The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (80 page)

Besides multilingualism, child-rearing by traditional societies offers many other model options from which we can choose. All prospective parents should ask themselves which of the following options make sense for them: a period of on-demand nursing insofar as it’s practical, late weaning, maintaining physical contact between the infant and some adult, co-sleeping (get a firm mattress or a crib in your bedroom, and discuss it with your pediatrician!), transporting infants vertically and facing forwards, much allo-parenting, responding quickly to a child’s crying, avoiding physical punishment, giving your child freedom to explore (appropriately monitored!), multi-age playgroups (valuable for both the younger and the older children), and helping your kids learn to entertain themselves rather than stifling them with manufactured “educational toys” and video games and other pre-packaged entertainment. You may find individual adoption of some of these measures difficult if your neighborhood or local society as a whole doesn’t change: when all of the kids on the block have video games and only your house doesn’t, you may find your children wanting to spend all their time in other kids’ homes. But it’s worth thinking seriously about these choices: the independence, security, and social maturity of children in traditional societies impress all visitors who have come to know them.

Still another thing that we can do individually is to assess realistically the dangers inherent in our lifestyles, and to adopt New Guinea–style constructive paranoia selectively. My New Guinea friends figured out not to sleep underneath dead trees in the jungle, and to pay attention to seemingly innocent-looking broken sticks in the ground—even though the odds are that they could sleep for dozens of nights under a dead tree and ignore dozens of seemingly innocuous sticks without getting into trouble. But they know that, if they adopt those incautious practices hundreds of times, the odds will eventually catch up with them. For most of us Westerners, life’s major hazards aren’t dead trees or sticks in the ground, but they also aren’t terrorists, nuclear reactors, plane crashes, and the other spectacular but realistically insignificant hazards that we obsess about. Instead, accident statistics show that most of us should be constructively paranoid about cars (driven by ourselves or by other people), alcohol (consumed by ourselves or by other people), and (especially as we get older) stepladders and slipping in showers. For each of us, there are some other risks that we should also be thinking about, depending on our particular individual lifestyle.

Our religion (or lack of religion) is yet another choice that we make as individuals. Many of us go through difficult periods of life when we re-assess our religious beliefs. At such times, it’s worth remembering that our choice of religion is a broader and more complex matter than just adopting metaphysical beliefs that we’ve decided are true, or rejecting beliefs that we’ve decided are false. As I write these lines, I’m reflecting on the different choices made by three friends whom I’ve known for decades: one, a life-long Unitarian for whom her church has been a central focus of her life; the second, a lifelong Jew for whom his religion and his wrestling with his relationship to Israel have been a core of his identity; and the third, a German friend raised a Catholic, living in an overwhelmingly Catholic area of Germany, who recently astonished me by converting at age 40 to Protestantism. In all three cases, my friends’ decisions to maintain or to change their religion have depended on roles of religion other than as a source of beliefs. Those various roles have waxed and waned at different times for my friends through their lifetimes, just as they have waxed and waned in different historical periods for societies over the millennia. The roles include the search for satisfying explanations of ultimate
questions about the physical world; dealing with anxiety and stressful situations; making sense of the death of a loved one, of the prospect of one’s own death, and of other painful events; justifying one’s moral principles of behavior, and one’s obedience or disobedience to authority; and identifying oneself as a member of a group whose ideals one shares. For those of us going through a period of religious turmoil, perhaps it might help clarify our thinking to remember that religion has meant different things to different societies, and to be honest with ourselves about what religion does or might mean specifically to us.

Turning now to admired features of traditional societies whose implementation requires both individual action and societal action, I already mentioned one example: reduction of dietary salt intake, a goal towards which we can make some progress as individuals, but which requires actions by governments and food manufacturers if we are also to reduce our cryptic salt intake in processed foods. We can similarly reduce our individual risk of diabetes by exercise and appropriate diets, but governments can also contribute in ways such as public awareness campaigns and regulating sales of fattening foods in public school cafeterias. As for how society (and not just bilingual parents of infants) can foster multilingualism and combat language extinction, some governments (e.g., Switzer-land’s) work hard to preserve their language diversity; other governments (e.g., that of the U.S.) only recently stopped working hard to eradicate their nation’s diversity of native languages; and still other governments (e.g., the French in the region of Brittany) continue to oppose retention of a native language.

The status of the elderly also depends on both individual and societal decisions. Increasing numbers of older people make themselves valuable in new ways, ease the lives of their working adult children, and enrich the lives of their grandchildren and of themselves, by providing high-quality one-on-one child care to their grandchildren. Those of us who are parents between the ages of 30 and 60 may be starting to wonder what quality of life we shall enjoy, and how our children will treat us, when we reach old age. We should remember that our children are now watching how we care for our own elderly parents: when it comes our own time to be receiving rather than giving care, our children will remember and be influenced by our example. Society can enrich the lives of the elderly as a group, and can
enrich society itself, by not requiring retirement at some arbitrary age for people able and eager to continue working. Mandatory retirement policies have been falling by the wayside in the United States in recent decades, have not led to incapable older people clinging to jobs as initially feared, and have instead retained the services of the most experienced members of our society. But far too many European institutions still require employees at the peak of their productivity to retire, just because they have reached some arbitrary age in the absurdly low range of 60 to 65 years.

In contrast to eating slowly and providing crib bilingualism, which we can do independently ourselves while waiting for changes in society as a whole, combining the advantages of traditional justice with the advantages of state justice will mostly require societal decisions. Two mechanisms that I discussed are restorative justice and mediation. Neither is a panacea, both appear useful under some circumstances but not other circumstances, and both require policy decisions by our court systems. If you see possible value in these options, your role as an individual is to join movements promoting these mechanisms in courts; you can’t adopt them by yourself. But you may be able to utilize by yourself the New Guinea emphasis on informal mediation, emotional clearance, and reestablishment of relationships (or of non-relationships) in disputes the next time that you find yourself in a private dispute where tempers are rising.

The societies to which most readers of this book belong represent a narrow slice of human cultural diversity. Societies from that slice achieved world dominance not because of a general superiority, but for specific reasons: their technological, political, and military advantages derived from their early origins of agriculture, due in turn to their productive local wild domesticable plant and animal species. Despite those particular advantages, modern industrial societies didn’t also develop superior approaches to raising children, treating the elderly, settling disputes, avoiding non-communicable diseases, and other societal problems. Thousands of traditional societies developed a wide array of different approaches to those problems. My own outlook on life has been transformed and enriched by my years among one set of traditional societies, that of New Guinea. I hope that you readers as individuals, and our modern society as a whole, will similarly find much to enjoy and adopt from the huge range of traditional human experience.