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