Artificial Ape - Excerpt

This is from Timothy Taylors book The Artificial Ape from p 52.  I really like the 2nd paragraph explaining the theory behind the de-evolution of the native Tasmanian people. As background Darwin (and many other explores) found the Native Tasmanians without composite tools, or clothes, or houses or architecture. Recently however, evidence has shown that the first people who occupied tasmania did have all those things so the standing theory is that they lost the technology though a tragedy or over time. Taylor however has a different theory, that they over a long period of time choose the primitive path for their civilization, editing unnecessary cumbersome, complicated technology and slowly choosing a simpler and simpler way of life. 

"Most modern technology is very highly entailed. A car needs wheels and fuel. Those entail rubber plantations and oil wells, and complex manufacturing, refining, marketing, and distribution processes. Once all the things that cars have to have to be cars are factored in-from metal, tarmac, and glass, through to traffic police, a licensing bureaucracy, test agencies, and so on, each of which comes with its own primary and subsidiary systems of entailment- it is clear that the car can exist only within a modern globalized industrial system. Reverse entailment, although it sounds as if it might be even more complicated, means a type of dissociation, a deliberate unmeshing. To our Habitually entailed existence, the prospect seems strange, the opposite of progress.

Here is the theory of reverse entailment, presented as what is not entailed by the Tasmanian Aboriginal way of life: No Bone tools means no awls means no clothes means no pockets means nowhere to keep tinder and fire-making kit; that means no fire making, which means carrying fire all the time. That means quick fires whenever you want, which means it is ok not to wear clothes, carrying fire all the time means it is safer not to wear clothes, so you don’t catch fire by accident. It also reduces what else can be carried. No composite tools means no aces, so no log boats or all-weather craft, which means no fish – But with lots of sudden storms, why risk orphaning the children when seals can fish and you can eat seals? Inshore, you can grease up and diver for lovely stuff. Naked, of course, because you don’t want damp clothes. You want to get dry and warm as fast as possible by the fire, and eat abalone, wallaby, and tree-harvested possum. Your little temporary rafts can take you to small seabird breeding haunts in fine weather and who wants to go birding and egg-hunting in high seas? Without a complex toolkit to lose, or surpluses to be stolen, or clothes to dry, you don’t really need a house, and since you carry fire everywhere the risks of burning one down would be high. With no houses and little personal property, there’s not much hierarchy. That means no need to make loads of stuff, like thrones and crowns. Accounting is unnecessary, so you don’t need writing or numbers, or pens or paper or money. You have no maps, but you are not lost. You know where absolutely everything you need is. And because you don’t have to look after it, you can get in when you want it. " - Timothy Taylor from The Artificial Ape