Another Way of Knowing

John Zerzan: Division of Labor

2005-11-18T11:57:00.000-08:00

Di-vi-sion of la-bor n. 1. the breakdown into specific, circumscribed tasks for maximum efficiency of output which constitutes manufacture; cardinal aspect of production. 2. the fragmenting or reduction of human activity into separated toil that is the practical root of alienation; that basic specialization which makes civilization appear and develop.

The relative wholeness of pre-civilized life was first and foremost an absence of the narrowing, confining separation of people into differentiated roles and functions. The foundation of our shrinkage of experience and powerlessness in the face of the reign of expertise, felt so acutely today, is the division of labor. It is hardly accidental that key ideologues of civilization have striven mightily to valorize it. In Plato's Republic, for example, we are instructed that the origin of the state lies in that "natural" inequality of humanity that is embodied in the division of labor. Durkheim celebrated a fractionated, unequal world by divining that the touchstone of "human solidarity," its essential moral value is-you guessed it. Before him, according to Franz Borkenau, it was a great increase in division of labor occurring around 1600 that introduced the abstract category of work, which may be said to underlie, in turn, the whole modern, Cartesian notion that our bodily existence is merely an object of our (abstract) consciousness.

In the first sentence of The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith foresaw the essence of industrialism by determining that division of labor represents a qualitative increase in productivity. Twenty years later Schiller recognized that division of labor was producing a society in which its members were unable to develop their humanity. Marx could see both sides: "as a result of division of labor," the worker is "reduced to the condition of a machine." But decisive was Marx's worship of the fullness of production as essential to human liberation. The immiseration of humanity along the road of capital's development he saw as a necessary evil.

Marxism cannot escape the determining imprint of this decision in favor of division of labor, and its major voices certainly reflect this acceptance. Lukacs, for instance, chose to ignore it, seeing only the "reifying effects of the dominant commodity form" in his attention to the problem of proletarian consciousness. E.P. Thompson realized that with the factory system, "the character-structure of the rebellious pre-industrial labourer or artisan was violently recast into that of the submissive individual worker." But he devoted amazingly little attention to division of labor, the central mechanism by which this transformation was achieved. Marcuse tried to conceptualize a civilization without repression, while amply demonstrating the incompatibility of the two. In bowing to the "naturalness" inherent in division of labor, he judged that the "rational exercise of authority" and the "advancement of the whole" depend upon it - while a few pages later (in Eros and Civilization) granting that one's "labor becomes the more alien the more specialized the division of labor becomes."

Ellul understood how "the sharp knife of specialization has passed like a razor into the living flesh," how division of labor causes the ignorance of a "closed universe" cutting off the subject from others and from nature. Similarly did Horkheimer sum up the debilitation: "thus, for all their activity individuals are becoming more passive; for all their power over nature they are becoming more powerless in relation to society and themselves." Along these lines, Foucault emphasized productivity as the fundamental contemporary repression.

But recent Marxian thought continues in the trap of having, ultimately, to elevate division of labor for the sake of technological progress. Braverman's in many ways excellent Labor and Monopoly Capital explores the degradation of work, but sees it as mainly a problem of loss of "will and ambition to wrest control of production from capitalist hands." And Schwabbe's Psychosocial Consequences of Natural and Alienated Labor is dedicated to the ending of all domination in production and projects a self-management of production. The reason, obviously, that he ignores division of labor is that it is inherent in production; he does not see that it is nonsense to speak of liberation and production in the same breath.

The tendency of division of labor has always been the forced labor of the interchangeable cog in an increasingly autonomous, impervious-to-desire apparatus. The barbarism of modern times is still the enslavement to technology, that is to say, to division of labor. "Specialization," wrote Giedion, "goes on without respite," and today more than ever can we see and feel the barren, de-eroticized world it has brought us to. Robinson Jeffers decided, "I don't think industrial civilization is worth the distortion of human nature, and the meanness and loss of contact with the earth, that it entails."

Meanwhile, the continuing myths of the "neutrality" and "inevitability" of technological development are crucial to fitting everyone to the yoke of division of labor. Those who oppose domination while defending its core principle are the perpetuators of our captivity. Consider Guattari, that radical post-structuralist, who finds that desire and dreams are quite possible "even in a society with highly developed industry and highly developed public information services, etc." Our advanced French opponent of alienation scoffs at the naive who detect the "essential wickedness of industrial societies," but does offer the prescription that "the whole attitude of specialists needs questioning." Not the existence of specialists, of course, merely their "attitudes."

To the question, "How much division of labor should we jettison?" returns, I believe, the answer, "How much wholeness for ourselves and the planet do we want?"

(From Insurgent Desire.)

Richard Heinberg: The Critique of Civilization

2005-11-18T11:46:00.000-08:00

(A paper presented at the 24th annual meeting of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, June 15, 1995. Found at John Filiss' Primitivism web site.)

I. Prologue

Having been chosen - whether as devil's advocate or sacrificial lamb, I am not sure - to lead off this discussion on the question, "Was Civilization a Mistake?", I would like to offer some preliminary thoughts.

From the viewpoint of any non-civilized person, this consideration would appear to be steeped in irony. Here we are, after all, some of the most civilized people on the planet, discussing in the most civilized way imaginable whether civilization itself might be an error. Most of our fellow civilians would likely find our discussion, in addition to being ironic, also disturbing and pointless: after all, what person who has grown up with cars, electricity, and television would relish the idea of living without a house, and of surviving only on wild foods?

Nevertheless, despite the possibility that at least some of our remarks may be ironic, disturbing, and pointless, here we are. Why? I can only speak for myself. In my own intellectual development I have found that a critique of civilization is virtually inescapable for two reasons.

The first has to do with certain deeply disturbing trends in the modern world. We are, it seems, killing the planet. Revisionist "wise use" advocates tell us there is nothing to worry about; dangers to the environment, they say, have been wildly exaggerated. To me this is the most blatant form of wishful thinking. By most estimates, the oceans are dying, the human population is expanding far beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the land, the ozone layer is disappearing, and the global climate is showing worrisome signs of instability. Unless drastic steps are taken, in fifty years the vast majority of the world's population will likely be existing in conditions such that the lifestyle of virtually any undisturbed primitive tribe would be paradise by comparison.

Now, it can be argued that civilization per se is not at fault, that the problems we face have to do with unique economic and historical circumstances. But we should at least consider the possibility that our modern industrial system represents the flowering of tendencies that go back quite far. This, at any rate, is the implication of recent assessments of the ecological ruin left in the wake of the Roman, Mesopotamian, Chinese, and other prior civilizations. Are we perhaps repeating their errors on a gargantuan scale?

If my first reason for criticizing civilization has to do with its effects on the environment, the second has to do with its impact on human beings. As civilized people, we are also domesticated. We are to primitive peoples as cows and sheep are to bears and eagles. On the rental property where I live in California my landlord keeps two white domesticated ducks. These ducks have been bred to have wings so small as to prevent them from flying. This is a convenience for their keepers, but compared to wild ducks these are pitiful creatures.

Many primal peoples tend to view us as pitiful creatures, too - though powerful and dangerous because of our technology and sheer numbers. They regard civilization as a sort of social disease. We civilized people appear to act as though we were addicted to a powerful drug - a drug that comes in the forms of money, factory-made goods, oil, and electricity. We are helpless without this drug, so we have come to see any threat to its supply as a threat to our very existence. Therefore we are easily manipulated - by desire (for more) or fear (that what we have will be taken away) - and powerful commercial and political interests have learned to orchestrate our desires and fears in order to achieve their own purposes of profit and control. If told that the production of our drug involves slavery, stealing, and murder, or the ecological equivalents, we try to ignore the news so as not to have to face an intolerable double bind.

Since our present civilization is patently ecologically unsustainable in its present form, it follows that our descendants will be living very differently in a few decades, whether their new way of life arises by conscious choice or by default. If humankind is to choose its path deliberately, I believe that our deliberations should include a critique of civilization itself, such as we are undertaking here. The question implicit in such a critique is, What have we done poorly or thoughtlessly in the past that we can do better now? It is in this constructive spirit that I offer the comments that follow.

II. Civilization and Primitivism

What Is Primitivism?

The image of a lost Golden Age of freedom and innocence is at the heart of all the world's religions, is one of the most powerful themes in the history of human thought, and is the earliest and most characteristic expression of primitivism - the perennial belief in the necessity of a return to origins.

As a philosophical idea, primitivism has had as its proponents Lao Tze, Rousseau, and Thoreau, as well as most of the pre-Socratics, the medieval Jewish and Christian theologians, and 19th- and 20th-century anarchist social theorists, all of whom argued (on different bases and in different ways) the superiority of a simple life close to nature. More recently, many anthropologists have expressed admiration for the spiritual and material advantages of the ways of life of the world's most "primitive" societies - the surviving gathering-and-hunting peoples who now make up less than one hundredth of one percent of the world's population.

Meanwhile, as civilization approaches a crisis precipitated by overpopulation and the destruction of the ecological integrity of the planet, primitivism has enjoyed a popular resurgence, by way of increasing interest in shamanism, tribal customs, herbalism, radical environmentalism, and natural foods. There is a widespread (though by no means universally shared) sentiment that civilization has gone too far in its domination of nature, and that in order to survive - or, at least, to live with satisfaction - we must regain some of the spontaneity and naturalness of our early ancestors.

What Is Civilization?

There are many possible definitions of the word civilization. Its derivation - from civis, "town" or "city" - suggests that a minimum definition would be, "urban culture." Civilization also seems to imply writing, division of labor, agriculture, organized warfare, growth of population, and social stratification.

Yet the latest evidence calls into question the idea that these traits always go together. For example, Elizabeth Stone and Paul Zimansky's assessment of power relations in the Mesopotamian city of Maskan-shapir (published in the April 1995 Scientific American) suggests that urban culture need not imply class divisions. Their findings seem to show that civilization in its earliest phase was free of these. Still, for the most part the history of civilization in the Near East, the Far East, and Central America, is also the history of kingship, slavery, conquest, agriculture, overpopulation, and environmental ruin. And these traits continue in civilization's most recent phases - the industrial state and the global market - though now the state itself takes the place of the king, and slavery becomes wage labor and de facto colonialism administered through multinational corporations. Meanwhile, the mechanization of production (which began with agriculture) is overtaking nearly every avenue of human creativity, population is skyrocketing, and organized warfare is resulting in unprecedented levels of bloodshed.

Perhaps, if some of these undesirable traits were absent from the very first cities, I should focus my critique on "Empire Culture" instead of the broader target of "civilization." However, given how little we still know about the earliest urban centers of the Neolithic era, it is difficult as yet to draw a clear distinction between the two terms.

III. Primitivism Versus Civilization.

Wild Self/Domesticated Self.

People are shaped from birth by their cultural surroundings and by their interactions with the people closest to them. Civilization manipulates these primary relationships in such a way as to domesticate the infant - that is, so as to accustom it to life in a social structure one step removed from nature. The actual process of domestication is describable as follows, using terms borrowed from the object-relations school of psychology.

The infant lives entirely in the present moment in a state of pure trust and guilelessness, deeply bonded with her mother. But as she grows, she discovers that her mother is a separate entity with her own priorities and limits. The infant's experience of relationship changes from one of spontaneous trust to one that is suffused with need and longing. This creates a gap between Self and Other in the consciousness of the child, who tries to fill this deepening rift with transitional objects - initially, perhaps a teddy bear; later, addictions and beliefs that serve to fill the psychic gap and thus provide a sense of security. It is the powerful human need for transitional objects that drives individuals in their search for property and power, and that generates bureaucracies and technologies as people pool their efforts.

This process does not occur in the same way in the case of primitive childbearing, where the infant is treated with indulgence, is in constant physical contact with a caregiver throughout infancy, and later undergoes rites of passage. In primal cultures the need for transitional objects appears to be minimized. Anthropological and psychological research converge to suggest that many of civilized people's emotional ills come from our culture's abandonment of natural childrearing methods and initiatory rites and its systematic substitution of alienating pedagogical practices from crib through university.

Health: Natural or Artificial?

In terms of health and quality of life, civilization has been a mitigated disaster. S. Boyd Eaton, M.D., et al., argued in The Paleolithic Prescription (1988) that pre-agricultural peoples enjoyed a generally healthy way of life, and that cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, emphysema, hypertension, and cirrhosis - which together lead to 75 percent of all mortality in industrialized nations - are caused by our civilized lifestyles. In terms of diet and exercise, preagricultural lifestyles showed a clear superiority to those of agricultural and civilized peoples.

Much-vaunted increases in longevity in civilized populations have resulted not so much from wonder drugs, as merely from better sanitation - a corrective for conditions created by the overcrowding of cities; and from reductions in infant mortality. It is true that many lives have been spared by modern antibiotics. Yet antibiotics also appear responsible for the evolution of resistant strains of microbes, which health officials now fear could produce unprecedented epidemics in the next century.

The ancient practice of herbalism, evidence of which dates back at least 60,000 years, is practiced in instinctive fashion by all higher animals. Herbal knowledge formed the basis of modern medicine and remains in many ways superior to it. In countless instances, modern synthetic drugs have replaced herbs not because they are more effective or safer, but because they are more profitable to manufacture.

Other forms of "natural" healing - massage, the "placebo effect," the use of meditation and visualization - are also being shown effective. Medical doctors Bernie Siegel and Deepak Chopra are critical of mechanized medicine and say that the future of the healing professions lies in the direction of attitudinal and natural therapies.

Spirituality: Raw or Cooked?

Spirituality means different things to different people - humility before a higher power or powers; compassion for the suffering of others; obedience to a lineage or tradition; a felt connection with the Earth or with Nature; evolution toward "higher" states of consciousness; or the mystical experience of oneness with all life or with God. With regard to each of these fundamental ways of defining or experiencing the sacred, spontaneous spirituality seems to become regimented, dogmatized, even militarized, with the growth of civilization. While some of the founders of world religions were intuitive primitivists (Jesus, Lao Tze, the Buddha), their followers have often fostered the growth of dominance hierarchies.

The picture is not always simple, though. The thoroughly civilized Roman Catholic Church produced two of the West's great primitivists - St. Francis and St. Clair; while the neo-shamanic, vegetarian, and herbalist movements of early 20th century Germany attracted arch-authoritarians Heinrich Himmler and Adolph Hitler. Of course, Nazism's militarism and rigid dominator organization were completely alien to primitive life, while St. Francis's and St. Clair's voluntary poverty and treatment of animals as sacred were reminiscent of the lifestyle and worldview of most gathering-and-hunting peoples. If Nazism was atavistic, it was only highly selectively so.

A consideration of these historical ironies is useful in helping us isolate the essentials of true primitivist spirituality - which include spontaneity, mutual aid, encouragement of natural diversity, love of nature, and compassion for others. As spiritual teachers have always insisted, it is the spirit (or state of consciousness) that is important, not the form (names, ideologies, and techniques). While from the standpoint of Teilhard de Chardin's idea of spiritual evolutionism, primitivist spirituality may initially appear anti-evolutionary or regressive, the essentials we have cited are timeless and trans-evolutionary - they are available at all stages, at all times, for all people. It is when we cease to see civilization in terms of theories of cultural evolution and see it merely as one of several possible forms of social organization that we begin to understand why religion can be liberating, enlightening, and empowering when it holds consistently to primitivist ideals; or deadening and oppressive when it is co-opted to serve the interests of power.

Economics: Free or Unaffordable?

At its base, economics is about how people relate with the land and with one another in the process of fulfilling their material wants and needs. In the most primitive societies, these relations are direct and straightforward. Land, shelter, and food are free. Everything is shared, there are no rich people or poor people, and happiness has little to do with accumulating material possessions. The primitive lives in relative abundance (all needs and wants are easily met) and has plenty of leisure time.

Civilization, in contrast, straddles two economic pillars - technological innovation and the marketplace. "Technology" here includes everything from the plow to the nuclear reactor - all are means to more efficiently extract energy and resources from nature. But efficiency implies the reification of time, and so civilization always brings with it a preoccupation with past and future; eventually the present moment nearly vanishes from view. The elevation of efficiency over other human values is epitomized in the factory - the automated workplace - in which the worker becomes merely an appendage of the machine, a slave to clocks and wages.

The market is civilization's means of equating dissimilar things through a medium of exchange. As we grow accustomed to valuing everything according to money, we tend to lose a sense of the uniqueness of things. What, after all, is an animal worth, or a mountain, or a redwood tree, or an hour of human life? The market gives us a numerical answer based on scarcity and demand. To the degree that we believe that such values have meaning, we live in a world that is desacralized and desensitized, without heart or spirit.

We can get some idea of ways out of our ecologically ruinous, humanly deadening economic cage by examining not only primitive lifestyles, but the proposals of economist E. F. Schumacher, the experiences of people in utopian communities in which technology and money are marginalized, and the lives of individuals who have adopted an attitude of voluntary simplicity.

Government: Bottom Up or Top Down?

In the most primitive human societies there are no leaders, bosses, politics, laws, crime, or taxes. There is often little division of labor between women and men, and where such division exists both gender's contributions are often valued more or less equally. Probably as a result, many foraging peoples are relatively peaceful (anthropologist Richard Lee found that "the !Kung [Bushmen of southern Africa] hate fighting, and think anybody who fought would be stupid").

With agriculture usually come division of labor, increased sexual inequality, and the beginnings of social hierarchy. Priests, kings, and organized, impersonal warfare all seem to come together in one package. Eventually, laws and borders define the creation of the fully fledged state. The state as a focus of coercion and violence has reached its culmination in the 19th and 20th centuries in colonialism, fascism, and Stalinism. Even the democratic industrial state functions essentially as an instrument of multinational corporate-style colonial oppression and domestic enslavement, its citizens merely being given the choice between selected professional bureaucrats representing political parties with slightly varying agendas for the advancement of corporate power.

Beginning with William Godwin in the early 19th century, anarchist social philosophers have offered a critical counterpoint to the increasingly radical statism of most of the world's civilized political leaders. The core idea of anarchism is that human beings are fundamentally sociable; left to themselves, they tend to cooperate to their mutual benefit. There will always be exceptions, but these are best dealt with informally and on an individual basis. Many anarchists cite the Athenian polis, the "sections" in Paris during the French Revolution, the New England town meetings of the 18th century, the popular assemblies in Barcelona in the late 1930s, and the Paris general strike of 1968 as positive examples of anarchy in action. They point to the possibility of a kind of social ecology, in which diversity and spontaneity are permitted to flourish unhindered both in human affairs and in Nature.

While critics continue to describe anarchism as a practical failure, organizational and systems theorists Tom Peters and Peter Senge are advocating the transformation of hierarchical, bureaucratized organizations into more decentralized, autonomous, spontaneous ones. This transformation is presently underway in - of all places - the very multinational corporations that form the backbone of industrial civilization.

Civilization and Nature.

Civilized people are accustomed to an anthropocentric view of the world. Our interest in the environment is utilitarian: it is of value because it is of use (or potential use) to human beings - if only as a place for camping and recreation.

Primitive peoples, in contrast, tended to see nature as intrinsically meaningful. In many cultures prohibitions surrounded the overhunting of animals or the felling of trees. The aboriginal peoples of Australia believed that their primary purpose in the cosmic scheme of things was to take care of the land, which meant performing ceremonies for the periodic renewal of plant and animal species, and of the landscape itself.

The difference in effects between the anthropocentric and ecocentric worldviews is incalculable. At present, we human beings - while considering ourselves the most intelligent species on the planet - are engaged in the most unintelligent enterprise imaginable: the destruction of our own natural life-support system. We need here only mention matters such as the standard treatment of factory-farmed domesticated food animals, the destruction of soils, the pollution of air and water, and the extinctions of wild species, as these horrors are well documented. It seems unlikely that these could ever have arisen but for an entrenched and ever-deepening trend of thinking that separates humanity from its natural context and denies inherent worth to non-human nature.

The origin and growth of this tendency to treat nature as an object separate from ourselves can be traced to the Neolithic revolution, and through the various stages of civilization's intensification and growth. One can also trace the countercurrent to this tendency from the primitivism of the early Taoists to that of today's deep ecologists, ecofeminists, and bioregionalists.

How We Compensate for Our Loss of Nature.

How do we make up for the loss of our primitive way of life? Psychotherapy, exercise and diet programs, the vacation and entertainment industries, and social welfare programs are necessitated by civilized, industrial lifestyles. The cumulative cost of these compensatory efforts is vast; yet in many respects they are only palliative.

The medical community now tells us that our modern diet of low-fiber, high-fat processed foods is disastrous to our health. But what exactly is the cost - in terms of hospital stays, surgeries, premature deaths, etc.? A rough but conservative estimate runs into the tens of billions of dollars per year in North America alone.

At the forefront of the "wellness" movement are advocates of natural foods, exercise programs (including hiking and backpacking), herbalism, and other therapies that aim specifically to bring overcivilized individuals back in touch with the innate source of health within their own stressed and repressed bodies.

Current approaches in psychology aim to retrieve lost portions of the primitive psyche via "inner child" work, through which adults compensate for alienated childhoods; or men's and women's vision quests, through which civilized people seek to access the "wild man" or "wild woman" within.

All of these physically, psychologically, and even spiritually-oriented efforts are helpful antidotes for the distress of civilization. One must wonder, however, whether it wouldn't be better simply to stop creating the problems that these programs and therapies are intended to correct.

IV. Questions and Objections.

Isn't civilization simply the inevitable expression of the evolutionary urge as it is translated through human society? Isn't primitivism therefore regressive?

We are accustomed to thinking of the history of Western civilization as an inevitable evolutionary progression. But this implies that all the world's peoples who didn't spontaneously develop civilizations of their own were less highly evolved than ourselves, or simply "backward." Not all anthropologists who have spent time with such peoples think this way. Indeed, according to the cultural materialist school of thought, articulated primarily by Marvin Harris, social change in the direction of technological innovation and social stratification is fueled not so much by some innate evolutionary urge as by crises brought on by overpopulation and resource exhaustion.

Wasn't primitive life terrible? Would we really want to go back to hunting and gathering, living without modern comforts and conveniences?

Putting an urban person in the wilderness without comforts and conveniences would be as cruel as abandoning a domesticated pet by the roadside. Even if the animal survived, it would be miserable. And we would probably be miserable too, if the accouterments of civilization were abruptly withdrawn from us. Yet the wild cousins of our hypothetical companion animal - whether a parrot, a canine, or a feline - live quite happily away from houses and packaged pet food and resist our efforts to capture and domesticate them, just as primitive peoples live quite happily without civilization and often resist its imposition. Clearly, animals (including people) can adapt either to wild or domesticated ways of life over the course of several generations, while adult individuals tend to be much less adaptable. In the view of many of its proponents, primitivism implies a direction of social change over time, as opposed to an instantaneous, all-or-nothing choice. We in the industrial world have gradually accustomed ourselves to a way of life that appears to be leading toward a universal biological holocaust. The question is, shall we choose to gradually accustom ourselves to another way of life - one that more successfully integrates human purposes with ecological imperatives - or shall we cling to our present choices to the bitter end?

Obviously, we cannot turn back the clock. But we are at a point in history where we not only can, but must pick and choose among all the present and past elements of human culture to find those that are most humane and sustainable. While the new culture we will create by doing so will not likely represent simply an immediate return to wild food gathering, it could restore much of the freedom, naturalness, and spontaneity that we have traded for civilization's artifices, and it could include new versions of cultural forms with roots in humanity's remotest past. We need not slavishly imitate the past; we might, rather, be inspired by the best examples of human adaptation, past and present. Instead of "going back," we should think of this process as "getting back on track."

Haven't we gained important knowledge and abilities through civilization? Wouldn't renouncing these advances be stupid and short-sighted?

If human beings are inherently mostly good, sociable, and creative, it is inevitable that much of what we have done in the course of the development of civilization should be worth keeping, even if the enterprise as a whole was skewed. But how do we decide what to keep? Obviously, we must agree upon criteria. I would suggest that our first criterion must be ecological sustainability. What activities can be pursued across many generations with minimal environmental damage? A second criterion might be, What sorts of activities promote - rather than degrade - human dignity and freedom?

If human beings are inherently good, then why did we make the "mistake" of creating civilization? Aren't the two propositions (human beings are good, civilization is bad) contradictory?

Only if taken as absolutes. Human nature is malleable, its qualities changing somewhat according to the natural and social environment. Moreover, humankind is not a closed system. We exist within a natural world that is, on the whole, "good," but that is subject to rare catastrophes. Perhaps the initial phases of civilization were humanity's traumatized response to overwhelming global cataclysms accompanying and following the end of the Pleistocene. Kingship and warfare may have originated as survival strategies. Then, perhaps civilization itself became a mechanism for re-traumatizing each new generation, thus preserving and regenerating its own psycho-social basis.

What practical suggestions for the future stem from primitivism? We cannot all revert to gathering and hunting today because there are just too many of us. Can primitivism offer a practical design for living?

No philosophy or "-ism" is a magical formula for the solution of all human problems. Primitivism doesn't offer easy answers, but it does suggest an alternative direction or set of values. For many centuries, civilization has been traveling in the direction of artificiality, control, and domination. Primitivism tells us that there is an inherent limit to our continued movement in that direction, and that at some point we must begin to choose to readapt ourselves to nature. The point of a primitivist critique of civilization is not necessarily to insist on an absolute rejection of every aspect of modern life, but to assist in clarifying issues so that we can better understand the tradeoffs we are making now, deepen the process of renegotiating our personal bargains with nature, and thereby contribute to the reframing of our society's collective covenants.

V. Some Concluding Thoughts.

In any discussion of primitivism we must keep in mind civilization's "good" face - the one characterized (in Lewis Mumford's words) by "the invention and keeping of the written record, the growth of visual and musical arts, the effort to widen the circle of communication and economic intercourse far beyond the range of any local community: ultimately the purpose to make available to all [people] the discoveries and inventions and creations, the works of art and thought, the values and purposes that any single group has discovered."

Civilization brings not only comforts, but also the opportunity to think the thoughts of Plato or Thoreau, to travel to distant places, and to live under the protection of a legal system that guarantees certain rights. How could we deny the worth of these things?

Naturally, we would like to have it all; we would like to preserve civilization's perceived benefits while restraining its destructiveness. But we haven't found a way to do that yet. And it is unlikely that we will while we are in denial about what we have left behind, and about the likely consequences of what we are doing now.

While I advocate taking a critical look at civilization, I am not suggesting that we are now in position to render a final judgment on it. It is entirely possible that we are standing on the threshold of a cultural transformation toward a way of life characterized by relatively higher degrees of contentment, creativity, justice, and sustainability than have been known in any human society heretofore. If we are able to follow this transformation through, and if we call the result "civilization," then we will surely be entitled to declare civilization a resounding success.

Jared Diamond: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

2005-11-18T11:25:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in the May 1987 issue of Discover magazine, found at Iowa State University Agronomy 342 course materials, Ricardo J. Salvador, Associate Professor.)

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.

From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?

The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.

How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy. And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.

Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9" for men, 5' 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of only 5' 3" for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A.D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 percent increase in [tooth] enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants - wheat, rice, and corn - provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae circa 1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from circa A.D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts - with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.

Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.

As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

Thus with the advent of agriculture an elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.

One answer boils down to the adage, "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over one person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that. Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want.

At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it.

Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?

Jared Diamond: Why Societies Collapse

2005-11-18T11:12:00.000-08:00

(The following is a transcript of an Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National Background Briefing program: "Jared Diamond at Princeton University: Why Societies Collapse". Kristen Garrett is the program host.)

Kristen Garrett: Throughout human history, societies, civilizations have prospered and collapsed over time. The reasons, obviously, have lessons for the whole of our intricately interlinked planet today. At Princeton University in America, earlier this month, eminent professor Jared Diamond, Professor of Physiology at UCLA, gave a speech about the collapse of ancient societies. ... He spoke of once-vibrant societies such as the ones that built Angkor Wat, the Mayan civilization, the Easter Islands, Greater Zimbabwe, and the Indus Valley.

Jared Diamond: Why did these ancient civilizations abandon their cities after building them with such great effort? Why these ancient collapses? This question isn't just a romantic mystery. It's also a challenging intellectual problem. Why is it that some societies collapsed while others did not collapse?

But even more, this question is relevant to the environmental problems that we face today; problems such as deforestation, the impending end of the tropical rainforests, over-fishing, soil erosion, soil desalinization, global climate change, full utilization of the world's fresh water supplies, bumping up against the photosynthetic ceiling, exhaustion of energy reserves, accumulation of toxics in water, food and soil, increase of the world's population, and increase of our per capita input. The main problems that threaten our existence over the coming decades. What if anything, can the past teach us about why some societies are more unstable than others, and about how some societies have managed to overcome their environmental problems. Can we extract from the past any useful guidance that will help us in the coming decades?

There's overwhelming recent evidence from archaeology and other disciplines that some of these romantic mystery collapses have been self-inflicted ecological suicides, resulting from inadvertent human impacts on the environment, impacts similar to the impacts causing the problems that we face today. Even though these past societies like the Easter Islanders and Anasazi had far fewer people, and were packing far less potent destructive practices than we do today.

It turns out that these ancient collapses pose a very complicated problem. It's not just that all these societies collapsed, but one can also think of places in the world where societies have gone on for thousands of years without any signs of collapse, such as Japan, Java, Tonga and Tikopea. What is it then that made some societies weaken and other societies robust? It's also a complicated problem because the collapses usually prove to be multi-factorial. This is not an area where we can expect simple answers.

What I'm talking about is the collapses of societies and their applications to the risks we face today. This may sound initially depressing, but you'll see that my main conclusions are going to be upbeat.

Kirsten Garrett: The first example he gave to illustrate the sorts of problems communities accumulate was the American state of Montana. Not many years ago, it was one of the wealthiest in America, wealth based on copper mining, forestry and agriculture. Now it's very poor. Mining has gone, leaving terrible environmental damage, 70% of the children in Montana are on Food Aid, logging and farming are in decline. What happened was that the mining, forestry and agriculture which earned so much wealth, became destructive. Montana now has terrible forest fires, desalinization, erosion, weeds and animal diseases, and population decline.

Jared Diamond: If Montana were an isolated country, Montana would be in a state of collapse. Montana is not going to collapse, because it's supported by the rest of the United States, and yet other societies have collapsed in the past, and are collapsing now or will collapse in the future, from problems similar to those facing Montana. The same problems that we've seen throughout human history, problems of water, forests, topsoil, irrigation, desalinization, climate change, erosion, introduced pests and disease and population; problems similar to those faced by Montanans today are the ones posing problems in Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Australia, Nepal, Ethiopia and so on. But those countries, Afghanistan, Pakistan etcetera have the misfortune not to be embedded within a rich country that supports them, like the United States.

Visiting Montana again just brought home to me that these problems of ancient civilizations are not remote problems of romantic mysterious people, they're problems of the modern world including of the United States. I mentioned then that there's a long list of past societies that did collapse, but there were also past societies that did not collapse. What is it then that makes some societies more vulnerable than others? Environmental factors clearly play a role, archaeological evidence accumulated over the last several decades has revealed environmental factors behind many of these ancient collapses. Again, to appreciate the modern relevance of all this, if one asked an academic ecologist to name the countries in the modern world that suffer from most severe problems of environmental damage and of over-population, and if this ecologist never read the newspapers and didn't know anything about modern political problems, the ecologist would say "Well that's a no-brainer, the countries today that have ecological and population [problems], there are Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines, Indonesia, Solomon Islands." Then you ask a politician who doesn't know, or a strategic planner who knows or cares nothing about ecological problems, what you see is the political tinderboxes of the modern world, the danger spots, and the politician or strategic planner would say "It's a no-brainer; Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines, Indonesia, Solomon Islands", the same list. And that simply makes the point that countries that get into environmental trouble are likely to get into political trouble both for themselves and to cause political troubles around the world.

In trying to understand the collapses of ancient societies, I quickly realized that it's not enough to look at the inadvertent impact of humans on their environment. It's usually more complicated. Instead I've arrived at a checklist of five things that I look at to understand the collapses of societies, and in some cases all five of these things are operating. Usually several of them are.

The first of these factors is environmental damage, inadvertent damage to the environment through means such as deforestation, soil erosion, desalinization, over-hunting etc.

The second item on the checklist is climate change, such as cooling or increased aridity. People can hammer away at their environment and get away with it as long as the climate is benign, warm, wet, and the people are likely to get in trouble when the climate turns against them, getting colder or drier. So climate change and human environmental impact interact, not surprisingly.

Still a third consideration is that one has to look at a society's relations with hostile neighbors. Most societies have chronic hostile relations with some of their neighbors and societies may succeed in fending off those hostile neighbors for a long time. They're most likely to fail to hold off the hostile neighbors when the society itself gets weakened for environmental or any other reasons, and that's given rise for example, to the long-standing debate about the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Was the conquest by Barbarians really a fundamental cause, or was it just that Barbarians were at the frontiers of the Roman Empire for many centuries? Rome succeeded in holding them off as long as Rome was strong, and then when Rome got weakened by other things, Rome failed, and fell to the Barbarians. And similarly, we know that there were military factors in the fall of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. So relations with hostiles interacts with environmental damage and climate change.

Similarly, relations with friendlies. Almost all societies depend in part upon trade with neighboring friendly societies, and if one of those friendly societies itself runs into environmental problems and collapses for environmental reasons, that collapse may then drag down their trade partners. It's something that interests us today, given that we are dependent for oil upon imports from countries that have some political stability in a fragile environment.

And finally in addition to those four factors on the checklist, one always has to ask about people's cultural response. Why is it that people failed to perceive the problems developing around them, or if they perceived them, why did they fail to solve the problems that would eventually do them in? Why did some peoples perceive and recognize their problems and others not?

I'll give you four examples of these past societies that collapsed. One is Easter Island, I'll discuss it first because Easter is the simplest case we've got, the closest approximation to a collapse resulting purely from human environmental damage.

The second case are the collapses of Henderson and Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, which were due to the combination of self-inflicted environmental damage, plus the loss of external trade due to the collapse of a friendly trade partner.

Third I'll discuss, closer to home, the Anasazi in the U.S. southwest whose collapse was a combination of environmental damage and climate change.

And then finally I'll mention the Greenland Norse who ended up all dead because of a combination of all five of these factors.

So let's take then the first of these examples, the collapse of Easter Island society. Any of you here in this room, have any of you had the good fortune to have visited Easter Island? Good for you, you lucky person, I'm going there next month, I've wanted for decades to go there. And Easter is the most remote habitable scrap of land in the world; it's an island in the Pacific, 2,000 miles west of the coast of Chile, and some 1,300 miles from the nearest Polynesian island. It was settled by other Polynesians coming from the west, sometime around AD800 and it was so remote that after Polynesians arrived at Easter Island, nobody else arrived there. Nobody left Easter as far as we know, and so the Easter story is uncomplicated by relations with external hostiles or friendlies. There weren't any. Easter Islanders rose and fell by themselves.

Easter is a relatively fragile environment, dry with 40 inches of rain per year. It's most famous because of the giant stone statutes - those big statues weighing up to 80 tons - stone statues that were carved in a volcanic quarry and then dragged up over the lift of the quarry and then 13 miles down to the coast and then raised up vertically onto platforms, all this accomplished by people without any draught animals, without pulleys, without machines. These 80-ton statues were dragged and erected under human muscle power alone. And yet when Europeans arrived at Easter in 1722, the statues that the islanders themselves had erected at such great personal effort, the islanders were in the process of throwing down their own statues, Easter Island society was in a state of collapse. How, why and who erected the statues, and why were they thrown down?

Well the how, why and who has been settled in the last several decades by archaeological discoveries. Easter Islanders were typical Polynesians, and the cause of the collapse became clear from archaeological work in the last 15 years, particularly from paleo-botanical work and identification of animal bones in archaeological sites. Today Easter Island is barren. It's a grassland, there are no native trees whatsoever on Easter Island, not a likely setting for the development of a great civilization, and yet these paleo-botanical studies, identifying pollen grains and lake cores show that when the Polynesians arrived at Easter Island, it was covered by a tropical forest that included the world's largest palm tree and dandelions of tree height. And there were land birds, at least six species of land birds, 37 species of breeding sea-birds - the largest collection of breeding sea-birds anywhere in the Pacific.

Polynesians settled Easter, they began to clear the forest for their gardens, for firewood, for using as rollers and levers to raise the giant statues, and then to build canoes with which to go out into the ocean and catch porpoises and tuna. In the oldest archaeological sites one sees the bones of porpoises and tuna that the people were eating. They ate the land birds, they ate the sea-birds, they ate the fruits of the palm trees. The population of Easter grew to an estimated about 10,000 people, until by the year 1600 all of the trees and all of the land birds and all but one of the sea-birds on Easter Island itself were extinct. Some of the sea-birds were confined to breeding on offshore stacks.

The deforestation and the elimination of the birds had consequences for people. First without trees, they could no longer transport and erect the statues, so they stopped carving statues. Secondly, without trees they had no firewood except of their own agricultural wastes. Thirdly, without trees to cover the ground, they suffered from soil erosion and hence agricultural yields decreased, and then without trees they couldn't build canoes, so they couldn't go out to the ocean to catch porpoises. There were only a few sea-birds left. Because they didn't have pigs the largest animal left to eat with the disappearance of porpoises and tuna were humans. And Polynesian society then collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism. The spear points from that final phase still litter the ground of Easter Island today. The population crashed from about 10,000 to an estimated 2,000 with no possibility of rebuilding the original society because the trees, most of the birds and some of the soil were gone.

I think one of the reasons that the collapse of Easter Island so grabs people is that it looks like a metaphor for us today. Easter Island, isolated in the middle of the Pacific Island, nobody to turn to to get help, nowhere to flee once Easter Island itself collapsed. In the same way today, one can look at Planet Earth in the middle of the galaxy and if we too get into trouble, there's no way that we can flee, and no people to whom we can turn for help out there in the galaxy.

I can't help wondering what the Islander who chopped down the last palm tree said as he or she did it. Was he saying, "What about our jobs? Do we care more for trees than for our jobs, of us loggers?" Or maybe he was saying, "What about my private property rights? Get the big government of the chiefs off my back." Or maybe he was saying, "You're predicting environmental disaster, but your environmental models are untested, we need more research before we can take action." Or perhaps he was saying, "Don't worry, technology will solve all our problems."

Kirsten Garrett: After speaking about several other Pacific Island nations and what happened to them, Professor Jared Diamond went on to talk of the Anasazi, an Indian nation later called the Pueblo, in what is now the United States.

Jared Diamond: My next example involves the Anasazi in our southwest, in the four corners area of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah. How many of you here have been to either Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon? OK, looks like nearly half of you. It's very striking to visit say Chaco Canyon where there are still the ruins of the biggest skyscrapers erected in the United States until the Chicago skyscrapers erected in Chicago's loop in the 1870s and 1880s. But the skyscrapers of Chaco Canyon were erected by native Americans, the Anasazi. Up to 6-story buildings, with up to 600 rooms. The Anasazi build-up began around AD600 with the arrival of the Mexican crops of corn, squash and beans, and in that relatively dry area. Again it's very striking today to drive through an area where today either nobody is living at all, or nobody's living by agriculture. At Chaco Canyon itself there are a couple of houses of National Park Rangers importing their food, and then nobody else living within 20 or 30 miles. And yet to realize, and to see the remains on the ground, this used to be a densely populated agricultural environment.

The Anasazi were ingenious at managing to survive in that environment, with low fluctuating, unpredictable rainfall, and with nutrient-poor soils. The population built up. They fed themselves with agriculture, in some cases irrigation agriculture, channeled very carefully to flood out over the fields. They cut down trees for construction and firewood. In each area they would develop environmental problems by cutting down trees and exhausting soil nutrients, but they dealt with those problems by abandoning their sites after a few decades and moving on to a new site.

It's possible to reconstruct Anasazi history in great detail for two reasons: tree rings, because this is a dry climate, the Southwest. From tree-rings you can identify from the rings on the roof beams, what year - 1116, not 1115 AD - what year the tree in that roof was cut down. And also those cute little rodents in the Southwest, pack rats, that run around gathering bits of vegetation in their nests and then abandoning their nests after 50 years, a pack rat midden is basically a time capsule of the vegetation growing within 50 yards of a pack rat midden over a period of 50 years. My friend Julio Betancourt was near an Anasazi ruin and happened to see a pack rat midden whose dating he knew nothing about. He was astonished to see in what's now a treeless environment, in this pack rat midden were the needles of pinion pine and juniper. So Julio wondered whether that was an old midden. He took it back, radio carbon-dated it, and lo and behold it was something like AD 800. So the pack-rat middens are time capsules of local vegetation allowing us to reconstruct what happened.

What happened is that the Anasazi deforested the area around their settlements until they were having to go further and further away for their fuel and their construction timber. At the end they were getting their logs, neatly cut logs, uniform, weighing on the average 600 pounds, 16 feet logs, were cut at the end on tops of mountains up to 75 miles away and about 4,000 feet above the Anasazi settlements, and then dragged back by people with no transport or pack animals, to the Anasazi settlements themselves. So deforestation spread. That was the one environmental problem.

The other environmental problem was the cutting of arroyos. In the Southwest, when water flow gets channeled for example in irrigation ditches, vast water flow is run off in desert rains [that] digs a trench in the channel, and digs a trench deeper and deeper so those of you who've been to Chaco Canyon will have seen those arroyos up to 30 feet deep. And today, if the water level drops down in the arroyos, that's not a problem for farmers, because we've got pumps, but the Anasazi did not have pumps, and so when the irrigation ditches became incised by arroyo cutting and when the water level in the ditches dropped down below the field levels, they could no longer do irrigation agriculture. For a while they got away with these inadvertent environmental impacts. There were droughts around 1040 and droughts around 1090, but at both times the Anasazi hadn't yet filled up the landscape, so they could move to other parts of the landscape not yet exploited. And the population continued to grow.

And then in Chaco Canyon when a drought arrived in 1117, at that point there was no more unexploited landscape, no more empty land to which to shift. In addition at that point, Chaco Canyon was a complex society. Lots of stuff was getting imported into Chaco - stone tools, pottery, turquoise, probably food was being imported into Chaco. Archaeologists can't detect any material that went out of the Chaco Valley, and whenever you see a city into which material stuff is moving and no material stuff is leaving, you think that the modern world - the model could be of New York City or Rome, or Washington and Rome - that is to say you suspect that city is having political control or religious control in return for which the peasants in the periphery are supplying their imported goods.

When the drought came in 1117 it was a couple of decades before the end. Again any of you who have been to Pueblo Benito, will have seen that Pueblo Benito was the six storey skyscraper. Pueblo Benito was a big, unwalled plaza, until about 20 years before the end, when a high wall went up around the plaza. And when you see a rich place without a wall, you can safely infer that the rich place was on good terms with its poor neighbors, and when you see a wall going up around the rich place, you can infer that there was now trouble with the neighbors. So probably what was happening was that towards the end, in the drought, as the landscape is filled up, the people out on the periphery were no longer satisfied because the people in the religious and political center, were no longer delivering the goods. The prayers to the gods were not bringing rain, there was not all the stuff to redistribute and they began making trouble. And then at the drought of 1117, with no empty land to shift to, construction of Chaco Canyon ceased, Chaco was eventually abandoned. Long House Valley was abandoned later. The Anasazi had committed themselves irreversibly to a complex society, and once that society collapsed, they couldn't rebuild it because again they deforested their environment.

In this case then, the Anasazi case, we have the interaction of well understood environmental impact and very well understood climate change from the tree rings - from the width of the tree rings, we know how much rainfall was falling in each year and hence we know the severity of the drought.

My next to last example involves Norse Greenland. As the Vikings began to expand over and terrorize Europe in their raids, [they] also settled six islands in the North Atlantic. So we have to compare not 80 islands as in the Pacific, but 6 islands. Viking settlements survived on Orkney, Shetland, Faroe and Iceland, albeit it with severe problems due to environmental damage on Iceland. The Vikings arrived in Greenland, settled Greenland AD 984, where they established a Norwegian pastoral economy, based particularly on sheep, goats and cattle for producing dairy products, and then they also hunted caribou and seal. Trade was important. The Vikings in Greenland hunted walruses to trade walrus ivory to Norway because walrus ivory was in demand in Europe for carving, since at that time with the Arab conquest, elephant ivory was no longer available in Europe.

Vikings [on Greenland] vanished in the 1400s. There were two settlements; one of them disappeared around 1360 and the other sometime probably a little after 1440. Everybody ended up dead.

The vanishing of Viking Greenland is instructive because it involves all five of the factors that I mentioned, and also because there's a detailed, written record from Norway, a bit from Iceland and just a few fragments from Greenland: a written record describing what people were doing and describing what they were thinking. So we know something about their motivation, which we don't know for the Anasazi and the Easter Islanders.

Of the five factors, first of all there was ecological damage due to deforestation in this cold climate with a short growing season, cutting turf, soil erosion. The deforestation was especially expensive to the Norse Greenlanders because they required charcoal in order to smelt iron to extract iron from bogs. Without iron, except for what they could import in small quantities from Norway, there were problems in getting iron tools like sickles. It got to be a big problem when the Inuit, who had initially been absent in Greenland, colonized Greenland and came into conflict with the Norse. The Norse then had no military advantage over the Inuit. It was not guns, germs and steel. The Norse of Greenland had no guns, very little steel, and they didn't have the nasty germs. They were fighting with the Inuit on terms of equality, one people with stone and wooden weapons against another.

So problem number one, ecological damage, problem number two, climate change. The climate in Greenland got colder in the late 1300s and early 1400s as part of what's called the Little Ice Age cooling of the North Atlantic. Hay production was a problem. Greenland was already marginal because it's high latitude short growing season, and as it got colder, the growing season got even shorter, hay production got less, and hay was the basis of Norse sustenance. Thirdly, the Norse had military problems with their neighbors the Inuit. For example, the only detailed example we have of an Inuit attack on the Norse is that the Icelandic annals of the years 1379 say, "In this year the scralings (which is an old Norse word meaning wretches, the Norse did not have a good attitude towards the Inuit), the wretches attacked the Greenlanders and killed 18 men and captured a couple of young men and women as slaves." Eighteen men doesn't seem like a big deal in this century of body counts of tens of millions of people, but when you consider the population of Norse Greenland at the time, probably about 4,000 people, 18 adult men stands in the same proportion to the Norse population then as if some outsiders were to come into the United States today and in one raid kill 1,700,000 adult male Americans. So that single raid by the Inuit did make a big deal to the Norse, and that's just the only raid that we know about.

Fourthly, there was the cut-off of trade with Europe because of increasing sea-ice, with a cold climate in the North Atlantic. The ships from Norway gradually stopped coming. Also as the Mediterranean reopened Europeans got access again to elephant ivory, and they became less interested in the walrus ivory, so fewer ships came to Greenland.

And then finally cultural factors - the Norse were derived from a Norwegian society that was identified with pastoralism, and particularly valued calves. In Greenland it's easier to feed and take care of sheep and goats than calves, but calves were prized in Greenland, so the Norse chiefs and bishops were heavily invested in the status symbol of calves.

The Norse, because of their bad attitude towards the Inuit did not adopt useful Inuit technology, so the Norse never adopted harpoons, hence they couldn't eat whales like the Inuit. They didn't fish, incredibly, while the Inuit were fishing. They didn't have dog sleighs, they didn't have skin boats, they didn't learn from the Inuit how to kill seals at breeding holes in the winter. So the Norse were conservative, had a bad attitude towards the Inuit, they built churches and cathedrals, the remains of the Greenland cathedral is still standing today at Gardar. It's as big as the cathedral of Iceland, and the stone churches, some of the three-stone churches in Greenland are still standing. So this was a society that invested heavily in their churches, in importing stained-glass windows and bronze bells for the churches, when they could have been importing more iron to trade to the Inuit, to get seals and whale meat in exchange for the iron.

So there were cultural factors also while the Norse refused to learn from the Inuit and refused to modify their own economy in a way that would have permitted them to survive. And the result then was that after 1440 the Norse were all dead, and the Inuit survived. Greenland then is particularly instructive in showing us that collapse due to environmental reasons isn't inevitable. It depends upon what you do. Here are two peoples and one did things that let them survive, and the other things did not permit them to survive.

There are a series of factors that make people more or less likely to perceive environmental problems growing up around them. One is misreading previous experience. The Greenlanders came from Norway where there's a relatively long growing season, so the Greenlanders didn't realize, based on their previous experience, how fragile Greenland woodlands were going to be. The Greenlanders had the difficulty of extracting a trend from noisy fluctuations. Yes we now know that there was a long-term cooling trend, but climate fluctuates wildly up and down in Greenland from year to year; cold, cold, warm, cold. So it was difficult for a long time perceive that there was any long-term trend. That's similar to the problems we have today with recognizing global warming. It's only within the last few years that even scientists have been able to convince themselves that there is a global long-term warming trend. And while scientists are convinced, the evidence is not yet enough to convince many of our politicians.

Problem No. 3, short time scale of experience. In the Anasazi area, droughts come back every 50 years, in Greenland it gets cold every 500 years or so; those rare events are impossible to perceive for humans with a life span of 40, 50, 70 years. They're perceptible today but we may not internalize them. For example, my friends in the Tucson area. There was a big drought in Tucson about 40 years ago. The city of Tucson almost over-draughted its water aquifers and Tucson went briefly into a period of water conservation, but now Tucson is back to building big developments and golf courses and so Tucson will have trouble with the next drought.

Fourthly, the Norse were disadvantaged by inappropriate cultural values. They valued cows too highly just as modern Australians value cows and sheep to a degree appropriate to Scotland but inappropriate to modern Australia. And Australians now are seriously considering whether to abandon sheep farming completely as inappropriate to the Australian environment.

Finally, why would people perceive problems but still not solve their own problems? A theme that emerges from Norse Greenland as well as from other places, is insulation of the decision making elite from the consequences of their actions. That is to say, in societies where the elites do not suffer from the consequences of their decisions, but can insulate themselves, the elite are more likely to pursue their short-term interests, even though that may be bad for the long-term interests of the society, including the children of the elite themselves.

In the case of Norse Greenland, the chiefs and bishops were eating beef from cows and venison and the lower classes were left to eating seals and the elite were heavily invested in the walrus ivory trade because it let them get their communion gear and their Rhineland pottery and the other stuff that they wanted. Even though in the long run, what was good for the chiefs in the short run was bad for society.

We can see those differing insulations of the elite in the modern world today. Of all modern countries the one with by far the highest level of environmental awareness is Holland. In Holland, a higher percentage of people belong to environmental organizations than anywhere else in the world. And the Dutch are also a very democratic people. There are something like 42 political parties but none of them ever comes remotely close to a majority, but this which would be a recipe for chaos elsewhere, in modern Holland are very good for reaching decisions. And on my last visit to Holland I asked my Dutch friends, "Why is it this high level of environmental awareness in Holland?" And they said, "Look around. Most of us are living in Polders, in these lands that have been drained, reclaimed from the sea, they're below sea level and they're guided by the dykes." In Holland everybody lives in the Polders, whether you're rich or poor. It's not the case that the rich people are living high up on the dykes and the poor people are living down in the Polders. So when the dyke is breached or there's a flood, rich and poor people die alike. In particular in the North Sea floods in Holland in the late '40s and '50s, when the North Sea was swept by winds and tides 50 to 100 miles inland, all Dutch in the path of the floods died whether they were rich or poor. So my Dutch friends explained it to me that in Holland, rich people cannot insulate themselves from consequences of their actions. They're living in the Polders and therefore there is not the clash between their short-term interests and the long-term interests of everybody else. The Dutch have had to learn to reach communal decisions.

Whereas in much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions.

Well, finally then. I've talked mostly about the past. What about the situation today? There are obvious differences between the environmental problems that we face today and the environmental problems in the past. Some of those differences are things that make the situation for us today scarier than it was in the past. Today there are far more people alive, packing far more potent per capita destructive technology. Today there are 6 billion people chopping down the forests with chains and bulldozers, whereas on Easter Island there were 10,000 people with stone axes. Today, countries like the Solomon Islands - wet, relatively robust environments, where people lived without being able to deforest the islands for 32,000 years - within the past 15 years the Solomon Islands have been almost totally deforested, leading to a civil war and collapse of government within the last year or two.

Another big difference between today and the past is globalization. In the past, you could get solitary collapses. When Easter Island society collapsed, nobody anywhere else in the world knew about it, nobody was affected by it. The Easter Islanders themselves, as they were collapsing, had no way of knowing that the Anasazi had collapsed for similar reasons a few centuries before, and that the Mycenaean Greeks had collapsed a couple of thousand years before and that the dry areas of Hawaii were going downhill at the same time. But today we turn on the television set and we see the ecological damage in Somalia and Afghanistan, or Haiti, and we pick up a book and we read about the ecological damage caused in the past. So we have knowledge both in space and time, that ancient peoples did not.

Today we are not immune from anybody's problems. Again, if 20 years ago you would ask someone in strategic assessments to mention a couple of countries in the world (in fact I was in on such a conversation) completely irrelevant to American interests. The two countries mentioned as most irrelevant to American interests were two countries that are remote, poor, landlocked, with no potential for causing the United States trouble: Somalia and Afghanistan. Which illustrates that today anybody can cause trouble for anybody else in the world. A collapse of a society anywhere is a global issue, and conversely, anybody anywhere in the world now has ways of reaching us.

We used to think of globalization as a way that we send to them out there our good things, like the internet and Coca Cola, but particularly in the time since September 11th we've realized that globalization also means that they can send us their bad things like terrorists, cholera and uncontrollable immigration. So those are things that are against us, but things that are for us is that globalization also means that exchange of information and that information about the past, so we are the only society in world history that has the ability to learn from all the experiments being carried out elsewhere in the world today, and all the experiments that have succeeded and failed in the past. And so at least we have the choice of what we want to do about it. Thank you.

Kirsten Garrett: That was Professor Jared Diamond from UCLA, speaking at Princeton University earlier this month. Then there were some questions from members of the audience.

Man: The impression I get is that you are talking about them primarily in relation to environmental factors, you're talking about an elite that becomes isolated, insular and operates without being affected by the consequences of environmental degradation. What about other cultural forces, such as the development of political instability, civil wars, people who are low down in the hierarchy that are challenging the order. And could it be the societies simply over time devolve towards political instability. What about other factors such as disease for example, could they play a role as well?

Jared Diamond: Absolutely. In two minutes I did not do justice to cultural factors. There's a large literature on causes of instability and civil wars and collapse of states and civil unrest, and it turns out that you will go home and say Jared Diamond has a list of eight explanations for everything. There are eight variables that people have been able to identify: With risk of civil war, for example there's a data base of all cases of state failures and civil wars and violent government transitions in the last 30 years. People have mined this data base. Would anybody like to guess what is the single factor that is the best predictor of the collapse of societies in the last couple of decades? This is an unfair question because it's so surprising. The strongest predictor is infant and child mortality. Countries that have had high infant or child mortality are more likely to undergo state collapse, and there are many links, including difficulties in the workforce, high ratio of children to adults. But in brief, yes, there is a large literature of other cultural factors that contribute to the collapse of societies.

Woman: Talking about culture problems, is there any correlation between the level of conservatism in a society and the likelihood of it collapsing?

Jared Diamond: I don't know. This is something that we haven't measured, we haven't tried to measure. Interesting, but I don't know.

Kirsten Garrett: The next question was not miked, so Professor Jared Diamond responded and restated it.

Jared Diamond: Interesting question. For those of you who didn't hear it: Do I think that today there's more reliance that technology will come and somehow save us, even though we can't specify how? Yes there certainly is, and many of my friends, particularly in the technology sector don't take environmental problems so seriously. I'll give you a specific example. After Guns, Germs and Steel was published, it was reviewed by Bill Gates who liked it and gave it a favorable review, and the result was that I had a two-hour discussion with Bill Gates, who is a very thoughtful person, and he's interested in lots of things. He probes deeply and he has seriously considered positions of his own. The subject turned to environmental issues and I mentioned that that's the thing that most concerned me for the future of my children. Bill Gates has young children. He paused in his thoughtful way and he said, not in a dismissing way, "I have the feeling that technology will solve our environmental problems, but what really concerns me is biological terrorism." Look, that's a thoughtful response, but many people in the technology sector assume that technology will solve our problems. I disagree with that for two reasons.

One is that technology has created the explosion of modern problems while also providing the potential for solving them. But the first thing that happens is technology creates the problem and then maybe later it solves it, so at best there's a lag.

The second thing is that the lesson we've learned again and again in the environmental area is it's cheaper, much cheaper and more efficacious to prevent a problem at the beginning than to solve it by high technology later on. So it's costing billions of dollars to clean up the Hudson River, and it costs billions of dollars to clean up Montana, [but] it would cost a trivial amount to do it right in the beginning. Therefore, I do not look to technology as our savior.

Jared Diamond: Easter's End

2005-11-18T11:02:00.000-08:00

In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?

(Originally published in Discover magazine, found at OilCrash.com.)

Among the most riveting mysteries of human history are those posed by vanished civilizations. Everyone who has seen the abandoned buildings of the Khmer, the Maya, or the Anasazi is immediately moved to ask the same question: Why did the societies that erected those structures disappear?

Their vanishing touches us as the disappearance of other animals, even the dinosaurs, never can. No matter how exotic those lost civilizations seem, their framers were humans like us. Who is to say we won't succumb to the same fate? Perhaps someday New York's skyscrapers will stand derelict and overgrown with vegetation, like the temples at Angkor Wat and Tikal.

Among all such vanished civilizations, that of the former Polynesian society on Easter Island remains unsurpassed in mystery and isolation. The mystery stems especially from the island's gigantic stone statues and its impoverished landscape, but it is enhanced by our associations with the specific people involved: Polynesians represent for us the ultimate in exotic romance, the background for many a child's, and an adult's, vision of paradise. My own interest in Easter was kindled over 30 years ago when I read Thor Heyerdahl's fabulous accounts of his Kon-Tiki voyage.

But my interest has been revived recently by a much more exciting account, one not of heroic voyages but of painstaking research and analysis. My friend David Steadman, a paleontologist, has been working with a number of other researchers who are carrying out the first systematic excavations on Easter intended to identify the animals and plants that once lived there. Their work is contributing to a new interpretation of the island's history that makes it a tale not only of wonder but of warning as well.

Easter Island, with an area of only 64 square miles, is the world's most isolated scrap of habitable land. It lies in the Pacific Ocean more than 2,000 miles west of the nearest continent (South America), 1,400 miles from even the nearest habitable island (Pitcairn). Its subtropical location and latitude - at 27 degrees south, it is approximately as far below the equator as Houston is north of it - help give it a rather mild climate, while its volcanic origins make its soil fertile. In theory, this combination of blessings should have made Easter a miniature paradise, remote from problems that beset the rest of the world.

The island derives its name from its "discovery" by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, on Easter (April 5) in 1722. Roggeveen's first impression was not of a paradise but of a wasteland: "We originally, from a further distance, have considered the said Easter Island as sandy; the reason for that is this, that we counted as sand the withered grass, hay, or other scorched and burnt vegetation, because its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a singular poverty and barrenness."

The island Roggeveen saw was a grassland without a single tree or bush over ten feet high. Modern botanists have identified only 47 species of higher plants native to Easter, most of them grasses, sedges, and ferns. The list includes just two species of small trees and two of woody shrubs. With such flora, the islanders Roggeveen encountered had no source of real firewood to warm themselves during Easter's cool, wet, windy winters. Their native animals included nothing larger than insects, not even a single species of native bat, land bird, land snail, or lizard. For domestic animals, they had only chickens.

European visitors throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries estimated Easter's human population at about 2,000, a modest number considering the island's fertility. As Captain James Cook recognized during his brief visit in 1774, the islanders were Polynesians (a Tahitian man accompanying Cook was able to converse with them). Yet despite the Polynesians' well-deserved fame as a great seafaring people, the Easter Islanders who came out to Roggeveen's and Cook's ships did so by swimming or paddling canoes that Roggeveen described as "bad and frail." Their craft, he wrote, were "put together with manifold small planks and light inner timbers, which they cleverly stitched together with very fine twisted threads. ... But as they lack the knowledge and particularly the materials for caulking and making tight the great number of seams of the canoes, these are accordingly very leaky, for which reason they are compelled to spend half the time in bailing." The canoes, only ten feet long, held at most two people, and only three or four canoes were observed on the entire island.

With such flimsy craft, Polynesians could never have colonized Easter from even the nearest island, nor could they have traveled far offshore to fish. The islanders Roggeveen met were totally isolated, unaware that other people existed. Investigators in all the years since his visit have discovered no trace of the islanders' having any outside contacts: not a single Easter Island rock or product has turned up elsewhere, nor has anything been found on the island that could have been brought by anyone other than the original settlers or the Europeans. Yet the people living on Easter claimed memories of visiting the uninhabited Sala y Gomez reef 260 miles away, far beyond the range of the leaky canoes seen by Roggeveen. How did the islanders' ancestors reach that reef from Easter, or reach Easter from anywhere else?

Easter Island's most famous feature is its huge stone statues, more than 200 of which once stood on massive stone platforms lining the coast. At least 700 more, in all stages of completion, were abandoned in quarries or on ancient roads between the quarries and the coast, as if the carvers and moving crews had thrown down their tools and walked off the job. Most of the erected statues were carved in a single quarry and then somehow transported as far as six miles - despite heights as great as 33 feet and weights up to 82 tons. The abandoned statues, meanwhile, were as much as 65 feet tall and weighed up to 270 tons. The stone platforms were equally gigantic: up to 500 feet long and 10 feet high, with facing slabs weighing up to 10 tons.

Roggeveen himself quickly recognized the problem the statues posed: "The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment," he wrote, "because we could not comprehend how it was possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber for making any machines, as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images." Roggeveen might have added that the islanders had no wheels, no draft animals, and no source of power except their own muscles. How did they transport the giant statues for miles, even before erecting them? To deepen the mystery, the statues were still standing in 1770, but by 1864 all of them had been pulled down, by the islanders themselves. Why then did they carve them in the first place? And why did they stop?

The statues imply a society very different from the one Roggeveen saw in 1722. Their sheer number and size suggest a population much larger than 2,000 people. What became of everyone? Furthermore, that society must have been highly organized. Easter's resources were scattered across the island: the best stone for the statues was quarried at Rano Raraku near Easter's northeast end; red stone, used for large crowns adorning some of the statues, was quarried at Puna Pau, inland in the southwest; stone carving tools came mostly from Aroi in the northwest. Meanwhile, the best farmland lay in the south and east, and the best fishing grounds on the north and west coasts. Extracting and redistributing all those goods required complex political organization. What happened to that organization, and how could it ever have arisen in such a barren landscape?

Easter Island's mysteries have spawned volumes of speculation for more than two and a half centuries. Many Europeans were incredulous that Polynesians - commonly characterized as "mere savages" - could have created the statues or the beautifully constructed stone platforms. In the 1950s, Heyerdahl argued that Polynesia must have been settled by advanced societies of American Indians, who in turn must have received civilization across the Atlantic from more advanced societies of the Old World. Heyerdahl's raft voyages aimed to prove the feasibility of such prehistoric transoceanic contacts. In the 1960s the Swiss writer Erich von Daniken, an ardent believer in Earth visits by extraterrestrial astronauts, went further, claiming that Easter's statues were the work of intelligent beings who owned ultramodern tools, became stranded on Easter, and were finally rescued.

Heyerdahl and von Daniken both brushed aside overwhelming evidence that the Easter Islanders were typical Polynesians derived from Asia rather than from the Americas and that their culture (including their statues) grew out of Polynesian culture. Their language was Polynesian, as Cook had already concluded. Specifically, they spoke an eastern Polynesian dialect related to Hawaiian and Marquesan, a dialect isolated since about A.D.400, as estimated from slight differences in vocabulary. Their fishhooks and stone adzes resembled early Marquesan models. Last year DNA extracted from 12 Easter Island skeletons was also shown to be Polynesian. The islanders grew bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, and paper mulberry - typical Polynesian crops, mostly of Southeast Asian origin. Their sole domestic animal, the chicken, was also typically Polynesian and ultimately Asian, as were the rats that arrived as stowaways in the canoes of the first settlers.

What happened to those settlers? The fanciful theories of the past must give way to evidence gathered by hardworking practitioners in three fields: archeology, pollen analysis, and paleontology.

Modern archeological excavations on Easter have continued since Heyerdahl's 1955 expedition. The earliest radiocarbon dates associated with human activities are around A.D. 400 to 700, in reasonable agreement with the approximate settlement date of 400 estimated by linguists. The period of statue construction peaked around 1200 to 1500, with few if any statues erected thereafter. Densities of archeological sites suggest a large population; an estimate of 7,000 people is widely quoted by archeologists, but other estimates range up to 20,000, which does not seem implausible for an island of Easter's area and fertility.

Archeologists have also enlisted surviving islanders in experiments aimed at figuring out how the statues might have been carved and erected. Twenty people, using only stone chisels, could have carved even the largest completed statue within a year. Given enough timber and fiber for making ropes, teams of at most a few hundred people could have loaded the statues onto wooden sleds, dragged them over lubricated wooden tracks or rollers, and used logs as levers to maneuver them into a standing position. Rope could have been made from the fiber of a small native tree, related to the linden, called the hauhau. However, that tree is now extremely scarce on Easter, and hauling one statue would have required hundreds of yards of rope. Did Easter's now barren landscape once support the necessary trees?

That question can be answered by the technique of pollen analysis, which involves boring out a column of sediment from a swamp or pond, with the most recent deposits at the top and relatively more ancient deposits at the bottom. The absolute age of each layer can be dated by radiocarbon methods. Then begins the hard work: examining tens of thousands of pollen grains under a microscope, counting them, and identifying the plant species that produced each one by comparing the grains with modern pollen from known plant species. For Easter Island, the bleary-eyed scientists who performed that task were John Flenley, now at Massey University in New Zealand, and Sarah King of the University of Hull in England.

Flenley and King's heroic efforts were rewarded by the striking new picture that emerged of Easter's prehistoric landscape. For at least 30,000 years before human arrival and during the early years of Polynesian settlement, Easter was not a wasteland at all. Instead, a subtropical forest of trees and woody bushes towered over a ground layer of shrubs, herbs, ferns, and grasses. In the forest grew tree daisies, the rope-yielding hauhau tree, and the toromiro tree, which furnishes a dense, mesquite-like firewood. The most common tree in the forest was a species of palm now absent on Easter but formerly so abundant that the bottom strata of the sediment column were packed with its pollen. The Easter Island palm was closely related to the still-surviving Chilean wine palm, which grows up to 82 feet tall and 6 feet in diameter. The tall, unbranched trunks of the Easter Island palm would have been ideal for transporting and erecting statues and constructing large canoes. The palm would also have been a valuable food source, since its Chilean relative yields edible nuts as well as sap from which Chileans make sugar, syrup, honey, and wine.

What did the first settlers of Easter Island eat when they were not glutting themselves on the local equivalent of maple syrup? Recent excavations by David Steadman, of the New York State Museum at Albany, have yielded a picture of Easter's original animal world as surprising as Flenley and King's picture of its plant world. Steadman's expectations for Easter were conditioned by his experiences elsewhere in Polynesia, where fish are overwhelmingly the main food at archeological sites, typically accounting for more than 90 percent of the bones in ancient Polynesian garbage heaps. Easter, though, is too cool for the coral reefs beloved by fish, and its cliff-girded coastline permits shallow-water fishing in only a few places. Less than a quarter of the bones in its early garbage heaps (from the period 900 to 1300) belonged to fish; instead, nearly one-third of all bones came from porpoises.

Nowhere else in Polynesia do porpoises account for even 1 percent of discarded food bones. But most other Polynesian islands offered animal food in the form of birds and mammals, such as New Zealand's now extinct giant moas and Hawaii's now extinct flightless geese. Most other islanders also had domestic pigs and dogs. On Easter, porpoises would have been the largest animal available - other than humans. The porpoise species identified at Easter, the common dolphin, weighs up to 165 pounds. It generally lives out at sea, so it could not have been hunted by line fishing or spearfishing from shore. Instead, it must have been harpooned far offshore, in big seaworthy canoes built from the extinct palm tree.

In addition to porpoise meat, Steadman found, the early Polynesian settlers were feasting on seabirds. For those birds, Easter's remoteness and lack of predators made it an ideal haven as a breeding site, at least until humans arrived. Among the prodigious numbers of seabirds that bred on Easter were albatross, boobies, frigate birds, fulmars, petrels, prions, shearwaters, storm petrels, terns, and tropic birds. With at least 25 nesting species, Easter was the richest seabird breeding site in Polynesia and probably in the whole Pacific.

Land birds as well went into early Easter Island cooking pots. Steadman identified bones of at least six species, including barn owls, herons, parrots, and rail. Bird stew would have been seasoned with meat from large numbers of rats, which the Polynesian colonists inadvertently brought with them; Easter Island is the sole known Polynesian island where rat bones outnumber fish bones at archeological sites. (In case you're squeamish and consider rats inedible, I still recall recipes for creamed laboratory rat that my British biologist friends used to supplement their diet during their years of wartime food rationing.)

Porpoises, seabirds, land birds, and rats did not complete the list of meat sources formerly available on Easter. A few bones hint at the possibility of breeding seal colonies as well. All these delicacies were cooked in ovens fired by wood from the island's forests.

Such evidence lets us imagine the island onto which Easter's first Polynesian colonists stepped ashore some 1,600 years ago, after a long canoe voyage from eastern Polynesia. They found themselves in a pristine paradise. What then happened to it? The pollen grains and the bones yield a grim answer.

Pollen records show that destruction of Easter's forests was well under way by the year 800, just a few centuries after the start of human settlement. Then charcoal from wood fires came to fill the sediment cores, while pollen of palms and other trees and woody shrubs decreased or disappeared, and pollen of the grasses that replaced the forest became more abundant. Not long after 1400 the palm finally became extinct, not only as a result of being chopped down but also because the now ubiquitous rats prevented its regeneration: of the dozens of preserved palm nuts discovered in caves on Easter, all had been chewed by rats and could no longer germinate. While the hauhau tree did not become extinct in Polynesian times, its numbers declined drastically until there weren't enough left to make ropes from. By the time Heyerdahl visited Easter, only a single, nearly dead toromiro tree remained on the island, and even that lone survivor has now disappeared. (Fortunately, the toromiro still grows in botanical gardens elsewhere.)

The fifteenth century marked the end not only for Easter's palm but for the forest itself. Its doom had been approaching as people cleared land to plant gardens; as they felled trees to build canoes, to transport and erect statues, and to burn; as rats devoured seeds; and probably as the native birds died out that had pollinated the trees' flowers and dispersed their fruit. The overall picture is among the most extreme examples of forest destruction anywhere in the world: the whole forest gone, and most of its tree species extinct.

The destruction of the island's animals was as extreme as that of the forest: without exception, every species of native land bird became extinct. Even shellfish were overexploited, until people had to settle for small sea snails instead of larger cowries. Porpoise bones disappeared abruptly from garbage heaps around 1500; no one could harpoon porpoises anymore, since the trees used for constructing the big seagoing canoes no longer existed. The colonies of more than half of the seabird species breeding on Easter or on its offshore islets were wiped out.

In place of these meat supplies, the Easter Islanders intensified their production of chickens, which had been only an occasional food item. They also turned to the largest remaining meat source available: humans, whose bones became common in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral traditions of the islanders are rife with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth." With no wood available to cook these new goodies, the islanders resorted to sugarcane scraps, grass, and sedges to fuel their fires.

All these strands of evidence can be wound into a coherent narrative of a society's decline and fall. The first Polynesian colonists found themselves on an island with fertile soil, abundant food, bountiful building materials, ample lebensraum, and all the prerequisites for comfortable living. They prospered and multiplied.

After a few centuries, they began erecting stone statues on platforms, like the ones their Polynesian forebears had carved. With passing years, the statues and platforms became larger and larger, and the statues began sporting ten-ton red crowns--probably in an escalating spiral of one-upmanship, as rival clans tried to surpass each other with shows of wealth and power. (In the same way, successive Egyptian pharaohs built ever-larger pyramids. Today Hollywood movie moguls near my home in Los Angeles are displaying their wealth and power by building ever more ostentatious mansions. Tycoon Marvin Davis topped previous moguls with plans for a 50,000-square-foot house, so now Aaron Spelling has topped Davis with a 56,000-square-foot house. All that those buildings lack to make the message explicit are ten-ton red crowns.) On Easter, as in modern America, society was held together by a complex political system to redistribute locally available resources and to integrate the economies of different areas.

Eventually Easter's growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used the land for gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses - and, of course, for lugging statues. As forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more uncomfortable - springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available for fires.

People also found it harder to fill their stomachs, as land birds, large sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared. Because timber for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises disappeared from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation allowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving.

With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter Island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex society running. Surviving islanders described to early European visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers, made by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took to living in caves for protection against their enemies. Around 1770 rival clans started to topple each other's statues, breaking the heads off. By 1864 the last statue had been thrown down and desecrated.

As we try to imagine the decline of Easter's civilization, we ask ourselves, "Why didn't they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?"

I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope didn't simply disappear one day - it vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation. Our Pacific Northwest loggers are only the latest in a long line of loggers to cry, "Jobs over trees!" The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect: yes, this year we cleared those woods over there, but trees are starting to grow back again on this abandoned garden site here. Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Their children could no more have comprehended their parents' tales than my eight-year-old sons today can comprehend my wife's and my tales of what Los Angeles was like 30 years ago.

Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.

By now the meaning of Easter Island for us should be chillingly obvious. Easter Island is Earth writ small. Today, again, a rising population confronts shrinking resources. We too have no emigration valve, because all human societies are linked by international transport, and we can no more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean. If we continue to follow our present course, we shall have exhausted the world's major fisheries, tropical rain forests, fossil fuels, and much of our soil by the time my sons reach my current age.

Every day newspapers report details of famished countries - Afghanistan, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Zaire - where soldiers have appropriated the wealth or where central government is yielding to local gangs of thugs. With the risk of nuclear war receding, the threat of our ending with a bang no longer has a chance of galvanizing us to halt our course. Our risk now is of winding down, slowly, in a whimper. Corrective action is blocked by vested interests, by well-intentioned political and business leaders, and by their electorates, all of whom are perfectly correct in not noticing big changes from year to year. Instead, each year there are just somewhat more people, and somewhat fewer resources, on Earth.

It would be easy to close our eyes or to give up in despair. If mere thousands of Easter Islanders with only stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their society, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine power fail to do worse? But there is one crucial difference. The Easter Islanders had no books and no histories of other doomed societies. Unlike the Easter Islanders, we have histories of the past - information that can save us. My main hope for my sons' generation is that we may now choose to learn from the fates of societies like Easter's.

Mark Cohen: Health and the Rise of Civilization

2005-11-18T10:55:00.000-08:00

Introductory Comment: A common myth these days is that the development of agriculture and civilization has necessarily resulted in a substantial improvement in the human diet, along with a concomittant increase in human health and well-being. But as this excerpt from the book Health and the Rise of Civilization by medical historian Mark Nathan Cohen shows, evidence from both ethnographic descriptions of contemporary hunter-gatherers and the archaeological record indicates that both the quality and quantity of human diets have actually declined due to agriculture and civilization. As Cohen puts it, "Even the poorest recorded hunter-gatherer group enjoys a caloric intake superior to that of impoverished contemporary urban populations. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers appear to have enjoyed richer environments and to have been better nourished than most subsequent populations (primitive and civilized alike)."

In addition to better nutrition, Cohen also describes how anthropological and archaeological research demonstrate that prehistoric hunter-gatherers typically were significantly less afflicted by both infectious diseases and the many degenerative diseases now so common in modern societies, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. In short, we've been sold a completely phony bill of goods about how civilization and "progress" have supposedly vastly improved human lives. The truth is that we modern, "civilized" people work much longer and harder hours and have poorer nutrition and worse health than so-called "primitive" people.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Civilization has not been as successful in guaranteeing human well-being as we like to believe, at least for most of our history. Apparently, improvements in technology and organization have not entirely offset the demands of increasing population; too many of the patterns and activities of civilized lifestyles have generated costs as well as benefits.

There is no evidence either from ethnographic accounts or archaeological excavations to suggest that rates of accidental trauma or interpersonal violence declined substantially with the adoption of more civilized forms of political organization. In fact, some evidence from archaeological sites and from historical sources suggests the opposite.

Evidence from both ethnographic descriptions of contemporary hunters and the archaeological record suggests that the major trend in the quality and quantity of human diets has been downward. Contemporary hunter-gatherers, although lean and occasionally hungry, enjoy levels of caloric intake that compare favorably with national averages for many major countries of the Third World and that are generally above those of the poor in the modern world. Even the poorest recorded hunter-gatherer group enjoys a caloric intake superior to that of impoverished contemporary urban populations. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers appear to have enjoyed richer environments and to have been better nourished than most subsequent populations (primitive and civilized alike). Whenever we can glimpse the remains of anatomically modern human beings who lived in early prehistoric environments still rich in large game, they are often relatively large people displaying comparatively few signs of qualitative malnutrition. The subsequent trend in human size and stature is irregular but is more often downward than upward in most parts of the world until the nineteenth or twentieth century.

The diets of hunter-gatherers appear to be comparatively well balanced, even when they are lean. Ethnographic accounts of contemporary groups suggest that protein intakes are commonly quite high, comparable to those of affluent modern groups and substantially above world averages. Protein deficiency is almost unknown in these groups, and vitamin and mineral deficiencies are rare and usually mild in comparison to rates reported from many Third World populations. Archaeological evidence suggests that specific deficiencies, including that of iron (anemia), vitamin D (rickets), and, more controversially, vitamin C (scurvy) as well as such general signs of protein calorie malnutrition as childhood growth retardation have generally become more common in history rather than declining.

Among farmers, increasing population required more and more frequent cropping of land and the use of more and more marginal soils, both of which further diminished returns for labor. This trend may or may not have been offset by such technological improvements in farming as the use of metal tools, specialization of labor, and efficiencies associated with large-scale production that tend to increase individual productivity as well as total production.

But whether the efficiency of farming increased or declined, the nutrition of individuals appears often to have declined for any of several reasons: because increasingly complex society placed new barriers between individuals and flexible access to resources, because trade often siphoned resources away, because some segments of the society increasingly had only indirect access to food, because investments in new technology to improve production focused power in the hands of elites so that their benefits were not widely shared, and perhaps because of the outright exploitation and deprivation of some segments of society. In addition, more complex societies have had to devote an increasing amount of their productive energy to intergroup competition, the maintenance of intragroup order, the celebration of the community itself, and the privilege of the elite, rather than focusing on the biological maintenance of individuals.

In any case, the popular impression that nutrition has improved through history reflects twentieth-century affluence and seems to have as much to do with class privilege as with an overall increase in productivity. Neither the lower classes of prehistoric and classical empires nor the contemporary Third World have shared in the improvement in caloric intake; consumption of animal protein seems to have declined for all but privileged groups.

There is no clear evidence that the evolution of civilization has reduced the risk of resource failure and starvation as successfully as we like to believe. Episodes of starvation occur among hunter-gatherer bands because natural resources fail and because they have limited ability either to store or to transport food. The risk of starvation is offset, in part, by the relative freedom of hunter-gatherers to move around and find new resources, but it is clear that with limited technology of transport they can move neither far nor fast enough to escape severe fluctuations in natural resources. But each of the strategies that sedentary and civilized populations use to reduce or eliminate food crises generate costs and risks as well as benefits. The supplementation of foraging economies by small-scale cultivation may help to reduce the risk of seasonal hunger, particularly in crowded and depleted environments. The manipulation and protection of species involved in farming may help to reduce the risk of crop failure. The storage of food in sedentary communities may also help protect the population against seasonal shortages or crop failure. But these advantages may be outweighed by the greater vulnerability that domestic crop species often display toward climatic fluctuations or other natural hazards, a vulnerability that is then exacerbated by the specialized nature or narrow focus of many agricultural systems. The advantages are also offset by the loss of mobility that results from agriculture and storage, the limits and failures of primitive storage systems, and the vulnerability of sedentary communities to political expropriation of their stored resources.

Although the intensification of agriculture expanded production, it may have increased risk in both natural and cultural terms by increasing the risk of soil exhaustion in central growing areas and of crop failure in marginal areas. Such investments as irrigation to maintain or increase productivity may have helped to protect the food supply, but they generated new risks of their own and introduced new kinds of instability by making production more vulnerable to economic and political forces that could disrupt or distort the pattern of investment. Similarly, specialization of production increased the range of products that could be made and increased the overall efficiency of production, but it also placed large segments of the population at the mercy of fickle systems of exchange or equally fickle social and political entitlements.

Modern storage and transport may reduce vulnerability to natural crises, but they increase vulnerability to disruption of the technological or political and economic basis of the storage and transport systems themselves. Transport and storage systems are difficult and expensive to maintain. Governments that have the power to move large amounts of food long distances to offset famine and the power to stimulate investment in protective systems of storage and transport also have and can exercise the power to withhold aid and divert investment. The same market mechanisms that facilitate the rapid movement of produce on a large scale, potentially helping to prevent starvation, also set up patterns of international competition in production and consumption that may threaten starvation to those individuals who depend on world markets to provide their food, an ever-increasing proportion of the world population.

It is therefore not clear, in theory, that civilization improves the reliability of the individual diet. As the data summarized in earlier chapters suggest, neither the record of ethnography and history nor that of archaeology provide any clear indication of progressive increase in the reliability (as opposed to the total size) of human food supplies with the evolution of civilization.

Similar points can be made with reference to the natural history of infectious disease. The data reviewed in preceding chapters suggest that prehistoric hunting and gathering populations would have been visited by fewer infections and suffered lower overall rates of parasitization than most other world populations, except for those of the last century, during which antibiotics have begun to offer serious protection against infection.

The major infectious diseases experienced by isolated hunting and gathering bands are likely to have been of two types: zoonotic diseases, caused by organisms whose life cycles were largely independent of human habits; and chronic diseases, handed directly from person to person, the transmission of which were unlikely to have been discouraged by small group size. Of the two categories, the zoonotic infections are undoubtedly the more important. They are likely to have been severe or even rapidly fatal because they were poorly adapted to human hosts. Moreover, zoonotic diseases may have had a substantial impact on small populations by eliminating productive adults. But in another respect their impact would have been limited because they did not pass from person to person.

By virtue of mobility and the handling of animal carcasses, hunter-gatherers are likely to have been exposed to a wider range of zoonotic infections than are more civilized populations. Mobility may also have exposed hunter-gatherers to the traveler's diarrhea phenomenon in which local microvariants of any parasite (including zoonoses) placed repeated stress on the body's immune response.

The chronic diseases, which can spread among small isolated groups, appear to have been relatively unimportant, although they undoubtedly pose a burden of disease that can often be rapidly eliminated by twentieth-century medicine. First, such chronic diseases appear to provoke relatively little morbidity in those chronically exposed. Moreover, the skeletal evidence suggests that even yaws and other common low-grade infections (periostitis) associated with infections by organisms now common to the human environment were usually less frequent and less severe among small, early mobile populations than among more sedentary and dense human groups. Similar arguments appear to apply to tuberculosis and leprosy, judging from the record of the skeletons. Even though epidemiologists now concede that tuberculosis could have spread and persisted in small groups, the evidence suggests overwhelmingly that it is primarily a disease of dense urban populations.

Similarly, chronic intestinal infestation by bacterial, protozoan, and helminth parasites, although displaying significant variation in occurrence according to the natural environment, generally appears to be minimized by small group size and mobility. At least, the prevalence of specific parasites and the parasite load, or size of the individual dose, is minimized, although in some environments mobility actually appears to have increased the variety of parasites encountered. Ethnographic observations suggest that parasite loads are often relatively low in mobile bands and commonly increase as sedentary lifestyles are adopted. Similar observations imply that intestinal infestations are commonly more severe in sedentary populations than in their more mobile neighbors. The data also indicate that primitive populations often display better accommodation to their indigenous parasites (that is, fewer symptoms of disease in proportion to their parasite load) than we might otherwise expect. The archaeological evidence suggests that, insofar as intestinal parasite loads can be measured by their effects on overall nutrition (for example, on rates of anemia), these infections were relatively mild in early human populations but became increasingly severe as populations grew larger and more sedentary. In one case where comparative analysis of archaeological mummies from different periods has been undertaken, there is direct evidence of an increase in pathological intestinal bacteria with the adoption of sedentism. In another case, analysis of feces has documented an increase in intestinal parasites with sedentism.

Many major vector-borne infections may also have been less important among prehistoric hunter-gatherers than they are in the modern world. The habits of vectors of such major diseases as malaria, schistosomiasis, and bubonic plague suggest that among relatively small human groups without transportation other than walking these diseases are unlikely to have provided anything like the burden of morbidity and mortality that they inflicted on historic and contemporary populations.

Epidemiological theory further predicts the failure of most epidemic diseases ever to spread in small isolated populations or in groups of moderate size connected only by transportation on foot. Moreover, studies on the blood sera of contemporary isolated groups suggest that, although small size and isolation is not a complete guarantee against the transmission of such diseases in the vicinity, the spread from group to group is at best haphazard and irregular. The pattern suggests that contemporary isolates are at risk to epidemics once the diseases are maintained by civilized populations, but it seems to confirm predictions that such diseases would and could not have flourished and spread because they would not reliably have been transmitted in a world inhabited entirely by small and isolated groups in which there were no civilized reservoirs of diseases and all transportation of diseases could occur only at the speed of walking human beings.

In addition, overwhelming historical evidence suggests that the greatest rates of morbidity and death from infection are associated with the introduction of new diseases from one region of the world to another by processes associated with civilized transport of goods at speeds and over distances outside the range of movements common to hunting and gathering groups. Small-scale societies move people among groups and enjoy periodic aggregation and dispersal, but they do not move the distances associated with historic and modern religious pilgrimages or military campaigns, nor do they move at the speed associated with rapid modern forms of transportation. The increase in the transportation of people and exogenous diseases seems likely to have had far more profound effects on health than the small burden of traveler's diarrhea imposed by the small-scale movements of hunter-gatherers.

Prehistoric hunting and gathering populations may also have had one other important advantage over many more civilized groups. Given the widely recognized (and generally positive or synergistic) association of malnutrition and disease, the relatively good nutrition of hunter-gatherers may further have buffered them against the infections they did encounter.

In any case, the record of the skeletons appears to suggest that severe episodes of stress that disrupted the growth of children (acute episodes of infection or epidemics and/or episodes of resource failure and starvation) did not decline and if anything became increasingly common with the evolution of civilization in prehistory.

There is also evidence, primarily from ethnographic sources, that primitive populations suffer relatively low rates of many degenerative diseases compared, at least, to the more affluent of modern societies, even after corrections are made for the different distribution of adult ages. Primitive populations (hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers, and all groups who do not subsist on modern refined foods) appear to enjoy several nutritional advantages over more affluent modern societies that protect them from many of the diseases that now afflict us. High bulk diets, diets with relatively few calories in proportion to other nutrients, diets low in total fat (and particularly low in saturated fat), and diets high in potassium and low in sodium, which are common to such groups, appear to help protect them against a series of degenerative conditions that plague the more affluent of modern populations, often in proportion to their affluence. Diabetes mellitus appears to be extremely rare in primitive groups (both hunter-gatherers and farmers) as are circulatory problems, including high blood pressure, heart disease, and strokes. Similarly, disorders associated with poor bowel function, such as appendicitis, diverticulosis, hiatal hernia, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, and bowel cancers, appear rare. Rates of many other types of cancer particularly breast and lung appear to be low in most small-scale societies, even when corrected for the small proportion of elderly often observed; even those cancers that we now consider to be diseases of under-development, such as Burkitt's lymphoma and cancer of the liver, may be the historical product of changes in human behavior involving food storage or the human-assisted spread of vector-borne infections. The record of the skeletons suggests, through the scarcity of metastases in bone, that cancers were comparatively rare in prehistory.

The history of human life expectancy is much harder to describe or summarize with any precision because the evidence is so fragmentary and so many controversies are involved in its interpretation. But once we look beyond the very high life expectancies of mid-twentieth century affluent nations, the existing data also appear to suggest a pattern that is both more complex and less progressive than we are accustomed to believe.

Contrary to assumptions once widely held, the slow growth of prehistoric populations need not imply exceedingly high rates of mortality. Evidence of low fertility and/or the use of birth control by small-scale groups suggests (if we use modern life tables) that average rates of population growth very near zero could have been maintained by groups suffering only historically moderate mortality (life expectancy of 25 to 30 years at birth with 50 to 60 percent of infants reaching adulthood figures that appear to match those observed in ethnographic and archaeological samples) that would have balanced fertility, which was probably below the averages of more sedentary modern populations. The prehistoric acceleration of population growth after the adoption of sedentism and farming, if it is not an artifact of archaeological reconstruction, could be explained by an increase in fertility or altered birth control decisions that appear to accompany sedentism and agriculture. This explanation fits the available data better than any competing hypothesis.

It is not clear whether the adoption of sedentism or farming would have increased or decreased the proportion of individuals dying as infants or children. The advantages of sedentism may have been offset by risks associated with increased infection, closer spacing of children, or the substitution of starchy gruels for mother's milk and other more nutritious weaning foods. The intensification of agriculture and the adoption of more civilized lifestyles may not have improved the probability of surviving childhood until quite recently. Rates of infant and child mortality observed in the smallest contemporary groups (or reconstructed with less certainty among prehistoric groups) would not have embarrassed most European countries until sometime in the nineteenth century and were, in fact, superior to urban rates of child mortality through most of the nineteenth century (and much of the twentieth century in many Third World cities).

There is no evidence from archaeological samples to suggest that adult life expectancy increased with the adoption of sedentism or farming; there is some evidence (complicated by the effects of a probable acceleration of population growth on cemetery samples) to suggest that adult life expectancy may actually have declined as farming was adopted. In later stages of the intensification of agriculture and the development of civilization, adult life expectancy most often increased and often increased substantially but the trend was spottier than we sometimes realize. Archaeological populations from the Iron Age or even the Medieval period in Europe and the Middle East or from the Mississippian period in North America often suggest average adult ages at death in the middle or upper thirties, not substantially different from (and sometimes lower than) those of the earliest visible populations in the same regions. Moreover, the historic improvement in adult life expectancy may have resulted at least in part from increasing infant and child mortality and the consequent "select" nature of those entering adulthood as epidemic diseases shifted their focus from adults to children.

These data clearly imply that we need to rethink both scholarly and popular images of human progress and cultural evolution. We have built our images of human history too exclusively from the experiences of privileged classes and populations, and we have assumed too close a fit between technological advances and progress for individual lives.

In scholarly terms, these data which often suggest diminishing returns to health and nutrition tend to undermine models of cultural evolution based on technological advances. They add weight to theories of cultural evolution that emphasize environmental constraints, demographic pressure, and competition and social exploitation, rather than technological or social progress, as the primary instigators of social change. Similarly, the archaeological evidence that outlying populations often suffered reduced health as a consequence of their inclusion in larger political units, the clear class stratification of health in early and modern civilizations, and the general failure of either early or modern civilizations to promote clear improvements in health, nutrition, or economic homeostasis for large segments of their populations until the very recent past all reinforce competitive and exploitative models of the origins and function of civilized states.

In popular terms, I think that we must substantially revise our traditional sense that civilization represents progress in human well-being or at least that it did so for most people for most of history prior to the twentieth century. The comparative data simply do not support that image.

(Found at John Filiss' Primitivism web site.)

Nature's Little Rule Book

2005-11-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

Hello, dearies, this is Mother Nature. I'm speaking up here because you humans seem to have an awful lot of difficulty understanding and living in accord with the rules of life on Earth, so I thought I'd lay it all out for you in a very simple and direct form. This is very important, so please pay close attention.

Rule No. 1 - Life on Earth is a web, NOT a pyramid.

At first glance, this rule may seem obvious, even trite. "Well, of course," you may say. "I know that! Tell me something I don't know!"

But this rule is not directed at your rational mind, which probably knows perfectly well that life on Earth is a complex interweaving of hundreds of millions of different kinds of organisms and processes. Instead, it is aimed at your cultural mind, the one that has been trained from the day you were born to believe in the mythology of your modern culture - a mythology that, when it is lived out in billions of peoples' lives around the world, is destroying the web of life on Earth.

"Hey, wait a minute!" you are probably thinking. "We modern, scientific people don't believe in myths anymore! Myths are only for less developed, pre-scientific cultures."

But given that you humans seem almost completely unable to alter your destructive way of life even though your supposedly rational, scientific minds are generally quite aware that you are destroying the fabric of life on Earth, it seems rather obvious there's something else going on than just rational, scientific thinking. That something else, I suggest to you, is mythical thinking.

In its most basic sense, a myth is simply a story that attempts to explain to the people of any given culture how something came to be the way it is. A mythology is a collection of myths that, taken together, attempt to explain and express a culture's deepest understanding of the world and how it works, and the place of humans within it.

Of course, you modern humans don't see your myths as myths, you think they're The Truth, just like every other culture from the Greeks to the Maya has viewed their myths as The Truth. That's what's tricky about myths - they don't appear as myths to those living in them. So although you think modern people have progressed beyond all that mythology stuff, the fact is that snuggled up right beside your scientific understanding of the web of life is the pervasive myth that life on Earth is a pyramid - with humans at the very top.

According to your modern mythology, the broad base of the pyramid of life is populated by all of the bacteria and other supposedly "primitive" forms of life that are viewed as being animated by merely the instinctive struggle for biological survival and reproduction. In your mythology, as one climbs up this mythical pyramid, life becomes more and more complex until suddenly there is the great leap to the much-vaunted self-consciousness and presumed "superior intelligence" that allegedly makes you humans so "special" and "unique" among all the rest of life on Earth.

A more extreme form of this "myth of the pyramid" goes even further, lifting humans completely off the top of the pyramid and placing them in the space somewhere above it. In this version, humans have somehow magically transcended the whole messy, instinct-driven mass of life: there is the "natural" world - nature - and then there are humans.

This mythic imagery of a pyramid with humans at top is designed to emphasize several key, interrelated aspects of the "story" being told by the mythology of human civilization:

One, that humans are so special and different from all other forms of life on Earth, that you have somehow been elevated "above" everything else;

Two, that because you are such a special species, you are exempt from the rules of life that govern every other species on Earth;

Three, by virtue of your superior position at the top of the pyramid, you humans are somehow "meant" to rule over and use the rest of life on Earth for your own purposes; and,

Four, even though your supposedly "civilized" way of life is driving you to both a human and ecological catastrophe, you can't give it up because that would mean giving up everything that makes you humans "special" and admitting that you are not, after all, "meant" to be at the top of the pyramid, dominating and using the rest of life on Earth.

In other words, the guiding mythology of modern society is the "myth of human exceptionalism" - a story that tells you that humans are so utterly special that the rules of life that apply to every other species on Earth somehow don't apply to you; that the world was, in effect, made just for humans so you could have a stage upon which to show off what a wonderful and "highly evolved" species you are; and that you have no choice but continue acting as you have, even though you now face ecological catastrophe as a result, because that would mean not fulfilling your supposed "destiny" as the most wonderful, special species that has ever walked the face of the Earth.

The myth of human exceptionalism also tells you that humans are so special that, unlike every other species on Earth, you can somehow control your fate (and the fate of everything else that lives on Earth). That is the enormous - and fateful - conceit and drive behind agriculture and the entire edifice of human civilization that agriculture has inevitably spawned - the desperate attempt to wrest your fate from the "hands of the gods," to become as gods yourselves, supposed masters of your own fate. But you are not gods, you do not have the gods' wisdom about how the world works, so you are making a real hash of things in your vain efforts to be as powerful as the gods.

I hope that by now it is clear that, regardless of how you modern, "advanced" humans like to think about yourselves, the fact is that you do have your own unacknowledged myths and mythology. In and of itself, that is not a problem. What is a problem is that your particular mythology - the myth of human exceptionalism - has led to the point where Earth now stands on the edge of a sixth mass extinction, one caused not by an massive asteroid from space but by 10,000 years of humans living an unsustainable myth.

What is worse is that you seem helpless to do anything to stop your incredible destructiveness, even though you now stand on the brink of ecological and human catastrophe. In such a dire situation, it really does become imperative that you try to tear the blinders off and take a hard look at the mythology that is driving you to persist in such a destructive way of thinking about and living human life on Earth. In short, you need a radically new way of thinking about and living human life on Earth.

Rule No. 2 - The evolution of life on Earth has NO inherent direction or "purpose" that directs it to develop supposedly "higher" forms of life.

Quite frankly, my dears, all evolution "cares" about is what "works" - that is, can a species find and successfully adapt to an ecological niche? If it can, that's wonderful. If not, goodbye.

In other words, the "purpose" of the evolution of life on Earth was NOT to eventually produce humans as the supposed pinnacle of life. Consider: If the reason for the existence of the universe and Earth was just to provide a stage for humans to eventually appear on, why does evolution continue, why do galaxies continue to collide and black holes form since you appeared on the scene? The fact that the universe and evolution have continued without even the slightest hiccup since the appearance of humans is a compelling argument that, whatever "purpose" there might be for the universe and evolution, it certainly has nothing to do with making sure that the human species came into existence.

Now I know the news that the "purpose" of the universe - or even just the evolution of life on Earth - is not to make sure that humans came into existence probably comes as a big blow to your apparent need to feel like you're better than every other form of life on Earth because of your presumed superior intelligence. Well, I'm sorry, folks, but the reality is that you are just one of tens of millions of species, each one of which has an equally important role to play and none of which are higher or lower, inferior or superior, less than or better than any other species.

To put it more bluntly, if you - a supposedly "highly evolved" species - are blinded enough by the glittering myth of human exceptionalism to insist on continuing to pretend like the rules of nature don't apply to you and allow your population to spin out of control while fouling your own nest, so to speak, then evolution will in effect say to itself, "Hmmm, that species is not working out right," and consign you to the evolutionary trash bin, along with the billions of other species that evolution "tried out" but didn't "work." In other words, humans really aren't that special - you are in fact just one species among many, governed by the exact same rules of life that govern every other bit of life on Earth.

Rule No. 3 - Life on Earth is infinitely subtle, complex and interrelated.

Although your scientists have indeed made great strides in understanding how the vast interconnecting web of life on Earth "works," the fact remains that what you humans don't know still vastly exceeds what you do know. Indeed, that will always be the case, even a million years from now (assuming you are still around then), because everything is connected to everything else, which effectively makes life on Earth infinitely complex. As a result, you humans will never be able to fully understand all of the potential impacts of your efforts to control and manage life on Earth for your supposed benefit.

If you don't believe that humans will always be inherently limited in their understanding of how life on Earth works, I'd like you to stop for a moment and try a simple thought experiment. Get out a blank sheet of common notebook paper. Now make a complete list of everything that is somehow connected to the existence of that piece of paper and trace out all of their inter-relationships. Then make a list of everything that is connected to the things you have just listed, and trace out the inter-relationships of those things.

Here, I will help you get started. The first thing obviously connected to the piece of paper is the tree that was cut down in order to make it. Since sunlight is necessary for trees to grow, we can also "see" the sun in that tree and thus in the piece of paper. And because trees need water to grow, we can also "see" clouds and rain in the paper. Beyond that, we can see all of the factors that affect climate and rainfall: the presence of greenhouse gases (both natural and anthropogenic) in the atmosphere; the oceans and the heat they absorb and store from the sun and atmosphere, the ocean currents which help move heat around, and so on, as well as the things that they affect; the levels of particulate matter in the atmosphere, including human-caused air pollution; the convection due to the heat island effect caused by cities; and so on.

Be thorough and go deeply here: Where do greenhouse gases come from and what are their effects? What factors drive ocean currents and what happens if those factors change? What are the natural and anthropogenic sources of particulate matter in the atmosphere and how do they affect climate and rainfall? How do greenhouse gases, ocean currents, particulate matter, climate and rainfall affect trees and forests? If you don't know the answers, then use the Google search engine and try to find them.

We can also see in the piece of paper the soil the tree sunk its roots into, so list everything that contributed to the making of the soil and trace out all of their relationships. What else lived in the soil around the tree's roots? What plants, bugs, butterflies, spiders, lizards, birds, bacteria, fungi and other life lived in the tree and its surrounding forest, the nearby streams and ponds, etc.? What are their ecological relationships and what other things affect them?

Of course, we can also see in the paper the logger who cut down the tree, as well as the logging company and its other employees, and the loggers' spouses and children. Going further, we can see all of the people, farms and factories involved in producing the food, clothing, school books, medical equipment, and the vast array of items in the stores and market they shop in, as well as the trucks, trains, and ships involved in transporting both the raw materials to the factories and the finished goods to the store or auto showroom. Don't forget to see, too, the plants, animals, and ecosystems that once occupied the places now taken over by pulp and paper mills, farms, houses, schools, hospitals, mines, steel mills, factories, stores, roads, airports, and so on. What are their interconnections? How have they been affected by the making of the piece of paper in front of you?

Have you given up yet? I should hope so, because even though it's just a simple piece of paper that you're trying to understand, as you've just demonstrated it's basically an impossible task to completely describe everything that is connected to that piece of paper, let alone understand how all those things interact, for the simple reason that everything in the universe is somehow connected to that sheet of paper.

In other words, no matter how supposedly smart or technologically "advanced" humans are, if you can't even understand everything connected to a simple piece of paper, you will certainly never be able to understand life on Earth well enough to not make a complete hash of any effort to try to "manage", control or dominate it, SO PLEASE STOP TRYING. Indeed, the dismal results of your efforts to just understand and manage just your own behavior, such as your disturbing propensity to resort to violence to solve problems, should be enough to put the lie to your pretensions of being able to understand the rest of life on Earth well enough to successfully "manage" it.

Rule No. 4 - Death is an essential part of life on Earth.

At some point in time, every individual animal or plant must die in order to provide the basis for new life. As just one example out of tens of millions, the death of a rabbit or deer fawn in the jaws of a wolf means food for the wolf's cubs. This is something you humans know quite well, given that you even have a catchy little song about it ("The Cycle of Life" from the movie The Lion King).

When this rule is allowed to function as intended, each species has an optimum average age of death which allows the ecosystem of which it is a part to flourish in a relative state of balance. Although the death of an individual might occur earlier or later than its species' optimum age of death, the average age of death for the species as a whole will, over time, tend to be that which most promotes both the ecosystem's balance and diversity, and thus even the continued survival of that species.

There is also an average optimum lifespan for all species taken together within an ecosystem, based on the natural resources (sunlight, nutrients, etc.) available to that ecosystem. In other words, if for some reason one species begins to live longer, the lives of other species will necessarily be shortened. (Note also that if the average lifespan of a species is reduced too much for too long, that species will eventually go extinct.) Predation, disease, aging, parasites, and fluctuations in food availability are just some of the many ways that nature has of making sure that, on average, the members of any given species don't live too long at the expense of other species and the ecosystem's diversity and balance.

Now I know you don't want to hear this, but just like every other species on Earth, humans also have an optimum average age of death - one that promotes the health and diversity of those ecosystems of which you are a part. If you exceed that optimum average lifespan, that inevitably means an unbalancing of the ecosystems that you affect and shorter lives on average for the other species with which you share those ecosystems.

That, of course, is exactly what is happening as you continuously strive to lengthen the human lifespan by trying to guarantee your food supply through agriculture, develop antibiotics and other forms of intensive modern medicine, and so on. The resulting extension of the average human lifespan has therefore predictably resulted in the destabilization and degradation of Earth's ecosystems and decreased lifespans for the majority of species on Earth, many to the point where they have either become extinct or are now on the verge of extinction.

In other words, what you so proudly point to as glorious human accomplishments - medicine, agriculture, municipal sanitation systems, etc. - are in fact an environmental disaster for the rest of life on Earth, given that they have led to an astronomical increase in your numbers during the course of the 10,000 years or so of human "civilization." In short, if you want to have any hope of conserving what remains of the vast and wondrous diversity of life on Earth, you MUST give up your bizarre fixation on "saving" every possible human life and artificially prolonging the human lifespan, and instead start allowing yourselves to die "naturally." Yes, that means some of you will die "untimely" deaths, but keep in mind that your continued refusal to allow death to play its natural role in your lives will inevitably mean the untimely death (that is, extinction) of much of life on Earth, including very possibly your own.

Rule No. 5 - Variety - lots of it - is the spice of life.

Contrary to the commonly held assumption that life expresses itself most fully by striving for supposedly "higher" levels of development, the truest expression of life striving to fulfill itself actually lies in its exuberant diversity - which you are now rapidly destroying.

Biological diversity (biodiversity) is nature's way of assuring the resilency of ecosystems - that is, their ability to recover after disturbance, whether natural (e.g., floods, drought, fire, etc.) or anthropogenic (human caused) - because greater species diversity provides more pathways for recovery. For example, monocropped corn in a rain-watered field will simply shrivel up and die during a drought, leaving nothing but dry husks and bare ground highly vulnerable to erosion, but in a diverse grassland, drought-adapted species will remain and expand their productivity. (The disastrous Dust Bowl of the 1930s in the U.S. can thus be seen as being caused in large part by a lack of biodiversity due to agriculture.) Similarly, a forest with a number of tree species will be able to handle periodic outbreaks of pests such as bark beetles more effectively than a forest made up of only one type of tree because some trees species will likely be pest resistant.

In many ecosystems, diversity is maintained by "keystone species", typically predators that control prey that would otherwise dominate a landscape and thereby reduce species diversity. In the absence of predators, for example, rabbits will rapidly multiply and overgraze an area, causing species extinctions and reduced biodiversity, as has happened in Australia (where rabbits have been introduced into an ecosystem with few rabbit predators) and parts of Europe (where rabbit predators have been mostly eliminated by humans). In such situations, the coyote or other rabbit predator is a keystone species, keeping rabbit populations in check and thereby helping to preserve the ecosystem's balance and diversity.

Imagine what would happen, though, if all of the rabbits should get together and declare war on anything that preys on them in an effort to wipe them out. Should the rabbits succeed, their numbers would explode and most plant life rapidly eaten down to the ground, resulting in ecosystem collapse. I mention this because that is essentially what is happening as a result of your war on grizzly bears, lions, bacteria and any thing else that might prey on humans. Indeed, one of the reasons human population control has proven to be such an intractable problem for you is because of your ongoing efforts to wipe out all of the predators that would normally help limit your numbers.

Rule No. 6 - Assuming stable rates of predation and other causes of death, a species' population inevitably increases as its food supply increases.

If you fence off an area, put 10 rabbits in there, and then provide enough food to feed 100 rabbits, it is absolutely guaranteed that you will soon have about 100 rabbits. No matter how many times you duplicate the experiment, you will always wind up with about 100 rabbits. And if you then increase the food to an amount that will feed 1,000 rabbits, it is similarly guaranteed that you will soon have 1,000 rabbits.

This illustrates yet another one of the basic rules of nature that you humans know quite well, yet you steadfastly refuse to consider its implications for humans. That is, every year you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on birth control and other so-called "population control" measures, all the while studiously ignoring the simplest, most foolproof population control measure there is - to simply stop growing more food!

If for some reason rabbits overpopulate an area and eat everything down to the nub, and then start dying of starvation because they've eaten all of the food available in their ecosystem, does nature come charging in with emergency relief shipments of rabbit food pellets to save them all from starving? No, obviously not, because starvation due to a species outstripping the food resources of their ecosystem is one of nature's natural ways of "curing" overpopulation. Indeed, rushing in more food to feed the starving rabbits will only serve to allow their numbers to continue to grow despite the fact that there are already more of them than their resource base can support, therefore guaranteeing that there will be even more starving rabbits in the future. So you decide, is it more humane to let x number of rabbits starve to death now, or to supply them with emergency rations with the result that there will be x+y starving rabbits next year?

Because humans are in fact just another animal, the same rules of population ecology that apply to rabbits hold true for humans. Yet you still keep growing more food and then express surprise and consternation that your so-called population control measures haven't worked as human population continues to spiral upwards each year. For over 40 years now, your population "experts" have predicted that birth control pills and sterilization, raising the status of women, development, and other supposed population control measures will cause human numbers to stop growing. Yet here we are now, 40 years on, and the time it takes the world's human population to add another billion people has gotten progressively shorter. It took all of human history up to the early 1800s for the world's human population to reach one billion people and until 1960 to reach three billion, but today, despite 40 years of "population control", the world's human population grows by one billion people every 11-12 years or so.

Of course, what else could we really expect, given that you keep growing ever more food? One can only wonder what catastrophe it will finally take to make you humans finally consider the only proven means of population control that there is, that is, to stop trying to endlessly increase your food supply.

"But, but, but," I can hear you stammer in horror, "what about all of the starving people in the world?! We can't just let them all starve to death! We have to grow more food to feed them!"

No, you don't have to keep growing ever larger amounts of food. In fact, all you are doing by growing more food to supposedly feed "all the poor starving people" is making sure that human population continues to grow and that ever greater numbers of people will face famine in the future. This is "humanism"? This is "progress"? I don't think so.

[An important side note: Due to the horrific impacts of colonialism, imperialism and racism, the ugly situation is that most of those now afflicted by famine and starvation are in the so-called "developing" countries, but the ecological position that humans need to stop growing ever more food to stop the explosion in human population should not be construed as meaning the rest of the world should just let millions of people starve to death in those countries. The desperate environmental crisis caused by human overpopulation does mean that it is urgent that humans stop trying to constantly increase their food supply, but if that should lead to food shortages and starvation, fundamental justice requires that the burden should be equitably distributed among the entire human population and not just one segment. How could such equitability be accomplished? That's for you to decide, for I have no doubt that such an inventive species as yours could come with some way of fairly "sharing" the pain of doing what is necessary to really control human population growth.]

Rule No. 7 - You are allowed to compete with other species for food, but not to wage war on them.

As Daniel Quinn points out in his book, Ishmael, lions may not like the hyenas that compete with them for food and territory and will sometimes pick fights with them, but lions don't organize all-out, genocidal war against hyenas as you humans do against any species that dares to eat "your" food, with your pesticides that indiscriminately poison everything that comes near "your" crops, or your "predator control" programs that seek to exterminate the bears, wolves, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, hawks and eagles, etc., that occasionally prey on "your" sheep, cattle, chickens, etc.

What you humans fail to realize is that trying to deny competing species access to the food that you claim as yours alone can only lead to eventual ecological devastation. The other species that compete with you for food exist for very good reasons: Because biodiversity helps preserve ecosystem stability and health (see Rule 5, above) and because they form an important part of the food chain. Just one of many examples: Wolves do not just eat "your" sheep or cattle, they also eat deer, and the extermination of wolves in much of North America has therefore led to widespread ecosystem damage due to the severe overpopulation of deer in such areas as the northeastern U.S.

Rule No. 8 - Earth's ecosystems are NOT evolutionarily designed to withstand a species that goes gallivanting all around the world and willy-nilly introducing species from one place to another.

In other words, STAY PUT and stop moving and trading things all over the place!! Can I put it any simpler than that?!

As you well know, your wholesale introduction of non-native species into new habitats - both deliberate and "accidental" - is the second leading cause (after habitat destruction, degradation and fragmentation) of the mass extinction crisis you have unleashed across the planet. This ongoing (and increasing) introduction of invasive species is leading inevitably to the homogenization of Earth's ecosystems based on a limited base of "weedy" species and is rapidly depleting the biodiversity that life on Earth needs to sustain its resilency.

It is also quite evident that your puny, underfunded systems for preventing the introduction of invasive species are almost complete failures at protecting ecosystem integrity. Indeed, they would continue to be so even in the unlikely event of their size and funding being increased a thousand-fold. Why? Because the whole shebang of life on Earth is so infinitely complex and sly that you will never understand it well enough to know everything to look for when trying to keep things from slipping past your monitoring systems.

You know all this quite well, yet you steadfastly ignore the ONLY logical conclusion that can be drawn from the situation - that you MUST stop traipsing all over the place and stop moving and trading plants, animals, and everything else out of their native ecosystems.

Rule No. 9 - It's very easy to determine what a sustainable way of human life looks like - just look around you.

It always amazes me how humans seem to think that figuring out how to live in a sustainable fashion is such a difficult question that it requires think tanks filled with experts, global conferences, mastery of a veritable library of research and books, and all of the rest of the lucrative trappings of what can only be called a "sustainability industry." Contrary to appearances, though, what constitutes a sustainable way of human life on Earth is quite simple and lies in plain sight all around you - that is, in the example of the tens of millions of other forms of life that manage to live on Earth without creating environmental havoc, not to mention the example of the hundreds of thousands of years of human life on Earth when you humans did actually manage for the most part to live in a truly environmentally sustainable manner.

What is the crucial difference between you modern humans and the rest of life on Earth, which was "working" quite well before you humans decided you knew better and started gumming up the works? Quite simply, what your hunter-gatherer ancestors and the rest of life on Earth have in common - what "works" - is the willingness to "live in the hands of the gods."

"Oh, great," you say, "and just what the heck does that mean?" Well, for starters it means accepting that ultimate control over whether or not you live or die resides in something outside of yourselves. It means a profound acceptance of death as a necessary, natural and expected part of life on Earth, not its negation. It means giving up the delusion that you can control the terms of human life on Earth.

Practically speaking, it means not trying to guarantee your food supply, as you humans do with your vast, intensive agricultural systems, but instead accepting that it is the sole perogative of the "gods" to decide if you or any other species will have enough to eat. It means not resorting to artificial measures to avoid death, as with your present clutching at synthetic drugs and medical technology in order to prolong your lives. It also means accepting that some of you might become "meat" for a tiger, grizzly bear, mountain lion, or shark, just as rabbits or deer become meat for you.

Given how deeply ingrained your myth is about how supposedly wonderful "civilization" is - how humans have lifted themselves up out of the "slime" to where they can aspire to control and dominate nature, indeed, life itself - it's likely that you aren't very thrilled about the idea of living in the "hands of the gods." Even when you do allow yourselves to recognize for a moment that you are doomed unless you can somehow break out of the trap of thinking there is no other way for you to live human life on Earth except by destroying it and yourselves, you still recoil from facing the changes you must make, believing that to live in any other, less destructive way would somehow be less than truly human.

So no doubt your mind is now rebelling against everything I've said. "But, but, but," you're angrily sputtering. "You're saying we should live just like any other animal!" That's right, I am. Because despite all of your supposed intelligence and technological skills, at base that's what you are - "just" another animal on Earth.

Consider this: Tens of millions of species are willing to accept the necessity of living in accord with the rules of life on Earth, but one species - yours - keeps stubbornly insisting it is too "special" to be limited to living within those rules, and in the process is obviously badly mucking things up for all life on Earth. Putting on your most rational, logical "hat," how likely do you think it is that all of those tens of millions of species are wrong - and that the one stubborn species is right - about the best way to live on Earth?

Consider this, too: You humans assume that all of the other tens of millions of forms of life on Earth must be less intelligent than you because they accept "living in the hands of the gods" and don't try to seize control of their fate like you have. But what if you have it backwards? What if the real measure of intelligence is not stubbornly insisting - in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary - that trying to control everything is the best way to live? What if true intelligence instead is accepting the necessity for "living in the hands of the gods" so that the ecstatic dance of life - including your own - might continue to flourish on Earth?

Is it possible that the lizard sunning itself on a rock, the lion lazing under a tree in the noonday heat, the whales singing in the oceans and the ravens playing on the wind know and accept an essential wisdom beyond your limited human concept of intelligence? I think so. I think they are in touch with dimensions of life on Earth that are far more wondrous than any technological achievement, no matter how grand - dimensions you have sadly lost touch with in your futile search for mere material security.

Let's be honest here: You humans are literally driving yourselves crazy with your essentially psychotic conceit that you can control life on Earth. The levels of human dis-ease, mental illness, addiction, dysfunctional, destructive and unsatisfying relationships, sadness, crime, hatred, fear, violence, "ethnic cleansing" and genocide, terrorism and war are all going through the ceiling as you keep frantically escalating your efforts to control everything even as you unsuccessfully struggle to keep up with fixing the messes you've made. This is "progress"? This is really better than "just" living as an animal - in your case, as a simple foraging animal? I don't think so.

Given the dismal track record of "progress" and "civilization" in procuring true human happiness, health and security, it is no wonder that so-called "savages" and "primitive" people around the world typically fiercely resisted the imposition of the alleged benefits of "civilization." Perhaps they are not so "backwards" after all? Perhaps they can see, as you cannot, that truly "the emperor has no clothes" - that "progress" and "civilization" are in fact a massive fraud? Perhaps they know what you have forgotten, that a truly graceful way of living human life on Earth can only be based on a profound acceptance of the need to live in the hands of the gods instead of pursuing the deranged - and ultimately disastrous - conceit that you can become gods yourselves?

There is even a lot of good, sound scientific evidence that living in the hands of the gods offers a way of human life on Earth that is far more healthy, graceful and happy than the frantic, destructive alienation currently driving you towards disaster. Anthropologists calculate that, on average, hunter-gatherers spend only 3 to 3-1/2 hours a day on meeting their needs for subsistence. The rest of their time is mostly spent hanging out, playing, napping, and other pleasant pastimes. And contrary to popular myth, "primitive" hunter-gatherers are (and were) generally much healthier than you so-called "civilized" folks and once they make it past the dangers of early childhood, typically live as long as you do. The archeaological record, for example, shows that humans lost 6 inches of height due to malnutrition when they began adopting agriculture as a way of life.

Perhaps the most important advantage to living in the hands of the gods is the enduring sense of embeddedness, the reassuring feel of always being "home," that comes from living life according to the natural rhythms of the life flowing about you, as opposed to your ever so modern alienation and estrangement, the constant unacknowledged pain of which drives you to drink and drugs, neurotic and destructive relationships, hatred and war, and worse. Indeed, giving up the disastrous conceit that you humans can manage and control life on Earth opens you up to wonders that are unimaginable to most of you now. The true gift of the experience of "embeddedness" that comes from living in the hands of the gods is that it frees you to reconnect with the immense wonder of nature and spirit. Most of you don't even realize what you've lost due to civilization and its relentless chatter and chasing after "things" - the easy ability to talk with animals, plants and, yes, even rocks, to move back and forth in time, and a host of other "miraculous" abilities. Which leads me to the final rule of life on Earth.

Rule No. 10 - There is much more to life than meets the [supposedly "civilized"] human eye.

It has been very sad to watch as your futile search for physical security has pulled you away from pursuing the true, inexhaustible wonders that life has to offer. Truly, there is so much more to life than just the material world - there are vast, endless realms of wonder and mystery to explore. There really is no need to worry that returning to living in the hands of the gods will somehow reduce you to a stupid, mindless way of life.

There is a way of truly human life on Earth far more healthy, graceful and balanced than the destructive alienation now driving you and much of the rest of life on Earth towards disaster, a way of life so powerfully connected to the unnoticed wonder that surrounds you that it can actually heal the immense devastation you've caused during your misguided attempts at so-called "human progress" and "civilization." But re-connecting with those wondrous dimensions of life and regaining those miraculous healing abilities - what you call "spiritual" - can only happen if you give up the delusion that you can control your fate, that you are somehow so special that you are exempt from the rules of life on Earth, and shut down the endless - and ultimately meaningless - chatter that fills your minds.

The damage you humans have caused to Earth during the course of your 10,000-year-long march of so-called human "civilization" and "progress" has now reached the point that even the most heroic physical (and by extension, political) measures will no longer be sufficient to stave off the environmental holocaust looming over you and the rest of life on Earth. Ecosystems around the world are starting to collapse now from the accumulated impacts of human activity, not 30 or 60 or 80 years from now when the pundits say human population growth will supposedly "stabilize." In other words, the level of global ecological damage you have caused has now reached a point so severe that the only thing that can save the present level of biodiversity (and quite possibly human life) on Earth is nothing short of a "miracle" - that is, the healing of Earth on a so-called "spiritual" level. But that is something that can only happen if you make a choice to return to "living in the hands of the gods."

So you humans have a fateful choice that you must quickly make: You can either continue on your inevitably disastrous course of vainly trying to become "masters" of your fate, or you can accept "living in the hands of the gods" as your hunter-gatherer forebears did AND as all of the rest of life on Earth does, and in doing so regain the world of miracles that you forsook for the glittering but ultimately useless - and deadly - world of material goodies.

Oneida Kincaid
(Originally written in December 2002, last revised on November 18, 2005.)

Note: The "seeing the whole universe in a sheet of paper" exercise is from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn.

Daniel Quinn: Living in the Hands of the Gods

2005-11-18T09:56:00.000-08:00

(Excerpted from the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.)

One day (Ishmael began) the gods were considering the administration of the world in the ordinary way, and one of them said, "Here's a spot I've been thinking about for a while - a wide, pleasant savannah. Let's send a great multitude of locusts into this land. Then the fire of life will grow prodigiously in them and the birds and lizards that feed on them, and that will be very fine."

The others thought about this for a while, then one said, "It's certainly true that if we send the locusts into this land, the fire of life will blaze in them and in the creatures that feed on them - but at the expense of all of the other creatures that live there." The others asked what his point was, and he went on. "Surely it would be a great crime to deprive all these other creatures of the fire of life so that the locusts and the birds and the lizards can flourish for a time. For the locusts will strip the land bare, and the deer and the gazelles and the goats and the rabbits will go hungry and die. And with the disappearance of the game, the lions and the wolves and the foxes will soon be dying too. Won't they curse us then and call us criminals for favoring the locusts and the birds and the lizards over them?"

Now the gods had to scratch their heads over this because they'd never looked at matters in this particular light before. But finally one of them said, "I don't see that this presents any great problem. We simply won't do it. We won't raise a multitude of locusts to send into this land, then things will go on as before and no one will have any reason to curse us."

Most of the gods thought this made sense, but one of them disagreed. "Surely this would be as great a crime as the other," he said. "For don't the locusts and the birds and the lizards live our hands as well as the rest? Is it never to be their time to flourish greatly, as the others do?"

While the gods were debating this point, a fox came out to hunt, and they said, "Let's send the fox a quail for its life." But these words were hardly spoken when one of them said, "Surely it would be a crime to let the fox live at the quail's expense. The quail has its life that we gave it and lives in our hands. It would be infamous to send it into the jaws of the fox!"

Then another said, "Look here! The quail is stalking a grasshopper! If we don't give the quail to the fox, then the quail will eat the grasshoppper. Doesn't the grasshopper have its life that we gave it and doesn't it live in our hands as truly as the quail? Surely it would be a crime not to give the quail to fox, so that the grasshopper may live."

Well, as you can imagine, the gods groaned heavily over this and didn't know what to do. And while they were wrangling over it, spring came and the snow waters of the mountains began to swell the streams, and one of them said, "Surely it would be a crime to let these waters flood the land, for countless creatures are bound to be carried off to their deaths." But another said, "Surely it would be a crime not to let these waters flood the land, for without them the ponds and marshes will dry up and all the creatures that live in them will die." And once more the gods were thrown into confusion.

Finally one them had what seemed to be a new thought. "It's clear that any action we take will be good for some and evil for others, so let's take no action at all. Then none of the creatures that live in our hands can call us criminals."

"Nonsense," another snapped. "If we take no action at all, this will also be good for some and evil for others, won't it? The creatures that live in our hands will say, 'Look, we suffer, and the gods do nothing!'"

And while the gods bickered among themselves, the locusts swarmed over the savannah, and the locusts and the birds and the lizards praised the gods while the game and the predators died cursing the gods. And because the gods had taken no action in the matter, the quail lived and the fox went hungry to its hole cursing the gods. And because in the end the gods decided to stem the flood of spring waters, the ponds and the marshes dried up and all the thousands of creatures that lived in them died cursing the gods.

And hearing these curses, the gods groaned. "We've made the garden a place of terror and all that live in it hate us as tyrants and criminals. And they're right to do this because by action or inaction we send them good one day and evil the next without knowing what we should do. The savannah stripped by the locusts rings with curses, and we have no answer to make. The fox and the grasshopper curse us because we let the quail live, and we have no answer to make. Surely the whole world must curse the day we made it, for we are criminals who send good and evil by turns, knowing even as we do it that we don't know what ought to be done."

Well, the gods were sinking right into the slough of despond when one of them looked up and said, "Say, didn't we make for the garden a certain tree whose fruit is the knowledge of good and evil?"

"Yes," cried the others. "Let's find that tree and eat of it and see what this knowledge is." And when the gods had found this tree and had tasted its fruit, their eyes were opened, and they said, "Now indeed we have the knowledge we need to tend the garden without becoming criminals and without earning the curses of all who live in our hands."

And as they were talking in this way, a lion went out to hunt, and the gods said to themselves, "Today is the lion's day to go hungry and the deer it would have taken may live another day." And so the lion missed its kill and as it was returning hungry to its den it began to curse the gods. But they said, "Be at peace, for we know how to rule the world and today is your day to go hungry." And the lion was at peace.

And the next day the lion went out to hunt and the gods sent it the deer they had spared the day before. And as the deer felt the lion's jaw on its neck, it began to curse the gods. But they said, "Be at peace, for we know how to rule the world and today is your day to die, just as yesterday was your day to live." And the deer was at peace.

Then the gods said to themselves, "Certainly the knowledge of good and evil is a powerful knowledge, for it enables us to rule the world without becoming criminals. If we had yesterday sent the lion away hungry without this knowledge, then indeed it would have been a crime. And if we had today sent the deer into the lion's jaws without this knowledge, then indeed this too would have been a crime. But with this knowledge we have done both of these things, one seemingly opposed to the other, and have committed no crime."

Now it happened that one of the gods was away on an errand when the others were eating at the tree of knowledge, and when he returned and heard what the gods had done in the matter of the lion and the deer, he said, "In doing these two things you have surely committed a crime in one instance or the other, for these two things are opposed and one must have been right to do and the other wrong. If it was good for the lion to go hungry on the first day, then it was evil to send it the deer on the second. Or if it was good to send it the deer on the second day, then it was evil to send it away hungry on the first."

The others nodded and said, "Yes, this is just the way we would have reasoned before we ate of this tree of knowledge."

"What knowledge is this?" the god asked, noticing the tree for the first time.

"Taste its fruit," they told him. "Then you'll know exactly what knowledge it is."

So the god tasted, and his eyes were opened. "Yes, I see," he said. "This is indeed the proper knowledge of the gods: the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die."

[...]

When the gods saw that Adam was awakening, they said to themselves, "Now here is a creature so like us that he might almost be one of our company. What span of life and what destiny shall we fashion for him?"

One of them said, "He is so fair, let's give him life for the lifetime of this planet. In the days of his childhood let's care for him as we care for all others in the garden, so that he learns the sweetness of living in our hands. But in adolescence he will surely begin to realize that he's capable of much more than other creatures and will become restless in our care. Shall we then lead him to the other tree in the garden, the Tree of Life?"

But another said, "To lead Adam like a child to the Tree of Life before he had even begun to seek it for himself would deprive him of a great undertaking by which he may gain an important wisdom and prove his mettle to himself. As we would give him the care he needs as a child, let's give him the quest he needs as an adolescent. Let's make the quest for the Tree of Life the occupation of his adolescence. In this way he'll discover for himself how he may have life for the lifetime of this planet."

The others agreed with this plan, but one said, "We should take note that this might well be a long and baffling quest for Adam. Youth is impatient and after a few thousand years of searching, he might despair of finding the Tree of Life. If this should happen, he might be tempted to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil instead."

"Nonsense," the others replied. "You know very well that the fruit of this tree nourishes only the gods. It can no more nourish Adam than the grasses of the oxen. He might take it into his mouth and swallow it, but it would pass through his body without benefit. Surely you don't imagine that he might actually gain our knowledge by eating of this tree?"

"Of course not," the other replied. "The danger is not that he would gain our knowledge but rather that he might imagine that he'd gained it. Having tasted the fruit of this tree, he might say to himself, 'I have eaten at the gods' own tree of knowledge and therefore know as well as they how to rule the world. I may do as I will do.'"

"This is absurd," said the other gods. "How could Adam ever be so foolish as to imagine he had the knowledge that enables us to govern the world and to do what we will do? None of our creatures will ever be master of knowledge of who shall live and who shall die. This knowledge is ours alone, and if Adam should grow in wisdom till the very eclipse of the universe, it would be as far beyond him as it is right now."

But the other was not disconcerted by this argument. "If Adam should eat of our tree," he persisted, "there's no telling how he might deceive himself. Not knowing the truth, he might say to himself, 'Whatever I can justify doing is good and whatever I cannot justify doing is evil.'"

But the others scoffed at this, saying, "This is not the knowledge of good and evil."

"Of course it's not," the other replied, "but how would Adam know this?"

The others shrugged. "Perhaps in childhood Adam might believe he was wise enough to rule the world, but what of it? Such arrogant foolishness would pass with maturity."

"Ah," said the other, "but possessed of this arrogant foolishness, would Adam survive into maturity? Believing himself our equal, he would be capable of anything. In his arrogance, he might look around the garden and say to himself, 'This is all wrong. Why should I have to share the fire of life with all these creatures. Look here, the lions and the wolves and the foxes take the game I would have for myself. This is evil. I will kill all these creatures, and this will be good. And look here, the rabbits and the grasshoppers and the sparrows take the fruits of the land that I would have for myself. This is evil. I will kill all these creatures, and this will be good. And look here, the gods have set a limit on my growth just as they've set a limit on the growth of all others. This is evil. I will grow without limit, taking all the fire of life that flows through this garden into myself, and that will be good.' Tell me - if this should happen, how long would Adam live before he had devoured the entire world?"

"If this should happen," the others said, "Adam would devour the world in a single day, and at the end of that day he would devour himself."

"Just so," the other said, "unless he managed to escape from this world. Then he would devour the entire universe as he had devoured the world. But even so he would inevitably end by devouring himself, as anything must that grows without limit."

"This would indeed be a terrible end for Adam," another said. "But might he not come to same end even without having eaten at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Might he not be tempted by his yearning for growth to take the fire of life into his own hands even without deluding himself that this was good?"

"He might," the other agreed. "But what would be the result? He would become a criminal, an outlaw, a thief of life, and a murderer of the creatures around him. Without the delusion that what he was doing was good - and therefore to be done at any cost - he would soon weary of the outlaw's life. Indeed this is bound to happen during his quest for the Tree of Life. But if he should eat the tree of our knowledge, then he will shrug off his weariness. He will say, 'What does it matter that I'm weary of living as a murderer of all the life around me? I know good and evil, and this way of living is good. Therefore I must live this way even though I'm weary unto death, even though I destroy the world and even myself. The gods wrote in the world a law for all to follow, but it cannot apply to me because I'm their equal. Therefore I will live outside this law and grow without limit. To be limited is evil. I will steal the fire of life from the hands of the gods and heap it up for my growth, and that will be good. I will destroy those kinds that do not serve my growth, and that will be good. I will wrest the garden from the hands of the gods and order it anew so that it serves only my growth, and that will be good. And because these things are good, they must be done at any cost. It may be that I'll destroy the garden and make a ruin of it. It may be that my progeny will teem over the earth like locusts, stripping it bare, until they drown in their own filth and hate the very sight of one another and go mad. Still they must go on, because to grow without limit is good and to accept the limits of the law is evil. And if any say, "Let's put off the burdens of the criminal life and live in the hands of the gods once again," I will kill them, for what they say is evil. And if any say, "Let's turn aside from our misery and search for that other tree," I will kill them, for what they say is evil. And when at last all the garden has been subjugated to my use and all kinds that do not serve my growth have been cast aside and all the fire of life in the world flows through my progeny, still I must grow. And to the people of this land I will say, "Grow, for this is good," and they will grow. And to the people of the next land I will say, "Grow, for this is good," and they will grow. And when they can grow no more, the people of this land will fall upon the people of the next to murder them, so that they may grow still more. And if the groans of my progeny fill the air throughout the world, I will say to them, "Your sufferings must be borne, for you suffer in the cause of good. See how great we have become! Wielding the knowledge of good and evil, we have made ourselves the masters of the world and the gods have no power over us. Though your groans fill the air, isn't it sweeter to live in our own hands than in the hands of the gods?"'"

And when the gods heard all this, they saw that of all the trees in the garden, only the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil could destroy Adam. And so they said to him, "You may eat of every tree in the garden save the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for on the day you eat of that tree, you will certainly die."

Photo: Sign of the Times

2005-11-17T17:48:00.000-08:00

(from TalkLeft)

Btw, Billmon has an hysterically funny photoshopped pic of Bob Woodward (or as Billmon refers to him, Judy Woodward/Little Mister Run Amok).

Daniel Quinn: The Great Forgetting

2005-11-17T15:46:00.000-08:00

(Excerpted from the book, The Story of B.)

With every audience and every individual, I have to begin by making them see that the cultural self-awareness we inherit from our parents and pass on to our children is squarely and solidly built on a Great Forgetting that occurred in our culture worldwide during the formative millennia of our civilization. What happened during those formative millennia of our civilization? What happened was that Neolithic farming communes turned into villages, villages turned into towns, and towns were gathered into kingdoms. Concomitant with these events were the development of division of labor along craft lines, the establishment of regional and interregional trade systems, and the emergence of commerce as a separate profession. What was being forgotten while all this was going on was the fact that there had been a time when none of it was going on - a time when human life was sustained by hunting and gathering rather than by animal husbandry and agriculture, a time when villages, towns, and kingdoms were undreamed of, a time when no one made a living as a potter or a basket maker or a metalworker, a time when trade was an informal and occasional thing, a time when commerce was unimaginable as a means of livelihood.

We can hardly be surprised that the forgetting took place. On the contrary, it's hard to imagine how it could have been avoided. It would have been necessary to hold on to the memory of our hunting/gathering past for five thousand years before anyone would have been capable of making a written record of it.

By the time anyone was ready to write the human story, the foundation events of our culture were ancient, ancient developments - but this didn't make them unimaginable. On the contrary, they were quite easy to imagine, simply by extrapolating backward. It was obvious that the kingdoms and empires of the present were bigger and more populous than those of the past. It was obvious that the artisans of the present were more knowledgeable and skilled than artisans of the past. It was obvious that items available for sale and trade were more numerous in the present than in the past. No great feat of intellect was required to understand that, as one went further and further back in time, the population (and therefore the towns) would become smaller and smaller, crafts more and more primitive, and commerce more and more rudimentary. In fact, it was obvious that, if you went back far enough, you would come to a beginning in which there were no towns, no crafts, and no commerce.

In the absence of any other theory, it seemed reasonable (even inescapable) to suppose that the human race must have begun with a single human couple, an original man and woman. There was nothing inherently irrational or improbable about such a supposition. The existence of an original man and woman didn't argue for or against an act of divine creation. Maybe that's just the way things start. Maybe at the beginning of the world there was one man and one woman, one bull and one cow, one horse and one mare, one hen and one cock, and so on. Who at this point knew any better? Our cultural ancestors knew nothing about any agricultural "revolution." As far as they knew, humans had come into existence farming, just the way deer had come into existence browsing. As they saw it, agriculture and civilization were just as innately human as thought or speech. Our hunting-gathering past was not just forgotten, it was unimaginable.

The Great Forgetting was woven into the fabric of our intellectual life from its very beginning. This early weaving was accomplished by the nameless scribes of ancient Egypt, Sumer, Assyria, Babylon, India, and China, then, later, by Moses, Samuel, and Elijah of Israel, by Fabius Pictor and Cato the Elder of Rome, by Ssu-ma T'an and his son Ssu-ma Ch'ien in China, and, later still, by Hellanicus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon of Greece. (Although Anaximander conjectured that everything evolved from formless material - what he called "the boundless" - and that Man arose from fishlike ancestors, he was as unaware of the Great Forgetting as any of the others.) These ancients were the teachers of Isaiah and Jeremiah, Lao-tzu and Gautama Buddha, Thales and Heraclitus - and these were the teachers of John the Baptist and Jesus, Confucius and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle - and these were the teachers of Muhammad and Aquinas and Bacon and Galileo and Newton and Descartes - and every single one of them unwittingly embodied and ratified the Great Forgetting in their works, so that every text in history, philosophy, and theology from the origins of literacy to almost the present moment incorporated it as an integral and unquestioned assumption.

Now I hope - I sincerely hope - that there are many among you who are burning to know why not a single one of you has ever heard a word about the Great Forgetting (by any name whatsoever) in any class you have ever attended at any school at any level, from kindergarten to graduate school. If you have this question, be assured that it's not an academic one by any means. It's a vital question, and I don't hesitate to say that our species' future on this planet depends on it.

What was forgotten in the Great Forgetting was not that humans had evolved from other species. There isn't the slightest reason to think that Paleolithic humans or Mesolithic humans guessed that they had evolved. What was forgotten in the Great Forgetting was the fact that, before the advent of agriculture and village life, humans had lived in a profoundly different way.

This explains why the Great Forgetting was not exposed by the development of evolutionary theory. Evolution in fact had nothing to do with it. It was paleontology that exposed the Great Forgetting (and would have done so even if no theory of evolution had ever been proposed). It did so by making it unarguably clear that humans had been around long, long, long before any conceivable date for the planting of the first crop and the beginning of civilization.

Paleontology made untenable the idea that humanity, agriculture, and civilization all began at roughly the same time. History and archaeology had put it beyond doubt that agriculture and civilization were just a few thousand years old, but paleontology put it beyond doubt that humanity was millions of years old. Paleontology made it impossible to believe that Man had been born an agriculturalist and a civilization-builder. Paleontology forced us to conclude that Man had been born something else entirely - a forager and a homeless nomad - and this is what had been forgotten in the Great Forgetting.

It staggers the imagination to wonder what the foundation thinkers of our culture would have written if they'd known that humans had lived perfectly well on this planet for millions of years without agriculture or civilization, if they'd known that agriculture and civilization are not remotely innate to humans. I can only conclude that the entire course of our intellectual history would have been unthinkably different from what we find in our libraries today.

But here is one of the most amazing occurrences in all of human history. When the thinkers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were finally compelled to admit that the entire structure of thought in our culture had been built on a profoundly important error, absolutely nothing happened.

It's hard to notice nothing happening. Everyone knows that. Readers of Sherlock Holmes will remember that the remarkable thing the dog did in the night was ... nothing. And this is the remarkable thing that these thinkers did: nothing. Obviously they didn't care to do anything. They didn't care to go back to all the foundation thinkers of our culture and ask how their work would have changed if they'd known the truth about our origins. I fear the truth is that they wanted to leave things as they were. They wanted to go on forgetting ... and that's exactly what they did.

Of course they were forced to make some concessions. They couldn't go on teaching that humans had been born farming. They had to deal with the fact that farming was a very recent development. They said to themselves, "Well, let's call it a revolution - the Agricultural Revolution." This was slovenly thinking at its worst, but who was going to argue about it? The whole thing was an embarrassment, and they were glad to dismiss it with a label. So it became the Agricultural Revolution, a new lie to be perpetuated down through the ages.

Historians were sickened to learn the true extent of the human story. Their whole discipline, their whole worldview, had been shaped by people who thought that everything had begun just a few thousand years ago when people appeared on the earth and started immediately to farm and to build civilization. This was history, this story of farmers turning up just a few thousand years ago, turning farming communes into villages, villages into towns, towns into kingdoms. This was the stuff, it seemed to them. This was what counted, and the millions of years that came before deserved to be forgotten.

Historians wouldn't touch this other stuff, and here's the excuse they fashioned for themselves. They didn't have to touch it ... because it wasn't history. It was some newfangled thing called prehistory. That was the ticket. Let some inferior breed handle it - not real historians, but rather prehistorians. In this way, modern historians put their stamp of approval on the Great Forgetting. What was forgotten in the Great Forgetting was not something important, it was just prehistory. Something not worth looking at. A huge, long period of nothing happening.

The Great Remembering was in this way turned into a nonevent. The intellectual guardians of our culture - the historians, the philosophers, the theologians - didn't want to hear about it. The foundations of all their disciplines had been laid during the Great Forgetting, and they didn't want to reexamine those foundations. They were perfectly content to have the Great Forgetting go on - and, for all practical purposes, it did exactly that. The worldview we transmit to our children today is fundamentally the same as the worldview transmitted to children four hundred years ago. The differences are superficial. Instead of teaching our children that humanity began just a few thousand years ago (and didn't exist before that), we teach them that human history began just a few thousand years ago (and didn't exist before that). Instead of teaching our children that civilization is what humanity is all about, we teach them that civilization is what history is all about. But everyone knows that it comes to the same thing.

In this way human history is reduced to the period exactly corresponding to the history of our culture, with the other ninety-nine point-seven percent of the human story discarded as a mere prelude.

The myth of the Agricultural Revolution

That the earth is the motionless center of the universe was an idea that people accepted for thousands of years. In itself, it seems harmless enough, but it spawned a thousand errors and put a limit on what we could understand about the universe. The idea of the Agricultural Revolution that we learn in school and teach our children in school seems similarly harmless, but it too has spawned a thousand errors and puts a limit on what we can understand about ourselves and what has happened on this planet.

In a nutshell, the central idea of the Agricultural Revolution is this, that about ten thousand years ago, people began to abandon the foraging life in favor of agriculture. This statement misleads in two profoundly important ways: first, by implying that agriculture is basically just one thing (the way that foraging is basically just one thing), and second, by implying that this one thing was embraced by people everywhere at more or less the same time. There is so little truth in this statement that it isn't worth bothering with, so I'll just issue another one:

Many different styles of agriculture were in use all over the world ten thousand years ago, when our particular style of agriculture emerged in the Near East. This style, our style, is one I call totalitarian agriculture, in order to stress the way it subordinates all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food. Fueled by the enormous food surpluses generated uniquely by this style of agriculture, a rapid population growth occurred among its practitioners, followed by an equally rapid geographical expansion that obliterated all other lifestyles in its path (including those based on other styles of agriculture). This expansion and obliteration of lifestyles continued without a pause in the millennia that followed, eventually reaching the New World in the fifteenth century and continuing to the present moment in remote areas of Africa, Australia, New Guinea, and South America.

The foundation thinkers of our culture imagined that what we do is what people everywhere have done from the beginning of time. And when the thinkers of the nineteenth century were forced to acknowledge that this wasn't the case, they imagined instead that what we do is what people everywhere have done for the past ten thousand years. They could easily have availed themselves of better information, but they obviously didn't think it was worth bothering with.

East and West

It's become a solid part of our cultural mythology that a profound gulf separates East from West, "and never the twain shall meet," and this causes people to be disconcerted when I speak of East and West as a single culture. East and West are twins, with a common mother and father, but when these twins look at each other, they're struck by the differences they see, not the similarities, just the way biological twins are. It takes an outsider like me to be struck by the fundamental cultural identity that exists between them.

Nothing could be more fundamental to any people than the way they get the wherewithal to live. The people of our culture, East and West, do this by means of totalitarian agriculture, and have done so from the beginning - the same beginning; for the past ten thousand years the people of both East and West have built squarely, solidly, and exclusively on totalitarian agriculture as their base. There's not a single thing to chose between them in this regard.

Totalitarian agriculture is more than a means of getting what you need to live, it's the foundation for the most laborious lifestyle ever developed on this planet. This comes as a shock to many listeners, but there isn't any question about it: No one works harder to stay alive than the people of our culture do. This has been so thoroughly documented in the past forty years that I doubt if you could find an anthropologist anywhere who would argue about it.

It's my notion that the laboriousness of their lifestyle has given rise to another fundamental similarity between the peoples of East and West, and this is the similarity in their spiritual outlook. Again, it's commonplace to imagine that an enormous gulf separates East and West in this regard, but the two of them look like twins to me, because they're both obsessed by the strange idea that people need to be saved. In recent decades, the salvationist coloration of Eastern religions has been toned down for export to Beat, hippie, and New Age markets, but it's unmistakable when seen in the originals, in native habitats.

It's certainly true that the ends and means of salvation differ between East and West, but then the ends and means of salvation differ among all the salvationist religions of the world - this is precisely how you tell them apart. The essential fact remains that, anywhere in the world, East or West, you can walk up to a stranger and say, "Let me show you how to be saved," and you'll be understood.

The nothingness of prehistory

When the foundation thinkers of our culture looked back in time, past the appearance of man the agriculturalist, they saw ... nothing. This was what they expected to see, since, as they had it worked out, people could no more exist before agriculture than fish could exist before water. To them, the study of pre-agricultural man would have seemed like the study of nobody.

When the existence of pre-agricultural man became undeniable in the nineteenth century, the thinkers of our culture didn't care to disturb the received wisdom of the ancients, so the study of pre-agricultural man became the study of nobody. They knew they couldn't get away with saying that pre-agricultural peoples lived in non-history, so they said they lived in something called prehistory. I'm sure you understand what prehistory is. It's rather like pre-water, and you all know what that is, don't you? Pre-water is the stuff fish lived in before there was water, and prehistory is the period people lived in before there was history.

As I've pointed out again and again, the foundation thinkers of our culture imagined that Man had been born an agriculturalist and a civilization-builder. When thinkers of the nineteenth century were forced to revise this imagining, they did it this way: Man may not have been born an agriculturalist and a civilization-builder, but he was nonetheless born to become an agriculturalist and a civilization builder. In other words, the man of that fiction known as prehistory came into our cultural awareness as a sort of very, very slow starter, and prehistory became a record of people making a very, very slow start at becoming agriculturalists and civilization-builders. If you need a tip-off to confirm this, consider the customary designation of prehistoric peoples as "Stone Age"; this nomenclature was chosen by people who didn't doubt for a moment that stones were as important to these pathetic ancestors of ours as printing presses and steam locomotives were to the people of the nineteenth century. If you'd like to get an idea of how important stones were to prehistoric peoples, visit a modern "Stone Age" culture in New Guinea or Brazil, and you'll see that stones are about as central to their lives as glue is to ours. They use stones all the time, of course - as we use glue all the time - but calling them Stone Age people makes no better sense than calling us Glue Age people.

The myth of the Agricultural Revolution (cont.)

The foundation thinkers of our culture envisioned the descent of Man this way:

            First Humans

                   |

                 Us!

The reluctant revisers of the nineteenth century amended the descent of Man to look like this:

            First Humans

                   |

           Paleolithic Humans

                   |

           Mesolithic Humans

                   |

           Neolithic Humans

                   |

                 Us!

Naturally, they didn't hesitate to assume that the whole of the human story was all leading up to "Us" - the people of our culture - and this is the way it's been taught in our schools ever since. Unfortunately, like so much of the thinking that was done at this point, this was so grotesquely false to facts as to make flat-earth cranks look like intellectual giants.

Here is how it must look if you begin by acknowledging the fact that the people of our culture are not the only humans on this planet:

This diagram reveals a split in humanity far more profound than the one we see dividing East and West. Here we see the split that occurred between those who experienced the Great Forgetting and those who did not.

The Law of Limited Competition

During the Great Forgetting it came to be understood among the people of our culture that life in "the wild" was governed by a single, cruel law known in English as "the Law of the Jungle," roughly translatable as "kill or be killed." In recent decades, by the process of looking (instead of merely assuming), ethologists have discovered that this "kill or be killed" law is a fiction. In fact, a system of laws - universally observed - preserves the tranquillity of "the jungle," protects species and even individuals, and promotes the well-being of the community as a whole. This system of laws has been called, among other things, the peacekeeping law, the law of limited competition, and animal ethics.

Briefly, the law of limited competition is this: You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war on your competitors.

The ability to reproduce is clearly a prerequisite for biological success, and we can be sure that every species comes into existence with that ability as an essential heritage from its parent species. In the same way, following the law of limited competition is a prerequisite for biological success, and we can be sure that every species comes into existence following that law as an essential heritage from its parent species.

Humans came into existence following the law of limited competition. This is another way of saying that they lived like all other creatures in the biological community, competing to the full extent of their capacity but not waging war on their competitors. They came into existence following the law and continued to follow the law until about ten thousand years ago, when the people of a single culture in the Near East began to practice a form of agriculture contrary to the law at every point, a form of agriculture in which you were encouraged to wage war on your competitors - to hunt them down, to destroy their food, and to deny them access to food. This was and is the form of agriculture practiced in our culture, East and West - and in no other.

Leavers and Takers

We have at last arrived at a point where we can abandon this vague and clumsy way of talking about "people of our culture" and "people of all other cultures." We might settle for "Followers of the Law" and "Rejecters of the Law," but a simpler pair of names for these groups has been provided by a colleague, who called them Leavers and Takers. He explained the names this way, that Leavers, by following the law, leave the rule of the world in the hands of the gods, whereas the Takers, by rejecting the law, take the rule of the world into their own hands. He wasn't satisfied with this terminology (and neither am I), but it has a certain following, and I have nothing to replace it with.

The important point to note is that a cultural continuity exists among Leaver peoples that extends back three million years to the beginning of our kind. Homo habilis was born a Leaver and a follower of the same law that is followed today by the Yanomami of Brazil and the Bushmen of the Kalahari - and hundreds of other aboriginal peoples in undeveloped areas all over the world.

It is precisely this cultural continuity that was broken in the Great Forgetting. To put it another way: After rejecting the law that had protected us from extinction for three million years and making ourselves the enemy of the rest of the biological community, we suppressed our outlaw status by forgetting that there ever was a law.

Good news and bad news

If you know even a little about me, you'll know I'm called by many bad names. The reason for this is that I'm a bringer of good news, the best news you've had in a long time. You might think that bringing good news would make me a hero, but I assure you this isn't the case at all. The people of our culture are used to bad news and are fully prepared for bad news, and no one would think for a moment of denouncing me if I stood up and proclaimed that we're all doomed and damned. It's precisely because I do not proclaim this that I'm denounced. Before attempting to articulate the good news I bring, let me first make crystal clear the bad news people are always prepared to hear.

"Man is the scourge of the planet, and he was BORN a scourge, just a few thousand years ago."

Believe me, I can win applause all over the world by pronouncing these words. But the news I'm here to bring you is much different:

Man was NOT born a few thousand years ago and he was NOT born a scourge.

And it's for this news that I'm condemned.

Man was born MILLIONS of years ago, and he was no more a scourge than hawks or lions or squids. He lived AT PEACE with the world ... for MILLIONS of years.

This doesn't mean he was a saint. This doesn't mean he walked the earth like a Buddha. It means he lived as harmlessly as a hyena or a shark or a rattlesnake.

It's not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it's a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. OUR culture.

And here is the best of the news I have to bring:

We don't have to change HUMANKIND in order to survive. We only have to change a single culture.

I don't mean to suggest that this is an easy task. But at least it's not an impossible one.

Questions from the audience

Q. Are you identifying what religionists call the Fall with the birth of our culture?

A. That's precisely what I'm doing. The points of similarity between these two events have long been noted, of course - the fact that both are associated with the birth of agriculture and both occurred in the same part of the world. But the difficulty in identifying them as a single event has been that the Fall is perceived as a spiritual event whereas the birth of our culture is perceived as a technological event. I fear I shall have to come here another time to explore with you the profound spiritual ramifications of this technological event, however.

Q. You say that Man lived at peace with the world during the millions of years that preceded our agricultural revolution. But hasn't recent evidence revealed that ancient foragers hunted many species to extinction?

A. I believe I can still recall the words I used just a moment ago, when I said that Man lived at peace with the world: "This doesn't mean he walked the earth like a Buddha. It means he lived as harmlessly as a hyena or a shark or a rattlesnake." Whenever a new species makes its appearance in the world, adjustments occur throughout the community of life - and some of these adjustments are fatal for some species. For example, when the swift, powerful hunters of the cat family appeared late in the Eocene, the repercussions of this event were experienced throughout the community - sometimes as extinction. Species of "easy prey" became extinct because they couldn't reproduce fast enough to replace the individuals the cats were taking. Some of the cats' competitors also became extinct, for the simple reason that they couldn't compete - they just weren't big enough or fast enough. This appearance and disappearance of species is precisely what evolution is all about, after all.

Human hunters of the Mesolithic period may well have hunted the mammoth to extinction, but they certainly didn't do this as a matter of policy, the way farmers of our culture hunt coyotes and wolves, simply to get rid of them. Mesolithic hunters may well have hunted the giant elk to extinction, but they certainly didn't do this out of callous indifference, the way ivory hunters slaughter elephants. Ivory hunters know full well that every kill brings the species closer to extinction, but Mesolithic hunters couldn't possibly have guessed such a thing about the giant elk.

The point to keep in mind is this: It is the policy of totalitarian agriculture to wipe out unwanted species. If ancient foragers hunted any species to extinction, it certainly wasn't because they wanted to wipe out their own food supply!

Q. Wasn't agriculture developed as a response to famine?

A. Agriculture is useless as a response to famine. You can no more respond to famine by planting a crop than you can respond to falling out of an airplane by knitting a parachute. But this really misses the point. To say that agriculture was developed as a response to famine is like saying that cigarette smoking was developed as a response to lung cancer. Agriculture doesn't cure famine, it promotes famine - it creates the conditions in which famines occur. Agriculture makes it possible for more people to live in an area than that area can support - and that's exactly where famines occur. For example, agriculture made it possible for many populations of Africa to outstrip their homelands' resources - and that's why these populations are now starving.

Daniel Quinn: The Boiling Frog

2005-11-17T15:08:00.000-08:00

(Excerpted from the book, The Story of B.)

Systems thinkers have given us a useful metaphor for a certain kind of human behavior in the phenomenon of the boiled frog. The phenomenon is this. If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

We all know stories of frogs being tossed into boiling water - for example, a young couple being plunged into catastrophic debt by an unforeseen medical emergency. A contrary example, an example of the smiling boiled frog, is that of a young couple who gradually use their good credit to buy and borrow themselves into catastrophic debt. Cultural examples exist as well. About six thousand years ago the goddess-worshipping societies of Old Europe were engulfed in a boiling up of our culture that Marija Gimbutas called Kurgan Wave Number One; they struggled to clamber out but eventually succumbed. The Plains Indians of North America, who were engulfed in another boiling up of our culture in the 1870s, constitute another example; they struggled to clamber out over the next two decades, but they too finally succumbed.

A contrary example, an example of the smiling-boiled-frog phenomenon, is provided by our own culture. When we slipped into the cauldron, the water was a perfect temperature, not too hot, not too cold. Can anyone tell me when that was? Anyone?

Blank faces.

I've already told you, but I'll ask again, a different way. When did we become we? Where and when did the thing called us begin? Remember: East and West, twins of a common birth. Where? And when?

Well, of course: in the Near East, about ten thousand years ago. That's where our peculiar, defining form of agriculture was born, and we began to be we. That was our cultural birthplace. That was where and when we slipped into that beautifully pleasant water: the Near East, ten thousand years ago.

As the water in the cauldron slowly heats, the frog feels nothing but a pleasant warmth, and indeed that's all there is to feel. A long time has to pass before the water begins to be dangerously hot, and our own history demonstrates this. For fully half our history, the first five thousand years, signs of distress are almost nonexistent. The technological innovations of this period bespeak a quiet life, centered around hearth and village - sun-dried brick, kiln-fired pottery, woven cloth, the potter's wheel, and so on. But gradually, imperceptibly, signs of distress begin to appear, like tiny bubbles at the bottom of a pot.

What shall we look for, as signs of distress? Mass suicides? Revolution? Terrorism? No, of course not. Those come much later, when the water is scalding hot. Five thousand years ago it was just getting warm. Folks mopping their brows were grinning at each other and saying, "Isn't it great?"

You'll know where to find the signs of distress if you identify the fire that was burning under the cauldron. It was burning there in the beginning, was still burning after five thousand years ... and is still burning today in exactly the same way. It was and is the great heating element of our revolution. It's the essential. It's the sine qua non of our success if success is what it is.

Speak! Someone tell me what I'm talking about!

"Agriculture!" Agriculture, this gentleman tells me.

No. Not agriculture. One particular style of agriculture. One particular style that has been the basis of our culture from its beginnings ten thousand years ago to the present moment - the basis of our culture and found in no other. It's ours, it's what makes us us. For its complete ruthlessness toward all other life-forms on this planet and for it's unyielding determination to convert every square meter on this planet to the production of human food, I've called it totalitarian agriculture.

Ethnologists, students of animal behavior, and a few philosophers who have considered the matter know that there is a form of ethics practiced in the community of life on this planet - apart from us, that is. This is a very practical (you might say Darwinian) sort of ethics, since it serves to safeguard and promote biological diversity within the community. According to this ethics, followed by every sort of creature within the community of life, sharks as well as sheep, killer bees as well as butterflies, you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war. This ethics is violated at every point by practitioners of totalitarian agriculture. We hunt down our competitors, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That indeed is the whole purpose and point of totalitarian agriculture. Totalitarian agriculture is based on the premise that all the food in the world belongs to us, and there is no limit whatever to what we may take for ourselves and deny to all others.

Totalitarian agriculture was not adopted in our culture out of sheer meanness. It was adopted because, by its very nature, it's more productive than any other style (and there are many other styles). Totalitarian agriculture represents productivity to the max, as Americans like to say. It represents productivity in a form that literally cannot be exceeded.

Many styles of agriculture (not all, but many) produce food surpluses. But, not surprisingly, totalitarian agriculture produces larger surpluses than any other style. It produces surpluses to the max. You simply can't out produce a system designed to convert all the food in the world into human food.

Totalitarian agriculture is the fire under our cauldron. Totalitarian agriculture is what has kept us "on the boil" here for ten thousands years.

Food availability and population growth

The people of our culture take food so much for granted that they often have a hard time seeing that there is a necessary connection between the availability of food and population growth. For them, I've found it necessary to construct a small illustrative experiment with laboratory mice.

Imagine if you will a cage with movable sides, so that it can be enlarged to any desired size. We begin by putting ten healthy mice of both sexes into the cage, along with plenty of food and water. In just a few days there will of course be twenty mice, and we accordingly increase the amount of food we're putting in the cage. In a few weeks, as we steadily increase the amount of available food, there will be forty, then fifty, then sixty, and so on, until one day there is a hundred. And let's say that we've decided to stop the growth of the colony at a hundred. I'm sure you realize that we don't need to pass out little condoms or birth-control pills to achieve this effect. All we have to do is stop increasing the amount of food that goes into the cage. Every day we put in an amount that we know is sufficient to sustain a hundred mice and no more. This is the part that many find hard to believe, but, trust me, it's the truth: The growth of the community stops dead. Not overnight, of course, but in very short order. Putting in an amount of food sufficient for one hundred mice, we will find - every single time that the population of the cage soon stabilizes at one hundred. Of course I don't mean one hundred precisely. It will fluctuate between ninety and a hundred ten but never go much beyond those limits. On the average, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, the population inside the cage will be one hundred.

Now if we should decide to have a population of two hundred mice instead of one hundred, we won't have to add aphrodisiacs to their diets or play erotic mouse movies for them. We'll just have to increase the amount of food we put in the cage. If we put in enough food for two hundred, we'll soon have two hundred. If we put in enough for three hundred, we'll soon have three hundred. If we put in enough for four hundred, we'll soon have four hundred. If we put in enough for five hundred, we'll soon have five hundred. This isn't a guess, my friends. This isn't a conjecture. This is a certainty.

Of course, you understand that there's nothing special about mice in this regard. The same will happen with crickets or trout or badgers or sparrows. But I fear that many people bridle at the idea that humans might be included in this list. Because as individuals we're able to govern our reproductive capacities, they imagine our growth as a species should be unresponsive to the mere availability of food.

Luckily for the point I'm trying to make here, I have considerable data showing that, as a species, we're as responsive as any other to the availability of food - three million years of data, in fact. For all but the last ten thousand years of that period, the human species was a very minor member of the world ecosystem. Imagine it - three million years and the human race did not overrun the earth! There was some growth, of course, through simple migration from continent to continent, but this growth was proceeding at a glacial rate. It's estimated that the human population at the beginning of the Neolithic was around ten million - ten million, if you can imagine that! After three million years!

Then, very suddenly, things began to change. And the change was that the people of one culture, in one corner of the world, developed a peculiar form of agriculture that made food available to people in unprecedented quantities. Following this, in this corner of the world, the population doubled in a scant three thousand years. It doubled again, this time in only two thousand years. In an eye blink of time on the geologic scale, the human population jumped from ten million to fifty million, probably eighty percent of them being practitioners of totalitarian agriculture: members of our culture, East and West.

The water in the cauldron was getting warm, and signs of distress were beginning to appear.

Signs of distress: 5000-3000 B.C.E.

It was getting crowded. Think of that. People used to imagine that history is inevitably cyclical, but what I'm describing here has never happened before. In all of three million years, humans have never been crowded anywhere. But now the people of a single culture - our culture - are learning what it means to be crowded. It was getting crowded, and overworked, overgrazed land was becoming less and less productive. There were more people, and they were competing for dwindling resources.

The water is heating up around the frog and remember what we're looking for: signs of distress. What happens when more people begin competing for less? That's obvious. Every schoolchild knows that. When more people start competing for less, they start fighting. But of course they don't just fight at random. The town butcher doesn't battle the town baker, the town tailor doesn't battle the town shoemaker. No, the town's butcher, baker, tailor, and shoemaker get together to battle some other town's butcher, baker, tailor, and shoemaker.

We don't have to see bodies lying in the field to know that this was the beginning of the age of war that has continued to the present moment. What we have to see is war-making machinery. I don't mean mechanical machinery - chariots, catapults, siege machines, and so on. I mean political machinery. Butchers, bakers, tailors, and shoemakers don't organize themselves into armies. They need warlords kings, princes, emperors.

It's during this period, starting around five thousand years ago, that we see the first states formed for the purpose of armed defense and aggression. It's during this period that we see the standing army forged as the monarch's sword of power. Without a standing army, a king is just a windbag in fancy clothes. You know that. But with a standing army, a king can impose his will on his enemies and engrave his name in history and absolutely the only names we have from this era are the names of conquering kings. No scientists, no philosophers, no historians, no prophets, just conquerors. Again, nothing cyclic going on here. For the first time in human history, the important people are the people with armies.

Now note well that no one thought that the appearance of armies was a bad sign a sign of distress. They thought it was a good sign. They thought the armies represented an improvement. The water was just getting delightfully warm, and no one worried about a few little bubbles.

After this point military needs became the chief stimulus for technological advancement in our culture. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Our soldiers need better armor, better swords, better chariots, better bows and arrows, better scaling machines, better rams, better artillery, better guns, better tanks, better planes, better bombs, better rockets, better nerve gas ... well, you see what I mean. At this point no one saw technology in the service of warfare as a sign that something bad was going on. They thought it was an improvement.

From this point on, the frequency and severity of wars will serve as one measure of how hot the water is getting around our smiling frog.

Signs of distress: 3000-1400 B.C.E.

The fire burned on under the cauldron of our culture, and the next doubling of our population took only sixteen hundred years. There were a hundred million humans now, at 1400 B.C.E., probably ninety percent of them being members of our culture. The Near East hadn't been big enough for us for a long time. Totalitarian agriculture had moved northward and eastward into Russia and India and China, northward and westward into Asia Minor and Europe. Other kinds of agriculture had once been practiced in all these lands, but now need I say it? Agriculture meant our style of agriculture.

The water is getting hotter, always getting hotter. All the old signs of distress are there, of course, why would they go away? As the water heats up, the old signs just get bigger and more dramatic. War? The wars of the previous age were piddling affairs compared with the wars of this age. This is the Bronze Age! Real weapons, by God! Real armor! Vast standing armies, supported by unbelievable imperial wealth!

Unlike signs of war, other signs of distress aren't cast in bronze or chiseled in stone. No one's sculpting friezes to depict life in the slums of Memphis or Troy. No one's writing news stories to expose official corruption in Knossos or Mohenjo-Daro. No one's putting together film documentaries about the slave trade. Nonetheless, there's at least one sign that can be read in the evidence: Crime was emerging as a problem.

Looking out into your faces, I see how unimpressed you are with this news. Crime? Crime is universal among humans, isn't it? No, actually it isn't. Misbehavior, yes. Unpleasant behavior, disruptive behavior, yes. People can always be counted on to fall in love with the wrong person or to lose their tempers or to be stupid or greedy or vengeful. Crime is something else, and we all know that. What we mean by crime doesn't exist among tribal peoples, but this isn't because they're nicer people than we are, it's because they're organized in a different way. This is worth spending a moment on.

If someone irritates you, let's say by constantly interrupting you while you're talking - this isn't a crime. You can't call the police and have this person arrested, tried, and sent to prison, because interrupting people isn't a crime. This means you have to handle it yourself, whatever way you can. But if this same person walks onto your property and refuses to leave, this is a trespass, a crime, and you can absolutely call the police and have this person arrested, tried, and maybe even sent to prison. In other words, crimes engage the machinery of the state, while other unpleasant behaviors don't. Crimes are what the state defines as crimes. Trespassing is a crime, but interrupting is not, and we therefore have two entirely different ways of handling them - which people in tribal societies do not. Whatever the trouble is, whether it's bad manners or murder, they handle it themselves, the way you handle the interrupter. Evoking the power of the state isn't an option for them, because they have no state. In tribal societies, crime simply doesn't exist as a separate category of human behavior.

Note again: There's nothing cyclical about the appearance of crime in human society. For the first time in history, people were dealing with crime. And note that crime made its appearance during the dawning age of literacy. What this means is that, as soon as people started to write, they started writing laws; this is because writing enabled them to do something they hadn't been able to do before. Writing enabled them to define in exact, fixed terms the behaviors they wanted the state to regulate, punish, and suppress.

From this point on, crime would have an identity of its own as "a problem" in our culture. Like war, it was destined to stay with us East and West right up to the present moment. From this point on, crime would join war as a measure of how hot the water was becoming around our smiling frog.

Signs of distress: 1400-0 B.C.E.

The fire burned on under the cauldron of our culture, and the next doubling of our population took only fourteen hundred years. There were two hundred million humans now, at the beginning of our "Common Era" ninety-five percent or more of them belonging to our culture, East and West.

It was an era of political and military adventurism. Hammurabi made himself master of all Mesopotamia. Sesostris III of Egypt invaded Palestine and Syria. Assyria's Tiglath Pileser I extended his rule to the shores of the Mediterranean. Egyptian pharaoh Sheshonk overran Palestine. Tiglath Pileser III conquered Syria, Palestine, Israel, and Babylon. Babylon's Second Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem and Tyre. Cyrus the Great extended his reach across the whole of the civilized west, and two centuries later Alexander the Great made the same imperial reach.

It was also an era of civil revolt and assassination. The reign of Assyria's Shalmaneser ended in revolution. A revolt in Chalcidice against Athenian rule marked the beginning of the twenty-year-long conflict known as the Peloponnesian War. A few years later Mitylene in Lesbos also revolted. Spartans, Achaeans, and Arcadians organized a rebellion against Macedonian rule. A revolt in Egypt brought Ptolemy III home from his military campaign in Syria. Philip of Macedon was assassinated, as was Darius III of Persia, Seleucus III Soter, the Carthaginian general Hasdrubel, social reformer Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the Seleucid king Antiochus VIII, Chinese emperor Wong Mong, and Roman emperors Claudius and Domitian.

But these weren't the only new signs of stress observable in this age. Counterfeiting, coinage debasement, catastrophic inflation - all those nasty tricks were seen regularly now. Famine became a regular feature of life all over the civilized world, as did plague, ever symptomatic of overcrowding and poor sanitation; in 429 B.C.E. plague carried off as much as two thirds of the population of Athens. Thinkers in both China and Europe were beginning to advise people to have smaller families.

Slavery became a huge, international business, and of course would remain one down to the present moment. It's estimated that at the midpoint of the fifth century every third or fourth person in Athens was a slave. When Carthage fell to Rome in 146 B.C.E., fifty thousand of the survivors were sold as slaves. In 132 B.C.E. some seventy thousand Roman slaves rebelled; when the revolt was put down, twenty thousand were crucified, but this was far from the end of Rome's problems with its slaves.

But new signs of distress appeared in this period that were far more relevant to our purpose here tonight. For the first time in history, people were beginning to suspect that something fundamentally wrong was going on here. For the first time in history, people were beginning to feel empty, were beginning to feel that their lives were not amounting to enough, were beginning to wonder if this is all there is to life, were beginning to hanker after something vaguely more. For the first time in history, people began listening to religious teachers who promised them salvation.

It's impossible to overstate the novelty of this idea of salvation. Religion had been around in our culture for thousands of years, of course, but it had never been about salvation as we understand it or as the people of this period began to understand it. Earlier gods had been talismanic gods of kitchen and crop, mining and mist, house painting and herding, stroked at need like lucky charms, and earlier religions had been state religions, part of the apparatus of sovereignty and governance (as is apparent from their temples, built for royal ceremonies, not for popular public devotions).

Judaism, Brahmanism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and Buddhism all came into being during this period and had no existence before it. Quite suddenly, after six thousand years of totalitarian agriculture and civilization building, the people of our culture - East and West, twins of a single birth- were beginning to wonder if their lives made sense, were beginning to perceive a void in themselves that economic success and civil esteem could not fill, were beginning to imagine that something was profoundly, even innately, wrong with them.

Signs of distress: 0-1200 C.E.

The fire burned on under the cauldron of our culture, and the next doubling of our population would take only twelve hundred years. There would be four hundred million humans at the end of it, ninety-eight percent of them belonging to our culture, East and West. War, plague, famine, political corruption and unrest, crime, and economic instability were fixtures of our cultural life and would remain so. Salvationist religions had been entrenched in the East for centuries when this period began, but the great empire of the West still saluted its dozens of talismanic deities, from Aeolus to Zephyrus. Nonetheless the ordinary people of that empire - the slaves, the conquered, the peasants, the unenfranchised masses - were ready when the first great salvationist religion of the West arrived on its doorstep. It was easy for them to envision humankind as innately flawed and to envision themselves as sinners in need of rescue from eternal damnation. They were eager to despise the world and to dream of a blissful afterlife in which the poor and the humble of this world would be exalted over the proud and the powerful.

The fire burned on unwaveringly under the cauldron of our culture, but people everywhere now had salvationist religions to show them how to understand and deal with the inevitable discomfort of being alive. Adherents tend to concentrate on the differences between these religions, but I concentrate on their agreements, which are as follows: The human condition is what it is, and no amount of effort on your part will change that; it's not within your power to save your people, your friends, your parents, your children, or your spouse, but there is one person (and only one) you can save, and that's you. Nobody can save you but you, and there's nobody you can save but yourself. You can carry the word to others and they can carry the word to you, but it never comes down to anything but this, whether it's Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam: Nobody can save you but you, and there's nobody you can save but yourself. Salvation is of course the most wonderful thing you can achieve in your life - and you not only don't have to share it, it isn't even possible to share it.

As far as these religions have it worked out, if you fail of salvation, then your failure is complete, whether others succeed or not. On the other hand, if you find salvation, then your success is complete again, whether others succeed or not. Ultimately, as these religions have it, if you're saved, then literally nothing else in the entire universe matters. Your salvation is what matters. Nothing else not even my salvation (except of course, to me).

This was a new vision of what counts in the world. Forget the boiling, forget the pain. Nothing matters but you and your salvation.

Signs of distress: 1200-1700 C.E.

It was quite a vision but of course the fire burned on under the cauldron of our culture, and the next doubling of our population would take only five hundred years. There would be eight hundred million humans at the end of it, ninety-nine percent of them belonging to our culture, East and West. It's the age of bubonic plague, the Mongol Horde, the Inquisition. The first known madhouse and the first debtor's prison are opened in London. Farm laborers revolt in France in 1251 and 1358, textile workers revolt in Flanders in 1280; Wat Tyler's rebellion reduces England to anarchy in 1381, as workers of all kinds unite to demand an end to exploitation; workers riot in plague- and famine-racked Japan in 1428 and again in 1461; Russia's serfs rise in revolt in 1671 and 1672; Bohemia's serfs revolt eight years later. The Black Death arrives to devastate Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century and returns periodically for the next two centuries, carrying off tens of thousands with every outbreak; in two years alone in the seventeenth century it will kill a million people in northern Italy.

The Jews make a handy scapegoat for everyone's pain, for everything that goes wrong; France tries to expel them in 1252, later forces them to wear distinctive badges, later strips them of their possessions, later tries to expel them again; Britain tries to expel them in 1290 and 1306; Cologne tries to expel them in 1414; blamed for spreading the Black Death whenever and wherever it arrives, thousands are hanged and burned alive; Castile tries to expel them in 1492; thousands are slaughtered in Lisbon in 1506; Pope Paul III walls them off from the rest of Rome, creating the first ghetto.

The anguish of the age finds expression in flagellant movements that foster the idea that God will not be so tempted to find extravagant punishments for us (plagues, famines, wars, and so on) if we preempt him by inflicting extravagant punishments on ourselves. For a time in 1374, Aix-la-Chapelle is in the grip of a strange mania that will fill the streets with thousands of frenzied dancers. Millions will die as famine strikes Japan in 1232, Germany and Italy in 1258, England in 1294 and 1555, all of Western Europe in 1315, Lisbon in 1569, Italy in 1591, Austria in 1596, Russia in 1603, Denmark in 1650, Bengal in 1669, Japan in 1674. Syphilis and typhus make their appearance in Europe. Ergotism, a fungus food poisoning, becomes endemic in Germany, killing thousands. An unknown sweating sickness visits and revisits England, killing tens of thousands. Smallpox, typhus, and diphtheria epidemics carry off thousands.

Inquisitors develop a novel technique to combat heresy and witchcraft, torturing suspects until they implicate others, who are tortured until they implicate others, who are tortured until they implicate others, ad infinitum. The slave trade flourishes as millions of Africans are transported to the New World. I don't bother to mention war, political corruption, and crime, which continue unabated and reach new heights. There will be few to argue with Thomas Hobbes when, in 1651, he describes the life of man as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." A few years later Blaise Pascal will note that "All men naturally hate one another." The period ends in decades of economic chaos, exacerbated by revolts, famines, and epidemics.

Christianity becomes the first global salvationist religion, penetrating the Far East and the New World. At the same time it fractures. The first fracture is resisted hard, but after that, disintegration becomes commonplace.

Please don't overlook the point I'm making here. I'm not collecting signals of human evil. These are reactions to overcrowding - too many people competing for too few resources, eating rotten food, drinking fouled water, watching their families starve, watching their families fall to the plague.

Signs of distress: 1700-1900

The fire burned on under the cauldron of our culture, and the next doubling of our population would take only two hundred years. There would be one and a half billion humans at the end of it, all but half a percent of them belonging to our culture, East and West. It would be a period in which, for the first time, religious prophets would attract followers simply by predicting the imminent end of the world; in which the opium trade would become an international big business, sponsored by the East India Company and protected by British warships; in which Australia, New Guinea, India, Indochina, and Africa would be claimed or carved up as colonies by the major powers of Europe; in which indigenous peoples all around the world would be wiped out in the millions by diseases brought to them by Europeans - measles, pellagra, whooping cough, smallpox, cholera - with millions more herded onto reservations or killed outright to make room for white expansion.

This isn't to say that native peoples alone were suffering. Sixty million Europeans died of smallpox in the eighteenth century alone. Tens of millions died in cholera epidemics. I'd need ten minutes to list all the dozens of fatal appearances that plague, typhus, yellow fever, scarlet fever, and influenza made during this period. And anyone who doubts the integral connection between agriculture and famine need only examine the record of this period: crop failure and famine, crop failure and famine, crop failure and famine, again and again all over the civilized world. The numbers are staggering. Ten million starved to death in Bengal, 1769. Two million in Ireland and Russia in 1845 and 1846. Nearly fifteen million in China and India from 1876 to 1879. In France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Japan, and elsewhere, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands died in other famines too numerous to mention.

As the cities became more crowded, human anguish reached highs that would have been unimaginable in previous ages, with hundreds of millions inhabiting slums of inconceivable squalor, prey to disease borne by rats and contaminated water, without education or means of betterment. Crime flourished as never before and was generally punished by public maiming, branding, flogging, or death; imprisonment as an alternate form of punishment developed only late in the period. Mental illness also flourished as never before - madness, derangement, whatever you choose to call it. No one knew what to do with lunatics; they were typically incarcerated alongside criminals, chained to the walls, flogged, forgotten.

Economic instability remained high, and its consequences were felt more widely than ever before. Three years of economic chaos in France led directly to the 1789 revolution that claimed some four hundred thousand victims burned, shot, drowned, or guillotined. Periodic market collapses and depressions wiped out hundreds of thousands of businesses and reduced millions to starvation.

The age also ushered in the Industrial Revolution, of course, but this didn't bring ease and prosperity to the masses; rather it brought utterly heartless and grasping exploitation, with women and small children working ten, twelve, and more hours a day for starvation wages in sweatshops, factories, and mines. You can find the atrocities for yourself if you're not familiar with them. In 1787 it was reckoned that French workers labored as much as sixteen hours a day and spent sixty percent of their wages on a diet consisting of little more than bread and water. It was the middle of the nineteenth century before the British Parliament limited children's work days to ten hours. Hopeless and frustrated, people everywhere became rebellious, and governments everywhere answered with systematic repression, brutality, and tyranny. General uprisings, peasant uprisings, colonial uprisings, slave uprisings, worker uprisings - there were hundreds, I can't even list them all. East and West, twins of a common birth, it was the age of revolutions. Tens of millions of people died in them.

As ordinary, habitual interactions between governed and governors, revolt and repression were new, you understand characteristic signs of distress of the age.

The wolf and the wild boar were deliberately exterminated in Europe during this period. The great auk of Edley Island, near Iceland, was hunted to extinction for its feathers in 1844, becoming the first species to be wiped out for purely commercial purposes. In North America, in order to facilitate railway construction and undermine the food base of hostile native populations, professional hunters destroyed the bison herds, wiping out as many as three million in a single year; only a thousand were left by 1893.

In this age, people no longer went to war to defend their religious beliefs. They still had them, still clung to them, but the theological divisions and disputes that once seemed so murderously important had been rendered irrelevant by more pressing material concerns. The consolations of religion are one thing, but jobs, fair wages, decent living and working conditions, freedom from oppression, and some faint hope of social and economic betterment are another.

It would not, I think, be too fanciful to suggest that the hopes that had been invested in religion in former ages were in this age being invested in revolution and political reform. The promise of "pie in the sky when you die" was no longer enough to make the misery of life in the cauldron endurable. In 1843 the young Karl Marx called religion "the opium of the people." From the greater distance of another century and a half, however, it's clear that religion was in fact no longer very effective as a narcotic.

Signs of distress: 1900-1960

The fire burned on under the cauldron of our culture, and the next doubling of our population would take only sixty years - only sixty. There would be three billion humans at the end of it, all but perhaps two-tenths of a percent of them belonging to our culture, East and West.

What do I need to say about the water steaming in our cauldron in this era? Is it boiling yet, do you think? Does the first global economic collapse, beginning in 1929, look like a sign of distress to you? Do two cataclysmic world wars look like signs of distress to you? Stand off a few thousand miles and watch from outer space as sixty-five million people are slaughtered on battlefields or blasted to bits in bombing strikes, as another hundred million count themselves lucky to escape merely blinded, maimed, or crippled. I'm talking about a number of people equal to the entire human population in the Golden Age of classical Greece. I'm talking about the number of people you would destroy if today you dropped hydrogen bombs on Berlin, Paris, Rome, London, New York City, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.

I think the water is hot, ladies and gentlemen. I think the frog is boiling.

Signs of distress: 1960-1996

The next doubling of our population occurred in only thirty-six years, bringing us to the present moment, when there are six billion humans on this planet, all but a few scattered millions belonging to our culture, East and West.

The voices in our long chorus of distress have been added a few at a time, age by age. First came war: war as a social fixture, war as a way of life. For two thousand years or more, war seems to have been the only voice in the chorus. But before long it was joined by crime: crime as a social fixture, as a way of life. And then there was corruption: corruption as a social fixture, as a way of life. Before long, these voices were joined by slavery: slavery as world trade and as a social fixture. Soon revolt followed: citizens and slaves rising up to vent their rage and pain. Next, as population pressures gained in intensity, famine and plague found their voices and began to sing everywhere in our culture. Vast classes of the poor began to be exploited pitilessly for their labor. Drugs joined slavery as world trade. The laboring classes - the so-called dangerous classes - rose up in rebellion. The entire world economy collapsed. Global industrial powers played at world domination and genocide.

And then came us: 1960 to the present.

Of what does our voice sing in the chorus of distress? For some four decades the water has been boiling around the frog. One by one, thousand by thousand, million by million, its cells have shut down, unequal to the task of holding on to life.

What are we looking at here? I'll give you a name and you can tell me if I've got it right. I'm prepared to name it ... cultural collapse. This is what we sing of in the chorus of distress now - not instead of all the rest, but in addition to all the rest. This is our unique contribution to our culture's howl of pain. For the very first time in the history of the world, we bewail the collapse of everything we know and understand, the collapse of the structure on which everything has been built from the beginning of our culture until now.

The frog is dead - and we can't imagine what this means for us or for our children. We're terrified.

John Zerzan: Community

2005-11-17T13:54:00.000-08:00

Com-mu-ni-ty n. 1. a body of people having the same interests. 2. [Ecol.] an aggregate of organisms with mutual relations. 3. a concept invoked to establish solidarity, often when the basis for such affiliation is absent or when the actual content of that affiliation contradicts the stated political goal of solidarity.

Community, by which one obviously means more than, say, neighborhood, is a very elusive term but a continuing touchstone of radical value. In fact, all manner of folks resort to it, from the pacifist encampments near nuclear test sites to "serve the people" leftists with their sacrifice-plus-manipulation approach to the proto-fascist Afrikaaner settlers. It is invoked for a variety of purposes or goals, but as a liberatory notion is a fiction. Everyone feels the absence of community, because human fellowship must struggle, to even remotely exist, against what "community" is in reality. The nuclear family, religion, nationality, work, school, property, the specialism of roles - some combination of these seems to comprise every surviving community since the imposition of civilization. So we are dealing with an illusion, and to argue that some qualitatively higher form of community is allowed to exist within civilization is to affirm civilization. Positivity furthers the lie that the authentically social can co-exist with domestication. In this regard, what really accompanies domination, as community, is at best middle-class, respect-the-system protest.

Fifth Estate, for example, undercuts its (partial) critique of civilization by upholding community and ties to it in its every other sentence. At times it seems that the occasional Hollywood film (e.g., Emerald Forest, Dances With Wolves) outdoes our anti-authoritarian journals in showing that a liberatory solidarity springs from non-civilization and its combat with the "community" of industrial modernity.

Jacques Camatte discussed capital's movement from the stage of formal domination to that of real domination. But there appear to be significant grounds from which to project the continuing erosion of support for existing community and a desire for genuine solidarity and freedom. As Fredy Perlman put it, near the end of his exceptional Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!: "What is known is that Leviathan, the great artifice, single and world-embracing for the first time, in His-story, is decomposing ... It is a good time for people to let go of its sanity, its masks and armors, and go mad, for they are already being ejected from its pretty polis."

The refusal of community might be termed a self defeating isolation but it appears preferable, healthier, than declaring our allegiance to the daily fabric of an increasingly self-destructive world. Magnified alienation is not a condition chosen by those who insist on the truly social over the falsely communal. It is present in any case, due to the content of community. Opposition to the estrangement of civilized, pacified existence should at least amount to naming that estrangement instead of celebrating it by calling it community.

The defense of community is a conservative gesture that faces away from the radical break required. Why defend that to which we are held hostage? In truth, there is no community. And only by abandoning what is passed off in its name can we move on to redeem a vision of communion and vibrant connectedness in a world that bears no resemblance to this one. Only a negative "community," based explicitly on contempt for the categories of existent community, is legitimate and appropriate to our aims.

(From Insurgent Desire.)

Kirkpatrick Sale: The Myth of Progress

2005-11-17T13:35:00.000-08:00

I can remember vividly sitting at the dinner table arguing with my father about progress, using upon him all the experience and wisdom I had gathered at the age of fifteen. Of course we live in an era of progress, I said, just look at cars - how clumsy and unreliable and slow they were in the old days, how sleek and efficient and speedy they are now. He raised an eyebrow, just a little. And what has been the result of having all these wonderful new sleek and efficient and speedy cars, he asked. I was taken aback. I searched for a way to answer. He went on.

How many people die each year as a result of these speedy cars, how many are maimed and crippled? What is life like for the people who produce them, on those famous assembly lines, the same routinized job hour after hour, day after day, like Chaplin's film? How many fields and forests and even towns and villages have been paved over so that these cars can get to all the places they want to get to - and park there? Where does all the gasoline come from, and at what cost, and what happens when we burn it and exhaust it? Before I could stammer out a response - thankfully - he went on to tell me about an article written on the subject of progress, a concept I had never really thought of, by one of his Cornell colleagues, the historian Carl Becker, a man I had never heard of, in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, a resource I had never come across. Read it, he said.

I'm afraid it was another fifteen years before I did, though in the meantime I came to learn the wisdom of my father's skepticism as the modern world repeatedly threw up other examples of invention and advancement - television, electric carving knife, microwave oven, nuclear power - that showed the same problematic nature of progress, taken in the round and negatives factored in, as did the automobile. When I finally got to Becker's masterful essay, in the course of a wholesale re-examination of modernity, it took no scholarly armament of his to convince me of the peculiar historical provenance of the concept of progress and its status not as an inevitability, a force as given as gravity as my youthful self imagined, but as a cultural construct invented for all practical purposes in the Renaissance and advancing the propaganda of capitalism. It was nothing more than a serviceable myth, a deeply held unexamined construct - like all useful cultural myths - that promoted the idea of regular and eternal improvement of the human condition, largely through the exploitation of nature and the acquisition of material goods.

Of course by now it is no longer such an arcane perception. Many fifteen-year-olds today, seeing clearly the perils with which modern technology has accompanied its progress, some of which threaten the very continuance of the human species, have already worked out for themselves what's wrong with the myth. It is hard to learn that forests are being cut down at the rate of 56 million acres a year, that desertification threatens 8 billion acres of land worldwide, that all of the world's seventeen major fisheries are in decline and stand a decade away from virtual exhaustion, that 26 million tons of topsoil is lost to erosion and pollution every year, and believe that this world's economic system, whose functioning exacts this price, is headed in the right direction and that direction should be labeled "progress."

E.E. Cummings once called progress a "comfortable disease" of modern "manunkind," and so it has been for some. But at any time since the triumph of capitalism only a minority of the world's population could be said to be really living in comfort, and that comfort, continuously threatened, is achieved at considerable expense.

Today of the approximately 6 billion people in the world, it is estimated that at least a billion live in abject poverty, lives cruel, empty, and mercifully short. Another 2 billion eke out life on a bare subsistence level, usually sustained only by one or another starch, the majority without potable drinking water or sanitary toilets. More than 2 million more live at the bottom edges of the money economy but with incomes less than $5,000 a year and no property or savings, no net worth to pass on to their children.

That leaves less than a billion people who even come close to struggling for lives of comfort, with jobs and salaries of some regularity, and a quite small minority at the top of that scale who could really be said to have achieved comfortable lives; in the world, some 350 people can be considered (U.S. dollar) billionaires (with slightly more than 3 million millionaires), and their total net worth is estimated to exceed that of 45 per cent of the world's population.

This is progress? A disease such a small number can catch? And with such inequity, such imbalance?

In the U.S., the most materially advanced nation in the world and long the most ardent champion of the notion of progress, some 40 million people live below the official poverty line and another 20 million or so below the line adjusted for real costs; 6 million or so are unemployed, more than 30 million said to be too discouraged to look for work, and 45 million are in "disposable" jobs, temporary and part-time, without benefits or security. The top 5 percent of the population owns about two-thirds of the total wealth; 60 percent own no tangible assets or are in debt; in terms of income, the top 20 percent earn half the total income, the bottom 20 percent less than 4 percent of it.

All this hardly suggests the sort of material comfort progress is assumed to have provided. Certainly many in the U.S. and throughout the industrial world live at levels of wealth undreamed of in ages past, able to call forth hundreds of servant-equivalents at the flip of a switch or turn of a key, and probably a third of this "first world" population could be said to have lives of a certain amount of ease and convenience. Yet it is a statistical fact that it is just this segment that most acutely suffers from the true "comfortable disease," what I would call affluenza: heart disease, stress, overwork, family dysfunction, alcoholism, insecurity, anomie, psychosis, loneliness, impotence, alienation, consumerism, and coldness of heart.

Leopold Kohr, the Austrian economist whose seminal work, The Breakdown of Nations, is an essential tool for understanding the failures of political progress in the last half-millennium, often used to close his lectures with this analogy.

Suppose we are on a progress-train, he said, running full speed ahead in the approved manner, fueled by the rapacious growth and resource depletion and cheered on by highly rewarded economists. What if we then discover that we are headed for a precipitous fall to a certain disaster just a few miles ahead when the tracks end at an uncrossable gulf? Do we take advice of the economists to put more fuel into the engines so that we go at an ever-faster rate, presumable hoping that we build up a head of steam so powerful that it can land us safely on the other side of the gulf; or do we reach for the brakes and come to a screeching if somewhat tumble-around halt as quickly as possible?

Progress is the myth that assures us that full-speed-ahead is never wrong. Ecology is the discipline that teaches us that it is disaster.

Before the altar of progress, attended by its dutiful acolytes of science and technology, modern industrial society has presented an increasing abundance of sacrifices from the natural world, imitating on a much grander and more devastating scale the religious rites of earlier empires built upon similar conceits about the domination of nature. Now, it seems, we are prepared to offer up even the very biosphere itself.

No one knows how resilient the biosphere is, how much damage it is able to absorb before it stops functioning - or at least functioning well enough to keep the human species alive. But in recent years some very respectable and authoritative voices have suggested that, if we continue the relentless rush of progress that is so stressing the earth on which it depends, we will reach that point in the quite near future. The Worldwatch Institute, which issues annual accountings of such things, has warned that there is not one life-support system on which the biosphere depends for its existence - healthy air, water, soil, temperature, and the like - that is not now severely threatened and in fact getting worse, decade by decade.

Not long ago a gathering of elite environmental scientists and activists in Morelia, Mexico, published a declaration warning of "environmental destruction" and expressing unanimous concern "that life on our planet is in grave danger." And recently the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement endorsed by more than a hundred Nobel laureates and 1,600 members of national academies of science all over the world, proclaimed a "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" stating that the present rates of environmental assault and population increase cannot continue without "vast human misery" and a planet so "irretrievably mutilated" that "it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know."

The high-tech global economy will not listen; cannot listen. It continues apace its expansion and exploitation. Thanks to it, human beings annually use up some 40% of all the net photosynthetic energy available to the planet Earth, though we are but a single species of comparatively insignificant numbers. Thanks to it, the world economy has grown by more than five times over in the last 50 years and is continuing at a dizzying pace to use up the world's resources, create unabating pollution and waste, and increase the enormous inequalities within and between all nations of the world.

Suppose an Objective Observer were to measure the success of Progress - that is to say, the capital-P myth that ever since the Enlightenment has nurtured and guided and presided over that happy marriage of science and capitalism that has produced modern industrial civilization.

Has it been, on the whole, better or worse for the human species? Other species? Has it brought humans more happiness than there was before? More justice? More equality? More efficiency? And if its ends have proven to be more benign than not, what of its means? At what price have its benefits been won? And are they sustainable?

The Objective Observer would have to conclude that the record is mixed, at best. On the plus side, there is no denying that material prosperity has increased for about a sixth of the world's humans, for some beyond the most avaricious dreams of kings and potentates of the past. The world has developed systems of transportation and communication that allow people, goods, and information to be exchanged on a scale and at a swiftness never before possible. And for maybe a third of these humans longevity has been increased, along with a general improvement in health and sanitation that has allowed the expansion of human numbers by about tenfold in the last three centuries.

On the minus side, the costs have been considerable. The impact upon the earth's species and systems to provide prosperity for a billion people has been, as we have seen, devastatingly destructive - only one additional measure of which is the fact that it has meant the permanent extinction of perhaps 500,000 species this century alone. The impact upon the remaining five-sixths of the human species has been likewise destructive, as most of them have seen their societies colonized or displaced, their economies wrenched and shattered, and their environments transformed for the worse in the course of it, driving them into an existence of deprivation and misery that is almost certainly worse than they ever knew, however difficult their times past, before the advent of industrial society.

And even the billion whose living standards use up what is effectively 100 percent of the world's available resources each year to maintain, and who might be therefore assumed to be happy as a result, do not in fact seem to be so. No social indices in any advanced society suggest that people are more content than they were a generation ago, various surveys indicate that the "misery quotient" in most countries has increased, and considerable real-world evidence (such as rising rates of mental illness, drugs, crime, divorce, and depression) argues that the results of material enrichment have not included much individual happiness.

Indeed, on a larger scale, almost all that Progress was supposed to achieve has failed to come about, despite the immense amount of money and technology devoted to its cause. Virtually all of the dreams that have adorned it over the years, particularly in its most robust stages in the late 19th century and in the past twenty years of computerdom, have dissipated as utopian fancies - those that have not, like nuclear power, chemical agriculture, manifest destiny, and the welfare state, turned into nightmares. Progress has not, even in this most progressive nation, eliminated poverty (numbers of poor have increased and real income has declined for 25 years), or drudgery (hours of employment have increased, as has work within the home, for both sexes), or ignorance (literacy rates have declined for fifty years, test scores have declined), or disease (hospitalization, illness, and death rates have all increased since 1980).

It seems quite simple: beyond prosperity and longevity, and those limited to a minority, and each with seriously damaging environmental consequences, progress does not have a great deal going for it. For its adherents, of course, it is probably true that it doesn't have to; because it is sufficient that wealth is meritorious and affluence desirable and longer life positive. The terms of the game for them are simple: material betterment for as many as possible, as fast as possible, and nothing else, certainly not considerations of personal morality or social cohesion or spiritual depth or participatory government, seems much to matter.

But the Objective Observer is not so narrow, and is able to see how deep and deadly are the shortcomings of such a view. The Objective Observer could only conclude that since the fruits of Progress are so meager, the price by which they have been won is far too high, in social, economic, political, and environmental terms, and that neither societies nor ecosystems of the world will be able to bear the cost for more than a few decades longer, if they have not already been damaged beyond redemption.

Herbert Read, the British philosopher and critic, once wrote that "only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines." It is a profound insight, and he underscored it by adding that "only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them."

An apprenticeship to nature - now there's a myth a stable and durable society could live by.

(From John Filiss' Primitivism web site.)

Bob Black: Primitive Affluence: A Postscript to Sahlins

2005-11-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

The Original Affluent Society by Marshall Sahlins is an essay of wide-ranging erudition whose persuasive power largely derives from two extended examples: the Australian Aborigines and the !Kung Bushmen. The Australian instance, omitted here, is developed from a variety of 19th and 20th century written sources. The data on the Bushmen - or San, as they call themselves - were the result of fieldwork in the early 1960's by Richard Borshay Lee, an anthropologist. Lee has subsequently published a full monograph on work in a !Kung San band in which he augments, recalculates and further explains the statistics relied on by Sahlins. As finally marshalled, the evidence supports the affluence thesis more strongly than ever - and includes a couple of surprises.

"Why should we plant," asks Lee's informant, Xashe, "when there are so many mongongos in the world?" Why indeed? Originally, Lee studied the San equivalent of what is conventionally accounted work in industrial society - hunting and gathering in their case, wage labor in ours. This was the comparison Sahlins cited. In terms of our standard eight-hour workday, a San adult works between 2.2 and 2.4 hours a day - well below the provisional four hour figure Sahlins references. Not that the San work a seven- or even a five-day week at these ludicrously low levels of labor, for they spend "less than half their days in subsistence and enjoy more leisure time than the members of many agricultural and industrial societies." For many Lee might better have said any. More often than not, a !Kung San is visiting friends and kin at other camps or receiving them in his own.

Upon returning to the field, Lee broadened his definition of work to encompass all "those activities that contribute to the direct appropriation of food, water or materials from the environment" - adding to subsistence activity tool-making and fixing and housework (mainly food preparation). These activities didn't increase the San workload as much as their equivalents in our sort of society increase ours - relatively we fall even further behind. Per diem the manufacture and maintenance of tools takes 64 minutes for men, 45 minutes for women. "Housework" for the San means mostly cracking nuts, plus cooking - most adults of both sexes and older children crack their own mongongo nuts, the only activity where women do more work than men: 2.2 hours a day for men, 3.2 hours for women. Nor are these figures fudged by unreported child labor. Until about age fifteen San children do virtually no work, and if they are female they continue to do little work until marriage, which may be some years later. Our adolescents fare worse at McDonald's, not to forget that women and children comprised the workforce for the brutal beginnings of industrialization in Britain and America.

It is often asserted that in most societies women work more than men and this is probably, in general, true. In a perhaps not unrelated development, women in all known societies wield less political power than men, in fact usually none whatsoever. ... In San society, however, men work more than women. Men do one-third more subsistence work than women, although they provide only 40% of caloric intake.

When the full tally of work as Lee expansively defines it is taken, the average [San] workweek is 44.5 hours for men, 40.1 hours for women.

Lee's original figures relied on by Sahlins were startling enough, but the later data enhance their value by allowing comparisons of housework as well as subsistence work. Our world of work has a dirty secret: wage-work rests on the indispensable prop of unpaid "shadow work." (Illich 1981) The arduous toil of housewives - cleaning, cooking, shopping, childcare - is so much uncompensated drudgery literally unaccounted for in statistics on work. With us as much as with the San such work is usually women's work, [but] to a much greater extent among us. How many husbands perform even two hours of housework a day? How many wives, like their San counterparts, less than three? Nor does San society exhibit any sight so sorry as the majority of married women working for wages or salaries in addition to the housework they always did - and at levels of pay which still reflect sexual inequality.

Lee's later figures strengthen the affluence thesis in other ways - for instance, caloric intake, previously underestimated, is upped to a more than adequate level. The surplus is stored as body fat against occasional shortages, fed to the dogs or consumed to sustain people's efforts at all-night trance-healing dances occurring one to four times a month. And despite the staggering variety of plant and animal sources in their diet, the San do not eat many items which other peoples find inedible. Their work yields them so many consumer goods that the San as a society can and do exercise consumer choice. To assign such societies to the category "subsistence economy" is not only foolish phraseology - what economy is not a subsistence economy? - as Pierre Clastres argues, it passes an adverse value judgment in the guise of a statement of fact. The implication is that these societies have failed to be other than what they are, as if it were unthinkable anybody might prefer a leisurely life bereft of bosses, priests, princes and paupers. The San have a choice. In the 1960's and 1970's, amidst a worsening political situation in Botswana and neighboring Namibia, many San gave up foraging for employment by Bantu cattle ranchers or South African farmers. All along they were able but not willing to work for wages.

As Ivan Ilich observes, "Economists understand about work about as much as alchemists about gold." In positing as twin fatalities infinite wants and finite (scarce) resources, they erect a dismal science on axioms every sensible person rejects out of hand. By their lifeways the hunter-gatherers give the lie to the Hobbesian hoax. Resources are bountiful and the San consume them with gusto, but since they are rational hedonists, not ascetic madmen, the San find satisfaction in satiety: they have worked enough if there is plenty for everybody. So scandalous are the foragers for the economists and their addicts that they call forth paroxysms of pulpit-thumping prejudice, notably by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard and, in a hostile review of my book espousing the abolition of work, David Ramsey Steele. Liberty (as it styles itself) suppressed 90% of my rejoinder to Steele. Let me retaliate by quoting him only in quoting myself:

Steele, with unintended humor, explains why hunter-gatherers loaf most of the time: "If you have one animal carcass to keep you going for the next week or two, it's a waste of effort to get another one, and what else is there to do but swap stories?" The poor devils are too rich to work. Cruelly denied the opportunity to accumulate capital, what else is there for the benighted savages to do but create, converse, dance, sing, feast and fuck? (Liberty, May 1989)

Behind Steele's braying ethnocentrism is a fear of wildness and wilderness, a yearning fear for the call from the Forest, a fear of freedom itself.

Foragers like the San and the Australians are not the only prosperous primitives with ample leisure. Gardeners who practice shifting ("slash and burn") cultivation work a lot less than we moderns. In the Philippines the horticultural Hanunoo annually devote 500 to 1,000 hours to the subsistence activity that sustains one adult. At the higher figure, that works out to less than 2 hours and 45 minutes a day. Gardening, augmented by hunting and gathering, was the mode of production among most of the Indians in eastern North America when the Europeans arrived. The clash of cultures has been regarded from many perspectives, but not as insistently as it should be as a collision between worlds of work.

Far from living hand-to-mouth, the Indians produced a surplus - had they not, the settlers would have starved at Jamestown and Plymouth. Far from exhausting themselves scrounging for survival, the impression the Indians left on early English observers like Captain John Smith was that their life was a paradise of all but workless plenty. He thought the settlers might enjoy a three-day workweek featuring the "pretty sport" of fishing.

In 1643, the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay received the submission of two Rhode Island sachems. "Giving them to understand upon what terms they must be received under us," as Governor John Winthrop put it, the Indians were told "Not to do any unnecessary workd on the Lord's day within the gates of proper towns." Not to worry, replied the sachems: "It is a small thing for us to rest on that day, for we have not much to do any day, and therefore we will forbear on that day."

According to one of the Roanoke colonists, to feed one Virginia Indian enough corn for a year required annually 24 hours of work. (Morgan 1975) Of course the Indians ate more than corn; New England Indians enjoyed an abundant, varied "diet for superb health," more nutritious and less monotonous than what became standard fare in, say, the back country of the South; or in later industrial tenements.

"Whatever else early America was," according to recent scholarship, "it was a world of work." (Innes 1988) Indian America was anything but, as that Roanoke colonist was not the only one to notice. No wonder that he and the others apparently went native, abandoning the earliest English settlement, leaving only a message carved on a tree that they were gone "To Croatan." These first defectors from civilized toil to barbarous ease were not to be the last. Throughout the colonial period, hundreds of Euro-American agriculturalists joined the Indians or, captured in war, refused to return when peace came. Women and children were inordinately likely to take to the Indian life-style, readily casting off their restrictive roles in white society, but adult males also sought acceptance among the heathen. Without a doubt work was a major motivation for the choices they made. At Jamestown, John Smith enforced a regimen of labor discipline so harsh as to approach concentration camp conditions. In 1613, some of the English were "apointed to be hanged Some burned Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to death." Their crime? An historian recounts that all "had run away to live with the Indians and had been recaptured." (Morgan 1975)

The anthropology of work does not suggest any reduction in the quantity or increase in the quality of work in societies of greater complexity. The trend or tendency is rather the other way. The hunt for Virginia Indian men, as for their San counterparts, was more like "sport" than work, but their wives seemed to have worked more than San women if less than their white contemporaries. On the other hand, the gardeners work perhaps even less than the San but some of the work, like weeding and clearing new fields, is more arduous.

The watershed, however, is the onset of civilization with its government, cities, and class divisions. Peasants work more because they are compelled to: because they have rents, taxes, and tithes to pay. Later the laboring class pays all that plus profits too, which are taken by employers whose interests lie in prolonging and intensifying work. There is, in the words of the Firesign Theatre, "harder work for everyone, and more of it too." Consider how many weeks of subsistence work an Englishman had to do over the centuries: in 1495, 10; in 1564, 20; in 1684, 48; and in 1726, 52. (Eyer & Sterling, Review of Radical Political Economics, Spring 1977) With progress, work worsens.

So it was with the American worker. In the eighteenth century, there was a general trend for labor, slave and free alike, formerly seasonal, to become continual. Technical progress, as usual, made matters worse. Seamen, for instance, were something of an avant garde of wage-labor. During the eighteenth century, the size of ships and their capacity for cargo greatly increased and the work became heavier and also harder to do. Seamen responded by collective action including strikes - they coined the word, they would strike the sails - mutinies, and the ultimate, piracy, the seizure of the workplace. Pirates simplified the management hierarchy, elected their captains, replaced wages with cooperative ownership and risk-sharing, and vastly reduced the hours of work since a pirate ship had a crew five times larger than the merchantmen they preyed upon. Aversion to work was a main motivation. For one pirate, "the love of Drink and a Lazy Life" were "Stronger Motives with him than Gold." An admiral who impressed some suspected pirates into service on his man-of-war thought to rehabilitate them, "to learn them ... working" which "they turned Rogues to avoid." The governor of the Bahamas said, "for work they mortally hate it," and another resident of those islands concurred: "Working does not agree with them." (Rediker, Innes 1988)

It goes without saying that the next turn of the wheel, industrialization, made for more and more monotonous work than workers as a class ever endured before. There were no volunteers in the industrial army. The earliest American factory operatives were not even, in most cases, formally free: they were women and children sent to work by their lawful superiors, their husbands and fathers. The factories of the North, like the plantations of the South, rested, so to speak, on servile labor. For a time, much later, the hours of work did decline as organized labor and assorted reformers made shorter hours a part of their agenda. The eight-hour day which we officially enjoy is the cause for which the Haymarket anarchists of 1886 paid with their lives. But the new deal in legislating a forty hour week scotched proposals by then-Senator Hugo Black (later a Supreme Court Justice) for a thirty hour week and the unions dropped shorter hours from their shopping lists. In recent years, workers have dropped unionization from their shopping list. Everything that goes around, comes around.

Not only have the hours of work not diminished, for all the technological progress of the last half century, the years of our lives devoted to work have actually gone up. The reason is that many more people are living to retirement age, which means that the system is getting more years of work out of us: the average American male works eight more years than his counterpart in 1900. In the eighteenth century a worker ended his days, if he lived so long, in the poor-house; in the twentieth, if he lives so long, in the nursing home, lonely and tortured by medical technology. Progress.

I have saved the worst for last: women's work. Today's working women (most women now work, outside the home, as employees) are worse off working than they have ever been. They still do most of the household work they have done since industrialism, and additionally they do wage-work. Their entry in force into the workforce (they were working all along, but unpaid labor, insane to say, isn't counted as work) in the last twenty years has greatly increased their total toil and, as a result, the total toil altogether (since nobody thinks men are working less). Even if sex discrimination were entirely eradicated, which is far from imminent, equalized women workers would still shoulder an unequal load of what Ilich calls "shadow work," "the consumer's unpaid toil that adds to a commodity an incremental value that is necessary to make this commodity useful to the consuming unit itself." Civil rights laws do not - can not - penetrate the household. The history of work, if it has any evolving logic, is a history of the increasing imposition of exhausting toil on women. Any feminism which is not implacably anti-work is fraudulent.

The world of civilization, the world of history is above all, objectively and subjectively, a world of work. The jury is in on the verdict workers pass on what work means to them, subjectively: it hurts and they hate it. Objectively it just gets worse in terms of the ways it might imaginably get better. Since the late nineteenth century, most work has been "de-skilled," standardized, moronized, fragmented, isolated, policed, and made secure against piratical expropriation. To take and hold even one workplace the workers will have to expropriate them all.

Even hard work could be easier, and easier to take, than the bossed work most of us do. In Liberia the Kpelle, for instance, grow rice, which is work - strenuous work - by any definition. But these "neolithic farmers" conduct their work in a way that the organizers of our work can't or won't even consider. Lii-nee', "joy," axiomatically accompanies any work the Kpelle do or they won't do any. Work is conducted in groups to the accompaniment of musicians whose rhythms pace the strokes of their hoes and machetes. Intermittently a woman throws down her hoe and dances to entertain her companions and relax muscles made sore by repetitious movements. At the end of the day the workers drink palm wine and sing and dance together. If this is not Sahlin's original affluent society, it is still an improvement on our allegedly affluent one, workwise. The anthropologist adds that the government has compelled the Kpelle to switch from dry rice-farming to wet (irrigated) rice farming since it is more productive. They demur, but not out of any inherent conservatism: they accepted the advice of the same experts to raise cocoa as a cash crop. The point is that "paddy-rice cultivation will be just plain work without the vital leavening of gossip, singing and dance" - the traces of play which have been all but leached out of most modernized work.

As the 80's ended and the 90's commenced, working hours in America, where millions are without work, went up. The new two-income family has a lower standard of living than the one-income family of the 1950's. Housework has hardly been diminished by 20th century technology. Time studies suggest 56 hours of housework a week in 1912; 60 in 1918; 61 for families in 1925. In 1931, college educated housewives in big cities worked 48 hours a week, but by 1965 the average for all housewives was 54 hours, with college educated women putting in 19 more minutes a day than those with grade school educations. By 1977, wives without outside employment worked 50 hours a week, those with jobs, 35 hours excluding wage-work, which at 75 hours "adds up to a working week that even sweat shops cannot match." (Cowan 1983)

Primitive productive life was neither nasty nor brutish, nor is it even necessarily short. Significant proportions of San men and women live past age sixty; the population structure is closer to that of the United States than to a typical Third World country. With us, heart disease is the leading cause of death, and stress, a major risk factor, is closely related to job satisfaction. Our sources of stress hardly exist among hunter-gatherers. (Cancer, the second greatest killer, is of course a consequence of industrialization.)

"Working conditions" for hunters can be hazardous, yet civilized work does not even here exhibit a clear superiority, especially when it is recalled that many of the 2-1/2 million American motoring fatalities to date involve one or more participants in wage-work (police, cabbies, teamsters etc) or shadow work like commuting and shopping.

Sahlins had already remarked upon the superior "quality of working life" enjoyed by primitive producers, to borrow a catchphrase from the pseudo-humanist experts in job redesign and job enrichment. In addition to shorter hours, "flextime" and the more reliable "safety net" afforded by general food sharing, forager's work is more satisfying than most modern work. We awaken to the alarm clock; they sleep a lot, night and day. We are sedentary in our buildings in our polluted cities; they move about breathing the fresh air of the open country. We have bosses; they have companions. Our work typically implicates one, or at most a few hyper-specialized skills, if any; theirs combines handwork and brainwork in a versatile variety of activities, exactly as the great utopians called for. Our "commute" is dead time, and unpaid to boot; they cannot even leave the campsite without "reading" the landscape in a potentially productive way. Our children are subject to compulsory school attendance laws; their unsupervised offspring play at adult activities until almost imperceptibly they take their place doing them. They are the makers and masters of their simple yet effective toolkits; we work for our machines, and this will soon be no metaphor, according to an expert from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: "In general, robots will work for men, but there may be exceptions in which some robots are higher in the hierarchy than some humans." The last word in equal employment opportunity.

(From John Filiss' Primitivism web site.)

Marshall Sahlins: The Original Affluent Society

2005-11-17T11:21:00.000-08:00

(Excerpted from the book, Stone-Age Economics, by Marshall Sahlins.)

Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it, the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.

There are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way - based on the concept of market economies - states that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although they can be improved. Thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behaviour: their "prodigality" for example - the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own.

Destutt de Tracy, "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire" though he might have been, at least forced Marx to agree that "in poor nations the people are comfortable", whereas in rich nations, "they are generally poor".

Sources of the Misconception

"Mere subsistence economy," "limited leisure save in exceptional circumstances," "incessant quest for food," "meagre and relatively unreliable" natural resources, "absence of an economic surplus," "maximum energy from a maximum number of people" - so runs the fair average anthropological opinion of hunting and gathering.

The traditional dismal view of the hunters' fix goes back to the time Adam Smith was writing, and probably to a time before anyone was writing. Probably it was one of the first distinctly neolithic prejudices, an ideological appreciation of the hunter's capacity to exploit the earth's resources most congenial to the historic task of depriving him of the same. We must have inherited it with the seed of Jacob, which "spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north", to the disadvantage of Esau who was the elder son and cunning hunter, but in a famous scene deprived of his birthright.

Current low opinions of the hunting-gathering economy need not be laid to neolithic ethnocentrism. Bourgeois ethnocentrism will do as well. The existing business economy will promote the same dim conclusions about the hunting life. Is it so paradoxical to contend that hunters have affluent economies, their absolute poverty notwithstanding? Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world's wealthiest peoples.

The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely without parallel. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behaviour of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity.

The entrepreneur is confronted with alternative investments of a finite capital, the worker (hopefully) with alternative choices of remunerative employ, and the consumer... Consumption is a double tragedy: what begins in inadequacy will end in deprivation. Bringing together an international division of labour, the market makes available a dazzling array of products: all these Good Things within a man's reach - but never all within his grasp. Worse, in this game of consumer free choice, every acquisition is simultaneously a deprivation, for every purchase of something is a foregoing of something else, in general only marginally less desirable, and in some particulars more desirable, that could have been had instead. That sentence of "life at hard labour" was passed uniquely upon us. Scarcity is the judgment decreed by our economy. And it is precisely from this anxious vantage that we look back upon hunters. But if modern man, with all his technological advantages, still lacks the wherewithal, what chance has the naked savage with his puny bow and arrow? Having equipped the hunter with bourgeois impulses and palaeolithic tools, we judge his situation hopeless in advance.

Yet scarcity is not an intrinsic property of technical means. It is a relation between means and ends. We should entertain the empirical possibility that hunters are in business for their health, a finite objective, and that bow and arrow are adequate to that end.

The anthropological disposition to exaggerate the economic inefficiency of hunters appears notably by way of invidious comparison with neolithic economies. Hunters, as Lowie¹ put it blankly, "must work much harder in order to live than tillers and breeders" (p. 13). On this point evolutionary anthropology in particular found it congenial, even necessary theoretically, to adopt the usual tone of reproach. Ethnologists and archaeologists had become neolithic revolutionaries, and in their enthusiasm for the Revolution spared nothing in denouncing the Old (Stone Age) Regime. It was not the first time philosophers would relegate the earliest stage of humanity rather to nature than to culture. "A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself"² (p.122).

The hunters thus downgraded, anthropology was freer to extol the Neolithic Great Leap Forward: a main technological advance that brought about a "general availability of leisure through release from purely food-getting pursuits".³ In an influential essay on "Energy and the Evolution of Culture", Leslie White^5,6 explained that the neolithic generated a "great advance in cultural development ... as a consequence of the great increase in the amount of energy harnessed and controlled per capita per year by means of the agricultural and pastoral arts."

White further heightened the evolutionary contrast by specifying human effort as the principal energy source of palaeolithic culture, as opposed to the domesticated plant and animal resources of neolithic culture. This determination of the energy sources at once permitted a precise low estimate of hunters' thermodynamic potential - that developed by the human body: "average power resources" of one-twentieth horse power per capita - even as, by eliminating human effort from the cultural enterprise of the neolithic, it appeared that people had been liberated by some labour-saving device (domesticated plants and animals). But White's problematic is obviously misconceived. The principal mechanical energy available to both palaeolithic and neolithic culture is that supplied by human beings, as transformed in both cases from plant and animal source, so that, with negligible exceptions (the occasional direct use of non-human power), the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is the same in palaeolithic and neolithic economies - and fairly constant in human history until the advent of the industrial revolution.⁵

Marvelously Varied Diet

Marginal as the Australian or Kalahari desert is to agriculture, or to everyday European experience, it is a source of wonder to the untutored observer "how anybody could live in a place like this." The inference that the natives manage only to eke out a bare existence is apt to be reinforced by their marvelously varied diets. Ordinarily including objects deemed repulsive and inedible by Europeans, the local cuisine lends itself to the supposition that the people are starving to death.

It is a mistake, Sir George Grey⁷ wrote, to suppose that the native Australians "have small means of subsistence, or are at times greatly pressed for want of food." Many and "almost ludicrous" are the errors travellers have fallen into in this regard: "They lament in their journals that the unfortunate Aborigines should be reduced by famine to the miserable necessity of subsisting on certain sorts of food, which they have found near their huts; whereas, in many instances, the articles thus quoted by them are those which the natives most prize, and are really neither deficient in flavour nor nutritious qualities."

To render palpable "the ignorance that has prevailed with regard to the habits and customs of this people when in their wild state," Grey provides one remarkable example, a citation from his fellow explorer, Captain Stuart, who, upon encountering a group of Aboriginals engaged in gathering large quantities of mimosa gum, deduced that the "unfortunate creatures were reduced to the last extremity, and, being unable to procure any other nourishment, had been obliged to collect this mucilaginous." But, Sir George observes, the gum in question is a favourite article of food in the area, and when in season it affords the opportunity for large numbers of people to assemble and camp together, which otherwise they are unable to do. He concludes:

"Generally speaking, the natives live well; in some districts there may be at particular seasons of the year a deficiency of food, but if such is the case, these tracts are, at those times, deserted. It is, however, utterly impossible for a traveller or even for a strange native to judge. whether a district affords an abundance Of food, or the contrary ... But in his own district a native is very differently situated; he knows exactly what it produces, the proper time at which the several articles are in season, and the readiest means of procuring them. According to these circumstances he regulates his visits to different portions of his hunting ground; and I can only say that l have always found the greatest abundance in their huts."⁸

In making this happy assessment, Sir George took special care to exclude the lumpen-proletariat aboriginals living in and about European towns. The exception is instructive. It evokes a second source of ethnographic misconceptions: the anthropology of hunters is largely an anachronistic study of ex-savages, an inquest into the corpse of one society, Grey once said, presided over by members of another.

"A Kind of Material Plenty"

Considering the poverty in which hunters and gatherers live in theory, it comes as a surprise that Bushmen who live in the Kalahari enjoy "a kind of material plenty," at least in the realm of everyday useful things, apart from food and water:

"As the !Kung come into more contact with Europeans and this is already happening - they will feel sharply the lack of our things and will need and want more. It makes them feel inferior to be without clothes when they stand among strangers who are clothed. But in their own life and with their own artifacts they were comparatively free from material pressures. Except for food and water (important exceptions!) of which the Nyae Nyae !Kung have a sufficiency - but barely so, judging from the fact that all are thin though not emaciated - they all had what they needed or could make what they needed, for every man can and does make the things that men make and every woman the things that women make...

"They lived in a kind of material plenty because they adapted the tools of their living to materials which lay in abundance around them and which were free for anyone to take (wood, reeds, bone for weapons and implements, fibres for cordage, grass for shelters), or to materials which were at least sufficient for the needs of the population. ... The !Kung could always use more ostrich egg shells for beads to wear or trade with, but, as it is, enough are found for every woman to have a dozen or more shells for water containers all she can carry - and a goodly number of bead ornaments.

"In their nomadic hunting-gathering life, travelling from one source Of food to another through the seasons, always going back and forth between food and water, they carry their young children and their belongings. With plenty of most materials at hand to replace artifacts as required, the !Kung have not developed means of permanent storage and have not needed or wanted to encumber themselves with surpluses or duplicates. They do not even want to carry one of everything. They borrow what they do not own. With this ease, they have not hoarded, and the accumulation of objects has not become associated with status."⁹

In the non-subsistence sphere, the people's wants are generally easily satisfied. Such "material plenty" depends partly upon the simplicity of technology and democracy of property. Products are homespun: of stone, bone, wood, skin - materials such as "lay in abundance around them." As a rule, neither extraction of the raw material nor its working up take strenuous effort. Access to natural resources is typically direct - "free for anyone to take" - even as possession of the necessary tools is general and knowledge of the required skills common. The division of labour is likewise simple, predominantly a division of labour by sex. Add in the liberal customs of sharing, for which hunters are properly famous, and all the people can usually participate in the going prosperity, such as it is.

For most hunters, such affluence without abundance in the non-subsistence sphere need not be long debated. A more interesting question is why they are content with so few possessions, for it is with them a policy, a "matter of principle" as Gusinde¹⁰ says, and not a misfortune.

But are hunters so undemanding of material goods because they are themselves enslaved by a food quest "demanding maximum energy from a maximum number of people," so that no time or effort remains for the provision of other comforts? Some ethnographers testify to the contrary that the food quest is so successful that half the time the people seem not to know what to do with themselves. On the other hand, movement is a condition of this success, more movement in some cases than others, but always enough to rapidly depreciate the satisfactions of property. Of the hunter it is truly said that his wealth is a burden. In his condition of life, goods can become "grievously oppressive," as Gusinde observes, and the more so the longer they are carried around. Certain food collectors do have canoes and a few have dog sleds, but most must carry themselves all the comforts they possess, and so only possess what they can comfortably carry themselves. Or perhaps only what the women can carry: the men are often left free to reach to the sudden opportunity of the chase or the sudden necessity of defence. As Owen Lattimore wrote in a not too different context, "the pure nomad is the poor nomad." Mobility and property are in contradiction. That wealth quickly becomes more of an encumbrance than a good thing is apparent even to the outsider. Laurens van der Post¹¹ was caught in the contradiction as he prepared to make farewells to his wild Bushmen friends:

"This matter of presents gave us many an anxious moment. We were humiliated by the realisation of how little there was we could give to the Bushmen. Almost everything seemed likely to make life more difficult for them by adding to the litter and weight of their daily round. They themselves had practically no possessions: a loin strap, a skin blanket and a leather satchel. There was nothing that they could not assemble in one minute, wrap up in their blankets and carry on their shoulders for a journey of a thousand miles. They had no sense of possession."

Here then is another economic "peculiarity" - some hunters at least, display a notable tendency to be sloppy about their possessions. They have the kind of nonchalance that would be appropriate to a people who have mastered the problems of production.

"They do not know how to take care of their belongings. No one dreams of putting them in order, folding them, drying or cleaning them, hanging them up, or putting them in a neat pile. If they are looking for some particular thing, they rummage carelessly through the hodgepodge of trifles in the little baskets. Larger objects that are piled up in a heap in the hut are dragged hither and thither with no regard for the damage that might be done them.

"The European observer has the impression that these (Yahgan) Indians place no value whatever on their utensils and that they have completely forgotten the effort it took to make them. Actually, no one clings to his few goods and chattels which, as it is, are often and easily lost, but just as easily replaced... The Indian does not even exercise care when he could conveniently do so. A European is likely to shake his head at the boundless indifference of these people who drag brand-new objects, precious clothing, fresh provisions and valuable items through thick mud, or abandon them to their swift destruction by children and dogs. ... Expensive things that are given them are treasured for a few hours, out of curiosity; after that they thoughtlessly let everything deteriorate in the mud and wet. The less they own, the more comfortable they can travel, and what is ruined they occasionally replace. Hence, they are completely indifferent to any material possessions."¹⁰

The hunter, one is tempted to say, is "uneconomic man". At least as concerns non-subsistence goods, he is the reverse of that standard caricature immortalised in any General Principles of Economics, page one. His wants are scarce and his means (in relation) plentiful. Consequently he is "comparatively free of material pressures," has "no sense of possession," shows "an undeveloped sense of property," is "completely indifferent to any material pressures," manifests a "lack of interest" in developing his technological equipment.

In this relation of hunters to worldly goods there is a neat and important point. From the internal perspective of the economy, it seems wrong to say that wants are "restricted," desires "restrained," or even that the notion of wealth is "limited." Such phrasings imply in advance an Economic Man and a struggle of the hunter against his own worse nature, which is finally then subdued by a cultural vow of poverty. The words imply the renunciation of an acquisitiveness that in reality was never developed, a suppression of desires that were never broached. Economic Man is a bourgeois construction - as Marcel Mauss said, "not behind us, but before, like the moral man."

It is not that hunters and gatherers have curbed their materialistic "impulses"; they simply never made an institution of them. "Moreover, if it is a great blessing to be free from a great evil, our (Montagnais) Savages are happy; for the two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests, I mean ambition and avarice... as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth."¹²

Subsistence

When Herskovits¹³ was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic illustration of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest," so precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible". Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed - on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.

The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being, which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic.

As for the Bushmen, economically likened to Australian hunters by Herskovits, two excellent recent reports by Richard Lee show their condition to be indeed the same.^14,16 Lee's research merits a special hearing not only because it concerns Bushmen, but specifically the Dobe section of !Kung Bushmen, adjacent to the Nyae about whose subsistence - in a context otherwise of "material plenty" - Mrs. Marshall expressed important reservations. The Dobe occupy an area of Botswana where !Kung Bushmen have been living for at least a hundred years, but have only just begun to suffer dislocation pressures.

Abundance

Despite a low annual rainfall (6 to 10 inches), Lee found in the Dobe area a "surprising abundance of vegetation." Food resources were "both varied and abundant," particularly the energy rich mangetti nut - "so abundant that millions of the nuts rotted on the ground each year for want of picking."¹⁵ The Bushman figures imply that one man's labour in hunting and gathering will support four or five people. Taken at face value, Bushman food collecting is more efficient than French farming in the period up to World War II, when more than 20 percent of the population were engaged in feeding the rest. Confessedly, the comparison is misleading, but not as misleading as it is astonishing. In the total population of free-ranging Bushmen contacted by Lee, 61.3 per cent (152 of 248) were effective food producers; the remainder were too young or too old to contribute importantly. In the particular camp under scrutiny, 65 per cent were "effectives." Thus the ratio of food producers to the general population is actually 3:5 or 2:3. But, these 65 percent of the people "worked 36 percent of the time, and 35 percent of the people did not work at all"!¹⁵

For each adult worker, this comes to about two and one-half days labour per week. (In other words, each productive individual supported herself or himself and dependents and still had 3 to 5 days available for other activities.) A "day's work" was about six hours; hence the Dobe work week is approximately 15 hours, or an average of 2 hours 9 minutes per day. All things considered, Bushmen subsistence labours are probably very close to those of native Australians.

Also like the Australians, the time Bushmen do not work in subsistence they pass in leisure or leisurely activity. One detects again that characteristic palaeolithic rhythm of a day or two on, a day or two off - the latter passed desultorily in camp. Although food collecting is the primary productive activity, Lee writes, "the majority of the people's time (four to five days per week) is spent in other pursuits, such as resting in camp or visiting other camps"¹⁵:

"A woman gathers on one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and spends the rest of her time resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps, or entertaining visitors from other camps. For each day at home, kitchen routines, such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to three hours of her time. This rhythm of steady work and steady leisure maintained throughout the year. The hunters tend to work more frequently than the women, but their schedule uneven. It is 'not unusual' for a man to hunt avidly for a week and then do no hunting at all for two or three weeks. Since hunting is an unpredictable business and subject to magical control, hunters sometimes experience a run of bad luck and stop hunting for a month or longer. During these periods, visiting, entertaining, and especially dancing are the primary activities of men."¹⁶

The daily per-capita subsistence yield for the Dobe Bushmen was 2,140 calories. However, taking into account body weight, normal activities, and the age-sex composition of the Dobe population, Lee estimates the people require only 1,975 calories per capita. Some of the surplus food probably went to the dogs, who ate what the people left over. "The conclusion can be drawn that the Bushmen do not lead a substandard existence on the edge of starvation as has been commonly supposed."¹⁵

Meanwhile, back in Africa the Hadza have been long enjoying a comparable ease, with a burden of subsistence occupations no more strenuous in hours per day than the Bushmen or the Australian Aboriginals.¹⁶ Living in an area of "exceptional abundance" of animals and regular supplies of vegetables (the vicinity of Lake Eyasi), Hadza men seem much more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game. During the long dry season especially, they pass the greater part of days on end in gambling, perhaps only to lose the metal-tipped arrows they need for big game hunting at other times. In any case, many men are "quite unprepared or unable to hunt big game even when they possess the necessary arrows." Only a small minority, Woodburn writes, are active hunters of large animals, and if women are generally more assiduous at their vegetable collecting, still it is at a leisurely pace and without prolonged labour.¹⁷ Despite this nonchalance, and an only limited economic cooperation, Hadza "nonetheless obtain sufficient food without undue effort." Woodburn offers this "very rough approximation" of subsistence-labour requirements: "Over the year as a whole probably an average of less than two hours a day spent obtaining food."¹⁶

Interesting that the Hazda, tutored by life and not by anthropology, reject the neolithic revolution in order to keep their leisure. Although surrounded by cultivators, they have until recently refused to take up agriculture themselves, "mainly on the grounds that this would involve too much hard work." In this they are like the Bushmen, who respond to the neolithic question with another: "Why should we plant, when there are so many mongomongo nuts m the world?"¹⁴ Woodburn moreover did form the impression, although as yet unsubstantiated, that Hadza actually expend less energy, and probably less time, obtaining subsistence than do neighbouring cultivators of East Africa.¹⁶

To change continents but not contents, the fitful economic commitment of the South American hunter, too, could seem to the European outsider an incurable "natural disposition":

"... the Yamana are not capable of continuous, daily hard labour, much to the chagrin of European farmers and employers for whom they often work. Their work is more a matter of fits and starts, and in these occasional efforts they can develop considerable energy for a certain time. After that, however, they show a desire for an incalculably long rest period during which they lie about doing nothing, without showing great fatigue.... It is obvious that repeated irregularities of this kind make the European employer despair, but the Indian cannot help it. It is his natural disposition."¹⁰

The hunter's attitude towards farming introduces us, lastly, to a few particulars of the way they relate to the food quest. Once again we venture here into the internal realm of the economy, a realm sometimes subjective and always difficult to understand; where, moreover, hunters seem deliberately inclined to overtax our comprehension by customs so odd as to invite the extreme interpretation that either these people are fools or they really have nothing to worry about. The former would be a true logical deduction from the hunter's nonchalance, on the premise that his economic condition is truly exigent. On the other hand, if a livelihood is usually easily procured, if one can usually expect to succeed, then the people's seeming imprudence can no longer appear as such. Speaking to unique developments of the market economy, to its institutionalisation of scarcity, Karl Polanyi¹⁸ said that our "animal dependence upon food has been bared and the naked fear of starvation permitted to run loose. Our humiliating enslavement to the material, which all human culture is designed to mitigate, was deliberately made more rigorous."

But our problems are not theirs.

Rather, a pristine affluence colours their economic arrangements, a trust in the abundance of nature's resources rather than despair at the inadequacy of human means. My point is that otherwise curious heathen devices become understandable by the people's confidence, a confidence which is the reasonable human attribute of a generally successful economy.

A more serious issue is presented by the frequent and exasperated observation of a certain "lack of foresight" among hunters and gatherers. Orientated forever in the present, without "the slightest thought of, or care for, what the morrow may bring,"¹⁹ the hunter seems unwilling to husband supplies, incapable of a planned response to the doom surely awaiting him. He adopts instead a studied unconcern, which expresses itself in two complementary economic inclinations.

The first, prodigality: the propensity to eat right through all the food in the camp, even during objectively difficult times, "as if," Lillian said of the Montagnais, "the game they were to hunt was shut up in a stable." Basedow²⁰ wrote of native Australians, their motto "might be interpreted in words to the effect that while there is plenty for today never care about tomorrow. On this account an Aboriginal inclined to make one feast of his supplies, in preference to a modest meal now and another by and by."

Le Jeune even saw his Montagnais carry such extravagance to the edge of disaster. "In the famine through which we passed, if my host took two, three, or four Beavers, immediately, whether it was day or night, they had a feast for all neighbouring Savages. And if those People had captured something, they had one also at the same time; so that, on emerging from one feast, you went to another, and sometimes even to a third and a fourth. I told them that they did not manage well, and that it would be better to reserve these feasts for future days, and in doing this they would not be so pressed with hunger. They laughed at me. 'Tomorrow' (they said) 'we shall make another feast with what we shall capture.' Yes, but more often they capture only cold and wind."¹²

A second and complementary inclination is merely prodigality's negative side: the failure to put by food surpluses, to develop food storage. For many hunters and gatherers, it appears, food storage cannot be proved technically impossible, nor is it certain that the people are unaware of the possibility.¹⁸ One must investigate instead what in the situation precludes the attempt. Gusinde asked this question, and for the Yahgan found the answer in the self same justifiable optimism. Storage would be "superfluous", "because through the entire year and with almost limitless generosity she puts all kinds of animals at the disposal of the man who hunts and the woman who gathers. Storm or accident will deprive a family of these things for no more than a few days. Generally no one need reckon with the danger of hunger, and everyone almost any where finds an abundance of what he needs. Why then should anyone worry about food for the future... Basically our Fuegians know that they need not fear for the future, hence they do not pile up supplies. Year in and year out they can look forward to the next day, free of care..."¹²

Gusinde's explanation is probably good as far as it goes, but probably incomplete. A more complex and subtle economic calculus seems in play. In fact one must consider the advantages of food storage against the diminishing returns to collection within a confined locale. An uncontrollable tendency to lower the local carrying capacity is for hunters au fond des choses: a basic condition of their production and main cause of their movement. The potential drawback of storage is exactly that it engages the contradiction between wealth and mobility. It would anchor the camp to an area soon depleted of natural food supplies. Thus immobilised by their accumulated stocks, the people may suffer by comparison with a little hunting and gathering elsewhere, where nature has, so to speak, done considerable storage of her own - of foods possibly more desirable in diversity as well as amount than men can put by. As it works out, an attempt to stock up food may only reduce the overall output of a hunting band, for the havenots will content themselves with staying in camp and living off the wherewithal amassed by the more prudent. Food storage, then, may be technically feasible, yet economically undesirable, and socially unachievable.

What are the real handicaps of the hunting-gathering praxis? Not "low productivity of labour," if existing examples mean anything. But the economy is seriously afflicted by the imminence of diminishing returns. Beginning in subsistence and spreading from there to every sector, an initial success seems only to develop the probability that further efforts will yield smaller benefits. This describes the typical curve of food-getting within a particular locale. A modest number of people usually sooner than later reduce the food resources within convenient range of camp. Thereafter, they may stay on only by absorbing an increase in real costs or a decline in real returns: rise in costs if the people choose to search farther and farther afield, decline in returns if they are satisfied to live on the shorter supply or inferior foods in easier reach. The solution, of course, is to go somewhere else. Thus the first and decisive contingency of hunting-gathering: it requires movement to maintain production on advantageous terms.

But this movement, more or less frequent in different circumstances, more or less distant, merely transposes to other spheres of production the same diminishing returns of which it is born. The manufacture of tools, clothing, utensils, or ornaments, however easily done, becomes senseless when these begin to be more of a burden than a comfort. Utility falls quickly at the margin of portability. The construction of substantial houses likewise becomes absurd if they must soon be abandoned. Hence the hunter's very ascetic conceptions of material welfare: an interest only in minimal equipment, if that; a valuation of smaller things over bigger; a disinterest in acquiring two or more of most goods; and the like. Ecological pressure assumes a rare form of concreteness when it has to be shouldered. If the gross product is trimmed down in comparison with other economies, it is not the hunter's productivity that is at fault, but his mobility.

Demographic constraints

Almost the same thing can be said of the demographic constraints of hunting-gathering. The same policy of debarassment is in play on the level of people, describable in similar terms and ascribable to similar causes. The terms are, cold-bloodedly: diminishing returns at the margin of portability, minimum necessary equipment, elimination of duplicates, and so forth - that is to say, infanticide, senilicide, sexual continence for the duration of the nursing period, etc., practices for which many food-collecting peoples are well known. The presumption that such devices are due to an inability to support more people is probably true - if "support" is understood in the sense of carrying them rather than feeding them. The people eliminated, as hunters sometimes sadly tell, are precisely those who cannot effectively transport themselves, who would hinder the movement of family and camp. Hunters may be obliged to handle people and goods in parallel ways, the draconic population policy an expression of the same ecology as the ascetic economy.

Hunting and gathering has all the strengths of its weaknesses. Periodic movement and restraint in wealth and adaptations, the kinds of necessities of the economic practice and creative adaptations of which virtues are made. Precisely in such a framework, affluence becomes possible. Mobility and moderation put hunters' ends within range of their technical means. An undeveloped mode of production is thus rendered highly effective. The hunter's life is not as difficult as it looks from the outside. In some ways the economy reflects dire ecology, but it is also a complete inversion.

Three to Five Hour Working Day

Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present - specifically on those in marginal environments - suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker's hours, notably less than modern industrial workers (unionised), who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week. An interesting comparison is also posed by recent studies of labour costs among agriculturalists of neolithic type. For example, the average adult Hanunoo, man or woman, spends 1,200 hours per year in swidden cultivation;²¹ which is to say, a mean of three hours twenty minutes per day. Yet this figure does not include food gathering, animal raising, cooking and other direct subsistence efforts of these Philippine tribesmen. Comparable data are beginning to appear in reports on other primitive agriculturalists from many parts of the world.

There is nothing either to the convention that hunters and gatherers can enjoy little leisure from tasks of sheer survival. By this, the evolutionary inadequacies of the palaeolithic are customarily explained, while for the provision of leisure the neolithic is roundly congratulated. But the traditional formulas might be truer if reversed: the amount of work (per capita) increases with the evolution of culture, and the amount of leisure decreases. Hunter's subsistence labours are characteristically intermittent, a day on and a day off, and modern hunters at least tend to employ their time off in such activities as daytime sleep. In the tropical habitats occupied by many of these existing hunters, plant collecting is more reliable than hunting itself. Therefore, the women, who do the collecting, work rather more regularly than the men, and provide the greater part of the food supply.

In alleging this is an affluent economy, therefore, I do not deny that certain hunters have moments of difficulty. Some do find it "almost inconceivable" for a man to die of hunger, or even to fail to satisfy his hunger for more than a day or two.¹⁶ But others, especially certain very peripheral hunters spread out in small groups across an environment of extremes, are exposed periodically to the kind of inclemency that interdicts travel or access to game. They suffer, although perhaps only fractionally, the shortage affecting particular immobilised families rather than the society as a whole.¹⁰

Still, granting this vulnerability, and allowing the most poorly situated modern hunters into comparison. it would be difficult to prove that privation is distinctly characteristic of the hunter-gatherers. Food shortage is not the indicative property of this mode of production as opposed to others; it does not mark off hunters and gatherers as a class or a general evolutionary stage. Lowie²² asks:

"But what of the herders on a simple plane whose maintenance is periodically jeopardised by plagues - who, like some Lapp bands of the nineteenth century were obliged to fall back on fishing? What of the primitive peasants who clear and till without compensation of the soil, exhaust one plot and pass on to the next, and are threatened with famine at every drought? Are they any more in control of misfortune caused by natural conditions than the hunter-gatherer?"

Above all, what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an increasing situation. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.

The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo.

(from John Filiss' Primitivism web site.)

References

1. Lowie, Robert H. 1946. An introduction to Cultural Anthropology (2nd ed.) New York. Rinehart.

2. Braidwood, Robert J. 1957. Prehistoric Men. 3rd ed. Chicago Natural History Museum Popular Series, Anthropology, Number 37.

3. Braidwood; Robert J. 1952. The Near East and the Foundations for Civilisation. Eugene: Oregon State System of Higher Education.

4. Boas, Franz. 1884-85. "The Central Eskimo", Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Anthropological Reports 6: 399-699.

5. White, Leslie A. 1949. The Science of Culture. New York: Farrar, Strauss.

6. White, Leslie A. 1959. The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill.

7. Grey, Sir George. 1841. Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, During the Years 1837, 38, and 39. 2 vols. London: Boone.

8. Eyre, Edward John. 1845. Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland from Adelalde to King George's Sound, in the Years 1840-41. 2 vols. London: Boone.

9. Marshall, Lorna. 1961. "Sharing, Talking, and Giving: Relief of Social Tensions Among !Kung Bushmen", Africa 31:23149.

10. Gusinde, Martin. 1961. The Yamana. 5 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Human Relations Area Files. (German edition 1931).

11. Laurens van der Post: The Heart of the Hunter.

12. Le Jeune, le Pere Paul. 1897. "Relation of What Occured in New France in the Year 1634", in R. G. Thwaites (ed.), The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Vol. 6. Cleveland: Burrows. (First French edition, 1635).

13. Herskovits, Melville J. 1952. Economic Anthropology. New York: Knopf.

14. Lee, Richard. 1968. "What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources", in R. Lee and I. DeVore (eds.), Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine.

15. Lee, Richard. 1969. "Kung Bushmen Subsistence: An Input-Output Analysis", in A. Vayda (ed.), Environment and Cultural Behaviour. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press.

16. Woodburn, James. 1968. "An introduction to Hadza Ecology", in Lee and I. DeVore (eds.), Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine.

17. Woodburn, James (director). 1966: "The Hadza" (film available from the anthropological director, department of Anthropology, London School of Economics).

18. Polanyi, Karl. 1974. "Our Obsolete Market Mentality", Commentary 3:109-17.

19. Spencer, Baldwin, and F. J. Gillen, 1899. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan.

20. Basedow, Herbert. 1925. The Australian Aboriginal. Adelaide, Australia: Preece.

21. Conklin, Harold C. 1957. Hanunoo Agriculture. Rome: Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations.

22. Lowie, Robert H. 1938. "Subsistence", in F. Boas (ed.), General Anthropology. (2nd ed.) New York: Rinehart.

Robert Wolff: Freedom Contra Choice

2005-11-17T10:59:00.000-08:00

The following is excerpted from Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing by Robert Wolff. (Note that the title of this excerpt, "Freedom Contra Choice", is mine not Wolff's.)

Wolff has a nicely relaxed, rather meandering style of telling stories, so at first you may wonder if he's ever going to get to something "important." Rest assured he indeed is circling in on a critical insight, so be patient and keep reading.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Assumptions

My first career position was government psychologist in Suriname, a developing country in South America. I had worked before, of course, but this, I thought, would be the first step on my career ladder. Little did I know that this ladder not only went up, but it also went around the world.

While we were in Suriname, Life magazine photographed the jungles around Paramaribo, the capital city, for what later became the issue on the tropical rain forest in the series "The World We Live In." The country lies a few degrees above the equator. It is hot and humid and densely forested. Then, there were few roads - one traveled on the rivers in steamboats or dugout canoes.

Suriname had been a colony first of England, then of Holland, and now had a new sort of independence. The original population was Native Caribbean American. They call themselves Arawak. They were displaced by African slaves a few hundred years ago. Because of the dense jungle, a majority of slaves escaped almost immediately and were never captured. Instead, these slaves who liberated themselves established a seventeenth-century African culture in the interior of Suriname. A hundred years ago they made peace with the government of the Netherlands. The Djuka, as they called themselves then, controlled the interior; the Dutch ruled a narrow strip along the coast, with the capital, Paramaribo, and few other small towns. Today Suriname is independent.

The colonists were certain that they were unable to work in that environment. They were probably right - they wore too many clothes for a tropical jungle, but they also thought themselves vastly superior to people who did not have their kind of civilization. So workers had to come from elsewhere. After the abolition of slavery, people from South Asia (now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) and later from Java could be talked into signing contracts as indentured laborers. Although the contracts guaranteed that they would be returned home after their term was served, many chose to stay.

In Suriname all people mixed indiscriminately. The palette of skin colors there is unique in the world. There may be few African blacks (also called blue-blacks), but there is every other shade of black, brown, beige, yellow, and almost-white.

Suriname has aluminum ore that is mined by Alcoa, the United States aluminum company. Some people worked for Alcoa, a few people grew food - and a few even found gold nuggets in the jungle and smuggled them to Miami - but there was not much of anything people could do to make a living except work for the government, the largest employer in the country at that time.

Very soon after we arrived I heard that some of the department heads and other bosses felt that workers were lazy and ambitious. That surprised me because people I had befriended seemed happy, active men and women, always ready to improve themselves. Since there was no institution of higher learning in the country, they wrote away for correspondence classes. It was only later that I learned that my friends often took courses that had little or nothing to do with their work. But the students felt they were improving themselves, not their work skills. They desperately wanted to learn and they found learning where they could.

After I was hired I was asked, What does a psychologist do? I had two degrees in psychology, one of them a brand-new, untested degree in social psychology from a famous American university. I thought I knew survey technology; I was supposed to know how to construct, conduct, analyze, and interpret an "attitude survey." So when I was asked what a psychologist does, I explained attitude surveys, sampling, research in general, the importance of validity and reliability - none of which was an answer to the question, of course. Then I said that a psychologist finds out what people are really like, not what other people think they are like.

Undoubtedly I explained too much. I got no reaction. I thought the subject closed. In fact, I almost forgot about it.

Someone knew, however, that psychologists also administer tests. I was put to work testing children in a newly established child guidance clinic. My first official action had to be telling my superior that we could not use any of the tests he had ordered because the tests were designed for Western-educated children. Local children spoke a different language, had a very different culture, and could not be expected to be within norms developed elsewhere. We invented other tests and we managed.

~ ~ ~

About a year later, when I had almost forgotten my earlier conversation about what a psychologist does, a notice in the local paper screamed: The Government hereby announces that the Government Psychologist will conduct a scientific study to find out why people are so lazy. All people are notified that they must cooperate!

I protested. I tried to make my superiors understand that under the circumstances I could not do a valid study. They agreed to wait six months, while I carefully and secretly designed a survey and hoped people would forget the notice in the newspaper.

Our survey would ask a sample of government employees questions about their attitudes toward work. When we did a trial run, we discovered that few people had ever taken a multiple-choice test. Our trial run failed miserably. I revised my ideas and designed an interview study. We changed the questions somewhat and trained interviewers.

Through this we discovered that it was not the format after all, but the questions that were wrong. Too many people could not answer the questions our interviewers asked. For instance, after a section in which interviewers asked employees what their jobs were (by jobs we meant careers), we asked, "If you were not doing what you are doing now, what would you prefer to do?" A common enough question in the West, which I expected would lead people to express their satisfaction with their job, and perhaps even their motivation and ambition.

Instead I was met with blank stares.

To our question they responded, "What I am doing now." They asked, What else would we be doing? Yes, definitely, what they were doing now.

~ ~ ~

At the children's clinic, meanwhile, I had been trying to use a test that was commonly used in Europe and America at that time. I would give the children a plain piece of paper and some colored crayons and ask them to draw something, anything.

To my astonishment, of the children who were given the test (263, at first), only two produced anything at all. The rest sat with dead faces. Ages varied, but all the children were primary school age. Their average age was eight and a half.

The Draw Something, Anything test had been discussed extensively in psychology books and journal; there were established norms to interpret the work that children would produce. The test was considered to be cross-cultural; it could be used in any culture without bias, the experts said. And yet here was a population where children between the ages of six and ten years old did not produce anything that could be analyzed.

I thought of several explanations. Perhaps paper and pencil were strange to them (I was wrong about that). Or, I thought, they were scared of me because I am white. I got along with the children well enough and had never sensed any fear in them, but in a country of people of all imaginable colors, few were as white as I am. I asked a native teacher to help me administer the test. She asked the children to draw something, anything.

Same result: blank stares.

[...]

The [work] survey was barely limping along when a man came to see me. Although uneducated, he was obviously intelligent and insightful. He said that because he thought I liked the country's people, he wanted to help me.

"It is very simple," he said. "People here have not had much choice about anything. We do not think in terms of what we would rather be doing. When a boy reaches the age when it is thought that he'd better do something to stay out of trouble, the first job that comes along is what he does. When it is time for him to get a woman, the first woman that comes along who is willing, is his woman."

Very simple, indeed.

Immediately I made the obvious connection with the Draw Something, Anything test. What would happen, I wondered, if I asked the children to draw a house, or their mother, or themselves? They all drew with gusto and no little skill. All along it was not that they could not draw, what blocked them was my instruction to draw something, anything. They needed to be told what to draw. The children had no difficulty expressing themselves, imagining, creating, but they had never been given that much choice, that much freedom.

I discussed this with teachers and others. Yes, they all agreed, the way people had been living did not allow many choices, so that such an open-ended direction to draw something, anything, might well be meaningless to the children, perhaps even frightening.

I can choose between carrots and tomatoes if both vegetables are on a dish in front of me. But when there is only one vegetable, and from past experience I know that is all there is, it would be foolish of me to say what I would rather have. I take what is offered.

Now I understand the stares we received when we asked some of the questions on the survey. They had never been asked those kinds of question before. People had never thought about what they would rather do. They did whatever work there was. Because choosing was not something people had much practice with, choosing an imaginary alternative was simply not in their experience.

~ ~ ~

The survey became a much larger project than I had foreseen. I had to reconsider questions that would have been routine if we had done this survey in a Western country. This was not a Western country, however.

We could no longer ask what people would rather do. Instead we read them little stories with the idea that by identifying with the people in the story, they could tell us what they thought the people in the story would choose. After doing some trial tests, that seemed to work well enough.

In the end, when we had rewritten the questions several times, when we thought we had good, reliable information, when we had analyzed all the information forward and backward ... I found that it was the questions I had asked myself that were wrong. I had made assumptions about human behavior that might have made sense in a Western society, but they made no sense in Suriname at that time.

Of course, Surinamers were not lazy - far from it. They sacrificed their own time and money to take correspondence courses. True, the courses they took often had no bearing on their jobs, but acquiring new or better job skills was not why they took them.

I had assumed that workers thought as Westerners do: the better you do a job, the more income you will get. Therefore it is to your advantage to learn things that help you do a better job. I assumed that was how people everywhere thought about work. These assumptions are so basic in our society that we are not aware that we hold them. In Suriname at that time, however, your worth was not determined by what you did, or how well you did it, but by your becoming a better person.

Most families we knew wanted the children to become better people. They had not learned that in a Western world it does not pay to acquire a general education, but it is important to have better training for a specific job.

Someone told me, "It is not so much what you have [training, skill, or even money] that determines your worth, but who you are [a good person]."

~ ~ ~

In tribal societies one's worth comes from the tribe one belongs to, not from individual skills or competence. In Suriname, government employees knew, of course, that they no longer lived in a tribal society, but they felt that they now belonged to the government. They were proud to belong to the government, which they called papa govn'men. It was a prestigious tribe to belong to. And to show their pride as well as their appreciation, they took correspondence courses to better themselves. You did your tribe proud by becoming a better person.

It did not occur to people that an employer might not care whether you were a better person. The employer was interested in hiring a better-qualified employee, or a better-educated employee, or a more ambitious employee who might acquire new job-related skills.

The expectations of employer and employee were very different. Employers grumbled because employees were lazy, they said, or unambitious. But the behavior they judged lazy or unambitious was rooted in tribal thinking. Employers thought as Westerners think. Employers lived in one reality, the reality of the West. Employees lived in a very different reality: the reality of a tribal people.

~ ~ ~

Some years later I met a very sophisticated university professor from Suriname's neighboring country, Guyana. He was bitter and quite outspoken about what he called the colonial experience: "Their [the colonists] whole culture is designed to imprint on us [the colonized] that they are better than we. They tell us that we must strive to become like them, lords and ladies. But we cannot become lords and ladies. We shall always be less."

He spoke impeccable, immaculate BBC English. If you had not seen his dark brown skin, you certainly might have thought him Lord something or other.

Surinamers, perhaps, felt less as well, and perhaps believed that improving themselves would buy entry into the civilized world.

~ ~ ~

I learned that I cannot make assumptions about what drives people, nor can I make generalizations about what people are really like, until I can stand in their shoes, so to speak.

My apologies to the blank-faced children whom I asked to draw something, anything. They had not learned to choose. They never had to choose - there had been few possibilities for choices in their lives.

Draw Something, Anything

It is a long way from a world with few choices to our world with too many choices, and new choices emerging every day. Choosing has come to be one of the central aspects of our Western way of life. We cannot do anything, go anywhere, without having to choose. What shall I wear? What do I want to eat for breakfast? We teach babies early to choose from an abundance of toys.

It took me some time to realize that choosing is an activity that is overvalued in our world and causes much frustration. To me, it is not important whether I buy this product or another; it is more important to maintain my sanity. For important decisions I have come to trust my intuition, my dreams, a feeling that I should turn this way rather than that.

We have designed a society that puts choices in our way all the time. We must choose services: a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber. Have you ever moved to a new city and had to choose a doctor at night? Or agonized over how to choose an electrician or a carpenter in an emergency?

How do we choose a profession? What criteria do we use to choose a mate? How do we choose a religion?

Choosing has become the quintessential aspect of Western society. Most other people of this world do not choose often, if at all. Life is what is front of you.

And what do we do when it comes to new choices, choices our parents never had to make? People have always known how to prevent becoming pregnant and in this century it has become feasible to choose the number of children you have, but must we now also choose our children's gender? Do we want to abort a fetus that is known to carry the gene for Down's syndrome? Those are choices our parents could not even dream would one day become important decisions. Our forebearers would have thought those choices sinful, or presumptuous.

How do we choose who shall live? Modern medical technology can keep a body living long past the point when, ten or twenty years ago, it would have died a natural death. Keeping a body alive, however, with machines and people to service those machines, is expensive. It costs much more than most of us can afford - and often more than insurance companies are willing to reimburse. Do we expect society to pay for machines to keep a body breathing? Society does not have deep pockets anymore. How must it decide who shall continue to breathe and who shall be allowed to die a natural death? Should doctors decide?

There are so many choices, so many alternatives to everything we do, or want, that we have had to learn that sometimes the best choice is not to choose.

We may not want to choose a doctor, or a lawyer, or a plumber, or a new dress, or another career. Perhaps we want to trust luck, or whatever comes our way, or what is available while staying within a budget, or what is available in our neighborhood, or choose only on days that we feel like it.

Because our world has become a world of chaotic overabundance, we feel stressed. The stresses we feel are in large part the result of the overwhelming number of alternatives we must choose from, but also the result of the fact that we have had no time to develop an ethic to help us choose. The headlong rush into new technologies and new ideas, without the time to consider consequences, makes it almost impossible for us to choose. How can we have an opinion about something that did not exist yesterday?

Do we really want experts to choose for us?

We are learning to be leery of expert advice. All too often we find, twenty years later, that the experts were no more expert that we were, that they too were ignorant of the long-term effects of a new drug, a new chemical to control pests, a new way to generate energy. We are beginning to disbelieve experts, distrust authorities and those who claim to know what is best for us.

We call this mad dance freedom.

We are proud to be a society of free people, by which we mean people who are free to choose, people who, in fact, must choose - endlessly, all day - often making choices from alternatives that are so new that we have not had time even to imagine their consequences. We are choosing in a fog.

~ ~ ~

Not long ago, most people - almost all people - had few choices they could make.

A million years ago I did not have to choose what I ate. I ate what I could find or catch. I did not have to choose whom I married, or where I lived, or how many children I had.

Even a few hundred years ago - almost everywhere in the world, except perhaps western Europe - I spent my life where I was born, with the people of my tribe. I did what my father did, or perhaps what a maternal uncle did. I married the girl next door, or at most a few doors away. I aet what everyone else ate, most likely what there was available to eat. I wore whatever everyone else wore. I belonged to the religion of my forebears. I died and was buried in the same cemetery where my parents and their parents were buried, or was cremated as they were cremated. I did not have to choose much.

How much simpler life was when we had a bard who sang the songs he knew and we knew as well. How much simpler when there was one healer in our village, and she did not expect me to tell her what was wrong because she knew. I did not pay her, although she often expected a gift at midwinter. If the roof leaked, neighbors helped repair it. If the soles of my shoes were worn, the village cobbler repaired them. We ate what was in season. We traded eggs for vegetables, perhaps, or milk for a wool sweater.

Not a bad time, on the whole. A time when a major decision might be whether I should go on a vision quest now or later.

Today we go on a vision quest over the weekend. We take shamanic training at a two-day workshop that is repeated every few weeks for others who want to learn whatever it is that a particular teacher has to say about shamanism. There are a hundred others who will teach us differently what they think shamanism is. There are undoubtedly catalogs that will list the various shamanic traditions we can learn.

Having so many alternatives serves only to devalue all of them.

What has made life in the Western world so stressful is that we think we must choose among a chaos of products and services. Frankly, neither the products nor the services work well anymore - we are in too much of a hurry to give much thought to consequences while we make money, invent new gadgets, start new fads, create new everything. Our very existence on this planet is threatened because, in our haste, we have made - and continue to make - bad choices.

Stress is the price we pay for affluence - an affluence that in the end is little more than a glut of increasingly meaningless choices.

If someone would tell me today to draw something, anything, I too would stare into space with a blank look on my face.

Too many choices.

Photo: Buffalo skulls

2005-11-17T10:24:00.000-08:00

A photo from the 1870s shows a massive pile of American bison skulls waiting to be ground for fertilizer. (from Mongabay)

John Zerzan: Future Primitive

2005-11-16T23:46:00.000-08:00

Introductory comment: From John Zerzan comes a long and challenging but important essay, reminding us of the crucial but too often ignored fact that "life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health. This was our human nature, for a couple of million years, prior to enslavement by priests, kings, and bosses."

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Division of labor, which has had so much to do with bringing us to the present global crisis, works daily to prevent our understanding the origins of this horrendous present. Mary Lecron Foster (1990) surely errs on the side of understatement in allowing that anthropology is today "in danger of serious and damaging fragmentation." Shanks and Tilley (1987b) voice a rare, related challenge: "The point of archaeology is not merely to interpret the past but to change the manner in which the past is interpreted in the service of social reconstruction in the present." Of course, the social sciences themselves work against the breadth and depth of vision necessary to such a reconstruction. In terms of human origins and development, the array of splintered fields and sub-fields - anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, ethnology, paleobotany, ethnoanthropology, etc., etc. - mirrors the narrowing, crippling effect that civilization has embodied from its very beginning.

Nonetheless, the literature can provide highly useful assistance, if approached with an appropriate method and awareness and the desire to proceed past its limitations. In fact, the weakness of more or less orthodox modes of thinking can and does yield to the demands of an increasingly dissatisfied society. Unhappiness with contemporary life becomes distrust with the official lies that are told to legitimate that life, and a truer picture of human development emerges.

Renunciation and subjugation in modern life have long been explained as necessary concomitants of "human nature." After all, our pre-civilized existence of deprivation, brutality, and ignorance made authority a benevolent gift that rescued us from savagery. "Cave man" and "Neanderthal" are still invoked to remind us where we would be without religion, government, and toil.

This ideological view of our past has been radically overturned in recent decades, through the work of academics like Richard Lee and Marshall Sahlins. A nearly complete reversal in anthropological orthodoxy has come about, with important implications. Now we can see that life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health. This was our human nature, for a couple of million years, prior to enslavement by priests, kings, and bosses.

And lately another stunning revelation has appeared, a related one that deepens the first and may be telling us something equally important about who we were and what we might again become. The main line of attack against new descriptions of gatherer-hunter life has been, though often indirect or not explicitly stated, to characterize that life, condescendingly, as the most an evolving species could achieve at an early stage. Thus, the argument allows that there was a long period of apparent grace and pacific existence, but says that humans simply didn't have the mental capacity to leave simple ways behind in favor of complex social and technological achievement.

In another fundamental blow to civilization, we now learn that not only was human life once, and for so long, a state that did not know alienation or domination, but as the investigations since the '80s by archaeologists John Fowlett, Thomas Wynn, and others have shown, those humans possessed an intelligence at least equal to our own. At a stroke, as it were, the "ignorance" thesis is disposed of, and we contemplate where we came from in a new light.

To put the issue of mental capacity in context, it is useful to review the various (and again, ideologically loaded) interpretations of human origins and development. Robert Ardrey (1961, 1976) served up a bloodthirsty, macho version of prehistory, as have to slightly lesser degrees, Desmond Morris and Lionel Tiger. Similarly, Freud and Konrad Lorenz wrote of the innate depravity of the species, thereby providing their contributions to hierarchy and power in the present.

Fortunately, a far more plausible outlook has emerged, one that corresponds to the overall version of Paleolithic life in general. Food sharing has for some time been considered an integral part of earliest human society (e.g. Washburn and DeVore, 1961). Jane Goodall (1971) and Richard Leakey (1978), among others, have concluded that it was the key element in establishing our uniquely Homo development at least as early as 2 million years ago. This emphasis, carried forward since the early '70s by Linton, Zihlman, Tanner, and Isaac, has become ascendant.

One of the telling arguments in favor of the cooperation thesis, as against that of generalized violence and male domination, involves a diminishing, during early evolution, of the difference in size and strength between males and females. Sexual dimorphism, as it is called, was originally very pronounced, including such features as prominent canines or "fighting teeth" in males and much smaller canines for the female. The disappearance of large male canines strongly suggests that the female of the species exercised a selection for sociable, sharing males. Most apes today have significantly longer and larger canines, male to female, in the absence of this female choice capacity (Zihlman 1981, Tanner 1981).

Division of labor between the sexes is another key area in human beginnings, a condition once simply taken for granted and expressed by the term hunter-gatherer. Now it is widely accepted that gathering of plant foods, once thought to be the exclusive domain of women and of secondary importance to hunting by males, constituted the main food source (Johansen and Shreeve 1989). Since females were not significantly dependent on males for food (Hamilton 1984), it seems likely that rather than division of labor, flexibility and joint activity would have been central (Bender 1989). As Zihlman (1981) points out, an overall behavioral flexibility may have been the primary ingredient in early human existence. Joan Gero (1991) has demonstrated that stone tools were as likely to have been made by women as by men, and indeed Poirier (1987) reminds us that there is "no archaeological evidence supporting the contention that early humans exhibited a sexual division of labor." It is unlikely that food collecting involved much, if any division of labor (Slocum 1975) and probably that sexual specialization came quite late in human evolution (Zihlman 1981, Crader and Isaac 1981).

So if the adaptation that began our species centered on gathering, when did hunting come in? Binford (1984) has argued that there is no indication of use of animal products (i.e. evidence of butchery practices) until the appearance, relatively quite recent, of anatomically modern humans. Electron microscope studies of fossil teeth found in East Africa (Walker 1984) suggest a diet composed primarily of fruit, while a similar examination of stone tools from a 1.5 million-year-old site at Koobi Fora in Kenya (Keeley and Toth 1981) shows that they were used on plant materials. The small amount of meat in the early Paleolithic diet was probably scavenged, rather than hunted (Ehrenberg 1989b).

The "natural" condition of the species was evidently a diet made up largely of vegetables rich in fiber, as opposed to the modern high fat and animal protein diet with its attendant chronic disorders (Mendeloff 1977). Though our early forbears employed their "detailed knowledge of the environment and cognitive mapping" (Zihlman 1981) in the service of a plant-gathering subsistence, the archaeological evidence for hunting appears to slowly increase with time (Hodder 1991).

Much evidence, however, has overturned assumptions as to widespread prehistoric hunting. Collections of bones seen earlier as evidence of large kills of mammals, for example, have turned out to be, upon closer examination, the results of movement by flowing water or caches by animals. Lewis Binford's "Were There Elephant Hunters at Tooralba?" (1989) is a good instance of such a closer look, in which he doubts there was significant hunting until 200,000 years ago or sooner. Adrienne Zihlman (1981) has concluded that "hunting arose relatively late in evolution," and "may not extend beyond the last one hundred thousand years." And there are many (e.g. Straus 1986, Trinkhaus 1986) who do not see evidence for serious hunting of large mammals until even later, viz. the later Upper Paleolithic, just before the emergence of agriculture.

The oldest known surviving artifacts are stone tools from Hadar in eastern Africa. With more refined dating methods, they may prove to be 3.1 million years old (Klein 1989). Perhaps the main reason these may be classified as representing human effort is that they involve the crafting of one tool by using another, a uniquely human attribute so far as we know. Homo habilis, or "handy man," designates what has been thought of as the first known human species, its name reflecting association with the earliest stone tools (Coppens 1989). Basic wooden and bone implements, though more perishable and thus scantily represented in the archaeological record, were also used by Homo habilis as part of a "remarkably simple and effective" adaptation in Africa and Asia (Fagan 1990).

Our ancestors at this stage had smaller brains and bodies than we do, but Poirier (1987) notes that "their postcranial anatomy was rather like modern humans," and Holloway (1972, 1974) allows that his studies of cranial endocasts from this period indicate a bascally modern brain organization. Similarly, tools older than 2 million years have been found to exhibit a consistent right-handed orientation in the ways stone has been flaked off in their formation. Right-handedness as a tendency is correlated in moderns with such distinctly human features as pronounced lateralization of the brain and marked functional separation of the cerebral hemispheres (Holloway 1981a). Klein (1989) concludes that "basic human cognitive and communicational abilities are almost certainly implied."

Homo erectus is the other main predecessor to Homo sapiens, according to longstanding usage, appearing about 1.75 million years ago as humans moved out of forests into drier, more open African grasslands. Although brain size alone does not necessarily correlate with mental capacity, the cranial capacity of Homo erectus overlaps with that of moderns such that this species "must have been capable of many of the same behaviors" (Ciochon, Olsen and Tames 1990). As Johanson and Edey (1981) put it, "If the largest-brained erectus were to be rated against the smallest-brained sapiens - all their other characteristics ignored - their species names would have to be reversed." Homo neanderthalus, which immediately preceded us, possessed brains somewhat larger than our own (Delson 1985, Holloway 1985, Donald 1991). Though of course the much-maligned Neanderthal has been pictured as a primitive, brutish creature - in keeping with the prevailing Hobbesian ideology - despite manifest intelligence as well as enormous physical strength (Shreeve 1991).

Recently, however, the whole species framework has become a doubtful proposition (Day 1987, Rightmire 1990). Attention has been drawn to the fact that fossil specimens from various Homo species "all show intermediate morphological traits," leading to suspicion of an arbitrary division of humanity into separate taxa (Gingerich 1979, Tobias 1982). Fagan (1989), for example, tells us that "it is very hard to draw a clear taxonomic boundary between Homo erectus and archaic Homo sapiens on the one hand, and between archaic and anatomically modern Homo sapiens on the other." Likewise, Foley (1989): "the anatomical distinctions between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens are not great." Jelinek (1978) flatly declares that "there is no good reason, anatomical or cultural" for separating erectus and sapiens into two species, and has concluded (1980a) that people from at least the Middle Paleolithic onward "may be viewed as Homo sapiens" (as does Hublin 1986). The tremendous upward revision of early intelligence, discussed below, must be seen as connected to the present confusion over species, as the once-prevailing overall evolutionary model gives way.

But the controversy over species categorization is only interesting in the context of how our earliest forbears lived. Despite the minimal nature of what could be expected to survive so many millennia, we can glimpse some of the texture of that life, with its often elegant, pre-division of labor approaches. The "tool kit" from the Olduvai Gorge area made famous by the Leakeys contains "at least six clearly recognizable tool types" dating from about 1.7 million years ago (M. Leakey, 1978). There soon appeared the Acheulian handaxe, with its symmetrical beauty, in use for about a million years. Teardrop-shaped, and possessed of a remarkable balance, it exudes grace and utility from an era much prior to symbolization. Isaac (1986) noted that "the basic needs for sharp edges that humans have can be met from the varied range of forms generated from 'Oldowan' patterns of stone flaking," wondering how it came to be thought that "more complex equals better adapted." In this distant early time, according to cut-marks found on surviving bones, humans were using scavenged animal sinews and skins for such things as cord, bags, and rugs (Gowlett 1984). Further evidence suggests furs for cave wall coverings and seats, and seaweed beds for sleeping (Butzer 1970).

The use of fire goes back almost 2 million years (Kempe 1988) and might have appeared even earlier but for the tropical conditions of humanity's original African homeland, as Poirier (1987) implies. Perfected fire-making included the firing of caves to eliminate insects and heated pebble floors (Perles 1975, Lumley 1976), amenities that show up very early in the Paleolithic.

As John Gowlett (1986) notes, there are still some archaeologists who consider anything earlier than Homo sapiens, a mere 30,000 years ago, as greatly more primitive than we "fully human" types. But along with the documentation, referred to above, of fundamentally "modern" brain anatomy even in early humans, this minority must now contend with recent work depicting complete human intelligence as present virtually with the birth of the Homo species. Thomas Wynn (1985) judged manufacture of the Acheulian handaxe to have required "a stage of intelligence that is typical of fully modern adults." Gowlett, like Wynn, examines the required "operational thinking" involved in the right hammer, the right force and the right striking angle, in an ordered sequence and with flexibility needed for modifying the procedure. He contends that manipulation, concentration, visualization of form in three dimensions, and planning were needed, and that these requirements "were the common property of early human beings as much as two million years ago, and this," he adds, "is hard knowledge, not speculation."

During the vast time-span of the Paleolithic, there were remarkably few changes in technology (Rolland 1990). Innovation, "over 2 1/2 million years measured in stone tool development, was practically nil," according to Gerhard Kraus (1990). Seen in the light of what we now know of prehistoric intelligence, such "stagnation" is especially vexing to many social scientists. "It is difficult to comprehend such slow development," in the judgment of Wymer (1989). It strikes me as very plausible that intelligence, informed by the success and satisfaction of a gatherer-hunter existence, is the very reason for the pronounced absence of "progress." Division of labor, domestication, symbolic culture - these were evidently refused until very recently.

Contemporary thought, in its postmodern incarnation, would like to rule out the reality of a divide between nature and culture; given the abilities present among people before civilization, however, it may be more accurate to say that basically, they long chose nature over culture. It is also popular to see almost every human act or object as symbolic (e.g. Botscharow 1989), a position which is, generally speaking, part of the denial of a nature versus culture distinction. But it is culture as the manipulation of basic symbolic forms that is involved here. It also seems clear that reified time, language (written, certainly, and probably spoken language for all or most of this period), number, and art had no place, despite an intelligence fully capable of them.

I would like to interject, in passing, my agreement with Goldschmidt (1990) that "the hidden dimension in the construction of the symbolic world is time." And as Norman O. Brown put it, "life not repressed is not in historical time," which I take as a reminder that time as a materiality is not inherent in reality, but a cultural imposition, perhaps the first cultural imposition, on it. As this elemental dimension of symbolic culture progresses, so does, by equal steps, alienation from the natural.

Cohen (1974) has discussed symbols as "essential for the development and maintenance of social order." Which implies - as does, more forcefully, a great deal of positive evidence - that before the emergence of symbols there was no condition of dis-order requiring them. In a similar vein, Levi-Strauss (1953) pointed out that "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution." So whence the absence of order, the conflicts or "oppositions?" The literature on the Paleolithic contains almost nothing that deals with this essential question, among thousands of monographs on specific features.

A reasonable hypothesis, in my opinion, is that division of labor, unnoticed because of its glacially slow pace, and not sufficiently understood because of its newness, began to cause small fissures in the human community and unhealthy practices vis-a-vis nature. In the later Upper Paleolithic, "15,000 years ago, we begin to observe specialized collection of plants in the Middle East, and specialized hunting," observed Gowlett (1984). The sudden appearance of symbolic activities (e.g. ritual and art) in the Upper Paleolithic has definitely seemed to archaeologists one of prehistory's "big surprises" (Binford 1972b), given the absence of such behaviors in the Middle Paleolithic (Foster 1990, Kozlowski 1990). But signs of division of labor and specialization were making their presence felt as a breakdown of wholeness and natural order, a lack that needed redressing. What is surprising is that this transition to civilization can still be seen as benign. Foster (1990) seems to celebrate it by concluding that the "symbolic mode ... has proved extraordinarily adaptive, else why has Homo sapiens become material master of the world?" He is certainly correct, as he is to recognize "the manipulation of symbols [to be] the very stuff of culture," but he appears oblivious to the fact that this successful adaptation has brought alienation and destruction of nature along to their present horrifying prominence.

It is reasonable to assume that the symbolic world originated in the formulation of language, which somehow appeared from a "matrix of extensive nonverbal communication" (Tanner and Zihlman 1976) and face-to-face contact. There is no agreement as to when language began, but no evidence exists of speech before the cultural "explosion" of the later Upper Paleolithic (Dibble 1984, 1989). It seems to have acted as an "inhibiting agent," a way of bringing life under "greater control" (Mumford 1972), stemming the flood of images and sensations to which the pre-modern individual was open. In this sense it would have likely marked an early turning away from a life of openness and communion with nature, toward one more oriented to the overlordship and domestication that followed symbolic culture's inauguration.

It is probably a mistake, by the way, to assume that thought is advanced (if there were such a thing as "neutral" thought, whose advance could be universally appreciated) because we actually think in language; there is no conclusive evidence that we must do so (Allport 1983). There are many cases (Lecours and Joanette 1980, Levine et al. 1982), involving stroke and like impairments, of patients who have lost speech, including the ability to talk silently to themselves, who were fully capable of coherent thought of all kinds. These data strongly suggest that "human intellectual skill is uniquely powerful, even in the absence of language" (Donald 1991).

In terms of symbolization in action, Goldschmidt (1990) seems correct in judging that "the Upper Paleolithic invention of ritual may well have been the keystone in the structure of culture that gave it its great impetus for expansion." Ritual has played a number of pivotal roles in what Hodder (1990) termed "the relentless unfolding of symbolic and social structures" accompanying the arrival of cultural mediation. It was as a means of achieving and consolidating social cohesion that ritual was essential (Johnson 1982, Conkey 1985); totemic rituals, for example, reinforce clan unity.

The start of an appreciation of domestication, or taming of nature, is seen in a cultural ordering of the wild, through ritual. Evidently, the female as a cultural category, viz. seen as wild or dangerous, dates from this period. The ritual "Venus" figurines appear as of 25,000 years ago, and seem to be an example of earliest symbolic likeness of women for the purpose of representation and control (Hodder 1990). Even more concretely, subjugation of the wild occurs at this time in the first systematic hunting of large mammals; ritual was an integral part of this activity (Hammond 1974, Frison 1986).

Ritual, as shamanic practice, may also be considered as a regression from that state in which all shared a consciousness we would now classify as extrasensory (Leonard 1972). When specialists alone claim access to such perceptual heights as may have once been communal, further backward moves in division of labor are facilitated or enhanced. The way back to bliss through ritual is a virtually universal mythic theme, promising the dissolution of measurable time, among other joys. This theme of ritual points to an absence that it falsely claims to fill, as does symbolic culture in general.

Ritual as a means of organizing emotions, a method of cultural direction and restraint, introduces art, a facet of ritual expressiveness (Bender 1989). "There can be little doubt," to Gans (1985), "that the various forms of secular art derive originally from ritual." We can detect the beginning of an unease, a feeling that an earlier, direct authenticity is departing. La Barre (1972), I believe, is correct in judging that "art and religion alike arise from unsatisfied desire." At first, more abstractly as language, then more purposively as ritual and art, culture steps in to deal artificially with spiritual and social anxiety.

Ritual and magic must have dominated early (Upper Paleolithic) art and were probably essential, along with an increasing division of labor, for the coordination and direction of community (Wymer 1981). Similarly, Pfeiffer (1982) has depicted the famous Upper Paleolithic European cave paintings as the original form of initiating youth into now complex social systems; as necessary for order and discipline (see also Gamble 1982, Jochim 1983). And art may have contributed to the control of nature, as part of development of the earliest territorialism, for example (Straus 1990).

The emergence of symbolic culture, with its inherent will to manipulate and control, soon opened the door to domestication of nature. After two million years of human life within the bounds of nature, in balance with other wild species, agriculture changed our lifestyle, our way of adapting, in an unprecedented way. Never before has such a radical change occurred in a species so utterly and so swiftly (Pfeiffer 1977). Self-domestication through language, ritual, and art inspired the taming of plants and animals that followed. Appearing only 10,000 years ago, farming quickly triumphed; for control, by its very nature, invites intensification. Once the will to production broke through, it became more productive the more efficiently it was exercised, and hence more ascendant and adaptive.

Agriculture enables greatly increased division of labor, establishes the material foundations of social hierarchy, and initiates environmental destruction. Priests, kings, drudgery, sexual inequality, warfare are a few of its fairly immediate specific consequences (Ehrenberg 1986b, Wymer 1981, Festinger 1983). Whereas Paleolithic peoples enjoyed a highly varied diet, using several thousand species of plants for food, with farming these sources were vastly reduced (White 1959, Gouldie 1986).

Given the intelligence and the very great practical knowledge of Stone Age humanity, the question has often been asked, "Why didn't agriculture begin, at say, 1,000,000 B.C. rather than about 8,000 B.C.?" I have provided a brief answer in terms of slowly accelerating alienation in the form of division of labor and symbolization, but given how negative the results were, it is still a bewildering phenomenon. Thus, as Binford (1968) put it, "The question to be asked is not why agriculture ... was not developed everywhere, but why it was developed at all." The end of gatherer-hunter life brought a decline in size, stature, and skeletal robusticity (Cohen and Armelagos 1981, Harris and Ross 1981), and introduced tooth decay, nutritional deficiencies, and most infectious diseases (Larsen 1982, Buikstra 1976a, Cohen 1981). "Taken as a whole ... an overall decline in the quality - and probably the length - of human life," concluded Cohen and Armelagos (1981).

Another outcome was the invention of number, unnecessary before the ownership of crops, animals, and land that is one of agriculture's hallmarks. The development of number further impelled the urge to treat nature as something to be dominated. Writing was also required by domestication, for the earliest business transactions and political administration (Larsen 1988). Levi-Strauss has argued persuasively that the primary function of written communication was to facilitate exploitation and subjugation (1955); cities and empires, for example, would be impossible without it. Here we see clearly the joining of the logic of symbolization and the growth of capital.

Conformity, repetition, and regularity were the keys to civilization upon its triumph, replacing the spontaneity, enchantment, and discovery of the pre-agricultural human state that survived so very long. Clark (1979) cites a gatherer-hunter "amplitude of leisure," deciding "it was this and the pleasurable way of life that went with it, rather than penury and a day-long grind, that explains why social life remained so static." One of the most enduring and widespread myths is that there was once a Golden Age, characterized by peace and innocence, and that something happened to destroy this idyll and consign us to misery and suffering. Eden, or whatever name it goes by, was the home of our primeval forager ancestors, and expresses the yearning of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative ease.

The once rich environs people inhabited prior to domestication and agriculture are now virtually nonexistent. For the few remaining foragers there exist only the most marginal lands, those isolated places as yet unwanted by agriculture. And surviving gatherer-hunters, who have somehow managed to evade civilization's tremendous pressures to turn them into slaves (i.e. farmers, political subjects, wage laborers), have all been influenced by contact with outside peoples (Lee 1976, Mithen 1990).

Duffy (1984) points out that the present day gatherer-hunters he studied, the Mbuti Pygmies of central Africa, have been acculturated by surrounding villager-agriculturalists for hundreds of years, and to some extent, by generations of contact with government authorities and missionaries. And yet it seems that an impulse toward authentic life can survive down through the ages: "Try to imagine," he counsels, "a way of life where land, shelter, and food are free, and where there are no leaders, bosses, politics, organized crime, taxes, or laws. Add to this the benefits of being part of a society where everything is shared, where there are no rich people and no poor people, and where happiness does not mean the accumulation of material possessions." The Mbuti have never domesticated animals or planted crops.

Among the members of non-agriculturalist bands resides a highly sane combination of little work and material abundance. Bodley (1976) discovered that the San (aka Bushmen) of the harsh Kalahari Desert of southern Africa work fewer hours, and fewer of their number work, than do the neighboring cultivators. In times of drought, moreover, it has been the San to whom the farmers have turned for their survival (Lee 1968). They spend "strikingly little time laboring and much time at rest and leisure," according to Tanaka (1980), while others (e.g. Marshall 1976, Guenther 1976) have commented on San vitality and freedom compared with sedentary farmers, their relatively secure and easygoing life.

Flood (1983) noted that to Australian aborigines "the labour involved in tilling and planting outweighed the possible advantages." Speaking more generally, Tanaka (1976) has pointed to the abundant and stable plant foods in the society of early humanity, just as "they exist in every modern gatherer society." Likewise, Festinger (1983) referred to Paleolithic access to "considerable food without a great deal of effort," adding that "contemporary groups that still live on hunting and gathering do very well, even though they have been pushed into very marginal habitats."

As Hole and Flannery (1963) summarized: "No group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing." They have much more free time, adds Binford (1968), "than do modern industrial or farm workers, or even professors of archaeology."

The non-domesticated know that, as Vaneigem (1975) put it, only the present can be total. This by itself means that they live life with incomparably greater immediacy, density and passion than we do. It has been said that some revolutionary days are worth centuries; until then "We look before and after," as Shelley wrote, "And sigh for what is not..."

The Mbuti believe (Turnbull 1976) that "by a correct fulfillment of the present, the past and the future will take care of themselves." Primitive peoples do not live through memories, and generally have no interest in birthdays or measuring their ages (Cipriani 1966). As for the future, they have little desire to control what does not yet exist, just as they have little desire to control nature. Their moment-by-moment joining with the flux and flow of the natural world does not preclude an awareness of the seasons, but this does not constitute an alienated time consciousness that robs them of the present.

Though contemporary gatherer-hunters eat more meat than their pre-historic forbears, vegetable foods still constitute the mainstay of their diet in tropical and subtropical regions (Lee 1968a, Yellen and Lee 1976). Both the Kalahari San and the Hazda of East Africa, where game is more abundant than in the Kalahari, rely on gathering for 80 percent of their sustenance (Tanaka 1980). The !Kung branch of the San search for more than a hundred different kinds of plants (Thomas 1968) and exhibit no nutritional deficiency (Truswell and Hansen 1976). This is similar to the healthful, varied diet of Australian foragers (Fisher 1982, Flood 1983). The overall diet of gatherers is better than that of cultivators, starvation is very rare, and their health status generally superior, with much less chronic disease (Lee and Devore 1968a, Ackerman 1990).

Lauren van der Post (1958) expressed wonder at the exuberant San laugh, which rises "sheer from the stomach, a laugh you never hear among civilized people." He found this emblematic of a great vigor and clarity of senses that yet manages to withstand and elude the onslaught of civilization. Truswell and Hansen (1976) may have encountered it in the person of a San who had survived an unarmed fight with a leopard; although injured, he had killed the animal with his bare hands.

The Andaman Islanders, west of Thailand, have no leaders, no idea of symbolic representation, and no domesticated animals. There is also an absence of aggression, violence, and disease; wounds heal surprisingly quickly, and their sight and hearing are particularly acute. They are said to have declined since European intrusion in the mid-19th century, but exhibit other such remarkable physical traits as a natural immunity to malaria, skin with sufficient elasticity to rule out post-childbirth stretch marks and the wrinkling we associate with ageing, and an "unbelievable" strength of teeth: Cipriani (1966) reported seeing children of 10 to 15 years crush nails with them. He also testified to the Andamese practice of collecting honey with no protective clothing at all; "yet they are never stung, and watching them one felt in the presence of some age-old mystery, lost by the civilized world."

DeVries (1952) has cited a wide range of contrasts by which the superior health of gatherer-hunters can be established, including an absence of degenerative diseases and mental disabilities, and childbirth without difficulty or pain. He also points out that this begins to erode from the moment of contact with civilization.

Relatedly, there is a great deal of evidence not only for physical and emotional vigor among primitives but also concerning their heightened sensory abilities. Darwin described people at the southernmost tip of South America who went about almost naked in frigid conditions, while Peasley (1983) observed Aborigines who were renowned for their ability to live through bitterly cold desert nights "without any form of clothing." Levi-Strauss (1979) was astounded to learn of a particular [South American] tribe which was able to "see the planet Venus in full daylight," a feat comparable to that of the North African Dogon who consider Sirius B the most important star; somehow aware, without instruments, of a star that can only be found with the most powerful of telescopes (Temple 1976). In this vein, Boyden (1970) recounted the Bushman ability to see four of the moons of Jupiter with the naked eye.

In The Harmless People (1959), Marshall told how one Bushman walked unerringly to a spot in a vast plain, "with no bush or tree to mark place," and pointed out a blade of grass with an almost invisible filament of vine around it. He had encountered it months before in the rainy season when it was green. Now, in parched weather, he dug there to expose a succulent root and quenched his thirst. Also in the Kalahari Desert, van der Post (1958) meditated upon San/Bushman communion with nature, a level of experience that "could almost be called mystical. For instance, they seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion, an antelope, a steenbuck, a lizard, a striped mouse, mantis, baobab tree, yellow-crested cobra or starry-eyed amaryllis, to mention only a few of the brilliant multitudes through which they moved." It seems almost pedestrian to add that gatherer-hunters have often been remarked to possess tracking skills that virtually defy rational explanation (e.g. Lee 1979).

Rohrlich-Leavitt (1976) noted, "The data show that gatherer-hunters are generally nonterritorial and bilocal; reject group aggression and competition; share their resources freely; value egalitarianism and personal autonomy in the context of group cooperation; and are indulgent and loving with children." Dozens of studies stress communal sharing and egalitarianism as perhaps the defining traits of such groups (e.g. Marshall 1961 and 1976, Sahlins 1968, Pilbeam 1972, Damas 1972, Diamond 1974, Lafitau 1974, Tanaka 1976 and 1980, Wiessner 1977, Morris 1982, Riches 1982, Smith 1988, Mithen 1990). Lee (1982) referred to the "universality among foragers" of sharing, while Marshall's classic 1961 work spoke of the "ethic of generosity and humility" informing a "strongly egalitarian" gatherer-hunter orientation. Tanaka provides a typical example: "The most admired character trait is generosity, and the most despised and disliked are stinginess and selfishness."

Baer (1986) listed "egalitarianism, democracy, personalism, individuation, nurturance" as key virtues of the non-civilized, and Lee (1988) cited "an absolute aversion to rank distinctions" among "simple foraging peoples around the world." Leacock and Lee (1982) specified that "any assumption of authority" within the group "leads to ridicule or anger among the !Kung, as has been recorded for the Mbuti (Turnbull 1962), the Hazda (Woodburn 1980) and the Montagnais-Naskapi (Thwaites 1906), among others."

"Not even the father of an extended family can tell his sons and daughters what to do. Most people appear to operate on their own internal schedules," reported Lee (1972) of the !Kung of Botswana. Ingold (1987) judged that "in most hunting and gathering societies, a supreme value is placed upon the principle of individual autonomy," similar to Wilson's finding (1988) of "an ethic of independence" that is "common to the focused open societies." The esteemed field anthropologist Radin (1953) went so far as to say: "Free scope is allowed for every conceivable kind of personality outlet or expression in primitive society. No moral judgment is passed on any aspect of human personality as such."

Turnbull (1976) looked on the structure of Mbuti social life as "an apparent vacuum, a lack of internal system that is almost anarchical." According to Duffy (1984), "the Mbuti are naturally acephalous - they do not have leaders or rulers, and decisions concerning the band are made by consensus." There is an enormous qualitative difference between foragers and farmers in this regard, as in so many others. For instance, agricultural Bantu tribes (e.g. the Saga) surround the San, and are organized by kingship, hierarchy and work; the San exhibit egalitarianism, autonomy, and sharing. Domestication is the principle which accounts for this drastic distinction.

Domination within a society is not unrelated to domination of nature. In gatherer-hunter societies, on the other hand, no strict hierarchy exists between the human and the non-human species (Noske 1989), and relations among foragers are likewise non-hierarchical. The non-domesticated typically view the animals they hunt as equals; this essentially egalitarian relationship is ended by the advent of domestication.

When progressive estrangement from nature became outright social control (agriculture), more than just social attitudes changed. Descriptions by sailors and explorers who arrived in "newly discovered" regions tell how wild mammals and birds originally showed no fear at all of the human invaders (Brock 1981). A few contemporary gatherers practiced no hunting before outside contact, but while the majority certainly do hunt, "it is not normally an aggressive act" (Rohrlich-Leavitt 1976). Turnbull (1965) observed Mbuti hunting as quite without any aggressive spirit, even carried out with a sort of regret. Hewitt (1986) reported a sympathy bond between hunter and hunted among the Xan Bushmen he encountered in the 19th century.

As regards violence among gatherer-hunters, Lee (1988) found that "the !Kung hate fighting, and think anybody who fought would be stupid." The Mbuti, by Duffy's account (1984), "look on any form of violence between one person and another with great abhorrence and distaste, and never represent it in their dancing or playacting." Homicide and suicide, concluded Bodley (1976), are both "decidedly uncommon" among undisturbed gatherer-hunters. The "warlike" nature of Native American peoples was often fabricated to add legitimacy to European aims of conquest (Kroeber 1961); the foraging Comanche maintained their non-violent ways for centuries before the European invasion, becoming violent only upon contact with marauding civilization (Fried 1973).

The development of symbolic culture, which rapidly led to agriculture, is linked through ritual to alienated social life among extant foraging groups. Bloch (1977) found a correlation between levels of ritual and hierarchy. Put negatively, Woodburn (1968) could see the connection between an absence of ritual and the absence of specialized roles and hierarchy among the Hazda of Tanzania. Turner's study of the west African Ndembu (1957) revealed a profusion of ritual structures and ceremonies intended to redress the conflicts arising from the breakdown of an earlier, more seamless society. These ceremonies and structures function in a politically integrative way. Ritual is a repetitive activity for which outcomes and responses are essentially assured by social contract; it conveys the message that symbolic practice, via group membership and social rules, provides control (Cohen 1985). Ritual fosters the concept of control or domination, and has been seen to tend toward leadership roles (Hitchcock 1982) and centralized political structures (Lourandos 1985). A monopoly of ceremonial institutions clearly extends the concept of authority (Bender 1978), and may itself be the original formal authority.

Among agricultural tribes of New Guinea, leadership and the inequality it implies are based upon participation in hierarchies of ritual initiation or upon shamanistic spirit-mediumship (Kelly 1977, Modjeska 1982). In the role of shamans we see a concrete practice of ritual as it contributes to domination in human society.

Radin (1937) discussed "the same marked tendency" among Asian and North American tribal peoples for shamans or medicine men "to organize and develop the theory that they alone are in communication with the supernatural." This exclusive access seems to empower them at the expense of the rest; Lommel (1967) saw "an increase in the shaman's psychic potency ... counterbalanced by a weakening of potency in other members of the group." This practice has fairly obvious implications for power relationships in other areas of life, and contrasts with earlier periods devoid of religious leadership.

The Batuque of Brazil are host to shamans who each claim control over certain spirits and attempt to sell supernatural services to clients, rather like priests of competing sects (S. Leacock 1988). Specialists of this type in "magically controlling nature ... would naturally come to control men, too," in the opinion of Muller (1961). In fact, the shaman is often the most powerful individual in pre-agricultural societies (e.g. Sheehan 1985); he is in a position to institute change. Johannessen (1987) offers the thesis that resistance to the innovation of planting was overcome by the influence of shamans, among the Indians of the American Southwest, for instance. Similarly, Marquardt (1985) has suggested that ritual authority structures have played an important role in the initiation and organization of production in North America. Another student of American groups (Ingold 1987) saw an important connection between shamans' role in mastering wildness in nature and an emerging subordination of women.

Berndt (1974a) has discussed the importance among Aborigines of ritual sexual division of labor in the development of negative sex roles, while Randolph (1988) comes straight to the point: "Ritual activity is needed to create 'proper' men and women." There is "no reason in nature" for gender divisions, argues Bender (1989): "They have to be created by proscription and taboo, they have to be 'naturalized' through ideology and ritual."

But gatherer-hunter societies, by their very nature, deny ritual its potential to domesticate women. The structure (non-structure?) of egalitarian bands, even those most oriented toward hunting, includes a guarantee of autonomy to both sexes. This guarantee is the fact that the materials of subsistence are equally available to women and men and that, further, the success of the band is dependent on cooperation based on that autonomy (Leacock 1978, Friedl 1975). The spheres of the sexes are often somewhat separate, but inasmuch as the contribution of women is generally at least equal to that of men, social equality of the sexes is "a key feature of forager societies" (Ehrenberg 1989b). Many anthropologists, in fact, have found the status of women in forager groups to be higher than in any other type of society (e.g. Fluer-Lobban 1979, Rohrlich-Leavitt, Sykes and Weatherford 1975, Leacock 1978).

In all major decisions, observed Turnbull (1970) of the Mbuti, "men and women have equal say, hunting and gathering being equally important." He made it clear (1981) that there is sexual differentiation - probably a good deal more than was the case with their distant forbears - "but without any sense of superordination or subordination." Men actually work more hours than women among the !Kung, according to Post and Taylor (1984).

It should be added, in terms of the division of labor common among contemporary gatherer-hunters, that this differentiation of roles is by no means universal. Nor was it when the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, of the Fenni of the Baltic region, that "the women support themselves by hunting, exactly like the men ... and count their lot happier than that of others who groan over field labor." Or when Procopius found, in the 6th century A.D., that the Serithifinni of what is now Finland "neither till the land themselves, nor do their women work it for them, but the women regularly join the men in hunting."

The Tiwi women of Melville Island regularly hunt (Martin and Voorhies 1975) as do the Agta women in the Philippines (Estioko-Griffen and Griffen 1981). In Mbuti society, "there is little specialization according to sex. Even the hunt is a joint effort," reports Turnbull (1962), and Cotlow (1971) testifies that "among the traditional Eskimos it is (or was) a cooperative enterprise for the whole family group."

Darwin (1871) found another aspect of sexual equality: "...in utterly barbarous tribes the women have more power in choosing, rejecting, and tempting their lovers, or of afterwards changing their husbands, than might have been expected." The !Kung Bushmen and Mbuti exemplify this female autonomy, as reported by Marshall (1959) and Thomas (1965); "Women apparently leave a man whenever they are unhappy with their marriage," concluded Begler (1978). Marshall (1970) also found that rape was extremely rare or absent among the !Kung.

An intriguing phenomenon concerning gatherer-hunter women is their ability to prevent pregnancy in the absence of any contraception (Silberbauer 1981). Many hypotheses have been put forth and debunked, e.g. conception somehow related to levels of body fat (Frisch 1974, Leibowitz 1986). What seems a very plausible explanation is based on the fact that undomesticated people are very much more in tune with their physical selves. Foraging women's senses and processes are not alienated from themselves or dulled; control over childbearing is probably less than mysterious to those whose bodies are not foreign objects to be acted upon.

The Pygmies of Zaire celebrate the first menstrual period of every girl with a great festival of gratitude and rejoicing (Turnbull 1962). The young woman feels pride and pleasure, and the entire band expresses its happiness. Among agricultural villagers, however, a menstruating woman is regarded as unclean and dangerous, to be quarantined by taboo (Duffy 1984). The relaxed, egalitarian relationship between San men and women, with its flexibility of roles and mutual respect impressed Draper (1971, 1972, 1975); a relationship, she made clear, that endures as long as they remain gatherer-hunters and no longer.

Duffy (1984) found that each child in an Mbuti camp calls every man father and every woman mother. Forager children receive far more care, time, and attention than do those in civilization's isolated nuclear families. Post and Taylor (1984) described the "almost permanent contact" with their mothers and other adults that Bushman children enjoy. !Kung infants studied by Ainsworth (1967) showed marked precocity of early cognitive and motor skills development. This was attributed both to the exercise and stimulation produced by unrestricted freedom of movement, and to the high degree of physical warmth and closeness between !Kung parents and children (see also Konner 1976).

Draper (1976) could see that "competitiveness in games is almost entirely lacking among the !Kung," as Shostack (1976) observed "!Kung boys and girls playing together and sharing most games." She also found that children are not prevented from experimental sex play, consonant with the freedom of older Mbuti youth to "indulge in premarital sex with enthusiasm and delight" (Turnbull 1981). The Zuni "have no sense of sin," Ruth Benedict (1946) wrote in a related vein. "Chastity as a way of life is regarded with great disfavor ... Pleasant relations between the sexes are merely one aspect of pleasant relations with human beings ... Sex is an incident in a happy life."

Coontz and Henderson (1986) point to a growing body of evidence in support of the proposition that relations between the sexes are most egalitarian in the simplest foraging societies. Women play an essential role in traditional agriculture, but receive no corresponding status for their contribution, unlike the case of gatherer-hunter society (Chevillard and Leconte 1986, Whyte 1978). As with plants and animals, so are women subject to domestication with the coming of agriculture. Culture, securing its foundations with the new order, requires the firm subjugation of instinct, freedom, and sexuality. All disorder must be banished, the elemental and spontaneous taken firmly in hand. Women's creativity and their very being as sexual persons are pressured to give way to the role, expressed in all peasant religions, of Great Mother, that is, fecund breeder of men and food.

The men of the South American Munduruc, a farming tribe, refer to plants and sex in the same phrase about subduing women: "We tame them with the banana" (Murphy and Murphy 1985). Simone de Beauvoir (1949) recognized in the equation of the plow and the phallus a symbol of male authority over women. Among the Amazonian Jivaro, another agricultural group, women are beasts of burden and the personal property of men (Harner 1972); the "abduction of adult women is a prominent part of much warfare" by these lowland South American tribes (Ferguson 1988). Brutalization and isolation of women seem to be functions of agricultural societies (Gregor 1988), and the female continues to perform most or even all of the work in such groups (Morgan 1985).

Head-hunting is practiced by the above-mentioned groups, as part of endemic warfare over coveted agricultural land (Lathrap 1970); head-hunting and near-constant warring is also witnessed among the farming tribes of Highlands New Guinea (Watson 1970). Lenski and Lenski's 1974 researches concluded that warfare is rare among foragers but becomes extremely common with agrarian societies. As Wilson (1988) put it succinctly, "Revenge, feuds, rioting, warfare and battle seem to emerge among, and to be typical of, domesticated peoples."

Tribal conflicts, Godelier (1977) argues, are "explainable primarily by reference to colonial domination" and should not be seen as having an origin "in the functioning of pre-colonial structures." Certainly contact with civilization can have an unsettling, degenerative effect, but Godelier's Marxism (viz. unwillingness to question domestication/production), is, one suspects, relevant to such a judgment. Thus it could be said that the Copper Eskimos, who have a significant incidence of homicide within their group (Damas 1972), owe this violence to the impact of outside influences, but their reliance on domesticated dogs should also be noted.

Arens (1979) has asserted, paralleling Godelier to some extent, that cannibalism as a cultural phenomenon is a fiction, invented and promoted by agencies of outside conquest. But there is documentation of this practice (e.g. Poole 1983, Tuzin 1976) among, once again, peoples involved in domestication. The studies by Hogg (1966), for example, reveal its presence among certain African tribes, steeped in ritual and grounded in agriculture. Cannibalism is generally a form of cultural control of chaos, in which the victim represents animality, or all that should be tamed (Sanday 1986). Significantly, one of the important myths of Fiji Islanders, "How the Fijians first became cannibals," is literally a tale of planting (Sahlins 1983). Similarly, the highly domesticated and time-conscious Aztecs practiced human sacrifice as a gesture to tame unruly forces and uphold the social equilibrium of a very alienated society. As Norbeck (1961) pointed out, non-domesticated, "culturally impoverished" societies are devoid of cannibalism and human sacrifice.

As for one of the basic underpinnings of violence in more complex societies, Barnes (1970) found that "reports in the ethnographic literature of territorial struggles" between gatherer-hunters are "extremely rare." !Kung boundaries are vague and undefended (Lee 1979); Pandaram territories overlap, and individuals go where they please (Morris 1982); Hazda move freely from region to region (Woodburn 1968); boundaries and trespass have little or no meaning to the Mbuti (Turnbull 1966); and Australian Aborigines reject territorial or social demarcations (Gumpert 1981, Hamilton 1982). An ethic of generosity and hospitality takes the place of exclusivity (Steward 1968, Hiatt 1968).

Gatherer-hunter peoples have developed "no conception of private property," in the estimation of Kitwood (1984). As noted above in reference to sharing, and with Sansom's (1980) characterization of Aborigines as "people without property," foragers do not share civilization's obsession with externals.

"Mine and thine, the seeds of all mischief, have no place with them," wrote Pietro (1511) of the native North Americans encountered on the second voyage of Columbus. The Bushmen have "no sense of possession," according to Post (1958), and Lee (1972) saw them making "no sharp dichotomy between the resources of the natural environment and the social wealth." There is a line between nature and culture, again, and the non-civilized choose the former.

There are many gatherer-hunters who could carry all that they make use of in one hand, who die with pretty much what they had as they came into the world. Once humans shared everything; with agriculture, ownership becomes paramount and a species presumes to own the world. A deformation the imagination could scarcely equal.

Sahlins (1972) spoke of this eloquently: "The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all, it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization."

The "common tendency" of gatherer-hunters "to reject farming until it was absolutely thrust upon them" (Bodley 1976) bespeaks a nature/culture divide also present in the Mbuti recognition that if one of them becomes a villager he is no longer an Mbuti (Turnbull 1976). They know that forager band and agriculturalist village are opposed societies with opposed values.

At times, however, the crucial factor of domestication can be lost sight of. "The historic foraging populations of the Western Coast of North America have long been considered anomalous among foragers," declared Cohen (1981); as Kelly (1991) also put it, "tribes of the Northwest Coast break all the stereotypes of hunter-gatherers." These foragers, whose main sustenance is fishing, have exhibited such alienated features as chiefs, hierarchy, warfare and slavery. But almost always overlooked are their domesticated tobacco and domesticated dogs. Even this celebrated "anomaly" contains features of domestication. Its practice, from ritual to production, with various accompanying forms of domination, seems to anchor and promote the facets of decline from an earlier state of grace.

Thomas (1981) provides another North American example, that of the Great Basin Shoshones and three of their component societies, the Kawich Mountain Shoshones, Reese River Shoshones, and Owens Valley Paiutes. The three groups showed distinctly different levels of agriculture, with increasing territoriality or ownership and hierarchy closely corresponding to higher degrees of domestication.

To "define" a disalienated world would be impossible and even undesirable, but I think we can and should try to reveal the unworld of today and how it got this way. We have taken a monstrously wrong turn with symbolic culture and division of labor, from a place of enchantment, understanding and wholeness to the absence we find at the heart of the doctrine of progress. Empty and emptying, the logic of domestication with its demand to control everything now shows us the ruin of the civilization that ruins the rest. Assuming the inferiority of nature enables the domination of cultural systems that soon will make the very earth uninhabitable.

Postmodernism says to us that a society without power relations can only be an abstraction (Foucault, 1982). This is a lie unless we accept the death of nature and renounce what once was and what we can find again. Turnbull spoke of the intimacy between Mbuti people and the forest, dancing almost as if making love to the forest. In the bosom of a life of equals that is no abstraction, that struggles to endure, they were "dancing with the forest, dancing with the moon."

(From Future Primitive & Other Essays (1994) by John Zerzan)

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Future Primitive Update

(From Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, #48 Fall/Winter, 1999-2000, via Insurgent Desire.)

In the past couple of years there have been some very remarkable findings concerning the capacities of early humans. These discoveries have reinforced and even considerably deepened some aspects of the general paradigm shift underway in recent decades. The work of Thomas Wynn and others has shown that Homo around one million years ago had an intelligence equal to our own. Anthropological orthodoxy now also views Paleolithic humans essentially peaceful, egalitarian, and healthy, with considerable leisure time and gender equality.

The most recent material has to do with mental achievements and has radical implications similar to those in the other areas of pre-civilized life. In late August, 1999, University of Minnesota and Harvard anthropologists disclosed a narrowing of the size differential between men and women that begun about 1.9 million years ago. The key factor was not so much the use of fire, which began then, but cooking of tuberous vegetables. Cooking reduced the need for bigger teeth, which predominated in males, and the sexes began to equalize in size. The fact of cooking, so long ago, is a considerable datum in terms of the capacities of early Homo. An upcoming issue of Current Anthropology will discuss this research in depth.

M. J. Morwood et al., in the March 12, 1998 issue of Nature, revealed evidence that humans used seagoing vessels 800,000 years ago in the western Pacific. This enormous revision of how long ago humans were able to construct vessels and guide them over miles of ocean actually elicits, according to the authors, a complete reappraisal of the cognitive capacity of early humanity.

In a related vein, a one-million-year-old skull found in Eritrea that possesses Homo sapiens features pushes back such an occurrence by 300,000 to 400,000 years. The September 1998 Discovery magazine called this find a "breakthrough in human origins," noting that prior to this discovery the earliest fossils with H. sapiens features dated to only 700,000 to 600,000 years ago.

The February 27, 1997 issue of Nature recounts the discovery of the world's oldest hunting weapons, a trio of 400,000-year-old wooden spears found in German coal mine. It is not clear whether this repudiates the prevailing view that Homo engaged almost entirely in foraging or scavenging until about 100,000 years ago, but the find does clearly demonstrate high intelligence. The 6 to 7-foot long spears "required careful planning", utilizing the hardest ends of young spruce trees, with the thickest and heaviest part of the carved shaft about one-third of the distance from the spear point for optimal balance.

What these reports establish is that humans were cooking, traveling over seas, and skillfully making tools at generally much earlier times than previously suspected, and very much prior to any known existence of symbolic culture.

We are trained to equate intelligence with symbolic culture, though clearly this assumption is at variance with the record of human existence. Likewise, we tend to measure intelligence in terms of division of labor and domestication, those benchmarks of basic alienation. We are finding out a bit more about an intelligence that we know lived with nature instead of dominating it, and lived without hierarchy or organized violence. (Head-hunting, cannibalism, slavery, war all appear only with the onset of agriculture.)

On one level or another it seems, humans so very long ago and for so many millennia understood what a good thing they had. Healthy and free, they many have sensed that division of labor erodes wholeness and fragments the individual, leading to social stratification, imbalance and conflict. They resisted it for more than a million or two million years, succumbing to civilization only quite recently, along with its consolation, symbolic culture.