It is possible, though, that for domestic consumption in coastal cities, desalination could eventually contribute a substantial proportion of the total. Particularly as newer technologies are developed, including nuclear desalination (making use of the heat from nuclear power plants) and reverse-osmosis approaches (where salt is removed from seawater by using a permeable membrane), desalination could become more important. Add this to the increasingly urbanized world population, throw in water-saving technologies like low-volume toilets, low-flow showers, and wastewater recycling, and it is possible to envision a time when much of the world’s population is using the limited fresh-water supplies in a more sustainable way.
The big culprits, of course, are agriculture and industry. It takes at least 1,000 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef and more than 500 gallons to produce a pound of rice. Better technologies, particularly genetic engineering to develop varieties of plants that require less water, could reduce these numbers significantly. Unfortunately, the legacy of the Green Revolution has meant that most seed companies have focused on creating herbicide-resistant strains to complement the expensive herbicides they sell—a wonderful business model, but not very wise in terms of natural resource utilization. Ultimately, even with these technologies, with a rising world population we are still likely to need far more water than we have easy access to. The only long-term solution, it seems, is to use less—something that runs against the grain of modern life.
This still leaves many people, such as the inhabitants of Africa’s Sahel region, stuck in a precarious geographic trap. They will soon no longer have enough water to sustain even the frugal lives they lead now, as the Sahara expands unrelentingly to the south. Global warming, groundwater depletion, and a long-term drying trend in the region will all combine to cause millions to flee their villages. But where will they go? How will the rest of the country, or the other countries in the region, cope with the influx? According to the Red Cross, more people are now forced to leave their homes because of environmental disasters than war, and more than 25 million people worldwide can now be classified as “environmental refugees.”
Not all of them are in the developing world, either. California may be eyeing a future of environment-induced migration, but Mississippi and Louisiana’s Gulf Coast residents may have already experienced it. When Hurricane Katrina made landfall there in 2005, more than 1 million people were forced to flee their homes. Many have not returned—it’s estimated that at least 100,000 of them are now living elsewhere. According to many climate scientists, as the earth’s temperature rises over the next century and the gulf waters become warmer, strong storms such as Katrina, which reached Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale just before making landfall, will become more frequent. Katrina could be a sign of things to come.
As with the people of Tuvalu, the earth’s changing climate will soon have a profound impact on all of us. We can choose to respond by turning a blind eye, hopeful that the effects of global warming aren’t as serious as they seem to be, or we can take the coming changes as a powerful incentive to remake both our technological and our social orders. The twenty-first century will test much of what we take for granted about our current lifestyles, and will force us to finally come to terms with the powerful transgenerational trends we unleashed during the Neolithic period. Climate change provides us with an opportunity in crisis, a powerful reason to change deeply entrenched behaviors. As a species that has long been accustomed to growth, expansion, and consumption, we will have to use our ingenuity in new ways to create a lifestyle with long-term sustainability. It’s certainly not going to be an easy transition, but just as with the other crisis points in our species’ history, we do possess the intellectual abilities to adapt. First, however, must come a sea change in our worldview.
Chapter Seven
Toward a New Mythos
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY
LAKE EYASI, TANZANIA
I spent the morning tracking animals with my friend Julius. As we walked between the trees and across the open grasslands of the savanna, he showed me the tracks of elephants, impalas, porcupines, and half a dozen other species, left like fleeting messages in the sandy soil. Julius’s ability to discern even the faintest evidence of a passing animal, gained from a lifetime of hunting, was extraordinary. He gently glided along the path, sometimes stooping to get a closer look, pausing now and again to listen, and I found watching him like observing a dancer in an unhurried but carefully choreographed outdoor ballet. While he walked, he would explain what he was doing in a soft, purring way, punctuated by the popping sounds that distinguish his language. He was passing on his rich store of knowledge to two boys from the tribe, ensuring that it didn’t die with him. Observing their interactions, I wondered how many thousands of generations had acted out this same scene, the elder teaching the old ways to the future hunters. I also wondered how much longer this would go on, with the twenty-first century rapidly encroaching on the group. Their hunting grounds were in danger of being sold to a safari outfit from the United Arab Emirates, who wanted to bring well-heeled men from the Persian Gulf here to hunt, their large-caliber guns making a mockery of Julius’s slender bow and delicate arrows.
Julius is a Hadzabe, among the last remaining members of an ancient group that has lived in Tanzania for tens of thousands of years. Their unusual language, with clicks forming a part of many words, like the Khoisan languages spoken by their hunter-gatherer cousins in southern Africa, is completely different from that spoken by the nearby Masai cattle herders. During the dry season they live in shelters made from branches and grasses woven together into a basic tentlike structure, and in the wet season they move into a cave shelter closer to Ngorongoro Crater. The location of their dry season camps is dictated by the hunt—when they kill a large animal, the entire group of twenty or so will relocate to that place. This seminomadic hunter-gatherer existence is a perfect adaptation to life on the game-rich African savanna.
Like hunter-gatherers elsewhere, the Hadzabe live with virtually no modern conveniences. Although Julius spends part of the year working as a guide and tracker at a nearby game park in order to make money to help support his family—even hunter-gatherers sometimes need medicines and other modern necessities—most of the time he chooses to live in the traditional Hadzabe way, near Lake Eyasi. This means making nearly everything, the only concessions being a few metal tools: an ax, knives, and small pieces of metal that they hammer into the tips for their arrows. To spend time living with the Hadzabe is to return to an ancient way of life, one where the term “self-sufficient” takes on new meaning. They possess a huge body of knowledge on natural history, including which plants can be eaten and which produce potent poison that can be used to kill large game; how to identify the species, age, and even the sex of the animals from their tracks; how to tell bird species from their calls; and so on. Hadzabe boys learn how to make their own arrows, carefully straightening selected branches by warming them in a fire and bending them with their teeth; then they practice shooting until they are able to hit their targets with lethal accuracy. The Hadzabe spend their evenings telling stories of recent hunts and ancient legends while sitting around a small fire, story lines punctuated with careful intonations, sound effects, and jokes. It is a rich and varied existence, and after several days of living with them I started to feel a distinct calmness, as the worries and clutter of modern life melted away. In an odd way, it felt like returning home after a long absence.
For most of us, living in the way the Hadzabe do is unimaginable. It has been so many generations since we last hunted and gathered our food that we no longer have the skills necessary to survive. The closest we typically get to hunting is searching for a parking spot in a crowded urban neighborhood or reaching for the last container of mint chocolate chip ice cream in the grocery store. The difference involves more than just how we obtain our
food, though. There’s something else about the way people like the Hadzabe live their lives, something that seems to combine so many aspects of what it means to be human, making use of so many different skills. While we may see ourselves as multitaskers, in fact the jobs most of us carry out are remarkably focused. Whether staring at a computer screen all day, sitting in meetings and making conference calls, installing kitchen appliances, playing professional baseball, or driving a truck, we live lives defined by a narrow range of skills. Perhaps this is why spending time with the Hadzabe is so liberating: it forces us to rediscover a treasure trove of long-lost abilities.
FIGURE 30: HADZABE BOW AND ARROWS.
Such an admiring view of a group like the Hadzabe runs counter to recent cultural attitudes. One of the great debates of nineteenth-century social theory concerned whether social evolution is progressive. In other words, is there some purpose to our lives, and are the exertions of the present leading us to a brighter future? Early evolutionists represented life as a great chain of being, with single-celled organisms at the bottom of the chain and humans at the top, as the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. Furthermore, even humans were divided into those who had achieved a certain level of material culture (“civilized”) and those who in some way lagged behind (“uncivilized”). Lewis Morgan, an influential nineteenth-century social theorist, wrote in his 1877 magnum opus, Ancient Society, about three stages of human cultural evolution: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Savagery was hunting and gathering, the way humanity had lived during its earliest stages of evolution. Barbarism was essentially subsistence agriculture of the type practiced during the Neolithic. Civilization was advanced agriculture, urban settlements, written language, and the rule of law. Morgan’s evolutionary approach to human cultures greatly influenced Friedrich Engels, who, of course, had his own idea of where social evolution was headed. The theme of nineteenth-century progressive thinking was that the goal of humanity was to arrive at the form of civilization found in Europe and other “advanced” societies, and that alternative ways of life were primitive and undesirable. In fact, according to Morgan, it was inevitable that cultural evolution would follow such a trajectory, with the advanced societies triumphing over those stuck in an earlier evolutionary rut.
In the case of the Hadzabe, successive waves of agriculturalists and imperial European powers took over their land, forcing them into the small enclave where fewer than two thousand scrape out a meager living today. Their lack of agriculture, land ownership, advanced tools, and money were held up as examples of why such a primitive people needed to be conquered and civilized. Their children were taken away to missionary schools, their names were changed (Julius’s real name is !Um!um!ume, with the exclamation mark representing the tsk sound you might use when scolding a child), their culture represented as backward and undeserving of preservation, and their land given to other people by the Tanzanian government. With the rise in cultural relativism in twentieth-century anthropological thinking, it was eventually possible to appreciate the variety of human cultures as equally valid, but this shift in attitude was nearly too late for the Hadzabe and other hunter-gatherer groups around the world, for whom the damage was already done. Today, if they still follow a traditional way of life at all, it is as part of a conscious effort, effectively making themselves into living museum pieces as a cultural statement or for tourist dollars.
We have seen elsewhere in this book how and why the cultural progression away from hunting and gathering took place, and the effects it has had on our bodies, our society, and our planet. What I’m focusing on in this final chapter is less quantifiable and more subtle: the effects on our “moral compasses.” How do we define morality in today’s complex world? Is it possible to learn anything from people like the Hadzabe who live outside the mainstream of modern society in a way that our ancestors did during the many millions of years that our brains and behavioral norms were evolving? Clearly there can be no easy answers to questions like these, as they involve many complex philosophical ideas. However, taking an evolutionary view of how our moral systems came into being is a worthwhile exercise. Many people today would argue that modern society lacks morality. If so, how did we reach this point? One has only to look at the events of September 11, 2001, to understand that something, somewhere is not right.
How we turn our collective moral compass in a positive and sustainable direction and at the same time try to deal with technological advances in fields like genetics and the effects of global warming is one of the great problems of this century. It is also probably the most difficult to solve, if it can indeed be said to be solvable, as there are so many competing interpretations of morality. Philosophers, religious leaders, writers, legal scholars, and politicians have spent thousands of years trying to develop a coherent ethical framework for living one’s life, for knowing what is “right” and what is “wrong,” and for providing guidance in even the most trivial scenarios (think of newspaper advice columns). To attempt to survey the entire field of thought is not only impossible, it’s perhaps even counterproductive. Sometimes it is worth starting with a blank page and trying to reconstruct how we arrived at our present situation—in other words, taking a scientific and historical approach to a very modern problem. So let’s begin with a mathematical approach.
PRISONERS, METAETHICS, AND GREED
Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics developed by the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1944, with the economist Oskar Morgenstern, he published the hugely influential book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The basic idea is to take social situations and formalize them as “games” that can be analyzed using mathematics. This approach to human behavior has subsequently been widely applied not only in economics but also in other social and biological sciences. In fact, it is one of the most influential developments in twentieth-century mathematics.
One of the classic problems investigated by game theoreticians was developed in the 1950s. Known as the prisoner’s dilemma, it provides a framework in which to investigate the development of morality. The scenario is as follows: two suspects are arrested for a crime that they may have committed and are separated at the station house. The police don’t have enough evidence to convict, but by keeping them separate during the interrogation they hope to get one prisoner to betray the other. If this happens the betrayer will be released and the betrayed will receive a sentence of ten years in prison. If both betray each other, each will receive a sentence of five years. If, on the other hand, neither betrays the other, each will receive only six months in prison. What should they do, in a rational world?
A careful mathematical analysis reveals that the most rational strategy is for each prisoner to betray the other, since there is a chance that the other person won’t betray you and you’ll go free. This is known as the classical prisoner’s dilemma. If, on the other hand, the game is played many times in succession, it is known as the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. If the prisoners know that the game will be played only a specified number of times, then the best solution is still for each person to betray the other. If, however, the number of rounds is unknown, a new strategy becomes more successful: each player not betraying the other, so that they each spend six months in prison. In the parlance of the game theory field, it becomes evolutionarily stable to cooperate, since you don’t know how many times you will be playing again in the future, and if you betray the other prisoner in this round, he or she could betray you in the next.
Obviously, such a simple game is a gross simplification of human social interactions, but it does give us a tool to begin to dissect what we mean by good—in other words, how morality can be defined, and how notions of good and bad might have arisen in the first place. In the case of the prisoners, each knows that there is a chance in any given turn that he or she will be betrayed by the other, and that if this happens the next round could result in retaliation. The fear of retaliation, in effec
t, keeps one’s baser instincts in check. After all, it’s better to spend six months in jail than five or ten years, even if this means giving up the chance of going free. Such an approach to the concept of cooperation was outlined—without his knowing about the prisoner’s dilemma, of course—by Plato in his Republic. In Book II, one of the characters, Glaucon, describes the origins of morality as a compromise between the desire to do injustice—to betray, in prisoner-speak—and the knowledge that injustice might happen to you. This contrasts with Socrates’s view that there is something inherently desirable about being just, or moral, even if there is no threat of punishment.
These two opposing views of morality have been debated ever since Plato’s day, and no clear winner has emerged. The field of philosophy known as metaethics attempts to answer questions about the origins of morality and what one should do in various situations. Is ethical behavior defined only in reference to a particular society, for instance, or are there universals that would be regarded as moral by everyone? It certainly isn’t possible in this chapter to examine the entire history of this quest for moral explanations, but what seems to be clear is that there probably are some universals, and that they likely extend from the sort of conundrum posed by the prisoner’s dilemma. In human society, no one is a free agent; our actions always have potential impacts on others. Most laws in modern secular society derive from this premise, and punishments are meted out for people whose actions impinge on others’ lives: murder, assault, theft, or behaviors that might increase the likelihood of these happening (e.g., driving at double the speed limit while intoxicated).
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