ritics of American society see too many of us as semi-literate, self-involved, materialistic, racist, politically unaware, etc., but we rarely hear us called “primitive,” and if we did it would not seem credible. After all, “primitive” tribes no longer exist. Tribes like the Tifalmin of New Guinea, the Yanomamo of Brazil, the Turkana of northwestern Kenya that were isolated and intact as recently as 50 years ago are no longer. Technological progress blurred the boundaries between these groups and their “modern” neighbors. But there are “primitive” residues in many of us today, and for a surprising number—an inchoate nostalgia for the clarity the primitive worldview offered. An anthropologist looking more kindly at some in the Trump base than those people who think of them as “deplorables” might interpret their unshakeable support of Trump in such a way, allowing perhaps for better understanding.
Anthropologists have variously defined “primitive” societies as preliterate, or “folk” societies, ones that existed before the rise of cities. These groupings (“societies” is too large a term for them) were first of all characterized by smallness, isolation, and homogeneity; there were no outsiders, solidarity was based on familial, clan or tribal affiliations all of which reinforced shared beliefs. Though there were, as in all human groups, those who deviated from the norm, the “fundamental order” of primitive groups “was a matter of moral conviction” as anthropologist Robert Redfield put it. For the members of such societies “their sense of right and wrong springs from the unconscious roots of social feeling, and is therefore unreasoned, compulsive and strong” as British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown put it long ago. A sure sense of the moral universe is what held people together.
To the primitive, outsiders are hostile and dangerous, only those inside the group can be trusted. Primitive people allow few if any doubts about existence or everyday phenomena. Everything is explainable by magical narratives and myths, rich in symbols: disease, the different roles of men, women, children, ancestors, the arc of life from birth to death, everything is constructed to answer both the large and small questions about life and its meaning. There is little room for ambiguity.
In the early 1970s the then-isolated Tifalmin of New Guinea explained illness and death by the ubiquitous presence of demons called “bis.” A bis is an evil person who has the power to kill people by magic. A bis can transform him or herself into a bird, a lizard, or a toad, all the better to be in position to harm someone. But its magic is most potent when a person is alone. Therefore, being alone is dangerous, and staying within the company of the group provides safety and incidentally increases solidarity. The Tifalmin, like other primitive groups have countless taboos that dictate behavior. For example, if a person unintentionally touches the skull of an ancestor (kept in a cave) he or she must wait three days before touching a child. Few question these rules.
Historically, primitive life gave way to the rise of cities, hence “civilization” (from the Latin civitas for city). A society made up of cities is far more complex and heterogeneous than primitive society; it is the opposite of small and isolated. With civilization and complexity, the moral order is less self-contained and clear. As Redfield put it, “…with heterogeneity come doubts as to the moral order. Civilization is deracination.”
It is in this sense that many in the U.S. today are anti-civilization (and not coincidentally anti-big city). They lament the loss of a world in which things were sure, where the group was recognizable, unchanged and untouched by outsiders, in short, an idealized primitive past. The white supremacy movement can be understood as nostalgia for such a world in which clarity—of place (“we belong and you do not”), identity, ownership and rights—is clear and unequivocal.
After the Spanish Conquest of Latin America, a native Mayan lamented the loss of the old moral order: “Then everything was good. Then they adhered to the dictates of their reason. There was no sin; In the holy faith their lives were passed. There was then no sickness; they had then no aching bones…. At the same time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here. They brought shameful things when they came.”
This 500-year-old lament could be uttered today by Americans hungering for a return to an imagined “orderly” time before the “foreigners” came, before multiculturalism. For many, the immigrant is thus not just an undeserving intruder taking away jobs or spending welfare money. The Trump accusation of immigrant rape and murder resonates with the primitive view of the dangerous and menacing outsider; a threat to the moral order of “our” way of life.
The sense of loss of order and a longing for a return to simple clarity become all the more intense as the world comes to seem more and more chaotic. And the greater the intensity of the sense of loss, the greater the fear, the anger and the tendency to want to fight against something or someone, often with violence. Flexibility and nuance in the face of the inchoately seen threat are not possible; only rigid opposition, feeding into our current state of polarization.
Primitives tend not to reflect on what is happening around them, but instead they cling (and are susceptible) to symbols and ideas that fit together in ways that reduce doubt and dissonance. In this way, many Americans believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax, that QAnon is taking over, that Obama hates America, that whatever the media say is “fake,” that drinking bleach will prevent COVID-19, and so on. Most telling is their capacity to deny what is in front of them. Just as a “bis” cannot be seen, and yet the Tifalmin are sure of its existence, similarly the Trump base is positive that Trump is a God-loving patriot who truly cares about them. In his famous boast about not losing his base’s support if he shot someone on 5th Avenue, Trump counts on their denial of reality.
The primitive mind responds to simple formulations that can be easily repeated as in “four legs good, two legs bad” (from Orwell’s Animal Farm). Trump is a master of reducing everything to easy repetition (“little Marco,” “crooked Hillary, “lock her up”). During the Republican Convention, the repetitions were rife, in particular the claim that “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs” marks the Trump era. With such simple repetitions the fact that nearly a quarter of the jobs held by under-educated Americans have disappeared during the COVID-19 crisis, is rendered meaningless. Just as a primitive tribesperson cannot be convinced that the frog in front of him is not a frog, but an evil sorcerer, so it is with Trump’s assertion that facts are “fake news.” Repeating simple words makes it easy to transform them into unassailable beliefs. It goes without saying that self-preservation, and self-interest have little to do with such beliefs. What’s important is that they allay one’s fears. For a primitive, a waving of hands over a sick person accompanied by an incantation, remains the right treatment despite the death of the person hours later.
But the Trump base is not alone in its attraction to aspects of the primitive world view; it is just more extreme. All of us use parts of our minds to avoid reflection, to make symbolic shortcuts, to act on superstitions, to skip over doubts and make us sure. The “elites” who shop at Whole Foods believe, for example, that non-GMO products are safer, better, healthier. We do not stop and ask whether we are merely conforming to a kind of group-think about food, or about what kind of car is best, or how to raise our kids. And of course, it takes “two” to polarize, and we are just as rigid in many of our views as the Trump base. But still, in cities, where there is a mix of people, where there is education, literacy, where people are more exposed to speculative thinking, resilience in the face of existential dilemmas and chaos is fostered by the very diversity and complexity around us. We may harbor some aspects of the primitive, but we’re still capable of bracketing them when it comes time to make decisions about our collective future.
That is the optimistic side of the story here: humans are basically creative and resilient. While the breaking down of local cultures can result in a profound sense of the loss of meaning and purpose, human intelligence can also generate a fresh moral vision, and enlarge and widen the view of the world, rendering it far less primitive. Indeed, we saw this happen steadily during the period roughly between 1945 and 2001 when the world in general, and the United States in particular, became infinitely more open and tolerant. Since then, the pendulum has swung back towards greater primitivism. Let us hope the election this year will be the start of a swing the other way.
a global affairs media network
Is America Now a “Primitive” Society?
Photo by Andrew Benz via Unsplash.
September 17, 2020
C
ritics of American society see too many of us as semi-literate, self-involved, materialistic, racist, politically unaware, etc., but we rarely hear us called “primitive,” and if we did it would not seem credible. After all, “primitive” tribes no longer exist. Tribes like the Tifalmin of New Guinea, the Yanomamo of Brazil, the Turkana of northwestern Kenya that were isolated and intact as recently as 50 years ago are no longer. Technological progress blurred the boundaries between these groups and their “modern” neighbors. But there are “primitive” residues in many of us today, and for a surprising number—an inchoate nostalgia for the clarity the primitive worldview offered. An anthropologist looking more kindly at some in the Trump base than those people who think of them as “deplorables” might interpret their unshakeable support of Trump in such a way, allowing perhaps for better understanding.
Anthropologists have variously defined “primitive” societies as preliterate, or “folk” societies, ones that existed before the rise of cities. These groupings (“societies” is too large a term for them) were first of all characterized by smallness, isolation, and homogeneity; there were no outsiders, solidarity was based on familial, clan or tribal affiliations all of which reinforced shared beliefs. Though there were, as in all human groups, those who deviated from the norm, the “fundamental order” of primitive groups “was a matter of moral conviction” as anthropologist Robert Redfield put it. For the members of such societies “their sense of right and wrong springs from the unconscious roots of social feeling, and is therefore unreasoned, compulsive and strong” as British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown put it long ago. A sure sense of the moral universe is what held people together.
To the primitive, outsiders are hostile and dangerous, only those inside the group can be trusted. Primitive people allow few if any doubts about existence or everyday phenomena. Everything is explainable by magical narratives and myths, rich in symbols: disease, the different roles of men, women, children, ancestors, the arc of life from birth to death, everything is constructed to answer both the large and small questions about life and its meaning. There is little room for ambiguity.
In the early 1970s the then-isolated Tifalmin of New Guinea explained illness and death by the ubiquitous presence of demons called “bis.” A bis is an evil person who has the power to kill people by magic. A bis can transform him or herself into a bird, a lizard, or a toad, all the better to be in position to harm someone. But its magic is most potent when a person is alone. Therefore, being alone is dangerous, and staying within the company of the group provides safety and incidentally increases solidarity. The Tifalmin, like other primitive groups have countless taboos that dictate behavior. For example, if a person unintentionally touches the skull of an ancestor (kept in a cave) he or she must wait three days before touching a child. Few question these rules.
Historically, primitive life gave way to the rise of cities, hence “civilization” (from the Latin civitas for city). A society made up of cities is far more complex and heterogeneous than primitive society; it is the opposite of small and isolated. With civilization and complexity, the moral order is less self-contained and clear. As Redfield put it, “…with heterogeneity come doubts as to the moral order. Civilization is deracination.”
It is in this sense that many in the U.S. today are anti-civilization (and not coincidentally anti-big city). They lament the loss of a world in which things were sure, where the group was recognizable, unchanged and untouched by outsiders, in short, an idealized primitive past. The white supremacy movement can be understood as nostalgia for such a world in which clarity—of place (“we belong and you do not”), identity, ownership and rights—is clear and unequivocal.
After the Spanish Conquest of Latin America, a native Mayan lamented the loss of the old moral order: “Then everything was good. Then they adhered to the dictates of their reason. There was no sin; In the holy faith their lives were passed. There was then no sickness; they had then no aching bones…. At the same time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here. They brought shameful things when they came.”
This 500-year-old lament could be uttered today by Americans hungering for a return to an imagined “orderly” time before the “foreigners” came, before multiculturalism. For many, the immigrant is thus not just an undeserving intruder taking away jobs or spending welfare money. The Trump accusation of immigrant rape and murder resonates with the primitive view of the dangerous and menacing outsider; a threat to the moral order of “our” way of life.
The sense of loss of order and a longing for a return to simple clarity become all the more intense as the world comes to seem more and more chaotic. And the greater the intensity of the sense of loss, the greater the fear, the anger and the tendency to want to fight against something or someone, often with violence. Flexibility and nuance in the face of the inchoately seen threat are not possible; only rigid opposition, feeding into our current state of polarization.
Primitives tend not to reflect on what is happening around them, but instead they cling (and are susceptible) to symbols and ideas that fit together in ways that reduce doubt and dissonance. In this way, many Americans believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax, that QAnon is taking over, that Obama hates America, that whatever the media say is “fake,” that drinking bleach will prevent COVID-19, and so on. Most telling is their capacity to deny what is in front of them. Just as a “bis” cannot be seen, and yet the Tifalmin are sure of its existence, similarly the Trump base is positive that Trump is a God-loving patriot who truly cares about them. In his famous boast about not losing his base’s support if he shot someone on 5th Avenue, Trump counts on their denial of reality.
The primitive mind responds to simple formulations that can be easily repeated as in “four legs good, two legs bad” (from Orwell’s Animal Farm). Trump is a master of reducing everything to easy repetition (“little Marco,” “crooked Hillary, “lock her up”). During the Republican Convention, the repetitions were rife, in particular the claim that “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs” marks the Trump era. With such simple repetitions the fact that nearly a quarter of the jobs held by under-educated Americans have disappeared during the COVID-19 crisis, is rendered meaningless. Just as a primitive tribesperson cannot be convinced that the frog in front of him is not a frog, but an evil sorcerer, so it is with Trump’s assertion that facts are “fake news.” Repeating simple words makes it easy to transform them into unassailable beliefs. It goes without saying that self-preservation, and self-interest have little to do with such beliefs. What’s important is that they allay one’s fears. For a primitive, a waving of hands over a sick person accompanied by an incantation, remains the right treatment despite the death of the person hours later.
But the Trump base is not alone in its attraction to aspects of the primitive world view; it is just more extreme. All of us use parts of our minds to avoid reflection, to make symbolic shortcuts, to act on superstitions, to skip over doubts and make us sure. The “elites” who shop at Whole Foods believe, for example, that non-GMO products are safer, better, healthier. We do not stop and ask whether we are merely conforming to a kind of group-think about food, or about what kind of car is best, or how to raise our kids. And of course, it takes “two” to polarize, and we are just as rigid in many of our views as the Trump base. But still, in cities, where there is a mix of people, where there is education, literacy, where people are more exposed to speculative thinking, resilience in the face of existential dilemmas and chaos is fostered by the very diversity and complexity around us. We may harbor some aspects of the primitive, but we’re still capable of bracketing them when it comes time to make decisions about our collective future.
That is the optimistic side of the story here: humans are basically creative and resilient. While the breaking down of local cultures can result in a profound sense of the loss of meaning and purpose, human intelligence can also generate a fresh moral vision, and enlarge and widen the view of the world, rendering it far less primitive. Indeed, we saw this happen steadily during the period roughly between 1945 and 2001 when the world in general, and the United States in particular, became infinitely more open and tolerant. Since then, the pendulum has swung back towards greater primitivism. Let us hope the election this year will be the start of a swing the other way.
