|
Marijuana Nihilist posted:An idiotic idea. Leave the tribes alone, the last thing we need on this planet is more cultural homogenization. Not everyone on earth needs to live in the exact same way. A thousand times this. There's an assumption in the OP that bears examination, and it's the assumption that civilized life is objectively better than indigenous/noncivilized life. Not only is that not necessarily the case, but I can actually think of two instances where civilization is the clear loser when measured up against noncivilized lifestyles (which I'd define as any lifestyle that includes hunting/gathering as the primary mode of subsistence): 1. Sustainability. In a little over a century, industrialized society has radically altered Earth's climate, acidified the oceans, left us with only 60 years of viable topsoil remaining, and caused an extinction event on the order of magnitude of asteroid collision. Indigenous lifestyles, on the other hand, have been ecologically stable for hundreds of thousands of years. 2. Mental Health. I know this one sounds ridiculous, but humor me. Anthropologists have shown time and again that mental illness is nearly unheard of in uncivilized peoples. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that their lifestyle results in more contentedness, life satisfaction, and just a better perspective on life in general. If you don't believe me that mental illness is incredibly rare among the noncivilized, I'll gladly provide citations. Contrast that with roughly 1 in 5 Americans suffering from some form of mental illness every year.
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 00:49 |
|
|
# ? Jun 5, 2024 05:23 |
|
I'd like to thank everyone who contributed thus far. Like I said, I was not convinced of either position being a moral good (leaving aside practicality). After reading everything, I'm now convinced that the proposal in my OP would be immoral. It rested on the premise that modern, industrialized society is inherently better, and that is a shaky premise at best.
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 02:33 |
|
Your Sledgehammer posted:2. Mental Health. I know this one sounds ridiculous, but humor me. Anthropologists have shown time and again that mental illness is nearly unheard of in uncivilized peoples. I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say that their lifestyle results in more contentedness, life satisfaction, and just a better perspective on life in general. If you don't believe me that mental illness is incredibly rare among the noncivilized, I'll gladly provide citations. Contrast that with roughly 1 in 5 Americans suffering from some form of mental illness every year. This sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. On its face. Hunter-gatherer societies don't have the detection and diagnosis apparatus available to industrialized nations. It's also foolish to assume given issues are going to be manifested in the same way they would be by someone who grew up in and lives in NYC. Or that because they're not easily detected by laymen or self-reporting that they don't exist. It's entirely plausible that there are way different (and more) stressors in a first-world nation. To say mental illness is all but nonexistent in primitive societies is a huge claim. That said, forcibly de-isolating tribes is a bad idea for numerous reasons that others have given.
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 04:49 |
|
Your Sledgehammer posted:
Book of Job is quite clearly about a depressed dude even if it's a parable about why you shouldn't back talk God.
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 04:53 |
|
Main Paineframe posted:Your cultural biases are showing. Why do you think a child raised in an isolated culture would be less likely to be able to become a doctor than a child raised in an urbanized Western city? They are less likely to match Western cultural standards for Western-style doctoring, but given that these isolated cultures are isolated, their cultural perception of the medical profession - and the requirements to enter it - are no doubt substantially different and not dependent on Western-style education. But traditional medicine are often dependent on incredibly dumb practices such as randomly poking needles into energy sphere locations within the body to cure cancer. There's no way that a doctor trained in an isolated amazonian tribe is going to be anywhere near as good as one trained in an actual med school.
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 04:54 |
|
Your Sledgehammer posted:
That's like saying uncivilized peoples don't get diabetes because they don't have the means of diagnosing it. Mental health is something deeply stigmatized in traditional societies and are often handwaved away with denial or attributed to the supernatural. Thus why few people until quite recently even in industrialized societies are willing to admit the phenomenon even exist.
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 04:58 |
|
Typo posted:That's like saying uncivilized peoples don't get diabetes because they don't have the means of diagnosing it. Diabetes is probably a bad example since diseases like hypertension and DM2 are strongly linked to culture. Type 2 diabetes is pretty much unheard of in tribal cultures. Type 1 diabetes is a different story and almost certainly predates civilization. And there does seem to be certain mental illness that increase when people industrialize (depression) or some that simply don't exist (Anorexia Nervosa). Of course we still have things like Schizophrenia which seems to affect everyone and a whole list of Culture Bound Syndromes that may only exist in these small cultures. I do feel bad for these isolated groups that don't have access to modern medicine. However as pretty much everyone has said we are really poo poo at trying to civilize then.
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 10:36 |
|
Main Paineframe posted:Your cultural biases are showing. Why do you think a child raised in an isolated culture would be less likely to be able to become a doctor than a child raised in an urbanized Western city? They are less likely to match Western cultural standards for Western-style doctoring, but given that these isolated cultures are isolated, their cultural perception of the medical profession - and the requirements to enter it - are no doubt substantially different and not dependent on Western-style education. It's dumb cultural relativism to say that a (effectively) stone age doctor is as good a doctor as someone trained in some variety of science and evidence-based medicine unless your criterion for "being a good doctor" refers primarily to e.g. social standing instead of treating illnesses.
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 14:33 |
|
Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Actually, we should be more isolated. Agreed, The Diamond Age seems like a fun future.
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 14:34 |
|
Your Sledgehammer posted:A thousand times this. There's an assumption in the OP that bears examination, and it's the assumption that civilized life is objectively better than indigenous/noncivilized life. Not only is that not necessarily the case, but I can actually think of two instances where civilization is the clear loser when measured up against noncivilized lifestyles (which I'd define as any lifestyle that includes hunting/gathering as the primary mode of subsistence): Hahahaha someone is seriously posting about the Noble Savage in D&D
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 15:00 |
|
To be fair, deliberately and unilaterally making contact with them in order to bring them the wonders of modern civilisation (which has historically tended to include alcohol, disease, poverty, extinction etc) does sound a bit like the White Man's Burden, if we're going to start accusing people of racist fallacies. e: There are plenty of groups that have had occasional contact and remained hostile to the outside world, I'm sure most of them are aware that there is something bigger out there and if they choose for whatever reasons of their own not to engage with it, it's pretty paternalistic to decide you're going to do it anyway because we know better. XMNN fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Oct 6, 2015 |
# ? Oct 6, 2015 15:51 |
|
Mineaiki posted:Is education actually universally important for a high quality of life, or is it highly important to us because that's what it "guarantees" in our societies? As they proved in their behavior during the process of passing the UDHR, Saudi Arabia's leaders believe that a strong faith in Islam is the key to a high quality of life in their society, and to some degree they are correct. Acculturation is terrible but sometimes a little is needed to protrect the human rights of people. For example the campaigns against female circumcision in Africa, where that mutilation is part of "their culture" and the women themselves would justify it. I don't think anyone can back such practices just in order to "let them be." wiregrind fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Oct 6, 2015 |
# ? Oct 6, 2015 16:58 |
|
XMNN posted:To be fair, deliberately and unilaterally making contact with them in order to bring them the wonders of modern civilisation (which has historically tended to include alcohol, disease, poverty, extinction etc) does sound a bit like the White Man's Burden, if we're going to start accusing people of racist fallacies. Paternalism regarding cultures that are objectively several thousand years behind us technologically, resulting in a vastly lower life expectancy* and quality of life**, is probably the correct ideology. That said, this argument does not apply if/when half of the contacted culture promptly dies of the flu so until we solve that point it's moot. *the reason such tribespeople usually seemed/seem healthy to outsiders is not because they don't have sick people, it's because they don't have them for very long and/or because any babies with any kind of genetic condition certainly aren't around for very long **doesn't apply if we integrate these people into society following the best practices of the 1800's through 1950's, which most of those countries would still do, so once again this point is currently moot
|
# ? Oct 6, 2015 18:32 |
|
-Troika- posted:Hahahaha someone is seriously posting about the Noble Savage in D&D Why is this in any way unexpected? Didn't you know that Noble Savages lived in harmony with nature everywhere they went also, yeah, Adar posted:Paternalism regarding cultures that are objectively several thousand years behind us technologically, resulting in a vastly lower life expectancy* and quality of life**, is probably the correct ideology.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 00:15 |
|
Typo posted:Mental health is something deeply stigmatized in traditional societies and are often handwaved away with denial or attributed to the supernatural. Thus why few people until quite recently even in industrialized societies are willing to admit the phenomenon even exist. Probably a lot of mental illnesses are first world problems. People in indigenous tribes have more serious problems and don't have the luxury of developing something like anorexia when food may be scarce for them.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 15:33 |
|
Jesus an actual example of the noble savage myth in tyool 2015. Anyway, civilizing isolated people would probably be a good thing. The only problem is you can't do that without taking control and removing their agency. In other words, the harm done would outweigh the good, so we leave them be. Like on one hand, they would no longer have to worry about starving or giant parasite worms in thier flesh, but you would be destroying thier whole world. As far as life satisfaction, going to school and becoming a big shot doctor may not be any better than being a big shot shaman for the local tribe. WorldsStongestNerd fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Oct 7, 2015 |
# ? Oct 7, 2015 15:52 |
|
I guess they would enjoy entering the bottom ranks of the globalized world.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 16:05 |
|
I was going to point out that I think people without a lot of money still have to worry about parasite flesh worms and starving.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 16:08 |
|
Entering the global capitalist economy will surely bring them unimaginable wealth and happiness, just like everybody who currently occupies it. For too long have they been deprived of the luxurious lifestyle enjoyed throughout the developing world.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 16:13 |
|
The fact that anyone saying that they agree to "civilizing" isolated groups can only be done so with a bunch of caveats shows that it is probably a bad idea and shouldn't be done.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 16:14 |
|
blackguy32 posted:The fact that anyone saying that they agree to "civilizing" isolated groups can only be done so with a bunch of caveats shows that it is probably a bad idea and shouldn't be done. it's more like "civilising isolated groups would be a good idea but we're bad at it"
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 16:23 |
|
Do isolated tribesmen feel existential terror sometimes like I do?
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 16:47 |
|
blowfish posted:it's more like "civilising isolated groups would be a good idea but we're bad at it" I am not sure it is something that you can really become good at. Taking people from their way of life and telling them that this one is better is just asking for all kinds of complications and resistance.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 16:47 |
|
blackguy32 posted:I am not sure it is something that you can really become good at. Taking people from their way of life and telling them that this one is better is just asking for all kinds of complications and resistance. That already happened to many isolated groups though since pre-colonisation jungle shitholes actually had dense populations and big cities not unlike Europe, so amazonian tribesmen in tyool 2015 are probably descendants of people living in a postapocalyptic wasteland. Now the question is do we do it again Island tribes that always sat on a rock nobody else ever occupied are an exception obviously.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 16:51 |
|
I'm not really sure what it is they stand to gain from being 'civilized' Given that they have been around as long as we have and survived for as long and are literally didn't drop out of a wormhole from prehistoric times sort of suggests that they don't really need civilization. Given that they have very little to gain, and a hell of a lot to lose, I don't really see how it can be justified in people intervening. Unless of course we just want to feel good about saving the savages from themselves.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 16:56 |
|
People keep saying noble savage a lot then arguing that civilising the jungle savages is the white man's burden. I have no doubt that life for these people is nasty, brutish and short and dying of an intestinal parasite is something that ideally wouldn't happen in 2015, but everywhere you look life is nasty, brutish and short and people are being killed by treatable diseases including specifically in the countries where these people live and for similar groups that have had some interaction with global civilisation. As long as we're not forcing them to remain in the rainforests, I just don't see how it can be ethical to force them to interact with us.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 17:24 |
|
Mayor Dave posted:I think it's interesting that OP mentioned the Amish. They're not isolated by any stretch of the imagination, and putting them in the same category as uncontacted tribes in the Amazon or whatever is really weird and not helpful. Also, unless you're going literally full communism or whatever this is a bad idea (it's probably a bad idea under full communism too) Yeah, go to Reading Terminal in Philadelphia, and tell me how isolated the Amish are.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 19:29 |
|
We owe every native person the right to live like a bug in a favela.
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 20:38 |
|
For God's sake, somebody has got to explain to these savages that magic isn't real! Its a matter human decency!
|
# ? Oct 7, 2015 20:40 |
|
silence_kit posted:Probably a lot of mental illnesses are first world problems. People in indigenous tribes have more serious problems and don't have the luxury of developing something like anorexia when food may be scarce for them. As I said before Anorexia Nervosa seems to be a Western Culture-Bound Syndrome. Non-western societies have their own Culture-Bound Syndromes that we don't see in the west.
|
# ? Oct 8, 2015 13:27 |
|
Mister Adequate posted:Yes? Like, there are plenty of other arguments for and against it, but transparently yes, it would equality opportunity further? Not as much as all schools being of the same standards anyway, obviously, but absent that, random distribution is a good way to achieve that goal. How would it be more equal to give all the kids wildly differing educations while forcing them out into a culture with wide variance in education levels, as opposed to giving them all the exact same education in a culture where everyone has the same education? The entire premise of the question is fundamentally flawed, because while a local education may leave them disadvantaged in global Westernized society, it obviously does just fine for finding a job in their own, isolated society. Getting a tribal education doesn't affect their opportunities within the tribe - it only becomes a negative factor if they're forcibly de-isolated! In other words, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the supposed justification for forcibly de-isolating these children is so that they'll be ready for the global economy when their culture is forcibly de-isolated. Typo posted:But traditional medicine are often dependent on incredibly dumb practices such as randomly poking needles into energy sphere locations within the body to cure cancer. There's no way that a doctor trained in an isolated amazonian tribe is going to be anywhere near as good as one trained in an actual med school. They're probably going to be better than Western practitioners of "traditional medicine" (including acupuncturists), who seem to survive just fine in the global economy. And that's really the question at hand here. The OP's proposal wasn't "educate these kids so they can improve their own society", it was "educate these kids because otherwise they won't have a good enough resume to get a job supporting Western society after we de-isolate their culture". Besides, the real health impact isn't from modern doctoring knowledge, it's from modern doctoring equipment (which means commerce and open trade, which means opening and totally de-isolating their society, which means total abandonment of their ways and integration into Western society as paupers, beggars, and cheap labor). And honestly, modern plumbing has probably saved more lives than both of those combined.
|
# ? Oct 8, 2015 15:39 |
|
Traditional societies probably are not immune to mental illness, but contact with civilization has been causing indigenous mass-suicides and a stupendously high individual suicide rate at least here in Brazil, besides extreme poverty, discrimination and drug abuse that generally plague integrated indigenous populations worldwide. I suspect everyone is better-off in intermittent contact regimes, with indigenous populations getting tools but keeping dominion over their territory. Land use is a key issue, even doing something simple as opening up a road leads to poo poo like illegal logging, hunting and in lots of cases an expansion of the agribusiness frontier, all of which generally end badly for the locals. On traditional (as in millenia-old and not "new age") medicine, a tribe in the peruvian amazon that has put together a 500 page encyclopedia of medicinal rainforest plants is a pretty good example of what sort of knowledge is lost by "integrating" populations. It may not follow western typology, but this basic knowledge of what plant does what has been filtered through many generations of people living there and figuring it out by experience, which narrows the search for potential new medical compounds still undiscovered in the rainforest. So yeah, I guess forced education is pretty horrible because it paves over cultures that have formed over hundreds of years and in return gives the "educated" one of the most miserable and discriminated positions in modern society. Maybe we should try instead to treat them as fellow autonomous human beings and holders of knowledge worthy of respect. But we're probably gonna extinguish them all anyway.
|
# ? Oct 8, 2015 16:38 |
|
in the treeee of dreamssssss
|
# ? Oct 8, 2015 16:41 |
|
Equipment matters, but the medical knowledge even GPs are taught is going to be more extensive than the knowledge that isolated community has. It's unreasonable to suggest that an isolated tribe is going to have medical knowledgeon par with the entire rest of the world.
|
# ? Oct 8, 2015 17:34 |
|
I think you'll find that they're better off uncontacted.
|
# ? Oct 8, 2015 18:01 |
|
bagual posted:Traditional societies probably are not immune to mental illness, but contact with civilization has been causing indigenous mass-suicides and a stupendously high individual suicide rate at least here in Brazil, besides extreme poverty, discrimination and drug abuse that generally plague integrated indigenous populations worldwide. I suspect everyone is better-off in intermittent contact regimes, with indigenous populations getting tools but keeping dominion over their territory. Land use is a key issue, even doing something simple as opening up a road leads to poo poo like illegal logging, hunting and in lots of cases an expansion of the agribusiness frontier, all of which generally end badly for the locals. Intermittent contact is probably "best" in the short term (again, we're avoiding the everyone dead from measles thing here) but in the long run for every hundred people saved from a moderate fever or a stomach cramp by a plant the tribe will lose as many to everything from Hodgkin's to the local guinea worm equivalent to haemochromatosis. You won't see them die but that doesn't make them less dead. Of course the other issue here is they'd die anyway because this is the middle of the Brazilian jungle so instead of integration and free medical care they'll get shot by loggers and get nothing. That's a huge and very valid problem that's definitely a good reason not to do anything until humanity grows up! But it's not "do not integrate the noble primitive into the corrupt modern world.txt".
|
# ? Oct 8, 2015 18:04 |
|
Do these isolated tribes have Spider-Man? If not then we should airdrop Spider-Man onto them until they get civilized enough to join western society, or remodel their entire society around Spider-Man, whichever comes first.
|
# ? Oct 8, 2015 19:32 |
|
Adar posted:Intermittent contact is probably "best" in the short term (again, we're avoiding the everyone dead from measles thing here) but in the long run for every hundred people saved from a moderate fever or a stomach cramp by a plant the tribe will lose as many to everything from Hodgkin's to the local guinea worm equivalent to haemochromatosis. You won't see them die but that doesn't make them less dead. Well, they do manage to survive in one of the most hazardous environments for human beings so that's got to count for something. But yeah it's ultimately not about them being uncorrupted or noble or something like that. That's just moralizing navel-gazing by "civilized" people about their own perceived corruption, plastering romantizations over a "natural" other. In the end it's about indigenous people's rights as autonomous groups of human beings.
|
# ? Oct 8, 2015 19:37 |
People declaring that it's okay to treat uncontacted people as children (which is what paternalism means) provide the strongest example of why compassionate contact is largely impossible- too many people refuse to look at these uncontacted people as fully human.
|
|
# ? Oct 10, 2015 03:45 |
|
|
# ? Jun 5, 2024 05:23 |
|
Really we should just make trading agreements to them and when they get in debt take their land forcibly by reneging on previous agreements.
|
# ? Oct 10, 2015 03:48 |