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Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Melbourne Terrorism and Truth Denial

Melbourne Terrorism and Truth Denial

As I said at the end of my article yesterday about the latest terror attack in Melbourne, it is interesting how it always seems to boil down to one common factor: no, not Islam, but mental illness! This is the new catch-all cause for all terror attacks it seems.
It does not matter in the least if the guy who did the slaughter was a Muslim from a Muslim country talking about Islam, it of course has NOTHING to do with Islam – it must just be a mental illness. That is the new mantra we all must now run with in the West.


 

Islam is never the fault – mental problems explain everything. So today with more info available on the attacker, we read this: “The suspect has some mental health issues, a range of matters in his past, including drug use. He has made utterances, speaking of voices and dreams, attributing his actions to the treatment of Muslims around the world.”

Um, so here the Muslim even admits that this is all about Islam, but we still must not believe him. Whenever a Muslim acting according to his Islamic beliefs does something fully in line with the tenets of his faith – and even says so – he is NOT to be believed.

No matter how much he states that he does this because of concern for Islam or out of Islamic ideology, that CANNOT be the real reason why he did it. Islam is just not capable of generating Islamic terrorism and Islamic terrorists, so we must find another reason for all this.

So mental illness will have to do the trick. And just imagine if a devout Christian had done this, claiming it was for “the treatment of Christians around the world.” Would everyone still be talking about mental health and no connection to terrorism? Um, I don’t think so.

Thankfully I am not alone in being very concerned about all this. Others are also asking some hard questions here. For example, columnist Andrew Bolt, who gets it right on most things – while most political and religious leaders do not – said this:
All the bollards put up after six people were killed in Bourke St Mall in January have not stopped this. You cannot put up bollards at pedestrian crossings, a blindingly obvious point I made six months ago when the State Government was putting up what I called these stones of stupidity – bollards meant to falsely reassure us our politicians would protect us. But our reckless immigration and refugee policies may well have played a role here, though, although we do not yet know the identity of the people in the car. Add this to the Sudanese riots and we have a very, very serious topic that needs debating.
UPDATE:
Sure enough, the 32-year-old driver was an Australian citizen of Afghan descent, yet police say only that he has a history of drug use and mental illness and there is no known terrorism link.
(Does having a mental illness exclude the possibility of also wanting to kill for your faith?)
And Mark Steyn has just written a ripper of a piece on the latest Melbourne jihad attack. He is worth quoting at length. He begins:
So there will be more empty seats round the Christmas table this year, after an “Australian citizen” mowed down pedestrians at the junction of Flinders Street and Elizabeth Street in Melbourne. The casualties include “a pre-schooler with serious head injuries”. The “Australian citizen” (I presume this designation is being used to emphasize that he’s entirely eligible to serve in Mr Turnbull’s cabinet) did it deliberately, but relax, lighten up, there’s no need to worry because, according to Victoria’s police commissioner, all this terrifying terror is “not terror-related”.
So he’s not a crack operative with the Islamic State’s Australian branch office, he’s just, as The Age’s cheery headline writer puts it, “of Afghan descent and mentally ill”. A second man, arrested while filming the scene and found to have three knives in his bag, is believed to be nothing to do with the first man. Just another Australian citizen taking his knife collection out for a stroll.
He reminds us that the last Melbourne terror attack spurred the government to take the bollard steps. A lot of good they have done. As he rightly reminds us in his title, “We Are the Bollards”. He continues:
One of the problems with bollarding off pedestrians behind a wall of Diversity Bollards is that they still occasionally have to emerge from behind the bollards to cross the street, and it’s hard to bollard off a pedestrian crossing. In this case, the non-terror-related Australian citizen simply waited until the little green sign indicated it was safe for pedestrians to cross the street and then floored it. In an amusing touch, his car eventually came to a rest against a bollard.
What’s the solution? Maybe automobile manufacturers could replace airbags with Diversity Bollards timed to inflate whenever non-terror-related drivers with mental-health issues accelerate near pedestrian crossings. Or perhaps it would be easier to issue citizens of western nations at birth with an individual ring of bollards to wear about their persons at all time, starting with when they leave the maternity ward.
Alternatively, instead of attempting to ring-fence every potential target – ie, everything and everyone – with Diversity Bollards, we could try installing bollards where they matter – around the civilized world. To reiterate what I reiterated last time:
I don’t want to get used to it – and I reiterate my minimum demand of western politicians that I last made after the London Bridge attacks: How many more corpses need to pile up on our streets before you guys decide to stop importing more of it?
If your congressman or senator says that’s not on his agenda, what he means is he’s willing to sacrifice you and your loved ones in the suicide lottery of diversity.
He closes by pointing out the irony of it all. Please click on the photo that I have accompanying this article, and notice what is in the top right corner of the picture. Says Steyn:
That’s the scene in Melbourne. At street level, the area is cordoned off. Thousands of law-abiding citizens are disrupted in their daily business by an Australian citizen “of Afghan descent and mentally ill”. At the far corner, that’s St Paul’s Cathedral. Can you see the banner they’re displaying three days before Christmas? Anything about Jesus? Christianity? No. Instead:
WELCOME REFUGEES
In that post-Christian void – the shell of a church with faith in everything but itself – a very merry Muslim Christmas makes a perverted kind of sense.
Yep, that about says it all. The West is committing hari kari as it jettisons and demonises its own past, welcomes in zillions of people who do not share – and even detest – our way of life and its Christian foundation, and have declared war on us.
Yet our leaders insist that we take in more such folks, no questions asked. Oh, and if they do go on a killing rampage, we know it must be due to mental illness. It certainly has absolutely nothing to do with a political ideology which has slaughtered hundreds of millions of people over its 1400 year history.
That is now the new normal in the West. Our craven and compromised leaders can no longer deny that Muslims are those doing almost all of the terrorism on our streets. So their new spin on things is that they are all mentally ill. Yep, that makes it all OK then. We can go back to sleep now.
As I wrote late last night in my first piece on this horrific incident of Islamic Christmas cheer:
I wonder how many genuinely mentally ill people have deliberately ploughed down innocent people on footpaths with cars and trucks before IS said this would be a terrific way to slaughter the infidels. Maybe the MSM or police can answer that question for us.
Somehow I don’t expect they will.

www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/pedestrians-hit-in-melbourne-cbd/news-story/0793771ddb8f4d79ec660e0d1c4735d5
www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/pedestrians-hit-in-melbourne-cbd/news-story/0793771ddb8f4d79ec660e0d1c4735d5
www.steynonline.com/8340/we-are-the-bollards

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Islam and Western Dhimmitude: This is How Revolutions Begin

Islam and Western Dhimmitude: This is How Revolutions Begin

The formula is now down pat and fully predictable: another terror attack; usually by an Islamic refugee; Western leaders strenuously deny it is terror- or Islam-related; ‘It was a lone wolf attack by someone with mental problems’; soon enough the blood is cleaned from our streets; we await the next instalment.
Over and over it goes – the same old same old. Our spineless leaders, a complicit lamestream media, and some utterly clueless Christian leaders all follow the piper in regurgitating the same script: ‘This has nothing to do with Islam; Islam is a religion of peace; and what really must be dealt with is “Islamophobia”.’

 

After hearing this tired routine countless times now, many Westerners are unsurprisingly getting a bit upset with all this. So where will it all lead to? While I am not a big fan of conspiracy theories, I do try to be a student of history, and what I see unfolding right now has me really worried.

What happens when ever larger portions of the population suspect that their leaders (politicians, police chiefs, media outlets, etc) are actually lying to them about crucial things like national security? What will happen to a culture when the masses suspect their leaders are far more interested in defending those who hate them than in protecting its own citizens?

I fear we are increasingly moving in this direction. This can be true on various fronts, but overwhelmingly we find what seems to be lies, obfuscations and deliberate deception when it comes to the ever-related issues of Islam and terrorism. Our leaders for the most part seem intent on denying reality here, and are more concerned to protect and make excuses for Islam than they are in defending their own populations.

As the body count rises and more and more blood flows on Western streets, the masses are increasingly getting unhappy about this. They are getting restless. They are getting ticked off. They do not want to be treated like fools. They do not like to be lied to. They do not like to be kept in the dark as to what is really going on.

All this makes for fertile soil not just for all sorts of conspiracy theorists, but for a population that will eventually snap and begin to take matters into their own hands. I am not advocating any of this. I am not fomenting revolution. I am not demanding that we take to the streets.

I am simply pointing out what I see currently happening. And as I tie this in to the lessons of history it is not looking good. Indeed, all this has me quite worried. This sort of stuff just cannot continue. Something eventually has to give. And the latest attack in Melbourne just offers us more of the same.

Our dhimmi leaders, cowardly politicians, clueless media personnel, and gullible Christians are all still insisting this was not about terrorism and Islam, even as the evidence mounts up to the contrary. As I have stated in earlier articles on this, the attacker listed the conditions of Muslims elsewhere as a reason why he did this. And today we learn further about this:

“Flinders St attacker Saeed Noori rambled about Allah and the nation’s top security agency after mowing down 18 people. Acting Chief Commissioner Shane Patton has revealed that Noori made the comments from his hospital bed in the hours after his rampage which left three people on Friday night fighting for life.”

Let me point out this home truth: there are plenty of abused, misused and aggrieved Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus and so on – and some would even be mentally ill – yet we don’t read about them driving vehicles on to crowded sidewalks, slaughtering as many innocents as possible. Why is that?

The “mental illness” mantra is already wearing a bit thin. If they were actually trying to tell us all Muslims are mentally ill, that might be one thing. But that is not what they are trying to say. What they are saying is this: “A good Muslim is one who does not act according to his own faith, nor take it seriously. The devout, obedient Muslim, on the other hand, is mentally ill.” Problem solved!

I think the millions of people who do suffer from genuine cases of mentally illness who have NOT mowed down innocents on sidewalks in speeding vehicles are owed a massive apology from our dhimmi leaders and authorities. They are being painted with a really bad brush here.

While I make no claim to being an expert on mental illness, nor want to belabour all this, a few quotes from those who are experts may be of use here:
There is little consensus in the literature regarding the importance of mental illness in lone-actor terrorism. However, the evidence suggests that mental illness is not a key factor contributing to acts of violence in these cases. It is therefore erroneous to insinuate that psychiatrists have a role in identifying these individuals. It is also highly questionable whether a ‘future potential Breivik’ would – or could – be identified by psychiatrists. In the case of Breivik, the forensic psychiatric evaluation concluded that although he has narcissistic personality disorder, he was not affected by a serious mental disorder when committing the act of terrorism, nor at the time of the evaluation.
Or as one person told me just recently:
A short time ago on Sky News a mental health expert said it was wrong to blame mental health patients for atrocities like Flinders Street. He said statistics show that it is very rare for a mental patient to do such crimes. Mental health people are statistically far more likely to be victims of crimes than perpetrators of crimes. This crime was done by a person who knew exactly what he was doing and he has indicated to police that one of his motives was the treatment of Muslims around the world.
And one more:
What is it about terrorism that people fail to grasp? I’ll put it as simply as I can: there are individuals (and groups) out there that plan and carry out heinous acts of violence we label as terrorism because they really believe in what they are doing. Whether it is divinely inspired (or mandated) or self-styled legitimate action to right a wrong, some people will engage in these acts out of a sense of justice or to impose on the rest of us what they see as the only way to conduct our lives. There is nothing inherent in any of this that points to mental illness. We really need to stop leaping to the conclusion that perpetrators are suffering from psychological imbalance just because we don’t understand why they are doing these kinds of attacks.
It is simply part of the accepted PC narrative in the West that Islam is just peachy and terrorism cannot be Islamic-based, so we must find another excuse. And right now playing the mental illness card seems to be working just fine for our elites.
Today Chris Kenny said what needs to be said:
The police arrested an Afghan migrant who according to their own reports cited the treatment of Muslims as his grievance and his motivation. Yet Victoria Police waited five hours before sharing any of the detailed information and even then denied any link to terrorism.
This denial is so worrying so ignorant and so dangerous, yet even the Prime Minister adopted this same ridiculous line. They tell us a Muslim migrant from Afghanistan has mown down people and raved about the treatment of Muslims yet they say there is no link to terrorism.
How can the public feel safe if the authorities and politicians won’t even confront the very real enemy of Islamist extremism terrorism. This is the evil whose name they dare not speak — they are in jihad denialism.

Let me finish with a few quotes from commentator Brendan O’Neill. His views sum up what a good many of us are thinking right now. He reminds us that
terror has become a normal part of everyday life. It has contributed to today’s weird acceptance, almost, that strange violent incidents, the occasional truck attack or stabbing rampage or bomb, are part and parcel of living in the West in the 21st century. This strange, muted sense that terror is like the weather — always there and beyond our control — has become more and more pronounced during the past year.
And he points out that another casualty of all this Islamic terror is the death of truth. We are just not supposed to talk about the obvious:
We’re discouraged from asking difficult questions. Debate is frowned on. Wonder if radical Islam is a major problem for the West and you’ll be branded “Islamophobic”. Ask if it was wise of Angela Merkel to welcome hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Middle East into Europe in 2015 and you’ll be called racist.
Even to argue that there are certain French, British, American or Australian values that are good, and that we should encourage newcomers to adopt, is to risk being viewed as a sinner against the multicultural idea that all values are equally valid.
We always see this post-terror: the chilling of debate. The aim is to tame moral thought, dampen dangerous emotions. It sometimes feels like the political and media elites fear us, the public, more than they do the apocalyptic terrorist. After every attack their first response is to say: “There had better not be an Islamophobic backlash in response to this.”
It is becoming clear that the perversely chilled response to terrorism is not an act of defiance. Rather, it speaks to a reluctance in the West to engage in robust debate about terror, religion, immigration and values. It speaks to such a deeply entrenched culture of relativism, PC offence-avoidance and intellectual and moral cowardice that some now think occasional acts of barbarism are a price worth paying if it means we can avoid asking deep, difficult questions about Western society, Islam and multicultural tensions in the 21st century.
We need to change this post-terror culture. We need to recognise that a society that will not even permit anger or moral soul-searching when an eight-year-old girl at an Ariana Grande concert is blown apart is a society that has already been defeated. It is a society that is already dead.

Such cultures will either be dead, or become the ideal fertile soil for an ugly and perhaps violent revolt from the masses. Neither outcome is looking very good.
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www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/pedestrians-hit-in-melbourne-cbd/news-story/0793771ddb8f4d79ec660e0d1c4735d5
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5288096/
www.hilltimes.com/2017/11/16/go-mental-health-terrorism/125792
www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/chris-kenny/call-it-for-what-it-is-an-islamist-terror-attack/news-story/5f82ebf458f46ff3f98d5f6fea883b58?nk=4eb9eec5ef94761caf7b0f3843fb713f-1514001482
www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/west-needs-a-new-response-to-terror/news-story/c5875ce2fbe753a2a4d8a1db7101fd51
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A review of Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony. By Robert Edgerton.



A review of Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony. By Robert Edgerton.

Free Press/Macmillan, 1992.

The tenet of cultural relativism has been around for quite some time.
The cold war version went something like this: Liberal/leftists insisted that America in particular and the West in general possessed no innate moral superiority over the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. 
 Conservatives challenged this notion, claiming (rightly) that Marxist nations and Western nations do not share a moral reciprocity- rule of law, freedom of speech, assembly, press and religion were all virtues found not in the Communist East but in democratic Western nations.

With the end of the cold war, new forms of cultural relativism are emerging.
One version is that found on Western campuses, known as political correctness. Among other things, PC dogma tells us that Western civilization is corrupt, sexist, racist, oppressive and exploitative. “Hey ho, hey ho, western civ has got to go!”, the chant goes on many campuses today. Indeed, this is a kind of reverse cultural relativism: not only are all cultures equal, but some are more equal than others.

But today’s exponents of political correctness are not alone in romanticising certain cultures.

Various leftists, socialists and utopians have looked at primitive cultures as examples of past arcadias, of more harmonious and more peaceful societies. 

Such films as Dances With Wolves reinforce this idealised vision of older harmonious societies invaded by modern exploitative and disharmonious societies. Exploitation, competition, sexism, racism, alienation, alcohol abuse, mental illness and social divisions are thought, by these utopians, to be recent inventions, a product of industrial, especially capitalist, societies.

Rousseau’s “noble savage” is a good example of this utopianism. But several questions need to be asked about these past cultures: were they as peace loving, gentle and harmonious as we make them out to be? Or did they have their dark sides as well?
Sick Societies sets out to answer these and related questions. In brief, the book states that we have been sold a bill of goods on this issue.
Anthropologists are largely to blame.

Says Edgerton,
“All societies are sick, but some are sicker than others…. There are some customs and social institutions in all societies that compromise human well being…. For a number of reasons …many anthropologists have chosen not to write about the darker side of life in folk societies, or at least not to write very much about it.”

This book examines why the ethnographic record has been skewed, and devotes a great amount of detail to an examination of past cultures. We discover that many of these primitive societies were hotbeds of anger, stress, competition, brutality, warfare, exploitation, greed and torture.

Any number of “modern” problems were rife in past cultures.
Take the issue of child abuse. Practices of abandoning, beating, burning, starving, imprisoning and murdering children can be found in many folk cultures says Edgerton.
Male dominance was also widespread. “Men have approved wife beating in virtually every folk society,” says Edgerton. In Tasmanian culture, for example, “men clearly dominated women and benefited disproportionately from their labor and risk.”
 Various Tasmanian bands were also quite warlike, with raids to capture women being a major cause of death.

A number of barbaric practices have been indulged in by primitive cultures, but the doctrine of cultural relativism has tended to mute any criticisms of such atrocities.

 American college students, so taken by this doctrine, have even been reluctant to pass judgment on the Hindu practice of suttee, in which a widow, willing or not, was called upon to join her deceased husband by being burned to death.

Ironically, the only criticisms now go to Western “imperialists” like the colonists and missionaries who often tried to stop such barbaric customs. 

Indeed, Edgerton almost waxes theological at one point:
 “Nowhere have adults found it necessary to teach their children to be selfish, greedy, angry, stubborn, envious, or disobedient; instead, they search everywhere for means to limit or eliminate these characteristics in their children.” The missionaries would have called this the doctrine of original sin! But such is the insanity that prevails amongst Western intellectuals, that to try to make a moral judgment about other cultures is considered wrong, while the brutal practices are said to be merely the product of a culture’s uniqueness.

Edgerton lists plenty of these practices, from female genital mutilation, to witchcraft, torture, human sacrifice, cannibalism and blood feuds.
In some societies warfare was so ferocious that entire populations were annihilated.
Other cultures, like the Zulus, pre-dated Stalin in becoming experts at sustaining a despotic rule of terror.
Other cultures institutionalised barbaric practices. The Aztecs, for example, were estimated to have sacrificed as many as 250,000 people every year-and they ate the flesh of almost all of them. Other even more horrendous practices cannot here be described (Edgerton provides a fair amount of gory detail).

Contrary to the Kevin Costner view of history, many American Indian tribes were also quite cold-blooded. The Cheyenne sometimes gang-raped an errant wife; the Skidi Pawnee sacrificed human beings for religious purposes; and the Chumash were divided between upper and lower classes, with slavery an important part of the culture.

All in all, primitive cultures were often warlike, barbarous, environmentally unfriendly, inept at providing food and clothing, filled with poor health practices, bad nutrition, social inequalities and physical and mental illnesses. Life was “nasty, poor, brutish and short,” to use Hobbes’ phrase. Clearly then some cultures are better than others, or are to be preferred over others. This book should put the final nails in the coffin of cultural relativism.
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Robert Edgerton’s ‘Sick Societies’ (1992) Revisited: Is Culture Adaptive?

Robert Edgerton’s ‘Sick Societies’ (1992) Revisited: Is Culture Adaptive?

A critique of cultural relativism by an ethnologist and anthropologist of longstanding high repute, Robert B. Edgerton’s Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (1992) has implications not only for how one might evaluate the pre-modern, non-Western folk-societies (primitive societies) studied by professional ethnographers and anthropologists, but for how one might understand both institutions and social practices – and perhaps even political ones – more generally. Sick Societies provoked moderate controversy when it appeared, but probably few remember the book today. Nevertheless, Sick Societies deserves not to disappear into the oblivion of the library stacks. Revisiting it nearly twenty years later indeed holds promise of intellectual profit. Sick Societies might well be a meditation on culture urgently relevant to the current phase of the West’s seemingly interminable crisis at the end of the first decade of the Twenty-First Century.


I.

Adaptation, a Darwinian evolutionary concept, plays a central role in anthropology. The theory of adaptation articulates the anthropologist’s conviction that all societies manage to come to terms optimally with their external environment, and with the internal difficulties presented by communal life, as a people strives to fit itself in its niche. This optimal coming-to-terms will be the case even when it might seem to uninformed or prejudiced outsiders that the beliefs and practices of a given community operate inefficiently or counterproductively and that they therefore fail to meet the requirements of human happiness. Under this view, a modern Westerner’s disdain for magic or witchcraft or for elaborate rituals or proliferating taboos would itself indicate a deformation (“ethnocentrism”) because the objects of that disdain, which the anthropologist or ethnographer properly understands even where the lay person does not, operate by concealed rationality. On this assumption, seemingly irrational commitments and practices would in fact be just as rational as modern Western arrangements, but in a way that Western prejudice makes people liable not to recognize.
From this position, in Edgerton’s words, “it follows that any attempt to generalize about either culture or human nature must be false or trivial unless it is confined to people who live in a specific cultural system.” This would imply, in turn, that “Western science is only a culturally specific form of ethnoscience, not a universally valid way of verification or falsification.”
Edgerton does not directly state, but rather he implies, that, if the idea in the last sentence quoted above were true, as anthropologists and ethnographers by consensus assert, then that truth would hold important implications for anthropology and ethnography themselves. Why, for example, must one validate the tribal belief in magic while withholding validation for the modern Western suspicion about magical thinking? But ethnography does not treat Western self-confidence as adaptive.

The idea that all societies have achieved adaptation, whether apparent to the outsider or not, thus communicates strongly with that longstanding strain in the modern Western mentality of irate rebellion against norms, simply because they are norms, and of seeking to replace the existing order, blamed for all sorrows, with a utopian one. In anthropology, this strain of antinomian rebelliousness can take on a rebarbative character, violating its own ostensible principle that cultures are “incommensurable” by extolling pre-modern and non-Western societies at the expense of modern Western society, the latter now coming under condemnation through a sneaky reintroduction of commensurability. The ethnographer, becoming an advocate for what he studies, declares the ethnic societies to be better adapted than the modern Western society. Adaptation as a concept belongs with the set of ardent convictions called cultural relativism, with the codicil that relativism is never really relative, but always serves the rhetorical purpose of establishing a covert, antithetical hierarchy.

The rhetoric of cultural relativism stems classically from the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who asserted, with literary flair, the supposed unique sickness of the European civilization of his own day. Rousseau joined his denunciation of civic society with nostalgic speculation about a primitive utopia before the invention of prohibitions and institutions – la société commencée. There is a strong Rousseauvian strain the work of Franz Boas (1858-1942), usually credited with being the founder of modern anthropology, as such.

Edgerton, whose willingness to admit reservations and concede opposing points makes him quite different from Rousseau, argues, not that no folk-societal arrangements are truly adaptive (some are), but that anthropologists and ethnographers have exaggerated adaptation, always taken to signify some type of rationality, into a dogma. The acceptance of that dogma has rendered practitioners of the discipline uncritical of what they actually observe when in the field and, if not exactly incapable of an honest evaluation, then quite reluctant to embrace a strictly neutral type of objectivity. Edgerton’s subtitle names the fixed position: The Myth of Primitive Harmony. In fact, Edgerton writes, “it has never been demonstrated that all human customs or institutions, or even most of them, have adaptive value, but the assumption that this is so is still commonplace among scholars who study,” not only ethnic or primitive cultures, but also, in larger terms, “human evolution.” Edgerton indeed brings against ethnology a universally observed phenomenon: “All populations yet discovered have agreed [that] a steel axe is better than a stone one.”

Against adaptation, as dogmatically construed, Edgerton posits “maladaptation.” The term, he asserts, requires subtlety of explanation, so he throws out a number of complementary definitions and analogies. Thus by analogy, and in Darwinian terms, “a single gene or number of genes that in combination may predispose an individual to depression, schizophrenia, or panic,” would illustrate the idea.
Edgerton’s interest lies mainly elsewhere than in individual psychology, however; so he swiftly reminds his readers that, for example, “a group of related individuals’ refusal to engage in altruistic behaviors, or the absence of well-being among cooperating groups of people engaged in warfare or big-game hunting” would illustrate the idea just as well, if not better. In the discussion of maladaptation, Edgerton writes, “the focus can legitimately fall on categories or corporate groups of people who share common interests and risks because of their age, gender, class, ethnicity, race, occupational specialty, or some other characteristic, or it can encompass an entire society, a kingdom, an empire, or a confederation.” Edgerton imagines that, in certain circumstances, the whole of the human race might prove itself maladapted to some emergent global condition. Nuclear arsenals on hair trigger might well have constituted such a condition, as more than one science fiction scenarist imagined.

Edgerton finally offers three formulaic definitions. In the first of these definitions, maladaptation refers to “the failure of a population or its culture to survive because of the inadequacy or harmfulness of one or more of its beliefs or institutions.” In the second, “maladaptation will be said to exist when enough members of a population are sufficiently dissatisfied with one or more of their social institutions or cultural beliefs that the viability of their society is threatened.” In the third, “it will be considered to be maladaptive when a population maintains beliefs or practices that so seriously impair the physical or mental health of its members that they cannot adequately meet their own needs or maintain their social or cultural system.”

Edgerton’s first definition applies mainly to historical peoples, whose existence today only the physical remains or vestiges of their societies – items of their material culture – indicate. Edgerton’s second definition operates historically but also implicates societies that exist today and are subject to observation; this would include the modern Western societies. Edgerton’s third definition has the same range of application as his second.


II.

In the main chapters of Sick Societies, Edgerton piles up the instances of maladaptation, one after the other, until the quantity of examples seems to make his case all by itself. In about two-thirds of these instances, Edgerton finds himself obliged to discuss, not only the particular maladaptation, but also the deliberate eliding of failed or counterproductive or misery-producing institutions or practices in the field-reports of the ethnographers. Deliberate misreporting and the suppression of unflattering truths occur with alarming frequency in professional accounts of folk-societies, Margaret Mead's romantic descriptions of the supposed sexual utopia in Samoa establishing the pattern. Aware of a widespread tendency to excuse the exotic Edgerton directs his analysis to two cases of specifically Western – indeed of American – sub-cultures that demonstrate how maladaptation can result in the destruction of a community. These cases are significant because romantic misreporting has not distorted the relevant facts, which, belonging as they do to the historical record, no one disputes.

The first of Edgerton’s two preliminary cases is that of the Oneida Colony in mid-Nineteenth Century Upstate New York, founded in 1848 by its leader John H. Noyes, and dissolved in a major scandal in 1879. The second of these two cases is that of the “Duddie’s Branch” community in Eastern Kentucky in the mid-Twentieth Century.

THE ONEIDA COLONY
The Oneida Colony functioned, in effect, as a large-scale experiment in group-marriage, the governance of which ran to the bizarre. In Edgerton’s words, the Colony’s rules of promiscuous cohabitation “prohibited any lasting emotional attachments (including those between mothers and their children), and required all men, except Noyes and a few other leaders, to practice coitus reservatus,” or non-ejaculatory intercourse. Later on, Noyes imposed new strictures, according to which, “only older men… would be allowed to have sex with young… women,” whereas “young men… could only have sex with postmenopausal women.” These arrangements, which exist elsewhere only in a comedy by Aristophanes, produced so much revulsion that communal order broke down in open rebellion, with Noyes fleeing to Canada in order to evade charges of statutory rape.

DUDDIE's BRANCH
“Duddie’s Branch” was an extremely isolated mountain hollow, home to two hundred and thirty-eight incestuously related people, who, while nominally English-speakers, “spoke to one another so rarely that for some time [Rena] Gazaway,” the anthropologist who studied them, “thought that many of them were mute.” The “Branchers” not only could not read or write; they could not even count change. They had no notion of the civic order and could not name for Gazaway the (or any) president of the United States or explain their situation as citizens of a county or state. The Branchers’ poverty and insouciance left them perpetually malnourished, especially the children; people defecated not in outhouses or trenches (they had none), but on the ground outside their shacks, in the perpetual mud where their louse-infested children played. The Branchers found it impossible to reckon kinship both from lacking the requisite terms and “because sexual relations were indiscriminate… and illegitimate births were commonplace.”

Concerning the Oneida Colony, the glaringly patriarchal and sexually exploitative set-up of the community makes it difficult for cultural relativism to mount any kind of rhetorical rescue, especially given Noyes’ final megalomaniacal rule that reserved to him – and to him alone – the jus primi nocti with any adolescent girl who had just experienced her first menses. The regulatory structure of Noyes’ little kingdom cut across every propensity in the sexual side of human nature, exacerbated the predisposition of people to resent unjust shares, and more or less doomed itself to death by internal revolt.
The Branchers, by contrast, lived without internal regulation, and were so symbolically, as well as so materially, impoverished that they only survived through food-welfare from the county and state governments. “There was little interaction,” Edgerton writes, “among households, and none at all as an entire community,” no church or community council or neighborhood picnics on holidays. Families slept in piles on the floor and “girls began to have sexual intercourse as early as the age of six.” The Oneida Colony qualifies as maladapted under Edgerton’s first and second definitions and the Branch community under the third.
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THE TASMANIANS
While it is next to unimaginable that even a committed cultural relativist would want to touch either the Oneida Colony or the Branchers apologetically with a ten-foot pole, the non-anthropological laity will probably – if only from its vestigial impulse to Christian charity – experience considerable sympathy for another case: that of the Tasmanians. Yet according to Edgerton these people, whose demise came about in part due to heavy-handed European interference, present a case of maladaptation as vivid as any other. At the same time, they present an actual people whose level of cultural development stands remarkably close to that of Rousseau’s speculative société commencée, the supposed happiest era of human existence. Once the ice-bridge that permitted human migration to Tasmania melted, the Tasmanians remained in isolation from all other human contact for somewhere between ten and twelve-thousand years before the arrival of Europeans in modern times.
Not only did the Tasmanians have at least ten millennia to come to terms with their natural environment and learn how to live together happily in a territorially ample multi-tribal community; they also lived in a resource-rich, exploitable landscape that would have yielded a bounty, had only the denizens innovated an instrumentality and devised the social practices to realize the potential. Instead, as Edgerton notes, “when Europeans first made contact with them in the Eighteenth Century, the approximately 4,000 Tasmanians then living had the simplest technology ever reported for any human society.”
On the Australian mainland, where the closest kindred-peoples lived, the tribes had developed “a substantially more complex array of tools, weapons, and other artifacts long before European contact.” As Edgerton puts it, “the Tasmanians put the lie to the myth of Homo Faber.” They also put the lie, once again, to “The Myth of Primitive Harmony.” Tasmanian men dominated and exploited Tasmanian women, delegating almost all of the necessary subsistence labor, some it arduous, to them while taxing themselves hardly at all. Worse: “Despite the risks that women took and their crucial role in the economy, Tasmanian women appear to have been treated harshly by men, and to have been denied access to the choicest foods.” Tasmanian women complained of such maltreatment already to the earliest European travelers, clearly indicating their unhappiness. Now institutions serve to mediate conflicts within a community, but, as Edgerton writes, “unlike the Australians, the Tasmanians had no initiation rituals, only rudimentary religious conceptions and rituals, and no elaborated forms of social organization.


III.

Although the physical conditions of the island of Tasmania did not of themselves impose scarcity, the meager material culture did, as did also fierce tribal rivalries, which resulted in raids for women and food and counter-raids for revenge in an endless cycle. “The Tasmanians failed to devise social and cultural mechanisms to control their destructive tendencies.” An unhappy people, their way of life could not withstand contact with outsiders.

Edgerton finds similar patterns of maladaptation among or Kalahari Bushmen, the Inuit, and the medieval Icelanders, among others, who all suffered from internal violence driven by social arrangements that exaggerated rather than reduced resentment and capitally failed to address matters of scarcity and fair distribution. The much-romanticized Chumash tribes of California raided their neighbors for slaves and developed a materially impoverished forced-labor-economy that, while discouraging innovation, necessitated the devotion of considerable energy to policing the chattels. Such practices stultified and brutalized the society. But tribal societies are not the only ones vulnerable to maladaptation, as the case of the Aztecs shows.

THE AZTECS
Aztec achievement at the level of material culture ran high. Their pyramidal remains testify to their engineering audacity. The Aztec elites articulated a social hierarchy, governed by elaborate rituals, on par with those of the Early Bronze-Age, Old-World kingdoms, from which they differed, however, in signally failing to win the friendliness and loyalty of the masses. The bloody order of the Aztec polity – although defended by such relativistic lights of academic anthropology as Marvin Harris and Marshal Sahlins – justly inspires a high degree of popular revulsion. The Aztec elites valued warrior-competency and male-super-dominance above all other values, practiced slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism all on a lavish scale, and incessantly raided their neighbors for slaves and victims – the latter also furnishing the viands for the great ritual feasts. Aztec art celebrated these forms of brutality and the Aztec calendar provided a precise schedule for the bloody displays.
Edgerton writes: “The desire for human flesh was so great that many wars were fought for no other reason than the capture of prisoners.” The commoners tilled, planted, harvested, and paid burdensome harvest-taxes to the nobles, who returned almost nothing in the other direction.
The nobles apparently believed in their many superstitions, and this credulity contributed to their downfall when Europeans arrived in the form of Hernan Cortez and his Conquistadors. Montezuma, the Aztec Royal, interpreted Cortez in mythic terms as an avatar of Quetzalcoatl, a god whose return the prophecies foretold. That served Cortez well, but even more so did the fact that the neighbors of the Aztecs, weary of harassment, willingly formed a military auxiliary to back up the handful of Spanish troops. Spanish occupation of Tenochtitlan refuted Montezuma’s claim to divinity, broke the hold of superstition on the elites, and triggered a belated coup-d’état against the Royal by the cadet branch of the aristocracy. The spasm bespoke pure ire, as no possibility existed, once the rebels had assassinated Montezuma, that the commoners would then side with them to expel the interlopers.
Aztec society disintegrated rapidly, as did also Tahitian society, equally warlike if not equally sacrificial or cannibalistic, on initial contact with Europeans. The complex of social structures and ritual practices characteristic of Aztec society, dominated by the haughty elites, ultimately doomed itself because it systematically shut out the masses from the actual commonwealth and aroused the hatred of the neighboring peoples through constant aggression and depredation.
It is worth saying that Spanish colonial society in the New World was almost as brutal and perverse as the societies of the sacrificial kingdoms – Aztec, Inca, or Caribe. The anomaly that redeems Spanish colonial society marginally is that it could produce someone like Bartolomé de las Casas, a man willing to speak out, at no little risk to himself, on behalf of native peoples against the atrocious colonial policies.


IV.

Dramatically deformed societies such as those discussed in the foregoing summary of Edgerton’s book represent only a small minority of known human communities, as Edgerton openly allows.
Nevertheless, Edgerton writes, “all societies maintain some beliefs and practices that are maladaptive for at least some of their members, and it is likely that some of these social arrangements and cultural understandings will be maladaptive for everyone in the society.” Edgerton reminds his readers that his “insistence that maladaptive beliefs and practices are commonplace must not be construed to mean that humans never make effective adaptations to their environments.”

Edgerton confesses to being uninterested, finally, in the question “whether so-called primitive thought is less abstract, more magical, or less able to assess marginal probabilities” than modern Western thought. Edgerton asserts otherwise that, “most people in all societies, including those most familiar with Western science, sometimes make potentially harmful mistakes and tend to maintain them.” Thus as Edgerton writes: “It must be… acknowledged that populations have not always gotten things right,” but rather, “inefficiency, folly, venality, cruelty, and misery were and are also a part of human history” and “human suffering is one result.”

THE MODERN WEST
One can hardly read Sick Societies, nearly twenty years after its publication, without speculating how Edgerton’s arguments and observations might apply to the existing condition of the West, governed as it is by dogmatic elites who would implement the antitheses of the market and repeal longstanding norms – I refer to redistribution of wealth, penalization of productivity, and the infliction, via immigration, of pre-modern and non-Western cultural forms on Western societies, under a doctrine that goes by the misleadingly abstract name of “Multiculturalism.”
For one thing, the maladaptation theory implies a consistent human nature that bad arrangements can violate. This notion of a consistent human nature is rejected by the reigning cultural relativism, but affirmed by the continuity of the Western tradition from Greek philosophy through the Gospels to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the American Constitution.

Self-criticism is central to the Western tradition, from Plato and Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. The currently prevalent self-hatred, urged on the commonality by the elites (who certainly never show any similar hatred of themselves or their own beliefs), differs radically from genuine introspection.
One might trace the history of this self-hatred, while cataloguing its destructive results, from Rousseau, who directly influenced the French Revolution and provided theoretical justification for its enormities, through Karl Marx’s inspiration of the Bolsheviks, with their homicidal record, to the deliquescence of civic society consequent on the socialist-and-multicultural policies of existing Western governments. Not least of these inimical governments would be the increasingly radical and dictatorial Democrat-Party regime in the USA, whose idea of economics resembles the magical thinking of primitives and whose social policies, administered by “Czars,” mimic the most non-productive notions of Soviet-era Third-World governments.

We have seen earlier how Edgerton identifies the semantic slipperiness in the standard ethnographic claim that intuitively maladaptive practices operate by concealed rationality, which the professionally uninitiated cannot perceive or understand.
 It is striking that the advocates and defenders of many-times-tried-and-failed public and national policies, invariably leftwing, make similar counterintuitive claims.
High taxation and deficit spending first cause and then deepen economic recessions, but the authors of such programmatic devastation invariably assert that their tax-and-spend schemes “are working” to revive prosperity, even despite the non-appearance of the promised results and the worsening of the general picture.

The architects and defenders of borderless-ness claim that the massive unrestricted influx of foreign nationals, many of them linguistically and educationally handicapped, serves a goal of utopian (call it “neo-primitive”) harmony, even despite the visibly demoralizing, because culturally divisive, effects that large-scale demographic intrusions inflict on the host-society.

One cannot blame the current sickness of the West on governments solely, which after all acquire their mandates through majority endorsement at the ballot box.
To turn slightly an old observation: everyone in a democratic polity, no matter how wisely he votes, gets the government that the gullible majority deserves.
Many widespread traits of Westerners qualify as “sick,” from the willingness of the underclass to live on welfare, letting producers subsidize their destructive habits, to the willingness of elites to defend anti-social behavior, to the unwillingness of the middle class to assert morality, crippled as the bourgeoisie is, spiritually, by a metastatic “White Guilt.”
 The elites have carefully inculcated same “White Guilt” through the educational system for decades. That again is “sick.”

A friend of mine, a psychologist specializing in corporate culture, recently asked me, in my capacity as a “humanist,” whether I could think of any historical precedent for the current “norm-hatred” of the elites. I could not.

I can also not think of any historical society that was as absorbed in diversion as the modern Western society, whether it is the ubiquitous pornography of the Internet or the gangster-ethos of “youth-culture” or the stupidity of TV game shows and glitzy amateur hours and so-called reality-dramas.

Insofar as they abet the laziness caused by enthrallment to diversion, other practices, such as those that encourage “self-esteem” in individuals who have no real claim on it, also qualify as maladaptive and therefore as “sick.”

These customs and proclivities satisfy the conditions of all three of Edgerton’s operative definitions of maladaptation.