Nostalgia or Naivete (or both)?

Living here in Colorado (well for a few years anyway) and having these forest fires burning acres of land and dozens of homes while knowing that, however they are set, this is a part of the natural cycle of rebirth through death, I find myself thinking how the Native Americans really had it right. More mobile societies that can adapt to nature (move the teepees, follow the buffalo, at it’s most basic) rather than sit and watch their live’s work go up in flames, etc.

Really, at the base of these thoughts is the idea that humanity in sync with nature vs. fighting nature is being lost at great expense.

I’ve also thought along these lines in respect to the Irish paganism vs. Catholicism, gaining livelihood from the land vs. from factories and offices and overseeing automated tasks, education by established mentor vs. institutionalized curriculum- pusher.

Is this just plain reactionary or might it be that we’re really forfeiting much of what humanity has labored to bequeath us?

Or, put another way, have we, collectively, benefitted from progress?

The idea of living “with nature” (i.e., following herds of animals, migrating with the seasons, etc.) is a romantic one indeed. And this likely was the model for living during humanity’s infancy. But as the population expands, it becomes less likely that wandering groups of people would co-exist peacefully. If you can remember a time before everything was glossed over with the stinking veneer of political correctness, you will recall that many American Indian groups were frequent combitants with each other, often battling over limited resources. The establishment of agriculture, on the other hand, ensured a continuous, more reliable source of substinance. So have we benefitted from progress? Well, we live longer, and in greater numbers. But we still have war and unrest, and pollution and loss of species diversity. So while mankind has benefitted on the whole, perhaps our planet is looking less inviting to us.

We do well to remember that one of the features of living “with nature” is to regularly endure times of famine when people starve. Burying your children was a more or less routine event for most aboriginal peoples.

There are many things to admire about American Indians. They produced, for example, some of the most effective horse-borne warriors the human race has known. There is some validity to their image of being at one with their environment.

But the full story is a bit more complicated. There are, for example, a number of “buffalo jump” sites in the west – the animals were killed by stampeding them off a cliff. Those indians, like most humans elsewhere, had no trouble chosing in favor of their own survival, even if it meant excess slaughter of bison.

Collectively, we have certainly benefitted from progress. The benefits are accompanied with some drawbacks, with which it is our job to cope. It has been ever thus.

I never meant to come down on the American Indians in particular. My point, really, is that humans haven’t been at one with nature since… well, perhaps before they were human.

Actually, humans were hunter-gatherers for 99% of our existance. Farming began in the Middle East only roughly 10 thousand years ago. It didn’t reach northern climates until about 7 thousand years ago. This is not humanity’s infancy, we had been fully human for many, many thousands of years at that point. There is absolutely no evidence of organized or mass conflict between humans (even in small numbers) before the advent of farming.

Even after farming came into being, many areas had farmers and hunter-gatherers living close together for centuries. The speculation is that the reason so many people continued to use the hunter-gatherer strategy is that while farming makes a food supply more stable and dependable (sometimes only marginally so) the expenditure of effort (calories) to return is very, very high. One of my anthropology sources estimates that a band of approx. 20 hunter-gathers requires a range of 50 square miles in areas relatively rich in resources. And no, hunter-gatherers (including native Americans) were not particularly ecologically minded. There are many kill sites in Europe and America dating to as early as the end of the last ice age, where huge herds of animals were driven off of cliffs. There is also alot of evidence that human predation of this sort accelerated or even caused the extinction of the big mammals like the Mammoth.

Sorry for the Hijack, but do you have a Cite for this? American Indians had a pretty limited time to associate themselves with horses, since before Europeans came over here they did not have them. Mongols however, had Centuries to associate themselves with ridden combat. I vaguely remember the Mongols riding the steppes having the best horse-borne warriors. I don’t see how the American Indians can even come comparably close. Even the Japanese have whole martial arts developed around horse ridden combat.

When industrialization first took place in Europe around the beginning of the 19th century, the towns and cities experienced huge population booms. Millions of people decided that it was better to work 14 hour days in dark, dirty factories than to live as peasant farmers, and that’s held true everywhere in the world that industrialization has taken place. That should tell you something about what life as a peasant is like. Heck, the saying in India is that beggers in the streets of Calcutta live better than peasant farmers.

I think one source for this is John Keegan’s excellent book A History of Warfare. (Unfortunately, I foolishly lent my copy and can’t recall to whom.)

A measure of the effectiveness of American Indian warriors is how well they did against US Troops into the 1880s – they had some notable successes in battle. They commanded immense respect among the seasoned US soldiers. They were quick to learn the effective use of firearms (no small thing for someone on horseback).

Another example I can think of is a show they aired on PBS about a group of people who spent the summer living the rough equivilant of Montana in the 1800s. They built their own cabins, tended the gardens, cut firewood, etc. With the exception of one very unhappy woman, they were all heartbroke to leave. In other words, they much preferred the toil of homestead living to sitting in front of computers 10 hours a day. One man could hardly speak in his pre-departure interview because he was crying too hard.

As for the peasant life, I think life in a medevial scheme, working endless hours only to give a large percentage of your crops to the landowners would be miserable. Some sort of free, naturalistic living, on the otherhand intrigues me.

Also, while it’s true that American Indians would drive a herd of buffallo off a cliff, it’s much preferable to the ‘hunters’ who would shoot herds of buffallo for ‘sport’ and leave the carcasses untouched.

In Evan McConnell’s “Son of the Morning Star,” there was an account of an Indian buffalo hunt in which a herd was run off a cliff, and the hunters took only one part of the buffalo (which had some spiritual significance as well as nutritional), leaving the rest of the animal to rot.

But getting back to the OP, was humanity ever “in sync” with nature? What does that mean? Not wearing clothes when it’s cold? Not developing tools or weapons? Wearing furs and making spears altered our relationship with nature, so why are these acts considered “in sync” and building a house and growing food not?

All of these developments arose from a single source: the use of our intelligence and imagination to figure out the solution to problems. And we’ve taken it to a point where a great many people are living longer and better than, say, the Ice Man found in the Alps.

Given the choice, I’d rather fight than switch.

Welcom to the SDMB, polymur, and I’d also like to compliment you on a kick-ass question to begin your illustrious career here.

The question being: Have we benifited from progress?

Progress is a wide area to generalize, but generally, yes, we have. Progress is both good for the environment and humanity.

GQ is for questions with factual answers. “Have we benefited from progress?” is more of a Great Debate, so I’ll ship this thread over there.

From a purely biological point of view, humans are staggeringly successful and I would argue that it is a direct benefit of progress. Indeed, as a direct benefit of one key advance - domestication of plants and animals.

There are more humans on the planet in more environments than any other single species of large animal (i.e. of comparable body size). So, by weight of numbers, yes, we have benefited. We have also benefited our parasites and domesticated plants and animals – they have out-competed similar organisms by co-evolving with humans rather than, say, aardvarks or anacondas. E.g. there are more domestic dogs than wolves, more apple trees than mahogany trees, more cattle than blue-fin tuna.

For individual humans, where you live determines whether progress has benefited you or not. We rich Westerners are probably in the yes camp – our lifestyles benefit from the best that progress has to offer.

But there is a cost to progress. The majority of humans don’t live in the West and their experience of its benefits is limited. For non-domesticated organisms on the planet, human progress has been devastating. Imagine a conversation between the dodo and the passenger pigeon, moderated by the great auk, avidly followed by the smallpox virus - fighting for its own survival.

Earth itself, or Gaia to the mystics, doesn’t care. As a first approximation, in the short term all individual organisms are dead, in the medium term all species are extinct. As far as the Earth is concerned, life is a minor phenomenon that affects only the extreme edge of its crust.

I’m going to try to scope my post a bit more–“benefit” is a vague term. And before I get written off as a Marxist, let it be known that make my livelihood from ‘for-profit’ healthcare.

As pesh indicated, intelligence and imagination are key here. I don’t expect evolved monkies to run around clothless or scoff the wheel as unnatural. I would expect these evolved monkies to use their intelligence and imagination to consider the impact of new tools and processes. Some societies seem to have imagined that their environment was vital to their own sucess and were careful about the tools they introduced into them. Other societies have written off environment as expendable and developed tools at great cost to the environment and great personal gain.

So, benefit, measured by percentage of matter harnessed by human DNA over time has been won. However, while there may be 10 billion people on earth by the year 2010, this monkey can no longer drink or eat fish from a stream, eat food untainted by chemicals without paying a 100% premium or go forth under the sun without greasy sunscreen and a pair of UV-blocking sunglasses (granted this is especially true in CO for other reasons). Furthermore, most are (imho) denied seeing the fruits of their labor, working in factories, offices, retail stores, lose their sense of worldly purpose (I am here to sew together 3000 pairs of Nikes?) and I would say that our progress has brought the average quality of life down but has multiplied that average across a much wider population for perhaps a greater overall ‘benefit’ total (if you can imagine such a thing).

Finally (ready to step off the soap box), it’s hard to imagine that this intelligence we possess couldn’t have produced a large number of societies both advancing (longer-life, less disease, meaningful life’s work) and at the same time preserving of the ecosystem and genepool that brought us this far. Perhaps we’d have only 4 billion people instead of 6, and 8 pairs of shoes instead of 16, but also the peace of mind that we are fostering health in our neighbor socieities and living things at large could go some distance in alleviating these guilt-driven neurosis we act out every day.

FWIW…

So, you make your living by actively taking humans further from the natural world?

Eh? I routinely eat fish from a stream (OK, generally lakes and oceans but occasionally streams), and there are plenty of streams you can drink from. Sure, there’s a risk of getting sick from it - but that risk was there back when the Indians were off being close to nature. Are you seriously telling me that it’s not possible to fish in the entire state of Colorado?

What percent of your income would that be? Now take that percent of your income, multiply it by your total hours worked, and compare that amount of time to the amount of time someone ‘close to nature’ would spend hunting and gathering or farming.

I go forth under the sun without greast sunscreen and UV-blocking sunglasses rather often. Even if I didn’t use sunscreen for long exposures, skin cancer wouldn’t be a problem until late enough in life that I’d probably be dead from other causes - life expectancies in ‘close to nature’ societies are not quite as long as ours.

Life is what you make it. I can’t really say that eking out a living by hunting and storing vegetables to stay one step ahead of starvation would be very meaningful to me. And your hypothetical society is still going to need people to make clothes, grow food, dispose of garbage, and do all of the meaningless drudgework - in primitive societies, the difference is just that more people spend more of their time on such things.

I think that modern medical care, air conditioning, food so cheap that obesity is a major health concern, clothing, entertainments, educational opportunities, etc. make our average quality of life a lot better than the allegedly ideal close-to-nature life. But if you still think that our progress has brought the average quality of life down so far, why don’t you give up the modern ‘benefits’ and go live a primitive lifestyle? There are still places where you can do so (Alaska has a lot of undeveloped land, and there are other areas), and no one is stopping you.

Have you ever spent a winter in upstate New York (let alone Alaska)?

Anyway, I get the point of the posts here–there are some quaint depictions of ages gone by, but sitting in a chair in an office 12 hours a day sure beats hunting your own food. I’m not convinced, but it’s an interesting sample of responses.

Am I being whooshed? You do realize that you just said you weren’t convinced that modern life is preferable, immediately after complaining that you could never live a primitive life in a place that had a cold winter.

This kind of thing makes the baby Darwin cry…

jayjay

Xema, Epimethus: Re: the hijack on Amerindian calvary capabilities, I’ll disagree just a bit with Xema ( and perhaps Keegan, more on him in a second ). Amerindians were not, in fact, the ultimate in calvary troops and the relatively recent adoption of horse culture had a lot to do with that. For one thing most Amerindians, even among the nomadic plains hunters, did not fight primarily from horseback. It was far more common for them to ride to battle, dismount, then fight ( the fact that most of these ‘battles’ were in fact small-scale raids had a lot to do with this ). For the most part Custer was not obliterated by waves of calvary - He was mostly done in by warriors advancing on foot and using the ground as cover.

The most prominent exception to this general trend among the Plains tribes, were the Comanche. They were one of the few nomadic hunter groups ( as opposed to agriculuralists ) on the Great Plains before the arrival of the horse ( most migrated in later - due to American expansion the mobile horse culture of the plains was a short-lived cultural paradigm, lasting not much more than a century ) and situated on the southern plains, they were among the first to acquire them in numbers. They did frequently fight from horseback and often mounted immepressively long-range raids, with numerous extra horses to provide a constant stream of fresh remounts ( definitely a military characteristic of horse-cultures the world over ). Even other plains tribes acknowledged that the Comanche were “horse-obsessed” - They came the closest to the classic Eurasian horse-cultures like the Scythians or Mongols.

However an encounter between the Comanche and Mongols would have been a one-sided slaughter. Of course the bigest reason has to do wih the s[perior arms and armor of the more “sophisticated” Mongols. Naked Comanche with shortbows or even single-shot rifles would not have been up to dealing with armored Mongols with re-curved bows. But just as significant, the Mongols were inheritors of over a millenia of mounted conflict against similar cultures, as well as sedentary peoples. Accordingly the had a well-developed system of mass warfare, employing precision movement of disciplined units, utilizing flags or other signal devices to coordinate movement. The Amerindians, for whom warfare was almost entirely a question of raiding parties rather than mass battles, did not have as sophisticated and coordinated a system. Since large-scale mounted battles were rare ( unheard of ) among Amerindians, such classic steppe tactics as the ‘feigned retreat’ ( with envelopment of the scattered pursuers by the wings of the "retreating army " ), were not commonly ( if at all ) utilized.

This doesn’t take anything away from the bravery and horsemanship of the Plains tribes - They simply evolved in a different cultural milieu.

I like Keegan’s History of Warfare. But I disagree with his assesment in a number of spots, his view of the Mongols ( both politically and militarily ) not least of all. But then, I guess I, of all people, would disagree on that point :D.

  • Tamerlane

Well I for one prefer living in our nice and cozy modern society. I’ve done my fair share of camping and I don’t care for it. It’s nice as a minor diversion but I wouldn’t want to live my life that way. Heck, I don’t even like going places where I don’t have to parallel park.

I would much rather have my fish delivered by a little Japaneese guy from the local sushi restaurant than to have to spend 4 hours catching and preparing it. And thats not even taking into acount getting mauled by a bear on my way home.