I don`t see that that is true. The polytheism of the Ancient Greeks assumed the Gods were very unpredictable and petty and feuded among eachother and basicaly behaved like insolent children jet they created a notable culture.
I don`t know about the tribes that farmed, but the hunting tribes of the plains were not anarcho-socialist. And I am starting to wonder if it is not ideological fanaticism that makes many libertarians persist in saying they were. They lived nearby and migrated as a unit for mutual aid and protection, but the means of production ie the bow, the horse and the axe were privately owned as was all produce of labor such as buffalo meat, buffalo skins and firewood.
I always figured the reason why American Indians were less advanced than the Old World was because of their migration. You can not invent stuff on the move and thus Indians “lost time” in migrating so to say. While division of labout was slowly begginning to arise in Mesopotamia, the Nile, India and China they were busy migrating accross the Bering strait and thus could not have done the same.
It is also interesting civilisation developed in areas which were extremely favorable for agriculture and are even today the most densely populated areas in the world (India, China, lower Nile). It would imply the need and possibility for technological advancement is much more apparent to farmers than to hunters. Probably because hunting is so easy and natural. A hunter does not need to view himself outside the nature, but the farmer must clearly recognise he is manipulating and controlling nature.
Why the primitive societies stayed primitive for so long may have something to do with the fact frequency of technological advances increase almost exponentialy. It took thousands of years to domesticate the dog, jet it only took 40 years to domesticate a fox. Jet in a sense domestic dog was a much more revolutionary advance than a domestic fox. Not because a dog is more useful, but because it was the first and therefore the whole idea of “domestification” was invented along with him.
I would say the truly revolutionary thing about those times was the realisation that technological and cultural proggress is possible. We take it for granted that one year from now we will have better computers than we do now, but in those times people belived life never changes (because it had trully not changed) and the idea of advancement itself was alien to them. When you look at it like that you can see how overcoming that might have required thousands of years.
I don’t think was based on religion. I think there were other cultural and regional influences at play here. Because Islam also spread throughout North Africa, but it’s cradle of intellectual growth was the middle east.
I’m more inclined to go along with Byzantine, the idea that institutions dictate so much of progress or capacity for progress, seems a little too Marxian to me.
Also, I’d like to remind everyone that Islam had a pretty big influence in Europe, particularly through the Iberian Peninsula. I’m an atheist, but of the “Big 3”, I think that Islam definitely had a lot more to offer than the others in the way of property rights and social organization (the other two being Judaism and Christianity).
The anarcho-socialists will likewise grant you the right to own your own clothes, but not the capital to produce them. The Indian tribes did not allow ownership of land, which is why they had to live as nomads.
This is just another way to say that they could not accumulate capital because they did not have the social system to do so.
It’s the other way around: Their way of life did not require ownership of land because land was not scarce. As soon as they would have settled down and formed a developed agricultural society that made full use of the available land, property titles (however limited) in land would have arisen, as they did everywhere else.
Exactly. These attempts at trying to portrait western ‘judeo-christian’ religion as a civilizing force, when in reality it was just the opposite, are pathetic.
a) The Native American Indian population GREATLY diminished after Columbus arrived, caused by Spanish Conquistadors looking for gold spreading disease.
b) Necessity is the mother of invention. At the point in time we are referencing, all current needs were being met. BTW, Lacrosse is a Native American Indian thing…
c) As a cultural reference, relationships between members of society outweighed material possession importances. Consider relationships between members of society as an additional “good” a Native Indian would consider in their trading.
d) The one person who made the “IQ” must not have much of one. Look up Sequoyah and Syllabary.
e) As far as ability of the Native Indians to adapt to changes brought on by competing culture, the Cherokee were living in houses and towns just like their European counterparts until they were forcebly removed and sent on ‘The Trail of Tears’ to Oklahoma so that their lands could be taken and given to white people. The rapid adaptation of better technology from the Europeans by the Cherokee before the ‘Trail of Tears’ occurred actually might make an interesting research project.
f) Remember, Native Indians had full trade with their neighbors’ neighbors’ neighbors’ via trade routes that existed before the Europeans got here.
g) Native American Indians weren’t socialist. A couple was expected to hunt for their own food.
h) Gambling also pre-existed any contact with any Europeans.
i) As far as anything north of the Rio Grande, try ‘Cohokia Mounds’
j) Native American Indians, when ever they did settle down for agricultural reasons, and switch to using corn, beans, etc as their main staple instead of gathering and hunting, started suffering from diseases related to higher carbohydrate diets. Native Americans + Starches/Sugars == Short Lifespan. [Conjecture: Eventually results in collapse of agricultural society.]
Also, there was in a sense, property rights concerning land even amongst nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, as they would occasionally fight over hunting grounds. Their ideas of specific land just wasn’t permanent as they had no need for permanent claim on a particular piece of land.
A society that does not have have capital has no need for titles to capital, but when it comes into contact with a capital-accumulating society, which can support much higher population densities and thus field bigger armies, it is wiped out. This has happened the same way every time in history.
Sure, but I was just saying they kind of had a de facto sense of “land ownership” in that they claimed hunting grounds and occasionally fought with other tribes over use of said hunting grounds.
That is not relevant. It takes private ownership in order to accumulate capital and increase the productivity of the land. That is what the anarcho-socialists do not accept.
This is partly correct. Native American groups appear to have lower IQs on average than certain Old World populations like the white Europeans. Institutions matter but so does genetics, which sets very real physical limits on people and populations.
The point of view claiming that Native American Indians have a lower I.Q. is incorrect. Please read the following excert from: [LINK]
The Cherokee homeland at the time of European contact was located in the highlands of what would later become the western Carolinas and eastern Tennessee. Contact with anglophone and, to a lesser extent, francophone Europeans came early to the Cherokee, and their general cultural response—adaptation while trying to maintain their autonomy—is mirrored in their language.
In the history of Native American languages, the singular achievement of Sequoyah, an illiterate, monolingual Cherokee farmer, is without parallel. Impressed by the Europeans’ ability to communicate by “talking leaves,” Sequoyah in the early nineteenth century set about, by trial and error, to create an analogous system of graphic representation for his own language. He let his farm go to ruin, neglected his family, and was tried for witchcraft during the twelve years he worked out his system. The formal similarity with European writing—a system of sequential groups of discrete symbols in horizontal lines—belies the complete independence of the underlying system. What Sequoyah brought forth for his people was a syllabary of eighty-four symbols representing consonant and vowel combinations, and a single symbol for the consonant “s.” By about 1819, he had demonstrated its efficacy and, having taught his daughter to use it, what followed was a rapid adoption and development of literacy skills among the tribe. By 1828, a printing press had been set up, and a Newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, and other publications in the Cherokee syllabary were produced for tribal consumption.
The removal of the Cherokees from their homeland to Oklahoma in 1838–1839 (“The Trail of Tears”) necessitated the reestablishment of the printing press in the independent Cherokee Nation, where native language literacy continued to flourish, to the point where the literacy rate was higher than that of the surrounding white population. In 1906, Cherokee literacy was dealt a severe blow when the United States government confiscated the printing press, evidently as a prelude to incorporating the Cherokee Nation into the State of Oklahoma.
No doubt Cherokees (and any human race) have the necessary IQ to form a stable, literate society. But my point (somewhat unrelated to the thread) is, the biggest leaps and breakthroughs in civilizational development are achieved by people with high IQs. Some population groups (“races”) have a statistically higher chance of producing individuals with these genius IQs; this is scientifically demonstrable.
There is a significant difference between the ability to adopt a syllabary and the ability to comprehend and push the farthest frontiers of mathematics, physics, and other fields.
The problem is that classical liberals tend to believe humans are born complete tabula rasas and can be precisely molded into anything you want by the right “circumstances”. This is untrue. We are (at least at our current level of technology) still very much constrained by biochemistry and genetics, so people are not complete tabula rasas but limited by their genetic endowments. That is not to say this won’t change in the future and we won’t be able to use genetic manipulation technologies to create uniformly genius populations.
If you remove the welfare state, there will still be intellectual stratification on racial grounds, perhaps even more pronounced than in the presence of the welfare state and its accompanying affirmative action policies. This stratification is not at all evil. To the contrary that is simply how the chips will fall in the the most natural and efficient economic-evolutionary conditions.
The welfare state of reservations and the associated 3rd world poverty conditions (no running water, no electricity, etc.) is not what I would call “affirmative action”.
Relatively low average levels of Native American intellectual achievement are just as pronounced in a non-reservation setting.
Certainly abolishing the reservation system will increase prosperity among the inhabitants. That is in accordance with the fact the Cherokee tribes are just as capable as any people of forming a stable, literate society as I pointed out. Yet I’m totally confident in my prediction that at our current level of technology, no amount of education, whether provided by private free market sources or by a totalitarian government, is capable of creating a Cherokee Albert Einstein or David Hilbert.
Look up Sequoyah and Syllabary.