But.

Western culture, as pointed out previously, is also the product of colonization. This is how memes spread and have a chance to mutate and propagate and improve. It’s not always fun, but ultimately, it’s a good thing.

Western culture is not bad. It is good. Really, really good. By basically any measure you can think of. It is the product of a lot of unconnected cultures mixing and mingling, pulling the best ideas out of each (we have a lot of ideas and values from everywhere from India to pre-Christian Britain, with ever-growing modern additions from East Asia). It’s not perfect, but it’s damn good.

We are healthy, well- (actually OVER-) fed, and yes, pretty happy. We don’t have to worry about having our arms lopped off for fun by the tribe next door, or being massacred by them and our wives and daughters raped pregnant and used to grow the numbers of our enemies…

These are the problems that people face in primitive (and yes, that is the right word) cultures. We were there, too, in Europe, until the Romans opened our eyes to the possibilities of social organization on a massive scale. The possibilities of a meritocracy. It’s a good model. Before that, people just lived in horrid little tribes–extended family groups–and killed each other left and right. The Romans taught the Northern Europeans that if you stopped doing that for awhile, you could build a nation so strong that you could kill even bigger groups of people.

…Okay, so I’m half joking about the last bit.

What I’m saying is this: Violent deaths used to be incredibly common in our cultures, as they are in primitive cultures still today. But now the numbers that die violently–even with the big wars we wage–is miniscule. It is entirely probable that not a single person reading this will die at the hands of another human. That, my friends, is the proof in this particular pudding.

So, do we share our society with these people?

I dunno. It’s not going to go well for them, and they won’t be able to buy any Big Macs with leaves or dirt or whatever, so they won’t even be able to participate. Their children or grandchildren might, but not them.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. They will be contacted eventually, and it won’t be fun for them, so we might as well get to destroying their culture and killing them with the common cold sooner rather than later. All we can do is try to be humane about it.

http://mg225.mgshck.s/mg225/2623/trb2cw6.jpg

they would prob kill each other if they got a coke bottle like the other tribe who went bananas when they got theirs

They could have once been “contacted” but over several generations of no contact have lost memories of “modern” folks… s’possible.

Either way, very interesting stuff.

I’m not an expert on the numbers, and maybe the percentage of people who die due to human violence compared to those who die of other causes is lower now than 10000* years ago. But, that’s only because we now have 6.5 billion people around to make that ratio work out. Thousands and thousands of people die of human-on-human violence daily now. I doubt that that many people were dying of human-on-human violence daily 2000 years ago when an estimated 5 million** people populated the earth.

*I chose 10000 years ago because it seems likely that the majority of people were living in this type of “simple” society then – minus perhaps the Egyptians building the pyramids, maybe the Mayans, and who knows what other complex societies. There were pyramid builders in Southern Illinois at some point, but that might have been only 5000 years ago.

**I’ll admit, my population numbers come from Wikipedia, and I couldn’t find a source for those.

yay arkizzle! (my private BB)

I’m gonna have to stop suggesting links, the emotional investment is just too high.

Your argument would make more sense if you replaced those three things with Herzog movies, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and organ harvesting.

Not exactly a catchy headline, sorry.

Or how about gang?
or hunter-gatherer collective?
or autonomous anarchist commune?

Tribes it is, then.

The point is I liked the argument that was being given until it reverted back to pointing out the negatives in our society.

The article on the BBC says there was a previous flyover which is probably why they got out their weapons and body paint (red for the men, black for the woman) as an act of defense/agression

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7427417.stm

Also this article is intresting/heartbraking: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7318021.stm

The real story I heard in connection to that article is a reality TV show ignored the standards for precautions such as bringing professional medical teams along to supervise.

cheers

Check out the movie at http://www.survival-international.org/
They have some interesting information about an Indonesian tribe who was able to keep the Indonesian govt. away from their island, the have lived on their island for 60,000 years and don’t have any intention of leaving, it’s quite fascinating.

“The first flight had an obvious impact on the tribe. By the time the plane returned, most of the women and children had fled and those who remained had painted their bodies.”

“Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small day model of your grandfather, hot to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It’s a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago.”

‘Primitive vs advanced’ is an unhelpful polarity. I personally choose the pronouns, penicillin & McDonalds over the Sago, but wouldn’t dream of forcing it on someone else…

In the video they had some scientist comment on the footage… the guy’s name is “Had Alkaloid”. There’s a nice scientific name for you! :-)

So unless their isolation can be determined harmful to anyone, why try to strike up a conversation?