I think we deceive ourselves all the time.

Lately I've been conceiving "consciousness" as a kind of conglomerate or patch-work that is made up of many subsystems (mainly abstract predictive models learned and encoded in neural networks). By combining the right predictive models in response to stimulus (another layer of predictive modeling which learning neuronal networks can encode and optimize), accurate belief and "awareness" emerges as a result (not self-awareness, though that may be yet another layer of learned predictive modeling, but awareness in and of itself).

The end product that that the conscious mind labels belief (the understanding it is aware of) is initially the result of bottom up selection in and between neurons and neural networks which optimize them into predictive units (between which further bottom up selection and optimization into compound predictive units occurs). The overall conscious experience is then a cascade of predictions, where we are more "aware" of those predictions/beliefs which are formed from selection between greater numbers and levels of predictive sub-networks, and we are less "aware" of those optimizations and selections which occur in and between lower level and fewer quantities of abstract predictive models.

Relating this to self deception:

Natural selection between predictive models involves trial and error; error, if when one predictive model is apt and accurate but is neglected in favor of a less apt and accurate model, then self-deception has conceivably occurred.

Self-deception doesn't exactly carry the same connotations as "lying to one's self" though. To lie to one's self implies intentional self-deception. But what is intent?

Intent, I reckon, is one of those executive components of mind and brain of which we are by definition more "aware". It is when we have a full formed notion of something we desire and we employ the sub-networks of predictive models (of which we're less aware) to actually arrive at the thing we desire.

If, for instance, we desire to be somehow virtuous (intelligent, moral, successful, likeable etc...) then we may ask ourselves whether or not it is already the case that we have such virtue. If the desire is strong enough (and the feeling failure entails too harsh) then perhaps we bias ourselves in the course of consciously discriminating between groups of predictive models/understandings and arbitrarily ignore models which do not reinforce our higher level preconceptions. In other words, when we assume that something is true we may fundamentally alter our predictive models to conform to that assumption. We may invent excuses that amount to predictive models which do not conform to reality, or we may ignore and negate predictive models which DO conform to reality.

In summary, we lie to ourselves when our high level consciousness (the thing with the most "awareness"), which ideally is the more reliable product of complex selection (more accurate), operates fast and loosely on the sub-components of mind of which we're less aware. It is an error that is reinforced via top-down selection in the hodgepodge that is the human mind and brain.

There's no star-spangled guarentee that logic will continue to yield "truth". It's a kind of brute fact that logic yields truth: inductive experience points to deduction as robust.

Although, if things did not have consistent "logical" relationships, the world might be a much more surprising place to live in.

When it comes to justifying induction, we can use more induction:

In my experience, objects have consistency...

In my experience, I consistently observe that objects have consistency...

In my experience, I consistently observe that I consistently observe that objects have consistency...

I realise I haven't addressed your post point by point, but I hope I've picked up on all the themes. — Pseudonym

My apologies for the lateness of my response, and I understand the need to condense our responses.

I additional apologize for my inability to keep to sane post length. Two things I have yet to address are the issues of sustainability and expense to others which we can address at a later point. Adding them to this post seemed unnecessary.

What makes a civilization more or less successful?

Measures of success depend on goals; preferences. Answering the titular question is then somewhat subjective. Some may prefer the goal of long term and rigid endurance, others may prefer the goal of legacy and influence upon others (see: Japan v Rome). Producing knowledge, technology, wealth, safety, justice, and freedom of all kinds are all equally laudable goals which to some are more preferable than to others. I'm sure some people also believe civilization is primarily a spiritual endeavor and measure its success by proximity to divine/religious standards, which even on its own can become a quagmire of disparate human interests. Humans at large are liable to choose, from any of these goals, one that is the most important to them, and the diversity in our normative and existential philosophies is testament to that fact. So where then can we begin? And how can we avoid mere subjectivism? One recourse is to explore relationships between various preferences to discover possible dependencies and hierarchies, and to explore trends in human preference too see which goals are more important to humans on average; some basic fundamental goals are necessary to achieving other goals, and some goals are more common among humans. Comparing average is' does amount to ethical relativism, which is not an issue when comparing like with like, and if some specific preferences and goals are indeed fundamentally more important/prior to others then we might also have a meta-ethical argument that can transcend subjective preference.

Physical, mental, and spiritual "well-being" are three broad classifications that adequately capture the gamut of human interest. While I would personally prefer to view spiritual health as a sub component of mental health, to do so would not charitably address the existential beliefs and preferences of its proponents, and it might also prove useful to delineate what is important for maintaining stable mental health from the more subjective and varied ways people seek "spiritual" fulfillment. Something to keep in mind is that results and sub-metrics of these three overly broad categories can co-vary. A simple example of this is productivity and morale: a decrease in well being can lead to a decrease in morale, which can in turn have a negative impact on productivity and place additional strain on well-being. Keeping this in mind, let's start with physical well-being:

While reproductive success is the main selective force which has underwritten human evolution and represents a strong biological imperative in and of itself, it is well supported by the proximal imperative of survival; not all humans want to reproduce (though many, perhaps most, do) but nearly all humans want to go on living.

An aside on why reproduction is most important from an evolutionary perspective and why survival is most important from a human perspective:



Every aspect of a successful life requires some modicum of survival for individuals to actually exist and access it in the first place (even if they choose to give their life for their children or community, they will still need to have survived until adulthood in order to have the chance to make that choice). As such survival is both the most ubiquitous of significant human preferences, and also the most fundamentally important in underpinning every other preferred human endeavor (at least to a point) . As direct measures of survival, mortality rate and lifespan are therefore intrinsically valuable for enabling access to all the other boons of life. Mortality rate and lifespan also partially represent the cumulative effects of many other possible metrics (medicine, affluence, violence, security, etc...), which does make them additionally useful in assessing the overall success of a civilization.

A persuasive way of looking at the importance of mortality rate is to consider Rawl's "original position" where we're about to enter a society but we don't know who within that society we're going to be. Having a high chance of being dead on arrival or dead relatively shortly after arrival because of high mortality rates and shorter lifespans reduces an individual's chances of living a more successful life in all respects. Victors tend to be happy with the system in hindsight, and we seldom hear from losers.

Physical health beyond survival is another nearly universal human value (held by nearly all individuals) which must therefore be considered high on the list of important attributes of societal success. Because physical health can also affect mental health and even spiritual health, like survival it plays a major role in supporting other aspects of human preference and success. For instance, physical health and freedom from disability can be required to be productive in some societies, where nonproductivity can impede mental health and hinder or stall spiritual pursuits; likewise chronic pain even without debilitation can lead to mental duress/health issues and interfere with spiritual and otherwise subjective goals.

Access to wealth, security, and medicine play important roles in maintaining survival and physical health, and while different individuals and societies can have unique needs and desires with respect to these endeavors, these resources none the less make objectively valuable contributions to the success of a given society in terms of physical health and beyond. "Sustainability" in acquiring these things is also an important consideration. "Egalitarianism", however, doesn't necessarily contribute to physical health directly (it just evenly distributes some types of burdens), but does play a significant role in contributing to mental health.

Before moving on to mental health, It should be noted that suicide is sometimes carried out strictly because of physical health reasons (terminal illness associated with severe suffering), which demonstrates that under severe circumstances bad physical health can outweigh all other values, including survival.

Mental health can have many direct and indirect effects on physical health and survival which can in turn be amplified in positive and negative feedback loops, making its overall impact potentially more than just additive (as with physical health, the added benefits of good mental health and the detriments of poor mental health are dynamic and non-linear). "Good mental health" is almost as slippery a philosophical concept as "happiness" given what makes people happy and mentally healthy can differ drastically from individual to individual. Specific focus can instead be given to aspects of a society which lead to negative mental health outcomes on a more consistent basis:

Fear is something we know can impact mental health in negative ways. Unpredictable fear and terror tend to precipitate warfare and interpersonal violence, and as such security in general contributes to sustaining mental health while also promoting physical health and survival. Physical health can affect mental health as was already mentioned, but it is quite difficult to say how severely and in what way poor physical health can necessarily affect mental health; suffice it to say that physical health does have some impact on mental health.

"Unfairness" (wealth inequality, social hierarchies, etc...) affects human mental health in a fascinating way: an individual and a group can be content and fulfilled with what they have, but should they learn of something more desirable that they do not have access to it can lead to unhappiness or depression. Mere knowledge of the existence of some kind of inaccessible delight which others have access to causes mental anguish where otherwise they may have lived in "blissful ignorance". Once some hunter-gatherer groups are introduced to things like metal knives and outboard motors, they covet them so profusely for their utility that they practically become physically and mentally dependent on them. If you want to make someone unhappy, give them something and then take it away from them (and if you want to make someone happy, take something away from them and then give it back). It's also worth noting that the more upward economic mobility that exists in a society the less of an impact inequality will tend to have on mental health (and perhaps even the mere perception of economic mobility can mitigate the negative effects of inequality. In some contexts inequality can be seen as injustice, and in another it can be perceived as incentive).

Suicide is one of the worst possible ramifications of mental illness, and to the extent that it afflicts a society it should be weighed as disadvantage, but depression leading to suicide is not the only aspect of mental health worth considering, and the instance of suicide alone should not be used as a direct proxy for happiness and overall mental health in a given society. As an effect of negative mental health rather than a cause, and because it occurs for reasons other than poor mental health and depression, it could be very misleading to use overall suicide rates as a discrete metric.

Spiritual well-being is in my opinion a component of mental health, but unlike being free from mental anguish and mental illness (and the things which cause them such as fear and deprivation) as I have defined it, it has much more to do with various and subjective notions of happiness and existential fulfillment. It would include things like religion (and freedom thereof), access to means of artistic and intellectual expression, fulfillment from family/community/culture, and more.

The concept of "neurodiversity" becomes a helpful one: different people can have different neurological traits, and as a result their preferences can differ. It may be the case that some people are better oriented towards general and specific lifestyles, where a given civilization is fulfilling to some individuals but not others. (i.e: different people can be fulfilled by family, by religion, by conformity, individualism, science, art, sport, conflict, etc...). Someone who is on the autism spectrum, for instance, may fare better or worse in environments where spatial reasoning is more important than social or linguistic skills (more likely to survive, more likely to thrive, more likely to be fulfilled). Physical and mental variations of all kinds may render some civilizations more or less appealing to individuals. Sexual dimorphism, for instance (the degree to which males and females of a species are phenotypically different), can render individuals better or worse off in their given society/environment: in hunter-gatherer environments where sustained warfare is non-existent, men and women generally spend their time doing similar activities, and so having a low degree of sexual dimorphism allows them to both be phenotypically well adapted to the environment and contribute to child rearing; in some other societal structures where violence and conflict are mainstay, it could be more reproductively successful to have larger males better suited to violence and conflict, and females better suited to child-rearing.

Differing traits between individuals or groups does affect what type of society they would be best adapted to. This is a controversial idea for some (especially for those still wielding the notion of tabula rasa) but natural selection can act on different individuals and populations in different ways. Some environments can lead to convergence of adaptations (when selective pressures are stringent diversity between individuals shrinks overtime as naturally selected individual adaptations converge toward a singular adaptive strategy) and others can lead to divergence in adaptations (when selective pressures change, especially when a previously limiting environmental factor is removed, then a massive increase in possibly successful strategies is made available, and diversity between evolving and adapting elements can increase as natural deviations are no longer destroyed by rigid selection). Hunter-gatherers, for example, endure many such destructive selective forces which eliminates diversity among and between them by making many strategies nonviable: if hunter-gather population grows too fast, war famine and disease induced decline become more likely; if hunter-gatherers become non-egalitarian the resulting internal conflict hamstrings their ability to carry out day to day necessities and live sustainably; the fact that persistent violence has so little utility among hunter-gatherers contributes to their lower rates of sexual dimorphism; the need to stay nomadic in many hunter-gatherer environments makes having property rights a possible source of conflict and therefore selected against; everyone in a hunter-gatherer society basically needs to perform the same activities, leaving little to no room for individual specialization; hunter-gatherers tend to be mono-cultural as everyone conforming to the same customs and practices is crucial to the survival of the group.

The contemporary west on the other hand has drastically less stringent selective pressures: there are hundreds of niche careers that individuals can seek out and choose from which can select for different biological and neurological predispositions; war, famine, and disease no longer limit population size, allowing us to form communities in greater scales; cultural conformity is no longer required for the success of individuals, communities, or our society, permitting multiculturalism and divergence between individuals and groups. I contend that because the west has been permitting a kind of cultural and neurological/biological stratification and divergence in ways which hunter-gatherer way of life cannot, modern western population compositions have much more variability between individuals who will thrive best in different circumstances when compared with hunter-gatherers whose populations are more rigidly composed of like minded, like bodied, and like spirited individuals.

Having more or less variation in traits between individuals of a given population is neither a good or bad thing per se, but it does have implications on what kinds of economic and social structures would be more or less conducive to offering ideal environments for the greatest percentage of the given population. That some societies demand conformity might not be an indefinite problem for their societal happiness, as if some humans thrive in conformity then the applicable traits can be selected for, and the population can converge toward them. It does however require the shedding of Darwinian blood, sweat, and tears when deviation is naturally culled. A population with 1001 unique roles calls for a diverse population; we're no longer all hunters or gatherers. Some are warriors, and others are scholars; farmers, artists, doctors, builders; leaders, servants, vagabonds, and viscounts. Some occupations demand nothing but brawn, some nothing but brain. Our religions and entertainments are legion. The west has got something for everyone; if the greatest show on earth is a matter of taste, then she's your circus. In the end Darwin must still be paid, and there's never a shortage of failure bad turns in the course of a circus. Where rigid survival conditions lead to adaptive convergence by selecting against deviations (through the death and non-reproduction of outliers), a multitude of available environmental niches leads to adaptive divergence that deregulates deviation and inexorably leads to failure of its own, as novel adaptive niches are explored and tested through trial and error.

A word on related controversies:



The overall thrust of spiritual, mental, and physical health as measures of societal success entails the initial normative presumption that a civilization ought to serve the interests and well-being of its people (an assumption that is in line with my own normative platforms). When broken down it becomes clear that these three categories of well-being are interrelated in complex and obscure ways which can frustrate our ability to construct predictive and comprehensive models of causes and outcomes. Some relationships between different causes of well-being are more evident than others, and importantly, some forms of well-being are much more universally important than others. Physical health in the sense of survival and freedom from disease underpin all and most other forms of well-being respectively; mental health in the sense of freedom from mental illness and anguish is on the same level of near universality as is physical health, though its requirements are more varied within and between groups, and it does underpin and contribute to many other forms of well-being; spiritual health in the sense of the freedom to pursue happiness is important, but requirements for spiritual health vary between individuals and groups much more than their requirements for physical and mental health. The increased "neurodiversity" found in larger civilizations undergoing adaptive divergence of all kinds alters the ideal structure and methods that a civilization can employ in service of its people: if there are more types of people with a broader spectrum of increasingly disparate needs and preferences, then a civilization will need to offer a diverse set of environments which different individuals can thrive in.

Mortality rate and lifespan are perhaps the easiest metrics to apply, and in my assessment they are as fundamentally important as any other form of well-being (i.e: if religion or family makes life worth living, then life is still required to exploit it). Broad physical health isn't simple to asses because different civilizations suffer different physical health issues. While we can say that the contemporary west prevents death from disease more effectively than any other civilization, it is not imminently clear whether there is more or less physical suffering/pain from disease on average in the contemporary west or other civilizations. Tertiary considerations toward physical health such as nutrition and freedom from accidental/intentional injury are noteworthy but because there are so many factors which can contribute to physical suffering, especially in a diverse society, it is unclear just how well the west performs (we can say that many forms of suffering are treatable in the contemporary west, but how many additional forms of suffering exist in the contemporary west is not clear).

Assessing the mental and spiritual well-being of any society seems too complex a task to satisfy. Aside from some very basic factors which contribute to mental health and happiness such as freedom from fear, it's unanimously unclear what all humans ought to do to be happy. There is however the noteworthy observation that a given environment and culture will tend to naturally select individuals who are well suited to being happy and mentally healthy in the adaptive niches which it offers, and so overtime a given population might come to be well suited to the arbitrary circumstances they happen to be in. "Neurodiversity" and genetic variation complicates this assessment further, which leads me to conclude that overall western and non-western civilizations may very well perform generally the same when it comes to assuring the mental and spiritual health of their peoples. I would also conclude, however, that the contemporary and thoroughly stratified population of the west, or a microcosm thereof, would likely not fare well in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and perhaps groups adapted over many generations to hunter-gatherer lifestyle likewise would not fare well in the west despite its diversity in social niches.

Um, because you said that Western civilisation was better than hunter-gatherers and you cited "backwards" reasons for infanticide as one of your reasons? Do you want to re-state your argument as "Western civilisation is better than some hunter-gatherers, but worse than others?"

You really need to get your argument straight. The question was whether Western civilisation has been a disaster. That would be proven if there were a civilisation better than ours which ours has replaced, or is replacing. In other words, things have gotten worse from some point, not better.

In order to counter this argument you need to demonstrate that conditions in western civilisation are better than those in all others, otherwise those other earlier civilisations are better then western civilisation and so things have got worse (ie a disaster).

So I'm either going to take your arguments as applying to all hunter-gatherers, or as being irrelevant to the topic. The question isn't "do some hunter-gatherers do some things we'd rather they didn't?". The question is whether Western civilisation replacing the civilisations which went before it (all of them) was a success.

Maybe you wish to make the argument that for some reason you can't have the good hunter-gatherer tribes without the bad ones. But even in that case, you'd have to show that the bad outweighed the food. Otherwise, I could just cite the slums outside of Rio and say that community represents Western civilisation. — Pseudonym

Demonstrating that average person in the contemporary west is better off (note that "better off" means something different than "better") than average persons of all other broad societal categories is what I have set out to do. If you want a rigid formulation of my position, I am arguing that in the child-mortality/lifespan metric, the contemporary west (1st world) performs better than any other known group. I'm also arguing that the contemporary westerner is less likely to die from violence (this is something different than appraising violence in culture, and while there may be a few very specific examples of groups who suffered less from violence on average, the average fare even for hunter-gatherer societies includes an increased chance of death from violence compared the contemporary west).

Reducing my position, as you have and continue to do, to "you say the west is better 'cause infanticide be backward", is not going to advance us to a point of agreement. Westerners are better off on average, and one major reason is that they have better odds than a coin flip of making it past age 20. The fact that some reasons for infanticide are "backwards" is really a separate discussion (such as the killing of twins which is uncomfortably common). Whether or not they have good or bad reasons, some infanticide is still worse than no infanticide.

Since you have asked me to straighten out my argument for you, the best way to do this is to go directly to my bold opening claim which seems to have initiated your doubt in the first place:

"Objectively, the average contemporary western citizen is better off than most other humans throughout all of history by every applicable metric."

I hate to play the pedant (do I though? :chin: ) but my original and main contention is:

The average* westerner is better off** than most*** other humans**** by every applicable***** metric.

note*: average westerner is a statistical measure which focuses neither on the most or least favorable circumstances it has to offer, but rather the average and likelihood.
note**: "better off" is to be in a better position of means and security (including health). It does not mean "better" as in "Picasso is better than Mozart"
note***: "most", meaning there are exceptions. This is an average to average comparison, and the "most" component signifies my position that I believe the west performs better than over 50% of other societies (though I raise this number in regard to specific metrics, sometimes to 100%, such as in the case of infant mortality rate).
note****: "humans" means all humans; whites, browns, reds, greens, red-greens, all of them. Not just hunter gatherers but all human societies and societal structures that are not the contemporary west. My statements also apply to the historic western world such as Roman society (in many cases more aptly than to the nomadic hunter-gatherers you so dearly anti-Romanticize)
note*****: applicable in the sense of well measurable and with clear implications. Suicide for instance doen't necessarily represent overall happiness, and without some pretty serious consideration and explanation I'm not comfortable with using it as a discrete metric. It can be included in mortality rates with other illness and disease.

Again, why would "examples" be relevant here. The question is "are there better civilisations than our which we have replaced?". If there are/we're, then our replacing them had been a disaster, it has made people's lives worse than they would otherwise have been. To prove your point you need to argue that all hunter-gatherers are more violent than western civilisation, otherwise the ones which aren't are better than us and replacing them is a disaster. — Pseudonym

I could probably get away with arguing that hunter gatherers die from violence more often on average in regards to the metric of violence. I'm interested in a broad comparison though, and violence alone isn't the only readily applicable metric; a society does not necessarily become better off on the virtue of reduced violence alone, let alone "better".

Also, here is a paper arguing precisely that the archaeological evidence is as scant as I think. It opens with "Interpersonal conflict may be one of those causes [trauma] but the skeletal evidence itself is rarely conclusive and must therefore be evaluated in its individual, populational, sociocultural, and physical context." Of course, for those 'wanting' to see violence, it's easy, for those with a little less prejudice, it rarley yields such conclusive results. — Pseudonym

This paper describes the difficulties in appraising skeletal trauma, but it's not as if assays of skeletal records have been wholly misleading. Furthermore, evidence such as instruments of war and fortifications clearly designed as defense in bow and arrow warfare are more conclusive. Some injuries are very clearly intentional violence, such as certain patterns in cranial traums and intentional dismemberment. The evidence for violence among hunter-gatherers isn't perfect, but it isn't scant either.

The Cumash are a sedentary people, I specifically and repeatedly limited my claim to nomadic hunter-gatherers. Notwithstanding that, I don't dispute that the environment may have an effect on violence, I'm disputing your claim that it therefore follows that pre-contact tribes must therefore have been more violent that western societies, there is nothing preventing their entire range of violence from being below that we experience, when measured fairly. — Pseudonym

I never claimed that pre-contact tribes must be more violent than the west, and while that is similar to a claim made in one of the articles I cited, I was demonstrating that varied levels of violence is the only reasonable assumption to make about pre-contact HG way of life. The modern west does have a very low rate of death from violence compared to its own past and its contemporaries, and the only thing preventing every pre-contact HG society from performing better is massive improbability (and of course the existing evidence pointing to fluctuating violence among many pre-contact groups: skeletal, archeological, ethnohistoric, etc...).

The fact that the Chumash are sedentary as the reason why you won't accept them as part of your more successful societal model seems a fair bit revealing to me. The Chumash may never have chosen sedentarism as a first option; seasonal resource locations (salmon runs for example) and other factors, such as steady population growth, can render nomadism impossible (if you have to stay near a main supply of abundant resources or you cannot risk intruding on the territory of neighbors, then sedentarism seems unavoidable). Put differently: individual HG cultures cannot force nomadism if being sedentary is a better survival strategy (individual an HG group would be knowingly facing hardship by choosing nomadism over a geographically static abundant resource, and collectively, groups which maintain nomadism despite environmental disadvantage will tend to die out more often and be outproduced and supplanted by groups who adapt more successfully).

Your argument applies to all civilization, not just the west. The moment hunter-gatherers lay down roots, they seed civilizations of their own, and they beget the population density, social stratification, and technological innovations that can exacerbate violence and war in ways not possible among nomadic hunter-gatherers. Daily burdens may tend to increase with population density, but you also get many more boons (longer lifespan, more complex culture, better medicine, etc...).

By your success or disaster calculus, if nomadic HG societal structure is the most succesful, then a given nomadic HG group dominating other non-nomadic HG groups and forcing them into nomadism of their own would represent a success right?

In the world you see as successful, I am stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. I'll wear leather clothes that will last me the rest of my life. I'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when I look down, I'll see tiny figures pounding wild corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.

I'm not quite sure how your citing this article supports your thesis. It basically just re-iterates the point I made earlier, that chronic resource limits (of the type that might make food-sahring a wise strategy, are not strongly correlated with warlikeness, and that far stronger correlations are the exact same one we experience today and were massively inflated during colonisation. Fear of disaster (global warming), unpredictable resources stress (peak oil), and fear of other groups (colonisation). — Pseudonym

I'm doing my due diligence to explore proximal causes of violence and war. Nomadic HG way of life doesn't necessarily prevent fear of disaster and others, or completely insulate a group against resource stress, or guarantee egalitarian culture (which in and of itself isn't a magic anti-bullet). If I can understand the proximal causes of war and violence among all groups, then to some extent these proximal causes will have an effect on nomadic HG groups as well.

Again, in settled communities, not nomadic hunter-gatherers, but we'll push on. It still seems to point away from your idea that environmental factors alone predicate violence and instead point to a multitude of factors including very strong and cultural ones. — Pseudonym

I've never subscribed to the idea that wars are fought and violence committed for single causes. I've focused on environmental causes because you began this discussion by assuming I am racist and misrepresenting my position as morally condemning all non-western cultures as barbaric savages. I should also clarify (and I will make distinction in the future) that "environmental" as I have used it sometimes refers to ecological/climate conditions, and sometimes it refers to the entire set of conditions that a given people must adapt to (which includes things like migration, technology, disease, etc...).

As I've been asking, what is your evidence for this claim? — Pseudonym

Cases like the Chumash and the North western tribes are good evidence as hunter-gatherers, and the !Kung and Hadza rates of death by violence are higher than western rates. The Hadza are a particularly good example of peaceful nomads. They have no war, almost no infanticide, and only 3.2% (pg 341) of them die as a result of homicide. Only one out of 18 thousand people in America die as the result of homicide. This may not represent all violence, but it does represent lethal violence.

Can you point me toward a group with lower rates of homicide? (surely exceptions exist, and I am interested to learn about them).

Here's an article detailing what I'm saying about the stability of hunter=gatherer communities in the face of massive environmental change. — Pseudonym

Nomadism in response to uncertainty and resource stress is a great adaptive strategy in harsh conditions, but when better conditions come along better strategies also become available. Technology too can make a relatively harsh environment where traditionally nomadism has been the norm into an environment where sedentary and agrarian practices become more robust options.

So induction is fine when you want to use it, but not anyone else? If lots of people are killing themselves it's not such a wild speculation to assume that lots of people are unhappy. — Pseudonym

I've put a good deal of effort into explaining the causative models underlying my conclusions, but you have not delved into the explanation for this claim. Unhappiness= suicide is not sufficient. It's fair to say that suicide is the result of depression and unhappiness, but without knowing more about why some people become depressed and others do not we should not just assume that it reflects unhappiness representative of the entire population. Including it in mortality rates is important, but as Ive said from the outset, "happiness" is a slippery concept, and it could very well be that the unhappiness of some westerners is balanced out by excessive happiness in others.

Look, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here because even after all you've said, I don't believe you're really as right-wing as this sounds. The way you've phrased this (together with the fact that you're presenting it as a counter to my argument that the poor are not really 'free') sounds like you're saying it's all their fault, they're there because they cant do any better, as in the ones that could do better got out. I'm struggling to see how to interpret this charitably. I'd said that the poor are not really free because they too are constrained in their life choices and you answer with this? — Pseudonym

"Waiter! I'd like to send back this doubt. I ordered "benefit of" but this is all bell-end"

The question you asked was if westerners have more freedom than nomadic HG's, why do they choose to live in slums? The charitable way of interpreting my answer is that their existing lodging is the best option that was available to them, just as wigwams, etc., are the best lodgings available to nomadic and sedentary HG's, and so they choose them.

Since you implied yourself that living in slums was a free choice, I answered in the most compassionate way available by pointing out that it's better than their other options.

In terms of lodgings and creature comforts, a shack is not dissimilar to a hut, but it's not my intention to defend slums; they're not the average.

Are you implying that the trading policy of the western world does not have anything to do with the rapid urbanisation without infrastructure investment which is the root cause of slums? — Pseudonym

I'm saying that western food abundance is not the only cause. Resource squandering and corruption by local governments is one, and inaccessible contraception in third world countries is another.

Would you rather grow up in a slum or never be born at all? Large populations present larger problems to overcome. If one day poverty across the globe was eliminated, would the west be successful then?

Right. How many people are in the position you admit is worse than the position of an average hunter-gatherer. Do you think its fair that the rest of society lives the life it does at the expense of these people? And please don't answer with more utopian bull about how how things are getting better for them, I'm talking about how things are now. — Pseudonym

I would say far fewer than 50% of all people are in positions worse than the average hunter-gatherer. The child mortality rate, the reduced lifespan (violence and disease), and the rigid conformity that nomadic HG life entails is a pretty big package of disadvantages. The benefit of reduced suicide isn't inconsequential, but it isn't enough (and we know too little about pre-contact nomadic HG suicide). Flat social hierarchies aren't that great if you're still expected to conform; it's not freedom. Global access to medicine presently makes a massive difference in the number of surviving children and the quality of life for many individuals. Settled indigenous groups living in depressing shacks still have better lifespans on average (pg 323,326) thanks to modern medicine access

Things have already gotten better. 50-100 years ago perhaps I might side with you that the average person is worse off than the average nomadic HG.

So why is then that single mothers in ghettoes with government assistance are killing themselves in unprecedented numbers whilst Yanomami women are rejecting government settlement and risking their lives to fight to maintain their lifestyle? — Pseudonym

"WAITER!... Is this herring caught locally!? I've never seen them this color before..."

People generally want to maintain their cultural identity, and that's what motivates Yanomami women.

Are mothers in ghettos killing themselves in unprecedented numbers? I cannot give you an answer as to why suicide among mothers in rising. Can you? (hint: "because ghetto mamas are not nomadic hunter-gatherers" isn't helpful)

But what would your answer be? — 0 thru 9

Population control!

The bigger our population grows, the more stresses of scale are placed on the population. We're so dependent on steady food, energy, and materials that if something goes wrong before we're ready then we might just come to disaster after-all!

As I said, I'm not interested in your story-telling. I have absolutely no doubt at all that you can construct a reasonable story from the evidence that's available to support your notion of the peace-loving, justice seeking, freedom seekers that is white western civilisation and the backwards, violent communist spoiler of innovation that are hunter-gathers (who, I'm sure just happen to be entirely non-white and that's just a complete coincidence). — Pseudonym

You point out that contemporary HG's are non-white so often that I'm starting to think ethnicity is somehow an important factor to you. Do you know that you should not judge people by the color of their skin? The west is not entirely white, and the non-west is not entirely non-white; please stop obsessing over race as a crucial difference between HG and western ways of life.

Seriously though, if I say that reasons for infanticide are backwards, why would you conflate that with all HG peoples? You know my position. The straw polemic is unpersuasive.

The issue is that you are confusing you ability to come up with an explanation, with an argument that it actually is the case. The fact that you can interpret the evidence the way you do does not in any way prove that that is in fact the meaning of the evidence. It's pointless you keep saying "It stands to reason", "This is reasonable...", "a more successful strategy might be...", "hunter-gatherer cultures may have indeed been...", "competition over resources is as likely an explanation as any.". "If...", "Would be..., "Could..." etc.etc.. I'm not doubting your ability to come up with possible scenarios, I'm arguing that you cannot say they are necessarily the case simply because you can come up with them. — Pseudonym

Inductive arguments are more than sufficient to explore what is likely but not necessary, and unfortunately that's the best we can do to answer questions about an uncertain past, present, and future. I don't need deductive proof if my inductive arguments establish their conclusions as reasonably likely; attacking my arguments as being inductive without addressing their content or inductive strength doesn't actually undermine their persuasive power. Anthropology, archeology, and the whole of science is built on induction.

No it doesn't. What factors are preventing it from being the case that all hunter-gatherer groups engaged in less violence prior to western contact. Or, for that matter that all hunter-gatherer groups engaged on more violence prior to western contact. We have no clear evidence of levels of violence prior to western contact other than the third-hand reports of anthropologists relating what village elders have told them, and bone fragments from a very limited number of buried remains. No conclusion "stands to reason" at all on the basis of such scant evidence. — Pseudonym

The notion that different hunter-gatherers throughout history have had different customs and cultures, and have experienced varying levels of violence stemming partially from environmental conditions, is not at all controversial. We've discussed how things like food scarcity can make resource sharing an effective strategy, and how egalitarianism seems likely to emerge among HG groups because status leveling promotes food sharing (which would make egalitarian HG groups more likely fare better than non egalitarian ones in harsh environments) which also directly and indirectly maintains nomadism and the stable population numbers which are required to permit it (i.e: nobody will settle down and cultivate land or animals of their own if they have to share everything, and by not settling down and using agriculture they are less likely to have larger populations or to have customs, like an absence of property rights, challenged). If you would contend that of the 200k years or so of HG society, there are no examples that are more violent than contemporary western culture or prior to contact with agrarians, then you're rolling dice on some incredibly long odds, and the existing archeological evidence against you isn't as scant as you think.

Social adaptations and cultural evolution are made possible and probable through divergence between individuals and groups, which improves the diversity of options that nature can select from. When we say "hunter-gatherers are almost universally egalitarian because food sharing and inter-tribal peace are beneficial to survival", we're also saying something like "groups living in harsh environments which did not practice food sharing and egalitarianism (for peace) tend to be less successful and therefore are less prevalent". We're making inductive statements about possibilities that are probably true (from evidence), and while establishing the means, medians, and modes of the spectrum of behaviors that HG and all indigenous groups have exhibited is quite difficult, establishing that there is indeed a spectrum of diverse behaviors in the first place is quite easy.

This seems to be your new line of attack, but I see scant evidence supporting it. There is no evidence that I'm aware of permanent settlements for 99% of human prehistory, a time when we lived through some of the most dramatic environmental upheavals the world has seen. So far you've only presented the evidence of a single author speculating that inter-tribal conflict may have been greater when resources were differently distributed. You seem to have taken this single data point and wildly speculated that the whole social structure will have changed without any evidence at all to support this theory. — Pseudonym

You're speaking of hunter-gatherer violence as if one description applies to all hunter-gatherer groups. Hunter gatherers are diverse, and it would be amazing to discover that they all exhibit the exact same kinds and levels of violence. It would be even more amazing to discover that environmental conditions have no bearing on the emergence of conflict...

Here's a link (pg 76-103) to a very interesting and comprehensive analysis of historical trends in violence of the Chumash people using remains at burial sites spanning over 7000 years of continuous Chumash habitation (sedentary hunter-gatherers of central and coastal California). It looks at various forms of skeletal trauma and bone health to establish long term trends in relative violence, and compares that to known climate data in search of correlations with climate events that could cause resource stress. It does find correlations with worsening climate, and subsequent debate and inquiry into the Chumash and other indigenous groups has expanded and refined their results.

This cross cultural study seeks to find factors which predict the frequency of war among 186 societies, and indeed finds a link between violence/war and fear of resource scarcity/disaster/other groups. Their multivariate analysis yielded the finding that fear of disaster and fear of other peoples/groups were the best predictors of a rise in violence. Chronic and predictable food shortage was not a predictor of rising violence, but unpredictable resource stresses (the difference being the unpredictable is psychologically more upsetting) was. Likewise, fear of other groups or at least proximity to newly arrived migrants was a strong predictive factor. The overall conclusion is that war is predominantly a preemptive action taken by groups largely out of fear. The periods of environmental upheaval you mentioned seem like they could facilitate unpredictable catastrophes which we know would contribute to a rise in uncertainty, anxiety, fear, and eventual violence (in addition to migration which could exacerbate it).

This article looks at the archeological evidence for warfare and violence among the natives of North-West coast of North America (i.e, skeletal evidence of violence, artifacts such as armor and armor piercing bone arrows, the rise of larger villages and defensive sites/palisades to protect them). Additionally, it compares the archeological record to ethnographic/ethnohistoric data and literature, and discusses the competing anthropological perspectives seeking to explain violence and warfare among hunter-gatherers and human groups in general. Rather than siding with one of the main competing perspectives explaining indigenous warfare (territory/resources/slaves vs ceremony/revenge/honor), the author considers that human groups are capable of going to war for a wide of range of reasons and that many factors should be considered as contributing to fluctuations in trends of violence. For example, the author demonstrates that after the invention of the bow the subsistence habits of various groups was altered along with their settlement habits (building on hilltops and defense locations) while violence increased. Whether we choose to emphasize environmental resource factors or cultural institutions as primary causes, the paper stresses that there are a myriad of causes of violence within and between groups. This paper also argues that warfare was more prevalent among north western groups prior to contact, as by the 19th century the indigenous populations were a fraction of what they once were, owing to western disease and violence. Furthermore, since many groups continued to practice warfare post-contact while presumably resource scarcity was not an issue, cultural institutions must indeed have causative force of their own which contributes to violence and warfare.

Adding the insight of the Ember & Ember article to this (that fear is a predictor of violence) offers explanatory help to how these diverse factors can indirectly contribute to a rise in violence. (example: in honor culture where slaver ownership amounts to social prestige, it can drive violent action among bands fearing loss of honor. Major causes of individual violent events could also be a matter of a growing and powerful group requiring additional territory and therefore taking it from a neighbor (in fact wars resulting in territory exchanges seem to only occur when one more powerful group is growing in size), or it could be a combination of both, and many other factors).

A great summary article, finds that violence in the Chumash region (mainly projectile trauma, blunt force trauma, and dismemberment trends evident in skeletal record) correlates highly with population density and a particular region which was more likely to receive migrants. Two main spikes in violence are delineated, the first being a spike in primarily dismemberment/trophy taking occurring between 500 B.C and 420 AD which correlates with the arrival of new ethnolinguistic groups. The second spike, primarily in sharp force/projectile trauma, coincides and follows the arrival of the bow and arrow, and peaks after Europeans had arrived in North America. Overall the article finds no single causes; environmental fluctuation and resource stress contributes in some cases, and high population density in others. Cultural institutions, migrations, and new technologies as well.

What emerges from this series of papers is that human warfare can occur for a myriad of reasons, including amongst hunter-gatherer groups. No human group seems completely exempt from the fundamental problem of human conflict, and even generally egalitarian hunter-gatherer lifestyle can give way to violence. Fear as a general motive I think is a useful explanatory tool, and it helps to bridge the many observed factors which promote violence through a human motivational lens. Fear of other groups, and the general resentment of others that population density can possibly give rise to, seems to be a very well demonstrated contributing factor, along with fear of disaster. Competing violently over resources during an unexpected society wide food shortage out of fear seems universally human.

In any case, there is plenty of evidence for violence existing amongst prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and while it is not my position that hunter-gatherers are more violent than all other groups, it IS my position that the contemporary west is less violent than the average hunter-gather, or otherwise indigenous, historic or prehistoric, contacted or un-contacted, group. I do not believe non-whites are more violent or backward or less human, but I do believe that everyone is only human.

This entire section is nothing but idle speculation with no evidence to back it up. Read something, anything, about what we can infer of human social structure from past environments. There is not a single example of a group "...claim[ing] a rich area and settl[ing] down permanently" until about 9200 years ago at most. In fact, a recent study by Philip Edwards at La Trobe University has pushed the date further forward still. It is an undisputed fact that our ancestors were nomadic throughout whatever environmental change they were exposed to and in absolutely every environment they encountered. — Pseudonym

To be fair, there is very little archeological evidence or data for anything whatsoever prior to 9200 years ago. Scant evidence as you say. Nomads sure, but utterly conflict free?

Again, the evidence contradicts this. There is a long-ranging stability in the types of paleo-archeological finds throughout environments and environmental changes. In fact paleo-archaeologists even use consistent cultural markers as a means of tracking the migration of groups as the move from one continent to another. Your idea that the environment itself has a far -reaching effect on the type of society adopted is simply without evidential support. It effects levels of conflict, birth rates, death rates and migration. There is no evidence that it affects social structure or culture at that scale. — Pseudonym

Not every cultural marker has to be adaptive, but to the extent that the way of life an environment permits interacts with culture, yes a specific way of life can be dependent on a stable environment. Egalitarian nomads are so often found in harsh environments because food sharing/altruism is highly adaptive in such environments, and because egalitarianism helps to avoid the mutually destructive possibility of large scale/extended violence and conflict. When a cultural practice affects your survival and reproductive success differently in different environments, then the environment can play a role in selecting long term cultural shifts and trends.

Actually, in the UK, the highest suicide rates are in the 40-54 ages, with another smaller peak at 30-34, and there is only a 15 point variation across all ages from 15 to 90. Suicide is the leading cause of death for males all the way from 5 to 50 — Pseudonym

Granted, suicide numbers represent a health problem perhaps unique to the west or industrialized nations, but it does not necessarily mean that the west is overall less happy than societies with fewer suicides, nor does it take into account the myriad of other health concerns which westerners and hunter-gatherers respectively face.

Where are you getting this from? In what way have the poor of Western societies got more practical freedom than Hunter-gathers? If they have any freedom, then why the hell have they chosen to live in the slums they do? — Pseudonym

Same reason why hunter-gatherers choose to live in the huts, wigwams, lean-to's and long-houses that they live in: it's the best they can do. I'd like to say in defense of the west that there are almost no slums in the contemporary western world. It is perhaps unfair to blame the existence of slums entirely on the western world. Agriculture can provide cheap(albeit less nutritious) food that can support population growth, and lagging infrastructure or an unequal distribution of resources can foreseeably lead to the existence of large slums. The west is greedy, but greed isn't a western invention, and much of the wealth existing in third world nations doesn't flow directly to the west (the third world has corruption too). Give the west bad credit where bad credit is due, but don't blame it for everything.

Increased longevity, education (yielding options), and increased geographic freedom are things the poor statistically have more of in the west. Granted the very poorest and down-trodden of the west, including, for its part, the many far flung victims, live worse lives than the average hunter-gatherer. Poor is a relative term; I'd rather be a Yanomami warrior than a homeless war-veteran in America, but I would also much rather be a single mother living in a ghetto /w government assistance than a Yanomami woman (or warrior for that matter).

Another example of having your cake and eating it. In the west apparently, we're far less likely to die from injury due to the marvels of modern medicine. Someone with a simple piecing fracture might have died in Hunter-gatherer society, but would have suffered nothing more than a brief hospital visit in western culture. And yet, when comparing cultural attitudes, you completely ignore the evidence you just used and claim that hunter=gatherers are just as violent because they're more likely to die from violence. Do you not see the bias? How violent do you think our society would look of every fracture counted as a death from violence? We're less likely to die from violence because we have good medicine, meaning we're less likely to die from injuries caused by violence. You've no evidence at all that the culture is less violent. — Pseudonym

Accidental death and different medicinal quality is something worth considering in trying to account for all forms of violence in overall trends, but it's not difficult to distinguish between accidental injury and intentionally inflicted/defensive wounds (much of that is detailed in the first article presented, and in later articles healed wounds are also taken into account (showing non-lethal violence). Non-lethal wounds are identifiable as non-lethal because they will have healed). The fact that a wound of a given degree is more fatal anywhere else than the modern world is worth noting, but in cases of extreme violence where there is a clear intent to kill it's hard to say how much of a difference western medicine actually makes.

It was never my explicit intention to take up the position that the western culture is less violent than any other culture, but it is undeniably true that in the west we are less likely to die from violence than at any other time and place in human history.

However, when you look at statistics for violence itself, an estimated 12.5% of US children experience confirmed child maltreatment — Pseudonym

This is a problem, and I wonder what percentage of nomadic HG children experience maltreatment. I know what percentage of them die before age 15 though. It's 43% (pg 326).

I'm not sure what difference this would make. The per capita suicide rate in the US is 9.1, but 11.9 in Europe where it is calculated differently. At the moment the evidence we have from palaeoanthropology and the reports of anthropologists and tribal elders is that the suicide rate in pre-contact tribes is zero (or close to it). To my knowledge, there have been no palaeoanthropological finds where the cause of death has been attributed to suicide, there have been no ethnographical accounts which mention prevalent suicide and the quotes I gave you all point to fact that it was virtually unheard of. — Pseudonym

I might look into pre-contact suicide in hunter-gatherer groups, but since suicide would be nearly impossible to appraise in the archeological record, and because suicide involves more than just average societal happiness, it is not an applicable metric. It can be included in the overall death from illness which is accounted for in mortality rates, but generalizing beyond that is too hasty even to my biased western eyes.

As I said way back, we're comparing hunter-gatherer societies to what the west actually is, not some utopian dream of what it could be. — Pseudonym

I've not portrayed any utopian dreams, only the reality of today. You however have portrayed the doomsday of tomorrow which has yet to come. I would agree that the west would come to disaster if and when it ends, but if we do survive in the foreseeable future then I'll chalk it all up as a massive success!

Life only wants you to think that it's about sex in order to obfuscate its cyclical existential crisis.

Like all good show(o)men, it fakes it until you makes it.

And you shouldn't let this deflate you; in place of an Ayn Rand novel you get to enjoy an erotic mystery.

Your claim is that the excess violence is a really bad thing and was probably as bad outside of colonial pressure. I put less of an emphasis on non-violence as a measure of a society (though still important) and believe the indications are that it would have been much lower outside of pressure from western civilisation. We cannot resolve this difference by resort to evidence because none exists. You don't agree with my theory, I don't agree with yours. — Pseudonym

It stands to reason that some groups will have engaged in more violence prior to western influence, and some will have engaged in less (it's not an either or proposition; different groups have different histories, and have endured different cultural changes). This is reasonable because environmental conditions can have drastic and disparate effects on simple social structures, and throughout history nature has inflicted environmental conditions of all varieties onto human groups. The Lomas article concludes by expressing exactly the point that you say no evidence exists for:

Conflict appears to occur at a lower incident rate amongst hunter - gatherers of a “simple” form. However, through this analysis it has become evident that archaeologists have unduly created a myt h of the “peaceful hunter - gatherer”. It has been made clear that conflict is prevalent and healthy within these groups. Furthermore, the method in which conflict is managed and resolved is much different than what Westerners are accustomed to. Simple hunter - gatherers are acephalous and conflict is dealt with by collective social control. This method is effective because each individual is interdependent and conformity is necessary for the livelihood of each member.

In addition to utilizing social control for conflict resolution and management, modern hunter - gatherers live in vastly different environments than their counter - parts did in the past (LeBlanc 2003). The present residential environments are primarily harsh and modern groups have low birth rates that maintain stable resources. This combination allows for adequate resources to be shared within the group, generally reducing resource competition. The differing residential areas of the past, however, provided great resources, and high population growth rates ensued. This combination eventually provides a strain on resources and competition naturally follows. Consequently, evidence of historical violence and warfare are common in the archaeological and ethnographical record. One must look at the data and evidence both objectively and critically to dispel these perpetuated myths of the “noble savage” or brutish solitary “beast”. This is vital for a clear, concise representation of what humans were like prior to the development of agriculture which transformed the current global human condition. — Lomas

You want a society where one person can excel at the expense of the other. I don't. That's an ethical position and again, not one that can be resolved by further recourse to evidence. No amount of evidence that the Hadza fiercely maintain egalitarianism by pulling down those who seek to rise up is going to convince me of anything because I don't believe they're wrong to do so. — Pseudonym

As I've argued previously, and as Lomas echoes and explains, as a hunter-gatherer you have to conform to your group or perish, which constitutes a dilemma of "freedom". Even if as an individual hunter-gatherer you excel in a way that benefits others, your rise in status might bring issue. Some HG groups practice what is called "insulting the meat" where when a hunter returns from a successful hunt, him and his catch are ridiculed for humor, and the successful hunter will also ridicule himself and his hunt, pointing out everything that went wrong and everything he could do better. Mainly this has the effect of status leveling between men and women, and successful/unsuccessful hunters which otherwise could create a power imbalance.

The recent history of the west has an interesting perpendicular: there has been a great deal of status levelling in western culture over the last 50 years, but it has not come at the expense of tearing down men, it has come with a lifting up of the status of women (i.e: as breadwinners, women are no longer reliant on a husband who wears the pants). Instead of tearing down the hunter who brings in the bacon, we encourage women to kill pigs with the rest of us.

Likewise with your proposition that "Human groups have been suffering territory issues since time immemorial." You're speculating that resource availability has a massive influence on societal structure to the extent that hunter-gatherer social dynamics might have been as violent or unhealthy in the past as a result of natural variation as they are now as a result of the pressure from western civilisation. I could point you in the direction of evidence that this is not the case (Jared Diamond would be a good approachable start), but that would be pointless, because by this point in speculation, there will be enough evidence to the contrary for you to believe whatever you want to believe. — Pseudonym

Well at least you didn't point me toward Howard Zinn :D

Resource availability/scarcity affects so many aspects of possible and optimal survival strategies that they are beyond counting. From the perspective of thermodynamics, the more scarce energy is, the fewer possible courses of action are available which will yield a positive return. Energy economy and upward efficiency on return (not wasting energy) become very important for success along with careful resource management practices (to not overtax or squander the few renewable resources that are available). In the context of jungle and savanna hunter-gatherers who live in somewhat harsh bush environments with a low upward limit on resource availability per acre per year, having a peaceful and war-free society (the kind that leaderless egalitarianism upholds) can wind up saving a ton of potentially lost and wasted energy in unnecessary warfare. If the environment was less harsh and more bountiful, then instead of moving from place to place once resources are depleted, a more successful strategy might be to claim a rich area and settle down permanently. Many factors play a role in what cultural and survival strategies are possible and popular, but the factor of resource scarcity really should not be underestimated, and is evidently crucial for sustaining many traditional hunter-gatherer cultures.

Even without extreme environmental change, the natural seasonal fluctuations of an environment can lead to competition over resources (i.e: if for several seasons good weather causes abnormally high food yields, which causes a boom in baby birth rates (and subsequent survival), the ensuing normalization of food yields in later years could leave a situation of overpopulation and food shortage which would lead to numerous conflicts and a non-trivial amount of suffering.).

My overall point here is that conditions in the past will have been diverse across time and space, and depending on the time and place, hunter-gatherer cultures may have indeed been more violent or otherwise less meritorious than their counterparts of today.

Again, you're speculating. I have no doubt you can find evidence to support this claim, so I'm not even going to ask you to. I would have equally ease putting my hands on evidence to refute this claim. I'm thinking particularly of a paper I read recently on resource manipulation in Zebra fish and the way in which it affected aggression, then relating this to studies of Aborigonal Australians. The upshot was that resource availability does not affect the balance between aggression/cooperation in the way you think. When resources are scarce ther'e more value in cooperating because aggression leads to fighting which is more energy consuming than cooperative hunting. Likewise when resources are rich, there's little point in hoarding them. The conclusion was that competition arose only when resources we abundant enough to supply the energy for fighting, but scarce enough to be worth fighting for. To meet this criteria, they needed to be time-stable (ie continually available) which meant no nomadism. Hence the author's postulated this as a reason why all nomadic hunter-gatherers were egalitarian. I could try to dig out the article if you like, but at the moment I'm convinced the effort would be wasted. I have no doubt at all that you could find an article contradicting it, it's only a theory after all. If you don't want to believe it, I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince you. — Pseudonym

I'm not saying that resource scarcity or availability in the upward or downward direction in and of itself dictates whether violence will be present in the local culture, I'm saying resource scarcity in general, especially fluctuations in resource availability, can have sweeping ramifications on what sorts of strategies are adaptive and therefore likely to emerge and proliferate. The stability of indigenous ways of life are dependent on steady state environments. Climate fluctuations and shifts, changes in ecosystem (which can result from long term HG presence), and the arrival of competition are all things that can upset the sometimes delicate balance with nature that stone-age HG's tend to maintain. It's no secret that competition over resources can lead to warfare even among previously egalitarian hunter gatherer groups. As Lomas points out, the archeological and ethnographic records clearly show some examples of heightened violence, and competition over resources is as likely an explanation as any.

Same again here. Your assertion that physical health is measured only (or even best) by lifespan and child mortality is just that, an assertion. There's nothing wrong with your position, but it's not debatable, there's no point further discussing it. You think it is, I don't I prefer to think about the health of the individual through their life. Ten years of good health is worth more to me than twenty of poor health. I'd rather spend 40 years a fit and able person enjoying an active life than spend 60 years an overweight layabout kept alive by drugs. But if you'd rather the latter, I can't argue with that, it's just a preference. — Pseudonym

This topic deserves a thread of its own (that you feel it is not debatable makes it especially worthy of debate I think :) ) and there's really a lot to consider (in particular if explore the extremes of a short but utterly blissful existence vs a barely sufferable extremely long existence) but I think I still have room for an argument if I can find some reasonable assessments about the overall health and rates of chronic suffering in HG environments. As an HG, if you break an arm or injure your back or shoulder, you might have to live with that chronic pain and debilitation for the rest of your life (were it becomes especially painful in old age) while in the west with proper bone setting, corrective surgery, and proper administration of pain medication the chronic ailment can be treated. It might actually be the case that the west suffers less from chronic health problems in addition to not dying early nearly as often from disease. Since my posts are already consistently and unreasonably long, let's leave this aside for now.

I really don't understand this comment. I cited three quotes which speak specifically of suicide, you can't possibly have missed it. — Pseudonym

I would like the whole article and preferably a link to them. I could tell some of the articles you cited didn't really apply to people living a stable HG lifestyle, except perhaps the Inuit/Eskimo quote. Without the articles I cannot properly assess the full implications or validity of the quotes. The causes of suicide in the west are a different issue from the suicide prevalent in indigenous communities dispossessed of land, culture, and autonomy. It's another topic which deserves it's own thread, but it's a main part of your argument as to why the west leaves people less healthy and happy than HG cultures so I'll have to address it.

But again, we're back to the same problem. Because you don't want to hear that suicide isn't a problem in hunter-gatherer societies, my sources aren't good enough for you, you want widespread data, you want stratified surveys. When you wanted to find evidence of mistreatment in tribes the say-so of a single anthropologist from a single tribe was enough for you to base your entire worldview on. You'll find what you want to find. The evidence is sufficiently scant and vague for you to do that. My sources, by the way, are papers I happen to have here in the office, I don't know of any online versions. Again, I could try and track them down if you like, but I get the feeling the effort would be wasted. If the only thing that's going to convince you of the low suicide rates in hunter-gatherer tribes is some kind of universal stratified sample which somehow also takes into account unexplained disappearances, or any other possible misconception of term, then I don't have anything for you. Just try applying that standard to your other claims — Pseudonym

I've not explicitly denied the possibility of HG societies having lower suicide rates, but I AM questioning the conclusions you draw from it. High suicide rates do not necessarily represent the overall population, especially given, as your sources indicate, suicide is most prevalent among particular demographics. Elder suicide is not uncommon in HG society, and youth suicide is very common in young males of HG cultures bereft of sovereignty and tradition (citing identity/nostalgia issues combined with social problems like forced integration and racism). Young males also have the highest rate of suicide in the west, and it may be something to do with cultural identity and or depression caused by social ills, or it could be the combined effect of other issues, but a crisis in suicide rates concentrated in one or two demographics should not be used to hastily generalize the overall mental health and therefore happiness of the rest of the population.

"Happiness" is a philosophically and empirically slippery metric to apply, and so I've avoided it, but by definition I've included suicide in the overall mortality rate metric. Clinical depression is a disease that afflicts some people and not others, and even when it is not fatal it causes suffering (like many chronic diseases). I would prefer not to assume that the instance of suicide or even depression is necessarily representative of the overall happiness of a given society. It can certainly be an indicator, but there are so many possible causes and factors involved that oversimplifying it is impossible to avoid. Again, I grant that it could be that a stone-age lifestyle mitigates depression and therefore prevents suicide, but there's more to consider regarding the overall happiness of a people. For example, if the west still predominantly practiced orthodox religion, instance of depression and suicide might be reduced to levels comparative to HG societies (though happiness might be lower), and furthermore, it might be only a subset of a given population that experiences mental health detriments due to some social/environmental factor.

I'm not just running around wearing confirmation blinders and employing double standards by asking for data assessing HG mental health statistics. First, I haven't only used a single example to substantiate my claims, and while at times I have alluded to evidence rather than offering a source, I have since supplied a source confirming or indicating most or all of my crucial points. My original point about things like sadistic leaders and war-crimes was not that the norm among indigenous societies, but that indigenous culture was not immune or exempt from them; providing a single example at the outset to what I perceived as your insistence that such problems are utterly non-existent in any HG culture seemed appropriate and sufficient. Second, assessing whether someone died from violence (as is common with archeology) is much easier to do than assessing whether someone had good mental health and happiness when they were alive. If contacted tribes tend to become disturbed and experience an increase in mental health problems and overall unhappiness as a result (contact which is required for an intimate assessment of mental health), then we have little means of controlling for that impact. the archeological record is scant on mental health statistics, but it seems fairly reliable for mortality rates and lifespan.

More opinion. The meaning of 'better' is the very thing we're discussing here. — Pseudonym

"Better off" to be specific, "by every applicable metric" (metric implying standard system of measurement). Freedom from violence, freedom from disease/premature death, geographic and social mobility are all reasonably measurable. You would say that HG society performs better in the equality metric, but if even the poor of western societies have more practical freedom and rights than HG people then is equality really so valuable? (if equality is worthy because it plays a role in freedom, overall the west seems to outperform). You would say that being non war-like is another metric HG society outperforms in, and yet in the west we're less likely to die from violence of any kind. If being less war-like is valuable because it is function of freedom from violence and a reduction of overall mortality rates, the average westerner is still better off by the violence and mortality metrics.

By this point I've given up on this exchange of evidence, but the difference is in the degree of speculation the coroner puts into the 'unintentional harm' category, which is often a judgement call. It also depends on the degree of 'clumping' one applies to other diseases (the more of those you lump together, the more significant they will be). We do things slightly differently in England, hence the stats are different. But again, you'll just pick whichever version proves whatever it is you already want to believe so the excersice is pointless. — Pseudonym

I'm glad that you've stopped calling me racist as a rhetorical device, but assuming my biases and constantly including mention of it in the midst of your arguments can be just as annoying of a fallacious appeal. I know you need to get some kicks out of making long tedious responses, but overdoing it adds an unnecessary extra layer of tedium.

It's possible that skeptical American coroners are pushing down the suicide numbers in America, but the clumping possibility is why I asked for per capita suicide rates to begin with and not potentially misleading statements like how can the west be more happy if suicide is the leading cause of death.

See... How can you possibly know this? Putting aside the fact that the Yanomami are actually agriculturalist and so outside the scope of this discussion, also putting aside the fact that their reputation for fierceness comes almost entirely from Napoleon Chagnon, a single anthropologist whose agenda has since been widely discredited.
Aside from those two things, you can't possibly know what they were like pre contact. — Pseudonym

Nobody denies that the Yanomami are warriors, and their warrior traditions didn't suddenly spring out of western ships. Chagnon, as far as I know, made exaggerated depictions about the Yanomami and held that constant barbaric violence was central to their culture, when in truth their warrior culture is the backdrop for networks of alliances between Yanomami groups and only occasionally does severe violence occur (unsurprisingly, when something upsets a balance). As foraging pastoralists the Yanomami are well within the scope of my original points pertaining to sadistic leaders and war-crimes, and no I have not singled them out because they are some particularly violent group (in fact you brought them up long before I did). Originally my point was "The Yanomami people for instance dabble in agriculture, so perhaps you wouldn't accept them as an example of an imperfect hunter-gatherer group? Western presence in the Amazon region may be one of the root causes of exacerbated violence among the Yanomami (by causing resource scarcity and anxiety among groups mainly), but it also shows how fragile indigenous societal systems can actually be.". Not only did I acknowledge that western presence will have exacerbated Yanomami violence at the outset, I'm well within the bounds of reason to point out that the semi-nomadic "foraging horticulturalist" culture of the Yanomami does inherently employ violence in response to social and environmental instability, making peace relatively fragile..

The conclusion of the Lomas article which I've supplied earlier in this post (for the benefit of other readers) is precisely that neither the myth of the completely peaceful HG, nor the barbaric savage is an accurate depiction of present or past day HG's. The case of the Yanomami (while not quite strict hunter-gatherers) offers insights into why neither stereotype is true.

The Lomas article spends three pages on describing the successful non-violent means hunter-gatherers use to settle disputes without violence, it cautioned against drawing conclusions about ancient hunter-gatherers from modern examples because of the effects of colonisation. You completely ignored the non-violent methods, completely ignored the warning about extrapolation, and simply concluded that egalitarianism is and always was maintained by violence. That's the cherry-picking I'm talking about. — Pseudonym

You're misrepresenting what I've said. Egalitarianism is maintained by a lot of things, such as resource scarcity and cultural institutions amounting to "altruistic punishment" (which I've brought up and acknowledged from the very get go and incorporated into my argument). I didn't ignore the warning about extrapolation, I literally paraphrased Lomas' own extrapolations. here's a direct quote: "The present residential environments are primarily harsh and modern groups have low birth rate s that maintain stable resources. This combination allows for adequate resources to be shared within the group, generally reducing resource competition. The differing residential areas of the past, however, provided great resources, and high population growth rates ensued. This combination eventually provides a strain on resources and competition naturally follows. Consequently, evidence of historical violence and warfare are common in the archaeological and ethnographical record."

No it isn't, yes it has, and no it couldn't. I think we're pretty clear on what each other's opinions are on this matter. Do you have any evidence to bring to bear, or shall we just agree to differ?...


...By all means, present your case, but I don't think it's right to use your case to try and prove someone else's wrong. Lack of a correspondence with the evidence proves a theory wrong. The mere existence of an alternative does not — Pseudonym

I'm not morally condemning the entire enterprise of indigenous ways of life. If you go back and read my first and second posts, I've been very clear and consistent about the nature of my claim that the average contemporary western civilization is objectively better off by every applicable metric.

"Better off" did not mean "every other time and place is terrible and immoral". In my view, the metrics of lifespan and child mortality rate alone are sufficient and sufficiently objective (and measurable) metrics underpinning "better-off-ness". Consider the kinds of advantages which are unevenly distributed in the west according to individual wealth (education, medicine, comfort, etc...). It is these kinds of advantages which the contemporary west (on average, or at the low end of the economic spectrum) is performing better than ever in (largely thanks to technology). We might say "so and so is better-off", but it's not a put-down of those worse-off, it's more of a descriptive/explanatory factor.

I should confess disclose that I'm no ethical/moral relativist. I do think some practices are strategically and morally inferior to others, and I have no qualms criticizing them. You might have noted that I haven't actually condemned or denigrated entire ways of life, and of the specific behaviors and practices (not cultures) which I have compared and contrasted as inferior to western standards, I've also offered contextually explanatory factors which lay clear blame on environmental or other arbitrary circumstances, never ethnicity...

Whether or not the west will be able to continue existing is a bit of a complex subject, but at least until the end of oil (30-50 years) or unless rapid climate change occurs, we'll be doing fine. If we can develop a battery that can outperform a tank of gasoline then oil won't even be an issue and perhaps the climate could recover. The extraction of energy resources from third world countries would no longer be required, and given the right advancements in materials and construction, countries like China might no longer rely on imported materials. Energy and infrastructure developments (I.E, mobile/automated electric construction) could solve agriculture and food exploitation issues as well. Maybe these are pie in the sky ideas, but the problems western societies (and humanity as a whole) are facing are being given more and more consideration every day. You might not believe in betterness between societies, but surely you can see that as a society the west has made recent improvements? (or at the very least, surely you agree improvements are possible?).

Do you truly believe that western society is imminently doomed?

Yes, So my claim that they are more egalitarian than western civilisations stands. My claim wasn't that they were less violent than western civilisations (although there's not a significant difference). The Hadza have equality of rights even for children, each individual has an equal say and conflicts are usually resolved peacefully, how's that a bad thing? Yes, there's coercion, sometimes quite strong, violent coercion, but how's that any different to western civilisation, in what way are we more free? — Pseudonym

To be clear, the Hadza are the least violent hunter-gatherer group I've found, but they're still more violent than the west at least in terms of homicide. We're more free from homicidal reprisal (3.8% of Hadza die form homicide, less than 1% of Americans die form homicide) thanks to our more sophisticated justice institutions which deter and incarcerate criminals. Groups like the Hadza rely on conflict avoidance mechanisms like moving away to keep conflict incidents low in number, but when conflicts do occur and the main resolution mechanism fails, conflicts more often prove fatal due to underdeveloped cultural institutions.

You're not exactly free to excel beyond the traditional Hadza way of life as one of them; prestige and affluence leads to jealousy and resentment, which in the Hadza social setting means ostracization, sanction, or worse. Mob justice is only ever as good as what side of the bed the mob woke up on that morning.

It reminds me of "crabs in a bucket" (no i'm not making a racist morphological comparison). If one Hadza male becomes too wealthy then the other males and the cultural institutions (no property, mandatory sharing, etc...) pulls them back down and levels social hierarchies before they can begin to stratify. We could say that this fact protects and preserves the egalitarian structure of the Hadza, and we could also say that it prevents them from developing something more socially sophisticated.

We're objectively more free from the coercive threat of lethal reprisal from individuals displeased with our behavior, but we're also more free in the sense that we can travel further, can marshal and have access to more resources, have more knowledge and information that yields additional lifestyle options and courses of action, are more free from illness related suffering and death (along with our children). Hunter-gatherers must conform to the somewhat rigid ways of life and cultural norms that individual hunter-gatherer groups use as adaptive means of survival.

In the west, we all need land in some form (either directly growing crops or for housing), all land is in private ownership so we are all beholden to the economic system to purchase in some form the land we need. I'm still not seeing the difference here. Be required to co-operate altruistically with your group, or be required to earn money in whatever economic system is prevalent in your country. I know which I'd prefer. — Pseudonym

I'm merely explaining how property-less egalitarianism does't make you more free, it just means you have comparatively equal freedom to everyone else.

This is a very salient point and something people like the Hadza have been suffering from since the 19th Century, as have virtually every tribal community forced to the very edges of hospitable land. Think about that next time you presume that levels of violence in modern hunter-gatherers reflect the levels of violence they lived with before the colonisation of western civilisation. — Pseudonym

Human groups have been suffering territory issues since time immemorial. The colonial west is a recent catalyst, but demographic and environmental changes within a group or region can bring about destructive disequilibrium without the need for external influence.

Hypothetically, if conditions change in Hadza territory such that survival becomes much easier for them (acquiring an abundance of preservable food thanks to a new technology, discovery, or environmental change) and their population grew in number to a point where random movements by bands caused territorial overlap, then essentially the entire way of life of the Hadza people could change. The freedom to move from band to band could be lost as newfound population density leads to anxieties about camp size and territorial overlap open the possibility of developing a war culture (their egalatarianism and lack of property could simply evaporate).

It's true the west has contributed to worsening environmental and social conditions among countless indigenous groups, but human history is (and must be) a long story of fluctuating conditions which have at times pitted groups of all kinds against other groups, or themselves. The fact that hunter-gatherer life is as harsh as it is (mothers simply don't have the time or energy to breastfeed while pregnant, for example), which inherently limits the population and group size of hunter-gatherer bands, is what keeps them stable at low enough population levels such that warfare serves no possible purpose. It's a true irony that the human successes such as agriculture which allow us to grow in number and comfort also inexorably create conditions where novel problems can occur, but that's just how it is. Even attempting to remain in homeostasis with the environment is a risk because we cannot control our environments, where fundamental changes can reduce relatively healthy and peaceful egalitarian societies to warring and suffering ones or destroy them entirely.

Whether or not hunter-gatherers of the past were more or less violent (this was one objective of the Lomas article), I'll address later, but regardless of whether or not it was more or less prevalent my point here about social fragility holds: since environmental conditions have such sweeping ramifications on what kinds of cultural norms and practices hunter-gatherer groups can successfully maintain, they are therefore at greater existential threat to more minute and unpredictable changes in the environment. You might think you're signing up for peaceful egalitarianism, but should a storm wipe out the main food source of your people, who knows what you're gonna get instead?

At what point did I say that hunter-gatherer societies were completely free from violence and injustice? You're attacking a straw man. The point raised, a point you vehemently defended, was that western culture was much better than hunter-gatherer culture, no-one even mentioned the idea that hunter-gatherer culture was somehow completely immune from violence. — Pseudonym

"Better off" was specifically the point I opened with, (since we're being so carefully pedantic ;) ). I'm the one with the burden of showing the demerits of non contemporary western societies compared to contemporary western ones, so can you really blame me for delving into the violence category?

That being said, from your own source which you have completely cherry-picked for the data you want (still trying to convince me you're not biased?);

"It is widely debated what the ultimate causes of conflict are within hunter-gatherer societies, but it has been well established that conflict and violence escalate as the shift from foraging practices toward pastoralism and agriculture subsistence increases."

"Egalitarian societies appear to have less intra-group conflict compared to socially stratified societies."

"Self-proclaimed leaders are not tolerated and are often ostracized by the group."

"...hunter-gatherers rely on informal methods of social control such as gossip, shunning, ridicule, ostracism, and public debating which lead to group consensus. These methods of conflict management are extremely effective at ensuring that quarrels and violence are avoided, or, if they should arise, they are dealt with swiftly within the group to return the group back to the status quo."

And most importantly, as I have mentioned;

"...care must be taken to not make the common assumption that these modern groups are representative of past hunter-gatherers."

But you seem to have conveniently ignored all that, together with the three pages the author spends explaining hunter-gatherer's primarily non-violent means of conflict resolution to hone in on the report on on single anthropologist reporting a level of violence over access to women in a tribe whose population dynamic has been devastated by the very western civilisation you're trying to claim is better. — Pseudonym

Better off ;) . As in, performs better by all apt metrics.

Gossip, ridicule, ostracism, and public debates aren't unique to hunter-gatherers, they're universal social sanctions that exist in every human group and kind of human group I can think of. They work, but only up to a point. The first line of defense once serious conflict arises for the Hadza (conflict as in:you're being ostracized or have a personal conflict with another individual) is moving to another band, and if there is no clear resolution then unregulated violence might wind up being the answer. For some issues the Hadza seek out the chieftans of neighboring pastoralist tribes to arbitrate and settle disputes. If the Hadza were copacetic to having leaders of any kind, they might be able to elevate their outcomes pertaining to justice and less often resort to potentially unjust sanctions or violence.

I'd already read the Lomas article, and if you want to rebuke the notion that hunter-gatherers are innately peaceful and harmonious, I suggest you find someone who thinks that hunter-gatherer societies are innately peaceful and harmonious, and stop straw-manning my argument that they are more egalitarian, more healthy and have a lower suicide rate, and that these things are indicators of a successful civilisation. — Pseudonym

The Lomas article echoes many of my points, especially in describing how environmental conditions among historical hunger-gather groups could have contributed to kinds of aggression not present in their modern counter-parts. While present day H-G's occupy rough bush that inherently stabilizes their population levels, hitorically H-G's occupied richer and less depeleted territory where food was much closer to home and rapid population growth could occur. Population growth eventually puts a strain on resources, which inevitably leads to competition and aggression.

Egalitarianism can be neutered through changes in availability of resources (upward or downward) as competition leads to dominance and social stratification, and even if you're guaranteed equal rights as everyone else, the amount of rights you have and the amount of protection of those rights you have might be quite small indeed. In the contemporary west there are many guaranteed and well protected rights that hunter-gatherer cultures can scarcely comprehend. The right to a fair trial and freedom from unreasonable punishment for instance...

Overall physical health is something that the west performs better in than anywhere else. Longer lifespans and lower child mortality rates does really say it all. A full blown discussion about causes of death and the various proportions can get a bit tedious. You wonder why suicide is higher on the list of causes of death in the west, and a big reason this is the case is that we have practically eliminated many of the historically top causes of death, while suicide remains very difficult to prevent and address. We have higher rates of certain diseases, but we have lower mortality rates overall. We may die from different diseases, but they die from disease sooner.

It would be quite difficult to find reliable assessments about what the suicide rates and causes of ancient hunter-gatherers would have been, and I would like to see some citations on modern hunter-gatherer suicide statistics properly compared to west. Granted, suicide may be a problem exacerbated by some elements of modernity and it may very well be the case that hunter-gatherers suffer less often from clinical depression (impossible to really know because contacting them tends to depress them), but even taking this into account the west does a better job of keeping its people alive. It does not actually follow that if suicide rates are lower a society is more happy; reasons for suicide can extend beyond the presence of happiness; the suicide of some doesn't necessarily represent widespread unhappiness in the overall population; living in the bush in and of itself may alter the nature and perception of suicide (you can disappear and never be seen from again and nobody would know what happened; being depressed for an extended period of time in the bush could increase the likelihood of accidental death or failure to subsist, thereby reducing the possibility of suicide, etc...).

If any of the citations you've provided speak of suicide I apologize for missing it, if so and otherwise, can you direct me to any reliable data assessing mental health statistics in hunter-gatherer societies?

The people being studied nowadays have generally had some form of contact with Europeans, bring diseases they've never encountered before, and are living in some of the harshest environments on earth. If you could just set your bias aside for five minutes, how do you think the pressure from western civilisation, conflict with loggers and farmers, marginalisation to the lands not even rugged pioneers will farm...how do think all that is going to affect their health? — Pseudonym

Many of the diseases and other causes of death which presently afflict HG's will have also afflicted them in the past. If you want to point out that indigenous groups are generally less healthy immediately after contact with European germs, I would not argue. But after generations of contact and access to some western medicine, the lifespan and child mortality rates of indigenous groups increases. It may be that hunter-gatherer groups are presently hemmed in to only the most inhospitable regions which has impacted their mortality rates, but it could also be that it is only in inhospitable regions where the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is the most successful or most viable adaptive social strategy, which is why they're only found in such regions.

You blame so much on colonialism that it's not unreasonable for me to assume you think hunter-gatherer way of life is blameless in everything. It's not as if mortality rates were better in the past for every single indigenous group, and of the groups who did have a more bountiful environment, they had the later issues associated with long term settlement (death in war) just like we have novel issues of our own.

Suicides were not unheard of in Arctic communities prior to sedentarisation; elderly or infirm members of the community would occasionally take their own lives in times of food shortage. However, suicide among young, healthy, productive individuals was unheard of. NAHO 2005; Bjerregaard et al 2004; Shephard and Rode 1996 — Pseudonym

So Inuit/Eskimo youth rarely committed suicide. O.K.

P.S, I need the names of the articles you cite or else finding them can be nightmarish

In British Columbia, groups [of tribal peoples] with strong links to their land and culture reported no suicides, while those with no continuity to their land and culture reported rates up to 10 times the national average. Chandler and Lalonde (in press) — Pseudonym

When a systematically neglected and abused group of people are given a chance to reclaim cultural values and identity, it certainly will impact suicide rates for the better. A lessening of oppression which leads to a reduction in very high suicide rates doesn't exactly demonstrate the mental health merits of HG lifestyle in and of itself, it might mainly show the value of not arbitrarily having your culture and identity taken away from you.

Guarani communities in which suicide has been a terrible problem have reported no suicides since returning to their land to live in their traditional ways. CIMI 2001 — Pseudonym

I cannot find this source.

It appears that mental illness was present in Australian Aboriginal culture prior to European colonization of Australia but was, most likely, a relatively rare occurrence. The much greater prevalence of mental illness and suicide in the current Aboriginal population is a reflection of the significant disruption to Aboriginal society and has a strong context of social and emotional deprivation. Psychological disorders of Aboriginal Australians - Journal of Metal Health. — Pseudonym

Again this shows that being disrupted causes mental health problems, not that HG lifestyle is more free from mental health issues in general. It also reinforces my point about the fragility of simple social systems: external forces can cause such degrees of uncertainty and social upheaval because they are social systems which expect a very specific steady environment to be successfully adaptive.

The west is decidedly better at enduring and achieving change; we've downright mastered it.

Personally, I think suicide is a very good measure of a civilisation's merits, How are you interpreting the fact that our children are more likely to kill themselves than die of any other cause as a measure of success? — Pseudonym

This is just factually inaccurate. Suicide is not the leading cause of death for any age group, at least in America (the most readily available statistics):



Only in the 15-25 range does suicide seem to barely edge out disease, but in every single category unintentional injury is far more likely than suicide.

Unbelievable, you're trying to blame the hunter-gatherers (agriculturalists) for the violence brought on directly by western colonial dominance. Basically your argument here seems to be that western culture is better because it can bully other cultures into having to fight each other for land. What kind of metric is that for success? — Pseudonym

Not all of the Yanomami violence can be blamed on western presence on the coast; western presence alone isn't the cause of their occasional brutality. Preexisting degrees of Yanomami violence aside (hard to know about, but they obviously have an ancient warrior culture), a social system that lacks capacity for larger scale organization/cohesion can always be vulnerable to external influence which drives demographic change. At least some of the Yanomami violence is inherent to its culture, and an increase of violence in response to uncertainty and competition seems to be a component of that culture.

As I said, there is no point continuing if you keep comparing a completely imaginary utopian scenario of western civilisation (ignoring the pillage it reaps on the third world to sustain it and the environmental un-sustainability) to the very worst cases you can find of hunter-gatherers. — Pseudonym

I'm not leaping to cherry-picked examples of hunter-gatherers. I'm actually examining the first examples I encountered by following the google search you've linked it me to. Do you have an ideal candidate to name? Otherwise I don't see how you can criticize the examples I've provided as biased.

Hunter-gatherer lifestyle isn't all Disney's Pocahontas cracked it up to be.

Regarding pillaging/unsustainability, etc., we're on the path toward stable technology and renewable energy, and it's not as if every non-western nation has been thoroughly pillaged in order to pay the west's bill. The west does also produce wealth and could plausibly continue existing without exploiting third world nations.

Yes, because we're so concerned about their mental health that in 2015 suicide was the most common cause of death among 5-19 year olds and the NHS in England treats over 250,000 children with severe mental health problems at any one time with about 60% having suffered some traumatic event.

How are you interpreting a skyrocketing suicide rate as indicating that we are providing children with a better life? — Pseudonym

Whataboutism isn't really that bad and all, but pointing to total numbers of suicide is less revealing than pointing to suicide per capita or a full picture of child mortality. A very small percentage of children die before making it to adulthood in the west because we've practically eliminated the historically most common causes of child death (birth complications, exposure to elements, many infections and diseases, correctable biological defects, etc...). This is not true for any hunter-gatherer groups.

This is becoming ridiculous. I'm not about to dedicate half my mornings to giving you a crash course in anthropology when I'm not even convinced you have any interest in the subject beyond what it has on offer to support your cultural biases. — Pseudonym

I don't remember enrolling in moral outrage 101.

1. Your citations and examples are not drawn from nomadic hunter-gatherers, they are drawn from indigenous tribes, there's a difference. Many indigenous tribes are agriculturalists or pastoralists. I'm talking about the lifestyles of nomadic hunter-gatherers. — Pseudonym

The Hadza happen to be semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, and so are Eskimo, but if I've not addressed hunter-gatherers specifically enough then it's your fault for not naming a specific group with which I can do an apples to apples comparison with a contemporary western society.

My claims in that regard are;

Hunter-gatherers have more egalitarian forms of government than western civilisations. Each individual has more autonomy and is less likely to be forced into anything they don't want to do. — Pseudonym

Living in an egalitarian environment isn't the same as having more freedom or being free from coercion or being free from violence, it more or less means that no individual has extra power or authority. The Hadza abide and enforce their own cultural institutions through third-party punishment where the most common means of preemptively resolving a possibly violent conflict is for a band to split and form separate camps. If neither party wants to budge then there might be a problem.

You generally require a group to survive in regions such as the Hadza occupy, and survival necessitates daily hunting and foraging, which makes all individuals beholden to the norms of Hadza groups. Lacking any formal institutions which preserve justice (having only informal institutions and sanctions such as third party/collective violence done upon individuals who transgress norms) is as binding as it is liberating; there are no formal laws or authority above you or anyone else, and as such maintaining the right reputation is critical for your own protection. The fact that the Hadza have a territory large enough to permit the splitting of groups is a necessary environmental reality which allows for the violence avoidance of group-splitting in the first place. Resource scarcity or overpopulation which could threaten this mechanic might lead to catastrophe.

Each Hadza male has access to poisoned arrows, and the possibility of being shot in one's sleep or ambushed on a hunt is very real to the Hadza. Disputes over women and other transgressions can lead to fatal conflict, and even if the killer is known to the group there may be nothing done about it. That reality makes it less possible for one Hadza male to try and dominate others and disincentives confrontation (thereby preserving their egalitarianism). Among the !Kung people (also hunter-gatherers), a group specifically known for it's egalitarianism, disputes over women have at times so often proven fatal that betrothing girls as young as eight was done to prevent them from arising in the first place. The Hadza and !Kung might be extraordinarily egalitarian compared to other groups (especially us), but they actually have to walk a very fine line of somewhat rigid survival practices required to endure the environment and their unique sets of cultural norms and practices which maintain them. Hunter-gatherers do not seem to be safer from violence or injustice, nor more autonomous in the sense of having more freedom (everyone just has the same amount of it). Egalitarian societies almost by definition don't have sadistic leaders (a point I was applying to all human groups in general), but shit happens. It's true that agrarian culture and the social/wealth/power stratification/population density it leads to also tends to lead to more brutal violence (hunter-gatherers can usually just split up and move away), but it is indeed a myth that hunter-gatherers are completely free from the ubiquitous human problems of violence and injustice

Sources:
"Conflict, Violence, and Conflict Resolution in Hunting and Gathering Societies" (Lomas, 2011)
Egalitarian Societies (Woodburn, 1982)

I recommend reading the article by William Lomas as it very directly addresses the issue we seem to be having: I'm not adhering to the old school primitive savage stereotype that portrays all hunter-gatherers as violent and backward; I'm rebuking the newer stereotype that portrays all hunter-gatherer society as better than western culture by virtue of innate peace and harmony with nature, or in terms of degrees of freedom or freedom from coercion.

They have lower rates of suicide than western civilisations which I take to be about the clearest measure of whether the people are happy or not. — Pseudonym

Suicide and suicide trends aren't necessarily a measure of a civilization's merits. But also, citation please.

They do not exploit their children, force them into marriages, commit war crimes, have sadistic leaders, torture people, kill anyone for ritualistic or superstitious reasons, nor waste their time on non-productive activities to the extent Western civilisations do — Pseudonym

Different groups do different things. #Notallhuntergatherers, sure, but I have yet to see the shining example of a morally flawless hunter-gatherer society that has higher standards of justice than the contemporary west. Ritualized killings, violence, and comparative equivalents amounting to crimes against humanity (war-crimes), have at times been practiced by different hunter-gatherer groups. The line is quite blurry as to what constitutes a true hunter-gatherer society, so if you could name your standard that might help advance the discussion. Many Amazonian groups practice tribal warfare involving stark levels of violence (surprise attacks in villages involving the beating, rape, and murder; torture). The Yanomami people for instance dabble in agriculture, so perhaps you wouldn't accept them as an example of an imperfect hunter-gatherer group? Western presence in the Amazon region may be one of the root causes of exacerbated violence among the Yanomami (by causing resource scarcity and anxiety among groups mainly), but it also shows how fragile indigenous societal systems can actually be. When the Hadza people inevitably face enough loss of livable territory that allows them to avoid conflict by moving away (or some other crisis which forces settlement such as population growth) then they too will experience rising levels of inter and intra-group violence as their existing conflict resolution mechanisms are strained or no longer function. They'll have to create more formal means of keeping the peace and determining what is just in given conflicts. They might need to begin farming which will entail an overhaul of their cultural interpretation of "property". Failures will occur.

They are not facing starvation, working all the time to get food, struggling to feed everybody any more than western civilisations. — Pseudonym

It's somewhat true that no matter how good we get at producing food, population size can always grow (or shrink) to meet our ability to feed them. Unsurprisingly in general it is resource scarcity in environmental conditions which plays a significant role as a determinant of cultural adaptations and regulating population size. Relative food scarcity among the Hadza makes food sharing an optimal strategy, which can explain why their social sanctions enforce sharing meat as a norm.

Perhaps what you truly think is a disaster is agriculture in and of itself? Agriculture means settlement, property and wealth stratification, which leads to conflict and disproportionate power, and occasionally abuses of that power or warfare over land. We could stay in environmental homeostasis as egalitarian hunter-gatherers, but we would need to accept different sets of rights, different living conditions, different risks/burdens, and different rewards.

They do not suffer from industrial diseases, heart disease, cancer, or any of the top ten causes of death to the extent Western cultures do. — Pseudonym

78% (pg. 21) of Hadza die from illness and disease though, and they live shorter lives on average. The Hadza have remarkably low levels of death from violence with homicide being responsible for only 3% of deaths, but in the west homocide is responsible for less than 1% of deaths. In addition, diseases with chronic and treatable symptoms can be much more successfully managed in the west using modern medicine.

If you wish to combat any of those claims you would need an example from a nomadic hunter-gatherer Community and evidence that it occurred more frequently than in Western civilisation, preferably from more than one source to eliminate bias. — Pseudonym

The Hadza, the !Kung, and Eskimo groups are three examples of nomadic hunter-gatherers which are far from perfect and statistically live less long, die more often due to violence, and have significantly higher child mortality rates, and the two latter groups additionally practice infanticide. Foraging horticulturalists like the Yanomami might be total disasters like the west though, as far as you're concerned. Clarification?

You have used the terms "backwards", "bored" you and accomplishing nothing". You've exaggerated negative traits without any attempt to quantify their frequency. You've made negative presumption about both lifestyle and motive without evidence. — Pseudonym

This is another misrepresentation (yawn). It's not presumptuous to say that reasons for infanticide are "backwards" (and I applied that observation to "minimalist groups and tribes of all orders"). The exact statement was "Infanticide is a word not heard often heard these days, but minimalist tribes and groups of all orders have practiced infanticide for all sorts of backwards reasons". From the Eskimos to ancient Greece, there are examples of many different types of groups practicing infanticide, including for reasons of superstition. In the contemporary west infanticide is viewed as a high crime, and that was the contrast I was pointing out.

P.S. I said "nothing else to bother accomplishing" in reference to the gambling habits of the Hadza people, and while there was some tongue in cheek with this statement, I did actually substantiate it. Hadza males spend most of their time in camp gambling, far more time than they spend gathering food and other necessities. "Boredom" is not a pejorative.

These are pejorative terms and actions for cultural traits which you show little understanding of or willingness to understand. You've taken the first negative description that comes along and generalised it at least to the extent that you feel capable of concluding it occurs more than it does in Western civilisation. At the very least that is an uncomfortable degree of bias in favour of your own culture, at worst it is racism. — Pseudonym

Yes, I know, I'm a bad person and I should feel bad, bla bla bla...

As I've already explained with citations, infanticide is an environmental adaptation which does occur more frequently among many peoples living traditional ways of live in harsh environments than it occurs in the contemporary west. Early death by violence and disease are well understood to be more frequent in non-western nations, with child mortality rate being an especially significant benefit that the contemporary west has over every other time and place. Child marriage and betrothal is not uncommon for a host of reasons among many indigenous groups, and though it may be their cultural norm and serve adaptive functions, it's still something that the west has laudably discontinued.

Modern medicine, electricity, running water, and education do not all come standard in the west. They are denied to huge swathes of the population, cannot be sustained using the technology we have. What planet are you living on where you think running water modern medicine and electricity are 'standard' benefits? Have you ever been to a third world country? — Pseudonym

There's some ambiguity in the term "western world" but I thought that we were referring to first world nations who have adopted contemporary western technology and standards, where food, medicine, and education are actually guaranteed human rights. We can indeed sustain these things given our steady technological improvements, and one day they might be available in every nation...

Right, so from which ethnography have you obtained your knowledge about the reasons for infanticide? — Pseudonym

Here's an article which covers a gamut of reasons for infanticide.

Here's an article covering the superstition based killing of twins in a region of India.

Here's another broad article for good measure.

As is clear, infanticide has been practiced throughout many many cultures and for various reasons, including socially constructed superstitious beliefs which you should have no problem ridiculing as backward.

Which ethnography describes sadistic leaders? — Pseudonym

My point was that small hunter gatherer groups can have sadistic leaders (a problem which large and small groups can share). I suppose I could argue that any leader who perpetuates child sacrifice is somehow sadistic to satisfy your request, but tribal peoples generally don't keep detailed histories so I'm short on names. It stands to reason that since some humans are sadistic, there is a chance in some of them gaining leadership authority in large and small groups alike. Genghis Khan springs to mind. Are nomads too dissimilar to hunter-gatherers?

Many people point to western society as disastrous because we have had to endure terrible leadership, and I'm pointing out that smaller groups and non-western groups can experience disasters of equal gravity but of smaller scale. Being ostracized from the group for superstitious reasons or forced or coerced into marriage by the authority wielding elders seems unethical, bordering on the sadistic.

Is the Khan fair game?

Which describes war crimes? — Pseudonym

Primarily I would say attacking and destroying neighboring groups is the main indigenous war-crime equivalent. Killing males and taking the females is a common way that has played out. Some other war-crimes and war-crime like equivalents would be mutilation, torture, cannibalism, the use of poison weaponry. These are not common among indigenous groups, but they exist within many of them (perhaps at a similar rate to which they are found in the west)

Once you have your citations, compare them to the weight of ethnographies showing absolutely nothing of the sort, then come back and we'll talk about your claim that the generalisations are not racist. — Pseudonym

I've not actually generalized in the way you think I have, and it would be nice if we could conduct this discussion without the additional topic of whether or not I am racist. My argument is that the contemporary west is the best civilization to live in. Yes this means I'm generalizing all other civilizations as not as good as the west, but it doesn't mean I'm saying every other civilization and human group has a sadistic war criminal demanding the life of every first born as a leader.

To portray the west as uniquely suffering from the aforementioned disadvantages and to thrust the idea of utopic hunter-gatherer problem-free life is special pleading; your ignoring the myriad of problems inherent in many indigenous lifestyles, idealizing your conception of hunter-gatherer life, and generally obfuscating by appealing to racism.

I can't debate with you if you're just going to make stuff up in support of your argument. I've provided you with ample evidence that hunter gatherer diets were both nutritious and reasonably secure (both things absent from at least a quarter of the modern population), yet you keep just presuming, without any evidence at all, that hunter-gatherers were permanently on the brink of starvation. Where is your evidence for this? — Pseudonym

When did I say "permanently on the brink of starvation"? Please don't exaggerate my position so far beyond what it is, or indeed you won't actually be debating with me.

Some hunter-gatherer groups, especially in jungle conditions, have practiced infanticide and twin infanticide because the mother cannot care for two young infants at the same time (time and resource constraints). This makes some sense because it is nearly impossible to store food in the jungle and so acquiring food is an on-going task which often requires moving from place to place once an area becomes depleted (a fact which can eventually lead to conflict). Not being able to care for two babies at the same time is a logistical disadvantage for mothers living in the jungle, and it can cost one of the babies its life. Many tribal groups don't actually consider babies to actually be people until they start exhibiting human like behavior like smiling and interacting. This works well as an obvious defense mechanism against the emotional pain of losing children so very often, and also makes it easier to commit infanticide for whatever reason.

My house is a necessity, yes. I'd probably die from exposure fairly quickly without it, and I work a 24hr week to pay the rent. And yes, I would quite happily give it all up to live in a primitive Eden, as the thousands of tribal peoples fighting for their land and traditional way of life rather than 'development' are doing right this moment. — Pseudonym

Don't you reckon you would regret not being able to read books or watch movies or travel great distances or receive modern medical care? You would have to marry one of your neighbors too!

Yes many indigenous people are fighting to prevent the destruction of their land and to preserve their cultures, but they're not exactly turning their noses up at western steel, dogs, motors, vaccines, and more. I understand why they want to maintain the old ways, and I laud their efforts if that's what will make them happy, but I wonder how long before their children pine for entry into the global economy. I'm fairly certain that a primitive Eden isn't actually what you want. Fruit isn't ripe all year round even in Eden; are you prepared to wake up and eat re-fried snake or boar or monkey for breakfast everyday?

Which ethnographies have you read from which to draw the conclusion that the Hadza are bored and achieve nothing worthwhile with their spare time. What efforts have you made to obtain a balanced account? For someone trying to convince me you're not racist you seem to be doing an awfully good job of sounding like one. — Pseudonym

Gambling is one of their most important activities because it allows them to transfer goods which are not available in all parts of their country in a way that does not create trade obligations which could lead to imbalances of trading/social power, and thereby maintains their egalitarian structure. It's literally one of the most important things they go about doing, why are you minimizing the important social accomplishment of gambling among the Hadza? What are you racist or something?

I skimmed through a few of the results when you linked me to a google search and called it a citation.

This one. Read it yourself?

"Hadza use a distinctive method for transmitting such personally owned objects between people which has profound consequences for their relationships. In any large camp men spend most of their time gambling with one another, far more time than is spent obtaining food. They gamble mainly for metal-headed hunting arrows, both poisoned and non-poisoned, but are also able to stake knives, axes, beads, smoking pipes, cloth and even occasionally a container of honey which can be used in trade. A few personally-owned objects cannot be staked, because, Hadza say, they are not sufficiently valuable. These are a man's hunting bow, his non-poisoned arrows without metal heads used for hunting birds and small animals, and his leather bag used for carrying his pipes and tobacco, arrowheads and other odds and ends. These objects excluded from gambling share two characteristics: first, they maintain a man's capacity to feed and protect himself and secondly, they are made from materials available in every part of the country..."

So, if in a debate about the merits of white and blacks I just "pointed out" that some black people are sadistic, that wouldn't be racist? Afterall, some black people are sadistic, do you want specific examples? — Pseudonym

When did we start having a debate about whites and blacks?

This I would like some examples of, preferably from a reasonably wide range of anthropologists so as to avoid bias. — Pseudonym

I've already given examples of exploitation of the innocent: infanticide and arranged/child marriage.

Here's the source.

Tent in the woods, thanks. I guess we're all different, quel surprise. So what was the justification for the West imposing it's culture on everyone else whether they want it or not again? — Pseudonym

I've never said the west is justified in imposing its anything on anything. You're attacking a boogie-straw-man.

The original comment you made said that we treated our prisoners better than the Hadza treated their elderly. I pointed out that vast numbers of Hadza elderly voluntarily choose to die rather than be in settled accommodation, let alone a prison cell. You're imposing your own culturally generated world view on others who do not share it. — Pseudonym

Imposing my view on them? What?

After spending a life as a bushman, a basic permanent shack somewhere would seem pretty depressing indeed. They're not being offered full time care in hospices. Since they would be too big of a burden to stay with their family, and because the settlements are so depressing and un-stimulating to begin with, I'm not surprised they choose death.

A piano player prefers the piano, but my statement of "better" is based around objectively measurable statistics and attributes such as child mortality rate, life expectancy and in this case how well we treat the lowest among us (we can afford to keep even our prisoners alive and give them some quality of care while infanticide and "geriatricide" are necessary considerations for peoples living in harsh environments)

No, I've directly addressed your point. Actual bushmen who are given the actual choice of a 'tent in the woods' (without geriatric care) or a house in the settlement (with the sort of medical care most of the world have access to) voluntarily kill themselves. They make their choice in just about the most clear way anyone can. Your cultural values place more on prolonging life than on freedom and dignity, their cultural values are the opposite, but instead of accepting cultural differences, you presume they're all 'backwards'. I've generously termed this cultural bias, but it's basically racism. — Pseudonym

You keep thoroughly and blatantly misrepresenting my views (I never said people who prefer traditional ways of life are backwards, I said "infanticide is practiced for all sorts of backwards reasons") and you keep using those misrepresentations to call me racist over and over again. I could care less how long or passionately you make appeals to racism or my character because it doesn't address the subject being discussed. For all you know I'm a proud racist and pointing that out doesn't actually reveal anything new or relevant to the subject matter. Back to the debate then?

An ad hoc settlement set up for struggling indigenous people doesn't come with all the perks and freedoms of living in the west. They're at best transitory and designed to quickly be replaced by something more developed, and in reality people languish in them. The fact that elders don;t want to move into these places reflects their attachment to old ways. Are the children committing suicide just as often? In most of the documentaries I've seen the youth are much more optimistic and eager about moving to the new settlements because it gives them an opportunity to be a part of a larger world and some of its novel boons.

I'm not saying that everyone has to subjectively prefer the west, I'm saying the west is objectively more preferable if lifespan, child mortality rate, and access to modern healthcare are important to you.

Firstly again, you're confusing your own cultural bias for objective judgement. Who are you to say when adulthood begins? Because we postpone it to 18 or 20 that makes it right for every culture in the world to do the same? — Pseudonym

According to our western moral and medical prowess, a young girl being married off deprives her of sexual freedom, presents a real threat to her physical, sexual, and mental health, and denies her opportunities for education and independence. I simply cannot condone the practice of marrying at 14. I know why it is done and why it can even be seen as a necessary adaptation, but it is still a disadvantage; it's regrettable. It's not just some cultural fact that we should just accept has no normative component. It's a bad thing that they have to marry so young and if they can easily cease the practice, they ought to. Yes I think the right of children to not be coerced into marriage is universal.

Secondly, again, you've selected just one ethnography to condemn the whole way of life, ignoring the contrary data, and ignoring, even in your own evidence, the key word "begin". Are you suggesting that in the west children do not "begin" to work at age 14-16? No paperounds, no shop work, no household chores? — Pseudonym

They are not expected to perform tasks critical to the existence of the household, no. They don't need to put food on the table or pay rent. Those extra 5ish years of freedom western children enjoy has got to be worth something.

P.S, I'm not condemning "the whole way of life". You said hunter-gatherer children are not forced to do anything at all, and so I pointed out that actually they're forced to do some fairly non-trivial shit. Marrying young isn't a stranger to the west though; basically 100 years ago it was considered normal for women to marry as young as 12 (basically at puberty). The treatment of women in general is something the west has made slow progress in, and continues to do so, but through most of the world most of the time women and girls have been second class. Female infanticide is more prevalent than male infanticide because men are seen as more valuable in various contexts (environmental, cultural, and social), and the same reason is why marrying off daughters young is such a common theme exhibited by all races of humans.

Yes, that's almost exactly what they're saying. The lifestyle you are using for comparison cannot be sustained, the nutritional security, medicine, technology, police forces that you laud are all bought at the cost of half the world living in relative poverty and no future for your great-grandchildren. — Pseudonym

The rest of the world wasn't exactly plunged into poverty the moment the west became powerful and the benefits are not completely one-sided (they're fully stratified). I've heard that the top 1% controls up to half of the global wealth, so perhaps with changes we could have western civilization and reduce relative wealth inequality?

The rest of the world is modernizing, and with it comes better access to the basic advantages that contemporary western society can offer. Making improvements is what we do.

I'm confident that the Earth is going to be here in 100 years, and that humans and western society can adapt.

1. Drop the cultural bias and take people's preferences on their words and actions. The vast majority of tribal people offered 'development' freely are choosing to fight for their traditional way of life instead. You might not prefer it, they do. — Pseudonym

Just because the west is a safer place where you and your children are likely to live much longer and more free from disease/injury induced suffering, doesn't mean everyone has to actually prefer it.

What cultural bias? When I say that an adult marrying a 14 year old is morally wrong, is that just racism cultural bias that I should be ashamed of?

Compare hunter-gatherer lifestyles with a sustainable average Western one, not the unsustainable lifestyle of the richest 10%, and not some optimistic techno-utopia that you've no sound reason to believe will ever happen. — Pseudonym

I've never appealed to the boons of the top 10% or alluded to any techno-utopia; modern medicine, electricity, running water, and education all come standard in the west. Meanwhile you're alluding to the apocalypse...

Yes, basically the presentation of a way of life created almost entirely by white people as being some kind of pinnacle of civilisation whilst presenting all the remnant tribal peoples (who just happen to be almost entirely non-white) as backwards, violent, superstitious animals scraping a living from the dirt, who need to 'educated' out of their uncivilised ways, is just racist colonialism — Pseudonym

The only thing I've said is backwards are reasons for infanticide. Violent, superstitious, scraping a living from the dirt, need to be educated out of their wayss: these are all your words.

I'm saying the contemporary west is the best we've ever had it, I'm not saying any and every other civilization is therefore lower than dirt.

I'll see your racist colonialism, and I'll raise you emotional postmodernism.

This seems to me to be the bulk of your argument, apart from a few technical mistakes which I will pick up on later, you seem to be saying that, yes, hunter-gatherers were more egalitarian, ate a more nutritious diet, were less stressed, and less prone to kill themselves or die from industrial diseases, but it's worth losing all that because we live longer, have lower infant mortality rates, and can hoard more stuff than we actually need if we want to. So;

Firstly, that's not your call to make and Western Civilisation is nothing if not all consuming. If some group of people made that call and decided they wanted to take the advantages you list over the disadvantages you admit to, then good luck to them, I'm not about to claim that I have such prophetic abilities that I know what path is best for humanity. But that's not how it goes is it. Those people who want those advantages gain them by destroying utterly anyone who makes a different choice. Rather than try to speak for the people who are destroyed in the name of 'Civilisation', I'll let then speak for themselves. — Pseudonym

Some hunter gatherers were more "egalitarian" meaning they had less stratification in social powers, but life can still suck in a world where we're all equal. We have less nutritious diets on average, but we also have more reliable diets on average (freedom from starvation and food insecurity). Hunter-gatherers seem less likely to die from suicide industry caused diseases, but they're more likely to die from regular diseases which are treatable in the west or to die from injury. Living longer is worth something, and our children not dying is worth more. Hoarding the stuff we need like clever ants is how we got here.

Secondly, that's the point I made earlier (although you may not have read my earlier posts). You seem to presume that the disadvantages are necessary to gain the advantages. Are they? On what grounds? — Pseudonym

Problems will inevitably arise because we cannot predict all the ramifications of our actions. We generally choose the actions which we think yield the most advantages and the least disadvantages, and failure sometimes happens before we discover something robust.

Super-bugs (infectious bacteria) in hospitals are novel threats of our own creation: un-forseen ramifications of overusing antibiotics. We probably should have used them sparingly, but to be absolutely safe we would have to not use them whatsoever.

If what you want is a world with no disadvantages then prepare for disappointment...

There is virtually no evidence at all that children starve or are malnourished in tribal societies outside of the pressures caused directly by development. None of the rigourous ethnographies from early contact report starvation or malnutrition, this is simply not true — Pseudonym

Certain Eskimo groups, for instance, practice infanticide because it has adaptive merit in their harsh environment. I imagine hunter-gatherer children generally didn't die of malnutrition and starvation but instead actual infanticide, and for reasons other than just food insecurity.

The Hadza you refer to work an average 14 hour week obtaining all their food and necessities, and they live in a bloody desert! The idea that hunter-gatherers are working every hour under the sun to just about scrape enough food to live is again simply untrue, not even in the harsh environments they have been pushed to by early farming, we can only imagine how little time must have been spent hunting in the rich environments later taken by early agrarian societies. — Pseudonym

How much time do you spend obtaining and processing your food? Is your house, computer, and internet a necessity? Would you give it all up if only you had a primitive Eden?

We spend less time getting our necessities. Farms are so efficient that many of us can spend no time doing anything productive at all. Granted, the Hadza, have 2 hour work days, and the rest of the time they sit around gambling in boredom (metal arrow heads, knives, honey and such), with nothing else to bother accomplishing.

That's not what you said though is it? You said "Small groups can have sadistic charismatic leaders who do noting but exploit. Small groups experience intra/inter-group violence and warfare, with the only convention against total injustice (war-crimes) being tradition if you're lucky (though tradition can support injustice just as easily)...Disease and early natural death affect non-western societies much more than the west, owing to lack of medicinal understanding and low living standards. Infanticide is a word not heard often heard these days, but minimalist tribes and groups of all orders have practiced infanticide for all sorts of backwards reasons (security, superstition, legacy)".

That's not just "pointing out", that violence and infanticide are inherent in tribal communities, that judging them, 'sadisitc', 'exploit', 'war-crimes', 'low living standards', 'backwards reasons'. That's what's racist. — Pseudonym

But it's true that small groups can experience these problems, just as western civilization can and has experienced these problems. Do you want specific examples?

Pointing out that leaders of small groups can wind up being sadistic is not racist. Cultural practices which exploit the innocent exist among some indigenous peoples and it's not racist to point this out. "low living-standards" simply is not racist, especially in the context of my point about early death due to living conditions. "Backwards reasons" was in reference to reasons for infanticide which are downright abominable, such as the killing of twins for superstitious reasons.

I'm pointing out that indigenous, ancient, hunter-gatherer, and otherwise tribal life doesn't guarantee you justice, comfort, or freedom. The west doesn't guarantee it either, but it does better on average.

Again, this is just showing your, let's generously call it cultural bias, rather than racism. — Pseudonym

A bit late to try and temper your rebuke...

You simply presume that because you would rather be alive at 70 (even if in a prison cell with no freedom at all) that everyone would also make that choice, so you scoff at cultural differences like geriatricide. If you found evidence of the elderly being murdered, being offered the choice of a shorter life in the wild or a longer life cooped up in a cell and them taking the latter, then you'd have a point. In reality, Bushman elders have one of the highest suicide rates in the geographic are when they are forcibly settled. If they prefer a longer life in a cell to a shorter one in the wild, how do you explain the sky-rocketing suicide rates? — Pseudonym

A prison cell?

Seems like a false dichotomy. I would prefer not to die of exposure because that's the cultural and therefore justified norm. I'll take a hospice over a tent in the woods any-day. How about you?

You've decided to impugn my character instead of addressing my point that bushmen cannot afford to care for their elderly like we can, and while we could always do better than we currently do, we sure beat the pants off a tent in the woods. You've basically just said that bushmen not being able to care for the elderly (whose bodies tend to deteriorate earlier than ours as a consequence of the lifestyle) doesn't matter because they want to be euthanized anyway.

Regarding the separate alleged issue of bushmen elders committing suicide when forcibly settled, I'l going to answer by saying that their suicide might have something to do with being forcibly settled.

What has a graph going back to 1820 showing how many people attend school and can read and write got to do with anything we've been talking about? — Pseudonym

It has to do with the average life that our children lead. In place of an education children have fewer options. They are forced to take up the trades of their parents and are generally more vulnerable to the whims of their culture and environment. Having no other option but to herd your fathers cattle or accept an arranged marriage is probably a less fulfilling childhood than getting an education in the modern west. Before you label me a bigot or some such, to be clear I'm not saying that every non-western culture practices arranged marriage or uses their children for labor instead of offering them freedom and an education (let alone better odds of making it past age 5 than a coin flip).

So, you're just completely ignoring the evidence I gave you that hunter-gatherer children are not forced to do anything at all, let alone labour, and the average age of childbirth among the Awa, for example, is 22 — Pseudonym

Perhaps my use of the word "children" is liberal, but I include teenagers in my definition. Here's a quote from the article you cited. "Girls are around 14 years old before they begin regular food gathering and water- and wood-collecting. This is in spite of the fact that they may be married before this age. Boys are 16 years old or over before they begin serious hunting. Children do amazingly little work.”

So they play all day every day during the time they would be getting a primary education, until 14 and 16 when marriage and work starts.

"By 2012, the equivalent of 1.6 Earths was needed to provide the natural resources and services humanity consumed in one year." - WWF Living Planet Report. We absolutely do need 1 and a half earths to sustain our lifestyle. So where's the other half an earth coming from? I admire your optimism, I really do, but where is all this progress? — Pseudonym

1.6 planets?

How would that even work?

I'm confused, is WWF saying that we've taken out a loan on another half a planet?

I'm sorry it's just a really silly quote. We were able to harvest a certain amount of energy and it only took one Earth. I suppose if you just count up all the energy we consume from non-renewable sources and compare it to all renewable sources you can rationalize the statement, but it's still quite uninformative.

I'm getting the sense that you think the west is on the brink of catastrophe. Is that why hunter-gather life in perpetual homeostasis with nature is so much better than modernity?

I find the Candian "living tree" (an ongoing interpretative process) metaphor and the American constitutional originalism extremes to both be rather silly. Like everything of interest, the answer is mired in the complex middle.

While Canadian constitutionalism is the story of a small bird aimlessly searching for its real mother (since we fell leaped out of the royal nest that is), by comparison American constitutional identity and interpretation is very much rigid, stubborn and immobile.

In truth both countries have made continual improvements and amendments as their culture, people, and circumstances change and demand adaptation. In their own way, both nations have engaged in reinterpretation while also maintaining original intentions as normative bases for constitutional sovereignty. Within that process, a conservative mind will laud originalism and see the virtue of a constitution as a binding limit against possible future tyranny, and a progressive or reformist mind will see originalism as the binding us to the tyranny of the past. The "living tree" metaphor is likewise criticized as open to arbitrary changes in future interpretation, and supporters point out that it frees contemporary populations from the arbitrary whims and perhaps poorly chosen values of the past.

In my own view, we do need to respect the original intent of our laws, especially the "highest laws" of the land, and very important laws should not be changeable on mere whim. It should be difficult to alter both the intent and content of constitutional laws and amendments, but it mustn't be too difficult, or impossible, lest we have no democracy to speak of.

When Canada finally gained the right to alter its own constitution acts, it abandoned one aspect of original interpretation and intent in search of its own sovereignty (it abandoned the idea that it needs British consent to change its constitution), and that was a good thing, but it also decided (at least on paper) to keep the original intent of various treaties and agreements between the British monarch and "first nation" indigenous Canadians, which was also a good thing (many people don't know, but Canada wasn't exactly formed through conquest of indigenous groups, but rather through treaties and agreements with them). It took Canada a long time to find it's own constitutional identity (it's still searching in truth), perhaps too long, which might explain why Canadian constitutional law is so infatuated with the living tree metaphor.

America was birthed in righteous rebellion, and they eloquently articulated exactly what they wanted and what their constitutional identity was in words that are still admired to this day ("All men are created equal", "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; freedom from tyranny), and reinterpretation of these original words and to whom they should apply has definitely been a good thing (applying them to women and non-land-owning-whites). As new social issues and values rise, it is the prerogative of a given democratic public to have a say in what should be changed. Suffrage for non land owning white males is one example, abolition of slavery is another, minority and women's suffrage is another, and state level equal rights amendments are a great example. Gay marriage, abortion and transgender rights are also things we the people should have a say about. We need to think very carefully about what is best for us in the world of today, and these decisions are not easy. Calling for a broad conservation of historically recent values is good in some situations, and bad in others; it depends on the issue and the value.

No, because the entire sample is biased in favour of bones left in places where they were either buried or otherwise preserved from the elements. This represents a specific sub-section of all deaths of unknown significance. We cannot extrapolate the cause of all deaths from a subset of deaths which we know is not a stratified sample — Pseudonym

You're basically saying archeology and anthropology are hopeless endeavors because we don't have perfectly representative remnants. Depending on the group of humans we're talking about, remains and ruins can indeed tell us about how the people lived, even if they're incomplete. I don't know why you think we need every bone from every individual to paint a picture of a given civilization...

I see, you can't come up with an example to prove your claims so you ask me to. If I were to make the claim that, overall, black people were more violent than whites and then refuse to provide any evidence but simply say "you prove they're not" how seriously would you take my argument?. I'm nonetheless happy to provide some examples. — Pseudonym

At first I thought you believed traditional ways of life are just the bee's knees, but now I see you think it's racist to say western civilization is somehow better than any other civilization.

Is that correct?

Metric 1 - Suicide. The leading cause of death in young men of most Western societies, in the top ten causes of death among virtually all age groups. So rare among hunter-gatherers that most don't even have a word for it in their language. — Pseudonym

We also have terrorism and serial killers too, which are also somewhat novel problems that only seem to express in modern conditions. Rich, famous, and legacy secure, Leo Tolstoy was none the less stricken with suicidal thoughts (he couldn't see any meaning/purpose), while his peasant servants considered it to be the ultimate taboo (and not only on religious grounds). Should we take from this that being Leo Tolstoy or being rich and famous constitutes a disaster? If he did commit suicide, does that mean his life was objectively a disaster or not worth living or that the lives of his servants were more worthwhile?

If I had to make a serious guess as to why suicide rates are increasing, I would say it has to do with a rise in emotional and mental stress, and/or a reduction in forces which have previously mitigated suicide. Working in a cubicle is almost certainly less emotionally healthy than hunting or working your own farm (and can seem bereft of the kind of existential pat on the back traditional living can provide), but in the end the boons of centralized economies and long distance trading means working in cubicles leads to fewer of our children starving or suffering malnutrition.

Without mines there are no mining accidents, no black lung, but without mines there are no hypodermic needles et al. An individual miner, especially one with black lung, might judge the whole endeavor unjust on the count of their own circumstances, and this is why we pay miners good wages in the first place. I will be the first to say that many miners and office workers deserve better pay for their physical and mental/emotional sacrifices. I'll agree that burdens and benefits can be more evenly distributed (which might make life seem more just to those who would otherwise lose hope) but we're still getting better returns on our burdens in the world of today than in the past (food security and medicine are undeniable benefits).

Metric 2 - Equality. Here is a link to a paper describing the way hunter-gatherers are predominantly egalitarian, it not necessarily the best example just one I happened to have the link to, but it gets the point across. — Pseudonym

This is a link to a google scholar search, so I'm not sure which paper you're referencing. The few first results talk about how very specific and stringent environmental and cultural conditions seem to be necessary to produce an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, where many hunter-gatherer groups lacking those conditions (like the absence of recognized property rights, or environmental circumstances making sharing a survival necessity) along with groups practicing traditional agrarianism do have significant levels of inequalities.

There are some really groovy small groups, to be sure, who are downright lousy with equality, but they don't tend to offer much else. As one of the papers you pointed me to detailed, when it came time for the Hadza people to move camp, a beloved elder who is too sick to travel was left there on her own with some supplies, knowing she could not fend for herself, to die. Perhaps if they had property rights, established farms and infrastructure (along with the ensuing inequalities), there would have been a place for her to be cared for.

Metric 3 - Health. Here is a meta study bringing together much of the data demonstrating the catastrophic effect on health brought about by a move to subsistence farming (the state of at least 25% of the current world population). — Pseudonym

Meditating on the side of a mountain all day and living off of dates and goat milk is probably more healthy than living in an air polluted city and eating process foods everyday, but the medical knowledge we have more than makes up for it. Without the cities we wouldn't have the medical and human capital that makes that possible, and our massively increased average lifespans and low infant mortality rates are testament to this. It may very well be true that when a society begins practicing agrarianism that there is an initial nutritional deficit, a learning curve, but even while the nutritional deficit is present, the populations tend to explode in size and are able to invest energy into other things where before they had to spend all their time hunting, foraging, and processing.

Maybe it's fair to say that western society has been a nutritional disaster? This might be true, but it's been a atomic bomb of calorific success.

What I can't beat western societies on is lifespan, infant mortality, death in childbirth, and death in war. I'm not claiming hunter-gatherers live in some kind of utopia, but this idea of some violent backward savage is borderline racist (not you, the view your espousing). — Pseudonym

When we're speaking broadly about non-contemporary non-western civilization, it's really not possible to generalize and there's no reason to suggest I've done so. It is quite relevant to point out that infanticide and violence are inherent in some non-western ways of life. Calling this statement borderline racist is mere hand-waving. Eliminating violence and infanticide to the degrees that we have is the inverse of a disaster.

If the civilization I asked you to point to is the Hadza, then I'll point out that while they have higher degrees of certain kinds of equality, in some ways we treat the lowest members of our society (criminals) better than they can afford to treat their most beloved.

For their egalitarianism to hold, they all need to have the means of directly coercing one another (to overcome conflict of course), and so while nobody seems to have rights above anyone else, justice might be entirely absent. If a Hadza hunter doesn't share the best parts of a kill with his fellow hunters, then violence might be done upon him for such an inegaliratian faux-pas. "Altruistic punishment" they call it, and in the case of the Hadza, it's required to induce the sharing which acts as buffer against food insecurity.

Proof — Pseudonym

I'll demonstrate that it stands to reason with the following:



Not being deprived of education generally means not being engaged in labour of some kind, and it also tends to absolve them (especially girls) of an economic/cultural/traditional need to marry at what we consider to be an extremely young age. These are in my mind the most prevalent forms of child exploitation to begin with, and contemporary western values which abhor them are in line with my own.

Again, I'm not suggesting that things are not getting better, I'm arguing that the concept of things having been only progressively worse in the past is false. Things got worse and are now getting slowly better again (in some areas). No children are exploited in the vast majority of hunter-gather societies, they are left entirely to the own devices and have the freedom to do exactly as they choose. See here — Pseudonym

At what exact time in which exact society were things "better"?

Children being left to play and learn wholesome social norms in hunter-gatherer groups isn't quite the whole story.

Again, this is without proof. I've provided evidence for the egalitarianism in Hunter-gather societies, are you suggesting that all the authors contained within the entire meta study were simply making it up? — Pseudonym

Reduced injustice and egalitarianism aren't quite the same things. I consider injustice to mainly exist in the form of unnecessary harm done to one person by another. Just because a tribe has no leadership hierarchy or individuals with special rights (tribal egalitarianism) doesn't make them free from conflict, violence, and injustice. Egalitarianism in our rights is a great ideal (it's one the west is striving toward), and I would much rather have much rights protected by a police force and a legal system than at the tip of my own arrow or the torches of a mob.

Well, you have very low standards, and a poor grasp of maths. If using one and a half of the world's sustainable resources is passable, then how do you propose we continue? Where's the other half a planet we need? — Pseudonym

As technology allows us to get more efficient returns and explore and exploit entirely new resources, we're also reducing the number of our births. We don't need another half a planet, we just need to not run out of oil before we can diversify away from it.

You've just repeated the same assertions without any evidence. Repeating a thing doesn't make it any more true. You do realise your graph only goes back to 1550? Modern humans first evolved about 200,000 years before then. Your graph is missing a bit. — Pseudonym

Granted, I lost my information on the Civilization of Atlantis.

It would be themselves if the universe was solipsistic so no. If the universe was not solipsistic, then it would be better characterized as an angel of enlightenment.

Well, if solipsism grants absolute certainty, and someone was validly absolutely certain that they were in a solipsistic universe, then they by definition would not doubt.

But, maybe they accidentally bonk their head on itself one day and get confused, and begin doubting in error :)

But, surely that's illogical. — Posty McPostface

Solipsists cannot logically reason that they are in a solipsistic universe using the following argument:

P1: I would have certainty in a solipsistic universe
P2: I am in a solipsistic universe
C1/P3: Therefore I have certainty
C2: Therefore I am in a solipsistic universe

If we doubt that we live in a solipsistic universe , then we're not sure if we have certainty (heh). The circularity here is informally called "begging the question", as the conclusion is fully contained in one of the premises. The premise/assumption that we live in a solipsistic universe cannot be magically self-reinforcing. If we doubt it, the conclusion is no longer valid.

By doubting that the world is full of absolute certainty to begin with, of course!

Can a solipsist doubt their beliefs? Yes.

I might have said that a solipsist can only become a solipsist by doubting that anything they perceive did not originate with themselves. I also might have said that they can only become a solipsist by assuming that everything they perceive does originate within themselves.

One man's assumed positive is another man's doubted negative.

1. You can't possibly know this, or even reasonably infer it. For most of human history (the vast majority) all we have to go on are a few scraps of bones from very specific burial circumstances and the limited non-perishable remains. How on earth are you sustaining a conclusion that the people whose lives are hinted at by these scant remains are "objectively" worse of than the average Westerner? — Pseudonym

We can actually learn quite a bit about how people lived from their scant remains and ruins. The bones themselves tell us about the age of the deceased (and in numbers, their average lifespan), and the condition of the bones can tell us about causes of death like violence or child-birth (and in numbers average cause of death). Artifacts tell us about technology culture, lifestyle, religion, etc...

Overwhelmingly, technology and prosperity correlates with increased lifespans and reduced mortality rates. We know that physically stressful lives and a lack of adequate medicine reduces our lifespans on average, and we also know that no other society has been as affluent and technologically/medicinally advanced as the west

We know from anthropological research that on the whole, ancient tribal life was rife with early demise and hardship. It would be exhausting to present every applicable metric to actually prove my point, so perhaps you could point out a non-western civilization which fares better than our own in a specific metric of your choosing?

One of the major issues with "western" culture is inequality. It would be no surprise to find that, in such a system, the "average" person is reasonably comfortable, the question is whether it is just that this is bought at the expense of the fact that the least comfortable is an 11 year old child forced to work 12 hours a day stitching shoes so that this "average" person can lead their "comfortable" life. — Pseudonym

In societies of larger scale, proportionally more injustice is likely to exist. Child marriage is more common in ancient and non-western cultures, but that doesn't condemn the entirety of every non-western enterprise. I'll defend my point by arguing that in the contemporary west (and afflicted third worlds) the average child is less likely to die early or be exploited than in the past. Public education is an invention of the late 19th century, and while in some parts of the world children are being exploited, the western education which has allowed you to raise objection is spreading fast and may soon become available to them, along with technology and affluence. We're making moves to bring a universal end to the exploitation of children; things are getting better.

There will inevitably be injustice in the world. At times western civilization has exacerbated injustice, and at times it has abated it. We're currently at a place where injustice has been reduced more than ever before, and while injustice persists in some of its parts we need not do away with the whole.

I don't understand your logic here. You seem to be saying that because there is some good in western culture we should continue with it along the same unaltered path. — Pseudonym

I'm saying that if there are parts of western civilization worth maintaining, then we should maintain them.

I was trying to contrast with what appears to be your own logic: "because there are disasters of justice in western civilization, it should not be continued". If it holds that "western civilization is a disaster", then it seems to follow that it ought to be undone.

I see utility in the way you go on to talk of good and bad parts of western civilization which can be distinguished and appraised individually (some parts of western civilization have been downright successful). Else-wise, how do we tell if something has been an overall disaster or success? If it falls short of perfection, is it therefore disaster? If it manages to achieve an iota of success or merely endure, is it therefore successful?

I don't rightly know...

This is a very substantial underplaying of the situation we face almost to the point of being ridiculous. Global warming could very well make half the world uninhabitable, we are presiding over just about the largest mass extinction ever known, 12 million hecatres of previously productive farmland is now in "Seriously Degraded" condition according to the UN (a state from which there is currently no known remedy), we dump 2.2 billion tons of waste into the ocean every year, air pollution kills 18000 people a day, availability of fresh drinking water has halved in the last 50 years...I mean, do I have to go on? It's just absurd to suggest that these are 'just one of the obstacles that always arise with any group which carries on long enough. We lived as hunter-gatherers for at least 200,000 years without having any appreciable impact on our ability to continue doing so. Western (or modern) civilisation has been around for barely a hundredth of that and is already using more than one and a half times the resources the earth can sustain over the next 50 years.

Yes, we could overcome all these problems technologically, but where are the solutions? It's no good just wishful thinking, they have to come in time, not just eventually. If we're halving the available drinking water every 50 years we need technology to stop that right now, not at some point in the future. — Pseudonym

Woah, chill out, Thanos. Global population growth has been slowing since the 80's, and we're almost at 0%. We're vigorously researching new energy technology to replace oil, which is on the way out and also the main source of carbon emissions. We'll get there. Yes climate change can be bad, and people die from pollution, but without the pollution there is no infrastructure to support the 7+ billion people that currently exist. The global population went from 1 billion in 1800 (up from the ancient 300 million or so average) to over 7 billion. Unless the global population falls below 1 billion, or the average quality of life today falls below the average quality of life in 1800, we're still better off today.

Things could get worse and then maybe we can call the whole thing a disaster, but until then I think we're performing passably.

Show me some evidence, any evidence at all, for any of these wildly presumptive assertions being widespread in respect to nomadic hunter-gather communities. — Pseudonym

I have made no presumptive assertions. nomadic hunter-gatherer communities are not exempt from bad leadership, disease, famine, hardship (inducing infanticide), warfare, etc...

Warfare and bad leadership being equal (it depends on the time and place), disease, famine, hardship, infanticide, and premature death are all things that occur less frequently in the western world (and on average in the world of today) than any other society and globally at any other time. We have greatly extended lifespans thanks to medicine which can keep us alive through afflictions, and thanks to better living conditions which is an added health bonus.

Here's a graph showing the combined benefits of prosperity and medical advancement on female life expectancy:

I would like to ask if you can imagine a technologically advanced society that is not a disaster.

Is anything short of utopia not worth the effort?

Objectively, the average contemporary western citizen is better off than most other humans throughout all of history by every applicable metric. There have indeed been disasters: plagues; great wars; great depressions; colonialism; et cetra, and we can question whether or not these historical disasters morally condemn the whole enterprise, but we must also appraise the current situation we're in and what to do going forward. If western civilization is truly a thorough disaster, then we ought to stop perpetuating it (which is not possible without causing billions of deaths and immeasurable suffering/quality of life reduction).

If what we have now is in any way good or worth preserving, then we should continue progressing on the paths we're on as if western civilization is not a disaster. It should also be noted that as western civilization continues to progress we're getting better and better at avoiding unnecessary death and destruction. In my view, western civilization has been dealing with and successfully overcoming disasters, not becoming one.

Civilization is both a cause and effect of "disaster":

A group of humans improve their lot, and proliferate.

Unforeseen ramifications of proliferation lead to crises.

Crises are overcome, or they are not, and the group proliferates or declines.

The history of human groups and civilizations could be viewed as a process of natural selection where weak and maladaptive groups cease to exist while the strong and dynamic survive in spite of inevitable obstacles. Obstacles in food security, fuel security, reproductive security, physical security, environmental security, and so on, will inevitably rise if a group carries on existing long enough. Groups change, change their environment, and eventually obstacles emerge.

Small, ancient, and otherwise non-western civilizations are not exempt from internal and self-caused disasters either, and compared to the west they're downright fragile. Small groups can have sadistic charismatic leaders who do noting but exploit. Small groups experience intra/inter-group violence and warfare, with the only convention against total injustice (war-crimes) being tradition if you're lucky (though tradition can support injustice just as easily). Disease and early natural death affect non-western societies much more than the west, owing to lack of medicinal understanding and low living standards. Infanticide is a word not heard often heard these days, but minimalist tribes and groups of all orders have practiced infanticide for all sorts of backwards reasons (security, superstition, legacy), and so I say why not look at western civilization where infanticide is punished as an escape from disaster?

Child mortality rate in general is perhaps the most disastrous thing about all of human history, and if that is true then western civilization is the exact opposite of a disaster.

Was the universe created by purpose or by chance? — Devans99

I think it's about 1/1 000 000 that a benevolent god would force us all to claw and chomp the raw bit of reality in such a harsh world filled with things like child leukemia and the Ebola virus.

Factoring this in to your maths: .9375 x .0000001 x 100 = .0001 (rounding up).

That's a one in ten-thousand chance in my estimation.

This is clearly a case of projection on your part: you tell me I'm insisting on a misinterpretation and then you call me an anti-natalist without any suggestion of that on my par — NKBJ

Actually I pointed out your well repeated misinterpretation, and then explained why your continued misinterpretation suggests you're an anti-natalist.

More than once you presented my position as stating that we're morally obligated to breed farm animals and to reproduce, even going so far as to say I've argued against abortion, which is not a reasonable interpretation of anything I've said. I'm now characterizing your position as anti-natalist because as I've explained, unless many farm animals are harvested at some point we could never afford them to begin with, so to not harvest farm animals is to not breed them.

The thermodynamic necessity of harvesting our farm animals is why we're justified to eventually do so. Just because we need to harvest some or many of them doesn't make their lives not worth living.

And when you compare farmers to child-traffickers/rapists, you're pretty much confirming your anti-natalist position towards farm animals in strong emotional terms.

I have repeatedly said that putting animals on this planet is not immoral. Therefore putting humans on it is neither. The problem arises when you seek to cause them harm, and death counts as harm. — NKBJ

We seek to continue life, not to cause harm. If we invest our energy to produce nourishment with plants only, then we cannot waste any on breeding animals.

But it shows that you don't want to die, and neither does the pig, and that you would see something wrong in being killed...that's because it is wrong to kill someone for your own profit. — NKBJ

I see neither right nor wrong in the situation. The farmer does what nature permits them, and so does the pig. It's an evolutionary contrived exchange made necessary by thermodynamic limitations; prey and predator, just with much more sophisticated predators. The pig wants to live and the farmer wants to continue being a farmer and get a return on their investment (less they risk bankruptcy), so the pig tries to escape and the farmer tries to harvest the pig. If the pig can clear obstacles before it, then it can possibly live free (unlikely unless it is a robust enough breed) and maybe even find intergenerational purchase and become the grandparent of a new invasive species of boar, if the farmer clears their own hurtles, then they play a part in the continuation of human civilization, which inexorably demands suffering as payment.

Your own circumstances matter not in the least here. Whine to your doctor about it. Until you show me some scientific evidence about how this happens to people and not just you your personal "experience" cannot be used in this discussion. Not sure why that's so hard to wrap your head around? If I told you that being vegan cured my cancer, I should hope you wouldn't just take my word for it either. It's just hearsay. — NKBJ

Your compatriot Chatter-bears kept asking if I ate meat myself, which is why I brought it up originally, but it has relevance to my central argument:

Planning and purchasing a nutritionally adequate vegan diet might be possible for me to do, but it is presently too difficult. Different people do have different nutritional requirements (do you want scientific evidence for that?). different people also have different means and access with which to purchase nutritionally adequate vegan diets (do you want scientific evidence for that?). As a society, at present, we are not yet able to pull off the logistical miracle of delivering a nutritionally adequate plant-based diet to everyone for the host of reasons I've previously went in to and more.

Medical evidence shows that eating less meat or no meat is great for your health.

And I've already explained that being vegan does not have to cost more than being omnivorous... the price of either diet depends on your abilities to shop and cook and perhaps your location. — NKBJ

Medical evidence shows Americans in particular eat too much meat, and medical evidence shows that well planned diets result in improved health.

Show me the study that demonstrates consuming zero meat or animal products is nutritionally superior to eating some meat...

Of course I know they are complex, but I know for a fact that in comparison to what we currently have, both plant-based agriculture and universal health care would be much much simpler, affordable, better for humans, animals, and the plane — NKBJ

How are you going to fertilize all the existing and extra crops without manure and as the price of oil based synthetic fertilizer goes up? How will you manage the logistics of ensuring nationally adequate planting per total nutritional requirements? alter our harvesting and processing infrastructure? ensure proper refrigerated distribution? manage year round nutritional consistency against possible bottlenecks of certain nutrients? Re-educate everyone to understand how to plan and prepare adequate vegan diets? Develop and redevelop the extra land required to grow varieties suitable for replacing animal products in our diet?

Where will all this money come from?

If it was simpler and more affordable we would already be doing it.

So you admit then that meat is more expensive since it is more profitable? — NKBJ

This doesn't make sense at all.

Just, FYI, citing relevant sources or experts does not count as personal anecdote. At most you could argue that I should be providing some way to verify these sources, but I guess that you really have a hard time telling what is and what isn't anecdotal. — NKBJ

"This one farmer told me one time that I'm right"...

Honestly, you've got to be joking. You squeal when I suggest that I'm not equipped to undertake a plant-based diet, demanding scientific evidence and screaming anecdote, but when you unambiguously put forward anecdotal evidence of your own you put on blinders

This one farmer you met one time isn't "citing" nor "expert, it's an unambiguous and stereotypical fallacious use of anecdote, and you say I'm the one who has a hard time telling what is and is not anecdotal?

In any case, no new arguments are being made here. We've clearly reached an impasse, so unless you have something new to add, I will consider this conversation over now — NKBJ

Why would I need to make new arguments when you haven't yet rebuked them or put forward a substantial argument of your own?

The key being once it is born. Arguing that we ought to bring people into life, because they will then enjoy it is just an argument against birth control. — NKBJ

You know very well that I'm not arguing that we ought to reproduce or raise farm animals for their own sake. I've explained this multiple times, you keep repeating the same misinterpretation. I'm arguing that it's not immoral to breed farm animals, just as its not immoral to produce children. The reason you keep making this mistake can only be because you hold the position that reproducing or breeding animals is immoral, and you're confusing the negation of this with inversion into moral obligation. You're clearly an anti-natalist.

And even a well-treated pig doesn't want you to hurt it or kill it. You're pretending like this is a bargain that the pigs made with you: "some time living for my right to eat you." Well, you never asked the pig permission, it hasn't agreed to those terms. — NKBJ

If pigs could make such bargains then they probably would. If their life is a net positive, worth living, then they would probably rather have the lives they have than never have lived at all.

You never asked your child's permission to thrust them into the world, and it will inevitably involve suffering and death for them. this is exactly what anti-natalists say to argue that reproduction is immoral.

Baloney. If you knew what was coming, you'd try everything in your power to get the heck out of there. You wouldn't just happily say "oh, gee thanks for letting me live at all. I guess it's okay for you to kill me now for the sake of eating my flesh." You would obviously try to escape and you wouldn't be all that grateful. Just like I don't think African American slaves were so grateful to be alive that they thought their situation was just a-okay. — NKBJ

Wanting to escape the farm before my execution (even though it's certain death) isn't the same as not wanting to have ever lived at all.

And the comparison to child traffickers is spot on. But we can change it to "black-market organ sellers" or "cannibals" or "snuff film makers" if you want to err on the side of the animal/child simply dying. Cattle are killed at 22 months of age on average, but they have a natural lifespan of 20 years. So killing them at that age is like killing a human whose only 10 years old. — NKBJ

You're very good at not addressing the meat of the argument. How would you like it if I used the Christian potential life argument and endlessly compared your moral beliefs to that of Hitler, Stalin and Mao? You would probably want me to address the actual subject matter at hand and get tired of the emotion laden false equivocations and irrelevant appeals.

Let's see if we can actually agree on a comparison: Your hypothetical wife is pregnant and prenatal genetic testing reveals a congenital terminal disease which will definitely cause the death of the child around age 10. If your hypothetical pregnant wife chooses to have the baby knowing it must die young but will otherwise live happily until then, has she done something immoral?

Your intuition will rightly tell you that it is not immoral, and you will assume that it's not a fair comparison because the killing of the farm animal is optional, and this is where you're wrong.

Just like your hypothetical pregnant wife, the farmer must make a decision prior to the birth of their animals which functions in the exact same manner as the decision she faces: if the animal is to be afforded life, it must include an early demise. One is a genetic cause, the other is a thermodynamic/economic one. Even if you hold to the idea that we can afford animals without harvesting, we cannot afford all of them without harvesting some.

Ummm, but you keep on inserting your personal stories like they matter. — NKBJ

If I'm making a point about my own circumstances, then I needs must reference myself. This is very straightforward and easy to understand. Obfuscatory hand-waving is bad rhetoric.

And yet all the medical evidence points to the fact that meat is something we can actually live very well without. Better yet, it points to the fact that meat consumption is linked to various diseases and shorter lifespans — NKBJ

Medical evidence pointsd toward consuming less meat as a healthier alternative, not consuming no meat. And unfortunately there are yet extant economic and logistic hurtles toward a nutritionally adequate national diet.

How sweetly condescending. I don't buy it though. You've obviously just bought into American corporate propaganda. — NKBJ

Or you've obviously bought into vegan propaganda? You don't buy that either agriculture or health-care are complex systems which are difficult to model, predict, control, and plan?

Of course you don't...

But why?

I know plenty of farmers-some just vegetable farmers, some raise cattle. They don't dispute that raising cattle is a lot more work, money, and resource intensive than beans and kale. — NKBJ

And depending on the resources available to the farm, cattle might be more profitable than vegetable.

Why are you inserting your personal stories like they matter? :D

If anyone is interested in first hand accounts and criticism of old school beatniks and hipsters , I just came across this absolute gem:



Basically it's the mind altered father of the beat movement (drunk Kerouac) bopping for an old school cheeky gentlemen (the interviewer), a critical sociologist (Yablonsky), and a next-gen hippy musician (Sanders). It touches on the essence and causes of beat and hippy movements and indirectly addresses the nature of drugs in the movements. It was filmed half a century ago, the year following "the summer of love" (a bunch of hippies reached critical mass in some random Californian town or something). The different perspectives and language of these four individuals paints a really vivid and intimate picture of this bygone culture and the environment it grew out of and into.

Did the hippy beatniks find enlightenment or cosmic consciousness?

No...

They really should have listened to Kerouac, in the end all they did was just have a good time.

Then they are poor medical professional, at that. That's why I always would ask for a second or third opinion. — Posty McPostface

We're talking about booze, nicotine, and THC, not crack-cocaine or Fentanyl. Different substances do different things, and many of them do not require professional advice before each use.

Yeah, it's the placebo effect manifest in reality. Quite a phenomenon if you ask me. — Posty McPostface

I'm not sure where this is coming from, but buying the car you fancy and getting the girl you've crushed on aren't placebos; the car actually drives, the woman actually womans. It can be quite an actual affair.

But if cars and chicks are placebos, illusions, then so is everything, right?

Then, you open up the can of worms, that we are really weak if we need that crutch. I have always felt impotent whenever I have indulged in stimulants to treat my ADD. — Posty McPostface

I'm not saying anyone who takes drugs is weak or impotent, I'm saying that some substances for some people can strengthen them, allowing them to accomplish more (i.e, endure the stress of having more children). To say that psychoactive medication can make us more robust is not to say that anyone who indulges is therefore weak.

I guess we can reduce the issue to a matter of taste. But, nobody gives you informed consent that what you may be doing is actually bad for your health or mental stability. It all smacks of some wishful thinking, and some such matters. — Posty McPostface

My experience with the effects of such substances (and available data) along with my awareness of my own mental health allow me to choose when to indulge in things like booze or marijuana (when it might actually be relaxing/have a positive effect). I could ask whether or not you have a professional opinion stating that there is no detriment to NOT indulging from time to time.

I wish I knew a Hippie that didn't have to indulge in drugs to propound such noble goals. Did they sabotage themselves/their message in some sense? — Posty McPostface

Hippies weren't nearly as drug heavy as today's youth. Perhaps someone of finer vintage can back me up here, but their main shtick was smoking the lowest quality weed known to man, talking about spiritualism/poetry, and having sex; enjoying themselves. It was a political and cultural movement AFAIK, not one based around substance use or abuse. There were definitely drugs at the hippie scenes, but there always have been mind altering substances present at gatherings of young adults, and they didn't exactly require drugs to found their existential platforms.

"Beat" (as in beatnik) culture was born of post war anti-conformity, which put them at odds with America's return to normalcy following WW2. They were anti-materialist black-beret sporting poetry-spouting anti-conformist free-loving jazz types, and many of them did experiment with drugs in search of new perspectives. The 60's gave way to hippiedom, which inherited beat ideas, vernacular and its shitty weed. Beats became hippies, and when LSD finally struck mid 60's it was popular among all the counter-cultures. Meanwhile mainstream culture was as saturated in tobacco, alcohol, et al., as ever. Different tokes...

Why did the hippies decline? I'm not entirely sure, but aside from the natural progression and continual evolution that all cultures undergo, the end of the Vietnam war was perhaps their final victory. Without the war to protest (and with hippie culture seeming less and less hip), it just naturally went away. Hippies and hippie culture grew up and out of themselves, though they've surely left some lasting marks.

Reducing them to a bunch of drug addicts is far too simple. The original Beat generation was reactionary: rejected the post-war mainstream as futile, materialistic, repressed, and narrow minded. By the end of the 70's American culture was far less repressed and much had changed, diverged, and diversified. The 80's came with harder and more dangerous drugs (in greater quantities) than ever before (new gangs too), which probably sucked up and destroyed a lot of nostalgia chasing late-era hippies.The rest went straight.

Drugs may have been a final nail in the hippie coffin, but were not alone the cause of death.

Not everyone, some yes. — Posty McPostface

Sleep is enough of a trip for me, every night. I heard DMT levels rise during REM sleep or something like that. — Posty McPostface

When you eat a chocolate bar you alter your mind; when you do squats you alter your mind; when you watch T.V you alter your mind; when you read and write forum posts you alter your mind.

Changes to your body affect your mind, and changes to your mind affect your body. Diet, physical activity, and mental activity/stimulus of all kinds have ramifications on your health and behavior which extend well beyond our ability to fathom. Hormones, phermones; neurotransmitters: eating sugar filled junk food can cause your body to produce more things like tryptophan, insulin, and serotonin. Eat enough of it on a regular basis and you can become addicted in the sense that you will have constant cravings and experience withdraw symptoms. Like so many things, it alters our reactionary minds. Too much sleep, or too little, and you'll be harming yourself substance free. Moderation is a useful skill.

Depressing, really. — Posty McPostface

Our dreams are only depressing if you want them to be. And while we cannot directly control what we want, we can through some perhaps wholesome practices such as exercise, good diet, and meditation/self reflection, improve our desires and our general outlook; we can alter our minds. The relaxation and perspective altering effects of some substances can be useful on the whole. After millennia of such consumption we're practically optimized for it.

We all get our fix though. It's why we come here; it's why we eat; it's why we work; it's why we strive, reproduce, build, enshrine, etc...

We're all seeking happiness, a life worth living, so what's the use in begrudging one path and not others so arbitrarily? If the quality of the road is high, and the destination desirable, why not?

Here's Jack Kerouac, the quintessential beatnik, reading the last page of his novel "On the Road" which supposedly encapsulates the beat movement:



He more than embraces the bleakness of reality in his writings, and somehow he manages to savour it. Beat culture was a reaction to a depressing reality, marked by a concerted effort to have a good time.

It's really not all that bad.

lol what the fuck is this shit? — Maw

It's Prager U.

It's like, some kind of conservative video production group founded by a religious American conservative pundit who panders to pro-American Christians by providing rebuke to the evil amoral nihilist atheist humanist democratic hordes intent on voting away your right to spiritual virginity.

This holy alliance between Peterson and Prager is a matter of convienience: both Peterson and Prager employ religious and Christian foundations in their ideology (although Peterson's actual religious ideology exists in the context of clinical psychology (therapy) while Prager's is philosophically Christian) and both of them are against "the radical left". Prager just hates foreigners and non-christians, while Peterson does have a couple fair points.

Prager's style of cartoon based indoctrination does make the video a bit ironic given Peterson begins by speaking about indoctrination.

Yes, being pragmatic, psychoactive substances have their use; but, the point is that it has to be directed of governed (medical professionals, etc.) by someone who has figured out what benefit it actually has — Posty McPostface

Medical professionals might not be intimately acquainted with our individual emotional ups and downs, and when to have a beer, a smoke, or a toke is probably better decided by ourselves so long as over-use isn't an issue.

because most people realize that achievement is an illusory concept imposed by society to maintain it. So, you're faced with a dilemma, in some sense. — Posty McPostface

Most people aren't so cynical about it I reckon. Wanting a fancy car or romantic gratification might be partially illusion-infused drives, but we still enjoy achieving them profusely. Enduring greater stress to achieve these ends with the crutch of substance seems to be in our nature, else we might have been content in a more primitive state.

So, drugs are for the weak minded? I'm pretty sure psychoactive drugs are only for the strong minded. — Posty McPostface

There's a great deal of neurodiversity within human groups, so different types and dosages of substances could be more or less beneficial/detrimental for a given individual and the environment they are in.

I think that regular periods of chemically assisted relaxation or pleasure can make an otherwise stressed mind more robust by giving it reprieve. Certainly some substances in some dosages can damage minds, and predicting the effects of harder drugs on individuals can be difficult (there is some risk). When it comes to things like THC, nicotine, caffine and alcohol it's not so dangerous. People who do physically demanding labour seem to like how alcohol relaxes their body; people who do mentally demanding labour seem to enjoy how nicotine relaxes their mind; people who do work which requires consistent or extreme focus seem to enjoy caffeine, and people who smoke THC seem to enjoy it for it's own sake (or some combination of the aforementioned effects).

I think that psychoactive substances when properly consumed can make individuals more robust, some more than others, weak and strong alike

So, hedonism? — Posty McPostface

Pleasure is inexorably why we do anything isn't it? In this case I enjoy the different ideas which occur to me because of THC. Marijuana is not a drug that puts you into some kind of orgasmic comatose state such as with injecting heroine (chemical hedonism if it exists).

Inexorably we all chase the dragon, but no I do not chase him directly.

I don't know if that's true. If it we're then why did the all hippies die out or recede into irrelevancy? — Posty McPostface

Hippies were less about drugs as they were about peace, free love, and like, cool ideas, man. But my point is more broad than experimentation with recreational drugs. It's about a broader underlying reliance on consuming substances and performing rituals which psychoactively impact and regulate our minds, and that we have naturally done so for thousands of years. The hippies didn't die our per se, their tie-dye faded and many of them went back to church and booze. Marijuana stuck around though, and it's edging/crowding out other substances and rituals much vigor.

Culture can change somewhat rapidly but human biology is more constant. Apparently our biology is such that we cannot stand to face the world straight and sober 100% of the time, and those who pretend to do so are usually those who derive the most emotion and happiness from non-substance psychoactive rituals (prayer, prostration, worship, exercise, competition, sex, poetry, prose, music, hippy drum circles, political rallies, etc...).

Where we get our fixes, how, and how much, are matters which fluctuate with the times, that we inexorably get our fix, however, does not.

Humans have been self-medicating since time immemorial... Incorporating some sort of psycho-active substance or inebriant into diet or rituals is absolutely ubiquitous among traditional contemporary and ancient cultures.

Though I'm not convinced by it, stoned ape theory deserves a mention. It's entirely possible that psychoactive substances did play a direct role in the evolution of intelligence, but there's no proof for this.

I do however see plenty of evidence showing the general fragility of human minds, and everywhere I look I see humans consciously and unconsciously doping their brains on semi-regular and regular baseis. Nicotine, caffine, and THC (three of my favorites) don't even need to be mentioned to demonstrate the truth of this: sugar alone is psychoactive and we consume it not just because it tastes good, but because we like the short term effect it has on our minds (energizes).

Alcohol is almost never consumed for the taste alone, it is consumed only for the effect it has on our minds (some exceptions exist), many of us compulsively consume it on a regular basis, and almost every culture and people known to man consume some form of alcohol. Of the aboriginal groups who aren't a fan of fermentation, instead they have other substances: ayahuasca, poisonous frogs, peyote, tobacco, mushrooms, etc...

Since we're all so dependent on regulating our minds by constantly self-administering substances which affect how and what we think and do, I can only imagine that it is of net benefit rather than a net detriment. I'm forced to imagine that regular inebriation can somehow bring stability or fortitude to an individual mind: perhaps inebriation helps to destroy malformed or weak or detrimental beliefs and models/understandings which then makes minds subsequently more robust; perhaps it simply endows us the ability to manage arbitrarily large amounts of stress, allowing us to achieve more. By all accounts Winston Churchill (and all of our great grandparents) drank and smoked constantly, and by his own account they were of religious importance to him.

And maybe this touches on one of the proper functions of religion as a whole in addition to drugs: the emotions we feel near the sacred altar are absolutely psychoactive experiences, and something about this mental shakeup is probably a good thing given the hard hardships of life (toil, tragedy, rejection, failure, death). There's too much stress and confusion in the universe to endure and reconcile it all, which is why the euphoria of inebriation seems to be requisite.

Until now I think I've failed to realize just how similar the effects of drugs and religion actually are. They both seem to have come from the same place: arguably schizophrenic/schizotypal shamans with neat ideas about nature prepare the inebirant for the rest of their tribes, and transport us on guided trips through the ineffable self and the imagined worlds.

Religion isn't the opiate of the masses, it IS an opiate, and it makes sense why modern religions air against mind altering substances: it's uncontrollable competition against their refined product. Drugs provide the feel good aspect that we all covet, and they even yield some of the "enlightenment"/self improvement effect that religion has claimed as tangible raison d'etre.

Personally I do not like being severely inebriated whatsoever. If I cannot think with some clarity then all I have to gain is nausea instead of relaxation. I'm definitely not after enlightenment when I smoke tobacco or marijuana, but I am after some kind of psychoactive alteration that either makes thought easier, more interesting, or more enjoyable. I very much enjoy learning for its own sake, and chemically altering my perspective on a regular basis seems to be some kind of bulwark against exhaustion.

To condense this down to a brief evolutionary perspective, individuals who regulate their minds with psychoactive stimulation (achieving relaxation and perhaps greater "awareness") can endure greater hardship and thus be more reproductively successful, which is why nearly all humans today do so.

Nope.
A) A non-existent entity has no interest in being born. Therefore there are no non-existent pigs who wish for you to create them. Your hypothetical pig would not be unhappy about not being born, because not being born prohibits anyone from having interests positive or negative.
B) You cannot justify causing harm that way. Try: "I can afford to have children only if I sell them to traffickers/cannibals/pornographers once they are a certain age".... should those children be happy their lives were afforded by your pemeditating to harm them? I think not. — NKBJ

A) Once a creature is born it can begin exhibiting preferences and interests. Therefore, once a pig is born it can be indirectly pleased that you created it. Your argument here is that the whole concept of a life worth living cannot be considered or applied with respect to as yet non existent creatures, but given the similarity between past and future members of given species, it's more than reasonable to assume that once born, animals who are treated well would prefer life over non-existence, despite the nature of its end.

B) Your comparison is blown far out of proportion. Ethically slaughtered animals are not sentenced to a life of such abuses. If a pig's existence necessarily entails its slaughter, and I was that pig, I might be upset at the brevity of my existence but I would still be thankful for the life I do have.

No duh. But you'd still be wrong to beat and eat your kids. — NKBJ

Beating farm animals isn't good practice...

I thought we had moved on from talking about you? You can't think clearly about something that you so intensely personalize. You'll notice I also do not expound upon my personal experience, because it's simply too subjective and I realize it's too prone to the regular trappings of psychology. — NKBJ

When discussing my individual justification for eating meat, I have to bring up myself. Yes this is anecdotal, but such is the nature of personal circumstances. I don't know why you're concerned about psychology and subjective experience though, you could just address the things I've said directly.

Can one humanely slaughter unwilling humans? If not, I find the term silly. — NKBJ

Well, lethal injection protocols were developed precisely to achieve this. Hanging seems painful, and while the guillotine is fast and probably more ethical it's also an instrument of terror.

I won't say there's a perfectly humane way to slaughter unwilling humans, but there are more and less humane ways, just as there are more and less humane ways to raise and slaughter farm animals. Relatively speaking, yes, animals and humans can be humanely slaughtered.

Farms, refrigerators, heating, medications, clothes, etc are all not things which are "part of nature." We can clearly deviate from nature when we choose to. — NKBJ

We don't deviate from nature really, it's our nature to deviate. Refrigeration is a wonderful product of the wondrous natural adaptive capabilities of the human brain, and it allows us to transport and store quantities of vegetables which would otherwise rot, but we're still beholden to material, energy, and thermodynamic limitations which prevent us from just doing whatever we want to do. We cannot refrigerate everything because it's too expensive.

Some interesting points, most of which I don't agree with, but really, if you want to talk about this completely separate issue, you should make a new thread. But of course I also understand if you're kinda sick of talking to me by now — NKBJ

I'm not interested in making a companion thread for this other subject. I was more so trying to broaden your perspective of the interconnected and complex nature of societal agricultural systems. Contrary to popular belief farmers aren't stupid, especially when it comes to farming. If eliminating animal husbandry entirely was more nutritious, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly in every way, they would already be doing so en-masse. Many farms are indeed switching towards more human edible plant-based crops, but the feasibility of such a switch is farm dependent and is not suitable for traditional pastureland in the least.

It's not a dilemma. If you can't afford them without harming them, don't create them. Just like you shouldn't have a kid you can't afford. Don't adopt puppies you can't afford. — NKBJ

But I can afford the pig if I harvest it at some point, and I'm confident that the pig would rather have lived and been harvested than to have never lived at all, so actually what I'm doing might be considered morally praiseworthy, although not morally obligatory.

We're back to non-existence Vs life + suffering.

The argument that you should raise the pig even if you can't afford it and have to harm it sounds a lot like what I refuted earlier, which you yourself admitted is absurd. — NKBJ

You're again forgetting the difference between not immoral (fair game) and morally obligatory courses of action. I've never said we're obligated to raise farm animals or even to procreate. It is not necessarily immoral to do so just because life will contain some suffering and eventual death for our farm animals and our children.

This is why the economic, nutritional, and other logistic realities of societal agriculture are relevant to my position. There is yet no possible utopia where we can all live completely harm free; to radically and rapidly alter existing agricultural systems would create short term nutritional deficits or create great expense elsewhere, which is the ethical basis for my reticence to immediately do so as a society. We can definitely make improvements though, and a reduction of meat consumption looks to be beneficial in many ways while eliminating it entirely does not. Regarding my personal consumption of meat: I do mainly consume what I believe to be somewhat humanely produced animal products, and when I am in in a state of health where eating no meat does not pose a health risk to me, I will do so.

But if by "harvest" you mean "let it live its complete natural lifespan without causing it harm and then eating it once it's died of old age or other natural causes", okay, I guess if that makes you happy. Ew, gross. But at that point, it's just aesthetics and not ethics. — NKBJ

By harvest I mean humanely slaughter for sale and consumption at a point when it is financially beneficial to do so. This does mean slaughtering the animal before it dies of old age or disease, but it doesn't necessitate ruthless pursuit of profit either (which leads to factory farming). I think the way veal is produced is immoral (it's a specialty meat that we don't need to consume, and which involves inflicting suffering which is unnecessary AFAIK), but I don't think the way we produce free-range beef and poultry is immoral, nor do I think hunting is immoral. Yes harm is a bad thing, but some harm can be justified, namely when human survival and well-being are on the table.

We're still a part of nature, and unless we continue to play its game we won't ever have the means to ever escape it.

Oh boy! I guess somebody better call Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Japan, Luxembourg, etc, etc and let them all know their superior, more cost efficient, public health care which directly results in people who live longer and more healthily is naive. *sarcasm alert* — NKBJ

Believe it or not, but public health involves more factors than the existence or absence of public health care (food and exercise culture is a big one). America spends more than any other nation on its healthcare system and on average it is not the best. Yes, a single payer system would be more efficient for America. BUT, and this is the crucial bit, America's health-care needs and existing physical and financial health-care infrastructure are somewhat unique (massive) when compared with other nations; we cannot just copy-paste their systems. Changing it's healthcare institutions into a universally state operated system would be a logistic and political nightmare. I'm not a free market absolutist, but it is important to understand that market forces in a system as large as American healthcare can be hard to replace with top-down management.

To be clear, yes America should move into a single payer health-care system, but the difficulty of pulling it off given the complexity of American healthcare and all its interconnected systems/institutions, is extreme, and not to be understated or underestimated. It would require nothing short of creating new governmental departments to investigate and plan transition requirements along with a hefty loan or tax hike to pay for it all. And if we screw anything up during the process, then people might die.

Agriculture is similar in the sense that we need to have uninterrupted success within the industry as a whole for our security, and there are many autonomous and complex interconnected components in agricultural networks where impacting one sector can have ramifications across all agricultural sectors. Comprehensive modeling of these systems is barely achievable by teams of experts, if at all, which makes specific predictions somewhat unreliable.

Medicine nor Agriculture are simple human endeavors, and while state funded single payer health-care systems are something we know is achievable, a national and nutritionally adequate vegan agricultural system has no precedent that could be applicable to America. Someday soon we may have the dietary and technological science required to achieve this, and when that day arrives we should do so. Until then, some animals and some animal products are too financially, nutritionally, and thermodynamically useful.

You need to decide whether you're arguing for a well-balanced diet or not. A well-balanced omnivorous or vegan diet will both require more fruits and vegs than are currently consumed by the average American. The meat-heavy diet as is followed by most people today is dangerous to the health of children and adults alike. Heart disease is, after all, the leading cause of death in the US. An unbalanced vegan or omnivorous diet is going to be grain heavy. In either case, the omnivorous diet uses animal products which are less efficient than plant proteins.

Just like the study you mentioned compared a standard American diet (which is meat and grain heavy) to a vegetable heavy vegan one, which doesn't really make sense. You can't then counter a grain heavy vegan diet by claiming it's unhealthy but advocate for the grain heavy omnivorous one which is even less healthy. — NKBJ

The study found that a non-animals agriculture would increase the amount of grain available in our societal food stores, resulting in a more grain heavy diet for those who cannot afford well planned variety. The finding was that certain nutritional deficits are increased under completely non-animals agriculture.

I'm not advocating for a grain heavy omnivorous diet, we should all have well-planned diets. It's just that the actual cost of producing enough volume and variety for everyone is less when we continue using traditional farming styles, such as raising cattle on pastureland. I'm not advocating for over-consuming grains, or for factory farming, or for over-consuming meat.

You vegans say eating no animal products whatsoever is the best bet, some people argue for more subsidies for factory farms. My position is that the current regime of over-producing meat is unhealthy and inefficient, while eliminating all animal husbandry is also unhealthy and inefficient: both are unfeasible, the optimal solution is somewhere in the complex middle.

I'm glad you think the conclusion is undesirable. But it is the logical conclusion of saying we have some sort of obligation to bring anyone into the world.

But let's assume you said that it's not immoral to cause existence even if it entails suffering. Okay, sure. But that does not give us the right to cause said suffering. Go ahead, raise pigs for all I care. You just shouldn't hurt them, and that includes murdering them. — NKBJ

Why would we need to assume what Ive argued when my arguments are there for all to read?

Unless I murder the farm animals at some point I could never have afforded them to begin with, that's the dilemma. When you give me the go ahead to raise pigs, you're implicitly giving me the go ahead to harvest them. Would you like to recant?

I don't wish to get off track here, so I'll try to be brief: Healthcare is in fact super simple--allow all people to choose a government-run health plan regardless of income level. It's amazingly easy. Other countries do it; I've lived it. It's a great thing.

But even if it were complicated, it's the right thing to do, because letting people die for the want of funds to pay a bill is just barbaric. — NKBJ

I see that I was not wrong to characterize your position as Trump-esque naivete. Healthcare insurance and healthcare infrastructure in America is anything but "super-simple", and likewise societal agriculture is deceivingly complex.

Again, all of this is based on some totally weird idea about what a plant-based diet even looks like. It's like you have a block and can't process this simple fact: vegans eat grains. Half of the vegan diet consists of grains. And attacking a vegan diet on the basis of how many veg/fruit are in it, is just attacking a well-balanced diet period. It would amount to about the same with a well-balanced omnivorous diet — NKBJ

I'm well aware that Vegans eat grains, and you're well aware that eating too many grains and not enough variety of other plants will result in nutritional deficits. The conclusion of the study I cited found that the non-animals plant based agricultural system would over-produce grains which give rise to calorie surpluses, higher volume diets, and certain nutritional deficiencies.

There's a reason vegan diets are hard to plan; you can't just eat grains and call it a nutritional day: there's a such thing as too much grain.

It can't be immoral not to bring people or animals into the world or else you'd have to argue that birth control is immoral. Or immoral for women not to try to be perpetually pregnant throughout their fertile years. Or that even child molesters/beaters/traffickers should procreate and raise children, because living in hell is better than not living... absurd. — NKBJ

Your constant misinterpretation and hyperbolization of everything I say is genuinely absurd :)

I never said it was immoral to not bring animals or people into the world, I said it was NOT immoral to BRING animals or people into the world despite knowing it will necessarily contain some suffering for them.

Negative moral obligations are much easier to justify than positive ones; identifying things we should abstain from as immoral is much easier than identifying things we must carry out as morally obligatory. I'm not saying we're morally obligated to reproduce or continue breed farm animals, I'm saying it's not immoral to continue to do so.

A human life is worth more than a non-human animal life sure, but that does not mean every single, however trivial human interest is worth more than an animal life. — NKBJ

Adequate nutrition for children is a non-trivial consideration we must make in undertaking a national vegan diet. If I recall correctly, something like 10-15% of households in the U.S experience food insecurity as it is with varying levels of severity. If we do something that increases the end consumer cost of adequate nutrition in anyway whatsoever, then we exacerbate the harm.

The Twitter in Chief can go jump in a lake as far as I'm concerned. I have no reason to give any credence to anything that ever comes out of his mouth. — NKBJ

Generally the things he says are foolish beyond measure. He campaigned in part on repealing Obamacare,one piece of a massively complex industry - medicine and medical insurance - but it turned out that the complexities of the task were well beyond his ability to fathom. Agriculture and societal nutrition are one such field of human activity with hard to fathom complexities.

I guess that explains your inability to thrive on a plant-based diet. A well-balanced any kind of diet has about the same composition: 45-65% of calories from grains, 5 servings veggies or fruit, some source of protein, some healthy fats. Vegans simply choose plant-based proteins and choose veggies high in calcium and iron (like kale or spinach or collards).

All your article really says is that if all people ate the amount of veggies and fruits that they ought to, it would have an impact on agriculture. Which we should look into, and perhaps it means we need to change food production methods here and there, but that does not equal telling people to give up healthful foods. Aside from that, the cost of protein production is simply much lower with legumes and other plant-based alternatives.

Your second article also talks about B12 and the cost of making it and the unavailability in plants alone... Conveniently neglecting to mention that 90% of b12 supplements in the US are given to farm animals so that either way your daily b12 comes from a supplement, directly or indirectly. — NKBJ

The article is not telling people to give up healthy foods. It takes a look at the feasibility of America switching to a national vegan through the nutritional/GHG ramifications of doing so.

I do understand that this article seems as a pessimistic delay to your vegan goals, but you must acknowledge the real world hurtles we must clear before we can reach them. Our current agricultural systems aren't so easily modified, or so presently stupid as to be missing out on more nutritional crops that would also be more profitable.

Remember when Trump said "who knew health care could be so complicated?"?

It's called supply and demand. It's a simple concept really, but also the authors of your article don't seem to get it. Vegan foods are currently more expensive due to low supply due to relatively low demand. They have been becoming more affordable due to higher demand creating greater supply. But even when avoiding fancy tofus or vegan cheese, anyone can afford a bag of beans. Like any diet, being vegan can be as expensive, cheap, healthy, unhealthy, bad or good for the environment as you want to make it. But on average, it wins against an omnivorous one. — NKBJ

I wish you vegans could actually put forward a tangible action plan or feasibility assessment. It would be great if we could improve our health and save money, truly it would.

So why does the U.S import more than twice the fruit and veg that it exports? If growing it domestically could be cheaper, and there's a demand, why don't they take the risk by planting fruits and vegetables on land better suited to grains? Because grains are easier to grow on soil where vegetables might not thrive, they are easier to harvest, store, and transport; a less risky crop. Suggesting that demand alone determines what farmers can and choose to plant is a vastly narrow view of the complexity involved in large scale agriculture and the many layers of decision making that are involved.

Furthermore, if indeed farmers simply operated on market value, we would have to endure regular ups and downs in pursuit of nutritional stability where one year certain nutriments are at a deficit, and thus more expensive, and then next others are at a surplus, leading to possibly just as much waste as exists presently. We would need massive central planning to tell farmers what to plant, where, and how much, otherwise the total nutritional value of the food we produce will continue to reflect more factors than nutritional demands by proxy of market demands (we're going to continue getting excesses of the cheap reliable stuff: corn and corn syrup)

Where it does make economic sense for farms to move into vegetable and fruit produce and away from field grains, they're already tending to do so. Specific farms may benefit from such a switch but other farms might not. It can depend on region, market availability, market fluctuations, infrastructure, climate, crop risk, soil quality, and more. As people realize that eating too much meat is needlessly expensive and unhealthy, where possible farms will diversify, but your baseless assertion that their ability to arbitrarily alter crop production has no limits invokes the same unrealistic view of economics and agriculture that rendered Emery et al. unable to grasp the assumptions and objectives of the study they criticized.

That is why all this talk about agriculture and the environment is just so much icing on top of the real issue: do we have a right to harm sentient, intelligent, emotional beings like farm animals? And if the answer is no (which I obviously think it is) then everything else is secondary. Even if it were more costly to do the right thing (thankfully it's not, but if it were) you still should do the right thing: don't hurt others. — NKBJ

I believe it is more important to exist at all than to not be hurt. I don't wish suffering on animals, but I also do not wish non-existence on them as you are inexorably doing. I maintain that there is room on this earth for ethical farms which enable our extended phenotype farm animals to continue existing happily, with lives worth living, which are also thermodynamically and economically efficient on our end compared to a plant-based alternative.

Unless a farm harvests the animals it rears, it cannot continue supporting itself. If and when we can afford the aforementioned animal sanctuaries and actually tackle present infeasibility of nationally going vegan (economically, thermodynamically, nutritionally), then we will share the same views for the same reasons. Until then, I maintain you're wrong that we can so radically alter our current agricultural strategies without great risk, cost, and societal detriment. We need fish, we need ruminants (we may even need their feces). We need poultry for sure... Without these things we're on the train down to too much grain town, where some will afford adequate variety and some will not.

If tis better to have lived happily and been harvested than to have never lived at all, and or if fellow humans are worthy of more moral consideration than non-human animals, then eating meat can be ethical/not immoral.

I don't believe that, as meat isn't some magical pill you can just take and fix everything with. — chatterbears

But this is what you seem to think plants are: a silver-bullet to solve problems while creating none.

Alas, a lack... The world isn's so easily managed or surmised...

I was sold three strums in.

I've got a thang for them blues, and boy them blues got him.

We definitely do. Appreciating the novel and the other can be quite difficult for some; it often takes wise eyes.

Good music is hard to scoff at though. Something about it transcends language.

And what we are listening to right now is a curious and reversely influential reflection of us. Nationalism is tied up in anthems, social, ethnic, and regional identity tied up in pop music. Even corporations have their own theme music. It can divide us or bring us together, depending on the content and the environment and the individual. On the whole though music seems to unite more commonly than divide, so more of it is probably a good thing (even if we have to sift through the mud and muck of the Bieber's and Cyrus's to locate the good stuff!).

I don't know if this counts because I was listening to it in my head.



Something about the nipponification of western culture just feels right.

And you assume vegans eat only vegetables? Huh? And I'm not sure I follow your reasoning...meat may be the least efficient thing to produce of all the foods, but grains are more efficient than veggies...therefore eat meat? Makes no sense.

You're failing to examine what an actual plant-based diet would look like. — NKBJ

I know that a well planned plant-based diet does not include too much grain, which is what we would have on our hands given the aforementioned difficulties in vegetable and fruit produce agriculture and distribution.

One thing I would like you to realize is that different forms and scales of agriculture can have different levels of efficiency. A super cattle farm that relies on a constant supply of grain and water is not efficient compared to a traditional farm which grazes its cattle and bales its own hay. The fact that we can afford to raise so much grain fed livestock reflects the point I'm making: grains are cheap to begin with. In the world where we stop using animals completely, we're left with too much potential for grain and not enough potential for vegetables.

One benefit of eating some meat is that you get very compact calories and protein, allowing you to supplement your diet with other things for adequate nutrition. If you need to consume twice the amount of corn as meat to replace the calories and protein, then you have less dietary room to round out your nutrition with other things.

Again...vegans eat grains.
Just a lot fewer than are needed to make the same amount of calories and nutrition from animal-based products. I shouldn't have to explain that: your own article explains that:
" Specific to animal agriculture is the inherently energetically inefficient conversion of feed to usable products. Because animals (and humans) obey the laws of thermodynamics, energy that is converted to heat through metabolic processes is lost and not retained in tissues " — NKBJ

I'm aware of thermodynamics, but we don't have the 4 stomachs that each cow does to refine the calories and protein of the feed corn we produce for them. Unfortunately we already consume quite enough grain, and we cannot replace all the field corn with fruit and vegetable crops, and if we did their harvest would be seasonal (wreaking havoc on national nutritional planning). There are many factors which can cause the efficiency of animal husbandry to vary. As the article goes on to say following your excerpt:

"Acceptability of such inefficiencies depends upon the resources used in this conversion and the value of the resulting products. Livestock, particularly ruminants, consume substantial amounts of byproducts from food, biofuel, and fiber production that are not edible by humans, and they make use of untillable pasture and grazing lands that are not suitable to produce crops for human consumption (7, 8). When compared on a human-edible nutrient input to human-edible nutrient output basis, animal and plant foods can have similar efficiencies (9). Animals also provide more than food. A multitude of animal-derived products are used in adhesives, ceramics, cosmetics, fertilizer, germicides, glues, candies, refining sugar, textiles, upholstery, photographic films, ointments, paper, heart valves, and other products (10)."

Yeah, and if the market went vegan, they would plant vegan foods. D'oh. — NKBJ

They already do plant vegan foods, and vegan foods are already more expensive. Is it just big agro keeping the kale man down? Are vegan foods so expensive because we don't plant enough of them? Or is the production cost proportional to the market value?

The complexity and economics of agriculture is perhaps beyond even the all-distilling powers of a Simpsons episode...

The article states: " Their use of irrelevant economic information in the abstract,1 unrelated to the design of their study or any of their findings, shows evidence of bias in favor of the livestock industry."

They didn't accuse the others of bias outright. They merely suggested that the way the first article is written has some evidence pointing to bias. — NKBJ

The supposedly irrelevant piece of information was "The US livestock industry employs 1.6 × 10^6
people and accounts for $31.8 billion in exports.". They didn't bother explain how it was irrelevant (it seems relevant to exploring the creation of agricultural production models), they just went ahead and declared it evidence of bias.

The original authors did publish their own rebuttal to your rebuttal if you're interested. It wasn;t easy to find but here's the link.

They basically summarize all of the criticisms and explanations I have already levied and more. It's a very quick read, I do recommend it.