The Roofs of the Pacified Past
As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, the anthropological concepts of primitive war and prehistoric peace are extremely contrary to ethnographic and archaeological fact. But how and why did such delusions develop, especially among academics? Why were they maintained in the face of contrary facts? Why did Quincy Wright ignore the implications of his casualty figures for primitive societies? Why did Harry Turney-High never consider the actual effects and effectiveness of primitive compared with civilized warfare? Why have Brian Ferguson and others never mentioned the archaeological data that was so obviously relevant to their theory of prehistoric peace? Why have archaeologists glibly interpreted remains that testify unambiguously to violent conflict in symbolic or ritualistic terms? Each of these questions points to a prevailing studied silence about prestate warfare; the causes of this silence are to be found in events and intellectual currents outside academic anthropology.
The concepts that provide the framework for the pacified past originated in the period immediately following World War II. Several features of that particular war and its aftermath encouraged a pervasive and profound odium for everything connected with warfare. Since the hearth and wellspring of modern Western culture remains western Europe, the events in and the attitudes of that region are of key concern because they soon radiate to the New World and beyond.1
World War II was an especially traumatic experience for western Europe, which had not seen combat across its whole territory since the days of Napoleon. During World War I, the fighting in the West had been confined to a narrow strip of territory along the trench lines. But almost every populous region of France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and the Low Countries was an arena of combat and devastation during World War II or the preceding Spanish Civil War. Guerrilla warfare spread the horror even to remote rural areas. For the previous 125 years, for most western Europeans, war had always taken place elsewhere, and it had therefore been viewed with a degree of detachment.
Unlike previous European wars, World War II left most western Europeans (and North Americans) with plentiful scars from direct injuries and stains of innocent blood on their hands. The devastation, disease, displacement of populations, and near famine of the war’s aftermath encouraged self-pity among the nations that started the war and charity from the United States—die war’s only unequivocal victor. After the passions of the war had cooled, the widespread slaughter of noncombatants by bombing became distasteful even to those who had inflicted it. Even in our revisionist age, it is difficult to deny that the Allied victory delivered the world from evil, but the total war necessary to achieve this deliverance entailed economic, human, and moral costs that still seem staggering.2 And the almost immediate development of the Cold War revealed that all this suffering had merely eliminated one rivalry only to expose another even more dangerous. Europe remained an armed camp. Historian John Keegan notes that World War I persuaded only the victors that “the costs of war exceeded its rewards,” whereas World War II convinced the “victors and vanquished alike of the same thing.”3 After generations of seeing war masked by a degree of comfortable distance, western European society was brought face to face with its true visage, and it conceived a most profound aversion for it.
This general change in the Western appreciation of war can be seen in two areas of popular and academic culture. The war stories, novels, and poems of the nineteenth century celebrated the adventure, heroism, and glory of war.4 Those produced between the world wars treated war and soldiers’ experience of it as an epic tragedy that, if lacking in any pretense to glory, nevertheless provided the stage for stoic heroism and comradely self-sacrifice.5 The literature of the past fifty years, by contrast, has tended to treat war as a brutal bedlam in which humans merely struggle, usually unsuccessfully, to preserve their lives and sanity. Postwar American war novels, for example, portray men as the dazed neurotic victims of psychotic officers, the petty tyrannies and stupefying boredom of military life, and the mindless cruelty of war itself.6 War had changed in literature from an uplifting melodrama, to a elegiac tragedy, to a surrealist black comedy.
The great American academic historians of the nineteenth century often dealt with military subjects—for instance, Parkman’s France and England in North America, Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, and Mahan’s very influential naval histories. But by the middle of the twentieth century, history professors at prestigious universities were concerned almost exclusively with social and economic matters.7 A recent acknowledgment of this tendency occurs in the preface to Princeton historian James McPherson’s magnificent Battle Cry of Freedom, in which the author feels compelled to justify the space (about 40 percent of the book) devoted to military campaigns, in a book about the American Civil War! Military history has been relegated to a few professors at provincial institutions and the military academies, to nonacademics, and to amateurs. As war has come to be represented in literature as an absurd nightmare, academic interest in military history has waned.
The newly discovered madness of war is symbolized by the mushroom cloud. Not only did atomic weapons immediately exterminate and devastate on a gigantic scale, but their radiation continued to kill and maim for generations after hostilities had ceased. These Old Testament qualities of nuclear weapons had such a special resonance for the Western mind that people began to speak not of another world war but of Armageddon. As the Cold War developed and nuclear weapons proliferated, “atomic fear” gripped the civilized world. Even before it was a practical proposition, visions of an atomic apocalypse appeared in the popular literature and films of the 1950s and 1960s. Typically, these productions asked not whether humanity could survive a nuclear war, but whether such a war was worth surviving. They depicted a world returned to the Stone Age, populated by nightmarish mutant species and tiny tribes of impoverished survivors. Once “mutually assured destruction” (with its perfect acronym, MAD) became technologically possible in the 1960s, the concepts of victory and defeat, “good guys” and “bad guys” lost their significance. War was seen as more man just stupid or cruel; in its atomic form, it was suicidal lunacy—a lunacy that Western civilization had induced and could not cure. Western Europe had “seen the elephant” (as American soldiers called seeing combat during the Civil War), and the very thought of it became an anathema.
By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Hobbes’s view of primitive life had gained the upper hand because it was, of course, superbly convenient to European colonial and imperial ambitions. What political or territorial rights could be granted to heathens whose lives were one long criminal spree, who (because of their violent anarchy) could neither produce nor enjoy any of the fruits of civilized industry, whose very proximity radiated disorder and anxiety into the frontier zones of civilized settlement? With such a view, colonists and colonial administrators could no more tolerate “unpacified” Hobbesian primitives nearby than they could leave pirates or brigands unmolested. The consequences of these applications of Hobbes’s arguments were transformed, by the end of the nineteenth century, into the sanctimonious “white-man’s burden” of bringing the peace and bounty of civilization to “lesser breeds without the Law.” Few Westerners paused to consider that the “law” they brought often meant slavery and penury to the natives or that these “lesser breeds” might legitimately view the greedy colonials as pirates and brigands whom the natives could ill-afford to leave unmolested.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, sociologists and anthropologists united the neo-Hobbesian perspective with something quite foreign to Hobbes’s careful arguments for human equality: Social Darwinism and racism. Imperialists had long been troubled by the common and often violent refusal of native peoples to acknowledge the superiority of European culture and religion or adopt them willingly. The new doctrines of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest provided a cornucopia of explanations and justifications. The spread of Western civilization and Europeans at the expense of other cultures and races became a splendid illustration of Spencer’s survival of the fittest. Inherited mental inferiority thus “explained” the intractable resistance to European civilization by “primitive races.” The lives of savages were “nasty, brutish and short” because the humans who lived them were both culturally and genetically limited. Late-nineteenth-century imperialists thus discovered a moral duty and a biological right to wrest dominion of the earth from such less-favored peoples.8
If prewar European imperialism encouraged a view of war and conquest as normal and right, World War II and its aftermath severely challenged it. One especially shocking aspect of World War II was that the Nazis attempted to do to fellow Europeans what the latter had long been doing (less efficiently and less brutally) to non-Europeans. The Nazis justified genocidal “clearances,” the grossest forms of labor exploitation, and tyrannical government over conquered peoples by an uncomfortably familiar reference to a self-proclaimed superiority of race, technology, and culture. After the Nazis, warfare and conquest looked less like noble crusades or direct expressions of a law of nature and more like the basest of crimes. After four centuries of western European imperialism, the sauce for the goose had finally been applied to the gander.
However bitterly contested and involuntary it may have been, postwar decolonization also lifted a considerable burden from the backs of western European intelligentsia. The demise of their nations’ empires virtually eliminated any need for apology or self-reproach. Indeed, in the postwar period, European nations became quasi-colonies themselves—their empires liquidated, their economies dependent on those of the United States and the Soviet Union, and they themselves reduced to second-rate client-states of “the Great Powers” (which no longer included them). Postwar western European intellectuals, both right and left, began seeing themselves and their societies as victims of imperialism and neocolonialism, even if they felt the peas of their victimization through increasing mattresses of prosperity.9 A generation after the end of World War II, it became intellectually fashionable in western Europe to identify with the many non-Western peoples that once were colonial subjects.
As cynics often observed in the United States during the nineteenth century, the nobility of “savages” was directly proportional to one’s geographic distance from them.10 During the late nineteenth century, Easterners were thus very sympathetic to the plight of the western Indians, doted on James Fennimore Cooper’s sentimental portrayals of eastern Indians, and put the fine speeches of Indian orators in their children’s schoolbooks. Yet the grandparents of these same sympathetic Easterners had offered bounties on Indian scalps and had ruthlessly expelled the natives from their states. One such rapid shift in white attitudes was responsible for the irony that the general who presided over the final defeats of the western tribes, Ohio-born Tecumseh Sherman, was named for a great Shawnee chief (William was added only when he was nine). Of course, it had been a generation before Sherman’s birth that Chief Tecumseh had pursued his vain quest for a great tribal coalition to drive the Americans out of the old Northwest, including Ohio. Most Westerners still in direct contact with “wild” Indians, on the other hand, regarded them as dangerous vermin, turbulent brigands, or useless beggars to be expelled or exterminated at any opportunity. Once the natives were safely reduced to living on reservations, however, Westerners were just as inclined to become sentimental about them and their traditional ways of life as Easterners were.
This change from fearful hatred to nostalgia as distance in time or space increases is not peculiar to the United States. The difference in attitude toward the German tribes evidenced by Julius Caesar and Tacitus, the increasing admiration of neo-Australians for Aborigines (actually, “traditional” Aborigines), the Boer fascination with the Bushmen, and the softening of Japanese attitudes toward the Ainu are examples of similar phenomena. It is much easier to admire tribal life once it has been destroyed and little chance remains, except in fantasy, of its returning. In Western popular culture, Rousseau triumphs over Hobbes only when “man in a state of nature” is no longer a viable competitor and has faded from direct sight.
The disappearance of uncivilized ways of life began with the evolution of the first urban societies 6,000 years ago, but the incorporation of tribal peoples into civilized economies definitely accelerated after World War II. Before the war, “primitives” could still be found living traditional lives in some isolated areas of the world, such as highland New Guinea, west-central Australia, and parts of tropical South America, the Phillipines, and Africa. But the rapid postwar growth in Third World populations, dramatic improvements in transportation and communications technology, and the voracious appetite of industrial economies for ever-scarcer raw materials have carried modern civilization to every corner of the inhabited world. As anthropologists are acutely aware, the primitive world of traditional prestate economies and cultures had completely vanished by the late 1960s. Thus tribal societies can no longer impede civilized enterprises, and direct observations can no longer contradict sentimental views of them. Any unpleasant behavior on the part of the subjugated remnants of such societies can be dismissed as being due to their corruption and degradation by Western civilization. The increasing bowdlerization of precivilized life in popular culture over the past few decades is just a broader and more final version of the changing attitudes toward traditional Indian lifeways observed in the United States during the nineteenth century.
The great shock of World War II savagery, atomic fear, the ex post facto awakening to the evils and indignities of imperial conquest, and the later spread of ecological sensitivity eroded all that remained of the Western myths of progress and civilized superiority. Attacks on these moribund notions have reached frenzied proportions in the past few decades. Industrial expansion and technological advance are now regarded merely as harbingers of ecological disaster and more destructive wars, while advances in medicine have only encouraged overpopulation and further misery. Mass communications and cheap transportation are regarded as having eroded human linguistic and cultural diversity while bringing the commercial corruptions of the West to every doorstep. These accusations imply some rather drastic cures—technological regression, depopulation, deindustrialization, decreasing human mobility, and censorship or suppression of global communications. Ironically, these prescriptions, taken simultaneously, resemble less Rousseau’s golden age and more the post-apocalyse world envisioned in science fiction. These neo-Rousseauian arguments curiously imply that we are only a nuclear winter away from a springtime of human equality and harmony.
Cynics have observed that those who have benefited the most from “progress”—the citizens of the First World—are the people most inclined to disdain it. The privileged few who eat better, lead longer and more stimulating lives because of modern agriculture, medicine, education, mass communications, and travel, and are most cushioned from physical discomfort and inconvenience by industrial technology are the most nostalgic about the primitive world. This attitude is more difficult to find among the real “victims of progress” in the Third World except among members of these nations’ Western-educated elites. Despite the odds against them, the inhabitants of these countries flow in dense streams toward those shabby islands of modernity, the cities, attracted by the slim hope of material progress they offer. For many of these migrants, the primitive world they are fleeing is not a legend but a living memory. Perhaps the most bizarre expression of this impulse was the elevation of the notion of material progress to a religion by the Cargo Cults of the tribesmen of New Guinea.11 The concept behind these cults was to obtain the material plenty and comforts of civilization (Cargo) by magical means. The current Western distaste for progress may be just another luxury Westerners enjoy. But a less cynical gloss is that civilization inevitably looks grimmer to those intimately familiar with its thousand discontents, whereas its streets seem paved with gold in the eyes of those farthest from its citadel.
Most of the evils attributed to civilization and progress—such as social inequality and subordination, murder, theft, rape, vandalism, and conquest—are found concentrated in the conduct and effects of war. Therefore, in a neo-Rousseauian world view, war itself constitutes one of the principal products of Western progress, and the precivilized condition and the non-Western world before European expansion must have been idyllic and peaceful. As ever, when faith in the myth of progress declines, the myth of the golden age finds new adherents.
In the postwar atmosphere of anxiety, malaise, and dissatisfaction with Western civilization, anthropologists have introduced doctrines concerning precivilized violence consistent with this mood. But the concepts of primitive war and prehistoric peace were not the products of pure imagination or conscious falsehood. They relied on available evidence, but often the data cited were quiteirrelevant to their key ideas. Thus the proponents of safe and ineffective primitive war have focused on stylized and low-casualty battles in preference to the rarer massacres and much more frequent raids that killed most people. These proponents have evaluated the effectiveness of tribal war entirely on the ethnocentric grounds of how similar its conduct was to modern warfare rather than on the basis of its actual effects. They have devoted special attention to the murky question of motives. Similarly, the advocates of prehistoric peace ignore the very archaeological evidence that disproves their case. Archaeologists, relying on the time-honored method of “ethnographic analogy,” have contributed to the pacification of the past by blithely ignoring the problem of prehistoric violence. The resulting fashionable ideas concerning precivilized warfare are the products of discrimination, then, not ignorance or prevarication.
The anthropologists whose interpretations have helped artifically to pacify the past were in a sense merely possessed by the spirit of their times. As is true of all ideas everywhere, scientific understanding is usually rooted in the values and attitudes of a particular era or culture. What saves scientific propositions from being mere intellectual fashions is their ability to withstand testing against critical evidence. The concepts of the pacified past are wrong not because they are fashionable or biased, but because they are incompatible with the most relevant ethnographic and archaeological evidence.
Yet there is something to be criticized in the fashions themselves, whether those of the neo-Hobbesian past or those of the neo-Rousseauian present. Both deny tribal peoples their complete humanity. A previous era refused to acknowledge the intelligence, sociability, and generosity of uncivilized people and the richness, effectiveness, and rationality of their ways of life. Today, popular opinion finds it difficult to attribute to tribal peoples a capacity for rapacious-ness, cruelty, ecological heedlessness, and Machiavellian guile equal to our own. (For example, when ecological accusations fly, who recalls the ten marvellous and unique species of flightless birds [Moas] hunted to extinction by the ancient Polynesians who first settled New Zealand?) Both laypersons and academics now prefer a vision of tribal peoples as lambs in Eden, spouting ecological mysticism and disdain for the material conditions of life. In short, we wish them to be more righteous and spiritual (in our terms, not theirs), happier and less emotionally complicated, and less prone to rational calculations of self-interest than ourselves.12 With only rare exceptions, Westerners of the past few centuries have found it difficult to accept that primitive and prehistoric people were ever as clever, as morally equivocal, and as emotionally complex as themselves. When we attribute to primitive and prehistoric people only our virtues and none of our vices, we dehumanize them as much as ourselves.
A wise writer once noted that “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”13 By believing that primitive and prehistoric peoples were far more humane and peaceful than their modern civilized counterparts, we metaphorically make beasts of ourselves. Our capacity for organized violence, the universal ugliness of war, and the intricate difficulties of keeping a peace are part of the “pain” of being human. Accepting the despairing myth of the pacified past encourages us to neglect solving these universal problems in the only place we can—in the present, among ourselves.