Nomad’s Land
In his short, poignant 2016 book Tribe, journalist Sebastian Junger opens with a surprising claim: As the United States expanded west to conquer the continent, there was always a societal pull for the European newcomers to abandon their comfortable modern lives and to join the primitive nomadic tribal cultures that were struggling to survive in the face of invasion. Most surprising to me was that I had previously understood the reverse to be true: that the primitive nomadic tribesmen had gladly abandoned their primitive ways and tried to adopt what they viewed as lives of happy wealth. Examples here included the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of the eastern states prior to the Indian Removal Act. (I use the term “primitive” here to reflect an historic set of assumptions about indigenous peoples, fully aware of its inherent prejudice and self-flattering unfairness.) But I should add that Junger backs up his claim with several quotes from the likes of Benjamin Franklin and others from the colonial period.
Unlike the natural sciences, the human (and sometimes biological) sciences can yield findings that appear contradictory, but actually represent aspects of reality that are true in different contexts, sometimes at the same time. So Junger’s exists alongside its opposite: that Anglo settlers freely gave up their relative material comforts to join nomadic hunter-gatherer clans or that indigenous people abandoned their cultures for a richer Anglo lifestyle. Both were true simultaneously.
As Charles C. Mann describes the first encounters between North American civilizations and English colonists in his magnificent 2011 book 1493, the civilizational distance between the cultures was not that great. (Both were similarly primitive, to use the dated term.) The Native Americans that inhabited today’s New England—where the cultures intermingled extensively for the first time a half millennium ago—were not significantly behind the newcomers in terms of standards of living or civilizational progress. The Europeans lived in small, smoke-filled hovels on subsistence farms, mostly sharing their homes with their livestock, whose infectious diseases they had grown immune to over generations. The Native Americans lived in similar smokey housing, but without the animal waste inside, subsisting on less intensive agriculture. The natives managed wild animals for hunting. While much is made of European gun technology in warfare, it was not that much deadlier or effective than what the weaponry indigenous people used. The technology of steel weapons was a greater help than guns, but the spread of European disease ahead of population contacts was the greatest advantage of all, even if entirely accidental.
It was the European diseases that wiped out the Native Americans in untold numbers, permanently halting technological and societal progress—a point also brought to life in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). As Mann describes it, Europeans moving into the New World soon encountered the surviving members of a disease-reduced human population on a scale that historians and archeologists have only come to terms with over the past 50 years or so. The Europeans assumed these indigenous people were scarce and culturally backward, while in fact whole entire villages, tribal lineages, and even languages and cultures were obliterated by disease before European eyes ever beheld them. The native cultures were rendered primitive when deaths from infection killed off enough of the adults in these non-literate socieities that generations of collective learning vanished with them forever.
What is our attachment to place? Is it cultural? Is it based on the physical geography? Human geography distinguishes between push and pull migration. Did our forebears hope to give up modernity and flee to relative primitivism? Did the native populations decimated by disease hope to flee hunter-gatherer living for the relative comforts of a culture that offered technological improvement?
Is this still something we dream of doing: fleeing modernity in pursuit of a simpler, healthier life away from technology? Do we abandon the old ways and traditions in favor of the promises of technology and innovation? Or is merely having the dream and never acting on it the real preferred choice?
It’s a bit more of a rambling jumble today than perhaps usual, but the subject of modernism and nostalgia for a pre-modern simple life caused me to revisit a few of my favorite books of this new century so far. The most interesting books are the ones that provide answers, inspiring more questions.
My promised post about German compound words is now up in the comments on Wednesday's G-File, "The Problem With Einfuhlung."
I am so sorry I missed discussion of this yesterday!
It is great to be in a place where people talk about books I have actually read and found really interesting!