I feel like the Washington DC politician who was pilloried for using the word 'niggardly.' The word choice may have not been felicitous, but certainly I wasn't referring to sexual mores.Robert Tulip wrote:Is that just subtle positioning with the term “in-bred” or are you implying that Stone Agers committed incest? The general practice was that women left the band to marry, preventing in breeding. Nonetheless, use of this pejorative term does serve to position the discussion with a condescending sense of modern superiority towards the primitive, which is the prejudicial attitude that Junger is questioning.DWill wrote: mere size of settlements didn't mean that the in-bred need for close social contact couldn't be satisfied.
All pronouns are good, but the demonstrative pronoun I used can be especially tricky. I remember an English teacher telling us to write "this idea, this statement, this development," or whatever. Good advice. I was talking about the change.Robert Tulip wrote:Your term “this” is ambiguous, as to whether it refers to the change or the dependence. A good rule for precision and clarity in communication is to remove all pronouns.DWill wrote: I think of city neighborhoods early in the last century and perhaps still today. Large populations can break into smaller units to retain more of the "band" feeling. The change has more to do with the growing ability of humans to lessen their dependence on one another. This would seem to be against our best interests on the one hand, but on the other we feel it is desirable.
This impersonality of cities ( ) doesn't fit the image I have of teeming metropolises such as Bombay, where, supposedly, village-like social customs can still be found. That's what I've been told by travelers, anyway. I continue to think that greater size isn't the sole driver of anonymity or alienation.If band-level tribal social coordination is wired in to our biology (not ‘in-bred’) then you naturally should expect that people will try to recover methods that are similar to what has been the norm for 99% of human evolution. But a city with its formal rule-of-law systems provides preference to anonymous mass identity, and the informality of the local clashes against the urban economic driver of the larger and larger efficient unit of scale. Efficiency is impersonal, but human beings are personal. Black markets are a way that informal systems defeat formal systems. The goal of formality is a key objective in development theory, for example with property law.
Your critique is unclear to me, Robert. I assumed you meant that treating gays like second-class citizens goes along with the drive of capitalism, rather than against it. In any event, it's my impression that, by and large, capitalism is progressive on the subject of gay marriage. Businesses don't want to lose customers or potential employees, so they don't want to discriminate against gay couples. Companies who do discriminate, like Hobby Lobby, are the exceptions.Robert Tulip wrote:Even the family is under pressure. To raise a highly controversial topic, gay marriage, it has occurred to me that the capitalist economy has a natural preference for individual workers who are entirely flexible and have no dependents, so can effectively marry the firm. To treat homosexuals as second-class citizens - by excluding them from the sacred bond of sacramental relationship in marriage - works against this drive of capitalist anonymity and formality in social relations. The nuclear family has an informal quality, reminiscent of the tribal band.DWill wrote: There can be as much stress, after all, in close association as there can be warm fuzzy feelings, and we still have the original "band" to fall back on or withdraw into, in the family.
Viewing the distant past nostalgically, reverentially, and mythologically is humans' typical mode. We do seem to need to believe that the warts that are all too evident in our present didn't plague us in our innocent beginnings. I'm pretty much a uniformist; I take the Ecclesiastian view: there is nothing new under the sun.Robert Tulip wrote:Sure, those are all good and reasonable points. Perhaps I am just a hopeless romantic drawn to the dream of the noble savage, but I would go even further, and say that in my own scientific mythology, the dawn of the Holocene ten thousand years ago in the Neolithic era was the Golden Age, while the depths of modernity in the later Middle Ages was the centre of the Iron Age. This combines the orbital analysis of the seasons seen in the Milankovich Cycles with the ancient Indian myth of the Yuga, the cycles of wisdom and ignorance. Exploring the correlations between the science and myth in this dialectic of the modern and the primitive is one of the big research topics that this material leads to. The reason I regard the dawn of the Holocene as the Golden Age, before the rise of settled agriculture, is that despite the shortcomings of primitive life I think there was a social stability and freedom which have both steadily deteriorated, together with biodiversity – in a fall from grace – as a direct function of technological progress. Mapping the actual orbital cycles onto the mythological cycles appears to me to provide a very accurate long term theory of history.DWill wrote:there is room to question not only the paleo diet (probably a good deal of starch consumed), but the existence of individual freedom as we would define it. Traditional cultures have romantic attraction but also tend to be less liberal than we probably can imagine. And the thing about happiness is of course that it's damn hard to define.
To my way of thinking, what would make a myth scientific is that it had support in fact and data, just as we we expect from scientific theories. I suppose then it would cease to be a myth. I don't find that simply basing a myth on geologic epochs or using any other scientific language gives it more factual status.
Let me be clear at this point that I admire Junger's book. What he tells us about our current society is important. There is, however, a nekker-cube quality to this matter of tribes and tribalism, whereby with a change in perspective we see a new and unwelcome aspect. I don't need to elaborate much on this; tribalism has been linked to many intractable ills of humankind. It isn't as though the unified beliefs of groups--group solidarity--has been a general blessing for us.
Yes, Wal Mart seems to be the culmination of this fantastic engine of production. But if you like capitalism, as you do, you must like Wal Mart, wouldn't you say? I would never deny the sadness of what seemed to have been lost, but for me it comes down to having to accept the bad with the good. Otherwise it's wanting to have our cake and eat it.There is a story of a Sioux chief visiting New York two centuries ago and returning to tell his people that the old ways are over, that the Plains Indians cannot survive against this industrial monster that has landed on their continent. I am not talking about the romance of the frontier with growing food for a family around a log cabin, I am describing how the European systems of settled agriculture were systematically exported to the USA on a greenfields basis, enabling productivity on a scale undreamt of by hunters and gatherers. That process of industrial efficiency has continued, leading to the glories of Walmart.
In a better world than we had, that quality of primitive life that I agree should be cherished, would have been, when the clash of civilizations occurred 500 years ago. But it didn't happen that way, so you and I are the inheritors of a bloody, violent overthrow of indigenous civilizations. We owe our existence to that tragic reality.Robert Tulip wrote:The point I was trying to make is not at all to diminish the level of superstition and ignorance in primitive life, but rather that systematic monotheism takes the alienation of spirit from nature to a whole other level compared to tribal religion which is small and unique and close to the earth, generally involving an animist reverence for the spirituality of specific natural places.DWill wrote: I don't understand, either, Robert, singling out the Europeans' religion as supernatural, as though there was no such thing in native religions. Christianity from one point of view entails less superstition than older religions, not more. The supernatural placed relatively few restraints on the Europeans compared to those of other religions. I'd recommend looking at the matter anthropologically to lessen the chance of partisan bias.
As I've already hinted, tribalism may be part of the problem regarding human decision-making, which must occur on a unified basis in order for our planet to be saved. It's ironic that becoming all one tribe, world-wide, means ditching tribalism. That push toward unification also would mean loss of cultural diversity even if by a miracle we save biological diversity. That needs to be seen as an acceptable trade-off.Robert Tulip wrote:Yes, that is an entirely reasonable comment, and illustrates the need for caution in romanticizing tribal life, as Pinker has argued. But still my view is that our modern global historical trajectory is towards human extinction, due to the pathological denial of the natural basis of spiritual identity, and our failure to see the risks inherent in technological progress. I see mental illness as an important ‘canary in the coal mine’ regarding the deep unhappiness that people feel about the direction we are taking our planet. We need a paradigm shift to prevent the collapse of civilization, and a recognition of the value of tribal practices seems to me to be a central part of that paradigm shift.DWill wrote:If you go in for utilitarian calculations of happiness, it isn't true that a society with lower incidence of mental illness is therefore happier. What if the higher-MI society is able to deliver a much greater level of happiness to most of its members? What if the happiness of the low-MI society is really just so-so? These are the trade-offs philosophers discuss when parsing happiness from a utilitarian perspective.
I don't know if Mozart was worth the homogenization of the planet, but it's true that in some hard-to-specify way, the two go together. The point I would make is that we do point with particular pride to achievement in the arts, and those arts could not have developed in tribal societies.Robert Tulip wrote:It is a good question, is the ability to produce a Mozart worth the homogenization of the planet? Part of the beauty of the arts is that creativity emerges from the interstices between the formal and the informal, with the spark of genius usually railing against the prevailing culture in some way. The Roman plebs were bought off with bread and circuses, but that old tactic to stop urban riots does not mean the plebians were happier than the free people outside the Empire.DWill wrote: the "arts" part, meaning the specialization made possible by agriculture created literature, music, sculpture, etc. in such quantity that one could argue more happiness was produced for humankind than was possible while almost everyone needed to be producing food. I recall that the research on money and happiness states that a certain amount of surplus money does produce more happiness, but that the effect doesn't hold as people become truly wealthy. Eric Hoffer said that it's that little bit extra, over the level of sufficiency, that people feel so motivated to work for and that they in a certain sense need.
[/quote]Robert Tulip wrote:Is that so about Judaism? I thought Jews believed in going to heaven. I am not talking about any literal return to indigenous beliefs, since evolution does not go backwards and modern thought should be entirely scientific. My point about indigenous culture is that the context prior to the rise of industrial civilization was on the whole happier, albeit on a much much smaller scale of population, with lower productivity and lifespan, and with a flat earth horizon limited by the surrounding mountains.DWill wrote:Judaism, the first of the Abrahamic faiths, didn't include immortality of the soul, but I accept your general distinction, though I wouldn't agree that indigenous beliefs are, in total, more conducive to a healthy society.
This comment simply takes me back to the what-is-happiness question. The American view of happiness is the Jeffersonian, entailing active pursuit of individual desires. Happiness equals fulfillment on that view. Happiness equals stability and harmony on the other.