The Hunter Gatherers Had a Few Things Right

Clearly not too many of us are interested in living in thatched huts, cooking over open fires and depending on the random bounty (or lack thereof) of nature for our survival. Mankind invented agriculture and domesticated animals for very good reasons. But our hunter gatherer forbears, and other early tribal cultures can teach us a lot about how society, even large industrialized civilizations, should treat its members.

First and foremost, every member of a tribal community is directly responsible for every other member of the tribe. If a member falls ill, the rest of the community cares for them. If they cannot participate in the hunt, or go out gathering fruits and vegetables, they are provided for. Those that have at any given moment care for those that don't. It's understood because in a small community, there are no superfluous parts. Each person has a function, a meaningful place in society, and that society's health is determined by the optimum functioning of each member.

Industrialized societies have forgotten that level of care. We've managed to create a very large community that can function even if not every member is participating. People have become marginalized, and there is a substrata of society that is, for all practical purposes, unnecessary. At least that's the perception. And while it's incorrect, the perception has dire consequences.

Take health care for example. From my perspective every human being on the face of the earth has the right to reasonable, affordable heath care. Is not one of the most basic functions of society to protect its own members? In tribal, hunter gatherer societies, affordable and available health care (even if it was witch doctors and herbal medicine) was a given. A blight on one member was a blight on the entire group. How are we any different? How can we consider ourselves to be an enlightened, humane society if we systematically deny and overcharge for live-saving care? It's absurd.

Humanity strives for meaning. Purpose. Everyone on the planet yearns for a "reason to be". Take that away from them and they can decay from the inside, and take society down with them. The old parable, "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime," has a secondary benefit. Teach a man to fish and he'll have something meaningful and useful to do with his life. And not only can he then catch fish for himself, he can catch fish for others.

I think if we tried to think of ourselves in tribal terms, life for all of us would benefit. Each member of a society is valuable. Each one has a unique perspective. A unique skill set which can, if given the chance, be brought to bear on problems. The more each member of our modern societies feels cared for, valued and respected the less problems overall we'll have to face. If we look at each other as tribesman instead of just neighbors, or worse, strangers, we'd see better the intrinsic value innate in each of us, value as measured by service to others. To our fellow tribesman, in the tribe called humanity.

It's not stupid. Drop five people in the middle of the forest, and watch how desperately each member depends upon the other four for survival. Increase the number to 50 and while the desperation subsides, the need for support remains intense. At 500 some people begin flying under the radar, mooching off of the work of others. At 5,000 the problem grows. At 50,000 you begin to delineate those with power and those without. People become cogs instead of family. At 500,000 and beyond you begin to fall into society as we know it today. Add technological advances and major labor-saving devices, and you've created a civilization stratified into the haves, the have-a-bits, and the have-nots.

I'd argue that people are most satisfied with their lives during the early numbers of the above demonstration, when each person is needed, sometime desperately. Life makes sense when it's lived in service to the survival of others as well as yourself. Otherwise selfishness and greed sets in. If we could work out a way to live in the 5,000,000 or 5,000,000,000 and above rungs as if we were still only 50, desperately working to claw out happy, meaningful existences for each other, societal problems would evaporate.

Seriously. They would just go away. Isn't that worth reevaluating modern thinking?

I Just Saw a Face

So I'm racking my brain for an entry topic today, unsuccessfully, when I absentmindedly look off to my right and see one of Kate's hair clips sitting alone on a small white table. At the angle it's sitting it looks very much like a fairly unattractive human face.

Entry idea.

Our brains are wired to look for patterns, and one of the most iconic images our minds scan our environments for is the human face. I, and probably most of you, tend to see faces everywhere. In scribbles, the backs of cars, and dirty blotches on the sidewalk. Anywhere there is a random assemblage of shapes or patterns, my eye sees a face.

And that's positive because it shows that not only are we wired to recognize the human face, which you'd expect, but we also have a strong tendency to seek that pattern out. Meaning we have a strong, innate desire to find others of our own kind. To be social creatures.

Try paying attention to the patterns you recognize in random assemblages. I'd be willing to bet more often than not you'll see a face.

Modern

I think the term "modern" is really interesting because of its constantly shifting meaning. Statically, modern can be defined as, "the historical period starting after the Middle Ages." That's the modern age. But that definition is skewed by our current temporal position. At its most basic level, modern means, "of or pertaining to present and recent time; not ancient or remote". That's a truly static definition that doesn't vary with time. But the experiential baggage that walks lockstep with the definition is constantly changing, and so, what "modern" means to me is very different than what it meant to someone twenty years ago, or 50 years ago, and certainly different from 150 years ago and farther.

I think we all tend to imagine our "modern" time as the best of all possible worlds. We look back at the past, see where we've come from, note all the improvements made to life since then, and almost pity those on the timeline less fortunate than us. We can't imagine how someone could have lived without indoor plumbing, or modern medicine, or the internet. On that point we can look back even fifteen years and wonder how those poor people managed. But imagine life in this country 150 years ago, before the industrial revolution. Before most of the enhancements to modern living we've become accustomed to.

Were those people miserable? On the whole, no. In fact they likely looked at their modern time and too imagined it as the best of all possible worlds. Because we as a species acclimate ourselves into the world we're born to. We're constantly striving to improve things, yes, because we always look to a better future. But at the time we look at the here and now and see it as generaly good. The major exception might have been Europe in the throes of the Dark Ages, nestled tight with the Plague. Those miserable, illiterate wretches likely didn't have a historical perspective, and simply new that the here and now sucked. For the most part, though, history has moved our species forward.

So clearly we know that our plum life is fleeting and that 100 years from now people will look back at us with awe and wonder that we were able to get by. "They had to physically type each word into their computers? That's so labor intensive!" "Achh! Traveling wasn't instantaneous? Where did the find the time to "drive" places, or "fly" to more distant points? Teleportation is the only way to travel." It's likely that even many of our labor-saving devices today will seem like a major imposition to future humans. We do the same thing with those same devices from our past. No reason to assume it would be different when we're examined by people 100 years from now.

I think it's a good thing that humanity tends toward excepting its lot. Life is difficult enough sometimes. Throwing in a constant, major dissatisfaction with life as it is would be enough to drive most people insane. Society works because we imagine that "modern" refers specifically to us, something that all those "past-ies" wouldn't get. Losers.