[Note: This is the fifty-second 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.
HUMAN
WEBS
The culture we live in is fantastically irrational, burning
every bridge it crosses, and then charging forward to rubbish what lies
ahead. Efforts to comprehend reality
often result in throbbing headaches. In
the early pages of this book, I mentioned a fundamental question that William
Cronon’s father gave him, to help his son navigate the path of life with
greater wisdom, “How did things get to be this way?” Both father and son were history
professors. His question has guided my
process of writing this book.
William and
John McNeill were another father and son team of historians, and their
vision was to write a book that actually answered the question. William’s 1963 experiment was written in a
conventional history textbook style, and was a hefty 829 pages. John thought a slimmer and slicker book was
possible. He envisioned an
unconventional approach, and with a few years of effort the two of them got the
job done in 350 pages, The Human Web.
Webs are relationships that link together groups of people
that have come into contact with each other.
These meetings encourage exchanges of information. In ancient times, hunter-gatherers were few
in number, and widely dispersed. Bow and
arrow technology somehow spread around the wild and roadless planet, to every
continent except Australia. This was
made possible, over the passage of millennia, by the first worldwide web, which
remained a loose and informal network.
As wild folks migrated into unknown lands, and encountered new
challenges, innovation increased the odds for survival. Learning the skills used by others could be
extremely beneficial.
Then came agriculture.
As farming and herding grew in importance, the human herd also
grew. More and more cities and
civilizations mutilated once-healthy ecosystems, filling the land with more and
more people. Strangers from different
webs bumped into each other, more and more often. These random meetings exposed folks to more
and more foreign technologies, crops, ideas, goods, and so on. Over time, regional webs formed, and these
often merged with others, forming larger webs. Webs enabled a wide variety of information to
travel to distant lands, where it accumulated, mutated, intermingled, and
jumped on the next boat or caravan to elsewhere.
Eventually, via this process of mergers and acquisitions, the
most powerful web of all came into existence around A.D. 200, the Old World
Web. In its early phase, it spanned
across North Africa and most of Eurasia.
By 1450, about 75 percent of humans lived within it. After 1890 it grew explosively. Today, it has essentially become a single
worldwide web that includes most of humankind, from beggars to billionaires.
As professors, the McNeills had a sacred occupational
obligation to gush with pride about the wonders of science, technology, progress,
and human brilliance. It’s mandatory
that innocent young students be filled with a radicalized blind faith that
we’re zooming up the path to a better tomorrow.
At the same time, the McNeills felt a moral obligation to make an
embarrassing confession, regarding the dark shadow of brilliance —
civilization’s chronic addiction to self-destructive habits. The amazing consumer wonderland that we live
in is only kept on life support by ever-growing complexity made possible by
ever-increasing flows of rapidly diminishing non-renewable resources,
especially fossil energy — a steep and slippery downhill path to a mangled
tomorrow.
More and more, the inflow of strategic resources is getting
dodgy. We are moving at a brisk velocity
toward rock solid limits. Consequently,
John regretfully sighed, “the chances of cataclysmic violence seem depressingly
good.” They were writing 20 years ago,
back in the happy days when far less was known about methane plumes, melting
permafrost, abrupt climate change, and the limits of modern technology to
conjure miraculous solutions.
Deep
Connection
In prehistoric times, webs were small and simple exchanges
between neighboring tribes. Like all
other wild critters, our ancestors were absolutely integrated into the
ecosystem around them, to a degree that we can barely imagine today — like your
hand is connected to your arm. The full
attention of all their senses was tuned into the sights, sounds, and smells of
the surrounding land. Their world was
sacred, spiritually alive, worthy of full respect.
Louis
Liebenberg spent lots of time among hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari
Desert, folks who lived like your ancestors once did. Today, some experts believe that the
ancestors of every living human trace back to their ancient gene pool. Hunting on the hot, dry Kalahari was
challenging. Some hunters were more
skilled than others. In one group, up to
half of the adult men did not kill even one large animal in a year. Some barely killed any large game during
their entire lives. Reciprocity was the
bedrock norm. Meat was always equally
shared with everyone. Hunters were
expected to be humble and gentle. When a
lad had a long lucky streak, he might take some time off — sometimes for weeks
or months — to avoid inspiring envy and resentment.
Each band lived within a territory that they considered their
hunting grounds. The boundary lines were
not marked, but all the neighboring hunting bands knew where they were, and
respected them. Boundaries reduced the
likelihood of friction and conflict. In
drought years, when a hunting ground dried up, the band could shift to the
hunting ground of an allied band. This
provided life insurance in a land where precipitation varied from place to
place, and year to year.
It’s hard to imagine our ancestors’ extremely intimate
connection to place. Natalie
Diaz described this relationship. In
the Mojave culture, there is no separation between me and the place that
surrounds me, we are one. Each person is
entirely a living embodiment of the nearby water, air, soil, plants, and
animals. In the Mojave language, the
same word is used to express both body and land, because they are
the same. People are buried in the land
of their birth, the land of their ancient ancestors, the place where they
belong, home sweet home. Over time, the
family of life recycles their corpses, and new beings arise.
You carry yourself much differently when you deeply
experience your sacred connection to all that is, and are fully present in a
healthy wild ecosystem. This sense of
oneness with life, experienced by our Homo ancestors for more than two
million years, has had a substantial influence on the development of what we
are as a species. The mind and body of
the amazing critter you see in the mirror was fine-tuned via a very, very long
era of successfully living as happy, healthy, brown skinned, curly haired, bare
naked, illiterate wild heathens in the tropics.
We continue to squirt out of the womb with the genes of a
Pleistocene tropical primate. Today’s
newborns still expect to open their eyes in a healthy wild world that is filled
with abundant life. They are ready to
spend their life’s journey wandering, living in small bands of family and
friends, singing under the stars, dining on a generous variety of wild foods. We only become unstable oddballs when we are
born into a dysfunctional society, and have no choice but to learn its ways.
For us, still today, it is comfortable and enjoyable to be
among small groups of people that we love, respect, and trust. Cooperation and sharing are what healthy humans
naturally do. We expect to be fondly
treated like an equal.
In modern society, most of us do not spend every day
surrounded by an intimate circle of equals.
It is unpleasant being around folks who are self-centered,
disrespectful, and exploitive. We are
constantly encouraged by our culture’s thundering jungle drums to live and
think like individuals, not sisters and brothers. The fundamental verb of life is compete. A primary purpose in life is to climb as high
as possible up the pyramid of wealth and power.
For us, still today, it is comfortable and enjoyable to
wander through a forest, gathering mushrooms, berries, and nuts. It’s healing to watch moonlight rippling on
the surface of a wild and isolated lake.
It’s inspiring to feast on the beauty of northern lights in a winter
wonderland.
In modern society, eight lane highways filled with speeding
motorized wheelchairs seem like horrific glimpses into the rumbling bowels of
hell. Nothing could be more unnatural
and traumatizing than living amidst large numbers of strangers, day after
day. We are like zoo inmates surrounded
by walls and fences. John
Livingston wrote that lions raised in zoos, under absolute human control,
and isolated from wild habitat, go insane.
They are “overfed, graceless, apathetic, almost catatonic.” No animal was meant to live like this.
Today, our lives are connected to the global economy,
industrial civilization, numerous news and entertainment feeds, and necessities
produced by perfect strangers in faraway places. Many of us don’t feel at home in nature. We live in climate controlled space stations,
staring at glowing screens, lonely in a world of billions, clinging to our
companion animals. Alexis de Tocqueville
once wrote, “What can one expect from a man who has spent the last 20 years of
his life putting heads on pins?”
Big
Fork
John
Gowdy put his spotlight on a massive shift in the human saga. Humans emerged maybe 300,000 years ago, near
the end of the Pleistocene epoch. The
Pleistocene was a 2.5 million year era of countless whipsaw climate
swings. Trends could sometimes shift
from ice age to tropical in just two centuries.
The pattern changed around 9,700 B.C., with the arrival of the Holocene
epoch, a highly unusual and long lasting era of climate stability and warmer
temperatures.
In several regions of the world, this change led to an
abundance of wild grain. For the first
time, it became possible for agriculture to be practiced over the span of
several thousand years without blast freezer interruptions. Conditions became suitable for
civilization. Today, as temperature
trends swerve toward hothouse, this moderate stable climate is beginning to
experience sharp chest pains. The sun is
setting on the Holocene, and shadows are deepening on the future of industrial
agriculture, and the billions who depend on it.
Climate change gave birth to our reckless joyride, and climate change
will drive an iron stake through its heart.
James
Scott focused his research on southern Mesopotamia because it was the
birthplace of the earliest genuine states.
What are states? They are
hierarchical class-based societies, with rulers and tax collectors, built on a
foundation of farming and herding. Taxes
were usually paid with grain, which was easier to transport and store than more
perishable stuff. States often had armies,
defensive walls, palaces, ritual centers, and slaves.
In Mesopotamia (now Iraq and Kuwait), the transition from
wild tribes to states took several thousand years. By around 12,000 B.C., there is scattered
evidence of hunter-gatherers who quit being nomads and settled down in regions
having abundant wild foods. The menu
included wild grains and pulses, large herbivores, and wetland wildlife. Plant and animal domestication began around
9,000 B.C. Then, it took at least four
thousand years (160 generations) before agricultural villages appeared, and
then another two thousand years before the first states emerged, around 3,100
B.C.
States were typically located close to the floodplains of
large rivers, places having abundant fertile soil. They could produce enough grain to feed a
pool of laborers. States had no interest
in expanding into less productive lands that couldn’t generate enough wealth to
pay the cost of governing them. Scott
noted that as late as A.D. 1600, most humans in the world were still not
governed or taxed by any state.
Over thousands of years, as many groups gradually shifted
from wild and free toward a creepy new role as hardworking law-abiding
taxpayers, housewives, or slaves, huge social changes took place. On the other hand, wild humans in the tropics
did not have a more-is-better mindset when acquiring plant and animal
foods. They simply took what they
immediately needed, always being mindful to avoid overuse of scarce
resources. They lived and thought like a
coherent group, not a motley crew of competitive self-centered
individuals. This very long tradition of
mutual support strongly influenced the evolution of who we are today.
The important point here is that wild people were free,
nobody gave or obeyed orders. But with
the transition to farming and herding, freedom got put on a short leash. We began living under the firm control of a
hierarchy of masters. Small groups can
readily and happily cooperate, but large dense groups tend to generate snarls
and sparks. Crowding overwhelms our
Pleistocene minds, generating anxiety, paranoia, rage, depression, and so
on. Naturally, this undermines social
tranquility.
Masters fear disorder, because angry mobs can rip them to
pieces. To prevent this, crowds must be
overseen by enforcers. Rules must be
strictly obeyed, and violators punished.
Growing up in civilization, folks have to obey numerous rules decreed by
families, schools, religions, businesses, bureaucracies, and so on. The god words for this way of life include compete,
control, and obey.
Most of humankind is now compelled to spend much of their
time wandering among mobs of strangers, folks who are not friends or kin. Some crowded communities are ruled by violent
gangs, ideological fanatics, or the chaotic whims of fate. Others have law and order, tolerable rules,
and sufficient enforcement — the preferred option for those who must live in
Strangerland.
Livingston wrote that many endure the numbing conformity of
Strangerland by choosing the safe and easy path of docility. Rules are good tools for controlling people,
but beliefs are sometimes even better.
When properly programmed by an ideology, our behavior can be largely
manipulated by an autopilot of beliefs, like a self-driving robo-car. Believers passively accept control from their
superiors, and leap to their feet and when der Führer calls.
Because we excel at herd-like followership and
self-deception, it’s easy to be swept away by trendy fads or bloody gangsters. Leni Riefenstahl filmed Triumph
of the Will, a haunting documentary on the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, which
starred 700,000 Nazi supporters. Scene
after scene shows streets jammed with folks in crisp new uniforms, marching in
orderly rows. Today, with the benefit of
highly advanced communication systems, charismatic hucksters, sorcerers, and
lunatics can entrance large mobs of naive believers in many locations at the
same time.
Carl
Jung lived through the whirlwinds of death and destruction during two world
wars. This was an ideal time to become a
psychotherapist. Mobs bring out the
worst in us, creating ideal conditions for devastating psychic epidemics. “The larger the number of people involved in
an action, the greater the propensity towards mindlessness and barbarism.” Huge growing crowds jammed together in big
cities encouraged what Jung called the insectification of humankind. People were at risk of “complete atomization
into nothingness, or into meaninglessness.
Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”
Mesopotamian
Web
Sometime before 3,000 B.C., the first state-based
civilization emerged in Sumer, located in southern Mesopotamia, where the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers approach the Persian Gulf, and empty into it. This civilization developed the cultural DNA
for the Mesopotamian web, which eventually metastasized into the Old World Web
by around A.D. 200. Today, the Old World
Web dominates the whole planet, providing the thundering drumbeat for the global
economy and industrial civilization.
Sumer initially lit the fuse.
Abdullah Öcalan is a Kurdish political scientist (and
political prisoner). He wrote about the
history of Mesopotamia, his ancestral homeland.
Sumerian civilization established or advanced many unusual experiments,
including agriculture, herding, patriarchy, slavery, irrigation, deforestation,
metallurgy, etc. The ability to produce
surplus food enabled some folks to indulge in specialized pursuits — merchants,
potters, smiths, miners, leather workers, fishermen, bricklayers, weavers,
scribes, and so on.
Sumer’s inventions include the calendar, writing,
mathematics, astrology, and prostitution.
Women took a distant second place in the gender hierarchy. The traditional animism of wild folks was
displaced by new forms of religion, first pantheism (multiple gods and
goddesses), and later monotheism (one male god). Öcalan wrote that today’s mosques, churches,
synagogues, and universities have their roots in Mesopotamian ziggurats (temples).
The McNeills noted that these ziggurats, constructed with
millions of mud bricks, were the most conspicuous buildings in cities (like
many of our jumbo sized capitol buildings and worship centers). At the time, they were the biggest manmade
structures in the world. Ziggurats were
monuments built to pay honor to deities.
In the good old days, all gods were local, each city had one or more. Religions were local too. Gods were twitchy scary rascals who sometimes
made believers fat and happy, and other times sent plagues, locusts, famines,
floods, fires, and other assorted miseries to slap them down, or rub them
out.
In order to discourage divine fury, cities built super-duper
temples to flatter their gods’ fragile egos.
Benefits, if any, were temporary.
The ziggurats are long gone, and their gods abandoned. In Babylon, the legendary Tower of Babel was
built as tall as possible, which oddly pissed off their temperamental god, who
saw it as an outrageous act of blasphemy that required strong punishment. Some think the Babel legend was inspired by
the ziggurat of Marduk (Babylon’s god), which certainly existed.
Babel is the Hebrew word for Babylon, a city on the Euphrates
in northern Mesopotamia. Let’s take a
quick side trip here. In maybe 586 B.C.,
Babylon’s famous ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, captured Jerusalem, destroyed their
temple, and led the Jews away to a less than pleasurable exile in Babylon. The Jews brought with them their scrolls of
sacred scriptures, and this sparked a historic event — the creation of the
first portable religion. They were
living and worshipping in a place that was far from their holy land. The portability enabled by written scriptures
made multinational religions possible — believers could establish congregations
anywhere in the world.
In Babylon, congregations of Jewish men and women gathered
for weekly meetings to spend time with a rabbi who discussed the sacred
scriptures. This preserved their
cultural identity, and allowed them to remain distinct. They did not melt into Babylonian
society. Congregational religions were
another innovation from this era. The
McNeills wrote that this put Jews on the path to monotheism. If the deity of Jerusalem could be worshipped
in Babylon, then he could also be worshipped in Egypt or Lebanon. One god fits all… everywhere.
As centuries passed, cities, civilizations, and empires grew. In them, numerous competing variations of
congregational religions provided solace to the huddled masses of
Strangerland. They enabled city dwellers
to be among like-minded people with familiar faces, to benefit from friendship
and mutual support, and to righteously snort and sneer at local heretics and
infidels. Urban populations lacked the
intimate sense of community found in village life, or tribal life. Congregations provided some pain relief, a
sense of meaning and belonging.
Patriarchy
Öcalan presented a different perspective on the birth of
monotheism. Long, long ago, Babylon was
home to a minor league god named Marduk.
Eventually, he rose to prominence after mercilessly slaughtering the
primordial sea-serpent goddess, Tiamat (the female principle), and creating the
world with her body. Marduk (the male
principle) then created humans, to take care of the daily dirty work as
servants and slaves, freeing the gods to enjoy a decadent life of leisure and
debauchery.
Marduk could be helpful or brutal, depending on his
mood. Over time, he became the supreme
deity, and gained the title Bel (Lord).
In Babylon, he was astrologically associated with the jumbo planet we
now call Jupiter. Over time, this
Mesopotamian web spread into new regions.
In Greece, the top god Zeus was also associated with Jupiter. When it eventually got to Rome, their highest
god was actually named Jupiter.
What was happening here was a huge revolutionary transition
in the human saga, from the Stone Age to the Neolithic era (the new stone age),
when folks shifted from hunting and foraging to farming and herding. The Neolithic first arose in
Mesopotamia. Then, the highly contagious
culture spread to North Africa, India, China, the Danube region, southwest
Europe, and elsewhere. It matured into a
culture of civilization, food production, slavery, patriarchy, growth mania,
and so on.
In wild webs, bands of hunter-gatherers lived via
cooperation. In the Mesopotamian web, workers,
housewives, and slaves were obligated to submit to the control of their
assorted masters. Top level masters
(kings, emperors, etc.) were mortal patriarchs who had an expiration date. Upon death, a new master had to take his
place. Sometimes the transfer of power
was smooth, and other times it sparked fury.
Monotheism’s deity, Big Daddy, was immortal, invisible, and
divine — the supreme master, who endured the passage of centuries, and the rise
and fall of mortal rulers. His rules
were the highest ones. They were
permanent, and disobedience was dangerous and stupid. God must be feared. The invisible Big Daddy watches everything
you do, and knows your every thought. We
behave differently when someone is watching us, and we experience guilt, shame,
and paranoia when our minds are being read.
This submission to multiple layers of masters and rules was the oxygen
that kept civilization on life support.
In his pro-feminist
writing, Öcalan wrote, “The 5,000 year history of civilization is essentially
the history of the enslavement of women.”
Prior to 2000 B.C., the woman-mother culture strongly influenced
Sumerian civilization, and the two sexes were fairly equal (no shaming of
women). Over time, the warrior class
encouraged a strongman cult that came to dominate religion. The creator of heaven and Earth was male
(Marduk). “So radical was this sexual
rupture, that it resulted in the most significant change in social life that
history has ever seen.”
This led to the “housewifization” of women, a sharp
demotion. Their new role was to sit at
home, and faithfully obey their husbands.
Chastity became mandatory, in order to guarantee the genuine paternity
of daddy’s children, so that only his true sons would rightfully inherit his
wealth. It was vital that young women
remain virgins prior to marrying their master.
[Continued in sample 53]
