But I did quite enjoy one thing about the film, and that thing was the world building. Okay, the Na’vi species isn’t all that different from the human species, and, sure, the Na’vi culture isn’t all that different from white Americans’ common misinterpretations and mental mishmashing of every native culture our grubby pale hands have ever come in contact with. But overall I thought the Na’vi were kinda neat. I liked the idea that they could literally connect with nature via a neural net, I liked that they could tame animals this way, and I liked that this all influenced the development of their culture. I also liked the general badassness of the Na’vi, whose pedagogy seemed to boil down to, “Learn this fast or die in the most painful way possible.” Probably wouldn’t work for us squishy humans, but Na’vi bodies take a beating better than ours do—they can handle it.
My quick review of Avatar, then, is, “Bland plot, bland characters, pretty animation but not so pretty that I’m going to start cursing God for giving James Cameron such powers… but it had its moments. And those moments involved the world building.”
Color me surprised, then, that the ever popular Jason Kottke had almost the exact opposite reaction. To him, Avatar’s story, characters, and visuals were top-notch; the world building, on the other hand, was piss-poor and nonsensical. According to his review, the Na’vi shouldn’t be living in Stone Age conditions because
1. They are physically capable.
2. They are very intelligent.
3. They are aware of their environment/have access to many natural resources.
4. They are well-nourished, healthy, omnivorous, adaptive, and inventive.
5. They have domesticated animals.
6. They are troubled by few serious natural predators.
7. They can live in different environments.
8. They can communicate over and travel long distances.
9. They have regular access to a global supercomputer.
And he concludes: “The Na’vi are too capable and live in an environment that is far too pregnant with technological possibility to be stuck in the Stone Age. Plot-wise it’s convenient for them to be the way they are, but the Na’vi really should have been more technologically advanced than the Earthlings, not only capable of easily repelling any attack from Captain Ironpants but able to keep the mining company from landing on the moon in the first place.”
My response is thus:
Nope. Nope nope nope. Wrong on almost every count. And here’s why.
Premise 1: The Na’vi Are Smart And Strong
Let’s start at the beginning. Rather than refute each sub-argument point by point, I’m going to combine the first four premises of Mr. Kottke’s thesis into one big point: “In their intelligence and resourcefulness, the Na’vi are like humans.”
And I agree with this premise, for the most part. In almost every important physical way (let’s put off discussion of their neural ponytails for the time being), the Na’vi species is humanlike. We can expect, therefore, that they will develop in an anthropologically similar way. (This is a big assumption, I know, but you have to make some assumptions in a case like this. It’s not like I can go to Pandora and study these people for generations like Sigourney Weaver’s character.)
The problem here isn’t the premise that the Na’vi are as smart and physically-capable as humans but the conclusions that follow this premise. Mr. Kottke seems to be assuming that intelligent, physically-capable people would naturally explode with technology. This argument bothers me quite a bit because of its unspoken flipside: that any culture existing at a Stone Age level must be UNintelligent, UNhealthy, and weak. I don’t want to call anyone out on being a racist here, but, dude, that’s a little racist. I know you didn’t mean to be racist, but, dude.
Anyway, the notion that any smart and physically-capable civilization will break out of the Stone Age is just not true. Take the Taíno Indians, for example. (You know, the folks Mr. Columbus and co. stumbled upon when they accidentally crashed into the Caribbean in that helpfully rhyme-able year of 1492? Them.) As far as we can tell from our limited sources, the Taíno who lived back in the 15th century were in many ways similar to the Na’vi. They most certainly lived in Stone Age conditions. They didn’t wear much in terms of clothing; they didn’t have a real written language; their weapons were made of rock and wood and bone.
Oh, and the Spanish killed them. Not all of them, but, like, 99.9% of them. Guess they must have been really stupid, then. Really stupid or really weak or really… something.
But that’s not what Columbus said. Read his logs from his first voyage and you’ll see that he was in awe of how strong and tall (read: healthy) the Taíno really were. He also constantly mentioned their obvious intelligence and curiosity. (These traits were of interest to him, by the way, because it meant that the Spanish could probably convert them to Christianity easily. You can’t do that with true “barbarians.”)
The 15th century version of Avatar.
Now, you may argue, “Well, maybe the Taíno weren’t actually strong or healthy or smart; maybe Columbus was just making shit up so he could sell these people as slaves.” Maybe. But the fact is, when Columbus got home to Spain with a small group of Taíno he kidnapped, everyone else in Europe was impressed with their strength, health, and intelligence, too—impressed enough to want to buy them as slaves.
“Okay, okay!” you may argue. “But if the Taíno really were that smart and healthy and physically-capable, why didn’t they try to fight off their Spanish conquerers?” Well, actually, they did, and, trust me, they f-ed some shit up. This is from a culture that, if Spanish records are of any use, described themselves as a peace-loving people. And they did some damage. You may not recall from your elementary school history class, but Columbus was forced by circumstance (read: Dumbass crashed a ship) to leave a whole boatload of armed Spanish sailors in a fort on Hispaniola, and one clan of Taíno ended up killing all of them. Stone Age weapons 1, Renaissance weapons 0.
Unfortunately for the Taíno, there was a little thing called “disease” back then, which thinned their numbers to the point of no return. (They got their revenge, though, in a way. The Taíno got smallpox or whatever from the white man; in return, the white man became familiar with a little disease known as syphilis.)
The Taíno wasn’t the only human culture full of smart, physically-capable people who lived in the Stone Age. You may also recall that several groups of smart, physically capable white Europeans lived in the Stone Age, too, for, oh, about two and a half MILLION years. Long story short: Intelligence and strength alone do not instantly lead to technological advancement.
But wait! There’s more!
Premise 2: The Na’vi Have Domesticated Animals
Mr. Kottke’s next argument has to do with the Na’vi’s domesticated animals. If you’ve seen Avatar, you know that the blue folk have access to alien-horses and alien-sky-horses. Even more interesting, it seems that the Na’vi and their steeds evolved in parallel so that their nerves can be hooked up to one another via hair cable. Cool stuff.
That Mr. Kottke made an argument based on domesticated animals suggests to me that he’s read Guns, Germs, and Steel or has at least heard the ideas held within its covers. In that book, Jared Diamond argues that the denizens of certain continents turned out to become more technologically-advanced than the denizens of other continents not because some races are smarter or more physically-capable than others, but because some continents have domesticatable animals and others don’t. According to this theory, Eurasia had a leg up on all other continents, because it had 13 species of large, domesticatable animals, including cows, horses, sheep, goats, and so on. Africa had just one domesticatable animal (the camel), South America had one (the llama), and poor Australia had zilch. The argument follows that the people who were able to domesticate animals advanced into the New Stone Age period and were able to make a whole lot of food a whole lot faster. First, they were able to breed lots of cows and sheep and goats and so on for food, and, second, they were able to use animals like horses and oxen to plow their fields when they started farming. That led to more food, which led to population explosions, and added resistance against animal-borne diseases.
It makes sense, then, that Mr. Kottke would make this argument. The Na’vi have domesticated animals, so why are they still living in the Stone Age?
This argument has a number of flaws.
First, the Na’vi only have close relationships with two animal species. They have domesticated Pa’li (their horses), and they have access to Ikran (those cool flying things that live up in the mountains). Let’s start by focusing on the Pa’li. Horses are helpful, sure. As Kottke says, they give the Na’vi the ability to travel long distances. But it doesn’t really help them grow their food supply. There was no indication that the Na’vi use their horses to plow fields so they can farm; after all, the Na’vi we saw lived in the rainforest and thus didn’t have fields to plow. Plus, there was no indication that the Na’vi bred their horses for food. So the horses aren’t really helping them grow their populations or move into a Neolithic stage of development.
As for the Ikran, I’m not sure we can truly call them “domesticated.” On the one hand, the Na’vi have an evolutionary link with the Ikran (as humans do with, say, dogs). On the other hand, one Na’vi can only control one Ikran in a lifetime; the other Ikran are completely wild to them. This means that the Na’vi can’t pen the Ikran like cattle and can’t breed them in captivity. Seems to meet that each individual Ikran is more “tamed” than domesticated.
Premise 3: The Na’vi Have Few Natural Predators
This argument seems wrong to me, given what the film showed. When Jake was stumbling around Pandora’s forests at the beginning of the movie, it seemed like everything was trying to kill him. Everything. Off the top of my head, I can think of that pack of wild dog things, the giant dinosaur-rhinoceros things, the Ikran, the Toruk, and that giant panther thingy that Neytiri was magically able to ride at the end of the movie. At some point in the film, all of those animals tried to kill Jake. There are plenty of predators in Pandora.
The movie then takes its time to show the difference between humans like Jake and Na’vi like Neytiri. The predators in the woods don’t attack Neytiri, but I don’t think it’s because they find blue flesh unappetizing. Neytiri says it’s because she knows how to approach them. Jake, on the other hand, is like a baby, making noise and annoying the animals to no end. It’s like people in Asia who live with tigers, or people in Africa who live with lions. These big predators WILL eat humans if those humans happen to stumble out into the brush making all sorts of noise, but predators don’t go out of their way to eat humans, because A) there’s better meat out there and B) they’ve learned over the course of millennia that human hunters will fuck them up with their Stone Age weapons. Like those humans who live in dangerous, predator-filled areas of the world, the Na’vi have predators but have learned to live with them.
Anyway, just because a culture has few natural predators, it doesn’t mean they’ll magically start a technological revolution. Take the Taíno Indians again. They had literally zero natural predators (except other humans, of course). You’d think that their populations would explode, but the fact is that it couldn’t, because they could only make little gardens, not massive farms. This was because their land wasn’t made for agriculture—which is exactly what you can say about the rainforest-dwelling Omaticaya.
Premise 4: The Na’vi Can Travel and Live in Different Environments
It’s true. Like humans, the Na’vi can travel fairly long distances and live in wildly different environments. But travel alone doesn’t lead to technological advances. It only does that if A) the culture you’re traveling to is more technologically-advanced than yours, B) that other culture wants to share that technology with you, C) you can use that technology in your homeland, and D) you want or need to use that technology back home.
Again, let’s look at the Taíno. They weren’t trapped on tiny islands in the Caribbean. They had boats, and they traveled all over the place. But the question is, where could they travel to get more advanced technology? The other islands in the Caribbean were still operating in the Stone Age, as were the tribes in Northern South America. Maybe the Taíno could have gotten better technology from the Aztecs, but the Aztec technology wasn’t much more advanced, and I somewhat doubt the warlike Aztecs would have wanted to share it.
It seems to me that this is why Avatar’s Omaticaya aren’t all that technologically-advanced, either. They can visit other Na’vi clans, but what technology can they get from them? Not much, I’d guess. Moreover, the end of the film suggested that the Na’vi clans get along fairly well, which means that they wouldn’t need to constantly develop new weapons technology to use in wars. Until the Sky People showed up, the Omaticaya were doing quite all right in terms of weapons. The other clans were under control, their natural predators were under control, and they knew how to live in their environment in a sustainable way. Why would they need to develop new weapons?
James Cameron, on the other hand, needs to use the most advanced weaponry available to him, even if it is completely unnecessary.
Premise 5: But for God’s Sake, Woman: The Na’vi Have a Supercomputer!
This argument suggests to me that Mr. Kottke believes that all possible computers would naturally be like Earth’s current computers. Our computers, which are made by humans, store information about how to make technology and other types of “progress.” We’d naturally assume that the Na’vi supercomputer would be similar.
But why assume that at all? First of all, the Na’vi supercomputer is clearly not a human computer. We make our computers in our image; the Na’vi didn’t make their computer at all. The neural network in and under their trees might have been there before Na’vi ever existed. It’s likely that the Na’vi evolved to connect to that network, rather than the other way around.
Even if the Na’vi had made the supercomputer themselves, they would have made that supercomputer to store the information they found valuable. You can see this in any scene that features Jake or Neytiri connecting to the Pandora-net. In the Tree of Voices, Jake doesn’t learn from the ancestors how to build a functioning abacus or how to destroy an enemy culture with a nuclear-powered death ray. It seems that Pandora-net doesn’t store technological blueprints but important cultural information: advice, stories, myths, information on how to live. Pandora-net is less a Wikipedia and more a Soul-a-pedia.
Premise 6: The Unspoken Premise
Here’s the most important point. Although Mr. Kottke never says this outright, his entire argument is based around this false premise: that cultures naturally “progress” according to our current Western notions of what progress means. And, for all its flaws, Avatar needs to get props for discussing this fallacy in its script. Colonel Quaritch (a.k.a. the evil soldier guy) and Parker Selfridge (a.k.a. the evil corporate guy with the evil spiky haircut) offer the Na’vi technology, medicine, and education in exchange for their Unobtanium. The Na’vi refuse. As Jake makes clear to his human bosses, the Na’vi do not want any of these things. They do not want anything humanity can give them. And why would they? They were doing just fine until the humans showed up.
The fact is, technological progress does not happen on its own. Yes, people are naturally inventive, but they only need to invent things if they have a use for them. It’s only been in the past two hundred or so years that people have been developing technology just for the sake of developing it (thank you, capitalism). Before that, and still today even, technological progress (if you must call it that) sometimes happened slowly, backward, or not at all. If you don’t believe me, look at medieval fashions, which barely changed at all for hundreds of years at a time, and compare that to today, where fashions change every other day so corporations can make some extra moolah.
Look: there have been plenty of times in history where cultures have not adopted new technologies because they just have no use for them in their environment. Take the ancient steam engine, which first developed in the 1st century A.D., redeveloped during the Renaissance, and then finally picked up for real in the 1700s. Or consider the Stone Age-level cultures of the Americas, which developed the wheel for their kids’ toys but decided they didn’t really need it for transportation or agriculture. They were doing fine without the wheel, thank you very much. Or consider my favorite example from Guns, Germs, and Steel: the example of Beta-Max, which was passed over for the inferior VHS tape player.
And, as far as agricultural progress is concerned, trust me, you don’t get into agriculture willy-nilly. Farming is much, much harder than hunting and gathering is; raising animals will cut your lifespan short because you’ll trade diseases with them; and agricultural societies tend to be taken over by annoying kings and emperors, who tend to make life difficult for the grunts. Cultures only develop agricultural technology if environmental pressures force them to. The Na’vi are lucky enough and smart enough not to need it.
Even if they wanted to, the Na’vi’s culture and religion would discourage them from developing and adopting new technologies at the drop of a hat, anyway. The Na’vi are taught to respect and be a part of nature; most technology is developed to subjugate nature. Mr. Kottke says that the Na’vi must be aware of all the natural resources available to them, and I agree. They probably do know all about that vein of Unobtainium under their Home Tree. But even if they wanted that metal to make guns or whatever, they would never think of digging it out. It’s under the Home Tree, for Heaven’s sake! That shit is sacred. Human history makes it clear that, time and again, civilizations will do without technology—even if they desperately need it—for religious reasons. (See Europe’s Dark Ages for details.)
Conclusions.
It makes perfect sense that the Na’vi live in the Stone Age, and, more than that, I think it’s fine that they live in the Stone Age. Great, even. It seems to be working for them, so more power to ‘em. I’m not saying I want to live that way—this computer I’m working on seems to have domesticated me good—but if the Na’vi were real, I’d wish them well.