We are evolved to live as hunter-gatherers in small close-knit communities and to deal with daily challenges to survive. Our modern world does not afford us the opportunity to live like this, which has consequences on a physical and mental health.
I wrote the following blog over a few weekends. It turned into a bit of a behemoth. I have broken it up into a couple of parts. This is part 1…
You may have heard the saying, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. Though this is on the surface true, what it actually takes to both raise a child, keep it happy into adulthood and remain happy until death, is a tribe.
We are evolved to live as hunter-gatherers in small close-knit communities and to deal with daily challenges to survive. Our modern world does not afford us the opportunity to live like this, which has consequences on a physical and mental health.
It is well known that when European settlers came to North America, they forged a nation across 3000 miles of wilderness populated by stone-age tribes. From the 1600s until 1924, when the last Apache were still running cattle raids across the Rio Grande, colonials fought a guerrilla war to establish modernity with native peoples who had hardly changed for the last 15,000 years.
It says something about human nature that when colonials were kidnapped by Native American Indians, often when rescue attempts were made by other settlers, the ‘captives’ would refuse to leave or would go into hiding so that they could not be repatriated to their families, or would return once ’freed’.
Also, a lot of young white male settlers, and some women, absconded from their colonial groups and crossed the frontier to join native tribes. They fled white society; they didn’t like it. No lesser man than Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753:
if he goes to see his relations and make on Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return… Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.
There was lots of young colonials fleeing to the Indians and not one incidence of the Indians leaving the tribe to join White Society. Though one may think that the Indians would be tempted to join the whites, not one did voluntarily. It may be common belief that the settler had better food, housing and resources but this was not actually true. The Indians had a very successful society and plenty of food. Their nutrition was better than the whites, a much more varied diet, a more ‘paleo’ diet that suited the human genome better. But this post is not about nutrition, I’ll save that for another day. This post is about how tribal, communal society suits the human genome better, with a concentration on the mental benefits it offers.
I hinted at this in a previous post where I quoted Yuval Noah Harari (יובל נח הררי; historian, author of ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Deus‘, and a tenured professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on the effects of an agricultural society on the biopsychosical heath of modern humans.
The human body and mind evolved in adaptation to the life of hunter-gatherers. You go to the forest to look for mushrooms. You climb trees to pick apples… And suddenly, what you do all day as a peasant is you bring water from the river in buckets and you harvest the corn and you grind the corn. It’s much more difficult for the body and it’s very boring to the mind.
Even today, the jobs of hundreds of millions of people around the world are far more boring than going to the forest to look for mushrooms.
The reasons that the traffic of young person emigration was only one way, towards the Indians, was because the settlers found their society more egalitarian and less depressing than colonial society.
Women who moved in with the Indians experienced much more freedom than women with the settlers. Indian society was not crushed by Christian morality so, as a woman, you could marry who you wanted, get divorced and do whatever you wanted with your body.
Studies have shown that in societies where everyone is necessary for food production, everyone is treated equal. In agricultural societies, in industrial societies, in modern society, you have large sections of the population, often women, who are not involved in food production (and by that I mean gaining money to buy the food or actually tending to the fields), they are involved in reproduction. In these societies, equality actually goes down.
A case could be made that society as we have created over the last two centuries is almost totally incompatible with the human genome, the human body, the human spirit. Now, genetics are complicated and quite clearly on certain levels modern society is quite successful. We have 7 billion people living on the planet, the most throughout history, and still growing, but as wealth goes up within a society, as a society becomes more modern, mental health cases go up! Suicide incidence increase, depression incidence increases, schizophrenia incidences. Modern society is not good for the human psyche.
We evolved to live in groups of 30 to 40 persons, in a harsh environment, totally reliant on each other for survival. This society creates a huge amount of equality within a group; a huge amount of loyalty within a group. This is what we are designed for genetically. Those who were selfish or ‘went-it-alone’ did not survive. Their genes died out.
Modern society allows an individual to be independent, not require the tribe. This is an individual liberation but can lead to alienation and depression. Modern cities allow you to be amoungst millions of people but to be alone.
We are not programmed to be around strangers all day long.
I live in London, and I love it, but all day long in this city you encounter strangers and do not recognise anybody. I used to commute 1.5 hours to work every day (thankfully my commute now is shorter). For the duration of those journeys I was alone in a crowd. I used to not directly look at or interact with anyone for those 3 hours per day even though we were literally bumping into each other and sharing the same space (anyone who has ridden the Tube during rush hour will know what I mean). This is not something that human beings have experienced until quite recently in their history.
In a nomadic society, you can not accumulate wealth and possessions because you have to carry them. Ultimately, in societies like that, similarly in a platoon in combat, you are valued by what you can contribute to the group. This has been destroyed in modern society.
People are hugely self serving. Capitalism implores us to be so. There is evolutionary benefits in doing this. ‘Survival of the fittest’ requires you live to reproduce whilst your ‘competitors’ die out, but in modern society this is hugely out of whack. That is, we are programmed to be somewhat selfish but to also serve the group. In a healthy society, these two prerogatives are in a dynamic homeostasis. In modern society there is not really a tribe to serve, which leads to a strong sense of meaninglessness for many persons.
This can lead to a morbid deep-set desire for something to go wrong. Some call it a ‘white knight’ complex, where a person wishes that something terrible happens so that they can jump to the rescue of another. This may be less likely done for the accolades that the white knight may get but more to do with the sense of meaning and purpose to their life.
Whatever does not kill a society, forces it together, and makes it stronger
Tragedy forces people to band together. The irony of modern society is that it has removed hardship and danger from everyday life. It is in the events of hardship and danger that persons come to understand their own value in the world and get a sense of meaning to their lives.
During The Blitz in London and the U.K. within World War II, 30,000 persons were killed by German bombs over the course of 6 months. It was a catastrophe. But people were sleeping side by side, head to toe in the Tube stations (oh, how the role in society the Tube plays has changed); putting out fire in bucket brigades; digging people out of rubble; and acting as a unified society. The U.K. government were expecting mass psychological casualties due to having a bunch of civilians being rained on by bombs and witnessing death and destruction, but the opposite happened. Mental health ward admission decreased during The Blitz and returned after the bombing stopped. Allegedly, an English official said during The Blitz, “it is amazing, we have the chronic neurotics of peace time driving the ambulances”.
I intuitively developed an awareness of the benefits of war when I was a young adult. I developed an idea that my generation, whom have subsequently been dubbed The Millennials, are the first generation in the last three that has not faced the threat of conscription to the armed services. My father’s generation had Vietnam; my grandfathers both fought in World War II and their fathers’ fought in World War I. Meanwhile, their future wives and families stayed at home and tended to the home front. These societies had common causes, Total War; the war effort. As I grew into adulthood and asked the question in my own mind, ‘what is going to be the purpose of my life’, I was aware that I was spoiled for choice and lacked my war to focus my attention. I did not wish to be sent to war, but I knew that if I was I would not have to make up my own mind. I would not have the despair of having to make a success of life on my own.
After the war, within England there developed a palpable yearning for The Blitz days, as devastating as they were, because British society felt like they were united; the United Kingdom. Similar things happened in Sarajevo in the late 20th century, after the Siege of Sarajevo earlier in the 1990s. Up to 20 years later, civilian would speak about how they missed the war years because they believed that they were better people who cared more for each other during it. This also allegedly happened after the September 11th terrorist attacks that downed the Twin Towers in New York. There are reports that the behaviour of the New York population before and after the attacks were very different. People were more friendly, more open, very appreciative of first responders. Firemen became superheroes. This was in stark constrast to previous to the attacks where NY was the usual closed, unfriendly metropolos that exist in various cities around the world.
Sebastian Junger, war journalist, author of 
… I was with America soldiers on a remote outpost in Afghanistan called
And they were very psyched to come back to Italy where they were based at the end of their deployment. You could imagine, they had some pretty good parties planned, but after that died down a real depression set in. By the time I got caught up with them again in Vicenza, and interviewed them, many of them said they wanted, they didn’t want to come back to America, they wanted to go back out to Restrepo… I thought, ‘why is it that no one want to come home?”… And I realised, it is not that they want war. They are not sociopaths. They do not want to be out there killing people and getting shot at. They missed each other. They missed the intense communalism of life in a platoon in a remote hilltop in combat. And it struck me… Oh my god, a platoon in combat effectively reproduces our evolution. I mean, we evolved to live in groups of that size in a harsh environment… Of course it resonated with them. It resonated genetically with them. And I’ve got to say, as tough as it was out there, there was a weird, also a weird, I don’t want to call it euphoria but a strange sense of wellbeing out there that I missed enormously when I left…
…I sank into a real depression, and it took me a while to understand my depression was partly to do with the fact I was no longer part of a group.
Junger told a similar story of meeting a cancer survivor who sheepishly admitted to him that when she was sick she was on the cancer ward and knew all the other families on the ward and her family, her tribe, rallied around her because they were not sure if she was going to survive, and she survived and now she misses being sick. She missed the community of cancer sufferers and her own community that had so much time for her. She was lonely.
If soldiers are missing war and cancer survivors are missing cancer, something is missing in this world.
Side note, it does not have to be adversity that unites a city and create a euphoria. I have lived and worked in both Sydney and London during the Olympic Games in each city in 2000 and 2012 respectively. The visceral feels of the city changed during each. There was a background radiation of euphoria. We were united. The focus of the world. Everyone was friendly and open to the influx of foreigners; something that does not exist largely in these cities outside of these times. All it takes is a uniting force to increase the mood of a population.
That said, research has found that adversity promotes pro social behaviours in people. Adversity makes people acts well. Lack of adversity, safety and comfort, allow people to act selfishly. After 9/11, the suicide rates went down in New York. The violent crime rate went down in New York. Vietnam Vets reported that their Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms went down after 9/11. People suddenly feel that they are needed by their society, by their people. If you feel needed, you are able to ignore your own issues.
If you think of it in terms of evolution, if adversity and danger produced bad human behaviour, we would not have survived until today. We are the offspring of the humans 100,000 years ago who survived a crisis. The people who acted poorly, selfishly and did not protect their group, died out. The groups that encouraged altruism and self sacrifice of individuals for the group during a crisis survived and passed on their DNA to subsequent generations.
Adam Grant, PhD encourages altruism in his book Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, which argues that those that are Givers succeed in the long run more than those that are Takers or Matchers. This fits with evolution because success leads to increased chances of reproduction and passing on your seed to subsequent generations; survival of the fittest.
To read the rest of this post, tune in same Bat blog later in the week, where I’ll discuss how we are evolved to operate in groups in which we are needed.
Enjoy!
Scott