[lit-ideas] Re: Theatre of the Absurd -- a work in progress
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 09:16:53 -0400
Very interesting account, John. I definitely agree, and I was serious that
agriculture is what changed humanity profoundly and for the worse. It
eliminated variety by narrowing food choices to only what was grown or
raised, and it was unreliable. Before agriculture, paleolithic peoples
were actually taller than we are on average, and from their fossils, better
nourished that we are even today. With the advent of agriculture, humans
became smaller and deficiency diseases set in, exacerbated further in the
19th and 20th centuries by refining of grains. There?s a lot of talk
nowadays about whole grains as being healthful, yet we did not evolve
eating whole grains. Wheat berries, but not grains as such. Certainly
bread would have been unheard of, although cooking I believe was done.
I would imagine that religion would have had to evolve around the same time
as agriculture. I read that paleolithic (or very ancient at any rate)
grave sites have been discovered, therefore ancient people did bury their
dead, but I've never heard of any evidence that they had religion.
Paleolithic people also didn't artificially deem men more important than
women. Both were equally necessary for group survival.
Overall, from what you've written and whatever I know, I am convinced that
the primitive brain, what I'm calling the crocodile brain that?s so active
today, is a fallback position when humans are improperly nurtured (not
nourished, nurtured). There?s evidence that children as young as 18 months
are altruistic, know when someone needs help and when they don't, and they
enjoy helping. This is drummed out of kids over the years. One might
argue that, Rousseau notwithstanding, civilization is ultimately an
unnatural condition. Unfortunately, the sheer numbers of humans due to
their otherwise amazing adaptability makes civilization a necessary and
ironically a self-defeating evil.
I still think that the effects of civilization can be greatly, vastly
mitigated if incipient humans were nurtured properly, something
institutions of civilization will never allow.
Thanks, John, for your comments. They were so very interesting.
> [Original Message]
> From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 4/27/2006 11:32:00 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Theatre of the Absurd -- a work in progress
>
> On 4/28/06, Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > We are of a mind. The crocodile brain rules. Still, I think humans, if
> > not perfectible, can be vastly improved so as to be unrecognizable.
All we
> > have to do is retool the factories where they're made. So simple, yet
so
> > impossible. I read somewhere that Paleolithic man was actually quite
happy
> > (the ones who survived the saber tooths); at the very least, much better
> > nourished than humans before McDonald's. Everything changed when
hunting
> > and gathering was replaced by agriculture. Once humans settled into one
> > spot, they were much more subject to drought, famine, floods and
therefore
> > scarcity. I saw the movie Ice Age, so I know this is true. I also own
a
> > saber toot tiger, a small one, you saw her picture ..
> >
>
> The only problem is, of course, that Mike's premise, the caveman
> coming home to a cave with no one there but his wife and kids, is a
> fable, a fiction, and very likely utterly false to paleolithic or
> mesolithic realities. Far from being the (phallic?) club-wielding
> wildman individualists of the fantasy on which Mike draws, actual
> hunters and gatherers turn out on the whole to be highly cooperative
> and sharing sorts of people. Here, for example, is anthropologist
> Sidney Mintz summarizing one account.
>
> "In an early article, Lorna Marshall provided a glowing description of
> how sharing food serves to reduce individual and intragroup tension.
> the !Kung Bushmen, she reported, always consumed fresh meat
> immediately after it became available: 'The fear of hunger is
> mitigrated; the person one shares with will share in turn when he gets
> meat, and people are sustained by web of mutual obligation. If there
> is hunger, it is commonly shared. There are no distinct haves and
> have-nots. One is not alone.... The idea of eating alone and not
> sharing is shocking to the !Kung. It makes them shriek with uneasy
> laughter. Lions could do that, they say, not men.' Marshall described
> in detail how four hunters who killed an eland, following ten days of
> hunting and three days of tracking the wounded animal, bestowed the
> meat upon others--other hunters, the wife of the arrow's owner, etc.
> She recorded sixty-three gifts of raw meat and thought there had been
> many more. Small quantitites of meat were rapidly diffiused, passing
> on in every-diminishing portions. This swift movement was not random
> or quixotic; it actuallyilluminated the interior organization of the
> !Kung band, the distribution of kinfolk, divisions of sex, age, and
> role. Each occasion to eat meat was hence a natural occasion to
> discover who one was, how one was related to others, and what that
> entailed."
>
> That several hunters were involved, that the hunt stretched over a
> number of days, and that custom required the sharing of the kill in a
> way that ensures that everyone gets something are typical features of
> ethnograpic descriptions of actual hunter-gathers. The caveman fantasy
> is, on closer examination, an artifact of modernity, the separation of
> family and workplace, and the lonely figure of the man who goes off to
> "bring home the bacon" and normally, if successful, brings home only
> the money with which his wife purchases the meat produced by anonymous
> others at the end of industrial food chains.
>
> Just thought you ought to know.
>
>
> John McCreery
> The Word Works, Ltd.
> 55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
> Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN
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