"Wokeist" - When people talk about progressivism without acquaintance

[Samson]

other people were invoking "our brains evolved to go happy when work" and i'm like... yes but actually no. that's not how the psychology works. if the other people are going to appeal to nature to bulk up a damaging work ethic, i'm just gonna go and say well actually.

Was this me? It kind of is how evolutionary psychology works because you cannot do real experiments so it is just left for people to come up with vaguely convincing stories.

 

[Farm Boy]

there was a reasonable equivalency of calories to work, and yes, what was done was hard work. it just didn't take dawn to dusk all of the warm months

It probably couldn't. Managing expenditure is as important as anything when resources are not available. Crazy hard work all day and adequate nutrition on top to say, reproduce successfully, is bonanza level food availability. We're just used to bonanza.

 

[Hygro]

Pre ice age there was likely a lot more life on this planet. And the evidence points to farmers pushing hunter gatherers into worse and worse land. So back in the day it’s likely food was quite abundant, when there was a lot of life on earth and not many humans and no farmers.

I agree with the contextualizing, but I think often the “difficultly level” of that game was closer to chieftain than deity. Hunter gatherers today have it much harder.

 

[Farm Boy]

I don't buy it. Humans will be humans. They'll screw with each other. Injuries were more dangerous. The footwear sucked. You can just safely go much harder, today.

 

[Narz]

Was this me? It kind of is how evolutionary psychology works because you cannot do real experiments so it is just left for people to come up with vaguely convincing stories.

That's psychology in general. It's not like the dsm is scientific.

When it comes to the past speculation using the limited evidence at hand is all one has.

 

[Hygro]

I don't buy it. Humans will be humans. They'll screw with each other. Injuries were more dangerous. The footwear sucked. You can just safely go much harder, today.

All of that is true. can. But.. with no expectation that the good times will end and thus no drive to granaries and surplus, and with maximally healthy bodies (we see evidence of near Olympian skill in some movements, they were often 6 feet tall, etc) it’s likely they were often living healthy with a lot of free time.

 

[Angst]

It probably couldn't. Managing expenditure is as important as anything when resources are not available. Crazy hard work all day and adequate nutrition on top to say, reproduce successfully, is bonanza level food availability. We're just used to bonanza.

i can trust you or the literature on this. the calorie point specifically was about how farming, while heinously work intensive back then, produces enough food per calorie to have others' manufacture specialize easier. hunting takes less time to do but doesn't give as many calories for it

Was this me? It kind of is how evolutionary psychology works because you cannot do real experiments so it is just left for people to come up with vaguely convincing stories.

not sure whether it was you. the point was that we feel rewarded and accomplished from doing stuff, but there's a big difference between that and a 8 hour amazon pseudo sweatshop thing

 

[Farm Boy]

All of that is true. can. But.. with no expectation that the good times will end and thus no drive to granaries and surplus, and with maximally healthy bodies (we see evidence of near Olympian skill in some movements, they were often 6 feet tall, etc) it’s likely they were often living healthy with a lot of free time.

Olympian level skills were the work skills. The sample that survives is the sample you get. But I'm just trusting you on this. Whatever literature this is, with its sunny approach to spiral wrist fractures.

 

[innonimatu]

alright so uh. you're reading into something that i'm not saying, some of it reasonably offensive. i made no appeal to the noble savage thing (which i know you know what it would imply about my position), i simply said that pre-agrarian life was less taxing, according to most of modern research.
i'm not asking us to go back to pre-agrarian life. my argument is not the same thing.

i'm just saying life back then wasn't 8-10 hours of hard labour a day, regardless of what you're saying here. i'm following what modern anthropologists have observed in societies without widespread agriculture (and dude, i know you're able to distinguish between before and after the shift). hobbes was extremely wrong. locke was also wrong, but for other reasons.
the more demanding parts of pre-agrarian lifestyles are much less taxing on our bodies and brains than post-agrarian life if we follow the capitalist work model (for most people; bourgois non-work is not that taxing). our workload was simply less than what has been standardized after agriculture.

Please understand that I'm not saying you were invoking the noble savage. After picking what you mentioned for quoting I went on to elaborate on some past ideas that (whether we're aware or not) also shape present ideas. I've been fond of the idea that past societies didn't require so much work from people, but later became convinced that is was not just a gross generalization, it was most likely wrong.

Nature not shaped by humans is harsh. Even fertile places get harsh: overgrown, without paths, taken over by large animals (they do make paths, but they can make a meal of you). You can try living by the sea or lakes, pick shellfish there for the taking, but then you're dealing with water-borne diseases as soon as the population gets a bit dense around these resources. And then you have to either abandon the place or toil to make it less dangerous. Needless to say draining swamps was the stuff of centuries or labour spent on it.
Or you can live inland, in the forests, but... there is a long, long history of the forest being the place of banishment, not the place of freedom. Forest = freedom is a romantic era thing, nowhere have I found it on earlier narratives. Do you know some?
For some reason evolution of societies has always been to settlement. Not necessary abandonment of a nomadic lifestyle, the pastoralists maintained that - but in marginal lands that could not be cultivated. Even there keeping the nomadic lifestyle was a survival need, not a choice.

There are a handful of anthropologists who claim that in hunter-gatherer societies people worked less. When you look at their work they're looking at places, at people, in marginal lands. Pushed there, not there by choice. The Kalahari - it's the last refuge of a people who suffered a genocide in their former areas of habitation, who were probably pastoralists if not farmers also.. The amazon basis - we have archaeologic evidence that it had large settlements and agriculture. Etc. These anthropologists look at tiny pockets only, and cannot look backwards even there. Their conclusions, right or wrong about those pockets alone, imo do not provide a basis for any generalization about past human societies. They are food for thought, can raise question, but do not provide answers. We're stuck at guesses. Archeology is imo a better basis for looking backwards, even if it is biased to tell us about the post-hunter-gatherer era.

What do we have from that older era, here in Europe at least? Skeletons in caves. Some found individually, some ritually buried. I've seen both. Clearly there were people living alone, with no others to care for them, and people living in community. In tens or hundreds of thousands of years that may have changed again and again. In some caves you can find layers of human occupation, hunting camps. Followed by layers of animal dens, bears, wolves. Skeletons with crafted goods, plaques, stone tools. Some were children, some adults, notably very few died old. Settlements, possibly (necessarily?) from an era with agriculture have more stone tools, loom weights, piles of shells. Marks of foundations, more bones. They were surrounded by lakes, the people living there may not have been farmers despite the evidence of weaving some fibers. No sculpture in stone yet. That was what I observed here in my corner of the continent. Scarce material remains, sure, but it does not strike me as a paradisaical era. I would never exchange mine for that.

We get young people, and retired people, from other corners of Europe trying their retreats from civilization here. Usually (always, in my region) the place ends abandoned and overgrown in a dozen years or less. It seems to me that even those who at some point think that the past was a better place and seek to chase the idea of some "simpler life" always quit it pretty fast. That too is what I have had opportunity to observe.

And you know, even Cervantes already spoke of something like this in 16th century Spain. And mocked them at several points in Don Quijote. Nothing new under the sun?

If we compare agricultural versus urban work rhythms, and if we specifically pick the early industrial revolution versus the (earlier) pre-industral farming, then the picture does favor farm living. Those farmers had to be forced into the cities by stealing their land. Now? Farming is harder than a desk job. And farming is not at all tolerant of people slacking off. If you don't sow at the right time, it won't get rain to grow. If you don't pick when you must, it rots. If you don't milk the cows in early morning they will be very cross. And quicker to cease producing. etc. But you were arguing for hunter-gatherers of course. Still there there are rhythms the hunter-gatherer mush submit to. They're dealing with animals, as the shepherds must. And animals they can't even control, in any way unlike the shepherd. Or they're dealing with plants, and the harvest must be done at the right time anyway, like with the farmer. Unlike the farmer, the hunter-gatherer must collect in a wider area, and must keep longer paths open or create new paths - that is hard work in most types of terrain. Try it some day, go collect wild plants and fruits in an area that is completely abandoned by human beings, no foot paths being maintained. One thing you will be very grateful for is good booths and sturdy trousers. Something our ancestors had to make on their own somehow, as well as the stone tools to craft them. I'm skeptical of these anthropologists. Very much.

 

[Narz]

For some reason evolution of societies has always been to settlement. Not necessary abandonment of a nomadic lifestyle, the pastoralists maintained that - but in marginal lands that could not be cultivated. Even there keeping the nomadic lifestyle was a survival need, not a choice.

This isn't true. Plenty of agricultural empires came and went, either to collapse, war, disease or simply abandoned. And it can be reasonably assumed that many, perhaps most "pre-agricultural" people understood cultivation and even domestication and choose not to bother w it.

There are a handful of anthropologists who claim that in hunter-gatherer societies people worked less. When you look at their work they're looking at places, at people, in marginal lands. Pushed there, not there by choice. The Kalahari - it's the last refuge of a people who suffered a genocide in their former areas of habitation, who were probably pastoralists if not farmers also.. The amazon basis - we have archaeologic evidence that it had large settlements and agriculture. Etc. These anthropologists look at tiny pockets only, and cannot look backwards even there. Their conclusions, right or wrong about those pockets alone, imo do not provide a basis for any generalization about past human societies. They are food for thought, can raise question, but do not provide answers. We're stuck at guesses. Archeology is imo a better basis for looking backwards, even if it is biased to tell us about the post-hunter-gatherer era.

It makes sense that tribes who lived in more abundant areas would likely have to work even less hard than those in lousy areas

Still there there are rhythms the hunter-gatherer mush submit to. They're dealing with animals, as the shepherds must. And animals they can't even control, in any way unlike the shepherd. Or they're dealing with plants, and the harvest must be done at the right time anyway, like with the farmer. Unlike the farmer, the hunter-gatherer must collect in a wider area, and must keep longer paths open or create new paths - that is hard work in most types of terrain. Try it some day, go collect wild plants and fruits in an area that is completely abandoned by human beings, no foot paths being maintained.

Hunter gatherers didn't live in "the wild", they may not have terraformed their environments w such a heavy hand as us but they understood how to alter the landscape for their benefit. You dont really think they were dumber than even beavers do you?

They just realized it was easier to not screw w a bountiful world to the point where they become dependent on just a few crops, tedious work, overpopulation and disease.

Hunter gatherer life wasn't a paradise but one interesting thing about early life in the Americans is worth noting. When whites were lost and joined up w natives or even if they were kidnapped they would more often than not choose to stay w them once 'found' even shunning their own families.

Natives lost or kidnapped or who otherwise assimilated for whatever reason into colonial society would immediately bolt back for their family if given a chance.

"When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.“ — Benjamin Franklin Letter to London merchant Peter Collinson (9 May 1753); reported in Labaree: "Papers of Benjamin Franklin", vol 4, pp 481-482

Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/191020...an-indian-child-has-been-brought-up-among-us/

So modern life and hot showers vs living in a small tribe on some crummy land? Yeah I'll take the showers but 400 years ago when the average European was living til what? 35? Yeah then it was less clear.

 

[innonimatu]

I urge caution on studies of americna natives used as source for extrapolations. There is something to be said about the native americans at the time of european colonization. Ameerica had probably undergone a demographic catastrophe, leaving more resources for the survivors - population was still bouncing back in the 18th century. Is this proven that was widespread? No, afaik. But it's likely. The same think happened in the european 14th and 15th centuries after the black death first came - wages rose, lord's powers weakened. Commonp people's lives improved, they had a pick of dwellings, the best lands to keep while marginal ones were abandoned. There is indeed something to be said for low density populations. But those are not steady-state situations historically, are they? Either some big demographic catastrophe had happened, or virgin lands were being settled - or mortality was very high. And if the last, was it a good life?

It's the same with the anthropologists studying tribes in the amazon basin. Look up the "black earth" finds. Archeology (and now surveys) strongly suggests these were places of sizeable communities which collapsed as europan diseases spread. And the population there, between that shock, european colonization, and then encroachment by the rubber boom, logging, never recovered. They may have been looking not at a snapshot of some stable past but at.. wrecks. It0d be like sending an hypothetical expolorer to Machu Picchu in the 18th century and trying to extrapolate the Inca Empire society and way of life from 100 survivors isolated there.

I ought to preemptively apologize to @Angst because I am taking this into a different subject, he wasn't indeed arguing about this stuff really. It's just an off comment prompted by some of the things said.

 

[Angst]

Please understand that I'm not saying you were invoking the noble savage. After picking what you mentioned for quoting I went on to elaborate on some past ideas that (whether we're aware or not) also shape present ideas. I've been fond of the idea that past societies didn't require so much work from people, but later became convinced that is was not just a gross generalization, it was most likely wrong.

Nature not shaped by humans is harsh. Even fertile places get harsh: overgrown, without paths, taken over by large animals (they do make paths, but they can make a meal of you). You can try living by the sea or lakes, pick shellfish there for the taking, but then you're dealing with water-borne diseases as soon as the population gets a bit dense around these resources. And then you have to either abandon the place or toil to make it less dangerous. Needless to say draining swamps was the stuff of centuries or labour spent on it.
Or you can live inland, in the forests, but... there is a long, long history of the forest being the place of banishment, not the place of freedom. Forest = freedom is a romantic era thing, nowhere have I found it on earlier narratives. Do you know some?
For some reason evolution of societies has always been to settlement. Not necessary abandonment of a nomadic lifestyle, the pastoralists maintained that - but in marginal lands that could not be cultivated. Even there keeping the nomadic lifestyle was a survival need, not a choice.

There are a handful of anthropologists who claim that in hunter-gatherer societies people worked less. When you look at their work they're looking at places, at people, in marginal lands. Pushed there, not there by choice. The Kalahari - it's the last refuge of a people who suffered a genocide in their former areas of habitation, who were probably pastoralists if not farmers also.. The amazon basis - we have archaeologic evidence that it had large settlements and agriculture. Etc. These anthropologists look at tiny pockets only, and cannot look backwards even there. Their conclusions, right or wrong about those pockets alone, imo do not provide a basis for any generalization about past human societies. They are food for thought, can raise question, but do not provide answers. We're stuck at guesses. Archeology is imo a better basis for looking backwards, even if it is biased to tell us about the post-hunter-gatherer era.

What do we have from that older era, here in Europe at least? Skeletons in caves. Some found individually, some ritually buried. I've seen both. Clearly there were people living alone, with no others to care for them, and people living in community. In tens or hundreds of thousands of years that may have changed again and again. In some caves you can find layers of human occupation, hunting camps. Followed by layers of animal dens, bears, wolves. Skeletons with crafted goods, plaques, stone tools. Some were children, some adults, notably very few died old. Settlements, possibly (necessarily?) from an era with agriculture have more stone tools, loom weights, piles of shells. Marks of foundations, more bones. They were surrounded by lakes, the people living there may not have been farmers despite the evidence of weaving some fibers. No sculpture in stone yet. That was what I observed here in my corner of the continent. Scarce material remains, sure, but it does not strike me as a paradisaical era. I would never exchange mine for that.

We get young people, and retired people, from other corners of Europe trying their retreats from civilization here. Usually (always, in my region) the place ends abandoned and overgrown in a dozen years or less. It seems to me that even those who at some point think that the past was a better place and seek to chase the idea of some "simpler life" always quit it pretty fast. That too is what I have had opportunity to observe.

And you know, even Cervantes already spoke of something like this in 16th century Spain. And mocked them at several points in Don Quijote. Nothing new under the sun?

If we compare agricultural versus urban work rhythms, and if we specifically pick the early industrial revolution versus the (earlier) pre-industral farming, then the picture does favor farm living. Those farmers had to be forced into the cities by stealing their land. Now? Farming is harder than a desk job. And farming is not at all tolerant of people slacking off. If you don't sow at the right time, it won't get rain to grow. If you don't pick when you must, it rots. If you don't milk the cows in early morning they will be very cross. And quicker to cease producing. etc. But you were arguing for hunter-gatherers of course. Still there there are rhythms the hunter-gatherer mush submit to. They're dealing with animals, as the shepherds must. And animals they can't even control, in any way unlike the shepherd. Or they're dealing with plants, and the harvest must be done at the right time anyway, like with the farmer. Unlike the farmer, the hunter-gatherer must collect in a wider area, and must keep longer paths open or create new paths - that is hard work in most types of terrain. Try it some day, go collect wild plants and fruits in an area that is completely abandoned by human beings, no foot paths being maintained. One thing you will be very grateful for is good booths and sturdy trousers. Something our ancestors had to make on their own somehow, as well as the stone tools to craft them. I'm skeptical of these anthropologists. Very much.

just wanted to say i appreciate you didn't think i was invoking the noble savage. like really. i wasn't comfortable with that lol

in regards to work, let me put it like this; early human life was tough, it was tough on the body in ways we can't really relate to in urbanized society. my point is moreso that from what i read, daily active work, literally just in the vein of food production, it meant more time to do other things - other things necessary, mind you, but other things. the toughest workload of the day was less monotone and strenious on the body than hard labor simply because of the time investment (and if we're talking ancient time, early crops and farming techniques were horrid, but that's neither here nor there in regards to my point). stuff we do for fun today - quilting, fx - was necessary back then (at least similar work), but a bigger part of life than gathring food, and it meant, simply, more time to do other things. there's a reason the spread of agriculture coincided with large scale specialization of industry, past the legitimate handicraft you note. we are just not made to stay in the same chair for years, it does not reward the brain as much as varied life. now, again, i'm not asking for us to return to that time; and i do prefer urbanized life over hunter-gatherer life; but the point is that there is a problem here, rather than the work culture some people want to push; work does make us feel fulfilled in a way, generally, but not the kind of work that exists today. you will not become fulfilled by having a night shift job sorting mail by yourself for years. but work as an abstraction (a marxist one, infact) does make us feel fulfilled. it's why people do art without any material compensation, and such. that was the base point, regardless of the nuances some people are trying to push. it's why i started talking about it at all.

am i making sense?

 

[Angst]

I ought to preemptively apologize to @Angst because I am taking this into a different subject, he wasn't indeed arguing about this stuff really. It's just an off comment prompted by some of the things said.

heh i'm at fault too, don't worry about it. i actually think it's symptomatic to the point of the thread that the topic has shifted around so much

 

[Narz]

I urge caution on studies of americna natives used as source for extrapolations. There is something to be said about the native americans at the time of european colonization. Ameerica had probably undergone a demographic catastrophe, leaving more resources for the survivors - population was still bouncing back in the 18th century

I don't think population destiny alone can explain this phenomenon.

Also remember why the population density was so low (disease and settlers attempts @ extermination), doesn't sound very stress free.

 

[Traitorfish]

You don't have to envision any type of particular bliss to understand that social creatures often derive meaning from social interactions where they dicern they have purpose.

That's as much an argument against the modern economy as in favour of it, mind: a lot of contemporary work is characterised by a pervasive sense of purposelessness, of repetitive actions done apparently for their own sake, with any eventual social utility being so abstracted from the daily experience of work as to be a mere fairy tale. A lot of people hate their jobs precisely because those jobs represent eight hours a day (and eight hours which tend to dictate the terms of the other sixteen) during which they are explicitly prohibited from engaging in social interactions from which they can discern a purpose.

 

[Ajidica]

That's as much an argument against the modern economy as in favour of it, mind: a lot of contemporary work is characterised by a pervasive sense of purposelessness, of repetitive actions done apparently for their own sake, with any eventual social utility being so abstracted from the daily experience of work as to be a mere fairy tale. A lot of people hate their jobs precisely because those jobs represent eight hours a day (and eight hours which tend to dictate the terms of the other sixteen) during which they are explicitly prohibited from engaging in social interactions from which they can discern a purpose.

I'd be leery about ascribing that to a 'modern' economy, as if it was something unique. Apparently purposeless repetitive actions comprises most pre-modern economic activities too. Collecting wood for charcoal burning or for fires, weaving cloth, spinning thread, pulling wire, carrying goods, etc. Is working in a call center, entering data into a program, or flipping burgers any less repetitive and purposeless than spending your days sending a shuttle back and forth on a loom to make fabric to sell?

 

[El_Machinae]

That will be partially just because we make such gains from specialization and trade, we're disconnected from the output. The society that forsakes these will eventually be outcompeted by the one that doesn't, with eventual transfer of ownership from the poor to the rich. If you're being paid, it means that some part of the process values your output. In a non-market economy, there will be other ways of generating similar sentiment, but the straight line is less available. The problem kicks in when we realize who's appreciating us and how little. But that also happens in a non-market economy

 

[Lexicus]

Collecting wood for charcoal burning or for fires, weaving cloth, spinning thread, pulling wire, carrying goods, etc. Is working in a call center, entering data into a program, or flipping burgers any less repetitive and purposeless than spending your days sending a shuttle back and forth on a loom to make fabric to sell?

No activity is inherently any more or less purposeless than any other activity; people make meaning of what they do and can derive meaning from just about anything.

The point Tfish seems to be making is about economic alienation. I think that people who lived before agriculture would not have seen their repetitive activities as pointless because those activities were all directly embedded into the life of their community. They made the fires for the feasts that were the center of the community's social life; they made clothes that they and their families would wear in front of everyone they knew, etc. etc. To the extent that capitalist relations alienate workers from the products of their labor, the underlying sense of listlessness and purposelessness would be worse now than it ever was. I think the start of hierarchy, material inequality, is when you would begin to see alienation in this sense: the emergence of parts of the population that exist by extracting surplus from the productive (meaning, basically, farming or herding) part of the population.

I'm not suggesting that hunter-gatherer life was perfect, or even better than what we have now, but I do think that, given what we know about how people lived before agriculture, there are clearly problems in modern life that did not exist then (just as there were problems then, arguably worse problems, that we have largely solved in modern life).

 

[Ajidica]

No activity is inherently any more or less purposeless than any other activity; people make meaning of what they do and can derive meaning from just about anything.

The point Tfish seems to be making is about economic alienation. I think that people who lived before agriculture would not have seen their repetitive activities as pointless because those activities were all directly embedded into the life of their community. They made the fires for the feasts that were the center of the community's social life; they made clothes that they and their families would wear in front of everyone they knew, etc. etc. To the extent that capitalist relations alienate workers from the products of their labor, the underlying sense of listlessness and purposelessness would be worse now than it ever was. I think the start of hierarchy, material inequality, is when you would begin to see alienation in this sense: the emergence of parts of the population that exist by extracting surplus from the productive (meaning, basically, farming or herding) part of the population.

I'm not suggesting that hunter-gatherer life was perfect, or even better than what we have now, but I do think that, given what we know about how people lived before agriculture, there are clearly problems in modern life that did not exist then (just as there were problems then, arguably worse problems, that we have largely solved in modern life).

Are we using 'modern'/'capitalist' to describe everything from God-King Sumeria to modern New York City? Because once regional cities started emerging or a monetary economy began filtering down to the lower classes, we began to see at least some people turn what had been occasional tasks done for the family/household, such as weaving, into full time professions to sell their goods.

 

[Narz]

I'd be leery about ascribing that to a 'modern' economy, as if it was something unique. Apparently purposeless repetitive actions comprises most pre-modern economic activities too. Collecting wood for charcoal burning or for fires, weaving cloth, spinning thread, pulling wire, carrying goods, etc. Is working in a call center, entering data into a program, or flipping burgers any less repetitive and purposeless than spending your days sending a shuttle back and forth on a loom to make fabric to sell?

While tedious these tasks were at least understandable w concrete outcomes that one could at least appreciate. Nowadays half of work is so abstract we cannot explain it to our kids.