Submitted by Ma3Ke4Li3 t3_12303in in philosophy
Any kind of stable social group at low technology levels would need a fairly egalitarian model simply because everyone was essential. Anyone simply refusing to cooperate anymore would be a massive harm to the whole group.
One factor to bear in mind is communities would effectively be in a state of permanent manpower shortage - effectively needing to take every step they could to prevent fragmentation and preserve unity.
Undemocratic institutions are unsustainable over the long term under those conditions.
Curious about your thoughts here. By "low technology", are you referring to sticks and stones? Bronze age? "Low" seems relative. Or is it just a perceived "low technology" by the group when they compare to other groups?
Also, can you clarify what you mean by "fairly egalitarian"? Is the historically pervasive belief that some humans can be considered less than others (slavery, child labor, prejudice) part or not part of the "fairly" egalitarian definition?
I would think here "low technology" would mean having no machines to leverage, for example, a tractor can do the work of 20 people with 1 person, in such situations person who is in control of such technology (here tractor) doe not need to depend on other people can can refuse cooperation
What about a plough? A fulcrum? Let's say both made or, more accurately, fashioned out of wood. Would that be indicative of "machines" or lack thereof? Or, what about a hammer (or something that works as one - like, say, a big stone)? What about arrow heads shaped out of stone/flint or even wood?
I'd rather talk in terms of existence of high concentrations of people. If the level of technology is maintained by a small, 30 person isolated community - then i guess it's the level of technology the above poster is talking about. This is bone, leather, stone tools, an occasional copper or gold knife, and so on.
Bronze is much more high-tech, because it requires 3 different ores, from different regions, which means trade needs to happen, which means there should be cities for sending caravans over to
Well, my response was to query how the poster was determining "levels of technology" and/or what qualifies as "technology" in his/her assessment.
Arguably, "fire", the stirrup, the plough, wood and stone implements, the concept of the lever, the concept of "the wheel" may all be considered to be "technology", indeed foundational technologies that preceded the "Age of Metal".
I should also point out - a fact that you are also aware of - that trade was not contingent on the development/existence of cities. Trade routes existed between pre-urban (and even between nomadic systems) human habitations, which may or may not have been permanent.
Hunter gather societies generally held regular seasonal meetings where multiple groups would converge on a single ritual site, where knowledge, tools, resources and culture could be shared and bartered.
You do not need established cities or caravans
What to you mean? Sure, they "held regular seasonal meetings where multiple groups would converge on a single ritual site" but how that means they did not need caravans?
Do you even know from where the ingridients for bronze were brought from in bronze age? all the way from turkey and afganistan.
How do you imagine hunter-gatherers carrying rocks from afganistan to egypt or middle east for no reason?
Why do you think bronze age had bronze? Because they had resources to direct to metal works. What resources? Food and time for people who dedicated themselves to metalworks. The hunter gatherers just could not invest the required effort for researching how to work metals. Only something like golden nuggets, or maybe sometimes using meteor iron. But there is a catch - there is too little of both for everyone. So gold/iron knife or arrow point remained a local and very treasured tool - but never led to other metals in hunter-gatherer societies
??
You're playing down the extent of the number of groups that would participate, the distances they would travel and the cultural significance these annual festivals had.
You understand that bronze existed before the bronze age? Because in order to successfully complete a sufficient bronze tool you do not need an entire metal works or trade caravans. Hunter gatherer groups absolutely had the time, resources and knowledge to locally produce metal tools as they needed them.
You're falling into the trap of classifying human behaviours under specific periods, bronze wasn't discovered in one place, where the bronze age began, but in many places simultaneously and over time became more significant within human society. Furthermore the existence of bronze age bronze works does not disprove the existence or practice of metal working in an earlier period.
You can build a furnace out of river mud, light it with fuel, and now all you need is the metal, which you probably would have sourced before lighting the fire. The reason bronze was valuable was because it was more ideal than copper, which is primarily the most accessible ore for hunter gatherers, since similarly to gold it can sort of be "found" in the environment. Gathering a specific resource for alloying would be more difficult without centralised population centers or long distance trading, but not impossible as some people would have lived in regions where both resources were accessible, such as Cornwall for example.
Moving away from the idea that human civilisation started when we stopped to build cities is more reflective of the archaeological evidence we have
Yeah, it did, because people smelted the natural copper ores that have tin or arsenic in them.That is not the same as deliberately producing bronze, and the scale of those early bronze artifact production was much smaller.so let's say one place which had those ores on the ground would produce the bronze instruments, whereas all the other places around could not.What would be the impact of that happening? Pretty much negligient.Otherwise, why would actual smelting of different ores start only at around 3000 BCE (when bronze-age civilizations were already there?)
As for downplaying - in my opinion it's you who downplay a drastic change in human civilization that happened with agriculture. Raising crops and cattle allowed for a completely different way of living, with smelting bronze from separate ingridients (so you could combine much more abundant copper with tin and arsenic, instead of looking for a very rare natural combination of both), trade, and food surplus that lead to people being more specialized.
All you hunter-gatherer society fans say is that somehow life in those times was better, because people were all equally living in precarious conditions.
Sure, maybe early settlers in agricultural societies were not that happy with their life, but they had way less problems every year with food shortages, had some kind of state to protect them, and were capable of creating city culture, which we are all part of now.
While hunter-gatherers could be wiped by a hostile tribe at every given moment, every winter-spring could lead to starvation, and the amount of resources to spend on anything except survival was miniscule
From what I read in college the argument was that when weapon for fight become easy to manufacture you will have more egalitarian societies because revolt is always around the corner. But if weapons can't be mass produced easily you will have authoritative state. However the the Philosopher in question was American so he might have been biased towards that particular idea
This is not consistent with modern insight into hunter gather societies, they were generally speaking more compassionate than we are today, if you want to measure compassion based off of a groups willingness to spend resources on social care.
Hunter gather societies, especially neanderthals, spent a much larger portion of their limited resources caring for their sick and disabled group member than we do today
>Hunter gather societies
I was not talking about hunter gather. I am taking about full blown civilization with Cities.
>they were generally speaking more compassionate than we are today
This is very recent developments we trying to commercials every thing. From mentor to friendship every thing can be bought and sold. And on being generous they were only generous to in group members because they expected same kind of generosity in return. Which is commonly known as barter system.
Those two things go with eachother.
Like op said. When there is a need for Manpower You cannot aford to treat other like "less like".
For example durango WW2 many women went to work while the men were at war. The needs of war outweight the centuries of disctimination.
In the same way disctimination can only happens when there is structure to wrap around. Everyone can chop a tree the same way but only a few would be able to make a good pot.
>Anyone simply refusing to cooperate anymore would be a massive harm to the whole group.
Not just those refusing cooperation, but also people not capable of it, like those born with a disability.
There is nothing about people born with a disability that makes them incapable of cooperation.
In our world? Sure. But in a state of nature without our level of technology, no. I'm not saying this to be a dick. That was just the reality of things.
No, that isn't the reality of things at all. That's just factually wrong - and historically wrong since we know lots of early hominids took extensive care of disabled members of their communities.
This analysis seems particularly flawed and wishful. It ignores the likelihood that force, physical or coercive, applied by the few over the many is much more likely to resolve non-compliance than expecting individuals to simply look out for the group.
Statements like "Undemocratic institutions are unsustainable over the long term" ignore both recorded history and studies of more primitive cultures which still exist today. Superficially they may appear to support the inferences you make until you understand rhe actual dynamics of the group.
It's my understanding that by 'fairly egalitarian' it is meant that democratic practices were common at most times, but there was usually some hierarchy of authority in place too. So that if say another community invades, or there's a sudden decrease in resources, there's somebody for the community to look to for direction.
Sometimes those were elder councils, sometimes one person, like a war chief or shaman... But it would understandably vary on occasion and over time, as early and primitive societies weren't bound by unchangeable rules.
Perhaps for many years the elders of a tribe are very inclusive of others in decision making, but then several die from illness and one psychopath rises to power as a warchief and bullies the few remaining into following their lead, until they and many males die in battle and the community falls back into a more egalitarian state led mostly by the remaining elder women.
There are countless variations of these themes that could play out over time within the millions of primitive communities that have existed over the history of the human race.
But from what I've encountered, while studying these things as a personal curiosity, is that when these societies were at their healthiest, as judged by peace and sustainability of resources, they tended to be pretty damn egalitarian. And most didn't exactly have a name for that, it's just the way things were, they saw and thought of themselves as one unit. You are me, I am you, we are equals--respecting and caring for you is respecting and caring for myself.
Individuals who didn't exhibit this kind of inclination would be understandably seen as broken, dysfunctional, and dangerous--a threat to the community.
> It ignores the likelihood that force, physical or coercive, applied by the few over the many is much more likely to resolve non-compliance than expecting individuals to simply look out for the group.
No, it just means that a small number of individuals have very few resources to prevent people from simply leaving without a larger state apparatus.
>Statements like "Undemocratic institutions are unsustainable over the long term" ignore both recorded history and studies of more primitive cultures which still exist today.
"Primitive" cultures that exist today are almost always highly egalitarian compared to even modern "democratic" cultures.
Even on the societies that are based on "force" You still need to have complience from the masses. Otherwise your structure crumbles.
Even in dictatorships You still have some democratic participation by desing.
How would this account for societies that practice ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism? If manpower was so precious wouldn't we not observe these norms among low technology societies?
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments