Bill Bailey <ozymandias2 <at> earthlink.net> writes: Sept 29: ������Levi-Strauss argues that there is no real difference in terms of complexity between "primitive" and scientific thought; he found the primitive's categories and structurings in botany, for example, to be as complex as any western textbook might offer. The difference he found was that the primitive botany was based upon use--what plants were good for���.���
������I still think Levi-Strauss erred in being driven by the concerns of his day, possibly responding to developmentalists like Heinz Werner, and was out to prove "primitives" were not "simple." But what he ended up describing as the primitive mind is the everyday mind of socialized people everywhere--habits of willful tenacity and authority���.��� ���I don't accept the notion of "man in a state of nature." What few studies/examples of feral children and social isolates there are suggest, unless rescued before puberty, they do not achieve normal human development. I don't know what "laws" there are governing the human mind, but whatever they are, they're largely social. To be socialized means to be locked into belief systems based upon tenacity and authority, initially those you are born into. These two social requisites of belief are perfectly capable of the most radical kinds of error and monstrosity. They have historically supported all sorts of superstition, tyranny, genocide--you name it--along with the heights of human achievement.��� end Bailey quotation Dear Bill, You describe Levi-Strauss���s claim that ���primitive��� can often match ���scientific��� knowledge in areas such as botany, though ���primitive��� is not disinterested. And how sometime later you acknowledged how scientists ���too are filling needs, have uses for their systems.��� So far I���m with you. One might even state it differently: scientific naturalists can tend to be focalized exclusively on a research question, whereas hunter-gatherers can tend to view a particular question as an aspect of ecological mind. Jared Diamond gives a great example of ornithological field work in New Guinea where his focus on identifying a particular rare bird limited him from seeing it ecologically: his aboriginal guide had to show him how one version of the bird is found low in branches, the other in higher branches. Diamond was only looking at the bird itself, isolate. The question I would pose is: who was more scientific, the aboriginal or the focused Diamond? But your idea that ���man in a state of nature��� is feral, if I understand you, seems to me to be a basic misreading of the life of hunter- gathering through which we became human, as is your idea that the ���primitive mind is the everyday mind of socialized people everywhere.��� I���m not a fan of Levi-Strauss���s way of boiling people down to his structural conception of mind. But the anthropological record reveals hunter-gatherer peoples typically to be highly sophisticated naturalists. Consider Paul Shepard���s words, from his book, Nature and Madness: ���Beneath the veneer of civilization, in the trite phrase of humanism, lies not the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and necessary for becoming fully human: birth in gentle surroundings, a rich nonhuman environment, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the discipline of natural history, play at being animals, the expressive arts of receiving food as a spiritual gift rather than as a product, the cultivation of metaphorical significance of natural phenomena of all kinds, clan membership and small group life, and the profound claims and liberation of ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship. There is a secret person undamaged in each of us, aware of the validity of these conditions, sensitive to their right moments in our lives. All of them are assimilated in perverted forms in modern society: our profound love of animals twisted into pets, zoos, decorations, and entertainment; our search for poetic wholeness subverted by the model of the machine instead of the body; the moment of pubertal idealism shunted into nationalism or otherworldly religion instead of an ecosophical cosmology.��� ���We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse. It awaits only an authentic expression. The task is not to start by recapturing the theme of a reconciliation with the earth in all of its metaphysical subtlety, but with something much more direct and simple that will yield its own healing metaphysics.��� Paul Shepard, from Nature and Madness You also claim that, ���To be socialized means to be locked into belief systems based upon tenacity and authority, initially those you are born into...��� Yet this seems to me not a depiction of socialization, but of what Dennis Wrong called ���the oversocialized conception of man.��� Healthy socialization brings forth individuals capable of spontaneous reasonableness and autonomy, not simply molded to blank conformity, but possessed of an internalized community with whom to dialogue in the process of thought. And socialization is truly a biosocial, biosemeiotic process, especially in its earliest stages where real brain development occurs with real social interaction of mother and infant, involving real human, primate, and mammalian characteristics. For hunter-gatherers socialization involves internalizing an inner community peopled not only by human parental, peer, and authority figures, but by the living instinctual intelligence of the all-surrounding community of life, found especially in its animal and plant creatures. ���Man in a state of nature,��� contra Hobbes, is man as but one member of the community of life, who realizes the value of omnivorously attending to and revering ecological mind. Man in a state of agriculturally-based civilization, contra Hobbes, is one who lives the shorter, nastier, more brutish life, even literally growing 4 to 6 inches shorter universally wherever civilization flourishes, encumbered in megastructures of authority and inequality. To hunter-gatherers, a people who regarded themselves and the universe as dead machines to which life is reducible would be the feral children, socialized into a matrix ultimately as suicidal as it is murderous. That is precisely the world brought about by modern science and its arrogant dismissal of the psycho-physical universe under the spell of materialism; by the modern scientific world-view, whose apparent ���disinterest��� disguises the crypto- religious teleology it serves. Scientific self-correction may be a matter of the long run. Hooray for it. Someday it may correct its ghost in the machine delusion and renew the psycho- physical universe as irreducibe reality. The problem is that life is also a matter of once for all time. Cut its cord and its gone. We are the earth���s feral children razoring away. Gene --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com