Dene, who are
well outside the Northwest Coast cultural area, treat dogs with respect but
think them unable to survive in the wild—unlike wild animals and the Tłįchǫ themselves. The Tłįchǫ also tend to think of animals as very different in powers and natures
from humans, though still being other-than-human persons. One Tłįchǫ wanted to learn caribou knowledge,
and eventually could turn himself into a caribou—but he learned so much that he
became a caribou and could not become human again, since he had more caribou
knowledge than human knowledge; Legat 2012:89.)
Salmon are
people too, and abundantly present in myth.
Something of the empathy between human and salmon people is found in a
powerful song recorded by Marius Barbeau and translated by William Beynon—the
song the salmon sing as they go upriver:
“I
will sing the song of the sky.
This
is the song of the tired—the salmon panting as they swim up the swift current.
I
go around where the water runs into whirlpools.
They
talk quickly, as if they are in a hurry.
The
sky is turning over. They call me.”
This
was sung by Tralahaet (a Tsimshian chief) and translated by Benjamin Munroe and
William Beynon, early 20th century.
Recall that the salmon give birth and die; this poem is about
sacrificing one’s life for the rising generations. (Garfield, Barbeau and Wingert 1950:132.)
“Commonality
between species” means “we are all brother and sisters not only to each other,
but also to every life form.” This implies
“respect, kindness, generosity, humility, and wisdom” not only toward and for
humans, but for other life-forms (Atleo 2004:88). It should be pointed out that “brothers and
sisters” here translates Nuu-chah-nulth words that cover all related persons in
one’s own generation. Since
Nuu-chah-nulth kinship is reckoned over many generations, almost all
traditional Nuu-chah-nulth can trace some relationship to almost all others,
and thus are all literally brothers and sisters (or whatever generation term is
appropriate). And, since animals are
persons involved in human kin networks, one can be quite literally brother to a
wolf or sister to a whale. This
extension of kinship does fade over distance, and a far-off “brother” or
“sister” can be no closer to oneself than some of my long-lost third cousins are
to me. However, it is taken seriously,
to a point really striking to an outside observer; correspondingly, my
Nuu-chah-nulth friends were struck by the weakness of kin ties among
Euro-Canadians.
One may add
that society—human, but also other social mammals’ society—is reinforced by
strong social codes. These are
generated, and apply, at the level of community: for humans, on the Northwest
Coast, the local realm of a chiefly lineage or lineage-group and associated
commoners and others. This would involve
around 500 people—fewer in the cold interior, many more around the rich Salish
Sea. It also involved all the nonhuman
lives in the area.
Communities
were tightly organized. This too varied,
from the extremely close-knit kin and community groups of the Nuu-chah-nulth to
the loose and flexible ones of the interior Athapaskans, but the similarities
still strike me as more important than the differences. Even the Nuu-chah-nulth recognized
individuals and their needs, balancing them with the collectivity in a very
self-conscious manner (see Atleo 2004:55-56).
The strong awareness that a community is made up of interacting
individuals led to a philosophy of individuals-in-society. This integrated harmoniously with the
philosophy of people-in-nature—more accurately, no “nature,” only different
kinds of people.
The
contrast is with the western world, where the usual alternative to
individualism is “communitarianism,” which, often, consists of justifications
for top-down autocracy. Northwest Coast
community morality integrates the individual in the community but does not
subject him or her to a king, pope, or dictator. Chiefs had real authority, and in some parts
of the coast could sometimes get downright tyrannical, but their power was
limited—usually very much so. These were
face-to-face communities, strongly ranked but small enough that the chief knew
he had to get along; otherwise, as noted, he would be abandoned or killed.
What
Theodore Stern says of some Plateau groups would apply throughout the
Northwest: “On winter nights [children]
were an apt audience for elders reciting myths; daily they heard the headman’s
exhortations and on special occasions the war stories…. From their parensts and grandparents, as well
as those brought in to speak of their lives, they heard praised the virtues of
obedience, of honesty, and of charity to the unfortunate” (Stern
1998:406). The “unruly” were punished. Teaching stories were filled with lore on
managing and the morality behind it (Turner 2014, vol. 2, esp. pp.
244-266).
Thus, the
Northwest Coast peoples could be paradoxically freer than most westerners
manage to be. Rampant individualism
cannot work in practice in a large group, for obvious reasons, and the western
remedy has always been top-down autocratic control—by church if not by
centralized government. The ancient
Greeks already saw, and criticized, this, in their pessimistic ideas on the
sequence from democracy to aristocracy to tyranny. The alternative of free self-organizing and
self-governing communities was not unknown to them. It was a reality later in much of the Celtic
and Germanic world until medieval times and locally later, but it never
replaced the dismal alternation between libertarian and tyrannical
alternatives.
Thomas Hobbes (1651) is the locus
classicus; he saw no alternative to
“warre of each against all” except a totalitarian king. If only he had known enough about the peoples
he called “savages,” he would have realized there were other possibilities.
On the other hand, recall what has
been said of warfare above; typical of the Northwest Coast was superb relations
with nonhuman persons, good relations with one’s own people, and warfare with
other people of different language and homeland. The goal, at least for some, was peace with
all species within one’s own lands, and warfare outside of that. By contrast, the western world has long had
an ideal—often neglected but never quite forgotten—of peace with one’s own
species everywhere. Unfortunately,
modern western societies also exhibit total war against nature.
The intense
Native American relationship of community and land must be continually stressed,
and this brings us back to stewardship.
A group is localized, and their local world is desperately important. Its mountains, trees, major rocks, and rivers
are transformed beings that are part of local society. They may be actual kin to the humans of the
immediate area. This concept is alien to
the modern Euro-American settlers, who have been in the area for three centuries
or less. However, it is similar to the
rootedness of many villages in Europe, with their sacred wells, their megalithic
monuments, and their churches built on sites of pre-Christian temples.
This and
the two previous principles led to a powerful and quite deliberate conservation
ethic. Conservation was “wise use” of
every resource, rather than lock-down preservation. It contrasts especially with the modern
concept of sacrificing most of the land for devastating misuse while locking up
a tiny fraction for aesthetic or recreational reasons. The Northwest peoples used all the land in a
carefully managed, sustainable manner.
For example: “Among the Lower
Lillooet, resource stewards…directed the use of specific hunting grounds and
some fisheries. These were hereditary
positions, at least in the historic period, but required special
knowledge. Spiritual qualities were not
requisite for this position, but such qualities were required for the
specialized hunters” (Kennedy and Bouchard 1998a:182). All other groups in the northern interior had
these stewards also. The Spokan, for
instance, had a fish leader or fish chief to oversee fishing, and a fish shaman
to make sure that all the rules of proper resource management were kept; there
was also a fish trap keeper (Ross 2011).
Rules that were pragmatic (no blood or waste in the water; it repels
salmon) merged into purely ritual rules, all being believed equally necessary
to keep the fish coming.
The Lakes (Sinixt) Salish of
southern British Columbia had almost all moved to Washington state (to a
reservation with related groups), had mostly merged into other groups, and had
been declared extinct in Canada as long ago as 1956, but when a road was
punched through their main surviving cemetery they all appeared in force and
blockaded the road (Pryor 1999). A
threat to the old sacred ground brought the tribe together again.
Individual moral experience,
especially the vision quest, is discussed and constructed into community
morality.
This is brilliantly described by
the Nuu-chah-nulth scholar Richard Atleo, a traditionally-raised Northwest
Coast person who is also highly educated in European science and philosophy: “In
traditional Nuu-chah-nulth culture…the world of good and evil is known and
experienced collectively through the practice of oosumich [vision quest; spiritual discipline including bathing in
cold water]. Consequently, in these
communities the collective spiritual experiences of people determine human
perceptions of the nature of the world.
There can be no equivalent to a Plato, or a Socrates, or some such
individual who might create a school of thought abvout reality that is later
shared by some loyal followers. Rather,
good and evil are determined by consensus through personal spiritual
experiences that are reflected in the physical realm. Individual experiences are judged in the
context of broad community experiences” (Atleo 2004:37). Atleo has gone on to elaborate concepts of
consent, continuity, personal independence and responsibility, and polarity,
including the reconciliation of opposites (Atleo 2011).
Socialized conservation comes
naturally to the highly social Nuu-chah-nulth, who live in a world of kinship
and community that is tight and close even by Native American standards, but it
applies generally. The first words I learn in most languages are “hello” and a
couple of cuss-words, but the first word I learned in Nuu-chah-nulth was tłeko, which is most simply translated
“thank you!” but which has so many deeper implications of exchange,
interdependence, formal relations, and group morality that it is routinely used
even by Nuu-chah-nulth who are otherwise strictly English speakers. (See e.g. Coté 2010:xi-xii. She spells it
“kleko,” which is itself interesting; English-speakers find “tł” difficult as
an initial, and substitute “kl”; traditional Nuu-chah-nulth speakers of my
acquaintance have the opposite problem, and naturally substitute “tł” for “kl,”
thus, for instance, saying “ten o’tłock.”
Coté is Nuu-chah-nulth, but finds the English spelling more convenient.)
The Nuu-chah-nulth tend to pack a huge
range of associations into one word, instead of multiplying highly specialized
words as English does.
The Haida seem a good deal more
self-consciously individualist, and the Athapaskan groups less communal in
lifestyle, but they have the same philosophy; the difference is that the
resulting consensus is looser. (At least
this is my experience, and I know at least some would agree with me.) The contrast of Nuu-chah-nulth and
Euro-Canadians is really striking in
this regard, as anyone who has observed extensive interactions within and
between these groups can testify.
Discussion to reach a collective moral conclusion contrasts vividly with
defiant independence and militant liberty of conscience (Atleo 55-56; 2011,
amply confirmed by my own research).
On the other hand, note that in the
final analysis the Northwestern collective morality is based on individual
experiences, from which the shared principles are then teased out. This contrasts with the rigid top-down
morality and power/knowledge of many western institutions: the more hierarchic churches, the schools,
and above all the state. (Of course,
this brings church and state into many a conflict with the individualistic
Euro-Canadians and Euro-Americans! But
that is another story.)
The Plateau groups, however,
display a key difference: Individuals
can indeed use their spiritual experiences on vision quests to start social
movements that take on a life of their own.
The “prophets” famous in 19th-century Plateau history almost
certainly have a long, complex history reaching back centuries or millennia. This makes them more like the ancient Greeks,
especially when one remembers that the philosophy of Plato—and still more that
of sages like Pythagoras—had a strong spiritual component.
This brings us to the vision quest,
the all-important life-transforming experience that all Northwest Coast young
people used to experience, and that a surprisingly large number still undergo.
Let us begin with Richard Atleo
again: “Oosumich is a secret and
personal Nuu-chah-nulth spiritual activity that can involve varying degress of
fasting, cleansing [often by using herbal emetics], celibacy, prayer, and
isolation for varying lengths of time depending upon the purpose” (Atleo
2004:17); it also includes beating oneself with medicinal branches, including
those of a plant containing a natural soap, which thus has a cleansing effect
(Atleo 2004:92). For whaling it could
last eight months, for hunting three or four days (Atleo 2004:17).
The Nuu-chah-nulth oosumich, or
uusimch (George 2003:48; phonetically ʔuusumch)
is a quest for spiritual power and purity.
“Oo” or uu literally means
“spiritual mysteries” and is used just to mean “be careful” (Atleo 2004:74,
83). It is related to management
practices, even controlled burning, which similarly manages the world to
reconcile conflicting impulses of destruction and preservation (Atleo
2011:133).
Related lonely quests for power,
with bathing in cold water, beating oneself with medicinal branches, fasting,
and other self-denials, occur among most Northwest Native groups (Benedict
1923; Miller 1988, 1997, 1999). Similar
spiritual quests are known throughout the continent. Such quests or spiritual retreats are
undergone throughout life by medicine persons, warriors, and others in need of
extra spiritual power. The extreme
eight-month retreats of Nuu-chah-nulth whalers (e.g. Atleo 2011:101-102) show the
great danger, great potential benefits to the whole community, and consequent
special needs for spiritual power of that enterprise. (Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is worth recalling.)
“Indian doctors,” shamans or
spirit-possessors, were primarily curers, but they could kill by sorcery,
become invisible, foretell the future, protect people, and find lost persons
and objects (see e.g. particularly complete account in Ignace and Ignace 2017:387-393;
also Jolles 2002:;172-173).
Secwépemc children as young as five
or six might receive spirit powers.
Elders might “doctor” them with animal skins or parts to give them the
power of the animal. Ron Ignace received
grizzly bear and woodworm powers this way.
Woodworms, the larvae of wood-boring beetles, are known throughout the
Northwest for their ability to drill slowly and patiently through the hardest
wood, and thus give persistence and tenacity.
In early adolescence, youths went for the more typical Northwestern
vision quest: “…a yong person had to live in solitude for days, potentially
weeks and months, often on more than one stay.
Through…fasting and prayer in solitude, individuals found their personal
seméc (spirit guardian power)…. Songs
would come to them, given by an animal or a force of nature, like fire or
water, that thus showed itself to the person questing and transferred its
spirit power” (Ignace and Ignace 2017:383-384; see long list of spirit powers
on p. 386). The initiate thus had to
shift for himself or herself for many days, with only the few resources brought
along for the trip. One elder lamented
the difficulty of finding remote enough places in this modern world. Getting one’s power from natural beings created
an intense bonding with the wild and with natural realities.
Bathing in cold water was
apparently a universal part of the quest in the Northwest. Under conditions of hunger, cold, stress, and
loneliness, the young person would sooner or later have dreams and visions, and
these would validate the calling.
Known from the Northwest to the
Plateau (Benedict 1923) and the Plains (the classic account being Neihardt
1932, but there are many others), vision questing extends down into Mexico, but
from the southwest and southern United States on southward it was often
supplemented or replaced by group or social training and initiation.
In the vast majority of cases, it
is undergone around the time of puberty.
Often there is one long and arduous quest; sometimes a boy or girl will
undergo several quests. Boys usually—but
not always—undergo longer and harder quests than girls, and further discussion
below will focus on the boys, whose quests are much better described in the
literature.
The typical
adolescent spirit quest usually involves isolation at a Power Place, an area of
great known concentration of spirit power.
Power places can be mountaintops, dramatic cliffs, waterfalls, stream
eddies, or other dramatic spots.
Mountaintops are the ones preferred for spirit questing, because of
their isolation and extreme conditions of cold, violent weather, spectacular
scenery, and fearfulness.
The youth subjects himself to
fasting, drinking only cold water, bathing in cold water, purification, staying
awake as much as possible, and continual praying or crying for visions. After a few days or at most weeks of this,
visions or powerful dreams are virtually guaranteed. Stress physiology combined with cultural
expectations insure that even the least sensitive person will have them.
The quest was highly individual
among the Plains and Plateau nations, more socially constructed and integrated
into collective ceremonies on the Coast, and reduced to a quiet, secret, lonely
forest experience among the Athapaskan groups.
There is a huge literature on it, particularly for the Coast.
The Salish peoples are especially
well covered. Among them: “In order to
exploit his natural environment successfully a person needed to establish lines
of communication with the nonhuman realm. He would doso primarily through a
vision or encounter with a more or less individualized, personalized
manifestation of the power which pervaded the wild realm of nature…. Contact
could be achieved only if the human supplicant were purged of the taint of
human existence…. Daily bathing in the
river was the cornerstone of this regime” (Amoss 1978:12-13, from research with
the Nooksack). The young person had to
be away from humans, in a power place, subjecting him- or herself to privation
and discomfort. Women were restricted in
action, less often allowed to go far off, and thus tended to get lesser powers
(Amoss 1978:13-14). They could, however,
become clairvoyants.
The vision typically tells the
youth what power he has—or, in western psychological terms, gives the youth
mental freedom to realize what he really wants to do with his life (cf. Jilek
1982). For the Plains tribes, it
normally gave warrior power, but the Northwest Coast groups, with their highly
varied range of activities, presented a wider range of possibilities. Woodworking power came from Master Carpenter
or an equivalent spirit being, thus proving the deeply religious nature of art
in traditional society. Seamanship,
fishing, housebuilding, and all manner of other powers could be given.
Since this power comes from the
all-important spirit world, it cannot be gainsayed. Thus, if parents had been hoping the boy
would become a woodworker, but the spirits make him a hunter, a hunter he shall
remain. This is not infrequently used by
a boy or girl to validate his or her career choice at the expense of parental
planning. Many a college student forced
by parents to “go into medicine,” learning of this aspect of the spirit quest
in an anthropology class, has dearly wished for such an institution in modern
America.
Obviously, some of these spirit
gifts were more noble than others, and youths were counseled to be happy with
whatever they got. Some delightful
stories make the point. Among the Upper
Skagit, one youth got only the power to win eating contests. He was embarrassed and ashamed. But then a much more powerful enemy tribe
challenged the Upper Skagit people to war or equivalent competition. The Upper Skagit had the good sense to demand
the right to pick the type of contest…and of course our poor youth was soon the
hero of his people (Collins 1974).
Special, everywhere, was healing
power. All the way from Siberia to
California (thus bridging the Bering Strait), healing or shamanic power had a
special name, separate from other spirit power.
A healer received power to travel to the spirit world to find out the
cause and cure of illness. The whaling
power of the Nuu-chah-nulth was also of a special nature, and involved
meditating among human skulls and other mementi
mori, as part of dealing with the danger of the art.
The spirit
vision quest thus gives meaning and direction to life. It has thus been rehabilitated lately for
treating adolescent alienation and problematic behavior, and community
alienation and aimlessness (Amoss 1978).
This is especially true among the Salish groups, because among them the
youth returns to society and dances out his vision in a public ceremony. A youth is not supposed to reveal or talk
about the actual spirit that gave him the vision, but he receives a song and
dance that sometimes make the spirit identifiable. A youth who moves and growls like a bear, or
a wolf, for instance, reveals what sort of spirit he has. Others then dance their visions, or simply
dance along with everyone.
This gives the Salish youths a
chance to validate their power, life choices, and personal experience of the
Divine, as well as to reconnect with their culture, community, and identity. This is done through dancing during the winter
ceremonial season. The youth—and the
adult for the rest of life—dances in such a way as to demonstrate, but not show
too clearly, his or her spirit power. Onlookers
can only guess what animal or other spirit the individual received, but his or
her life and work demonstrates the actual power received.
Spirit dancing holds the community
together, reveals and reinforces social structure, spreads resources widely,
and acts as religious focus; as such, it maintains a vibrant cultural and
social world in what is otherwise a situation of limited possibilities (Amoss
1978).
Spirit dancing has proved a
powerful social therapy. It has been
instrumental in reducing alcoholism, suicide, depression, and anomie among
young people, especially if combined with other help. It has given people a sense of control and
self-efficacy. Literally hundreds,
perhaps by now thousands, of Salish youths have had their lives turned around
by it (Amoss 1978; Collins 1974; Jilek 1972).
Psychologist Wolfgang Jilek (1972)
memorably described his findings on this and his conclusion that the spirit
dancing worked far better than clinical therapy for the Salish youths. I have talked to Jilek, and many others,
about this; the encounter that I most remember was with a Catholic priest who
had actually taken part in the dancing.
Someone with me asked “Doesn’t the church say that is all from the Devil?” To which the priest replied, quietly and
seriously, “Anything that has the effects I’ve seen must be from God.”
Returning to the
wider—lifelong—quest for spirit power, as Richard Atleo says, powerful
individual spiritual experiences validated individuals’ sense of self, and then
fed back into the community’s collective experience of spirituality and thus of
morality. Morals were constantly being
tested against individual transformative experience. Since the latter was, inevitably, highly
conditioned by cultural expectation and tradition as well as personal
experience, it normally reinforced the moral tenets of the people.
On the other hand, it also allows
for change, and validates ideas about how to cope with new circumstances. This is most obvious on the Plateau, with its
many prophets announcing visions about the Whites, the horses they brought, and
other new matters. These prophets were
lifelong vision-questers, who had mystical experiences and intense spirit
journeys on a regular basis throughout life.
The coastal Salish also had prophet cults, and other groups had
individuals who taught new adaptations.
The relevance of this to
conservation will appear below, in the consideration of traditional
stories. Many of these depend on some
young person having a spirit vision in which the animal persons tell him or her
what they expect and need from humans.
The vision is described matter-of-factly—the youth meets a mountain goat
and is led to the home of the goats—but many touches reveal that the journeys
are spirit journeys rather than physical ones.
Spirit journeys by medicine persons
were also regular features of life in the Northwest. Healers sent their souls to the spirit worlds
for many purporses. They also used their
special spirit powers, those peculiar to the curing life. Curing was especially important, and usually
involved sucking out objects or “pains” magically implanted in a patient by a
witch or else going to the land of the dead to retrieve a lost soul (see e.g.
Boyd 2013a). More directly relevant to
ecology were spirit-journeys to find out why the fish were not running or the
game was scarce. Typically, the finding
was that a taboo had been broken—in particular, someone had been disrespectful
to the animal persons. Social rules were
powerfully reinforced.
A point not often enough made is
that the major role of curers in traditional times was probably treating mental
illnesses and sicknesses. Infectious
diseases were rather few, until the Whites brought the full range of Old World
conditions. The healers had no way of
coping with these, and died along with their patients. In pre-contact times, the few infectious
diseases were generally either minor and easily treated with herbs, or were
chronic and fluctuating. Probably much
more common were physical traumas—accidents, bear bites, war wounds, falls—and
these could be treated by first aid and some dramatic placebo-effective ritual.
Conversely, mental and social
problems were evidently numerous and serious.
Winter confined people in their houses with seemingly endless rain,
cold, and night outside. Summer brought
frantic activity to get food put away.
Dangers of war and interpersonal conflict were always present. Anyone even slightly prone to depression,
aggressiveness, schizophrenia, or other problems would be sorely tested. Thus, healers had to specialize in these
conditions. Of course, they interpreted
them as spiritual, but their ways of dealing with them were pragmatic. Psychologists such as Wolfgang Jilek (1972)
have pointed out that traditional psychological therapy was stunningly
effective, and was based on principles perfectly comprehensible to a modern
psychologist. I can testify to the truth
of this from some experience (Anderson 1992; Anderson and Pinkerton 1987).
All this ritual, healing, and
animal protection is part of a religious system loosely known as
“shamanism.” A better name should be
coined. True shamanism is a tightly
defined complex of religious ideas and behaviors that centers on Siberia and
central Asia (the classic account by Eliade, 1964, is dated and less than
satisfactory; see the superb work of Caroline Humphrey 1995, 1996, and the beautifully
illustrated work of Pentikäinen et al. 1999 for better overviews). The word “shaman” is the word for a
soul-sending individual healer, in the Tungus languages of eastern
Siberia. Northwest Coast religion is so
similar that is can be called “shamanism” without stretching definitions, but
as one moves farther east, the characteristic shamanistic features gradually
fade, and we are left with a religion more focused on individual spirit
experience, less on the spectacular and complex rituals of the shaman per
se.
Shamanism is based on individual
soul-travel to the land of gods and dead or to the skyworld or underworld, to
find lost souls or lost objects, find causes and cures for illness, and
otherwise fix social and personal problems.
The shaman has an animal familiar, or several of them, and often other kinds
of spirit powers exist. Shamans can
normally transform themselves into animals or spirit beings. Ordinary people with special spirit powers
can transform also. Folktales in
shamanic societies almost invariably include many competitions between rivals,
to see who can assume the most powerful shape, foiling the rival (see Bland
2012). (Such stories endure even in
modern Europe, e.g. the Child ballad of “The Twa Magicians,” a Scottish tale
that survived into the 20th century). Moreover, animals—usually the predators in
particular—can transform into humans, or into other shapes. In fact, the transformation,
interpenetration, and mutual shape-shifting and soul-shifting between human and
natural realms is a key basic tenet of shamanic societies. (This problematizes, to say the least,
Descola’s claim that “animism” postulates spiritual similarity but physical
difference beween people and other-than-human persons; Descola 2013.)
Some authors describe all Native American religion as
shamanic, even the priestly religion of the high cultures of Mesoamerica and
the Andes. Others do not even allow the
Northwest Coast into the “shamanism” camp. Still others draw the line somewhere in
between. Some exceedingly acrimonious exchanges
have taken place about this. Some of the
best studies, like Jay Miller’s Shamanic
Odyssey (1988; see also Miller 1999), integrate Northwest Coast religion
into the shamanism complex. Others do
not.
This allows us better understanding
of the superficially “strange” or “exotic” ethnozoology of the Athapaskan
peoples of northwest Canada. Recent superb descriptions of these people by
Julie Cruikshank (1998, 2005), Jean-Guy Goulet (1998), Leslie Johnson (2000,
2010), T. F. McIlwraith (2007), Paul Nadasdy (2004), Robin Ridington (1981a,
1981b, 1988, 1990), Henry Sharp (19878, 2001), David Smith (1999) and others
have presented a very consistent picture. From somewhat outside our area, but
from closely related Athapaskan peoples, comes the thorough account of Richard
Nelson (1983), which speaks to conservation issues.
The Athapaskans see the world
through trails and paths (Johnson 2010; Legat 2012; Ridington 1981b,
1988). They have complex terminologies
for types of places, mostly habitats for hunting and gathering. They may name features that seem small and
insignificant to outsiders, while leaving whole mountains unnamed—as do many
peoples worldwide (Johnson 2010; anthropologists were surprised at this, but
the beautiful high ridge I see from my window has no name, and it is in a major
city). The trailways were taken by
ancestral beings long ago, and the small features were spots that were critical
in those mythic adventures. Again there
are world parallels; I have stood in a quite young grove of trees, in Kakadu
National Park in Northern Australia, that is locally regarded as composed of
transformed supernatural beings from the Dreaming time.
Robin Ridington has studied the
Dunne-za (“Beaver”) people of British Columbia.
He reports: Beneath each mountain
or valley lay the body of a giant animal that had been sent below the earth’s surface
when the great transformer Saya taught the Dunne-za of old to be hunters rather
than game. The melodic lines of their
songs were said to be the turns of a trail to heaven and the steady rhythm of
drum, the imprint of tracks passing over this imaginary terrain” (Ridington
1981b:240). The giant underground
animals are widely known in the Northwest (Sharp 1987), and are the explanation
for earthquakes; stories about one of them cluster around the faults running
through Seattle.
Ridington continues to describe
finding the game by dreaming where they are.
Camps among the Dunne-za were always set up so that there was bush unbroken by
human trails in the direction of the rising sun. People slept with their heads in this
direction and received images in their dreams.”
Dreaming the locations of game is also noted for related nearby groups
by Henry Sharp (1987, 2001) and Jean-Guy Goulet (1998). The hunters, among these Athapaskan groups as
among other North American Indigenous nations, find that “the animals could not
be killed unless they had previously given themselves to the hunter in his
dream images. It was said that the real
hunt took place in the dream and the physical hunt was only a realization of
what had already taken place” (Ridington 1981b:241).
Leslie Johnson has written at
length about the differences between this moving-traveler view of the world and
more static or totalizing views (Johnson 2010).
She contrasts the Athapaskan view, rich in narrative, personal history,
and subsistence knowledge, with the abstract, arbitrary, geometric grids laid
down on the land by modern states. True,
but having grown up in rural Nebraska almost a century ago, I can testify that
a few generations of farming and childrearing transforms a grid into a
richly-known, well-loved, story-laden landscape. It is the living, or
“dwelling” (Ingold 2000; Legat 2012) that counts. The Anglo-Canadians may have soullessly
gridded the land, but more serious is their tendency to “rip, ruin, and run,”
taking all the fish or trees or minerals and leaving a desert. If they had stayed and made a living from the
total landscape, as the Native peoples did, they would have come to appreciate
it—as Johnson and other long-resident immigrants have indeed done.
For Canadian Athabaskan peoples,
animals exist as spirits, as well as in fleshly form. One dreams of these animals, and dreams of
their trails. The spirit comes from the
sky (Ridington 1981a, 1988) or some other nebulous place, moves about on
earth. The hunter dreams the path and
goes to intersect the animal. If
successful, he kills it, and the animal’s soul returns to spirit land, to take
fleshly form again later (as we have seen, above, for other groups).
One summary of an Athapaskan
worldview sees the past as “continually pulled through to the present” by
stories and experiences; humans constantly learning spiritual and practical
knowledge; “all beings take different trails, each utilizing different places
within the dè [land, country],” (Legat 2012:200). All are related and interact. Stories and trails hold the world
together.
What is astonishing is that the
hunters do, in fact, dream where the moose and deer are, go where their dreams
lead, and actually find and kill the animals.
Often, Anglo-Canadian hunters have no success using their hi-tech
hunting methods in the same woods.
Thanks to the work of Goulet (1998), Ridington (1981a, 1981b, 1988, 1990),
Sharp (2001), and David Smith (1998), we have some sense how bioscience can
explain this. The hunter notices
countless cues at a preattentive level while he (men do most of the hunting) is
out in the forest. Every faint track,
nibbled twig, bent branch, distant sound, muddied watercourse, old bedding
ground, and unusual bird noise is noted.
Trying to notice and evaluate all these cues consciously would overwhelm
the mind. They are attended preconsciously
or at the bare edge of consciousness. At
night, they are all integrated in dreams—and the dreams do, indeed, tell the
hunter where lies the game.
Psychologists now hold that the purpose of dreams is to integrate and
organize such preattentive knowledge, and process it or store it for use. The Dunne-za were years ahead of the
psychologists.
The First Nations of the Northwest
know every tree, every rock, and every fishing spot in a vast wilderness better
than I know my own living room. They also
believe also that giant fish produce earthquakes by twitching their tails
(Sharp 2001), and that animals have spirits that communicate with hunters. These beliefs make perfect sense in the
context of animism. Many, perhaps most,
cultures worldwide explained earthquakes by assuming a giant animal lived
underground. Spirits that communi