First, there is far more extreme and brutal inequality in our industrialized society than in a hunting and gathering society. Second, note how you're smuggling in the standards of our society to judge hunting and gathering societies as inferior. For instance, independence: there is nothing inherently good or bad about independence; some societies valorize it, other societies reject it in favor of interdependence and cooperation. Thus valuing independence cannot be used as an objective standard by which to evaluate all societies.
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> I'm sorry but this is taking post-modernism much too far - though, I
> admit, taking it out of American and French universities was too far
> for me. Universal good does not belong in quotation marks. To write
> off progress as some kind of cultural illusion, or false consciousness
> if you like, is frankly further than I am willing to engage in a
> debate. I had a startlingly similar conversation with someone a few
> weeks ago.
My argument is not based on postmodernism. Rather, it is an obvious conclusion from the available ethnographic data on how values vary in different types of human societies. It is a well-established fact that the values we hold dear in an industrial society are not shared by people everywhere. For me, the conclusion is inescapable: we cannot assume that the values we hold, no matter how dear they are to us, should be applied as universal standards to rank societies as "better" or "worse". I know this is brazen moral relativism, but consider the alternative: if we arbitrarily say "the values in my society are the universal standards by which all societies should be judged", then we're engaged in equally brazen ethnocentrism.
So yes, I completely reject the claim that human society has "progressed" over the past 100,000 years. --Or rather, using some arbitrary standards, you can claim progress; using other arbitrary standards, you can claim decline.
Miles