Reading the history of Westerners on the islands really broke my heart. Particularly this paragraph:
> Perhaps no one fell so deeply under the islands’ spell as Maurice Vidal Portman, a minor English aristocrat and amateur anthropologist who was made Royal Navy officer in charge of the islands in 1879 when he was just 19. For two decades, Portman made ceaseless expeditions to find the various Andaman tribes, who he would kidnap and transport to Port Blair. Portman was an enthusiastic practitioner of “race science,” believing that intelligence could be gauged by measuring a subject’s cranium with calipers. Poor science cannot explain Portman’s additional recording of the size of islanders’ penises, breasts, and testicles; his evaluation of their “lustfulness” (which he equated with willfulness); and his photographs of naked tribesmen in classical poses. But his ambivalence about whether his subjects lived or died is explained by the view, common in Europe at the time, that the beings before him were so distantly of his species, they were best categorized as fauna. “They sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents,” Portman wrote of six Sentinelese he took to Port Blair. “This expedition was not a success. ... We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.”
I cannot even begin to imagine how terrified those people must have been. To be kidnapped and then poked and prodded by a bunch of instruments you've never seen before by people you can't communicate with or understand. The way they were treated was truly barbaric.
It almost sounds like an episode of alien abduction. Except the aliens were white men in a ship, not Martians on a flying saucer. We have indeed fashioned the villains in our fantasies after our own image.
I found reading this article gripping and it led to a lot of questions.
My first thought is how casual 'belief' or 'faith' in moderate Christians is what led JAC down this route. When society believes that not knowing God is a path to eternal damnation, then is it that surprising if someone with empathy and ambition makes it their mission to fix?
Obviously there is also a bit of the 'messiah' complex going on there - probably reinforced by other Christians and IG followers.
I was also thinking about how the dad felt, when he tried to talk his son out of what he was doing, but couldn't argue against the religious beliefs he'd previously taught him? At that point, if I were in his shoes, would I hold my hands up and say my faith had all been a big mistake, it was convenient to getting me where I am, but it doesn't really make sense. Or maybe I'd take the tack of 'don't be so extreme - be more moderate', something that really wasn't going to fly with JAC.
Also, as a father, I can't imagine raising a baby boy, a child, who becomes a young adult and then watching him take this path. The article made me think about how a father is a role-model to their children. His father went through a difficult time with his career and JAC was witness to this. I lead a stressful, busy life, I wonder what affect that will have on my kids outlook?
You can have a bit of messiah or jesus complex without having mental illness, and mental illness is a broad term for an entire field of medicine, so it's not very specific. I don't think we can call it mental illness unless we are trained psychiatrists and we'd assessed him.
I think the effort to say "look, this guy wasn't evil, he was doing what he thought was right" is totally off course.
Almost no one is intentionally evil. Most people somehow or another justify whatever they are doing as right. I'd imagine most low level nazi party members thought they were making a hard decision to do what was right.
He did what he thought was right and luckily he got killed as opposed to surviving to make contact causing serious damage to the tribe.
He is the embodiment of evil to me, not because he wanted to be evil but because he was too stupid or intellectually dishonest to realize that what he thought was right was deeply damaging to other people. In this sense he puts himself in the company of most horrendous people in history.
I don't think the article is trying to justify what the guy did. It is trying to explore the background and specific experiences that made him do what he did, from the point of view of someone who clearly isn't thrilled about evangelical Christianity.
Although this kind of explanation can and are often used to apologize for bad behavior, it can be valuable to learn the mechanisms by which people are pushed toward those kinds of behavior. Learning what encourages people to commit certain crimes in our own society, for example, can help us reduce the incidence of said crimes.
Instead of just pointing fingers at religious fanatics and blaming them for everything, we could do something more constructive and try to reach out to troubled kids when their dad loses his medical license (which is what happened to this particular guy) so that they don't need to seek refuge in a fantasy project. That's the kind of insight that a detailed post-mortem can bring, both in technology and in the society.
Brutal. Can it really be classified as evil without intention to do harm, though? It seems to me that true evil can only be if the actor knows and intends harm. Classifying ignorance as evil seems disingenuous - ignorance can be not only a symptom of laziness or some other self-imposed decision but also a result of circumstances out of ones control. Being a victim of circumstance does not IMO precipitate being evil.
Would you consider attempting to convince an entire civilization to bend to your (lord's) will, against their own (as expressed on several occasions, spanning several decades), to be a harmful act?
I mean, I think there is one sense where you can define evil only as the intent to be evil. In this case donating money to orphans would be evil if somehow your intent was to do harm failing to realize that you were doing good.
My argument is that from a utilitarian perspective, people with good intentions doing [bad, evil, unethical, whatever] cause much more human suffering and misery than those people whose intent is evil and yet they so often are given a pass on their actions.
And then either way, you could make this argument like: "why did person x choose to be evil where as person y chose to be good." That seems almost more arbitrary an likely to be biological from a detached perspective. I'd much rather judge people on their ability to deeply introspect and evaluate the world and come to good conclusions.
I can't help wondering if history will look back on most of what we see today as "willful evils", instead as "misunderstood tragedies"... see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman whose tower sniping was initiated by... a brain tumor.
The truest evil IMHO is that committed by people who believe they are doing good (but perhaps are "making the tough decision"): see the Nazis.
Not a bad write-up but one thing that's conspicuously missing is anything about Lynda, John's mother, who apparently was the most devout of the family. Isn't her influence in his life likely to be as or more important than his father's? My guess is that the author had access to Patrick but not Lynda and shaped the narrative accordingly; if true, that would be unfortunate.
I feel like I have the opposite problem. I don’t actually have many strong beliefs that guide my life, which leads to “drifting” and lack of intentionality.
The most fulfilled people in life are probably wired more like JAC than anything else. Like if he applied that level of belief to a startup as he did to his faith I imagine he’d be wildly successful by now.
I also sometimes envy people who totally identify with something be it religion, business or something else. It must be nice to have full conviction following a path but obviously this can also go wrong.
maybe those people just make more of a good story for an article or movie? it might be a sampling bias. We have to be careful in a world dominated by storytelling. Maybe that guy was actually completely different than what is reported, it's just that a publication needed a good story to sell advertisement.
This article completely glosses over Chau's selfishness, he exposed the Sentinelese to outside pathogens that they have no immunity to and could have killed all of them, that might currently be killing them for all we know.
He possibly wiped out a stone age community of real people.
The article also mentions that he immunized himself against a dozen diseases -- probably in addition to the vaccines that most Americans get in their childhood -- and quarantined himself for a while, too. He was definitely aware of the risk and tried to minimize it. Not sure whether that was enough, though. If the North Sentinelese have been isolated since the end of the last ice age, they could be vulnerable to something that outsiders don't even care about, like our normal gut flora.
Well, specifically it said he "attempted to immunize himself against 13 diseases", which isn't equivalent to actually doing that. Furthermore, I get the sense that his isolation was primarily to avoid the authorities ("he stayed not at the Lalaji but secretly—and illegally", use of the word "safehouse"), and not due to biological concerns. If anything, that was a second order benefit in his mind - "The benefit of that is that I was essentially in quarantine"...
and in the name of what? God? wanting to be an adventurer/explorer that he so obviously idolised?
his actions were ignorant and worse, genuinely harmful.
the press narrative focuses on his religion and desire for adventure and largely ignores the fact that he legit endangered people
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” -- John 14:6 (emphasis mine)
Once you throw eternal heaven or oblivion/hell into the equation, then no matter how terrible the method, if you convert even a single person, it was worth it.
This always puzzled me - how can good Christians do nothing while (according to Christianity) countless souls are lost?
Reading this makes me want to look at what constitutes fanaticism in my own life. His life looks like a study in someone who fell into a true believer mindset and it led to his death.
But, I'm haunted by the parallels of En-mei, who turned out to be no less subject to the stress of finding a mate than those of us in the more modern world. If there is a hidden message there that is trying to say that we are all fanatics like JAC, well, it's an interesting thought.
I think the message is we all just want to get laid...
Joking aside, we might be fanatic about some things, but if we knew of an incredibly violent group of programmers using notepad, I think I'd pass up attempting to teach them vim.
What's haunting about that? Finding a husband or wife is a primary concern in almost every culture, so that makes sense.
Along the same lines, the characterization of En-mei as selfish and manipulative seems unfair. His story is a heightened version of a common one: guy grows up in a small town, gets in some trouble, leaves to see a bit of the big world, then goes back home because -- while the big world has some interesting stuff -- the small town makes more sense to him.
What an astounding success! Job well done, mission accomplished, RIP.
What I don't understand is the dismay felt by readers for the loss of this ignorant and closed mind man. Most men lives life of quiet desperation. There is no meaning but that which we make and this (to me) foolish man live the life that he wanted.
> Perhaps no one fell so deeply under the islands’ spell as Maurice Vidal Portman, a minor English aristocrat and amateur anthropologist who was made Royal Navy officer in charge of the islands in 1879 when he was just 19. For two decades, Portman made ceaseless expeditions to find the various Andaman tribes, who he would kidnap and transport to Port Blair. Portman was an enthusiastic practitioner of “race science,” believing that intelligence could be gauged by measuring a subject’s cranium with calipers. Poor science cannot explain Portman’s additional recording of the size of islanders’ penises, breasts, and testicles; his evaluation of their “lustfulness” (which he equated with willfulness); and his photographs of naked tribesmen in classical poses. But his ambivalence about whether his subjects lived or died is explained by the view, common in Europe at the time, that the beings before him were so distantly of his species, they were best categorized as fauna. “They sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents,” Portman wrote of six Sentinelese he took to Port Blair. “This expedition was not a success. ... We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.”
I cannot even begin to imagine how terrified those people must have been. To be kidnapped and then poked and prodded by a bunch of instruments you've never seen before by people you can't communicate with or understand. The way they were treated was truly barbaric.