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Hunter-gatherer societies do not represent some ideal state that we should strive for, but rather a particular societal adaptation to the environment at the tim
by ryanwaggoner 3y ago
Hunter-gatherer societies do not represent some ideal state that we should strive for, but rather a particular societal adaptation to the environment at the time. We live in a different environment (one that I have zero interest in destroying in favor of trying to recreate some imagined ideal from prehistory), so the naturalistic fallacy is what has no place here.
- hollerith 3y agoThe naturalistic fallacy: because something (e.g., marriage) has been part of life for so long, it must be good. The hypothesis we are entertaining here: things that humans have no experience with over evolutionary timescales tend to be bad for us. Ice cream for example, has more sugar, fat and salt than anything humans had access to until very recently; evolutionarily speaking, we have no experience with it. Ditto alcohol and heroin.
- ryanwaggoner 3y agoThat may be the hypothesis that you are entertaining, but that’s not the comment I was responding to. Nor is it a particularly well-formulated or convincing hypothesis, your cherry-picked examples notwithstanding. We don’t have evolutionary-timescale experience with medicine, electricity, the written word, or democracy either. How we think prehistorical people groups may have arranged their societies is almost completely irrelevant for modern policymakers, which is what this article is actually about. We have a long list of better ways to make this decision than “Hmm, well, how do uncontacted Amazon tribes of a few dozen people structure things? Perhaps we should just copy that in our nation of 300 million people?”