Many things irritate me when I read anthropological literature, and the work of historians who absorb the premises of anthropologists. Terminology is everything, and no terminology is “neutral”. All names for particular behaviour among humans carry with them imagistic overtones and unspoken value judgments. Sometimes I learn, disconcertingly, that many scholars customarily use a simple term with an implied meaning entirely opposite that which seems obvious or natural to me.
One of those terms is “individualism”. Time and time again, I’ve read some academic paper, book, or article in which the term “individualism” is used with overt or subtle hostility. When the hostility is overt, the terms “selfish” (bad) and “atomistic” (understood to be very very bad) are added in sprinkles. Since “individualism” is, in my mind, a word that designates the most profoundly moral and positive of human attitudes, this usually leaves me somewhat baffled. Many scholars (especially, it seems, British ones) seem to use the word “individualism” to mean “selfishness”, and to associate things like class distinctions, cruelty, dishonesty, theft, and bullying with the word. This, to me, is incomprehensible nonsense, since the word “individualism” means “the practice of respect for all human beings as equal, autonomous, self-governing individuals, with consistent respect for their rights”. Class distinctions are the product of collectivist thought, and individualist thought requires, by definition, a total and absolute rejection of class distinctions. All forms of bullying are violations of individualist morality.
Often, I’ve seen writers contrast “individualism” and “co-operation”… entire books being sometimes built on the premise that they are opposites. Again, this defies any rational definition of individualism, or any use of the word that I would endorse or find natural. Co-operation is something that only individualists do. No collectivist ever practiced co-operation. Co-operation is the natural, logical, and necessary relationship between individualists; it is how things are done by individualists when they act together. To the collectivist mentality, the natural modes of interaction are violence, the threat of violence, and fraud. All the crimes and horrors of human history, from the slave and death camps devised by the ideology of Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx, to the smallest example of bullying in a schoolyard, are the product of some form of collectivism, some sort of assault on the rights of the individual. All that is praiseworthy, and desirable in human relations is the product of the assertion of the equal dignity and rights of the individual human being, in other words, of individualism. Individualism, co-operation, egalitarianism, justice, freedom, democracy, and civilization are near cognates, that is, words that always belong together. Any conception of human affairs that attempts to contrast them is false. Collectivism, violence, hierarchy, injustice, oppression, aristocracy, and barbarism are the contrasting set of near-cognates, words that also belong together at all times.
Another practice that annoys me is the arbitrary use of the word “simple” to designate democratic and egalitarian structures. I recently read a paper which reviewed a variety of “explanations” for egalitarian political structures among various hunter-gatherer societies. In every single system reviewed, egalitarian and proto-democratic political structures were defined as “simple”, as opposed to hierarchical, monarchical, and aristocratic structures. This usage remained unquestioned by any of the scholars involved, and in fact, obtains in virtually every book and article I’ve ever read that touches on the subject. Yet it plainly makes no sense. What is so damn “complex” about a political system that consists of a bunch of assholes screaming orders at people, backed up by a bunch of thugs who beat them up? The fact that huge empires and big pyramids have been built by this process does not make it either complex or sophisticated. This kind of political system exists, in identical form, among many troops of baboons. Egalitarian decision-making, by contrast, requires sophisticated techniques of debate, concensus-forming, and accommodation. There is nothing simple about it. Bashing in heads is simple. Democracy is sophisticated.
But, if you accept the premises behind the cultural classifications employed by most of our historians and anthropologists, then the political body that I inhabit, in which millions of people with different ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds engage in a myriad of economic and social interactions with visible harmony and good temper, and in which I can easily approach a federal cabinet minister and argue national policy, is defined as “simpler” and “more primitive” than the hierarchical Nazi death camp at Buchenwald, where there was no trouble determining who was in charge and who was not.
This silly scheme of hunter-gatherers exemplifying a “simple” political system which supposedly inevitably evolved into a “complex” and “sophisticated” system of aristocracy and inequality is part of the overall bundle of nonsense that we have inherited from nineteenth century philosophers. They transformed their worship of power into a framework of clichés, all of which re-enforced the supposition that individualist-egalitarian-democratic ideas are “primitive”, while collectivist ones are “advanced”. You see the residue of this in every museum display or school textbook in which it is glibly explained that some society “evolved” into a “civilized” state by acquiring an aristocracy.
It is time we grew up, and realized that thuggery is not sophisticated.
