>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 09/30/99 08:49PM >>>
The commentary on ancient society says more about the daydreaming Palaeolithics on the list than it does about Palaeolithic societies.
As ever romanticising the past is just a psychological expression of distaste for the present. OK, so you want to live in a cave. Do it.
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Charles: I always wondered whether Plato's cave wisdom was of the caveman type.
There is a kernel of truth in what you say with respect to my attitude on this, but I do not propose throwing out all that has been developed since the hunting and gathering mode of production.
I think one piece of material evidence that gives some basis for inferring that hunters and gatherers' mode was not so precarious is the length of time that it survived. Why is it so hard to believe that over 2 million years many hunterers and gatherers may have mastered their technique and situation such that they could meet their basic needs for food, shelter/defense such that had a lot of leisure time ? Were they really all just on the edge for 2 million years ? That would be the greatest tight rope act of all times, obviously. What I am saying is that nasty, brutish and short is one step from extinction. Perhaps the myth of the Garden of Eden is a reflection of some kind of material reality.
Another factor that raises the quality of life quotient of these modes is that they did not have exploitative class relations, it is generally agreed. They were egalitarian societies.
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In message <s7f385ad.095 at mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>, Charles Brown
<CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes
>I'll take up the defense of my old prof. Jim, don't you also have to have a time
>and motion study of the same people to prove your side of the argument: that
>their lives were nasty brutish and short ? What is your evidence that people who
>lived in such societies didn't have a concept of free time ; or what is any of
>your evidence of what people did and thought in such societies ? Surely,
>Marshall Sahlins has more of that evidence than you do.
Jim: well, we know from the fossil evidence that their lives were short, and that disease and injury were debilitating problems. As to nasty, we know that hunter-gatherer societies generally killed their enemies rather than enslave them, because additional numbers could not be absorbed into the clan.
Charles: I'm not sure that we have a very high percentage of the remains of the people who died, or that the remains prove that they had more disease and injury or more debilitating diseases and injuries than modern peoples. Just as an example, they, of course, had no car accidents, no industrial accidents, no injuries from the slave masters' punishments.
I don't think the fossil record demonstrates that the hunters and gatherers had as many enemies as modern societies do. I certainly don't think that you can show that they killed a higher percentage of enemies than have been killed with modern weaponry. There is no evidence that they spent as high a percentage of their time in war and conquest as class exploitative societies. From modern hunters and gatherers we might infer that their "war" was more like a form of sports.
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Jim: As to whether they had a concept of free time, I know that they did not in the same way that Marx knew that they did not exchange fish and firs by consulting prices on the stock exchange: The concept of free-time only makes sense in the context of the selling of labour power.
Charles: Of course, their "free time" was not the same as today. But that doesn't mean they didn't have a form of waking break from essential productive activities, and that a higher percentage of their day was spent in them than your average modern worker.
Sahlins' examination of this issue in the hunters and gatherers of today is very empirically based.
Also, on "free time" vs. labor, see comment below on Marx's concept of alienated and non-alienated labor. It should be an important fact in analyzing and contrasting labor/free time that the hunters and gatherers, when they "labor" own the fruits of their labor. Don't you count this as very important in the comparisons of happiness and unhappiness , especially with respect to whether labor is experienced as toil or as fulfilling ? Marx seems to think that non-alienated labor or productive activities are naturally fulfilling rather than something that makes humans unhappy. This really complicates your comparison of work and freetime in this dispute.
When you (Jim H.) say ". In fact, modern societies clearly devote much less time, proportionately, to feeding itself" seems to me that you have not produced the factual evidence to counter Sahlins' factual evidence that contradicts this. For one thing, of course, hunterers and gatherers don't produce their food. It grows itself and they just go get it. Then the term "feeding itself" in the modern situation must include all of the work distributing the food, which adds lots more work hours.
Of course there is a much greater division of labor and specialization today. So, in comparing, you sort of have to count the work that non-food producers do as time toward "feeding themselves" . I mean all the non-food producers are not in leisure just waiting to be fed by the work of the food producing workers.
The qualitative differences between the modes makes the comparison more complex than what you say.
When you say "Your hesitation is mistaken. Life expectancy is rising across the board, more rapidly in the third world than in the first. Those rises, as often discussed on this list, are spread across social classes. There are some parts of the world that have seen a fall, such as sub-Saharan Africa, but they are by no means the majority." , the problem again is the huge discrepancy in total time of existence. Assume life expectancy has been rising in say the last 100 years. That is a small percentage of the total time of modern society. It could fall to zero next year with a nuclear war, to take an extreme example. Or it could just fall way off by war or economic collapse. Furthermore, you have to put in the life expectancy for the whole history of capitalism or class society ( depending on what you are comparing with hunting and gathering ) not just the last 100 years or 30 years. And then the fact that hunting and gathering lasted so long enters in. There could have been periods or areas with very long life expectancies that have not been detected by the evidences of those society to us today. We have remains of only a small percentage of all the hunters and gatherers of all times.
Seems to me the bottom line on this is that , first , you are correct to say many achievements of capitalism ( class society ? I am not sure what you are favoring over hunting and gathering) are advances for the quality and quantity of life for humanity. Yet, you ignore that modern society has also brought with it, along with a giant leap in the mode of production, a giant leap in the mode of destruction. So, that the exact net gain is not entirely obvious. Also, as Sahlins says, satisfaction is not an absolute quantity , but a relationship between wants/ needs and production. Modern society has introduced a big increase in wants/needs as a complement to its tremendous increase in absolute production ( Marx and Engels noted in _The German Ideology_ that in satisfying wants and needs humans regularly create new wants and needs). So, the satisfaction of people is a constantly expanding task.
Finally, productive activity is not necessarily inherently alienated. I know you are very familiar with Marx's analysis of this. But the point here is that in a non-class exploitative society, the producers own the fruits of whatever labor they do. If we take Marx seriously on this critique of capitalism and class exploitative society, then its implication for the happiness of people in non-exploitative society cuts against your general argument here.
Oh and one more note. It seems to me that part of the satisfaction that we get from some physically vigorous sports may be left over from Marx's general idea that productive activity that is not alienated is fulfilling rather than toilsome. Also, note the medical ideas of recent years emphasizing the importance of exercise. Although , the notion that ontogeny reiterates phylogeny has been rebuffed, perhaps an order of society in which we incorporate some reiteration of all the forms of cultural evolution in a modified way for everyone's experience would be naturally physiologically fulfilling and healthy. Modern camping and hiking does this to some extent. I am not suggesting a complete return to the old mode of production, but an educational scheme based on more respect for the lifestyle we had for most of the time that our physiology was shaped, more respect than the Hobbesian myth of nasty, brutish and short lives until the last two hundred years.
Charles Brown