# Nostalgia or Naivete (or both)?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nostalgia-or-naivete-or-both/115416
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [June 22, 2002, 8:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nostalgia-or-naivete-or-both/115416 "2002-06-22T08:10:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@threemae](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/threemae)
#### Post date: [June 26, 2002, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nostalgia-or-naivete-or-both/115416/21 "2002-06-26T20:46:29Z")
I hear a figure thrown around a lot that early humans in the paleolithic era only had to spend around three hours a day to provide for themselves with food and other necessities of life.
Then why did that population spend over a million years barely growing in size. I’m sorry, but life isn’t easy or all happiness for anyone. Every single organism on the planet lives to reproduce, and they reproduce until they starve to death. The only exception that I see is societies such as Italy, France, or quickly the United States, where people who could afford to raise more children chose, for whatever reason, decide to only have one or two kids.
Finally, if you don’t mind living to 35, burying four of your kids, suffering from constant diarrhea, dehydration, malnutrition, hunger, and being ugly, toiling in the cold/heat/sun for fourteen hours a day just to eat, go knock yourself out. There are more deer on the east coast now than any point in recent history, and a much forest as the turn of the twentieth century, so go have fun.
I’ve never understood why people who complain about their detachment from community, nature, or the products of their work don’t go back.
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### Author:  [@polymur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/polymur)
#### Post date: [June 27, 2002, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nostalgia-or-naivete-or-both/115416/22 "2002-06-27T06:14:14Z")
I have a couple questions here:
- what is being whooshed?
Either way, to say you don’t want to live in Alaska does not necessarily imply that you embrace a given society’s detachment from its temperate natural environment.
- threemae said:
> [@](#):
>
> I hear a figure thrown around a lot that early humans in the paleolithic era only had to spend around three hours a day to provide for themselves with food and other necessities of life.
>
> Then why did that population spend over a million years barely growing in size
What is so intrinsically positive about a population growing in size?
Where, also, is the diseconomy of scale in population growth, or, when do you say ‘why did a population spend x years reproducing to the point it consumed all its food source, only to perish thereafter?’.
- finally, regarding:
> [@](#):
>
> Finally, if you don’t mind living to 35, burying four of your kids, suffering from constant diarrhea, dehydration, malnutrition, hunger, and being ugly, toiling in the cold/heat/sun for fourteen hours a day just to eat, go knock yourself out. There are more deer on the east coast now than any point in recent history, and a much forest as the turn of the twentieth century, so go have fun.
Why do you have to die at 35, blah blah \, to be ‘in sync’ with nature? To be in sync only requires that you react to nature as it reacts to you. You introduce fossil fuels and notice that it’s x degrees more warm than it was prior (discounting any warming trends that may exist) and hundreds of thousands of acres of forest are burning around, and decide maybe we, as a society, should invest however many X billions in fuel cells rather than on warring with oil-producing countries. I’m not suggesting that we attempt to aspire to be monkeys, but to use our intelligence and imagination in the best way possible for ourselves, our neighbors, and our ecosystem at large, i.e. not building your 2MM estate on a flood plain.
As for the deer on the east coast, they’re eating the ivy off the house in Massachusetts where I grew up. Why? Hunting ban and no remaining natural predators (coming soon to a new-growth, deer-infested forest near you, however).
I will listen to arguments that propose that the efficiencies created by Western society as we know it outweigh the negative impacts we’ve placed on our environment. I’ll also listen if you say that our abilities are so great that we will develop ways to heal our ecosystem when we need to. To close your mind to listening to your environment and adapting accordingly, and to say that, for example, a lion’s live is so rough that it reproduces till it starves, while at the same time killing young cubs of a different gene, is, frankly, assinine.
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### Author:  [@polymur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/polymur)
#### Post date: [June 27, 2002, 6:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nostalgia-or-naivete-or-both/115416/23 "2002-06-27T06:28:40Z")
um, speaking of **asinine** …
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### Author:  [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)
#### Post date: [June 27, 2002, 8:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nostalgia-or-naivete-or-both/115416/24 "2002-06-27T08:22:43Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by polymur \*
> \*\* 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.
\*\*
Next time you have vacation time give it a shot for a couple of weeks. Living off the land isn’t exactly the easy happy life you might imagine it to be.
> [@](#):
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> \*\*
> 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.
\*\*
What is being lost and at great expense to who? Or is that whom?
> [@](#):
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> \*\*
> 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.
\*\*
I don’t understand. Did Catholicism force pagan farmers into factories and offices? Are there no Irish Catholic farmers?
> [@](#):
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> \*\*
> Is this just plain reactionary or might it be that we’re really forfeiting much of what humanity has labored to bequeath us?
\*\*
I can only imagine that my ancestors wanted me to have a better life. The efforts of humanity all through the years have come together to bring us our modern philosophy and technology. It is one thing to remember where you’re from. Only by rejecting modern life would you forfeit what they’ve bequeathed.
> [@](#):
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> \*\*
> Or, put another way, have we, collectively, benefitted from progress? \*\*
Yeah, not only do I not spend much of my time hunting and gathering but I’m not a peasant, I don’t have to pick cotton, and it isn’t 100 degrees in my house during the summer. Yay modern life.
Marc
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