At the time of tapping these words into my laptop, a vicious
campaign is taking shape within the Conservative Party in England. On
this Friday afternoon, Tory MPs are going home to their constituency
parties to talk over with their local party officials and members as to
whether they will write a letter when they return to London on Monday --
a letter asking the Tory chief whip at Westminster to organise the
election of a new party leader to replace Ian Duncan-Smith. Never mind
that Duncan-Smith has been properly elected by the majority of the
countryside Conservative Party two years ago, and is still popular with
many ordinary party members, he has been found wanting by some of those
politicians close to the top of the party and he must go. Or else the
Tories will lose the next general election lamentably and may even cease
to exist afterwards. At least, that's the verdict of many Tory Members of
Parliament, political journalists and most opinion polls in recent
months.
The attack on the leader will not be physical, and Ian Duncan-Smith is
unlikely to be killed, of course, as he would possibly have been in the
days of early man -- or, indeed, as happened to Julius Caesar, or still
occurred frequently in Medieval England or even, until only a few years
ago, in an African, Central Asian, or South American republic. But it
will be just as vicious all the same. It will be vicious for the same
reason that status fights at the very top -- whether in a small tribal
group or a large nation -- have always been vicious in man and any
closely related primate society, whether baboon, chimpanzee, gorilla and
a dozen or so more. It is a genetic predisposition. And one of the
strongest, too.
To be fair to the Tory Party, the same viciousness erupts from time to
time in the Labour Party in England and perhaps it will also happen in
the ostentatiously peaceful Liberal-Democratic Party if they ever get
close to power (or perhaps even if they don't). It also happens in the
boardrooms of large business corporations (two days ago we had one in the
case of our television corporation, ITV). It may even happen in American
politics for all I know!
The urge for status is strong in all males, though few carry it to
extreme levels like politicians and business leaders. Most males simmer
down remarkably after riotous boyhood and adolescence and express their
need for status in many other more subtle and peaceful ways. While most
males will accept lowly status relative to the real high flyers among
them and will normally be deferential to those in formal authority so
long as they are not oppressed too badly, they will always be attracted
by opportunities to show off their status or to lay claim to a higher
one. That's the whole basis of the consumer society. All consumer goods
-- above that of basic food, clothing and shelter -- have been objects
purchased in order to exhibit high status at the time they were first
invented at one period in history or another. Yes, even the knives, forks
and plates on our dinner table.
The article below is about cannibalism. This is another 'vicious' habit
of man -- as also that of our other primate cousins. One suspects that
this sort of article, and the book Tim Taylor has also written, could not
have been published for most of the last century. It would have been
totally disbelieved and thrown into the editorial bin immediately. It has
only been in the last few decades, as the various strands of undeniable
evidence from various disciplines come together, that even intelligent
people are prepared to accept that we are a great deal lower than the
angels -- in fact, only barely civilised by careful practice. Peel that
thin veneer away and, lo and behold, we are primates with just as much
savagery in us as any other primate.
Fortunately we have much larger frontal lobes in our brains than the
other primates which can, for most of the time, control our primitive
instincts. But it doesn't mean that these urges are permanently
neutralised. Some erupt volcanically fom time to time, and some appear as
suitably disguised pixies most of the time. That's usually why we buy a
new car. We don't really need it. With relatively little expense we could
maintain our existing one carefully, but the opportunity to show your
neighbour that you, too, can afford to buy one a little newer than his --
and more expensive if possible! -- is just too great. The kitchen in my
house was state-of-the-art when I bought my house 16 years ago and
everything works perfectly well. It is likely that the first thing a
buyer will do (if I am able to sell the place at the present pause in th
housing market) will be to rip it all out and re-fit with the latest
fashionable equipment which shows that the new owners are 'with it' in
the status game. In truth, our animal instincts not only dominate our
political and organisational life from time to time, but it also dominate
our economy and consumer society all the time.
Keith Hudson
<<<<
UNPALATABLE BUT TRUE: CANNIBALSIM WAS ROUTINE
Tim Taylor
The science of cannibalism has just become respectable, as irrefutable
bio-molecular evidence that we have eaten each other for millennia spurs
renewed efforts by archaeologists, geneticists and anthropologists to
find out when we started to do it, and why.
With the Lendu and Hema militias currently cooking human hearts and
livers under the eyes of UN observers in north-east Congo, and the
abduction of children for food in North Korea, it is hard to believe that
until recently academia was dominated by politically correct assertions
that cannibalism did not exist. While no one denied that psychopaths and
the very hungry do it sometimes, eye-witness accounts of routine
cannibalism were ignored.
In his 1979 book, The Man-Eating Myth, the social anthropologist William
Arens told a generation of scholars what they wanted to hear stories of
cannibal tribes were the racist slanders of white imperialist
scientists.
Survival cannibalism made headlines after the 1973 Andes air crash.
Sixteen Catholics had stayed alive by eating those who either died on
impact or subsequently. The Vatican advised that, although those who had
chosen to starve were not guilty of the sin of suicide, those who
practised cannibalism had not sinned either the souls of the deceased
were with God, the corpses profane husks.
The ease with which humans switch into survival mode should have alerted
the anthropologists who espoused Arens that their cherished theory was
fictional. Archaeologically, cannibal behaviour was evident all along,
from prehistoric Fiji to the Aztecs to the Neanderthals of
Europe.
There is now an overwhelming case that cannibalism is a worldwide
phenomenon, stretching back to our evolutionary origins wild chimpanzees
and 70 other mammal species have been observed killing and eating each
other, while the two-million-year-old Homo habilis cranium known
as Stw 53 is covered with deliberate cut marks.
With this in our behavioural inheritance, the question of why we started
to do it fades away. More interesting is the cannibalism we have chosen.
The emerging picture is of two main types, one aggressive, as on
Pueblo-Indian sites where children's skulls were used to cook their
brains; the other reverential, as in the Siberian Iron Age, where select
cuts of meat were removed from bodies before burial to make a funeral
meal.
Sceptics who have argued against these interpretations now have the
findings of molecular biology to deal with. Desiccated human faeces,
preserved for a thousand years among smashed bone at the Pueblo-Indian
site of Cowboy Wash, have been found to contain protein unique to human
heart muscle.
This is the remains of just one meal, eaten in one place, but there is
new evidence that is global in extent. Researchers from University
College London, having identified gene-based resistance to diseases of
the mad-cow type among the Fore of Papua New Guinea -- who only recently
gave up eating their dead -- went on to identify it in all the rest of us
as well. John Collinge of UCL sees the pattern of chromosomal
codification as due to the evolutionary "selection pressure" of
past cannibalism-related diseases.
The question is why has cannibalism, by and large, stopped? The answer
has less to do with innate decency or moral progress than with status.
For most of the hunter-gatherer period a community could not afford not
to eat its dead or its dead enemies. With farming came a certain pride in
displaying a life of plenty. Human burials and cremations were (and are)
acts of conspicuous consumption.
It is easy to think that what "we" do is what all
right-thinking humans do. And it is hard, in our supermarket culture, to
imagine what it is like to scavenge for food. But the careful procedures
of science can uncover the truth in the face of hardened
preconceptions.
Now we know that cannibalism was a widespread norm in the past, we need
to find out why particular societies gave it up. Somewhat uncomfortably,
the reason in Papua New Guinea, after the Australian government's
suppression of funerary cannibalism in the Fifties, seems to have been a
desire on the part of the indigenous population to be reincarnated as
affluent white people.
Daily Telegraph 15 October 2003
Dr Tim Taylor teaches at the Department of Archaeological Sciences,
University of Bradford. His book, The Buried Soul How Humans Invented
Death was published in paperback this week (Fourth Estate)
>>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England,
<www.evolutionary-economics.org>,
<www.handlo.com>,
<www.property-portraits.co.uk>
