Revelations

We recently watched “The Gods Must be Crazy” in Global Ethics class. The purpose of this was to attempt to draw connections between materials in the movie and the ideas discussed in Ishmael. I feel that the first sequence of scenes were the most telling of all; they demonstrated a distinct parallel between taker life and leaver life. They analyzed taker life-style simply by describing a single day in the life of a taker, “you begin your day...you then re-adapt yourself to a work environment... you look busy... you take a break... you look busy...” etc. This can hardly be described as a serious effort to dismantle taker life, yet it results in a “reductio ad absurdum” of taker culture, it breaks taker culture down by exposing the absurdity of certain elements. As a stunning contrast to the bustling cacophony that is taker culture, leaver life is depicted by the film as being tribal, placid, harmonious, nearly as paradise, where the notion of private ownership is unknown, where nobody hurts anybody else. I disagree with this view, I’d argue that the notion of the “noble savage” is naive and false. Were one to accept this tenuous proposition, one would need to (at the very least) suggest that violence was less wide-spread in those societies than it is now; this could not be farther from the truth. Lawrence Keeley conducted tests in the New Guinea highlands, and he found that the chance of dying as a result of homicide ranged from 15%-60% in foraging hunter-gatherer societies, while the United States and Europe had barely a 5% chance, including both world wars. This suggests that leaver life is not nearly as idillic as it is made out to be. I’d argue that Daniel Quinn is wrong in his interjection that only takers systematically eliminate their enemies. Takers, unless I am mistaken, are those who exempt themselves from the biological law and endow themselves with the false knowledge of who shall live and who shall die, they are also the only people who systematically eliminate their immediate competitors. There is an inconsistency here; the leaver tribes of the New Guinea Highlands seem to, by all accounts, eliminate their competitors to secure food sources, they even go the extra mile and eliminate some of them completely to prevent future troubles with rival tribes, yet we have no problem calling these people leavers. I do not think that leaver life is quite as good as Daniel Quinn makes it out to be. I am not in any way advocating taker life-style, I am simply saying that there is a slightly disingenuous (or perhaps ignorant) misinterpretation of leaver lifestyle, which, I feel, must be discussed. The next pivotal scene was when the terrorists attempted to assassinate the prime minister, it demonstrated with crystalline clarity how catastrophic group-psychology can be when coupled with terrible taker technology. Here we have a human social conflict (I will not exempt leavers from this type of violence) which comes down to competition for resources, once you wade through all the mundane politics, the true source of this violence is trying to survive in a world full of competitors, which has been transformed into a calamity of diabolical proportions by the technological revolution of the takers. This scene decisively showed how, beneath all the inanities and inconveniences of taker life, there lurks a hidden danger, one that has been exacerbated tremendously by the application of 20th century weaponry. I feel that those are the two key connections to make between Ishmael and “The Gods Must be Crazy”, those two sections, though initially appearing to be satyrical, light-hearted fun, held tremendous symbolic value. Those two scenes demonstrates two things: 1.) The stark contrasts between taker and leaver culture. 2.) Leavers and takers face similar problems, takers simply cause a greater impact due to technological advancements.