[Note: The following is some new and updated material from my rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. It is primarily expansion or revision of subjects related to samples 52, 53, and 54. The other samples of this rough draft can be accessed HERE. If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd has been reading and recording my book HERE.]
During my years of studying and writing, I have enjoyed
learning about wild cultures that preserved elegant low impact simplicity. They hold up a mirror so we can fully
appreciate the incoherence of modernity.
Let’s take a quick peek at a few of those cultures.
Sentineli
The Andaman group of islands is located in the Bay of Bengal,
and belongs to India. North Sentinel
Island is inhabited by the Sentineli,
a society of negrito pygmies. Outsiders
can sometimes view them from offshore boats, or from helicopters, but the natives
want nothing to do with outsiders.
Intruders who get too close are showered with arrows, rocks, and rude
comments. Some have been killed. India has outlawed all visitors. Today the Sentineli enjoy a complete
separation from the modern world.
Their island is 14,700 acres (5,949 ha), a bit smaller than
Manhattan. The interior is forest,
surrounded by sandy beaches, surrounded by reefs. Treacherous currents make landing on the
island impossible for ten months of the year, and extremely dangerous for the
other two. The island has nothing that
is attractive to greedy parasites from elsewhere. For these reasons, the Sentineli remain wild
and free in the twenty-first century.
Flyovers have noted the existence of several villages with
clusters of small huts. No evidence of
agriculture has been observed. There may
be 50 Sentineli, or 500, nobody knows.
They survive by foraging, fishing, and gathering shellfish. They may also hunt for turtles, birds, and
invertebrates. Their small canoes are
used in the lagoons, but not for open-sea travel. They fish with spears and nets.
Long ago, two expeditions were able to land on North
Sentinel. They brought along folks from
a nearby island to serve as translators.
In the brief and hostile meetings, the Sentineli spoke a language that
the translators did not understand.
Obviously, they have been living in isolation for a long time. They may be descendants of the folks who
first settled in the Andaman Islands 60,000 years ago.
Imagine what it would be like to live in a society that was
not at war with the planet and the future — a genuinely sustainable way of
life, a tropical culture with a year round supply of food, where your wardrobe
consisted of a g-string, headband, and a couple leaves. Imagine a life without money, clocks,
calendars, automobiles, airplanes, sirens, internet, locks, fences, bosses,
salesman, presidents, police, classrooms, guns, dogs, nuclear weapons, taxes,
racism, billionaires, and religions.
Imagine a paradise where the diseases of civilization were unknown.
Contemplate the enormous load of information stored in your
brain, accumulated during a lifetime of existing in a highly complex society,
and your constant struggle to keep pace with competitors in the endless quest
for status, wealth, and power. Now, imagine
being blissfully unaware of absolutely everything happening in the outside
world — and the entire outside world knowing almost nothing about your
society. Imagine having a healthy,
simple, sane life.
Imagine living on an island where there were no strangers,
where the soundtrack was waves, birds, breezes, and the voices of your friends
and family. We weren’t meant to live
like consumers. There are better paths.
New
Guinea Highlands
New Guinea is a land base much larger than Oregon and
California combined. Around 1930, white
folks from elsewhere began wandering into the highlands, in search of mineral
treasure. At that time, the highlands
were home to a million uncivilized folks unknown to the outer world.
Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson wrote that native groups
spoke maybe 800 languages, of which several hundred were unique, having
absolutely nothing in common with any other language in the world. Communication between tribes was limited or
impossible. It wasn’t easy for
innovative ideas to spread from group to group.
This helped tribes preserve traditional cultures.
Long distance travel (10+ miles) was also difficult or
impossible because of the rugged mountain landscape, warlike enemies, and
deadly fevers. There were no roads,
wheels, or beasts of burden. One group
might be completely unaware that other groups resided just a few miles
away.
So, many groups may have existed in complete isolation,
living as they had always lived, in their ancient time proven manner. Nobody in the highlands knew that they lived
on an island, or that the Pacific Ocean existed. There may still be uncontacted groups that
remain wild, free, and unknown to the outer world.
As mentioned earlier, when interaction between groups creates
regional webs, and more and more webs share more and more ideas with a widening
circle of other webs, shit happens. Over
the passage of centuries, accumulations of cleverness can trigger explosive
snowballing chain reactions, creating situations like the world outside your
window. How clever was that?
Pirahã
I was especially fascinated to learn about the Pirahã
(pee-da-ha) people of the Amazon rainforest.
They are hunter-gatherers who live in a few jungle villages along the
Maici River in northwestern Brazil.
Estimates of their population range up to 800. They hunt, fish, and forage. Fish provide about 70 percent of their
diet.
Over the years, I’ve read about many wild cultures. The Pirahã are among the simplest and lowest
impact of all. We know a lot about their
culture, largely because of Daniel Everett,
a missionary sent to save them. Over
time, it became painfully clear to him that they didn’t need to be saved. He was the one who was lost. He concluded, “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.”
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.
The Pirahã 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. Their
language has nothing in common with any other language in the world.
The Pirahã had no leaders or social hierarchy, all were
equal. It was taboo to tell someone to
do something. 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.
In the tribe, memories of ancestors or historic events were
not preserved, they evaporated. 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. If a missionary had not
actually met Jesus, then jabber about Jesus was meaningless.
The Pirahã people were remarkably easygoing and infectiously
happy. They wore bright smiles, and
laughed about everything. 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. They had no cultural folklore, legends, fables,
or worship. He wonders if they might be
the only group in the world that has no numbers, and no creation myth.
Everett wrote, “Committed to an existence in which only
observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in
abstractions.” (“Abstract” is the
opposite of concrete. Abstractions only
exist as ideas or thoughts.) They have
no concept of heaven, hell, sin, god, creation, apocalypse, devils, angels,
guilt, punishment, salvation, damnation, sustainable, rich, poor, overshoot, democracy,
capitalism, and on and on.
Modern folks spend their entire lives with their heads
constantly buzzing with swarms of abstractions.
The Pirahã spend every day of their lives being highly attuned to the
incredible living paradise that they are so lucky to inhabit. They enjoy living in a stable, low impact,
time-proven culture where everyone shares the same belief system.
Everett was amazed by them.
“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.”
They were lucky to have enjoyed centuries of isolation in a
vast tropical rainforest. They had very
little contact with clever outsiders who had bad habits, odd tools, dark
impulses, and heads slithering with brainworms.
Unfortunately, the outer world has found them, and wants to “help” them
enjoy the wonders of modern living.
Every morning, I listen to news reports describing a world that
is out of its mind. 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.
If you are curious about the Pirahã, and have a couple 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.
