No. The charge is that the Fall paints people before farming as naturally good, the “noble savage” of romantic fantasy, and projects modern discontents onto a past that cannot answer back. Therapeutic Shamanism rejects that picture as firmly as it rejects the opposite one, Hobbes’s “nasty, brutish and short” savage. Hunter-gatherers had hardships, conflicts and flaws, and the claim is only that, on the evidence, they were doing much better than we are at living well with each other and the Earth.
What is the “noble savage” charge? #
That the story of the Fall is a golden-age myth in modern dress. The idea of the noble savage, usually linked with the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though he never used the phrase (it first appears in John Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada, 1672), is that people living outside civilisation are naturally good and that civilisation corrupts them. The anthropologist Manvir Singh raises the same concern about the related idea that early humans shared everything. “Primitive communism is appealing. It endorses an Edenic image of humanity, one in which modernity has corrupted our natural goodness.”1 Steve Taylor’s book The Fall, from which Therapeutic Shamanism takes the name, has itself been questioned for romanticising hunter-gatherer lifestyles, a criticism that is, to a certain extent, fair.2
Does Therapeutic Shamanism say hunter-gatherers lived in paradise? #
No. “I am fully aware that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were not living in paradise. I am no such romantic!” They had sickness, injuries, conflicts, bereavements, times of scarcity and bad weather to deal with.3 Lots of children did not live to adulthood, many women died in childbirth, and “people are people, and there are bound to have been tensions and conflicts both within and between tribes.”4 “We’re not putting hunter-gatherers on some pedestal. I mean, they had all sorts of their own problems and things, but they were demonstrably doing better than we are now.” See What was hunter-gatherer life really like?
Which two myths does it set aside? #
Both of the old ones. The first is the view of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his book Leviathan (1651), that life before government was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. That became the story colonial culture told, and portraying hunter-gatherers as violent and savage “can be used (and has been used) to justify” arriving in their lands to ‘save’ them from their own barbarity.5 The second is the noble savage, which puts those same cultures on a pedestal. Therapeutic Shamanism does neither, and looks instead at what the evidence shows.
So what exactly is the claim? #
A claim about relative health, not about perfection. “Again, this is not about romanticising but about relativity.” Hunter-gatherer cultures were not living some idyllic existence, but relative to the agriculturalists who came after them, “they had a much healthier relationship with the Earth and with the non-human Peoples.”6 That they lived in a better relationship with the Earth than we do is, for us, literally true, a matter of logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this and not only of myth. “Again, this is not about romanticising hunter-gatherer cultures at all. They had their problems and flaws, but it is just a fact that, whatever their other issues, they were living in a vastly more harmonious relationship with the earth than we are now.”7
The anthropology is kept to what is known, with no superpowers added and no idyll painted. “They were just people. Human beings with flaws like us.”7
What does the evidence say, and who disputes it? #
How violent and how equal early humans were is still disputed. The archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996), holds that warfare before civilisation was common, with high rates of death.8 Manvir Singh says that hunter-gatherers shared because they had to, and that most balanced sharing with special rights, so they were not simply communist.9
On the other side, the anthropologists Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg, looking at nomadic foragers alone, conclude that their social organisation “is not conducive to making war”, though fighting and killing do occur.10 And Therapeutic Shamanism points out that most of Keeley’s examples “are not in fact examples of hunter-gatherer cultures, but settled, agricultural cultures.”11 See Who is Steve Taylor, and what is his idea of “the Fall”? and What did Richard Lee learn from the !Kung about sharing?
Isn’t a golden-age story still just a story? #
It is, and it is meant to be. Stories of a golden age, when humans lived in harmony with nature and could talk to the animals, and of how we lost our way and found it again, are found in native cultures all over the world. “Hunter-gatherer people were not stupid. They knew that stories about an earlier golden age were mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this.”12 The point of such stories was not to tell a factual truth about the past but to remind people how to be and to hold them to account. The West’s nearest equivalent, the Garden of Eden, has become a story about the Fall itself.13
So the Fall is held in two ways at once, as logos, a claim about the record that can be checked, and as mythos, a guiding story of a time when we were doing better than this, which every culture needs. Holding both is what keeps it from becoming either nostalgia or propaganda. See What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
Does it mean we should go back to living as hunter-gatherers? #
No. With human numbers as they are, “our future does not lie in all of us abandoning technology and going to live in the woods by foraging”; billions of people trying it would be a disaster for the countryside. Not everything in the modern world is bad either, and modern medicine is one of the good things in it. The task is to face what is wrong, and to find new solutions, for which “the healthiest template on which we can base them will usually be found in the wisdom of our animist, Leaver-cultureLeaver culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the animist tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers above all, who took only as much as they needed and left the rest, living in reciprocal right-relationship for the vast majority of human history. Read the full answer ancestors.”14 See What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
