A requiem for a lost civilisation?

 

A requiem for a happier civilization?

Anthropologist James Suzman has been studying the lives of the Ju/‘hoansi people of the north-western Kalahari for 30 years. What he discovered is a more contented time in the past where people are happier, with less wants, and more time to enjoy the simple things in life. 

From the Ju/‘hoansi people’s point of view, James wrote that “very little about the relentlessly expanding global economy makes sense”. And they once asked James these questions: -

“Why did government officials who sat in air-conditioned offices drinking coffee and chatting all day long get paid so much than the young men they sent out to dig ditches?”

Or, “Why, when people were paid for their work, did they still go back the following day rather than enjoy the fruits of their labour?”

“And why did people work so hard to acquire more wealth than they could ever possibly need or enjoy?”

I guess ignorance here is bliss. With more understanding, the tribal folks will come to see that our world works very differently from theirs. While the Ju/‘hoansi “spent only fifteen hours a week securing their nutritional requirements and only a further fifteen to twenty hours per week on domestic activities that could be loosely described as “work”, we in the modern world work more than 40 hours a week, and some of us work full day on the weekends. 

The working hours are however not the only difference. The Ju/‘hoansi is a society where “any individual attempts to either accumulate or monopolise resources or power were met with derision and ridicule.” 

Pride is frowned upon. Any member of the same tribal community who boasts about his catch for the day would be shamed, mocked and even exiled. And by some comic extension, people like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos of our world would not last very long in such community. 

One member of another tribe, namely, !kung, in the Kalahari said: “We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”

Everyone in the tribe knew the communal code of permissible behaviour. Of course, there will be some rogue members or free-riders/loaders, but when they become unbearable, the community will exact their own collective justice on them. 

In the book, Humankind, by Rutger Bergman, he wrote how such justice was meted out to those grew increasingly unmanageable: -

“The group was fed up: “They all fired on him with poison arrows till he looked like a porcupine. Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached his body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death.””

Well, maybe such tribal retributive justice doesn’t accord with our modern sense that much, but the point to all this is that there are a lot of things we can learn from these tribal community about living a life that is underscored by contentment and driven by compassion and humility. This learning journey starts with dispelling some misconceptions about them and their society. Here are some. 

We often see them in some documentaries or movies as “nasty, brutish and (having) short” lives. But according to James, “the Ju/‘hoansi were revealed to be well-fed, content and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies, and by rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week had plenty of time and energy to devote to leisure.” 

In other words, they generally lead happier lives, enjoying prosperity that is not dictated by endless wants, and as one author puts it, theirs is a kind of “Zen road to affluence” through which they were able to enjoy “unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living” (per Marshall Shahlins). 

And that’s not all. Even the way they organise their society shows how natural it is for them to share the fruit of their labour. 

James wrote: “It revealed, for instance, the extent to which their economy sustained societies that were at once highly individualistic and fiercely egalitarian, and in which the principal redistributive mechanism was “demand sharing” - a system that gave everyone the absolute right to effectively tax anyone else of any surpluses they had.””

Somehow, our ancestors then valued equality more, are much less competitive, are more close-knit as a community, and largely lived without that endless strife unlike now where we are desperate to prove ourselves, and in doing so, risks leaving a trail of broken or neglected relationships behind.

Yes, one may argue that comparing our time with theirs is not comparing apple with apple, because after the industrial revolution, after the creation of the state and its sovereignty, where boundaries are clearly drawn out, and with the advent of technology and globalisation, our world and its population have all expanded/risen dramatically. There is just too much to manage, too many diverse interests to satisfy or pacify. As such, things are much more complex and complicated than the things a tribal community nestled in one corner of the globe has to deal with. 

That may be true, yet, we make the laws and the rules, we pass legislations, we carry out policies, we decide for ourselves what is best for our children and our children’s children, and we create the community best suited for our present and future. Ultimately, the same hands that created the nuclear bomb liable to destroy the world with a push of a button are the same hands that created the civilisation we are now enjoying and thriving in today. 

The reality is, we have been striving for and creating utopias for centuries as things get more and more complex, yet there is one effort or discipline towards a certain utopian world that we have not given its due attention and address, and that is our endless appetites for material possessions. And I believe if we address that, the world, regardless of its size and complexity, will be a whole lot more manageable, slower, smaller and surely saner. 

Let me end with this thought from James’ book, “Affluence without abundance”.

“Imagine a society in which the work week seldom exceed 19 hours, material wealth is considered a burden, and no one is much richer than anyone else. Unemployment is high there, sometimes reaching 40% - not because the society is shiftless, but because it believes that only the able-bodied should work, and then no more than necessary. Food is abundant and easily gathered. The people are comfortable, peaceable, happy and secure.”

Alas, most times, what we truly need is some imagination, and the courage to carry out the conviction of the heart empowered by that imagination.