Most law students in the English-speaking world will have come across R v Dudley and Stephens, from 1884, which established the precedent that necessity is not a defence for murder. The case has a particular grisly attraction, as the defendants were sailors who had resorted to cannibalism after being cast adrift on a lifeboat for nearly three weeks. Such scenarios, though rare, had occurred at sea before, and with public opinion apparently favourable to Messrs Dudley and Stephens, they were finally sentenced to only six months in prison.
Strong taboos against cannibalism have been widely shared in sophisticated societies throughout recorded history. However, as the New Scientist pointed out this week, they have not been universal. A feature and an accompanying editorial note emerging evidence which suggests that cannibalism has been more widespread than previously thought, with perhaps as many as one fifth of all known societies in the last 100,000 years adopting the practice in various ways.
It is 2024, of course, so the journal is not content to simply note the scientific findings and celebrate the advance of knowledge about the fascinating diversity of human history. Instead, the reader must be scolded for possibly harbouring outdated and problematic attitudes to cannibalism. An editorial notes rather piously that in the high imperial period of the nineteenth century, ‘racist stereotypes of the cannibal were concocted to justify subjugation.’ This rather vague, passive phrasing is typical of the muddle that descends on the New Scientist when it moves from recording scientific findings to making political points. Were racist stereotypes really ‘concocted’ by European explorers and missionaries? Or were those people simply reporting what they encountered? No doubt there are plenty of examples of cannibalism being sensationalised, or of its prevalence being overstated as part of unfairly sweeping condemnations of native peoples under imperial rule. Equally, however, as the New Scientist themselves accept, cannibalism was real! Anthropologists like William Arens, who argued that it was a myth put about by villainous white Christian men, have been refuted.
It is certainly true that many different practices come under the heading of cannibalism. Societies where a small amount of human flesh is eaten as part of funerary rites are not the same as ones where prisoners of war or those who violate social norms are consumed. But the latter did exist – and in a few places, still do.
It is all very well to sneer about ‘stories about missionaries being boiled in pots’. The fact remains that there are recorded cases of people being killed in this way. John Williams and James Harris were murdered and eaten in the New Hebrides – now Vanuatu – in 1839. Thomas Baker suffered the same fate in Fiji in 1867, along with a number of Fijian Christians. Captain James Cook, the great explorer, was not killed for cannibalistic purposes, but his heart was eaten by tribal chiefs on the Hawaiian island where he died.
The European empires genuinely did come into contact with tribespeople who ate their enemies and captives. It is entirely understandable that they considered their own civilisations to be broadly superior, and they were right to have that belief. Modern academics, well-drilled in cultural relativism and holding an instinctive revulsion for any concept of empire as civilising mission, will disdain such beliefs. But it’s hard to see why the consequent fading of cannibalism and the integration of its practitioners into a better way of life should be regarded as a bad outcome.
The New Scientist coverage is striking in another way. The general argument, both explicit and implicit, is that we should adopt a more nuanced attitude towards cannibalism, because we now have a fuller understanding of the variation in human societies and have moved away from superstitions about body and soul. Who’s to say that eating human flesh is wrong, really?
There is certainly a kernel of truth here. Blanket moralism is not a good basis for understanding and exploring the variety in human life. At the same time, the New Scientist essentially misunderstand the taboo against cannibalism, making the classic reasoning errors often made by materialistic scientists airily dismissing supposedly archaic views.
One researcher is quoted as saying ‘cannibalism is not bad or unnatural. It’s part of the natural world. We are an extension of that.’ But the mere fact that something happens a lot doesn’t tell us anything definitive about its moral status. Those awful old-fashioned European Christians were actually intelligent, thinking individuals, not motivated simply by fear or disgust – not that we should accept the utilitarian cliché that disgust is a useless emotion. They had a high view of the human body, which precluded treating it as a food source, because they had a high view of humankind and its potential, refined and considered over many centuries of thought and debate. And it is that high view of humanity which made possible the scientific worldview, and the resulting civilisation, of which New Scientist is the inheritor.
Comments