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Spengler: For whom the chopper lands
Neolithic hunters aiming arrows at a rescue chopper stand out among the terrible images of the December tsunami (Early warning? Ask Nicobar's stone-agers, January 9). For the aborigines of the Sentinel Islands, the last stone-age people to resist contact with the world, an Indian Coast Guard helicopter landing on their shores seemed a direr threat than the tsunami. It is not known whether more than 40 of them survived the events of December 26 out of an estimated population of 100, the remnant of 10,000 at the turn of the 18th century.Because we often have seen the dreadful fate of primitive peoples thrust into the modern world, their hostility surprises us not at all. They would rather die on their own terms than live as our wards. Like Friedrich von Schiller's William Tell, the Sentinelese will cry, "Better by the hand of God than the hand of man." To refuse disaster aid would seem an irrational choice for a Swedish tour group, but not for aborigines, for whom the approaching chopper resembles an exterminating angel. "Send not to know for whom the chopper lands: it lands for thee," a modern John Donne might have written. [1] Who is less rational, the aboriginals of the Andaman Sea or today's Europeans? The former are fighting to keep their culture, while the latter are liquidating theirs, first of all by failing to reproduce (Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8, 2003). Our actions seem more rational than those of the Sentinelese because we live at a greater distance from the existential boundary. The Sentinelese live in wariness of the next anthropologist to step out of the bush. Remote by contrast seems the day in which other people will inhabit the hills and valleys of our land, and our language will be preserved only in libraries, in Franz Rosenzweig's memorable phrase. Posted by: tipper 2005-01-10 |
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