[Note: This is the forty-sixth sample from my rough draft of
a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy. The Search field on the right side will find
words in the full contents of all rants and reviews. These samples are not freestanding
pieces. They will be easier to
understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE —
if you happen to have some free time. If
you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording
my book HERE.
WHO
ARE WE?
Life
in the Wild Lane
Over a long span of time, our minds, bodies, emotions, and
instincts were given form on tropical savannahs. Like our savannah ancestors, you and I are
social animals, and we do best in small groups, where we can maintain ongoing
personal relationships with all the others.
Many wild folks likely spent their entire lives without seeing a
stranger. For them, exposure to dense
crowds of odd-looking, odd-smelling, odd-sounding strangers would have been
terrifying.
On the day of your birth, you did not squirt out of momma’s
womb with credit cards, car keys, and a cell phone. You were a wild animal that evolution had
fine-tuned for a wholesome life of hunting, scavenging, and gathering in a
tropical wilderness. You were fully
expecting to be welcomed into a kind and caring tribe — an egalitarian culture
of anarchist singers, dancers, and nature lovers. You were not expecting to squirt into the
frightening bright lights of a totally insane planet-thrashing civilization,
condemned to a life sentence without parole.
You were expecting to spend your entire life out of doors, in
a thriving ecosystem where humans were a wee minority group in the family of
critters. You enjoyed frequently seeing,
hearing, and smelling your wild non-human neighbors throughout every day. Many of these neighbors were good to eat, and
some of them would eagerly leap at any opportunity to tear you to bloody shreds
and ravenously feast on your yummy flesh.
Survival required paying acute attention to reality at all times.
Paul Shepard wrote that for three million years, our wild
hominin ancestors were “few in number, sensitive to the seasons and other life,
humble in attitude toward the Earth, and comfortable as one species among
many.”
It
Takes a Village
Soon after birth, many animal species are capable of skills
like walking, running, swimming, climbing, and feeding themselves. This is not true for humans, because we are
an experiment to see what might happen if tropical primates were allowed to
evolve unusually swollen brains. This
project required some tweaks.
The birth canal from mom’s uterus to her vagina passes
through an opening in the pelvis, and this opening is too small to allow the
passage of a fetus with a more fully developed brain. Consequently, humans are born long before we
are capable of functioning unassisted.
Because we are helpless for an extended period, we require a lot of
attention from mommy, daddy, and the surrounding tribe. Many observers have reported that wild people
did an above average job of raising children.
Jean
Liedloff spent two and a half years living with wild people in a Venezuelan
jungle, while occasionally zipping back and forth to big city America, two
cultures that could not possibly be more different. The wild folks were generally a kind and
cheerful bunch. But every time she
stepped off a plane in America, she would immediately be jolted by how
strikingly unhappy people appeared.
Why? This question eventually
inspired her to become a therapist, and the author of an awesome book.
Our months in the womb were very safe and comfortable, the
most peaceful period in our journey.
Liedloff described how tribal folks made the transition to life in the
outer world as pleasant as possible.
From the moment of their birth, newborns were held and nursed and loved
— and this warm, secure, continuous contact lasted until the infant indicated
that it was ready to begin the creeping and crawling phase. Raised in this manner, wild kids lived with a
sense of wellbeing that might last throughout their entire lives. They were well-adjusted and happy. Life was good.
On the other hand, in the big city realm, the bright and
noisy world outside the womb could be a rather unpleasant place, sometimes
hellish. Newborns were hustled away to a
nursery, where they could cry by themselves until they ran out of tears. The sense of wellbeing disintegrated, and some
of the infants never again recovered it.
Civilized folks, who spend their lives isolated in climate
controlled cubicles, with state of the art entertainment systems, often have to
buy books to learn how to raise a kid.
Liedloff detested these <spit!> horrid books. She wrote that if parents followed the
printed instructions, they would “produce children they cannot love, who grow
up like themselves, anti-self, antisocial, incapable of giving, destined forever
to go hungry.”
Phases
of Development
During our life journey, we pass through four developmental
phases. In any society, a child’s
physical and emotional needs are different from those of an adolescent, adult,
or elder. In any region of the world,
everyone’s body physically changes through these four phases. No matter what culture we live in, our bodies
will automatically proceed from one phase to the next as we meander through the
years of our lives.
On the other hand, it’s very important to understand that our
emotional development is never guaranteed to automatically
proceed from one phase to the next. You
cannot smoothly advance into adolescence emotionally until you successfully
acquire the emotional skills of childhood.
This is true for every transition through the four phases. Each must be completed before moving up to
the next — but this doesn’t always happen.
Emotional development can get permanently stuck in one phase,
even as the years and decades keep passing.
Thus, you can have infantile adults, gray haired adolescents, and other victims
of arrested development. Many may never
develop a mature sense of social responsibility or emotional stability. This is especially common in complex
societies, which have a long reputation for being incubators of mental deformities. Evolution didn’t prepare us for living in
crowded, sprawling, synthetic habitats.
It takes about 20 years for a newborn to fully develop the
body and brain of an adult. We did not
squirt out of mom’s womb with a comprehensive understanding of how to
effortlessly glide through our joyride to the finish line. Luckily, we are social animals, and if we had
been lucky enough to be born into a healthy wild society, the community would
have provided us with timely and competent mentoring. Folks born into complex societies, like ours,
are often not so lucky.
Especially critical are the transitions from one phase to the
next. For example, a child does not
instinctively know how to gracefully move through the whirlwinds of puberty and
then smoothly flow into a delightful adolescence. Rites of initiation are ceremonies that
explore the wisdom of cultural stories, and provide important instructions for
social behavior, conflict avoidance, and other core issues. When a safety net of support is provided, transitions
can be much easier. These communities
are more likely to nurture the blossoming of sane, competent, well-adjusted
people. Modern communities do a far
sloppier job of providing guidance and support.
We are now about to take a quick peek at the phases of
development. Paul Shepard devoted a lot
of attention to this subject in four of his books, especially Nature
and Madness. He wore a critic’s hat,
and focused his flame thrower on how civilized cultures achieved great advances
in self-destruction, producing hordes of obedient grunts to crank the wheels of
the machine, and build the palaces, while rubbishing the ecosystem. His writing emits a sharp aroma of extensive
learning and intense brainpower, but it’s not a breeze to read. His career didn’t include intimate long-term
experiences in wild cultures.
Among my all-time favorite books is The Human
Cycle, by Colin Turnbull, a gentle soul and careful writer. This book focused on how different cultures
guided their people through the transitions of life’s journey. Turnbull was raised in a pathetically
dysfunctional family and peer group (upper class Britain). Later in life he deeply enjoyed spending lots
of time with the Mbuti Pygmies, who celebrated life in the Ituri rainforest of
Zaire. For many thousands of years they
were a happy and sustainable society — until paradise turned into a war zone
and logging camp. Turnbull shared
fascinating descriptions of both wonderful and wonky cultures. He gave us a delicious glimpse of how our
ancestors may have lived in the good old days.
The following comments are a generic overview. They do not describe universal practices that
are exactly the same in all societies.
Humans have created countless unique cultures over many thousands of
years. Each attempted to guide folks
through their life journey, in a wide variety of ways, with mixed results.
CHILDHOOD. Childhood
is the thrilling and confusing era of intense change that spans between
birthday and puberty. For their first
three years, all Mbuti infants remained in constant contact with their mothers,
which provided a heavenly bonding experience.
This prepared the infant for becoming a confident and competent social
being during the rest of its life.
On the other hand, in Turnbull’s upper class Britain (and
throughout much of the civilized world), the mother-infant relationship was far
less intimate and comforting. Turnbull
was raised by a long series of nannies.
Because of the terribly dangerous health risks of breastfeeding, his
mother did not nurse him. His brother
had different nannies, and lived in the same house, but the two never met until
Colin was 6, and they shared a hotel room.
With great excitement, they eagerly conversed, until mom discovered the
mistake. Rich people can sometimes be
oddballs. Colin begged gypsies to kidnap
him, but they refused.
Carleton Coon wrote that the Andaman islanders nursed their
young until the age of 3 or 4. The
hungry little milk lovers were passed around, and suckled by all lactating
women. Shepard noted that when the infant’s
bond with mother was properly formed, it encouraged the potential for intellectual
and emotional growth. But if this
bonding was dodgy, the damage done could sometimes have lifelong impact.
As the infant eventually learned to speak, crawl, and
explore, it became less dependent on mother.
This began at around age three.
For the next nine years or so, until the onset of puberty at 12 or so,
it was an amazing time of discovery. In
wild cultures, these nine years were a time window for the absolutely vital
process of forming healthy bonds with nature, in all its diversity. During this experience, kids absorbed the
richness of the natural order — animals, insects, plants, storms, stars,
aromas, colors, sounds — the sacred wonderland of creation, home sweet home!
Imagine a catfish that paid little attention to the other
living things in the lake — a fish that was raised in a radicalized catfish
supremacy cult, believed that the creator of the universe was a catfish, and the
only thing that mattered was the prosperity of catfish. How weird would that be? Unfortunately, many modern folks, eyes
riveted to glowing screens, or confined in speeding vehicles, never experience
a full immersion baptism in wild nature (like a catfish without a lake). For them, nature is merely static scenery
along the highway. Boring and
meaningless.
Wild kids spent lots of time watching the “others” (non-human
animals), learned their names, categorized them, imitated them, and studied
their anatomy when butchered. Kids knew
the daily and seasonal patterns of the others, and watched them move through
their life cycle, from youngsters to oldsters.
Kids developed a strong feeling of kinship with them.
Hunting was a core component of our wild ancestors’
lives. Folks accumulated enormous
amounts of knowledge about tracking and animal behavior. Our brains evolved, over hundreds of
thousands of years, in wild Stone Age cultures.
What you and I are today is a direct result of this very long,
beautiful, and deeply intimate wild relationship, despite the fact that it is
largely absent in the culture that currently suffocates us.
In an interview with Derrick Jensen, John Livingston shed
more light on the process of bonding with nature. A newborn human is an incredibly flexible
animal, capable of fully adapting to the worldviews, religions, lifestyles, and
languages of a vast spectrum of cultures, from “primitive” to “advanced,”
anywhere in the world.
Thus, a primary component of childhood is open-mindedness, a
mindset in which they are free and eager to explore all possibilities. So, for youngsters who have access to wild
nature, and who have a tingling curiosity to explore big magic, it’s perfectly
normal, healthy, and life enhancing to form emotional and spiritual bonds with
the family of life. If the bond with
nature doesn’t form by age 12 or so, it’s likely that it never will, but not
impossible.
In the ghoulish world of deepest, darkest couch potato
suburbia, nature has been reduced to something that folks passively watch on
gigantic flat screen TVs, while gobbling cheese doodles and guzzling fizzy
sugar water. The normal around-the-clock
stimulation of wildness, that every animal needs, is absent. Children are denied the vital education
provided by the daily affairs of the family of life. They are hobbled by what Richard
Louv would diagnose as Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD).
Stan Rowe
called it EDD (Earth Deficiency Disease), a devastating disconnection from the
meaning of life. EDD children tend to
form bonds with machines, not nature. He
estimated that consumers spend 95 percent of their lives indoors. Children are often kept under house arrest,
because parents fear that going outdoors is too dangerous. The poor kids share some similarities with the
homeless wild animals imprisoned in zoos.
Rowe wrote, “Our two best doctors are our legs.” He hated cities. “The city is an unhealthy place for those who
want to come home at least once before they die.”
In modern cultures, a major shift follows the open-minded
curiosity of childhood. It is the dawn
of a long era of tedious work, responsibilities, challenges, and
annoyances. For this reason, Turnbull
noted that we romanticize our childhood, a golden age of innocence and
joy. The Mbuti did not idolize
childhood, “because, for them, the world has remained a place of wonder, and
the older they get the greater the wonder.”
They bonded beautifully with nature, their forest home was sacred, and
the source of all goodness. When they
moved through the forest, they sang to it.
They referred to it as mother, father, or both. Life was good.
By the arrival of puberty, wild children were well rooted in
place, feeling at-one with the flora and fauna that surrounded them. They had developed a profoundly important
spiritual connection to life. Florence
Shepard, Paul’s wife, said it like this: “At the heart of our identity is a
fundamentally wild being, one who finds in the whole of wild nature all that is
true and beautiful in this world.”
PUBERTY. Oh-oh! Somewhere around 12 or so, the path begins to
get slippery, anxious, and exciting.
Welcome to puberty, girls and boys!
Puberty is the kickoff for adolescence, which is the bridge between
childhood and maturity. For females,
adolescence is generally the years between 12 and 20; and for males, 14 to
25. Puberty is time to say goodbye to
the sweet and easy innocence of childhood, and undergo a transformation into
sexual beings.
In Mbuti country, the all-knowing adult community was fully prepared
to launch into the traditional rituals and ceremonies that are among the most
important events in life, according to Turnbull. These are the rites of initiation. Shepard
noted that in various cultures, initiations often provided “ceremonies that
include separation from family, instruction by elders, tests of endurance and
pain, trials of solitude, visions, dreams, and rituals of rebirth.”
For Mbuti girls, the puberty alarm clock rings with a
dramatic event, the passing of their first blood. It was time for initiation. Often the community waited until more than
one girl was ready. The girls were then
moved to the special elima house, where they changed their attire, announcing
that they were no longer children. Boys
were allowed to visit, and there was sexual play, but it never led to
pregnancy. Girls and boys learned new
songs and sang them together.
At puberty, boys were not awakened by a bloody alarm. Every two or three years, adults selected a
group of boys between ages 9 and 11 for initiation. For Mbuti kids, who sleep in small huts near
mom and dad, the mechanics of sex were no mystery at all. Initiation was the time to learn about lots
of important stuff beyond the huffing and puffing, including the social
responsibilities of adulthood. The
strategy here was that the boys would learn — in advance — the possible
consequences of what mom and dad did in the dark.
For the Mbuti, initiation led to the emergence of “a fully
integrated self.” Me and my classmates
seem to have passed through puberty in a fairly dis-integrated manner. For our ersatz initiation, we were more or
less hurled off the end of the dock into deep water (note the high teen
pregnancy rates). For more than a few,
emotional development got stuck in adolescence (note the numerous struggling adults
in our society who are the opposite of well-adjusted and fully integrated).
If there was just one idea that Turnbull could send you away
with, it would be this: no culture handles puberty and adolescence as poorly as
ours. “The consequences of our folly are
to be seen all around us in the violence, neuroses, and loneliness of our
youth, our adults, and aged.” Some never
come close to having a full or rich life.
Shepard would be quick to add that this culture is also demented
because of our disconnection from wildness and nature, our domestication of
plants and animals, our conversion of ecosystems into cropland and crowded
urban nightmares, the exploitive and oppressive hierarchies including
patriarchy, and on and on. This is not a
good path.
ADOLESCENCE. With the
transition into adolescence, the time window for the free-flowing
open-mindedness of childhood tends to draw closed. It becomes time to put on cultural blinders,
and become fully immersed in our tribal identity. This is something like the process of how wet
pourable concrete inevitably becomes rigid, strong, and permanent. The worldview, beliefs, and values of your
culture become deeply imprinted infallible truths, a mindset you carry to the
end of your days (usually).
If you were a wild, free, and happy Mbuti, this transition was
perfectly normal, healthy, and beneficial — an essential step on the path to
maturity. Throughout adolescence, the
bonds with nature continued expanding and deepening — the Mbuti never outgrew
their sacred relationship with the family of life.
If you are a citizen of industrial civilization, its ersatz
initiation process leads to a far different outcome. Compulsory education extends from childhood
into the years of adolescence. In my
youth, busloads of kids my age were separated from society for seven or eight
hours a day, so we could be rigorously trained in the myths of our culture, and
the skills essential for full time employment.
We were trained to become aggressive, status-seeking, narrowly focused
achievers. Upon graduation, we were set
free to join the voracious locust swarms of consumers.
Turnbull received his public education at Westminster, a
prestigious school, where students had their brains filled with knowledge, in
an efficient assembly line process.
Intellectual skills, like competency in critical thinking, were not part
of the curriculum. He had nothing nice
to say about the abominable experience, only this: “It would have been good
training for a life in prison.”
In Mbuti culture, following their initiation, the new adults
did an excellent job of reintegrating with the community — almost all spent the
rest of their days living among their friends and kinfolk. They didn’t banish themselves to faraway
places, never to return. Notably, their
community was stable, closely bonded, and highly supportive.
Rites of initiation are traditionally a three-step process: (1)
separation from the community, (2) preparation for adulthood, and (3) reincorporation
into society as an adult. Industrial
culture commonly omits the last step. Many
of our successful graduates are blasted out of a cannon into the outer world,
to attend university, pursue a career, enlist in the military, or whatever. Turnbull complained that many of our
adolescents actually “expect and want
a permanent separation” from the community they grew up in, because they seek
“freedom.” They scatter to the winds
like tumbleweeds, and many are never seen again.
Like Turnbull, Shepard also loathed our culture’s assembly
line for manufacturing adults, most of whom never formed close bonds with
nature. Most were likely to imprint that
normality was largely non-living, and that humans were the only beings that
were truly alive. They internalize
chaos, and when it’s time to master social relations, they are not
prepared. Shepard wrote, “The only
society more fearful than one run by children might be one run by childish
adults.”
[Continued in sample #47]
NOTE: Since the last post, this blog crossed a
threshold. As of this morning, it has
now had 504,603 views! Thank you! I’m glad that my work is useful to some. On to a million…
