Romantic primitivism
Although Evfit is critical of some aspects of western consumerism, its criticism is essentially of physical manifestations of some aspects of our culture, not of the idea of civilization - or even western civilization - itself.
Evfit, in its turn is a possible target of two criticisms, one likely but ill-founded, simplistic and easily dismissed. The other no less well-founded, but rather more complex and difficult to deal with.
Criticism 1: "But we can't all go back to living in caves..." If you haven't already been confronted with a statement like this, you soon will be. What is happening here is that the speaker creates in their mind a superficial and uninformed "straw man" model of your aspirations and accuses you of having this flawed model in your mind.
Don't fall for it!
Of course, you could respond that, well, in fact it is the one thing that most of us could do - if there were enough caves to go around.
But the best response is one which indicates you are on a journey of discovery, discovery through education and experimentation, that it's a hobby and it's fun!
Criticism 2: There is, however, a history of ideas about romantic primitivism in western thought and you will be well-placed to avoid the trap if you are aware of this history. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) in his Discourse on Inequality provided one of the most influential statements in support of romantic primitivism, but it was not the first. "Romantic primitivism - the idealizing of social simplicity and the world of the 'noble savage' - has been around for a long time. You can find it in classical Greece 2500 years ago: the Cynics and the Stoics are examples ... In the words of [Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas] who looked closely at the subject from its first appearance in classical times, primitivism represents 'the unending revolt of the civilized against civilization'. This revolt has one invariable feature. As Rousseau himself dramatically demonstrated, those most excited by the idea of 'noble savagery' have no experience at all of true dirt-and-diseases tribal life. What inspires them is an idée fixe in the mind ... the noisiest and most excitable [romantic primitivists] are always media folk or imaginative writers or campus intellectuals who haven't a clue what they're getting into. Romantic primitivism consists of fantasies inside the heads of urban dwellers - delusions of a morally superior, Edenic world beyond the horizon - which are then projected onto primitive peoples themselves".
This extensive quotation is from Roger Sandall's The Culture Cult and it depicts succinctly, a trap which some may fall for, but which Evfit does not. Sandall is an experienced anthropologist and senior academic who observed at first hand the fortunes of anthropological science over the second half of the twentieth century. His sharpest barbs are directed at those who are absolutists at home (in condemning the shortcomings of their own, western, culture) and relativists abroad (in condoning cruel and irrational actions elsewhere).
Sandall's salutary critique is not directed at the Evfit approach or the approach of scientists like Dr Loren Cordain. Evfit does not advocate a 'return to noble savagery' and certainly does not reject the best that western civilization has to offer. Indeed, the sophisticated technologies, and the application of those technologies by trained and imaginative scientists, possible only in a mature civil society, are the basis for Evfit's synthesis.
Further, it is our scientific approach to the evidence that enables us to identify, for application today, the features of (a) our Pliocene origins, (b) the Pleistocene environment and (c) the Paleolithic lifestyle without being encumbered by romantic baggage.
Three cautions
1. There is a tendency among some writers to attribute to the Cro-Magnons
'noble savage' status. Donald Johanson suggests that the Cro-Magnons were
'unnecessarily valorized', originally in the nineteenth century in contrast to
the unnecessarily denigrated Neanderthals.
2. It goes without saying, of course, that Brooks Kubik's 'Dinosaur Training' does not pretend to be founded in palaeontology any more than does the Flintstones. These are not example of romantic primitivism.
3. The hunter-gatherers extant today have all been touched in various degrees by western civilization and their ethnographies need be interpreted with caution. The serious allegations about the extent to which anthropologists merely observed and recorded the Yanomami or actually intervened in Yanomami society is just a recent example of a century-old phenomenon.
Further reading:
Roger Sandall, The Culture Cult, Westview Press, Boulder Colorado, 2001
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, originally 1868
Wilfrd Thesiger, Arabian Sands, 1959
McKnight's observations of the destruction of
Mornington Island society
Viewing:
The movie Atanarjuat, 2002