Mind/Body Health Unit 6 Two Minds, Two Lifeways

Having now looked at stress as it manifests in social hierarchy, human interaction with nature, and nutrition, we can now look deeper at what these have in common. As the presence of stress in all three areas in modern stratified life, and its relative absence in more egalitarian settings, might tell you, there are a couple fundamentally different worldviews, or lifeways, at work here, springing from different mindsets. The focus this week is on what they are and how all this came to be in the first place.

To start to get at this, we’ll look in class at this clip from The Gods Must Be Crazy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66pTPWg_wUw. Notice in particular the Coke bottle and the changes it brings. Then have a look at the “Mander Table” PDF, from Jerry Mander’s brilliant In the Absence of the Sacred. In one lifeway, humans are seen as superior, and in the other, part of an interconnected web of life. In looking at the table, see how each of these relationships coalesces into a larger worldview and value system.

The Pyramid, the hierarchy characteristic of civilized societies, and the Circle, as in people gathered in a circle around a campfire, as in the circle of life. See the “Pyramid Circle” powerpoint (a re-post) for a visual of this.

While we’ve looked with Sapolsky at stress levels within the hierarchical lifeway, it’s also important to compare stress levels between the lifeways. The stress response is designed for, and advantageous to our survival in, acute stress, the kind that occurs in nature. The negative health effects come in with the chronic stress so rare in land-based societies yet so ubiquitous in the Pyramid. The “DJ Benedict” PDF, an excerpt from Jensen, gets at this link between cultural values, social climate, and stress levels.

The Keegan Envir file, from the Holistic Nursing textbook, discusses the development and nature of Western civilized thought. Chellis 1-3 and the background “Stone Age Econ” article, along with the other readings from Marshall Sahlins and Richard Lee, are a further look at the “other” lifeway. There’s a notion among civilized folks, expressed most famously in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, that tribal (“primitive” or “savage”) life, life in the state of nature, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This view held sway in anthropology until the 1950’s and 60’s, when a potent intellectual revolution, from which the readings are taken, resulted in the ascendance of primitive affluence. Far from being anywhere near as “nasty, brutish, and short” as life in Hobbes’ 17th century England, tribal life was (and is) recognized to be a balanced, low-stress, high-sustainability way of life.

Prior to a few thousand years ago, there was only one human lifeway, the native or holistic version, the Circle. (See the background “How Flowers Changed the World” for some beautiful context here!) Certainly each tribe had their own variations, surface differences in style and custom, but the deeper principles of cooperation, food sharing, egalitarianism, and communion with nature remained remarkably consistent across tribes. Many cultures have writings referring to a Golden Age, a period of life on earth without daily strife and struggle. From Ovid to the Egyptian Tep Zepi to the Garden of Eden, early civilizations tell the story of an earlier, better period, a reality corroborated by European descriptions of the happiness and contentment of the tribes they then conquered and enslaved. This is the reality of Primitive Affluence, and it’s how humans lived for upwards of a couple million years, during which time human societies and the state of the environment remained largely harmonious and vibrantly healthy.

Roughly 5-13,000 years ago, humans began, very gradually at first, to develop another approach to life, the Pyramid of civilization. Beginning with agriculture and animal domestication and growing later into the creation of cities, advanced technology, and the modern lifestyle as we know it, this change in human life brought with it a great many unintended consequences. We’re all taught to think of the coming of civilization as Progress, the advancement of the human species, or at the very least, inevitable. As often happens in civilized discourse, though, a darker reality gets obscured. Accompanying the dawn of civilization were changes, not largely positive, in every area of human life.

To examine this, let’s look at the beginnings of it all. You can start with the “Consequences of Domestication” and “Primitivist Critique” docs- these are a good overview of some of what civilization brought with it.

Here are a couple quotes about slavery. The first is from Kevin Bales, one of the foremost contemporary experts on human slavery, from his book Disposable People:

Slavery as we know it began when human beings started to settle and farm instead of wandering as hunter-gatherers. What we often call the beginnings of human history are also the beginnings of bondage. About 11,000 years ago, this settling began in three places: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the plains of India. The beginning of agriculture led to the invention of new kinds of societies. These new societies were made up of people instantly recognizable to us: farmers and city folk, rulers and followers, soldiers and civilians, masters and slaves. The bureaucracies needed to manage these big concentrations of people were something like ours today. Some people sat in rooms and pushed papers (well, clay tablets anyway), while most people had to sweat. Food for the rulers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and masters had to come from the work of the people in the fields, and it was much easier to appropriate this food when these farmers were rigidly controlled. This was where the soldiers came in, “conquering” (enslaving) people and keeping them under control; so things went for millennia.

And here’s Friedrich Engels:

Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without Hellenism and the Roman Empire as the base, also no modern Europe. We should never forget that our whole economic, political, and intellectual development has as its presupposition a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it is universally recognized. Finally, American pro-slavery writer William Harper: “Servitude is the condition of civilization.” To get at the underlying relationship in the Pyramid, look next at the “DJ Slavery” PDF. It becomes necessary to add slavery to the list of the consequences of domestication, a disease of civilization like diabetes, and to question whether there is a one-to-one relationship between civilization and slavery.

Next comes the background Nature and Madness PDF, from the wonderful Paul Shepard book of the same name. While we civilized folks normally think of the development of the technological lifeway, the Pyramid, as the growth of human consciousness and maturity, Shepard looks at it the other way around. He posits that humans in the state of nature go through a normal developmental process, an ontogeny, that results after 20 years in the creation of a mature adult. We go through the most complete psychoemotional development, in other words, when we live in tribes close to the land in the Circle of Life.

As civilization develops, to Shepard, we begin to truncate this 20-year growth process. While the tribal foraging lifestyle is consistent with full human development, the domestication process engenders psychological immaturity. In the N&M Domestication PDF, see how the village lifestyle of early civilizations gives rise to psychological adolescence rather than maturity. While we won’t look in as much detail at the later stages, the idea is then that the normal maturation process gets cut off earlier and earlier as civilization “advances,” to the point that the psychology most adaptive to life in modern technological culture is that of early childhood.

Just as the Pyramid and Circle have (mostly differing) expressions in every area of life, each lifeway creates a different climate for sexual and romantic relationships. Far from being “natural,” our civilized ideas about monogamy and marriage are profoundly shaped by our cultural context. Tribal societies are characterized by widespread sharing in all areas of life; modern programming about the naturalness of monogamy notwithstanding, this sharing creates a norm of multiple simultaneous sexual relationships. Crucially, child-raising is also shared; with paternity uncertainty, each male has a stake in helping with all the kids. Might be dad, after all. Paternity certainty becomes important only with the rise of Pyramids; monogamy and marriage appear on the human scene to enforce it and, as generally happens with inventions of hierarchy, bring with it control, violence, and misery. See the intro to the wonderful book Sex at Dawn and the background New Monogamy article to get into this. Sex at Dawn part 1 is at the following link, part 2 posted in a PDF: http://sexatdawn.com/page11/page10/page10.html

See also the Language Shape article, particularly the section about orientation in space in Circles and Pyramids. If we want to describe spatial relationships, we’d say “in front of you” or “to your left,” but Circle cultures often do it differently.

Besides the creation of psychological truncation, hierarchy, the population explosion, food insecurity, ownership, and systematic violence, including war, the Pyramid has other effects. See the background reading at your leisure to examine the patterns as they manifest in the spread of infectious disease, the creation of war and empire, and even our relationship with nudity!

Note- a revised schedule is also posted at the top of the web page.