DWill wrote:There is tremendous space between primitive tribal life and modern affluent life. Junger is saying that the earliest tribal life had solidarity going for it, despite what must appear to us to be a life of hardship and lack of opportunity. Presumably, this solidarity didn't disappear when people began living in larger groups.
I think the argument is that the emergence of larger social groups caused a steady corresponding reduction in human solidarity, simply because the solidarity of a band where you know and rely on everyone is obviously far stronger than in each successive stage of larger and larger social groups.
The six million years of evolution since we split from the chimps has mostly involved small clan group organization, so there is a sense in which this level of intimacy is hardwired in our genes as the optimal social structure for mental health. Any bigger group has to find substitutes for the solidarity of the clan.
DWill wrote: As Junger says, it is still possible for people to feel united even in our own century, but it takes some extraordinary event to make us snap to attention to the presence of one another.
The feeling of existential unity produced by war is the closest analog to clan identity, but even then, there is a need for intensive state propaganda to whip up the fervor of nationalism. Such social unity among strangers is quite different from the solidarity of a small group in a hunter gatherer world.
DWill wrote: Otherwise, the forces of individualism and inter-cultural war separate us and weaken us as surely as if we were being attacked from without. (I jump ahead here to his topic in the final chapter of the book.)
Yes, this theme of the corrosive atomizing force of competitive individualism as a social norm is the big question for
Tribe.
DWill wrote:
I don't consider this happiness deficit an established fact, though. Junger makes much of the numbers of whites (how many?) who did not want to be repatriated. I'm not sure this supports a conclusion that life with the Indians was happier.
Intuitively it seems obvious. The Indians had a paleo diet, individual freedom, rituals grounded in reverence for nature, and strong social values of honor and dignity. By contrast the industrial mass conformism of the USA had brought with it from Europe a range of traits that gave it much more economic power as a group but at the cost of reduced individual happiness.
I suspect the settlers had a less nutritious mass produced diet, and more mental illness from forced conformity to alienated dogmatic fantasy and rituals based on separation of spirit from nature. The great thing about industrial agriculture is that it feeds a bigger population and produces surplus for war and culture. But to cope emotionally with the alienation from nature produced by industrial life requires supernatural religion, which brings a heavenly host of social pathogens. Primitive life is happier, even if shorter and less comfortable, more subject to disease, accident, poverty and risk.
DWill wrote: For one thing, we have here a somewhat negative view of happiness, that is, as the relative infrequency of depression and suicide.
I don’t get how that is negative. A society where mental illness is worse is obviously less happy. Modernity has an epidemic of mental illness, a good proxy for unhappiness.
DWill wrote: the surplus that agriculture made possible resulted directly in specialization and with it the growth of arts and industries, elements that we would like to cite as essential to our happiness.
Yes, the question of whether money can buy love is an enduring controversy. Looking at the hierarchy of needs, above the base level it seems unlikely that increased affluence increases happiness, although I recall a Swedish book a few years ago by Johan Norberg argued against that.
DWill wrote:
The afterlife figures in many indigenous traditions that were not the creation of a priestly class. Deception was also part of shamanistic practice.
The difference between shamanic and monotheist religion turns in large part on the contrast between animist and transcendental frameworks. My reading is that primitive religion is more about a return to the earth and the cycle of life, whereas the Abrahamic view takes off with a theory of the immortality of the soul, and the complex metaphysics of heaven. My impression is that there is a big difference between how fundamentalist Christianity views heaven as our home and how indigenous spirituality views earth as our home.
DWill wrote: The key word is "trade-off," indicating a loss compensated for by a gain. Junger acknowledges but does not emphasize that we may have gained as much as we lost in becoming modern people.
The evolution of an advanced global technological civilization has brought opportunities and powers orders of magnitude above the stone age. But the problem is identifying what we have lost, and how we might create substitutes for the things we have lost such as the comfort and solidarity of a close knit small community.
DWill wrote:
There is really no state of grace in shortened lives in which brutality will not be unknown (see Steven Pinker and others) and in which the harsh law of nature prevents the old and handicapped from being cared for.
What I personally understand by the concept of a state of grace is harmony with nature. A society that is in harmony with its natural environment is sustainable, able to continue in similar way. A society that is not in harmony with its natural environment is unsustainable.
One of the big influences on my thinking on this topic was the 1982 movie
Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi . The soundtrack by Philip Glass joined with the vision of the scale of industrial onslaught on nature to create a vision of an unsustainable world, hurtling towards apocalyptic destruction. The overall theme is the delusory dangers of the dominant alienated American religious view that wrongly sees spirit as separate from nature and sees no path for their reconciliation.
DWill wrote:I just don't think religion and myth give us any ability to objectively view our past.
If myth provides a distorted mirror of the reality in which people live, then it does provide some help in social and cultural interpretation. On the big themes of the alienation from nature, which is an underlying theme in
Tribe, the Christian story of cross and resurrection could actually provide some ability to interpret the big trends of history.
For example, the Biblical idea is that society was so fallen and delusional and depraved that when God appeared among them the response was to hammer nails in his hands. As a metaphor for the separation of spirit and nature the story of the cross is quite strong.
DWill wrote: I also take issue with your view that it took religious delusion, foisted on the masses, to fuel the destruction of cultures that stood in the way of wealth-producing societies. That wasn't the engine because there was no singular engine in such onslaughts.
When we look at colonialism, there is a universal use of religion as part of the imperial enterprise. There is a dominant view that primitive religion is Satanic and must be stamped out by the advanced faith of the conquering power. The moral legitimacy conferred by religion is essential to imperial expansion. The conquest on earth tends to be mirrored by an imagined conquest in the realm of myth. How you could take issue with that core feature of history, how the mandate of heaven provides moral justification for mundane conquest, looks surprising.
DWill wrote:If we look at the beliefs that have sustained cultures with greater solidarity than our own, we'll find things that aren't "true." But can that be the point? For example, American Indian traditions have never recognized evolution, but should it be a deal-breaker? I also think that "only as symbolic" will vitiate whatever tradition we're looking at 100% of the time. These beliefs have always been held as more than symbolic and need to continue to be in order to hang on.
This problem of the status of symbols can best be explored by study of the role of Jesus Christ, seen as the universal mediator between earth and heaven. This mediation function has an old metaphysical purpose in connecting time to eternity. That is an abstract conceptual ideal role of an anointed savior - purely and entirely symbolic.
Now the problem that arises when you build a world civilization is that this symbolic need for a cosmic king does not go away. People always want a source of moral redemption and hope focused in an individual. So if there is nobody with the perfect skill to be the mythical king, one will inevitably be invented, as a law of social psychology.
Now as we move to a scientific world where all claims must be justified by evidence and logic, the complete absence of any real evidence for the historical existence of Jesus Christ stands as a problem for the “vitiation” model of faith that you describe. You seem to be saying that to the extent the myths of the Gospel are seen as literally untrue they lose their religious power.
That is an assumption that I entirely question, because retaining Christian tradition and interpreting it parabolically provides a far better ethical framework for society than any available alternative.
The problem of atheism is that it lacks any framework of ritual organization, and is therefore incapable of serving as a basis for local community cohesion. There should be no problem with retaining the beautiful comforting religious traditions of baptism and eucharist within a worldview that refuses to accept any unscientific assertions.
DWill wrote:
We misjudge the lives of the !Kung people if we think they had super-abundance. It may have taken them only part of the work-day to gather what they needed to survive because that's about all the land offered.
I did not say the !Kung have abundance, but that they are happy, and that global society requires universal abundance to achieve similar happiness.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/happines ... nah-curtis explains that “The claim that happiness is brought on by buying goods and spending money is disproved by the Kalahari Bushmen, who, as the chief of the tribe told me, believe that the key to their happiness is fewer material goods. He said that because they have so little, they are so happy… Instead of the common western belief that money and luxury brings pleasure, it was interesting to see how experience and community is the Bushmen’s foundation for happiness… Through these observations of the Kalahari society, I have realized that song and dance can bring more happiness than buying a pricey new handbag. In fact, through personal experience such as walking through the bush, playing games, making dinner, and learning their language, I felt a new sensation of joy… enjoy the ride and live happily because like the Bushmen, all a person needs is a supportive community and an enthusiastic spirit to live a thrilling life.”
DWill wrote: They adjusted their lives to be attuned to the environment, as we have not. They were content with very little, as we are not. We need super-abundance today, but only so that all the people of the earth can have enough, which implies a socialistic leveling process that doesn't work in the U.S. or, I'm guessing, in Australia.
It is quite hard to survive in the modern world without affluence. When wealth is put to productive use it is a great boon. However, I agree with Junger’s argument later in the book about the criminal nature of the finance industry, how the American political system is so badly corrupt that it allows thieves working for banks to get away with unimaginable grand larceny.
So the idea that more equality would be good is something I endorse, simply to deliver rule of law. But I don’t think it is unreasonable for people to want to have assets worth a million dollars to retire on, for example.
My view is that productive use of the vast scale of the world oceans will be the key to achieving sustained global super abundance, a bonobo world of universal happiness.