And the Toba catastrophe theory (population down to 10,000 breeding pairs) you refer to is not as solid science as one might hope. I understand there is some evidence pertaining to it, but that might just as well be circumstantial.

I think taking down fascination with tribal societies to inevitable euthanasia is a little extreme, but maybe that’s just me!

If I may make a few strongly worded points of argument:

I would point out that egalitarianism in the context of hunter-gatherers typically means that every male member of a community has an equal opportunity to play dictator over anyone else. The basis for leadership in a primitive egalitarianism is actually the same as the basis of fascist leadership: charismatic authority (I am not calling anyone a fascist, this is merely a lesson in cross-cultural comparison). While the modern primitives and the romantics would undoubtedly argue, as did a certain Lord John Acton, that without absolute power (in the form of industrial nation-states or agricultural empires) we should have no fear of absolute corruption, I would counter that we’ve seen plenty of corruption, but has anyone ever truly wielded absolute power? Let me rephrase that question: “Does God exist?” Didn’t think so. So there we have, no such thing as absolute power, so we really have no way of testing Lord John Acton’s hypothesis, do we?

On the subject of the Yanomamo, I assume you are aware of their infamous penchant for misogyny, wife-beating, and other nasty forms of anti-woman brutality. As for cultural relativity (and feminism, for that matter), the unfortunate Yanomami women actually consider the scars inflicted by their brutal husbands to be signs of their male masters’ affection: the more a Yanomami man beats his wife, or slices her skin with his machete, the more he is said to value her like the object she is considered in Yanomamo culture. Perhaps we can tease out the signs of the Stockholm Syndrome?

Obviously this is not true for every primitive society, but statistically it’s true for most of them. The !Kung practice arranged marriages. As for genital mutilation, previously brought up, don’t get me started. The reason I went into anthropology in the first place to advanced the “Modern Tribalist” agenda, offering primitive community as the best possible model for peaceful and naturalistic human coexistence. The reason I eventually discarded this theory was because of my having gone into anthropology.

The “primitive” has always been subject to distorted romanticization by outsiders. Finally, what would it take to reduce the human footprint and allow us to start over? Arguably we’re all alive today because 75,000 years ago climate disruption lead human ancestors to migrate, spreading diseases as they came into contact, at one point actually reducing the gene pool to about 10,000 breeding pairs. So are we all just supposed to wait for the next depopulation bomb? Because if you want everyone to live as hunter gatherers or horticulturalists off the land, you’re gonna need a lot less people. And getting the human population to a more manageable and sustainable size- well that’s going to take some major technocratic social engineering over a very long term, unless of course we’re down with the aforementioned euthenasia. It’s either that, or hope for one hell of an asteroid impact to remind the lucky(?) survivors of some much needed cosmic humility.

That’s what my theory depended on: an apocalyptic and utopian vision of death and destruction. And I still tried to make it work. Eventually that naive idealism was eroded by the effects of my own cognitive dissonance. Barring a major depopulation event, I’ll keep my technology, my progress, and my global community, thank you.

For that matter I find much of modern U.S. culture repugnant, like its anti-intellectualism.

I definitely feel you as far as human rights issues are concerned, but I find the argument that cultures should be preserved for their own sakes naive at best, and dangerous at worst.