Which way will the stone age vote swing?
Ever since the principles of our own social order have become a matter of sustained debate, there has been a persistent tendency to invoke the First Man to settle our disputes for us… It is not entirely clear why Early Man should possess such authority over our choices. Suppose that archaeologists digging up a very early site, found a well-preserved copy of the original Social Contract: should we feel bound by it terms, and proceed to declare all current statue law which was incompatible with it to be null and void?
—A great quote from Ernest Gellner’s Plough, Sword, and Book, which I will now keep close in my quote file thanks to a cheeky rant from John railing against utter and complete crap. (Though I think he’d agree with me that the study of psychoceramics itself, properly undertaken, can prove if not entirely edifying then at least entertaining.)
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I disagree that it's complete crap. Certainly at least 70% of it is, but I rather liked about 15% of the piece and was interested by some of the rest.
Which you make clear in your own piece. The part you were railing against was the "utter and complete crap," though, as you said yourself. I perhaps should have made the distinction more clear, but I was gunning for a quick rhetorical point, and anyway, I myself lost utter and complete patience with Gyrus's 15% when I got to the line dissing "traditional academic activities" such as "thinking" and "reading." Call me an old-fashioned grump, but that sort of façonnable anti-intellectualism--and dehumanization of academics, who themselves apparently never have ideas from dreams, drugs, sex, conversations with truckers who give them lifts, synchronicity-laden trails that lead them to books they wouldn't usually notice, trashy movies, walks in the countryside, emotional breakdowns, lazy days, and playing with kids--that sort of excuse for laziness toasts my cookies. So.
Oh it was mostly crap--I'd probably go higher than either of you on the crap to interesting ratio, roughly 10%/90%. I was particularly amused by the references to the Great Goddess (and let me tell you Gimbutas is not the person to use for ths argument) and then the Mother-Maiden-Crone bits, which have Robert Graves' fingerprints all over the place. Then the stuff about Amebury was just darlin'.
"traditional academic activities" such as "thinking" and "reading." Call me an old-fashioned grump, but that sort of façonnable anti-intellectualism--and dehumanization of academics
Actually, I saw that more as a critique of specific paths to truth and not of the people that walk those paths. In such pursuits, I find the idea that synchronicity and subjective experience are given as much weight as traditional intellectual work exceedingly sensible.
John: I do and I don't, myself. Yes, Robert Graves translated the Number of the Beast thanks to a vision thrown up from God-knows-where. But without checking your wild hairs against what we shall laugh up our sleeves as we term it common sense results in, well, monument-building aliens in chariots from outer space seeking the germ plasm of our females to strengthen their gold-mining bloodlines, and did I mention the secret conclave of carnivorous lizardmen under the sands of Dulce?
I would not give them equal weight; I would, instead, say that people ought to be open to both. It's two different ways of thinking, after all, and two different ways of seeing the world; it's two different maps of (rather, ways of mapping) the ten thousand things. Each is useful, and each can lead you astray. But the subjective is the more likely to trip you up and lead you down garden paths than the objective--which is the more likely to convince you that it's all been done and there's nothing new left under the sun and all that. Use the one to check the other; use the other to invigorate the first; use either in whichever proportion best suits whatever you're trying to get away with at the moment. But don't use the one to excuse your failings at the other, which is what Gyrus did, which cheesed me off. Prejudiced me against some of the keener insights into the genealogy of modern occultist thought that are offered, though I can't help but think Gyrus would be greatly profitted by reading Alan Bray--which, by the way, is proving spectacularly useful; thanks for the loan.
Lisa: perhaps I'm in a generous mood, for all my prejudice against him.
I think the general point about determining a reasonable relationship to historical and prehistoric social and cultural systems is more interesting than this particular piece of 85%+ crap.
As someone who went through a youthful phase of fascination with anthropology as a possible explanation of my personal problems (looking there instead of pop psych or religion or cargo-cult artist worship), I've dallied with ideas of a lost prehistoric utopia myself. I think I finally recognized the fallacy when I saw it reflected in others who latched onto other periods as their personal Eden -- 50's America, say, or the Third Reich, or Ancient Egypt, or Aztlán, or what have you.
Nevertheless, I think an understanding of our evolutionary origins and our varied cultural adaptations in the changing prehistoric and historic periods which followed is illuminating in that it can give us some sense of the ways in which we are and aren't likely to be adaptable.
I think the current fashion for biological determinism and evolutionary psychology is intriguing, although it too may be 90% crap (or at least 90% untestable). Whether, say, it turns out that women have a genetic predisposition to monogamy and men have one to stray (early claims which researchers are now busy refuting), people in this camp are asking some good questions -- much better than the folks who make up a Mother Goddess or a Golden Age of Happy White People out of whole cloth and wishful thinking.
wut up