Steven Leblanc

If we do not strive to understand what we have done in the past and why, it will only make it harder to get it right in the future.


                                                                            Steven LeBlanc

Archeologist Steven LeBlanc was born in 1943, the same year as Jim Morrison, romance and mystery novelist Janet Evanovich, and Newt Gingrich. He is the director of collections at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and an expert on the Mimbres Culture of southwestern New Mexico.

In 2003's Constant Battles, LeBlanc and his wife and co-author Katherine Register make the case that ecological imbalance causes human warfare. People deforest or overgraze the places where we live, or breed beyond our environments' carrying capacities, then try to expand our territories by invasion. There has never been an Edenic time in which we were at peace with our environment or each other. LeBlanc's case for this includes the way ancient people sited their villages, ancient skeletons damaged by violence, anecdotes related to early European settlers by native Americans, and the behavior of other primates and remaining "stone age" farmers.

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.