Ship of Fools Quotes

“Now it is perfectly true that nothing unifies a group more effectively than a threat, particularly an enemy. This may be external, but an internal enemy, a traitor, a trouble-maker, a deviant, will do as well, and the group feels better if it has someone to bully and despise. But while every group and society contains despised groups and individuals, they are not normally killed or even necessarily ill-treated, let alone selected for slaughter. Not surprisingly, it is very hard to find eyewitness accounts of human sacrifice, but the following example is nevertheless very instructive.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“The idea of people “inventing” religious beliefs to “provide the needed social links” comes out of the same rationalist stable as the claim that kings invented religious beliefs to justify their oppression of their subjects and that capitalists did the same to justify their exploitation of their workers. Religious belief simply doesn’t work like that. It is true, however, that what he calls universal and missionary religions started appearing in the first millennium BC.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“It didn’t work out that way, however, because people didn’t foresee population growth, poor diet and disease. Since it would have taken many generations to realise all the disadvantages of agriculture, by that time the population would have grown so large that it would have been impossible to go back to foraging, so the agricultural trap closed on Man for evermore.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Harari clearly has no knowledge at all of cross-cultural developmental psychology, and of how modes of thought develop in relation to the natural and socio-cultural environments. The people who carved the Stadel lion-man around 30,000 years ago and the Piraha had the same ability to learn as we do, which is why Piraha children can learn to count, but these cognitive skills have to be learnt: we are not born with them all ready to go. Cross-cultural developmental psychology has shown that the development of the cognitive skills of modern humans actually requires literacy and schooling, large-scale bureaucratic societies and complex urban life, the experience of cultural differences, and familiarity with modern technology, to name some of the more important requirements”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Harari’s belief that the Cognitive Revolution provided the modes of thought and reasoning that are the basis of our scientific civilisation could not therefore be further from the truth. We may accept that people became able to speak in sentences at this time, and language is certainly essential to human culture, but anthropologists and developmental psychologists, in their studies of primitive societies, have found that their language development and their modes of thought about space, time, classification, causality and the self have much more resemblance to those of the Piraha than to those of members of modern industrial societies.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Religion” is not, in fact, some simple disposition that could possibly be either innate or learned. It is a highly complex phenomenon both psychologically and culturally, and there are major differences between the forms of religion found in primitive societies and the world religions with which we are familiar, as I have described in detail elsewhere (Hallpike 1977: 254-74; 2008a: 266-87; 2008b: 288-388; 2016: 62-88). But studying all these ethnographic facts is time-consuming and boring, and it is much more fun to assume that we all know what we mean by “religion”—something like “faith in spiritual beings”—and get on with constructing imaginative explanations about how it must have been adaptive for early man.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“In the first place, as we saw earlier, the menace of the free-rider that permeates evolutionary psychology is a fantasy. In the simple subsistence economies of hunter-gatherers and early farmers failure to reciprocate in exchange relations, or to participate in communal activities cannot be concealed and got away with. Nor in any case does survival and reproduction have any relation to the exchange of resources.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“It is quite remarkable that the whole discussion of cheating by evolutionary psychologists is entirely dominated by the assumptions of the game theorists and economists, completely rooted as they are in the world-view of modern liberal individualistic capitalism, and who think purely in terms of the material benefits of cheating.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“The killing of pigs among the Tauade was also a formal occasion, though not a sacrifice, because there was a taboo against killing one’s own pigs: “They are like our own children”, I was told, so someone else had to do it for them. This led to ceremonial killings at which speeches were made, followed by the killing of the pigs which was done by beating them over the head with the equivalent of baseball bats as they lay on the ground. The thuds of the blows, the shrieks of the dying animals, and the blood streaming from their nostrils being lapped up by the village dogs took some getting used to.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Arens’s hilarity at the racist idea of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease being transmitted by cannibalism turned out to be misplaced, however, since it was cattle cannibalism in the form of brain and spinal cord matter from diseased animals being included in cattle feed that led, a few years later, to the spread of BSE in Britain. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease, was a prion disease that also infected a number of humans in the form of vCJD, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and led to a ban on the export of British beef in 1996.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“So far, we have been considering accounts of cannibalism that involve the eating of enemy prisoners, usually killed or captured in warfare. Cross-culturally this appears to be the basic form of cannibalism; there seems little evidence that shortage of protein had anything to do with it, as materialists like Marvin Harris supposed; and many primitive societies were as strongly opposed to cannibalism as we are. There is, however, a different type of cannibalism, conventionally known as “endo-cannibalism”, in which the relatives of a deceased person eat the corpse, or part of it, as a mortuary”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“It is a curious feature of the intellectual world that many people think themselves perfectly qualified to dogmatise about primitive society while knowing very little about it. Evolutionary psychologists are one example, and Girard is another.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“On Tonga in the early nineteenth century it is described (Martin 1827(I): 189-91) how in the course of warfare a warrior killed a man within a sacred enclosure, which was a very serious act of sacrilege. The priest of the temple was consulted, and revealed that a child must be sacrificed to appease the anger of the god, and the victim had to be a child of a chief by one of his concubines. The chiefs met to decide which of their number must provide the sacrifice, and one of the chiefs present agreed to allow his child, a little boy of two, to be the victim. He was then ritually strangled, and his body carried round all the neighbouring temples to appease their gods as well, before it was released to be buried. This sacrifice had nothing to do with restraining the warfare itself, which continued unabated, and the general emotion among the people involved was acute fear of the anger of the gods, not the rage of communal violence. The only other sentiment recorded was sadness for the little child—“Why are the gods so cruel?”. Nothing here provides any support for Girard’s theory of the human scapegoating”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“It has also been pointed out that as well as the “acquisitive mimesis” that principally concerns Girard, there is also what can be called “beneficial mimesis”, as when individuals provide models of good behaviour, such as settling disputes, kindness, and generosity. But if there is such a thing as beneficial mimesis this means that social peace can be re-established by other means than scapegoating and sacrifice, as we know from the many ceremonial forms of peace-making in primitive society.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“We can now move on to his general theory of imitation or mimesis. There is no doubt that human culture could not exist without imitation, notably by children imitating their parents and other adults. We all have a natural tendency to imitate our peers as well, and important people or classes also have a very powerful influence on fashions of all kinds.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“My objection is supported by the fact that archaeological evidence about the origins of human culture shows that self-decoration with coloured ochre, and simple shell necklaces, only started occurring around 100,000 years ago, but even this is not symbolic behaviour. (What, for example, is the symbolic meaning of a woman’s lipstick?—nothing whatever.) The first clear evidence for symbolic culture comes from Europe about 40,000 years ago”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“But a consistent Darwinist should surely rejoice to see such a fine demonstration of the survival of the fittest, with other species either decimated or subjected to human rule, and the poor regularly ground under foot in the struggle for survival.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Throughout the book there is also a strange vacillation between hard-nosed Darwinism and egalitarian sentiment. On one hand Harari quite justifiably mocks the humanists’ naive belief in human rights, for not realising that these rights are based on Christianity, and that a huge gulf has actually opened up between the findings of science and modern liberal ideals.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“By the time of Galileo, whom Harari does not even mention, the idea that science should be useful had become a dominant idea of Western science. Galileo was very much in the natural magic tradition and was a prime example of a man of learning who was equally at home in the workshop as in the library—as is well-known, when he heard of the Dutch invention of the telescope he constructed one himself and ground his own lenses to do so. But Galileo was also enormously important in showing the crucial part that experiment had in the advancement of science.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“The Islamic world had transmitted much of Greek science to medieval Europe, and Aristotle in particular was greatly admired by Muslim scholars as “The Philosopher”. But under the influence of the clerics Islam eventually turned against reason and science as dangerous to religion, and this renaissance died out. In rather similar fashion, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian closed the philosophy schools of Athens in 529 AD because he considered them dangerous to Christianity. But while in the thirteenth century several Popes, for the same reason, tried to forbid the study of Aristotle in the universities, they were ignored and in fact by the end of the century Aquinas had been able to publish his synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology in the Summa Theologica.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. (279-80) These traditions may have claimed to know all that was essential to salvation and peace of mind, but that kind of knowledge had nothing whatsoever to do with pre-modern traditions of science. In Europe this meant Aristotle and Greek natural philosophy but about which, astonishingly, Harari has nothing at all to say anywhere in his book.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“But to refer to these nations as “Afro-Asian” is conspicuously absurd, and the whole concept of Afro-Asia is actually meaningless from every point of view. The general idea of Eurasia, however, does make a good deal of cultural as well as ecological sense, not only because it recognises the obvious importance of Europe, but because of the cultural links that went to and fro across it, so that the early navigators of the fifteenth century were using the Chinese inventions of magnetic compasses, stern-post rudders, paper for their charts, and gunpowder, and were making their voyages to find sea-routes from Europe to China and the East Indies rather than relying on overland trade.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“The Epicureans, however, do not belong in this group at all as they were ancient materialist atheists who did not believe in natural law of any kind.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“By the state I mean centralised political authority, usually a king, supported by tribute and taxes, and with a monopoly of armed force. Although it has been estimated that only about 20% of tribal societies in Africa, the Americas, Polynesia, New Guinea, and many parts of Asia actually developed the state, the state was almost as important a revolution in human history as agriculture itself, because of all the further developments it made possible, and a large literature on the process of state formation has developed”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“These criticisms of agriculture are, of course, quite familiar, and up to a point legitimate. But if agriculture was really such a bad deal why would humans ever have gone along with it? Harari begins by suggesting that wheat and other crops actually domesticated us, and made us work for them, rather than the other way round, but this doesn’t get him very far in explaining the persistence of agriculture, and instead he argues that wheat offered nothing to individuals, but only to the species by enabling the growth of larger populations.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“For Harari the great innovation that separated us from the apes was what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, around 70,000 years ago when we started migrating out of Africa, which he thinks gave us the same sort of modern minds that we have now. “At the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.… Survival in that area required superb mental abilities from everyone” (55), and “The people who carved the Stadel lion-man some 30,000 years ago had the same physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities we have” (44). Not surprisingly, then, “We’d be able to explain to them everything we know—from the adventures of Alice in Wonderland to the paradoxes of quantum physics—and they could teach us how their people view the world” (23). It’s a sweet idea, and something like this imagined meeting actually took place a few years ago between the linguist Daniel Everett and the Piraha foragers of the Amazon in Peru (Everett 2008). But far from being able to discuss quantum theory with them, he found that the Piraha couldn’t even count, and had no numbers of any kind.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Japan, for example, which apparently “suffers” from an almost complete lack of swearing, deserves a whole chapter to itself. But Westerners are always making the ethnocentric assumption that what is normal for them must also be normal for everyone else, a constant and universal feature of human nature itself, whereas in fact it may just be a product of social and cultural factors, and I shall try to show that this is the case with swearing.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Wilson’s basic fallacy is very simple: he assumes, quite wrongly, that homosexuals can’t (or won’t) marry and have children, whereas there is plenty of evidence from anthropology, the classical world, and more recent history, that homosexuals of both genders are quite capable, in most cases, of marrying and begetting children.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“Wilson’s hypothesis of the helpful, nepotistic homosexual uncle increasing his inclusive fitness by looking after his nieces and nephews does not, then, find any ethnographic support, and his ideas are in fact completely uninformed speculation.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society

“On the contrary, it was the general human disposition to attribute sacred status to those in authority that was one of the main reasons why it could develop.”
― C.R. Hallpike, Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society