Canadians, The National Post is satire, right?

[loinburger]

Depends on the cancer. I've got a friend with late stage brain cancer who opted out of treatment because the prognosis sucked, and she wanted to enjoy what was left of her life without the side-effects of chemo / radiation. However, childhood leukemia is very treatable, with about a 90% survival rate

[Elok]

Ah, yes, I just re-read the original article and saw that. My wife's uncomfortable with the very idea of forcing a medical decision on a family, because of the bad old days when they forcibly sterilized the retarded, etc. Also she comes from a family with a strong libertarian streak. I can see any number of angles on this that might be defensible. Only the article itself makes it sound cut-and-dried stupid.

[loinburger]

Yeah, there's definitely a large gray area between a family refusing something like an appendectomy and refusing something like chemo for late stage cancer that's already metastasized. Or even further on the spectrum, refusing something like a prefrontal lobotomy.

[ricketyclik]

It may well be cut-and-dried stupid, but that's not the point, or at least the point I was trying to make. My point was not "respect for bad science", it was respect for the right for people to believe what they like and live accordingly. Another example might be "A guy in the sky spoke to some Lebanese dudes and they wrote it all down and now I have to do everything that He said, even though a lot of it is internally contradictory or just plain bat-**** crazy". I don't agree with it, but I think people have the right to make their own choices.

[Lorizael]

Cancer treatment sucks, but treatment of childhood leukemia is apparently very good. The survival rate in Canada for childhood leukemia (that is, the odds of dying from something else completely unrelated to the cancer in the distant future) is something like 80-90%.

[Lorizael]

Depends on the cancer. I've got a friend with late stage brain cancer who opted out of treatment because the prognosis sucked, and she wanted to enjoy what was left of her life without the side-effects of chemo / radiation. However, childhood leukemia is very treatable, with about a 90% survival rate

Wow, I'm way late to the party.

[Lorizael]

It may well be cut-and-dried stupid, but that's not the point, or at least the point I was trying to make. My point was not "respect for bad science", it was respect for the right for people to believe what they like and live accordingly. Another example might be "A guy in the sky spoke to some Lebanese dudes and they wrote it all down and now I have to do everything that He said, even though a lot of it is internally contradictory or just plain bat-**** crazy". I don't agree with it, but I think people have the right to make their own choices.

This argument kind of falls apart when you argue that people have the right to kill their children (i.e. other people) because of their beliefs.

[loinburger]

It may well be cut-and-dried stupid, but that's not the point, or at least the point I was trying to make. My point was not "respect for bad science", it was respect for the right for people to believe what they like and live accordingly. Another example might be "A guy in the sky spoke to some Lebanese dudes and they wrote it all down and now I have to do everything that He said, even though a lot of it is internally contradictory or just plain bat-**** crazy". I don't agree with it, but I think people have the right to make their own choices.

I think that people have the right to make their own choices up until they start to harm others - this includes refusing treatment when their children have treatable but otherwise fatal diseases.

X-Lorizael'd

[Lorizael]

That's some nice symmetry there.

[Elok]

The wife did agree with me that "traditional cultures" often suck. She told me about an anthropologist who got pestered into marrying one of the Yamomamo Indians he was studying. She was fifteen or so, but the locals were adamant and this was in the forties or something, so he said sure, fine, whatever. When in Rome. But he kept having to go back to America for a couple of months to renew his grant or something, and when he came back he always learned that the tribespeople had been gang-raping his wife in his absence. Because, apparently, Yamomamo culture says that's what you do to unprotected women, even if they're from your own tribe. Eventually he said to hell with this and took the poor girl back to America for good. Where of course she was overwhelmed and miserable, but not gang-raped anymore. So I guess I would say that their culture is not "a precious and unique snowflake" so much as "a frozen turd that fell out of an airplane and killed someone."

[Lorizael]

The cultural relativism that pervades modern anthropology is a tricky issue, I think. It's pretty easy to recognize that a lot of "traditional cultures" have some pretty horrific practices. It's also easy to recognize that a lot of our modern cultures have descended from older cultures which had practices that were comparably horrific. I don't think it does a lot of good to look at a culture specifically and say, "Wow, what a ****ty culture," because I think the it becomes easy to conclude that the people who perpetuate such a culture have some inherent ****tiness about them. I think the more valuable observation is, "What about these people's environments leads to cultures with such ****ty practices?" This doesn't excuse the actions of people who do terrible things, but I think it helps us understand a little more about human nature.

Additionally, condemning an entire culture means we might miss out on positive aspects within a culture. Maybe some random "traditional culture" has some pretty awesome art that isn't practiced by other people, or maybe some philosophical ideas that are worth discussing and dissecting. Nothing good about a culture should be able to balance out the bad about a culture, but it doesn't mean the good isn't good. Really, I just don't think we should be judging cultures as monolithic entities. We should appreciate and preserve the positive elements and seek to understand the source of the bad elements. (We can condemn the bad elements, too, but pointing out that slavery/clitorectomies/pre-scientific medicine is bad is not exactly a heroic stance. I'm looking at you, Lorizael.)

[ricketyclik]

Any individual is capable of ****ty thoughts, and it becomes even more likely that they turn into actions and the accepted norm when it becomes group think. It's amazing how easily and often it becomes the case, and I don't think any culture is exempt.

The US's antipathy to socialised health care springs to mind, or less recently the Holocaust.

[Elok]

Diamond does point out the good aspects; many of these societies are more attentive to their children and treat their elderly with more respect and dignity than we do. Er, except some of them (sometimes even the same ones) will also kill deformed infants or twins at birth, or abandon their sick and elderly when they move camp. He always tries to be fair about it--these people generally can't afford to coddle unproductive members, or have one mother nurse two infants. His aim is to dig out the good aspects that are worth copying. I do wonder if it's really practical to extract the good aspects from their natural contexts, when they were just as much the result of that context as the bad stuff.

As the planet grows ever more overpopulated, I think it's fair to ask whether allowing land to be underused in the name of preserving a culture as an exotic curio is really moral. Not that our own land use is exactly moral, sensible or sustainable. I would be okay with letting these traditional cultures reclaim the American Southwest, and every golf course. Headhunting raids on federally-subsidized ethanol farmers should be not only allowed, but encouraged.

Anyway, I don't have a beef with anthropologists--I've barely started to read them. But the general public is in many places still basically clinging to Rousseau's Noble Savage. Most traditional societies practice things that would earn someone in our society a long time in jail. These behaviors are mostly a direct and necessary consequence of the way they live. And our ancestors probably did much the same thing, for that reason. Diamond notes that, when the New Guinea authorities stepped in to stop the tribal warfare, the overwhelming majority of the tribals were relieved and accepted the outside authority without a fight. If Cortez hadn't been intent on mass enslavement and plunder, merely destroying the power of the Aztecs would have marked him as one of history's great philanthropists. Of course, he would have had no motive for doing so, any more than the Aztecs would have had a motive for not running their empire as a giant, permanent version of the Hunger Games.

Saying "Oh, what a beautiful, vanishing way of life, we must leave it uncorrupted" is very easy to say when you're miles away, and can get up to pee in the middle of the night without worrying about your enemies putting a spear through your guts. I think it's essentially a larger-scale version of the reasoning in the OP.

[Lorizael]

Diamond is pretty rad. I'm reading* The Third Chimpanzee right now and have read some of his other stuff in the past. My favorite anecdote about Diamond is this: Maybe 10ish years ago, during the height of Iraq War, he was being interviewed by some talking head and was asked why there was so much conflict in the region today. His answer began with, "Well, the deforestation of the Fertile Crescent two thousand years ago..."

*Started several months ago but haven't picked up in awhile because oh god life and monkeys and other books

[Ben Kenobi]

As the planet grows ever more overpopulated, I think it's fair to ask whether allowing land to be underused in the name of preserving a culture as an exotic curio is really moral. Not that our own land use is exactly moral, sensible or sustainable. I would be okay with letting these traditional cultures reclaim the American Southwest, and every golf course. Headhunting raids on federally-subsidized ethanol farmers should be not only allowed, but encouraged.

I don't see how abandoning unwanted children to the elements is less crap than abortion clinics. Crap analysis starting from worthless principles will fail to accomplish anything.