Rare footage of largest uncontacted tribe in the world [video]
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Also, what is the long term fate of such tribes? Without genes flowing in, it's probably not good.
I wonder about a protocol that a high technology civilization could use to contact them. Priorities would be to avoid violence, disease, misunderstandings and so on but at the same time, to allow them enter into the modern world over some generations. Kind of like sci-fi where an alien species contacts humanity (e.g. Childhood's End).
I tend to agree with your assessment that the balls in their Court and they can do what they want
Sometimes it's fine to sit back and let people make their own decisions and even mistakes, as long as they don't adversely impact you.
nobody has perfect information. that is the human condition. We dont know the future: how our lives will develop, how our marriages will end, what our kids will be like, and when and how we will die.
for example assuming they are granted to own the land they live on, we could not just let them sell the right to logging and let others destroy their land. so we need to be careful which the choices we allow them to make. eg, if they want to move into the city, fine, but then we need to make sure they can reverse that decision and go back, or at least continue some of their lifestyle. iaw: the problem is irreversible decisions that are difficult to understand.
but also problems caused by learning about alcohol, depending on government support, education that doesn't respect their culture and knowledge, etc.
so my approach would be to teach them knowledge they can use to improve their lives, introduce them to the idea that others live in other ways, but also that it takes an effort to change their lifestyle. like they will have to learn new trades in order to get jobs and earn an income if they want to do that.
“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
In the past, this particular aspect co-occurred with colonial genocide and economic exploitation. But that is not an excuse to stipulate that there isn’t an objective benefit to the progress of understanding and culture.
Trade is disastrous when suddenly all local production has to compete with hyper efficient imports, but there's no export to really pay for imports. The damage to local production happens despite the imbalance. Repeatedly give a man a fish and sooner or later he will forget everything he ever knew about fishing.
And what level of experience we are looking at! Remember the 10000h rule? Imagine a group developing exactly one skill set since childhood. Trained by a chain of ancestors following the same path that would make the Bene Gesserit blush.
This would all collapse under contact. A few years of handouts and/or one-time trades and nothing of those abilities would be left. And those years would be far too short to find a place in the new (to them) market above that of beggars and thieves. They would have trouble even working as prostitutes not knowing the cultural codes around that.
I agree with you on many points, but the word "preferable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It doesn't describe who it is preferable to, or how objective outcomes inform people's preferences, or whether this preference only exists when it is non-uniformly distributed across the world.
I believe that more precise empirical knowledge of the world is preferable, but I don't think it generalises - or naturalises - to human cognition. Or that it is causally related to reduction of colonial genocide and economic exploitation.
Anecdotally, I know a number of people who prefer their "objectively better" life courtesy of vigorous anti-intellectualism, conspiracy, religious fundamentalism, internalised naturalisation of race/gender/faith/etc. And other cognitive distortions - as I would call them.
Again though, I agree with you because I believe (among other things) that less human suffering is preferable, increased longevity is preferable, our species surviving longer is preferable, and other species surviving with us is also preferable. And I believe more precise empirical knowledge is the best way to achieve those things.
But many, many people disagree, and many just believe differently. As far as we know, that disagreement is not due to a kind of naturalised deficiency of cognition.
So it's a reality many actually don't want to mix with civilization.
I haven't gotten to read it yet, but I highly recommend Ailton Krenak's book "A vida não é Util"[1] (Life is Not Useful) and his other ones, he discusses some of those questions as an indigenous person.
Also, really most tribes in Brazil are in existential danger from many activities, specially illegal logging and mining. One significant role they perform is defend the forest since it's their territory and traditional livelihood.[2] Differently from elsewhere, tribes in Brazil are quite unique because many have been agricultural in pre-colonization times (I believe cassava is the staple crop generally), and have unique cultures like music, languages, garments and dishes.
But generally each tribes has its own unique culture and history and we cannot generalize much (some are more violent, some much less, etc. too).
[1] Seems to be available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Not-Useful-Ailton-Krenak-ebook/d... (This time Amazon's name is fitting :) )
[2] Brazil has quite generous indigenous reservations I think and we generally quite value indigenous people culturally, but we are struggling to defend most forests from criminals and, what other word to use, evil business interests in the region.
(One significant cultural movement is Brazil from the early 20th century was the idea of "Anthropophagy", which is to value all cultures and learn what we can from them, absorb ("eat") what's good they have to teach us)
It is a general pattern. Whenever the larger evolutionary pool encounters the smaller one, the larger pool's viruses spread like wildfire through the smaller population, wrecking it. And it's not just viruses. Whenever predators from Eurasia/Africa, the "Old World", the largest landmass, arrive on an island, it is an extinction event. How much destruction has the housecat wrought?
Now, perhaps this is, fundamentally, an unstable dynamic, literally in the dynamical-systems sense, and the situation cannot be maintained. Ultimately they will come into contact with these diseases; the only question is how and when.
(To strike a philosophical note, however, your death is also inevitable, yet you seek to delay it.)
So perhaps some protocol, as you suggest, of extremely careful, "clean room" contact, with vaccines, or something like that, might be possible and desirable. How to win sufficient trust, I don't know.
But the disease aspect is important.
Our newborns don't have these immunities either, right?
Or am I misunderstanding the human immune system?
Besides how hard it is to get everyone on board with vaccines even when they have been raised in a culture that's seen wild success from them for generations
Experiencing that petri dish as an adult can be overwhelming. For the same reason that kids have a staggered plan of shots that lasts for a dozen years, you’d have to trickle in the resistance more or less that way that you came about it, or you’re not really “not overloading their immune system”
It takes a lot of time to trust strange people enough to let them pierce your body to inject random substances. After about a century of vaccination among the "civilized", with proven results, there's still a lot of people that are not OK with it.
The medical procedures for "contact" are pretty straightforward. You screen and temporarily quarantine the contact team for diseases. You ensure only those people are meeting with the indigenous group, and that the contact team isn't being exposed themselves. You have physicians and other medical staff available in the contact team to provide medical care.
The goal isn't to prevent all disease transmission. That's not possible because "uncontacted" tribes are already interacting with the outside world. The Nomole people in TFA trade with their Piro cousins for example, and interact with loggers, miners mineral surveyors, among others. The goal is to minimize the transmissions you can control and provide the political/cultural/medical resources necessary to deal with whatever situation is initiating the contact process.
If contact was made, the short term fate of the tribes would likely be bad. They likely don't have immunity to all the diseases that we do. It could prove devasting.
We can send robots with video screens, to mention one of the many solutions for that well known issue.
Let them make the decision for themselves. Stop trying to control other people. Their decisions aren't negatively impacting you so you have no moral justification for taking control of their lives.
I wrote nothing about controlling people. Only communicating with them, so they can make informed decisions about what level of contact they want.
It's less "they should remain uncontacted", and more "any contact should be on their terms". If they prefer being left alone, that must be respected.
Growing up (1960s) I was exposed to Western Desert language groups, in the mid 80's I spoke to the Pintupi Nine.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
One brother turned back soon after, the others declined in health thanks to modern life and sugar.
It's interesting to contrast first hand experience with lifetime hunter gatherers with techbro manifests about how living with technology is so much better.
Given a real choice not everyone is convinced.
I hate this.
We’ve seen what happens when we choose to meddle with these tribes when people tried to reach out to the Sentinel tribe. A missionary traveled to the island and tried to introduce them to Christianity (he was killed as a result), another group of people kidnapped six of the island’s inhabitants for the purpose of “studying” them. Eventually the situation got bad enough that the Indian government intervened and made it illegal to go the island by sea or air (they banned air travel because the sentinels would fire arrows at helicopters). We need to just leave these people alone and only observe from a great distance.
If they knew about our 0.4% child mortality, 80 year life span etc, each individual could make an informed decision.