What's so great about 'civilisation'

Great Debates
1

No, not the computer game…

I watched Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival the other night and there was a most interesting feature about a nomadic people living in vast areae of unspoilt woodland in Siberia.

They hunt, fish, forage and keep herds of reindeer for milk, meat and skins. They are able to fashion pretty much anything they need from what the land provides (the programme showed a pair of warm boots being made from rabbit skins and a wonderful bucket from birch bark).

They have little contact with the outside world except occasional trade (they need a few things like metal tools and cooking pots, although I daresay they would be resourceful enough to manage without).

They very seldom suffer illness, and they live to a considerable age. They have very little or nothing of the things that we consider basic essentials - electricity, running water, medicine, TV, radio, media, microwave-ready meals. Entertainment consists of stories and songs around a communal fire, eating and working together. Although they are living directly on the earth there seemed nothing squalid about their existence.

And yet they are wholly content to live their simple, uncluttered, largely anonymous lives. The children very rarely cry, even as babies.

The debate? - who is better off, us** or them***? (And why?).

*[sub]A documentary where the named presenter examines different ways to live off the land in different climates etc, interspersed with retellings of real heroic survival ordeals[/sub]
**[sub]‘Us’, in the scope of this debate encompasses any of the ‘civilised’, ‘western’ world, but if you want to be more specific, go ahead.[/sub]
***[sub]‘Them’ denotes specifically the above mentioned culture/people.[/sub]

2

Ah the romantic notion of man roaming free in the wilderness, at one with nature.

What the heck is so great about living in tents, wearing elk skins and hunting your food with a knife made from an animal bone?

Some of the many advantages of civilization:

Comfort - Living in a tent sucks
Art - One of the benefits of living in a society thatdoes not need to allocate 100% of its resources to gathering food
Sanitation - I for one like having running water and toilet paper
Travel - I like the ability to travel to other parts of the world in a few hours
Food - Do you like being able to eat foods like Chinese food or oranges that aren’t indiginous to your local area?
Clothing - I’m willing to bet by Gore-tex boots and Banana Republic stretch shirts are a lot more comfortable than rabbit skins.

3

I ought to clarify; the question was not intended to be whether a person from one world would comfortably adapt to the other, but rather whether one world is objectively better than the other.

Sure civilisation brings comfort in some areas and there are a whole list of nice things we can have, but does that make civilisation better overall? - don’t forget to consider that our technological modern society is not without it’s problems and that it places burdens on people, albeit relieving others.

4

Well it might be better for the ecosystem if we all ran off to the woods and gave up on the whole ‘civilization’ thing but that would be like us giving up on our natural advantages of intelligence and adapting and such. So we’ll just have to learn to manage the ecosystem, which we do better now than 100 years ago. Still the problem is just as bad with billions of more people to feed etc.

5

I can think of one distinct advantage to “civilisation”: between us and them, we’re going to crowd them out eventually, and they’re going to disappear.

Their primitive culture, as self-sufficient and self-satisfying as it may be when considered in isolation, cannot defend itself from the encroachment of a “civilised” culture. If they want a first-world nation to revert to a hunter-gatherer existence, there’s nothing they can do; if we decide we want the resources in the land they roam, they’re screwed. It’s an inherent weakness of comparatively “undeveloped” cultures.

Sorry for all the scare-quotes: it’s just that I fully recognize that those are loaded words and very subjective concepts. Nonetheless, I think my point still stands: in a cultural battle between us and them, they’ll lose.

6

Incidentally, the world is too small for humanity’s population to depend upon hunter-gathering. Turning back the clock, as it were, isn’t really an option.

My understanding is that certain anthropologists have asserted that the quality of life of the hunter-gatherer can be quite good before population pressures exert themselves. Sorry, I can’t provide a cite.

7

How many space stations do you see hunter-gatherer societies building?

8

And space stations are useful?

Folks; I’ll say it again - I’m not advocating a transfer of individuals from civilisation to nomadic wandering, neither am I suggesting a mass regression of society; I’m talking about quality of life/living. Is the hunter-gatherer better off (in context) than the western citizen (in context).

9

I have already pointed out why a citizen of civilized society is better off. Granted it is all subjective, but the simple fact that we don’t have to dig a hole to go to the bathroom and use leaves for…ah…freshening up should tell you that we have a better standard of living. Maybe you should define what criteria should be used to determine relative quality of life. Is it life expectancy? amount of leisure time? Comfort? Physical health? Otherwise it will just be a debate of “they had it better because they were outside…etc”.

10

I should probably explain why I started wondering about this: it was the assertion that the children in this culture hardly ever cry (the presenter actually said that they were very content and placid, and that they hardly ever cry).

I wondered at this because it seemed to fly in the face of logic; the infants are bundled up in animal skins, a nappy (diaper) made of cotton and decayed sawdust, then carted around in baskets on the back of reindeer. The climate there is not what I would call comfortable; dig down two feet and you hit permafrost, the diet is limited and so on. The older children are sent away to boarding school and yet they always return home to settle down on completion of their education.

I am not trying to be a Luddite, but it just made me wonder if there is (or can be) any objective measure of quality of life.

11

the lifestyle of hunter-gather… “nasty, brutish and short”.
Thomas Hobbes, cited in Guns, Germs and Steel (J Diamond) p104.

Call me a wuss, but mod cons have a certain allure. As to children not crying, well none of my kids ever cried … provided they got 100% attention, were breastfed on demand, were carried everywhere and Mum had nothing else to do.

12

And yet there seemed nothing particularly nasty or short about the lives of the forest nomads in Siberia (I wish I could remember their collective name), brutish? perhaps, depending on your definition - they were a lot closer to the roots of their food production than the average western citizen, but that’s about all.

They really seemed quite serene over all.

13

Well, these people have achieved a stable society. If the culture wasn’t stable, it just wouldn’t be there…it would evolve into some other type. A stable society is a happy, content one. It really doesn’t have to rely on any one aspect: technology, religion, manner of food production, government unit, etc. All that matters is that the society/individual has a good existence, as far as they care or know.

I’m happy in my world, they are happy in their world. Who is better off? That debate sounds like " I’m happier than you because I have (fill in the blank)." Why debate happiness when both sides are happy?

A sidenote: I am dubious of the assertion that all of these people come back home on their own volition after recieving an education. The show was not an anthropologic study, so they just stretched their point by stating a genralization as fact. And other factors besides the lure of their culture may force them back home, like the national government not permitting them to move elsewhere. If you find the name of the people, I would be interested in it. Thanks.

14

They are the Evenk.

15

Gee, there isn’t any cultural bias in this thread. Of course we are better off western civilzation… we have cotton underpants!

I think being an average member of these “tribes” (perhaps the word is accurate and doesn’t need to be in quotes, I don’t know) is probably better than being an average citizen in a western society. But this topic is huge when it is challenged; I must combat the notion of rights, comfort, et cetera.

What is so great about working 40+ hours a week, being alienated from politics, having no control over your work environment, and only obtaining an education by the grace of public coffers? I mean, hey, that’s the question.

Art has been around for quite some time, including hunter-gatherer societies. Their clothing, dances, weapons, pottery… function and form combined. Some might think that is more beautiful than art for art’s sake.

Is X better because you like it, or do you like it because it is better? Anyway, sanitation as such is helpful for large numbers of people.
hansel, re: us versus them. I’m not sure equating survival with “betterness” is strictly accurate. Is it better to die on your feet than live on your knees?

Mangetout, I think the inherent assumption of all societies is that “we do it right.” It is difficult to reject this when it is taught implicitly so early and so repetitively. The justification for war, progress, political feuds, and so on, lead us to the conclusion that wherever we are, it is better than where we were. That’s progress. But I strongly suspect that the problems we face outweigh the niceties we lacked.

16

There have been happy people since the dawn of human existence. There have also been mean bastards, some with big sticks. And the fact is that the people in the tribal group might not have been entirely typical in their behavior while being filmed for a documentary.

It is at least as much a social prejudice to say that their happiness comes from the absence of our social and technological characteristics as it does to assume that cotton underwear and cell phones are essential to their “betterment” as a civilization. Some of the Bushmen of the Kalahari still live in the most desolate and barren land the world, and do so because they love their lives. Some of them leave the region, and never look back. In both cases, we have a human being seeking his own choices in life. The freedom to make those choices is undeniably a refinement that generates greater possible happiness. Which choice the person makes is only significant in that choices exist.

By the way, “Civilization” is responsible for the existence of most of those choices. If hunter-gatherer were the only choice, the folks stuck with being hunter-gatherers in places where things were not so balanced and stable as your example would probably tend to cry a bit more. Roving bands of marauders killing and looting are a well documented aspect of uncivilized lifestyles. While I cannot deny that I would have probably been quite happy as a roving marauder, being a maraudee seems to have significant drawbacks, happiness wise.

Being content with your lot in life has both benefits and detriments, although in some cases, ignorance of the possible benefits is not an entirely unhappy circumstance. But being used to flea and lice infestations from infancy does not make it itch less. The fact that people thought lice were inevitable, and the just punishment of human sin in our own civilization only a century or two ago doesn’t make me want to throw away my cotton underwear, and soap and water to “get back to true happiness.”

There are folks out there, living in cities surrounded by nothing but concrete and steel, with never even a view of rolling plains, or verdant mountains. These benighted souls live their entire lives without any herds to accompany them, or provide them with milk, or fur. They must satisfy themselves with flickering images from a box, instead of the warmth of a home fire, and the chanting of the ancient sagas. Most of them cannot even skin a carcass, or butcher it. Yet these poor prisoners of society often claim to love this “City so nice they named it twice.” The cruel harshness of their environment is a part of their cultural identity, so much so that they claim “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, New York, New York.”

Personally I prefer the suburbs. Yak liver makes me vomit.

Tris

“When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.” ~ Eric Hoffer ~

17

I would imagine that living in and with the peaceful, quiet beauty that is nature would be just as comfortable, if not more comfortable, than modern society with all its noise and pollution and “stuff.”

Who said they allocate do that? Quite the contrary. This essay explains that primitive peoples generally worked two to three hours a day, and thus had a lot of leisure time. They weren’t working 9 to 5 to sustain a house and a car. They did have storytelling, which is kind of a verbal art. And who needs art anyway when the beauty of nature is all around you?

Have you actually tried relieving yourself of waste outdoors? It’s not that bad, actually.

Primitive peoples have no reason to travel abroad. Why would they want to live with the community they grew up with?

If primitive peoples can get by nutritionally with what is indigenous to their area, I don’t see why that would really matter, especially considering there are plenty of tasty fruits and such in virtually any climate.

Primitive people have two answers to that one. If you’re in a warmer climate, who needs clothes at all? If you’re in a colder climate, like the Eskimos, you learn to tailor clothes like parkas that are warm, ergo comfortable.

It is My Humble Opinion™ that the primitive man was better off than we are today in modern society. They were generally healthy and had plenty of leisure time. Tribes were often communally based, practicing direct democracy and not recognizing any leaders. They didn’t have all the superfluous possessions we have today. They didn’t have to deal with the stresses of work, school, and politics. They didn’t have to worry if there was too much sodium or too many calories in what they ate, because their diets were generally wholesome and they got lots of exercise. All that and they weren’t destroying the environment in the process!

18

>> there seemed nothing particularly nasty or short about the lives of the forest nomads in Siberia

nasty may be subjective but I do not believe for even a fraction of a second that the life expectancy of a forest nomad is the same as that of a person in a developed country. Do you have any proof of that?

I’ll tell you one thing: I got a root canal today. If I were part of a primitive tribe I would endure months of agonizing pain instead. Well, come to think of it, maybe not. . .as I am nearsighted I would have been devoured by a siberian tiger which I didn’t see coming.

19

As I understand it dental problems as serious as we have them are largely a function of our sugar intake. That seems too simple to be true, so if it is wrong I won’t be upset.

The short-sightedness is interesting, however.

20

Well, according to the programme I saw, their life expectancy was quite reasonable, but length of life needn’t necessarily be the only measure of it’s quality.