Review of Our Kind by Marvin Harris
[note, if anyone read the first draft of this...I'm sorry.]
So much of history, as it's usually presented, is either a local
microcosm or a culturally specific snapshot, it fails to capture the
big (the big impersonal) picture of the human experience. Philosophy
follows a similar flaw of intimacy, driving for a first-principals
explanation of the human condition, proceeding from axioms created in
our skulls to as many future conditional progressive tenses as may be
(here's how I think I think, therefore, here's how society should
work). I am liking the empirical perspective lately, that is, the
anthropological one, observing the evidence of human coexistence and
making inductive generalizations from the pattern of the data. It's
been my growing conviction that for all the myriad ways we're fucked
up on an individual level, human behavior in the aggregate is a lot
more predictable and explainable than six billion partisans would have
you believe.
In Our Kind, Marvin Harris moves quickly to an important distinction
in this explanation, in truth another one I've been wrestling with:
that cultural evolution is different than the biological sort, faster,
and even if it's not working through genetics, it's force is similarly
powerful. Harris describes how cultural development as an unconscious,
collective means to most efficiently realize our various biological
imperatives. The species is, more or less, equally endowed, but we
react in different ways to the externalities of different communities:
different availabilty of proteins, vitamins, and heat sources,
differnt population density, different history, and varying degrees of
feasibility that somewhere else exists to go. The outlines of politics
and culture derive from these parameters. He puts the lie to fertility
as a biological imperative, digging up anthropological evidence and
biological analogies to show that humans are more wired more for sex
than we are for babies, and develops the consequences. He pokes at
race as an artifical construct. Our body shapes and colors over the
generations correlate more to local geography than our ethnic
heritage, both because of cultural selection and extensive
interbreeding (Jews, he notes in an example, generally look more like
the locals than they do Jews elsewhere, which is maybe one hint that
journalists should be careful not to casually conflate ethnography
with genomes.)
It gets touchy in parts. Harris outlines ways in which early societies
dealt with population pressures, reducing the idea of war to a means
to deal with this, and correlating that with misogyny. Preservation of
a warrior class limits population more than in the obvious way, Harris
says, and includes selection for male heirs for the patriarchy,
pushing toward female infanticide as a remarkably common device, even
in modern times. Historically, life has officially begun at the point
parents decided to keep the child, sometimes months ex utero. He
questions the cost of misogyny in terms of male life expectancy (along
with the contemporary unwillingness to question this), paints
government as an inevitable consequence of animal domestication.
I don't think any of the above discussions are comfortable, but the
cases are strong. His religious angle is perhaps the most sensitive.
He describes "killing" religions, entailing animal and human
sacrifice, as a development of a means of protein redistribution,
drawing patterns across the globe from Aztecs to the Vedic to the
Pacific island traditions. The non-killing faiths he paints as
reactionary creeds developed to address the failure of the faiths that
passed out meat, usually in response to specific political pressures.
He draws a line from here directly to subjugation empire, implicating
the gentler religions as a direct enabler of military powers. Why?
Because making a virtue of poverty and delaying material rewards past
death suits would-be emperors brilliantly. The first act of conquest
of non-killers, cites Harris, is to convert to the non-killing faith,
as true of Christianity, as of Jainism, as of Buddhism. The
proscription against killing, historically, has been easy enough to
circumvent, but the faith in ethereal rewards much harder to shake,
and murderous zealots have been useful tools of tyrants. (One amusing
point: even as Harris constructs a general condemnation of religioun
that quite clearly includes the Pauline faiths, he sticks with the
western conceit of weighting Biblical history toward the factual,
using Christian-formal terms like 'year of Our Lord', and citing that
holy book, and only that one, using chapter and verse. It's got to be
force of habit.)
Stylistically, Marvin Harris both worked for me and didn't. His
ultra-short sections--the book is five hundred pages long, but every
third page was a blank title--got right to the point, but they were so
brief and un-footnoted, that it lent to a less than scholarly feel.
It's not that the sections are unresearched: the author has done his
share of influential work the field himself, and there is a a detailed
bibliography for each tiny chapter in the back. He just doesn't point
to it. He also has a penchant for scribbling over his weaker points
with anecdote or irritable analogy. For example, he's probably out to
lunch on his message of gender identity--not so culturally controlled
between sexes as all that--but on the other hand, his message that
cultural selection usually satisfies the biological preferences in the
aggregate is almost certainly true, and biologically, he's largely
divorced sexuality from both reproduction and gender anyway. I admit
that I'd be more bothered by his idiosyncratic style if I agreed with
less of it.
We all know how short the timeframe of civilization is compared the
earth's history, but even our species is young, only around for a
hundred thousand years or so. By contrast, our various hominid
ancestors populated the earth for about 3 million years. (Our most
recent evolutionary analog, the Neandertals were a short-lived
species, only lasting about 200 thousand altogether). Even given the
age of our genome, sapient, language-using humans have only been
evidenced for a fraction of that, about 35,000 years. I can't accept
neither can Harris, which is why he describes evolution in the
cultural sphere). In that short time, we've graduated from the stone
tools that our ape-plus ancestors and cousins had used, and covered
the earth in dense societies, razing mountains and forests, and
erecting countless evidence that we lived. Although we may still fight
like animals, we've made a hell of a mark in the short time our kind
has been civilizing.
And the big question remains this: are we going somewhere, or have we
achieved our ecological niche? According to ideas of punctuated
equilibrium, species persist for a long damn time, but originate and
fill in their ecological space very quickly. In terms of biological
evolution, the fossil record and all that, 35 kiloyears ain't much. We
humans are probably still spreading into our role As a conclusion,
Harris calls our penchant for empire and evil as the likely inevitable
cultural consequences of our nature. Our failures to will into being
benevolent governments are a result of the unfortunate statistical
average of human action. They've all followed similar paths. Is there
hope, he wonders, a conclusion beyond the state? I have to think that
there's not going to be any success in regressing pre-state, that the
factors that pushed governments into existence--food dependence,
population, and circumscription--seem to only drive one way. But
here's the thing, the catch: trying to will cultural evolution forward
is how our biological imperative works, and there may be a point we
haven't yet achieved with it. We're certainly on different ground this
time in terms of communication, size, and boundaries. Is there still
time to realize a better existence than empire?
I'm not very optimistic actually--existential brinkmanship can't
continue forever--but the idea of a better future beyond nation-staes
is the hope I can find. Maybe we'll get there.
