The Moral Calculus Of Hunter-Gatherers

 ... or rather, the moral calculus of encountering hunter-gatherers.

Late Add: It just dawned on me after originally posting this that the underlying question I've been wrestling with for some time is: How did we get to the point where Nazi logic makes sense? Having read most of Mein Kampf and consumed a decent amount of Nazi propaganda, modern parallels with the Nazis' distortion and selective application of history simply scream at me whenever I encounter the rantings of the dominant culture with its emphasis on white guilt.

How did we get here? That's a question for future posts, but I just wanted to plant that in your head while you go through this.

After noodling the Afrikaner question and pondering how the black majority is South Africa is seeking a final solution to it, I began to wonder about the proper behavior for any settler upon encountering sparse populations of evolutionarily trapped hunter-gatherers.

Tim brought up some objections to my use of AI as a research tool, but I thought about it as I chatted with ChatGPT and never saw any glaring contradictions. The climate and terrain of San Diego is pretty similar to parts of South Africa. We, too, had our hunter-gatherer indigenous population, the Kumeyaay. Like the Khoisan in South Africa, they were eventually encountered by Europeans. In our case, the Spanish, in their case, the Dutch.

When I go hiking here in San Diego, I can't help but put myself in the moccasins of the Kumeyaay. Just what was it like to live that way? Could you imaging being born into that in, say, the year 1320? Come August, when there has been no rain for months, there is absolutely nothing to eat out there. I guess you might be able to catch some insects or something, but your whole day would be spent just trying to glean a subsistence from the dry chapparal or the tidepools on the coast.

When AI asserted that the population density was on the order of 1 person for every 3 square miles, it was totally believable.

So just what were the Euros supposed to do? They had come great distances on the ocean and were trying to open trade routes to other nations. When they landed at Capetown or trekked up the West Coast to what is now San Diego, pulled out their spyglasses and saw 3 people wandering around on a hillside miles away, were they supposed to get back on their boats and leave?

That's not a rhetorical question. It is, in fact, the central moral question being raised by the decolonizers. What was the appropriate response to encountering the Khoisan or the Kumeyaay?

You couldn't negotiate with them because there was no central authority with whom you could sign treaties. You couldn't buy the land from them because the whole concept of land ownership was unintelligible to them. Father Junipero Serra tried to educate and civilize them and that, apparently, was evil. Some Kumeyaay didn't like it at all and frequently tried to return to their native ways of foraging in the scrub brush for roots and small game.

Here's the elephant in the room: Why is this moral conundrum never posed for the Zulu or the Apache?

No, seriously. Why doesn't this moral no-win scenario apply to Africans or the American Indians? They, too, expanded and encountered hunter-gatherer tribes. When that happened, they were, err, a bit on the rough side, if you know what I mean.

So why don't the decolonizer types blow a gasket over that?

The question answers itself.

They want us to believe that white people are somehow not native or indigenous to any place on Earth pic.twitter.com/azNI15SO0y

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) May 15, 2025