Becker

Our great wistfulness about the world of primitive man is that he managed willy-nilly to blunt the terrible potential destructiveness of the drama of heroism and expiation. He didn’t have the size, the technological means, or the world view for running amok heroically. Heroism was small scale and more easily controlled: each person, as a contributor to the generative ritual, could be a true cosmic hero who added to the powers of creation. Allied to this cosmic heroism was a kind of warfare that has always made military men chuckle. Among the Plains Indians it was a kind of athletic contest in which one scored points by touching the enemy; often it was a kind of disorganized, childish, almost hysterical game in which one went into rapture if he brought back a trophy or a single enemy for torture. Anyone was liable to be snatched out of his hut at daybreak, and on mountainous islands like those of Polynesia groups lived in continual fear of those just over the ridge or across the lagoon; no one was ever safe from capture and sacrificial slaughter. This is hardly the ideal of altruism, and there are very few today who have a romantic image of primitive man’s peaceful nature; one look at the blunt stone sacrificial slave-killing knives of the Northwest Coast Indians is enough to set the record straight. Since we do not experience the terror of the occasional victims of primitive raids, we can look back nostalgically at the small numbers consumed at random, and compare them with those who died in one day at Dresden or one flash at Hiroshima. Rousseau had already wistfully observed the comparatively low toll of life that primitive warfare took , 2 and a whole tradition of social analysts including Marx agreed with him. Recently, when Lewis Mumford put the crown on a lifetime of brilliant work, he reaffirmed this perspective on history . 3 Today we are agreed that the picture looks something like this: that once mankind got the means for large-scale manipulation of the world, the lust for power began to take devastating tolls. This can be seen strikingly at the rise of the great civilizations based on divine kingship. These new states were structures of domination which absorbed the tribal life around them and built up empires. Masses of men were forged into obedient tools for really large-scale power operations directed by a powerful, exploitative class. It was at this time that slaves were firmly compartmentalized into various special skills which they plied monotonously; they became automaton objects of the tyrannical rulers. We still see this degradation of tribal peoples today, when they hire themselves out for money to work monotonously in the mines. Primitive man could be transformed, in one small step, from a rich creator of meaning in a society of equals to a mechanical thing. Something was accomplished by this new organization of labor that primitive man never dreamed of, a tremendous increase in the size of human operations: huge walled cities, colossal monuments, pyramids, irrigation projects, unprecedented wars of booty and plunder. Mumford’s contribution of insight into all this was to call it a “megamachine.” The amalgam of kingship with sacred power, human sacrifice, and military organization unleashed a nightmare megamachine on the world — a nightmare, says Mumford, that began at Sumer and that still haunts us today, with our recent history of megamachines in Warsaw, Hiroshima, and Vietnam. This is the colossus of power gone mad, a colossus based on the dehumanization of man that began, not with Newtonian materialism. Enlightenment rationalism, or nineteenth-century commercialism, but with the first massive exploitation of men in the great divine kingships of the ancient world. It was then that man was thrown out of the mutualities of tribalism into the cauldron of historic alienation. We are still stewing there today because we have not seen that the worship of the demonic megamachine has been our fate, and we have willingly perpetuated it and even aggravated it until it threatens to destroy the very world. From the point of view of a Marxist level of analysis, this perspective on history attacks social evil at its most obvious point. From the very beginning the ravages of large-scale warfare were partly a function of the new structure of domination called the state; the state was an instrument of oppression that had come into being “artificially” through conquest, and with it began mankind’s real woes. The new class society of conquerors and slaves right away had its own internal frictions; what better way to siphon them off than by directing the energies of the masses outward toward an “alien” enemy? The state had its own built-in wisdom; it “solved” its ponderous internal problems of social justice by making justice a matter of triumph over an external enemy. This was the start of the large-scale scapegoating that has consumed such mountains of lives down through history and continues to do so today, right up to Vietnam and Bangladesh: what better way to forge a nation into a unity, to take everyone’s eyes off the frightening state of domestic affairs, than by focusing on a heroic foreign cause? Mumford very pointedly summed up the psychology of this new scapegoating of the state: Hence the sense of joyful release that so often has accompanied the outbreak of war . . . popular hatred for the ruling classes was cleverly diverted into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies. In short, the oppressor and the oppressed, instead of fighting it out within the [ancient] city, directed their aggression toward a common goal — an attack on a rival city. Thus the greater the tensions and the harsher the daily repressions of civilization, the more useful war became as a safety valve .” The Marxist argument discussed above — and it is now an agreed one — is that the new structure of the conquest state forced an increased butchery of war. Mumford very aptly reasoned that in this sense “the invention of the military machine made war ‘necessary” and even desirable.” With the advent of the megamachines, power simply got out of hand — or rather, got pressed into the service of a few hands — and instead of isolated and random sacrifices on behalf of a fearful tribe, ever larger numbers of people were; deliberately and methodically drawn into a “dreadful ceremony” on behalf of the few. So that the “ability to wage war and to impose collective human sacrifice has remained the identifying mark of all sovereign power throughout history.” 5 Little does it matter that modem public relations and the appearance of bureaucratic neutrality and efficiency disguise better than ever both the sacrifice and the blatant central power of the state; the chief of the U.S. “‘Selective Service” (the public relations euphemism) may sit around and logically explain his function and the “fairness” of the selective process to young high school students, but the bare fact is that they are obliged by the state’s power to offer their lives for its own diversionary ceremony, just as were the ancient Egyptian slaves.

Becker