Microblog Memes

I'll allow it, because A. interesting. and B. I can use my preplanned response:

Interesting exception: in North America around the Great Lakes, pure native copper was widely available at the surface due to the ice sheets exposing underground deposits when they advanced/retreated.

I thought mercury was more likely for causing those "issues."

Nor feet!

Warning: Rant

There are two meanings to the word "Tribalism". One sense of the word just describes people living in tribes. The second meaning involves discriminatory behavior or attitudes towards out-groups, based on in-group loyalty.

There is a perhaps understandable tendency to conflate these two meanings. For one they are spelled and pronounced the same. We aren't really taught a lot about tribal cultures, and we just kind of assume things. Also our 'cultures' have been teaching us tribal people were savages and we did them a favor by conquering them.

I'm not claiming that they don't correlate to some extent. Of course you are going to have a preference for the people in your tribe over the people not in your tribe. You know those people, you are around them a lot and can personally vouch for their character. People not in your tribe are strangers and not immediately trusted. That much is true.

What I take issue with is the idea that Tribal people automatically hated anyone not in their tribe (out group) and had violent intent towards them. Also, equating being in a tribe and being in a pack is dehumanizing.

Yes, there was sometimes conflict with neighboring "Tribes", but for the most part tribes stuck to their own territory and didn't cause problems for other groups. Tribes often coexisted peacefully near each other for hundreds of years. This was advantageous in that it gave us trade partners and potentially ways to get new genes into the gene pool. Plus unnecessary fighting is just a good way to end up dead for no reason.

Typically tribal people settle on their territory pretty quickly and it's usually enough or more than enough to provide for the needs of the tribe- so there was little need to encroach on other peoples territory. Also when conflicts did arise, it very rarely escalated into 'Total War', where the goal was to kill/subjugate the members of the other tribe and take over their territory, because A) that's a good way to get a lot of your own people killed, and B) they had their own territory so they didn't need more.

Ironically, it was the invention of "modern" agriculture and "Civilization" that really kicked off the second type of tribalism. Modern (aka Totalitarian) style agriculture is extremely efficient. As such it nearly always produces a surplus of food (barring droughts, blights, and other natural disasters). When you introduce a surplus of food into a population- it has he effect that the population size increases along with it. Once you get more people than the land can support, then you do need more territory.

Another effect of 'Civilization' is that you see full time soldiers for the first time. In a tribe practicing subsistence living, your job would typically be something related to the daily survival of the tribe. Hunter, Gatherer, Cook, Crafts-person etc. If 'War' broke out then all of the able bodied Men and sometimes women would become 'Warriors' for the duration of the conflict. Again, since there was relatively little conflict there was no need to have people who were warriors exclusively (soldiers). With 'civilization' you can pay some people out of the surplus of food to guard the food.

So what happens when you are a large group of people, made powerful by the new technology and you find yourself in need of more land to farm? You take it- typically from the tribe next door. Only now the goal is 'Total War'. You want to kill or subjugate everyone in the territory you are tying to conquer. The problem is that they are human beings and you are human beings- so how do we get normal people to want to fight and kill their neighbors? The second form of Tribalism. That group is bad. They are uncultured swine. They are subhuman in some way because they are different. That's the kind of attitude you have to foster about other people to get your people to agree to conquer them.

Pretty much the entirety of human history sees the same scenario play out. 'Civilized' groups 'other' tribal people and systematically wipe them out and/or conquer them and appropriate their land. It wasn't until Europe/Asia had basically ran out of tribal people to conquer that nations started to go to war with each other.

The same thing happened with civilizations that arose in the New World, Mayans, Aztec's, Inca etc. It's no coincidence that these cultures relied heavily on agriculture.

What is my point? It's that 'Tribal' people are less 'tribal' than civilized people. It's the civilized people who are savage.

Why does this matter? We tend to forget that for the vast majority of human history we lived tribally. It's kind of easy to forget that because people didn't start recording history until right around the same time as civilizations were invented.

What am I trying to say? It's not "a part of our animal nature to be tribalistic", automatically hating anyone not in our in group and harboring violent intent about them.

Further evidence, look at modern attitudes towards tribalistic thinking. Despite living in the more savage mode of living- a large percentage of humans have woke up to the fact that tribalism is bad, short sighted, bigoted, and unfair. Take some very young children and put them in a playground together and they will play. They don't form little cliques based on superficial characteristics or 'culture'. We have to be taught to hate each other. We have to be told the reasons why it's ok to discriminate or subjugate others.

Tl:DR Nope. Respectfully of course.