Boffing With Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand with a Boffer. These things were foam swords for working out your aggressions. The theory was that violence is instinctive in us, and we could reduce the real thing by playfully ritualizing it. Brand introduced me to a lot of things through the Whole Earth Catalog, and its descendants, including Boffers — which got my thigh seriously chomped by a friend’s dog. More lately, Brand has introduced me to Steven LeBlanc’s archeological history of human violence, Constant Battles. We’re violent when we exceed carrying capacity.

Character Armor

Drawn last winter while reading Steven LeBlanc's Constant Battles.

Wilhelm Reich invented the idea of "character armor." The idea is that we have devices, postures, habits that we use, both to defend ourselves from a world we see as hostile to us, and to keep us from realizing ourselves as we really are. We have all had experiences, even in the womb, Reich thought, that convinced us that the world is hostile, and we perform a kind of goofy calculus that makes us think it would be even more hostile, if we were to behave as we really are.

Eden Is Ahead Not Behind

Anthropologist Napoleon Chignon wrote about the Amazonian Yanomamo people in Yanomamo: The Fierce People. It's easy to idealize them: No bosses or punch-clocks, no taxes, no responsibility for using up the world's oil or warming the atmosphere. Heck, they get to go naked. Their bows are primitive compared to those of the North American Plains Indians', but their arrows have interchangeable, disposable points, each adapted to its own game.

On the other hand, they live hand-to-mouth, count no further than two, practice infanticide (more against girls than boys, but they don't know that, because they can't count), and practice a kind of agriculture that obliges them to move periodically and which forces them to war with their neighbors. In fact, 25% of adult males die from combat.

Eden is in the future. The noble savage is our descendant.

Sketchbook Pages

I've always been torn. Part of me is optimistic, believing ours is the time in human history during which we take active control of evolution, and integrate with the rest of the world. The other half is paralyzingly pessimistic. It's natural to think that the time when humans quit fooling around and consciously find our niche(s) in the ecosystem would be perilous. Buckminster Fuller's Utopia or Oblivion comes to mind. The material wealth that has made our global and empirical understanding of our situation nominally belongs to individuals and groups of individuals who can't afford to integrate.

Reading Constant Battles truly freaked me out. I can't write my way out of the puzzle it presented, and I don't want to pollute anybody else's thinking with my dire fascination. So I'm shifting gears.

I've changed sketchbook size, so I can get whole pages onto the scanner. The way I work sketchbooks is to use permanent markers, with no under-drawing. I make a mark on the page, and it suggests something. I draw that suggested something, then ask myself why that particular something. I add entourage to illustrate the subject's raison d'what. Sometimes the drawings are good. Sometimes less so. I'd like to think that I'm channeling something in my drawings, something meaningful that I can't reach otherwise. Sometimes, the drawings seem merely inane. I keep moving.

Constant Blues and Battling The Art Of Portraiture

I haven’t posted for more than a week, the reason, either a case of the late winter blues, or one of being utterly spooked by LeBlanc’s Constant Battles. I took that sumbitch back to the liberry, leaving the last chapter unread. I did read the last couple of pages, so I know there’s no surprise happy ending.

LeBlanc is an academic, and the book, for him, is a way to show us what we’ve overlooked in studying our ancestors. For me, their benighted behavior is an allegory for our own, and it makes me think of something fictional adventurer Travis McGee said to Meyer, his economist sidekick: “Right now I’m...trying to work out a jigsaw puzzle where every piece is square, and when I get them in the right places, they make an abstract painting. But they also make an abstract painting any way I fit them together.” McGee settled on the right arrangement, and it was dangerous. For me the peril implied by our history of perfidy, is compounded with irritation. Where do we go from here? Not being able to solve the puzzle bugs the daylights out of me.

Enclosed, some recent drawings, good, bad, and promising.

The nice clean portrait of the young man with the soul patch, I did for the first of what I hope is a series of short newspaper pieces about busy and interesting neighborhood residents. Eric is a guitar teacher at the park building, with a plan to provide music instruction, something being scaled back in the financially strapped schools.

The double caricature is one whose subjects asked me to draw it. First iteration. The drawing of the man is on the money, the woman, recognizable, but hmm. Men are easier to caricature than women, because -- feminism notwithstanding -- even comical renderings must render them as desirable. How do I get a likeness of Lila that is as lush and alluring as she, and still a little goofy?

I think the messy one is the most exciting. I like the textures and contrasts. It is, in a word I have begun using to myself, painterly. On the other hand, I traded the clear and articulate quality, that I can get with simpler means, for excitement. I hope that the former will gel from the latter.

Telstar And Constant Battles

An interesting idea in Steven LeBlanc’s Constant Battles is that farmers are harder on a region’s carrying capacity than foragers. Foragers, like the Kalahari’s !Bang or Australia’s various aborigines range over the landscape, picking fruit and vegetables and hunting game. They do eventually exhaust an area, and move on, but the farmer lifestyle is more resource intensive, and farmer populations are larger.

Forager women give birth about every four years. Children nurse longer, nursing depressing fertility, and there are several incentives for limiting family size. Foragers are mobile daily, as they search for food, and groups move periodically. Several small children are harder to tend on the move than one. Beside the logistical problems, children aren’t knowledgeable to be genuine contributors, and are liabilities until puberty or later.

Farm crops require more processing and cooking, and a larger tool kit, so farmers need fuel and materials that foragers don’t. Staying in the same place for generations, farmers deplete soil. LeBlanc documents soil depletion with the history of the Mimbres Valley in the southwestern United States, beginning in the early Common Era, and ending with collapse in the thirteenth of fourteenth century. Farmer populations are larger. Since farmers are sedentary, and since they get more calories out of an area than foragers would, they can afford more children. Ground and cooked grains make good baby foods, so children nurse for less time. There are farm chores that don’t require a lot of knowledge and expertise -- ones that children could do -- so there’s an incentive to reproduce to get more workers. There's an incentive to reproduce, as well, so that someone can take care of you in your dotage.

It might have seemed to early farmers, rubbing shoulders with foragers, that they were the ones who used their resources better. After all, they were providing for more people, living better, and staying in the same place for a long time. In fact, they were mining their soils.

LeBlanc explains the sudden shift from foraging to farming (10,000 years ago in the Middle East, soon after in China, 6,000 years ago in America), not with some teleological inspiration, or people’s recognizing a good idea and embracing it. He says that farming spread because farmers warred on foragers to take their territories, when farmer populations had exceeded their territories’ carrying capacities.

Buckminster Fuller liked to say that we would succeed by “doing more with less.” He called it “ephemeralization.” One example he used was Telstar, the first commercial communications satellite. Fuller said that this quarter-ton sphere replaced thousands of tons of transoceanic cable. I always wondered about the infrastructure supporting the two communications devices: ship versus rocket, steel mill versus transistor factory. Which industries use more water, fuel, noxious chemicals? What changes in society did each communications device inspire, and what were their consequences for the planet’s carrying capacity. Was Fuller correct that Telstar did more with less?

If Telstar did use more of the world’s wealth, I recognize that it could still have been benign. For instance, widespread, rapid, global, electronic communication might be necessary in an Earth which had recently experienced World War II, in which the United States and Soviet Union aimed hydrogen bombs at each other, and in which global commerce was introducing us all to each other. It’s the old conundrum in which you wonder if polio vaccine was worth Madison Avenue.

I wonder if it’s possible for us to find our way to a forager lifestyle, informed by what we’ve learned along the way. The foragers weren’t able to control their populations and stay out of conflict, but they might have, if they’d had our biological and technical knowledge.

More Constant Battles

Continuing with LeBlanc’s Constant Battles, I’m realizing that it’s useful, despite its thesis’ "going without saying." We’re beings which seek resources, as all do, and will plunder to get them, if that’s what it takes. There’s a pornographic appeal in reading about pre-historic atrocity, or stories from aboriginal sources about torture killings. If there’s value, though, in following LeBlanc’s grim telling of our past, it has to be that, in seeing our situation with new clarity, we can design a future that sidesteps the old horror, perpetrated with modern genius. Ka-boom!

We get out of ecological balance when we exceed our territory's carrying capacity, then we go to war so we can continue in our profligate ways. (I’d guess that the people we call conservatives have a more pressing sense of this than liberals, but lack the vocabulary to allow understanding and correction. Consequently, they’re morally content with empire, and practically confuse liberty and regimentation.)

Toward the end of Chapter Three, LeBlanc spins a scenario that resonates with Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons. He tells us that a given period’s competitors will have approximately the same technology, and that the larger population will prevail. (Bad news for the developed world, and -- from a limited point of view -- a sensible reason for the double standard over who gets to own nuclear weapons.)

He imagines two neighboring cultures. “Assume for a moment that by some miracle one of our two groups is full of farsighted ecological geniuses.” They keep their population far enough below carrying capacity, that they can survive minor changes in weather or climate.

“The second group, on the other hand is just the opposite -- it consists of ecological dimwits.” They don’t control their population, and operate right at their territory’s carrying capacity. They get a bad year, and raid the geniuses next door. Over the decades, the dimwits eliminate and replace the geniuses. It’s high school all over again, unless everybody does the right thing.

Hardin’s solution was “mutually agreed mutual coercion.” Figure out carrying capacity, and regulate reproduction. It’s a little more complicated with a global culture that converts fossil fuels into food, but avoiding catastrophe is the agenda for the rest of your lifetime, and mine.

Constant Battles: It Goes Without Saying

I’ve begun Steven LeBlanc’s Constant Battles. This is the book by the archaeologist from Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline suggested reading list. Brand quoted it to show that we -- not Gaia -- are imperiled by global warming.

LeBlanc shows archaeological examples of fortification, genocide, erosion, extinction, etc., demonstrating that warfare has been a human activity from forager times until today. He eliminates the idea of our ever having had an Edenic or noble-savage existence using examples of modern forager cultures, in which a quarter of the males die in combat, and the behavior of our nearest primate relatives, the chimps. His thesis is that the pattern is one of each population’s expanding beyond its range’s carrying capacity, then doing what it must -- conquest -- to survive. The existence of war is evidence to LeBlanc of life out of harmony with its environment: if people were fed and comfortable, there would be no incentive for war.

(Fuller, writing during the Cold War, said that the ideological battle between Communism and Capitalism was over whose strategy would best allocate scarce resources. Twenty or thirty years ago, I quoted this to a guy at a party, who reminded me of the religious war brewing between us and Islam. Maybe some zealots can go to war over religion, but most people’s faith isn’t that deep. They go to war over resources, and blame it on God.)

Population is the villain. LeBlanc talks about a Samoan chief, Sila, from his Peace Corps days. Sila complained that the fruit trees didn’t bear the way they did when he was young. For LeBlanc, the problem was that the same harvest needed to feed more people. Slow population increase is the problem. Survival becomes more difficult gradually. There are occasions when the difficulty becomes apparent abruptly, as in the case of natural disasters, but it’s pretty much the case of the frog slowly brought to boil.

I believe I’ll finish Constant Battles, but I didn’t really need to crack the book to say, “Of course!” Organisms move toward nutrients. Why should we be any different? But -- and here’s the ray of hope -- we are the organism that can see the pattern, and organize to avoid the painful parts.

Here's the deal with extinction. Species aren't bad or in the way of some divine plan. What happens is that they are adapted to certain conditions, then the conditions change. But maybe we can notice what's happening, and adapt on purpose to the new conditions.

It won’t be easy. As a species, we are adapted to the global economy, and every one of us -- excepting people like the Yanomamo and !Kung -- included. The people in Brazilian favelas have cell phones, I’m waiting for the bone to heal around an implant for the installation of my new, four thousand-dollar molar, and the hygienist told me she had seen people who have twenty-eight permanent prosthetic toofers. There are people whose immediate struggle for survival is so urgent that they can’t think of anything else, people who haven’t caught on to the Copernican Universe yet, and people with weird, cobbled-together weltanschuaungen, that would see this essay as rankest heresy. And there are villains and demagogues.

Still, there’s hope. The Garden of Eden, and you and I as noble savages, are in the future, not the past. And the alternative kind of sucks.

Constant Battles Inhumanity And Carrying Capacity

Stewart Brand quoted Steven LeBlanc's Constant Battles in his book Whole Earth Discipline. Now I have another title on my list. LeBlanc is a Harvard archaeologist, and Brand summarizes Constant Battles as showing that, for most our history, we have dealt with the carrying capacities of our ranges by robbing our neighbors, killing them, or enslaving them. In spite of World Wars, we modern people lose about three percent of adult males to war, but over our history we've lost twenty-five percent that way. This rang a bell for me. Napoleon Chignon says this is about what the Yanomamo, an Amazonian people, lose to war.

The Nazis weren't monsters, they were vestiges. If we're not careful, we may see them again, or worse, be them.