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They were in poverty because that's been the normal condition for thousands of years. Not being poor and victimized was a significant accomplishment, everywhere

They were in poverty because that's been the normal condition for thousands of years. Not being poor and victimized was a significant accomplishment, everywhere. Buddhism comes from the point of view that nobody can do much against that and the suffering that it brings. But... we did. Don't minimize it.

CaptArmchair 7y ago
> They were in poverty because that's been the normal condition for thousands of years. That's textbook example of biased thinking. You're comparing the historical and present condition of other cultures by your own present condition. When you study history or sociology, the first lesson you will be taught is that you will need to question your own frame of reference, before you can make factual statements about the historical record. If anything, there are ample examples of traditional tribal communities who are struggling with modern problems - health, addiction, crime - which they didn't have just 50 years ago. Ask any traditional fishing community within the Northern polar circle, for instance. What you consider as "poverty" is the baseline way of living. Isolated tribes simply don't know any better. The modern concept of "poverty" you try to apply, makes absolutely zero sense from their frame of reference. If these tribes act resentful or hostile towards modernity, then it's because they see "progress" as an existential threat to a way of living that worked out for them for thousands of years. And that's a totally valid way of reasoning about how a human could live their lives.
- mantap 7y ago
  Do isolated tribes generally want to stay isolated? There certainly are examples of tribes forcefully isolating themselves, such as the baduy dalam in indonesia. However in many cases it's the reverse, and tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money, and it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history.
  - CaptArmchair 7y ago
    > However in many cases it's the reverse Beware of generalization. > tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money Beware of switching cause and and effect. Would they still have wanted to "experience the create comforts of modernity" if modernity hadn't presented itself to their doorstep? > it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history. That's projection. And it's not even "our past", so that would be cultural appropriation. If anything, the developed world isn't a homogeneous society of like-minded individuals either. Most ethnological collections in Western museums don't have anything to do with Western culture, beyond the fact that these objects were taking out of context out of sheer curiosity. There's an ongoing discussion to return objects to traditional communities, or what's left of them, as they carry particular cultural value. It's a debate which is hugely controversial because it forces us to recognize that our Western sense of "progress" hasn't benefited other cultures in absolute terms. Case in point: Read Heart of Darkness and wonder why Ben Affleck's present endeavour to film that book is making certain European countries quite uncomfortable.
    - mantap 7y ago
      > Would they still have wanted to "experience the create comforts of modernity" if modernity hadn't presented itself to their doorstep? Yes, absolutely. Without either hospitals or contraception, it's quite common for women to have lost multiple children in their life. Without other sources of income, you are a crop failure or drought away from hunger. It's easy to romanticise pre-modern life from the comfortable position of a developed country. It's much harder for the people who live it.
      - CaptArmchair 7y ago
        > Yes, absolutely. No, not even close. Pre-modern tribes don't even have language or concepts that define "hospital" or "contraception". If you don't have ideas, it's improbably that those will emerge out of themselves. The fact that it happened in our Western world wasn't a wilful act. Society didn't wake up one day thinking "let's build a hospital". Our present situation is the result of hundreds of years of evolving thinking and so having those concepts today is more attributable to happenstance then anything else. It's incorrect to assume that any human tribe can and will come up with those ideas all by themselves and somehow "want them because that's what they want". I stand by my comment. > Without other sources of income, you are a crop failure or drought away from hunger. Of course. Nobody is debating that. We're debating the biased notion that "progress" - Western modernity - is the primary and only way how to solve this; and - more importantly - the underlying, false, assumption that "progress is by definition good". A slew of researchers, philosophers, politicians, writers, artists,... have moved on from that point of view since the 1940's and shown that this is a naive way of thinking. It's called "Post-Modernism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism > It's easy to romanticise pre-modern life from the comfortable position of a developed country. It's much harder for the people who live it. Of course it is. We're not debating that either.
- javagram 7y ago
  > If anything, there are ample examples of traditional tribal communities who are struggling with modern problems - health, addiction, crime - which they didn't have just 50 years ago This is the noble savage belief, but it really doesn’t match up with reality. Life was nasty, brutish, and short before modern civilization. People died early from preventable disease, war, famine, and crime was still a thing. Most people were peasants, serfs, or slaves, chained to the land and forced to work for a small upper class who enjoyed the fruits of their labor. If you look at the history of South America or Africa, they still had kingdoms and empires, they still had wars, and they certainly still had poverty. People in China or elsewhere also weren’t in “isolated tribes” they were still poor peasants in an empire. (Edit: just to be clear I do accept there are some problems unique to modernity but I want to challenge the idea that the past was a golden age)
  - CaptArmchair 7y ago
    I didn't refer to kingdoms, civilizations or any comparable large societal system. I was referring to ancient tribal communities that lost their traditional way of living to Western dominated modernity. > This is the noble savage belief That's what you read into my statements. That's not what I implied. Let me be crystal clear here: Of course, life wasn't easy back then. People suffered and died. If you didn't adapt or pulled your weight, you died. If you were unlucky in any respect, you died. I'm very much aware of that. And I reject any glorification or comparison as "one-is-better-then-the-other" vehemently. The idea that modern civilization and "progress" somehow solved all of that is manifestly false. Millions upon millions are born and live in abject misery, simply because economies of scale have allowed those lives to exist, but without the affordances - social cohesion, cultural identity, an authentic belief system,... - to sustain them properly or give their lives a due sense of purpose and meaning. I'm pushing back against usage of the past - see, they were poor, primitive and miserable - to be able to laud the merits of "Progress" without considering the misery it has caused and is causing as well.

CaptArmchair 7y ago

> They were in poverty because that's been the normal condition for thousands of years. That's textbook example of biased thinking. You're comparing the historical and present condition of other cultures by your own present condition. When you study history or sociology, the first lesson you will be taught is that you will need to question your own frame of reference, before you can make factual statements about the historical record. If anything, there are ample examples of traditional tribal communities who are struggling with modern problems - health, addiction, crime - which they didn't have just 50 years ago. Ask any traditional fishing community within the Northern polar circle, for instance. What you consider as "poverty" is the baseline way of living. Isolated tribes simply don't know any better. The modern concept of "poverty" you try to apply, makes absolutely zero sense from their frame of reference. If these tribes act resentful or hostile towards modernity, then it's because they see "progress" as an existential threat to a way of living that worked out for them for thousands of years. And that's a totally valid way of reasoning about how a human could live their lives.

mantap 7y ago
Do isolated tribes generally want to stay isolated? There certainly are examples of tribes forcefully isolating themselves, such as the baduy dalam in indonesia. However in many cases it's the reverse, and tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money, and it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history.
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  > However in many cases it's the reverse Beware of generalization. > tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money Beware of switching cause and and effect. Would they still have wanted to "experience the create comforts of modernity" if modernity hadn't presented itself to their doorstep? > it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history. That's projection. And it's not even "our past", so that would be cultural appropriation. If anything, the developed world isn't a homogeneous society of like-minded individuals either. Most ethnological collections in Western museums don't have anything to do with Western culture, beyond the fact that these objects were taking out of context out of sheer curiosity. There's an ongoing discussion to return objects to traditional communities, or what's left of them, as they carry particular cultural value. It's a debate which is hugely controversial because it forces us to recognize that our Western sense of "progress" hasn't benefited other cultures in absolute terms. Case in point: Read Heart of Darkness and wonder why Ben Affleck's present endeavour to film that book is making certain European countries quite uncomfortable.
  - mantap 7y ago
    > Would they still have wanted to "experience the create comforts of modernity" if modernity hadn't presented itself to their doorstep? Yes, absolutely. Without either hospitals or contraception, it's quite common for women to have lost multiple children in their life. Without other sources of income, you are a crop failure or drought away from hunger. It's easy to romanticise pre-modern life from the comfortable position of a developed country. It's much harder for the people who live it.
    - CaptArmchair 7y ago
      > Yes, absolutely. No, not even close. Pre-modern tribes don't even have language or concepts that define "hospital" or "contraception". If you don't have ideas, it's improbably that those will emerge out of themselves. The fact that it happened in our Western world wasn't a wilful act. Society didn't wake up one day thinking "let's build a hospital". Our present situation is the result of hundreds of years of evolving thinking and so having those concepts today is more attributable to happenstance then anything else. It's incorrect to assume that any human tribe can and will come up with those ideas all by themselves and somehow "want them because that's what they want". I stand by my comment. > Without other sources of income, you are a crop failure or drought away from hunger. Of course. Nobody is debating that. We're debating the biased notion that "progress" - Western modernity - is the primary and only way how to solve this; and - more importantly - the underlying, false, assumption that "progress is by definition good". A slew of researchers, philosophers, politicians, writers, artists,... have moved on from that point of view since the 1940's and shown that this is a naive way of thinking. It's called "Post-Modernism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism > It's easy to romanticise pre-modern life from the comfortable position of a developed country. It's much harder for the people who live it. Of course it is. We're not debating that either.
javagram 7y ago
> If anything, there are ample examples of traditional tribal communities who are struggling with modern problems - health, addiction, crime - which they didn't have just 50 years ago This is the noble savage belief, but it really doesn’t match up with reality. Life was nasty, brutish, and short before modern civilization. People died early from preventable disease, war, famine, and crime was still a thing. Most people were peasants, serfs, or slaves, chained to the land and forced to work for a small upper class who enjoyed the fruits of their labor. If you look at the history of South America or Africa, they still had kingdoms and empires, they still had wars, and they certainly still had poverty. People in China or elsewhere also weren’t in “isolated tribes” they were still poor peasants in an empire. (Edit: just to be clear I do accept there are some problems unique to modernity but I want to challenge the idea that the past was a golden age)
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  I didn't refer to kingdoms, civilizations or any comparable large societal system. I was referring to ancient tribal communities that lost their traditional way of living to Western dominated modernity. > This is the noble savage belief That's what you read into my statements. That's not what I implied. Let me be crystal clear here: Of course, life wasn't easy back then. People suffered and died. If you didn't adapt or pulled your weight, you died. If you were unlucky in any respect, you died. I'm very much aware of that. And I reject any glorification or comparison as "one-is-better-then-the-other" vehemently. The idea that modern civilization and "progress" somehow solved all of that is manifestly false. Millions upon millions are born and live in abject misery, simply because economies of scale have allowed those lives to exist, but without the affordances - social cohesion, cultural identity, an authentic belief system,... - to sustain them properly or give their lives a due sense of purpose and meaning. I'm pushing back against usage of the past - see, they were poor, primitive and miserable - to be able to laud the merits of "Progress" without considering the misery it has caused and is causing as well.