Yes, childhood itself is a fairly recent advent in the the annals of history- including western history. By and large, the transition from treating children as pint sized adults is a good thing, not a bad one. In any case, it's straight out silly to compare stone age hunter/gatherer societies with complex contemporary ones. I'm not suggesting that Diamond is doing this, but the author of this review certainly is.

dumb.

"complex contemporary" hierarchic civilization has not grown up into responsible individual and member of community - which includes whole biosphere, of which also human life depends from. Rather, globalized civilization seems to be now suffering from severe teenage phase of suicidal tendencies and existential crisis, as global limits of growth have been met.

Yes, complex contemporary societies host a slew of ills- as do hunter/gatherer societies, but my point is one simply cannot translate the latter's methods of raising children to the former's. Seriously, would you do away with child endangerment laws? Laws against pedophelia? Child labor laws? Mandatory education?

... precisely?

First Nations are all potential terrorists, as authoritarian control freaks generally fear an loath independent peoples who are not controllable.

How about noble indigo savage child?

once you know what to look for.

We are barely out of the cave, from an evolutionary perspective of course.

Hierarchic authoritarian class societies condition children into remaining authoritarian followers, big children who never grow up and follow orders without questioning.

Free and egalitarian societies rely on children growing into responsible individuals and members of community, and responsibility comes with freedom to experience and also to make mistakes and learn from them.

oh, and I think toddlers should be allowed to flex their individuality by playing unchaperoned in busy traffic.

Do you not get that applying the guidelines used in hunter/gatherer societies to raise children, don't translate well to contemporary ones?

that what you mean by "contemporary" is authoritarian power pyramid that relies on not letting children grow into responsible individuals, but keeping them forever authoritarian followers that obey without questioning.

oy

Given the comments of the poster I addressed said questions to, they're eminently reasonable. And I'm curious. Why on earth would you think those questions are rhetorical?

I believe we would be better of by getting rid of all hierarchic power pyramids and their laws.

There will always be those who desire power over others and they will always work to accumulate and consolidate that power.

You can't derive a general social "law" of human social organization and potential of cultural evolution based on contemporary globalized civilization and its history of unsustainable agrarian way of life.

A much more plausible general law can be derived from standard material physics and evolutionary population biology: any system that is dependent from continuous growth and from it's environment, cannot grow ad infinitum as part of finite system. If a cancer kills the host organism, cancer cell population dies also.

Pyramid fraud of power hierarchies is not sustainable model of cultural and biological evolution and adaptation.

either.

And how the agrarian experiment is going to wind up is anyone's guess at the moment.

they just adapted to nearly every ecosystem on Earth in sustainable way. And gave rise to agrarian societies that turned into empires and global civilization that consumes and destroys ecosystems, humans included, and is destroying itself.

If the population stays below the threshold I mentioned then there is not sufficient material of adequate density for the authoritarians to build a rigid hierarchy.

You can't put a number on it and claim it is immutable law.

As a matter of fact, multilayered gardens produce much more per acre than monoculture farming and allow greater (sustainable) population density. But such horticultural societies seem much more egalitarian and resistant to formation of power hierarchies than monoculture farming.

I've lived in a small tightly knit town and I think while it's clearly great for some or even most people it really sucks for a minority, everyone knows everyone and if you don't fit the group you are totally on the outs with no one to turn to.

It's been my experience that those who are least aware of the hierarchy are those who fit the best in it.

Pashtun society and culture is not hierarchically centralized but decentralized network of largely self-reliant smaller communities united most importantly by ancient ethical code preserved by oral tradition called Pashtunwali, which is not limited to native speakers of Pashtun but has been adopted by other neighboring cultures. And they have been at least significant enough to succesfully resist both Soviet Union and US empires.

Our various coevolutionary relations and how they affect our population dynamics and forms of social organization is a complex multivariable issue, but any serious anthropological study will not lead to conclusion that global power hierarchy with bankers on top is the only option with any population number. Or that nation state hierarchies are any more natural form of social organization, or that decentralized bottom up network of communities could not be possible on global scale.

Locally sustainable communities can have very strict (unwritten) social norms, but there is great variety and also individual freedom of movement to stay in community and company that suits individual needs.

so if your 4 year old was raped, that would just be a learning experience for the little tyke. Yikers.

your culture is raping Mother Earth and making it unlivable for all our children. Your "complex" culture. Culture of Oedipal complex.

by the way, let me tell you a little story about two men I knew when they were boys living on the same commune I lived on. They were about 5 and the mom of one of them had much the same beliefs that you apparently espouse. She was off fucking someone and her son and the other kid were playing with his nifty bow and arrow. Her son shot an arrow into the eye of the other kid, blinding him. Btw, the kid who was blinded grew up to be a wonderful creative man, husband and father. The kid who shot his eye out grew up to a beautiful, extremely fucked up man-child.

In this thread and elsewhere on DU I get the impression that you strongly identify with current hierarchic society and it's unsustainable way of life.

And often engage in personal attacks against those who question the wisdom of authoritarian system fouling up it's own nest and instead of discussing the subject, you turn it into attempts to blame game and guilt trip those who do not agree with your need for authoritarian control.

Not the whole truth about your way of life, dear, just general impressions from my limited point of view, since you asked.

have done so for over 30 years living a sustainable way of life. I live about as outside the normal "hierarchic" society as just about anyone. Haven't been in a mall, for instance, in a couple of decades. One thing is true: I have little patience for stupidity or those with ideological blinders tightly affixed to narrow temples.

Oh and clearly your knowledge of my life and lifestyle is as erroneous as everything else you've posted in this thread.

you turned the discussion being about You (and how wrong and stupid I am .

"Your culture" referred to European colonial culture, which I assumed and still assume is your cultural background. Which does not mean that this is about You, personally, how ever interesting your relation with your cultural heritage may be, and if that's what you want to talk about, I'll listen.

with a BB gun..... my brother fell off of the roof while "playing" Starsky and Hutch.....I was thrown from my horse into a ditch....I got 7 stitches in my chin while playing football.....neighbor kids were always getting hurt - probably because we were allowed to play outside. Your example may be extreme.....but it's CHILDHOOD!

??

Children are taught to make and use bows and arrows from very little. My father made me a very lethal crossbow when I was small, it was just lying around in the summer commune and in winter I kept it in my own room. But any time any child would point even a plastic toy weapon towards another human, all adults raised hell and made clear that's not cool, not even when "just" playing.

and they also constantly embarrassed us children by telling blatant lies that we children believed, as was the traditional way of parenting in my tribe. Felt cruel at the time, but our parents teaching us not to trust their lies taught us to think by ourselves and question and not trust the lies on which the global civilization is built on.

they allow them to wander into the fire?

No, sorry, that's just shitty parenting, whatever your culture.

Under that same logic, a woman who's fucked up on dope and lets her 4-yo cook her own macaroni is just letting the kid do what she wants.

It's especially reprehensible if it leaves legit scars. Like I "burn" myself while cooking about twice a year, and I have 0 burn scars because by the time I started cooking my own food, I was old enough to not put my hand down on the burner, or set my clothes on fire, or put my hand in the boiling water.

Jared Diamond is a toolbag made of other, smaller toolbags.

from harm that is the problem. It's the punishments and reactions after the behavior. Even in other mammal species, we can observe animal parents intervening and attempting to control their offspring's reckless behavior. It's usually the lower functioning, reptilian brained animals that don't care about what their children are doing.

When we rescue our children from sticky situations, like these elephants are, we are protecting our investment.

becomes more protective and restrictive.

Even the best raised American children would not function in a Hunter Gatherer society. The opposite is equally true. Each social structure requires and teaches completely different skill sets.

In fact many Europeans chose to live with natives instead of in colonies, and natives have been forced to learn European ways (children robbed from their parents and communities and treated horribly in the "schools" they were kidnapped to).

But both apples and oranges grow on trees, and global civilization would not be saved even if it destroyed all remaining indigenous peoples and robbed and consumed their ecosystems. "Idle No More" First Nations are not speaking out and demonstrating only for themselves, but as we are all in the same boat, for the whole fruitsalad and the trees and land that give us fruits.

and it's been done before. http://www.continuum-concept.org/home.html

but all I read in that excerpt sounded pretty meh.

Where do kids live in magic land where they do not do dangerous things?

from the impersonal chaos of the industrial world in so many ways that the word better in the OP subject line is inappropriate, IMO.

What's interesting to me is the possibility that some hunter gatherer tribes as small closed societies may understand the effects of constant surveillance on human beings from birth, and are allowing their children to experience life with minimal surveillance conditioning.

Individuals, particularly anthropologists in this context, in industrial societies generally have difficulty comprehending the real individual and collective consciousness/worldview of past and hunter gatherer societies. Anthropologists very often develop theories on very incomplete information and process this information from their own conscious and unconscious processes and value systems based on their experiences as people raised in industrial cultures. They often formulate theories based on observation of material relics or art, with little or no information as to what was going on in the consciousnesses of hunter gatherer individuals and the hunter gatherer culture's respective collective consciousness.

I love this magazine article below, from 1891, and have posted it on DU several times, because it illustrates differences in the worldviews and understandings respective to two very different cultures. Granted, most North American aboriginal cultures had already been tainted by European interference by this time, but, IMO, the differences in intrinsic cultural worldviews are still relevant in the present with respect to present day traditional North American native folks and descendants of European imperialists.

Please keep in mind as you read this that this entire article is Huggins' basically clueless outsider interpretation of what was going on in the minds and hearts of North American native culture(s) of the time. I believe the the excerpt I have chosen to post here is a succinct illustration of the wide and deep chasm in values, consciousness, and understanding between two very different cultures.

Having given this issue lot of attention, I'm again reminded of the story of two wolves and the choice which one to feed. But first, name of the game is variety and to talk about just hunting and gathering is too limiting and exclusive of horticultural and nomadic indigenous ways of life. Though not unproblematic, I prefer term "indigenous" to "hunter-gatherers", as does UN.

And from what I've seen, read, heard etc., it's clear that many indigenous communities (BTW "closed" does not describe them generally or well) do indeed on communal level actively feed the "good" wolf and starve the "bad" wolf in individual members and community as whole. There are many stories of how indigenous way of "teaching" is practical, result oriented and effective without being active teaching but passive observation and allowing and encouraging to learn from experience, especially mistakes, by heart. For example, a Finnish writer and photographer was traveling in Lapland with his sami friend and guide, and (IIRC) for many nights he felt very cold and uncomfortable in his teepee and finally complained to his friend. Sami guide told him that he hat noticed what he was doing wrong and showed the right way, so he wouldn't feel cold. "Why didn't you tell me this right away and let me feel cold for many nights?", asked the writer. "So that you would learn well and remember", answered guide.

BTW that book was about search for Whooper Swan, which by WWII had been hunted to near extinction in Finland, after long journey they found and photographed one pair and the writer wrote a book about the journey. The story resulted in protecting the swan from hunting, and Whooper Swan has returned and lives now everywhere in Finland. The book also contributed in many ways to healing nations soul traumatized by long and bloody war.

On the other hand, it is not a demonstration that primitive societies raise their children "better."

("Primitive" means more like an earlier historical state... same root as primal. Though often used pejoratively, it is supposed to be a value-neutral word.)

I agree with Cali that the headline overstates the case, but the baby need not be thrown out with the headline writer.




Hunter-gatherer societies almost certainly do a better job of raising children for life in a hunter-gatherer society. Our world does a better job preparing our children for the world they will, in fact, live in.

(Keep in mind that primitive societies, even without guns or television, are much more full of homicide than ours. Of course optimal child-rearing will be different. If you have to train your children to fight with a knife then obviously "playing with knives" will be viewed differently.)

But we may (and probably have) gone too far in our modernization of child-rearing, so that in some ways a move in the direction of hunter-gatherer methods might be an improvement.

A full return to hunter-gatherer methods would, however, be disastrous.

And in the publishing world that sort of nuance doesn't sell books, so we get headlines like, "Do Hunter-Gatherer Societies Raise Their Children Better Than Americans Do?" with the implication that the question wouldn't be asked unless the answer was a clear YES.