We have just shifted our complexity to other areas, such as the TV shows we watch or the jobs we do.
But we have to do jobs like computer programming or accounting, tasks that are far beyond hunting or gathering in the sheer detail-oriented complexity and the requirement to juggle multiple, conflicting goals.
Name me the animist Aquinas or Augustine.
Cite?
I haven’t heard this argument against literacy in a long time.
Cite? How complex is running a buffalo jump and then picking through the massive pile of meat below?
> We have just shifted our complexity to other areas, such as the TV shows we
> watch or the jobs we do.
What this argues is not that primitive societies are not complex but that their complexity is in different places. Both modern industrial society and primitive society are complex, but the complexity is specialized in modern society. In primitive society the complexity was on display for everyone and large numbers of the population knew all of it. In modern society each person knows a rather distinct chunk of it.
> I haven’t heard this argument against literacy in a long time.
Who said that he was arguing against literacy? Sleel was making a statement of fact. In primitive society, it was necessary to memorize more than in modern society.
Derleth, do some anthropology reading. Everything I’ve said can be found any any general introductory text. I don’t dispute that some of the social complexity has been shifted. Take a look at the last paragraph of my post where I say as much. You’re not saying anything new there. You seem to have gotten the impression that I think a non-industrial society is superior, but you’re mistaken. My intent was to refute the idea that traditional societies are simple when in fact they are most certainly not.
Have you ever gone hunting? Have you ever tried tracking an animal? Have you ever gone out gathering plants? All of those involve a huge amount of attention to detail and managing conflicting goals.
And how is a job flipping burgers anywhere close to those jobs you mentioned, which are considered to be relatively complex and demanding even in our society. You can’t just pick jobs off the top and say that that’s what everyone does. On the other hand, just about everyone in an HG society depends on at least basic competency in multiple areas, or they might go hungry.
Did philosophy start with Aquinas? No, it started much earlier in the West, with the Greeks being the most famous early philosophers. Perhaps you’ve heard of Plato and Socrates? Aquinas was influenced by Greek philosophy as well as Church theology. The Greeks came up with the ideas that would lead to the atom, but they still carried animistic beliefs, such as that dryads lived in certain trees. In addition, Eastern philosophy goes back to times that in Europe were prehistory. In fact, writing in China is held to be a development from symbols shaman used to cast auguries.
Shinto is an animistic religion that has survived even into the present day in an industrial society. While its beliefs are often characterized as amorphous, it would be more accurate to say that there are a multiplicity of beliefs, many contradictory, and a wealth of stories that date back to before the introduction of writing. Animistic beliefs survive in Hinduism, which has a history of philosophy stretching back millennia.
You might argue that any sophistication is the work of later, literate traditions, but Chagnon, one of the first people to study the Yanomamo, characterized their cosmology as one of the most complex he’d studied.
I need a cite for many people not knowing much about what’s actually written in the bible? Have you ever gone to church, a bible study? I grew up Christian, I went to a weekly bible study class. I know from experience that while people claim to have read and considered a lot of the bible, it’s all rather piecemeal and fragmented reading. A phrase here, a chapter there, and most of it reinterpreted to support an argument the person wants to make. And most of the people in my church did not pursue the level of scholarship that the study group my family went to did.
On the other hand, storytelling, dancing, and singing are the equivalent of TV in traditional societies. Read just about any ethnology and I’ll lay a bet that you’ll find a discussion of group story telling, dance performances, and music. Heck, in the US, you don’t have to look back more than a couple of hundred years to see the equivalent in folk songs, square dances, and tall tales.
Sure, not everyone would be equally good at doing all of those, but considering that everyone practiced them at least a little bit, whereas few of us do, they’d probably be at least competent. Storytelling in particular is a valued and prestigious skill in practically every society I’ve ever heard of. Oral traditions mean that performances are rehearsed and polished. We have some parallels in rap music and sevens among urban blacks.
My comment about having to memorize all of the information they need to know is not an argument against literacy, it was meant to illustrate that less technology does not mean less complexity. Just the opposite, in fact. We have the luxury of forgetting things because we can always look them up later, or not paying close enough attention to remember something long term and instead relying on notes. We can simplify our lives by throwing away information, safe in the knowledge that we can probably retrieve it later. If you have no writing, and you forget a vital piece of knowledge when it’s necessary, you’re in big trouble. You’ve got to have it all in your head all the time.
Have you ever tried it? At the least, you need a thorough knowledge of animal behavior, knowledge of the terrain in all the areas they might go if you can’t maintain control of their movements so that you can find an alternate way to get them where you want them. You need to pay attention to the wind so that they don’t catch your scent before you’re close enough to be effective, which means knowing the weather patterns well enough to plan your approach. It might take an hour or more to work close enough to a herd to be reasonably sure of getting them moving in the right direction.
Cleaning and skinning an animal is another set of skills you need, along with being able to manufacture replacement tools if yours become dull or broken. You need to know methods of preserving meat and skin, and you need to plan the logistics of transporting your catch when you decide to move on.
Look, my point is not that the way of life was so great, but that it was demanding. There was no welfare beyond friends and family sharing food. If you didn’t work, you eventually went hungry. If you didn’t have a minimal level of competence in multiple skills, you couldn’t work. If you couldn’t remember things, you wasted time and energy — in the best case — or put yourself in a life-threatening position if it was a particularly bad time to screw up. None of the skills in a supposedly unsophisticated stone-age society was exactly easy, as anyone who has studied about those things or has tried to do them themselves knows. It takes a lot more knowledge and a lot more planning than you credit.
Like I said, don’t take my word for it. Pick up some anthro texts or ethnologies. People everywhere are fascinating and have very different ways of doing things. By learning about how others live, you might learn to see your own society better, and appreciate that different doesn’t necessarily mean better or worse, just different.
I don’t doubt that tribal languages have more complex grammar having never been standardized and simplified in the way that English and other languages have. However, I’m doubtful that their vocabulary is as vast. Conversely, I remember reading that they have words for fewer colors. Some tribal languages only have words for four or five colors, while we have words for obscure colors like aquamarine, fuschia, beige… Colors are only a tiny fraction of a language, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t like this in general.
Ok, just so we are clear here, are you saying that modern society is not as complex as primitive society? Do we need to define a metric for this? Are we talking about comparing samples of societies or societies as a whole?
As far as I’m concerned, modern society is far more complex than those of the past. Manhattan Island 2008: complex. Manhattan Island 1008: not so much.
I’m talking about society, not their technology, though it’s obvious to me that you guys don’t really appreciate the knowledge and skills necessary to make and maintain even simple stone age technology. It’s nowhere near as easy as you think. You could probably take a tribesperson from just about any traditional society that’s still around, bring them to the US, and he or she would probably be getting along just fine in a year or so. Take any desk worker and put that person in the tribe, and he or she would be lucky to live out the first 6 months.
My claim is that all societies are roughly equally complex, though the complexity may occur in different areas. The reason I made such a strong argument against the popular perception that paleolithic people were “simple” or “primitive” is because that popular perception is dead wrong.
They were people, just like us. They were equally smart — or dumb — but the environment they lived in was much less tolerant of mistakes and stupidity than ours. Their lives depended on utilizing their intelligence and gathering and remembering large amounts of information. Ours do too, but the stakes are lower. They weren’t inferior, they were different; their societies weren’t less complex, they were more varied than the industrial monoculture that’s slowly taking over the world. The same things are true of pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, and other remaining traditional societies.
The vocabulary of the average speaker for any language is about the same. Any given speaker knows something like 20,000 to 50,000 words of his native language. Are there more words in English than in an Australian aboriginal language? Of course. However, any individual English speaker doesn’t know any more words of his language than an individual speaker of that Australian aboriginal language though. The vocabulary of any single person is just about the same.
Just as most of the complexity of modern American society is distributed in individual packages which are only known by very small part of American society, so most of the vocabulary of English is distributed in very small packages, each of which is only known by a very small number of English speakers. The language known by any individual speaker of any language is about the same complexity (both in grammar and vocabulary) for any single speaker. Incidentally, there’s no correlation between the level of the society and the number of color words in the language of that society. Some languages of primitive societies have more standard color words than English and some have less. Of course, in dictionaries of English there are many color words. Most of those words are only known to specialists. Again, it’s necessary to distinguish between the knowledge of the average member of the society and the total knowledge of the entire society.
I know it wasn’t easy. People used to harpoon whales by hand. Not easy. Hell, I tried to make fire in my backyard using a wooden dowel and a makeshift bow. Very difficult.
I think we are arguing over semantics.
I’ll point out that modernity spawned dozens of types of engineers and you’ll probably say, “Sure, and they all drive Jettas 12.7 miles to work and eat the same BLT for lunch that is eaten halfway around the world. They’re all the same.” Correct?
I think that when anyone says, “We’ve just arguing over semantics” that they are complaining that someone else is trying to make a distinction that they can’t be bothered to understand. Semantics is the study of meaning. To understand what someone else says, you have to understand what they mean by the terms that they use.
The amount of knowledge of any one person in modern society is the same as the amount of knowledge of a person in primitive society. The total amount of knowledge available in a modern society is much greater than the total amount of knowledge available in a primitive society. It takes just as much intelligence to be a successful member of a primitive society as it does to be a successful member of a modern society.
Before you start calling modern Western society “complex”, consider: English has only one single word to describe one’s parents siblings’ children. It doesn’t matter if the relative in question is my mother’s brother’s son, or my father’s sister’s daughter, or whatever: All eight possibilities are lumped together as “cousin”. We don’t even have a separate word for the descendants of one’s ancestor’s cousins; we just call those “cousins”, too, and throw in a few numbers. You want a complex society? Find one that has separate words for every blood relative through 1/16 consanguinity, and depending on whether the relationship is through the male or female line at every step of the way. Then we can talk.
Not quite. We have separate words for navy, cerulean, cyan, and turquoise, but we would say that those are all merely shades of blue. Likewise, a “primitive” culture might have a word for blue, but say that blue is merely a shade of white. It’s not that they had any less of a concept of color; they just organized them differently.
Welcome to my (adopted) world. I can never keep my wife’s relatives straight. And that’s just their titles: imagine being back in old times, when one must adhere to different social rules and manner of speech when interacting with each type of relative.
There’s no way to know for sure about the level of complexity of chimpanzee society, since we can’t ask them about it. My guess is that, chimps being less intelligent than humans, chimpanzee society is considerably less complex than any human society, including typical hunter/gatherer society. The amount of social information in the head of a typical hunter/gatherer is just as much as the amount in the head of a typical member of a modern society. Much of the social information in the head of a member of a modern society is specialized information only known to a fairly small part of that society.
