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Gone to Croatoan
Another bone I wanted to pick with Giuli’s recent comments here. I asked her what it would look like to have a primitivist philosophy which was not irretrievably tied into notions of Peak Oil and depopulation. She responded:
It looks like, “Hey, they’re happier and healthier than we are, so let’s go live like them.” It looks like a bunch of European settlers abandoning their village and leaving only a sign reading, “Gone to Croatan.”
Hearing that, one could argue that this philosophy is therefore based on envy. Envy of what - of the perceived internal states of others operating outside of your own cultural context. But, since they are outside of your own cultural context, how could you be really certain that they are in fact “happier” than you are? You cannot. We don’t know that those settlers who left for Croatoan had any better time of it than those who stayed behind… There is, unfortunately, no objective way to measure and compare interior states. To seek to do so (by saying that some group is “happier” than some other) is to move towards views of modern science which if I understand correctly are part of what you guys stand against. But I recognize my understanding of this point is not very clear.
Further, isn’t seeking happiness as an end goal somewhat narrow? Don’t you, as primitivists, actually seek the fullest experience possible of being a human, whether that is sadness or happiness, or everything in between? And if that is really what you seek, don’t you think it ultimately becomes possible to fully experience human life in any and every situation, whether it is part of civilization or not? In fact, wouldn’t civilization actually offer you a greater range of human experiences? Wouldn’t it actually be a neo-primitivist lifestyle which would be overly restrictive?
Also, it seems that the idea that you could simply choose to “go native” is heavily rooted in consumerism (tied into the quest of happiness) - that you can and should just go out and get what you want to fulfill your fantasies. Within primitive systems, you don’t - in my possibly warped understanding - get to run around chasing your tail trying to be happy and be fulfilled. Instead, you simply do your dharma. You fulfill your station in life and your success as a person is measured not at all by your happiness, but by your ability to fulfill your social obligations.
In other words, what if all they found at Croatoan was bitter enslavement to a starkly rigid social order far worse than what they’d left behind? Wouldn’t that be a kick in the butt!
- Prev: Staying In Balance
- Next: Growing Up
September 18th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
well wanting to go enjoy the superior lifestyle of natives is still inevitably tied into mass death, because the earth can’t support 9 billion people living as hunter gatherers. so it’s either a country club for the philosophical vanguard and little else, or it’s genocide again.
it’s kind of like the idea that we can raise everyone to a first world standard of living. you can’t. not under the current regime of energy usage, that would result in the destruction of the earth if we tried that. so really, if there’s no way back and no way to stand still, then the only position not directly tied to mass death is progress.
September 18th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
Okay, but is progress better than mass death or, better yet, is life (we’re talking about human life, right?) even that important any way? If we’re going to think critically about every element of this debate, then something as fundamental as the sanctity of life should probably be examined too. It’s the one element in this ongoing discussion, I can think of, that hasn’t met any direct contention.
September 19th, 2006 at 12:40 am
i think of it more as a neccisary pressupposition. if you’re dead, there’s no conversation to be had. given that, i presume that anyone who cares enough to participate in life values it.
as for progress, every moment is in flux, everything changes no matter what you do and nothing ever returns to the way you left it, not exactly anyway. so no value judgements on progress are neccisary. it’s not an option, it’s just the way it happens. one chooses a direction, no matter what. even if that direction is modelled on the past, it will never be the past, and it will aways be built on who and what came before.
September 19th, 2006 at 1:33 am
one might use the experiences of someone who lived both civilized and primitive as a measure of which is more satisfying. According to Benjamin Franklin:
“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 makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. And … when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet within a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of Life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”
(from Ran)
September 19th, 2006 at 2:42 am
Well, the earth can’t support a billion gas and junkfood guzzlers either. We can adopt some useful aspects of “primitvism,” like not needing so much electricity, and working less.
When I studied anthropology, supposedly the hunter-gatherer only has to work about 10 hours a week for sustinance. But that’s taking for granted that weather is always good, they are also very prone to famine if the environment goes nasty.
When you grow crops, its harder work, but you can set things like dried corn husks aside for a the dry days.
We’ve got enough technology to create food for everyone, even hydroponics could grow food on a spaceship.
But we’ve got this enormously wasteful market system.
We’ve got the values all wrong, technology should be used to free us once again to live the leisure life of a hunter-gatherer without being in danger of starvation.
Really when you look back on human pre-history, its a miracle we made it thus far, but we still have that same basic mindest, but with big, nuclear spears.
September 19th, 2006 at 7:16 am
Thanks Jake, I’ve been looking for that quote.
Tim makes an important point that I often come back to: the idea that primitive societies may have a rigid social order. Not necessarily hierarchical, but nevertheless rigid. Throughout my life I’ve conducted little thought experiments where I’d try to construct a utopia. The ones that bear towards primitive cultures are inevitably fairly rigid and often, ultimately, militaristic. Kind of like a gang. This could of course be more of a reflection on my own inner states than on any immutable truth, but I offer it up here.
My conclusion is — and this will be unpopular — that rigid social orders may in fact be preferable. The conceit of the West is that we can all be happy and free. I actually think that both of these concepts — happiness and freedom — are so ill-defined as to be useless, or worse, destructive. To me, the critical axis to look at is spiritual wholeness. Huxley’s Brave New World is the most immediate illustration of what I’m talking about: the juxtaposition of a degraded technocratic hierarchy that sustains an illusion of freedom with a brutal but spiritually plugged-in primitive society.
I’m still pondering on all this, so don’t all attack me at once.
September 19th, 2006 at 8:51 am
hmmm… you’ll be happy until you break your leg or start vomiting blood and then you’ll be like what the fuck
what about the rest of the world that has guns computers and aircraft, like they are going to leave you alone?
anarchy is the only model that could sustain this utopian idea but you cant take over the world with a broken off tree limb ?!?!? I guess you wait till one falls off because breaking it yourself would be ‘progress toward ones one self defense’?
put down the pipe, yo.
-tc
September 19th, 2006 at 8:53 am
With all this arguing, I feel like I’m faced with two main choices: giving up or winging it. What constitutes giving up is, of course, also a matter of debate, as in Tim’s post “Not My Apocalypse!” As I think has been said here before, preparing for Peak Oil or whatever may not necessarily be considered giving up.
As for winging it — let’s just do whatever we can to avoid massive deaths, either from starvation OR from primitivist genocide. We can try to save our technology, both because (a) we like it and (b) much more importantly, it’s generally agreed that going straight back to nature would result in billions of people dying. If keeping all our toys save our neighbors from dying in a Mad Max hellzone, well, there’s nothing easier than doing the right thing when it helps you.
However, it could also be that the opposite would be the case. If it comes down between keeping our fun technology and thereby killing billions through planet-death starvation on one hand, and getting rid of our technology to save a greater amount of lives on the other, then I guess I’ll have to resign myself to never beating Sonic & Knuckles.
September 19th, 2006 at 9:01 am
If people are happier under rigid social orders, how come they don’t appear to be happy under all the rigid social orders around the world today? I mean, maybe the trade unionists arrested and tortured in Zimbabwe are happy, but it doesn’t look like it to this Westerner.
September 19th, 2006 at 10:47 am
The Roanoke colony was the first English colony in the New World, but when the English came back, they found the colony abandoned, with just a sign: “Gone to Croatan.” We have evidence of English influence on the local Native population. When given the chance, they “went native.” No one stayed behind, everyone went to Croatan.
It’s a familiar story. The spread of civilization has never been voluntary. We do not have one example of any forager culture willingly adopting agriculture—ever. Yet we have example after example after example of foragers who fought to the death against it, who would rather die that to submit to civilization. As J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in his Letters from an American Farmer:
Or, as Benjamin Franklin succinctly put it:
Sitting Bull could easily see why, of course:
Or, as Daniel Quinn put it so well:
In other words, civilization has been experienced as so deeply dehumanizing by everyone at all times in all places that in 10,000 years, no one has ever gone to it voluntarily. Indeed, civilization has expanded to new cultures only on pain of death. That’s how much it was hated by those who knew what another way of life was like.
Of course, any society that’s going to work for any amount of time must operate within certain limits of tolerability, and civlizations are no exceptions. A wide range of distractions is constantly innovated to distract the civilized person from the endless, tedious labor that is required to maintain his life. The earliest was simply alcohol; to this we have added every kind of recreational drug, from the panem et circenses to modern professional sports, to video games, pornography, and religion, our culture is under constant stress to come up with more and better means of keeping life tolerable, as the misery of civilization intensifies.
Too often when imagining a world without civilization, we imagine what life would be like with our current stresses and miseries, but without those creature comforts that allow us what little indulgence we have left. Of course, this is absurd, since a loss of civilization would also mean a loss of those same stresses and miseries, in exchange for the freedom that Sitting Bull talked about.
If the historical case is not convincing, then perhaps you’d prefer my thesis #25, where I show that foragers enjoy a superior quality of life on every accepted metric, even when these metrics are specifically chosen to give civilization the advantage. If we could find some way to weigh in contentment, fulfillment, and a sense of community, these would play to what are truly a forager’s strengths. Social isolation in the U.S. is growing, and older white males, the most affluent and powerful people in our world, are the most likely to kill themselves. Meanwhile, among most hunter-gatherers, such things are practically unknown. Sahlins called them “the original affluent society.” Scarcity is accepted by economists as a basic fact, but it’s actually deeply cultural. Scarcity comes from living such a marginal life as a farmer, and that scarcity is perpetuated upwards through our entire civilization. Our way of life is founded on scarcity. By comparison, the forager way of life is founded on abundance.
Much has been made here of the rigid social structures of forager societies, but let’s take a moment to consider what those social structures are. They include the Two-Spirit, and third, fourth, or even fifth genders. They include shamans that provide a place and a role for schizophrenia, where the “disease” is easily treated by giving it a place. This is what forager social structures excel at: they give everyone a place. Unlike our restrictive, cookie-cutter social roles, the roles in a forager community give everyone a place to be important and unique. As Paul Radin emphasizes in Primitive Man as Philosopher, forager societies emphasize personal achievement and freedom. They also see the community itself as its own being, and inside of community functions, everyone is expected to play their proper role–otherwise, they would be denying the community the chance to express itself, which is as intolerable as coercing another individual.
Why is it that foragers are so much happier, healthier, and better off? Why do civilized people always run off to join them, but none of them ever become civilized of their own free will? Why is this such a one-sided relationship?
The answer to that is simple, of course. Because foraging bands are the societies we evolved with. They are us. Civilization is a denial of our human nature. Civilization is the antithesis of human; it is dehumanizing. In a world where we have no evidence, your questions might be more compelling, but the fact of the matter is, we do know what forager life is like. Most primitive societies emphasize individuals pursuing their personal fulfillment. Notably, the idea of “dharma” is distinctly agricultural. With the advent of farming, we get the first societies emphasizing the idea that people should know their place and remain true to it. This is fairly unprecedented in human cultures, as diverse as they are. What you paint above as a “primitive” society is actually among the most defining elements of agricultural society–the very things that make a society not primitive. That’s precisely what the colonists at Roanoke were leaving behind them.
Is this mere envy? Simply the pursuit of something we think will make us happier? Well, it’s certainly undeniable that the human condition would be immeasurably improved by abandoning this failed experiment and returning to the modes of existence that we evolved with, that are as fundamentally human as our own bodies, but there’s more than this. The fact of the matter is, civilization is so dehumanizing, so alienating, that it doesn’t just alienate us from one another, but from the world around us. Our suffering has become the world’s suffering. The world is dying from our misery. Either we will find a better way to live, or our species will die–and possibly the rest of life with us.
No. Civilization offers us experiences we might not otherwise have: the experience of hunger, or strife, of dull, repetitive, tedious labor to maintain our existence. It offers the experience of degradation, of being treated like an object, of being stripped of our dignity and used as a tool for someone else’s profit. It offers us the opportunity to rationalize and justify that so that we can feel good about it; it offers us the experience of needing something, anything, that can numb the pain of it. But I wouldn’t call these particularly “human” experiences. They are dehumanizing experiences.
It’s human experiences that civilization cuts us off from: the experience of the safety and comfort of a real community, the experience of the living, animist world around us, the experience of waking up every morning to a day unlike any other, the experience of freedom.
Freedom is the natural birthright of humanity. Civilization strips that away from us and makes us wage slaves or worse. Primitivism is about restoring that which we’ve lost. Sankofa: “it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.”
September 19th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
The problem there is hierarchy, not rigid social order. One can imagine a non-hierarchical tribe with very proscribed behaviors, where people are happy though not “free” in the Western consumerist/hedonist sense.
That’s all well and good if it can be done. One of the primitivist arguments, piggy-backing on Peak Oil, is that keeping our technology is not an option because of constraints on available resources. This is part of Jason Godesky’s argument, one that he makes reasonably convincingly. (However, he rules out a Deus-ex-Machina miracle, which I do not.)
September 19th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Oh yeah, the other problem is that even if we can keep up our technology, there’s no guarantee that it won’t lead to a hellish 1984-style totalitarian society or worse. This is Ran Prieur’s concern.
I’m not at all supporting the idea of / desire for massive death. I’m just laying the issues on the table and hoping for a miracle that saves us both from total murderous chaos and from soul-killing order.
September 19th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
jlhart7, do you really think getting rid of technology could save lives? I guess in theory it could make the difference between 6 billion deaths and 10 billion, but who gives a flying fuck? A literally unthinkable number of people would still die if we all tried to adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle today. You’d have to think like a character from Doctor Strangelove to consider giving rid of everyone’s technology. Now, for a Temporary Autonomous Zone, it makes more sense. It could even lead to global adoption of primitivism if our secret plan to decrease population through sexual freedom succeeds. (No point trying to hide it now that Tim has exposed us.)
Meanwhile, slomo said: “I actually think that both of these concepts — happiness and freedom — are so ill-defined as to be useless, or worse, destructive. To me, the critical axis to look at is spiritual wholeness.”
Think about that for a second.
September 19th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
Incidentally:
I’m pretty sure they do. (Bear in mind, the first ‘professional’ reviewer does not seem to have read to the end.)
September 19th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Foraging is not a solution for 6.5 billion people. This is why Quinn doesn’t advocate it. My response is, what is a solution for 6.5 billion people? Industrialism and agriculture are self-defeating. Organic agriculture, horticulture, permaculture, and anything else remotely sustainable can’t support 6.5 billion people any more than foraging can.
The future lies in hunting and gathering, because that’s the only sustainable level of human existence. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers. That’s what we are. The short schemes of the past 10,000 years to change that have all been short-sighted and ultimately disastrous. But this is not going to happen through some kind of mass enlightenment. The argument that primitivism is wrong because the earth can’t support 6.5 billion people misses the point entirely. This isn’t a matter of revolution–it’s a matter of evolution. Civilization is very close now to the only outcome it could ever have. Civilization is simply a fancy case of overshoot, and all overshoot ends in die-off. The future lies in hunting and gathering not because everyone is going to embrace it, but because in a thousand years, if there are any humans on this earth at all, they will be the descendants of those few who did.
September 19th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
hf:
Hi, hf. Oops, I guess I didn’t make myself clear. I do not think getting rid of technology would save lives; I tend to agree with you that it would kill more people. I was just making a rhetorical point that if I were discovered to be wrong in this, then I would change direction. I think keeping technology will save more people than it will kill; I could be wrong, and if so, then I would consider dropping technology. My main point is that we should either keep or drop technology (and again, I’m now saying keep it) based on how many more lives it would save to do either one, and not whether, on one hand, we like technological comforts or, on the other hand, we like the idea of living in the woods. Make more sense now?
September 19th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
It strikes me that this whole discussion is based on spurious concepts. First of all, the idea of some kind of dichotomy between “primitive” and “civilized” seems really weird when you think about it. I mean, all “civilization” really means is a society in which people try to live together, so if you talk about life after “the collapse of civilization,” you’re really talking about the replacement of one kind of civilization with another. Secondly, the idea that certain cultures are ‘primitive’ and others are ‘civilized’ is pretty much grounded in European Imperialist philosophy from the get-go– Noble Savages and whatnot. Really, when you think about it, the notion of “primitivism” is almost bigoted. All of the cultures in question, whether “primitive” or “civilized,” are *technical* cultures– tool users. No “collapse” of anything will ever erase that, and due to the nature of technique, which always expands to fill all of its possibilities, it’s very possible that within a hundred years or so after any kind of collapse many so-called primitivist communities will become reliant on technologies once again.
I think a far, far better descriptor for the differences in question might be sustainable versus nonsustainable. In other words, a transition not from “civilization” to “primitivism,” but from destructive civilization to holistic civilization. This could certainly be done even at our current population levels, and we could even keep a lot of our shiny toys.
September 19th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Keeping technology means driving our complexity up until we simply run out of resources and crash. Perhaps 10 billion or so, continued mass extinction, 200 species a day for the next few decades, possible ecological collapse and much diminished chance of human survival. Giving up technology means hastening collapse, half as many dead (since only half as many will be alive), and abandoning our campaign of ecological devastation immediately, rather than allowing it to continue for a few more decades.
There’s no doubt that collapse is always better the sooner and faster it happens. The longer it takes, and the longer it is in coming, the more devastation it will entail. So there’s your choice: catastrophe now, or postpone the catastrophe and make it worse. You’ll never eliminate it. The best you can do is put it off, and in so doing, magnify it.
September 19th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
I don’t see that as a valid “critique” of civilization since it is coming from a time period and group of people very heavily influenced by Romanticism. I’m also struggling to find good ways to reconcile this idea that happiness is some kind of barometer to success and your matching your environment effectively. It seems faulty to me still…
September 19th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
You’re correct that there’s no such strict dichotomy. Civilization is a specific type of culture, and “primitive” is, well, anything else. But it’s not about people living together. Any society does that, and frankly, civilization does a poorer job of that than most. Rather, as I went into in detail elsewhere, civilization is defined by its single-minded focus on complexity as the solution to every problem. “Primitive” societies are those in which anything else is ever considered.
You’d certainly be right if I were using the term in its normal sense. Rather, I’m using it here for lack of a better term to refer to all the other ways of organizing a culture. I once eschewed it, but I’ve since come to realize that it is literally accurate: a primitive culture, the first culture, the way we lived before this recent aberration in the broad sweep of our time on this planet.
Something I’ve been trying to educate my fellow primitivists on for some time! Tool use is part of what makes us human. It’s not technology itself that’s the problem. The problem is one of diminishing returns; essentially, a problem of moderation, if you prefer to think of it as that. After collapse, the neo-primitive communities that make it out will use technology, but I see no reason (or even possibility) for them to continue developing that technology endlessly as we have. In other words, we lived within reasonable limits to our technological complexity for millions of years, and broke that pattern only in a tiny portion of our time on this planet, and for very basic, materialistic reasons. Absent those factors, it will not only not be particularly necessary to develop such advanced technology, it probably won’t even be possible. Again, the problem is not that technology is essentially “bad,” but that it is subject to diminishing returns.
Well, leaving aside the perils in the term “sustainable” itself, I must disagree strongly. Any technique that can provide the food needed by 6.5 billion people does so by destroying the very ecology such techniques depend upon. There is no sustainable means of supporting a mass society like ours.
September 19th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
What then are the “useful” aspects of primitivism and what are the detrimental ones? This is a major element of what I seek in these discussions
I am tending more and more towards this direction, but under what system of guidance should this “new society” be run? Technocrats seem to believe it would be under a scientific system, but even this I think is ultimately not enough as science has many flaws (some of which are quite useful of course)
September 19th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
Slomo:
I’m also toying with this question a lot, and the answers you get in either direction you take this cause me a lot of problems!
September 19th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
It’s a supporting argument, certainly not the main one. The fact remains that throughout history, people have fled civilization whenever possible, fought it with all their strength, and submitted to it only on pain of death. I think that says something for the quality of life it offers.
I’m not sure personal happiness is the way to think of this, though. It’s certainly not how I think of it. But, are we agreed that improving the general human condition is a good goal? In other words, you’re right that the selfish pursuit of one’s own desires is questionable, but that’s less my concern here than the general quality of life for the entire species. We’re talking about increased lifespan, better health, freedom, knowledge, art, all of these things not only expanding, but being opened to everyone–as opposed to civilization, which opens them to an elite, only because there are so many toiling towards that end.
September 19th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Thanks for quoting this, Tim; I would’ve missed it otherwise.
Hunter-gatherers have never been in danger of starvation. Starvation is something that only happens to farmers. In both the ethnographic and the archaeological records, the only starving foragers we know of come from the Arctic. Even the !Kung in the Kalahari eat well (often while their pastoralist Bantu neighbors starve).
September 19th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
But I don’t accept that they did this because of some ideal dream of “happiness” or because of some romantic notion of how tribal society is “better.” They may simply have realized that they were dying and the Indians weren’t - which could make good supporting arguments for tribalism, or it could simply say that their inherited European lifestyles were ill-suited to a new climate and environment.
Second, we haven’t mentioned at all that maybe it was the *leaders* who decided to “go to croatoan” and that in fact everyone else was quite pissed about it, and quite unhappy to be going native. Or, what if the Indians captured and enslaved the settlers, and the last white men remaining left that note to explain that they were going to croatoan in order to rescue their comrades or die trying?
September 19th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
This is a simply unsupportable argument. You in fact don’t have the history of every individual in all places over 10,000 years to make this kind of statement.
September 19th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
So then, I don’t understand what is holding you back from taking it upon yourself to actively cause it TODAY!?
September 19th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Is that really true? Aren’t they in danger of starvation when their prey fails? What about the natural cycles of predation in which populations of predators and prey rise and fall based on availabilty? Unless I am reading that wrong, nature would seem to suggest otherwise that hunters are cyclicaly in danger of starvation
September 19th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
No, they did it because civilized life sucked, they saw how the Croatans lived, and decided to join them.
The colony was too small to afford much in the way of leadership. Leaders didn’t really have that much authority. What was he going to do, complain to the Crown? And maybe in a year the king would send help, but then and there, 4,000 miles affords an unusual degree of freedom.
You’re right, that’s true. We have hundreds if not thousands of documented cases of Europeans “going native,” but we do not have a single documented case of the reverse. Might have happened, but if it did, nobody thought it anything exceptional to write down. Of course, given that a native just visiting a village was often cause for a royal audience, this seems unlikely. But you’re right, it can’t be proven. All we know is that there are hundreds if not thousands of cases of Europeans “going native,” and not one record of the opposite.
Firstly, what would be effective in causing it? If it’s really about investment, then the best way to cause it, and the best way to help as many people to survive it as possible, would be to help people understand why it’s a bad investment. So in fact, I am helping to accelerate the process, by trying to help as many people as possible survive it. If I were selfish and simply ran off into the woods with my tribe with nary a word, I wouldn’t be helping anyone but ourselves. I also wouldn’t be doing anything to bring on collapse. Trying to tell people what’s happening both hastens it (thus making it less catastrophic), and helps increase the number of people who are likely to survive it.
Humans are omnivores. To starve a nomadic forager, you would need to wipe out nearly all life on the planet, or else they’d have something to eat. It’s not always the tastiest food. Pine nuts I think are pretty bland, and my wife balks at the idea of eating bugs (I like bugs, myself), but there’s always something to eat. With nomadic omnivores, you still got Lotka-Volterra cycles, but when one prey species is diminished, you simply hunt a different one.
Compare to farmers, who grow a small number of closely related cereal grains. All it takes is a dry summer to starve them out, because their strategy is basically “all your eggs in one basket.” Even their animal domesticates are all large, herbivorous herd mammals (OK, and chickens).
September 19th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
No, I don’t think that says that at all. All that says to me is that people stick with what they know and resist changing at all costs once they are really entrenched in their position. That doesn’t make their positions or situations better, it just makes the unknown terrifying and dangerous
Maybe? But can we agree on what would constitute and improvement or what the natural human condition really is?
Is that not the great dream of civilization though - or at least of our regional variant of it? How is what you’re saying counter to civilization since your rhetoric and your goals are coming straight out of the classic American revolutionary dream?
And also, I’m not certain I follow how hunter-gathering would give us all health, freedom, knowledge, art, etc…
September 19th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
That undoubtedly plays a role, but if that’s all there is, what’s with all the Europeans “going native”? That’s why I mention them at once–you can’t explain both phenomena without admitting that there is an overwhelming preference for primitive life.
In broad outline, I think we can. I’ve dealt here with fairly unambiguous “goods.” At least, as unambiguous as they get.
It is, but it’s a dream that our civilization is incapable of fulfilling. It would need to destroy itself to do so.
The classic American revolutionary dream is firmly rooted in the primitive experience. The difference is that I’m not espousing a dream. This isn’t a thought experiment. This is the way humans lived for millions of years. This is the only way of life that has ever been truly proven. The burden of proof is not on me. It’s up to this young, unproven interloper of civilization to prove why it should be considered a feasible way of life. Primitive societies have proven themselves; they’re the only ones that have. It’s civilization that hasn’t proven itself yet.
Because hunter-gatherer cultures possess these things in equal measure to our own culture, but where our culture hoards these things for its elites, hunter-gatherer cultures are egalitarian. Imagine having the same amount of health, freedom, knowledge, art, etc., except it’s open to everyone instead of hoarded for the few. That’s what a primitive society does.
September 19th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Fair enough: “spiritual wholeness” is also quite ill-defined. What I should have made clear is what I mean by “spiritual wholeness”. I would define that in terms of community cohesiveness (not ill-defined, you can use standard social network theory to do this) and other behavioral measures (incidence of alcoholism, suicide, sexual promiscuity, and other well-defined self-destructive behaviors), both individual and collective. The reason why I classify these as “spiritual” is a byproduct of my own belief system, but not necessary for the current discussion.
September 19th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
Er, with all due respect, this isn’t true at all. There have been countless examples of native peoples abandoning “primitivism” in favor of civilization. See the book “Savages” by Joe Kane, in which Huaorani natives (full-on headhunters) flock to the Oil concerns for the “privileges” of western-style jobs, in which they don suits, buy cars, etc. The same pattern has repeated itself again and again throughout history. Pocahontas, anyone?
Or, for a more ideological example, take the Cargo Cults of Papua New Guinea whose whole mythology centers around the idea of getting “civilization’s” stuff. Although they might not full on “go-civvie,” as it were, their very raison d’etre centers around the concept.
I think the difference is that since we live in a “civvie” society, it’s not very sensational– indeed, most people would expect “primitives” to want to go civvie, so it’s far more shocking when the opposite occurs.
September 19th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
I’m not familiar with the Huaorani natives (as such intensive agriculturalists, they fall under my perception of embryonic civilization), but Wikipedia records that they’re better known for killing oil workers and missionaries.
I do know the case of Matoaka, though, and it certainly doesn’t prove as much as you seem to think it does. Matoaka didn’t join the colonists willingly; she was captured and held prisoner.
Neither do the cargo cults, seeing as how their culture didn’t change. They freely took on the artifacts of European culture, and even elevated those artifacts to the level of gods and spirits, reflecting the living, animistic world they lived in. But they didn’t start living as Europeans. None of them made the pilgrimage to London to become Englishmen. The cargo cults are better an example of what Sitting Bull said in the quote above: “The white men had many things that we wanted, but we could see that they did not have the one thing we liked best—freedom.” The cargo cults were awed by the obvious power of civilization. That’s a very different thing than wanting to join them. Most religions carry a pretty healthy respect for demons, too, but that doesn’t make damnation to hell a Christian goal.
Then why can’t we find one? You’ve come close, perhaps, but it doesn’t look like any of your examples hold up. Note that when they took Matoaka prisoner, it was so exceptional to have a savage in the camp that she was sent back to London to appear before the Court. A lot of pomp and circumstance if it was so commonplace for natives to go civilized, don’t you think? If it was commonplace, why couldn’t Benjamin Franklin, or J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur find any of these common examples, and even wrote that none existed?
September 19th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
Yes, yes you are. It may be a nice dream with good intentions, but it is still a dream, simply because we do not currently live in it. That it has existed or exists elsewhere does not make it less of a dream for here, for us, for now.
September 19th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.” Oscar Wilde.
September 19th, 2006 at 9:41 pm
Y’all might find this interesting:
http://freerangeorganichuman.blogspot.com/2006/09/wild-brain.html
The rest of the blog is well worth a read too.
September 20th, 2006 at 11:07 am
That’s a very strange definition of dream there, friend. The only proven way of life, the only one that’s proven to work, the one that’s worked for two million years, is a dream? But the way we live right now, that’s speeding headlong towards it own gory suicide after a few mere millennia, that’s what’s realistic? I find that a very odd definition indeed.