Well, speak of the devil.

I’m going to block this account as well. Finding my comment buried deep in a discussion yet again and feeling compelled to jump in with the same snarky condescension is exactly why I don’t want to interact with you. Your reliance on hostility, bad-faith caricatures, and aggressive profanity to “win” a performance is why I blocked you in the first place. By setting up a false binary where any attempt to discuss specific historical structures is automatically labeled a “noble savage” trope, you created a framework that leaves no room for actual historical specificity or nuance. There was never room for a genuine conversation.

To be clear for anyone genuinely curious about this historiographical distinction: resisting reductive materialism is not an assertion of moral innocence or ‘noble savagery.’ It is a recognition of historical contingency and structural logic. Human violence is real, but it is not a uniform mechanical reflex. Kinship-based warfare and state-sponsored, capitalist settler-colonialism operate under fundamentally different cultural schemas and institutional logics. Recognizing that culture actively shapes how human societies utilize power and resources rather than treating all humans as uniform cogs in a deterministic equation is standard social theory.

If you are not PugJesus and happen to see his point and the errors I made, I’m very open to hearing them. Please do take the time to understand my interpretive frame. I think I’ve carefully situated it such that it doesn’t preclude the possibility of this happening, but recognizes the role of culture in providing a mitigating factor. I just ask that you engage in direct discussion and assume a modicum of good faith on my part. It is something I take seriously.

Here are some thinkers and movements who have influenced my views: The Cultural Turn: Thinkers who argue that culture is not merely a passive byproduct of an economic base, but an active, creative force that shapes human behavior and historical outcomes on its own terms. If they made any major mistake, it was that there was no theory making.

Logics of History by William Sewell Jr: He critiques the radical particularism of the “cultural turn” while rejecting mechanical materialism. Sewell bridges the gap by arguing that historical events can be bracketed to reveal how Schemas (cultural logics/rules) and Resources (material power) dialectically interact to transform social structures over time. If there’s anything I would want anyone to walk away with, its the understanding and value of bracketing when doing history.

Antonio Gramsci: His cultural hegemony notes that cultural frameworks, ideas, and “common sense” actively shape material realities and must be engaged with as an independent site of struggle.

Bertell Ollman: Develops the idea that social relations are a web of internal relations where the individual, culture, and material conditions co-constitute each other simultaneously.

Ernst Bloch: He rejected linear material determinism, showing that humans live in overlapping cultural temporalities that prevent consciousness from simply “mirroring” the immediate economic base.

When it comes to doing history, I reject predetermined trajectories and defend culture as an active, open-ended variable. Humans are universally bound by material realities, their cultural systems dictate how they respond to those realities, making historical development fundamentally open-ended rather than mechanically predictable.