Wretched or contented? The politics
of past lives
Eckersley, R. 2008. Wretched or contented? The politics of past
lives. Ockham’s Razor, ABC Radio National, 24 February.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2008/2168740.htm#transcript
Richard Eckersley
An
enduring myth of modern times is that life before it was miserable.
In the oft-quoted words of 17th century English
philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the life of man in his natural state was
‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
A good
example of the Hobbesian school of thought is Bjorn Lomborg's
controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the
Real State of the World. Lomborg includes a long quotation from
the historian, Lawrence Stone, which he also paraphrases in his
final chapter: ‘We are no longer almost chronically ill, our breaths
stinking of rotting teeth, with festering sores, eczema, scabs, and
suppurating boils’. He uses this to warn against ‘a scary
idealisation of our past’ and as a descriptive benchmark against
which to judge progress. It is recited as if it represents the human
condition before we discovered material affluence.
I have
travelled through many poor African and Asian countries; the
description applies to no communities I saw. Nor does it fit many
other societies and times, including indigenous and hunter-gatherer
peoples. Stone’s description is of one time and place, England in
the 18th century – a period of rapid population growth
and large-scale social dislocation as rural people flocked to the
cities.
We
might compare it with this assessment of life in medieval England in
The Year 1000, by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger: ‘We have
more wealth, both personal and national, better technology, and
infinitely more skilful ways of preserving and extending our lives.
But whether we today display more wisdom or common humanity is an
open question, and as we look back to discover how people coped with
the daily difficulties of existence a thousand years ago, we might
also consider whether, in all our sophistication, we could meet the
challenges of their world with the same fortitude, good humour, and
philosophy.’
The
Hobbesian perspective also contrasts with the picture of Aboriginal
life in Treading Lightly: The Hidden Wisdom of the World’s Oldest
People, by Karl-Erik Sveiby and Tex Skuthorpe. Indigenous
Australians have the longest continuous cultural history in the
world. Their traditional ways of living were devastated by the
arrival of Europeans, but early accounts suggest a life of relative
abundance and ease. People spent between two and five hours a day
gathering and preparing food; there were seasonal fluctuations but,
except during extreme drought, it was not hard work. They spent a
few hours more on making tools and shelters, allowing the rest of
the day to be spent on ‘intangibles’.
Sveiby and Skuthorpe say spiritual life was much more significant
than material life for the Australian Aboriginal people. ‘Instead of
putting their surplus energy into squeezing more food out of the
land, Aborigines expended it on intangibles: spiritual, intellectual
and artistic activities. They carried their palaces on their backs,
their cathedrals were built in their minds and they felt no need to
glorify human heroes. It is in the mind and the creativity of the
spirit… that Aboriginal society stands out.’ This created a
psychology that was completely disinterested in acquiring and
possessing material things.
James
Cook noted in his journal after his visit to Australia in 1770:
‘From what I have said of the Natives of New Holland they may appear
to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth; but in reality
they are far happier than we Europeans...the earth and the sea of
their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for
life...’
It
doesn’t make evolutionary sense to think we lived miserable lives
for a million years or two until we discovered economic growth and
material progress. Why would we be unhappy in the natural habitat to
which we were biologically and psychologically adapted? It’s not how
wild animals are (they are mostly fit and healthy), and we have
been, for most of our time on earth, animals in the wild.
It’s
true that life was shorter in the past. The dramatic rise in life
expectancy, which globally has more than doubled in the last 200
years, is one of humanity’s greatest achievements (although it was
never an explicit goal of governments and is the result of more than
increasing wealth).
In
The Biology of Civilisation, human ecologist Stephen Boyden says
life expectancy in hunter-gatherer populations was much lower than
in rich countries today, but probably higher than in most urban
societies before the 20th century. Injury was a common
risk and often led to infection. Serious illness was a greater
threat to survival; people either recovered quickly – or they died.
On the
other hand, he says, most people were well nourished and they did
not suffer the infectious diseases of urban societies or the chronic
non-communicable diseases associated with modern diets and
lifestyles. ‘Furthermore, I strongly suspect that most of the time
most humans, like other animals living in their natural habitat,
were more or less enjoying themselves.’
Life expectancy figures are deceptive and often misunderstood. They
represent the number of years people can, on average, expect to live
at prevailing mortality rates. One thousand years ago life
expectancy was only about 24, but this was in part because a third
of people died in the first year of life. When I pointed this out
last year to an American colleague who had quoted Hobbes in a
journal paper, he asked what life expectancy would be if you
adjusted for these infant deaths.
I put this to ANU biostatistician Keith Dear, who did some quick
back-of-the-envelope calculations. If life expectancy was 24 and a
third of the infants died at age zero (you could say six months but
it makes little difference) then the other two thirds of the
population would live an average 36 years. If, hypothetically, a
third of those who survived their first year died before age five
(say at age two on average), then the remainder would have a life
expectancy of 53.
So
those who survived childhood would often live much longer than the
life expectancy estimates. The Bible gives the human lifespan
as three score years and ten (70). Hobbes himself, pessimist though
he was, lived to over 90.
Dear and I asked another ANU colleague, demographer Bruce Caldwell,
about these matters. Caldwell pointed out that Sveiby and
Skuthorpe’s description of Aboriginal society echoed that of
Marshall Sahlins in a famous 1966 paper, The Original Affluent
Society, which argued that hunter-gatherers had (and have) less
wants than Western materialistic people and could meet them more
easily.
Caldwell said that while he would not describe anyone as being like
Hobbesian man he was a little worried about exaggerating the case. A
high proportion of mortality was infant and child mortality and
adults were comparatively healthy, but there was still a lot of
capricious adult mortality.
Caldwell said that Western observers were notoriously unreliable on
both sides - some were capable of seeing people as wretched and
others as strong, healthy individuals, even in the midst of famine.
‘My guess is that, in general, both were wild exaggerations based
more on preconceptions than proper observation. Cook's observations
of course were one of the bases for the concept of the noble savage
- itself a very misleading notion.’
So perceptions of
past life are often tainted by modern political inclinations.
Defenders and advocates of continuing material progress use the
Hobbesian view to promote their case. Its critics (myself included)
lean towards a more benign view of the past to make the point that
how well we live is more than a matter of how long we live.
In The Skeptical
Environmentalist, Lomborg concludes that mankind’s lot has
improved vastly in every significant measurable field and that it is
likely to continue to do so. ‘Children born today – in both the
industrialised world and developing countries – will live longer and
be healthier, they will get more food, a better education, a higher
standard of living, more leisure time and far more possibilities –
without the global environment being destroyed. And that is a
beautiful world.’
Lomborg attributes
this progress almost wholly to economic growth and development,
overlooking the contribution of many other social changes over this
period. His basic premise is that the world is getting better
because we are getting richer and ‘we have become richer…primarily
because of our fundamental organisation in a market economy’.
This is, broadly
speaking, the view of progress that underpins the policies of
governments around the world, including in rich countries like
Australia: strong economic growth has been, and remains, the
foundation on which to build a better life.
While acknowledging
the benefits (including longer life), I challenge the almost
exclusive focus on material wellbeing (as well as the
underestimation of environmental constraints). Emotional, social and
spiritual wellbeing barely register in this view of progress. And it
is in these areas that progress has become most problematic,
especially in rich nations.
These concerns are
not just self-indulgent existential angst, as implied in the
expression Lomborg cites: ‘No food, one problem. Much food, many
problems’. The dismissal of the non-material aspects of life flies
in the face of human history and a huge body of psychological and
other knowledge about the importance to human health and wellbeing
of qualities such as meaning, belonging, identity and security.
My doctor once commented of medicine: ‘Before
we just tried to keep people alive; now people are staying alive,
but they’re not very happy’. Similarly,
governments might well say: ‘Before we just tried to make people
richer; now they are rich, but they’re not very happy’. Instead of
asking what this means, governments remain focused on making us
richer still.
Prosperity isn’t enough anymore. Costs to quality of life can
no longer be regarded as unfortunate side-effects of a model of
progress whose effects remain largely beneficial. Instead they need
to be seen as a direct and fundamental consequence of how we
currently define and pursue progress. It's not so much money, or
possessions, or growth per se that matter, but the importance
attached to them, personally and socially, which crowds out other
things important to wellbeing. To put it another way, materialism is
culturally hostile to personal, social and spiritual relationships.
I’m aware of at
least ten reports and studies released in Australia in the past year
that reveal deepening social divisions; our sense of being pressured
and stressed; the burden of mental illness; our concerns about the
future; the widening gap between the ‘official’, or orthodox, future
political leaders promise and the future we want. Add to these the
stream of reports and new evidence on environmental threats such as
global warming, resource depletion and species extinction and their
potential costs, and you have a compelling case for redefining
progress.
Sveiby
and Skuthorpe say in Treading Lightly that traditional
Aboriginal society provides a model or recipe for sustainability.
But the word that came to my mind was that this was a parable or
allegory for our times, an extremely important one. The moral is not
that we could or should adopt an indigenous lifestyle, but that we
need to recognise that other, quite different, and even better, ways
of making sense of the world and our lives are possible. And not
only that: we need to examine our present situation at this most
fundamental level if we are to have any chance of achieving a high,
equitable and durable quality of life.
The
writer C S Lewis once cautioned against the ‘snobbery of
chronology’: the assumption that because we have come later, we know
better. It’s a warning we should heed, especially at this moment in
history.
Richard Eckersley is a founding director of Australia 21, a
public-interest research company, a visiting fellow at the National
Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, ANU, and author of
‘Well & Good’ (Text, 2005).