The Ignoble Savage

Plus DH Lawrence and Jeff Bezos

Hello,

Welcome to Cultural Capital. Last week I went to Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 at the National Gallery. Highly recommended. Some favourites:

I took a break from Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf to read How Religion Evolved by Robin Dunbar. It was recommended to me by a friend and it sounded so interesting I bought it immediately. Dunbar’s subject is the evolutionary psychology of religion but his argument is a bit too technical to easily summarise here. An interesting and important part of his case centres on the way religions hack the basic moral intuitions that seem to be part of our evolutionary inheritance in order to make us behave better to one another in large and complex societies. E.g. it seems that we have evolved to behave altruistically towards our neighbours in small tribal bands but probably not — as Christianity usefully encourages us — towards the strangers we encounter in large communities.

Dunbar’s view of the severe moral limitations in human nature is a sharp corrective to the fashionable idea — espoused by Yuval Noah Harari among others — that our species was happiest when we all lived as hunter gatherers in a time before we were corrupted by the arrival of agriculture and civilisation. This is the Rousseauian myth of the noble savage. There is obviously some truth in it — hunter gatherers seem to have been healthier and to have worked less hard than agriculturalists. But the idea that our species once lived in a state of prelapsarian bliss is overdone at present. As Dunbar writes:

We tend to think of our prehistoric ancestors as living an idyllic life, quietly going about their business with only the occasional hunting expedition to excite them. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. There has been a constant movement of peoples on every continent for at least the last 70,000 years, and as time progressed these migrations increasingly resulted in conflict between different tribal groups.

This is useful for me as I am a Rousseauian by temperament, tending to believe that modern life has corrupted us and made us miserable. It’s also interesting to think that there was ‘history’ even in the era of pre-history.

Hunter gatherers were capable of extraordinary cruelty:

The Crow Creek massacre took place in South Dakota during the 1320s AD, when an entire village of Caddoan Central Plains Indians was massacred by their Mandan neighbours. Of the 486 bodies of men, women and children that have been recovered by archaeologists from this site, over 90 per cent had been scalped (as evidenced by cut-marks on the sides of the skulls). In addition, many had had their lower arms and tongues removed (another common form of trophy-hunting among Native Americans that persisted well into modern times).

Similar massacre sites have been discovered in many parts of Central Europe, dating to periods around 7000 BC. Most appear to involve massacres of entire bands of early European hunter-gatherers by farmers working their way westwards from Anatolia. The burial sites include men, women and children, with clear evidence of violent death from blunt instrument trauma to the side or back of the skull and casual rather than respectful disposal of the bodies. In around half the skeletons at one site, shin bones had also been deliberately broken before death (presumably to prevent escape).

And it gets grimmer:

At many of these burial sites, there is a conspicuous absence of young women, suggesting that these had been separated out and taken away as sex slaves – a practice that has been, and continues to be, characteristic of societies all over the world. Women of reproductive age were a major prize of raiding among Amazonian Indians even as late as the 1960s

In the civilised twenty-first century we spend a lot of time fretting over how isolated and atomised our species has become. Perhaps it is encouraging to learn that the tight-knit communal life of hunter gatherers has its own formidable problems:

living in groups of any size is stressful. From time to time, the San Bushmen feel the need to dispel what they call ‘star sickness’. This is a mysterious force that takes over a group of people, causing jealousy, anger, quarrels and the failure of gift-giving. These pressures pull people apart and damage social cohesion. Trance dancing mends the social fabric because it assuages hostility. In addition, the stresses created by social friction can have a dramatic effect on female menstrual endocrinology, causing temporary infertility. This is a general problem for all mammals and is a major factor limiting the size of the social groups of mammals in general, primates in particular and, by extension, humans.

And perhaps it is more dispiriting to learn that hunter gatherer societies even have their own version of cancel culture:

In an analysis of the causes of disputes among San in Namibia, the most common causes of complaint were the behaviour of inconsiderate trouble-makers, jealousy over possessions, persistent stinginess or failure to share, inappropriate sexual behaviour and the failure to fulfil obligations towards kin. Ostracism was the ultimate, albeit rarely used, sanction that, in such societies, was equivalent to a death sentence since individuals rarely survived when living alone. Most cases of ostracism involved behaviour, and especially sexual behaviour, that was considered socially disruptive. Under pressure from criticism by other members of the community, one woman who had had frequent sexual relationships with neighbouring Bantu men left the band and subsequently died.

PS if you’re looking for a book on the evolution of religion I’m now reading Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God and finding it much richer than the (still interesting) Dunbar book

Other Things

Kenneth Tynan
I’ve also been reading Kenneth Tynan’s theatre criticism, collected in the book Theatre Writings. That he was admired by the young Robert Hughes (patron saint of Cultural Capital) was recommendation enough. I should have got round to Tynan before. He’s as wonderful a stylist as everyone says. I have a real weakness for this kind of aphoristic and witty journalistic prose. Here he is on Orson Welles’s stage adaptation of Moby Dick:

At this stage of his career, it is absurd to expect Mr Orson Welles to attempt anything less than the impossible. It is all that is left to him. Mere possible things, like Proust or War and Peace, would confine him. He must choose Moby Dick, a book whose setting is the open sea, whose hero is more mountain than man and more symbol than either, and whose villain is the supremely unstageable whale. He must take as his raw material Melville's prose, itself as stormy as the sea it speaks of, with a thousand wrecked metaphors clinging on its surface to frail spars of sense. You do not dip into Melville, you jump in, holding your nose and praying not to be drowned. If prose styles were women, Melville’s would be painted by Rubens and cartooned by Blake: it is a shotgun wedding of sensuousness and metaphysics. Yet out of all these impossibilities, Mr Welles has fashioned a piece of pure theatrical megalomania: a sustained assault on the senses which dwarfs anything London has seen since, perhaps, the Great Fire.

Depressingly Tynan was in his mid twenties when he was writing like this. The whole book is thoroughly enjoyable.

The Golden Age of Vanity Fair
As a twenty first-century journalist this reminiscence of the heyday of Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair when you could earn more than a hundred thousand dollars for a single article was painful to read:

As I look back today, Graydon’s Vanity Fair does feel like some lost world, a gold-encrusted Atlantis ultimately inundated by economic and technological tsunamis, its glories only now being picked over by media anthropologists. I’ve never talked much about what it was like to write there. Because I have always worried about how I’d come off. I mean, the money alone. I’m probably breaking some unwritten law of publishing, but here it is: For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance ￾or an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.

Then there was the Hollywood money. Every third or fourth article I wrote ended up optioned for the movies. Most were in the $15,000 to $25,000 range for a renewable eighteen-month option. A handful crossed into six figures. (You haven’t lived until you’ve sat across from Robert De Niro on a film set as he reads your own words back to you…

All that plus nobody was ever mobbed on Twitter for a headline they didn’t write!

Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich
I’m very fond of the painter Caspar David Friedrich. I think he’s viewed by many people as German Romantic kitsch. The new exhibition of his paintings in Hamburg and now New York has prompted a lot of writing about him. It’s nice to see him being taken seriously for all his flaws (e.g. not being especially good at doing people). This judicious piece is from The New York Review of Books:

Friedrich may not have been good at human figures, but with rocks and water he was as fine and as imaginative a draftsman as anyone could wish, and he worked especially well in sepia, whose brownish tones come from cuttlefish ink—a new medium in the Dresden of his day. An early double-sheeted drawing shows the moon rising over Rügen Island, a few miles o￾ the coast from Greifswald, with its monochromatic waves appearing to gleam; the trick is done with a few dots of uninked paper. The rocks on the beach look still crisp in shadow, and the two small boats drawn up on the shingle seem to await their owners’ return.

The last works in the show are in sepia as well. They were all finished after his stroke, and his line is now more reliant on wash, a kind of deliberate fuzz that both calms and enthralls. A dolmen balances atop a few small boulders; a cave opens on a granite mountainside in the Harz, and Friedrich pulls our eyes down, down into the earth itself, an image with no hint of sky. The best of them shows him returning to the coasts of his childhood, to stones and saltwater, and again to the moon, a perfect circle on the horizon. There are no boats here, or birds, or anything alive, and the world seems at once newly created and eternal. The water rolls, the night softens the rocks, and even in the near distance their outline fades. Soon the tide will cover them. But for the moment they look as if they could speak, and tell us the things that none of his people can.

Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump
Depressing piece in the FT about how Jeff Bezos is sucking up to Trump:

On inauguration day, Bezos stood dutifully beside other tech billionaires as Trump was sworn in. The ceremony, which was supported by a $1mn donation from Amazon, was streamed live on Prime Video. The platform has also paid $40mn for a Melania Trump documentary — nearly tripling the bid from rival studio Disney, though Amazon’s offer was for a limited series rather than a one-off programme. Roughly $28mn of that sum will go directly in the first lady’s pocket, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Amazon recently paid to air old episodes of The Apprentice, Trump’s 2004-2017 reality TV show, on Prime Video — another way to send both money and flattery to the president. At The Washington Post, Bezos killed an editorial board endorsement of Kamala Harris and ordered the Post’s opinion section to only run articles about “personal liberties and free markets”, pledging never to publish views contrary to these principles.

DH Lawrence

Poem of the Week: Spring Morning by DH Lawrence

I’ve been rereading a lot of DH Lawrence poems recently. There’s a remarkable amount of good stuff: Bavarian Gentians, Snake, The Best of School, Bare Fig Trees. The poems have a dashed-off, improvised style — either meanderingly anecdotal or breathlessly exclamatory — that I find incredibly appealing. Often, it’s like Lawrence himself just burst into the room and started talking to you off the top of his head. This makes him an easy poet to get along with. You can sit down with his fat Collected Poems and read bits of it through, almost like a novel or a diary (skipping the inevitable mad stuff). My favourite Lawrence poem is Spring Morning. It hardly requires explanation. Spring has come and the poet and his lover have resolved to stop fighting and to love one another again. The emotional breakthrough and the change of season become metaphors for each other. It’s full of his un-English virtues, sincerity, exuberance, love of life:

Ah, through the open door
Is there an almond tree
Aflame with blossom!
— Let us fight no more.

Among the pink and blue
Of the sky and the almond flowers
A sparrow flutters.
— We have come through,

It is really spring!

I wrote last week about how poets have to earn their right to be serious. Lawrence earns his by plunging straight in with unembarrassable bravado. How many other poets could get away with so many exclamation marks?

What is so touching about the poem is the weary and hard-won nature of its loudly trumpeted emotional victory. The poet’s joyful spontaneity is not quite spontaneous but the result of determined effort. It is a willed happiness, a happiness that is perhaps achieved in the face of contrary evidence. It is not quite clear whether Lawrence and his lover have actually agreed to stop fighting or whether he has merely woken up and unilaterally decided that they should get along with each other from now on. Every shout of joy contains the memory of unhappiness:

- But, did you dream
It would be so bitter? Never mind
It is finished, the spring is here.
And we're going to be summer-happy
And summer-kind.

But it is a shout of joy nonetheless.

You can read the full poem here.