The mental image is easy to form: it’s just after first light on a morning in 1800 and your wooden ship has sunk after a surprise attack by canon fire. Random bits of wood and spars bob here and there on the waves, and you’ve managed to scramble atop the largest one. The next thing you notice is a horde of rats desperately treading water and aiming for your floating safety—as if vacuuming them from the surface of the sea. Within minutes your haven is teeming with clinging rats. Aside from the rapidly-receding gunboat, the horizon is clear of any other escape from immersion. It’s just you and the rats.

Why bother to describe this scene? It will serve a dual purpose. First, it vaguely mirrors a false impression many have of modernity as the only safe way to live in a perilous world. Second, it serves as an instructive contrast to actual encounters between modernity and tribal people. Both highlight the severe misimpression we have been handed of life outside modernity.

The Terror

Modernity relies on controlling food via agriculture, controlling “pests,” eliminating dangerous animals, controlling the spaces in which we live, controlling domesticated animals, and controlling other people’s actions via money and laws (carrots and sticks). We’re control freaks, one might say—seeking control over an ever-expanding set of concerns.

This approach to life shelters its participants to the point that they are robbed of the sort of freedom every wild being knows. Importantly, inability to secure satisfying wild food without much effort makes us daily-dependent on “the system” in order to get fed. Talk about control!

From the vantage of this enfeebled, helpless state of domesticated captivity, it seems inconceivable that one could enjoy life or even simply survive without the support of modernity. People really freak out at the suggestion that modernity must collapse one way or another, and that we need to find other ways to live. It seems as hopeless as standing on flotsam without any other dry option in sight. Leaving modernity surely means an unpleasant death. It’s the nihilism of ignorance: the conviction that nothing else (worthwhile) exists. Television “reality” shows are set up to have us gawk at how essentially-impossible life is when stripped of our comforts. We tell stories about how we saved ourselves from a life of misery and terror—how we struggled to reach the safety of our hunk of flotation. That our “system” is initiating a sixth mass extinction makes us feel all the more hopeless: between a rock and a hard place.

The terror “out there” is a very common perception. Probably 95% of the time anyone invokes the Hobbesian line that life before modernity was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” or Tennyson’s characterization of nature as being “red in tooth and claw,” it is in affirmation of these sentiments rather than dismissing them as terrified ignorance.

First, humans outside modernity are definitely not solitary! They are not poor, being the “original affluent society“—obtaining all they need on part-time “work.” They spend lots of time singing, dancing, teasing, laughing, and relaxing—which sounds opposite of nasty. While they might, out of necessity, be aggressive toward intruders and sometimes make shows of strength to neighbors, daily life—the vast majority of lived moments—is cooperative and not brutish. Life spans are not as long as by modern standards, but once making it to ten years old, a reasonably long life becomes quite likely and normal. Old people are not rare. Simple math involving reproductive ages and child-bearing capacity indicates it could not possibly have been any other way. It’s more than speculation or storytelling. As an aside, I am well aware that saying even one positive thing about hunter-gatherer lifestyles brings charges of romanticizing “noble savages.” I recommend ignoring this defensive overreaction.

But on the subject of danger: does nature contain teeth and claws, sometimes colored by blood? Most assuredly, it does. Every effective lie contains a healthy dose of truth. Outside modernity, is puncture of a given human individual’s skin by such implements a daily, weekly, monthly, annual, or even every-decade experience? We would not be here if that were so.

Modernity barricades us in a bristling fortress set against the wildness outside. From this position of retreat, having disengaged from the external reality for generation upon generation, we tell spooky stories about what’s out there and shudder to think about the certain death of leaving our safe haven: thus the analogy to standing on flotsam in an otherwise empty sea. We either cling to our safety or face a cold, wet, hopeless, and short existence—cloudy and wet with a chance of sharks.

We Will Not Be Rats

This heading borrows from the title of a book I am enjoying presently called (in the U.S.) We Will Be Jaguars, by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson.

So, here we are in our well-provisioned floating fortress-of modernity, and we have figured out how to make smaller fortified boats so that we can travel into the wild world while clinging to our protective gear (this is essentially what I do when I go backpacking like the pathetic modernity wimp I am). Sometimes—and rather frequently in “explorer” days—these offshoot boats would encounter “wild” humans.

The fascinating observation is what didn’t happen in these encounters—time and time again. The “natives” did not swarm to the lifeboat like rats to flotsam (spoiler hint: they aren’t like rats). They did not say: “Finally, we are saved from our solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short lives. Finally, we have real food obtained from the sweat of someone’s brow. Finally, we have protection from the nightmares in the dark. Finally, we have proper shelters and apparel. Finally, we can be truly human.”

No: most perplexingly, such reactions kept not happening. What the free people did do—time and time again—was fight like hell to keep their beloved way of life. Instead of rats desperate to be saved, they fled our boats and shot arrows back at us. Those two scenarios look remarkably different, don’t they? How could we have gotten so confused?

Rationalization

The typical response is that: “The savages were just ignorant. They had no idea what they were missing. The poor beings were too dumb to recognize that they were running from a glorious lifestyle—one that offers money!” But this is completely incompatible with the simultaneous conviction that native life was miserable, terrifying, and desperate. Miserable, terrified, desperate people will gladly accept help and jump to safety and comfort—or be too weak to resist help.

To give one’s life in order to preserve a lifestyle speaks volumes to the merits of that lifestyle. Moreover, the very fact that such people possessed the strength, capacity, and determination to sustain stiff resistance says that they were less than desperate: they were healthy and well-fed. They correctly assessed that by far the biggest dangers in their lives were not teeth or claws of any color, but bullets, money, and property rights. BY FAR!

Also running counter to the “ignorance” charge, those Europeans who meaningfully integrated into Native American culture tended to choose staying in that culture, when still possible in the wake of surrounding genocide. Native Americans who had a taste of modernity tended to go back when they could, but this was seldom realistic given the obliteration of their cultural ways and communities. Full, adult exposure to two markedly-different lifestyles cannot be called ignorance.

Ironically, in 1651 when Hobbes offered his nasty nugget, many people around him were living lives far more poor, nasty, brutish, and short than those who never had the pleasure of modernity’s acquaintance. Returning to “reality” television, shows like Alone betray their fundamental flaw right there in the title of the show! Banishment from a tribe (for being a narcissistic jerk, for instance) was essentially a death sentence. A severed finger is of no use without a hand. Similarly, the one season of the show I watched (on Great Slave Lake) imposed the additional constraint of strict boundaries that confined the solitary competitors to small patches of land. The hunted animals were not likewise artificially confined, nor are/were the Indigenous folks of that region.

A More Balanced View

The image of a lone safe haven on an empty sea—or a fort surrounded by howling dangerous chaos—is just wrong. What looks like shark-infested waters to our ignorant eyes (correct: I’m flipping who’s ignorant, here) that any sane rat would surely want to escape turns out to be a sea of waving grass providing innumerable accommodations and food opportunities for the rats. Actually, the rat analogy is terribly off because it suggests those happily living outside modernity are vermin—which I hope is obviously opposite my intent. It’s more a projection of how modernity views destitute people deprived of modernity’s graces.

Chapter 11 of Ishmael—and section 4 in particular—first offers a powerful image for how modern people perceive life outside modernity, and then a truly brilliant role-play dialog that exposes the disconnect rather well. I recommend taking a look, if you’re unfamiliar.

Very few modernist people have spent significant time embedded in hunter-gatherer bands, thus our collective egregious ignorance is completely understandable. But, those who have spent time report contentment rather than miserable suffering. Our reaction is usually something like: “That can’t be right; the anthropologist was clearly deluded.” Imagine the arrogance this requires: zero personal exposure outweighs decades of lived experience (witnessing millennia of successful tradition).

But, the main point of this post is that we don’t even have to trust the anthropologists. This simple pair of facts does most of the work for us:

1. We in modernity are understandably frightened of a lifestyle with which we have zero personal experience—a lifestyle that we are assured is miserable and dangerous.
2. The overwhelming Indigenous reaction to modernity was to fight and flee rather than scramble onto the lifeboat, clinging to relief from misery and terror.

There: I just saved you from decades of embedded living in order to realize that the ignorance is ours and that life outside modernity is not a living hell. Otherwise I would not marvel at and celebrate the chickadee chicks emerging from the nest with joy in my heart, but shake my head in tragic horror at the hellscape they are about to experience as they flit desperately from tree to tree, chittering in terror.

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