The Myth of the Noble Savage

[eborr]

Interesting to use the example of Jesus as an individual who changed the course of history, after all none of the New Testement was written by Jesus it is a synthesis of what the his hegenomous followers wanted to be attributed to him -


Historical novels are insidious things, unless you know a huge amount about the period they tend to shape your thinking - unless you are ultra careful, it becomes a bit like the confusion between the story in Lord of the Rings and the story in Lord of the Rings

[Jnyusa]

Wow! This thread really went in a different direction since I was here yesterday!

At some point in the immediate future I'm going to try to explain the way interdisciplinary economists from my own school of thought approach the problem of understanding indigenous peoples, but I still haven't found time to compose that. So let me just make a few comments on the current topic.

Faramond -- because you are the one who mainly objected to this idea I'll address this to you --

I don't believe in geographic or economic determinism either. Rather, geography and economics place physical boundaries around the directions in which a culture may evolve in the short run. The boundaries are not absolute or permanent either - people move, people innovate.

The reason I give a great deal of importance to these factors is because anthropological or sociological explanations must not contradict what we know about economic and geographic dynamics. We look at these boundary conditions to place reality checks on what other disciplines are telling us; and their research does the same to us. I cannot come up with theories of economic development that contradict anthropological knowledge.

Mith -- again, because you are the one who introduced the argument from the individual I'll address this to you --

Individualism is a very modern concept; very modern, and largely restricted to Western cultures. I can't say whether ancient or indigenous Peoples thought/think of themselves as individuals -- one needs a really intimate knowledge of the language to draw a conclusion about this. But I can say with some certainty that ancient Peoples and modern indigenous Peoples did not/do not think of their prospects as individual in nature. "Go West, young man!" would make no sense to them; but "My People, we must leave Egypt," would.

Because there is so much history for us modern folks to learn, our educational system tends to reduce every age to its most famous representatives, presenting them either as those who typified the age or as those who innovated its changes. But ages are not shaped by individuals; it is individuals who are shaped by their age, and then if those individuals become famous because of what they have written or done, we may speak of them as representative of a trend.

There are no thoughts that simply fall from the blue sky onto unsuspecting individuals and revolutionize the times in which they live. It sometimes appears this way because of how we are taught history, but if you enter the study of an age in depth, you find in all cases that the evolutions are not tidy. There are always early proponents who are ignored, counter trends that delay acceptance of ideas, every great person had a teacher whose thinking he reflects even if it is to identify those ideas with which he is going to disagree, as with the most famous case of Aristotle and Plato whose differing approaches would define empirical debate for the subsequent two thousand years. Yet the roots of all their ideas can be found in earlier, less famous people.

The same is true of indigenous people. The neolithic "revolution" by which we identify an entire period of history lasting thousands of years was certainly not the result of one individual having a great idea. It was an accumulation of knowledge, a solving of successive problems, which eventually crossed a critical threshold and altered significantly the economic prospects of all humans. This knowledge took thousands of years to disseminate across the globe, and there are some places that it never reached because their economies were too different to make use of it. In certain areas we can see the gradation of acceptance of these new ideas, and so we are forced to define a fuzzy interim period known as mesolithic to convey the messiness of this evolution.

The cult of individualism begins with Hegel, I think. Our culture is now infused with this notion that some individuals matter more than others, and then we busy ourselves trying to identify who they are. This search has become a kind of religion because of Marx's vehement opposition to it. To deny the importance of the individual is to be communist. This is where our instilled fear of overlooking the individual comes from. But by insisting on individualism we actually prove the opposite - that we are products of our age and reflect the thoughts and fears of a very narrow and localized context.

Of course it is true that there must always be some person who is the first to try out the new idea and test whether it works, but for the most significant revolutions in human history this person is unknown, and would not have thought of themselves as an innovator, and possibly not even as an individual, but as one of many whose daily task was to contribute their share to the survival of their particular tribe.

Who first controlled fire? Who invented irrigation? Who tamed the first wild cow? All of these things are more significant to humanity than the fact that Frederick Wilhelm dreamed of Greater Prussia or that Leonardo da Vinci designed airplanes.

The elimination of indigenous tribes and their absorption into the larger identities of their conquerors happened very early in Europe - there was no one to tell their tale except their conqueror and such tales must always be held suspect. There were hundreds of different tribes living in the South of England when Julius Caesar arrived and conquered them. What do we know about them? A bit from the Greeks, a bit from the Romans, otherwise nothing. The Romans destroyed their written records, in the same way that Alexander destroyed the written records of all Peoples that he conquered. Cultures was conscientiously destroyed and today we know next to nothing about pre-Alexandrian Persia because of Alexander. Our only source of info now is the archeological record and the theoretical boundaries we can place around interpretations of that record from economics and geography and paleobotany and ecology, etc.

Because we know next to nothing about our own ancestry prior to the great conquistadors of western history we tend to think of indigenous Peoples as those discovered from the 15th century on during the voyages of discovery. With the exception of the North American Indians, these are mostly tropical peoples, and the Europeans had zero context for interpreting what they saw, and the natives had zero context for understanding the Europeans. Tropical ecology forces cultures to evolve an entirely different set of knowledge from that accumulated by temperate zone cultures, which I will talk about in the 'explanatory' post when I get around to that. When these two cultures met they might as well have come from different planets.

Lord M., you said that we can trust anecdotal accounts. Not so. Nothing could be further from the truth. Could you be plunked down in China right now in the middle of a religious festival and explain the belief system behind the acts you were seeing? Could you even accurately describe what you were seeing? I can't even look at PBS programs about these medieval English festivals and figure out the meaning of the things those people are doing unless someone who already knows explains them to me, and I do have a shared context and a shared language and so on.

We are much too facile in our belief that we know what is going on and that all people are just like us, only more primitive or more aggressive, etc. There is an arrogance that comes to us out of the 18th century scientific tradition that we have to abandon, in my opinion, before we can know much of anything about Peoples who are different from ourselves.

Jn

[axordil]

18th century scientific tradition, and 19th century Romanticism.

[Jnyusa]

Yes, where the idealized concept of the 'savage' is concerned, we have to blame the Romantics.

Jn

[MithLuin]

Erm...I was asking a question?

I was trying to establish the relationship between an individual and a culture. I suggested that the 'ideal' was when the idividual was willingly part of the culture and accepted it - meaning that there is an understanding that this person was working with other people. So, neither individual nor culture takes over at the expense of the other, and the tension between the two does not result in bloody conflict.

To me, the point of this thread is to examine what makes a culture good. Because there is going to be conflict, we don't live in a world of happy, smiley people, and it matters who wins and why. You can't really examine whether the Europeans conquering the globe is good or bad or contrast their culture to the cultures they encountered if you don't know what you're looking for in a culture. Basically, by what standard do you condemn them? By the standard that we should respect other cultures, which is an idea that can by found in the humanism of Western Civ? But...wait. We are condemning Western Civ with an idea expressed by that same culture?

I suggested that a 'healthy' culture was one that had a balance between the contributions of the individual and the dictates of the society, and also one which supported 'justice'. You suggested that justice was culturally-defined, and I agreed (to a point). So, then...couldn't someone say that all cultures are just by their own standards?

And then I said that I meant the reality of justice, not the theory. All cultures have a theory of justice, but none practices it perfectly. The more extreme the disconnect, the more dissatisfied the people (usually), and the less likely you can describe the society as a healthy balance between the individual and the culture.

So, yes, I do think there is a disconnect between reality and cultural ideals of goodness and truth. But I think it is obvious what causes that disconnect - tension with other (perhaps less noble) concerns. Ie, how are we going to eat? How can I make you do my work for me? How can I get what you have? But I wanted to sleep with her. Etc. You might as well ask "Why don't people always do what they know is the right thing?" Something tempts them to take a shortcut or take advantage, or it just costs too much to follow through. 'Why do countries break treaties?' is a very similar question to 'Why do children cheat when playing a game?'

So, no, I wasn't asking what caused the disconnect. I was asking people not to be so cynical about its existence when evaluating a culture. Rather than saying that everything is really run by geography, biology and economics, understand that all three of these create tensions with the core values the culture is trying to live by. So much so that sometimes the values aren't very recognizable, but that doesn't mean they should be discounted.



Oh, and about Pastwatch - it combines time travel with his understanding of world history, so it isn't completely wishful thinking. But I disagree with many of his premises and conclusions. The basic idea is that certain 'deadly' ideas will wipe out the human race if they are let to run too long. One of these is human sacrifice (which the Aztecs had). Another is slavery (with the Europeans had). So, in his view, neither group could be allowed to conquer the other, because then the human race was doomed. So, interventions were needed to alter the Aztec culture to get rid of human sacrifice and then allow the cultures to have contact. I think. (I forget how he stopped slavery in time to prevent DOOM, but there you have it ).

Edit: Oh, hi again, Jny.

I was not advocating individualism, but trying to place the individual within the context of culture so that modern Americans (who are hung up about individuals) can relate to this conversation. [Yeah, you're not all Americans, I know, I know....]

As for the concept of the individual in Western History, it depends what you are talking about. The concept of modern 'individualism' is of course very new. But the importance of an individual person's will was certainly discussed by Augustine (c. 500 AD), and his thought was a dominant force all through the Middle Ages. For instance, you needed to consent to marriage - if someone forced you, that was wrong. But wait a minute, we know all about arranged marriages back then..... Ah, but you still had to consent, just as you were expected to 'consent' to being governed by a King. Their concept of the importance of freedom and free will was the same, just they interpreted how that played out a bit differently. You were often seen as a member of your family just as much as you were an individual - but all the importance of relative rank and who sat where focused very much on the individuals.

[axordil]

Where do the core values come from, though? As jny notes, they don't pop out of the aether into people's heads. They have to have concrete origins in the circumstance of the group.

[MithLuin]

Yes, which is what 'culture' is - each culture grows from the experiences of that group of people. But not all of them would tell the same stories about the same circumstances - not whether the hero is a sailor or a king, but whether he is a clever trickster or strong warrior. Just as a similar experience can produce different stories, it can produce a different understanding of the importance of core values.

But having core values is human. How they are shaped is cultural.

[Jnyusa]

So, then...couldn't someone say that all cultures are just by their own standards?

I think this is generally true. No culture succeeds by perpetuating injustice against its own people. The people will, as you said, rebel.

But I would argue that it is very rare for a society to realign itself as a result of injustice done to an individual. Societies do not even realign themselves when there are injustices against a whole group, or they do so very slowly, e.g. the civil rights movement in America.

The difficulty of deciding whether a culture is 'good' or not comes from another source, in my opinion. We can't define 'good' except with reference to our own ideas of what that means, and our own ideas are themselves culturally bound. The question we have to ask is whether the culture/society works for the people who are in it. Are they content to live within the bounds of their culture? Is it good for them?

We have no right to say that something is bad only because it is bad by our standards, or to pretend that there are logical absolutes that we can impose on society/culture. (That is the 18th ce arrogance we have to get rid of.) Nine times out of ten, in my experience, we will find out that our own culture perpetuates the same kind of abuse but it takes a different form, so the thing we criticize is something we do ourselves but understand its justifications and therefore think it good, or at worst the lesser of two evils, or an exception to how we really are, and so forth.

Jn

[axordil]

Mith--

Agreed. For example, as Joe Campbell noted, pretty much all cultures have a trickster figure in their myths, but the light in which they get depicted varies widely depending on the nature of the culture.

And that difference is due to whether the trickster is seen as a necessary evil, a threat to order, a goad to change, a friend to man (if not the gods), et al.

Now: where does the interpretation of the role of the trickster arise? In the core values of the culture, which are determined initially when the culture is forming according to the circumstance of the people at the time.

jny--

I would support the idea of a culture that was good for its people and bad for its neighbors sliding over into the "possibly bad" column.

[Jnyusa]

I would support the idea of a culture that was good for its people and bad for its neighbors sliding over into the "possibly bad" column.

Yes, but we become aware of this conflict because the impact neighbors attempt to do something about it. We cannot make this judgment from the absolute. The original French and English trappers and traders who came to America were not repulsed by the Indians. The Indians welcomed the trade, as they welcomed the first English settlers. Settling on land that is occupied by someone else is not bad in and of itself. It depends on what's in it for both sides. If it is to mutual advantage, then on what basis could we judge it to be wrong?

It is only when the natives objected, indicating that the settlers had crossed some line, that we are asked to evaluate respective rights and judge whether subsequent actions were 'good' or 'bad' for the people who lived through them and, of course, for us who have to live with their consequences.

Jn

[yovargas]

The cult of individualism begins with Hegel, I think. Our culture is now infused with this notion that some individuals matter more than others, and then we busy ourselves trying to identify who they are.

...

Of course it is true that there must always be some person who is the first to try out the new idea and test whether it works...

So, of course, you admit the individual matters, as it is the individual(s) that creates progress of thought, technology, ect. And yet you call this simple, logical fact the "cult of individualism"?

[Jnyusa]

So, of course, you admit the individual matters, as it is the individual(s) that creates progress of thought, technology, ect. And yet you call this simple, logical fact the "cult of individualism"?

The individual does not develop ideas in a vacuum, Yov. It is not the individual as such who creates progress of thought, technology, etc. but the individual building on what society has already given him/her, making small adjustments at the margin. There are many more individuals who build in this manner than we acknowledge. The creative process is more collaborative and more universal than we credit. And in no case do we know the identity of the individuals who made the most significant contributions to human culture.

To explain my sentence which you quoted by an example: ten programmers work on new computer sofware, each one contributing to the concept, the code, the editing. Finally they think it will work, and one of those ten puts it into his computer and they all stand around and watch. Why would that one person whose computer is booted with the new program be considered more important than the other nine just because he is the one who hit the enter button?

I would argue that all the innovators we praise and point to as significant contributors to human development are exactly like that programmer who happened to be the one who hit enter.

Jn

[MithLuin]

I would agree with yov that that strains credulity. There are innovators. Sure, it's not one per invention - but the individual contributions of all the innovators makes a huge difference . Teamwork depends, by its very nature, on every individual on the team. Individuals and societies are a both/and thing, not an either/or thing..... PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction, used to amplify DNA) was invented in a stroke of genius by one woman while she was driving somewhere. She got the idea, pulled over and wrote it down. Would someone else have thought of it if she didn't? Well, sure, eventually. But don't relegate her contribution to an invisible committee.

I also hinted (somewhere a page ago) that I do hold that there are absolute standards of goodness and justice. And before you suggest that that is self-righteous of me, I did not suggest that I either knew them or live by them. I merely assert their existence.

I understand why people are leary of the idea of absolute standards. Too easy to get complacent and assume that mine are 'it'. Much better to keep striving and keep watch to make sure I'm not sliding off the deepend into injustice, chaos, and other unpleasant things . It is not surprising that when Legolas asserts in the movie "The Ring must be destroyed!", Gimli replies with mistrust, "And I suppose you think you're the one to do it?" It is good to be wary when people assert things as true absolutely, and to be aware of the agendas that may accompany their convictions.

After all, I do have moral convictions, as do we all. They are from my culture, and I am quite proud of them. I will also whet my axe when they are challenged .

BUT - this does not mean that I confuse them with a perfect expression of the absolute, ideal, perfect values, nor does it mean that I think my culture cannot learn from other cultures; I know we can. It just means that I think 'justice' has a meaning that is not limited to cultures, even if it always finds its expression within cultures in real life.

I think the danger of relativism is that it settles for a "well, if it works for you..." approach in evaluating other cultures. This complacency is also dangerous, because the temptation is to preserve a culture without evaluating what is good or what is evil in it. I am not saying that anyone who looks at justice in a relative manner will be stagnant and unable to grow, merely that that is the pitfall to avoid. No, I don't think the Westerners should rush in and prevent the 12-yr-old girls from getting married. But I do think that is the kind of cultural norm that should be re-evaluated by the people of that culture, and not just be automatically accepted as okay by outsiders.

[yovargas]

I would argue that all the innovators we praise and point to as significant contributors to human development are exactly like that programmer who happened to be the one who hit enter.

Okay, I get what you're saying. Don't think I agree but even going along with it, my point still holds. Those 10 programmers are not interchageable cogs in some programming Borg collective! If you change one, much less all, individual in that group of programmers, the results can change drastically. The change may cause the project to fail totally, or be a far greater success. The different individual may want to take the project in a different direction, may cause a rift amongst the others, and maybe we end up with two teams of five instead of one team of ten. Maybe the two new projects both succeed; maybe they both fail.

You say that revolutionary ideas don't just fall from the sky. Maybe I can buy that. But they don't fall from "society" - they fall from one individual who was taught by another individual who was taught by another and so on. Given that collective thought is not possible, progress is the chain of individuals giving new thoughts to new individuals. And I'm arguing that if you remove one link in that chain - much less every link in that chain! - and the end result may radically change.

[vison]

Yes, yovargas, that is all true. Culture is not "collective thought", it is just the way any given group of people commonly live. That's all it is; culture is not the product of an individual, but of a bunch of individuals. Revolutionary ideas always arise from a culture, but indeed there comes along someone who sees what no one else saw, or who makes connections that no one else did. But no one could "invent" an electric light bulb in the year 1600, nor could anyone really formulate a Theory of Evolution: the groundwork had not yet been laid. Human history is full of the thoughts and deeds of individuals, but those individuals always came from somewhere. No one ever acted in a vacuum; as the saying goes, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

It is certainly true that if you change one thing, any thing, about any string of events you will likely change the outcome. But by how much? Say, for instance, that Queen Isabella had refused to sell her jewels in order to fund Columbus's adventure. Well, Columbus might have found the money elsewhere. Or some other man, a year or two later, might have gone instead of Columbus. The thing is, human existence in Europe in the late 1400's had reached a point at which such a venture was inevitable. And while it is certainly possible to IMAGINE that exploring Europeans might have acted differently than they did, I can see no reason whatsoever to think they would have.

[Jnyusa]

I understand why people are leary of the idea of absolute standards. Too easy to get complacent and assume that mine are 'it'. Much better to keep striving and keep watch to make sure I'm not sliding off the deepend into injustice, chaos, and other unpleasant things.

Not to mention that Absolutists have justification for every persecution they find expedient.

After all, I do have moral convictions, as do we all. They are from my culture, and I am quite proud of them. I will also whet my axe when they are challenged

Case in point.

It just means that I think 'justice' has a meaning that is not limited to cultures, even if it always finds its expression within cultures in real life.

But you also think more than that, Mith. You also think that your own beliefs are truth in some absolute sense, and this is the reason you feel justified in whetting your axe.

Racism is not about what we think of others. It is about what we think of ourselves. Our truth is objective, absolute, and superior. Never mind that we don't always live up to our ideals - our ideals are still the correct ones. All others, no matter how diverse, are put into a single 'other' category, culture-bound, relativistic and inferior. We possess the only essential; everyone else's truth is accidental. If they happen to hit on something we like we will borrow it, but the intrinsic value of the other is never acknowledged. This is why racism has so many heads, takes so many forms - because it is not about the particular culture being devalued, it is all about us and our superiority no matter what the comparison.

No one will rebuke a plumber or a professor of literature for having such a world view. But it is no longer an acceptable world view for those of us who theorize about other cultures in an empirical context. Empiricism and Absolutism cannot co-exist.

PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction, used to amplify DNA) was invented in a stroke of genius by one woman while she was driving somewhere. She got the idea, pulled over and wrote it down. Would someone else have thought of it if she didn't? Well, sure, eventually. But don't relegate her contribution to an invisible committee.

It does not relegate her contribution to an invisible commitee to acknowledge that she would not even be looking for something like a PCR if she came from some other cultural context. Or that her research would be impossible except for millenia of work by the mathematicians and chemists and biologists who preceded her. Or that the universities where she studied were founded and supported by people who died before she was born and spent their efforts creating an institution of use to her because learning had cultural value to them. It does not diminish her that she had the luck to be born into a society that recognizes the scientific capability of women and does not exclude them from education.

You describe her idea as a stroke of genius. I am sure she would not describe it that way herself. She would know what papers she read, what routes she considered, what hypotheses she rejected, prior to having this one insight where everything came together. She would probably feel amazement and gratitude that it did come together for her at last and she did not spend her career looking for something she could not find. And she probably felt humility that she 'got there first' and garnered a fame that belongs to many.

What I applaud in her as an individual is her discipline in using her intelligence to accomplish something difficult, her dilligence in writing down those ideas as they came, her willingness to defend them before peers. I applaud her for the part of it that was really up to her and could not have been accomplished except for her perseverence. I do not discount her simply because if she hadn't done it someone else would have. (That is Marx, by the way, and I do not share at all his belief in the inevitability of history.) But I refuse to pretend that she is a lone star riding the horizon, or that any of us are, because we are not.

The famous equation of Albert Einstein: E=mc^2. This was derived from three textbook equations that had been known for centuries. Einstein saw the connection between them that no one else had seen. Does it disparage him to say that he would not have written his equation if those other three equations had not been written first? Does it disparage him to say that he could not have thought of relativity theory in the decade following Newton, but only after centuries of anomalies had been recorded, intriguing the most intelligent among us to work on those particular puzzles?

This is doubly true in economics, and it is true of every scientific work, and it has always been so going back to the Enlightenment, to the Scholastics, to the ancient Greeks, step by step backwards to the first societies that could afford to have philosophers and mathematicians and physicians, to the first group of people who noticed that water runs downhill and if we dig a ditch ... that nameless committee whose trials and errors probably emerged from a lifetime of carrrying buckets and bemoaning the weight of water ... that tiny labor-saving improvement which sparked an agricultural revolution and made possible all the civilizations that followed.

Ask those persons, if you could, which of them had the genius to invent irrigation systems and they will look at you as if you landed fom Mars. "We were sitting around complaining about how heavy the bucket of water is .... " that is how the explanation will begin. And then they will tell you it didn't work the first time, it filled with mud, until someone else got the idea to line it with rocks, or whatever. It was a group effort as all real progress is, in spite of the fact that today, because of the kind of problem we work on, we spend as much time sitting alone at a desk struggling with an equation as we spend discussing the outcome with colleagues. And we have a whole universe of written communication in which every publication is attributed to individual authors, but if you turn to the last page you will see the foundations and scaffolding in the citations list. I do not need a second person to hold my eraser for me but I need help and consultation in other ways and thank goodness I get it.

Ask any sociologist, any communications specialist, any scientist, and they will tell you that the increasing rate of progress in our knowledge is due to the increased opportunities for collaboration and the increased efficiency of communication among collaborators. It is not due to better genetic engineering of individual genius.

Those 10 programmers are not interchageable cogs in some programming Borg collective!

Of course not! But they will not conceive of a Space Program if they live in the age of Stonehenge. In the age of Stonehenge they will conceive of Stonehenge, which cost its society the equivalent of our Space Program in accumulated knowledge and resources devoted to the effort.

But they don't fall from "society" - they fall from one individual who was taught by another individual who was taught by another and so on.

What do you think society is, if not all the people who came before you and taught you language and manners and how to do arithmetic?

Given that collective thought is not possible, progress is the chain of individuals giving new thoughts to new individuals. And I'm arguing that if you remove one link in that chain - much less every link in that chain! - and the end result may radically change.

Which is exactly the same thing that I am saying. It is the whole chain that matters. You cannot remove links willy-nilly and say this one is going to be important and the other one is not. How do you know, until the final product is realized, what the breakthrough will be or where it will come from? You don't.

Collective thought ... I bet there are a lot of people in the scientific community who would consider that description quite close to what they actually do.

Jn

eta: vison, we cross posted, but yes, you have caught the drift.

[MithLuin]

Well, yes, of course I recognize the historical context required for any discovery, and that culture is part of that history. I think Einstein was smart for figuring out Brownian motion, which is something I can understand , also based on data that had been published for years.

In the Civilization computer games, you have to make one advance before you can move on to the next.

As I keep trying to say, culture and individuals is a both/and scenario, not either/or. By asserting the contribution of an individual spark or idea...I am in no way belittling the necessary steps that preceded it.

You are saying "but no one can do any of that without the bigger culture leading up to that moment." And I agree, and say, surely not, but none of those things would ever have happened unless someone did them.

So do we agree? Or am I missing something very important about what you are saying?

You describe her idea as a stroke of genius. I am sure she would not describe it that way herself.

Actually....I think he does. (Kary Mullis is a guy not a girl, oops...) He wrote about his experience, and basically said 'wow, this idea came to me, and it was so simple and obvious.' He wouldn't have realized the significance if working with small samples of DNA wasn't a nuisance, but...it didn't really require a lot of prior knowledge. The problem he was thinking about at the time was unrelated. It really is a simple concept, and a simple process. Working out the details required a bit of reading papers and research...and help from his coworkers at that lab. But not the initial inspiration. And yes, PCR is straightforward and useful enough that someone would have thought of it, kinda like irrigation.

For an example from a different field: J. K. Rowling was riding on a train when she had an idea for a story about 'a boy who's a wizard, but he doesn't know it.' It just popped into her head. The phenomena of her books depends on a lot of cultural (and economic and marketing!) details, but the idea...just came out of nowhere. How it developed into a story reflects her culture.


But the real issue - absolutism.

No, I do not whet my axe because I consider myself to be appointed judge over all. I whet my axe because I believe things passionately and will fight for anything I think important or worth defending. That is part of my culture. One of those ideas is that there is an absolute basis to reality. I will not give up that idea, and I will not recuse myself from considering other cultures.

There is truth, and I will do everything I can to find out what it is.

Why do you think I cannot respect someone who thinks and feels differently than I do, just because I believe that? I recognize the pitfalls, and realize that this position requires humility - a very tricky virtue to hold onto. My safeguard is to learn by emersion - by making myself the minority, I am less likely to be arrogant and assume that my way is the right way of looking at things. And thus, absolutism can be criticized when it leads to persecution, but it should not be blanketly condemned because it may. I do not condemn relativism for making people complacent, but rather warn that that is the pitfall - if you become too complacent, you can miss opportunities to do good. It is an if...not inevitable.

I can evaluate things on a relative scale, and do. But because I am an absolutist, I care what the truth of the matter is.

I am neither a plumber nor a professor of literature; I am a high school teacher, responsible for shaping the minds of my students. Am I excused? Am I a menace to society? Should I be more careful with my metaphors? (The last time I went after someone with an axe, it was The Wagner - you can ask him what he thought of the experience).

Edit - I apologize if this disjointed and random; I didn't mean to post here at 2 AM!

[Faramond]

A thread at its best is collective thought.

There are lots of things I want to argue with, but I think it would be pointless to do so. I've decided to do no more arguing in this thread.

I don't believe in cultural relativism. This means that if I judge the actions of others, I will use the moral concepts of my own culture to do so. This may be a weakness. It may be that I should be a cultural relativist, but it is too hard, too much a strain on my sense of self. Or I may feel it is too humiliating to really act on the thought that the stories and traditions that are the foundations of my life aren't absolute truth. That's probably it.

I think it's best if I judge the actions of others as little as possible. That seems to be my only escape from arrogance. Jesus said something to the effect that humans shouldn't go around judging each other, so I think it's likely some good advice, even if he is imaginary.

The Golden Rule has been around for a long time, and crosses cultures, like a whispered word common to all languages, spoken at death. Jesus is one of many to say it and mean it. I wonder, which culture does Jesus belong to?

[Frelga]

Never mind that we don't always live up to our ideals - our ideals are still the correct ones. All others, no matter how diverse, are put into a single 'other' category, culture-bound, relativistic and inferior.

Indeed. Each measures with his own ruler.

For instance, Mith postulated that the measure of goodness of culture is how much it values human life. I agree - I do after all come from the religious tradition that teaches that every human being is created in the image of God and there is not crime more horrible than to destroy human life. OK, so we are the good guys, right Mith?

For instance again, running through Jny's eloquent posts I detect the underlying assumption that the more peaceful culture is inherently the "gooder" one, more civilized, more advanced. Warlike = bloodthirsty = inferior. Again, I agree. But that's the view from our particular stump in space and time.

There were many cultures where a man's greatest destiny was to be a warrior. Romans, Mongols, some North American tribes, English, Vikings... In those cultures, the warrior class did not see the value of human life as we do. Death was nothing to be afraid of, not the enemy's, not their own. For the most part, they were as ready to die as they were to kill.

It seems pretty horrific to us. And yet - everyone dies. Does it really matter if death comes 20 years earlier or later, whether it comes on the edge of sword or wheezing with pneumonia? I recall on the eve of New Year 2000 reporters asked one German guy what he was planning to do in the new Millennium. He replied, "I plan to be dead for the most of it." Given that, should we really look down on the more warlike cultures?

Let me be really explicit here - my own values place human life at the top of the pyramid. It's something that is so obvious to me that it's very easy to believe that everybody else instinctively feels the same way, deep down. When discussing other cultures, it is imperative to remember that no, not everybody does feel the same way deep down and what to me is supreme strength to others is an abysmal weakness.

Collective thought ... I bet there are a lot of people in the scientific community who would consider that description quite close to what they actually do.

Indeed again. That's why brainstorming works - getting a bunch of individuals into a group and letting ideas bounce from brain to brain. Society is, after all, just a bunch of individuals trying to survive together.

As someone who actually was on a team of, if not 10 then 7 programmers, I can tell you that indeed, the idiosyncrasies, strength and failings of each do shape the end program. And yet... there are only 2 people left from that original team, but the product lives on.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

A thread at its best is collective thought.

We should add this to our banner (in Tengwar, of course)!

In case someone is wondering, I'm not really serious.