https://fourthworldchronicle.com/2018/04/17/confronting-the-racist-myth-of-so-called-political-tribalism-part-one/
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In their desperation to explain the Trump phenomenon many people are embracing the racist ideology of so-called political tribalism. In theory, so-called tribal (i.e. indigenous) peoples are somehow inherently more violent than people living in modern technocratic societies. Supposedly, all peoples in the past were tribal and therefore retain these violent group tendencies.
A recent example is Yale Law Professor Amy Chua’s new book Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. Literature like this represents a visceral fear of group identity common in Western society. It is a rejection of the concept of collective rights in favor of individual or private rights. It is what political philosopher Hannah Arendt called the atomization of society.
This literature does not begin with Chua, William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is another example. It is a story of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island who make a disastrous attempt to govern themselves. Presumably, human nature is so depraved that the characters in the novel end up torturing and killing each other. The problem is, it is not true.
History proves otherwise. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that, after the destruction of the natural resources on the island, the Rapa Nui people lived in peace for one thousand years before European arrival on Easter Island. Similarly, the Jarawa and Sentinelese lived peaceably on the Andaman Islands for 70 thousand years until the threat of territorial dispossession from India.
Golding’s pessimism of the human condition is positively Hobbesian, and that is not a compliment. Defenders of the status quo talk about Thomas Hobbes as though he were the only philosopher who ever lived. Human nature is described as Hobbesian. Hobbes claimed human nature was inherently selfish and therefore people should try to act in enlightened self-interest.
Hobbesianism is just secular original sin. The total depravity of the human condition. This idea comes from one source, Augustine of Hippo, and it is unique to Western Christianity. The idea is rejected by half the world including; the Eastern Orthodox Church, Judaism, and Eastern religions. Adherents all assert human nature is basically good and that selfishness is inculcated.
Hobbesian ideology, however, serves corporate and state interests. This explains its popularity. Hobbesianism represents the unquestioning, unwavering obedience to the state except in the most extreme circumstances. It is fundamentally undemocratic. That is why the framers of the US Constitution were far less influenced by Hobbes than they were by Rousseau.
According to Grinde and Johansen, natural rights philosophers like Rousseau, author of The Social Contract, were profoundly influenced by descriptions of indigenous political theory and practice found in colonial literature like the Jesuit Relations. Rousseau concludes, correctly, that before the rise of the sovereign state, most of the peoples of the world lived in egalitarian, democratic societies.
Hobbes, by contrast, describes the so-called state of nature as, “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This example of Hobbesian ideology was popularized in recent years by Dr. Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.
The myth that indigenous peoples are inherently more violent is demonstrably false. Pinker’s analysis is fundamentally flawed. Pinker uses, as one example, the notorious Napoleon Chagnon’s work on the Yanomami Indians. Never mind the allegation that Chagnon is said by some to be a wanted criminal in Venezuela for deliberately starting a war between indigenous peoples in an effort to prove his thesis of their allegedly inherently violent nature.
In fact, when Napoleon Chagnon was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the renowned anthropologist Marshall Sahlins resigned in protest. Chagnon’s work is resoundingly rejected by most modern anthropologists. Fortunately, some anthropologists like Jeremy Narby, author of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, wish to distance themselves from what Narby calls colonial anthropology.
Chua asserts that people are in conflict over ethnic, clan-based, or other group identities. Yet, so-called ethnic conflict is more often than not deliberately created by outside influence. The best modern example is the Rwandan genocide. Prior to European colonialism the Tutsi and Hutu lived more or less peaceably. The Belgians inculcated the ideology of Tutsi superiority. Later, the Belgians backed the Hutus in this sickening game of colonial divide and rule. (To be continued…)
Fourth World Chronicle Editor in Chief H. Matthew Barkhausen III is a citizen of the Skarù•ręʔ Katèhnu•ʔaka (Tuscarora – People of the Cypress) Nation.
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