The Assumption of Primitive August 4, 2005 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

I finally got to watch Frtiz Lang’s M last night. I found it quite a stunning film, amazing in so many respects, but mostly because it was so prescient. The German film came out in 1931, yet it has all the makings of a modern film. Because of a series of unsolved child murders, a large German town turns mobbish as they search in vain for the killer. The police use fingerprinting, handwriting analysis, and psychological profiling to narrow their search, methods which I had assumed were relatively recent inventions until now. The mafia/underworld, unable to do their normal business with so many police on the lookout, take it amongst themselves to catch the murderer. In one of the most powerful scenes of the film, a man writes a capital “M” on his hand in chalk, then “bumps” into the murderer, placing an “M” on the killer’s shoulder, but unbeknownst to him. I got the chills watching this scene, as the killer marches through the German streets with a child by his side, a child that he will soon murder, and a letter “M” marking him as he walks. My assumptions about the capability of filmmakers in the 30s were blown away. (This was even Lang’s first film with sound).

While drinking beer in a pub a few weeks ago with some friends, I remarked to a friend after tasting a pretty foul brew, that perhaps this is what the people of the middle ages had to suffer through. And she responded, and rightly so, that it is false to assume that just because it was the middle ages does not mean they didn’t know how to make a good beer. And though her argument was solely about beer, it got me thinking about all things Medieval. Just because our era launched men into space and designed machines that could calculate Pi to a billion places, doesn’t mean that other eras were devoid of achievements or incapable of, for example, making a good beer.

Case in point: I’m currently reading a philisophical text written in the early 12th century, and I assumed that the logic would be faulty, the science educated guesses at best, and the arguments centuries old. But I found to my surprise that the prose was utterly clear, and the arguments held within are still relevant today. Who are we to assume that we stand at the pinnacle of civilization? In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael he criticizes the common notion among people that humanity is the crowning achievement of existence, and he emphasizes that perhaps evolution is not done, that we are just one of millions of creatures still walking an evolutionary path. He criticizes too the common phrasing, “…and then man arrived…” as if our existence denotes some kind of finality to creation. I suppose in my daily life I have become influenced by that notion, and came to believe that we at this point in history are better in all respects than those who have gone before us, regardless of the wars, the bickering and stupidity that goes on among us. But lately, that thought has changed. Perhaps we are better in some ways, but humanity has been at least as intelligent as us for the past 10,000 years according to some scientists, and perhaps going as far back as 50,000 years. In other words, you could go back to the savannah in Africa 50,000 years ago, bring a child forward to our time and train her in our ways. And she would be capable of everything you do, she would be able to understand everything you do, and she would not be deficient in any way. Just because we can send men to the moon does not mean we are more intelligent than those that have gone before us. We only, to paraphrase Einstein, have giant shoulders to stand on.