You know that Golden Rule?" Not the one that VCs quote, but the one that goes "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you?"
We should think about that when we choose how to deal with uncontacted tribes. It may be that one day another intelligence will need to decide how to deal with us, and on that day I hope we can say, "Yes, we used to have a habit of massacring technologically inferior peoples we encountered, but we grew up a little and we don't do that any more. Then we used to keep them alive but destroy their culture and identity while mouthing platitudes about how we were helping them, but we grew up a little and we don't do that any more either."
We should give them access to technology and to our way of life. Our way of life is better. Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive.
Help is exactly what I would want from advanced alien visitors. I don't want them to respect my culture just because it is mine; I want something better for myself, not cultural relativism.
There is nothing good or enviable about uncivilized lifestyles to preserve; any actions that maintain them in that lifestyle are ensuring they literally die young, mostly of preventable causes. Their lives are short, uncomfortable and brutal. Trying to minimize contact is ensuring they do not get modern medical care and that they retain their dark ages quality (or worse) myths and prejudices.
Also, nothing I wrote says anything about providing them with access, it says something about destroying their culture and identity. So don't be too quick to make assumptions about what I believe or don't believe about medicine and education.
I readily acknowledge we may agree more than it first appears given the particular emphasis we each chose. But I do think there is substantive disagreement here within the realm of non-violent (and, dare I say it: civilized) ways to approach the matter.
The very idea of having a way that "we" deal with "uncontacted tribes" is collectivist on both ends.
Individuals should do whatever they want without violating anyone's rights.
Your way of phrasing the situation has systematic collectivist bias that implies things like withholding access to some individuals in their tribe if a tribal leader doesn't want us. And it implies central planning/organization (what "we" do).
When you don't let any individual who wants to interact with them, without violating their rights, do as he pleases, then you are restricting access.
When you divide the world into different countries, tribes, etc, and restrict the free flow of people, information, trade, etc, worldwide across all borders, then you are restricting access. When you draw a sharp distinction between aliens and human, that is species prejudice. Making a big deal out of what collective group people are from is the real nationalism, xenophobia, racism, or whatever. I see all people as individual people and that's it.
I suspect we still agree on the principles. The only thing I am advocating is thinking things through. For example, it is very difficult to interact with them without violating their right to life because it is easy to infect them with a disease. What do we do? Nothing, and let people figure it out for themselves? Put up signs? Or restrict the area to anthropologists who have training in the matter?
I don't personally know what to do about that. I said I'd like to treat them as I'd like to be treated. Personally, I'm glad I have access to the Internet.
...it is very difficult to interact with them without violating their right to life because it is easy to infect them with a disease. What do we do?
Ship in a bunch of doctors, and introduce them to disease under medically controlled circumstances. We can't isolate them forever to avoid an epidemic, but we can try to mitigate the impact when it occurs.
To those downmodding, do you have a better solution? Should we simply wait for accidental contact (most likely with no doctors present) to wipe out everyone?
Ignoring collectivist thinking is a fault when people do in fact act in groups. It is even more so a fault when referring to the violation of rights, when rights only exist as a collectivist decision.
If you were about to meet this tribe, there is nothing you can do about the fact that you are a member of a Western culture meeting a member of a tribal culture, and your different groups--national, cultural, philosophical (in the sense of your strict individualism)--are interacting in important ways. Denying the problem by pretending there are no groups does not make it go away.
Observing this discussion, it occurs to me (not for the first time) that it would be nice if people discussing the topic took each other's words literally, didn't take them to mean anything beyond the literal meaning.
xenophanes says "Our way of life is better" and argues for "giv[ing] them access to technology and to our way of life" and against "[p]reserving their backwards culture", "actions that maintain them in that lifestyle", and "[t]rying to minimize contact". Then raganwald appears to hear "It's justified to force them to follow our way of life" appended to xenophanes's post and proceeds to argue against this (mentioning two historical examples); it takes another post by xenophanes to explain that he neither said nor meant that.
Elsewhere, d3x says "You are basically saying that your beliefs and way of life are so superior and better than theirs that you must convert them", and the italicized part is, again, not part of what xenophanes said. xenophanes replies saying "I did not advocate forced conversion", plus a bit of ranting about a "left wing way of thinking" which probably led to enough downvotes to keep it at 2 and provoked a 10-point reply devoted solely to the "left wing" comment and a 9-point reply devoted half to it and half to the original topic.
Also, DanielBMarkham jumps in with a reply to d3x, making basically the same points as xenophanes--saying "If they are happy with a life expectancy of 30, [etc....], if they want that life, let them have it", arguing to "show and tell them what they are missing and let them decide", arguing against "inaction" and "let[ting] people suffer when we can help them stop [i]f they so desire". And d3x replies arguing against "[the idea that] their lives are so bad" (which does address what he said), "feel[ing] ... that I have the right to be condescending when discussing their way of life-" (which at least addresses his comment, though I think it's unfair) "-and I have the obligation to convert them to my way of thinking" (which is not what he said). d3x also draws a comparison between DanielBMarkham's arguments and historical arguments to justify slavery, a reductio ad absurdum that might conceivably be aimed at Markham's actual arguments, but that I imagine was aimed at an argument d3x read into Markham's comment.
This entire tree of discussion is full of this sort of putting-words-in-your-mouth. Even xenophanes's reply to raganwald's original comment may be guilty of this--raganwald originally argued against "massacring technologically inferior peoples" and "keep[ing] them alive but destroy[ing] their culture and identity while mouthing platitudes about how we were helping them", which does not say anything about the deliberate "preserving their backwards culture" or "[t]rying to minimize contact" that xenophanes proceeds to argue against. xenophanes doesn't directly say something to indicate that this is intended as a rebuttal to raganwald's comment, and it was his first post in this thread (I think), so maybe he was just making a general statement of his position (which I personally would upvote)... but I could also interpret it as yet another misguided rebuttal to things someone didn't say and didn't mean.
So, guys, please become more autistic and interpret things literally; it would cut out the need for a lot of the anger and "No that isn't what I said" noise in this thread.
I'm joking about the autism, but seriously, there are 277 comments on this story and I think reading-and-replying-to-things-that-weren't-written is the reason for most of them.
I was indeed commenting not only to what Raganwald said explicitly but also on what I took to be the full meaning. This turned out to be worthwhile b/c many other commenters believed the position I first thought Raganwald held -- I knew it wasn't a rare straw man no one believes.
I think it's pretty harmless to guess what people mean and reply to issues they didn't directly raise as long as you try to keep things pretty impersonal and focus on issues that are worth discussing in their own right. I don't think it's avoidable to make some guesses about what other people mean b/c writing is never 100% clear (plus lots of people are in the habit of being unclear so if you don't add substantial interpretation for them they blame you for being difficult).
I don't particularly object to Raganwald misunderstanding me at first. We got on the sort of the same page in only a couple comments. Honestly I consider that fast/good. It's the 3 people who assumed or wanted me to be joking b/c they disagreed with me that I have a problem with... The guy posting intentional ad hominems against me. The guy posting that he's lowering his opinion of HN b/c I got upvoted. All the people who take or make stuff personal and don't focus on the issues and post nasty stuff without argument and don't correct their misunderstandings even after clarifications...
I actually think it's just that difficult a problem. Whether we decide to contact them or not, in a sense we're still deciding _for_ them whether or not they will have access to technology that will fundamentally reshape their culture.
In a sense it also isn't our place to _care_ if _they_ decide to fundamentally reshape their culture based on what we "give" them.
Both of these viewpoints have been important in world history. Would Africa be so violent if there were less people selling them guns? Is it our right to _not_ sell guns to people if we know they're going to be used for violence that is, in our eyes, senseless?
Mostly I see polite disagreement in this topic. If we're putting words in mouths, it's because those words are the natural conclusion proceeded to upon viewing the actually mouthed words from the opposite perspective.
A numerical majority of comments are probably polite, yes, but here are some quotes...
"Your reply is so laced with hypocrisy its disgusting."
"Talk about arrogance...and ignorance."
"I really hope you are kidding. If not this is so typical..."
Next, you say: "If we're putting words in mouths, it's because those words are the natural conclusion proceeded to upon viewing the actually mouthed words from the opposite perspective."
Obviously that wasn't the conclusion of the person who holds this opposite perspective. If you think their words imply a monstrous conclusion, then either they must be a monster, or their thought process leads to a different conclusion, and if you want to carry out a constructive conversation, you should assume the latter and press them. Here's a part of my above post that I didn't include, but I will now:
--
Probably it would help if you a) noticed when you read things into comments (be on your guard when discussing politics or morals) and b) explicitly said so when you addressed a claim someone didn't make. For example, d3x could have said something like, "You say that our lives are so much better than theirs, that contact with primitive cultures destroys those cultures, that you'd have to be a flaming idiot to want to live like that.... Do you therefore advocate forcing them to live like us? [You could answer that by reading the third paragraph of Markham's post--"let them decide"--but perhaps d3x thought that was a sarcastic quip, which I suppose is believable. Another tip for navigating rocky topics: don't assume sarcasm unless you're quite sure.] If so, then I've got a lot to say about that. <insert text of d3x's original post> If not, then precisely what do you advocate?"
And then DanielBMarkham could have said something like... well, I'm not him and I don't speak for him, but perhaps he'd say something like, "No, I don't advocate that. What do I advocate? Well, I don't prescribe a particular course of action, but let's take an example. A group of people who felt generous might visit them in a boat, set up a demonstration of modern technology on the shore, and offer to teach anything to natives who wanted to learn."
And maybe d3x would reply, "They'd just stay on the shore, teaching them and getting nothing in return? Who'd be that generous? They'd only do it if they had an ulterior motive--to convert them to their religion, to get cheap unskilled labor from them, to trick them into selling their natural resources for much less than they're worth, and everything else that's gone wrong in the past."
And maybe Markham would say, "Oh, snap, that's a problem," or he'd say "Maybe a rich billionaire who felt charity-minded (or PR-minded) would fund the whole effort, and these teachers would follow through with it because they'd be paid," or he'd say "Dude, doing unskilled labor for a price that's ridiculously cheap to us might look like horrible exploitation to you, but in fact it's better than the lives they currently lead. The fact that they choose it over their current lives is proof that it's better, unless you wish to argue that you know better than them, which is hypocritical given your earlier argument." But this is just me talking now.
--
Regarding guns: I would recommend being careful and slow about giving them war materials (or the capability to make them) in case one party gets hold of them and attempts to conquer the rest of the island. But it's not a moral/legal imperative, any more than it is to be careful about introducing college kids to alcohol. (People may hate you if you do it badly, but they can't really stop or punish you.) I'll comment that any civilization that advances in science and has access to plentiful resources will eventually develop all sorts of weapons, including guns; and that the developments of fire, bronze, iron, steel, flight, nuclear physics, and many more things all led to weapons as well as productive tools, and I think it was worth it.
Disease is the objection I find most potentially problematic. Also, one part of me says it would be interesting to let them be so we could watch them, study them; another part says that if I knew someone in there, and she was sick with a disease that modern medicine could cure, I would sure as hell want to save her. Or if I knew someone working his butt off, and I knew I could give him some technological tools that would make it ten times easier for him, I'd do that.
I think that's the best way it can happen: if some individual people from one society are connected with some individual people in the other, and they get and use some advanced things whenever they feel the need. Then their neighbors might see the results, decide they want some advanced things too, and try to work out a way to get them. Maybe a few families would want to send their (young adult) kids out to the advanced society so they could stay for a while, learn things and get things, and bring them back home. Or maybe they'd move out with their kids, young children, and raise their family and run a career for a decade or two, periodically sending gifts and maybe visiting their extended family in the old country, perhaps moving back eventually. You know, this is sounding a good deal like what some immigrants from poor countries to the U.S. do today.
Yes. And not every kind of discrimination or restriction is wrong.
We must not contact them, unless they want to contact us. We cannot be certain of the impact of our presence to their minds. Just as we can't be certain (no, we can't) of the impact of an alien presence in our planet.
>We must not contact them, unless they want to contact us.
And how do we tell?
They can't know about us unless they... know about us (contamination: our existence, and any visual differences). They can't contact us unless they know where we are (contamination: we're watching them, and they see us doing so). Then they can't express desires until we understand each other (contamination: language and ideas). At that point, you've already significantly altered their culture, at least for the individual(s) you directly dealt with, and any they told. If we "must not contact them", then we must not contact any, because every person is part of a group, and arguably is a group of one, so you've already contaminated a person, a group, a sub-culture, a unique society that will never be the same again.
We either force contact, or we deny them the knowledge of our existence. There is no middle-ground, because any step away from zero contact is contact. Inaction is just delay of choice; what happens if they literally walk in a straight line until they hit a city? We are forcing contact by our mere existence, we could pick up the city and move to avoid contaminating them against their choice, since if they didn't know about us they couldn't have chosen to contact us.
Your last paragraph, if analyzed, contains a false assesment. If they walk in a straight line and contact us, and then they don't return to their way of life because they want to keep that contact, then we can be certain they want to communicate with us. We can CHOOSE to stay away. There's nothing that states we MUST communicate or have relationships with all human beings, nor step onto EVERY land until everything's explored and divided. Just let them be, do not interfere.
Really? What if they're just out walking and are unaware of the existence of other humans? Finding a city when you think your group is all there is would be rather "contaminating". And you've still contaminated that one; if they bring back that information, you've allowed contamination of the culture as a whole, the same as if you went yourselves, except you get to sit back and lie about how you had nothing to do with it. Unless you wish to state that an individual can and does accurately speak for a group, especially a group you know almost nothing about except what that individual has told you? What if they're the anarchist of the group?
And if we were to know if they think other humans than themselves / those they immediately interact with exist, we've probably exposed ourselves to them, as that would be hard to know through un-detected observation alone.
Our existence is interference if they become aware of it. Absolute non-interference is impossible if they ever become aware of us in any way. If we "must not contact them" unless they want it, we cannot impose ourselves on any who do not wish to contact us, which means complete isolation until they magically express their desire to contact that which they cannot know exists.
My point is that "We must not contact them, unless they want to contact us." is a logical impossibility, not something one can actually achieve, and it makes no sense to hold such an impossibility as an ideal.
What if they are? Can you see the diference between giving them, a group with far fewer resources to defend themselves, the chance to remain isolated if they want it so, or contact us as well, against forcing our presence there?
"Our existence is interference if they become aware of it"
I concede you that point. Can I rephrase "must not contact them" with "should minimize points of contact from our side"? Those planes have their purpose: to make us aware of their presence, because we're about to wipe out their environment. Should we keep our distance? Yes. Should we do nothing and let companies run them over? No, absolutely not. Then I go for flying over them and take pictures.. It's the lesser of two evils.
There's no magic. Once they discover us, instead of we discovering them, they can take the step to communicate wth us.
It makes you wonder what they were thinking when they saw the plane flying around over their heads. In almost every shot of the tribe, they were all standing and staring. I doubt it is the first time they have seen some sort of modern technology, but it certainly isn't common.
Modern man is taking away their land to oil drilling and logging. Personally, I think we should treat it as tribal leaders once did. We are the enemy. If we want to preserve them, then we should not study them as subjects either. That is their land, their home. Let them be.
It sounds like they would have seen planes many times as this guy has been following them for 20 years. It would be interesting how they perceive the planes, they may see them as some kind of god watching over them.
Hard to say since it's unlikely to be the same plane, they might think it's either multiple beings. I'd suspect more that they think it's a giant bird than a god though.
These people will be contacted by the modern world one way or another. I choose to help them not treat them like animals to be set on display at a zoo. Let them be the decision makers in their own destiny. Like the guy said, loggers will come in and kill them. We can at least give them the ability to speak for themselves. And that unfortunately means someone is going to have to make contact with them.
You make a lot of sense. Whether they should be contacted or not is irrelevant. They will be. Besides, while we pretend they're invisible, they'll be defending themselves from the worst in our society.
They have human rights, but theirs haven't teeth until they're in communication with a world ready to honor them. The real issue is how can we safely open a dialog.
What about the missionaries who stopped indigenous peoples' crazy blood soaked ways and widespread human sacrifice rituals? The Aztecs in particular were quite psycho.
With the daily stories of decapitated bodies and mass slayings in connection with the drug cartels in Mexico, sometimes a wonder about the cultural link back to the Aztec ways.
But let's not quibble a minor point like that. The question I raised was simply how our perspective today differs from their perspective back in colonial times, with an eye to considering the possibility that we are fallible and that what we sincerely believe is in someone else's best interests may not be in their best interests.
I'm not saying we can't or shouldn't contact or help them, I'm saying we should be careful, because it may be that what we think is good for them today turns out to be bad for them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't act, but isn't it worth thinking carefully before making choices?
The scope of human sacrifice was largely exaggerated. The book 1491, by Charles C. Mann, puts the amount of people sacrificed per year by the Aztecs at 3000-4000, out of around 30 million people. He compares that to England, which executed 75000 people between 1530 and 1630. England had about 1/10th the population of the Aztecs, and if it had the same, it would have been executing 7500 people each year, around double the Aztecs were.
Yes but those executions weren't a ridiculous attempt to appease some "sun god" - many of the those executed in England were witches.
As to the comment above - are you suggesting the Spanish deliberately spread diseases? It seems a little unfair to accuse the Spanish invaders of bio-warfare.
Excuse me - it might be that I'm tipsy but did you just call appeasing gods ridiculous while presenting the execution of witches as something less ridiculous?
yes, he did. it's a little absurd, but I believe his main point is still valid.
the inquisition &etc were as much about cultural conformity and control than about espousing a culture of violence. while ridiculous the question is not to compare ridiculousness levels but to compare the _reasons_ that people were doing the ridiculous things they did.
killing people for the express and explicit purpose of killing people is bad mojo.
I don't think either example can be held above the other as the better example. Both were ultimately born out of superstition. Both were used as a form of control by one group over another (more so witch hunting & inquisition).
They shouldn't have done it...
..at least by our standards today. It is always difficult to judge historical people because we are, even from an early age, in possession of more facts than they were.
> are you suggesting the Spanish deliberately spread diseases? It seems a little unfair to accuse the Spanish invaders of bio-warfare.
You're actually right, there's little evidence or even mention of biological warfare until much later, and truly only in the North American field. However, bio-warfare likely dates back at least three-thousand years, so it would be hard to tell.
Furthermore the Spanish didn't really need biological warfare, "for with fifty men one could keep the whole population in subjection and make them do whatever one wanted." However, given that the Spanish had some of the harshest policies on forced labor, it's not hard to see why they wouldn't want to use biological warfare. The encomienda system offered protection to tribe members in exchange for tribute through labour, this didn't effect tribes like the Incas where they had a system like this long established, but for the Arawak it is thought to be why they ended up with large populations on the south american mainland.
I think the Spanish deliberately chose not to spread disease so as to make the most profit, which is easy to see considering Spain basically took on the policy of strip-mining south America to send every ounce of gold they found back to Spain.
Given that most native populations at the time had nothing more than bronze-age technology, they couldn't even take a stand against the Spanish. The Spanish in their war with the Incas managed to kill easily ten times their amount of men, but there's few reports of Spanish casualties in their fights against thousands of natives. In many battles they achieved 400:1 ratios of Indian:Spanish deaths in battle.
Consider that at the Battle of Thermopylae the Spartans only managed 10:1, despite the home-turf advantage, better tactics, land advantage and far superior training as they were fighting against a largely conscripted army. Considering the Spanish achieved a 40-fold increase in advantage, it shows how unbelievably powerful steel armour, muskets and cannon were. Not to mention the Spanish made extensive use of horses.
But could this be because they don’t see the benefits of ‘our’ way of life? If they knew, might they want to join us?
They won’t get the chance. In reality, the future offered by the settler society is to ‘join’ at the lowest possible level – often as beggars and prostitutes. History proves that tribal peoples end up in a far worse state after contact, often dead.
has the basic argument that as a direct result of modern technology, there are people living on the planet now (in sub-saharan Africa), with the lowest standards of living ever present on this planet, significantly worse than that experienced by Paleolithic hunters and gatherers.
Uncivilized lifestyles turned out not to be that brutal, and in fact modern medicine is the primary mechanism by which the poorest countries have significantly lower standards of living than undiscovered tribes.
Ahh yes, the colonialist's mantra. Even more of a historical failure than the communist manifesto. Go look at how life 'improved' in sub saharan africa. Or the profoundly sad state of natives all over the world, in Canada, Australia, US, and beyond.
Our way of life is not better. It is not for everyone. We have huge wealth and health disparity, large scale violence, drug addiction and homeless to name but a few unsavories.
Your argument is a very old one - this is a 19th century discussion. As such I suggest you look at the history of colonialism, and the atrocities that resulted and continue to result because of it. Maybe start with Rwanda, it's pretty compelling.
Yes, it is. Would you trade places with them? Would you want your children to?
We have huge wealth and health disparity
Which we could certainly eliminate by destroying all our wealth and abandoning medicine. The only thing that should tell you is that "inequality" is a poor metric.
And none of this implies that it would be acceptable to forcibly impose our civilization on anyone. It does imply that we should offer them the choice.
It's not fair to offer that comparison after we've already been exposed to our own cultures. Of course now that we've had technology, our social traditions and structure, and advances in science and history, that it would be nearly impossible to WANT to trade places with them.
However, we are a stressed out, overworked, sick society who has lost traditions such as appreciation of family, and our idea of relaxation and "living life" is a 2 week vacation once a year. Sure, we've got great tools and Xboxes and the Internet and modern medicine... but at the end of the day, 100+ million Americans are literally sick (defined by the prescribed medications that over 1 in 3 have to treat symptoms of sickness).
If I had grown up in their tribe, and was given an opportunity to completely understand the pros and cons of the new society, I may just want to stay ignorant in my tribe.
It's quite possible that while they're likely less intelligent, less advanced and very primitive, but happy and connected with each other and have a quality of life that comparatively (to them) is better than our way of life.
At the end of the day, to me at least, quality of life is what's really important. To others, it's competition, satisfaction of proving that they are better than others, money, and egocentric activities that make them happy (and that's fine).
>. Yes, it is. Would you trade places with them? Would you want your children to?
Honestly, I don't know how did you get so many upvotes. I mean, we have this huge imbalance problem of equality between different peoples right now, which could be easily solved if only the "superior" whites in Europe and the United States would vote down the anti-immigration rules.
The situation of poor sub-saharan people, whose way of life was irremediably "improved" by superior European colonialism, would very much be improved if they were allowed to travel and work freely in all over of Western Europe. The same goes for the United States and its hinterland in Latin America.
And let me tell you what would happen were we to contact these tribes. Half of them will die from a disease like normal influenza, while the rest will be either lost to cronic alcoholism or to the Brazilian favellas. We've seen all this happen before.
After spending one's life with one worldview, how many people would just up and trade it for another? You're asking the wrong question.
For instance, it's said that 99% of Japanese who attempt living abroad end up returning to Japan. Is it because their way of life is "superior"? The vast majority of foreigners who try living there end up returning from where they came from, as well. Is it because we're all superior to each other?
If these people are brought in to our culture they're fucked. Plain and simple.
What do you think they're going to do, move to the Bay Area and start a social media company?
They're on the bottom rung. They've got some red body paint, some banana trees, and some thatch roofed huts. They're wealth exists solely in their own way of life. As soon as they're faced with our way of life, they're fucking worthless.
>Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive.
The point is that they are not suffering.
Modern anthropology and the best science actually indicates that tribal hunter-gatherers experience higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than your typical citizen of an agricultural society.
Tribal hunter-gatherers have healthier diets, live longer without outside interference, have more social harmony, deeper longer lasting social bonds, etc. All the ingredients for deep, lasting, and fulfilling happiness.
They are living precisely how humans evolved to live. From the perspective of "suffering" agriculture is actually a step backwards. Nonetheless agricultural societies dominate because agricultural societies have higher populations, stronger diseases (natural disease warfare) and better military technology.
It is natural that agriculture dominates and pushes out the tribal lifestyle. However on the basis of suffering/misery it is actually the agriculturalists who are worse off.
A great book that details this phenomenon was recently released for the public called Sex At Dawn.
There are degrees of agriculturalism. How much of their diet is from foraging and hunting? Also there is still a big difference between cultures who cultivate fruits and cultures who cultivate grains and legumes.
If they adopt grains/legumes their population will increase and their lifespans will decline. But as long as they stick to fruit and animal meat, and avoid modern diseases, they will be healthier than our society.
It's NOT a foregone conclusion that they experience suffering/misery.
It's certainly possible but in order to claim this you need to provide evidence of their suffering/misery.
Most likely, it's quite the opposite. If they are anything like the typical tribal hunter-gatherers, depression is probably unheard of in their culture.
Modern anthropology and the best science actually indicates that tribal hunter-gatherers experience higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than your typical citizen of an agricultural society.
So does the typical Oxycontin addict. 'Happiness and satisfaction' are weasel words that ultimately have no objective meaning.
Tribal hunter-gatherers have healthier diets, live longer without outside interference,
I wasn't the one making the argument that these people are experiencing misery/suffering. Misery and suffering is no more objective than happiness and satisfaction. I would argue that both of these things are objective and can be observed in the brain and well as inferred from other criteria.
>No, they do not.
Yes, they do.
We can go back and forth like this all day or you can make a real argument. Read SEX AT DAWN and get back to me with your criticism of their anthropology.
Based on your statements regarding happiness I'm going to tentatively conclude that you're one of the ignorant engineers who has little contact with the social sciences.
Why do programmers believe they know more than everyone else in subjects where they are grossly ignorant? We need a word for this. Programmer hubris or something. I guess it's just the Dunning-Kruger effect striking again.
What constitutes a 'civilized' lifestyle? Your concepts of 'backwards' and 'civilized' are grounded in normative assumptions about what is right and wrong. I am not a post-structuralist, but I expect someone to acknowledge his or her normative stance before degrading a culture different than your own. What do you mean when you say 'There is nothing good?' What do you define as 'good?'
You're mistaken in your assumption that I am ignorant of philosophy just b/c A) I didn't cite anyone impressive in my initial comment B) we disagree. Yes I am aware of Chomsky (in more detail than New Yorker articles offer). Yes I am aware of what ontology is.
Yes I have studied philosophy. Do you want me to counter-cite philosophers for you to read? You might learn something by reading _The Myth of the Framework_ and _The Open Society And Its Enemies_ by Karl Popper.
If you want to trash freedom, human rights, peaceful cooperation, and other aspects of modern Western civilization, and deny their objective value, don't pretend there is no serious and thoughtful stuff published on the other side and that everyone who disagrees with you is ignorant.
Next time you want to call someone closed minded, try to do it without ad hominem. Ad hominem arguments don't make you come off as tolerant and willing to have an open-ended discussion where you don't assume in advance who is right.
You certainly don't argue or write like you studied anything but Glenn Beck's wikipedia page.
Can you please explain to me how I am 'trashing' freedom, and human rights? Cultural rights ARE human rights.
And please explain to me how Karl Popper somehow supports your theory of 'objective value.' Popper's arguments concern the contingency of analyses. Contingency, not objectivity.
I only reserve the ad hom's for close-minded dipshits like yourself.
Popper also wrote the books "Objective Knowledge" and "In Search of a Better World". These titles are perhaps a giveaway.
Throughout he advocates the existence of objective truth, and things like the possibility of a "better" world. He is no relativist. He thinks some ideas and values are better than others. He makes explicit statements (and arguments) in favor of objective ethics in, e.g., _The World of Parmenides_, ch 2, addendum 2. Also of course he favors the open society and thinks it is better than the closed society.
It won't be better for them. It may not better for their children. It will probably be better for their grandchildren... if we continue to be generous. But by that time we'll probably be disgusted and resentful because they haven't assimilated well enough to be productive members of the middle class. The alternative, of course, is forcible assimilation and cultural extinction, which would be a horrific fate inflicted on two generations for the sake of unborn ones.
To accomplish what you suggest, it seems like the "cleanest" and most humane way would be to kidnap every child under ten and every subsequent child born into the tribe and put them up (separately) for adoption in wealthy countries. Let everyone older than ten live out their lives undisturbed, except for the tragic disappearance of all of their children. I challenge you to either endorse this method or describe a way that causes less suffering.
I never actually said we shouldn't contact them or offer assistance. Before I go to the gym, I'll argue what I think is with your point.
For those who think they should be left in isolation, why is it bad to contact them and expose them to our civilization, but good to invent new things and businesses and cultural systems in our civilization?
For example, entrepreneurs invented television and birth control. These inventions changed everything for us and our culture. How is it ok for someone to invent television but not ok for us to contact an isolated tribe and show them what the rest of the world is doing?
How is it ok for someone to invent a way for hetero women to make more choices about their bodies and their sexuality, but not ok for us to offer them medicine so that they can make more choices about their bodies?
We hackers espouse a philosophy of creating change. How is it ok to create change for our culture but not ok to create change for theirs?
I think it's because when we invent television we don't lose anything. Once we show these people the modern world, there is no going back. It makes it a difficult moral dilema.
When we invented cars we lost our own culture’s tradition of riding horses. It used to be the case that everyone knew how to ride a horse, now only a select few decide to preserve that tradition. Even they ride only for sport and fun, a cheap imitation of what it meant to ride a horse 200 years ago.
Cars viciously destroyed the role horses play in our society, that part of our culture is forever lost.
But people can still ride a horse. A contacted tribe can never become uncontacted again. BTW I have no idea whether the right answer is to contact them or not, I am just explaining why it is a moral dilemma.
The individuals in the tribe should ideally be allowed to do the same. (I know that’s not easy. Said tribe would be forever changed if we explained to them what they could do in such a way that they can make an informed decision.)
The whole question of whether we should in principle allow access seems easy to me but I also think that many massively underestimate the enormity of that task. I fit the culture I’m living in because my parents invested massive amounts of energy, time and money over two decades to make me part of that culture. I would guess that a similar effort would be required for the individuals in that tribe and they have no parents to help them along.
Much can go wrong. Individuals of the tribe might end up much more miserable or, indeed, dead. This is one of those problems that seems to me to be in principle easy but in practice extremely hard to actually solve.
I don't know why the belief in the "noble savage" persists to this day, but your response is exactly what I would hope for from a rational human being.
Certainly there probably is an optimal way to go about contacting a tribe like this and "bringing them up to speed" with the rest of the world, and I admit that there probably isn't a single person on this earth who actually knows what that optimal way is. But to deny these people even the chance at a better life because we're busy hand-wringing over how it will affect their culture is terrible.
How do you know they are uncivilized? I think you are making assumptions.
If they are civilized... I know of at least one old-fashioned civilized culture relatively estranged from Western influence that seems to be doing well, at least in some regards: http://www.menshealth.com/fitness/longevity/page/2
Their incidence rate is at or near zero in just about every category, including diabetes, vascular disease, and colorectal cancer. Age seems to have no effect on them, either: The Tarahumara runner who won the 1993 Leadville ultramarathon was 55 years old. Plus, their supernatural invulnerability isn't just limited to their bodies; the Tarahumara have mastered the secret of happiness as well, living as benignly as bodhisattvas in a world free of theft, murder, suicide, and cruelty.
Great article. Thanks so much for sharing. Very relevant for me, I mean to my life (as I get well when doctors say it cannot be done -- and I live without a car and walk a lot).
How do you know that they live a miserable life or that they suffer? Do you think they remain uncontacted because they do not have the means to contact? They have remained uncontacted because of their choice. They live close to nature and there is nothing wrong with that. They have their own society and their own culture. Their life is as complicated and as rich as your life is.
How do you measure how civilized a culture is? If it is their choice to remain un-contacted, they should be free to live that way. You cannot make an assumption that they would die young. Their bodies would have developed systems to counter most of the natural viruses and other health aspects there. Their upbringing would have taught them the skills to live in harmony with the forest. Their brains would not have developed the adequate techniques to survive in our society. Getting them out of there is the worst possible thing that you can do to them. They have got their technology and we have ours.
What is comfort to you is only a conditioned response? Car is a great comfort only if you want to travel long distances. They have crafted their lifestyle in such a manner that they do not need such comforts. Most of their building materials and techniques would take care of air conditioning and cooling. They consume so few resources that their carbon foot print is probably negative.
As far as education is concerned, we use this education to survive in this society, to earn, to create and transact with goods and so on. Their society is not built on such structures and transactions. They would have different structures and transactions. One is not necessarily superior or inferior. They are merely different.
Primitive people's lives are short, yes. But that they are uncomfortable and brutish is at best an uninformed value judgment that supports the narrative of civilization. By any good measure of happiness, they are probably happier than us. Most of them would die from diseases of civilization in the event of contact, anyway, so I don't really see how western medicine potentially extending their lives applies.
The shortness of tribal people's lives has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, it's pure myth.
The book Sex at Dawn demonstrates this using the latest anthropology and archaeology if you want to know more.
Until recently, it was normal for tribal societies to live longer on average than agricultural societies. All of the statistics that support the idea that tribal life is short were done very poorly and skewed by abortion/infanticide.
Tribal societies would have the same lifespans on average as our society does today and perhaps even longer because they had far healthier diets and always got lots of exercise.
However, they would keep their numbers low through infanticide and eugenics. For instance a baby with birth defects would often be allowed to die and abortions using certain drugs were normal.
Anyway, the idea that tribal life was brutish, solitary and short is utterly wrong on every point.
The science indicates clearly:
- it was less brutish on average with more social harmony and warfare was less painful for all involved
- it was not short at all, quite the contrary. Only modern agricultural societies, through scientific medicine, have begun to approach the lifespans of tribal societies who are not interfered with. This was just a myth from the very start.
- it was not solitary. Our society is solitary. In a tribal society, every person is surrounded by lifelong friends and relatives at every moment of every day for their entire lives. Modern man can scarcely imagine the depths of human bonding that tribal societies experience.
But on a more qualitative note, tribal societies gain little from total war. "Total war" is the modern concept that every war is a struggle for existence and every avenue must be utilized to destroy the enemy culture/civilization.
In tribal societies most violent conflict was settled symbolically - Keegan goes into this in one of his books I forget which one.
For instance the tribes will line up against each other like in typical war and then attack each other, but due to various spiritual taboos against certain war practices, it's really more like a sport than what we consider war. There will be few casualties and most of the combat will be decided more like wrestling or, in some cases, even more like a dance competition. This is not a joke.
Obviously the particular superstitions and rituals differed among tribes, but hunter-gatherer warfare in general did not lead to even fractions of the amount of suffering that agricultural warfare leads to.
Having said all this, it's essentially impossible for hunter-gatherers to compete with agricultural civilization. It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma - whichever tribe "decides" to become agricultural will worse lives individually, but the collective is so powerful and efficient that it replicates itself.
Agriculture is better for our genes - we multiply far more. But hunter-gathering is better for our quality of life.
I haven't read that book, but others have estimated (it varies between tribes) that roughly half of all males that make it to adulthood die of violence - either within (murder and vengeance killing) or between tribes (warfare). One source, though I don't remember what kind of numbers he gave is Pinker's The Blank Slate; which also excoriates the kind of "primitive worship" that seems to be common in these comments.
There is a big difference between "primitive civilizations" and hunter gatherer tribes.
People often forget that the Aztecs were an agricultural civilization. So were most Native Americans like Pocahontas -- yes, Pocahontas' dad was a farmer. Shocking, I know.
The comparison is between different forms of past societies, not between past societies and today.
Until very recently, plenty of men in agricultural societies died from violence and war.
>Primitive people's lives are short, yes. But that they are uncomfortable and brutish is at best an uninformed value judgment that supports the narrative of civilization.
Then let them make their own value judgement. Offer them 80-year life expectancies and the extravagant luxury of modern life; let them make their own choices. Xenophanes isn't the one arguing for forced isolation -- for keeping the truth of the world secret from them.
“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” -- Stephen Hawking
The truth, in both theory and practice, is that there is no pure, fair sharing of technology. It always, in nearly every single situation throughout world history, has ended in blood, subjugation, and/or slavery. And, it likely always will.
Cultures don't just switch over to a "more superior" one; they're almost always forced to.
Think of how many people died or were conquered through history just so that we could all be able to flush a toilet and it actually go somewhere. Absurd, but apropos.
> The truth, in both theory and practice, is that there is no pure, fair sharing of technology. It always, in nearly every single situation throughout world history, has ended in blood, subjugation, and/or slavery. And, it likely always will.
However this always happened between social apes. E.T. aliens probably would be completely different from us (see "Ender's game" for instance) and may very well act in different ways and follow different motivations. So we don't know, really.
I hope that was sarcasm because as such it would be great and insightful, and very symbolic of Western civilication throughout the centuries. If not, I disagree pretty much with everything you said.
Myself, I think Shaw grokked it perfectly with his "Don't do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same".
The problem is that once we make contact with them, 50% will die due to disease. The rest will lead miserable dependent lives, and probably turn to alcoholism. I have seen this first hand with the Jarawa people of the Andaman Islands, and anecdotally with many other tribals.
Now are you sure our way of life is better? That is a rather self centered thing to say.
How do you think they would do in Brazilian society with no property no education and no ability to speak the language? How much do you know about the lives of the poorest Brazilians and Peruvians? Do you think they get much modern medicine? These people would of course be poorer than the poorest brazilians and peruvians because even they (i) can speak the language and (ii) know something about the society they live in.
As an Australian, seeing what has happened to our Aboriginal people partly as a result of our interference, and partly also just because of the incompatible nature of our societies and cultures, I'd be very concerned about how such change would affect these people.
This experience is repeated among indigenous peoples the world over.
> We should give them access to technology and to our
> way of life. Our way of life is better.
So, we should like emulate Canada over the mid-20th century, and kidnap children from tribal lands and force them into orphanages/boarding school where most of them will be abused physically and sexually in the process of trying to 'train the savage' out of them?
The natives might disagree if they saw our lives, but they can't reply here. They don't know the Internet exists and they're illiterate.
I doubt many of us would desire to live in an uncontacted tribe. People in uncontacted tribes spend most of their time getting food to avoid starvation. Sometimes they get injured or ill, but they don't have painkillers or medicine. Sometimes a kid gets appendicitis. They don't have surgery, so the kid dies. Sometimes a child is born with a cleft palette. Charities do this procedure in developing countries, but in uncontacted tribes the child is deformed for life.
Based on evidence from other tribes, they're almost certainly a patriarchal society. Sorry girls, you can't be leaders when you grow up. You'll have to have birth children without painkillers or medical supervision. (Oh and there's no birth control.) Breech baby? Tough luck. And don't get attached to your kids early on; infant mortality is pretty high.
Granted, their quality of life isn't going to be great even if they're contacted. And arguing on the Internet isn't going to change the outcome of this situation. But our way of life is better. There are very few places on earth where quality of life is worse than an uncontacted tribe. The list is pretty short: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and a couple other countries. Eventually, even those failed states will progress, whereas the uncontacted tribes won't.
Here is another way of looking at it: If you compare the way of living in the United States today to the way of living in the United States at any other point in time, do you think that you would be able to roughly order those ways of living from superior to inferior?
If you think that’s possible, wouldn’t it be very weird indeed if you couldn’t similarly order geographically separated cultures?
Perhaps they have something to teach us as well. We should at least ask for directions to El Dorado, before we convert them to OS X and give them some french fries.
It sounds as if you're envisioning these people being painlessly integrated into modern society, perhaps retrained as plumbers, software developers, etc., then joining Brazil's (extremely small) middle class. This is just not realistic.
In practice, these people joining "civilization" would almost certainly mean ending up living in grinding poverty in an extremely violent "favela" (Brazil's ubiquoutous shanty towns) with drugs and guns everywhere.
Help is exactly what I would want from advanced alien visitors. I don't want them to respect my culture just because it is mine; I want something better for myself, not cultural relativism.
I wish it were so simple. Culture is really not easy to transmit. Transmitting some small piece of it in isolation very often only causes problems without improving anything at all. It often destroys what was there without replacing it with anything viable. Look at the really high rates of diabetes and other issues in so many tribal groups around the world. Look at the general quality of life contact has brought them. I'm really not impressed with the track record so far of "helping" such peoples.
EDIT: Here is an article (called "Diseases of Affluence") which talks about the high levels of diabetes and such that I found through HN not terribly long ago. Really fascinating piece in its own right.
We won't get a chance to offer them a better life if the illegal loggers kill them off with guns and disease first - a process that already began during the rubber boom.
The fact that illegal loggers are even there to begin with shows that our morality is not greater than our greed in the pursuit of resources. We may have good intentions, but, if these tribes are not completely protected, elements within our society will slowly take every liberty with the land and its people as has been done countless times in the history.
We know nothing of aliens. Any speculation is a reflection on ourselves and, therefore, it is more common to believe that aliens would annihilate us rather than be interested in improving our way of life.
Let them decide for themselves. Consider those who chose to explore, chose to leave their home village, chose to travel across continents. The members of that tribe who want to know more will explore if/when they decide to do so, and only then should they discover what worlds lie outside of theirs, not by force by us.
Perhaps an advanced civilization would think the same. They have seen us go to the moon and send probes into space, and hopefully this would be sufficient for them to understand that we too, wish to explore and are ready for more knowledge.
They're living exactly as nature intended them to. Aren't animals best off in their natural environments? You obviously don't know how 'contact' works out. They would likely become alcoholic slum-dwellers, but hey, they have TV!
Your attitude is the same as China's regarding Tibet.
"Save Tibet!"
"Why?"
"The Chinese are destroying their culture and way of life by modernizing them! Forcing them to go to school, learn Chinese and math and business and stuff, to get jobs..."
A significant number of them may die of disease. There have been a few uncontacted tribe members that were forced to make contact with the outside world, and at least one died of TB: https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=26225682776
This is quite similar to what happened in North America; the blankets with smallpox were highly unnecessary.
This is the old noble savage debate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage). As evidenced by the fact that Western societies have engaged in it for at least the past 500 years, it's way less settled than you make it out to be. Convincing arguments exist for both sides.
The problem with our unproven claims is that you speak from the vantage point of the advanced alien visitors speaking on the primitive cultures behalf.
I am not sure what you mean with uncivilized lifestyles. Do you mean wearing clothes? Eating with knife and fork or do you talk about dropping the bomb, invading other countries?
I'm not sure if I agree with you, but I really do appreciate you making this point so we can openly debate the merits (and pitfalls) of this perspective.
I'm here because someone helpfully provided one of my ancestors with an education into modern sugar plantation processes and methods, including a free trip to Barbados.
If it hadn't been for that, I'd be in Nigeria living large on my 419 business. Blogs, 419s, what's the difference?
I really hope you are kidding. If not this is so typical of the american way of thinking. Yes, we are so superior lets convert them all to our [insert culture, religion etc...]. What is so bad about leaving them alone? I would bet they are much happer than the majority of the FB and Twitter obsessed narcissist that I run into every day.
While we are at it lets make sure they all become good christians too because anyone that has not accepted christ in their life just does not know what they are missing.
Im not trying to be an ass but I fundamentally disagree with everything you just said. BTW: you to know that Western medicine is not the only medicine in the world. While we are at it lets take them our aids, diabetes, obesity etc...
You are basically saying that your beliefs and way of life are so superior and better than theirs that you must convert them and that is total bullshit. They have a right just as you do to continue their way of life without someone like you coming along and deciding what is and is not ok for them.
What is so bad about leaving them alone? I would bet they are much happer than the majority of the FB and Twitter obsessed narcissist that I run into every day.
What is so bad is you making the decision for them -- one way or the other. It's that kind of pompous paternalistic attitude that caused all kinds of pain and misery.
If they are happy with a life expectancy of 30, of having mothers die in childbirth commonly, of dying of things like scratches and measles -- if they want that life, let them have it. But show and tell them what they are missing and let them decide. Don't arrogantly assume that there's something romantic about living like a caveman. It's just as whacked as automatically assuming they would want all of the modernity we enjoy.
What we've found, over and over again, is that contact with primitive cultures destroys the cultures. That's because you'd have to be a flaming idiot to want to live like that (I find the greatest supporters of "leave them alone" are armchair philosophers living all nice and comfy in the west) We can't help that, but it's no excuse to let people suffer when we can help them stop if (If they so desire) There is nothing noble in inaction.
Treat people as you would like to be treated if you were them. It's really very simple. If you'd like to rant and rave about how much modern life sucks, fine. But don't use these guys as props to do so. They deserve better than that.
By the way, this is also a pet peeve of mine, and I come at this from exactly the opposite pov. Sometimes I think "Star Trek" has done more to muddy up an entire generation of thinkers than a hundred piss-poor colleges could have ever hoped to accomplish.
Treat people as you would like to be treated if you were them.
I wish I had 100 upmods to give. This is exactly what I was saying elsewhere, we should think about how we would want to be treated. Would we want medicine and education offered to us? Would we want the option for some of our elders to live out the rest of their lives in a traditional manner? Would we want bulldozers knocking down our trees? Would we want jobs driving bulldozers?
I don't know the answer, I just know that I'd want to ponder that for a good long while if I had to make a call.
I don't know the answer either, but I sure as hell know it's not my decision to make for somebody else.
Your point about possible alien intelligences is an excellent one. How would we want to be treated if the shoe were on the other foot? I don't know my answer -- I suspect I would be all for change even if it were uncomfortable. But I absolutely know that I would be the one to make my personal decision about the matter. That's not for others to decide for me.
We have a word for a situation where beings are allowed to live in fake isolation, while we secretly observe them and feel great about ourselves for letting them live as close to their natural state as we can allow. It's called a "zoo"
I don't know what they're going to do here. The isolated tribe in India live in a protected zone, but the government regularly offers them a chance to make contact, and the tribe drives them off with weapons.
That's a way forward that is neither dragging them into the 21st century nor running a zoo. I'm not advocating for that, of course, just pointing out that contact/isolation is a false dichotomy.
Yeah, I was aware of the peculiarities of this particular case (the tribe not wanting contact) and chose to ignore them in order to make the larger point.
Science fiction is great. It lets us look at some of these issues without (perhaps) so much emotional heat.
So let's assume that in the 1950s, aliens contacted the president of the United States -- a theme which recurs over and over again in sci-fi. The president decided that we were too primitive and paranoid to handle contact with a galactic civilization, so he told them to leave us alone.
What I'm saying is that whatever the nature of the leader, whether they are the president, or prime minister, or head of NATO, or head of the UN, or whoever else, it doesn't matter. They don't have the moral authority to be making decisions like that for me. No part of the social contract allows leaders to make decisions of such huge import and keep them secret.
So while I support any individual's right to be left alone and live however they like, I do not support people who are presumed leaders keeping information of that magnitude from others.
Just to speculate a bit, if you're the chief of a tribe, or part of the power structure, it probably sounds pretty good to be left alone. After all, who wants change? However if you're a mother who just watched her 5-year-old kid die from something that was easily prevented? You might have different ideas. Keeping the mother uniformed so that you can continue exercising your power over her is immoral and I do not support it.
As you point out, in the real world, these kinds of things are murky at best, with lots of little conditions and details you want to consider. All I'm saying is that it's not acceptable to simply throw your hands up and give up. From what little I know, I think the idea of repeated gentle contact -- as much as it can be done without annoying them too much -- is probably the wisest course of action. This would allow us to be sure we have made a reasonable and polite effort to inform them of the outside world, as well as trying to catch the newer members of the tribe as they are born and grow up. After all, even if you're left alone, it is reasonable to expect that you still have some kind of relationship to your neighbors.
I remember I said to my philosophy teacher, 'nobody considers native tribes to be poor or miserable, even though they lack material comfort,' and she replied 'I think the comfort of these situations greatly depends on whether you're male or female.'
Some members of the tribe drive them off with weapons.
Others are children who do not get to make a choice until AFTER they have been indoctrinated with the tribe's values.
We see the same problem in the Muslim world. In some countries, Muslim women are treated as property and not allowed outside without a chaperone. How can they make a free choice to join the West when their male guardians say "no" for them?
India is now an "important" country. Burgeoning technologically and culturally, what it received from Britain was access to the intellectual firestorm of the Enlightenment. Hindu thinkers were involved in the formation of Universalism, the idea that all religions were different aspects of the same thing and could be united.
Of course, it cost them the pain of the Pakistan-India divide, the struggle of Gandhi, and a confusing cultural identity among a people that didn't necessarily have a singular cultural identity in the first place. But what price is too much?
South Africa paid the price, and is now among the most advanced of African nations.
Of course, most indigenous peoples just got royally fucked. Aboriginal Australians and the Maori. So I suppose your point in general holds.
It is a bit presumptuous to assume that India or S.A. would not have made progress or exchanged "intellectual" information without a country sailing over and lording over it for a hundred years.
I'm not assuming anything, I'm making an assertion--an assertion that could be right or wrong. In particular I am not assuming/asserting that India or S.A. would not have made progress.
I am saying that the effects of colonial rule are so unstable and so varied that it can be difficult to the point of meaninglessness to say a country would be "better" or "worse" without it.
The Bengal Renaissance is a documented movement, founded and driven by people exposed to Western thought. That doesn't mean the movement wasn't theirs, that they weren't the ones producing "intellectual" information. But they were in a different place because of colonialism than they would have been without, one where Indians went to school in Britain and where people were writing letters to each other across the ocean.
Technically, I agree, but using this same logic, the effects of _any_ major historical incident are so unstable and so varied that "it can be difficult to the point of meaninglessness to say a country would be "better" or "worse" without it."
GDP is one measure of a country's power. I should point out that measuring the GDP of India prior to British imposition is a little bit hairy since India was not really a singular political entity.
Besides, my point was never that India didn't suffer; my point was to illustrate some of the advantages of colonial rule and demonstrate _just how muddy_ the interference of a technologically superior culture can become.
There are much less invasive options for contact than colonialism. Nobody said we have to move ourselves into some indigenous peoples' lands in order to offer them the chance to accept or reject a modern life.
But the effect is the same - their society would be absorbed, and probably forgotten.
It's like time travel - you can't go back because you don't know what kind of effects you'll have on the future. In this case you don't know what kind of effects contact will have on their (the tribe's) future.
you're comparing different things, or do you think that a highly advanced CIVILIZATION like the japanese encountering the west is similar to a TRIBE of HUNTERS-GATHERERS.... damn!
No. I was referring to messages by lwhi and nitrogen. As nitrogen said, there are less invasive options to contact them than colonization and there are cases where it is beneficial to the (in some ways) less advanced civilization. It might not have been fun for the japanese when the westerners first came there, but in the long run it was a good thing. And while the japanese culture was certainly changed, it was not destroyed or forgotten.
One thing that people in this conversation are overlooking is that if these tribes were contacted they wouldn't be brought into an American culture, they wouldn't get quality health care and internet access. There are millions of indigenous people living throughout South America and they mostly live in squalid slums. Personally I'd rather live in the jungle.
Then first, you must comprehend yourself how all of these "improvements" would impact their society and minds. And then, you have to teach them enough so they can understand all of those facts you just learned, so they can take an INFORMED decision. That alone would make you get in contact with them, show them things they have never seen before, change their culture in unimaginable ways.
There's no "interface" here to which you can give them access, and expect that if they choose not to use it, their lives would remain as they were.
If you touch it, you change it. You don't know how. Perhaps you will destroy it and will never know what of all those things you showed/gave them did it.
What is so bad is you making the decision for them -- one way or the other. It's that kind of pompous paternalistic attitude that caused all kinds of pain and misery.
On the other hand, can they even make an informed decision?
I mean, heck, we let the FDA make decisions for us every day. 99.9% of us are not chemist or biologist enough to make a real decision on many consumables and drugs, so we let the more informed make that call
It's true, there's a whole mess of slippery ground around this subject, but is it actually ethical to allow someone to make a choice if they cannot fully comprehend the ramifications etc? (honest question)
If it were unethical, then the entire system of voting in a democracy would be unethical.
The simple fact is: nobody is informed enough to make the kinds of decisions they are responsible for making in life. Many times doctors don't know what the heck they are doing, lawyers have no idea which way the court might rule, economists can theorize all day long but couldn't tell you the GDP five years out. I would say something pithy like "we live in a complicated world that nobody can master", yet the sad fact is that we reach the limit of understanding possible consequences to social changes after the number of people involves climbs past one or two. There simply is no way for anybody to make an informed decision about these folks -- us or them. We can cite statistics or tell stories about similar situations, but that's about it. But whether or not an informed or good decision can be made is a completely different question than who's responsibility it is to make one. If I am very sick, there might be nobody on the planet that can tell me how my treatment might work out, but that doesn't mean that somehow I should surrender that decision to a doctor. In fact, just the opposite is true: the more unknown and hard-to-understand the situation, the more important it is for all of us to let the individuals involved make the choices. It is, after all, those people who are going to have to live with the consequences.
EDIT: Also remember that it's not just the individuals who are affected: it's also all of their descendants. My great ancestor who fought the Roman conquerors in Europe probably had a much different opinion of the Romans than I do today. He and I disagree, but I fully support the fact that it was his decision to make, not the Romans'. I also feel that it was best that the Romans won. These opinions are not self-contradictory: I fully believe that individuals are the ones who are supposed to make these decisions about themselves, even if they make what to all intents and purposes look like the wrong choices. For any of the rest of us to step outside the system and start making choices for those involved is an awful affront to the dignity of man. (Sorry for the over-the-top rhetoric. Like I said, it's a pet peeve)
He is not making the decision. Uncontacted tribes are extremely aware of the western culture outside their area. Many tribes choose not to make contact, and when contact is forced, they might even kill the enemies who refuse to leave them alone.
There are few-to-none cases of tribes for whom forced contact with westerners* has been beneficial to them.
* If you don't like the term westerner, feel free to insert or state your own preferred term and move on rather than argue the term in an attempt to change the topic.
I would assert that the problem is in the problem and not in Star Trek's analysis of the problem.
That is to say, the problem of interference and controlling choice is not an easy one. Star Trek portrays one viewpoint and its pitfalls. That's not muddying, that's _clarifying_ how muddy it already s.
You should really read the book "Ishmael". It explores the end-game of our "way of life" and gives thoughts to alternatives. It doesn't involve an extraordinarily intelligent alien showing us the way, but an alternatively evolved intelligence here on earth.
While I agree totally with the points you've made, I don't know how to balance that against the nearly unavoidable side effect that contacting them may very likely end up killing most of them from diseases to which they have no resistance.
Pardon me, but while you are certainly well-spoken I cannot help but notice that you present two options only: either someone wants to keep knowledge and culture from "them", or "they" get to decide whether they want to partake in our ways.
I find that large parts of the discussion are missing another point of view: perhaps we could also learn something from them?
Your reply is so laced with hypocrisy its disgusting. How do you know their lives are so bad? From what the video showed they seem to be doing just fine.
I would rather be A West coast armchair philosopher than an elitest who feels he is so superior to other people that I have the right to be condescending when discussing their way of life and I have the obligation to convert them to my way of thinking.
FYI: one of the main justifications for slavery - Slavery was good for the slaves; the slaveowners took on the burden of caring for the interests of inferior beings, seeing that they would be fed, clothed and given religious instruction.
I hope he was talking about something a little more subtle, like the fact that we have so many Hispanic people here without citizenship and have therefore created a sort of lower subservient class. But probably not, slavery's a bit too strong a term unless there's a somewhat-mitigating "wage" in front of it.
There's also domestic servant slavery and even factory worker slavery, such as the slaves that are imported to US Territory Saipan to work in Chinese owned garment factories. (http://articles.sfgate.com/1999-01-22/news/17677080_1_garmen...) Workers there are raped by managers, kept in guarded chained enclosures, and have to undergo forced abortions when they get pregnant from the rapes.
There's also legal slavery, such as prison labor, which is explicitly permitted under the Constitution, although many legal experts believe that it actually has to be part of the sentence as punishment for the crime, and not just something that applies to all prisoners without a judge's approval during sentencing. To simplify things we'll skip those as being "OK" slavery since some believe there is legal justification for it even when not part of sentencing. Don't want to confuse the issue.
By slavery we mean you are not free to leave and you are not paid wages for your work. Many workers in the US are even shackled up and beaten.
Gosh look I even just now found a new book on Modern American Slavery.
Of course there was also slavery of black people in the US that lasted until the 1940s. Oh, didn't know about that? http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/
Most people prefer not to know why the goods and food they buy are so cheap.
It is possible to link all of these happenings by the single term "slavery" but that does not make it prudent for the course of communication. In your original post you elucidated images of chattel slavery, the actual written right to own another person within the law, which does not exist in the United States. In practice there are other forms of slavery, of course, as you demonstrate, some more subtle and some less.
But don't fall into the trap of over-applying the label, particularly one as loaded (in the US) as slavery.
Also, your smugness is... well, smug. Yes. Yes I did know about that. Stick to the information and cut out the assumption that you're delivering a revelation, because you're not.
However, I appreciate your bitterness and rage towards the unfairness of the world.
Huh, what's that word where someone describes themselves and applies it to others? Like a smug person calling another person smug? Oh yeah, projection, it's called projection.
Lots of real modern slavery in the US and elsewhere regardless of your personal opinions about it.
Yeah, I'm perfectly willing to admit I was being smug, though I might prefer the term coldly critical or openly irritated. Your deflection of my criticism does not address my criticism, it merely weakly attempts to declare it unimportant. "You're smug too!"
Additionally you have failed to address anything about my point concerning precision of definition, except perhaps _very_ obliquely by using the phrase "real modern slavery" to deselect chattel slavery.
I do not question that some (many) form(s) of slavery exist(s). I was the one that suggested a form of slavery you might have meant.
When your terms are overbroad, you fail to communicate (as has happened in this topic). Clarity is your responsibility as a writer.
The selection of chattel is your own arbitrary distinction. Being held against one's will, forced to labor, and not paid, is slavery.
Is your concern that slaves are not being bought and sold as property? Well they are bought and sold in many of these cases. Not all of them are, but not all slaves in plantation days were bought and sold either. You're trying to claim that slavery doesn't exist because you want to make it be only something exactly the same as plantation era slavery, which is an absurd claim for which there is no justification.
It is arbitrary but so far as it is my own, it is also most people's, tying into my point about clarity of definition. Chattel slavery means the public acceptance of slavery--slave markets, the fugitive slave act. Chattel is a legal term connoting legal approval of slavery.
It is also what people think of first when someone starts talking about slavery. Alongside chattel slavery was indentured servitude, which might well fall into your definition of slavery.
>You're trying to claim that slavery doesn't exist because you want to make it be only something exactly the same as plantation era slavery
No, I am not. I am asking you to be more precise in your language, because typing off a one-line post about non-hypothetical slavery was confusing. Notice how more people upvoted you when you were expanded the precision of what you meant by slavery?
Perhaps in your imagination. Speaking of clarity, I hope you will come to some clarity in your mind that you are the only person here trying to insert these qualifiers into this discussion.
there are two of us here, though this will be my last post. I already inserted the qualifier into the discussion, way back in response to Charuru. I clarified your point. Karma's not important, but it does demonstrate how many people resonated with concepts; and as I already said, the flow of karma demonstrates that when you actually communicated, people agreed with you more.
I've rarely seen more assumptions and projections made in a few paragraphs.
On the one hand, you judge these cultures as "primitive" and "caveman". Then in the next breath you decry pomposity and paternalism.
Yeah, we've found over and over again that contact with "primitive" cultures destroys the cultures. Tell that to Native Americans in both South and North America. Their "primitive" culture could have taught our "modernity" plenty...that is, if we'd taken a few minutes to listen to these "primitives" before we practiced a policy of systematic genocide.
Don't arrogantly assume there is anything wonderful about your "modern" life with carcinogens and pollution all around, man made global destruction of the environment, and nuclear destruction of the whole fucking planet just a half hour away. Talk about arrogance...and ignorance.
Since you seem to subscribe for the concept of "noble savage", I should mention that much of the "primitive" tribes indeed do wage wars upon neighbours. That they are not commiting acts of large scale genocide has more to do with their technical insophistication than with any inherent set of cultural values.
>BTW: you to know that Western medicine is not the only medicine in the world.
There is only one class of medicine in the world, and is scientific. Your attempt to frame science-based medicine as a racial or cultural property ("Western") lies at the root of your reasoning fallacies: you reinterpret comparison between industrialized and tribal humans as cultural/racial, regardless of whether race or culture has anything to do with it. The superiority of empirical medicine is not cultural hegemony. The life-saving knowledge of microbe theory and hygiene is not a religious belief that be can relativized with shamanist "healing."
"By definition, Alternative Medicine has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call Alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine."
Traditional medicine != Alternative medicine, it's the only medicine available for majority of people on Earth (about 80% of people in Asia are exposed almost exclusively to it). Chinese had their medicine when we europeans were still living in caves.
For all intents and purposes, there are two types of "medicine". Modern science based medicine, and everything else. I put medicine in quotes there because the "everything else" isn't medicine. Traditional medicine is a form of alternative medicine, and it is bullshit.
"The American National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) cites examples including naturopathy, chiropractic medicine, herbalism, traditional CHINESE MEDICINE, Ayurveda, meditation, yoga, biofeedback, hypnosis, homeopathy, acupuncture, and nutritional-based therapies, in addition to a range of other practices.[5]"
There is also a european traditional medicine, only that it has been largely forgotten because scientific medicine was so much more effective. In China they never developed any scientific approach to healing, so the traditional stuff was all they had. And no, its not "that" old.
"I would bet they are much happer than the majority of the FB and Twitter obsessed narcissist that I run into every day."
Hi, I am an obsessed FB and Twitter narcissist, and I'm proud of it. I'm also happy about having access to the Western medicine, which, while not the only one, and not perfects, seems to be the only one that consistently works.
And you are not talking about giving them a "right". You are talking about choosing something for them -- we can contact them (which will unavoidably deeply alter their culture, and is quite dangerous) or not (and let them live uncomfortably). It's our choice, and we can't really run from it. By doing nothing we decide for them, whether we like it or not.
Oh, and your parent didn't really say that we should convert them. He said that we should give them access to our technology. And if that converts them, then possibly it's actually them who preferred our culture over their own.
I'm actually mostly on the side of avoiding contact for now -- but mostly because of health risks related to contact, not because I'm afraid for their culture. Culture is about the change, not about maintaining some snapshot of society.
Keep in mind that most of our thoughts about what is good have been shaped by the society we were raised in. If you were born and had lived your entire life in the rain forests of South America, you almost certainly wouldn't feel the same way.
Their very definition of comfort might be different from yours. Keep in mind that many people in more advanced countries prefer heat and humidity, sleeping on bare floors to soft mattresses, and many other things that many other people would consider odd.
Our culture is about change, many cultures are about tradition. Change is not inherently good.
What I was trying to say was that we have to make a decision and thus decide what's better for those people. We can't even ask them without influencing them.
Therefore we have to make a decision that seems best for them, even considering our cultural bias and imperfect view of their society. I can even say that we will make a decision for them, maybe just wrapping it into some feel-good distractions. When you decide not to interfere you're not really letting them evolve on their own, you're starting to avoid them. It's more subtle influence, but influence nonetheless.
I'm not really saying that change is inherently good, that's a view that can be easily disproved by samples from our own culture. I'm saying that change is an inseparable part of culture, and we shouldn't try too much to protect a culture from it (but we shouldn't actively try to destroy a culture without very good reasons -- like, I don't know, mass killings or something -- as well). Especially considering that (at least for me) people are more important than culture (while keeping in mind that culture is quite important for people).
As for preferences like those you've mentioned -- actually, here in Poland I know people from the whole spectrum on each of those issues, and soft mattresses are easily available. When you don't show a person a mattress you're not really letting the person choose to sleep on a bare floor, you're forcing the person to sleep on a bare floor.
Don't forget that technology is in itself a drug and nearly impossible for a "simple" mind to resist. To them technology appears as "tools of the Gods"... how could they reject it?
After all that, you have to think... do they really have the self-driven choice to accept it?
I wonder if anyone is seriuosly advocating forcing anyone to do anything. Yes, civilization was once murderously expansionist, then it was culturally imperialist, but I'd like to think we've got better.
Remember, there are ways to make contact that don't involve oppression and/or bloodshed. Shockingly, some of them have even been tried successfully. It befuddles the hell out of me that many people here--allegedly accurate thinkers--not only can't see this, but actively dislike anyone who can.
To the entire thread: ye who hate thoughtful discussion, go away.
>You are basically saying that your beliefs and way of life are so superior and better than theirs that you must convert them
No, they're saying that they believe their beliefs and way of life are superior, therefore they have a moral obligation to improve the lives of those less fortunate than them.
Whether they're right or not is another issue, and as there's no objective way to measure such things, there is no actual correct view. If that's their belief, they're entirely justified in taking that course of action. Your belief is apparently the opposite, so you're entirely justified in preventing them from doing so. But what they said is not total bullshit, it's just opposed to you.
"No, they're saying that they believe their beliefs and way of life are superior, therefore they have a moral obligation to improve the lives of those less fortunate than them."
"Whether they're right or not is another issue [..]"
Morals are all about right or wrong - you can't have it both ways.
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The OPs belief is entirely objectionable. Have none of us learnt anything from history?
EDIT: Actually, maybe that wasn't quite strong enough. The OPs belief is utterly abhorrent. It's from the same school of thought that's used in attempts at 'ethnic cleansing'.
Okay, it's an extreme example .. but it definitely exists on the same side of the scale.
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Look at what happened to Australian Aboriginals - the settlers who separated kids from their families had the best of intentions - but they also had a sense of superiority which gave them an utter contempt for the culture of the children in question.
There are some parallels between those settlers and the OP's statement:
"There is nothing good or enviable about uncivilized lifestyles to preserve; any actions that maintain them in that lifestyle are ensuring they literally die young, mostly of preventable causes."
I've got to agree with the parent to yours, it's still a different scale. Ethnic cleansing seeks to destroy that which is different. Ethno-centric superiority complexes (like this, not necessarily all) seek to improve that which is different. They are capable of causing the similar outcomes, but I know of no examples (they didn't kill the children), and the motivations are almost total opposites. Both are essentially insulting to the other group though, absolutely, but in different ways.
Maybe children weren't killed, but Australian Aboriginal society has been completely decimated - many of the stories involved are heartbreaking, and these people now have many many more problems that ever before.
I'm sure that regimes that take part in ethnic cleansing believe that they're doing the right thing. A sense of superiority helps them to make their choices.
Whether violence is used or not, in some ways, the effect is the same.
EDIT: If you read about these people and the problems that they're facing, it's not difficult to see that they were pretty much undeniably better off before. It's nothing but a tragedy - and their ill-treatment even continues to this day.
That's committing the same error the OP made, but in reverse. Instead of viewing your lifestyle as superior, you clearly view theirs as superior, since adopting the new one has been a net loss. "many of the stories involved are heartbreaking" - I don't doubt that. But all change comes with cost, though that one was certainly far higher than it should have been.
Citing past injustices in the pursuit of improving life doesn't mean the pursuit is incorrect. How about all the successes? Slavery was partially under the guise of improving lives (recently. Slavery has existed for far longer than we have records, usually the losing warring culture becoming slaves for the winning), but so was/is removing it.
In some ways, at some times, the effect is the same. What about the others? Should the pursuit be abandoned entirely?
The debate can be made more general: should we abandon everything that has ever caused suffering? Should only 100% successful lines be pursued? And, as no action is totally identical to a previous one: what's the measure used to tell if something is adequately different to be worth a shot?
edit to match edit: OK, so their problem is current ill-treatment. That is wrong. But that's still not the only thing that happens with cultural assimilation, nor does it always happen, nor must it continue indefinitely. If it improves at any point in the future, would it have been worthwhile? If 100 years of suffering result in 1000 of improvement, was it right or wrong? Not "could it have been better", is it right or wrong to suffer to gain improvement, or to impose suffering to grant improvement? We're debating broad decisions, not issues with a single choice. There's always something wrong with a single choice, and those nuggets of wrongness don't decide whether the core choice was right or wrong as a whole.
It really is immensely complicated - I have no solutions, but I do know that we have to learn from history.
Good intentions almost always fail. People deserve respect. Superiority is often an illusion. Motivations are multifaceted.
I know I'd be happier with a simple life, and - perhaps romantically - I imagine that these people might have a better life than we do. Realistically, that's just as likely as the opposite - because, for all the interesting things our lives have to offer, there are some deep-routed problems we face, that we're very far from solving.
I think I said it in another post - but I'll reiterate before signing off .. I really hope this tribe is left alone. If a lot of contact is made, I'm sure no good will come from it.
I can agree with almost all of that except "almost always fail". Saying that means you think the amount of evil in the world outweighs the amount of good, to which I must ask, "how are you measuring?" I'd argue that good goes unnoticed and taken for granted because it's the norm; people notice exceptions far more quickly than what they encounter every day. We're able to debate on the internet; is that not good? How many billions (trillions?) of good interactions happen because of the internet?
Quite a few people choose simpler lives voluntarily. If they're happy, that's fantastic, they made the right choice. I de-clutter occasionally, which is a similar choice. But I see no reason that any style of life could be without deep-rooted problems. Ours is most likely ennui; I'll take that, because it's a personal problem that can be battled personally, and solved. Our culture could be better for such things, but not without other costs / problems which really can't be predicted, so I won't try. Many more "primitive" cultures have problems which are less solvable by individuals - food, safety, health, and yes I'm oversimplifying and it could be insulting, but it's more true of smaller, more isolated, less-technologically-advanced cultures than it is of the rest of the world.
We have far more individual options than they do, if only because we can choose to do without them (see: Amish). Which may be the root of the problems with our culture. But I like personal problems. I can fix them. I can't fix society as easily.
Morals are, beliefs are not. And since morals are heavily heavily based on beliefs, they are heavily influenced by the person who is determining right and wrong.
One person can't have it both ways. Two can have opposing viewpoints and still be completely, logically correct in their own eyes. It's a fundamental aspect of communication between different entities.
I was referring to two (apparent) opposite points of view, and it seemed like you were using semantics to disagree. I read the last part of that sentence as you personally stating that the OP had a moral obligation, which I now realise might have been incorrect.
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I understand that people form their own moral compass, and that views differ - but sometimes, I think there are issues which are so universally felt that the whole of society has to learn how to deal with them in a united way.
There are so many examples of self-proclaimed 'superior' societies dominating and assimilating smaller cultures which aren't able to defend themselves.
Many of these examples are well documented and - now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can see exactly what kind of effect was left behind.
I think most people can agree that gross injustices took place.
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Would you voice any objection to a holocaust denier?
The cultural contamination taboo is pretty clearly not so "universally felt", though. You must contaminate (significantly) to discover their decision so you can respect it, or you must prevent all contamination, when you could be improving their lives (note: could be. To disagree is to state our/your culture / technology is in every way deficient compared to theirs, the "noble savage" viewpoint).
Whether it's a majority opinion or not, it's hard to say. I encounter both sides very regularly, while you apparently don't. Such is life.
As to the holocaust deniers, yes, I would. Because I disagree with them, and because it's essentially an intentionally-ignorant standpoint that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
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But as to contaminate-or-not, I do prefer contamination so they can choose. Otherwise, it seems to me we're treating them like animals in a zoo, incapable of choosing intelligently for themselves. It also implies our culture is just so virulent that any who come in contact with it are sure to lose their way, join us heathens, and destroy their culture; again, insulting their intelligence and based on what's essentially a superiority complex.
For myself, I'll always choose contamination over being walled off. Others will disagree. But until we're capable of knowing they disagree, we either force some contamination to find out or we force them behind walls, taking away their choice. I find walls to be more offensive to sentients as a whole.
"Morals are all about right or wrong - you can't have it both ways."
Bullshit! While morals are about distinctions between right or wrong, the only moral debates worth having are ones that are about conflicting moral principles. In this case, between the moral principle that says we should allow people to determine and preserve their own culture and the principle that we want people to have the highest quality of life possible. It involves clashing interests and ill-defined concepts, so, yes, you can have it both ways. That's why it's a debate.
You are posting a very typical left wing way of thinking where you have a hard time believing people can both exist and fundamentally disagree with you. You hope they don't really mean it, or at least they are Christians so you have something unintellectual to blame (I am not).
You are advocating some kind of "tolerance" of primitive cultures (consisting largely of non-intervention which is rather different than tolerance) but you have have no tolerance of opposing viewpoints within your own culture.
I did not advocate forced conversion. That you refuse to differentiate between access to better ideas and depriving them of their rights is a straw man.
The basic premise of conservatism is that government should be limited, and that its primary role should be to protect people's rights from other people, the government, and other governments.
Obviously, these people have a right to their property. It is being encroached upon. The issue is not, should we go through the jungle and make conversation? The issue is if Peru should allow the destruction of this group of people's property by farmers. There is nothing liberal about saying that the government should be protecting the property of these people.
We have already in essence made contact. They have seen an airplane or helicopter taking a picture of them. They are all clearly looking at the camera. They know there is a world out there that they aren't a part of because they certaintly can't fly and other people can. That could make them do things they would not have done if they had not seen the airplane, so we have shattered their world view already.
What I'm more interested in is if they want to keep their land or not. There are plenty of tribes in the world who know about the real world, and choose to stay in their own way of life. There was an entire American TV series about this, they brought people from tropical islands to the US and showed them everything, and most of them chose to go back. I think these people should have a choice as well, but that choice will not be there for them if their forest is destroyed.
Very typical left wing way of thinking? I'm staying out of this slugfest because there's no way anybody will end up edified by it - but in what possible way can you characterize philosophical intolerance as an exclusively left-wing trait? That's just weird.
Because he sees himself as right-wing, so anyone disagreeing must be a socialist; therefore he's falling in the very trap he warned his opponent of. Funnily recursive indeed.
You're wrong. I do not self-identify as right wing. I dislike most of the right wing. I said some stuff is left wing b/c left wing ppl so often believe it.
OK, so you dislike right wing, and apparently despise left-wing. So what are you, apolitical? I have news for you : people calling themselves apolitical usually are right wing, preferably of the wingnut/fascistic category :)
Sorry to bother you. What kills me is that it's almost impossible to have a good coherent political discussion on usenet, forums, whatever. It devolves incredibly fast in flamebait, and that's a pity. That would be a great startup idea : invent a forum system that allows proper, reasonable and contradictory political discussions but somehow avoids the Godwin malediction. Am I asking too much?
I'm a (classical) liberal. This does not fit into the "political spectrum" very well. You might think that being pro-capitalism is right wing but most of the mainstream right wing is not really capitalist and doesn't have that much in common with me. They also do stuff like oppose abortions and gays, favor traditional/conservative values, etc (ugh)
As you know, "right" and "left" aren't that meaningful, conservative vs progressive, authoritarian vs liberal are probably more significant oppositions.
It's just that many (feared and hated) leaders from history took a similar view.
I'm surprised so many people on HN share it.
(Did I dodge the Godwin's law bullet...?)
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Seriously though, this is exactly the point of view that was used by all colonial movements. It's antiquated, unjust and it's also completely xenophobic. I'm genuinely shocked.
Respectable people like Jacob Bronowski, David Deutsch, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- not to mention easily over 100 million Americans -- believe this kind of thing. Don't be so shocked by a mainstream point of view.
It is not xenophobic to be pro-civilization, to think that allowing people the option to join civilization is good for them, or to wish aliens would come along and share advanced knowledge with us (thus radically transforming our world).
Change is not bad or scary on principle. Change is a necessary aspect of improvement. Improvement exists. I'm not going to force my idea of improvement on anyone, but I damn well am going to offer it to them and give them the choice.
Maybe you are ignorant of how some Western organizations strive to keep uncivilized people backwards against those people's will by putting up barriers between them and integration with the modern world. They treat them a little like a zoo. That's disgusting.
(You might have dodged Godwin's law if you hadn't included the parenthetical about it... :)
Honestly - I think our politics are so far removed, that talking about this sanely would involve a hours of deprogramming on either of our parts.
My biggest problem with your point of view is that you're claiming superiority for our society, when the quality of a culture can't easily be measured.
It's equivalent of saying 'mine is the best, because it's mine'. I can't agree with it.
You can also read some of my philosophy if you like (if you think I am programmed by someone, please let me know who I've copied here! :) http://fallibleideas.com/
You know, it's a good thing that people are not all the same. There is harm in trying to make everyone alike - both at a micro level and a macro level.
"BTW: you to know that Western medicine is not the only medicine in the world. "
First off, can we not call it "Western medicine?" Because what you're calling "Western medicine" happens to be practiced all over the world. I'd prefer to call it "science-based medicine" or "evidence-based medicine", although I will admit the applicability of those labels is more range-based than absolute.
However, you're right. Western medicine isn't the only medicine in the world. There's also voodoo-based medicine (with "voodoo" representing any variety of "ancient chinese secret"-type of treatments). So which would you prefer to be treated with? "Western" medicine, or voodoo medicine?
Also, "While we are at it lets take them our aids, diabetes, obesity etc..."
You do realize AIDS originated in sub-saharan Africa, right? Not exactly the heart of modern civilization.
Actually, I've pursued "alternative" medicine for treating my (very deadly) medical condition and gotten much better results than "modern" medicine can promise. I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my 23 year old son. I have gotten off 8 or 9 prescription drugs. I have not been on antibiotics for about 7 years. I have been drug free for about 18 months. My son has not been on antibiotics in nearly 13 years. He has been drug free for about 4 years. Ten years ago, I was bedridden for 3 1/2 months and spent a year at death's door. Doctor's told me "People like you don't get well. Symptom management is the name of the game." I currently live without a car, thus walk a lot, and have a full-time job. The hole in my lung has closed and my symptoms have basically all disappeared or greatly improved.
Modern medicine has it's good points. But a lot of other traditions also have value. I think it is unproductive and a straw-man argument to pit them against each other. I don't see why we can't take from both and build something better than either.
I've been trying to stay out of the comments in this thread about medicine because I'm basically one lone "nutcase" who is dismissed by most folks in the CF community. So you can either believe I am telling the truth or not. I really don't have a leg to stand on if you choose to think I am making up tall tales, as many people think.
(And I hope you will take my post as a compliment, as a statement that you seem like a reasonable person who might listen, rather than as "argumentative" or attacking.)
I have no reason to not believe you, and I'm very glad that it sounds like you've found something that is working for you. I wrote my original message at about 2 a.m., and re-reading it in the light of day I realize I missed a few qualifiers. Namely, that "western" medicine doesn't have all the answers and that voodoo medicine can work. We trust "western" medicine more, however, because effort has been put into at least trying to understand the underlying mechanisms of both the disease and the treatment. That doesn't mean it always gets it right, but it's better than trying to explain that your CF symptoms are caused by your chi being out of whack.
That's not to say that they are not, in fact, caused by your chi being out of whack. We just really have no real evidence that that is the case, whereas we do have a scientific basis for the present "western" explanation for CF and its' treatments. Anyway, you sound reasonable and I imagine most of what I just wrote is essentially preaching to the choir.
"Modern medicine has it's good points. But a lot of other traditions also have value. I think it is unproductive and a straw-man argument to pit them against each other. I don't see why we can't take from both and build something better than either."
I agree with this. There's a lot of value in traditions and common sense. In reality, medicinal treatments arrived at through modern, scientific processes, and treatments arrived at through tradition are somewhat similar, process-wise. Both are evolutionary processes in which superior treatments are selected over time and inferior treatments fall out of use. I don't want to equivocate, however. In western medicine, the ways in which new treatments are proposed is more evidence-based, and the feedback loop for determining the efficacy of a treatment is much faster.
Anyway, like I said at the beginning, I have no real reason to believe that you're not telling the truth, and as such, I would really encourage you to try to get your message out to the medical community. You may be dismissed by many as "one lone nutcase", but if diet and lifestyle can better treat CF for the population at large it's important that that message get out.
...I would really encourage you to try to get your message out to the medical community. You may be dismissed by many as "one lone nutcase", but if diet and lifestyle can better treat CF for the population at large it's important that that message get out.
Thanks. I have a website. I don't think the medical community will ever listen to me. But sick people might -- some of them do anyway. I just need to find better ways to convey the information.
I put "alternative" in quotes because I don't see a practitioner of any kind of medicine. I hang out on a forum where folks know all kinds of interesting things (about non-drug treatments and other related stuff) and I do a lot of research and have made it up as I go. It's basically a diet and lifestyle based approach. There is a little info about what I have done here:
Perhaps you'd be good enough to explain to us all exactly what an "uncivilized lifestyle" is, what is "backward" about them, and exactly which "uncivilized" and "dark age" cultures you feel currently live lives which are "uncomfortable, short, and brutal." Exactly what characterizes "our way of life?" Technology? How does technology make our way of life "better?" Science? I'd advance that many of these "backwards cultures" are probably successful in large part because they are more scientific and experienced and thoughtful about the worlds they inhabit, than oh, say, the average conservative Republican in the "civilized" U.S...who denies global warming, thinks education is dangerous, wants to halt stem-cell research, believes in the efficacy of prayer in health care, etc etc.
Maybe we could continue our discussion with a glance at the now classic 1990 New England Journal of Medicine article indicating that African American men in the middle of one of our modern and "civilized" cities and countries in the late twentieth century have a lower life expectancy than their counterparts in Bangladesh. "Dark ages quality?" "Myths and prejudices" You mean racism? Nationalism? "In God We Trust?"
Maybe we could move on to a thesis dozens of historians share, that the "primitive" Native Americans gave us MORE in the way of transfer of technology and culture than we provided. The agricultural knowledge passed on, the result of generations of careful observation and experimentation by Native Americans, was immense. Beyond agricultural technology and an enlightened, observational ecology, it's not even clear that the average European knew you could take a damned bath with water regularly as a healthful practice before immigrants gaped at Native Americans doing just that. More importantly, as Ian Frazier notes in the first chapter of "On the Rez" which I invite all the cultural imperialists here to read, at the time of Columbus there were probably about "eleven people in all of Europe who could do what they wanted." Amerigo Vespucci had brought back news that in the New World, "every one is his own master." Frazier goes on to show the profound impact Native American thought had on the idea of personal freedom among European immigrants still steeped in monarchy, and what that brought forth in America.
I'll go one further: How do you know other civilizations don't go "the inhabitants of Earth are one of the few uncontacted civilizations left in the galaxy" and petition the Intergalactic Council to not harvest the sun for energy?
It sounds far-fetched, but do you think this tribe is thinking "there are other civilizations on Earth that we've never talked to, yet they're trying not to destroy us"?
>... we grew up a little and we don't do that any more either.
The only 3rd alternative being "Now we wall them in, pretend they don't exist, and tell people not to tap on the glass"? And those really are the only options, unless you know of an approach that isn't fundamentally the same as one of "kill them", "bring them into our culture", or "prevent our culture from getting into theirs".
I'll take door number 2, thanks. And I hope anyone/thing that sees this will proceed to destroy my culture and identity to bring me closer to seeing the rest of the universe as it really is.
And therein lies the dilemma: one of those three choices must be made first, before we can know what their decision is. Once such a decision is known, absolutely, we should respect it as much as we are able, but to know such a thing requires significant cultural contamination.
I think this is exactly the kind of situation where the Golden Rule fails hardcore. If I think about it in that manner, I think "I'd want the hell out!" Who I am and how I would want people to treat me is largely shaped by the culture I live in. I wouldn't be me if I lived in those tribes.
We shouldn't be thinking about how we would want to be treated in that situation, we should think about what they want, now. And that's generally for those bulldozer things to stop mowing down their homes.
The concept of "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you?" is implicitly biased as it project's your worldview/morals/values/etc onto the "others" in question.
If the goal is to understand, support and/or show respect for the uncontacted tribes, I think the focus should be adjusted to: "Do unto others as they want you to do unto them".
I wonder what kind of disturbance just the helicopter (or whatever method was used to capture the footage) caused on the tribe.
Obviously the tribe was aware of it, but if they've never been contacted, would they be able to even fathom what such a thing is? I'm genuinely curious because I'm also genuinely ignorant on how "uncontacted" tribes like that are and what their civilization is like.
Could anyone enlighten me? It seems like such a fascinating area of study.
There's a pretty detailed article (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1022822/Incre...) that explains what anthropologists assume they're thinking. It's basically "Stay Away" since the plane is a foreign object. In fact, you can see the tribesmen readying their weapons in case the flying object veers towards them.
I would expect that it would do what every other unexplainable but repeated phenomena did in pre-scientific cultures, become part of the mythology. See: Weather.
But my only anthropology was a few GE classes in undergrad, so maybe someone with actual knowledge can chime in?
Hopefully future history books (or niche Ph.D. theses more likely ...) won't include a section about the bloody war between the plane-ists and the aplane-ists, over the deep theological issue of gods made manifest and physically watching over you... [See discussion below, not meant as a dig about this specific video or this specific group of people]
"uncontacted tribes will have seen aeroplanes on numerous occasions. The idea that this damages their self-image and/or spiritual beliefs belongs in the realm of fiction, and is based on the false supposition that their cultures are fragile. Experience shows that such peoples are in fact robust and well able to adapt to outside goods – most have been doing so for a very long time. Tribal peoples are not destroyed when they get or see things from outside, but by violence and disease as their lands are invaded."
It may not "hurt" them, but it does influence/effect them. It has to. Going way back to my anthro classes, all primitive cultures crafted religious beliefs as survival mechanisms, to pass down stories and things that would benefit future generations etc etc. It was also a way to explain what they couldn't explain but still experienced (weather, natural disasters...) and this would fall into that category.
What the FAQ did was use inflammatory language (damage, fragile) rather than talk about how this might shape and craft their thoughts and beliefs. If we haven't contacted them, we simply cannot know if IT DID impact them.
You're being nitpicky. The point is that they won't form a religion around it and it won't have any major "The Gods Must Be Crazy"-style impact on their culture. Yes, it will have some effect, and so will a butterfly flapping its wings in China.
I did not mean to suggest that they would deviate significantly from the norm of any other group of people presented with unexplainable phenomena throughout the remainder of human history. Given the variance in how smoothly minor points of difference in mythology have gone down in the rest of history, it was not intended to indicate any additional fragility over baseline humanity.
Suggesting that it damages anything is a significant value judgment. To suggest that notable, repeated, unexplained phenomena would have no impact at all whatsoever is sufficiently at odds with the entirety of human history, culture, and the general body of human mythology, that I'd like to see a stronger citation than the paragraph on their website if you find one.
That's probably it. I dislike approaches that generate mythos rather than knowledge, but you really can't claim that such a thing is or is not damage. It is change, and you have to either seek to maintain what things are now (enforced isolation) or you must cause change, especially if you seek to communicate with them at any time in any way.
Sure, just like I'm sure you'd forget seeing a literal flying saucer, glowy lights and everything. Just like all the alien-visitation advocates forget it, and don't try to tell others.
First, you're making the assumption people have actually seen such things, rather than making up stories to draw attention to themselves.
Second, a helicopter high in the sky in broad daylight would be far less freaky.
Third, it's not inevitable that just anyone goes and form entire religions and mythological worlds based on seeing something fly by in the sky. You're average person just simply isn't that creative.
1) you're making the assumption that people haven't.
2) a noisy, black, flying thing that's bigger than any bird won't draw attention, clearly. Why would it be less freaky?
3) totally agree. But your average person does tell other people. Do you think Spielberg made Close Encounters because he was visited by aliens? Or a significant number of the many many many other alien books / movies?
1) you're making the assumption one should accept something as true without the slightest shred of evidence beyond someone claiming it to be true. Well, I'm the King of Atlantis. Now the onus is on you to prove me wrong!
2) nobody said it wouldn't draw attention. Watch the video. It did. But where's the evidence that having seen something freaky has now just irreparably altered their way of life?
3) Not sure where you're going with that. People tell stories, some of those stories have budgets, but...how has that changed our way of life? If (if!) these people go on to tell their children about the Big Noisy Freaky Thing In The Sky for generations to come...so what? Does this in any way prevent them from living the lives they have always lived? Does the fact that they've seen such a thing now mean that we have to invade their culture and "civilize" them, because otherwise...well, otherwise what? At most, they've got a new god to add to their stories. If that.
The uncontacted tribes are not unknown and they are not ignorant that there is a world outside with airplanes. They are uncontacted because they choose not to make contact with non-tribal outsiders. This is in part due to violent conflicts in the past.
There's a statement by a Yamomani leader on the site that uncontacted tribes should be left alone on their own lands and since governments like Peru were denying their existence, the photos will help.
Yanomami if you recall are a stone age people from this area who only made peaceful contact a few decades ago. They have had contact and familiarity with some of these other tribes.
The tribes in this video are protected somewhat by the Brazilian government which uses aerial visits to check on the condition of tribes and make sure that outsiders have not breeched the perimeter of the reserve.
I assume you're hinting at the theory regarding the Native Americans not being able to comprehend Columbus's ships.
It would definitely be an interesting research study, though getting the paperwork filed might be a bit of a challenge :-)
To be honest, I'm not sure I agree with what they've done. I have no proof, or evidence of anything, just a gut feel. That moment could have irreversibly changed each one of their lives - possibly for the worse.
Its all of our world, I know, but still. I mean, they're not zoo animals.
I'm sure they've seen planes plenty of times, I mean commercial airliners fly pretty much everywhere I think? I'm sure they'd love to see it up close though. They must assume it's a bird monster or something.
Nah, commercial airliners don't fly pretty much everywhere they fly between airports on predetermined routes. Through air traffic control "sectors" One of the things that is hard to understand for all of us who live so close to the civilized world, is how much of the world is uninhabited and poorly understood.
You can't imagine how right you are. Tribes like this do not exist officially. Loggers would not hesitate to wipe them off - problems solved, no questions asked.
What is more troublesome, is that nobody knows how often this has happened in the past.
I'm surprised you can so easily equate illegal loggers with mass murders.
I'm actually a bit shocked at a lot of the comments here. This story has brought out the crazy in a lot of posters that's generally suppressed by the focused theme of HN.
I have been skimming over the comments in here, and I have come to two thoughts. First off, I don't have a well-established stance, but our god-like observation of their civilization is ... strange. I wonder what would happen if they all were struck by a terrible disease as the scientists with their kilometre-spying cameras watched. Would they go and help? Where's their "don't contact them" nature, then?
But that wasn't the thought I intended to contemplate. Some people have said that their culture is lost. Why is their culture lost? And this is terrible, but, does it matter? If their culture is full of things long since dis-proven, what has been lost? If they choose to leave their old ways upon discovering/learning (through whatever means) our ways, what does that matter? Please explain why these things are bad to me. If a people has chosen a different way of life upon experiencing it, who cares that it's gone? The anthropologists that were having fun? This desperation to keep these people isolated reminds me of another article I read on HN a while ago that discussed scientists that were very sad about the situation that polar bears and grizzlies were beginning to breed. I thought it was beautiful to see their joined species able to survive, but I can only imagine the people that wanted to keep them separate were disappointed, in part, because there wouldn't be any pure-bred polar bears anymore.
My other thought is a request to HN for this very type of article. Please, please, please, for heated debates like this with the numerous tree-like threads. Please make a way to collapse sub-threads so the train of thought that brought someone to a particular point can be clearly seen.
No. This is empty sensationalism. It’s extremely unlikely there are any tribes whose existence is totally unknown to anyone else. The uncontacted tribe in these photos has been monitored by the Brazilian government for 20 years, and lives in a reserve set up to protect uncontacted tribes."
Absolutely fascinating stuff, and for me anyway it raises some interesting ethical questions. Making contact with these tribes would (I would imagine) destroy a lot of culture, to say nothing of the obvious issues of disease, etc. On the other hand, in a society where we claim to value innovation and progress, failing to offer these tribes the benefits available to others feels a little wrong. Given the choice between our lifestyles and theirs, how many of us would choose theirs?
It raises some interesting legal questions too. In the United States for example, I believe (and I could be wrong on this) starting in 2014 we would fine these tribes for failure to purchase health insurance. To say nothing of the "Republican Form of Government" guarantee in the constitution.
Traditionally those legal problems are solved by simply granting these people exceptions. I mean aboriginal people and native Americans do get special treatment in some cases.
Yeah, I expect thats how it would be handled here (although "granting an exception" to the Constitution could get tricky, depending on the timeline in this hypothetical).
What I really meant (and I wasn't very clear on this) was more of how could we ethically reconcile our laws with our desire, if we have one, to preserve such tribes. For the most part it seems like if you have to special-case something you're doing something wrong to begin with. So either allowing such tribes to exist without interference should run counter to what we're trying to accomplish with our laws, or our laws don't actually say what we intend them to.
There are several ways to anthropophagy, endogamous (eating your ancestors) and exogamous (eating your enemies). Most cannibals tribes are of the first kind, until some external pressure brings them to eat their enemies :
- rise of slave trades may have pushed African tribes into exogenous cannibalism;
- extreme scarcity of proteins source and population growth may be the cause of cannibalism in Papua.
In any case, as Montaigne famously said more than 400 years ago, they would find our way of treating our dead relatives (or enemies) incredibly cruel and barbaric, letting them rot in the ground instead of giving them the proper grave their souls call for in our own bodies?
The idea of uncontacted tribes - still in existence - is awesome. ...but it's a little scary too to consider the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Sure, these tribes may not have been contacted, but what mythologies have evolved to explain the strange, huge bird in the sky that circles around them from time to time?
They have two eyes with slightly different perspectives, and there's also the atmosphere to color blue things that are far away, so they have some idea of how far is it.
Knowing how far and how big it looks like, you can estimate the real size.
Yes, but it's hard to judge things that you have no reference frame for.
There's another story about the Grand Canyon. Apparently the first Spaniards to reach it estimated it to be a couple hundred feet deep, and thought the part of the Colorado that they could see was about six feet across. It was a mile down and 200 feet across, but they had no concept of a canyon that big.
A better example might be from Colin Turnbull's The Forest People where one of the Pygmies accompanied him to the edge of the forest and refused to believe a distant "bug" was really a buffalo.
I am really getting a kick out of the ironic juxtaposition of the most technologically primitive segment of the world population getting space up here at the top of Hacker News. After all, the Hacker News audience represents arguably the most technologically sophisticated segment of the world population.
Unfortunately I think Hacker News, in this thread, is providing support to the thesis that there is something about the engineer mindset that is inherently authoritarian and extremist.
Perhaps when your job is to be right, and success or failure is quite clear (either the program compiles or it doesn't; either the bridge supports its design weight or it crumbles), it's easy to extend that mindset to the rest of the world.
This has better photos. According to NBC report in 2008, an agency has been aware of the tribe and have been tracking (and not contacting) them since 1910.
Is there some number of links that would make this tribe 'contacted' then? I would have assumed 'uncontacted' meant 'no knowledge of outside world at all' but it seems not.
Having this tribe get a machete and pot and see a plane makes it feel pretty 'contacted'. Not that I want to quibble over some definition...
I think that they mean that these people have not been in direct contact with non-tribal people. It sounds like most of them are very isolated. Even the other tribes that have contact with the mainstream society seem to have little to no contact with these "uncontacted" tribes.
This is mostly info I read on that website and related links, i.e. I'm not an expert.
Someone of the comments even suggest that these pictures are a hoax, shot in someone's backyard, and from the ground, not in a helicopter. Others say that they could have found the machete and cooking pot in an abandoned camp. Whatever the truth, having a machete is certainly a 'contact' with modern civilisation, I think.
The child in the first picture has very big and modern looking blade on his hand and a metallic pot is on the ground as pointed out by Keyframe in an another comment. Far from uncontacted.
This "footage" hit the news a couple of years ago in Brazil, and a couple of days later was challenged as being fake. I could look more into details and see if there is any translation from the articles back then, but I will stand that this is NOT an "uncontacted tribe".
"The photographer that took the picture, José Carlos, has admitted that the tribe has, in fact, been known about since 1910. He created the hoax "in order to call attention to the dangers the logging industry may have on the group."
If you read the source linked to in that article, the hoax wasn't that the tribe was uncontacted; it was that it was only just discovered. However, the fact that it's been known of for so long certainly does suggest that there has been at least some contact.
A set of photographs of the tribe were indeed published by msnbc.com and others in May 2008. However, the images above - which were made available to the media for the first time yesterday - are not the same photographs. A Survival International spokesperson has just confirmed to me that the images were taken in June 2010. For the sake of clarity and accuracy, I have therefore updated the title of this post to say Newly-released photos rather than New photos.
The controversy over the 2008 pictures was sparked by an article in The Observer headlined Secret of the "lost" tribe that wasn't. Later in 2008, Stephen Pritchard, that newspaper's readers' editor, wrote a follow-up piece in which he said the original article had misrepresented the situation.
As far as the argument of contact or no contact, I don't have an answer but I think the issue is that contact often destroys the culture rather than helps it grow and evolve.
I have read some things that indicated native americans lost in part because they adopted guns and abandoned bows. They lacked the means to make or money to buy the type of oil that would work in cold weather and used lard instead, which firms up in the cold. They would keep their guns under their blankets with them to keep the lard warm enough for the guns to work. Just adopting one piece of technology did not resolve their problems and it was a technology they were ill equipped to adequately maintain.
I am reminded of a scene in "Lawrence of Arabia" where he tells the Arabs "If you take English engineers, you take English rule."
Where you have a large, "evolved" culture with a density of people, material goods, information and so on, contact with a culture that is less "dense" (in terms of numbers of people, amount of material goods, etc) tends to simply wipe it out, sometimes literally killing all members (because microbes in large communities evolve rapidly and become more virulent -- Americans who move to Europe, which is more densely populated, routinely wind up with a horrific flu shortly after moving there, far worse than the flu bugs typically caught in the U.S. This is common knowledge in the military community/among military families who have ever lived over there.).
I wish a knew a means to gently make contact and offer options. I think that would be the ideal. I have no idea if it is achievable.
Lawrence of Arabia is a historical figure and I did a college paper on him. He accomplished amazing things in the real world in terms of helping the Arabs achieve their independence. The Arabs were a relatively "primitive" (tribal) people compared to the English who sought to rule them. The film is based on real events. Like most such films, it is part documentary, part fiction/drama. He was famous enough during his life to have been followed around by a journalist. The journalist provided both actual documentation of Lawrence's activities (through film and photos) but also hyped it, so not all of that information is really accurate. Some themes in the movie are relevant to the discussion here:
The Arabs keep wanting British artillery as The Answer. The British don't want to give it to them because they want to keep the Arabs under their thumb. (Note: Like with American Natives, they apparently saw "guns" as a source of power and wanted them completely out of context -- unable to manufacture them themselves and so on.)
Lawrence tells the Arabs that he thinks their traditional ways are their source of power -- that riding camels through the desert like they did historically is the way to have power equivalent to British power. At the time, Britain was a Naval power and he compares the camels to ships and the desert to the ocean.
I cannot verify whether or not Lawrence ever said that but it is historical fact that he rode with Arab irregulars and that such troops traveled by camel. It is also historical fact that he took Aqaba, a key port city, with a force of only 40 men.
Here is an actual quote of the man which agrees with the gist of what I am saying and from a reputable source:
Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.
Too much time has passed and I no longer have an edit button. Wanted to make it more accurate. My brain mangled the following:
Lawrence and Auda left Wedj on 9 May 1917 with a party of 40 men to recruit a mobile camel force from the Howeitat of Syria.[10] On 6 July, after an overland attack, Aqaba fell to those Arab forces with only a handful casualties.
So he went with 40 men and more joined. It would be better if my remarks indicated he took Aqaba with a relatively small number of Arab irregulars. But they apparently basically overran the city with a small-ish force. The point is not inaccurate, but the detail of how many men is inaccurate.
My bad -- posting in the middle of the night while suffering insomnia.
It's so easy to play God hovering in the skies, and make decisions for these people's future, isn't it? Maybe they actually don't enjoy 50+% child mortality, dying of appendicitis, and having to barter a truckload of plantains for a pot and a steel machete. Why don't they send someone on the ground, to explain to them that there's a big world out there that can change their ways forever, and give them a choice whether they'd like to be a part of it or not?
Well, you could not simply explain it to them, you would have to show it to some of them, and let them live the life, before they could make an informed decision.
Perhaps the best advice would be to contact other tribes that have been assimilated, and see how they feel about the process. Would they go back, if they could?
Furthermore, I'd like to know reasons for their return, if that's the case. Also, I'd like to know what their children think, if they have them in the outside world, and what happens if they're provided some of the benefits of outside society (eg: state-of-the-art surgery from top-trained surgeons)
Yeah, that's the inherent problem with this sort of thing. We say the moral thing is to show them and let them decide, but they can't make an informed decision. A lot of things sound really good when you hear about them, but wind up utterly unsatisfying when you actually have them.
Yes, informing them is not a perfect solution, and anyways there's no such thing as perfect information. Is it better though to take a decision for them, and not inform them at all?
The existence of isolated social groups isn't a mind-blowing concept to me, but not something I think about daily either. Does a new awareness of the exception to the rule really change your perception of how interconnected most of humanity is?
Maybe I'm reading too much into this comment, but something about it seems to imply that being disconnected from the global network is a bad thing. Though I myself am a highly plugged-in urbanite, I hope that people who see this remember that living in a small group (or even alone) is just as valid as assimilating with the vast network that connects the majority.
I didn't mean it as a negative comment; I don't see being isolated as a bad thing, but definitely (at least) mildly mind-blowing. Honestly, I don't think I've though about this level of isolation (not used negatively here either) from other regions and cultures. For the majority of my life I have been connected to people via different networks and this is a culture that I, also a highly plugged-in urbanite, can't relate to much (again, not in a bad way).
I think that other people who see this on HN share a similar viewpoint - we're so far removed from isolation that we don't see this as "valid" or "invalid" but as a completely different culture that doesn't relate to ours except on very basic levels.
Meta about some of the comments on this post: I've never seen such unbridled arrogance and xenophobia in a post on HN before. The our way or the highway attitude is shocking.
I think the focused nature of HN content generally hides the crazy. Even though the site is populated by techs and businessmen we're still pretty much just a random cross section of society, only linked by our common interest.
This issue is tricky and not for some of the reasons I've seen listed in this thread. My maternal grandparents were both the children of indigenious South Americans so this is somewhat personal for me. One the one hand if we contact them then we are dooming everyone in the tribe above the age of about ten to dependency for the rest of their lives. They will go from being autonomous, skilled members of a sovereign tribe to illiterate, unskilled Peruvian citizens in one fell swoop. In their world they own their land, have their own system of wealth and acheivement and customs that are tailored to their own strengths. In our world, they are penniless and barely subsist on land that is actually owned but the Peruvian government. Unless the proponents of contact are willing to provide the extensive resources they will need in order to assimilate to our way of life, I say we leave them alone. I saw alot of mention of technology and medicine and all the other comforts of modern life, but those things are not free for the taking. There are hundreds of thousands of
There's something appalling about this, as if remote tribal people are to be watched like animals on the Discovery channel. It's creepy. They're not there for your viewing entertainment.
As the BBC reports, the advocacy group that is promoting these images acknowledges that the persons shown have steel machetes, which must be trade goods. So to call them "uncontacted" is stretching a point.
Reminds me of "Guns, Germs, and Steel". I've started reading it a few weeks ago, following recommendations on another HN thread. Great book so far.
Part of the book focuses on diseases, and how epidemic diseases only spread in large populations. Problem appears when small tribes with no immunization are exposed to these "common" diseases...
as I am currently living in Peru, this is pretty moving to me. the argument here on both sides is pretty powerful, and you can easily find passionate people telling you it's real, or it's fake, etc etc. The president's (Alan Garcia) accusation that environmentalists are making "uncontacted people" up seems pretty ridiculous to me though, as there seems to be a lot of evidence supporting the claim that there a number of uncontacted peoples in the remote regions of the country.
It sucks that if these uncontacted tribes were to try to make contact, the only people that would be there to meet them would be loggers. I can't imagine loggers would treat them with the same dignity/respect that a trained professional might.
I'm astounded (perhaps I should not be) that so many assume that the lives of the people in these cultures must be short brutish and unpleasant. For a culture, or set of cultures to survive and likely thrive for 1000s of years in the jungle it must be a rich life. Take a look at the decoration these people paint on their skin for instance. They have free time to decorate and adorn themselves. They have farms. They have technology and knowledge beyond what your small minds can imagine. Yes, technology, they can light fires, create traps for the food they need, farm and make tools from all manner of naturally occurring materials that surround them in abundance. I'd wager they live an abundant happy life. Sure, they have their difficulties. But I live in modern society and I have lots of difficulties too. These people live in a tightly knit family and society. I envy them in some ways. I certainly wouldn't be sitting here thinking how much better I have it from them. They have a different way of life. To assume their way or our way is better can only stem from ignorance, and oh of course, no shortage of arrogance.
If someone took you and immersed you in the jungle you'd be lucky to last a day or two.
Think of what would happen to one of these people if you put them in a city.
I once attended a talk by Carl Sagan where, during the question-answer session, someone mentioned how much we could learn from "primitive societies". Sagan replied that we should not glorify such lives. In addition to other things, he said that in 1900 the average life span in civilized countries was 35. As artificial and commercialized as we have become, technology has improved our lives.
With the amount of comments on this page it's unlikely anyone will even see this, but am I the only one surprised at how many people still use the term "Indian" to refer to natives populations who look a bit like Indians?
As far as I'm aware, this is the sole reason for the origination of the term in this context (as opposed to, you know, people from India).
I think the term has nothing to do with looks. It originated because, when Columbus first came to America, he thought he was in India (that was his destination, after all), so he called the people there "Indians". Now the term tends to mean "natives".
I find it extremely disgusting. There's nothing wrong with contacting others. Everyday I'm contacted by lots of people: colleagues, marketers, head hunters etc. They give me choice. Let members of the tribe enjoy the same freedoms. Stop treating them like animals in a ZOO.
Selection effect. You also didn't see anyone with cleft palettes or appendicitis or iodine deficiency. If somebody gets sick or injured in that tribe, they're much more likely to die than in most places. Also, sick or injured people don't romp around the forest checking out strange birds in the sky.
Given loggers, or just the general expansion of modern civilizations, they will run into the outside world. Wouldn't it be better if they were given a gentle introduction? Send in some speakers and voice/video feeds. Eventually send in people. If they want to be left alone afterwards, it's their choice. If some people want to explore the outer society, let them.
If you look at say, Malaysia, the Iban have done pretty well in Sarawak--contact doesn't have to result in the destruction of the natives...
Having knowledge about the world only shows you how much you don't know. And the more you learn, the more you are aware of all the things you have not yet discovered and will never learn in your lifetime.
So, its much nicer to be able to know "the whole world" (i.e. the isolated village you live in). You know everything and everybody in the "world" and for the stuff you can't explain (lightning, death) you just make up a god and blame it on him/her.
It's absurd to say they are "uncontacted". They are humans after all. How can such a smart crowd fall for that headline stuff?
Concerns about their public health and inability to defend their property rights (our interpretation of those rights, at least) may be well founded. However, this whole episode says more about how Brazil tries to control loggers than it does about indigenous people. They are finally starting to slow down deforestation, using any tool they can.
To everyone saying that they should be given the opportunity to join our civilization, it's not like they have a choice. They'll die if they get the common cold or flu or at the very least come close to death.
And how do we know that our civilization is "better" for them? It's not like they could become incorporated into our society anyway (not the current generation). Contacting and converting them is more an act of self-righteousness than anything else.
How do uncontacted people view us? They seem to be mesmerized by the plane, and even chase after it for a longer look. Can't we just ask them how they want to relate with us? I'm sure we can find some way to discuss the matter with them and still not be invasive.
I think the best way to do this is observe, document and study as much of their culture as we can without contact, After that contact them to with the goal of medical help and protection. And proceed carefully from there.
In my opinion they would have left their forrest a long time ago if they where really curious to seek out what was beyond it. The fact that they stay, indicates to me that they are happy with the way life is.
Let's think about, say, American slaves in 1835. Only some slaves risked their lives trying to reach free states or Canada and escape slavery. Therefore any slave who remained must have been happy with the way their life was?
Curiosity only has a little to do with it. Maybe the curious ones left and never returned. That doesn't mean those that remain enjoy their lives.
I mean, I could be wrong and they're the happiest people on earth, but I bet some penicillin could make their lives even better.
I don't think slaves is the best comparison here, their way of life was artificial and forced on them and there was an unbalance of power. My point was that terms like happiness, and quality of life is hard to find any absolute definitions for. It's highly subjective and ones view of it is very likely colored by the culture a person identifies with. These people do most likely posess expert knowledge of their forrest, hypothetically there is nothing that is preventing them from leaving, or seeking out the unknown. This is not a quality that is unique to the europeans who colonised the world.
But could this be because they don’t see the benefits of ‘our’ way of life? If they knew, might they want to join us?
They won’t get the chance. In reality, the future offered by the settler society is to ‘join’ at the lowest possible level often as beggars and prostitutes. History proves that tribal peoples end up in a far worse state after contact, often dead."
I noticed that as well. They seemed quite defensive, but rightfully so since they probably have no idea why the plane is monitoring their village so it might seem as a threat to them.
Throwing my 2 cents in here but I just wonder whether by giving them right to choose culture we would inadvertently have already made that decision for them.
Our life expectancy and education is literally thousands of years ahead of anything they have. You can argue about violence, capitalism and religion, and I'd agree, but parts of our culture are better then theirs in easily measurable ways.
education: it depends on the subject- many of the people under discussion are probably expert trackers/hunters and have a more intimate knowledge of their surroundings than even our modern biologists. Most of civilization's education is not very useful in this context.
I doubt there is a single part of our culture that is "better in an easily measurable way". This includes life expectancy, which of course cannot be "literally thousands of years ahead".
Why should we assume 'life expectancy' is an absolute measure of progress. One could equally argue that what one does over the course of a lifetime is more important than how long it lasts. Many people in our social systems spend the best part of 15 years in school, then 40 years working 40 hours a week, and may spend their final years riddled with diseases; depression and mental illness are on the rise; obesity, diabetes, back problems, etc., are increasingly common even in the young.
It was only relatively recently that the overall health of a person living in an agricultural society came to be comparable with the health inferred from ancient hunter gatherer skeletons.
There is no way to objectively 'measure' whether their lives or ours are better spent or more enjoyable.
life expectancy in civilization is easy enough to measure.
However, by definition it is very difficult to measure life expectancy of isolated people. First you must contact them- which starts to change them. Second, you must determine their age, which is a difficult task.
The real problem is that using life expectancy by itself is misleading- it mostly represents access to emergency medicine and antibiotics, and the harshness of the environment. We can keep people alive in the USA for a very long time, but that doesn't mean they are healthy.
What does it matter if some parts of our culture are better in "easily measurable ways?" If one is making the case whether or not these people should be exposed to the Western world, one must keep in mind the net utility that would be added to their lives. It could very well be negative. At that point, higher life expectancy and education would be irrelevant.
How is it that some peoples can remain in this state for so long? Please don't read disrespect in the question, I mean it neutrally. There seems to have been very little innovation or growth in terms of technology when you look at people still living like this.
Perhaps a more interesting question to ask is why would anyone want to switch to civilization? It has really been all downside (except for the wealthiest few %) until very recently in history.
We should think about that when we choose how to deal with uncontacted tribes. It may be that one day another intelligence will need to decide how to deal with us, and on that day I hope we can say, "Yes, we used to have a habit of massacring technologically inferior peoples we encountered, but we grew up a little and we don't do that any more. Then we used to keep them alive but destroy their culture and identity while mouthing platitudes about how we were helping them, but we grew up a little and we don't do that any more either."