Sure, but at the time the rationale of taking aboriginale children away from their parents because living with white people was just awesome might have also been considered good. You were making it sound like this was a better alternative. From today’s perspective, they both look like messed up paternalistic actions.
Certainly it is, if by “superior” you mean “possessing better access to electricity, running water, agriculture, computers, radios, cars, aeroplanes, and medicine”.
If you want your statement to be more meaningful than that, I’m afraid you do have to step up to the plate and explicitly specify how you’re quantifying “superior”.
How else would you define “Superior”? It’s just fucking better in every way, and any sane person can see that.
If you think being living like it’s 10,000 BC is so great, give away everything you own and go and live in a cave in the desert for the next 20 years or so and avoid all contact with the modern world in any way, shape or form. You’re not going to though, are you? Of course not.
Why? Because that’s a crappy way to live and everyone knows that. Why would you want to voluntarily live in a cave in the desert like a sand-based version of Gilligans Island when you could live somewhere with air-conditioning, running water, telephones, books, modern medicine, a steady food supply, and so on? You wouldn’t.
But why do you have to embrace every aspect of the culture in order to want to study it? Many people love studying the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but most people don’t want to forsake indoor plumbing.
Those same people aren’t (generally) saying that Medieval Culture is somehow as good as “Modern” culture when it clearly isn’t, though.
But I don’t really see the need to denigrate them. Yes, in many ways, it is, but why do you feel the need to go on about how Aboriginal culture is no good and they’re completely irrelevant and pointless? If I were an Aboriginal I really wouldn’t want any part in a culture that’s so completely dismissive of me.
Calm down, I’m not claiming that I personally would prefer a Stone Age lifestyle to a modern technological one, and if I did I wouldn’t blame you for not believing me.
But an enraged splutter is not a substitute for a rational answer. Assertions like “any sane person can see that it’s just fucking better in every way” and “everyone knows that it’s better” don’t qualify as a clearly explained objective standard for determining what we mean by "better".
Now if what you’re trying to say (more politely) is “well fuck you Kimstu, this is so obvious that we don’t need to specify a clearly explained objective standard for it and you’re just being a pain in the arse to insist on it”, hey fine, I’m not offended.
I do think, though, that if this superiority “in every way” is so obvious, then it shouldn’t be difficult to come up with a clearly explained objective standard for measuring it.
Exactly. Because the modern technological one is clearly superior to the cave-dwelling one. Now, if everyone lived in caves then arguing your cave-dwelling culture was “superior” because you had a woolly mammoth rug and the neighbours didn’t would be silly (And which it’s a bit silly and too complicated to compare different “Modern” cultures with other “Modern” cultures).
But arguing your cave is “superior” because you’ve got a woolly mammoth rug, when your neighbours have a four-bedroom ranch house with air-conditioning, satellite TV, home theatre, broadband internet, a fridge that filters your drinking water, and two late-model cars in the garage is just patently absurd.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m trying to say, but without the “Fuck you” part. 
The problem is that trying to define cultural superiority is like trying to define pornography- everyone knows it when they see it, but it’s incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to accurately come up with a clearly explained objective standard by which it can be measured.
Hmm, that’s an interesting comparison. As I understand it, the reason Justice Stewart used that phrase about identifying obscene materials was that “obscenity” is difficult to define precisely because it is subjective:
But you’re claiming here that unlike obscenity, cultural superiority is not subjective, since “any sane person” would evaluate it in the same way that you do.
Okay then, but I would think that in that case, it should be easy to come up with a clearly defined objective standard for evaluating it.
Look, ultimately I still contend the sort of thing I’m talking about is blatantly obvious to pretty much anyone who isn’t a back-to-the-land neo-hippy type, and you’re being obtuse by demanding a specific set of criteria for it. “The culture with the most technologically advanced stuff is superior to cultures that don’t have technologically advanced stuff”. How’s that? It works for me.
Really, what are you looking for? I mean, I’m sorry, but I just can’t have a rational debate about the issue if you can concede that you wouldn’t want to give up modern conveniences to go and live in a cave, but still can’t see how that makes modern culture superior to a stone age one.
We’re just on totally different wavelengths here, I’m afraid.
Sure, I’ve got no problem with that. What it says is that the criterion for superiority is technological advancement (at least in cases where the levels of technological advancement are very different), and I think that’s a perfectly reasonable criterion to choose.
There now, was that so hard?
(my emphasis)
But it isn’t better in every way. For instance, I prefer Australian rock art to modern conceptual art of the “unmade bed” variety. As an atheist, I prefer the idea of the Dreaming to Christianity as a mythology. Hell, I prefer wearing just a loincloth to a suit and tie, A/C or no. I’m wearing one now, in fact.
So your absolutist stance is rubbish. Yes, there are lots of ways modern culture is better - I like fridges, medicine, optometry, etc. But there are other aspects of modern culture that can get fucked, as far as I’m concerned, and that are not preferable to living in a cave. Car culture, global warming, WMDs, machine guns, pollution, habitat destruction on a scale the already-not-innocent-of-environmental-devastation Aborigines could only dream of. Christianity, Islam, New Age woo, celebrity worship, reality TV…Oh, and the music of AC/DC, that’s not good for anyone.
I think it’s better if one takes a fragmented approach, and emphasises that while most elements of material and technological culture are better in the modern world, there are aspects of artistic and psychological culture that aren’t. And leave it at that**, rather than try and combine them into one overall score called “Culture”. That kind of forced aggregate is less informative than the eclectic approach that doesn’t judge each culture as as some sort of monolith, to be discarded in toto if even a piece is found wanting.
This was basically sums up all of the ‘history’ lessons in (my) primary school.
Missed edit window: I mean, it is history. But I would have been nice to learn about the rest of the world, once in awhile. It wasn’t so… Australia focused at high school, though obviously being taught in Australia there still was a fair bit of it.
(No; I meant one definition of superior cultures would be those which persuade other cultures to their ways of thinking ((education and equality for all, e.g.))
I find your approach amusing, but disingenuous. It’s the same sort of approach applied when arguing the superiority of one group over another: Define your terms. Quantify the results. Give me a cite. Show me the rigor with which you came to your bigoted conclusion.
Sorry; no. I’m OK with you walking away satisfied that you’ve defended the Aborgines and their culture like the superb guardian of egalitarianism that you are. As I’ve noted, the world (and likely Kimstu) have voted with their feet. Their daily behaviour and choices reflect superior cultures and civilizations wherever they find them, sourced from whatever populations and nations invented them. And in that list of how we behave and what we do the items sourced by the Aborigines are a fairly tiny fraction, I’d guess.
In short, this gets an average choice over this, and this required a mite more execution than this.
But hey; you wanna live in egalitarian Dreamtime and pretend that absent rigorous quantification (and of course, also discounting technological superiority) all cultures are about equal? Enjoy. Why, I expect the world will surge to an Australian Aboriginal way of life Real Soon Now, because not a single clearly specified objective standard has been advanced to show it is in any way inferior.
I don’t hate the British Empire. I do deplore what they did to the Tasmanians, & apparently you are unaware of it, if you characterize it as “being mean.”
I’m a historian and well aware of the sort of things that happened during the early years of European settlement in Australia.
And I also feel it was 200 years ago so it’s time to stop whingeing about it.
I’m sure there are probably examples of Aboriginal tribes being extremely shitty to each other as well (they were here 40,000 years before everyone else and there’s no way they all got along famously for all that time) but I don’t see people going around accusing the Aborigines of atrocities.
Oh okay, now I see. But it seems to me that the reliability of that metric is significantly impaired by the fact that a change in “ways of thinking” isn’t necessarily the result of “persuasion”, as tomndebb pointed out.
:dubious: Well, yeah. Around here, those seem like reasonable requests to make.
You’re apparently just not reading what I’ve been saying:
You’re still not getting it; in fact, somewhat alarmingly, you seem to be understanding less and less as the debate continues. Contrary to your claim, many clearly specified objective standards have been advanced to show that Aboriginal culture IS in some ways inferior.
For example, Martini Enfield suggested the metric of technological advancement as a means of comparing cultures, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that by that metric, Aboriginal culture ranks as far inferior to modern culture. I don’t have a problem with that at all, and I think it’s a perfectly valid argument.
What I have a problem with is the illogic of your insistence that you can describe one culture as intrinsically and unqualifiedly “better” than another while refusing to clearly specify an objective metric for determining what it means to be “better”. That’s not an argument at all: it’s just self-congratulatory flag-waving,
Well, ISTM that this is a logical consequence of people unthinkingly accepting the unqualified assertion that European culture is somehow intrinsically and essentially superior to Aboriginal culture. They naturally feel that the representatives of European culture ought to be held to a higher standard.
I haven’t refused; you simply took issue with them and wanted an unnecessary elaboration, as if they were unquantifiable. Unfortunately, the SDMB is not high enough on my to-do list to comply, and as I said, if you want to walk away satisfied, feel free.
The culture and civilization which replaced/overtook the Aboriginal culture and civilization in Australia was superior by nearly any metric I can think of, including technology.
It’s not possible to isolate technology, so that metric alone is enormous. The capability to invent and implement technology enables advances in nearly every aspect of “culture” or “civilization.” However with respect to the arts (I gave you a nice set of pictures to help you out, but feel free to listen to Beethoven’s 9th and stack it up against a didgeridoo), learning and the distribution of what is learned to current and future generations, care of the sick and infirm, fostering institutions that can promote the welfare of man on a broad basis, and in general the ability to improve the lot of humans instead of just passively and haplessly suffering at the hands of nature–in all of these areas and many more, the invading culture/civilization is vastly superior. And that’s why the aboriginal culture and civilization is on the ropes in the first place. Res ipsa loquitur despite your challenge to quantify.
Perhaps you’d like to advance a few particulars of where the Aboriginal culture and civilization are superior.
I remind you again that with respect to the OP, at least we are on the same page. I’m unconcerned any effort at teaching a “balanced history” will confuse the average student.