Wild Free and Happy Sample 54

 

[Note: This is the fifty-fourth 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.

[Continued from sample 53]

BEING WILD, FREE, AND HAPPY!

We live in interesting times.  Bunnies aren’t acidifying the oceans.  Salmon aren’t blindsiding the climate.  Geese aren’t nuking rainforests.  Even our closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, remain absolute champions at sustainable living.  Today, much of humankind has become disconnected from our wild, free, and happy roots.  The rest of the family of life is not amused.

Many folks believe that electric cars are environmentally harmless, and that miraculous technology will certainly stop and reverse the Climate Crisis.  Other folks, the wee minority who pay close attention to the eco-related news feeds, are more inclined toward anger, grief, and haunting premonitions of extinctions.  They perceive that our culture is a runaway steamroller destined to smash everything in its path.

Big Mama Nature is strong, fiercely determined, and invincible.  She is the spirit of life, and its sacred guardian.  She’s glad to see that the planet-thrashing catastrophe is accelerating to its exit.  Maybe its speedy demise could prevent many extinctions.  Rust in peace, and good <bleeping> riddance!  When the storms have passed, Big Mama will still be standing tall and proud amidst the smoldering ruins, nurturing the recovery of what was lucky to survive.

Some folks seriously wonder if the human species is fatally flawed, a goofy divine booboo.  There are cultures that live like hurricanes, and others that walk softly.  History repeatedly assures us that wrecking ball cultures eventually rubbish their resource base and blink out.  Those cultures are indeed ridiculous, fatally flawed, dead ends, and the impacts of their lifestyle harm the entire family of life.  Sadly, they also have a long tradition of brutalizing lower impact cultures.

At the beginning of this long and meandering word dance, I promised to serve you stories that contemplate how things got to be this way.  I promised to propose zero miraculous solutions.  Well into the writing process, I became spellbound by an exceptional culture whose simplicity and sustainability have been highly polished by centuries of heavenly isolation.  They are not fatally flawed.  So, I need to take a side trip here, and share a bit of their story.

Pirahã

I’m delighted to introduce you to the Pirahã (pee-da-ha) people of the Amazon rainforest.  They are hunter-gatherers who live in a few jungle villages near the Maici River in northwestern Brazil.  Estimates of their population range up to 800.  The outer world mostly knows about them via the work of Daniel Everett, who first met them in 1977. 

In the beginning, he had been a missionary and linguist on a mission from God to learn their language, translate the Bible, and inspire the salvation of their damned souls.  His project was nearly derailed by the fact that their language had absolutely nothing in common with any other in the world.  They were able to effectively communicate via speaking, singing, humming, and whistling.  When hunting, whistles were less likely to spook monkeys and other game.  Whistled words allowed conversations between folks who were not close together.  When Dan was present, private conversation shifted to whistling.

To help you get to know the Pirahã, let me toss out some snips and notes from assorted sources.  They hunted, fished, and foraged.  Fish provided about 70 percent of their diet, and the combo of fishing and hunting provided up to 90 percent.  Manioc was recently introduced to them by Steve Sheldon, the linguist whom Everett replaced.  Scraggly manioc plants sometimes grew in small weedy patches, and their food production was miniscule.  They did not depend on this food.

The Pirahã knew the usefulness and location of all important plants in their area.  They understood the behavior of local animals, and how to take them, or avoid them.  They could walk into the jungle naked, with no tools or weapons, and walk out three days later with baskets of fruit, nuts, and small game.  By the age of nine, all of them were capable of surviving in the jungle on their own, feeding themselves and making shelter.  They were at peace with their ecosystem because they knew how to live in it.  Their faith was in themselves. 

The Pirahã had no leaders, or social hierarchy, all were equal.  It was taboo to tell someone to do something.  Violence, anger, and shouting were unacceptable.  They were amazingly content, tolerant, and patient.  Children were never spanked or given orders.  They were free to play with sharp knives.  Adults spoke to them as equals, no baby talk. 

They often chitchat about daily events and personal affairs, but they were not storytellers.  They have no cultural folklore, legends, fables, or worship.  Everett wrote, “Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions.”  He suspects that they may be the only group in the world that has no numbers, and no creation myth.  They have no concept of sin, punishment, or god.  Nor do they fear death or evil spirits.  Belief in evil spirits is common among groups of farmers or herders, where a year’s work can be lost suddenly via bad luck.  Fishers and hunters, on an unlucky day, were more likely to lose no more than a day’s work.

The people were remarkably easygoing and infectiously happy.  They wore bright smiles, and laughed about everything.  Folks from the outer world were often astonished to be among people who were sunbeams of happiness.  A visiting psychologist, amazed by their joy, said, “The Pirahãs look the most happy of all the people we ever saw; they laugh the most of all the populations we have seen.”

In the tribe, memories of ancestors or historic events were not preserved, they evaporated.  The distant past and future were off the radar of their here and now worldview.  Their realm of reality was limited to stuff that they could personally see or hear, or things seen or heard by their living parents, grandparents, friends, and kinfolk.  History was strictly limited to living memory.  Folks didn’t worry about what happened yesterday, or what might happen tomorrow.  They had no word for worry.  They lived entirely in the here and now. 

Origins

The Pirahã have a misty past, and it will likely remain misty.  Archaeologists estimate that they arrived in the Amazon at least 10,000 years ago.  Earlier, they were a subgroup of the Mura people, but they separated from them in 1714, when annoying colonists fell out of the sky, disturbing the peace.  Most of the Mura learned Portuguese and got closer to the Brazilian culture.  The Pirahã said screw this, moved deep into the jungle, and eventually settled along the Maici River, where a passing Portuguese missionary mentioned them in 1784. 

Everyone’s ancient ancestors originally evolved on African savannahs.  As they expanded around the world, grasslands were their preferred habitat, because they could be primo hunting grounds.  Thousands of years ago, when wild hunter-gatherers from Eurasia first arrived in the Amazon, they were happy to find, kill, and eat a variety of delicious large herbivores.  At some point during this era of migration and expansion, we aren’t sure when or how, the ancestors of the Pirahã also arrived in the Amazon region.

In 2020, news stories announced the discovery of tens of thousands of ice age rock paintings in the Amazon rainforest of Colombia (Article) (Video).  They were found on an eight mile (13 km) stretch of cliff face that was sheltered from the rain.  Images date from 12,600 to 11,800 years ago, when humans were busy colonizing North and South America. 

This was about the time that a megafauna extinction spasm was underway.  The rock painters could have never imagined how generations of low intensity overhunting might gradually lead to devastating irreversible impacts (modern highly educated folks are no less shortsighted and clueless).  In the years of feasting on fantastic abundance, they expressed jubilant celebration in their art.  Life is grand!  Yum!

Today, the Amazon rainforest is dense jungle, where it hasn’t been obliterated by loggers, miners, farmers, and ranchers.  The region was much different when the painters worked.  In those days, a warming climate was transforming the ecosystem.  A patchwork of savannahs, trees, and thorny scrub was in the process of shifting into today’s leafy tropical rainforest.  Among the cliff portraits were extinct horses, mastodons, camelids, and giant sloths.  These were not jungle critters. 

The Pirahã were super lucky.  Long before the invasion of pale faced space aliens with swords, axes, and smallpox, the rainforest had time to become well established in the Amazon basin.  It created a moist tropical climate that nurtured the survival of dense jungle.  This lush habitat was not suitable for herds of large herbivores, hunters of large game, livestock herders, or food producing soil miners.  Fish was their primary source of nutrients, and it was available year round.  The daily catch was promptly consumed, to avoid spoilage, or losses to hungry nonhuman neighbors.

The ecosystem was also home to black caiman, jaguars, giant anaconda, schools of piranha, venomous snakes, malaria, and other life threatening challenges.  Roadless jungle largely prohibited overland travel, which discouraged visits from uninvited outsiders.  This worked pretty well for a very long time.  Obnoxious neighbors can be a bloody pain in the ass.

In recent years, when the Brazilian government began providing the Pirahã with food from outer space, folks got fat.  Upon receiving sugary junk food, kids began getting tooth decay.  Folks now have a village generator, lights, a TV, and clinic.  They have a school where the kids are taught math and Portuguese.  And so on.  It would be awesome if the government instead directed their attention to protecting the rainforest, punishing the swarms of two-legged eco-terrorists, and teaching Brazilian kids ecology and environmental history.

The traditional Pirahã culture generated wastes that were biodegradable, no landfill needed.  It’s important to remember that they already had a way of life that worked perfectly, was not self-destructive, and could not be improved by increased exposure to troublesome stuff from outer space — exotic cultures, technology, beliefs, habits, diseases, etc.  They enjoyed living in a stable, low impact, time-proven culture where everyone shared the same belief system, and folks smiled and laughed a lot.  What could possibly be more terrible?

Missionary Work

In the beginning, after three years of tedious struggle, Everett finally became fluent in the Pirahã language.  He translated the Gospel of Mark, and shared it with some natives.  He had no doubt that the Bible was so spiritually powerful that anyone exposed to it could not help but be overwhelmed by its truth, and inspired to rush toward a heaven-bound path.  Well, the natives were fascinated by the bit about John the Baptist getting his head cut off, but nothing else had any effect on them whatsoever.

His holy objective had been “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.”  A traditional missionary proverb says, “You’ve got to get them lost before you can get them saved.”  Everett told them that Jesus could deliver them from fear, and lead them to a good life.  But they didn’t live in fear, and they already enjoyed an excellent way of life. 

Another missionary proverb says that “everyone has a god-shaped hole in their heart,” but the Pirahã apparently had whole hearts.  None were converted despite decades of effort.  They were empirical people who expected compelling here-and-now evidence.  Notions from unknown times, places, or people were beyond their realm of reality — perfectly meaningless nonsense.

Everett had never met Jesus, because Jesus lived 2,000 years ago.  He often tried to tell the Pirahã about Jesus, but stumbled.  They asked, “Did you see him yourself?”  “No.”  “So why do you tell us about things that you have never seen?”  Another time, when he read them names from his translation of the Gospel of Luke, they assumed that these were people that Everett knew.  When he described crucifixion, they were aghast.  It was beyond comprehension.  Did Americans really do that?  This information was from outer space, not here-and-now reality.

In addition to his religious role, Everett was also a linguist, a science-based field.  The scientist in him deeply respected the importance of trustworthy evidence.  As the river of time flowed past, Everett began to question his right to tell them about ancient supernatural miracles that he had not seen with his own eyes.  He believed they were true.  Of course, believing anything makes it true, but “truth” is a slippery rascal that can cast powerful spells, and open trap doors.  He loved the Pirahã, and they loved him, but they had no interest in Jesus, and finally told him so.  This was truly a sharp metaphysical rebuke.

By around 1982, he began having uncomfortable visits from doubt fairies, and these increased with every passing month.  By 1985, the fairies had become a nonstop whirling cloud of fluttering wings.  Finally, there came a day when he was able to summon the power to see beyond the stone wall of his beliefs.  A miracle happened — the mission’s first spiritual conversion.  His old life had become unbearable.  He could never accept that they were lost and going to hell.  “I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.” 

He remained a closet atheist until the late ’90s, at which point he came out, and his wife and three children abandoned him.  By 2008, the banishment had ended.  In a 2015 interview, he noted that his son had also been awakened by doubt fairies, and that his ex-wife continued her holy efforts to save the Pirahã. 

Webs and Cleverness

Unlike the Pirahã, I wake up every morning in an apartment with hot and cold running water, electricity, refrigerator, stove, flush toilet, heater, computer, phone, book collection, etc. — decadent luxuries for idle rich folks confined in maximum impact societies.  Outside my window is a busy industrial city, streets rumbling with thousands of motorized wheelchairs.  It’s an outpost of a global civilization that’s maniacally devouring resources, pooping out mountains of waste, blindsiding the climate, and racing to oblivion.

In bed, as I wake up, I turn on the radio for an hour or two of morning news.  Every day, there is abundant evidence that much of the world is out of its mind — tsunamis of bullshit, mass hysteria, and countless conflicts.  I think about the Pirahã, who are also getting up, smiling and laughing, down by the river, welcoming the beginning of a new day.  Same species, same morning, same planet.  They have not forgotten who they are, or how to live.

Earlier, I talked a bit about human webs, associations of people that shared a similar knowledgebase.  The U.S. is in the Old World Web, a patriarchal farmer-herder culture that likely originated in Mesopotamia, and eventually grew in all directions.  It’s now found almost everywhere, with a dwindling number of backwater exceptions, like Pirahã country.

I’ve talked about how humans evolved on African savannahs, and eventually expanded around the world, long before the advent of agriculture and herding.  Humans have traditionally had a strong preference for grassland and tundra ecosystems, because they are prime habitat for large herbivores, a highly preferred food source.  Open country made it easier to see both hungry man-eating predators, and delicious herds of walking meat.  Over the centuries, vast regions of forest have been cleared to create grassland openings attractive to herds of grazing animals.

Open grasslands also made overland travel relatively easy.  There were thousands of miles of Silk Road routes.  By making long distance travel more convenient, they also encouraged the long distance exchange of seeds, commodities, ideas, and technologies.  Cleverness can be highly infectious and contagious.  When a clever idea from one culture smacks into a different culture for the first time, the collision can set off a snowballing chain reaction of brilliant, highly destructive foolishness.  For example, when knowledge of the Chinese substance we call gunpowder arrived in Europe, it sparked an explosion of innovation, which soon began generating mountains of mutilated corpses.

Epidemics of cleverness can trigger bloody competition for resources.  In these conflicts, the groups with superior cleverness tend to have the advantage.  Winners are able to grab more, feed more, fight more, enslave more, rape more, and hoard more.  It’s essential for clever wizards to pay close attention to the jungle drums of innovation, because the cutting edge is a moving target.  Great empires were never built by sleepy half-clever societies.

Living in the wholesome isolation of their rainforest, the Pirahã have not domesticated plants or animals, built cities and civilizations, developed industries, obliterated the trees, conquered neighbors, or invented automobiles and cell phones.  Their cleverness was invested in carefully mastering the art of sustainable survival, which was all they ever needed.

Diversity

In a 2007 interview, Everett said that his initial impression of Pirahã culture was that it was colorless and disappointing.  “But then I realized that this is the most intense culture that I could ever have hoped to experience.  This is a culture that’s invisible to the naked eye, but that is incredibly powerful, the most powerful culture of the Amazon.  Nobody has resisted change like this in the history of the Amazon, and maybe of the world.”

To him, the Pirahã success in resisting change seemed miraculous and otherworldly.  How was it possible that a society so healthy and happy could still survive in the twenty-first century?  It was stunning to see.  I’m not sure that resistance was the key factor here.  Isolation was probably what benefitted them most.  They had very little contact with clever people from elsewhere who had bad habits, odd tools, dark impulses, and heads slithering with brainworms. 

Everett was born and raised in California, where his cultural programming conditioned him to believe that innovation was the golden path to a better tomorrow.  This path was not focused on living in harmony with the ecosystem.  California culture is a highly diverse hell-broth of constantly clashing races, religions, classes, fads, and politics.  A better tomorrow is about more jobs, more income, more consumption, more landfills, and keeping your head above water in the ever changing currents.

In a 2017 essay, Everett praised diversity, because we learn far more (for better or worse) when we are around people who are different from us.  The more we learn, the more innovative we can become.  If we live among people who are just like us, we’re not going to learn much.  In a 2008 interview, he said that his biggest personal desire was to be able to learn faster.  He had a very busy mind.

Back in 1977, when he first fell out of the sky in Pirahã country, he landed in a living paradise of jungle diversity that bore no resemblance to California.  This diversity was ecological, not human, and it was overwhelmingly healthy.  He could have spent the rest of his life learning about the rainforest, and becoming one with it. 

Everett was once asked if an outsider could ever become fully integrated in the Pirahã culture.  He said that he could not, and had never met anyone who could.  “It requires tremendous knowledge of the jungle and its flora and fauna, as well as toughness that one rarely finds among outsiders.”  A complicating factor was his wife and three kids, who would not be eager to join a mind-expanding adventure in do-it-yourself rewilding.  If he abandoned mission work, he would lose his lifeline — and you and I would now know nothing about the Pirahã.

In 1999, when he returned to the Pirahã world from a side trip to outer space, he did not gather vegetation and build a lovely hut.  Instead, he unloaded 14 tons of ironwood from a boat, and built a two room dwelling.  It had a gas stove, freezer, water filtration system, TV, and a DVD player.  It was designed to ban the entry of bugs and snakes.  This pleased his wife and three kids.

Three Modes of Society

As mentioned earlier, Jon Young has devoted his life to promoting nature connection, because without connection, we are lost and confused critters.  He spent time with the San people of the Kalahari who had a deep spiritual connection to their land.  He said that they had perfect posture, and that their mental health factors are all positive.  They were super-happy, super-vital, and totally connected from birth to death.  In our society, maybe one in a thousand adults has connection.  Youngsters often have it, but it usually dies in the teen years, as they move into the cultural fast lane, into the realm of glowing screens and steaming hormones.

Colin Turnbull, in his most daunting book, compared the lovely wild society of Mbuti pygmies to the Ik tribe of Uganda, who were in a heartbreaking death spiral.  They had been banished from their ancient hunting grounds by the creation of a national park, and were expected to become farmers during a long and devastating drought.  Their traditional society was rapidly disintegrating, as many perished from starvation, and empathy went extinct.  The Ik reminded him of Western society, where growing de-socialization was also underway.  The Ik seemed like a spooky preview of where we were headed.

Like the Mbuti culture, Pirahã society was also held together by strong social bonds.  Their way of life depended on the complete cooperation of everyone, male and female, young and old.  This was possible because they lived in small intimate groups, where all were kin or friends, and everyone shared the same beliefs and values.  Their way of life echoed the original human blueprint.  They had no need for laws and cops.

For the Ik, family relationships had rotted, and society degenerated into a mob of self-centered individuals.  Western cultures can also be madhouses of rabid dog-eat-dog individualism.  We strive to achieve personal goals via competition for personal advancement.  We frequently suffer from the painful friction of diversity.  Our morals, values, lifestyles, ethnicities, and religious beliefs are all over the place, and often generate intolerance, resentment, exploitation, and hostility.  Our communities are too crowded and diverse to be kept in order by family connections.  So, we try to control the herd via laws, cops, and prisons. 

When cooperation and morals fail, and laws and prisons fail, door number three is social meltdown — absolute morality-free individual freedom, like the Ik.  In the ’70s, Turnbull was horrified by the rising tide of social rot in his world.  “The state itself, is resting ever more on both intellectual and physical violence to assert itself.”  Heads of state and their assistants fill the air with “loud-mouthed anti-intellectual blabberings.”  The populace “must not only not believe or trust or love or hope, but must not think.”  Sound familiar?

Abstractions

The good news is that the Pirahã, Mbuti, San, and others clearly demonstrate that the human species is not fatally flawed.  They show us that it’s possible for humans to be happy, healthy, and sustainable.  Simplicity is elegant.  What about the rest of us?  Babies born in Washington D.C. have essentially the same brains as Pirahã newborns.  Being raised in our warp speed consumer culture rewards us for living like thunder beings.  Pirahã kids leave the world in no worse condition than when they arrived.

Jack Turner was a philosophy professor who grew up to become a “belligerent ecological fundamentalist.”  Modern society was savagely and senselessly pounding the natural world to bloody bits, and this drove him mad, because it was insane.  He was deeply fond of the natural world, because it was the source of all life.  He was far less fond of eco-activists who tirelessly yowled and hissed at the designated villains, including capitalism, greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, the evil enemy-of-the-day, and so on.  They were overlooking the deeper point.

The root problem was philosophical.  Civilized cultures had reduced the natural world to abstractions — a treasure chest to be looted, a valuable machine that human brilliance should strive to rigorously control, despite barely understanding it.  (Abstract is the opposite of concrete.  Abstractions only exist as ideas or thoughts.)  The planet was being pummeled by a culture that was infested with childish abstract ideas — more is better, get rich quick, grow or die, human supremacy. 

These abstractions provided a sleazy seal of approval for numerous villainous behaviors, and they weren’t the sole domain of rich and powerful big shots.  Ordinary bubbas also got the cultural green light to clear a forest, drain a wetland, or plow a prairie.  On countless occasions, ambitious folks have gazed upon a sacred old growth forest, analyzed the potential board feet of milled lumber, calculated its dollar value, estimated the profit potential, fetched their axes, and turned living nature into lifeless cash.  This example of get-rich-quick fever is abstraction powered. 

In civilized cultures, the front line abstractions do not include reverence and respect for the natural world.  “We only value what we know and love, and we no longer know and love the wild,” Turner wrote.  “What we need now is a culture that deeply loves the wild earth.”  We must rejoin the natural world.  That’s an intelligent idea!  Is it possible?  Can we free our minds from the abstractions that cripple us?

Long ago, I chatted with Nick Trim, a Shawnee gentleman, on a Greenpeace bulletin board.  In the mid-1600s, French colonists were teaching the Shawnee how to build cabins, which involved cutting trees, an extremely dark and unnatural activity.  Many trees were home to “little people,” powerful spirits that required utmost respect.  Thus, it was necessary to knock on each tree, mention the possibility of cutting it, provide a worthy reason for doing so, and sincerely apologize for disturbing the peace.

Then, it was necessary to wait for a while, at least a day, to allow the little people to find a new tree.  A highly irritated French officer complained, “These Shawnee can’t cut a tree without a lengthy prayer, and a ceremony, and a day’s delay.”  Nick added, “I am pleased to say that some things don't change.  We still love trees.”  The frustrated officer found some French lads to do the murdering.

In our world, parents, educators, clergy, and others work to pass abstractions from one generation to the next.  Abstractions inspire cultures to send trainloads of heretics, pariahs, and useless eaters to gas chambers.  They inspire holy martyrs to put on suicide vests.  They inspire thundering mobs of Walmart Christmas shoppers to trample others in their maniacal quest to seize a bargain priced TV.  They inspire thousands of dimwitted fanatics to smash apart the U.S. capitol.  They inspire thousands of ambitious self-centered bumpkins to obliterate the Amazon rainforest.

Our poor brains are constantly raw and bleeding, thrashing with countless weird abstractions — owner, slave, freedom, oppression, success, failure, rich, poor, conservative, liberal, organic, conventional, ambition, apathy, valuable, worthless, sustainable, overshoot, sin, guilt, devils, angels, heaven, hell, creation, apocalypse, salvation, damnation, gods, goddesses, scripture, prophesy, dogmas, creeds, priests, shamans, heretics, infidels…. 

Skimming through the Wikipedia page on Abstraction, I read this: “Thinking in abstractions is considered by anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists to be one of the key traits in modern human behavior, which is believed to have developed between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.”  The development of complex language unlocked the gate, and set loose a flash flood of cleverness.  The ingenious ability to effortlessly engage in abstract thinking was a tremendous achievement on the path to domestication, civilization, industrialization, mass extinctions, and the Climate Crisis.

Every day, many long freight trains rumble through my neighborhood, blowing their horns.  Similarly my mind seems to be pulling a long train of abstractions, day after day, a heavy and tiresome burden.  They stimulate confusion, illusion, irritation, distraction.  Life would be so much lighter, freer, and easier if I could simply unhitch my mind, and stop dragging around an enormous load of cultural goofiness.  Imagine what it would be like to switch to an abstraction-free diet and immediately lose 800 pounds (363 kg) of suffocating mental sludge.  You would feel so light, bouncy, free, and alive!

I must now repeat Everett.  Listen!  “Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions.”  Wow!  This beautiful clarity must inspire their trademark smiles, laughter, and happiness.  It never occurs to them to do stupid things — burn down the forest, start a gold mine, build a dam.  They are not dangerous, unpredictable loose cannons. 

Indeed, it seems that the Pirahã were superb shamans.  They succeeded in exorcizing some thorny abstractions that caused Everett so much existential pain.  They were not demons in need of salvation, they were sweet joyful beings who knew how to live well, think with great precision, and instantly deflect mental sludge from the outer world.  When they held a mirror in front of him, he gasped, saw the light, and began a journey of healing, growth, and liberation.  Free at last! 

If only the rest of humankind could spend some years hanging out with happy, sustainable, uncivilized, illiterate, moneyless, abstraction-free role models.

 

PS:  For the sake of a smoother reading experience, I didn’t clutter up the above by noting sources.  If you are curious, and have two hours to invest, I recommend that you listen to the 52 minute The Humanist Hour #183 podcast (2015), and watch the 2012 documentary, The Grammar of Happiness.  In 2008, Everett wrote the book that introduced the Pirahã people to the world, Don’t Sleep: There are Snakes. 

If you want more, Everett did a TED talk, Wisdom from Strangers. He wrote articles Seek Out Strangers (2017) and About the Pirahãs.  The Instituto Socioambiental wrote a detailed report on the tribe.  See two articles in Wikipedia, Pirahã and Daniel Everett.  Several folks interviewed Everett:  John Colapinto (2007), Dominique Godreche (2012), Clare Dudman (2008).

The Mountain People



Anthropologist Colin Turnbull was born London in 1924, and raised in a surreal upper class family, which he described in his important book, The Human Cycle.  World War Two jolted the pampered lad into the bloody real world.  In the 1950s, he spent lots of time in the Congo, with the Mbuti Pygmies, who inspired his masterpiece, The Forest People.  It was a beautiful life-changing experience to live with healthy, happy humans who were profoundly in love with their sacred forest — nothing like the zombies of England.

When war in the Congo zapped his plans for another visit, he accepted an assignment to learn about the Ik tribe in northeastern Uganda.  The government wanted a plan for transforming them into law-abiding taxpaying farmers.  For unknown thousands of years, they had been hunter-gatherers in the Kidepo Valley, an arid mountainous savannah.

In 1962, their traditional lands became a 540 square mile (1,399 sq km) wildlife preserve, the Kidepo Valley National Park.  Hunting was banned, and the Ik were moved into the mountains.  They were expected to magically shape shift into farmers in a region that experienced droughts about one in every four years.  Turnbull’s study ran from 1965 to 1967, and the first two years were back-to-back droughts.  Crops withered in the fields, the granaries were empty, and about 2,000 people began to starve.  Turnbull described the cultural meltdown in The Mountain People. 

Turnbull wrote, “The hunter and gatherer gives little thought for the morrow, getting his feed fresh, from day to day, with the ready assurance of someone who has come to terms with the world around him.  He knows the world he lives in as few others do, and he lives in sympathy with it, rather than trying to dominate it.”  A farmer can lose a year’s work in one night.  A hunter can only lose a day’s work.

When he first got there, the famine was just beginning.  Two months later, the horror began.  People became totally self-centered.  Their two interests in life were now food and water.  Most became habitual liars, and most took every opportunity steal Turnbull’s stuff.  They pulled many juvenile pranks on him, hoping for him to get hurt or die.  “The people were as unfriendly, uncharitable, inhospitable, and generally mean as any people can be.”  They laughed hard at anyone’s misfortunes.  It was amusing to steal food from the feeble, and push them down.

Upon being weaned at age three, youngsters were thrown out of their parents’ house.  Evicted children formed bands and wandered the countryside looking for something to eat.  Lucky ones found some figs, the unlucky ate dirt and pebbles, and soon died.  Feeding children and elders, who couldn’t take care of themselves, was a foolish waste of precious nutrients.

Turnbull was often scolded for his idiotic generosity.  He was feeding folks who were soon to be dead, cruelly prolonging their misery.  Adults refused to feed their starving parents, or let them into their house.  When they died, most were quickly buried in the family compound, in secrecy.  If the villagers found out, they would expect a funeral ceremony, which required a feast.

Famines were a crappy time to be born.  Nobody was happy to see you, nobody cared.  When out foraging, mothers put their babies down roughly, and didn’t watch them carefully.  Maybe a hungry leopard would relieve her of her little bummer.  One time, a leopard ate a baby.  Sleepy from a delicious meal, the cat laid down for nice nap.  Men found it, killed it, and ate it, baby and all.

Turnbull once took pity on an old woman who was close to death.  He wanted to create a new village, where the abandoned people could be properly cared for.  She was not interested.  She wanted to die near her son, who would not take care of her.  Turnbull fed her, and gave her some food.  She burst into tears, because this triggered memories of “a time when people had helped each other, when people had been kind and good.”  She was the last survivor who remembered the good old days.

Stuff like this fills most of the book.  Turnbull spent 18 months eating by himself in his Range Rover.  For some reason, he got the blues.  He hoped “that we who have been civilized into such empty beliefs as the essential beauty and goodness of humanity may discover ourselves before it is too late.”  “Most of us are unlikely to admit readily that we can sink as low as the Ik, but many of us do, and with far less cause.”  Whoa!

I first read The Mountain People in 2001, and it snapped my mind.  It was an unforgettable book that you wished you could forget.  I was blindsided by the misery, cruelty, and horror, and this was the impression that I took away from the book.  In 2017, I read the book a second time, and it blew me away again, for another reason.  Near the end of the book, Turnbull shared some troubling conclusions that I was too dazed to grasp in my first reading.  He held up a mirror, so his well-fed readers could see their own deformities, and get their noses rubbed in them.

Having spent years with the Mbuti, he had directly experienced a healthy functional society.  Before that, he had grown to adulthood in twentieth century Western society, a world of atomic bombs, concentration camps, and the brutal extermination of tens of millions.  It was the opposite of a functional society.  It had become pathologically individualized and de-socialized — similar to the Ik, and in many ways worse.  The Ik give us a taste of our days to come.

“We pursue those trivial, idiotic technological encumbrances and imagine them to be the luxuries that make life worth living, and all the time we are losing our potential for social rather than individual survival, for hating as well as loving, losing perhaps our last chance to enjoy life with all the passion that is our nature and being.”  Today, Americans speed down the highways in their motorized wheelchairs while the polar ice melts, and monster hurricanes obliterate societies.  Sorry kids!

Here is a comment, from 45 years ago, that could have been written today.  “The state itself, is resting ever more on both intellectual and physical violence to assert itself.”  Heads of state and their assistants fill the air with “loud-mouthed anti-intellectual blabberings.”  The populace learns not to believe, trust, love, hope, or think.

The Mbuti enjoyed a society harmonized by a common set of beliefs, values, and lifestyles.  Everyone was on the same channel.  Our society is a cranky boisterous mob of numerous competing cultures, classes, and religious beliefs.  “In larger-scale societies we are accustomed to diversity of belief, we even applaud ourselves for our tolerance, not recognizing that a society not bound together by a single powerful belief is not a society at all, but a political association of individuals held together only by the presence of law and force — the existence of which is a violence.” 

Love is not a hardwired function, like breathing.  It has to be learned.  When love is not reciprocated, it dies.  The Ik demonstrated that love can go extinct.  When lonely consumers are starving for love in modern society, many choose to purchase companions. “The keeping of pets, which is one of the characteristics special to civilization, indicates a deterioration in human relationships.”

The Ik were excessively individualistic, spending their days in solitude and boredom, rarely forming significant relationships.  Each one was alone, and content to be alone.  Turnbull often sat with Ik men on a ridge overlooking the valley, gazing into space.  Day after day, all day long, not a word was ever spoken.  This reminds me of the spooky smart phone cult in my town today.  People gather around tables in a café, each silently gazing at their glowing screens.

The Ik expelled their children from home at age three.  Westerners wait until kindergarten, when the kids begin their decades of institutionalization.  The state now oversees health, education, and welfare.  We are indoctrinated with an “individualism that is preached with a curious fanaticism.”  This radical individualism “is reflected in our cutthroat economics, where almost anything is justified in terms of an expanding economy and the consequent confinement of the world’s riches in the pockets of the few.”

When it was released in 1972, The Mountain People got a lot of attention.  Immediately, hordes of dignified scholars explosively soiled their britches.  Heresy!  The Ik were nothing but an extreme exception, a bizarre mutation!  Civilized humans are moral and virtuous!  We are the greatest!

Turnbull, Colin M., The Mountain People, Touchstone, New York, 1972.

HERE is a 5-minute video about Colin Turnbull and the Mbuti.  The narrator says, “His advisor at Oxford wrote that Colin Turnbull is tall, fair, handsome, impulsive, and elusive.  All his screws are loose, real communication with him seems impossible.  Perhaps one has to belong to one of the backwards races in order to get his wavelength.”

The Sixth Extinction

I didn’t rush to read Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, The Sixth Extinction, because I imagined it would be a gloomy expose on the unfortunate consequences of way too much half-baked cleverness — and it was.  But it’s also a fascinating story about the long saga of life on Earth, and the unclever antics of the latest primate species.  It’s an outstanding book.

We have soared away into a fantasy world, where godlike humans spend their lives creating brilliant miracles.  But when observed in a 450 million year timeframe, from this moment when a new mass extinction is gathering momentum, the wonders of progress and technological innovation lose their shine.  Kolbert rips off our virtual reality headsets, and serves us powerful medicine, a feast of provocative news.

The frog people have lived on this sweet planet for 400 million years, but many are now dying, because of a fungus called Bd.  This fungus can live happily in the forest on its own, without an amphibian host, so endangered frogs rescued by scientists cannot be returned to the wild.  The crisis began when humans transported frogs that carried the fungus, but were immune to it.  There was money to be made in the frog business, and so the fungus has spread around the globe.

This is similar to the chestnut blight of a century ago.  Entrepreneurs profitably imported chestnut seedlings from Asia.  The Asian species was immune to the fungus it carried.  American chestnut trees were not immune, and four billion died, almost all of them.  The fungus persists, so replanting is pointless. 

North American bats are dying by the millions from white-nose, caused by fungus that is common in Europe, where bats are immune to it.  It was likely carried across the Atlantic by a tourist who dropped some spores in Howe Caverns, in New York.  By 2013, the die-off had spread to 22 U.S. states and five Canadian provinces. 

Welcome to New Pangaea!  Once upon a time, long before we were born, all seven continents were joined together in a single continent, Pangaea.  Over time, it broke apart, and ecosystems on each continent evolved in a unique way.  In recent centuries, highly mobile humans have moved countless organisms from one ecosystem to another, both deliberately and unintentionally.  The seven continents no longer enjoy the long-term stability provided by isolation.

On another front, many colonies of humans have become obsessed with burning sequestered carbon on an enormous scale.  This is overloading the atmosphere with carbon, which the oceans absorb and convert to carbonic acid.  Carbonic acid is a huge threat to marine life, except for lucky critters, like jellyfish.  The world’s coral reefs are dying.

Tropical rainforests are treasure chests of biological diversity.  Tropical oceans generally are not, because of low levels of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.  Coral reefs are the shining exception.  They provide habitat for thriving ecosystems, home to more than 500,000 species.  This reminded me of beaver ponds, which are also sanctuaries of abundant life. 

Coral polyps and beavers give us excellent examples of reciprocity.  They create relationships that are mutually beneficial for many species.  Reciprocity is a vital idea that most human cultures have forgotten.  Our dominant culture has no respect for the wellbeing of ecosystems.  It has a tradition of displacing or exterminating the indigenous species on the land, and replacing them with unsustainable manmade systems.

Evolution is fascinating.  Rabbits and mice have numerous offspring, because they are vulnerable to predators.  Other species have deflected the predator challenge by evolving to great size, like mammoths, hippos, and rhinos.  Big critters have long lifespans and low birth rates.  This made them highly vulnerable when Homo sapiens moved into the neighborhood. 

Kolbert imagines that the megafauna extinctions were not the result of a reckless orgy of overhunting.  It probably took centuries.  Hunters had no way of knowing how much the mammoth population had gradually dwindled over the generations.  Because they reproduced so slowly, they could have been driven to extinction by nothing more than modest levels of hunting.  An elephant does not reach sexual maturity until its teens, and each pregnancy takes 22 months.  There are never twins.  Deer are still with us, because they reproduce faster.

Sadly, Neanderthals are no longer with us.  They lived in Europe for at least 100,000 years, and during that time, their tool collection barely changed.  They probably never used projectiles.  They have acquired a reputation for being notorious dimwits, because they lived in a stable manner for a very long time, and didn’t rubbish the ecosystem.  Homo sapiens moved into Europe 40,000 years ago.  By 30,000 years ago, the Neanderthals were gone.  The DNA of modern folks, except Africans, contains up to four percent Neanderthal genes.

Homo sapiens has lived in a far more intense manner.  In the last 10,000 years, we’ve turned the planet inside out.  Kolbert wonders if there was a slight shift in our DNA that made us so unstable — a “madness gene.”  I wonder if we’re simply the victims of cultural evolution that hurled us down a terrible path.  If we had been raised in Neanderthal clans, would we be stable, sane, and happy?

Kolbert laments, “The Neanderthals lived in Europe for more than a hundred thousand years and during that period they had no more impact on their surroundings than any other large vertebrate.  There is every reason to believe that if humans had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals would be there still, along with the wild horses and wooly rhinos.”

Cultures have an amazing ability to put chains on our mental powers.  Kolbert describes how scientists (and all humans) typically struggle with disruptive information, concepts that bounce off our sacred myths.  Bizarre new ideas, like evolution, extinction, or climate change, are reflexively dismissed as nonsense.  As evidence of reality accumulates, increasing levels of absurd rationalizations must be invented.  Eventually, someone actually acknowledges reality, and a paradigm shift is born. 

For most of my life, human extinction has not been on my radar.  By the end of Kolbert’s book, readers understand that our extinction is more than a remote, theoretical possibility.  What is absolutely certain is that we are pounding the planet to pieces.  Everything is connected, and when one type of tree goes extinct, so do the insects that depend on it, as well as the birds that depend on the insects.  When the coral polyps die, the coral reef ecosystem disintegrates.

The sixth mass extinction is clearly the result of human activities.  The driving forces include the things we consider to be our great achievements — agriculture, civilization, industry, transportation systems.  This is highly disruptive information, and everyone is working like crazy to rationalize our nightmares out of existence.  Luckily, a number of people, like Kolbert, are beginning to acknowledge reality.  Will there be a paradigm shift?  Will we walk away from our great achievements, and spend the next 100,000 years living in balance with the planet?

Kolbert, Elizabeth, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2014.

The Human Web

Cultural cheerleaders constantly shout about how lucky we are to live in an age of miracles, a utopia of technology and progress.  Everything is just great (if you cram most of reality under the bed).

But the folks who rip off their blinders know better.  They can perceive huge and growing crises that cannot be well addressed via the pursuit of shopping and entertainment.  They can see that it’s time to learn, to think, and to change.  Understanding how we got into this bog of predicaments requires learning, lots of learning.  For this, we need our superheroes, the historians.

William McNeill, and his son John, heard the calls for help, and came to the rescue.  William once tried to boil the human journey down to one book, but it was 829 pages, too big for general readers.  John’s vision was human history in 200 pages, and he teamed up with his father to write it.  The finished product was 350 pages, and titled The Human Web.

The book slices human history into time blocks, and provides snapshots of the world during each period.  It’s not a sleep-inducing recital of kings, empires, wars, and dates.  It’s about trends — in technology, weaponry, religion, worldviews, and environmental impacts.  The McNeills framed their discussion based on a model of webs, which are networks of communication and trade.  Throughout the book, they take readers on an interesting promenade through the ages.  Let’s take a peek at a few of their topics.

For most of the human journey, our hunter-gatherer phase, webs were small nomadic clans.  They weren’t completely isolated.  For example, the freakishly powerful new technology of bows and arrows made it much easier to deplete game and enemies.  It managed to gradually spread from web to web until it was used everywhere except Australia.  This was version 1.0 of the worldwide web.  Technology that expands food production or kill-power has always been popular and highly contagious.  Webs that don’t adopt the latest technology have an increased risk of extinction.

As humans migrated out of Mother Africa, into non-tropical ecosystems, new challenges and opportunities forced many changes.  Survival depended on flexibility and innovation, and we got quite slick at this.  By 40,000 years ago, we had become a potent “weed species” of invasive exotics, like dandelions, rats, and houseflies.  Nothing could stop our spread.

With the emergence of agriculture 12,000 years ago, webs got bigger, and interacted more with neighboring webs.  Around 6,000 years ago, the emergence of cities led to metropolitan webs.  Things and ideas spread faster and farther.  Strong webs frequently expanded by absorbing weaker webs.  By 2,000 years ago, the highly successful Old World web included most of Eurasia and North Africa.  Finally, by 500 years ago, most of the world’s webs merged into the cosmopolitan web, which spanned the entire globe.

We began domesticating animals about 6,000 years ago.  Along the way, we learned a new trick, milking them.  “Herdsmen, in effect, substituted themselves for kids and lambs as consumers of milk — an extraordinary perversion of natural biological relationships.”  By going into the dairy business, a herder could extract four times more calories from their enslaved animals, compared to simply eating them.

Salvation religions, like Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam grew in popularity because they made life tolerable for the oppressed majority.  Everyone, including women and slaves, had souls, so nobody was worthless.  Those who obeyed the divine rules while alive were promised eternal life in paradise.

Trading by barter was often clumsy.  I might not want to trade my wheat for your rutabagas.  The invention of money made trading much easier.  This greatly increased the exchange of goods, and the injuries caused to ecosystems.  Emperors also loved money, because taxes paid in rutabagas were a hassle.  When peasants were required to pay taxes with money, they had to acquire money by selling stuff, forcing them to produce commodities.

In A.D. 1000, most of Western Europe was largely forest, and lightly populated.  Then the moldboard plow came into use.  It enabled farmers to till heavy soils.  Cropland rapidly expanded as forests shrank.  A similar explosion occurred in India and China, as rice farming spread between A.D. 200 and 1000, spurred by irrigation, iron tools, and the use of oxen.  Population growth accelerated.

In the good old days, communities were not diverse.  Members of small webs shared the same worldview, so there was far less friction.  With the invention of the printing press, cities were flooded with information from many cultures, and many of the new ideas conflicted with traditional beliefs.  Both the Pope and Luther howled, and tried to block the rising tide of science and other heresies.  Today, science is working to standardize the global mind, at the expense of multinational religions and animist traditions.

Civilization is addicted to agriculture.  Soil mining and water mining are unsustainable.  We know this, but it’s impossible for us to go cold turkey and quit the habit.  Similarly, we have become extremely addicted to the unsustainable use of fossil fuels, and our modern way of life would be impossible without them.  Non-renewable resources do not last forever.  Our super-sized global society is lurching toward its expiration date.

The most disturbing trend in this book is a non-stop, ever-growing arms race, driven by an obsession with perpetual growth.  It seems to be impossible for unsustainable societies to stop pursuing more and better ways of smashing each other.  During the industrial era there has been explosive growth in death technology.  In the twenty-first century, we are now capable of wiping out most of humankind in a single day, with the push of a button.

The last chapter provides two summaries.  John, the son, writes first.  He sees history as an ongoing race for complexity, requiring ever-increasing flows of energy and information.  In remote areas, simple cultures still work, but when complex cultures thrust into their sacred home, the days of wildness and freedom are soon over.  Complexity provides immense competitive advantages, as long as the inflow of extracted resources continues.  But the inflow is beginning to sputter.  Consequently, “the chances of cataclysmic violence seem depressingly good.”

Then William, the father, writes.  The path that led us to having one worldwide web was driven by a collective pursuit of wealth and power.  He wondered how long this web could survive on our current energy flows.  William thought that for long-term survival, we needed to return to small face-to-face communities, “within which shared meanings, shared values, and shared goals made life worth living for everyone, even the humblest and least fortunate.”  He concluded, “My personal hunch is that catastrophes — great and small — are sure to come and human resilience will prove more than we can imagine.”

This book is part of a significant watershed in the modern perception of reality.  It is pushing aside the magical thinking that assured us that technology and wise leaders could be trusted to smooth the path before us.  Very late in the game, it’s finally acceptable for respected scholars like the McNeills to state the obvious.  They point to big storms ahead, ready or not. 

Constantly wishing away the swarms of contradictions makes us crazy.  When we stop wishing, and open our eyes, the world suddenly snaps into sharp focus, and makes perfect sense — we are not in utopia; we are lost.  Finally, we have a call to action.  How can we get home?  It’s time to pursue understanding, and stir in generous amounts of imagination.  Our experiment in controlling and exploiting ecosystems has been a disaster.  On the path forward, adapting to ecosystems is likely to work far better.  It’s worth a try.

McNeill, J. R. and McNeill, William H., The Human Web — A Bird’s-eye View of World History, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2003.