The Gallic Wars



After a long and crazy joyride in overshoot, enormous bills are coming due.  Industrial civilization is sliding toward foreclosure.  Capitalism gets the blame, but the roots of the madness go far deeper, older than ancient empires.  Many public buildings in America imitate the architecture of the Roman Empire, with their rows of tall stone columns.  Like ancient empires, our economic tentacles reach far into distant provinces, sucking up the wealth.  Like them, we are obsessed with perpetual growth, by any means necessary, to avoid being absorbed by competing empires.

Empires must constantly resist competitors.  Empires behave like alpha male chimps defending their harems.  Alphas live amidst numerous horny alpha wannabes, who carefully wait for the moment when the big boy stumbles.  Julius Caesar was a famous alpha, and The Gallic Wars is the story of his glory days, when he turned hundreds of thousands of folks into wolf chow and compost.  His book gives us a glimpse of life in Western Europe more than 2,000 years ago (51 B.C.).

Chimps fight for dominance with fists, feet, teeth, and teamwork.  Killing is not the objective.  Caesar’s troops were professional killers, well equipped with state of the art swords, spears, helmets, armor.  Fighting was face-to-face.  Warriors had to “come to grips” with their foes, and get splashed with blood and sweat.  Those who were aggressive, strong, experienced, and lucky were more likely to see another day.  Today, we fight more with technology — triggers, pushbuttons, and mouse clicks.

In a nutshell, this book is a play-by-play description of Caesar’s efforts to conquer the world.  He immodestly boasts about his brilliant victories, conquering the Celtic tribes of Gaul (France) and Belgae (Belgium).  The Gallic tribes had agriculture and cities, which chained them to a place they had to defend.  Roman trade networks gave them access to luxurious status trinkets.  The Belgae lived farther from empire, and were more scruffy and dangerous.  (MAP)

There were two groups in Gaul’s upper class, Druidic priests and warriors.  The priests provided spiritual guidance, resolved conflicts, and oversaw sacrifices.  Their training, which took up to 20 years, required them to memorize a large collection of verses.  Druids shunned writing, because it weakened memory, a crippling handicap.  Consequently, we know almost nothing about them today.  Caesar noted that human sacrifices were common, an excellent way to reward criminals.  Men were sometimes burned alive in wicker baskets.

Gallic warriors had no fear of death, because souls never die, they move to other bodies.  Their tribes clashed like Los Angeles street gangs.  If the Gallic tribes had been unified, they could have turned the Romans into wolf chow, but they figured this out too late in the game.  They eventually merged their armies together under Vercingetorix, and 40,000 Gauls attacked Caesar.  At the end of the battle, only 800 Gauls survived (according to Caesar).

When Caesar conquered a tribe, they were forced to pay tribute to Rome.  They also had to provide conscripts for the Roman legions.  The legions largely consisted of lads from the provinces, not indigenous Romans.  In Rome, the citizens enjoyed many luxuries, thanks to the massive wealth extracted from the provinces.  Military expansion generated many prisoners, who were either executed or sold into slavery.  Around 30 to 40 percent of the residents of Rome were slaves (similar to low wage workers today).  They were often treated brutally.  Today, our school children are taught that Rome was cool, a role model for a great nation.

Caesar took his troops to England.  Along the southern coast, there were colonies of Belgae farmers, who lived much like the Gauls.  North of the coast lived the indigenous Britons, who were skilled at hit-and-run guerilla warfare.  They would swarm out of the forest, kill disorganized troops, and return to the forest, where Romans dared not follow.

Few Britons grew grain.  They were herders and hunters who lived on milk and flesh.  They were clothed in animal skins, and the men had long hair and moustaches.  Warriors applied woad to turn their skin blue, causing opponents to wet their pants with fear.  The effort to conquer England failed when most of the Roman ships were destroyed by a powerful storm.  Caesar was almost defeated, and barely managed to escape.

German tribes were the scariest opponents.  Most of them lived east of the Rhine River, but some had crossed the river, and conquered portions of Gaul.  This was a serious threat to empire turf.  Caesar attacked the 120,000 German intruders, transforming most of them to wolf chow.

He then built a wooden bridge across the Rhine, spent 18 days molesting Germans, returned to Gaul, and destroyed the bridge.  Roman legions did not haul tons of food with them on their campaigns.  They acquired food along the way, snatching it from farms and towns.  This didn’t work in Germany, where little grain was grown and stored.  Also, wilderness warfare gave the Germans a huge advantage.  Protected by the mighty river, they were lucky to remain wild and free longer than other regions.

In those days, Germany was a land of vast forests and wetlands.  Caesar jabbered about the numerous stags and elk.  The aurochs (wild cattle) astonished him.  He said they were a bit smaller than elephants, and impossible to tame.  “Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied.”  The “wild and savage” Germans “were men of huge stature, of incredible valor and practice in arms.”  They were hunters, herders, and warriors.  Their diet majored in milk, cheese, and flesh.  They wore deerskin cloaks that left much of their bodies exposed, even in cold weather.

Chieftains assigned parcels of land to clans and families every year.  Everyone had to move annually, so nobody constructed McMansions (cool idea!).  The best parcels never stayed in the same hands, and this wisely prevented some from getting richer than others.  Equality breeds contentment and cooperation.  On the other hand, robbing others was OK.  Raiding outsiders was a good way to improve useful skills, grab booty, and cure boredom.

Conquest was also OK.  It pushed back folks who might raid your livestock.  Life was more secure when outsiders lived nowhere close.  The best neighbors were those who lived far away, and were never seen.  The Suevi tribe was the largest, most warlike, and most feared.  On one side of their territory, there was an uninhabited region that was 600 miles long.  Smart people didn’t mess with them.

As discussed in my review of Germania, tribes that became dependent on agriculture and/or herding increased the carrying capacity of the land.  Thus, population increased, as did social tensions.  Livestock were valuable status trinkets that presented an irresistible temptation for rustlers.  Raiding and tribal warfare were common in this era.  The same pattern emerged in the American west (and everywhere else) when tribes acquired domesticated horses and livestock.  Anthropology reports that nomadic hunter-gatherers avoided much craziness by owning very little.  They were egalitarian — the opposite of empire.

Anyway, everyone in Rome was amazed by Caesar’s astonishing success in war.  Then, when he returned to Rome, he was assassinated by nobles.  The end.

Caesar, Julius, The Gallic Wars, London MacMillan, London, 1908.  Translated by T.  R.  Holmes.

Make America Great Again



 

In 2016, the election slogan of TV star Donald Trump was “Make America Great Again!”  One day, a pilgrim on the internet asked, “When was America great?”  For someone deeply immersed in the study of ecological sustainability, the answer was obvious.  America was great at least 15,000 years ago, when America resembled something like the Serengeti — a self-regulating (manager-free) wild ecosystem in a climax phase.

In those days, America was a paradise for the indigenous mastodons, wooly mammoths, wooly rhinos, short-faced bears, cheetahs, saber-tooth lions, jaguars, and many others who are now gone forever.  They had inhabited this ecosystem for millions of years, and successfully coevolved in it.  This was their ancient home and community.

I’m not exactly certain why there were so many extinctions, but all had survived hundreds of thousands of years of recurring ice age cycles.  Experts with their high-tech gadgets assert that many disappeared from the stage in the same era that humans from Siberia arrived.  Of course, other continents had similar experiences.  Europe, Asia, and Australia were also great prior to the arrival of two-legged tropical primates, and then went downhill in the millennia that followed.

Evolution is brilliantly simple — as conditions change, species genetically adapt via natural selection, a slow and steady process that has worked very well for a few billion years.  Our innovative tropical primate ancestors figured out how to sneak around this time-proven process.  For example, learning how to preserve and control fire was a big juju shift that no other animals have made.

With fire, they were better able to fend off predators.  They could stay warm in non-tropical climates.  They learned how to cook, which made it easier to digest food.  Cooking made many inedible substances edible, and these were added to their diet.  Consequently, they could extract more calories from the same territory.  So, the carrying capacity of their habitat increased, which led to more well-fed bambinos.

This process is called cultural evolution — a deliberate way of altering our relationship with the ecosystem via learning and innovation, a process for change that was far faster than genetic evolution.  With clothing and shelters, they could survive in cooler lands.  With weapons and teamwork, they could kill animals much larger than themselves.  When they first arrived in new ecosystems, the wildlife had no instinctive fear of them, which made hunting ridiculously easy.  This led to more well-fed bambinos.

Eventually, we became clever enough to live everywhere, even the Arctic.  Cultural evolution gained momentum, transforming many societies of two-legs into ecological super storms.  Technological innovation has given us the power to poison the oceans, erase vast forests, exterminate wildlife, and disrupt the planet’s climate systems — and we’re bloody proud of this.  We call it Progress.

Our closest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos (like all other animals), did not board the runaway train of cultural evolution.  Their ancestors have lived in the same tropical ecosystem for millions of years, without wrecking it.  Our DNA is ninety-nine percent the same as theirs.  All newborn humans are wild tropical primates, expecting to spend their lives in a thriving Serengeti, but most of their parents have been entranced.  Most newborns squirt out of the womb into a batshit crazy culture.

This crazy culture imagines that one animal species (guess who) is superior to everything else in the universe, and no other species matters at all.  In this culture, newborns grow up, go to school, get a job, and spend their entire lives wandering around amidst mobs of neurotic insecure tropical primates.  Unlike wild humans, and other wild animals, consumers mature, reproduce, and die in a bleak space station culture of human supremacy.

I once spent nine years in the forest.  Humans would build a cabin in bear country, and live as if they were in a sterile suburban cul-de-sac where everything wild had been exterminated.  They’d put their garbage (bear food) on the porch, which would attract… (guess who).  A hungry bear would dine on the wasted food, the moron would race of the cabin with a high-powered rifle, screaming obscenities at the “problem bear,” and blow it away.  The moron perceived himself to be the lord and master of the ecosystem.  This attitude is perfectly normal in our culture.

You see, the mastodons and wooly rhinos instinctively lived in an ancient time-proven manner — automatically, thoughtlessly, effortlessly — like the other species in the world.  This is exactly why America was great.  It worked!  The American flora and fauna had succeeded in adapting to millions of years of ongoing changes of climate and habitat via evolution and coevolution.  By staying on the traditional path, they did not nervously tap-dance through minefields of their own making.

By adapting fire, clothing, and weapons, two-legs had moved onto a terrifically dangerous path.  They had become far more powerful than bonobos or chimps.  They were en route to becoming the mightiest critters on the planet — via culture, not genes — a treacherous daredevil experiment with no safety nets.

To wisely avoid self-destruction, the innovative two-legs had to have foresight.  They had to have respect and reverence for their ecosystem.  They had to develop traditions and taboos that expected everyone to practice self-restraint.  No other species had to struggle with these highly challenging responsibilities.  Surprisingly, numerous human societies actually succeeded in living mindfully, until being clobbered by… (guess who).  The Koyukon, Ohlone, Ojibway, and many other tribes carefully adapted to their ecosystems, and lived for thousands of years in a low-impact manner.  Great, eh?

Today, I’m living in a culture that generates staggering amounts of scientific data, but has pathetically limited foresight.  There is little respect for this ecosystem.  Self-restraint is seen as a disgusting disability in a consumer culture obsessed with unrestrained self-indulgence, and an insatiable hunger for status and power.  History is clear that cultures like this one routinely trump the wild cultures of reverence, respect, and restraint.  Civilized cultures mindlessly mangle everything in their paths.

The Glowing Screen People inhabit a wonderland of technological progress — not a devastated ecosystem.  They do not perceive the huge gaping holes in the family of life.  They have no awareness of all that has been lost.  They do not grieve the absence of giant condors, giant beavers, giant armadillos, giant bears.  They have no memory of the great American Serengeti.  They will barely notice the passing of the last lions and tigers and bears, and few will grieve their demise.

Well, gosh, we’ve inherited an interesting mess, and it’s getting worse.  This is the opposite of great, methinks.  Genes did not get us into this mess, culture did — it’s a buggy software thing.  Our nightmare is a swirling roaring pandemonium of dysfunctional beliefs, ideas, fantasies, and illusions — toxic cultural baggage.  But our society is not required to continue operating on Ecocide 1.0 until the bloody end.  We have the option of creating an entirely different operating system, in theory.  Attempting to dominate and exploit the entire family of life has been a catastrophic experiment in megalomania and embarrassing foolishness.

We’re not going to bring back the wooly rhinos and mastodons.  America will not return to a healthy stable wild paradise for a very long time.  People capable of thinking outside the box understand that the path to ecological sustainability travels in the opposite direction from the current path of windmills, solar panels, electric cars, nuke plants, voyages to Mars, and happy meals for eleven billion shoppers on antidepressants.

Anyway, I wonder if this was the profound vision of “great again” that Donald Trump struggled so clumsily to convey — turning out the lights, walking away from civilization, going home sweet home, and living happily ever after.

The Tender Carnivore

Paul Shepard was an animal with a PhD who made the astonishing discovery that he really was an animal, and so was everyone else.  This sort of thinking makes us sweaty and nervous, because we prefer to believe that we are the creator’s masterpiece — not the cousins of disgusting baboons and orangutans.  It’s insulting to call someone’s kid a cute animal.

Two-legged primates evolved as hunters and gatherers in healthy wild habitats, living in groups of a dozen or so.  These highly intelligent animals were perfectly at home in natural surroundings, but today’s two-legs are overwhelmed by the input barrage of modern life.  For two-legs, industrial civilization feels like a prison.  Could this be why we are frantically shopping the planet to smithereens?  Shepard spent his life trying to solve this riddle.

Historians have invented glorious stories of the incredible ascent of humankind, from hungry dirty peasants to futuristic cell phone zombies.  In the process, they whited out ninety-nine percent of the human journey, the era before we went sideways.  Restricted to this heavily edited history, our culture has “unwittingly embraced a diseased era as the model of human life.”  This has nurtured “a malignant self-identity.”

We can’t know who we are if our past has been whited out.  In his book, The Tender Carnivore, Shepard pulls back the curtains and presents readers with the 14 million year version of our story.  Notably, the book leaps outside the wall of flatulent myths, and speaks from a viewpoint where wild people are normal healthy animals, and planet thrashers are not.  His ideas provide an effective antidote to the trance, a charm to break the curse.

The book includes a timeline of the human saga.  By 40,000 years ago, we had 240 tools, and numbered 3.3 million.  By 10,000 years ago, we had domesticated sheep, goats, and cereals, and there were 5.3 million.  By 6,000 years ago, we had irrigation, pottery, metal, war, states, wheel, trade, ideology, and writing — and there were 86 million.  The human enterprise was getting dangerously out-of-balance.

Tree monkeys are relatively safe from predators, so males and females are about the same size, and the troop is sexually promiscuous.  Ground monkeys, like baboons, are far more vulnerable to predators, so they are larger, and live in tight groups.  They kill and eat other animals.  The males are much bigger and stronger than the females, and they are hot-tempered.

Ground monkeys are “the most aggressively status-conscious creatures on Earth.”  High-ranking males have primary access to females and food.  They are constantly watched by low-ranking males, who wait for signs of aging and weakness, and opportunities to drive the big boy out of the harem.  They are high-strung animals who constantly adapt to a hierarchy that is always changing.

Humans are also status-conscious critters, so it’s hard for us to recognize that this monkey business is unusual in the animal kingdom.  Monkeys are not our direct ancestors, but we share many genes with them.  Like ground monkeys, every group of humans has a hierarchy of individuals, from ultra-cool to scruffy riffraff.

In sedentary human societies, where personal wealth varies, the status game is amplified by hoarding status trinkets — cars, televisions, and other valuables.  Is it possible that the reason folks refuse to wean themselves from habitual car driving is because it would sharply reduce their social status — something far more important than a stable climate?  Shepard says that we are obsessed with immature goals and follow trends like a dumb herd.

The ape family includes chimps and gorillas.  They inhabit forests, and spend the daylight hours on the ground.  Chimps live in groups of about 40, and use a few very simple tools.  They are nice, mild mannered animals, Shepard says.  But when Shepard was writing, Jane Goodall’s chimp research was just beginning.

It turns out that chimp groups are ruled by an alpha male, who aggressively dominates the females.  They are also violent killers.  Goodall saw one chimp group completely exterminate another group.  Bonobos are their closest relatives, and they are strikingly different.  Bonobo groups are matriarchal, extremely promiscuous, and rarely violent.

A number of anthropologists have reported that, among recent hunter-gathers, males are not dominators, with some exceptions.  But many would agree that, during the civilized era, the status of women often got the shaft.  Shepard’s overview of primate history suggests that male domination and abuse was not invented by Middle Eastern deities.  Evolution can get rough.

When scientists raised chimps in their homes, along with their own children, the chimps were at least as intelligent as children, until the children were three or four, learned language, and left the chimps in the dust.  Language promotes mental development, spurring reasoning and knowing.  Yet, without language, lions and wolves are superior hunters.  Intelligence is an evolutionary experiment.  It allows us to better comprehend the complexity of the world, but it also enables us to better destroy it.

When adolescence concludes with a successful initiation into adulthood, the youth becomes a confident fully human animal that is well integrated with the non-human environment.  He clarifies his self-identity, moves closer to his peer group, and away from his parents.  When initiation is botched or omitted, the youth remains trapped in adolescence, chronically narcissistic, enraged at humankind and nature for failing to help him become a complete human.  “Everyone who fails will be intellectually, emotionally, and socially retarded for the rest of his life.”

Because humans evolved to be ground-dwelling wild omnivores, the hunter-gatherer way of life “is the normal expression of his psychology and physiology.  His humanity is therefore more fully achieved, and his community is more durable and beautiful.”  When removed from a healthy wild environment, folks “live in constant crisis, stress, and poor mental health.”

Throughout the book, Shepard directs a fire hose of ideas at readers, and some are stronger than others.  This one is false: “Hunters and gatherers, by contrast, do not make war.”  When Knud Rasmussen trekked from Greenland to Siberia in the 1920s, he reported several regions where warfare was common, in his book Across Arctic America.

It is also false that all humans are inherently violent.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Richard Lee, and Colin Turnbull all reported that Pygmy and Bushman hunter-gatherers were not warlike.  People with adequate space and resources like to sing and dance.  The Inuit described by Rasmussen lived in extremely low population density, but the lands they inhabited had an extremely low carrying capacity.  Crowding is a social disease that causes frantic agitation.

In the last chapter, Shepard looks toward the future.  He presents us with imaginative, impractical, and sometimes daffy solutions.  Rather than burning oil, we could use yeast to convert it into high-protein food.  Agriculture and domesticated animals must go.  Human settlements should be limited to a five-mile strip along the coasts, returning the interiors of continents to nature.  In the wild lands, only foot travel would be allowed.  Only hand weapons could be used for hunting, no guns or dogs.  And so on.

The book was written in the good old days of the early 1970s, when there were fewer than four billion, and the future seemed fairly stable.  Peak oil and climate change had yet to walk onto the stage.  We seemed to have time to repair things.  This is a 40-year old book, with a few rough edges, but well worth the time.

Shepard, Paul, The Tender Carnivore, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1998.  [1973]

Other reviews of Shepard books: Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Nature and Madness, The Others, Thinking Animals, Encounters with Nature, Where We Belong