Just curious. Modern society often appears rife with people who are lazy, inattentive and apathetic. If someone has these personality traits of laziness and/or apathy in a hunting subsistence society what happens to them? Are they tolerated and fed, do they care for the children, do they starve, are they killed as a drag on the tribe… what happens?
Beyond this, and this question might sound a bit unusual, can these personality traits even exist in a hunting subsistence society? If hunting and working (making arrows, spears & cutting flints or something) are the sum totality of one’ occupational universe does they option of being disaffected, lazy and apathetic even exist?
And being the tribe shaman is always good for those who are lazy and apathetic. They also may end up doing menial work for the absolute minimun compensation (say, just being fed.) SOMEONE has gotta wash Og the Hunter’s clothes by beating them on a rock by the river.
And let’s not forget that beating and ensalving submissive, lazy people into submission whist staving and working them to death was socially acceptable in nearly all primitve/ancient societies. :eek:
There really isn’t all that much work to do in a hunter gatherer society. Generally they only need to work a few hours a day to take care of food and shelter. Hunting is nowhere near as large of a food sorce as gathering, and it doesn’t get much easier than walking outside and picking whatever happens to be growing around your hut. I’d imagine lazy people wouldn’t have much trouble fulfilling their basic needs. Where they would lose out is on the social aspects of life.
There also arn’t a lot of fun things besides work. It’s not like you can sit around using the Internet all day. Most forms of entertainment require you to at least leave the house.
What even sven said. We work harder than they do (/did). Farming, which is what people first did when they stopped doing hunter-gatherer subsistence, means working harder than we do.
To me this indicates that folks shifted from hunter-gatherer to farmer only when they really absolutely had to, and that it was traumatic and destructive to all the old rhythms and patterns. (Your anthropological take on it may differ, I suppose). I visualize it as being as cheerful a transition as “OK, the train is stuck in the mud, everyone out of your seats and get out there in the mud and grab ahold of the train and start pushing.”
Si Amigo
Exactly. Except we’re talking in agricultural civilization, not the relaxed world of hunter-gathering that preceded it. Lots of stratification and coercion in the brave new world of bust-yer-butt farming. Actually me and my brother and my girlfriend, we’re gonna ride the train. These five big guys don’t have to push the train, in exchange for which they’re gonna beat the crap out of any of you who don’t push. Rest of you, heave-ho, got it?
Also worth thinking about: we did the hunter-gatherer thing for a handful of hundred-thousand years. Longer if you’re relaxed about who and what you define as “us”. We’ve been doing the agriculture, and then city-state thing, for right around 10,000 years now. We’ve made some impressively shiny towers, fast monorails, even got computers and footprints on the moon. But most of the getting here from there has truly sucked.
10,000 years ain’t nothing. And yet it’s everything. Our culture doesn’t remember before. What we think we know about us is nearly all derived from us under the circumstances of the last 10,000 years.
Oh, and one more thing: we’re not in those circumstances any more. This is effectively a post-agrarian age. Very few of us were up at dawn out in the fields starting a long day of manual labor. But while 10,000 years is long enough to have erased most of our sense of self from the days before we tilled the soil, the brief 2-3 centuries in which we’ve really gotten out from under the domination of the farming life has only just started to make a dent in how we think of ourselves.
I think I see what you’re getting at, and it’s not immediately clear that this is so. It is equally likely that human development was a parallel process and agrarian culture is a parasitic brake. Maybe monorail, towers, steel and guns would be there in this time frame anyway, or even sooner if there wasn’t the agricultural lifestyle to leech from it. Definitely a great debate though.
I would argue of course that the first few hundred thousand years also is basically meaningless. The number of human beings we’re talking about is microscopic compared to the number today. While most of human history was hunter-gathering, most of the humans that have lived throughout recorded time actually lived after agriculture was invented.
Your argument needs to take account of the fact that our genetic makeup has changed very little in the past 10,000 years, compared to what happened during the prior portion of human history.
I think one of the reasons laziness has developed is that many people are totally divorced from the work we do. I sit in an office and enter data all day; my work has nothing to do with my sustenance or well-being except that I know I’ll make money if I do it, and that money=food. And still then, the equation is a little fuzzy; why is it again that I have to stay in the office all day when I have no tasks to complete? Whereas if the well-being of yourself, your family, and your tribe depends on your work, you have more of a motivation to work. I don’t think laziness is a natural human trait, or at least, it used to be much more rare than it is now. It’s the product of a disconnect between effort and result.
What Xema said. Or to put it another way, evolutionary change occurs at each generation. The question is how many generations, not how many in each generation.
What Xema said. Or to put it another way, evolutionary change occurs at each generation. The question is how many generations, not how many in each generation.
There must be more modern, even contemporary, parallels to what the OP is asking. What about an impoverished third world country that gets a vicious military dicatator who insists all teenagers do military service? What happens to that fat, timid, asthmatic kid with bottle-end glasses?
The probelm with this sort of romanticisation of the HG lifetsyle is that it overlooks the reason why HGs didn’t need to work hard most of the time. They didn’t need to work hard because the population was always just under the worst-season carrying capacity. So if one year in seven was a drought year or an exceptionally harsh winter the population was mainatined at the level that could be sustained in that year. What that meant is that for the other 6 years the population was overloaded with food.
That produces a pretty good life for those 6 years. But the 7th year was hell. Moreover the population was maintained at those low levels by the use of population control. Not primarily birth control which simply doesn’t exist in effective form in nature. Population was controlled by population control, which is a nice way of saying killing people. In most societies it was the children who were killed, but the elderly weren’t exempt either.
So the HG lifestyle was far from idyllic. Pretty pleasant some of the time, certainly very low in labour requirements, but emotionaly traumatic to say the least. The transition to farming certainly required more work, but with the benefit of greater security and an option iot to have to slaughter your son or grandmother. It’s no coincidence that almost any time HGs can adopt agriculture they rapidly do so. The HG lifestyle simply wasn’t very pleasant.
Which more or less answers the OP. Laziness simply wasn’t an issue in HG societies because HG societies were never geared towards labour. In normal seasons food was abundant. In bad seasons food wasn’t avialable no matter how much you worked. It was probably only for a few months every 10 years or so that laziness could possibly have become detrimental to HGs, and even then it was probably only a minor liability.
They also may end up doing menial work for the absolute minimun compensation (say, just being fed.) SOMEONE has gotta wash Og the Hunter’s clothes by beating them on a rock by the river.