Man the Hunted

Not long ago, I came across a book that looked interesting, Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution, written by two anthropologists, Donna Hart and Robert Sussman.  Almost half of the book discussed the many varieties of man-eating predators who for millions of years have enjoyed transforming our delicious ancestors into steaming feces.  Would it shed light on the drastic reduction in man-eating predators?  Would it explain why we plunged into our disastrous experiment with tool making, which has brought us to the brink of planetary disaster?  It did not, but it was both interesting and odd.

In the deepest, darkest auditoriums of academia, the wizards of primatology are engaged in a yowling catfight over the primary factor that influenced the course of human evolution.  The choices are: (a) being hunters, or (b) being prey.  Apparently, (c) all of the above, is rewarded with a dunce cap and a paddle whack.

The authors believe that the general public, and a sizable mob of halfwit professors, have been stupefied by the trendy Man the Hunter myth.  It proclaims that our ancestors were bloodthirsty hunters, and hunting encouraged us to become aggressive, violent, sociopathic killers, and monstrous oppressors of women.  Folks entranced by this myth also believe that their human ancestors were never eaten by predators, because they were far too smart to be killed by lions, leopards, or wolves.

The authors are on a mission from God to torpedo the Man the Hunter myth and illuminate readers with the shining truth — Man the Hunted.  Our ancestors were slow, weak, and lacked fierce teeth, sharp claws, and long horns.  On the ground, they were easy prey.  Thus, our evolutionary journey was largely influenced by being yummy meatballs in a hungry cathouse.  This encouraged us to live in groups, pay close attention to reality, cooperate with one another, and become smart, lovable, feminist hominids.

Readers discover that it was impossible for our ancestors to consume meat prior to the invention of cooking, because we lack the teeth and digestive system of carnivores.  Well, actually, we’re omnivores, like our chimp, bonobo, and baboon relatives, all of whom eat both plant and animal foods, uncooked.  Maybe our smaller teeth evolved following the invention of cooked food. 

It’s impossible to accurately determine when we began manufacturing spears, controlling fire, cooking food, or using complex language.  These interesting and unusual innovations had enormous unintended consequences.  They unlocked the entrance to a fantastically dangerous path.

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that bonobos and chimps, our closest living relatives, have managed to inhabit the same ecosystem for two million years without trashing it.  They wisely avoided the temptation to fool around with technology beyond sticks and stones.  The book revealed an even more astonishing success story, the crocodiles, critters that have a special fondness for inattentive humans.  Today’s crocs are nearly identical to the crocs that lived in the dinosaur era, 200 million years ago.  They live in the water, floating close to the surface, and patiently wait for a thirsty critter to stop for a drink — a simple and awesomely brilliant strategy.

Bonobos and chimps provide us with an important lesson.  Their territories are separated by the Zaire River, so they’ve never met.  The bonobos are like free love hippies, whilst the chimps sometimes act like brutal biker gangs.  Why the difference?  The two species are almost genetically identical, and they inhabit the same ecosystem.  But in bonobo country, there are no chimps, baboons, or gorillas.  So, they have more food, less competition, and life is grand.  In chimp country, it doesn’t pay to be a gentleman.  The most aggressive male is always first in line at the buffet, as well as the primary sperm pump.

The authors lash out at Demonic Males, by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, a gospel of Man the Hunter.  It discusses species that kill their own kind, like orangutans, chimps, gorillas, and humans.  For these species, aggressive behavior could provide some benefits, so this trait has not been discouraged by natural selection.  This infuriates Hart and Sussman, because blame is shifted to the females, who shamelessly burn with desire for demonic males, and then give birth to cute little baby demons.

All parties agree that bonobos were dealt an unbeatable hand and won the jackpot.  If humans had been dealt a similar hand of luxurious abundance, we’d probably be running around naked in an African paradise, having sex ten times a day.  Instead, we got a crap hand — the queen of technology, the joker of excess cleverness, and the ace of self-destruction.

All parties agree that, in theory, humans could mindfully choose to outgrow their rough habits, and transform into adorable sweeties.  Our unpleasant behavior is learned, not genetic.  The Pygmies, Bushmen, and other hunter-gatherers were generally good-natured.  Hunting doesn’t automatically turn us into monsters.

All parties agree that humans are not crazy-violent by nature.  Competition, crowding, scarcity, and anxiety trigger our belligerence.  So, what the heck is this argument about anyway?  Certainly, the demonic male meme has the pungent funk of Judeo-Christian juju, the crabby old sky god who never tires of exterminating city dwellers and other despicable deviants.  Where’s the science?  Well, the science of human evolution provides us with a few hundred pieces of a 100 billion-piece puzzle, and numerous versions of the story are continuously being rewritten, hence the hissing primatologist catfights.

With brains substantially larger than Homo sapiens, Neanderthals managed to live on this planet for maybe 200,000 years without leaving permanent scars.  Scientists sneer at their embarrassing lack of technological innovation (dullards!), and disregard their stunning success at sustainable living (who cares?).  Scientists are quirky folks obsessed with stuff like space colonies and computer-driven electric cars.  (I was surprised to learn that Neanderthals may have gone extinct because they ate too much meat.)

The book is about genetic evolution, not cultural evolution.  Cultural evolution is what has blown the human journey off the rails, ignited the turbo thrusters, and sent us skyrocketing into the dark unknown.  Cultural evolution provided shortcuts that gave us spears and hammers far faster than genetic evolution could enhance our anatomical assets.  Today, the pace of techno-innovation has grown to furious hurricane force.  So, does the hunter vs. hunted catfight really matter?  The planet is not being destroyed by naughty genes.  Wouldn’t it be wiser to yowl and hiss about our toxic culture instead?

Humans evolved in a healthy, wild, natural world.  Our ancestors’ lives were highly adapted to the ecosystem they inhabited.  Survival required being constantly alert to the ever-changing sights, sounds, and smells.  Humankind still exists because our ancestors were acutely aware.  Infants born today have genes that evolved during our hunter-gatherer era, genes fine-tuned for thriving in a tropical savannah amidst hungry leopards, hyenas, snakes, and crocodiles.

But look at us.  We now live in a brutally lobotomized ecosystem where being eaten is no longer a normal everyday possibility.  We live amidst crowds of strangers.  We hunt and forage in supermarkets.  We spend the last years of our lives filling diapers.  Imagine what we’d look like if we spent the next 100,000 years sitting on our butts, staring at glowing screens, and guzzling soda pop.

Many species of bipedal hominids have evolved over seven million years.  Humans are the last of the line.  Few of our bipedal cousins survived as long as the chimps have; they flamed out.  The happy ending here is that a perfect storm of manmade predicaments seems destined to yank the rug out from under our culture.  We won’t have to spend the next 200 years having loud catfights over climate change, contraceptives, or evolution.  Humankind will be dealt a very different hand of cards.  Will we be lucky?

Hart, Donna and Sussman, Robert W., Man the Hunted — Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution, Westview Press, New York, 2005.

Wrangham, Richard and Peterson, Dale, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1996.

Wrangham, Richard, “Out of the Pan, Into the Fire: How Our Ancestors’ Evolution Depended on What They Ate,” Tree of Origin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001.

Tarzancíto

The naked wild boy lived on his own, scampering around the jungle between Ahuachápan and Sonsonate, in El Salvador.  Villagers had been aware of him for a couple years, but efforts to catch him always failed.  He was a superb runner, swimmer, and tree climber.  Folks called him Tarzancíto (Little Tarzan).  The lad lived on a diet of wild fruit and raw fish.  He slept up in the branches to avoid becoming a warm meal for hungry predators.

When a woodcutter finally captured him in 1933, the boy was about five years old.  You must understand that Tarzancíto was not, in any way, delighted about his “rescue,” and he took every opportunity to escape.  He was a healthy, happy wild animal, and all he wanted to do was go back home, to the jungle.

He often attacked and bit his captors, but they were civilized people, and refused to let him go.  In their minds, it was intolerable to allow a young boy to be illiterate, unbaptized, naked, and free.  Proper young boys should understand words and numbers, sleep indoors, wear clothing, and eat cooked food on a clockwork schedule.  Tarzancíto hated this.

His life in the jungle had been enormously stimulating, because the land overflowed with an abundance of living beings, all of them fully alive, free, and dancing to the wild music of the big beat.  It was no different from living in paradise, because it was paradise.  Compared to the rapture of life in the jungle, life in a box in the village was crushingly empty, dull, and sad.

I think about Tarzancíto with great fondness.  The lucky lad was merely five years old, but he could live at one with the land, easily, confidently, and happily.  Indeed, the human journey originally began in a similar jungle, long, long ago.  The jungle is the womb of our species, our sacred home, the mother of our evolution.  Nutritious food was available year round, and we could enjoy a wonderful life without tools, weapons, clothes, fire, or cell phones.  We were simply ordinary animals, thriving in pure fairyland.

To this very day, all of our wild relatives in the family of life continue to exist as ordinary animals, living in a state of balance, innocence, and integrity.  Their populations are not exploding, they are not erasing vast forests, they are not poisoning the sacred waters.  Deer continue to live like deer, ducks continue to live like ducks, but most humans have forgotten how to live like humans.

The amazing thing is that all humans everywhere are still born as ordinary wild animals, ready for a thrilling life in the jungle.  Sadly, almost none of them are born into tribes of wild jungle people anymore.  Most are born into societies of consumers, where they are raised to be the opposite of wild, free, and healthy.

Ordinary animals rarely get the respect they deserve.  Exactly what happened to the countless millions of mastodons, wooly mammoths, Irish elk, sabre tooth tigers, cave bears, aurochs, and on and on?  Everyone agrees that they were not driven to extinction by ordinary wild animals.  A number of reputable scholars have concluded that most or all of the megafauna were exterminated by human tool addicts, notably lads with the deadly new stone-tipped lances — creatures that had abandoned ordinary, and had come to live outside the laws of nature.

Long, long ago, our ancestors started farting around with simple tools of sticks and stones.  So did the ancestors of chimps.  The ancient chimps were blessed with good luck, and never swerved into the tool addict lane.  Yes, they used sticks to fish for termites, but this useful trick never mutated into a dependency.  Chimps can still survive perfectly well without termite sticks.  Our ancestors were not so lucky.  Gradually, across long spans of time, our cleverness with tools increased.  Eventually, we became highly addicted to them, and could no longer survive without them.

Our ancestors were not evil.  It was with good intentions that they innocently slid deeper and deeper into the technology trap.  They invented better hunting tools, killed more critters, and ate very well, for a while.  Their numbers grew to the point where they could not all fit in Africa anymore.  Many clans packed up and migrated to other continents, into challenging non-jungle ecosystems where it was impossible to survive without new and improved technology.  We are the only species that wears clothes.

It was inevitable that we would wake up one day with our backs up against the wall — too many humans, not enough wild food.  We started farting around with domestication, and our success with it was the most unlucky event in the entire human journey.  This led to the emergence of civilizations, insane societies obsessed with a single idea — perpetual growth.  These runaway trains doomed the long-term survival of far less destructive hunter-gatherer groups, most of which have now blinked out.

There’s a very important lesson here.  In a number of ways, we remain ordinary wild animals.  Like every other species, humans have almost no powers of foresight, because animals who live within the laws of nature have no need for foresight.  I could be gazing at a group of wooly mammoths right now, if only the inventor of the stone-tipped lance had the foresight to imagine the consequences of giving weapons of mass destruction to a gang of scruffy-looking illiterate longhaired rednecks.  Lions and tigers and bears have no need for long-term thinking, because they live in their natural manner.  They simply hunt with tooth and claw, an ancient time-proven method that doesn’t rock the ecological boat.

Likewise, the first farmers could not begin to imagine the catastrophic changes that their clever new stunt would unleash.  New innovations that provided short term benefits tended to be highly contagious.  If your neighbors adopted guns, horses, or corn-growing, you would be wise to do likewise, in order to survive.  Few hunter-gatherers refused knives, pots, or axes.  Bows and arrows spread to just about everywhere.  In the wake of stone-tipped lances, the disaster of technological innovation snowballed exponentially, and has yet to slow down.

Today, our civilized world is rolling and tumbling into a turbulent era of collapse, downsizing, and healing.  There are far too many of us, living far too hard, but the temporary bubble of abundant energy is thankfully moving toward its conclusion.  The remaining days of extreme madness are numbered.  It would be grand if this led to great awakening, and inspired us to explore better ways of living.  If humans manage to survive the coming storms, they would be wise to remember the lessons of Tarzancíto — live as simply as possible, joyfully.

The Evolution of Technology

Humans are the most sophisticated toolmakers in the family of life.  We’ve gone from stone hammers to hydrogen bombs.  We’ve become so addicted to our technology that we can no longer survive without it.  If we eliminated electricity, this way of life would disintegrate before our eyes, causing many to perish.

Humans no longer sit in the pilot seat of our global civilization.  The autopilot runs the show.  Our complex labyrinth of technology herds us through a chute.  It’s no longer possible to make sharp (intelligent) turns, because the system has immense momentum and no brakes.  We can’t banish cars, plows, or electricity today.  We’re trapped on a runaway train.

How and why did we get into this mess?  That’s the subject of George Basalla’s book, The Evolution of Technology.  Scholars were debating this issue, and Basalla had an urge to jump into the ring, molest the illusions of his inferiors, and set the record straight.

His first task was to demonstrate that innovation did, in fact, evolve — by synthesizing or altering existing innovations.  Famous inventions were never original, unique, unprecedented acts of pure magic that fell out of the sky, like acts of God.  The myth of the heroic inventor is just 300 years old.  Henry Ford referred to his monster child as a quadracycle.  “The first automobiles were little more than four-wheeled bicycles,” said Basalla.  The mother of invention was evolution, not revolution.  A stick on the ground evolved into a throwing stick, then a spear, then a missile.

His second task was to explain the various ways in which our dance with artifacts has evolved, and this consumed most of the book.  Readers are taken on an illuminating journey to realms that our industrial society has erased from the maps and forgotten.

We’ve all seen the graph of population growth over the last 10,000 years.  Technological evolution follows a similar curve.  For most of the hominid journey, our artifacts were little more than sticks and stones, and their evolution happened very slowly.  A state of the art stone hammer might be no different from a hammer used 500,000 years earlier.

It is important to understand that for almost the entire hominid journey, our ancestors enjoyed a relatively sustainable way of life, and that this era corresponds exactly with the long, long era when technological evolution was essentially in a coma.  This is not a coincidence.

Unfortunately, our system of education is writhing in a bad trip after inhaling the loony fumes of the myth of progress.  This intoxicant was conjured by notorious buffoons 200 years ago, and its side effects include disorientation, anxiety, and uncontrollable self-destructive impulses.  We continue to hallucinate that the zenith of the human journey is today, and that the Golden Age is yet to come.  We have a remarkable ability to completely tune out what is perfectly obvious, and vitally important.

The Tikopians and Sentineli are island societies that keep their numbers in check, and live very lightly, using simple artifacts.  These communities stay in balance with their land, and are content.  They do not suffer from a persistent itch for more and more.  Technological innovation is entirely off their radar.  They have no need for it, and experimenting with it could permanently destroy them.

Native American potters and basket weavers created artifacts that were careful, error-free reproductions of traditional designs.  Apprentices worked hard to imitate the work of their elders, and their success earned respect.  Their culture had a healthy resistance to change, because their time-proven traditions kept them on a good path.

 “In the Muslim tradition, innovation or novelty is automatically assumed to be evil until it can be proved otherwise,” said Basalla.  “The Arabic word bid’a has the double meaning of novelty and heresy.”  The Prophet warned that those who imitate infidels turn into infidels.  Indeed!

China invented the compass, gunpowder, and printing, and put them to practical use.  When Europeans brought this knowledge home, it sparked immense innovation that led to major changes in their way of life.  The vast Chinese civilization was stable and conservative.  It was not nimble, fast-paced, and highly competitive, like Europe.  Europe was a chaotic and unstable collection of competing nations.  Society had far less resistance to new artifacts.

The wheel was first used in Mesopotamia, about 5,000 years ago.  In many societies, it became a popular artifact, used for commerce and warfare.  “A wise king scattereth the wicked, and bringeth the wheel over them.”  (Proverbs 20:26)

The native civilizations of North and South America were able to grow and die without using wheeled transport.  Many groups in the Near East eventually abandoned the use of wagons, because camels were a faster and easier way of moving stuff.  Wild tribes often just carried stuff home on their backs via footpaths, or paddled canoes — wheels required far more effort: cleared roads, bridges, and wagons.

The industrial civilizations of Europe and America have extensively used wheels in their artifacts.  Our cultural myths celebrate the wheel as a super-sacred icon.  Basalla concluded, “the wheel is not a unique mechanical contrivance necessary, or useful, to all people at all times.”  The ability to whoosh across the landscape on a bicycle is not required to meet our biological needs.  No sustainable society used wheels, because they had no need for them.

Basalla’s book contained zero evidence that he was an eco-terrorist determined to smash civilization, or even a mild-mannered tree-hugger.  The book just seemed to be unusually objective, as if it had a good cleansing soak in a potent mythocide.  It felt like he was a shaman conveying vital messages from the realm of the ancestors, whilst being cleverly disguised as a history professor.  To the mainstream mind, these messages constitute shocking, obscene heresies.  But the messages contain the medicine we need to blow the locks off our minds, so we can escape, go home, and heal.

Agriculture and architecture are new novelties, not necessities.  “No technology whatsoever is required to meet animal needs.”  Yes, other animals use tools but, “There are no fire-using animals nor are there animals that routinely fashion new tools, improve upon old tool designs, use tools to make other tools, or pass on accumulated technical knowledge to offspring.” 

Obviously, we could not live like hurricanes without artifacts, and we could not survive in many regions where humans are an invasive exotic species, but we could enjoy a tool-free future in tropical regions, like our ancient African motherland (or a future Siberian jungle?).

There is no evidence that “a causal connection exists between advances in technology and the overall betterment of the human race.  Therefore, the popular but illusory concept of technological progress should be discarded.”

Agriculture and cooking are “unnecessary because plants and animals are able to grow and even thrive without human intervention, and because food need not be processed by fire before it is fit for human consumption.”

“Artifacts are uniquely identified with humanity — indeed they are a distinguishing characteristic of human life; nevertheless, we can survive without them.”

“Fire, the stone axe, or the wheel are no more items of absolute necessity than are the trivial gadgets that gain popularity for a season and quickly disappear.”

Basalla’s insights bounce off the frozen minds of the mainstream world, automatically rejected by bulletproof denial.  But these fresh notions are a sure sign that clear thinking is beginning to seep into the stagnant halls of history departments, those dusty story museums where the dying Cult of Progress will make its last stand.

The path to sustainability is blocked by ideas — toxic illusions, metabolized into highly contagious beliefs, resulting in mass insanity.  At the gate of the path to healing, rubbish ideas must be left in the recycle bin.  There is no shortage of better ideas.  Help yourself, and share.

Basalla, George, The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1988.

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

I’ve been living like a hermit for 19 months now, reading dozens of powerful books, and writing weekly blogs.  I’m not the same person I was when I started.  My perception of reality has gone through some changes.  I’ve been sharing what I learned with the world.  I hope that seekers will find it, and I hope that my work will be helpful to them.  I’ll be publishing this material in book form shortly.

Genuine sustainability, of course, is the holy destination — a way of life that is healthy, satisfying, and has a long-term future.  Getting there, of course, will be an enormous challenge, requiring enormous changes, enormous wisdom, enormous luck, and probably a century or three, at least.

What we are today is the result of many choices and changes — stone tools, projectile weapons, fire, complex language, consciousness, directed thinking, cultural evolution, civilization, industrialization, the domestication of plants, animals, and minerals, and so on. 

At the time of the Great Leap Forward, 40,000 years ago, the megafauna were still abundant, and perhaps we were still sustainable.  But these cave painters were quite different from the far simpler hominids who roamed in Africa 500,000 years ago.  The high-tech cave painters were much more vulnerable to falling out of balance, which is exactly what happened.  Infants born today are still pure wild animals, ready to grow up in an advanced tribe of cave painters, or a primitive tribe of early Africans.  As Prince Charles says, we are what we are surrounded by.

Obviously, the safest and most conservative ideal would be to return to tropical regions.  Back in Africa, we didn’t need clothing, fire, shelters, or tools.  We lived much like chimps.  Food was readily available year round.  People enjoyed abundant leisure, and good health.  Perhaps climate change will come to our rescue here, by expanding tropical regions, and dealing a deathblow to agriculture.

But some predict that climate change will be the final chapter in the human story.  Those who foresee near term extinction (NTE) perceive me to be a delusional moron for contemplating the possibility that any humans will exist 100 years from now.  Rapid heating will destroy agriculture and blindside every ecosystem on the planet.  Oceans will become so acidic that only jellyfish remain.  Coal burning will cease with the demise of industry, so less incoming solar energy will be deflected by pollution, and the warming process will accelerate.  When the power goes out, the cooling ponds for spent fuel rods at 430+ nuclear power plants will evaporate, the rods will burn, and ionized radiation will poison the planet.

Extinction would neatly solve every single one of our problems.  We were certain to go extinct at some point in the future anyway.  Uff!  But what if there are still some humans alive 100 years from now?  I’m very happy that I’m not going to live to see the end of the collapse.  What the survivors choose to do is entirely beyond my control.  I am not responsible for the decisions they make, but I am responsible for taking action to protect their wellbeing, to the best of my ability.  We all are.

Collapse will blow away many obstructions that currently block our return to sustainability, but not all of them.  In theory, we are smart enough to choose a new path, and deliberately strive to return to a sustainable way of life.  What we do today to encourage this return, before the lights go out, may make a big difference in the coming years.  It feels right to try.

Five hundred years ago, large portions of the planet were still inhabited by humans living in a relatively sustainable manner.  Four thousand years ago, even more.  But these nature-based societies had no long-term future because there were pockets of dark energy emerging on the planet, something like cancer tumors, and their plan was perpetual growth, by any means necessary.

In his parable of the tribes, Schmookler warned us that once a bully entered the playground, the fun and games were over.  Only power can stop power.  He believed that this problem could be cured by creating a global civilization that was guided by wisdom.  Jack Forbes called it the cannibal disease, and he thought that this disease could be eliminated by spiritual rebirth on a global scale.  There is no fast-acting, silver bullet cure for the growing predator energy.  It’s a formidable challenge to the healing process.  In theory, we can outgrow it.

Another serious problem is a lack of foresight.  I could be gazing at a group of wooly mammoths right now, if only the inventor of the stone-tipped lance had the foresight to imagine the consequences of giving weapons of mass destruction to a gang of scruffy-looking illiterate longhaired rednecks.  Lions and tigers and bears don’t have this problem, because they hunt with tooth and claw, and this works just fine. 

Dilworth, Crosby, and Wright changed the way I think.  I used to believe that our problems began with domestication.  They taught me that our problems began with tool making.  Imagine what a paradise this world would be if prehistoric toolmakers had had foresight, immediately abolished their dangerous profession, and pursued careers in singing, dancing, and storytelling. 

At the dawn of the last century, there was loud and abundant opposition to automobiles, but the wise voice of conservatism was foolishly ignored — a huge mistake!  Two centuries ago, we failed to listen carefully to the ultraconservative Luddites, and what a mess we have now, Lord Almighty!  The problem really isn’t a lack of foresight, it’s a lack of stability.  Stable species have no need for foresight.  They live entirely in the here and now, and do so beautifully.  Domesticated humans are the exception.  We’re the loose cannons of the animal world.

Likewise, Shepard, Wells, Ehrlich, and Livingston warned us about the dangers of cultural evolution.  This is the same problem: a lack of stability.  Culture does not become toxic until it falls out of harmony with wildness, freedom, and the laws of nature — until it crosses the line and becomes unsustainable, a dead end.

It all boils down to remembering who we are, and how to live like human beings.  It’s about living as lightly as possible, and contributing the healing process to the best of our ability.

Thank you!  This has been fun!  Have an honorable life!  Best wishes!

Rogue Primate

Canadian scholar John A. Livingston (1923-2006) was a pioneer in the deep ecology movement, and a notorious rogue thinker.  He detested the senseless ecological destruction caused by civilized societies, and blamed this on their humanist ideology, which seemed to be possessed by an insatiable hunger for perpetual growth at any cost — a death wish.

This ideology had poisoned the minds of most modern humans, and it had roots even deeper than religion or politics.  Communists and capitalists, liberals and conservatives, Christians and Muslims — all shared a fervent blind faith in human superiority, and our right to ruthlessly plunder the planet to support any and all enterprises that human folly could fancy.  Destroying the future was what cool people did.  The planet was ours to devour, of course.

Wildlife conservationists, environmental activists, animal rights advocates, spiritual leaders, politicians, and mainstream consumers all earned Livingston’s scorn for their failure to think outside of the humanist box.  What a jerk!  Cool people never criticize humanism.  Consequently, he gained a reputation for being a pessimistic misanthrope, which is why you’ve probably never heard of him. 

Pessimist is accurate; like any sane person, he did have “a lack of hope or confidence in the future.”  A misanthrope is one with “a hatred, dislike, or distrust of humankind.”  Livingston did distrust our species, but he seemed to be a compassionate misanthrope — he hoped that we could get our act together some day, and believed that this was not totally impossible.  So, he really wasn’t a nutjob, he was just someone who had a rare gift for being able to see what was clearly obvious. 

In Rogue Primate, Livingston discussed the boo-boos of human history, and contemplated the possibility of undoing them.  Many thinkers have concluded that agriculture or civilization was the start of our downfall.  Livingston believed that the stage for disaster was set long before that, when we invented magical thinking.

In an earlier essay, One Cosmic Moment, Livingston concluded that the development of magic had done far more to damage the future than our adventures in tool-making.  Cave paintings and fertility figurines were created to metaphysically encourage successful hunting and abundant game.  At this point, we began symbolically controlling nature — from an imaginary position of human superiority.  As everyone knows, those who flirt with magic will have to marry it.

The magic act began maybe 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.  Our cultural evolution became unhitched from our slow-motion genetic evolution, and it moved into the fast lane.  We ceased being evolutionary creatures, and became revolutionary.  Some have called this transition the Great Leap Forward.  At this point, we began accumulating how-to information, which eventually turned us into the loose cannons of the animal world.  By and by, we became clever enough to live and prosper almost anywhere.

Wildness was about freedom.  Wild animals had no masters or owners.  Domestication, on the other hand, was about submission and dependence.  Non-human domesticates were selectively bred to be passive, fast growing, and capable of producing abundant offspring.  They were dim, infantile creatures who did not blend in with the wild ecosystem.  They had lost the ability to survive in the wild, and depended on humans to provide them with food, water, and protection.  Humans were the crutch that they could not live without.

Following the Great Leap Forward, humans became highly dependent on a different sort of crutch.  Evolution had not elegantly designed us to thrive as ground-dwelling creatures.  What we lacked in strength, speed, teeth, and claws we eventually replaced with cleverness.  We developed complex language and abstract thinking.  We learned how to make and control fire.  We became good at cooperation, sharing, tool-making, and hunting.  Every useful bit of learning was passed on to the next generation, and our knowledge base snowballed in size and power.

Cleverness became the crutch that we could not live without, our key to survival.  As our dependence on learning grew, our own biology became less and less important.  The embarrassing result was that humans became the only species to accidentally domesticate themselves, a dangerous and unnatural achievement. 

With the emergence of agriculture and civilization, our mindset got much wackier, and we began causing significant ecological damage (while hunter-gatherers continued a low-impact way of life).  In the civilized world, the notion of human superiority moved to center stage, and old fashioned ritual magic was replaced with powerful human-like gods and goddesses.  The new mindset majored in individualism, competition, and aggression.  The entire planet, and everything on it, was absorbed into the human sphere.  This gave birth to the humanist ideology, which had now spread to almost every society on Earth.

As domesticated animals, we became excellent followers, obedient hard working servants.  We could endure living in high density populations, and spending many hours a day in windowless factories manufacturing frivolous status trinkets.  We had an extremely high tolerance for abuse.  Alas, our days of wild freedom were behind us, and forgotten.

Some say that there is a window of opportunity, between the ages of 5 and 12, when we are most likely to form vital emotional bonds with nature.  A bond with life on Earth is essential for a sane mind.  Unfortunately, today’s kids are far more likely to stay indoors and form bonds with technology, which we eagerly encourage.  They are dangerously isolated from the family of life, and likely to remain stunted for the rest of their days.

Livingston went on and on, illuminating the various errors of our ways.  This was not a celebration the amazing brilliance of humankind (which sounds sillier every year).  Instead, he presented us with a coherent explanation of how we got into this mess — a sobering look in the mirror.

The good news is that the core of the problem is thought patterns, and thought patterns can be changed.  First, the notion of human superiority must be disemboweled and fed to the ravenous mongrels.  It is essential that we once again develop an intimate and respectful relationship with nature.  Remember that there was a time when this culture did not exist.  We can live without it, and we must.

Many thinkers have come to the same conclusion, that we must radically change the way we think and live.  Livingston’s analysis focused attention on domestication, bonding with nature, abandoning dominance relationships, and denouncing the diabolical cult of humanism.  He followed a different path, and added some important pieces to the puzzle.

He concluded by prodding his readers: “We, the educated, the informed, the well nourished, the affluent, do pathetically little to stall the human juggernaut.”  We need to imagine an alternative way of human being in the world, and we need to stop being silent, passive, tolerant, domesticated sheep.  No matter how broken we are, we all still possess traces of undamaged healthy wildness buried deep inside — ancestral memories of better days.  Courage!

Livingston, John A., Rogue Primate — An Exploration of Human Domestication, Roberts Rinehart Publishers, Boulder, Colorado, 1994.