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It would've been better to seek them out and bring them into the modern world Why is that better? Is there some proof that a modern lifestyle is better than a

It would've been better to seek them out and bring them into the modern world Why is that better? Is there some proof that a modern lifestyle is better than a tribal lifestyle that's been maintained for thousands of years? How would you even define "better"? Obviously unexpected mixing of uncontacted tribes with modern humans can end badly, but that doesn't mean that the best answer is to assimilate the tribe.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
It seemed a matter of time till they'd be wiped out. The modern world is hostile to them and their way of living, and Brazil is disinterested in protecting them.
eloff 9y ago
Of course, it is. If you didn't believe that, go back to tribal living. The problem is they're not us. They're at risk for a lot of our diseases, they will have great difficulty joining our society. The process will take generations. We only have to look at natives elsewhere in the Americas to see that they're still struggling. They're caught between trying to keep some of their own ways and culture and at the same time be a part of society and deal with our ways and culture. And they've already had multiple generations to assimilate. All that said, the process must start sometime. It's not like there's an alternative.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  I agree with you but I think it's yet to be shown they're less happy than modern people. Happiness seems to be relative, and bringing them in from masters of their environment (if they are) to lower status advanced humans could easily drop their happiness even if it improves things in an objective manner. I've absolutely no love for the concept of "nobel savages" or "primitives living in harmony with nature" but it's possible they're just as happy, even given disease, murder, etc.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Sure, but sadly they're not safe. At what point is it ok to let them die? On one hand, that would be letting nature take its course, since humans are a part of nature. On the other hand, we could do something.
  - dmix 9y ago
    I may have read too much Nietzche and Schopenhauer but I belive using a fleeting emotion such as happiness as the sole basis for measuring the quality of one's life is a terrible idea, yet sadly it remains an incredibly popular concept in pop-science self-help books.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      Do you have a better measure of quality of life? Even if you don't, can you explain why you think using happiness is a terrible idea?
      - tchaffee 9y ago
        Meaningfulness would be a far better measure. People will give up happiness and comfort for a meaningful life.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  I have no interest in going back to tribal living, but I'm not presumptuous enough to think that tribal members want to give up the pressures of tribal living and replace them with the pressures of modern life. We have no uncontacted natives in the USA AFAIK, we have Natives that had their population decimated (through disease and outright war) and lost their land, then we parked the survivors on isolated reservations in a world that's nothing at all like they once thrived in. There is an alternative, it's just not economically viable or socially popular, but it would be to quarantine much of the Amazon and prevent modern humans from moving in.
  - letitgo12345 9y ago
    Well the alternative is not better for most of the rest of humanity.
    - Johnny555 9y ago
      Humanity benefits from continued mining, deforestation, and development of the Amazon rainforest? Sure, some humans (and corporations) benefit, but is there a benefit to humanity in general?
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    Actually, it wouldn't be as outrageously expensive as I thought -- some sites say an acre of rainforest can be bought and protected for $10/acre. [1] The entire Amazon rainforest is 2 million square miles or around 1.2B acres. So you could buy the whole thing for around $12B. Or about half the price of building a wall between the USA and Mexico [2] that many people see as unneeded and unwanted. [1] https://www.rainforesttrust.org/10-for-1/ https://www.rainforesttrust.org/10-for-1/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-wall-exclusive/exclusive-trump-border-wall-to-cost-21-6-billion-take-3-5-years-to-build-internal-report-idUSKBN15O2ZN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-wal...
    - schoen 9y ago
      When I talked to some Brazilians about the American enthusiasm for buying the rainforest in order to protect it from deforestation, they were pretty concerned about how well the property rights in the purchased land could be protected. They pointed out that there is a whole lot of poaching going on in the Amazon and even in Brazilian parks. The Rainforest Trust that you mentioned sounds like they're donating the land to national parks, which seems like a great solution because there will be forest rangers and so on, yet my Brazilian friends were concerned about how effectively they can deter poaching, especially in remote areas. I don't have a clear sense of this but I wonder if it might provide a greater marginal benefit at present to pay for more protection of existing "protected" areas, compared to purchasing additional land.
- crispinb 9y ago
  > Of course, it is. The funny thing is, I've never met a single person who has read much anthropological or historical literature who holds this view. Truly. Not one. It's only ever held by people who know nothing of so-called 'tribal living' (as if pre-modern 'tribes' in different parts of the world have much in common!). Human cultures can be so vastly different as to be truly incommensurable. Have a read of Bill Gammage's 'The Biggest Estate on Earth', about the Australian indigenous nations. They managed the entirely of Australia a single 'estate', providing ample, easily-obtained subsistence from a massive variety of sources, using a variety of agricultural and hunter-gathering techniques. For 60,000 years. The depth of culture and development of rich social interaction this engendered is literally unimaginable to us. A contemporary American or Australian, with our love of comfort and trivial gadgets, philosophical naivety, absence of acquaintance with the nonhuman world, and lack of concern for conspecifics may well seem like an unfathomably ignorant and petulant child to an Australian of 1000 years ago. There's far too much to say about this in an HN comment, but the notion that modern living is objectively and unambiguously 'better' than that is plainly false. Particularly when you consider that our culture is very likely to destroy most natural systems in the next 100 years. The fashionable lingo is that our societies are 'unsustainable', but the plain accurate truth is that, so far, we have proven to be unviable. Maybe we'll fix this, maybe not. But indigenous Australians have a 60,000 year proven track record. Note I'm not claiming the converse of your claim is true, but just that you're being grossly simplistic. > If you didn't believe that, go back to tribal living. That's an unworthy and silly rhetorical jibe, as you surely must know. We are moderns and must make our lives where we are. That doesn't prevent us from taking a fair and knowledge-based look at premodern cultures.
  - miketery 9y ago
    Modern living is necessary for the survival of our species. Otherwise we'll suffer a catastrophic event and die. Therefore it is objecyively better to be working and living at our means pushing those limits of capital.
    - Johnny555 9y ago
      Modern living could lead to the catastrophic event that makes us all die: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation It seems unlikely that humans will be able to colonize other planets any time soon which would help preserve the human race after an extinction level event -- it will take some impending catastrophe to make that happen, and it's not clear that even then world governments could work together to make it happen. If Europeans hadn't settled North America, is there reason to think the American Indians would be extinct today?
- colemickens 9y ago
  Am I really reading a comment advocating for culture genocide because of an assumption that our version of "society" must be forcibly imposed on other people? And this is being discussed in good faith? Am I in real life right now?
  - crispinb 9y ago
    Colonialist attitudes are still the baseline. They may often be barely-acknowledged, perhaps even unconscious, but ubiquitous.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    They didn't advocate genocide...
    - Johnny555 9y ago
      He said "cultural genocide": Cultural genocide is the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements which make a one group of people distinct from other groups.
      - dwaltrip 9y ago
        Thanks for the clarification. Interesting stuff (just skimmed the Wikipedia page). Seems pretty thorny to me. In this case, with uncontacted peoples, I can't imagine having them persist for hundreds of years (or more) without us trying to communicate some medical knowledge, at the very least. However, there is likely no easy way to do so.
  - noam87 9y ago
    Yes, this thread is a fucking embarrassment.
- tuna-piano 9y ago
  There are actually, interestingly enough, historical examples of the opposite. I agree that it is counterintuitive. "In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one. This struck them as strange. Colonial society was richer and more advanced. And yet people were voting with their feet the other way. The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. " https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-fallacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluen...
  - tomjakubowski 9y ago
    > The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. "The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay." is a nice euphemism for "The colonials kidnapped Native American children, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay."
    - blfr 9y ago
      The interesting point is that natives also captured colonials' children and did manage to persuade them to stay. And not just impressionable kids, even adults. People in both symmetric situations tended towards pre-modern lifestyle. FTFA The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. Benjamin Franklin observed the phenomenon in 1753, writing, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” During the wars with the Indians, many European settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. After a while, they had plenty of chances to escape and return, and yet they did not. In fact, when they were “rescued,” they fled and hid from their rescuers.
  - 9y ago
- noam87 9y ago
  > And they've already had multiple generations to assimilate. And choose not to. They understand perfectly well what our culture has to offer, and want no part in it. Get it?
Chris2048 9y ago
> Is there some proof that a modern lifestyle is better How many people yearn for the horrors of the past today?

sillysaurus3 9y ago

It seemed a matter of time till they'd be wiped out. The modern world is hostile to them and their way of living, and Brazil is disinterested in protecting them.

eloff 9y ago

Of course, it is. If you didn't believe that, go back to tribal living. The problem is they're not us. They're at risk for a lot of our diseases, they will have great difficulty joining our society. The process will take generations. We only have to look at natives elsewhere in the Americas to see that they're still struggling. They're caught between trying to keep some of their own ways and culture and at the same time be a part of society and deal with our ways and culture. And they've already had multiple generations to assimilate. All that said, the process must start sometime. It's not like there's an alternative.

MichaelGG 9y ago
I agree with you but I think it's yet to be shown they're less happy than modern people. Happiness seems to be relative, and bringing them in from masters of their environment (if they are) to lower status advanced humans could easily drop their happiness even if it improves things in an objective manner. I've absolutely no love for the concept of "nobel savages" or "primitives living in harmony with nature" but it's possible they're just as happy, even given disease, murder, etc.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Sure, but sadly they're not safe. At what point is it ok to let them die? On one hand, that would be letting nature take its course, since humans are a part of nature. On the other hand, we could do something.
- dmix 9y ago
  I may have read too much Nietzche and Schopenhauer but I belive using a fleeting emotion such as happiness as the sole basis for measuring the quality of one's life is a terrible idea, yet sadly it remains an incredibly popular concept in pop-science self-help books.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Do you have a better measure of quality of life? Even if you don't, can you explain why you think using happiness is a terrible idea?
    - tchaffee 9y ago
      Meaningfulness would be a far better measure. People will give up happiness and comfort for a meaningful life.
Johnny555 9y ago
I have no interest in going back to tribal living, but I'm not presumptuous enough to think that tribal members want to give up the pressures of tribal living and replace them with the pressures of modern life. We have no uncontacted natives in the USA AFAIK, we have Natives that had their population decimated (through disease and outright war) and lost their land, then we parked the survivors on isolated reservations in a world that's nothing at all like they once thrived in. There is an alternative, it's just not economically viable or socially popular, but it would be to quarantine much of the Amazon and prevent modern humans from moving in.
- letitgo12345 9y ago
  Well the alternative is not better for most of the rest of humanity.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    Humanity benefits from continued mining, deforestation, and development of the Amazon rainforest? Sure, some humans (and corporations) benefit, but is there a benefit to humanity in general?
- Johnny555 9y ago
  Actually, it wouldn't be as outrageously expensive as I thought -- some sites say an acre of rainforest can be bought and protected for $10/acre. [1] The entire Amazon rainforest is 2 million square miles or around 1.2B acres. So you could buy the whole thing for around $12B. Or about half the price of building a wall between the USA and Mexico [2] that many people see as unneeded and unwanted. [1] https://www.rainforesttrust.org/10-for-1/ https://www.rainforesttrust.org/10-for-1/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-wall-exclusive/exclusive-trump-border-wall-to-cost-21-6-billion-take-3-5-years-to-build-internal-report-idUSKBN15O2ZN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-wal...
  - schoen 9y ago
    When I talked to some Brazilians about the American enthusiasm for buying the rainforest in order to protect it from deforestation, they were pretty concerned about how well the property rights in the purchased land could be protected. They pointed out that there is a whole lot of poaching going on in the Amazon and even in Brazilian parks. The Rainforest Trust that you mentioned sounds like they're donating the land to national parks, which seems like a great solution because there will be forest rangers and so on, yet my Brazilian friends were concerned about how effectively they can deter poaching, especially in remote areas. I don't have a clear sense of this but I wonder if it might provide a greater marginal benefit at present to pay for more protection of existing "protected" areas, compared to purchasing additional land.
crispinb 9y ago
> Of course, it is. The funny thing is, I've never met a single person who has read much anthropological or historical literature who holds this view. Truly. Not one. It's only ever held by people who know nothing of so-called 'tribal living' (as if pre-modern 'tribes' in different parts of the world have much in common!). Human cultures can be so vastly different as to be truly incommensurable. Have a read of Bill Gammage's 'The Biggest Estate on Earth', about the Australian indigenous nations. They managed the entirely of Australia a single 'estate', providing ample, easily-obtained subsistence from a massive variety of sources, using a variety of agricultural and hunter-gathering techniques. For 60,000 years. The depth of culture and development of rich social interaction this engendered is literally unimaginable to us. A contemporary American or Australian, with our love of comfort and trivial gadgets, philosophical naivety, absence of acquaintance with the nonhuman world, and lack of concern for conspecifics may well seem like an unfathomably ignorant and petulant child to an Australian of 1000 years ago. There's far too much to say about this in an HN comment, but the notion that modern living is objectively and unambiguously 'better' than that is plainly false. Particularly when you consider that our culture is very likely to destroy most natural systems in the next 100 years. The fashionable lingo is that our societies are 'unsustainable', but the plain accurate truth is that, so far, we have proven to be unviable. Maybe we'll fix this, maybe not. But indigenous Australians have a 60,000 year proven track record. Note I'm not claiming the converse of your claim is true, but just that you're being grossly simplistic. > If you didn't believe that, go back to tribal living. That's an unworthy and silly rhetorical jibe, as you surely must know. We are moderns and must make our lives where we are. That doesn't prevent us from taking a fair and knowledge-based look at premodern cultures.
- miketery 9y ago
  Modern living is necessary for the survival of our species. Otherwise we'll suffer a catastrophic event and die. Therefore it is objecyively better to be working and living at our means pushing those limits of capital.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    Modern living could lead to the catastrophic event that makes us all die: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation It seems unlikely that humans will be able to colonize other planets any time soon which would help preserve the human race after an extinction level event -- it will take some impending catastrophe to make that happen, and it's not clear that even then world governments could work together to make it happen. If Europeans hadn't settled North America, is there reason to think the American Indians would be extinct today?
colemickens 9y ago
Am I really reading a comment advocating for culture genocide because of an assumption that our version of "society" must be forcibly imposed on other people? And this is being discussed in good faith? Am I in real life right now?
- crispinb 9y ago
  Colonialist attitudes are still the baseline. They may often be barely-acknowledged, perhaps even unconscious, but ubiquitous.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  They didn't advocate genocide...
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    He said "cultural genocide": Cultural genocide is the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements which make a one group of people distinct from other groups.
    - dwaltrip 9y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. Interesting stuff (just skimmed the Wikipedia page). Seems pretty thorny to me. In this case, with uncontacted peoples, I can't imagine having them persist for hundreds of years (or more) without us trying to communicate some medical knowledge, at the very least. However, there is likely no easy way to do so.
- noam87 9y ago
  Yes, this thread is a fucking embarrassment.
tuna-piano 9y ago
There are actually, interestingly enough, historical examples of the opposite. I agree that it is counterintuitive. "In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one. This struck them as strange. Colonial society was richer and more advanced. And yet people were voting with their feet the other way. The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. " https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-fallacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluen...
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  > The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. "The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay." is a nice euphemism for "The colonials kidnapped Native American children, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay."
  - blfr 9y ago
    The interesting point is that natives also captured colonials' children and did manage to persuade them to stay. And not just impressionable kids, even adults. People in both symmetric situations tended towards pre-modern lifestyle. FTFA The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. Benjamin Franklin observed the phenomenon in 1753, writing, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” During the wars with the Indians, many European settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. After a while, they had plenty of chances to escape and return, and yet they did not. In fact, when they were “rescued,” they fled and hid from their rescuers.
- 9y ago
noam87 9y ago
> And they've already had multiple generations to assimilate. And choose not to. They understand perfectly well what our culture has to offer, and want no part in it. Get it?

Chris2048 9y ago

> Is there some proof that a modern lifestyle is better How many people yearn for the horrors of the past today?