Wrongly rooted assumptions (part two)

Nothing that was important to us was important to him.”

Quite an epitaph! Does it mark the passing of some God-crazed saint or single-minded revolutionary? Or serial killer or simple kook? None of these.

The phrase was applied early this month to someone who, until recently in cosmic time, would have been unremarkable. His name was N!xau. He died gathering wood. And he lived the way we all did until about 10,000 years ago.

If 10,000 years seems a long time, try this chronology for size: We and chimpanzees – our closest cousins – last shared a common ancestor at least 5 million years ago. Since then we’ve been on our own evolutionary tangent: changing all the while but uniquely en route to modern homo sapiens. Now do the math. Against that background, the past 10 millennia – before which we all lived like N!xau – represent a mere one five-hundredth of total human experience in terms of time.

Herein lies a tale … and a challenge to current neo-conservative belief in natural human belligerence. The philosophical stakes are considerable. If we’re inherently warlike, as neocons tend to think, then war becomes unavoidable and sometimes even desirable. If not, there’s hope.

N!xau was a Bushman, more correctly one of the San people who live nowadays in the least habitable corners of southern Africa. Until recent decades, they were hunter-gatherers. They collected food rather than produced it. They maintained an economy based on subsistence rather surplus. And so, until 10,000 years ago, did we all.

Hence the importance of N!xau and his people and the pitifully few other food collecting groups still on the planet. They, more than anyone else, can show us what we were like for virtually all of our five million human years. If that’s not “human nature,” what is?

Last Saturday’s column explored the dry evidence of stones and bones. These suggest that our remote ancestors were scarcely the “killer apes” promoted by poor scholarship and B-movie Hollywood. Instead we made it by means of cooperation. Only by living together in closely interdependent groups could our species – physically slow, weak and unarmed – survive and ultimately thrive.

Do folks like N!xau – real, live, fully human beings – confirm or confound this pattern? What of human nature can we see in their lives? Basically there are two views.

The traditional view, espoused by neocons of the Cheney-Rumsfeld ilk, was definitively phrased four centuries ago by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes who held forth “On the Natural Condition of Mankind as concerning their Felicity and Misery.” From the comfort of his utterly speculative armchair, Hobbes opted for Misery and produced several phrases that famously resonate to this day. Life “in the state of nature” is as a war of all against all “where every man is enemy to every man.” Such existence possesses “no society; and, which is worst of all, continued fear and danger of violent death.” Then the clincher sound bite: “Primitive” life, Hobbes wrote, must necessarily be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hobbes, of course, had never met anyone like N!xau nor lived himself in “the Natural Condition.” But finely phrased smears, once put abroad, can acquire a momentum of their own. “Nasty, brutish, and short” was elaborated by most explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators. Food collectors were assumed to exist on the brink on starvation, to exhaust themselves in “the mere struggle for existence” (1900 Encyclopedia Britannica), and thus to war on one another over eternally scare resources.

Enter anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and his 1971 “Stone Age Economics.” In terms of “human nature” – a term that Sahlins, as a strict social scientist, avoids – I don’t know of a more intriguing, profoundly subversive, and ultimately hopeful book. His thesis: That our hunter-gatherer forebearers lived in an “original affluent society.”

Sahlins begins by noting occasional exceptions in early Western assessments of N!xau-style food collector economies. A Catholic priest in 17th century French Canada said of the hunter-gatherer Micmac Indians: “Never had Solomon his mansion better regulated and provided with food.” Sir George Grey, traveling in harsh areas of western Australia during the 1830s, criticized as “almost ludicrous” the reports that Aboriginals “have small means of subsistence, or are at times are greatly pressed for want of food.” On the contrary, Grey observed, “In all ordinary seasons they can obtain in two or three hours a sufficient supply of food for the day, but their usual custom is to roam indolently from spot to spot, lazily collecting it as they wander along.”

Sahlins then offers three mid-20th century studies – two with Australian Aboriginals, one with N!xau’s people in southern Africa – conducted before the hunter-gatherer life fell prey to outside forces. Here we’re talking not anecdotal impressions but thorough data. And sure enough: The food collector work week averages not 40 hours but 14!

So material survival, far from being a round-the-clock struggle and preoccupation, could normally be accomplished in quite easygoing fashion. How long since your bills got paid on 14 hours a week?

A second radical finding has to do with notions of economic surplus. Getting more of it, Sahlins reveals, has not always been the name of our game. Certainly not for food collectors which, remember, we all were for more than 99 percent of human time. Typically they’re nomadic, moving as food sources are gradually consumed. As they move, without pack animals and wheeled conveyance, hunter-gatherers take with them only what little they can carry by hand and basket. As Sahlins puts it, “Utility falls quickly at the margin of portability.” A given thing, no matter how immediately alluring, is really of any lasting value only if it can be readily transported. Light makes right. Less is more.

Maybe you can accumulate surplus – nuts or fruit or even meat – but why bother? You can’t take it with you – not to heaven nor even to the next water hole. Furthermore, there’ll be more plants and animals available for collection en route. So rather than being the universal goal of food collectors, surplus is regarded by them as unnecessary, cumbersome, and thus dysfunctional.

And if light makes right, why fight over heavy surplus? Why go to war?

If Sahlins is correct, our true legacy is more cooperative than competitive, more peaceful than warlike. War arrived with the onset of surplus economics, occasioned by the shift to food production a mere 10,000 years ago. Suddenly surplus appeared and immediately went up for grabs. That dynamic – a.k.a. greed leading to war – quickly became habitual.

So quickly and deeply habitual, in fact, that it seemed natural by the time of ancient Greece. Plato: “Every city is in a natural state of war with every other.” And Heraclitis (as cited by Cheney’s war guru, Victor Hanson Davis): War is “the father of us all.” War had become, in other words, what we call “second nature.”

But if Sahlins is correct – here’s the hopeful part – it’s not our first nature. We’re not born that way. Culture may have changed, but not our genes. Our first nature, forged over countless trial-and-error generations, is more accurately represented by N!xau.

Here’s a tip on how to spend some of your surplus: Get hold of a 1980 movie called “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” N!xau’s the improbable star. We moderns appear in several guises, among them a Coke bottle that falls from the sky and introduces the noxious element of scarce, surplus resources. Billed as a comedy and full of slapstick gesture, the film has tragic overtones. It’s our story.

But – if Sahlins and N!xau are correct – it doesn’t have to be.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is available from Waveland Press.