What Makes a Culture Sophisticated? The New Dreaming - Part 2 : Music
Anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe, have very successfully shown in their 2021 book, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, just how wrong ‘Professor’ Bruce Pascoe really is with his Dark Emu theory.
Readers might like to read of some of the devastatingly accurate critiques of Bruce Pascoe and his Dark Emu that have emerged since the publication of Sutton & Walshe’s book - see here from media Item No. 31 onwards.
However, there are some underlying themes in Dark Emu which also seem to appear to be attractive to some of Bruce Pascoe’s fiercest critics.
These themes we have called, ‘The New Dreaming’ as they appear to us as being promoted as set of foundational principals and philosophies to explain life in modern Australia, and as a guiding influence on how we in Australia should live in the future.
The New Dreaming is similar to the Aboriginal cultural concept of The Dreaming, through which Aboriginal peoples sought to explain their universe and live their lives according to a set of principals and laws. This they achieved quite successfully on this continent for some 50,000 years.
As an example, it appears, to us here at Dark Emu Exposed, that Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe might actually share common ground with Bruce Pascoe and his methodology when it comes to the settlement/invasion debate surrounding Australia’s colonisation - see Part 1 in our New Dreaming Series here
Similarly, we detect in some of Peter Sutton’s interviews that he might be in good company with Bruce Pascoe, as both seem to be in favour of a simpler, less consumer-orientated way of living.
In a 2021 ABC interview Peter Sutton tells us that,
Anthropologist Peter Sutton - See Wikipedia
‘I’m rather worried by the word sophisticated. It’s one of the virtues of a cosmpolitan culture which I typify as being sort of International Californianism. It goes with ingenuity, creativity and a whole brace of things which are deemed by the West and now global urban societies to be inherently good.
Constant change is inherently good, dynamism, alteration, novelty are all good. Well are they all good?
Not to the Elders of traditional societies in many parts of the world, which are now pockets of tradition…
So all of this over valorising of invention, cleverness, if you like, a colonial imposition of the West’s own thinking on the Old People, who were here so successfully and so conservatively and so consistently with some changes, but they were changes within the same template, over 50,000 years.
So that is the real problem that I think that both of us [Sutton & Walshe] have with trying to shoe-horn the Old People into Western ideas of what constitutes advancement. Sophistication is part of that…’ -( Listen here from 03:40)
Sutton is correct in the ‘pro-Aboriginal’ society sense - The Old People did exercise their agency and develop a complex hunter gatherer society that developed very slowly within the accepted spiritual and practical framework that they had constructed for themselves. In their eyes that was good enough and enabled them to survive successfully for 50,000 years.
But then he ignores the fact that, in the long run, the society that the Old People had constructed failed.
With the arrival of Western High Culture into Australia in 1788, the Aboriginal High Culture and the society of the Old People, in its purest form, collapsed within only a 100 years or so of First Contact.
Sutton would seem to have common ground with Bruce Pascoe he when speaks of what one might call an ‘anti-Western values’ stance - questioning the benefits of change, improvements, dynamism, alteration, novelty, invention, cleverness and colonialism. Bruce Pascoe too has questioned the benefits of these sorts of values and their effect on the ‘trajectory’ of our society.
But what both Sutton and Pascoe fail to see is that these values are the drivers that made Western Culture the most so successful and longest living human culture the world has ever known. Sutton and Pascoe might sing the praises of Aboriginal High Culture, or the societies of the Old People, but ultimately in their purest forms they have failed and exist no more.
It is a misnomer to say Aboriginal culture is ‘the World’s Oldest Living Culture’ given that it has morphed into a version of Western Culture. Indeed, it is Western Culture that is now ‘The World’s Oldest Living Culture’ as it is still going strong after leaving Africa some 70 to 100,000 years ago on its journey of colonisation and invention. And it continues to develop strength as nearly all the societies of the world today freely select those parts of Western Culture that they want to morph into their own.
One of the main reasons why Western Culture has, and will continue to have, ongoing success is that, unlike ‘fundamentalist’ cultures such as that of the Taliban and the Aboriginal Old People, where change is not allowed, Western Culture embraces change and has found a way to unlock the potential of every human individual, no matter what their race, creed, gender or position in society. Humans are voting with their feet to be part of the ‘sophistication’ of Western Culture so that they can flourish and realise their full human potential in the three-score-and-ten years of their existence.
The following film clip succinctly illustrates the sophistication that music in Western Culture has achieved when compared to the music of the Aboriginal Old People which, although it was deemed to be completely satisfactory for their needs and meanings in life, was just too ‘simple’ and inadequate for our Western cultural needs and beliefs.
Our Western Culture is able to use pretty much the same elements that were available to the Old People - the human voice, wood, animal fibre & earth (minerals) - but then transform these raw materials to a level of ‘sophistication’ that then produces a music and a set of human emotions that would be unachievable, and indeed unimaginable, within the cultural restrictions imposed by Aboriginal society.
Ditto for all the other human needs and desires. The West’s promotion of the virtues of creativity, novelty, cleverness, colonialism, etc, are concepts that are completely alien to the Aboriginal Old People.
And that is why modern Australia’s Western-based culture flourishes and other cultures fade away.
Look out for more episodes in our series, The New Dreaming, as they are posted in the coming weeks.
