Ron Baiman: >Louis, > > Yes, Ehrenreich is an Honorary Chair of DSA and quite active - >recently she spoke at the DSA youth conference in Columbus Ohio. > > You can smear DSA's "pretty good name" as much as you'd like too >- we can take it - isn't that what "democratic" socialism is all about! > > I thought her "deviationist" thinking in the Book reviews was quite >interesting. > Speaking of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, here is an interesting item that was posted to the Nation Magazine Forum: Barbara's Bad Science by Chris Vail, 5/5/97 I had the chance to browse Ehrenreich's book yesterday, and I read her chapter on the first human sacrifice. It represented very bad science. First of all, none of her references were primary evidence; all were the interpretations of other researchers, which she was relaying uncritically. Secondly, she talked mostly about agricultural societies in historical times, and she relied upon stories from the Bible as evidence of human sacrifice. Thirdly, she has missed out on some rather fascinating evidence of human sacrifice 40,000 years ago (she was talking 3,000 years ago!). Originally, humans lived in large communities without walls, or armies. Originally, humans sacrificed their elite adults. Originally, the elite adults consented to the sacrifice. Human sacrifice was part of organized religion, a means of explaining the world. It came relatively late in human development, long after the use of fire and the development of big game hunting (although the prevalence of big game animals during the last Ice Age permitted large communities of humans to live together, develop complex religion, and engage in human sacrifice). But humans had gotten over their fear of wild animals (and wild animals had forgotten humans were prey animals) long before then.
