Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Best I can tell, a key part of being a serious, interesting liberal thinker is to take some outdated shibboleths of the Left, and then criticize them very vociferously. The original way of doing this was to say all sorts of horrible things about communism — this just meant telling the truth. Then you would criticize the New Left, and then later you would say that America was afflicted by a Vietnam Syndrome that burdened us with unnecessary doubt when it came time to intervene in Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo or Iraq.

Well, my left-wing shibboleth, that very few people take seriously, is going to be any notion that hunter-gatherer societies were at all “better” than agricultural, civilized, centralized ones. Although there is some evidence that agriculture lead to the beginning of epidemic disease and may have, initially, decreased life expectancies, there is also the fact that hunter-gatherer societies were – and are – incredibly violent. An interesting article in New Scientist on the work of Santa Fe Institute evolutionary biologist Samuel Bowles has these intriguing bits of data:

In ancient graves excavated previously, Bowles found that up to 46 per cent of the skeletons from 15 different locations around the world showed signs of a violent death. More recently, war inflicted 30 per cent of deaths among the Ache, a hunter-gatherer population from Eastern Paraguay, 17 per cent among the Hiwi, who live in Venezuela and Colombia, while just 4 per cent among the Anbara in northern Australia.On average, warfare caused 14 per cent of the total deaths in ancient and more recent hunter-gatherers populations.

Now, this isn’t a pure inditement against hunter-gatherer society. For one, all this evidence comes from around 10,000-15,000 years ago, when agriculture was emerging and, as Bowles speculates “climactic swings that occurred between approximately 10,000 to 150,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene period may have pushed once-isolated bands of hunter-gatherers into more frequent contact with one another.” Second, any data gleaned from violent death rates among hunter-gatherer societes in Australia, Brazil or South Africa has to be treated very carefully, because those societies clearly aren’t the same as the ones that predominated in our pre-civilization days.

But the overall point that societies that exhibit very few of the hallmarks of civilization also exhibit very high rates of violent death, and moreover, that the occurence of violent death has been decreasing constantly, even including the horrible institutionalized mass death of the twentieth century.

Now, I don’t think very many on the left actually think that hunter-gatherer societies are particularly admirable or that they represent a model that we should emulate, but there is a particularly credulous school of social anthropology influenced by Franz Boas, which seems to have an almost Romantic attachment to pre-civilization societies and is willing to believe the best about them, despite evidence to the contrary.