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Postmodern Thoughts, Illuminated by the
Practices of a Premodern Tribe

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Published: June 18, 2007

(Page 2 of 2)

In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s telling the Caduveo actually take on a strangely
postmodern flavor, shedding the very idea of natural law or constraints. Even
Mr. Rorty might have found his sympathies touched. He once suggested that
science had been established by modern man “to fill the place once held by God”
but that it didn’t merit that position; it should be seen, Mr. Rorty said, as
having the “same footing” as literature or art, and he suggested that physics
and ethics were just differing methods of “trying to cope.” The Caduveo might
have agreed, as long as they were permitted to determine which methods of coping
were used.

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Micha Bar-Am, 1987

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Related

Richard
Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75 (June 11, 2007)

But what place would such a society have in a Rortian democratic landscape?
How would they be answered if their claims to divine right and arbitrary power
came in direct conflict with the more embracing arbitrariness of Mr. Rorty’s
vision?

In reasoning one’s way into pragmatism, in minimizing the importance of
natural constraints and in dismissing the notion of some larger truth, the
tendency is to assume that as different as we all are, we are at least prepared
to accommodate ourselves to one another. But this is not something the Caduveo
would necessarily have gone along with. Mr. Rorty’s outline of what he called
“the utopian possibilities of the future” doesn’t leave much room for the kind
of threat the Caduveo might pose, let alone other threats, still active in the
world.

One tendency of pragmatism might be to so focus on the ways in which one’s
own worldview is flawed that trauma is more readily attributed to internal
failure than to external challenges. In one of his last interviews Mr. Rorty
recalled the events of 9/11: “When I heard the news about the twin towers, my
first thought was: ‘Oh, God. Bush will use this the way Hitler
used the Reichstag fire.’ ”

If that really was his first thought, it reflects a certain amount of
reluctance to comprehend forces lying beyond the boundaries of his familiar
world, an inability fully to imagine what confrontations over truth might look
like, possibly even a resistance to stepping outside of one’s skin or mental
habits.

But in this too the Caduveo example may be suggestive. As Mr. Lévi-Strauss
points out, neighboring Brazilian tribes were as hierarchical as the Caduveo but
lacked the tribe’s sweeping “fanaticism” in rejecting the natural world. They
reached differing forms of accommodation with their surroundings. The Caduveo,
refusing even to procreate, didn’t have a chance. They survive now as sedentary
farmers. Such a fate of denatured inconsequence may eventually be shared by
absolutist postmodernism. The Caduveo’s ideas weren’t useful, perhaps. Some
weren’t even true.

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Richard
Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75 (June 11, 2007)

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