Another, smaller point for Valhelmethead-the lifespan of the sun is not anywhere NEAR 300 billion years. That is over 15 times the current age of the universe, and about a HUNDRED times the actual estimated remaining life in the sun. Sorry if I sound nit-picky, but I get kind of obsessed over matters like that.

And going back to the original topic, in my opinion electronics is the best thing about civilization.

Electronics are nice. I'd narrow it down and say that effectively instant long-distance communication is the best thing about civilization, or open it up and say that technology is.

My answer - I love how I'm able to retain a friendship after my friend moved 15,000 km away.

@ValHelmethead - I think you misunderstand an essential part of the difference between tribal and civilized societies. It isn't in the workload which

I do believe there are some problems within society that most people ignore though. As I'm sure Sicarius agrees the most prevailent of them being materialism, over-indulgence and even the willful ignorance people

damn thing posted before I was ready...

land.

...because God's not making any more of it.

*Just ignore the first post

@ValHelmethead & Sicarius - I think you misunderstand an essential part of the difference between tribal and civilized societies. It isn't the workload that increases productivity, its the specialization. In tribal societies everyone must more or less do a bit of everything, and most importantly take time to become proficient in those things.

People would find it very difficult to become a career artist in a tribal society, if they did choose to dedicate their lives to art they would also need to spend time hunting/building and fulfilling other duties. It also extends to most other jobs. Its more effective for everyone to have specialties.

I do believe there are some problems within society that most people ignore though. As I'm sure Sicarius agrees the most prevailent of them being materialism, over-indulgence and even the willful ignorance people choose to allow. I simply don't agree that the problem lies in the formation of civilization.

*Its more effective for everyone to spend their entire time within their specialty. Though I will concede some people make money doing very little of value.

Ah, Sicarius, your favourite argument. I thought we ended the last one with me bringing up population statistics showing you that your numbers were wrong/selectively used to give the impression that primitive hunter gatherers had comparable life spans to modern civilized humans... you never did respond. =)

I also pointed out that hunter gathering societies had ridiculously disproportionate death and murder rates, with statistics... do I have to be bothered to rustle them up again?

We don't have surplus production in general (though certainly in some industries), Western civilization is just relatively wasteful simply because we've gone far beyond the necessities of life. Don't worry though, population boom will soon remove that "surplus", hooray for incentive.


Civilization gives us more capabilities... I don't think it's civilization that is necessarily immoral (entirely your opinion), it's simply how society chooses to use it's capabilities. You can still go out and live as a hunter gatherer now if you wanted, and not too many people would bother you... but in a hunter gatherer society I couldn't be supported solely on what I believe to my strengths and I certainly wouldn't be able to debate this issue with you online! Hell, we most likely wouldn't exist because of population constraints.

You say that the collapse of civilization is inevitable... and I would say that yes... given enough time, all is ephemeral... but that's not to say hunter gatherer society is somehow the natural life and that civilized life is some sort of anomaly that will soon be corrected. Civilization is pretty much inevitable as well, simply because no hunter gathering society could ever hope to compete against the far more efficient and numerous populace of an agrarian society. I hope you notice that the places where hunter gatherer's still exist are the places that can't support agriculture. Humans (as do all organisms) naturally strive to maximize their energy intake, and if they get more from agriculture than from hunting and gathering that's what they'll do, if the opposite is true, than the opposite is exactly what happens. We aren't a deviation, we're a deterministic inevitability, bar massive climate change.

If you think modern society is bad, you should see early agrarian societies... if we reverted to hunting and gathering, you could expect us to climb that brutal and bloody ladder again. As for whether or not modern society will collapse in the face of it's own unsustainability... that doesn't necessarily make it immoral, it just makes it unsustainable. =)

With that said, I think you'll find that while population might decrease as carrying capacity feels the negative effects of our greed, civilization won't experience a huge collapse with us resorting to hunting and gathering... we'll continue to use agrarian practices and the methods of civilization as long as they provide us with a higher energy intake than "living off the land", which it almost certainly will. I definitely think you're also underestimating the effects of technological change in the very long run. Check out Thomas Malthus for a smart economist who also predicted the eventual downfall of society a long time ago only to have his predictions continually thwarted by exponential increases in productivity due to technological advances.

Hey, if we polled civilized peoples and asked them if they'd prefer to be civilized or hunter gatherers I think you'd find they'd choose civilization. Hell, if you polled primitive hunter gatherer's after explaining to them the luxuries of civilized life, they'd probably choose civilization too... at least, that's what a lot of Native Americans (who weren't slaughtered or cheated) chose... though the notion that Native Americans were hunter gatherer's is flawed to say the least. =)

Of all the kooky ideas Sicarius has put forth, this takes the cake.

And the irony that he is against civilization but uses a computer is priceless.

Quick toss-in - the current scientific consensus is that in the vast majority of primitive cultures, the reason for the shorter average lifespan than modern civilizations was the high rate of infant mortality. People lived about as long, give or take maybe ten years on the outside - we're just a lot more likely (like 1000%) to hit the age of four than they were.

I don't believe that's entirely accurate. The largest changes in life expectancy do happen when the chances of living past 5 increase, but a 60 year-old was still ancient pre-modern-medicine (I think its fair to say most who lived through disease/accidents/whatever would die in their 50s). When you rule out accidental/induced deaths the life expectancy in western democracies I believe exceeds 80. That's a pretty huge difference, maybe not as much as life expectancy figures would leave you to believe but it isn't '10 years on the outside' its closer to 30.

Primitive societies had a similar life expectancy, even greater, than pre-industrial revolution humans. But now we live better. I mean really: we have iphones. The inuit didn't enjoy higher life expectancy than modern Canadians because when they had critical heart disease they couldn't get a transplant. Plus they ate alot of raw seal meat.
But lets say you are right Sicarius, lets say primitive cultures enjoyed a better standard of living than humans today. Logically, we should all revert back into a primitive lifestyle. I personally wouldn't want to because then I wouldn't be able to go on phpdiplomacy which increases my standard of living, but lets say we all do. You realise that the principle reason people never shifted back to primitive after figuring out that it sucked in primitive agriculture is because they had too many people. What would we do with all the people? A primitive culture is only sustainable with a fraction of the people we have today. So given that, what are you advocating? Are you just whining about a choice some neolithic people made in mesopotamia? Are you advocating mass genocide by anarchists on the less enlightened?

Allow me to summarise: who cares?

Sicarius: Where do you get this BS. From every place I've read, they state that most people living in the neolithic died by there mid 40's. Sure a few old folks survived longer by being lucky and very healthy. Also most women died younger still from child bareing, and one reason no BC pills. That means any women in could give birth about every year till death or metapause. Most of the kids would die by age 10, but you would still have more offspring than the land could support in a few generations. What about drugs like antibiotics and vaccines, without which even a minor wound could kill. Of course you have to think about the lions, tigers, and bears oh my. Than you have droughts, fires, storms, plague, so on and so on. Much of these has been mitagated by civilization. I do not think people living this way had time to produce a Plato or a Mozart. There still are a few areas in the world you can live off the land, neolithic like. Large areas of Africa that it is comman to be attacked by wild animals. Why do you not try living there for a couple of years, and come back tell us how well you enjoyed the life, if you survive.

Toilet Paper. I think the reason is clear. =)

I value things like computers.

Choices - I like making choices, the more civilized we become the more choices we have, including not being very civilized. I am aware that my personal choices impact on others choices, but I still think they have plenty more choices than they would have had in an uncivilized society.

Oh, and education. I think that's a great thing about civilization.

I value the dentist.

...another discussion abandoned by Sicarius.

Sicarius has a point. There is a lot to be said for a hunter gather lifestyle. I can imagine that compared to our humdrum lives that it was probably quite a fulfilling way to live. But it is way to late go back. Pandora's box has been opened and we just have to deal with it, including Sicarius.

"hunter gatherer society is somehow the natural life and that civilized life is some sort of anomaly that will soon be corrected."
nice quote chrispminis ;]

iphones define quality of life?
well I'd rather have drinkable streams than iphones
and breatheable air
and an unpoisoned body


look the point is NOT whether or not I think primitive society is a better way to live.
what it is about is the way we are living now cannot be maintained.
truthfully I'd love to chill out all day playing videogames, making food in my fancy oven, which just came out of my fancy fridge, which is plugged into my fancy electrical outlet.
I like technology. I think it's really fucking cool.
but I'd rather have rainforests than halo 3
I'd rather have a working ocean ecosystem than hotpockets
I'd rather have dioxin free breastmilk for my children than nikes.

the point is not whether I would like to live primitivly or think its a better way of life
the point is that the stone age is the only sustainable level of technology, and if we continue as we are, we will render the earth inhabitable.

Civilization (in theory) isn't any more unsustainable than a hunter-gatherer society.

I'm sure you could well imagine a hunter-gatherer society that overuses its food supply and goes into critical decline? It happened all the time.

Pollution can easily affect pre-agricultural societies; its not all that difficult to foul a water source and make it undrinkable if you poop in the wrong place.

The dramatic things that seem to be threatening 'civilization' like climate change and ecosystem collapse happen in nature anyway and also affect Primitive socieities, perhaps even more than they affect us.
(And I'm fairly sure that the modern age will not be beaten by climate change whether we change our ways or not)

Neither are the facets of civilization necessarily unsustainable. Well, any more than energy is unsustainable by virtue of its eventual dissapation.

A complex structured and advanced society can subsist on agriculture, be relatively technologically advanced with a high standard of living and still not have a net effect (per person) worse than that of hunter-gatherers.

Much sustainable energy that we use today is NOT possible without the dirty advances of previous centuries. I'm not saying thats the best tactic for pursuing sustainability, but it is a tactic.

Now, perhaps (well, almost certainly) civilization is going to end at some point, but I'll bet my buckets that primitive society will, (and would have if we had never opted with agriculture) perished simulataneous to this collapse, if not before.

So, sorry to attack your fallback point Sicarius, but there you go.

"Civilization (in theory) isn't any more unsustainable than a hunter-gatherer society.
I'm sure you could well imagine a hunter-gatherer society that overuses its food supply and goes into critical decline? It happened all the time."


yes but you see, when those primitive societies fuck up, they all die. now whats different from that in this situation is that they didnt take the whole world with them.

"A complex structured and advanced society can subsist on agriculture, be relatively technologically advanced with a high standard of living and still not have a net effect (per person) worse than that of hunter-gatherers."

its possible, but thats not what we have today or in the near future.

"Pollution can easily affect pre-agricultural societies; its not all that difficult to foul a water source and make it undrinkable if you poop in the wrong place."
if someone shits in a stream its not gonna effect you. theres shit in streams anyway, thats part of streams. what they've done now is wholly different. they've befouled everything. now theres nowhere that isnt poisoned. a good example is breastmilk, which is a nice little chemical cocktail that includes dioxin and mercury and hormones and drugs.

"
Much sustainable energy that we use today is NOT possible without the dirty advances of previous centuries. I'm not saying thats the best tactic for pursuing sustainability, but it is a tactic."

we're not sustainable though. very very much the opposite.
so its not we polluted the earth for a few years buts its ok cuz we dont do it anymore. it is like; we polluted the earth for a few years, and are doing so at an increasing rate


yeah climate change might happen anyway, in fact I know it does. but there are things we are doing that are not at all natural things, and these things will scar earth for a very long time


"And the irony that he is against civilization but uses a computer is priceless."
invictus if you just think about this I'm sure you will realize why it makes you sound like an idiot

Yeah, I'M the idiot here. Not you, the one opposed to civilization itself, but me. Mea culpa, Biff.

have you started endgame?
I think a professional writer can say what I'm trying to tell you better than a traveling anarchist teenager

My last final was yesterday. I'll get it tomorrow or after Christmas, I'm off most of January.

You can't make this sow's ear of an idea into a silk purse, no matter how good the writer may be.

I'm not trying to trick you I'm trying to tell you.

I'm opposed to civilization because I'm informed.
you really dont see whats being done to the planet do you

No, I guess I'm an uniformed moron. Not like you, who are privy to the secret knowledge of octogenarian cavemen and the glories of the savage life.