I was feeling a bit called out by an epithet I saw in the maelstrom that is Substack. It had something to do with “environmentalists who want to return us to hunting and gathering.” Yes, I’ve written a novel in which humans have been returned to hunting and gathering, and that future seems pretty good to me (but with some big drawbacks, or there would be no story!).
Then I came across this excellent post by
on money as an addiction. In one brilliant metaphor, he cuts through all of the cultural superiority that makes us believe our society is at the peak of an inevitable evolution toward better and better things. He compares this viewpoint to the increasing levels in a video game:This is how solutionists picture society. They imagine a proverbial ‘Level 1’ world of prehistoric people who gradually solve things through acts of discovery - fire, agriculture, writing, and so on. This sets society on a path ‘upwards’ or ‘forwards’ to new levels. History is us accumulating an inventory that expands our capacities.
But society isn’t a video game, and what actually happens is that we become accustomed to our current level of technology. So much so that we can’t do without it, and we need more and more of it. So increasing levels of technology are more like an increasing addiction to something like cigarettes:
In our interdependent economies, the expansion of capacities is mirrored by the expansion of needs, along with the altering of skills, culture and expectations through adaptation. We’re trained to notice that the proverbial caveman has less stuff and lower technological capacity, but we fail to notice that they also need less stuff, have less dependence (i.e. they have more internal resilience) and don’t care in the slightest about our judgement of their lives.
Here’s a simple example: early societies could survive without going to a supermarket, while we can’t. If a supermarket were miraculously dropped into the inventory of our prehistoric man above, it’s true that it would give him a big ‘positive score’, but - over the span of decades and centuries - that would sink back into the background as the new baseline for survival. In modern-day society, a supermarket doesn’t earn positive points. Rather, if it were suddenly removed from our inventory, we’d go negative: we’d be dying in the streets with no means to make or find our own food. We’d be flooding out into the countryside in a desperate attempt to relearn agriculture in a week.
It’s a brilliant piece and you should go read it. And it reminded me of a piece I wrote a couple of years ago on my blog. It’s mainly a teaser for Ada’s Children, but it speaks to the reasons that rejecting our technological way of life and going back to a life more in tune with nature seem so attractive. Or, in the inimitable words of
:There are times when the ideal future feels like the past lived with the gift of hindsight. I don’t want innovation, I want ecology. I want to ride the current backward, against where it is taking me now. I want to put in at the present and dam up the past, blocking the future from the death grip of invaders who thought nothing of the world they wrecked, when it was everything.
I wrote this post during the pandemic shutdowns and shortages, when the drawbacks of our overcomplexified global economy seemed pretty stark. The one doomer article I cite is based on global warming predictions that probably won’t come to pass, which I’ve noted in the text.
Sila urged Shadow on, the horse’s hooves thundering over the sloping grassland. The wounded bison was almost within bowshot, the Howling Forest just ahead. Behind her, Jun shouted for her to stop. But he was far back, and her prey was right in front of her, its massive hump looming above her as she came within range. Just a few strides closer now. She let go of the horse’s mane and pulled her bowstring taut, sighting down the arrow.
That’s how the first chapter of my novel, Ada’s Children, opens. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? (At least I hope so!) The thrill of galloping across the prairie with the wind in her hair. A chance to demonstrate her skill, and the glory that comes with it. Most of all, the anticipation of a good meal, and the feeling of self-reliance in being able to obtain it.
It sure beats staring at grocery shelves bereft of toilet paper and canned goods, wondering how bad the hoarding and the shortages might get. To be that self-sufficient — it seems in many ways superior to our overly complex society, which no individual can either fully grasp or survive without. In contrast, there's the story of an Inuit, stranded on a remote, deserted island, who was able to survive indefinitely by recreating their entire physical culture from what was at hand*. As Jordan Hall writes, “The operating logic of our current civilization has been to trade resilience for efficiency (creating fragility).”
But, oops!
Then the horse was gone from under her and she was in the air. In that frozen moment, she knew Shadow must have stumbled into a prairie dog hole. She hoped the horse was all right.
Every rose must have its thorns, and every romanticized idyll its practical drawbacks. Especially so if you’re writing about an imagined post-post-apocalyptic future, and you want to give your characters something to struggle against.
At first, I thought I might be making that future sound too idyllic. The near-future timeline of my novel is grim enough, so I wanted to create a more pleasant world for my far-future characters to inhabit. And hunter-gatherer societies do have their advantages: less time spent getting a living than most of us spend today; fewer diseases, both infectious and chronic, than modern societies (surely a plus at the moment!); lifespans equivalent to our own for those who survive their first year or two; and less social isolation and alienation, due to living in extended family groups. All of which sounds pretty good.
There's even a growing body of research showing that hunter-gatherers didn't immediately and enthusiastically take up intensive agriculture, division of labor, and all the rest. No, they had to be dragged into it kicking and screaming, often through slavery, because settled agriculture wasn’t the obviously superior way of organizing society we’re often told it was.
James C. Scott, author of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, writes,
Agriculture, it was assumed, was a great step forward in human well-being, nutrition, and leisure. Something like the opposite was initially the case. ... In fact, the early states had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage and were plagued by the epidemics of crowding. The early states were fragile and liable to collapse, but the ensuing "dark ages" may often have marked an actual improvement in human welfare.
A benevolent dark age — that's certainly something to look forward to! Who wouldn't want to flee the constant drudgery of settled agriculture, especially if you performed that labor as a slave, for a lifestyle requiring a few hours of varied activities with plenty of leisure time in between?**
So I thought I was on the right track by giving my future humans a mostly attractive society to inhabit. Then I read this Psychology Today blog post, which celebrates hunter-gatherer societies from around the world and from past to present. I realized I might not have made it idyllic enough.
Warfare was unknown to most of these societies, and where it was known it was the result of interactions with warlike groups of people who were not hunter-gatherers. In each of these societies, the dominant cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual decision-making. Their core value, which underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals.
But maybe this is too idyllic after all, especially for a hunter-gatherer society that develops out of our own. These societies do have some well-known drawbacks. One is a high mortality rate from common injuries incurred while hunting. (Sila survives her fall, or there would be no novel.) While those who survive to adulthood have a good chance of living to a ripe old age, these societies face higher rates of infant mortality and death in childbirth. And if they aren’t dying from those causes, they still have to keep their population well below the carrying capacity of the land. Depending on the environment, that could be through starvation (think of what the Indigenous peoples of eastern North America called the Starving Time, December through April), or through infanticide and warfare.
All of that sounds terribly grim to anyone used to the comforts of modern life (though perhaps less so to those who have been barred from full access to those comforts). In Ada’s Children, I came up with more humane, but still troublesome, ways around those drawbacks. Those solutions still don’t sit well with my two main characters. Their resulting rebellion against their goddess’s rules sends them off on a great adventure.
Our society may be headed for a similar adventure. If this article is to be believed, we (or perhaps Gen Z’s children) better get used to the idea of a return to hunting and gathering:
Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible…Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.
[The 2023 IPCC report has an even higher upper projection of 5.7°C for 2100, but only under a “carbon-intensive scenario.” There’s pretty strong evidence that global society is turning away from that pathway. According to
and Climate Action Tracker, “current policies will limit warming to 2.7C.” So I’m actually a bit more hopeful than I was back when I wrote this. But I’ll let the rest stand.]Perhaps the question isn’t if we’ll return to that way of life, but when and how. Will the transition inevitably involve chaos and conflict, as all those currently stocking up on guns and ammo surely believe? Or can we do it in some more peaceful and orderly way? The article recommends immediate extreme efforts (none of them very likely, in my estimation) to mitigate climate change, rewild our remaining natural areas, protect remaining Indigenous cultures, and drastically reduce our population.
Or maybe there’s a third way, which I explore in Ada’s Children. Saying any more would spoil it, so you’ll just have to read it, either here on Substack or in book form.
*The story I’m thinking of could be the amazing one of Ada Blackjack, but I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure it was retold by either Barry Lopez or Richard K. Nelson, but I haven’t been able to find it.
**Scott's argument is more subtle than "hunter-gatherer good/settled agriculture bad." He points out that there were intermediate stages in which people developed proto-agriculture and lived in a sedentary fashion in villages of as many as a few thousand, while still not experiencing the drudgery or stratification of the more fully developed states that came later. He concentrates on the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, but the same seems to apply in North America as well, the Cahuilla of southern California being one example.
good analysis! i've got a friend who's fond of the Steven Pinker, "things have never been this good" model of progress—the leveling-up that you're describing. it's an ongoing debate with us, because i've always maintained that those historical comparisons are impossible: we can't quantify the effect that greater metaphysical agency has on quality of life. it's something we don't even acknowledge within modernity.
we always talk about the end of life as a way to measure its quality, and assume that a life ending too soon in difficult conditions must be equally terrible for people outside modernity. but we can't relate to people who recognize with their whole being that the cunningfolk's healing magic is working—that the combined energy of the kin group or tribe is genuinely (not just metaphorically) lifting them up—and when their body finally fails, they'll literally ascend to the stars to join their ancestors.
i believe alienation due to loss of metaphysical agency is one of the most acute forms of suffering that humans can experience. although it's been turbocharged under modernity, it's only a recent condition, and people used to be free from it in ways we can't imagine now.