Wild Free and Happy Sample 47

[Note: This is the forty-seventh 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.

PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT

[Continued from #46]

Adulthood

The point where adolescence ends and adulthood begins is sort of blurry.  Colin Turnbull noted that in Mbuti society, adulthood begins with marriage.  It was a phase during which disputes and conflicts were more common, so adults were involved less in decision making, and more in the routines of daily life.  Turnbull thought that adulthood was a time for doing, and elderhood was a time for being. 

Wild cultures and modern cultures take a very different approach to adulthood.  In our culture, doing implies working — activities that bring money into your life, so you can afford the basic necessities of survival.  For many, “work” does not rhyme with “fun” or “joy.”  Most consumers have peculiar illusions about the difference between needs (essentials) and wants (desires).  Their conception of needs is far more expansive than other cultures — stuff like televisions, cell phones, computers, automobiles, and all other impulsive cravings.  For several billion less affluent non-consumers, needs focus on today’s sustenance.

When I contemplate the amount of all the stuff I’ve thrown out in my life, it staggers me — many, many tons.  Every week, garbage trucks rumble down the alley, and it’s stunning to imagine how much crap this neighborhood discards, or this city.  It must end up in a landfill as high as the Alps, constantly growing taller.  Every other animal in the family of life leaves the world in no worse condition than they found it.  This is exactly what sustainability means.

Turnbull noted that in simpler cultures, “work” means no more than what you happen to be doing in your life (assuming that it’s socially acceptable).  So, a child’s play is work, and so is the adolescent’s exploration of sexuality.  Work is reading a book, or gazing at the stars, or making love, or singing and dancing.  The Mbuti have no need for money, because the forest provides all their needs.  For them, singing a honey song is seen as essential for survival.  For the factory worker, installing windshields is essential for survival, because it is rewarded with trade tokens. 

In essence, unlike child’s play, Mbuti adulthood is about playing a “constructive role in the furtherance of the social order,” and it is “done with a conscious sense of social responsibility.”  This is about cooperation, and consideration for others.  Importantly, the focus is on WE, not ME.  In their culture, being independent and self-centered is irresponsible, obnoxious, and pathological.

In our culture, individualism and competition are promoted “with a curious fanaticism,” and this results in a fiercely exploitive crazy-making planet-thrashing nightmare world.  In our culture, ME trumps WE.  To us, absolute individual freedom is the Holy Grail — no responsibilities, no bosses, no rules, no cops, no consequences.  I can do whatever I want.  Stay out of my way.  Shut up!  To wild folks, this is absolute insanity.

In our culture, adulthood takes different forms.  Turnbull wrote, “We have all met many adults in our lives who, without seeming to try, have shown us what a rich thing adulthood can be.  We have also met many who have shown us what an empty thing it can be, sometimes by trying too hard to be other than what they are.  We have also met all too many who neither try nor succeed, those who are frankly and openly concerned only with their own immediate welfare…”

Old Age

In Mbuti society, elders are honored in their golden years.  This phase of life is about being.  Elders shift toward other important roles in society — guarding the camp, playing with children, mediating conflicts, and passing wisdom on to younger generations.  They enjoy tremendous respect.  While body and mind may have been stronger in years past, they are more experienced than ever, and their heart and soul continue getting stronger.  They still have important things to do.

Elders are relieved of adult responsibilities, withdrawing from involvement in a future that is not theirs.  These obligations are left to folks for whom the future belongs.  So, their social horizons narrow, while their authority expands, as they approach their return “to the source of Spirit.”  Elderhood encourages three paths: saints, witches, and wise ones.  It’s common for elders to engage in more than one role.  

Saints are rare elders who are radiant with spirit energy, aglow with a warm presence.  They don’t need to preach, “they just have to be.”  Their goodness can be especially beneficial to adolescents who travel on a more slippery path. 

“Witch” refers to the African sense of the word, not to the unfortunate victims of the Christian Inquisition (“demonic” women who must be tortured and burned alive).  Mbuti witches (male and female) have acquired excessive power, which is not under control, and can be used for good or ill, deliberately or not.  Elderly recluses can provide an important service.  They know all the shady things happening in the village, and they enjoy the freedom to piss off whoever they wish, and say exactly what they think.  While this makes the offenders uncomfortable, it encourages increased integrity in the community.

Wise elders are living treasure chests of important knowledge and experience.  They are the greatest babysitters, because children trust them.  They can communicate in a special way, since kids are close to the beginning of life, and elders are close to the end.  Elders are outside of the parent-child relationship, and its frictions, so things can be relaxed and open.

Of course, elders in modern cultures are a very different story.  Elderhood is often associated with uselessness, decline, poor health, poverty, senility, death.  Treating them as diminished beings results in a serious loss to the community.  We send elders away to institutions for old folks, “a pre-death limbo” where they are isolated from family and younger generations, and denied the joys of old age.  They become an annoying obligation for their children, who cherish their freedom and independence.  For many, retirement can be painful and traumatic, because folks no longer feel valued.  It can be a sad time of loneliness.

COHERENT SOCIETIES

So, we’ve taken a peek at how wild and modern cultures attempt to guide their people through the phases of the life cycle, and the different outcomes they produce.  Wild cultures were far more likely to enjoy functional, coherent societies, because everyone was on the same channel.  Humankind has generated a multitude of groups that invent unique cultural abstractions that are fundamentally (sometimes violently) intolerant of the beliefs of outsiders.  No other animal species does this.  In The Mountain People, Turnbull noted that the Mbuti enjoyed a society that was harmonized by a common set of beliefs, values, lifestyles, and ethnicity.  A beauty!

Our modern society is a boisterous mob of different cultures, ethnicities, classes, crime gangs, hate groups, religious beliefs, and so on.  When jolted, it can explode into a swarm of furious hornets.  Indeed, Turnbull would not even call it a society.  “In larger-scale societies we are accustomed to diversity of belief, we even applaud ourselves for our tolerance, not recognizing that a society not bound together by a single powerful belief is not a society at all, but a political association of individuals held together only by the presence of law and force — the existence of which is a violence.”  It’s a strong, wobbly, dimwitted Frankenstein, a manmade monster that cannot be kept on a leash.

Turnbull wrote, “Hunters frequently display those characteristics that we find so admirable in man: kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity, and others.”  These traits not rare and noble virtues, they are fundamental to the survival of hunting cultures.  The Taliban people are also apparently united by a single powerful belief, but their culture is built on a different foundation.  They are civilized.

It’s important to pay attention to the core differences between wild and modern cultures.  Hunting people lived in small groups, where everyone was family or friends, and all were on the same channel.  They had an extremely intimate relationship with the lands they lived in, and they fully understood the patterns of food availability.  They followed their stomachs, as they roamed across the land.  For hunter-gatherers, the wild menu was highly diverse.  They had many more dining options than the hungry dirty farmer with a cow and a wheat field.

Earlier, I mentioned how the San people in Botswana were able to survive in the Kalahari Desert through three years of extreme drought, because they possessed time-proven knowledge of how to live there.  The long drought killed 250,000 of the cattle owned by their Bantu neighbors, of whom 180,000 were kept on life support by U.N. famine relief projects. 

The domestication of plants and animals was a clever experiment.  When conditions were suitable, agriculture could feed a lot of people, and spawn civilizations.  But good luck was never a faithful companion.  Life was full of surprises.  It’s not a pleasant surprise to wake up every morning in a turbulent jam-packed world that is mercilessly pummeling the planet.  Alas, the clever experiment has turned out to be perfectly un-clever.

Turnbull emphasized that the bottom line here is that a farmer can lose a year’s work in one unfortunate day.  All of his eggs are stored in one basket.  A Mbuti hunter can only lose a day’s work when his luck takes a nap.  He has no need to hoard food, and constantly defend the stash.  If one food source becomes scarce, he eats something else.  They periodically move from place to place, as guided by their traditional wisdom, and shifting conditions.

Turnbull wrote, “The hunter and gatherer gives little thought for the morrow, getting his feed fresh, from day to day, with the ready assurance of someone who has come to terms with the world around him.  He knows the world he lives in as few others do, and he lives in sympathy with it, rather than trying to dominate it.  He is the best of conservationists, knowing exactly how much he can take from where at any given time.”

The farmer, on the other hand, is betting everything on a narrow mix of food resources, which exist in a fixed location (his field and pasture), and are entirely vulnerable to a wide variety of potential threats.  A ripe field could suddenly be reduced to ashes.  A swarm of locusts might discover his delicious wheat crop.  Passing soldiers, friends or foes, could confiscate his livestock and stored grain.  A fungus could turn his bumper crop of spuds into a field of stinky black slime overnight.  His livestock could all drop dead when an epidemic of rinderpest or anthrax paid a visit to his region.  Drought, deluge, flood, heat wave, early autumn frost, late springtime frost — farming was a risky business, not a pleasant stroll down Easy Street.

Modern consumers are vulnerable to all of the above risks, plus they are dependent on an extremely complex system of industrial agriculture, food processing, distribution, retailing, and a functional economic system.  If the money in their wallets becomes worthless during an economic meltdown, what’s for dinner?  Will they get evicted?  Will the bank foreclose on their mortgage?  The food system depends on the fossil fuel industry to keep stuff moving on the farms, highways, railways, and airlines.  Refrigeration requires energy to keep food from spoiling.  Stoves and ovens need power to cook meals.  Industrial civilization must remain on life support to keep all the gears of the machine moving.  An enormous house of cards.  What could possibly go wrong?

CONNECTION TO PLACE

Coherent societies can only survive in coherent places — healthy wild ecosystems.  Wild animals are a constant presence in the surrounding countryside, outnumbering the humans.  Free critters inspire contemplation and deep respect.  They provide the folks with food, and eventually compost them.  Throughout every day, wild people devote careful attention to the ongoing drama of sounds, movements, smells, turds, tracks, spirits, and other matters of utmost importance.  Being wild and free is a rich and fully engaging experience.  It requires far more mindfulness than living in a glowing screen zoo.

In Encounters With Nature, Paul Shepard wrote about how our lives can be shaped by animals and places.  For hundreds of thousands of years, wild kids enjoyed childhoods in healthy lands where everything around them, the entire landscape, was fully alive with their plant and animal relatives.  Animals were especially fascinating.  Three year olds take great delight in learning the names of different animals, because they are so amazing.  Children’s lives were warmly embraced by their mothers, their family and neighbors, and by the land that fed them and fascinated them.

In 1997, I was living in the remains of a once prosperous copper mining district near Lake Superior.  I was able to spend a bit of time with the Anishinabe activist Walter Bresette, a man who had a profound spiritual connection to life.  One day, after lunch, I showed him a beautiful piece of copper that had been smoothed by passing glaciers.  To the Anishinabe, all of Creation is alive, sacred, and related — everything in Creation is a being with spiritual power.  I learned that copper rocks are especially sacred to the Anishinabe, and they affectionately and respectfully refer to these ancient and powerful red metal spirit beings as the copper people.

Walter took the heavy green stone in his hands, and gasped with amazement and delight.  The two of them went off, into the next room, and sat down together by the wood stove.  Walter bowed his head, and he and the copper spirits spent a long time in deep and sacred communication.  It was an awesome and moving experience to observe.  I will never forget it.  He spent a night in my house, to feel the strong presence of so many copper spirits.

Shepard said that a child’s early homeland imprinted on its psyche, and remained a special and sacred place for the rest of its life.  Kids soak in all that surrounds them.  At puberty, rites of initiation further strengthened the spiritual bonds to place, via tests of endurance, vision quests, and so on.  The person and the land were one.  All beings on the land belonged there.  None were pests or weeds that had to be eliminated.

In the good old days, before the plague of glowing screens, and the fear of perverts hiding behind every bush, children were allowed to run free, unsupervised, explore their home range, and get their hands dirty.  I was one of these, and I was lucky to live close to forests, lakes, and wetlands.  My imprint of this homeland remains vivid.  I still remember that place in great detail.  It played an important role in shaping my identity.  Most of it has now been obliterated by sprawl.  I have no interest in returning, it’s too painful to see.

Jay Griffiths and her brothers also spent much of their youth playing outdoors.  Like me, they rarely watched television.  She fears that her 1960s generation may be the last to experience the remaining vestiges of a normal childhood.

John Livingston lamented how being raised in a manmade reality deforms us.  Like livestock, we become passive and obedient servants.  We learn to endure the stress of living in dense populations of strangers, and spending most of our time in enclosed climate controlled cubicles with artificial lighting.  Our cubicles are located inside vast concentration camps called cities.  We are likely to develop a high tolerance for abuse, filth, squalor, noise, and intense pollution.

Richard Louv told a touching story about a Girl Scout field trip.  Girls with AIDS from Los Angeles were taken to a camp in the mountains.  One night, a nine year old girl woke up, and had to go to the bathroom.  Stepping outside, she looked up and gasped.  Growing up in a sprawling megalopolis, she had never seen stars before.  “That night, I saw the power of nature on a child.  She was a changed person.  From that moment on, she saw everything.  She used her senses.  She was awake.” 

Natalie Diaz, a Mojave poet, noted that in her language, the same word is used to say both “body” and “land.”  The Mojave had no supermarkets, malls, cities, or online shopping.  So, throughout their lives, their air, water, and food came from the land, their home.  They were at one with the land, like a fetus in the womb. 

There is a profound difference between purchasing food-like substances at a shopping center, and gathering nourishment from the land.  When the land feeds you, an intimate and reverent relationship is born.  I fished a lot in my boyhood years.  Later in life, I took great pleasure in foraging in wild places, and on the recovering remains of abandoned farms and mining settlements.  Over the years, I’ve gathered apples, pears, cherries, plums, blueberries, thimbleberries, blackberries, strawberries, elderberries, grapes, figs, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, acorns, mushrooms, asparagus, and so on.  Joy!

Tom Brown was eight years old when he met an elderly Indian in the woods.  Stalking Wolf was a tracker raised in a wild, free Apache community.  He possessed vast knowledge about the natural world, and how to survive in it.  He spent nine years teaching Tom and his buddy Rick.  Tom grew up to establish a school for trackers, and write 17 books. 

I was lucky to spend much of my childhood playing in the woods and swamps.  I felt very at home in nature.  Years later, a friend pointed me to Tom’s books, and it was a mind-blowing experience — an adult who had profound reverence and respect for the family of life.  Religion had given me years of painful headaches, because it was so incoherent.  Beliefs frequently seemed to have little or no influence on behavior.  I finally found something that made sense, holiness was all around me.  I could see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, respect it.

Jon Young happened to meet Tom Brown in 1971, when Tom was 18, and Jon was 10.  Tom spent eight years teaching his young friend.  When Jon later arrived at Rutgers University, he had extensive knowledge of wild ecosystems, which made him a total freak among his classmates, who seemed to be more than a little disconnected from life — suburban zoo animals.

Young soon discovered that he was the only person at Rutgers who understood bird language.  One day, on an outdoor field trip, he heard a bird call.  It was announcing the approach of a Cooper’s hawk, warning nearby critters that a predator was getting close.  Pay attention!  Jon mentioned this to the others.  The professors gazed at the sky, saw nothing.  They proceeded to exclaim that bird communication was impossible.  Then, the hawk came into view.  Wow!  Jon’s classmates were astonished that the professors, who were card-carrying bird experts, were clueless about bird language. 

Young clearly understood that connection to nature was precious, necessary, and vital.  Not forming that connection was a crippling injury, one suffered by most folks in modern society.  They have no hearts, because they are “dis-placed,” said Okanagan elder Jeanette Armstrong.  In Chief Seattle’s famous speech, he allegedly said, “To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.  You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret.”

Jack Forbes, of Powhatan and Delaware heritage, diagnosed disconnection as an epidemic of insanity, which he called wétiko psychosis, the cannibal disease.  It’s a spiritual illness that causes people to become predators, and to relentlessly consume the lives of others.  Wétiko was the essence of European culture, a nightmare world of bloodthirsty vampires and werewolves.  Their “religion” was something isolated from everyday life, practiced indoors, away from the perfection of Creation. 

Anyway, in 1979, Jon Young asked a core question.  Which people are the most fully connected to the family of life?  Why are some cultures deeply connected, and others not?  There are three components here: connection to self, connection to others, and connection to nature.  In Western societies, disconnection from self, others, and nature (separation sickness) is at pandemic levels.  Over time, Young learned that the San people (“Bushmen”) of the Kalahari were among the most connected cultures still in existence, so he spent time with them.

Being with the San, you always feel safe.  They are super intelligent, super happy, super vital, and great problem solvers.  You never feel competition.  People are in love with every aspect of the ecosystem around them, celebrating it with childlike wonder through all stages of their life.  Every person in that community is committed to the flowering of every other person.  They are incredibly aware of their surroundings at all times, because a brief lapse of attention can kill you in lion country.

When San children grow up with nature in this way, they’re well-adjusted, healthier, happier, smarter, spiritually grounded, and more creative.  By the time they are 12 to 15 years old, they have master tracker skills.  They are illiterate, but they fully understand the language of the Kalahari.  They are better scientists than civilized scientists.

The San are remarkably skilled at living like human beings.  They are wary of entering buildings, because folks who do this too often become damaged, no longer human.  They go crazy.  Today, using the techno-juju of DNA mapping, it’s looking like the San are the common ancestors of all humankind.  For two million years, our hominin ancestors lived like the San.  We have their genes and instincts, but our culture lost its connection centuries ago.

Louis Liebenberg wrote two fantastic books about the tracking skills of San hunters on the Kalahari.  He and Young became friends.  San women were as good as men, or better, at interpreting spoor.  Everyone in a band, even children, could observe human tracks, and accurately identify the individual person who made them.  One time, Liebenberg asked some trackers if they could actually recognize the spoor of an individual antelope.  “They found it very amusing that I should ask them such a stupid question.  To them it is difficult to understand that some people can not do it.”    

Lame Deer was a Lakota medicine man.  His parents were the last generation to be born wild and free.  His generation suffered from the relentless efforts of white people to destroy the Lakota people, and he fiercely resented this.  Whites had lost their connection to the family of life, and were desperately in need of a big healing.  Like their cattle, sheep, and lapdogs, their wild power had been bred out of them.  Lame Deer shared a powerful story, in the hope of helping white folks outgrow their bad trip, so their world-killing rampage would come to an end.

He told us that we needed to experience nature in a good way, and become part of it.  Let’s sit down and listen to the air.  Let’s talk to the butterflies, owls, rivers, and lakes.  They are our relatives.  Let’s become like stones, plants, and trees.  Let us be animals, and think and feel like animals.  Even rocks are holy.  Every man needs a stone to guide him.  His story was painful and beautiful, but it failed to inspire a miraculous healing among the palefaces.

Aldous Huxley wrote, “A man must do more than indulge in introspection.  If I would know myself I must know my environment.”  Prince Charles said it a bit differently:  “In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.”  Carson McCullers said, “To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.”  Paul Shepard put it like this, “Knowing who you are is impossible without knowing where you are.”

Every five years, the average American moves to a different address in the same city, or another county, state, or nation.  We typically spend 95 percent of our lives indoors.  Someone once realized that prisoners in maximum security prisons typically spend more time outdoors than suburban kids do.  We have become space aliens, residents of no place, something like zoo animals.

CONNECTED PEOPLE

Many of us have been taught ideas that echo Thomas Hobbes, who declared that the lives of hunter-gatherers were “nasty, brutish, and short.”  Many folks who have had direct experience would disagree.  The wild cultures that were less than mellow tended to be engaged in herding or horticulture, situations in which it was more common to bump into neighbors in an unpleasant manner.

Peter Freuchen spent a lot of time with the Eskimos, and married into their culture.  In Book of the Eskimos, he wrote that “they always enjoy life with an enviable intensity, and they believe themselves to be the happiest people on earth, living in the most beautiful country there is.”

Colin Turnbull spent years with the Mbuti Pygmies, and described them in The Forest People.  He was amazed by their joyful way of living.  He said that they laugh until they can no longer stand, then they sit down and laugh.

In Original Wisdom, Robert Wolff described the Sng’oi people of Malaysia.  They knew each other’s unspoken thoughts, seeming to communicate telepathically.  “They had an immense inner dignity, were happy, and content, and did not want anything.”  They loved to laugh and joke.  They were often singing and smiling.  Angry voices were never heard.

In The People of the Polar North, Knud Rasmussen noted how the Eskimos pitied (and giggled at) the Danes, because they suffered from hurricane minds — they never stopped thinking.  Knud once observed an Eskimo who appeared to be deep in thought, and asked him what he was thinking about.  The man laughed.  “Oh!  It is only you white men who go in so much for thinking; up here we only think of our flesh-pits and of whether we have enough or not for the long Dark of the winter.  If we have meat enough, then there is no need to think.”  Their language included no tools for discussing abstractions.  Eskimos rarely made plans for tomorrow.  “An irresponsible happiness at merely being alive finds expression in their actions and conversation.”

In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff described the natives she met in South America.  The Tauripan people of Venezuela were the happiest people she had ever met.  All of their children were relaxed, joyful, cooperative, and rarely cried — they were never bored, lonely, or argumentative.  The Yequana people seemed unreal to Liedloff, because of their lack of unhappiness.  As an expedition was moving up a challenging jungle stream, she noticed that the Italians would get completely enraged at the slightest mishap, while the Yequana just laughed the struggles away.  Their daily life had a party mood to it.

In his book, In Search of the Primitive, Lewis Cotlow visited Eskimos in arctic Canada.  One night, he spent several hours talking to local officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  They kept repeating one idea in different ways: “The Eskimos are the happiest people in the world.”

In 1832, the artist George Catlin visited Indian tribes in the Upper Missouri River region.  He wrote, “They live in a country well stocked with buffaloes and wild horses, which furnish them an excellent and easy living; their atmosphere is pure, which produces good health and long life, and they are the most independent and happiest race of Indians I have met with: they are all entirely in a state of primitive rudeness and wildness, and consequently are picturesque and handsome, almost beyond description.  …In my travels I have more than realized my former predictions that those Indians, who could be found almost entirely in a state of nature, with the least knowledge of civilized society, would be found the most cleanly in their persons, elegant in their dress and manners, and enjoying life to the greatest perfection.”

Daniel L. Everett was sent to the Amazon to translate the Bible into the language of the illiterate Pirahã hunter-gatherers.  He described his efforts in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.  He eventually realized that it was pointless “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.”  He became a devout atheist.  “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.”

[Continued in sample #48]

Wild Free and Happy Sample 46

 

[Note: This is the forty-sixth 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.

WHO ARE WE?

Life in the Wild Lane

Over a long span of time, our minds, bodies, emotions, and instincts were given form on tropical savannahs.  Like our savannah ancestors, you and I are social animals, and we do best in small groups, where we can maintain ongoing personal relationships with all the others.  Many wild folks likely spent their entire lives without seeing a stranger.  For them, exposure to dense crowds of odd-looking, odd-smelling, odd-sounding strangers would have been terrifying.

On the day of your birth, you did not squirt out of momma’s womb with credit cards, car keys, and a cell phone.  You were a wild animal that evolution had fine-tuned for a wholesome life of hunting, scavenging, and gathering in a tropical wilderness.  You were fully expecting to be welcomed into a kind and caring tribe — an egalitarian culture of anarchist singers, dancers, and nature lovers.  You were not expecting to squirt into the frightening bright lights of a totally insane planet-thrashing civilization, condemned to a life sentence without parole.

You were expecting to spend your entire life out of doors, in a thriving ecosystem where humans were a wee minority group in the family of critters.  You enjoyed frequently seeing, hearing, and smelling your wild non-human neighbors throughout every day.  Many of these neighbors were good to eat, and some of them would eagerly leap at any opportunity to tear you to bloody shreds and ravenously feast on your yummy flesh.  Survival required paying acute attention to reality at all times.

Paul Shepard wrote that for three million years, our wild hominin ancestors were “few in number, sensitive to the seasons and other life, humble in attitude toward the Earth, and comfortable as one species among many.”

It Takes a Village

Soon after birth, many animal species are capable of skills like walking, running, swimming, climbing, and feeding themselves.  This is not true for humans, because we are an experiment to see what might happen if tropical primates were allowed to evolve unusually swollen brains.  This project required some tweaks. 

The birth canal from mom’s uterus to her vagina passes through an opening in the pelvis, and this opening is too small to allow the passage of a fetus with a more fully developed brain.  Consequently, humans are born long before we are capable of functioning unassisted.  Because we are helpless for an extended period, we require a lot of attention from mommy, daddy, and the surrounding tribe.  Many observers have reported that wild people did an above average job of raising children.

Jean Liedloff spent two and a half years living with wild people in a Venezuelan jungle, while occasionally zipping back and forth to big city America, two cultures that could not possibly be more different.  The wild folks were generally a kind and cheerful bunch.  But every time she stepped off a plane in America, she would immediately be jolted by how strikingly unhappy people appeared.  Why?  This question eventually inspired her to become a therapist, and the author of an awesome book.

Our months in the womb were very safe and comfortable, the most peaceful period in our journey.  Liedloff described how tribal folks made the transition to life in the outer world as pleasant as possible.  From the moment of their birth, newborns were held and nursed and loved — and this warm, secure, continuous contact lasted until the infant indicated that it was ready to begin the creeping and crawling phase.  Raised in this manner, wild kids lived with a sense of wellbeing that might last throughout their entire lives.  They were well-adjusted and happy.  Life was good.

On the other hand, in the big city realm, the bright and noisy world outside the womb could be a rather unpleasant place, sometimes hellish.  Newborns were hustled away to a nursery, where they could cry by themselves until they ran out of tears.  The sense of wellbeing disintegrated, and some of the infants never again recovered it. 

Civilized folks, who spend their lives isolated in climate controlled cubicles, with state of the art entertainment systems, often have to buy books to learn how to raise a kid.  Liedloff detested these <spit!> horrid books.  She wrote that if parents followed the printed instructions, they would “produce children they cannot love, who grow up like themselves, anti-self, antisocial, incapable of giving, destined forever to go hungry.” 

Phases of Development

During our life journey, we pass through four developmental phases.  In any society, a child’s physical and emotional needs are different from those of an adolescent, adult, or elder.  In any region of the world, everyone’s body physically changes through these four phases.  No matter what culture we live in, our bodies will automatically proceed from one phase to the next as we meander through the years of our lives.

On the other hand, it’s very important to understand that our emotional development is never guaranteed to automatically proceed from one phase to the next.  You cannot smoothly advance into adolescence emotionally until you successfully acquire the emotional skills of childhood.  This is true for every transition through the four phases.  Each must be completed before moving up to the next — but this doesn’t always happen. 

Emotional development can get permanently stuck in one phase, even as the years and decades keep passing.  Thus, you can have infantile adults, gray haired adolescents, and other victims of arrested development.  Many may never develop a mature sense of social responsibility or emotional stability.  This is especially common in complex societies, which have a long reputation for being incubators of mental deformities.  Evolution didn’t prepare us for living in crowded, sprawling, synthetic habitats.

It takes about 20 years for a newborn to fully develop the body and brain of an adult.  We did not squirt out of mom’s womb with a comprehensive understanding of how to effortlessly glide through our joyride to the finish line.  Luckily, we are social animals, and if we had been lucky enough to be born into a healthy wild society, the community would have provided us with timely and competent mentoring.  Folks born into complex societies, like ours, are often not so lucky.

Especially critical are the transitions from one phase to the next.  For example, a child does not instinctively know how to gracefully move through the whirlwinds of puberty and then smoothly flow into a delightful adolescence.  Rites of initiation are ceremonies that explore the wisdom of cultural stories, and provide important instructions for social behavior, conflict avoidance, and other core issues.  When a safety net of support is provided, transitions can be much easier.  These communities are more likely to nurture the blossoming of sane, competent, well-adjusted people.  Modern communities do a far sloppier job of providing guidance and support.

We are now about to take a quick peek at the phases of development.  Paul Shepard devoted a lot of attention to this subject in four of his books, especially Nature and Madness.  He wore a critic’s hat, and focused his flame thrower on how civilized cultures achieved great advances in self-destruction, producing hordes of obedient grunts to crank the wheels of the machine, and build the palaces, while rubbishing the ecosystem.  His writing emits a sharp aroma of extensive learning and intense brainpower, but it’s not a breeze to read.  His career didn’t include intimate long-term experiences in wild cultures.

Among my all-time favorite books is The Human Cycle, by Colin Turnbull, a gentle soul and careful writer.  This book focused on how different cultures guided their people through the transitions of life’s journey.  Turnbull was raised in a pathetically dysfunctional family and peer group (upper class Britain).  Later in life he deeply enjoyed spending lots of time with the Mbuti Pygmies, who celebrated life in the Ituri rainforest of Zaire.  For many thousands of years they were a happy and sustainable society — until paradise turned into a war zone and logging camp.  Turnbull shared fascinating descriptions of both wonderful and wonky cultures.  He gave us a delicious glimpse of how our ancestors may have lived in the good old days.

The following comments are a generic overview.  They do not describe universal practices that are exactly the same in all societies.  Humans have created countless unique cultures over many thousands of years.  Each attempted to guide folks through their life journey, in a wide variety of ways, with mixed results.

CHILDHOOD.  Childhood is the thrilling and confusing era of intense change that spans between birthday and puberty.  For their first three years, all Mbuti infants remained in constant contact with their mothers, which provided a heavenly bonding experience.  This prepared the infant for becoming a confident and competent social being during the rest of its life. 

On the other hand, in Turnbull’s upper class Britain (and throughout much of the civilized world), the mother-infant relationship was far less intimate and comforting.  Turnbull was raised by a long series of nannies.  Because of the terribly dangerous health risks of breastfeeding, his mother did not nurse him.  His brother had different nannies, and lived in the same house, but the two never met until Colin was 6, and they shared a hotel room.  With great excitement, they eagerly conversed, until mom discovered the mistake.  Rich people can sometimes be oddballs.  Colin begged gypsies to kidnap him, but they refused.

Carleton Coon wrote that the Andaman islanders nursed their young until the age of 3 or 4.  The hungry little milk lovers were passed around, and suckled by all lactating women.  Shepard noted that when the infant’s bond with mother was properly formed, it encouraged the potential for intellectual and emotional growth.  But if this bonding was dodgy, the damage done could sometimes have lifelong impact.

As the infant eventually learned to speak, crawl, and explore, it became less dependent on mother.  This began at around age three.  For the next nine years or so, until the onset of puberty at 12 or so, it was an amazing time of discovery.  In wild cultures, these nine years were a time window for the absolutely vital process of forming healthy bonds with nature, in all its diversity.  During this experience, kids absorbed the richness of the natural order — animals, insects, plants, storms, stars, aromas, colors, sounds — the sacred wonderland of creation, home sweet home!

Imagine a catfish that paid little attention to the other living things in the lake — a fish that was raised in a radicalized catfish supremacy cult, believed that the creator of the universe was a catfish, and the only thing that mattered was the prosperity of catfish.  How weird would that be?  Unfortunately, many modern folks, eyes riveted to glowing screens, or confined in speeding vehicles, never experience a full immersion baptism in wild nature (like a catfish without a lake).  For them, nature is merely static scenery along the highway.  Boring and meaningless.

Wild kids spent lots of time watching the “others” (non-human animals), learned their names, categorized them, imitated them, and studied their anatomy when butchered.  Kids knew the daily and seasonal patterns of the others, and watched them move through their life cycle, from youngsters to oldsters.  Kids developed a strong feeling of kinship with them.

Hunting was a core component of our wild ancestors’ lives.  Folks accumulated enormous amounts of knowledge about tracking and animal behavior.  Our brains evolved, over hundreds of thousands of years, in wild Stone Age cultures.  What you and I are today is a direct result of this very long, beautiful, and deeply intimate wild relationship, despite the fact that it is largely absent in the culture that currently suffocates us.

In an interview with Derrick Jensen, John Livingston shed more light on the process of bonding with nature.  A newborn human is an incredibly flexible animal, capable of fully adapting to the worldviews, religions, lifestyles, and languages of a vast spectrum of cultures, from “primitive” to “advanced,” anywhere in the world. 

Thus, a primary component of childhood is open-mindedness, a mindset in which they are free and eager to explore all possibilities.  So, for youngsters who have access to wild nature, and who have a tingling curiosity to explore big magic, it’s perfectly normal, healthy, and life enhancing to form emotional and spiritual bonds with the family of life.  If the bond with nature doesn’t form by age 12 or so, it’s likely that it never will, but not impossible.

In the ghoulish world of deepest, darkest couch potato suburbia, nature has been reduced to something that folks passively watch on gigantic flat screen TVs, while gobbling cheese doodles and guzzling fizzy sugar water.  The normal around-the-clock stimulation of wildness, that every animal needs, is absent.  Children are denied the vital education provided by the daily affairs of the family of life.  They are hobbled by what Richard Louv would diagnose as Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD).

Stan Rowe called it EDD (Earth Deficiency Disease), a devastating disconnection from the meaning of life.  EDD children tend to form bonds with machines, not nature.  He estimated that consumers spend 95 percent of their lives indoors.  Children are often kept under house arrest, because parents fear that going outdoors is too dangerous.  The poor kids share some similarities with the homeless wild animals imprisoned in zoos.  Rowe wrote, “Our two best doctors are our legs.”  He hated cities.  “The city is an unhealthy place for those who want to come home at least once before they die.” 

In modern cultures, a major shift follows the open-minded curiosity of childhood.  It is the dawn of a long era of tedious work, responsibilities, challenges, and annoyances.  For this reason, Turnbull noted that we romanticize our childhood, a golden age of innocence and joy.  The Mbuti did not idolize childhood, “because, for them, the world has remained a place of wonder, and the older they get the greater the wonder.”  They bonded beautifully with nature, their forest home was sacred, and the source of all goodness.  When they moved through the forest, they sang to it.  They referred to it as mother, father, or both.  Life was good.

By the arrival of puberty, wild children were well rooted in place, feeling at-one with the flora and fauna that surrounded them.  They had developed a profoundly important spiritual connection to life.  Florence Shepard, Paul’s wife, said it like this: “At the heart of our identity is a fundamentally wild being, one who finds in the whole of wild nature all that is true and beautiful in this world.”

PUBERTY.  Oh-oh!  Somewhere around 12 or so, the path begins to get slippery, anxious, and exciting.  Welcome to puberty, girls and boys!  Puberty is the kickoff for adolescence, which is the bridge between childhood and maturity.  For females, adolescence is generally the years between 12 and 20; and for males, 14 to 25.  Puberty is time to say goodbye to the sweet and easy innocence of childhood, and undergo a transformation into sexual beings.

In Mbuti country, the all-knowing adult community was fully prepared to launch into the traditional rituals and ceremonies that are among the most important events in life, according to Turnbull.  These are the rites of initiation.  Shepard noted that in various cultures, initiations often provided “ceremonies that include separation from family, instruction by elders, tests of endurance and pain, trials of solitude, visions, dreams, and rituals of rebirth.”

For Mbuti girls, the puberty alarm clock rings with a dramatic event, the passing of their first blood.  It was time for initiation.  Often the community waited until more than one girl was ready.  The girls were then moved to the special elima house, where they changed their attire, announcing that they were no longer children.  Boys were allowed to visit, and there was sexual play, but it never led to pregnancy.  Girls and boys learned new songs and sang them together. 

At puberty, boys were not awakened by a bloody alarm.  Every two or three years, adults selected a group of boys between ages 9 and 11 for initiation.  For Mbuti kids, who sleep in small huts near mom and dad, the mechanics of sex were no mystery at all.  Initiation was the time to learn about lots of important stuff beyond the huffing and puffing, including the social responsibilities of adulthood.  The strategy here was that the boys would learn — in advance — the possible consequences of what mom and dad did in the dark.   

For the Mbuti, initiation led to the emergence of “a fully integrated self.”  Me and my classmates seem to have passed through puberty in a fairly dis-integrated manner.  For our ersatz initiation, we were more or less hurled off the end of the dock into deep water (note the high teen pregnancy rates).  For more than a few, emotional development got stuck in adolescence (note the numerous struggling adults in our society who are the opposite of well-adjusted and fully integrated).

If there was just one idea that Turnbull could send you away with, it would be this: no culture handles puberty and adolescence as poorly as ours.  “The consequences of our folly are to be seen all around us in the violence, neuroses, and loneliness of our youth, our adults, and aged.”  Some never come close to having a full or rich life. 

Shepard would be quick to add that this culture is also demented because of our disconnection from wildness and nature, our domestication of plants and animals, our conversion of ecosystems into cropland and crowded urban nightmares, the exploitive and oppressive hierarchies including patriarchy, and on and on.  This is not a good path.

ADOLESCENCE.  With the transition into adolescence, the time window for the free-flowing open-mindedness of childhood tends to draw closed.  It becomes time to put on cultural blinders, and become fully immersed in our tribal identity.  This is something like the process of how wet pourable concrete inevitably becomes rigid, strong, and permanent.  The worldview, beliefs, and values of your culture become deeply imprinted infallible truths, a mindset you carry to the end of your days (usually).

If you were a wild, free, and happy Mbuti, this transition was perfectly normal, healthy, and beneficial — an essential step on the path to maturity.  Throughout adolescence, the bonds with nature continued expanding and deepening — the Mbuti never outgrew their sacred relationship with the family of life.

If you are a citizen of industrial civilization, its ersatz initiation process leads to a far different outcome.  Compulsory education extends from childhood into the years of adolescence.  In my youth, busloads of kids my age were separated from society for seven or eight hours a day, so we could be rigorously trained in the myths of our culture, and the skills essential for full time employment.  We were trained to become aggressive, status-seeking, narrowly focused achievers.  Upon graduation, we were set free to join the voracious locust swarms of consumers.

Turnbull received his public education at Westminster, a prestigious school, where students had their brains filled with knowledge, in an efficient assembly line process.  Intellectual skills, like competency in critical thinking, were not part of the curriculum.  He had nothing nice to say about the abominable experience, only this: “It would have been good training for a life in prison.”

In Mbuti culture, following their initiation, the new adults did an excellent job of reintegrating with the community — almost all spent the rest of their days living among their friends and kinfolk.  They didn’t banish themselves to faraway places, never to return.  Notably, their community was stable, closely bonded, and highly supportive.

Rites of initiation are traditionally a three-step process: (1) separation from the community, (2) preparation for adulthood, and (3) reincorporation into society as an adult.  Industrial culture commonly omits the last step.  Many of our successful graduates are blasted out of a cannon into the outer world, to attend university, pursue a career, enlist in the military, or whatever.  Turnbull complained that many of our adolescents actually “expect and want a permanent separation” from the community they grew up in, because they seek “freedom.”  They scatter to the winds like tumbleweeds, and many are never seen again.

Like Turnbull, Shepard also loathed our culture’s assembly line for manufacturing adults, most of whom never formed close bonds with nature.  Most were likely to imprint that normality was largely non-living, and that humans were the only beings that were truly alive.  They internalize chaos, and when it’s time to master social relations, they are not prepared.  Shepard wrote, “The only society more fearful than one run by children might be one run by childish adults.”

[Continued in sample #47]

NOTE: Since the last post, this blog crossed a threshold.  As of this morning, it has now had 504,603 views!  Thank you!  I’m glad that my work is useful to some.  On to a million…

 

The Mountain People



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Forest People

Colin Turnbull’s book The Forest People takes us on a fascinating voyage into the world of the Mbuti Pygmies, who live in the Ituri rainforest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Turnbull (1924-1994) was an anthropologist who spent several years with the Pygmies, beginning in 1951.  He came from a wealthy English family, but he found life among the Pygmies to be so satisfying that he had to resist strong urges to remain with them.

Instead of using the standard scholarly format for anthropology books, Turnbull described these people in a series of stories.  These stories included descriptions of the important cultural components of the Pygmy way of life, and introduced us to the personalities of various individuals in the band. 

They were hunter-gatherers, and they enjoyed an exceedingly low tech way of life in their tropical rainforest home.  They had little need for clothing, blankets, or warm shelters.  They hunted with nets, spears, and bows and arrows.  They did not garden or herd animals.  Consequently, they had an abundance of leisure time.  They loved singing, dancing, storytelling, and visiting kinfolk.  They would laugh until they were too weak to stand, then sit down and laugh.

In 2500 BC, Egyptian explorers discovered the Pygmies.  Their report to the Pharaoh described “a people of the trees, a tiny people who sing and dance to their god, a dance such as had never been seen before.”  When Turnbull arrived 4,500 years later, he found a similar scenario.  They had a way of life that worked, and it was quite enjoyable.  Yes, daily life included normal personality conflicts, but their society did not suffer from chiefs, priests, thieves, chauvinists, inequality, or individualism.

The hunting way of life required cooperation, so the Pygmies were highly skilled at conflict resolution.  One of their proverbs proclaimed that “a noisy camp is a hungry camp.”  Disputes promptly led to active discussion by the group.  Shunning and ridicule were common tools, and annoying offenders were sometimes beaten.

Everything about the forest was sacred to the Pygmies.  “They were a people who had found in the forest something that made their life more than just worth living, something that made it, with all its hardships and problems and tragedies, a wonderful thing full of joy and happiness and free of care.”  

In another book, Turnbull mentioned Father Longo, a Catholic missionary who refused to preach to the Pygmies, because they had no word for evil.  “In order to convert them, then, he would first have to teach them the concept of evil, and that he was not prepared to do.”

Moke, a wise elder, said: “The forest is a father and mother to us, and like a father or mother it gives us everything we need — food, clothing, shelter, warmth, and affection.  Normally everything goes well, because the forest is good to its children, but when things go wrong, there must be a reason.”

Alas, sometimes the forest fell asleep, and failed to take care of the Pygmies, leading to illness, death, or bad hunting.  Army ants might move in, or a leopard might snatch a child.  When these problems occurred, the Pygmies would sing to the forest, to wake it up and make it happy.  They sometimes performed the molimo ceremony, during which animal noises were made using a long hollow wooden instrument.

And when the forest was happy, they would sing and dance to share their happiness with it.  They lived in a heavenly place, in constant direct contact with everything they held to be sacred.  They had absolute reverence for the forest, their ancient home, and they were some of its many children.

The Pygmies enjoyed at least 4,500 years of relative stability, and this was made possible by their primitive technology.  If they had become farmers or herders, their journey would have been far more destructive and turbulent.  They would have seriously damaged themselves and their sacred forest.

Change has been increasing in Pygmy country, requiring them to adjust the way they live.  Maybe 400 years ago, Bantu people moved into the forest and began slash-and-burn farming.  They had been herders from the grasslands of East Africa, but they were driven off their home by other tribes.  Their cattle died in the jungle, so they traded food with the Pygmies for meat. 

In the 1880’s, the Congo became a colony of Belgium.  Since then efforts have been made to “liberate” the unfortunate Pygmies and convert them into hard-working tax-paying farmers.  This plan has not enjoyed great success.  At one farm, 29 Pygmies died of sunstroke in a single day.  They thrive in the cool shade of their ancient forest, and they harbor an intense hatred of miserable backbreaking field work — what could be more idiotic?

In the twentieth century, the Ituri has been ravaged by road-builders, loggers, miners, ivory poachers, bushmeat hunters, missionaries, and a bloody parade of trigger-happy rebels, terrorists, goon squads, psychopaths, and freedom fighters.  There have been numerous armed conflicts.  The Second Congo War began in 1998, and resulted in 5.4 million deaths, mostly from disease and starvation.  Many displaced people were driven into the Ituri Forest.  Pygmies were hunted down and eaten like game animals. 

Much deforestation has been caused by the continuous expansion of slash-and-burn farming.  Jungle soils are rapidly depleted by agriculture, and the Congo’s birthrate is one of the worlds highest.  Almost half of the population is younger than 15.

When The Forest People was published, it soon became popular.  Turnbull thought that the book had impact “because the near-Utopia described rang true, and showed that certain voids in the lives of many of us could indeed be filled.”

Ah yes, the voids in our lives.  How often do we sing and dance to keep our forest happy?  Turnbull has given us a precious gift — a taste of what a healthy and joyful life could be like, living in harmony with the land, singing and dancing in a balanced ecosystem, century after century after century.  His book offers us a brief enchanting escape from our world of madness, and a beautiful vision of what life could be like for our descendants.

Turnbull, Colin M., The Forest People, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1961.

The Human Cycle

The anthropologist Colin Turnbull (1924-1994) was born into an upper class family in England.  His mother did not breast feed him because of the “health risks.”  He was raised by a long string of nannies.  His father was distant and rarely spoke to him.  His brother lived in a separate nursery, and had other nannies.  Colin really wanted to get to know him, but never did.  He was forbidden to visit portions of the house where his parents, brother, and the servants lived.  When Colin was twelve, his last nanny was fired, and he finally got to spend some time with his parents. 

Following school, he graduated from Oxford University, attended Banaras Hindu University in India, became an anthropologist, spent several years living with the Mbuti Pygmies, wrote books, and became a Buddhist monk before dying of AIDS.  He had a life of prosperity and privilege, but his journey from infancy to adulthood was painful and left permanent emotional scars. 

The Pygmies blew his mind, because their social system was far better, in many ways, than the Western way of life.  Observing them, it was easy to comprehend what a dysfunctional upbringing he had received from his dysfunctional society and family.  Near the end of his life, Turnbull wrote a powerful book, The Human Cycle.  It examined the ways that people in different societies progressed through the phases of life — childhood, adolescence, youth, adulthood, and old age.

Pygmy culture relied on their ancient traditions for guiding people through life in an optimal way, with generous servings of self-confidence, integrity, happiness, and fall-down-laughing gaiety.  Western societies were skilled at producing damaged people.  We tend to regard our childhood as a golden age of innocence and joy — before we’re shipped off to dreary schools, jobs, and nursing homes.  The Pygmies did not idolize childhood, “because, for them, the world has remained a place of wonder, and the older they get the greater the wonder.”  Imagine that.

The Pygmies taught their children everything they needed in order to thrive in their sacred forest, especially a strong sense of social consciousness — “we” not “I.”  Sharing, cooperation, and conflict avoidance were core skills.  But Western education was more like a factory where heads were filled with knowledge.  Students spent years faithfully absorbing facts and dogmas without questioning them.  The goal was to produce aggressive, competitive, self-absorbed individualists.  “It would have been good training for a life in prison.”

The Pygmies performed rituals of initiation, which ceremonially transformed adolescents into adults.  A vital component of this process was reintegration, when the new adults were returned to their community, where they would remain for life.  Each young man built a new hut.  When Western youths graduated, they bypassed reintegration, and were shot from a cannon into the outer world.  They often left behind their family and friends, and spent their lives in urban isolation, with little connection to their neighbors.  Because their initiation was unfinished, it was common for them to suffer from terminal adolescence.

Westerners formally practiced religion once a week, which focused on beliefs and rituals.  The Pygmies lived every minute of their lives in a shimmering world of spiritual power.  They were at one with the forest, the source of their existence, and they regarded it with complete adoration.  The forest was heaven.  Humans were sacred members of the family of life, not masters, managers, or stewards.  They enjoyed a complete lack of religious freedom — everyone was on the same channel, unified by the same belief system — zero conflicts.  Turnbull once said that the Pygmies were without evil and infinitely wise.

Western society teaches us that sex is naughty, shameful, dirty, sinful, and disgustingly bad.  At a school for the upper class, Turnbull watched in horror as a boy was gang raped by other students.  The Pygmy initiation process taught boys and girls about the joys of sacred sex.  Premarital sexual relationships were normal, healthy, and not promiscuous.  Curiosity about sex was “encouraged to flower into exuberance.”

In the Western world, adulthood usually majored in work, and minored in play — and work was often miserable, soul-killing drudgery required for survival.  In the Pygmy world, it’s hard to see a clear boundary between work and play.  The vital task of maintaining social harmony required generous amounts of singing and dancing, followed by gathering ripe fruit, or hunting, or fireside chats, or teaching the children.

Westerners sent their old folks off to retirement homes when they became a drag on the independence of their children — away from regular contact with family, friends, and other age groups — away to a place where they had nothing to do, “a pre-death limbo.”  Retirement denied the elderly of the joys of old age.  The Pygmies had tremendous respect for their old folks, who remained tightly integrated in society, and never retired.  The elderly provided valuable services like arbitration, babysitting, teaching, counseling, and guarding the camp.

As they lived, Pygmies moved from joyful childhood to joyful youth to joyful adulthood to joyful old age.  “They discover that each stage of life is rich, but that the next stage is even richer; nothing is lost.”  Turnbull learned huge lessons from them.  It’s gratifying to see how he learned, healed, and grew in the second half of his life.  Turnbull gave us a precious gift — the awareness of other modes of living that are far healthier than our own, rooted in social responsibility, functional communities, and spiritual connection to the family of life.