Harry Baird wrote: ↑Sun Sep 04, 2022 4:12 pm
Such tribal societies were/are based on every individual contributing for the benefit of every other individual without having to be paid in money for their contributions.
They
didn't have money, Harry...that's why. A monetary system tends to develop as society goes beyond the primitive. But I doubt you'd want to say that their trading in pelts or scalps would be an advance over paper dollars.
As individuals, no doubt, they had/have the same flaws as the rest of us. As a society and culture, however, they didn't contaminate their own beds such that they suffocated in their own waste, as the famous (purported) Native American observation of white man's culture quite fairly goes.
There weren't enough of them, or enough technological advancement among them, for them even to have the chance. They had neither nations nor cities. But it wasn't because they virtuously realized the axioms of global conservationism. They had no such concept. In fact, you'll find that it's very hard for a primitive tribe to be concerned with much beyond survival. That tends to take all the concern they have.
Indigenous Australians (culturally) see/saw themselves as custodians of the natural world.
I find this implausible, in view of other tribal people around the world, with which I am much more familar. If they had any such special virtue, they were the only tribalists who did, it seems.
But if you have their writings to that effect, or their Greenpeace membership cards, I'll look at them.
The extent to which indigenous Australians were amenable to Christian evangelism is, I suggest, that to which Christ's message of unconditional love for one's fellows resonated with them in a social and cultural sense, because, in that sense, they already practised it - at least to a much better approximation than did their colonisers.
There is some truth to that. Lamin Saneh points out that a lot of the Biblical narrative rests on agrarian and local parables and situations, so that more primitive people have some particular affinity with certain narratives that can exceed that which "sophisticated" Westerners may have. And that played well in Africa. Fair enough.
But these ancient tribes also had no literacy, and were generally polytheistic and highly superstitious, in the worst sense of that word; so it was a bit of a trade-off, I would say. An openness to the gospel is a very good thing; but to spend countless hundreds or thousands of years enslaved to the spirits and demons, and under the thumb of the local witch-doctor is one heck of a price to pay for a little extra openness.
I don't think "love for one's fellows" is a strong value beyond the single tribe. In fact, tribal life tends to be marked by extreme xenophobia and hatred of every tribe that could compete for precious resources. They murder and enslave each other without compunction, in ordinary cases. Global goodwill is not their strong suit. In fact, the overwhelmingly normal response of a tribe to the arrival of an "other" is to throw a spear at him, so it's always dangerous to enter a tribe's territory.
No human group has a special monopoly on "love for one's fellow man," it's true. Even today's Globalists have far too little of that. But tribal groups tend to see the only "real men" as being the men (and usually not even really the women)
of their own tribe.
If your Aborigines are different in that regard from everybody else's "first nations" or "natives," then I guess you're just very blessed. The rest of the world is not so lucky in that regard.
