Bushmen

• crude culture

66:5.30Tut and his as­so­ciates la­bored to pro­mote group as­so­ci­a­tions of a peace­ful na­ture, to reg­u­late and hu­man­ize war­fare, to co-or­di­nate in­ter­tribal re­la­tions, and to im­prove tribal gov­ern­ments. In the vicin­ity of Dala­ma­tia there de­vel­oped a more ad­vanced cul­ture, and these im­proved so­cial re­la­tions were very help­ful in in­flu­enc­ing more re­mote tribes. But the pat­tern of civ­i­liza­tion pre­vail­ing at the Prince’s head­quar­ters was quite dif­fer­ent from the bar­baric so­ci­ety evolv­ing else­where, just as the twen­ti­eth-cen­tury so­ci­ety of Capetown, South Africa, is to­tally un­like the crude cul­ture of the diminu­tive Bush­men to the north.

• inferior race

68:1.6That con­tem­po­rary cul­tural so­ci­ety is a rather re­cent phe­nom­e­non is well shown by the pres­ent-day sur­vival of such prim­i­tive so­cial con­di­tions as char­ac­ter­ize the Aus­tralian na­tives and the Bush­men and Pyg­mies of Africa. Among these back­ward peo­ples may be ob­served some­thing of the early group hos­til­ity, per­sonal sus­pi­cion, and other highly an­ti­so­cial traits which were so char­ac­ter­is­tic of all prim­i­tive races. These mis­er­able rem­nants of the nonso­cial peo­ples of an­cient times bear elo­quent tes­ti­mony to the fact that the nat­u­ral in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic ten­dency of man can­not suc­cess­fully com­pete with the more po­tent and pow­er­ful or­ga­ni­za­tions and as­so­ci­a­tions of so­cial pro­gres­sion. These back­ward and sus­pi­cious an­ti­so­cial races that speak a dif­fer­ent di­alect ev­ery forty or fifty miles il­lus­trate what a world you might now be liv­ing in but for the com­bined teach­ing of the cor­po­real staff of the Plan­e­tary Prince and the later labors of the Adamic group of racial up­lifters.

• still employ food-gathering lines

68:5.31. The col­lec­tion stage. Food co­er­cion, hunger, led to the first form of in­dus­trial or­ga­ni­za­tion, the prim­i­tive food-gath­er­ing lines. Some­times such a line of hunger march would be ten miles long as it passed over the land glean­ing food. This was the prim­i­tive no­madic stage of cul­ture and is the mode of life now fol­lowed by the African Bush­men.

• crude culture

70:3.2Sex hunger and mother love es­tab­lish the fam­ily. But real gov­ern­ment does not ap­pear un­til super­fam­ily groups have be­gun to form. In the pre­fam­ily days of the horde, lead­er­ship was pro­vided by in­for­mally cho­sen in­di­vid­u­als. The African Bush­men have never pro­gressed be­yond this prim­i­tive stage; they do not have chiefs in the horde.

• no individual names

88:5.5Prim­i­tive man be­lieved that names must be treated with re­spect, es­pe­cially names of the gods. The name was re­garded as an en­tity, an in­flu­ence dis­tinct from the phys­i­cal per­son­al­ity; it was es­teemed equally with the soul and the shadow. Names were pawned for loans; a man could not use his name un­til it had been re­deemed by pay­ment of the loan. Nowa­days one signs his name to a note. An in­di­vid­ual’s name soon be­came im­por­tant in magic. The sav­age had two names; the im­por­tant one was re­garded as too sa­cred to use on or­di­nary oc­ca­sions, hence the sec­ond or ev­ery­day name—a nick­name. He never told his real name to strangers. Any ex­pe­ri­ence of an un­usual na­ture caused him to change his name; some­times it was in an ef­fort to cure dis­ease or to stop bad luck. The sav­age could get a new name by buy­ing it from the tribal chief; men still in­vest in ti­tles and de­grees. But among the most prim­i­tive tribes, such as the African Bush­men, in­di­vid­ual names do not ex­ist.

• inferior race

103:3.1While the be­lief in spir­its, dreams, and di­verse other su­per­sti­tions all played a part in the evo­lu­tion­ary ori­gin of prim­i­tive re­li­gions, you should not over­look the in­flu­ence of the clan or tribal spirit of sol­i­dar­ity. In the group re­la­tion­ship there was pre­sented the ex­act so­cial sit­u­a­tion which pro­vided the chal­lenge to the ego­is­tic-al­tru­is­tic con­flict in the moral na­ture of the early hu­man mind. In spite of their be­lief in spir­its, prim­i­tive Aus­tralians still fo­cus their re­li­gion upon the clan. In time, such re­li­gious con­cepts tend to per­son­al­ize, first, as an­i­mals, and later, as a super­man or as a God. Even such in­fe­rior races as the African Bush­men, who are not even totemic in their be­liefs, do have a rec­og­ni­tion of the dif­fer­ence be­tween the self-in­ter­est and the group-in­ter­est, a prim­i­tive dis­tinc­tion be­tween the val­ues of the sec­u­lar and the sa­cred. But the so­cial group is not the source of re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence. Re­gard­less of the in­flu­ence of all these prim­i­tive con­tri­bu­tions to man’s early re­li­gion, the fact re­mains that the true re­li­gious im­pulse has its ori­gin in gen­uine spirit pres­ences ac­ti­vat­ing the will to be un­selfish.