Biology and Community: An Homage to Paul Shepard
Sorry to start with a such long and challenging quotation, but it's gotta be done:
Among those relict tribal peoples who seem to live at peace with their world, who feel themselves to be guests rather than masters, the ontogeny of the individual has some characteristic features. I conjecture that their ontogeny is healthier than ours (for which I will be seen as sentimental and romantic) and that it may be considered a standard from which we have deviated. Their way of life is the one to which our ontogeny has been fitted by natural selection, fostering cooperation, leadership, a calendar of mental growth, and the study of a mysterious and beautiful world where the clues to the meaning of life were embodied in natural things, where everyday life was inextricable from spiritual significance and encounter, and where the members of the group celebrated individual stages and passages as ritual participation in the first creation....
The twenty-year human psychogenesis evolved because it was adaptive and beneficial to survival; its phases were specialized, integral to individual growth in the physical and cultural environments of the emergence of our species. And there is the rub: it is to those environments--small-group, leisured, foraging, immersed in natural surroundings--that we are adapted. For us, now, that world no longer exists. The culmination of individual ontogenesis, characterized by graciousness, tolerance, and forbearance, tradition-bound to accommodate a mostly nonhuman world, and given to long, indigent training of the young, may be inconsistent in some ways with the needs of "advanced" societies. In such societies--and I include ours--the persistence of certain infantile qualities might help the individual adapt better: fear of separation, fantasies of omnipotence, oral preoccupation, tremors of helplessness, and bodily incompetence and dependence. Biological evolution cannot meet the demands of these new societies. It works much too slowly to make adjustments in our species in these ten millennia since the archaic foraging cultures began to be destroyed by their hostile, aggressive, better-organized, civilized neighbors. Programmed for the slow development toward a special kind of sagacity, we live in a world where that humility and tender sense of human limitation is no longer rewarded. Yet we suffer for the want of that vanished world, a deep grief we learn to misconstrue.
Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness
We've talked quite a lot about "community" in previous posts. As I may have mentioned in another place, I'm not coming at the community angle because I'm a super-involved activist or neo-hippie commune-lover. I do not currently live in any kind of group, nor am I particularly involved with my neighborhood. And while I do support the idea of local business, I am not a fervent practitioner of farm-stand shopping and such. I do admire my many liberal friends who really are involved in community causes and other political projects. I've been much lazier and lukewarm over the years. So my interest in community is really coming from a different place. As the passage above highlights, the loss of group/tribal social forms is not just a tragedy for our political and environmental spheres, but for our very psyches as well. Our economic and ecological crises are intimately bound up with the profoundly unhuman living conditions we have created.
Paul Shepard (1925-1996) is a relatively unknown figure at the moment, but he was undoubtedly one the greatest big-picture ecological thinkers of our times (I think the greatest). His works are amazingly dense and frequently difficult to digest, but his blending of archeology, psycho-history, anthropology and philosophy are unparalleled, and multiple readings of his books will pay enormous dividends (see mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11072/Shepard/ for a bibliography). He deserves to be rediscovered by the intellectual community at large, especially as he put forth a grand meta-theory on ecological decline that we would ignore at our own peril.
At the core of Shepard's grand theory of history and prehistory is the idea that the natural and social environments in which human beings evolved are crucial for the healthy psychological development of individuals, what he calls "ontogeny." So when people become detached from natural surroundings and communal social forms, they not only lead less fulfilling lives, they are actually arrested in their psychological maturation, and become frozen in pre-adult ways of thinking and acting. Shepard was convinced that modern civilization, especially in the West, is composed of stunted adults trapped in adolescent and preadolescent stages of development, resulting in the highly inhuman and harmful relationships that people have with each other and the natural world around them.
But the good news from Shepard is that we do not have to "go back" to anything to recapture the appropriate models for healthy living. We're not going to suddenly transform ourselves into hunter-gatherers or tribal nomads, nor would we want to. We can't turn back the clock. Rather, the seeds for community living and respect for the natural world are actually inside of us, embedded in our genes. Human beings are, after all, social primates. Despite the seeming "naturalness" of our current nuclear family and town-city arrangements, these things are startlingly new. We and our ancestors have lived well over 99% of our tenure on this planet in tribal groups. Just as bees belong in hives and lions belong in prides, people belong in tribes (see Daniel Quinn's work here too, at www.ishmael.org). The recent drop of time that we call "history" has not undone what millions of years of evolution have laid down in us. Community living is who we are. It feels right in our bones, and the lack of it is what drives so much of our present-day angst.
Consider for a moment what are often called "peak experiences." I think this term emerged in other settings, maybe even in the pop-psychology, quasi-businessy world of highly effective habits, or whatever -- but I like the term. Think about the true peak experiences you have had in your life. Unless I'm totally off-base, I would bet that some of those experiences involve groups, maybe even cohabitating group situations. For myself, the two community archetypes were dorm living and summer camp. In each case, large groups of people lived together in close quarters, and the overall scene was high-activity and low-consumption. In dorm living and summer camp (where I was a counselor, not a camper), many individuals were working hard, putting in long hours and late nights. But in both settings, the power and vitality of the group made life so much richer and more interesting. Work and leisure were woven into each other. We had televisions, but they were rarely watched (and when they were, it was usually a large-group movie night). There were plenty of shopping opportunities at nearby malls, but no one ever went. The flow of life instead involved much more physical activity, social interaction, and low-tech entertainment like card games.
Of course, I realize that dorm life and summer camp are not the real world. But that is precisely the point. The real world that we have created for ourselves is so devoid of spontaneous group activity that we have become alienated from precisely those things that would satisfy our social primate psyches. No, we can't go back to dorm living or summer camp once we become adults, just like we can't go back to tribal hunter-gathering as an overall social strategy. But we can, and I think must, bring elements of dorm and camp into our everyday social forms. Peak experiences of community should not be something we leave behind for good once we enter the world of work, marriage and child-rearing. Indeed, we literally cannot leave it behind, for the desire to live in tribal situations is entrenched in our genetic endowment. Community is that nagging desire that dogs us all, and we try to fill it up with ideologies, religions, products, hobbies, and stimulants. We create countless quasi-communities to try and satisfy our urges (think online gaming, motorcycle gangs, Facebook, mega-churches, garden clubs), but their sheer multiplication alone is evidence of their basic inadequacy at filling the void. Nothing but intimate cohabitation can satisfy our ancient lust for the tribe.
Decentralize we must. Localize we will, whether we like it or not -- thanks to Peak Oil. But the absolute community imperative is the social form itself. We must take the enormous leap into our own genetic heritage and rediscover the tribal form, albeit in a new incarnation. The fracturing of humanity into isolated individuals and nuclear families has done irreparable damage to both the planet and to the individuals who live in the resulting social chaos. As Shepard would say, we are a society of stunted adolescents, and the modern consumer civilization is the enactment of juvenile fantasies of power and mastery. We are destroying our environment and ourselves, all because the basic living arrangements we grow up in are catastrophically unsatisfying. We are forever looking without, to God or technology or Progress. But we must instead look within. Group living is the only magic bullet that can address our external problems, because it is the only thing that will heal the internal dysfunction that created the external conditions in the first place. We have to jump-start that genetic kernel of full ontogeny that lies within all of our primate brains, because only healthy people can create a healthy society. In Shepard's beautiful phrase, we must "come home to the Pleistocene."
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