The Hunter-Gatherer Solution

We think of the dawn of man as having come somewhere around the end of the last Ice Age, between fifteen and ten thousand years ago. That seems to be the time when people really started paying attention, you know, paying attention to the seasons and the stars, counting the days, figuring out that they could influence the characteristics of the plants and animals that they liked to eat. We had long since become the people that we are today; for tens of thousands of years already by then we had looked and thought much as we do today. We were finally getting good at it, that’s all.

How old are the oldest cave paintings? What are they saying now? Thirty thousand years? Maybe they’ve pushed it back, but let’s just say thirty for the sake of this post. The cave paintings prove that we were thinking symbolically. We would have had dogs by then, dogs that could be trusted around children, I mean. Domesticated. We were pretty domesticated ourselves. Tools were getting better. Fire had been mastered. If we were painting on cave walls, I would say that language must also have been developing into something more useful. My hunch is that language had remained very basic for a very long time, because life was straightforward (if not simple) and people didn’t live very long. The use of language requires the same kind of symbolic abilities as the cave paintings, so I am sure that we had bigger vocabularies by that time and were speaking together more effectively.

So, thirty thousand years ago, small bands of hunter-gatherers following crops and game around a tract of land that they were familiar with, communicating better with each other, passing along more information, becoming more successful, and accelerating into what by the year 10,000 BCE was a rush to modernity. What were people like thirty thousand years ago?

I would guess that empathy and cooperation were well established already in human society. I say that with confidence because for a small band of hunter-gatherers, every baby is monumentally important. Infant mortality must have been staggering, so living babies were a matter of survival. Constant attrition in members of the band of all ages would have made every person important. And as for the elderly members of the band, you know, the thirty-seven-year olds, they were slowing down by then but they were precious themselves. Old Og had fallen out of a tree and couldn’t really run anymore, and Uma had had that sloth step on his leg that time, and it didn’t heal right. They had valuable experience, however, and there were plenty of things that they could still do.

In such a small, delicate group, people must have learned to get along, and learned to value every member of the band. The loss of any one of them impoverished them and reduced their security. They must have learned to look out for each other and help each other as much as possible. Or else they would have died off.

I’m also convinced that every band had a group of hunters who were specialists in that trade, and it is likely that the hunter who was a bit smarter and faster and stronger than the others was some kind of chieftain, if only for ceremonial purposes. I believe that the caveman movies and stories that we are familiar with are comically wrong in portraying a constant round of envy and contention, often culminating in violence. A scene like that would be counterproductive, although, being humans, problems must have arisen.

One thing is for sure, any kind of leadership group or individual would have needed to put the well-being and security of the entire band first, or else. If there were a chieftain who was just plain mean, and left old people to die because they couldn’t keep up, someone who was cruel in any way and allowed to band to be reduced because of his character flaws, well the band would just get rid of him, wouldn’t they? Why wait until the fool gets us all killed? Who wants to starve to death because this mean-spirited numbskull wants to go kill a mountain goat and refuses to take us to the place where we all know there will be plenty of fish in about a month? I’m sure that our distant but doubtlessly recognizable ancestors would simply do away with such a chieftain.

Lest we forget, this guy is fast and strong, so my guess is that the second-best hunter would get the job of smacking old chiefie in the head with a huge rock while he was sleeping. The new chieftain would then get a talking to from the circle of elder females, and the band would have fish again that year and make it through another winter.  

They couldn’t afford to fool around back then. Every single thing that happened every day was a matter of life and death. We’ve got it a lot easier now, and to prove it we do nothing but fool around. Right now we have a whole ruling class that does not give one good Goddamn about the security and prosperity of our band, our tribe, our nation-state, our people. They do nothing to help us, they allow the least of us to die from neglect, and they care only about lining their own pockets and hoarding wealth. And it’s all a big yawn to most people, as though there were nothing to be done about it.

Our primitive ancestors would be ashamed of us. They would never have stood still for such a failure to care about the future of the group. We have lost some of our essential humanity in the interim. I only hope that we can regain our will to live before it is too late.

An Entirely Remarkable Story About Thailand

Interesting things happen to me every day in Bangkok, and remarkable things happen on a regular basis. I don’t write-up every separate occurrence. This story, however, is awesome for several reasons. In two completely different ways it illustrates the deep, wide river of goodness that runs through Thai culture.

A friend and I took a cab ride yesterday from my campus to the Mall Bangkapi. This is a ride that I have taken hundreds of times by now. It takes about twelve minutes. Generally I love to talk to the drivers, and I learn a lot from those conversations. This fellow yesterday seemed like the quiet type, though, and I usually leave them to their meditations if that appears to be their style. I spoke a bit with my friend, the usual combination of mostly English with a little Thai, and we let the fellow just drive.

Within a couple of minutes I noticed that in the door panels in the back  there were bottles of drinking water, two on the right and two on the left. They were new, not refills. They still had the plastic around the tops. This was very unusual. I casually looked up front and the driver had a couple of refill bottles up there for himself. It was obvious that the new bottles were there for customers’ use and convenience, if needed. I didn’t think that I had ever seen this before, and it made an impression on me. It also reminded me of a similar custom that I had observed in the north of Thailand.

I spent three years living in the province of Phrae, way up in the mountains. It was two years as a Peace Corps volunteer, and one year on my own teaching high school English. I noticed early on that many of the houses had water bottles outside of the gates, which seemed a curious thing. When I asked a Thai friend about it, she explained that it was a northern custom to leave water outside for travelers. Many people walk long distances, and Thailand is a hot country. If one of the walkers gets thirsty, the water is there for them, and they can just help themselves. It seemed to me that the water bottles in the taxi mirrored this brotherly consideration for the needs of others. So I asked the driver about it.

“Excuse me,” I asked the driver (in Thai), “may I ask you? Are you from a northern province?” “Ah, yes, I’m from Sukhothai.” He seemed surprised at this question coming from a Farang, especially since I had guessed correctly that he was from the north. I told him about my Phrae experience and the custom with the water, and he told me that they do that in Sukhothai as well. "You putting this water in your cab made me think of that." I don’t think he had ever really made the connection to why he left water in the cab, and he had a good laugh when he realized that they seemed to be related events. We then had a nice conversation about brotherhood and community, and the wisdom of people helping one another. We got to the mall, and I gave him what in Thailand is a very good tip (35%). “You’re a good man,” I said, “very nice to talk to you!” He laughed out loud again, and that was that.

Or so it would seem, anyway.

At the mall, I went to the Dunkin Donuts to have a coffee with a Farang friend of mine, and my Thai friend went to do a little shopping on her own. After an hour or so she came to the Dunkin and said, “I have a problem!”

She had left her phone in the cab. She told a confused story about going to the “PR” at the mall, somebody called somebody, and the driver was on his way back to the mall with the phone. It seemed to be a dubious proposition, because considerable time had elapsed and we had no taxi number, no drivers’ license number, or any other information about the cab, but who knows? Maybe it’ll work. I talked it over with my Farang friend and I decided that 300 Baht ($10) would be a fair reward for such a thing. Thai people usually don’t think about tips or rewards. My friend went outside to wait at the taxi line, which we could see from the Dunkin.

Sure enough, the taxi returned, and after a brief exchange my friend came back in waving the phone and smiling from ear to ear. It was just a mid-line WuaWai, but still worth about $175 new (replacement value). The driver had seen the phone and thrown it onto the seat next to him while he took a couple of other rides.

The “PR” turned out to be "public relations," the customer service office of the mall. They had the phone number for “lost and found” in Bangkok taxis, but that service couldn’t help without any information. Then they tried calling the phone itself, and the taxi driver answered it! He remembered us, of course. After that conversation that we’d had he would remember us for at least six months, and tell his friends the story over drinks. He said, sure, I’ll come back now. My friend said, “turn the meter on,” and the guy had another good laugh about that. Meter, schmeeter, I’ll be right there. It had taken him almost half an hour to return to the mall, with the meter off, not expecting a nickel.  Having 300 Baht forced on him was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

Bear in mind that the driver could easily have sold the phone for about sixty bucks. Bangkok is full of places of all sizes selling used phones, and they will buy a working phone for about half of what they can sell it for. This phone, in its present condition, would sell for about 4,000 Baht (that’s $120). Over here, you can buy a used phone, buy a new SIM card and phone number for two dollars, and take it to a service provider to set up an account right away. Very easy.

I don’t know about you, but to me that qualifies as an altogether remarkable story, in all of its particulars. I love it when people ask me, “Fred, do you feel safe in Thailand?” Why yes, I tell them, I do feel safe. No place on earth is perfect, but Thais can be so cooperative and hospitable that it’s almost enough to restore your confidence in human nature. These days, I can use a bit of reminding from time to time that some things, somewhere, are still going very well. 

The God That Is In Us

Or, Everything that I Needed to Know in Life, I Learned As a Baby. 

Babies are born, and they seem to just lie there and do nothing. It’s an illusion. They are actually very busy. From the first day, they are listening carefully to all of the new sounds that are reaching their ears, newly freed from their watery habitat. They are beginning to explore movement in a less restricted environment, moving their hands and arms and legs. Soon they open their eyes, and they begin a close study of the thing that interests them the most:

Faces.

Babies are born with large brains that work perfectly well. They cannot speak, nor can they understand spoken language, and for that they are intellectually short-changed. In reality, they are neither stupid nor ignorant. They are innocent. Their brains are working fine, but there is very little information up there to work with. They immediately set about to remedy this situation by closely examining the world, and the people, around them.

Many aspects of this new reality are distressing. Babies have all had a longish period of awareness in utero before being born into the outside world. They found their time in the womb, I daresay, rather pleasant. It was warm, and the temperature was constant. Sounds were muted and indistinct. Nutrition was delivered on an almost constant basis, and waste products were effortlessly removed. Movement was restricted, but if you ask any mother you will be assured that babies get plenty of exercise and move around quite a bit. Just as they are becoming accustomed to this peaceful existence, they are painfully expelled from it. Those muscular contractions that are making mom scream in pain are no party for the baby either, I’m sure. They are expelled, and/or dragged, or sometimes suddenly cut out. Then there’s the bright light, and the sounds and the smells, and the breathing, and the crying, and the absence of the mother. Her heartbeat! The mother’s heartbeat had been the sound of being alive, and now it’s gone! That can’t be a good feeling.

Chief among these discomforts is doubtless the feeling of hunger. Blessed is the baby who is immediately delivered into the warmth of its mother’s embrace and breast fed. In any case, the baby will presently discover the frequent feeling of hunger, and hunger will teach the baby the most terrible truth of its life:

The baby is helpless.

The baby feels hunger, and soon realizes that it is only with outside help that this awful feeling can be mitigated. The baby itself is powerless to remedy the situation. It can only cry, and hope that somebody is listening. Hopefully it will be somebody who will understand the crying and compassionately render appropriate assistance. This understanding of helplessness brings new urgency to the baby’s study of faces.

Babies look at faces and immediately see differences between them. These are not value judgments, they are not based on beauty or its absence. Babies can instinctively see that some faces are positively disposed to the baby while others are not. Those cheerful, loving faces are much more likely to respond to the baby’s hungry cries. Babies begin almost immediately to encourage this profitable relationship with sympathetic adult faces by smiling, gurgling and cooing. They are saying, love me! Care for me! Clean me! Feed me!

They do this out of desperation, but also with love and appreciation. Tender, loving caregivers will be repaid with the child’s love as it grows through the stages of life. As helplessness is gradually replaced by independence, the child’s gratitude will remain if the relationship, like the child, is nurtured. This is the greatest gift of parenthood for those lucky enough to have been successful at the job.

Well, that’s a nice story, but how do I come to write it up today, on this day in particular? It happens that during a taxi ride yesterday it occurred to me that the baby’s experience in infancy was the beginning of the child’s understanding of right and wrong. It was no less than the foundation of the child’s value system for life. Looking for those happy, helpful faces taught the baby what is good in life. Worrying about those stern, unhelpful faces taught the baby what is bad. Helping people is good. Letting them suffer is bad. In the baby’s simple, straightforward life-and-death situation, compassion and the willingness to help the weak were identified as the best attributes of all of mankind.

This is not all speculation on my part. I have read about studies that involved older babies, immediately pre-verbal babies, say six or seven months old. They are propped up in a car seat in front of a kind of Punch and Judy show. As puppets are introduced, the baby’s facial expressions are videoed and studied. The babies’ emotions regarding the puppets and the dramatic action can be readily seen. The puppets are not designed with visual clues as to their personalities; whether they are kind or unkind can only be seen through their movement and their actions. They do, however, have features that can be recognized. Perhaps one puppet is short and faced with food on a high shelf. It tries to reach the food but cannot, and it appears to be in distress. The babies read this information very well. Now another, taller puppet enters the stage, and helps the first puppet reach the food, which the “hungry” puppet enjoys. The baby is delighted.

In another vignette, a puppet enters the stage eating something. Another puppet comes onstage and steals the food, causing the first puppet to act upset. The baby observing this action is horrified.

Later on, one of the “good” puppets comes on stage alone, and the baby shows delight at the very sight of helpful puppet. By the same token, the mere appearance of the “unkind” or “bad” puppet causes the baby distress. Voila! Their understanding of good and bad is fully formed.

I am sure that this experience leaves a permanent presence in the baby. We grow up with a “conscience,” a voice inside of us that counsels us on the correctness of a particular course of action. As in, “his conscience was bothering him,” i.e., because he had done something that he knew was wrong. Or asking someone who is considering a course of action, “what does your conscience say?” My hypothesis today is that this voice inside of us is God.

Yup, I just said it. And I mean it just that simply. The voice that most of us have inside of us that guides us towards empathy, compassion and cooperation is God. We all have our own God in our minds, and the general chorus of these multiple Gods acting in concert is God overseeing the progress of life on earth. Observed in practice, it is the chief force for good in the universe and the one thing that allows human life to prosper. Without it, we would be much less than dogs, less even than the apes. We would be struggling in selfish chaos like alligators or something.

Without it, we would be sociopaths, considering only our own needs and wants. Without it, civilization would collapse into anarchy in a matter of a few years. We struggle these days with the curse of those among us who lack it entirely or in whom it exists only weakly. I’m talking about these Ayn Rand following lunatics that have become unaccountably successful in politics and the justice system of late. Even in Hollywood, if you count the Scientologists. It’s like a virus that has entered our public discourse. But I guess that’s another subject.

So, parents, do all that you can to strengthen the developing consciences of your children. Help them to become right-thinking adults. And people, listen to your consciences as you go through life. To fail in these attempts has consequences. The God in our heads is powerful. It can make you ashamed of yourself, or it can make you proud of your actions. Which do you prefer? As you lay dying you will judge your own life. This is the only judgment that you should fear. Would you prefer to lay there feeling like you did a pretty good job of it, recalling family and friends whom you loved and helped, and times when you were thanklessly kind to strangers? Or would it please you more to remember only your money and possessions, while realizing that you missed every good opportunity to be kind to anyone, as your family goes about their business wondering what to do with your money? “What the fuck was I thinking!” is not a thought that anyone should want to be the last on their minds.

Make your beds, my friends. Someday you will find yourselves lying in them.