'Noble Savages' and the Origins of Civilisation

As pointed out in the Philosophy Thread, most Hunter-gatherer societies are actually quite egalitarian*

, thanks to a number of factors, such as cooperation with other people when food is hard to come by, to simply it being more convenient to solve societal issues by democracy when your "society" consists of 40 people who all know each other. The concept of hierarchy and land ownership only appeared when societies began to become sedentary and raise animals/grow food. At this point, it became too difficult to maintain egalitarianism and democracy, and the concepts of wealth inequality and hierarchy came into being (again).

That being said, though, I consider anarcho-primitivism to be an example of 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'.

You're correct - limited resources breed egalitarianism because the population is too scarce and too busy starving to specialise, and a multitude of specialist roles = judgements over which roles are more valuable. What point were you trying to make, though?

What's precedent ever done for us?

I would think that has more to do with the number of people than amount of resources.

Specialisation has barriers to entry too. You need to be in a moderately stable economic situation before you can afford to engage in it.

What's precedent ever done for us?

You need to be able to afford to have people not be able to do certain things in order for them to specialize in other things.

More to the point, hierarchies naturally form when there are enough resources for humans to specialize in killing other humans.

Or large animals, for that matter.

Keep Rolling On

May I point out that specialisation occurs in hunter-gatherer societies, as well? Somebody primarily makes the weapons, because they're better at that than most. Others look after the kids. Still others are known as very good artists, dancers and story-tellers, and are in demand as such on the long nights by the fire or when carving something specific either for others or the gods. <_<

And, we've got evidence for distinct hierarchies going back over 40,000 years. Give over...

In short: the noble savage is a lovely notion. Shame we're all just human, eh?

edited 1st Mar '13 4:16:15 AM by Euodiachloris

I recently read Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday, which is precisely about hunter-gatherer societies. It's a very cool read, I think*

. Some points that Diamond makes, I think very convincingly, are:

1. Hunter-gatherer societies are not all the same, not even close. Arguably, there is more variation between different "primitive" cultures — which adapted to different environments, and developed different cultural mores — than between different agricultural or post-agricultural societies. Talking about the Inuit, the !Kung and the Yanomami as if they were pretty much the same thing makes no sense whatsoever.

2. Some of the aspects of (some) hunter-gatherer societies — for example, a greater emphasis on conflict resolution through negotiation, or their diets — seem to have some advantages over our culture's analogues, and deserve further investigation.

3. Other aspects of these societies, on the other hand, are just awful. We should really not romanticize "noble savages": many of these cultures practice infanticide, for example, and their conflicts have a death rate (expressed as a percentage over the — very small — population) which is far greater than even that of our worst wars.

4. These "savages" are not actually savage in the least. Their cultures are quite sophisticated and culturally complex: for example, traditional New Guineans generally know at least 5+ different languages (and not even closely related ones, by the way), which is a feat that not many of us would find easy to replicate.

edited 1st Mar '13 5:38:23 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Yeah, Diamond is an excellent resource on this. The thread subject very much reminded me of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and its commentary on early societal development.

What's precedent ever done for us?

I doubt their diets were better than ours. They might have been better for them, but a diet geared towards spending all your time hunting mammoths and dying of a tooth infection at age 40 is not the same as a diet geared towards spending all your time in an office and dying of cancer at age 90. I suspect that if compared to what hunter/gatherers ate, we have better options now to suit our own lifestyles. The main problem is that we often choose worse ones...ironically, based on the same instincts that were meant to get cave men to eat well.

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I've never seen a good reason for that being a confirmed definition to begin with. Most of the time I see it mentioned, it's usually in a "not like us" context similar to the original meaning of barbarian or uncultured meaning not British.

Fight smart, not fair.