Anatomy of Restlessness (10 page)

 

Chapter IV ‘Herdsmen' (or ‘Pastoralists').

The herding of domesticated animals was one of the technical advances that led towards the formation of Civilisation, but it was always combined with some sort of agriculture, and was, therefore, always reasonably settled. True pastoral nomadism, with herds on the move all the time and no agriculture, was not a stage towards Civilisation. It developed as an
alternative
to it. It was directly in competition with it, especially in border regions. The art of riding provided the means of mobility; it was the ‘tip-over' factor that enabled some groups to abandon agriculture and be permanently on the move. The pastoralist had much in common with the hunter – they believed in a mystical bond between animal and man. But from Civilisation they learned the idea of the unity of the State, and from the techniques of herding and killing domesticated animals, they discovered those of human coercion and extermination.

This is a long chapter and perhaps best divided into two. I will then trace the origins of the great nomad cultures, the Scythians, the Huns, the Germanic ‘waves', the Dorian Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols and the Turks, the last (semi)nomadic people to aspire to world conquest.

There will be an account of nomadic life; its harshness and intolerance, its illiteracy and obsession with genealogies; the comparative lack of slavery, though that did not prevent nomads from being the most successful slave traders; the renunciation of all but the most portable possessions in times of emergency; the failure to appreciate civilised standards of human life balanced by a natural adjustment towards death, which the super-civilised have lost; the communality of property and land within a tribe. ‘All are God's guests. We share and share alike' (Bedou chief); the position of women (remarkably emancipated, particularly in Northern Asia); the sanctity of the craftsman etc.

 

Chapter V will continue the story of the nomads in face of a triumphant agricultural and then industrial Civilisation. I may call it ‘ “Civilisation or Death!” ' the cry of the American frontiersman. This will be a record of the hard line towards nomads, its rationalised hatred and self-assumed moral superiority. Nomads are equated with animals, and treated as such. I will discuss the fate of the Gypsies, the American Indians, the Lapps and the Zulus, also nomads within highly civilised societies, tramps, hobos etc. I would give an account of the Beja in the Eastern Sudan, the Fuzzy-Wuzzies of Kipling. They have been able to resist all civilising influences, since they were first mentioned in Egyptian annals some three thousand years ago, only because they are prepared to tolerate the lowest level of personal comfort. They are sensationally idle and truculent as well. Most of the morning for the men is taken up by a fantastic mutual coiffure session (grooming urge?). There is also the depressing moral and physical effect of Civilisation on the Arab. ‘Law and order have settled in like a blight on Sinai and Palestine' (G. W. Murray,
The Sons of Ishmael
)
.

 

Chapter VI will be the reverse of Chapter V and will trace the longings of civilised men for a natural life identified with that of the nomads or other ‘primitive' peoples. To be called ‘Nostalgia for Paradise', the belief that all those who have successfully resisted or remained unaffected by civilisation have a secret to happiness that the civilised have lost. It is bound up with the idea of the ‘Fall of Man', with Paradise myths and Utopias, the Myth of the Noble Savage and primitivist writings from Hesiod on. Its most extreme form is Animalitarianism, the assumption that animals are endowed with superior moral qualities to human beings. ‘I could turn and live with the animals ...' (Walt Whitman). Hence at a different level the popularity of such books as
Born Free
. Otherwise it may emphasise the essential unity of animal and man, an intellectual tendency far older than Aesop and still with us. We also have a lingering idea that eating animals is sinful, and it is interesting to find that some Asian hunting tribes preserve legends of a Vegetarian Paradise, a folk memory of our vegetarian primate days.

 

Chapter VII – ‘The Compensations of Faith'

Nomads are hated – or adored. Why? It cannot be sheer chance that no great transcendental faith has ever been born of an Age of Reason. Civilisation is its own religion; religion and state are wedded; at the apex the god king of Egypt, the deified Roman emperor or the papal monarch. In its own day ‘Pax Britannica' was a religion, and one nineteenth-century sceptic described as religion ‘civilisation as inflicted on the “lower” races at the end of a Hotchkiss gun'. The great faiths renounce material wealth and the idea of progress in favour of spiritual values. Their ideologies hark back to the religious experiences of the early hunters and herdsmen – a complex of religious beliefs known as Shamanism. The shaman is the original religious mystic, androgynous and ecstatic. The nearest the Chinese have to a transcendental faith – Taoism – is ‘little more than systematised shamanism'; Judaeo-Christianity, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu Buddhist traditions preserve their pastoral past (Feed my Sheep – The Lord is a Good Shepherd – The Flock of the Faithful – The Sacred Cow). Islam is the great nomadic religion. Even in the Middle Ages the ecstatic dualist cults of the Bogomils and Albigenses had their origins in Manichaeanism and the shamanic traditions of the western end of the steppes and they paved the way for the Reformation. The religious leaders of the Civilised give way to the shamanic type of religious hero, the self-destructive evangelist, the celibate, the wandering dervish or divine healer. Note the difference between the Shakers (ecstatics) who shook themselves out of existence and the Mormons (enthusiasts), who aspired to the Presidency. The nomad renounces; he reflects in his solitude; he abandons collective rituals, and cares little for the rational processes of learning or literacy. He is a man of faith.

The Jewish diaspora obviously violates every attempt to categorise it. I would think it worth a chapter to itself Title – ? ‘The Wandering Jew' – a daunting subject. There are two questions I would like to ask – Was Jewish ‘exclusivism' kept alive by the loss of the ‘Promised Land', their tribal territory? and were their energies diverted as a result towards the nomad's other great stand-by – portable gold?

Incidentally, while we are about it we can lay for all time the Great Aryan Myth; it surfaced again the other day in a new disguise – the wishful thinking of a frustrated lady archaeologist. Northern nomads – The Blond Brutes – were not the active masculine principle that fertilised an effete south. The Amazons are not my idea of femininity; they could not aspire to womanhood till they had killed their man. Neither are the Maenads nor the Bacchae. They were all nomad ladies. There must be some other explanation.

 

Chapter VIII will continue some more general aspects of nomadic behaviour, and may be called the ‘Nomadic Sensibility'; their sense of values; the importance of music (the drum and guitar are pre-eminently nomadic instruments); the craving for brilliant colour and the reassuring brilliance of gold. Nomads wear the most elaborate jewellery; a Bedou woman will wear her whole fortune round her neck; the nomads' roads to ecstasy – Turkish Baths, saunas, Indian hemp and mushrooms. Nomadic art is intuitive and irrational rather than analytic and static. I could use some illustrations to make my points and this chapter will obviously be expanded as I go along.

 

Chapter IX to be called the ‘Nomadic Alternative' calls into question the whole basis for Civilisation, and is concerned with the present and future as much as the past. There have been two main inducements to wander: ECONOMIC and NEUROTIC. For example, the International Set are neurotics. They have reached satiation point at home; so they wander – from tax-haven to tax-haven with an occasional raid on the source of their wealth – their
base
. How often has one heard the lamentations of an American expatriate at the prospect of a visit to his trustees in Pittsburgh. The same thing happened in the Roman Empire in the third century AD and later. The rich abdicated the responsibilities of their wealth; the cities became unendurable and at the mercy of property speculators. Wealth was divorced from its sources. A strong state took over and collapsed under the strain. The rich wore their wealth, and the governments passed endless laws against extravagance in dress. Compare the diamonds and gold boxes of today, and the aura attached to portable possessions. The mobile rich were impossible to tax: the advantages of nofixed-address were obvious. So the unpredictable demands of the tax-collector were laid at the feet of those who could least afford to pay. Wandering passed from the neurotic to the economic stage.

True nomads watch the passing of civilisations with equanimity; so does China, that unique combination of Civilisation and Barbarism. There is a good Egyptian text to illustrate the patronising attitude of the super-civilised in his self-confident days. ‘The miserable Asiatic ... he does not live in one place but his feet wander ... he conquers not, neither is he conquered. He may plunder a lonely settlement but he will never take a populous city.' Civilisations destroy themselves; nomads have never (to my certain knowledge) destroyed one, though they are never far away at the kill, and may topple a disintegrating structure. The civilised alone have control of their destiny, and I do not believe in any of the cyclical theories of decline, fall and rebirth.

 

Now for today. We may have enough food even, but we certainly do not have enough room. Marshall McLuhan asks us to accept that literacy, the linch-pin of Civilisation is OUT; that electronic technology is by-passing the ‘rational processes of learning' and that jobs and
specialists
are things of the past. ‘The World has become a Global Village,' he says. Or is it Mobile Encampment? ‘The expert is the man who
stays put
.' Literature, he says will disappear, and the social barriers are coming down; everyone is free for the higher exercises of the mind (or spirit?). One thing is certain – the Paterfamilias, that bastion of Civilisation (not the matriarch) is right OUT. McLuhan is correct in much of his analysis of the effects of the new media. He does not seem to appreciate their probable long-term consequences. They are likely to be rather less than comfortable. The old nostalgic dream of a free classless society may indeed now be possible. But there are too many of us and there would have to be a drastic drop in population. Much of the world's population is on the move as never before, tourists, businessmen, itinerant labour, drop-outs, political activists, etc: like the nomads who first sat on a horse, we have again the means for total mobility. As anyone who owns a house knows, it is often cheaper to move than to stay. But this new Internationalism has activated a new parochialism. Separatism is rampant. Minorities feel threatened; small exclusive groups splinter off. They
£
50 travel allowance was not imposed for purely economic reasons.

Are these two trends not representative of the two basic human characteristics I mentioned earlier?

Yours ever,
Bruce Chatwin

Diogenes the Cynic said that men first crowded into cities to escape the fury of those outside. Locked within their walls, they committed every outrage against one another as if this were the sole object of their coming together. Diogenes' deprecation of city life is an early example of ‘cultural primitivism' or ‘the discontent of the civilised with civilisation'.
¹
It is an emotional rather than a rational impulse that has always led men to abandon civilisation and seek a simpler life, a life in harmony with ‘nature', unhampered with possessions, free from the grinding bonds of technology, sinless, promiscuous, anarchic, and sometimes vegetarian.

But civilisation rarely lacks its champions. ‘All men have civic virtues,' as Protagoras suggested – ‘a democratic note often in modem times associated with the belief that democracy is a return to the original goodness of man.'
²
The word ‘civilisation' is charged with moral and ethical overtones, the accumulated inheritance of our own self-esteem. We contrast it with barbarism, savagery, and even bestiality, whereas it means nothing more than ‘living in cities'. The City, as such, appeared with astonishing abruptness out of the alluvium of Southern Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC. This transformation depended on irrigation works, intensive agriculture, specialised skills such as pottery and metallurgy, and supervision by a literate bureaucracy, judiciary and priesthood. Civilisation demands a stratified social and economic hierarchy. There is, regrettably, no indication that it is cohesive without one. The urban civilisations of the Old World radiated outwards, excluding all who would not conform to the canons of civilised behaviour. There were setbacks. Mesopotamian chroniclers lament the ravages of the ‘Amorite who knows not the grain' or the ‘host whose onslaught is like a hurricane, a people who have never known a city'.
³
But as the civilisations consolidated they came, in the north, to the point of diminishing returns. Their natural frontiers crystallised. Beyond, the ‘barbarians' were to be left to their own devices. As some Han officials said, ‘The lands are all swamps and saline waters, not fit for habitation. It is better to make peace.'
⁴
But the stigmatised outsider was unlikely to regard the frontier with the smugness of the man inside; nor could he emulate urban civilisation in land unsuited to it. On the steppe, from Mongolia to Hungary and beyond, he gave up his agriculture and opted for a ‘Nomadic Alternative'.
⁵

A nomad does not ‘wander aimlessly from place to place' as one dictionary would have it. The word derives from the Latin and Greek meaning ‘to pasture'. Pastoral tribes follow the most conservative patterns of migration, changing them only in times of drought or disaster. The animals provide their food; agriculture, trade or plunder are additional benefits. ‘The Nomad' is a clan elder, responsible to the whole tribe, who parcels out the grazing for each person. Ssu-Ma-Ch‘ien says that the Hsiung-nu congregated in the first month of the year for the allotment of their rights, and again in the autumn when the cattle were fat. Haymaking does not enter into this scheme: that would prejudice mobility and grazing claims. Spring and summer are the times when the nomads are on the move. ‘The days are long and the nights are short,' a Chinese said of the plains about the Caspian in the thirteenth century: ‘in little more than the time needed to cook a mutton chop, the sun rises again.'
⁶