Thursday, October 25, 2012

the removal of native americans and the subversion of professed morality...,



worldfreeinternet | There is yet a deeper widespread rationalization for our avoidance of Indians and the news they bring us. On some level we think that however beautiful Indian culture once was, however inspiring their religious ideas, however artistic their creations and costumes, however wise their choices of life within nature, our own society has advanced beyond that stage of evolution. They are the "primitive" stage and we have grown beyond them. They have not adapted as we have. This makes us superior. We are the survivors. We are the "cutting edge."

A good friend of mine (who now works in television) put it this way: "There is no getting around the fact that the Indian way is a losing way. They are no longer appropriate for the times. They are anomalies." In saying this, my friend was essentially blaming the Indians themselves for the situation that befell them. They failed to adapt their lifestyle and belief systems to keep up with the changing times. Most importantly, they failed to keep up with technological change. They were not competitive.

This statement reflects a Darwinist, capitalist outlook of survival of the fittest, with fitness now defined in terms of technological capability. If you can use the machine better than the next fellow or the next culture, you survive and they die. This may be sad, the reasoning goes, but that's the way it is in today's world. This view sees Western technological society as the ultimate expression of the evolutionary pathway, the culmination of all that has come before, the final flowering. We represent the breakthrough in the evolution of living creatures; we are the conscious expression of the planet. Indians helped the process for a while, but they gave way to more evolved, higher life forms.

Our assumption of superiority does not come to us by accident. We have been trained in it. It is soaked into the fabric of every Western religion, economic system, and technology. They reek of their greater virtues and capabilities. Judeo-Christian religions are a model of hierarchical structure: One God above all, certain humans above other humans, and humans over nature. Political and economic systems are similarly arranged: Organized along rigid hierarchical lines, all of nature's resources are regarded only in terms of how they serve the one god -- the god of growth and expansion. In this way, all of these systems are missionary; they are into dominance. And through their mutual collusion, they form a seamless web around our lives. They are the creators and enforcers of our beliefs. We live inside these forms, are imbued with them, and they justify our behaviors. In turn, we believe in their viability and superiority largely because they prove effective: They gain power.

But is power the ultimate evolutionary value? We shall see. The results are not yet in. "Survival of the fittest" as a standard of measure may require a much longer time scale than the scant 200 years' existence of the United States, or the century since the Industrial Revolution, or the two decades since the advent of "high tech." Even in Darwinian terms, most species become "unfit" over tens of thousands of years. Our culture is using its machinery to drive species into extinction in one generation, not because the species are maladaptive, but by pure force. However, there is reason to doubt the ultimate success of our behavior. In the end, a model closer to that of the Indians, living lightly on the planet, observing its natural rules and modes of organization, may prove more "fit," and may survive us after all. Until that day, however, we will continue to use Darwinian theories to support the assertion that our mechanistic victory over the "primitives" is not only God's plan, but nature's.

10 comments:

Big Don said...

Actually, the smarter Native Americans, the more perceptive IQ-160s in the bunch, quickly realized that the Reservation was a LOOZer. Many of them, particularly the women, married White guys, suffused into White Society, took nondescript names, and forsook their "Indian" heritage. Women in the 1800's had no rights and were merely accessories to men so it was easy to do and not all that noticeable.


The differences in status, between men and women of the time, are particularly noticeable in the obituaries of husbands and wives of the era when the man was a mover-shaker pillar of the community. His obit got a big front page write up. The wife's obit were one or two sentences in the back pages that didn't even list their children. Such differences are very noticeable even into the early 1900's......

CNu said...

Thank you for underscoring the extent to which IQ is primarily a measure of passive assimilation to hegemonic culture, rather than, actual, individual cognitive capacity.

CNu said...

The mayor of blacktown says he can shoehorn you in tomorrow for a little chat. http://www.blacktown.net/

Big Don said...

Dunno if this reflects "hegemonic culture" or not, but, today Half Sigma predicted *IF* the brewing Atlantic Storm hits East Coast during the election, it will suppress the Democratic vote because Dems have lower Future_Time_Orientation and are less likely to give a rip regarding the outcome....

umbrarchist said...

How common do you think a 160 IQ is? Like 1 in 11,000.

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/combnorm.html


138 is 1 in a 100. But this is about White people doing stupid things with technology. So they crash their own system because they hide so much important information from each other.

DD said...

This article sucks. There is no overarching Indian culture and never was, it's a narrative that's not based in reality. Indians are fully assimilated into the modern world, but due to our species wide, faulty pattern recognition software, anybody in a tie or riding a skateboard or upper class is no longer considered an Indian, culturally or ethnically.

Indians are the only ethnic group assumed to be a historical archetype, and it's fucking annoying. My grandfather was a goddamn engineer who designed jet engines.

People who bash and uplift "Native Culture," use the same stupid meta narrative and sound like their talking about an NFL team.

DD said...

Love my avatar BTW!

CNu said...

I didn't gather from the source article that that author posited an overarching and/or essentialist "Indian culture". He did, however, give credit to the high level of cultural development widespread among various native american nations, and, he was forthright about the genocidal nature of the european waves (particularly that scots-irish anglo wave) that has damn near genocidally wiped the native american nations off the face of the earth.

Most interestingly to me, the original source of the article for me was one of my alltime favorite websites http://may.greyfalcon.us/

DD said...

I've spent some time with that link. Great site, thanks for hooking it up.

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