What Do We Want? And What "Comes Natural"?

That is, once we have a full stomach and shelter from the rain and cold. To begin at the beginning: we have a shared history--a history that, however short it may be from the perspective of geologic time is inconceivably deep from the perspective of human time.

Uncounted generations back and back; two or three generations of chaotic change without anchor or harbor; but before that, a near-endless succession of generations with comparatively little changes at all; plenty of exciting events to be sure, enough to fill any life full, but always consistency--the kind of consistency, fragile as it may seem, that has always been sufficient to link every generation with the generations that came before it, and after it. Any child could pick up skills and beliefs from its parents that could be counted on to carry it reliably through its own life. The experiences of child and parents may have been different in detail, but never in kind, except for rare punctuations brought about by migration or plague or some other such fluke. A great great granddaughter could relate in every way with the experiences and even the surroundings of her great great grandmother, and she in turn with hers. Sedentary villagers on Asia, Africa, and Europe, like their counterparts in aboriginal California, not only lived exactly as their distant ancestors lived, but knew and loved the exact same trails, rocks, hills, waterways, even the same individual trees and the same houses that their ancestors had known and loved, bonds that were torn and reformed only by rare and usually forced, usually heartbreaking removals to new homes. Even nomadic peoples kept their solid traditions alive and little changed over uncounted generations, and if their worlds were larger than those of the villagers, they were no less familiar and tradition-hallowed in their own way, the landmarks bigger, the intimacy on a different scale but no less intense as they followed the pastures on their yearly cycle. Whether your own ancestors were sedentary farmers of wandering herders, if you go back deeper in time you will find all of us united by an ancestry of even closer connection to the land. All our distant ancestors, for several million years before farming and herding and towns were ever invented, even back to a time before we were human, all lived “off the land” in the most direct possible way, like any other omnivorous critter, hunting other animals and (mainly) gathering all sorts of plant foods, adapting ourselves to our surroundings rather than vice versa. Nor were we living as “loners,” much less of the modern “loners in crowd” kind. We had a “support group” system for our entire history; fight little communities of several families or more, little tribelets, living by the code of all for one, one for all, inherently leery of other such tribelets we might encounter. After all, even though the strangers might include future friends or mates, they were certainly competing for the same food that your group depended on. The origin of xenophobia, racism, war? And, whether or not you want to “admit” it, we are still the same creature, physically and instinctually and aesthetically, that we were a million years ago. Our modern veneer of high technology and sophisticated culture is just that--a veneer. Exactly the same as if, having fun around contentedly naked all our lives, we had suddenly been handed a sparkling silver space-suit to put on, and all of a sudden we think we’re Luke Skywalker. Wrong. We’re still a naked ape in a space suit. We think we’re sooooo modern; so beyond it all. For the first time in our history, the experiences, skills, and values of one generation have become irrelevant to the next--or the past--generation. For the first time in history--and I refer here in general to the “industrial age” and beyond--we have become alienated not only from each other but from the very ground we stand on. We have let this space-suit thing go way to our heads. If we don’t come back down to earth, and soon, there won’t be enough of an earth to come back down to.

Some things really are “natural” to us, things we have lived with and grown to love over the huge span of time that we lived the basic, not-so-simple life of the hunter and gatherer. Things like: fire. Whole doesn’t love a cozy, crackling fire on a cold night? And company. We are social creatures, but not indiscriminately so [continue later].