Murray N. Rothbard vs. the Philosophers - Ludwig von Mises Institute

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REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 123 Second, it is implicitly and even explicitly assumed that the way primitive tribes act is more “natural,” and somehow more appropriate to man than the “artifices” of civilization. This is at the root of Rousseauism. The way ignorant, fearridden, quasi-animalistic savages act is somehow more natural—because presumably more “instinctual”—than the ways of civilization. This is the root of Rousseau’s, and many other leftists’ view that man is “naturally good,” but is corrupted by his institutions. This basic idea is fundamentally and radically antihuman, because it denies the basic facts about human nature and the way human beings must necessarily operate. Animals are born with “instincts”; these instincts are, in essence, sense-determined responses. Animals do not possess a free will or rational consciousness, hence they can only adapt, in sensory fashion, to their environment. Man, on the other hand, can alter his given environment by use of his reason and his free will. Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason. Civilization is precisely the record by which man has used his reason to discover the natural laws on which his environment rests, and to use these laws to alter his environment so as to suit and advance his needs and desires. Therefore, worship of the primitive is necessarily corollary to, and Margaret Mead (1901–1978), an American anthropologist, studied with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. Author of the famous Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), her numerous works also include Growing up in New Guinea (1930) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). She worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Franz Boas (1858–1942), a German anthropologist, was founder of a school of anthropology based on the concept of cultural relativism. He spent a large part of his career at Columbia University in New York. He specialized in the culture of the Indians of North America and had numerous students who continued to develop cultural anthropology. Author of The Mind of the Primitive Man (1911), Primitive Art (1927), and Language and Culture (1940).
MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS 124 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI based upon, an attack on man’s reason and intellect. It is this deep-seated “anti-intellectualism” that leads these people to proclaim that civilization is “opposed to nature” and that the primitive tribes are closer to it. It is this opposition to the mind and to reason that leads them to, for example, worship the Negro as being more “instinctual,” “sexier,” closer to nature, etc. And because man is supremely the “rational animal,” as Aristotle put it, this worship of the primitive is a profoundly antihuman doctrine. Antihuman, antirational doctrine, then, eagerly looks to illiterate, savage, fear-ridden primitives as people on whom we—the heirs of 2,000 years of the finest products of civilization and the human race—are supposed to model ourselves. If an existing primitive tribe has no private property or engages in indiscriminate promiscuity, this should be all the more reason for us to do the reverse. The myth is then coined of the “happy savage,” that these primitives are truly happy and content. This myth permeates the Polanyi volume. Let us shed the vestiges of romantic mythology and look at these savages as they are. They are, in the first place, complete slaves to their environment. When the fruit tree is in bloom, they can perhaps subsist by picking the fruit off the tree; but suppose there is a blight, one year, on fruit trees? What happens to this “happy-golucky” tribe? It dies, en masse. It is no wonder that the primitive tribes are all small in number. Second, the primitive’s life is a life of almost constant terror: terror of the world about him, which he does not and cannot understand, since he has not engaged in any sort of scientific, rational inquiry into its workings. We know what a thunderstorm is, and therefore do not fear it, and can take rational measures against lightning; the savage does not know, and therefore surmises that the god of the thunder is displeased with him, and that therefore that god must be propitiated with votive offerings and sacrifices (sometimes human sacrifices). Since the savage has no concept of a world knit together by natural law (a concept that employs reason and science),
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© 2009 by the Ludwig von Mises Ins
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ROTHBARD’S UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS I
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REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY NEWT
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Murray N. Rothbard vs. the Philosophers - Ludwig von Mises Institute

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