Absolutely brilliant! And here's me thinking I was complex when actually it's the same theory through and through. Quietist philosophy, quietist child-rearing.

Not trying to oversimplify you. Just thought there might be an underlying allegiance to your thoughts on philosophy and politics.

Finally getting to the latter. Here's what I don't quite understand about your position. If the original sin is settlement, agriculture, etc., then all such civilizations have gone wrong. Is there something especially wrong with European civilization?

Btw -- and this is me still uncertain whether I've offended you -- the idea that a certain way of doing philosophy is a kind of localized imperialism doesn't strike me as crazy at all. It's what @csalisbury noted a while back about apo's insatiable dialectic. There's no problem it does not hunger to solve, and then declare solved, no opposing position it can't incorporate. It's a system designed to endlessly expand and absorb everything else, overcoming all the pitiful rebel groups that might put up a bit of a fight here and there.

For me, this is right in line with my vaguely economic approach to philosophy these days.

Not trying to oversimplify you. Just thought there might be an underlying allegiance to your thoughts on philosophy and politics. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't mind being simplified, I genuinely thought it a really fascinating insight. One can provide all sorts of clues that hint at sarcasm, but very few which confirm the absence of it.

If the original sin is settlement, agriculture, etc., then all such civilizations have gone wrong. Is there something especially wrong with European civilization? — Srap Tasmaner

Interesting. I'm tempted to say that this is where the influence of your concept of force multipliers comes in. I don't know if you've read Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel', but it's pretty much an account of how those three force multipliers (plus some others) explain almost entirely the dominance of Western culture.

So, settlement sets everyone off on this diabolical race (except the very few hunter-gatherers) and the ones with the most guns, germs and steel win.

So you would have voted

(4) Not just Western civilization, but all of them, son, all of them!

Haven't done Diamond, though I've heard him intone the title of his book on PBS in that Boston accent of his.

I'd like to make a suggestion I'm slightly horrified by: suppose this is all growing pains. Even chimps have something like war, sad to say. You settle down, develop science, create social institutions and structures, and if you haven't destroyed yourselves or your planet after a hundred millennia or so, then maybe you've got a shot at actual civilization, a Star Trek future of science and democracy.

In a way, this is not so far from my question: is the barbarism and cruelty we witness, the reckless destruction of our own home, is all of this going on because of "Western civilization" or in spite of it? Maybe eventually the Enlightenment will have its day. Are we sure the horrors of our time are its fault, rather than a measure of just how much more work there is to do, how uncivilized we still remain?

I'm not unsympathetic to the position you outline with the proviso that the story is not one of biblical redemption from original sin. The 'problem' that we could see enlightenment values as trying to solve is that of the change in what we might call human nature brought about by settlement, rather than the original sin of simply being human.

But if we do accept the intention of the enlightenment project, I think I'd like to reserve the ability to criticise it on its lack of success. Not that we've got some other history to test it against, but I wouldn't want to rest on our laurels and presume to just knuckle down to furthering a project which has had so little demonstrable sucess without at least exploring the alternatives.

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.

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

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?

2. 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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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. I don't really see how that's any different to saying that because the trains ran on time in Fascist Italy we should continue with Fascism. What about a system which preserves the good but discards the bad, or a system which removes the bad (at the expense of the good) but replaces them with other goods of equal value, or a system which removes the bad (and most of the good) but the net result of which is an overall improvement. Why are these options not available for you?

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

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? — VagabondSpectre

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

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:

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). — VagabondSpectre

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.

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? — VagabondSpectre

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

the average child is less likely to die early or be exploited than in the past. — VagabondSpectre

Proof

We're making moves to bring a universal end to the exploitation of children; things are getting better. — VagabondSpectre

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

We're currently at a place where injustice has been reduced more than ever before — VagabondSpectre

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?

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

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?

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

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.

You're basically saying archeology and anthropology are hopeless endeavors because we don't have perfectly representative remnants. — VagabondSpectre

No, I'm saying that damning an entire section of humanity on the basis of a few bones is unwarranted. What if the early people involved tended to bury or care within the cave for those who died prematurely, but those who lived what they considered their natural term simply walked out into the wilderness (a practice we know exists in modern tribes). All the remains we work on would be the violent or early deaths and this would skew the results. I'm not saying we have enough evidence to show this was the case, I'm saying we need to be cautious in interpreting results when we have a considerable bias already.

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? — VagabondSpectre

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.

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? — VagabondSpectre

Tolstoy may well have had clinical depression and so his suicide would hev been nothing more than a tragic result of his illness and nothing whatsoever to do with him, his life or his environment. I want to make that abundantly clear. For the sake of this argument, absent of any biological mechanism, we cannot simply presume that genetically inherited clinical depression is on the rise, so the suicides I'm talking about are those resulting from a brain that is not genetically predisposed to low serotonin.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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 — VagabondSpectre

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

“What kind of development is this when the people lead shorter lives than before? They catch HIV/AIDS. Our children are beaten in school and won’t go. Some become prostitutes. We are not allowed to hunt. They fight because they are bored and get drunk. They are starting to commit suicide. We never saw this before. Is this “development”?” — Roy Sesana of the Botswana Bushmen

“We are against the type of development the government is proposing. I think some non-Indians’ idea of “progress” is crazy! They come with these aggressive ideas of progress and impose them on us, human beings, especially on indigenous peoples who are the most oppressed of all. For us, this is not progress at all.” — Olimpio, of the Guajajara tribe in the Brazilian Amazon

‘Mining will only destroy nature. It will only destroy the streams and the rivers and kill the fish and kill the environment – and kill us. And bring in diseases which never existed in our land.’ ‘We are not poor or primitive. We Yanomami are very rich. Rich in our culture, our
language and our land. We don’t need money or possessions. What we need is respect: respect for our culture and respect for our land rights.’ — Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami

It's like having a gun cocked against our heads — Guarani-Kaiowa, Brazil

We are committing suicide because we have no land — Unnamed Guarani, Brazil

‘My father said that before the whites [came] we had hardly any illnesses. In 1984 my father died of a lung infection. At the time of [the building of the road] everyone got flu and measles and everyone died’

"We have been in long lilim long before the companies came in… in the past our life was peaceful, it was so easy to obtain food. You could even catch the fish using your bare hands – we only needed to look below the pebbles and rocks or in some hiding holes in the river. The people are frequently sick. They are hungry. They develop all sorts of stomach pains. They suffer from headaches. Children will cry when they are hungry. Several people including children also suffer from skin diseases, caused by the polluted river. Upper patah used to be so clean.’ — Ngot laing, 53, chief of long lilim community

‘When i was a child life was easier because there was forest, enough food and we made farinha [manioc flour] and fished. We made our own sugar from the forest bees. I was born in amambai and it was an indigenous village then. I think things are much worse now. We are surrounded by ranchers here. They have fenced us in and they won’t let us in to hunt armadillos and partridges. They won’t even let us look for medicinal plants on the farms. The time when we used to get honey from the bees is over because there is no forest left. There is nothing for the indian now. He has to look for everything in the town now. So that’s why the young are committing suicide because they think the future will be worse’ — Adolfin Nelson, limão verde, 1996

‘First they make us destitute by taking away our land, our hunting and our way of life. Then they say we are nothing because we are destitute.’ — Jumanda Gakelebone, Gana Bushman, Botswana

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?

So, to the technical errors.

This is a link to a google scholar search, so I'm not sure which paper you're referencing. — VagabondSpectre

First mine. Apologies, I copied my bookmark, not the paper. I'll leave it how it is though because actually you get a wider view of different academic opinions this way.

working in cubicles leads to fewer of our children starving or suffering malnutrition. — VagabondSpectre

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.

...before they had to spend all their time hunting, foraging, and processing. — VagabondSpectre

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.

It is quite relevant to point out that infanticide and violence are inherent in some non-western ways of life. — VagabondSpectre

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.

in some ways we treat the lowest members of our society (criminals) better than they can afford to treat their most beloved. — VagabondSpectre

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

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

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?

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

We don't need another half a planet, we just need to not run out of oil before we can diversify away from it. — VagabondSpectre

"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?

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?

The only thing I've said is backwards are reasons for infanticide. — VagabondSpectre

Right, so from which ethnography have you obtained your knowledge about the reasons for infanticide? Which ethnography describes sadistic leaders? Which describes war crimes? 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.

we also have more reliable diets on average (freedom from starvation and food insecurity). — VagabondSpectre

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?

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. — VagabondSpectre

So I'm to debate against your imagination?

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? — VagabondSpectre

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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

Pointing out that leaders of small groups can wind up being sadistic is not racist. — VagabondSpectre

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?

Cultural practices which exploit the innocent exist among some indigenous peoples and it's not racist to point this out. — VagabondSpectre

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

The west doesn't guarantee it either, but it does better on average. — VagabondSpectre

Wow, so you've added up some kind of quantitative equivalent of Justice, comfort and freedom from the thousands of tribes across the world, plus all the paleoanthropological data, and compared it to the same metric gathered from all Western civilisations? Impressive work for someone who didn't even have their basic information right a few hours ago.

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? — VagabondSpectre

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? 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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

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.” — VagabondSpectre

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? 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?

is WWF saying that we've taken out a loan on another half a planet? — VagabondSpectre

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.

If you want to really engage in a comparison of hunter-gatherer lifestyle with modern Western lifestyle in a realistic way you'll need to;

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.

2. 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.

Then we can have a meaningful discussion about the relative merits.

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

Not a human society, no. :fear:

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...

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.

In summary;

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. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

2. 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.
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.

3. 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?

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. — VagabondSpectre

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?

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...

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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

Or you could have actually shown an interest in why we might have such divergent opinions instead of scrabbling for every example you could find of just how nasty the backwards natives can really be.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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?

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

it is indeed a myth that hunter-gatherers are completely free from the ubiquitous human problems of violence and injustice — VagabondSpectre

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.

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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

78% (pg. 21) of Hadza die from illness and disease though, and they live shorter lives on average. — VagabondSpectre

Again, you're arguing against a point I didn't make. Are you suggesting I think that the Hadza do not suffer from any illness? I quite clearly listed the illnesses they do not suffer from and instead of just admitting that, you come up with some completely unrelated statistic. What percentage of Westerners die from illness and disease, do you think it's less than 78%?

And I refer you back to the comment of Lomas;

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

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?

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. — VagabondSpectre

None of which are the claims that I made.

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

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

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)

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

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.

In a study of 2000 Kaluli aborigines from Papua New Guinea, only one marginal case of clinical depression was found.

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?

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. — VagabondSpectre

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?

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... — VagabondSpectre

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.

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.

I think we've reached the point arrived at in just about every debate of this sort where we've exhausted the actual evidence and our positions rely on supposition from which there is no traction without the will to.

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.

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.

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.

Population growth eventually puts a strain on resources, which inevitably leads to competition and aggression. — VagabondSpectre

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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

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...). — VagabondSpectre

I don't want to labour this point excessively, but I do want to di justice to your post by answering each point, so...Again, this is just your speculative opinion, and you could be right, but you could also be wrong. I think suicide is a good measure of the happiness of a society. You can't prove it isn't, only present an alternative view. You might speculate that hunter-gatherers committed suicide in less recognisable ways, and I can't argue with that except to say that they might equally not have done so.

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? — VagabondSpectre

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

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

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

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): — VagabondSpectre

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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

I'm actually examining the first examples I encountered by following the google search you've linked it me to. — VagabondSpectre

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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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?

I want to make it clear that I'm not saying you are wrong to conclude that Western civilisations are 'better' than hunter-gatherers. I think you are absolutely wrong about some of your pre-concieved notions about hunter-gatherers, and I've tried to present evidence to combat them, but that doesn't really matter, because it doesn't change anything. If you want to believe the western civilisation is best you will have no trouble constructing a story with accompanying evidence to support that view. What I object to is any suggestion that the alternative claim (that hunter-gatherers are 'better' than western civilisation) can some how be 'disproven'. This is where any vitriol comes from (for which I apologise, by the way). I consider it really bad form to construct a plausible (but by no means necessary or sufficient) story about 'betterness' and the use it to combat another equally plausible (but by no means necessary or sufficient) story.

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.

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?

Still unsure what the components of 'Western Civilization' are, and if it is distinct from the equally confused concept of 'White Civilization'.

Thanks @VagabondSpectre and @Pseudonym for your thorough discussion of the topic. Been following the back-and-forth keenly. (I think the match is tied and will have to be decided by penalty kicks! :grin: j/k). Seriously though, I appreciate the effort, ideas, and the cited references given. This issue/topic/question (about Western Civ and its strengths, weaknesses, and otherwise) seems to go to the marrow and to the core of our culture, our thinking, our very lives and future. And it covers a long timespan of thousands of years, possibly more. It is almost the primal “To Be, Or Not To Be” question of our society, in my opinion.

So I don’t think there are any easy or obvious answers. Even though there may not be one piece of evidence that will answer the question, the question persists. This topic and question not only uses the findings of archeology, but is almost as slow and laborious as archeology. Like digging slowly through rock while carefully examining and cataloguing. I think the only foolish (and perhaps most tempting) answer to this question about Western Civilization is “What a stupid question! Why even bother asking it!”. I haven’t seen anyone here take that stance, no matter where they stand on the issue, thankfully.

So... I happened to vote that WC was disastrous. Like I mentioned, if it were a choice, I would’ve voted “partial disaster”. Our world seems now such a mixed bag of extremes that to even conceptually visualize it strains my imagination, not just my intellect. (FWIW, I can imagine Bagend in Hobbiton. I can imagine the Death Star. I can imagine a Yellow Submarine from Pepperland floating in the Sea of Time. But I can’t imagine the real world. I can think about any of its aspects or parts. But as a whole, I can’t even imagine it for a second. Maybe because it is real. Or too big. Others may fare better. But back to the issue...)

Science and its offshoots and its ever-bountiful impact seems to be one of the consensus top things about WC. (Though as I mentioned in my first post in this thread, the very term Western Civilization has always been fuzzy, and may be getting fuzzier. For example, is China now part of WC? Almost or partially? On the edge?) And there are very many other powerful examples of the wonderful “fruits of Western culture”. You and I probably are holding or using some of them at this moment. Or it is in the room with you now. Or you are traveling on one at the speed of sound. Or... etc. etc.

Let’s make a large assumption for the purpose of discussion: let’s say Western Civilization can never again go back to being a Hunter-Gatherer culture. (But for the moment I’m NOT directly comparing or judging current Western Civilization OR Hunter-Gatherer societies of the past). Let’s just say both have numerous strengths. And living in WC all of our lives (one would assume), we probably have seen some things that were painful, unpleasant, or unfair. Maybe that is just how life is, and always will be. Or maybe certain things could be changed. My question: can current civilization be inspired by anything at all from tribal cultures? Is there any way to improve WC, by following some certain examples of “Leavers” (as Daniel Quinn would call them).

Jared Diamond wrote a recent book called The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? I am in the middle of reading it, so I don’t know his answer yet. But what would your answer be?

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).

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.

It stands to reason that some groups will have engaged in more violence prior to western influence, and some will have engaged in less — VagabondSpectre

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.

environmental conditions can have drastic and disparate effects on simple social structures — VagabondSpectre

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.

Well at least you didn't point me toward Howard Zinn — VagabondSpectre

And that would have been a problem because...? Oh yes, because his view is definitely and demonstrably wrong without a shadow of a doubt. I'm sure the McCarthy investigations into his Anti-Americanism had absolutely no influence on the conclusions his critics drew.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

The stability of indigenous ways of life are dependent on steady state environments. — VagabondSpectre

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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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

even the poor of western societies have more practical freedom and rights than HG people — VagabondSpectre

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?

in the west we're less likely to die from violence of any kind. — VagabondSpectre

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.

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

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

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. — VagabondSpectre

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.

Still unsure what the components of 'Western Civilization' are, and if it is distinct from the equally confused concept of 'White Civilization'. — Maw

I don't think you can separate the two. There seems to me to be only one of two possible scenarios; either sub-concious racism exists or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then we might as well abandon all positive discrimination, role-model development, media depiction issue etc because they all rely on combating sub-concious racism. Not to mention the fact that we'd have to come up with some other explanation for the countless psychological experiments which have demonstrated the phenomenon.

If, on the other hand, we're going to accept the concept of sub-concious racism, then how can we ignore the impact of the glaringly obvious fact that all of the races involved in the development of "Western Civilisation" are white and all the races involved in alternative civilisations are non-white?

can current civilization be inspired by anything at all from tribal cultures? — 0 thru 9

Child-rearing.

If I could pick a single thing, it would not be respect for their environment, their respect for autonomy or even egalitarianism, all of which I consider very important to healthy societies, but their approach to child-rearing outstrips them all by miles in my opinion in terms of it's impact on the health of a culture.

(Spoiler alert - that's the conclusion Jared Diamond comes to as well)

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!