Science is continually adjusting the date of the first appearance of Homosapien sapiens on this planet. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, current consensus among paleontologists points to our emergence 315,000 years ago. A pretty long time back. First indications of agriculture (the start of the "Neolithic Revolution") appear 10,000 years ago in the the valleys around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (Mesopotamia), located in current day Iraq, Kuwait, the eastern parts of Syria, Southeastern Turkey, and regions along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders.
The storage of surplus grain that begins with the Neolithic Revolution makes possible extreme social hierarchy and leads to what is sometimes referred to as the "Neolithic Package": the emergence of individual human ownership of land (private property), diets greatly reduced in their nutritional value, empires and armies, bureaucracy, *extreme* divisions of labor (my great aunt spent a couple of decades in a factory in Boston sitting in a clear plastic booth, tying ribbons onto candy boxes, for example), individualized competition replacing the sharing of resources, the formation of mass society (typically, hunter gatherer existence occurs in band society of not more than 150 people living together), the monetization of practically everything and a tragic distancing or estrangement from the web of life of the planet and the reciprocity that defines it.
All of these deleterious changes are accelerated with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. We now live within a global industrial consumer economy that can make the following elements, which are essential to our well-being, difficult to achieve: community or social connectedness; varied physical activity; a healthy diet with sufficient omega-3 consumption; light exposure -- hunter gatherers spend the day outside, where the light is 10 to 20 times stronger than indoor light on a sunny day; sufficient sleep; and anti-ruminative behavior – brooding, a self-recriminating cycle of thoughts can become deadly – pre-civilization modes of living involve many activities that interrupt such thinking. (This list of six elements found in hunter gatherer culture that are key to staving off depression are identified by Dr. Steven Illardi of the University of Kansas).
In addition to the chronic absence of some or most of these daily elements that evolution has made essential to our well-being, we find ourselves in 2020 bewildered by an ever-increasing list of circumstances never before faced by humans. I’m going to list a few of them below, with the goal of suggesting we all cut ourselves some slack when we feel shitty… because we were not designed to deal with this kind of nonsense and nobody reading this created these circumstances…
- Landscapes covered with asphalt and denuded of trees and other friendly species
- The novel idea that you have to pay money to occupy the space where you sleep, prepare your food and hang out
- The lack of knowledge of how to procure food for free and/or the unavailability of such food
- The consequent fact that we have to rent or sell our labor in order to obtain paper coupons that may purchase us the ability to occupy the space where we live and to buy the food that we need for sustenance
- The absence of frequent dance – communal, creative, often ecstatic and with deep roots
- The absence of direct democratic agency over what happens to us and our immediate world; electing representatives to do this, under current circumstances, has become an oxymoron: an unhumorous farce
- As Forrest Palmer has pointed out on recent occasions, the knowledge that the very things we are doing in order to guarantee our individual survival are contributing to the waning of life on this planet; this is extremely hard to “deal with,” nor should it be easy to deal with
- The fact that our perambulations are dominated by an awareness that the 3000-pound steel leviathans known as cars can swerve and eliminate us at any moment
- The absence of the perception of the non-human world as sacred, vibrating with mystery and, oftentimes, love for us
Well, this list could extend quite a ways. It’s time to take a load off and start my vacation.
The idea is that by naming these, we can begin to try to fill in the gaps and return to something less overwhelmingly difficult. Changes can be made now, under current circumstances, and more changes can be realized if we pursue greater social transformation.
(If you think of any other *unprecedented* misery-inducing things that we are all facing currently, feel free to leave them in the comments. I think it is an important thing to do on the road to reclaiming our humanity).
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