Fear of Nature

 Junger, S. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Hatchette Book Group. NY, NY, 2016.


- Junger theorizes that the modern American way has lost an important sense of community and tribe. Veterans experience this sense of tribe in their military experience, and then they desperately miss it when they reenter civilian society. This tribal way of life represents 99% of human evolution. It is only in this last blip of modern history that we’ve become individualized and financially competitive against each other. What is the cost to human health when we abandon the larger thing that that health has depended on for 99% of human history?



(9) “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of these aborigines having from choice become Europeans,” a French emigre named Hector de Crevecoeur lamented in 1782. “There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.”

(11) The nature of the frontier was that it kept expanding beyond the reach of church and state.

(17) The iKung were so well adapted to their environment that during times of drought, nearby farmers and cattle herders abandoned their livelihoods to join them in the bush because foraging and hunting were a more reliable source of food. The relatively relaxed pace of iKung life - even during ties of adversity - challenged long standing ideas that modern society created a surplus of leisure time. It created exactly the opposite: a desperate cycle of work, financial obligation, and more work.

(17) Genetic adaptations take around 25,000 years to appear in humans, so the enormous changes that came with agriculture in the last 10,000 years have hardly begun to affect our gene pool.

(18) First agriculture, then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidable diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day - or an entire life - mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.

(21) A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience.

(22) Self determination theory holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status.

(33) Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice, 1795: “Whether civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested…[both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are the most civilized.”

(37) Modern society doesn’t conduct initiation rites on its young men, but many boys still do their best to demonstrate their readiness for manhood in all kinds of clumsy and dangerous ways. They drive too fast, get into fights, haze each other, play sports, join fraternities, drink too much, and gamble their lives in a million idiotic ways. Girls generally don’t take those kinds of risks, and as a result, boys in modern society die by violence and accidents at many times the rate that girls do. These deaths can be thought of as one generation after another trying to run their own initiation rites because they live in a society that no longer does that for them. To the extent that boys are drawn to war, it may be less out of an interest in violence than a longing for the kind of maturity and respect that often come with it.

- see John Fire Lame Deer, stealing cars instead of horses, etc

(44) Communities that have been devoted by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals. (Despite erroneous news reports, New Orleans experienced a drop in crime rates after Hurricane Katrina, etc).

(53) Charles Fritz theorized that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face an existential threat, Fritz found, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group. It is a kind of fleeting social utopia that, Fritz felt, is enormously gratifying to the average person and downright therapeutic to people suffering from from mental illness.

(55) As soon as relief flights began delivering aid to the area [post earthquake in Chile 1970], class divisions returned and the sense of brotherhood disappeared. The modern world had arrived.

(56) …male personality trait known as “impulsive sensation seeking.”

(58) In late 2015, a bus in eastern Kenya was stopped by gunmen from an extremist group named Al-Shabaab that made a practice of massacring Christians as part of a terrorism campaign against the Western-aligned Kenyan government. The gunmen demanded that Muslim and Christian passengers separate themselves into two groups so that the Christians could be killed, but the Muslims - most of them were women - refused to do it. They told the gunmen that they would all die together if necessary, but that the Christians would not be singled out for execution. The Shabaab eventually let everyone go.

(59) The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good. Protected by police and fire departments and relieved of most of the challenges of survival, and urban person might go through their entire life without having to come to the aid of someone in danger - or even give up their dinner.

(66) What catastrophes seem to do - sometimes in the span of a few minutes - is turn back the clock on tens thousand years of evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.

(70) Nidzara Ahmetasevic [survivor of Siege of Sarajevo 1990s]: “I missed being that close to people, I missed being loved in that way. In Bosnia, we don’t trust each other anymore; we became really bad people. We didn’t learn the lesson of the war, which is how important it is to share everything you have with human beings close to you. The best way to explain it is that the war makes you an animal. We were animals. It’s insane - but that’s the basic human instinct, to help another human being who is sitting or standing or lying close to you.”
I asked her if people had ultimately been happier during the war.
“We were the happiest,” she said, “and we laughed more.”

(77) The Iroquois Nation presumably understood the transformative power of war when they developed parallel systems of government that protected civilians from warriors and vice versa. Peacetime leaders, called sachems, were often chosen by women and had complete authority over the civil affairs of the tribe until war broke out. At that point war leaders took over, and their sole concern was the physical survival of the tribe. They were not concerned with justice or harmony or fairness, they were concerned only with defeating the enemy. If the enemy tried to negotiate an end hostilities, however, it was the sachems, not the war leaders, who made the final decision. If the offer was accepted the war leaders stepped down so that the sachems could resume leadership of the tribe.

(87) Roughly half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have applied for permanent PTSD disability. Since only 10 percent of our armed forces experience actual combat, the majority of vets claiming to suffer from PTSD seem to have affected by something other than direct exposure to danger.
This is not a new phenomenon: decade after decade and war after war, American combat deaths have generally dropped while disability claims have risen. Most disability claims are for medical issues and should decline with casualty rates and combat intensity, but they don’t. They are in an almost inverse relationship with one another. Soldiers in Vietnam suffered one-quarter the mortality rate of troops in WWII, for example, but filed for physical and psychological disability compensation at a rate that was 50 percent higher. It’s tempting to attribute that to the toxic reception they had at home, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Today’s vets claim three times the number of disabilities that Vietnam vets did, despite a generally warm reception back home and a casualty rate that is roughly one-third what it was in Vietnam.

- PTSD as more “community loss” and “purpose loss” than emotional combat trauma.

(90) In other words, the problem doesn’t seem to be trauma on the battlefield so much as reentry into society.

(91) There are enormous numbers of people who had utterly ordinary wartime experiences and yet feel dangerously alienated back home. Clinically speaking, such alienation is not the same as PTSD - maybe deserves its own diagnostic term - but both result from military service abroad, so it’s understandable that vets and clinicians alike are prone to conflating them. Either way, it makes one wonder exactly what it is about modern society that is so mortally dispiriting to come home to.

- “loss of tribal life syndrome” Fromm’s The Sane Society, Escape From Freedom, Diamond’s In Search of the Primitive, Berman’s Wandering God.

(92) Win Stracke in The Good War (Studs Terkel): “You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society. We had no hopes of becoming officers. I liked that feeling very much…It was the absence of competition and boundaries and all those phony standards that created the thing I loved about the Army.”

(92) What people miss presumably isn’t danger or loss, but the unity that these things often engender. There are obvious stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation, so during disasters there is a net gain in well-being. Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild. A modern soldier returning from combat goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good…Whatever the technological advances of modern society, the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.

(93) Sharon Abramowitz: “We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that.”

- including, and especially to the “Original Other” of Nature/Animals

(98) Because modern society has almost completely eliminate trauma and violence fro everyday life, anyone who does suffer those things is deemed to be extraordinary unfortunate. This gives people access to sympathy and resources but also creates an identity of victimhood that can delay recovery. Anthopologist Danny Hoffman, who studied Mende tribal combatants both during and after civil wars in Liberia and Sierre Leone, found that international relief organizations introduced the idea of victimhood to combatants who until then had rarely, if ever, thought of themselves in those terms.

(110) A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity…Soldiers experience this tribal way of thinking at war, but when they come home they realize that the tribe they were actually fighting for wasn’t their country, it was their unit.

- “nobody fights for a flag, for a piece of cloth,” John Fire Lame Deer

(115) It’s revealing to look at the kinds of communities where [mass shootings] usually occur. A rampage shooting [mass shooting] has never happened in an urban ghetto…Attacks at school almost always occur in otherwise safe, predominantly white towns.

- people go crazy when things become too safe, too sterile, too comfortable.
- War before Civilization (Keeley), Better Angels of our Nature (Pinker). If the modern world is less violent in an evolutionary sense, then perhaps mass shootings are instances of latent energy acting out, like medicated caged animals, or a room of over-medicated kids who are supposed to “be quiet” all day.

(115) The first time the United States suffered a wave of mass shootings was during the 1930s, when society had been severely stressed and fractured by the Great Depression…Mass shootings dropped significantly during WWII, then rose again in the 1980s and have been rising ever since. It may be worth considering whether middle class American life has lost some essential sense of unity that might otherwise discourage alienated men from turning apocalyptically violent.

- “have been rising ever since,” as general society becomes more and more distant from the activity of war

(116) The last time the United States experienced that kind of unity was -briefly - after the terrorist attacks of September 11. There were no mass shootings for the next two years. The effect was particularly pronounced in New York City, where rates of violent crime, suicide, and psychiatric disturbances dropped immediately. In many countries, antisocial behavior is known to decline during war time. New York’s suicide rate dropped by around 20 percent in the six months following the attacks, the murder rate dropped by 40 percent, and pharmacists saw no increase in the number of first time patients filling prescriptions for anti anxiety and antidepressant medication. Furthermore, veterans who were being treated for PTSD at the VA experienced a significant drop in their symptoms in the ones after the September 11 attacks.

- dullardism is the main cause of anxiety and depression; basically the boredom of a non Nature-based life
- it’s in our blood to live non-sterile lives; too much safety and comfort causes the backlash of unreasonable violence in “safe” communities. we don’t even want to see how our chicken dinner got to our table.

(117) Gregory Gomez, Apache: “Most of us Indian guys who went to Vietnam went because we were warriors. I did not fight for this country. I fought for Mother Earth. I wanted to experience combat. I wanted to see how I’d do.”

(126) The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed as out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared or the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two party system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs - and more broadly over liberal and conservative thought - will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.

- G Lakoff: the domineering father model (conservatives) vs the nurturing parent model (liberals)

(128) The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively - that should be encouraged - but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.

- the “luxury” of venomous rhetoric. too much comfort and safety (boredom and sterility).
- “without diversity, the mind creates autonomous and delusional experience,” P Shepard. Ie, a rich, white, old man as president trying to create a nation of rich, white, old men. the infantile, elementary emotional response of “us against them” that comes with boredom.

(131) Acting in a tribal way simply means being willing to make a substantive sacrifice for your community - be that your neighborhood, your workplace, or your entire country. Obviously, you don’t have to be a Navy SEAL in order to do that.