💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › replies › 3349 captured on 2023-03-20 at 20:15:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

~inquiry

> I think what you're missing is that "laws, law
> enforcement, and prisons" do not and have not
> existed in all societies for all of history.

It wasn't that I missed it for not being able to imagine such having *ever* been the case. Rather, I assumed "laws, law enforcement, and prisons" was so mathematically vastly the case that edge cases (relatively speaking compared with predominant case assumption) seemed a non-factor in my "coming to conclusions" department.

I mean, I understand "have not existed in all societies for all of history". But if that phrase numerically works out to be sufficiently small an overall percentage of all cases to be considered "negligible" by people in the habit of "doing the math", then I don't find it too horrific to have spoken in a general way based on that assumption.

That said, if you've got actual numbers so I can see with my own eyes such cases *aren't* negligible over all societies over all time, I'm all eyes.

> For instance, the Iroquois confederation and many
> Huron tribes did not have any form of "prison" or
> "laws." When somebody murdered somebody else (which
> of course did happen from time to time) the families
> and confederations themselves were responsible for
> the perpetrator, would have to "make right" with the
> victims in some form or another, and perhaps exile or
> help to educate the murderer. This is not an isolated
> case, by the way—many societies operated similarly,
> and may operate this way again.

Sounds wonderful.

But, again, how representative a situation is that over all societies/time?

> If this is interesting to you, I would implore you to
> read *The Dawn of Everything* by Graeber and Wengrow,
> which is a wonderful volume that directly argues
> against the line of thinking you're pursuing here
> with a plethora of real world examples and evidence!

People (going back to your "for instance" case) behaving better than they usually do interests me. But the word 'plethora' sans numbers doesn't move me with respect to lines of thinking. Whenever words like that appear without numbers, the words "hand-waving" come to mind. (To be fair, my initial post contained implied hand-waving in the form of my assumption that "laws, law enforcement, and prisons" constituted the vast majority of cases of all societies and time.)

Write a reply

Replies

~blackwood wrote (thread):

The problem with the this assessment of a majority is that a lot of modern "developed" and mostly European societies come from a tangled and incestuous colonial origin. While culturally the origins of many modern societies may differ they are in many ways structurally very similar. This wasn't however because of a mass convergence on the best way to exist but rather the process of structure being grafted from one successful power from another.

To your point about quantitative data the main issues with a lot of this is that the prospect of generating clear quantitative data on massive society wide shifts is naive. While it's possible some numerical data does exist when looking back on the past quantifying these sorts of things become increasingly difficult. Not to mention the inherent issues surrounding the reality that quantitative data is not implicitly more reliable as the methods of data collection and presentation are heavily biased by the people involved in the research. This can lead to wildly incorrect claims being generated from "good data" that has been validated to be reliable.

TL;DR (for this last paragraph) I think you are overemphasizing the value of quantitative data as objective measure.

~calgacus wrote (thread):

Yeah the book I talk about here makes the case that for the vast majority of human history our social arrangements did not have things like coercive penal apparatus and that is largely an invention of recent vintage that happened, but isn't even necessary for "civilization" as we conventionally understand it and is decidedly *not* connected with the rise of agriculture and sedentary life, contrary to how we've been taught in broad strokes. If you like thinking about this kind of stuff at all you'll really enjoy the book, since it's concerned with exactly this argument we're having here and I think convincingly argues for the point I'm making here.