From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Tue Jul 16 2002 - 09:07:56 MDT
Damien, you're right, "primitive" is not a politically correct word these
days, but I forget what the currently preferred term is.
I guess it's still OK to say "Stone Age cultures", right?
I did not mean the word "primitive" as a value judgment, but as an
indication that the technologies and general culture patterns of these
groups are those that other groups of humans abandoned long ago.
ben g
> Sidebar: we have almost no evidence of what primitive peoples felt one way
> or the other (taking the term literally to mean human forbears from, say,
> 100,000 or a million years ago). But I assume Ben here refers to, say,
> extant hunter-gatherer societies, or their deracinated remnants. Such
> people are no more primitive than any other; each human sub-group has been
> in existence as long as all the others, and has adapted with as much
> ingenuity to today's climate, constraints, opportunities, etc. The
> distinctiveness of different peoples' religious ideas and practises might
> be illuminating, but not because any of them is `primitive' in this sense.
>
> Damien Broderick
>
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