Why Life Would Still Suck Without Industrialization

You know what really pisses me off?

Those little tabs that never come off right on brand new mustard bottles. But right now I'm talking about the "good old days".

Living in our modern industrial world, academics (and others, I suspect) sit back and talk about how AWESOME things were before industrialization. How we've RUINED the world. How colonialism was EVIL (which is an over-simplistic value judgment and I fucking hate over-simplistic value judgments) and how people are miserable across the world because of US. (you can read US both ways)

How ethnocentric can you be? WE are the cause of the world's misery? Industrialization was the beginning of the end?

If there was a beginning of the end it was the invention of agriculture. But that's a rant for another day.

Humans are not strong. Or fast. Or all that dangerous without weapons and other humans to help. What we have going for us is our brains. They're really big. And we come up with ways to get around how slow, weak and ineffective we are physically. TOGETHER our brains meant we survived all these millennia. So we evolved as group-oriented animals. We eventually NEEDED human interaction (Harlow's monkeys and experience with feral children have shown us that without enough human contact we DIE). Which meant that we created societies. Which meant that we became what we now know as humanity. And do you know what happens when we create a society with its own culture and cultural pressures and have near constant interaction with people we depend on for survival?

CONFLICT.

Which is why life has always sucked. No, that's not accurate. Life has always been hard. Really, really hard. We like to look at "quaint" tribes in Africa and say that the only problems they have are a result of colonization. Like they would live in peace and harmony if it weren't for us. Walter Goldschmidt argues quite convincingly that the Sebei of Uganda were actually saved by colonization because it ended the wars with their neighbors that they were losing due to inadequate adjustment to settling down to become farmers (which happened before the colonization by the British). Got that?

Cultures create idealized images of what their people are supposed to be. The ideal and the real are very rarely the same. No matter which culture you pick, or which time period, if you're thinking that they are "happier" than you are, and they live conflict-free lives, you are not accurate. Dorothy Lee, a usually great thinker, wrote a painfully cheery essay on Hopi Indians. Apparently, we are supposed to be just like them because while they make all individuals bow to the group, each individual is appreciated for what he or she can do. They don't treat their people like interchangeable robots, which was pissing her off about the United States in general. She gave us a picture of a beautiful and fluid society where everything was perfect. She did not mention that the children were taught to fear Katchinas, gods who would punish them if they were bad, and then at 10 or 12 they were beaten by said Katchinas, finding out afterward it was their family all along. This was presented by David Aberle in a paper called "Psychological Analysis of a Hopi Life History" as the source of the major trauma and trouble with adjustment of one Hopi child.

Since culture came into full existence in the Upper-Paleolithic, there have been cultural roles and people who do not live up to them. There has been warfare due to economics and warfare due to ego. There have been individuals who feel alone and unconnected to their society, or who feel animosity toward their community. We all struggle with living up to the roles we are supposed to play. (Professor McSmartSmart said something that rings quite true: We see people from other cultures as truly human and can relate to them most when they mess up and don't fulfill their cultural roles, like when we see a couple ostracized for their forbidden love). There is extra trouble when the roles are ill-defined or in a process of rapid change due to ecological changes. Societies, all societies, are constantly in flux; we are our societies and we are forever adapting to the external world and changing to try to meet our needs as best we can.

"It is a peculiar conceit of modern man to think that...individual behavior, such as doubt in and disrespect for traditional wisdom is a product of our era, that tribal man, that humanity in its state of nature, neither enjoys the freedom of choice nor suffers the pangs of doubt." --Walter Goldschmidt

So let's liberate ourselves from the fallacy that if we could travel back two hundred or two thousand years we would live lives without conflict, disease, war, disappointment, betrayal and all the other fun things that go along with taking part in Humanity. None of this is new. None of it is a sign of the apocalypse (which we have also been predicting for as long as we've lived in communities...coincidence? I think not). Humanity is conflict AND the attempt to FIX the conflict. Humanity spends its life dealing with the problems it creates.

Disclaimer: This is a rant intended to make us accept society for all its problems, not reject it. I believe "Humanity" is what has set us apart from the animal world. Not opposable thumbs, but society. And I love society. We are born without morals, character, or value (I refer to social value, that we matter to people, because I'm not sure I believe in objective value). Socialization in the family, the community, society and the world gives us the morals, character and value which make us great. Cultures are constantly changing, and you can argue that in the industrial world they change very quickly. But there have been many periods in time when cultures have had to change quickly - for example every diaspora ever - and we adapt. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. But that is our official profession as a species. And as we are still here and have been wildly successful at procreation (how many billion people are there?!!), I suppose we can slap ourselves on the back and say we're mighty good adapters. CHEERS TO US!!