A Short History of Progress

Every year, Canadians eagerly huddle around their radios to listen to the Massey Lectures, broadcast by the CBC.  For the 2004 season, Ronald Wright was the honored speaker.  He presented a series of five lectures, titled A Short History of Progress.  In 2005, Wright’s presentation was published as a short book, and it became a bestseller.  Martin Scorsese’s movie, Surviving Progress, was based on the book. 

It was an amazing success for a story contrary to our most holy cultural myths.  Wright believed that the benefits of progress were highly overrated, because of their huge costs.  Indeed, progress was approaching the point of becoming a serious threat to the existence of humankind.  “This new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.” 

He pointed out that the world was dotted with the ruins of ancient crash sites, civilizations that self-destructed.  At each of these wrecks, modern science can, in essence, retrieve the “black box,” and discover why the mighty society crashed and burned.  There is a clear pattern.  Each one crashed because it destroyed what it depended on for its survival. 

Wright takes us on a quick tour of the collapse of Sumer, Easter Island, the Roman Empire, and the Mayans.  He explains why the two oddballs, China and Egypt, are taking longer than average to self-destruct.  The fatal defects of agriculture and civilization are old news for the folks who have been paying attention.  It has become customary for these folks to believe that “The Fall” took place when humans began to domesticate plants and animals. 

Wright thinks the truth is more complicated.  What makes this book unique and provocative is his notion of progress traps.  The benefits of innovation often encourage society to live in a new way, while burning the bridges behind them as they advance.  Society can find itself trapped in an unsustainable way of living, and it’s no longer possible to just turn around and painlessly return to a simpler mode.  Like today, we know that the temporary bubble of cheap energy is about over, and our entire way of life is dependent on cheap energy.  We’re trapped.

Some types of progress do not disrupt the balance of the ecosystem, like using a rock to crack nuts.  But our ability to stand upright freed our hands for working with tools and weapons, which launched a million year process of experimentation and innovation that gradually snowballed over time.

We tend to assume that during the long era of hunting and gathering our ancestors were as mindful as the few hunting cultures that managed to survive on the fringes into the twentieth century.  But in earlier eras, when big game was abundant, wise stewardship was not mandatory.  Sloppy tribes could survive — for a while.

Before they got horses, Indians of the American west would drive herds of buffalo off cliffs, killing many at a time.  They took what they needed, and left the rest for legions of scavengers.  One site in Colorado contained the carcasses of 152 buffalo.  A trader in the northern Rockies witnessed about 250 buffalo being killed at one time.  Wright mentioned two Upper Paleolithic sites I had not heard of — 1,000 mammoth skeletons were found at Piedmont in the Czech Republic, and the remains of over 100,000 horses were found at Solutré in France. 

Over time, progress perfected our hunting systems.  Our supply of high-quality food seemed to be infinite.  It was our first experience of prosperity and leisure.  Folks had time to take their paint sets into caves and do gorgeous portraits of the animals they lived with, venerated, killed, and ate.

Naturally, our population grew.  More babies grew up to be hunters, and the availability of game eventually decreased.  The grand era of cave painting ended, and we began hunting rabbits.  We depleted species after species, unconsciously gliding into our first serious progress trap. 

Some groups scrambled to find alternatives, foraging around beaches, estuaries, wetlands, and bogs.  Some learned how to reap the tiny seeds of wild grasses.  By and by, the end of the hunting way of life came into view, about 10,000 years ago.  “They lived high for a while, then starved.”

Having destroyed the abundant game, it was impossible to return to simpler living.  This was a progress trap, and it led directly into a far more dangerous progress trap, the domestication of plants and animals.  Agriculture and civilization were accidents, and they threw open the gateway to 10,000 years of monotony, drudgery, misery, and ecocide.  Wright says that civilization is a pyramid scheme; we live today at the expense of those who come after us. 

For most of human history, the rate of progress was so slow that it was usually invisible.  But the last six or seven generations have been blindsided by a typhoon of explosive change.  Progress had a habit of giving birth to problems that could only be solved by more progress.  Progress was the most diabolically wicked curse that you could ever imagine.  Maybe we should turn it into an insulting obscenity: “progress you!” 

Climate scientists have created models showing weather trends over the last 250,000 years, based on ice cores.  Agriculture probably didn’t start earlier because climate trends were unstable.  Big swings could take place over the course of decades.  In the last 10,000 years, the climate has been unusually stable.  A return to instability will make civilization impossible.

Joseph Tainter studied how civilizations collapse, and he described three highways to disaster: the Runaway Train (out-of-control problems), the Dinosaur (indifference to dangers), and the House of Cards (irreversible disintegration).  He predicted that the next collapse would be global in scale.

Finally, the solution: “The reform that is needed is… simply the transition from short-term thinking to long-term.”  Can we do it?

We are quite clever, but seldom wise, according to Wright.  Ordinary animals, like our ancestors, had no need for long-term thinking, because life was always lived in the here and now.  “Free Beer Tomorrow” reads the flashing neon sign on the tavern, but we never exist in tomorrow. 

The great news is that we now possess a mountain of black boxes.  For the first time in the human journey, a growing number of people comprehend our great mistakes, and are capable of envisioning a new path that eventually abandons our embarrassing boo-boos forever.  All the old barriers to wisdom and healing have been swept away (in theory). 

Everywhere you look these days; people are stumbling around staring at tiny screens and furiously typing — eagerly communicating with world experts, engaging in profound discussions, watching videos rich with illuminating information, and reading the works of green visionaries.  It’s a magnificent sight to behold — the best is yet to come!

Wright, Ronald, A Short History of Progress, Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 2005.

The Harmless People

Folks who spend their lives staring at computer screens in vast corporate cubicle farms have a powerful tendency to drift off into vivid daydreams of gathering nuts, roots, and melons in wild country, with their hunter-gatherer ancestors, in a world without roads, cities, or alphabets.  For them, there is treasure to be found in Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ book, The Harmless People.  It’s a beautiful book. 

Elizabeth was 19 when she first met the Bushmen of southern Africa.  Her parents led three expeditions between 1950 and 1956 to study and film these people, who were among the last surviving hunter-gatherer societies in the world.  The family spent a lot of time living in Bushmen camps, learned their language, and really got to know them.  Elizabeth’s book is a respectful and affectionate diary of her experiences with these people, and it is easy and enjoyable to read.

The first expedition searched for several months before finding Bushmen, because Bushmen disappeared whenever they saw outsiders, who were a dependable source of trouble.  Black and white outsiders frequently kidnapped them, and forced them to spend the rest of their days as farm laborers.  They never returned home.  Police would arrest them if they killed a giraffe in the desert, because giraffes were royal animals protected by the law.  Arrested hunters were hauled away, and never seen again.  The Thomas expedition eventually gained their trust because they developed a reputation for being very generous with their gifts, and for being unusually decent white folks.

Long ago, Bushmen lived across much of southern Africa.  But black and white farmers and herders aggressively seized the best lands, forcing the Bushmen into the Kalahari Desert, an exceedingly difficult place to live.  Some places were so dry that the primary sources of water were melons, roots, and killed animals.  Some winter nights dipped below freezing, leading to sleepless nights for the nearly naked people.

Each group lived in a specific territory, sometimes several hundred square miles in area, which had clearly defined traditional boundaries.  They intimately know every bit of their homeland, every rock, every bush, and every notable variation of the terrain.  They knew exactly where different types of food could be found.  They often had to move their camp every few days.

Hunting was done with spears and bows and arrows.  Arrows were treated with a poison made from the pupa of a beetle, which could take several days to kill the prey.  After shooting, hunters waited two or three days, then tracked the wounded animal, hoping to find it dead.  One unlucky hunter was fully impaled on the long horn of an angry buffalo who wasn’t dead yet.  Amazingly, he survived.  Another time, hunters tracked a wounded wildebeest, and found it surrounded by 20 to 30 hungry lions.  Amazingly, they drove away the lions, finished off the animal, and carried the meat back to camp.

In the honey season, men climbed high into the trees to raid the hives, whilst being stung everywhere by a furious cloud of stingy bees.  There was a long tradition of fatal falls.  Hives that were frequently raided became fiercely defensive, viciously attacking all of the Bushmen on the ground, before the climbing began.  Honey was definitely not a free lunch.

Living in a harsh land, the Bushmen were very careful to sidestep the problems caused by overpopulation.  The stability of their society was more important than the survival of every newborn, and these cultural values enabled their way of life to be sustainable.  They believed that there was a period of delay between birth and becoming alive.  If the newborn was crippled or deformed, it was promptly buried and forgotten.  When conditions were strained, and it was not possible to feed more mouths, newborns were not kept.  The Bushmen had no tools for contraception or abortion.  To avoid the pain of infanticide, they frequently abstained from intercourse for long periods of time, when there was room for no more.  Usually, childbirth was a joyful event, because the number of pregnancies was voluntarily limited.

Thomas described the ongoing soap operas of camp life, and the inevitable friction that developed among people who lived in close contact with others all the time.  Camp life was not a never-ending love fest.  But great care was taken to avoid conflict, and to promptly defuse and resolve conflicts.  Belongings were constantly kept in circulation via gift-giving to avoid jealousy.  The fundamental keys to their success were cooperation and sharing.

She presented us with a fascinating description of thriving in a challenging land.  Bushmen life seemed to be far less dismal than life in corporate cubicle farms.  Bushmen enjoyed healthy, satisfying, and meaningful lives, despite their lack of televisions, computers, cell phones, automobiles; despite being a cruelly persecuted minority; despite being surrounded by lions and leopards who enjoyed having children for lunch; despite the blast furnace summer days when the sand burned their feet.  Life was good.  They had what they needed.

Thomas published her book in 1961.  She returned to the region in 1986 and 1987 and discovered that the Bushmen had been blindsided by what is called sustainable development (i.e., catastrophic destruction).  This inspired her to produce a revised edition, which was published in 1989, to bring us up to date.

The Bushmen had been driven off their land and forced into villages, where their superiors treated them like the scum of the Earth.  Their culture disintegrated into a nightmare of malnutrition, disease, alcoholism, homicide, and wage labor.  People quit sharing, ate in secret, and hid purchases.  

Thomas summed up the new reality:  “No Bushmen lack contact with the West and none is undamaged by it.  And their own way of life, the old way, a way of life which preceded the human species, no longer exists but is gone from the face of the earth at enormous cost to the individuals who once lived it.”  Welcome to industrial civilization!

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, The Harmless People, Vintage Books, New York, 1989.

The Heart of the Hunter

Laurens van der Post (1906-1996) was born in South Africa and grew up to be a reporter, dairy farmer, soldier, writer, and television personality.  He was the godfather of Prince William, and was sometimes referred to as “Prince Charles’ guru,” because he was a mystical visionary with a wise old soul, quite skilled at thinking outside the box. 

He took great pleasure in creating fascinating stories intended to wake up people whose thinkers had fallen asleep.  The transformative power of his stories was far more important to him than 100% factual accuracy, and he sometimes “embellished” them to make them more forceful.  This was the storyteller’s job: creating amazing stories — not rigidly accurate scientific discourses.

Laurens was not universally loved by white South Africans, because he had an annoying habit of criticizing segregation, racism, and oppression.  He had special fondness for the Bushmen, who were sharply mistreated by everyone, both black and white.  Bushmen once inhabited all of southern Africa, but black and white newcomers drove them off their best lands, forcing them into the Kalahari Desert, an extremely harsh place. 

In 1955, Laurens did a documentary on the Bushmen for the BBC, and it was the second most popular program ever, only the queen’s coronation had a bigger audience.  He went on to write several books on Bushmen themes, including The Heart of the Hunter.  Passages from this book are often quoted by writers of the counterculture, because Laurens had profound respect for the ability of simpler societies to live lightly on the Earth, with great reverence.  He also had a robust contempt for modern industrial society, and he did not hesitate to express this.  He had a front row seat for World War II, and this adventure in industrial warfare took much of the shine off of civilization’s reputation.

Laurens introduced us to his beloved wild Bushmen, people of “irrepressible gaiety.”  One elder was “utterly at one with all the life that was and could ever be.”  Bushmen were incredibly in tune with nature, and could feel the presence of unseen animals.  They could sense danger from far away.  They could communicate telepathically.  They didn’t work hard, they didn’t have jobs, they didn’t have leaders, and they were free.  Free!  They had a culture that worked.  John Reader once wrote that the Bushmen were able to live in their ordinary manner during the third year of extreme drought that killed 180,000 people and 250,000 cattle. 

Unfortunately, the Bantu and European newcomers were farmers, herders, and assorted moneymakers — property freaks — and the way they treated Bushmen was similar to the relationship between Montana ranchers and prairie dogs.  Consequently, the Bushmen avoided all contact with the outside world, because the dominant culture treated them like sub-human vermin, or no-cost slaves, or future tax-paying peasants or diamond miners.

Laurens lamented modern society, with its vast hordes of property freaks, the tragic innocent victims of arrested development.  Because of our estrangement from nature, our minds had lost contact with core human instincts, we had lost our souls, we were starved for meaning, and we were mindlessly destroying system after system.  He decreed: “One look at the identical towns we are building all over the world ought to be enough to show us that this kind of progress is like the proliferation of a single cell at the expense of the rest, which produces the cancer that kills the whole body.” 

In 1961, Laurens did not think like the herd.  He celebrated wild freedom, and denounced the destructive insanity of industrial civilization.  Yet he was a popular and respected celebrity in Britain, and he sipped champagne with the richest and most powerful.  He was knighted in 1981, becoming Sir Laurens van der Post, an extraordinary achievement for someone who was so at odds with mainstream thinking.

The power of this book lies in its rebellious and unconventional attitude.  It’s OK to think.  It’s OK to question.  It’s OK to shout “Wolf!” when there are wolves as far as the eye can see.  It’s OK to be different, to prefer integrity over trendiness, to seek truth instead of mindless conformity.  If your heart is screaming about the senseless destruction of life on Earth, you aren’t crazy, you’re awake.  What’s crazy is our way of life, our culture.  This is an important concept to understand.

Creative people have a primary role to play in influencing the path of our society, because society permits them to think outside the box.  Popes, politicians, tycoons, and educators aren’t allowed to do this, because they have an obligation to protect and preserve the pathological belief system that is laying waste to the world.  Everything we need for healing can only be found outside the box, and creative people can help us find them, with luck.

The weakness of the book is that it doesn’t teach us a great deal about the Bushmen way of life.  Laurens knew few Bushmen, spent little time with them, and didn’t know their language.  The BBC documentary was almost aborted because Laurens and his team had a very hard time finding any Bushmen to film.  Finally they found one band, who allowed themselves to be seen, because they were close to dying from dehydration.  You could learn much more about the Bushmen by reading Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

The Bushmen finally got their own official home when the Central Kalahari Game Reserve was created in 1961.  This Denmark-sized park was located in the middle of what is now Botswana.  But diamonds were discovered on the reserve in the early ‘80s, and this inspired the government to remove the Bushmen from their land.  In 2006, they won the right to return, but were forbidden to hunt or drink water.  In 2011, they won the right to drink water. 

Botswana promotes safari tours at the reserve, and this generates a lot of income for an extremely poor country.  Rich tourists want to enjoy a pure wilderness experience, gazing at giraffes from their hot tubs, and wild, naked, blood-spattered savages would simply spoil this demented fantasy.  Laurens would have a different opinion, of course.

van der Post, Laurens, The Heart of the Hunter, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1961. 

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 Ohlone Way

The wee folk were once beaten by iron-using people, which made them detest this powerful metal, and the people who used it.  Consequently, when the Iron People conquered Europe, they were very careful to protect themselves.  They sewed bits of iron into their children’s clothing, and hung horseshoes on their doors.  They used the dark energy of forged iron to repel the bright spirits.

Malcolm Margolin’s book, The Ohlone Way, is a magnificent collection of bright knowledge that is powerfully repellent to the dark energy of misanthropes — those cynics who insist that all humans everywhere have always been self-centered, materialistic, and aggressively warlike by nature — fatally flawed, and rotten to the core.  If you carefully absorb the knowledge in this book, misanthropes will skedaddle whenever they see you coming.  Bye-bye!

Humans simply aren’t the problem.  The problem is crazy cultures.  It is cleansing and healing to comprehend this important distinction.  It implies no quick or easy remedies, but it negates the notion that the only effective solution to the Earth Crisis is human extinction.  We possess adequate intelligence to do what needs to be done, but whether we will ever do so remains a potent and prickly mystery.

The Ohlone were an assortment of tribes that lived in the region around San Francisco Bay for thousands of years prior to European conquest.  Margolin does a lovely job of describing the various aspects of their way of life, and Michael Harney’s drawings are intriguing — many show skies darkened with millions of seabirds.  The Ohlone were blessed to inhabit a land that provided an abundance of plant and animal foods. 

It’s so hard for us to imagine what a magical treasure this planet was prior to farmers.  Ohlone country, like much of the western region, was lucky to have a climate that was poorly suited for growing corn, so the tribes were able to avoid that dangerous and highly unstable way of life.  They didn’t farm, nor did they enslave animals, yet they were able to enjoy a complex culture and a stable way of life. 

Occasional armed conflicts were usually low-intensity ritual warfare, good for blowing off steam.  Sometimes conflicts were intense, wiping out whole villages.  But this was not a war-oriented culture.  There were no wooden palisades surrounding villages.  The men did not have shields, war clubs, tomahawks, or body armor.  The culture did not enshrine heroic war chiefs, nor did it create a sprawling empire.  They were really into dancing.

The Ohlone lost few people to disease, famine, and war.  But their culture was successful at maintaining a stable population.  Taboos and restrictions on sex kept a leash on the birth rate.  Sex was forbidden during the two years that a mother was nursing, as it was prior to hunts, or during menstruation.  Deformed babies and twins were not kept.  Women understood how to terminate unwanted pregnancies.  They were careful to avoid the horrors of population growth.  Smart!

Stability was the core of their success, and time-proven wisdom was carefully preserved.  “To be different was to be wrong, the best ways were the old ways.”  Innovators and rebels were scorned, as were freedom and individualism.  The Ohlone valued belonging — having strong social bonds to family, clan, and tribe.  A man without his family was nothing.  It was a society built on a foundation of cooperation, sharing, and generosity.  Greedy and aggressive people were banished, because they toxic.  Respectable people learned well, and then passed the ancient knowledge on to the next generation.

Stability is hard for us to comprehend.  The Ohlone could live in the same place for a thousand years and not destroy the soils or forests.  The hills were still filled with antelope, elk, and deer.  The rivers were still thrashing with salmon.  The nut trees continued producing sacred acorns.  Stability did not diminish the seals, sea lions, sea birds, or shellfish.  Fast forward a thousand years into the future, and it’s the same culture, the same stories, songs, and dances.

They did not live like a hurricane.  They lived like reverend guests in a sacred land.  “Everything was alive, everything had character, power, and magic, and consequently everything had to be dealt with properly.”  “It was a world in which thousands of living, feeling, magical things, all operating in dream logic, carried out their individual actions.”  “Power was everywhere, in everything, and therefore every act was religious.”

All of us have wild ancestors who enjoyed a similar manner of living.  The Ohlone were not fascinating freaks.  Five hundred years ago, the tribes of western North America were among the most stable, successful, and sustainable human societies on the planet.  The secret of their success was that their cultures were, in almost every way, the direct opposite of our own.  Sadly, the Iron People arrived in 1770, and hurricanes of progress and ecocide soon followed.

Margolin worked on this book for three years, and he often dreamed about the Ohlone.  “It produced in me a sense of victory to know that such a way of life is part of the human potential, part of the human history.” 

Yes, indeed!  The daily news in our world regularly fills us with awe and amazement at the stunning achievements of human foolishness.  It’s difficult not to feel like inmates at an insane asylum because, in many ways, we are.  On the bright side, we all have front row seats as our insane civilization crumbles before our eyes, creating thrilling opportunities for new experiments in living.  And Margolin reminds us of the important fact that our genes are not diseased, just our culture.  Victory over civilization is not impossible, it’s a matter of time and love and healing.