h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

From around the late 18th century until the mid-20th century, cultural anthrology, as defined by Euroamericans, was devised, based on the notion that human cultures evolve through hierarchal levels from savagery, through barbarism to modern civilization. Along the way, the Greeks and Romans rated pretty high marks, but any non-Aryan contributions were pretty much discounted or ignored.

At the same time, physical anthropology was devised along parallel lines with Man, specially WHITE MAN, as the pinnacle of evolutionary creation. Much "research" was offered proving this, specifically studies of cranial capacity that could properly order the "races" in a hierarchy beginning from the bottom from the indian and black through the asian to the caucasian.

These disciplines reflect to some extent the more ancient notions of Supalveda, referencing Aristotle, that certain people by nature are masters and most others are slaves. The slave classes were not fully human, despite protestations from the Catholic Church to contrary.

The Church endorsed Las Casas' view that indians were possessed of souls and hence fully human in the eyes of God. Not that it mattered much in practice because the indian couldn't remain in any sense significantly indian while becoming Christian and Spanish.

English and German views essentially rendered the argument mute. The indian wasn't redeemable in most cases, not being accounted one of the Elect, so there was little point in debating his humanity. Nor did they bother to note the diversity of indian people.

All people inhabiting the Americas before the Europeans invasion were by definition savages, subhuman, and beyond the redemption of church or civilized society. That was convenient and together with the colonial Spanish attitudes precipitated one of the most horrendous genocides in history. In comparison, the crimes of the nazis are a drop in the bucket.

The ultimate conclusion then was that God had created the world to be settled by white people or later, that human evolution had selected the white race to dominate the world. Histiography and anthropology were both coopted to justify these assertions and until the mid-20th century, this process continued unabated.

During the 1970s, there began to be challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy. Evolution began to be perceived as more than a pyramid of life with WHITE MAN at the top, but as a series of levels in which the diversity of life expanded and all creatures evolved to fill ecological niches appropriate to their life ways.

Cultural diversity began to be appreciated as more than another pyramid with Euroamerican civilization at the apex. Human life ways began to be perceived as evolving according to local conditions without any global "right way" of doing things.

Unfortunately, political science and economics haven't kept pace with these trends. The same old mantras of white, Euroamerican supremacy seem to be major factors in how people perceive national organization and ways of provisioning societies.

I hope that can be corrected at some point, but given the current bellacose tendencies of the rich and powerful of the world, I'm not very optimistic it will be anytime soon.

It is always odd to me that the nordic or white race takes such credit for the Greeks and Romans. I have been to the ruins of both countries and know that I have little in common with them, other than that my ancestors killed the Roman Empire prior to wiping out the rest of the world. Romans are small dark complected and so are the Greeks. While alll of us WASPy types are big and light. We're the skin cancer victims. Romans and Greeks lived at the beach, without sunscreen. It just slays me. The Rennaisance and Christianity were both severely Anglocized prior to taking root with my forefathers. It seems so weird that we would use those as the basis for our cultural identity. Am I wrong?
I think it would help us a great deal if we could point out that we are actually descended from barbarians that came out of the semi-frozen North in Europe and Asia, rather than thinking we have any ties to the cradle of civilization worth writing home about. We just sat around in their ruins to long and started to think we built it all.

Well, not entirely without sunscreen. I think they might have been using all that olive oil for something besides salad dressing or lamp fuel.

Actually, too, the idea that Greeks and Romans were direct cultural ancestors of the Euros is a fairly recent assertion, dating from the nineteenth century Aryan glorification movement. Not that Renaissance and Enlightment people didn't admire the so-called classical civilizations. John Adams even referred to himself as a Roman from time to time, however, the idea became more than metaphorical when the Aryan promoters got a hold of it. It took a few centuries to fully formulate the concept but once it got formulated things like social Darwinism and naziism quickly followed.

I'm indebted to John Mohawk for explaining a lot of this stuff and the associated criticisms of conventional histiography and anthropology.

Professor Mohawk pointed out that one of the objections to the notion that Euroamerican culture might not represent a culmination of an evolutionary process beginning with the classical Greeks is that there's no documentary evidence to support the idea that democracy and similar stuff was actually borrowed from the indians.

He rightly notes that just because somebody didn't write something down or somebody else lost it if they did, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

There's very little in the Greek idea of democracy that's been reproduced in America. The same applies to Rome and England. Neither the Magna Carta nor the Glorious Revolution had much to do with democracy but quite a bit to do with oligarchy. John Locke wasn't the philosopher of democracy just because he was opposed to absolute monarchy. He often championed the privileged classes in much the same way as Plato or Aristotle did.

Consequently, it's maybe more compelling to suggest that the democratic features of the Constitution were actually borrowed from the indians, especially the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois. It might take some time to produce totally convincing evidence of that or fully understand the implications, but I think it'll happen sooner or later.

In the meantime, one thing's pretty certain. At the time Americans were devising their system of government, only one person in 20 could even vote in England.

Some other things that Professor Mohawk pointed out that I think might be relevant to the discussion.

Feudalism was actually a rural based system of localized military dictatorships that was eventually superseded in the 16th and 17th centuries by the concept of the nation state dominated by the sovereign in alliance with trading and other commercialized urban interests. It's probably best exemplified in Louis XIV's famous "I am the state" statement.

It was this system that supported colonialism in America and it's against this system that the Americans rebelled without totally divesting themselves of its legacies, one of which came to be known as Federalism. That's something they most likely didn't borrow from the Iroquois and it's also something that wasn't fully accepted by the nation until after the American Civil War.

Consequently, you could argue that the Civil War and its aftermath were evidence of a revolution perpetrated against the masses by the privileged classes in America, the legacy of which we're living with still. The issue of slavery was merely a convenient pretext appealing to the emotions, which is shown by how the freed slaves were subsequently treated by white society. The civil rights movement was a response to that abusive treatment that a few powerful and influential whites are still trying to thwart or reverse.

For these people, human rights mean very little except if applied to them. It is their rights and greed for which the government has been hijacked, a consequence that many lower class whites still fail to appreciate. They still perceive the blacks or other people of color as the enemy when in fact it's the privileged whites who are actually screwing them, while blaming Affirmative Action and other civil rights initiatives.

As long as the common people can be kept at each other's throats, the privileged have little fear. That's one of the advantages of the two party system. It institutionalizes what is in fact senseless factionalism.

The true governmental agenda is pursued in caucuses and executive sessions or by means of informal agreements with lobbyists or major contributors. Consequently, participatory democracy doesn't exist in America anymore. It was killed by the Republicans before they were called Democrats then laid to rest by the Republicans who are still called that. Even representative democracy is essentially a political fiction and probably always has been.

Maybe some day common white people and other immigrants plus indians can make a common cause in reestablishing something more closely resembling the Iroquois confederation and more representative of the American ideal before it was corrupted by the greedy bastards who are still trying to micromanage everybody.

I've got to agree with Tom Paine. Government governs best that governs least and the best government of all is no government at all. What we need instead is a council of consensus to encourage and preserve the peace, unless of course we insist on trying to conquer the rest of the world. Then big, coercive, intrusive government makes a good deal of sense. In fact it's about the only way we can marshal the resources necessary for that conquest.

I know, that always gets me. We were a limited democracy of white land-owning men until Jackson. And our definitions of democracy change everytime we have a new amendment like the 19th or 26th. Yet, we always claim this superior system of "all men created..." crap. Jefferson meant "all [English] men were created equal [whether they reside in England or not]." We have coopted the meaning to serve our changing society, (for the good). But, come on! Thomas Paine said, "We have the power to begin the world again." Why, because we took the power of a monarch and tossed it to the gentry? aargh!

Just the way my brain works:

There was a tale that said that all people were baked by a goddess.
The brown ones were just right, the black ones were overdone and the white ones hardly baked at all...

Jefferson grew up around the "indians" in his area. He once had, until it was stolen, a dictionary of all the tongues he encountered, as he learned a bit of every language he heard.

He spent years editing a version of the New Testament in which he threw out all the 'additions' and settled on what he thought were the true words of Christ.

The cultural and religious attitudes toward the Native Americans were always based on what was at stake.
There's a whole three hundred year period from the 1492 to about 1812 where the treatment of all peoples, regardless of race, was determined by the local dictator.

Oddly enough, the abolitionist movement in the upper eastern states that began in the 1820s did more harm than good with regard to thought about the 'savages'. Those who behaved were regarded as 'pitiful' but trainable, while those who fought were regarded as 'pitiable' but in need of punishment. Just like little children.

The horror of racism and stupidity transcends all rational thought.
The association of 'science' with religion, racism and stupidity is only gradually becoming known.

When power is seen as ultimately deriving from the divine right of kings instead of the people, then the gentry would naturally inherit it. Between 1787 and 1789, the colonists had a choice. They could have retained their confederation and perhaps enhanced it a little here and there and it would have served admirably, but instead they had delusions of grandeur which they wanted to transform into reality.

That necessitated federal power be institutionalized. That necessitated a national bank and eventually all the other things that an empire must have to function as such.

Everything had to get big like the big states of Europe. And the revolution of the people became the revolution of the privileged and they continued to press it for over 200 years in a seesaw war of words and deeds turning the commonwealth into their personal estates.

Who is the biggest land owner in America?