But what would your answer be? — 0 thru 9

Population control!

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

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

Child-rearing. — Pseudonym

:up: Interesting answer, with which I would tend to agree. Could you expand on that?

My thoughts on applying tribal cultures’ approach on raising children... First of all, a few words about some possible pitfalls. I would say that parents who are either too regimented/demanding or (on the other hand) too permissive/passive might be unintentionally pushing their kids into consumerism, and other addictive behaviors. (I will comment on that below). The tribal parent may have given their child a large zone of freedom to explore and even make some mistakes where the child would feel pain. There have always been dangerous situations and animals around (including other humans). And it is difficult to directly compare current circumstances with other places and times. But today, the hazards seem to be endless, even for an adult. The danger of road traffic alone for a child is immense. And of course, there are many other potential physical dangers for a child.

Let me note that each child is ultimately their own person, making important choices from almost day one. They create their lives. They do this from a combination of their choices, and the materials and “energies” (the mental and spiritual factors) around them. A mother or father cannot take the credit nor blame for the person their child grows into. The best and wisest parents can happen to have a child who eventually becomes a danger to others. It seems the most a parent can do (beyond keeping the child healthy) is give them a nudge in what the parent thinks is the “right direction”. The particulars of what constitutes the “right direction” is of course debatable. A parent cannot teach what they don’t know, nor give what they don’t have. Which might not actually be a problem, because oftentimes the child doesn’t follow in the exact footsteps of or career as the parent anyway.

However... if a parent can help their offspring avoid addictive and dysfunctional habits and relationships, they deserve the highest praise and most sincere admiration. What the natures of addiction and dysfunctional relationships are is probably another topic. But here I will roughly define addictive behavior as based on a belief that “more is ALWAYS better”. And I define dysfunctional relationships as ones with a master/slave basis and/or objectification of persons. How is a parent supposed to do that? Especially when they themselves are (hopefully) resisting addictions and toxic relationships? When there are purveyors of addiction and enslavement all around?

What purveyors of addiction and enslavement? (One may ask). Take for instance the subject of food. Let me say that if there is only “one right and correct diet” for all people, I would ABSOLUTELY NOT know what that would possibly be. Humanity seems to have evolved with an omnivorous nature perhaps surpassed only by other omnivores that will eat rotting meat (scavengers) or ones that consume a large variety of insects. So therefore, humans can survive on an extremely wide variety of nutritional sources. A great many species would go extinct for lack of food before humans would.

But not knowing the correct answer or the “correct diet” doesn’t mean that one is incapable of determining what a wrong answer or diet might be. A diet of sawdust and plastic pellets, for instance, could be rejected out of hand as being not even remotely nourishing. Not quite as bad, but far more dangerous (because of its prevalence) is the so-called typical American diet. This consists mainly of sugars, highly refined flours, and hormone, antibiotic, pesticide, and bacteria-tainted meats. (These meats are usually “ground” meats because such are more malleable and chewable. Plus, ground meats from several sources are easy to combine. These factors make ground meats the most marketable.)

If one were to allow that this typical American diet (or TAD) is a tad unhealthy (pun intended... sorry) despite its omnipresence, then one would probably wonder why it exists like it does. But one would probably only wonder for a moment before guessing an answer. Money! It’s cheaper and easier to create, package, ship, and sell food products which are mostly sugars, flours, and grinded meat. And if these food products (or as some have labeled them: “edible entertainment”) are somewhat addictive, then that simply means that there are more repeat customers. More money means more companies selling similar items. It’s a feedback loop. (No pun intended this time!) You gotta eat something. Good luck!

This example of addictive behavior being encouraged by our culture in general is far from being the only one. I am straining to think of any area of our lives that is not fully on its way to becoming a toxic product. Instead of sugar, flour, and meat the ingredients are... what? Sex, violence, and fantasy? (Or as the Buddha called them: desire, hatred, and delusion). Is it just “A Race To the Bottom”, as the marketing saying goes? This DESPITE the scientific knowledge or technical ability to do otherwise. Maybe this is all shocking, but not so surprising.

How many toxic and addictive products can you think of ten seconds? Ok... GO!!! Medicine and drugs (both legal and illegal)? Pornography? Music and music videos? Movies? Video games? News and other propaganda? Umm... semi-automati... BZZZTT!!!

TIMES UP! We have a winner!

So why do I feel like I have food poisoning?

Population control!

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

:up: Oh most definitely!

It seems though that the current odds favor a disaster(s) itself being that very population control, most unfortunately. I hope to God that is not the situation. I hope the Earth can indeed carry 10 billion people, even if uncomfortably so. However, I truly doubt the speculation some have put forward that a billion people could live in the desert states of the USA. Or that a couple billion could be housed on the lands within the Arctic Circle... once all of the ice melts! :gasp:

Seriously though, if I say that reasons for infanticide are backwards, why would you conflate that with all HG peoples? — VagabondSpectre

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

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

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

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

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

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. — VagabondSpectre

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

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

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. — VagabondSpectre

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

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. — VagabondSpectre

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

This article looks at the archeological evidence for warfare and violence among the natives of North-West coast of North America — VagabondSpectre

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

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. — VagabondSpectre

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

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. — VagabondSpectre

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

So far you've provided a few articles referring to wars in post contact tribes (but not comparing them with the number of wars in Western civilisation), violence in settled tribes (but again, not comparing it to western civilisation), and paleoanthropological evidence of violence-related injuries (but again, with no comparison to similar data from western civilisation). So I'm struggling to see how, from the data you've shown me, you've reached the conclusion that Western civilisation is less violent than nomadic hunter-gatherers on average. Very little of your data mentions nomadic hunter-gatherers, and that which does doesn't compare like-with-like metrics to Western civilisation.

but it does not necessarily mean that the west is overall less happy than societies with fewer suicides — VagabondSpectre

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

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. — VagabondSpectre

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

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. — VagabondSpectre

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

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. — VagabondSpectre

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

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). — VagabondSpectre

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

Interesting answer, with which I would tend to agree. Could you expand on that? — 0 thru 9

Perhaps in another thread. I think it might verge a little off topic here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK. Your position seemed a lot different and certainly included a lot of extraneous points to this specific one, but I will, of course, take you at your word and presume any other interpretations are the result of my misunderstanding.

So, I entirely agree with you that the average child mortality and lifespan in the contemporary West is higher than that in virtually any hunter-gatherer society past or present. I think the evidence for this is strong. I also agree with you that hunter-gatherers, both past and present are probably more likely to die as a result of violence-related injury or than the average contemporary westerner, though I think the evidence for this is less strong.

What I disagree with is that either of these things are a measure of the success of a civilisation.

As we skirted around earlier this seems to be a far more significant issue between us than the details about hunter-gatherer lifestyle over which we still disagree. I have limited time to put to things like this (as I'm sure have you), despite the enjoyment I get from engaging in these discussions, so might I suggest we focus on the disagreement over appropriate metrics of success (which can be done philosophically), rather than on an exchange of citations about the measurement of those metrics, which, whilst fascinating, is very time-consuming (particularly for me as most of my sources are still in paper format and I have to try and track down the Internet equivalent) and I'm not sure it's actually getting us anywhere in this particular discussion because I think we would still disagree even if we reached agreement over the facts.

I'd like, if it's OK with you, to try and bring the discussion back to what I think are the salient points (correct me if I'm wrong).

1. What are the measures of a successful (or a disastrous) civilisation?

I propose suicide rates (the closest measurable proxy for happiness we have), sustainability and fairness (that it doesn't gain its success at the expense of others not having it). Basically I'm arguing that if the members of a society aren't happy, there isn't any point in it. If it isn't sustainable then it hasn't really worked (it's trivial to give the extreme of a society where everyone is really happy but dies out after one generation to see this), and if it gains its success at the expense of others, then it's not really it's own success, it's being given success, rather than having made it itself.

So why is it you think mortality and the causes of mortality are so much more important a metric for the success of a civilisation compared to those I've suggested? A man kept in a cage on a drip feed of balanced nutrients and antibiotics with his muscles stimulated at exactly the right rate to avoid atrophy would live longest. No disease, no accidents, no suicide. But that's not what you want is it? So where's the other measurements that you'd have to include?

2. Do other civilisations do better then us on our chosen metrics?

This is where we get mired in an exchange of sources, but I already agree that by your chosen metric (as specified above), western civilisation is doing best, so there's no need to continue proving that.

Do other civilisations have a lower suicide rate than us? - Yes most definitely they do, our civilisation last year, for example.

Are other civilisations more sustainable than us? - Yes, most certainly they are. Hunter-gatherers have lived for more than 200,000 years without having any appreciable impact of the global ecology (megafauna extinction possibly, and localised habitat modification).

Are other civilisations more fair than ours? - This is where I think the points you made are worth arguing. So you seem to be saying that the plight of the poor is not the fault of the rich (or at least not mostly?) and that they are free in a way that hunter-gatherers in an egalitarian society are not.

This is the point I'm completely failing to understand. 'Free' to me means the ability to do what you want to do without constraint. Any constraint limits freedom. I don't see what the difference is between being unable to lie in the sun all day because you need to earn enough money to pay for your house/food etc, and being unable to lie in the sun all day because you will be castigated for not doing your bit in an egalitarian group. I don't see the difference between being unable to eat the whole of your slaughtered cow because you need to earn money from selling most of it, and being unable to eat the whole of your hunted cow because society pressurises you into sharing it.

I don't see how the type of restriction makes any meaningful difference. It's only the degree of restriction that matters. So a society which allowed the maximum equality of opportunity to achieve one's desires would be the fairest. Are you arguing that ours is such a society, despite the fact that all land is in private ownership and the richest 1% own 82% of the wealth (according to Oxfam)? It seems hard to draw from that the conclusion that the poor are basically free to do whatever they choose without restriction.

3. To what extent can the choices people make indicate their universal preferences?

This question rather presumes that happiness is a metric and you seem to disagree there so this might not be relevant, but you've made mention of it so I will add it here. If hunter-gatherers choose freely to continue with their traditional lifestyle rather than accept what western civilisation has to offer them, to what extent can this not be taken as a sign that they prefer that lifestyle and therefore undermine the principle that western civilisation is universally better? You say that people might choose to stay out of comfort for the world they know, but if that were a common metric when people make choices about lifestyle, there would not be such a huge migrant population. Somehow we need to account for that fact.

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

Defining Western Civilization as liberal, capitalist democracies, it's objectively the greatest civilization that's ever been. If you look at the average income of human beings, it's basically flat for all of humanity, until it takes off asymptotically in the 19th century. It's also the best for human rights and morality there's ever been (the first major civilization to outlaw slavery), best for minorities and alternative lifestyles, best for the environment, best for the arts, best for pretty much everything.

Most of the gripes against it come from spoiled, coddled brats who have no sense of history and the kind of suffering human beings have had to undergo throughout most of it, and the amount of struggle it took to build it.

What tends to happen with such people is that they take the gains that have been achieved for granted, and posit a perfect ideal, with only the vaguest idea of how to go about getting there, other than tearing down what has been achieved. The result is always, predictably, disastrous.

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

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

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

What makes a civilization more or less successful?

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A word on related controversies:



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

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

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

It's taken me quite a while (evidently) to decide whether to reply to this, or indeed any other post. I get a bit bored from time to time with the treadmill of argument/counter-argument, it seems sometimes like such an inefficient way of refining one's model of the world. But then there doesn't immediately seem to be a better one, so I return to this. Anyway, just wanted to let you know that the long haitus has nothing to do with your post (which was interesting and deserved better than the long silence I offered).

No-one values longevity alone. It is a multiplier for how much they value their life and their future. People do not strive for physical or spiritual health, they strive for happiness (mental well-being) alone. They appear to strive for physical well-being, but only because being physically fit and able makes them happy. They appear to strive for spiritual well-being, but only because they imagine it will make them happy (perhaps even in the afterlife, it's no co-incidence that all afterlives are really nice places). If you're going to take intermediate goals as if they were ultimate then you might as well say people strive for money, or food, or winning at sports, getting a girlfriend, having a nice haircut etc. We don't say this because all these things are simply subsumed into striving to be happy.

So, no matter how it's dressed up in poetic rhetoric, it's relatively simple maths. If each year (and if my prediction of each future year) is going to bring me a net happiness of 1, then a hundred such years are worth 100 to me. If, on the other hand, the best I can predict for the net happiness value of my future years is 0 (just exactly as much happiness as suffering), then a hundred such years are worth no more to me than one, a hundred times zero is still zero. If my years (and my predicted future years) bring me ultimately only sadness (a happiness value of minus 1) then a hundred years are just going to make me even less happy. The result of this calculation is the result that approximately one percent of the UK population reach at some point in their lives - extending their lives is going to cause them more sadness and so their best course of action is to end it now.

In a society where 1% are so certain that their future years are going to yield net sadness that they don't even consider it worth finding out for sure, it's not at all unreasonable to presume that there is a much larger proportion for whom they consider (with varying, but lesser, degrees of certainty) that their future years may yield the same level of unhappiness. Hence it is not an unreasonable conclusion that we might be living in a society whose happiness value for future years is (on average) so low (zero or below) that increasing the quantity of years in their lives does nothing to increase their net happiness.

None of this is to say, of course, that people perform this calculation correctly. People may have an overly optimistic value to their future years only to be consistently disappointed as to how entirely mundane they actually turn out to be. This then raises the slightly separate question of whether policy makers should act upon what people say they want, or on what can be demonstrated to actually make people happier despite what they they say.

There is also a more positive corollary of all this. If each year (and you predict each future year) is worth a net happiness value of 2, then 40 such days will yield you more happiness than 70 years at a happiness value of half that. The important point here is that the person living 40 years (with each year twice as happy as his more long-lived counterpart) is still going to want to live for 80 years. In fact, they're going to be even more desperate to live for 80 years than the person whose years are less happy. So if you offer them a life which promises to be both happier and longer, they're going to want to take it, but the point is, that if it turns out that that life is in fact only longer (not happier), then they would be mistaken in taking up that offer - 40x2 is definitely more than 70x1.

I can't see how you could make an argument that a 70 year life at a happiness value of 1 per year is worth more than a 40 year life at a happiness value of 2 per year, simply because it is longer. It simply makes no sense to me.

What I can see, is how society might think they'd prefer the 70 years over the 40 if they're fooled into thinking that they're not going to be taking any net loss of happiness per year in achieving that longevity. So the reason why society has chosen Westernisation, is not a mystery to me, but how intelligent thinkers can defend it on the basis of longevity alone, is.

You seem to have raised a separate point about diversity within hunter-gather societies as opposed to Western ones, but again, like your earlier points, this seems to be nothing but speculation based on what you think hunter-gatherer societies are like rather than on the basis of any actual evidence. It's this sort of analysis that bores me. I have no doubt at all that if I demand evidence from you of the cultural homogeneity of hunter-gather tribes you will find some. A factor like cultural homogeneity is sufficiently vague that anyone who wanted to prove it could easily do so, and anyone who wanted to prove otherwise would have equally little trouble. The relevant issue for me is that you've arrived at this opinion first. If I ask you to back it up with evidence you will do so, but that doesn't alter the fact that your opinion arose from your prior prejudice, not from your years of anthropological research. You're writing at great length about things you 'reckon' are the case and then trawling through the internet to find evidence to support it when requested. We could do this forever and it would would become no less pointless. Even with something a coldly factual as physics or biology you can find 'evidence' on the internet to prove diametrically opposed theories.

Your posts have been valuable to me in that I have been able to test my view of the world against them. Maybe my posts have been of equal use to you (maybe not), but let's not pretend that we're on some journey where together we'll find the 'truth' of the matter by this mythical dialectic where we each points out the incontrovertible flaw in the other's argument until we centre on the one 'true' way. Rather we could continue indefinitely providing argument and counter-argument because theoretical counter-arguments are infinitely possible to construct. It's been interesting and I didn't want to leave the discussion with the unexplained silence I had previously bequeathed it. You may, of course want to reply for whatever reason, but It's run it's course now for me. Thanks.

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 civilizations are non-white? — Pseudonym

The Greek and Romans who were two major players in the rise of Western Civilization. They were olive skinned and not white. They have been lumped as white, by a left wing racism scam. Christianity began in the middle east where Arab skin color was the norm. They were not white.

The Democrat Party, on the other hand, was among the worse example of racism in the history of Western Civilization. They have successfully distracted away from their own shady past by blaming everyone but themselves, for their crimes against humanity.

I blame this distraction scam on an education system that is being lead by Democrat party criminals who are setting up the smoke screen. The wolves in sheep clothing are creating shallow citizens, who do not look very deep, but get wrapped up on surface illusions; diversity and name calling. It creates dual standards where racism, is not racism, if you are a protected group. This perpetuates racism. If race is not to be a factor, than we would have one standard for all humans, bot dual standards. But Democrats think in terms of racism and have many standards to avoid their own guilt.

Are you aware that the Nazi's used the Democrat party's legal basis, for discriminating and segregating against the blacks in the 19th-20th century, as their model for making Jews legally second class citizens as a prelude for extermination? The Democrats were thanked of this. However, they never paid for this, but have attempted to blame everyone else, hiding behind dual standards.

If we are to deal with racism and the shady side of Western Civilization, we need to address and lay blame on those who continue to defend this dark time, by avoiding the light of day. In the Civil war, 100's of thousand of white Republicans and Independents sacrificed their lives to atone and get rid of for slavery. While a similar number of white Democrats fought to maintain slavery and segregation.

Yet only the Democrats blame all whites, as racist, instead of targeting themselves. The Republicans have paid it forward by their sacrifice and are now exempt. The Democrats have double down their guilt by lying and deceiving. White Guilt equals Democrat party guilt. Maybe 100,000 Democrats can take their lives for atonement, starting in Washington. Once this is atoned, there is no need for the white guilt scam, that lumps criminals with the innocent, all in a shallow grave.

The Greek and Romans who were two major players in the rise of Western Civilization. They were olive skinned and not white. They have been lumped as white, by a left wing racism scam. Christianity began in the middle east where Arab skin color was the norm. They were not white. — wellwisher

Is a darkly tanned German not white? Is a light-skinned Syrian not an Arab?

"Race" owes its existence to the geography of human expansion outwards from Africa. One group went west (Europeans), two went east (Asians and Amerindians). Africans moved around too, but within Africa. If we assume for a moment that Norwegians and Greeks are both native Europeans with no other-group mixing, we would still end up with differences in skin tone. Over time, people who are exposed to higher levels of ultraviolet sun light develop more melanin as a defensive reaction. People who live near the poles (Norwegians, for example) lose melanin over time so that they can manufacture enough Vitamin D to survive.

Of course there was mixing among groups that were close to each other. But what makes "Western Civilization", or the other Civilizations, is culture, not melanin.

"Bad behavior" is a human phenomena, not a racial phenomena. People are just not that nice, and no matter where they are, no matter what civilization they have created, no matter how good they are overall--we still have horrible practices. As for the United States, you can not get away with finding one section of the country innocent and another section guilty; you can't hold one political party as noble and decent and the other parties as criminal enterprises.

In the history of slavery and Amerindian genocide, every part of the country was involved, no political party represented the interests of poor whites, blacks, amerindians or asians for very long -- no longer than it was temporarily expedient. True: there were more abolitionists in the NE than there were in the SE parts of the US. True: The North, and the Republican Party (as it was in 1860) led the war to maintain the Union and attempt reconstruction of the South. True: a Republic president issued the Emancipation Proclamation. True: after the civil war, after reconstruction had failed and was given up for dead, the North and South, Democrats and Republicans (as they were then constituted) resumed political aims which were not in the interests of poor whites, blacks, amerindians or asians. Both parties tended to serve the interests of rich people who, in this country, happened to be white.

The history of all civilization includes dungeons, massacres, ethnic cleansing of one sort or another, misgovernment, tyranny, slavery, corruption, class favoritism (the richest getting the most and best favors), and so on and so forth. It also includes great art, libraries, invention, religious innovations, good environmentalism, learning, and so on and so forth.

The Greek and Romans who were two major players in the rise of Western Civilization. They were olive skinned and not white. They have been lumped as white, by a left wing racism scam. — wellwisher

You know you're absolutely right. Now I come to think of it, most of the people I know are sort of pinky-yellow. Some are positively tan. Where are all these 'white' people we keep hearing about. Damn those Democrats! I've been scammed.

So, no matter how it's dressed up in poetic rhetoric, it's relatively simple maths. If each year (and if my prediction of each future year) is going to bring me a net happiness of 1, then a hundred such years are worth 100 to me. If, on the other hand, the best I can predict for the net happiness value of my future years is 0 (just exactly as much happiness as suffering), then a hundred such years are worth no more to me than one, a hundred times zero is still zero. If my years (and my predicted future years) bring me ultimately only sadness (a happiness value of minus 1) then a hundred years are just going to make me even less happy. The result of this calculation is the result that approximately one percent of the UK population reach at some point in their lives - extending their lives is going to cause them more sadness and so their best course of action is to end it now. — Pseudonym

I think human happiness doesn't quite work this way if only because it would be a terrible evolutionary strategy to have individuals take their own lives the moment they forecast long-term negative hedons. Instead, humans in general seem capable of enduring vast amounts of suffering while gaining few pleasures. Happiness and sadness isn't necessarily just a sum or difference between pain and pleasure; it's possible that being happy some of the time can make being unhappy most of the time worth the trouble (it's also possible individuals can adapt to being adequately happy across a wide range of environments)...

None of this is to say, of course, that people perform this calculation correctly. People may have an overly optimistic value to their future years only to be consistently disappointed as to how entirely mundane they actually turn out to be. This then raises the slightly separate question of whether policy makers should act upon what people say they want, or on what can be demonstrated to actually make people happier despite what they they say. — Pseudonym

A politician wielding such authority and employing your notion of human happiness might actually decide that some people are better off euthanized, and therefore force it upon them. Furthermore, different individuals can be made happy by different sets of circumstances, which is why I'm in favor of maintaining personal and democratic freedom.

You seem to have raised a separate point about diversity within hunter-gather societies as opposed to Western ones, but again, like your earlier points, this seems to be nothing but speculation based on what you think hunter-gatherer societies are like rather than on the basis of any actual evidence. It's this sort of analysis that bores me. I have no doubt at all that if I demand evidence from you of the cultural homogeneity of hunter-gather tribes you will find some. A factor like cultural homogeneity is sufficiently vague that anyone who wanted to prove it could easily do so, and anyone who wanted to prove otherwise would have equally little trouble. The relevant issue for me is that you've arrived at this opinion first. If I ask you to back it up with evidence you will do so, but that doesn't alter the fact that your opinion arose from your prior prejudice, not from your years of anthropological research. You're writing at great length about things you 'reckon' are the case and then trawling through the internet to find evidence to support it when requested. We could do this forever and it would would become no less pointless. Even with something a coldly factual as physics or biology you can find 'evidence' on the internet to prove diametrically opposed theories. — Pseudonym

I have actually already provided plenty of evidence and argumentation as to why conformity is very likely to be prevalent among hunter-gatherers. Instead of addressing those arguments or evidence you are just brushing them and me aside as prejudicial and speculative while accusing me of trawling the internet for evidence. If I recall correctly you're the one who requested anthropological assessments of my claims, and now that I've provided and cited them suddenly academic journals are not to be trusted because we can just shop around for articles that support our conclusions. Furthermore, my conclusion that hunter-gatherer groups are more culturally rigid/homogeneous is a direct result of research I carried out explicitly for this discussion. It's true each of us could merely shop around with a confirmation bias or accuse the other of being biased, but we could also honestly assess the evidence we have found and make comparisons. If my position in this thread is factually untrue, it's unlikely that I would have been able to find so many quality studies which conclude as much.

But how can you deem "cultural homogeneity" to be too vague to measure while happiness units 1 & 2 are simple maths? Being generally leaderless, the stability of hunter-gatherer groups, and the success of individuals within hunter-gatherer groups depends to a large degree on everyone following the same basic set of norms and customs which allow them to survive and get along. For example, individual men must become hunters to be seen as contributing, and they must share their meat (the success of the group may depend on it) or they will be socially sanctioned. Customs like the killing of twins is common for survival reasons (resource/nutrition strain on the mother and other infants) which is common specifically because it helps group survival in harsh conditions. With no leaders, their justice systems rely heavily on tradition and superstition, and where deviation from norms tends to be frowned upon.

Social structures which demand conformity are almost implicit/inherent if it is to be a social structure that maintains long-term egalitarianism (people aren't going to be "equal" if they don't conform), as deviation among individuals leads to wealth stratification, and to the dissolution of an egalitarian social structure. This is one of the direct conclusions and implications of the William Lomas article "Conflict, Violence, and Conflict Resolution in Hunting and Gathering Societies which I previously cited and asked that you read.

And yes I use words like "reckon", but you should probably deal with my actual reconnoitering rather than making fun of the words I use and constantly falling back on your accusation of racism.

Regarding the issue of happiness and your insistence that hunter-gatherers were happier based on your analysis of suicide, there's not much left for me to say. Much of my previous post sought to broach the complexities of happiness but you've doubled down on the idea that suicide is its true measure.

Your unwillingness to discuss this further fills me with 1.39 sadness units...

Your posts have been valuable to me in that I have been able to test my view of the world against them. Maybe my posts have been of equal use to you (maybe not), but let's not pretend that we're on some journey where together we'll find the 'truth' of the matter by this mythical dialectic where we each points out the incontrovertible flaw in the other's argument until we centre on the one 'true' way. Rather we could continue indefinitely providing argument and counter-argument because theoretical counter-arguments are infinitely possible to construct. It's been interesting and I didn't want to leave the discussion with the unexplained silence I had previously bequeathed it. You may, of course want to reply for whatever reason, but It's run it's course now for me. Thanks. — Pseudonym

I think the discussion has been interesting, and perhaps romantically I do value criticism of my ideas and arguments because I believe they can help me on some journey to find "truth". But dialogue and debate isn't an endless or meaningless affair: your general demand for evidence forced me to do research and in my view improve my position (but to be frank I could have done without the constant fallacious character appeals which got in the way of you fully engaging in this discussion).

Whatever its faults, it would be going too far to call it a disaster, what with all of the progress, development, and advancement that has been achieved, politically, technologically, economically and socially.

I voted with the majority.

As I said, I think the discussion on measures of a civilisation's success has run it's course, but I think there may be some value in clarifying what I mean by my comments with regards to the nature of the debate itself and the use of argument and evidence therein.

At the outset, we don't know what each other thinks. I've studied a small amount anthropology at university, I have colleagues I speak to regularly in the anthropology department, and paleopathology (particularly mental health, implied from hunter-gather tribes) arises in my professional work. It seemed like a reasonable supposition that the ideas I subscribe to in this regard, though not mine, are sufficiently unusual and reasonably well-informed (though I'm certainly no expert myself) that they might be of interest to others. I don't know you at all, so equally I presumed that your view of these ideas might be likewise interesting. I asked for your evidence on the presumption that you had some to hand which had already informed your opinion on the matter. Not on the presumption that you would go away and look some up. I can (and clearly have) performed several Google Scholar searches on these issues myself, so there's really no advantage in my getting you to this for me.

The trouble is, once these ideas have been expressed and we each know where the other stands, I can't then see the value of then continuing to provide counter-arguments to each other. This issue is not a new one and scholars more well-informed than either of us still disagree about it so it's clear that our ability to come up with counter-arguments is not going to be constrained at any point. If it were, then the matter would have been settled among those more well-informed scholars beforehand.

You seem to feel that your having provided argumentation and evidence for a thing being the case is sufficient for it to be presumed to be the case, or at least that you and I are in the same boat in this regard, but that's not the case as I see it. I've formed an idea, or set of ideas, based on what I've read, experienced first hand and spoken about with colleagues. The information came first, the ideas formed from it. That doesn't in any way make them right, it just means that I have a reasonable presumption that they might be of interest to people who've perhaps not been exposed to the literature, experiences and people from whence they came. If you'd been exposed to a different range of literature, experiences and people connected with anthropology, and so formed different ideas, it might well have been interesting to explore them until such time as our base of evidence was fully shared. We might still disagree, of course, but we would at least have gone away better informed. But that's not what has happened here. You have simply provided me with the largely uninformed opinion you already had, an opinion which is pretty much exactly in line with the commonly held view of hunter-gatherers that I'm already well aware of, having spoken to plenty of non-anthropologists already (their being the majority of the world). Then you've backed it up post hoc with evidence that I've already read. This doesn't mean that your opinion is wrong, it may well be absolutely spot on, but it means that I've heard it before, as have (more importantly) the experts I've spoken with and read, who nonetheless still disagree with it.

Now if you were looking for new ideas on the matter, there might continue to be some value in my providing counter-arguments to your view, by way of providing another way of looking at things, but again, this is evidently not the case. If the only way would would theoretically change your previously determined belief is for me to provide an argument that is absolutely irrefutable then there is clearly no point in my continuing to provide the sketchy, uncertain and speculative ideas that actually the stuff or real scholarship.

They're just ideas, they cannot, and will not ever prove anything definitively. If anyone's interested in them then that's great, I've done something of some small use, if they're boring or you've heard them all before then I'm sorry for wasting your time, but if you want me to defend them ad infinitum from every conceivable counter-argument then you're going to be disappointed, that is clearly an impossible task otherwise it would have been done already.

The mere existence of a counter-argument does not in itself make the original argument flawed. There aren't now, nor ever have been, arguments for which there are no counter-arguments, it's a standard to which no idea in history could ever be held. I'm all in favour of poking an idea, picking it apart to see how it works and testing it against it's counter-arguments, it's an essential part of trying it out to see if you like it. I don't know if you've read any of my other threads, but I think of ideas like clothes, we try them on, see if we like the look, the fit, the material. We might then go away wearing it, or we might decide it's not for us and stick to what we're already wearing. But then there are some people who have no intention of changing clothes at all, they simply find flaw in other clothing to reassure themselves that theirs was the right choice all along and there's no need to change. Obviously there's no point in continuing to present the clothes you're selling to someone who has no intention of ever buying them because, as I said already, all clothes have flaws, it's not going to come as a surprise to any tailor that a customer can spot a flaw in their work, the question is whether the features they like outweigh those they do not.

There's no way of being sure what type of customer anyone you speak to is, you might be genuinely interested in my ideas but just incredibly demanding, but at some point in time, I have to make a guess one way or the other otherwise I end up wasting my time.

We might still disagree, of course, but we would at least have gone away better informed. But that's not what has happened here. You have simply provided me with the largely uninformed opinion you already had, an opinion which is pretty much exactly in line with the commonly held view of hunter-gatherers that I'm already well aware of, having spoken to plenty of non-anthropologists already (their being the majority of the world). Then you've backed it up post hoc with evidence that I've already read. This doesn't mean that your opinion is wrong, it may well be absolutely spot on, but it means that I've heard it before, as have (more importantly) the experts I've spoken with and read, who nonetheless still disagree with it. — Pseudonym

I almost don't know what to say: this is one big silly ad hominem attack: I'm uninformed, incapable of being persuaded, and grasping at lofty truths beyond my station; I ignore evidence which contradicts my prejudicial/racist preconceived bigotries and am peddling the colonial myth of the inferior savage.

I don't mind these kinds of summaries (you're being honest after-all) but consider for a moment that I'm so wrapped up in the actual subject matter of this debate that I don't actually care that we're not experts, or that you think I hold racist views or am incapable of being persuaded, or any other alleged fact that does not directly pertain to the actual topic of discussion.

We've had so many meta discussions (first about lack of anthropological evidence, then about the limits and biases of anthropological evidence, about my own alleged biases, about historical biases, etc...) that I'm surprised you expected the overall exchange to yet be persuasive (not to say you haven't made adequate contributions). The majority of our exchange from your end has been criticism of my position and demands for evidence (a valuable service). The majority of my contributions are rebuttals and explanations (including ample exploration of academic sources which do support my positions). While you've been attacking my position (and I defending it) you haven't really gone out of your way to carve out a sufficient position of your own (one that could replace my own); more or less you hold that HG's are less violent (or more happy/more successful) than the west (or, at times, that there may be some very successful HG group out there that does better than the contemporary west, but is yet unnamed). Compared to the myriad of reasons I've given in support of my positions, you've mainly offered the single untreated supposition that suicide rates indicate you are correct. I don't think that my having given reasons automatically makes me correct, but it does mean that you should directly address those reasons in order to actually dissuade me from them, as I have been addressing yours.

We're not experts and this discussion is complex and tedious, and I may just be an ignorant dog with an old bone, but I refuse to abandon my uninformed misconceptions on anyone's assurance but evidence and logic (because I've worked hard to find and refine them). Yes this discussion is tedious, and I don't blame you for feeling it has run its course or for disengaging from it. Where you feel I'm dogmatically unwilling to abandon my positions, I' feel you're dogmatically unwilling to adequately and directly engage them (perhaps in part because you're convinced my descriptive position represents some kind of normative condemnation against non-white ethnic groups). You say that my position is one you've heard before (the old world violent savage narrative, which is not my position), and this makes me think that you might not actually be comprehending or appreciating the full scope of my position along with its nuances (which definitely explains why you see normative implications in it that aren't there, and why you've made so many rationally unrelated appeals).

You might be done with the topic, and that's fine, but I'm still quite interested in it. At some point I'll summarize the conclusions and evidence I've put forward into a new thread, and I'll welcome your participation if you're interested.

This may come as no surprise to you, but it's not uncommon for those with whom I'm engaged in some discussion to come away feeling like they've been personally attacked. I'd defend myself by saying that it's not my intention, but I'd also have to admit that it's not that I put as much effort into avoiding it as I should either. For what it's worth, I'm sorry that you feel I've mis-characterised you in some way, the meta discussion is what interests me far more than the actual topic (which, quite frankly is in the most part a matter for experts more well informed than either of us), and so my view of the means by which you come to have and maintain your beliefs is the more significant issue here for me.

With regards the actual topic, as I said, I just thought the approach I'd learned from my exposure to the evidence might be of interest to someone and that there might be some value in explaining it where it seemed to make no sense to you. I'm not particularly interested in your opinion on the matter because you seem no more well informed than the sources I've already been exposed to. That's no reflection on your person, I'm not claiming your opinions are worthless or stupid, or even wrong (except in few directly factual instances), it's just that they are not sufficiently interesting for me to want to examine them.

What I am interested in, is the development of my own thoughts on the matter, and defending them in a way which I find satisfactory is important to me. Defending them in a way you find satisfactory is of no interest to me at all. Not that that wouldn't be useful, I imagine the already oppressed lives of the few tribal communities we have left would be considerably easier if fewer people thought they knew best how to give them a 'better' life. It's just that I see the exercise as a complete waste of time, for the reasons I've given previously - there is no possible argument I could bring that you could not construct a counter-argument for and there is no possible evidence I could raise to which you could not find contradictory evidence.

All that I've stated in my post which you took such offence to, is the facts that explain this position. To take them one claim at a time;

"You have simply provided me with the largely uninformed opinion you already had...". This seems indisputable as your opinion came first and the only evidence you provided me with was a paper you found from searching Google Scholar, after you'd given your opinion. Unless I've missed something really important, these just seem to be irrefutable facts, not ad hominem attacks. Again, I'm not suggesting you did anything wrong in this regard, just that a less well informed opinion based on evidence I've already read isn't of much interest to me.

"... an opinion which is pretty much exactly in line with the commonly held view of hunter-gatherers that I'm already well aware of, having spoken to plenty of non-anthropologists already". Nothing in there makes the claim that your opinion is of the 'inferior savage' variety (although I think it tends to that at times), only that it seems common to me. I don't think most people think that hunter-gatherers are awful savages, I do think that most people think our society is better than theirs because of medicine, democracy, less warfare and more freedom to do what we want. Which is, unless I'm mistaken, pretty much exactly the view you're espousing.

"...you've backed it up post hoc with evidence that I've already read.". Again, unless I've missed some step on re-reading the posts here, you did indeed look up the evidence after I asked you for your sources, and that evidence does indeed consist of a paper I've already read. In fact I think it was my Google Scholar link which lead you to them.

So what part of it is "one big silly ad hominem attack"?

If indeed I have, as you suggest, failed to comprehend and appreciate the full scope of your position and it's nuances, then I look forward to a fresh exposition of it in some future thread. There may be some level at which I feel it would be rational of me to take part, but It will unlikely be simply to try and convince you that you are wrong using argument and evidence.

"You have simply provided me with the largely uninformed opinion you already had...". This seems indisputable as your opinion came first and the only evidence you provided me with was a paper you found from searching Google Scholar, after you'd given your opinion. Unless I've missed something really important, these just seem to be irrefutable facts, not ad hominem attacks. Again, I'm not suggesting you did anything wrong in this regard, just that a less well informed opinion based on evidence I've already read isn't of much interest to me. — Pseudonym

"...you've backed it up post hoc with evidence that I've already read.". Again, unless I've missed some step on re-reading the posts here, you did indeed look up the evidence after I asked you for your sources, and that evidence does indeed consist of a paper I've already read. In fact I think it was my Google Scholar link which lead you to them. — Pseudonym

I provided you with evidence when you asked for it, and I can assure you that I've been "informed" by many sources prior to our discussion. It does not follow that I am or was previously uninformed just because I used google scholar to find the exact evidence you requested. The supposition that I'm uninformed is the silly ad hominem...

"one big silly ad hominem attack" — Pseudonym

The part where instead of addressing the positions, arguments and evidence you initially criticized as wrong, you just assume that I'm uninformed, prejudiced, biased, etc...

If indeed I have, as you suggest, failed to comprehend and appreciate the full scope of your position and it's nuances, then I look forward to a fresh exposition of it in some future thread. There may be some level at which I feel it would be rational of me to take part, but It will unlikely be simply to try and convince you that you are wrong using argument and evidence. — Pseudonym

If you aren't willing to engage in the actual discussion at hand (argument and evidence), and instead insist on having meta-discussions about the shortcomings of my education or character, why bother?

I provided you with evidence when you asked for it, and I can assure you that I've been "informed" by many sources prior to our discussion. — VagabondSpectre

Well that's very confusing behaviour. If your opinion was informed by some reliable sources prior to my request for evidence why didn't you provide me with those sources in response to my request? That's really what I meant by asking for evidence - asking for the sources behind your opinion. I wasn't just asking for any sources, that would have been ridiculous (of course there are some negative anthropologists out there). I was asking for your sources. Why would you keep your sources a secret and provide me instead with one you looked up post hoc?

I apologise for presuming on the basis of your action here that you were relatively uninformed, but It seemed pretty conclusive behaviour to me. So, perhaps you could answer my original request now. What are the actual sources you used to inform your opinion prior to this discussion, and more importantly (to me) why on earth didn't you quote them when I asked, or indeed at any other time in the whole discussion, rather than trawl the internet for some others?

The part where instead of addressing the positions, arguments and evidence you initially criticized as wrong, you just assume that I'm uninformed, prejudiced, biased, etc... — VagabondSpectre

You're still not quite understanding (or perhaps simply vehemently disagreeing with) my position on this, so I'll try to be clearer. As far as I'm concerned, you have provided ample reasoning and evidence to show that;

a) using longevity as a metric for a civilisation's success is a reasonable thing to do,

and that;

b) even if we used happiness in some way, it is reasonable to presume that hunter-gatherer tribes are not happier than us.

So there really is nothing to address, you're presenting arguments and evidence aimed at showing that these two positions are well reasoned and well supported and I don't disagree.

What you've provided no reasoning, nor evidence, for is the contention that these two positions are the only reasonable and well supported positions it is possible to hold, which seems to be what you're aiming at achieving. To do that it is not sufficient to simply find evidence to support your theory, nor experts who agree with you, it would be necessary to demonstrate a complete absence of evidence to support any alternate theory and a total lack of experts who support them. It is not sufficient to show how you have followed a reasonable, logical route from some agreed absolute presuppositions to arrive at your theory (as you have perfectly adequately done), it is necessary to show how that it is the only reasonable logical route from the agreed absolute presuppositions (which you have not even touched on).

I do not believe that either of those two demonstrations are possible to achieve so I do not attempt them. I do, however, like my theories to be relatively robust, and I like to have answers to the criticisms that might be levelled at them, so I express them to other people, listen to their critique and provide counter-arguments. As I said above, the fact that you find these counter-arguments to be unsatisfactory (or, it seems completely absent), is totally immaterial. As would be my opinion of your counter-arguments. A theory you hold must satisfy your requirements, not anyone else's.

So...

If you aren't willing to engage in the actual discussion at hand (argument and evidence), and instead insist on having meta-discussions about the shortcomings of my education or character, why bother? — VagabondSpectre

... because this is a philosophy forum, not an anthropology one. It is necessary, if I wish to support my theory, to demonstrate that there exists some evidence that tribes are largely non-violent (by some metric), egalitarian (without needing to resort to violence to enforce it), happy with their condition (without being happy only out of ignorance) and feel as free as the majority in the west do. This I have done to my satisfaction. I presume it is also necessary for you to do the same for your theory, in order for you to be satisfied with it, and this you have evidently done to your satisfaction. The further matter of settling what tribes are actually like in terms of violence, equality, happiness, freedom etc. is a matter for people vastly better informed than either of us. Why would we debate that particular matter on a public philosophy forum when there remain literally tons of papers and full length books on the subject which neither of us have read? I suggest that if you're truly interested in resolving that issue you read at least the large part of the available literature on the subject, rather than speculate and argue with those who are more-or-less as uninformed as you are on the matter.

There are two philosophical points that I can see have developed in this thread.

1) How should we measure success in society? We have both presented theories on that, I'm satisfied that mine has answered your critique, you appear well satisfied with yours, there's no more work to be done there unless someone else chimes in with a new critique of either.

2.) How do we handle conflicting theories and evidence? This is the more interesting question to me as it crops up in almost every discussion, but I'm guessing it holds little interest for you as you've not engaged with it.

So unless you wish to engage with the second question, or you still think I've misunderstood (rather than simply disagree with) your theory (or critique of my theory) as to how to measure success in society, then there's nothing left to say.

On second thought maybe I've been to harsh expecting it to be obvious how the way in which you've raised your argument leads to the conclusions above without specific reference, so here is an attempt to do so.

nearly all humans want to go on living. — VagabondSpectre

This is simply an assertion. It may be the case, but it also may not. Those who find themselves in circumstances not conducive to going on living (very miserable with no prospects), clearly do not wish to go on living as evidenced by the fact that they kill themselves. This makes your assertion that humans all(or nearly all) want to go on living circumstantially proscribed, those circumstances being happiness. So you haven't avoided happiness being the primary metric, your secondary metric only applies in those circumstances where the human concerned is sufficiently happy to want to go on living. So the extent to which this is the case is the difference between our theories. You have presented a rational possibility (that the fact that most people want to go on living makes survival a good metric), but you have not shown that it is the only rational possibility (which would involve showing how it is definitely not sufficiently contingent on happiness to make happiness the primary metric). Without this second comparative measure, all you've shown is that a second viable theory exists and seeing as I don't disagree with that, I don't see the point in continuing to do so.

survival is both the most ubiquitous of significant human preferences, and also the most fundamentally important in underpinning every other preferred human endeavor (at least to a point) . — VagabondSpectre

No. Clearly, desire for sex, fame, children, adoration of peers, adrenaline rushes and objects of desire all frequently cause people to take actions which are huge risks to their survival. If the desire to survive was so ubiquitous and important as to trump all other desires, then why would anyone base jump, sky-dive, go to war, or even drive to work. Why would anyone do anything when one's survival chances are maximised by staying at home with an en-suite gym on a drip feed of antibiotics? The fact that a thing is necessary does not make it the most fundamental thing. You have to demonstrate that other things are not equally necessary.

As direct measures of survival, mortality rate and lifespan are therefore intrinsically valuable for enabling access to all the other boons of life. Mortality rate and lifespan also partially represent the cumulative effects of many other possible metrics (medicine, affluence, violence, security, etc...), which does make them additionally useful in assessing the overall success of a civilization. — VagabondSpectre

You've quite literally stated here that mortality is an intrinsically valuable, and useful metric. I have not argued that mortality is not either of those things, I've argued that it is not sufficiently valuable or useful to act as a measure of the success of a society on its own. To respond to that by simply pointing out that it is valuable and intrinsic is not a counter-argument. Imagine we were trying to establish who had most oranges. If you simply argue that you definitely have some oranges, and I argue that I too have some oranges, we have gotten nowhere. We must do one of two things, either quantify our batch of oranges by some comparable metric, or directly compare our batch of oranges. I am aware that mortality is a useful measure of a society's success, what I disagree on is how useful.

Having a high chance of being dead on arrival or dead relatively shortly after arrival because of high mortality rates and shorter lifespans reduces an individual's chances of living a more successful life in all respects. — VagabondSpectre

This is simply statistically wrong as you are confusing a metric's necessity with the extent to which it is exhaustive. If a person has a 1:100 chance of being successful in any given year in one society, and a 1:1,000,000 chance in any given year in another, then a smaller number of years in the first society yields better odds of success than a larger number of years in the latter. It's just maths. Unless, as you do, you ignore other contributory factors. again, it's about comparison, so you must provide some quantitative metric, otherwise all you're doing is demonstrating that your theory is a viable possibility and I already agree with that.

Physical health beyond survival is another nearly universal human value (held by nearly all individuals) which must therefore be considered high on the list of important attributes of societal success. — VagabondSpectre

Again, you're simply presenting your case as if it were an argument. I don't disagree that physical health must be considered high on the list of important attributes, but in rejecting my theory you need to argue that it must be considered higher than metrics of happiness, not just high.

Access to wealth, security, and medicine play important roles in maintaining survival and physical health, and while different individuals and societies can have unique needs and desires with respect to these endeavors, these resources none the less make objectively valuable contributions to the success of a given society in terms of physical health and beyond. — VagabondSpectre

Again, this is without comparison, demonstrating that these things are important is not the issue, no-one disagrees with that. Demonstrating that they are more important than happiness is the issue. There must be some quantitative or comparative measure, which you have not provided.

I won't quote directly from your section on mental well-being, but suffice to say you have again simply declared that something is the case which I do not disagree with - various factors influence mental well-being including fear and inequality. I fail to see how this has any bearing on it's use as a metric for the success of a society either necessarily or exhaustively.

it could be very misleading to use overall suicide rates as a discrete metric. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, I don't disagree. Again, you have failed to carry out any comparative analysis. Is it more misleading than other metrics, if so why?

Physical and mental variations of all kinds may render some civilizations more or less appealing to individuals. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, they may... or they may not. Providing an argument that they may has no bearing on whether they actually do.

Some environments can lead to convergence of adaptations (when selective pressures are stringent diversity between individuals shrinks overtime as naturally selected individual adaptations converge toward a singular adaptive strategy) and others can lead to divergence in adaptations (when selective pressures change, especially when a previously limiting environmental factor is removed, then a massive increase in possibly successful strategies is made available, and diversity between evolving and adapting elements can increase as natural deviations are no longer destroyed by rigid selection). — VagabondSpectre

Yes, they can. So you now need to demonstrate that hunter-gatherer societies experience mostly convergence whereas modern Western societies experience mostly divergence, and again, if you expect this debate to resolve it is not sufficient to show how that could be the case, by some metric you've chosen, but how it is the only conclusion from any rational metric. Otherwise, all you've shown is that your theory is a rational possibility, and I already don't disagree with that notion. You've presumed, for example, in your measure that diversity of job is correlated with diversity of personal expression. I don't see any evidence that this is the case. One could be a fire-fighter, or a bank clerk and basically have the same neuro-typical outlook on life. Equally one could conceive of two hunters who have diametrically opposite outlooks and understandings of the world, yet both have the same job.

Assessing the mental and spiritual well-being of any society seems too complex a task to satisfy. Aside from some very basic factors which contribute to mental health and happiness such as freedom from fear, it's unanimously unclear what all humans ought to do to be happy. — VagabondSpectre

And yet your argument relies heavily on the presumption that low mortality rates are definitely one of those things. If they're not, then why bother achieving them, if they are then it is clearly possible to arrive at some reasonably firm conclusions about what contributes to metal well-being. We've already explored some - freedom from fear, relative equality, freedom of expression, freedom to choose one's own path, food security, a supportive community, I don't really think any of these things are in much doubt.

There is however the noteworthy observation that a given environment and culture will tend to naturally select individuals who are well suited to being happy and mentally healthy in the adaptive niches which it offers, and so overtime a given population might come to be well suited to the arbitrary circumstances they happen to be in. — VagabondSpectre

Right, so just how short a timescale do you think evolution acts on? Because this seems key to your argument. I don't see any evidence that evolution acts on the genome at anything other than very long timescales, which would mean, by your own analysis, we are broadly speaking adapted to be happy and mentally healthy in the hunter-gather cultural environment in which we evolved. If you think evolution acts faster than that, then why is it do you think, that our biology still requires the levels of exercise a hunter-gatherer lifestyle provides and not that which a modern largely sedentary lifestyle does? Why does it still require the sort of nutrition provided by hunter-gather lifestyles and has not evolved to be more tolerant of the refined-carbohydrate-rich diet modern society provides? Does it not seem more parsimonious to presume that likewise, our mental well-being relies on the sorts of cultural environment, challenges and activities that hunter-gatherer lifestyles provide? You have provided ample argument and evidence to show that it might not, and there's certainly nothing biological to my knowledge that prevents mental well-being from adapting faster than physical biology, but you've failed to provide any argument to show that it must not, that we must reject the most parsimonious theory that our mental well-being is dictated by the same evolutionary pressures at the same pace as those which dictate our physical well-being and so we are as mentally well-suited to an idealised hunter-gather lifestyle as we are physically suited to it. In other words, why would we have evolved to strongly desire things which were completely out of our reach for the first few million years? Do you not think that evolutionary pressure would have removed the stress that desiring something unobtainable causes, in favour of individuals who do not desire such things and so suffer less stress?

Well that's very confusing behavior. If your opinion was informed by some reliable sources prior to my request for evidence why didn't you provide me with those sources in response to my request? That's really what I meant by asking for evidence - asking for the sources behind your opinion. I wasn't just asking for any sources, that would have been ridiculous (of course there are some negative anthropologists out there). I was asking for your sources. Why would you keep your sources a secret and provide me instead with one you looked up post hoc?

I apologise for presuming on the basis of your action here that you were relatively uninformed, but It seemed pretty conclusive behavior to me. So, perhaps you could answer my original request now. What are the actual sources you used to inform your opinion prior to this discussion, and more importantly (to me) why on earth didn't you quote them when I asked, or indeed at any other time in the whole discussion, rather than trawl the internet for some others? — Pseudonym

You don't need a full history of the evidence I've been exposed to engage in this discussion, and the evidence (in the form of anthropological journals which you've requested) that I have presented should be sufficient (there are probably no academic studies which concisely capture the main thrust of my original post (that western civilization has been the opposite of a disaster)). I've gathered my understanding of human cultures over a long period of time and from many sources (such as history books and documentaries, which I reckon you would merely ridicule as undisciplined); I made a myriad of points in a cumulative argument, each of which I've been happy to provide evidence for, but providing all my original sources would be a herculean feat of memory.

What you've provided no reasoning, nor evidence, for is the contention that these two positions are the only reasonable and well supported positions it is possible to hold, which seems to be what you're aiming at achieving. To do that it is not sufficient to simply find evidence to support your theory, nor experts who agree with you, it would be necessary to demonstrate a complete absence of evidence to support any alternate theory and a total lack of experts who support them. It is not sufficient to show how you have followed a reasonable, logical route from some agreed absolute presuppositions to arrive at your theory (as you have perfectly adequately done), it is necessary to show how that it is the only reasonable logical route from the agreed absolute presuppositions (which you have not even touched on). — Pseudonym

I'm never going to be able to prove that there is a 0% chance I am wrong, or that no expert in a vast field of study hold conflicting views. However, the more rational merit I can give to my own positions, the less likely alternative theories seem to be. No science requires total consensus even among experts..,

1) How should we measure success in society? We have both presented theories on that, I'm satisfied that mine has answered your critique, you appear well satisfied with yours, there's no more work to be done there unless someone else chimes in with a new critique of either. — Pseudonym

To be fair it is only my last post before your hiatus which focused specifically on this question. Lengthy as it was it was not a conclusive post. For most of our discussion I've simply been defending my original claims which amount to my presupposed metrics of a successful society. The fact that I have not reached a satisfactory conclusion for myself yet is why I'm considering a new thread, and there are several issues which I neglected to address.

2.) How do we handle conflicting theories and evidence? This is the more interesting question to me as it crops up in almost every discussion, but I'm guessing it holds little interest for you as you've not engaged with it. — Pseudonym

Sure it's an interesting question, but asking it in the midst of a debate is somewhat less than pertinent. It's inexorably going to side-track the main discussion as we sit around wondering what it is about the other's psyche that keeps them so close minded. Any explanations we offer are likely to be self serving given we've yet to resolve our differing opinions. The way you've framed things, reasonable truth is locked inside fort knox, with a lion, and a decaying academic consensus atom. If I must: you underestimate us. We're more than capable of forming and informing evidence based opinions, even if originally they may have started as anecdotal or evolutionary preconceptions. In the spirit of philosophy and debate I think it always best to try and confront evidence and arguments directly (unless they're obviously absurd). Nobody likes to be persuaded and we're all less vulnerable to rational influence than we should be, but I genuinely do attempt to expose myself. I'm very interested in persuasion and bias, but how can we discuss our own biases in the middle of our biased debate? (And besides, its not especially persuasive...)

This is simply an assertion. It may be the case, but it also may not. Those who find themselves in circumstances not conducive to going on living (very miserable with no prospects), clearly do not wish to go on living as evidenced by the fact that they kill themselves. This makes your assertion that humans all(or nearly all) want to go on living circumstantially proscribed, those circumstances being happiness. So you haven't avoided happiness being the primary metric, your secondary metric only applies in those circumstances where the human concerned is sufficiently happy to want to go on living. So the extent to which this is the case is the difference between our theories. You have presented a rational possibility (that the fact that most people want to go on living makes survival a good metric), but you have not shown that it is the only rational possibility (which would involve showing how it is definitely not sufficiently contingent on happiness to make happiness the primary metric). Without this second comparative measure, all you've shown is that a second viable theory exists and seeing as I don't disagree with that, I don't see the point in continuing to do so. — Pseudonym

By your own reasoning the statement "nearly all humans want to go on living" is true simply because nearly all humans have not and will probably not commit suicide. Across all human cultures, nearly all human deaths are not caused by suicide. Even in the most awful conditions we know of (slavery/war/prison) most humans do not commit suicide, and by your reasoning therefore want to go on living, and are therefore sufficiently happy. Suicide rates go up when conditions go down (for obvious psychological reasons) but on average all human cultures provide the means of lives worth living.

If life is worth living, and I'm saying that it usually is to most people, then survival is intrinsically important as necessary to preserve the value life contains. It may not sufficiently describe happiness, but it is an absolute limiting factor of it.

Happiness is one of the real problems here: how do we define it? In my view it's not easy to define at all; it's a myriad of things. comforts, nutrition, freedom, fulfillment, belonging, uniqueness, adversity, growth, achievement - whatever - . Until we can grip a solid definition of happiness we're stuck with our many sub-categories.

No. Clearly, desire for sex, fame, children, adoration of peers, adrenaline rushes and objects of desire all frequently cause people to take actions which are huge risks to their survival. If the desire to survive was so ubiquitous and important as to trump all other desires, then why would anyone base jump, sky-dive, go to war, or even drive to work. Why would anyone do anything when one's survival chances are maximised by staying at home with an en-suite gym on a drip feed of antibiotics? The fact that a thing is necessary does not make it the most fundamental thing. You have to demonstrate that other things are not equally necessary. — Pseudonym

People desire those things (sometimes more than anything else), but very rarely will someone do something like jump off a cliff to be famous or knowingly die for an adrenaline rush. (the point is to get repeated doses, which requires you to go on living). I'm not saying that mortality rates are the one true and ultimate measure of societal success, but they are a necessary and major part of any broad and comprehensive assessment of societal success.

You've quite literally stated here that mortality is an intrinsically valuable, and useful metric. I have not argued that mortality is not either of those things, I've argued that it is not sufficiently valuable or useful to act as a measure of the success of a society on its own. To respond to that by simply pointing out that it is valuable and intrinsic is not a counter-argument. Imagine we were trying to establish who had most oranges. If you simply argue that you definitely have some oranges, and I argue that I too have some oranges, we have gotten nowhere. We must do one of two things, either quantify our batch of oranges by some comparable metric, or directly compare our batch of oranges. I am aware that mortality is a useful measure of a society's success, what I disagree on is how useful. — Pseudonym

We agree that longevity is not sufficient as a standalone metric, and thankfully I've not used it as such. Broad physical health, mental health, security (freedom from fear), and freedom in general are other areas I've explored. If a given society is rife with such boons, then being alive longer within them would indeed be valuable/sucecssful.

I've given you a somewhat comprehensive approach to defining citrus fruit and provided varied exemplar. Oranges are indeed one of the examples I've given for citrus, but it's simply not true to claim that I've provided only oranges.

This is simply statistically wrong as you are confusing a metric's necessity with the extent to which it is exhaustive. If a person has a 1:100 chance of being successful in any given year in one society, and a 1:1,000,000 chance in any given year in another, then a smaller number of years in the first society yields better odds of success than a larger number of years in the latter. It's just maths. Unless, as you do, you ignore other contributory factors. again, it's about comparison, so you must provide some quantitative metric, otherwise all you're doing is demonstrating that your theory is a viable possibility and I already agree with that. — Pseudonym

I'm attempting to show why my positions are reasonable and likely, more likely than random alternative theories...

It doesn't exactly matter that some societies offer better odds of leading successful lives: statistically, if you have a higher chance of dying, you have a lower chance of leading a successful life, whatever that may entail. Yes, it is just maths. I'm aware that a society with 0% chance of death and 0% chance of success is worse than a society with 25% chance of death and a 0.5% chance of success (if instead there was a 50% chance of death, then you're that much more likely to be taken out of the running for the 0.5% success pool.

I've not proposed lifespan as a standalone metric (however under your untreated interpretation of suicide, the mere continuation of one's own life means that life is worth living, which would mean that longevity does represent success).

Again, you're simply presenting your case as if it were an argument. I don't disagree that physical health must be considered high on the list of important attributes, but in rejecting my theory you need to argue that it must be considered higher than metrics of happiness, not just high. — Pseudonym

Happiness is not a straightforward metric. Physical health is a component of happiness. I'm not prepared to demonstrate that health is important to happiness (happiness comes from a combination of different things, in my opinion), so you will just have to take it or leave it. That you agree it is important is good enough as I reject the idea that happiness a wholly separate metric. Humans tend to desire good health, and attaining one's desires tends to make us happy.

Again, this is without comparison, demonstrating that these things are important is not the issue, no-one disagrees with that. Demonstrating that they are more important than happiness is the issue. There must be some quantitative or comparative measure, which you have not provided.

I won't quote directly from your section on mental well-being, but suffice to say you have again simply declared that something is the case which I do not disagree with - various factors influence mental well-being including fear and inequality. I fail to see how this has any bearing on it's use as a metric for the success of a society either necessarily or exhaustively. — Pseudonym

By necessarily and exhaustively you seem to be supposing that an individual metric ought to occupy a universal and immovable place in a hierarchy of values that all humans agree with. I cannot tell you the exact point at which security becomes a greater concern than freedom, or precisely chart the many factors which influence individual human happiness.

Yes, I don't disagree. Again, you have failed to carry out any comparative analysis. Is it more misleading than other metrics, if so why? — Pseudonym

It's more misleading as ametric for societal happiness because as I understand it suicide often is the result of clinical depression, an affliction not necessarily caused by society itself. I've put forward and supported many good metrics, but I don't exactly feel the need to show why all other possible metrics, including suicide, are more misleading. Hell, maybe suicide is actually the closest proxy for societal happiness that we have, as you say it is, but until I get ahold of some reasons as to why this is the case (as opposed to not the case), I have no reason to assume its merit.

Yes, they can. So you now need to demonstrate that hunter-gatherer societies experience mostly convergence whereas modern Western societies experience mostly divergence, and again, if you expect this debate to resolve it is not sufficient to show how that could be the case, by some metric you've chosen, but how it is the only conclusion from any rational metric. Otherwise, all you've shown is that your theory is a rational possibility, and I already don't disagree with that notion. You've presumed, for example, in your measure that diversity of job is correlated with diversity of personal expression. I don't see any evidence that this is the case. One could be a fire-fighter, or a bank clerk and basically have the same neuro-typical outlook on life. Equally one could conceive of two hunters who have diametrically opposite outlooks and understandings of the world, yet both have the same job — Pseudonym

I have to keep pointing out that inductive arguments which establish conclusions as likely rather than deductively necessary can be just as philosophical (better in fact).

Are you essentially suggesting that we would be equally happy if we were all forced to do the same job?

And yet your argument relies heavily on the presumption that low mortality rates are definitely one of those things. If they're not, then why bother achieving them, if they are then it is clearly possible to arrive at some reasonably firm conclusions about what contributes to metal well-being. We've already explored some - freedom from fear, relative equality, freedom of expression, freedom to choose one's own path, food security, a supportive community, I don't really think any of these things are in much doubt. — Pseudonym

Being alive is definitely required to be mentally and spiritually healthy, therefore low mortality rates improves your odds of being mentally and spiritually healthy. It's not a presumption...

I was more or less remarking on the complications and subjective dilemmas associated with happiness (like human adaptability to suffering and subjective differences between individuals).

Right, so just how short a timescale do you think evolution acts on? Because this seems key to your argument. I don't see any evidence that evolution acts on the genome at anything other than very long timescales, which would mean, by your own analysis, we are broadly speaking adapted to be happy and mentally healthy in the hunter-gather cultural environment in which we evolved — Pseudonym

Evolution and the already extant adaptive capacities of the human genome work over many different time-scales. Depending on the strength of selective forces, and the nature of the trait changes can happen quite quickly (did you know Yao Ming was essentially selectively bred?). Genes which interact with height through various hormone and RNA signals naturally vary during reproduction, and when selection pressures are strong the average height of group could change fairly rapidly. Cognitive traits and the genes that code for them are probably more complex (or at least more complex in that we don't fully understand cognition), but whatever they are, many aspects of them must be heritable.

It's not capitalized Evolution that I'm describing in the sense of the emergence of a novel trait, it's more of a re-balancing of existing traits for adaptive purposes, which is a natural and regular function of how humans genetically adapt generation to generation.

If you think evolution acts faster than that, then why is it do you think, that our biology still requires the levels of exercise a hunter-gatherer lifestyle provides and not that which a modern largely sedentary lifestyle does? — Pseudonym

Sedentary life isn't without exercise (ask a farmer), but it seems we have no heritable and variable trait which allows our muscles to grow healthily without exercise (it can take a long time for such an evolutionary miracle).

Why does it still require the sort of nutrition provided by hunter-gather lifestyles and has not evolved to be more tolerant of the refined-carbohydrate-rich diet modern society provides? — Pseudonym

Because basic nutrients are still required for our complex cells to function properly, but maybe our dietary tolerances do evolve. For example, European consumption of alcohol has led them to be less sensitive to its effects (something to do with alcohol metabolizing enzymes IIRC) than Asian ethnic groups...

In other words, why would we have evolved to strongly desire things which were completely out of our reach for the first few million years? Do you not think that evolutionary pressure would have removed the stress that desiring something unobtainable causes, in favour of individuals who do not desire such things and so suffer less stress? — Pseudonym

From an evolutionary perspective, those who suffered too much due to their physiology/psychology will have tended to reproduce less, but it would also be true that evolving to be completely satisfied would also cause you to reproduce less successfully. Having insatiable desires keeps us motivated.

You don't need a full history of the evidence I've been exposed to engage in this discussion, and the evidence (in the form of anthropological journals which you've requested) that I have presented should be sufficient (there are probably no academic studies which concisely capture the main thrust of my original post (that western civilization has been the opposite of a disaster)). I've gathered my understanding of human cultures over a long period of time and from many sources (such as history books and documentaries, which I reckon you would merely ridicule as undisciplined); I made a myriad of points in a cumulative argument, each of which I've been happy to provide evidence for, but providing all my original sources would be a herculean feat of memory. — VagabondSpectre

I haven't asked for a full list. I'm merely defending my statement that your opinion was largely uninformed (in the academic sense), and supported post hoc with evidence you found by searching the internet in a concious attempt to support it. You seemed to take great offence at the suggestion, so I presumed it wasn't true. This would mean that your opinion was, in fact, supported by some academic information and that you searched the internet for new sources to support it for some reason other than your lack of previous sources. If you're now saying that that wasn't the case, then my first assertion, which you labelled ad hominem, was actually perfectly true. I'm not judging. I didn't at any point say "... and therefore your opinion is stupid and rubbish", just that it was reasonable of me to to not treat it's exposition as a learning experience.

I'm never going to be able to prove that there is a 0% chance I am wrong, or that no expert in a vast field of study hold conflicting views. However, the more rational merit I can give to my own positions, the less likely alternative theories seem to be. — VagabondSpectre

That's fine, showing that one theory has more rational merit than another is a reasonable way of comparing them (although I don't see any convincing ethical argument that we should then adopt the argument which shows most rational merit, but that's another debate entirely), but contrary to your later suggestion that we cannot discuss these ideas in the midst of a bias-laden debate, I really don't see how we can even have a debate (bias-laden or otherwise) unless we resolve what it is we're using as a measure of rational merit. You seem to believe in the (I think very much mistaken) notion that the ability to provide counter-arguments is just such a measure, but the history of ideas demonstrates with glaring empirical accuracy, that the ability to derive counter-arguments is almost infinite, limited only by the imagination. So then we're left with this unsatisfactorily subjective notion of 'compelling' counter-arguments. You don't find my arguments 'compelling', I don't find yours 'compelling' so where do we go from there?

We're more than capable of forming and informing evidence based opinions, even if originally they may have started as anecdotal or evolutionary preconceptions. In the spirit of philosophy and debate I think it always best to try and confront evidence and arguments directly (unless they're obviously absurd). — VagabondSpectre

I agree entirely. The difference I'm trying to get at is that presenting your argument, together with the rational process and evidence by which you support it, is not sufficient on it's own to do anything more than offer someone an alternative (which they may then adopt or reject). If you want to go further, then this you'll need to do some comparative work. My criticism of your argument so far was mostly based on the fact that it is rarely more than a just-so story. It lays out how something could be the case, not how something must be the case, nor even how something is more likely to be the case than any alternative. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I presumed at first that this was intentional, and you were simply laying out an alternative for me to consider (which I why I said that I wasn't interested in reading an alternative presented by someone who was largely uniformed, when I could read alternatives presented by experts). Now that you've made it clear that you're not simply laying out an alternative, but are attempting to argue it's relative merits, I'm focussing my criticism more on the fact that I don't see any such comparative arguments there.

My second post attempts to draw out where I expected to see some comparative arguments.

The most important point you're missing, which covers the first three of your responses, is a simple mathematical one. You're treating survival as a binomial factor when it is in fact variable. Hunter-gatherer tribes do not fail to survive (where modern societies achieve survival). Hunter-gatherers survive for less long than modern people's on average. This treatment of a variable as a binomial causes all sorts of problems for your argument...

If life is worth living, and I'm saying that it usually is to most people, then survival is intrinsically important as necessary to preserve the value life contains. — VagabondSpectre

So here, 'survival', is not a binomial factor (one you either have or do not have), it is a variable (one you have a certain quantity of). The decision we're talking about is trading a certain quantity of this variable for an increase in the variable 'happiness', yet this argument here treats it as if the only choice were to either have 'survival' or not have it. Treat it as a variable and your last assertion "survival is intrinsically important as necessary to preserve the value life contains" ceases to be true. Only when the 'survival' variable is zero does the 'value life contains' variable become impossible to obtain. At all other values for the 'survival' variable, it is still possible to obtain any amount of the 'value life contains' variable depending entirely on how 'valuable' each moment of that life is.

...(the point is to get repeated doses, which requires you to go on living). I'm not saying that mortality rates are the one true and ultimate measure of societal success, but they are a necessary and major part of any broad and comprehensive assessment of societal success. — VagabondSpectre

Again, same error. It does require you to "go on living" to get repeated doses of happiness, and lack of mortality is definitely necessary for a society to be successful. But both modern societies and hunter-gatherer societies have that. Hunter-gatherers do not instantly drop dead the moment they're born, so both possess this necessary quality 'being alive for some time'. The variable is the amount of time. The point I'm making with the sky-divers is that statistically they will be (as a population) reducing the amount of time they spend alive (sky-divers have a shorter lifespan on average than non-sky-divers). They trade this shortened average lifespan for the adrenaline rush their sport gives them. This is also true of absolutely any of the risks we take in life. We trade the shortened average lifespan of a group taking that risk for the benefits that risk gives us. This is no different to the argument I'm making about hunter-gatherers who choose to remain so. They're trading a shortened average lifespan for the benefits their lifestyle gives them.

If a given society is rife with such boons, then being alive longer within them would indeed be valuable/sucecssful — VagabondSpectre

Here, bizarrely, you've basically undermined your own argument and replaced it entirely with the one I'm trying to lay out. "If a given society is rife with such boons, then being alive longer within them would indeed be valuable/successful". Do you see... The variable 'being alive longer' is only of value if a given society is 'rife with such boons'. If a given society is not 'rife with such boons' then the variable 'being alive longer' is not worth anything. So why are you suggesting we judge the worth of a society in any way on the variable 'being alive longer' when we've just established that such a variable is only worth anything if such a society is 'rife with such boons'? The first job is to establish whether a society is rife with boons, before we've done that the variable 'being alive longer' is of no use to us as a metric, as you just stated.

It doesn't exactly matter that some societies offer better odds of leading successful lives: statistically, if you have a higher chance of dying, you have a lower chance of leading a successful life, whatever that may entail. — VagabondSpectre

No, you've completely ignored the maths. You do not automatically have a lower chance of leading a successful life if you have a higher chance of dying. That's not the way probability works. With two variables the one is multiplied by the other. If you live in a society with an extremely low chance of achieving happiness, it doesn't matter how long you live for (presuming infinity is not an option), because your chances of happiness are so low that getting to roll those dice more often is not sufficient compensation. Imagine I have a ten-sided-die and a hundred-sided die, and my aim is to roll a one as often as I can (the size of the die represents how easy it is to achieve happiness in a given society, rolling a one represents happiness being achieved, the number of times you can roll a die represents your lifespan). I need to roll the hundred-sided die ten times more to have an equal chance of obtaining a one, than if I roll the ten sided die. So if someone said to me, would you be prepared to trade a loss in the number of times you get to roll the die for an opportunity to swap dice, you would be best taking that option.

This is what I'm suggesting makes hunter-gatherer societies compare favourably to Western ones despite their lower life expectancies. This is why sky-divers accept a lower life expectancy on average than non-sky-divers. This is why anyone does anything remotely risky. People are, and always have been, prepared to trade a loss in expected lifespan for an increase in the happiness of that lifespan.

By necessarily and exhaustively you seem to be supposing that an individual metric ought to occupy a universal and immovable place in a hierarchy of values that all humans agree with. I cannot tell you the exact point at which security becomes a greater concern than freedom, or precisely chart the many factors which influence individual human happiness. — VagabondSpectre

And yet that's exactly what you're doing because you're presenting the fact that Western societies have a higher life expectancy as a metric which is sufficient to outweigh any advantages hunter-gather societies may have in diet, child-rearing, equality, community, exercise, purpose, freedom etc. You have decided the place life expectancy has in the hierarchy of values.

It's more misleading as ametric for societal happiness because as I understand it suicide often is the result of clinical depression, an affliction not necessarily caused by society itself. I've put forward and supported many good metrics, but I don't exactly feel the need to show why all other possible metrics, including suicide, are more misleading. Hell, maybe suicide is actually the closest proxy for societal happiness that we have, as you say it is, but until I get ahold of some reasons as to why this is the case (as opposed to not the case), I have no reason to assume its merit. — VagabondSpectre

This seems to go back to the 'laying out an alternative' approach rather than any comparative work. I'm not asking you to assume the merit of suicide as a metric. As far as I'm concerned you can take it or leave it, but it was my understanding that you wanted to engage in arguing the relative merits of your theory, which would make it necessary for you to show how your metric compared relative to mine, how it improves on mine. So if we're talking about the property of a metric's clarity (it's failure to mislead), then a comparative argument would show how your metrics had less tendency to mislead than mine. Without that you're just back to saying that you have a reasonable theory and I already don't deny that.

I have to keep pointing out that inductive arguments which establish conclusions as likely rather than deductively necessary can be just as philosophical (better in fact). — VagabondSpectre

No you don't because I have at no point denied that is the case. I haven't at any point claimed that you do not have a valid philosophical theory. We're not arguing about validity, we're arguing about relative merit. Why are your conclusions more likely than mine?

Are you essentially suggesting that we would be equally happy if we were all forced to do the same job? — VagabondSpectre

Yes. So long as the 'force' you mention is simply the force of naturally occurring circumstances and not some dictatorial government, then that is exactly what I'm saying. Your job does not determine who you are, two bakers could be more diverse in personality and approach to life than a bank clerk and a soldier who might approach their respective jobs with exactly the same world-view. What matters is your personal identity, not what you do for a living.

Being alive is definitely required to be mentally and spiritually healthy, therefore low mortality rates improves your odds of being mentally and spiritually healthy. It's not a presumption... — VagabondSpectre

Back to this again...I refer you to the discussion on how probability works above. 'Being alive' is not a binomial value in this. Hunter-gathers achieve 'being alive', western societies achieve 'being alive'. The binomial value 'being alive' does not vary across the societies we're comparing as both have it. What varies is the variable value 'length of being alive', and 'length of being alive' is not directly correlated with mental and spiritual well-being as our population of sky-divers, soldiers and all other risk takers proves.

Again, I'm not going to take your comments on evolution individually. Suffice to say they conform to the same approach. You've given me a perfectly cogent argument as to why genetic factors determining what makes us happy might have evolved more quickly than, say, dietary requirements. Once again proving that you have a perfectly logical and reasonable argument. But you have not done any comparative work. Is it more likely that our genetic predisposition to causes of happiness has evolved quickly to take account of modern life? Because if not, then we simply have two equally valid alternatives.

From an evolutionary perspective, those who suffered too much due to their physiology/psychology will have tended to reproduce less, but it would also be true that evolving to be completely satisfied would also cause you to reproduce less successfully. Having insatiable desires keeps us motivated. — VagabondSpectre

Absolutely, but this is no less true of a modern society. If we satisfy all our desires easily, we will have nothing to strive for and will ultimately feel less satisfied in the long run.

---

To sum up. You're arguing that mortality rates are a good metric because you need to be alive to enjoy anything else life has to offer, but this mistakes a variable for a binomial value. Both hunter-gatherer tribes and modern societies achieve the binomial value 'being alive'. Mortality rates are a measure of the variable value 'length of being alive', and again, both societies have a positive value in this measure. It is clearly, and I think fairly irrefutably, not the case, that a particular value of this variable is a contingent necessity for enjoying life, (one could potentially really enjoy a single year, or fail to enjoy a hundred years) so your arguments about necessity are irrelevant.

What is relevant is the trade and this requires us to measure how valuable each year of additional life in modern society is, and at what cost those additional years are purchased. My use of the shockingly high suicide rates in modern societies means to show that the value of each additional year is really not that high. Dozens of additional years are routinely thrown away to avoid misery. My example of sky-divers and other risk takers further reinforces this. Again, many potential additional years are thrown away for what seems like the most trivial of benefits. We really do not value additional years that highly.

What we do seem to value highly is happiness, the tiniest potential increases are pursued doggedly; advertising companies, peers and our own desires get us to do all sorts of risky behaviours for the most trivial, ephemeral and often completely illusionary gains in happiness.

I haven't asked for a full list. I'm merely defending my statement that your opinion was largely uninformed (in the academic sense), and supported post hoc with evidence you found by searching the internet in a concious attempt to support it. You seemed to take great offence at the suggestion, so I presumed it wasn't true. This would mean that your opinion was, in fact, supported by some academic information and that you searched the internet for new sources to support it for some reason other than your lack of previous sources. — Pseudonym

There's no rational point in characterizing me as uninformed and I would rather not waste time defending my education. In the context of our discussion, doing so amounts to an ad hominem attack because it fallaciously persuades that my position is incorrect by appealing to an aspect of me instead of an aspect of my argument/evidence/position.

That's fine, showing that one theory has more rational merit than another is a reasonable way of comparing them (although I don't see any convincing ethical argument that we should then adopt the argument which shows most rational merit, but that's another debate entirely), but contrary to your later suggestion that we cannot discuss these ideas in the midst of a bias-laden debate, I really don't see how we can even have a debate (bias-laden or otherwise) unless we resolve what it is we're using as a measure of rational merit. You seem to believe in the (I think very much mistaken) notion that the ability to provide counter-arguments is just such a measure, but the history of ideas demonstrates with glaring empirical accuracy, that the ability to derive counter-arguments is almost infinite, limited only by the imagination. So then we're left with this unsatisfactorily subjective notion of 'compelling' counter-arguments. You don't find my arguments 'compelling', I don't find yours 'compelling' so where do we go from there? — Pseudonym

I believe that strong arguments (the strength of an argument matters) which are well supported by evidence are what help us generally move toward truth. A descriptive model which provides predictive power and can be tested against experimentation and evidence is something of a golden rational standard. Reason comes in many forms; I'm not sure having a meta discussion about the epistemic or ontic nature of reason and evidence is going to get us anywhere...

I agree entirely. The difference I'm trying to get at is that presenting your argument, together with the rational process and evidence by which you support it, is not sufficient on it's own to do anything more than offer someone an alternative (which they may then adopt or reject). If you want to go further, then this you'll need to do some comparative work. My criticism of your argument so far was mostly based on the fact that it is rarely more than a just-so story. It lays out how something could be the case, not how something must be the case, nor even how something is more likely to be the case than any alternative. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I presumed at first that this was intentional, and you were simply laying out an alternative for me to consider (which I why I said that I wasn't interested in reading an alternative presented by someone who was largely uniformed, when I could read alternatives presented by experts). Now that you've made it clear that you're not simply laying out an alternative, but are attempting to argue it's relative merits, I'm focussing my criticism more on the fact that I don't see any such comparative arguments there. — Pseudonym

I've been attempting to argue that my original claims are likely. I'm using cumulative induction to show that my positions have a high statistical likelihood of being correct. (I think) you're asking me to consider alternative positions and to show why they're likely not the case, and I confess this confuses me because much of my approach from an evolutionary perspective has been to show why certain behaviors and social trends are selected for and selected against. By modeling the factors which contribute to evolving behavioral and social trends (and checking their predictions against available examples/evidence) I'm in essence comparing the model against alternative possibilities: if the predictive models/descriptions don't produce predictions that are statistically reliable, then the model is dis-confirmed. Yes better predictive descriptions and models can and will come along, but until then I'm stuck with the best theories available.

Making direct comparisons between alternatives isn't exactly necessary to show the likelihood of my positions. The alternatives I'm concerned with are the direct inversions of what I hold to be true; if I can show them to likely be false then I'll simultaneously be showing my position to likely be true. For instance, by showing that the social trends of observable groups are dramatically impacted by environmental factors in similar ways across many cultures (e.g: uncertainty leading to fear, fear leading to violence), I am attempting to argue that it is likely ancient unobserved people would largely have been subject to the same pitfalls as their observed counterparts (i.e, harsh climates leads to practices like nomadism and infanticide and social egalitarianism, while bounty leads to sedentarism, population density, social stratification, war, and many other boons and burdens). The alternative hypothesis would be that climate and environmental forces did not shape the behavioral trends of ancient people in ways similar to the people of recorded history. Doesn't that seem unlikely?

The most important point you're missing, which covers the first three of your responses, is a simple mathematical one. You're treating survival as a binomial factor when it is in fact variable. Hunter-gatherer tribes do not fail to survive (where modern societies achieve survival). Hunter-gatherers survive for less long than modern people's on average. This treatment of a variable as a binomial causes all sorts of problems for your argument... — Pseudonym

You're mischaracterizing the relevance of average lifespan to my position. I've already ceded that lifespan is not in and of itself necessarily valuable, but instead that it is connected to every other possibly valuable aspect of life. It becomes a limiting factor of how many hedons can be gotten out of life, on average, when considered alongside associated boons and burdens.

So here, 'survival', is not a binomial factor (one you either have or do not have), it is a variable (one you have a certain quantity of). The decision we're talking about is trading a certain quantity of this variable for an increase in the variable 'happiness', yet this argument here treats it as if the only choice were to either have 'survival' or not have it. Treat it as a variable and your last assertion "survival is intrinsically important as necessary to preserve the value life contains" ceases to be true. Only when the 'survival' variable is zero does the 'value life contains' variable become impossible to obtain. At all other values for the 'survival' variable, it is still possible to obtain any amount of the 'value life contains' variable depending entirely on how 'valuable' each moment of that life is. — Pseudonym

I see what you're saying but I've not implicitly treated survival this way. I've made the point that increased longevity can give individuals more access to the sources of happiness which they do have. If each day you gain positive net hedons, then living for more days will get you more hedons overall. People can sacrifice or risk additional days for more hedons in the moment (hedonism), but most people tend toward long term stability as a preference.

I've also made the point that longevity can be useful as an indicator of factors like good health and freedom from violence...

Again, same error. It does require you to "go on living" to get repeated doses of happiness, and lack of mortality is definitely necessary for a society to be successful. But both modern societies and hunter-gatherer societies have that. Hunter-gatherers do not instantly drop dead the moment they're born, so both possess this necessary quality 'being alive for some time'. The variable is the amount of time. The point I'm making with the sky-divers is that statistically they will be (as a population) reducing the amount of time they spend alive (sky-divers have a shorter lifespan on average than non-sky-divers). They trade this shortened average lifespan for the adrenaline rush their sport gives them. This is also true of absolutely any of the risks we take in life. We trade the shortened average lifespan of a group taking that risk for the benefits that risk gives us. This is no different to the argument I'm making about hunter-gatherers who choose to remain so. They're trading a shortened average lifespan for the benefits their lifestyle gives them. — Pseudonym

I respect the choices of individuals to live their lives how they choose, but it might be a bit misleading to say that hunter-gatherers "choose" to live the way they do. If you're born into a primitive tribe you don't get to choose much about your future lifestyle within the group (conformity is high) and until recent times there were simply no other options. It may be the case that hunter0gatherer life is so stimulating and happiness inducing that they net more average hedons overall despite early deaths and high child mortality rates. I really don't think this is the case though...

So why are you suggesting we judge the worth of a society in any way on the variable 'being alive longer' when we've just established that such a variable is only worth anything if such a society is 'rife with such boons'? The first job is to establish whether a society is rife with boons, before we've done that the variable 'being alive longer' is of no use to us as a metric, as you just stated. — Pseudonym

But I've already established many of the boons of western society. Once boons are established, then it is required to include longevity in our assessment. If I have not yet sufficiently established that western society does yield boons, I apologize, but it's all still the same formula.

No, you've completely ignored the maths. You do not automatically have a lower chance of leading a successful life if you have a higher chance of dying. That's not the way probability works. With two variables the one is multiplied by the other. If you live in a society with an extremely low chance of achieving happiness, it doesn't matter how long you live for (presuming infinity is not an option), because your chances of happiness are so low that getting to roll those dice more often is not sufficient compensation. Imagine I have a ten-sided-die and a hundred-sided die, and my aim is to roll a one as often as I can (the size of the die represents how easy it is to achieve happiness in a given society, rolling a one represents happiness being achieved, the number of times you can roll a die represents your lifespan). I need to roll the hundred-sided die ten times more to have an equal chance of obtaining a one, than if I roll the ten sided die. So if someone said to me, would you be prepared to trade a loss in the number of times you get to roll the die for an opportunity to swap dice, you would be best taking that option.

This is what I'm suggesting makes hunter-gatherer societies compare favourably to Western ones despite their lower life expectancies. This is why sky-divers accept a lower life expectancy on average than non-sky-divers. This is why anyone does anything remotely risky. People are, and always have been, prepared to trade a loss in expected lifespan for an increase in the happiness of that lifespan. — Pseudonym

You've misunderstood my statement (I could have been clearer, admittedly). I'm saying that in any given society with X amount of average hedons per day, living for additional days will on average net X(days) more hedons. I'm not saying that any society with better longevity harvests more hedons (we've already clarified this), I'm saying that within any society that is good to live in, an individual who lives longer on average will net more average hedons. In other words, reducing the average risk of death in any given society (without reducing the rewards of that society) should make it more successful. In other other words, if skydiving was safer, it would increase happiness among sky-divers by keeping them alive longer, on average.

In any given society, if fewer babies die without additional burden, then success in increased. Agree?

And yet that's exactly what you're doing because you're presenting the fact that Western societies have a higher life expectancy as a metric which is sufficient to outweigh any advantages hunter-gather societies may have in diet, child-rearing, equality, community, exercise, purpose, freedom etc. You have decided the place life expectancy has in the hierarchy of values. — Pseudonym

Actually I've decided that it is a kind of parallel value, a factor. If being happy is to be successful in life, then we could imagine the utilitarian equation [number of days lived x happiness units per day], could we not? Societal success would then be [average number of days lived x average happiness units per day]. Lifespan is necessary to look at, but it is not necessarily the determining factor.

This seems to go back to the 'laying out an alternative' approach rather than any comparative work. I'm not asking you to assume the merit of suicide as a metric. As far as I'm concerned you can take it or leave it, but it was my understanding that you wanted to engage in arguing the relative merits of your theory, which would make it necessary for you to show how your metric compared relative to mine, how it improves on mine. So if we're talking about the property of a metric's clarity (it's failure to mislead), then a comparative argument would show how your metrics had less tendency to mislead than mine. Without that you're just back to saying that you have a reasonable theory and I already don't deny that. — Pseudonym

I have addressed the implications of suicide as a metric, but the burden of showing its merits as a metric rests with you (comparative analysis of this kind is the point of debate). I know that the causes of suicide don't necessarily reflect happiness (eg: it can reflect clinical depression, not hedonic calculus), and individuals who do commit suicide aren't representative of the majority of the population (some people being clinically depressed doesn't mean everyone is clinically depressed). In addition I've touched on the fact that suicide might look very different in hunter-gatherer society (given you can just disappear, never to be found) and so trying to assess suicide rates might be impossible to do even if it was a meritorious metric or proxy of societal success.

No you don't because I have at no point denied that is the case. I haven't at any point claimed that you do not have a valid philosophical theory. We're not arguing about validity, we're arguing about relative merit. Why are your conclusions more likely than mine? — Pseudonym

Empirical preponderance (depending on the specific conclusion). I believe I've provided more comprehensive and detailed explanatory and predictive models, and offered a greater quantity and quality of evidence to back them up. As the bulk of your contributions have been criticisms, can you exactly blame me for not seeing all the merits of your few positive conclusions? (suicide as a metric showing HG's are more successful)

But you have not done any comparative work. Is it more likely that our genetic predisposition to causes of happiness has evolved quickly to take account of modern life? Because if not, then we simply have two equally valid alternatives. — Pseudonym

I was pointing out how "happiness" can be a complicated subject to assess given that we do in fact] inter-generationally adapt to different lifestyles. There is no "more likely" component (at least no reasonable doubt). Genetically influenced human traits are subject to natural selection which leads to adaptations suited to given environments, and many neurological traits are heritable. If being well adapted, neurologically or otherwise is conducive to happiness, then there is an extra layer of complication when it comes to assessing it.

We really do not value additional years that highly. — Pseudonym

Regular sky-divers aren't looking to throw away their future years of misery, more likely they're addicted to the adrenaline rush and general thrill/fun of sky-diving. Illness precipitated suicide we can discount as a useful metric out of hand (it's covered under overall mortality rates or illness comparisons) and the rest is complicated by the variable circumstances which actually cause suicide. Suicide being carried about for financial reasons is something that could never affect a propertyless society, and so while this might come as a mortal risk in western society it still doesn't necessarily reflect average societal happiness (everyone who didn't lose their house/job might be over the moon with constant joy).

There's no rational point in characterizing me as uninformed and I would rather not waste time defending my education. In the context of our discussion, doing so amounts to an ad hominem attack because it fallaciously persuades that my position is incorrect by appealing to an aspect of me instead of an aspect of my argument/evidence/position. — VagabondSpectre

I'm not asking you to 'defend' your education, nor am I implying that your position is incorrect by virtue of it. If I have stated that at any time I was wrong to do so, but I don't think I did. The claim I'm making in this regard is only that it was reasonable of me to not engage with an argument that I have already heard coming from someone who appeared to be less well-informed than I am. That's not making any claim about the veracity of your argument, it's making a claim that I'm very likely to have considered it already. My consideration may well have been massively flawed (I'm no expert myself), it's not about the veracity, it's about that fact that I've already done it once and see no value to me in doing it again.

Considering an alternative theory that I have already heard, presented by someone less well-informed than I am, is simply not something I'm interested in spending my time on, it's no reflection on either you, nor the veracity of your theory. It's an (entirely reasonable) decision of mine about how to spend my time, I simply explained my reasoning to you out of courtesy.

This is all moot anyway since it seems I'd simply mistaken what I took for your lack of comparative analysis as meaning that you were simply presenting an alternative theory for my interest rather than attempting to critique my own. In fact you are attempting to dispute my theory, and that is something I am interested in and which is not borne upon by the extent to which you are well-informed. I enjoy trying to defend a theory of mine from intelligent critique regardless of the extent to which the critic has prior knowledge of the subject, hence my renewed involvement.

I'm not sure having a meta discussion about the epistemic or ontic nature of reason and evidence is going to get us anywhere... — VagabondSpectre

Fine, we will have to agree to disagree on that one, but I'm happy to leave it for now.

___

I understand from the rest of your response that we have some significant misunderstandings, so I'd like again, if it's OK, to try and draw together some of them to make sure we're on the right track rather than respond point-by-point.

Firstly it seems that I'd mistaken your emphasis on longevity as being unsupported by an argument about hedonic value where you consider that argument to have been laid out already. We are in agreement then that longevity acts only as a multiplier of hedonic value (with the caveat that the number of future years one can expect to live may well have a hedonic value of its own)? That is to say that if a person gained 2 units of hedonic value from every year of life they could live half as long as someone gaining only 1 unit from each year and would have been objectively no more or less successful.

Presuming that's right, our argument should really have been focussed on the various hedonic values of the socieites (the boons, as you call them) rather than being sidetracked into a discussion about mortality rate. Mortality rates are not that different between the two societies in a mathematical sense. A life expectancy of 45 is not quite half the average life expectancy in Western societies, so hunter-gatherer society would have to demonstrate just less than twice the hedonic value of Western societies to make up for its lower life expectancy, yes? I'm not suggesting we put numbers to this, just trying to find a way to shelve mortality (other than as a hedonic factor itself) for the time being until we've established that it is a factor at all. It is only a factor if hunter-gather societies are much less than twice as happy as average westerners, otherwise it is not relevant because its multiplying effects are outweighed by the increase in hedonic value of each year.

So the argument in this respect is - are hunter-gatherer societies enough happier to justify their lower life expectancies? You're arguing they're not, I'm suggesting they might be.

I want to also bear in mind at this point that my argument here is expressed in weaker terms that yours ('not' vs. 'might be'). The reason I've done that is that I don't want to lose sight of the arguments about justice and sustainability. To my mind, a society which has a higher hedonic value to each year (or an equal value but more years to get it) would also have to obtain this boon justly and sustainably to be classed a success, it is not sufficient that it simply increases the happiness of it's current citizens. It must do so with a realistic chance of providing the same value to future generations, and without exploiting other societies, or minority groups within their own society, to gain this happiness.

The corollary of this, is that we're stuck with assessing happiness regardless of how slippery and difficult to measure a concept it might be because assessment of mortality is pointless without knowing the hedonic value of each year. We cannot simply presume that it is equal just because it's difficult to measure, that would be a fallacy. If we really cannot get a measure of it, then we must presume it is unknown, which means that the whole debate is undecidable. We've just agreed (I think) that longevity simply acts as a multiplier, not really a factor of its own. Any number multiplied by an unknown quantity just yields an unknown quantity. The only caveat I would accept to this is that at some point a society might yield such a massive improvement in life expectancy that it simply becomes extremely unlikely that any gain/loss in hedonic value enough to outweigh the multiplying effects will ever be possible. I don't think we're there, but I suppose it's possible you do. If so, then the discussion become one not too dissimilar to the Utility Monster. Would we be willing to admit that a life which had a million years of barely more than tolerable happiness was actually worth more than one which had only a hundred of moderate happiness, simply by multiplying factor alone?

___

The next bit I'm a bit stuck on. You seem to have agreed that mortality is (mostly) only a multiplier for hedonic value. This, to me entails that you're having decided the two societies are of at least roughly equal hedonic value is absolutely crucial to your argument, without it you are comparing two unknown quantities. You then go on to make two seemingly contradictory statements - firstly that your argument is strong, has good predictive abilities and conforms to the evidence, and secondly that happiness (hedonic value) is so hard to measure as to be virtually useless as a metric. Given that your argument relies entirely on demonstrating that the two societies have at least equal hedonic values, how can you claim it to be so strong yet still claim that hedonic value is virtually impossible to measure?

This seems to me to be the main sticking point, and where I keep misunderstanding your argument. You seem contradictory in your valuation of the measurement of happiness, on the one had agreeing that it is a vitally important measure (one half of the 'degree of happiness' x 'years of happiness' equation), but then on the other hand suggesting that we can't possibly measure happiness so we might as well not bother.

It seems to me that there are four inextricable factors - longevity, happiness, justice and sustainability. At it's most trite, it seems sometimes your argument is "we can't measure the last three very well so lets just ignore them and say that western society has won on longevity alone" and that's just not good enough for me. If someone were to offer me an extra thirty years of average life expectancy, admitting that they might be bought at the expense of my overall happiness, the survival of future generations and the well-being of other societies and minority groups, but we can't be sure about how much, I don't think it would be moral for me to just take them unquestioningly.

Firstly it seems that I'd mistaken your emphasis on longevity as being unsupported by an argument about hedonic value where you consider that argument to have been laid out already. We are in agreement then that longevity acts only as a multiplier of hedonic value (with the caveat that the number of future years one can expect to live may well have a hedonic value of its own)? That is to say that if a person gained 2 units of hedonic value from every year of life they could live half as long as someone gaining only 1 unit from each year and would have been objectively no more or less successful. — Pseudonym

I understand in principle that longevity alone doesn't make life worth living, but keep in mind longevity is an indicator of other values (especially via your assessment of suicide). Longevity infers a modicum of comfort, medicine, security, and points toward positive net hedons (if people forecast negative hedons, under your view, they kill themselves). There's no escaping longevity as a necessary and useful metric for calculating the average hedonic success of a civilization (it must be considered). If someone lives twice as long with the same hedonic intake per day, then they are twice as successful!

If you want to use suicide as a proximal indicator of hedonic value and societal (un)happiness, then I get to use longevity in similar fashion. Longevity doesn't necessitate happiness, and suicide doesn't necessitate unhappiness, but if you feel that wanting to kill one's self indicates that people are unhappy (and is representative of other individuals) then why can't I say not wanting to kill one's self (which actually is representative) means people are happy?

Presuming that's right, our argument should really have been focussed on the various hedonic values of the socieites (the boons, as you call them) rather than being sidetracked into a discussion about mortality rate. Mortality rates are not that different between the two societies in a mathematical sense. A life expectancy of 45 is not quite half the average life expectancy in Western societies, so hunter-gatherer society would have to demonstrate just less than twice the hedonic value of Western societies to make up for its lower life expectancy, yes? I'm not suggesting we put numbers to this, just trying to find a way to shelve mortality (other than as a hedonic factor itself) for the time being until we've established that it is a factor at all. It is only a factor if hunter-gather societies are much less than twice as happy as average westerners, otherwise it is not relevant because its multiplying effects are outweighed by the increase in hedonic value of each year.

So the argument in this respect is - are hunter-gatherer societies enough happier to justify their lower life expectancies? You're arguing they're not, I'm suggesting they might be. — Pseudonym

I'm reticent to presuppose the validity of hedonic calculus in and of itself. I think we have less of a shot at adequately defining "happiness" than we do adequately digesting and interpreting the academic evidence pertaining to this discussion. It might not be qualitatively or quantitatively true to consider someone as being "twice as happy" as another person without considerations of their relative hedonic fluctuations. We might forecast having servants as a hedon yielding circumstance, but after 30 years of being waited on hand and foot, surely the hedons it yields will wane. If a rich person who has known only luxury and service their entire life is suddenly thrown into poverty, they can have the same circumstances as a fellow poor person but be enduring many more negative hedons as a result of their subjective experience. Uncontacted hunter-gatherer tribes who have never known certain technology and comforts (metal knives, dogs, motors, guns, tobacco) seem to be quite content right up until the west starts making gifts of them, at which point there's no going back. Once you travel rivers by motor and have a durable long lasting knife, going back to poles, paddles, and flint knapping, is hell. So, almost paradoxically, an HG way of life can produce X average hedons per day, and by giving them technology which temporarily improves their hedonic circumstances, we can be doing negative hedonic damage in the long run.

I hope you can appreciate how confounding the subjective nature of happiness actually is to trying to appraise averages. I can't actually point to things like access to technology or very low child mortality rates as increasing average societal hedons because I already know that living without these things from the get go prepares us to endure lives without them. It is extremely common in HG tribes to have strange customs surrounding newborns: they aren't given names, or really considered to be people until they make it through the earliest and most dangerous phase of life and begin to display human expressions like smiling. It's expected that many infants will die, and while it must still have some impact on mothers, the reduced expectations and the cultural precautions they take (not naming them or considering them "people", sequestering mother and child for a period of time after birth, the father not touching the infant, and others I'm forgetting) along with the acceptance that such things are unavoidable, overall it is reasonable to wonder whether infant mortality has any significant long term impact on the happiness of HG peoples whatsoever.

The corollary of this, is that we're stuck with assessing happiness regardless of how slippery and difficult to measure a concept it might be because assessment of mortality is pointless without knowing the hedonic value of each year. We cannot simply presume that it is equal just because it's difficult to measure, that would be a fallacy. If we really cannot get a measure of it, then we must presume it is unknown, which means that the whole debate is undecidable. We've just agreed (I think) that longevity simply acts as a multiplier, not really a factor of its own. Any number multiplied by an unknown quantity just yields an unknown quantity. The only caveat I would accept to this is that at some point a society might yield such a massive improvement in life expectancy that it simply becomes extremely unlikely that any gain/loss in hedonic value enough to outweigh the multiplying effects will ever be possible. I don't think we're there, but I suppose it's possible you do. If so, then the discussion become one not too dissimilar to the Utility Monster. Would we be willing to admit that a life which had a million years of barely more than tolerable happiness was actually worth more than one which had only a hundred of moderate happiness, simply by multiplying factor alone? — Pseudonym

We shouldn't presume a happiness equilibrium, but how much of a happiness disequilibrium ought we expect? There are good reasons to believe that humans can psychologically and emotionally adapt to environments such that they're still motivated to flee discomfort and pain (but not consumed/hindered by it) and also motivated to chase pleasure (but not stalled by reaching it too easily).

Is there a maximum number of hedons any given individual can experience? Is the value of 1 additional hedon to someone already rich with hedons the same as the value of that hedon to the impoverished (diminished returns)? (same questions for anti-hedons).


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The next bit I'm a bit stuck on. You seem to have agreed that mortality is (mostly) only a multiplier for hedonic value. This, to me entails that you're having decided the two societies are of at least roughly equal hedonic value is absolutely crucial to your argument, without it you are comparing two unknown quantities. — Pseudonym

I think the magnitude in difference between the average happiness of the west and HG peoples is certainly not great enough to overcome a near doubling of days lived. I'm not at all convinced that HG peoples are happier than those in the west, but I'm also not jumping to the conclusion that HG peoples are entirely unhappy. If I can show that humans have the capacity to be generally/similarly happy across a wide range of environments, then it will stand to reason that a doubling of lifespan increases the average amount of happiness an individual will attain.

You then go on to make two seemingly contradictory statements - firstly that your argument is strong, has good predictive abilities and conforms to the evidence, and secondly that happiness (hedonic value) is so hard to measure as to be virtually useless as a metric. Given that your argument relies entirely on demonstrating that the two societies have at least equal hedonic values, how can you claim it to be so strong yet still claim that hedonic value is virtually impossible to measure? — Pseudonym

Forgive my lack of clarity once more. I've made many separate claims in this thread and have defended them in a variety of ways. In general, I've sought to demonstrate the validity of my original claims with reasoning from an evolutionary perspective, academic sources, and by looking at example HG tribes to see if my various statements and generalizations held true. The metric of happiness, which is not exactly central to my initial and overall argument, is something I criticize as hard to measure, along with the entire concept of rudimentary hedonic maths as misleading and presumptive. Originally I laid out what I thought to be general standards of health and societal well-being which were universal enough to use as proxies for success (not just longevity, but robustness, security, literacy, and freedom from violence, disease, strife, etc...). I said that people are on average better off in the contemporary west than any other society and at any other time, not that they are all X amount happier.

This seems to me to be the main sticking point, and where I keep misunderstanding your argument. You seem contradictory in your valuation of the measurement of happiness, on the one had agreeing that it is a vitally important measure (one half of the 'degree of happiness' x 'years of happiness' equation), but then on the other hand suggesting that we can't possibly measure happiness so we might as well not bother. — Pseudonym

"If being happy is to be successful in life" then such an equation would follow. I was trying to clarify that I understand the difference between quantity and quality. I'm agreeing that quantity without any quality is valueless (and vice versa), but I'm not assenting to your full set of assumptions pertaining to how hedonic utility should or could be approximated. For all we know there is a very low upper limit to maximum happiness and what we should be critically measuring is freedom from fear and suffering.

You think that archeology and anthropology are complicated fields of study that we're unfit to grapple in, but psychology and neuroscience aren't?

Given that your argument relies entirely on demonstrating that the two societies have at least equal hedonic values, how can you claim it to be so strong yet still claim that hedonic value is virtually impossible to measure? — Pseudonym

I'm happy to argue that people can adapt to be generally happy across a wide range of environments and circumstances (obviously we cannot adapt to everything, such as long lasting torture), and that various natural environments suitable for HG lifestyle and the super-organism that is the contemporary west are two such adaptable circumstances. I'm not hinging my argument (a lengthy series of positions in a cumulative argument showing different elements of "success") on my ability to show westerners as more than half as happy as HG's.

"Happiness" and all it's various kinds might not be impossible to measure, but they are very complex, and we haven't even begun to directly address them...

It seems to me that there are four inextricable factors - longevity, happiness, justice and sustainability. At it's most trite, it seems sometimes your argument is "we can't measure the last three very well so lets just ignore them and say that western society has won on longevity alone" and that's just not good enough for me. If someone were to offer me an extra thirty years of average life expectancy, admitting that they might be bought at the expense of my overall happiness, the survival of future generations and the well-being of other societies and minority groups, but we can't be sure about how much, I don't think it would be moral for me to just take them unquestioningly. — Pseudonym

To be fair, justice and sustainability I have intentionally left aside because the discussion is already dense enough (once we settle the happiness question, we can move on to others). Broadly I've broken down happiness/human interest into the categories of physical, mental, and spiritual health, but I don't quite know how to fundamentally assess the average spiritual and mental health of an entire society. Both of those questions could be endlessly explored and no clear answers might be found. (Are you willing to seriously investigate suicide and its relationship to mental/spiritual health?)

If we cannot come to any agreement about the relative success of a society in terms of happiness or well being, then we can move on to justice and sustainability (although they may somewhat bleed back into the happiness question. e.g: if something is less sustainable or less just but has high returns on happiness, is that society more successful? (the needs of the many are especially eminent with any utilitarian approach)).

If you'd like to move on to these new metrics, regarding sustainability I'll be focusing on the overall fragility of individual HG bands. While it's true scattered humans somewhere will always tend to find a way to survive, it comes at the cost of the death and obliteration of the many. Not only within groups as individuals die younger, but whole groups themselves that are for whatever reasons unlucky or maladapted have been wiped out and replaced by others (or by nobody at all in desolate regions). HG people are subject to the whims of nature to a greater degree than the west thanks to our technology and agriculture. You will surely be forecasting the demise of the human race brought about by western hubris (climate change, disease, end of oil, or nuclear war) to thus show it is unsustainable, but rather than offer preemptive rebukes I'll let you make your case.

Regarding injustice I'll be mostly focusing on the fact that HG people have no formal justice systems and rely on altruistic punishment to enforce basic norms. Acephalous groups have no wise leaders who can arbitrate disputes and actually make informed decisions about what is just (such as a modern judge might), instead altrustic punishment amounts to the often superstition informed whims of the mob. I've met some wise judges, but I've never met a wise mob. You will surely raise the objection that the west unjustly exploits the rest of the world and many of its own in order to sustain itself. While this may have been true throughout the west's colonial era, much of the rest of the world has freed itself from the grip of European colonial powers and are joining the ranks of growing economic powers. Global trade isn't the one way street it used to be, and even if one lane is still wider than the other, every nation engaging in international trade is still benefiting on average (six of the ten fastest growing economies this year are in Africa!). There was a transitory phase of definitive exploitation, and some exploitation yet persists, but it is not the highway robbery it used to be. Conversely, one of my original points was that indigenous groups are not exempt from unjust warfare and exploiting their neighbors. Should the average peaceful HG tribe happen upon a stable and geographically fixed year round food source, they might become sedentary, and war for territory might follow. One of the best arguments for western success is its constantly improving standards of justice.

Longevity infers a modicum of comfort, medicine, security, — VagabondSpectre

I did mention that we cannot completely remove longevity from an assessment of happiness as the prospect of a long life will itself produce happiness in the reasonably optimistic person.But it's important in this respect to recognise that this would not then be average lifespan. If we're talking about this effect of longevity increasing happiness (which is then multiplied by lifespan) then we cannot use average lifespan any more. This is something we haven't even gotten into yet because it's not yet been relevant, but it is very relevant to the discussion about the effect of predicted lifespan on happiness. The average lifespan of the hunter-gatherer past five is not radically different to that of the average westerner.

"Post-reproductive longevity is a robust feature of human life and not only a recent phenomenon caused by improvements in sanitation, public health, and medical advances. We argue for an adaptive life span of 68-78 years for modern Homo sapiens based on our analysis of mortality profiles obtained from small-scale hunter-gatherer and horticultural populations from around the world."

from - here

The problem is that high infant mortality rates drag the average down hugely. The idea of a hunter-gather adult having to face the prospect of not making it past 40 is a complete myth. The average hunter-gatherer adult can look forward to just as long a life as the average westener, it's just that they have a lower chance of getting past five once born.

This lower chance matters a lot when measuring the success of society (no-one wants a high infant mortality rate) and it will affect happiness overall, so it's not been appropriate to use the average until now, but when we start talking about longevity as an indicator of other things, it's simply not true to say there's any difference to account for. Aside from infant mortality, the lifespan of hunter-gatherers is approximately the same as that of average westerners, so the extent to which it reflects metrics like security, comfort, and lack of (potentially unrecorded) suicide do not vary between the societies.

if you feel that wanting to kill one's self indicates that people are unhappy (and is representative of other individuals) then why can't I say not wanting to kill one's self (which actually is representative) means people are happy? — VagabondSpectre

Not wanting to kill oneself is still measuring suicides. The percentage of births which end in suicide represent that proportion of the population that want to kill themselves, the percentage of births which end in some other cause represents the proportion of the population that did not want to kill themselves (up to that point). You can't say that life expectancy is somehow a proxy for people not wanting to kill themselves, we already have that data, it's the inverse of the suicide rate. To use it as a proxy without the suicide rate you'd have to fabricate a large proportion of hunter-gatherers secretly committing suicide despite the complete absence of any record of such a practice in the enthnographies. This really would show the sort of bias I've been on-and-off suspecting. It's one thing to seek evidence deliberately to support a position. It's another thing entirely to try and support a position by claiming that a phenomenon exists for which there is no evidence at all.

Once you travel rivers by motor and have a durable long lasting knife, going back to poles, paddles, and flint knapping, is hell. So, almost paradoxically, an HG way of life can produce X average hedons per day, and by giving them technology which temporarily improves their hedonic circumstances, we can be doing negative hedonic damage in the long run. — VagabondSpectre

Absolutely. You touch here on something you keep coming back to later but never reach the inevitable conclusion. A society in which wealth and advantage are unevenly distributed is less happy than one in which they are evenly distributed. This is something almost universally acknowledged by psychologists. I can cite a dozen articles in support of this notion, but it sounds like you already subscribe to it. So the egalitarianism that you acknowledge marks out hunter-gatherers, becomes a key measurable component of happiness. We may not be able to say with any certainty that improvements in technology will make a person happier because (as you say) if they didn't know such improvements were possible they won't miss them. But what we can say with almost absolute certainty, is that if one visible section of society is benefiting from some improvement, the section that is not will be significantly less happy no matter what their absolute level of comfort is. So we have at least one metric of happiness on which you, I, and the majority of the psychological community agree and that is wealth equality. Would you seriously try to argue that western societies are better at wealth equality that hunter-gatherers?

There are good reasons to believe that humans can psychologically and emotionally adapt to environments such that they're still motivated to flee discomfort and pain (but not consumed/hindered by it) and also motivated to chase pleasure (but not stalled by reaching it too easily).

Is there a maximum number of hedons any given individual can experience? Is the value of 1 additional hedon to someone already rich with hedons the same as the value of that hedon to the impoverished (diminished returns)? (same questions for anti-hedons). — VagabondSpectre

Very interesting point. From psychological research there is absolutely a limit to positive hedon value. Again, there is almost universal agreement on the diminishing returns of increases in hedonic experiences. I don't think you'll find a psychologist who disagrees, but if you're interested, the seminal work on this was by Daniel Kahneman. The same is also true of gains as they stretch into the future (called hyperbolic discounting). But both these points seem to argue against your emphasis on longevity, not in favour of it. If there's a limit to the value of additional pleasures, then any which modern society can provide will produce a diminishing return.

I think the magnitude in difference between the average happiness of the west and HG peoples is certainly not great enough to overcome a near doubling of days lived. — VagabondSpectre

As I mentioned above. There is not a near doubling of days lived. There is a doubling of life expectancy. the two are completely different measures. I you want to talk about odds (as in exchanging
happiness for odds of survival) over a whole society, then it's a useful metric as it is, but now you're starting to talk about the effect it has directly on the prospects of those experiencing the happiness, it's inappropriate. The average hunter-gatherer is not facing a halving of the number of days lived. The average hunter-gatherer is facing almost exactly the same number of days as the average westener, they simply have a lower chance of getting to be the average hunter-gatherer in their first five years of life.

If I can show that humans have the capacity to be generally/similarly happy across a wide range of environments, then it will stand to reason that a doubling of lifespan increases the average amount of happiness an individual will attain. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, this is the correct use of lifespan (I know the difference is subtle, but it's important), but I don't agree that you can achieve such a demonstration, that is also fair and sustainable.

I'm still not getting this dual use of happiness as a metric, we have;

"The metric of happiness, which is not exactly central to my initial and overall argument, is something I criticize as hard to measure, along with the entire concept of rudimentary hedonic maths as misleading and presumptive."

and

"If I can show that humans have the capacity to be generally/similarly happy across a wide range of environments..."

These still seem completely contradictory to me. How do you propose to show, 'strongly' or otherwise, that humans have the capacity to be happy across a wide range of environments without being able to measure happiness? You could perhaps show that the mechanisms which cause happiness are not related to external factors, but I think you'd be onto a losing task there as they very clearly are. You could perhaps explore mechanisms to do with tolerance and it's effect on happiness, but, as we've explored, that relies on relative equality and using this as your metric certainly undermines your argument. I can't see how else you could avoid having to supply, as evidence in support of your theory, two human groups who were equally happy despite radically different environments. But this would rely entirely on your being able to measure happiness, which you say is not critical to your argument.

if something is less sustainable or less just but has high returns on happiness, is that society more successful? — VagabondSpectre

Interesting question. I think that this next stage of the measurement is even more fraught with undecidable assumptions that the first and be even more fruitless as a consequence. If we don't agree on the ethics of our debt to future generations then we might as well stop here. 200 years of debate has shown pretty conclusively that there does not exist a method by which one person can convince another of the 'rightness' of any ethical position. My position is this. We have a diminishing duty to future generations as they go further into the future with regards to unforeseen harms, but we have an absolute duty to all future generations with regards to foreseeable harms. If our use of some resource might diminish it's availability in twenty generations time, then we have a relatively low priority duty to investigate further, but if our use of some resource obviously will case big problems for future generations, then it is unethical for use to continue to use it regardless. Basically, we would be denying our very nature not to assume that there will be future generations, therefore these people exist as moral entities, therefore we would be behaving immorally if we deliberately gained some inessential pleasure at their expense. If you disagree with this general position we might as well give up as I cannot support it rationally, it's just the way I feel.

While it's true scattered humans somewhere will always tend to find a way to survive, it comes at the cost of the death and obliteration of the many. Not only within groups as individuals die younger, but whole groups themselves that are for whatever reasons unlucky or maladapted have been wiped out and replaced by others (or by nobody at all in desolate regions). HG people are subject to the whims of nature to a greater degree than the west thanks to our technology and agriculture. — VagabondSpectre

You will need to support this assertion, as I simply disagree with it entirely. The idea that whole groups are wiped out to be replaced by others is not supported by any evidence I'm aware of. If you're arguing that a society is it's culture (such that you could say, for example, the Inca's were wiped out and replaced by the Aztecs) then you'd have to make the same judgement for western cultures. where are the Calvinists, where's feudalism, where's the Babylonian culture, where's state communism, where's the Shakers... Cultures get replaced by other cultures, this has nothing to do with sustainability. Sustainability (in ethical terms, which it how it is being used here) is about resource depletion. otherwise it's not an ethical matter and happiness could be obtained at it's expense without causing a problem. To be unsustainable in the ethical sense, a lifestyle has to be impossible to continue indefinitely by virtue of it choices, not by virtue of the vagaries of nature which are outside of it's control. We cannot become ethically obliged to control nature. There is a categorical difference between a society whose well-being is dependant on oil, and one whose well-being is dependant of clement weather. When oil runs out, that society will no longer benefit from that particular well-being - ever. During periods of inclement weather, the latter society may suffer, but when the weather returns to clemency, it will again thrive. These are two entirely different forms of sustainability, and have very different ethical connotations.

You will surely be forecasting the demise of the human race brought about by western hubris (climate change, disease, end of oil, or nuclear war) to thus show it is unsustainable, but rather than offer preemptive rebukes I'll let you make your case. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, but only if you are close in terms of ethics, if you're not there's no point in debating. One cannot prove ethics.

Acephalous groups have no wise leaders who can arbitrate disputes and actually make informed decisions about what is just (such as a modern judge might), instead altrustic punishment amounts to the often superstition informed whims of the mob. I've met some wise judges, but I've never met a wise mob. — VagabondSpectre

Again this is mere supposition at the moment, I'd need to see the evidence you're basing this on to believe it's not simply prejudice. Where are the examples of hunter-gatherers being treated unjustly because of 'the mob' where their treatment would have been more just under a state judicial system? So far, all you've provided that is on this subject is the practice of ostracisation as a punishment for lack of sharing (with more severe punishment being present but rare). How would this be any different if non-sharing were illegal in a state justice system. The perpetrator would still be ostracised (imprisoned), and treated violently (either in prison, or in states which still have forms of capital punishment). I'm not seeing how the one is more just than the other.

You will surely raise the objection that the west unjustly exploits the rest of the world and many of its own in order to sustain itself. While this may have been true throughout the west's colonial era, much of the rest of the world has freed itself from the grip of European colonial powers and are joining the ranks of growing economic powers. Global trade isn't the one way street it used to be, and even if one lane is still wider than the other, every nation engaging in international trade is still benefiting on average (six of the ten fastest growing economies this year are in Africa!) — VagabondSpectre

Did the Iraq war pass you by unnoticed? Did you miss the news broadcasts about Russia's invasion of the Ukraine? The invasion and control of weaker states fro their resources is still very much alive and well, it's just conducted differently now, less flag waiving and more tactical missiles.

You also seem to have slipped from focussing on justice to focussing on GDP. What has the fact that previously colonised countries, having been stripped of most of their natural resources, are now gaining in average GDP got to do with justice? Justice, in this sense, is about the extent to which the gains of one group are bought at the expense of another. The gains of modern western societies were definitely bought at the expense of the colonies, and the average GDP of the now former colonies completely masks the fact that the gains of the few (within those countries) are still being bought at the expense of the others. Income disparity is undeniably increasing and Tanzania, for example, which ranks in your top ten fastest growing economies, ranks nearly the bottom of the UN's World Happiness Report

As I think we might have mentioned before, happiness is complicated but a necessary metric. As pointless as it is seeing longevity alone as a measure of total happiness, it is equally pointless seeing justice in terms of average GDP.

Western civilization has become nothing more than a cesspool of toxicity, corruption, celibacy, mediocrity, narcissism, poor-taste, cowardice, delusion, incivility, unenlightenment, and thought-control.

I did mention that we cannot completely remove longevity from an assessment of happiness as the prospect of a long life will itself produce happiness in the reasonably optimistic person.But it's important in this respect to recognise that this would not then be average lifespan. If we're talking about this effect of longevity increasing happiness (which is then multiplied by lifespan) then we cannot use average lifespan any more. This is something we haven't even gotten into yet because it's not yet been relevant, but it is very relevant to the discussion about the effect of predicted lifespan on happiness. The average lifespan of the hunter-gatherer past five is not radically different to that of the average westerner. — Pseudonym

I'm not referencing longevity as a happiness producer, but as a happiness indicator. Having a good diet, getting restful sleep every night, not overworking your body, etc, are all things which increase longevity and could also contribute to happiness. I know longevity doesn't necessitate quality, but it is pointed to by it (in at least the same way as you say suicide points to unhappiness).

The problem is that high infant mortality rates drag the average down hugely. The idea of a hunter-gather adult having to face the prospect of not making it past 40 is a complete myth. The average hunter-gatherer adult can look forward to just as long a life as the average westener, it's just that they have a lower chance of getting past five once born.

This lower chance matters a lot when measuring the success of society (no-one wants a high infant mortality rate) and it will affect happiness overall, so it's not been appropriate to use the average until now, but when we start talking about longevity as an indicator of other things, it's simply not true to say there's any difference to account for. Aside from infant mortality, the lifespan of hunter-gatherers is approximately the same as that of average westerners, so the extent to which it reflects metrics like security, comfort, and lack of (potentially unrecorded) suicide do not vary between the societies. — Pseudonym

You're curiously doing what HG peoples tend to do: they don't think of infants as people (so that their deaths can be looked at as less consequential). Yes, if we shave off child mortality figures then longevity nearly equalizes, but why would we be shaving off child mortality figures? Everyone is a child at some point and are subject to the higher chance of death; when a child dies, their early death ought to pull down the average lifespan (for quantitative assessment purposes) because missing out on life is something we consider unsuccessful. In other words, if you're picking your society from Locke's "original position",an increased chance of death in childhood should be considered a negative.

Children dying frequently definitely causes some unhappiness, but as I've proposed it could be the case that frequent child death prepares people to endure it, making its overall impact negligible. What isn't negligible is the impact on average lifespan (and therefore its impact on average total hedons per person).

Not wanting to kill oneself is still measuring suicides. The percentage of births which end in suicide represent that proportion of the population that want to kill themselves, the percentage of births which end in some other cause represents the proportion of the population that did not want to kill themselves (up to that point). — Pseudonym

You need to actually prove that suicide indicates or is representative of societal unhappiness. You're arguing that since people commit suicide when they forecast negative hedons, and since the west has higher apparent rates of suicide, the west must produce fewer average hedons per person, but you have yet to demonstrate to what degree people actually commit suicide because they forecast negative hedons (and to what degree they might be mistaken) compared to all the other reasons people commit suicide (and then you may also wish to show that individuals who commit suicide because they are unhappy are representative of the rest of the population. I.e: that the factors which cause individuals to commit suicide act upon all of us to the detriment of our average hedonic intake)

You can't say that life expectancy is somehow a proxy for people not wanting to kill themselves, we already have that data, it's the inverse of the suicide rate. To use it as a proxy without the suicide rate you'd have to fabricate a large proportion of hunter-gatherers secretly committing suicide despite the complete absence of any record of such a practice in the enthnographies. This really would show the sort of bias I've been on-and-off suspecting. It's one thing to seek evidence deliberately to support a position. It's another thing entirely to try and support a position by claiming that a phenomenon exists for which there is no evidence at all. — Pseudonym

Well, it does stand to reason that suicide would be harder to statistically measure in an HG society for obvious reasons, but bias aside, my point was that if people commit suicide because they are unhappy, then they don't commit suicide because they are happy. You're right that this isn't longevity, it's the inverse of suicide statistics, but as far as our qualitative and quantitative utilitarian analysis goes suicide rates are therefore not representative of overall/average societal happiness. The quantitative loss of hedons through suicide is reflected in average lifespan reduction caused by suicide, but why does negative hedons for some individuals (those who commit suicide) necessarily reflect on the average hedons of the rest of the population? It might be the case that the west has a very high average level of happiness but also has more outliers at the upper and lower extremes, or while there is a higher risk of unhappiness leading to suicide there is a better chance of getting more overall happiness.

A society in which wealth and advantage are unevenly distributed is less happy than one in which they are evenly distributed. — Pseudonym

You can say that there will almost certainly be less happiness inequality when there is less wealth/burden inequality, but there are many egalitarian societies (many of them presently HG people) who despite being egalitarian are quite unhappy because of other circumstances (loss of territory, disease, etc...).

This is something almost universally acknowledged by psychologists. I can cite a dozen articles in support of this notion, but it sounds like you already subscribe to it. So the egalitarianism that you acknowledge marks out hunter-gatherers, becomes a key measurable component of happiness. — Pseudonym

A relative marker of happiness inequality within a society, but not between them. I can see that wealth inequality may contribute to and increase in unhappiness, but the overall boons offered by a wealth stratified society might far outweigh the relative unhappiness caused by the relative wealth inequality or lower basic standards (e.g: having good schools, hospitals, and many career options in life, despite being relatively poor, might still directly contribute to a significant increase in total or mean happiness)

But what we can say with almost absolute certainty, is that if one visible section of society is benefiting from some improvement, the section that is not will be significantly less happy no matter what their absolute level of comfort is.

We can say that the section of the population with more burdens will be less happy than those above their station (that there will be some happiness inequality), but they might not be significantly less happy depending on the degree of wealth inequality and also upon the basic levels of absolute comfort offered even to their worst off. (i.e: closer to the upper limits of hedonic intake, differences in wealth begin to matter less because of diminished returns, and as the floor of life quality in the west is moved closer to that virtual limit, the less room there is for impactful wealth inequality). Here's a study comapring happiness/life satisfaction inequality in western countries against wealth inequality and rising GDP. They found that when GDP consistently rises, even when wealth inequality also rises, happiness inequality is reduced.

But both these points seem to argue against your emphasis on longevity, not in favour of it. If there's a limit to the value of additional pleasures, then any which modern society can provide will produce a diminishing return. — Pseudonym

There's a limit to the value of additional pleasures within a given time-frame: If the hedonic treadmill is truly impactful (the tendency for satisfaction and happiness to acclimate to a general median after changes in circumstance), then living longer will tend to increase the total mount of satisfaction and happiness by allowing individuals to spread their excess wealth/benefits over a longer period of time rather than wasting it all at once for diminished hedonic returns.

As I mentioned above. There is not a near doubling of days lived. There is a doubling of life expectancy. the two are completely different measures. I you want to talk about odds (as in exchanging happiness for odds of survival) over a whole society, then it's a useful metric as it is, but now you're starting to talk about the effect it has directly on the prospects of those experiencing the happiness, it's inappropriate. The average hunter-gatherer is not facing a halving of the number of days lived. The average hunter-gatherer is facing almost exactly the same number of days as the average westener, they simply have a lower chance of getting to be the average hunter-gatherer in their first five years of life. — Pseudonym

You misunderstand. I'm pointing out that a near doubling of average days lived is a significant part of the quantitative component of our hedonic formula, not the qualitative one (though I do point out that longevity indicates well-being, I'm not saying it's a cause of well being.

What confuses me endlessly is this statement:

The average hunter-gatherer is facing almost exactly the same number of days as the average westener, they simply have a lower chance of getting to be the average hunter-gatherer in their first five years of life.

You've unambiguously contradicted yourself. If the "average hunter gather" who will live for approximately the same number of days as a westerner "has a lower chance of getting to be the average hunter-gatherer", then they are not the average hunter-gatherer, they're at best the mode hunter gatherer. It's almost as if you're moving toward the position that death doesn't matter whatsoever (because the dead are neither happy nor unhappy? And so it doesn't affect the per capita, per day averages?).

I'm still not getting this dual use of happiness as a metric, we have;

"The metric of happiness, which is not exactly central to my initial and overall argument, is something I criticize as hard to measure, along with the entire concept of rudimentary hedonic maths as misleading and presumptive."

and

"If I can show that humans have the capacity to be generally/similarly happy across a wide range of environments..."

These still seem completely contradictory to me. How do you propose to show, 'strongly' or otherwise, that humans have the capacity to be happy across a wide range of environments without being able to measure happiness? You could perhaps show that the mechanisms which cause happiness are not related to external factors, but I think you'd be onto a losing task there as they very clearly are. You could perhaps explore mechanisms to do with tolerance and it's effect on happiness, but, as we've explored, that relies on relative equality and using this as your metric certainly undermines your argument. I can't see how else you could avoid having to supply, as evidence in support of your theory, two human groups who were equally happy despite radically different environments. But this would rely entirely on your being able to measure happiness, which you say is not critical to your argument. — Pseudonym

My initial arguments rely on general well-being, not self reported or otherwise measured forms of happiness. As happiness was specifically brought up in your utilitarian assessment of suicide toward unhappiness as a proxy for success, I have no problems entertaining it (if to defeat your argument using its own logic) while also attempting to dismantle it and reveal its shortcomings. My initial approach to assessing societal success was, in a nut shell, its ability to avoid disasters (which is why things like child mortality rank so highly). I'm not one to devalue happiness (despite being cautious about seeking to measure it) so we might as well see what comparisons, if any, can be made.

You will need to support this assertion, as I simply disagree with it entirely. The idea that whole groups are wiped out to be replaced by others is not supported by any evidence I'm aware of. If you're arguing that a society is it's culture (such that you could say, for example, the Inca's were wiped out and replaced by the Aztecs) then you'd have to make the same judgement for western cultures. where are the Calvinists, where's feudalism, where's the Babylonian culture, where's state communism, where's the Shakers... Cultures get replaced by other cultures, this has nothing to do with sustainability. Sustainability (in ethical terms, which it how it is being used here) is about resource depletion. otherwise it's not an ethical matter and happiness could be obtained at it's expense without causing a problem. To be unsustainable in the ethical sense, a lifestyle has to be impossible to continue indefinitely by virtue of it choices, not by virtue of the vagaries of nature which are outside of it's control. We cannot become ethically obliged to control nature. There is a categorical difference between a society whose well-being is dependant on oil, and one whose well-being is dependant of clement weather. When oil runs out, that society will no longer benefit from that particular well-being - ever. During periods of inclement weather, the latter society may suffer, but when the weather returns to clemency, it will again thrive. These are two entirely different forms of sustainability, and have very different ethical connotations. — Pseudonym

Unsustainability in terms of insecurity (inability to mitigate the impact of inclement weather, for instance) can be a bigger problem than unsustainable resource consumption. It's true that human groups have proven capable of enduring inclement weather in the long run, but the endurance involves cyclical periods of suffering, which I don't see being any better than running out of a particular resource we're presently dependent on (people suffer and die either way).

Sustainability in terms of overall societal robustness is what I was considering: across vast regions where geographically disparate and low population HG bands thrive (harsh climates), so long as no extreme events eliminate everyone, at least some of the peoples of a given group may be likely to persist against rising survival pressures. The way of life is sustainable and persists so long as the climate is static and no new groups arrive, but not all of the individual bands will be successful. If external social or environmental changes do arrive, then the HG way of life often has no way to sustain itself. To conclude on this point, HG way of life is very sustainable within the environments it has evolved to operate in, but it cannot easily adapt to environmental change or the presence of many other groups. This makes HG way of life less reliable in the context of inevitable change.

Again this is mere supposition at the moment, I'd need to see the evidence you're basing this on to believe it's not simply prejudice. Where are the examples of hunter-gatherers being treated unjustly because of 'the mob' where their treatment would have been more just under a state judicial system? So far, all you've provided that is on this subject is the practice of ostracisation as a punishment for lack of sharing (with more severe punishment being present but rare). How would this be any different if non-sharing were illegal in a state justice system. The perpetrator would still be ostracised (imprisoned), and treated violently (either in prison, or in states which still have forms of capital punishment). I'm not seeing how the one is more just than the other. — Pseudonym

My point here has to do with the proper application and execution of justice in terms of procedure and cross-cultural norms. Having a very well developed, scrutinized, and tested legal system has not only helped us to find better normative rules but also how to properly enforce the rules when they're allegedly broken. Mobs often subscribe to the most base forms of persuasion whereas a competent lawyer or judge will seek critical evidence and rational argumentation (they tend to employ reason). As extreme examples, being ostracized for not wanting to undergo genital mutilation is one such superstitious norm that is not justifiable from any reasonable ethical perspective, and the killing of those suspected of witchcraft is another such norm which is not only unreasonably superstitious but also unreasonably unjust given its arbitrary application.

Did the Iraq war pass you by unnoticed? Did you miss the news broadcasts about Russia's invasion of the Ukraine? The invasion and control of weaker states fro their resources is still very much alive and well, it's just conducted differently now, less flag waiving and more tactical missiles — Pseudonym

Average death from wars are still declining and basic standards of living are still increasing; things aren't the one way street they used to be, and we're still improving.

You also seem to have slipped from focussing on justice to focussing on GDP. What has the fact that previously colonized countries, having been stripped of most of their natural resources, are now gaining in average GDP got to do with justice? Justice, in this sense, is about the extent to which the gains of one group are bought at the expense of another. The gains of modern western societies were definitely bought at the expense of the colonies, and the average GDP of the now former colonies completely masks the fact that the gains of the few (within those countries) are still being bought at the expense of the others. Income disparity is undeniably increasing and Tanzania, for example, which ranks in your top ten fastest growing economies, ranks nearly the bottom of the UN's World Happiness Report — Pseudonym

Is it not worth pointing out that in regards to international exchanges of goods, things are becoming less unjust? If the west can cease exploiting other nations, won't that amount to ethical success?

As I think we might have mentioned before, happiness is complicated but a necessary metric. As pointless as it is seeing longevity alone as a measure of total happiness, it is equally pointless seeing justice in terms of average GDP. — Pseudonym

As a loose proxy for international exploitation, it is not pointless, it's in redress of one of the main objections raised against the contemporary west - it's exploitative capitalist nature - both within and between nations. If other preciously exploited nations are beginning to grow economically, maybe that's a sign of reduced exploitation?

Having a good diet, getting restful sleep every night, not overworking your body, etc, are all things which increase longevity and could also contribute to happiness. — VagabondSpectre

You seem to have reverted to just making prejudiced statements about these cultural differences without doing any research first. The modern Western diet does not contribute to our longevity, it detracts from it.

The diets and nutrition of hunter-gatherers are discussed with the !Kung Bushmen (San) of the Dobe area, Botswana as the example. In general they show no qualitative deficiency of specific nutrients though they are thin and may be undernourished (by our standards) at some seasons. They show little or no obesity, dental caries, high blood pressure or coronary heart disease; their blood lipid concentrations are very low; and they can live to a good old age if they survive infections or accidents.

Here

Human populations in modern, westernized societies exhibit patterns of diet and physical activity that are associated with increased incidence of chronic and degenerative diseases, such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers, among others.

Here

As I already stated in my previous post hunter-gatherer life expectancy is reduced almost entirely by infant mortality (and, to a lesser extent, accidents and warfare). There is no evidence supporting the idea that they had worse diets, none that they "overworked their bodies", certainly none that they slept less well. So what has the fact that these things (indicated by longevity) could contribute to happiness got to do with the debate? This is the reason I brought up the fact that adult hunter-gatherers do not live significantly less long than adult westerners. All these issues you mention affect adult longevity. It takes serious malnutrition to affect infant mortality, no infant has ever had their life foreshortened by lack of sleep or overwork.

Yes, if we shave off child mortality figures then longevity nearly equalizes, but why would we be shaving off child mortality figures? — VagabondSpectre

To get at what the cause of longevity is by eliminating possible suspects and see what remains. You keep implying (the above quote being just one example) that the increase in longevity in Western societies can be linked somehow to happiness in a way which is the equal of (if not better than) the suicide statistics. The reason I took away infant mortality is to show that there is no such link. Take away infant mortality and you have no further difference in longevity to account for, so all your further talk of nutrition, stress, fear, security, diversity etc is not having the net effect on longevity you claim. The increase in longevity of modern westerners is caused almost entirely by better medical care in birth, and antibiotics. Beyond that, westerners seem to suffer from more non-bacterial disease, and hunter-gatherers seem to be more likely to be killed in warfare, but the two clearly balance one another out otherwise there would be a difference in the adult life expectancy and there simply isn't.

missing out on life is something we consider unsuccessful. — VagabondSpectre

I don't understand what you are saying here, on the face of it, this is simply not true. If my parents could have had 3 children but instead had two, is that "less successful" because some potential life has been missed? This idea of maximising 'life' as being a measure of success seems bizarre to me, and as I mentioned, leads to the Utility Monster version of success.

You need to actually prove that suicide indicates or is representative of societal unhappiness. You're arguing that since people commit suicide when they forecast negative hedons, and since the west has higher apparent rates of suicide, the west must produce fewer average hedons per person, but you have yet to demonstrate to what degree people actually commit suicide because they forecast negative hedons — VagabondSpectre

Fine.

we find a strikingly strong and consistent relationship in the determinants of SWB [subjective well-being] and suicide in individual-level, multivariate regressions.

Hete

It will not surprise anyone to learn that low SWB predicts mental problems and suicide. For instance, Bray and Gunnell (2006) found across 32 nations that happiness and life satisfaction were inversely associated with suicide rates. This is confirmed in studies of individuals, where SWB has been found to predict suicide (Koivumaa-Honkanen et al., 2001; Koivumaa-Honkanen, Honkanen, Koskenvuo, & Kaprio, 2003). In addition, SWB strongly and inversely predicts deaths due to nonintentional injuries (KoivumaaHonkanen et al., 2000).

- citations within text.

The fact that you're even questioning this really shows you're clutching at straws. "Hunter-gatherers might be committing suicide in secret without anyone noticing", "suicide might have nothing to do with unhappiness". How many more obscure and unlikely scenarios are you going to come up with to avoid having to admit that the high suicide rate of Western cultures is a serious failure?

and then you may also wish to show that individuals who commit suicide because they are unhappy are representative of the rest of the population. I.e: that the factors which cause individuals to commit suicide act upon all of us to the detriment of our average hedonic intake — VagabondSpectre

Really? Then you have a very different view of a successful society to me. One in which most people are quite happy but at the expense of one percent who are so miserable they kill themselves, is not a successful society by any measure I can think of, no matter what the 'average' hedonic intake.

You can say that there will almost certainly be less happiness inequality when there is less wealth/burden inequality, but there are many egalitarian societies (many of them presently HG people) who despite being egalitarian are quite unhappy because of other circumstances (loss of territory, disease, etc...). — VagabondSpectre

I don't understand your argument here at all. Yes there are egalitarian societies who are nonetheless unhappy for other reasons, but not because they're egalitarian. If you're going to argue like that, I could just say that nothing in Western society brings happiness because some groups within western society are still unhappy for other reasons. If we're not even going to bother averaging and comparing then what's the point? It just becomes an exchange of anecdotes.

the overall boons offered by a wealth stratified society might far outweigh the relative unhappiness caused by the relative wealth inequality or lower basic standards (e.g: having good schools, hospitals, and many career options in life, despite being relatively poor, might still directly contribute to a significant increase in total or mean happiness) — VagabondSpectre

We're back to this again. Yes, I'm aware that you have an argument, I'm not yet so sociopathic that I presume you're not even going to make sense, but what has "might be" got to do with anything? Of course it "might be" it also might not be, I'm trying to establish why you think it actually is .

Here's a study comapring happiness/life satisfaction inequality in western countries against wealth inequality and rising GDP. — VagabondSpectre

I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but you make it hard not to just conclude that you're just cherry-picking evidence. The study you cite here concludes that happiness is more homogeneously distributed in wealthier socities, but that, to quote directly from the study, "None of our analyses of countries over time reveal a significant relationship between GDP growth and average happiness.". You've literally just argued that suicide statistics in wealthier countries might indicate "a very high average level of happiness but also has more outliers at the upper and lower extremes", then you cite a paper that says the exact opposite? Which is it that you believe? Or are you just believing whatever is convenient to defend your argument?

You've unambiguously contradicted yourself. If the "average hunter gather" who will live for approximately the same number of days as a westerner "has a lower chance of getting to be the average hunter-gatherer", then they are not the average hunter-gatherer, they're at best the mode hunter gatherer. — VagabondSpectre

Firstly, what do you think the mode is if not a form of averaging? Secondly, even if we were to use the mean, we'd add up all the current ages within a community and divide by the number of people in that community. Either way, the 'average' age would be somewhere in the mid to late thirties. What maths are you doing that gets any different answer?

That they have a lower chance of getting to be that age than a westerner does seems pretty unambiguous to me, perhaps you could explain a bit more about why you're confused by these statements.

My initial arguments rely on general well-being, not self reported or otherwise measured forms of happiness. — VagabondSpectre

So what is well-being then, as opposed to self-reported happiness. It seems to me at this stage that the only difference is that self-reported happiness is what people actually strive for and well-being is what you think they ought to want.

To conclude on this point, HG way of life is very sustainable within the environments it has evolved to operate in, but it cannot easily adapt to environmental change or the presence of many other groups. This makes HG way of life less reliable in the context of inevitable change. — VagabondSpectre

No, that's just restating the same argument, I asked you for evidence to back it up. Hunter-gatherers have lived everywhere from the Sahara desert to the Arctic ice sheets, they've lived through interglacials and the ice-age. They have done all this for 190,000 years longer than any Western society. Where is your evidence that all the transitional phases involved mass loss of life?

As extreme examples, being ostracized for not wanting to undergo genital mutilation is one such superstitious norm that is not justifiable from any reasonable ethical perspective, and the killing of those suspected of witchcraft is another such norm which is not only unreasonably superstitious but also unreasonably unjust given its arbitrary application. — VagabondSpectre

I'm really starting to get offended by your casual prejudice. Please try to do at least the bare minimum of research before making your baseless assertions.

https://www.28toomany.org/blog/2013/feb/19/what-are-the-origins-and-reasons-for-fgm-blog-by-28-too-manys-research-coordinator/

http://www.fgmnationalgroup.org/historical_and_cultural.htm

FGM probably originated with the Egyptians and spread via slavery. There is no evidence at all of it being a traditional practice of nomadic hunter-gatherers. There is, however, direct evidence of it being used in Western societies right up until the late 19th century and is still used in many Arab countries even now, all of which have/had full judicial systems. So where is your evidence that the lack of judicial system encourages FGM?

I don't know if you're just making this stuff up out of ignorance or prejudice, but it's tiresome. Which nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes kill witches exactly? And who carried out the mass slaughter of possibly up to 10,000 European women during the late medieval period? Did those evil hunter-gatherers sneak in and do it?

If the west can cease exploiting other nations, won't that amount to ethical success? — VagabondSpectre

How on earth do you twist that into an ethical success? If I go on a murdering spree, am I to be congratulated when I finally stop for my ethical success? This seems to be your entire argument in favour of western culture - we may have completely destroyed almost everything in our path to here; enviroments, cultures and billions of individuals at the bottom of the ladder, but we're doing a lot better now so that makes us morally worthy.