** Chris Maser "Re-learning" what we've forgotten

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The !Kung Bushmen of southern Africa, for example, spent
only twelve to nineteen hours a week getting food because
their work was social and cooperative, which means they
obtained their particular food items with the least possible
expenditure of energy. Thus, they had abundant time for
eating, drinking, playing, and general socializing. In
addition to which, young people were not expected to work
until well into their twenties and no one was expected to
work after age forty or so. (3)
____________________

Original source URL:
http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=143&Itemid=2#cont

"Re-learning" what we've forgotten

Written by Chris Maser

Editor's note: This is Chris Maser's Part Three of his series for
Culture Change. I ate this one up, because ever since I read a 1987
article in Discover magazine by Jared Diamond, about
hunter-gatherers' working only a few hours a day a few days a week,
I've been aware that our modern way of life is not what it's cracked
up to be. In Maser's article there is solid anthropological insight
applicable to our current challenge as a dysfunctional society facing
extinction. In his 18 maxims, he concludes with "Placing material
wealth, as symbolized by the money chase, above spirituality, nature,
and human well-being is the road to social impoverishment,
environmental degradation, and the collapse of societies and their
life-support systems." - Jan Lundberg

If we all treat one another with the best principles of human
relationships, it is analogous to complying with Nature's biophysical
principles by taking responsibility for our own behavior. In other
words, if I want to become acquainted with you, it is incumbent on me
to determine how I must treat you in order to allow, even encourage,
you to reciprocate in kind. Thus, for me to receive the best service,
it is my responsibility to initiate a good relationship with the
person serving me. Likewise, to have an adequate supply of quality
resources in the form of ecoogical services from Nature to run our
cities, we must take care of the land in a way that perpetuates the
natural capital we require for a quality life. Here, the bottom line
is that, by treating one another-as well as the land-with respect, we
are uniting the two disparate entities into a single,
self-reinforcing feedback loop of complementary services that can be
perpetuated through time.

To bring this about, however, we need to view one another and
ourselves differently, which necessitates a brief, generalized visit
to the hunter-gatherers of olden times. If you are wondering why we
need to visit the hunter-gatherers, the answer is simple: to
understand what we have forgotten-how to live in harmony with one
another and the land.

What the hunter-gatherers knew

The hunting-gathering peoples of the world-Australian aborigines,
African Bushman, and similar groups-represent not only the oldest but
also perhaps the most successfully adapted human beings. Virtually
all of humanity lived by hunting and gathering before about 12,000
years ago. Hunters and gatherers represent the opposite pole of the
densely packed, harried urban life most people of today experience.
Yet the life philosophy of those same hunter-gatherers may hold the
answer to a central question plaguing humanity at it enters the 21st
century: Can people live harmoniously with one another and Nature?

Until 1500 AD, hunter-gatherers occupied fully one-third of the
world, including all of Australia, most of North America, and large
tracts of land in South America, Africa, and northeast Asia, where
they lived in small groups without the overarching disciplinary
umbrella of a state or other centralized authority. They lived
without standing armies or bureaucratic systems, and they exchanged
goods and services without recourse to economic markets or taxation.

With relatively simple technology, such as wood, bone, stone, fibers,
and fire, they were able to meet their material requirements with a
modest expenditure of energy and had the time to enjoy that which
they possessed materially, socially, and spiritually. Although their
material wants may have been few and finite and their technical
skills relatively simple and unchanging, their technology was, on the
whole, adequate to fulfill their needs, a circumstance that says the
hunting-gathering peoples were the original affluent societies.
Clearly, they were free of the industrial shackles in which we find
ourselves as prisoners at hard labor caught seeming forever between
the perpetual disparity of unlimited wants and insufficient means.

Evidence indicates that these peoples lived surprisingly well
together, despite the lack of a rigid social structure, solving their
problems among themselves, largely without courts and without a
particular propensity for violence. They also demonstrated a
remarkable ability to thrive for long periods, sometimes thousands of
years, in harmony with their environment. They were environmentally
and socially harmonious and thus sustainable because they were
egalitarian, and they were egalitarian because they were socially and
environmentally harmonious. They intuitively understood the
reciprocal, indissoluble connection between their social life and the
sustainability of their environment.

Sharing was the core value of social interaction among
hunter-gatherers, with a strong emphasis on the importance of
generalized reciprocity, which means the unconditional giving of
something without any expectation of immediate return. The
combination of generalized reciprocity and an absence of private
ownership of land has led many anthropologists to consider the
hunter-gatherer way of life as a "primitive communism," in the true
sense of "communism," wherein property is owned in common by all
members of a classless community.

Even today, there are no possessive pronouns in aboriginal languages.
The people's personal identity is defined by what they give to the
community: "I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am" is
a good example of the "self-in-community" foundation that gives rise
to the saying in Zulu, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu: "It is through
others that one attains selfhood." (1)

Hunter-gatherer peoples lived with few material possessions for
hundreds of thousands of years and enjoyed lives that were in many
ways richer, freer, and more fulfilling than ours. These nomadic
peoples were (and are) economical in every aspect of their lives,
except in telling stories. Stories passed the time during travel,
archived the people's history, and passed it forward as the
children's cultural inheritance. (2)

These peoples so structured their lives that they wanted little,
required little, and found what they needed at their disposal in
their immediate surroundings. They were comfortable precisely because
they achieved a balance between what they needed and/or wanted by
being satisfied with little. There are, after all, two ways to
wealth-working harder or wanting less.

The !Kung Bushmen of southern Africa, for example, spent only twelve
to nineteen hours a week getting food because their work was social
and cooperative, which means they obtained their particular food
items with the least possible expenditure of energy. Thus, they had
abundant time for eating, drinking, playing, and general socializing.
In addition to which, young people were not expected to work until
well into their twenties and no one was expected to work after age
forty or so. (3)

Like the hunter-gatherers of old, the sense of place for the
self-sufficient, nomadic Bedouins ("desert dwellers" in Arabic) is a
seasonal journey. With respect to socializing, however, Bedouins have
long had specific meeting places. In the desert of Sinai, an acacia
tree still serves as a landmark and meeting place that offers shelter
and social contact to travelers. The "makhad" (which means "the
meeting place around the acacia tree") is a traditional Bedouin
meeting place, where, according to their customs of friendship and
hospitality, all who pass through the desert are welcomed. In fact,
there is a particular acacia tree in the Sinai desert at the oasis
garden of Ein-Khudra (an oasis mentioned in the Bible) that has been
cultivated continuously by the same Bedouin family for over a
thousand years.

These "oasis gardens" are remarkably fertile and filled with
abundance, which reflects the Bedouin's love of and respect for their
desert home. The makhads are a socially recognized commons in that
they help to sustain the nomadic lifestyle-acting as a fixed point
around which the nomadic journey revolves. (4)

Hunter-gatherers also had much personal freedom. There were, among
the !Kung Bushmen and the Hadza of Tanzania, for instance, either no
leaders or only temporary leaders with severely limited authority.
These societies had personal equality in that everyone belonged to
the same social class and had gender equality. Their technologies and
social systems, including their economies of having enough or a sense
of "enoughness," allowed them to live sustainably for tens of
thousands of years. One of the reasons they were sustainable was
their lack of connection between what an individual produced and that
person's economic security, so acquisition of things to ensure
personal survival and material comfort was not an issue.

In the beginning, nomadic hunters and gatherers, who have represented
humanity for most of its existence, probably saw the world simply as
"habitat" that fulfilled all of their life's requirements, a view
that allowed the people to understand themselves as part of a
seamless community. For example, the Apache word "Shi-Ni," is used
for "land" and "mind," an indication of how closely the people were
united to the land. With the advent of herding, agriculture, and
progressive settlement, however, humanity created the concept of
"wilderness," and so the distinctions between "tame" (equals
"controlled") and "wild" (equals "uncontrolled") plants and animals
began to emerge in the human psyche. Along with the notion of tame
and wild plants and animals came the perceived need to not only
"control" space but also to "own" it through boundaries in the form
of corrals, pastures, fields, and villages. In this way, the
uncontrolled land or "wilderness" of the hunter-gatherers came to be
viewed in the minds of settled folk as "unproductive," "free" for the
taking, and/or as a threat to their existence.

Agriculture, therefore, brought with it both a sedentary way of life
and a permanent change in the flow of living. Whereas the daily life
of a hunter-gatherer was a seamless whole, a farmer's life became
divided into "home" and "work." While a hunter-gatherer had intrinsic
value as a human being with respect to the community, a farmer's
sense of self-worth became extrinsic, both personally and with
respect to the community as symbolized by, and permanently attached
to "productivity"-a measure based primarily on how hard a person
worked and thus produced in good or services.

In addition, the sedentary life of a farmer changed the notion of
"property." To the hunter-gatherers, mobile property, that which one
could carry with them (such as one's hunting knife or gathering
basket) could be owned, but fixed property (such as land) was to be
shared equally through rights of use, but could not be personally
owned to the exclusion of others and the detriment of future
generations. This was such an important concept, that it eventually
had a word of special coinage, "usufruct." According to the 1999
Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, "usufruct," is a noun
in Roman and Civil Law. Usufruct means that one has the right to
enjoy all the advantages derivable from the use of something that
belongs to another person provided the substance of the thing being
used is neither destroyed nor injured.

So the dawn of agriculture, which ultimately gave birth to
civilizations, created powerful, albeit unconscious, biases in the
human psyche. For the first time, humans clearly saw themselves as
distinct from and-in their reasoning at least-superior to the rest of
Nature. They therefore began to consider themselves as masters of,
but not as members of, Nature's biophysical community of life.

To people who lived a sedentary life, like farmers, land was a
commodity to be bought, owned, and sold. Thus, when hunter-gatherer
cultures, such as the American Indians, "sold" their land to the
invaders (in this case Europeans), they were really selling the right
to "use" their land, not to "own" it outright as fixed property,
something the Europeans did not understand. The European's difficulty
in comprehending the difference probably arose because, once a
sedentary and settled life style is embraced, it is almost impossible
to return to a nomadic way of life, especially the thinking that
accompanies it.

We, as individuals, may therefore despair when we contemplate the
failure of so many earlier human societies to recognize their pending
environmental problems, as well as their failure to resolve
them-especially when we see our local, national, and global society
committing the same kinds of mistakes on an even larger scale and
faster time track. But the current environmental crisis is much more
complex than earlier ones because modern society is qualitatively
different than previous kinds of human communities. Old problems are
occurring in new contexts and new problems are being created, both as
short-term solutions to old problems and as fundamentally new
concepts. Pollution of the world's oceans, depletion of the ozone
layer, production of enormous numbers and amounts of untested
chemical compounds that find their way into the environment, and the
potential human exacerbation of global climate change were simply not
issues in olden times. But they are the issues of today.

There are lessons we, as a society today, can re-learn from the
people who once lived-and the few who still live-a hunter-gatherer
way of life. I say, "relearn" because, as writer Carlo Levi once
said, "the future has an ancient heart."

What we must "re-learn"
1. Life's experiences are personal and intimate.

2. Sharing life's experiences by working together and taking care of
one another along the way is the price of sustainability.

3. Cooperation and coordination, when coupled with sharing and
caring, precludes the perceived need to compete, except in play-and
perhaps in story telling.

4. The art of living lies in how we practice relationship-beginning
with ourselves-because practicing relationship is all we humans ever
do in life.

5. Leisure is affording the necessary amount of time to fully engage
each thought we have, each decision we make, each task we perform,
and each person with whom we converse in order to fulfill a
relationship's total capacity for a quality experience.

6. Simplicity in living and dying depends on and seeks things small,
sublime, and sustainable.

7. There is more beauty and peace in the world than ugliness and
cruelty. 8. Any fool can complicate life, but it requires a certain
genius to make and keep things simple.

9. For a group of people to be socially functional, they must be
equally informed about what is going on within the group; in other
words, there must be no secrets that are actually or potentially
detrimental to any member of the group.

10. Separating work from social life is not necessary for economic
production-and may even be a serious social mistake.

11. By consciously limiting our "wants," we can have enough to
comfortably fulfill our necessities as well as some of our most
ardent desires-and leave more for other people to do the same.

12. Simplicity is the key to contentment, adaptability, and survival
as a culture; beyond some point, complexity becomes a decided
disadvantage with respect to cultural longevity, just as it is to the
evolutionary longevity of a species.

13. The notion of scarcity is largely an economic construct to foster
competitive consumerism and thereby increase profits, but is not
necessarily an inherent part of human nature. (We need to overcome
our fear of economically contrived scarcity and marvel instead at the
incredible abundance and resilience of the Earth.)

14. Linking individual well-being strictly to individual production
is the road to competition, which in turn leads inevitably to social
inequality, poverty, and environmental degradation.

15. Self-centeredness and acquisitiveness are not inherent traits of
our species, but rather acquired traits based on a sense of fear and
insecurity within our social setting that fosters the perceived need
of individual and collective competition, expressed as the need to
impress others.

16. Inequality based on gender and/or social class is a behavior
based on fear disguised as "social privilege."

17. Mobile property, that which one can carry with them, can be
owned, whereas fixed property-such as land, which may be borrowed-is
to be shared equally through rights of generational use, but can not
be personally owned to the detriment of future generations.

18. Placing material wealth, as symbolized by the money chase, above
spirituality, nature, and human well-being is the road to social
impoverishment, environmental degradation, and the collapse of
societies and their life-support systems. (3)

So, where are we today? We are the exact antithesis of the
hunter-gatherers in many respects: (1) who we are, (2) how we obtain
resources, (3) what we own, (4) our connection with Nature, and (5)
who benefits and who pays. I am, however, going to focus on our
connection with Nature, because, in a sense, the others are embodied
in the characteristics of that relationship.

The hunter-gatherers knew themselves to be an inseparable part of
Nature and therefore did their best to honor Nature by blending in
with the seasonal cycles of birth and death, of hunter, gatherer, and
hunted. Through their spirituality and myths, they sought to
understand the "Nature Gods," appease them, and serve them so they
might continue to be generous in the future.

We city folks, on the other hand, have all but lost our conscious
connection with Nature, in part because a number of modern religions,
such as Christianity and Judaism, consider humanity to be separate
from and above all other life on Planet Earth. In addition, we live
in protective "boxes" of one sort or another wherein our daily
necessities are transported-including our experience of the outer
world via television. Consequently, we rarely experience the night
sky, the seasonal flights of migrating geese, or the wide-open spaces
that are as yet uncluttered by the trappings of humanity. And those
city folks who do hunt, normally do so with high-powered rifles that
make their game into the abstractions of sport and trophies - not
lives taken with reverence for the necessity of food.

The hunter-gatherers lived lightly upon the land, honoring its
cycles, being patience with Nature's pace, taking only what they
needed, and thereby allowing the land to renew itself before they
took from it again. In this way, generations passed through the
millennia, each tending to be at least as well off as the preceding
one.

Because we have a propensity to see Nature as a commodity to be
competitively exploited for our immediate benefit, we are, at best,
short-changing the generations of the future by passing forward
unpaid environmental bills and, at worst, blatantly stealing their
inheritance and thus setting all generations on a course toward
environmental bankruptcy. The first is irresponsible, the latter
unconscionable. While the hunter-gatherers lived an effective life,
we are focused almost totally on efficiency. And they are not the
same thing!

Endnotes
1. Barbara Nussbaum. 2003. Ubuntu. Resurgence 221:13.
2. Sally Pomme Clayton. 2003. Thread of Life. Resurgences 221:29.

3. The foregoing discussion of hunter-gatherers is taken from: (1)
the Foreword, Introduction, and first eight chapters of the 1998 book
"Limited wants, unlimited means" edited by John Gowdy and published
by Island Press, Washington, D.C. The authors are as follows:
Foreword by Richard B. Lee, Introduction by John Gowdy, Chapter 1 by
Marshall Sahlins, Chapter 2 by Richard B. Lee, Chapter 3 by Lorna
Marshall, Chapter 4 by James Woodburn, Chapter 5 by Nurit Bird-David,
Chapter 6 by Eleanor Leacock, Chapter 7 by Richard B. Lee, and
Chapter 8 by Ernest S. Burch, Jr.; (2) Rebecca Adamson. People who
are Indigenous to the Earth. 1997. YES! A Journal of Positive
Futures, Winter:26-27; (3) Gus diZerega. 1997. Re-thinking the
Obvious: Modernity and Living Respectfully with Nature. Trumpeter
14:184-193; (4) Richard K. Nelson. 1983. Make Prayers to the Raven: A
Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, IL. pp. 214-215; (5) Stephanie Mills. 2001. Words for the
Wild. Resurgence 208:38-40; and (6) Roderick Frazier Nash. 2003. Wild
World. Resurgence 216:36-38.

4. The foregoing discussion about the nomadic Bedouins is based on:
Will Cretney. 2000. A Nomadic Journey. Resurgence 203:24-25.

* * * * *

This essay is condensed from Chris Maser's 2004 book The Perpetual
Consequences of Fear and Violence: Rethinking the Future. Maisonneuve
Press, Washington, D.C. 373 pp.

Chris has written several books that are showcased on his website,
chrismaser.com. Chris lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He is a consultant
on environmental land-use development, sustainable communities and
forestry.