Some claim that if only the West could return to the peace-loving tribes and indigenous societies of old, we would be happier, more fulfilled, and spiritually awakened. They claim we must learn how to love, appreciate nature, and live in peace. Unsurprisingly, we have found no evidence of ideas that surpass ideas like Kant’s’ categorical imperative.’ We haven’t found it because it doesn’t exist. The task inevitably fails because, beneath the fantasy, there is a more grotesque reality. There has never been such a thing as a peace-loving, egalitarian, or just indigenous/hunter-gatherer society.
For much of human history, nomadic tribes and indigenous societies were bloodthirsty, warlike and ruthlessly clinical.
If what I am saying sounds controversial and untrue, there are uncontacted tribes in the South American Amazon today who have been living in isolation for thousands of years. They speak a language unknown to the outside world and have customs and cultures that are of constant intrigue to researchers. They are an anomalous mystery. Yet, we know one thing: they are undeniably barbaric, violent, and bloodthirsty. The American filmmaker and conservationist Paul Rosolie has spent years in the Amazonian rainforest. He recently said that interactions between Westerners and uncontacted tribes had gone horribly wrong. He recalled how a man had recently left bananas for natives on the outskirts of the jungle. After a year, the man began to briefly interact with members of the tribe as he continued to give them bananas. One day, however, the man was found dead with multiple arrows sticking out of his back after the tribe brutally murdered him.
Rosolie also revealed another particularly harrowing account. In 2004, when one of his logger friends witnessed a tribe ambush another logger and cut open his intestines to examine his stomach out of sheer curiosity, they cut off his testicles and his arms. The man’s wife ran and escaped after jumping into the Amazon River.
Westerners like to romanticise indigenous societies because of their ‘spiritual connection’ to the land. While this facet of their culture and past may be interesting and alluring, it doesn’t discount the history of how these people behaved. The Comanche Indians of North America practised a barbaric way of life. We have first hand witness accounts of their actions.
From the book, Los Comanches, The Horse People 1751-1845, by Stanley Noyes:
“Comanches put the prisoner to work digging a hole, telling him they needed it for a religious ceremony. When the captive, using a knife and his hands, had completed digging a pit about five feet deep, they bound him with rope, placed him in it, filled the hole with dirt, packing it around his body and exposed head. They then scalped him and cut off his ears, nose, lips, and eyelids. Leaving him bleeding, they rode away, counting on the sun and insects to finish their work for them. Later, back at their encampment, they told the story as an excellent joke, one which gained them a certain celebrity throughout the tribe.”
In North America, the Aztecs frequently engaged in child sacrifice. Archaeologists have discovered the remains of at least 42 children. The Aztec god demanded the tears of the children before their deaths, so victims were beaten and tortured before their sacrifice to the god Tlaloc. They placed the victim on a stone, and a priest would cut open the abdomen of the victim, take out the heart, and hold it to the sky while it was still beating.
We often think that the practice of cannibalism is a vestige of our past, long forgotten. We may have assumed that cannibalism perhaps existed during times of extreme starvation as a last resort in desperate efforts to survive at all costs. But the Korowai tribe of Papua New Guinea has long practiced cannibalism as a cultural custom and still does, according to sources.
The moral norms we take for granted are not the standard of the indigenous societies that we like to compare ourselves to.
We must avoid the temptation in the West to cast our minds on wild flights of fantasies about the dream world of other pockets of humanity. We wrongly assume that, so dire are our actions, our only salvation is to learn from indigenous hunter-gatherer societies of the past and present. But we must remember that while we overly moralise about killing and eating animals to eat, there are societies that kill and eat other human beings. While some chastise the West for its alleged lack of “women’s equality,” there are women being beheaded for learning how to read. While we continually rail against ‘hitting children’ as a form of parental punishment, there were past societies that brutally disembowelled and sacrificed children to their gods.
While we moralise over the tragedies and aberrations of wars waged by the West, we should remember that winning a war for many indigenous societies meant the torture, murder, pillaging, and rape of its enemies. Our impulses want us to compare ourselves to hunter-gatherers of the past because we have to live with the guilt of civilisation, the guilt of the past, and how we got here.
This way of thinking ignores an important fact, there is blood on all hands. We must not lie to ourselves about the truth of the human past. It’s time to admit that the West is the greatest, most peaceful and egalitarian civilisation ever known to humanity.
