> "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.
That sounds like it wouldn't contribute to a single mainstream discourse, but rather to a heavily contested discourse where different groups are incentivized to say different things to take advantage of the legal situation.
Perhaps I explained it badly. The Kuringai were just an example; the narrative being supported is the idea that Aborigines in general were "owners" of the land.
There are other points of view and other groups with incentives, but discourse that supports those points of view is racist and effectively banned in polite society.
You mean, discourse that supports those points of view is *said to be* racist? Or do you mean that it actually is racist? Or that there is nothing more to racism than being said to be racist?
Anyway, I would advocate that no one in Australia say "aboriginal culture is the oldest culture". If they want to claim that certain land is long-established traditional land, they can make that claim without making up orientalist lies.
> You mean, discourse that supports those points of view is *said to be* racist? Or do you mean that it actually is racist?
I don't think that the word "racist" is sufficiently well defined at this point for there to be a sensible answer to that question.
There are many true and/or reasonable statements that don't meet my personal definition of racism, but which might meet someone else's. I don't think arguing over the definition of "racism" is particularly interesting, so I'd rather argue over whether things are true or reasonable than whether they're racist.
When you say effectively banned, do you mean that folks that say stuff like this are going to prison, or are being expelled from Australia? (I am rather under the opinion that Australia doesn't have freedom of speech where Aborigines are concerned).
I'm sure it's the same thing that happens here: you're shunned from mainstream discourse and risk losing your job, status, and/or social connections. If you're speaking on behalf of a company or institution then you risk inspiring a boycott or legal action ("hostile or discriminatory workplace"). Just because the government isn't directly doing the censoring doesn't mean that it's not censorship.
Australian columnist Andrew Bolt wrote a column making fun of the extremely white-looking people who are celebrated for being the First Aboriginal Astrophysicist or whatever. He got sued by one of his targets and a judge ruled Bolt can't make fun of people who claim to be aboriginal if they are even a little bit aboriginal. Or something. It's hard to find a clear explanation of the state of the law, perhaps because people are worried about being found in violation of the law, whatever it is.
Yes, that's one of my pet peeves. It's so ridiculous to think that the same language groups occupied the same area for millenia but I see it claimed all the time.
> 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.
Why orientalism?
I don't think the problem is a lack of understanding of how numbers work. You might, for example, see the claim that Coptic Christianity is older than Egyptian Islam. The 𝘯𝘶𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘴 are pretty clear on that point. What's questionable is the way in which you decide that (1) some set of phenomena should be reified as a distinct culture; and (2) a particular number is correctly associated with that culture.
I'll bet you that Egyptian Copts and Muslims have a lot in common, and that a lot of what distinguishes the Muslims from the Copts today was part of the culture before there was a concept of Islam, and that a lot of what distinguishes the Copts from the Muslims today developed after Islam came around. But those aren't numeric questions at all.
"Orientalism" is here the term for the tendency of members of one culture (most often the industrialized west) to treat other cultures as mysterious and unknowable and unchanging and exotic, rather than treating the cultures as just another culture, like our own past or present ones. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism)
Specific cultural practices can be dated, and can be older or newer than other specific cultural practices. But a culture as a whole (just like a species or a language) is never unchanging, and always has ancestors, so the cultures as wholes (just like the species and the languages) are parts of one big tree, and don't have meaningfully different ages.
Chinese culture isn't older than Egyptian culture or vice versa, though writing developed in one place before the other, and so did agriculture, and so did any other particular cultural practice. Similarly, sharks aren't older than humans or vice versa, though one of these lineages may have had something like its modern body form earlier, and one may have developed its current blood typing earlier and similarly for any particular genetic factor.
In your example, the practice of Christianity was in Egypt before the practice of Islam, but as you note, once you talk about Coptic Christian culture in comparison to Arabic Islamic Egyptian culture, each has some aspects that are more recent than corresponding aspects of the other and some that are older.
People sometimes make the opposite mistake about their own culture, assuming that it is new, because they can see some differences from past versions of it, while they treat another culture as old because they see some similarities to past versions of it. But a clearer comparison doesn't treat the cultures themselves as having ages, just individual cultural practices.
> "Orientalism" is here the term for the tendency of members of one culture (most often the industrialized west) to treat other cultures as mysterious and unknowable and unchanging and exotic, rather than treating the cultures as just another culture, like our own past or present ones. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism)
As that link is quite clear about, "orientalism" is the term for an attitude towards the "orient" [the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea; this is an etymologically correct use of the word "orient" that fails to account for the fact that in modern English it refers to the region around China].
> But a culture as a whole (just like a species or a language) is never unchanging, and always has ancestors, so the cultures as wholes (just like the species and the languages) are parts of one big tree, and don't have meaningfully different ages.
> Chinese culture isn't older than Egyptian culture or vice versa, though writing developed in one place before the other, and so did agriculture, and so did any other particular cultural practice.
Yes, I know. I generally make this point about languages, but it applies equally to culture.
What I'm saying here is that knowing how numbers work has nothing to do with the confusion that people experience. To claim that Chinese culture is younger than Egyptian culture, you need to make a lot of assumptions about what "Chinese culture" and "Egyptian culture" mean, and all of those assumptions are incoherent. But the numbers are the least problematic part of the argument. Numbers are simple. If anything, the fact that they 𝗱𝗼 understand the numbers is a major part of what's leading people astray.
Among opera fans, orientalism would be understood as a synonym for exoticism. European guy visits a foreign place where people have weird habits or beliefs (pretty much missrepresented from how that culture really works). The guy faces adversity and hostility from some locals, but there is this local girl who wants to sleep with him. After their ways part, she commits suicide. (Lakme, Madamma Butterfly).
The other variant is the girl, who sleeps with him and ruins his life (Carmen, Dellilah).
The music is adjusted to sound weird, usually the pentatonic scale.
Carmen is technically an European girl, but Roma/"gypsies" , or even Spain were exotic enough for the particular authors or for the composer, so it qualifies as this type of opera.
In Samson and Dellilah, the Jews get the western musical scales, while the Phillistines get the immitiation of scales like from Morocco or Algiers.
In summary, throw in some weirdness and pentatonic scales, and you have a foreign culture as a plot device.
I deny the notion that cultures can't have different ages just because they're always changing. That's letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. You can't date a culture with absolute precision, but it's perfectly unambiguous to say that e.g. Jewish Egyptian culture existed before Islamic Egyptian culture.
I think what you said looks fine - it’s just when you try to claim that the early Jewish Egyptian culture and Islamic Egyptian culture are somehow the *same* culture as contemporary Jewish Egyptian culture or Islamic Egyptian culture, such that one of the *contemporary* cultures is *older*, that it becomes problematic.
"the idea of one culture being “older” than another is just a kind of patronizing orientalism"
I'm not sure. Is it "patronizing orientalism" to point out that Chinese culture is *older* than Polish culture, say, in the sense that if you go back 2000 years, you can observe an advanced civilization that has *some sort of* continuity with present-day China, but unless you squint super hard, you can't really see anything like present-day Poland?
It's sort of like evolution: yes, both modern sharks and modern monkeys had the same time to develop from their last common ancestor, but if you go back 70 million years, you see creatures that look very similar anatomically to modern sharks and nothing that looks anywhere near as similar to modern monkeys. Is it patronizing to point this out?
The biggest problem I see with both of those examples is that people too often think that if the external form of sharks remained relatively similar during that period then they must not have undergone very much change in anything else either, and similarly for whatever aspects of Chinese culture have been relatively constant. I think that ancestors of current Chinese people were likely sedentary agriculturalists for longer than ancestors of current Slavic people were, and the ancestral cultures of China exerted more influence on their neighbors than the reverse, while the ancestral Slavic cultures were adopting more features from their neighbors for much of that time. But I don’t think any of that adds up to “the culture is older” in a particularly clear or useful way.
*snicker* "adopting features from other cultures" is a classic Japanese cultural practice. By that token, Japanese culture is constantly evolving (the way English sorta grabs words like taboo and schadenfreude, simply because it can).
You can argue that Karaite culture is older than Jewish culture, in that one is quite a bit more "changey" than the other. In fact, I kind of like that as a way to define "age" of culture -- a sort of rough "guess" of the age of cultural practices.
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.
Isaac Bacirongo's semiautobiography (dictated, but not written, by him) mentions that the Bantu see the pygmies as a source of spiritual power that is not available to the Bantu, and hire them to perform important magical ceremonies.
And I've read somewhere less authoritative that the Vikings saw the Laplanders in much the same way, as people who could wield magic that the Vikings couldn't, and hired them to perform important magical ceremonies.
It seems to me that this is also what modern Westerners want from the peoples they see as indigenous groups.
No, Shabbos Goys are invented to solve a particular technical problem in Jewish law, they are given tasks that are decidedly not magical or ceremonial but practical (like turning on the light switch), and they may be of any gentile ethnicity regardless of aboriginal cred.
I'd call myself a progressive Australian - woke even - and I don't think you know many progressive Australians. I do not think at all like you imagine I do.
So just in case you are interested in the way one group of modern Aborigines are currently thinking, check out the Sovereign Union page on facebook.
The way I see it, they want recognition of the truth of settlement/invasion to be fully noted in the history of Australia, and also by the right wing deniers - always supported by the Murdoch media - who minimise the violence and psychopathic behaviour of the colonists, ignore and quibble about new research that modern anthropologists and historians are publishing that refute the horror stories of Aboriginal culture.
And right wing people insist on hanging onto the horror stories told by diagnosable white men who thought they were the high point of evolution.
Yes progressives think we should pay for whatever 'they' want. If they want to integrate and some do, they should be supported and encouraged to do this. These people do need extra help even more than the poor whites who don't have a culture, because of the racism.
I know an aboriginal bloke who got a job as a teacher in a rural town and went to the real estate agent looking for a rental. Nope not a one. His white mate went in later and amazingly there were 2 houses to rent for him.
Petty little microaggressions that can be so disabling, if they happen all the time.
And if they want to stay on country they should also be supported in a decent standard of living.
Gina should pay, Twiggy should pay. We didn't have any millionaires in Australia when I was growing up. There are too many now and they have too much money and power.
Those who make the most money from owning the land and profiting from it's resources, should pay perpetual rent to the people whose land they stole, recompense them for the lives they took and develop some respect for the intelligence of a culture that they don't and possibly can't understand.
"The way I see it, they want recognition of the truth of settlement/invasion to be fully noted in the history of Australia, and also by the right wing deniers - always supported by the Murdoch media - who minimise the violence and psychopathic behaviour of the colonists, ignore and quibble about new research that modern anthropologists and historians are publishing that refute the horror stories of Aboriginal culture."
I went to Australia 10 years ago, and all I saw everywhere was "recognition of the truth of settlement/invasion", except the "truth" was cartoonishly propagandistic in favor of the Aborigines. Every museum, every billboard, every indigenous flag all sent the unmistakable message that the aboriginals were perfect beings living in harmony with nature while the colonists were literally Hitler. No recognition that some aboriginals welcomed the settlers' society while others did not; that some were allies of the Europeans while others enemies; that aboriginals benefited from European institutions and technologies; that the "terra nullius" concept makes at least some sense with nomadic peoples. Never, not once, did I ever read "the horror stories of Aboriginal culture". This was 10 years ago, and I bet Australia (like the rest of the West) has gotten significantly more woke since then.
" No recognition that some aboriginals welcomed the settlers' society while others did not; that some were allies of the Europeans while others enemies; that aboriginals benefited from European institutions and technologies; that the "terra nullius" concept makes at least some sense with nomadic peoples. "
Can't speak to the situation in Australia, but this sounds identical to what conservatives say about indigenous tribes in the US. Extrapolating from that, it's highly ironic, because even the white allies, the ones who adopted white technology and cultural norms, and the ones who were willing to share the land had what land they were using taken away from them and shoved into marginal reservations at great cost to their lives. Was it different in Australia?
Oh really, you were here 10 years ago and all you saw was....the aborigines being hard to get along with and white people bending over backward to make them welcome lol You must be one of those exceptional Americans who have contributed to the wonderful government you have now. Look at all the high value capitalists making America great.
OMG. what a hoot it all its.
But really, you were looking at things here in Australia through your biased eyes and your American ignorance and arrogance and seeing what you want to see to support your view that the white culture is the best thing evah and the colonisation here there and everywhere was good and decent and just the way intelligent humans roll.
You know what, I'm 70 something so I've been here in Australia for a long time and I played with Aborigines when I was a child living on a sheep station in Central Australia. I've worked with them as an adult in different situations and the central problem for them is the lack of respect that white Australians have for their culture.
If you haven't come across the horror stories of cannibalism, incredible violence toward women, stupid and lazy etc, you haven't read any of the Murdoch media publications and the right wing culture warriors who criiticise any good news story about Aboriginal life pre invasion. etc and really you have nothing useful to add to the discussion so why pretend you know something other don't?
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.
Le mot 'épopée' n'existe pas en anglais; on dit 'The Epic of Gilgamesh'
Incidentally, Ziusudra and Uta-napishtim are (respectively) the Sumerian and Akkadian names/titles of the same mythological figure -- in the Standard Babylonian Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, he is referred to by both.
The Sumerian word ZI means 'life', making it the equivalent of the Akkadian word napištum (from the Semitic root n-p-š 'life, soul, breath', cf. Arabic نَفْس and Hebrew נֶפֶשׁ).
The sodomites were defintely more than just annoying. They raped angels, which were probably understood as godly incarnations by the people that wrote the bible.
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.
> 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
The cuneiform literary culture persisted into the first few centuries AD. It did get eaten into by other forms of writing, and there were some Bronze Age protests of this that survive to us, but the timing isn't good for this theory.
(Cuneiform is also used to write different languages in different places, but that would be true too early instead of too late.)
That particular theory is not my main interest here and I haven't done any further reading since listening to the podcast a few years ago, but I don't think the idea that it *survived* long after that really has any bearing on its accuracy. The point is not that no one kept writing cuneiform, but rather that the fact that it was no longer the case that you had a vast and diverse world united by the use of cuneiform tablets -- hence the similarities with the Tower of Babel 'confusion of languages' story. The displacement by alphabetic systems and also the general widening of the literate world to include far-flung groups using Phoenician-derived systems is perfectly sufficient to generate this sense.
(Also, if people were already complaining in the bronze age, the timing actually seems pretty perfect for those complaints to transmogrify to myth, given that the babel story would've been written during the mid-iron age during the babylonian exile ~500BC.)
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.
Maybe "similarity with the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness" plays a role too? Being a hunter is more "natural" than being a grocery store clerk, so it might be better for *some aspects* of mental health (although I'm sure "not starving" is great for other aspects)
Regarding the immigrant-colonized difference, my understanding is that most immigrants aren't hunter-gatherers, they already have industrial-society jobs in their country of origin. When you're in this situation, moving to a similar but better-paid job in a more prosperous country seems like a more straightforward improvement
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.
Presumably they knew how to raise the other people's teenage sons though! Sure, they were of a different "section" and disciplining your own children can be more difficult than other people's children (for starters, the kid is much more likely to disobey), but it's not like the whole process was something fundamentally alien and unknown to them. The sudden lack of challenging rituals themselves (and the utterly solid belief on the part of the initiated that they *must* go through those to continue living) probably played a much more important part.
Also, in reality, between the 1910s and the 70s, Aboriginal children were being actively kidnapped from their communities by the Australian government to be raised by missions and convents and other such institutions. Many survivors of these institutions are still alive today, and many more Aboriginal Australians are children to the parents that came out of this system.
Adoptees and people who have been through the regular foster system also don't do particularly well - it turns out institutions are absolute hotbeds of child abuse. These being specifically racialised institutions, likely had worse abuse problems.
In effect - no initiation system with your Elders.
You do NOT trust the whitefella to do it now, because they either heavily traumatised yourself or your parents - in fact you should probably just distrust and fight the government in general because they keep forcing you into their brilliant schemes that will definitely fix it this time (is it an opportunity to send another white representative who is annoying and useless at best and actively abusive at worst? Yes it is!)
As far as I can tell, the most effective organisations are formed by Aboriginal people who have stepped up into the role of Elder and give kids support and advice about navigating the confusing whitefella society out there - like, what does moving to Melbourne to play AFL actually entail, and who can be trusted to help you, and which organisations are actually a bunch of nutty Christians who will try to indoctrinate you into their cult in exchange for aid.
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.
In practice perfect segregation is impossible and what happens is
1. The upper strata make their presence and power acutely aware to the lower strata, sometimes out of petty cruelty and self-aggrandizement (my grandma has seen tenant farmers being whipped for no discernible purpose), sometimes just to secure material goods they feel entitled to. Think of the endemic sexual harassement and assault girls from the lower classes were routinely subjected to. Or the habit of the aristocracy to pay their lessers if and when convenient, counting on the fact that a tailor or a goldsmith assertively demanding what their are due would have been seen as shameless and impolitic. Or the thousand other little abuses commoners suffered gritting their teeth, from stepping off the sidewalk (that is, into the street flowing with feces) to gratuitous violent threats to humiliating, barely disguised rituals of submissions. This is bound to create tension.
2. Because of 1, when possible, people will always pursue social mobility. This necessarily creates some tension with those considering higher status their birthright. Think of the trope of the parvenu and the impecunious noble fighting over a girl, an office or petty status markers. Sometimes these fights can get pretty deadly, on the personal level. Sometimes they enter the realm of policy and that's how you get millions dying of starvation bc y'know, abrogating the Corn Laws would "undermine the traditional social fabric of the country and consign it to mercantile interests". And when social mobility is entirely ruled out, eg bc of race or closed castes, well, if everything aligns perfectly you might get Dr King. More likely, you get Beria.
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.
If women still have familial and social responsibilities, can't those men get a sense of worth by doing those same activities? Modern culture is much more egalitarian than many traditional patriarchal cultures, so roles aren't as gendered.
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....
But didn't most people in history live in social groups of MAYBE a couple hundred people? And within that larger social group you are probably only competing for status with a small subset of people. Maybe there are 50 young men between the ages of 18-30 who are competing for status. And even in an extremely simple society, wouldn't there be quite a few hierarchies that you could theoretically rise in? Best hunter, fisher, builder, fire maker, cook, best looking, smartest, funniest, richest, etc. It seems likely that almost anyone could put themselves in the top handful of performers in at least one of these categories. And get all of the status, life satisfaction, etc. that comes with that.
I'm assuming a lot of modern western ideas about the organization of this society, like that many different skills and attributes are valued and accrue status separately and that people have the freedom to do pursue things where they have comparative advantage. So maybe nothing like this was very common historically. But I think it's obvious that people that live in cultures more like this, and especially who avoid social media and maybe modern media in general, end up much happier with their relative position in life.
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.
Not having the whole world to compare yourself to is probably optimal for the majority; a very small minority would benefit from being able to socialize with literally the top 100 people in their craft; it's the people in between that are kind of screwed either way.
You're looking at this from the point of view of someone who could be the best mathematician in a small town, though.
What about the experiences of people who would have been middle-of-the-pack or below-average in a small town, who now find themselves being middle-of-the-pack or below average in a global society? You don't have to be exceptional in any way to live a satisfactory life.
I don't buy the analogy here. Even leaving aside the divinity thing Jesus wasn't lowest-possible status, he was a regional celebrity and thousands of people would show up to hear him speak.
Even before that, he was the literate son of a carpenter, which pretty much makes him middle class by first century Judean standards.
It's not an 'argument'. Full blooded aborigines don't produce the enzyme that allows you to break down ethanol at a reasonable rate. This is why they're heavily restricted from purchasing booze in the NT and northern WA.
Neither do Chinese/Japanese (and culturally they've had ethanol for a while -- just not the free access to booze that the West had). Funny how we don't restrict them from purchasing booze "for their own good" innit?
I think the other unanswered part of the question here is: what makes us think that these traditional lifestyles were flourishing?
The early explorers of the West Coast described the inhabitants as the "miserablest people in the world", and while other early explorers might have been a little more complimentary (see: Manly Beach) I don't see why we should exclude the possibility that they were just as immiserated by their crappy physical conditions as they are now.
"Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it."
Isn't it the most natural feeling in the world?
Suppose humanlike aliens come with their superior tech that makes your high status job as a psychiatrist or software engineer irrelevant. They are also much richer and can hardly hide their disgust when looking at some of our practices like consuming meet or compulsory school.
They are kind though so your choices are to live off welfare (materially better than how you lived before) or do some kind of low status job. You realise no matter what you do you won't be able to master their culture codes fully or travel throughout the galaxy. I'd be pretty miserable!
"Suppose humanlike aliens come with their superior tech that makes your high status job as a psychiatrist or software engineer irrelevant."
We're sort of seeing this happen in real time as AI changes what jobs require humans and (therefore) what jobs are seen as high-status/valuable.
Sam Altman might think it's great that everyone can now produce a facsimile of an oil painting that will impress everyone but the experts. I wonder if he has any idea what it feels like to be an oil painter ten thousand hours deep in your craft?
I think another piece is feeling you get up in the morning to do something that you feel matters, though I haven't been able to quickly find the references on this I was remembering. Maybe that is pride, maybe it's feeling useful, maybe it's having a niche. But hunting/sourcing food that is needed is it, recreational hunting may or not be, and if that's your frame of reference, working at a convenience store isn't.
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.
Even apart from the fact that humans seem to want to have sex with vegetables, tentacles, cars, and the Eiffel Tower - and so Andromedan Sugar Daddies don't seem entirely without the bounds of possibility - I think your sex/reproduction argument relies on a faulty syllogism.
Sex and reproduction may be dependent on status - but that doesn't mean that status is dependent on sex and reproduction. There are status hierarchies that have little or nothing to do with sex (for example in a uniformed/military organisation, or certain holy orders, or in your local super-obsessive hobby group*, or between animals and their owners).
Therefore, I think you are wrong to discount the Rich Andromedans thought-expriment on the basis of sex - but I think the experiment actually sort-of supports your argument anyway, for other reasons.
The alien analogy would work if the aliens took all our cities and farmland away, shoving us off into marginal reservations. Somehow being high status in what is effectively a prison camp doesn't seem so attractive.
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.
Yeah it's not just the fact that they exist, it's they exist relatively close to you so you can actually easily reach them, and they can do seemingly magical things effortlessly and you are unable to hold even a medium-status position in their society no matter how hard you try (and that's not even taking racism into consideration). Oh, and they also deny that your gods exist. Seems pretty demotivating, tbh.
I could imagine a much more spiritually (and scientifically) advanced civilization than ours being able to position themselves in more gods-like fashion, so as to inspire awe and aspiration rather than defeat and despair, but ours is certainly not such a civilization in relation to the Aborigines.
Is it just me that finds the existence of such an alien society relatively close to us exciting and fascinating? Like being isekai'd into a sci-fi universe. Think about all the new things you will get to explore and learn.
The aboriginals are not exactly known for their love of exploration and learning. In fact, this is probably true of all the remaining primitive societies - and quite possibly one of the main reasons they remained primitive to this day. The Amish might be a good example of the reverse shift in a more modern/civilized society, but they at least don't share the dethroned gods problem with the aboriginals.
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.
It's wrong to think girls only had their father for protection. They would also have several brothers, uncles, and other male relatives. Remember that families used to be very nuclear.
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.
They are also fed a constant narrative of oppression and dispossession: that it's the Andromedans' fault they're poor, and the only way to stop being poor is to persuade the Andromedans to give them stuff.
Which, even to the extent that it's true, is a terrible thing to believe; it prevents you from doing pretty much anything that could actually help your situation. No point in working to improve your own situation if your situation is someone else's fault.
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."
Are you sure you're not conflating this with the value nihilism of "it's all just blind physics with no purpose at all"? I would certainly agree that most people find that view entirely unpalatable, despite its surge of popularity.
But if you believe in intrinsic value or purpose (religiously or otherwise), I don't see what would be so aversive about it being well distributed in the Universe.
Do lots of people really require the entire rest of the Universe to be a dumb side-show to the epic story of the Earth, for their emotional well-being? Not to be overly judgemental, but that sounds to me like a rather stupid and hugely wasteful thing to demand of the world.
It's not that people necessarily demand that Earth be the center of everything, to which the rest of the universe is just a sideshow, although some do. The most recent religious person I've spoken to in dept about her beliefs, when I asked what sort of real possible observations she'd consider truly incompatible with her beliefs, said that she'd consider the certain discovery of life on other planets to be such.
More commonly though, religious people I've spoken to about this have argued that if there's life on those planets, God created those too, and intends for them to follow his will just as he expects it of us. So Jesus is the savior of all species in the universe, or all beings in the universe are intended to follow the will of Allah, etc. And I think it would be deeply destabilizing to their views if they found that there were other civilizations in the universe, vastly more powerful and developed than ours, which saw this proposition in the same light that we see the prospect of converting our society to Australian Aboriginal religion.
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.
Actually this gets me wondering if anyone has studied the effect of loss of status when Germans lost WWII. You can see the model - Germans lose WWI but only barely (from their point of view anyway) - result is resentment and antagonism as you might predict. Germans get destroyed in WWII and do sink into depression but then reinvent themselves as Economic Miracle babies. I guess Aboriginals haven't figured out how to re-invent themselves. It also helped that Germans culturally were fairly close to the peoples that defeated them, so could simply adopt the cultures of the conquerors to some extent without feeling completely alienated.
I think the Marshall Plan had something to do with it. Were the Aborigines to become the beneficiaries of such a focused program to develop their economic self-sufficiency, their self perceived status might change too.
Because of the power differential. US rural voters are so powerful as a faction they elected their candidate for President. Aborigines in Australia appear to have little to now power at all.
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.
I honestly would expect that learning about super-rich Andromedan society actually would affect status hierarchies on Earth!
Probably not hugely, I admit, but I would expect many people to fear that their personal achievements had been made paler ("empaled"..?) by comparison: I think the emotional reward from achievemens is relative to the 'specialness' of the achievement more often than we're generally in the habit of thinking ("On the moon you can jump twelve feet - but so can everybody else so there's no point really" --Geoffrey Willans).
Isn't there some weird game-theoretic phenomenon whereby the builders of "world's tallest building" type skyscrapers try to obfuscate or mislead people, even within their own company, about the exact heights of their buildings during planning - even though this causes them loads of serious planning problems - because they fear rival skyscraper-builders will, upon learning the planned height, immediately start work on a skyscraper on the other side of the world that's a quarter of an inch taller?
(Source: I was told this by a few locals, when I was working near the then-new Burj Khalifa. It was presented as common practice but I have no way of knowing whether it's a one-off or even just an urban legend.)
If there is any basis to this, I think it's quite plausible that "fear of a skyscraper on the other side of the world stealing status because of an extra quarter-inch" might not be an *entirely* irrelevant model for understanding how a personality like (say) Elon Musk's would react to finding out about about a far-richer Andromedan society..
If Elon found out about an incredibly prosperous alien civilization, I suspect he'd drop everything in favor of finding some way to commit the Andromedan equivalent of petty wire fraud, then use the proceeds to mail-order a Baby's First Fusion Reactor and some cheap gardening tools, with which to terraform Venus.
I fully agree with you (based on his history of ignoring or circumventing rules, laws, ethical best-practices, gentleman's agreements etc.) that meeting a new civilisation and immediately trying to defraud it would be a very plausible modus operandi, but I do fear (based on the performance of Grok, SpaceX, Boring Company, Tesla's safety record, etc. etc.) that he'd be more likely to turn Earth into Venus than the other way around.
I make no guess one way or another as to whether he'd wield hypothetical stolen Clarketech gardening tools with diligent responsibility or success. https://qntm.org/orynth
As a strictly factual matter, though, to my understanding SpaceX has a better safety record for their paying customers than any other orbital-launch provider in history. They do blow up a lot of prototypes, but that's what prototypes are for. R&D for jet aircraft engines has a similar pattern.
Thanks most awfully for the fiction link - skimmed the first few paragraphs, realised that I like it but that need to set it aside until I can sit down and give it more attention - thanks!
When I read your point about SpaceX's safety record I was immediately inclined to agree: I have ties to the aerospace industry and I've heard almost nothing but criticism of SpaceX but lots of praise for Starlink, as a commercial product, so your claim matches what I've heard professionally.
...however! DDG searching "SpaceX safety record" shows a very different picture. Based on this (and on what I know about Musk's attitude to safety legislation) I very much doubt any of my Starlink-praising aerospace-industry friends and colleagues would want to actually work there!
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.
Yes - what strikes me about AA is the lack of the equivalent of Bob Marley or Will Smith, role models who are considered high-status even among whites, whose style is imitated even by affluent white kids.
Aboriginal Australian role models are primarily footy players, which aren't super well known internationally because AFL is mostly only big within Australia itself (and parts of Australia prefer rugby).
AFL/ rugby is really big among the communities, and I would guess it's one of the more realistic dreams of the youth - "I'm gonna play football in the MCG" is within the grasp of many kids great at kicking the ball around. Still, it's challenging for young people - because they usually grow up in such remote communities, they have to travel a long way to participate, and be really far from their communities.
There's also a couple of other prominent sporting stars, like Olympic medallist Cathy Freeman. Similar challenges.
There's a couple of famous artists, too, and there's a bit of government funding to try to make art a rewarding pathway to success. Not sure how well that's working - probably differs between states.
Lastly there's activism and politics, but that has ups and downs. Also being a politician is inherently a little bit cringe here, even to white society.
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...
The Taliban's victories were also against that same population. They pushed out the post-Soviet warlords to take over the country, then got overthrown when US special forces intervened. The US got tired of what Matt Yglesias calls the "ESPN Zone of Empire" and pulled out, then the Taliban defeated the Afghan government set up by the US.
They ARE dumb. No questions there. That's a 70 IQ country, mainly due to inbreeding. Still, doing jumping jacks is a difficult skill that we teach children.
The drill sergeants were told to tone it down, because it was culturally inappropriate (which I definitely agree with).
Does a Western IQ test really provide reliable information about the intelligence of a people whose traditional way of life is vastly different from ours?
G is G. General Intelligence. Assume that you can find a "fair" test of g (whether made by the West, the East, or the South) -- it should provide a reasonable judgement about a person, no matter where they are from. Please note that metaintelligence is one of the hardest skills to master, so if you're saying "these people look like those people, in terms of intelligence" it is more than likely that you're just not pulling metaintelligence off.
Assuming that such a fair test exists (or otherwise using a test developed for that culture), wherever that 70 IQ number comes from, I doubt that it comes from such a fair test.
Thinking about such a test more seriously, perhaps it is possible to measure intelligence across vastly different cultures with a single test. But what would that look like? You'd need to test the mental skills and abilities relevant in each culture the test should be applied to. And the result would be a "cross-cultural" IQ. But what would it mean?
I think the most practical reason to care about IQ are the positive correlations with job success etc. But what counts as important (for a job, social status, or whatever correlation we're looking it) can differ significantly between cultures. If I have difficulty tracking complex kinship relations, I might get a poorer cross-cultural IQ score. But that will only matter if I participate in a society where these relations matter. Dito for advanced pattern recognition or verbal intelligence or what have you.
Also, I don't understand your point about metaintelligence, I'm just confused. Who is "these/those people", are you saying I'm (personally) saying something along those lines and that I'm not pulling metaintelligence off? Please explain/elaborate.
I don't know. Around 1925 a white hunter went to British East Africa and wrote a book about it. 1925 being 1925 he described the backwardness and primitiveness of the local blacks in a very racist language. Until he noticed they are really, really good at tracking. Like they just see some tracks and say "OK that was a pregnant female antelop" and then down the road they find a pregnant female antelop. Dude was completely surprised, he hung out with hunters all his life and never ever seen anything even close to that.
Is the waiting room in a doctor's office really a ritual element? Say the doctor has three exam rooms and they are all full when you arrive at 9:50 for your 10 AM appointment because the clinic is running behind today. What would a non-ritual solution to this problem look like? The next patient has to wait somewhere.
Sets up the power dynamics of Doctor versus Patient, so that you're appropriately "receptive" to the Doctor's advice.
Compare the expected "wait" for a car mechanic (in general, if you get a loaner, the car mechanic will tell you when it's ready, and you won't wait long -- there's no expectation of an "arrive 30 minutes early").
The next patient has to wait somewhere only if you prioritize the doctor's time over that of the patients.
Here's a medical article fairly screaming (politely) at doctors to "do something with the time you're given -- in the waiting room":
I think the comparison with a car mechanic visit is not apt--your body would be the car! And the car *does* have to wait for the mechanic in the "car waiting room" (the parking lot).
I am not going to read a 248 page PhD thesis for this discussion. That observational "study" is basically a non-blinded psychology study and you know how well those replicate. If you just mean that anthropologists call anything we do regularly a ritual, I agree but I don't think that says much I'd care about as a patient.
I did read the article you linked from Sherwin et al. All of their ideas are basic QI stuff. Everyone agrees that wasting time isn't great and it would be nice to fill that time with medically beneficial things. That doesn't at all address the real question--is the waiting room experience more an obvious logistical solution to the requirements of healthcare or a psychologically meaningful event?
The suggestions Sherwin et al. offer are as follows
-improve space and lighting
-have waiting patients fill out questionnaires
-putting informative posters on the wall
-giving out a question coaching sheet
-giving decision aids
-hiring a Waiting Room Manager
Almost all offices I have ever visited have had the first three. The next two are good ideas and could probably see wider use. The last is a big expense but maybe would be net benefit for the clinic? Not sure.
What's missing from the article, however, is anything that says that waiting rooms are not necessary! The article is just trying to optimize a waiting room experience--a goal that anyone would agree with whether they agree with the ritual posture or not.
Since waiting for a doctor to be ready for you is a symptom of the power differential between doctor and patient, there is no "solution" that doesn't redistribute power between doctors and patients. The ritual is just a symptom, the actual problem is much deeper.
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.
Aborigines age gap between fathers and mothers is arguably close to the age gap that was the standard around 2000 generations from now (fig. A), admittely higher (however I don't find any genetic study that estimates the age gap for aborigenes).
It's worth to notice that the relative ages given in the study are a mean respectively for fathers and mothers and not for their age at birthday of the first child. Interestingly, the gap start to drop ≈500-1000 generations from now (since settlement ?).
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!
I was wondering this. Here is what I am thinking. Despite all the advances of feminism, men typically still want to be the heads of households. One way to deal with that is precisely age difference, because in that case it makes sense that the more senior person should be the boss, more life experience and all. Thinking about how silly I was at say 24, I really did not deserve to be the head of anything. But by 40 brains caught up with me.
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.
Anyone interested can try the game King of Dragon Pass. Should be on Steam, GOG, and I wanna say whatever Apple's store is. You play as a Viking-ish pastoral clan settling new, dangerous lands with several other clans that your shares a culture with.
It's a management game with a learning curve -- you have to pay attention and apply what you learn about the clans culture to the problems they face.
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.
This is a funny way of saying "there weren't psychotic communities in need of murderizing." Given that we have relatively few of those in the prehistoric record, I'm not comfortable saying "this social technology worked better than that social technology." A social technology that isn't exposed to psychotic communities doesn't get very well tested (in the outer reaches of what it can handle), now does it?
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?
Aborigines don't fish and don't tend cattle but 'women' is an interesting answer. My initial thought was that they were resource-intensive and therefore not able to be stockpiled, but ChatGPT tells me that they provide as many calories as the men do so fair enough. According to ChatGPT: "Fought over territory, access to resources (especially waterholes in arid areas), women (e.g., abduction or revenge for elopement), or retributive justice (e.g., payback killings)" so spot on.
I was surprised to see her surprise at the concept. Women are a primary source of conflict everywhere, and a primary source of raids in most places where raids are an option.
I have a Chinese children's mythology book, and I was pretty amused to see a description of how, shortly after people came into existence, the men started fighting over the women.
As far as "if they're nomadic pastoralists", I'm pretty sure they aren't. Australia hadn't developed very far at all by the time of discovery.
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.
War also inverts hierarchies, as someone of great skill can achieve rank. If you want to lock down rank to your benefit (old people), then letting young people go to war might upset that.
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.
But the Australian Aborigines are an exception to this, they were hunter-gatherers living in places that are now super-productive agricultural regions, and we studied them at least a bit before we pushed them out to the not-so-productive areas.
Though I've also heard it argued that the "richest" Aborigines (in terms of food availability) were the ones living in the tropical north rather than in the temperate regions suited to Western settlement and agriculture, and to a large extent there's still a lot living there.
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).
I think the shared understanding of the skin/ section system is because, with the exception of Tasmania, all of these groups were ultimately linked by trade networks, migration paths, and had inter-cultural protocols. They may have been separate but they definitely did interact with one another.
(The ideas of the songlines and the dreaming is another example of something that is shared throughout the continent).
Imagine the Silk Routes. Everyone on the Silk Routes had the concept of private property, trading valuable things for money, and we can infer that every single one of those societies punished theft and took payment (in literal coin usually, or other precious metal objects) in return for goods.
We've found money of various sources in China, and we've found Chinese money all over the place (the Vikings had some of it).
Also to punish theft, you also need to have laws.
Romans don't need to have physically gone to China to share a common understanding of private property, preventing theft, levying taxes and tariffs etc. They both talked to other societies as intermediaries.
So the groups in far north Queensland are connected to the groups on the west coast via all the groups in the middle that they interact with regularly.
>”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.
"Best athlete / musician in the neighborhood" is both a plausible aspiration and non-negligible source of status, even if it doesn't pay well in cash terms.
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.
Aborigines are vastly overrepresented in Australian Rules Football, for what that's worth.
Whether that's due to some genetic advantage (running around for hours chasing a kangaroo isn't so different to running around for hours chasing a ball) or just due to excellent recruitment/development and a lack of better alternatives is a mystery.
The footy field is one of the few places that the average Australian is likely to actually be exposed to a positive portrayal of an Aboriginal person (or rather, an Aboriginal person portraying themselves positively).
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."
Core of the classic Roman solution was "never lose." Once the industrial revolution came around, all-out war simply stopped being profitable - Germany and Japan gained more from the access to international trade that came after their defeat in WWII than they could possibly have hoped to secure in plunder by winning.
> Core of the classic Roman solution was "never lose."
Not quite. They could and did lose major battles. (And check out what happened with Hannibal.) They didn't lose wars; they took the viewpoint that if they hadn't won the war yet, it was still going.
If you believe Bret Devereaux, this is downstream (and upstream; there are feedback loops) of them being able to mobilize many times the manpower and equipment that rival states could.
Trying to come out on top in every single battle is what I'd call "always win," which is unsustainable, a tempting road to gambler's ruin.
"Never lose" is different, includes things like giving all your troops the best available armor even if they can't personally pay for it up front, fortifying every single overnight camp whether expecting trouble or not, having a well-drilled plan for retreating from overwhelming force, and letting whoever you conquered last year join up as respected, equal-cut-of-the-action 'allies' next year, rather than holding a grudge or trying to meddle in their internal affairs. Not a perfect system, but it lasted longer than most.
> "Never lose" is different, includes things like giving all your troops the best available armor even if they can't personally pay for it up front
That's not something the Romans did, except possibly very late in their military career.
Otherwise, you've provided a list of things you admire about the Romans. But it has nothing to do with "never losing", certainly not in contrast to "always winning" which means exactly the same thing. This has all the intellectual value of being opposed to (or in favor of!) "capitalism", when if someone looks at your position closely "capitalism" turns out to be defined as "whatever the United States does".
If you want to argue that the core of the Roman approach to warfare was "do the things the Romans do", you can claim to be right, but you can't claim to be saying anything.
> But it has nothing to do with "never losing", certainly not in contrast to "always winning" which means exactly the same thing.
That's only true if every contest has a strictly binary outcome. Even in sports elaborately optimized to produce unambiguous winners and losers, tied scores or other ambivalent results are often possible. Diplomacy, commerce, and war routinely produce situations where everyone involved loses, or everyone wins, or stalemates, or deliberate de-escalation, or disruptive muddles with full repercussions still unclear years later.
Minimizing loss and maximizing gain are absolutely NOT the same strategy.
> 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.
Come on, in the same breath where Scott says there's no war [actually, he says that certain other people who take an explicitly idealist viewpoint say there's no war], he also points out that these people die by violence at what we would consider implausibly high rates, the kind of thing where you could describe the actual facts to a modern American and she would insist that you were making up a horror story to satisfy some kind of personal perversion on your part.
There's no trouble killing them off. "We" aren't calling it 'war' because there aren't enough Aborigines to satisfy our model of what 'war' means.
"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.
Are we talking "random people raping other people without justice afterwards" or are we talking "theft common" (ala toronto's "leave your car keys outside") or are we talking "despair and substance abuse"?
Depending on the reserve: rampant child sex abuse, teen suicide epidemics, rampant alcoholism, regular violence, regular arson, regular window-breaking, regular home invasions, unemployment rates around 95%, terrible education outcomes (if I were guessing, that one's due to terrible attendance rates), apathetic-to-downright-abusive band governance, massive misappropriation of funds.
Like...I refuse to say it's colonialism's fault when one of the reserves made their justice councilor a guy with multiple penitentiary sentences and he stacked the system with his violent family members, who perpetrated multiple abuses. Them not being prosecuted IS colonialism's fault, though. Ugh.
I don't think it's just pride or status that makes hunting more enriching than a minimum wage job. Stacking shelves, working a factory line, mopping floors etc. are all classic alienated labour: repetitive, heteronomous, and done solely for a wage. Hunting on the other hand is something people find intrinsically enjoyable enough that it's done recreationally.
I think it's worth saying. I can't help but think of his "Why Do I Suck?" essay from some years back every time he writes an absolute banger like this. And don't even get me started on "The Colors of Her Coat"!
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.
...not sure why there's a PSA if only the Aboriginals (congrats on using what is generally agreed to be a racial slur, tho) are suffering from it.
It also is/was an issue in Northern Labrador and on one Cree reserve I am aware of. Given that it's REALLY bad for people I think it is largely avoided except by the truly miserable.
There's a PSA because it's a big problem. Like the "that was a joke" PSA "put your poo in the loo" -- big problems get PSAs.
The "read a book" PSA for blacks (this was a whole list of "tell black kids what they should do" including using deodorant) was pretty popular (until black folks realized white folks might watch it, and it looked pretty bad.)
I doubled down on this above before I saw your comment. Glue sniffing is being left out here. That went into a whole other demographic. Also spray paint. You spray it into a paper bag and then you breathe in the fumes. The drawback is you often get paint on your face.
Well, substitute glue sniffing for petrol sniffing, and you can expand your demographic considerably. I know it was a serious problem up in Labrador back in the day. I don’t know if it persists.
When I was small child and we would go to the gas station to fill up the car I couldn’t help but get close to that hole that led to the gas tank and breathe it in. I loved the smell of gasoline. I got over it or I had it slapped out of me. I don’t remember which.
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.
What's the point you're trying to make? Many East Asians get flush reactions from drinking alcohol, this is something genetic. Culture is involved too, but genetics can be hard to overcome with regard to specific things for different human groups.
Length of time with "access to strong liquor" is less correlated with "reduced violence" than "how much access did your average person have to strong liquor" (aka if you drank regularly, that was selection pressure against "angry drunks.")
I'm not even talking about violence, I just mean alcoholism as in the likelihood of developing a chemical-body addiction to alcohol. The people most badly affected by strong liquor seem to be the descendants of hunter-gatherers, as opposed to the descendants of farming and herding people. Among the latter, many have/had access to hard liquor, but don't seem as chemically liable to become addicted to it.
USSR basically addicted everyone to vodka. They made it cheaper than water. (I think vodka was related to their ability to allow "free speech" -- if the given excuse was "he was drunk! he didn't mean it!" you could say whatever you wanted).
"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.
It was kind of odd that Scott led with the idea that "aborigines" would unhesitatingly tell you that there are eight genders, and then showed a chart that divides society into four (4) classes, with different terms for the male and female members of each class. There is no way to operate this system at all without recognizing that the number of genders is two.
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
Of course I'm not being sardonic. Merely relaying what an advertising executive told me. As said executive routinely cruised gay bars for free drinks while living in Washington DC, I think he knows what he's talking about.
Well, he knows what he’s talking about re being gay in Washington DC. Gay capital of the western hemisphere is a comparative statement. It’s kind of like Hootersville being the rutabaga capital of the world.
I don't believe that first statement is true. He's not gay. He does, however, know quite a lot about advertising to gay people, and part of that is knowing where they live (to know which markets to advertise within).
Regarding the fertility thing - the only thing the wikipedia page on the Marinds mentions about the fertility drop is that it was "mainly attributable to earlier introduction of gonorrhoea" as well as an epidemic of "granuloma inguinale" (another STD) starting in 1912. Which sounds a lot more plausible than than rape physically destroying women's reproductive systems.
Rape physically destroying women's reproductive systems is an ongoing issue in conflicts in Africa. As in they're no longer able to be continent with urine.
Don't mean at all to downplay the violence. But you know urinating is different from the reproductive system right? Incontinence is very common after physical trauma such as vaginal birth, not infertility.
>"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.
Maslow's hierarchy is usually portrayed as a pyramid, no? Usual construction pattern with those is, first you build out the ground level to some necessary width, then you bring in additional material - which starts out at ground level - and move it up to fill in the higher levels as appropriate. Foundation-plus-adjacent-stockpile has a broader footprint than the final planned structure, so someone who didn't know the plan, and mistook stockpiles for an intended part of the structure, might be confused to see it get narrower late in the process.
A hunger strike is unusual behavior by any reasonable standard, so naturally it's going to be an odd edge case. Think about the symbolism of it, though: for the intended political message to make any sense, the striking party's subsistence needs have to already be quite secure in objective terms. "Not eating" needs to be clearly a *choice* they're voluntarily making. They could give up the strike at a moment's notice - if their demands were met - and, after having done so, their survival would no longer be in doubt. If the striker were, instead, likely to starve for unrelated reasons, their threat to do so on purpose wouldn't be nearly as personally costly, thus a far less credible signal of commitment to any cause.
I think one of the lessons of the Aboriginal experience is that people who feel their lives are meaningful can generally cope with poverty better than well-off people can cope with meaninglessness and alienation. "He who understands the Why can bear almost any How," as Nietzsche said in one of his more sensible moments.
I don't think that's the factor -- most depressed people don't feel they have much of a choice about their circumstances, and this belief doesn't seem to cheer them up very much. Rather, I think it's that people can cope with practically anything if they think there's some greater purpose behind it.
Yes, but when you’re depressed, that is an in interstate, but it’s but it’s not true. It might be somewhat true in some cases, but generally if they shifted their perspective, they do have choices. I am talking about really not having a choice in a very concrete pragmatic way. Like we don’t have a choice about whether we die or not.
Depends. Find your average Amerifat and tell him he needs to run a deer down. No tools, just sheer determination. Yes, it's cool if you can do it -- but, really? Do you want to "run a deer down" the way the Amerinds did?
I'm not going to say I haven't chased deer through the woods! Because I have. They outran me. I'm very impressed by the people who can catch them, and I think they deserve to be seen as cool and should take pride in their high degree of physical dominance. Further, I think that sense of pride and coolness is common not only among human groups, but for many (most?) mammals. Being strong and fast and able to survive in the wilderness is valuable for more than just humans!
So it's strange that Scott doesn't understand that pride, when, for instance, horses, orcas, dogs, hamsters, gorillas, elephants, etc do understand it. I myself have (for various reasons) made peace with being relatively weak, but it's perfectly obvious why somebody who was raised to expect a life like Davy Crockett's would be driven to suicide by having to live like Milton from Office Space.
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.
I think the harsh environment does all your selection for you. Instead I think that people used to these harsh conditions are already desensitized and you need a particularly gruesome ritual to have the appropriate psychological impact you need it too.
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.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if conditions now are worse than they were in the 1970s due to the fact that any kind of positive intervention (like taking children away from awful parents) is now considered racist and off the table.
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.
But most immigrants are already members of "modern society," is my point. Certainly many come from more rural and traditional areas, relative to e.g. Toronto or Houston, but they're not like Yanomamo tribespeople.
Or to put it another way: they come from places that were already colonized centuries ago, so I don't think it makes sense as an analogy for the experience of initial colonization.
Yeah, that's true, agreed. But as a thought experiment, Scott's framing of the immigrants with the highest possible compatibility compared against those with the lowest compatibility helps a reader imagine just how vast the gulf must be for Australian Abos when entering modern society, even centuries after the initial contact with Westerners. It's not really about colonization per se, more about the technological/organizational development gap, which is much smaller for virtually any group than for Abos. Australia's technological/social development and trading relations were more undeveloped than Africa's prior to the European conquest.
> "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?)
Solved. From the app, the link leads to a webpage with the option "open in app" didn't notice that the last time. In the app, I can mark the text as saved, to read later.
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.
I looked this up and I think Scott has oversimplified; as well as the four-way classification into Murri, Kumbo, Ippai and Kubbi they had a further classification by different animal totems (Bundar, Dinoun, Duli etc), and then marriage rules depend both on your top-level group and also what animal totem you have.
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 radically think some things through to their logical conclusion.
I'd definitely want some smaller-scale testing and room for incremental refinement, rather than everyone jumping straight into such a system with both feet. Any monoculture is a potential single point of failure.
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!
I still think that if those who dismiss him read one of his works in full/or mostly in full, their assessment would change significantly. Alas, I don't think many of those critics have the open mind to read someone whom they've already grouped as "problematic" in their mental schema.
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.
Except that they're not (in general, although we're talking about hundreds of different groups and some may differ) ordered; the sections (I've also heard them called moieties) are notionally equal.
Many tribes had complicated systems where your family's moiety changes through the generations; if you're an Alpha then you must marry a Beta, your sons will be Gammas and your daughters will be Deltas, then your Gamma sons will marry Phis to produce Rhos or something like that.
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.
This is very interesting but I want to point out that there's a lot of overgeneralisation here among the hundreds of different and largely non-interacting language groups with distinct cultures. There's similarities and common themes, but also massive numbers of variations and exceptions across the continent.
The most egregious example would I think be the idea that a Kamilaroi man could wander to the other side of the country and have his Kumbo status understood and acknowledged. Different language groups would have entirely different and non-intelligible systems. Adjacent groups might have enough contact to be able to map their systems onto each other, as in the table here which shows corresponding classifications from different Central Australian language groups https://www.clc.org.au/our-kinship-systems/ but you can't just wander from Kamilaroi to Arnhem Land and expect your Kumbo status to mean anything to anyone.
As an aside, the term 'aborigine' is now seen as disrespectful by most Australians; we've reached the end of a hyperstitious slur cascade. 'Aboriginal person' or 'Aboriginal Australian' is more common, though the latter is awkward when describing people who lived before the modern nation-state existed, and the former awkward when also trying to refer to groups from other continents that are commonly described as 'aboriginal'
There's a push to import the North American term "First Nations" at the moment despite the massive conflict with any normal us of the English word "nation" or for that matter "first".
I remember there was a push in the 90s for the term "Koori" but it fell out of fashion once it was pointed out that this was a term specific to certain languages.
I’m really, *really* confused by the nature of the generalisations in this review. Until I read the book itself — which I’m doing now — I won’t be able to assess how much of this is due to Hiatt’s writing in the book vs your summarising of it, but I wanted to flag the deep confusion first.
For context: I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence in remote Indigenous communities in “Central” Australia, particularly the northern and western parts of South Australia. I was raised by an anthropologist. And as an adult, I’ve lived and worked in cities on the east coast (Sydney, Canberra) and spent substantial time in Far-North Queensland, Arnhem Land, and elsewhere. I’ve got close & lifelong friends who are Indigenous Australians, some of whom still live in extremely remote parts of the country.
Almost all of the claims that you’ve made throughout this post seem (as I read them) to be premised on the notion that there was such a thing as a unified Aboriginal Culture on the Australian continent 250+ years ago, and that some amount of that can be reconstructed from contemporary ethnographic evidence and archaeological records. As I see it (and have in some cases experienced first-hand) there very clearly wasn’t/isn’t such a thing, at least on the specific fronts you’ve highlighted. Even in the fragmented post-colonial context, in which there’s a huge pressure to unify for political bargaining purposes, 'Aboriginal Culture' seems a bizarre fiction. I’ve spent enough time in different remote communities to be pretty confident about this particular point. It’s not just that a Pitjantjatjara speaker can’t understand a Wiradjuri speaker or a Yolŋu speaker. It’s not just that kinship structures or marriage customs or initiation rituals (such as the ones you’re describing) vary widely. And I don’t think it’s just that I found myself extremely confused by some specific (different) norms when I first started hanging with Indigenous people from the mountains in New South Wales & northern Victoria in my 20s (… or that I’ve met old folks who could recall seeing white people for the first time in a “first contact”-ish sort of way, whereas nobody in Sydney could possibly have claimed that so recently). It’s that the whole underlying ontologies are different. Across the continent, attitudes towards conflict and violence are wildly different. The thing that counts as “initiation” for different groups — how long it is, what it consists of, whether any version of it is even still practiced by anyone — is so shockingly different from one side of the country to the other. Levels of gender equality and differentiation of roles/expectations vary hugely. Moiety divisions are essential in some places and ridiculous alien concepts elsewhere. Even the underlying stories that are told about technology and the need for technological development are different (see, eg, the Dreaming stories about Kimberly points). And all of this is, I think, due to different adaptations to different contexts.
Sure, lots of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders today believe some specific things about the continuity of their cultures & cultural practices that suggest a unity of practice and belief over a long time, but that’s new (and more fragile/limited than it seems from a distance). The notion of a singular Aboriginal Culture is very obviously a modern political fiction: something downstream of colonisation; partly an activist response to (what is sometimes understood, from the inside, to be) a slow-moving genocide; partly a top-down imposition that is itself rejected by the people themselves. Anthropologists all know this — as do many/most Indigenous Australians — but they can’t/won’t say it in public because of the way in which Native Title laws etc are wrapped up in the fiction(s). For example, almost everyone knows and will openly admit that the “welcome to country” ceremonies that are now common practice in Australia were invented by the TV host Ernie Dingo; while things like a ‘welcome to country’ were common in some parts of the continent, they were completely alien in others. More confusing, though, are things like smoking ceremonies and the concept of “secret [men’s/women’s] business”. afaict, smoking ceremonies became widespread pretty recently. I know for sure that the contemporary emphasis on (and belief in) gendered secret knowledge is downstream of probably-false/definitely-motivated “expert testimony” from a single anthropologist in a native title case in the 1990s: the Hindmarsh Island bridge controversy. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander woman today who knows that fact, or rejects the importance of “secret women’s business” in their own culture. Why? Because claiming that something is “secret women’s business” it’s now a load-bearing part of navigating the surrounding power structures.
“What were anthropologists even doing?” / “Did Aboriginal tribes have chiefs?” ... Mostly, as far as I can tell, they were gradually discovering that, thanks to the ridiculous amount of cultural-adaptations-to-circumstance, a hundred years of bitter academic debate had been (mostly) wasted on an ill-formed question. The Aboriginal tribes in far-north Queensland had entirely different ontologies to the tribes in the Western deserts. In some geographies, chiefs were universal; in others, Big Men; in others, neither. The trouble is that that isn’t a politically or legally acceptable answer.
Either the book fails to make the bizarre diversity clear, or your review fails to transfer the specificity of the descriptions to your readers, or it’s a combination of both, or it’s a secret third thing. I really can't tell.
I’m not denying that there’s a lot of generalisation that we can/should do — I think cultural anthropology, as a discipline, has been shockingly bad at doing comparative theorising & abstraction that is so obviously necessary and possible — but the generalisations I see above are not, in my view, the generalisations you’re looking for. They’re not even accurate claims about kinship or gender across the continent, even though there *are* general claims about kinship & gender that you *can* make! Why can’t we talk about gender differences in hunting/gathering practices as a function of environment [see, eg, Bird & Bird’s “Why Women Hunt” (2008) on the Martu case study]? Why not dive deep on the fact that Central Australian cultures are shockingly conflict-avoidant and compromising when interacting with government legal systems, whereas activists in the tropics seem to occasionally flirt with violent revolutionary action? And yet, as generalisations go, some Dreaming stories *are* pretty universal?
As far as the alcoholism and drug abuse, and the violence and incarceration, and the ongoing suffering in remote communities: yeah, it’s really fucking bad in some places. I’ve buried a lot of friends, and I’m only 30. I can point to some ways in which government policy, even today, seems only explicable via deliberate bad intent: a project to burn piles of cash making things *worse* rather than better.
Overall, I feel as though this was probably a good post and a beneficial thing to be curious about, but a strange book to pick. Try Peter Sutton’s "Politics of Suffering" (2009) on the failures of government policy. Walshe & Sutton’s "Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?" (2021) is a book-length academic critique of Bruce Pascoe’s "Dark Emu", and that itself is a revealing controversy. Or read Tyson Yunkaporta’s "Sand Talk" (2019) for a first-hand contemporary Indigenous perspective — just try to remember that, with Yunkaporta in particular, it’s a guy trying to sell “Indigenous Thinking” to white intellectuals through gritted teeth with a gun to his head.
Thanks for the very detailed and informative post!
I know squat-all about Australian Aboriginal culture(s), but even so, I thought while reading this review: how come Scott is making it sound like there's one "Australian Aboriginal" culture, how likely is it? Australia is a big place! Think how varied the Native American cultures were before the Europeans came, why wouldn't Australian Aboriginal cultures be equally varied?
"I can point to some ways in which government policy, even today, seems only explicable via deliberate bad intent"
If you feel like sharing, would you mind telling us what you think the government/white people NGOs could do that would actually *help* alleviate the "alcoholism and drug abuse, and the violence and incarceration, and the ongoing suffering in remote communities"? Have you seen any programs that do more good than harm? Anything we can learn from Aboriginal people who have successfully integrated into modern Australian society?
I am much less well informed than Athropolagus but I feel compelled to reply to your last paragraph anyway...
I feel like the fundamental problem is that modern policy doesn't _want_ Aborigines to succesfully integrate into modern Australian society, it wants them to "preserve their culture".
But preserving their culture inevitably means living in poverty and squalor, it means living in a remote and insular community with no economic activity, speaking a language known only to your three hundred nearest neighbours. White Australians can go anywhere and do anything, but Aboriginal Australians are told that in order to preserve their culture they need to stay in one place and do nothing.
Isn't the implicit thinking behind the modern policy( that you mention) that the overwhelming majority of Aborigines would become part of the bottom of the underclass if they assimilated into society? A priori, one would not expect good outcomes for them...
The people I'm talking about are already the bottom of the underclass.
If they could move to a medium-sized regional town and hold down a full-time minimum wage ($25/hr) job, their material situation would drastically improve.
Scott's article mentions the "spiritual" problem of modernity for many technologically backward indigenous people. Given that many "modern-adapted" humans are depressed in today's society, wouldn't you expect that for Aborigines a material improvement would be outweighed by the spiritual/identity loss of ceasing to live communally, even if quality of life is already quite low?
Ooof, I can *try*, but take this with a grain of salt!
In the last census, ~3.2% of the Australian population (~812k) identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. While a much greater *proportion* of that population lives in relatively regional/remote contexts as compared to the non-Indigenous Australian population, it's worth noting that
(a) the Northern Territory, which has a ~30% Indigenous population, is doing a lot of the heavy lifting re those numbers, and
(b) Australia is just incredibly fucking urbanised for everyone at this point.
I mention the demographics upfront because I think there's a near-universal misunderstanding shared by most Australians (& nearly everyone else): in practice, "let's help remote Indigenous communities" often means "let's help a small number of people who are easy to identify on a map" not "let's help Indigenous Australians as a group". A big amount of the continued suffering — the so-called "gap" in health/education/employment outcomes that we claim to want to "close" — is, I suspect, something more like: currently-alive Indigenous people in Australia are living, often in towns/cities, with the multi-generational consequences of being *forcibly* "assimilated" rather than allowed to sensibly navigate any transition; having been relocated at gunpoint, denied work & education & healthcare, often forced to work without pay on cattle stations, and violently oppressed until very recently. The Australian government was still forcibly removing a lot of children (in the 'Stolen Generations') from their families into the 1970s. The first 'apology' for that came in 2008. And, if what you care about is enabling a recognised group to evolve & change while retaining "their" "culture", it's worth noting that in order for a recognised group to be granted a "Native Title" claim, they need to prove a continuous and continuing (and legal-fiction-y 'unchanged') cultural connection to their Country since before colonisation ... which is often impossible precisely because of past government actions. Even if granted, such a 'native title' claim (a) only affects land still owned by the Crown, (b) confers extremely limited rights (mostly related to negotiated payouts from mining companies), and (c) can't overlap with another group's claim. In effect, what I'm saying is that—
1. Much greater legal sovereignty and self-determination would be great, but it's not gonna help as much as some might hope;
2. The entire legal structure here insists on a kind of fig-leaf parody of cultural independence;
3. A lot of things that improve circumstances for the worst-off members of australian society will help a bunch of Indigenous australians, almost by definition, and so specific targeting is less effective than you might expect; and,
4. A lot of the issues are pretty entangled with a diffuse underclass.
In any case, a few things seem like obvious goods specifically for the regional/remote contexts:
1. Dry Communities. More specifically, giving remote communities the legal/self-governance affordances that are necessary for them to become the dry communities that they already want to be. There's a huge, noticeable difference (on every front) between the communities that are successfully alcohol-free and the ones that aren't; the ones that *are*, as I see it, are mostly the ones that have been allowed to ban alcohol in a big region. [Related: the introduction of low-aromatic fuel did a lot to combat petrol sniffing, and that was driven by people in the communities demanding it.] [See also the current (bad) situation in Alice Springs as an example of government / law enforcement spending resources on the wrong things.]
2. Legal reform to improve treatment of children in detention. Raising the minimum raise for incarceration and banning the use of spit hoods etc as a bare minimum, and generally spending the same dollars on non-carceral interventions that are currently spent on incarceration of kids. Before she died, Sophie Trevitt was a remarkable lawyer working at Change The Record on this. If we're gonna have a lot of extremely poor & disadvantaged children interacting with a still-pretty-fucking-racist legal system, reducing the degree to which their rights are violated and they're further traumatised seems like the least we could do (and also seems to help a lot in reducing lifetime over-incarceration).
3. Decentralised/independent power infrastructure. The average town camp household in Alice Springs spends over $3000 on power a year; the cost is *much* higher in more remote communities. A huge number of Aboriginal households throughout regional/remote Australia rely on prepaid power meters, meaning they need to buy prepaid "power cards", which they often can't afford, and experience frequent outages as a result. If those same regional communities had independent solar & battery infrastructure, it would be way cheaper and more reliable overall ... but nobody *in* the community has the the money to pay for that infrastructure upfront and, even if they did, they're often legally prohibited from building their own. [This bothers me more than many the other issues, because I've seen a number of instances in which the federal government spends HEAPS on temporary interventions that nobody in the community wants — "making sure everyone is educated = everyone gets a forklift licence even though the town doesn't even have a forklift" — while simultaneously adding new regulatory barriers to energy independence.]
4. Arts Centres. These can seem like silly/useless "plz preserve your unchanging culture so we can marvel at you as an aesthetic fetish object" things, but the international contemporary art market buys a lot of (increasingly ambitious & impressive) work from Indigenous artists. The Tate Modern has an Emily Kim Kngwarray show on at the moment, for example, and that's the tip of a very large iceberg. It's economic activity that connects remote communities to a wider market, while also letting them set the terms of their own cultural continuity etc. In practice, this usually involves someone (an "Arts Centre Manager") acting as an interface to the world of prestige art, but I suspect that improved power + internet infrastructure will/would alter that somewhat. Successful arts centres also often become service hubs for their communities. As I see it, this is a bootstrapping / start-up capital problem more than anything else: most existing arts centres make money, they just need resources and a talented (usually white / legibly prestigious / bureaucracy-literate) person to get things started.
5. Banning pokies (electronic slot machines) Australia-wide. These are a plague on the nation, and particularly on regional/remote communities and under-educated/disadvantaged Indigenous populations. I understand that Australians have a "complicated" relationship with gambling, but holy shit. I think it's particularly pernicious because [I'm told!] many Aboriginal cultures *previously* used gambling-adjacent things to semi-randomly reallocate resources within the community; now there's a hyper-optimised super-addictive thing that's extracting those resources instead of (at least!) keeping them 'within' the community where 'Elders' and/or Big-Man-style people in the community can help prevent catastrophe.
footnote/addendum: it's also worth noting that some of the badness has come from *restrictions* on movement for communities/cultures that previously relied on it. A lot of Australia is big and empty and unforgiving; lots of cultural groups 'have' land that stretches huge distances, and that they would have historically moved across in response to changing resource availability. Hence the stories enabling you to navigate to water in places that none of your *living* relatives have ever been. When Scott says "Aboriginal villages weren’t mental health disasters when they were following their traditional ways" he is, in many parts of the continent, completely confusing things: nobody was living in 'villages' or even semi-permanent settlements in the western desert, because they would die if they did; they were moving across a vast expanse seasonally; there were no "villages" until colonial intervention forced their creation. At least in the stereotyped remote parts of Australia that he/many seem to imagine, "following their traditional ways" is synonymous with "not living in villages at all". My sense is that, even if you magically removed the generations of genocide etc, you'd still get a lot of desperate poverty just by insisting that people stay still when the ecology can't support them.
Thank you for writing all of this, I also thought the generalizations seemed weird based on what I've osmosed about Aboriginal culture, but at the same time I didn't know enough specifics to weigh in myself.
There were hundreds of separate language groups spread out over a continent, from desert to rainforest. Tasmanians were cut off from the mainland for thousands of years. Cultures a few hundred kms apart might have been completely alien to each other. The icons often associated with "Aboriginal culture" are generally only associated with a few groups e.g. the didgeridoo is only from a few groups northern Northern Territory/Kimberley, the concept of dreamtime/the dreaming is from a few groups in central Australia.
>spend large portions of your time dressing up in cool costumes and terrifying people with bull-roarers.
bullroarer mystery cults are actually the best case we have for:
>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”.
The reason that making a phylogeny of these was abandoned was not for a lack of evidence, but rather because anthropologists problemetized ideas about progress and comparison to death. I collect dozens of researchers statements here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-bullroarer-much-more-than-you
Surely the obvious explanation for emigrants to more wealthy countries being more successful is that they're selected for being unusually willing to adapt to a new culture.
There are no "Aborigines" left, all are gone with the end of pre-contact people. Now decades behind us?
We're left with a spectrum of descendants, near or far.
One way or another all are now living with contact with modern life, in all its complexities.
Beyond all the wishful thinking that's cold reality.
As is that life for far too many of those in limbo land, a foot in each culture, has been disastrous.
Which disastrous dishonest deluded separate development strategy has been promoted officially for decades by both sides, despite sustained poor overall outcomes, especially in health, community violence.
Raising children into this depressing context comes close to institutionalised child abuse.
Poor old Hobbes and Rousseau (whom I consider my philosophical enemies at a deeper level but fair is fair...)
Neither of them believed "the state of nature" was a historical reality. They were positing a pre-social existence that would reveal what man "really is" underneath all historical experience.
Now if that seems a strange idea it's because it is. Most people would agree with Aristotle that man is a social animal (or a "political animal," a better translation of what he actually said though "political" too has a very different meaning for us).
But Hobbes and Rousseau knew that. Their conception(s) of "nature" are different: something like "that which is always there and would be realized more obviously in other conditions"...
"But that raises a second question: a modern Aborigine has two options. They can move to Sydney or Melbourne and try to assimilate"
Lots of young aboriginal people get scholarships to prestigious private schools that they attend in a boarding school (with other rural kids). There's a common thing which happens, which is between finishing school and going to college, the school tries to convince them not to go home to their village. Reason being, when they do, they often don't come back to attend college. The outcomes for the people that don't come back seem anecdotally much worse (young parents, low incomes etc.)
The most common reason given for this happening is social pressure - when they're looking to go to college, the local village chastises them for thinking they're "better than the rest of us". No idea if that's the only thing, but similar issues seem to happen during school holidays, but (at least anecdotally), the issue doesn't seem to be as big as when graduating.
One thing that we might learn, in different ways, both from Julian Jaynes and Steven Pinker that hunter-gathers are psychologically (in consequence of biologically) quite different from people who have learnt to live in civilizations. It takes quite a bit of civilizing or self-domestication to be able to live in cities of millions of strangers without panicking.
So, adjustment of an immigrant from poor Asian countries is far easier and of an entirely different type than adjustment of an Aborigine.
The comments from people outside of Australia are hilarious to read by anyone who lives in Australia and has engaged in discourse around Indigenous affairs.
Note my choice of language. If you were to go to any party in Melbourne or Sydney and use the term "Aborigine", you would be immediately castigated as using a borderline slur. Dogwhistle territory for the liberal youth of the nation.
Claims like "oldest continous culture on earth" and "traditional owners and custodians of the land" are commonplace and used liberally by everything from major banks to the biggest sporting leagues in the country. Place names now use both English and First Nations equivalents in the postal system, and will soon subsume their British place names.
Given it is a little backwater country on the edge of the empire, it's understandable that many US and UK residents do not understand the wide cultural project that has taken place over the past couple decades in Australia to glorify and idolize Aboriginal culture, despite its serious incongruity with Western ideals.
I did wonder with regard to all the people saying "abo", whether Scott would be equally sanguine about other ethnic slurs being used in the comment section.
It might not be intended as a slur but that combination of letters has unfortunately long been assigned a connotation that is not as neutral as "Brit".
It's more like deciding to shorten Japanese to "Jap", occasionally someone does it because they don't know it was used as a slur, but if someone uses it repeatedly while talking about crimes committed by that group (as in this comment section), it's likely they don't intend it as a friendly nicknaming.
This reminds me of the obvious cultural debt owed the Indigenous people of Greenland, in re the American Cold War air base formerly known, with efficient evocation, as Thule, now Pituffik. (No, you’re not pronouncing it right.)
Or the continued insistence on giving objects in the solar system, very long ludicrous Hawaiian (?) names because of the GPS coordinates of a telescope. This weird theater.
Mount Wellington, the large mountain overlooking Hobart, is now "kunanyi / Mount Wellington". Not Mount Kunayi, not even Kunayi, just "kunayi" with a lower case "k" in violation of all grammatical rules in the English language because being difficult is the point.
Trump amidst rolling back Obama’s (weird, AutoCorrect truly has no idea re Obama) national monument designation for the Bears ears area, decided to troll a little bit by calling the area he kept in the monument by some rather harsh sounding Navajo name. Not the general Indian preference.
Which words I think mean bears ears anyway, but lack that “cellar door” quality of Bears Ears - I mean there’s a mountain that looks like bear ears pretty pan culturally I think.
Anyhoo at least his trolling may have the effect of trolling himself in that if he gets around to undoing the part of it that Biden restored (I think he too kept out some uranium) over again, it will be harder to undo the part he’s ceremonially given the un-euphonious Navajo name I think. But undoing it will still be a travesty of course.
1. The rich symbology and symbolic hierarchy, often laden with sexual themes, by some traditional societies are organised has always been the thing that has made me go "huh, maybe Freudian psychology isn't bunk". "People who have sex with their mother-in-laws might have magic penises, but these will be hunted by ancestor figures, and also semen contains life essence that can be depleted" really makes even the determined skeptic want to crack out the Freud and take a second look.
2. "No sex across “age gaps”, where some people define “gap” as “half your age plus seven” and other people refuse to define it but reserve the right to judge transgressors anyway." - Oh God, really? Has this now gone from being a Twitter thing to an Actual Taboo? When I was younger, the "half your age plus seven" thing was more of a strong and usually quite sensible suggestion. Age gap relationships are usually a bad idea, but so long as everyone is an adult, enforcing a ban seems so... unromantic.
3. The general point that most customs probably serve *some* function for some end, getting distorted into the view that they must be benificient customs that keep society ticking over well for everyone, is the unique zaniness of the "Chesterton's fence" talking point. Yes, something of long standing probably has a function, but 1) It's not necessarily a nice, utilitarian one for the common good- in fact, there's not even a guarantee that that function is in any person's interest, and 2) There's no guarantee that it's possible to recover or know that function.
>The general point that most customs probably serve *some* function for some end, getting distorted into the view that they must be benificient customs that keep society ticking over well for everyone, is the unique zaniness of the "Chesterton's fence" talking point.
Chesterton's Fence doesn't say that all long-standing customs are good or optimal, it simply says you should take the trouble to learn what a custom's function is before abolishing it.
Yes, but- and I think this article illustrates it well- the idea that one can know "the purpose" of a custom misses the point that most customs are polyfunctional, and regardless, trying to work out their purpose(s) is not really something we are capable of in most cases.
Select achievement by subgroup, state/territory = NT, compare indigenous students to non indigenous. (I suspect “Very remote” in the NT is actually a better selector for ancestrally Aboriginal students than identification, but we can just keep it simple for now).
What you see: year 9 Aboriginal students are somewhat worse at writing, on average, than year 3 non Aboriginal students. This is with potentially substantial selection effects pushing the score up - by year 9 many Aboriginal students have stopped attending, or attend very irregularly.
So: a lot of Aboriginal adults have reading and writing ability worse than typical fairly young non Aboriginal children. This, I think, would make it challenging to live in Sydney or Melbourne, let alone assimilate.
I wonder if you're underestimating the power of numbers at the end there.
In these premodern cultures, presumably 50% of all children are dying by the age of five. One third of women are dying in childbirth. And other non-hackers are dying all the time. It's a society of winners much more than our 95% survival society.
Perhaps the decrease in mental wellbeing is nothing more than the more loserish half of the population now surviving into adulthood and beyond.
I thought the consensus was that a lot can happen in 50,000 years, evolutionary change wise. I feel like the “Get a job” commenters are denying this, or winking at it.
I see Scott himself saying (joking?/ I don't have time to re-read) is an hourly wage job so much cringier than hunting game ... Others saying that having some of your citizenry as "museum pieces" is not workable, given the marvelous temptations on offer; they should always have been assimilated into modern, non-welfare life from the start.
I can't have any opinion about Australia but do wonder if there is a big enough space that *we* kept out of, if it's impossible for people to live the life that the land shaped for them.
50,000 years seems like plenty of time to become suited to one thing and not another. At least, I thought people thought that change can happen over still "smaller" time scales than that, but perhaps I'm wrong,
I feel this way about animals and space on Earth, not just humans.
Well the people in some Andaman Islands still live a primeval life, but only because they chose to avoid contact with outsiders and the outside world has honored their will. It becomes harder to live a traditional life when you discover other peoples have much greater power/technology, the stuff your elders tell you just won't mean as much as it did before. I'm not sure I understand your point about the 50,000 years, other than to say that knowing about natural selection makes it quite evident that Australian Aborigines would not adapt very well to Western society.
Well, yes, I do think Scott mentions how he would not be able to adjust to Aboriginal society. The problem is they can't continue their tribal/cultural existence after coming face to face with modernity, imagine if we came face to face with aliens who can travel at the speed of light - Western society is still probably closer in scale to such a society than Aboriginal culture was to Western society. This is more about the harsh realities of nature, not morality.
Maybe so. Maybe it is all determined now. My instinct is that people should not put all their eggs in one basket. But again, this is from an environmentalist lens, so hardly to be shared here.
>The obvious answer is something like pride. Even if the average Aborigine has more stuff now, they get it from something like convenience store work or welfare or something, and this is less pride-inducing than being a traditional hunter (even if traditional hunters had less stuff and often starved). 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 mean, even the Taliban have struggled to make the transition from badass warriors to tame office workers:
And they're making the transition as leaders of the country after winning a war against the world's most powerful military. For Aborigines, who are generally getting very low-status jobs after their society was turned upside-down by infinitely wealthier and more technologically advanced foreigners, the situation would be even worse, because there'd be extra feelings of impotence and humiliation which presumably wouldn't apply to the Taliban.
But I do seriously wonder whether some of Aboriginal Australians' problems might be solved by recruiting them into the army. Being a soldier is generally considered masculine and cool, so they could still get status and a self-image as a proper man. Army pay isn't usually very high by regular civilian standards, but by the standards of an impoverished Aboriginal community it's probably very good. Military life has a lot of privations and hardships, but I'd certainly take it over some of the more gruesome initiation rituals (at least I wouldn't be expected to let my commanding officers slice my d**k open). And the general process of military training -- leaving home, being placed under the instruction of more experienced men, learning to do manly things -- is far more similar to traditional Aboriginal life-scripts than working as a shelf-stacker or going on benefits.
There’s some credit to the army idea but it’s assuming that the modal young aboriginal man would make a halfway-decent soldier and not a pure burden on the military, which seems like a big assumption. The military has no place within their cosmology so apart from the superficial similarities of leaving home to serve elsewhere they’d likely struggle with a life strictly regimented by the commands of rich outsiders
True, it's quite possible that most Aborigines would be, for whatever reasons, unsuitable as soldiers. Though I'm not sure following the commands of rich outsiders specifically would be necessarily be that hard -- from what Scott says above, it sounds like a young man would traditionally spend several decades working for his prospective in-laws, who would be outsiders and (by Aboriginal standards, which is admittedly a pretty low bar) richer than him.
This is a fascinating review, but as an Australian, it felt so weird to read it.
I couldn't get past the sense that you seem to believe that problems of racism, poverty and systemic disadvantage are sort of - if not resolved - then well enough on the way to being resolved that we can just take them as read and look for other explanations (like hurt pride) for things like suicide rates and poor educational outcomes etc etc. I think the legacy of colonialism is really salient and I think have a lot of explanatory power.
There's a world of difference between what rights/opportunities/choices are available to a theoretical Aboriginal person today vs. the situation the average Aboriginal person likely faces, statistically. It's not some sort of free choice between joining a healthy, functioning traditional society on the land with some sort of continuity with tradition (they exist but it's not straightforward to live there, and many rural communities are just horrible, modern, shanty towns), or 'moving to Sydney' and becoming a lawyer or something. People do manage to do these things, but they're very, very hard and require extraordinary agency, determination and luck.
Kids now are 1-2 generations separated from government policies that treated aboriginality as a problem to be gotten rid of, via 'assimilation' (confiscating children en-masse) and via rounding up and moving whole communities into rural shanty-towns without a means of making a living or practising their traditions. Those kids are less than one generation from the legal doctrine of Terra Nullius, which essentially denied Aboriginal people ever had sovereignty over the land here. Large parts of the country were literally under Federal military occupation until 2022 (imagine if Trump sent the National Guard to establish martial law in many tribal lands and then kept them there for 15 years). That's ended now, but people in those communities are still subject to curfews, compulsory income management and other authoritarian rules. Huge numbers of kids still go through a foster system that's not a great experience to live through, but the alternative is for authorities to leave them in risky situation that themselves cause harm. Police still doing police things.
Racism is certainly not considered permissible in the public sphere now, but scratch the surface and there's a snarling ego-defence, especially among the older generation. Their knee-jerk reaction to any discussion of the state of affairs is to get defensive, because they're sick of being held responsible for things they didn't themselves do, and sick of being reminded that despite their fairly comfortable situation, things are not ok. Generally speaking, we're living with the weird, unresolved consequences of a century of basically-genocidal policies, and there's total unwillingness in our most powerful demographic to even acknowledge the situation.
Sure, it's politically correct to say acknowledgements of country at events and generally say nice words about 'sovereignty never ceded' and not think much more about it, and everyone clucks their tongue every time the Closing the Gap report comes out and shows the numbers still absolutely suck, but it's absolutely not politically correct to say 'the justice system is still systemically racist' or 'mandatory income management targeting only indigenous communities and enforced by martial law is a racist and tyrannical policy" unless you're in particular circles of affluent and/or young people.
I don't want to dismiss the idea of a cultural 'psychic wound' being a factor in Aboriginal mental health, but I think the wound is much more tangible than 'feeling hurt pride because being a store clerk is low-status when you could have been a hunter'. That's such a glib formulation. One theme I have seen in things I have read is Aboriginal young people talking of a sense of grief or loss, that despite their best efforts piecing together their culture/ontology/society via a few living elders and the work of mostly-white anthropologists, most of it has been destroyed and lost forever, and they're now at the bottom of the social-status stack in a society that only recently decided it wasn't hostile to their very existence.
This comes across as quite ranty and polemical, and I really want to stress that I'm not trying to accuse you of insufficiently caring about these things, or whatever... I just wanted to share that I felt bizarre reading this, because it felt like wondering why the flowers are wilting, and reading a decades-old book, arriving at the conclusion that they might not like the climate this far south, while the house around you and the flowers was literally on fire five minutes ago and smoke is still pouring out etc.
I think Scott alludes to the fact that people who had a comparatively low state of development until recently will not be able to thrive in a modern technologically advanced society where they have to compete against others who are better suited to it. It's not really about morality, the gap between Europeans and Native Australians was just a huge one, it's no surprise that the Natives rarely end up as successful lawyers or bankers.
I don't think it works like that? Computers didn't exist 100 years ago and today people all over the world are programmers. People are flexible and learn things, I'm not aware of some kind of biological process that would make members of a particular race categorically unsuited to any aspect of the modern economy, especially in any way with sharp edges where you couldn't then make the same claim about people of many races with those attributes.
Well, computers didn't exist, but people in societies where the average job was more complex( like for instance, industrial) have definitely adapted to the newer technological changes such as computers better. This is why you see East Asians and West Eurasians at the top of the US socio-economic pyramid, and this is just a small example of the general trend. This is also why Jews were and are disproportionately successful in the West, they have been doing "white-collar" professions for a longer time than the average European or American, and being literate is virtually a necessity in traditional Judaism. Most Europeans were illiterate before the late 19th or early 20th century.
Weren't you guys just chasing down aboriginal children with dogs, and giving them punitive punishments for escaping the detention camps? As in within the last five years?
I don't know what you mean by detention camps (that was a COVID thing), but while I can't think of a specific incident you might be referring to, it's conceptually/essentially similar - or has the same vibe - as many things that have occurred in the prison and juvenile justice systems, particularly in the Northern Territory, in the last 10 years, yeah.
At least five aboriginal children escaped from the Howard Springs Detention center, and they used dogs to track them down. The punitive punishment was "you're going to have to say in quarantine longer" because of trying to escape.
This does not make you guys look good.
(continued sincere disclaimer, in case you haven't read it above. I am quite good friends with someone who is banned from going to Australia for work he's done with Aborigines -- made the government look stupid because they couldn't tell the performers were Aborigines).
Genuinely curious: what % of the Aborigine problem would you ascribe to genetically lower IQs? Under their traditional lifestyle it seems to me that individuals were tightly controlled: by indentured servitude, by ritual, or by the simple imperative to find water every day. Don't you think it's *possible* that they're simply not cognitively equipped to function in a modern society? I'm not saying that social factors like racism and cultural erasure aren't a factor, but before you go pointing the racism finger I think you have an intellectual obligation to consider the possibility that racist attitudes may simply be a rational response to the genetic reality.
Genuinely curious: would you consider, say, an IQ85 *white* person living in Australia to be "simply not cognitively equipped to function in a modern society"?
Or would you only apply that argument to an Aboriginal person with an equal IQ to them? Or are you using IQ as a motte for a kind of racially essentialist bailey you want to inhabit?
I'm not pointing the racism finger at Scott, I'm saying the post felt profoundly weird to read because it sort of skims over the entire experience of colonialism in terms of traumatic events inflicted on people who are still alive today, instead treating it as an abstract secular historical process. It's an interesting framing, I enjoyed the Rousseau/Hobbes thing, it's just like focusing on the climate when the house is on fire as I said before.
>Genuinely curious: would you consider, say, an IQ85 *white* person living in Australia to be "simply not cognitively equipped to function in a modern society"?
85? Probably not, but it's borderline. That's why the armed forces have an IQ cutoff of 83. Remote-living aborigines have an average IQ well below 85.
I don't know what you mean by "racially essentialist". Aborigines have a lower IQ. That's undeniable. It's also not hard to understand within the context of their history. Their traditional lifestyle had absolutely no requirement for abstract thought.
You didn't answer my question. I would like to know to what degree you think IQ differentials are responsible for their inability to integrate into mainstream culture.
>I'm not pointing the racism finger at Scott
I wasn't suggesting that you were. Your comment seemed to point it at Australian society, however.
In terms of falling for scams and stuff, IQ 85 people tend to do better than IQ 105-115 folks. IQ 85 folks know they are dumb, and if something seems too complicated, they're probably going to say "nah."
This is why it's possible to have entire societies with IQs averaging sub-100.
Do you have a link to a study about that? Otherwise I don't believe it for a second. Look at sub-Saharan Africa if you want to know what an 80-IQ society looks like.
I have looked at sub-saharan africa. These are societies that use "demonic possession" as an element in their judicial system (this can be discussed as "the me that did that isn't the me who is here." -- aka "I didn't do nuttin" -- famous from cop shows. This isn't precisely a lie, if your time horizon is short). They are NOT societies where Pied Piper scenarios occur often. (Compare to "Solar Fucking Roadways" -- a rather obvious scam that has suckered a lot of people in).
I dispute your entire premise that they have 'an inability to integrate into mainstream culture'. Many *have* integrated into mainstream culture despite significant obstacles to doing so that I think are largely due to the colonial policies, their legacy, and general societal racism.
I also dispute your implied premise that integrating into mainstream culture should necessarily be the end goal.
~15% of the general population has IQ 85 or below, so if you think they are "not cognitively equipped to function in a modern society", I think you need to explain why and how so many of them do function in modern society. I think the reasons are:
1. IQ is strongly predictive of many things but it is still possible for low-IQ people to have many strong attributes they use to achieve success/stability/good life.
2. Society has government and cultural institutions that seem 'designed' to create meaningful and productive roles for low-IQ people and generally protect them from harm. It's like a 'social safety net' (thinking of James C Scott) where there is a 'knowledge commons' or generally understood metis that reduces the cognitive load on any one individual. When we colonised Australia, we nearly completely destroyed Aboriginal cultural institutions that would have allowed the full range of mental abilities to participate in their society, as we do in ours. In their place, we created a colonial regime that systematically excluded them from our society until only a few decades ago.
I think that's why individuals of a given low IQ probably do better statistically when they're not Aboriginal - it's because Aboriginal people of a given low IQ lost all their cultural institutional support, have historically been at first totally excluded, then benefited less and less easily accessed the settlers' cultural institutions, and because they have to deal with the social legacy of genocidal policies and their impact on their immediate families and communities.
Although low IQ white Australians do exist, the fraction of similar IQ people among Australian Aborigines is surely much higher.... this makes sense given natural selection and history. This is what's relevant, the average intelligence of an Aboriginal vs the average Australian intelligence. Of course, non-IQ traits among Aboriginals might make it even harder for their low IQ population segment to function well in Australian society, as well as some degree of racism or self consciousness based on looking so different to the majority.
>I dispute your entire premise that they have 'an inability to integrate into mainstream culture'.
Then what did you mean by "...things like suicide rates and poor educational outcomes etc etc. I think the legacy of colonialism is really salient and I think have a lot of explanatory power."
A lot of explanatory power for what? If you object to the term 'assimilation' then just assume that I'm talking about whatever 'that' is. Aborigines have problems, I think we can agree on that.
>15% of the general population has IQ 85 or below
Yes and I'm sure that cohort, white or black, has many problems. They certainly do in the United States. The African American population has an average IQ of 85. They're consistently at the bottom in all aspects of society (except for sports, of course) and something like a third of all adult males spend some time in prison. I think it's therefore fair to say that 85 represents some sort of threshold below which the ability to function in society becomes fraught. Perhaps the actual threshold is 80 or 75, but as I'm sure you're aware, the average IQ of aborigines has been measured to be in the 70s. Remote populations test in the 60s.
>I think that's why individuals of a given low IQ probably do better statistically when they're not Aboriginal
That's probably true though I suspect that it's not as true as you think. Bear in mind that normal distributions quickly thin out in the tails: while 15% of the white population is below 85, only 2.5% is below 70. An IQ of 70 is the clinical threshold for intellectual disability, meaning an outright inability to live independently. Plausibly *half* of the aboriginal population is below that. Do you understand what that means?
>When we colonised Australia, we nearly completely destroyed Aboriginal cultural institutions that would have allowed the full range of mental abilities to participate in their society
Do you think there's any context outside of their traditional lifestyle where aborgines would thrive? I suspect that there's not and also that there's no counterfactual history, short of complete non-interference, where they would still be a functional society in any sense today. Yes contact with the modern west has destroyed their way of life. Why do you suppose they've been unable to create a new one? All cultures must deal with modernity. If one is cognitively unable to do that then that's not the fault of racism, it's simply an unfortunate and ineradicable reality. Stop pointing the finger at factors that didn't create the problem.
I find it interesting that you're refusing the answer the clear intent of my question. The whole reason I'm asking is that I'm genuinely curious about the intellectual distortions that race-based conflict has caused in Australia. You appear to be evidence that they're very substantial.
I find it interesting that you see a result like "average IQ in the 70s" and think "ah, this explains everything, my moral responsibility is alleviated" and not "wow, weird failure mode for the testing, huh" or "wow, their study population sure had some intense selection effects on it, didn't it?!" Your eagerness to treat the history of Aboriginal/European contact as a sort of natural experiment, and conclude that Aboriginal people are incapable of living in modernity is weird to witness, honestly. You claim as though it's a fact that modernity gives rise to intelligence via adaptation, when in face humans developed close to our current intelligence levels in pre-modern times and much of the rest of the (modest) rise can be explained via Flynn effect, education etc. You focus on pre-contact natural selection while giving no credit to the idea of post-contact, (non-biological!) selection pressures that determine things like "which Aboriginal people are living in rural shanty towns in the late 20th century?"
Let me put it like this: if you were an alien hiding out behind the moon, arriving a few hundred years ago, and you wanted to know whether Aboriginal people could live in a modern society, (and you had the power to control world events), would you design your experiment in the way that Australian history has gone? If you wanted an insight into the cognitive abilities of Aboriginal people in general, wouldn't you be desperate to avoid all of the different filters and selection effects acting to narrow and restrict the population considered in the studies you're gesturing at?
Yet people just throw around this "IQ in the 70s" statistic and then say "do you know what that means?" as though this were even vaguely representative of the Aboriginal population at large, (if you can even define exactly what that population is) or their pre-contact society. It means studying IQ is hard when there are massive cultural divides AND a century of genocidal government policies moving and filtering and selecting people AND you choose to study only people who (by the study's very design) haven't "integrated" into society in the way you mean.
So to answer your question, no I don't think purported IQ differences explain much of the social issues experienced by Aboriginal people today in Australia. I don't know why you think you can just demand to know people's view on race and IQ, by the way. It's a bullying tactic that will evaporatively cool your pool of conversational partners until you're surrounded by maniacs.
I find your "intellectual distortions to be substatial", as well, but I am not curious about them and I'm done with this discussion.
I'm sort of confused here. So Aboriginal men were supposed to serve their future mother-in-laws for over a decade, but they were also supposed to hate them and never talk to them? How do you serve someone without ever talking to them?
Yes, and just like animals often struggle to thrive when confined in a zoo, even though they've got food, shelter, veterinary care, etc., so too many people struggle to thrive when confined in an office cubicle.
“When Third World immigrants move to the US, they’re usually pretty happy with their decision. They might not assimilate completely, but they’re often able to hold down jobs or at least avoid spiraling into alcoholism and suicide.”
At the risk of romanticizing Third World immigrants, the typical immigrant experience is worlds apart from the aboriginal experience. Consider what it takes to become an immigrant:
1. You voluntarily leave behind almost everyone you ever loved, everyone you ever knew. This doesn’t just include relatives like parents, children, siblings, and cousins. It also means all your friends, your colleagues, your favorite bartender, your fishing buddy, your priest and congregation. It will be years or decades before you see them again–if you ever do.
2. You voluntarily operate with a different set of moral values, and accept a different set of customs. Yes, you might still believe in Sharia, but most Americans don’t, and you have to interact with them in a way they understand.
3. You accept a severe degradation in social status. That medical degree from Pakistan? Worthless in Canada. Instead of being a doctor, you drive doctors to the Toronto airport, sending them on vacations you can’t afford.
4. You learn a new language. Don’t underestimate how hard this is if your mother tongue is not Romance or Germanic! Many older Chinese immigrants have stories of spending long nights memorizing English dictionaries, telling themselves the sacrifice will be worth it when they’re earning $10/hour in America instead of $1/hour in China.
5. The destination country has to want you, and it probably doesn’t want people who look like they’ll be burdens on society. This doesn’t apply to illegal immigrants–and not surprisingly, illegal immigrants have worse outcomes.
So in order to be a median immigrant from a third-world country, you have to want it more than most people have wanted anything in their entire lives. You have to upend every aspect of your life to live thousands of miles from nearly everyone and everything you ever knew, among people very different from you. It’s not surprising that high openness, highly determined people who sacrifice everything just to join your society, integrate better than median-openness, median-determination people that your society forcibly integrated (aka many of their ancestors sacrificed everything to *not* join your society).
Wait, so the entire continent of Australia had a single native culture? I feel like that tells you something important right there.
I would bet dollar to donuts that this represents some kind of historical event wherein the current culture outcompeted everything else, which probably had to include some cultures that were more war like than the culture that we see now.
I think Scott is generalizing, there were cultural differences and distinct languages and different ecological niches, but the tech gap between every Australian society and Western society was equally large. Contrast this with Sub-saharan Africa, where you had hunter-gatherers but also more sophisticated farming and herding societies.
Book by an actual aborigine: Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. He isn't a full member of any aboriginal society, but he's partially initiated in some of them.
> In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta’s writing process begins with images. Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He yarns with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge.
Hm. Honestly that sounds like he wants to sell a book which doesn't say anything. And I doubt he has an subincisioned penis.I prefer the strange stories about a polygynic gerontocracy with infant betrothals and sister spearing.
That looks like a bad starting point. What do you mean by a chief? What do the people you're talking with think you mean by a chief?
I would think you'd need a leisurely open-ended conversation about how authority works in a society, and it would be hard to get reliable answers because people couldn't put it completely into words and might not want to tell the whole truth.
And then you have the culture that believed so strongly that truth was a commercial quantity, that they lied their way out of their original capital (and a lot of other things). If you didn't pay for the truth, you got lies.
Some cultures were a lot more reasonable for "European Anthropologists" to study than others.
Taken narrowly, no, most of us don't have political leaders who are called "chiefs", except for the very few Americans who are members of native tribes lead by chiefs.
But we do have oodles of political leaders, Presidents, Governors, Mayors, Sheriffs, and whatnot. Many of them are even leaders of smallish non-state polities. "Mayor" is etymologically related to "Big Man", which an anthropological and political science term is an adjacent concept to chiefdom (although US Mayors, as holders of formal offices rather than people who have informal power via wealth and patronage, have more in common with Chiefs than with Big Men).
We also have other important non-political leaders. Some of the ones most salient in our day to day life are called "bosses". In English, Boss and Chief are distinct terms, but other languages use the same word for both (e.g. "Jefe" in Spanish).
"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."
This was a great and thoughtful review, and I really appreciated it, as I appreciate most of your writing.
So I am trying to be as far as possible from snark or sarcasm or an easy jab when I say that it mildly terrifies me that major decisions and discussions about how AI should fit into a future human society are being led by people who cannot understand the above fact.
I'm a bit astonished to hear that this system was practiced across the whole giant continent of Australia, most of which they could not possibly visit more than a small corner of it in their lifetime.
Everywhere is that results in wildly different cultures and languages every few hundred miles!
There’s a lot of tension between “go through a decade of physical abuse and misery to become high status” and the “everyone takes care of each other and is reasonably equal, with allowances for sex and age”. The most obvious high status reward seems to be multiple wives. What happens to the men who, as a result, get no one? Is there no resentment there? How do these differences in status play out?
Get rich or die trying. Reading a few reports/descriptions from 200 years ago it was a hobbesian world with lots of small scale conflicts. Not war between nation states or even tribes, but small groups allying/feuding with each other.
Plus diseases. So it is easy to imagine fewer marriageable (older/high status) men than marriageable (young/fertile) women. With the initiations the older men could also dynamically control their peers/competitors/successors: Too few men? Fast track younger guys into high status. Too many men? Slow track them.
> But when a people gets colonized - after the bad part with the conquest and land theft and oppression, once they’re granted citizenship and the settlers feel vaguely apologetic - doesn’t it end up kind of like being an immigrant into a First World country?
No, not even close. When I'm forced to do something, I lose my agency. It is not me who is trying to assimilate, it is the outside world is trying to assimilate me. Suppose the best case scenario for the assimilation occurs when I do not resist and even trying to help. But how can I help? What parts of me are me and what parts are cultural elements that should be eliminated or replaced with elements from the foreign culture? It is not always obvious.
This is the case when I do not resist, while in reality I probably will. I smoked tobacco, I was considering quitting; I tried repeatedly without success. However when I heard how lawmakers were finding new ways to make it harder for me to smoke, I had to force myself from continuing to smoke out of spite of that, to keep my agency intact. It is a big issue for teenagers separating from their parents, but people who successfully overcame teenage issues are not immune from such thinking.
Moreover there is one more thing. Immigrants are self-selected. It means not only that they exercise their own agency, but also that they are willing to assimilate at least to some extent. If I despise the other culture and value the traditional ways of my native society, I will not become an immigrant.
I wonder if the successful adoption of elements of Western culture in Eastern nations (Japan, China, South Korea) could be explained in part by the adoption being partially a choice rather than a colonial mandate, as well as the fact that Western culture contains elements (as a result of crosstalk) from Eastern culture already.
It would also be interesting to see if cultural similarity predicts assimilation success.
Was the American occupation of Japan after WW2 a choice? The reason Asian countries have been able to assimilate to Western culture and others haven't is that Asians have sufficiently high IQs. Western culture is complex and individual-centric. Dummies can't handle that. I would bet any amount of money that a careful study would show that national IQ is the single best predictor of assimilation success.
Wasn't that largely downstream of Commodore Perry forcing Japan to open itself to the West? Of course that's less forcible than outright occupation but I'd put it below immigration on a scale of "how much of this was our idea".
Either way I think it matters way, way less than IQ. Look at India. They're fairly Westernized and that's on the back of colonialism.
Another interesting set of comparisons is the various Polynesian peoples, especially the Maori and the native Hawaiians.
These people were much less technologically advanced than the Indians or Japanese, though significantly more so than the Aborigines; the Polynesians had some agriculture and permanent settlements, but no cities or writing or use of metal.
When placed in a very similar situation to the Aborigines, the Maori and Hawaiians have performed much better; while there's some problems and gaps still do exist, Polynesian peoples have done a vastly better job of integrating into first-world society than Aborigines. It would be interesting to figure out why.
One thing in particular, I think that most of Scott's arguments about status loss moving out of a tribal society and into a larger civilisation do apply to the Maori as well, and this is certainly an issue (it's a theme in the book and film Once Were Warriors) but doesn't seem to have been as big of an issue.
That is really interesting. It would be nice if we had a good metric of cultural similarity, to see if Maori customs were closer to the European settlers.
Though it would be equally interesting if there were another set of variables entirely that explains the discrepancy.
I think there’s a couple of things that are getting short shift here. Number one is the assumption that the Qualia of pain to someone 10,000 years ago is anything like ours. They had to live with a lot of it on a daily basis. They could not succumb to it. If they were going to survive. Seen in this light some of these barbaric rituals take on a new dimension. You could even say they were doing the kid a favor.
The second is equating good, accurate hunting with taking part in a boomerang contest is pretty dismissive. I imagine it was very serious business. The kind of concentration one would expect trying to become a navy seal.
I see that "Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Aboriginal Australia by Geoffrey Blainey" is available in a thrift store near me, courtesy of Nick Cave.
Excellent review of an excellent book! Laughed multiple times. The sections stuff makes my eyes water. Interestingly, some regions only had 4 or 2 sections and some none at all. My guess is that they're not very old. One approach that modern anthropologists abandoned is the study of cultural evolution and diffusion. There were many commonalities within Australia but also fascinating distinctions. I think we'll end up finding that the last 50,000 years was much more dynamic than currently assumed (for instance, spear throwers appear to have been invented or introduced only 8000 years ago). But academic studies of these questions had been hamstringed by the Pan-Aboriginal political movement that began in the early 1970s and led to the censorship of many resources and even the reburial of 40,000 year-old fossils. You may find this deep dive interesting (although it's a bit depressing too): https://quillette.com/2025/01/25/the-original-aboriginals-australia/
The way that article completely ignored the Black War/Tasmanian genocide left a really bad taste in my mouth, especially given that it mentioned disease directly before mentioning the "decline" of the Tasmanians (and why do only Tasmanian women have living descendants?)
It didn't explicitly deny what happened to them, but it's written to give non-specialists exactly the wrong impression, despite the author clearly knowing better.
Great review. Even tech billionaires seem not quite fulfilled with just money and things. They turn to jiu-jitsu or other forms of more anciently aligned forms of personal masculine pride supporting endeavours too.
I wonder if some of the resistance to adapting to modern ways has to do not with individual pride, but with the power of tradition. To go from a kangaroo hunter to a minimum wage store clerk (and I might note that even in modern society, jobs involving heavy physical labor still have a certain cachet) might seem like moving to an easier, more rewarding job. But it carries a message of "It is not just that you were wrong- your family, your culture, your people going back thousands of years were wrong. While your culture was doing the same thing over and over for millennia, someone else was inventing a better way of doing things, which apparently you guys weren't smart enough to think of. Now, the best you can hope for is to hold a job at the bottom of our structure, which will still give more rewards than being at the top of your structure." For people with strong traditions and a tendency towards identity concentrated on relationships to others, that is a problem.
It reminds me of the Old Believers, the Russian Orthodox who did not care for the changes to the Church introduced by Peter the Great. There were certain theological issues involved that I don't understand, but one of their key arguments was tradition- and Eastern Orthodoxy, even more than Catholicism relies on tradition. To say "But this isn't the way we used to do it- you are saying that all of our ancestors were wrong, and facing divine judgment for that" was a powerful argument. And the Old Believers didn't simply react by becoming marginalized alcoholics, they were known to commit mass suicide by fire rather than adapt to what authority figures told them what to believe.
> 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?
...Yeah? Sounds very intuitive to me tbh. Between the status hit, the subsequent loss of self-respect and desirability to the opposite sex, the alienation (in a Marxist sense), and a crushing thought that it will never get better, it's a huge decrease in psychological welfare! I can completely understand the causality from there to alcoholism and suicide.
I think it's unfair to say that Henrich's view is that indigenous societies are all roses. He doesn't focus on it because he's interested in the cultural evolution angle, but I expect he would readily agree many indigenous practices are extremely unpleasant for the people involved in them. The point is more to be impressed by how well it all works despite the total lack of top-down design (where "works" doesn't mean it makes everyone happy, but rather successfully reproduces itself generation to generation in a difficult and hostile environment).
"If you’re keeping young people in a decades-long state of sexual frustration, maybe their sisters start to look pretty good; certainly the past few years of online pornography have suggested that this option is never far from the sexually-frustrated-young-person mind."
Regarding the prevalence of step-sibling and step-parent pseudo-incest porn: I think you see it for the same reason most sodas are kosher: there is a small minority that prefers it that way and the rest of the market simply ignores it as irrelevant, so there's no particular downside to giving that minority what they want.
There is at least one advantage to gerontocracy when compared to other kinds of "ocracies": if you're not in the favored group today and want to take over, all you have to do is wait.
Do we have anything as weird as mother-in-law languages?
Absolutely. American adults speak differently around children, and the younger the children are, the more our language gets distorted. For example, we are very likely to replace the words "urine", "penis", "vulva", or even "toilet" with euphemisms when in their presence, including when teaching children about the proper ways to use a toilet to urinate and then clean their penis or vulva afterwards.
Just posting my random aboriginal theory to get it off my chest: an underrated aspect of why aboriginals have such a bad time is diet. There's lots of books citing all the terrible health outcomes that the first agricultural people experienced during that transition, but I've never really seen it prioritised as a policy question for improving aboriginal outcomes beyond broad platitudes.
To me it's reasonable that living on a diet you are not adapted to is going to result in all sorts of health downsides - which in turn affect mental health. The massive prevalence of endocrine disorders supports the theory (eg. very high diabetes rates). Should aboriginal people be eating any significant amount of processed carbs? I suspect probably not. Alcohol is ruinous too, obviously.
Not close to the whole story of course but a corner of the issue that is under-discussed imo. That said - it's tough for the Aus govt to act on these sorts of questions given that it perpetrated a genuine attempt at cultural genocide.
Are Americans still allowed to make mother-in-law jokes like in the Henny Youngman / Rodney Dangerfield era?
President Obama's mother in law lived in the White House with him for eight years. Being old, that struck me as pretty funny, and it sounded like the basis for some good stand-up comedy meta-comedy about stand-up comedy, but nobody else seemed to find it funny. The only comedian I ever heard of making a single joke about it was Jimmy Kimmel, and his one joke bombed.
I like Otto Rank's explanation of the anthropology. He thinks early human men basically denied having anything to do with procreation for the same reason later cultures emphasized an inherited obligation for the son to continue (or revenge) the father's immortality project. The Classical Greek experience, for example, included a teacher-student obligation. In any case, Rank's evidence comes from those groups that didn't have marriage. Males and females lived separately, with the females raising the boys and girls until they came or age when the boys were made to join the Men group and females carried on with the Women. All the fanciful stories about how pregnancy happens illustrates how far early humans were willing to go in denying the obvious. Of course, that is Rank's thesis for all culture. We "know" we are part of nature but we idealize our essence as separate.
PS - Rank got thrown out of the club when he criticized Freud for thinking that it was all biology. Likewise, he thought Adler's Will to Power, and Jung's collective psyche were simply attempts by individuals to create an ideology as their own immortality project.
"So what’s gotten worse? The obvious answer is something like pride."
Maybe it's something we might call "meaning"? Loss of meaning is something people in our society struggle with, as well, see Viktor Frankl.
I imagine that there was a lot of meaning in the times before outside contact. You knew how the world worked and what you had to do to be successful. Afterwards, this was gone.
So I was reading Aristotle's The Politics, and this really jumped out of the given what SA notes about the aboriginees
"It is fitting, therefore, for the women to be married at around the age of
eighteen; the men at thirty-seven or a little before.91 At those ages, sexual
union will occur when their bodies are in their prime, and will end, con- 30
veniently for both, at the time when they cease to be fertile. As to difference
in age between parents and children, if the children are born soon
after marriage occurs, as can reasonably be expected, they will be at the
beginning of their prime when their father's period of vigor has come to
an end, at around the age of seventy."
How remarkable that an ancient Greek could hit upon roughly the same 20 year gap between men and women being the ideal, as the aboriginees did thousands of miles away over different millennia. Of course this could just be a coincidence… But if not, why not?
May have something to do with another choice tidbit of Aristotle: "if males have sex while their bodies are still growing, this is held to impair their growth; for this growth too takes a definite period of time, after which it is no longer extensive".
> "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.
That sounds like it wouldn't contribute to a single mainstream discourse, but rather to a heavily contested discourse where different groups are incentivized to say different things to take advantage of the legal situation.
Perhaps I explained it badly. The Kuringai were just an example; the narrative being supported is the idea that Aborigines in general were "owners" of the land.
There are other points of view and other groups with incentives, but discourse that supports those points of view is racist and effectively banned in polite society.
You mean, discourse that supports those points of view is *said to be* racist? Or do you mean that it actually is racist? Or that there is nothing more to racism than being said to be racist?
Anyway, I would advocate that no one in Australia say "aboriginal culture is the oldest culture". If they want to claim that certain land is long-established traditional land, they can make that claim without making up orientalist lies.
> You mean, discourse that supports those points of view is *said to be* racist? Or do you mean that it actually is racist?
I don't think that the word "racist" is sufficiently well defined at this point for there to be a sensible answer to that question.
There are many true and/or reasonable statements that don't meet my personal definition of racism, but which might meet someone else's. I don't think arguing over the definition of "racism" is particularly interesting, so I'd rather argue over whether things are true or reasonable than whether they're racist.
When you say effectively banned, do you mean that folks that say stuff like this are going to prison, or are being expelled from Australia? (I am rather under the opinion that Australia doesn't have freedom of speech where Aborigines are concerned).
I'm sure it's the same thing that happens here: you're shunned from mainstream discourse and risk losing your job, status, and/or social connections. If you're speaking on behalf of a company or institution then you risk inspiring a boycott or legal action ("hostile or discriminatory workplace"). Just because the government isn't directly doing the censoring doesn't mean that it's not censorship.
Australian columnist Andrew Bolt wrote a column making fun of the extremely white-looking people who are celebrated for being the First Aboriginal Astrophysicist or whatever. He got sued by one of his targets and a judge ruled Bolt can't make fun of people who claim to be aboriginal if they are even a little bit aboriginal. Or something. It's hard to find a clear explanation of the state of the law, perhaps because people are worried about being found in violation of the law, whatever it is.
Yes, that's one of my pet peeves. It's so ridiculous to think that the same language groups occupied the same area for millenia but I see it claimed all the time.
> 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.
Why orientalism?
I don't think the problem is a lack of understanding of how numbers work. You might, for example, see the claim that Coptic Christianity is older than Egyptian Islam. The 𝘯𝘶𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘴 are pretty clear on that point. What's questionable is the way in which you decide that (1) some set of phenomena should be reified as a distinct culture; and (2) a particular number is correctly associated with that culture.
I'll bet you that Egyptian Copts and Muslims have a lot in common, and that a lot of what distinguishes the Muslims from the Copts today was part of the culture before there was a concept of Islam, and that a lot of what distinguishes the Copts from the Muslims today developed after Islam came around. But those aren't numeric questions at all.
"Orientalism" is here the term for the tendency of members of one culture (most often the industrialized west) to treat other cultures as mysterious and unknowable and unchanging and exotic, rather than treating the cultures as just another culture, like our own past or present ones. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism)
Specific cultural practices can be dated, and can be older or newer than other specific cultural practices. But a culture as a whole (just like a species or a language) is never unchanging, and always has ancestors, so the cultures as wholes (just like the species and the languages) are parts of one big tree, and don't have meaningfully different ages.
Chinese culture isn't older than Egyptian culture or vice versa, though writing developed in one place before the other, and so did agriculture, and so did any other particular cultural practice. Similarly, sharks aren't older than humans or vice versa, though one of these lineages may have had something like its modern body form earlier, and one may have developed its current blood typing earlier and similarly for any particular genetic factor.
In your example, the practice of Christianity was in Egypt before the practice of Islam, but as you note, once you talk about Coptic Christian culture in comparison to Arabic Islamic Egyptian culture, each has some aspects that are more recent than corresponding aspects of the other and some that are older.
People sometimes make the opposite mistake about their own culture, assuming that it is new, because they can see some differences from past versions of it, while they treat another culture as old because they see some similarities to past versions of it. But a clearer comparison doesn't treat the cultures themselves as having ages, just individual cultural practices.
> "Orientalism" is here the term for the tendency of members of one culture (most often the industrialized west) to treat other cultures as mysterious and unknowable and unchanging and exotic, rather than treating the cultures as just another culture, like our own past or present ones. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism)
As that link is quite clear about, "orientalism" is the term for an attitude towards the "orient" [the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea; this is an etymologically correct use of the word "orient" that fails to account for the fact that in modern English it refers to the region around China].
> But a culture as a whole (just like a species or a language) is never unchanging, and always has ancestors, so the cultures as wholes (just like the species and the languages) are parts of one big tree, and don't have meaningfully different ages.
> Chinese culture isn't older than Egyptian culture or vice versa, though writing developed in one place before the other, and so did agriculture, and so did any other particular cultural practice.
Yes, I know. I generally make this point about languages, but it applies equally to culture.
What I'm saying here is that knowing how numbers work has nothing to do with the confusion that people experience. To claim that Chinese culture is younger than Egyptian culture, you need to make a lot of assumptions about what "Chinese culture" and "Egyptian culture" mean, and all of those assumptions are incoherent. But the numbers are the least problematic part of the argument. Numbers are simple. If anything, the fact that they 𝗱𝗼 understand the numbers is a major part of what's leading people astray.
Among opera fans, orientalism would be understood as a synonym for exoticism. European guy visits a foreign place where people have weird habits or beliefs (pretty much missrepresented from how that culture really works). The guy faces adversity and hostility from some locals, but there is this local girl who wants to sleep with him. After their ways part, she commits suicide. (Lakme, Madamma Butterfly).
The other variant is the girl, who sleeps with him and ruins his life (Carmen, Dellilah).
The music is adjusted to sound weird, usually the pentatonic scale.
Carmen is technically an European girl, but Roma/"gypsies" , or even Spain were exotic enough for the particular authors or for the composer, so it qualifies as this type of opera.
In Samson and Dellilah, the Jews get the western musical scales, while the Phillistines get the immitiation of scales like from Morocco or Algiers.
In summary, throw in some weirdness and pentatonic scales, and you have a foreign culture as a plot device.
Or: "Orientalism" is the term for when interest in another culture - any other culture - is a strictly one-way process.
I deny the notion that cultures can't have different ages just because they're always changing. That's letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. You can't date a culture with absolute precision, but it's perfectly unambiguous to say that e.g. Jewish Egyptian culture existed before Islamic Egyptian culture.
I think what you said looks fine - it’s just when you try to claim that the early Jewish Egyptian culture and Islamic Egyptian culture are somehow the *same* culture as contemporary Jewish Egyptian culture or Islamic Egyptian culture, such that one of the *contemporary* cultures is *older*, that it becomes problematic.
"the idea of one culture being “older” than another is just a kind of patronizing orientalism"
I'm not sure. Is it "patronizing orientalism" to point out that Chinese culture is *older* than Polish culture, say, in the sense that if you go back 2000 years, you can observe an advanced civilization that has *some sort of* continuity with present-day China, but unless you squint super hard, you can't really see anything like present-day Poland?
It's sort of like evolution: yes, both modern sharks and modern monkeys had the same time to develop from their last common ancestor, but if you go back 70 million years, you see creatures that look very similar anatomically to modern sharks and nothing that looks anywhere near as similar to modern monkeys. Is it patronizing to point this out?
The biggest problem I see with both of those examples is that people too often think that if the external form of sharks remained relatively similar during that period then they must not have undergone very much change in anything else either, and similarly for whatever aspects of Chinese culture have been relatively constant. I think that ancestors of current Chinese people were likely sedentary agriculturalists for longer than ancestors of current Slavic people were, and the ancestral cultures of China exerted more influence on their neighbors than the reverse, while the ancestral Slavic cultures were adopting more features from their neighbors for much of that time. But I don’t think any of that adds up to “the culture is older” in a particularly clear or useful way.
*snicker* "adopting features from other cultures" is a classic Japanese cultural practice. By that token, Japanese culture is constantly evolving (the way English sorta grabs words like taboo and schadenfreude, simply because it can).
You can argue that Karaite culture is older than Jewish culture, in that one is quite a bit more "changey" than the other. In fact, I kind of like that as a way to define "age" of culture -- a sort of rough "guess" of the age of cultural practices.
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
I think it's important that Kaczynski was against industrialization, not agriculture.
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.
Isaac Bacirongo's semiautobiography (dictated, but not written, by him) mentions that the Bantu see the pygmies as a source of spiritual power that is not available to the Bantu, and hire them to perform important magical ceremonies.
And I've read somewhere less authoritative that the Vikings saw the Laplanders in much the same way, as people who could wield magic that the Vikings couldn't, and hired them to perform important magical ceremonies.
It seems to me that this is also what modern Westerners want from the peoples they see as indigenous groups.
Does this match with shabbos goy?
No, Shabbos Goys are invented to solve a particular technical problem in Jewish law, they are given tasks that are decidedly not magical or ceremonial but practical (like turning on the light switch), and they may be of any gentile ethnicity regardless of aboriginal cred.
That's an interesting insight. See: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro
I'd call myself a progressive Australian - woke even - and I don't think you know many progressive Australians. I do not think at all like you imagine I do.
So just in case you are interested in the way one group of modern Aborigines are currently thinking, check out the Sovereign Union page on facebook.
The way I see it, they want recognition of the truth of settlement/invasion to be fully noted in the history of Australia, and also by the right wing deniers - always supported by the Murdoch media - who minimise the violence and psychopathic behaviour of the colonists, ignore and quibble about new research that modern anthropologists and historians are publishing that refute the horror stories of Aboriginal culture.
And right wing people insist on hanging onto the horror stories told by diagnosable white men who thought they were the high point of evolution.
Yes progressives think we should pay for whatever 'they' want. If they want to integrate and some do, they should be supported and encouraged to do this. These people do need extra help even more than the poor whites who don't have a culture, because of the racism.
I know an aboriginal bloke who got a job as a teacher in a rural town and went to the real estate agent looking for a rental. Nope not a one. His white mate went in later and amazingly there were 2 houses to rent for him.
Petty little microaggressions that can be so disabling, if they happen all the time.
And if they want to stay on country they should also be supported in a decent standard of living.
Gina should pay, Twiggy should pay. We didn't have any millionaires in Australia when I was growing up. There are too many now and they have too much money and power.
Those who make the most money from owning the land and profiting from it's resources, should pay perpetual rent to the people whose land they stole, recompense them for the lives they took and develop some respect for the intelligence of a culture that they don't and possibly can't understand.
"The way I see it, they want recognition of the truth of settlement/invasion to be fully noted in the history of Australia, and also by the right wing deniers - always supported by the Murdoch media - who minimise the violence and psychopathic behaviour of the colonists, ignore and quibble about new research that modern anthropologists and historians are publishing that refute the horror stories of Aboriginal culture."
I went to Australia 10 years ago, and all I saw everywhere was "recognition of the truth of settlement/invasion", except the "truth" was cartoonishly propagandistic in favor of the Aborigines. Every museum, every billboard, every indigenous flag all sent the unmistakable message that the aboriginals were perfect beings living in harmony with nature while the colonists were literally Hitler. No recognition that some aboriginals welcomed the settlers' society while others did not; that some were allies of the Europeans while others enemies; that aboriginals benefited from European institutions and technologies; that the "terra nullius" concept makes at least some sense with nomadic peoples. Never, not once, did I ever read "the horror stories of Aboriginal culture". This was 10 years ago, and I bet Australia (like the rest of the West) has gotten significantly more woke since then.
" No recognition that some aboriginals welcomed the settlers' society while others did not; that some were allies of the Europeans while others enemies; that aboriginals benefited from European institutions and technologies; that the "terra nullius" concept makes at least some sense with nomadic peoples. "
Can't speak to the situation in Australia, but this sounds identical to what conservatives say about indigenous tribes in the US. Extrapolating from that, it's highly ironic, because even the white allies, the ones who adopted white technology and cultural norms, and the ones who were willing to share the land had what land they were using taken away from them and shoved into marginal reservations at great cost to their lives. Was it different in Australia?
Oh really, you were here 10 years ago and all you saw was....the aborigines being hard to get along with and white people bending over backward to make them welcome lol You must be one of those exceptional Americans who have contributed to the wonderful government you have now. Look at all the high value capitalists making America great.
OMG. what a hoot it all its.
But really, you were looking at things here in Australia through your biased eyes and your American ignorance and arrogance and seeing what you want to see to support your view that the white culture is the best thing evah and the colonisation here there and everywhere was good and decent and just the way intelligent humans roll.
You know what, I'm 70 something so I've been here in Australia for a long time and I played with Aborigines when I was a child living on a sheep station in Central Australia. I've worked with them as an adult in different situations and the central problem for them is the lack of respect that white Australians have for their culture.
If you haven't come across the horror stories of cannibalism, incredible violence toward women, stupid and lazy etc, you haven't read any of the Murdoch media publications and the right wing culture warriors who criiticise any good news story about Aboriginal life pre invasion. etc and really you have nothing useful to add to the discussion so why pretend you know something other don't?
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)
Come on, Scott specifically told you not to look that up.
Woke ain't wrong here. Except that that's socialism, and therefore evil.
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.
Le mot 'épopée' n'existe pas en anglais; on dit 'The Epic of Gilgamesh'
Incidentally, Ziusudra and Uta-napishtim are (respectively) the Sumerian and Akkadian names/titles of the same mythological figure -- in the Standard Babylonian Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, he is referred to by both.
The Sumerian word ZI means 'life', making it the equivalent of the Akkadian word napištum (from the Semitic root n-p-š 'life, soul, breath', cf. Arabic نَفْس and Hebrew נֶפֶשׁ).
The sodomites were defintely more than just annoying. They raped angels, which were probably understood as godly incarnations by the people that wrote the bible.
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
> 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
The cuneiform literary culture persisted into the first few centuries AD. It did get eaten into by other forms of writing, and there were some Bronze Age protests of this that survive to us, but the timing isn't good for this theory.
(Cuneiform is also used to write different languages in different places, but that would be true too early instead of too late.)
That particular theory is not my main interest here and I haven't done any further reading since listening to the podcast a few years ago, but I don't think the idea that it *survived* long after that really has any bearing on its accuracy. The point is not that no one kept writing cuneiform, but rather that the fact that it was no longer the case that you had a vast and diverse world united by the use of cuneiform tablets -- hence the similarities with the Tower of Babel 'confusion of languages' story. The displacement by alphabetic systems and also the general widening of the literate world to include far-flung groups using Phoenician-derived systems is perfectly sufficient to generate this sense.
(Also, if people were already complaining in the bronze age, the timing actually seems pretty perfect for those complaints to transmogrify to myth, given that the babel story would've been written during the mid-iron age during the babylonian exile ~500BC.)
"Das Kraftfeld der Mythen" by Norbert Bischof. Should be translated by AI any day now.
> the weirder parts of early Mesopotamian myth (such as the gods punishing humans not for moral transgression but rather for being loud and annoying)
That feels to me like the most relatable part of mythology.
Thanks, I agree so much that I said basically the same thing, minus the Mesopotamian reference
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."
I agree
Maybe "similarity with the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness" plays a role too? Being a hunter is more "natural" than being a grocery store clerk, so it might be better for *some aspects* of mental health (although I'm sure "not starving" is great for other aspects)
Regarding the immigrant-colonized difference, my understanding is that most immigrants aren't hunter-gatherers, they already have industrial-society jobs in their country of origin. When you're in this situation, moving to a similar but better-paid job in a more prosperous country seems like a more straightforward improvement
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.
Presumably they knew how to raise the other people's teenage sons though! Sure, they were of a different "section" and disciplining your own children can be more difficult than other people's children (for starters, the kid is much more likely to disobey), but it's not like the whole process was something fundamentally alien and unknown to them. The sudden lack of challenging rituals themselves (and the utterly solid belief on the part of the initiated that they *must* go through those to continue living) probably played a much more important part.
Also, in reality, between the 1910s and the 70s, Aboriginal children were being actively kidnapped from their communities by the Australian government to be raised by missions and convents and other such institutions. Many survivors of these institutions are still alive today, and many more Aboriginal Australians are children to the parents that came out of this system.
Adoptees and people who have been through the regular foster system also don't do particularly well - it turns out institutions are absolute hotbeds of child abuse. These being specifically racialised institutions, likely had worse abuse problems.
In effect - no initiation system with your Elders.
You do NOT trust the whitefella to do it now, because they either heavily traumatised yourself or your parents - in fact you should probably just distrust and fight the government in general because they keep forcing you into their brilliant schemes that will definitely fix it this time (is it an opportunity to send another white representative who is annoying and useless at best and actively abusive at worst? Yes it is!)
As far as I can tell, the most effective organisations are formed by Aboriginal people who have stepped up into the role of Elder and give kids support and advice about navigating the confusing whitefella society out there - like, what does moving to Melbourne to play AFL actually entail, and who can be trusted to help you, and which organisations are actually a bunch of nutty Christians who will try to indoctrinate you into their cult in exchange for aid.
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.
The U.S. seemed to have had around two generations where part of the solution was nearly universally-watched evening family sitcoms.
You aren't wrong. I heard it somewhere that our current state of cultural polarization is a function of the fall of network TV.
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.
In practice perfect segregation is impossible and what happens is
1. The upper strata make their presence and power acutely aware to the lower strata, sometimes out of petty cruelty and self-aggrandizement (my grandma has seen tenant farmers being whipped for no discernible purpose), sometimes just to secure material goods they feel entitled to. Think of the endemic sexual harassement and assault girls from the lower classes were routinely subjected to. Or the habit of the aristocracy to pay their lessers if and when convenient, counting on the fact that a tailor or a goldsmith assertively demanding what their are due would have been seen as shameless and impolitic. Or the thousand other little abuses commoners suffered gritting their teeth, from stepping off the sidewalk (that is, into the street flowing with feces) to gratuitous violent threats to humiliating, barely disguised rituals of submissions. This is bound to create tension.
2. Because of 1, when possible, people will always pursue social mobility. This necessarily creates some tension with those considering higher status their birthright. Think of the trope of the parvenu and the impecunious noble fighting over a girl, an office or petty status markers. Sometimes these fights can get pretty deadly, on the personal level. Sometimes they enter the realm of policy and that's how you get millions dying of starvation bc y'know, abrogating the Corn Laws would "undermine the traditional social fabric of the country and consign it to mercantile interests". And when social mobility is entirely ruled out, eg bc of race or closed castes, well, if everything aligns perfectly you might get Dr King. More likely, you get Beria.
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.
If women still have familial and social responsibilities, can't those men get a sense of worth by doing those same activities? Modern culture is much more egalitarian than many traditional patriarchal cultures, so roles aren't as gendered.
> 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....
But didn't most people in history live in social groups of MAYBE a couple hundred people? And within that larger social group you are probably only competing for status with a small subset of people. Maybe there are 50 young men between the ages of 18-30 who are competing for status. And even in an extremely simple society, wouldn't there be quite a few hierarchies that you could theoretically rise in? Best hunter, fisher, builder, fire maker, cook, best looking, smartest, funniest, richest, etc. It seems likely that almost anyone could put themselves in the top handful of performers in at least one of these categories. And get all of the status, life satisfaction, etc. that comes with that.
I'm assuming a lot of modern western ideas about the organization of this society, like that many different skills and attributes are valued and accrue status separately and that people have the freedom to do pursue things where they have comparative advantage. So maybe nothing like this was very common historically. But I think it's obvious that people that live in cultures more like this, and especially who avoid social media and maybe modern media in general, end up much happier with their relative position in life.
Hm, yeah, that makes sense to me. Those were the days...
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.
Or we could regulate the algorithm in various ways.
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.
Not having the whole world to compare yourself to is probably optimal for the majority; a very small minority would benefit from being able to socialize with literally the top 100 people in their craft; it's the people in between that are kind of screwed either way.
You're looking at this from the point of view of someone who could be the best mathematician in a small town, though.
What about the experiences of people who would have been middle-of-the-pack or below-average in a small town, who now find themselves being middle-of-the-pack or below average in a global society? You don't have to be exceptional in any way to live a satisfactory life.
Gen Z talks about this openly. That all the "I am a millionaire by 23" tik-tok videos really mess with their self-esteem.
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.
I don't buy the analogy here. Even leaving aside the divinity thing Jesus wasn't lowest-possible status, he was a regional celebrity and thousands of people would show up to hear him speak.
Even before that, he was the literate son of a carpenter, which pretty much makes him middle class by first century Judean standards.
Yeah he was sort of the Scott Alexander of his time and place.
Wow, that's quite the analogy. And I guess Pontius Pilate was his Cade Metz, and he rose from the dead instead of just moving to Substack.
Yup
Arguably the biggest difference between a traditional lifestyle and spiralling into alcoholism is alcohol.
It has been argued that Aborigines are far more susceptible to alcoholism than people descended from groups that have had alcohol for a while.
It's not an 'argument'. Full blooded aborigines don't produce the enzyme that allows you to break down ethanol at a reasonable rate. This is why they're heavily restricted from purchasing booze in the NT and northern WA.
Neither do Chinese/Japanese (and culturally they've had ethanol for a while -- just not the free access to booze that the West had). Funny how we don't restrict them from purchasing booze "for their own good" innit?
I think the other unanswered part of the question here is: what makes us think that these traditional lifestyles were flourishing?
The early explorers of the West Coast described the inhabitants as the "miserablest people in the world", and while other early explorers might have been a little more complimentary (see: Manly Beach) I don't see why we should exclude the possibility that they were just as immiserated by their crappy physical conditions as they are now.
"Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it."
Isn't it the most natural feeling in the world?
Suppose humanlike aliens come with their superior tech that makes your high status job as a psychiatrist or software engineer irrelevant. They are also much richer and can hardly hide their disgust when looking at some of our practices like consuming meet or compulsory school.
They are kind though so your choices are to live off welfare (materially better than how you lived before) or do some kind of low status job. You realise no matter what you do you won't be able to master their culture codes fully or travel throughout the galaxy. I'd be pretty miserable!
"Suppose humanlike aliens come with their superior tech that makes your high status job as a psychiatrist or software engineer irrelevant."
We're sort of seeing this happen in real time as AI changes what jobs require humans and (therefore) what jobs are seen as high-status/valuable.
Sam Altman might think it's great that everyone can now produce a facsimile of an oil painting that will impress everyone but the experts. I wonder if he has any idea what it feels like to be an oil painter ten thousand hours deep in your craft?
I could be happy. Happiness is a skill (to an extent).
Am I the only one who found this line confusing?
Doesn't literally any human male think it's far more masculine and cool to hunt kangaroos than work a minimum wage job?
I certainly do. Pretty sure my son would too.
I think another piece is feeling you get up in the morning to do something that you feel matters, though I haven't been able to quickly find the references on this I was remembering. Maybe that is pride, maybe it's feeling useful, maybe it's having a niche. But hunting/sourcing food that is needed is it, recreational hunting may or not be, and if that's your frame of reference, working at a convenience store isn't.
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.
Even apart from the fact that humans seem to want to have sex with vegetables, tentacles, cars, and the Eiffel Tower - and so Andromedan Sugar Daddies don't seem entirely without the bounds of possibility - I think your sex/reproduction argument relies on a faulty syllogism.
Sex and reproduction may be dependent on status - but that doesn't mean that status is dependent on sex and reproduction. There are status hierarchies that have little or nothing to do with sex (for example in a uniformed/military organisation, or certain holy orders, or in your local super-obsessive hobby group*, or between animals and their owners).
Therefore, I think you are wrong to discount the Rich Andromedans thought-expriment on the basis of sex - but I think the experiment actually sort-of supports your argument anyway, for other reasons.
(* I'm not even entirely joking! https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/escape-2)
You have to wonder whether the character in that strip got married before or after enlightenment.
The alien analogy would work if the aliens took all our cities and farmland away, shoving us off into marginal reservations. Somehow being high status in what is effectively a prison camp doesn't seem so attractive.
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.
Yeah it's not just the fact that they exist, it's they exist relatively close to you so you can actually easily reach them, and they can do seemingly magical things effortlessly and you are unable to hold even a medium-status position in their society no matter how hard you try (and that's not even taking racism into consideration). Oh, and they also deny that your gods exist. Seems pretty demotivating, tbh.
I could imagine a much more spiritually (and scientifically) advanced civilization than ours being able to position themselves in more gods-like fashion, so as to inspire awe and aspiration rather than defeat and despair, but ours is certainly not such a civilization in relation to the Aborigines.
Is it just me that finds the existence of such an alien society relatively close to us exciting and fascinating? Like being isekai'd into a sci-fi universe. Think about all the new things you will get to explore and learn.
The aboriginals are not exactly known for their love of exploration and learning. In fact, this is probably true of all the remaining primitive societies - and quite possibly one of the main reasons they remained primitive to this day. The Amish might be a good example of the reverse shift in a more modern/civilized society, but they at least don't share the dethroned gods problem with the aboriginals.
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.
It's wrong to think girls only had their father for protection. They would also have several brothers, uncles, and other male relatives. Remember that families used to be very nuclear.
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.
Let's not forget the part where the Andromedans conquered the Earth and kept most of it for themselves. That would suck.
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.
They are also fed a constant narrative of oppression and dispossession: that it's the Andromedans' fault they're poor, and the only way to stop being poor is to persuade the Andromedans to give them stuff.
Which, even to the extent that it's true, is a terrible thing to believe; it prevents you from doing pretty much anything that could actually help your situation. No point in working to improve your own situation if your situation is someone else's fault.
This is also true of, and explains dysfunctional behavior among, urban African-Americans.
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."
Are you sure you're not conflating this with the value nihilism of "it's all just blind physics with no purpose at all"? I would certainly agree that most people find that view entirely unpalatable, despite its surge of popularity.
But if you believe in intrinsic value or purpose (religiously or otherwise), I don't see what would be so aversive about it being well distributed in the Universe.
Do lots of people really require the entire rest of the Universe to be a dumb side-show to the epic story of the Earth, for their emotional well-being? Not to be overly judgemental, but that sounds to me like a rather stupid and hugely wasteful thing to demand of the world.
It's not that people necessarily demand that Earth be the center of everything, to which the rest of the universe is just a sideshow, although some do. The most recent religious person I've spoken to in dept about her beliefs, when I asked what sort of real possible observations she'd consider truly incompatible with her beliefs, said that she'd consider the certain discovery of life on other planets to be such.
More commonly though, religious people I've spoken to about this have argued that if there's life on those planets, God created those too, and intends for them to follow his will just as he expects it of us. So Jesus is the savior of all species in the universe, or all beings in the universe are intended to follow the will of Allah, etc. And I think it would be deeply destabilizing to their views if they found that there were other civilizations in the universe, vastly more powerful and developed than ours, which saw this proposition in the same light that we see the prospect of converting our society to Australian Aboriginal religion.
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?
>Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
:-) with the talk of sci-fi examples earlier in the thread, there's a distinct alternate timeline vibe... :-)
Actually this gets me wondering if anyone has studied the effect of loss of status when Germans lost WWII. You can see the model - Germans lose WWI but only barely (from their point of view anyway) - result is resentment and antagonism as you might predict. Germans get destroyed in WWII and do sink into depression but then reinvent themselves as Economic Miracle babies. I guess Aboriginals haven't figured out how to re-invent themselves. It also helped that Germans culturally were fairly close to the peoples that defeated them, so could simply adopt the cultures of the conquerors to some extent without feeling completely alienated.
I think the Marshall Plan had something to do with it. Were the Aborigines to become the beneficiaries of such a focused program to develop their economic self-sufficiency, their self perceived status might change too.
Because of the power differential. US rural voters are so powerful as a faction they elected their candidate for President. Aborigines in Australia appear to have little to now power at all.
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.
I honestly would expect that learning about super-rich Andromedan society actually would affect status hierarchies on Earth!
Probably not hugely, I admit, but I would expect many people to fear that their personal achievements had been made paler ("empaled"..?) by comparison: I think the emotional reward from achievemens is relative to the 'specialness' of the achievement more often than we're generally in the habit of thinking ("On the moon you can jump twelve feet - but so can everybody else so there's no point really" --Geoffrey Willans).
Isn't there some weird game-theoretic phenomenon whereby the builders of "world's tallest building" type skyscrapers try to obfuscate or mislead people, even within their own company, about the exact heights of their buildings during planning - even though this causes them loads of serious planning problems - because they fear rival skyscraper-builders will, upon learning the planned height, immediately start work on a skyscraper on the other side of the world that's a quarter of an inch taller?
(Source: I was told this by a few locals, when I was working near the then-new Burj Khalifa. It was presented as common practice but I have no way of knowing whether it's a one-off or even just an urban legend.)
If there is any basis to this, I think it's quite plausible that "fear of a skyscraper on the other side of the world stealing status because of an extra quarter-inch" might not be an *entirely* irrelevant model for understanding how a personality like (say) Elon Musk's would react to finding out about about a far-richer Andromedan society..
If Elon found out about an incredibly prosperous alien civilization, I suspect he'd drop everything in favor of finding some way to commit the Andromedan equivalent of petty wire fraud, then use the proceeds to mail-order a Baby's First Fusion Reactor and some cheap gardening tools, with which to terraform Venus.
I fully agree with you (based on his history of ignoring or circumventing rules, laws, ethical best-practices, gentleman's agreements etc.) that meeting a new civilisation and immediately trying to defraud it would be a very plausible modus operandi, but I do fear (based on the performance of Grok, SpaceX, Boring Company, Tesla's safety record, etc. etc.) that he'd be more likely to turn Earth into Venus than the other way around.
(P.S. Loved your micro-scale work of sci-fi!)
I make no guess one way or another as to whether he'd wield hypothetical stolen Clarketech gardening tools with diligent responsibility or success. https://qntm.org/orynth
As a strictly factual matter, though, to my understanding SpaceX has a better safety record for their paying customers than any other orbital-launch provider in history. They do blow up a lot of prototypes, but that's what prototypes are for. R&D for jet aircraft engines has a similar pattern.
Thanks most awfully for the fiction link - skimmed the first few paragraphs, realised that I like it but that need to set it aside until I can sit down and give it more attention - thanks!
When I read your point about SpaceX's safety record I was immediately inclined to agree: I have ties to the aerospace industry and I've heard almost nothing but criticism of SpaceX but lots of praise for Starlink, as a commercial product, so your claim matches what I've heard professionally.
...however! DDG searching "SpaceX safety record" shows a very different picture. Based on this (and on what I know about Musk's attitude to safety legislation) I very much doubt any of my Starlink-praising aerospace-industry friends and colleagues would want to actually work there!
Top three search results:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety
https://www.jalopnik.com/spacex-employees-are-getting-hurt-in-alarming-numbers-1851442642
https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2024-04-25-spacex-employee-injury-rate-rockets-ahead-of-industry-average-for-the-second-year-running
That's a pretty obvious move if you can pull it off, right? Roadside Picnic was basically about this.
TBF, I would feel sad.
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.
Yes - what strikes me about AA is the lack of the equivalent of Bob Marley or Will Smith, role models who are considered high-status even among whites, whose style is imitated even by affluent white kids.
Aboriginal Australian role models are primarily footy players, which aren't super well known internationally because AFL is mostly only big within Australia itself (and parts of Australia prefer rugby).
AFL/ rugby is really big among the communities, and I would guess it's one of the more realistic dreams of the youth - "I'm gonna play football in the MCG" is within the grasp of many kids great at kicking the ball around. Still, it's challenging for young people - because they usually grow up in such remote communities, they have to travel a long way to participate, and be really far from their communities.
There's also a couple of other prominent sporting stars, like Olympic medallist Cathy Freeman. Similar challenges.
There's a couple of famous artists, too, and there's a bit of government funding to try to make art a rewarding pathway to success. Not sure how well that's working - probably differs between states.
Lastly there's activism and politics, but that has ups and downs. Also being a politician is inherently a little bit cringe here, even to white society.
You mean they play Australian Rules, not FIFA?
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?
insurgency and counter-insurgency have different tactics, thus different performance requirements.
Warriors are not Soldiers. That said, payment in 14 year old girls (for permanent rape marriage) seemed to incentivize a lot. Just ask Joe Biden!
The Taliban's victories were also against that same population. They pushed out the post-Soviet warlords to take over the country, then got overthrown when US special forces intervened. The US got tired of what Matt Yglesias calls the "ESPN Zone of Empire" and pulled out, then the Taliban defeated the Afghan government set up by the US.
They aren't stupid, they were just socialized into a different skillset since youth, and are used to a different definition of a warrior's honor. See https://acoup.blog/2021/01/29/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-i-soldiers-warriors-and/
They ARE dumb. No questions there. That's a 70 IQ country, mainly due to inbreeding. Still, doing jumping jacks is a difficult skill that we teach children.
The drill sergeants were told to tone it down, because it was culturally inappropriate (which I definitely agree with).
Does a Western IQ test really provide reliable information about the intelligence of a people whose traditional way of life is vastly different from ours?
G is G. General Intelligence. Assume that you can find a "fair" test of g (whether made by the West, the East, or the South) -- it should provide a reasonable judgement about a person, no matter where they are from. Please note that metaintelligence is one of the hardest skills to master, so if you're saying "these people look like those people, in terms of intelligence" it is more than likely that you're just not pulling metaintelligence off.
It should NOT be a knowledge test.
Assuming that such a fair test exists (or otherwise using a test developed for that culture), wherever that 70 IQ number comes from, I doubt that it comes from such a fair test.
Thinking about such a test more seriously, perhaps it is possible to measure intelligence across vastly different cultures with a single test. But what would that look like? You'd need to test the mental skills and abilities relevant in each culture the test should be applied to. And the result would be a "cross-cultural" IQ. But what would it mean?
I think the most practical reason to care about IQ are the positive correlations with job success etc. But what counts as important (for a job, social status, or whatever correlation we're looking it) can differ significantly between cultures. If I have difficulty tracking complex kinship relations, I might get a poorer cross-cultural IQ score. But that will only matter if I participate in a society where these relations matter. Dito for advanced pattern recognition or verbal intelligence or what have you.
Also, I don't understand your point about metaintelligence, I'm just confused. Who is "these/those people", are you saying I'm (personally) saying something along those lines and that I'm not pulling metaintelligence off? Please explain/elaborate.
I don't know. Around 1925 a white hunter went to British East Africa and wrote a book about it. 1925 being 1925 he described the backwardness and primitiveness of the local blacks in a very racist language. Until he noticed they are really, really good at tracking. Like they just see some tracks and say "OK that was a pregnant female antelop" and then down the road they find a pregnant female antelop. Dude was completely surprised, he hung out with hunters all his life and never ever seen anything even close to that.
Sounds wild
Is the waiting room in a doctor's office really a ritual element? Say the doctor has three exam rooms and they are all full when you arrive at 9:50 for your 10 AM appointment because the clinic is running behind today. What would a non-ritual solution to this problem look like? The next patient has to wait somewhere.
Anthropologically speaking, yes.
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=case1457030358&disposition=inline
Sets up the power dynamics of Doctor versus Patient, so that you're appropriately "receptive" to the Doctor's advice.
Compare the expected "wait" for a car mechanic (in general, if you get a loaner, the car mechanic will tell you when it's ready, and you won't wait long -- there's no expectation of an "arrive 30 minutes early").
The next patient has to wait somewhere only if you prioritize the doctor's time over that of the patients.
Here's a medical article fairly screaming (politely) at doctors to "do something with the time you're given -- in the waiting room":
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3653648/
I think the comparison with a car mechanic visit is not apt--your body would be the car! And the car *does* have to wait for the mechanic in the "car waiting room" (the parking lot).
I am not going to read a 248 page PhD thesis for this discussion. That observational "study" is basically a non-blinded psychology study and you know how well those replicate. If you just mean that anthropologists call anything we do regularly a ritual, I agree but I don't think that says much I'd care about as a patient.
I did read the article you linked from Sherwin et al. All of their ideas are basic QI stuff. Everyone agrees that wasting time isn't great and it would be nice to fill that time with medically beneficial things. That doesn't at all address the real question--is the waiting room experience more an obvious logistical solution to the requirements of healthcare or a psychologically meaningful event?
The suggestions Sherwin et al. offer are as follows
-improve space and lighting
-have waiting patients fill out questionnaires
-putting informative posters on the wall
-giving out a question coaching sheet
-giving decision aids
-hiring a Waiting Room Manager
Almost all offices I have ever visited have had the first three. The next two are good ideas and could probably see wider use. The last is a big expense but maybe would be net benefit for the clinic? Not sure.
What's missing from the article, however, is anything that says that waiting rooms are not necessary! The article is just trying to optimize a waiting room experience--a goal that anyone would agree with whether they agree with the ritual posture or not.
"Obvious logistical solution" is only a solution when you discuss the problem. And then understand that we need not have a problem.
Time was, doctors used to do house calls, like plumbers and stuff do. That generally doesn't involve "waiting in a waiting room."
If you'd talked to a Regency doctor, they'd have said it was "equally obvious" to not having a waiting room.
Since waiting for a doctor to be ready for you is a symptom of the power differential between doctor and patient, there is no "solution" that doesn't redistribute power between doctors and patients. The ritual is just a symptom, the actual problem is much deeper.
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.
You don't have a source and Claude doesn't have a source, so we should treat that as unproven.
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/28109-study-reveals-average-age-at-conception-for-men#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20study%2C%20published,having%20children%20at%20older%20ages
Aborigines age gap between fathers and mothers is arguably close to the age gap that was the standard around 2000 generations from now (fig. A), admittely higher (however I don't find any genetic study that estimates the age gap for aborigenes).
It's worth to notice that the relative ages given in the study are a mean respectively for fathers and mothers and not for their age at birthday of the first child. Interestingly, the gap start to drop ≈500-1000 generations from now (since settlement ?).
> and I can't imagine Aboriginal men do a great job staying well-preserved and attractive-looking.
Really? They might have battle wounds, or hunting wounds, but they're going to be in much better physical shape than modern men.
Relative to younger Aboriginal men
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!
I was wondering this. Here is what I am thinking. Despite all the advances of feminism, men typically still want to be the heads of households. One way to deal with that is precisely age difference, because in that case it makes sense that the more senior person should be the boss, more life experience and all. Thinking about how silly I was at say 24, I really did not deserve to be the head of anything. But by 40 brains caught up with me.
Women also typically want to be the head of households. Everyone likes more power.
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.
Anyone interested can try the game King of Dragon Pass. Should be on Steam, GOG, and I wanna say whatever Apple's store is. You play as a Viking-ish pastoral clan settling new, dangerous lands with several other clans that your shares a culture with.
It's a management game with a learning curve -- you have to pay attention and apply what you learn about the clans culture to the problems they face.
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.
First system? https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iia-the-many-faces-of-battle/
Ah yes exactly! Lmao turns out it's entirely original to acoup, I thought it's something more established.
Not completely original. Devereaux based it on Stephan Biddle's concept of the "Modern System." https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/
This is a funny way of saying "there weren't psychotic communities in need of murderizing." Given that we have relatively few of those in the prehistoric record, I'm not comfortable saying "this social technology worked better than that social technology." A social technology that isn't exposed to psychotic communities doesn't get very well tested (in the outer reaches of what it can handle), now does it?
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?
Aborigines don't fish and don't tend cattle but 'women' is an interesting answer. My initial thought was that they were resource-intensive and therefore not able to be stockpiled, but ChatGPT tells me that they provide as many calories as the men do so fair enough. According to ChatGPT: "Fought over territory, access to resources (especially waterholes in arid areas), women (e.g., abduction or revenge for elopement), or retributive justice (e.g., payback killings)" so spot on.
Aborigines certainly did fish.
You may be thinking of Tasmanian Aborigines in particular who supposedly didn't.
They fought for women all the time. It was a major part of every male's life. That just isn't being called "war" here.
Yep. Did you mean to reply to me, or to Wanda, by the way?
Both.
I was surprised to see her surprise at the concept. Women are a primary source of conflict everywhere, and a primary source of raids in most places where raids are an option.
I have a Chinese children's mythology book, and I was pretty amused to see a description of how, shortly after people came into existence, the men started fighting over the women.
As far as "if they're nomadic pastoralists", I'm pretty sure they aren't. Australia hadn't developed very far at all by the time of discovery.
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.
War also inverts hierarchies, as someone of great skill can achieve rank. If you want to lock down rank to your benefit (old people), then letting young people go to war might upset that.
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.
But the Australian Aborigines are an exception to this, they were hunter-gatherers living in places that are now super-productive agricultural regions, and we studied them at least a bit before we pushed them out to the not-so-productive areas.
Though I've also heard it argued that the "richest" Aborigines (in terms of food availability) were the ones living in the tropical north rather than in the temperate regions suited to Western settlement and agriculture, and to a large extent there's still a lot living there.
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.
You are so smart! Thanks for this!
I'm not particularly smart, but I just have a vast amount of useless knowledge on various subjects.
This is a good read if you're interested in the Lakota...
Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (The Lamar Series in Western History) by Pekka Hämäläinen
Immigrants to rich societies aren't hunter-gatherers? Are you sure? Squatters use elevator shafts as toilets (and yes, those are hunter-gatherers).
“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).
This was my assumption too
I think the shared understanding of the skin/ section system is because, with the exception of Tasmania, all of these groups were ultimately linked by trade networks, migration paths, and had inter-cultural protocols. They may have been separate but they definitely did interact with one another.
(The ideas of the songlines and the dreaming is another example of something that is shared throughout the continent).
Imagine the Silk Routes. Everyone on the Silk Routes had the concept of private property, trading valuable things for money, and we can infer that every single one of those societies punished theft and took payment (in literal coin usually, or other precious metal objects) in return for goods.
We've found money of various sources in China, and we've found Chinese money all over the place (the Vikings had some of it).
Also to punish theft, you also need to have laws.
Romans don't need to have physically gone to China to share a common understanding of private property, preventing theft, levying taxes and tariffs etc. They both talked to other societies as intermediaries.
So the groups in far north Queensland are connected to the groups on the west coast via all the groups in the middle that they interact with regularly.
>”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.
"Best athlete / musician in the neighborhood" is both a plausible aspiration and non-negligible source of status, even if it doesn't pay well in cash terms.
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.
Counterpoint: maybe black men are just less likely to have feelings of hopelessness and nihilism.
Take a visit to West Baltimore sometime.
Is that something you've done? What do you think I would learn from doing it?
Are we just assuming that if a place looks bleak to us, the people who live there can't help but be overwhelmed by hopelessness and nihilism?
I feel as though you're being willfully obtuse. Put it this way: mass overdose episodes don't generally happen in healthy, thriving communities.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8m5jggjdgo
I think if you talk to the people there, you will understand what they feel. Is that really so complicated?
Spoiler: "don't go to east cleveland, or you'll die."
Aborigines are vastly overrepresented in Australian Rules Football, for what that's worth.
Whether that's due to some genetic advantage (running around for hours chasing a kangaroo isn't so different to running around for hours chasing a ball) or just due to excellent recruitment/development and a lack of better alternatives is a mystery.
The footy field is one of the few places that the average Australian is likely to actually be exposed to a positive portrayal of an Aboriginal person (or rather, an Aboriginal person portraying themselves positively).
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."
Yeah I understand. My wording could have been better
Anyone celebrating gadget's 80th tomorrow? :-)
Hey, we haven't had a conventional WWIII (albeit some close calls for a nuclear one)...
Core of the classic Roman solution was "never lose." Once the industrial revolution came around, all-out war simply stopped being profitable - Germany and Japan gained more from the access to international trade that came after their defeat in WWII than they could possibly have hoped to secure in plunder by winning.
> Core of the classic Roman solution was "never lose."
Not quite. They could and did lose major battles. (And check out what happened with Hannibal.) They didn't lose wars; they took the viewpoint that if they hadn't won the war yet, it was still going.
If you believe Bret Devereaux, this is downstream (and upstream; there are feedback loops) of them being able to mobilize many times the manpower and equipment that rival states could.
Trying to come out on top in every single battle is what I'd call "always win," which is unsustainable, a tempting road to gambler's ruin.
"Never lose" is different, includes things like giving all your troops the best available armor even if they can't personally pay for it up front, fortifying every single overnight camp whether expecting trouble or not, having a well-drilled plan for retreating from overwhelming force, and letting whoever you conquered last year join up as respected, equal-cut-of-the-action 'allies' next year, rather than holding a grudge or trying to meddle in their internal affairs. Not a perfect system, but it lasted longer than most.
> "Never lose" is different, includes things like giving all your troops the best available armor even if they can't personally pay for it up front
That's not something the Romans did, except possibly very late in their military career.
Otherwise, you've provided a list of things you admire about the Romans. But it has nothing to do with "never losing", certainly not in contrast to "always winning" which means exactly the same thing. This has all the intellectual value of being opposed to (or in favor of!) "capitalism", when if someone looks at your position closely "capitalism" turns out to be defined as "whatever the United States does".
If you want to argue that the core of the Roman approach to warfare was "do the things the Romans do", you can claim to be right, but you can't claim to be saying anything.
> But it has nothing to do with "never losing", certainly not in contrast to "always winning" which means exactly the same thing.
That's only true if every contest has a strictly binary outcome. Even in sports elaborately optimized to produce unambiguous winners and losers, tied scores or other ambivalent results are often possible. Diplomacy, commerce, and war routinely produce situations where everyone involved loses, or everyone wins, or stalemates, or deliberate de-escalation, or disruptive muddles with full repercussions still unclear years later.
Minimizing loss and maximizing gain are absolutely NOT the same strategy.
Japan in particular could have gained more in international trade by winning. Imagine if The Great Leap Forward had never happened?
Given how imperial japan treated the regions of China it invaded, I am highly skeptical.
The solution was: "We are much better at war than you".
> 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.
Hunting is pretty good. Starving to death when you can't catch anything is a lot less good.
If you starve to death you can’t be mentally ill though
I mean, you definitely still can, just not for more than a few weeks.
lol, true.
This has probably been one of my more speculative comments I assert too confidently, but it makes intuitive sense to me.
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
Most aborigines didn't live in the famously inhospitable outback. It's famously inhospitable!
Come on, in the same breath where Scott says there's no war [actually, he says that certain other people who take an explicitly idealist viewpoint say there's no war], he also points out that these people die by violence at what we would consider implausibly high rates, the kind of thing where you could describe the actual facts to a modern American and she would insist that you were making up a horror story to satisfy some kind of personal perversion on your part.
There's no trouble killing them off. "We" aren't calling it 'war' because there aren't enough Aborigines to satisfy our model of what 'war' means.
"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.
Are we talking "random people raping other people without justice afterwards" or are we talking "theft common" (ala toronto's "leave your car keys outside") or are we talking "despair and substance abuse"?
Depending on the reserve: rampant child sex abuse, teen suicide epidemics, rampant alcoholism, regular violence, regular arson, regular window-breaking, regular home invasions, unemployment rates around 95%, terrible education outcomes (if I were guessing, that one's due to terrible attendance rates), apathetic-to-downright-abusive band governance, massive misappropriation of funds.
Like...I refuse to say it's colonialism's fault when one of the reserves made their justice councilor a guy with multiple penitentiary sentences and he stacked the system with his violent family members, who perpetrated multiple abuses. Them not being prosecuted IS colonialism's fault, though. Ugh.
I don't think it's just pride or status that makes hunting more enriching than a minimum wage job. Stacking shelves, working a factory line, mopping floors etc. are all classic alienated labour: repetitive, heteronomous, and done solely for a wage. Hunting on the other hand is something people find intrinsically enjoyable enough that it's done recreationally.
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.
I think it's worth saying. I can't help but think of his "Why Do I Suck?" essay from some years back every time he writes an absolute banger like this. And don't even get me started on "The Colors of Her Coat"!
I agree that this was a great review.
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.
A more reasonable interpretation.
...not sure why there's a PSA if only the Aboriginals (congrats on using what is generally agreed to be a racial slur, tho) are suffering from it.
It also is/was an issue in Northern Labrador and on one Cree reserve I am aware of. Given that it's REALLY bad for people I think it is largely avoided except by the truly miserable.
There's a PSA because it's a big problem. Like the "that was a joke" PSA "put your poo in the loo" -- big problems get PSAs.
The "read a book" PSA for blacks (this was a whole list of "tell black kids what they should do" including using deodorant) was pretty popular (until black folks realized white folks might watch it, and it looked pretty bad.)
I doubled down on this above before I saw your comment. Glue sniffing is being left out here. That went into a whole other demographic. Also spray paint. You spray it into a paper bag and then you breathe in the fumes. The drawback is you often get paint on your face.
Well, substitute glue sniffing for petrol sniffing, and you can expand your demographic considerably. I know it was a serious problem up in Labrador back in the day. I don’t know if it persists.
When I was small child and we would go to the gas station to fill up the car I couldn’t help but get close to that hole that led to the gas tank and breathe it in. I loved the smell of gasoline. I got over it or I had it slapped out of me. I don’t remember which.
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.
Careful. Japanese/Chinese have had strong liquor for a while. However, they haven't had the cultural availability of it.
What's the point you're trying to make? Many East Asians get flush reactions from drinking alcohol, this is something genetic. Culture is involved too, but genetics can be hard to overcome with regard to specific things for different human groups.
Length of time with "access to strong liquor" is less correlated with "reduced violence" than "how much access did your average person have to strong liquor" (aka if you drank regularly, that was selection pressure against "angry drunks.")
I'm not even talking about violence, I just mean alcoholism as in the likelihood of developing a chemical-body addiction to alcohol. The people most badly affected by strong liquor seem to be the descendants of hunter-gatherers, as opposed to the descendants of farming and herding people. Among the latter, many have/had access to hard liquor, but don't seem as chemically liable to become addicted to it.
USSR basically addicted everyone to vodka. They made it cheaper than water. (I think vodka was related to their ability to allow "free speech" -- if the given excuse was "he was drunk! he didn't mean it!" you could say whatever you wanted).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_in_Russia
"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?
they were doing it before the bandwagon started (i.e. Hobbes, Rousseau)
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.
This is also something that bothered me about the review. They say "Aborigines", but they clearly mean a small subgroup.
"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.
Well you know what Kumbo girls are like.
By definition, there are no Kumbo girls.
It was kind of odd that Scott led with the idea that "aborigines" would unhesitatingly tell you that there are eight genders, and then showed a chart that divides society into four (4) classes, with different terms for the male and female members of each class. There is no way to operate this system at all without recognizing that the number of genders is two.
> 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."
> This is also his argument about creoles, although he never comes right out and says that English ought to be regarded as one.
There are plenty of people willing to make that argument. They are delusional. McWhorter isn't.
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.
Not according to Google, it isn’t. Perhaps you are being sardonic.
Of course I'm not being sardonic. Merely relaying what an advertising executive told me. As said executive routinely cruised gay bars for free drinks while living in Washington DC, I think he knows what he's talking about.
Well, he knows what he’s talking about re being gay in Washington DC. Gay capital of the western hemisphere is a comparative statement. It’s kind of like Hootersville being the rutabaga capital of the world.
I don't believe that first statement is true. He's not gay. He does, however, know quite a lot about advertising to gay people, and part of that is knowing where they live (to know which markets to advertise within).
Sorry. I misunderstood..
I am not gay either, but I could do a pretty good troll of gay bars in New York if I had to.
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
Regarding the fertility thing - the only thing the wikipedia page on the Marinds mentions about the fertility drop is that it was "mainly attributable to earlier introduction of gonorrhoea" as well as an epidemic of "granuloma inguinale" (another STD) starting in 1912. Which sounds a lot more plausible than than rape physically destroying women's reproductive systems.
The "infertility belt" in Africa was caused by STDs https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/08/13/infertilty-belt/
Rape physically destroying women's reproductive systems is an ongoing issue in conflicts in Africa. As in they're no longer able to be continent with urine.
Don't mean at all to downplay the violence. But you know urinating is different from the reproductive system right? Incontinence is very common after physical trauma such as vaginal birth, not infertility.
>"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?
I had to buy my own red stapler.
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.
Maslow's hierarchy is usually portrayed as a pyramid, no? Usual construction pattern with those is, first you build out the ground level to some necessary width, then you bring in additional material - which starts out at ground level - and move it up to fill in the higher levels as appropriate. Foundation-plus-adjacent-stockpile has a broader footprint than the final planned structure, so someone who didn't know the plan, and mistook stockpiles for an intended part of the structure, might be confused to see it get narrower late in the process.
A hunger strike is unusual behavior by any reasonable standard, so naturally it's going to be an odd edge case. Think about the symbolism of it, though: for the intended political message to make any sense, the striking party's subsistence needs have to already be quite secure in objective terms. "Not eating" needs to be clearly a *choice* they're voluntarily making. They could give up the strike at a moment's notice - if their demands were met - and, after having done so, their survival would no longer be in doubt. If the striker were, instead, likely to starve for unrelated reasons, their threat to do so on purpose wouldn't be nearly as personally costly, thus a far less credible signal of commitment to any cause.
I think one of the lessons of the Aboriginal experience is that people who feel their lives are meaningful can generally cope with poverty better than well-off people can cope with meaninglessness and alienation. "He who understands the Why can bear almost any How," as Nietzsche said in one of his more sensible moments.
Another way of putting this is that people can put up with practically anything if they don’t have a choice
I don't think that's the factor -- most depressed people don't feel they have much of a choice about their circumstances, and this belief doesn't seem to cheer them up very much. Rather, I think it's that people can cope with practically anything if they think there's some greater purpose behind it.
Yes, but when you’re depressed, that is an in interstate, but it’s but it’s not true. It might be somewhat true in some cases, but generally if they shifted their perspective, they do have choices. I am talking about really not having a choice in a very concrete pragmatic way. Like we don’t have a choice about whether we die or not.
Depends. Find your average Amerifat and tell him he needs to run a deer down. No tools, just sheer determination. Yes, it's cool if you can do it -- but, really? Do you want to "run a deer down" the way the Amerinds did?
I'm not going to say I haven't chased deer through the woods! Because I have. They outran me. I'm very impressed by the people who can catch them, and I think they deserve to be seen as cool and should take pride in their high degree of physical dominance. Further, I think that sense of pride and coolness is common not only among human groups, but for many (most?) mammals. Being strong and fast and able to survive in the wilderness is valuable for more than just humans!
So it's strange that Scott doesn't understand that pride, when, for instance, horses, orcas, dogs, hamsters, gorillas, elephants, etc do understand it. I myself have (for various reasons) made peace with being relatively weak, but it's perfectly obvious why somebody who was raised to expect a life like Davy Crockett's would be driven to suicide by having to live like Milton from Office Space.
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.
I think the harsh environment does all your selection for you. Instead I think that people used to these harsh conditions are already desensitized and you need a particularly gruesome ritual to have the appropriate psychological impact you need it too.
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 don't think you'll find many pets who like to eat people.
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.
Feeling and believing that you are doing something useful is very good for one’s state of mind.
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.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if conditions now are worse than they were in the 1970s due to the fact that any kind of positive intervention (like taking children away from awful parents) is now considered racist and off the table.
Surprisingly, chasing aboriginal children with dogs, and giving them punitive sentences is not considered racist or off the table.
Taking children away from awful parents is probably back on the table, provided the awfulness you're discussing is "won't vaccinate."
Because Australia is kinda awful, sometimes.
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.
But most immigrants are already members of "modern society," is my point. Certainly many come from more rural and traditional areas, relative to e.g. Toronto or Houston, but they're not like Yanomamo tribespeople.
Or to put it another way: they come from places that were already colonized centuries ago, so I don't think it makes sense as an analogy for the experience of initial colonization.
Yeah, that's true, agreed. But as a thought experiment, Scott's framing of the immigrants with the highest possible compatibility compared against those with the lowest compatibility helps a reader imagine just how vast the gulf must be for Australian Abos when entering modern society, even centuries after the initial contact with Westerners. It's not really about colonization per se, more about the technological/organizational development gap, which is much smaller for virtually any group than for Abos. Australia's technological/social development and trading relations were more undeveloped than Africa's prior to the European conquest.
> "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?)
Solved. From the app, the link leads to a webpage with the option "open in app" didn't notice that the last time. In the app, I can mark the text as saved, to read later.
> 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.
I looked this up and I think Scott has oversimplified; as well as the four-way classification into Murri, Kumbo, Ippai and Kubbi they had a further classification by different animal totems (Bundar, Dinoun, Duli etc), and then marriage rules depend both on your top-level group and also what animal totem you have.
https://transcripts.sl.nsw.gov.au/page/item-02-kamilaroi-and-other-australian-languages-rev-william-ridley-2nd-ed-sydney-1875-page-173
All of which probably excludes first-cousin marriages but you'd probably have to draw a diagram to figure it all out.
"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 radically think some things through to their logical conclusion.
I'd definitely want some smaller-scale testing and room for incremental refinement, rather than everyone jumping straight into such a system with both feet. Any monoculture is a potential single point of failure.
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.
> even if you kidnap her, there would be no reason why you would not place her in the correct caste in your tribe
The most obvious reason would be that your tribe doesn't use the same system.
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!
Coon was both a physical and cultural anthropologist and was good at both.
I still think that if those who dismiss him read one of his works in full/or mostly in full, their assessment would change significantly. Alas, I don't think many of those critics have the open mind to read someone whom they've already grouped as "problematic" in their mental schema.
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.
Also, it comes too late for the aggressive teenagers.
>“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.
Except that they're not (in general, although we're talking about hundreds of different groups and some may differ) ordered; the sections (I've also heard them called moieties) are notionally equal.
Many tribes had complicated systems where your family's moiety changes through the generations; if you're an Alpha then you must marry a Beta, your sons will be Gammas and your daughters will be Deltas, then your Gamma sons will marry Phis to produce Rhos or something like that.
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.
This is very interesting but I want to point out that there's a lot of overgeneralisation here among the hundreds of different and largely non-interacting language groups with distinct cultures. There's similarities and common themes, but also massive numbers of variations and exceptions across the continent.
The most egregious example would I think be the idea that a Kamilaroi man could wander to the other side of the country and have his Kumbo status understood and acknowledged. Different language groups would have entirely different and non-intelligible systems. Adjacent groups might have enough contact to be able to map their systems onto each other, as in the table here which shows corresponding classifications from different Central Australian language groups https://www.clc.org.au/our-kinship-systems/ but you can't just wander from Kamilaroi to Arnhem Land and expect your Kumbo status to mean anything to anyone.
As an aside, the term 'aborigine' is now seen as disrespectful by most Australians; we've reached the end of a hyperstitious slur cascade. 'Aboriginal person' or 'Aboriginal Australian' is more common, though the latter is awkward when describing people who lived before the modern nation-state existed, and the former awkward when also trying to refer to groups from other continents that are commonly described as 'aboriginal'
There's a push to import the North American term "First Nations" at the moment despite the massive conflict with any normal us of the English word "nation" or for that matter "first".
I remember there was a push in the 90s for the term "Koori" but it fell out of fashion once it was pointed out that this was a term specific to certain languages.
Somewhere in the pages of a dusty 20th century tome must lie the ideological impetus for all this “naming” business.
I’m really, *really* confused by the nature of the generalisations in this review. Until I read the book itself — which I’m doing now — I won’t be able to assess how much of this is due to Hiatt’s writing in the book vs your summarising of it, but I wanted to flag the deep confusion first.
For context: I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence in remote Indigenous communities in “Central” Australia, particularly the northern and western parts of South Australia. I was raised by an anthropologist. And as an adult, I’ve lived and worked in cities on the east coast (Sydney, Canberra) and spent substantial time in Far-North Queensland, Arnhem Land, and elsewhere. I’ve got close & lifelong friends who are Indigenous Australians, some of whom still live in extremely remote parts of the country.
Almost all of the claims that you’ve made throughout this post seem (as I read them) to be premised on the notion that there was such a thing as a unified Aboriginal Culture on the Australian continent 250+ years ago, and that some amount of that can be reconstructed from contemporary ethnographic evidence and archaeological records. As I see it (and have in some cases experienced first-hand) there very clearly wasn’t/isn’t such a thing, at least on the specific fronts you’ve highlighted. Even in the fragmented post-colonial context, in which there’s a huge pressure to unify for political bargaining purposes, 'Aboriginal Culture' seems a bizarre fiction. I’ve spent enough time in different remote communities to be pretty confident about this particular point. It’s not just that a Pitjantjatjara speaker can’t understand a Wiradjuri speaker or a Yolŋu speaker. It’s not just that kinship structures or marriage customs or initiation rituals (such as the ones you’re describing) vary widely. And I don’t think it’s just that I found myself extremely confused by some specific (different) norms when I first started hanging with Indigenous people from the mountains in New South Wales & northern Victoria in my 20s (… or that I’ve met old folks who could recall seeing white people for the first time in a “first contact”-ish sort of way, whereas nobody in Sydney could possibly have claimed that so recently). It’s that the whole underlying ontologies are different. Across the continent, attitudes towards conflict and violence are wildly different. The thing that counts as “initiation” for different groups — how long it is, what it consists of, whether any version of it is even still practiced by anyone — is so shockingly different from one side of the country to the other. Levels of gender equality and differentiation of roles/expectations vary hugely. Moiety divisions are essential in some places and ridiculous alien concepts elsewhere. Even the underlying stories that are told about technology and the need for technological development are different (see, eg, the Dreaming stories about Kimberly points). And all of this is, I think, due to different adaptations to different contexts.
Sure, lots of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders today believe some specific things about the continuity of their cultures & cultural practices that suggest a unity of practice and belief over a long time, but that’s new (and more fragile/limited than it seems from a distance). The notion of a singular Aboriginal Culture is very obviously a modern political fiction: something downstream of colonisation; partly an activist response to (what is sometimes understood, from the inside, to be) a slow-moving genocide; partly a top-down imposition that is itself rejected by the people themselves. Anthropologists all know this — as do many/most Indigenous Australians — but they can’t/won’t say it in public because of the way in which Native Title laws etc are wrapped up in the fiction(s). For example, almost everyone knows and will openly admit that the “welcome to country” ceremonies that are now common practice in Australia were invented by the TV host Ernie Dingo; while things like a ‘welcome to country’ were common in some parts of the continent, they were completely alien in others. More confusing, though, are things like smoking ceremonies and the concept of “secret [men’s/women’s] business”. afaict, smoking ceremonies became widespread pretty recently. I know for sure that the contemporary emphasis on (and belief in) gendered secret knowledge is downstream of probably-false/definitely-motivated “expert testimony” from a single anthropologist in a native title case in the 1990s: the Hindmarsh Island bridge controversy. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander woman today who knows that fact, or rejects the importance of “secret women’s business” in their own culture. Why? Because claiming that something is “secret women’s business” it’s now a load-bearing part of navigating the surrounding power structures.
“What were anthropologists even doing?” / “Did Aboriginal tribes have chiefs?” ... Mostly, as far as I can tell, they were gradually discovering that, thanks to the ridiculous amount of cultural-adaptations-to-circumstance, a hundred years of bitter academic debate had been (mostly) wasted on an ill-formed question. The Aboriginal tribes in far-north Queensland had entirely different ontologies to the tribes in the Western deserts. In some geographies, chiefs were universal; in others, Big Men; in others, neither. The trouble is that that isn’t a politically or legally acceptable answer.
Either the book fails to make the bizarre diversity clear, or your review fails to transfer the specificity of the descriptions to your readers, or it’s a combination of both, or it’s a secret third thing. I really can't tell.
I’m not denying that there’s a lot of generalisation that we can/should do — I think cultural anthropology, as a discipline, has been shockingly bad at doing comparative theorising & abstraction that is so obviously necessary and possible — but the generalisations I see above are not, in my view, the generalisations you’re looking for. They’re not even accurate claims about kinship or gender across the continent, even though there *are* general claims about kinship & gender that you *can* make! Why can’t we talk about gender differences in hunting/gathering practices as a function of environment [see, eg, Bird & Bird’s “Why Women Hunt” (2008) on the Martu case study]? Why not dive deep on the fact that Central Australian cultures are shockingly conflict-avoidant and compromising when interacting with government legal systems, whereas activists in the tropics seem to occasionally flirt with violent revolutionary action? And yet, as generalisations go, some Dreaming stories *are* pretty universal?
As far as the alcoholism and drug abuse, and the violence and incarceration, and the ongoing suffering in remote communities: yeah, it’s really fucking bad in some places. I’ve buried a lot of friends, and I’m only 30. I can point to some ways in which government policy, even today, seems only explicable via deliberate bad intent: a project to burn piles of cash making things *worse* rather than better.
Overall, I feel as though this was probably a good post and a beneficial thing to be curious about, but a strange book to pick. Try Peter Sutton’s "Politics of Suffering" (2009) on the failures of government policy. Walshe & Sutton’s "Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?" (2021) is a book-length academic critique of Bruce Pascoe’s "Dark Emu", and that itself is a revealing controversy. Or read Tyson Yunkaporta’s "Sand Talk" (2019) for a first-hand contemporary Indigenous perspective — just try to remember that, with Yunkaporta in particular, it’s a guy trying to sell “Indigenous Thinking” to white intellectuals through gritted teeth with a gun to his head.
Thanks for the very detailed and informative post!
I know squat-all about Australian Aboriginal culture(s), but even so, I thought while reading this review: how come Scott is making it sound like there's one "Australian Aboriginal" culture, how likely is it? Australia is a big place! Think how varied the Native American cultures were before the Europeans came, why wouldn't Australian Aboriginal cultures be equally varied?
"I can point to some ways in which government policy, even today, seems only explicable via deliberate bad intent"
If you feel like sharing, would you mind telling us what you think the government/white people NGOs could do that would actually *help* alleviate the "alcoholism and drug abuse, and the violence and incarceration, and the ongoing suffering in remote communities"? Have you seen any programs that do more good than harm? Anything we can learn from Aboriginal people who have successfully integrated into modern Australian society?
I am much less well informed than Athropolagus but I feel compelled to reply to your last paragraph anyway...
I feel like the fundamental problem is that modern policy doesn't _want_ Aborigines to succesfully integrate into modern Australian society, it wants them to "preserve their culture".
But preserving their culture inevitably means living in poverty and squalor, it means living in a remote and insular community with no economic activity, speaking a language known only to your three hundred nearest neighbours. White Australians can go anywhere and do anything, but Aboriginal Australians are told that in order to preserve their culture they need to stay in one place and do nothing.
Isn't the implicit thinking behind the modern policy( that you mention) that the overwhelming majority of Aborigines would become part of the bottom of the underclass if they assimilated into society? A priori, one would not expect good outcomes for them...
The people I'm talking about are already the bottom of the underclass.
If they could move to a medium-sized regional town and hold down a full-time minimum wage ($25/hr) job, their material situation would drastically improve.
Scott's article mentions the "spiritual" problem of modernity for many technologically backward indigenous people. Given that many "modern-adapted" humans are depressed in today's society, wouldn't you expect that for Aborigines a material improvement would be outweighed by the spiritual/identity loss of ceasing to live communally, even if quality of life is already quite low?
Ooof, I can *try*, but take this with a grain of salt!
In the last census, ~3.2% of the Australian population (~812k) identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. While a much greater *proportion* of that population lives in relatively regional/remote contexts as compared to the non-Indigenous Australian population, it's worth noting that
(a) the Northern Territory, which has a ~30% Indigenous population, is doing a lot of the heavy lifting re those numbers, and
(b) Australia is just incredibly fucking urbanised for everyone at this point.
I mention the demographics upfront because I think there's a near-universal misunderstanding shared by most Australians (& nearly everyone else): in practice, "let's help remote Indigenous communities" often means "let's help a small number of people who are easy to identify on a map" not "let's help Indigenous Australians as a group". A big amount of the continued suffering — the so-called "gap" in health/education/employment outcomes that we claim to want to "close" — is, I suspect, something more like: currently-alive Indigenous people in Australia are living, often in towns/cities, with the multi-generational consequences of being *forcibly* "assimilated" rather than allowed to sensibly navigate any transition; having been relocated at gunpoint, denied work & education & healthcare, often forced to work without pay on cattle stations, and violently oppressed until very recently. The Australian government was still forcibly removing a lot of children (in the 'Stolen Generations') from their families into the 1970s. The first 'apology' for that came in 2008. And, if what you care about is enabling a recognised group to evolve & change while retaining "their" "culture", it's worth noting that in order for a recognised group to be granted a "Native Title" claim, they need to prove a continuous and continuing (and legal-fiction-y 'unchanged') cultural connection to their Country since before colonisation ... which is often impossible precisely because of past government actions. Even if granted, such a 'native title' claim (a) only affects land still owned by the Crown, (b) confers extremely limited rights (mostly related to negotiated payouts from mining companies), and (c) can't overlap with another group's claim. In effect, what I'm saying is that—
1. Much greater legal sovereignty and self-determination would be great, but it's not gonna help as much as some might hope;
2. The entire legal structure here insists on a kind of fig-leaf parody of cultural independence;
3. A lot of things that improve circumstances for the worst-off members of australian society will help a bunch of Indigenous australians, almost by definition, and so specific targeting is less effective than you might expect; and,
4. A lot of the issues are pretty entangled with a diffuse underclass.
In any case, a few things seem like obvious goods specifically for the regional/remote contexts:
1. Dry Communities. More specifically, giving remote communities the legal/self-governance affordances that are necessary for them to become the dry communities that they already want to be. There's a huge, noticeable difference (on every front) between the communities that are successfully alcohol-free and the ones that aren't; the ones that *are*, as I see it, are mostly the ones that have been allowed to ban alcohol in a big region. [Related: the introduction of low-aromatic fuel did a lot to combat petrol sniffing, and that was driven by people in the communities demanding it.] [See also the current (bad) situation in Alice Springs as an example of government / law enforcement spending resources on the wrong things.]
2. Legal reform to improve treatment of children in detention. Raising the minimum raise for incarceration and banning the use of spit hoods etc as a bare minimum, and generally spending the same dollars on non-carceral interventions that are currently spent on incarceration of kids. Before she died, Sophie Trevitt was a remarkable lawyer working at Change The Record on this. If we're gonna have a lot of extremely poor & disadvantaged children interacting with a still-pretty-fucking-racist legal system, reducing the degree to which their rights are violated and they're further traumatised seems like the least we could do (and also seems to help a lot in reducing lifetime over-incarceration).
3. Decentralised/independent power infrastructure. The average town camp household in Alice Springs spends over $3000 on power a year; the cost is *much* higher in more remote communities. A huge number of Aboriginal households throughout regional/remote Australia rely on prepaid power meters, meaning they need to buy prepaid "power cards", which they often can't afford, and experience frequent outages as a result. If those same regional communities had independent solar & battery infrastructure, it would be way cheaper and more reliable overall ... but nobody *in* the community has the the money to pay for that infrastructure upfront and, even if they did, they're often legally prohibited from building their own. [This bothers me more than many the other issues, because I've seen a number of instances in which the federal government spends HEAPS on temporary interventions that nobody in the community wants — "making sure everyone is educated = everyone gets a forklift licence even though the town doesn't even have a forklift" — while simultaneously adding new regulatory barriers to energy independence.]
4. Arts Centres. These can seem like silly/useless "plz preserve your unchanging culture so we can marvel at you as an aesthetic fetish object" things, but the international contemporary art market buys a lot of (increasingly ambitious & impressive) work from Indigenous artists. The Tate Modern has an Emily Kim Kngwarray show on at the moment, for example, and that's the tip of a very large iceberg. It's economic activity that connects remote communities to a wider market, while also letting them set the terms of their own cultural continuity etc. In practice, this usually involves someone (an "Arts Centre Manager") acting as an interface to the world of prestige art, but I suspect that improved power + internet infrastructure will/would alter that somewhat. Successful arts centres also often become service hubs for their communities. As I see it, this is a bootstrapping / start-up capital problem more than anything else: most existing arts centres make money, they just need resources and a talented (usually white / legibly prestigious / bureaucracy-literate) person to get things started.
5. Banning pokies (electronic slot machines) Australia-wide. These are a plague on the nation, and particularly on regional/remote communities and under-educated/disadvantaged Indigenous populations. I understand that Australians have a "complicated" relationship with gambling, but holy shit. I think it's particularly pernicious because [I'm told!] many Aboriginal cultures *previously* used gambling-adjacent things to semi-randomly reallocate resources within the community; now there's a hyper-optimised super-addictive thing that's extracting those resources instead of (at least!) keeping them 'within' the community where 'Elders' and/or Big-Man-style people in the community can help prevent catastrophe.
footnote/addendum: it's also worth noting that some of the badness has come from *restrictions* on movement for communities/cultures that previously relied on it. A lot of Australia is big and empty and unforgiving; lots of cultural groups 'have' land that stretches huge distances, and that they would have historically moved across in response to changing resource availability. Hence the stories enabling you to navigate to water in places that none of your *living* relatives have ever been. When Scott says "Aboriginal villages weren’t mental health disasters when they were following their traditional ways" he is, in many parts of the continent, completely confusing things: nobody was living in 'villages' or even semi-permanent settlements in the western desert, because they would die if they did; they were moving across a vast expanse seasonally; there were no "villages" until colonial intervention forced their creation. At least in the stereotyped remote parts of Australia that he/many seem to imagine, "following their traditional ways" is synonymous with "not living in villages at all". My sense is that, even if you magically removed the generations of genocide etc, you'd still get a lot of desperate poverty just by insisting that people stay still when the ecology can't support them.
Very well said. The notion of a single, continent-wide Aboriginal culture is not a useful way of conceptualising pre-colonial Australia.
Thank you for writing all of this, I also thought the generalizations seemed weird based on what I've osmosed about Aboriginal culture, but at the same time I didn't know enough specifics to weigh in myself.
Was thinking exactly this while reading.
There were hundreds of separate language groups spread out over a continent, from desert to rainforest. Tasmanians were cut off from the mainland for thousands of years. Cultures a few hundred kms apart might have been completely alien to each other. The icons often associated with "Aboriginal culture" are generally only associated with a few groups e.g. the didgeridoo is only from a few groups northern Northern Territory/Kimberley, the concept of dreamtime/the dreaming is from a few groups in central Australia.
>spend large portions of your time dressing up in cool costumes and terrifying people with bull-roarers.
bullroarer mystery cults are actually the best case we have for:
>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”.
The reason that making a phylogeny of these was abandoned was not for a lack of evidence, but rather because anthropologists problemetized ideas about progress and comparison to death. I collect dozens of researchers statements here: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-bullroarer-much-more-than-you
Surely the obvious explanation for emigrants to more wealthy countries being more successful is that they're selected for being unusually willing to adapt to a new culture.
There are no "Aborigines" left, all are gone with the end of pre-contact people. Now decades behind us?
We're left with a spectrum of descendants, near or far.
One way or another all are now living with contact with modern life, in all its complexities.
Beyond all the wishful thinking that's cold reality.
As is that life for far too many of those in limbo land, a foot in each culture, has been disastrous.
Which disastrous dishonest deluded separate development strategy has been promoted officially for decades by both sides, despite sustained poor overall outcomes, especially in health, community violence.
Raising children into this depressing context comes close to institutionalised child abuse.
Relevant reading:
The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, 32 Years a Wanderer amongst the Aborigines of the Then Unexplored Country Round Port Phillip ( https://archive.org/details/lifeandadventur00morggoog/page/n6/mode/2up )
Three-part review of the same,
https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2016/12/02/anthropology-yes-friday-the-life-and-adventures-of-william-buckley-32-years-a-wanderer-amongst-the-aborigines/
https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2016/12/09/anthropology-friday-the-life-and-adventures-of-william-buckley-pt-2/
https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2016/12/16/anthropology-friday-the-life-and-adventures-of-william-buckley-pt-33/
Why Warriors Lie Down and Die ( https://www.whywarriors.com.au/services/why-warriors-lie-down-and-die/ )
Can you give a summary?
I figured that's what EvolutionistX's review was for.
Poor old Hobbes and Rousseau (whom I consider my philosophical enemies at a deeper level but fair is fair...)
Neither of them believed "the state of nature" was a historical reality. They were positing a pre-social existence that would reveal what man "really is" underneath all historical experience.
Now if that seems a strange idea it's because it is. Most people would agree with Aristotle that man is a social animal (or a "political animal," a better translation of what he actually said though "political" too has a very different meaning for us).
But Hobbes and Rousseau knew that. Their conception(s) of "nature" are different: something like "that which is always there and would be realized more obviously in other conditions"...
"But that raises a second question: a modern Aborigine has two options. They can move to Sydney or Melbourne and try to assimilate"
Lots of young aboriginal people get scholarships to prestigious private schools that they attend in a boarding school (with other rural kids). There's a common thing which happens, which is between finishing school and going to college, the school tries to convince them not to go home to their village. Reason being, when they do, they often don't come back to attend college. The outcomes for the people that don't come back seem anecdotally much worse (young parents, low incomes etc.)
The most common reason given for this happening is social pressure - when they're looking to go to college, the local village chastises them for thinking they're "better than the rest of us". No idea if that's the only thing, but similar issues seem to happen during school holidays, but (at least anecdotally), the issue doesn't seem to be as big as when graduating.
One thing that we might learn, in different ways, both from Julian Jaynes and Steven Pinker that hunter-gathers are psychologically (in consequence of biologically) quite different from people who have learnt to live in civilizations. It takes quite a bit of civilizing or self-domestication to be able to live in cities of millions of strangers without panicking.
So, adjustment of an immigrant from poor Asian countries is far easier and of an entirely different type than adjustment of an Aborigine.
The comments from people outside of Australia are hilarious to read by anyone who lives in Australia and has engaged in discourse around Indigenous affairs.
Note my choice of language. If you were to go to any party in Melbourne or Sydney and use the term "Aborigine", you would be immediately castigated as using a borderline slur. Dogwhistle territory for the liberal youth of the nation.
Claims like "oldest continous culture on earth" and "traditional owners and custodians of the land" are commonplace and used liberally by everything from major banks to the biggest sporting leagues in the country. Place names now use both English and First Nations equivalents in the postal system, and will soon subsume their British place names.
Given it is a little backwater country on the edge of the empire, it's understandable that many US and UK residents do not understand the wide cultural project that has taken place over the past couple decades in Australia to glorify and idolize Aboriginal culture, despite its serious incongruity with Western ideals.
I did wonder with regard to all the people saying "abo", whether Scott would be equally sanguine about other ethnic slurs being used in the comment section.
Is it a slur if you are in a far away country and just want to to type fewer letters? Like using "Brit" instead of "Briton/Britisher".
It might not be intended as a slur but that combination of letters has unfortunately long been assigned a connotation that is not as neutral as "Brit".
It's more like deciding to shorten Japanese to "Jap", occasionally someone does it because they don't know it was used as a slur, but if someone uses it repeatedly while talking about crimes committed by that group (as in this comment section), it's likely they don't intend it as a friendly nicknaming.
Good analogy
Does anyone apart from Indians actually use Britisher? In every case I remember seeing someone actually using it, the user is Indian.
This reminds me of the obvious cultural debt owed the Indigenous people of Greenland, in re the American Cold War air base formerly known, with efficient evocation, as Thule, now Pituffik. (No, you’re not pronouncing it right.)
Or the continued insistence on giving objects in the solar system, very long ludicrous Hawaiian (?) names because of the GPS coordinates of a telescope. This weird theater.
It gets worse than that, at least in Australia.
Mount Wellington, the large mountain overlooking Hobart, is now "kunanyi / Mount Wellington". Not Mount Kunayi, not even Kunayi, just "kunayi" with a lower case "k" in violation of all grammatical rules in the English language because being difficult is the point.
Trump amidst rolling back Obama’s (weird, AutoCorrect truly has no idea re Obama) national monument designation for the Bears ears area, decided to troll a little bit by calling the area he kept in the monument by some rather harsh sounding Navajo name. Not the general Indian preference.
Which words I think mean bears ears anyway, but lack that “cellar door” quality of Bears Ears - I mean there’s a mountain that looks like bear ears pretty pan culturally I think.
Anyhoo at least his trolling may have the effect of trolling himself in that if he gets around to undoing the part of it that Biden restored (I think he too kept out some uranium) over again, it will be harder to undo the part he’s ceremonially given the un-euphonious Navajo name I think. But undoing it will still be a travesty of course.
Three thoughts:
1. The rich symbology and symbolic hierarchy, often laden with sexual themes, by some traditional societies are organised has always been the thing that has made me go "huh, maybe Freudian psychology isn't bunk". "People who have sex with their mother-in-laws might have magic penises, but these will be hunted by ancestor figures, and also semen contains life essence that can be depleted" really makes even the determined skeptic want to crack out the Freud and take a second look.
2. "No sex across “age gaps”, where some people define “gap” as “half your age plus seven” and other people refuse to define it but reserve the right to judge transgressors anyway." - Oh God, really? Has this now gone from being a Twitter thing to an Actual Taboo? When I was younger, the "half your age plus seven" thing was more of a strong and usually quite sensible suggestion. Age gap relationships are usually a bad idea, but so long as everyone is an adult, enforcing a ban seems so... unromantic.
3. The general point that most customs probably serve *some* function for some end, getting distorted into the view that they must be benificient customs that keep society ticking over well for everyone, is the unique zaniness of the "Chesterton's fence" talking point. Yes, something of long standing probably has a function, but 1) It's not necessarily a nice, utilitarian one for the common good- in fact, there's not even a guarantee that that function is in any person's interest, and 2) There's no guarantee that it's possible to recover or know that function.
>The general point that most customs probably serve *some* function for some end, getting distorted into the view that they must be benificient customs that keep society ticking over well for everyone, is the unique zaniness of the "Chesterton's fence" talking point.
Chesterton's Fence doesn't say that all long-standing customs are good or optimal, it simply says you should take the trouble to learn what a custom's function is before abolishing it.
Yes, but- and I think this article illustrates it well- the idea that one can know "the purpose" of a custom misses the point that most customs are polyfunctional, and regardless, trying to work out their purpose(s) is not really something we are capable of in most cases.
I said "function", not "purpose".
Moving to Sydney or Melbourne and assimilating is not as easy as you make it sound.
Take a look at the NAPLAN writing results (not subject to test floor effects like the other sub tests which are all multiple choice): https://www.acara.edu.au/reporting/national-report-on-schooling-in-australia/naplan-national-results
Select achievement by subgroup, state/territory = NT, compare indigenous students to non indigenous. (I suspect “Very remote” in the NT is actually a better selector for ancestrally Aboriginal students than identification, but we can just keep it simple for now).
What you see: year 9 Aboriginal students are somewhat worse at writing, on average, than year 3 non Aboriginal students. This is with potentially substantial selection effects pushing the score up - by year 9 many Aboriginal students have stopped attending, or attend very irregularly.
So: a lot of Aboriginal adults have reading and writing ability worse than typical fairly young non Aboriginal children. This, I think, would make it challenging to live in Sydney or Melbourne, let alone assimilate.
Well maybe Brisbane then.
hey!
bloody mexicans thinking they are funny...
I wonder if you're underestimating the power of numbers at the end there.
In these premodern cultures, presumably 50% of all children are dying by the age of five. One third of women are dying in childbirth. And other non-hackers are dying all the time. It's a society of winners much more than our 95% survival society.
Perhaps the decrease in mental wellbeing is nothing more than the more loserish half of the population now surviving into adulthood and beyond.
I thought the consensus was that a lot can happen in 50,000 years, evolutionary change wise. I feel like the “Get a job” commenters are denying this, or winking at it.
can you elaborate? 50,000 years can lead to substantial divergence between populations, how does this relate to "get a job"?
I see Scott himself saying (joking?/ I don't have time to re-read) is an hourly wage job so much cringier than hunting game ... Others saying that having some of your citizenry as "museum pieces" is not workable, given the marvelous temptations on offer; they should always have been assimilated into modern, non-welfare life from the start.
I can't have any opinion about Australia but do wonder if there is a big enough space that *we* kept out of, if it's impossible for people to live the life that the land shaped for them.
50,000 years seems like plenty of time to become suited to one thing and not another. At least, I thought people thought that change can happen over still "smaller" time scales than that, but perhaps I'm wrong,
I feel this way about animals and space on Earth, not just humans.
Well the people in some Andaman Islands still live a primeval life, but only because they chose to avoid contact with outsiders and the outside world has honored their will. It becomes harder to live a traditional life when you discover other peoples have much greater power/technology, the stuff your elders tell you just won't mean as much as it did before. I'm not sure I understand your point about the 50,000 years, other than to say that knowing about natural selection makes it quite evident that Australian Aborigines would not adapt very well to Western society.
I’m surprised that people think they should adapt, or that it would be done by now.
If the situation were reversed, I’m sure that I would not have adapted to their way of life by now.
Well, yes, I do think Scott mentions how he would not be able to adjust to Aboriginal society. The problem is they can't continue their tribal/cultural existence after coming face to face with modernity, imagine if we came face to face with aliens who can travel at the speed of light - Western society is still probably closer in scale to such a society than Aboriginal culture was to Western society. This is more about the harsh realities of nature, not morality.
Maybe so. Maybe it is all determined now. My instinct is that people should not put all their eggs in one basket. But again, this is from an environmentalist lens, so hardly to be shared here.
This review makes a marked contrast to your 2019 review of Heinrich's "The Secret of Our Success" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zm7WAJMTaFvuh2Wc7/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success), which was strongly criticised — both the book and your review of it — in the LessWrong 2019 Review. Any present thoughts on Heinrich?
>The obvious answer is something like pride. Even if the average Aborigine has more stuff now, they get it from something like convenience store work or welfare or something, and this is less pride-inducing than being a traditional hunter (even if traditional hunters had less stuff and often starved). 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 mean, even the Taliban have struggled to make the transition from badass warriors to tame office workers:
https://time.com/6263906/taliban-afghanistan-office-work-quiet-quit/
And they're making the transition as leaders of the country after winning a war against the world's most powerful military. For Aborigines, who are generally getting very low-status jobs after their society was turned upside-down by infinitely wealthier and more technologically advanced foreigners, the situation would be even worse, because there'd be extra feelings of impotence and humiliation which presumably wouldn't apply to the Taliban.
But I do seriously wonder whether some of Aboriginal Australians' problems might be solved by recruiting them into the army. Being a soldier is generally considered masculine and cool, so they could still get status and a self-image as a proper man. Army pay isn't usually very high by regular civilian standards, but by the standards of an impoverished Aboriginal community it's probably very good. Military life has a lot of privations and hardships, but I'd certainly take it over some of the more gruesome initiation rituals (at least I wouldn't be expected to let my commanding officers slice my d**k open). And the general process of military training -- leaving home, being placed under the instruction of more experienced men, learning to do manly things -- is far more similar to traditional Aboriginal life-scripts than working as a shelf-stacker or going on benefits.
There’s some credit to the army idea but it’s assuming that the modal young aboriginal man would make a halfway-decent soldier and not a pure burden on the military, which seems like a big assumption. The military has no place within their cosmology so apart from the superficial similarities of leaving home to serve elsewhere they’d likely struggle with a life strictly regimented by the commands of rich outsiders
True, it's quite possible that most Aborigines would be, for whatever reasons, unsuitable as soldiers. Though I'm not sure following the commands of rich outsiders specifically would be necessarily be that hard -- from what Scott says above, it sounds like a young man would traditionally spend several decades working for his prospective in-laws, who would be outsiders and (by Aboriginal standards, which is admittedly a pretty low bar) richer than him.
This is a fascinating review, but as an Australian, it felt so weird to read it.
I couldn't get past the sense that you seem to believe that problems of racism, poverty and systemic disadvantage are sort of - if not resolved - then well enough on the way to being resolved that we can just take them as read and look for other explanations (like hurt pride) for things like suicide rates and poor educational outcomes etc etc. I think the legacy of colonialism is really salient and I think have a lot of explanatory power.
There's a world of difference between what rights/opportunities/choices are available to a theoretical Aboriginal person today vs. the situation the average Aboriginal person likely faces, statistically. It's not some sort of free choice between joining a healthy, functioning traditional society on the land with some sort of continuity with tradition (they exist but it's not straightforward to live there, and many rural communities are just horrible, modern, shanty towns), or 'moving to Sydney' and becoming a lawyer or something. People do manage to do these things, but they're very, very hard and require extraordinary agency, determination and luck.
Kids now are 1-2 generations separated from government policies that treated aboriginality as a problem to be gotten rid of, via 'assimilation' (confiscating children en-masse) and via rounding up and moving whole communities into rural shanty-towns without a means of making a living or practising their traditions. Those kids are less than one generation from the legal doctrine of Terra Nullius, which essentially denied Aboriginal people ever had sovereignty over the land here. Large parts of the country were literally under Federal military occupation until 2022 (imagine if Trump sent the National Guard to establish martial law in many tribal lands and then kept them there for 15 years). That's ended now, but people in those communities are still subject to curfews, compulsory income management and other authoritarian rules. Huge numbers of kids still go through a foster system that's not a great experience to live through, but the alternative is for authorities to leave them in risky situation that themselves cause harm. Police still doing police things.
Racism is certainly not considered permissible in the public sphere now, but scratch the surface and there's a snarling ego-defence, especially among the older generation. Their knee-jerk reaction to any discussion of the state of affairs is to get defensive, because they're sick of being held responsible for things they didn't themselves do, and sick of being reminded that despite their fairly comfortable situation, things are not ok. Generally speaking, we're living with the weird, unresolved consequences of a century of basically-genocidal policies, and there's total unwillingness in our most powerful demographic to even acknowledge the situation.
Sure, it's politically correct to say acknowledgements of country at events and generally say nice words about 'sovereignty never ceded' and not think much more about it, and everyone clucks their tongue every time the Closing the Gap report comes out and shows the numbers still absolutely suck, but it's absolutely not politically correct to say 'the justice system is still systemically racist' or 'mandatory income management targeting only indigenous communities and enforced by martial law is a racist and tyrannical policy" unless you're in particular circles of affluent and/or young people.
I don't want to dismiss the idea of a cultural 'psychic wound' being a factor in Aboriginal mental health, but I think the wound is much more tangible than 'feeling hurt pride because being a store clerk is low-status when you could have been a hunter'. That's such a glib formulation. One theme I have seen in things I have read is Aboriginal young people talking of a sense of grief or loss, that despite their best efforts piecing together their culture/ontology/society via a few living elders and the work of mostly-white anthropologists, most of it has been destroyed and lost forever, and they're now at the bottom of the social-status stack in a society that only recently decided it wasn't hostile to their very existence.
This comes across as quite ranty and polemical, and I really want to stress that I'm not trying to accuse you of insufficiently caring about these things, or whatever... I just wanted to share that I felt bizarre reading this, because it felt like wondering why the flowers are wilting, and reading a decades-old book, arriving at the conclusion that they might not like the climate this far south, while the house around you and the flowers was literally on fire five minutes ago and smoke is still pouring out etc.
I think Scott alludes to the fact that people who had a comparatively low state of development until recently will not be able to thrive in a modern technologically advanced society where they have to compete against others who are better suited to it. It's not really about morality, the gap between Europeans and Native Australians was just a huge one, it's no surprise that the Natives rarely end up as successful lawyers or bankers.
I don't think it works like that? Computers didn't exist 100 years ago and today people all over the world are programmers. People are flexible and learn things, I'm not aware of some kind of biological process that would make members of a particular race categorically unsuited to any aspect of the modern economy, especially in any way with sharp edges where you couldn't then make the same claim about people of many races with those attributes.
Well, computers didn't exist, but people in societies where the average job was more complex( like for instance, industrial) have definitely adapted to the newer technological changes such as computers better. This is why you see East Asians and West Eurasians at the top of the US socio-economic pyramid, and this is just a small example of the general trend. This is also why Jews were and are disproportionately successful in the West, they have been doing "white-collar" professions for a longer time than the average European or American, and being literate is virtually a necessity in traditional Judaism. Most Europeans were illiterate before the late 19th or early 20th century.
Weren't you guys just chasing down aboriginal children with dogs, and giving them punitive punishments for escaping the detention camps? As in within the last five years?
I don't know what you mean by detention camps (that was a COVID thing), but while I can't think of a specific incident you might be referring to, it's conceptually/essentially similar - or has the same vibe - as many things that have occurred in the prison and juvenile justice systems, particularly in the Northern Territory, in the last 10 years, yeah.
At least five aboriginal children escaped from the Howard Springs Detention center, and they used dogs to track them down. The punitive punishment was "you're going to have to say in quarantine longer" because of trying to escape.
This does not make you guys look good.
(continued sincere disclaimer, in case you haven't read it above. I am quite good friends with someone who is banned from going to Australia for work he's done with Aborigines -- made the government look stupid because they couldn't tell the performers were Aborigines).
Genuinely curious: what % of the Aborigine problem would you ascribe to genetically lower IQs? Under their traditional lifestyle it seems to me that individuals were tightly controlled: by indentured servitude, by ritual, or by the simple imperative to find water every day. Don't you think it's *possible* that they're simply not cognitively equipped to function in a modern society? I'm not saying that social factors like racism and cultural erasure aren't a factor, but before you go pointing the racism finger I think you have an intellectual obligation to consider the possibility that racist attitudes may simply be a rational response to the genetic reality.
Genuinely curious: would you consider, say, an IQ85 *white* person living in Australia to be "simply not cognitively equipped to function in a modern society"?
Or would you only apply that argument to an Aboriginal person with an equal IQ to them? Or are you using IQ as a motte for a kind of racially essentialist bailey you want to inhabit?
I'm not pointing the racism finger at Scott, I'm saying the post felt profoundly weird to read because it sort of skims over the entire experience of colonialism in terms of traumatic events inflicted on people who are still alive today, instead treating it as an abstract secular historical process. It's an interesting framing, I enjoyed the Rousseau/Hobbes thing, it's just like focusing on the climate when the house is on fire as I said before.
>Genuinely curious: would you consider, say, an IQ85 *white* person living in Australia to be "simply not cognitively equipped to function in a modern society"?
85? Probably not, but it's borderline. That's why the armed forces have an IQ cutoff of 83. Remote-living aborigines have an average IQ well below 85.
I don't know what you mean by "racially essentialist". Aborigines have a lower IQ. That's undeniable. It's also not hard to understand within the context of their history. Their traditional lifestyle had absolutely no requirement for abstract thought.
You didn't answer my question. I would like to know to what degree you think IQ differentials are responsible for their inability to integrate into mainstream culture.
>I'm not pointing the racism finger at Scott
I wasn't suggesting that you were. Your comment seemed to point it at Australian society, however.
In terms of falling for scams and stuff, IQ 85 people tend to do better than IQ 105-115 folks. IQ 85 folks know they are dumb, and if something seems too complicated, they're probably going to say "nah."
This is why it's possible to have entire societies with IQs averaging sub-100.
Do you have a link to a study about that? Otherwise I don't believe it for a second. Look at sub-Saharan Africa if you want to know what an 80-IQ society looks like.
I have looked at sub-saharan africa. These are societies that use "demonic possession" as an element in their judicial system (this can be discussed as "the me that did that isn't the me who is here." -- aka "I didn't do nuttin" -- famous from cop shows. This isn't precisely a lie, if your time horizon is short). They are NOT societies where Pied Piper scenarios occur often. (Compare to "Solar Fucking Roadways" -- a rather obvious scam that has suckered a lot of people in).
I dispute your entire premise that they have 'an inability to integrate into mainstream culture'. Many *have* integrated into mainstream culture despite significant obstacles to doing so that I think are largely due to the colonial policies, their legacy, and general societal racism.
I also dispute your implied premise that integrating into mainstream culture should necessarily be the end goal.
~15% of the general population has IQ 85 or below, so if you think they are "not cognitively equipped to function in a modern society", I think you need to explain why and how so many of them do function in modern society. I think the reasons are:
1. IQ is strongly predictive of many things but it is still possible for low-IQ people to have many strong attributes they use to achieve success/stability/good life.
2. Society has government and cultural institutions that seem 'designed' to create meaningful and productive roles for low-IQ people and generally protect them from harm. It's like a 'social safety net' (thinking of James C Scott) where there is a 'knowledge commons' or generally understood metis that reduces the cognitive load on any one individual. When we colonised Australia, we nearly completely destroyed Aboriginal cultural institutions that would have allowed the full range of mental abilities to participate in their society, as we do in ours. In their place, we created a colonial regime that systematically excluded them from our society until only a few decades ago.
I think that's why individuals of a given low IQ probably do better statistically when they're not Aboriginal - it's because Aboriginal people of a given low IQ lost all their cultural institutional support, have historically been at first totally excluded, then benefited less and less easily accessed the settlers' cultural institutions, and because they have to deal with the social legacy of genocidal policies and their impact on their immediate families and communities.
Although low IQ white Australians do exist, the fraction of similar IQ people among Australian Aborigines is surely much higher.... this makes sense given natural selection and history. This is what's relevant, the average intelligence of an Aboriginal vs the average Australian intelligence. Of course, non-IQ traits among Aboriginals might make it even harder for their low IQ population segment to function well in Australian society, as well as some degree of racism or self consciousness based on looking so different to the majority.
>I dispute your entire premise that they have 'an inability to integrate into mainstream culture'.
Then what did you mean by "...things like suicide rates and poor educational outcomes etc etc. I think the legacy of colonialism is really salient and I think have a lot of explanatory power."
A lot of explanatory power for what? If you object to the term 'assimilation' then just assume that I'm talking about whatever 'that' is. Aborigines have problems, I think we can agree on that.
>15% of the general population has IQ 85 or below
Yes and I'm sure that cohort, white or black, has many problems. They certainly do in the United States. The African American population has an average IQ of 85. They're consistently at the bottom in all aspects of society (except for sports, of course) and something like a third of all adult males spend some time in prison. I think it's therefore fair to say that 85 represents some sort of threshold below which the ability to function in society becomes fraught. Perhaps the actual threshold is 80 or 75, but as I'm sure you're aware, the average IQ of aborigines has been measured to be in the 70s. Remote populations test in the 60s.
>I think that's why individuals of a given low IQ probably do better statistically when they're not Aboriginal
That's probably true though I suspect that it's not as true as you think. Bear in mind that normal distributions quickly thin out in the tails: while 15% of the white population is below 85, only 2.5% is below 70. An IQ of 70 is the clinical threshold for intellectual disability, meaning an outright inability to live independently. Plausibly *half* of the aboriginal population is below that. Do you understand what that means?
>When we colonised Australia, we nearly completely destroyed Aboriginal cultural institutions that would have allowed the full range of mental abilities to participate in their society
Do you think there's any context outside of their traditional lifestyle where aborgines would thrive? I suspect that there's not and also that there's no counterfactual history, short of complete non-interference, where they would still be a functional society in any sense today. Yes contact with the modern west has destroyed their way of life. Why do you suppose they've been unable to create a new one? All cultures must deal with modernity. If one is cognitively unable to do that then that's not the fault of racism, it's simply an unfortunate and ineradicable reality. Stop pointing the finger at factors that didn't create the problem.
I find it interesting that you're refusing the answer the clear intent of my question. The whole reason I'm asking is that I'm genuinely curious about the intellectual distortions that race-based conflict has caused in Australia. You appear to be evidence that they're very substantial.
I find it interesting that you see a result like "average IQ in the 70s" and think "ah, this explains everything, my moral responsibility is alleviated" and not "wow, weird failure mode for the testing, huh" or "wow, their study population sure had some intense selection effects on it, didn't it?!" Your eagerness to treat the history of Aboriginal/European contact as a sort of natural experiment, and conclude that Aboriginal people are incapable of living in modernity is weird to witness, honestly. You claim as though it's a fact that modernity gives rise to intelligence via adaptation, when in face humans developed close to our current intelligence levels in pre-modern times and much of the rest of the (modest) rise can be explained via Flynn effect, education etc. You focus on pre-contact natural selection while giving no credit to the idea of post-contact, (non-biological!) selection pressures that determine things like "which Aboriginal people are living in rural shanty towns in the late 20th century?"
Let me put it like this: if you were an alien hiding out behind the moon, arriving a few hundred years ago, and you wanted to know whether Aboriginal people could live in a modern society, (and you had the power to control world events), would you design your experiment in the way that Australian history has gone? If you wanted an insight into the cognitive abilities of Aboriginal people in general, wouldn't you be desperate to avoid all of the different filters and selection effects acting to narrow and restrict the population considered in the studies you're gesturing at?
Yet people just throw around this "IQ in the 70s" statistic and then say "do you know what that means?" as though this were even vaguely representative of the Aboriginal population at large, (if you can even define exactly what that population is) or their pre-contact society. It means studying IQ is hard when there are massive cultural divides AND a century of genocidal government policies moving and filtering and selecting people AND you choose to study only people who (by the study's very design) haven't "integrated" into society in the way you mean.
So to answer your question, no I don't think purported IQ differences explain much of the social issues experienced by Aboriginal people today in Australia. I don't know why you think you can just demand to know people's view on race and IQ, by the way. It's a bullying tactic that will evaporatively cool your pool of conversational partners until you're surrounded by maniacs.
I find your "intellectual distortions to be substatial", as well, but I am not curious about them and I'm done with this discussion.
I'm sort of confused here. So Aboriginal men were supposed to serve their future mother-in-laws for over a decade, but they were also supposed to hate them and never talk to them? How do you serve someone without ever talking to them?
I think it was clear in the review it was done by proxy of either the father-in-law or their children
> But in absolute terms, they’re much richer now: nobody starves, there’s decent medical care, people have quality clothes and houses, etc.
You could say the same thing about animals kept in a decent zoo
Yes, and just like animals often struggle to thrive when confined in a zoo, even though they've got food, shelter, veterinary care, etc., so too many people struggle to thrive when confined in an office cubicle.
Absolutely
“When Third World immigrants move to the US, they’re usually pretty happy with their decision. They might not assimilate completely, but they’re often able to hold down jobs or at least avoid spiraling into alcoholism and suicide.”
At the risk of romanticizing Third World immigrants, the typical immigrant experience is worlds apart from the aboriginal experience. Consider what it takes to become an immigrant:
1. You voluntarily leave behind almost everyone you ever loved, everyone you ever knew. This doesn’t just include relatives like parents, children, siblings, and cousins. It also means all your friends, your colleagues, your favorite bartender, your fishing buddy, your priest and congregation. It will be years or decades before you see them again–if you ever do.
2. You voluntarily operate with a different set of moral values, and accept a different set of customs. Yes, you might still believe in Sharia, but most Americans don’t, and you have to interact with them in a way they understand.
3. You accept a severe degradation in social status. That medical degree from Pakistan? Worthless in Canada. Instead of being a doctor, you drive doctors to the Toronto airport, sending them on vacations you can’t afford.
4. You learn a new language. Don’t underestimate how hard this is if your mother tongue is not Romance or Germanic! Many older Chinese immigrants have stories of spending long nights memorizing English dictionaries, telling themselves the sacrifice will be worth it when they’re earning $10/hour in America instead of $1/hour in China.
5. The destination country has to want you, and it probably doesn’t want people who look like they’ll be burdens on society. This doesn’t apply to illegal immigrants–and not surprisingly, illegal immigrants have worse outcomes.
So in order to be a median immigrant from a third-world country, you have to want it more than most people have wanted anything in their entire lives. You have to upend every aspect of your life to live thousands of miles from nearly everyone and everything you ever knew, among people very different from you. It’s not surprising that high openness, highly determined people who sacrifice everything just to join your society, integrate better than median-openness, median-determination people that your society forcibly integrated (aka many of their ancestors sacrificed everything to *not* join your society).
And what if the immigrants do not wish to integrate?
Wait, so the entire continent of Australia had a single native culture? I feel like that tells you something important right there.
I would bet dollar to donuts that this represents some kind of historical event wherein the current culture outcompeted everything else, which probably had to include some cultures that were more war like than the culture that we see now.
That's really odd. Australia is huge.
I think Scott is generalizing, there were cultural differences and distinct languages and different ecological niches, but the tech gap between every Australian society and Western society was equally large. Contrast this with Sub-saharan Africa, where you had hunter-gatherers but also more sophisticated farming and herding societies.
Book by an actual aborigine: Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. He isn't a full member of any aboriginal society, but he's partially initiated in some of them.
Goodreads:
> In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta’s writing process begins with images. Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He yarns with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge.
Hm. Honestly that sounds like he wants to sell a book which doesn't say anything. And I doubt he has an subincisioned penis.I prefer the strange stories about a polygynic gerontocracy with infant betrothals and sister spearing.
>Honestly that sounds like he wants to sell a book which doesn't say anything.
Well, it sounds like he’s suggested very well to Western culture which should be considered a success story.
That initial question: do aborigines have chiefs?
That looks like a bad starting point. What do you mean by a chief? What do the people you're talking with think you mean by a chief?
I would think you'd need a leisurely open-ended conversation about how authority works in a society, and it would be hard to get reliable answers because people couldn't put it completely into words and might not want to tell the whole truth.
And then you have the culture that believed so strongly that truth was a commercial quantity, that they lied their way out of their original capital (and a lot of other things). If you didn't pay for the truth, you got lies.
Some cultures were a lot more reasonable for "European Anthropologists" to study than others.
Similarly: do 21st century Americans have chiefs?
Taken narrowly, no, most of us don't have political leaders who are called "chiefs", except for the very few Americans who are members of native tribes lead by chiefs.
But we do have oodles of political leaders, Presidents, Governors, Mayors, Sheriffs, and whatnot. Many of them are even leaders of smallish non-state polities. "Mayor" is etymologically related to "Big Man", which an anthropological and political science term is an adjacent concept to chiefdom (although US Mayors, as holders of formal offices rather than people who have informal power via wealth and patronage, have more in common with Chiefs than with Big Men).
We also have other important non-political leaders. Some of the ones most salient in our day to day life are called "bosses". In English, Boss and Chief are distinct terms, but other languages use the same word for both (e.g. "Jefe" in Spanish).
Huh, well isn't that the first question we would have asked them 200 years ago?
"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."
This was a great and thoughtful review, and I really appreciated it, as I appreciate most of your writing.
So I am trying to be as far as possible from snark or sarcasm or an easy jab when I say that it mildly terrifies me that major decisions and discussions about how AI should fit into a future human society are being led by people who cannot understand the above fact.
Truly a great read!
I'm a bit astonished to hear that this system was practiced across the whole giant continent of Australia, most of which they could not possibly visit more than a small corner of it in their lifetime.
Everywhere is that results in wildly different cultures and languages every few hundred miles!
Or did I misunderstand something?
Fantastic article. Thanks.
There’s a lot of tension between “go through a decade of physical abuse and misery to become high status” and the “everyone takes care of each other and is reasonably equal, with allowances for sex and age”. The most obvious high status reward seems to be multiple wives. What happens to the men who, as a result, get no one? Is there no resentment there? How do these differences in status play out?
Get rich or die trying. Reading a few reports/descriptions from 200 years ago it was a hobbesian world with lots of small scale conflicts. Not war between nation states or even tribes, but small groups allying/feuding with each other.
Plus diseases. So it is easy to imagine fewer marriageable (older/high status) men than marriageable (young/fertile) women. With the initiations the older men could also dynamically control their peers/competitors/successors: Too few men? Fast track younger guys into high status. Too many men? Slow track them.
>What happens to the men who, as a result, get no one?
They vanish without a trace, as nature intended.
> But when a people gets colonized - after the bad part with the conquest and land theft and oppression, once they’re granted citizenship and the settlers feel vaguely apologetic - doesn’t it end up kind of like being an immigrant into a First World country?
No, not even close. When I'm forced to do something, I lose my agency. It is not me who is trying to assimilate, it is the outside world is trying to assimilate me. Suppose the best case scenario for the assimilation occurs when I do not resist and even trying to help. But how can I help? What parts of me are me and what parts are cultural elements that should be eliminated or replaced with elements from the foreign culture? It is not always obvious.
This is the case when I do not resist, while in reality I probably will. I smoked tobacco, I was considering quitting; I tried repeatedly without success. However when I heard how lawmakers were finding new ways to make it harder for me to smoke, I had to force myself from continuing to smoke out of spite of that, to keep my agency intact. It is a big issue for teenagers separating from their parents, but people who successfully overcame teenage issues are not immune from such thinking.
Moreover there is one more thing. Immigrants are self-selected. It means not only that they exercise their own agency, but also that they are willing to assimilate at least to some extent. If I despise the other culture and value the traditional ways of my native society, I will not become an immigrant.
I wonder if the successful adoption of elements of Western culture in Eastern nations (Japan, China, South Korea) could be explained in part by the adoption being partially a choice rather than a colonial mandate, as well as the fact that Western culture contains elements (as a result of crosstalk) from Eastern culture already.
It would also be interesting to see if cultural similarity predicts assimilation success.
Was the American occupation of Japan after WW2 a choice? The reason Asian countries have been able to assimilate to Western culture and others haven't is that Asians have sufficiently high IQs. Western culture is complex and individual-centric. Dummies can't handle that. I would bet any amount of money that a careful study would show that national IQ is the single best predictor of assimilation success.
I had the Meiji Restoration in mind.
Wasn't that largely downstream of Commodore Perry forcing Japan to open itself to the West? Of course that's less forcible than outright occupation but I'd put it below immigration on a scale of "how much of this was our idea".
Either way I think it matters way, way less than IQ. Look at India. They're fairly Westernized and that's on the back of colonialism.
Another interesting set of comparisons is the various Polynesian peoples, especially the Maori and the native Hawaiians.
These people were much less technologically advanced than the Indians or Japanese, though significantly more so than the Aborigines; the Polynesians had some agriculture and permanent settlements, but no cities or writing or use of metal.
When placed in a very similar situation to the Aborigines, the Maori and Hawaiians have performed much better; while there's some problems and gaps still do exist, Polynesian peoples have done a vastly better job of integrating into first-world society than Aborigines. It would be interesting to figure out why.
One thing in particular, I think that most of Scott's arguments about status loss moving out of a tribal society and into a larger civilisation do apply to the Maori as well, and this is certainly an issue (it's a theme in the book and film Once Were Warriors) but doesn't seem to have been as big of an issue.
That is really interesting. It would be nice if we had a good metric of cultural similarity, to see if Maori customs were closer to the European settlers.
Though it would be equally interesting if there were another set of variables entirely that explains the discrepancy.
A quick google tells me that native Hawaiians have an average IQ in the high 80s vs the low 60s of the Aborigines.
This is a significantly large gap to explain the difficulty in success.
Today's inane observation: We transliterated Mokha into English, twice. Now it's Mocha Java, and Moka pot. Why, English, why?!
>Something like this has to be true, but I can’t make myself understand it.
Scott, I thought you liked Lou Keep? He reviewed a whole book about that: https://samzdat.com/2017/06/01/the-meridian-of-her-greatness/
I think there’s a couple of things that are getting short shift here. Number one is the assumption that the Qualia of pain to someone 10,000 years ago is anything like ours. They had to live with a lot of it on a daily basis. They could not succumb to it. If they were going to survive. Seen in this light some of these barbaric rituals take on a new dimension. You could even say they were doing the kid a favor.
The second is equating good, accurate hunting with taking part in a boomerang contest is pretty dismissive. I imagine it was very serious business. The kind of concentration one would expect trying to become a navy seal.
Himmm.
I see that "Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Aboriginal Australia by Geoffrey Blainey" is available in a thrift store near me, courtesy of Nick Cave.
Excellent review of an excellent book! Laughed multiple times. The sections stuff makes my eyes water. Interestingly, some regions only had 4 or 2 sections and some none at all. My guess is that they're not very old. One approach that modern anthropologists abandoned is the study of cultural evolution and diffusion. There were many commonalities within Australia but also fascinating distinctions. I think we'll end up finding that the last 50,000 years was much more dynamic than currently assumed (for instance, spear throwers appear to have been invented or introduced only 8000 years ago). But academic studies of these questions had been hamstringed by the Pan-Aboriginal political movement that began in the early 1970s and led to the censorship of many resources and even the reburial of 40,000 year-old fossils. You may find this deep dive interesting (although it's a bit depressing too): https://quillette.com/2025/01/25/the-original-aboriginals-australia/
The way that article completely ignored the Black War/Tasmanian genocide left a really bad taste in my mouth, especially given that it mentioned disease directly before mentioning the "decline" of the Tasmanians (and why do only Tasmanian women have living descendants?)
It didn't explicitly deny what happened to them, but it's written to give non-specialists exactly the wrong impression, despite the author clearly knowing better.
Great review. Even tech billionaires seem not quite fulfilled with just money and things. They turn to jiu-jitsu or other forms of more anciently aligned forms of personal masculine pride supporting endeavours too.
I wonder if some of the resistance to adapting to modern ways has to do not with individual pride, but with the power of tradition. To go from a kangaroo hunter to a minimum wage store clerk (and I might note that even in modern society, jobs involving heavy physical labor still have a certain cachet) might seem like moving to an easier, more rewarding job. But it carries a message of "It is not just that you were wrong- your family, your culture, your people going back thousands of years were wrong. While your culture was doing the same thing over and over for millennia, someone else was inventing a better way of doing things, which apparently you guys weren't smart enough to think of. Now, the best you can hope for is to hold a job at the bottom of our structure, which will still give more rewards than being at the top of your structure." For people with strong traditions and a tendency towards identity concentrated on relationships to others, that is a problem.
It reminds me of the Old Believers, the Russian Orthodox who did not care for the changes to the Church introduced by Peter the Great. There were certain theological issues involved that I don't understand, but one of their key arguments was tradition- and Eastern Orthodoxy, even more than Catholicism relies on tradition. To say "But this isn't the way we used to do it- you are saying that all of our ancestors were wrong, and facing divine judgment for that" was a powerful argument. And the Old Believers didn't simply react by becoming marginalized alcoholics, they were known to commit mass suicide by fire rather than adapt to what authority figures told them what to believe.
> 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?
...Yeah? Sounds very intuitive to me tbh. Between the status hit, the subsequent loss of self-respect and desirability to the opposite sex, the alienation (in a Marxist sense), and a crushing thought that it will never get better, it's a huge decrease in psychological welfare! I can completely understand the causality from there to alcoholism and suicide.
I think it's unfair to say that Henrich's view is that indigenous societies are all roses. He doesn't focus on it because he's interested in the cultural evolution angle, but I expect he would readily agree many indigenous practices are extremely unpleasant for the people involved in them. The point is more to be impressed by how well it all works despite the total lack of top-down design (where "works" doesn't mean it makes everyone happy, but rather successfully reproduces itself generation to generation in a difficult and hostile environment).
"well, sometimes the spirits come at unexpected times."
The spirits apologize, because the spirits are not usually like that but got excited.
"If you’re keeping young people in a decades-long state of sexual frustration, maybe their sisters start to look pretty good; certainly the past few years of online pornography have suggested that this option is never far from the sexually-frustrated-young-person mind."
Regarding the prevalence of step-sibling and step-parent pseudo-incest porn: I think you see it for the same reason most sodas are kosher: there is a small minority that prefers it that way and the rest of the market simply ignores it as irrelevant, so there's no particular downside to giving that minority what they want.
There is at least one advantage to gerontocracy when compared to other kinds of "ocracies": if you're not in the favored group today and want to take over, all you have to do is wait.
Do we have anything as weird as mother-in-law languages?
Absolutely. American adults speak differently around children, and the younger the children are, the more our language gets distorted. For example, we are very likely to replace the words "urine", "penis", "vulva", or even "toilet" with euphemisms when in their presence, including when teaching children about the proper ways to use a toilet to urinate and then clean their penis or vulva afterwards.
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Just posting my random aboriginal theory to get it off my chest: an underrated aspect of why aboriginals have such a bad time is diet. There's lots of books citing all the terrible health outcomes that the first agricultural people experienced during that transition, but I've never really seen it prioritised as a policy question for improving aboriginal outcomes beyond broad platitudes.
To me it's reasonable that living on a diet you are not adapted to is going to result in all sorts of health downsides - which in turn affect mental health. The massive prevalence of endocrine disorders supports the theory (eg. very high diabetes rates). Should aboriginal people be eating any significant amount of processed carbs? I suspect probably not. Alcohol is ruinous too, obviously.
Not close to the whole story of course but a corner of the issue that is under-discussed imo. That said - it's tough for the Aus govt to act on these sorts of questions given that it perpetrated a genuine attempt at cultural genocide.
Are Americans still allowed to make mother-in-law jokes like in the Henny Youngman / Rodney Dangerfield era?
President Obama's mother in law lived in the White House with him for eight years. Being old, that struck me as pretty funny, and it sounded like the basis for some good stand-up comedy meta-comedy about stand-up comedy, but nobody else seemed to find it funny. The only comedian I ever heard of making a single joke about it was Jimmy Kimmel, and his one joke bombed.
I like Otto Rank's explanation of the anthropology. He thinks early human men basically denied having anything to do with procreation for the same reason later cultures emphasized an inherited obligation for the son to continue (or revenge) the father's immortality project. The Classical Greek experience, for example, included a teacher-student obligation. In any case, Rank's evidence comes from those groups that didn't have marriage. Males and females lived separately, with the females raising the boys and girls until they came or age when the boys were made to join the Men group and females carried on with the Women. All the fanciful stories about how pregnancy happens illustrates how far early humans were willing to go in denying the obvious. Of course, that is Rank's thesis for all culture. We "know" we are part of nature but we idealize our essence as separate.
PS - Rank got thrown out of the club when he criticized Freud for thinking that it was all biology. Likewise, he thought Adler's Will to Power, and Jung's collective psyche were simply attempts by individuals to create an ideology as their own immortality project.
"So what’s gotten worse? The obvious answer is something like pride."
Maybe it's something we might call "meaning"? Loss of meaning is something people in our society struggle with, as well, see Viktor Frankl.
I imagine that there was a lot of meaning in the times before outside contact. You knew how the world worked and what you had to do to be successful. Afterwards, this was gone.
So I was reading Aristotle's The Politics, and this really jumped out of the given what SA notes about the aboriginees
"It is fitting, therefore, for the women to be married at around the age of
eighteen; the men at thirty-seven or a little before.91 At those ages, sexual
union will occur when their bodies are in their prime, and will end, con- 30
veniently for both, at the time when they cease to be fertile. As to difference
in age between parents and children, if the children are born soon
after marriage occurs, as can reasonably be expected, they will be at the
beginning of their prime when their father's period of vigor has come to
an end, at around the age of seventy."
How remarkable that an ancient Greek could hit upon roughly the same 20 year gap between men and women being the ideal, as the aboriginees did thousands of miles away over different millennia. Of course this could just be a coincidence… But if not, why not?
May have something to do with another choice tidbit of Aristotle: "if males have sex while their bodies are still growing, this is held to impair their growth; for this growth too takes a definite period of time, after which it is no longer extensive".