AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA ----Episode 4

HUMANS HAVE DRAGGED A BODY WITH A LONG HOMINID HISTORY, REARED IN A TRIBAL ENVIRONMENT,  INTO AN OVERFED, MALNOURISHED, SEDENTARY, SUNLIGHT-DEFICIENT, SLEEP-DEPRIVED, COMPETITIVE, INEQUITABLE, AND SOCIALLY-ISOLATING ENVIRONMENT WITH DIRE CONSEQUENCES 

   The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in the hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates : a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates----including humans. 
   In America in the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves.  In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room --- a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered "well-educated." Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals ; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. 
   The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them "self-soothing," but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates ---we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees ---- and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala : "Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night. " Another study notes about Bali : "Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities." 

                         LESS COMMUNITY --- MORE AUTHORITY 

   As modern society reduced the role of community, it simultaneously elevated the role of authority. The two are uneasy companions, and as one goes up, the other tends to go down. In 2007, anthropologist Christopher Boehm published an analysis of 154 foraging societies that were deemed to be representative of our ancestral past, and one of their most common traits was the absence of major wealth disparities between individuals. Another was the absence of arbitrary authority. "Social life is politically egalitarian in that there is always a low tolerance by a group's mature males for one of their number dominating, bossing, or denigrating the others," Boehm observed. "The human conscience evolved in the Middle to Late Pleistocene as a result of . . . the hunting of large game. This required . . . cooperative band-level sharing of meat." 
   Because tribal foragers are highly mobile and can easily shift between different communities, authority is almost impossible to impose on the unwilling. And even without that option, males who try to take control of the group ----or of the food supply----are often countered by coalitions of other males. This is clearly an ancient and adaptive behavior that tends to keep groups together and equitably cared for. In his survey of ancestral-type societies, Boehm found that ---in addition to murder and theft --- one of the most commonly punished infractions was "failure to share." Freeloading on the hard work of others and bullying were also high up on the list. Punishments included public ridicule, shunning, and, finally, "assassination of the culprit by the entire group."