Quotessence
Home / Topics / Primitivism Quotes

Primitivism Quotes

Browse 8 quotes about Primitivism.

Primitivism Quotes

“The church's theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant's categorical imperative - a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific community. Liberal Christianity fostered ahistoricism by reducing Christianity to a universal, rational kernel of moral teaching. Along a more conservative, evangelical trajectory (and the Reformation is not wholly innocent here), it was recognized that Christians could not simply jettison the historical particularities of the Christian event: the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, there was still a quasi-Platonic, quasi-gnostic rejection of material history such that evangelicalism, while not devolving to a pure ahistoricism, become dominated by a modified ahistoricism we can call primitivism. Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God's action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity) and seeks to make only this first-century 'New Testament church' normative for contemporary practice. This is usually articulated by a rigid distinction between Scripture and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as 'the traditions of men' as opposed to the 'God-give' realities of Scripture). Such primitivism is thus anticreedal and anticatholic, rejecting any sense that what was unfolded by the church between the first and the twenty-first centuries is at all normative for current faith and practice (the question of the canon's formation being an interesting exception here). Ecumenical creeds and confessions - such as the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed - that unite the church across time and around the globe are not 'live' in primitivist worship practices, which enforce a sense of autonomy or even isolation, while at the same time claiming a direct connection to first-century apostolic practices.”

GodChristianityBibleTraditionChurch HistoryEvangelicalismPrimitivismLiberal Christianity
Book:Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church
Create image

“The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities...”

WorkCapitalismLaborAnarchismAnthropologyWork Life BalancePrimitivismEco Socialism
Book:The Abolition of Work
Create image

“People can behave like savages when they are allowed to, but only in art do they go so far as to call themselves primitivists. And when the primitivist urge doesn’t seize them, the psychoaesthetic urge, the study of human evil - itself another form of primitivism, when you come to think about it - does. So portrait painting is a further recidivism that’s frowned on and discouraged - that’s insofar as one can discourage anything in a free society. In the main, prize-culture does the job for us. When all the gongs go to landscape, why would any aspiring artist waste his energies on the dull and relentless cruelties of the human face?”

ArtPrimitivism
Book:J
Create image

“Apes do evidently understand what others are doing, and they can prudently do the same, in which sense they "cooperate"—for their own reasons. But they lack the ability to symbolically par­ticipate in others' existence and thus communalize their own. [...] "Traditional models of economic decision-making assume that peo­ple are self-interested rational maximizers. Empirical research has demonstrated, however, that people will take into account the inter­est of others and are sensitive to norms of cooperation and fairness. [...] Here we show that in an ultimatum game, humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are rational maximizers and are not sensitive to fairness. These results support the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences and aversion to inequitable outcomes, which play key roles in human social organization, distinguish us from our clos­est living relatives." {Jensen, Call, and To masello 2007, 107; see also Jensen et al. 2006) So much, then, for the dismal economic science—whose future is not bright either, inasmuch as chimpanzees are disappearing.”

EmpathyEconomicsDecision MakingHuman BehaviorRationalityPrimatesUtilitarianismPrimitivismMutuality Of Being
Book:What Kinship Is-And Is Not
Create image

“Intelligent people have said again and again: "How easily men could make things much better than they are-if they only all tried togetherl". But people never do "all try together," because the principle of natural selection guarantees that self-prop systems will act mainly for their own survival and propagation in competition with other self-prop systems, and will not sacrifice competitive advantages for the achievement of philanthropic goals.”

UtopiaPrimitivismUnabomberSelf Prop Systems
Book:Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How
Create image