Lies Our Culture Tells Us: The Lives Of Primitive People's were Nasty Brutish Short

[Sage Blackthorn]

I'm not exactly sure how to start this post other than to quote what was said in another post that made me think of it from Ghel's comment in "What Is A Miracle"

And fear. Would you really want to go back to a time when the average human life span was 40 years? When common causes of death were infection after a wound, influenza, and childbirth? When the average person spent 90% of their waking hours looking for food?

I'm quite glad I don't live in an earlier time. The advances in medicine and technology have allowed people in industrialized nations to have a much better standard of living than ever before. If nothing else, I wouldn't want to live in a time when tampons didn't exist.

This statement seems to be based on a myth that has been perpetuated in pop-culture. That the life of priitive hunter/gatherer and hunter/gardener societies was "Nasty, brutish, and short" as they had to contend with "Nature, red in tooth and claw." While this simplistic view of ancient "stone age" people might be forgiven to a person living in the 1700's or 1800's who lacked both the evidence of both archeaology of the past, and the anthropology studies of the present with modern hunter/gatherer societies, this sort of ignorance should not be perpetuated today.

Researchers studying modern tribes have shown that on average, Hunter/Gatherers work significantly less time each day to aquire food, water, and materials for providing, shelter and clothing than a settled agriculturalist. Agriculture is, flat out, more work than hunting, fishing, and foraging. Yet the myth that the life of tribal peoples is "Savage, brutish, and short" persists in the face of overwhelming evidence that the hunting and gathering lifestyle is far more leisured than out own.

When I was 17, a friend handed me a book he was studying in his psychology class. Brian said they were studying the Eutopian Novel genre of literature as a way of identifying what a culture values. The first was "Utopia" by Sir Thomas Moore, published in 1516. The second was "Herland" by Charlotte Perkins, published in 1915. But the last was the one that captured my attention, "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, published in 1992. From that book, I found myself reading all of his books, as well as those on his suggested reading list. A few of those deal with the how's and whys of Tribal lifestyle.

"Stone Age Economics" by Marshal Sahlins, Described as "the classic study of the "Original Affluent Society".

"Limited Wants, Unlimmited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment", John Gowdy, Editor "For more than 99% of our history, human life has meant hunting-gathering life. If you want to know how this life worked, you can spend two or three years intensively browsing the anthropology shelves of your local library—or you can read Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment. John Gowdy's book is a treasure, and I recommend it without reservation to all who want to know more about this tragically-neglected subject."

"Man's Rise to Civilization" by Peter Farb

"Stolen Continents: the Americas Through Indian Eyes Since 1492" by Ronald Wright.

"The Continuum Concept" by Jean Liedloff, which has in it's core a comparison between "Modern Civilized" people and modern "Primitive, Stone Age" people.

The rest of the "suggested reading list" can be found at http://www.ishmael.org/Education/Readings/ if anyone is interested.

From there I started to read about Tribal Hunter/Gatherer societies, first those mentioned in Quinn's books (Ishmael, The Story Of B, My Ishmael, Beyond Civilization, etc.) like The Gebusi tribe of Papua New Guinea, and the Yequana Tribe of Venezuela to the Kombai of West Papua and the Candoshi-Shapra of the Amazon (whom my friend's Ron and Karen visited with to learn their skills and document them in one of the instructional videos which won a Telly Award for Best Documentary).

Recently, as I've mentioned in other posts, I picked up a copy of "The Vegetarian Myth" by Lierre Keith that makes mention of Tribal people being shown in a variety of studies to be healthier and free of complaints common to "civilized" people who rely on modern agriculture to procure their food. Lierre mentions the Weston A. Price Foundation in her research in relation to the links between modern diet and various diseases that seem to plague civilization but are notably absent from indigenous peoples who are still being allowed to live their traditional lifestyles (and hence to eat their traditional diets).

There is abundant evidence, not the least of which are documentaries with "primitive" peoples themselves, that they do not live in constant fear nor do they spend "90% of their time looking for food."

[Ghel]

That comment was comparing prehistoric hunter/gatherer societies with modern industrial societies. It may be that the 90% I cited is off, but you can't deny that driving to the grocery store takes much less time than walking through the forest, hunting small game and gathering berries. You can't deny that the average human lifespan has increased dramatically in the last 500 years. You can't deny that increasing medical technology has decreased the number of deaths from infection and childbirth. If prehistoric humans were healthier, it was because they exercised more than we do with our sedentary lifestyle.

This sort of unreserved nostalgia bothers me. Many people look at the past through the filter of time and see something wonderful. Well, it wasn't. Culture goes through a cycle, getting better and worse at different times, but knowledge advances. Except in extreme cases, you can't kill off an idea. So the medical technology that we have today and the knowledge of germ theory and evolution will remain with us. People no longer die in droves because of smallpox. For that reason alone, the present is better than the past.

And I still wouldn't want to live in a time when tampons weren't readily available.

[AdminAssistant]

And I still wouldn't want to live in a time when tampons weren't readily available.

Ooh, me either.

I get this sometimes from undergrad theatre majors who think that Shakespeare was sooo romantic, and wouldn't it be awesome to go back in time to see his plays in the Old Globe? Um, no. Elizabethan/Jacobean London was anything but romantic - disease, overcrowding, the Thames being a cesspool, everybody hurling their crap out of the window, not to mention the whole "not bathing" thing. Hey, I wouldn't bathe either if the water were that contaminated. Oh, and of course, the rampant syphilis that would make your junk fall off. Yup. Romantic.

[Sage Blackthorn]

That comment was comparing prehistoric hunter/gatherer societies with modern industrial societies. It may be that the 90% I cited is off, but you can't deny that driving to the grocery store takes much less time than walking through the forest, hunting small game and gathering berries. You can't deny that the average human lifespan has increased dramatically in the last 500 years. You can't deny that increasing medical technology has decreased the number of deaths from infection and childbirth. If prehistoric humans were healthier, it was because they exercised more than we do with our sedentary lifestyle.

This sort of unreserved nostalgia bothers me. Many people look at the past through the filter of time and see something wonderful. Well, it wasn't. Culture goes through a cycle, getting better and worse at different times, but knowledge advances. Except in extreme cases, you can't kill off an idea. So the medical technology that we have today and the knowledge of germ theory and evolution will remain with us. People no longer die in droves because of smallpox. For that reason alone, the present is better than the past.

And I still wouldn't want to live in a time when tampons weren't readily available.

"Takes less time" does not equate with less work. Take into account the tremendous amount of work that is required to grow, process, and transport that food to the grocery store. Then consider the work involved in producing the car that carries a person to the store, the fuel for the car. Now consider the ecological destruction of modern farming practices in order to grow the food that is sent to those grocery stores. It takes a phonomenal amount of work to acquire the food that you buy from a grocery store.

It's more convenient to goto a grocery store, pick out processed foods in neat little plastice wrappers. But there is a great deal of evidence that eating such foods are unhealthy for us, as well as our "sedentary lifestyle". We end up eating nutritionally deficient foods that lack the nutrients our bodies need to function properly.

This in not, as you put it, unreserved nostalgia for the past. Tribal life is not a Eutopia. Tribal peoples are neither Angels nor Devils and raising such an arguement is a classic tactic for distracting from issues of the negative side effects of modern civilization and modern life.

Depending on which researcher you listen to, modern human beings, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, people physically no different from you or I, have been on this planet for between 50,000-150,000 years. The estimated human population at the beginning of the last great Ice Age is thought to be about 10,000 world wide. By the end of that Ice Age our numbers had grown to an estimated 100,000. In all that time, we did not destroy the world. Yet in the last 13,000 years, populations have exploded to 6.8 billion and humans have over-run the globe. We have a finite amount of resources on this planet, and it's common knowledge amongst ecologists that as there are more and more humans in existance, there must logically be less of something else. That "something else" is the other forms of life on this planet that feed us, clean the water we drink and the air we breath. Species extinction is upto what? 200 species a day now? Many of those species as a direct result of modern, civilized human activity in the form of clearing habit (destroying eco-systems) for industrial farming.

Proponents of such things always say "We have to grow more food to feed the starving millions!" Well, guess what. Biologists have known for years that population levels always track with their food supply, and that modern agriculture actually is the cause of famine by allowing populations to grow beyong their territories carrying capacity.

Life spans? There are numerous individuals amongst tribal peoples who have been reported to live "seventy winters" or more and be in good health (as in not in need of dialysis, wheelchairs, heart medication, or oxygen tanks and full life-support). Tribal peoples do have medicine. There are stories from the tribes of North America of shamans having the ability to heal even gravely wounded warriors using herbal medicines. Take into account that approximately 50% of the pharmaceuticals on the market today are derived from plant sources, and "modern medicine" is now paying close attention to traditional healing techiques.

The point is not unreserved nostalgia for the past, the point is that Tribal societies have evolved lifestyles, beliefs, and rules of social conduct (traditions) that, through empiracal testing, through trial and error, have had to deal with every social problem imaginable, and they have found ways of maintaining the harmony and happiness of the tribe based on experience of what works for them. The point is that they, Tribal peoples, where ever they are found to still be living their traditional lifestyles are no "in fear" but are invariably happy....until the intercesstion of modern civilzation. The point is that they have maintained their balance within the ecosystems, they are an integral part of the whole while we, "civilized" humans, seem bent on killing ourselves. What is it that they know that we don't? Why is that some tribes have existed since those "pre-historic" times right up until now, living exactly as their ancestors lived and not destroyed themselves? Because they developed a stable society, ideally suited to their environment.

Yes, modern technology and modern medicine have done amazing (one might even say miraculous) things. But not all of those things have been beneficial to us in the long run. Unintended consequences and such. But people keep clinging to this way of life becuase they have been spoon fed a story about tribal life that scares them to death. A story that is flat out false, based on biased assumptions of thinkers from hundreds of years ago.

The fact of the matter is that tribal life is not as scary as we are lead to believe. It is simply a different way of earning a living in this world that has a number of benefits that our lifestyle lacks. Perpetuating the myth that tribal peoples live in constant fear and struggle does a disservice to all civilization. It's cultural propaganda, a way of teaching people from birth not to question the recieved wisdom. And it NEEDS to be questioned, especially considering the damage modern civilization is doing to the world that sustains us.

[Wingates_Hellsing]

Normally I don't resort to quote-stacks, but I feel that this is the only way I can intelligibly respond to this particular text wall.

"Takes less time" does not equate with less work. Take into account the tremendous amount of work that is required to grow, process, and transport that food to the grocery store. Then consider the work involved in producing the car that carries a person to the store, the fuel for the car. Now consider the ecological destruction of modern farming practices in order to grow the food that is sent to those grocery stores. It takes a phonomenal amount of work to acquire the food that you buy from a grocery store.

You're forgetting or ignoring that each of these steps doesn't provide the necessary object or substance for only person for each person performing the given task. Modern technologies allow a relatively small group of farmers to work incredibly large areas of land which are capable of producing higher than ever yields, preserved and carried by the hundreds of tons more efficiently than ever to the various areas consuming said substance. In this sense it takes very little comparative work for me to get my grocery store food because the processes involved have optimized production and distribution so that farmland no longer has to be local (a troublesome limitation) and the work they do doesn't just feed me, it feeds thousands of people. This is as opposed to hunting/gathering which takes a lot of time, effort and expertise for each meal all of which has to be done by hand and is by no means reliable compared to structured farming. If the game decides to move out, or a pestilence ruins the berry population, you're fucked. But industrial farming allows for a certain amount of redundancy and protection against loss.

It's more convenient to goto a grocery store, pick out processed foods in neat little plastice wrappers. But there is a great deal of evidence that eating such foods are unhealthy for us, as well as our "sedentary lifestyle". We end up eating nutritionally deficient foods that lack the nutrients our bodies need to function properly.

Well, there's some evidence that some of the substances in some of the food we buy at supermarkets may be more harmful than comparative substances that we would encounter in nature. Ultimately though, we still have all the access in the world to fresh veggies and fruit as well as raw meat that's perfectly healthy depending on how you prepare it. What we eat is a personal choice that was created, not decided, by technology. In the end, it matters much less if the food you eat is healthy so much as it does that you have food at all.

This in not, as you put it, unreserved nostalgia for the past. Tribal life is not a Eutopia. Tribal peoples are neither Angels nor Devils and raising such an arguement is a classic tactic for distracting from issues of the negative side effects of modern civilization and modern life.

Denying that scientific advancement isn't practically better because less advanced cultures manage to get along is just as incorrect nostalgia notwithstanding. The fact of the matter is that scientific advancement has and will feed us better, heal us better, and make our lives more comfortable. Spirituality, the vague and ultimately 100% opinion thing that it is, cannot be considered outside the individual as being better or worse. Meanwhile you yourself gloss over the negative aspects of tribal life and present the positive as equal or greater than those of modern culture.

Depending on which researcher you listen to, modern human beings, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, people physically no different from you or I, have been on this planet for between 50,000-150,000 years. The estimated human population at the beginning of the last great Ice Age is thought to be about 10,000 world wide. By the end of that Ice Age our numbers had grown to an estimated 100,000. In all that time, we did not destroy the world. Yet in the last 13,000 years, populations have exploded to 6.8 billion and humans have over-run the globe. We have a finite amount of resources on this planet, and it's common knowledge amongst ecologists that as there are more and more humans in existance, there must logically be less of something else. That "something else" is the other forms of life on this planet that feed us, clean the water we drink and the air we breath. Species extinction is upto what? 200 species a day now? Many of those species as a direct result of modern, civilized human activity in the form of clearing habit (destroying eco-systems) for industrial farming.

We haven't destroyed the world in the last 10,000 years either, and the evidence to suggest that we necessarily will anytime soon is more than a little thin on the ground. Actually, there is an infinite amount of resources on this planet over time because, outside the mineral, ever speck of it is technically renewable. Some more than others with a few too slow to utilize as such (oil, for example). The plants and animals we eat reproduce themselves and thus make more, the water cycle cleans our water constantly, and so long as there is plant life there will be an o2/CO2 cycle. This planet is not a closed or outwards-only system as you seem to imply. Energy comes into the system as heat and light from our sun, is transferred from form to form occasionally passing through living organisms before it eventually leeches into space. But until the day the sun no longer shines there will be new energy coming in.

Proponents of such things always say "We have to grow more food to feed the starving millions!" Well, guess what. Biologists have known for years that population levels always track with their food supply, and that modern agriculture actually is the cause of famine by allowing populations to grow beyong their territories carrying capacity.

This is one of the more confusing claims you've made. True, population increases with the food supply because more people are able to just barely squeeze by, but this is not what causes people to literally be starving. Sure, the tendency is for there to be more equally hungry people in a supplied society, but we're talking about un-supplied societies. Those who lack the technology and knowledge to grow the food they need. If every third world nation had the same food production technology as the privileged few there would be minimal hunger. Starving people plastered on the news are usually tribal cultures or disaster-struck semi-advanced cultures living under temporary duress. People in Somalia were only barely scraping by before and they're only barely scraping by now, the problem is, as it ever was, that when the defecation hits the oscillation they've got literally nothing to fall back on domestically.

Life spans? There are numerous individuals amongst tribal peoples who have been reported to live "seventy winters" or more and be in good health (as in not in need of dialysis, wheelchairs, heart medication, or oxygen tanks and full life-support). Tribal peoples do have medicine. There are stories from the tribes of North America of shamans having the ability to heal even gravely wounded warriors using herbal medicines. Take into account that approximately 50% of the pharmaceuticals on the market today are derived from plant sources, and "modern medicine" is now paying close attention to traditional healing techiques.

There are also numerous persons in modern culture who also find that they can get on without medical help. It isn't that people in modern culture have to have this assistance and tribals don't, it's that in both there's a small percentage who manage not to need any. In tribal culture there's limited assistance and any who do end up needing it die, in modern culture those who need assistance can get it so they don't. More to the point, there's very little empirical testing in less advanced cultures. They happen across something that works and run with it. Technology allows us to transcend merely knowing that something works, but why. This in turn allows us to do it better because we can skip all the stuff that doesn't have to do the work at hand and focus on the moving parts themselves. Oh, and as an aside, for the love of god don't factor alternative medicine in with modern medicine, they go together about as well as peanut butter and toothpaste. What scientific attention is being paid to tribal remedies is almost entirely if not entirely relegated to the area of that which we have not yet encountered. It's more to do with the fact that we haven't been there and they just happen to live there already.

The point is not unreserved nostalgia for the past, the point is that Tribal societies have evolved lifestyles, beliefs, and rules of social conduct (traditions) that, through empiracal testing, through trial and error, have had to deal with every social problem imaginable, and they have found ways of maintaining the harmony and happiness of the tribe based on experience of what works for them. The point is that they, Tribal peoples, where ever they are found to still be living their traditional lifestyles are no "in fear" but are invariably happy....until the intercesstion of modern civilzation. The point is that they have maintained their balance within the ecosystems, they are an integral part of the whole while we, "civilized" humans, seem bent on killing ourselves. What is it that they know that we don't? Why is that some tribes have existed since those "pre-historic" times right up until now, living exactly as their ancestors lived and not destroyed themselves? Because they developed a stable society, ideally suited to their environment.

I've yet to see any real evidence that tribal people are inherently happier or more stable than modern people. You can't deny that tribes throughout history have had conflicts with each other like any other civilization, sometimes violent conflicts. To say that tribal people are invariably happy and harmonious until evil ugly modern culture interceded is to portray them as angels and us as devils. But life isn't fairy tails. Some people are happy and some people aren't. Some fight, and others don't. But this has everything to do with the number and variance of cultures which are aware of the others when it comes to conflict and the individual in question when it comes to happiness. The way you put it one would think that a tribal shits flowers and hangs out with other tribes having good times. They don't. They sometimes get along, and sometimes they kill each other. No one's shit doesn't stink.

Yes, modern technology and modern medicine have done amazing (one might even say miraculous) things. But not all of those things have been beneficial to us in the long run. Unintended consequences and such. But people keep clinging to this way of life becuase they have been spoon fed a story about tribal life that scares them to death. A story that is flat out false, based on biased assumptions of thinkers from hundreds of years ago.

Problem being that you imply that the negative effects of technology invalidate the positive without providing any proof. The net effect of nuclear energy is very far into the positive. There may be a few smudges along the way, and they can be pretty bad in and of themselves. But within the context of all that we've gained it's pretty insignificant.

The fact of the matter is that tribal life is not as scary as we are lead to believe. It is simply a different way of earning a living in this world that has a number of benefits that our lifestyle lacks. Perpetuating the myth that tribal peoples live in constant fear and struggle does a disservice to all civilization. It's cultural propaganda, a way of teaching people from birth not to question the recieved wisdom. And it NEEDS to be questioned, especially considering the damage modern civilization is doing to the world that sustains us.

Yes, it is. There may be some exaggerations but it's pretty easy to see that doing almost nothing but hunt for food and fashion largely low-quality tools and clothes can't really compare with going to work for 8 hours a day with TV, the internet and countless hobbies to come home to in addition to easily acquirable food and energy. Sometimes the norm is the norm because no one questions it, other times it's the norm because plenty of people questioned it and most of them came to the same conclusion.

[Sage Blackthorn]

Ok, one thing at a time., this is gonna take a long time to work through thoroughly and logically. I've spent the last 20 years studying this subject, so it's not gonna be easy to get through in just one post.......

You're forgetting or ignoring that each of these steps doesn't provide the necessary object or substance for only person for each person performing the given task. Modern technologies allow a relatively small group of farmers to work incredibly large areas of land which are capable of producing higher than ever yields, preserved and carried by the hundreds of tons more efficiently than ever to the various areas consuming said substance. In this sense it takes very little comparative work for me to get my grocery store food because the processes involved have optimized production and distribution so that farmland no longer has to be local (a troublesome limitation) and the work they do doesn't just feed me, it feeds thousands of people. This is as opposed to hunting/gathering which takes a lot of time, effort and expertise for each meal all of which has to be done by hand and is by no means reliable compared to structured farming. If the game decides to move out, or a pestilence ruins the berry population, you're fucked. But industrial farming allows for a certain amount of redundancy and protection against loss.

If the game decides to move, the tribe follows it, usually on a traditional migration for nomadic peoples that corresponds to the seasonal migrations of the animals themselves. If a pestilance ruins the berries that year, then the dig for roots. In terms of calories gained vs. calories expended, foraging beats farming hands down when all factors are considered. Those factors are not only things like water and sun and harvesting. But also soil fertility (of which modern farming practices have depleted, leading to the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930's), dependance on fossil calories in the form of petroleum based chemical fertilizers that give us those high crop yields. Also chemical pesticides (also petroleum based). And what allows those few people to do so much work? Tractors, Combines, Threshers, Bailers.....machines that run on diesel and gasoline (more calories from the fossil reserve, a finite resource). Transportation from farm to processing and distribution centers (which themselves run on energy derived for the most part from coal, more fossil calories) in trucks that use gas, and a recent estimate I heard said that it takes an average of 7 gallons of oil to produce one tire, not to mention it takes oil to produce all the plastic parts of the machines. Plastic packaging for the food, energy to run refrigeration systems. Jet fuel to transport food across oceans quickly so it doesn't spoil before reaching market. Pumps to draw water from deep well aquifers for Center-Point irrigation systems. Aquifers that are being drained faster than they are being replenished via the Water Cycle that you mentioned.

The only reason that modern food production has such high yeilds, and is able to distribute all that food over as large an area (the world) as it does is due to Oil, a finite resource. It's productivity is artificially inflated. When the fossil reserve runs out, so does the food and we're all "fucked" as you so eloquently put it. World oil reserves have alread fallen passed the 50% mark. All of modern civilization is currently based on technologies that require oil. Are you telling me that you don't think this situation is a negative side effect of building a civilization on a finite resource? Rather than developing technologies that depend on renewable resources?

And since you pointed out that I haven't stated any of the negative consequences to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, I'll do so now. One of the draw backs is the size of the population that can be supported. H/G societies tend to be smaller in comparison to settled agrarian societies. But, smaller populations are able to survive on the food that can be produced without the tremendous added input of energy.

Depending on the climate, organic farming methods can produce yeilds on par with modern industrial farming, using natual rainfall and surface water irrigation from rivers and streams. Using crop rotation, compost, manure, blood and bone meal, and wood ashes as fertilizer. In fact farmers Gene Logsdon and Joel Salatin have been pioneering this methods for a number of years now and it's estimated that if all the farms in the Northeast United States employed these methods, not only would they be replenishing the top soil, and hence rebuilding soil fertility and reversing the damage done by industrial chemical farming practices, but would also be sequestering enough atmospheric carbon to offset and cancel out that which is currentlly being produced by the US. This is likely what will have to happen if we are to deal with the immediate problems. But I don't see this happening with the way we currently govern ourselves (and this is where Tribalism comes into it, not so much the technology, but how a people decide what technology is used and how.)

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According to those who study evolutionary biology (In this case, I learned this from Alan Thornhill, professor of evolutionary biology at Texas A&M University when he did a lecture with Daniel Quinn called "Food Production and Population Growth" that I have on DVD), population size, a regions "Carrying Capacity" is affected by 3 levels of interaction with the environment. The basic level of interaction is the amount of available resource in a biologic population's territory. That determines the base size.

The second level overlays and modifies the first and involves competition with other biologic populations. Think of it as having a pie that represents all the resources in a given area. With just one species there, they can take all the pie. But when you have multiple species, they each take a part of the pie. And in a sense they are also part of the pie as prey species become food for predator species. It's the ABC's of ecology that we all should've learned in grade school. When there's lots of rabbits, the foxes eat well and reproduce a lot. More foxes means there's less rabbits for all of them, and their population drops accordingly. Fewer foxes to eat the rabbits means that the rabbits population rises, and the cycle starts over.

So anyway, the 3rd level that overlays and modifies the first two is the social level and that only kicks in with social animals. Social groups develope lifestyles that in conjunction with the first two levels, serve to limit population growth further. These are institutions that govern acceptable family size in a social group. In wolf packs, for example, only the Alpha Male and Female have puppies.

How does modern industrial farming create the conditions under which famine can occur? Simply put, it's when resources are brought into a region to artificially boost it's carrying capacity beyond normal. Food is brought into say Somalia (since you mentioned it) in order to "feed the starving millions" (requiring all that oil for production and transportation I mentioned above). All the sudden life gets easier. Basic ecological laws tell us that Populations track with Food Supply: More Food = More People. So now a region that could support say, 40,000 people on it's own resources now has a population of 50,000 people, 10,000 of which are now dependant on outside resources, and because there are more people, there are still people starving. So Foreign and International Aid sends in more food to feed those starving. People being people, the population rises again to 60,000, with 20,000 now dependant on foreign aid shipments to live. At the same time, modern medical techniques are put into effect.

The net effect is what Dr. Thornhill describes as "The Demographic Trap", which is that death rates drop sharply while birthrates remain high because the social changes of the 3rd level of interaction haven't caught up. The people of the region are use to have LOTS of children to offset the high infant mortality rate in Somalia. More of those children survive, more of the elderly survive as basic sanitation and modern medical practicies are introduced. The problem arises when this population explosion brings the population beyond their country's carrying capacity, forcing dependance on a continual influx of resources from outside. (Which was pointed out in Michael Merrin's book "The Road To Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. Merrin was himself an Aid Worker in Somalia and saw these things first hand, among other problems as well. Many "Third World" countries entire economies are now entirely based on foreign aid donations instead of being imdependant supporting.)

[Wingates_Hellsing]

Before I get into more specifics I'd like to address two over-arching point that I think apply very well here. First of which is the presence of the free-market as a moderating system. There's very little reason to believe the implied scenario where the oil just suddenly disappears and overnight there's nothing we can do about it. What's more likely, especially considering some key technological advancements in the areas of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, is that as the price of oil increases, more corporations will switch or form to exploit the growing comparative advantage of various alternatives.

Since everything mentioned is ultimately powered by electricity which can be garnered from any source desired (vehicles being the key distinction as they generate theirs as needed with on board fuel supplies.) it doesn't matter within their own scope where it comes from just that they have it. All alternative energy sources have flaws but they generally balance-out. Examples include the limited areas in which wind energy can be gathered en-masse, the effect ethanol conversion would have on the food supply, and the expense related to solar power collection. Nevertheless, when implemented the collective whole will balance out the disadvantages of any one. If it weren't for the irrational fear of nuclear power we'd be able to power the entire country with a relatively small number of additional facilities and thus take advantage of another finite resource albeit slow to deplete.

Second is that I find you're inclusion of fossil calories in computing the expended to gained calorie ratio to be fallacious in two ways. First being that it's only to expected that energy is not created out of nowhere, we're using much more, but we're also producing a lot more, no one claimed that energy is magically appearing out of nowhere. Secondly, you're missing the point of industrial farming. The point of industrial farming isn't to create magical energy, it's to allow the same amount of end product to spring from fewer man-hours and ultimately fewer people, which in turn frees up more individuals to pursue other fields, which in turn leads to technological advance that feeds back into food production.

The fossil fuel supply running out is a problem, but it is far from insurmountable. I think you underestimate modern culture's ability to overcome adversity whilst overestimating that of tribal cultures. In the same way as the tribe relying on digging for roots until their resource returns, modern cultures can fall back on general food rationing. In the same way as the tribe can pick up shop and follow their chosen game, modern culture can shift manufacture in a fairly short time to utilize something else. Modern culture is not without survival mechanisms. When I say 'fucked' I mean in serious trouble. It's only very rarely that anyone finds themselves in a situation that they can't 'unfuck'.

A few things I'd like to point out. Modern culture has a capacity for interdependency that tribal cultures don't. In modern society, a failing area or stricken group can and often will benefit from outside assistance originating from better-prepared areas. In H/G groups, the buck stops with you. If one group get's screwed by a confluence of events, that group will not have any help and it's basically certain that they will die out.

I don't get the upshot in this next statement of yours (boils down to HGs can't support a large population but it's good because it's small). The most objective way to measure the quality of a food supply system falls within two parameters: quantity and reliability (leaving out quality for the moment). Even basic farming is more reliable and produces more than foraging. Therefore, farming is better. This is not to say that farming is infallible, it isn't. Both are subject to factors outside our control. But centralized food production allows us to control more factors and therefore optimize. Moreover, there's nothing stopping the farmers from foraging if they need or want to.

You started with the key words "depending on the climate". Most of the advantages of modern food production are related to increasing the margin of usable and optimal conditions. Whilst a big part of it certainly is increased yield, something that organic farming would still be benefiting from on the technological front, it's much more about the ability to take what would be poor farmland and tailor a crop, a pesticide, and a fertilizer to that area and get out of it just as much as we would out of others. I've yet to see conclusive proof that chemical pesticides are inherently worse for people or the environment than organic ones in the same way as I've yet to see conclusive proof that organic food is healthier than inorganic.

In you're second section, I'll address each layer as does pertain to modern food production in turn.

1st: GE crops and fertilizers increase this layer by allowing for food production where it was previously unfeasible. This is the area that should be addressed more when rendering aid (in the style of Norman Borlaug, the greatest man to have ever lived)

2nd: Synthetic fertilizers and artificially constructed barriers increase humanities ability in this layer as we're able to eliminate invading competition and secure it from further invasion.

3rd: Modern society like I said provides advantages in this area as well, like interdependency as I stated earlier. If it wasn't for the communication and physical mingling of different groups, this wouldn't be possible and areas without reliable food sources would be unpopulated. None of which would occur without technology.

I'll boil down the negative effects mentioned in as stemming primarily from application of charity over empowerment. Although plenty of empowerment still occurs. Most aid shipments occur in times of crisis for a given people. With Somalia as I understand it, there was famine due to an explosion of civil war, aid shipments were interdicted by militia forces and our own military involvement soon followed. There's no question that helping people through a tough spot is a good thing, so I'm going to assume that you refer to unilateral aid supplies provided even to those not in particular need, which isn't how it works all that often. Still, the problem isn't so much that the aid is sent as it is that it's bad if it's pulled.

This is why it's better to teach them how to fish, that is, instead of giving them a lot of grain, we should give them the tools, machinery and knowledge necessary for them to better take care of themselves, once they have, they'le be able to self sustain. This is advantageous over straight charity because it's a long term fix that relies less on PO and 'stateside' conditions. If WW3 breaks out, you can bet that giving starving Ethiopians food is going to be secondary to producing more Aegis-class missile ships.

But here's the key disagreement. You see that an increased population that still has famine as bad because the famine wasn't eliminated. But to me, it's more important that more people were able to live out their lives more comfortably than they otherwise would have. Is it not better to have lived for a few generations until some befall a setback than to have not lived at all?

[Sage Blackthorn]

Wow, you are just a dyed-in-the-wool, die-hard supporter of modern civilization aren't ya! Don't you think there is anything that can be learned from tribal cultures?

[the_std]

Wow, you are just a dyed-in-the-wool, die-hard supporter of modern civilization aren't ya! Don't you think there is anything that can be learned from tribal cultures?

I'm not sure this is a fair thing to say. As a fellow "modernist", I think there was a lot to learn from tribal cultures, a lot to be appreciated from them - they made for a fantastic jumping-off point to get to the amazingly advanced places we've gotten now.

[Sage Blackthorn]

I'm not sure this is a fair thing to say. As a fellow "modernist", I think there was a lot to learn from tribal cultures, a lot to be appreciated from them - they made for a fantastic jumping-off point to get to the amazingly advanced places we've gotten now.

Sorry, was just a bit overwhelmed, and I made the mistake of letting the discussion drift towards arguements over technology rather than tribal structure vs. the structure of modern civilization. Tribalism isn't about what technology we use, it's about how people work together and how they govern themselves. I tend to get caught up in discussions about technology because it's something I'm interested in.

Whether ya' want to call it, my "theory" or my "premise" or whatever, I think, I "believe", that most people have been mislead about life in primitive tribal society's. The idea that their lives were "Solitary, poor, brutish, nasty, and short" is one that was put forth by Thomas Hobbes, who lived between 1588 and 1679. Even in the face of modern studies of tribal people, these ideas still persist. That they live in constant fear: untrue, those still being alowed to live their traditional life-styles show little to no instances of depression or suicide. They are confident in their knowledge of their territory on where to obtain food, shelter, materials for clothing. That they spend all their time scrambling for food: untrue, on average each member of a tribal, hunter/gatherer society spent/spends approximatly 2-3 hours per day engaged in what we would consider "work" to gain food, shelter, clothing and the rest of their time in what would term "leisure".

Thomas Hobbes, in my opinion, was operating from a flawed premise. He argued that in a state of nature, a state without government, each person would have a right to everything in the world and that would lead to a war of everyone against everyone that would result in people's lives being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But tribal societies are not without government. They have leaders, chosen based on their ability to make good decisions for the group, to put the needs of the group ahead of their own. They have tradtions of behaviour, Tribal Laws, that govern the people of the members in terms of what is social acceptable and what is not. These laws do not so much describe what is permitted and not permitted, but rather how to deal with a variety of situations based on previous experience.

Technology is really a seperate issue and probably deserves it's own thread. Primitive tribal societies are often described as "Stone Age" societies for their use of stone tools. This tends to carry with it a connotation of being a holdover from the distant past, and that it's somehow "bad". It was once pointed out to me that the use of Glue is just about ubiquitous in modern society, but it makes about as much sense to call our modern age "The Glue Age" as it does to refer to modern tribal peoples as being "Stone Aged"....they use other technologies than just stone tools. And there are a lot of other things that seem to contribute to this myth that tribal societies are inferior to our own. That such a way of life is filled with fear and starvation and to be avoided at all costs even though great mountains of data and research have shown it's not. A few of which I cited in my original post.

[Hobbs]

Have you ever made an effort to live like or join a group that lives like a primitive culture?

Yeah. At one point I thought of being a Marine.

Okay, in seriousness, I haven't, but my anthropology professor did. In fact, that's how he got his doctorate. IT was interesting learning about his research into the tribe.

[lordlundar]

Have you ever made an effort to live like or join a group that lives like a primitive culture?

<clutches computer> GRRR...

[Andara Bledin]

It may be that the 90% I cited is off, but you can't deny that driving to the grocery store takes much less time than walking through the forest, hunting small game and gathering berries.

Your analogy is flawed.

It is not only about the time it takes to drive to the store and do your shopping. You must also include the time and effort you had to go through to acquire the money that you used to purchase the food that you bought by driving to the store. Dependent upon your wage, it is quite possible for a modern individual to actually spend more time and energy feeding himself than it took his primitive ancestor.

^-.-^

[Boozy]

Dependent upon your wage, it is quite possible for a modern individual to actually spend more time and energy feeding himself than it took his primitive ancestor.

Not likely.

Thanks to industrialization, we can produce far, far more with far, far less labour than at any time in the past.

[Ghel]

Industrialization and modern technology also allows us to stockpile food for the winter. It allows us to irrigate fields during times of drought. We have a much larger quantity, quality, and variety of food than was available to our ancestors.