Asia Times: ‘Noble savages’ would have killed 2 billion more in 20th century

One of the obstacles to honest archaeological research is the doctrine of the "noble savage," the idealistic notion that primitive humans behaved so much more peacefully and respectfully than civilized humans tainted by modern methods.

It’s one reason archaeologists have to wrestle with fellow faculty members when they discover the ancient remains of American Indians ("paleoindians") that indicate these primitive people were killed in brutal wars or savage rituals. It also accounts for the academic reluctance to accept findings that show primitive humans wiped out the mammoths, mastodons and an early species of horse -- for food.

In the mythology, "noble savages" couldn’t fight over land or religion or tribe. "Noble savages" couldn’t harm the environment, couldn’t drive whole species into extinction. These are articles of faith in children’s books, and some adults refuse to let the facts alter their childish prejudices. This is not a "liberal" fault, as many like to argue. It is simply stupidity.

Facts as stubborn things. As that great empiricist liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts." To ignore facts is to learn nothing, giving all of us a better chance of worse problems and delayed solutions.

Now, as it turns out, Lawrence H. Keeley has done a study demonstrating that civilization can take credit for a giant drop in deaths by war. Primitive society, it seems, was no Heaven on Earth. The Asia Times reports:

Two billion war deaths would have occurred in the 20th century if modern societies suffered the same casualty rate as primitive peoples, according to anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley, who calculates that two-thirds of them were at war continuously, typically losing half of a percent of its population to war each year.

This and other noteworthy prehistoric factoids can be found in Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, a survey of genetic, linguistic and archeological research on early man. Primitive peoples, it appears, were nasty, brutish, and short, not at all the cuddly children of nature depicted by popular culture and post-colonial academic studies. The author writes on science for the New York Times and too often wades in where angels fear to tread….

Native Americans, Eskimos, New Guinea Highlanders as well as African tribes slaughtered one another with skill and vigor, frequently winning their first encounters with modern armed forces. "Even in the harshest possible environments [such as northwestern Alaska] where it was struggle enough just to keep alive, primitive societies still pursued the more overriding goal of killing one another," Wade notes.

A quarter of the language groups in New Guinea, home to 1,200 of the world's 6,000 languages, were exterminated by warfare during every preceding century, according to one estimate Wade cites. In primitive warfare "casualty rates were enormous, not the least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent's society. Captured warriors were killed on the spot, except in the case of the Iroquois, who took captives home to torture them before death, and certain tribes in Colombia, who liked to fatten prisoners before eating them."

Enlightenment and peace. Spengler, the Asia Times’ writer, contends that Christianity changed everything for the better. I’m sure there are lots of arguments for and against that. But civilization, the Enlightenment and liberal democracy certainly have had their benefits.

Primitive humans can’t be blamed for developing weapons capable of ending the human race in the blink of an eye. On the other hand, primitive humans often came close to ending the species, and there is little evidence they provided eras of peace, or even advanced longevity.

Frank Warner

SEE ALSO: Dictatorships’ death toll: 262 million murdered in the 20th century -- and not by war.

Comments

[jj mollo]

I don't know about Keeley, but this pseudonymous Spengler is a profound thinker with an uncommon slant on everything. Sometimes I agree with him, but I have to demur on one aspect of this article. He slams Jared Diamond for the Guns, Germs and Steel book, implying that Diamond would be opposed to Keeley's point of view.

I think Diamond's focus was actually on the question of why Western Civilization arose and spread before those other places were able to promote their own civilizations. I was very impressed with his book. Contrary to Spengler's implication, he works on the assumption that the people of these other places were equally intelligent, competent and resourceful. He might, in his heart feel that the "primitives" are superior to us, or at least smarter, but that is not the thrust of his argument. He is merely explaining why we of the West were so lucky.