The Poverty of Multiculturalism by Patrick West

Author:Patrick West
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society
Published: 2005-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

Not one escaped. Some ran away from us, these were killed, and others were killed, but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom.72

Extreme deforestation was also a custom of the Native American Indians, who burnt down acres of trees in their pursuit of bison, moose, elk and deer. According to one authority, deforestation in the Americas was more extensive prior to European settlement than it was afterwards.73 In one important respect pre-agricultural, pre-modern societies do live with nature—in that they are slaves to nature. Archaeologists believe that life expectancy at birth for primitive hunter-gatherers was 26 years.74 Thanks to Western man’s ‘unnatural’ inventions and discoveries—such as hospitals, penicillin, inoculations, heart transplants and so on—most of us can now look forward to dying in our sleep in our 80s.

This is not to call for a return to the Victorian notion that cultures should be charted teleologically, that all are on some mystical time chart, some more ‘ahead’ and some more ‘behind’. Rather it is to urge that we retain the notion that some can be regarded as superior and some as inferior, some better and some worse. For instance, as Franz Boas revealed, the Kwakiutl tribe of North America have no linguistic difference between singular and plural: ‘There is a house over there’ and ‘There are some houses over there’ are indistinguishable. The distinction between present and past is not made in Eskimo societies (‘The man is coming’ vs ‘The man was coming’).75 And the small Piraha tribe of Brazil, who live in the Lowland Amazon area, have no numeral words beyond one, two and many. Even their ‘one’ can mean ‘a few’ and ‘two’ is interchangeable with ‘not many’.76 Consequently, concluded Peter Gordon of Columbia University in New York, their skill levels were similar to those of prelinguistic infants, monkeys, birds and rodents. ‘Primitive’ is a word that should be applied to such societies.

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