Before the European invasions, Indigenous societies in Africa, Asia and the Americas discovered medicine, domesticated plants and animals, created literature, designed architecture, and organized confederacies and empires. Through trial and error these societies evolved to imperfect but harmonious civilizations. Then came the holocausts of religious and biological plagues.
For whatever reasons, the European invaders had long lost a sense of harmony, and it would take them a long time to begin to rediscover their Indigenous values. In the meantime, they had lost control of the machinery of domination to the extent it began to devour them.
With the dawn of their new awareness, the Europeans and their diaspora found they had lost not only their harmony, but their sanity as well. In their attempt at becoming whole, they discovered their identities of domination had to be discarded entirely, and that the machinery they had erected would have to be dismantled.
Jay,
The indigenous people of Europe also discovered medicine, domesticated plants and animals, created literature, designed architecture, and organized confederacies and empires …
…
before the Roman invasions. And indigenous tribes around Rome had flourished, before the Greek invasions. And pre-Mycenean Greek tribes had flourished before the Phoenician invasions. And … Hittite invasions, Assyrian invasions, Egyptian invasions … yada, yada.
And our Neanderthal-like ancestors had flourished before the Cro-Magnon invasions out of Africa.
What we’re seeing is the accelerating “development front” as the talents of growing human populations compound at an accelerating rate.
We were ALL tribal only 1-2 thousand years ago.
We are ALL trying to see how to scale up some of our key tribal customs while not destroying them all.
We all agree that we’re tossing out diverse babies with the bathwater, but don’t for a moment think that this phenomenon is or ever was isolated to non-European settings.
ps: remnants of some European tribes linger on. Basque, Sami, Welsh, even various German tribes.
Thanks for commenting, Roger.
You are correct that Indigenous values existed on all continents, and still exist in the form of customs and traditions derived from Indigenous cultures, as well as in stateless nations of Europe. If you browse the archives here at IC, you will find I have occasionally written about that.
One book that comes to mind that you might find interesting is The Distorted Past by Josep Fontana. For the European diaspora and Europeans today, rediscovering their own Indigenous values can be a way of unlearning the doctrine of domination, and acquiring a more authentic and fulfilling identity.