If somebody loses his leg, and you give him a prosthetic, and he says he wishes he still had his leg, do you tell him he’s a hypocrite and to give back the prosthetic if he hates it so much?

“Hey! If you don’t like it here, leave the country!”

*sigh*

all too common….

Everyone here grossly overestimates the quality of life in Stone Age societies. Sure, they probably didn’t have lots of lawlessness, because if you had that in a small group on the razor’s edge of survival (which is all the time when you depend on the environment for food) your group dies off, and then you don’t have any more lawlessness, or any more group.

You’ve grossly underestimated the quality of life in Stone Age societies. Razor’s edge of survival? We have no evidence of famine before the advent of agriculture, because hunter-gatherers ate such a wide variety of things. To starve out hunter-gatherers would take a cataclysmic event, with the death of nearly all life in a region; to starve out farmers, you just need a bad crop for a single, fickle cereal grain. Stone Age societies had plenty of food, which they provided with a minimum of work. That much we know for certain, quantifiably. We’ve measured it, and that’s what we found. Yes, it flies in the face of the recieved wisdom and assumption we had previously made about life beyond civilization as “nasty, brutish, and short,” but those are the facts. So who’s grossly underestimating whom: you, repeating the already-debunked myths of the Enlightenment, or us, citing the actual data?

So the individuals in groups that survive don’t commit many crimes, but they don’t really have so much fun either, because they’re in the stone age. What can you do for fun with stone age technologies? Not much.

I think jhereg already put this ridiculous claim to rest, but to reiterate, hunter-gatherers had far, far more liesure time on their hands than any of us do, and they spent it well. There was plenty to do for fun. There was also plenty of time to spend for yourself, just relaxing and contemplating and observing, which is also important. Most of the things we do for fun today are just recapitulations of what we were already doing in the Stone Age, and with things like TV or movies, we’re very often trying to fill a gap that the loss of Stone Age “fun” left, and coming up with pale mimicries that do little to measure up against the real thing. Anyone who’s ever been part of a storytelling circle with all the richness a developed oral tradition gives to that will know just how weak the best TV or movies seem next to that experience.

People have problems today in society because happiness is relative. We have a huge range of emotion. Sure, you can be extremely depressed (which anti-civilizationists love to cite statistics about), but you could also be raptuously happy, because of the many activities you can do in a complex society with advanced technology.

That’s true, to some minor extent, but if that were all there was to it, you’d have a bell curve. As many people would be rapturously happy as suicidally depressed, right? That’s not what you have. Most people are isolated, depressed, and alienated. That means something’s tipping that scale, skewing the bell curve. That’s civilization.

Society isn’t so bad, which is why there are so many of us in it, and so few that choose to go live out in the woods in convents.

Except that huge piles of evidence contradict that statement. For as long as civilization has gone on, people have run off to join the circus, join the gypsies, go native, “go to Croatan,” and so on. The moment the first opportunity arises, we leave civilization in a heartbeat. By contrast, no one has ever submitted to civilization willingly. Every new culture has had to be conquered, often with no small measure of genocidal fervor. Most societies have fought to the death, preferring annihilation to civilization. So few go into the woods because we don’t all for that possibility, because we’ve learned that our civilization cannot exist if its citizens have any alternatives.

This is extrordinarily ignorant. Medicine not advanced? Just think about how the average lifespan has increased (supported by every other study than the obscure one cited here), how many diseases we have cures for, how we can create prosthetic limbs, how a broken limb can be perfectly repaired.

This is extraordinarily ignorant. The average lifespan has not increased (supported by every actual study, rather than your hand-waving attempt to justify the mere repitition of recieved wisdom), we really have very few actual cures for diseases, and our ability to heal broken limbs or provide prosthetics has not really changed that much from the Paleolithic. Most importantly, even where some advancement has taken place, it is only available to the most fabulously wealthy in our society, as opposed to the medicine of hunter-gatherer societies, which is available to everyone.

Art? insane. We have more instruments, genres, type and variations of art that can be counted

Just like we did in the Paleolithic. Hasn’t really changed. Today, modern artists are studying cave art and Pygmy songs, because they’re recognizing that they’re at least the equals of Rembrandt and Mozart, if not superior.

Specialized people are able to spend their entire lives perfecting their art, which ensures quality and originality far beyond stone age cave paintings and drumbeatings.

But then we consider art as the expression of a single artist, ensuring that it can never be any deeper than the genius of a single individual, whereas so much of primitive art becomes a communal expression that becomes enriched the more people contribute to it and perfect it. This is why all of our art is so shallow, and why primitive art is so deep and nuanced. No single genius can ever achieve the artistic genius of an entire tribe. That ensures quality and originality far beyond classical paintings and piano chords.

sleeping storytelling and gambling. Sound exciting to do for the rest if your life? I’d rather have the limitless options afforded by civilization actually, thank you.

And all it costs is your humanity.

I’m going to keep skydiving, drinking, driving my car, flying around the world, using the internet and experiencing the benefits of civilization, and you probably will too. Don’t tell me that civilization is unnatural from an internet site.

One of the most common, and most lame, counter-arguments we get. Do you suppose that if we shut our eyes and hum really loud that the internet will go away? So you take away everything that makes us human, give us this pale imitation to replace it, and then tell us we’re not allowed to note that this is a rotten deal because the cheap knock-off is all we have left? If somebody loses his leg, and you give him a prosthetic, and he says he wishes he still had his leg, do you tell him he’s a hypocrite and to give back the prosthetic if he hates it so much?

We’re in the process of reclaiming our humanity, in full. And for those still trapped in the web of myths, misconceptions, recieved wisdom and unexamined assumptions that keep us mired in domestication (like the ones you’ve been mindlessly repeating like a mantra against the evil eye), the internet provides the only way left to tell them how to do the same. You took away all the ways that really work, after all. And if it weren’t for the systems that spawned the internet, we wouldn’t need to use the internet to tell people about this–we’d be able to just live it, instead.

What can you do for fun with stone age technologies? Not much.

really? wow. that’s a bit of a revelation to me actually.

i mean, there’s storytelling (you know, it’s kind of like theather, movies or television, but in a lot of ways more engaging and democratic). then there’s music (which even the most artistic of musicians is beginning to recognize as more complex than the majority of what we listen to today). then there’s games (like, say, mancala, or dice/dice equivalents); or if you prefer athletic contests (ie, running, throwing, archery, wrestling, etc).

Wikipedia lists these as examples of entertainment:

Animation
Anime (visual storytelling)
Circus
Cinema (visual storytelling)
Comedy (funny storytelling)
Comics (visual storytelling)
Corporate Entertainment (not needed)
Conventions (assuming we translate this as “fair” or “gathering”, then “Stone Age” peoples have this as well.)
Dance (last time i checked, high tech wasn’t a requirement for this.)
Fantasy (storytelling and/or daydreaming)
Film (visual storytelling)
Gambling (hell, you can bet on anything, right?)
Games (see above)
Horror (storytelling; i mean, where did all those stories of mythological monsters and beasties came from, right?)
Lecture (um… not sure this actually qualifies as entertainment, but, if it did, and there was an interest, it’s certainly doable)
Magic (plenty of stories about illusion games in “Stone Age” societies)
Mass media (uh… okay, you got me, there wouldn’t be Mass media. Damn. Best call the whole thing off. )
Music (please, no problem here. and before you start talking about how there are more instruments now than in the “Stone Age”, think about how many instruments you can easily dig up that are anything but mainstream? (ie, pan flutes, guiro, maracas, bodhran, didgeridoo, ocarina, bullroarer, etc)
Pornography (well, i suppose it’s all in the definition, eh wot?)
Revue (i think a fair few evenings in a “Stone Age” society would count as a “Revue”)
Reading (storytelling)
Television (visual storytelling)
Science Fiction (storytelling, i suppose)
Sports (plenty of sports to be had, track & field, wrestling, etc)
Theatre (visual storytelling)
Video game (varies by video game, but i really don’t see anything earth shatteringly “new” in video games, just attempts at how to do it as well with an electronic chip as without.)

bold represents my comments on each

i suspect that whatever selections you think you see over and above what existed in the “Stone Age” are illusions and nothing more.

The myth of progress is one far more deserving of our scorn. Where is the evidence for it? Our medicine,50 our knowledge,51 nor even our art52 can truly be said to have advanced beyond what it was 10,000 years ago. Yet for this way of life we suffer an inferior quality of life, even by our own skewed standards.53

This is extrordinarily ignorant. Medicine not advanced? Just think about how the average lifespan has increased (supported by every other study than the obscure one cited here), how many diseases we have cures for, how we can create prosthetic limbs, how a broken limb can be perfectly repaired. Art? insane. We have more instruments, genres, type and variations of art that can be counted. Specialized people are able to spend their entire lives perfecting their art, which ensures quality and originality far beyond stone age cave paintings and drumbeatings.

Foragers have a good deal more free time than we civilized folk. For the most part, this time was spent divided between three primary leisure activities: sleeping, storytelling, and gambling. The latter two are those that concern us presently.

sleeping storytelling and gambling. Sound exciting to do for the rest if your life? I’d rather have the limitless options afforded by civilization actually, thank you.

I’m going to keep skydiving, drinking, driving my car, flying around the world, using the internet and experiencing the benefits of civilization, and you probably will too. Don’t tell me that civilization is unnatural from an internet site.</b>

Which is why human population is a function of food supply.

Do you know a lot of women who considered population numbers when they decide to have a child or not?

What I meant to say was, in a population living in balance with its environment the number of births and the number of deaths over a period will balance, without need for family planning. We have infanticide because we are not in balance, we “chase” available resource to expand our economy continually. Foragers don’t live like this.

There may be another reason for infanticide that is fitness related rather than economic.

The searches I made on Google turned up some additional info:

The time honored approach among anthropologists is to assume that infanticide is one of several population regulation mechanisms designed to prevent hunter-gatherers from depleting environmental resources or degrading their environment. From this perspective, infanticide is a way to maintain the balance between people and the resources they exploit. With the influential publication of Susan Lees’ and Daniel Bates’ “The Myth of Population Regulation”, some anthropologists now view infanticide as a mechanism to maximize the reproductive success of individuals (and not the stability of groups). Bear in mind, we discussed a variety of so-called “population regulation” mechanisms (invalidicide, senilicide, abortion, and post-partum taboos). However, we gave special attention to Daly and Wilson’s crosscultural research on infanticide to suggest that such mechanisms actually insure the quantity and quality of children and the decision to commit infanticide is made by the parents and not the group:

Consistent with evolutionary theory, Daly and Wilson predict that infanticide should occur under the following conditions:

1. uncertain paternity
2. defects in offspring
3. lack of parental resources to successfully rear the child

From the HRAF Daly & Wilson analyzed the 60 societies in the probability sample. They found that 39 societies (65%) practiced infanticide. Of these, 35 gave reasons for infanticide with a total of 112 reasons for infanticide (many societies gave multiple reasons for infanticide). These reasons were placed into four categories: the three deduced from evolutionary theory and a fourth was were a collection of reasons that could not be classified from an evolutionary perspective by Daly & Wilson.

Of the 112 reasons, 97 or 86% fell into the evolutionary explanations posited by Daly & Wilson.

Jonas

Jason, normally I have a great deal of respect for what you write, because you liberally back it up with confirmable, solid evidence. But this… well, where are you getting this? If it’s your opinion on the matter/your hypothesis, I’d like to hear you say it, but I don’t think you could produce any evidence that backs this up. To put it bluntly, I think you just pulled this out of your ass due to some sort of dislike or phobia of human space travel.

- Chuck

Civilization is inherently exploitative and unsustainable. Any transformation that changed that would make it cease to be civilization. But we’ve put ourselves into a position of ecological overshoot. Population reduction, by one means or another, is now unavoidable.

As far as violence, civilization makes violence an ubiquitous way of life. In primitive societies, violence is something that happens. We have a whole class of professional killers (soldiers, police, etc.) whose job is to use the violence necessary to keep the system running. Collapse means drastically reduced violence.

And yes, one day, humanity will go extinct. There’s no way around that. What makes us human is rooted in the ecologies we inhabit; removed from that context, we’ve already lost our humanity, so hoping to keep the human species going by colonizing space is a fool’s dream. A Homo sapiens living his entire life in space loses his humanity, and becomes psychotic. We belong to this planet, and we’ll go down with it, or destroy ourselves trying to escape it.

As far as our own survival, you may be right if you mean as we are now, but we’re doing what’s necessary to move beyond civilization. In the past year we’ve learned to forage food and medicine, how to tend injuries and make medicines and first aid, how to build shelters and make cordage and start fires and make tools. Before the year is out, we’ll have added archery, hunting, fishing, brain tanning and making clothes to that repertoire. We’ve started a permaculture garden, and have a whole cabinet full of herbal medicines we’ve whipped up ourselves. We’re on pace. Collapse doesn’t come like the Angel of Death to kill people at random. It destroys civilization, and everyone who relies on it will die with it. We’re cutting off our reliance on civilization, and with a few more years, we’re on pace to be able to do precisely that. How about you?