16th May 2008
Old stuff is NOT automatically better
Awesome…
… when people start waxing about how it’s more natural and that’s how they did it in the old days, I think “menstrual huts” and wonder why people seem to think that undernourished, illiterate people who didn’t get out much from the past were somehow magically smarter than we are now.
…from the end of an anti-anti-vaccination rant.
I want that on a t-shirt.
When I was in high school, I was very taken with the democratic and nationalist philosophy of Rousseau. Unfortunately, all most people remember about the greatest of the philosophes is that he wrote about “the noble savage.” (That phase of his work was undoubtedly very popular in his own time, but that is not what made him a great thinker whose work is still respected. Indeed, in his most important work, on the social contract, he described man in a state of nature in almost Hobbesian terms, although without the eloquence of Hobbes’s “nasty, brutish, and short.” Man, Rousseau said, benefited from the social contract that established the rules of government. But, unlike Locke’s idea that the contract was between the government and the governed–so that if the government failed in its obligations, it could be legitimately overthrown, an idea very much like the Chinese principle of the “mandate of heaven,” although wiithout the mystical baggage–Rousseau realized that the social contract is a contract among the governed. The government is not a party to the contract, it IS the contract. It is the system the people create to keep order among themselves. But the government exists only at the sufferance of the governed. For me, this seemed a very profound observation, hence my admiration for Rousseau.)
Anyway, not understanding this, my mother thought I must have some romantic ideas about the “noble savage.” And so for several weeks, she spent time digging up disgusting stories of primitive life and reading them to me. I still have an image of Yanamamo Indians with their bloody noses stuffed with hallucinogenic leaves that I can’t completely shake.