Little thoughts (no 2)

I don’t believe in “wisdom of the savages” – that is, the idea, that primitive cultures lived within limits of sustainability because of their deep understanding of environmental problems. Why would they need such wisdom? They possessed no real means to damage nature, why develop behavioral algorithms for protecting it? Granted, there has probably been some genial intellectual shamans and chieftains whose understanding of nature was deeper than that of your run-of-the-mill savages, but for ordinary hunters and gatherers depleting natural resources was just too much work. That was the main reason, why they didn’t do it. Where contemporary nature-wasting consumer differs from harmoniously living hunter-gatherer is the high-tech means and larger needs, artificially bloated by advertising magic. Other than that, they both just take what they need. Where colonial society delivered for primitives the tools (guns, for example) and motivation (like glass beads and fire water), in many cases these primitives themselves hunted and gathered their “holy lands” and “woodland brothers” to extinction. It seems to me, that on certain level, primitive way of life and consumer lifestyle have much in common. Both enjoy the freedom to take whatever they want when they want it. Only primitives actually have this freedom.

That’s why I believe that we don’t have much to learn from tribal cultures, unlike what some contemporary greens think. On the contrary, the problem is that we are too much like primitives – still behaving like nature’s children, taking all we want, while possessing technological might that goes far beyond our “mother”. I we hope to survive, we need to look for the wisdom of gods, wisdom that would match our technological prowess. Worryless live-for-the-moment freedom of the animals is no longer for our species.