In The Vanishing, Malcolm
Gladwell's book review of "Collapse," by Jared Diamond, there are several sections which struck a cord in me:
"Why did the Norse choose not to eat fish? Because they weren't thinking about their biological survival. They were thinking about their cultural survival. Food taboos are one of the idiosyncrasies that define a community. Not eating fish served the same function as building lavish churches, and doggedly replicating the untenable agricultural practices of their land of origin. It was part of what it meant to be Norse, and if you are going to establish a community in a harsh and forbidding environment all those little idiosyncrasies which define and cement a culture are of paramount importance. "The Norse were undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland's difficulties," Diamond writes. "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity." He goes on:
To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches , to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth.
Diamond's distinction between social and biological survival is a critical one, because too often we blur the two, or assume that biological survival is contingent on the strength of our
civilizational values. That was the lesson taken from the two world wars and the nuclear age that followed: we would survive as a species only if we learned to get along and resolve our disputes peacefully. The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically suicidal. The two kinds of survival are separate. "
Malcolm, according to Diamond, uses the example of the war in Rwanda. "The Hutu didn't just kill the Tutsi, he points out. The Hutu also killed other Hutu." Diamond attributes much of this to land erosion, deforestation leading to irregular rainfall, subsequent famine..."This was a society on the brink of ecological disaster, and if there is anything that is clear from the study of such societies it is that they inevitable descend into genocidal chaos."
"And when the
archaeologists looked at the animal bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found bones of dogs covered with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost sight of what they stood for."
The New Yorker, January 3, 2005
So many current social and political systems come to mind after reading this. For one, human beings remain as stubborn as dust. We can easily transpose the
Norse's sociocultural arrogance with the arrogance of today's suburbanite sprawl, social malice, beauty obsessed, phobia-ridden behaviors. Including the "red" half of the country, who deem it unpatriotic to acknowledge global warming, and the probability of their own biological extinction, preferring to blindly align themselves
with a government which sends their children to war for oil, thus securing their great grand children's legacies -- or so the power's that be doggedly imagine.
Also, I can't help but feel a little like the Inuit, who the Norse called
skraelings, "wretches," and whose practical wisdom and general humanity was treated with malicious hostility.
Are we so blinded by cultural survival that we are willing to be so cavalier as to pick and choose whom we are open to learning from and including -- to the detriment of our biological survival? I mean, what this implies is that, diversity, or lack thereof, will kill us all in the end; the marginal, such as myself, will be the first to go.
