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"Status and prestige matter to everyone, of course, but they matter to some more than others. Most of all, they matter to those who find themselves in precarious industries where one's reputation counts for a great deal and, just as important, to lonely, unattached people who long to feel valued and desired. Delayed marriage and child-rearing ensure that many more young people spend many more years in the mating market and, by extension, orienting their lives around fulfilling their own social and sexual appetites over the care and feeding of children. This is especially true among children of the culturally powerful upper middle class, who’ve been trained to fear downward mobility in a stratified society as much as our primitive ancestors feared being devoured by toothy predators. The result is what you might call a culture of 'competitive wokeness.'" Reihan Salam   "The war has not gone well, and increasingly in an almost primitive reaction to which modern societies are as much exposed as any Stone Age clan it has been judged that this is because the gods are against it. In modern parlance this means that the evil military industrial complex has embarked on a racist colonialist adventure. (I have heard the head of SNCC state that we were in Vietnam 'for the rice supplies.') But the essential point is that we have been losing a war, and this more than any single thing erodes the authority of a government, however stable, just, well-intentioned or whatever. I would imagine that the desire not to be the first President to 'lose' a war has been much in President Johnson's mind over the past years, and explains some of his conduct. But the fact is that he could not win, and the all-important accompanying fact is that the semi-violent domestic protest that arose in consequence forced him to resign. In a sense he was the first American President to be toppled by a mob. No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls." Daniel Patrick Moynihan   "It is not peace which was natural and primitive and old, but rather war. War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention." Henry Sumner Maine   "Stacking the deck in favour of the accused is not a perfect solution. It doesn't always work, and when it does the results can be decidedly unjust. But that strong preference for freeing the guilty over incarcerating the innocent is arguably the most civilised thing about us. The fact that it actually structures the proceedings in all our criminal courts, and that it has for two and a half centuries, is proof of our conviction in the lofty promises of our founding documents. It is the principle on which we must agree, and to which we must aspire. Indeed, to surrender it would lead us quickly backward, to a much more primitive and brutal society." Bret Weinstein   "The Scottish theorists were very much aware of how delicate this artificial structure of civilization was which rested upon man's more primitive and ferocious instincts being tamed and checked by institutions that he neither had designed nor could control. They were very far from holding such naive views, later unjustly laid at the door of their liberalism, as the 'natural goodness of man,' the existence of 'a natural harmony of interests,' or the beneficent effects of 'natural liberty' (even though they did sometimes use the last phrase). They knew that it required the artifices of institutions and traditions to reconcile the conflicts of interest. Their problem was 'that universal mover in human nature, self love, may receive such direction in this case (as in all others) as to promote the public interest by those efforts it shall make towards pursuing its own.' It was not 'natural liberty' in any literal sense, but the institutions evolved to secure 'life, liberty, and property,' which made these individual efforts beneficial." Friedrich Hayek   "When the history books are written, we will not look wise or kind for insisting that kids and toddlers wear masks for hours on end, year after year, without ever testing this policy with controlled trials. We will look ignorant, cruel, fearful, and cowardly. We might even look worse than our primitive ancestors who, when faced with great plagues, engaged in all sorts of bizarre, superstitious behavior—but which rarely included making kids suffer most." Vinay Prasad   "When a man spent a long day with very primitive weapons in stalking a deer with the hope of dinner, and when, at the end of the day, he dragged the carcass triumphantly to his cave, he sank down in contented weariness, while his wife dressed and cooked the meat. He was sleepy, and his bones ached, and the smell of cooking filled every nook and cranny of his consciousness. At last, after eating, he sank into deep sleep. In such a life there was neither time nor energy for boredom. But when he took to agriculture, and made his wife do all the heavy work in the fields, he had time to reflect upon the vanity of human life, to invent mythologies and systems of philosophy, and to dream of the life hereafter in which he would perpetually hunt the wild boar of Valhalla. Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labour. I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed." Bertrand Russell   "I've heard someone comment recently that to be a lawyer means, by definition, to have to occupy the same room with people you seriously disagree with—and yet to have to engage in reasoned, indeed persuasive, argument with them. If that is true—and it is—then the primitive impulse to shout someone down is not a trait we should want to encourage in law schools. Just the opposite. It is a trait we should strive to help students unlearn." Kyle Duncan   "Wherever Fascism's roots are to be found—in Italy's synthesis of syndicalism and nationalism, in the messianic quest for 'the Third Rome,' in the primitive Christianity of Sorel's ricorso (recurrence); or, in the case of the other classic example, in Germany's characteristic, restless Sehnsucht (longing), in its intoxicating life-worship, or its passionate Völkisch ideology—Fascism's central ethos invoked an idealistic vitalism completely at odds with the mechanistic temper of science. We need only go to the official 'Doctrine of Fascism,' published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana, a frequently quoted essay signed by Mussolini but actually written by Gentile. Here we are told that the Fascist State is 'the result of the general reaction of modern times against the flabby materialistic positivism of the nineteenth century.'" John Patrick Diggins   "Definitions of equity, whether provided by the White House or by elite universities, are baffling, I suspect intentionally so. Terms such as 'fairness' and 'anti-racist' are thrown around—but somehow this adds up to 'investment' and 'allocating resources' favouring designated grievance groups. Equity, in practice, means absolute equality of outcomes in all transactions, measured not in the liberal tradition, between individuals, but harking back to a more primitive outlook: between castes to which we have been assigned by birth and fate." Martin Gurri   "Arable farming is seasonal, but in the season it is hell; and the treatment of the grain after harvest, in threshing and milling, is at least as hard as the work before. Most of the Old Testament is about early arable farming—although not particularly early, because farming had been practised for several thousand years by the time the accounts were written. The Old Testament can in fact be read like a bumper edition of The Farmer's Weekly, and the stories it tells are horrendous: of famines, of slave labour, and of unremitting toil. Look, for instance, at the story of Ruth gleaning, picking up the fallen seed (for this was still primitive corn, still liable to fall off the stem) after the sicklers have been. The grind of fanning by hand was beautifully described only one hundred years ago by Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina: the sheer physical effort of wielding a scythe, hour after hour. And if you don't do it at the appointed time, then you lose the crop, and starve. Even now you can just watch any South-East Asian farmer ploughing a monsoon field with a bullock-plough. The labour is horrendous. Yet the first arable farmers did not even have bullocks to help them along or beautiful iron scythes. They had sickles." Colin Tudge   "In primitive societies it was customary for extreme weather events to be explained as punishment from the gods for the sins of the people; and there is no shortage of this theme in the Bible, either—particularly, but not exclusively, in the Old Testament. The contemporary version of this is that, as a result of heedless industrialisation within a framework of materialistic capitalism, we have directly (albeit not deliberately) perverted the weather, and will duly receive our comeuppance." Nigel Lawson   "Kroeber endorsed the idea that there can be universal ethical standards, transcending cultural differences. Kluckhohn said essentially the same. Redfield declared more primitive societies less 'humane' than 'advanced civilizations.' Murdock said Benedict's idea that a cultural element had no meaning except in its context was 'nonsense,' and that Herskovits' assertion that all cultures must be accorded equal dignity was sentimental nonsense, that it is absurd to claim that cannibalism, slavery, magical therapy and killing the aged should be given the same 'dignity' or 'validity' as old age security, scientific medicine and metal artifacts. But all of these views were considered unacceptable by the majority of anthropologists, by that time. The mainstream opinion in anthropology supported cultural relativism and denied any universalities in either psychology or culture." Robert Endleman   "I would not have it thought that I condemn a society because of its material ruin, for that would be to make its material success a sufficient test of its excellence; I mean only that a wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanised, commercialised, urbanised way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet. And without sentimentalising the life of the savage, we might practise the humility to observe, in some of the societies upon which we look down as primitive or backward, the operation of a social religious-artistic complex which we should emulate upon a higher plane." Thomas Stearns Eliot   "A Martian who wanted to learn about human interaction from a textbook in social psychology would have no inkling that humans behave any differently to their relatives than to strangers. Some anthropologists have argued that our sense of kinship has nothing to do with biological relatedness. The conventional wisdom of Marxists, academic feminists, and café intellectuals embraces some astonishing claims: that the nuclear family of husband, wife, and children is a historical aberration unknown in centuries past and in the non-Western world; that in primitive tribes marriage is uncommon and people are indiscriminately promiscuous and free of jealousy; that throughout history the bride and groom had no say in their marriage; that romantic love was invented by the troubadours of medieval Provence and consisted of the adulterous love of a knight for a married lady; that children used to be thought of as miniature adults; that in olden times children died so often that mothers were unaffected by the loss; that concern for one's children is a recent invention. These beliefs are false. Blood really is thicker than water, and no aspect of human existence is untouched by that part of our psychology." Steven Pinker   "Transgenic crops are being developed with high yields, lifesaving vitamins, tolerance of drought and salinity, resistance to disease, pests, and spoilage, and reduced need for land, fertilizer, and plowing. Hundreds of studies, every major health and science organization, and more than a hundred Nobel laureates have testified to their safety (unsurprisingly, since there is no such thing as a genetically unmodified crop). Yet traditional environmentalist groups, with what the ecology writer Stewart Brand has called their 'customary indifference to starvation,' have prosecuted a fanatical crusade to keep transgenic crops from people—not just from whole-food gourmets in rich countries but from poor farmers in developing ones. Their opposition begins with a commitment to the sacred yet meaningless value of 'naturalness,' which leads them to decry 'genetic pollution' and 'playing with nature' and to promote 'real food' based on 'ecological agriculture.' From there they capitalize on primitive intuitions of essentialism and contamination among the scientifically illiterate public. Depressing studies have shown that about half of the populace believes that ordinary tomatoes don't have genes but genetically modified ones do, that a gene inserted into a food might migrate into the genomes of people who eat it, and that a spinach gene inserted into an orange would make it taste like spinach. Eighty percent favored a law that would mandate labels on all foods 'containing DNA.'" Steven Pinker   "Jared Diamond talks about hunter-gatherer societies in Papua New Guinea and notes: 'To venture out of one's territory to meet other humans, even if they lived only a few miles away, was equivalent to suicide.' Margaret Mead was famously romantic about the lifestyles of these communities, viewing them as morally superior in many regards to modern societies. But in an interview, she was blunt about their feelings toward strangers: 'Most primitive tribes feel that if you run across one of these subhumans from a rival group in the forest, the most appropriate thing to do is bludgeon him to death.' We do manage to overcome this extreme parochialism—human groups do eventually come to co-operate, trade, and intermarry—but our natural default is to hate and fear strangers." Paul Bloom   "'I followed my own conscience.' 'I did what I thought was right.' How many madmen have said it and meant it? How many murderers? Klaus Fuchs said it, and the men who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre said it, and Alfred Rosenberg said it. And, as we are rotely and rather presumptuously reminded by those who would say it now, Jesus said it. Maybe we have all said it, and maybe we have been wrong. Except on that most primitive level—our loyalties to those we love—what could be more arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal conscience?" Joan Didion   "In order to understand what a market originally was, you must try to picture to yourselves a territory occupied by village-communities, self-acting and as yet autonomous, each cultivating its arable land in the middle of its waste, and each, I fear I must add, at perpetual war with its neighbour. But at several points, points probably where the domains of two or three villages converged, there appear to have been spaces of what we should now call neutral ground. These were the Markets. They were probably the only places at which the members of the different primitive groups met for any purpose except warfare, and the persons who came to them were doubtless at first persons especially empowered to exchange the produce and manufactures of one little village-community for those of another." Henry Sumner Maine   "Many intellectuals tout the small numbers of battlefield casualties in pre-state societies as evidence that primitive warfare is largely ritualistic. They do not notice that two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the United States." Steven Pinker