Can you summarize their arguments? I don’t particularly want to slog through some weird web page to tease out whatever point you are making.
There’s a sort of mythology whipsaw that’s not helpful
“Savages in a state of nature were little more than animals, until the invention of farming which gave them more food and allowed civilization.”
“Hunter gatherers in a state of nature were noble savages, until the invention of farming turned them into impoverished serfs.”
“Our peasant ancestors were impoverished serfs until the industrial revolution created modern prosperity.”
“Our peasant ancestors were hardy self sufficient yeomen, until the industrial revolution turned them into impoverished wage slaves.”
“Impoverished proletarian sweatshop workers were little more than slaves until the modern welfare state”.
“Factory work was honorable and freeing, until the modern welfare state turned everyone into moochers and looters.”
Shrug, I can’t even change the oil in my car. I doubt that makes my ancestors superior to me. Most of them never even saw a car. Not sure what you mean by “technological slavery.” Technology works for me, not vice versa. When it fails, life becomes a little more difficult. Not worth worrying about really.
The equivalent of this would be ‘I can’t even make a decent arrow or spear point and I’m hopeless with baskets, but I sure can throw a good spear. Technology works for me, not vice versa. When it fails, I get eaten by a lion…’
I can’t without severely cutting down context and clarity, he’s already summarizing the sources cited. But the read is short (especially the first link).
Skimming briefly, it doesn’t look like anything that hasn’t already been addressed. Basically, the person making the arguments is using a few ‘wow, see how great our ancestors were when they were HGs!!’ to try and spin it so that it looks much better. I mean, if our ancestors in southern Russia 20k years ago could make a skin house 20 feet in diameter using ‘rich furs and rugs’, how great is that?!?!?! :eek:
As all of this has been addressed up thread I don’t see anything new here to bother with. It’s just a re-hash of the same points, but actually done worse. Anything else?
You really need to take a critical thinking class in order to help you evaluate new material.
SOME h-g’s made a good go of it. That doesn’t mean ALL did, or even that a majority did. Those who did well as h-g’s was largely due to environment that permitted them plenty of opportunity for living off wild nature. But as they thrived, and populations grew, competition for resources grew as well and availability of wild food decreased. What’s more, those who adapted their methods of survival to farmed subsistence were able to remain in familiar environments, protecting their land/territory more effectively (as opposed for traipsing around some thousand square miles and running into other hostile h-g’s). Those who farmed were also more likely to survive the fickle nature of wilderness. To say nothing of the opportunities for trade and commerce that farming offers over the h-g lifestyle.
It’s just that the bibliography is quite long and to me it seems like it’s correct, but then again I’m the person who used to think that the Illuminati were real (now I know how stupid that is) so my evaluation skills aren’t the best.
But they say that farming brought inequality, war, and disease rates (people packed together). It was also more work than HG. In fact early on their teeth were bad due to their diet.
As a thought experiment (and somewhat to the point ** Lemur866** makes in post #142), suppose that we are headed in the direction of Safety Cubes, and everyone in this future lives in one of these person-sized Cubes, made of solid stainless steel or titanium or something very durable, and some of them think it’s just great, their life, living a majority of it, which is perhaps very long compared to ours, in their Safety Cube, with its umbillical inputs for food and fluids and air, and its output ports for waste, and a bundle of cables into every Cube to provide sensory input to eyes, ears, tactel suits, etc. (by means of which they socialize and “travel”), and even medication to stabilize a/o correct mood issues, and bio implants to monitor health conditions, and then somehow manage to travel back in time and walk among us, and they declare us all savages, while we sit around and scratch our heads at them (does life in a Safety Cube sound good to you?). The fact is their consciousness is so saturated with their way of life that they cannot comprehend our lives any better than we can theirs.
Tribal societies are far from equal. You have the elders who tell others what to do, and you have the “big men” who get to be bossy. There are varying degrees of sexual inequality, some of it based on physiology.
Women still have to do the childbearing, but they also get to be CEOs, admirals, and sports stars. In the ancient-most of days, women didn’t get to do much of the hunting, and almost none of the warfare.
Sorry. But as soon you start off a post with that line you declare that what follows aint worth the read.
“Just asking questions …” and “they say that …” are in close competition for the most inane phrases ever posted on this message board. QuickSilver’s comment about taking a class in developing critical thinking is not a mean-spirited comment or an insult. Further developing that particular skillset will be of use to you.
You’ve identified yourself as being a person with Asperger Syndrome. That label can be a pretty big umbrella but difficulty with abstract concepts and thus difficulty with critical analysis, as well as repetitive questions and arguments are classically common. Still I think most can still develop the skills with a good teacher.
A small suggestion pending your taking such a class: try to refrain from “just asking questions” and repeating an argument based on “they say that …” - If you find yourself typing those phrases immediately stop and question what you are writing and why, and first develop your best independent assessment of what the answer to the questions are and the potential arguments (including facts-based) both against and for what “they say.”
http://fifteen.dividedquantum.info/
This also seems to be another bit about how civilization is a bad idea. TO give just a brief excerpt: “There are clear psychological needs that are not met by civilization; hunter-gatherers typify the role, sociologically and psychologically, into which humans evolved, and it is not surprising that, when people were taken out of that role, psychological aberration ensued.”
This is also a quote from the same site:
George Carlin was fond of calling society a “failed experiment.” This remark is quite perceptive. It can apply to the federal republic of the United States essentially not living up to the utopian dreams of the founding fathers – not living up and then some. How can one look at American history and not see an exposé of a bunch of land-grabbing, slave-owning pirates? His point can also apply to human civilization on the larger scale, and the fact that quality of life is markedly worse than it ever was outside of and before the onset of stratification, specialization, inequality and all the rest. If civilization were somehow to redeem itself – and this possibility would most likely occur in the form of the advent of artificial superintelligence, which would indeed be a worthwhile legacy – the fact remains that, as a system for taking care of, for adequately supporting its constituents, stratified civilization has been a total failure indeed. We’re stuck with it, and we have to put all our efforts into running it as smoothly as possible, but it is indeed a failure. Despite the fact that it could not have been avoided, it has been a giant swindle from the start. Carlin was absolutely right on both fronts.
Okay. Let’s approach that statement critically.
What are the psychological needs that are not met by civilization? What is the evidence of that and what is the evidence that HGs had those need better met? Is, for example, committing infanticide (something fairly commonly done in ancient HG societies) and having children often die in childhood, dying as a child yourself, a psychological need that is not being met by civilization? Is that what we are “meant” to be?
Do you believe that human evolution was frozen, made static, in Paleolithic times?
And now going to the link … oh boy … white font on black … hard to read but okay, apparently your source does think that.
Um. Humans did evolve and have continued to evolve. Part of that evolution was developing brains that worked in social structures, that advanced high fidelity transmission of knowledge across generations which could hen build on it, and that were able to work together to form a whole consisting of complementary specialized individuals that together could function with synergism. We evolved by creating minds that created societies and then civilizations and it was selected for as those with the phenotypes to be part of those groups had much greater reproductive fitness, to the degree that there are now so many of us with many more living to the age of being able to reproduce and succeeding in doing so.
I leave the many other inaccuracies and irrational statements and conclusions in that link to you as an exercise. You can do it! Seriously you do not need us to spoon feed the critical thinking to you.
If this is your “they” then you really should not just take what “they say” as having any value.
Unfortunately try as I might I am not able to look at things critically. I just end up digging a deepe hole for myself.
But the author also says those needs are the social aspect, that civilization isolates us from each other, that mate selection is more like a peacock ritual, that we are cutoff from nature. That there are plenty who suffer but we don’t help them, the poor and middle class work only ends up benefiting the rich, that the civilization we have is not sustainable in the slightest, also overpopulation. Plenty of individuals suffer at the hands of the system we create and they are unable to do anything about it, unlike the ancestors who had the skills to surivive at least the people are dependent on a system that doesn’t help them.
I don’t know how to refute that when it sounds pretty accurate. It’s hard to find the good in civilization after all that.
I mean how is stuff like this not true?
“I’m going to be blunt: any individual that prizes material possessions as much as the average American does has a malfunctioning brain, and is suffering from a kind of disease. Any individual who values material possessions as useful, but does not center his life around thinking about them constantly, is doing a little better, probably. The whole thing is totally disgusting. We exist in an economy that is extremely materialistic because it has to be in order to function – the buying and selling of goods is paramount to the maintenance of society itself. So, from a very early age people who exist inside of such an economy are conditioned to base their lives around accruing possessions, and being grateful for the opportunities to do so. Essentially, people in our culture are taught very early on to love “stuff,” and so they do, happily and unquestioningly. Like I said, this is pathological and not okay. But it is ubiquitous, and we are living in a virtual nightmare because of it.”
I’m wondering if people read the same thing I did.
And an additional point to elaborate:
There probably are psychological needs that civilization meets imperfectly; Freud realized as much. The problem with hunting/gathering is that it doesn’t allow much of a permanent physical culture; no written word, no hospitals, no Internet. We imagine that our lives would be diminished unacceptably without those things. The problem we face is the massive inequalities that got their start with agriculture, and the need for regimentation to make sure that the drudgery needed to maintain civilization gets done. The psychological impact of civilization comes from the need to create systems of compulsion to do those things.
The !Kung work time study, for one, doesn’t hold up - they excluded food preparation and tool maintenance time from their totals. Also ignoring the fact that they were often starving…
[QUOTE=my cite, emphasis in original]
[P]erhaps the most critical and telling remarks concerning the well-fed !Kung come from the demographer Nancy Howell (1986:171-72), who spent two years with them:
While the !Kung way of life is far from one of uniform drudgery-there is a great deal of leisure in the !Kung camp, even in the worst time of the year- **it is also true that the !Kung are very thin and complain often of hunger, at all times of the year. **It is likely that hunger is a contributing cause to many deaths which are immediately caused by infectious and parasitic diseases, even though it is rare for anyone simply to starve to death.
[/QUOTE]
And as for rugged individualism…
Yeah, that sounds super morally superior.
As noted above, do not forget that these are H-G that have been pushed out of the better areas into a desert.
Prehistoric people would have had easier access to more kinds of food.