Wampum

This is the coda of his recent contribution Reject the Lie of White "Genocide" Against Native Americans, which boils down to a 1k word synopsis of Jarred Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel", which has vastly higher unit sales numbers (its in every public library mega-bookstall I've set foot in since it came out) than the vastly better work "Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact", by Ann F. Ramenofsky.

A nation ashamed of its past will fear its future.

One of the most urgent needs in culture and education for the United States of America is discarding the stupid, groundless and anti-American lies that characterize contemporary political correctness.

The right place to begin is to confront, resist and reject the all-too-common line that our rightly admired forebears involved themselves in genocide.

The early colonists and settlers can hardly qualify as perfect but describing them in Hitlerian, mass-murdering terms represents an act of brain-dead defamation.

But the Ramenofsky text is not simply better than the Diamond text, there is a difference even more important than the factual misunderstandings that fill Diamond's works, whether he is describing the Icelanders who were the original European settlers of Greenland as "Vikings and Norweigans" or getting the human population densities in the Americas wrong by an order of magnitude, or the cultural dimension of domestications and pathogens. Ramenofsky doesn't indulge in romantic "historicism".

I expect that Michael Medved would like to take a call, to debate the issue, but I don't think that it would be useful to leave the framing "as is" that is, Diamond by way of Medved. I don't think he'd learn anything substantive from a discourse about cultural correctness or the choice of jurisdiction for a claim of genocide. It would be simply a moment of talk radio, black vs white, indistinguishable from the billions of air minutes spent on values discourses. He is correct to locate the dominance of the European Conquest in pathology, but he does not look beyond the pandemics of contact to the cultural and biological precursors of contagation.

Were Vine still alive, and were he interested in engaging a European awakened slightly from the dream of conquest, awakened to the point of relieving Europeans from the yoke of belief in military and cultural superiority, in the 15th century, but not to the point of complete consciousness, he could convey to Michael that the problem in the present isn't so much that the Europeans won, its that they missed the opportunity to join a superior culture, one that didn't have the opportunity to make the mistake of human domestication and its inescapable consequences, from male control over female reproduction to nation-states and total war. Further, the problem isn't confined to the 15th century, or the 17th if one buys into the England vs Spain non-distinction, it exists in the present, in the life and times of Judge Wild Bill Rehnquist, in the Secretaries Babbit and Rubin, and Secretaires Norton and Kempthorne.

There were mixed comments when I originally wrote Woodpecker and Petrified Forest in 2005, but it is a piece I'm wicked fond of, and I still think of Vine when I hear woodpeckers, acorn or piliated. Here is that piece again, if only because I like some of what I write.

---

Ivory-billed Woodpecker Audubon, watercolor, 1826

Some ideas are dead, turned into stone trees by the hunger of ghosts, immutable, or changing only as they are turned by the lathe of the ice, or the still slower forges of the deep hot earth. The idea that people like Jared Diamond are the better interpreters of the natural order of things is one such immutable dead idea.

Jared Diamond's prior work attempts to observe correctly the workings of that Natural Law in human affairs, in particular, European expansion since the European Renaisance. But to find Natural Law, the foundation of objectivism, it is necessary to look back to the European Middle Ages, to the exchange of letters in 1246 between Sinibaldo and Guyak. But I will simply take the position of Guyak as the co-equal to the position of Sinibaldo, and therefore that there is no "Natural Law" to be observed, correctly or otherwise, in the workings of human affairs, and that objectity is a construct of human agency.

I suppose it might help to point out that in his letter to Guyak, Khan of the Golden Horde, grandson of Gengis Khan and ruler of most of Asia and a significant part of Europe, Sinibaldo, as Pope Innocent IV and in 1246, ruler of what was left of Catholic Europe, wrote from exile in Lyons and dependency under Louis IX as follows (paraphrased, original in latin):

Before rising from the dead and ascending into Heaven the Creator had selected a vicar on earth, to whom the Creator had committed the care of all souls. From this, reason that (a) there is a natural law, (b) it is contrary to natural law for heathens to bedevil Christians.

Guyak's reply to Sinibaldo is a landmark in the history of epistalary humor.

Come at once to serve and wait upon us. At that time, I shall recognize your submission.

For the next two hundred and fifty years Christian jurists would construct the edifice of "Natural Law", and incorporate the encounter with pre-Holocene isolates in Inter Caetera of 1493, and continue into the European Renaisance, producing a Universlism, with Christian Europe at the defining center of an observable ordered natural universe.

That's where Jared Diamond is. At the center of a hermetic sectarianism called Western Modernity.

Diamond starts from the position that the explanation for the extension of control over non-European states by European states arises from environmental, rather than heriditary factors. The literary tradition that Diamond's work partakes of dates back several hundred years, and the causative factors argued for the "rise of the Europeans" has changed over the historical trajectory of the European Triumphalist literary tradition. Prior theories of causative factors are religion and race restated in a wide varity of forms.

But this European literary tradition of creating descriptive taxonomies of difference between European and non-European is not the only one that describes difference. There is another human literature that attempts to describe the reality of the partition of human populations into isolates since the Late Pleistocene.

In 1978 Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation) published a small book consisting of several essays written by an unnamed collective the previous year. Here is what I think is the key passage:

Herding and breeding of animals signaled a basic alteration in the relationship of humans to other life forms. It set into motion one of the true revolutions in human history. Until herding, humans depended on nature for the reproductive powers of the animal world. With the advent of herding, humans assumed the functions which had for all time been the functions of the spirits of the animals. Sometime after this happened, history records the first appearance of the social organization known as "patriarchy."

Diamond is able to accept the thesis of Dubins and others, that dual-host pathogens, arising from the truely revolutionary domestications of animals in Eurasia, the "germs" in his trypich of "guns, germs and steel", was co-causitive in European expansion in the Americas. However, he places the locus of action between Europeans and non-Europeans in the near present, not the remote past, simultanious to the adaptation of non-human hosts pathogens to human hosts.

Before embarking on the works of woodpecker, hammering beaks to get the termites, wood ants and boring beattles that thrive on, or are themselves trapped in, this stone forest of dead ideas, this core truth about humanity since the Plestocene divisions exists. Before guns, steel, Protestantism, Europe, monotheism and cities, even pottery, the uniqueness of Old World human isolates is their domestication.

Diamond is unaware of this division, unaware of the cultural difference between Old World and New World and Pacific human populations, that before every accretion to the cultural toolkit, and never discarded, is the sheep herd. Humans who reach into nature for the reproductive powers of the human animal. Humans who assumed the functions which had for all time been the functions of the spirits of the human animals.

When moderns formed from Europe hold up the fruits of two worlds and compare them, as Diamond does, more is ignored than attended to. There is a reason for this too, as the Akwesasne authors noted:

It is the people of the West, ultimately, who are the most oppressed and exploited.

Now woodpecker is ready to look for stone bugs closed in the stony bark of the petrified forest of the European Triumphalist myth. lôbatahigas meskanagwôd mosagwak -- the pounder hungers for woodworms [1].

[1] mosagwa :: carpenter ant larva, also the name for the snail, hence a sheltered, closed in, ignorant person, a know-nothing. Day Abenaki dictionary.