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In the Eucharist, in which we take bread
as a symbol of Christ's body and wine as the symbol of his blood, we practice a
vicarious form of canabalism which may date far, far back to a time when we did
the real thing.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2003 10:32
AM
Subject: [Futurework] Routine viciousness
and cannibalism
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>
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