Charles Kenny underscores the difficulty of pre-modern lifestyles. He focuses on the Jarawa, a limited-contact tribe living on islands off the coast of India:
The glorification of the Jarawa and in general of tribal life, with its supposed freedom from violence, poverty, drugs, crime, and overpopulation, is part of a dangerous denial of the huge benefits that modernity has brought to the vast mass of humanity. It is easy to get emotional about a supposedly idyllic Stone Age existence when we're staring at elegant photographs on a computer screen while sipping our Starbucks chai latte. But if we decided to actually return to the lifestyle of uncontacted peoples, the vast majority of the planet would die off from starvation, and those who remained would face nasty, brutish, and short lives. Romanticizing that lifestyle provides no insights into how we can better run a planet of 7 billion people on a sustainable basis — and does little to illuminate the challenges and needs of tribal people themselves.
(Photo: A portrait of a Jarawa man, naked apart from a decorative belt and chest straps, taken against a forest backdrop. Andaman Islands, India, circa 1900. By Father Browne/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.)
The Dish 