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twg
Joined: 02 Nov 2006
Location: Getting some fresh air...
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 Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 5:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| This board, then, is out of touch with not only the terms and framework of the debate, but the turbulence and obstructions that the very real left has caused and placed in everyone else's way. |
You should write a book about this. In it you can outline your solution to the problem of those sneaky lefties ruining everything. Title it, "My Struggle". It'll be a hit with some. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 5:23 pm Post subject: |
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| twg wrote: |
| You should write a book about this.... |
ROFL. Thank you for the suggestion.
Let us not forget the common but all-too-intellectually-bankrupt "Nazi" or "Hitler" analogy leftists predictably resort to when confronted with views they do not like to hear.
On the absolute lack of imagination and indeed meaningless of the term, how about a little George Orwell...?
| George Orwell wrote: |
| The word "Fascism" has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." |
Orwell, "Politics and the English Language."
Incidentally, Orwell is one of those who informs me on the non-neutrality views I have formed and articulated above, Mithridates. |
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twg
Joined: 02 Nov 2006
Location: Getting some fresh air...
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 5:45 pm Post subject: |
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Is it also intellectually lazy to bring up that whole "pot vs kettle" thing?
Cuz lord knows, I want to make sure I'm using the proper form of mockery when it comes to right-winged diatribes. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 5:53 pm Post subject: |
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| twg wrote: |
| ...I want to make sure I'm using the proper form of mockery when it comes to right-winged diatribes. |
Simpleton.
I dislike the left. Unapologetically. Ask anyone here.
In this particular case, I fault the childish left for overly complicating the debate on such issues as OP and Jared Diamond present with their predictable romanticization of non-Western peoples and cultures, their predictable "racism" allegation, and, as you show yet again, their predictable calling anyone who challenges these things a Nazi.
However this may be, please show me how my views on this, in-and-of-themselves, make me a right-winger. Show me any evidence at all for that matter that shows or even suggests I subscribe to or in any way sympathize with right-wing politics... |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 6:45 pm Post subject: |
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Twg: ever read Rigoberta Menchu's "autobiography?" The one Stockholm awarded a Nobel Literature Prize? The one feminist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray kind of helped along, if you know what I mean... 
Here is what Burgos-Debray says that Menchu said about her peoples' oral traditions...
| Rigoberta Menchu wrote: |
They say it is the duty of each one of us to reproduce the earth and the traditions of our anscestors, who were humble. They refer back to the time of Columbus and say: "Our forefathers were dishonoured by the White Man -- sinners and murderers...It is not the fault of our anscestors. They died from hunger because they weren't paid...If they hadn't come, we would all be united, equal, and our children would not suffer...
"Today human life is not respected, now people are killed, our children die...our old people used to live until they were a hundred and twenty-five...Many of our race now know how to kill. The White Man is responsible for this...Even now we must prevent him from teaching us how to kill...
"...this is what the White Man did; it's the fault of the White Man. Our anscestors used to sow enough maize, there was enough for each tribe, each community. They all lived together [like good Communists!]...Before we weren't divided into communities and languages. We understood each other. Who is to blame for all this? The White Man who came to our country. We must not trust them, white men are all thieves...Animals used not to bite us before, but now even that is something which happens..." |
Mehchu, I, Rigoberta Menchu, 67-69.
Do you have any idea how many such passages appear in this book?
Last edited by Gopher on Fri Jan 26, 2007 7:27 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 6:59 pm Post subject: |
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I wasn't aware that anyone outside of the fruitier margins of the humanities seriously argued that indigeneous peoples had no impact on their environments. In New Zealand, for example, that the Maori were responsible for the extinction of moa is not a matter for dispute. This fact does not however limit European culpability for further environmental damage, nor invalidate any claims for past grievances, as some in the NZ right have insinuated. I wouldn't be surprised if Duluoz was attempting to insinuate something similar in the OP.
And interesting to see Jared Diamond's name being brought up in the context of this thread. Perhaps he's changed his view on this, but he has in the past romanticised the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an extent:
| Jared Diamond wrote: |
| To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn�t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren�t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence. |
rest of the article here: http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diamondmistake.html |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 7:29 pm Post subject: |
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| gang ah jee wrote: |
| ...interesting to see Jared Diamond's name being brought up... |
Glad to see someone was able to appreciate the irony of my bringing him up in this context. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 8:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
Rigoberta Menchu wrote:
They say it is the duty of each one of us to reproduce the earth and the traditions of our anscestors, who were humble. They refer back to the time of Columbus and say: "Our forefathers were dishonoured by the White Man -- sinners and murderers...It is not the fault of our anscestors. They died from hunger because they weren't paid...If they hadn't come, we would all be united, equal, and our children would not suffer...
"Today human life is not respected, now people are killed, our children die...our old people used to live until they were a hundred and twenty-five...Many of our race now know how to kill. The White Man is responsible for this...Even now we must prevent him from teaching us how to kill...
"...this is what the White Man did; it's the fault of the White Man. Our anscestors used to sow enough maize, there was enough for each tribe, each community. They all lived together [like good Communists!]...Before we weren't divided into communities and languages. We understood each other. Who is to blame for all this? The White Man who came to our country. We must not trust them, white men are all thieves...Animals used not to bite us before, but now even that is something which happens..."
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Just out of curiousity Gopher, have you actually seen anyone on Dave's CE Forum expressing views like the ones above? In my experience, the posters here, even the left-wing ones, are not particularly given to a priori romanticization of non-western cultures. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 8:11 pm Post subject: |
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| By the way, it was the Peace Prize, not the Literature Prize, that Menchu got. I'd hate to think that anyone capabale of the didactic drivel quoted in your post would get Literature. |
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 8:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| gang ah jee wrote: |
| ...interesting to see Jared Diamond's name being brought up... |
Glad to see someone was able to appreciate the irony of my bringing him up in this context. |
Yes, my understanding was that Diamond is politically liberal, if not "leftist", though I'd say that the academic defence of revisionist Garden of Eden fantasies is much more the province of radical ethnic identity politics, rather than being a feature of the monolithic 'left' as such. Of course, he's also attacked by biblical literalists on the right, so no irony there.
In any case, I agree with him when he observes in Collapse that "some American and Australian whites, resentful of government payments and land retribution to Native American and Aboriginal Australians, do indeed seize on the discoveries to advance that argument [that their ancestors were bad stewards of their lands, so they deserved to be dispossessed] today." (p 9) Sounds familiar. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 9:09 pm Post subject: |
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| On the other hand wrote: |
| Just out of curiousity Gopher... |
I have never understood this objection, On the Other Hand.
I believe people commonly and easily disavow such views without really meaning it by means of this device. "No one here is arguing that." "We [scholars, some colleagues] are not making such arguments." Sounds too much like a technicality to me. And on the second one, I have personally witnessed leftist professors citing the technicality in print, publication, and public debate, but then, without blinking an eye, picking up the texts and positions they just denied, and requiring undergrads to read them as authoritive backgrounders...I am referring to American foreign relations and not paleoanthropology.
In any case, I rejected this objection after reading several works by Said last semester. As you know, he attacks Western imperialists and racists through any and every post-Napoleonic song, poem, travellers' account, book -- academic or not -- that treat the Middle East as evidence that Western academics are complicit in all of the above. He never restricted himself to his particular venue. Also, as you know, Columbia promoted him to University Professor in 1992.
It is not only Menchu's Peace Prize (thanks for the clarifcation, by the way, I apparently forgot which one she won). This romanticization is simply pervasive and ubiquitous in literature and film. Let us draw it out and expose it so that it loses credibility once and for all and so that we might move on to the serious business this and other related issues present.
And, yes, at least one poster came onto this thread and called me a Nazi, compared me to Hitler actually, for challenging the myth. Given other positions I have seen articulated here, sure, I believe that others here likely hold similar romanticized views.
Last edited by Gopher on Fri Jan 26, 2007 9:27 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 9:17 pm Post subject: |
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| gang ah jee wrote: |
| ...I agree with him when he observes in Collapse that "some American and Australian whites, resentful of government payments and land retribution to Native American and Aboriginal Australians, do indeed seize on the discoveries to advance that argument [that their ancestors were bad stewards of their lands, so they deserved to be dispossessed] today." (p 9) Sounds familiar. |
And, of course, I trust -- after how many pages we went around on this I can no longer recall -- that you know that I wholly reject such pretextual judgmentalism and would therefore agree with him on the problem this poses as well...
| Marc Bloch wrote: |
| ...nothing is more variable than such judgments, subject to all the fluctuations of collective opinion or personal caprice...history, by all too frequently preferring the compilation of honor rolls to that of notebooks, has gratuitously given itself the appearance of the most uncertain of disciplines. Hollow indictments are followed by vain rehabilitations. Robespierrists! Anti-Robespierrists! For pity's sake, simply tell us what Robespierre was...How much easier it is to write for or against Luther than to fathom his soul. |
Marc Bloch, Historian's Craft, 140-141.
Last edited by Gopher on Fri Jan 26, 2007 10:44 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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gang ah jee
Joined: 14 Jan 2003
Location: city of paper
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| Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 10:39 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| And, of course, I trust -- after how many pages we went around on this I can no longer recall -- that you know that I wholly reject such pretextual judgmentalism and would therefore agree with him on the problem this poses as well... |
I didn't think otherwise. Parts of both the left and right are involved in some distasteful and harmful rhetoric regarding ecological history, and this distracts from where the real discussion should lie, i.e., how cool mega-marsupials were. |
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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sat Jan 27, 2007 3:49 am Post subject: |
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| alffy wrote: |
Actually, science is is merely another form of social expression, one that focuses on empirical studies of the material world. It is, therefore, quite intimately intertwined with philosophy and "politics" of its practitioners.
Duluoz and Gopher are correct in asserting the concept of "simple undeveloped folk lived in harmony with nature" as a philosophically and, hence, politically driven theory. It grew out of the 1960s Academy that, for the first time, was seeing the expansion of its core members. Until the 60s, academics were disproportionately white, upper class intellectuals and their science demonstrated their philosophies. But the 60s saw a revolution in which the doors to the ivory tower were thrown open and the masses let in. We see a tremendous rise in numbers of minorities and women entering the fields, and they were generally young with radical ideas.
One of the new interpretions was this concept of "man in nature." Or, I guess, more appropitely, "humans in nature." We saw a sudden and drastic interpretation that modernity was abarrant behavior and that humans had "fallen" from a state of "grace" with nature.
This interpretation was nearly as invalid as the one it replaced in which "man the hunter/toolmaker" was dominant and conquering and hence was destined to do with the world as he saw fit. Today, most archaeologists and scientists actually studying human evolution, migration, and interaction with the environment take a more practical view of the data. Humans were constantly interacting with the environment in a very intimate manner. This did involve considerable waste and abuse (by modern interpretations), but were eminently reasonable for the time and place. The Black Mountain Folsom kill site is a good example. By driving herds of buffalo (most likely by lighting controlled brush fires), you send a small herd over a cliff that kills many. After that, you simply butcher what you want and walk away- not much danger to me and my family, yet providing considerable quantities of valuable meat. Very reasonable, yet not very ecological. But then if I died taking on a single buffalo, my family would likely starve to death over time. Very unreasonable, but ecologically considerate.
What we also see, though, is some peoples, upon realizing they were destroying their environment, and thereby endangering themselves in the long run, developed new resources and means of harvesting and renewing. We actually see this with the Late Mississippians and their successors prior to contact with the Europeans- they were apparently husbanding buffalo and deer, much as we do today.
But I do caution against a "one size fits all" answer to widespread megafauna extinctions corresponding with human migrations. Undoubtedly, humans took their toll on many species, but we also are seeing a widespread ecological shift in climate, flora, and fauna that seems to indicate that most of the extinct species were under a multi-pronged attack for their existence. Humans may have just been the most salient cause of their demise. And very likely an accelerating agent as well. But highly unlikely the sole cause. |
Alffy and Gopher,
My undergraduate degree is in Geomorphology, and a key analytical concept that is used in the analysis of cause and effect in geomorphological processes is the issue of timescale. Most undergraduate textbooks, and field research, couch discussions of 'what caused what' in terms of short, medium, and long timescales. For example, if a researcher wanted to examine and discuss the morphology of a particular landscape feature (such as a mountain), on a long timescale geological factors and processes would be predominant. On a medium or short timescale, however, factors such as climate, precipitation, sedimentology, vegetation coverage, etc. may be the predominant processes at work, actively modifying the morphology of the feature in question.
In Geomorphology, timescale is also an important analytical concept in defining what is or is not a landscape feature. Mountains may last for hundreds of millions of years; beach cusps, however, may last no more than a few hours, yet both are recognized as distinct landscape features.
It surprises me that timescale as an analytical concept doesn't seem to be used in the same way in discussions of evolutionary processes...and as a result the discussions seem to be less meaningful than they could otherwise be. For example, when it comes to the Australian megafaunals, one could argue that on a long timescale the ancient australians were not "in harmony with their environment", in that they (apparently) caused the extinctions of most of the large mammals. However, on a short timescale - say a single generation, or even a few seasons of anthropological field research - most observers would conclude that the ancient australians were very efficient resource users who lived 'in close harmony' with their environment. It seems to me both are true...depending on the timescale. |
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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Sat Jan 27, 2007 4:29 am Post subject: |
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The non-whites of the world (the peaceful non-imperialists, I should say) were are hard on each other as they were on their environment..
The next time any of you are on a "temple trek", I want you to think about who built them, and if they were afforded a minimum wages or 5 day work week. How many slaves had to die building monuments to gods that don't exist for a culture from yesterday to today be regarded as "noble" or "once-great"? |
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