The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (39 page)

Finally, let’s reflect on differences in child-rearing practices between small-scale societies and state societies. Of course, there is much variation among industrial state societies today in the modern world. Ideals and practices of raising children differ between the U.S., Germany, Sweden, Japan, and an Israeli kibbutz. Within any given one of those state societies, there are differences between farmers, urban poor people, and the urban middle class. There are also differences from generation to generation within a given state society: child-rearing practices in the U.S. today are unlike those prevalent in the 1930s.

Nevertheless, there are still some basic similarities among all of those state societies, and some basic differences between state and non-state societies. State governments have their own separate interests regarding the state’s children, and those interests do not necessarily coincide with
the interests of a child’s parents. Small-scale non-state societies also have their own interests, but a state society’s interests are more explicit, administered by more centralized top-down leadership, and backed up by well-defined enforcing powers. All states want children who, as adults, will become useful and obedient citizens, soldiers, and workers. States tend to object to having their future citizens killed at birth, or permitted to become burned by fires. States also tend to have views about the education of their future citizens, and about their citizens’ sexual conduct. Those shared goals of states promote some convergence among states in their policies regarding children; the child-rearing practices of non-state societies vary over a much wider spectrum than do the practices of state societies. Within non-state societies, hunter-gatherer societies are subject to convergent pressures of their own: they share some basic similarities of child-rearing with each other, but as a group they differ from states as a group.

States do have military and technological advantages, and advantages of vastly larger populations, over hunter-gatherers. Throughout recent millennia, those advantages have enabled states to conquer hunter-gatherers, so that the modern world map is now divided completely among states, and few hunter-gatherer groups have survived. But even though states are much more powerful than hunter-gatherer bands, that doesn’t necessarily imply that states have better ways of raising their children. Some child-rearing practices of hunter-gatherer bands may be ones that we could consider emulating.

Naturally, I’m not saying that we should emulate all child-rearing practices of hunter-gatherers. I don’t recommend that we return to the hunter-gatherer practices of selective infanticide, high risk of death in childbirth, and letting infants play with knives and get burned by fires. Some other features of hunter-gatherer childhoods, like the permissiveness of child sex play, feel uncomfortable to many of us, even though it may be hard to demonstrate that they really are harmful to children. Still other practices are now adopted by some citizens of state societies, but make others of us uncomfortable—such as having infants sleep in the same bedroom or in the same bed as parents, nursing children until age three or four, and avoiding physical punishment of children.

But some other hunter-gatherer child-rearing practices may fit readily
into modern state societies. It’s perfectly feasible for us to transport our infants vertically upright and facing forward, rather than horizontally in a pram or vertically upright but facing backwards in a pack. We could respond quickly and consistently to an infant’s crying, practise much more extensive allo-parenting, and have far more physical contact between infants and care-givers. We could encourage self-invented play of children, rather than discourage it by constantly providing complicated so-called educational toys. We could arrange for multi-age child playgroups, rather than playgroups consisting of a uniform age cohort. We could maximize a child’s freedom to explore, insofar as it is safe to do so.

I find myself thinking a lot about the New Guinea people with whom I have been working for the last 49 years, and about the comments of Westerners who have lived for years in hunter-gatherer societies and watched children grow up there. A recurring theme is that the other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children. We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, video games, and books. We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children. These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children, but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly telling them what to do. The adolescent identity crises that plague American teen-agers aren’t an issue for hunter-gatherer children. The Westerners who have lived with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies speculate that these admirable qualities develop because of the way in which their children are brought up: namely, with constant security and stimulation, as a result of the long nursing period, sleeping near parents for several years, far more social models available to children through allo-parenting, far more social stimulation through constant physical contact and proximity of caretakers, instant caretaker responses to a child’s crying, and the minimal amount of physical punishment.

But our impressions of greater adult security, autonomy, and social skills in small-scale societies are just impressions: they are hard to measure and to prove. Even if these impressions are real, it’s difficult to estab
lish that they are the result of a long nursing period, allo-parenting, and so on. At minimum, though, one can say that hunter-gatherer rearing practices that seem so foreign to us aren’t disastrous, and they don’t produce societies of obvious sociopaths. Instead, they produce individuals capable of coping with big challenges and dangers while still enjoying their lives. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle worked at least tolerably well for the nearly 100, 000-year history of behaviorally modern humans. Everybody in the world was a hunter-gatherer until the local origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, and nobody in the world lived under a state government until 5,400 years ago. The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted for such a long time are worth considering seriously.

The elderly
Expectations about eldercare
Why abandon or kill?
Usefulness of old people
Society’s values
Society’s rules
Better or worse today?
What to do with older people?

While I was visiting a village on the Fijian island of Viti Levu, I fell into conversation with a local man who had visited the United States and told me his impressions. There were some features of American life that he admired or envied, but others that disgusted him. Worst of all was our treatment of the elderly. In rural Fiji old people continue to live in the village where they have spent their lives, surrounded by their relatives and life-long friends. They often reside in a house of their children, who take care of them, even to the point of pre-chewing and softening food for an old parent whose teeth have been worn down to the gum-line. In the United States, though, my Fijian acquaintance was outraged that many old people are sent to retirement homes where they are visited only occasionally by their children. He burst out accusingly to me, “You throw away your old people and your own parents!”

Among traditional societies, some accord their elderly even higher status than do Fijians, allowing the elderly to tyrannize their adult children, to control the society’s property, and even to prevent young men from marrying until their 40s. Others accord their elderly even lower status than do Americans, starving or abandoning or actively killing them. Of course, there is much individual variation within any society: I have several American friends who put their parents into a retirement home and
visit them once a year or never, and another friend who published his 22nd book on his 100th birthday and celebrated the occasion in the company of all of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, whom he also saw regularly throughout the year. But the range of variation among traditional societies in their normal practices of eldercare exceeds even the range of individual variation in the United States. I don’t know any individual American whose devoted care of his aged parents goes as far as pre-chewing their food, nor any who has strangled his aged parents and been publicly commended as a good son for doing so. The lot of the elderly is widely acknowledged to be often miserable in the United States. Is there anything that we can learn from all that variation among traditional societies, both as to what we could emulate and what we should avoid?

Before I proceed, let me deal with two objections that are often raised. One is that there isn’t a universal definition of the age at which one becomes “old”: that, too, varies among societies and with one’s personal perspective. In the United States the federal government in effect defines old age as beginning at age 65, when one becomes eligible for Social Security. When I was in my teens, I looked up to people in their late 20s as being seemingly at their peak of life and wisdom, people in their 30s as already middle-aged, and anyone from about 60 onwards as old. Now that I am 75 years old, I regard my 60s and early 70s as the peak of my own life, and old age as likely to start sometime around 85 or 90 depending on my health. In rural New Guinea, however, where relatively few people reach the age of 60, even 50-year-olds are regarded as old. I recall arriving at a village of Indonesian New Guinea where, when the local people learned that I was (then) 46 years old, they gasped out “
setengah mati!,
” meaning “half-dead,” and they assigned a teen-aged boy to walk constantly beside me to ensure that I would not come to grief. Hence “old age” has to be defined by the standards of the local society, not by some arbitrary universal year count.

The other objection is related to that first objection. In countries where life expectancy is under 40, one might imagine that almost no one reaches old age as defined in the United States. Actually, in almost every New Guinea village where I have made inquiries, even if few people survive to 50 and anyone over 50 is considered a
lapun
(old man), I am still shown one or two people whose age can be estimated at over 70 by their memories of
datable events (e.g., whether they were alive at the time of the great cyclone of 1910). They are likely to be lame, sight-impaired or blind, and dependent on relatives for food, but they nevertheless play (as we shall see) a vital role in the life of the village. Similar findings apply to other traditional peoples: Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado reconstructed genealogies of five forest-dwelling Ache Indians from Paraguay who died at the respective estimated ages of 70, 72, 75, 77, and 78, while Nancy Howell photographed a !Kung man whom she calculated to be 82 years old but who could still walk long distances when his group was moving camp, and still gathered much of his own food and built his own hut.

How can we account for the wide variation among societies in their norms for treating the elderly? Part of the explanation, we shall see, involves variation among societies in material factors that make the elderly more or less useful to the society, and that make it more or less feasible for younger people to support their elderly. The other part of the explanation involves variation among societies in cultural values, such as respect for the elderly, respect for privacy, emphasis on the family versus the individual, and self-reliance. These values are only partly predictable from the material factors that make old people useful or just a burden.

Let’s start off with a naive expectation about eldercare. Although the expectation is obviously incomplete, formulating it will nevertheless help us by forcing us to ask why and in what respects it breaks down. A layperson with a rosy view of life might reason: parents and their children do and should love each other. Parents devote their best efforts to their kids and make sacrifices for them. Kids respect and are grateful to the parents who raised them. Hence we expect kids throughout the world to take good care of their old parents.

A naive evolutionary biologist might reach that same heart-warming conclusion by a different chain of reasoning. Natural selection is about passing on genes. The most direct way for people to pass on their genes is through their children. Hence natural selection should favor parents whose genes cause them to behave in ways that promote the survival and
reproduction of their children. Similarly, cultural selection is about passing on learned behaviors, and parents serve as behavioral models for their children. It therefore makes sense for parents to make sacrifices for their kids, even to sacrifice their own lives, if they thereby promote the survival and reproductive success of their kids. Conversely, older parents are likely to have accumulated resources, status, knowledge, and skills that their kids haven’t yet accumulated. Kids know that it’s in their parents’ genetic and cultural interests to help their kids by passing on those resources, status, knowledge, and skills. Therefore, kids reason, it’s also in the kids’ interest to take care of their elderly parents so that the parents can continue to help them. More generally, in a society of inter-related individuals, one expects the younger generation as a whole to take care of their elders, who share culture and many genes with members of the younger generation.