FleaInNYCbanner.jpg

? The beclowning of a nation | Main | Kaffirs ?

May 16, 2008

Vengeance is ours

Jared Diamond, much maligned in parts of the dextrosphere for his supposed lefty views, is quite brilliant. Guns, Germs and Steel - the book, not the verkakte television adaptation - was a tour de force.

Writing for the New Yorker, Diamond asks what can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even. He starts with New Guinea.

Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeperlying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig.

There is rather a lot more ethnography here than is strictly necessary to making the broader point by extension: personal pursuit of justice remains the norm for many parts of the world where states lack the power to impose impersonal systems. This is as true in the lives of some people in Detroit or Manchester - dare I say, Toronto - as it is in the tribal areas of "Pakistan" or those parts of Israel currently occupied by Jordanians and Egyptians pretending to be "Palestinian". And it gives the lie to Rousseau and that misconception still so prevalent on the left, that somehow we would all get along well if left to our own devices. Odd then the same people should make it their unrelenting quest to use state power to fix the rest of us.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at May 16, 2008 06:31 AM

Comments

You need to recall the mindset of the "progressive" point of view: only people of Northern European descent need the fixing and control of a benign "progressive" elite. The rest of the peoples of the world are perfect angels of good behavior, or would have been if they had not been contaminated by contact with Northern Europeans and their eeeville "independent thought" virus! It's all our fault, etc...

Posted by: Andrea Harris [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 16, 2008 07:13 AM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in. Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?