the back to the landers were kind of into going low tech (and most were back in the urban jungle in three years or so..a few stayed, but they developed some relationships with technology that benefitted them) but the point of the rovolution, so to speak, was to better society...perhaps anti- 1950s gray flannel society would be more correct.
Some of the threads I read catch me up short with their candidness and although I get a chuckle, I love the questions that people ask. This is actually a very good question that takes me back to Spain. When I had arrived there for the second time to live, it was just a few years after Franco had died and the Spanish were very slow at learning what it was like to live out from under such a strict dictatorial regime. Franco's control and rule had been absolute and reached into just about every aspect of Spanish life. People don't grow under such conditions because the fear of an educated or free society is what keeps dictators up at night figuring out ways to isolate their people and keep them from growing. How effective was Franco's isolationism? The first time a Spaniard asked me, in all seriousness, if it was true that gangsters like Al Capone still drove around American cities like Chicago and shot up the place with machine guns, just like in the old movies, I thought, "He's serious about this question. He really doesn't know about the States other that what he's seen in movies!" I would have dismissed this as an isolated incident, but when more and more people, different people, different times, asked me the exact same question, I was pretty well shocked. Now, how does this story pertain to the Threadstarters question? I guess I would have to say it's because the question also has the hint of an isolationist view point. The question seems posed from the viewpoint (again, it seems) that Hippies exist in a disconnected society. Why would Hippies be anti-civilization? Where would this kind of question come from? What kind of a vision do people have of Hippies? I don't ask this in an accusatory manner, because I think it accurately represents a lot of peoples perspective of hippies or many other counter-culture groups. Hippies are very much connected, civilized and pro-civilization! Their values, social consciouness, social habits and moral perspective may be different from mainstream society, but it all came from mainstream society! It just took a different fork in the road, not left the planet. Hippies, to me, say to society, "I can dig what you say, but it doesn't work for me that way. I'll find a better way, or create a new way that works to my interpretation." Hippies haven't really created anything new in our world, they just go about life in more grouped individualistic ways (sounds counter-productive, but it's not). This route allows for some real creativeness, some unique bending of mainstream concepts, and in many ways, a truer adherence to the very rules of life that civilization claims to represent. Gotta love it. Great question! Hope it makes people rethink some things.
These people are anti-civilization and have lots of interesting things to say about it: http://anthropik.com/thirty Remember, hunter-gatherers lived longer and were healthier than the first agriculturalists, who had stunted skeletons and spent their lives doing degrading, menial tasks over and over under the lash of a supervisor. Hunter-gatherers had much more autonomous lives; they worked less and spent more time just "being." Agriculture was not adapted because it made life better for everyone...it was adapted because it made life better for the elite, who retained the privileges of the old hunter-gatherer ways while enslaving everyone else. The result is that life conditions in general were more miserable, but in absolute terms, more people could be born and raised. Just like factory-farmed chickens! Pack 'em in there, who cares how unnatural it is, just keep that meat comin.' And a lucky few (the muscular elite) can have more luxury than ever before possible, based on the misery of the many. That's been the story of civilization ever since the dawn of agriculture. We are all living unnatural lives, rather than the way we lived for 99% of our time as a species, before the dawn of agriculture and (later) civilization.
???????? Where did you come with with some of that stuff??? The fact is like in all evolutionary process, agriculture and the shift from hunter gatherer to agriculture was a slow and extremely gradual process. I know that the average high school text book would lead you to believe that agriculture arrived on the scene fully blossomed about 7 to 5 thousand years ago but the truth is it actually got it's roots in human developement closer to 20 or 30 thousand years ago. For instance many if not most Native American tribes before the advent of the European invaders were BOTH hunter gatherer and agriculturalist. many primitive hunter gatherer tribes TODAY in places like New Guinea are both h/g's and aggies. Archealogists have excavated countless European Late Stone age and Early Bronze age settlements that had attributes of both types of culture. MY ancestors in the southeastern part of the United States prior to the advent of whites both farmed and hunted. Do you really believe that some thug like ogre arrived on the scene and suddenly forced the locals to lay down their hunting gear and start plowing??? Hell, even the Cheyene Indians of the northern great plains as some of the Souix in that area migrated on to the plains to BECOME hunter gatherers full time after leaving agrian societies further east. I image there would be thousands of instances of that very behaviour in the un-recorded ages past...no body tried to stop them from moving onto the plains there were no task masters...they did so freely.
I don't know where you got your info xazzer but your ideas of who the first agriculturalists were are totally different to what I have learnt. The first agriculturalists worked for the benefit of the whole community because it made life easier for the whole not just the ruling elite. At the time the ruling elite consisted of only a few people as the first agriculturalists were tribal. Remember in hunting and gathering tribes the hunting and gathering was usually only done by a small percentage of the group and not the tribes leaders, so the tribes leaders were benefiting from the work of others there as well. Agriculture arose from necessity due to depleted wildlife caused by over hunting. According to what you have said any progress must be seen as unnatural.
