Consider if a really big disaster happens or total nuclear war etc., who have better chance to survive it, our modern civilization or some remote tribe in Amazon? And from that point of view a rover on Mars is not that impressive. If it will be a human colony there that can survive without Earth, then we are talking. But it requires a lot more advances and political will.
> our modern civilization or some remote tribe in Amazon?
They won't make it either. Nuclear war is a game ender. Also this has kinda already happened on a tiny scale, namely the British testing of weapons in the Australian Outback in the 50s and 60s. It wasn't very good for the natives:
"He said, 'We thought it was the spirit of our gods rising up to speak with us'," she said.
"[He said] 'then we saw the spirit had made all the kangaroos fall down on the ground as a gift to us of easy hunting so we took those kangaroos and we ate them and people were sick and then the spirit left'."
Mr Morgan is sharing his story, in his words, so it won't ever be forgotten.
"After the explosion the fallout went north," Mr Morgan said.
"Powder, white powder killed a lot of kangaroos [and] spinifex [grass]. Water was on fire, that's what we saw."
Mr Morgan said water "died" but that he and the two men he was with drank the water, even though it was still hot.
"The smoke went into our noses, and other people still have that poison today," he said.
"We all poisoned, in the heart, in the blood and other people that were much closer they didn't live very long, they died, a whole lot of them."
at the end of the day life is not about being impressive. life is about living. and I have not doubt those tribes are happier than 90% of the people belonging to advanced civilizations.
> I have not doubt those tribes are happier than 90% of the people belonging to advanced civilizations.
I have just spent a year in 16 countries in West Africa.
On the whole, people here are extremely happy / content / friendly.
In all honesty, they make Canadians look unfriendly and unhappy.
I know you strongly believe everything we have invented in the modern world makes us happier (almost everyone does) You really, really, REALLY need to see with you own eyes, not just listen to what you have been told.
Happiness wasn't invented in the last decade of the 20th century... or at any arbitrary point in the development of civilization.
Pretty much any time things aren't just horrible and desperate, people are more than capable of being happy. People are very adaptable in that regard.
The other thing we tend to do as human beings is tell ourselves that people who are better off can't be (that much) happier. Or people who are better off convincing themselves that because their lives aren't perfect that all circumstances are essentially the same as far as happiness goes and that people with less or who are living closer to the edge are actually happier than they are.
There's a wide range of circumstances people can live with and still find happiness. Very few of us have a hard requirement of being on the very top rung of the ladder to be happy. And there's no particular rung on the ladder where happiness becomes possible.
> I know you strongly believe everything we have invented in the modern world makes us happier
It also raises our threshold for happiness in the long term, and we spend more and more of our time working to sustain that. It's kind of like a never ending drug addiction. I'm not surprised to hear people living simpler lives appear happier.
I mean, there are happy people in every region of every country. Very happy people in Togo, in Gabon, in Congo. But that just might be because I connected with them. Also Burkina Faso. Ahh, there are so many.
Lots of details on my site if you want to know more theroadchoseme.com
The article in question concerns an "uncontacted" Amazon tribe, and these discussions usually lead to paeans to the pre-agricultural life. I'm sorry if I jumped to conclusions.
On the other hand, the Symbicort I inhale daily to avoid COPD (and the emergency room treatments I received when I was younger) are pretty high tech.
My eyesight is very crappy and I have spent some asthma related evenings in the emergency room. Assuming I survived infancy, I would not have survived to adulthood and I wouldn't have enjoyed the process.
The OP would argue that we know myopia is chiefly caused by childhood visual experience and that Hygiene Hypothesis may explain asthma, which is definitely exacerbated by air pollution.
IMHO, however, people who talk about how happy people are in subsistence and developing societies haven't actually spent much time in them.
Happiness does not change much as long you can meet the basic needs for food / water / safety. So, the general assumption that people are about as happy works across a huge range of lifestyles.
On the other hand primitive lifestyles have significantly shorter lifespans which is objectively an issue.
Not necessarily, happiness (in a meaning of long lasting sense of personal satisfaction) is mainly about meeting the expectations (yours, of your family, peers, etc.). IMHO it primarily depends on to whom you choose to compare yourself. People in isolated environments have less peer competition and much lower expectations as everyone they know about is living the same way. If you and everyone you know expect to die at age 40, then it's merely a fact of life, like dying at 80s is for us. You don't think of it as injustice as you;re not aware of any other way. If you are poor your whole life, just like everyone around you, you still can feel extremely accomplished and successful in life, if you manage to get just a few chickens or a goat or more children or whatever more than your neighbors. It's one of the evils of the Internet that now we all compare ourself with the richest and the most successful people world-wide, and not just from within our local communities as before. I know it makes me unhappy quite often. People who never been in civilization are probably more content with their lives, as what else could they wish for, other then what they already have? Of course, just statistically speaking of the whole population, each individual has it's own ups and downs and unique ways, jealousies and envies and everything...
There is actually a lot of happiness research so you don't need to stuck with gut feelings.
The most shocking difference from expectations is happiness tends toward a steady state even after major life changes such as winning the lottery. People in prison for example are often happier than you might assume as long as their personal safety is not at issue and they can socialize.
>Happiness does not change much as long you can meet the basic needs for food / water / safety.
See Maslow's Hierarchy.
>On the other hand primitive lifestyles have significantly shorter lifespans which is objectively an issue.
What do you mean "objectively an issue"? One does not need to live a long life to live a fullfilling life. Many of these tribal socities have survived far longer than other civilized societies because they live in equilibrium with their environment.
Research disagrees, you can measure happiness of other people. Much like you can test for depression even if the difference is not subjectively obvious.
>Subjective: based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.
There are no objective biological tests for depression (or happiness), the psychiatric diagnosis relies exclusively on subjective observations (i.e. asking the person about their feelings).
>"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests."
The idea of happiness as a purely material objective phenomenon has been complicit in the exploitation and destruction of the Amazon and its inhabitants over the past centuries.
It's common to order blood tests when people show symptoms of depression. Hypothyroidism is the most common medical condition associated with depressive symptoms, but there are others.
Depression is considered when people have a null result on those tests, therefore there are physical tests for depression. Just not in the way testing is normally thought of.
I very much prefer a week programming so I don't think common sense has much to say. As to subside rates they are generally higher among tribes. However, it's been an enduring misconception that they are low.
Imagine a refined form of lobotomization were possible such that the individual who underwent the treatment would be reduced to an infantile level of IQ. They would retain sufficient intelligence to maintain basic hygiene and preservation, but little beyond that. However, it also resulted in the subject of said procedure receiving enormous pleasure engaging in simple repetitive tasks - such as, for instance, flipping burgers.
I would, in no way whatsoever, be interested in such a procedure and I think it's safe to say that applies to the vast majority. Thus, it must be presumed that the happiness of an individual or a group is not really a measurement of their 'fulfillment' even if it sounds like a reasonable premise in a vacuum.
I'm reading 'The Fatal Shore' by Robert Hughes at the moment, it's description of the customs of one primitive tribe might lead you to question how happy the women are in those Amazon tribes.
Is an interesting question. The people in the former modern civilization would be probably better fitted for glaciation events and living in a changing environment. On the other hand the battlefield of a nuclear war would be most probably the north, making more difficult to survive the first months and to find safe (non poisoned) places at long term.
> It is home to the Sentinelese who, often violently, reject any contact with the outside world, and are among the last people worldwide to remain virtually untouched by modern civilization. As such, only limited information about the island is known.
They are the control group. (And they live on Sentinel island! Get it?)
Human civilization and progress associated with it is a function of continuity and inertia. And that requires all the right inputs . Else it is perfectly possible to keep going in infinite loops between the past and the current.
I remember reading somewhere the human race would be way more advanced had the hellenistic period continued.
War, politics, economics, social conditions, religions they have to be all perfect.
>I remember reading somewhere the human race would be way more advanced had the hellenistic period continued.
I find those claims unconvincing. You can't just look at all the ups and downs in human social and technological development, pick and arbitrary upswing way back in the past, then project a continuous upward slope from that and pretend it was a realistic possibility.
Individual technological achievements that long ago were a fine thing, but as you say yourself a lot of different factors and technologies and situational chances have to come together to reach the industrial age. Maybe a few extra nudges in the right direction here and there in history might have helped things along a bit, but realistically it was still going to take a very long time for all the different pieces to come together.
It wasn't an arbitrary upswing. Hellenistic period lasted a good 300 years, and there was a decent prelude to it. Note the civilizations that came after it, although great in their own right. Including the Roman civilization had its own goals(Territorial expansion, cities, entertainment, Urban living etc etc).
Now to give you another example as to how things could reverse and take forever to recover. Take a look at USSR and its space program. They were once in race to putting man on the moon and sending probes to Venus. Today? Not really that ahead of the pack.
NASA on the other hand, has had relatively a lot more success. But a lot could change if there is some unanticipated political or economic crisis that could set back US as a country. Of course a new country will likely replace it, but the end and start points won't be exactly the same.
The point being you need continuity and need to keep the inertia going to achieve stellar growth.
I actually meant it more in this vein: "Given that the current descent into barbarbarism -- enacted by an outlier minority of their population, in one tiny corner of their country -- is still but a tiny fraction of what the Europeans, Arabs and their local proxies did, and much more as a popular and broadly-supported effort across pretty much the entire globe, across literally tens of generations, from about 500 until about 50 years ago -- as a people and a culture they aren't looking so bad."
Let's wait another couple of years, with increasing logging operations in the region, the introduction of diseases that their immune system hasn't encountered before etc.
If that can somewhat reassure you, most of the "traditional medicines" once tested in proper clinical trials, are just about the same as placebo. I'm not saying all, but a good majority. And people used to die from simple infections way more before we had modern medicine with antibiotics and the like, so I'd rather count on modern medicine any day for discoveries and treatments.
Staying in the jungle for a few thousand years leads you to optimize locally sourced flora and fauna to amazing levels to solve a range of medical conditions. That could be helpful to a lot of people in many social and financial conditions.
> Staying in the jungle for a few thousand years leads you to optimize locally sourced flora and fauna to amazing levels to solve a range of medical conditions.
From what I recall the big issue is that tribal medical conditions are usually for things like parasites. Not for the sort of first world diseases we're looking for.
The only exception is diabetes, because that's easy to spot by looking for sugar in urine.
That's a specifically auto-immune issue, which has more to do with growing up in a mostly-sterile environment than with the loss of any ancient medical knowledge.
That is not how an argument work. It's much harder (to the point of impossibility most often) to prove a negative, the burden of the claim always lies with the claimer.
You seem to asking for proof that humans for all these thousands of years of existence pre industrial revolution needed some kind of a health care system to survive.
that's not true. Look around you. Turmeric for eg a "traditional medicine" coming flying through in most clinical trials. At least lot better then artificially high sample size to show some kind of statistical significance. This is just one example there are thousands more like these.
If these are similar to other "uncontacted" tribes I've read about, they seem to react quite violently/aggressively when confronted (it doesn't matter if it's a reaction to fear... if someone's shooting arrows at you first and asking questions later and you have a gun... most people are going to return fire), so if the gold miners said they either had to kill or be killed, I'm inclined to believe them unfortunately.
The ridiculous thing is that they were allowed to go there in the first place. It's relatively common knowledge that these tribes are extremely hostile to outsiders and should be left alone, allowing gold mining there is basically signing their death warrants.
If these are similar to other "uncontacted" tribes I've read about, they seem to react quite violently/aggressively when confronted
As you would do, if a bunch of assholes started encroaching on your ancestral property.
So if the gold miners said they either had to kill or be killed, I'm inclined to believe them unfortunately.
No -- what they needed to do was just GTFO out of there, being as they clearly had no business being in those areas in first place. Paycheck, or "boss's orders" be damned.
Why does the concept of "ancestral property" somehow suddenly make violence acceptable to you. If the bank or government forecloses on my mother's house, I can shoot whoever comes to take ownership?
If the bank or government forecloses on my mother's house, I can shoot whoever comes to take ownership?
That's clearly not a relevant analogy.
Why does the concept of "ancestral property" somehow suddenly make violence acceptable to you.
Look, it was the person above me who was saying, basically, that it was the miners' violence against the tribespeople that was "acceptable" (paraphrasing, but that's what they basically said). So perhaps you should take up this line of discussion with them, instead.
All I'm saying is - if you knowingly invade territory known to be inhabited by an "uncontacted" community -- that is to say: by definition, a fully sovereign community, and not bound by any treaties with your own government -- and you don't expect the same kind of response (i.e. violent) any self-respecting community would make when not just their land, but their very survival comes under direct attack -- then at the very least, you're pretty damn naive.
And on top of that, it becomes really, really hard to see why you might deserve any sympathy.
In deciding to encroach upon those tribal properties (and hence, implicitly threatening the long-term physical survival of the people currently living there), clearly it's the miners who initiated violence, in this case.
Trespassing is an "implicit threat" that justifies initiation of violence to you?
That's fine if they want to attack anyone they perceive as being intruders. But once they do, retaliation is fair game as well. Live by the sword, die by the sword, and all that.
Trespassing is an "implicit threat" that justifies initiation of violence to you?
You're dodging the central issue: that it was the miners' act of trespass that, in itself, constituted the "initiation of violence" in this case.
But once they do, retaliation is fair game as well.
Sorry, but there's a very clear moral gradient at play here.
It seems like you're trying to suggest there's at least some rough equivalence between the actions of the two parties. But if so, then I just don't buy that argument, at all.
Could be a rationalization to cope with the trauma/horror of having killed someone, similar to "inappropriate" wartime or gallows humor; depersonalizing your victim is one way to avoid the full guilt of what you did and is a common psychological coping mechanism (that's not saying it's good...)
I was a Psych major. Apparently the essence of what it taught me was "empathy for others" and "intolerance for bullshit" :) I am now seemingly surrounded by the un-empathetic (and the uncritical-thinking...)
> I am now seemingly surrounded by the un-empathetic (and the uncritical-thinking...)
Then you cite fundamental attribution error...
Perhaps what's really happening is other are recognizing that the statement "it was kill or be killed" is not enough to determine what exactly happened, and does not necessarily mean the miners were attacked.
Even if the miners were attacked and had to kill in self-defense the other claims would still be crimes. If they were a "psychological coping mechanism", that would not absolve guilt, but only be relevant for determining punishment.
So 10 people were killed and possibly loads of culture destroyed because people wanted more shiny rocks. It goes to show that as advanced as we think we as modern humans are we are pretty damn primitive.
> Most humans had literally nothing to do with this.
It's impossible to apply effective collective guilt and to properly human-bash, if the "we" isn't used, that's why it is so frequently invoked that way. They know that the extreme majority of people had nothing to do with it when they use that phrasing, it doesn't have any captivation what-so-ever if you say: an extraordinarily small number of people out of seven billion are/were the problem/cause. It applies similarly to nearly every popular topic of human bashing, from animal cruelty to war (just as when people say their faith in humanity has been restored because of the act of one person, they're making a similar intentional error of collective application).
What happened was a crime. What are we as a collective supposed to do? Routinely exterminate criminals? Develop pre-crime police units? Build a large well-monitored wall around protected areas? What is the big insight that we as as a collective are supposed to learn from the supposed collective guilt?
There's literally a very small amount of people responsible for this atrocity and I hope they serve adequate sentences in prison for their crimes.
We as humans set the larger context for greed and the use of force to achieve that greed. We don't need those trees in the ever expanding amount of forest we cut down, but we can trade money for it, and thus the present robs from the future in the same way it robs those villagers of their life.
When a child gets run over by a car, all of society is at fault for valuing the driver, car and road over everything else. Self driving cars or better traffic design is simply an optimization and not a re-examination of the underlying contract.
> What are we as a collective supposed to do? Routinely exterminate criminals?
There are a zillion ways to reduce crime in a more friendly manner. I'm not an expert but what comes to mind are reducing the incentive to engage in criminal activity in the first place (economic factors could be at play), proper education, social projects, gun control, early psychopathological diagnosis, ...
The level of ignorance and /r/iamverysmart-worthy pontificating that's on display in this thread is truly embarrassing.
Worse than embarrassing, it's the embodiment of banal evil; because it's precisely this ignorance and blitheness that's enabling the atrocities that continue to go on in South America.
For Christ's sake, people, travel -- or read a damn book at the very least before sharing such ill-founded opinions.
Except for rare uncontacted tribes, South American natives are actual people you can meet and talk to. Ask them yourself why they choose not to join our wonderful shiny way of life.
This makes my heart ache so much that I can hardly bear to read it. I also feel like I detect a note of insecurity in many of the comments - it's as if the idea that our modern lifestyle and its impacts may be problematic and or in some aspects inferior to pre-modern ways of living is somehow threatening, and must therefore be rejected. I think it's massively ignorant and brutish to view earlier civilisations with such contempt, and collectively suicidal for humanity for us to carry on regardless when the Earth seems to be giving us plenty of signs that we are heading for disaster unless we change.
Topical, I watched a movie last night that covers a lot of the things you mentioned - Lost City Of Z http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1212428 it didn't get great ratings but was good, cinematic and thoughtful imho
You quoted the article, so I assume you read it. It states that "… the gold miners went to a bar in a near the border with Colombia, and bragged about the killings." Also, that "[t]he indigenous affairs bureau conducted some initial interviews in the town…"
In this case, the evidence appears to be a report of public acknowledgement of the crime and statements given in private interviews.
Perhaps you were asking about the content of the interviews, but you didn't specify.
That's not evidence. Hearsay most likely. Definitely suspicious.
I could walk into a bar tell everyone I killed someone and boast about it. I may become a suspect or person of interest to the police, but they're gonna have an awfully hard time pinning me with murder based on purely bar talk. Now if the police have bodies or weapons etc. then this is a different story.
OTOH who knows how rigorous the Brazilian court system is...
No idea what Brazilian law is regarding hearsay or even if they have a rule disallowing it, but at least in the US, this instance of hearsay would be allowed as evidence in court under the "statement against interest" exception to the hearsay rule.
They also said that they had to either kill or be killed. Which you conveniently omitted. And given everything I've read about many of these tribes, they will not hesitate to fire arrows at you even if you're a futuristic helicopter hovering 300 feet above them simply observing
It's a principle of the US criminal justice system that is derived from a moral intuition of justice. I hate seeing the US policy discarded because it's "irrelevant" to the context. The basis of the law is a moral issue that is always relevant. If murder wasn't illegal it'd still be wrong.
If you want to disagree with the moral principle, go ahead (but I suspect you'll sound like a tyrant).
Morality, morality morality, right, wrong, good, evil, bla bla bla... oh and if you disagree with me you should be shamed and ridiculed.
This is just an appeal to the mob to punish those that have a different value system then you. It works because there are enough people in the mob that agree with you that they know the absolute sense of what right and wrong is, that they all will punish those that don't share the same belief system, and praise you for sharing theirs.
So you get that tiny instinctual reward because you have shown yourself to be a valued member of the crowd through upvotes. And you'll also get an instinctual reward due to the sense of power, because those that oppose you are punished get downvoted to oblivion. This completes the circle, and keeps the mob mentality self sustaining. However, no intellectual progress comes out of it, and in fact it makes everyone dumber by rewarding only those who praise the mob.
The alternative is to live in a world where a few "strong men"/alpha males dominate over many people through fear and intimidation. I can't say one system is inherently more moral than the other but it does seem obvious which system is better for the average person
There are two factors that go into "innocent until proven guilty". One is basic reasoning: if you only know that a crime was committed, anyone is just as likely to have done it, so you need evidence to find the perpetrator. The other is the idea that it's worse to punish someone innocent than to let the guilty go unpunished.
The second part is quite interesting, because it would be suboptimal for rational agents. If humans were rational decision makers, the reaction to a crime should be chosen to balance out the damage, so that nobody can derive a benefit from criminal behavior. Then failure to punish would be equally severe as unjust punishment, and everyone should be treated according to their probability of guilt.
However, humans react much more strongly to losing something they already have than to not gaining it in the first place. So if you have a fine of $10,000 to distribute among 100 people with 1% probability of guilt, they will complain much more about the $100 they have to pay than when nobody pays anything, which means that one of them gets away with whatever crime deserved the $10,000 in the first place.
If the situation is different, e.g. when you are just deciding whether to write an article about some as yet unproven allegation, the same considerations don't necessarily apply. That doesn't make the general principle completely irrelevant, but it does mean that your standard of proof doesn't have to be quite as strict.
> If humans were rational decision makers, the reaction to a crime should be chosen to balance out the damage, so that nobody can derive a benefit from criminal behavior
Your example doesn't follow from this. In your example 99 innocent people are losing $100 because of a crime they didn't commit, and the perpetrator is making $9900 from their crime. So the perpetrator definitely still has profits from the crime if the punishment is spread out over multiple people.
Thanks for noticing that, I should have actually done the math instead of just relying on my intuition. Now I wonder what the actual optimal punishment strategy is.
Sort of. It's a technical detail of US criminal justice. If it was some moral basis of all justice, you'd have to explain why civil justice is 'immoral'.
I hate seeing the US policy discarded because it's "irrelevant"
I don't think anyone did that - if anything, you're seem to be elevating something you're very familiar with to some sort of universal principle mainly on the basis of that familiarity. And anyone who disagrees is a tyrant, somehow?
We make all sorts of nuanced judgements, even about other people's criminality, all the time. Sure, it's best not to judge without basis or too hastily or uncharitably or you name it. But few things outside actual criminal trials require 'proof beyond reasonable doubt'. That would be silly and impractical. Many people, for instance, believe OJ Simpson is guilty of murder and they're neither immoral nor tyrants for thinking it. Trotting out 'innocent until proven guilty' is even weirder and less applicable as some sort of substitute for 'there's a thing in this newspaper article I don't like or agree with'. One can just say that instead of reciting some strident and inapplicable phrase.
That's al well and good. Quite right. But that's a legal principle to be applied in a court of law, and also a principle applied and honoured int eh Brazilian courts. Nobody has been found guilty of anything yet. Everyone involved in this incident, if it even happened, is still a free person with protections under the law.
However there is prima fascia evidence a crime may have been committed and that is being reported and investigated.
What exactly, specifically about any of that is being objected to? I really can't tell. All I can see in criticism of the article is demagogic posturing.
> It's a principle of the US criminal justice system that is derived from a moral intuition of justice.
Morals are about value systems. Moral intuition is a paradox, as there is a multitude of moral value systems. Innocent until proven guilty is an American ethical precept.
> Innocent until proven guilty is an American ethical precept.
B-7, miss!
This concept predates Americans by a number of years; it certainly wasn't invented there. The idea can be traced to ancient Greek and was already applied by the Romans.
Regardless of whether the story is accurate or not the savagery of American native tribes is well-documented. Tribal warfare and cannibalism is commonplace.
Well, I didn't expect blatant racisim in HN comments, but there it is. Based on ignorance no less. Can we ban people like this? /serious
I am all for free speech, but excusing murder based on race is where I may have to draw the fucking line. Feel free to post this on a board relevant to your hopefuly unique interests.
I did not realize this was considered racism. I never excused anything. Is it true or false that native Americans took part in murderous rituals? It is very unfair to label my post racist. I am certainly not name-calling. The entire argument you presented in response was an ad hominem attack on me instead of refuting anything I mentioned. I am saddened that you are incapable of understanding my point. Please address the specific point I made earlier. Thank you.
There are hundreds of very different indigenous tribes spread throughout the country.
It is entirely up to each community and individual if/when/how they want to assimilate into citizenship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_in_Brazil#C...
As long as they remain in their indigenous status, they are actually exempt from some laws even.
Brazil has 500 years of indigenous abuse and they are very aware of that, to this day they have to constantly protect themselves and raise public awareness that land grabbers and miners are out to kill them. Recent political affairs have only worsened this ordeal.
It would've been better to seek them out and bring them into the modern world
Why is that better? Is there some proof that a modern lifestyle is better than a tribal lifestyle that's been maintained for thousands of years? How would you even define "better"?
Obviously unexpected mixing of uncontacted tribes with modern humans can end badly, but that doesn't mean that the best answer is to assimilate the tribe.
It seemed a matter of time till they'd be wiped out. The modern world is hostile to them and their way of living, and Brazil is disinterested in protecting them.
Of course, it is. If you didn't believe that, go back to tribal living. The problem is they're not us. They're at risk for a lot of our diseases, they will have great difficulty joining our society. The process will take generations. We only have to look at natives elsewhere in the Americas to see that they're still struggling. They're caught between trying to keep some of their own ways and culture and at the same time be a part of society and deal with our ways and culture. And they've already had multiple generations to assimilate.
All that said, the process must start sometime. It's not like there's an alternative.
There are actually, interestingly enough, historical examples of the opposite. I agree that it is counterintuitive.
"In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one.
This struck them as strange. Colonial society was richer and more advanced. And yet people were voting with their feet the other way.
The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. "
> The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay.
"The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay." is a nice euphemism for "The colonials kidnapped Native American children, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay."
The interesting point is that natives also captured colonials' children and did manage to persuade them to stay. And not just impressionable kids, even adults. People in both symmetric situations tended towards pre-modern lifestyle.
FTFA
The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. Benjamin Franklin observed the phenomenon in 1753, writing, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”
During the wars with the Indians, many European settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. After a while, they had plenty of chances to escape and return, and yet they did not. In fact, when they were “rescued,” they fled and hid from their rescuers.
The funny thing is, I've never met a single person who has read much anthropological or historical literature who holds this view. Truly. Not one. It's only ever held by people who know nothing of so-called 'tribal living' (as if pre-modern 'tribes' in different parts of the world have much in common!).
Human cultures can be so vastly different as to be truly incommensurable. Have a read of Bill Gammage's 'The Biggest Estate on Earth', about the Australian indigenous nations. They managed the entirely of Australia a single 'estate', providing ample, easily-obtained subsistence from a massive variety of sources, using a variety of agricultural and hunter-gathering techniques. For 60,000 years. The depth of culture and development of rich social interaction this engendered is literally unimaginable to us. A contemporary American or Australian, with our love of comfort and trivial gadgets, philosophical naivety, absence of acquaintance with the nonhuman world, and lack of concern for conspecifics may well seem like an unfathomably ignorant and petulant child to an Australian of 1000 years ago.
There's far too much to say about this in an HN comment, but the notion that modern living is objectively and unambiguously 'better' than that is plainly false. Particularly when you consider that our culture is very likely to destroy most natural systems in the next 100 years. The fashionable lingo is that our societies are 'unsustainable', but the plain accurate truth is that, so far, we have proven to be unviable. Maybe we'll fix this, maybe not. But indigenous Australians have a 60,000 year proven track record.
Note I'm not claiming the converse of your claim is true, but just that you're being grossly simplistic.
> If you didn't believe that, go back to tribal living.
That's an unworthy and silly rhetorical jibe, as you surely must know. We are moderns and must make our lives where we are. That doesn't prevent us from taking a fair and knowledge-based look at premodern cultures.
Agreed. I'm in no position to give up my lifestyle and the conveniences and predilections that accompany it, but reading this article about an American anthropologist who was betrothed to a Yamomami women while doing field work in the Amazon, had children, and tried to assimilate his wife and family into modern Western society (in New Jersey!) made me really reconsider some of my assumptions and priorities:
But life in New Jersey was not working out for Yarima. It wasn't the weather, food or modern technology but the absence of close human relations. The Yanomami day begins and ends in the shapono, open to relatives, friends, neighbours and enemies. But Yarima's day in the US began and ended in a closed box, cut off from society.
The "Tribal living" we're speaking of has a 0% chance of:
Curing disease
Defeating aging
Preventing mass-extinction from a supervolcano or asteroid impact
Leaving the planet before the sun envelops it
Of course, we might not do all of that either. We might get killed by nukes, or climate change. Some of it might not be possible even without those issues.
If you want the human race to continue on, a post-tribal lifestyle is the only way it is remotely possible. It isn't assured - but we know the chance of it happening with tribal living is 0.
Even simpler, a modern state can protect itself (to a certain extent) from other modern states. Being able to protect yourself from the apex predator is a wonderful thing ;)
It's amazing how people romanticize the past. Or imagine that past humans lived in harmony with nature. We never have. We're using to harvesting resources in unsustainable ways, burning old-growth forests intentionally to encourage habitats more friendly to prey animals, etc. Human nature wasn't that much different to now, but the scale and scope sure have changed!
But I'll still argue with 100% conviction that modern life is an improvement over what came before. You know where 1/10 women died in childbirth. Where a cut or a scrape or broken bone was often fatal. Where disease was often lethal and its cause unknown. Where war was just part of the way of life. Where only 1/10 men passed on their genes. Where superstition and practices that we consider barbaric abound. That doesn't mean we have it all right, or that there weren't nice things we gave up along the way. But never at any point was there any real option to stop advancing and keep the status quo. Cultures who did that, if any, are not around in an independent form today. Nature is still survival of the fittest.
And you could go back to tribal living if you wanted. There are plenty of people in the world living in primitive, tribal conditions and poverty with minimal interaction with the outside world. I expect some subset of those tribes would allow you to join them if you so chose. I'd seriously question your sanity if you did though.
And our paleo ancestors helped hunt woolly mammoths into extinction.
Turns out people are people and the "noble savage" thing is mostly myth. Not much hidden wisdom, not really any secret medicinal knowledge, just less effective ways of understand the world and doing things. This isn't to suggest pre modern cultures aren't worth studying, but it is to say they aren't worth romanticizing.
Most of America's landscapes were managed by indigenous peoples for tens of thousands of years. The idea of Europeans sailing to find a sparsely-populated wilderness is a myth. Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities in the world in the 15th century.
Furthermore, the fact that biochar is a buzzword in green agriculture today shows how little we've learned, seeing as indigenous populations used the "hidden wisdom" of 'terra preta' for thousands of years to enrich the soil. The quality of our crops today is built on thousands of years of selective breeding and clever farming by peoples in pre-Columbian America.
Sure, pre-modern cultures may have had "less effective" understandings of medicine or technology, but at the same time, these cultures survived for millennia. We're definitely more effective at screwing up our planet than they ever were.
Given the pending ecological disaster(s) we're facing, it's probably more responsible to try and learn from the examples set by ancient cultures rather than flippantly declaring that they were "less effective", and dismissing any contrary information as romanticizing.
The Aztecs had progressed beyond tribal society. They were an empire. If there had been peaceful trade, etc, they would likely be no different than you and I. They were certainly on the same path, if a bit behind.
They were a primitive technology empire though weren't they? I've always had the impression their tech was closer to that of the ancient Egyptians... so close to 2000 years behind the Europeans.
> The Aborigines very likely helped turn much of Australia into a desert.
That isn't remotely what that article (or the paper it summarises) suggests -- it has nothing whatsoever to do with desertification. The magnitude of ecological effects of indigenous settlement of Australia is as yet very poorly understood and highly contested, and the timeline even more so. It's possible, but by no means demonstrated, for example, that early human settlement wiped out megafauna, but that it quickly settled into a sustainable pattern as the incomers learned to manage the continent.
To label any detailed description of indigenous cultures as 'romanticizing' or relating to 18th century 'noble savage' myths, for no better reason than that it contradicts unevidenced & derogatory popular myths, is just lazy.
A portrait deriving from the actual evidence carefully unearthed so far suggests nothing remotely resembling a 'noble savage' account of indigenous Australian civilisation, nor one that was 'less effective' than ours. Indigenous Australians were not purely hunter-gatherers, running naked around a 'pristine' environment, but were active managers of an entire continent's biomass. The aforementioned Gammage and Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu are the best popular accounts, both drawing on and carefully referencing primary sources. Reading either might dispel a few prejudices.
"That isn't remotely what that article (or the paper it summarises) suggests -- it has nothing whatsoever to do with desertification"
Yes it is and yes it does. (But to find this out you have to read all the way to the end.)
The idea is that monsoon patterns were changed and the dry season extended which heated the land and resulted in more aridity. It's not a fringe theory at all and there is a fair degree of evidence for it.
Point being, primitives didn't necessarily live in Harmony with nature at all. Any more than we do. They just (to address your later point) were less "effective".
> Yes it is and yes it does. (But to find this out you have to read all the way to the end.)
I've read both it and the study it refers to. It has nothing to do with desertification (and it's not empirical -- it's simply modelling a possibility).
> It's not a fringe theory at all
I said 'contested', not 'fringe'. Big, big difference. The appropriate response when something is contested is to reserve judgement. As I do. And as Gammage, Pascoe et al do (it has little relation to their theses).
> Point being, primitives didn't necessarily live in Harmony with nature at all.
Only hippies ever suggested they did. The mainstream emerging picture of Australian indigenous civilisation has nothing whatsoever to do with 'living in H[sic]armony with nature'. That you choose that phrase, and jump so reactively at straw men, displays only your tribal affiliation to a general thesis, without any knowledge of the specifics.
"We showed that the climate responded significantly to reduced vegetation cover in the pre-monsoon season. We found decreases in rainfall, higher surface and ground temperatures and enhanced atmospheric stability"
In other words, burning vegetation led to a more arid climate. That is the entire thesis of the article. It's really pretty clear.
Not to beat a dead horse still further but one of us is really missing something here. It could be me and if it is I'd like to know what.
"Contested" isn't cause to reserve judgment at all. The age of the earth is contested. Man made climate change is contested. But the age of the earth is very likely what geologists claim it is. And it's also very likely aboriginal burning is one of the causes of aridity in Australia. In which case they weren't "managing" so much as ignorantly abusing. Very much as we do today.
Modern living is necessary for the survival of our species. Otherwise we'll suffer a catastrophic event and die. Therefore it is objecyively better to be working and living at our means pushing those limits of capital.
It seems unlikely that humans will be able to colonize other planets any time soon which would help preserve the human race after an extinction level event -- it will take some impending catastrophe to make that happen, and it's not clear that even then world governments could work together to make it happen.
If Europeans hadn't settled North America, is there reason to think the American Indians would be extinct today?
> It seems unlikely that humans will be able to colonize other planets any time soon
Human activity in space is increasing very rapidly, after recovering from the slowdowns at the end of the space race and the Cold War [1].
What makes you think this trend won't continue? Especially given the ongoing technological advancements and cost savings we are seeing from companies like SpaceX?
Agreed. Right now it looks like we may attempt a Mars Colony in my lifetime and by 2100 I wouldn't be surprised if there were dozens of Martian colonies.
To survive a catastrophic event you want to diversify your risk. Pushing the limit capital implies moving to a big city which makes it far easier for nuclear weapons to wipe out the majority of humans all at once.
Having self sustaining tribes far away from population centers is a very effective way to mitigate the death of our entire species in an all out nuclear war.
> They managed the entirely of Australia a single 'estate', providing ample, easily-obtained subsistence from a massive variety of sources, using a variety of agricultural and hunter-gathering techniques. For 60,000 years.
So an entire continent was just a big happy picnic for 60,000 years, with no famine or war? Uh huh.
Honestly the snark is unnecessary. I made no mention of war, nor perfection. Though as there were variable rates of nomadism in different indigenous language groups, and (in my experience) indigenous Australians are great foodies, there was probably a great deal of picnicking.
There are and have been no perfect human societies, and I'm making no such claims. My point is that unthinking statement, always based only on popular myth, that premodern cultures were uniformly inferior to modern, are unsubstantiated. The picture is much more complicated, particularly if you are willing to countenance values other than those our particular culture has chosen to maximise. Even the most cursory reading of anthropology and history reveals this very easily.
Your statement is equally hyperbolic and unthinking.
For one, "they managed the entirety of Australia" implies uniformity and political unity which did not exist. Australia is huge. Some unlucky groups in the interior had to dig ten feet deep to get water, and travel between wells frequently while waiting for them to refill. And keep their locations a closely-guarded secret, because their lives depended on it. I wouldn't call that "easily-obtained subsistence."
In general, the notion that hunter gatherers have an easier time procuring food than completely sedentary farmers is very much up for debate.
Your assertion that Americans are "philosophically naive" compared to indigenous australians is also... unscientific, to say the least.
We should absolutely reject colonialist value judgements like those found in the grandparent, however, let's not substitute them for an equally simplistic noble savage narrative.
I agree with you but I think it's yet to be shown they're less happy than modern people. Happiness seems to be relative, and bringing them in from masters of their environment (if they are) to lower status advanced humans could easily drop their happiness even if it improves things in an objective manner.
I've absolutely no love for the concept of "nobel savages" or "primitives living in harmony with nature" but it's possible they're just as happy, even given disease, murder, etc.
I may have read too much Nietzche and Schopenhauer but I belive using a fleeting emotion such as happiness as the sole basis for measuring the quality of one's life is a terrible idea, yet sadly it remains an incredibly popular concept in pop-science self-help books.
I have no interest in going back to tribal living, but I'm not presumptuous enough to think that tribal members want to give up the pressures of tribal living and replace them with the pressures of modern life.
We have no uncontacted natives in the USA AFAIK, we have Natives that had their population decimated (through disease and outright war) and lost their land, then we parked the survivors on isolated reservations in a world that's nothing at all like they once thrived in.
There is an alternative, it's just not economically viable or socially popular, but it would be to quarantine much of the Amazon and prevent modern humans from moving in.
Actually, it wouldn't be as outrageously expensive as I thought -- some sites say an acre of rainforest can be bought and protected for $10/acre. [1]
The entire Amazon rainforest is 2 million square miles or around 1.2B acres. So you could buy the whole thing for around $12B. Or about half the price of building a wall between the USA and Mexico [2] that many people see as unneeded and unwanted.
When I talked to some Brazilians about the American enthusiasm for buying the rainforest in order to protect it from deforestation, they were pretty concerned about how well the property rights in the purchased land could be protected. They pointed out that there is a whole lot of poaching going on in the Amazon and even in Brazilian parks.
The Rainforest Trust that you mentioned sounds like they're donating the land to national parks, which seems like a great solution because there will be forest rangers and so on, yet my Brazilian friends were concerned about how effectively they can deter poaching, especially in remote areas.
I don't have a clear sense of this but I wonder if it might provide a greater marginal benefit at present to pay for more protection of existing "protected" areas, compared to purchasing additional land.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm looking into Rainforest Trust now and they see to be one of the most credible and highly rated charity organizations (it's always so hard to make sure your donations aren't just bring taken advantage of).
Humanity benefits from continued mining, deforestation, and development of the Amazon rainforest? Sure, some humans (and corporations) benefit, but is there a benefit to humanity in general?
Am I really reading a comment advocating for culture genocide because of an assumption that our version of "society" must be forcibly imposed on other people?
And this is being discussed in good faith? Am I in real life right now?
Cultural genocide is the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements which make a one group of people distinct from other groups.
Thanks for the clarification. Interesting stuff (just skimmed the Wikipedia page). Seems pretty thorny to me.
In this case, with uncontacted peoples, I can't imagine having them persist for hundreds of years (or more) without us trying to communicate some medical knowledge, at the very least. However, there is likely no easy way to do so.
It is a much more complicated problem than that. There are all sorts of potential biological problems like limited disease resistance and potential psychological problems when forcing someone who grew up so primitively into a modern life. The standard has been to let these people make the choice for themselves without forcing them out of their current life. However they can never really make a true choice because they have no real understanding of what the modern world has to offer.
"The white people, who are trying to make us over into their image, they want us to be what they call "assimilated," bringing the Indians into the mainstream and destroying our own way of life and our own cultural patterns. They believe we should be contented like those whose concept of happiness is materialistic and greedy, which is very different from our way.
We want freedom from the white man rather than to be intergrated. We don't want any part of the establishment, we want to be free to raise our children in our religion, in our ways, to be able to hunt and fish and live in peace. We don't want power, we don't want to be congressmen, or bankers....we want to be ourselves. We want to have our heritage, because we are the owners of this land and because we belong here.
The white man says, there is freedom and justice for all. We have had "freedom and justice," and that is why we have been almost exterminated. We shall not forget this."
> “There is a lot of evidence, but it needs to be proven,” she said.
This won't stop the pitchforks from coming out well before we have such evidence, especially given they were workers from a mining company and the already hostile political climate regarding the topic of tribes. But personally I'd rather wait until this is the case before forming an opinion...
> warned that given the small sizes of the uncontacted Amazon tribes, this latest episode could mean that a significant percentage of a remote ethnic group was wiped out.
If 10 people dying means a "significant percentage was wiped out" shows that they were already on the brink of extinction as it was. It's not clear from the article if that was an obvious consequence to the preptraitors involved or they knew it was a risk.
Either way hopefully it wasn't a case of disregard for human life, even if the tribe violently engaged them giving an exuse to use modern weaponry against them.
Also this: With land disputes on the rise in many remote areas of Brazil, indigenous groups, rural workers and land activists have all been targeted by violence.
Not justifying alleged murder -- but looks to be a generally violent region and environment.
Gibson said it. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.