No, though it is a fair question. Therapeutic Shamanism does not say that hunter-gatherers were perfect, or that anyone should live as they did; it says that, by any sane measure of a culture’s health, they were doing much better than we are now, and that their way of life is a template worth learning from. The opposite picture, of primitive people living miserable lives, is itself a story, told by the cultures that replaced them.
What exactly is being claimed? #
A comparison, not a portrait of paradise. Measured by mental health, emotional health, spiritual health, ecological health, sustainability and ethics, the animist stories hunter-gatherers lived by produced healthier cultures than ours. They had all sorts of problems of their own, and they still did better than we are doing now; for two to three hundred thousand years, humans managed better than this. It is “not about romanticising but about relativity”.1
The older debate behind the question, Hobbes’s savage against Rousseau’s noble savage, the evidence on violence, and whether this means going back to the woods, is in Isn’t the Fall just “noble savage” romanticism? This answer takes up the other sides of the question.
Is the opposite view neutral? #
Not entirely. Modern culture has been sold the idea that it is the civilised one and that everything in the last few thousand years has been advancement. The word ‘civilisation’ itself comes from civitas, the city-state cultures that began around 4000 BC, and contrasting ‘civilised’ people with ‘primitive’ ones is already a ranking. The winners write history, and the Taker winners called themselves superior and hunter-gatherers savages.2
The author Daniel Quinn calls this the Great ForgettingGreat Forgetting. Daniel Quinn’s term for the mass amnesia by which Taker culture erased the knowledge that humanity ever lived any other way, dismissing almost all of our story as ‘pre-history’. Read the full answer. Everything before the city-states, from about 4000 BC, is filed as ‘prehistory’, as if nothing important happened in it, though it covers more than ninety-nine per cent of the human story. To justify itself, Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer has to deny that there was ever a healthier alternative.2 So the charge of romanticism is not always made from neutral ground, since it can carry the assumption that the present is the peak of a long climb. See What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
Weren’t there bullies and violent people among hunter-gatherers too? #
Yes. Psychopathic traits seem to have genetic markers, with estimates of around one in twenty-five people carrying them, and there is no known reason to think this was any different in hunter-gatherer bands. The difference lay in what the band did about it: such behaviour was usually contained by the tribe, because a band that could not cooperate was a band at risk.3 Hunter-gatherers were not warlike, but they were not pacifists either, and a persistent would-be dominator could in the end be killed to protect the band.4
So the claim is not that human nature was once better. It is that these cultures handled the same human nature far more wisely. See What does ‘fiercely egalitarian’ mean?
Is this an argument against modern life? #
No. Paul Francis is not anti-civilisation: he values running water, a warm shower and a refrigerator, and modern medicine, antibiotics above all, has saved his life on at least three occasions. Recognising the benefits does not cancel the costs, though. We are living through the Anthropocene extinction, the first mass extinction caused by one species, with extinction rates up to hundreds of times above normal; deep inequality; and depression and anxiety at levels not seen before. The point is to recognise those costs and put them right, not to give up the benefits.
Aren’t indigenous peoples today being idealised? #
That would be a different claim, and not the one made here. ‘Indigenous’ and ‘hunter-gatherer’ are not the same thing. Virtually all existing shamanic societies are agricultural, genuine hunter-gatherer shamanic cultures have all but gone, and even the few nomadic animist peoples left are usually herders. Animist or not, they are to some degree affected by domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and Taker thinking.5
That is no criticism of them. Present-day animist peoples still have a much healthier relationship with the Earth than the cultures that abandoned animism, and they have kept animist knowledge alive through the dark times. The criticism is of Taker thinking, in all its forms and wherever it is found.5 See What is the difference between a hunter-gatherer and an agricultural society?
Why tell the hunter-gatherer story at all? #
Because humans are a storytelling species, and a culture is a set of stories that people live by and agree to buy into. What has gone wrong is that a set of very healthy stories has been replaced with very unhealthy ones, so the real question is which stories to live by from here. The hunter-gatherer story offers a measure: a reminder that it does not have to be like this, because once it was not. See What are the Original Instructions?
Who says the critics are right, and who disagrees? #
The psychologist Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), holds that violence has fallen from a past of “chronic raiding and feuding that characterized life in a state of nature”, and that “today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence”.6 On that view, a high opinion of foragers gets the direction of history backwards.
On the other side, the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson examined the archaeological cases Pinker lists and concludes that they are “cherry-picked cases with high casualties, clearly unrepresentative of prehistory in general”. He also points out that complex hunter-gatherers, who were settled and unequal, have a well-established reputation for war, in sharp contrast to nomadic hunter-gatherers.7
