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Right, and my personal experiences with Alaskan Natives, some of whom lived in what Marx called a culture of "primitive communism" was completely different. One chief who died in 1993 at the age of 116 commented that his impression of "Europeans" or "white people" was their incredible obsession with material things. His obit in the Anchorage Daily News talked about how he first ran into them in 1890 at the age of 14 while hunting with his father when they were confronted by these prospectors who were starving; they gave them food and while they shoveled the food down they were frantically asking questions about "gold". Say what? they couldn't believe it. Thus from the "Western" perspective, Golding's attitude is somewhat different from that of Rousseau who questioned the whole notion of "civilisation" in the first place and of course Marx and others realized that this was really a self-serving monicker for class society. In that vein, wasn't it Lenin who talked about the difference between the bourgoisie in its incipient progressive phase and the bourgoisie in its decadent reactionary nihilistic dying imperialist one? On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 8:29 PM, Philip Ferguson <philipfergus...@gmail.com>wrote: > > But isn't that one of the mostr misanthropic things about the novel? > > I studied it in high school in sixth form (when you're 16). I hated it and > thought it was not merely pessimistic but anti-human. The assumption that > you take humans away from an existing society and they revert to some > barbaric, savage state is without any foundation at all. It's in line with > the whole 'Naked Ape' idea of humanity. In fact, taken out of a civilised > society, humans tend to attempt to recreate civilisation rather than fall > back into some savage state. > > I'm not quite sure what Golding's purpose was. Maybe he was trying to show > that the English upper class institutions don't really civilise people. > But > if that was his point, there were better ways of showing it. > > Phil > > ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
