The Terror<\/h3>\n
Modernity relies on controlling food via agriculture, controlling \u201cpests,\u201d eliminating dangerous animals, controlling the spaces in which we live, controlling domesticated animals, and controlling other people\u2019s actions via money and laws (carrots and sticks). We\u2019re control freaks, one might say\u2014seeking control over an ever-expanding set of concerns.<\/p>\n
This approach to life shelters its participants to the point that they are robbed of the sort of freedom every wild being knows. Importantly, inability to secure satisfying wild food without much effort makes us daily-dependent on \u201cthe system\u201d in order to get fed. Talk about control!<\/p>\n
From the vantage of this enfeebled, helpless state of domesticated captivity, it seems inconceivable that one could enjoy life or even simply\u00a0survive<\/em>\u00a0without the support of modernity. People really freak out at the suggestion that modernity must collapse one way or another, and that we need to find other ways to live. It seems as hopeless as standing on flotsam without any other dry option in sight. Leaving modernity surely means an unpleasant death. It\u2019s the nihilism of ignorance: the conviction that nothing else (worthwhile) exists. Television \u201creality\u201d shows are set up to have us gawk at how essentially-impossible life is when stripped of our comforts. We tell stories about how we saved ourselves from\u00a0a life of misery and terror<\/a>\u2014how we struggled to reach the safety of our hunk of flotation. That our \u201csystem\u201d is initiating a sixth mass extinction makes us feel all the more hopeless: between a rock and a hard place.<\/p>\n The terror \u201cout there\u201d is a very common perception. Probably 95% of the time anyone invokes the Hobbesian line that life before modernity was \u201csolitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,\u201d or Tennyson\u2019s characterization of nature as being \u201cred in tooth and claw,\u201d it is in\u00a0affirmation<\/em>\u00a0of these sentiments rather than dismissing them as terrified ignorance.<\/p>\n First, humans outside modernity are definitely not solitary! They are not poor, being the \u201coriginal affluent society<\/a>\u201c\u2014obtaining all they need on part-time \u201cwork.\u201d They spend lots of time singing, dancing, teasing, laughing, and relaxing\u2014which sounds opposite of nasty. While they might, out of necessity, be aggressive toward intruders and sometimes make shows of strength to neighbors, daily life\u2014the vast majority of lived moments\u2014is cooperative and not brutish. Life spans are not as long as by modern standards, but once making it to ten years old, a reasonably long life becomes quite likely and normal. Old people are not rare. Simple math involving reproductive ages and child-bearing capacity indicates\u00a0it could not possibly have been any other way<\/a>. It\u2019s more than speculation or storytelling. As an aside, I am well aware that saying\u00a0even one<\/em>\u00a0positive thing about hunter-gatherer lifestyles brings charges of romanticizing \u201cnoble savages.\u201d I recommend ignoring this defensive overreaction.<\/p>\n But on the subject of danger:\u00a0does<\/em>\u00a0nature contain teeth and claws, sometimes colored by blood? Most assuredly, it does. Every effective lie contains a healthy dose of truth. Outside modernity, is puncture of a given human individual\u2019s skin by such implements a daily, weekly, monthly, annual, or even every-decade experience?\u00a0We would not be here if that were so<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Modernity barricades us in a bristling fortress set against the wildness outside. From this position of retreat, having disengaged from the external reality for generation upon generation, we tell spooky stories about what\u2019s out there and shudder to think about the certain death of leaving our safe haven: thus the analogy to standing on flotsam in an otherwise empty sea. We either cling to our safety or face a cold, wet, hopeless, and short existence\u2014cloudy and wet with a chance of sharks.<\/p>\n This heading borrows from the title of a book I am enjoying presently called (in the U.S.)\u00a0We Will Be Jaguars<\/a><\/em>, by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson.<\/p>\n So, here we are in our well-provisioned floating fortress-of modernity, and we have figured out how to make smaller fortified boats so that we can travel into the wild world while clinging to our protective gear (this is essentially what I do when I go backpacking like the pathetic modernity wimp I am). Sometimes\u2014and rather frequently in \u201cexplorer\u201d days\u2014these offshoot boats would encounter \u201cwild\u201d humans.<\/p>\n The fascinating observation is what\u00a0didn\u2019t happen<\/strong>\u00a0in these encounters\u2014time and time again. The \u201cnatives\u201d\u00a0did not<\/strong>\u00a0swarm to the lifeboat like rats to flotsam (spoiler hint: they aren\u2019t like rats). They\u00a0did not<\/em>\u00a0say: \u201cFinally, we are saved from our solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short lives. Finally, we have\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0food obtained from the sweat of someone\u2019s brow. Finally, we have protection from the nightmares in the dark. Finally, we have proper shelters and apparel. Finally, we can be truly human.\u201d<\/p>\n No: most perplexingly, such reactions\u00a0kept<\/em>\u00a0not<\/strong>\u00a0happening. What the free people\u00a0did<\/strong>\u00a0do\u2014time and time again\u2014was fight like hell to keep their beloved way of life. Instead of rats desperate to be saved, they fled our boats and shot arrows back at us. Those two scenarios look remarkably different, don\u2019t they? How could we have gotten so confused?<\/p>\n The typical response is that: \u201cThe savages were just ignorant. They had no idea what they were missing. The poor beings were too dumb to recognize that they were running from a glorious lifestyle\u2014one that offers\u00a0money<\/em>!\u201d But this is completely incompatible with the simultaneous conviction that native life was miserable, terrifying, and desperate. Miserable, terrified, desperate people will gladly accept help and jump to safety and comfort\u2014or be too weak to resist help.<\/p>\n To give one\u2019s life in order to preserve a lifestyle speaks volumes to the merits of that lifestyle. Moreover, the very fact that such people possessed the strength, capacity, and determination to sustain stiff resistance says that they were less than desperate: they were healthy and well-fed. They\u00a0correctly<\/em>\u00a0assessed that\u00a0by far<\/strong>\u00a0the biggest dangers in their lives were\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0teeth or claws of\u00a0any<\/em>\u00a0color, but bullets, money, and property rights. BY FAR!<\/p>\n Also running counter to the \u201cignorance\u201d charge, those Europeans who meaningfully integrated into Native American culture tended to choose\u00a0staying<\/em>\u00a0in that culture, when still possible in the wake of surrounding genocide. Native Americans who had a taste of modernity tended to go back when they could, but this was seldom realistic given the obliteration of their cultural ways and communities. Full, adult exposure to two markedly-different lifestyles cannot be called ignorance.<\/p>\n What misery and desperation looks like: in this case due to a series of crop failures among agriculturalists (Famine of Deccan; 1630\u20131632; from\u00a0Wikimedia Commons<\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n Ironically, in 1651 when Hobbes offered his nasty nugget, many people around him were living lives far more poor, nasty, brutish, and short than those who never had the pleasure of modernity\u2019s acquaintance. Returning to \u201creality\u201d television, shows like\u00a0Alone<\/em>\u00a0betray their fundamental flaw right there in the title of the show! Banishment from a tribe (for being a narcissistic jerk, for instance) was essentially a death sentence. A severed finger is of no use without a hand. Similarly, the one season of the show I watched (on Great Slave Lake) imposed the additional constraint of strict boundaries that confined the solitary competitors to small patches of land. The hunted animals were not likewise artificially confined, nor are\/were the Indigenous folks of that region.<\/p>\n The image of a lone safe haven on an empty sea\u2014or a fort surrounded by howling dangerous chaos\u2014is just wrong. What looks like shark-infested waters to our ignorant eyes (correct: I\u2019m flipping who\u2019s ignorant, here) that any\u00a0sane<\/em>\u00a0rat would\u00a0surely<\/em>\u00a0want to escape turns out to be a sea of waving grass providing innumerable accommodations and food opportunities for the rats. Actually, the rat analogy is terribly off because it suggests those happily living outside modernity are vermin\u2014which I hope is obviously opposite my intent. It\u2019s more a projection of how modernity views destitute people deprived of modernity\u2019s graces.<\/p>\nWe Will Not Be Rats<\/h3>\n
Rationalization<\/h3>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nA More Balanced View<\/h3>\n
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