Ignorant and happy

I recently read a New Scientist article about a tribe in South America who, even after a century of contact with the outside world, happily maintain their old traditions and lifestyle. They have very little concept of ownership and no desire to accumulate goods or wealth. Kinship for them only extends to immediate family. They have almost no understanding of the passage of time and seem to live almost entirely 'in the now'. Even after concerted efforts, they have completely failed to learn basic arithmetic and none of them can count as high as ten. Yet they are completely content.

The tribe makes me ponder two points, one philosophical and one scientific. Firstly, this tribe shows us that civilisation is by no means a guarantee of human existence. And without writing to allow the accumulation of knowledge, technology could never arise. And there is no particular reason to assume that writing will always emerge. If the religionists have their way and civilisation is destroyed, I wouldn't be at all surprised (if I was still capable of being surprised at anything) if mankind went back to its simple tribal ways with no necessary drive to change. Mankind had a simple tribal existence for millennia before the first civilisations and the first written language, and it could go back to that for millennia to come. Ponder that - modern civilisation was not inevitable.

Ultimately, most people agree that human happiness is the fundamental goal of life (if they disagree about how to attain it or what exactly it is). These tribespeople are clearly happy. Why do we bother to advance science and technology, and to come up with more sophisticated political and social models? It certainly doesn't seem to make us happier.

My answer is that there's no halfway house: in a world with some learning and competition there will be advance. You cannot easily force it to halt (although the Church gave it a damn good try in the Dark Ages). We could eliminate medicine only to find the learning cropping up again. We could go all the way back to the dawn of the agricultural age, but we'd still have people inventing better tools and better ways of nourishing the soil. I think you really would have to go all the way back to a hunter-gatherer existence to achieve technological and social stability, like this tribe.

But we could do this if we really wanted to. Why shouldn't we want to?

Because modern technology allows us to live longer (so presumably, the same happiness for more time = more happiness?). But more importantly, it is the only barrier we have against extinction. In a simple existence we could be wiped out in an instant by disease, or by a natural disaster like an asteroid impact. I'm not saying we can necessarily defend ourselves against that now, but certainly technology is the only way it can be done.

So I say, if we consider a guarantee of the future existence of the human race to be a necessary part of human happiness, then we need to push on with technology. Push on, or go back, because there's no staying still.