Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Stone Age man we luuuuuurve you

"Dennis Prager has a trenchant column on the 40th anniversary issue of Rolling Stone, which I'd link to directly, except it's in this nightmare digital-edition format that takes forever to load. Anyway, Dennis cites various of the great thinkers gathered to mark the anniversary, among them the anthropologist, primatologist, ethologist [sic] and UN Messenger for Peace Jane Goodall:

We seem to have lost the wisdom of the indigenous people, which dictated that in any major decision, the first consideration was, 'How will this decision we make today affect our people in the future?'"
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWZkNWRiOTMwZjQ2MjllMGU3ZDcxZWUzNTRlYzViODM
(found at www.steynonline.com)

This brought to mind the Yequana, the Easter Islanders and the Shona. The Yequana live by slash and burn. They move the whole village to a new site a little way away from the original one, chop down some jungle, make some simple gardens and when they've exhausted the soil and the local stock of edible animals, head off again for pastures new. The Easter Islanders were so dumb they chopped down all the trees on Easter Island, didn't plant any new ones and thereby deprived themselves of a) transport b) the means to catch their primary food, fish and c) building materials. They then set about murdering each other in a frenzy of 'it was your fault' blame-laying. The Shona also lived by slash and burn, but with the added frisson of raiding parties of their neighbors to capture their cattle and women.

So what can we learn from these lovely tribal people? I don't think its that much...

Slash and burn is unsustainable- as soon as the population rises to a particular threshold, the land will not be able to sustain the constant depletions and deserts will emerge. Africa is literally covered with deserts largely or partially manmade. The goat, an African favourite, ought to be renamed the 'desert-maker' as it doesn't just take leaves it destroys the plant, including most damagingly young trees. Nevertheless, you will find goats all over 'indigenous' areas of Africa.

If there were enough Yequana, the Amazon rainforest would be gone and would look something like Namibia does today.

The Easter islanders aren't the first or the last 'indigenous' people to wantonly deprive themselves of their most important commodity. They are, after all, people.

The Shona show us that blinkered lifestyles, agression and doing things the cheap 'n easy way aren't just for us in the comfy west- they're all over.

You could go on and on- what about the lovely gently Mayans and Mongols? They're 'indigenous'. The mongols may well have killed more people per capita than any other tribe of people in the history of mankind. Lovely- lets be like them.

Most of this pro-stone age propaganda relies heavily on the Native Americans. Not the real ones, but the fantasy version now completely current in US universities. According to this propaganda, the Native Americans were hippies before being hippy was cool- living in tune with nature, only taking what they needed and leaving everything else in poetic pristinity. They were virtually angels. Sadly, history records many of the actual activities of Native Americans, and the great surprise is they were very much like people in other parts of the world- willing to go to war over small things, often careless with their resources, shortsighted, wilfully ignorant. They often spent long periods of time on drugs, which I suppose could be interpreted as a good thing, as it prevented them going off to cut down the forests or murder the neighbors, but its not necessarily good.

To me, the whole debate about 'original' man and 'corrupted by civilisation' man is an argument for the sake of argument. The souls and minds of people living in stone age America and 21st century London are the same- the culture and technology are different, but that doesn't mean much. Take a child from the first and put it in the second and you'd get just another member of that society. Human beings have been around for a very long time- 4 maybe 5 million years. I'd guess for all of that time we've been brutal, non-strategic, vain, lazy and suckers for a good drug.

So what? Life is for living and enjoying! We have this earth to enjoy, so lets!

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