One of the pathologies of American, and to a lesser extent, Western society, which really stands out yet is rarely remarked on, is the absolute epidemic of chronic diseases we suffer from. From historically apocalyptic rates of cancer to asthma, to heart and stroke disease, we’re one sick bunch. We walk around, not dead yet, but chronically sick.
This is a direct result of our economic arrangements. We dump huge amounts of carcinogens into the air, water and the food chain. We pollute the air in so many ways they’re uncountable. We build our residential areas to actively discourage exercise. We subsidize food that is bad for us, especially corn derived foods, and we eat so much sugar it’s surprising we aren’t all crazed. We dump such massive amounts of hormones into the water and food chain that our children are experiencing record early puberty. And this is the short list.
All of these are what economists call “negative externalities”, which is to say, the cost of someone’s profits is paid in illness and chronic bad health, which also has a monetary cost. But, y’know, forget the monetary cost for a moment. If you or someone you know has a chronic health condition, let alone cancer, do you care how many rich people the US has? If you’re one of the few doing well out of this system, does it matter to you when someone you love is suffering from cancer or chemo, or has diabetes, or struggles to breathe?
A society which makes itself sick and unhealthy the way we do can’t be said to be a good society to live in. Human welfare is about how enjoyable it is to be alive, and there’s nothing enjoyable about illness, or watching someone you love puking from chemotherapy.
So next time someone talks about pollution, or additives, or “negative externalities”, remember, what they’re talking about is making you or someone you care about unhealthy or downright sick. Your suffering, or the pain of your fatther, mother, lover, son, or daughter is what makes other people rich and enables the “lifestyle” of various other folks. The poorer you are, the sicker you are, as a rule, because all you can afford is the highly subsidized crap food, but even if you’re rich and you eat straight organic, hire a trainer, and so on, you can’t avoid all the water, air and food pollution. You or someone you know is still likely to wind up sick, who shouldn’t have.
The suffering of sickness and ill health is one of the prices of what passes, less and less, for prosperity.
CMike
There is the flip side to the alternative of not being born into and living in a modern society when it comes to ill health but I’ll leave that to a later comment if I get around to it.
I grew up on the east coast of the U.S. suffering from chronic asthma. My condition was bad enough that at least once a year, into my late teens, I ended up in the hospital with an episode. And I used to suffer ferociously from hay fever in the spring and summer. I ended up moving out to Vegas for reasons having nothing to do with my health but, all my problems having disappeared once there, I’ve resided out here in the southwest ever since. I thought maybe I outgrew my problems but they’ve returned whenever I’ve visited Denver or some other cold climate place.
At this point, I’m going to link to a “This American Life” audio clip. Act III: As The Worm Turns, the relevant one, runs from 34:20 to 48:51. I would recommend to anyone who is going to listen to Act III that you invest another ten minutes and listen to Act II: Blood Agent as the lead-in. That act begins at 24:18. This presentation so blew my mind I’m not going to try to summarize it. Now granted, Act III isn’t about the lifestyles or pollution found in modern society which Ian focuses on in his post but I do think it is quite on topic. I’d be interested if any of you find this theory explaining the high incidence of many of the health maladies people suffer in modern society a credible one. I don’t know what to think.
If you can’t get to the audio clip from my link above, here’s the web page for Enemy Camp 2010 where the particular This American Life episode with these segments can be found.
Ivan Karamazov
Your thesis is interesting, and probably correct. That said, I think one should compare the preindustrial, premodern era with the present one. What was the average life expectancy in Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Is it better to die at the age of forty, or to live into your seventies with heart disease and diabetes?
(Of course, this does not take into account one counterargument – that long lifespans in industrialized nations are enabled by much shorter ones in the third world.)
guest
I remember when I was young, the media and the congress actually covered things like pollution and the effects of specific polluters on workers and nearby residents. Last big one I remember was Bopal India, which resulted in various laws about disclosure of emissions in the US. If Bopal happened today, I can’t imagine it would make news outside of India. If it did, it would be a one day story, not a huge scandal.
Here we are fighting to protect soc sec and medicare in the middle of a jobs depression. No one can even be bothered to notice the catastrophe happening to the jobs market. Cancer and pollution? Fuggedaboudit. Put a pink or yellow rubberband on your wrist, join a walkathon, and go back to sleep.
Celsius 233
CMike
May 21, 2011
=======================
Thanks, great audio clip. Fascinating stuff.
We’re so far away from ourselves and the distance grows…
tBoy
Ivan – while lifespans were shorter in those times a major factor was childhood mortality. Remove from the statistics those who died before the age of 5 and suddenly our increase in lifespan is not nearly as large as you presented.
And the largest increases in lifespan in the 20th century were not medically driven but rather public health driven. Back when regulators cleaned up the meat & dairy supply, had disinfected water made available, etc.
David Kowalski
Back in 1968 the main Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem, PA employed 24,000 people. It also belched soot out so when I occasionally visited the town the buildings were a dark color and the air was unpleasant. Now the air is cleaner and the factory jobs are gone. People see that as a direct trade-off but it wasn’t. In the 70’s, the emissions were cleaned up and a significant number of people were still working. It was only later that the jobs were shipped off to Japan and later China or to the company’s newer factories in Indiana and near Baltimore.
We had a failure of trade policy and also a failure in applying externalities. The stockholders got short term money but the plants were not sufficiently modernized to compete. For years, people said the Japan benefited after WW II because it had to build new factories. That should have been only a temporary advantage but it wasn’t because too much of the US industrial base was pre-1930 with a few add-ons.
How could the U.S. de-industrialize and still produce epidemics of asthma. allergies, respiratory, and heart problems. Well, some of it is over development without proper infra-structure. More streets, parking lots and houses intensify flooding problems. The core of that problem has been the way that businesses control the regulatory decisions even when the populace is opposed.
Jack Olson
“This is a direct result of our economic arrangements.”
Two thirds of the U.S. population is overweight and one-third is morbidly obese, meaning it directly produces disease. Our national obesity shows up in morbidity and mortality statistics on two of our three most common causes of death, heart disease and stroke. (Cancer is second.) It also shows up in morbidity rates for diabetes and complications in pregnancy. Our national obesity problem is worst among our poor and least among our rich, which astonishes people from countries where the poor are thin and the rich are fat.
According to Ian Welsh, this is due to our economic arrangements, especially air and water pollution. Utter nonsense. If people got fat from polluted air or water, then countries with much worse pollution, like Russia and China, would be fatter than us. As it is, we are fatter than them.
Why are we so fat in general and our poor so fat in particular? Bad health habits, like overeating and lack of exercise. Yet, it doesn’t cost more to eat less, it costs less. Imagine how much better Americans’ health would be if the typical American walked a for half an hour a day. This would cost nothing aside from a pair of shoes once in a while. Then, why don’t we do it? Because pigging out on burgers, fries and ice cream is more pleasant than eating a balanced diet and because sitting on one’s widening butt is easier than getting off the couch and going for a walk. So many of us Americans are fat because so many of us are lazy gluttons. Our poor people are the fattest because they are especially lazy and gluttonous. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars or Burger King, but in we ourselves that we are lardasses.
guest
Olson, you need to read more carefully. IW did not say the poor are fat from dirty air and water. He was talking about the low quality processed food that make up the diet of poor people. E.g. high fructose corn syrup contaminated with mercury added to most processed food; hormones, preservatives, antibiotics and other drugs in the meat and milk (and yes in the drinking water) that cause early puberty, cancer and other health problems; nutrition stripped out of food by processing and then a few vitamins thrown back in to pretend the food is not degraded.
Cloud
Don’t forget autism — speaking of apocalyptic levels of things.
Ian Welsh
What Guest said, I didn’t say pollution caused obesity. Pollution of various kinds does cause other health issues, however, and those issues are at epidemic levels.
Ian Welsh
Increases in life-span since the pre-industrial era are certainly good (though overstated, as noted, once you take out infant mortality). The point, however, is that we could live many more healthy years than we are now, the competition isn’t between now and the past, the competititon is between now and what could be the future.
Mandos
Really? I tend to be skeptical about this sort of claim. What’s the evidence for these claim of skyrocketing chronic disease diagnoses, aside from maybe diabetes? What does “skyrocketing” even mean? How do you separate it from overdiagnosis, increased longevity, etc? I see we’ve already started on the fat-as-symbol-for-moral-incontinence and someone mentioned autism *sigh*.
Also,
To make this statement requires considerably tighter error bars on what constitutes “what could be the future”…
scruff
CMike: Unknown symbiotic effects are very interesting, and their lack probably accounts for a good chunk of western problems. But following the co-evolutionary line of logic, you might want to try eating an “evolutionary logic” diet. I don’t have asthma, but my allergies have reduced remarkably since cutting out wheat, and others have noted that dietary changes have “fixed” their asthma
CMike
Scruff,
Thanks for the heads-up. I had not heard that a high protein diet could be beneficial for asthma sufferers. A neurologist once told me such a diet is sometimes beneficial for someone with epilepsy.
I have been on the Atkins diet before. It’s very effective for losing weight but it seems to put anyone trying it at the risk for a yo-yo result if (when) they do fall off the wagon. Were I to go on it again, I would have to travel up north to see if it was helping with my chronic asthma as I don’t suffer from it here in the desert where I live.
Though it goes off in a different direction, you might enjoy reading this Susan of Texas post. (For those not familiar with Megan McArdle, here’s Matt Taibbi’s take on her in a completely unrelated context. )
cathyx
Most every adult I know has started having “allergies” in the last few years, including myself. I never could really believe that it’s allergies, but increased pollutants that are making everyone have respiratory congestion. Think of the food additives, plastics, water and air contaminants, chemicals in cleansers of clothes, body and households, and chemicals sprayed on fruits and vegetables, that we are exposed to day to day. It’s enough to get anyone sick.
Jack Olson
I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, rates of breast cancer in women have dropped by 3.7% per year from 2001-2004. My source is the American Cancer Society. The Society declined to speculate on why breast cancer should be less common, although they noted that the decline occurred only among white women and not black ones.
The mortality rate from cancer hasn’t really changed much in decades, except for lung cancer in men, and even that is dropping now that fewer men smoke.
The bad news is that obese men are twice as likely to contract prostate cancer as lean men (University of Washington School of Public Health) and more than twice as likely to die of it. Obese women after menopause are 50% more likely to contract breast cancer than women at healthy weight (National Cancer Institute). That is an effect of obesity, not environmental pollution, and it is especially bad news for black and Hispanic Americans. Obesity among the former group is 50% higher than for white Americans and for the latter, 20% higher (U.S. Center for Disease Control).
If black and Hispanic people can only afford cheap food, then they could still reduce their rate of obesity and thereby their risk of cancer by eating less of it. Is that what they want? Maybe they do when on the scales, but not when in the McDonald’s drive-through, which is where the choice between obesity and health is really made.
Petro
@Jack Olson,
I’ve had the dubious privilege of going from poor to pretty-darned-prosperous back to poor again. Trust me, it costs more to eat “less,” as it were, in this economic arrangement. The types of foods that you are driven to when stretching the food budget are precisely the ones that challenge the health. Yea, you can buy veggies and such and cook from scratch (tho’ the organic varieties are a luxury,) but until you yourself have to maintain such rigors, back away from the judgementalism. I’ve done OK, health & weight-wise, but I’m a pretty disciplined dude and I have complete sympathy with the macaroni-and-cheese set. Why should they be admonished, when the well-off can get the finest stuff, prepared for them, lingering over whites-only omelets and such?
Mandos
Petro: yep. That’s one of the things I’ve noticed since I moved to America from Canada, and one of the differences. In Canada, the price gap between fast-food/junk food/etc and “real” food is quite a bit larger in my experience of shopping in both countries. If you want to cook with “good” ingredients—fresh, tasty, healthy—and in particular are single and live in the wrong neighbourhoods, the gap between
cooking price and eating pizza every day is very small, in fact largely in favour of eating take-out pizza.
I always laugh when people talk about how all New Yorkers are thin. I lived in a poor-but-gentrifying neighbourhood of Harlem for a few months relatively recently and ’twas not the case that the inhabitants were particularly svelter than the rest of America. If you visit Midtown and the extremely selected population of people who already look good or must look good for their jobs, then you’ll get that idea. They can afford personal trainers or have a great genetic endowment which got them there—models, advertising professionals, rich tourists, etc. Once you leave the bubble, America is America.
Mandos
I meant “in America” when I was talking about the relative cost of take-out pizza, in case anyone didn’t get it.
Morocco Bama
Considering this, and I share your sentiment and agree with your analysis, you have to laugh when you hear the word “Recovery” bandied about….as it was in the last thread.
Recovery….yeah, okay…alrighty then. Keep drinking that Kool-Aid.
Alex SL
Um. Have you considered that people have to die of something? And that maybe so many people die of cancer because they do not die of starvation, black death, pox, childbirth, farm accidents and war anymore?
If things were as before, you would just have posted how our economic system is responsible for so many people starving to death at age 34; now it is responsible for people getting to live to 70 and then developing stomach cancer. If cure for cancer were invented tomorrow (not that this is possible, just hypothetically), you would presumably blame food companies for all the additional heart attacks that would kill those who would earlier have died of cancer. Again: we have to die of something, as unpleasant as that insight might be.
That does not change the fact that we should stop poisoning our environment, of course.
chicago dyke
meh, gotta go do radio soon, but: yes. the words you’re looki9ng for, Ian, are “organic sulfates” and their lack in modern soil, and thus foods. and why that matters. i’ve been doing a bunch of research into this of late, and i’m Shocked, really. i will be spreading kelp meal all the f*ck over my productive veggie garden beds for the next few years until i’ve corrected the problem. which is, short version: chemicals. chemicals that keep a chemical-industrial industry alive in this and other countries. but which are, as you say, also contributing significantly to an epic in pandemics of cancer, ALS/MS/MD, early puberty, etc. and probably? human insanity.
Morocco Bama
Disease is prosperity, hence we have so many innovative ways to die. Many thanks to Alex for giving proper credit to those who are working diligently to bring us prolonged suffering and death in a myriad of exciting ways. The Shareholders of the Multi-National Corporations who realize significant returns on their investments are very pleased, indeed. In this Garden of Disease, never eat of that one tree…..the Tree of Cures, for to do so will abolish this Disease Paradise and the glorious profits it produces. Cure is anathema, and that’s why the American Cancer Society has no interest in finding a cure for cancer, and why it is in bed with some of the leading cancer-causing industries.
http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/online/research/cancer.html
In fact, some analysts consider that the cancer industry is sustained by a policy of deliberately facing in the wrong direction. For instance, in the late 1970s, after studying the policies, activities, and assets of the major U.S. cancer institutions, the investigative reporters Robert Houston and Gary Null concluded that these institutions had become self-perpetuating organisations whose survival depended on the state of no cure. They wrote, “a solution to cancer would mean the termination of research programs, the obsolescence of skills, the end of dreams of personal glory, triumph over cancer would dry up contributions to self-perpetuating charities and cut off funding from Congress, it would mortally threaten the present clinical establishments by rendering obsolete the expensive surgical, radiological and chemotherapeutic treatments in which so much money, training and equipment is invested. Such fear, however unconscious, may result in resistance and hostility to alternative approaches in proportion as they are therapeutically promising. The new therapy must be disbelieved, denied, discouraged and disallowed at all costs, regardless of actual testing results, and preferably without any testing at all. As we shall see, this pattern has in actuality occurred repeatedly, and almost consistently.” (8) Indeed, many people around the world consider that they have been cured by therapies which were ‘blacklisted’ by the major cancer organisations.
Does this mean that ALL of the people who work in the cancer research industry are consciously part of a conspiracy to hold back a cure for cancer? Author G.Edward Griffin explains “. . . let’s face it, these people die from cancer like everybody else. . . [I]t’s obvious that these people are not consciously holding back a control for cancer. It does mean, however, that the [pharmaceutical-chemical] cartel’s medical monopoly has created a climate of bias in our educational system, in which scientific truth often is sacrificed to vested interests . . . [I]f the money is coming from drug companies, or indirectly from drug companies, the impetus is in the direction of drug research. That doesn’t mean somebody blew the whistle and said “hey, don’t research nutrition!” It just means that nobody is financing nutrition research. So it is a bias where scientific truth often is obscured by vested interest.” (9) This point is similarly expressed by Dr. Sydney Singer: “Researchers are like prostitutes. They work for grant money. If there is no money for the projects they are personally interested in, they go where there is money. Their incomes come directly from their grants, not from the universities. And they want to please the granting source to get more grants in the future. Their careers depend on it.”
As Gordon Gekko said in the movie Wall Street, Disease Is Good.
It’s not the Center for Disease Elimination….it’s the Center for Disease Control…….for a reason. It’s all about CONTROL.
anon2525
The following got some attention last year: 80,000 (thousand) chemical compounds are sold in the U.S. What are the odds that one of these will have an effect on you or someone you know?
From the 2008-2009 Annual Report – President’s Cancer Panel: Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk:
The Panel was particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally induced
cancer has been grossly underestimated. With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the
United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are
un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is
widespread. One such ubiquitous chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), is still found in many consumer
products and remains unregulated in the United States, despite the growing link between BPA
and several diseases, including various cancers.
anon2525
That report (download the .PDF file) by the President’s Cancer Panel has a section titled “What Individuals Can Do: Recommendations”, for those who are interested.
Morocco Bama
Hopefully #1 on that list is don’t procreate.
jawbone
Jack Olson wrote:
How about using “poor and working class” as well as low middle income people? I see plenty of obese white people, even some fat Asian people (albeit far fewer where I live), plenty of overweight Indian (Southeast Asians Indians).
What’s with the “black and Hispanic” only?
Morocco Bama
Yeah, no kidding, jawbone. Has anyone seen Farmers these days? They are not your Grandfather’s Farmers.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DlOAg8awgJ0/TGBTvwxXgcI/AAAAAAAAACQ/cGSOy-20n3c/s1600/obese-man-calendar.jpeg
Morocco Bama
This calls for some Carlin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLRQvK2-iqQ
Dog, I love this guy.
Bruce Wilder
One of the more telling statistics in favor of Ian’s thesis concerns adult height, which, for gross populations (though not individuals) is a reliable indicator of population health. Average height is greatest for the socialist hell-holes of northern Europe, but has been declining over the last generation for the U.S.
rumor
“Yeah, no kidding, jawbone. Has anyone seen Farmers these days? They are not your Grandfather’s Farmers.”
PLEASE warn when images aren’t safe for work. Err on the side of caution.
Also, I didn’t need to see that generally.
Morocco Bama
What was so wrong with it? There was no genitalia showing, so it wasn’t pornographic. It was art. You have to admit, the guy had a nice hair doo.
Also, you shouldn’t be surfing the internet at work, or on your work computer. You should know better than that.
StewartM
Jack Olsen:
As anyone who knows anything about obesity and weight control, a key variable if not the key is exercise, not “eating less”. Merely eat less and your body calorimeter just adjusts its usage rate (i.e., your basal metabolic rate) downwards in compensation.
And yes, exercise costs money.
StewartM
StewartM
Moracco Bama
Then how do you explain that the *age-adjusted* cancer rates are either stable or declining?
http://www.schizoidboy.com/u-s-cancer-rates-in-the-20th-century.html
Now, absolute cancer rates are rising, but that’s because as Alex correctly points out, you die from *something*, not just generic “old age”. The increase to all sorts of deaths due to degenerative diseases is a consequence of people *NOT* dying from all sorts of preventative ones less so than they did previously. And yes, while much of the death reduction is due to reduction in infant mortality, we’re also unquestionably living longer in old age.
Nor do I agree with Ian’s about chronic disease and morbidity, save for diabetes and obesity. We are no more sicker than the WWII veterans I grew up talking to, nor to the generation of my grandparents, insofar as I can see. We have worse health habits in some ways but better in others (smoking and heavy drinking in particular). As for carcinogens, while we may be exposed more to man-made ones (or may not in fact) we are unquestionably exposed less to “natural” ones (and yes, there are plenty of natural ones).
What I am detecting in this thread are all sorts of unfounded beliefs about what a “normal” human lifespan should be like and Panglossian views of nature . I believe that “in the wild” humans aren’t designed to live much past 35, certainly not 40. No matter what our diets, in the absence of dental care, humans naturally lose their teeth (or most of them) by that point, and once wild mammals lose their teeth they *die*. It’s not “natural” in the absence of medicine for us to live to 70 or 80 or 90 anymore than it’s natural for our dogs and cats to live into their teens (let alone past 20) like they do. Their wild counterparts don’t, despite being likewise bombarded by many of the same carcinogens and suffering from obesity. Likewise, animals in captivity usually outlive their wild counterparts by a wide margin.
My perspective also explains teenaged sexuality; nature wouldn’t fill 13-year olds with hormones telling them to “do it, do it, do it” unless nature meant for them to actually DO IT, because “in nature” if they waited until their mid- to late 20s do “do it”, they’ll leave their offspring orphaned because many will be dead by 35. The effect of culture on human societies has been to extend lifespans and also to correspondingly favor social neoteny, extending juvenile roles and behaviors well past what human biological programming “intends”.
This all being said–I expect mortality and morbidity rates to increase in the US and maybe elsewhere in the West, and human lifespan to start decreasing. That’s not because of junk food and pollutants so much as the elites are about to reduce or even eliminate the right of many to access health care, the chief cause of the extension of human lifespans. If Medicare is essentially transformed into Obamacare in the US, I expect the death rate among the elderly to skyrocket and life expectancy to plummet. There is no way that most of the elderly could afford “cost sharing” and moreover no way that most in the 40-55 age bracket could save up enough money to hand over in premiums in old age. If some of the signs coming out of the Democratic camp are true, if a “grand bargain” on entitlements is coming, President Bipartisan will preside over a decision that will result in the biggest increase in premature death ever in American history.
StewartM
Morocco Bama
StewartM, the way I see it, it was a swap of one set of diseases for another set of diseases. Yes, of course, the previously preventable ones have been prevented, at least in 1st World countries and to a significant extent in 2nd World countries, but an increasingly globalized industrial/consumer economy leading to more sedentary lifestyles and poorer nutrition per calorie has led to a whole new set of diseases that have taken the place of these previously preventative diseases. This latter disease set is also unavoidable, but in different ways and for different reasons. It can’t be argued that whole industries have sprung up to treat and control these new diseases, but all this is beside the point. The point is, it doesn’t have to be this way, and it didn’t have to be this way….but it is this way, and frankly the odds are that exactly what you say in your last paragraph will be what will transpire…but I don’t believe that will just be relegated to the U.S. Civilization is hitting its limits, so those life spans we are talking about will drop exponentially, as will the total number of humans.
Petro
@StewartM:
This is so *not* true. Once you get past infant mortality, which is an issue “in the wild,” most studies have found that these folks generally live long and healthy lives, and keep their teeth. I say generally, because of the natural occurrences of accident and disease, of course. Also, the phenomenon of menopause, rare in mammals, is a direct pointer to an evolutionary development which permitted people to live past their reproductive age, which is an essential element in creating cohesive societies with tribal memories.
Google around.
madamab
StewartM said,
Yup. (And don’t forget the endless wars that are causing premature deaths all over the world.) That’s why I say, Austerity=Murder. People wonder why the elites don’t address shrinking resources and overpopulation. They are addressing it…by causing as much death as they possibly can. It’s a win-win for them. All those Unexceptional People were just using up resources the Exceptional elites, in their Ayn Randian brains, believe they deserve much more.
StewartM
Petro:
I’m well-acquainted with the calculated lifespans of hunter-gatherers, and it is true that 1) the life expectancy at age 19 for hunter gatherers is only somewhat less than it is for modern Westerners (in the 60s, in fact) and 2) that agriculture and the Neolithic revolution actually *decreased*, not increased, life expectancy both at birth and at age 19 (the charts I’ve seen show that depending on time and place, life expectancy at age 19 dropped from the 60s to the early 50s to the late 30s and that infant mortality doubled). That part I am not disputing.
However, I believe that your error is in assuming hunter-gatherers are living in what I called “in the wild” and not modifying human biologically-driven behavior via their culture. Believe me, they are modifying it. They too have their lists of do’s and don’ts as defined by their culture. They widely have postpartum sex taboos, and they marriage as an institutions which in turn define incest taboos. They practice medicine and preventive care. While not to deny that one can find examples of geronticide, they take care of their members who can no longer contribute or who are ill. They may live at population densities of well under 1 person per square mile, but they still are under population pressure and alter their behaviors to adapt to it.
That’s the effect culture has on human society–we choose to repress or redirect our biological instincts using our conscious minds in order to maximize our overall well-being (though this decision-making process is often cloaked under religion). When culture start to predominate in human societies? Your guess is as good as mine. But I believe we can still see the mismatch between our biology and our culture.
(The UCLA history professor sci-fi writer Harry Turtledove wrote an alternative history of the New World entitled Strange Flesh, where Europeans discover the New World but find it inhabited not by Native Americans, but by H. Erectus. How do Europeans treat Erectus in this book? Not very well. I haven’t read the book–it sounds fascinating–but onc of the things I would expect is that Erectus’s lifestyle would be far more biologically-driven and less culturally-driven than that of hunter-gatherers).
Final note, where you are wrong–technologically primitive peoples do lose their teeth, even despite having rudimentary dental care. I know this because I know of someone who did their work in physical anthropology in dental wear among various prehistoric human populations, to correlate diet to dental wear. No matter what the diet, you lose your teeth, and usually by age 35 or 40. High meat diets abrade the teeth down to nothing while diets high in plant sources result in losing teeth to caries. You don’t win either way. The difference is between human hunter-gatherers and lions is that lions don’t have another lion prepare food for them that they can eat with missing teeth whereas in human societies one does.
StewartM
Morocco Bama
Stewart, that may be the case, but Hunter-Gatherer, on a spectrum, is much closer to our biological proclivity than is Civilization, and more specifically, contemporary Industrial Society. With the advent of Civilization, Humans have created a series of consecutive societies that have allowed for a greater chasm between our lifestyles and our biological proclivities. I viewed a documentary within the past year that dealt with technological society and where all this is headed, barring a collapse. It was rather intriguing. Here’s a link in case you’re interested. It’s three parts, and this is a link to the Part I…the other two parts can be found at that link.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7141762977713668208#
In regards to my hyperbole about creating innovative ways to suffer and die, I can think of no greater example than cigarettes. When you step back and look at the insanity of this nicotine delivery device, it’s satirical….really. It’s even more absurd when the practice and concept are rationalized…..and people are still smoking these death sticks in substantial numbers. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are a bevy of other examples to go with this one.
Morocco Bama
Here’s some interesting discussion on “primitive” culture versus modern industrial culture and tooth decay. Notice that there is a distinction between decay and wearing your teeth down. Decay is due to diet and nutrition and will result in the loss of your teeth. Wearing down is due to type of diet, but it is not decay and you don’t lose your teeth, although they become less effective the further they wear.
http://www.hunter-gatherer.com/category/tags/teeth
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/03/reversing-tooth-decay.html
Mandos
We don’t know where the nature/nurture line really is, and it may not be a meaningful question. Concern with what our biological proclivities are or aren’t in any manner that we apply to practical life is an instance of the naturalistic fallacy.
StewartM
Morocco Bama:
I have no problem with that perspective, and in fact I agree with it. I believe we are, in Jared Diamond’s words, “the third chimp”, though I believe we are much closer to peaceful bonobos in our biological natures than we are to the more violent common chimps. I also note that the economies of hunter-gathering societies are (or I should say were) one of a form of anachro-socialism, not dog-eat-dog capitalism, so when someone tells me that “socialism won’t work” I reply “socialism is in fact the only economic system that has been proven to work in the long term, humans practiced it throughout their prehistory, therefore it’s the only one that has existed for long enough to be possibly encoded in our DNA. Like bonobos, most (normal) humans are born empathetic and it takes all sorts of ugly social conditioning for them to lose that. It’s just that even hunter-gatherers still have some mismatches (mostly involving sex; we have the large sex organs and sex drive of bonobos but hunter gatherers practice marriage and have sex taboos and hardly have sex at the drop of a hat like bonobos).
Not to deny that a minority of humans may be born differently (sociopaths) or that most can’t be re-programmed to be callous and cruel, but overall, I think our base instincts are good ones.
StewartM
Ian Welsh
That chart is for death rates, not incidence rates (it’s from here: http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@epidemiologysurveilance/documents/document/acspc-026208.pdf). I’d want to look into it a bit more before accepting even it at face, since I know that one trick that is used a lot is “five year survival rates”, which misses the point, as anyone who’s known someone who had repeat bouts of chemo (note I say chemo, not cancer), knows.
The neolithic revolution is of interest to me, and the change from hunter/gatherer to agriculture. Stewart, if you have any reccomendations on good books on that I’d love to hear them.
Morocco Bama
Mandos, I disagree. It’s a vitally important question…until we crack the Code of Creation and start creating ourselves. I think Humans are amazingly resilient and infinitely malleable, but until we decipher the Master Code, or figure out how to write the code ourselves, or come to an agreement that we can, we are subject to certain, perceived or otherwise, biological constraints. For example, Humans are not biologically adapted to consume large quantities of wheat, and yet that’s very much the basis of Western culture. We are biologically adapted to eat a diversity of what the earth has to offer, but increasingly, that diversity has been replaced by homogenized mono-culture, thus rendering us vulnerable to a myriad of diseases which, with a nutritionally diversified and balanced diet, we could have avoided. The following article was helpful to me in reaching this conclusion:
http://bradmarshall.blogspot.com/2005/12/is-wheat-killing-us-introduction-maybe.html
Considering the Healthcare crisis with which we are faced in the U.S., and let’s face it…Canada too, and the entire Western World, I think it would be wise to consider those perceived biological parameters and change out diets, accordingly. It would cut the budget significantly…..bu then, a whole slew of people would lose their jobs in the Insurance and Medical fields…..and we couldn’t have that, could we, because it wouldn’t be “practical.”
Morocco Bama
Here’s an interesting discussion about the Neolithic Revolution and Civilization. The commentary is interesting, as well, with many references to various books on the topic.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/03/10/the-return-of-the-barbarian/
Morocco Bama
Ian, your link is broken for some reason. It says “page not found.”
Mandos
The problem is that there isn’t a Code of Creation as such. There’s a complex interrelationship between an underspecified DNA endowment, epigenetic endowments that occur through the human reproductive cycle (ie, the ovaries, testes, and mostly importantly uterus), and various environmental influences which are not easy to control. There are “Codes of Creation” at several levels—potential layers at which we can abstract away what it means to be human and what is “natural” and “not natural”.
For. Example. The production of a monoculture may be part of the human endowment. Perhaps we have a mental organ of technologizing. Who is to say? All we know is whether something is working and whether it isn’t and why. Unfortunately, we still know too little to have a very profound grasp on why.
Petro
@StewartM:
Thanks for the thoughtful response! As for my error regarding dentistry, I must say I can’t locate, at the moment, where I received that information – a strong indicator that it was some outlier.
What I’d like to be my takeaway here is the awareness that our species enjoyed its ascent due to the provisions of Nature, while we were still “know nothings,” as it were. I personally do not see civilization as a node in this ascent, but more as one of those stumbling-blocks in the maturation of that peculiarity of Nature, self-awareness – which at first appears to retard the evolutionary process. I say “appears,” as I think we have to go through this seemingly “un-natural” phase of self-absorption before we get over ourselves and get back to the business of looking outward again – all the while retaining this peculiar gift (or being stuck with it, depending on your proclivities.)
Your comment earlier seemed to carry that meme – that somehow we would be going backwards if we became more directly engaged in the world, instead of this concrete jungle we have created.
Again, thank you.
Mandos
I personally have some amount of transhumanist sympathy. We need to survive long enough to achieve a grand technofruition where we become ethereal space-dwelling beings consisting of cloudy nanobot orchestras. It’s known as Nerd Rapture.
StewartM
The neolithic revolution is of interest to me, and the change from hunter/gatherer to agriculture. Stewart, if you have any reccomendations on good books on that I’d love to hear them.
For one internet piece, there’s Jared Diamond’s “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”.
http://www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j.htm
I’ve not read his God, Germs, and Steel , but I want to. I also had saved some documentation describing life expectancies at birth and at age-19 in among various hunter-gatherer groups and various historical groups but can’t find that right now.
And most anything by the anthropologist Marvin Harris is good. Cannibals and Kings might be a good starting point for the development of economy and state, though it’s not the only one. I confess a fondness for Harris’s cultural materialist approach to anthropology, that “infrastructure probablistically drives structure and superstructure”.
As for pop anthro on the web, there’s this piece. Not terribly precise, but in general true.
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/19461?gko=cadd5
Finally, I wrote my own little contribution on FDL which tangentially addresses this :
http://my.firedoglake.com/stewartm/2010/11/24/let-freedom-ring/
Plus another (protected) blog “Upstairs, Downstairs” which I ask and answer “Was there life before kings?” Harris says that a visitor from outer space visiting humankind some 15,000 years ago would have concluded that humans were a hopelessly egalitarian lot with no tendency whatsoever to form stratified hierarchies.
StewartM
Petro
Well, that was engaging. Have I stumbled upon TBogg’s thread?
Petro
Not you, StewartM…
Morocco Bama
I hear you, Mandos. Personally, I find the idea of uploading this dysfunction into an eternity of virtual bits and bytes, nightmarish. It’s the one thing I look forward to about death….the possibility of finally leaving this all behind. There’s something to be said for finality at the individual level. Sure, with the conservation of energy principle and the fact that matter just converts and changes forms, we merely take on another shape and existence, but at least our consciousness, from what we can tell thus far, evaporates in the process, and no longer do we need to malinger on the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our existence. The Transhumanists want to extend what Petro aptly describes Civilization as…..a node of self-absorption, adulation and glorification.
Pursuant to this, here’s a link to an excellent presentation given by Robert Jensen. His take on the parable of the Garden of Eden story is exactly my take. I had been thinking about this for a couple of months now, and had formulated the very same opinion….and then I saw his video presentation, and was pleased to be validated.
http://vimeo.com/23709632#
StewartM
Morocco Bama:
If you’ve not read Good to Eat by Marvin Harris, I would highly recommend it.
Considering it all, though, food preferences are the least scary thing about the development of a world monoculture, a monoculture with English as its tongue. I’m a believer in at least a weak version of Sapir-Whorf, that our languages do tend to bend our thoughts, so that the future world is not only more likely to suffer the problem of physical diseases that race across the globe, but also from “viral memes” spread via our shared global language that result in gaping conceptual blind spots and errors. (Ayn Rand, that pop philosopher, once fell into a language trap involving English’s personal pronouns in making one of her arguments)
Ian predicts the downfall of the American empire. As a resident of said empire, that decline and downfall entails all sorts of unpleasant and even life-threatening consequences for me. But a bright spot might be the diminishment of English as the world mother tongue or even its replacement.
StewartM
Ian Welsh
More people speak Chinese as base than English, and either that or Hindi are the likely next replacements, which won’t necessarily be an improvement.
Lingua Franca’s come and go and languages naturally create themselves in the right conditions. (Ie. get off planet.)
(At one point, the language constrains our thinking hypothesis is what I considered doing my seniors thesis on. Getting sick and poor put an end to that, but I have a soft spot for Sapir-Whorf).
Thanks for the references, that tracks what I already understood to be the case, but as I was writing about it a while back I realized that I had no references for it.
Formerly T-Bear
Appearing from BBC is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13545386
“What Paddington tells us about German v British manners”
Are Germans ruder than the British? Are Britons more dishonest than Germans? Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on blind prejudice for answers. Serious academic research has been done on both sides of the North Sea.
Read the rest, how language is keyed to culture, etc.
Petro
Cool links, all!
Mandos
I have a somewhat negative view of what people call Sapir-Whorf because it simply boggles the mind what cultural purpose resumptive pronouns (or lack thereof) and subjunctive complementizer affixes (or lack thereof) could possibly have, but what do I know?
StewartM
Ayn Rand’s error–once she was arguing that if you could take one of the eyes of a normal human, to give it to a blind man, so that both would have one eye and could see, would it be right? No? Then it’s also not right to take money from the wealthy and redistribute it to the poor.
Her argument rests on a language trap. The fact that we say:
“My eye”
“My friend”
“My money”
The mere fact that we use the same pronoun–“my”–to describe what are three fundamentally different relationships, is the trap that Rand fell into (she in essence gave them equivalency based upon the mere use of that pronoun). Such language traps are insidious and often far more subtle than that example. I once became involved in a discussion on a paleontology board where someone defended their to the hilt their “right” to treat scientifically priceless fossil remains found on “their land” anyway they wished, even allowing them as the “owner” the “right” to wantonly destroy them based on religious belief, rather than to submit to a more rational belief that such things can properly belong to no one individual. (For one thing, no individual had any role in creating them). But you’d think that from the resistance I was getting that I was arguing for the right of us to collectively amputate and “own” his leg. My leg, my wife, my fossils.
English is very much a property-obsessed language. That’s probably the result of a symbiotic relationship between language and culture and history.
StewartM