The Deadly Danger of Being Sedentary

When things stop moving, they die. If blood stops running through your coronary arteries, your heart muscle dies. If a river stops running, it silts up and starts to smell foul.

We started to die in the Neolithic. We had previously been wanderers. Then we stopped. We built villages. Instead of occupying the whole world, we occupied a house and a few fields. We soon fouled our own nests. Our horizons became smaller. We had been cosmic people. Now we became parochial people. We had previously had porous boundaries: The wild world bled into us and we into it. Now our boundaries hardened. The result, eventually, was the tragic atomism of modern life. We now have carapaces so hard that no one can touch us. No wonder we're lonely.

In the Neolithic, we built boundaries across the land to contain the newly enslaved animals which we had seen (as, evolutionarily, they of course are) as honoured cousins (even if we sometimes had to eat them). We imprisoned animals, but ended up imprisoning ourselves inside our walls and fences. We built walls across our own minds, too. We built mental compartments and in them we started to house our divided, unintegrated lives. There are no straight lines in nature, and the only straight lines we see in the Upper Palaeolithic are the representations of the erect penises of shamans and the cross-hatched grids on cave walls, indicating the altered states of consciousness involved in much of Upper Palaeolithic ontology. The Neolithic is full of straight lines: walls, fences, time, avenues, paths to sky gods, and, perhaps most significantly, the delusion of linear progress.

It was (and is) more boring being a Neolithic farmer than an Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer. Not only are you stuck in one place, you need to know far less. As a hunter-gatherer you have to be multi-valent. You need to be an ecologist, knowing how the natural world is bolted together. You need to know a lot about a lot of species, and where, in each season, you can find food. You have to make and use a wide range of tools. You have to know and use the strenuous liturgical choreography that's necessary if everything you eat is ensouled, and every mouthful therefore morally significant. But as a farmer, you only have to know about a few species and a small area.

With sedentism came many of the world's evils. Population exploded, and so did epidemic disease. Average height and life expectancy reduced. We were crippled by arthritic conditions associated with repetitive stress (typically in the women, who spent much of their lives grinding corn). Our teeth rotted. We see for the first time (no matter whatever Steven Pinker says in The Better Angels of Our Nature) significant human-human violence. It's not surprising. If you rely on the harvest, and the harvest fails, what's more natural than to pick up your flint-tipped spear and go to pillage your neighbours who've had a better crop? If you're a hunter-gatherer, and the blackberries fail, you eat something else instead, or go to a place where the blackberries have done better.

But the agriculturally good times were, if anything, more disastrous than the bad. For then there was surplus, and surplus is connected with many sociological and psychological ills. It leads to the manipulation of supply and demand, and, soon, tyrannous manipulation by supply and demand. We see toxic status for the first time in the Neolithic: the haves and the have-nots. Hunter-gatherer communities are typically egalitarian. The gathering is typically done by women, and the hunting by men, and both are important and valued. But if the men are out in the fields doing the sowing and reaping, and the women at home grinding and cooking, it's easier for the men to present themselves as the primary producers, and therefore the most important people.

Anthropologist James C. Scott has compellingly demonstrated in his book Against the Grain that the transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary life happened slowly and very reluctantly. That's not how we like to imagine it happened. We're sedentary people ourselves. We fondly imagine that we're the pinnacle of human civilization, and that, given the chance, all sane humans would want to live as we do. Not so. People normally only become like us at the end of an actual or metaphorical whip. Our ancestors would look at us and ask, 'Why on earth would you give up freedom, health, happiness and meaning for that?'

But there's hope. As I've discussed in previous posts, we're constitutionally hunter-gatherers. We're not really Neolithic, even though we live as if we were. It's not so hard to recover the old hunter-gatherer ways of attending to the world. If we do, we'll start to shed many of our neuroses; we'll know more accurately what the world is really like, and so be able to feel more at home here. We'll re-acquire some of the old capacity for relationship, and our loneliness will dissolve. That's worthwhile.