Political Compass

[Gen. Volkov]

The hunter-gatherers may be more humane to those in their immediate tribe in the day-to-day side of things, but they are not above occasionally going out and killing all the men in a tribe from babies to elders and taking the women as loot to rape.

While true, it was also a fairly rare occurrence. Most of the time they were more focused on their own survival. The rates of wars among hunter-gatherer cultures are much lower than among settled, city-building, farming cultures. After all, hunter-gatherers don't have the spare resources or population size that would allow a soldier class to exist. This is why whenever a city-dwelling, farming culture meets a hunter-gatherer culture, the hunter-gatherers are either wiped out or assimilated.

City-dwellers may be unkind with each other, and they may sometimes vote for brutal wars and inhumane programmes, but on the whole they have a greater sense of decency, and if their own soldiers are caught doing brutal things, they will be outraged.

That really depends on what time period you are talking about. Any time in the 20th century yes, before that... it gets murky. When Southerners found out what was happening in Andersonville, most of them felt it was no less than what the "damn Yankees" deserved.

This was true even going back many centuries, it's just that standards of squeamishness have changed. The majority of nineteenth-century Germans thought nothing of driving Jews out of Germany, or of invading and looting France -- but I didn't call them civilised either!

Which was rather my point. LOL.

You forget something. Those "savage" people who weren't killed in internecine warfare (and that was a terribly high proportion of them in almost all places) may have lived healthier lives due to a more active lifestyle.

More active lifestyle and better diet. Though as far as internecine warfare goes, it really depended on where you were. In North America, for example, the tribes of the East were settled farmers, and had many wars. The Plains tribes were much less settled, and while they still had wars, they were fewer. The tribes of the West Coast had no wars to speak of.

But on the whole I'd certainly not swap with them. In some areas like the South Pacific, where resource competition was very low, there were occasional exceptions to this rule (which is a promising sign for humanity, I think). But science is better for health than a native lifestyle, and education and rule of law and stable government better guarantors of social stability than an abundance of resources.

Ah, but a stable government is usually dependent on an abundance of resources. A very high proportion of revolutions in history have come about because of a lack of some critical resource, food more often than not. Famine tends to make people unhappy. Oh, and by the way, while you may not swap with them, many Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries did leave the cities and become part of various American Indian tribes. The cities, in those days, were unhealthy disease pits. Health science wasn't much more advanced than "the limb is getting infected, saw it off". The closer you get to the 20th century, the better things get in terms of disease prevention and cures, as well as diet, but for a good portion of the 1800s, and all of the 1700s, the American Indians were considerably healthier and received better medical care than most Euro-Americans. George Washington, for example, died because the most knowledgeable doctors of the time believed that draining blood was a cure for disease. They took out 5 pints of blood from him and he promptly died of shock.

[The Beatles]

I should have been clearer and said violence instead of war. Just because some groups didn't have the resources to engage in formal warfare doesn't mean that their members didn't know how to wield some weapons and didn't do so at an alarming rate.

I've just Googled for the latest data (as I came to this conclusion about 8 years ago with the data then available), and found some decent writeups.
http://www.thefighting44s.com/archives/ ... or-savage/
http://whippersnapper.wordpress.com/200 ... y-violent/
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker0 ... index.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... -good.html
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/lif ... ality.html (only a specific case)

All of those articles are actually interesting and worth reading for other bits of info they contain. But if correct, they do seem to contradict your point.

About Andersonville: yes, squeamishness decreasing through the ages. But what I'm saying is with progressively greater levels of civilisation come progressively lower levels of tolerance for violence and injustice. Today we don't consider it acceptable to beat children, something that was commonplace until the middle of the last century and still is in many non-Western countries. Perhaps tomorrow our practice of cooping up animals in little boxes will be universally condemned as barbarous, and so on. Perhaps that's what you were saying too, in which case my apologies.

The settlers going from cities to live with the aboriginals doesn't necessarily mean they were better off. Plenty of people change their circumstances and it turns out for the worse. A staggering proportion of immigrants to America in the nineteenth century died within a decade of their arrival, for instance. If you told me that of those that left, a higher proportion survived to a ripe age than in the city, I'd be impressed. Same goes for George Washington: city medicine was terrible, but that's just an anecdote, and we know that death rates were lower in cities than on the plains, if not due to better medicine but the decrease in violence. Don't forget that plains medicine wasn't more advanced than city medicine.

Now while I quite agree with you that a stable government virtually always needs an abundance of resources (perhaps, excluding very short periods, possibly always), an abundance of resources doesn't guarantee a stable government. A stable government, I think, really needs either total oppression or justice and rule of law and a certain liberality or lack of interference in the day-to-day affairs of people -- and so far only the latter have succeeded for any amount of time.

[Gen. Volkov]

About Andersonville: yes, squeamishness decreasing through the ages. But what I'm saying is with progressively greater levels of civilisation come progressively lower levels of tolerance for violence and injustice. Today we don't consider it acceptable to beat children, something that was commonplace until the middle of the last century and still is in many non-Western countries. Perhaps tomorrow our practice of cooping up animals in little boxes will be universally condemned as barbarous, and so on. Perhaps that's what you were saying too, in which case my apologies.

That is exactly my point actually. From our point of view, both our ancestors and the hut dwellers are savages, despite one living in cities and the other living in huts.

All of those articles are actually interesting and worth reading for other bits of info they contain. But if correct, they do seem to contradict your point.

Actually, they reinforce my point. Hunter-gatherers were healthier than the farmers of their day. The only real contradiction is that I said hunter-gatherers fought less than farmers. What I am gathering though, is that humans are combative, no matter what the method of getting food, and the tribes who did not fight much were the exception rather than the rule. It's true in the last 50 years, deaths from war have gone drastically down, but that's more because the major nations of the world do not fight each other. If you look at a graph of human population vs. deaths in war, the two follow each other, up too WW2. Then the deaths drop drastically off. I think that's more because we finally gained the ability to completely annihilate each other in an astonishingly short amount of time, than any change in humanity. Simple self-preservation.

The settlers going from cities to live with the aboriginals doesn't necessarily mean they were better off. Plenty of people change their circumstances and it turns out for the worse. A staggering proportion of immigrants to America in the nineteenth century died within a decade of their arrival, for instance. If you told me that of those that left, a higher proportion survived to a ripe age than in the city, I'd be impressed.

Don't have those stats, will try to find them though.

Same goes for George Washington: city medicine was terrible, but that's just an anecdote, and we know that death rates were lower in cities than on the plains, if not due to better medicine but the decrease in violence. Don't forget that plains medicine wasn't more advanced than city medicine.

Well, not entirely true. The herbs and whatnot the tribe healers knew have often turned out to actually have beneficial effects. The best a city doctor could do was give you opium if you were in pain. Damn near everything else was just snake oil. It's also true that traditional remedies the settlers knew about, and the doctors rejected, proved to have beneficial effects.

Now while I quite agree with you that a stable government virtually always needs an abundance of resources (perhaps, excluding very short periods, possibly always), an abundance of resources doesn't guarantee a stable government. A stable government, I think, really needs either total oppression or justice and rule of law and a certain liberality or lack of interference in the day-to-day affairs of people -- and so far only the latter have succeeded for any amount of time.

I dunno, the Soviet Union was more or less a dictatorship, and they lasted 30 years. You're right though, that only the latter have succeeded for substantial amounts of time. Though I would mention that the Roman Empire lasted for quite a long time, and was an odd mix of oppression and liberty. If you bucked Roman authority, you were crushed without mercy, but as long as you accepted that their word was law, you could rely on them to provide justice, rule of law, and generally let you alone. There are also the absolute monarchs of Europe, who had quite a run. I generally agree with you, but I think you also have to take into consideration the ability to totally oppress. It wasn't until the 20th century that would be dictators actually had the technology to totally oppress their citizens.

[The Beatles]

Actually, they reinforce my point. Hunter-gatherers were healthier than the farmers of their day. The only real contradiction is that I said hunter-gatherers fought less than farmers. What I am gathering though, is that humans are combative, no matter what the method of getting food, and the tribes who did not fight much were the exception rather than the rule. It's true in the last 50 years, deaths from war have gone drastically down, but that's more because the major nations of the world do not fight each other. If you look at a graph of human population vs. deaths in war, the two follow each other, up too WW2. Then the deaths drop drastically off. I think that's more because we finally gained the ability to completely annihilate each other in an astonishingly short amount of time, than any change in humanity. Simple self-preservation.

No, they don't reinforce your point. Pinker's article in particular (the Edge one) flat-out disagrees. His whole article is that violence has been decreasing, on every scale from nation-states over millennia and centuries to homicides over decades, constantly and in every society. If you disagree with that, then please skim his article.

My personal theory is that violence is largely a function of organisation. Larger and better-organised societies have less violence. The smaller the basic unit is, the more violence you see. The Spanish who went to South America were barbarous, but less so than the aboriginals who were there, not because their philosophy was better, just because they were parts of a larger unit.

Also, by your standard, it's not fair to call modern Western civilisation civilised, because surely there will come a time which will condemn some of our practices as barbarous. It's a fair point but I personally disagree, I think we can call Western Protestant civilisation civilised from the 17th century onward or so. But I think this is a personal thing, so I don't wish to bring that up as an argument.

By the way, I found a neat quote in one of the articles as I was reading them:

Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one person per square mile. Farmers can live at 100 times that density. Hunter-gatherers may have been so lithe and healthy because the weak were dead. The invention of agriculture and the advent of settled society merely swapped high mortality for high morbidity, allowing people some relief from chronic warfare so they could at least grind out an existence, rather than being ground out of existence altogether.

Not meant as an argument, as I understand what you were saying about the hut-dwellers vs hunter-gatherers, but interesting and well-put nonetheless.

I find it hard to believe that plains medicine was more free from superstition than the European medicine -- nor that the European was better, obviously: mercury, leeches, bloodletting aren't scientific. In Africa the medicine-men were full of superstition rather than remedy, and it would surprise me if any culture had produced a halfway-decent system of medicine before the advent of science.

About dictators and so on, it's quite true that dictators have never had such a technological capacity for oppression. During the Nazi years, the balance definitely swung in the oppressor's favour. Since then it has swung the other way. It's hard to predict anything other than an "arms race" between the two, for the future.

It's hard to compare lengths of time across time. The pace of history has been constantly accelerating. Our modern democracies, with the exception of the English-speaking countries (United Kingdom at ~350 years, United States at ~150 years, others at ~100 years -- counting from last civil war or independence) are none more recent than the Second World War. And we've had at least one successful oppressive yet stable state as long (China). So the only real data we have to go on is the last 50-60 years or so, and that happens to bias toward the democracies. (The failed democracies in Africa and West Asia that formed after colonialism and collapsed around the 80s don't really count, they didn't even get a generation before high oil prices and neoliberalism killed them.)

It's hard to say, it's possible that democracy will some day wane and some other form of government take over, though I hope not. Even in the past, really stable empires like the Roman empire required some liberalism (including the rule of law). On the other hand, the balance of power, which swung towards the lower and middle classes right up until a peak around the Second World War has started shifting back towards the upper classes in the last 30-40 years. What do you think?

[The Beatles]

Oh, another thing. To the question: "Mothers may have careers, but their first duty is to be homemakers.", I've always put Agree. It makes sense to me that a child ought to have, at least for the first decade or so of its life, a parent or two parents whose primary and overriding duty is parenting. It becomes less important the more siblings they have, but never disappears. It could well be the father, of course, but one of the parents ought to have parenting as their first duty. What did you guys put down for that?

[Gen. Volkov]

No, they don't reinforce your point. Pinker's article in particular (the Edge one) flat-out disagrees. His whole article is that violence has been decreasing, on every scale from nation-states over millennia and centuries to homicides over decades, constantly and in every society. If you disagree with that, then please skim his article.

Oh, I see what you mean. Well, that's using statistics improperly. The deaths in tribal conflicts pile up over time. Only a fraction of each generation is killed in any one battle or war. Whereas in the World Wars, whole generations were essentially wiped out. Russia suffered 20 million deaths in WW2, primarily among men aged 18-25. The same thing happens to tribes, but it's over 50+ years. Eventually there are only a very few people left of any one generation, but by then there are new generations to replace them.

As for the decade and century long views, I discount every statistic about war past the year 1945. The invention of the atomic bomb changed how war was fought. The murder rates stats are interesting, though I'd like to see a stat for murder rates among tribal cultures.

I'm not trying to argue the noble savage here, I long ago stopped thinking of tribal cultures as inherently better than ours. I was merely pointing out a fact, that has been confirmed by these articles. For a very long time, the members of a tribal, hunter-gatherer society, were healthier than the members of a farming society. I was also saying that due to the nature of tribal life, within a tribe, the members cared more about each other than residents of the same city do. Both tribal and farming cultures are capable of being very inhumane to those they perceive as the "other".

My personal theory is that violence is largely a function of organisation. Larger and better-organised societies have less violence. The smaller the basic unit is, the more violence you see. The Spanish who went to South America were barbarous, but less so than the aboriginals who were there, not because their philosophy was better, just because they were parts of a larger unit.

Interesting, and certainly has some merit, though sometimes that organization just leads to organized violence.

Also, by your standard, it's not fair to call modern Western civilisation civilised, because surely there will come a time which will condemn some of our practices as barbarous. It's a fair point but I personally disagree, I think we can call Western Protestant civilisation civilised from the 17th century onward or so. But I think this is a personal thing, so I don't wish to bring that up as an argument.

We probably will be seen as barbarians by our descendants. However, I do agree with you to a certain extent.

I would just place the date of "civilized" further forward than you do, after all in the 1600s you still had some horribly inhumane things happening. The 30 Years War for example, which made rape, murder, and general pillaging a common and more or less accepted fact of life for the residents of the Germanies. The generals of the armies marching across the plains of Germany more or less wrote off these activities as "soldiers will be soldiers".

I find it hard to believe that plains medicine was more free from superstition than the European medicine -- nor that the European was better, obviously: mercury, leeches, bloodletting aren't scientific. In Africa the medicine-men were full of superstition rather than remedy, and it would surprise me if any culture had produced a halfway-decent system of medicine before the advent of science.

I didn't say more free from superstition, I was just saying it was more effective. Until science was applied to medicine in the Western world in the 1800s, there is only one culture that I know of who had a decent system of medicine that was practical, and not rooted in superstition. It wasn't exactly science, but it was as close as the ancient world got. I am, of course, talking about the Romans. It's been shown that they were using practices we use today in modern medicine. Many of these practices appear to have come from Greece, but Roman efficiency and practicality allowed them to be Empire-wide practices.

It's hard to compare lengths of time across time. The pace of history has been constantly accelerating. Our modern democracies, with the exception of the English-speaking countries (United Kingdom at ~350 years, United States at ~150 years, others at ~100 years -- counting from last civil war or independence) are none more recent than the Second World War.

I would say that the US deserves it's full lifespan of ~230 years. Our Civil War did not see a complete breakdown in society, as has been the case in so many others. Yes, the US split in half for a period of several years, but both sides still clung to the basic ideals on which the nation was founded, and the US government itself was not overthrown. England's last civil war, on the other hand, saw a regicide and the installation of a "Lord High Protector".

Other than that though, I agree with your point.

It's hard to say, it's possible that democracy will some day wane and some other form of government take over, though I hope not. Even in the past, really stable empires like the Roman empire required some liberalism (including the rule of law). On the other hand, the balance of power, which swung towards the lower and middle classes right up until a peak around the Second World War has started shifting back towards the upper classes in the last 30-40 years. What do you think?

I think the pendulum, as always, is going to swing back and forth. The balance of power at the turn of the century was pretty well consolidated in the hands of the upper classes. That time period saw an even greater disparity between rich and poor than we see today. I'm not sure about democracy, but I think that for as long as we are confined to just this planet, it's going to remain the dominant form of government. If we spread to the stars, the conditions that allowed Empires and Kingdoms to be successful in the past might re-emerge, and democracy might wane.

[Gen. Volkov]

What did you guys put down for that?

I put down disagree, because I figured it was a question about sexism. I feel it is important for a child to have a parent who's primary responsibility is childcare, I just don't think that is necessarily the job of the woman. Though given the relative incapacitation of the mother during pregnancy, it does make a certain amount of sense.

[Freenhult]

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/03/17/wa ... rrier-art/ This is the modern Art question, perfect example of it.

[inaniInsuby]

These topics seem to always incite personal attacks, which I find a bore and would rather avoid. If you could, would you create a seperate forum called Political and Nationallity Forum and leave the General forum for friendly/interesting and informative topics?

[Freenhult]

You clearly do NOT know this forum at all buddy, and to join and post that is pretty bold, asking us what to do.

But short answer:

No.


(Lol bot)

[Devari]

That is one funny bot.

[Gen. Volkov]

Personal attacks? FREEN YOU STOAT LICKING CHICKEN FONDLER! You mean like that? That never happens on this forum.

[Freenhult]

Personal attacks? FREEN YOU STOAT LICKING CHICKEN FONDLER! You mean like that? That never happens on this forum.

I have one correction to that Volkov. I'll have you know I never licked a stoat in my life.

[Shadow I]

On a semi=related note, a familiar but interesting personality test:

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes3.asp

My result:

Your Type is
INTJ
Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging
78                 12         100         67

http://keirsey.com/handler.aspx?s=keirs ... mastermind

I particluarly enjoy this line from the description:

Although they are highly capable leaders, Masterminds are not at all eager to take command, preferring to stay in the background until others demonstrate their inability to lead.

[Devari]

Oh, the MBTI? I'm an INFP, apparently.