T
here's a certain temptation, relatively recent in the scale of civilization, to look back fondly on the halcyon days of hunter-gatherer tribes. That's the way humans should be living, we can think to ourselves; I'm prone to it myself. Humans living in small, close-knit communities, engaging in beautiful and distinctive cultural crafts, fully engaging body and mind in their interactions with an alternatingly fruitful and hostile environment. The sense of purpose continuity with the natural world perhaps seem worth the costs of, say, higher infant mortality rates and susceptibility to disease and hardship.
However, I want to stir the pot a little, by asking how important "morality" is to judging the value of a lifestyle. Hunter-gatherer communities (or at least our idealized versions of them) can seem idyllic, but how do we judge their actions? These communities were (and are) prone to a great number of cultural artifacts that "civilized" man now finds repulsive. Human sacrifice, ritual torture, slave-keeping, regular territorial war, rape, pedophilia, female circumcision, murder of the weak, pillaging, and witch-hunts are just a few of a long list of very well-documented practices of "primitive man". My question is -- are these practices in some way "pre-moral", not truly bad because they are performed by innocents? Or are they moral lapses, for which the actors are responsible? Is there any sense of interior obligation for these kinds of societies to improve? Is there anything they could do that might be labeled truly bad or evil?
It is a danger of these communities to be somewhat intellectually and spiritually isolated, unable to engage in the kinds of dialogue with others that produce advancement in moral understanding. In a sense, early pagan cultures are a serious roll of the dice -- they might be utopias, they might be dens of wickedness, and they often don't have the resources to tell the difference.