William Buckner, a student of Evolutionary Anthropology at UC Davis, says that we’ve been romanticizing the hunter-gatherer:
Why do people in societies with substantially greater life expectancy, reduced infant mortality, greater equality in reproductive success, and reduced rates of violence, romanticize a way of life filled with hardships they have never experienced? In wealthy, industrialized populations oriented around consumerism and occupational status, the idea that there are people out there living free of greed, in natural equality and harmony, provides an attractive alternative way of life. To quote anthropologist David Kaplan, “The original affluent society thesis then may be as much a commentary on our own society as it is a depiction of the life of hunter-gatherers. And that may be its powerful draw and lasting appeal.” One might think that if avarice, status hierarchies, and inequality are peculiarly modern phenomena, then maybe they aren’t part of human nature, and with the right kind of activism, and enough forward-thinking individuals, such problems can be readily solved by changing the culture.
Conversely, to look across human cultures and notice that even the smallest and most ‘egalitarian’ societies are still plagued by problems of violence, sexism, xenophobia, and inequality may be disheartening for many political progressives and anthropologists dedicated to social justice. These problems are not new — in fact they are very old indeed — and they cannot simply be wished away or made to disappear with misleading commentary. But there is a concern that acknowledging the deep roots of many human social ills is to excuse them, or to concede that they can never be mitigated or overcome. This is not only defeatist, it is completely misguided. Recent human history is undeniably a story of enormous progress. If global declines in child mortality, hunger, violence, and poverty, and increases in life expectancy do not represent progress, then the word simply has no meaning.
Many of the so-called ills that Bruckner deprecates have genetic roots, but it is almost certain that he has been brainwashed by his teachers into disbelieving that. Also, the famous equality of hunter-gatherers applies only to material possessions, of which they have very little, and the deep-seated, genetic hierarchies common to all social animals are plainly in evidence. The Plains Indians were very good examples.
Those most prone to religious thinking and the quickest to accuse scientists of ‘believing’ in science. So too, I’ve round, the only persons who go around accusing others of the naturalistic fallacy are themselves the ones most trapped in worldviews built around the naturalistic fallacy. Here in the above example, they accuse others of arguing war is good when the others argue war happened among the earliest populations.
I sympathized with Bruckner. The HG way of life has no appeal for those of us who would have died in childhood. Even the healthy should look at HG living with skepticism- it’s hard and dangerous even in a world of plenty, and it probably was a pretty good winnower of quality in its human participants.
Romanticizing it has a long history, whether or not for political reasons. On some level, Rousseau and Marx may have been constructing thought experiments, but their elaborate [in Marx's case very] theorizing still rested on total, absurd, myths about the human past. For less overtly political reasons, we have had romanticizing of HG since the postwar era of the affluent society. Star Trek, normally in love with technocracy and the people who thrive in it, has had its moments. The original series mostly stuck to romanticizing earlier modes of civilized, settled life, basically anything without too much computer coordination. Deep Space 9 actually did one in which Captain Sisko confronted a lost settlement of human technophobes seeking a cultish HG/early farmer ideal, with the covert backing of some in the Federation. They were the villains, but given sympathy. I have more sympathy now than I did when I saw it 20 years ago.
I think we’re finally past the point where I think technology is going to go too far.
Of course, I stepped out of sympathy with Bruckner when he used the term “xenophobia”.
I have wearied of the non-clinical use of the suffix “phobia”. I’m not sure many people have a pathological fear of foreigners or any of the other things to which it is so readily attached. It starts to seem like a compulsive mental habit of a child-like society to keep using these 2-minute hate verbal constructions.
And, of course, the corresponding xenophilia trait is just as weird and far from a solid foundation, but is never cited.
Then again, I would have thought a friendliness to others combined with a desire to hold one’s own space a healthy mix. Apparently not.
Graham, xenophobia is probably a good thing for most hunter-gathering peoples. Strangers compete for limited resources and can carry dangerous diseases. The North Sentinel Islanders kill anyone who approaches their island, which is exactly why this primitive group of hunter-gatherers is still around. A single measles virus might wipe them out almost overnight.
It has been said that they eat strangers, although I don’t think there is clear evidence of that. Eating strangers could be very dangerous because of exposure to new pathogens. Their best strategy is “Kill the stranger but do not eat him”.
Jim,
That gave me a dark chuckle. You’re probably right on that best strategy.
Aliens coming to your world that are that much more advanced than you are, presuming you can even understand the interaction in those terms, are a mortal threat whether or not they claim to be or even are good willed. Getting rid of them and, to the best of your limited understanding, trying not to attract more of them and/or disposing of them in such a way as not to make it obvious what you’ve done, is job one.
If you’re close enough to them to understand some of their stuff, great. Learn it and wait.
If you’re close enough to interact more evenly but still well behind, that might actually be the most dangerous time- the time your culture is most likely to succumb or disintegrate altogether under the pressure/opportunities/blandishments of the new one.
If you’re close in tech and particularly capable and your alien patrons not too acquisitive, you might be all right. For example, Japan. It didn’t look it for a while, but India both had elites able to profit from allying their states to Britain and the capacity to develop a new elite under its aegis capable of eventually guiding a new Indian state not wholly disassociated from its roots. OTOH, most of the Muslim world had been on terms of equality if not superiority and dominance wrt Europe at one point and was still heavily broken by a comparatively brief period of colonial encounter with a stronger Europe. Plainly, no guarantees. What Ottoman vizier or Andalusian prince would have expected his society to fall from colonial master to colonized subject in any amount of centuries?
Sorry – a bit beyond scope there. Sometimes one just has random thoughts.
If you’re as isolated as the Sentinelese, probably best to kill the stranger and hope for the best. Definitely a good idea to have a strong taboo against eating him. Some wise chief/shaman/medicine-maker of the past hopefully convinced them that the strangers aren’t either men or good eating-animals. Think they were either would be a people-ending mistake. Good luck to them.
“the famous equality of hunter-gatherers applies only to material possessions, of which they have very little, and the deep-seated, genetic hierarchies common to all social animals are plainly in evidence.”
Very true. Many modern intellectuals who long for a primitive society would not be at the top of it — and might die soon after becoming part of it. Nonetheless, intellectuals are reasonable to long for a primitive society — because there are things worth dying for, and there are things worth being at the bottom of a hierarchy for.
The Buckner article is attacking a straw man – in the sense that ignorantly (or with a socio-political agenda) ‘romanticizing’ any people or way of life is bound to be erroneous in many respects.
Nonetheless there are major qualitative differences between simple HGs (without food storage) and the peansant-agrarian societies which replaced them; and there is no real doubt that HGs were (simple HGs do not now exist, nor have they for *many* decades, making recent fieldwork potentially very misleading) – on average – happier, taller, healthier, better fed, less disease-riddled, longer-lived and they have *a lot* more leisure than peasants.
HGs were not living in utopia, but these are solid advantages.
The following article (which has many references) was written before I came a Christian and anti-modernist (I was a kind of agnostic libertarian), but I still regard the basic facts as correct:
https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/evolpsych.html
Hunter Gatherer societies were violent as F*&K. I read about this anthropologist that went to the Amazon. He found a lot of people living in large villages with the most psycho evil head Men. When asked why they lived with the psycho Man they replied that if they lived in a smaller village the bigger one would attack them, kill all the Men, rape and enslave the Women so they lived with asshole to stay alive. All of them wanted to live in a smaller village of 50 people or so but couldn’t because of the asshole. If they tried to leave asshole would kill them. Has anything changed? The Western countries are run by psychopath assholes. Chimps, by the way, do much the same.
People struggle with the notion that we evolved for our natural environment, but our natural environment didn’t evolve for us.
It helps to think of modern humans as zoo animals. That’s the analogy John Durant makes in The Paleo Manifesto. Regular feedings and an environment devoid of predators certain increase average lifespan, but zoo animals aren’t exactly thriving in their enclosures.
Living like a hunter-gatherer can be fun in small doses. Hunting your own food, breathing clean air, cooking over an open fire and sleeping under the stars are great.
But my grandmother, who was born in a hide tent, reminded me it could be tough, even when everything is going great. I asked about the camp she and my grandfather used to live in, and she said she wouldn’t want to live there again. One year before my uncle was born it snowed on the fourth of July.
Horses were the only way to get anywhere, and once she had to drag my uncle on a homemade sled deal to get somewhere in the snow.
People romanticize the life; even my grandparents would take my brother and me into the mountains in the summer to fish and go berry picking. Now thinking about it I was stabbed with the desire to be at that camp again. Then I looked outside at the freezing rain. Maybe I’ll wait until summer.