THAT STONE AGE STATE OF MIND
If you could structure your waking life, your working life to perfectly suit your particular nature, what would your day be like? How long would you work, and where? Who would you want to send time with, and how much time? How would you manage your time, if you would manage it at all?
Indigenous peoples who have little or no contact with the outside world would never ask questions like those posited above. Their days, their lives are intimately wedded to ancient customs and norms, the roots of which go far back, deep, deep in time. Their waking hours are intertwined with the local environment, so much so that they cannot imagine themselves as being separate from it.
They are in a Stone Age state of mind. And that state, researchers now think, is where harmony within the human soul resides.
Ponder this a moment. Clinical depression afflicts one in four modern people in their lifetime, depression severe enough to require intervention with therapy or drugs or both. In paleo-like tribal societies truly isolated from modern civilization’s influence, depression is not only rare, it is virtually nonexistent. In the United States, 40,000 people end their lives by their own hand each year, the great majority because they are in such a state of stress that they can’t find relief from their turmoil. Those who live a hunter-gatherer existence even today don’t commit suicide.
There are other striking differences between our modern selves and peoples who live in remote settings far from civilization. We live and work inside. Hunter-gatherers live outside in the sun. We rarely experience the natural environment in any intimate way. Isolated native peoples live every waking moment in the wild and know a great deal about its benefits and dangers.
There’s more. When hunter-gatherer peoples go to work, if you can call it that, they usually complete a task crucial to their survival the same day and benefit directly from the effort that same day. Our work is generally cog like, often endlessly repetitious, and an effort within some greater task that we don’t complete or is part of an overarching goal we don’t set and can’t influence. The benefits for doing civilization’s work are indirect at best.
When we step into our workspace, we are often assigned a task and are alone in that task most of the day. We may have a boss and co-workers, but we are confined to our cubicle, wedded to our earphone, or we are shunted from room to room or place to place without letup to take care of a patient or a client or a customer we don’t know and will likely never see again.
Hunter-gatherers work in direct concert with others, usually close family members, relatives, and clan mates. A hunting party requires teamwork and planning. Members of the party work together until they have dispatched an animal that they then cut up and carry home to the tribal group. A gathering clutch knows where to find foods and when, what’s edible and what isn’t, how to navigate in wild terrain and find a way home, how to organize the labor, and how to avoid being injured or preyed upon. They work together until such time as they have gathered enough food to feed the members of the community that day.
When we modern humans are paid for our work, we drive a car alone to a store, shuttle around pushing a cart in aisles among strangers, get back in the car alone, and go to a home or apartment and prepare a meal sometimes alone, sometimes with a partner, sometimes with a family. Fifty percent of the time in the U.S., meals aren’t eaten in a community or family setting. Hunter-gatherers always eat in a communal setting and they usually spend a lot of time eating and socializing while and after they eat.
In truth, people who still live a Stone Age existence are never alone. They are always in the company of children, the elderly, extended family groups, clan members, and friends. Social norms are not only understood but practiced daily and reinforced by everyone. Disputes are most often resolved by numerous members of the community. The loss of a loved one is consoled by the many. Joyous occasions are reason for all members to gather to bond and to celebrate.
The pathologies of civilization – the substance abuse, depression, aggression, loneliness, obesity, stress and hypertension, exhaustion, lack of exercise, sleeplessness, and suicide – are largely absent in Stone Age-like cultures. The present day medical and research communities are beginning to understand that the single biggest difference between our urban selves and the hunter-gatherers we once were for 99.9 percent of our existence on this planet is the fact that we are not living and moving around continuously outside in a natural setting, in the sun, in company of other people we know intimately.
Patients who are suffering from civilization get relief from their afflictions without drugs if they follow their doctor’s orders to go for a brisk walk in the sun in a park or a forest for at least three-quarters of an hour three or four times a week. The more people get up and move around in a natural setting, the less the pathologies of civilization ravage their minds, bodies, and souls.
In short, the more we behave like our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the more we thrive. The more we exercise, the more time we spend with nature, the better we feel. The more time we spend connected with family, relatives and close friends, rather than co-workers and strangers, the more we can handle the slings and arrows of our overbuilt urban existence.
All of which begs a question. If urban life and hyper-consumption culture wrecks such havoc on the human soul, why do we continue to organize ourselves in such a manner? Surely there must be other models of human social engagement that we can adopt that are life-enhancing rather than life-debilitating. Increasingly, researchers point to the hunter-gatherer mode of existence as the model for which to strive.
Well, how in the world could anyone in this day and age adopt such a lifestyle? Impossible. Silly to even contemplate such a thing, right?
Throughout the 19th century, scores of experimental self-contained communities arose within the United States. Some were organized as religious cloisters, others as bulwarks of liberty against the greater national culture. Some were chaste, others experimented with sexual liberation. No matter how long these experiments lasted – some less than a generation, others for more than 100 years – all had certain traits in common and those traits harkened to a time when humans everywhere lived a Stone Age existence.
At the core of each experimental community was a desire to be self-sufficient. All of the new social arrangements revolved around a means to generate food: a farm. At some time during each day, most residents tended livestock and gardens to generate food for the table and cut firewood to heat buildings and fuel the economy of the villages. Although a farm is something quite different than a hunter-gatherer existence, both modes of living seek to instill self-reliance and promote self-sufficiency.
All the experimental living arrangements were communal, in that all members worked in concert daily to ensure the sustainability of the community. Work was not performed to enrich an owner or manager or to ensure the existence and expansion of some outside third-party entity such as a corporation or a utility. It’s not that some of the experimental villages did not make money. Some, such as the Shakers, were extremely adept at producing fine goods that found a ready market in the broader culture. They generated substantial flows of cash, but those funds were channeled into the community as a whole and all members benefitted.
In hunter-gatherer cultures, most resources procured through hunting and gathering are shared equally among the members. When times are good, all prosper. In times of drought or scarcity, all suffer similar deprivation.
What is intriguing about the social experiments and intentional villages of the 19th century is that the general mode of living they pioneered approximates the Paleolithic lifestyle. All lived in close community and worked in concert to sustain the whole. All strove to be self-sufficient so they could be free of outside influences to as great an extent as possible. By farming, they were physically active every day, used local resources predominately, learned to live harmoniously within their local natural surroundings, and enjoyed leisure time in a communal setting.
Many of these experimental arrangements, like Stone Age cultures, allowed ample time and resources for educating the young, for nurturing infants and small children, and attending to the eldest in their ranks. Fine craftsmanship, handiwork, and artistic endeavor were seen has essential to the life of the community. And both Stone Age cultures and the members of intentional communities placed high value on religious ceremony and spiritual enlightenment.
As our human story unfolds in the future it seems increasingly clear that the way forward requires tapping into the ancient lessons of our past. Living in mega-city environments wherein all the residents are dependent for their daily sustenance and livelihoods on people thousands of miles removed is a recipe for personal distress and ultimately disaster. We did not evolve to sit immobile all day isolated in some office cubicle or before a television screen, eat synthetic foods and ingest synthetic drugs, live bathed in artificial lighting, endure hyper-stimulation, and interact with nothing but strangers day in and day out.
Our past instructs us to get up on our feet, move constantly, grow and harvest our own foods and medicinal herbs, and live in small social groups and stable social settings with people we know well and love. Our past admonishes us to practice craftsmanship and art, live in the natural world and get to know it intimately, and provide goods and services directly for our own tight communities rather than selling our living hours to some third party so they may profit from our labors.
We are failing on all fronts to heed the lessons passed down to us from countless generations. The vanished peoples of the Stone Age are calling; we are not listening. But their ancient road is the new avenue to renewing our health, healing our souls, and understanding our true place in the world.
