This is something Ive been thinking about alot, and perhaps I wont be able to articulate it as well as I would want to. Our natural instinct wants us to hunt for food, to survive, to live off the land. But we live in a society that wants us to buy ipads, designer clothes, and watch television. So the question is, are tribes in Africa, South America and Asia more in touch with what it means to be human, then we are in modern society? Some of us may laugh at tribes because they are "funny and backwards", but maybe it is them who are laughing at us.
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Tribes, cavemen, hunter-gatherers
- Thread starter Portillo
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Belisarius
Bluelighter
Are they more in-touch? Definitely not, for two reasons:
1.) We are adaptable.
2.) We are defined biologically *and* socially.
There is nothing more natural about hunting with a spear or digging up roots, as opposed to buying food at a store or driving to work; they're things people are taught. Indeed, people can't do *anything* without being taught; something like, say, a snake "knows" everything there is to know about being one the moment it's hatched. We consider speech the quintessential human trait, but we can't do that either, without being taught. If society becomes increasingly advanced, we'll lose archaic behaviors for learned new ones; if society decays, we'll lose newer ones in favor of older ones. Learning and adapting are what it is to be sociologically human, not the tools we do or don't use.
1.) We are adaptable.
2.) We are defined biologically *and* socially.
There is nothing more natural about hunting with a spear or digging up roots, as opposed to buying food at a store or driving to work; they're things people are taught. Indeed, people can't do *anything* without being taught; something like, say, a snake "knows" everything there is to know about being one the moment it's hatched. We consider speech the quintessential human trait, but we can't do that either, without being taught. If society becomes increasingly advanced, we'll lose archaic behaviors for learned new ones; if society decays, we'll lose newer ones in favor of older ones. Learning and adapting are what it is to be sociologically human, not the tools we do or don't use.
P A
Bluelighter
^Excellent post.
True enough, but I still think something remains to be said for the tendency of contemporary Western societies to foster a kind of mucky alienation, collective ennui, cultural fatigue, and insipid nihilism, many of which qualities are conspicuously absent in most indigenous or voluntarily isolationist communities. I don't mean to suggest that these features are necessarily born out of, for instance, grocery shopping as such, but the correlation is strong enough to warrant consideration. Conversely, I'm sure that tribal societies suffer from sociocultural oppressions of their own making as well as do we, but to what extent? I'd wager, with Thoreau, that we, of the cozy prison cells and vapid consumerist dross, have everything we could ever need (and not need), and yet...
True enough, but I still think something remains to be said for the tendency of contemporary Western societies to foster a kind of mucky alienation, collective ennui, cultural fatigue, and insipid nihilism, many of which qualities are conspicuously absent in most indigenous or voluntarily isolationist communities. I don't mean to suggest that these features are necessarily born out of, for instance, grocery shopping as such, but the correlation is strong enough to warrant consideration. Conversely, I'm sure that tribal societies suffer from sociocultural oppressions of their own making as well as do we, but to what extent? I'd wager, with Thoreau, that we, of the cozy prison cells and vapid consumerist dross, have everything we could ever need (and not need), and yet...
Thanks for your replies. When I look around our modern society, all I see is mental illness, suicide, depression, anxiety, stress, and body image issues. Im not saying that people in the past never experienced this because of course they did. It just seems like modern society doesnt satisfy our primal instincts.
P A
Bluelighter
Or, alternatively, it fails to slake an even more essential thirst: Camus's famous nostalgia for a certain 'oneness' with nature, and intuitive connection to the world that can only be achieved by perfect surrender to and involvement in life itself, a near-impossible feat in a society as complex and sophisticated as ours.
webbykevin
Bluelighter
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webbykevin
Bluelighter
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Stop watching main stream media.
Edvard Munch
Bluelighter
So what may be in question is what it means to be 'human', and if technological advancements remove us from the property there-of.
If I am to understand the point-of-view correctly, then there is a set design that is to be 'human' as opposed to the evolution of human. To take an example from Nietzsche, "Verily, man is the most worm, since man sprang forth from worm." What Portillo may have neglected is human is an ever transitional period and to label it as a set condition is genealogically false.
Is human being tied to the bottom of the Maslow-ian (many of whom consider him of the most commendable Semite) rung? Or is it developing sophistication which seeks the pleasures of our innate conditions? An interesting point that Portillo makes is the 'by-proxies' of our condition, i.e., Humans are innately social beings, and Facebook allow's us to be social, if not a bit more removed. The same as action or horror movies that we can see other people, not ourselves, be part of a plot that involves the extremes of human conditions.
The proxy of experience seems to me like it certainly has a potential to enact ourselves into a Global "mind-sphere" wherebye which in the 1400's, if something happens it seeks to imprint itself much more powerful and harshly as opposed to the human who has TV can see lots of things with a degree of separation. A "Mind-Sphere" of telecommunications seeks to consolidate the individual of experience to a well-rounded, luke-warm sensation that, in my eyes, tends to breed people in having the same personality/beliefs. In the 400's, (and this is fact) you would find people that have much more variance of degree's of personality then today. So there is a degree of defining to do between "human" and "technology", and why in fact that are separate pieces to be thought of rather then making a point of "human" in itself.
If I am to understand the point-of-view correctly, then there is a set design that is to be 'human' as opposed to the evolution of human. To take an example from Nietzsche, "Verily, man is the most worm, since man sprang forth from worm." What Portillo may have neglected is human is an ever transitional period and to label it as a set condition is genealogically false.
Is human being tied to the bottom of the Maslow-ian (many of whom consider him of the most commendable Semite) rung? Or is it developing sophistication which seeks the pleasures of our innate conditions? An interesting point that Portillo makes is the 'by-proxies' of our condition, i.e., Humans are innately social beings, and Facebook allow's us to be social, if not a bit more removed. The same as action or horror movies that we can see other people, not ourselves, be part of a plot that involves the extremes of human conditions.
The proxy of experience seems to me like it certainly has a potential to enact ourselves into a Global "mind-sphere" wherebye which in the 1400's, if something happens it seeks to imprint itself much more powerful and harshly as opposed to the human who has TV can see lots of things with a degree of separation. A "Mind-Sphere" of telecommunications seeks to consolidate the individual of experience to a well-rounded, luke-warm sensation that, in my eyes, tends to breed people in having the same personality/beliefs. In the 400's, (and this is fact) you would find people that have much more variance of degree's of personality then today. So there is a degree of defining to do between "human" and "technology", and why in fact that are separate pieces to be thought of rather then making a point of "human" in itself.
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P A
Bluelighter
Are you fucking kidding me?
Edvard Munch
Bluelighter
Why are re-posting and quoting something that is banned? Abraham Maslow was annoyingly optimistic. These are the facts.
P A
Bluelighter
I edited your post to make your fuckup more explicit (for anyone's future reference), not to censor what you wrote per se. Also for my personal amusement.
And you appear to be a covert - or overt, as it were - antisemite.
It's like you've been reading my mind. I notice the same thing, in so many different ways I couldn't even start to list them.
That should be a bumper sticker. And a billboard. A thousand billboards.
And that should be an advertisement in every magazine and on every tv show.
I have stopped watching tv. It annoys me because the shows are either dumb, or dumber.
Edvard Munch
Bluelighter
I'll have to disagree. We are satisfying our primal instincts just fine. We modernize them, and glutton from the wealth that technology can improve this satisfaction. I'm not sure I understand your point anymore.
qwe
Bluelight Crew
our primal instincts were never meant to be satisfied in a way that would let us be long-term-happy. that's not how we evolved, and it's why humans have never been particularly happy.
we are now at a technological point, though, where we can choose to alter those primal instincts in numerous multiplying ways. even a TV can rewire, to an extent, how our visual cortex processes information. altering our basic instincts (what it means to be "human") leads us to... transhumanism.
Biovail
Bluelighter
Stupid question. Human is defined by who we are. So anything we do is human.
Hunting and gathering is very inhuman at this point.
Also, there is no such thing as "natural vs. unnatural". We are a part of nature, as is everything in the universe. Everything we do is natural. The bags of shit we call humans have a terrible habit of viewing ourselves as something special and separating our feats from those of the rest of the universe. The only distinctions are the ones we make, and so any discussion on the moral value or "rightness" of really anything is pointless and a waste of time. Right is whatever the observer makes it. Whether that observer be a monkey, a country, a human, a rock, an electron, a star, etc. It is all perception, and any discussion is simply an attempt at deception.
Hunting and gathering is very inhuman at this point.
Also, there is no such thing as "natural vs. unnatural". We are a part of nature, as is everything in the universe. Everything we do is natural. The bags of shit we call humans have a terrible habit of viewing ourselves as something special and separating our feats from those of the rest of the universe. The only distinctions are the ones we make, and so any discussion on the moral value or "rightness" of really anything is pointless and a waste of time. Right is whatever the observer makes it. Whether that observer be a monkey, a country, a human, a rock, an electron, a star, etc. It is all perception, and any discussion is simply an attempt at deception.
Your right. Who needs to hunt for food and survive when you can play games on your ipad all day.
webbykevin
Bluelighter
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so the show must go on, but no one has ever explained why this is so, why is it so important for life to continue ? is it in fact important at all ?