Terrible glory II

The problem with people is that they’re only human.
– Bill Watterson

We emerged from the mists of our deep history into awareness as rather appalling, scary creatures, and also as rather wonderful, amazing creatures… something completely new in the world: animals who told stories, who learned to laugh, befriended other species, created new things with their deft hands and spun delightful images with their clever brains. Initially, our powers were small. We lived, more or less, in harmony with the world, like other creatures. We were no more — but no less! — awful and destructive than the hyena or the shark. Like a hyena or a shark, we heedlessly grabbed what the planet offered. But since our powers were small, any damage we did was small. The limits Mother Nature places upon all organisms limited us as well.

Still, we evolved. Any shark or hyena grown an opposable thumb and a manipulative brain would be a very alarming creature indeed, especially as it began to evade, at least for a time, the bounds nature places on all organisms. I don’t blame humans for becoming more destructive as our capabilities grew. Would any other animal behave differently? As our behavioral repertoire expanded — better language, cooperation, skills of survival, hunting, reasoning abilities, symbols, dexterity — our ability to change the world, to help or harm it, increased apace. We became very good at survival, and very good at destroying what stood in our way. Any large predator – had it evolved such abilities – would become a very dangerous creature indeed, to self and others. Jekyll grew in powers. How wonderful. But so did Hyde. How very, very inauspicious.

As our capabilities expanded, humans began to cause significant damage to certain parts of the planet. We damaged a large part of the continent of Australia and its climate through fires. Imagine: small roaming bands of humans equipped only with simple stone age tools managed to bring ruin to an entire continent! We probably had a hand in wiping out our cousins, the Neanderthals, and perhaps other descendants of erectus as well. Our greedy hunting methods included mass stampedes of hundreds of animals over cliffs and into cul-de-sacs when only a few of their bodies could be used. With a variety of improved hunting strategies, we began to have significant impact on certain animal populations, and likely contributed to the extinctions of the Upper Paleolithic. We certainly caused great devastations much later as the outlying Pacific islands were settled, or used as larders by passing sailors.

Picture leaving a few pairs of predators – say, cats — on pristine Easter Island. They would have multiplied, wiped out the naïve fauna in relatively short order and collapsed, leaving an impoverished island behind. Just the way the Polynesians did it. We think that humans should know better. But the cats’ predicament is our predicament too. Even today, with all the bells and whistles of modern life, we are not good at dealing with the future staring us in the face. We find ourselves just as unable to modify our destructive behaviors as did the hapless Easter Islanders.

Face to face with a more realistic assessment of human nature, is pessimism or cynicism called for? I don’t see it that way. I do think evolution has saddled us with a problem that calls for a great deal of caution. Our shadow side cannot magically disappear by going into therapy, getting religion, via bootstrap evolution, through self-discipline, or doing the 12 steps. It will not disappear by sloughing off civilization. This is who we are: dangerous, amazing, limited human animals. We must face what is in terrible glory inside us. To let our heart be broken by who we are. To know, to surrender to the truth, and to find peace. Then we can quit tearing Mother Nature to pieces in revenge for having made us so imperfect, so “fallen.” Then, we can finally stop destroying each other and the planet we love.

 

Co-intelligence evolving

Next year, much of the writing hereabouts will dally under the astrological sign of Complexity. And since complexity is inextricably linked to evolution (or is it the other way around?), poking Darwinism with a stick will be at times regretfully necessitated. So… why not start now?

This raspberry-flavored whimsy comes adapted from The Sex Life of Flowers (ch. 5, The ‘unacceptable’ face of evolution) by way of Charles Bowden’s novel Blood Orchid.

They will do anything to reproduce. And they will use the needs of others, the deep appetites they see in all our faces, they will exploit these things to further their own ends. They will take over our ways of loving, they will seize upon our sense of property. They will ruthlessly read our diaries, our secret thoughts, and then make us slaves to our own obsessions.

Perhaps no clearer example exists than the tactics of the hammer orchid (Drakaea fitzgeraldii) and its scheme to seduce one particular type of wasp (of the family Thynnidae). Thynnids fall into the trap once they gaze upon the labellum of a hammer orchid.

Female Thynnids prosper by parasitizing the larvae of Scarabacid beetles, and the particular beetles favored as prey live by being root parasites. To find them, the females have to dig and since they spent their time digging, they lost the ability to fly. Indeed, they have lost their wings, a sacrifice which makes it easier for the females to tunnel under the earth. The hammer orchid lives high above them in the trees but somehow has become conscious of their strange ways.

Since the female Thynnids cannot fly, they cannot search the forest above them for food. This problem they solve by sucking fluids from the beetles that are their victims. That leaves the great subject of mating. Most wasps of this type have a culture in which the males are the active parties in mating. Usually, a female just plants herself in an easily reached location, releases a pheromone, and lets time solve her problem. Possibly, it is an intoxicating situation.

Usually, the mating process proceeds rather simply. The female sits, releases the pheromone into the air, and business proceeds. For copulation to occur the male wasp must be triggered by scent, by sight, and by touch. So the pretty and winged male flies a patrol, he stumbles upon the inviting scent drifting through the air and follows it. The female, to make it all so easy, has climbed up a ways off the ground on, say, a grass stem. Now the male approaches, the female begins to move her jaws in expectation. The male descends, grabs her with his legs. And off they go, like a military aircraft with a deadly missile slung underneath.

She does not fear that she will fall. She fastens her jaws on the male’s neck, and there she rides secure. They mate while in flight, a seemingly needless risk that long puzzled scientists. Why is this ride necessary? True, there are a lot of bees and butterflies and whatnot that fornicate in the air. But this species of wasp could have accomplished the venture without leaving the good and solid earth. So why are they behaving this way? And what – the impossible question we are trained never to ask – do the hammer orchids make of it all? For we know, and we insist, the orchids cannot think. Or see. Or in any way we will ever admit, know. And they are up there in the trees, clinging while the male flies and fucks with the female down below.

The male and female wasp do not hurry, no, not at all. They remain locked together in fornication for hours. And they do other things. The female for the first time in her life is off the ground, in flight. The tunnel-digging predator now kisses the sky. She does not waste this rare opportunity. The male hauls her from flower to flower and here they both feed, continuing to fuck all the while. For the first and last time during her time on this earth, the female tastes nectar.

While the male and female wasp are slurping up nectar and fornicating, the male, we think, is also scoping out the forest floor. Sex, we believe, does not distract him from this great task. He is looking for a good place to drop the female later, after the bash, a piece of ground rich in beetles where his kind can thrive, where his descendants will prosper. Just how he does this we do not understand. But we feel confident that however strange it may seem, he is actually the explorer of his world, the Columbus finding the new country and the new future. And the hammer orchid that cannot watch, watches; that cannot see, sees; that cannot know, …

We are in Australia, the wasps are mating just below and orchids, particularly hammer orchids (Drakaea) and elbow orchids (Spiculaea), seem to notice. The hammer orchids, for example, have a strange labellum – that tonguelike projection in the middle of the flower. It looks… just like a small, fat, wingless female version of the Thynnid wasp. The imitation is damn near perfect – shiny head, round, faintly hairy body, ass tilted up a bit into the air. The scent also – that delicious pheromone the female releases – is copied and wafts off into the air from the hammer orchid. It is floating across the forest, it is sexually inviting, perhaps maddening, and the orchid, which cannot possibly know, now it hears the rush of wings approaching it, though of course it cannot possibly hear either.

The fake female wasp rides on the end of a little hinged arm that sticks up from the flower of the hammer orchid. She bobs up and down in the wind, she looks so alive and of course, there is that scent. The male descends — ah, the moment is at hand that evolution has been waiting for, the moment that so stimulated that crabby old churchman Charlie Darwin as he battled his illnesses and fears in his dark English study — grabs the female impersonator, wrenches to take off into his mating flight. And then the hammer comes down, a thing delicately called the column, and on its end are stigma and polinia. The male wasp is already trying to probe that uplifted ass with his genitals when — wham! the hammer hits, and suddenly the male senses this is not a real female and he departs. It has taken less than a second. And glued to his back are the reproductive cells of the orchid. There are four species of hammer orchids. Each attracts a specific species of Thynnid wasp. And they do this by mimicking a female that spends all of her life tunneling in the forest floor far below. Except, of course, for her few hours of flying, fucking, nectar slurping, and fun.

The system of the hammer orchid usually fails. How could it be otherwise? If perfect, all the wasps would mate with fake females and soon there might be no real wasps to attract. The fake females, well, they are just not the real thing. No orchid can compete with a real lusty Thynnid female, not at all. Males will hardly visit the flowers when living females are out and about. The scent is just not like a whiff of the real thing. But there is a saving fact, a tiny detail that makes the sex life of the hammer orchid possible. Each spring, the males show up a couple of weeks before the females. And the hammer orchid knows this — no! no! that can’t be right, these damn things can’t really know. During this interlude, the hammer orchid seduces male Thynnids, and they land, and they fuck the false female, and the hammer falls. It has been going on for…

 

Doomer no more

We are fucked! We are so fucked!
– a doomer

It’s not that I am rooting for civ to survive. I believe and hope that this civilization is on its last legs. My unciv credentials remain unimpeachable. It’s the other stuff that bugs the hell out of me.

I am sick and tired of all the mantras of doom offered up in daily genuflections by “our kind” of people. Haven’t they noticed that the Spectacle promotes endlessly depressing messages, and has done so for ages? Custom dispiriting propaganda for different population targets! And we have helped it along through a regular menu of bleak scenarios, reassurances of very grim events looming just ahead, and perpetually hopeless computer simulations. You see, whatever we do — repeat after me — we.are.fucked.

Meh. It’s gotten boring, folks.

Isn’t it just a variation on the same millenarian bullcrap spouted by those crazy-eyed folks who assure us that the world will end next May 21st? Nobody knows the future. Nobody. Therefore we cannot know whether we are fucked or not. Ain’t that nice? Having those dismal tidings perpetually running through our heads gets in the way of sensing possibilities that have so far been missed. And guess what: the puppet-masters of the Spectacle want us to miss them!

So I am drawing a line. I will no longer repeat and pass on those tunes that flow out of the ol’ doomer hurdy-gurdy. I henceforth throw my lot in with those of us who are busy sensing transformative ways of proceeding, seeing new visions, finding and walking new paths. To think that we could know the future with the help of smart machines! What an exquisitely bizarre turn of the familiar hubris screw. Forget about those oh so slickly persuasive scenarios. Let us instead bet heavily that Gaia has something else in mind. Let us assume that the endless complexity that is the universe can morph into something unprecedented, swayed by the flapping of a butterfly’s shimmering wing or by a sudden wee burst of lovingkindness. The future I have in mind and heart begins in some tiny thing I do today that amplifies in completely unpredictable ways and tomorrow brings forth a … surprise.

I have been reading an ambitious, sprawling economic history of this civilization. Graeber’s ‘Debt: the first 5,000 years’ is a creative, eye opening work worth a series of winter evenings. I want to quote from its last chapter; to share some lines that hit me square in the solar plexus.

For most of the last several centuries, most people assumed that … the future was likely to be fundamentally different. Yet somehow, the anticipated revolutions never happened. The basic structure of financial capitalism remained in place. It is only now, at the very moment when it’s becoming increasingly clear that the current arrangements are not viable, that we suddenly have hit the wall in terms of our collective imagination.

There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist – most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet… Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction – even from those who call themselves “progressives” – is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

Maintaining [the military] apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union? One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and rebuilding the factories, but what in fact happened was precisely the other way around. This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, the apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down – along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with. Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons lest speculation, predictably, goes haywire. Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

The system wants it so that the only thing we can imagine is a catastrophe. People trapped and thrashing in the sticky web of perpetual doom will rather stay with the devil they know. And that serves the elites just fine. Fearing a popular alternative, they felt constrained in the Depression to make concessions, and to spread wealth around after the war. Once that alternative was discredited, they concluded that anything goes. And so “anything went.” And this same “anything” is still going down. But a new game is afoot. They’ll never realize it until it pokes them in the eye. We know the Spectacle is not real. It only exists because people keep watching it and dancing to its tunes.

Since doomerism has become part of the Spectacle, yet another way to keep people fearful and stuck, it no longer serves our interests. Dwelling on ghastly scenarios once had its charms; now it’s just another distraction. Let us imagine something that the puppet-masters hope we’ll fail to see in our mind’s eye — a world that works, a world where life thrives, a world where being human is an adventure — and give that world our undivided attention.

 

Terrible glory of being human I

If we believe in the fundamental goodness of man, we are doomed.
– Dr. Robert Hare

We may as well start with some very bad news, and get it out of the way. We humans are naturally violent, acquisitive, greedy, negligent, aggressive, destructive, petty, mean, self-centered, and sometimes abysmally foolish. And now for the very good news: it’s also in our nature to be peaceful, giving, generous, caring, gentle, creative, broad-minded, kind, altruistic, and sometimes profoundly wise. We are domineering, yet we long for equality.

Mother Culture of the so-called progressive worldview vigorously disagrees. As a reaction to the often-knee jerk blaming of human nature for the failings of civilization, many of us moderns bought the other side of the coin. Haven’t we been told by the various gurus of enlightened 21st century thinking that human nature is “basically good”? Like some anxiety management self-help circle, we indulge in endless mutual assurances that I am ok and you are ok. But the façade of “goodness” crumbles rather quickly under the critical gaze of those who lose faith in the ready blandishments. “There are more and more factors beginning to push us out of the comfortable pew where we mostly once worshiped our species, our ‘leaders’, our civilization, our perception of unlimited human capacity and entitlement and manifest destiny.” Indeed. And along with the worship of our species goes the often uncritical defense of the species’ nature. These particular worshipers fish around for evidence that our primate cousins are gentle giants, that our paleolithic ancestors lived non-violent lives, that hunting and omnivory was really somehow imposed upon us mild-mannered fruit-eaters, and that human aggression is really learned — not innate — and can be erased with another kind of learning.

When people argue on behalf of benevolent human nature, the argument often takes this informal shape: It is quite evident that most of us behave in fairly innocuous ways most of the time. But look at all the horrible things people have done – now a list of genocides, tortures, and other ghastly deeds emerges – that is not us, is it? The Hitlers of this world are caused by… culture, stress, poor upbringing, perhaps even innate pathologies. But that’s not us! See, most humans are basically good. Such an argument is based on a fallacy. It’s not either/or: either we are basically good, or we are genocidal maniacs and perverts. There is a third possibility: that we are both good and bad in fundamental common measure. And this point of view, called by some social scientists “the ambivalence model of human nature” is the keystone of my own understanding. I used to believe otherwise. I once defended vigorously the “basically good” point of view. But events in my own life — in my own behavior! — eventually prompted me to take a harder look.

I now accept a different argument. This one is rooted in the evidence of primitive tribes. Their profound egalitarianism, radical sharing, steady emphasis on social harmony, and the rarity of serious armed conflict rightly astounds the modern mind. But it would be a romantic misdirection to claim that greed, violence or power abuse is absent among them. Studies clearly indicate that hiding one’s kill from others, shirking common work, eagerness to inflict severe damage on neighbors, and upstartism has been documented time and again even among remote or newly contacted tribes. Significant levels of violence — mostly among males competing for females, and in skirmishes between bands — have been recorded in most primitive societies.

What is the evidence from our far-ancient ancestors and other primates? An erectus find displays the remains of a human being who had been scalped and his eyes gouged out. There is evidence of interhuman violence, including human sacrifice, in cave art and Upper Paleolithic remains. And a massacre from about 12,000 years ago shows half of a small settlement dispatched by human weapons. Chimpanzees have been observed to terrorize and kill other chimps. It has finally been understood that intraspecific violence is common among animals, including our closest primate relatives. We are no different.

It is the propensity for killing that allows both chimps and humans to be such good hunters. Bonobos were said by eager romanticizers a while back “to have lost the desire to kill.” But careful study shows bonobo females organizing themselves into precise, coordinated, swift and deadly hunting bands as they go after monkeys. It is hard to believe we would have evolved into fierce predators had there been no biological basis for it.

And then there is cannibalism. Well documented among the erectus, Neanderthals, and sapiens, it presents a picture of our nature many of us would prefer not to know. But the evidence cannot be ignored. Both long-ago ancestors and more recent tribal peoples hunted fellow humans as prey. Eating one’s fellows out of dire hunger, reproductive reasons, and cage confinement is not uncommon in the animal kingdom. But gastronomic cannibalism, the hunting of one’s own kind in plentiful times for food is far more unusual. We stand in the company of bull frogs, scorpions, king cobras, sharks, and our primate cousins, the common chimps. Isn’t that alone something to gag on?

Benevolent, us?! Trees are benevolent beings. We are not. Besides, any animal species has it in their power to wreak a lot of damage on earth by overbreeding, overtrampling, overkilling and overconsuming. This is true from bacteria all the way to mammals. It is true of us.

The dark and light nature of our species was vividly portrayed by that classic of a film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). Dr. Jekyll, a noble humanitarian, develops an elixir that — he hopes — will improve upon human nature. He tests his potion on himself and morphs into the hairy, coarse, nasty Mr. Hyde who goes off on a rampage. The story ends badly. To be rid of Hyde, the world must be rid of Jekyll. The Jekyll/Hyde metaphor is a powerful reminder of the underlying light-and-shadow that lives in ambivalent, dappled symbiosis in all of us.

Where once humans were blamed for the imperfection of civilization, turning it upside down blames civilization for the imperfection of humans. “It is the psychotic demands of civilization that have created these very troubling forms of social disintegration along with the weakness that haunts individuals in their complicit acquiescence, in their enslavement to these urban walls and the psychopathologies they generate.” Human evils are symptoms of stress-related mental illness caused by our culture. If that is true — and the project of Enlightenment has believed it to be so — then all we need is shucking off the burden, healing, and plenty of freedom. More freedom! How sweet it rang in the French revolution. How sweet the sound in all the propaganda for modernity. But if human nature is dark and light, then more freedom for Jekyll will always and inevitably lead to more freedom for Hyde… and that seems like a singularly bad idea.

 

“Our politics”

Slowly you realize that you have become a spectator, an object. Your politics take place on a stage and your social relations consist of sitting in an audience or marching in a crowd.
– Anti-mass

A persistent fantasy lightens my steps. I am peeking into the living room of a large house shared by several housemates. It’s evening, and all are companionably gathered there. All these folks are very interested in political solutions to our current impasse. One is reading a book analyzing the Washington political scene. One is at the computer, following political discussions in the state’s capital city. One is watching TV (with headphones on) where political pundits weigh in about some issues the legislature is discussing. Another yet is strategizing for an upcoming protest, while her neighbor is preparing a speech for the local Democratic Committee.

All is quiet, and into that silence, magic falls. Perhaps the Spirit of the Times has just flown by the softly lit window and waved its magic wand at the gathered household. The people stretch and wiggle about, as if awakening from a trance. They look around, trying to acclimate themselves to something so familiar and yet somehow completely unexpected. And one by one, they slowly turn around to face one another. It’s as though they are seeing each other for the first time.

A dawning. “It’s up to us, isn’t it?” a woman says wonderingly. “Can we do it?” The man next to her leaps in with gusto: “I am betting there are at this very moment small groups all around the world coming to the same awareness. We don’t know about them yet, and that is good, because they need time to mature, hidden from the Eye. But we are not alone!” “Just think,” says another, “we here are the beginning of a whole different world. The time we have waited for is upon us.” Smiles all around: We are the body politic!

“Our politics” begins as we come together within “our space”, three or five or a dozen, and begin the holy work of helping Gaia live & helping each other out of the slavery of Babylon. Then linking through the grassroots with others.

Our politics begins as we resolutely turn away from the Spectacle and give each other our full and open-hearted attention.

 

Agriculture: villain or boon companion?

Clearly, the definition of agriculturist merges insensibly into the definition of hunter-gatherer and it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.
– Tim Flannery

Jared Diamond of Collapse fame wrote an essay on agriculture’s origins provocatively titled The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. For many people, this is a paradigm-altering read. Diamond claims that rather than improve the lives of our ancestors, agriculture made them worse. It brought malnutrition and disease, inequality, despotism, risk of starvation, population explosion, and unsanitary crowdedness. Free time shrank, hard labor increased, parasitic elites skimmed the surplus produced and went to war on neighbors snatching slaves and tribute. When I read the essay, I was stunned. You bet I double-checked his claims. In the old days, anthropologists used to ask what took humans so long to become farmers. Now they are asking, what forced our ancestors into this difficult way of life when life as foragers was generally plentiful enough, healthier, and full of leisure compared to the new lifestyle?

In a nutshell, the understanding of the so called agricultural revolution is in flux. That oldest theory of all, that agriculture is the superior way to live, was laid to rest in the 60s when forager research matured enough to see past the stereotypes. The main theories which followed proposed that humans were pushed into agriculture by hunger, climate downturns, and population growth. Though they linger, testimony of the ground has not supported them. There is a great deal of evidence that agriculture as we understand it emerged in areas of relative plenty, during periods of favorable climate and small forager populations, when there was the luxury to experiment. For example, the first known domesticate, rye, was cultivated in the Near East as early as 13,500 years ago, well before the climatic cold of the Younger Dryas – the last gasp of the Ice Age.

Perhaps the word “disarray” would describe the situation better than “flux.” As Bryan Hayden commented in his 1990 article Nimrods, piscators, pluckers and planters:

Few topics in prehistory have engendered as much discussion and resulted in so few satisfying answers as the attempt to explain why hunter/gatherers began to cultivate plants and raise animals. Climatic change, population pressure, sedentism, resource concentration from desertification, girls’ hormones, land ownership, geniuses, rituals, scheduling conflicts, random genetic kicks, natural selection, broad spectrum adaptation and multicausal retreats from explanation have all been proffered to explain domestication. All have major flaws … the data do not accord well with any one of these models.

The most colorful conjecture posits that it all started with human fondness for alcohol and other grain-produced endorphins. Then there is the encouragement of surplus production for competitive feasting, Hayden’s own contribution, but we know such feasts had gone on among foragers without leading to agriculture. Each hypothesis seems to have a bit of the truth, and none seems to satisfy the demands of a full-fledged, well-corroborated theory.

There is another prism through which to view this puzzle. After delving into far prehistory in great detail, it seemed to me passing strange to assume that our sapiens ancestors 100,000+ years ago did not notice that sticking a bit of a plant back in the soil produces more. We have erectus building rafts and navigating the ocean 800,000 years ago, we have neanderthalensis cooking up glue at high temperatures at 80,000+ years ago, but gosh darn, nobody noticed plants grow from seeds!? It makes no sense. I am assuming along with Colin Tudge’s Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers that by some 50,000 years ago, our ancestors were minding plants in ways that will never show in the archeology record, and had probably been doing it for eons before that time. As the Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery stresses in his book The Future Eaters:

Traditionally, the major crops of New Guinea have been root crops such as the taro, or suckering species such as the banana. In order to propagate these plants one simply needs to grub them up, cut off the tuber or sucker and stick the leafy top back into the ground. This simple act has probably been part of the human behavioral repertoire for 100,000 years or more. Clearly it does not qualify a person as an agriculturist. But what is to be said of the person who returns to the newly established plant and clears competing species away from it? And what if they plant 10 taro tops together…?

Surely, human intelligence would apply itself in trying to enhance the fecundity of a given environment… not in order to be able to cram more humans into it, but in order to have an easier, less toilsome life with a bit more buffer from natural downturns. After all, we humans follow the “law of least effort” whenever we can. I wager that we have experimented with plant and animal “magic” for a long time, trying for the best mix of strategies to fit in with a particular environment. ‘To tend’ means to listen, be attentive to; to watch over; and finally to cultivate. And taming (as in befriending) animals or helping plants spread and thrive will not necessarily leave a genetic footprint. In other words, cultivation is possible without domestication. The tribal record shows that we’ve gone back and forth, trying this and that, then returning to what was before if the new ways did not please. The precise mix of subsistence means varied in response to local opportunities and challenges. We sapiens emerged from the mists not as some pure and delimited hunter-gatherers, but as hunters-scavengers-fishers-gatherers-tenders and “firestick farmers.” This is who we were then. This is who we are now.

We lived in bands and small tribal groups, eking out a living from the land with some combination of foraging and tending, coming together periodically to gift and trade, feast and forge alliances. There was no progression to some “other” future, no march toward a “revolution.” Each culture adapted to its environs; in some areas, by further simplification (for example, Tasmanians gave up harpoons, boomerangs and clothes as nonessential), in most areas by only modest elaboration (in Australia and many parts of the early Americas and Asia a stone age toolkit with modest enhancements was enough to secure the provender of a tribe); a few others leaned toward tending in more complex ways (in New Guinea, Near East, northern China, Mesoamerica and the Andes – the earliest known centers of more intensive cultivation – animal and plant selection, elaboration of containers and other tools, terracing and irrigation played a role). I think of it as a mosaic of great many adaptations, each evolved to fit a particular people and land.

To be fair: what Diamond’s article really pillories is intensive grain agriculture. Grain agriculture, as it was generally practiced in ancient times and as it is still widely practiced today, not only contributes to the evils listed above by Diamond, but through the repeated baring and plowing the soil has also been a major cause of soil erosion and deterioration around the the world. It is said that in Australia (where soils are particularly vulnerable) it costs several kg of vanished soil to put 1 kg of bread on the table. There is no doubt that there exist any number of very poor ways to farm, and that the plow has done a tremendous amount of damage. But that should not obscure the fact that there are many very good ways to farm; there are places in the world where the ancient farmers actually left the land in better shape than they found it (e.g. the terra preta areas of the Amazon basin). Field-based, low-till, high-mulch vegeculture is another good way to farm; so is soil-sparing horticulture, silviculture, and their various permutations, as in permaculture. And similarly, there are good ways to tend animals. The Saami follow the reindeer and tame a small subsection of the herd. Certain tribes in New Guinea develop a relationship with a sow and help take care of her piglets, while she continues to live a life of the woods, a life a pig was meant to live, breeding with wild boars all along. The North American Indians opened up eastern forests through controlled fire, creating new habitats for bison. Agriculture is as old as humanity, and has been of great use to us as we spread widely and adapted to a wide range of environments.

It seems to me that the most successful human adaptation ever is the one that offers the greatest diversity of food sources. Foraging combined with basic tuber cultivation and the naturalization of new crops, as the north Australian Aborigines did with the wild yam. Anchovies plus orchards and veggies the Norte Chicans thrived on. Limited-till small-field agriculture backed up by foraging in nearby woods, or biointensive gardens surrounded by sequentially grazed pastures, hedges and prairies. Even larger scale plow-based grain agriculture may have its place in the self-renewing soils of a regularly flooding river like the Nile used to be, or within carefully looked after mixed-use fields (e.g. milpa), provided foraging habitats are preserved nearby.

And indeed, the anthropological record shows a great many cultures combining foraging with small-scale tending, which became a very successful, long term, stable way of life. The people enjoyed a varied diet not dependent on heavy starches, and when their agricultural efforts failed in any given year, foraging kept them well fed. And vice versa; when a severe El Niño chased fish shoals far away from the coast, inland fruits and vegetables tided the people over. Even in recent times, of those New World cultures that preferred to invest more than 10% of their effort in cultivation, the most popular combination was about 40% agriculture, and 60% foraging.

The chase after the origin of agriculture is a mirage. (Leaf-cutting ants invented farming 250 million years ago; we don’t get any firsts anyway!) Archeological evidence shows not the origin, but the intensification of agriculture to a point when it becomes visible to us today. The question we should be asking is this: what brought about surplus-oriented intensification that began to do away with the sensible and durable lifestyle of our forager/tender ancestors and led an escalating chain of evils up to the present time?

 

Wisdom-process

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
– Stephen Vincent Benét

A puzzle. Why is it that some ancient societies destroyed their land and collapsed, while others were able to turn around when they saw the damage they were leaving in their wake and change their culture in the direction of co-adaptation?

Two islands in Oceania. Both so remote they could not export their problems. Both small; Tikopia, the smaller of the two, has better soils. The larger Easter Island provided a richer foraging environment when the Polynesians settled there. Both were peopled by forager/horticulturists of similar cultural stock. Tikopia was settled much earlier than Easter Island, and has been inhabited for 2,800 years, Easter Island for perhaps 1,300 years. On both islands, living was easy, with main reliance on gardens and fishing. The Tikopians brought with them pigs and chickens, the Easter Islanders only chickens (and stowaway rats).

Easter Island began to suffer deforestation from about 1,400 AD onward, partly due to burgeoning population and partly because of poor practices that led to soil erosion over and over again. In addition, the entire culture of 11 clans became intensely involved in the creation and erection of the huge statues of clan ancestors for which Easter Island is now famous. Trees were utilized to make the ropes, rolling logs and cranes necessary to transport the statues to their permanent sites. This highly competitive and ambition-driven enterprise between the clans led to bigger and bigger statues needing more extensive engineering works to move them.

The Easter Islanders could easily see the damage as they walked around their small island. The last trees were also their last link with the deep sea and the porpoises and big fish they loved to eat. The trees were their last chance of leaving the island on voyages connecting them with the larger world. And of course, the trees were their last hope for erecting new statues. Yet, they went ahead and cut down the last remaining trees. As anthropologist Terry Hunt describes it:

With the loss of their forest, the quality of life for Islanders plummeted. Streams and drinking water supplies dried up. Crop yields declined as wind, rain, and sunlight eroded topsoil. Fires became a luxury since no wood could be found on the island, and grasses had to be used for fuel. No longer could rope be manufactured to move the stone statues and they were abandoned.

As their access to protein diminished and their island home turned into a windblown grassy plain, the people began to wall in their gardens and expand their chicken flocks. But it was too late to ward off a collapse: too many people vying for too few resources, a conflict-ridden culture, and an almost incomprehensible sense of cultural madness. Ever larger statues lay in the quarry, some so enormous there was absolutely no chance of moving them. As violence broke out, people burrowed into little hidden shelters dug into the slopes and warriors took over any remaining governance. The culture eventually perished amidst famine and cannibalism. The survivors turned in fury against the statues their ancestors sacrificed so much to build; most were toppled and broken soon after the first Europeans visited the island in 1722.

On Tikopia, however, things worked out differently. Predictably enough, the Tikopians also arrived at a place where their small island held too many people, deforestation and erosion became severe, bird communities were decimated, people went hungry and wars among the clans started in earnest. At one point, the weaker of the clans made the choice to take to the sea and perish there rather than risk being murdered in their sleep.

And then, Tikopians turned around. They decided to keep their population at around 1200 people, resorting to infanticide, to sending young people on sea journeys that were perilous and highly uncertain of reaching other lands, and to restrictive reproductive customs (only first sons were permitted to marry and have children). Pottery was no longer made (presumably because it needs a lot of charcoal for firing). Gardening practices were altered in favor of forest gardens, soil was renewed, and the island remains covered by lush canopy to this day. Despite great fondness for pork, the increasing damage caused by the pigs led to their eradication. There were changes in the status of leaders; by the time Tikopia was studied in the 1920s, chiefs were highly respected but humble people who worked their own gardens and did not prey on the rest of the community. Nobody on Tikopia was dispossessed or landless. These cultural changes were made over long periods of time, and were adjusted toward greater radicalism when it became apparent that the damage had been merely slowed down and more profound changes were needed.

What made the difference? What can we ourselves learn from the lessons of Tikopia? I have a little niggling hypothesis banging around my head that still needs developing. I thought I’d share what little I understand and see if it leads to greater insights in time.

This is how it goes. In the background of every culture, there hums a process that informs the mode of governance and the levels of conflict within that particular social system. In some cultures, this generative groundwork can not unfairly be called a “power-process.” A power-process produces an accumulation of power (along with prestige and wealth). Such cultures are typically recognizable by high levels of competition and conflict and by monumental architecture — statuary, tombs, temples, and palaces — used to legitimate the entrenched sociopolitical structure.

In other cultures, there hums in the background a “wisdom-process” instead. The wisdom-process results in the accumulation of insightful, tried-and-true customs and traditions. Such cultures implement strong checks and balances, not allowing religious or secular leaders to monopolize power and prestige to the detriment of the community. This does not necessarily mean that such societies are deeply egalitarian — Oceania was settled by fairly rigidly ranked peoples. It means that the effects of power are modified and not allowed to get out of hand, and cooperation is the predominant ethos of the culture.

The power-process supersedes wisdom, and societies that rely on it are unable to deal with challenges that are not amenable to power-driven solutions. Whenever massive ecological challenges come their way, demanding profound cultural changes, particularly ones involving a shift in allocation of influence and wealth, a power-driven process retrenches and walls itself off so effectively from feedback and from any possibility of change threatening the status quo that the culture eventually collapses.

The power-process can be simplified into a diagram.

Power-process
/          \
/              \
people divided       rule and conquest

In other words, a power-process promotes the “divide and rule” paradigm. There are many ways to divide the people; ideologies, ingrained injustices that turn people against their neighbors, artificially generated conflicts, intentional immiseration and the like. People divided are easy to rule. They are unable, however, to come together when the whole culture is faced with the need to change course, even when their survival depends on it.

The wisdom-process, on the other hand, supersedes power. A culture that relies on it is able to turn around because the wisdom process pays close attention to feedback from all quarters, and follows some form of the OODA spiral to evolve cultural change in hoped-for directions. It is well suited to keep adjusting the social steering mechanism in the direction of greater cultural and ecological well being.

Wisdom-process
/          \
/              \
people united       co-governance

“Unify and co-govern” is the inverse of the old strategy that aims to “divide and conquer,” and may provide an effective antidote to the poison of congealed power. How can we open the door to unity and co-governance? By using the cultural tools that defuse conflicts and support trust-based relationships. A sense of common vision plays a role. And by weaving a social fabric where intrinsic differences among humans are not artificially aggravated. But these are just a few rough guesses. It is up to us to look for hints of wisdom-process in the old records, to learn from cultures today that are still sustained by it, and to evolve it anew in our post-civ afterculture. Listening for its faint hum is surely the first step.

 

And off the treadmill

The societies of the world will be faced with the task of rebuilding systems of fruitful activity, i.e., real economies based on productive behavior rather than the smoke-and-mirrors of Frankenstein-finance con games.
– James Howard Kunstler

Of course, getting out of the prison is only the first step. The escapee may in the beginning continue to work for the prison bosses voluntarily, going back and forth. This will give them time to consider what’s next.

Those who don’t see it as enough can look for bosses who are not fully wedged in the prison themselves… companies that, one way or another, understand the “no asshole rule” and the need for reconnection among the employees. There are a few out there. Work-sharing in another means to gradually disconnect from the “boss economy” while helping out another person still in need of a job. Laying down a local infrastructure that enables the family and the community to be more resilient when it comes to food, shelter, warmth, and other basics is another early step many are taking these days. And reconnecting eaters with farmers immediately provides fresh, high quality food to one party and a good living to the other.

Reconnected and disruptor-free, why don’t we start our own enterprises? Why don’t we run things among us so that they benefit those who have left the prison? We band together, creating co-ops, partnerships, worked owned businesses, farm CSAs and other types of rural communities, companies run with attention to the triple bottom line, and the like. We work for one another, not for the bosses anymore. Another move, now promoted by the Transition Town people, is to start “our” utility companies that serve a town with wind, sun or water energy gathered in greenish ways. But small enterprises enabling people to capture energy at the household or small neighborhood level while reducing each household’s energy needs may be by far the greenest option available.

The Amish model deserves to be emulated and modified for wider use. They have cradle-to-grave security, and a mix of private enterprise modulated by their tight community framework and mutual aid. Some people will opt for the “new tribalism” social pattern; they will gather together into clans that provide basic cradle-to-grave security in exchange for the freely-given contribution of all able adults to open source projects that benefit the entire community, the entire commonwealth. And experimentation with gift economies is already ongoing. Others will come up with solutions as yet unconceived today.

My favorite radical choice is the “new tribalism.” The term was invented by Daniel Quinn, who began to feel for another model of livelihood containing tribal elements. He did not get very far; his examples of a circus, a theater troupe and a newspaper are more on the order of cooperative enterprises. A tribal living cannot be sold. It is rooted in some form of commons cared for in perpetuity. I see a “new tribalist” community as one that provides all the basics for free to all its members. Basic food, shelter, warmth, education, and medical care. Safety, belonging and meaningful participation in one’s social and natural world. It’s not really hard to do. This is how humans had lived since time immemorial. This is how other creatures live, and manage it easily. The result being that all the other creative things can be done on a lark. Because a person wishes. Because a person is inspired. And since they don’t have to worry about survival they can explore anything they want. Any practical results, of course, belong to the commons, serving as open source for explorers coming after, freely modifying and experimenting with the ideas and inventions of others. And those who think that the “basics” are not enough are free to use their talents to figure out how to have better food or better shelter – as long as their solutions are not privatized and enrich the entire community. (This is, in part, how early science worked, and it worked admirably well.) Is this vision of a society that is both easy on the land, and full of creative ferment, enjoyment and exploration practically doable? That remains to be seen. Such “new tribalism” communities can be among the laboratories of new socio-economic patterns, evolved from the grassroots and debugged before wider implementation. But there is no need to consider them as “the one right way” and turn their development into an ideological quagmire. Those who think such a vision hopelessly commusomething are welcome to experiment elsewhere.

As these new enterprises spread, more and more people will emulate the most successful ones. Other groups will be working on local, non-predatory systems of credit (not money so much, which can be crushed at will by central bankers); yet others will find new ways to hold land, perhaps by implementing Georgist land-value fees, or by taking it out of the market by turning it into a land-trust in perpetuity. Let us not fall into the trap of thinking that some alternative economist out there has the right system all worked out. That is residual totalitarian thinking. Diversity is key and many schools of thought are needed, along with many practical interpretations. And it makes sense that many econ teachers and many learners thrive in our communities; we must no longer leave “economics” to the experts many of whom have been shown up as mere paid-for babblers. I am about to dive into two books that come well recommended. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (money is a late development, forced top-down, claims the anthropologist author), and Debt Virus: A Compelling Solution to the World’s Debt Problems, a controversial work by a physician turned rebel after sitting on board of a bank.

I am not an economist by inclination, and all I see is this fuzzy outline. But I think the following incipient formative sequence is sound. Wherever we go, whatever we do, let’s:

• shrink the distance between us
• adopt the “no asshole rule”
• find ways to work for one another, more and more…

How about starting an Underground Railroad that helps human beings leave the prison and begin to learn the skills to leave the workhouse treadmill as well? There are huge numbers of the unemployed in every country. Many of them are young, high energy people ready to pitch in. Let’s find room for them in “our economy.” There has never been lack of useful work needing doing. There certainly isn’t such lack today.

As Kevin Carson weighs in with the OWSers:

Our general aim should be to promote a relocalized, high-tech [and smart low tech, I add], low-overhead economy that’s less dependent on centralized infrastructure, in which production costs are lower, in which waste labor and waste from planned obsolescence are eliminated, and in which it takes an average of 20 hours or less a week to produce the equivalent of the value we consume.

Encourage a shift of as much production as possible to commons-oriented peer production, and self-provisioning in the informal, neighorhood, and household economies. Encourage primary social units like urban communes, neighborhood cohousing projects and cooperative associations, intentional communities, and extended family compounds, and a revival of the kinds of mutuals and friendly societies [that once flourished in America] as means for pooling income and risk.

Instead of “creating jobs,” we should be breaking the 200-year-old link between work and jobs, and enabling people to meet their needs with their own skills and labor in cooperation with other people, without depending on some corporate hierarchy to give them permission in the form of a “job” to translate their labor into subsistence.

One stream of our energy after another is removed from the prison economy. Eventually, the Leviathan may fight back. Our best hope is that it does not realize the need until the mycelium of the new culture permeates enough of the undergrowth to form a critical mass. Let’s do all this as non-confrontationally and “under the radar” as possible, while at the same time be ready to defend the culture we are building — if it comes to that. When a whole new culture has been grown within the grassroots first, the good fight is merely in the defense of a revolution that has already come.

We need a very rough vision of what the next economy can be, one that inspires wide support. Here is one possibility: whatever our ideological differences, the economy that makes across-the-board sense is a “low-overhead economy.” Bypassing all the countless trolls hunkered down in their toll booths, skimming off productive work of other people, will free up plenty of room for financial sanity and economic well being everywhere.

 

Out of the prison

We’re born in a prison, raised in a prison
Sent to a prison called school
We cry in a prison, we love in a prison
We dream in a prison like fools
– Yoko Ono

Daniel Quinn speaks of the kids of the 60s, failing in their rebellion because they could not find the bars of the cage. He was wrong. They found the bars and got out, but before they got far they were herded back. That burst of the energy that was the late 60s could not have come from prisoners. Those were, for a moment in time, free people reveling in their freedom. And sowing fear among the wardens.

The precursor of our modern Babylonish prison was the Egyptian workhouse. It was a structure daylight struggled to penetrate, where young people (most of whom never survived past their early 20s) labored from dawn to dusk at the querns or the looms. By the door was a guard with a stick who sometimes let you step out for a few minutes into the sunshine for a bribe of your food ration.

Much later prisons for miscreants and dissidents were a similar affair but for the costs to the community, did not come into use until recently. What is the traditional prison? Again, it is four walls, a door that is locked, and a guard with a stick outside. What does the prison accomplish? It severs contact between the prisoners and the outside world. It puts hard-to-cross distance between them and their fellows. But it’s expensive, obvious, produces resentment and wastes “human resources.” Not suitable in situations where great masses of people must be made to obey and in effect live permanently imprisoned, trapped within a twilight life on a treadmill going nowhere.

Babylon’s pervasive modern prison is a direct descendant of the Egyptian workhouses. Far more sophisticated, it employs many more tricks and lures to keep people in than just distancing separation and guards with sticks. Nevertheless, its basis is the same. Once trapped, you work for your food until you weaken. I feel a weird sort of admiration for those who have schemed to improve the prison system that is Babylon: they finally came up with something far far sneakier. Something very smart. Cheap, invisible, and self-maintaining, it is the dream of all jailers come true.

They began to shape culture and society in such a way as to systematically put distance between us. Think about it. A prison is a place that cuts you off from your fellows. A wall can do it. But so can …… just …………………… space. Greater and greater emptiness, stretching long and daunting. Hard-to-cross distance. Unreachable-ness. Greater and greater psychological atomization and imposed solitude around each human being makes is harder and harder to reach others, to enter into relationships with them, to trust them, and to gain the skills of working together.

Just think of the 20th century way of childhood. At birth, the baby is yanked away from the mother, cooped up in a nursery of little strangers equally distraught. The comforting breast is denied via “scientific formula” and the child spends its days in a crib, a pram, a pen, isolated from the daily activities and human warmth, human touch. Then the child enters school, another form of distancing and isolation, this time from his or her own family, the life of the community, and children older or younger. The child is even forced to sit alone, away from their fellows (at least in America; in Europe, we sat two by two, and it helped build friendships and cut the pain). Helping each other survive this institutionalized, dulled existence is called cheating. And the constant ranking and fear-mongering are among the tools that drive the real lessons home.

As adults, we go through the motions, isolated and infantilized, hoping to find a friend or a mate who will heal the pain. But many people are too wounded to truly reconnect. Watching the spectacle medicates their loneliness. Television increases the space between people as they stare, hypnotized, at a screen and forget how to relate to the people next to them. So does preoccupation with gadgets. I was recently subjected to the airport experience after many years. Have you noticed? The travelers no longer talk to each other; they are deeply engaged with machines.

Such practices have raised generations of people forced to live as narcissists, cut off from one another where ever they go, from birth on. Narcissists do not relate. They obey those above them, command those below them, and enter into formal associations with those they think equal. They are “not available” for real relationships. Babylon has condemned us all to a form of solitary confinement without walls.

I am of course not the first to note the increasing space between human beings in modern times. Psychologists have tried to heal the resulting pain, and sociologists have studied and rued this isolation. It’s been thought of as some sort of unavoidable side effect of modern living. I don’t think so. I think it’s contrived… not via a conspiracy, but by steady application of very old strategies that insert more and more narcissist “genes” into the body politic. The narcissists each do it because they know how, and because it serves their interests. But we can fight back with reconnection “genes.” It gladdens my heart that some of the rebels now practice “attachment (or continuum) parenting,” raising a generation of sane young people who expect connections with others, and have the skills and experience to make them work.

In the 60s, with the help of … who knows?… music, drugs, luck and spunk, the young prisoners discovered the invisible bars of the prison and broke them, simply by coming together, shrinking the distance, boldly crossing the yawning chasm. To talk real stuff. To play and be silly. To expand mind and behavioral frontiers. To be honest. To practice generosity and fairness. To learn to love in ways not sanctioned by Babylon’s overseers. No wonder they turned their new culture into one long celebration!

And then the kids infected the women, imagine! Women began to meet in intimate groups, talking real stuff and changing their lives. There was so much hope then. What is “sisterhood” but stepping out of the prison and trekking across that barren plain to hug another woman, tell her a story and truly listen to hers, be honest with your own hidden truths and feelings, find shared ground, and support one another as caring humans do?

Some were able to continue. A caravan of buses from San Francisco started the Farm in Tennessee, to continue the reconnection begun in Haight-Ashbury. Groups of young women started women-only spaces where, they hoped, they could continue to relate as sisters. Some folks hung on in small back-to-the-land communities. Family power relationships were never quite the same. And temporary autonomous zones were formed; the Rainbow Family Gatherings, and now Burning Man. But all in all, most of the kids, and most of the women, were soon herded back into the invisible prison. The prison, sure enough, got a little more comfortable; the hard edges of harassment were cleaned up. Concessions to prisoners were made, while new distancing tools were put into place to prevent a future breakout.

It is instructive to take a good look at what the escapees missed. After all, if you are a prisoner dreaming of a break, there are three key issues on your mind: how to find the bars of the cage, how to get out, and how to stay out. They succeeded with the first two. They failed at the third. They forgot about the guards with sticks.

In a prison built out of social and psychological isolation, who are the guards? They are the narcissists themselves who jealously guard the only reality they feel comfortable with: one where no real relationships are needed or asked for; an impersonal culture where everything possible is commodified, institutionalized, mediated, and ranked. For simplicity’s sake, I have been calling them narcissists. But they range from sociopaths, through various misers, trolls, egomaniacs, power hogs, self-aggrandizers, to bullies and dicks of various shades. You know… the disruptors of friendly human relations. The defectors from cooperation. The dementors who seek to suck the milk of human kindness from the world.

Ah heck… it’s really simple. They are the assholes always lurking nearby to ruin your office day, your volunteer meeting, your family gathering. One such asshole will ruin the pad you’ve generously opened up to other kids traveling through the area. One or two will handily dismantle a commune started by idealists. And they will certainly have no trouble sowing dissension among women still vulnerable to bully tactics, nor will they hesitate to trash capable leaders. A crew of skilled assholes will make sure that young visionaries give up en masse and disgustedly, dispiritedly run away from their former friends, telling anybody who wants to listen that human nature is just too warped. Getting away from each other, stretching the distance again, back into the prison. Go to work, nose to the grindstone, and stop dreaming silly dreams. Money is the sure thing…

The assholes stand ready to disrupt any occasion where human beings suddenly and despite great odds come together in peace, love, and understanding. A flag goes up, and they rush to put into place the many tools of disconnection they have at their disposal. One of the most important is the “divide and conquer” strategy. The sister-women were successfully divided from traditional women who were not ready to rock the boat. They were divided from women who wanted to stay at home and raise families, and thought this, and volunteer work for their community, was a very satisfying way to live. Traitors to the cause! Some of the theoreticians of the women’s movement who had been given comfortable posts within the academic establishment were encouraged to move way out to the batshit-furious fringe, so that women began to leave the movement in droves. Women who passionately believed that safe abortion must be available, and those who equally passionately believed in nurturing human fetuses, were divided by a cultural war and bitter hatred that still simmers in the body politic. And power-hogging leaders moved into key roles of women’s political organizations that came to play prisoners’ games.

But of course, most assholes are not bigtime players. They simply act to make our day-to-day lives more stressful, more miserable; they make sure that when we do dare to come together, bridging the fearsome gap, they stand ready to make the experience unpleasant. Just imagine one of those meetings you went to for a cause you believed in… Do we need to go over the disappointing, ego driven, alienating, silencing, crazy-making, painful experience? On second thought, let’s not. Let us imagine another world instead. You come to the meeting, are warmly welcomed, and someone is asked to be your buddy, sharing with you the basics of the group. She slips you a handout that will explain in more detail when you get home. The interesting speaker keeps to 30 minutes as promised, stays true to topic, answers several questions, and then the group moves into a friendly and leisurely exploration of the issues raised where all voices are heard. At the end, your new buddy stops by again and invites you to the next gathering, maybe mentioning a really cool event they are working on; would you like to help? They sure could use your talents!

You think you died and went to heaven. Turning to the person who organized the meeting, you pop the question. My goodness, an enjoyable meeting that works! How did you do this? The friendly bear of a man who goes under the name of Dwight Towers cracks a big laugh. Simple, he says. We put in place the “no asshole rule.” It changed everything.

 

Who are the Leavers?

Nobody really wants to be an outlaw and destroyer of the community of life. Yet we do it daily. We wake up and begin to devour the world.
– Daniel Quinn, paraphrased

When I don’t feel well, I often pick up one of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael books. They don’t exactly cheer me up, but somehow, they keep me sane on a bad day. Last spring I decided to follow up on a small query of mine. Quinn spends a lot of his time disabusing his characters and readers of the notion that the Leavers are tribal foragers. At times, he positively jeers at the idea. But then, he never tells explicitly who they are. He further clouds the issue by blaming agriculture for civilized ills.

No wonder Alan Lomax is flummoxed. When the ape is “packing” for their exploratory journey, he gives Alan the choice of using the terms “civilized” vs “primitive” or, Takers vs Leavers. Later on, he charts the divergence of the Takers some 8,000 years ago, with the Leavers continuing their lifeways until the present – those few who still exist. That again points to tribal foraging and simple horticulture. No wonder Ish folk have become seriously confused, and left with the images of primitivism as the only alternative to this civilization.

All right, all right, I too consider primitivism romantic, charming, refreshingly skill-rich and down to earth. I am a tomboy, after all! Were I younger, I might even embark on some primitive adventure in a remote part of the world where it is still possible. But to imagine primitivism as a viable alternative to the Leviathan I must at this point leave such “mostly-fantasy” to young folks who still experience themselves as healthy and invincible. Since I try to be honest with myself, I have to admit that primitivism is not an option for me at this stage of my life. And there is another problem with primitivism, of course, one linked to the problem of power. Those who choose to step out of this civilization into primitive life turn themselves into vulnerable targets for civilized predators. There is a reason why primitive tribes have nearly all been exterminated. It’s the ol’ Parable of the Tribes. You can run but you can’t hide. The Leviathan gets you in the end.

So… the wise gorilla surely must have meant something else, something that can be of use to me as I am now, and others in similar situations (i.e. most of us)? I think the world of Ishmael, one of my mythical companions, and could no longer shrug off this niggling puzzle. After all, my very blogger identity depends on sorting it out! So I delved into Ishmael and My Ishmael for clues. Armed with many notes, I set out to cluster the various claims made about the Leavers. Here is what I have come up with:

Leavers

• live by the Law of Limited Competition; food is freely accessible to all
• live in the hands of the gods; this is an easy, carefree, and satisfying way of life
• have a highly evolved social system that works well for humans as they actually are and places limits on disruptive behavior
• live without devouring the planet; their wealth is giving and getting support
• see themselves as belonging to the world

To restate what we already know about the Takers: they make war on the world and lock up food to be able to lord it over one another, work hard to control and manage the world which results in an anxious life full of cares and drudgery, have a scrambled social system they invent on the fly and which does not work well and produces vast amounts of disruption and damage from all classes of society, are busting the planet to pieces in their incessant push to make and get products, and see the world as theirs to use and abuse. But ‘nuff said about this sorry lot.

It was a bit of inspiration no doubt brought on by a mystical link to that cranky ape-philosopher living forever in the lowland jungle somewhere in Africa that got me past this frustratingly elusive list of “how the Leavers live” to fully grokking who they are. I think it comes down to this: Leavers are people who are both willing and able to live in co-adaptation with each other and the Earth. (Contrast that with the Takers, who are people who insist on controlling and dominating each other and the Earth.)

Once we say this, we must admit that not all primitive societies lived this way, and not all civilized failed at it. For example, some forager societies on the west coast of North America took far more salmon than needed for a comfortable existence, made slaves of their neighbors, and ostentatiously destroyed their wealth, while, on the other hand, the people comprising the pre-conquest Amazonian civilization knew how to turn the thin tropical soil into rich dark loam that still feeds forests and people today. It is fairly accurate to say, however, that all members of this particular civilization — rooted in ancient Mesopotamian plunder – are Takers. That means you and me, mates. Leavers by heart, dreams, and small caring actions we manage to weave into our daily lives, Takers by the daily damage we acquiesce to and survive by.

So when we neo-Leavers look back on the history of our ancestors, we do not see a line going back to foraging. We note with gladness the chain of peoples who lived by a very particular set of practical skills and cultural patterns that enabled them – whether they were using foraging, horticultural or agricultural forms of sustenance or a combination thereof – to live in co-adaptation with the world they had been gifted. Some of their wisdom still lingers in the world.

An interesting theory, this. It seems that at least some of the “primitive tribes” that have been recorded over the last 200 years or so have been refugees from civilization. Folks who said no to the civilized way of life, took to the hills and evolved their own culture away from takerism. Leach, Scott, and others have documented them extensively in Southeast Asia. These peoples went back to co-adaptation – made even more challenging by the intermittent low-level war waged against them by the lowland civilized – and to autonomy and freedom.

Our Leaver ancestors did not leave monuments or tomes behind, and their history cannot be traced easily. Mostly, you can tell them by excavations of modest dwellings that left only a light mark in the landscape, and an ecosystem that did not perceptibly suffer by their presence. A few clues provide a picture into how they treated each other. Invariably, Leavers have been sharers. Their economic lives are guided by the rule of thumb that says, Take the small stuff, share the big stuff. A hunter who caught a rabbit fed his own family. But a gazelle was shared around. And studies of recent Leaver tribes show people acutely aware of the dangers of power who keep a close eye on how it is used. Many readily available cultural means nip power abuse in the bud.

Being able to live simply, often as semi-nomads, with low overhead, within a generally plentiful Earth was a direct advantage to those who chose to keep on with the old attuned way of life. We neo-Leavers have a huge challenge ahead of us: how do we recapture the gist of co-adaptation in this particular world, riven by power and wealth, crowded and badly damaged by the excesses of takerism? What might it mean in the context we today are dealing with? How do we help one another enact this alternative cultural story? And how do we get from here to there?