Wild Free and Happy Sample 52

 

[Note: This is the fifty-second sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

HUMAN WEBS

The culture we live in is fantastically irrational, burning every bridge it crosses, and then charging forward to rubbish what lies ahead.  Efforts to comprehend reality often result in throbbing headaches.  In the early pages of this book, I mentioned a fundamental question that William Cronon’s father gave him, to help his son navigate the path of life with greater wisdom, “How did things get to be this way?”  Both father and son were history professors.  His question has guided my process of writing this book.

William and John McNeill were another father and son team of historians, and their vision was to write a book that actually answered the question.  William’s 1963 experiment was written in a conventional history textbook style, and was a hefty 829 pages.  John thought a slimmer and slicker book was possible.  He envisioned an unconventional approach, and with a few years of effort the two of them got the job done in 350 pages, The Human Web.

Webs are relationships that link together groups of people that have come into contact with each other.  These meetings encourage exchanges of information.  In ancient times, hunter-gatherers were few in number, and widely dispersed.  Bow and arrow technology somehow spread around the wild and roadless planet, to every continent except Australia.  This was made possible, over the passage of millennia, by the first worldwide web, which remained a loose and informal network.  As wild folks migrated into unknown lands, and encountered new challenges, innovation increased the odds for survival.  Learning the skills used by others could be extremely beneficial.

Then came agriculture.  As farming and herding grew in importance, the human herd also grew.  More and more cities and civilizations mutilated once-healthy ecosystems, filling the land with more and more people.  Strangers from different webs bumped into each other, more and more often.  These random meetings exposed folks to more and more foreign technologies, crops, ideas, goods, and so on.  Over time, regional webs formed, and these often merged with others, forming larger webs.  Webs enabled a wide variety of information to travel to distant lands, where it accumulated, mutated, intermingled, and jumped on the next boat or caravan to elsewhere. 

Eventually, via this process of mergers and acquisitions, the most powerful web of all came into existence around A.D. 200, the Old World Web.  In its early phase, it spanned across North Africa and most of Eurasia.  By 1450, about 75 percent of humans lived within it.  After 1890 it grew explosively.  Today, it has essentially become a single worldwide web that includes most of humankind, from beggars to billionaires.

As professors, the McNeills had a sacred occupational obligation to gush with pride about the wonders of science, technology, progress, and human brilliance.  It’s mandatory that innocent young students be filled with a radicalized blind faith that we’re zooming up the path to a better tomorrow.  At the same time, the McNeills felt a moral obligation to make an embarrassing confession, regarding the dark shadow of brilliance — civilization’s chronic addiction to self-destructive habits.  The amazing consumer wonderland that we live in is only kept on life support by ever-growing complexity made possible by ever-increasing flows of rapidly diminishing non-renewable resources, especially fossil energy — a steep and slippery downhill path to a mangled tomorrow.

More and more, the inflow of strategic resources is getting dodgy.  We are moving at a brisk velocity toward rock solid limits.  Consequently, John regretfully sighed, “the chances of cataclysmic violence seem depressingly good.”  They were writing 20 years ago, back in the happy days when far less was known about methane plumes, melting permafrost, abrupt climate change, and the limits of modern technology to conjure miraculous solutions.

Deep Connection

In prehistoric times, webs were small and simple exchanges between neighboring tribes.  Like all other wild critters, our ancestors were absolutely integrated into the ecosystem around them, to a degree that we can barely imagine today — like your hand is connected to your arm.  The full attention of all their senses was tuned into the sights, sounds, and smells of the surrounding land.  Their world was sacred, spiritually alive, worthy of full respect.

Louis Liebenberg spent lots of time among hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, folks who lived like your ancestors once did.  Today, some experts believe that the ancestors of every living human trace back to their ancient gene pool.  Hunting on the hot, dry Kalahari was challenging.  Some hunters were more skilled than others.  In one group, up to half of the adult men did not kill even one large animal in a year.  Some barely killed any large game during their entire lives.  Reciprocity was the bedrock norm.  Meat was always equally shared with everyone.  Hunters were expected to be humble and gentle.  When a lad had a long lucky streak, he might take some time off — sometimes for weeks or months — to avoid inspiring envy and resentment.

Each band lived within a territory that they considered their hunting grounds.  The boundary lines were not marked, but all the neighboring hunting bands knew where they were, and respected them.  Boundaries reduced the likelihood of friction and conflict.  In drought years, when a hunting ground dried up, the band could shift to the hunting ground of an allied band.  This provided life insurance in a land where precipitation varied from place to place, and year to year.

It’s hard to imagine our ancestors’ extremely intimate connection to place.  Natalie Diaz described this relationship.  In the Mojave culture, there is no separation between me and the place that surrounds me, we are one.  Each person is entirely a living embodiment of the nearby water, air, soil, plants, and animals.  In the Mojave language, the same word is used to express both body and land, because they are the same.  People are buried in the land of their birth, the land of their ancient ancestors, the place where they belong, home sweet home.  Over time, the family of life recycles their corpses, and new beings arise.

You carry yourself much differently when you deeply experience your sacred connection to all that is, and are fully present in a healthy wild ecosystem.  This sense of oneness with life, experienced by our Homo ancestors for more than two million years, has had a substantial influence on the development of what we are as a species.  The mind and body of the amazing critter you see in the mirror was fine-tuned via a very, very long era of successfully living as happy, healthy, brown skinned, curly haired, bare naked, illiterate wild heathens in the tropics. 

We continue to squirt out of the womb with the genes of a Pleistocene tropical primate.  Today’s newborns still expect to open their eyes in a healthy wild world that is filled with abundant life.  They are ready to spend their life’s journey wandering, living in small bands of family and friends, singing under the stars, dining on a generous variety of wild foods.  We only become unstable oddballs when we are born into a dysfunctional society, and have no choice but to learn its ways.

For us, still today, it is comfortable and enjoyable to be among small groups of people that we love, respect, and trust.  Cooperation and sharing are what healthy humans naturally do.  We expect to be fondly treated like an equal. 

In modern society, most of us do not spend every day surrounded by an intimate circle of equals.  It is unpleasant being around folks who are self-centered, disrespectful, and exploitive.  We are constantly encouraged by our culture’s thundering jungle drums to live and think like individuals, not sisters and brothers.  The fundamental verb of life is compete.  A primary purpose in life is to climb as high as possible up the pyramid of wealth and power. 

For us, still today, it is comfortable and enjoyable to wander through a forest, gathering mushrooms, berries, and nuts.  It’s healing to watch moonlight rippling on the surface of a wild and isolated lake.  It’s inspiring to feast on the beauty of northern lights in a winter wonderland.

In modern society, eight lane highways filled with speeding motorized wheelchairs seem like horrific glimpses into the rumbling bowels of hell.  Nothing could be more unnatural and traumatizing than living amidst large numbers of strangers, day after day.  We are like zoo inmates surrounded by walls and fences.  John Livingston wrote that lions raised in zoos, under absolute human control, and isolated from wild habitat, go insane.  They are “overfed, graceless, apathetic, almost catatonic.”  No animal was meant to live like this.

Today, our lives are connected to the global economy, industrial civilization, numerous news and entertainment feeds, and necessities produced by perfect strangers in faraway places.  Many of us don’t feel at home in nature.  We live in climate controlled space stations, staring at glowing screens, lonely in a world of billions, clinging to our companion animals.  Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “What can one expect from a man who has spent the last 20 years of his life putting heads on pins?”

Big Fork

John Gowdy put his spotlight on a massive shift in the human saga.  Humans emerged maybe 300,000 years ago, near the end of the Pleistocene epoch.  The Pleistocene was a 2.5 million year era of countless whipsaw climate swings.  Trends could sometimes shift from ice age to tropical in just two centuries.  The pattern changed around 9,700 B.C., with the arrival of the Holocene epoch, a highly unusual and long lasting era of climate stability and warmer temperatures. 

In several regions of the world, this change led to an abundance of wild grain.  For the first time, it became possible for agriculture to be practiced over the span of several thousand years without blast freezer interruptions.  Conditions became suitable for civilization.  Today, as temperature trends swerve toward hothouse, this moderate stable climate is beginning to experience sharp chest pains.  The sun is setting on the Holocene, and shadows are deepening on the future of industrial agriculture, and the billions who depend on it.  Climate change gave birth to our reckless joyride, and climate change will drive an iron stake through its heart.

James Scott focused his research on southern Mesopotamia because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states.  What are states?  They are hierarchical class-based societies, with rulers and tax collectors, built on a foundation of farming and herding.  Taxes were usually paid with grain, which was easier to transport and store than more perishable stuff.  States often had armies, defensive walls, palaces, ritual centers, and slaves.

In Mesopotamia (now Iraq and Kuwait), the transition from wild tribes to states took several thousand years.  By around 12,000 B.C., there is scattered evidence of hunter-gatherers who quit being nomads and settled down in regions having abundant wild foods.  The menu included wild grains and pulses, large herbivores, and wetland wildlife.  Plant and animal domestication began around 9,000 B.C.  Then, it took at least four thousand years (160 generations) before agricultural villages appeared, and then another two thousand years before the first states emerged, around 3,100 B.C. 

States were typically located close to the floodplains of large rivers, places having abundant fertile soil.  They could produce enough grain to feed a pool of laborers.  States had no interest in expanding into less productive lands that couldn’t generate enough wealth to pay the cost of governing them.  Scott noted that as late as A.D. 1600, most humans in the world were still not governed or taxed by any state. 

Over thousands of years, as many groups gradually shifted from wild and free toward a creepy new role as hardworking law-abiding taxpayers, housewives, or slaves, huge social changes took place.  On the other hand, wild humans in the tropics did not have a more-is-better mindset when acquiring plant and animal foods.  They simply took what they immediately needed, always being mindful to avoid overuse of scarce resources.  They lived and thought like a coherent group, not a motley crew of competitive self-centered individuals.  This very long tradition of mutual support strongly influenced the evolution of who we are today.

The important point here is that wild people were free, nobody gave or obeyed orders.  But with the transition to farming and herding, freedom got put on a short leash.  We began living under the firm control of a hierarchy of masters.  Small groups can readily and happily cooperate, but large dense groups tend to generate snarls and sparks.  Crowding overwhelms our Pleistocene minds, generating anxiety, paranoia, rage, depression, and so on.  Naturally, this undermines social tranquility. 

Masters fear disorder, because angry mobs can rip them to pieces.  To prevent this, crowds must be overseen by enforcers.  Rules must be strictly obeyed, and violators punished.  Growing up in civilization, folks have to obey numerous rules decreed by families, schools, religions, businesses, bureaucracies, and so on.  The god words for this way of life include compete, control, and obey.

Most of humankind is now compelled to spend much of their time wandering among mobs of strangers, folks who are not friends or kin.  Some crowded communities are ruled by violent gangs, ideological fanatics, or the chaotic whims of fate.  Others have law and order, tolerable rules, and sufficient enforcement — the preferred option for those who must live in Strangerland.

Livingston wrote that many endure the numbing conformity of Strangerland by choosing the safe and easy path of docility.  Rules are good tools for controlling people, but beliefs are sometimes even better.  When properly programmed by an ideology, our behavior can be largely manipulated by an autopilot of beliefs, like a self-driving robo-car.  Believers passively accept control from their superiors, and leap to their feet and when der Führer calls.

Because we excel at herd-like followership and self-deception, it’s easy to be swept away by trendy fads or bloody gangsters.  Leni Riefenstahl filmed Triumph of the Will, a haunting documentary on the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, which starred 700,000 Nazi supporters.  Scene after scene shows streets jammed with folks in crisp new uniforms, marching in orderly rows.  Today, with the benefit of highly advanced communication systems, charismatic hucksters, sorcerers, and lunatics can entrance large mobs of naive believers in many locations at the same time. 

Carl Jung lived through the whirlwinds of death and destruction during two world wars.  This was an ideal time to become a psychotherapist.  Mobs bring out the worst in us, creating ideal conditions for devastating psychic epidemics.  “The larger the number of people involved in an action, the greater the propensity towards mindlessness and barbarism.”  Huge growing crowds jammed together in big cities encouraged what Jung called the insectification of humankind.  People were at risk of “complete atomization into nothingness, or into meaninglessness.  Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” 

Mesopotamian Web

Sometime before 3,000 B.C., the first state-based civilization emerged in Sumer, located in southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers approach the Persian Gulf, and empty into it.  This civilization developed the cultural DNA for the Mesopotamian web, which eventually metastasized into the Old World Web by around A.D. 200.  Today, the Old World Web dominates the whole planet, providing the thundering drumbeat for the global economy and industrial civilization.  Sumer initially lit the fuse. 

Abdullah Öcalan is a Kurdish political scientist (and political prisoner).  He wrote about the history of Mesopotamia, his ancestral homeland.  Sumerian civilization established or advanced many unusual experiments, including agriculture, herding, patriarchy, slavery, irrigation, deforestation, metallurgy, etc.  The ability to produce surplus food enabled some folks to indulge in specialized pursuits — merchants, potters, smiths, miners, leather workers, fishermen, bricklayers, weavers, scribes, and so on. 

Sumer’s inventions include the calendar, writing, mathematics, astrology, and prostitution.  Women took a distant second place in the gender hierarchy.  The traditional animism of wild folks was displaced by new forms of religion, first pantheism (multiple gods and goddesses), and later monotheism (one male god).  Öcalan wrote that today’s mosques, churches, synagogues, and universities have their roots in Mesopotamian ziggurats (temples). 

The McNeills noted that these ziggurats, constructed with millions of mud bricks, were the most conspicuous buildings in cities (like many of our jumbo sized capitol buildings and worship centers).  At the time, they were the biggest manmade structures in the world.  Ziggurats were monuments built to pay honor to deities.  In the good old days, all gods were local, each city had one or more.  Religions were local too.  Gods were twitchy scary rascals who sometimes made believers fat and happy, and other times sent plagues, locusts, famines, floods, fires, and other assorted miseries to slap them down, or rub them out. 

In order to discourage divine fury, cities built super-duper temples to flatter their gods’ fragile egos.  Benefits, if any, were temporary.  The ziggurats are long gone, and their gods abandoned.  In Babylon, the legendary Tower of Babel was built as tall as possible, which oddly pissed off their temperamental god, who saw it as an outrageous act of blasphemy that required strong punishment.  Some think the Babel legend was inspired by the ziggurat of Marduk (Babylon’s god), which certainly existed.

Babel is the Hebrew word for Babylon, a city on the Euphrates in northern Mesopotamia.  Let’s take a quick side trip here.  In maybe 586 B.C., Babylon’s famous ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, captured Jerusalem, destroyed their temple, and led the Jews away to a less than pleasurable exile in Babylon.  The Jews brought with them their scrolls of sacred scriptures, and this sparked a historic event — the creation of the first portable religion.  They were living and worshipping in a place that was far from their holy land.  The portability enabled by written scriptures made multinational religions possible — believers could establish congregations anywhere in the world.

In Babylon, congregations of Jewish men and women gathered for weekly meetings to spend time with a rabbi who discussed the sacred scriptures.  This preserved their cultural identity, and allowed them to remain distinct.  They did not melt into Babylonian society.  Congregational religions were another innovation from this era.  The McNeills wrote that this put Jews on the path to monotheism.  If the deity of Jerusalem could be worshipped in Babylon, then he could also be worshipped in Egypt or Lebanon.  One god fits all… everywhere.

As centuries passed, cities, civilizations, and empires grew.  In them, numerous competing variations of congregational religions provided solace to the huddled masses of Strangerland.  They enabled city dwellers to be among like-minded people with familiar faces, to benefit from friendship and mutual support, and to righteously snort and sneer at local heretics and infidels.  Urban populations lacked the intimate sense of community found in village life, or tribal life.  Congregations provided some pain relief, a sense of meaning and belonging.

Patriarchy

Öcalan presented a different perspective on the birth of monotheism.  Long, long ago, Babylon was home to a minor league god named Marduk.  Eventually, he rose to prominence after mercilessly slaughtering the primordial sea-serpent goddess, Tiamat (the female principle), and creating the world with her body.  Marduk (the male principle) then created humans, to take care of the daily dirty work as servants and slaves, freeing the gods to enjoy a decadent life of leisure and debauchery.

Marduk could be helpful or brutal, depending on his mood.  Over time, he became the supreme deity, and gained the title Bel (Lord).  In Babylon, he was astrologically associated with the jumbo planet we now call Jupiter.  Over time, this Mesopotamian web spread into new regions.  In Greece, the top god Zeus was also associated with Jupiter.  When it eventually got to Rome, their highest god was actually named Jupiter. 

What was happening here was a huge revolutionary transition in the human saga, from the Stone Age to the Neolithic era (the new stone age), when folks shifted from hunting and foraging to farming and herding.  The Neolithic first arose in Mesopotamia.  Then, the highly contagious culture spread to North Africa, India, China, the Danube region, southwest Europe, and elsewhere.  It matured into a culture of civilization, food production, slavery, patriarchy, growth mania, and so on.

In wild webs, bands of hunter-gatherers lived via cooperation.  In the Mesopotamian web, workers, housewives, and slaves were obligated to submit to the control of their assorted masters.  Top level masters (kings, emperors, etc.) were mortal patriarchs who had an expiration date.  Upon death, a new master had to take his place.  Sometimes the transfer of power was smooth, and other times it sparked fury.

Monotheism’s deity, Big Daddy, was immortal, invisible, and divine — the supreme master, who endured the passage of centuries, and the rise and fall of mortal rulers.  His rules were the highest ones.  They were permanent, and disobedience was dangerous and stupid.  God must be feared.  The invisible Big Daddy watches everything you do, and knows your every thought.  We behave differently when someone is watching us, and we experience guilt, shame, and paranoia when our minds are being read.  This submission to multiple layers of masters and rules was the oxygen that kept civilization on life support. 

In his pro-feminist writing, Öcalan wrote, “The 5,000 year history of civilization is essentially the history of the enslavement of women.”  Prior to 2000 B.C., the woman-mother culture strongly influenced Sumerian civilization, and the two sexes were fairly equal (no shaming of women).  Over time, the warrior class encouraged a strongman cult that came to dominate religion.  The creator of heaven and Earth was male (Marduk).  “So radical was this sexual rupture, that it resulted in the most significant change in social life that history has ever seen.”

This led to the “housewifization” of women, a sharp demotion.  Their new role was to sit at home, and faithfully obey their husbands.  Chastity became mandatory, in order to guarantee the genuine paternity of daddy’s children, so that only his true sons would rightfully inherit his wealth.  It was vital that young women remain virgins prior to marrying their master.

[Continued in sample 53]

 

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 10

[Note: This is the tenth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Genetic Evolution

Charles Darwin achieved fame for popularizing the knowledge of genetic evolution, a normal and natural life process.  All living things have genes, and their offspring inherit copies of them.  No other critter, living or dead, possesses genes exactly like yours.  Each of the billions of cells in your body carries a copy of your unique genes.  Cells exist for a while, then die.  New cells are created to replace them.  Every hour, your genes are duplicated countless times as your body replaces dead cells with new ones. 

The genes in every cell are incredibly complex, and it is normal and natural for boo-boos to occur in the duplication process.  The mutations are purely random, and they are called genetic drift.  It is not unusual for mutated genes to be passed from parent to offspring.  For some offspring, random mutations might be beneficial in some way.  Other offspring can be diminished by mutated genes, leading them to become less able to survive, thrive, and reproduce. 

Everything on Earth, and all beings in the family of life, are constantly changing.  Food resources can increase or decrease.  Drought can be washed away by deluge.  Parasites, viruses, volcanoes, fires, floods, invasives… the wheels of change keep spinning.  Glaciers become tundra, tundra becomes grassland, grassland becomes forest, and then the parade reverses.  Stability is a temporary state, change is the long-term norm.  Evolution helps the family of life adapt and survive.  Species unable to adapt to change disappear from the stage.

In the animal world, if predators get too good at hunting, they deplete their prey, go to bed hungry, and maybe starve.  If prey get too good at escape, the growing herd will decimate the vegetation, and maybe create a desert, so everyone starves.  If the predators gradually become one percent faster, the prey gradually become one percent faster, not two.  Balance requires predators to be slightly better at their sacred obligation — limiting the herd — but not too good. 

The speed of genetic evolution varies.  Species with slow rates of reproduction, like elephants, can take many generations or millennia to adapt beneficial new features.  Evolution proceeds much faster in species with brief lifespans.  This is why pathogenic bacteria can quickly develop resistance to antibiotics, and insects to insecticides.  Some plants develop resistance to a new herbicide in as few as four years.  Some fungi can develop resistance to a new fungicide in just three years. 

We try so hard to control everything.  Big Mama Nature just howls with laughter, gushing tears, at our comical experiments in playing fake god, silly efforts that regularly bite us on the ass.  She has no use for two-legged stewards, or managers, or sustainable growth maniacs.  She gets along best with animals that are wild, free, and happy.  It’s survival of the fit-ins.  Ecological loose cannons need not apply.

Today, we’re living in an especially exciting time!  The treacherous sorcerers of innovation and progress have conjured a colossal curse on the family of life.  The curse has overloaded the atmosphere with crud, which is destabilizing the climate to a degree that seems certain to turbulently blindside life as we know it.  Thanks to genetic evolution, the surviving species will eventually adapt to wrecked ecosystems, and a heavily scarred family of life can continue on its sacred journey.

And now, dear reader, we need to stop here for a moment, sit down, take a deep breath, and have an extremely embarrassing birds-and-bees discussion on the difference between genetic evolution (yum!) and cultural evolution (danger!). 

Cultural Evolution

Genetic evolution is billions of years old, as old as life on Earth.  Its realm is the metamorphosis of genetic information over time.  Cultural evolution is the realm of learned information — beliefs, ideas, knowledge, and so on.  It has emerged recently, in the last few million years.  It’s essentially a hominin fad, a spooky quirk of swollen brains.  Innovation and progress are two of its monster children.  These children are as unpredictable as two year olds with a box of hand grenades.

In hominins, genetic evolution proceeds at a snail’s pace, but cultural evolution can boogie like a herd of gazelles on meth.  It might have taken our ancestors a million years to genetically evolve vicious claws and fangs, and we may have blinked out before succeeding.  Instead, cultural evolution inspired our ancestors to invent lances and javelins — fake claws and fangs. 

When someone’s leg is amputated, they can be fitted with a prosthetic leg, so they can walk again.  Dentures are prosthetic teeth.  Warm clothing is prosthetic fur.  Heated dwellings provide a prosthetic tropical climate, so tropical primates can survive far from their normal habitat.  Prosthetic claws and fangs eventually made the ancestors capable of killing critters bigger than themselves, bringing home more meat at the end of the day, and feeding more bambinos.

Chimps don’t do this.  They snatch insects and lizards with their hands.  Their small scale hunting is far less likely to rock the ecological boat.  This is why there are not seven billion pudgy chimps staring at cell phones while driving.  Indeed, their million year track record with this effective strategy has to be categorized as genuinely sustainable.  Chimps set an excellent example for the last surviving hominins — humans — who are beginning to swirl the drain.  Alas, we have been bedeviled by a compulsive obsession with every type of prosthetic device that greedy capitalists can imagine.  Zombie consumers endure mindless jobs in order to acquire and proudly display as many of this season’s trendy status symbols as possible.

Anyway, our ancestors got totally addicted to cultural evolution.  They shifted from chimp-type hunting, to stones and clubs, then scavenging, persistence hunting, thrusting spears, projectile javelins, bows and arrows, nets, snares, harpoons, horses, guns, and on and on.  Like junkies, prosthetic addiction requires shooting up bigger and bigger doses to continue experiencing the beautiful soaring flights of euphoria.  Like junkies, cold turkey withdrawal from prosthetic addiction is excruciatingly painful.  Imagine your president, and her husband, stumbling around naked in the Congo, gobbling termites, slugs, bird eggs, berries, and lizards.

Cultural evolution in weaponry enabled our ancestors to extract more food resources from the ecosystem, so the land’s carrying capacity for humans increased, for a while, as long as overhunting didn’t deplete the prey, and chill out the feast.  Each advance in hunting technology temporarily increased the food resources available for hungry hominins, encouraging their numbers to grow.  Inevitably, the ecological boat began to rock, and sometimes overturn. 

As you can see, innovation is risky.  It often has unintended consequences.  Chimps are conservative, and teach us that innovation is unnecessary for enjoying a million years of healthy sustainable living.  The humans that are currently decimating the chimps’ forest, and the entire planet, present a different, and very important lesson.

Chimps have almost no understanding of the human-caused Earth Crisis.  Their knowledgebase is modest, limited to local affairs, in the here and now.  They learn by observing and imitating their elders.  They lack the cultural information needed to destabilize the planet’s climate systems, acidify the oceans, eliminate forests, and generally behave like insane idiots.  They learn exactly enough to live sustainably from birth to death.  Perfect!

When I was a young lad, I was forced to spend years institutionalized in a series of educational penitentiaries.  Like an assembly line, students had their brains filled with cultural information.  I was taught about history, numbers, reading, writing, human supremacy, the daffy pursuit of status, and the sacred principles of unsustainable living.  Our mission in life was to get a job, work hard, accumulate status trinkets, and spend our lives moving as much stuff as possible from nature to landfills — a remarkably toxic game.  I shudder at the amount of stuff that has passed through my life.

Americans, British, and other colonizers created boarding schools for the children of the wild aboriginal people they conquered.  Kids were snatched away from their families, communities, and cultures.  They were forbidden to speak their own language, or sing their songs.  They had their brains filled with the cultural information of industrial civilization.  The kids suffered tremendous emotional damage from this brutal process, and many were seriously wounded for the rest of their days.

Priests used to boast: “Give me your child for his first seven years, and I will have him for life.”  The cultural information you are imprinted with in childhood usually solidifies like concrete, and those beliefs are carried until your final breath.  This works perfectly in sustainable wild cultures, where kids learn time-proven knowledge.  It sucks in super-toxic cultures, where everyone is taught to be mindless eco-terrorists.  Derrick Jensen once noted that unquestioned beliefs are the most dangerous and destructive things in the world.

Humans are not in serious trouble because of crappy genes.  Genes did not get us into this mess, culture did.  Every human that squirts out of the womb is a wild animal, ready to spend a lifetime in a healthy tropical ecosystem.  We don’t become batshit crazy critters until we are trained by a batshit crazy family and society.  If you had been born into a wild, free, and happy tribe in the Amazon rainforest, you would have grown up in a sane culture, and you would be living in a low impact mode that has respect and reverence for the natural world (until the maniacs on bulldozers arrive to introduce you to progress).

Genetic information is passed from one generation to the next via reproduction.  Cultural information is passed via words, images, and demonstration.  We acquire it from TV, websites, books, classrooms, conversations, and so on.  We absorb a knowledgebase that has accumulated over many generations.  Each new generation has no need to spend decades reinventing the wheel, clothing, or the fire drill. 

Paul Ehrlich once spent time among the Inuit of Hudson Bay, Canada.  He was surprised to discover that the entire knowledgebase of their cultural information was known by everyone — how to hunt seals, tan pelts, weave a net, sew a coat, and so on.  In Ehrlich’s own culture, nobody knows even a millionth of our cultural information.  It’s impossible to learn it all, and the knowledgebase is constantly growing, faster and faster.  Folks can get a PhD from Stanford without ever learning a single thing about science.  The survival of humankind is dependent on ecological sustainability, but most PhDs know nothing about it, nor do our political leaders.

Here’s a half-happy idea: William E. Rees reminded us that cultural evolution is also subject to something like natural selection.  Maladaptive cultural mutations, like the belief in perpetual growth, limitless resources, or utopia-bound progress will eventually push the civilization off the cliff, into the compost bin.  Stuff like motorized transport, industrial manufacturing, and agriculture will inevitably go extinct because depletion of resources will pull the plug on them.

The more daunting challenge has to do with wisely and deliberately tossing overboard the maladaptive hallucinations that infest our throbbing thinkers — hierarchy, patriarchy, human supremacy, materialism, disconnection from nature, and so on.  Our culture never stops pushing us to run at full speed to the cliff.  We are completely unprepared to proceed with a healthy, cleansing, cultural evolution enema.

The Myth of Human Supremacy



When an unlucky person has been swept away by the brainwashing of a wacko cult, concerned friends or family members sometimes seek the assistance of a skilled deprogrammer to exorcize the demons.  It’s a painful process.  The scrambled soul is blasted with a fire-hose of strong rational arguments, hour after hour, hammering away at the many contradictions in the cult’s beliefs.  Ideally, the shining power of truth blasts away the illusions, and opens the door to healing.

I was reminded of this while reading Derrick Jensen’s book, The Myth of Human Supremacy.  In his story, the wacko cult consists of human supremacists, zombies who have been indoctrinated to believe that humans are the miraculous conclusion of the long evolutionary journey.  Humans are the one and only species that is sentient, self-aware, intelligent, and able to make tools and communicate.

The cult of human supremacy has grown rapidly, and now includes a large portion of humankind.  The zombie mobs are mindlessly destroying the living planet that everything depends on for survival.  Jensen puts a spotlight on the demon: “Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture.”  We are bombarded with supremacist ideas from early childhood.  They define our understanding of normality, and encourage us to live like there’s no tomorrow.  Only humans matter, a living planet does not.

By definition, human supremacy is about hierarchy: the white male God, white kings, white men, white women, minorities, mammals, birds, plants, insects, bacteria, etc.  Most of the community of life is inferior to you, resources for you to exploit or destroy.  The supremacist worldview has no concern for ecological health.  Civilization is a space station where all of our needs are magically met.

Jensen devotes many pages to revealing the cult’s creepy narcissism.  Research is discovering that plants and nonhuman animals are sentient, self-aware, intelligent, and able to make tools and communicate.  Slime mold can learn and remember, displaying more intelligence than a number of world leaders.  Plants do react when damaged, disproving the cult’s belief that organisms without brains can feel no pain.  The cult believes that communication means making funny noises with human lips, but trees communicate using chemicals.

Humans spray neurotoxins on their food, while boasting that we are the only ones who possess intelligence.  “Intelligence” is a slippery word.  From the supremacist perspective, it’s intelligent to create an industrial society that blindsides the planet’s climate.  Thanks to this intelligence, 98% of old growth forests are gone, 99% of prairies, 99% of wetlands, 90% of large oceanic fish.  “When others besides human supremacists look at us, they see the worst thing that has ever happened to this planet,” says Jensen.  “If animals could conceive of the devil, his image would be man’s.”

For thousands of years, agriculture has had a well-documented history of transforming healthy ecosystems into wastelands via deforestation, soil mining, wetland destruction, and water mining — a process that still continues.  Agriculture can never be sustainable.  “Plows are probably the single most destructive human invention ever, and agriculture was the single biggest — and least intelligent — mistake any creature has ever made.”  Humankind is in extreme overshoot right now, as the population skyrocket keeps zooming upward.

There are two flavors of technology: authoritarian and democratic.  Authoritarian technology is produced by complex, hierarchical civilizations.  This technology tends to control the society.  We must have electricity, electronics, sequestered carbon, and transportation devices to participate in modernity.  Consumers are hardcore electricity addicts.  Jensen screams!  Lack of imagination is a primary cause of the Earth Crisis.  We can’t imagine living without electricity, but we can imagine a world without rhinos or tigers.  Oy!

It takes imagination to challenge the unquestioned beliefs that inspire insane behavior.  Jensen’s doctor says that there can be no cure without a proper diagnosis.  Unquestioned beliefs often make an accurate diagnosis impossible.  They tell us that renewable energy, nuclear power, and geoengineering are brilliant solutions.  So, every unquestioned belief must be mercilessly questioned, and the dodgy ones sent to the shredder.

Democratic technology, on the other hand, is stuff that anyone can make, like a basket or bow and arrow.  Chimps use sticks to fish for yummy termites.  Vultures throw stones to crack ostrich eggs.  This is sustainable.  It doesn’t rock the boat.  But authoritarian technology is big juju.  Too often, even green activists have vivid fantasies of a sustainable future, whilst keeping many of the unsustainable goodies of civilization.  The line between naughty and nice can be blurry.

Lately, I’ve been reading about the Aztecs.  In 1492, Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) was one of the biggest cities in the world, with a population of about 200,000, five times larger than London.  They had no horses, oxen, plows, or metals.  The fields were tilled with digging sticks, and fertilized with human poop.  It was a highly sophisticated and authoritarian Stone Age civilization famous for cutting the beating hearts out of thousands of prisoners at a time.

Words can be slippery.  Throughout the book, Jensen frequently uses “stupid” when discussing the quirks of civilized humans.  Stupid means unintelligent, having a limited ability to learn and understand, an incurable handicap.  Maybe "ignorant" would have been more precise.  It means a lack of knowledge — a somewhat curable shortcoming.  Methinks that ignorance plays a major role in the bad choices we make.  In many ways our education system remains lost in a dream world of yesteryear.

Anyway, Jensen tackles and paddles many unquestioned beliefs.  We all suffer from them, to some degree, he says.  It’s hard not to, living in this culture.  Questioning is a powerful medicine that should be used daily.  When it comes to innovation, we are terribly clever.  At the same time, we are tropical primates, engaged in a phenomenally ignorant adventure in violating as many of the laws of nature as humanly possible, for no good reason.

The myth of human supremacy asserts that we are rational, moral, and ethical.  Wild animals have no interest in reason, morals, or ethics because they have no need for them.  They live sustainably by simply remaining in balance with the community of life.  They have no need for powerful 20-20 foresight, because they stay on a stable time-proven path.  Supremacists are ravaging Earth, but they look awesome in their smiling selfies.

Jensen's book reminds me of a defibrillator, the gizmo used when someone's heart stops beating.  Its two paddles are placed on the chest, and then a powerful electric shock is blasted into the victim, in an effort to restart the heart.  He doubts that his book will convince many of the living dead supremacists to question their beliefs.  Its main purpose is to encourage the pilgrims who understand that civilization is killing the planet.  We need to save as many species as we can.

The book is also something like a hearing aid.  It heightens readers’ ability to hear the supremacist voices that barrage us every day.  It’s helpful to better recognize the tireless jabber from the lunatic asylum.  And so, Jensen waves and rides off into the sunset.  “The more I learn about the real world, the more wonderful I think it is, and the more honored I am to be here.”

Jensen, Derrick, The Myth of Human Supremacy, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2016.