Friday, December 31, 2021

Peter Wood gets stuck in a Vermont ditch for hours and ruminates on the essence of his 14,000-tome library: We are our imperfections

 

Here:

Read enough old ethnography, and the story of people victimizing one another is inescapable, but so is the deep knowledge of human commonality. As Pritchard grasped some 200 years ago, our cultural differences are myriad, but they aren’t everything, and the more we make of them, the worse our plight. Anthropology at its best taught us that our follies are as universal as our aspirations; and that grasping for ascendency in the name of justice is just another path to hardship and division. We are our imperfections. Best to get back on the road.

Because man is a political animal, and politics has been successful in the West, no raiding party happened by and scalped poor Mr. Wood. Instead he was rescued by a tow-truck, eventually.