The Fundamental Problem

“…saying we should have never left the trees. Some even said leaving the oceans was a bad idea.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

 

When we trace them to their roots, we find the ultimate causes of most of the really intractable problems in the world stem from the fact that we, as humans, are living in a way we never evolved to–one very different from the way we lived for almost our entire existence as a species.

This is what I call the Fundamental Problem.

For 90% of our time as a species on Earth, we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. This worked well for us for hundreds of thousands of years. This is the role for which we evolved, not the one in which we now find ourselves. But that all changed radically about 10,000 years ago, with the invention of agriculture and civilization.

True, civilization hasn’t been all bad. It’s given us scientific knowledge, antibiotics, the Internet. But at a tremendous cost. On a large scale, you have starvation, genocidal wars, pollution, gross disparity of wealth, epidemics, traffic. On an individual level, you have alienation, loneliness, and the loss of a sense that one’s life has meaning. And maybe worst of all: a situation in which millions of people have to essentially sell off a substantial portion of their lives in order to live.     

It has also caused a compartmentalization of our lives which makes it nearly impossible to keep them in balance. For example, we must spend eight hours a day earning money that we can then exchange for food, we must spend hours in a gym in order to keep our muscles strong and our bodies healthy, we must arrange time to be together with our friends and family. Each of these is a separate compartment and we are often unable to find time to do it all.

By contrast, people living in a hunter-gatherer tribe meet all three of these needs every time every time they go out to hunt. They maintain their social bonds by being with their fellow hunters, they get exercise by pursuing game, and they get food by killing it.

I’m not suggesting we go back to a primal hunter-gatherer way of life. With nearly seven billion people on Earth, this is clearly impractical. Plus, we can never un-know what we now know about technology. But i think we would do well to remember that the way we live now is an aberration, and do what we can to accommodate our primal nature.     

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Contrary to popular opinion, provided you could survive childhood diseases, human lifespans were not radically shorter before the advent of civilization. In fact, it was civilization that shortened them, and they have only recently returned to their pre-civilized durations.

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The native cultures are always doing just fine until the civilized people show up. 

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Most of the problems seem to stem from the tragic mistake of abandoning the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that served us so well for hundreds of thousands of years. Alienation, life compartmentalization,  traffic, unemployment, pollution, obesity–all come from that primal error.

This is not a new idea. The idea of the Noble Savage has been around for centuries. In the first century, the Roman Tacitus bemoaned how soft and decadent Roman society had become, especially when compared to the vigor and vitality of the northern “barbarians.”

There is even a name foe this idea: primitivism.  

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it’s tempting to think of human history as a slow but steady march of progress from primitive to civilized, worse to better. but this may be a modern conceit. 

The Nav’i in Avatar
Pandora’s Seed
Noble Savage
Conan the Barbarian
Dances With Wolves 
Sex at Dawn
Paleo Diet
Millennium: Tribal Wisdom And The Modern World

This has created, among other things, compartmentalization, loneliness, poverty, obesity, and a sense of purposelessness. 

Given that, and given that returning to our primal hunter-gatherer way of life is impossible, how best can we live? What can we do?

We would do well to remember our evolutionary roots. Remember the way we live now is unnatural in the extreme. knowing this maybe we can compensate and remember to do those things that resonate deeply with our primal nature.

We can still dance. We can still sing. We can spend time with our “tribe”. We can tell stories. We can spend time in nature. Maybe that’s why all those things feel good, feel right. 

And spend as little time as possible doing what is as far as possible from our natural way of life (e.g. sitting in a cubicle staring at a computer screen, sitting in a car in traffic, etc).