> "we definitely aren’t supposed to call them “the oldest society in the world” with a “fifty thousand year history”"
Perhaps not in academic circles specialising in this topic, but in mainstream Australian public discourse, people who consider themselves progressive and pro-Aborigine do routinely use this kind of language, and they clearly don't imagine it to have anything but positive connotations.
That’s surprising to me! I would assume that the idea of one culture being “older” than another is just a kind of patronizing orientalism that doesn’t understand how numbers work.
But mainstream discourse in a lot of places is still pretty full of this kind of stuff, including people who use the phrase “third world”.
Mainstream discourse on Aborigines (ie what you're allowed to say without being called racist) isn't about making Aborigines feel better, and it's certainly not about saying true things, it's about money; specifically it's about the question of land rights and the question of to what extent the Aborigines present on the land in 1788 can be said to have "owned" the land that they wandered nomadically across.
For this reason it's necessary to emphasise the staticness of the culture. You will see maps like this which represent a vague idea of where specific language groups existed at some point in the past century https://www.nationalunitygovernment.org/pdf/aboriginal-australia-map.pdf, and people will claim that this represents a map of how the country looked for fifty thousand years, regardless of how little sense that may make. If the Kuringai people were nomads who just happened to blunder into the area that is now Sydney six months prior to the arrival of the First Fleet then their claim to that land is rather weak; if that particular group had been on that particular piece of land for tens of thousands of years then their claim starts to look a bit stronger.
The Unabomber, of all people, wrote a sort of "takedown" of the anthropologist tendency to romanticize primitive societies while in prison. Those people were some of his closest "allies", yet even he found it necessary to be like "please stop saying these tribes are proto-leftist utopias, they aren't".
His most interesting point IMO is that some of these cultures might be MORE individualist than modern USA.
old and busted: "we should Christianize the aborigines to save their souls"
new hotness: "aborigines ought to assimilate into civil society to vegan and progressive, but *mumble mumble* there are more important things to concern ourselves with"
It was a low-effort joke, sorry about that. But the idea is that still today among progressives of various stripes, the sentiment seems to be that participation in modern/civil society is a prerequisite for the morally superior outcome(s) in the form of -isms. The difference now being that there's an embarrassment about it.
I don't think that matches how modern "progressives" think about Aborigines.
If anything they want them to continue to live their traditional culture as a museum piece, but somehow still have modern first-world standard of living, all funded by the Austalian taxpayer. They should hunt and gather and do ceremonies all day, but also live in air conditioned houses and get free food. They shouldn't have to work ordinary jobs like us muggles, but if the mix of free money and nothing to do results in drug and alcohol abuse then we just do a surprised pikachu face. They need to be university-educated, and also not to have to leave their middle-of-nowhere communities.
I wonder if one part of the answer to why people in traditional societies that are becoming westernized do so badly is actually very simple.
For a while, I worked with immigrants to my country. They struggled to integrate, because it's hard. But it was noticeable that there were areas where they particularly struggled to adapt, and that's when they were trying to learn how things functioned in private - family life, for instance. You can try and just do it the traditional way from back home, but that may not work, e.g. if your teenage kids don't like the idea. But how do western people parent in a way that's adapted to the pressures around? It's a hard thing to learn without lots of good western friends whose houses you can visit and with whom you can spend time, observing how they do things.
This is much harder in a modernising culture. If you are from a traditional aboriginal society, live among people from the same society, but can no longer parent in the traditional way (sending your sons away, as detailed above) then what do you do? You have literally never seen a mum and dad bring up their own son! How is it done?!
Those of us who are parents will agree it's a tough job at the best of times. How hard it would be if you'd never seen it done, or if you'd only seen it done in ways that had been made taboo, or illegal, is difficult to imagine.
So a long and painful adjustment period for traditional societies is not in any sense surprising. It takes time to build up easy learned cultural responses to the problems we face.
Two obvious guesses here about the difference between immigrants and aboriginees:
a. Immigrants are self-selected--they came to the US because they wanted to come. People who didn't feel like they could stand such a weird foreign society probably stayed home.
b. The distance between cultures probably matters. Coming from rural Mexico to the US is going to be a culture shock, but the distance isn't all that huge--your home might be more like the rural Midwest of 50-70 years ago than like the current rural Midwest, but you still grew up in a society with money and laws and books and cars and tractors and electricity and plumbing and such. For that matter, English and Spanish aren't so far apart (though if you're from a sufficiently remote indio village, probably you grew up speaking a language that is much further from English), the dominant religion is Christian, etc.
the selection effects in A seem very large. (non-refugee) immigrants are basically by definition high-openness. this is the only thing that really provides a coherent explanation of why one guy travels 2000 miles to a foreign land and his neighbor doesn't, despite both being aware of the potential rewards. when everyone is forcibly put through this experience, you are gong to have a *lot* of low-openness people (which is more common than being high-openness!) suddenly subjected to the thing they are explicitly bad at dealing with, psychologically.
but as far as B goes, I actually think the main thing we shouldn't gloss over is any settled rural community is agrarian, and that the distinction between humans living in basically the ancestral environment (hunter-gatherer bands) vs. people living in settled villages is actually vastly greater and more enormous than any gradation *within* settled life. one common interpretation of the weirder parts of early Mesopotamian myth (such as the gods punishing humans not for moral transgression but rather for being loud and annoying) is basically that overcoming this gap is very very difficult and tends to make the recently-converted hunter-gatherers quite miserable
No, I think that he clearly refers to the mesopotamian myth of the Deluge (Flood) as described in Gilgamesh's epopee where Uta-napishtim is the hero. There is an even older version with king Ziusudra as hero.
But there is definitely something in common with the myth of Babel, or even Sodom and Gomorrha. Humans are so annoying, let's kill them all.
Edit : sorry, Kade U already answered himself hereafter.
I was introduced to this through the Literature and History podcast's first few episodes which cover Mesopotamian literature, and there's some bits and pieces of this theme there along with some others (his main obsession here is with the idea that the Babel story in the bible is a reference to the collapse of the cuneiform literary culture). At one point I looked into it further and I wish I could easily find the stuff I read but it's not coming up in a quick google search. That said, if you're interested, here's the basic idea:
* The Epic of Gilgamesh famously features Gilgamesh, obviously, but also Enkidu, who is a stand-in for a wild, uncivilized 'state of nature' figure who is enormously powerful but also incredibly hostile to everything to do with settled life. Among the settled peoples, only Gilgamesh and other appropriately noble figures get to be badasses and everyone else is weak, but Enkidu gets to be a badass purely by virtue of his savagery and distance from civilization. (Interestingly we observe that even in the period this was written civilized people had developed the erroneous notion that primitive peoples were solitary rather than social, but I digress). Enkidu has major conflicts with the the civilized peoples, has a sort of masculine love-through-struggle episode with Gilgamesh, gets seduced into civilized life by a woman, and ultimately he is executed by the gods for safeguarding the settled peoples from the Bull of Heaven. The interpretation here is that Enkidu stands in for the legacy nomadic/hunter-gatherer type peoples that live on the borders of Mesopotamian society and are slowly absorbed by the agrarian state, and that the inner 'wild man' has a kind of ferocious power and dignity that is sacrificed in the transition to civilization, where only royal figures like Gilgamesh really get to live in the prideful and independent way Enkidu does.
* The flood myth -- in the biblical version, God sends the flood to punish humans for moral transgression, in the early mesopotamian version, it is because human settlements cause 'noise' and 'clamor'. The interpretation here is basically just that the *reason* the noise suddenly becomes a problem is very literal, that as humans begin to concentrate in cities, you begin to create a density of human activity that does not naturally exist and which upsets the divinely-ordained order in which humans were quiet like the other animals. The flood itself is a uniquely anti-urban punishment in the mesopotamian context, because it affects the cities settled along the river valleys whose residents are tied to the land, but more nomadic peoples further from the rivers, in the highlands, etc. are unaffected by the periodic river floods that decimate urban centers.
it's presumed that like the rest of the old testament, the adam and eve story is a codification of a very long oral lineage that goes back to the beginnings of the urban near east. the forbidden fruit is grain, adam and eve exist in the garden as hunter-gatherers and when they are exiled from the garden, the curse they are given by God is that they will have to toil for food rather than receiving it from the bounty of nature. this is the fundamental distinction between settled and non-settled life, which is the nature of the labor itself. H-G labor is what we evolved for, a lot of wandering around, doing lots of different things, people don't really seem to need to be forced to do it, it's not very rote, opportunities for socialization, etc. farm labor is completely different, it's rote, mundane, and generally anyone who can tries to force someone else to do it because it sucks so hard.
Third factor that comes to mind: Immersion. It's much easier to learn a new language, for instance, if you're surrounded by other people who speak it all the time and don't have the option to isolate yourself among people who preferentially speak the language you're already fluent in. By the same token, it's probably much easier to pick up cultural fluency through immersion than if you're living in an enclave of people with the culture you're already fluent in.
Agreed. Imagine you're an aboriginal father during the colonial transition period. Your son has just started puberty, and is acting like a hormonal teenager. You can't do the traditional thing and send him away to the elders for initiation. So what do you... do? How do you raise your son so that he grows into a mature adult? Do you sit him down and have a talk, man-to-man? But what do you say? How should you know? Your father, and his father, and his father before him, and so on *for 50,000 years,* had never directly raised a hormonal teenage son. What do you do!? "Teaching hormonal teenage boys how to behave" had been the elders' job since time immemorial, and now you have to do it without any guidance or traditions to fall back on.
(Also, your community has recently been devastated by smallpox and other foreign diseases, and you've probably just been violently herded onto a tiny postage stamp of marginal land and are struggling to survive.)
No wonder those boys grew up to be kind of messed up. And then they repeated the cycle of "not really knowing how to handle a hormonal teenage boy" with their own sons. A culture passes down parenting wisdom through the generations, and that culture didn't have any experience of fathers directly raising their adolescent sons. So *of course* they didn't do a great job. They didn't know how.
The language barrier is also a big obstacle. I am currently working as a volunteer with a woman to help her reduce her accent because she wants to find a better job.
"If you want to know how Australian Aboriginal peoples lived for 40,000 years, just ask Yukultji. She stepped into the 20th Century just 30 years ago..." [2014]
"The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe?"
It's all relative to what you're aware of. If the best thing you can be is a hunter, then being a hunter is cool. If you've got a minimum wage job, then you know *damn well* your work is the lowest value possible in modern society. I suspect being a traditional-style hunter would only be cool in current year because there's inherent danger to hunting (and the "connect to my roots" cache); modern society has devalued any traditional Aboriginal lifestyle just by being there.
I've sometimes wondered if this is a side-effect of living in a society with some kind of rigid caste-like divisions. Like, suppose you live someplace where your status is partly determined by your race and class, and partly by your actions. You are allowed to be the best black doctor in the black part of town, have the biggest house, etc., but you will never compete with the whites for status; you may be a fine soldier who becomes a trusted NCO, but given your peasant birth you simply could never be made an officer; etc.
One weird positive side of this (mostly bad, IMO) kind of system is that there are a whole lot more different status hierarchies. The richest black guy in the black part of town isn't competing with rich white guys for status; the peasant-born soldier isn't competing with noble-born soldiers for status. There are lots of little ponds in which to be the biggest duck.
I think you're on the right track; when you take their culture away from a group of people (even if you think you're doing them a favour), they lose all sense of self-value that they had previously. In cultures where men were the hunters and danger-facers, giving them guns or telling them to farm reduced their social status to near-zero. Women still had familial and social responsibilities to give them a sense of value and worth, but men had nothing. I've always thought this is why addictions and deaths of despair became so prevalent in indigenous societies when they were colonized.
I wonder how much this contributes to the decline in mental health in the internet era. In a small town, I could have been, say, the best mathemetician. In the wider community of the internet, I have no chance. The more I'm online, the less it feels worthwhile to do things because other people are already doing it way better than I can.
My head tells me that the effect of a larger "community" must be limited by the fact that only a few individuals can expect to be the best at things in even smallish communities. But my heart tells me that this is right on — sometimes it seems like the online world is just too big to leave some overlooked niche in which I can shine. It's clear that not everyone's psychological needs are like mine, but still....
Yes, this ties in well with the increasing critiques of social media... kids used to compare themselves to kids in their physical vicinity. Now they are comparing themselves to 100,000 kids (many of which have created artificial online personas). Maybe, since all of us are now "colonized" in one way or another, the best path forward is to find a viable way to push intrinsic value as the measuring stick. Simple as overriding 100,000 years of human evolution.
I can see this going both ways, though. In a small town, you probably wouldn't have just been the best mathematician, you'd have been the only mathematician in a town too small to need even one. Maybe you find a job that still allows you do a lot of math, or maybe it becomes a hobby, but it seems likely that you end up spending most of your time doing something you dislike, surrounded by people who aren't really into the same stuff that you are.
The internet gives you access to /r/math, among many, many other like-minded communities.
If you're primary motivation for doing something is to be the best at it, then I can see why a larger community might be disheartening. But I don't think that's the only motivation for a lot of people (maybe most), and for that reason I don't think the internet or social media is as much of a net-negative as some people seem to think.
Interesting point. In the pre-internet days if you found yourself in a too small town, your options were to a) move to the city (so to speak) or b) suffer through job doing things you dislike surrounded by people you dislike. The internet provided option c) stay in your basement and engage online communities. The question would be whether option c effectively meets social needs.
The reason why it sucks to be colonized and stuck with a dead-end job or on welfare — call it “pride” and it’s a sin to be so ungrateful for all the cheap goods, but call it “status” and it makes perfect sense.
No matter how many times we repeat that poor people with toilets should be happier than yesteryear’s kings, it’s very well established that the wellbeing of members of social species is more greatly determined by their social rank than material comforts.
Australian aborigines have low status — some of the lowest on Earth — and they are consistently reminded of this in their daily interactions.
Most of the attempts to improve their status are met with resistance, as it’s thought that status is zero-sum, so to give some to aborigines is to take some from others.
Status also explains why many poor colonized peoples resist integration. In one’s own community, one may rise up one’s own status hierarchy, whereas in the dominant society, one has little chance of success.
So why do immigrants tend to have higher wellbeing than colonized natives? Immigrants are not merely those who want to go elsewhere, they also want to leave home. Immigrants are driven by a desire to escape the limits of the local status hierarchy, so they see their new position at the bottom of the ladder as a blessing, not a curse. That, and most immigrants don’t land at the bottom. The local poor and long-oppressed outgroups are often seen as lower in status than new immigrants.
The problem with this theory is that lots of Aborigines live in Aboriginal villages and rarely interact with whites. Wouldn't you expect the average person there to be at the 50th percentile for status in his village, just like he would have been 10,000 years ago?
Probably the answer is something like "but they hear on TV about white people", I just don't really understand how this works psychologically. If a probe crashes into Earth bearing a message "people in the Andromeda Galaxy are much richer than you", do we all become sad?
I’m no expert on Australian history, but aren’t the rules on where aborigines can live determined by them having been invaded, conquered, genocided, and submitted to Australian authority?
And if they go outside of their treaty-defined territory, they are poor so they can’t buy stuff, and visibly an outgroup member, which stinks.
Edit to add: I’m surprised you’re surprised that humans (or other social species) hate being low status. This is extremely well documented in so many different ways, from hormonal biomarkers to behavioral changes to anecdotal reports to psychological studies.
The analogy of aliens doesn’t work because humans are a species. We can all reproduce. Sex and reproduction are specifically dependent on status. Colonialism tend to involve sexual violence, which is particularly humiliating, and “sexual inequality” (I don’t know what the technical term for this is, but I’m talking about rich outsides going into the countryside to promise all the attractive young women a softer life).
I wish people would stop using "genocide" as a verb, especially when "ethnic expulsion" is usually a better description for whatever event they're referring to.
Relative social status actually is zero-sum, by the way, more-or-less by definition, but honestly that's not the main reason to oppose AA.
I think maybe the answer is in domination? Knowing that they’re someone out there that’s much stronger than you, and that you exist basically by their goodwill is severely disempowering. In this view, “people in the Andromeda Galaxy are much richer than you” doesn’t really affect you, but “there are people a few solar systems over with massive spaceships who are way cooler than us but are letting us live for now” does.
One important idea is that you can absolutely destabilize/destroy a functioning social order by allowing people more freedom in a place where their lack of choices was load-bearing. You had a society that could function passably well (not great, but it worked) but that depended on not allowing young men to say "screw it, I'm moving to the city and getting a job in a factory instead of serving my in-laws for twenty years!"
Living with the in-laws was a mechanism to prevent warfare. Many wars in early societies were fought about women. When a man knows that he will get married, he doesn’t have to risk his life or the lives of others just to get himself a wife.
This makes sense. Also, if an infant girl is betrothed at birth to her eventual husband then she has someone to protect her from being carried off in a raid. Otherwise she'd still have her father, but he might be dead, so having a fiancee as well is a good move.
Let’s look at it from the female perspective. From a young man’s perspective, this system is awfully unfair, but for women and children it’s actually pretty good. The mother-in-laws gets some respect, since the son-in-law has to watch his mouth in her presence. The daughter stays gets to marry a man she knows well. When brides are obtained through barter or kidnapping, which is not uncommon in some societies, it is a lot more traumatic and not good for her relationship with her future husband.
The wife also benefits from marrying a well-vetted husband who has proven, over the course of many years, that he'll be a good provider (I presume young men who can't follow the rules get the boot). It seems like a mechanism for reducing risk and uncertainty.
Capture marriages are often as an alternative to dowries (that men can often not afford), and often the capture marriage is a "civil nicety" where the man "rapes" a woman (with tears and all) who wants to marry him, and has "in reality" consented to the entire thing (even though socially she is performing the "I am being raped" ritual)
I very much agree with you. Here is a real story that I heard from one woman from Uzbekistan, where such marriages were practiced in the past. This woman, I will call her “Yasmina” was courted by a man. This man was very handsome, but had a wandering eye, i.e. always liked to look at many pretty women omen. Yasmina liked him, but didn’t want to date him because she didn’t trust him. One day, he and his friends kidnapped her and brought her to his house. No one did her any harm. The women of the family put a vail on her to signify that she was now a”married” woman. She was held there for three days, after which his family approached her family to negotiate a “discount” on the bride’s price, which would other have been very high because she came from a prominent family. The two were married, but it was not a happy marriage for Yasmina. She fell deeply in love with her husband, but he cheated on her. She was so upset that she thought of committing suicide. After some time, the two were separated. She ended up building a successful career, but she still remembers being forced into a marriage that she didn’t initially want and that brought her a lot of bad luck.
Yasmine’s situation was quite complicated. She was physically kidnapped. She was grabbed on the street and pushed into a car by a bunch of guys. When she arrived at the man’s house, she was not allowed to leave, but other than that, no harm was done to her. She was immediately taken to the women’s quarters, where she was kept safe. The man didn’t even come near her. She had to stay there for three days. From a cultural perspective, if anyone outside the family would have found out that she was kept at the man’s house she would have been considered dishonored. This gave the man’s family the leverage to negotiate down the bride price. After that, the wedding took place and none of the guests knew what had happened to her. A further complication was that she actually liked the guy before all this, but she rejected his advances because she didn’t trust his character enough. It turned out that she was right from the very beginning.
All of the 3 comments below perfectly summarize the problem. Global power and status will always matter, being high status in a smaller pond only works if that smaller pond is somehow tightly enough integrated with the larger power hierarchy. After enough distance it doesn't feel like you are thriving in "The culture", but despite it or at the mercy of it. I assume it has to do with how the actual integration deviates from your ideal envisioned political integration.
The situation seems more like if we all gained access to a digital portal that projects the way cooler & sexier lifestyles of Andromedans, who display latent disgust for human-like traits and culture - and spent 2+ hours gazing into that portal every day (2014 stats on Aboriginal TV & other media consumption - https://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-11/quantitative-indigenous-research-report-2014.pdf). Seems related to social media comparison & unhappiness stuff, and does not seem to bode well for mental well-being
Someone with writing talent needs to make this a short story. What if every tv on earth got a new Andromeda channel, and social media platforms got regular vide updates, of Andromedan lifestyle influencers with their amazing wealth and technology? And then occasionally they would discuss the "earthling problem," where some Andromedans said these low-IQ humans need to pul themselves up by their bootstraps, and others said that actually human cultural practices like CO2 emissions and apartheid need to be respected?
I don't know what would happen, except I want someone else with writing talent to write that story.
I still agree with Wow and others. I'm not that confident that the richest in our world would not be sad to discover that all their goods are nothing compared to the Andromeda guys.
But in the case of Aborigines and other traditional ethnies, the distance is definitely closer than Andromeda. They know the rich guys are out there, all around, not that far away, and that many of these guys value their entire world and culture as low as shit.
This is in fact the premise of the (admittedly, utterly awful) Neil Blomkamp movie "Elysium," in which a society of super-rich happy people in an unobtainable space station is treated as bad per se notwithstanding the lack of direct interaction with the unwashed masses, in part because they can witness it and be aware of their relative inferiority.
It doesn't obviously seem wrong to me that one can be made unhappier owning a 2,000 square foot house when a 3,000 square foot house goes up next door.
Apart from the arguments people have already made about the disempowerment or domination that this could involve, I think there's an additional element of cultural denigration or irrelevancy that would follow from this for a lot of people. We live in a world where a majority of people believe that not just our world, but the universe as a whole, was created by some entity which values humans in particular, centers its creative attentions on Earth, and likely cares about them as individuals. Imagine how Christians, Muslims, etc. would feel about learning that most of the habitable universe is controlled by beings whose civilization is incomparably more powerful than ours, who could wipe out our entire arm of the galaxy by accident, and who think that human culture is laughably stupid and primitive. Don't you think that would be pretty destabilizing to their sense of emotional well-being?
Things Fall Apart does a good job of depicting this (yes it's agrarian Nigeria not hunter-gatherer Australia or a galactic civilization but still). You live in a world which - to our eyes - is in many ways violent and harsh and undesirable but which within itself has rules and organisation and makes sense. It has procedures and traditions that give life meaning, it has functioning systems for success and status and respect. And then over the course of a generation the world is turned upside-down: the gods have deserted you (and/or you have deserted them), the ancestors are dishonored, nothing makes sense any more.
Or (since this tends to be a more sci-fi based fictional crowd) it's like the Total Perspective Vortex which shows you all at once how insignificant you really are.
On the other hand, thinking that there's nothing special about our particular corner of the universe has been the default for educated westerners for a century or so. And despite the cries of traditionalists, I don't see that our collective sense of emotional well-being was much threatened by this shift.
The current system of social media serms to be doing much more damage, though. And it does that regardless of whatever happens beyond Andromeda.
Some people hold to this view, and are emotionally well adjusted to it, but I think it's worth recognizing that even in developed Western societies, this viewpoint is much more the exception than the rule. So I think it's likely that people who hold such a view are likely to be heavily filtered for people who don't find it aversive. I've certainly talked to many people who reject this viewpoint who have no qualms about saying "I find that whole viewpoint aversive and don't understand how anyone could hold it without losing their sense that life means anything," and often make explicit the step "therefore my intuition tells me that it must be wrong."
Good question. I would also wonder why the result of this cultural interaction is depression and ennui instead of resentment or antagonism? Like in the US, there is a pretty persistent urban vs rural social divide, where people in urban areas mock small-towners for their lack of sophistication or backwardness, and the rural people mock the urbanites for the social dysfunction they tolerate in their cities (fentanyl zombies crapping on your front stoop and so on). Why can't Aborigines adopt an attitude of "WEIRD white people have a few big things going for them, but they're crazy in these other ways. Let's take X and Y from but otherwise do our own thing." Seems reasonable and self-respecting, no?
I think Aboriginal backwardness is just too overwhelming. People in western countries can choose to live in cities vs the country, but for modern Australians the Aboriginal life just isn't an option.
Yeah, I guess there's the stereotype of the meth-addled West Virginia mining town that's dysfunctional and dying and everyone there wants to kill themselves, which is in some sense the same phenomenon. That seems to stem from a lack of a sense of purpose, and I suppose that's the same issue with Aboriginals. Maybe they should all convert to Islam or something.
Culture is a repository for meaning as well as the necessary vehicle of status. I honestly think that awareness of the existence of Western culture would make it very difficult for indigenous people to find the expected amount of meaning and satisfaction trying to reconcile their traditional ways of life to encroaching capitalism etc. Their expectations for what a valuable life looks like are so radically different from what is on offer; their culture isn't just different from the majority, it's been obsoleted by a global economic superstructure. I suspect as well that proximity to the remnants of their tribal culture makes it difficult to "move on," and that having a foot in each world undermines the capacity of the other to convey meaning. In the same way that westerners have vastly more difficultly understanding the significance of the aboriginal customs than, say, Americans trying to understand middle eastern hospitality or bargaining. The cultures are...non-fungible isn't the word I want but it's close. Minimally-translatable? In any case, I imagine that many feel like the world they live in is deeply broken and has next to nothing to offer them. They were supposed to be a Kumbo marrying a Kinta and being a very good son-in-law by never saying the proscribed words and prospering materially and so forth, but now 1) they either believe or suspect that all of those meaning-bearing cultural trappings are bullshit, and 2) their wealth is paltry and their status is pageantry. Meanwhile, their exposure to what remains of their tribal society makes them acutely aware of what they, and everybody else, have lost in modernity. What does it make sense for them to hope for in such a world?
Edit: the word I was trying to think of was "incommensurable".
I don't know how much TV your typical aborigine in a village watches, but it's surely a lot more than getting a random message from a crashing probe. Our social sense grabs out for a sense of the baseline to compare ourselves to, and modern storytelling through TV and other screens has lots of power to establish itself as the default baseline.
If it were just a sentence or two, that wouldn't affect anybody much. If it were a USB drive containing a series of high-intensity dramas illustrating the lives of people (let's say they're people and not aliens too different from us to relate to), and we watched them, the extent to which we engaged emotionally with the dramas would inform our new perceived status.
I mean look at TV as it's been: usually above-average rich, nearly always above-average looking people having always above-average amounts of fun, tension, drama, comedy.. or we wouldn't watch them. When TV showed up, envy went through the roof.
Add to this that immigrants to Western societies, outside of refugee and illicit immigration streams, are specifically selected for their proven ability to reach high levels of attainment on Western-oriented status ladders (i.e.: money, academic or technical skills).
The selection process does help bring in the international talent necessary to improve the workforce pool, but even in the best of circumstances, the adaptation process is very complicated, from emotional, practical and linguistic standpoint.
I like the framing of "rituals" (where the waiting room in a doctor's office is part of the ritual). Likewise, the Marine yells at you and treats you like slime during bootcamp is a ritual, designed to turn you into a "soldier."
These are helpful to understand, particularly when you're looking at how people unfamiliar with your culture respond. EG. The Afghani who ran away from the Marines during their "boot camp" were in genuine fear for their lives, not being experienced in the cultural ritual that Americans (and people exposed to American media) expect to endure. It's not "they're pansies" or "they couldn't cut it" (which would be the predominant conclusion if someone left bootcamp in the States, I assume).
I knew some guys in the air force whose interpretation was "they're so fucking dumb." For example they'd be told to do jumping jacks along with the group and they had absolutely no idea how to imitate the drill sergeant. Running away would probably get the same exasperated response.
That's what I heard from someone deployed via the army. He also said they would immediately fire all their ammo into the air, then sit down and let the Americans take over.
The concept of "military discipline" as a central necessity for effective fighting is a pretty weird one even after centuries of having it play such a big role in our culture. Half the stuff our military does would qualify as "cult behavior" if a private company did it...
In re: aboriginal suicide rates, two interesting papers from Michael Chandler that argue the determinant is the individual's ability to maintain "the narrative thread of one’s personal persistence" and suggest that in a pinch cultural/communal continuity can substitute:
The grad school analogy was made in jest, but aptly enough. It does represent a form of indentured servitude, where the graduate student spends a lot more time than it would take to obtain enough knowledge to justify the degree. A lot of time is spent “serving” the professor by assisting in teaching and working on grants that are disbursed to the professor. Meanwhile, the graduate student survives on substance-level wages and delays reproduction because they are insufficient for raising a family.
>> `a lot more time than it would take to obtain enough knowledge to justify the degree'
This really depends what you want to do with the degree. I'm a physics professor. If you just want a Physics PhD so you can signal your intelligence to hedge funds, then yeah, there's no particular reason for it to take a long time. But if you want to proceed to do independent and original work in physics, whether in academia or in industry...then no, it does really take that long. Ars Longa, Vita Brevis. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/)
It is true that when hedge funds look at hiring prospective employees, having a long list of publications in prestigious journals does make a candidate more attractive. So, in that respect, I do agree with you.
Wait, grad students work on grants? In what sense - helping with grant proposal application? I must have been failing to exploit my grad students all my life.
Also, being a teaching assistant is time spent serving the department, not the professor specifically (unless again we are talking about an archaic departmental culture I'm unaware of).
Presumably PhD students are doing the actual work that you promised in the grant application which asked for money to fund a PhD student to do the work.
One can only dream! OK, that may be true in the wetter/more experimental sciences. In math/non-experimental physics/theoretical computer science, it's a bit useless to expect a grad student to perform more labor than they require. Postdocs, sure - but even then, you have to thread a fine line, or the very grant committees to which you have to apply to get your postdocs funded will accuse you of being exploitative.
there being no experimental work involved (other than programming, which, surprisingly, most young people are deeply crap at) +
proper training taking so long that it's a rare graduate student who is actually useful, and so that kind of graduate student is genuinely appreciated.
I wouldn't imagine letting a postdoc deal with a grant proposal (unless of course it's a postdoc applying to their own grant, and then I might be called upon to perform free labor advising them and supporting them).
Yeah, IME grad students spend most of their time being a net labor sink for their advisor, and just when they reach the point of being a net labor source, they graduate. The last year is hopefully net positive…maybe the last two years if you get lucky.
I’ve never had a grad student work on a grant application either. On work supported by a grant, sure.
I personally know a psychologist grad student who did just that. She basically wrote the whole proposal, with just a little guidance from her professor. I guess her professor was very lucky to have such a competent grad student.
Yeah, I wouldn't say this was a big part of what I did as a grad student (the professor certainly spent more time on it overall) but I was definitely expected to help.
I am enjoying this review a lot. That said, it's a bit odd that the review seems to repeatedly claim that a woman being married to a man 20 years her senior would be really bad, when in this society it sounds super beneficial and potentially way nicer than being married to someone young. I don't have more to say on that, just that it struck me as odd, which likely means at least one of the author, the reviewer, and I are doit something strange
I don't know the exact statistics, but it seems like if the median marriage is something like 34-14, then ones on the far side of median are ~40-12, and I can't imagine Aboriginal men do a great job staying well-preserved and attractive-looking. In any case cheating and attempted cheating seemed pretty rampant. Maybe not vastly more rampant than in our society, but our society doesn't kill or brutally beat cheaters when they get caught.
(by the way, sorry for not saying your name, I was really confused seeing this after all the not-a-Book-Reviews and thought the author was Sccret Scott, not Public Scott)
That makes sense and I appreciate the clarification.
My confusion stems from ignorance about whether being raised in such a culture (and your great great great great grandparents having been raised in it as well) alters what women are expecting in men such that this is a good deal. Maybe I have to read the book and check its sources to have any shot at finding out!
The Aboriginal case looks stuning to us but genetics studies shows that it was quite the standard for Homo sapiens since the beginning. I heard that in a serious conference of J. J. Hublin at College de France. I don't find the exact sources but Claude believe to know that women generally had their first child around 18-22 years old, while men typically became fathers around 25-30 years old or later. Arguably Aborigines have a greater difference of age at marriage, but not that greater. The same studies also confirm the existence of complex social networks to avoid inbreeding.
I just came to say the same thing. Of all the bad things mentioned, this is an odd one out, especially since barely 100 years ago it's still treated as quite normal in most other societies. He even touch on this himself when he talks about our "super specific" culture taboos!
It feels like the dog that didn't bark in this description of aboriginal culture is war, except to say that they don't do war and don't approve of it.
Which seems really odd to me; so many other human cultures keep reinventing the idea of rounding up a bunch of your mates, stabbing the guys in the next community over, and taking their stuff as the coolest and most high status thing you can do. I guess maybe it's another result of keeping young men under such tight control.
They had small raids, but not enough organization for large-scale war, and lots of social technology for keeping the small raids under control. This seems to be a common pattern for hunter-gatherer groups.
This is also true, in broad strokes, of pastoralist tribal societies. Although the raids tend to be somewhat different in character, as the goal of pastoralist raids usually involves stealing sheep, cattle, horses, etc. I know less about hunter-gatherer raiding patterns.
I've heard this referred to as first generation warfare (or something like it. I google that and it's entirely different) where outright frontline are very rare, but it relies very heavily on village ambushes when the warriors are away. It's said that when two warrior factions actually met, they just shot some arrows, have one or two victims and retreat. But if one caught a village unguarded, casualties are very heavy.
War, real war with armies, soldiers, specialized weapons, is thought to have begun with the first cities-states. But collective violence (raids) has probably always existed. Chimps do the same. La Cima de los Uesos could also be interpreted as material evidence of collective violence by Homo neanderthalensis.
Maybe it's as simple as hunter-gatherers not having anything that's worth going to war over? They don't control territory and don't stockpile wealth. What could an aboriginal war even be for?
Women, for starters. If they're nomadic pastoralists, cattle raids are popular from what I understand. And I'm fairly certain territorial disputes are still possible, e.g. maybe the river teems with salmon in Fall, but who gets the best fishing grounds vs. gets pushed to the sidelines?
Even if they don't "control territory" as such, they may control specific features, e.g. they'll fight over a specific watering hole or hunting territory that they visit regularly, but they don't have the resources to actually control a whole section of territory.
Maybe the big gap is between hunter-gatherer and farmer-and-beyond. Immigrants to rich societies aren't hunter-gatherers. And it seems when farmers move to where hunter-gatherers live, they generally don't adapt, they die out (DNA stuff in Europe, the Ainu, USA Indians (but not Mexican farmer Indians),
It should be considered that most hunter-gatherers we have studied inhabited the margins, i.e. the driest deserts, the coldest tundras, and the most remote jungles. The kinds of people that would have inhabited Mestopotamia or the Nile delta must have had cultures adapted to their more abundant environments.
Graeber & Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" describes Indians in the Pacific Northwest who had one of the easiest spawn locations on Earth and spent their time on slavery and elaborate rituals.
The Lakota probably didn't have any choice, because they were pushed out of their previous home in the woodlands and mixed grasslands of what is now Minnesota and onto the less productive plains when their Anishinaabe neighbors acquired guns and other trade goods from the French *coureurs des bois*. If I recall correctly, Anishinaabe coveted the Lakota lands for their fur species, and since they were closer to the French, they gained an advantage and were able to drive the Lakota off their ancestral lands. Once the Lakota learned to exploit the big magical dogs (aka horses), the dynamic shifted. But the Lakota used to call the Anishinaabe snakes, and the Anishinaabe returned the insult. Note that once the Anishinaabe were introduced to horses, they didn't develop a nomadic horse culture. Unlike the Lakota, they continued with their original lifestyle while partially acculturating to the French.
“The Aborigines, whose culture can seem impossibly complex at times (is this an illusion? we’ll discuss that later!) give a feeling of something over-optimized, a genetic algorithm run for 999,999,999 epochs until it ends up at weird edge cases that break the reward module and get assigned infinite utility.”
There are some truly weird and cool things Aboriginal Australian societies do, but for my money the most interesting one is Songlines, and the most interesting thing related to Songlines are Songmen.
A songline is an oral technology, a long sequence of short verses with each verse recording the events (historical, legendary or mythological) of a particular site. Put together, these verses form a sung map of a route or territory. Not only does this help people to create and maintain a mental image of the surrounding land, it’s also vital for keeping track of valuable data like the location of waterholes or important cultural sites - kind of an externalized memory palace as I understand it, super valuable in a culture that doesn’t have a recording system outside of human memory.
The reason I’m bringing them up here is because it is accepted that “songmen”, a title for people with excellent memories for these songlines, will experience or “find” new songs through dreams, songs could be taught to and followed by other people.
It reminds me of the experience of solving a problem in a dream - something that’s happened to me exactly once. But this version seems to have been culturally embedded in a really interesting way. I thought both the existence of a specific type of problem-solving dreamer and that dreamer’s adjacent skill with memory was interesting and maybe indicative of a technique, sort of like how other societies have developed techniques for things like meditation. I can’t source this directly, but some info can be found on pages 42-43 of Lynne Kelly’s Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies if you're into that.
I heard a podcast with Lynne Kelly once, not much more than that I think, but I was impressed. She compared restriction of freedom of movement for the Aborigines to the destruction of a people‘s libraries. And she „solved“ Stonehenge, it‘s the memory palace rebuilt in physical form when people settled down in one place. (If I remember these points correctly.)
That sounds about correct based on what I know about her! She’s done a ton of work with different kinds of mnemonic systems and how important memory and the control of information would have been in oral cultures. I know she’s investigated a few prehistoric structures like Stonehenge, Chaco Canyon and Poverty Point as physical mnemonics, but she seems to acknowledge that even if this was one of their uses any knowledge that was once encoded in them is basically lost beyond maaayybe being able to discern a very few basic uses…I forget exactly how, been a while since I read it and the Songmen were the thing I retained most clearly.
I'm confused by the description of a more-or-less unified Aboriginal culture. I thought they were split up by language group, by technological adaptation to their land, and by geographical distance -- in some cases, like Tasmania, almost totally losing contact with the mainland and thus losing technologies. I wouldn't have expected such a distributed society to keep the same basic rules everywhere when they lost things like the ability to fish.
Yes, and Aborigenes in the outback would be expected to differ from ones on the coast (who would probably be doing more fishing, as long as they aren't Tasmanian).
>”Would it be humane to dole out welfare checks whose size is proportional to […] how many points they can score at in some kind of artificial boomerang-throwing contest? Would young people go off to […] spend years practicing boomerang-throwing, then come back as high-status members of society able to attract a wife and support a family? Would they be happy?”
Maybe? This is basically what society is like for American inner city blacks. The young men who are successful at football or basketball or music or whatever else our society decides is entertaining get status and wealth and women. There are lots of problems with inner-city African American culture, but to my knowledge they don’t have a suicide problem.
Peter Turchin writes all the time about how a surplus of wannabe elites is a problem, and I don't think it's much of a problem in hunter-gatherer societies. The surplus of men who wanted to be athletes/musicians but didn't succeed doesn't seem to cause high suicide rates in the African-American community.
It appears that blacks have generally had lower suicide rates than whites, but the gap may be narrowing recently.
I speculate that this is due to them having closer family ties (I know that they have fewer classic "nuclear families", but abandoning your parents to found a nuclear family is actually potentially antithetical to extended family ties) and more religiousness.
I read an essay on Substack a while ago that argued that black men were simply more likely to turn feelings of hopelessness and nihilism outward in the form of violence, whereas white men were more likely to channel those feelings inward and harm themselves, via suicide. I found this argument at least somewhat convincing.
Primitive societies succeeded when one group’s story dominate and all accepted its rules and traditions. Society A, with its meshugena traditions either conquers or is conquered by Society B. The subsequent society becomes society AB (A’s traditions domination) or society BA (v-a-v). The one that is more stable for longer eventually is conquered by Society C.
Once in a while a tipping point arises, as in western civilization (WC) from the enlightenment onward. Stability is enhanced with the advent of institutions that promote 1) rule of law (third person adjudicates conflicts between two person or two larger groups) and 2) scientific knowledge (e.g., how sex leads to babies). Tho imperfect, WC provided solutions to mankind’s oldest dilemmas: starvation, disease and war. Having solved the three major material problems that none of the earlier societies could solve by asking god(s) to manage, WC offered stability and led to huge populations, one-half of which are not WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). But within WEIRD world, tribes still make up sh*t and competed to take down each other. WC/WEIRD still is the dominant hegemony in the 21st century; but it’s not clear that our institutions (formulated myths) are strong enough to resolve conflict before a new and more dangerous tipping point arises.
Note he didn't say these were all solved during the Enlightenment: that was just a "tipping point." The claim was that they all have solutions NOW, and I'd assess "war" be about as solved as "starvation" and "disease."
> The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it.
I mean, yeah? Hunting is awesome. A significant number of people do it as a recreational activity. Divorced from our modern morality about hunting animals, the cost of hunting (equipment, transportation, permitting ,etc.), and the inconvenience if you live in a city or suburb, I think nearly every male would enjoy hunting as a sport.
Almost no one works at a convenience for fun. Maybe a retiree who has literally nothing to do and just wants some human interaction (even then, I doubt they'd choose convenience store clerk). It's why we pay people to do it, instead of charging them a "convenience store clerk permitting fee" or whatever.
If we replaced 40 hours of week sitting in front a cash register with the necessity of doing a fun sport for 20-40 hours a week, along with the strong and direct intrinsic motivator of hunger and "my family dies if I don't win this game of hunting kangaroos," I'd imagine that most mental illness would evaporate relatively quickly.
Maybe in 50,000 years we will get the same intrinsic motivation from modern work as we do from hunting and video games. But probably not since the modern form of work is almost certainly not stable enough for that long to select out all the people who don't find it intrinsically motivating.
I'd be curious to see how much "enjoyment of work" (independent of the work being done, or maybe enjoyment of work relative to the average for the sort of work you do) correlates with wealth or fertility in the modern day. Depending on how selective it is, and the heritability of that attitude, you could probably come up with a model of how many generations until the majority of everyone's genes are from people who just found work most people consider boring as intrinsically motivating and pleasurable.
Given how much some people camp and farm in video games "for fun" (?), I think slaying some souls (be it fictional or real) is inherently better for mental health.
"In the nineteenth century, anthropologists - buoyed by the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution - tried to invent grand Theories of Everything about the rise of humankind. These usually looked like “All savages originally did P, then passed through intermediate stages where they did Q, R, and S sequentially, and finally reached the light of civilization where they did T”."
Funny, this is basically economics to this day, with 'T' being some interpretation of 'rational' utility maximization.
> Still, really? Pride? The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it.
I do find it fairly easy to understand. Isn't this the same question Bostrom grappled with in Deep Utopia? What do you do after a transition to the post-scarcity world where you're no longer needed? Both of those scenarios involve getting ripped out of your traditional status structure where you needed to use skills to survive, and into the world of plenty one click of a button away.
One example that stuck with me from Bostrom: would you still raise your own children if you knew you're a subpar child-rearer compared to a fully automated superintelligent nanny? Where everywhere you look there are little happy fulfilled supergeniuses running around, and every minute you spend with your child makes it less likely they'll grow into one of them?
Stuck in a world that makes you choose between subpar (hunting, raising kids) or cringe (living on benefits, automated child-rearing), seems obvious to me that hedonism or suicide would be the only salient options in such a scenario, and others would be very non-trivial to find (and possibly very individual).
There's something particularly rough about hunter-gatherer people having to grapple with giving up traditional lifestyles, though. E.G., Japan's contact with the West certainly upended traditional Japanese society, at least if Tom Cruise's portrayal can be trusted, and they responded not by going to pieces but instead by rapidly modernizing, going toe to toe with the West in the Russo-Japanese war, and then trying to take over half the Pacific. Then when that didn't work out, they again didn't go to pieces and instead remade themselves once more and became an economic super power in the post war years.
Likewise, you could think of Mexico as kind of a halfway example. Sure, the Aztec Empire fell apart very fast, and lots of people died of small pox, but central America didn't go completely to hell after Cortez. Mexico and the rest of Central America have their problems, but I don't think life there is anywhere near as bad as say, a typical reservation in Wyoming or Manitoba or something like that. Again, the difference being Japan and Mexico being peopled by settled agriculturalists, whereas Australia and Wyoming/Manitoba by more or less pure hunter gatherers.
Japan looked very different after WWII than before it. As in, the people themselves were very different.
Reservation life is bad... but the issue in Manitoba has very little to do with the First Nations. (If the Spanish were in Manitoba, one could quite reasonably think that the Manitoban Indians would have similar "life in a caste system").
The issues in Manitoba have a huge racism component and a huge historically-fucked-over-economically component, but on-reserve culture is NOT healthy. Picking out the exact causes of that is...well, if I could do it for sure I'd either be burned at the stake or heralded as a genius.
Could alcoholism and suicide have more to do with alcohol and suicide than broader social issues? One reason immigrants don't have so many problems with alcohol is they are mostly immigrating from societies where alcohol is also cheap and abundant. If your culture isn't well adapted to alcohol it will be a problem regardless of anything else.
Gasoline? You mean gasoline? I'm pretty sure nobody except Abos has such trouble with petrol. "Keep the petrol in the can" is a lyric from a PSA, for god's sake.
Doesn't petrol-sniffing by Aboriginal Australians seem pretty similar to other epidemics of dissociative drug use by people experiencing despair? Perhaps Aboriginal Australians just have less access to more fun dissociative drugs compared to other peoples and so resort to gasoline out of desperation.
Well part of it is genetics for sure, even South Europeans like Spaniards, Italians and Greeks seem to have less drinking problems on average than North Euros like English or Swedes. There seems to be a correlation to the amount of time that an ethnic group has had access to strong liquor: natural selection in settled societies selects for people with less of a propensity to become alcoholics.
"In the early twentieth century, anthropologists embarked on a more ambitious project - demonstrating that something about primitive culture proved that their own political faction was right about everything."
Did the small-L Enlightenment liberals never get on the bandwagon, or do we just not hear about it?
I am hardly an anthropologist, much less an expert on aboriginal cultures in Australia, but I thought that there were lots of different Aboriginal clans, not all of whom spoke similar or even mutually intelligible languages or had similar cultures?
Sort of like the Americas - an Inuit and an Aztec didn't have all that much in common.
Doesn't that fit with the cultural group selection discussed by Henrich? Functional practices become more common via dysfunctional practices failing.
> The Marind-anim were warlike raiders who stole other tribes’ children because their own women were infertile. Unbeknownst to them, their own women were infertile because of a “fertility ritual” where multiple men would rape each woman on her wedding night so violently that it destroyed her reproductive system. Eventually European colonizers made them stop, and their fertility miraculously rebounded.
> Edgerton and Henrich don’t come out of nowhere. They’re the modern reincarnations of Hobbes and Rousseau - with the former calling primitive life “nasty, brutish, and short”, and the latter idealizing it as an Edenic paradise to which we could only dream of returning.
Between the two, I've only read Henrich. But he doesn't talk about such societies being better than our own, just that they were optimized for their own environment and so westerners dropped in (without the support of their own larger culture) could not perform as well.
> Further, everyone of the same section is . . . sort of the same person? My father’s brothers, who are Kubbi like him, are also sort of my fathers.
> Or does every society seem this byzantine to foreigners who are 50,000 years removed from the most recent common ancestor?
Language specifically tends to be simpler in larger societies that have more of a history of people needing to learn them as adults. English is thus relatively simple (not in spelling, but grammar) while Australian/New Guinean languages are complex.
> a special caste called “gay people” who must move to New York
I thought San Francisco was the gay capital.
> one pretty popular position is that women were trying to punish their husbands for all the forced marriages and beatings, using the only cudgel that they had
In ev-psych terms, both the husband & wife have shared Darwinian interest in any offspring (assuming this wasn't the result of cuckolding), but the wife has already invested more by bringing it to term. Killing the child isn't especially punishing the man over the woman, it's just removing the requirement for further investment.
> But maybe it should feel more mysterious. When Third World immigrants move to the US, they’re usually pretty happy with their decision.
Those immigrants usually aren't hunter-gatherers or even swidden farmers from stateless societies.
> They can move to Sydney or Melbourne and try to assimilate, in which case they’re no worse off than any other poor immigrant, and better than most.
I would expect their outcomes are worse than those of immigrants from Asia.
> then come back as high-status members of society able to attract a wife and support a family
In the case of polygynous societies where men have multiple wives, other men dying (typically violently) makes the math add up without such a big pool of unmarried men.
Thanks! But from the first glance, that does not say anything about *adults specifically* learning the language — it's simply a simulation of language acquisition / transmission in a smaller vs. bigger population.
Besides, it's a simulation. And from my own fascination with emergent communication studies I get the impression that our ability to simulate transmission of language is rather weak. So I'm moved to wonder if there is any studies that look into this hypothesis based on data from any real-world languages (from WALS or something...)
I mean, it's not an in-silico simulation, but it's an experiment with human participants learning and transmitting a simplistic artificial "language". It's kind of same sauce.
The paper links to evidence that languages with a larger population of speakers tend to be simpler, and then asks "hey, what if it's about the adult learners?"
Interestingly enough, they find that simply adding simplifications to the transmission simulation (simulating adult learners speaking their own version of the language) does not propagate the simplifications:
> Perhaps surprisingly, we find that simplifications do not propagate under any of the conditions we investigated, casting doubt on accounts which assume a straightforward link between adult learning and language simplification.
They also find that "complex-version" speakers use simple forms when speaking with "simplified-version" speakers, and some of the "complex" speakers retain some of the simplified version in the artificial language. So the authors hypothesize that hey, maybe *this* is what's going on.
But I'm not sure how big a role this actually plays. What if the "languages with a lot of speakers have less complexity" is just a result of some other information-theoretic shit, and then the salient examples of languages with many speakers in our heads have a lot of adult learners because immigration / colonialism / something something? Somehow I don't get the impression that the part about *the adult learners* being the reason is well-established yet. Language is a fine, weird, stochastic process, and just population size might be responsible for a small or a large portion of this effect, and maybe it's simply about the community size.
Edit: I mean this paragraph and the surrounding text: "McWhorter argues that this is just what happens to languages when they're suddenly picked up by a large number of adult learners. It's hard to learn a new language as an adult --- you rarely get it all quite right --- and when there are enough new speakers in one place, the language itself begins to drop the most complicated and challenging features. This is also his argument about creoles, although he never comes right out and says that English ought to be regarded as one."
IIRC Swahili and Indonesian Malay, which developed specifically as regional trade languages, have much simpler phonology and grammar than their Bantu and Austronesian relatives, though I don't have a link to hand right now.
Maybe there's an analogy with how languages that are learned a lot by adults become more simple/consistent with how cultures that assimilate a lot of people become more "simple" in some senses. At least in how you treat strangers western society has adopted a very simple shared operating system of no violence, respect their property, etc that applies regardless of where you sit in some complicated familial lineage system with respect to them. And so works even if you know nothing about them
>"Still, really? Pride? The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it."
I believe it. E.g. around ten years ago I felt self-conscious to be a 26-year-old barista (cringe, women will think I'm stagnant) albeit softened by how at least I was studying to try to get into grad school (ambitious, doing something with my life). And when I switched from barista to an academic editing job (educated, writerly) I also felt less self-conscious even though the job was actually worse in terms of hours + pay
(I could have decided to take pride in barista-ing, and I respect anyone who does, but that was where my head was at. When you feel like you're doing less than the script you read growing up it's tough)
I almost can't believe Scott's being honest when he says he doesn't understand this; that's how obvious it seems to me. Living off the land, surviving by your wits and physical strength, knowing the countryside intimately and the secret ways of the beasts and plants? That rules. It is far cooler than being given what you need to live by a boss who you have to obey; buying safety at the cost of subservience.
(Not that I'm some kind of cowboy or Davy Crockett myself. But the coolness advantage of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is super obvious.)
I guess the only real argument I can make is something like: whose mammalian nervous system is being maintained at a higher operating capacity? Davy Crockett's or Milton's from Office Space?
For me my credence is less about the universal coolness of hunting and gathering; it's more just about the standard social script you know, that defines what counts to you as success and dignity and how you're measuring up
1) is this comment intended to contribute to the discussion of Scott's article, or to shoehorn in an unrelated grievance with the modern left
2) it's odd to contrast old labor left with a "victim" left. The whole point of unions was that the owners exploit the workers so workers need to organize. (Could you just be projecting an annoyance that coal miner unions felt manlier to you than blue hair college kids feel?)
Anyway I *do* suspect that old union days felt empowering in a way that's lacking now (with the left being less organized and less effective, and political agency including unions being less a part of regular social life, etc). But that seems unrelated to your grievance with "victims."
I was replying to a thread of comments inspired by the above blog post rather than specifically Scott's blog post, though Scott does raise the issue in the first place.
I am trying to be descriptive rather than expressing an "annoyance" or "grievance". I don't think I gave any indication that I personally support labor unions, for instance. People who actually do support them have contrasted them as membership based organizations vs donor based organizations (sometimes citing Theda Skocpol), but the former would include the black churches of the civil rights movement that one could perceive as being more in continuity with a coalition of victims (although there a decline in church affiliation has been linked to younger black men drifting away from the Democratic party). Of course, MLK was the most prominent such black leader of that era, and near the end of his life he was focused on labor politics.
I don't think you can accuse the ideological strain behind Abolish The Police of failing to tap into the appeal of overthrowing your supposed oppressors.
I would think not having to "survive by your wits and physical strength" would be a welcome relief, though. Like sure, survive by your wits and physical strength I'll bet is all great when you're 20. When you're 40, it's just a #@$ing chore. Source: me. I'm 40 and my back hurts. Everything's a #$%ing chore in this condition.
I'm sometimes getting conflicted with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, because it implies that you won't have the upper need if the lower ones aren't satisfied. But it seems like, people irl easily trade some of the lower to fulfill the upper? People go on hunger strike for abstract things. I guess it is a simplication, but I haven't seen a more complex more correct model of that.
I take it every young boy was removed like this, but surely many must fail somehow? You can't have a high-status social role as a reward if every male who survives to 30 is getting the reward.
Hunting kangaroos is cool and being a convenience store clerk is lame because the first one involves proactive agency, planning, execution, has a meaningful range of outcomes and instant feedback and a marker of success. The second one is just being a servant, reacting to demands of anyone who shows up, which is fine if it's your mother-in-law and you're gonna get to bang her hot daughter someday but not if it's just every random smelly fat dude in a sweaty t-shirt that wanders by during 8 hours. Every young man in Western society who has one of those jobs routinely calls it "soul crushing" all over social media, and spends huge amounts of his spare time on some hobby that is a rough analogue of kangaroo hunting.
I suppose we could wonder why those substitutes wouldn't work for the aborigines, and ascribe that to the legacy of colonialism, but instead we should probably accept that those things aren't working for our young men either. I'm in my 40s and have held high-status positions (in small-ish ponds, but it's all relative as you experience it) and feel ok about where I ended up, but I definitely see young men's complaints all over the place these days, and compared to when I was a teen in the 90s it seems like the young guys today really do not believe there is a pathway to status for themselves. Almost every scummy hustler on the internet is trying to profit by selling some variety of that pathway. Seemingly every social and political movement of the past 15 years has been at least loosely about "hey wait a sec, I was supposed to get status if I did this and it isn't happening" or fears that status is being handed out to or diluted by immigrants and minorities, or hoarded by a small caste of people. Although I'm skeptical that the aboriginal way you describe here really produced a broadly accessible lane to high relative status to nearly every young man, it nevertheless seems like a pretty useful stabilizing feature for a culture to have and we could use some.
Yes, mortality before 30 was surely higher than today. It was more that those who "made it" were happy, and even those that didn't might have at least enjoyed their existence because they were striving for a goal. Now, virtually all of the group members are unhappy and without a goal to strive for, although there is no mortality( beyond self-inflicted causes).
I have a vague notion that the brutality of the initiation rituals is related to the difficulty of surviving as a hunter gatherer, especially in a place like the Outback (I don't actually know how hard it is to survive in the Outback, but it has a reputation for being extremely harsh).
When resources are scarce enough that survival itself becomes difficult, societies can't afford to have many weak links. The brutal rituals may desensitize people to everyday hardships.
But when modernity makes it fairly easy to meet one's basic needs, the rituals don't just seem brutal, but unnecessarily so. It doesn't at all surprise me that people would try to escape the brutal aspects of a traditional lifestyle, if given the choice. But the brutal aspects of a traditional lifestyle may not be separable from the supportive aspects, and modernity arrives rapidly there won't be time for new, non-brutal supports to emerge. Social ills follow, and many people may conclude that the traditional lifestyle, brutality and all, was actually worth it.
The elephant in the room that no one in polite Australian society would like to mention is that rates of child sexual abuse are dramatically higher in Aboriginal communities.
Best data estimates 2 - 4 times higher for sexual abuse, 8 times higher for all forms of abuse or neglect
But good data is very hard to come by because it’s under-reported. Everyone knows that it’s an issue but no one really talks about it which makes it hard to know how much of an issue it is.
The Liberal (right-wing) candidate for the last federal election, backed by his Indigenous minister for Aboriginal affairs, called for a Royal commission into it. But he lost, so it’s gone nowhere.
And here’s a pretty bog standard (left wing) response that repeats “the REAL problem is racism and these mean right wingers talking about child sexual abuse are just trying to distract us”
Yeah, I've heard reports of about a dozen adult Abos describing in florid detail how "tight" a virginal, preadolescent vagina was (I believe they were describing how tight it was as they strangled her to death).
Yes, it's really, really bad.
Disclaimer: I hear this from a friend who has been banned from Australia for making a music video that featured Abos (apparently some politician thought it was white guys in brownface).
If true, certainly fits the pattern across the Anglosphere (Pakistani rape gangs in UK and Epstein files in US) of child sexual abuse being covered up by powerful people in government and media, and the people who bring attention to it coming under attack
It's not the Anglosphere... You're misidentifying two different things, as one.
One is "pets" allowed to roam free. That occurs in Scandinavia and Germany just as much as in the UK. Rape is a particular favorite, because you can "reeducate the pets" on the subject (as if their ignorance would allow them to rape in their home country, without being stoned to death).
The other is "Big Powerful Men allowed to do As They Will" -- this holds true in Ukraine, in China, in UK (Prince Charles) in America... pretty much anywhere. The pattern is "big people get to break the rules that little people have to follow." Mr. Big Shot likes watching little boys strangled to death? Done and done -- so long as he votes correctly. So long as he remembers who gets him small children.
It is possible that in such a different culture child sexual abuse has a considerably less awful effect on the child. I have spoken with many people who were sexually abused as children, and the things they identify as most destructive about the experience are how shocking and bewildering it was (they had never seen sex or a sexually aroused person before), how guilty they felt, and the abuser's threats of terrible things that would happen if the child informed adults what was going on. If sexual abuse of children does not have these features, it may be comparable to uncomfortable and painful experiences many kids suffer at doctor's offices. As a small child I was terrified and horrified by things doctors did, such as putting a piece of wood down my throat that made me gag and feel like I could not breathe, & sticking an enormous sharp spike into my butt. But my mom was there in the room looking calm and saying reassuring things, so I thought of what was happening as a part of regular life, tho one I hated.
Yeah… I work in healthcare and I have seen too many Aboriginal people with horrible chronic mental health issues and repeated suicide attempts to consider this hypothesis plausible
Judith Harris of "The Nurture Assumption" wrote that the reason not to abuse children isn't a developmental one, but instead the same reason not to abuse adults.
But the aborigines "abuse" adults too. It's not that I'm a fan of abuse, just struck by how well, in many ways, the aborigines system works, and how much *good stuff* aborgines can count on (or maybe I should say could count on before the presence of our culture threw their system out of balance.).
Imagine there was a way to install cumulative pain meters in people. So we install one in an aborigine and one in a modern person from a first world country, and check them when they both reach age 50. Seems possible to me that if ythe meter measured both physical and psychic pain, the aborigine might have a lower total score despite having endured aborigine rituals and a childhood rape that caused considerable pain.
I thought I got your point. My paragraph about the pain meter was a way of saying that the aborigines culture, which permits & actually institutionalizes causing pain and injury to adults & children may end up causing less lifetime pain to members of their society than ours does to ours. Or you could say that members of our culture can be abused in ways that aborigines cannot -- for instance left to live in great loneliness because there is no equivalent in our culture of the tribal ties that apparently guarantee an aborigine will have many people who take an interest in their life and give assistance.
> The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe?
this strikes me as extremely obviously true, yeah.
This will probably mean nothing to anybody here, but the description of Aborigine kinship structure has helped me (somewhat) to understand Chapter 3 of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. So, thanks!
On immigration vs colonialization, the selection bias factor is worth noting. Most immigrants are selected to be people who were willing to move somewhere new, so they're probably the kind of people who're a lot happier adapting to a new society.
(E.g. I liked moving to America, but I don't think most of my cousins would like it here).
Even refugees are at least partly selected (even in extreme cases like Syria only like 20% of the population actually fled). And it's worth noting that refugees famously have a harder time with assimilation than other immigrants (presumably because they're less selected).
I think the lingering effects of colonialism contribute more significantly to the mental health problems experienced by Aboriginal Australians than you seem to suggest. Indigenous Australians were only granted the right to vote in 1962 and didn't have significant control over the reserves where they lived until the 1960s. Also, even into the 1970s, Aboriginal and "half-caste" children were forcefully taken from their families and put in institutions at the behest of the Australian government. I would imagine that the profound lack of agency over family, culture, and property experienced by Australian Aboriginals negatively impacted their mental health more than, say, not engaging in prestige-enhancing activities like hunting. Of course, Aboriginals today aren't living in the same horrible conditions of the 1970s, but they're not wholly divorced from those conditions either.
Good review, I enjoyed it! Though there are some discordant notes in the last section I thought. Why the conflation between "colonized hunter-gatherers" and "immigrants to first-world countries"? These are not even remotely similar groups of people - the typical immigrant has a smartphone and watches soap operas on TV even before they come to a place like the US - so it doesn't seem mysterious that they'd relate differently to the dominant society.
Nor does it seem mysterious that colonized indigenous people who have their system of meaningful social relations and the material conditions of their daily lives overthrown, while simultaneously being relegated to the lowest caste of the colonizing society, would get depressed. Even modern Westerners are pretty depressed these days, what with the constant overthrowing of value systems and material conditions of daily life due to constant technological and social change, and we're relatively used to it. That's before you even get into stuff like the loss of free movement and a rich connection to land, but I'll set those aside as possibly "Noble Savage"-inflected concerns.
I think that was Scott's rhetorical point - going from the group that would likely struggle the most to adapt to modern society, to the group that is most likely to adapt. I'm sure he sees the distinction between the two groups, he's just looking at the extremes and comparing them as a thought experiment.
> "The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it."
I'm sure I don't have a complete answer, but I believe part of it is "status". If you're in a society that values kangaroo hunting and gets the girls to admire you, then it *is* inherently masculine. But if you're in a modern society working a minimum wage job, the girls don't admire you for that. And I think gerontocracy probably reduces this stress -- you're more or less predestined to rise in status over your life. In a modern society, once you get your "career" established, there's no set way to rise in the pecking order. And indeed, given technological change, there's a considerable risk that you'll lose a chunk of whatever status you now have.
Indeed, I'd like to see a study of which choice for an Aboriginal will on the average leave the with more surviving children: the traditional life or getting into modern life at the bottom of the totem pole.
I think a lot of traditions make more sense when considered in economic context in which they're found. For example, primogeniture seemed weird to me until I thought about in the context of a patriarchal society where privately owned land is the primary generator of wealth and power.
Perhaps some aspects of Aboriginal culture would make more sense if you considered the economics of Aboriginal society. And if it's not economics its probably sex (as you already note in the essay).
Somehow the aborigine relationship with their future mother in law reminds me of the medieval European idea of "frauendinst" where young knights were supposed to have a distant platonic love relationship with a married woman of higher status (usually one married to a much older man), where they then would go around to jousts and wars wearing her colors and bringing back tokens of their conquests. It is debated by historians whether this actually ever existed in reality or only in literature, but it certainly does fill up a lot of medieval court literature from ca 1100 - 1300.
It was a great article, but I don't understand why you're confused at the end.
Of course it's more fulfilling to be a tribal hunter than a welfare check collector or minimum wage service sector worker. Also of course disregarding any difference in quality of life, or assuming the same quality of life, it's preferable to do the first than second. The problem these people have, and in fact maybe unknowingly all of us have, is a kind of an infohazard. Once one knows it's possible to sit in a climate controlled kwikmart or mcdonalds and be the minimum wage service sector worker while watching reels or something on a smartphone; even if the hunting life is definitely more fulfilling, nobody would want that. Also, once you know that the tribe or your family doesn't rely on the result of your hunt to survive, hunting becomes much less meaningful anyway.
It's like having all kind of junk food made from glucose syrup and trans oils and sodium and whatever being available 7/24 together with some harder-to-get healthy food. One has to force oneself to go for the healthy alternative. Just as helpful for survival, much more convenient, somewhat addictive. It destroys the person who eats it, and it also destroys the validity of the healthy meal. As I said, an infohazard.
About the comparison between an immigrant and a colonized people; I have some insight about that as well. I immigrated over a decade ago myself, been friends with different recent immigrants, and also been able to observe behaviours of people who immigrated a very long time ago or their descendants. Knowing that the place you came from with its physical properties but also social properties is in fact intact somewhere, is a different feeling. If I went back in time and tried to describe that feeling to my pre-immigration self, I'm not sure if I would be able to. And this is coming from somebody who internally immigrated a decade or so before that. People whose ancestors came back in the 60s still have in their minds their villages from that decade. Even when they time to time visit there, and it's definitely 2025 over there, they still have it in their mind. When one is colonized, probably that is lost. I don't know if this is a bad thing or a good one, but there's a psychological distinction.
According to the monograph on the Tiwi which every high-school student for a generation - at least in my district - read in our anthropology unit, the Tiwi solved the problem of the gerontocracy by having the women, once they were widowed from the older men they'd married, marry the young men, who'd themselves become widowed about the time they were ready to marry the young women. That neatly wrapped up the circle.
This matches up pretty well with what I remember reading about one such culture (in one of Jared Diamond's books) but I forget if it was the Tiwi or a Polynesian culture.
As a companion piece to this essay, especially if you're tempted to rationalize brutal initiation rituals for the young, I strongly recommend "Chattel Childhood" by Aella. Without actually using the term "Stockholm syndrome", she essentially argues that such brutality is perpetuated by a kind of Stockholm syndrome by proxy, and that our WEIRD society has its own ways of continuing to do this.
I don't think I understand your technical problem there. I just checked the link in my comment above, and it took me to Aella's post in another tab on my web browser, just as I expected it to. (What is "saving" in the context of Substack, anyway?)
1) Who the hell told you that alcoholism was the drug of choice for the Abos? It's gasoline. Native Americans do not replicate to the rest of the world. (Please listen to "don't be ramarama" it's charming and fun and a great PSA).
2) All this discussion of taboos, and we have yet to hear about a dozen Abos discussing in florid detail exactly how "good" a prepubescent Abo girl's vagina feels (I believe, but am not about to verify at this point, they raped her to death). I want to know the details about this! Why it is not culturally shaming to do so (in such a way that they'd refuse to discuss it, ref. Phillipe Bourgeoise's book about Spanish Harlem).
3) No discussion of out-group rape, which is very, very, very much a problem.
Noting for the purposes of discussion: I'm hearing this from someone who got banned from Australia for producing a music video that certain politicians thought was "brownface" but was actually Abos performing....
Looking at the thief-lashing story: I think our societies are symmetrically weird. We look at their penis-chopping ceremonies as horrific and barbaric. Meanwhile, our chief orders one of his own men to be tortured for violating a taboo on touching objects with a ritual classification of "private property". He invites some locals, and he fully expects them to appreciate that he is enforcing the taboo. (A deeper investigation would show that he fears the shame of the violation will cling to him, as he is the violator's social superior, and the ritual torture is a way to expiate that. Perhaps our aboriginal anthropologist would notice a connection to the commonplace and obviously correct practice of sister-stabbing.)
Much like the Dugum Dani, there are aspects of our culture that I think we would drop in a heartbeat if given a plausible coordinating mechanism. If aliens sent us some consultants to improve our justice system, and like the British police outpost, their system was obviously less error-prone and more humane than ours, I doubt even the anti-prison-reform people would muster any real resistance. (Most of their opposition is on practical grounds, after all.) If the Australian tribes had 21st century technology in the 19th century and proceeded to colonize Britain, the British would probably be grateful for the loss of some of their social hierarchy. They would probably mourn the loss of other aspects. Young British men, faced with a choice between living in a Victorian-style slum in the middle of nowhere and joining civilized society and receiving penile subincision, would probably consider suicide.
I suppose it's possible that particular culture is a complete dead-end in terms of technological advancement. My point was only to illustrate that the profound difference between the two cultures is symmetric, and to provide an argument-by-analogy that might explain the suicide rates.
My point was to emphasize how they are not symmetric, which is the thesis of Sick Societies (a thesis I admittedly criticized relative to Henrich's over at Psmith's post).
I'm probably missing something, but how does the marriage/gender system ensure that "there was no way that a legitimate marital partner could be any closer than a second cousin" ? It seems like it straightforwardly allows first-cousin marriages - if I'm Kumbo, my dad's-sister's-daughter and mom's-brother's-daughter are both Mata and thus marriageable, right?
I noticed the same thing. Under the system described here, first cousins are off-limits if they're parallel cousins but marriageable if they're cross cousins.
purpose, meaning, sense of accomplishment, engagement, status, fun...
Because presumably hunting kangaroos takes more effort and skill and intellectual ability than working a typical minimum wage job
.
And it's not just Hunting kangaroos it's the having a life where you know your place, have a family, have friends because you have what to bond with other people with who all share your culture.
Like if you spend your life ages 15 to 30 in specific hazing ceramlnies and in-law serving rituals, then the rituals themselves begin to take on meaning...they aren't just "things you have to do" but rather form the entire basis of your existence, the way you measure status, etc ...
But then exposure to a culture where that's not the case throws cold water on that entire conception of status. You go from thinking about yourself as "I'm awesome because I did these rituals"
To
"I'm a loser because I have a minimum wage job....also I wasted 15 years doing pointless rituals"
Being in both worlds at once can be the worse
... The rituals seem pointless since they don't lead to money
AND striving for money can seem pointless since it doesn't bring any sort of ritual/cultural/extra wife status.
>In traditional Aboriginal society, young men would be isolated from their family for a period of many years while they underwent a series of tortures expected to eventually result in a high-status social role within the community. The West has the same system: we call it “grad school”.
Spot on! I read the first part of this to my wife and she interrupted me before I got to the end: "wait, is this a PhD"?
> doesn’t it end up kind of like being an immigrant into a First World country? In fact, isn’t it strictly superior?
At least one difference is the person. The people who do try to go for a better but unfamiliar life instead of suffering through their default one must be statistically very different from those who don't.
What's most striking to me is that the aborigines seem quite high on basic kindness, fairness and generosity, even though their society does not do systematic instruction of the young in these norms, and does not have rules, laws and punishments to remind people not to stray from the norms. They didn't even have ill will towards people who looked and acted very different! (They shared food with the children of outsiders.) Maybe the world should take a leaf out of their book.
All cultures sprout delusions about gods, categories of people, forbidden actions, etc. We seem built to take these things seriousl y. Maybe instead of trying to be more rational we should instead design some system, some giant worldwide template of completely arbitrary categories and customs and goals, that, like the aborigines' template, puts a tight lid on some of the most dangerous groups and group phenomena: young horny males, sexual competition, family pride and loyalty, subgroup pride and loyalty, power hierarchies.
ASI could design it, and tell all the young horny males who want to climb the power hierarchy by being major contributors to the design to STFU. Then we would all take some drug that temporarily increases neuroplasticity enormously, and while under its influence be inculcated in the new system's customs, beliefs, etc. Then we'd take another drug that makes the new beliefs enormously resistant to skepticism or change.
I am actually not being ironic here, just trying to think some things through to their logical conclusion.
My hot take is that the occasional brutal treatment of people you can get away with brutally treating is healthy in some sense. Its similar to hazing. If you were angry, (which you probably are, as its really hot and you might be hungry) and then you mutilate a younger person, you and everyone else who does it with you feels better. Now laws and stuff prevent that, causing the would be hazers to instead do nothing, and still feel angry but not able to let it out, and then they just become depressed/low functioning. Its a trade off between occasional brutal treatment or constant depression/low functioning.
> "The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it. " <
I agree and it raises interesting questions. I didn't understand this quote to mean that Scott doesn't understand why the colonized would feel injured pride, but rather that he doesn't understand why the (understandably) injured pride leads to such disparate life outcomes. The common answer is 'hopelessness' and I get that, but it doesn't explain enough to me. Billions of people have injured pride, jealousy, etc, and, apparently, want to stick it to the 'elites' who put them there. And certainly, drug use and hopelessness are much higher in 'downtrodden' communities.
That marriage system seems certainly nifty. I think it would allow you to have sex with your paternal grandmother, or with the daughter of your daughter though.
I also wonder if it is optimal, and if there would be any genetic evidence for it. (My guess is that for mtDNA in women and Y chromosomes, two of the four subgroups should share a lineage. Possibly more pronounced in mtDNA, because having sex with a forbidden caste is likely more common than placing a female in the wrong caste -- even if you kidnap her, there would be no reason why you would not place her in the correct caste in your tribe.
Also, this seems like a way to constrict the bonds between a father and his son by placing them in different castes. Imagine if the kids of a Mormon father were always Jewish. Not that it matters much after the son hits puberty and gets removed from the tribe.
Also, it seems curious that the males switch tribes (or so I gather) when they pledge themselves to a couple. My understanding was that generally, it was more common for women to switch tribes on marriage generally, and that the (debatable) gender bonus from social skills for women was because they normally had to get along in the tribe of their husbands (where they might not know anyone), while men were staying in the tribe they were born in for life. Supposedly this could have helped in team hunting and warfare -- if you have trained together for all your life, and know which if your tribesmen is brave and who is not, that is a clear advantage. (Also, evolutionary, groups of men who were kin would be much more willing to risk their lives to save their comrades than groups of men who were only related by marriage.) On the other hand, a matrilineal system being less capable of producing organized violence might be seen as a feature.
I think it a bit curious that for a young man, it was not evolutionary advantageous to defect. I mean, getting all of the daughters of your mother in law is not a terrible deal generally, if the population is stable then the expected value of the number of daughters who will reproduce is one. Except that there is a chance that you die while your future first wife is five, or even when she is 20, and you would be much better off with marrying something your own age if that was an option. Of course, if you only get promised the first daughter to make it to puberty, that leaves you a chance of exp(-1)=0.37 of dying a virgin (assuming that the number of daughters reaching puberty are poisson distributed). And if you happen to be the second guy who waits for a daughter of a couple which just got married, your odds of success are only 0.26. At this point, becoming Oedipus-in-law might be the more promising strategy.
On the other hand, "no sanctioned reproduction until you have spent a decade sucking up to your elders" was certainly the norm for Roman legionaries, and it worked rather well for them. Still, I think that there is an important difference in kind.
I believe that horny young men who want to get laid are collectively a great force in society, which can be turned to very destructive but also constructive ends (and often the difference is just a matter of perspective). Possibly the first fire was tamed by some guy who just wanted to impress some girls. A man in say medieval Europe had some options which would influence his expected reproductive success. Become an outlaw or join some travelling people. Volunteer for the king's army and get trampled by enemy knights. Toil in the fields. Over time, a few of the men would find good niches, thus increasing the productivity of society.
I feel that the options for the young Aborigine man are much more constrained. Sure, if he is in the top 1% of hunting skills, he might get to pledge himself to a couple whose daughter is already eight (and whose previous husband-to-be was sadly killed by a kangaroo).
Say what you will about Great Plains steppe nomads -- they were certainly a violent bunch long before any European had set foot into America, but they were not stagnant. When the Europeans introduced firearms and horses, they took both in strides. Had they had another few millennia, some (settled) Native Americans might well have invented the steam engine.
Contrast this with Australia. They had 50 millennia, and I doubt the Europeans being late another five would have made a big difference. Sure, they were rather peaceful apart from the odd genital mutilation, but also stagnant.
Now I am wondering about an alternate universe where a bunch of Apache get isekaied to Australia and seduce young Aborigine men to their way of life.
I've seen them in Sydney, and whilst I was there in a capacity which meant I only saw them in the criminal justice system (so potentially colossal selection bias), they're doing really, really badly.* Much worse than typical blacks in the US, the median seemed to be roughly hovering around the black underclass. I didn't get a great sense of what life was like on the reservations/"not reservations" in the Northern Territory, but I can't imagine it was much worse.
They're also a lot less self-selected than immigrants; a chunk of them when I was there seemed to have been displaced from the Northern Territory by "The Intervention" (a big government crackdown nominally on child sexual abuse, which there was a fair amount of,** but also on aboriginal behaviour more generally; the paranoid theory at the time was that this was done as a favour to mining companies, but that was mostly said by the sort of people who would say that). Immigrants, by contrast, have to at least have the wherewithal to pick a country and somehow get there; most of the Aborigines I met would have struggled.
*The stats speak to this, but it has to be borne in mind that the Australians also include Elizabeth-Warren-equivalents as Aboriginal and pointing this out is considered scandalous.
**Confounded as against the regular underclass by having (in my vague anecdotal impression) slightly more fathers at least kicking about in the vicinity, what I suspect was a slight squeamishness for historical reasons about taking their kids into state care, and the fact that these were the ones who'd fled the intervention.
This article seems to me a mix of Alexanderian and Sailerian thought. Great subject matter, Carleton Coon does a good job of explaining the structure of Australian Aborigine societies in one of his books!
In primitive societies, hunting seems like the best occupation for young men. It allows them to use violence in a pro-social way, and rewards them by status. (If the most reckless ones die in the process, that is a bonus.) We don't have a good analogy to this in modern society. The closest thing is sport, but sport is economically useless... except as entertainment; but then the problem is that the people who "participate" in sport only as observers, instead of spending their energy in the arena, they spend it afterwards demolishing the city.
To a point. But in peacetime it doesn't actually let them expend their pent-up violence all that much, and even when the army *has* stuff to do, it requires a whole heap of rule-following and socialising at baseline, which young men who might have made great hunters might not be cut out for. Also, in our modern society having been in the military doesn't reliably translate to that much status, though it might have done a couple of generations ago.
>“Gender” is technically the wrong term. Most anthropologists use words like “section”. But there are some notable resemblances. Your “section” determines who you are, how people address you, and (especially) who you can marry.
About gerontocracy, at least for the males, I think a reason this is stable is because, like in seniority succession in monarchy, that it's promised that eventually, the young man'll also be the one to reap the benefit. They'll grow old, then they'll be able to fuck young women. I've seen careers with worse future prospects.
As for the females, we're back to arguments about patriarchy, and it's a whole other books of debates.
> "we definitely aren’t supposed to call them “the oldest society in the world” with a “fifty thousand year history”"
Perhaps not in academic circles specialising in this topic, but in mainstream Australian public discourse, people who consider themselves progressive and pro-Aborigine do routinely use this kind of language, and they clearly don't imagine it to have anything but positive connotations.
I couldn't tell if him saying that was a joke or not
That’s surprising to me! I would assume that the idea of one culture being “older” than another is just a kind of patronizing orientalism that doesn’t understand how numbers work.
But mainstream discourse in a lot of places is still pretty full of this kind of stuff, including people who use the phrase “third world”.
Mainstream discourse on Aborigines (ie what you're allowed to say without being called racist) isn't about making Aborigines feel better, and it's certainly not about saying true things, it's about money; specifically it's about the question of land rights and the question of to what extent the Aborigines present on the land in 1788 can be said to have "owned" the land that they wandered nomadically across.
For this reason it's necessary to emphasise the staticness of the culture. You will see maps like this which represent a vague idea of where specific language groups existed at some point in the past century https://www.nationalunitygovernment.org/pdf/aboriginal-australia-map.pdf, and people will claim that this represents a map of how the country looked for fifty thousand years, regardless of how little sense that may make. If the Kuringai people were nomads who just happened to blunder into the area that is now Sydney six months prior to the arrival of the First Fleet then their claim to that land is rather weak; if that particular group had been on that particular piece of land for tens of thousands of years then their claim starts to look a bit stronger.
The Unabomber, of all people, wrote a sort of "takedown" of the anthropologist tendency to romanticize primitive societies while in prison. Those people were some of his closest "allies", yet even he found it necessary to be like "please stop saying these tribes are proto-leftist utopias, they aren't".
His most interesting point IMO is that some of these cultures might be MORE individualist than modern USA.
The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of Anarchoprimitivism | The Anarchist Library https://share.google/sa23OsKvJIfxsF9iQ
old and busted: "we should Christianize the aborigines to save their souls"
new hotness: "aborigines ought to assimilate into civil society to vegan and progressive, but *mumble mumble* there are more important things to concern ourselves with"
Can you explain what you're talking about?
It was a low-effort joke, sorry about that. But the idea is that still today among progressives of various stripes, the sentiment seems to be that participation in modern/civil society is a prerequisite for the morally superior outcome(s) in the form of -isms. The difference now being that there's an embarrassment about it.
I don't think that matches how modern "progressives" think about Aborigines.
If anything they want them to continue to live their traditional culture as a museum piece, but somehow still have modern first-world standard of living, all funded by the Austalian taxpayer. They should hunt and gather and do ceremonies all day, but also live in air conditioned houses and get free food. They shouldn't have to work ordinary jobs like us muggles, but if the mix of free money and nothing to do results in drug and alcohol abuse then we just do a surprised pikachu face. They need to be university-educated, and also not to have to leave their middle-of-nowhere communities.
I was hoping for an inversion joke.
broke: we should Christianize and Civilize these aboriginals
woke: maybe we should aborigin-ize our civilization and initiate boys to solve the crisis of meaning
(I regret learning about subincision though)
I wonder if one part of the answer to why people in traditional societies that are becoming westernized do so badly is actually very simple.
For a while, I worked with immigrants to my country. They struggled to integrate, because it's hard. But it was noticeable that there were areas where they particularly struggled to adapt, and that's when they were trying to learn how things functioned in private - family life, for instance. You can try and just do it the traditional way from back home, but that may not work, e.g. if your teenage kids don't like the idea. But how do western people parent in a way that's adapted to the pressures around? It's a hard thing to learn without lots of good western friends whose houses you can visit and with whom you can spend time, observing how they do things.
This is much harder in a modernising culture. If you are from a traditional aboriginal society, live among people from the same society, but can no longer parent in the traditional way (sending your sons away, as detailed above) then what do you do? You have literally never seen a mum and dad bring up their own son! How is it done?!
Those of us who are parents will agree it's a tough job at the best of times. How hard it would be if you'd never seen it done, or if you'd only seen it done in ways that had been made taboo, or illegal, is difficult to imagine.
So a long and painful adjustment period for traditional societies is not in any sense surprising. It takes time to build up easy learned cultural responses to the problems we face.
Two obvious guesses here about the difference between immigrants and aboriginees:
a. Immigrants are self-selected--they came to the US because they wanted to come. People who didn't feel like they could stand such a weird foreign society probably stayed home.
b. The distance between cultures probably matters. Coming from rural Mexico to the US is going to be a culture shock, but the distance isn't all that huge--your home might be more like the rural Midwest of 50-70 years ago than like the current rural Midwest, but you still grew up in a society with money and laws and books and cars and tractors and electricity and plumbing and such. For that matter, English and Spanish aren't so far apart (though if you're from a sufficiently remote indio village, probably you grew up speaking a language that is much further from English), the dominant religion is Christian, etc.
the selection effects in A seem very large. (non-refugee) immigrants are basically by definition high-openness. this is the only thing that really provides a coherent explanation of why one guy travels 2000 miles to a foreign land and his neighbor doesn't, despite both being aware of the potential rewards. when everyone is forcibly put through this experience, you are gong to have a *lot* of low-openness people (which is more common than being high-openness!) suddenly subjected to the thing they are explicitly bad at dealing with, psychologically.
but as far as B goes, I actually think the main thing we shouldn't gloss over is any settled rural community is agrarian, and that the distinction between humans living in basically the ancestral environment (hunter-gatherer bands) vs. people living in settled villages is actually vastly greater and more enormous than any gradation *within* settled life. one common interpretation of the weirder parts of early Mesopotamian myth (such as the gods punishing humans not for moral transgression but rather for being loud and annoying) is basically that overcoming this gap is very very difficult and tends to make the recently-converted hunter-gatherers quite miserable
can you give me a link to somewhere i can read more about this interpretation of mesopotamian myths
Tower of Babel, maybe?
No, I think that he clearly refers to the mesopotamian myth of the Deluge (Flood) as described in Gilgamesh's epopee where Uta-napishtim is the hero. There is an even older version with king Ziusudra as hero.
But there is definitely something in common with the myth of Babel, or even Sodom and Gomorrha. Humans are so annoying, let's kill them all.
Edit : sorry, Kade U already answered himself hereafter.
I was introduced to this through the Literature and History podcast's first few episodes which cover Mesopotamian literature, and there's some bits and pieces of this theme there along with some others (his main obsession here is with the idea that the Babel story in the bible is a reference to the collapse of the cuneiform literary culture). At one point I looked into it further and I wish I could easily find the stuff I read but it's not coming up in a quick google search. That said, if you're interested, here's the basic idea:
* The Epic of Gilgamesh famously features Gilgamesh, obviously, but also Enkidu, who is a stand-in for a wild, uncivilized 'state of nature' figure who is enormously powerful but also incredibly hostile to everything to do with settled life. Among the settled peoples, only Gilgamesh and other appropriately noble figures get to be badasses and everyone else is weak, but Enkidu gets to be a badass purely by virtue of his savagery and distance from civilization. (Interestingly we observe that even in the period this was written civilized people had developed the erroneous notion that primitive peoples were solitary rather than social, but I digress). Enkidu has major conflicts with the the civilized peoples, has a sort of masculine love-through-struggle episode with Gilgamesh, gets seduced into civilized life by a woman, and ultimately he is executed by the gods for safeguarding the settled peoples from the Bull of Heaven. The interpretation here is that Enkidu stands in for the legacy nomadic/hunter-gatherer type peoples that live on the borders of Mesopotamian society and are slowly absorbed by the agrarian state, and that the inner 'wild man' has a kind of ferocious power and dignity that is sacrificed in the transition to civilization, where only royal figures like Gilgamesh really get to live in the prideful and independent way Enkidu does.
* The flood myth -- in the biblical version, God sends the flood to punish humans for moral transgression, in the early mesopotamian version, it is because human settlements cause 'noise' and 'clamor'. The interpretation here is basically just that the *reason* the noise suddenly becomes a problem is very literal, that as humans begin to concentrate in cities, you begin to create a density of human activity that does not naturally exist and which upsets the divinely-ordained order in which humans were quiet like the other animals. The flood itself is a uniquely anti-urban punishment in the mesopotamian context, because it affects the cities settled along the river valleys whose residents are tied to the land, but more nomadic peoples further from the rivers, in the highlands, etc. are unaffected by the periodic river floods that decimate urban centers.
* Adam and Eve -- This one i did find a link for but it's definitely not the original statement of this theory, which I would've originally read before this was published, but I think it does an OK job explaining it (https://mackseyjournal.scholasticahq.com/api/v1/articles/103125-the-divine-exile-from-original-affluence-a-revelatory-reinterpretation-of-adam-and-eve-and-cain-and-abel-from-the-old-testament-hebrew-bible.pdf)
it's presumed that like the rest of the old testament, the adam and eve story is a codification of a very long oral lineage that goes back to the beginnings of the urban near east. the forbidden fruit is grain, adam and eve exist in the garden as hunter-gatherers and when they are exiled from the garden, the curse they are given by God is that they will have to toil for food rather than receiving it from the bounty of nature. this is the fundamental distinction between settled and non-settled life, which is the nature of the labor itself. H-G labor is what we evolved for, a lot of wandering around, doing lots of different things, people don't really seem to need to be forced to do it, it's not very rote, opportunities for socialization, etc. farm labor is completely different, it's rote, mundane, and generally anyone who can tries to force someone else to do it because it sucks so hard.
thanks!!!
cain and abel can clearly be added to the list
"Das Kraftfeld der Mythen" by Norbert Bischof. Should be translated by AI any day now.
Third factor that comes to mind: Immersion. It's much easier to learn a new language, for instance, if you're surrounded by other people who speak it all the time and don't have the option to isolate yourself among people who preferentially speak the language you're already fluent in. By the same token, it's probably much easier to pick up cultural fluency through immersion than if you're living in an enclave of people with the culture you're already fluent in.
It seems like a mixed bag--it will be easier to assimilate but also more stressful because you'll never feel quite "home."
Agreed. Imagine you're an aboriginal father during the colonial transition period. Your son has just started puberty, and is acting like a hormonal teenager. You can't do the traditional thing and send him away to the elders for initiation. So what do you... do? How do you raise your son so that he grows into a mature adult? Do you sit him down and have a talk, man-to-man? But what do you say? How should you know? Your father, and his father, and his father before him, and so on *for 50,000 years,* had never directly raised a hormonal teenage son. What do you do!? "Teaching hormonal teenage boys how to behave" had been the elders' job since time immemorial, and now you have to do it without any guidance or traditions to fall back on.
(Also, your community has recently been devastated by smallpox and other foreign diseases, and you've probably just been violently herded onto a tiny postage stamp of marginal land and are struggling to survive.)
No wonder those boys grew up to be kind of messed up. And then they repeated the cycle of "not really knowing how to handle a hormonal teenage boy" with their own sons. A culture passes down parenting wisdom through the generations, and that culture didn't have any experience of fathers directly raising their adolescent sons. So *of course* they didn't do a great job. They didn't know how.
The language barrier is also a big obstacle. I am currently working as a volunteer with a woman to help her reduce her accent because she wants to find a better job.
Here's a remarkable, humanizing account from 1984--a kind of First Contact for Australia's Pintupi Nine:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
"If you want to know how Australian Aboriginal peoples lived for 40,000 years, just ask Yukultji. She stepped into the 20th Century just 30 years ago..." [2014]
"The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe?"
It's all relative to what you're aware of. If the best thing you can be is a hunter, then being a hunter is cool. If you've got a minimum wage job, then you know *damn well* your work is the lowest value possible in modern society. I suspect being a traditional-style hunter would only be cool in current year because there's inherent danger to hunting (and the "connect to my roots" cache); modern society has devalued any traditional Aboriginal lifestyle just by being there.
I've sometimes wondered if this is a side-effect of living in a society with some kind of rigid caste-like divisions. Like, suppose you live someplace where your status is partly determined by your race and class, and partly by your actions. You are allowed to be the best black doctor in the black part of town, have the biggest house, etc., but you will never compete with the whites for status; you may be a fine soldier who becomes a trusted NCO, but given your peasant birth you simply could never be made an officer; etc.
One weird positive side of this (mostly bad, IMO) kind of system is that there are a whole lot more different status hierarchies. The richest black guy in the black part of town isn't competing with rich white guys for status; the peasant-born soldier isn't competing with noble-born soldiers for status. There are lots of little ponds in which to be the biggest duck.
And being the ancient of the village is also easier to achieve when the population is low and made of small groups.
I think you're on the right track; when you take their culture away from a group of people (even if you think you're doing them a favour), they lose all sense of self-value that they had previously. In cultures where men were the hunters and danger-facers, giving them guns or telling them to farm reduced their social status to near-zero. Women still had familial and social responsibilities to give them a sense of value and worth, but men had nothing. I've always thought this is why addictions and deaths of despair became so prevalent in indigenous societies when they were colonized.
> It's all relative to what you're aware of.
I wonder how much this contributes to the decline in mental health in the internet era. In a small town, I could have been, say, the best mathemetician. In the wider community of the internet, I have no chance. The more I'm online, the less it feels worthwhile to do things because other people are already doing it way better than I can.
My head tells me that the effect of a larger "community" must be limited by the fact that only a few individuals can expect to be the best at things in even smallish communities. But my heart tells me that this is right on — sometimes it seems like the online world is just too big to leave some overlooked niche in which I can shine. It's clear that not everyone's psychological needs are like mine, but still....
Yes, this ties in well with the increasing critiques of social media... kids used to compare themselves to kids in their physical vicinity. Now they are comparing themselves to 100,000 kids (many of which have created artificial online personas). Maybe, since all of us are now "colonized" in one way or another, the best path forward is to find a viable way to push intrinsic value as the measuring stick. Simple as overriding 100,000 years of human evolution.
I can see this going both ways, though. In a small town, you probably wouldn't have just been the best mathematician, you'd have been the only mathematician in a town too small to need even one. Maybe you find a job that still allows you do a lot of math, or maybe it becomes a hobby, but it seems likely that you end up spending most of your time doing something you dislike, surrounded by people who aren't really into the same stuff that you are.
The internet gives you access to /r/math, among many, many other like-minded communities.
If you're primary motivation for doing something is to be the best at it, then I can see why a larger community might be disheartening. But I don't think that's the only motivation for a lot of people (maybe most), and for that reason I don't think the internet or social media is as much of a net-negative as some people seem to think.
Case in point: we get to have this conversation!
Interesting point. In the pre-internet days if you found yourself in a too small town, your options were to a) move to the city (so to speak) or b) suffer through job doing things you dislike surrounded by people you dislike. The internet provided option c) stay in your basement and engage online communities. The question would be whether option c effectively meets social needs.
The perception of one’s social status to be low compared to others is an important factor that contributes to depression.
The modern society has heard about a guy of obviously lowest possible status as a person being crucified, who returned after death.
The reason why it sucks to be colonized and stuck with a dead-end job or on welfare — call it “pride” and it’s a sin to be so ungrateful for all the cheap goods, but call it “status” and it makes perfect sense.
No matter how many times we repeat that poor people with toilets should be happier than yesteryear’s kings, it’s very well established that the wellbeing of members of social species is more greatly determined by their social rank than material comforts.
Australian aborigines have low status — some of the lowest on Earth — and they are consistently reminded of this in their daily interactions.
Most of the attempts to improve their status are met with resistance, as it’s thought that status is zero-sum, so to give some to aborigines is to take some from others.
Status also explains why many poor colonized peoples resist integration. In one’s own community, one may rise up one’s own status hierarchy, whereas in the dominant society, one has little chance of success.
So why do immigrants tend to have higher wellbeing than colonized natives? Immigrants are not merely those who want to go elsewhere, they also want to leave home. Immigrants are driven by a desire to escape the limits of the local status hierarchy, so they see their new position at the bottom of the ladder as a blessing, not a curse. That, and most immigrants don’t land at the bottom. The local poor and long-oppressed outgroups are often seen as lower in status than new immigrants.
The problem with this theory is that lots of Aborigines live in Aboriginal villages and rarely interact with whites. Wouldn't you expect the average person there to be at the 50th percentile for status in his village, just like he would have been 10,000 years ago?
Probably the answer is something like "but they hear on TV about white people", I just don't really understand how this works psychologically. If a probe crashes into Earth bearing a message "people in the Andromeda Galaxy are much richer than you", do we all become sad?
I’m no expert on Australian history, but aren’t the rules on where aborigines can live determined by them having been invaded, conquered, genocided, and submitted to Australian authority?
And if they go outside of their treaty-defined territory, they are poor so they can’t buy stuff, and visibly an outgroup member, which stinks.
Edit to add: I’m surprised you’re surprised that humans (or other social species) hate being low status. This is extremely well documented in so many different ways, from hormonal biomarkers to behavioral changes to anecdotal reports to psychological studies.
The analogy of aliens doesn’t work because humans are a species. We can all reproduce. Sex and reproduction are specifically dependent on status. Colonialism tend to involve sexual violence, which is particularly humiliating, and “sexual inequality” (I don’t know what the technical term for this is, but I’m talking about rich outsides going into the countryside to promise all the attractive young women a softer life).
I wish people would stop using "genocide" as a verb, especially when "ethnic expulsion" is usually a better description for whatever event they're referring to.
Relative social status actually is zero-sum, by the way, more-or-less by definition, but honestly that's not the main reason to oppose AA.
I think maybe the answer is in domination? Knowing that they’re someone out there that’s much stronger than you, and that you exist basically by their goodwill is severely disempowering. In this view, “people in the Andromeda Galaxy are much richer than you” doesn’t really affect you, but “there are people a few solar systems over with massive spaceships who are way cooler than us but are letting us live for now” does.
One important idea is that you can absolutely destabilize/destroy a functioning social order by allowing people more freedom in a place where their lack of choices was load-bearing. You had a society that could function passably well (not great, but it worked) but that depended on not allowing young men to say "screw it, I'm moving to the city and getting a job in a factory instead of serving my in-laws for twenty years!"
Living with the in-laws was a mechanism to prevent warfare. Many wars in early societies were fought about women. When a man knows that he will get married, he doesn’t have to risk his life or the lives of others just to get himself a wife.
This makes sense. Also, if an infant girl is betrothed at birth to her eventual husband then she has someone to protect her from being carried off in a raid. Otherwise she'd still have her father, but he might be dead, so having a fiancee as well is a good move.
Let’s look at it from the female perspective. From a young man’s perspective, this system is awfully unfair, but for women and children it’s actually pretty good. The mother-in-laws gets some respect, since the son-in-law has to watch his mouth in her presence. The daughter stays gets to marry a man she knows well. When brides are obtained through barter or kidnapping, which is not uncommon in some societies, it is a lot more traumatic and not good for her relationship with her future husband.
The wife also benefits from marrying a well-vetted husband who has proven, over the course of many years, that he'll be a good provider (I presume young men who can't follow the rules get the boot). It seems like a mechanism for reducing risk and uncertainty.
Capture marriages are often as an alternative to dowries (that men can often not afford), and often the capture marriage is a "civil nicety" where the man "rapes" a woman (with tears and all) who wants to marry him, and has "in reality" consented to the entire thing (even though socially she is performing the "I am being raped" ritual)
I very much agree with you. Here is a real story that I heard from one woman from Uzbekistan, where such marriages were practiced in the past. This woman, I will call her “Yasmina” was courted by a man. This man was very handsome, but had a wandering eye, i.e. always liked to look at many pretty women omen. Yasmina liked him, but didn’t want to date him because she didn’t trust him. One day, he and his friends kidnapped her and brought her to his house. No one did her any harm. The women of the family put a vail on her to signify that she was now a”married” woman. She was held there for three days, after which his family approached her family to negotiate a “discount” on the bride’s price, which would other have been very high because she came from a prominent family. The two were married, but it was not a happy marriage for Yasmina. She fell deeply in love with her husband, but he cheated on her. She was so upset that she thought of committing suicide. After some time, the two were separated. She ended up building a successful career, but she still remembers being forced into a marriage that she didn’t initially want and that brought her a lot of bad luck.
You think that was the effect of the famous Old Testament "Thou shalt marry thy rapist" law?
Yasmine’s situation was quite complicated. She was physically kidnapped. She was grabbed on the street and pushed into a car by a bunch of guys. When she arrived at the man’s house, she was not allowed to leave, but other than that, no harm was done to her. She was immediately taken to the women’s quarters, where she was kept safe. The man didn’t even come near her. She had to stay there for three days. From a cultural perspective, if anyone outside the family would have found out that she was kept at the man’s house she would have been considered dishonored. This gave the man’s family the leverage to negotiate down the bride price. After that, the wedding took place and none of the guests knew what had happened to her. A further complication was that she actually liked the guy before all this, but she rejected his advances because she didn’t trust his character enough. It turned out that she was right from the very beginning.
I'd actually be pretty upset about this, conditional upon them being aware of us, able to help us with our many serious problems, and not doing so
All of the 3 comments below perfectly summarize the problem. Global power and status will always matter, being high status in a smaller pond only works if that smaller pond is somehow tightly enough integrated with the larger power hierarchy. After enough distance it doesn't feel like you are thriving in "The culture", but despite it or at the mercy of it. I assume it has to do with how the actual integration deviates from your ideal envisioned political integration.
The situation seems more like if we all gained access to a digital portal that projects the way cooler & sexier lifestyles of Andromedans, who display latent disgust for human-like traits and culture - and spent 2+ hours gazing into that portal every day (2014 stats on Aboriginal TV & other media consumption - https://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-11/quantitative-indigenous-research-report-2014.pdf). Seems related to social media comparison & unhappiness stuff, and does not seem to bode well for mental well-being
Someone with writing talent needs to make this a short story. What if every tv on earth got a new Andromeda channel, and social media platforms got regular vide updates, of Andromedan lifestyle influencers with their amazing wealth and technology? And then occasionally they would discuss the "earthling problem," where some Andromedans said these low-IQ humans need to pul themselves up by their bootstraps, and others said that actually human cultural practices like CO2 emissions and apartheid need to be respected?
I don't know what would happen, except I want someone else with writing talent to write that story.
I still agree with Wow and others. I'm not that confident that the richest in our world would not be sad to discover that all their goods are nothing compared to the Andromeda guys.
But in the case of Aborigines and other traditional ethnies, the distance is definitely closer than Andromeda. They know the rich guys are out there, all around, not that far away, and that many of these guys value their entire world and culture as low as shit.
This is in fact the premise of the (admittedly, utterly awful) Neil Blomkamp movie "Elysium," in which a society of super-rich happy people in an unobtainable space station is treated as bad per se notwithstanding the lack of direct interaction with the unwashed masses, in part because they can witness it and be aware of their relative inferiority.
It doesn't obviously seem wrong to me that one can be made unhappier owning a 2,000 square foot house when a 3,000 square foot house goes up next door.
That film is basically a very bad remake of Metropolis.
Apart from the arguments people have already made about the disempowerment or domination that this could involve, I think there's an additional element of cultural denigration or irrelevancy that would follow from this for a lot of people. We live in a world where a majority of people believe that not just our world, but the universe as a whole, was created by some entity which values humans in particular, centers its creative attentions on Earth, and likely cares about them as individuals. Imagine how Christians, Muslims, etc. would feel about learning that most of the habitable universe is controlled by beings whose civilization is incomparably more powerful than ours, who could wipe out our entire arm of the galaxy by accident, and who think that human culture is laughably stupid and primitive. Don't you think that would be pretty destabilizing to their sense of emotional well-being?
Yes I agree with this.
Things Fall Apart does a good job of depicting this (yes it's agrarian Nigeria not hunter-gatherer Australia or a galactic civilization but still). You live in a world which - to our eyes - is in many ways violent and harsh and undesirable but which within itself has rules and organisation and makes sense. It has procedures and traditions that give life meaning, it has functioning systems for success and status and respect. And then over the course of a generation the world is turned upside-down: the gods have deserted you (and/or you have deserted them), the ancestors are dishonored, nothing makes sense any more.
Or (since this tends to be a more sci-fi based fictional crowd) it's like the Total Perspective Vortex which shows you all at once how insignificant you really are.
On the other hand, thinking that there's nothing special about our particular corner of the universe has been the default for educated westerners for a century or so. And despite the cries of traditionalists, I don't see that our collective sense of emotional well-being was much threatened by this shift.
The current system of social media serms to be doing much more damage, though. And it does that regardless of whatever happens beyond Andromeda.
Some people hold to this view, and are emotionally well adjusted to it, but I think it's worth recognizing that even in developed Western societies, this viewpoint is much more the exception than the rule. So I think it's likely that people who hold such a view are likely to be heavily filtered for people who don't find it aversive. I've certainly talked to many people who reject this viewpoint who have no qualms about saying "I find that whole viewpoint aversive and don't understand how anyone could hold it without losing their sense that life means anything," and often make explicit the step "therefore my intuition tells me that it must be wrong."
Good question. I would also wonder why the result of this cultural interaction is depression and ennui instead of resentment or antagonism? Like in the US, there is a pretty persistent urban vs rural social divide, where people in urban areas mock small-towners for their lack of sophistication or backwardness, and the rural people mock the urbanites for the social dysfunction they tolerate in their cities (fentanyl zombies crapping on your front stoop and so on). Why can't Aborigines adopt an attitude of "WEIRD white people have a few big things going for them, but they're crazy in these other ways. Let's take X and Y from but otherwise do our own thing." Seems reasonable and self-respecting, no?
I think Aboriginal backwardness is just too overwhelming. People in western countries can choose to live in cities vs the country, but for modern Australians the Aboriginal life just isn't an option.
Yeah, I guess there's the stereotype of the meth-addled West Virginia mining town that's dysfunctional and dying and everyone there wants to kill themselves, which is in some sense the same phenomenon. That seems to stem from a lack of a sense of purpose, and I suppose that's the same issue with Aboriginals. Maybe they should all convert to Islam or something.
> I would also wonder why the result of this cultural interaction is depression and ennui instead of resentment or antagonism?
It might have something to do with the fact that they have been completely defeated.
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Culture is a repository for meaning as well as the necessary vehicle of status. I honestly think that awareness of the existence of Western culture would make it very difficult for indigenous people to find the expected amount of meaning and satisfaction trying to reconcile their traditional ways of life to encroaching capitalism etc. Their expectations for what a valuable life looks like are so radically different from what is on offer; their culture isn't just different from the majority, it's been obsoleted by a global economic superstructure. I suspect as well that proximity to the remnants of their tribal culture makes it difficult to "move on," and that having a foot in each world undermines the capacity of the other to convey meaning. In the same way that westerners have vastly more difficultly understanding the significance of the aboriginal customs than, say, Americans trying to understand middle eastern hospitality or bargaining. The cultures are...non-fungible isn't the word I want but it's close. Minimally-translatable? In any case, I imagine that many feel like the world they live in is deeply broken and has next to nothing to offer them. They were supposed to be a Kumbo marrying a Kinta and being a very good son-in-law by never saying the proscribed words and prospering materially and so forth, but now 1) they either believe or suspect that all of those meaning-bearing cultural trappings are bullshit, and 2) their wealth is paltry and their status is pageantry. Meanwhile, their exposure to what remains of their tribal society makes them acutely aware of what they, and everybody else, have lost in modernity. What does it make sense for them to hope for in such a world?
Edit: the word I was trying to think of was "incommensurable".
I don't know how much TV your typical aborigine in a village watches, but it's surely a lot more than getting a random message from a crashing probe. Our social sense grabs out for a sense of the baseline to compare ourselves to, and modern storytelling through TV and other screens has lots of power to establish itself as the default baseline.
If it were just a sentence or two, that wouldn't affect anybody much. If it were a USB drive containing a series of high-intensity dramas illustrating the lives of people (let's say they're people and not aliens too different from us to relate to), and we watched them, the extent to which we engaged emotionally with the dramas would inform our new perceived status.
I mean look at TV as it's been: usually above-average rich, nearly always above-average looking people having always above-average amounts of fun, tension, drama, comedy.. or we wouldn't watch them. When TV showed up, envy went through the roof.
> If a probe crashes into Earth bearing a message "people in the Andromeda Galaxy are much richer than you", do we all become sad?
That’s a good question. I wouldn’t leap for the opportunity to say of course not.
Add to this that immigrants to Western societies, outside of refugee and illicit immigration streams, are specifically selected for their proven ability to reach high levels of attainment on Western-oriented status ladders (i.e.: money, academic or technical skills).
The selection process does help bring in the international talent necessary to improve the workforce pool, but even in the best of circumstances, the adaptation process is very complicated, from emotional, practical and linguistic standpoint.
There *has* to be a better frame for anthropology discourse than "tribal societies are stuff i like" versus "tribal societies are stuff i not like".
I like the framing of "rituals" (where the waiting room in a doctor's office is part of the ritual). Likewise, the Marine yells at you and treats you like slime during bootcamp is a ritual, designed to turn you into a "soldier."
These are helpful to understand, particularly when you're looking at how people unfamiliar with your culture respond. EG. The Afghani who ran away from the Marines during their "boot camp" were in genuine fear for their lives, not being experienced in the cultural ritual that Americans (and people exposed to American media) expect to endure. It's not "they're pansies" or "they couldn't cut it" (which would be the predominant conclusion if someone left bootcamp in the States, I assume).
I knew some guys in the air force whose interpretation was "they're so fucking dumb." For example they'd be told to do jumping jacks along with the group and they had absolutely no idea how to imitate the drill sergeant. Running away would probably get the same exasperated response.
That's what I heard from someone deployed via the army. He also said they would immediately fire all their ammo into the air, then sit down and let the Americans take over.
The concept of "military discipline" as a central necessity for effective fighting is a pretty weird one even after centuries of having it play such a big role in our culture. Half the stuff our military does would qualify as "cult behavior" if a private company did it...
But didn’t the Taliban recruit from the same population? What was their secret to make lazy idiots into warriors?
Disciplined students from Islamic schools vs random guys looking for easy paychecks?
In re: aboriginal suicide rates, two interesting papers from Michael Chandler that argue the determinant is the individual's ability to maintain "the narrative thread of one’s personal persistence" and suggest that in a pinch cultural/communal continuity can substitute:
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/j.cogdev.2007.02.001
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1002/cd.23219946406
The grad school analogy was made in jest, but aptly enough. It does represent a form of indentured servitude, where the graduate student spends a lot more time than it would take to obtain enough knowledge to justify the degree. A lot of time is spent “serving” the professor by assisting in teaching and working on grants that are disbursed to the professor. Meanwhile, the graduate student survives on substance-level wages and delays reproduction because they are insufficient for raising a family.
>> `a lot more time than it would take to obtain enough knowledge to justify the degree'
This really depends what you want to do with the degree. I'm a physics professor. If you just want a Physics PhD so you can signal your intelligence to hedge funds, then yeah, there's no particular reason for it to take a long time. But if you want to proceed to do independent and original work in physics, whether in academia or in industry...then no, it does really take that long. Ars Longa, Vita Brevis. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/)
It is true that when hedge funds look at hiring prospective employees, having a long list of publications in prestigious journals does make a candidate more attractive. So, in that respect, I do agree with you.
Wait, grad students work on grants? In what sense - helping with grant proposal application? I must have been failing to exploit my grad students all my life.
Also, being a teaching assistant is time spent serving the department, not the professor specifically (unless again we are talking about an archaic departmental culture I'm unaware of).
Presumably PhD students are doing the actual work that you promised in the grant application which asked for money to fund a PhD student to do the work.
One can only dream! OK, that may be true in the wetter/more experimental sciences. In math/non-experimental physics/theoretical computer science, it's a bit useless to expect a grad student to perform more labor than they require. Postdocs, sure - but even then, you have to thread a fine line, or the very grant committees to which you have to apply to get your postdocs funded will accuse you of being exploitative.
I suppose your university has very good procedures in place to make sure everyone is treated fairly. It is not necessarily as fair in other places.
I think it's just a combination of:
the culture of the field +
there being no experimental work involved (other than programming, which, surprisingly, most young people are deeply crap at) +
proper training taking so long that it's a rare graduate student who is actually useful, and so that kind of graduate student is genuinely appreciated.
I wouldn't imagine letting a postdoc deal with a grant proposal (unless of course it's a postdoc applying to their own grant, and then I might be called upon to perform free labor advising them and supporting them).
Yeah, IME grad students spend most of their time being a net labor sink for their advisor, and just when they reach the point of being a net labor source, they graduate. The last year is hopefully net positive…maybe the last two years if you get lucky.
I’ve never had a grad student work on a grant application either. On work supported by a grant, sure.
I personally know a psychologist grad student who did just that. She basically wrote the whole proposal, with just a little guidance from her professor. I guess her professor was very lucky to have such a competent grad student.
Yeah, I wouldn't say this was a big part of what I did as a grad student (the professor certainly spent more time on it overall) but I was definitely expected to help.
You are very right to be careful, of course.
I am enjoying this review a lot. That said, it's a bit odd that the review seems to repeatedly claim that a woman being married to a man 20 years her senior would be really bad, when in this society it sounds super beneficial and potentially way nicer than being married to someone young. I don't have more to say on that, just that it struck me as odd, which likely means at least one of the author, the reviewer, and I are doit something strange
I don't know the exact statistics, but it seems like if the median marriage is something like 34-14, then ones on the far side of median are ~40-12, and I can't imagine Aboriginal men do a great job staying well-preserved and attractive-looking. In any case cheating and attempted cheating seemed pretty rampant. Maybe not vastly more rampant than in our society, but our society doesn't kill or brutally beat cheaters when they get caught.
(by the way, sorry for not saying your name, I was really confused seeing this after all the not-a-Book-Reviews and thought the author was Sccret Scott, not Public Scott)
That makes sense and I appreciate the clarification.
My confusion stems from ignorance about whether being raised in such a culture (and your great great great great grandparents having been raised in it as well) alters what women are expecting in men such that this is a good deal. Maybe I have to read the book and check its sources to have any shot at finding out!
The Aboriginal case looks stuning to us but genetics studies shows that it was quite the standard for Homo sapiens since the beginning. I heard that in a serious conference of J. J. Hublin at College de France. I don't find the exact sources but Claude believe to know that women generally had their first child around 18-22 years old, while men typically became fathers around 25-30 years old or later. Arguably Aborigines have a greater difference of age at marriage, but not that greater. The same studies also confirm the existence of complex social networks to avoid inbreeding.
I just came to say the same thing. Of all the bad things mentioned, this is an odd one out, especially since barely 100 years ago it's still treated as quite normal in most other societies. He even touch on this himself when he talks about our "super specific" culture taboos!
It feels like the dog that didn't bark in this description of aboriginal culture is war, except to say that they don't do war and don't approve of it.
Which seems really odd to me; so many other human cultures keep reinventing the idea of rounding up a bunch of your mates, stabbing the guys in the next community over, and taking their stuff as the coolest and most high status thing you can do. I guess maybe it's another result of keeping young men under such tight control.
They had small raids, but not enough organization for large-scale war, and lots of social technology for keeping the small raids under control. This seems to be a common pattern for hunter-gatherer groups.
This is also true, in broad strokes, of pastoralist tribal societies. Although the raids tend to be somewhat different in character, as the goal of pastoralist raids usually involves stealing sheep, cattle, horses, etc. I know less about hunter-gatherer raiding patterns.
I've heard this referred to as first generation warfare (or something like it. I google that and it's entirely different) where outright frontline are very rare, but it relies very heavily on village ambushes when the warriors are away. It's said that when two warrior factions actually met, they just shot some arrows, have one or two victims and retreat. But if one caught a village unguarded, casualties are very heavy.
There was a link on the high rates of small-scale violence.
War, real war with armies, soldiers, specialized weapons, is thought to have begun with the first cities-states. But collective violence (raids) has probably always existed. Chimps do the same. La Cima de los Uesos could also be interpreted as material evidence of collective violence by Homo neanderthalensis.
Maybe it's as simple as hunter-gatherers not having anything that's worth going to war over? They don't control territory and don't stockpile wealth. What could an aboriginal war even be for?
Women, for starters. If they're nomadic pastoralists, cattle raids are popular from what I understand. And I'm fairly certain territorial disputes are still possible, e.g. maybe the river teems with salmon in Fall, but who gets the best fishing grounds vs. gets pushed to the sidelines?
Hunter gatherers absolutely do control territory, and sometimes they fight over it.
Even if they don't "control territory" as such, they may control specific features, e.g. they'll fight over a specific watering hole or hunting territory that they visit regularly, but they don't have the resources to actually control a whole section of territory.
Maybe the big gap is between hunter-gatherer and farmer-and-beyond. Immigrants to rich societies aren't hunter-gatherers. And it seems when farmers move to where hunter-gatherers live, they generally don't adapt, they die out (DNA stuff in Europe, the Ainu, USA Indians (but not Mexican farmer Indians),
It should be considered that most hunter-gatherers we have studied inhabited the margins, i.e. the driest deserts, the coldest tundras, and the most remote jungles. The kinds of people that would have inhabited Mestopotamia or the Nile delta must have had cultures adapted to their more abundant environments.
Graeber & Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" describes Indians in the Pacific Northwest who had one of the easiest spawn locations on Earth and spent their time on slavery and elaborate rituals.
US Indians also did lots of farming - did you never learn about Squanto in school?
Depends on which US Indians.
The Lakota abandoned farming when they got horses.
The Lakota probably didn't have any choice, because they were pushed out of their previous home in the woodlands and mixed grasslands of what is now Minnesota and onto the less productive plains when their Anishinaabe neighbors acquired guns and other trade goods from the French *coureurs des bois*. If I recall correctly, Anishinaabe coveted the Lakota lands for their fur species, and since they were closer to the French, they gained an advantage and were able to drive the Lakota off their ancestral lands. Once the Lakota learned to exploit the big magical dogs (aka horses), the dynamic shifted. But the Lakota used to call the Anishinaabe snakes, and the Anishinaabe returned the insult. Note that once the Anishinaabe were introduced to horses, they didn't develop a nomadic horse culture. Unlike the Lakota, they continued with their original lifestyle while partially acculturating to the French.
“The Aborigines, whose culture can seem impossibly complex at times (is this an illusion? we’ll discuss that later!) give a feeling of something over-optimized, a genetic algorithm run for 999,999,999 epochs until it ends up at weird edge cases that break the reward module and get assigned infinite utility.”
There are some truly weird and cool things Aboriginal Australian societies do, but for my money the most interesting one is Songlines, and the most interesting thing related to Songlines are Songmen.
A songline is an oral technology, a long sequence of short verses with each verse recording the events (historical, legendary or mythological) of a particular site. Put together, these verses form a sung map of a route or territory. Not only does this help people to create and maintain a mental image of the surrounding land, it’s also vital for keeping track of valuable data like the location of waterholes or important cultural sites - kind of an externalized memory palace as I understand it, super valuable in a culture that doesn’t have a recording system outside of human memory.
The reason I’m bringing them up here is because it is accepted that “songmen”, a title for people with excellent memories for these songlines, will experience or “find” new songs through dreams, songs could be taught to and followed by other people.
It reminds me of the experience of solving a problem in a dream - something that’s happened to me exactly once. But this version seems to have been culturally embedded in a really interesting way. I thought both the existence of a specific type of problem-solving dreamer and that dreamer’s adjacent skill with memory was interesting and maybe indicative of a technique, sort of like how other societies have developed techniques for things like meditation. I can’t source this directly, but some info can be found on pages 42-43 of Lynne Kelly’s Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies if you're into that.
Not to be ignored.
I heard a podcast with Lynne Kelly once, not much more than that I think, but I was impressed. She compared restriction of freedom of movement for the Aborigines to the destruction of a people‘s libraries. And she „solved“ Stonehenge, it‘s the memory palace rebuilt in physical form when people settled down in one place. (If I remember these points correctly.)
That sounds about correct based on what I know about her! She’s done a ton of work with different kinds of mnemonic systems and how important memory and the control of information would have been in oral cultures. I know she’s investigated a few prehistoric structures like Stonehenge, Chaco Canyon and Poverty Point as physical mnemonics, but she seems to acknowledge that even if this was one of their uses any knowledge that was once encoded in them is basically lost beyond maaayybe being able to discern a very few basic uses…I forget exactly how, been a while since I read it and the Songmen were the thing I retained most clearly.
Bans book reviews for contestants and yet reviews a book himself instead of a non-book. Appalling double standards
Scott as host is in a separate status hierarchy and doesn't have to engage in the same competition for the ritual status reward.
It would be if this was an entry in the contest. But I'm pretty sure it's not.
This isn't part of the contest though.
I'm confused by the description of a more-or-less unified Aboriginal culture. I thought they were split up by language group, by technological adaptation to their land, and by geographical distance -- in some cases, like Tasmania, almost totally losing contact with the mainland and thus losing technologies. I wouldn't have expected such a distributed society to keep the same basic rules everywhere when they lost things like the ability to fish.
Yes, and Aborigenes in the outback would be expected to differ from ones on the coast (who would probably be doing more fishing, as long as they aren't Tasmanian).
>”Would it be humane to dole out welfare checks whose size is proportional to […] how many points they can score at in some kind of artificial boomerang-throwing contest? Would young people go off to […] spend years practicing boomerang-throwing, then come back as high-status members of society able to attract a wife and support a family? Would they be happy?”
Maybe? This is basically what society is like for American inner city blacks. The young men who are successful at football or basketball or music or whatever else our society decides is entertaining get status and wealth and women. There are lots of problems with inner-city African American culture, but to my knowledge they don’t have a suicide problem.
The percent of people who can be successful athletes/musicians is much smaller than for hunters.
That... may not actually matter?
Peter Turchin writes all the time about how a surplus of wannabe elites is a problem, and I don't think it's much of a problem in hunter-gatherer societies. The surplus of men who wanted to be athletes/musicians but didn't succeed doesn't seem to cause high suicide rates in the African-American community.
It appears that blacks have generally had lower suicide rates than whites, but the gap may be narrowing recently.
I speculate that this is due to them having closer family ties (I know that they have fewer classic "nuclear families", but abandoning your parents to found a nuclear family is actually potentially antithetical to extended family ties) and more religiousness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#Race
I read an essay on Substack a while ago that argued that black men were simply more likely to turn feelings of hopelessness and nihilism outward in the form of violence, whereas white men were more likely to channel those feelings inward and harm themselves, via suicide. I found this argument at least somewhat convincing.
I'm skeptical that rates of homicide are inversely related to rates of suicide over time for them.
That's fine, because that's not the argument the essay was making.
Primitive societies succeeded when one group’s story dominate and all accepted its rules and traditions. Society A, with its meshugena traditions either conquers or is conquered by Society B. The subsequent society becomes society AB (A’s traditions domination) or society BA (v-a-v). The one that is more stable for longer eventually is conquered by Society C.
Once in a while a tipping point arises, as in western civilization (WC) from the enlightenment onward. Stability is enhanced with the advent of institutions that promote 1) rule of law (third person adjudicates conflicts between two person or two larger groups) and 2) scientific knowledge (e.g., how sex leads to babies). Tho imperfect, WC provided solutions to mankind’s oldest dilemmas: starvation, disease and war. Having solved the three major material problems that none of the earlier societies could solve by asking god(s) to manage, WC offered stability and led to huge populations, one-half of which are not WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). But within WEIRD world, tribes still make up sh*t and competed to take down each other. WC/WEIRD still is the dominant hegemony in the 21st century; but it’s not clear that our institutions (formulated myths) are strong enough to resolve conflict before a new and more dangerous tipping point arises.
Excuse me, what was the WC solution to war again?
Mutual-Assured Destruction counts as a solution of sorts.
The western world has seen quite a few big wars since the enlightenment. I think it’s a stretch to say it’s been solved.
Note he didn't say these were all solved during the Enlightenment: that was just a "tipping point." The claim was that they all have solutions NOW, and I'd assess "war" be about as solved as "starvation" and "disease."
> The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it.
I mean, yeah? Hunting is awesome. A significant number of people do it as a recreational activity. Divorced from our modern morality about hunting animals, the cost of hunting (equipment, transportation, permitting ,etc.), and the inconvenience if you live in a city or suburb, I think nearly every male would enjoy hunting as a sport.
Almost no one works at a convenience for fun. Maybe a retiree who has literally nothing to do and just wants some human interaction (even then, I doubt they'd choose convenience store clerk). It's why we pay people to do it, instead of charging them a "convenience store clerk permitting fee" or whatever.
If we replaced 40 hours of week sitting in front a cash register with the necessity of doing a fun sport for 20-40 hours a week, along with the strong and direct intrinsic motivator of hunger and "my family dies if I don't win this game of hunting kangaroos," I'd imagine that most mental illness would evaporate relatively quickly.
Maybe in 50,000 years we will get the same intrinsic motivation from modern work as we do from hunting and video games. But probably not since the modern form of work is almost certainly not stable enough for that long to select out all the people who don't find it intrinsically motivating.
I'd be curious to see how much "enjoyment of work" (independent of the work being done, or maybe enjoyment of work relative to the average for the sort of work you do) correlates with wealth or fertility in the modern day. Depending on how selective it is, and the heritability of that attitude, you could probably come up with a model of how many generations until the majority of everyone's genes are from people who just found work most people consider boring as intrinsically motivating and pleasurable.
Judging from the popularity of certain memes online a lot of modern people also find the idea of doing subsistence hunting quite appealing
They don't understand subsistence hunting then. Rambo dies because he starts raiding dumpsters. Not enough food in the woods to live on.
Oh, they definitely don't, but it's just an idle fantasy, not an actual plan, so there's no harm in letting people have it.
Given how much some people camp and farm in video games "for fun" (?), I think slaying some souls (be it fictional or real) is inherently better for mental health.
re [no war, infanticide], post is missing a malthusian angle - you need something to kill people off. wikipedia even says subincision lowers fertility
do they discuss it there are population cycles in aborigines?
Not if the famously inhospitable Australian outback does it for you, though?
that's starvation, I don't think you can get a balance where like spiders bite the surplus people
"In the nineteenth century, anthropologists - buoyed by the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution - tried to invent grand Theories of Everything about the rise of humankind. These usually looked like “All savages originally did P, then passed through intermediate stages where they did Q, R, and S sequentially, and finally reached the light of civilization where they did T”."
Funny, this is basically economics to this day, with 'T' being some interpretation of 'rational' utility maximization.
> Still, really? Pride? The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it.
I do find it fairly easy to understand. Isn't this the same question Bostrom grappled with in Deep Utopia? What do you do after a transition to the post-scarcity world where you're no longer needed? Both of those scenarios involve getting ripped out of your traditional status structure where you needed to use skills to survive, and into the world of plenty one click of a button away.
One example that stuck with me from Bostrom: would you still raise your own children if you knew you're a subpar child-rearer compared to a fully automated superintelligent nanny? Where everywhere you look there are little happy fulfilled supergeniuses running around, and every minute you spend with your child makes it less likely they'll grow into one of them?
Stuck in a world that makes you choose between subpar (hunting, raising kids) or cringe (living on benefits, automated child-rearing), seems obvious to me that hedonism or suicide would be the only salient options in such a scenario, and others would be very non-trivial to find (and possibly very individual).
There's something particularly rough about hunter-gatherer people having to grapple with giving up traditional lifestyles, though. E.G., Japan's contact with the West certainly upended traditional Japanese society, at least if Tom Cruise's portrayal can be trusted, and they responded not by going to pieces but instead by rapidly modernizing, going toe to toe with the West in the Russo-Japanese war, and then trying to take over half the Pacific. Then when that didn't work out, they again didn't go to pieces and instead remade themselves once more and became an economic super power in the post war years.
Likewise, you could think of Mexico as kind of a halfway example. Sure, the Aztec Empire fell apart very fast, and lots of people died of small pox, but central America didn't go completely to hell after Cortez. Mexico and the rest of Central America have their problems, but I don't think life there is anywhere near as bad as say, a typical reservation in Wyoming or Manitoba or something like that. Again, the difference being Japan and Mexico being peopled by settled agriculturalists, whereas Australia and Wyoming/Manitoba by more or less pure hunter gatherers.
Japan looked very different after WWII than before it. As in, the people themselves were very different.
Reservation life is bad... but the issue in Manitoba has very little to do with the First Nations. (If the Spanish were in Manitoba, one could quite reasonably think that the Manitoban Indians would have similar "life in a caste system").
The issues in Manitoba have a huge racism component and a huge historically-fucked-over-economically component, but on-reserve culture is NOT healthy. Picking out the exact causes of that is...well, if I could do it for sure I'd either be burned at the stake or heralded as a genius.
I’ve said it before and I may or may not say it again because I don’t like to repeat myself *too* much, but you are one damn fine writer Scott.
Could alcoholism and suicide have more to do with alcohol and suicide than broader social issues? One reason immigrants don't have so many problems with alcohol is they are mostly immigrating from societies where alcohol is also cheap and abundant. If your culture isn't well adapted to alcohol it will be a problem regardless of anything else.
Gasoline? You mean gasoline? I'm pretty sure nobody except Abos has such trouble with petrol. "Keep the petrol in the can" is a lyric from a PSA, for god's sake.
Doesn't petrol-sniffing by Aboriginal Australians seem pretty similar to other epidemics of dissociative drug use by people experiencing despair? Perhaps Aboriginal Australians just have less access to more fun dissociative drugs compared to other peoples and so resort to gasoline out of desperation.
Well part of it is genetics for sure, even South Europeans like Spaniards, Italians and Greeks seem to have less drinking problems on average than North Euros like English or Swedes. There seems to be a correlation to the amount of time that an ethnic group has had access to strong liquor: natural selection in settled societies selects for people with less of a propensity to become alcoholics.
"In the early twentieth century, anthropologists embarked on a more ambitious project - demonstrating that something about primitive culture proved that their own political faction was right about everything."
Did the small-L Enlightenment liberals never get on the bandwagon, or do we just not hear about it?
I am hardly an anthropologist, much less an expert on aboriginal cultures in Australia, but I thought that there were lots of different Aboriginal clans, not all of whom spoke similar or even mutually intelligible languages or had similar cultures?
Sort of like the Americas - an Inuit and an Aztec didn't have all that much in common.
In the Americas there was a greater degree of variety in technological/organizational complexity than in Australia.
"Plop me down in Arnhem Land, and it would take five minutes before I...had sex with my classificatory sister"
You've got a lot of confidence in your game.
> in some cases, pushed them into extinction
Doesn't that fit with the cultural group selection discussed by Henrich? Functional practices become more common via dysfunctional practices failing.
> The Marind-anim were warlike raiders who stole other tribes’ children because their own women were infertile. Unbeknownst to them, their own women were infertile because of a “fertility ritual” where multiple men would rape each woman on her wedding night so violently that it destroyed her reproductive system. Eventually European colonizers made them stop, and their fertility miraculously rebounded.
That caused me to ask in Psmith's comments how they hadn't gone extinct already https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-sick-societies-by-robert-b/comment/124658904
> Edgerton and Henrich don’t come out of nowhere. They’re the modern reincarnations of Hobbes and Rousseau - with the former calling primitive life “nasty, brutish, and short”, and the latter idealizing it as an Edenic paradise to which we could only dream of returning.
Between the two, I've only read Henrich. But he doesn't talk about such societies being better than our own, just that they were optimized for their own environment and so westerners dropped in (without the support of their own larger culture) could not perform as well.
> Further, everyone of the same section is . . . sort of the same person? My father’s brothers, who are Kubbi like him, are also sort of my fathers.
Marshall Sahlins used such logic to argue against sociobiologists, but I didn't buy that https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/the-use-and-abuse-of-biology/
> Or does every society seem this byzantine to foreigners who are 50,000 years removed from the most recent common ancestor?
Language specifically tends to be simpler in larger societies that have more of a history of people needing to learn them as adults. English is thus relatively simple (not in spelling, but grammar) while Australian/New Guinean languages are complex.
> a special caste called “gay people” who must move to New York
I thought San Francisco was the gay capital.
> one pretty popular position is that women were trying to punish their husbands for all the forced marriages and beatings, using the only cudgel that they had
In ev-psych terms, both the husband & wife have shared Darwinian interest in any offspring (assuming this wasn't the result of cuckolding), but the wife has already invested more by bringing it to term. Killing the child isn't especially punishing the man over the woman, it's just removing the requirement for further investment.
> But maybe it should feel more mysterious. When Third World immigrants move to the US, they’re usually pretty happy with their decision.
Those immigrants usually aren't hunter-gatherers or even swidden farmers from stateless societies.
> They can move to Sydney or Melbourne and try to assimilate, in which case they’re no worse off than any other poor immigrant, and better than most.
I would expect their outcomes are worse than those of immigrants from Asia.
> then come back as high-status members of society able to attract a wife and support a family
In the case of polygynous societies where men have multiple wives, other men dying (typically violently) makes the math add up without such a big pool of unmarried men.
> Language specifically tends to be simpler in larger societies that have more of a history of people needing to learn them as adults.
Would you happen to have a source on that handy?
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/855406
Thanks! But from the first glance, that does not say anything about *adults specifically* learning the language — it's simply a simulation of language acquisition / transmission in a smaller vs. bigger population.
Besides, it's a simulation. And from my own fascination with emergent communication studies I get the impression that our ability to simulate transmission of language is rather weak. So I'm moved to wonder if there is any studies that look into this hypothesis based on data from any real-world languages (from WALS or something...)
This one is an experiment rather than simulation https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6492256/
I mean, it's not an in-silico simulation, but it's an experiment with human participants learning and transmitting a simplistic artificial "language". It's kind of same sauce.
The paper links to evidence that languages with a larger population of speakers tend to be simpler, and then asks "hey, what if it's about the adult learners?"
Interestingly enough, they find that simply adding simplifications to the transmission simulation (simulating adult learners speaking their own version of the language) does not propagate the simplifications:
> Perhaps surprisingly, we find that simplifications do not propagate under any of the conditions we investigated, casting doubt on accounts which assume a straightforward link between adult learning and language simplification.
They also find that "complex-version" speakers use simple forms when speaking with "simplified-version" speakers, and some of the "complex" speakers retain some of the simplified version in the artificial language. So the authors hypothesize that hey, maybe *this* is what's going on.
But I'm not sure how big a role this actually plays. What if the "languages with a lot of speakers have less complexity" is just a result of some other information-theoretic shit, and then the salient examples of languages with many speakers in our heads have a lot of adult learners because immigration / colonialism / something something? Somehow I don't get the impression that the part about *the adult learners* being the reason is well-established yet. Language is a fine, weird, stochastic process, and just population size might be responsible for a small or a large portion of this effect, and maybe it's simply about the community size.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-our-magnificent-bastard-tongue
Edit: I mean this paragraph and the surrounding text: "McWhorter argues that this is just what happens to languages when they're suddenly picked up by a large number of adult learners. It's hard to learn a new language as an adult --- you rarely get it all quite right --- and when there are enough new speakers in one place, the language itself begins to drop the most complicated and challenging features. This is also his argument about creoles, although he never comes right out and says that English ought to be regarded as one."
IIRC Swahili and Indonesian Malay, which developed specifically as regional trade languages, have much simpler phonology and grammar than their Bantu and Austronesian relatives, though I don't have a link to hand right now.
Maybe there's an analogy with how languages that are learned a lot by adults become more simple/consistent with how cultures that assimilate a lot of people become more "simple" in some senses. At least in how you treat strangers western society has adopted a very simple shared operating system of no violence, respect their property, etc that applies regardless of where you sit in some complicated familial lineage system with respect to them. And so works even if you know nothing about them
The gayest city in the Western Hemisphere is Washington DC.
Here are the two citations Edgerton gives for the Marind-anim story. Let me know if you find a way to access them!
https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.2354074
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/south-coast-new-guinea-cultures/marindanim/300A457E5027A5B35F63E4D29227DF02
>"Still, really? Pride? The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it."
I believe it. E.g. around ten years ago I felt self-conscious to be a 26-year-old barista (cringe, women will think I'm stagnant) albeit softened by how at least I was studying to try to get into grad school (ambitious, doing something with my life). And when I switched from barista to an academic editing job (educated, writerly) I also felt less self-conscious even though the job was actually worse in terms of hours + pay
(I could have decided to take pride in barista-ing, and I respect anyone who does, but that was where my head was at. When you feel like you're doing less than the script you read growing up it's tough)
I almost can't believe Scott's being honest when he says he doesn't understand this; that's how obvious it seems to me. Living off the land, surviving by your wits and physical strength, knowing the countryside intimately and the secret ways of the beasts and plants? That rules. It is far cooler than being given what you need to live by a boss who you have to obey; buying safety at the cost of subservience.
(Not that I'm some kind of cowboy or Davy Crockett myself. But the coolness advantage of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is super obvious.)
I guess the only real argument I can make is something like: whose mammalian nervous system is being maintained at a higher operating capacity? Davy Crockett's or Milton's from Office Space?
For me my credence is less about the universal coolness of hunting and gathering; it's more just about the standard social script you know, that defines what counts to you as success and dignity and how you're measuring up
Yes, and the old labor left was more appealing to males than the current coalition of victims.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/the-good-old-days/
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/victims-and-sympathy/
https://www.natesilver.net/p/sbsq-21-why-young-men-dont-like-democrats
1) is this comment intended to contribute to the discussion of Scott's article, or to shoehorn in an unrelated grievance with the modern left
2) it's odd to contrast old labor left with a "victim" left. The whole point of unions was that the owners exploit the workers so workers need to organize. (Could you just be projecting an annoyance that coal miner unions felt manlier to you than blue hair college kids feel?)
Anyway I *do* suspect that old union days felt empowering in a way that's lacking now (with the left being less organized and less effective, and political agency including unions being less a part of regular social life, etc). But that seems unrelated to your grievance with "victims."
I was replying to a thread of comments inspired by the above blog post rather than specifically Scott's blog post, though Scott does raise the issue in the first place.
I am trying to be descriptive rather than expressing an "annoyance" or "grievance". I don't think I gave any indication that I personally support labor unions, for instance. People who actually do support them have contrasted them as membership based organizations vs donor based organizations (sometimes citing Theda Skocpol), but the former would include the black churches of the civil rights movement that one could perceive as being more in continuity with a coalition of victims (although there a decline in church affiliation has been linked to younger black men drifting away from the Democratic party). Of course, MLK was the most prominent such black leader of that era, and near the end of his life he was focused on labor politics.
>the owners exploit the workers so workers need to organize
...to stand up to and (eventually) overthrow them. That's what the lacking ingredient is.
I don't think you can accuse the ideological strain behind Abolish The Police of failing to tap into the appeal of overthrowing your supposed oppressors.
I would think not having to "survive by your wits and physical strength" would be a welcome relief, though. Like sure, survive by your wits and physical strength I'll bet is all great when you're 20. When you're 40, it's just a #@$ing chore. Source: me. I'm 40 and my back hurts. Everything's a #$%ing chore in this condition.
That's why the elders got the girls.
I'm sometimes getting conflicted with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, because it implies that you won't have the upper need if the lower ones aren't satisfied. But it seems like, people irl easily trade some of the lower to fulfill the upper? People go on hunger strike for abstract things. I guess it is a simplication, but I haven't seen a more complex more correct model of that.
Yeah this was the part of the essay that most stuck out to me as "Scott's theory of mind is, in this respect, very different from mine."
I take it every young boy was removed like this, but surely many must fail somehow? You can't have a high-status social role as a reward if every male who survives to 30 is getting the reward.
Hunting kangaroos is cool and being a convenience store clerk is lame because the first one involves proactive agency, planning, execution, has a meaningful range of outcomes and instant feedback and a marker of success. The second one is just being a servant, reacting to demands of anyone who shows up, which is fine if it's your mother-in-law and you're gonna get to bang her hot daughter someday but not if it's just every random smelly fat dude in a sweaty t-shirt that wanders by during 8 hours. Every young man in Western society who has one of those jobs routinely calls it "soul crushing" all over social media, and spends huge amounts of his spare time on some hobby that is a rough analogue of kangaroo hunting.
I suppose we could wonder why those substitutes wouldn't work for the aborigines, and ascribe that to the legacy of colonialism, but instead we should probably accept that those things aren't working for our young men either. I'm in my 40s and have held high-status positions (in small-ish ponds, but it's all relative as you experience it) and feel ok about where I ended up, but I definitely see young men's complaints all over the place these days, and compared to when I was a teen in the 90s it seems like the young guys today really do not believe there is a pathway to status for themselves. Almost every scummy hustler on the internet is trying to profit by selling some variety of that pathway. Seemingly every social and political movement of the past 15 years has been at least loosely about "hey wait a sec, I was supposed to get status if I did this and it isn't happening" or fears that status is being handed out to or diluted by immigrants and minorities, or hoarded by a small caste of people. Although I'm skeptical that the aboriginal way you describe here really produced a broadly accessible lane to high relative status to nearly every young man, it nevertheless seems like a pretty useful stabilizing feature for a culture to have and we could use some.
> You can't have a high-status social role as a reward if every male who survives to 30 is getting the reward.
Sure you can, if surviving to 30 is doing a lot of filtering.
Yes, mortality before 30 was surely higher than today. It was more that those who "made it" were happy, and even those that didn't might have at least enjoyed their existence because they were striving for a goal. Now, virtually all of the group members are unhappy and without a goal to strive for, although there is no mortality( beyond self-inflicted causes).
I have a vague notion that the brutality of the initiation rituals is related to the difficulty of surviving as a hunter gatherer, especially in a place like the Outback (I don't actually know how hard it is to survive in the Outback, but it has a reputation for being extremely harsh).
When resources are scarce enough that survival itself becomes difficult, societies can't afford to have many weak links. The brutal rituals may desensitize people to everyday hardships.
But when modernity makes it fairly easy to meet one's basic needs, the rituals don't just seem brutal, but unnecessarily so. It doesn't at all surprise me that people would try to escape the brutal aspects of a traditional lifestyle, if given the choice. But the brutal aspects of a traditional lifestyle may not be separable from the supportive aspects, and modernity arrives rapidly there won't be time for new, non-brutal supports to emerge. Social ills follow, and many people may conclude that the traditional lifestyle, brutality and all, was actually worth it.
The elephant in the room that no one in polite Australian society would like to mention is that rates of child sexual abuse are dramatically higher in Aboriginal communities.
Best data estimates 2 - 4 times higher for sexual abuse, 8 times higher for all forms of abuse or neglect
https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/indigenous-australians/indigenous-child-safety/summary
But good data is very hard to come by because it’s under-reported. Everyone knows that it’s an issue but no one really talks about it which makes it hard to know how much of an issue it is.
The Liberal (right-wing) candidate for the last federal election, backed by his Indigenous minister for Aboriginal affairs, called for a Royal commission into it. But he lost, so it’s gone nowhere.
And here’s a pretty bog standard (left wing) response that repeats “the REAL problem is racism and these mean right wingers talking about child sexual abuse are just trying to distract us”
https://theconversation.com/a-royal-commission-wont-help-the-abuse-of-aboriginal-kids-indigenous-led-solutions-will-216526
Yeah, I've heard reports of about a dozen adult Abos describing in florid detail how "tight" a virginal, preadolescent vagina was (I believe they were describing how tight it was as they strangled her to death).
Yes, it's really, really bad.
Disclaimer: I hear this from a friend who has been banned from Australia for making a music video that featured Abos (apparently some politician thought it was white guys in brownface).
If true, certainly fits the pattern across the Anglosphere (Pakistani rape gangs in UK and Epstein files in US) of child sexual abuse being covered up by powerful people in government and media, and the people who bring attention to it coming under attack
It's not the Anglosphere... You're misidentifying two different things, as one.
One is "pets" allowed to roam free. That occurs in Scandinavia and Germany just as much as in the UK. Rape is a particular favorite, because you can "reeducate the pets" on the subject (as if their ignorance would allow them to rape in their home country, without being stoned to death).
The other is "Big Powerful Men allowed to do As They Will" -- this holds true in Ukraine, in China, in UK (Prince Charles) in America... pretty much anywhere. The pattern is "big people get to break the rules that little people have to follow." Mr. Big Shot likes watching little boys strangled to death? Done and done -- so long as he votes correctly. So long as he remembers who gets him small children.
The big powerful men like to keep pets with their same horrible proclivities
Bring them all down
I think you mean Prince Andrew, don’t you or King Charles?
It is possible that in such a different culture child sexual abuse has a considerably less awful effect on the child. I have spoken with many people who were sexually abused as children, and the things they identify as most destructive about the experience are how shocking and bewildering it was (they had never seen sex or a sexually aroused person before), how guilty they felt, and the abuser's threats of terrible things that would happen if the child informed adults what was going on. If sexual abuse of children does not have these features, it may be comparable to uncomfortable and painful experiences many kids suffer at doctor's offices. As a small child I was terrified and horrified by things doctors did, such as putting a piece of wood down my throat that made me gag and feel like I could not breathe, & sticking an enormous sharp spike into my butt. But my mom was there in the room looking calm and saying reassuring things, so I thought of what was happening as a part of regular life, tho one I hated.
Yeah… I work in healthcare and I have seen too many Aboriginal people with horrible chronic mental health issues and repeated suicide attempts to consider this hypothesis plausible
Judith Harris of "The Nurture Assumption" wrote that the reason not to abuse children isn't a developmental one, but instead the same reason not to abuse adults.
But the aborigines "abuse" adults too. It's not that I'm a fan of abuse, just struck by how well, in many ways, the aborigines system works, and how much *good stuff* aborgines can count on (or maybe I should say could count on before the presence of our culture threw their system out of balance.).
Imagine there was a way to install cumulative pain meters in people. So we install one in an aborigine and one in a modern person from a first world country, and check them when they both reach age 50. Seems possible to me that if ythe meter measured both physical and psychic pain, the aborigine might have a lower total score despite having endured aborigine rituals and a childhood rape that caused considerable pain.
I'm responding to your comment referencing the "effect on the child" of such abuse varying by culture.
I thought I got your point. My paragraph about the pain meter was a way of saying that the aborigines culture, which permits & actually institutionalizes causing pain and injury to adults & children may end up causing less lifetime pain to members of their society than ours does to ours. Or you could say that members of our culture can be abused in ways that aborigines cannot -- for instance left to live in great loneliness because there is no equivalent in our culture of the tribal ties that apparently guarantee an aborigine will have many people who take an interest in their life and give assistance.
> The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe?
this strikes me as extremely obviously true, yeah.
This will probably mean nothing to anybody here, but the description of Aborigine kinship structure has helped me (somewhat) to understand Chapter 3 of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. So, thanks!
On immigration vs colonialization, the selection bias factor is worth noting. Most immigrants are selected to be people who were willing to move somewhere new, so they're probably the kind of people who're a lot happier adapting to a new society.
(E.g. I liked moving to America, but I don't think most of my cousins would like it here).
Even refugees are at least partly selected (even in extreme cases like Syria only like 20% of the population actually fled). And it's worth noting that refugees famously have a harder time with assimilation than other immigrants (presumably because they're less selected).
I think the lingering effects of colonialism contribute more significantly to the mental health problems experienced by Aboriginal Australians than you seem to suggest. Indigenous Australians were only granted the right to vote in 1962 and didn't have significant control over the reserves where they lived until the 1960s. Also, even into the 1970s, Aboriginal and "half-caste" children were forcefully taken from their families and put in institutions at the behest of the Australian government. I would imagine that the profound lack of agency over family, culture, and property experienced by Australian Aboriginals negatively impacted their mental health more than, say, not engaging in prestige-enhancing activities like hunting. Of course, Aboriginals today aren't living in the same horrible conditions of the 1970s, but they're not wholly divorced from those conditions either.
Good review, I enjoyed it! Though there are some discordant notes in the last section I thought. Why the conflation between "colonized hunter-gatherers" and "immigrants to first-world countries"? These are not even remotely similar groups of people - the typical immigrant has a smartphone and watches soap operas on TV even before they come to a place like the US - so it doesn't seem mysterious that they'd relate differently to the dominant society.
Nor does it seem mysterious that colonized indigenous people who have their system of meaningful social relations and the material conditions of their daily lives overthrown, while simultaneously being relegated to the lowest caste of the colonizing society, would get depressed. Even modern Westerners are pretty depressed these days, what with the constant overthrowing of value systems and material conditions of daily life due to constant technological and social change, and we're relatively used to it. That's before you even get into stuff like the loss of free movement and a rich connection to land, but I'll set those aside as possibly "Noble Savage"-inflected concerns.
I think that was Scott's rhetorical point - going from the group that would likely struggle the most to adapt to modern society, to the group that is most likely to adapt. I'm sure he sees the distinction between the two groups, he's just looking at the extremes and comparing them as a thought experiment.
> "The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it."
I'm sure I don't have a complete answer, but I believe part of it is "status". If you're in a society that values kangaroo hunting and gets the girls to admire you, then it *is* inherently masculine. But if you're in a modern society working a minimum wage job, the girls don't admire you for that. And I think gerontocracy probably reduces this stress -- you're more or less predestined to rise in status over your life. In a modern society, once you get your "career" established, there's no set way to rise in the pecking order. And indeed, given technological change, there's a considerable risk that you'll lose a chunk of whatever status you now have.
Indeed, I'd like to see a study of which choice for an Aboriginal will on the average leave the with more surviving children: the traditional life or getting into modern life at the bottom of the totem pole.
I think a lot of traditions make more sense when considered in economic context in which they're found. For example, primogeniture seemed weird to me until I thought about in the context of a patriarchal society where privately owned land is the primary generator of wealth and power.
Perhaps some aspects of Aboriginal culture would make more sense if you considered the economics of Aboriginal society. And if it's not economics its probably sex (as you already note in the essay).
Somehow the aborigine relationship with their future mother in law reminds me of the medieval European idea of "frauendinst" where young knights were supposed to have a distant platonic love relationship with a married woman of higher status (usually one married to a much older man), where they then would go around to jousts and wars wearing her colors and bringing back tokens of their conquests. It is debated by historians whether this actually ever existed in reality or only in literature, but it certainly does fill up a lot of medieval court literature from ca 1100 - 1300.
It was a great article, but I don't understand why you're confused at the end.
Of course it's more fulfilling to be a tribal hunter than a welfare check collector or minimum wage service sector worker. Also of course disregarding any difference in quality of life, or assuming the same quality of life, it's preferable to do the first than second. The problem these people have, and in fact maybe unknowingly all of us have, is a kind of an infohazard. Once one knows it's possible to sit in a climate controlled kwikmart or mcdonalds and be the minimum wage service sector worker while watching reels or something on a smartphone; even if the hunting life is definitely more fulfilling, nobody would want that. Also, once you know that the tribe or your family doesn't rely on the result of your hunt to survive, hunting becomes much less meaningful anyway.
It's like having all kind of junk food made from glucose syrup and trans oils and sodium and whatever being available 7/24 together with some harder-to-get healthy food. One has to force oneself to go for the healthy alternative. Just as helpful for survival, much more convenient, somewhat addictive. It destroys the person who eats it, and it also destroys the validity of the healthy meal. As I said, an infohazard.
About the comparison between an immigrant and a colonized people; I have some insight about that as well. I immigrated over a decade ago myself, been friends with different recent immigrants, and also been able to observe behaviours of people who immigrated a very long time ago or their descendants. Knowing that the place you came from with its physical properties but also social properties is in fact intact somewhere, is a different feeling. If I went back in time and tried to describe that feeling to my pre-immigration self, I'm not sure if I would be able to. And this is coming from somebody who internally immigrated a decade or so before that. People whose ancestors came back in the 60s still have in their minds their villages from that decade. Even when they time to time visit there, and it's definitely 2025 over there, they still have it in their mind. When one is colonized, probably that is lost. I don't know if this is a bad thing or a good one, but there's a psychological distinction.
Insightful comment, thanx.
According to the monograph on the Tiwi which every high-school student for a generation - at least in my district - read in our anthropology unit, the Tiwi solved the problem of the gerontocracy by having the women, once they were widowed from the older men they'd married, marry the young men, who'd themselves become widowed about the time they were ready to marry the young women. That neatly wrapped up the circle.
This matches up pretty well with what I remember reading about one such culture (in one of Jared Diamond's books) but I forget if it was the Tiwi or a Polynesian culture.
It's "mothers-in-law" not "mother-in-laws"
As a companion piece to this essay, especially if you're tempted to rationalize brutal initiation rituals for the young, I strongly recommend "Chattel Childhood" by Aella. Without actually using the term "Stockholm syndrome", she essentially argues that such brutality is perpetuated by a kind of Stockholm syndrome by proxy, and that our WEIRD society has its own ways of continuing to do this.
https://aella.substack.com/p/chattel-childhood
Why does the link not open in substack, so I can save it?
I don't think I understand your technical problem there. I just checked the link in my comment above, and it took me to Aella's post in another tab on my web browser, just as I expected it to. (What is "saving" in the context of Substack, anyway?)
> Prince Kropotkin
Is this a typo, or some sort of half-joking Rightful Caliph thing?
He was a descendent from Royalty of sorts, also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Prince
Ah, I did not know that. Thank you!
> a man must negotiate with the (future) mother-in-law in order to promised a bride in the first place
Typo
Also:
> Is cultural evolution showing off what it can given 50,000 years to work with
Ayiyi.
1) Who the hell told you that alcoholism was the drug of choice for the Abos? It's gasoline. Native Americans do not replicate to the rest of the world. (Please listen to "don't be ramarama" it's charming and fun and a great PSA).
2) All this discussion of taboos, and we have yet to hear about a dozen Abos discussing in florid detail exactly how "good" a prepubescent Abo girl's vagina feels (I believe, but am not about to verify at this point, they raped her to death). I want to know the details about this! Why it is not culturally shaming to do so (in such a way that they'd refuse to discuss it, ref. Phillipe Bourgeoise's book about Spanish Harlem).
3) No discussion of out-group rape, which is very, very, very much a problem.
Noting for the purposes of discussion: I'm hearing this from someone who got banned from Australia for producing a music video that certain politicians thought was "brownface" but was actually Abos performing....
The didgeridoo stuff is special, one has to admit.
Don’t be Rama Rama:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt0NcaxmGHo
We call the leaders of Ngaanyatjarra Lands
You don't sniff petrol from a can
You put your petrol in the car it stays
Don't be rama rama
it's messing with your brains
Looking at the thief-lashing story: I think our societies are symmetrically weird. We look at their penis-chopping ceremonies as horrific and barbaric. Meanwhile, our chief orders one of his own men to be tortured for violating a taboo on touching objects with a ritual classification of "private property". He invites some locals, and he fully expects them to appreciate that he is enforcing the taboo. (A deeper investigation would show that he fears the shame of the violation will cling to him, as he is the violator's social superior, and the ritual torture is a way to expiate that. Perhaps our aboriginal anthropologist would notice a connection to the commonplace and obviously correct practice of sister-stabbing.)
Much like the Dugum Dani, there are aspects of our culture that I think we would drop in a heartbeat if given a plausible coordinating mechanism. If aliens sent us some consultants to improve our justice system, and like the British police outpost, their system was obviously less error-prone and more humane than ours, I doubt even the anti-prison-reform people would muster any real resistance. (Most of their opposition is on practical grounds, after all.) If the Australian tribes had 21st century technology in the 19th century and proceeded to colonize Britain, the British would probably be grateful for the loss of some of their social hierarchy. They would probably mourn the loss of other aspects. Young British men, faced with a choice between living in a Victorian-style slum in the middle of nowhere and joining civilized society and receiving penile subincision, would probably consider suicide.
There's a reason Australia would never colonize Britain, just as there's a reason the places with cargo cults didn't create cargo https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-road-belong-cargo-by-peter
I suppose it's possible that particular culture is a complete dead-end in terms of technological advancement. My point was only to illustrate that the profound difference between the two cultures is symmetric, and to provide an argument-by-analogy that might explain the suicide rates.
My point was to emphasize how they are not symmetric, which is the thesis of Sick Societies (a thesis I admittedly criticized relative to Henrich's over at Psmith's post).
I'm probably missing something, but how does the marriage/gender system ensure that "there was no way that a legitimate marital partner could be any closer than a second cousin" ? It seems like it straightforwardly allows first-cousin marriages - if I'm Kumbo, my dad's-sister's-daughter and mom's-brother's-daughter are both Mata and thus marriageable, right?
I noticed the same thing. Under the system described here, first cousins are off-limits if they're parallel cousins but marriageable if they're cross cousins.
"Pride" is one word for it...you can also call it
purpose, meaning, sense of accomplishment, engagement, status, fun...
Because presumably hunting kangaroos takes more effort and skill and intellectual ability than working a typical minimum wage job
.
And it's not just Hunting kangaroos it's the having a life where you know your place, have a family, have friends because you have what to bond with other people with who all share your culture.
Like if you spend your life ages 15 to 30 in specific hazing ceramlnies and in-law serving rituals, then the rituals themselves begin to take on meaning...they aren't just "things you have to do" but rather form the entire basis of your existence, the way you measure status, etc ...
But then exposure to a culture where that's not the case throws cold water on that entire conception of status. You go from thinking about yourself as "I'm awesome because I did these rituals"
To
"I'm a loser because I have a minimum wage job....also I wasted 15 years doing pointless rituals"
Being in both worlds at once can be the worse
... The rituals seem pointless since they don't lead to money
AND striving for money can seem pointless since it doesn't bring any sort of ritual/cultural/extra wife status.
Looks like what I subscribed for, thanks. A lot to unpack indeed.
>In traditional Aboriginal society, young men would be isolated from their family for a period of many years while they underwent a series of tortures expected to eventually result in a high-status social role within the community. The West has the same system: we call it “grad school”.
Spot on! I read the first part of this to my wife and she interrupted me before I got to the end: "wait, is this a PhD"?
Banned for this comment.
> doesn’t it end up kind of like being an immigrant into a First World country? In fact, isn’t it strictly superior?
At least one difference is the person. The people who do try to go for a better but unfamiliar life instead of suffering through their default one must be statistically very different from those who don't.
What's most striking to me is that the aborigines seem quite high on basic kindness, fairness and generosity, even though their society does not do systematic instruction of the young in these norms, and does not have rules, laws and punishments to remind people not to stray from the norms. They didn't even have ill will towards people who looked and acted very different! (They shared food with the children of outsiders.) Maybe the world should take a leaf out of their book.
All cultures sprout delusions about gods, categories of people, forbidden actions, etc. We seem built to take these things seriousl y. Maybe instead of trying to be more rational we should instead design some system, some giant worldwide template of completely arbitrary categories and customs and goals, that, like the aborigines' template, puts a tight lid on some of the most dangerous groups and group phenomena: young horny males, sexual competition, family pride and loyalty, subgroup pride and loyalty, power hierarchies.
ASI could design it, and tell all the young horny males who want to climb the power hierarchy by being major contributors to the design to STFU. Then we would all take some drug that temporarily increases neuroplasticity enormously, and while under its influence be inculcated in the new system's customs, beliefs, etc. Then we'd take another drug that makes the new beliefs enormously resistant to skepticism or change.
I am actually not being ironic here, just trying to think some things through to their logical conclusion.
Great post, reminds me of the SSC golden era.
Another banger Mr. Alexander
My hot take is that the occasional brutal treatment of people you can get away with brutally treating is healthy in some sense. Its similar to hazing. If you were angry, (which you probably are, as its really hot and you might be hungry) and then you mutilate a younger person, you and everyone else who does it with you feels better. Now laws and stuff prevent that, causing the would be hazers to instead do nothing, and still feel angry but not able to let it out, and then they just become depressed/low functioning. Its a trade off between occasional brutal treatment or constant depression/low functioning.
> "The difference between a flourishing traditional lifestyle and spiraling into alcoholism and suicide is some sort of belief that hunting kangaroos is inherently masculine and cool, but working a minimum wage job is inherently cringe? Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it. " <
I agree and it raises interesting questions. I didn't understand this quote to mean that Scott doesn't understand why the colonized would feel injured pride, but rather that he doesn't understand why the (understandably) injured pride leads to such disparate life outcomes. The common answer is 'hopelessness' and I get that, but it doesn't explain enough to me. Billions of people have injured pride, jealousy, etc, and, apparently, want to stick it to the 'elites' who put them there. And certainly, drug use and hopelessness are much higher in 'downtrodden' communities.
That marriage system seems certainly nifty. I think it would allow you to have sex with your paternal grandmother, or with the daughter of your daughter though.
I also wonder if it is optimal, and if there would be any genetic evidence for it. (My guess is that for mtDNA in women and Y chromosomes, two of the four subgroups should share a lineage. Possibly more pronounced in mtDNA, because having sex with a forbidden caste is likely more common than placing a female in the wrong caste -- even if you kidnap her, there would be no reason why you would not place her in the correct caste in your tribe.
Also, this seems like a way to constrict the bonds between a father and his son by placing them in different castes. Imagine if the kids of a Mormon father were always Jewish. Not that it matters much after the son hits puberty and gets removed from the tribe.
Also, it seems curious that the males switch tribes (or so I gather) when they pledge themselves to a couple. My understanding was that generally, it was more common for women to switch tribes on marriage generally, and that the (debatable) gender bonus from social skills for women was because they normally had to get along in the tribe of their husbands (where they might not know anyone), while men were staying in the tribe they were born in for life. Supposedly this could have helped in team hunting and warfare -- if you have trained together for all your life, and know which if your tribesmen is brave and who is not, that is a clear advantage. (Also, evolutionary, groups of men who were kin would be much more willing to risk their lives to save their comrades than groups of men who were only related by marriage.) On the other hand, a matrilineal system being less capable of producing organized violence might be seen as a feature.
I think it a bit curious that for a young man, it was not evolutionary advantageous to defect. I mean, getting all of the daughters of your mother in law is not a terrible deal generally, if the population is stable then the expected value of the number of daughters who will reproduce is one. Except that there is a chance that you die while your future first wife is five, or even when she is 20, and you would be much better off with marrying something your own age if that was an option. Of course, if you only get promised the first daughter to make it to puberty, that leaves you a chance of exp(-1)=0.37 of dying a virgin (assuming that the number of daughters reaching puberty are poisson distributed). And if you happen to be the second guy who waits for a daughter of a couple which just got married, your odds of success are only 0.26. At this point, becoming Oedipus-in-law might be the more promising strategy.
On the other hand, "no sanctioned reproduction until you have spent a decade sucking up to your elders" was certainly the norm for Roman legionaries, and it worked rather well for them. Still, I think that there is an important difference in kind.
I believe that horny young men who want to get laid are collectively a great force in society, which can be turned to very destructive but also constructive ends (and often the difference is just a matter of perspective). Possibly the first fire was tamed by some guy who just wanted to impress some girls. A man in say medieval Europe had some options which would influence his expected reproductive success. Become an outlaw or join some travelling people. Volunteer for the king's army and get trampled by enemy knights. Toil in the fields. Over time, a few of the men would find good niches, thus increasing the productivity of society.
I feel that the options for the young Aborigine man are much more constrained. Sure, if he is in the top 1% of hunting skills, he might get to pledge himself to a couple whose daughter is already eight (and whose previous husband-to-be was sadly killed by a kangaroo).
Say what you will about Great Plains steppe nomads -- they were certainly a violent bunch long before any European had set foot into America, but they were not stagnant. When the Europeans introduced firearms and horses, they took both in strides. Had they had another few millennia, some (settled) Native Americans might well have invented the steam engine.
Contrast this with Australia. They had 50 millennia, and I doubt the Europeans being late another five would have made a big difference. Sure, they were rather peaceful apart from the odd genital mutilation, but also stagnant.
Now I am wondering about an alternate universe where a bunch of Apache get isekaied to Australia and seduce young Aborigine men to their way of life.
I've seen them in Sydney, and whilst I was there in a capacity which meant I only saw them in the criminal justice system (so potentially colossal selection bias), they're doing really, really badly.* Much worse than typical blacks in the US, the median seemed to be roughly hovering around the black underclass. I didn't get a great sense of what life was like on the reservations/"not reservations" in the Northern Territory, but I can't imagine it was much worse.
They're also a lot less self-selected than immigrants; a chunk of them when I was there seemed to have been displaced from the Northern Territory by "The Intervention" (a big government crackdown nominally on child sexual abuse, which there was a fair amount of,** but also on aboriginal behaviour more generally; the paranoid theory at the time was that this was done as a favour to mining companies, but that was mostly said by the sort of people who would say that). Immigrants, by contrast, have to at least have the wherewithal to pick a country and somehow get there; most of the Aborigines I met would have struggled.
*The stats speak to this, but it has to be borne in mind that the Australians also include Elizabeth-Warren-equivalents as Aboriginal and pointing this out is considered scandalous.
**Confounded as against the regular underclass by having (in my vague anecdotal impression) slightly more fathers at least kicking about in the vicinity, what I suspect was a slight squeamishness for historical reasons about taking their kids into state care, and the fact that these were the ones who'd fled the intervention.
This article seems to me a mix of Alexanderian and Sailerian thought. Great subject matter, Carleton Coon does a good job of explaining the structure of Australian Aborigine societies in one of his books!
In primitive societies, hunting seems like the best occupation for young men. It allows them to use violence in a pro-social way, and rewards them by status. (If the most reckless ones die in the process, that is a bonus.) We don't have a good analogy to this in modern society. The closest thing is sport, but sport is economically useless... except as entertainment; but then the problem is that the people who "participate" in sport only as observers, instead of spending their energy in the arena, they spend it afterwards demolishing the city.
> We don't have a good analogy to this in modern society.
Isn't this what the military is for?
To a point. But in peacetime it doesn't actually let them expend their pent-up violence all that much, and even when the army *has* stuff to do, it requires a whole heap of rule-following and socialising at baseline, which young men who might have made great hunters might not be cut out for. Also, in our modern society having been in the military doesn't reliably translate to that much status, though it might have done a couple of generations ago.
>“Gender” is technically the wrong term. Most anthropologists use words like “section”. But there are some notable resemblances. Your “section” determines who you are, how people address you, and (especially) who you can marry.
Seems closer to social class than gender.
About gerontocracy, at least for the males, I think a reason this is stable is because, like in seniority succession in monarchy, that it's promised that eventually, the young man'll also be the one to reap the benefit. They'll grow old, then they'll be able to fuck young women. I've seen careers with worse future prospects.
As for the females, we're back to arguments about patriarchy, and it's a whole other books of debates.