In Deepest Anthopologia...

Strange and bizarre ideas these Savage Minders have...

:-)

Fred and Deborah at Savage Minds say, I think, that inhabitants of Papua-New Guinea are not allowed to want steel axes, modern medicines, and umbrellas because they are useful in dealing with nature, but only because they are markers in human status games:

Savage Minds: "On cargo and cults — and Yali’s Question" Posted by Fred and Deborah: Yali and other PNGuineans became preoccupied with the refusal of many whites to recognize their full human-ness.... In their efforts to establish... equality... PNGuineans sought, often through magical and ritual means, the European things—-the “cargo”—-that whites so evidently valued.... Deeply resenting their inferiority in colonial society.... [Jared] Diamond, hence, misunderstands what many PNGuineans desired when he explains the background to Yali’s question (about the differences between white and black people).... [H]e presents local resentment as directed not at the nature and use of concerted colonial power so much as at the differential access to goods...

[I]n using the term “goods” Diamond implies that such items were inherently desirable.... Diamond suggests that local people will do whatever it takes to get such things: that in their desire for goods, local people are the agents of their own domination.... [H]e displaces our attention from the nature of colonial power relations.... PNGuineans such as Yali wanted cargo not because of its inherent and instantly recognizable value, but... to transform the relations of inequality between whites and blacks.... They wanted cargo primarily because they objected to... the... colonial governmen... [which] diminished their relative worth...

One might say that the Savage Minders misrepresent Jared Diamond's book. Yali's question is not "about the differences between white and black people." Yali's question is: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/001336.html.

One should say that the drawing of a sharp distinction between the "nature and use of colonial power" on the one hand and "differential access to goods" on the other would make Karl Marx's head explode. "Power," Marx would say, "is used to create 'differential access to goods'! That's the point the ruling class sees in having power!"

One must say that the Savage Minders' posing of a stark binary opposition between cargo-qua-use-value and cargo-qua-carrier-of-social-status seems badly off. Take it from me: lots of cargo makes life easier, more pleasant, less dangerous, less stressful, and more fulfilling. Take it from me: lots of cargo greatly improves one's bargaining power vis-a-vis others in social and economic situations--there are few unpleasant or laborious situations to which you must submit because there are no better options. For what is status but power over destiny, the ability to say no" coupled with the ability to make others jump? These are inextricably linked: almost always, it is possession or control over important use-values that carries with it benefits in terms of status and bargaining power; almost always, high status and bargaining power are used to gain control over important (because scarce) use-values.

Yet Fred and Deborah want very badly to draw a distinction between a "western" orientation, toward technology, wealth, and use-values, and a very different Papua-New Guinean orientation:

About Yali: Yali... remained largely PNGuinean... concerned less about the material attributes of things themselves than about the social uses to which things were put.... [For Yali] things have value because they can be used in transactions to establish relationships of recognition and respect... more like gifts than commodities. They are exchanged to establish relationships of obligation, alliance, and friendship rather than to get "good deals."...

Once again, the insistence on a binary opposition. Why? Why either-or? Why not both-and? If the deal is not good, the obligation is not established. If what is exchanged is not of significant use-value, its exchange is not an act of friendship and alliance. If the colonial government keeps you poor and without cargo, you have low status and cannot look the white invaders in the eye. If you claim to be of equal status--indeed even if the Australian government formally recognizes that you are of equal status--and yet have so little cargo that you are less able to keep yourself well-fed, dry, and entertained than the lowest-ranking clerk in a government office, your claim to equal status is empty.

Yali was interested in how he could get cargo for his people so that they could do their daily work more easily and efficiently. Yali was interested in how he could help his people stand up so that they could look the western invaders in the eye. Yali thought (correctly) that acquisition of cargo would be a powerful tool to that end. In the course of a long conversation, Yali asked Jared Diamond a question as part of his continuing campaign to learn about how the world worked. Jared Diamond allows Yali his own words and ideas. Diamond, I think, takes some care not to mention aspects of Yali's career that Diamond believes would rob Diamond's readers of their respect for him and his question.

Jared Diamond treats Yali with dignity.

Fred and Deborah enter the scene. They appear to say that were Yali and his people to recognize--as anyone who has spent two days in a Pacific rainforest does--the usefulness of a steel axe, their "desire for [western] goods" would make the "local people... the agents of their own domination." They prefer to construct a Yali who cares only about overthrowing colonial oppression, and not about how access to western technology could improve the material circcumstances of his people.

Comments

[Total]

Uh, didn't you just quote an article about how agriculture was the greatest mistake humanity ever made?

[Bruce Wilder]

"Diamond, I think, takes some care not to mention aspects of Yali's career that Diamond believes would rob Diamond's readers of their respect for him and his question."

And, Diamond's whole thesis is in a dialectic with a racist worldview, which would equate the triumph of European "western civilization" with some kind of racial virtue in the Westerner. Diamond, to his credit, rejects that racist view, and substitutes the explanatory power of evolutionary analysis, which emphasizes selection and diffusion from random events, constrained by structured possibility.

Still, there's something, which troubles me about Diamond's thesis, which is obscured by his tactful account of Yali: it is the advent of the modern, Enlightenment worldview, which preceded and accompanied the industrial revolution of the 18th century. Within a few decades, at most, prosecuting witchcraft with the utmost seriousness gave way to Newtonian physics and Whiggish politics.

Watching "Rome" on HBO, I am reminded that the ancient Romans (of the upper classes) had an "almost modern" worldview. So, I ask, watching Caesar mount a horse from a slave's back, why didn't these immensely practical and resourceful people invent the stirrup (or a decent horse collar)?

Watching contemporary American politics, I see majorities think there is a "debate" between darwinian theory and "intelligent design". I've watched a government, which previously managed to put a man on the moon, fail miserably in trying to take water and food to a port (!) city.

There's something puzzling, here, which I cannot quite articulate. I know some people do not believe in the Enlightenment, do not believe that something fundamental changed in the European worldview at the end of the 17th century, but I do, and I connect that odd event with Yali and his cargo cult, and I connect it, too, with the ancient "birth of tragedy" in the Hellenic-Roman world. Maybe it is just an epiphenomenon of the enhanced status accorded competent materialists in a rising civilization.

[dilbert dogbert]

Ah! Always something on Brad's blog to remind me of my youth. 1954 fall quarter for my girl friend at Berkeley; and in one of her text books was a story about how the European invader, christian missionaries, saw that the men of a local tribe were wasting their time making elaborate but very inefficient stone axes and in a fit of christian charity gave all the tribe members, men, women and kids steel axes. The tribe collapsed. Good cargo badly applied can destroy cultures.
Interesting.

[Dale]

One way to stradle the differences intellectually (I don't think it's available in practice)might be to think about whether PNG peoples should be free to preserve their traditional life worlds or are they free to desire to enter modernity? Another option would be the freedom to enter modernity intentionally, holding fast to the insights and practices of their cultures and utilizing the aspects of Western modernity that they feel is of value.

But who makes those decisions? Is any social group, especially the remnants of traditional cultures, "free" to make these sorts of decisions? Or is there a world system that will transform their lives, whatever their intention and choice?

[Matt]

I think you're partly right but partly wrong here, Brad. Much "cargo" is, pretty obviously, wanted as much or more for its social value as it's intrinsic (or even extrinsic) utility- why do all Russian mafia types want a mercedes 600? Not becuase it's the most fit car for Russian conditions, and not just because it's better than a Volga. (It surely is better than a Volga, but for strictly utilitarian reasons a Volvo or perhaps a Volkswagon is probably better.) They want a Mercedes 600 becuase that's the Car Of Power. Even if a Mercedes 400 would fit your needs much better, one really must have a 600 to be a real mafia type. It better damned well be black, too. Obviously many things are done for social status and not for their intrinsic usefulness- that doesn't mean that a person in New Guinea might not well see, appreciate, and desire a steel ax for its intrinsic usefulness, but we ought not just assume that either, surely.

[bambi vs godzilla]

Some tribal peoples can't express "give me" or "it's mine" in their native language. An anthropologist studying those people is likely to have different ideas about the implication of cargo than an economist.

[david]

You should read more anthropology. Economists, generally, ought to, but you're more likely than most to get something out of it. Sahlins is a good place to start, if you want somebody who may challenge your line of thinking in this post. Being well read, you've probably already read Sahlins, but this Savage Mind PNG stuff you've been putting up over the summer suggests you ought to read him again.

[abf]

Brad, I love your Jared Diamond posts, so I hope you keep them coming. If I had a stronger stomach, I'd enjoy the comments too, but my mind has had too much hypocrisy for one week already. Oh those lovely native innocents and their prelapsarian societies based on communal ownership but, alas, their unfortunate desire for free-floating status signifiers.

[Don Majors]

Yali's concept of society sure is different from a Jonah(Amish). The agriculture of Jonah's society attempts to level power and status and keep alive personal skills of food preservation, habitat construction, and animal husbandry perhaps for their ultimate Malthusian preservation? Maybe they are onto something.

[Dominika Kretek]

When people make decisions, strict use-value is not the only criterion that they use. Now, it's easy to try to elide the distinctions between the various criteria by arguing that all preferences amount to use-value in the end, partly because that abstraction relieves you of having to figure out what's going on inside someone else's mind, and partly because it really is true.

But I think that if you cross the threshold into the world of psychology and culture, you find that while sometimes people use something closer to reason to figure out how to maximize their total utility, a lot of times people don't have the time or the information or the wherewithal to do that, so they make decisions based on maximizing other correlating quantities that serve as proxies for use-value, i.e. power.

Status is one such quantity. Decisions made on the basis of maximizing status often lead to maximizing power or wealth, but only to the extent that status and power correlate. At the points where they diverge, you can begin to distinguish which criterion a given person or society is using to make their decisions.

The thing is, because at least some other people are also using status as a proxy for power, acquiring status per se can mean acquiring power. I think you're right that status vs. use-value is a false dichotomy, but I disagree that status is nothing more than "power over destiny." It's a particular kind of power over destiny. When status is most at work, you have power without having to bring your economic resources to bear, or without having economic resources. You can have high status while being broke, as poets and clergy have discovered.

I haven't read the Jared Diamond book, but it does seem quite plausible to me that a particular person in Yali's position might be more concerned at the outset with poor status in the eyes of the colonists, even if the use-value of cargo is not evident or impressive to him, just as one can imagine someone in a Western technological society who lives in squalor but drives a really nice car.

I also think that a lot of what Westerners typically think of as pure use-value is really just status in disguise. Firstly because even if they have no considered use for them personally, they pay a steep price in status when they no longer put those things to use, and secondly because those things are often put to use to get things that bring status. For instance, the mass-production of cheap clothing is often seen as a good thing in its own right, but quite a lot of people appreciate it mostly because it helps them keep up with fads and fashions. The benefits of keeping up with fashion are real, but that's not the same thing as a strict improvement in one's material circumstance. Most Westerners would see a world where attractive clothing was extremely durable and just as extremely expensive as a worse one, even though it might keep them equally well clothed. I think it's that kind of ambiguity that Fred and Deborah are trying to emphasize.

[Brad DeLong]

Fred and Deborah are not trying to emphasize that use-value, exchange-value, status-value, scarcity, and technology are in a dialectical relationship. Fred and Deborah are hunting very different game...

[econreason]

Of course how will we ever know what was going on in the mind of the Papua New Guineans who first saw white outsiders and all their "cargo?"

As it happens, something close to such an event was in fact filmed, and PNG participants were asked about the events 50 years later. I'm talking about the film 'First Contact' based on 1930 movie footage caught by Australian gold prospectors (who brought lots of cargo and shot several dozen natives dead because -- as rationalized 50 years later -- the natives would have stolen their cargo and killed them first).

If you haven't seen this film already Brad, I recommend you find it in the library and give it a view with the 14 year old: http://www.filmakers.com/indivs/FirstContact.htm

This still-shot from the film sums up the nature of the debate in this thread PERFECTLY:

http://www.filmakers.com/images/FIRST%20CONTACT.JPG

[Chris Lovell]

The statement that Jared Diamond "treats Yali with dignity"--and the implication that Fred and Deborah do not--is strange.

Fred and Deborah are working in a long history of anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea (PNG). One important work in this area is Peter Lawrence's book _Road Belong Cargo_, first published in 1964, which brought Yali into the academic limelight years before Diamond met him. Yali was a leader in the cargo cult phenomenon in PNG, which was ongoing when Lawrence did his fieldwork in the '50s. In cargo cult, natives tried to acquire European material goods by performing religious rituals--they believed that "cargo" came from a supernatural source whose secrets the Europeans understood, and if they conducted the proper rituals, they too could get cargo.

Given this history, it's not hard to see why Fred/Deborah see a significance in Yali's question that Diamond does not--since Yali had been convinced that western goods came from supernatural sources, he was asking a question that was both cosmological and historical, and for him the cosmological aspect was probably more important. In other words, the fact that westerners had more cargo indicated that they had a different--and better--relationship to the ancestors and to the gods. An answer about differences in biological and geological resources wouldn't be a very satisfying answer for someone thinking in these terms.

For Diamond, though, (and for Brad), Yali and the other inhabitants of PNG are economical rationalists. Here's Diamond (in what I take to be a fair representation of his viewpoint): "Whites had arrived, imposed centralized government, and brought material goods whose value New Guineans instantly recognized, ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and umbrellas. In New Guinea all these goods were referred to collectively as 'cargo.'" Diamond takes for granted that technological goods were instantly--perhaps instinctively--recognized as better than what the natives had, because of their practical utility. As Brad says: "Yali was interested in how he could get cargo for his people so that they could do their daily work more easily and efficiently."

But this assumes that the people of PNG evaluate technology and goods in the same way as the European colonists did and as we do now. For all that steel axes seem to us clearly superior than stone ones, they've been viewed with ambivalence in the South Pacific--a classic article by Lauriston Sharp, "Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians," details what happened when missionaries introduced steel axes to a northern Australian tribe--the axes were not adopted smoothly, and many members of the tribe viewed them with suspicion.

Fred/Deborah provide another illustration of how some groups in PNG (not Yali's tribe) weren't interested in western technology (http://savageminds.org/2005/09/03/about-yali/): "The Australians assumed that these PNGuineans were impressed with their complex technology—for example, their guns and steel. However, in Strathern’s view, possession of this novel technology initially marked these explorers as spirits ... the appearance of spirits among the living was extraordinary but ultimately not very important. Spirits, after all, would likely disappear without affecting social life very much. Only when Highlanders discovered that these Australians not only had large quantities of pearl shells but wished to transact with them did the Australians become plausibly human. Pearl shells, traded up from the coast, were for a long time central in the Highland exchanges through which marriages were contracted, compensation for death or injury was paid, and alliances were established. In other words, only when the Australians showed that they apparently valued what the Highlanders already valued and desired did the Highlanders regard them as interesting and socially significant."

Anthropological accounts of cargo cult emphasize that participants wanted to establish better relations with European colonizers (or alternatively drive them out) by equalizing their status through the acquisition of European goods. The attempt to do this through ritual, rather than through what we'd consider normal economic means, suggests that the participants weren't evaluating European goods in terms of their use-value but rather primarily in terms of their social or magical power, which ultimately derived from the fact that supernatural powers created European goods.

If we do stick with the notion of natives as economic rationalists, it's not really important to explain cargo cult--it becomes some weird misunderstanding of how capital is created, a bizarre mental artifact of a primitive society. When writing about Yali and PNG, Diamond speaks about "lifestyle" rather than "culture": "Yes, there still is a huge difference between the lifestyle of the average New Guinean and that of the average European or American. Comparable differences separate the lifestyles of other peoples of the world as well..." Diamond is referring primarily to differences in the standard of living, I think, and it's laudable that he draws attention to the immense difference in wealth between the developed world and the rest of the world. But it's indicative that he focuses on a difference of "lifestyle," as if, deep down, we'd all like to live the same way, with the same standard of living and the same goods.

To ignore culture--to ignore the unique history of PNG's colonization and the cargo cult, and to ignore the role that Yali played in cargo cult, and to instead invoke a universal economic rationalism--that, I think, is to treat Yali with disrespect.

[P.M.Lawrence]

Perhaps people might like to read Errol Flynn's autobiography, "My wicked, wicked ways", for the parts describing his own experiences in PNG in the early '30s. His first experience involved learning the hard way about managing people (the "boss boy" method). Later on he became cynical enough to exploit a native chief's cupidity and get indentured workers from him even when more experienced whites no longer could. It shows a lot of human nature in action at both ends of the interactions. Amusing in both senses.

[Ginger Yellow]

Diamond does talk about culture, and specifically the differences between cultures in developing and adopting technologies. He goes out of his way to explain that this differential attitude can't begin to explain the differences in "cargo" between Europeans and Papua New Guineans (or Native Americans, or Australian Aborigines etc), but that biogeography has been the dominant factor on a global scale. It seems to me that the Savage Minds people are so obsessed with proving that Diamond is either racist, condoning racism or lending support to racism that they completely miss the point. They're making much the same mistake as people who hold Darwin responsible for social darwinism. It really doesn't matter how Yali or other Papua New Guineans viewed cargo, as far as Diamond's thesis is concerned. The question as interpreted by Diamond is fascinating in its own right and worthy of an answer. Even if it could be proved that Diamond has misinterpreted Yali, it would make absolutely no difference to the value of his work. This is true regardless of whether you accept his conclusions or not.

[Timothy Burke]

I think Brad's criticism here is a bit strongly framed. I found Fred and Deborah's post at Savage Minds confusingly written, difficult to parse, but I understand them invoking a couple of concepts that are pretty commonplace in anthropological and ethnohistorical writing about material culture, consumerism, cargo cults and the like. Most of those concepts I think Brad would agree are important, and might even agree that they're in tension in some ways with Diamond's very stark materialism and his macroscale view of historical process.

First, the concept of gift economies and status or reputation capital, that in some societies, manufactured goods were wanted less for some sense of their material utility and more because they could be used in existing forms of exchange centering on gifts and status accumulation. To give an African example, liquor was one of the things that some African elites wanted as payment for slaves, and the common assumption on the part of Westerners was that Africans wanted the alcohol in order to drink it. But in many cases, elites just stockpiled it and never consumed it. They weren't interested in its "real" or material utility: it was a kind of gift-currency. You could give the bottles to clients and at a later date use the circulation of gifts as a way to mobilize your clients for various kinds of labor. The clients didn't usually drink what they were given, either: they had their own stockpiles. A lot of gift exchange in the Pacific worked pretty similarly historically. So for one, you might suggest that Yali's desire for goods had something to do with this understanding of wealth, that he or others like him were not necessarily saying, "Why do you guys have so much useful stuff", but "Why do you guys have so much stuff period" (and "Can we have some?", which counter to Fred and Deborah's assertions that Yali's question must have some kind of intricate critique of colonialism embedded within it, I would read Yali's question as potentially a desire to be a client within a global circulation of goods.)

Second, I understand them to be suggesting that when Yali asks about the disparity between the West and PNG, but also that what Yali might be more interested in the specific cultural meanings of specific goods than he was interested in their "real" material utility. In my own writing on consumerism in southern Africa, I think I'd suggest that there's no real contradiction between these things--that people can want manufactured soap because it's really useful and because it's actually easier and nicer to acquire manufactured soap than making soap or soap-equivalents yourself, but also that there's an entire symbolic order behind soap and cleanliness, a whole range of meanings, some consciously accessible, others implicit and subconscious, that were a part of wanting soap (and specific brands of it). In this sense, I'd be perfectly prepared to hear that Yali or someone like him might be asking both, "Why do you have so much concretely useful stuff" and be thinking about the meanings of goods in ways that might potentially have something to do with his views of colonialism, modernity, the West and so on.

And I would say that Diamond's materialism and his extreme macroscale comparativism leads him to be pretty soundly uninterested in what commodities mean to people, about the cultural and social history that govern the experience of desire or demand, about the way we think about the material world, about the symbolic or social capital that is involved in material culture or exchange. I think those are important issues: in fact, I'd say that one of the reasons that economics (and economic history) tend to get a bit uneasy in dealing with consumerism per se is that consumerism as a topic almost necessarily requires paying attention to both culture and psychology, to questions of what things mean, that people desire commodities for reasons that may have little to do with real material use-value.

[Roger Albin]

Chris, its not incorrect to treat the Cargo Cults as economic rationalism. Now, its true many of these items were treated as status items and had value independent of their actual utility. But, one of the major points of the Cargo Cults was to increase access to Western industrial goods. Some of the apparently bizarre manifestations of the Cargo Cults like the building of fake airfields and aircraft as acts of sympathetic magic are actually economically rational within the worldview of PNG. In a creative but futile way, PNG peoples like Yali attempted to incorporate these goods into their existing world view. The result was a complex articulation of some of their existing ideas about the natural world and the role of magic. This was essentially an attempt to produce European goods via what was to them rational and accepted processes. This is quite economically rational. A failure because of the incorrect assumptions about the natural world, but within the context of their culture, definitely economically rational.

[david]

But, if you treat cargo cults as economically rational, you've really traded in the concept of economic rationality for the culture concept. Because something has to be giving them the worldview from which they draw their values.

[Brad DeLong]

A bunch of it is missionaries: telling people that they must pray to God the Father and Jesus the Son and good things will come...

With respect to Tim Burke's "I think I'd suggest that there's no real contradiction between these things--that people can want manufactured soap because it's really useful and because it's actually easier and nicer to acquire manufactured soap than making soap or soap-equivalents yourself, but also that there's an entire symbolic order behind soap and cleanliness, a whole range of meanings, some consciously accessible, others implicit and subconscious, that were a part of wanting soap (and specific brands of it). In this sense, I'd be perfectly prepared to hear that Yali or someone like him might be asking both, "Why do you have so much concretely useful stuff" and be thinking about the meanings of goods in ways that might potentially have something to do with his views of colonialism, modernity, the West and so on."

He's right, of course. Commodities are both use-values and counters in human status games--it's pleasant to be clean, but it's also a serious loss-of-status in modern America not to be clean. My complaint about Fred and Deborah is that they claim that Yali and company don't care about use-values--that is is *all* about looking the white invaders in the eye. That's completely implausible.

[Julian Elson]

I'm reminded of Warren Farrell's Op-Ed in the Monday New York Times -- "women are poorer and less socially powerful than men in our society because that's how THEY want it to be!"

[Chris Lovell]

Roger Albin wrote: "This is quite economically rational. A failure because of the incorrect assumptions about the natural world, but within the context of their culture, definitely economically rational."

I think that's a fair statement, but that doesn't seem to be what most people mean by economic rationality. On most definitions of economic rationality, which don't factor in culture, cargo cult is extremely irrational behavior--it certainly interfered with economic development projects that might have made the natives better off.

Brad wrote: "My complaint about Fred and Deborah is that they claim that Yali and company don't care about use-values--that is is *all* about looking the white invaders in the eye. That's completely implausible."

Well, I've only read their blog post, not their book, but I don't think they're saying this. They didn't put in enough qualifying words, but note the word "primarily" in the second sentence of this quote: "PNGuineans such as Yali wanted cargo not because of its inherent and instantly recognizable value, but because of a desire to transform the relations of inequality between whites and blacks that were pervasive in colonialism. They wanted cargo primarily because they objected to the ways in which the centralized, colonial government used power and, correspondingly, diminished their relative worth." I read that as saying Yali et al. wanted cargo mostly because of its social value and much less because of its use value--the somewhat hasty nature of blog writing means that their piece draws more of an opposition than they intended.

In fact, in comments at the Savage Minds site, Fred/Deborah acknowledge that PNGers did want goods because of their utility, but note that use-value is embedded in the local political economy--as many posters here haved noted, social value and use value are intertwined.

[Brad DeLong]

Re: "In fact, in comments at the Savage Minds site, Fred/Deborah acknowledge that PNGers did want goods because of their utility, but note that use-value is embedded in the local political economy--as many posters here haved noted, social value and use value are intertwined."

Ummm... Unless I'm reading them incorrectly, they say that "perhaps" steel axes are useful--but immediately go to talk about the "problematics of the introduction of steel tools among the Yir Yoront... welcomed by some and detested by others."

They do say that it would be *a bad thing* if PNGers were to recognize steel axes as useful: "in using the term 'goods' Diamond implies that such items were inherently desirable—instantly recognizable as worth acquiring. In defining cargo as goods, Diamond suggests that local people will do whatever it takes to get such things: that in their desire for goods, local people are the agents of their own domination..." I don't think that fits with your reading at all.

[dilbert dogbert]

WooHee! Just think of our responses to a 1st contact with a superior culture. Use value? Power and status? MMMM??? All of the above? The antho groups would be in hog heaven - that is if we survived.

[Les Brunswick]

Fred and Deborah are coming from a basically left-wing perspective. It comes out of the twists and misfortunes the left has suffered in the last century and a half.

Marx said that capitalism would eventually collapse from its alleged contradictions. When many decades passed and this didn't happen, Marxists had to come up with an explanation, and one result was Lenin's book, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which claims that capitalism has avoided collapse by bringing the entire world under its domination.

That lead to the belief that, if the dominated colonies were to break free and become socialist, then capitalism would collapse, and hence the third-worldism of the 60's and later decades.

The theory didn't really make sense, because Marx taught that a traditional, pre-modern society first had to go through a capitalist phase before it would be ready for socialism (and in fact, Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth has a long, Marxist analysis of why third world socialist revolutions go bad). To believe it the third world revolutionists had to pretend that pre-modern societies (except for the original foraging societies) are not, as Marx himself explained, characterized by highly inequal social relations. Instead, they claimed that they were all already communistic, and any inequality was only the result of western capitalist imperialism.

Hence we get Fred and Deborah viewing steel axes as just Western capitalist corruption that the natives adopt in their war against imperialism.

[P.M.Lawrence]

Dilbert Dogbert, that isn't a hypothetical. It is just precisely what was going on during the northward advance of cultural norms of the mediterranean area, once they had spread west so that their "north" was modern western Europe. The process really only ground to a halt in the 19th century, with the Highland Clearances, and was at a high point during the 16th century pacification of Ireland (the cultural transfer, that is - 17th century developments weren't bringing in new cultural norms so much).

Oh, we do have much contemporary record on the subject, not all from one side.

[Maynard Handley]

I've got to say, Brad, that I find your argument very unconvincing, or, to put it differently, I find their argument very convincing. It is more an American trait than a universal trait to approve of something new because it is more functional, and even in America this trait is fairly severly proscribed. To give three examples:
(1) How many Ivy League students are learning about the law, or business, or liberal arts, because they intrinsically find these subjects interesting vs because they want a piece of paper (a status marker) that allows them to move on to the next step in their lives. Or, to put the question more explicitly, how many of these students, during their breaks when they are free to do what they want, are reading up on their subjects of choice rather than playing video games, chasing tail, or sunbathing? Many of the pure science students probably are, some of the engineers, few, I suspect, of the other disciplines.
(2) Britain, as a result, I suspect, of the history of the industrial revolution and how it interacted with class, seems to have a strange inverse snobbery that positively relishes houses that simply don't work properly --- poor water pressure, tepid rather than hot water, no air conditioning, few electrical outlets.
(3) Clothing. While certain swathes of America (Silicon Valley) have done a pretty good job of completely decoupling clothing from status, allowing one to dress for comfort, other sections of society (NY finance) are dressing in black suits in summer. These are people who are clearly well aware that there are more utilitarian alternatives --- but the social/status imperative is far more powerful than simple comfort.

[Ginger Yellow]

"Many of the pure science students probably are, some of the engineers, few, I suspect, of the other disciplines."

Well, I went to Oxford rather than the Ivy League, but I can assure you that with the exception of law, most "liberal arts" students were more interested in their subject outside of work than the scientists. Ironically, one of my (extremely talented) biochemist friends recently switched to law because he found his subject so tedious. The reason science students spend less time pissing about is that they have a lot more things to learn by rote - English students like myself, for example, have almost nothing to "learn" once we've read the set texts. Please note that I'm not at all saying that the sciences are less creative or what have you. Just that arts students simply don't have to learn formulae or memorise which bone connects to the hip bone like physicists and medics do.

[Maynard Handley]

Oh god, don't lump the pseudo-scientist medics with real scientists.
As for science, I'm going by my experience which is math/physicists (and CS types as an undergrad), but perhaps I just hung out with the really dedicated set.