Poll: Has "Western civilization" been a disaster? (Take 2)
This is a bit fluff for me, but I'm genuinely curious.
I don't want to prejudice the discussion -- a few of you might guess or know my answer -- so I'm not going to present any thoughts for or against.
I'm also not adding a "depends what you mean" option, because the whole point is to find out what people mean when they answer the question yay or nay. You'll have to choose if you want to play.
Everyone can define "Western civilization" however they like. I could say I intend the question to be about the culture we associate with European history rather than the behavior of Europeans, but anyone who wants to argue those cannot be disentangled is welcome to.
I don't want to prejudice the discussion -- a few of you might guess or know my answer -- so I'm not going to present any thoughts for or against.
I'm also not adding a "depends what you mean" option, because the whole point is to find out what people mean when they answer the question yay or nay. You'll have to choose if you want to play.
Everyone can define "Western civilization" however they like. I could say I intend the question to be about the culture we associate with European history rather than the behavior of Europeans, but anyone who wants to argue those cannot be disentangled is welcome to.
Comments (98)
In Australia, there's a big debate going on about a proposed grant of a very large sum to one of the Universities by the 'Ramsay Centre for Western Civilization'. It's been knocked back by several Universities, because apparently there were too many strings attached for the academics' liking.
Now the issue has become a cause célèbre in the Culture Wars, with conservative politicians (including an ex conservative PM) lining up for it, and almost everyone else against. The sub-narrative seems to be that 'conservatism' equates with 'dead white patriarchy' - i.e. Western Culture - and 'everyone else' equates to 'global cultural diversity'.
Now, as it happens, about six months ago, I had a call from my Uni alumni association (and it is one of the Uni's that knocked this offer back). Lovely girl came out to see me - I guess they're hunting bequests, regrettably I have not much to offer. But over the very long chat, I waxed eloquent about my late-blooming love for classical Western philosophy, by which I generally mean Christian Platonism and its various offshoots. I talked about how hardly anyone even seems to know what it is, and that is hardly taught; 'Classics' and 'Humanities' being very much on the back foot in the modern, commercially astute Academy.
The issue I see is that the tradition of Western philosophy is a spiritual tradition, but that historical forces have combined to eclipse its spiritual aspects. Quite why this has happened, is a deep historical question, but my original thesis was that it is due to the way Christian orthodoxy formed in the early period of Western culture. The emphasis on 'correct belief' and the convulsions over heresy and dissent have had a huge and negative impact on Western culture. But regrettably, at the same time, many other elements of Western thought, such as large parts of Platonist and classical philosophy, were appropriated by the Church and 'locked in the vaults' where they could only be examined on pain of agreeing to the Church's terms. Later developments, especially Calvinism, further accentuated the gulf between being saved and damned, and the exclusivist claims of Christianity. It left the Western intelligentsia with nowhere to turn - but to science, and what could be definitely known and measured. To me, that is the major dynamic of modern culture.
Subsequently I have softened my views somewhat, because Christianity encompasses an enormous range of philosophies. And also the 'new atheist' phenomenon which came along in the early 2000's actually made me feel defensive towards Christianity - I thought their arguments and attitudes were so utterly bereft of philosophical and cultural insight, that it made me feel much closer to my hereditary culture. By that stage, I had already formed a relationship with Buddhism, and that is unlikely to change. But I am still deeply respectful of classical Western philosophical theology, of which the only surviving currents of thought are preserved in neo-Thomist and some Orthodox schools; and I do feel that very few understand what it is that used to be understood, and so what has been forgotten.
See Does reason know what it's missing?
//ps//Also wanted to add that the Western tradition is also more than just a spiritual tradition - its respect for reason, mathematics, and many fundamental concepts hammered out over generations were essential to science itself, and arguably why the scientific revolution occurred in Europe and not the East.//
Maybe it's changed since 1985, but it would have to be a complete about-face for Western culture to be under-represented in Uni subjects.
I do have more recent experience in High school curricula and my observation is that they are tremendously Western-focused. Despite gestures like Welcomes to Country and aboriginal murals on walls, the literature studied is almost exclusively Western, and a high percentage of it Shakespeare.
I'm not bemoaning that - other than the over-emphasis on Shakespeare at the expense of other great writers like George Eliot - but I really can't see where the deficiency of teaching Western culture is supposed to be.
But one thing I will say, is that when I was at uni, late seventies-early eighties, the full force of PoMo deconstructivism hadn’t hit yet. Philosophy was divided up roughly into Oxbridge rationalism on one side, and New Left on the other. Certainly there was a Classics department - actually I was friendly with the extremely charming professor, Dexter Hoyos, way back then. But I had the feeling a lot of that emphasis on the classical curriculum has since become eclipsed. My elder son, a very successful student, would be barely acquainted with classical literature. [Heck, I’m barely acquainted with it, many of my relatives are much better-read than myself.]
I take 'Western civilisation' to encompass the colonisation of the rest of the world, the industrial revolution, and thereby current global politics. To start with the obvious - climate change, and the Holocene extinction. I won't even argue it.
Then there is the cultural devastation in Africa, the far East and Australia, and the Americas. Also obvious.
And then the culture itself, which glorifies greed and violence, and alienates its own people from nature and each other. The global village is a lonely place, and the population is miserable and insane, and increasingly, homeless.
Cripes - can’t say I blame him.
(The other fly in the ointment was Tony Abbott’s OP in Quadrant bemoaning Green Left Political Correctness in the Aus uni sector; Abbott is a Director. That went down like a lead balloon in academia.)
When I did Buddhist Studies I learned the uni had rejected a large grant from a Thai Buddhist organisation on similar grounds.
Has Western civilization been a disaster as referenced against....the East, right? Or?
However... But... Nonetheless...
Do we live in 2018 AD (Absolute Domination)?
There is the strong unmistakable odor of disaster wherever Civilization has been implemented. Is there anywhere left on Earth untainted by this ominous cloud? Please tell me where so I can pack my bags and buy a plane ticket! Perhaps without too much facetious hyperbole we can call it “cEVILization” or “civilwarization”. :wink: I have only words left to play with.
Like many, I go over and over in my mind trying to imagine what has gone wrong with us, IF indeed something has gone amiss. Imagining the human timeline of evolution and growth and expansion. From small groups to tribes to villages to city-states to modern international cities. From tools made of bone and stone to tools made with quantum computing chips.
There is such a apparently seamless flow of growth that even if one is troubled by current Civilization, trying to pick out a decisive moment, or wrong choice, is like trying to tell where a river ends and where the ocean begins. Koyaanisqatsi is both a film and a concept. “Unbalanced life”, from the Hopi people’s language. Is this merely quaint? Is this just fear of progress? Fear of reaching our potential? Growing pains?
A way of living “out of balance” logically implies that there is a way to live “in balance”. The first difficulty lies in determining what that could be. Or perhaps even more basically, the first difficulty is seeing or believing that there IS such as thing as a balance point, a Golden Mean, a flow of energy between yin and yang. That may sound too New-agey or something, but it is a critical point in any discussion of Civilization. The opposite viewpoint is what could be termed “unlimited growth” or “more is always better”.
If one holds that any pausing to debate Civilization at all (or any thinking about possible improvements and alternatives) is wasting time and impeding progress, then the conversation ends there in a stalemate. If one says “damn the torpedoes (and naysayers), full speed ahead!”, further talking might be a waste of breath on all sides. If one says that not having the answers to the questions means that the questions are better not even spoken of... then that is quite an imposing impasse.
Thinking precedes, underlies, and re-inforces action, as a general rule. The flaw in the thinking (I propose) concerns domination. Humanity (arguably) being given dominion over the earth does not entail that absolute domination over every other species and every last resource is the logical end.
That bears repeating and emphasizing, I think.
[b]Humanity being given dominion over the earth DOES NOT entail that absolute domination over every other species and every last resource is the logical end.
[/b]
And yet...
Yet we live in the age of Absolute Domination. It may as well be what the “AD” stands for in the date 2018 AD. (Or if one prefers to use CE (in the Common Era), it could stand for Civilizational Empire). If Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” mutates into a manifesto to utterly and categorically conquer the earth, each other, and eventually the rest of the galaxy, our culture needs to be reprogrammed and rebooted. (The idea of culture as software program was expanded on in this post).
One cannot repair a jet’s engine in midair. But waiting for an accident until even considering a change in operating procedure is a dangerously poor strategy.
I see no evidence of civilization merely the semblance of organized chaos.
As Will Durant often writes....man is a trousered Ape.
M
Anything in the answers already given you would count as a disaster and attribute to something you'd be willing to call "Western civilization"?
I like western civilization; it's home. Had I been born in China or India I'd like that civilization and it would be home.
Are Westerners any worse or any better than other civilizations? No. Humans all share the same drives, and if they get their hands on something really interesting and which gives them a lot of leverage, they tend to use it for all its worth.
Why did Europeans do so much colonizing? Because the benefits of colonialism were feasible and desirable. Did other people colonize other parts of the world, and exploit other people and resources? Of course. People have been moving from one place to another in search of resources and "good stuff" and this has generally involved taking over other people and their resources. This has been going on for... maybe 20,000 years.
The Roman peninsula (the site of the early Roman Empire, and then heart of the later empire) would not have been possible had not Rome gone out and gotten stuff from around "their sea" -- the sea between the lands. They sucked up goods from near Persia to Scotland, Egypt to Germany. Was it worth it?
Yes, it was probably worth it. There's usually a down-side to human enterprises, and no group of human beings are exempt. There's also usually upsides to human enterprises.
Yes, we share a lot of DNA with Pan troglodytes, our embarrassing close relatives. Trousered ape sums it up well. A combination of ape drive and human intellect is what makes us so splendid on the one hand (the paragon of animals) and Milton's very model of Lucifer, light bearer and heaven's own subversive--the devil--on the other hand.
Michail Bulgakov's satire of Bolsheviks, The Heart of a Dog, captures us well. A surgeon sews the glands (like testicles, of a human into a dog. The dog becomes quite human like, a uniformed Bolshevik bureaucrat, but has a lot of dog characteristics, like biting fleas in his armpits, sniffing around garbage cans, attacking cats, and thrusting his nose into crotches.
That, I believe, is actually an expression of C S Lewis, taken from his book, The Abolition of Man.
Of course it can, and if you make such a distinction, that western civilisation is the good stuff, and the bad stuff is uncivilised, or un western, then the answer is easy and comfortable. I don't know what the Cultural Revolution has to do with it, except that it is another disaster, (arguably heavily influenced by western thought).
But a culture that has demon spawn has at least to admit to supping with the devil with a too short spoon.
Thanks for the clarity.
It may well have originated from Lewis, but the most erudite gentleman of contemporary Philosophy (Durant) applies the term with far greater finesse and a much more subtle form of Genius.
M
:up:
A most interesting thread, in my opinion. Thanks for all of your insights, here and in other threads. Can Western Civilization continue as it is? Is it sustainable? Are there even any other options at this point? What is the way forward? Very tempting on this kind of topic for one (such as me, for instance :monkey: ) to exaggerate and over-dramatize. Absolute kinds of thinking are relatively dangerous, to put it mildly. I see little benefit in non-qualified use of such words as always, never, everyone, forever, no-one, etc, and attempt (sometimes successfully) to use them sparingly. By the way, I voted in the poll for WC as disaster. But probably would have voted “partial disaster, at least”, if that had been a choice... FWIW.
And the current political climate and discussion of this so-called Western Civilization is generally filled with drama, grandstanding, hyperbole, exaggerations, and absolutes. And that’s on a good day, excluding some of the nastier stuff. It is coming from all sides. Seemingly, people have to shout or make exorbitant claims to be heard or noticed. Maybe it is always been like this, or maybe it has been amplified of late. The presence and power of the internet seems to make everything amplified and accelerated.
Upon second thought, I am of at least two minds about using the term “Western Civilization”. Mostly because now China, Russia, Korea, Japan, etc. are so integral to the business, culture, news, and thinking of the Western countries. (That is probably the result of globalization, of which I am also of two minds about. But that is another can of fish bait.) But mostly, referring to Western Civilization is common and acceptable parlance, and that is fine. As a side point mentioned above, there is of course the Middle East, which still profoundly influences the Western world. And then there’s Africa and Greece, which might in some ways be referred to as the cradle of humanity and civilization.
Despite any polemic of mine to the contrary, I agree that there is much from WC that is commendable.
One would be somewhat foolish not to admit that, as well as biting the hand that feeds one (so to speak). Having an attitude of gratitude, as the proverb goes. And I do believe that, perhaps even more strongly when I fail to act upon it. Like one realizes that it is better not to speed on the highway after getting a ticket or having an accident.
So the science, industry, culture, democracy (such as it exists), invention, etc. are all to be applauded. Even while being critiqued and debated, hopefully in a fair and balanced manner. As @Bitter Crank noted above, civilization is a mixed bag of positives and negatives. Humans are not angels nor demons, despite all appearances to the contrary sometimes.
I feel that the general topic the recent thread found here about Self as illusion is quite central to this thread about the nature and fate of Western Civilization. I wish that I could neatly explain or prove this, but it is not so easy even if possible. One would have to demonstrate that our current civilization has inherent contradictions and problems. Not all would agree with that. Then one would have to successfully argue that Self is at least partially a construct or composite, having no definitive nature. This would be even trickier to demonstrate, especially to a skeptical audience. Then the two points would have to be shown to have some kind of cause and effect relationship.
I’ll just say that sometimes the sweetest and otherwise wholesome fruit can accidentally harbor deadly bacteria or virus. And sometimes that way forward involves going in reverse, and a tree grows up in proportion to its simultaneous growing downward. To quote a line spoken by Sean Connery as a wounded Holy Grail-seeking Dr. Jones in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “the penitent man will pass... the penitent man will pass”. Or as one high school teacher said, “Time will pass. Will you?”
Since you asked for my opinion....
On the whole, yes. Western civilisation is an imperial and xenophobic movement, responsible for capitalism and continuous-growth economics, and the use of science in places where other tools would serve us better. It has lead us to use the world, when we should be sharing it, so now (for example) three out of every four species of flying insects that lived when I was born are extinct; gone forever. Non-Western learning of all sorts is actively ignored; the history of non-Western civilisations is denied or demeaned. Philosophy is treated very similarly.
Yes, an unmitigated disaster for all the living creatures who live here on Earth.
Here's an argument, statement really, I've always found specious:
• Guns don't kill people; people do.
I find it specious not because it's false; it's obviously true. But given human frailty, making force multipliers like guns readily available is a bad idea. What might have been a fistfight with some asshole becomes manslaughter.
Here's my problem. Western culture produces lots of force multipliers. Once you can build resilient ships, reliable clocks and other navigational aids, better still fund it all with a joint stock company and insure it through an underwriter, you can unleash your tendency to greed, cruelty, and arrogance upon populations an ocean away. (Fast forward to colonialism, genocide, climate change, etc, etc, et bloody cetera.)
Do we blame the force multipliers? In this case I'm hesitant to. Am I being inconsistent?
One obvious difference is that handguns, let's say, have few other uses, and those uses are derivative. It's a tool whose sole purpose is the perpetration of violence.
Does it matter whether the sole purpose of sturdy ships was the transport of stolen silver and stolen people? Or whether it was the primary or the original purpose? I'm honestly not sure.
Many years ago, I read a splendid little book I'll bet some of you know called Medieval Technology and Social Change . One of its most famous arguments is that the invention of the stirrup "gave rise to" feudalism. Not "caused" exactly. Enabled? Made inevitable? (I honestly don't remember!) Feudalism of course is spectacularly unjust. What would it mean to blame the inventors of the stirrup for centuries of sophisticated barbarism?
I think of the question I posed here in these terms, technology and responsibility. Within technology I'd include social structures and institutions, it should be clear. I agree with the claim that many civilizations, though not all, have done as much exploiting and subjugating as they could given their technology. "We" have had more and better of the latter, and managed still more of the former.
Thoughts?
I'd also like to hear arguments that my whole approach is wrong and the culprit is how we think, the Western worldview, an instrumental view of the world, that sort of thing. A "culprit" in guiding the behavior of Europeans into immorality. Perhaps also a culprit -- has anyone claimed this here? Rich is gone -- in deforming science. Perhaps "the West" takes a fundamentally mistaken approach to understanding, well, everything.
I don't think your analysis is wrong. As I said at the outset, what I think is the problem is that Western culture has come adrift from its ethical moorings. I mean, given ethical moorings, then these 'force multipliers' can be - and have been! - developed for beneficent ends. After all the so-called 'Green Revolution' has prevented world-wide famine. Drug such as antibiotics, and modern medicine generally, have ameliorated enormous amounts of human suffering. Overall - and this may be counter-intuitive - life-expectancy and average wealth per capita has actually continued to improve, not decline (per this editorial.)
But there are obviously also vast inequalities, not to mention environmental and economic threats and potential cataclysms.
Take Steve Pinker's latest book. It is a paean to the benefits of 'enlightenment values', technological values and 'progress'. Bill Gates and Elon Musk both sung its praises. But many critics also note that Pinker seems almost entirely blind to the downsides of progress and science; he has become known as an 'apostle of scientism'. My view is that we have to recognise the benefits of liberal democracy and science - in that, I agree with Pinker - but *not* the worldview or attitude of scientific materialism in which it is embedded.
E. F. Schumacher, one of the heroes of counter-cultural economics, explained it in a radio lecture as follows:
This was whole basis of the counter-culture although few understood it through that perspective. Two books that I was strongly influenced by back in the day, were Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counterculture (which is where the term 'counterculture' was coined) and his follow-up Where the Wasteland Ends.
So - there needs to be a new Enlightenment, one that is not based on scientific rationalism, but understands and incorporates mok?a, spiritual liberation. It is precisely that idea which was snuffed out in Western culture - or, more accurately, coralled and neutered by ecclesiastical dogmatism. Schumacher was able to reconcile his understanding with the Catholicism to which he became a late-life convert, but it's not necessarily what most understand as 'religious' in the accepted sense. It's something more radical than that. That's what I'm working on.
This is not a truism, it's a dodge intended to derail any conversation about responsibility for manufacturing, promoting, selling, or using guns. Guns are in no sense agents. Left on their own, they never do anything except rust. The only relevant agents in any murder are people -- not guns, and not any other inanimate object.
As you quite usefully noted, rocks, big sticks, arrows, spears, knives, guns, bombs -- many things -- are "force multipliers" and the gun lobby is guilty of promiscuously manufacturing, promoting, selling, and (in some cases) using force multipliers. So is the military lobby. So are several other industries and lobbies.
I think that force multipliers undoubtedly play a massive part in the problem, but the palaeoanthropological data, whilst extremely sparse and open to massive degrees of interpretation, does seem to indicate that the 'problem' started during the technological revolution, rather than as a result of it. By that I mean that if we take some basic metrics of the problem - inequality, war-likeness, wealth acquisition without limit), these are all properties commonly assignable to very old cultures at the outset of more settled lifestyles, but crucially not to communities of exactly the same technological capacities, but who were not yet settled.
Exceptions to this rule, interestingly, are tribes like the Papua New Guineans, who are uniquely violent, possibly because the mountainous terrain offers little opportunities for widespread cooperation (there are more languages per square mile in Papua New Guinea than almost any where else in the world).
So it seems to me that it's less of a case of force multipliers acting on some intrinsic greed, selfishness and violence in a completely unavoidable fixed 'human nature', but of 'human nature' being a malleable and adaptable thing which responds with greed, selfishness and violence to some situations, but which responds with egalitarianism, tolerance and frugality in others.
The problem then is not just the force multipliers, but the environment in which our children are raised which promotes this version of 'human nature' and not any other, more desirable version.
It's not clear to me whether this puts you in the "it's how we think" camp. Is there only the one way of raising children in the European tradition -- and it's the wrong one -- or is the problem that at least two ways are available, at least one of them is the wrong one, and children raised one of the wrong ways "automatically" have a disproportionate impact on their environments (human and otherwise) and giving them force multipliers only makes the problem worse?
It occurs to me that you (you, Pseudonym, not "one") might write a history of philosophy that looks exactly like this. Coincidence?
I think there are broad enough similarities within the obvious diversity. I actually meant to specifically reference the environment our children are raised in (in a passive sense), rather than any child rearing method (in the active sense) as such, but I think that both have a part to play so I'm quite happy to stand by either.
To the first, one thing which marks out hunter-gatherers from settled agriculturalist is the freedom the children have. The theory goes that with settled resource harvesting, it becomes beneficial to harvest excess, so there is an incentive to put as much labour as possible to that project, and children are labour. In a nomadic system, there's no advantage to gathering an excess, so only that which is currently needed is gathered. This leaves a labour excess (the San for example work a 14hr week to gather all they need). Thus children are free to play. This play, the theory goes, develops egalitarianism and a strong belief in autonomy. If you're interested the primary paper is Here.
So yes, I guess I'm strongly in the "it's the way we think" camp in that our rejection of egalitarianism is a major factor, but I don't think it is intrinsic, I think it is learnt during childhood.
Im not entirely sure what you mean by your last paragraph, but you mentioned me by name so my internal narcissist compels me to ask you to expand, if you would.
Will come back to the other stuff.
I was starting to see something like an aggressive/pacifist divide. Philosophically, on one side there would be the Imperialist Metaphysical System Builders, with their water-cooled rapid-fire logical systems and advanced institutional defense subsystems, and on the other hand there are the Quiestist Therapists, who just want everyone to enjoy playing however they enjoy playing or not play at all and enjoy doing something else instead.
:sweat: :up:
Wish I had come up with that one! A picturesque metaphor is worth a thousand words of explication, imo.
Absolutely brilliant! And here's me thinking I was complex when actually it's the same theory through and through. Quietist philosophy, quietist child-rearing.
Not trying to oversimplify you. Just thought there might be an underlying allegiance to your thoughts on philosophy and politics.
Finally getting to the latter. Here's what I don't quite understand about your position. If the original sin is settlement, agriculture, etc., then all such civilizations have gone wrong. Is there something especially wrong with European civilization?
Btw -- and this is me still uncertain whether I've offended you -- the idea that a certain way of doing philosophy is a kind of localized imperialism doesn't strike me as crazy at all. It's what @csalisbury noted a while back about apo's insatiable dialectic. There's no problem it does not hunger to solve, and then declare solved, no opposing position it can't incorporate. It's a system designed to endlessly expand and absorb everything else, overcoming all the pitiful rebel groups that might put up a bit of a fight here and there.
For me, this is right in line with my vaguely economic approach to philosophy these days.
I don't mind being simplified, I genuinely thought it a really fascinating insight. One can provide all sorts of clues that hint at sarcasm, but very few which confirm the absence of it.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Interesting. I'm tempted to say that this is where the influence of your concept of force multipliers comes in. I don't know if you've read Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel', but it's pretty much an account of how those three force multipliers (plus some others) explain almost entirely the dominance of Western culture.
So, settlement sets everyone off on this diabolical race (except the very few hunter-gatherers) and the ones with the most guns, germs and steel win.
So you would have voted
(4) Not just Western civilization, but all of them, son, all of them!
Haven't done Diamond, though I've heard him intone the title of his book on PBS in that Boston accent of his.
I'd like to make a suggestion I'm slightly horrified by: suppose this is all growing pains. Even chimps have something like war, sad to say. You settle down, develop science, create social institutions and structures, and if you haven't destroyed yourselves or your planet after a hundred millennia or so, then maybe you've got a shot at actual civilization, a Star Trek future of science and democracy.
In a way, this is not so far from my question: is the barbarism and cruelty we witness, the reckless destruction of our own home, is all of this going on because of "Western civilization" or in spite of it? Maybe eventually the Enlightenment will have its day. Are we sure the horrors of our time are its fault, rather than a measure of just how much more work there is to do, how uncivilized we still remain?
I'm not unsympathetic to the position you outline with the proviso that the story is not one of biblical redemption from original sin. The 'problem' that we could see enlightenment values as trying to solve is that of the change in what we might call human nature brought about by settlement, rather than the original sin of simply being human.
But if we do accept the intention of the enlightenment project, I think I'd like to reserve the ability to criticise it on its lack of success. Not that we've got some other history to test it against, but I wouldn't want to rest on our laurels and presume to just knuckle down to furthering a project which has had so little demonstrable sucess without at least exploring the alternatives.
Is anything short of utopia not worth the effort?
Objectively, the average contemporary western citizen is better off than most other humans throughout all of history by every applicable metric. There have indeed been disasters: plagues; great wars; great depressions; colonialism; et cetra, and we can question whether or not these historical disasters morally condemn the whole enterprise, but we must also appraise the current situation we're in and what to do going forward. If western civilization is truly a thorough disaster, then we ought to stop perpetuating it (which is not possible without causing billions of deaths and immeasurable suffering/quality of life reduction).
If what we have now is in any way good or worth preserving, then we should continue progressing on the paths we're on as if western civilization is not a disaster. It should also be noted that as western civilization continues to progress we're getting better and better at avoiding unnecessary death and destruction. In my view, western civilization has been dealing with and successfully overcoming disasters, not becoming one.
Civilization is both a cause and effect of "disaster":
A group of humans improve their lot, and proliferate.
Unforeseen ramifications of proliferation lead to crises.
Crises are overcome, or they are not, and the group proliferates or declines.
The history of human groups and civilizations could be viewed as a process of natural selection where weak and maladaptive groups cease to exist while the strong and dynamic survive in spite of inevitable obstacles. Obstacles in food security, fuel security, reproductive security, physical security, environmental security, and so on, will inevitably rise if a group carries on existing long enough. Groups change, change their environment, and eventually obstacles emerge.
Small, ancient, and otherwise non-western civilizations are not exempt from internal and self-caused disasters either, and compared to the west they're downright fragile. Small groups can have sadistic charismatic leaders who do noting but exploit. Small groups experience intra/inter-group violence and warfare, with the only convention against total injustice (war-crimes) being tradition if you're lucky (though tradition can support injustice just as easily). Disease and early natural death affect non-western societies much more than the west, owing to lack of medicinal understanding and low living standards. Infanticide is a word not heard often heard these days, but minimalist tribes and groups of all orders have practiced infanticide for all sorts of backwards reasons (security, superstition, legacy), and so I say why not look at western civilization where infanticide is punished as an escape from disaster?
Child mortality rate in general is perhaps the most disastrous thing about all of human history, and if that is true then western civilization is the exact opposite of a disaster.
1. You can't possibly know this, or even reasonably infer it. For most of human history (the vast majority) all we have to go on are a few scraps of bones from very specific burial circumstances and the limited non-perishable remains. How on earth are you sustaining a conclusion that the people whose lives are hinted at by these scant remains are "objectively" worse of than the average Westerner?
2. One of the major issues with "western" culture is inequality. It would be no surprise to find that, in such a system, the "average" person is reasonably comfortable, the question is whether it is just that this is bought at the expense of the fact that the least comfortable is an 11 year old child forced to work 12 hours a day stitching shoes so that this "average" person can lead their "comfortable" life.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I don't understand your logic here. You seem to be saying that because there is some good in western culture we should continue with it along the same unaltered path. I don't really see how that's any different to saying that because the trains ran on time in Fascist Italy we should continue with Fascism. What about a system which preserves the good but discards the bad, or a system which removes the bad (at the expense of the good) but replaces them with other goods of equal value, or a system which removes the bad (and most of the good) but the net result of which is an overall improvement. Why are these options not available for you?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This is a very substantial underplaying of the situation we face almost to the point of being ridiculous. Global warming could very well make half the world uninhabitable, we are presiding over just about the largest mass extinction ever known, 12 million hecatres of previously productive farmland is now in "Seriously Degraded" condition according to the UN (a state from which there is currently no known remedy), we dump 2.2 billion tons of waste into the ocean every year, air pollution kills 18000 people a day, availability of fresh drinking water has halved in the last 50 years...I mean, do I have to go on? It's just absurd to suggest that these are 'just one of the obstacles that always arise with any group which carries on long enough. We lived as hunter-gatherers for at least 200,000 years without having any appreciable impact on our ability to continue doing so. Western (or modern) civilisation has been around for barely a hundredth of that and is already using more than one and a half times the resources the earth can sustain over the next 50 years.
Yes, we could overcome all these problems technologically, but where are the solutions? It's no good just wishful thinking, they have to come in time, not just eventually. If we're halving the available drinking water every 50 years we need technology to stop that right now, not at some point in the future.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Show me some evidence, any evidence at all, for any of these wildly presumptive assertions being widespread in respect to nomadic hunter-gather communities.
We can actually learn quite a bit about how people lived from their scant remains and ruins. The bones themselves tell us about the age of the deceased (and in numbers, their average lifespan), and the condition of the bones can tell us about causes of death like violence or child-birth (and in numbers average cause of death). Artifacts tell us about technology culture, lifestyle, religion, etc...
Overwhelmingly, technology and prosperity correlates with increased lifespans and reduced mortality rates. We know that physically stressful lives and a lack of adequate medicine reduces our lifespans on average, and we also know that no other society has been as affluent and technologically/medicinally advanced as the west
We know from anthropological research that on the whole, ancient tribal life was rife with early demise and hardship. It would be exhausting to present every applicable metric to actually prove my point, so perhaps you could point out a non-western civilization which fares better than our own in a specific metric of your choosing?
Quoting Pseudonym
In societies of larger scale, proportionally more injustice is likely to exist. Child marriage is more common in ancient and non-western cultures, but that doesn't condemn the entirety of every non-western enterprise. I'll defend my point by arguing that in the contemporary west (and afflicted third worlds) the average child is less likely to die early or be exploited than in the past. Public education is an invention of the late 19th century, and while in some parts of the world children are being exploited, the western education which has allowed you to raise objection is spreading fast and may soon become available to them, along with technology and affluence. We're making moves to bring a universal end to the exploitation of children; things are getting better.
There will inevitably be injustice in the world. At times western civilization has exacerbated injustice, and at times it has abated it. We're currently at a place where injustice has been reduced more than ever before, and while injustice persists in some of its parts we need not do away with the whole.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm saying that if there are parts of western civilization worth maintaining, then we should maintain them.
I was trying to contrast with what appears to be your own logic: "because there are disasters of justice in western civilization, it should not be continued". If it holds that "western civilization is a disaster", then it seems to follow that it ought to be undone.
I see utility in the way you go on to talk of good and bad parts of western civilization which can be distinguished and appraised individually (some parts of western civilization have been downright successful). Else-wise, how do we tell if something has been an overall disaster or success? If it falls short of perfection, is it therefore disaster? If it manages to achieve an iota of success or merely endure, is it therefore successful?
I don't rightly know...
Quoting Pseudonym
Woah, chill out, Thanos. Global population growth has been slowing since the 80's, and we're almost at 0%. We're vigorously researching new energy technology to replace oil, which is on the way out and also the main source of carbon emissions. We'll get there. Yes climate change can be bad, and people die from pollution, but without the pollution there is no infrastructure to support the 7+ billion people that currently exist. The global population went from 1 billion in 1800 (up from the ancient 300 million or so average) to over 7 billion. Unless the global population falls below 1 billion, or the average quality of life today falls below the average quality of life in 1800, we're still better off today.
Things could get worse and then maybe we can call the whole thing a disaster, but until then I think we're performing passably.
Quoting Pseudonym
I have made no presumptive assertions. nomadic hunter-gatherer communities are not exempt from bad leadership, disease, famine, hardship (inducing infanticide), warfare, etc...
Warfare and bad leadership being equal (it depends on the time and place), disease, famine, hardship, infanticide, and premature death are all things that occur less frequently in the western world (and on average in the world of today) than any other society and globally at any other time. We have greatly extended lifespans thanks to medicine which can keep us alive through afflictions, and thanks to better living conditions which is an added health bonus.
Here's a graph showing the combined benefits of prosperity and medical advancement on female life expectancy:
No, because the entire sample is biased in favour of bones left in places where they were either buried or otherwise preserved from the elements. This represents a specific sub-section of all deaths of unknown significance. We cannot extrapolate the cause of all deaths from a subset of deaths which we know is not a stratified sample.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I see, you can't come up with an example to prove your claims so you ask me to. If I were to make the claim that, overall, black people were more violent than whites and then refuse to provide any evidence but simply say "you prove they're not" how seriously would you take my argument?. I'm nonetheless happy to provide some examples.
Metric 1 - Suicide. The leading cause of death in young men of most Western societies, in the top ten causes of death among virtually all age groups. So rare among hunter-gatherers that most don't even have a word for it in their language.
Metric 2 - Equality. Here is a link to a paper describing the way hunter-gatherers are predominantly egalitarian, it not necessarily the best example just one I happened to have the link to, but it gets the point across.
Metric 3 - Health. Here is a meta study bringing together much of the data demonstrating the catastrophic effect on health brought about by a move to subsistence farming (the state of at least 25% of the current world population).
What I can't beat western societies on is lifespan, infant mortality, death in childbirth, and death in war. I'm not claiming hunter-gatherers live in some kind of utopia, but this idea of some violent backward savage is borderline racist (not you, the view your espousing).
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Proof
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, I'm not suggesting that things are not getting better, I'm arguing that the concept of things having been only progressively worse in the past is false. Things got worse and are now getting slowly better again (in some areas). No children are exploited in the vast majority of hunter-gather societies, they are left entirely to the own devices and have the freedom to do exactly as they choose. See here
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, this is without proof. I've provided evidence for the egalitarianism in Hunter-gather societies, are you suggesting that all the authors contained within the entire meta study were simply making it up?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Well, you have very low standards, and a poor grasp of maths. If using one and a half of the world's sustainable resources is passable, then how do you propose we continue? Where's the other half a planet we need?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
You've just repeated the same assertions without any evidence. Repeating a thing doesn't make it any more true. You do realise your graph only goes back to 1550? Modern humans first evolved about 200,000 years before then. Your graph is missing a bit.
You're basically saying archeology and anthropology are hopeless endeavors because we don't have perfectly representative remnants. Depending on the group of humans we're talking about, remains and ruins can indeed tell us about how the people lived, even if they're incomplete. I don't know why you think we need every bone from every individual to paint a picture of a given civilization...
Quoting Pseudonym
At first I thought you believed traditional ways of life are just the bee's knees, but now I see you think it's racist to say western civilization is somehow better than any other civilization.
Is that correct?
Quoting Pseudonym
We also have terrorism and serial killers too, which are also somewhat novel problems that only seem to express in modern conditions. Rich, famous, and legacy secure, Leo Tolstoy was none the less stricken with suicidal thoughts (he couldn't see any meaning/purpose), while his peasant servants considered it to be the ultimate taboo (and not only on religious grounds). Should we take from this that being Leo Tolstoy or being rich and famous constitutes a disaster? If he did commit suicide, does that mean his life was objectively a disaster or not worth living or that the lives of his servants were more worthwhile?
If I had to make a serious guess as to why suicide rates are increasing, I would say it has to do with a rise in emotional and mental stress, and/or a reduction in forces which have previously mitigated suicide. Working in a cubicle is almost certainly less emotionally healthy than hunting or working your own farm (and can seem bereft of the kind of existential pat on the back traditional living can provide), but in the end the boons of centralized economies and long distance trading means working in cubicles leads to fewer of our children starving or suffering malnutrition.
Without mines there are no mining accidents, no black lung, but without mines there are no hypodermic needles et al. An individual miner, especially one with black lung, might judge the whole endeavor unjust on the count of their own circumstances, and this is why we pay miners good wages in the first place. I will be the first to say that many miners and office workers deserve better pay for their physical and mental/emotional sacrifices. I'll agree that burdens and benefits can be more evenly distributed (which might make life seem more just to those who would otherwise lose hope) but we're still getting better returns on our burdens in the world of today than in the past (food security and medicine are undeniable benefits).
Quoting Pseudonym
This is a link to a google scholar search, so I'm not sure which paper you're referencing. The few first results talk about how very specific and stringent environmental and cultural conditions seem to be necessary to produce an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, where many hunter-gatherer groups lacking those conditions (like the absence of recognized property rights, or environmental circumstances making sharing a survival necessity) along with groups practicing traditional agrarianism do have significant levels of inequalities.
There are some really groovy small groups, to be sure, who are downright lousy with equality, but they don't tend to offer much else. As one of the papers you pointed me to detailed, when it came time for the Hadza people to move camp, a beloved elder who is too sick to travel was left there on her own with some supplies, knowing she could not fend for herself, to die. Perhaps if they had property rights, established farms and infrastructure (along with the ensuing inequalities), there would have been a place for her to be cared for.
Quoting Pseudonym
Meditating on the side of a mountain all day and living off of dates and goat milk is probably more healthy than living in an air polluted city and eating process foods everyday, but the medical knowledge we have more than makes up for it. Without the cities we wouldn't have the medical and human capital that makes that possible, and our massively increased average lifespans and low infant mortality rates are testament to this. It may very well be true that when a society begins practicing agrarianism that there is an initial nutritional deficit, a learning curve, but even while the nutritional deficit is present, the populations tend to explode in size and are able to invest energy into other things where before they had to spend all their time hunting, foraging, and processing.
Maybe it's fair to say that western society has been a nutritional disaster? This might be true, but it's been a atomic bomb of calorific success.
Quoting Pseudonym
When we're speaking broadly about non-contemporary non-western civilization, it's really not possible to generalize and there's no reason to suggest I've done so. It is quite relevant to point out that infanticide and violence are inherent in some non-western ways of life. Calling this statement borderline racist is mere hand-waving. Eliminating violence and infanticide to the degrees that we have is the inverse of a disaster.
If the civilization I asked you to point to is the Hadza, then I'll point out that while they have higher degrees of certain kinds of equality, in some ways we treat the lowest members of our society (criminals) better than they can afford to treat their most beloved.
For their egalitarianism to hold, they all need to have the means of directly coercing one another (to overcome conflict of course), and so while nobody seems to have rights above anyone else, justice might be entirely absent. If a Hadza hunter doesn't share the best parts of a kill with his fellow hunters, then violence might be done upon him for such an inegaliratian faux-pas. "Altruistic punishment" they call it, and in the case of the Hadza, it's required to induce the sharing which acts as buffer against food insecurity.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'll demonstrate that it stands to reason with the following:
Not being deprived of education generally means not being engaged in labour of some kind, and it also tends to absolve them (especially girls) of an economic/cultural/traditional need to marry at what we consider to be an extremely young age. These are in my mind the most prevalent forms of child exploitation to begin with, and contemporary western values which abhor them are in line with my own.
Quoting Pseudonym
At what exact time in which exact society were things "better"?
Children being left to play and learn wholesome social norms in hunter-gatherer groups isn't quite the whole story.
Quoting Pseudonym
Reduced injustice and egalitarianism aren't quite the same things. I consider injustice to mainly exist in the form of unnecessary harm done to one person by another. Just because a tribe has no leadership hierarchy or individuals with special rights (tribal egalitarianism) doesn't make them free from conflict, violence, and injustice. Egalitarianism in our rights is a great ideal (it's one the west is striving toward), and I would much rather have much rights protected by a police force and a legal system than at the tip of my own arrow or the torches of a mob.
Quoting Pseudonym
As technology allows us to get more efficient returns and explore and exploit entirely new resources, we're also reducing the number of our births. We don't need another half a planet, we just need to not run out of oil before we can diversify away from it.
Quoting Pseudonym
Granted, I lost my information on the Civilization of Atlantis.
No, I'm saying that damning an entire section of humanity on the basis of a few bones is unwarranted. What if the early people involved tended to bury or care within the cave for those who died prematurely, but those who lived what they considered their natural term simply walked out into the wilderness (a practice we know exists in modern tribes). All the remains we work on would be the violent or early deaths and this would skew the results. I'm not saying we have enough evidence to show this was the case, I'm saying we need to be cautious in interpreting results when we have a considerable bias already.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, basically the presentation of a way of life created almost entirely by white people as being some kind of pinnacle of civilisation whilst presenting all the remnant tribal peoples (who just happen to be almost entirely non-white) as backwards, violent, superstitious animals scraping a living from the dirt, who need to 'educated' out of their uncivilised ways, is just racist colonialism.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Tolstoy may well have had clinical depression and so his suicide would hev been nothing more than a tragic result of his illness and nothing whatsoever to do with him, his life or his environment. I want to make that abundantly clear. For the sake of this argument, absent of any biological mechanism, we cannot simply presume that genetically inherited clinical depression is on the rise, so the suicides I'm talking about are those resulting from a brain that is not genetically predisposed to low serotonin.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This seems to me to be the bulk of your argument, apart from a few technical mistakes which I will pick up on later, you seem to be saying that, yes, hunter-gatherers were more egalitarian, ate a more nutritious diet, were less stressed, and less prone to kill themselves or die from industrial diseases, but it's worth losing all that because we live longer, have lower infant mortality rates, and can hoard more stuff than we actually need if we want to. So;
Firstly, that's not your call to make and Western Civilisation is nothing if not all consuming. If some group of people made that call and decided they wanted to take the advantages you list over the disadvantages you admit to, then good luck to them, I'm not about to claim that I have such prophetic abilities that I know what path is best for humanity. But that's not how it goes is it. Those people who want those advantages gain them by destroying utterly anyone who makes a different choice. Rather than try to speak for the people who are destroyed in the name of 'Civilisation', I'll let then speak for themselves.
Secondly, that's the point I made earlier (although you may not have read my earlier posts). You seem to presume that the disadvantages are necessary to gain the advantages. Are they? On what grounds?
So, to the technical errors.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
First mine. Apologies, I copied my bookmark, not the paper. I'll leave it how it is though because actually you get a wider view of different academic opinions this way.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
There is virtually no evidence at all that children starve or are malnourished in tribal societies outside of the pressures caused directly by development. None of the rigourous ethnographies from early contact report starvation or malnutrition, this is simply not true.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
The Hadza you refer to work an average 14 hour week obtaining all their food and necessities, and they live in a bloody desert! The idea that hunter-gatherers are working every hour under the sun to just about scrape enough food to live is again simply untrue, not even in the harsh environments they have been pushed to by early farming, we can only imagine how little time must have been spent hunting in the rich environments later taken by early agrarian societies.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
That's not what you said though is it? You said "Small groups can have sadistic charismatic leaders who do noting but exploit. Small groups experience intra/inter-group violence and warfare, with the only convention against total injustice (war-crimes) being tradition if you're lucky (though tradition can support injustice just as easily)...Disease and early natural death affect non-western societies much more than the west, owing to lack of medicinal understanding and low living standards. Infanticide is a word not heard often heard these days, but minimalist tribes and groups of all orders have practiced infanticide for all sorts of backwards reasons (security, superstition, legacy)". That's not just "pointing out", that violence and infanticide are inherent in tribal communities, that judging them, 'sadisitc', 'exploit', 'war-crimes', 'low living standards', 'backwards reasons'. That's what's racist.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, this is just showing your, let's generously call it cultural bias, rather than racism. You simply presume that because you would rather be alive at 70 (even if in a prison cell with no freedom at all) that everyone would also make that choice, so you scoff at cultural differences like geriatricide. If you found evidence of the elderly being murdered, being offered the choice of a shorter life in the wild or a longer life cooped up in a cell and them taking the latter, then you'd have a point. In reality, Bushman elders have one of the highest suicide rates in the geographic are when they are forcibly settled. If they prefer a longer life in a cell to a shorter one in the wild, how do you explain the sky-rocketing suicide rates?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
What has a graph going back to 1820 showing how many people attend school and can read and write got to do with anything we've been talking about?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
So, you're just completely ignoring the evidence I gave you that hunter-gatherer children are not forced to do anything at all, let alone labour, and the average age of childbirth among the Awa, for example, is 22.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
"By 2012, the equivalent of 1.6 Earths was needed to provide the natural resources and services humanity consumed in one year." - WWF Living Planet Report. We absolutely do need 1 and a half earths to sustain our lifestyle. So where's the other half an earth coming from? I admire your optimism, I really do, but where is all this progress?
The only thing I've said is backwards are reasons for infanticide. Violent, superstitious, scraping a living from the dirt, need to be educated out of their wayss: these are all your words.
I'm saying the contemporary west is the best we've ever had it, I'm not saying any and every other civilization is therefore lower than dirt.
I'll see your racist colonialism, and I'll raise you emotional postmodernism.
Quoting Pseudonym
Some hunter gatherers were more "egalitarian" meaning they had less stratification in social powers, but life can still suck in a world where we're all equal. We have less nutritious diets on average, but we also have more reliable diets on average (freedom from starvation and food insecurity). Hunter-gatherers seem less likely to die from suicide industry caused diseases, but they're more likely to die from regular diseases which are treatable in the west or to die from injury. Living longer is worth something, and our children not dying is worth more. Hoarding the stuff we need like clever ants is how we got here.
Quoting Pseudonym
Problems will inevitably arise because we cannot predict all the ramifications of our actions. We generally choose the actions which we think yield the most advantages and the least disadvantages, and failure sometimes happens before we discover something robust.
Super-bugs (infectious bacteria) in hospitals are novel threats of our own creation: un-forseen ramifications of overusing antibiotics. We probably should have used them sparingly, but to be absolutely safe we would have to not use them whatsoever.
If what you want is a world with no disadvantages then prepare for disappointment...
Quoting Pseudonym
Certain Eskimo groups, for instance, practice infanticide because it has adaptive merit in their harsh environment. I imagine hunter-gatherer children generally didn't die of malnutrition and starvation but instead actual infanticide, and for reasons other than just food insecurity.
Quoting Pseudonym
How much time do you spend obtaining and processing your food? Is your house, computer, and internet a necessity? Would you give it all up if only you had a primitive Eden?
We spend less time getting our necessities. Farms are so efficient that many of us can spend no time doing anything productive at all. Granted, the Hadza, have 2 hour work days, and the rest of the time they sit around gambling in boredom (metal arrow heads, knives, honey and such), with nothing else to bother accomplishing.
Quoting Pseudonym
But it's true that small groups can experience these problems, just as western civilization can and has experienced these problems. Do you want specific examples?
Pointing out that leaders of small groups can wind up being sadistic is not racist. Cultural practices which exploit the innocent exist among some indigenous peoples and it's not racist to point this out. "low living-standards" simply is not racist, especially in the context of my point about early death due to living conditions. "Backwards reasons" was in reference to reasons for infanticide which are downright abominable, such as the killing of twins for superstitious reasons.
I'm pointing out that indigenous, ancient, hunter-gatherer, and otherwise tribal life doesn't guarantee you justice, comfort, or freedom. The west doesn't guarantee it either, but it does better on average.
Quoting Pseudonym
A bit late to try and temper your rebuke...
Quoting Pseudonym
A prison cell?
Seems like a false dichotomy. I would prefer not to die of exposure because that's the cultural and therefore justified norm. I'll take a hospice over a tent in the woods any-day. How about you?
You've decided to impugn my character instead of addressing my point that bushmen cannot afford to care for their elderly like we can, and while we could always do better than we currently do, we sure beat the pants off a tent in the woods. You've basically just said that bushmen not being able to care for the elderly (whose bodies tend to deteriorate earlier than ours as a consequence of the lifestyle) doesn't matter because they want to be euthanized anyway.
Regarding the separate alleged issue of bushmen elders committing suicide when forcibly settled, I'l going to answer by saying that their suicide might have something to do with being forcibly settled.
Quoting Pseudonym
It has to do with the average life that our children lead. In place of an education children have fewer options. They are forced to take up the trades of their parents and are generally more vulnerable to the whims of their culture and environment. Having no other option but to herd your fathers cattle or accept an arranged marriage is probably a less fulfilling childhood than getting an education in the modern west. Before you label me a bigot or some such, to be clear I'm not saying that every non-western culture practices arranged marriage or uses their children for labor instead of offering them freedom and an education (let alone better odds of making it past age 5 than a coin flip).
Quoting Pseudonym
Perhaps my use of the word "children" is liberal, but I include teenagers in my definition. Here's a quote from the article you cited. "Girls are around 14 years old before they begin regular food gathering and water- and wood-collecting. This is in spite of the fact that they may be married before this age. Boys are 16 years old or over before they begin serious hunting. Children do amazingly little work.”
So they play all day every day during the time they would be getting a primary education, until 14 and 16 when marriage and work starts.
Quoting Pseudonym
1.6 planets?
How would that even work?
I'm confused, is WWF saying that we've taken out a loan on another half a planet?
I'm sorry it's just a really silly quote. We were able to harvest a certain amount of energy and it only took one Earth. I suppose if you just count up all the energy we consume from non-renewable sources and compare it to all renewable sources you can rationalize the statement, but it's still quite uninformative.
I'm getting the sense that you think the west is on the brink of catastrophe. Is that why hunter-gather life in perpetual homeostasis with nature is so much better than modernity?
Right, so from which ethnography have you obtained your knowledge about the reasons for infanticide? Which ethnography describes sadistic leaders? Which describes war crimes? Once you have your citations, compare them to the weight of ethnographies showing absolutely nothing of the sort, then come back and we'll talk about your claim that the generalisations are not racist.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I can't debate with you if you're just going to make stuff up in support of your argument. I've provided you with ample evidence that hunter gatherer diets were both nutritious and reasonably secure (both things absent from at least a quarter of the modern population), yet you keep just presuming, without any evidence at all, that hunter-gatherers were permanently on the brink of starvation. Where is your evidence for this?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
So I'm to debate against your imagination?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
My house is a necessity, yes. I'd probably die from exposure fairly quickly without it, and I work a 24hr week to pay the rent. And yes, I would quite happily give it all up to live in a primitive Eden, as the thousands of tribal peoples fighting for their land and traditional way of life rather than 'development' are doing right this moment.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Which ethnographies have you read from which to draw the conclusion that the Hadza are bored and achieve nothing worthwhile with their spare time. What efforts have you made to obtain a balanced account? For someone trying to convince me you're not racist you seem to be doing an awfully good job of sounding like one.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
So, if in a debate about the merits of white and blacks I just "pointed out" that some black people are sadistic, that wouldn't be racist? Afterall, some black people are sadistic, do you want specific examples?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This I would like some examples of, preferably from a reasonably wide range of anthropologists so as to avoid bias.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Wow, so you've added up some kind of quantitative equivalent of Justice, comfort and freedom from the thousands of tribes across the world, plus all the paleoanthropological data, and compared it to the same metric gathered from all Western civilisations? Impressive work for someone who didn't even have their basic information right a few hours ago.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Tent in the woods, thanks. I guess we're all different, quel surprise. So what was the justification for the West imposing it's culture on everyone else whether they want it or not again? The original comment you made said that we treated our prisoners better than the Hadza treated their elderly. I pointed out that vast numbers of Hadza elderly voluntarily choose to die rather than be in settled accommodation, let alone a prison cell. You're imposing your own culturally generated world view on others who do not share it.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No, I've directly addressed your point. Actual bushmen who are given the actual choice of a 'tent in the woods' (without geriatric care) or a house in the settlement (with the sort of medical care most of the world have access to) voluntarily kill themselves. They make their choice in just about the most clear way anyone can. Your cultural values place more on prolonging life than on freedom and dignity, their cultural values are the opposite, but instead of accepting cultural differences, you presume they're all 'backwards'. I've generously termed this cultural bias, but it's basically racism.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Firstly again, you're confusing your own cultural bias for objective judgement. Who are you to say when adulthood begins? Because we postpone it to 18 or 20 that makes it right for every culture in the world to do the same? Secondly, again, you've selected just one ethnography to condemn the whole way of life, ignoring the contrary data, and ignoring, even in your own evidence, the key word "begin". Are you suggesting that in the west children do not "begin" to work at age 14-16? No paperounds, no shop work, no household chores?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, that's almost exactly what they're saying. The lifestyle you are using for comparison cannot be sustained, the nutritional security, medicine, technology, police forces that you laud are all bought at the cost of half the world living in relative poverty and no future for your great-grandchildren.
If you want to really engage in a comparison of hunter-gatherer lifestyle with modern Western lifestyle in a realistic way you'll need to;
1. Drop the cultural bias and take people's preferences on their words and actions. The vast majority of tribal people offered 'development' freely are choosing to fight for their traditional way of life instead. You might not prefer it, they do.
2. Compare hunter-gatherer lifestyles with a sustainable average Western one, not the unsustainable lifestyle of the richest 10%, and not some optimistic techno-utopia that you've no sound reason to believe will ever happen.
Then we can have a meaningful discussion about the relative merits.
Not a human society, no. :fear:
Here's an article which covers a gamut of reasons for infanticide.
Here's an article covering the superstition based killing of twins in a region of India.
Here's another broad article for good measure.
As is clear, infanticide has been practiced throughout many many cultures and for various reasons, including socially constructed superstitious beliefs which you should have no problem ridiculing as backward.
Quoting Pseudonym
My point was that small hunter gatherer groups can have sadistic leaders (a problem which large and small groups can share). I suppose I could argue that any leader who perpetuates child sacrifice is somehow sadistic to satisfy your request, but tribal peoples generally don't keep detailed histories so I'm short on names. It stands to reason that since some humans are sadistic, there is a chance in some of them gaining leadership authority in large and small groups alike. Genghis Khan springs to mind. Are nomads too dissimilar to hunter-gatherers?
Many people point to western society as disastrous because we have had to endure terrible leadership, and I'm pointing out that smaller groups and non-western groups can experience disasters of equal gravity but of smaller scale. Being ostracized from the group for superstitious reasons or forced or coerced into marriage by the authority wielding elders seems unethical, bordering on the sadistic.
Is the Khan fair game?
Quoting Pseudonym
Primarily I would say attacking and destroying neighboring groups is the main indigenous war-crime equivalent. Killing males and taking the females is a common way that has played out. Some other war-crimes and war-crime like equivalents would be mutilation, torture, cannibalism, the use of poison weaponry. These are not common among indigenous groups, but they exist within many of them (perhaps at a similar rate to which they are found in the west)
Quoting Pseudonym
I've not actually generalized in the way you think I have, and it would be nice if we could conduct this discussion without the additional topic of whether or not I am racist. My argument is that the contemporary west is the best civilization to live in. Yes this means I'm generalizing all other civilizations as not as good as the west, but it doesn't mean I'm saying every other civilization and human group has a sadistic war criminal demanding the life of every first born as a leader.
To portray the west as uniquely suffering from the aforementioned disadvantages and to thrust the idea of utopic hunter-gatherer problem-free life is special pleading; your ignoring the myriad of problems inherent in many indigenous lifestyles, idealizing your conception of hunter-gatherer life, and generally obfuscating by appealing to racism.
Quoting Pseudonym
When did I say "permanently on the brink of starvation"? Please don't exaggerate my position so far beyond what it is, or indeed you won't actually be debating with me.
Some hunter-gatherer groups, especially in jungle conditions, have practiced infanticide and twin infanticide because the mother cannot care for two young infants at the same time (time and resource constraints). This makes some sense because it is nearly impossible to store food in the jungle and so acquiring food is an on-going task which often requires moving from place to place once an area becomes depleted (a fact which can eventually lead to conflict). Not being able to care for two babies at the same time is a logistical disadvantage for mothers living in the jungle, and it can cost one of the babies its life. Many tribal groups don't actually consider babies to actually be people until they start exhibiting human like behavior like smiling and interacting. This works well as an obvious defense mechanism against the emotional pain of losing children so very often, and also makes it easier to commit infanticide for whatever reason.
Quoting Pseudonym
Don't you reckon you would regret not being able to read books or watch movies or travel great distances or receive modern medical care? You would have to marry one of your neighbors too!
Yes many indigenous people are fighting to prevent the destruction of their land and to preserve their cultures, but they're not exactly turning their noses up at western steel, dogs, motors, vaccines, and more. I understand why they want to maintain the old ways, and I laud their efforts if that's what will make them happy, but I wonder how long before their children pine for entry into the global economy. I'm fairly certain that a primitive Eden isn't actually what you want. Fruit isn't ripe all year round even in Eden; are you prepared to wake up and eat re-fried snake or boar or monkey for breakfast everyday?
Quoting Pseudonym
Gambling is one of their most important activities because it allows them to transfer goods which are not available in all parts of their country in a way that does not create trade obligations which could lead to imbalances of trading/social power, and thereby maintains their egalitarian structure. It's literally one of the most important things they go about doing, why are you minimizing the important social accomplishment of gambling among the Hadza? What are you racist or something?
I skimmed through a few of the results when you linked me to a google search and called it a citation.
This one. Read it yourself?
"Hadza use a distinctive method for transmitting such personally owned objects between people which has profound consequences for their relationships. In any large camp men spend most of their time gambling with one another, far more time than is spent obtaining food. They gamble mainly for metal-headed hunting arrows, both poisoned and non-poisoned, but are also able to stake knives, axes, beads, smoking pipes, cloth and even occasionally a container of honey which can be used in trade. A few personally-owned objects cannot be staked, because, Hadza say, they are not sufficiently valuable. These are a man's hunting bow, his non-poisoned arrows without metal heads used for hunting birds and small animals, and his leather bag used for carrying his pipes and tobacco, arrowheads and other odds and ends. These objects excluded from gambling share two characteristics: first, they maintain a man's capacity to feed and protect himself and secondly, they are made from materials available in every part of the country..."
Quoting Pseudonym
When did we start having a debate about whites and blacks?
Quoting Pseudonym
I've already given examples of exploitation of the innocent: infanticide and arranged/child marriage.
Here's the source.
Quoting Pseudonym
I've never said the west is justified in imposing its anything on anything. You're attacking a boogie-straw-man.
Quoting Pseudonym
Imposing my view on them? What?
After spending a life as a bushman, a basic permanent shack somewhere would seem pretty depressing indeed. They're not being offered full time care in hospices. Since they would be too big of a burden to stay with their family, and because the settlements are so depressing and un-stimulating to begin with, I'm not surprised they choose death.
A piano player prefers the piano, but my statement of "better" is based around objectively measurable statistics and attributes such as child mortality rate, life expectancy and in this case how well we treat the lowest among us (we can afford to keep even our prisoners alive and give them some quality of care while infanticide and "geriatricide" are necessary considerations for peoples living in harsh environments)
Quoting Pseudonym
You keep thoroughly and blatantly misrepresenting my views (I never said people who prefer traditional ways of life are backwards, I said "infanticide is practiced for all sorts of backwards reasons") and you keep using those misrepresentations to call me racist over and over again. I could care less how long or passionately you make appeals to racism or my character because it doesn't address the subject being discussed. For all you know I'm a proud racist and pointing that out doesn't actually reveal anything new or relevant to the subject matter. Back to the debate then?
An ad hoc settlement set up for struggling indigenous people doesn't come with all the perks and freedoms of living in the west. They're at best transitory and designed to quickly be replaced by something more developed, and in reality people languish in them. The fact that elders don;t want to move into these places reflects their attachment to old ways. Are the children committing suicide just as often? In most of the documentaries I've seen the youth are much more optimistic and eager about moving to the new settlements because it gives them an opportunity to be a part of a larger world and some of its novel boons.
I'm not saying that everyone has to subjectively prefer the west, I'm saying the west is objectively more preferable if lifespan, child mortality rate, and access to modern healthcare are important to you.
Quoting Pseudonym
According to our western moral and medical prowess, a young girl being married off deprives her of sexual freedom, presents a real threat to her physical, sexual, and mental health, and denies her opportunities for education and independence. I simply cannot condone the practice of marrying at 14. I know why it is done and why it can even be seen as a necessary adaptation, but it is still a disadvantage; it's regrettable. It's not just some cultural fact that we should just accept has no normative component. It's a bad thing that they have to marry so young and if they can easily cease the practice, they ought to. Yes I think the right of children to not be coerced into marriage is universal.
Quoting Pseudonym
They are not expected to perform tasks critical to the existence of the household, no. They don't need to put food on the table or pay rent. Those extra 5ish years of freedom western children enjoy has got to be worth something.
P.S, I'm not condemning "the whole way of life". You said hunter-gatherer children are not forced to do anything at all, and so I pointed out that actually they're forced to do some fairly non-trivial shit. Marrying young isn't a stranger to the west though; basically 100 years ago it was considered normal for women to marry as young as 12 (basically at puberty). The treatment of women in general is something the west has made slow progress in, and continues to do so, but through most of the world most of the time women and girls have been second class. Female infanticide is more prevalent than male infanticide because men are seen as more valuable in various contexts (environmental, cultural, and social), and the same reason is why marrying off daughters young is such a common theme exhibited by all races of humans.
Quoting Pseudonym
The rest of the world wasn't exactly plunged into poverty the moment the west became powerful and the benefits are not completely one-sided (they're fully stratified). I've heard that the top 1% controls up to half of the global wealth, so perhaps with changes we could have western civilization and reduce relative wealth inequality?
The rest of the world is modernizing, and with it comes better access to the basic advantages that contemporary western society can offer. Making improvements is what we do.
I'm confident that the Earth is going to be here in 100 years, and that humans and western society can adapt.
Quoting Pseudonym
Just because the west is a safer place where you and your children are likely to live much longer and more free from disease/injury induced suffering, doesn't mean everyone has to actually prefer it.
What cultural bias? When I say that an adult marrying a 14 year old is morally wrong, is that just [s]racism[/s] cultural bias that I should be ashamed of?
Quoting Pseudonym
I've never appealed to the boons of the top 10% or alluded to any techno-utopia; modern medicine, electricity, running water, and education all come standard in the west. Meanwhile you're alluding to the apocalypse...
This is becoming ridiculous. I'm not about to dedicate half my mornings to giving you a crash course in anthropology when I'm not even convinced you have any interest in the subject beyond what it has on offer to support your cultural biases.
In summary;
1. Your citations and examples are not drawn from nomadic hunter-gatherers, they are drawn from indigenous tribes, there's a difference. Many indigenous tribes are agriculturalists or pastoralists. I'm talking about the lifestyles of nomadic hunter-gatherers. My claims in that regard are;
Hunter-gatherers have more egalitarian forms of government than western civilisations. Each individual has more autonomy and is less likely to be forced into anything they don't want to do.
They have lower rates of suicide than western civilisations which I take to be about the clearest measure of whether the people are happy or not.
They do not exploit their children, force them into marriages, commit war crimes, have sadistic leaders, torture people, kill anyone for ritualistic or superstitious reasons, nor waste their time on non-productive activities to the extent Western civilisations do.
They are not facing starvation, working all the time to get food, struggling to feed everybody any more than western civilisations.
They do not suffer from industrial diseases, heart disease, cancer, or any of the top ten causes of death to the extent Western cultures do.
If you wish to combat any of those claims you would need an example from a nomadic hunter-gatherer Community and evidence that it occurred more frequently than in Western civilisation, preferably from more than one source to eliminate bias.
2. You have used the terms "backwards", "bored" you and accomplishing nothing". You've exaggerated negative traits without any attempt to quantify their frequency. You've made negative presumption about both lifestyle and motive without evidence.
These are pejorative terms and actions for cultural traits which you show little understanding of or willingness to understand. You've taken the first negative description that comes along and generalised it at least to the extent that you feel capable of concluding it occurs more than it does in Western civilisation. At the very least that is an uncomfortable degree of bias in favour of your own culture, at worst it is racism.
3. Modern medicine, electricity, running water, and education do not all come standard in the west. They are denied to huge swathes of the population, cannot be sustained using the technology we have. What planet are you living on where you think running water modern medicine and electricity are 'standard' benefits? Have you ever been to a third world country?
Yes, because we're so concerned about their mental health that in 2015 suicide was the most common cause of death among 5-19 year olds and the NHS in England treats over 250,000 children with severe mental health problems at any one time with about 60% having suffered some traumatic event.
How are you interpreting a skyrocketing suicide rate as indicating that we are providing children with a better life?
I don't remember enrolling in moral outrage 101.
Quoting Pseudonym
The Hadza happen to be semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, and so are Eskimo, but if I've not addressed hunter-gatherers specifically enough then it's your fault for not naming a specific group with which I can do an apples to apples comparison with a contemporary western society.
Quoting Pseudonym
Living in an egalitarian environment isn't the same as having more freedom or being free from coercion or being free from violence, it more or less means that no individual has extra power or authority. The Hadza abide and enforce their own cultural institutions through third-party punishment where the most common means of preemptively resolving a possibly violent conflict is for a band to split and form separate camps. If neither party wants to budge then there might be a problem.
You generally require a group to survive in regions such as the Hadza occupy, and survival necessitates daily hunting and foraging, which makes all individuals beholden to the norms of Hadza groups. Lacking any formal institutions which preserve justice (having only informal institutions and sanctions such as third party/collective violence done upon individuals who transgress norms) is as binding as it is liberating; there are no formal laws or authority above you or anyone else, and as such maintaining the right reputation is critical for your own protection. The fact that the Hadza have a territory large enough to permit the splitting of groups is a necessary environmental reality which allows for the violence avoidance of group-splitting in the first place. Resource scarcity or overpopulation which could threaten this mechanic might lead to catastrophe.
Each Hadza male has access to poisoned arrows, and the possibility of being shot in one's sleep or ambushed on a hunt is very real to the Hadza. Disputes over women and other transgressions can lead to fatal conflict, and even if the killer is known to the group there may be nothing done about it. That reality makes it less possible for one Hadza male to try and dominate others and disincentives confrontation (thereby preserving their egalitarianism). Among the !Kung people (also hunter-gatherers), a group specifically known for it's egalitarianism, disputes over women have at times so often proven fatal that betrothing girls as young as eight was done to prevent them from arising in the first place. The Hadza and !Kung might be extraordinarily egalitarian compared to other groups (especially us), but they actually have to walk a very fine line of somewhat rigid survival practices required to endure the environment and their unique sets of cultural norms and practices which maintain them. Hunter-gatherers do not seem to be safer from violence or injustice, nor more autonomous in the sense of having more freedom (everyone just has the same amount of it). Egalitarian societies almost by definition don't have sadistic leaders (a point I was applying to all human groups in general), but shit happens. It's true that agrarian culture and the social/wealth/power stratification/population density it leads to also tends to lead to more brutal violence (hunter-gatherers can usually just split up and move away), but it is indeed a myth that hunter-gatherers are completely free from the ubiquitous human problems of violence and injustice
Sources:
"Conflict, Violence, and Conflict Resolution in Hunting and Gathering Societies" (Lomas, 2011)
Egalitarian Societies (Woodburn, 1982)
I recommend reading the article by William Lomas as it very directly addresses the issue we seem to be having: I'm not adhering to the old school primitive savage stereotype that portrays all hunter-gatherers as violent and backward; I'm rebuking the newer stereotype that portrays all hunter-gatherer society as better than western culture by virtue of innate peace and harmony with nature, or in terms of degrees of freedom or freedom from coercion.
Quoting Pseudonym Suicide and suicide trends aren't necessarily a measure of a civilization's merits. But also, citation please.
Quoting Pseudonym
Different groups do different things. #Notallhuntergatherers, sure, but I have yet to see the shining example of a morally flawless hunter-gatherer society that has higher standards of justice than the contemporary west. Ritualized killings, violence, and comparative equivalents amounting to crimes against humanity (war-crimes), have at times been practiced by different hunter-gatherer groups. The line is quite blurry as to what constitutes a true hunter-gatherer society, so if you could name your standard that might help advance the discussion. Many Amazonian groups practice tribal warfare involving stark levels of violence (surprise attacks in villages involving the beating, rape, and murder; torture). The Yanomami people for instance dabble in agriculture, so perhaps you wouldn't accept them as an example of an imperfect hunter-gatherer group? Western presence in the Amazon region may be one of the root causes of exacerbated violence among the Yanomami (by causing resource scarcity and anxiety among groups mainly), but it also shows how fragile indigenous societal systems can actually be. When the Hadza people inevitably face enough loss of livable territory that allows them to avoid conflict by moving away (or some other crisis which forces settlement such as population growth) then they too will experience rising levels of inter and intra-group violence as their existing conflict resolution mechanisms are strained or no longer function. They'll have to create more formal means of keeping the peace and determining what is just in given conflicts. They might need to begin farming which will entail an overhaul of their cultural interpretation of "property". Failures will occur.
Quoting Pseudonym
It's somewhat true that no matter how good we get at producing food, population size can always grow (or shrink) to meet our ability to feed them. Unsurprisingly in general it is resource scarcity in environmental conditions which plays a significant role as a determinant of cultural adaptations and regulating population size. Relative food scarcity among the Hadza makes food sharing an optimal strategy, which can explain why their social sanctions enforce sharing meat as a norm.
Perhaps what you truly think is a disaster is agriculture in and of itself? Agriculture means settlement, property and wealth stratification, which leads to conflict and disproportionate power, and occasionally abuses of that power or warfare over land. We could stay in environmental homeostasis as egalitarian hunter-gatherers, but we would need to accept different sets of rights, different living conditions, different risks/burdens, and different rewards.
Quoting Pseudonym
78% (pg. 21) of Hadza die from illness and disease though, and they live shorter lives on average. The Hadza have remarkably low levels of death from violence with homicide being responsible for only 3% of deaths, but in the west homocide is responsible for less than 1% of deaths. In addition, diseases with chronic and treatable symptoms can be much more successfully managed in the west using modern medicine.
Quoting Pseudonym
The Hadza, the !Kung, and Eskimo groups are three examples of nomadic hunter-gatherers which are far from perfect and statistically live less long, die more often due to violence, and have significantly higher child mortality rates, and the two latter groups additionally practice infanticide. Foraging horticulturalists like the Yanomami might be total disasters like the west though, as far as you're concerned. Clarification?
Quoting Pseudonym
This is another misrepresentation (yawn). It's not presumptuous to say that reasons for infanticide are "backwards" (and I applied that observation to "minimalist groups and tribes of all orders"). The exact statement was "Infanticide is a word not heard often heard these days, but minimalist tribes and groups of all orders have practiced infanticide for all sorts of backwards reasons". From the Eskimos to ancient Greece, there are examples of many different types of groups practicing infanticide, including for reasons of superstition. In the contemporary west infanticide is viewed as a high crime, and that was the contrast I was pointing out.
P.S. I said "nothing else to bother accomplishing" in reference to the gambling habits of the Hadza people, and while there was some tongue in cheek with this statement, I did actually substantiate it. Hadza males spend most of their time in camp gambling, far more time than they spend gathering food and other necessities. "Boredom" is not a pejorative.
Quoting Pseudonym
Yes, I know, I'm a bad person and I should feel bad, bla bla bla...
As I've already explained with citations, infanticide is an environmental adaptation which does occur more frequently among many peoples living traditional ways of live in harsh environments than it occurs in the contemporary west. Early death by violence and disease are well understood to be more frequent in non-western nations, with child mortality rate being an especially significant benefit that the contemporary west has over every other time and place. Child marriage and betrothal is not uncommon for a host of reasons among many indigenous groups, and though it may be their cultural norm and serve adaptive functions, it's still something that the west has laudably discontinued.
Quoting Pseudonym
There's some ambiguity in the term "western world" but I thought that we were referring to first world nations who have adopted contemporary western technology and standards, where food, medicine, and education are actually guaranteed human rights. We can indeed sustain these things given our steady technological improvements, and one day they might be available in every nation...
Whataboutism isn't really that bad and all, but pointing to total numbers of suicide is less revealing than pointing to suicide per capita or a full picture of child mortality. A very small percentage of children die before making it to adulthood in the west because we've practically eliminated the historically most common causes of child death (birth complications, exposure to elements, many infections and diseases, correctable biological defects, etc...). This is not true for any hunter-gatherer groups.
Or you could have actually shown an interest in why we might have such divergent opinions instead of scrabbling for every example you could find of just how nasty the backwards natives can really be.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, So my claim that they are more egalitarian than western civilisations stands. My claim wasn't that they were less violent than western civilisations (although there's not a significant difference). The Hadza have equality of rights even for children, each individual has an equal say and conflicts are usually resolved peacefully, how's that a bad thing? Yes, there's coercion, sometimes quite strong, violent coercion, but how's that any different to western civilisation, in what way are we more free?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
In the west, we all need land in some form (either directly growing crops or for housing), all land is in private ownership so we are all beholden to the economic system to purchase in some form the land we need. I'm still not seeing the difference here. Be required to co-operate altruistically with your group, or be required to earn money in whatever economic system is prevalent in your country. I know which I'd prefer.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This is a very salient point and something people like the Hadza have been suffering from since the 19th Century, as have virtually every tribal community forced to the very edges of hospitable land. Think about that next time you presume that levels of violence in modern hunter-gatherers reflect the levels of violence they lived with before the colonisation of western civilisation.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
At what point did I say that hunter-gatherer societies were completely free from violence and injustice? You're attacking a straw man. The point raised, a point you vehemently defended, was that western culture was much better than hunter-gatherer culture, no-one even mentioned the idea that hunter-gatherer culture was somehow completely immune from violence.
That being said, from your own source which you have completely cherry-picked for the data you want (still trying to convince me you're not biased?);
"It is widely debated what the ultimate causes of conflict are within hunter-gatherer societies, but it has been well established that conflict and violence escalate as the shift from foraging practices toward pastoralism and agriculture subsistence increases."
"Egalitarian societies appear to have less intra-group conflict compared to socially stratified societies."
"Self-proclaimed leaders are not tolerated and are often ostracized by the group."
"...hunter-gatherers rely on informal methods of social control such as gossip, shunning, ridicule, ostracism, and public debating which lead to group consensus. These methods of conflict management are extremely effective at ensuring that quarrels and violence are avoided, or, if they should arise, they are dealt with swiftly within the group to return the group back to the status quo."
And most importantly, as I have mentioned;
"...care must be taken to not make the common assumption that these modern groups are representative of past hunter-gatherers."
But you seem to have conveniently ignored all that, together with the three pages the author spends explaining hunter-gatherer's primarily non-violent means of conflict resolution to hone in on the report on on single anthropologist reporting a level of violence over access to women in a tribe whose population dynamic has been devastated by the very western civilisation you're trying to claim is better.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I'd already read the Lomas article, and if you want to rebuke the notion that hunter-gatherers are innately peaceful and harmonious, I suggest you find someone who thinks that hunter-gatherer societies are innately peaceful and harmonious, and stop straw-manning my argument that they are more egalitarian, more healthy and have a lower suicide rate, and that these things are indicators of a successful civilisation.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, you're arguing against a point I didn't make. Are you suggesting I think that the Hadza do not suffer from any illness? I quite clearly listed the illnesses they do not suffer from and instead of just admitting that, you come up with some completely unrelated statistic. What percentage of Westerners die from illness and disease, do you think it's less than 78%?
And I refer you back to the comment of Lomas;
"...care must be taken to not make the common assumption that these modern groups are representative of past hunter-gatherers."
The people being studied nowadays have generally had some form of contact with Europeans, bring diseases they've never encountered before, and are living in some of the harshest environments on earth. If you could just set your bias aside for five minutes, how do you think the pressure from western civilisation, conflict with loggers and farmers, marginalisation to the lands not even rugged pioneers will farm...how do think all that is going to affect their health?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
None of which are the claims that I made.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Suicides were not unheard of in Arctic communities prior to sedentarisation; elderly or infirm members of the community would occasionally take their own lives in times of food shortage. However, suicide among young, healthy, productive individuals was unheard of. NAHO 2005; Bjerregaard et al 2004; Shephard and Rode 1996
In British Columbia, groups [of tribal peoples] with strong links to their land and culture reported no suicides, while those with no continuity to their land and culture reported rates up to 10 times the national average. Chandler and Lalonde (in press)
Guarani communities in which suicide has been a terrible problem have reported no suicides since returning to their land to live in their traditional ways. CIMI 2001
It appears that mental illness was present in Australian Aboriginal culture prior to European colonization of Australia but was, most likely, a relatively rare occurrence. The much greater prevalence of mental illness and suicide in the current Aboriginal population is a reflection of the significant disruption to Aboriginal society and has a strong context of social and emotional deprivation. Psychological disorders of Aboriginal Australians - Journal of Metal Health.
In a study of 2000 Kaluli aborigines from Papua New Guinea, only one marginal case of clinical depression was found.
Personally, I think suicide is a very good measure of a civilisation's merits, How are you interpreting the fact that our children are more likely to kill themselves than die of any other cause as a measure of success?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Unbelievable, you're trying to blame the hunter-gatherers (agriculturalists) for the violence brought on directly by western colonial dominance. Basically your argument here seems to be that western culture is better because it can bully other cultures into having to fight each other for land. What kind of metric is that for success?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
As I said, there is no point continuing if you keep comparing a completely imaginary utopian scenario of western civilisation (ignoring the pillage it reaps on the third world to sustain it and the environmental un-sustainability) to the very worst cases you can find of hunter-gatherers.
To be clear, the Hadza are the least violent hunter-gatherer group I've found, but they're still more violent than the west at least in terms of homicide. We're more free from homicidal reprisal (3.8% of Hadza die form homicide, less than 1% of Americans die form homicide) thanks to our more sophisticated justice institutions which deter and incarcerate criminals. Groups like the Hadza rely on conflict avoidance mechanisms like moving away to keep conflict incidents low in number, but when conflicts do occur and the main resolution mechanism fails, conflicts more often prove fatal due to underdeveloped cultural institutions.
You're not exactly free to excel beyond the traditional Hadza way of life as one of them; prestige and affluence leads to jealousy and resentment, which in the Hadza social setting means ostracization, sanction, or worse. Mob justice is only ever as good as what side of the bed the mob woke up on that morning.
It reminds me of "crabs in a bucket" (no i'm not making a racist morphological comparison). If one Hadza male becomes too wealthy then the other males and the cultural institutions (no property, mandatory sharing, etc...) pulls them back down and levels social hierarchies before they can begin to stratify. We could say that this fact protects and preserves the egalitarian structure of the Hadza, and we could also say that it prevents them from developing something more socially sophisticated.
We're objectively more free from the coercive threat of lethal reprisal from individuals displeased with our behavior, but we're also more free in the sense that we can travel further, can marshal and have access to more resources, have more knowledge and information that yields additional lifestyle options and courses of action, are more free from illness related suffering and death (along with our children). Hunter-gatherers must conform to the somewhat rigid ways of life and cultural norms that individual hunter-gatherer groups use as adaptive means of survival.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm merely explaining how property-less egalitarianism does't make you more free, it just means you have comparatively equal freedom to everyone else.
Quoting Pseudonym
Human groups have been suffering territory issues since time immemorial. The colonial west is a recent catalyst, but demographic and environmental changes within a group or region can bring about destructive disequilibrium without the need for external influence.
Hypothetically, if conditions change in Hadza territory such that survival becomes much easier for them (acquiring an abundance of preservable food thanks to a new technology, discovery, or environmental change) and their population grew in number to a point where random movements by bands caused territorial overlap, then essentially the entire way of life of the Hadza people could change. The freedom to move from band to band could be lost as newfound population density leads to anxieties about camp size and territorial overlap open the possibility of developing a war culture (their egalatarianism and lack of property could simply evaporate).
It's true the west has contributed to worsening environmental and social conditions among countless indigenous groups, but human history is (and must be) a long story of fluctuating conditions which have at times pitted groups of all kinds against other groups, or themselves. The fact that hunter-gatherer life is as harsh as it is (mothers simply don't have the time or energy to breastfeed while pregnant, for example), which inherently limits the population and group size of hunter-gatherer bands, is what keeps them stable at low enough population levels such that warfare serves no possible purpose. It's a true irony that the human successes such as agriculture which allow us to grow in number and comfort also inexorably create conditions where novel problems can occur, but that's just how it is. Even attempting to remain in homeostasis with the environment is a risk because we cannot control our environments, where fundamental changes can reduce relatively healthy and peaceful egalitarian societies to warring and suffering ones or destroy them entirely.
Whether or not hunter-gatherers of the past were more or less violent (this was one objective of the Lomas article), I'll address later, but regardless of whether or not it was more or less prevalent my point here about social fragility holds: since environmental conditions have such sweeping ramifications on what kinds of cultural norms and practices hunter-gatherer groups can successfully maintain, they are therefore at greater existential threat to more minute and unpredictable changes in the environment. You might think you're signing up for peaceful egalitarianism, but should a storm wipe out the main food source of your people, who knows what you're gonna get instead?
Quoting Pseudonym
"Better off" was specifically the point I opened with, (since we're being so carefully pedantic ;) ). I'm the one with the burden of showing the demerits of non contemporary western societies compared to contemporary western ones, so can you really blame me for delving into the violence category?
Quoting Pseudonym
Better off ;) . As in, performs better by all apt metrics.
Gossip, ridicule, ostracism, and public debates aren't unique to hunter-gatherers, they're universal social sanctions that exist in every human group and kind of human group I can think of. They work, but only up to a point. The first line of defense once serious conflict arises for the Hadza (conflict as in:you're being ostracized or have a personal conflict with another individual) is moving to another band, and if there is no clear resolution then unregulated violence might wind up being the answer. For some issues the Hadza seek out the chieftans of neighboring pastoralist tribes to arbitrate and settle disputes. If the Hadza were copacetic to having leaders of any kind, they might be able to elevate their outcomes pertaining to justice and less often resort to potentially unjust sanctions or violence.
Quoting Pseudonym
The Lomas article echoes many of my points, especially in describing how environmental conditions among historical hunger-gather groups could have contributed to kinds of aggression not present in their modern counter-parts. While present day H-G's occupy rough bush that inherently stabilizes their population levels, hitorically H-G's occupied richer and less depeleted territory where food was much closer to home and rapid population growth could occur. Population growth eventually puts a strain on resources, which inevitably leads to competition and aggression.
Egalitarianism can be neutered through changes in availability of resources (upward or downward) as competition leads to dominance and social stratification, and even if you're guaranteed equal rights as everyone else, the amount of rights you have and the amount of protection of those rights you have might be quite small indeed. In the contemporary west there are many guaranteed and well protected rights that hunter-gatherer cultures can scarcely comprehend. The right to a fair trial and freedom from unreasonable punishment for instance...
Overall physical health is something that the west performs better in than anywhere else. Longer lifespans and lower child mortality rates does really say it all. A full blown discussion about causes of death and the various proportions can get a bit tedious. You wonder why suicide is higher on the list of causes of death in the west, and a big reason this is the case is that we have practically eliminated many of the historically top causes of death, while suicide remains very difficult to prevent and address. We have higher rates of certain diseases, but we have lower mortality rates overall. We may die from different diseases, but they die from disease sooner.
It would be quite difficult to find reliable assessments about what the suicide rates and causes of ancient hunter-gatherers would have been, and I would like to see some citations on modern hunter-gatherer suicide statistics properly compared to west. Granted, suicide may be a problem exacerbated by some elements of modernity and it may very well be the case that hunter-gatherers suffer less often from clinical depression (impossible to really know because contacting them tends to depress them), but even taking this into account the west does a better job of keeping its people alive. It does not actually follow that if suicide rates are lower a society is more happy; reasons for suicide can extend beyond the presence of happiness; the suicide of some doesn't necessarily represent widespread unhappiness in the overall population; living in the bush in and of itself may alter the nature and perception of suicide (you can disappear and never be seen from again and nobody would know what happened; being depressed for an extended period of time in the bush could increase the likelihood of accidental death or failure to subsist, thereby reducing the possibility of suicide, etc...).
If any of the citations you've provided speak of suicide I apologize for missing it, if so and otherwise, can you direct me to any reliable data assessing mental health statistics in hunter-gatherer societies?
Quoting Pseudonym
Many of the diseases and other causes of death which presently afflict HG's will have also afflicted them in the past. If you want to point out that indigenous groups are generally less healthy immediately after contact with European germs, I would not argue. But after generations of contact and access to some western medicine, the lifespan and child mortality rates of indigenous groups increases. It may be that hunter-gatherer groups are presently hemmed in to only the most inhospitable regions which has impacted their mortality rates, but it could also be that it is only in inhospitable regions where the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is the most successful or most viable adaptive social strategy, which is why they're only found in such regions.
You blame so much on colonialism that it's not unreasonable for me to assume you think hunter-gatherer way of life is blameless in everything. It's not as if mortality rates were better in the past for every single indigenous group, and of the groups who did have a more bountiful environment, they had the later issues associated with long term settlement (death in war) just like we have novel issues of our own.
Quoting Pseudonym
So Inuit/Eskimo youth rarely committed suicide. O.K.
P.S, I need the names of the articles you cite or else finding them can be nightmarish
Quoting Pseudonym
When a systematically neglected and abused group of people are given a chance to reclaim cultural values and identity, it certainly will impact suicide rates for the better. A lessening of oppression which leads to a reduction in very high suicide rates doesn't exactly demonstrate the mental health merits of HG lifestyle in and of itself, it might mainly show the value of not arbitrarily having your culture and identity taken away from you.
Quoting Pseudonym
I cannot find this source.Quoting Pseudonym
Again this shows that being disrupted causes mental health problems, not that HG lifestyle is more free from mental health issues in general. It also reinforces my point about the fragility of simple social systems: external forces can cause such degrees of uncertainty and social upheaval because they are social systems which expect a very specific steady environment to be successfully adaptive.
The west is decidedly better at enduring and achieving change; we've downright mastered it.
Quoting Pseudonym
This is just factually inaccurate. Suicide is not the leading cause of death for any age group, at least in America (the most readily available statistics):
[hide]
Only in the 15-25 range does suicide seem to barely edge out disease, but in every single category unintentional injury is far more likely than suicide.
Quoting Pseudonym
Not all of the Yanomami violence can be blamed on western presence on the coast; western presence alone isn't the cause of their occasional brutality. Preexisting degrees of Yanomami violence aside (hard to know about, but they obviously have an ancient warrior culture), a social system that lacks capacity for larger scale organization/cohesion can always be vulnerable to external influence which drives demographic change. At least some of the Yanomami violence is inherent to its culture, and an increase of violence in response to uncertainty and competition seems to be a component of that culture.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm not leaping to cherry-picked examples of hunter-gatherers. I'm actually examining the first examples I encountered by following the google search you've linked it me to. Do you have an ideal candidate to name? Otherwise I don't see how you can criticize the examples I've provided as biased.
Hunter-gatherer lifestyle isn't all Disney's Pocahontas cracked it up to be.
Regarding pillaging/unsustainability, etc., we're on the path toward stable technology and renewable energy, and it's not as if every non-western nation has been thoroughly pillaged in order to pay the west's bill. The west does also produce wealth and could plausibly continue existing without exploiting third world nations.
I think we've reached the point arrived at in just about every debate of this sort where we've exhausted the actual evidence and our positions rely on supposition from which there is no traction without the will to.
Your claim is that the excess violence is a really bad thing and was probably as bad outside of colonial pressure. I put less of an emphasis on non-violence as a measure of a society (though still important) and believe the indications are that it would have been much lower outside of pressure from western civilisation. We cannot resolve this difference by resort to evidence because none exists. You don't agree with my theory, I don't agree with yours.
You want a society where one person can excel at the expense of the other. I don't. That's an ethical position and again, not one that can be resolved by further recourse to evidence. No amount of evidence that the Hadza fiercely maintain egalitarianism by pulling down those who seek to rise up is going to convince me of anything because I don't believe they're wrong to do so.
Likewise with your proposition that "Human groups have been suffering territory issues since time immemorial." You're speculating that resource availability has a massive influence on societal structure to the extent that hunter-gatherer social dynamics might have been as violent or unhealthy in the past as a result of natural variation as they are now as a result of the pressure from western civilisation. I could point you in the direction of evidence that this is not the case (Jared Diamond would be a good approachable start), but that would be pointless, because by this point in speculation, there will be enough evidence to the contrary for you to believe whatever you want to believe.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, you're speculating. I have no doubt you can find evidence to support this claim, so I'm not even going to ask you to. I would have equally ease putting my hands on evidence to refute this claim. I'm thinking particularly of a paper I read recently on resource manipulation in Zebra fish and the way in which it affected aggression, then relating this to studies of Aborigonal Australians. The upshot was that resource availability does not affect the balance between aggression/cooperation in the way you think. When resources are scarce ther'e more value in cooperating because aggression leads to fighting which is more energy consuming than cooperative hunting. Likewise when resources are rich, there's little point in hoarding them. The conclusion was that competition arose only when resources we abundant enough to supply the energy for fighting, but scarce enough to be worth fighting for. To meet this criteria, they needed to be time-stable (ie continually available) which meant no nomadism. Hence the author's postulated this as a reason why all nomadic hunter-gatherers were egalitarian. I could try to dig out the article if you like, but at the moment I'm convinced the effort would be wasted. I have no doubt at all that you could find an article contradicting it, it's only a theory after all. If you don't want to believe it, I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince you.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Same again here. Your assertion that physical health is measured only (or even best) by lifespan and child mortality is just that, an assertion. There's nothing wrong with your position, but it's not debatable, there's no point further discussing it. You think it is, I don't I prefer to think about the health of the individual through their life. Ten years of good health is worth more to me than twenty of poor health. I'd rather spend 40 years a fit and able person enjoying an active life than spend 60 years an overweight layabout kept alive by drugs. But if you'd rather the latter, I can't argue with that, it's just a preference.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I don't want to labour this point excessively, but I do want to di justice to your post by answering each point, so...Again, this is just your speculative opinion, and you could be right, but you could also be wrong. I think suicide is a good measure of the happiness of a society. You can't prove it isn't, only present an alternative view. You might speculate that hunter-gatherers committed suicide in less recognisable ways, and I can't argue with that except to say that they might equally not have done so.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I really don't understand this comment. I cited three quotes which speak specifically of suicide, you can't possibly have missed it. But again, we're back to the same problem. Because you don't want to hear that suicide isn't a problem in hunter-gatherer societies, my sources aren't good enough for you, you want widespread data, you want stratified surveys. When you wanted to find evidence of mistreatment in tribes the say-so of a single anthropologist from a single tribe was enough for you to base your entire worldview on. You'll find what you want to find. The evidence is sufficiently scant and vague for you to do that. My sources, by the way, are papers I happen to have here in the office, I don't know of any online versions. Again, I could try and track them down if you like, but I get the feeling the effort would be wasted. If the only thing that's going to convince you of the low suicide rates in hunter-gatherer tribes is some kind of universal stratified sample which somehow also takes into account unexplained disappearances, or any other possible misconception of term, then I don't have anything for you. Just try applying that standard to your other claims.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
More opinion. The meaning of 'better' is the very thing we're discussing here.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
By this point I've given up on this exchange of evidence, but the difference is in the degree of speculation the coroner puts into the 'unintentional harm' category, which is often a judgement call. It also depends on the degree of 'clumping' one applies to other diseases (the more of those you lump together, the more significant they will be). We do things slightly differently in England, hence the stats are different. But again, you'll just pick whichever version proves whatever it is you already want to believe so the excersice is pointless.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
See... How can you possibly know this? Putting aside the fact that the Yanomami are actually agriculturalist and so outside the scope of this discussion, also putting aside the fact that their reputation for fierceness comes almost entirely from Napoleon Chagnon, a single anthropologist whose agenda has since been widely discredited.
Aside from those two things, you can't possibly know what they were like pre contact.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
The Lomas article spends three pages on describing the successful non-violent means hunter-gatherers use to settle disputes without violence, it cautioned against drawing conclusions about ancient hunter-gatherers from modern examples because of the effects of colonisation. You completely ignored the non-violent methods, completely ignored the warning about extrapolation, and simply concluded that egalitarianism is and always was maintained by violence. That's the cherry-picking I'm talking about.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No it isn't, yes it has, and no it couldn't. I think we're pretty clear on what each other's opinions are on this matter. Do you have any evidence to bring to bear, or shall we just agree to differ?
I want to make it clear that I'm not saying you are wrong to conclude that Western civilisations are 'better' than hunter-gatherers. I think you are absolutely wrong about some of your pre-concieved notions about hunter-gatherers, and I've tried to present evidence to combat them, but that doesn't really matter, because it doesn't change anything. If you want to believe the western civilisation is best you will have no trouble constructing a story with accompanying evidence to support that view. What I object to is any suggestion that the alternative claim (that hunter-gatherers are 'better' than western civilisation) can some how be 'disproven'. This is where any vitriol comes from (for which I apologise, by the way). I consider it really bad form to construct a plausible (but by no means necessary or sufficient) story about 'betterness' and the use it to combat another equally plausible (but by no means necessary or sufficient) story.
By all means, present your case, but I don't think it's right to use your case to try and prove someone else's wrong. Lack of a correspondence with the evidence proves a theory wrong. The mere existence of an alternative does not.
It stands to reason that some groups will have engaged in more violence prior to western influence, and some will have engaged in less (it's not an either or proposition; different groups have different histories, and have endured different cultural changes). This is reasonable because environmental conditions can have drastic and disparate effects on simple social structures, and throughout history nature has inflicted environmental conditions of all varieties onto human groups. The Lomas article concludes by expressing exactly the point that you say no evidence exists for:
Quoting Pseudonym
As I've argued previously, and as Lomas echoes and explains, as a hunter-gatherer you have to conform to your group or perish, which constitutes a dilemma of "freedom". Even if as an individual hunter-gatherer you excel in a way that benefits others, your rise in status might bring issue. Some HG groups practice what is called "insulting the meat" where when a hunter returns from a successful hunt, him and his catch are ridiculed for humor, and the successful hunter will also ridicule himself and his hunt, pointing out everything that went wrong and everything he could do better. Mainly this has the effect of status leveling between men and women, and successful/unsuccessful hunters which otherwise could create a power imbalance.
The recent history of the west has an interesting perpendicular: there has been a great deal of status levelling in western culture over the last 50 years, but it has not come at the expense of tearing down men, it has come with a lifting up of the status of women (i.e: as breadwinners, women are no longer reliant on a husband who wears the pants). Instead of tearing down the hunter who brings in the bacon, we encourage women to kill pigs with the rest of us.
Quoting Pseudonym
Well at least you didn't point me toward Howard Zinn :D
Resource availability/scarcity affects so many aspects of possible and optimal survival strategies that they are beyond counting. From the perspective of thermodynamics, the more scarce energy is, the fewer possible courses of action are available which will yield a positive return. Energy economy and upward efficiency on return (not wasting energy) become very important for success along with careful resource management practices (to not overtax or squander the few renewable resources that are available). In the context of jungle and savanna hunter-gatherers who live in somewhat harsh bush environments with a low upward limit on resource availability per acre per year, having a peaceful and war-free society (the kind that leaderless egalitarianism upholds) can wind up saving a ton of potentially lost and wasted energy in unnecessary warfare. If the environment was less harsh and more bountiful, then instead of moving from place to place once resources are depleted, a more successful strategy might be to claim a rich area and settle down permanently. Many factors play a role in what cultural and survival strategies are possible and popular, but the factor of resource scarcity really should not be underestimated, and is evidently crucial for sustaining many traditional hunter-gatherer cultures.
Even without extreme environmental change, the natural seasonal fluctuations of an environment can lead to competition over resources (i.e: if for several seasons good weather causes abnormally high food yields, which causes a boom in baby birth rates (and subsequent survival), the ensuing normalization of food yields in later years could leave a situation of overpopulation and food shortage which would lead to numerous conflicts and a non-trivial amount of suffering.).
My overall point here is that conditions in the past will have been diverse across time and space, and depending on the time and place, hunter-gatherer cultures may have indeed been more violent or otherwise less meritorious than their counterparts of today.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm not saying that resource scarcity or availability in the upward or downward direction in and of itself dictates whether violence will be present in the local culture, I'm saying resource scarcity in general, especially fluctuations in resource availability, can have sweeping ramifications on what sorts of strategies are adaptive and therefore likely to emerge and proliferate. The stability of indigenous ways of life are dependent on steady state environments. Climate fluctuations and shifts, changes in ecosystem (which can result from long term HG presence), and the arrival of competition are all things that can upset the sometimes delicate balance with nature that stone-age HG's tend to maintain. It's no secret that competition over resources can lead to warfare even among previously egalitarian hunter gatherer groups. As Lomas points out, the archeological and ethnographic records clearly show some examples of heightened violence, and competition over resources is as likely an explanation as any.
Quoting Pseudonym
This topic deserves a thread of its own (that you feel it is not debatable makes it especially worthy of debate I think :) ) and there's really a lot to consider (in particular if explore the extremes of a short but utterly blissful existence vs a barely sufferable extremely long existence) but I think I still have room for an argument if I can find some reasonable assessments about the overall health and rates of chronic suffering in HG environments. As an HG, if you break an arm or injure your back or shoulder, you might have to live with that chronic pain and debilitation for the rest of your life (were it becomes especially painful in old age) while in the west with proper bone setting, corrective surgery, and proper administration of pain medication the chronic ailment can be treated. It might actually be the case that the west suffers less from chronic health problems in addition to not dying early nearly as often from disease. Since my posts are already consistently and unreasonably long, let's leave this aside for now.
Quoting Pseudonym
I would like the whole article and preferably a link to them. I could tell some of the articles you cited didn't really apply to people living a stable HG lifestyle, except perhaps the Inuit/Eskimo quote. Without the articles I cannot properly assess the full implications or validity of the quotes. The causes of suicide in the west are a different issue from the suicide prevalent in indigenous communities dispossessed of land, culture, and autonomy. It's another topic which deserves it's own thread, but it's a main part of your argument as to why the west leaves people less healthy and happy than HG cultures so I'll have to address it.
Quoting Pseudonym
I've not explicitly denied the possibility of HG societies having lower suicide rates, but I AM questioning the conclusions you draw from it. High suicide rates do not necessarily represent the overall population, especially given, as your sources indicate, suicide is most prevalent among particular demographics. Elder suicide is not uncommon in HG society, and youth suicide is very common in young males of HG cultures bereft of sovereignty and tradition (citing identity/nostalgia issues combined with social problems like forced integration and racism). Young males also have the highest rate of suicide in the west, and it may be something to do with cultural identity and or depression caused by social ills, or it could be the combined effect of other issues, but a crisis in suicide rates concentrated in one or two demographics should not be used to hastily generalize the overall mental health and therefore happiness of the rest of the population.
"Happiness" is a philosophically and empirically slippery metric to apply, and so I've avoided it, but by definition I've included suicide in the overall mortality rate metric. Clinical depression is a disease that afflicts some people and not others, and even when it is not fatal it causes suffering (like many chronic diseases). I would prefer not to assume that the instance of suicide or even depression is necessarily representative of the overall happiness of a given society. It can certainly be an indicator, but there are so many possible causes and factors involved that oversimplifying it is impossible to avoid. Again, I grant that it could be that a stone-age lifestyle mitigates depression and therefore prevents suicide, but there's more to consider regarding the overall happiness of a people. For example, if the west still predominantly practiced orthodox religion, instance of depression and suicide might be reduced to levels comparative to HG societies (though happiness might be lower), and furthermore, it might be only a subset of a given population that experiences mental health detriments due to some social/environmental factor.
I'm not just running around wearing confirmation blinders and employing double standards by asking for data assessing HG mental health statistics. First, I haven't only used a single example to substantiate my claims, and while at times I have alluded to evidence rather than offering a source, I have since supplied a source confirming or indicating most or all of my crucial points. My original point about things like sadistic leaders and war-crimes was not that the norm among indigenous societies, but that indigenous culture was not immune or exempt from them; providing a single example at the outset to what I perceived as your insistence that such problems are utterly non-existent in any HG culture seemed appropriate and sufficient. Second, assessing whether someone died from violence (as is common with archeology) is much easier to do than assessing whether someone had good mental health and happiness when they were alive. If contacted tribes tend to become disturbed and experience an increase in mental health problems and overall unhappiness as a result (contact which is required for an intimate assessment of mental health), then we have little means of controlling for that impact. the archeological record is scant on mental health statistics, but it seems fairly reliable for mortality rates and lifespan.
Quoting Pseudonym
"Better off" to be specific, "by every applicable metric" (metric implying standard system of measurement). Freedom from violence, freedom from disease/premature death, geographic and social mobility are all reasonably measurable. You would say that HG society performs better in the equality metric, but if even the poor of western societies have more practical freedom and rights than HG people then is equality really so valuable? (if equality is worthy because it plays a role in freedom, overall the west seems to outperform). You would say that being non war-like is another metric HG society outperforms in, and yet in the west we're less likely to die from violence of any kind. If being less war-like is valuable because it is function of freedom from violence and a reduction of overall mortality rates, the average westerner is still better off by the violence and mortality metrics.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm glad that you've stopped calling me racist as a rhetorical device, but assuming my biases and constantly including mention of it in the midst of your arguments can be just as annoying of a fallacious appeal. I know you need to get some kicks out of making long tedious responses, but overdoing it adds an unnecessary extra layer of tedium.
It's possible that skeptical American coroners are pushing down the suicide numbers in America, but the clumping possibility is why I asked for per capita suicide rates to begin with and not potentially misleading statements like how can the west be more happy if suicide is the leading cause of death.
Quoting Pseudonym
Nobody denies that the Yanomami are warriors, and their warrior traditions didn't suddenly spring out of western ships. Chagnon, as far as I know, made exaggerated depictions about the Yanomami and held that constant barbaric violence was central to their culture, when in truth their warrior culture is the backdrop for networks of alliances between Yanomami groups and only occasionally does severe violence occur (unsurprisingly, when something upsets a balance). As foraging pastoralists the Yanomami are well within the scope of my original points pertaining to sadistic leaders and war-crimes, and no I have not singled them out because they are some particularly violent group (in fact you brought them up long before I did). Originally my point was "The Yanomami people for instance dabble in agriculture, so perhaps you wouldn't accept them as an example of an imperfect hunter-gatherer group? Western presence in the Amazon region may be one of the root causes of exacerbated violence among the Yanomami (by causing resource scarcity and anxiety among groups mainly), but it also shows how fragile indigenous societal systems can actually be.". Not only did I acknowledge that western presence will have exacerbated Yanomami violence at the outset, I'm well within the bounds of reason to point out that the semi-nomadic "foraging horticulturalist" culture of the Yanomami does inherently employ violence in response to social and environmental instability, making peace relatively fragile..
The conclusion of the Lomas article which I've supplied earlier in this post (for the benefit of other readers) is precisely that neither the myth of the completely peaceful HG, nor the barbaric savage is an accurate depiction of present or past day HG's. The case of the Yanomami (while not quite strict hunter-gatherers) offers insights into why neither stereotype is true.
Quoting Pseudonym
You're misrepresenting what I've said. Egalitarianism is maintained by a lot of things, such as resource scarcity and cultural institutions amounting to "altruistic punishment" (which I've brought up and acknowledged from the very get go and incorporated into my argument). I didn't ignore the warning about extrapolation, I literally paraphrased Lomas' own extrapolations. here's a direct quote: "The present residential environments are primarily harsh and modern groups have low birth rate s that maintain stable resources. This combination allows for adequate resources to be shared within the group, generally reducing resource competition. The differing residential areas of the past, however, provided great resources, and high population growth rates ensued. This combination eventually provides a strain on resources and competition naturally follows. Consequently, evidence of historical violence and warfare are common in the archaeological and ethnographical record."
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm not morally condemning the entire enterprise of indigenous ways of life. If you go back and read my first and second posts, I've been very clear and consistent about the nature of my claim that the average contemporary western civilization is objectively better off by every applicable metric.
"Better off" did not mean "every other time and place is terrible and immoral". In my view, the metrics of lifespan and child mortality rate alone are sufficient and sufficiently objective (and measurable) metrics underpinning "better-off-ness". Consider the kinds of advantages which are unevenly distributed in the west according to individual wealth (education, medicine, comfort, etc...). It is these kinds of advantages which the contemporary west (on average, or at the low end of the economic spectrum) is performing better than ever in (largely thanks to technology). We might say "so and so is better-off", but it's not a put-down of those worse-off, it's more of a descriptive/explanatory factor.
I should [s]confess[/s] disclose that I'm no ethical/moral relativist. I do think some practices are strategically and morally inferior to others, and I have no qualms criticizing them. You might have noted that I haven't actually condemned or denigrated entire ways of life, and of the specific behaviors and practices (not cultures) which I have compared and contrasted as inferior to western standards, I've also offered contextually explanatory factors which lay clear blame on environmental or other arbitrary circumstances, never ethnicity...
Whether or not the west will be able to continue existing is a bit of a complex subject, but at least until the end of oil (30-50 years) or unless rapid climate change occurs, we'll be doing fine. If we can develop a battery that can outperform a tank of gasoline then oil won't even be an issue and perhaps the climate could recover. The extraction of energy resources from third world countries would no longer be required, and given the right advancements in materials and construction, countries like China might no longer rely on imported materials. Energy and infrastructure developments (I.E, mobile/automated electric construction) could solve agriculture and food exploitation issues as well. Maybe these are pie in the sky ideas, but the problems western societies (and humanity as a whole) are facing are being given more and more consideration every day. You might not believe in betterness between societies, but surely you can see that as a society the west has made recent improvements? (or at the very least, surely you agree improvements are possible?).
Do you truly believe that western society is imminently doomed?
Thanks @VagabondSpectre and @Pseudonym for your thorough discussion of the topic. Been following the back-and-forth keenly. (I think the match is tied and will have to be decided by penalty kicks! :grin: j/k). Seriously though, I appreciate the effort, ideas, and the cited references given. This issue/topic/question (about Western Civ and its strengths, weaknesses, and otherwise) seems to go to the marrow and to the core of our culture, our thinking, our very lives and future. And it covers a long timespan of thousands of years, possibly more. It is almost the primal “To Be, Or Not To Be” question of our society, in my opinion.
So I don’t think there are any easy or obvious answers. Even though there may not be one piece of evidence that will answer the question, the question persists. This topic and question not only uses the findings of archeology, but is almost as slow and laborious as archeology. Like digging slowly through rock while carefully examining and cataloguing. I think the only foolish (and perhaps most tempting) answer to this question about Western Civilization is “What a stupid question! Why even bother asking it!”. I haven’t seen anyone here take that stance, no matter where they stand on the issue, thankfully.
So... I happened to vote that WC was disastrous. Like I mentioned, if it were a choice, I would’ve voted “partial disaster”. Our world seems now such a mixed bag of extremes that to even conceptually visualize it strains my imagination, not just my intellect. (FWIW, I can imagine Bagend in Hobbiton. I can imagine the Death Star. I can imagine a Yellow Submarine from Pepperland floating in the Sea of Time. But I can’t imagine the real world. I can think about any of its aspects or parts. But as a whole, I can’t even imagine it for a second. Maybe because it is real. Or too big. Others may fare better. But back to the issue...)
Science and its offshoots and its ever-bountiful impact seems to be one of the consensus top things about WC. (Though as I mentioned in my first post in this thread, the very term Western Civilization has always been fuzzy, and may be getting fuzzier. For example, is China now part of WC? Almost or partially? On the edge?) And there are very many other powerful examples of the wonderful “fruits of Western culture”. You and I probably are holding or using some of them at this moment. Or it is in the room with you now. Or you are traveling on one at the speed of sound. Or... etc. etc.
Let’s make a large assumption for the purpose of discussion: let’s say Western Civilization can never again go back to being a Hunter-Gatherer culture. (But for the moment I’m NOT directly comparing or judging current Western Civilization OR Hunter-Gatherer societies of the past). Let’s just say both have numerous strengths. And living in WC all of our lives (one would assume), we probably have seen some things that were painful, unpleasant, or unfair. Maybe that is just how life is, and always will be. Or maybe certain things could be changed. My question: can current civilization be inspired by anything at all from tribal cultures? Is there any way to improve WC, by following some certain examples of “Leavers” (as Daniel Quinn would call them).
Jared Diamond wrote a recent book called The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? I am in the middle of reading it, so I don’t know his answer yet. But what would your answer be?
As I said, I'm not interested in your story-telling. I have absolutely no doubt at all that you can construct a reasonable story from the evidence that's available to support your notion of the peace-loving, justice seeking, freedom seekers that is white western civilisation and the backwards, violent communist spoiler of innovation that are hunter-gathers (who, I'm sure just happen to be entirely non-white and that's just a complete coincidence).
The issue is that you are confusing you ability to come up with an explanation, with an argument that it actually is the case. The fact that you can interpret the evidence the way you do does not in any way prove that that is in fact the meaning of the evidence. It's pointless you keep saying "It stands to reason", "This is reasonable...", "a more successful strategy might be...", "hunter-gatherer cultures may have indeed been...", "competition over resources is as likely an explanation as any.". "If...", "Would be..., "Could..." etc.etc.. I'm not doubting your ability to come up with possible scenarios, I'm arguing that you cannot say they are necessarily the case simply because you can come up with them.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No it doesn't. What factors are preventing it from being the case that all hunter-gatherer groups engaged in less violence prior to western contact. Or, for that matter that all hunter-gatherer groups engaged on more violence prior to western contact. We have no clear evidence of levels of violence prior to western contact other than the third-hand reports of anthropologists relating what village elders have told them, and bone fragments from a very limited number of buried remains. No conclusion "stands to reason" at all on the basis of such scant evidence.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This seems to be your new line of attack, but I see scant evidence supporting it. There is no evidence that I'm aware of permanent settlements for 99% of human prehistory, a time when we lived through some of the most dramatic environmental upheavals the world has seen. So far you've only presented the evidence of a single author speculating that inter-tribal conflict may have been greater when resources were differently distributed. You seem to have taken this single data point and wildly speculated that the whole social structure will have changed without any evidence at all to support this theory.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
And that would have been a problem because...? Oh yes, because his view is definitely and demonstrably wrong without a shadow of a doubt. I'm sure the McCarthy investigations into his Anti-Americanism had absolutely no influence on the conclusions his critics drew.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This entire section is nothing but idle speculation with no evidence to back it up. Read something, anything, about what we can infer of human social structure from past environments. There is not a single example of a group "...claim[ing] a rich area and settl[ing] down permanently" until about 9200 years ago at most. In fact, a recent study by Philip Edwards at La Trobe University has pushed the date further forward still. It is an undisputed fact that our ancestors were nomadic throughout whatever environmental change they were exposed to and in absolutely every environment they encountered.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, the evidence contradicts this. There is a long-ranging stability in the types of paleo-archeological finds throughout environments and environmental changes. In fact paleo-archaeologists even use consistent cultural markers as a means of tracking the migration of groups as the move from one continent to another. Your idea that the environment itself has a far -reaching effect on the type of society adopted is simply without evidential support. It effects levels of conflict, birth rates, death rates and migration. There is no evidence that it affects social structure or culture at that scale.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Actually, in the UK, the highest suicide rates are in the 40-54 ages, with another smaller peak at 30-34, and there is only a 15 point variation across all ages from 15 to 90. Suicide is the leading cause of death for males all the way from 5 to 50
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Where are you getting this from? In what way have the poor of Western societies got more practical freedom than Hunter-gathers? If they have any freedom, then why the hell have they chosen to live in the slums they do?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Another example of having your cake and eating it. In the west apparently, we're far less likely to die from injury due to the marvels of modern medicine. Someone with a simple piecing fracture might have died in Hunter-gatherer society, but would have suffered nothing more than a brief hospital visit in western culture. And yet, when comparing cultural attitudes, you completely ignore the evidence you just used and claim that hunter=gatherers are just as violent because they're more likely to die from violence. Do you not see the bias? How violent do you think our society would look of every fracture counted as a death from violence? We're less likely to die from violence because we have good medicine, meaning we're less likely to die from injuries caused by violence. You've no evidence at all that the culture is less violent.
However, when you look at statistics for violence itself, an estimated 12.5% of US children experience confirmed child maltreatment
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I'm not sure what difference this would make. The per capita suicide rate in the US is 9.1, but 11.9 in Europe where it is calculated differently. At the moment the evidence we have from palaeoanthropology and the reports of anthropologists and tribal elders is that the suicide rate in pre-contact tribes is zero (or close to it). To my knowledge, there have been no palaeoanthropological finds where the cause of death has been attributed to suicide, there have been no ethnographical accounts which mention prevalent suicide and the quotes I gave you all point to fact that it was virtually unheard of.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
As I said way back, we're comparing hunter-gatherer societies to what the west actually is, not some utopian dream of what it could be.
I don't think you can separate the two. There seems to me to be only one of two possible scenarios; either sub-concious racism exists or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then we might as well abandon all positive discrimination, role-model development, media depiction issue etc because they all rely on combating sub-concious racism. Not to mention the fact that we'd have to come up with some other explanation for the countless psychological experiments which have demonstrated the phenomenon.
If, on the other hand, we're going to accept the concept of sub-concious racism, then how can we ignore the impact of the glaringly obvious fact that all of the races involved in the development of "Western Civilisation" are white and all the races involved in alternative civilisations are non-white?
Child-rearing.
If I could pick a single thing, it would not be respect for their environment, their respect for autonomy or even egalitarianism, all of which I consider very important to healthy societies, but their approach to child-rearing outstrips them all by miles in my opinion in terms of it's impact on the health of a culture.
(Spoiler alert - that's the conclusion Jared Diamond comes to as well)
You point out that contemporary HG's are non-white so often that I'm starting to think ethnicity is somehow an important factor to you. Do you know that you should not judge people by the color of their skin? The west is not entirely white, and the non-west is not entirely non-white; please stop obsessing over race as a crucial difference between HG and western ways of life.
Seriously though, if I say that reasons for infanticide are backwards, why would you conflate that with all HG peoples? You know my position. The straw polemic is unpersuasive.
Quoting Pseudonym
Inductive arguments are more than sufficient to explore what is likely but not necessary, and unfortunately that's the best we can do to answer questions about an uncertain past, present, and future. I don't need deductive proof if my inductive arguments establish their conclusions as reasonably likely; attacking my arguments as being inductive without addressing their content or inductive strength doesn't actually undermine their persuasive power. Anthropology, archeology, and the whole of science is built on induction.
Quoting Pseudonym
The notion that different hunter-gatherers throughout history have had different customs and cultures, and have experienced varying levels of violence stemming partially from environmental conditions, is not at all controversial. We've discussed how things like food scarcity can make resource sharing an effective strategy, and how egalitarianism seems likely to emerge among HG groups because status leveling promotes food sharing (which would make egalitarian HG groups more likely fare better than non egalitarian ones in harsh environments) which also directly and indirectly maintains nomadism and the stable population numbers which are required to permit it (i.e: nobody will settle down and cultivate land or animals of their own if they have to share everything, and by not settling down and using agriculture they are less likely to have larger populations or to have customs, like an absence of property rights, challenged). If you would contend that of the 200k years or so of HG society, there are no examples that are more violent than contemporary western culture or prior to contact with agrarians, then you're rolling dice on some incredibly long odds, and the existing archeological evidence against you isn't as scant as you think.
Social adaptations and cultural evolution are made possible and probable through divergence between individuals and groups, which improves the diversity of options that nature can select from. When we say "hunter-gatherers are almost universally egalitarian because food sharing and inter-tribal peace are beneficial to survival", we're also saying something like "groups living in harsh environments which did not practice food sharing and egalitarianism (for peace) tend to be less successful and therefore are less prevalent". We're making inductive statements about possibilities that are probably true (from evidence), and while establishing the means, medians, and modes of the spectrum of behaviors that HG and all indigenous groups have exhibited is quite difficult, establishing that there is indeed a spectrum of diverse behaviors in the first place is quite easy.
Quoting Pseudonym
You're speaking of hunter-gatherer violence as if one description applies to all hunter-gatherer groups. Hunter gatherers are diverse, and it would be amazing to discover that they all exhibit the exact same kinds and levels of violence. It would be even more amazing to discover that environmental conditions have no bearing on the emergence of conflict...
Here's a link (pg 76-103) to a very interesting and comprehensive analysis of historical trends in violence of the Chumash people using remains at burial sites spanning over 7000 years of continuous Chumash habitation (sedentary hunter-gatherers of central and coastal California). It looks at various forms of skeletal trauma and bone health to establish long term trends in relative violence, and compares that to known climate data in search of correlations with climate events that could cause resource stress. It does find correlations with worsening climate, and subsequent debate and inquiry into the Chumash and other indigenous groups has expanded and refined their results.
This cross cultural study seeks to find factors which predict the frequency of war among 186 societies, and indeed finds a link between violence/war and fear of resource scarcity/disaster/other groups. Their multivariate analysis yielded the finding that fear of disaster and fear of other peoples/groups were the best predictors of a rise in violence. Chronic and predictable food shortage was not a predictor of rising violence, but unpredictable resource stresses (the difference being the unpredictable is psychologically more upsetting) was. Likewise, fear of other groups or at least proximity to newly arrived migrants was a strong predictive factor. The overall conclusion is that war is predominantly a preemptive action taken by groups largely out of fear. The periods of environmental upheaval you mentioned seem like they could facilitate unpredictable catastrophes which we know would contribute to a rise in uncertainty, anxiety, fear, and eventual violence (in addition to migration which could exacerbate it).
This article looks at the archeological evidence for warfare and violence among the natives of North-West coast of North America (i.e, skeletal evidence of violence, artifacts such as armor and armor piercing bone arrows, the rise of larger villages and defensive sites/palisades to protect them). Additionally, it compares the archeological record to ethnographic/ethnohistoric data and literature, and discusses the competing anthropological perspectives seeking to explain violence and warfare among hunter-gatherers and human groups in general. Rather than siding with one of the main competing perspectives explaining indigenous warfare (territory/resources/slaves vs ceremony/revenge/honor), the author considers that human groups are capable of going to war for a wide of range of reasons and that many factors should be considered as contributing to fluctuations in trends of violence. For example, the author demonstrates that after the invention of the bow the subsistence habits of various groups was altered along with their settlement habits (building on hilltops and defense locations) while violence increased. Whether we choose to emphasize environmental resource factors or cultural institutions as primary causes, the paper stresses that there are a myriad of causes of violence within and between groups. This paper also argues that warfare was more prevalent among north western groups prior to contact, as by the 19th century the indigenous populations were a fraction of what they once were, owing to western disease and violence. Furthermore, since many groups continued to practice warfare post-contact while presumably resource scarcity was not an issue, cultural institutions must indeed have causative force of their own which contributes to violence and warfare.
Adding the insight of the Ember & Ember article to this (that fear is a predictor of violence) offers explanatory help to how these diverse factors can indirectly contribute to a rise in violence. (example: in honor culture where slaver ownership amounts to social prestige, it can drive violent action among bands fearing loss of honor. Major causes of individual violent events could also be a matter of a growing and powerful group requiring additional territory and therefore taking it from a neighbor (in fact wars resulting in territory exchanges seem to only occur when one more powerful group is growing in size), or it could be a combination of both, and many other factors).
A great summary article, finds that violence in the Chumash region (mainly projectile trauma, blunt force trauma, and dismemberment trends evident in skeletal record) correlates highly with population density and a particular region which was more likely to receive migrants. Two main spikes in violence are delineated, the first being a spike in primarily dismemberment/trophy taking occurring between 500 B.C and 420 AD which correlates with the arrival of new ethnolinguistic groups. The second spike, primarily in sharp force/projectile trauma, coincides and follows the arrival of the bow and arrow, and peaks after Europeans had arrived in North America. Overall the article finds no single causes; environmental fluctuation and resource stress contributes in some cases, and high population density in others. Cultural institutions, migrations, and new technologies as well.
What emerges from this series of papers is that human warfare can occur for a myriad of reasons, including amongst hunter-gatherer groups. No human group seems completely exempt from the fundamental problem of human conflict, and even generally egalitarian hunter-gatherer lifestyle can give way to violence. Fear as a general motive I think is a useful explanatory tool, and it helps to bridge the many observed factors which promote violence through a human motivational lens. Fear of other groups, and the general resentment of others that population density can possibly give rise to, seems to be a very well demonstrated contributing factor, along with fear of disaster. Competing violently over resources during an unexpected society wide food shortage out of fear seems universally human.
In any case, there is plenty of evidence for violence existing amongst prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and while it is not my position that hunter-gatherers are more violent than all other groups, it IS my position that the contemporary west is less violent than the average hunter-gather, or otherwise indigenous, historic or prehistoric, contacted or un-contacted, group. I do not believe non-whites are more violent or backward or less human, but I do believe that everyone is only human.
Quoting Pseudonym
To be fair, there is very little archeological evidence or data for anything whatsoever prior to 9200 years ago. Scant evidence as you say. Nomads sure, but utterly conflict free?
Quoting Pseudonym
Not every cultural marker has to be adaptive, but to the extent that the way of life an environment permits interacts with culture, yes a specific way of life can be dependent on a stable environment. Egalitarian nomads are so often found in harsh environments because food sharing/altruism is highly adaptive in such environments, and because egalitarianism helps to avoid the mutually destructive possibility of large scale/extended violence and conflict. When a cultural practice affects your survival and reproductive success differently in different environments, then the environment can play a role in selecting long term cultural shifts and trends.
Quoting Pseudonym
Granted, suicide numbers represent a health problem perhaps unique to the west or industrialized nations, but it does not necessarily mean that the west is overall less happy than societies with fewer suicides, nor does it take into account the myriad of other health concerns which westerners and hunter-gatherers respectively face.
Quoting Pseudonym
Same reason why hunter-gatherers choose to live in the huts, wigwams, lean-to's and long-houses that they live in: it's the best they can do. I'd like to say in defense of the west that there are almost no slums in the contemporary western world. It is perhaps unfair to blame the existence of slums entirely on the western world. Agriculture can provide cheap(albeit less nutritious) food that can support population growth, and lagging infrastructure or an unequal distribution of resources can foreseeably lead to the existence of large slums. The west is greedy, but greed isn't a western invention, and much of the wealth existing in third world nations doesn't flow directly to the west (the third world has corruption too). Give the west bad credit where bad credit is due, but don't blame it for everything.
Increased longevity, education (yielding options), and increased geographic freedom are things the poor statistically have more of in the west. Granted the very poorest and down-trodden of the west, including, for its part, the many far flung victims, live worse lives than the average hunter-gatherer. Poor is a relative term; I'd rather be a Yanomami warrior than a homeless war-veteran in America, but I would also much rather be a single mother living in a ghetto /w government assistance than a Yanomami woman (or warrior for that matter).
Quoting Pseudonym
Accidental death and different medicinal quality is something worth considering in trying to account for all forms of violence in overall trends, but it's not difficult to distinguish between accidental injury and intentionally inflicted/defensive wounds (much of that is detailed in the first article presented, and in later articles healed wounds are also taken into account (showing non-lethal violence). Non-lethal wounds are identifiable as non-lethal because they will have healed). The fact that a wound of a given degree is more fatal anywhere else than the modern world is worth noting, but in cases of extreme violence where there is a clear intent to kill it's hard to say how much of a difference western medicine actually makes.
It was never my explicit intention to take up the position that the western culture is less violent than any other culture, but it is undeniably true that in the west we are less likely to die from violence than at any other time and place in human history.
Quoting Pseudonym
This is a problem, and I wonder what percentage of nomadic HG children experience maltreatment. I know what percentage of them die before age 15 though. It's 43% (pg 326).
Quoting Pseudonym
I might look into pre-contact suicide in hunter-gatherer groups, but since suicide would be nearly impossible to appraise in the archeological record, and because suicide involves more than just average societal happiness, it is not an applicable metric. It can be included in the overall death from illness which is accounted for in mortality rates, but generalizing beyond that is too hasty even to my biased western eyes.
Quoting Pseudonym
I've not portrayed any utopian dreams, only the reality of today. You however have portrayed the doomsday of tomorrow which has yet to come. I would agree that the west would come to disaster if and when it ends, but if we do survive in the foreseeable future then I'll chalk it all up as a massive success!
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!
: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?
: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:
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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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).
Quoting 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.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
As I've been asking, what is your evidence for this claim?
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Perhaps in another thread. I think it might verge a little off topic here.
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.
Quoting 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".
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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...).
Quoting 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).
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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)
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.
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.
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:
[hide="Reveal"]We have some biologically hard-wired attributes which tend to push us toward wanting to reproduce (or accidentally reproducing), but different individuals exhibit wildly different degrees of interest in doing so (or doing so well once they become parents). Survival seems to be a more consistently held preference in and of itself, which makes sense for several evolutionary reasons: humans, unlike most other mammals, have a very long period of maturation before becoming reproductively capable adults which means that high mortality rate, especially at lower ages, was something heavily selected against, leaving us with a potent fear of injury and death and the willingness of some but not all to sacrifice themselves for the good of children; additionally, individuals can contribute to the reproductive success of their own genes without themselves reproducing (through the contributions they make to the survival of their family/group who share their genes). The average modus operendai that evolution has contrived for us in regards to this dichotomy seems to be "focus on survival first and foremost, and then reproduce if possible", as opposed to "reproduce first and ask survival questions later".
There's an interesting but resolvable chicken and egg dilemma here: the egg is critical to long-term survival of a group (evolutionary drive), but neither "groups" nor eggs, nor evolution have actual survival preferences, only individuals do. We can say that the spiritual value of reproduction constitutes an area of subjective difference between humans (a society where more children survive or a society where more adults survive: take your pick) but we can also say that while sometimes the desire to survive is overtaken by the desire to secure one's legacy, our desire for individual survival tends to be the most universally influential of all human drives. The life of the chicken is more important to the chicken than the potential life of the egg, and we're a society of chickens.
It's also worth pointing out that in many ways some reproduction is required to ensure our well-being in old age as we need new generations to care for the old (else, geriatricide) and to that extent does contribute to our survival and physical well-being[/hide]
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:
[hide]I'm very well aware that a wave of neo-nazis wish to use genetic research, evolutionary theory, and biology in general to substantiate racist and ethically backward political beliefs. I'm also aware that some of what I've put forward here could be re-purposed as a racist appeal... While it's undeniably true that there are genetic differences between individuals which contribute to our behavior, personality, etc., and while it is also undeniably true that there are differences between the genetic averages of different populations, including ethnic groups, these differences do not confer "superiority", only adaptive benefit in the environment our differences were selected/gambled for. Furthermore, the amount of intra-ethnic genetic variability is so high that an assessment of an individual's merits rather than the merits of their ethnic group is required to glean any useful information about a given individual. We should not tolerate someone making racist appeals to science they don't understand, but we also musn't fear exploring topics that people might misinterpret to justify their hatred.[/hide]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)...
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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...
Quoting 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).
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.
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.
Quoting 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...
Quoting 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...
Quoting 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?
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?
Quoting 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...
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, they may... or they may not. Providing an argument that they may has no bearing on whether they actually do.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
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.
Quoting 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..,
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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...)
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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).
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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).
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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).Quoting 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...
Quoting 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.
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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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...
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
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.
Quoting 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...
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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...
Quoting 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...
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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)
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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).
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.
Quoting 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.
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?
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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).
------
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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...
Quoting 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.
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.
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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
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).
Quoting 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).
Quoting 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)
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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...).
Quoting 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)
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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?).
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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?
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.
Here
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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Fine.
Hete
- 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?
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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 .
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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.
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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?
Quoting 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.
You seem to have just reverted to calling me prejudiced instead of comprehending or addressing the points I make. Not everything I say is a put down of hunter-gatherers.
Quoting Pseudonym
I was strictly speaking of longevity as a possible proxy for these things regardless of which society you're in, but since you insist, infant mortality has a lot to do with nutrition. Are you saying that when an HG people kill twin babies it's not a superstition that was originally made adaptive thanks to inadequate nutrition?
Quoting Pseudonym
Well, actually, even when we shave off infant mortality, life expectancy is still higher in the west. My life expectancy in Canada is 82 years, and that's including infant mortality rate. Ten extra years on average has to be indicative of something right?
43% of nomadic hunter-gatherers die before reaching age 15....
Quoting Pseudonym
So dying at age 15 isn't "unsuccessful" just because some potential life has been missed? I'm not talking about utility monsters...
Quoting Pseudonym
I've never denied that suicide is a problem, but you're using it as the lynch pin of your argument that hunter gatherers are more than twice as happy as westerners because A they commit less suicide and B suicide is representative of overall societal happiness..
Quoting Pseudonym
"Individual-level"... Meaning in the analysis of a particular case of suicide and subjective-well-being, and preferences, which is different than suicide rate indicating overall average happiness/saddness.
Did you actually read the paper you "cited"? (you're supposed to paraphrase and explain rather than pasting a single sentence from the abstract). It concludes that suicide and SWB data can predict preferences, and also that micro-level multivariate regressions show correlation between SWB and suicide within given individuals, but also concludes that societal average SWB and happiness/saddness do not covary with suicide rates and that people should be very cautious when making such inferences from suicide data. You've misrepresented the entire thrust of this paper; it's about preferences, not the ability of suicide to function as proxy for average expected utility (the only statements it makes on that matter are that there are no direct correlations and that such inferences should be made with caution).
"In this paper, we compare and contrast the empirical patterns of SWB and suicide data. We find that the two have very little in common in aggregate data (time series and cross-sectional), but have a strikingly strong relationship in terms of their determinants in individual-level, multivariate regressions."
[i]"An obvious concern regarding suicide data, however, is that the preferences of suicide victims, who arguably are at the extreme lower tail of the well-being distribution, may not be representative of the overall population. "
"At the root of our study is an interest in knowing whether the two data series capture the latent variable on well-being that would allow one to infer preferences from their relationships with other variables"
"Previewing our results, we find essentially no relationship between the suicide rate and the subjective well-being data in the aggregate time series patterns. We find a weak relationship between suicide in the aggregate cross-sectional results, but it is inconsistent across variables. In contrast, at the micro level, we find a strikingly strong relationship between the relative risks on the variables associated with greater suicide risk and higher likelihood of unhappiness. Our results suggest that while researchers should be cautious about inferences based on time series data from SWB surveys or suicide rates, the findings from micro data on SWB and suicide appear to be quite reflective of typical preferences in society."
"Comparing trends in the suicide rate to those in subjective well-being reveal little co-movement across these series. The suicide rate has mostly moved independently, trending down over time. Other investigations suggest that this downward trend is more likely related to improvement in and
access to antidepressants rather than to any underlying changes in the happiness of the population."
"Overall, we find a weak relationship between the cross-sectional aggregate patterns in the suicide and
SWB data. The low association between these series both in the time series and across several aggregate correlates is worrisome, and raises concern that either suicide data or SWB data, or both, may not be good indicators of the latent variable that they are often used to measure—utility of a typical member of the population. With this in mind, we consider how these data compare in individual level, multivariate analyses. "
"The micro data results show a strikingly strong association between the results obtained from suicide and SWB data. The similar pattern found in both data sources cross-validates the value of these alternative data sourcesfor assessing determinants of latent well-being in general and supports the findings of diminishing marginal utility and the importance of relative income in particular."
"The micro results suggest that the same factors that shift people down the happiness continuum also increase their suicide risk. These results suggest that suicide data may be a useful way to assess the preferences of the general population, not just those in the extreme lower tail of the distribution."[/i]
(paraphrasing the above: individual level analysis of why people do commit suicide (multivariate correlates at the micro-level) can be useful to determine the general preferences of the overall population, but says nothing of "suicide utility threshholds" or the average societal level of experienced/expected/reported utility)
"There are three key findings that emerge from the empirical patterns uncovered in this analysis. First, there is little relationship between the suicide rate and subjective well-being in the time series. Second, there is a weak and inconsistent relationship between the correlates of the suicide rate and subjective well-being data in the aggregate cross-section. Finally, there is a strikingly strong relationship between the correlates of suicide risk and unhappiness/happiness in the multivariate micro analysis. The micro results cross-validate the usefulness of subjective well-being and suicide data for individual-level analyses. The results suggest that prior work using micro subjective well-being data to address relative income status questions are robust to concerns raised about reporting errors. However, we also find that caution is warranted when making inferences from the time series patterns in the subjective well-being data, at least those obtained from the GSS. Going forward, we see the results of this study as supportive of additional and complementary work on preferences using both subjective well-being and suicide data."
------
"Suicide might have nothing to do with unhappiness" isn't an unlikely scenario. Suicide is often the result of the mental illness known as depression. Sometimes it is carried out for medical reasons (e.g: reduced quality of life from illness or accident) whereas in an HG society without access to medicine these individuals might not have survived their illness/accident long enough to even consider suicide. Do such suicides actually reflect negatively on western society whereas the higher mortality rates of HG society (which prevents the opportunity for such suicides) is by this virtue a benefit? These are the kinds of confounding variables which make overall suicide rates non-representative of average utility.
"Suicide in secret...". If you live with a small group of people in a vast wilderness, and you intend to commit suicide, are you going to do it in front of them? Are you going to do it where they will find you? If someone no longer wishes to live in that environment, they can functionally disappear completely into the wilderness. From the perspective of the group you left behind, how can they tell the difference between suicide and accidental death/disappearance?
Quoting Pseudonym
So you admit that suicide does not represent average societal happiness?
Different strokes for different folks. You look on dead infants as a non-problem because the average hunter-gatherer who makes it into adulthood has decent longevity. If anyone here is the utility monster it's you for suggesting that since dead people cannot experience utility we need not include them in our assessment of lifespan (it's special pleading; "the average HG who makes it past age 15...)
But why do you think that the 1% who commit suicide are made unhappy so that the rest can be happy (as if there is an exploitative exchange happening between them)? That's very strange.
One of the few consistent positions you've tacitly held in this discussion is that it is better to be dead than to be unhappy, so perhaps you would prefer a society where more than half of us die but none of the leftovers are unhappy, as opposed to all or most of us living but 1% being unhappy?
Your use of suicide as a measure of societal happiness is highly questionable, but suicide as a proxy for injustice is just absurd. I'm reluctant to actually take up the negative position given the absence of evidence pointing to the positive, but you've left me no choice:
Suicide rates actually positively correlate with average societal happiness with the best explanation being relative differences in happiness can cause people to subjectively feel worse. So if you have a society that gives people more life satisfaction on average, the few people who are unable to achieve it will be more likely to commit suicide.The solution to this under your view would be to arbitrarily reduce the upper levels of happiness that average people experience such that those who are unable to achieve it don't feel as bad by comparison. This would also be in line with some of the norms enforced by altruistic punishment (or rarely murder) in many HG societies; if you do not conform you do not belong and you cause problems (jealousy).
If reducing relative inequality of any kind is the only thing that matters toward societal success (because it reduces suicide), then it doesn't matter how many people die at any age for any reason, other than suicide, so long as we're all subject to the same circumstances in life. Suicide as your proxy for societal success (happiness) only appears to measure the existence of a lower extreme (and indicates the presence of an upper extreme of happiness) while saying almost nothing about the overall distribution of average happiness or how one society actually compares to another in terms of average expected utility. If you're now making an argument based on the ethics of a society which fails to prevent suicide (arbitrarily so given we might also focus on the ethics of a society which fails to save the lives of infants), I'm happy to move on to that, but do you then cede that suicide is not useful as a metric regarding overall or average societal levels of SWB/life-satisfaction/happiness because they don't inversely correlate? (in fact they positively correlate)
Quoting Pseudonym
Egalitarianism reduces happiness inequality, that much is shown, but you have not shown that egalitarianism actually improves happiness overall. While wealth stratification will almost certainly lead to reduced subjective happiness in some, it will also lead to increased subjective happiness in others. The wealth stratification that inherently emerges from property rights, free trade and, industrialization does actually produce wealth in ways which can improve the objective living standards of everyone (not only by keeping more people alive, but by keeping them alive with access to novel comforts and pleasures which people do seem to enjoy (entertainment, medicine, travel, education, retirement, etc...).
Gather enough anecdotes and you've got the makings of an argument. Maybe that's all I've been doing but I've sure as heck gathered more, and more persuasive anecdotes, than egalitarianism and suicide rates
Quoting Pseudonym
Because a cursory glance at the living conditions enjoyed by HG's and contemporary westerners shows immediate and vast disparities. High risk births, lack of comparable medical ability, lack of comprehensive education, lack of geographic/social/economic upward mobility, career choices, physical security (from elements and violence) etc... The difference is so obvious that as soon as any HG people get a cursory glance at the boons the west has to offer, they're thrown into relative/subjective unhappiness if they cannot reliably get them (knives, motors, tobacco, dogs, medicine are typically desired among the elderly, and dwellings, education, money, and travel are typically desired among the young).
Here you might actually say that the existence of an affluent west is unjust or unethical because their success causes jealousy and unhappiness (uncertainty and fear too) in the groups it contacts (even where it does not "exploit"). I would simply say that this makes HG way of life less robust, and therefore less successful.
Quoting Pseudonym
Wow... I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know the difference between happiness inequality and happiness...
You stated that it is certain that when one portion of a population benefits from something that the portion which does not will be significantly less happy. I challenged this idea by citing a source which found that as GDP steadily grows, happiness inequality can be reduced (i.e: become insignificant) even as wealth inequality grows. Average happiness has nothing to do with this particular point. As far as being accused of cherry picking sources goes, I might as well accuse you of the above errors in regards to the happiness/suicide study with which you only bothered to quote a single sentence from the abstract without comprehending it or reading the article.
Quoting Pseudonym
I was talking about the expected number of days the average HG will live. This is the number we need to use if we're going by your just less than twice as happy standard/formula/goal-post, not current average number of days lived among the living. But what you're really saying by trying to negate child mortality is that HG way of life is far less successful for some (those who die young) and much more successful for others. It's still egalitarian because the dead aren't around to complain.
Quoting Pseudonym
Physical health, physical security (freedom from death war and disease), access to information, and the freedom to pursue individual desires which may diverge from the mainstream are things I personally value, but the first two (health and security) are things which are nearly universally desired by all humans. My original post focused on the west's ability to escape disasters which otherwise affect our physical well-being.
Quoting Pseudonym
We've already been over the evidence. Remember the Chumash peoples who experienced massive increases in violence caused by geographic concentrations of migrants and climactic events? Remember the endless list of existing HG peoples whose ancient ways of life are being utterly decimated by the introduction of new technology or germs or outside pressures? Being robust means more than just surviving, it means the ability to thrive across a wider range of environments. HG practices might be required to survive an ice-age, but they can only support low population densities and naturally give way to or are out-competed by groups who develop agriculture in environments which are not harsh enough to prevent them. HG society is the most successful during an ice-age (assuming come the next one we don't have sufficient technology to endure it) and in any environment where hunting and gathering is the only way to stay alive, but that is evidently not most environments.
Quoting Pseudonym
I think you might be the prejudiced one actually. It's the only explanation for you continual misrepresentation of my statements and reliance on racism as a constant fallaciousappeal (other than you having no good arguments...). I never said that FGM originated as a nomadic tradition, I said that the absence of contemporary western ethical and legal standards leaves groups vulnerable to such practices in ways that the contemporary west is not. You've either prejudged me as a racist or you're unwilling to entertain any possible truths which you think may reflect negatively on non-white groups..
Many pastoralist groups in Africa have practiced FGM for backward reasons (isn't any reason for non-consensual FGM backward?), and while you don't consider pastoralists to be successful, there are still a few examples of HG's practicing FGM such as the Okiek people in Kenya (who were surely taught it by some neighbors) and also the Hadza for whom it has come to have significant cultural relevance (source). My point was that these are extreme sorts of behaviors which are eliminated by a fair and functional justice system along with the freedom and duty to question and improve our existing values, traditional or otherwise. The beast of superstitious tradition in human culture is being successfully slain by modern access to education and information.
Regarding the killing of sorcerers, among the tribes in Papua New Guinea, belief in sorcery and the killing of witches is a problem that persists even to this day. Spirits, spells, and other superstitious and animistic explanations can lead to people doing some really stupid and horrible things. This was just an extreme example to show the importance of education and reason based justice, not a challenge specifically against nomadic hunter-gatherers, but here you go,
I don't know why you're bringing the word "evil" into this (I'm not a witch!), but the late medieval European murders of innocent "witches" could have been prevented if they had any modicum of good education, scientific understanding, or an impartial reason based justice system.
Quoting Pseudonym
If the west can perpetuate itself without exploiting or destroying people or nature, will it be more successful? Ethically or otherwise? It's a pretty simple question and I think you fear answering it because you know the west no longer directly enslaves and exploits the rest of the world; we have ever improving standards of fairness and justice, and we're more concerned than ever with not doing any harm to anything or anyone else (your own ethical disposition as case in point). Whether or not the west is continuing to exploit and destroy would make for a good discussion but perhaps the above is already too big a mouthful...
So why did you mention those specific measures of happiness which contribute to longevity in a debate about hunter-gatherer lifestyles vs Western ones? Either they are irrelevant because they are no different in either society, or you have prejudicially presumed that they are lower in hunter-gatherer societies without actually checking first. If there's some third explanation for your bringing them up that I've missed then please explain, but your posts are littered with examples where you subtly (or not so subtly) imply that the hunter-gatherer way of life is deficient in many areas in which there is no widespread evidence of it being so, and then when I challenge you on it you either say you were simply using it as an example or you ferret out some single source which backs it up (but which clearly was not the origin of your opinion). If the only expressions of prejudice we were entitled to call out were the of the extremely obvious "group X are awful because they're all black" sort, then society would hardly progress at all in the field. Prejudice is presuming a negative about a particular culture just because they are different from your own; you presume hunter-gatherers have poor diets, you presume hunter-gatherers have 'backward' traditions, you presume hunter-gatherers perform FGM, you presume hunter-gatherers have a secretly high suicide rate, you presume hunter-gatherers have no fair justice system, you presume hunter-gatherers burn witches, you presume hunter-gatherers kill children out of superstition, you presume hunter-gatherers get ill all the time, you presume hunter-gatherers get wiped out by the slightest change in their environment. All of this without a scrap of evidence first. The fact that you can look some up later does not change the fact that these negative views of a culture that differs from your own were presumed prior to that investigation. Anything other than prejudice would motivate you to look at a wide range of sources (not just those that support your argument), anything other than prejudice would motivate you to give other cultures a fair benefit of the doubt until such time as the evidence was incontrovertible, anything other than prejudice would motivate you to try and understand how other cultures work rather than presume they're all 'backwards', based on a single example.
Your latest example is this;
Quoting VagabondSpectre
You presume that the practice of twin killing has to be a 'superstition' that's evolved biologically because you just can't bring yourself to credit these people with the intelligence to actually work it out rationally each time. One of my colleagues in anthropology has actually had direct conversations with bushmen about infanticide and is is both heart-wrenching and definatly carried out with the full knowledge of the actual practical necessity. The stories around it are just there to make the whole thing slightly more bearable. The fact that you have to keep caricaturing these intelligent and caring people as backward savages driven by unquestioned superstition is what I find offensive.
So yes, I think your position is prejudiced. If you want to speak authoritatively about the practices and motivation of other cultures then at least do them the respect of a minimum threshold of research, not just the first negative ethnography you can lay your hands on and a popsci interpretation of what motivates them.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This is another common tactic of yours which I don't know if it is deliberate or just poor argumentation. You take the specific logical point of an argument and then move it out of context to highlight the negative aspects of hunter-gatherer culture. The point I was arguing against was your assertion that hunter-gatherers might have been more unhappy because a good diet causes happiness and westerners obviously have a better diet because they live longer. This is not true because the surviving hunter-gatherers do not face a poor diet, so that poor diets cannot then go on to make them unhappy. This has nothing to do with the fact that total calories are often scarce enough to warrant infanticide. You were arguing about the link between diet and happiness, not the link between total available calories and infanticide. If it will make things simpler for you I will make it clear now - Hunter-gather lifestyles are not a bed of roses, calorie restriction leads to infanticide and this is an awful thing. In western societies children die from preventable causes too. According to UNICEF 25,000 children die every day from diseases largely related to poverty such as pneumonia, diarrhoeal diseases (both of which we have good reason to believe were absent in hunter-gatherer societies because newly contacted tribes seem to have little immunity to them), or poor nutrition. Again you're accusing me of seeing hunter-gatherers through rose-tinted glass, but you're consistently arguing in favour of this mythical version of western culture that you think we're headed towards, not the one we're actually in. Hunter-gatherer-societies kill infants because of low calorie availability. Western society causes the deaths of infants because of rapid population growth and poor resource distribution. You could argue that if we continue on our current trajectory these infants will survive, I could argue that if hunter-gatherers lived in the lush environments now dominated by western cultures instead of the most harsh environments know to man, they might not have to kill so many infants due to calorie restrictions, so where does that leave us?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I don't know how much statistics you've done, but there's really no need to cite the whole paper if you didn't understand the difference, you could have just asked, rather than get snarky about it. You've misunderstood the nature of multivariate analysis. What the paper is concluding is that individual measures (not individual people) correlate with suicide well, but aggregate measures (when you put all the individual measures together in multivariate analysis) correlate weakly, which means they still correlate, just not so much. What this means is that suicide is well correlated with causes of unhappiness (i.e the link between suicide and unhappiness is strong), but that the reasons in individual cases vary widely such that no conclusions can be drawn about a general connection between all the measures. This makes the aggregate score of Subjective Well-Being a poorer correlate of suicide than the connection between suicide and unhappiness would suggest. The paper is an fact arguing that suicide is even more strongly correlated with unhappiness than the weak correlation between SWB and suicide rates would at first imply, it's just that the specific nature of the unhappiness varies widely making it difficult to measure across societies. This means that the suicide rate remains a very strong measure of a society's happiness (at least at one end of the scale), but the link will be masked if one aggregates all the different reasons for unhappiness.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
How is that strange. If we have two societies, one in which there is virtually no suicide, and one in which there is 1% suicide, the most parsimonious explanation is that the nature of that second society is causing the suicides rate to rise. If the remainder of that second society are really happy (although your own cited paper reveals they're not in our case, but lets go with it for now), then again, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are being made happy by the nature of that society. It therefore stands to reason that a change to that second type of society from the first has made one group of people happy at the expense of another which it has made unhappy. It might not be the actual case for all sorts of reasons, but I can't see why you're having trouble understanding the theory.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
You haven't answered my question on this from my previous post. It's hard to argue against your position when you keep changing it. Are you saying that happiness in rich western societies is unevenly distributed (which you seem to be saying here) or evenly distributed (as concluded by the paper you cited in support of the link between GDP and happiness). It can't be both as and when it suits you. Pick one position and we'll discuss that. At the moment I'm not prepared to engage in a debate about whichever position suits you at the time.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, you're missing the statistical conclusion of these papers. It's not that suicide is not caused by unhappiness, no-one in any of these papers is arguing that, so I don't know where you're getting that impression from. It's that our measures of unhappiness do not seem to work in aggregate. The papers are all arguing that we might have our measures of happiness wrong, not that happiness is not related to suicide at all. The paper you cite here opens with "Suicide is the ultimate act of desperate unhappiness" and their tentative explanation is that "...suicide is more likely in response to short-term unhappiness." (although they caveat that strongly), or that "Life evaluation may refer to the long-term outlook, or to achievement as conventionally measured – education, income, marriage, and good health "[my bold]. Nowhere does it say that suicide might not be related to unhappiness at all. It's questioning how we measure happiness.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Not to your satisfaction maybe. Many of the studies I've previously cited have indicated a link between average happiness and income inequality. What's interesting about modern research in the field is that as income inequality goes up, average happiness goes down, but happiness inequality goes down also, indicating that even those at the top do not gain happiness from their privileged status, but very few people are challenging the concept the wealth inequality leads to unhappiness.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
... are all the advantages of Western culture (though I disagree with some, like comprehensive education, and upward mobility, which is a joke). Since when has anyone ever carried out an analysis based on looking only at the advantages of only one side. What about the disadvantages? Inequality, chronic disease, lack of community, poor diet, suicide rates, a history of violent oppression and genocide, environmental degradation. The whole point of this debate is to assess the degree to which Western civilisation has been a sucess. You seem to just want to list its advantages, and bury its disadvantages in a load of wishful thinking about the future and self-congratulatory zeal about how we're not violently oppressing quite so many people as we used to.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
What ability? Colonial famines, dictatorships, two world wars, the great depression, the potato famine, the aids epidemic in Africa, diphtheria, influenza A, measles, mumps, pertussis, smallpox, tuberculosis, the black death, global warming, clean water shortages, cigarettes, toxic smog, obesity... Are you so blind to the west's shortcomings? Of course, we're still here, but so are hunter-gatherers.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Remember the Nazis who caused a massive increase in violence caused by socio-economic consequences of Western socities?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
But they've not been utterly decimated. They're still here. They're certainly under a monumental attack by forces hugely more well-resourced than they are, and yet reserves are being won, rights are being written into law. Small groups of individuals with nothing but spears are fighting the entire might of government backed multinational companies and occasionally they're winning. What exactly do you expect these people to do to prove their worth to you. They've survived the ice age, they've survived being pushed into the world's most inhospitable environments, they've survived genocide, they've survived epidemics, they've fought off entire armies and now fight the multinational companies. And they're still not robust enough for you?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, a point which is only true if you make the prejudiced assumption that hunter-gatherers routinely carried out FGM. Otherwise how can you argue that Western ethical and legal standards are required to defend against it? You've given an example of FGM being carried out in hunter-gatherers (though as you rightly say, not from their own tradition). I've given an example of it being carried out under a western judicial system. It is not practiced by the overwhelming majority of traditional hunter-gatherers (and there's no evidence it ever has been) and it is not carried out by the overwhelmingly majority of modern Western democracies. So where are you getting the idea only the west has sufficient ethical and legal standards to prevent it? All the evidence you have (without prejudice) indicates that hunter-gatherers have perfectly adequately prevented it for 200,000 years. You keep doing this. You say Western society is better because it doesn't do such-and-such a terrible thing, I say that it's prejudicial to presume such practices were widespread among traditional hunter-gatherers and you then either find a single isolated example, or claim you weren't talking about hunter-gatherers at all (in which case, what was the point?).
Really, if all you're going to do is take the very best example of Western civilisation and compare it to the worst possible practices in hunter-gatherer tribes then yes, you win. The very best practices in Western civilisation are definitely better than the very worst practices in hunter-gatherer tribes. I had hoped to have a more nuanced discussion than that.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Not at all, I just have. The very best practices of Western civilisation, if practiced in the absence of the worst, would obviously count as successful. But in what way does that not apply to hunter-gatherers too? Their best practices and achievements, taken apart from their worst, would seem very successful.
I feel like we're just getting nowhere here and I think you think I'm arguing something I'm not. My argument really is quite simple - Western civilisation has been a disaster because it has exploited, massacred and oppressed millions of people to get where it is. It has destroyed and degraded entire ecosystems to get where it is, and something about it still causes a significant minority of its people to kill themselves rather than continue living in it. It has slums, homelessness, widespread disease (caused by its own pollutants). It has people starving to death while others buy yachts. It's generated apartheid, the gas chambers, slavery and cigarette advertising. I think hunter-gatherers demonstrate that none of these things are necessary. I think some quarters of modern Western culture also prove that these things are unnecessary too. So if all that is unnecessary, how can it possibly be labelled a sucess?
If I may interrupt for just a little question: do you think that other cultures would have been better, especially if they would have enjoyed similar technological advantage in the 18th - 19th Century? Or would they have been similar disasters?
Comes to my mind the Chinese advisors who succeeded in reasoning to their Mongol overlords that killing absolutely every human being in some vast area and turning the whole land to pasture to their horses wasn't such a great idea and far better idea would be to leave some people alive to be taxed.
I certainly think it's possible. Unless some biological evolution in neurology has occurred, then the people who care enough to advise against such practices today, much like your Chinese advisers, must have always existed. So the question is, how much power they have to control the direction of society relative to those with fewer moral scruples, and whether that power balance is any different in other cultures.
Obviously this whole area is highly speculative, but current psychological thinking is that about 30-50% of what psychologists label as 'personality' traits are genetic, the rest are generated by upbringing and the environment. I'm gathering (correct me if I'm wrong) that what you're asking is whether other cultures would have acted differently in response to the same environmental stimuli as the early western cultures had. So at a cursory analysis the answer seems to me to be an obvious yes, because 30-50% of the factors determining a response would have differed (although perhaps only slightly) as other cultures would have a different mix of genetic personality traits, and a substantial (although unknown) proportion of their response would have been the result of their child-rearing practices, which again would have been different. The environment, which in our example is the one factor we're keeping constant, plays the minority role, albeit a very large minority.
The huge caveat I would add to that analysis, is that it hinges heavily on the genetic differences in distribution of personality types making any aggregate difference to the culture's response. It may well be that different cultures have a different genetic mix of personality types (highly unlikely today given the widespread cultural mixing, but possible 10,000 years ago I suppose), but that does not automatically mean that such difference would have been in important factors. If one culture was more generally extroverted than another, for example, I'm not sure I can see how that would have affected their response to the environmental stimuli around at the birth of western civilisation in any significant way.
I'm much more confident, psychologically, in the effect child-rearing practices have on personality, and I think it highly likely that cultures who rear their children differently would have adults who react very differently indeed to the same environmental stimuli and so would perhaps have taken a very different path had they been at the same place as western civilisation when it began.
As I said, because I'm attempting to persuade you to accept longevity as a proxy for physical well-being. This isn't critical to my argument, but insofar as you get to use suicide as a proxy for societal unhappiness I still don't see why I can't use longevity as a proxy for physical well-being.
Quoting Pseudonym
It is my position that the average westerner is objectively better off than most humans throughout all of history. Get over it already. I'm making the argument that the west is the most appealing society to live in, and that entails the position that other societies are less appealing to live in. It's not prejudiced against hunter-gatherer way of life to point out that the longest average lifespans ever recorded are of the contemporary west, and that things like access to quality medicine and good physical security are direct contributors of that. Nutrition will be addressed below.
Quoting Pseudonym
You've raised the idea that hunter-gatherers have better diets than westerners, but we've also been discussing how infanticide (twin killing specifically) is not uncommon among HG groups due to the heightened nutritional requirements of the mother (the superstitious associations as evidence of lack of equitable justice aside). On the surface it seems that while HG's may have diets lacking in many of the bad things like sugars and processed fats, they also have fairly rigid upper limits on the amount of nutrition they can gather in a short period of time (hence the nomadism). They may have better diets ("better nutrition"), but we surely have more reliable nutrition (hence the ability of mothers to refrain from pragmatic infanticide).
Quoting Pseudonym
Quoting Pseudonym
So I'm confused. Why do many hunter gatherers practice infanticide while the contemporary west does not practice it at all and utterly forbids it? Is it because hunter-gatherer lifestyle yields inadequate nutrition to support nursing two infants? And they know that? Is superstition involved or isn't it?
Heaven forbid an intelligent, caring, non-white individual should ever adhere to superstition. That would be racist...
Quoting Pseudonym
As opposed to your oh so well defended view that the west is an abominable and exploitative disaster... My original position wasn't actually shitting on hunter-gatherers you know... It was pointing out that every human society has been vulnerable to disasters of various kinds in ways which western progress has allowed us to reduce or eliminate entirely. But you had to also say that hunter-gatherer way of life was better, and to defend that you've been taking nothing but unsubstantiated meta-shits over myself and everything I say. Accusing me of racist presumption, demanding evidence only to then accuse me of cherry-picking; characterizing it all as racist. To satisfy you I will have to prove beyond a shadow of a statistical doubt that the contemporary west is measurably superior in every conceivable way to every hypothetical HG society that could ever exist...
Quoting Pseudonym
Why are you only now giving a more nuanced description of "nutrition"? (Oh, it was something different all along! Forgive me). Short term food availability... Or something... I'm not exactly sure how we could measure this, except in terms of it's detrimental impact (infanticide). This kind of resource availability issue is something I've been on about from the get go, and you've been denying it up until now. If the only way I can get you to even slightly move your position toward a reasonable middle is to force you to choose between superstitious infanticide (and its implications on "justice") and pragmatically necessary infanticide (and it's implications on "resource availability/reliability"), then so be it.
Quoting Pseudonym
The expansion of western society (Aside from the initial wave of disease related death) actually improves child mortality rates though, it doesn't cause them per se.. The west does an objectively better job at saving the live of infants, and it is objectively doing a better and better job.
Quoting Pseudonym
This smacks of foolish romance. "Lush environments"? Yes our forests and plains aren't what they used to be, but they were never any free lunches (because they're quickly gobbled up).
But, where environments tend to be more and more "lush", sedentary ways of life (valuable and interesting cultures which you are basically racist toward out of hand by considering them inferior to HG peoples) then tend to emerge because if people don't have to pack up and leave due to resource depletion, guess what? They don't. Population density ensues, civilization happens (with all its boons and burdens), et cetra et cetra..
Quoting Pseudonym
No, what the paper is concluding is that the correlates of suicide risk also effect SWB, and are therefore representative of societal preferences. "Individual level" or "micro level multivariate analysis" of suicide and SWB correlates is actually comparing the correlates of suicide and SWB at the individual level. The actual comparison they made showed that the correlates of suicide among individuals are the same as the correlates of SWB among individuals. They showed that things which make people commit suicide also make them unhappy. The correlation at this individual or micro-level also worked as a kind of cross-validation for using individual level data in assessing SWB and suicide risk (that at least reporting errors and other possible spurious factors are not a necessary issue).
The paper several times articulated that explicit caution be used when making inferences from aggregate/time-series data on subjective well-being (in other-words, don't assume that overall suicide risk correlates with average subjective well-being)
Quoting Pseudonym
The bold: Yes, at the individual level,according to the micro-level multivariate regressions and comparison.
The italic: No. It means that there is a link, but there is no evident direct strong link (not the kind your argument hinges on).
The underlined: No. There is correlation among the reasons in individual suicide cases (that's what the correlates are in the micro-level regression) and they're strikingly similar to SWB correlates. What varies are the number of individuals who actually commit suicide and the reported amount of overall SWB (there's no strong link). At best, there is a "weak and inconsistent" link.
Quoting Pseudonym
The study shows that suicide is not a measure of average subjective well being and advocates caution about making such inferences from aggregate data. The study does show that the nature of happiness has some consistency (the things which make us unhappy also make us commit suicide) but again, it explicitly does not show that the more people commit suicide, the more people are unhappy overall.
The lack of correlation in the aggregate and time series data was not only due to inconsistency among individuals and how they experience happiness, it is also likely due to the forces which make people unhappy being inconsistently applied to individuals across society (things which make people unhappy can be more concentrated in a few individuals which pushes them over a hypothetical suicide threshold, while the rest of of society may tend to have a much higher level of SWB). This article just doesn't prove what you say it proves. You've misunderstood it.
Quoting Pseudonym
Trouble understanding the theory :lol: ...
I'm capable of making direct comparisons (that's what my original post was an attempt at). Are you?
You brought up suicide to show that HG life has better year-for-year utility, but all it shows is that the lower tail of expected utility is larger in western society, not that the average year-for year utility is lower. I guess you can attempt to make an ethical argument out of it, but the same ethical argument would apply to child mortality rate (i.e: HG's enjoy their happier existence at the expense of dead infants).
Quoting Pseudonym
I never denied that happiness is unevenly distributed in rich western society; it's implied with wealth stratification... I denied that when happiness is unevenly distributed that overall happiness is less. In fact it can be greater. The paper I cited on the issue showed that as relative income inequality rises, happiness inequality can shrink. Again, it has nothing to do with overall average happiness.
Now you answer my question, Is your solution to happiness inequality and higher suicide rates to put a social upper limit on happiness (even risking reducing average overall happiness) to eliminate relative happiness inequality? (which does seem to make people feel subjectively worse when they're on the lower end).
Quoting Pseudonym
Individuals who commit suicide are desperately unhappy. Yes.
Quoting Pseudonym
The papers argue different things you know :D (I know you know ;) )
One of them questions income inequality as a measure for happiness inequality. Another questions aggregate SWB data as a measure for overall suicide risk (and by extension, vice versa, which is exactly how you're trying to use suicide as a measure).
I'm well aware of the psychological relationship between happiness and suicide, and thanks to the research you've forced me to do, I'm also well aware of the absence of a statistical correlation between the overall happiness of a population and its suicide rate (except the most recent article I cited which indicates that as average SWB rises in a society, so too does suicide, which may be a relationship spurred by wealth stratification interacting with with relative happiness, or depression being relatively more severe in societies with very high average levels of happiness, and many other possible factors).
Quoting Pseudonym
If any of the articles you've cited show a link between income inequality and average happiness, please link me once more.
Quoting Pseudonym
My original position asked the ethical question of whether or not we're morally obligated to deconstruct and disband western society. If it is a disaster, then should it not be ended? Yes the west has a terrible past, but that's the rub, it has a terrible past, and a less terrible present; she ain't what she used to be. If I'm going to bother judging the west, it will be the living and breathing one that we live in, not the patriarchal or colonial past you're so convinced I adore and intellectually inhabit. The fact that the west is still changing is something that must be taken into account, as is the fact that HG lifestyle is something largely unchanging.
Death is pretty much what I'm personally most concerned with from an ethical perspective. I could care less about the environment if its mismanagement didn't threaten life. Oppression and genocide are at historical lows as far as I'm concerned. Maybe during an ice age there is less oppression because there's nobody around to oppress (oppression is a population density thing), but the contemporary west does very well ethically speaking. A lot of people have crappy diets, that's true, but we're getting better in that department too (and we have a more reliable food source allowing us to escape famine more easily and nourish all or most of the infants).
Quoting Pseudonym
Colonial famines aside, dictatorships are antithetical to western democracy (the thing the society I hail as the best is founded on). We've had big wars but fewer wars, and our wars are becoming far less deadly. We have novel diseases but we've defeated more than we've created to the benefit of lifespan. Global warming will not end us. It will slow us, maybe even cause intolerable disaster, in which case, you were right, but I don't think so. Clean water can be an issue for nomads too. Cigarettes could be hedonically worthwhile. I don't know much about toxic smog. In some cultures obesity is a sign of wealth and is considered attractive (at least according to my racist colonial stereotypes).
Quoting Pseudonym
Are you blaming Hitler on bad weather? :D
You asked for evidence that environmental changes were accompanied by loss of life (that changing circumstances leads to bloody adaptation), and the Chumash ethnographic/archeological records are evidence of that . WW2 and Nazism are quite different sorts of problems. WW1 and WW2 unique in the scope and scale of violence seen in the west and I think it unlikely we will ever see another world war. Regardless of cause, the contemporary west does less war on average, or at least there are fewer violence related deaths.
Quoting Pseudonym
There's some irony here...
For starters, they've been more than decimated, (they've been reduced much more than 1/10th their number), but listen to yourself:
"under attack by forces hugely more well resourced"
"reserves are being won"
"rights are being written into law"
As you may know, I'm Canadian (with a heritage rich in hunter-gatherer lifestyle as it so happens). It's in my programming to care about all other humans, so it doesn't really matter how robust people are, I think they have a right to exist (and I even think we should offer assistance to the less robust). Here's a post I made detailing Canada's unique position when it comes to the ethical implications of hunter-gatherers vs the west. It's jam packed with all kinds of information I did unbiased research for, and I was quite disappointed that it generated very few responses (I guess Canadian politics really are by default uninteresting).
Canada is in the process of writing in to law reserves and rights to indigenous groups despite it being hugely more well resourced . Progressive contemporary western ethics and its sophisticated legal institutions (which have aspects both good and bad) are making that happen, which is a very very good aspect of the contemporary west.
Quoting Pseudonym
"I said that the absence of contemporary western ethical and legal standards leaves groups vulnerable to such practices in ways that the contemporary west is not"
My point is that without well reasoned and ethical formal legal institutions groups can be vulnerable to horrible practices which go unchecked. I never said FGM is routine or common among hunter-gatherers, nor does the point I made hinge on it.
Quoting Pseudonym
It's not required, but it does defend against FGM (and many other practices we consider unethical).
Quoting Pseudonym
Which western judicial system? If it's not secular then it's not western.
Quoting Pseudonym
FGM was cited as an extreme example of practices which progressive ethics and formal legal institutions prevent, there are other practices that it also prevents, such as marriage prior to age of consent, infanticide, and revenge killing (though it doesn't not work perfectly, it does a better job than informal institutions like altruistic punishment.
Quoting Pseudonym
The point, originally, and enduringly, is to show that certain (bad) things which the contemporary west is nigh immune to, are things which are more common in every other known type of society (i.e: they're not immune). I don't need to show that they're widespread if they're practically non-existent in the contemporary west.
Quoting Pseudonym
Only a minimalist or a perfectionist would say this. Survival is the only necessity, which may include some minimum level of happiness, but what of thrival?
The growing pains of technology have been worth it in my opinion because there are more people alive and they have a better shot at survival, but the gamble that is future potential is irresistible to me; I'm not that conservative.
We've dominated the planet, (which will be disastrous only if we dominate her too much) and this is a success. So long as the present keeps getting better (which it has by all of the metrics you just mentioned, perhaps save one or two) then we keep getting more successful.
What rate of suicide is an acceptable margin to be considered successful? What rate of chronic disease? Of relative poverty?
P.S: Cigarette advertising is illegal in Canada.
I understand your argument to be, as expressed in your first post, that Western civilisation is a success because the average modern westerner is better off by any available metric than the average member of every other (or most other?) culture in history.
I counter that I believe suicide rate, egalitarian distribution of resources and opportunity, sustainable resource management and personal autonomy are metrics of success by which the average Western society is not better off than other cultures, specifically hunter-gatherers.
You argued that those measures are complicated and might not be good measures of success, but I think the same applies to your preferred measures. I think for any measure, demonstrating how it should rightly be considered a measure of 'success' is complicated. The simplicity (or otherwise) of the actual metric is not relevant, it is the difficulty with which it can be rationally tied to 'success' that matters, and I think here we just disagree in a manner too fundamental to resolve by discussion.
You also argued that Western societies actually are better off by some of those metrics, but I find the breadth of your knowledge of hunter-gatherer tribes too narrow to be persuaded by your arguments here. Your arguments, particularly with reference to justice, diversity, fragility and personal freedom are highly speculative and based on a very small subset of cases deliberately chosen for that specific purpose. I'm not interested in those kinds of arguments.
Your argument with regards to violence and infant mortality are sound as measures of the failings of many hunter-gatherer societies. We've already covered how I do not believe the success of the west in reducing these two things is enough to claim the whole enterprise a success considering the many failings I think should be accounted for. You evidently think they do.
You make the case that the success of Western society should be judged only by its current practices, with regards to exploitation. I don't believe that a society which is still benefiting from the rewards of such previous exploitation can be fairly judged without including the actions which gave rise to its current wealth. Conversely when it comes to sustainability, you'd prefer Western society to be judged not on its current practices, but on what you hope it will be able to achieve some time in the future. Again, it seems we have a fundamental disagreement about what factors should be taken into account when judging 'success'
There's obviously been some arguments about coherence, consistency and the accuracy of evidence where engagement in discussion is of value, but they're not worth resolving whilst we fundamentally disagree about the main issues outlined above.
Well, it's certainly obvious that you look at this from the genetical and from child-rearing practices. Fair enough, but I would point out that the reduction from societies to individuals and their genetical background etc. brushes aside what sociology is about. And sociology (and history) can tell us a lot even if they surely aren't natural sciences. Reductionism (or methodological reductionism) has it's pitfalls.
What is very typical to every country, people or "culture" that has gained a dominant position usually through winning wars against others is that they don't see their success due to applying new technology, having a better organization or simply because of their superior numbers and resources. No, what they see as the key to their success is their inherent traits of the people themselves. They have been simply better, the people themselves are special and are different from others. Some would call it racism, but that negative term doesn't capture so well what I'm going for. No dominant country wants to accept that it's success is because of something else than the exceptionality of it's people.
Basically the point is that classic Western Imperialism doesn't differ so much from Japanese Imperialism even if the cultures do differ. And so don't the Muslim conquests differ so much from the Roman ones. The differences are actually quite minor in the end. And this is because every nation or culture that has gained dominance has always learned and adapted things from others and has had various relations with other cultures and people. Hence it's no wonder that the cultures have been similar and only when there has been absolutely no interaction before, has it happened that one "culture" has been totally superior in technology to another. Trade, ideas and interaction in general make us similar.
I've rigorously debunked suicide rates as a metric of societal happiness and its primacy as a metric of success (In recent posts I've gone so far as to show the opposite). Despite my constant objections and rebukes, you continued on with suicide as your primary metric under a utilitarian framework, within which I have also shown that suicide rates are also not indicative of societal unhappiness. As my original position is heavily concerned with the preservation of life (assuming it's a nearly universal human desire, and nearly universally among the most important desires), I still find it much more appropriate to include death by suicide in the overall mortality rates under a "better-off" description rather than a happiness-utility model.
Egalitarianism is something you floated initially but haven't bothered to substantiate. Your original evidence was a link to a google search which you elected not to modify. At this point the only thing left for me to do would be to attempt to prove the negative, like I've recently done with suicide. Your main rebuttal to infant mortality rate and longevity has been utilitarian, so it's strange that you mostly consider the issue of egalitarianism from a justification perspective rather than a utilitarian one.. To the extent that egalitarianism does prevent certain injustices, it can be considered successful, but egalitarianism does not obviate injustice (especially in the execution of justice where there are no clear standards of evidence or punishment. e.g: being ostracized or worse for an action you did not actually commit would be unjust).
Opportunity and personal autonomy are things which I've brought up as merits of the contemporary west, given that the average westerner has more geographic mobility, more career options, and more and better protected rights (like property and habeus corpus). Hunter-gatherers basically have very few lifestyle choices to make given that they must hunt and forage on a constant basis, and given that their environment and technology demands they do so in specific and efficient ways (opportunism, nomadism, egalitarianism, etc...). There's less room for individual autonomy and instead a demand for conformity. I would also rate the societal autonomy of hunter-gatherers to be worse-off than the west. Formal democracy allows us to actively question and improve upon our traditions and faults while hunter-gatherer social autonomy and culture is a more rigid result of natural selection. In a propertyless egalitarian society, the individual autonomy to start a farm doesn't exist because it is expected that everything is shared. Autonomy on the individual and societal level (the freedom to do more things) is generally what breaks HG lifestyles (as HG people become sedentary or are out-competed by sedentary groups when they can gain much more resources by doing so, and the extra food and fuel translates to personal freedom of a certain kind).
You've offered evidence (a pay-walled article) that the transition from hunting/gathering to agriculture entailed nutritional deficits and the creation of new diseases, which is certainly true, but the medicinal and agricultural prowess of the contemporary west is able to prevent more death from malnutrition (or pragmatic infanticide) and disease in general. While if we look at the average health of an individual in a functioning HG society (that is to say, one not beset with novel pressures brought on by western presence) they are probably healthier than the average living westerner, this will to a large degree be the case because injury and illness is much more often fatal outside of the contemporary west. Certain diseases such as obesity and influenza were indeed less common, but despite these ills the west is still able to prolong the average lifespan much more effectively than a natural HG diet and lifestyle will. The ability of western medicine to treat chronic pain and offer corrective surgery is also something that I would not discount out of hand. Anecdotally, I've seen many documentaries featuring HG tribes where some members have severe injuries which they have to deal with on a daily basis which would otherwise be correctable (or treatment for pain offered) in the contemporary west. Shoulder, hip, and leg injuries are common dangers for a hunter, and broken bones that aren't set properly and allowed to heal can be a source of lifelong pain.
Sustainable resource management is something we've not gotten a chance to discuss, and it's true that hunter-gatherers traditionally do not overtax their resources (they wouldn't have stable practices if they did). It's also true that the west has been known to overtax resources, but we're not yet hopelessly in the red. We're running out of oil, but we're running toward alternative energy sources and storage technologies. We've damaged the environment, perhaps irreparably for the foreseeable future, but we also have more direct control over the environment (or ability to manage our affairs despite changing norms) than ever before. The west is in the process of emancipating itself from a reliance on nature and replacing it with a reliance on technology, and if we can successfully do so entirely then I think the whole endeavor will have been a success (because we ill be more robust than ever before)
Quoting Pseudonym
Where we're headed is an important aspect of our current practices; change is fundamental to the west while it is not to static HG lifestyles. But you speak of sustainability and the west as if the west is already doomed or has no chance of overcoming the obstacles that are before it. It's proven you wrong up until now, with it's slow but steady improvements. Why will the west fail tomorrow?
What I thought we set out to compare were the trends and practices of the contemporary west and typical HG peoples, not their average happiness or the sins of their fathers. Reflecting back on my original position(s), it hasn't changed much. I have a better understanding of why certain things afflict hunter-gatherers less frequently than most other societies (less war, less tyranny), but my overall thrust still holds.
It's been an interesting discussion despite some obvious difficulties, and I'm sure any readers will get quite a bit of good information from it.
Cheers!