As readers are doubtlessly tired of hearing, I am teaching World History this year for the first time in over a decade.  So far it’s been hugely fun, as we have been studying the earliest humans and how people transitioned from the hunter-gathering lifestyle of the Paleolithic Age to the settled agricultural lifestyle of the Neolithic Age.  With agriculture came cities and, ultimately, civilization.

There’s been a subtle-but-noticeable trend of late that idolizes the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.  Wouldn’t it be great to spend a few hours gathering food each day, then lounging by the campfire with your kinsmen and relaxing?  Well, yes, if you’re in an area of great abundance, that wouldn’t be bad, but you’re also living with massive food insecurity all the time.

One telling graph in my students’ World History textbooks shows the population of the world prior to the rise of agriculture, and the population afterwards.  The transition is dramatic:  while the global population hovered around just a few hundred thousand people for millennia, the global population shot up to roughly ninety million people in the first 5000 years following the advent of agriculture.  The graph is a real hockey stick.

We definitely have made sacrifices for civilization, and I think Western Civilization has particularly grown quite sick.  Crowding a bunch of people into tightly-packed cities is probably not good for our mental health.  Some people need to live on forty acres in the middle of nowhere.  I suspect that most of us need considerably less space, but there’s something dehumanizing about cramming people into shoebox apartments stacked one atop the other.  We’re probably also not meant to destroy our minds and bodies on soul-sucking corporate work for a dozen hours a day, either.

But even with these drawbacks, civilization breeds life.  And the struggles inherent in maintaining a civilization create the greatest art and literature the world has ever known.

My argument for civilization will always boil down to this idea:  the civilization that produced Bach is a civilization worth preserving.

With that here is 24 August 2024’s “TBT^2: Rebuilding Civilization: The Hunter-Gatherer“:

It’s interesting to come back to the question of the value of civilization from time to time.  For what it’s worth, I think civilization is definitely worth maintaining, even with the inevitable social ills that come with it.  Better to live a life abundant in not just material well-being, but also with opportunities for self-improvement and finer pursuits, like literature and art, than to be scrounging around for every meal.

Of course, the few remaining peoples that live the hunter-gatherer life would disagree—if they were even capable of conceiving of a different lifestyle.  As difficult as it is for us in the “civilized” world to imagine the hunter-gatherer’s life, how much more difficult must it for be for the hunter-gatherer to conceive of our life?

I doubt either one would trade places with the other, which is what makes the situation so intriguing.  Both ways of life have merits and pitfalls.  Beyond that, that human beings could live such vastly different lives is a testament to the incredible diversity of our own species.  It’s fascinating to consider that we have, essentially, living ancestors in the world today, people who live largely as all humans did in the remotest past of our time on this planet.

All interesting, conceptual things to consider.  Which life would you choose?

With that, here is 18 August 2022’s “TBT: Rebuilding Civilization: The Hunter-Gatherer“:

Yours portly is back at school, which always gets me thinking about the future of our civilization.  Children are the future, allegedly, and the Bible pretty much says that if you’re a bad teacher who leads kids astray, you’re going to Hell—yikes!  In short, there’s a big responsibility to do the job well, and not to screw up the kids, since they’ll be running things in thirty or forty years or so.

Of course, our mode of living is quite different from the hunter-gatherers of yore—and those of today.  Their lives are substantially different from our own, to the point they’d likely survive whatever catastrophic event might destroy the rest of us here in the “civilized” world.

Still, for all the problems that come with civilization, I rather like it.  Air-conditioning and Hot Pockets are pretty nice luxuries, and I like knowing I can get a pizza in thirty minutes if I really want one.  The only hunting I have to do is hunting for a coupon; the only gathering is picking my figs (and my neighbor mostly does that).

Nevertheless, we’d all do well to take a page from the hunter-gatherer’s playbook and appreciate the simple things in life—and maybe work a few less hours each day.  Well, maybe.

With that, here is 25 August 2021’s “Rebuilding Civilization: The Hunter-Gatherer“:

Thanks to Audre Myers of Nebraska Energy Observer I have a new commenter on the blog, 39 Pontiac Dream, a proper English gent of the old school (or so I gather).  He very kindly shared some links with me from The Conservative Woman (or TWC as it is styled on its website), a site both Audre and Neo have recommended to me many times.  One of those links was to an intriguing piece by Stuart Wavell, “The next civilisation.”

Our culture has an obsession with apocalyptic scenarios:  massive plagues (a bit too relevant at the moment); zombie uprisings (always a popular one); massive meteor impacts (a bit retro—a favorite of the 1990s).  Perhaps it’s a sign of a moribund and decadent culture that we fantasize about most of human life ending and starting the whole thing over from scratch.

When we indulge in these celluloid and literary fantasies, I suspect the inherent assumption is similar to those who want to restore absolute monarchies:  we assume that we will survive the collapse, just as the would-be monarchists assume they will be king (or at least some important member of the nobility).

Chances are, most of us (yours portly included) would die quite quickly, either from the cataclysm itself, or from the bands of marauding raiders that would inevitably rise up in the wake of such a collapse.  If those didn’t get us, it would be starvation, disease, or our own inability to assess danger that would do us in.

Wavell makes a similar point, with an interesting caveat:  while those of us softened and doughy by the abundance of civilization would find ourselves in the pickle brine, the isolated, self-sufficient hunter-gatherers of the world—and they are still out there!—would be just fine, as they have been for millennia.

The piece gives a look into the life and mentality of the hunter-gatherer, a mentality that is quite different from that of us living in the gilded luxury of the modern world.  The split all began, Wavell writes, with the plough, and “it all went downhill” after that, according to the hunter-gatherers.

The life of the hunting-gathering society is tough, but filled with a respect for Creation—and a surprising amount of leisure, especially compared to our workaholic lives.  As Wavell writes:

No one is impartial enough to say which of the two lifestyles is best. Neither side would swap their lives for the other’s. But during the recent lockdowns, furloughed workers had a taste of hunter-gatherers’ leisurely existence. This consists of putting in on average four hours a day for hunting, gathering and cultivation, the rest of the time devoted to song and dance, eating, sex, stories and games.

During the glorious summer months I lived like a hunter-gatherer (minus the butchering of narwhal blubber for sustenance, as the Inuit do), putting in about four hours of work (and often less) each day on lessons, writing, or gardening, and otherwise relaxing (there wasn’t dancing or naughtiness, but plenty of song, stories, and games).  I can attest that it’s pretty amazing operating on such a time frame.  But living completely off the land at a subsistence level, hunting squirrels and rabbits to survive, would seem impossible to me—just as my indolent lifestyle would seem impossible to the hunter-gatherer.

Still, there is a certain quiet nobility to the hunter-gatherer that Wavell captures.  The stories and legends of various tribes across vastly different biomes contain common threads:  a respect for Nature, and a rejection of empty materialism:

A sobering tale for our times is recounted by Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As they tell it, the world once teemed with technically advanced humans who, after abusing nature, were virtually wiped out on three occasions by cataclysms. The Pygmies, the only survivors, thereupon renounced material riches and set about repopulating the planet.

Perhaps their time will come again.

Perhaps, indeed.