The New Criterion

Professor Charles Taylor’s heart aches for the Crow—the Crow Indians of the Yellowstone river valley, that is, whose warriors are now mere ghosts, and whose culture of incessant killing and scalping and murder and rapine has been irrevocably lost. “Tragically lost,” says Taylor, Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University. In his mind cultural loss is about the worst thing that can happen.

Genocide is even more serious, it’s true, but as he writes in last April’s New York Review of Books, reviewing Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, “The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone.” He then quotes the tribal chief Plenty Coups who said back in the 1920s that “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”

Now you can find this sort of thing all over the world, with or without the poignant image of departing buffalo—and although you may be surprised to hear this, quite often something did happen. In New Zealand and Australia, individual Maoris or Aborigines of will, energy, and foresight picked themselves up and got on with it, changing their lives and taking new directions. Why didn’t this happen among the Crow? Why have they not lifted up their hearts and started again?

Of course the truth is that many of them did exactly that, and very successfully too. But success stories about those who got an education and assimilated and became productive members of modern society are of no interest to Professor Taylor. Like other mourners at the bier, he is only interested in the “terrible reality” of cultural extinction, and in the masochistic opportunity it provides for self-flagellating exercises in Western guilt and shame. It is a fate

that we in “advanced,” more “complex” societies have been imposing for many centuries on “indigenous” or “tribal” peoples.

How true, alas, how true! But before we take out our handkerchiefs and dab our teary eyes, let us ask what Crow culture actually looked like. What did people do? What values did they hold and believe in, and how do those values and beliefs stack up today? It is to Professor Taylor’s credit that he provides a long and sobering quotation from the distinguished anthropologist Robert Lowie, who visited the Crow a century ago. As Lowie tells us:

War was not a concern of a class nor even of the male sex, but of the whole population, from cradle to grave. Girls as well as boys derived their names from a famous man’s exploit. Women danced wearing scalps, derived honor from their husband’s deeds, publicly exhibited the men’s shields or weapons; and a woman’s lamentations over a slain son was the most effective goad to a punitive expedition… .

Most characteristic was the intertwining of war and religion. The Sun Dance, being a prayer for revenge, was naturally saturated with military episodes… . More significant still, every single military undertaking was theoretically inspired by a relation of a story in dream or vision; and since success in life was so largely a matter of martial glory, war exploits became the chief content of prayer.

For Charles Taylor, this represents a thriving and healthy society. Not for a moment does he think it is sick. Killing as a way of life? Militarized women festooned with scalps? Religion and murder insidiously combined? With all due respect, how is this salubrious? But the professor has a ready answer. Old-time Crow society is healthy because it embodies an “integrated” culture where human hopes are fulfilled, and desires are satisfied, and emotional needs are met—even if you hope for war, you desire human scalps, and you pray for successful homicide.

This savage world is in fact nothing more than the dark and chaotic domain of strife, treachery, and unending bloody vengeance that mankind’s long struggle to build civil society very sensibly left behind. It is the world of Homer, of Hector and Achilles. It is the world portrayed in the Oresteia of Aeschylus, in which Agamemnon must die for sacrificing Iphigenia, and Clytemnestra must die for murdering Agamemnon, and Orestes must die for murdering … and so on.

But wait a minute: the really interesting thing of course is that Orestes does not die, for unlike Professor Taylor (who imagines that murderous cultures of this kind were marvels of political and religious integration, and that to lose them is an unrelieved calamity), Aeschylus, 2,465 years ago, knew this was sentimental nonsense. And vicious nonsense too. Aeschylus understood that tribal and clan feuds were quite simply incompatible with civilized life. They had to be stopped and abandoned. Their loss was no tragedy: it was a necessary step forward in social evolution. So in the final play of his trilogy, circa 458 B.C., Athena proposes a new vision of both justice and human society: the Furies, hell-bent on vengeance, become the peace-making Eumenides (a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission), and the unending chain of killing that the Crow Indians never managed to escape comes to a provisional end.

Charles Taylor is an authority on Hegel, and it may seem pointless to try to bring him down to earth. But let us take a not unimportant issue central to his argument: is it empirically the case that warrior societies, when forced to give up routine killing, always despond, decline, find life has lost all meaning, and lie down and despairingly die? Maybe some Crow felt that way. Maybe some didn’t. Anyway, what is the evidence from elsewhere?

Fortunately another writer, who is a trained anthropologist too and much better informed, provides an alternative view. In a book that Charles Taylor and many others should read, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, Robert Edgerton describes some of the lost cultures whose passing brings tears to Taylor’s eyes. His account of the irrational, pathological, and violently disruptive features of these supposedly well-integrated tribal societies is riveting, and drawn from right across the ethnographic record. There are many examples—the Xhosa in southern Africa, the Siriono in Brazil, the Tasmanians—and they are deeply instructive.

Here, however, we are mainly concerned with the issue of pacification, and the costs and benefits to people in giving up traditional patterns of violence, and intertribal strife, along with their associated horrific initiation ceremonies. Was primitive war the culturally unifying force Professor Taylor suggests it was in the pages of The New York Review? Was it a source of satisfaction for all? What happened in Papua New Guinea?

In some societies [writes Edgerton], warfare led to tangible gains in arable land, livestock, hunting territory, captives, and other resources. But for most societies these gains were ephemeral and outweighed by the costs of retaliation and irresolvable violence.

For example, the Mae Enga of highland Papua New Guinea fought incessantly to gain and hold arable land, but the price they paid for meagre advantage was high. Twenty-five percent of all male deaths were the result of warfare, and anxiety was endemic.

Elsewhere in highland Papua New Guinea the percentage of male deaths due to warfare was even higher. For a modern state to have, year after year, 25 or 30 percent of its male deaths result from warfare would be almost unthinkable. For some societies in highland Papua New Guinea and for others in Amazonia, warfare with its terrible casualities was virtually unending.

Will suppressing tribal warfare lead to all sorts of undesirable unintended effects—domestic violence, for example, or suicide? When police pacified the Dugum Dani of Irian Jaya in 1961, the American anthropologist Karl Heider thought it would:

Heider was convinced that warfare was so central to Dani life that if it were abolished, the result would be an increase of within-group violence, including suicide, which he thought of as a form of hostility directed inward. Heider was wrong, as he later freely admitted. For two years following pacification, there were no suicides and no increase in within-group violence. What is more, the Dani never complained to him about the police-imposed prevention of their presumably all-important practice of warfare.

How attached are warlike societies to their violent initiation ceremonies? Not much it seems. Many ethnographers have reported how seemingly indispensable rites of passage were quickly abandoned after contact with Christian missionaries or European administrators:

Societies throughout highland Papua New Guinea (before Australian contact) required that boys go through initiation ceremonies in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced… .

These ceremonies were generally thought by anthropologists to play a vital role in these societies; but soon after Australian contact took place, several of these societies gave up their violent initiation rituals without apparent reluctance. Some men even volunteered the information that they did not regret giving up the more violent aspects of their initiations.

No one who considers the plight of many tribal peoples today can regard their predicament without concern. My own view, however, is that sitting around on ancestral lands, pretending that the values of the tribal world can be artificially preserved even though the economic foundations of that world have long gone, and doing nothing while community health collapses, alcoholism soars, and child abuse and domestic violence run out of control, is not the way forward. A clean and decisive break with the past is preferable. You can’t go back—so move on. And if Professor Taylor is inclined to weep when he thinks of all those lost traditions, perhaps he might spare a tear for the boys in New Guinea described in the passage above—boys without number—who were forced to suffer those cruelties in days gone by.