Domesticated Adults

Last week’s blogpiece asked whether our quality of life had improved as our quantity of life had increased. The answer suggested that it had not.

So, let us ask ourselves – why not?

The answer to that is not simply (as last weeks blog seemed to imply) that we now work longer than our hunter/gatherer days.

For years, psychology and the self-development movement were focussed on the human as an autonomous person responsible almost completely and solely for their thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. The human place in nature was largely missing from these endeavours.

Fortunately, this is changing. First, let us return to asking what happened that shifted us away from a greater quality of life.

For more than 95% of our (Homo sapiens) existence upon the Earth we lived in a manner intimately connected with and part of the natural world. Then, around 12,000 years ago, beginning in the Levant, Mesopotamia, and western Asia something began to dislodge us from that intimacy.

Many point to the Agricultural Revolution as that “something.” Although the advent, over many centuries, of agriculture was a significant factor, it wasn’t the only one. Whatever were the combination of factors, the outcomes of the disruption could be identified within the first few millennia. Today, 10,000 years later, the consequences are readily apparent, unless we have forgotten what happened and what went before.

Daniel Quinn calls this “The Great Forgetting.” Quinn claims that not only have we forgotten how our ancestors lived more than 12,000 years ago, but that we have also forgotten that we have forgotten. Hardly surprising, he notes, as it was not until a few thousand more years had passed before stories and memories got written down, and history was invented.

Unless we are willing to delve into this forgotten time, via archaeology, palaeontology, and pre-history, then we may be inclined to consider normality to be no different than it has been throughout recorded history, i.e. only the last 5,000 years or so.

But what is now “normal” is anything but “normal” when looked at over the course of 200,000 – 300,000 years. Even though the dislocation from nature took place over thousands of years, when viewed against our evolutionary journey the disruption was “sudden.”

As with many “sudden” disruptions the effects can be traumatic. “Traumatic” is how eco-psychologist. Chellis Glendinning, refers to the break from nature. ‘What could be more “distressing” than finding ourselves, out of short-term needs, locked into a cycle of abuse that insists we slash, dig, and burn the very Earth we have always respected and known ourselves to be made up of?’ she asks.¹

Drawing upon her work with post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers, Glendinning notes that culturally we suffer from PTSD collectively. And, as do individual sufferers, we collectively deny any trauma, and attempt to cover it up with addictions and justifications. In our westernised cultures we deny and cover up through addictions to technology, and the myth of progress. As with the individual, these addictions and myths only exacerbate the underlying problems.

The title of Glendinning’s book alludes to the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) introductory remarks in seeking recovery from addiction – My name is Chellis, and I’m in recovery from western civilization.

A person attending an AA programme will be offered a “sponsor” (or mentor) to assist them through the process and the recovery.

Who are the sponsors for those wishing to recover from western civilization? Who are the guides to facilitate the journey from childhood into healthy, nature-based adulthood and beyond?

Sadly, within westernised societies they are few and far between. Again, it is not surprising that there are so few guides. Our dislocation from nature had the flow on effect of also disrupting our “natural” succession from childhood, to adulthood, to elderhood. The deep ecologist and author, Paul Shepard, asserts that by ‘…spatially isolating the individual from the nonhumanized world, agriculture made it difficult for the developing person to approach the issues around which the crucial passages into fully mature adult life had been structured in the course of human existence.’²

The eco-psychologist and wilderness guide, Bill Plotkin, concurs. He declares that, ‘With the development of agriculture a new form of adolescent pathology became possible (in fact, inevitable), a pathology that begins with greed and eventuates in hoarding, domination, and violence.’  Furthermore, Plotkin claims that in modern societies ‘many people of adult age suffer from a variety of adolescent psychopathologies…’³

He then goes on to list examples of these psychopathologies: social insecurity, identity confusion, low self-esteem, few or no social skills, narcissism, relentless greed, arrested moral development, recurrent physical violence, materialistic obsessions, little or no capacity for intimacy or empathy, substance addictions, and emotional numbness. That’s quite a bit isn’t it?

What’s more, Plotkin notes that, ‘We see these psychopathologies most glaringly in leaders and celebrities of the Western world.’

It is a damning indictment, is it not?

Where are the guides and mentors then?

Just as humans have domesticated plants and animals, so agriculture has domesticated our adults.

Tame adults are never going to provide the necessary guidance for raising healthy humans in a healthy planet.

Notes:

1. Chellis Glendinning, My Name Is Chellis & I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization, Shambhala Publications, Boston, 1994

2. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1982

3. Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, New World Library, Novato, California, 2008

Quality of Quality of Life

One of the social indicators that many wish to extol about modern life is that life expectancy has increased. Indeed it has. By about 20 – 25 years since the Industrial Revolution.

If we consider an even longer timeframe, say back to Palaeolithic times then there has been a significant increase in the quantity of life that we now live. Although estimates vary, the consensus of archaeologists tends towards recognising that once a hunter/gatherer reached about 15 years of age then he/she could expect to live a further 35 to 40 years. That is, an adult living in the Palaeolithic would be likely to reach an age of 50 – 55 years.

So, yes indeed, the quantity of years that has been added to human life has increased markedly.

But – has the quality of life increased?

During the 1970s, I recall, there was much discussion about quality of life and how that should be the goal of personal life and that governments could play a role in facilitating that. However, in recent years I find that I rarely hear the phrase. It is as though something else has grabbed our attention and we have forgotten that quality of life may be a worthwhile goal.

Or, is it that we have conflated quality of life with quantity of life?

Let’s find out.

First though, how is quality of life defined? Philosophers, sociologists, poets, politicians, and spiritual leaders have all proposed definitions over many centuries. Herein, I am using a simple metric as a proxy for quality of life. That metric is the amount of leisure time we have, once we have accounted for work hours, sleep, and education. None of this is rigorous, and the arithmetic involved is very much back of a napkin computation.

The next thing that must be considered is how much leisure time do we have today compared to previous times. There are 8,766 hours in a year. Sleep (at 8 hours per night) takes up 2,922 of those hours. In the OECD (the richer nations of the world) the average working year consists of 1,900 hours. That leaves 3,944 hours for eating, commuting, and human activities that contribute towards quality of life.

We can factor in education. In the OECD most children go to school between the ages of 5 – 15 years, for 40 weeks per year. That is about 670 hours per year.

If all these numbers are crunched (I won’t bore you with the arithmetic details) then leisure time (quality of life) for people living today to the age of 75 is around 227,000 – 230,000 hours over the course of their lifetime.

Now, let us consider the quality of life enjoyed by our ancestors, both those who lived prior to the Industrial Revolution and those living much earlier as hunter/gatherers in Palaeolithic times.

These next figures may surprise you, yet they are the considered opinion of experts in the field. A peasant working before the Industrial Revolution is likely to have worked only some 1,440 hours per year – less than half the OECD average of today.¹

In 1968 Marshall Sahlins (an American cultural anthropologist) wrote an influential essay titled The Original Affluent Society, in which he claimed that hunter/gatherers “worked” far fewer hour per week than we tend to think. He termed this approach to life/work balance as ‘the Zen road to affluence.’ Sahlin’s essay has been much quoted, verified, and expanded upon by many researchers since then.² Sahlins and others show that for many modern-day nomadic tribespeople and hunter/gatherers of yore, work took up between 2 and 4 hours per day.

Now, for the interesting bit.

If we calculate leisure time per year with the lifespan of hunter/gatherers and modern-day nomadic people, then the total hours of leisure (quality of life) equates to around 202,000 to 205,000 hours over their lifetime.

That is not much less than the 227,000 hours of leisure that modern-day humans in rich societies obtain. Further calculation shows that the difference is only 2.5 – 3.2 years!

Is that all? Three years or less? Just that for all our vaunted increase in quantity of life.

And, what have we done with this extra three years of leisure time?

Wasted it!

Modern humans spend much of leisure time sitting watching television, or glued to the mini-screen of an iPhone, or playing computer games, or other mindless, and ultimately self-comatosing, pastimes. Statistics from both Australia and the USA show that well over 60% of leisure time is spent in front of the TV or a computer. Not much quality in this quantity of life.

Contrast this with the use of leisure time by hunter/gatherers and pre-Industrial Revolution peasants. Their time was taken up with dancing, storytelling, humour, music making, communal gatherings, feasts, arts, crafts, playing, ritual, and similar activities.

Let us then ask: Who has/had the greater quality of life?

Notes:

1. See for example, Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Basic Books, New York, 1992

2. Glendinning, Chellis, My Name Is Chellis & I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization, Shambhala Publications, Boston & London, 1994. Graeber, David & Wengrow, David, The Dawn of Everything, Penguin Books, UK, 2021. Lent, Jeremy, The Patterning Instinct, Prometheus Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2017.

Observations of The Little Prince

First translated into English in 1943 The Little Prince¹ has been a firm favourite for all ages of reader. With more than 300 translations into other languages (including that of Klingon – the fictional Star Trek language) this small book is the most translated non-religious boo in the world.

The Little Prince tells of a meeting between an airman who has landed in the Sahara Desert with a damaged engine. The author of the book, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is himself an airman, serving with the French during WW2. Whilst attempting to repair his plane the airman meets an extraordinary young traveller known only as the Little Prince.

The Little Prince comes from another planet (de Saint-Exupéry calls it asteroid B-612) on which there are three tiny volcanoes, a flower, and baobab bushes. The Little Prince must continuously uproot the baobabs for fear that they will take over his entire planet.

During his interplanetary travels and his time on Earth the Little Prince meets a number of characters. What he observes about each of them tells us something of the mindsets of grown-ups (as the Little Prince refers to them.)

After meeting each of these characters the Little Prince is left concluding that, ‘Grown-ups are very odd/strange’.

How does the Little Prince come to this conclusion? Let us look at some of his meetings and we might understand.

On one planet the Little Prince meets a king and notes that ‘to them, all men/women are subjects.’ In this encounter the Little Prince observes the need to reign supreme and without question so often displayed by rulers and leaders of countries.

On another he meets a conceited man and observes that this man never hears anything but praise. The conceited man shows the hallmarks of narcissism and listens only to those willing to heap admiration upon him.

Travelling further, the Little Prince meets a businessman for whom riches and ownership are all that matters. When the Little Prince asks the businessman, What good does it do to own so much?’ the businessman answers that ‘it makes me rich.’  The Little Prince pursues this with, ‘What good does it do you to be rich?’ A fair question you may agree. The businessman though, has an answer, ‘It makes it possible for me to buy more.’  In this encounter the Little Prince exposes the greed, and the circular arguments made for ever increasing wealth and riches.

One of the planets the Little Prince lands upon is so small that there is only room upon it for a single streetlamp and a lamplighter. The lamplighter’s job is to light and extinguish the lamp. When the Little Prince asks him why he is doing this, the lamplighter replies, ‘Orders are orders.’ Indeed, how often do we follow orders simply because they are orders?

Landing upon one planet the Little Prince meets a man who is poring over a book. The Little Prince queries him and is told that this man is a geographer. When asked to tell the Little Prince about his planet, the geographer says that he cannot do that, because I am not an explorer.’  Furthermore, when the Little Prince mentions the flower that exists upon his planet, the geographer informs him that ‘we do not record flowers.’ The Little Prince his aghast at this reply. But ‘the flower is the most beautiful thing on my planet!’ he exclaims. Beauty, to the geographer, is dismissed as ‘ephemeral.’ Welcome to a world where beauty is of little worth Little Prince.

Just one more example.

On one of the planets the Little Prince visits is a railway switchman. During the conversation between the Little Prince and the switchman we discover that the switchman has the job of shifting trains from one line to another, and then back again. When asked about this coming and going the switchman answers that ‘No one is ever satisfied with where he is.’ He further reveals that all the adults are asleep in the railway carriages and that ‘only the children are flattening their noses against the window-panes.’

With this observation the Little Prince then declares that ‘Only the children know what they are looking for.’ The switchman agrees. ‘They are lucky’ he states.

This small, allegorical tale is worth reading over and over and taking note of the Little Prince’s observations.

Certainly, the grown-ups are very odd and strange.

Note:

1. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, Pan Books Ltd., London, 1974

Questions Science Cannot Answer (and Nor Can Religion)

For science to progress it must first ask questions. Many times the answer can be found, albeit sometimes after years, perhaps decades or even centuries, of searching.

Gravity is a good example. The Greek philosophers pondered why it was that things fall naturally. Aristotle, for example, postulated that the reason for this was that the Earth was the centre of the Universe and that therefore all objects fell towards it. Plutarch, on the other hand, claimed that gravity was not unique to the Earth.

In the 7^th century CE, an Indian mathematician and astronomer suggested that gravity was a force. One thousand years later, in 1687 Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in which he described what we now know as the Laws of Gravity. It took more than 2,000 years to answer the question. Even so, science did manage to answer it.

But, what of those questions that science cannot answer? How do we answer them? Indeed, do we even want answers to them?

These are the sort of questions that occur to us when we smell a flower, look up at the night sky, or kiss another human being. Why is this flower so beautiful? How big is the Universe? What is this feeling inside?

We answer these questions with words and expressions of awe, magnificence, wonder, love, and mystery.

And, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry answered in The Little Prince¹ what is important and what is of consequence is invisible.

It is not knowing, not having an answer, which speaks to our heart, soul, and humanity most exquisitely.

Science cannot answer such questions. Nor should we expect science to do so.

We should not expect religion to do so either. That science cannot answer some questions does not mean that God (or some other deity) must be enlisted to fill the gap.

Gaps in knowledge do not need to be filled. Indeed, it is in the gaps that we find ourselves face-to-face with our insignificance and our magnificence at the same time.

Gaps allow us to notice the beauty of a flower. Gaps allow us to contemplate, yet never fully appreciate, the sheer immensity of the cosmos.

Gaps allow us to feel the love in a kiss.

Addendum: Nothing in the above should be read as a refutation of either science or religion. Simply, that we need not look for answers where we do not need answers – we simply need to seek the wonder in the mystery.

Note:

1. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, Pan Books Ltd., London, 1974. First published 1945