Daily reminder that ALL atrocities are bad. Yes, even of your favorite polity
General or meta
(media.piefed.social)
The frame I’m rejecting is the idea that, given the same material conditions, all people and cultures throughout history would react in the same way.
Broadly speaking, they do. People are people. I didn't realize we were entering into an argument where cultural chauvinism is the very foundation.
This view oversimplifies and dehistoricizes the diverse experiences of Native Americans, as I mentioned in my first comment.
How the fuck so? When Native Americans have, even just during the time period of European record-keeping, have been observed engaging in displacement and systemic violence aimed at cultural erasure?
Or are we laying it all on some strange notion of an especial-but-unproven cultural immunity to the development of novel diseases?
Culture and material conditions are interconnected; they shape and influence one another. If culture only emerged from material conditions, then people would merely be reacting mechanistically to their environments, lacking the richness of creativity, belief systems, and individual agency that shape societies in diverse and meaningful ways.
No culture yet seen has been observed to prevent human beings from acting in according with their own interests; our interests are determined overwhelmingly by material conditions.
The way you dismissed my response was uncalled for. I’ve take time and care to craft my response to be honest and considerate. I’m not interested in a discussion that is otherwise.
The entire point of the Noble Savage trope is exactly the line of argument you laid down. I'm sorry that you feel being called out is being 'dismissed', but perhaps before denying using a trope you should at least check what it means first?