The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (78 page)

A possible victim of this cryptic epidemic of diabetes that I postulate in Europe was the composer Johann Sebastian Bach (born in 1685, died in 1750). While Bach’s medical history is too poorly documented to permit certainty as to the cause of his death, the corpulence of his face and hands in the sole authenticated portrait of him (
Plate 28
), the accounts of deteriorating vision in his later years, and the obvious deterioration of his handwriting possibly secondary to his failing vision and/or nerve damage are consistent with a diagnosis of diabetes. The disease certainly occurred in Germany during Bach’s lifetime, being known there as
honigsüsse Harnruhr
(“honey-sweet urine disease”).

In this chapter I’ve discussed just two among the many currently exploding non-communicable diseases (NCDs) linked to the Western lifestyle:
hypertension and its consequences, and Type-2 diabetes. Other major NCDs that I haven’t had space to discuss, but that S. Boyd Eaton, Melvin Konner, and Marjorie Shostak do discuss, include coronary artery disease and other heart diseases, arteriosclerosis, peripheral vascular diseases, many kidney diseases, gout, and many cancers including lung, stomach, breast, and prostate cancer. Within the Western lifestyle I’ve discussed only some risk factors—especially salt, sugar, high calorie intake, obesity, and sedentariness. Other important risk factors that I have mentioned only briefly include smoking, high alcohol consumption, cholesterol, triglycerides, saturated fats, and trans fats.

We’ve seen that NCDs are overwhelmingly the leading causes of death in Westernized societies, to which most readers of this book belong. Nor is it the case that you’ll have a wonderful carefree healthy life until you suddenly drop dead of an NCD at age 78 to 81 (the average lifespan in long-lived Western societies): NCDs are also major causes of declining health and decreased quality of life for years or decades before they eventually kill you. But the same NCDs are virtually non-existent in traditional societies. What clearer proof could there be that we have much to learn, of life-and-death value, from traditional societies? However, what they have to teach us is not a simple matter of just “live traditionally.” There are many aspects of traditional life that we emphatically don’t want to emulate, such as cycles of violence, frequent risk of starvation, and short lifespans resulting from infectious diseases. We need to figure out which specific components of traditional lifestyles are the ones protecting those living them against NCDs. Some of those desirable components are already obvious (e.g., exercise repeatedly, reduce your sugar intake), while others are not obvious and are still being debated (e.g., optimal levels of dietary fat).

The current epidemic of NCDs will get much worse before it gets better. Sadly, it has already reached its peak in Pimas and Nauruans. Of special concern now are populous countries with rapidly rising standards of living. The epidemic may be closest to reaching its peak in wealthy Arab oil countries, further short of its peak in North Africa, and under way but still due to become much worse in China and India. Other populous countries in which the epidemic is well launched include Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia,
South Africa, and Turkey. Countries with lower populations in which the epidemic is also under way include all countries of Latin America and Southeast Asia. It is just beginning among the not-quite 1 billion people of sub-Saharan Africa. When one contemplates those prospects, it’s easy to become depressed.

But we’re not inevitably the losers in our struggles with NCDs. We ourselves are the only ones who created our new lifestyles, so it’s completely in our power to change them. Some help will come from molecular biological research, aimed at linking particular risks to particular genes, and hence at identifying for each of us the particular dangers to which our particular genes predispose us. However, society as a whole doesn’t have to wait for such research, or for a magic pill, or for the invention of low-calorie potato chips. It’s already clear which changes will minimize many (though not all) risks for most of us. Those changes include: not smoking; exercising regularly; limiting our intake of total calories, alcohol, salt and salty foods, sugar and sugared soft drinks, saturated and trans fats, processed foods, butter, cream, and red meat; and increasing our intake of fiber, fruits and vegetables, calcium, and complex carbohydrates. Another simple change is to eat more slowly. Paradoxically, the faster you wolf down your food, the more you end up eating and hence gaining weight, because eating rapidly doesn’t allow enough time for release of hormones that inhibit appetite. Italians are slim not only because of their diet composition but also because they linger talking over their meals. All of those changes could spare billions of people around the world the fates that have already befallen the Pimas and the Nauruans.

This advice is so banally familiar that it’s embarrassing to repeat it. But it’s worth repeating the truth: we already know enough to warrant our being hopeful, not depressed. Repetition merely re-emphasizes that hypertension, the sweet death of diabetes, and other leading 20th-century killers kill us only with our own permission.

At Another Airport

From the jungle to the 405
Advantages of the modern world
Advantages of the traditional world
What can we learn?

At the end of an expedition of several months to New Guinea, mostly spent with New Guineans at campsites in the jungle, my emotional transition back to the modern industrial world doesn’t begin at Papua New Guinea’s Port Moresby airport, with which I began this book’s Prologue. That’s because, on the long plane flight from New Guinea back to Los Angeles, I use the time to transcribe my field notes, relive daily events of my months in the jungle, and remain mentally in New Guinea. Instead, the emotional transition begins in the baggage claim area of Los Angeles airport, and it continues with the reunion with my family waiting outside baggage claim, the drive home along the 405 Freeway, and my confrontation with piles of accumulated mail and e-mails on my desk. Shifting from New Guinea’s traditional world to Los Angeles pummels me with a conflicting mixture of feelings. What are some of them?

First and foremost are the joy and relief of being back with my wife and children. The U.S. is my home, my country. I was born and grew up here. Americans include friends whom I’ve known for 60 or 70 years, and who share and understand my life history, my culture, and many of my interests. I’ll always speak English better than any other language. I’ll always understand Americans better than I understand New Guineans. The U.S. has big advantages as a base to live. I can expect to have enough food, to
enjoy physical comfort and security, and to live almost twice as long as the average traditional New Guinean. It’s much easier to satisfy my love of Western music, and to pursue my career as an author and university geographer, in the U.S. than in New Guinea. All of those are reasons why I choose to live in the U.S. Much as I love New Guinea and New Guineans, I’ve never considered moving there.

A different emotion hits me when I exit the Los Angeles airport onto the 405 Freeway. The landscape around me on the freeway consists entirely of an asphalt road grid, buildings, and motor vehicles. The sound environment is traffic noise. Sometimes but not always, the Santa Monica Mountains, rising 10 miles north of the airport, are visible as a blur through the smog. The contrast with New Guinea’s pure clear air, the variegated green shades of its dense jungle, and the excitement of its hundreds of bird songs could not be starker. Reflexively, I turn down the volume knobs on my senses and my emotional state, knowing that they will stay turned down for most of the time during the following year until my next New Guinea trip. Of course one can’t generalize about differences between the traditional world and the industrial world just by contrasting New Guinea jungle with the 405 Freeway. The advantage of beauty and of emotional opening-up would be reversed if I were instead returning from months in Port Moresby itself (one of the world’s most dangerous cities) to our summer home in Montana’s gorgeous Bitterroot Valley, under the snow-capped forested peaks of North America’s Continental Divide. Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons why I choose Los Angeles as my base, and why I choose New Guinea jungle and the Bitterroot Valley just for trips. But LA’s advantages come at a heavy price.

Returning to urban life in the U.S. means returning to time pressures, schedules, and stress. Just the thought of it raises my pulse rate and my blood pressure. In New Guinea jungle there is no time pressure, no schedule. If it’s not raining, I walk out of camp each day before dawn to listen to the last night bird songs and the first morning bird songs—but if it’s raining, I sit in camp, waiting for the rain to stop; who knows when that will be. A New Guinean from the nearest village may have promised me yesterday that he’ll visit camp “tomorrow” to teach me bird names in his local language: but he doesn’t have a wristwatch and can’t tell me when he’ll come, and perhaps he’ll come another day instead. In Los Angeles,
though, life is heavily scheduled. My pocket diary tells me what I shall be doing at what hour on what day, with many entries months or a year or more off in the future. E-mails and phone calls flood in all day every day, and have to be constantly re-prioritized into piles or numbered lists for responding.

Back in Los Angeles, I gradually shed the health precautions that I adopted as reflexes in New Guinea. I no longer press my lips tightly shut while showering, lest I inadvertently contract dysentery by licking a few drops of infected water off my lips. I no longer have to be so scrupulous about frequently washing my hands, nor about keeping an eye on how the plates and spoons in camp are washed or on who touched them. I no longer have to monitor each scratch on my skin, lest it develop into a tropical ulcer. I stop taking my weekly anti-malaria pills and constantly carrying vials of three types of antibiotics. (No, all those precautions are not paranoid: there are serious consequences to omitting any of them.) I no longer have to wonder whether a twinge in my abdomen might mean appendicitis, at a jungle location from which I couldn’t get to a hospital in time.

Returning to Los Angeles from New Guinea jungle carries for me big changes in my social environment: much less constant, direct, and intense interactions with people. During my waking hours in New Guinea jungle, I’m almost constantly within a few feet of New Guineans and ready to talk with them, whether we are sitting in camp or out on a trail looking for birds. When we talk, we have each other’s full attention; none of us is distracted by texting or checking e-mail on a cell phone. Camp conversations tend to switch back and forth between several languages, depending on who is in camp at the moment, and I have to know at least the bird names in each of those languages even if I can’t speak the language. In contrast, in Westernized society, we spend far less time in direct face-to-face conversation with other people. It’s estimated that the average American instead spends eight hours per day in front of a screen (of a computer, TV, or hand-held device). Out of the time that we do spend interacting with other people, most of that interaction is indirect: by e-mail, phone, text-messaging, or (decreasingly) letters. By far most of my interactions in the U.S. are monolingual in English: I count myself lucky if I get to converse in any other language for a few hours a week. Of course, those differences don’t mean that I constantly cherish New Guinea’s di
rect, intense, omnipresent, full-attention, multilingual social environment: New Guineans can be frustrating as well as delightful, just as can Americans.

After 50 years of commuting between the U.S. and New Guinea, I’ve worked out my compromises and found my peace. Physically, I spend about 93% of my time in the U.S. and occasionally in other industrial countries, and about 7% of my time in New Guinea. Emotionally, I still spend much of my time and thoughts in New Guinea, even when I am physically in the U.S. New Guinea’s intensity would be hard to shake off even if I wanted to do so, which I don’t. Being in New Guinea is like seeing the world briefly in vivid colors, when by comparison the world elsewhere is gray.

Because most of the remainder of this chapter will be about features of traditional life from which we in the modern world can usefully learn, let’s begin by reminding ourselves of an obvious conclusion. Traditional life should not be romanticized: the modern world does offer huge advantages. It’s not the case that citizens of Westernized societies are fleeing in droves from steel tools, health, material comfort, and state-imposed peace, and are trying to return to an idyllic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Instead, the overwhelming direction of change is that hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers who know their traditional lifestyle, but who also witness a Westernized lifestyle, are seeking to enter the modern world. Their reasons are compelling, and include such modern amenities as material goods that make life easier and more comfortable; opportunities for formal education and jobs; good health, effective medicines, doctors, and hospitals; personal security, less violence, and less danger from other people and from the environment; food security; much longer lives; and a much lower frequency of experiencing the deaths of one’s children (e.g., about two-thirds of traditional Fayu children died in childhood). Naturally, it is not true that every traditional village that modernizes, and every villager who moves to a city, succeed in obtaining these hoped-for advantages. But some do, and most villagers can see that other people enjoy these advantages, and many villagers aspire to them.

For example, Aka Pygmy women interviewed by Bonnie Hewlett mentioned the following reasons for abandoning their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the forest to settle down as village farmers: material goods such as salt, pepper, palm oil, pots and pans, machetes, beds, and lanterns; good clothes and shoes; a healthier life; the opportunity to send one’s children to school; that it is easier to obtain plant food from fields than to gather it in the forest; and that it is easier and safer and faster to hunt animals with a gun than to make nets and extract kicking, biting, and slashing animals trapped in nets. Ache Indians interviewed by Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado named their motives for giving up life in the forest and moving to reservation settlements: to acquire a shotgun, a radio, and new clothes; to keep themselves and their children well fed and healthy; to live longer; and to have many children survive to become adults. Western material goods that my New Guinea friends value include, most notably, matches, steel axes, clothes, a soft bed, and an umbrella. (To understand the value of an umbrella, remember that rainfall in New Guinea ranges up to 500 inches per year or higher). New Guineans also value non-material benefits such as medical care, schooling for children, and the end of tribal warfare. Ishi, the Yahi Indian of Northern California who gave up his hunter-gatherer lifestyle around the age of 50 to spend his last years in San Francisco, initially admired matches and glue above all other European inventions, and with time also grew fond of houses, furniture, flush toilets, running water, electric lights, gas stoves, and railroad trains. Sabine Kuegler’s sister Judith, upon moving for a year from her family home in the New Guinea jungle to Germany, was astonished by all the different brands of chocolate bars available in a German supermarket.

These are among the many obvious and concrete advantages of the Western lifestyle mentioned by people who have grown up among the insecurities, dangers, and discomforts of traditional societies. Other, subtler advantages are mentioned by educated New Guinea friends whose survival needs were already being met in their New Guinea village, and who admire other things about life in the United States. They cite access to information, access to a broad diversity of people, and more rights for women in the U.S. than in New Guinea. One New Guinea friend surprised me by telling me that what she most likes about life in the U.S. is its “ano
nymity.” She explained that anonymity means to her the freedom to step away from the social bonds that make life in New Guinea emotionally full, but also confining. To my friend, anonymity includes the freedom to be alone, to walk alone, to have privacy, to express oneself, to debate openly, to hold unconventional views, to be more immune to peer pressures, and not to have one’s every action scrutinized and discussed. It means the freedom to sit in a café on a crowded street and read a newspaper in peace, without being besieged by acquaintances asking for help with their problems. It means the freedom of Americans to advance themselves as individuals, with much less obligation to share their earnings with all their relatives than in New Guinea.