If any proof is still needed that industrialized people are no more, and no less, complicated than non-industrialized people, look no further than Lawrence Osborne's article, "Strangers in the Forest," from the April 18, 2005 New Yorker. In this, the myth of the Noble Savage is swiftly debunked, and we are bettered by a recognition of strange people.

Probably there are finer ethnographic studies at hand, readings from which I could learn more even than from this short article, but Osborne did more in these roughly 7 pages than any such in my undergraduate curriculum, certainly more than those officious old studies from the turn of the 20th century. Contemporary anthropology, I sense, is more humble in studying that grand old Other, than anything from Malinowski to Levi-Strauss, just to pick some fenceposts. The newer stuff seeks to study similarities as much as differences between cultures, and recognizes that for any of the fictions that we live by in one culture, there are equally fictious mandates in any other.

Hippies and Apologists of Westernism (right back to Rousseau) are wont to see an admirable simplicity in that Other, while arrogant Structuralists have at times seen their science as encompassing, therefore transcending, all the "simpler" machinations of the target culture. And most of us have long presumed that non-technological cultures have remained unchanged for thousands of years, marking a primitive, frozen state of our own culture—but it's quite plausible that all societies do change, although not all have a relentless pressure to change; not all societies have "progress" has their prime directive.

After reading the article, I jumped up to come here and write this. I imagined myself explaining to a Kombai man by the fire, "I have a machine that allows me to instantly contact anyone that I've met before, because in my society, everyone is always near one of these machines, . . ."

And there is a system by which my writings can be sensed by thousands of "news aggregators" where yuppies will casually peruse what I've said while riding the morning train.