In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, one of the dialogs I especially enjoyed was in Chapter 11 when the pupil expressed his anxiety around pre-civilization life. The mental image he shared was of a man running along a ridge in deepening twilight, hungry and following tracks on the hunt, while tooth and claw pursued not far behind. The man is “forever one step behind his prey and one step ahead of his enemies.” Ishmael, role-playing a hunter-gatherer, laughed off the concerns as being wildly off the mark.
I find similar expressions of fear from people when I challenge the viability of modernity. For many, losing modernity is a frightening prospect tantamount to certain death—either by starvation or violence by man or beast. The projection is that modernity is the only thing standing between us and a life of misery and anxiety. But since it’s not even a choice whether to continue modernity (unsustainable things fail), we may as well start to think about life without that particular security blanket.
How frightened should we be? Was pre-civilization life a miserable, desperate struggle, or did things seem to be pretty well in hand? I can offer some quantitative arguments suggesting that life could not have been that knife-edge, white-knuckle anxious.
Let’s start with this mental image of trying to stay one step ahead of being eaten, while facing the similarly daunting challenge of finding enough to feed yourself. If you asked the person conveying that image to quantify their fear in terms of survival odds, they might very well guess a 50/50 prospect of surviving the night. We’ll moderate that in a bit, but let’s roll with it for now.
If the daily odds of finding enough food to survive and evading predation were as dire as 50%, a person would have a meager 0.1% chance of surviving 10 days (one chance in 210 = 1024). Ouch. Granted, a 50/50 chance might be a reasonable-enough estimate for a modern (urban?) human dropped into the wild. Thus, the sense of horror is not baseless when the prospect is applied to us, personally.
But we’d like to know how it would have felt for individuals adapted to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. One way to look at it is that the pre-modern human population would be gone well within a month at a 50% daily rate of attrition (20 days would wipe out a million, and 30 days would cover a billion—which is well above prehistoric human population levels). Clearly it was not as bad as that.
What about 10% odds of copping it each day? Well, then your 0.1% expectation (a lucky survivor) would be two months, but most would not survive a week. Okay, things can’t even be that bad. At a 1% chance of failing to survive the day, you might expect to live a few months, and would have less than a 0.1% chance of lasting two years.
What’s the right answer? Well, we know something relevant: humans routinely survived to reproductive age. Otherwise, the species would fail to hang on. For an individual, attaining a 50% chance of surviving through adolescence corresponds to a daily death probability of about 0.01%, or one chance in 10,000 (would drop a bit to 1 in 8,000 to have a 50% chance of living just to age 15).
How scary would that feel? Such low odds are not consistent with living in constant fear, looking over one’s shoulder for the fatal agent one step behind. One in ten-thousand sounds more like having life basically figured out, so that most days are free of close calls.
At this 99.99% daily survival rate, a simple “half-life” exponential decay process would have about a quarter of people making it to age 40, and 10% to age 60. Life expectancy would technically be about 19 years (median) at this rate, but white hair and wrinkles would not be unknown: every clan would sport a few elders.
Admittedly, this model is dirt-simple. But it is still capable of illustrating a reasonable point. Unless following the strategy of having offspring by the thousands or millions, species don’t survive if the odds of individual survival are stacked heavily against them. Survivors have things figured out well enough that each day is pretty mellow. As a whole, you know how to find sufficient food. You know how to stay warm enough or cool enough. You know how to avoid predation day to day. If not, bye bye, species. Any species that has survived for the last several million years is demonstrably capable of dealing with one-in-a-million bad-luck years—including whole strings of tough years such as during ice ages.
Media Skew
Sometimes I see movies set in an exotic environment (often other-worldly), where a fast-paced life depicts one thing eating another and then getting eaten itself moments later. If that’s how things went, the show of life would be over pretty quickly. If it’s not boring, it’s probably not realistic. Nature documentaries, while showing real life, involve editing months of time in the field to a few minutes of captivating footage. Most of the time involves a whole lot of “nothing much” going on. High drama is the exception.
Life in the Wild
It can help to think of the strategies various plants and animals have devised to survive, reproduce, and thrive. A squirrel has its food situation figured out, as does a bird, or a fish, or a wasp. They also have strategies for dealing with seasons. Trees might shed leaves for winter. Some animals hibernate, migrate, or have the fortitude to accommodate large temperature ranges. While perhaps subject to predation, life can’t involve significant daily deathly danger or too few individuals would be around long enough to propagate the species.
So ask yourself: do you think animals in the wild are miserable? Do you think every waking moment is a torment of fear, and that even sleep is fitful and given to nightmares and sudden starts? That’s no way to live. Sure, each life form has to be on its toes to seize opportunities and stay safe, but most moments are relaxed and mundane. A while back I saw in a documentary a study of stress levels in deer (or similar animals). When they lower their head to graze or browse, they show no physiological signs of stress. They might hear something and pause their foraging to assess possible danger—during which time stress is measurably higher—but revert to low stress when returning attention to their food. They’re not wound particularly tight.
Wild Humans
Now the big surprise: humans are also animals that evolved on this planet. We also had strategies for finding plenty and surviving for decades. Lots of that time was available for relaxing, laughing, sporting, loving, storytelling, and supporting the health of our communities. Sure, we might have had a fright now and again, and some lean periods (for which we necessarily had strategies). But such trials don’t rob life of pleasure or meaning, which were not inventions of modernity.
When I think about life before civilization, I am filled with admiration, not anxiety. If I were thrown into living in the wild, as a product of modernity I probably would not fare too well. I think this is part of why people react the way they do. But first, individualism is a new thing: an aberration enabled by modernity. Pre-modern living was as a social team—not as a contestant on a reality show. Second, we’ve lost a lot of knowledge and wisdom for how to live without modern conveniences. But many of the social instincts are still there, waiting to be utilized again in something akin to their original context.
If plunged overnight into the end of civilization, we would have a rough go of it. But given time to adapt and shed the trappings of modernity, those who are willing to let go and embrace new (old?) ways of living will stand a decent chance of being satisfied with life.
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With our knowledge gained in the last few hundred years, very much can be done, but evidently not by using the engine of capitalism to drive humans. So if it comes to (“gracefully?”) returning to the medieval standards of living, that will essentially be a group choice by humans. Opposing that, for instance, “Source Cities” could be set up well-distributed across the country (like military bases are today) which receive preference for available “renewable/rebuildable” electrical power. These could be tasked with a few, well-triaged needs, such as vaccines against grave diseases, medical care of certain types, production of certain agricultural needs, production of physical- and mental-tools to interface well with Nature (from microbes to bioregions). Unfortunately, there isn’t much available evidence that humans could govern themselves under such circumstances, other than, maybe, the Byzantine Collapse scenario (Tainter/Patzek [2011]), into which the current Elites will likely not trod willingly – but who knows? Optimism springs eternal.
Agreed, I have toyed with the same kinds of calculations about the perceived risk of bands of humans being in constant warfare with each other. It is quite easy to understand that if people live in groups of 20-100 persons of which 5-15 are “warriors” that not even one person per year could have been killed in combat – not counting all other fantastic horrors of humans.
I would also argue that a neither the life of poor peasants could have been such a disaster for similar reasons. Most of the time populations increased, albeit slowly. I believe that the threat of “how life was earlier” is a hoax.
Nice one Tom. Bird watching helps with perspective like this too. They sing a lot and often seem fat and happy. Then they fly 6000 miles south only to return again next year!
“If plunged overnight into the end of civilization, we would have a rough go of it.”
I think this concern is a central piece to people’s anxiety about deindustrialization/collapse. They envision it as an overnight, sudden phenomenon and so rightly fear it. The problem is that we are doing nothing collectively to enable a slow descent.
Tyson Yunkaporta (Sand Talk, 2019) has no fears about living a ‘pre-modern’ life. On the contrary, as this quote shows:
“I am often told that I should be grateful for the progress that western civilisation has
brought to these shores. I am not. This life of work-or-die is not an improvement on pre-invasion living, which involved only a few hours of work a day for shelter and sustenance, performing tasks that people now do for leisure activities on their yearly holidays –
fishing, collecting plants, hunting, camping and so forth. The rest of the day was for fun, strengthening relationships, ritual and ceremony, cultural expression, intellectual pursuits and the expert crafting of exceptional objects.” (p. 159)
But as per a previous comment, it is how 8 billion people get to there from here – from appallingly polluted, hot and depleted places – that is the real issue. I am afraid it is going to get even harder than it already is now for literally billions of people. The best those of us who have choices in this matter can hope for – and hopefully do – is to heed the advice of John Michael Greer in The Long Descent (2008) on how to descend as gracefully as possible.
“This life of work-or-die is not an improvement on pre-invasion living, which involved only a few hours of work a day for shelter and sustenance, performing tasks that people now do for leisure activities on their yearly holidays –
fishing, collecting plants, hunting, camping and so forth. The rest of the day was for fun, strengthening relationships, ritual and ceremony, cultural expression, intellectual pursuits and the expert crafting of exceptional objects.”
Oh brother! I don’t know this person, but it sounds like this person has never lived outside a city. I grew up on a cattle farm. We weren’t a huge farm by any means, but it was a working farm where we sold our cattle at market. We also had chickens and pigs. We heated our house with firewood in the winter. We had well water to drink, and except for electricity and a home phone, we pretty much lived off the grid. It was a full time job and it was HARD work. I had to collect eggs and milk the cow before and after school, as well as feed our cattle. We made our own haybails to feed our cattle. Those were lo.ng and hot hours that involved my parents and grandparents. We also had a massive garden where we picked our fruits and vegetables and then spent long hours canning our food. We also made our own butter and cream that we sold to other people, as well as our eggs. None of this includes any maintenance on the property or barns, and long hours shoveling cow crap out of the barn, which could only be done by shovel. That was my job as a kid, as well as splitting every piece of firewood we used to heat our home. I grew up, moved away, and became a professional, as well as my wife. We raised our kids in a suburban environment where we had weekends to play ball, go to movies, and generally lived a life of relative leisure. The hardest thing my boys ever had to do was clean their room and team up to mow the yard. My kids had it easy compared to the life I lived growing up.
So, if you want to live a “pre-invasion” lifestyle where the mortality rate of children was unimaginably high, the life expectancy was, on average, really low, there was no antibiotics or antivirals, be my guest. If anyone thinks that’s an improvement, they are seriously deluded. Here’s the thing, you’re free to live a “pre-invasion” lifetyle any time you want. Make sure you give up any guns you might have. Don’t worry about bears and wolves or snakes. They just have a bad PR problem. They’re actually all very friendly. Don’t forget to give up your Netflix and Spotify accounts, too, as well as your toothpaste, toothbrush, and shampoo. It’s “pre-invasion” time, so don’t forget to give up your deodorant and feminine hygiene products, and birth control. You need to make as many babies as you can, hoping that some of them make it to adulthood.
I’m going to be laughing about this “pre-invasion” thing for a very long time.
Leaving behind the trappings of modern life equates to very poor outcomes for women. I am 55 and about to undergo a total hysterectomy to prevent cancer. I also am about to have scans for a breast lump for the 3rd time. I had two caesarians, the first one an emergency as my pelvis is too small for a baby to pass through. Without contraception women were pregnant or breast feeding most of the time with little autonomy over their bodies in many/most cultures. I could cope with giving up most of modern life but not medical care. And there is no way any semblence of modern medicine at scale will survive unplanned degrowth aka collapse. It will be terrible for everyone but women are looking at a horror future.
When I read “Do you think every waking moment is a torment of fear, and that even sleep is fitful and given to nightmares and sudden starts?” I thought “That’s us. In Modernity. Today.” Every day in my family doctor’s office I see people who are anxious, depressed and stressed, and sedatives, sleeping pills and antidepressants are among the most common medications I prescribe. We can’t possibly have evolved to be like this. This is the elephant in our room, the unacknowledged side effects of modernity.
While I started life in Los Angeles, we ended up moving to the midwest. It’s worse than you might think. We moved from the hustle and bustle of the 3rd largest metropolitan area in America to an area where my closest neighbor might be able to faintly hear me if I screamed at the top of my lungs. We lived off the land, raising our own cattle, chickens, pigs, and even multiple species of fish. We grew most of our own crops and canned our fruits and vegetables. That doesn’t include food brought in by hunting. We went to “town” about once a month to get things we couldn’t make or grow on our own. In the winter, we heated our house by firewood from trees we felled and chopped ourselves. Before school, we had to feed our cattle, milk our cow, feed our chickens and retrieve eggs, and feed our other animals. Then, I had to do it again when I got hom from school. I say all this to say I know how much work and planning it takes to live this life. My guess is that most people living in cities have no idea how to hunt and dress out any game they might catch, not to mention the people to food ratio in metropolitan areas. Once all the easy food is gone, then people will turn toward pets, then rats and mice, and finally, long-pork. At this point, good luck. Your chances of long term survial drop precipitously.
Oh, I absolutely agree, and I do make that distincting later in my comment. Anyone who thinks living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is somehow superior to how we live in America, overall, is seriously deluded. There’s a reason the global population was so small during hunter-gatherer time periods. The lifespan of the average person was very short. The people who have these ideas are typically people who feel there are too many people on the Earth and that humans are a blight on the planet. This idea isn’t new and was really taking hold in the 60’s, especially after Paul Ehrlich published his hit book, The Population Bomb. Every prediction Ehrlich made in his novel was wrong. Not just wrong, but wildly wrong. It didn’t matter and even today he’s espousing anti-human rhetoric and the philosophy continues to spread, thus, you get people espousing things like how great it was to live in a hunter-gatherer society.
There’s a lot we can learn from hunter-gatherer and other traditional cultures. As you say, we can’t copy exactly.
I think pre-invasion means a hunter-gatherer way of life, not farming which is considerably more strenuous.