A decade ago in the High Court a leading QC, I think it was Shand or Hughes, got into an exchange with one of the judges. The outcome was the self-satisfied conclusion that the law is embodiment of logic tempered with common-sense.
Why then, I thought, were the judges wearing silly, uncomfortable horse-hair wigs on their heads. These wigs added nothing to the processes of logic and common-sense that were supposedly going on underneath them. Indeed, they detracted from them. How could one have any faith in the common-sense of someone who put a silly horse-hair wigs on his head?
Now the judges of the High Court, at least, have abandoned them. But other continue with them. It is a cultural thing. Judges wear wigs for the same reason that some African tribes put bones through their noses or cut holes in their ear-lobes.
Many of these cultural things do no harm. It does not matter if a judge wears a wig or not or whether someone puts a bone through his nose.
This is one of the myth-debunking conclusions of a new book called üSick Societies.@ This is not recommended reading for anthropologists. Many will choke on it.
The author Robert B. Edgerton piles up example after example of cultural habits in societies all over the world and draws profoundly different conclusions from your average anthropologist.
Edgerton has sharp words about anthropologists who go into primitive societies _ now called folk societies in the moving nomenclature of the politically correct.
He says they go to work in these societies for months, even years, and invariably come to the unsupported conclusion that primitive societies are places of harmony and bliss where caring, sharing people are at one with their environment and what a damn shame ugly western society with its greed and violence could not learn from them.
Invariably the anthropologists (anthroapologists?) draw the wrong conclusions about some of the nasty and silly cultural habits of these societies. Food taboos which result in many people going hungry at best or starving at worse are described a useful ways of conservation. Brutal mutilations in the name of primitive religions are described as somehow useful for enforcing a sense of community.
Anthropologists after working hard in primitive conditions for a long time cannot bear to conclude that a pointless ritual is precisely that: a pointless ritual. They argue instead that it has great meaning and purpose in help these societies survive. That is, that the ritual is adaptive.
In fact, primitive societies often do not adapt well. They keep rituals and taboos long past their usefulness, if they ever had any. The rituals and taboos become maladaptive. That is, they work against the survival of the society. Examples abound in primitive and less primitive societies: Inuit refusing to fish in certain lakes through fear of man-eating monsters, Chinese binding the feet of women, the Hindi practice of sutee.
It should not be assumed that persistent, traditional beliefs or practices surviving in a society are adaptive and wholesome. Often they are quite the opposite, or neutral. Or they are helpful for some in a society (male priests retaining their power) and unhelpful for others (those who get less food or get mutilated). Despite the belief by some in the west that primitive societies lived in harmony with nature, Edgeton gives many examples of environmental misuse or destruction by small, primitive societies.
Edgerton also argues that anthropologists make a mistake when they say that the traditional beliefs and practices are essential to the society’s well-being. In fact, with colonialism, a lot of nasty, violent and repressive beliefs and practices were thrown off to the delight of their former practitioners with no apparent harm to the cohesiveness of the society. The taboos were like the Emperor dressed in new clothes. Further, a lot of primitive societies had such ridiculous, maladaptive practices that they were busily destroying themselves without any aid from western colonialists.
And there are a lot of harmless ones, in primitive societies and less primitive ones: grown men swinging incense in church and wearing horese-hair wigs.
Some primitive societies were better than others, but all, like western society, had suffering, pain and misery. All had suicide, murder, fear, hunger and sickness. Indeed, all had shorter, nastier and more brutish lives than the average life in the industrialised west.
Edgerton notes that people in primitive societies, when given the option, invariably go for western practices over traditional ones. They prefer corrugated iron roofs to leaky thatch. They prefer western medicine, water supplies and sewerage systems.
And just when you think that the book is to be an extollation of the virtues of western culture, Edgerton rips a few masks away from its many maladaptive and pointless rituals.
The sad conclusion is that the human condition has some indelible nasty bits.
“”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 eliminated these characteristics in their children,” Edgerton writes.
The efforts of people to constrain these unwanted aspects of their nature are never more than partially successful. Edgerton argues this is because genetic predisposition might be contradictory. We have a genetic predisposition to be selfish and altruistic; to compete and co-operate; to be curious and to fear the unknown; to be assertive and submissive.
The use of culture, beliefs and practices to control these contradictory traits is also only partially successful and more successful with some individuals than others, resulting uneven levels of satisfaction and happiness.
Some societies do change their maladaptive practices in the face of changing circumstances; others do not. The depressing thing is that many societies and individuals resist change despite the need for it. As a result, the societies perish.
Edgerton does not want to be too harsh on primitive societies; western industrial societies and past civilisations have produced just a many irrational, maladaptive beliefs and practices.
Aristotle believed male babies were conceived when strong north winds blew; 80 per cent of Americans believe God works miracles and 50 per cent believe in angels; and 58 per cent of American college students believe that astrological predictions are valid. If that is the product of sophisticated societies, what hope for the primitives?
Risk assessment among humans is way off mark. People fear being eaten by a shark while swimming yet think nothing of the 1000-fold greater risk of driving to the beach. Humans are not very good at problem-solving, in primitive or sophisticated societies. Crucial decisions like where to fish or hunt and where to move to are made on superstition, dreams and prophesies with no rational base. In modern societies, such as the US under Reagan, the fate of the world lay in the hands of man who believed in astrology.
Because humans are so poor at looking at and assessing evidence, they do not change their minds easily. They continue with maladaptive practices and beliefs and they do not change the way they do things for the better very easily.
Of course, some short-term adaptive practices might become maladaptive in the long-term. A successfully aggressive Indian tribe, for example, might have done well on the Plains for centuries against other Indian tribes. Come the white settlers, its aggression results in genocidal reprisals. The other more passive tribes accommodate and survive. The adaptive practices of the industrial revolutions which increased food output and improved shelter and medicine become maladaptive as the environment gets so wrecked it starts to destroy the health and longevity the industrial revolution created. And humans are too slow, too set in their ways or too stupid to change, to adapt.
Many shrug off global warning, ozone-layer damage, species extinction and rain-forest destruction as unproved or not a threat.
In Australia, the blinkers are on. Changes to tax, industrial relations and immigration practices are like asking Pacific Islanders to give up head-hunting, despite the obvious changes needed to maintain living standards. Changes to deforestation and grazing practices are met with a similar shrug.
Sick Societies is a penetrating book. It defrocks the myth of harmony in primitive societies, with ideas that would, in western societies, attract the applause of the politically conservative and the wrath of the politically correct, then uses the same ideas in a classic Zulu pincer movement, surrounding the politically conservative and forcing them to look inwards at the very same defects in their own societies, and leaving the politically correct as irrelevant as a witchdoctor treating myopia.