Civilization - A Good Idea?

The other day someone shared this story on Facebook:

It looked like something I'd seen before.  It had the feel of a sermon illustration, and even though it was going against Science to question a doctor, I looked it up, and sure enough, it is probably bogus.

First off, Mead probably didn't say it.  No one seems to have been able to track it to a named source close to Mead, let alone Mead herself.  One of the benefits of attributing a story to a student is that you don't need to provide a reference.  But that's also one of the hallmarks of an urban legend, that you heard from a friend of a friend of a friend.  It doesn't prove it isn't authentic, but it makes it suspicious. That malicious little voice in my head crowed triumphantly, "And that student's name?  It was Albert Einstein!"

Byock's version was published in 2012, as you can see.  Someone has, however, found a variant from 1980, two years after Mead's death, "in the surgeon Paul Brand's Christian memoir Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Zondervan). This screenshot is from page 68."

This at least seems to be an eyewitness account by someone who'd attended a lecture by Mead, recalling what he remembered she'd said at some remove.  I'm trying to make sense of that "I was soon to be reminded", but maybe it would be clearer in context.

Second, there are problems with its account of "civilization."  One is that Brand's characterization of "primitive" societies is false: modern capitalist societies are "savage, competitive societies," yet we do treat broken bones and other injuries.  It's false that "primitive" societies don't treat injuries or care for ill or wounded people, and "clues of violence" inflicted by arrows and clubs are not limited to such cultures -- just read the accounts of warfare by the children of Israel in the Tanakh, or the fantasies of mass bloodshed by the Lamb in the book of Revelation. Nowadays, of course, we have added guns, explosives, napalm, and nuclear weapons to the armory.  I don't believe that Mead, who spent a fair amount of time among "primitive" people, would have uttered such a falsehood about them; at best this must be a fabrication by Brand.

While looking up the story, I found this blog post about it by a paleoarchaeologist, Stacy Hackner, who corrects some of its numerous factual errors.  (See also this post from a Christian blog, which not only perpetuates the Mead legend but distorts what Hackner said about it.  The blogger also seems to misunderstand or misread the word "truthiness."  Then there's this version from Forbes magazine online, which adds its own embellishments and distortions to the mix.)

The quote has a bit of “truthiness” to it. The general idea of the quote – other versions have her saying “in the law of the jungle, if you can’t hunt, you die” – is that all animals but humans live in a tooth-and-claw Darwinian world where literally only the fit survive. This is not so. Animals are adapted to living within their environment, and the most fit to their environment survive. Femoral fractures in wild animals can be survivable if they happen to juveniles who heal fully in few weeks (and are taken care of as a matter of course, at least in primates). A review of such fractures in primates was conducted by Bulstrode et al (1986). The authors examined wild animal skeletons in natural history collections, finding the healed fracture rate higher than expected.

I'm not a naturalist, nor do I own a pet, but I knew it was false that non-human animals don't exhibit compassion or care for one another.  A day ago on the street I passed a cat that caught and killed a squirrel.  In a nearby tree another squirrel was chittering angrily at the cat; it was aware that its fellow had been hurt, and was upset about it.  A couple of years ago I found a dead squirrel lying in the middle of a sidewalk near my apartment.  Another squirrel had spreadeagled itself flat on the concrete a few inches away and was chittering noisily in what I took to be distress.  It fled as I approached, but returned as I walked away and continued its cries.  When I returned later, it was gone, having apparently given up.  I don't know exactly what these squirrels were feeling, of course, but they certainly weren't indifferent to the fates of other squirrels.  (A quibble: "Nature red in tooth and claw," to which Hackner alludes, is Tennyson, not Darwin.)

Hackner adds:

Another key point about the quote is that only humans have the tools to actually fix a broken limb. (I mean, only humans have the tools, period. We invented tools.) If a wild animal has a broken limb, it can heal, but it will heal improperly.

Among human beings, bonesetting is at least 3000 years old.  Other animals don't have bonesetters, surgeons, antibiotics, or vaccination.  We didn't have such things ourselves for most of our history and prehistory, but that didn't mean people didn't care about the suffering of others.  When people stood by helplessly watching someone suffer and die, it didn't necessarily mean that they didn't care, only that there was nothing they knew to do about it.

Hackner concludes:

We tend to think of people before us as cruel and barbaric, a fallacy I continue to address in my teaching. But they’re only as cruel as people today, and also as compassionate. There’s a whole field exploring archaeology of disability, including the social treatment of people with injuries and conditions that affected their mobility.

It's significant, I think, that this distortion and attempted erasure of human (and animal) compassion should have been spread by a palliative-care physician and a Christian surgeon.  It seems clear to me that Brand's reference to monks caring for the injured is meant to suggest (to a fundamentalist Christian readership, who'd welcome the suggestion) that only Christians care for the sick and hurt.  That's also false: pre-Christian Greek and Buddhist temples, among others were places of medical treatment.  But leave their motivations aside: the key point is that both projections of non-human and "primitive" human responses to suffering are false.

I don't believe that Margaret Mead actually said anything like the words that these men put into her mouth.  For one thing, Mead was constantly accused, during and after her life, of being too positive about "primitive" societies, of seeing them as better than modern "civilization."  As it happens, I also found this transcript of some of her remarks about culture and civilization, which reads much more like what I would expect a world-class anthropologist to say on the subject.

What annoyed me at first glance in Byock's and Brand's parables was their misuse of the word "civilization," a misuse typical among non-anthropologists.  Generally when a non-specialist talks about "civilized" behavior, or "true" civilization, they mean that the society in question exhibits values and conduct they approve of.  You can see this when someone uses "normal" as a normative term: they might be referring to a trait or conduct that's found in a minority of people, or even quite rare.  That doesn't matter to them: it's how people should be.

Similarly, "civilization" and "civilized" are not normative terms.  They refer to certain structures of human society.  As Mead described it:

When we start to distinguish between cultures and civilization we come up against a quite different problem. Over the last ten thousand years and possibly longer—we don’t know yet—there have periodically appeared in different parts of the world dense populations, a tremendous  increase in the number of people and a corresponding increase in the ability to grow food and to store it. Under the impetus of people living with far greater density, we have developed—this has been developed several different times in different  parts of the world—our capacity  to  manage such large groups of people.  This means keeping accounts, keeping records. It means some kind of taxation and revenue. It means a great deal of division of labor so that large groups of people can divide among themselves all the skills and tasks and knowledge that are necessary to manage a large civilization—like  ancient China, like the civilization of the Incas in South America, or the civilization of the Maya and Aztecs in Mexico, like ancient Greece or Rome, and like our own complex civilization today.

I've read a fair amount of anthropology over the decades, and this fits with everything I've read about what civilization is.  You might think (and many people do) that large, complex, densely populated societies with a specialized division of labor are a bad thing; you might prefer to live in a "primitive" kinship-organized society (as long as you can have your iPhone and a good 5G signal).  But that means you don't think civilization is a good thing.  It's okay, I'm tolerant.

So to repeat, I don't believe Byock and Brand accurately present what Margaret Mead said about civilization.  I certainly agree that caring for other people is an essential element of a good society, but it doesn't matter whether it's called "civilized" or not.  Telling the truth does, and that brings me back to why I refer to this legend as a sermon illustration.  When someone is caught spreading misinformation online, the most common defensive move is to say something like, "Who cares who said it?  It's true, and I like it."  Just as a matter of truth-telling, which is also a universal human value no matter how often it's violated, we should all care that we are accurate about who said something, and whether they said it.  But in this case as in so many, it also matters that the story being spread is not true.  It misrepresents animals and human beings alike.

Against Nature

A reader wrote in to correct something I wrote in this post, that "this cultivated nostalgia for a carefully modified-and-tamed-by-humans Nature is an artifact of modernity.  It's a luxury we moderns can indulge because we can keep Nature at bay.  (Most of the time, anyway.)"  My reader pointed out "the Roman poets and their longing for simple country life," and I sit corrected.

I should also have remembered Socrates, who according to Plato, reacted against a similar romanticizing of nature even before the Romans.  In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that "the country places and the trees won't teach me anything, but the people in the city do."  The trick to getting him out of the city, he continues, is to dangle a book in front of him, as people dangle carrots in front of hungry draft animals to get them moving.

I noticed this too when I read The Tale of Genji about a decade ago.  It's a vast novel a thousand years old about Japanese court life.  The title character likes to send flowers on branches, wrapped in poems of his own composition, to the ladies he pursues.  (And rapes, as often as not.)  But when Genji goes out in the rain or snow to collect these romantic gifts, he is wrapped in oilcloth against the elements.  It's his servant, less well covered, who does the work of breaking the branches off their trees.  Japanese culture is famous for its aestheticization of nature, but I noticed that "nature" in Genji's day was something to be cut up and gift-wrapped.  Just like my co-worker, taking her backlit e-reader with her when she goes camping to commune with nature.  So I admit, this fetish isn't a product of modernity.

This might also be the place to mention a couple of related things I've read lately.  Today I noticed a collection of C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry sword-and-sorcery stories.  The stories themselves date back to the 1930s, but the collection was published in 2007, with an introduction by the science-fiction writer Suzy McKee Charnas.  I liked some of what Charnas had to say, but much of it baffles me.

For example, she discusses the popularity of "two-fisted action" in pulp writing of the early twentieth century, and contrasts it with literary fiction of the period:

Meanwhile back at the library, the stuff called “literature” in the United States was dominated by people like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, stylists of a terse, “masculine” mode touted as the truest voice of serious American writing.  This hard, stripped-down style was clearly intended to challenge the more ornate, emotional, and melodramatic style of novel that had been popular (especially with middle-class women) for generations – think Dickens, and you’re definitely in the ballpark.  World War One had a powerful effect in concentrating the cultural mind on consensual reality.  After all that killing and dying in reality, mere “fancy” had come to be considered childish and insignificant in literary quarters.  Or, worse, decadent (code for – gasp! – homosexual) [12].

First, Hemingway I can see (though he learned his "terse, 'masculine' node" from the much butcher Gertrude Stein), but Fitzgerald?  His writing is only "terse" compared to, say, Dickens.  I just took another look at the opening pages of This Side of Paradise, thanks to Project Gutenberg:

When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father's private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphere—especially after several astounding bracers.

Young Amory sounds more like Truman Capote than Conan the Barbarian.  I also know from reading Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture (Knopf, 1977) that nineteenth-century American male writers were obsessed with writing what Julian Hawthorne called "Man-books."  Herman Melville, says Douglas, "regarded the reception of his books as a test which would ascertain what genuine masculinity, or, as he tacitly defined it, what health and independence of mind, remained in American culture" (296).  "Over and over, Melville assures us that he will "set forth things as they actually exist"; he writes to correct 'high-raised romantic notions' about life at sea; no 'sentimental' illusions motivate him; he will give us 'facts'" (301).  Self-conscious striving after "literature" by American males seems to go along quite often with masculine anxiety and homosexual panic; it's not specific to any particular period.

About Jirel of Joiry, whose adventures take place in a version of medieval Europe, Charnas goes on to say that of course both her parents are dead by the time she's an adult, because "In such a violent age if you reached maturity your parents were likely dead, leaving you to replace them as you were meant to" (17).  True, the feudal period was violent, but violence wasn't the only thing that killed people then.  Plague swept through Europe periodically, decimating the population, and women often died in childbirth.  Also, says Charnas, "The feudal, rural France of 'Joiry' is nothing like the Renaissance world of reason, light, and beauty we’re familiar with from history" (15).  Renaissance Europe was still a violent, dirty, stinking, plague-ridden place, with "reason, light, and beauty" kept within strict limits.  Charnas seems to be relying on some outdated histories here, which depicted the medieval period as much 'darker' than it was, and the Renaissance as much 'lighter' and more rational.

I've just begun reading George Sturt's The Wheelwright's Shop (Cambridge UP, 1923), several months after I learned about it from David Ellis's Memoirs of a Leavisite.  Ellis accuses Sturt of romanticizing the old ways of working and living, but this seems at odds with this lovely passage:

The shop was still but half opened when the two front doors had been unfastened.  On either hand was a window, shuttered at night with two shutters put up from within and then fixed with a wooden bar.  When the shutters had been taken down from the windows there was nothing to take their place.  Snow, freezing wind, had a clear run.  With so much chopping to do one could keep fairly warm; but I have stood all aglow from yet resenting the open windows, feeling my feet cold as ice though covered with chips.  To supply some glass shutters for day-time was one of the first changes I made in the shop.  Nowadays, when all the heavy work is done by machinery, men would not and probably could not work at all in such a place; yet it must have sufficed for several generations.  My grandfather and my father had put up with it, and so did I until the winter came round again and the men began to ask me for sundry small indulgences, of which this was one.

Six o’clock in the morning was well enough in the summer; none the less I liked the dark winter mornings better.  Truly they were dark!  At that time the Farnham Local Board, caring nothing for working-class convenience and caring much to save money, had all the street lamps in the town put out at midnight.  The result was that, in the depth of winter, every man who went to work at six in the morning, and most artisans did, had to find his way without any light.  To be sure, there were moonlight mornings.  Sometimes, too, snowy roofs showed clear enough under glittering starlight.  But, on the other hand, there was freezing fog, there was the blackness of dense rain.  One foggy morning I lost my whereabouts in the familiar street; no building could be seen nor any sky distinguished; nothing but a slight difference in the feel of the pavement under my feet told me that I was passing So and So’s shop.  Another time a little glimmering light that met and passed me proved to be a lighted candle-end between the fingers of a chimney sweep, against whom one might otherwise have uncomfortably blundered.  And one black morning I walked through and was conscious of what I took to be the aura of a man on the pavement whom I never saw – probably a motionless policeman [13-14].

Lately I've been thinking often about what life was like in the days before electric light, about town streets -- let alone country roads and paths -- at night; or what it would be like to work in a place like the shop Sturt describes.  Sturt gives a striking picture of that time, and he doesn't seem unduly nostalgic about it.  Well, I've only read the first chapter or so, but I suspect I'll find more nuance here than Ellis allowed.