TRIBAL LIFE TRUMPED THE LIFE OF THE
SETTLERS IN MANY IMPORTANT WAYS
The question for Western society isn't so much why tribal life might be so appealing ----- it seems obvious on the face of it -----but whyWestern society is so unappealing. On a material level it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it's possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren't a good trade for freedom. One study in the 1960s found that nomadic !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert needed to work as little as twelve hours a week in order to survive ---roughly one-quarter of the hours of the average urban executive at the time. " The 'camp' is an open aggregate of cooperating persons which changes in size and composition from day to day," anthropologist Richard Lee noted with clear admiration in 1968. "The members move out to hunt and gather, and return in the evening to pool the collected foods in such a way that every person present receives an equitable share. . . Because of the strong emphasis on sharing, and the frequency of movement, surplus accumulation . . . is kept to a minimum."
The Kalahari is one of the harshest environments in the world, and the !Kung were able to continue living in a Stone-Age existence well into the 1970s precisely because no one else wanted to live there. The !Kung were so well adapted to their environment
that during times of draught, nearby farmers and cattle herders abandoned their livelihoods to join them in the bush because foraging and hunting were a more reliable source of food. The relatively relaxed pace of !Kung life----even during times of adversity --- challenged long-standing ideas that modern society created a surplus of leisure time. It created exactly the opposite : a desperate cycle of work, financial obligation, and more work. The !Kung had far fewer belongings than Westerners, but their lives were under much greater personal control.
Among anthropologists, the !Kung are thought to present a fairly accurate picture of how our hominid ancestors lived for more than a million years before the advent of agriculture. Genetic adaptations take around 25,000 years to appear i humans, so the enormous changes that came with agriculture in the last 10,000 years have hardly begun to affect our gene pool. Early humans would most likely have lived in nomadic bands of around fifty people, much like the !Kung. They would have experienced high levels of accidental injuries and deaths. They would have countered domineering behavior by senior males by forming coalitions within the group. They would have occasionally endured episodes of hunger, violence, and hardship. They would have practiced extremely close and involved childcare. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others. THEY WOULD HAVE ALMOST NEVER BEEN ALONE.
First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day --- or an entire life --- mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.
The evidence that this is hard on us is overwhelming. Although happiness is notoriously subjective and difficult to measure, mental illness is not. Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society --- despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology ---is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth seems to foster it.
Suicide is difficult to study among unacculturated tribal peoples because the early explorers who first encountered them rarely conducted rigorous ethnographic research. That said, there is remarkably little evidence of depression--based suicide in tribal societies. Among the American Indians, for example, suicide was understood to apply in very narrow circumstances : in old age to avoid burdening the tribe, in the ritual paroxysms of grief following the death of a spouse, in a hopeless but heroic battle with an enemy, and in an attempt to avoid the agony of torture. Among tribes that were ravaged by smallpox, it was also understood that a person whose face had been hideously disfigured by lesions might kill themselves. According to The Ethics of Suicide : Historical Sources, early chroniclers of the American Indians couldn't find any other examples of suicide that were rooted in psychological causes. Early sources report that the Bella Coola, the Ojibwa, the Montagnais, the Arapaho, the Plateau Yuma, the Southern Paiute, and the Zuni, among many others, experienced no suicide at all.
This stands in stark contrast to many modern societies, where the suicide rate is as high as 25 cases per 100,000 people. [In the United States, white middle-aged men currently have the highest rate at nearly 30 suicides per 100,000.] According to a global survey by the World Health Organization, people in wealthy countries suffer depression at as much as eight times the rate they do in poor countries, and people in countries with large income disparities---like the United States --- run a much higher lifelong risk of developing severe mood disorders. A 2006 study comparing depression rates in Nigeria to depression rates in North America found that across the board, women in rural areas were less likely to get depressed than their urbam counterparts. And urban North American women----the most affluent demographic of the study ---were the MOST likely to experience depression.
The mechanism seems simple : poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses --- and certainly isn't the American ideal --- but it's much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence. A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from the community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Financial independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide. This might be a fair trade for a generally wealthier society --- but a trade it is.
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