The Five Billion Year Story set the broader context for humanity. Now it is time to get much closer and to look at what it means to be human. In the last chapter, I hope I have dispelled the myth that the natural world is inherently competitive and warlike. In this chapter I hope to do the same for humanity.
In the family tree of life, humans are part of the branch that are the mammals, which appeared some 210 million years ago. We are part of the sub-branch of the mammals that are the primates, which includes the monkeys, apes and others like lemurs, tarsiers and lorises. The first primates appeared about 70 million years ago.
Then about 20 million years ago, in Africa there appeared the Oak Ape, Dryopithecus, the ancestor of all the modern apes, including the chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-utans and humans.
Y: Don't you mean the apes and the humans?M: No, I think it is pure conceit to give us a group by ourselves. I'd rather make the continuity more explicit by including humans among the other apes.[5]
Of the apes, our closest relatives are the chimpanzees, which is probably why they are so appealing to us. In fact, our genetic makeup differs from that of the chimps by only 1%. It is an important 1%, but it is nonetheless clear that in terms of our physical makeup we are just a variation on the ape theme. Chimps are highly intelligent animals. They can do simple counting and fractions, and can recognise simple geometrical shapes. Someone has estimated that chimps have an IQ (in human terms!) of 80 [6], which is not bad at all!
There have been many experiments in which people have tried to teach chimps human language, with a certain amount of success. Chimps do not have the muscular control of their faces and vocal chords needed to produce words, but they can learn to use sign language, or to communicate using special keyboards and they can understand limited human speech. They tend to combine words with gestures. The Bonobo chimps seem to have the most advanced abilities. They can understand sentences of the complexity of:
"Get a Coke and give it to Rose. The Coke is on the table there.""Get the ball that's outdoors." (another one was in view)
Their language ability is limited to objects and events in their direct experience, and is comparable to that of a 2 1/2 year old child.
Chimps are very social animals with active and intricate social lives. They live in bands for mutual protection and companionship, spending much time grooming each other. They can spontaneously learn to use objects around them as simple tools. They use twigs to fish ants from holes in wood. They hunt monkeys in groups with some chasing the monkey into an ambush formed by several others.
Fighting is common among chimps, but their social bonds are so important to them that reconciliation after fights usually occurs. "Within a minute of a fight having ended the two former opponents may rush towards each other, kiss and embrace long and fervently and then proceed to groom each other." [7]
There is a dominance hierarchy of males and females in a chimp band. The most dominant male has the greatest sexual access to the females when they are in heat. His function is to protect them from attack or annoyance, especially by other males. To maintain his dominance he needs the active assistance of the females. In Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal describes the intricate maneuvers chimps get up to as one male, or perhaps a pair, will challenge another for dominance. "Whole passages of Machiavelli seem to be directly applicable to chimpanzee behaviour"[8]. Deception is part of their normal repertoire of behaviour.
For our purposes, the important point about this is what it tells us about chimpanzee mental abilities. For a chimp to be able to deceive another, it must be able to imagine what it is like to be that other chimp.
Chimps have friendships, but do not form permanent sexual bonds. Female chimps do not normally mate except when they are in heat. When a female chimp is in heat, the other males pay special attention to her, and may bring her gifts of food. Otherwise, food is not generally given by one chimp to another, although a group will share eating an animal they have killed.
Humans and chimps parted company somewhere around 4 million years ago. The climate had changed somewhat. The forests were shrinking, but there were opportunities for apes to exploit on the edges of the forest. Perhaps it helped if you could run out of the forest into a nearby clump of vegetation, grab some fruit or nuts and carry them back to the safety of the forest. To do this carrying you had to use your hands and walk on your feet only.
Apes can walk on their legs and carry things with their hands if they want to, but normally they walk on all fours, putting some of their weight on their knuckles. Like most mammals, their backs are suited to supporting their body's weight at both ends.
The apes that exploited this new way of living soon became adapted to it. The angle of their hips changed, their feet changed, the angle of their heads changed. Their backs &emdash; bone and muscle &emdash; adapted to standing on one end to support the entire weight of their bodies.
These upright apes, Australopithecus, were our earliest direct ancestors. Other than their upright stance, they were like other apes. Their brain size was the same, and we can presume that they were as intelligent and social as the other apes.
Now there is one way in which humans differ from the other apes which isn't mentioned as often as our big brains and upright stance. We are by far the sexiest of the apes. Our women are sexually receptive even when they cannot conceive, and have lost the distinguishing physical signs of being 'on heat' at times when they are fertile. Women have sex when they are pregnant, during menstruation, and on into old age beyond the childbearing years. This increased sexuality probably occurred very early in human evolution, at the time of the Australopithecines. For us, sex has taken on an additional function. It is not just to conceive children, it also promotes bonding between people, a first step towards increased sociability and culture[9].
Standing upright might have had its advantages for food gathering, but it also created certain problems. The change in the angle of the pelvis disrupted the easy passage of the infant through the birth canal. The difficulty women have in giving birth started at this early point, and was compounded much later when human brain sizes increased. The solution that emerged was that babies were born slightly earlier, and thus smaller. Present day human babies are born very much more immature and helpless than other ape babies.
These less mature babies needed more care than earlier ape babies, so the friendly attention of the men was very welcome. The food sharing which was offered to a sexually receptive female previously would be of great benefit to a sexually receptive female with an infant. Any increased care and attention would promote the survival of mother and child. Thus was born what Helen Fisher calls 'the sex contract', a close tie between two people for mutual support based on sexual attraction, but not just to produce babies. It developed into our present sexiness and what we call 'falling in love'.
Standing upright itself, with the new angle of the pelvis, might have promoted increased sexuality as the sexual organs were displayed more prominently. Eye contact was enhanced, and face-to-face sex, with its greater intimacy, became more favoured.
Various physical differences between humans and other apes are likely to have arisen at this time as they increase human sexiness: loss of most body hair and skin that is more sensitive to touch, enlarged breasts as a reminder of the sensuality of nursing, larger penises in men, and more lengthy sexual acts. (For chimps it lasts for only 15 seconds!)
From this very early stage, the change to humanness was one of increased sociability. The early bonds between men and women were a step towards human culture. I even speculate that they had more significance: With face-to-face sex, close eye contact and more kissing, the muscles of the face and mouth would become more flexible, allowing subtler movements. As the couple had more to do with each other, communication between the couple would become much more important.
Y: So it was the Australopithecus women who first started saying to their men, "We need to communicate more!"M: Let me finish. My speculation (and it is only that, although I like it a lot) is that the physical changes for increased sexiness pre-adapted people for better communication and speech.
There was a famous discovery by Mary Leakey of a set of fossilised footprints of a small group of Australopithicines in Tanzania. As Helen Fisher interprets it,
"The time was the beginning of the wet season some 3.6 million years ago... On this afternoon a large adult hominid, about four feet eight inches tall, was strolling through the damp volcanic ash. Beside him was his companion, a smaller (probably female) hominid about four feet tall. They strode through the muck together, almost rubbing shoulders. Behind the larger individual, another smaller one followed, carefully stepping in the footsteps of the leader.""Mary Leakey thinks that the two adults who walked side by side almost four million years ago were holding hands; that all three were playing." [10]
So now we have an upright ape, with hands free to carry, manipulate, and use tools, and with an increased sexuality to promote bonds between individuals. These bonds created collaborations that would have been to the benefit of the individuals and the whole band: more efficient gathering of food, protection and child care.
M: As I've stuck my neck out this far, I might as well stick it out still further.
With this heightened sexuality, no longer linked only to procreation, and with the advantages that sexual bonds brought, sexual bonds between two men or two women might also have occurred. These too would have been beneficial to the survival of the individuals and the group of which they were part. Thus I think it is likely that homosexuality appeared at the dawn of human evolution as a normal but relatively infrequent part of the human sexual repertoire, just as red hair is a relatively infrequent part of the normal variation of human hair colourings.
Australopithecus may have been an upright-walking, sexy, social ape, but they were still a long way from the big-brained, talking, cultured people of today. The next major change occurred about 1.6 million years ago, probably triggered (as were so many evolutionary changes) by a change in the climate.
Around 1.6 million years ago, the Earth again entered a phase of ice ages which still continues today, so far as we know. Because it is so much more recent than the ice ages that occurred 2.5 billion years ago and 570 million years ago, there is much more evidence to describe them.
Y: Another period of ice ages? I don't understand. If the Earth cools down so that conditions are right for an ice age why does it heat up again so the ice ages end only to be followed by another period of ice ages much later?M: The best sense I can make of it is that over the longest time scales, billions of years, the Sun is getting hotter, and so if it weren't for life, the Earth would now be very much hotter than it was in the early Archaen. In fact, it might now have been much too hot for life as we know it. However, life has gradually been reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so keeping the temperature more or less the same. At times it gets a little cooler and the Earth slips into ice ages. The difference in average temperature between ice age and no ice age is only a few degrees.
A few million years ago, a new type of plant evolved which could live more efficiently on lower levels of carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide levels fell still lower. Various other conditions were significant too: the continents had shifted to suitable positions, with Antarctica over the South Pole where it could support an ice cap, and a ring of land around the North Pole on which an ice cap could form. Anyway, the climate became marginal and could easily be triggered into or out of an ice age about 1.6 million years ago. Since then the Earth has oscillated into and out of ice ages regularly.
Between 1.6 million years ago and about 730,000 years ago there were about 20 short cycles, lasting about 40,000 years each, of ice ages followed by interglacial periods. In the past 730,000 years there have been about 8 more cycles, with the earlier cycles lasting about 70,000 years and the later ones lasting about 100,000 years.
We are presently in an interglacial period that began roughly 10,000 years ago. The previous interglacial period was between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago. At the beginning of the ice age period, 1.6 million years ago, our first ancestors with much larger brains started to appear. And it wasn't until the beginning of the last interglacial, 130,000 years ago, that fully modern people appeared with bodies more or less the same as ours. Thus during most of the time since big-brained humans appeared, the Earth has been in an ice age.
The dramatically changing climate of the past 1.6 million years created crisis after crisis to which all life on Earth, including developing humanity, had to adapt. During the interglacial periods, huge parts of the land were covered in forest: temperate forests in cooler areas and rain forest in the tropics.
During the ice ages, ice sheets covered large parts of Europe, Asia and North America. Below this was largely tundra. The rain forests shrunk and fragmented into small, separated areas. When the next interglacial arrived the forests and rain forests rapidly re-grew and joined. This repeated fragmentation and re-joining is probably responsible for the enormous variety of species found in rain forests, which are now fragmented by us. Crisis after crisis also favoured the evolution of more generalist animals, like humans.
Like the chimpanzee and gorilla, Australopithecus had a brain size of about 400 - 500 cc. Our early larger-brained ancestors, had brains twice that size (and we have brains around 3 times that size). The hands of these people were almost as dexterous as ours.
The earliest of our bigger brained ancestors are called Homo habilis. With the remains of Homo habilis have been found simple stone tools, probably used for crushing nuts, breaking open bones to expose the marrow, other food preparation, scraping, cutting and hammering. They did only a little shaping of the natural stone, choosing stones with a useful shape to start with.
Later, and somewhat bigger-brained is Homo erectus. They used quite a variety of stone tools, carefully shaped. They made hand axes, choppers, chisels, scrapers, cleavers, awls, anvils and hammer stones. To do this they had developed quite elaborate techniques for breaking and shaping stones. They also built dwellings and used fire. With this level of sophistication, they were likely to have used animal bladders to carry water and use animal skins for clothing in the cold ice age winters.
This is a long way from the lifestyle of the oak ape, ancestor to all the apes. This is culture: people learning detailed ways of doing things from each other. It wasn't only the bodies (including brains) of our ancestors that were evolving, their ideas were evolving too.
The technologies of making tools and the lifestyles associated with them were passed from person to person and from generation to generation. For these early humans the intricate web of life in which all creatures are enmeshed now included their ancestors. Human culture, relationships with other humans, came to be more and more important as part of the environment of an individual human.
The evolution of bigger brains and early human cultures were two aspects of the same process. The bigger brains enabled the understanding needed for the developing culture which in turn created the pressure for the elaboration of the brain.
Part of this process must have been the development of language. Early language would have been very close to direct experience and memory, a few steps beyond what a chimpanzee can learn today. It was a language of objects, and manipulating objects, simple stories of how to do this, and what happens when you do that. What can you eat and how do you prepare it? Where and when are these plants found? How do you catch and kill these animals?
This too made a major difference in the life experience of early people. Along with their direct experiences of food, other creatures, the weather, they had experiences shaped by language. There were associations between certain stones and the tools they could make, names that linked whole classes of objects. Thinking, as we know it, was beginning to be born.
Homo erectus first appeared in Africa about 1.6 million years ago. They gradually spread far and wide. By 730,000 years ago they had spread to the middle east and southern Europe. By 250,000 years ago they had spread throughout Europe and Asia.
Modern humans, Homo sapiens, (with brain sizes and bodies like ours) seem to have evolved in Africa too, descended from Homo erectus populations there. They first appeared around 130,000 years ago, and they too spread widely. They had arrived in the middle east about 90,000 years ago, and spread throughout Europe and even reached Australia by 40,000 years ago, but did not get to Japan or Siberia until about 30,000 years ago. They reached North America some 10-15,000 years ago. In the middle of the Ice Age, with so much water locked up in the ice sheets, the sea level was much lower. There were land bridges between Siberia and Alaska, and only a short distance by sea to Australia.
By about 60,000 - 40,000 years ago, in the middle of the last ice age, fully modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, had arrived. At around this time a new level of culture appears in human remains. This was the time of cave paintings of animals and people, which appear beautiful even by modern artistic standards. Tools too appear with great aesthetic appeal. This was a time of ritual burial &emdash; bodies carefully laid out with a variety of objects. Beautiful carved statues have been found, in the form of abstractions of a pregnant woman. These are generally interpreted as symbols of a fertility goddess. Abstract thought, symbolism and religion had arrived.
Forty to sixty thousand years ago may seem very distant to us, but it is quite recent on the time scale of human evolution. There appears to have been very little further development of human bodies and brains since that time. If an infant from that time were raised in a modern Western city, it would probably be indistinguishable from its modern step-brothers and sisters. Its speech would be fully fluent and with a modern accent. It might grow up to be a nuclear physicist or a politician.
Y: More likely unemployed. And you say a politician, but didn't you also say that chimpanzees were good politicians?M: I said that chimpanzee social manipulations were Machiavellian, but they are not capable of giving a speech showing that their actions are for the public good!
The point is that the level of complexity of human culture that had evolved by the time Homo sapiens sapiens appeared was fully modern. Brains capable of handling the level of abstraction their cultures required are also capable of handling the abstractions of modern science. Languages subtle enough for their purposes were subtle enough for the careful shadings of truth of modern politicians. What continued to evolve were the ideas, technologies and forms of social organisation.
The early Homo sapiens sapiens lived in small bands, of perhaps 30 to 50 people. Their lifestyle was that of wandering gatherers and hunters. This has been the principal way of life of humans from the very beginning. It began to be displaced with the beginnings of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, and then still more with the advent of 'civilisations', that is, cities and large scale social organisation, about 5,000 years ago. Substantial populations lived in this way as late as the 19th century, but only small isolated pockets of these cultures are left today.
The gathering/hunting way of life required a very detailed and sophisticated understanding of the life cycles of plants and animals. Which parts are good to eat? Which have medicinal properties or can be used as poisons to hunt others? How do you make tools for carrying, hunting or shelter out of stone, bone, wood, or animal parts? Where are the game animals or the ripe edible plants this week?
All of this was wrapped in a rich social life in which people collaborated on finding and preparing food, and caring for their children and their old people. Common talk around the campfires is of the movements of the animals, which food plants are in season, and especially, the gossip of the doings and mis-doings of the people in your own and neighbouring bands.
Our complex brains and languages evolved with and were formed by the need to cope with this rich knowledge of the natural and social environment. Most adults knew most of what was needed to thrive. By contrast, in modern cultures the cumulative and stored knowledge is much greater, but any individual knows very little of that total.
A major function of culture has always been the maintenance of the bonds between people, because interactions with other people make up a very large part of the environment in which people live. Many cultural devices evolved to support this: rituals, music, dance, ceremonies.
Y: Let me get this clear: Are you saying that the purpose of music and dance is to maintain bonds between people?M: Yes. I imagine that they evolved fairly soon after abstract thought evolved, and for exactly that reason. Any aspect of culture which developed which supported group coherence would aid group survival and would be likely to continue. That is also why music and dance have such a strong emotional impact.
The development of abstract thought meant that human minds could add extra layers of association to their experience. Not only could they distinguish 'tigers' but could recognise that many different animals had the same cat-like qualities. They could even associate aspects of cat-like behaviour with aspects of human behaviour. This is metaphor, the mapping of the qualities of one set of experiences onto another.
With this ability to use metaphor, many mysterious patterns which people experienced could be explained in terms of familiar social experiences. So the essential nature of the deer might have been given a separate existence, with human-like qualities: a deer-spirit. If there were few deer around to hunt perhaps this deer-spirit had been offended. This is animism, the explanation of natural patterns in terms of spirits or souls.
I imagine that early modern humans had a very clear intuitive sense of the picture I tried to paint in the last chapter: of the interconnectedness of all living creatures, of the inherently supportive quality of nature, and also of the chaotic and disruptive changes continually occurring. They experienced it directly on a daily basis. They expressed it in the only vocabulary and images they had available: metaphors expressing natural patterns as human-like spirits.
This was the time of the goddess cultures. Lovely statues and images of a pregnant woman, somewhat abstracted with no details of face or hands, are found associated with many ancient cultures. They are likely to have symbolised nature, Gaia, the Earth Goddess.
Y: You seem to be falling into the trap of romanticising these cultures. Weren't these also woman-bashing cavemen? Do you really think that they were all nature-worshipping, peace-loving, hippy paradises?M: No, not at all. I am trying to counter the view that before civilisations started, humans were ignorant, aggressive savages, struggling against the odds for survival. That is why I am emphasizing the collaboration, intelligence and intuitive wisdom of early cultures.
I'm also trying to build up a picture of the evolution of thought. I'm leading up to a description of the kinds of mental traps, sets of uncorrectable ideas, which abstract thought makes possible. However, since you raised the issue, perhaps I had better tackle the issue of aggression directly and then come back to the evolution of thought afterwards.
I think it is clear that one side of being human is being an animal which has taken sociability and collaboration far beyond that of any other animal. We are adapted to it physically, with the language abilities of our brains, faces and vocal chords. With our extended sexuality, and our generalised ability to feel love, we are adapted to it emotionally. Another side of being human is being an animal which has taken aggression and conflict far beyond that of any other animal. These two sides clearly both co-exist in modern cultures.
The question is whether the extremes of aggression and conflict occur in all human cultures? Are they, like music, dance, language and our sexiness, a mark of being human or do they only occur under certain conditions?
I do think that extremes of aggression and conflict are universal in 'civilised' cultures. And since people rarely look beyond civilised cultures when considering 'human nature', the myth that they are universal has flourished. To set it straight we need to consider the range of human cultures which has existed since the appearance of homo sopiens sapiens, some 40-60,000 years ago.
From the artifacts left by a prehistoric culture it is very difficult to determining how aggressive the people were. Speculations about this probably say more about the preconceptions of the investigator than of the culture. For our purposes I think it is reasonable to consider studies of similar cultures which have existed recently.
The most striking feature of pre-industrial
cultures is their variety. Some are fierce and warlike, others are gentle and
peaceful. I'll give some examples of the latter.
The gentle people of Tahiti"The people in general are of the common size of Europeans... their gait easy and genteel and their countenance free, open and lively, never sullied by a sullen or suspicious look; their motions are vigorous, active and graceful and their behaviour to strangers is such as declare at first sight their humane disposition, which is as candid as their countenances seem to indicate, and their courteous, affable and friendly behaviour to each other shows that they have no tincture of barbarity, cruelty, suspicion or revenge. They are ever of an even unruffled temper, so they ought not to be suspected, and an hour's acquaintance is sufficient to repose an entire confidence in them." [11] "Tahiti in the early 1960's when I began my field work there seemed in regard to gentleness little different than the reports of the late 18th and early 19th century had suggested. ...my own observations during a period of more than two years...indicated in comparison with Western experience and in comparison with reports of many other non-Western societies an extreme lack of angry, hostile, destructive behaviour." [12] |
The Yequana of Venezuela"(There) is a respect for each individual as his own proprietor. ...Deciding what another person should do, no matter what his age, is outside the Yequana vocabulary of behaviours. There is great interest in what everyone does, but no impulse to influence; let alone coerce anyone. A child's will is his motive force. ...The Yequana do not feel that a child's inferior physical strength and dependence upon them imply that they should treat him or her with less respect than an adult. No orders are given a child which run counter to his own inclinations as to how to play, how much to eat, when to sleep, and so on. But where his help is required, he is expected to comply instantly. Commands like 'Bring some water!', 'Chop some wood!', 'Hand me that!', or 'Give the baby a banana!' are given on the same assumption of innate sociality, in the firm knowledge that a child wants to be of service and to join in the work of his people. No one watches to see whether the child obeys; there is no doubt of his will to cooperate. As the social animal he is, he does as he is expected without hesitation and to the very best of his ability." [13] "One of the most striking differences between the Yequana and any other children I have seen is that they neither fight nor argue among themselves. There is no competitiveness and leadership is established on the initiative of the followers. In the years I spent with them, I never saw a child argue with another, much less fight. The only angry words I did hear were a very rare burst of impatience from an adult with a child who had done something undesirable." [14] |
The Buddhist culture of Ladakh"A concern not to offend or upset one another is deeply rooted in Ladakhi society; people avoid situations that might lead to friction or conflict. When someone transgresses this unwritten law, ...extreme tolerance is the response. And yet concern for community does not have the oppressive effect on the individual that one might have imagined. In traditional Ladakh, aggression of any sort is extremely rare: rare enough to say that it is virtually nonexistent. If you ask a Ladakhi to tell you about the last fight he can remember, you are likely to get mischievous answers like 'I'm always beating up my neighbor. Only yesterday I tied him to a tree and cut both his ears off.' Should you get a serious answer, you will be told that there has been no fighting in the village in living memory. Even arguments are rare. I asked Sonam once, 'Don't you have arguments? We do in the West all the time.' He thought for a minute. 'Not in the villages, no; well, very very seldom, anyway.' 'How do you manage it?' I asked. He laughed. 'What a funny question. We just live with each other, that's all.' 'So what happens if two people disagree; say about the boundaries of their land?' 'They'll talk about it, of course, and discus it. What would you expect them to do?'" [15] |
The Fore of New Guinea"The Fore protoagricultural communities were quite different from anything I had previously encountered. There were no chiefs, priests, medicine men, or the like. Moving about at will and being with whom they like, even the very young enjoyed a striking personal freedom. Infants rarely cried, and they played confidently with knives, axes and fire. Older children typically enjoyed deferring to the interests and desires of the younger; sibling rivalry was virtually undetectable. A responsive 'sixth sense' seemed to attune the hamlet mates to each other's interests and needs. ...A spontaneous urge to share food, affection, work, trust and pleasure characterised the daily life. Aggression and conflict within communities was unusual and the subject of considerable comment when it occurred."[16] |
Y: That is quite amazing. I find it hard to believe. These descriptions don't sound like people as I know them.M: Yes, I know. I was absolutely knocked about by this material when I first came across it. It just shows how limited are most people's experience of the possibilities of human nature.
For these cultures, and many others in the anthropological literature, there is a natural, intuitive sociability and cooperativeness with coercion and aggression rare. The metaphor of the starlings applies: freedom and collaborative support. For these people, this is the obvious way people behave.
Y: But let me be clear. You are not saying that all cultures were like that before civilisation.M: No, not at all. I've been describing the extreme peaceful end of a spectrum. It simply shows that that extreme is within the bounds of possibility of human nature. I'll take a first look at some of the reasons for the differences now. Unpicking those differences fully is, if anything, the main theme of this book.
Later in the book I'll be suggesting more collaborative ways for people to organise their economic behaviour, for example. I don't want you to say, "It won't work because people are inherently aggressive and competitive."
Two of the books I have been quoting express strong views about the reasons why some cultures are more aggressive than others. They point to child-rearing practices as a major factor. Ashley Montague says,
"Years ago Margaret Mead was the first anthropologist to inquire into the origins of aggressiveness in nonliterate societies. In her book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, [17] she pointed to the existence of a strong association between child-rearing practices and later personality development. The child who received a great deal of attention, whose every need was promptly met, as among the New Guinea Mountain Arapesh, became a gentle, cooperative, unaggressive adult. On the other hand, the child who received perfunctory, intermittent attention, as among the New Guinea Mundugomor, became a selfish, uncooperative, aggressive adult.Later research among nonliterate and civilised peoples has substantially confirmed this relationship, and so do the studies presented in this volume." [18]
Jean Liedloff, in The Continuum Concept, and Ashley Montague, in another of his books, Touching, The Human Significance of the Skin, [19] are even more specific. Jean Liedloff writes at length about "the in-arms experience", in which an infant in many pre-industrial cultures is continually carried in its mother's arms and is allowed to feed on demand. Ashley Montague describes this same practice as an "external gestation". He says it is important because human babies are born relatively immature compared to other apes. (This is due to the human adaptation to upright walking and large brains I described earlier.) The sense of security and being cared for in the womb is continued in the early experience of the infant. This provides the foundation for their later views of what the world is like.
Y: So we are back to permissive parenting. You know that many of us have tried that. It is not so easy and the results may be spoiled children rather than non-aggressive children!M: Hang on! There is much more to it than what I have just said. And 'permissiveness' does not capture the essence of it. The 'child as boss' approach can be as harmful as the 'parent as boss' approach. I will be developing this much more fully later in the book. The key issue is the way the infant learns to see its environment. Is it being supported or is it being opposed?
Both Jean Liedloff and Ashley Montague are clear that child rearing is not the whole story. Ways of caring for infants and children cannot be taken out of the context of the whole culture. There needs to be a consistency between the supportive nature of child-rearing practices and the rest of the culture. This is what Jean Liedloff means by the 'continuum concept'.
By the time settled agriculture developed, human cultures had taken on an enormous variation of forms. There were local variants of language, of ways of obtaining and preparing food, of songs, myths, rituals, healing practices, of what was considered proper dress and sexual behaviour, of aggressive or non-aggressive ways of dealing with children, adults and neighbouring groups of people. The whirlpool metaphor applies here. These local patterns were self-perpetuating as they were taught by one generation of people to the next.
With the development of agriculture came more permanent settlements. This was followed by the development of much larger settlements, cities, and with it a much more specialised lifestyle. It was no longer the case that most people knew most of what there was to know in the culture. Most still worked on the land, but others specialised in producing implements, cloth, building or in trade. This meant that people were no longer dealing directly with people they knew well. Trade and barter became more important and money appeared. The sense of intimate support in the gathering/hunting band was no longer there. The earliest reports of widespread crime, corruption and dissolute youth come from the early civilisations.
At the same time, the more specialised lifestyles meant that many people's lives were less close to natural forces. People began to rely on other people to directly provide much of what they needed. Environmental problems appeared. Fertile land was farmed too intensively in places, creating deserts. Parts of northern Africa which are now desert were the granaries of the Roman Empire.
Larger scales of social organisation appeared too: political hierarchies. With them came specialised ways of maintaining themselves, and dealing with the new social disorders. Professional fighters and standing armies appeared. Now there were groups of men whose principal function was to enforce the will of some groups upon others. Much larger scale wars appeared. There were wars between gathering/hunting groups too, but these were conducted by men whose usual role in the culture was hunting and gathering. Those earlier wars were often highly ritualised, like much animal conflict. A war might end when the first blood was spilled.
With all the social and political change came a new set of mythologies and world-views. Authoritarian male gods and hierarchies of gods appeared, reflecting and justifying the political hierarchies in the early civilisations.
Y: So our modern problems started with the beginning of civilisation! Does this mean you propose that we go back to that earlier hunter-gatherer style of life?M: The size of the human population is vastly too great for the Earth to support us as gatherer/hunters. Although I have heard some people seriously propose moves in that direction, I don't think it is remotely desirable.
However, I do think it is possible that we could have the social intimacy and supportiveness of the most peaceful gatherer/hunter cultures with a sophisticated technology, although changed quite a bit from the present.
Also, I think that our modern problems took a great spurt in intensity at various times in the past. The beginnings of civilisation were one such time, the industrial revolution was another, and the late 20th century the most recent. But I think their roots lie in the evolution of abstract thought, which made it all possible. I'd like to go back to that to finish this chapter. It will lead nicely into the theoretical ideas in Part II, that clarify the possibilities of coherent cultures.
With abstract thought came the full flowering of human cultures with all their beauty and all their ugliness. A particular human culture can be seen as a collection of ideas about themselves and their world, shared by a given group of people through their language. These ideas shape their actions. They determine what they eat, how they dress, what music they make, how they form relationships and what they expect from them, how to make things, who does what, who gets what. People live in an environment shaped at least as much by ideas as by their direct experiences. These collections of ideas, as I have said, have that whirlpool-like quality of regenerating and maintaining themselves, as they are passed around from person to person.
Abstract ideas enabled humans to develop cultures which could cope with a much wider range of environments. They also opened new possibilities for confusion. Some sets of ideas are removed by several layers of abstraction from people's direct experience and may not be correctable by experience. The experience of fear from a story you are told may feel the same as that from a charging rhino. With the development of abstract thought comes the possibility of confusing thought and experience.
Other ideas are closely linked to direct experiences of the person or indirect experiences through others they have learned from. They are often very practical and subject to correction and learning from later experiences. Technologies for making things, manipulating the natural environment, for healing, have all become progressively more developed, building on earlier ideas. Thus we have some sets of ideas which are correctable through experience and some which are not.
The origin of an uncorrectable idea may be lost in ancient history and tradition: "Our people have always done it like that." A particular set of actions may have great benefit and yet have uncorrectable elements in it. Perhaps eating a certain animal, say pigs, are more prone to lead to disease than others, but the tradition arises that eating a whole class of animals is forbidden, including some which are quite safe. The tradition may consist of a very wide set of rules and rituals governing all aspects of eating. It may have major social benefits in maintaining the coherence of the community as well as its health benefits. But to the people in the culture, the tradition is sufficient unto itself. The health and social benefits are a side issue.
Metaphor builds upon metaphor to explain ways of living. Whole clusters of ideas appear which re-inforce each other to make up the traditions which form a culture. The whole, whirlpool-like, persists, regardless of any confusions or uncorrectability. This cluster of ideas forms the boundaries of appropriate behaviour for the people in the culture.
Our world is full of different cultures. Their variety is vastly greater than the local differences in ways of living of any other animal. People in different cultures vary in their what clothes they wear, and what is considered proper body covering. They vary in the food they eat and consider proper to eat, and the drugs they take and consider proper to take. They vary in their sexual behaviour and what is considered proper sexual behaviour. They vary in their levels of cooperation and aggression. There are some cultures where life is easy and people are mostly happy, and many others where this is not at all so.
Clearly, some of these differences are arbitrary. The same functions may be served in many different ways. And, as I know from my multi-cultural New York childhood, it is possible for people to acknowledge and respect their neighbours' cultures without invalidating their own.
So we come to the end of Part I of Becoming Friends, Growing Coherent Cultures. I hope it has served its function: We have looked at the development of life, humanity and human cultures. We have seen how the natural environment may be seen as a single, interconnected whole, which provides the support needed for all its parts. We have seen that some human cultures view it and their fellow people in this way, and have lived lives which have been very collaborative, supportive and free. Others have not.
The differences and arbitrarinesses are possibilities which arise from the nature of abstract thought. Human cultures have not yet achieved the self-awareness needed to understand the difference between what is arbitrary and what is not in their thoughts and behaviour. Incompatible sets of uncorrectable ideas abound.
Human thought has not yet evolved to the point at which people are routinely aware of the way in which language and communication shape their views of reality. This would be a new level of awareness and is what leads to the possibility of self-aware cultures which are (relatively!) harmonious and coherent. I believe humanity is just arriving at that point. All the supporting ideas are available. I will try to pull them together and make them explicit in Part II, and then apply them to the present and future in Parts III and IV.
5 Desmond Morris, in his classic book, The Naked Ape, made this point very well.
6 From Helen Fisher, The Sex Contract, The Evolution of Human Behaviour, Granada, 1982.
7 Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, Jonathon Cape, 1982., p. 41.
8 op. cit. p. 19.
9 There is a very good discussion of this in Helen Fisher's The Sex Contract, op. cit.
10 Fisher, op cit. p. 79.
11
Morrison, James, 1935, The Journal of James Morrison, London, Golden
Cockerell Press,
p. 170 (report from 1784).
12
Levy, Robert I, "Tahitian gentleness and redundant controls", in Montague, Ashley,
Learning Non-Aggression,
Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 224.
13 Liedloff, Jean, The Continuum Concept, Futura, London, 1975., pp. 78-79.
14 ibid., p.95.
15
Norberg-Hodge, Helena, Ancient Futures, Learning from Ladakh, Rider,
1991, pp. 46-47.
I am including Ladakh because
it is such a clear example of the kind of culture I am describing
even though it is not an example
of a gathering/hunting lifestyle, and as a Buddhist culture,
developed much later than the
others.
16
Sorenson, E. Richard, "Cooperation and Freedom among the Fore", in Montague,
Learning Non-aggression,
op. cit., p. 14-15.
17
Mead, Margaret, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Morrow,
New York, 1935.
18 Montague, op. cit., p. 7.
19
Harper and Row, 1971.