← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 20440 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-09-28
2005-09-28 19:56 | User Profile
I wonder if anyone catched this comment from Steve Sailer, which would seem to support Leo Strauss' conviction that without belief in supernatural restraints, human societies fall apart:
[url]http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/09/reader-responds-to-new-orleans.html[/url] [COLOR=DarkRed] [SIZE=3][FONT=Arial] "I suspect actual African tribes organize themselves well -- disaster isn't all that different from daily life and they know how to deal with that. But last year's Tropical Storm Jeanne in Haiti unleashed similar mayhem in urban zones.
"A friend of mine, an anthropologist who lived for 3.5 years in the bush with hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa and liked it so much he almost gave up his American professorship to become a hunting guide for safaris, said that life was sweet in the villages, poor but harmonious, with that African joie de vivre ... until the first road came to town. Then everything went to hell. [B]The arrival of the outside world shattered the traditional web of beliefs, evolved over thousands of years, in black magic that had kept people in line. Young men stopped believing that if they raped a pretty girl her grandmother would cast a spell that would give them blackwater fever.[/B][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR]
This would be crudely comparable to the effect that sophists had on the Greek civilization from the late 5th century BC onwards. Cosmopolitanism would seem to breed moral anarchy...
Petr