The Nomadic Alternative – Page 8

The Quest for the Ignoble Savage has been the object of several expensively equipped expeditions in recent years, and to the satisfaction of some the village dwelling planters and pig-breeders of Western New Guinea qualify for the role. They live “an unending round of death and revenge” and performed the same very nicely in front of the movie cameras. “Here”, says Dr. Derek Freeman, “I suggest we have revealed the essentials of the pristine state of man.” Oh, have we? By implication Dr. Freeman asks his audience to believe that pig-breeding and irrigated agriculture, as well as warfare, are essential to the pristine state of man. He might also have mentioned that many of the inhabitants of New Guinea have an incidence of peptic ulcers that might make a Manhattan physician’s hair stand on end; but, to my knowledge, nobody bothered to enquire whether the ulcers might be the cause of war or war the cause of ulcers. Happily and despite large sums of capital invested in the concept of the Original Human Bloodbath, evidence for man’s murderous inclinations is very very thin.

And finding this evidence so thin, the Anti-Primitivists have lurched into an argument more paradoxical than that of their rivals. They have carried their search for the origins of human nastiness over the threshold of humanity, have by-passed the Noble Savage and settled on the Happy Beast, falling into that intellectual delusion Lovejoy and Boas christened Animalitarianism, “the tendency to represent the beasts – on one ground or another – as creatures on the whole more admirable, more normal, or more fortunate, than the human species.” Mammals fight to establish a hierarchy, but rarely, if ever, kill their own kind. Men do both.

And to contrast the alleged bloodthirstiness of the savage with the more moral beast, they look to some fatal flaw in the biology of man.

An ardent disgust with the disorder of human affairs has inspired this class of writer to “turn and live with animals” and, following the lead of such ethologists as Dr. Konrad Lorenz, they have concocted a most extravagant animal fable to illuminate the Fall of