Читать книгу Muddling Toward Frugality - Warren Johnson - Страница 13

Whenever I hear someone say that because of our modern consciousness the future will have to be something brand new (inferring that there is little we can learn from the past), I like to remind them that during the last 150,000 years the size of the human brain has not changed, nor has anything else about Homo sapiens changed except the superficial adaptation to different environments that we call race. Our technology has changed spectacularly and our numbers have grown huge, but our minds and our bodies operate the same ways as in ages past.

Homo sapiens has been a hunter and gatherer for 90 percent of his existence, and if to this period we add the era of pre-man, the figure rises to 99 percent of our ancestry. Because of this long evolutionary experience, hunting and gathering is the way of life for which we are genetically “wired,” and it fits comfortably with our physical and psychological makeup. Our tendency has long been to regard this ancestry as primitive. Recently, books dealing with hunting and gathering societies have served to help counter this condescension toward “primitive” people, perhaps because civilization (in the original sense of the word, meaning urban-based societies) is no longer at war with hunters and gatherers for land and resources.¹ We no longer feel the need to picture them, as Thomas Hobbes did in the seventeenth century, as savages in a war of all against all. If there was such a war, we have won it, and there is now no danger in being generous to the vanquished. And even though the world population is now so great that there is no chance of returning to hunting and gathering as a method of livelihood, it is still useful to understand this way of life because of the light it throws on our genetic makeup.

In a fascinating article in Scientific American, “The Origin of Society,” anthropologist Marshall Sahlins identifies what seems to be the most basic differences between the simplest hunting and gathering societies that still survive and the society of our closest animal relatives, the primates .² Sahlins argues that the key difference is the control of sex. Among apes and monkeys, males compete with each other for females, and so sex involves a great deal of conflict. This behavior has survival value since the strongest males mate with the females, and the offspring thus carry the genetic material of the strongest male. But in human society this advantage is foregone, and the sexual free-for-all is constrained on all sides by taboos in order to encourage cooperation. The most important taboo is that against incest, and its key cultural function is to create harmony in the family. If parents and children competed for sexual favors, there would be continuous tension in the family, and it could not function as a cooperative unit. The incest taboo also had the advantage of creating blood ties between separate families in the tribe. Since marriage outside the family was favored, blood ties would eventually spread widely throughout the group. And since hunting and gathering societies were usually small, a tribal group soon came to see all its members as having descended from common ancestors. Such a view helped form a strong, cohesive group. In this way, the competition of the primate groups was replaced with cooperation and mutual aid. The phrase “survival of the fittest” is correct only up to a point; beyond that it should be “survival of the most cooperative.” Richard Leakey makes this point very strongly in his book Origins , and demonstrates it by the progress early man made compared to his primate relatives.³

In early societies, hunting was man’s work, and although it did not normally bring in as much food as the gathering done by women, it did serve to organize society and did so very satisfactorily. For one thing, hunting made sharing virtually inevitable. Because meat rotted quickly, a killed animal had to be divided and consumed before its value was lost. Hunting peoples characteristically feast after a successful hunt, and then enjoy themselves by relaxing, playing, telling stories, or recounting past hunts, until it is time for the next hunt. Hunters were blessed with all sorts of positive incentives to hunt; not only was hunting challenging and exciting, but the successful hunter also enjoyed the deference accorded to him when he was able to give away more meat than he received from others. Moreover, the hunter was free from internal conflict since to do what was most enjoyable and in one’s own best interest—to kill animals and give away the meat—was also in the group’s interest. Selflessness and selfishness were satisfied by the same act. There was still competitiveness, but it was of a positive nature.

In addition, the best hunter often became the leader of the band, although not always. The leader, in any case, was not elected and usually had little or no authority; his main role was to advise. He gained his position by giving the advice that was considered the best and so was most often accepted. Among the Shoshoni, the name for the leader was “the talker,” and for the Eskimos it is “he who thinks.” The other leader was the shaman—the witch doctor in Tarzan terminology—a function accorded to the individual who had the best psychological insights; who could give sound advice on matters of the mind and spirit; who knew about the tribal spirits and rituals; and who could recite the band’s myths and knew its history and stories.

The other factor that was instrumental in giving hunting and gathering societies their attractive characteristics was that they were almost always nomadic. To move regularly meant that personal possessions had to be kept to a minimum, leaving no chance that individuals would compete for status through accumulation of material things. The readiness of hunters and gatherers to give away what they had and the poor care given to their possessions were regularly reported by visitors to tribal groups. With so much leisure, there was plenty of time to make new things, a pleasurable pastime; and they used materials that were common to them: bone, sinews, skins, and wood. It was only in rare cases that nomadism was not necessary, such as around the mouths of rivers in the Pacific Northwest, where a steady supply of seafood as well as freshwater fish from the rivers permitted settled communities. The settled affluence of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest led them to the custom of the potlatch, in which individuals competed to become wealthy enough to give away more than others could return to them. They still shared, but with a vengeance; it was more like the economic warfare of our own society.

Each tribal group came to terms with its environment and learned when animals should not be killed, what plants were edible, and how to stay comfortable during different seasons, The spirits tended to keep each group in its own territory; if they ventured outside its boundaries, the spirits were unfamiliar and possibly dangerous, and the shaman was less sure of being able to deal with them. American Indians always resisted being moved away from their homelands, knowing that their chances of finding enough food to survive in an alien environment were slim, and that it probably would mean slow starvation. Time and again they would return to their ancestral lands and face death rather than die slowly in a foreign place. The Eskimos love the Arctic and the Bushmen love the desert as much as other hunters and gatherers loved more benevolent landscapes. Warfare was rare except in societies that became culturally trapped in it, as when warfare was necessary to gain manhood or high status, or when an equilibrium was upset, such as after the horse was introduced on the Great Plains. But this was unusual, and most reports are of gentle, peaceable people.

Controlling population seems to have been the most unpleasant task of hunters and gatherers. Migration, as a response to overpopulation, was rarely possible and then only from the periphery of occupied areas. Even then it was hazardous: little food could be carried along and new territory might provide little to eat; or the good lands reached might already be occupied by others. Migration was a desperate, temporary step, and sooner or later it would be necessary to maintain the group’s population within the bounds of the environment’s carrying capacity. It must have been a heavy burden, however, for a parent to expose a child because it could not be supported, or for men and women to endure long periods of sexual abstinence following the birth of a baby. But these sacrifices were found to be absolutely essential, otherwise the group found itself living on the edge of survival, having to eat starvation food such as leaves and bark, and watching sickness and death hover over the band. Population control was essential for the good life.

Beyond this painful obligation, hunters and gatherers seemed to be remarkably happy, easygoing people. They were able to enjoy leisure and still rise to the challenge of the hunt, and they had the capacity to sustain themselves by using only simple technology, something few of us can say these days. The books written about hunters and gatherers by outsiders who had the opportunity to live with them while their way of life was still intact are inspiring reading, and the reports confirm the good fit that millions of years of evolution produced.⁴