Jason seems to be looking at hunter-gathers and saying, "Yes, they live the good life, 'cause, they say they live the good life, and all the evidence (medical examinations not least among them) point towards them living the good life".
No, I say, “They live the good life even according to our standards.” I really have to stress this, especially in the context of “dealing with non-believers” (as much as I may not like that formulation), because the idea that hunting and gathering involves toil and deprivation provides one of the biggest stumbling blocks, but it hasn’t the faintest thing to do with reality–just our preconceptions.
It seems that Jason and I are talking about different scenarios. To me he is describing a vision of the future where the rewilding culture has evolved closer to it's full potential. I am thinking more of what the folks who are on this forum right now, and probably their children, are likely to experience in their lifetimes if they go for the dream.
No, I have in mind my own life, the lives that people typing on this board can look forward to, not a distant ideal. They’ll have something even better, but even in the immediate term, hunting and gathering offers such an immediate advantage over the way we live now that we can only honestly call it luxurious. If not, why have children run off to join the circus for so long? Why did European settlers “go to Croatoan” as soon as possible? Why, if it holds no immediate lure of an easy, luxurious life, do so many people go native? “There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating,” J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in his Letters from an American Farmer, “and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!” These things don’t happen for the promise that their grandchildren might have a better life, but because they could recognize a better life laid out before them, right then and there.
I don't understand what that means. I haven't read that book. I don't know much about Zen. If I get what your saying, my point is not to hold onto mainstream values but just deny them. I'm saying, place your value on something different.
“The Original Affluent Society,” an essay by Marshall Sahlins, really revolutionized the old view of hunter-gatherers and set off the modern investigation to which primitivism, and rewilding, owe so much. Well worth a read.
But in it, he makes the argument that hunter-gatherers had a life of plenty because of their, as a later book would use as a title, “limited wants, unlimited means.”
here are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way- based on the concept of market economies- states that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although they can be improved. Thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behaviour: their "prodigality" for example- the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own.
In other words, we can call hunter-gatherers affluent by changing what we mean by affluence; they don’t have much, but they also don’t want much. A shift in values, as you seem to say.
I don’t mean to judge you by this, but I’ve observed that most of us make unwitting slaves to philosophers. We live according to their ideas, repeating them as unquestionable truth, and as often as not do not even know it. How many people live their lives according to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes? And how few of them have ever read Leviathan? I’d wager most would not even recognize Hobbes’ name. These ideas float in the cultural ether, and we breathe them in and take them on, usually without probing very deeply into their premises, or how well they hold up. I don’t mean to say that you personally espouse any kind of ascetic philosophy, but what you’ve said very clearly shows a strong ascetic influence. And I wouldn’t ascribe it to just you, either, because you’ve simply elucidated an extremely common point of view about hunter-gatherer life, one that really constitutes the “received wisdom” on the matter.
This sounds like a description of an evolved culture that could be down the road for our descendants. Not too likely for us or our own children, even with all the circumstances that we look for. Actually I think this is really a description of the best of times for those "Old growth cultures" as you call them. Not typical day to day life.
For most hunter-gatherers still alive today, that does describe day-to-day life, at least, as much of it as anthropologists have gotten to observe. I can understand that anthropologists misinterpret a lot of what they observe, but when you watch the man spend most of the day playing lukucuko, it makes it hard to suggest that he somehow hid away eight hours or more of daily work.
I’ve begun rewilding to the Toby River, a.k.a., the Clarion River, marking the south-eastern boundary of the Allegheny National Forest. We have a massively overpopulated deer herd, as many as 10 per square mile. We have enough so that drunk hunters can typically get a buck a year. Our forest faces a lot of problems (the oversized deer herd prominent among them), but I can’t buy the argument that with that kind of abundance, that hunger or want would count among our concerns. We have enough to spend the rest of our lives on thick venison steaks. Yes, my children will need to become better hunters than I; fortunately, they’ll get to hunt from their youth, and as we need better skills from the deer herd returning to a normal size, we’ll also have better skills from spending more time hunting!
I guess since I'm not still doing that exactly I would fall into what you describe as a failure. However I don't see it that way.
No, I wouldn’t call you a failure. Did you start off by charging off into the woods saying, “I will live as a hunter-gatherer!” If so, well, I suppose you did fail at that–you haven’t lived as a hunter-gatherer, it sounds like. But does that make you a failure? Obviously not. It sounds to me like you’ve found something immensely rich and rewarding in your life, and frankly, I would love to live a life more like yours than mine. But if you get into an argument about how feasible hunting and gathering seems, well, the personal rewards don’t mean nearly as much as whether or not you’ve succeeded hunting and gathering, eh?
I would like to point out, though, that the only thing harder than living inside civilization comes when you live next to it. Lots of hunter-gatherers seek out the civilized life after civil wars, deforestation and poison in the air and waters makes their traditional way of life impossible. Ran Prieur writes about the difficulties of homesteading often, but then calls it “primitive.” I don’t see much about homesteading that I’d call primitive, though. Homesteading, agrarianism, co-ops and small farms make for just about the hardest way of life humans have ever known. If you have that in mind, then absolutely, everything you said about needing to shift your values to see any kind of ease or luxury in that would apply. But I don’t mean that lifestyle at all. I mean hunting and gathering, which has always made for a very luxurious life, even in the middle of the world’s most inhospitable deserts. One of the reasons the bushmen have survived lies in the Kalahari itself–water appears so infrequently there that almost no one else can survive there. Only the bushmen have the relationship with water to know where they can find her there.
Your comment about hunting for a few hours a day and only when they felt like it might be the case somewhere, but not most areas of N. America, except possibly the NW coast.
That comes from the bushmen. Yes, they rely on an intimate knowledge of their home, but then, I can’t think of too many places in North America with as little life as the Kalahari. As I mentioned before, we have a forest so thick with deer that a drunk can sit on a folding chair, shooting at vague shadows and kill one. The ANF has many, many problems; I would not call it a healthy forest at all. Yet I still cannot imagine under what circumstances a hunter-gatherer there could go hungry.
Your description above doesn't talk about life outside.
How not?
Most people would not think of walking, with all the possessions that their family needs, for a week or more to get to the next seasonal camp, in any kind of weather, as luxury.
Most people would not consider going outside in the night at 30 below to squat over a hole to shit as luxury.
Granted, though all your possessions seems a tad disingenuous: that provides precisely the impetus for why hunter-gatherers have so few possessions. Putting it like that makes it sound like we have to push around a U-Haul with all the possessions we keep now.
Though he, too, invokes the idea of “zen” affluence, I very much appreciate Jeff Vail’s take on “Vernacular Zen.” Even in our own society, with the values we have now, we appreciate that the experiential means more than the material. Ask people what they fantasize about, and they’ll start listing experiences, not things. Sure, we pursue things as the way to get those experiences, but even we value the experience more than the thing.
But we have no shortage of people who pack up all their possessions, hoist them on their back, and go walking day in and day out, just for the fun of it, and call it a vacation. We call it backpacking! And your motivated modern backpacker will go on a few trips a year, about as often as a hunter-gatherer band moves between camps!
No matter how luxurious your fur bedding is, waking up in a dwelling with the air temp. below freezing and having every liquid in your house frozen solid since you went to bed last night would not be considered luxury even by most of the people on this forum.
No, it wouldn’t, but most primitive shelters do a heck of a lot better job keeping the heat than any of our modern buildings. Wigwams and longhouses don’t have that problem. Even an igloo keeps you pretty warm comparatively, though admittedly, the Arctic makes almost everything difficult. I’d file that problem under our common misconceptions, actually. You really shouldn’t face that problem very often as a hunter-gatherer. In fact, living in this old, drafty apartment, I find myself often yearning for the warmth and comfort of a good wigwam.
Regardless of how well set up you are, there are times when you have to be outside, maybe all day, maybe for several days, even if it's pouring down rain for days at a time.
Why? I admit I’ve never lived as a hunter-gatherer. I’ve heard of some hunter-gatherers who do go on long hunts. But I know others who never go farther from camp than they can return in the same day. Why would you have to do that? Plenty of hunter-gatherers don’t, so I don’t know what I’ve missed here.
They walked, and would return the same year because wintering on the plains would be harsh and very dangerous for them being in another people's territory.
Yes, I would say that walking comprises the main hunter-gatherer activity. Both hunting and gathering involve, more than anything else, walking. And of course, you have the migrations from one camp to another. Certainly, walking wouldn’t count as a life of luxury. But even that marks a big step up in ease from even the cushiest desk job. Besides…
I just think that emphasizing this idea of a life of leisure, laying around telling stories and feasting while reclining on beds of furs is a fantasy that would set most people up for a rude awakening when confronted with the reality of every day life.
Think about it. Maybe you go out once a week to hunt. Or not. Maybe you go out for a few hours each day to collect wild plants. Or not. Your choice. A few times a year, you go backpacking for a few days to reach your next camp. Compare this to hours of laying around telling stories and feasting while reclining on beds of furs every night. Which element makes up the dominant feature of this way of life? It seems disingenuous to me to call the daily reality of hunter-gatherer life a “fantasy” based on that.
With all due respect to both you, Billy, and you, Jason, I suspect you're both speaking past one another.
Yes, but you always suspect that. 
And, having such keen perception, you often get it right. But I don’t think you’ve gotten it on this one. It sounds to me like the connection between primitive life and asceticism remains too strong for a lot of people here to even really understand what I’ve said here. I can certainly understand that, but I maintain that we really must break down that connection.
This thread is titled Dealing with non-believers. I had a bit of a hard time with the use of "ease and comfort" and "luxury" in describing the life of wild cultures to "non-believers" and thought that given modern values it would be a hard sell.
I think it just takes dismantling the misconceptions about hunter-gatherer life. It doesn’t look luxurious from a different set of values or a less materialistic perspective; it looks luxurious from the typical, domesticated, Western point of view, right here, right now. But actual hunting and gathering looks like that, not the common misconceptions and myths about it that get so much circulation. So mainly, we just need to tell people how hunter-gatherers actually live. Break down the misconceptions, and the luxury seems pretty self-evident to me.
Walking, wintertime, snowshoes, Rocky Mountains, hunting buffalo, trap lines. Awesome!