In my last entry I made the case that after millennia of
slow progress in human productivity, in the last 250 years there has been an
exponential growth of that productivity. As a direct result of that growth in
productivity mankind has finally made the commitment to universal human
equality. Never in the course of human history has mankind been both more free from
want as well as fear.
That’s my story of human history and I’m sticking to it; but
what about man before history. After all mankind has been around for at least
200,000 years (and according to recent findings perhaps 350,000 years[1])
and history has been here for less than 10,000. Three authors make the point
that life before history was a lot different. I will begin with a quote from
one of them.
"[I] attribute
the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that
society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those
under which the human race evolved ..." --The Unabomber
And so also begins Robert Wright’s essay, The Evolution of
Despair that appeared in Time Magazine in August 1995. In that essay Wright a
writer whose area of interest is evolutionary psychology makes the case that
for most of human pre-history, humans lived as hunter/gatherers and he
emphasizes the social structure was far more communal than society is today or
has been for a long time. Looking at the
hunter/gatherer societies that still exist today he notes that people live “in
close contact with roughly the same array of several dozen friends and
relatives for decades.”[2]
All this is healthy for everyone involved.
Depression, child abuse, and suicide rates are all vanishingly small or non-existent
in these societies.
In 2016 Sebastian Junger in his book Tribe revisits this
problem of how we live now and how mankind lived for most of its
existence. He notes the salutary effect
of the communal nature of these societies.
An additional point of emphasis he makes is that these societies were
much more egalitarian. People, men and women, shared responsibility and
authority in almost equal measure. There was little disparity in wealth and
property was very much communally shared. However, with the advent of first
agriculture then industry the structure of society changed to one that is
hierarchical and patriarchal where one’s rank in society was a measure of his
how much property he owned.
How does all this compare to modern society? I think if we
are honest with ourselves we come to the same conclusions for the most part
that Wright does. He notes that modern society is rife with social isolation. At
the time of his writing he states that the 25% of Americans were living alone compared
with 8% in 1940 and we are often strangers to our neighbors. Our family relations
spread out across the country and even the world so just from shear distance
family bonds are stretched to the breaking point.
Wright goes on to note that technology plays a significant
role in fostering this social isolation.
He makes the case that the automobile allowed for the development of
suburbia where every man’s home is truly his solitary citadel. The town square,
where we transacted our social, civic, and commercial interests, was replaced
first by the shopping mall and now by Amazon and Facebook.
He quaintly notes the isolating effect of television and the
VCR where he notes that the average American was spending 28 hours a week in
front of the TV. How much more screen time do we have today with TIVO,
computers and smart phones.
As an evolutionary psychologist Wright makes the case that
we are not wired to live this way and it is taking a toll in the rates of child
abuse, depression, suicide and the dysphoric zeitgeist we all perhaps feel at
least a little.
“In America I saw the
freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the
world affords, it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow,
and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures.”[3]
One might think that democracy would have a mitigating effect
on this dysphoria but de Tocqueville felt quite the opposite was true. In his
chapter Why The Americans Are So Restless In The Midst Of Their Prosperity he notes
even or especially at this relatively egalitarian stage of American history
that there are three concurrent reasons for this restlessness.
As each individual is responsible for their own destiny they
have an insatiable desire to maximize that destiny. At the time de Tocqueville
wrote this it meant acquiring property which since the dawn of history was the
measure of a man.
Since everyone is allowed to compete we are all vying with
virtually everyone (or to be honest, at the time, white males) so it is with
great difficulty to break away from the pack.
If everyone is relatively equal, when one does compare
oneself to one’s neighbor, one tends to notice those who are slightly ahead so
one gets the impression they are always a little bit behind.
To all this I would add my own theory as to what fuels our
discontent in the midst of so much abundance. Throughout my early entries I kept
reapplying de Tocqueville’s term salutary
servitude that he used for dogma.
We have the salutary servitude of the markets that allow us
to get paid sometimes handsomely for the most highly specialized service and
then have the ability to purchase virtually any good or service that is our
pleasure. However, how frustrating is it when the car wont start, or the
computer freezes, or the freezer doesn’t, and they are just too complicated for
us to manage so we have to pay someone else to fix or replace them.
We have the salutary servitude of government that provides a
regulatory framework to, as much as possible, ensure smooth transactions
throughout the marketplace. However, how frustrating is it when every time you
turn around you need a permit for this or a zoning easement for that. And don’t
get me started when some bureaucrat in Washington (or even Providence) thinks
they know how to practice medicine (or law or education or architecting) better
than I (we) do.
Finally, we have the salutary servitude of representative
democracy where we select public servants to represent our interests
thoroughly, thoughtfully, and selflessly. Let’s just say human nature being
what it is this could be a lot more perfect than it is. As a result we feel the
servitude more than we feel the salutary.
Each of these is extremely salutary in that they promote our
health, safety, material wellbeing, and as I pointed out in my last posting
underwrite our moral principles. But it is still servitude. We lose our sense of agency. We are in fact
wholly dependent on others for much of our existence. Perhaps the “Don’t Tread
on Me” flags that have sprouted up across this country are an unconscious
rebellion against precisely this “benevolent” servitude.
In addition we lose our sense of urgency. If the refrigerator goes down and the
contents spoil we just go out and replace both the refrigerator and its
contents. There is no do or starve. Mankind has worked hard to get away from
that brink but something is lost for having done that.
As Wright points out, no one is buying a one-way ticket back
to pre-history. There are some
legitimate reasons for that which I will get into in my next entry. Nonetheless, I think it is worth pondering
what is lost with what is gained and considering how individually and, perhaps
more importantly, communally we might recapture at least some of what we have
lost.
