Review of The Culture Cult, Roger Sandall, Westview Press, 2001

Roger Sandall, a recently retired New Zealand lecturer in anthropology, has launched a broadside against the modern version of the noble savage. In fact the essays included in this book cover so many topics, ranging from designer tribalism to Karl Popper in New Zealand, that a little sorting out is required by the reader.

The basic thesis can be found in a three page appendix The Four Stages of Noble Savagery, which could well have come at the front. The first stage is that of the Captain Cook era in the 18th century. The Swiss philosopher Rousseau was already praising the superiority of primitive culture. But the actual encounters took place between the pioneers and conquerors on the one hand and their axe and club wielding opponents. Men are killed on both sides but they are baked and eaten on one side only. The life of the stateless savage is seen as the hard boiled English philosopher Thomas Hobbes would have said: nasty, brutal and short.

The second stage is war and pacification. It corresponds most closely to that described in anti-imperialist tracts. There is war over land and violent displacement of peoples; but the indigenous population is eventually well placed to win the moral war.

The third stage is called transfiguration. The vanquished tribes live in reserves and outskirts, demoralised, sullen, and often drunk. Meanwhile the intellectuals of the conquering nations start glorifying tribal culture and go beyond merely fighting for its rights.

The fourth stage is termed Disneyfication. The primitive is elevated above the civilised. White populations are said to have lost the appreciation for magic and the capacity of wonder. Few of the critics care to note that the imagined entities with whom the Pacific is being re-populated are creatures of their imagination. The existence of cannibalism is of course denied and loving environmentalism is held to reign supreme. Ironically attempts to succeed by real life natives are handicapped by academic hostility to market society as well as the invented traditions they are supposed to uphold.

Clearly the background to this book is the antipodean political struggle over the position of the Maoris and Aborigines. But the author wants to paint on a wider canvas and he uses the glorification of the primitive as a means to attack a whole host of guilt ridden and politically correct left wing ideas, including those prevailing in North America and Western Europe.

Sandall might have done better to discriminate a little among his enemies. Some of them start off as self proclaimed neutral students who refuse to be judgmental between different cultures. They are the self proclaimed positivists of the social sciences. There are then those who have talked themselves into idolising the primitive or the tribal: not necessarily savages in the jungle, but at least the rural pre-industrial societies which some of the German romantics have held up to our admiration, often with unpleasant racial overtones as well. Such people are certainly opponents of global capitalism; but they are are likely to be politically conservative rather than radical.

Thirdly, there are those who are motivated either by a genuine antipathy to capitalism or a hostility to all authority, which they wrongly equate with competitive markets. Such radical critics are not particularly interested in the primitive or the tribal heritage. They simply use the sins of imperialism, or the imagined superiority of the primitive, as debating weapons against Western market culture.

The author has his own betes noires, which he has obviously been longing to attack for years. It is at first sight surprising to find Isaiah Berlin condemned for lack of belief in Western liberalism and for sympathy with reactionary nationalism. The basis of this attack is Berlins pretty standard philosophical position that one culture or moral code cannot be judged in terms of another - which does not mean that we refuse to take sides. Berlins interest in Herder and similar German writers arose from a genuine desire to understand why the European Enlightenment failed to conquer all comers and why resistance to its scientific and utilitarian bias has remained to this day.

Nevertheless I admit I have always had a problem with the cult of Berlin among the Western political and intellectual establishment. Why is it that so many people who have no time for political or philosophical ideas, and would much rather ride a horse than read a theoretical book, so idolise Berlin and set him up as a paradigm of cleverness? It is indeed troubling that as far as I know, that Berlin - in contrast say to Bertrand Russell - never, as far as I knew stuck his neck out or became identified with any unpopular cause which would have made the conventional public school or Oxbridge graduate raise his eyebrows.

Wittgenstein is more of a minority taste than Berlin. But he has still found a special place in English language culture. How is it that someone who denied in mystical and moralistic terms that there were such things as philosophical problems was so much taken to heart by common sense dons who felt more at home on the towpath.

But as in the case of Berlin I do not think that Sandall’s strictures gets to the heart of the matter. When Wittgenstein extolled the common sense beliefs and linguistic usages of our culture he seemed to me to take for granted that customs and usages were fairly similar everywhere and if he concerned himself with the exotic and unfamiliar, it was only to point up the nature of the usages with which his readers would be already familiar. It is doubtful if he had much anthropological interest in comparing one culture with another in terms of either superiority or equality.

If some readers by now suspect that The Culture Cult is a right wing rant, they will not be completely wrong. But because nowadays there are few such rants by authors familiar with or interested in the world of ideas, as distinct from partisan politics, he does hit some targets on the head and provides information otherwise difficult to obtain. For instance, I found out for the first time the difference between Karl and Michael Polanyi. They were not the same person but they were indeed brothers. While Michael adhered to the classical liberal tradition, was a follower of Friedrich Hayek and an unremitting opponent of collectivism, his brother Karl managed at the same time to idolise both Soviet economic planning and the 18th century slave-owning and cannibalistic West African state of Dahomey .

Before we just say “so be it” it is worth learning that Karl refused to the bitter end to condemn the atrocities of Pol Pot in Cambodia which he regarded as at most unfortunate. Yet in one book and tract after another I see Karl Polanyi praised to the heights as a profound critic of market capitalism. If it needs a right wing rant to reveal the true nature of our cultural icons, then we need a few more specimens.

But let us not make the mistake, made in so many supposedly free market think tanks, of adopting a right wing form of political correctness in place of the left wing variety. It is time we forget where people stand in relation to the seating of parties in the 1779 French revolutionary assembly (which is where left and right have their origin) and expose the fallacies and perverted morals of all the enemies of Enlightenment from whatever side of the political circumference they come. And if we can win a few more skirmishes and have a few laughs on the way we will not have lived in vain.