Leaving the Stone Age
At lunch yesterday I was reading from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, about which I'm sure I'll have more to say in the future, but this isn't about that exactly. As he has discussed how various societies have trounced other societies and taken them over or wiped them out, the discussion occasionally touches on societies that, until very recent times, lived with stone-aged technologies as hunter-gatherers: no metals, no plant cultivation, no domesticated animals. How could some cultures conquer other cultures and create airplanes and computers and not succumb to smallpox, while some still use chipped-stone axes?
This is my news for the past week: last Thursday a duo of Verizon technicians came to our house and installed a fiber-optic (FiOS) broadband internet connection for us. It took about three hours and was rather painless. Technicians Jeff and Adrienne were pleasant and efficient and the process was almost fun. About noon we plugged the computers in to the new connection and now I can painlessly surf places like YouTube and be part of modern pop culture.
In a matter of hours we stepped out of the stone-age of online connectivity (my 54k modem*) and into the 21st century — finally!
The funny thing is that it doesn't seem all that different. Most of the frustration from waiting has disappeared, and I don't have to write nasty-grams to friends anymore who unthinkingly e-mail 5-megabyte photographs to me. Isaac and I can surf at the same time without cursing each other. Why, the new router even came with a wireless interface so I immediately get connectivity with the laptop computer that already had a wireless port but had previously seemed like an orphan without a network.
And yet it doesn't feel so very different, maybe because my typing isn't suddenly 1,000 times faster and my thoughts keep backing up just as fast as before. I'm still waiting to see whether I get any work done any faster, although I've identified a couple of projects that I now might be able to finish before I die.
But still, I'd sort of hoped that by setting down my stone ax in the morning and picking up a laser gun in the afternoon that I might notice some major qualitative difference in my hunting-gathering experience. I suppose the difference between me and an aboriginal is that I knew what was coming, having tasted it elsewhere.
Still, I don't plan on going back to living in perfect harmony with nature anytime soon.
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* I'm so old I remember when my 54k modem was cutting-edge technology — beyond cutting edge even, because I remember when my 9600-baud modem was cutting edge and bits would never travel faster than that. Remember that? Ever wonder what happened? Information theory happened, then a deeper understanding of Shannon's laws about bandwidth, then trellis-coded modulation and lots of other cool stuff that made phone lines able to carry more information than anyone in the 80s ever thought they could.
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on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 at 02.08
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Oh yes, how well I remember my first separate modem, 300 baud, nominally. No fancy GUI to operate it, either. Had to work with an instruction sheet written by an electrical engineer.
Be it known, electrical engineers, however nice they might be as individuals, have no business writing directions for electrical/electronic devices intended for consumers. No way, never.
Ah, but it was a learning experience before moving on to 1,200 baud, then 2,400, then 36K, then 56K. Not that I ever experienced anything above 28K Bps, mind you. Usually, I couldn't even get up to that speed. Old phone lines in my part of town, I was told. Too far from the phone company's switching station, I was told.
Then, after two or three years of bitching and moaning because it wasn't offered in my part of town, finally, I got DSL. Woohoo, what a difference. I can't imagine going back to dialup.
on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 at 16.32
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I find this interesting, because lately I've been alert to absolute measures of happiness. Our consumer society pushes the latest and greatest, but those who study these trends talk about something called "hedonic adjustment", where we are happier for awhile after a jump in living standard, then we fall back to our previous level of contentment, or lack thereof. It seems a large factor is our "set point", a basic level of contentment each person has after a minumum of food, clothing, and shelter has been provided.
I found Jared Diamond's recent books interesting. He seems at times to question whether the transistion from hunter/gatherer to modern ag. was a good idea, considering that modern society may outrun its resources and become extinct.
on Thursday, 24 May 2007 at 17.20
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"He seems at times to question whether the transistion from hunter/gatherer to modern ag. was a good idea, considering that modern society may outrun its resources and become extinct."
I remember from my teens reading a review of a book that delved that notion or a very similar one, RSF.
The question seems to fail to reckon with two important things.
First, the survival instinct is extremely strong in most humans. The hunter-gatherers of ages ago had short lifespans puncuated by considerable illness, pain and suffering. Not all the pain and suffering was physical, either. Infants and small children died like flies. Heck, if you read the death lists and obituaries from just a century ago, the high numbers and high percentage of infants and children who died is shocking. People, universally, don't like to outlive their young. Yet that was commonplace for ancient hunter gatherers.
The other thing it fails to reckon with is man's ability to adapt. Long before outstripping our rescources, I look for mankind to develop new alternatives and new ways to use old rescources. I also look for people to adjust to new realities. Change can be annoying, even painful, but a big reason humankind has made it this far was that it could and did do the things I mentioned.
on Friday, 25 May 2007 at 05.16
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My argument for modern society is that it allows for travel beyond earth, and robots. These two may insure our legacy survives.
Jared Diamond has spent quite a bit of time with the indigenous peoples of New Guinea. He has come away impressed with their ability to solve problems and adapt, and to be as happy as their modern couterparts.
(SW mentioned obits from a century ago. Diamond points out that such stats were a hallmark of urban centers. Until about 1900, cities' death rate exceeded their birth rate by a hefty margin. Urban centers were sustained by a continual migration from the countryside.)
(Diamond and others have pointed out that the switch from hunter/gatherer to farming (and thus modern life) was initially a poor deal for the populace. It meant a shorter life span, and more time working. It did, however, allow an elite few more leisure time.)
on Monday, 28 May 2007 at 10.34
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My quibble might be whether Diamond has a strong opinion about whether moving from hunting-gathering to agriculture was a "bad idea": my sense is that his tone is descriptive but not very judgmental. Fred's sense might differ, of course. Certainly there were consequences, in that it allowed for greater population growth (maybe even 'caused'), and it also allowed for greater organization of the population with leftover food production for a ruling elite. But, where these things bad or just inevitable?
Regardless, I find his discussions enlightening. I usually get the feeling that, rather than laying down something that he thinks might be a final theory he's contributing to what he sees as a continuing discussion about human history and how to understand it.
on Wednesday, 30 May 2007 at 09.48
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I agree that Jared Diamond, for the most part, took a neutral political tone in his latest books. Sometimes I sensed an underlying tone of support for a kind of populist liberalism, but maybe this was from my McCarthyite tendencies.
I recall from his book "Collapse", near the end, he was talking about the role of the elites in guiding society. At one point he wrote, "…the power and wealth of the Norse elites on Greenland merely bought them the privilege of being the last to starve…" I thought to myself that this was a line Jeff S. enjoyed.
on Thursday, 31 May 2007 at 11.06
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I forgot last time to mention, Fred, that I'm fascinated by the idea of "absolute measures of happiness", probably because I tend to discount "happiness" as elusive and illusive; I find "contentment" much more useful as a gauge, although the pursuit of happiness can be fun.
My impression wasn't that Diamond was arguing quite for the happiness of the hunting-gathering residents of New Guinea so much as arguing that he found no evidence that New Guineans appeared just as "smart" — another difficult-to-quantify thing — as other people and that he didn't think this was the reason that New Guineans didn't conquer the world, the basic theme of Guns, Germs, and Steel (which I read most recently).
I do remember that discussion about the Norse elite from Collapse; I can't say I particularly remember being delighted at their trials but I surely won't deny having enjoyed it merely to be disputatious! Overtly, of course, I'm mostly liberal; secretly I'm more an aristocrat. Regardless, I don't think I enjoyed the comeuppance of the ruling class so much as I'm fascinated about how the elite seems to keep arising when food production allows it. It must tell us something about how people are put together, and the answer will likely please neither liberals nor conservatives.
I suspect that Diamond is probably writing from the liberal side, although it might appear that way as much because he's partly an ecologist, still seen as a liberal concern. Regardless, I thought his books might be readable without too much offense (or equal offense) by both liberals and conservatives.