Just because a bunch of religions believe it doesn’t make it true. Also the only times I have heard of it happening in psychology is the result of a bad childhood or abuse (which seems more in line with what is going on).
Well, a whole lot of them must have fallen in love. Fortunately for us. So it wasn’t all eating and not being eaten.
People watching doesn’t seem to help or address the main point of the link. That psychologically because of how our society is we feel like we have to fill some hole or as the result of a cut from some primal unity. I don’t like feeling like I’m born broken from something out of my control.
The breast-feeding period is only that long when there’s little food available that’s easily chewed and digested by small children. When enough easily chewed and digested food is available, it’s like Hari Seldon said:
One big problem with a hunter/gatherer life that requires nursing for four years is that nursing does not prevent additional pregnancies. This means that a mother with more than one child under four (or three, or two, depending on local resources) has to choose which child is nursed. I can’t imagine the pain of making that choice. Talk about leaving a hole.
I have big doubts about the nursing having an impact on psychology and that it was more of a necessity than anything else.
But the quoted post notes how HG don’t have to “lose themselves” in egoic striving or the “elites” charisma and other things.
Well, that too is a gross generalization, and pretty inaccurate as well.
Hunter/gatherers generally did a lot more gathering than hunting, and both activities were characterized by seasonal flurries of intense activity and then a lot of idleness. Like, when the salmon run you better get out there and catch your salmon and smoke and dry them, but after that, you’re coasting until the next harvest thing comes around.
California natives spent a lot of time gambling, singing, and making exquisite baskets. There weren’t even that many big predators until the whalers started letting so many stripped carcasses float to shore, supporting a boom in grizzlies and black bears.
But I guess it also makes me question what is natural and right when I see how different life is from then and now
Like how wanting relationships or getting swept up in a leader is just to try and recapture this feeling of the numinous
http://www.fearofnature.com/wandering-god-berman
Actually this was the book I’m talking about.
Also while the link to the site seems hyperbolic I think it gets at how humans were ones adept at surviving “in nature” and now it’s like there is a fear of it with them.
People ALWAYS form hierarchies.
Hunter/gatherers are dependent on their local environment. They need to know a great deal about local resources and to coordinate to harvest the local resources. Coordination is critical to survival and it doesn’t happen by floating mentally “in nature”. I’m not sure what “egoic striving” and “‘elites’ charisma” is supposed to mean, but if they’ve got anything to do with managing one’s place in a group or managing between groups, then they were survival level critical.
Rosa Sayer: Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.
Well the link I posted is a book that suggests such things. But from what I have read about HG seems to suggest that the tale is quite varied and not exactly monolithic
But the author in the link seems to suggest otherwise
http://9-1.huntergatherers.org/
And this one seems to suggest that in order to recapture the experience with the “numinous” (according you erikson) modern man tries many fusion experiments.
He is also self published and has no academic credentials online. He does not mention any academic credentials in his introduction, stating: "I have undertaken this project out of an intellectual fondness for the subject matter . . . "
This is a hobbyist. This is a hobbyist who could not find anyone willing to publish his meanderings unless they were paid up front (White Poppy Press). And this is a hobbyist with a horrible bright orange background on the home page of his website. I would not read anything he wrote for fear of it killing brain cells.
And about the “hole” - that’s a feature, not a bug. Humans spend many vulnerable years in childhood during which they need to stay close to and pay attention to the other humans around them. That requires motivation. Fortunately, most humans are born with a “hole” - a strong urge to be with, and create social bonds with, other humans. Without that “hole”, even in adulthood, the odds of survival go way down, especially in a hunter/gatherer situation.
Modern resources allow people born with less urgent “holes” to survive, so if anything, modern life has allowed less “broken” personalities to spread. Theoretically. There’s really no way to measure how urgent the inborn need to connect is among different populations. So we, and JAH, are stuck telling stories about how we think things might be working.
I did run across a magazine article, long ago, about scientists studying a hunter/gatherer tribe and how difficult it was to just watch while babies, children, and adults died of starvation. Because if you provide food, you change the society. Did you know that babies are born with a greater or lesser propensity to cry? Guess which babies were more likely to survive during periods of starvation. Guess why.
That’s a review from, I assume the owner of the website. He describes himself: “Corbett Robinson . . . is a California native. He obtained his BA degree in Religious Studies with minors in Philosophy and Native American Studies from Humboldt State. He currently works for the National Park Service, on the Trail Crew for Golden Gate National Recreation Area.”
I’m not sure I’d rely on him to accurately describe the book: Berman, M. Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000). That’s Morris Berman, with, according to wikipedia, a bachelor’s in mathematics and a PhD in History of Science. He’s described there as a humanist cultural critic who specializes in Western cultural and intellectual history. It looks like he ranges a bit from that when he writes for a general audience, but he was published by university presses.
At a brief scan, Berman’s writing is dense and he argues against a lot of other historians/popularizers on a number of topics. In the introduction to Wandering God, he writes that with the hunter/gatherer outlook: “One does not “deal with” alienation (the split between Self and World) as much as live with it, accept the discomfort as just part of what is.” This is the exact opposite of what JAH is claiming in your first link.
It looks like CR’s review is a mix of summary of MB, quotes from MB, and his own ideas, with references to other works. I don’t know how much he strays from MB’s conclusions. JAH, on the other hand, is very much going his own way. He’s much easier to read, but that’s all his own stuff. The reference(s) are there only for decoration, not support.
Wandering God is the last book in a trilogy about consciousness and spirituality through different eras. I did not read it. I only scanned through. I’d describe what I did read as being based on what has been written about “consciousness and spirituality through history” by past historians, philosophers, and early psychologists. So if you’d enjoy having him describe other people’s guesses about the internal workings of long dead people to you and then tell you which of them he agrees with or disagrees with, go to it. There may be some actual evidence in there, but what evidence there is is drowning in multiple conclusions from multiple people.
The first two books in the trilogy are The Re-enchantment of the World and Coming to Our Senses. He’s also written a trilogy on the decline of American civilization: The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America, Why America Failed (2011).
So he pretty much just quotes a bunch of different people but presents nothing original of his own?
Also I don’t get what he means by the split between self and world, and I doubt that was the HG outlook and if it was then it’s not a good one. From what I can tell humans caused a lot of damage because of that split, unable to see how we are connected to the world and everything around us. Plenty of eastern philosophy argues quite well against this perceived “split”:
If that’s the main point of his piece then HG were wrong in their view of the world because there isn’t a split between you and the world,
That’s a load of cack, and you have no idea what you’re talking about. Bonding around the fire is *exactly *what they do.