I can remember my senior English teacher first day of school giving us a bit of the philosophy we were going to be given. The one line I remember clearly “There are two things that don’t empress me the first is technical skills the second is civilization.” The line shocked me a bit…no it scared me in away.
But I’ve a several years to chew on this line and while in hindsight he did use civilization as a bit of boogieman. I can’t help but agree that agriculture and all other subsequent scientific and technological advancement has really improved the quality of human life.
While I don’t want to go as far as to say that among primitive or, as Joseph Campbell eventually referred to them as, primal cultures that violent conflicts (i.e. wars) never occurred over resources (as my teacher suggested), but those conflicts never held the possibility of annihilating human life as we know it. Also those cultures didn’t posses the potential that modern industrial civilizations have today. I’ve also come to the conclusion that hunter-gatherer cultures aren’t stupid by any means living in the middle of the jungle or desert takes people who both knowledgeable about their environment and skillful enough use that knowledge.
So while I don’t want to say that human race is worse off because of civilization I do have to ask are we in way besides in scientific knowledge has the human race advanced in any meaningful way?
Medical improvements (in the last 50 years) has allowed us to spend more and longer spans of time enjoying our lives instead of going about hacking and aching. We also do not need to grieve the death of 8 of our 10 babies and young children (nor birth ten children thereby just to preserve the species.)
Modern governments (representative democracy) have also given us the ability to choose lives for ourselves and not just to have to answer to the big ape whenever he demanded.
Technical achievements has similarly allowed us to choose how we want to spend the rest of our lives. As hunter gatherers, we would have no choice except to spend our time desparately searching for sustenance–while as now one can make a (sometimes very good) living just taking and selling pictures of naked babes.
That we can now kill each other with the press of a button instead of having to hack away at each other with rock hatchets…dunno. Personally I would rather die by having a H-Bomb dropped on me than dying from gangrene after some dude bit off my finger while we battled over the remains of a dead pig found in the forest but, YMMV.
I think your English teacher would be shocked by this paragraph as well.
It’s really a pretty ignorant statement on the part of your English teacher. Does he live in a house? Does he drive a car to work? Buy food or grow it himself? Has he ever used medicine or gone to a hospital?
Excuse me for posting in a spasm of irritation, but - technical skills? He was unimpressed by technical skills?
Typical, artsy-fartsy claptrap spread by clueless effete arseholes who have to pay someone else to change the washers in their taps (faucets), and look down on them while doing so! And you can quote me.
Newsflash - the “non-civilised” are really big on technical skills. Chipping flint tools is a technical skill. Making fire is a technical skill. Turning trees into dugout canoes is a technical skill. Boiling down roots to make curare is a technical skill.
It is civilisation that allows parasitic organisms like moronic English teachers to exist, because they’d have a hard time trading idiotic pronouncements for food in the Amazon rainforest. (Non-moronic English teachers, with the ability to communicate, inspire and invigorate, may have better luck.)
Now I’ve got that out the way - there are aspects of the modern society I live in that do not seem very conducive to happiness. The emphasis given to acquisition, status and comparitive wealth doesn’t impress me. The pursuit of more convenience, more comfort, more instant gratification and vicarious experience doesn’t impress me either. But there’s no reason why these are diseases of “civilisation”, and there’s no reason why we can’t take the better aspects of other people’s societies onboard, primitive or not, and ditch the lousier aspects of our own.
I think the key wording in Sage Rat’s post is “choice.”
You can, believe it or not, choose to live technology free. I have groups of friends who do it. They do practice agriculture, and utilize some simple tools that could be made by hand, but why bother (like shovels and sewing needles), but by and large live much like, say, the early Celts. Without the war part.
But, if they wanted, they could walk to the nearest hospital, hotel or internet cafe. (It’d be a long walk, but it could be done.) They have this choice of lifestyle because of modern technology and civilization. “Civilization” doesn’t take away the choice to be “uncivilized,” but there was no choice before technology and civilization arose.
I, frankly, have a lot more respect for people who view civilization as not serving their needs who remove themselves from it honestly than I do an English teacher railing against it in her air conditioned classroom before driving home to microwave herself a frozen dinner to eat in front of last week’s TiVoed Survivor. You know?
Art. Music beyond drums (much as I love drums, I also love a good string quartet). Polar fleece on a cold night. Fine wine and cheeze whiz.
“Besides scientific knowledge” is a hard one to get around. So much of what I personally like about living today is possible only because of science. My tent, in which I spend much of every summer getting away from civilization, is only as lightweight and portable as it is because of fiberglass poles. I’ve been in teepees, I love 'em. But it takes a pickup truck to transport one. Likewise, my camp cookset lets me make meals I enjoy. My flashlight lets me stay up later at night to watch the stars, yet make it back to my tent in one piece. And need I mention mosquito repellent and sunscreen?
Sure, that’s well and good for me. I mean, I love civilization. But you and I are on the top spectrum of civilization. For most people throughout history, and even today, “civilization” has resulted in them living worse lives than their hunting and gathering ancestors did.
I think this is the key sentence of the OP… are we more advanced than before… or are we simply “cavemen” equipped with technology and science ? Correct me if I’ve misinterpreted.
I think we aren’t that different from the past… I guess there were altruistic cavemen in the past too. That there were harmonious cavemen tribes and some belligerant ones as well. Civilization allows us to multiply the bad, the ugly and the good too. Still that small difference is quite substantial. I think we certainly are better than we were before. From animal rights to freedom of expression. Women especially are better off I beleive nowadays. With the ocassional Bush to spoil the average…
I really don’t think you truly understand how difficult it is to survive in the wilderness without any of today’s modern technology. Even early hunter/gatherer societies were very harsh by today’s standards. People buy into this romantic nobel savage mythology of happy loincloth clad natives leisurely killing lions and fishing while the women-folk mend nets and sweep the hut. It was very hard work and it took all day long. If you didn’t catch your food, you starved and the longer you starved, the less likely you would catch food. If you injure yourself there’s no hospital to go to. You basically die from anything that a few herbs won’t heal. Even the poorest in America have a roof over their head and can get dropped off at the emergency room.
However, the jump to agriculture didn’t improve on any of these conditions. Life was still nasty, brutish and short. Plus, anthropological studies have shown that subsistence-level farmers tend to be shorter and less healthy than comparable groups of hunter-gatherers. What agriculture does allow is higher population densities. One sturdy hunter is still no match for five scrawny farmers.
It’s harder to live off the land now than it was “then,” simply because you and I don’t know what to eat! Learning how to prepare and eat wild foods is a lifetime task, but one which everyone would have known. It’s reasonable to assume that, just like today when I’ll stop by the store on the way home, they would pick that great patch of yellow dock on their way back from the hunting site, or the stream from washing. When leading an herb walk through second-growth forest, I can instruct half a dozen people in what to pick as we walk, and we have a reasonable salad for us all when we’re done. And I know very, very little about edible wildstuffs. With more knowledge, I’m certain we could feed ourselves a full meal with just an hour or two of easy work.
Certainly once we’re into the era of jewelry and clothing decoration, I’d be hard pressed to believe that they were casually sitting around the caves boring beads by hand while they were starving. This sort of art indicates a good amount of leisure time beyond feeding and reproducing.
And, to defend the herbs, there are still people practicing ALL medicine with herbs, including emergency medicine and veterinary medicine. Juliette De Bairacli Levy is probably the most well known and greatly respected. She’s treated extensive third degree burns with not a scar to be seen. Heart bypass? Not so much. But lots of the sedintary and obesity related illnesses would simply not have existed then to need treatment.
I tend to agree. Early civilizations were great for the folks in charge, but the majority of people had poor diets and were subject to lots of new diseases that thrive in dense, settled communities. And don’t forget that most civilizations had a large slave class, too.
A better question might be: at what point in the devolopment of civilization did people start leading better lives than their h/g ancestors? And there’s also the problem that you can’t get to where we are now w/o going thru the difficult growing pains of earlier civilizations.
As is implied in WhyNot’s citation, and depending on who you are talking about and your definition of “better,” it could be at the very start of agriculture (reducing some of the uncertainty of life and allowing more people to be supported by a given piece of land), the late 19th century (when disease finally began to be understood and lifespans started growing), or “not yet.”
Very good point. If you are going to make grand pronouncements about civilization, then you have to consider the whole human race, not just Americans or Europeans or even Australians with access to the Internet. I believe it is still the case that over half the human race has never made a phone call. Too expensive, you see.
I also remember reading that studies of current hunter-gatherer’s workdays consist of four to six hours, with lots of standing around talking involved. Something to think about.
On preview, or to be more accurate, post-view, I can see my point has already been made. I think John Mace’s question is the right one, though. It might also make sense to consider what portion of the population was better at what point. That is, there was probably a substantial population of bankers, tradesmen and nobles in Renaissance Italy who led decent lives, but many in Italy who did not. How many? I don’t know. Victorian England was great for the middle class (relative to hunter-gatherers) but not for the millions of displaced farmworkers making starvation wages in factories and mills.
And China has long been a sore spot where human misery is concerned, with its periodic famines and wars and permanent overclass who still think of their citizenry as slave labor.
It’s a really hard question to answer if you think about it.
It’s a moot point, anyway - there are 6 billion people on Earth. The planet can’t support 6 billion hunters-gatherers. I doubt it can support 60 million hunter-gatherers, in fact. That’s why “primitive” societies always fall to the more “civilized”: they just can’t match the numbers. Aboriginies may work 7 hours a week, but there are never more aboriginies then the land could directly support, which is why the Aboriginies were screwed.
I think we should accept the world as it is. Maybe we should have abandoned civilization when we could, back in the early Neolithic, but we can’t do it now without killing off 99% of the human race, which is not a price I’m willing to play in return for the privilege of giving up my Red Hot Chili Peppers CDs and going to live in a yurt.
I don’t believe it. First of all, go ahead and try making a shovel or a sewing needle by hand. You’ll have to start by mining iron ore and coal by hand, building your own furnace and forge, and learning by painstaking trial and error how to turn iron into steel that can be drawn and sharpened into a usable needle or beaten into a shovel. (Of course, once you’ve got your own furnace and forge, you won’t be able to resist the temptation to make, say, a hammer or a sword). And, agriculture itself is technology, as opposed to eating whatever you happen to find growing in the woods. Also, they are indirectly benefiting from technology because if everyone lived like they did, there would be no land left. Technology enables more people to live off the existing, fixed quantity of land.
As for the OP, I thought all that “noble savage” crap went out with Rousseau.
I have at least as good an idea as you, I suspect. What you don’t seem to appreciate is how difficult a life subsistence farming was and still is today.
Whose standards? By my cushy middle class existence? No doubt. To a peasant in western China? Probably not.
I have no doubt. However, in those areas where hunting and gathering is still done, the natives have generally longer lives and remain healthier than their poor farmer counterparts. Hunting and gathering is difficult, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being some poor peasant in the backwaters of Mexico.
Undoubtedly, but I’m not talking about America. When I was talking about “you and I” I wasn’t really referring to middle-class Americans, I was talking about people living in first world, developed countries. We are in the vast minority of people. Civilization has not been appreciably better for most people in history because they never got to really enjoy the fruits of civilization. They were dirt poor peasants and serfs with no education and who had to work constantly just to continuously skirt the edge of starvation.
