War before Civilization (P): The Myth of the Peaceful Savage [Paperback]

For Lawrence Keeley, the study of prehistory (a period which, for some peoples, ended only a few dozen years ago) has been torn between two paradigms: the Hobbesian and the Rousseauian. According to the former, primitives are warlike, and need the institution of the state to put an end to the nastiness and brutishness of their lives. According to the latter, civilization is the corrupter, subverting the harmony and peacefulness of primitive life with overpopulation, greed and the encouragement of exploitative behaviour.

For several decades, the Rousseauian myth has ruled academia, where swords have been "beaten into metaphors": omnipresent fortifications are interpreted as expressions of "the symbolism of exclusion" and weapons as a form of money or status symbols, so that- to paraphrase Keeley- the obviously bellicose becomes the arcanely peaceable.

But what the civilization-bashers had not counted on was that their Big Lie would ultimately be exposed by objective scientists working on the basis of incontrovertible facts: the archeologists, whose patient, reality-oriented detective work completely refutes the fashionable whitewashing of primitive peoples.

What bones tell us is that wars were more common among the primitives than among modern nations, that proportionately more people were involved in them and died in them. Admittedly, those wars were waged on a smaller scale than modern man's, because primitive economies could neither support the large populations nor the impressive logistics that enable modern nations to sustain long-term and wide-ranging war efforts. But relative to their population figures, primitives are a much more violent breed than civilized men.

As always, of course, statistics tell only part of the story. Just as enlightening are the picture of the corpse of a U.S. cavalryman, horribly mutilated by the Cheyenne, or the simple description of what a Tahitian warrior would do to his vanquished enemy's corpse: crush it flat with his war club, then cut a slit through it and wear it as a poncho. (Horror is mitigated by irony when one considers that, in the 18th century, "the explorer Louis de Bougainville reported that Tahitians exactly fulfilled Rousseau's predictions"...)

*War Before Civilization* is an excellent illustration of what the application of logic to reality can do to dispel the myths woven by evaders and ideologically motivated revisionists, and so long as the author sticks to his own discipline, he shines as a beacon of perspicaciousness and objectivity. Outside of his own field, though, Keeley is less brilliant: his recommendations for the preservation of peace in our age (such as compromising with our enemies or letting foreign powers monopolize resources we could produce ourselves) are examples of fallacious induction; his choice of Hobbes as the antithesis of Rousseau creates an unsavory alternative between two proponents of absolute power (which is all the more regrettable as Locke would have served the author's purposes just as well); and his endorsement of the theory that "real" war is total war makes him mistake the moral constraints of civilized warfare for a lack of realism or even inefficiency. As for his analysis of the causes of the academic distortion of the prehistorical record, it would have benefited from a familiarity with Ayn Rand's Objectivism, and Gross and Levitt's debunking of the academic left in *Higher Superstition*.

If you are the kind of person who always feels compelled to put such words as "civilized" and "primitive" in quotes, Lawrence Keeley's book is the best therapy I can think of, along with Robert B. Edgerton's *Sick Societies* and Ayn Rand's *Return of the Primitive*.