These problems are not new
I have found a category of human beings even more useless than music critics and movie critics: “culture critics.” These people should be shot. They are wasting my oxygen. The culture critic is a uniquely annoying mix of elitism, narrowmindedness, aloofness, ignorance, sophistry, and partisanship. One example is The Baffler magazine, whose publishers were on Chicago Public Radio’s Eight Forty-Eight this morning. Hey, do me a favor: don’t click on either one of those links. They’re shit.
An interesting book caught my attention recently, and I’ve read through a good chunk of it. Steven LeBlanc’s title is rather bold: Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage. His thesis has two central points:
- Mankind has always fought, even among small social groups. There was no Golden Age.
- Mankind has never lived in harmony with his environment. Mankind does not naturally conserve.
LeBlanc is right. Yet his message has met with surprising resistance, as you can plainly see from the Amazon.com reader reviews of his book. The reason? The pacifist, leftist academic elite is blind to warfare and ecological destruction. Their political agenda has so blinded them that they are unable to rationally and objectively study the past.
If you thought politics could never creep into a discipline as esoteric as archaeology, you’re wrong. It has, does, and always will, that is until academia achieves true diversity and sheds its disgusting witch-hunt tactics. ‘Tis a dangerous thing to disagree in academia—and a curious thing, that, from a group that considers itself the standard-bearers for freedom of expression and liberalism. You can get angry about it—and I do—or you can shake your head and pity the pathetic state of higher learning in this country. I’m afraid that’s the direction I’m moving in.