Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization,
Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western
Civ" to about two hours. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep
issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as
quickly as possible. The deep issue here is the ancient Western
specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly
innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as
the basis or nemesis of cultural order.Yet these Western notions of
nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of
human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship
relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each
other's lives and die each other's deaths. But where the existence
of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither
interest, nor agency nor even experience is an individual fact, let
alone an egoistic disposition. "Sorry, beg your pardon," Sahlins
concludes, "Western civilization has been built on a perverse and
mistaken idea of human nature."
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