The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (44 page)

My other vignette took place when my then-22-year-old son Joshua and I discovered that our dinner companion at a hotel one evening was an 86-year-old ex-marine who had participated in (and was willing to talk about) the American assault on the beaches of Tarawa Atoll in the Southwest Pacific Ocean on November 20, 1943, against ferocious Japanese resistance. In one of the most fiercely contested amphibious landings of the Second World War, within three days and within an area of less than half of a square mile, 1,115 Americans and all except 19 of the 4,601 Japanese defenders were killed. I had never heard the story of Tarawa’s horrors first-hand, and I hope that Joshua will never experience such horrors himself. But perhaps he and his generation will make better choices for our country if they have learned from survivors of the last world war over 65 years ago what it was like. These two vignettes illustrate why there are programs bringing together elderly people and high school students, for the students to hear and learn from vivid accounts of events that may prove to hold lessons for them.

My remaining suggestion is to understand and make use of the changes in people’s strengths and weaknesses as they grow older. At the risk of overgeneralizing about a vast and complex subject without presenting supporting evidence, one can say that useful attributes tending to decrease with age include ambition, desire to compete, physical strength and en
durance, capacity for sustained mental concentration, and powers of novel reasoning to solve circumscribed problems (such as the structure of DNA and many problems of pure mathematics, best left to scholars under the age of 40). Conversely, useful attributes tending to increase with age include experience of one’s field, understanding of people and relationships, ability to help other people without one’s own ego getting in the way, and powers of synthetic interdisciplinary thinking to solve complex problems involving multifaceted databases (such as the origin of species, biogeographic distributions, and comparative history, best left to scholars over the age of 40). These shifts in strengths result in many older workers choosing to devote more of their efforts to supervising, administering, advising, teaching, strategizing, and synthesizing. For instance, my farmer friends in their 80s spend less time on horseback and on tractors, more time making strategic decisions about the business of farming; my older lawyer friends spend less time in court, more time mentoring younger lawyers; and my older surgeon friends spend less time doing long or complex operations, and more time training young physicians.

The problem for society as a whole is to use older people for what they are good at and like to do, rather than requiring them to continue to put in the 60-hour work weeks of ambitious young workers, or else going to the opposite extreme of stupidly imposing policies of mandatory retirement at some arbitrary age (as remains regrettably widespread in Europe). The challenge for older people themselves is to be introspective, to notice the changes in themselves, and to find work utilizing the talents that they now possess. Consider two examples involving great musicians, both of them introspective honest people who spoke openly about what types of music they could or couldn’t write in their old age (Plates 40, 41). The composer Richard Strauss’s opera librettist, Stefan Zweig, described their first meeting, when Strauss was already 67 years old: “Strauss frankly admitted to me in the first hour of our meeting that he well knew that at 70 the composer’s musical inspiration no longer possesses its pristine power. He could hardly succeed in composing symphonic works like
Till Eulenspiegel
and
Tod und Verklärung
[his masterpieces of his 20s and 30s] because pure music requires an extreme measure of creative freshness.” But Strauss explained that he still felt inspired by situations and words, which he could still illustrate dramatically in music, because they spontaneously
suggested musical themes to him. Hence his last composition, completed at age 84, and one of his greatest achievements, was his
Four Last Songs for Soprano and Orchestra,
with a subdued autumnal mood anticipating death, unostentatiously rich orchestration, and quotations from his own music of 58 years earlier. The composer Giuseppe Verdi intended to end his musical career with his sprawling grand operas
Don Carlos
and
Aida
, written respectively at ages 54 and 58. However, Verdi was persuaded by his publisher to write two more operas,
Otello
at age 74 and
Falstaff
at age 80, often considered his greatest works, but in a much more condensed, economical, subtle style than his earlier music.

Devising new living conditions for our elderly, appropriate to the changing modern world, remains a major challenge for our society. Many past societies made better use of their elderly, and gave them better lives, than we do today. We can surely find better solutions now.

Attitudes towards danger
A night visit
A boat accident
Just a stick in the ground
Taking risks
Risks and talkativeness

On one of my first trips to New Guinea, when I was still inexperienced and incautious, I spent a month with a group of New Guineans, studying birds on a forest-covered mountain. After a week camped at low elevation and inventorying birds there, I wanted to identify the bird species living at higher elevation, so we moved our gear a few thousand feet up the mountain. For the campsite at which we would be based for the next week, I selected a gorgeous location in tall forest. It was on a long ascending ridge at a point where the ridge flattened and became broader, offering lots of gentle terrain nearby in which I could comfortably walk around and watch birds. From a nearby stream, we could obtain water without having to go far. The campsite was at one side of the flat ridge crest, overlooking a steep drop-off into a deep valley over which I would be able to watch soaring hawks, swifts, and parrots. As the place to erect our tents, I chose the base of a glorious giant of a forest tree, with a thick straight trunk covered with moss. Delighted at the prospect of spending a week in such beautiful surroundings, I asked my New Guinea companions to build a platform for our tents.

To my astonishment, they became agitated and refused to sleep there. They explained that the tall tree was dead, so it might fall over on our camp and kill us. Yes, I did see that the tree was dead, but I was still surprised
at their overreaction and objected, “It’s a huge tree. It looks still solid. It’s not rotten. No wind could blow it over, and there isn’t wind here anyway. It will be years before this tree falls over!” But my New Guinea friends remained frightened. Rather than sleep in the shelter of a tent under that tree, they declared that they would instead sleep exposed out in the open, far enough away that the tree wouldn’t hit and kill them if it fell.

I thought then that their fears were absurdly exaggerated and verged on paranoia. But as my months of camping in New Guinea forests went on, I noticed that, at least once on almost every day, I heard a tree falling somewhere in the forest. I listened to stories of New Guineans killed by tree-falls. I reflected that these New Guineans spent much of their lives camped in the forest—perhaps a hundred nights a year, or about 4,000 nights over their 40-year expected lifespan. I eventually carried out the math. If you do something that involves a very low probability of killing a person—say, just once in a thousand times that you do that something—but you do it a hundred times per year, then you are likely to die in about 10 years, instead of living out your expected lifespan of 40 years. That risk of falling trees doesn’t deter New Guineans from going into the forest. But they do reduce the risk by being careful not to sleep under dead trees. Their paranoia makes perfect sense. I now think of it as “constructive paranoia.”

My choice of this oxymoronic, seemingly unpleasant term for a quality that I admire is intentional. We normally use the word “paranoia” in a pejorative sense, to include greatly exaggerated and baseless fears. That’s how New Guineans’ reactions to camping under dead trees initially struck me, and it’s true that usually a particular dead tree wouldn’t fall on the particular night that a person chose to camp under it. But, in the long run, that seeming paranoia is constructive: it’s essential to surviving under traditional conditions.

Nothing else that I have learned from New Guineans has affected me as deeply as that attitude. It’s widespread in New Guinea, and reported in many other traditional societies around the world. If there is some act that carries a low risk each time, but if you’re going to do it frequently, you had better learn to be consistently careful if you don’t want to die or become crippled at a young age. That’s an attitude that I’ve learned to adopt towards the low-risk but frequent hazards of American life, such as
driving my car, standing in the shower, climbing a ladder to change a light bulb, walking up and down stairs, and walking on slippery sidewalks. My cautious behavior drives crazy some of my American friends, who consider it ridiculous. The Westerners who most share my constructive paranoia are three friends whose lifestyle made them, too, alert to the cumulative hazard of repeated low-risk events: one friend who piloted small airplanes, another who was an unarmed policeman on the streets of London, and a third who floats rubber rafts down mountain streams as a fishing guide. All three learned from examples of less cautious friends who were eventually killed after years of that job or activity.

Of course, not just New Guinea life but also Western life has its dangers, even if one isn’t a pilot, bobby, or river guide. But there are differences between the perils of modern Western life and of traditional life. Obviously, the types of dangers are different: cars and terrorists and heart attacks for us, lions and enemies and falling trees for them. More significantly, the overall level of danger is much lower for us than for them: our average lifespan is double theirs, meaning that the average per-year risk that we face is only about half as great. The other significant difference is that the effects of many or most accidents that we Americans suffer can be repaired, whereas accidents in New Guinea are much more likely to prove crippling or fatal. On the sole occasion when I became incapacitated and unable to walk in the United States (from slipping on an icy Boston sidewalk and breaking my foot), I hobbled to a nearby pay phone to call my physician father, who picked me up and took me to a hospital. But when I injured my knee in the interior of Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville Island and became unable to walk, I found myself stranded 20 miles inland from the coast, without any means to obtain outside help. New Guineans who break a bone can’t get it set by a surgeon and are likely to end up with an improperly set bone that leaves them permanently impaired.

In this chapter I shall describe three incidents that befell me in New Guinea, and that illustrate constructive paranoia or the lack of it. At the time of the first incident, I was too inexperienced even to recognize signs of mortal danger nearby: I was operating as a normal Westerner, but in a traditional world that required a different mind-set. In the next event, over a decade later—the one that finally taught me to embrace constructive paranoia—I was forced to acknowledge that I had made a mistake that
nearly cost me my life, while another, more cautious man facing the same choice at the same time didn’t make my mistake and thus didn’t experience the trauma of coming close to death. In the remaining incident, yet another decade later, I was with a New Guinea friend who reacted with constructive paranoia to a seemingly inconsequential detail that I had overlooked. He and I were never able to decide whether the apparently innocent stick on the ground that my friend spotted really did mark the presence of hostile people (as my friend feared), but I was impressed by his cautious attention to minutiae. In the following chapter I’ll discuss the types of danger faced by traditional societies, and the ways in which people estimate, misestimate, and deal with danger.

One morning, I set out from a large village with a group of 13 New Guinea Highlanders to reach an isolated small village several days’ walk away. The region was in the foothill altitudinal zone with New Guinea’s lowest population densities, below the elevation of the densely populated Highland valleys suitable for intensive cultivation of sweet potatoes and taro, above the lowland elevations where sago palms grow well and freshwater fish are plentiful, and in the altitudinal range with the highest incidence of cerebral malaria. I was told before setting out that our journey would take about three days, and that we would be constantly in forests that were completely uninhabited. The whole region had a very sparse population and had come only a few years previously under government control. Warfare had been occurring until recently, and endocannibalism (eating of one’s dead relatives) was reported as still being practised. Some of my New Guinea companions were local, but most of them came from another district of the Highlands and knew nothing about this district.

The first day’s walk was not bad. Our route wound around the slopes of a mountain, gradually gained in elevation to cross a ridge, and then began to descend again along the course of the river. But the second day was one of the most grueling hikes of my career in New Guinea. It was already drizzling when we broke camp at 8:00
A.M.
There was no trail: instead, we waded along a mountain torrent, climbing up and down over
huge slippery boulders. Even for my New Guinea friends, accustomed to rugged Highland terrain, the route was a nightmare. By 4:00
P.M
. we had descended over 2,000 vertical feet along the river and were exhausted. We pitched camp in the rain, erected our tents, cooked our rice and tinned fish for dinner, and went to sleep while the rain continued.

The details of the layout of our two tents are relevant for understanding what happened during that night. My New Guinea friends slept under a large tarpaulin stretched over a central raised horizontal ridge-pole, and pulled down taut to the ground along both sides parallel to the ridge-pole, like an inverted V in cross-section. The tarpaulin’s two ends were open; one could walk into or out of the tarpaulin at its front and back ends, and the ridge-pole was high enough that one could stand up under the tarpaulin’s center. My own tent was a bright green Eureka pup-tent stretched over a light metal frame, and with a large front door flap and a small rear window flap both of which I zipped closed. My tent’s front door faced one of the two open ends (the “front”) of the New Guineans’ large tarpaulin, and was just a few yards away from it. Anyone walking out of the front of their tarpaulin would come first to the closed front door of my tent, then walk along the side of my tent, and finally pass my tent’s rear with its closed window flap. But to someone unfamiliar with Eureka pup-tents, it would have been unclear whether the actual entrance after unzipping a flap was the closed front door or the rear with a closed window. I slept with my head towards the rear and my feet towards the front door, but I would have been invisible from the outside of my tent because its walls were not transparent. The New Guineans kept a fire going inside their tarpaulin for warmth.