From: gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.anthropology
Subject: Development policies
Distribution: world
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 92 09:57:28 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <BzxFn2.FIM@techbook.com> szabo@techbook.com writes:

 > gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick) writes:
 >  
 > > Some choice between incompetence and greed you offer.
 >  
 > This statement strikes me as getting to the emotional core of the 
 > socialist vs. capitalist issue.

My question was posed as a rhetorical device because it does indeed
get to the core of many issues we have had imposed upon us, but I do
think it is greatly misleading and therefore *part* of the problem we
have here before us.

                                    I think the choice can be
 > resolved as follows.  The global economy is a very different milieu
 > than the hunter-gatherer tribe.  In the latter, people often have a 
 > lifelong, face-to-face relationship.  They can perform altruistic 
 > acts with the (perhaps unconscious) assurance that such altruism 
 > will, more often than not, benefit kin or be reciprocated down the line.  
 > I'd be interested in Gil elaborating on this!

Please do not make the mistake of assuming altruism in h-g societies;
the people are homo sapiens sapiens like everyone else, and as I have
pointed out elsewhere hunting and gathering is what people *do*, not
what they *are*.

Such societies adhere to rigid standards of behaviour, and enforce in
an overt and explicit way the structure of obligations to one another.
The simplest explanation for white people I have come up with over the
years is to suggest that in such societies deafness is the greatest
crime of all. I mean by that, if you cannot listen to advice you are
likely to get a spear in your leg as punishment. If you so persist in
misbehaving that you become a chronic menance, despite all the advice,
remonstrations and punishments up to that point, then you are likely to
get a spear right through you, and that would be the end of that.

Further, however, there are complex ceremonies and transitions through
the entire life-cycle which are absolutely obligatory, taking each and
every person through the various ranks from cradle to grave within a
cyclical, nonlinear timeframe. They way things are to be done was set
out by the creation beings and the ancestors; there is no evolution,
nor idea of progress, nor change, only the world and the best way we
have to live in it. That's it. No questions asked. No worries. Just do
it.

Paradise.

 > The "global village", on the other hand, is a TV-generated illusion.
 > We imagine that because we can see the faces and problems of people
                                .
                                .
                                .
 > although the level of participation per agent is far from equal.
 > It is also abstract, and applying ethical instincts based on face-to-face
 > interaction in small communities could lead us far astray.

Yes there are other aspects also of TV, including the tight clipping
of bars of behaviour and their superimposition with quite different
scenes in inappropriate contexts, which make the medium bizarre in the
extreme. One case study I worked on a few years ago involved some news
footage about a policeman who had shot himself after being pricked by
a syringe needle, suddenly interrupted by a silly jingle advertising
Red Rooster Chicken ( . . . are you red red ready . . . ). This during
peak viewing time.

But again, the capitalist/communist dichotomy is false and misleading,
*both* pertaining to the problems of urban living rather than to any
valid cultural comparisons. Here in my (new) neighbourhood a mix of
people have built houses; some ex-farmers part of the current rural
depopulation here in W.A., Aboriginal families, and inner city types
moving out to far suburbs. It is easy to see which families are from
where; both farmer and Aboriginal families are oriented toward the
land and so do not bother to build fences, yet acknowledge and respect
each other's territorial space. The hyped up city types build high
fences, install burglar alarms, and keep dogs in their back yard, yet
regard unfenced areas as common land and amid angry abuse tramp over
other people's patch claiming a *right* to do so since the owner has
taken no steps to protect it.

 > Let's keep local ethics local, and not make false comparisons of
 > the "greed" of multinational corporations in an abstract market
 > to the greed of an individual in a small, face-to-face community.  

I do not know who has made such a comparison. I certainly have not.
The differences arise from the social organisation of unproductive
city based hierarchies artificially restrained by built environments
yet promoting as virtue individual freedom, human rights, and "moral
consciousness", compared with the land based social organisation of
kinship structures unrestrained by fences or buildings but promoting
as virtue strict social obligation and proper behaviour.

 > In the global economy, the rational self-interest of competitive
 > market agents has demonstrated itself by far the best method for 
 > growing the global economy while preserving the global environment.  
 > Yet, when faced with a problem we always seem to first think of command 
 > solutions -- pass a law, regulate this, subsidize those poor people,
 > ban that.  That is our hunter-gatherer heritage , which often works
 > when applied locally, but is often disastrous when applied to a large 
 > nation or globally.

Agreed, although I suggest that the breakdown of large nations (which
grew to secure the hinterland of cities, not farmers and certainly not
h-g societies) is wrought with problems given that the trend is for the
built environment to take the place of culture and rites of passage as
the media for limiting the behavioural propensities of human beings. It
is architects, urban planners, police and school teachers who have now
taken the place of the ritual elders, but imposing an objective, built
world of hard reality on people, rather than a traditionally subjective
world of obligation and kinship, who take it as licence for libertarian
and/or revolutionary lifestyles whose sustainability or efficacy is highly
questionable.

You also have your "National Guard" on standby over there, I believe,
not at all to guard the nation but to keep the urban masses subdued and
in their place by the application of armed force.

 >                     There are many problems to be solved; let's make
 > market solutions (eg tradable pollution credits) the first solutions 
 > we think of and try, instead of the last.

I am a little confused by your throwing a single solution for some
reason into a global context, but do suggest that unless individuals
at least to a reasonable extent take up their subjective obligations
to other people once again, and *internalise* responsibility for the
way things are by taking back from the State ownership of their own
problems, to sort things out among themselves and then *tell* the
State what infrastructure they want in place to facilitate whatever
local solutions they have mind, we might all as well kiss our sweet
collective arse goodbye.

Perhaps we might look simply to achieving some balance. I do not want
to live in the desert risking a spear in the leg every time I step out
of line, nor in the middle of a city hemmed in by glass and concrete
with a policeman to order me about, but the extra-urban townscape I
can live with comfortably myself, and can live locally in with other
people, appears an appropriate option. What arises from that finally
might well be the best answer of all, and maybe some of you should
come over and have a good look at what we are doing here in Perth W.A.
right now.

In the meantime Socialism and Capitalism (like all isms and wasms) have
been revealed as merely two sides of the same ideological coin already
spent, yes? Interesting, not.