(urth) Lupiverse(es)

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

________________________________
 From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>
To: urth at urth.net 
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 8:37 AM
Subject: (urth) Lupiverse(es)
 
... Anthropological estimates suggest pre-civilized humanity died at a rate of up to 25% 
from warfare/violence. Accuse me of optimism if you like but I think getting it below 
1% is a great accomplishment. This is arguably the mose peaceful time in human history.

I'm skeptical of this estimate, since it is based on traditional scholarly assumptions of inherent structural violence that inevitably inflate the degree of violence in so-called "traditional" societies. Modern "civilized" humans tend to think of the "uncivilized" as violent because they get all pissy when we take away their land and their way of life and then try to kill them. Premodern civilized humans like the Greeks had to deal with nomadic tribes whose societies were utterly different from those of traditional societies but not all that different from the Greeks themselves. They had horses, for one thing, allowing them to form larger political units based on slavery. They had kings.

We have little choice but to base our assumptions about lost societies on what we know of existing "primitive" ones. Since we have almost zero information about precivilized---or, more precisely, "pre-civilization"---societies, we can choose whether to assume they were more like the Mongols or more like the Khoisan, but we can be wrong. I'll offer a few data points:

(1) Outwardly violent tribes living in isolation in New Guinea and the Amazon tend to be all show, from everything I've read. Very rarely do people get hurt; certainly they don't get their villages burned and their women and children slaughtered like in South Sudan. Violence is highly stylized among these tribes. Even cannibalism, to the extent that it ever existed, was a religious act.

(2) Every example I have seen in NAtional Geographic of a crushed skull found in an ancient grave has been ascribed to ritual violence---not warfare. Even the Iceman was ambushed and shot in the back, and his body was unlooted. His killer knew him or his tribe and that knowledge was the reason for his murder. It wasn't war.

(3) If you consider Stonehenge, which existed in wooden form for many centuries before it was upgraded to stone, and the stone site in Anatolia (I forget the name) that was occupied from about 10,000 BC to 8,000 BC, you have to conclude that cults and cultures were often spread over surprisingly vast areas. We know nothing about the political structures of the people who used these sites, but this does not indicate rampant warfare. Consider also the Silk Road, which operated long before China existed, and where human civilization---city-living---was actually born (not Egypt, not Mohenjo-Daro). Trade routes do not survive war well.

Face it: civilization means holocaust for the Other and slavery for its survivors. "Progress" is an invention.

I'm aware that the relevance of this viewpoint depends on its prominence in Wolfe's own worldview, but I doubt he'd disagree if presented with the same set of facts. When I read Latro I don't exactly feel like I get a diametrically opposed perspective.
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