Wild Free and Happy Sample 54

 

[Note: This is the fifty-fourth 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.

[Continued from sample 53]

BEING WILD, FREE, AND HAPPY!

We live in interesting times.  Bunnies aren’t acidifying the oceans.  Salmon aren’t blindsiding the climate.  Geese aren’t nuking rainforests.  Even our closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, remain absolute champions at sustainable living.  Today, much of humankind has become disconnected from our wild, free, and happy roots.  The rest of the family of life is not amused.

Many folks believe that electric cars are environmentally harmless, and that miraculous technology will certainly stop and reverse the Climate Crisis.  Other folks, the wee minority who pay close attention to the eco-related news feeds, are more inclined toward anger, grief, and haunting premonitions of extinctions.  They perceive that our culture is a runaway steamroller destined to smash everything in its path.

Big Mama Nature is strong, fiercely determined, and invincible.  She is the spirit of life, and its sacred guardian.  She’s glad to see that the planet-thrashing catastrophe is accelerating to its exit.  Maybe its speedy demise could prevent many extinctions.  Rust in peace, and good <bleeping> riddance!  When the storms have passed, Big Mama will still be standing tall and proud amidst the smoldering ruins, nurturing the recovery of what was lucky to survive.

Some folks seriously wonder if the human species is fatally flawed, a goofy divine booboo.  There are cultures that live like hurricanes, and others that walk softly.  History repeatedly assures us that wrecking ball cultures eventually rubbish their resource base and blink out.  Those cultures are indeed ridiculous, fatally flawed, dead ends, and the impacts of their lifestyle harm the entire family of life.  Sadly, they also have a long tradition of brutalizing lower impact cultures.

At the beginning of this long and meandering word dance, I promised to serve you stories that contemplate how things got to be this way.  I promised to propose zero miraculous solutions.  Well into the writing process, I became spellbound by an exceptional culture whose simplicity and sustainability have been highly polished by centuries of heavenly isolation.  They are not fatally flawed.  So, I need to take a side trip here, and share a bit of their story.

Pirahã

I’m delighted to introduce you to the Pirahã (pee-da-ha) people of the Amazon rainforest.  They are hunter-gatherers who live in a few jungle villages near the Maici River in northwestern Brazil.  Estimates of their population range up to 800.  The outer world mostly knows about them via the work of Daniel Everett, who first met them in 1977. 

In the beginning, he had been a missionary and linguist on a mission from God to learn their language, translate the Bible, and inspire the salvation of their damned souls.  His project was nearly derailed by the fact that their language had absolutely nothing in common with any other in the world.  They were able to effectively communicate via speaking, singing, humming, and whistling.  When hunting, whistles were less likely to spook monkeys and other game.  Whistled words allowed conversations between folks who were not close together.  When Dan was present, private conversation shifted to whistling.

To help you get to know the Pirahã, let me toss out some snips and notes from assorted sources.  They hunted, fished, and foraged.  Fish provided about 70 percent of their diet, and the combo of fishing and hunting provided up to 90 percent.  Manioc was recently introduced to them by Steve Sheldon, the linguist whom Everett replaced.  Scraggly manioc plants sometimes grew in small weedy patches, and their food production was miniscule.  They did not depend on this food.

The Pirahã knew the usefulness and location of all important plants in their area.  They understood the behavior of local animals, and how to take them, or avoid them.  They could walk into the jungle naked, with no tools or weapons, and walk out three days later with baskets of fruit, nuts, and small game.  By the age of nine, all of them were capable of surviving in the jungle on their own, feeding themselves and making shelter.  They were at peace with their ecosystem because they knew how to live in it.  Their faith was in themselves. 

The Pirahã had no leaders, or social hierarchy, all were equal.  It was taboo to tell someone to do something.  Violence, anger, and shouting were unacceptable.  They were amazingly content, tolerant, and patient.  Children were never spanked or given orders.  They were free to play with sharp knives.  Adults spoke to them as equals, no baby talk. 

They often chitchat about daily events and personal affairs, but they were not storytellers.  They have no cultural folklore, legends, fables, or worship.  Everett wrote, “Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions.”  He suspects that they may be the only group in the world that has no numbers, and no creation myth.  They have no concept of sin, punishment, or god.  Nor do they fear death or evil spirits.  Belief in evil spirits is common among groups of farmers or herders, where a year’s work can be lost suddenly via bad luck.  Fishers and hunters, on an unlucky day, were more likely to lose no more than a day’s work.

The people were remarkably easygoing and infectiously happy.  They wore bright smiles, and laughed about everything.  Folks from the outer world were often astonished to be among people who were sunbeams of happiness.  A visiting psychologist, amazed by their joy, said, “The Pirahãs look the most happy of all the people we ever saw; they laugh the most of all the populations we have seen.”

In the tribe, memories of ancestors or historic events were not preserved, they evaporated.  The distant past and future were off the radar of their here and now worldview.  Their realm of reality was limited to stuff that they could personally see or hear, or things seen or heard by their living parents, grandparents, friends, and kinfolk.  History was strictly limited to living memory.  Folks didn’t worry about what happened yesterday, or what might happen tomorrow.  They had no word for worry.  They lived entirely in the here and now. 

Origins

The Pirahã have a misty past, and it will likely remain misty.  Archaeologists estimate that they arrived in the Amazon at least 10,000 years ago.  Earlier, they were a subgroup of the Mura people, but they separated from them in 1714, when annoying colonists fell out of the sky, disturbing the peace.  Most of the Mura learned Portuguese and got closer to the Brazilian culture.  The Pirahã said screw this, moved deep into the jungle, and eventually settled along the Maici River, where a passing Portuguese missionary mentioned them in 1784. 

Everyone’s ancient ancestors originally evolved on African savannahs.  As they expanded around the world, grasslands were their preferred habitat, because they could be primo hunting grounds.  Thousands of years ago, when wild hunter-gatherers from Eurasia first arrived in the Amazon, they were happy to find, kill, and eat a variety of delicious large herbivores.  At some point during this era of migration and expansion, we aren’t sure when or how, the ancestors of the Pirahã also arrived in the Amazon region.

In 2020, news stories announced the discovery of tens of thousands of ice age rock paintings in the Amazon rainforest of Colombia (Article) (Video).  They were found on an eight mile (13 km) stretch of cliff face that was sheltered from the rain.  Images date from 12,600 to 11,800 years ago, when humans were busy colonizing North and South America. 

This was about the time that a megafauna extinction spasm was underway.  The rock painters could have never imagined how generations of low intensity overhunting might gradually lead to devastating irreversible impacts (modern highly educated folks are no less shortsighted and clueless).  In the years of feasting on fantastic abundance, they expressed jubilant celebration in their art.  Life is grand!  Yum!

Today, the Amazon rainforest is dense jungle, where it hasn’t been obliterated by loggers, miners, farmers, and ranchers.  The region was much different when the painters worked.  In those days, a warming climate was transforming the ecosystem.  A patchwork of savannahs, trees, and thorny scrub was in the process of shifting into today’s leafy tropical rainforest.  Among the cliff portraits were extinct horses, mastodons, camelids, and giant sloths.  These were not jungle critters. 

The Pirahã were super lucky.  Long before the invasion of pale faced space aliens with swords, axes, and smallpox, the rainforest had time to become well established in the Amazon basin.  It created a moist tropical climate that nurtured the survival of dense jungle.  This lush habitat was not suitable for herds of large herbivores, hunters of large game, livestock herders, or food producing soil miners.  Fish was their primary source of nutrients, and it was available year round.  The daily catch was promptly consumed, to avoid spoilage, or losses to hungry nonhuman neighbors.

The ecosystem was also home to black caiman, jaguars, giant anaconda, schools of piranha, venomous snakes, malaria, and other life threatening challenges.  Roadless jungle largely prohibited overland travel, which discouraged visits from uninvited outsiders.  This worked pretty well for a very long time.  Obnoxious neighbors can be a bloody pain in the ass.

In recent years, when the Brazilian government began providing the Pirahã with food from outer space, folks got fat.  Upon receiving sugary junk food, kids began getting tooth decay.  Folks now have a village generator, lights, a TV, and clinic.  They have a school where the kids are taught math and Portuguese.  And so on.  It would be awesome if the government instead directed their attention to protecting the rainforest, punishing the swarms of two-legged eco-terrorists, and teaching Brazilian kids ecology and environmental history.

The traditional Pirahã culture generated wastes that were biodegradable, no landfill needed.  It’s important to remember that they already had a way of life that worked perfectly, was not self-destructive, and could not be improved by increased exposure to troublesome stuff from outer space — exotic cultures, technology, beliefs, habits, diseases, etc.  They enjoyed living in a stable, low impact, time-proven culture where everyone shared the same belief system, and folks smiled and laughed a lot.  What could possibly be more terrible?

Missionary Work

In the beginning, after three years of tedious struggle, Everett finally became fluent in the Pirahã language.  He translated the Gospel of Mark, and shared it with some natives.  He had no doubt that the Bible was so spiritually powerful that anyone exposed to it could not help but be overwhelmed by its truth, and inspired to rush toward a heaven-bound path.  Well, the natives were fascinated by the bit about John the Baptist getting his head cut off, but nothing else had any effect on them whatsoever.

His holy objective had been “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.”  A traditional missionary proverb says, “You’ve got to get them lost before you can get them saved.”  Everett told them that Jesus could deliver them from fear, and lead them to a good life.  But they didn’t live in fear, and they already enjoyed an excellent way of life. 

Another missionary proverb says that “everyone has a god-shaped hole in their heart,” but the Pirahã apparently had whole hearts.  None were converted despite decades of effort.  They were empirical people who expected compelling here-and-now evidence.  Notions from unknown times, places, or people were beyond their realm of reality — perfectly meaningless nonsense.

Everett had never met Jesus, because Jesus lived 2,000 years ago.  He often tried to tell the Pirahã about Jesus, but stumbled.  They asked, “Did you see him yourself?”  “No.”  “So why do you tell us about things that you have never seen?”  Another time, when he read them names from his translation of the Gospel of Luke, they assumed that these were people that Everett knew.  When he described crucifixion, they were aghast.  It was beyond comprehension.  Did Americans really do that?  This information was from outer space, not here-and-now reality.

In addition to his religious role, Everett was also a linguist, a science-based field.  The scientist in him deeply respected the importance of trustworthy evidence.  As the river of time flowed past, Everett began to question his right to tell them about ancient supernatural miracles that he had not seen with his own eyes.  He believed they were true.  Of course, believing anything makes it true, but “truth” is a slippery rascal that can cast powerful spells, and open trap doors.  He loved the Pirahã, and they loved him, but they had no interest in Jesus, and finally told him so.  This was truly a sharp metaphysical rebuke.

By around 1982, he began having uncomfortable visits from doubt fairies, and these increased with every passing month.  By 1985, the fairies had become a nonstop whirling cloud of fluttering wings.  Finally, there came a day when he was able to summon the power to see beyond the stone wall of his beliefs.  A miracle happened — the mission’s first spiritual conversion.  His old life had become unbearable.  He could never accept that they were lost and going to hell.  “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.” 

He remained a closet atheist until the late ’90s, at which point he came out, and his wife and three children abandoned him.  By 2008, the banishment had ended.  In a 2015 interview, he noted that his son had also been awakened by doubt fairies, and that his ex-wife continued her holy efforts to save the Pirahã. 

Webs and Cleverness

Unlike the Pirahã, I wake up every morning in an apartment with hot and cold running water, electricity, refrigerator, stove, flush toilet, heater, computer, phone, book collection, etc. — decadent luxuries for idle rich folks confined in maximum impact societies.  Outside my window is a busy industrial city, streets rumbling with thousands of motorized wheelchairs.  It’s an outpost of a global civilization that’s maniacally devouring resources, pooping out mountains of waste, blindsiding the climate, and racing to oblivion.

In bed, as I wake up, I turn on the radio for an hour or two of morning news.  Every day, there is abundant evidence that much of the world is out of its mind — tsunamis of bullshit, mass hysteria, and countless conflicts.  I think about the Pirahã, who are also getting up, smiling and laughing, down by the river, welcoming the beginning of a new day.  Same species, same morning, same planet.  They have not forgotten who they are, or how to live.

Earlier, I talked a bit about human webs, associations of people that shared a similar knowledgebase.  The U.S. is in the Old World Web, a patriarchal farmer-herder culture that likely originated in Mesopotamia, and eventually grew in all directions.  It’s now found almost everywhere, with a dwindling number of backwater exceptions, like Pirahã country.

I’ve talked about how humans evolved on African savannahs, and eventually expanded around the world, long before the advent of agriculture and herding.  Humans have traditionally had a strong preference for grassland and tundra ecosystems, because they are prime habitat for large herbivores, a highly preferred food source.  Open country made it easier to see both hungry man-eating predators, and delicious herds of walking meat.  Over the centuries, vast regions of forest have been cleared to create grassland openings attractive to herds of grazing animals.

Open grasslands also made overland travel relatively easy.  There were thousands of miles of Silk Road routes.  By making long distance travel more convenient, they also encouraged the long distance exchange of seeds, commodities, ideas, and technologies.  Cleverness can be highly infectious and contagious.  When a clever idea from one culture smacks into a different culture for the first time, the collision can set off a snowballing chain reaction of brilliant, highly destructive foolishness.  For example, when knowledge of the Chinese substance we call gunpowder arrived in Europe, it sparked an explosion of innovation, which soon began generating mountains of mutilated corpses.

Epidemics of cleverness can trigger bloody competition for resources.  In these conflicts, the groups with superior cleverness tend to have the advantage.  Winners are able to grab more, feed more, fight more, enslave more, rape more, and hoard more.  It’s essential for clever wizards to pay close attention to the jungle drums of innovation, because the cutting edge is a moving target.  Great empires were never built by sleepy half-clever societies.

Living in the wholesome isolation of their rainforest, the Pirahã have not domesticated plants or animals, built cities and civilizations, developed industries, obliterated the trees, conquered neighbors, or invented automobiles and cell phones.  Their cleverness was invested in carefully mastering the art of sustainable survival, which was all they ever needed.

Diversity

In a 2007 interview, Everett said that his initial impression of Pirahã culture was that it was colorless and disappointing.  “But then I realized that this is the most intense culture that I could ever have hoped to experience.  This is a culture that’s invisible to the naked eye, but that is incredibly powerful, the most powerful culture of the Amazon.  Nobody has resisted change like this in the history of the Amazon, and maybe of the world.”

To him, the Pirahã success in resisting change seemed miraculous and otherworldly.  How was it possible that a society so healthy and happy could still survive in the twenty-first century?  It was stunning to see.  I’m not sure that resistance was the key factor here.  Isolation was probably what benefitted them most.  They had very little contact with clever people from elsewhere who had bad habits, odd tools, dark impulses, and heads slithering with brainworms. 

Everett was born and raised in California, where his cultural programming conditioned him to believe that innovation was the golden path to a better tomorrow.  This path was not focused on living in harmony with the ecosystem.  California culture is a highly diverse hell-broth of constantly clashing races, religions, classes, fads, and politics.  A better tomorrow is about more jobs, more income, more consumption, more landfills, and keeping your head above water in the ever changing currents.

In a 2017 essay, Everett praised diversity, because we learn far more (for better or worse) when we are around people who are different from us.  The more we learn, the more innovative we can become.  If we live among people who are just like us, we’re not going to learn much.  In a 2008 interview, he said that his biggest personal desire was to be able to learn faster.  He had a very busy mind.

Back in 1977, when he first fell out of the sky in Pirahã country, he landed in a living paradise of jungle diversity that bore no resemblance to California.  This diversity was ecological, not human, and it was overwhelmingly healthy.  He could have spent the rest of his life learning about the rainforest, and becoming one with it. 

Everett was once asked if an outsider could ever become fully integrated in the Pirahã culture.  He said that he could not, and had never met anyone who could.  “It requires tremendous knowledge of the jungle and its flora and fauna, as well as toughness that one rarely finds among outsiders.”  A complicating factor was his wife and three kids, who would not be eager to join a mind-expanding adventure in do-it-yourself rewilding.  If he abandoned mission work, he would lose his lifeline — and you and I would now know nothing about the Pirahã.

In 1999, when he returned to the Pirahã world from a side trip to outer space, he did not gather vegetation and build a lovely hut.  Instead, he unloaded 14 tons of ironwood from a boat, and built a two room dwelling.  It had a gas stove, freezer, water filtration system, TV, and a DVD player.  It was designed to ban the entry of bugs and snakes.  This pleased his wife and three kids.

Three Modes of Society

As mentioned earlier, Jon Young has devoted his life to promoting nature connection, because without connection, we are lost and confused critters.  He spent time with the San people of the Kalahari who had a deep spiritual connection to their land.  He said that they had perfect posture, and that their mental health factors are all positive.  They were super-happy, super-vital, and totally connected from birth to death.  In our society, maybe one in a thousand adults has connection.  Youngsters often have it, but it usually dies in the teen years, as they move into the cultural fast lane, into the realm of glowing screens and steaming hormones.

Colin Turnbull, in his most daunting book, compared the lovely wild society of Mbuti pygmies to the Ik tribe of Uganda, who were in a heartbreaking death spiral.  They had been banished from their ancient hunting grounds by the creation of a national park, and were expected to become farmers during a long and devastating drought.  Their traditional society was rapidly disintegrating, as many perished from starvation, and empathy went extinct.  The Ik reminded him of Western society, where growing de-socialization was also underway.  The Ik seemed like a spooky preview of where we were headed.

Like the Mbuti culture, Pirahã society was also held together by strong social bonds.  Their way of life depended on the complete cooperation of everyone, male and female, young and old.  This was possible because they lived in small intimate groups, where all were kin or friends, and everyone shared the same beliefs and values.  Their way of life echoed the original human blueprint.  They had no need for laws and cops.

For the Ik, family relationships had rotted, and society degenerated into a mob of self-centered individuals.  Western cultures can also be madhouses of rabid dog-eat-dog individualism.  We strive to achieve personal goals via competition for personal advancement.  We frequently suffer from the painful friction of diversity.  Our morals, values, lifestyles, ethnicities, and religious beliefs are all over the place, and often generate intolerance, resentment, exploitation, and hostility.  Our communities are too crowded and diverse to be kept in order by family connections.  So, we try to control the herd via laws, cops, and prisons. 

When cooperation and morals fail, and laws and prisons fail, door number three is social meltdown — absolute morality-free individual freedom, like the Ik.  In the ’70s, Turnbull was horrified by the rising tide of social rot in his world.  “The state itself, is resting ever more on both intellectual and physical violence to assert itself.”  Heads of state and their assistants fill the air with “loud-mouthed anti-intellectual blabberings.”  The populace “must not only not believe or trust or love or hope, but must not think.”  Sound familiar?

Abstractions

The good news is that the Pirahã, Mbuti, San, and others clearly demonstrate that the human species is not fatally flawed.  They show us that it’s possible for humans to be happy, healthy, and sustainable.  Simplicity is elegant.  What about the rest of us?  Babies born in Washington D.C. have essentially the same brains as Pirahã newborns.  Being raised in our warp speed consumer culture rewards us for living like thunder beings.  Pirahã kids leave the world in no worse condition than when they arrived.

Jack Turner was a philosophy professor who grew up to become a “belligerent ecological fundamentalist.”  Modern society was savagely and senselessly pounding the natural world to bloody bits, and this drove him mad, because it was insane.  He was deeply fond of the natural world, because it was the source of all life.  He was far less fond of eco-activists who tirelessly yowled and hissed at the designated villains, including capitalism, greedy corporations, corrupt politicians, the evil enemy-of-the-day, and so on.  They were overlooking the deeper point.

The root problem was philosophical.  Civilized cultures had reduced the natural world to abstractions — a treasure chest to be looted, a valuable machine that human brilliance should strive to rigorously control, despite barely understanding it.  (Abstract is the opposite of concrete.  Abstractions only exist as ideas or thoughts.)  The planet was being pummeled by a culture that was infested with childish abstract ideas — more is better, get rich quick, grow or die, human supremacy. 

These abstractions provided a sleazy seal of approval for numerous villainous behaviors, and they weren’t the sole domain of rich and powerful big shots.  Ordinary bubbas also got the cultural green light to clear a forest, drain a wetland, or plow a prairie.  On countless occasions, ambitious folks have gazed upon a sacred old growth forest, analyzed the potential board feet of milled lumber, calculated its dollar value, estimated the profit potential, fetched their axes, and turned living nature into lifeless cash.  This example of get-rich-quick fever is abstraction powered. 

In civilized cultures, the front line abstractions do not include reverence and respect for the natural world.  “We only value what we know and love, and we no longer know and love the wild,” Turner wrote.  “What we need now is a culture that deeply loves the wild earth.”  We must rejoin the natural world.  That’s an intelligent idea!  Is it possible?  Can we free our minds from the abstractions that cripple us?

Long ago, I chatted with Nick Trim, a Shawnee gentleman, on a Greenpeace bulletin board.  In the mid-1600s, French colonists were teaching the Shawnee how to build cabins, which involved cutting trees, an extremely dark and unnatural activity.  Many trees were home to “little people,” powerful spirits that required utmost respect.  Thus, it was necessary to knock on each tree, mention the possibility of cutting it, provide a worthy reason for doing so, and sincerely apologize for disturbing the peace.

Then, it was necessary to wait for a while, at least a day, to allow the little people to find a new tree.  A highly irritated French officer complained, “These Shawnee can’t cut a tree without a lengthy prayer, and a ceremony, and a day’s delay.”  Nick added, “I am pleased to say that some things don't change.  We still love trees.”  The frustrated officer found some French lads to do the murdering.

In our world, parents, educators, clergy, and others work to pass abstractions from one generation to the next.  Abstractions inspire cultures to send trainloads of heretics, pariahs, and useless eaters to gas chambers.  They inspire holy martyrs to put on suicide vests.  They inspire thundering mobs of Walmart Christmas shoppers to trample others in their maniacal quest to seize a bargain priced TV.  They inspire thousands of dimwitted fanatics to smash apart the U.S. capitol.  They inspire thousands of ambitious self-centered bumpkins to obliterate the Amazon rainforest.

Our poor brains are constantly raw and bleeding, thrashing with countless weird abstractions — owner, slave, freedom, oppression, success, failure, rich, poor, conservative, liberal, organic, conventional, ambition, apathy, valuable, worthless, sustainable, overshoot, sin, guilt, devils, angels, heaven, hell, creation, apocalypse, salvation, damnation, gods, goddesses, scripture, prophesy, dogmas, creeds, priests, shamans, heretics, infidels…. 

Skimming through the Wikipedia page on Abstraction, I read this: “Thinking in abstractions is considered by anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists to be one of the key traits in modern human behavior, which is believed to have developed between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.”  The development of complex language unlocked the gate, and set loose a flash flood of cleverness.  The ingenious ability to effortlessly engage in abstract thinking was a tremendous achievement on the path to domestication, civilization, industrialization, mass extinctions, and the Climate Crisis.

Every day, many long freight trains rumble through my neighborhood, blowing their horns.  Similarly my mind seems to be pulling a long train of abstractions, day after day, a heavy and tiresome burden.  They stimulate confusion, illusion, irritation, distraction.  Life would be so much lighter, freer, and easier if I could simply unhitch my mind, and stop dragging around an enormous load of cultural goofiness.  Imagine what it would be like to switch to an abstraction-free diet and immediately lose 800 pounds (363 kg) of suffocating mental sludge.  You would feel so light, bouncy, free, and alive!

I must now repeat Everett.  Listen!  “Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions.”  Wow!  This beautiful clarity must inspire their trademark smiles, laughter, and happiness.  It never occurs to them to do stupid things — burn down the forest, start a gold mine, build a dam.  They are not dangerous, unpredictable loose cannons. 

Indeed, it seems that the Pirahã were superb shamans.  They succeeded in exorcizing some thorny abstractions that caused Everett so much existential pain.  They were not demons in need of salvation, they were sweet joyful beings who knew how to live well, think with great precision, and instantly deflect mental sludge from the outer world.  When they held a mirror in front of him, he gasped, saw the light, and began a journey of healing, growth, and liberation.  Free at last! 

If only the rest of humankind could spend some years hanging out with happy, sustainable, uncivilized, illiterate, moneyless, abstraction-free role models.

 

PS:  For the sake of a smoother reading experience, I didn’t clutter up the above by noting sources.  If you are curious, and have two hours to invest, I recommend that you listen to the 52 minute The Humanist Hour #183 podcast (2015), and watch the 2012 documentary, The Grammar of Happiness.  In 2008, Everett wrote the book that introduced the Pirahã people to the world, Don’t Sleep: There are Snakes. 

If you want more, Everett did a TED talk, Wisdom from Strangers. He wrote articles Seek Out Strangers (2017) and About the Pirahãs.  The Instituto Socioambiental wrote a detailed report on the tribe.  See two articles in Wikipedia, Pirahã and Daniel Everett.  Several folks interviewed Everett:  John Colapinto (2007), Dominique Godreche (2012), Clare Dudman (2008).

Wild Free and Happy Sample 53

 

[Note: This is the fifty-third 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.

[Continued from sample 52]

ABRAHAMIC WEB

Mesopotamian cultures preserved many traditional stories from long, long ago.  The tales began as oral traditions, and quite a few were later inscribed on clay tablets, many of which are still readable.  These tablets date as far back as 3500 B.C.  Much later, around 586 B.C., Hebrew people were living in exile in Babylon.  Most scholars agree that the writing of the Torah began in Babylon, a project to create a lasting record of older traditions.  The Torah contains the five books of Moses.  In the Bible, these five books are called Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

In Genesis, a lad named Abraham appeared.  Abdullah Öcalan wrote that Abraham has been celebrated as the founding father of monotheistic religion in three scriptures, first in the Torah, then the Bible, and later the Qur’an.  Abraham was the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — which is why these three are known as Abrahamic religions.  All three provide a stage for characters including Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, and Moses.  All three believe in angels, judgment day, heaven for the good folks, and hell for everyone else.  All of their prophets were male.

It’s interesting to note that some of the values, ideas, and themes in ancient Sumerian legends have left their fingerprints on stories in Abrahamic scriptures.  These seem to be an indication of the Mesopotamian web influencing the Abrahamic cultures, which then spread the ideas to distant realms.  Today, some of these traditions are known to more than a billion people.  Let’s take a quick peek at how they compare, and pay a few visits to other points of interest.

Creation

A few pages back, I mentioned a Babylonian creation myth, in which Marduk killed the goddess Tiamat, created the world with her body, and then created humans.  Over the span of several thousand years, numerous Mesopotamian societies created a wide variety of stories, and Marduk makes guest appearances in many.  Some say he was the son of Enki.

Older than the Babylonian story was a Sumerian creation story that starred the god Enki, and the goddess Ninmah.  Once upon a time, the gods and goddesses were feeling overworked, so they decided to invent servants.  While preparing to create humans, they got into the mood for spiritual work by drinking “overmuch” and becoming roaring drunk.  Consequently, because our creators were totally sloshed, every human has at least one serious defect.  (Now the world makes perfect sense!)

Over the years, reputable researchers have worked hard to decipher characters that were etched on clay tablets thousands of years ago, in a long extinct dialect.  Their translations present us with a sanitized version of this drunken creation story that was safe to share with innocent children.  They tell us that the gods created humans from “clay.”  Öcalan, writing in the comfort of his luxurious prison cell, enjoyed the freedom to sidestep a scholarly obligation to disguise embarrassing ancient raunchiness.  He wrote, “It does not take much interpretative skill to realize that the narrative suggests that these servants were created from the feces of the gods.”  Holy shit!  Walking turds!

Let us now turn our attention to the Abrahamic version of the creation story.  In Genesis, humans were created in the Garden of Eden, a wilderness paradise.  Adam was made first, and then Eve was made from his rib.  Humans were the creator’s masterpiece, made in his image.  The first two humans had everything they needed — food, water, clean air, a perfect ecosystem, and a hot date. 

They could remain in paradise as long as they obeyed just one simple rule — don’t eat apples from one forbidden tree, or you will be severely punished.  There were many other trees in the garden, and it was perfectly OK to eat as much of their fruit as you wished.  Of course, just 14 short verses after the stern warning, they chose to break the one and only rule. 

The creator was infuriated.  He tossed them some leather clothes, and threw them out of paradise.  Their punishment for disobeying divine instructions was to till the ground from which they came — condemned to spend the rest of their lives chained to the backbreaking drudgery of farming (Genesis 3:1-24).  Eve was gullible and dim, as was Adam.

The Qur’an also tells a version of creation that includes Adam, Eve, forbidden fruit, and nudity.  Humans may be the only animals that are embarrassed by their nakedness.  Like the Sumerian story, the first humans were created from clay (soil from the earth).

So, both the Sumerian and Abrahamic creation stories imply that humans are less than brilliant.  Both also introduce the existence of a cosmic hierarchy.  Deities are all-powerful, immortal, and often short tempered.  Gods are our masters, and good humans always obey our masters.  Complex societies can work more smoothly when obedience is believed to be virtuous, and the mobs behave in an orderly manner.  Wild, free, and happy societies had no masters or hierarchies. 

Flood

In the Sumerian story of the great flood, the booze-headed gods had become thoroughly sick of humans.  There were way too many of them, and they were now making so much noise that the gods couldn’t sleep at night.  So, the way to cleanse the land of these noxious primate pests was to unleash a great flood and drown them all. 

At this point, the god Enki told the king of Sumer, Ziusudra, to build a large barge, gather up his family, and specimens of the various animal species, and spare them from the coming floods.  So he did.  Then, it rained, and rained, and rained, generating a great flood that lasted seven days.  The world got much quieter, and the gods slept much better.  Ziusudra made an offering to Enki, and then his family got to work repopulating the Earth. 

Floods were serious bad juju in Sumer, because the normal season for flooding in the Tigris Euphrates watershed corresponded to the time when wheat and barley crops were normally ripe.  If the un-harvested grain was suddenly washed away, hunger times followed, and gravediggers would work overtime.  Myths provided an explanation for why the gods sometimes punished them (humans are annoying).

In the remarkably similar Abrahamic flood story, the god Yahweh instructed Noah to build an ark.  God was thoroughly sick of humans, and regretted creating them.  He saw humans as being thoroughly wicked — every thought that crossed their minds was evil.  They were hopeless, a mistake (Genesis 6:5-7).  God told Noah to build an ark and load it with critters.  Then it rained for forty days and forty nights, and the mountains were covered.  The flood lasted 150 days.  Every nonaquatic critter drowned.  The creator was happy again. 

Unfortunately, the small group of surviving humans who stepped off of the ark were the same inherently flawed critters who had boarded it, and would now proceed to repopulate the Earth.  God sighed, and then took pity on his imperfect evil-loving boo-boos.  “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done.”  (Genesis 8:21)  In Islam, Noah is also celebrated as a great prophet.  The Qur’an presents a similar version of the flood story, a tale of immoral unbelievers who were drowned for their wrongs.

Myths seem to indicate how ideas traveled via ancient webs.  In Greece, river floods were almost unknown, but their myths still included flood stories, likely reflecting a Mesopotamian influence.  In one tale, Zeus got furiously pissed off at the sins of humankind, and decided it was flood time.  Prometheus discovered the plan, and told his son Deucalion to build an ark or chest.  Floods arrived, and Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha (Pandora’s daughter) floated for nine days and nights, until they safely landed on Mount Othrys.  They recreate humans by throwing stones behind their back, from which people are born.

In the Norse story of Ragnarök, the humanlike gods subdued the four forces of nature.  Of course, nature violently broke loose, and gave the arrogant control freak gods their bloody just rewards.  The whole world burned, and was then was submerged by floods.  Earth was cleansed, healed, and renewed.  Greek myths also mention that, from time to time, fires destroyed the world.

When you toss a stone into still water, ripples fan out in expanding circles.  The apocalyptic culture of ancient Mesopotamia can seem to be a splash that rippled around the world, disturbing the very long era of kinder and gentler cultures that preceded it.

Herder vs. Farmer

Jared Diamond wrote that Mesopotamia was unusual because it was home to a number of plant and animal species that were suitable for domestication.  Early hunter-gatherers were delighted to discover abundant wild foods.  They ceased being nomads, eventually gobbled up too much of the abundance, and began fooling around with domestication. 

The friction between farmers and herders is very old.  Farmers clustered along the floodplains of waterways.  Crops were habitual heavy drinkers and, in lucky times, they could produce generous harvests of nutrient-rich grains and pulses (peas, lentils, etc.).  Farming was hard work.  It chained you to a piece of land, where the food stored in your granary could provide an irresistible temptation to nomadic raiders, violent parasites.

Floodplains were primo real estate for both farmers and herders.  Herders managed livestock that had a serious addiction to grass and water.  In the eyes of livestock, a lush field of wheat and barley was a paradise of yummy grass.  Was it the farmer’s job to protect his fields, or the herder’s job to keep his critters in the hills?  Herding was an attractive choice for people disinterested in backbreaking drudgery, folks who preferred the freedom of nomadic living.

Myths preserve the enduring friction between farmers and herders.  Sumerians told a story about the lovely goddess Inanna, who was courted by Dumuzid (a herder), and Enkimdu (a farmer).  She chose the herder, the more prudent choice. 

Much later, this story is echoed in the Abrahamic tradition, by the story Cain (farmer) and Abel (herder).  God did not favor Cain’s offering, but gladly accepted Abel’s.  This hurt Cain’s feelings, so he murdered his brother, which did not amuse God.  Cain was banished, wandered away, and built the city of Enoch.

In both stories, the farmer appears inferior.  The Sumerian and Abrahamic traditions were strongly influenced by the culture of nomadic pastoralism.  For example: “Neither shall ye build house, nor sow seed, nor plant vineyard, nor have any: but all your days ye shall dwell in tents; that ye may live many days in the land where ye be strangers.”  (Jeremiah 35:7)

Bruce Chatwin wrote, “The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Hosea were nomadic revivalists who howled abuse at the decadence of civilization.  By sinking roots in the land, by laying house to house and field to field, by turning the Temple into a sculpture gallery, the people had turned from their God.”

Chatwin also mentioned that the name Cain means metal-smith, and that in several languages the words for “violence” and “subjugation” are linked to the discovery of metal, and the malevolent arts of technology.  Warfare became much bloodier.  The pages of the Old Testament document the violent deaths of up to several million people, and the destruction of many cities.  For example:

“And so it was, that in the seventh day the battle was joined: and the children of Israel slew of the Syrians an hundred thousand footmen in one day.” (Kings 1, 20:29)  “But the Syrians fled before Israel; and David slew of the Syrians seven thousand men which fought in chariots, and forty thousand footmen, and killed Shophach the captain of the host.” (Chronicles 1, 19:18)

Jared Diamond discussed God’s instructions to Hebrew warriors, regarding the proper treatment of heathens.  When an ordinary city you are attacking does not surrender, besiege it, kill every male, enslave the women, children, and cattle, and take what you want.  On the other hand, when attacking cities that worship false gods, like the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, “thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.” (Deuteronomy 20:10-18)  Diamond noted that Joshua faithfully slaughtered every person in over 400 cities. 

METAPHYSICAL WHIRLWINDS

Wild cultures were local and simple, and their notions of the cosmos, if any, were quite different from the religions of civilization.  With the emergence of farming and herding, populations grew, ecosystems got pounded, and bloody conflicts became more numerous and destructive.  Religions developed a number of new and unusual mutations.  Old fashioned traditions of respect and reverence for creation often got hurled overboard.  Civilization was focused on growth, wealth, status seeking, dominance, and other quirky kinks.

Multiply and Subdue

By the time that the Abrahamic scriptures had been written down, the notion of human supremacy was well established in the Fertile Crescent.  Indeed, the human saga is a long story of our cleverness, our tireless expansion into every land, and the tumultuous “progress” we unleashed. 

A classic example of this mindset appears in Genesis.  Immediately after creating Adam and Eve, the first instructions that God gave them were: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”  (Genesis 1:28) 

Humans were made in God’s image, the world was made for humans, and only humans matter (no mention of limits or foresight).  Our holy mission was to multiply, subdue, and dominate.  The descendants of Adam and Eve have displayed exceptional skill at achieving these objectives.  Unintended consequences now include the climate crisis, surging extinctions, soaring population, pollution, deforestation, and on and on. 

Biblical scholars have reported that Earth was created between 4000 B.C. and 3000 B.C., some calculating specifically 3137 B.C., but scientists have some doubts.  Scholars who study historic demographic trends estimate that in that era, humankind had a population between 7 to 14 million.  Almost all of the planet still looked a lot like an ecological paradise.  Water in the Mississippi, Rhine, and Thames was safe to drink.  The Irish rainforest was full of stags, wolves, and boars.

Writing is a fantastically powerful technology, for both illuminating and casting spells.  If there was a deep cave somewhere in which God was unable to read our every thought, some might be tempted to question whether divine instructions given to a world of 14 million are still wise and appropriate in a world zooming toward 8 billion.  In the twenty-first century, maybe contraceptives are not tools of the devil.  But that cave does not exist.  Never mind!  Just kidding!

Linear Time

Control freak societies can get obsessive-compulsive about time, measuring it in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, millennia.  I am writing at 4:08 PM PST on Sunday, January 17, A.D. 2021.  This moment is unique in the life of the universe, like a fingerprint, or a DNA sequence.  Many were just born, many just died, and Big Mama Nature received more kicks.

Wild folks had a softer and gentler perception of time.  Time was the daily passage of the sun across the sky, and the monthly phases of the moon.  Time was the perpetual cycle of winter, spring, summer, and fall.  It was the zig and zag of wet seasons and dry seasons, of cold ones and hot ones, of serenity and frightening storms.  For these people, time was circular, a wheel that never stops turning.  It keeps spinning and spinning, and it is real and alive and good.

In a number of Neolithic societies, like those in Mesopotamia, something extremely weird happens — the notion of linear time emerges.  It is not circular.  Linear time is like a drag strip for tire-burning hot rods, a one-way sprint from the starting line (creation) to the finish line (apocalypse), from paradise to wasteland, from womb to worms.  It is a cosmic (comic?) soap opera in which the spotlights remain focused on the rise and fall of an odd and amusing species of primates — as if we are the one and only thing in the universe that matters.  Nothing came before us, and nothing shall follow us.  How weird!

Paul Shepard said that folks living in Neolithic societies couldn’t help but notice that their way of life was wobbly, sloppy, and turbulent.  He wrote, “Living amidst collapsing ecosystems, agrarians accept a religion of arbitrary gods, catastrophic punishments by flood, pestilence, famine, and drought in an apocalyptic theology.”  Folks could see that the surrounding region was dotted with the ruins of past glory, remnants of the eternal two-step of overshoot, and its faithful companion, collapse.

Populations sometimes grew faster than Big Mama Nature could limit the swarms.  When the flood plains reached full occupancy, settlement expanded into forests, and up hillsides.  Hungry herds of hooved locusts chewed away the vegetation, exposing the naked soil, which blew away and washed away.  Rainfall and snowmelt rapidly ran off of stripped slopes.  Consequently, catastrophic floods were common, as were landslides.  Irrigation systems eventually made the fields so salty that nothing can grow in them.  A satellite flying over Mesopotamia now sees THIS.

The McNeills commented on the expanding shoreline along the Persian Gulf, into which the Tigris and Euphrates emptied.  Sumerian cities that were once located on the coast, or close to it, are today up to 100 miles (161 km) inland from the shore.  Former islands are now mainland, far from the coast.  Massive erosion was a perfectly normal consequence of upstream deforestation, overgrazing, and agriculture. 

George Perkins Marsh, in his 1864 book, described his visits to the ruins of many classic civilizations, and (correctly) worried that America was on the same path.  He wrote that where the Roman Empire once reigned, more than half of their lands today (1860s) are either deserted, desolate, or at least greatly reduced in both productiveness and population.  Vast forests are gone, much soil has been lost, springs have dried up, famous rivers have shrunk to humble brooklets, smaller rivers have dried up or have become seasonal, entrances to navigable streams are blocked by sandbars, former harbors are now distant from the sea, and large areas of shallow sea and fertile lowland are now foul smelling unhealthy swamps.

The ancient Greeks saw history as a long and tragic saga of human decline.  Hesiod writes of the Golden Age: “They lived like gods, free from worry and fatigue; old age did not afflict them; they rejoiced in continual festivity.”  This was followed by the Silver Age, a matriarchal era of agriculture, when men obeyed their mothers.  This was followed by the Bronze Age, a patriarchal era of war.  “Their pitiless hearts were as hard as steel; their might was untamable, their arms invincible.”  This was followed by the Iron Age, a time “when men respect neither their vows, nor justice, nor virtue.”

Today, we live in the Overshoot Age, when billions of people spend their lives in the crazy lane, and nothing seems to really matter.  Do redwoods matter, or whales, or polar bears, or ravens, or children?  Is anything sacred?  Hello?  Is anybody home?

Holy Lands

Wild cultures felt a sense of sacred oneness with their ancestral homeland.  It was a relationship of profound reverence and respect.  Their creation stories do not include the notion of being forcibly evicted from paradise for naughty behavior.  Something like paradise was their birthplace and permanent address, the home of their ancestors, and the generations yet to be born.  A Karuk man once took me to a bluff, and pointed down to a bend in the Klamath River where the Karuk people were first brought into existence, long, long ago.

Modern Americans are two-legged tumbleweeds that have blown in from countless distant places.  We frequently move every few years.  Many tumbleweeds have little or no knowledge of their ancestral homelands.  Many never develop a spiritual connection to any place.  For them, nature is typically nothing more than a meaningless static backdrop along the highway, stuff they zoom past during their daily travels.

Paul Shepard noted that this was a big shift away from older cultures, in which folks felt a profound spiritual connection to the land where they lived.  His wife Florence Shepard said it like this, “At the heart of our identity is a fundamentally wild being, one who finds in the whole of wild nature all that is true and beautiful in this world.”  By the time wild children reach puberty, they have developed a healthy connection to place.  They have a profound sense of belonging that most modern tumbleweeds cannot begin to imagine, and will never experience.

Vine Deloria was a Yankton Sioux who had immense respect for their traditional culture, because it had deep roots in place, and a healthy sense of coherence.  Settlers were ridiculously incoherent.  A missionary would tell them they were devil worshippers, convert them to the one true faith, and then a year later the next missionary would inform them that the first one was a demonic fire hose of lies and deceptions.  All the black robes read the same book, but none agreed on what it meant.

In 1945, a farmer named Mohammed Ali found an ancient jar near Nag Hammadi in Egypt.  Among the contents of this jar was a book containing the Gospel of Thomas.  This gospel of Jesus’ life had never been edited, corrected, clarified, or blessed by the official Holy Roman Church.  In chapter 113 of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is talking about the nature of heaven — God’s kingdom.  He said that it was not an event that would occur in the future.  Here is what he said: “The kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”  In other words, heaven is where your feet are standing.  Wherever you stand is sacred ground.

Moralizing Society

Harvey Whitehouse wrote about how deities changed with the rise of civilizations.  Complex societies tend to promote the rise of gods that are all-powerful, all-seeing, and tireless moralizers — deities that reward the virtuous, and spank the naughty.  Folks tend to be more motivated by the fear of punishment, rather than the desire for rewards.  Strict morals can also be useful for getting ethnically diverse groups to march to the same drum, without getting uppity.

The objective here was to encourage beneficial behavior, because a disempowered, obedient, and orderly mob was a productive and profitable mob.  Elites do not enjoy the presence of rebels and rabble-rousers.  But in a big community, troublesome folks can often become invisible within the vast anonymous crowds.  In theory, all-seeing moralizing gods are personal deities.  They always know exactly what you (and everyone else) are doing and thinking.

In simple societies, the local spirits were less likely to become morality police.  There was no cultural diversity to generate friction, everyone shared the same worldview.  Folks in small groups lived in fishbowls — everyone was well aware of what everyone else was doing.  There were no secrets.  Folks were inclined to behave mindfully.  Misbehavior could lead to friendly nudges, a damaged reputation, an ass whooping, or ostracism. 

John Trudell, a Santee Sioux activist, bitterly detested the colonization of the Americas.  Traditionally, tribal people were raised in a culture of spiritual reality, which emphasized a profound respect and reverence for the family of life.  Their guiding star was responsibility.  Settlers, on the other hand, were far less interested in notions of responsibility.  Preachers blasted tribal folks with intensely toxic moralizing.  A primary objective was to make people feel powerless, to convince them that they’re bad, sinful, evil from birth — to paralyze them with guilt and shame, to strip away their self-respect.

Vine Deloria said that a tribal person “does not live in a tribe, the tribe lives in him.”  Their sense of identity was rooted in “we,” not “me.”  Self-centeredness was a spiritual abnormality.  Everyone had powerful bonds to the land, the clan, and their family.  I am an only child, and my good buddy Jim was one of seven children.  I envy their powerful lifelong bonds, and their ongoing mutual support.  This is the mode in which social primates evolved to live.

Robert Anton Wilson noted that living within a tribe, and benefitting from mutual support, was vital for survival.  Being punished by banishment or exile was like being thrown overboard in the high seas — an extremely brutal and terrifying punishment that was only chosen for hopelessly impossible buttheads.  Execution would have been more merciful.  The benefits of mutual support really encouraged conformity to time-proven tribal norms.

And this, dear reader, is why hierarchical societies, like industrial civilization, are wonderlands of craziness.  The air is constantly hissing with the voices of sorcerers.  Thou shalt compete (not cooperate).  Thou shalt hoard (not share).  Thou shalt always strive to become a heroic example of personal success and extravagant excess.  Fun fact: “Thou shalt” appears exactly 500 times in the King James Bible. 

Individual Salvation

A few pages back, we learned that the Sumerian gods could be sloppy drunks.  They created humans so flawed that the only solution was to exterminate them with a great flood.  The Genesis story echoes this.  When the flood subsided, Noah’s surviving kinfolk were still just as flawed as the countless humans who were deliberately drowned.  A rational person could wonder why all-knowing, all-powerful creators kept flubbing up when creating humans, but that might be heresy.  Let’s not go there.  Reason and religion usually sleep in separate beds.

It’s not heresy to perceive the obvious.  These Neolithic cultures clearly taught that the humans were inherently flawed.  In the Christian tradition, every newborn is evil until baptized.  Once baptized, living in strict obedience to divine instructions is not mandatory.  The world is filled with temptations, and we all have the freedom to be naughty or nice.  Nice folks are obedient, and their reward is salvation, the heavenly ticket to eternal paradise.  Death is when the good times begin.

With regard to salvation, everyone is equal, from billionaires to ditch diggers, women, and slaves.  Everyone has the option of seeking the path to a wonderful afterlife.  Nobody is worthless.  This is very cool, because if you were born a slave, that was God’s will, not a cruel misfortune.  So, with this understanding, you can happily shovel shit for a few decades, and then go to paradise for eternity.  Yippee!

Belief in salvation can be so powerful that it overrides survival instincts.  Michael Dowd wrote, “In group-to-group conflicts, any culture that offers the promise of an afterlife to those who heroically martyr themselves will likely triumph over an army of atheists who have the rational belief that death marks the absolute end of individual existence.”

Humans are social critters, not stray cats.  We are most comfortable when we are among small intimate groups of family and friends, where everyone is equal, and we care for each other.  With regard to individual salvation, the opposite is true.  When it’s time to meet the divine for your final exam, you are completely on your own.  I may achieve salvation, while everyone I love and respect does not (or vice versa).

Beyond flawed humans, the entire planet is flawed.  In the Christian sphere, they believe that the world is the realm of Satan, a place of evil.  For them, Earth is something like a cheap motel room where we get an opportunity to spend some time demonstrating our worthiness for salvation (or the toasty alternative).  It’s just an audition.  Of course, this implies that the living ecosystem does not deserve respect and reverence.  It’s just a funky roadside flophouse with stained sheets with cigarette burns, a cheap place for a short stay.  It’s OK to smash it up (or flood it).

[Continued on sample 54]

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]