As in other traditional hunting-gathering societies, child-rearing tends to be unstructured and permissive. Bushman children are not pressured into doing chores. Boys, for example, will only go hunting when they feel moved to do so. Children are never disciplined by being beaten. Instead, as one woman put it, “we talk to them a lot.” A child will be allowed to scowl back when scolded without being punished into blind obedience. Parents regard this venting of emotion as healthy and warn against beating a child; as one parent explained: “If you beat a child too much, they will become stubborn, and you cannot win that child over again,” and then, “It is better to give a child a reward when they do something right, than to beat him/her when doing something wrong.”
At puberty the situation changes somewhat when girls begin an initiation into womanhood. The initiation of boys tends to come later and is associated with the first big kill, signifying the ability to feed a family and contribute to the community. But apart from a few taboos relating to menstruation rites and hunting, there are no “adults only” areas and no externally imposed structures. Adults and children intermingle freely around all public activities. All are free to join the healing dances and to listen to the discussions and storytelling; children are free to make their own interpretations. Education takes place continuously, merging invisibly with participation in everyday life.
This freedom continues into adulthood. Each person follows intuition, passion, and home-crafted wisdom in charting the course of his or her own life. Should the group become oppressive or unsatisfying, there is always the real option of getting up, wandering off, and joining another band; individual Bushmen can also live for a time on their own, as hermits, though this is almost unknown. Deeply rooted autonomy sharpens the joys of communal life, making ostracism the greatest punishment.
The voluntary nature of Bushman association refutes the ideas of economists, even those of relatively enlightened ones like Robert Heilbronner, who asserts it is only “the pure need for self-preservation…that pushes [primitive] society to the cooperative completion of its daily labors.” On the contrary, the hunter-gatherer band knows and honors the value of communal effort, but it cultivates an autonomous self-sufficiency that provides a real freedom of choice. Ironically, it’s “the pure need for self-preservation” that compels the rule-bound bureaucrat and the obedient wage earner to conform to the hierarchies of our industrial societies. We are educated to fit into the most extreme division of labor of any civilization, which directly constrains our choices of dress, speech, and behavior. Often, the memberships, affiliations, and personas we create and maintain determine how and whether we prosper in a complex variety of corporate structures, from school and business to church and state. Deviance can jeopardize a livelihood.
Much of the stress of modern life — the insecurity and anxiety — seems to be due to this lack of direct control over the conditions for survival. Few of us could feed our families by hunting, gathering, or growing our own food. Even fewer could build and repair a house, computer, car, or phone. We cannot heal sickness, nor can we expect to have unmet needs fulfilled by loudly complaining to our neighbors. Here, rich and poor alike are free to compete for both necessities and luxuries, with no legal or moral limit to the accumulation of wealth, and no obligation to share with or care for one another. When an entire working lifetime can be spent on the production line of a factory, the individual becomes isolated, anxious, and self-absorbed and collapses into a fragile one-dimensionality — personified in the bureaucrat, citizen, or soldier for whom obedience to authority becomes one of the highest virtues.
Here is the paradox: precisely because of the material simplicity of Bushman society, each individual can develop a greater inner wealth, cultivating a whole human life. For the most part, each member of the band participates in all the definitive humanizing activities: producer, provider, teacher, learner, leader, follower, artist, musician, dancer, and healer. Everyone has a
direct voice in the ongoing discussions and helps create the consensus that constitutes governance. The archetypal events of a human life cycle — birth, growth, maturity, and death — are ubiquitous and public. The full range of human emotions — love and hate, anger and tenderness, meanness and generosity — are similarly on public display in the full context of the lives of the protagonists. As with the medicine wheel, the very compact structure of the primal band exposes the individual to a complexity that is a stimulus to growth around the wheel of life.
In summary the San Bushmen give us a vivid sense of the defining template of the original wild human society. Much of this is “hardwired” in all of us as humans. Industrial civilization has developed by explicitly repressing the wild human. As we become conscious of this history and recover the basic template of what it means to be human, we become healed and empowered as we reconstruct a species politics for a planetary civilization.
From the book Future Primal. Copyright © 2013 by Louis G. Herman. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.NewWorldLibrary.com. See also http://futureprimalbook.com/
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