Hey Nevermorons,
Y’all know that I like to make grand statements. If I think that Whitney Webb is the world’s greatest living journalist, then I’m going to say to. If you’ve got something nice to say, then why not say it?
I’m a big believer in giving credit where credit’s due, including high praise.
Anyway, if you clicked on this article, I’m guessing that you are probably wondering whether it’s going to be about to be about Jordan Peterson.
I’ll fully admit that I’m a fan of Jordan Peterson, although I find he is much stronger on psychology than on politics. I can’t not respect him for standing up to the woke mob, but at the end of the day he is a Hobbesian statist who does pretty much believe that the West is the Best. I love his work on myth and religion, though, and I credit him for taking the personality psychology of Otto Gross and Carl Jung so far.
Surely, Jordan Peterson is in the running for the greatest Canadian intellectual of all time, but is his work more important than Marshall McLuhan?
Honestly, it’s probably between those two, because both Peterson and McLuhan have had a huge impact on Western thought. Pretty hard to think of anyone else in their league. I guess Northrop Frye used to be a big deal, but you don’t really hear that name too much these days, do you? I guess the other big names would be Wade Davis, Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Margaret Laurence, Grey Owl, and Farley Mowat.
I’m curious. Who else would even be in the running?
If it were up to me, I’d nominate George Woodcock, but I’m biased. Woodcock would be on my list because he is the most important Canadian anarchist thinker of all time.
If you’re not familiar with his classic essay The Tyranny of the Clock, you’re in for a treat.
You can check it out here:
RONALD WRIGHT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST CANADIAN INTELLECTUALS OF ALL TIME
Okay, really that intro was a ploy to get you to care about a brilliant thinker who you may not have heard of - Ronald Wright. He’s got my vote!
What do you guys think?
Honestly, this guy is one of my literary heroes.
The first time I came to Mexico was in 2010, and believe it or not, it kind of happened by accident.
Basically, my girlfriend Kate and I were hitchhiking around and it started getting cold, so we headed South, where we wound up in Dallas, Texas.
She was a frileuse (someone who’s always cold) and she was still cold, even in Texas, so when she found some hippies offering a ride to a Rainbow gathering in Chiapas, we decided to keep heading South.
I really believe that something drew me there. It all had a lot to do with prophecy. The Rainbox gathering was being held in order to energetically prepare for a larger Rainbow gathering which was to be held in December 2012.
I was very into Terence McKenna and Daniel Pinchbeck’s ideas about the end of the Long Count of the Mayan calendar and the Transcendental Object at the End of Time, and all that, so you can imagine how excited I was to be heading to the legendary city of Palenque, which for years was where the most brilliant shamanic warrior-philosophers held their annual conference.
Anyway, it was in Chiapas that I fell in love with the Mayan culture. Somewhere along the way I came across Ronald Wright’s book Time Among The Maya, and it had a huge influence on me.
Time Among The Maya is a travelogue in which the author describes his travels in Central America. He visits a lot of archaeological sites, and talks a lot about the ancient past, but he is also interested in the contemporary Maya, and their political struggles.
After reading it, I realized that this was the perfect formula for me to copy, and that’s what I ended up doing ten years later with The Motorcycle Diaries.
So I suppose I owe a debt of gratitude to Ronald Wright for the idea.
Thanks, Ron!
By the way, Mr. Wright, if you do happen to read this, I’d love to get your thoughts on whether an anarchist revolution might have toppled the rulers of Tonina.
I present that theory here:
WHO IS RONALD WRIGHT?
Ronald Wright is an author, historian, and anthropologist. He studied archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge University, and took particular interest in the Incan and Mayan civilizations.
He wrote a book called Stolen Continents, which is by far the best history of the Conquest of the Americas that I have read, and which I cannot possibly recommend highly enough.
With all due respect to Dee Brown, I liked Stolen Continents way better than Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, who I couldn’t even bring myself to finish.
Ronald Wright also wrote a travelogue set in the Andes called Cut Stones and Crossroads, and also wrote several novels.
I suspect that what he will be most remembered for, however, is for an extremely brilliant 2004 book called A Short History of Progress, which consists of five lectures in which the great anthropologist basically sums up his life’s work.
It’s truly glorious. I’m sure that many great thinkers have done their best to leave such a parting note to the world, but few have succeeded so marvellously.
Really, you’ve just got to hear what he has say. This is the life’s work of a great mind, all tied up with a ribbon and bow.
If you haven’t already heard these lectures, you’re in for a treat. Thank me later!
WHAT IS THE MYTH OF PROGRESS?
Ronald Wright, in A Short History of Progress, begins by asking the three crucial questions which any mythology must answer:
What are we?
Where did we come from?
Where are we going?
As mythology is a term more often used to refer to ancient cultures than our own, we would do so well to define the term Myth.
Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture’s deepest values and aspirations … Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time.
In an anthropological sense, there is no such thing as a culture without a mythology. However, the Mythos of any given culture may well be imperceptible to members of that culture, for the same reason that water is imperceptible to fish.
The Mythos of any given culture is not seen as Myth by members of that culture, but as Reality.
This begs the question - How then might we understand the Mythos of modern civilization? What answers does our culture offer to Gauguin´s questions? What is the central Myth of our culture? Liberalism? Capitalism? Democracy?
None of these fit the bill. Remember, the defining characteristic of a true Mythos is a quality of being unquestionable. Liberalism, capitalism and democracy are widely discussed in political discourse, and innumerable critiques of all three are endlessly debated. We must look deeper. We must look for something which is not up for debate.
Ronald Wright places himself in the company of anarchists such as Jacques Ellul, Fredy Perlman, John Zerzan, and Paul Cudenec when he names the Myth of Progress as the central Myth of Western civilization. He writes:
“Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology — a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become ‘myth’ in the anthropological sense.”
Wright defines Progress as:
“the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind … that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is toward improvement.”
This, I think, is very profound. If there is one thing about which both communists and capitalists can agree, it is that technological Progress must proceed at all costs. Economic growth must continue. The system depends upon it, and so humanity must serve the Machine. That alone is imperative.
So it is not true that there is no modern religion - there is, and it nothing other than the slavish devotion to Technik, which is nothing other than Power, and justifies itself with the Myth of Progress.
Interestingly, it seems that the Myth of Progress emerged in response to the indigenous critique of Western civilization.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say the indigenous critique, I refer you to the following article, in which I explain how Graeber and Wengrow use that term:
THE LEFT AS WE KNOW IT TODAY WAS INVENTED IN RESPONSE TO THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE… AND SO WAS THE RIGHT!
Okay, I know that you’re a busy person and your time is valuable and everything, but you’ve really got to watch this video. It’ll blow your mind!
As Dr. Scrotes explains:
The European Enlightenment was heavily influenced by Native American critiques of European culture. That European intellectuals reacted against this by developing the theory of “stages of human progress” from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to pastoralists to farmers to market civilization. That Jean-Jacques Rousseau synthesized the American critique and the stages of progress theory into a seemingly egalitarian critique of European social hierarchies which resigns to accept hierarchy as the price of civilization. That this synthesis was the birth of the “intellectual left”. That the concept of human equality has no meaning and should be discarded.
HERE’S WHERE THINGS GET REALLY INTERESTING
So far, the ideas that I have expressed here are things that I’ve said elsewhere, or simple reiterations of other people’s ideas, but now I think that I have something to add to the theoretical framework invented by Ronald Wright.
It turns out that Marx and Engels were highly influenced by the American anthropologist (and Freemason) Lewis Morgan, who is best known for his theory of evolutionary stages of human society.
In an essay called Karl Marx and the Iroquois, Franklin Rosemont explains that when Karl Marx died, he left behind an unfinished manuscript based on Morgan’s study of the Iroquois League.
Karl Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks — notes for a major study he never lived to write, have something of the same fugitive ambiguity. These extensively annotated excerpts from works of Lewis Henry Morgan and others are a jigsaw puzzle for which we have to reinvent the missing pieces out of our own research and revery and above all, our own revolutionary activity. Typically although the existence of the notebooks has been known since Marx’s death in 1883, they were published integrally for the first time only eighty-nine years later, and then only in a highly priced edition aimed at specialists.
The essay is really worth checking out for more reason than one - it also contains interesting information about how Marx and Engels related to occultists and Freemasons.
A transcription of text exactly as Marx wrote it — the book presents the reader with all the difficulties of Finnegan’s Wake and more, with its curious mixture of English, German, French, Latin and Greek, and a smattering of words and phrases from many non-European languages, from Ojibwa to Sanskrit.
Cryptic shorthand abbreviations, incomplete and run-on sentences, interpolated exclamations, erudite allusions to classical mythology, passing references to contemporary world affairs, generous doses of slang and vulgarity; irony and invective: All these the volume possesses aplenty, and they are not the ingredients of smooth reading. This is not a work of which it can be said, simply, that it was “not prepared by the author for publication”; indeed, it is very far from being even a “rough draft?”
Rather it is the raw substance of a work, a private jumble of jottings intended for no other eyes than Marx’s own — the spontaneous record of his “conversations” with the authors he was reading, with other authors whom they quoted, and, finally and especially, with himself.
In view of the fact that Marx’s clearest, most refined texts have provoked so many contradictory interpretations, it is perhaps not so strange that his devoted students, seeking the most effective ways to propagate the message of the Master to the masses, have shied away from these hastily written, disturbingly unrefined and amorphous notes.
The neglect of the notebooks for nearly a century is even less surprising when one realizes the degree to which they challenge what has passed for Marxism all these years. In the lamentable excuse for a “socialist” press in the English-speaking world, this last great work from Marx’s pen has been largely ignored. Academic response, by anthropologists and others, has been practically nonexistent, and has never gone beyond Lawrence Krader’s lame assertion, at the end of his informative 85-page Introduction, that the Notebooks’ chief interest is that they indicate “the transition of Marx from the restriction of the abstract generic human being to the empirical study of particular peoples.”
It would seem that even America’s most radical anthropologists have failed to come to grips with these troubling texts.
So there you have it - a research topic for some intrepid intellectual oddball.
HOW AN ARGUMENT ABOUT ‘FREEDOM’ BECAME ONE ABOUT ‘EQUALITY’
In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow ignore Marx’s foray into ethnography, focusing instead on how the indigenous critique influenced right-wing thinkers. Indeed, they argue persuasively that the indigenous critique specifically influenced Adam Smith, who went on to create the field of economics by writing The Wealth of Nations.
So, basically, the field of economics, which Adam Smith founded, alway began as a response to the indigenous critique. So both capitalism and communism were invented in response to the indigenous critique. How crazy is that?
Eventually, it was a young French seminary student named A. R. J. Turgot who came up with the idea of material economic progress and turned it into a general theory of history. I suspect that this is the true origin of the whole idea of Marx’s historical materialism and all that awesome Force of History stuff.
Graeber and Wengrow explain:
“Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’ – in principle. But we must consider a larger context. In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and, therefore, where everyone is equally poor.
As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances. Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour. We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some – however lamentable it may be – is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole.
As excuses go, it was logical enough, and it did the trick. People love have having reasons for things, you know. Helps you swallow the pill.
A few years later, Turgot would elaborate these same ideas in a series of lectures on world history. He had already been arguing – for some years – for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization.
Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are best understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development.In this way, theories of social evolution – now so familiar that we rarely dwell on their origins – first came to be articulated in Europe: as a direct response to the power of indigenous critique. Within a few years, Turgot’s breakdown of all societies into four stages was appearing in the lectures of his friend and intellectual ally Adam Smith in Glasgow, and was worked into a general theory of human history by Smith’s colleagues: men like Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson and John Millar.
The new paradigm soon began to have a profound effect on how indigenous people were imagined by European thinkers, and by the European public more generally.
Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food.
‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal parties to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.
So there you have it, folks. That’s what they did. They defined primitive as poor, and then used the poverty of the people they were dispossessing as proof of their backwardness.
Then came the coup de grace - the “Myth of the Noble Savage”, in which it magically became racist to claim that that Turtle Islanders were culturally superior. Because, you know, people hate it when you say nice things about them.
But I digress. That’s a subject for another day.
Anyway, Adam Smith and others basically invented the idea of economics in order to justify their own beliefs about their own supposed cultural superiority.
Basically, the fact that Europeans were richer and more technologically advanced than Turtle Islanders was the ultimate response of European intellectuals to the indigenous critique.
“That’s why we’re better than you,” answered Europe. “Because we’re richer and BECAUSE SCIENCE-HISTORY, BOO-YAH!”
Honestly, it’s really just an intellectually-dressed-up way of saying NANA-NANA-BOO-BOO!
They then got back to the business of plundering, scheming how to turn indigenous peoples against each other, and trying to save the souls of the poor Indians.
Okay, well that was kind of all over the place, but hey, not everyone’s got the erudition of someone like Ronald Wright, okay?
David Graeber was a grade-A rambler and I’m giving myself free rein to ramble as I explore his ideas.
Shere was I? Oh yeah, basically Ronald Wright is cool as fuck and you should immediately go read A Short History of Progress, or listen to the lecture series, which is nothing short of a complete masterpiece.
By the way, Martin Scorcese actually made it into a movie. Here’s the trailer:
And here’s a summary if you suffer from severe ADD, hate fine oratory, or are just in a ridiculous hurry for some reason:
By now, the idea of the Myth of Progress has also been taken up by other thinkers, including Chris Hedges, Charles Eisenstein, Mary Harrington, Paul Cudenec, Darren Allen and just about everyone who’s anyone.
So, yeah, the idea of the Myth of Progress is here to say. Ronald Wright has earned his place in history.
If you end up reading this, Mr. Wright, please allow me to offer my congratulations.
I sincerely thank you for the influence that you’ve had on me. You’ve enhanced my life and my understanding of the world through your writing, and you have rendered the world a great service by sharing the fruits of your life’s intellectual journey so masterfully.
You probably think that I’m a total freak, but for what it’s worth, I plan to continue your life’s work, and to honour your legacy by always remembering the Neanderthals.
See you in Valhalla, comrade.
How about John Ralston Saul?
Another cool article! If write-ins are allowed, I'm going to nominate another great Canadian who may have just missed the cut: Wolvie! He may be better known for his physical prowess, but he is no slouch in the intellectual arena either!
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