Jim Goad has produced a short film to accompany his latest essay, “50,000 Years of Failure,” on the 50,000-year-old mess that is Papua New Guinea, where the main pastimes include rape, murder, and cannibalism. (more…)
Tag: primitive societies
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Archeological evidence suggests that at some dim juncture 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, migrants originating from Africa arrived in what is now known as Papua New Guinea.
Ever since their arrival — and I’m gonna be completely frank here — they haven’t accomplished much worth writing home to mom about. (more…)
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In my “Notes on Strauss and Husserl,” I discuss the following passage from Leo Strauss’ Natural Right and History:
To grasp the natural world as a world that is radically prescientific or prephilosophic, one has to go back behind the first emergence of science or philosophy. It is not necessary for this purpose to engage in extensive and necessarily hypothetical anthropological studies. The information that classical philosophy supplies about its origins suffices . . . (more…)
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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
Rich Houck: There’s also other parts I find a small problem with. Ted Kaczynski seems to think that without these modern technologies, people cannot be controlled or subverted or treated poorly, but it seems to me that throughout history that’s not been the case. He talked about some of these movements. He mentioned Communism and Nazism in in the same line, as mass movements, but it seems to me that even if we can imagine a society where there’s no modern technology, you could still have a group of people come that is hostile to your interests for various reasons. (more…)
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Leo Strauss credited Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as a critical resource for his project of overthrowing modern political thought and vindicating the ancients. This may come as some surprise to readers of Strauss, given the prominence of his critique of historicism, which applies to Husserl as well. But Strauss’s late essay, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy”[1] as well as posthumously published lectures and correspondence reveal significant debts to Husserl.
Husserl was not, moreover, a mere “negative influence” — i.e., someone whose ideas Strauss rejected. Husserl was a “positive influence,” meaning that Strauss accepted and incorporated some of his ideas. (more…)
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C. R. Hallpike
Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society
Kouvola, Finland: Castalia House, 2018C. R. Hallpike’s Ship of Fools should prove to be an embarrassment to the scientific community — the most fascinating, righteous, and gratifying embarrassment there could possibly be.
Armed with his many years of hands-on experience as an anthropologist, Hallpike thoroughly refutes a number of popular scientific theories about primitive societies. (more…)