Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (36 page)

Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus’s penis was—a good three feet.

I didn’t know what to say to this. I had no idea whether a Pirahã male had pretended to be Jesus and pretended to have a long penis, faking it in some way, or what else could be behind this report. Clearly Kaaxaóoi wasn’t making this up. He was reporting it as a fact that he was concerned about. Later, when I questioned two other men from his village, they confirmed his story.

The difficulty at the core of my reason for being among the Pirahãs was that the message that I had staked my life and career on did not fit the Pirahãs’ culture. At the very least, one lesson to draw here was that my confidence in the universal appeal of the spiritual message I was bringing was ill-founded. The Pirahãs were not in the market for a new worldview. And they could defend their own just fine. Had I taken the time to read about the Pirahãs before visiting them the first time, I would have learned that missionaries had been trying to convert them for over two hundred years. From the first record of contact with the Pirahãs and the Muras, a closely related people, in the eighteenth century, they had developed a reputation for “recalcitrance”—no Pirahãs are known to have “converted” at any period of their history. Not that this knowledge would have dissuaded me. Like all new missionaries, I was prepared to sweep aside mere facts and believe that my faith would ultimately overcome any obstacles. But the Pirahãs did not feel lost, so they didn’t feel a need to be “saved” either.

The immediacy of experience principle means that if you haven’t experienced something directly, your stories about it are largely irrelevant. This renders them relatively impermeable to missionary efforts based on stories of the long-ago past that no one alive has witnessed. And this explains why they have resisted missionaries for so long. Creation myths are no match for this demand for evidence.

Surprisingly, this all resonated with me. The Pirahãs’ refusal to believe something just because I said they should was not completely unexpected. I never believed that missionary work would be easy. But there was more to the reaction I was having than this. The Pirahãs’ rejection of the gospel caused me to question my own faith. This surprised me. I was no novice, after all. I had graduated at the top of my class from Moody Bible Institute. I had preached on the streets of Chicago, spoken in rescue missions, gone door-to-door, and debated atheists and agnostics in my own culture. I was well trained in apologetics and personal evangelism.

But I had now also been trained as a scientist, where evidence was crucial, where I would demand for any claim evidence similar to what the Pirahãs were now requesting of me. I did not have the evidence that they wanted. I only had subjective support for what I was saying, my own feelings.

Another edge to the Pirahãs’ challenge was my growing respect for them. There was so much about them that I admired. They were a sovereign people. And they were in effect telling me to peddle my goods elsewhere. They were telling me that my message had no purchase among them.

All the doctrines and faith I had held dear were a glaring irrelevancy in this culture. They were superstition to the Pirahãs. And they began to seem more and more like superstition to me.

I began to seriously question the nature of faith, the act of believing in something unseen. Religious books like the Bible and the Koran glorified this kind of faith in the nonobjective and counterintuitive—life after death, virgin birth, angels, miracles, and so on. The Pirahãs’ values of immediacy of experience and demand for evidence made all of this seem deeply dubious. Their own beliefs were not in the fantastic and miraculous but in spirits that were in fact creatures of their environment, creatures that did normal kinds of things (whether or not I thought they were real). There was no sense of sin among the Pirahãs, no need to “fix” mankind or even themselves. There was acceptance for things the way they are, by and large. No fear of death. Their faith was in themselves. This was not the first time I had questioned my faith. Brazilian intellectuals, my own hippie background, and a lot of reading had already raised doubts. But the Pirahãs were the last straw.

So, sometime in the late 1980s, I came to admit to myself alone that I no longer believed in any article of faith or in anything supernatural. I was a closet atheist. And I was not proud of it. I was terrified that someone I loved might find out. I knew that eventually I must tell them. But in the meantime, I feared the consequences.

There is a sense among missionaries and their financial backers that missionary work is a noble challenge—a feeling that you are putting your money where your mouth is when you volunteer to go to dangerous and difficult parts of the world in order to serve Jesus. And when the missionary arrives, he or she usually is able to begin right away a life that at once combines adventure with altruism. Obviously, this is tempered by the missionary’s desire to convert people to his or her own concept of truth, but worse things are known and the relative effect of proselytizing varies from people to people.

When I reached the place where I was finally prepared to take the consequences and let someone else know about my “deconversion,”some two decades had elapsed since my initial doubts. And, as I expected, when I finally announced my change of belief, it had severe consequences for me personally. It’s a difficult decision for anyone to tell his closest friends and family that he no longer shares their foundational beliefs—the beliefs that make them who they are. It must be something like coming out as gay to unsuspecting close friends and family.

In the end, my loss of religion and the epistemological crisis that accompanied it led to the breakup of my family—what I most wanted to avoid.

The missionary martyr to the Huaorani people, Jim Elliot, said once, in a line that affected me for many years after I read it, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” He meant, of course, that giving up this world, which we cannot keep, is a small price to pay to know God and dwell in a heaven that we cannot lose.

I have given up what I could not keep, my faith, to gain what I cannot lose, freedom from what Thomas Jefferson called “tyranny of the mind”—following outside authorities rather than one’s own reason.

The Pirahãs made me question concepts of truth that I had long adhered to and lived by. The questioning of my faith in God, coupled with life among the Pirahãs, led me to question what is perhaps an even more fundamental component of modern thought, the concept of truth itself. Indeed, I decided that I lived under a delusion—the delusion of truth. God and truth are two sides of the same coin. Life and mental well-being are hindered by both, at least if the Pirahãs are right. And their quality of inner life, their happiness and contentment, strongly supports their values.

From the time we are born we try to simplify the world around us. For it is too complicated for us to navigate; there are too many sounds, too many sights, too many stimuli for us to take even a single step unless we can decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore. In specific intellectual domains we call our attempts at simplification “hypotheses” and “theories.” Scientists invest their careers and energies in certain attempts at simplification. They request money from funding organizations to travel to or to build some new environment in which to test their simplifying scheme.

But this type of “elegance theorizing” (getting results that are “pretty” rather than particularly useful) began to satisfy me less and less. People who contribute to such programs usually see themselves as working toward a closer relationship to truth. But as the American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James reminded us, we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. We are no more nor less than evolved primates. It is rather ridiculous to think that the universe is a virgin saving herself for us. We are all too often the three blind men describing an elephant; or the man who looks on the wrong side of the road for his keys, simply because the light is better there.

The Pirahãs are firmly committed to the pragmatic concept of utility. They don’t believe in a heaven above us, or a hell below us, or that any abstract cause is worth dying for. They give us an opportunity to consider what a life without absolutes, like righteousness or holiness and sin, could be like. And the vision is appealing.

Is it possible to live a life without the crutches of religion and truth?The Pirahãs do so live. They share some of our concerns, of course, since many of our concerns derive from our biology, independent of our culture (our cultures attribute meanings to otherwise ineffable, but no less real, concerns). But they live most of their lives outside these concerns because they have independently discovered the usefulness of living one day at a time. The Pirahãs simply make the immediate their focus of concentration, and thereby, at a single stroke, they eliminate huge sources of worry, fear, and despair that plague so many of us in Western societies.

They have no craving for truth as a transcendental reality. Indeed, the concept has no place in their values. Truth to the Pirahãs is catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children, loving your brother, dying of malaria. Does this make them more primitive? Many anthropologists have suggested so, which is why they are so concerned about finding out the Pirahãs’ notions about God, the world, and creation.

But there is an interesting alternative way to think about things. Perhaps it is the presence of these concerns that makes a culture more primitive, and their absence that renders a culture more sophisticated. If that is true, the Pirahãs are a very sophisticated people. Does this sound far-fetched? Let’s ask ourselves if it is more sophisticated to look at the universe with worry, concern, and a belief that we can understand it all, or to enjoy life as it comes, recognizing the likely futility of looking for truth or God?

The Pirahãs have built their culture around what is useful to their survival. They don’t worry about what they don’t know, nor do they think they can or do know it all. Likewise, they do not crave the products of others’ knowledge or solutions. Their views, not so much as I summarize them dryly here, but as they are lived out in the Pirahãs’ daily lives, have been extremely helpful to me and persuasive as I have looked at my own life and the beliefs that I held, many of them without warrant. Much of what I am today, including my nontheistic view of the world, I owe at least in part to the Pirahãs.

Epilogue                  Why Care about Other
Cultures and Languages?

T
he Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project is housed at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. The project is funded by a donation of £20 million from Lisbet Rausing, the daughter of Hans Rausing. The goal of the project is to document languages from around the world that are in danger of extinction.

Why would anyone give £20 million sterling to study languages spoken mainly by powerless tribal people in parts of the world that are, to put it lightly, off the beaten tourist trails? After all, one could easily make the case that languages come and go and that their disappearance, or their spread, or the emergence of new languages, is governed by the forces of natural selection. A dying tongue is an inconvenience for those who need to learn a new language because their own is no longer viable, but little more than that. In fact, if one believes that the Tower of Babel was either literally a curse or merely symbolic of some human problems, reducing the number of spoken languages and homogenizing or “globalizing” human languages could be viewed as a good thing.

On the Rausing Project’s Web site, they put part of their rationale for the interest in endangered languages this way:

This sounds persuasive to me. Think of what the Pirahãs’ combination of language and culture has taught us about human cognition. Now think of all the similar lessons that could be learned from other endangered languages.

Languages become endangered for at least two reasons. They are endangered when the people who speak them are in danger. The Pirahãs are down to less than four hundred speakers. They are a fragile people because they have little resistance to outside diseases and are being exposed more and more to the outside world, often with the government of Brazil exercising little effective control over who enters their reservation. So the Pirahã language is endangered because the Pirahã people are endangered—their survival as a people is threatened.

Another reason that languages become endangered is what we might call the effect of “market forces” or natural selection. The speakers of some minority languages, such as Irish, Diegueño, Banawá, and others, begin to switch to national languages (English, Portuguese, and so on) because it is economically advantageous to do so. Banawá speakers of Brazil move off their land to work for Brazilians because they have come to rely on industrialized goods. This in turn places them in environments where speaking their own language can make them the object of ridicule, and where, in any case, Portuguese is the only language that is useful for working with Brazilians. So Banawá has begun to disappear.

In this second sense, however, the Pirahã language is not endangered because the Pirahãs are not interested in using Portuguese, or any other language, at all. Certainly they feel no pressure to stop speaking Pirahã in favor of any other language.

A more general question worth asking in light of our discussion of the uniqueness of pairings of languages and culture is: What is the loss to those of us who don’t speak the language that has disappeared? Is there really any loss to us? Clearly there is.

The number of languages actually spoken in the world at a given moment of human history is but a small fragment of the perhaps infinitely large total number of possible human languages. A language is a repository of specialized cultural experiences. When a language is lost, we lose the knowledge of that language’s words and grammar. Such knowledge can never be recovered if the language has not been studied or recorded. Not all of this knowledge is of immediate practical benefit, of course, but all of it is vital in teaching us different ways of thinking about life, of approaching our day-to-day existence on planet Earth.

One of the groups I have studied in addition to the Pirahãs is the Banawás, one of the Amazonian Indian peoples that make curare, a fast-acting and deadly strychnine-based poison used on blowgun darts and arrows. The ability to make this poison is the result of centuries of lore and experimentation, encoded in the Banawás’ language in the terms for plants and procedures. All this is in danger of being lost, as the last seventy remaining Banawá speakers gradually switch to Portuguese.

For many people, like the Banawás, the loss of their language brings loss of identity and sense of community, loss of traditional spirituality, and even loss of the will to live. To save languages like Banawá, Pirahã, and thousands of others around the world will require a massive effort by linguists, anthropologists, and other interested individuals. We need, at a minimum, to identify which languages are endangered around the world, to learn enough about each of them to produce a dictionary, a grammar, and a written form of the language, to train native speakers of these languages as teachers and linguists, and to secure government support for protecting and respecting these languages and their speakers. This is a daunting task, but a vital one.

The view of this book is that every language and culture pair shows us something unique about the way that one subset of our species has evolved to deal with the world around it. Each people solves linguistic, psychological, social, and cultural problems in different ways. When a language dies without documentation, we lose a piece of the puzzle of the origin of human language. But perhaps more important, humanity loses an example of how to live, of how to survive in the world around us. With terrorism and fundamentalism threatening to sever the ties of trust and common expectations that bind societies together, the examples of endangered languages become ever more precious and their loss ever more damaging to our hopes for survival as a species.

Groups like the Pirahãs offer novel, deeply useful, and alternative examples of how to deal with perennial and ubiquitous problems such as violence, rape, racism, the treatment of disabled members of society, child-parent relations, and so on. The fact, for example, that no Amazonian group that I have worked with has “motherese,” or baby talk—that is, a special, watered-down way of talking to little children—is interesting. The Pirahãs’ lack of baby talk seems to be based on the belief of Pirahã adults that all members of the society are equal and thus that children should not be treated any differently from adults, by and large. Everyone has responsibility for the community and everyone is cared for by the community.

Looking more closely at Pirahã language and culture, there are other, equally important lessons for us. The Pirahãs show no evidence of depression, chronic fatigue, extreme anxiety, panic attacks, or other psychological ailments common in many industrialized societies. But this psychological well-being is not due, as some might think, to a lack of pressure. It is ethnocentric to suppose that only industrialized societies can produce psychological pressure, or that psychological difficulties are found only in such societies.

True, the Pirahãs don’t have to worry about paying their bills on time or which college to select for their children. But they do have life-threatening physical ailments (such as malaria, infection, viruses, leish-maniasis, and so on). And they have love lives. And they need to provide food every day for their families. They have high infant mortality. They regularly face dangerous reptiles, mammals, bugs, and other creatures. They live with threats of violence from outsiders who frequently invade their land. When I am there, with a much easier life than the Pirahãs themselves have, I still find that there is plenty for me to get worked up about. The thing is, I do get worked up, but they do not.

I have never heard a Pirahã say that he or she is worried. In fact, so far as I can tell, the Pirahãs have no word for
worry
in their language. One group of visitors to the Pirahãs, psychologists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Brain and Cognitive Science Department, commented that the Pirahãs appeared to be the happiest people they had ever seen. I asked them how they could test such a statement. They replied that one way might be to measure the time that the average Pirahã spends smiling and laughing and then to compare this with the number of minutes members of other societies, such as Americans, spend smiling and laughing. They suggested that the Pirahãs would win hands down. In the more than twenty isolated Amazonian groups I have studied over the past thirty years, only the Pirahãs manifest this unusual happiness. Many others, if not all, that I have studied are often sullen and withdrawn, torn between the desire to maintain their cultural autonomy and to acquire the goods of the outside world. The Pirahãs have no such conflicts.

My own impression, built up over my entire experience with the Pirahãs, is that my colleague from MIT was correct. The Pirahãs are an unusually happy and contented people. I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.