Category: The Mysteries of Us

Back to the Land (and Vegetarianism) – The Great Hippy Blunders

In 1974 I and about 30 other young dreamers bought a magnificent 1200 acre farm in one of the most beautiful spots on earth. We were going back to the land, like thousands of earth-children throughout the western world. We were going to feel the earth between our fingers and toes again. And the sea – Sandy Bay was on our doorstep, the sea teeming with abundance. We would till the soil, make art and music, love each other and share.

Back to our roots.

Forty years later, it’s a pretty miserable scene. Not that much tilling, less art and even less sharing. A hell of a lot of bickering over insanely trivial issues. An underground river of venomous gossip and grudges lasting decades.

Just like thousands of its counterparts around the world. Why?

In a nutshell, because they were never our roots. They weren’t anyone’s roots. In fact they were, ironically, further from our roots than our urban lifestyle. Even that didn’t tie us down to a few people on a few acres.

Three events widely separated in time have provided me with the understanding why this enterprise was doomed to failure.

First, in 1967, I went to a film festival in Brisbane which ran a documentary I never have, never could, forget. Someone with a 16mm camera and a tape recorder spent weeks in the Australian bush moving along with an extended group of Aboriginal hunter gatherers. I recognised the most natural lifestyle I had ever encountered and the sanest, happiest people I had ever seen. Unfortunately, a few years later, swept up in the beauty of Moehau and the energy of making a new community, I forgot.

Earlier this year I walked the Camino de Santiago, hefting my pack on my back every morning and walking fifteen to twenty miles.

And this week I heard an extract from a book called Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari.

For 200 millennia, more or less, we lived like pilgrims on the Camino. We had no fixed abode but did have a sense of a larger sphere in which we moved. Every morning we rose, gathered our few belongings and walked. It is no accident that a human child learns to walk around about the time that it gets too heavy to be carried any distance.

By and large the females gathered and the men hunted, but there was a fair amount of cross-over in response to what was available. No rigid plan; rigidity came with farming. When the fish were running everyone fished. When we came across an abundant vegetable resource everyone gathered and feasted. At night, we lit fires and ate.

Becoming farmers cursed us well and truly. We had to defend what we invested months, years, accumulating. Warfare and violent death became normal. As farmers, it wasn’t enough to simply create food. We had to build storage and then build defences for the storage. Powerful parasites called priests and their soldiers descended on us and demanded tribute. We farmed the land and they farmed us. Groovy. Soon populations grew so large that the door to a return to hunting and gathering was closed forever. We were trapped in a miserable, everlasting lifestyle. Little wonder that religions still make a virtue of large families and call birth control sinful.

By comparison, when a hunter-gathering clan ran into a superior competitor it moved out of the way, instead of fighting tooth and claw to defend … what? We didn’t have anything to defend. There was always more space because hunter-gathering prevented over-population. You simply could not have six children, it wasn’t viable. I have no idea how they prevented large families, but they did.

These are our true roots, and the real reason, I believe, why almost everyone who sets out to do the Camino finishes it, no matter how unlikely that may seem at the outset. It’s in our bones, our blood, our genes. Pushing on, keeping going – we’ve been doing it literally forever. And of course it is the reason why we feel wrong, unsatisfied, down, in the days after we stop. We have just spent a few weeks doing what we were designed to do since the dawn of our species.

One of Harari’s many theses is that mankind didn’t domesticate cereals 10,000 years ago – cereals domesticated mankind, very much to our disadvantage. We got a grossly inferior diet and a host of diseases – arthritis, digestive disorders, bad teeth, under-nutrition due to mineral and protein deficiencies and more. We lost, the cereals won, becoming the most widespread and successful plant group in history. The life and diet of the hunter-gatherer is constantly diverse. We had hundreds of different foods, changing with the locale and the seasons. As farmers, we inherited a miserable and insufficient handful. Vegetarianism, from an evolutionary perspective, is dietary self-flagellation. Enjoy.

It started with the dog, 10,000 years ago. In all likelihood someone found a wolf pup and raised it, discovering that the creature grew up identifying the human as its pack leader, driven to obey him or her. Then pastoral animals, then cereals. The wheat snuck up on us behind a bunch of cute animals. Fiendishly clever!

The biggest loss was that we became not only sicker but sadder, because we no longer spent our days doing what we had evolved to do – move constantly, see new things, deal with a constantly changing environment, walk, walk, walk. Homo sapiens, as you discover on the Camino if you’re paying attention, is a walking machine. People become utterly, stupidly happy walking the Camino. It’s now being said that the cure for almost everything is to walk two miles a day. Close but not enough – it’s more like three or four miles. And I do. If I don’t my happiness declines quickly.

The other big hit we took was over-work. We are absolutely not designed to work eight, ten hours a day, and doubly-absolutely-not designed to do the same work every day. (Walking isn’t work. It’s more like breathing with your legs.)

Eat meat, fish, and everything else that nourishes you. Consume all the parts of the animals you eat. Walk everywhere and (this is what I learnt from the aboriginal film) look around constantly, observing, thinking. Those aboriginals saw from two hundred yards away a goanna sitting on a rock that I couldn’t see from twenty. Take lots of rest, and share what you have. Accumulate as little as possible.

Live as much like a hunter gatherer as you can. You will flourish.

It really is that simple, because ten millennia is the blink of an evolutionary eye. It’s yesterday. We are still hunter gatherers where it counts.

And of course, don’t be so foolish as to voluntarily surrender to the tyranny of the cereal by putting roots down in the soil. Roots are for plants.

Hang on, I hear you say. I know happy farmers.

Really? I don’t. But I know farmers who are happier than their counterparts running the rat-race in the city, being carried around everywhere like shopping, heaving with 21st-Century insecurities. Farmers are outdoors a lot of the time, they have space, they don’t have a boss. Not bad, as modern lifestyles go. But their relative contentment isn’t in the same league as those Aboriginals wandering under the sky. They appeared to me to be transcendently happy, showing all the signs of a complete absence of inner conflict, living a Buddha-like existence in the permanent present.

We’re just not designed to spend our days walking 50 yards to the orchard and another 50 to the gardens, spending hours there doing back-breaking work, go back to the house for meals and sit around in the evenings on our bums talking and watching TV. And seeing the same handful of  people, the same set of scenery, year in year out. Thinking that would make us happy was a terrible mistake.

Not one I personally made for long, I’m pleased to say. A few months living in another community building a Buddhist temple was enough for me. I learned that living and eating communally, seeing the same faces everyday, was my particular hell. I had no idea I could come to hate someone because of the way they nibbled their rice.

Peace, man.

Might as well address the other common thesis, that we are ‘evolving to a higher state of consciousness’ which involves the peaceful, non-violent path of not eating animals.

For starters that is a gross and ignorant mis-use of the word ‘evolve.’ The only path of evolution, the only one, is adaptation by natural selection. So we won’t even start to do that until we start preferentially selecting mates on the basis of their vegetarianism and within those unions have more children who out-survive those of meat-eaters. Out-survive, in evolutionary language, has nothing to do with length of life. It means, technically, we will have more grandchildren who live to child-bearing age. One, it isn’t happening and two, if it was it would still take 50 millennia, minimum, to produce the slightest physical changes, the vital one being developing the herbivore’s ability to synthesise the essential amino acids from plant sources. Without complete (animal) protein we need to have all 9 essential amino acids in our system at the same time. Studies have shown various combinations of plant foods can provide these provided they are all consumed on the same day. To really thrive on this diet takes knowledge, effort and the availability of a wide variety of high-quality plant foods such as one finds in health food stores. I consider a lifestyle dependent on health-foods stores that bring together, year-round, food from all over the planet both unnatural and undesirable.

Evolving to become natural vegetarians has not even begun and is highly unlikely to. It would take an extended famine, during which one individual would strike luck thousands of times greater than that needed to win a national lottery and experience not just one but several gene mutations enabling that person to produce the necessary enzymes. It is theoretically likely that this person would thrive and have many healthy children when everyone else was starving. The gene would be rapidly dispersed through the population by preferential choice of mate and we would have evolved to become vegetarians.

Aint’ gonna happen.

The Strange and Unsatisfying History of the Human Orgasm


This is it! The Big One. My Grand Unifying Theory of Sex. (Not quite Stephen Hawkings, but a whole lot easier to understand.)

Humans, like, I suspect, many mammalian species, have sex lives which are for the most part unfulfilling. From evolution’s point of view, this is a good thing, believe it or not. It improves our chances of successful propagation of our genes.
What?
Yes. What men want, what gets men off, doesn’t do it for women, and vice versa. Our bits are in the wrong place and our instinctive techniques are at odds. Men tend to feel driven to violent thrusting, women tend to prefer strong, gentle rhythm (strong emphasis on tend). Most importantly, though, and the key to my theory is that the physical areas which produce the orgasm through friction and heat, the penis and the clitoris, don’t even normally come into contact because of where they’re placed. Weird. What’s worse, men let it all rip in one great bang and that’s it. A few drags on the post-coital fag and off to sleep with a beaming smile on our faces. But the women can come again, and again, and again, and love it.
How could nature get it so wrong?
My theory, for what it’s worth, is because that old trickster Momma Nature did it deliberately. That’s right. In this all-important part of keeping the species going she made sure that we guys get what we want and our female partners don’t.
Think about it. It all stems from the unchangeable fact that for the hugest part of our time as this species we didn’t have language anything like useful enough to have a discussion about who did what with whom and when. And it wouldn’t have done any good if we had, because we may not have even understood the connection between copulation and fertility anyway. Result: the females were alone in having certainty that the babe in their arms absolutely was theirs. Studies of comparable species show that the odds of a monogamous male wasting his time in feeding, protecting and training offspring who are not biologically his own are very high. Even today, anonymous surveys suggest that as many as 25% of kids are brought up by men who unknowingly are not their fathers.
You callous swine, I hear some people say. Wasting his time? Yes, because evolution is interested exclusively in the individual propagating his or her genes, and raising someone else’s offspring and not having any of your own may be socially worthy in modern terms but evolutionarily this is the ultimate catastrophe.
The male of many species, lions for example, avoid this disaster by killing any existing offspring of a female they hook up with. Humans, being highly communal and co-operative, don’t. So what the male does is take every chance he gets to swing his leg over someone else’s woman. If he spends his efforts raising someone else’s kid, but gets two other mates of two other women to raise his, he’s a winner.
So, since our cultural evolution has far outstripped the rate of the physical, and biologically we’re essentially cavemen and cavewomen in suits and skirts,  we blokes are still wired up to pop our rocks and leave. Get to sleep as soon as possible, because that’s important for the success of the next day’s hunting. Of course, we come back the next day for more of the same with the same partner. Because ‘guarding behaviour’, aka raging jealousy, makes it most likely that the female we coupled with last night and for the preceding period of time really will be carrying our child. So the main strategy is always going to be to hang around and keep the groceries flowing.
But if the male gets a chance to leap the odd back fence while some other guy is off doing …whatever, both he and the neighbour’s missus have a certain investment in laying off their bets with another partner.
That’s right – both of them. Because the female is stuck with an uncertainty neatly corresponding to the male’s: she can’t know if Loverboy No. 1 is actually fertile. When life is brutish, nasty and short, every year of fertility counts more than we can imagine today. Not only does she have to be free of disease or debility, she has to be carrying enough body fat to ovulate, menstruate and produce milk. And have enough healthy years left in her to see the kids through to university at age, say, twelve. Not an everyday guarantee in 150,000 BC. A few months wasted with a husky hunter shooting blanks is another catastrophe.
So, if we observe how The Act, in its default setting, works, we can see exactly why it is the way it is today. The male piles in, has his fun and rolls over for his beauty sleep as soon as she’ll let him go. She is attracted, turned on, stimulated, but during the act the chance that there will be enough of the right sort of clitoral contact to produce that satisfying orgasm is very low. So she clings, holds him in her, wanting more and unknowingly providing those little spermies the optimum environment to complete their long paddle to light up an egg.
And, just as nature designed it, when Big Hunter has rolled off and is stacking up Z’s in the corner – she still wants more! So maybe she’s aware of some youthful eyes glittering in a far corner of the cave, has observed an unattached stud with his mitts in his loincloth while they’ve been at it. Mmmm. Insurance time.
Sadly, of course, it’s no more likely that lover number two is going to hit the G-spot either, or even be interested in doing so. But maybe. You never know.
Don’t believe me? Female chimpanzees will routinely copulate with every male in the family group. The other very large advantage of this is that any male who has gotten biblical with her will leave her kids alone, because they might be his.
Neat, you must admit, even if something of the short straw for the female.
With men, it’s much simpler:
Higamous, Hogamous,
Woman is monagamous.
Hogamous, Higamous,
Man is polygamous.
…as Mrs. Amos Pinchot, William James, Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and many others are said to have said.
Which really means, because of the aforementioned ‘guarding behaviour’, men are openly promiscuous whereas women discreetly so.
Of course, although for the interests of readability I describe all this as though the protagonists are doing all this in full knowledge of the whys and wherefores, or as if some notional designer worked it all out that way, that’s not how evolution produces behaviour or physiology. Just as no-one up there, be it God, or Evolution as Architect, has any interest in making us behave in a manner which makes us happy. All that happens is that those men and women who by inclination are sufficiently promiscuous to cover their bets but not so promiscuous that they incite jealous rage and an early death will out-reproduce those at either end of the ideal point on the spectrum. That ideal point is to be faithful, do whatever you can to keep husband on song and providing, or your wife faithful, but when opportunity arrives, cover off the risk with someone else. Especially because in early times we lived and moved in smallish groups, with correspondingly small and interconnected gene pools, and the chance of the odd infidelity being exposed by a child of incongruously variant appearance was small.
And yes, without thought and intervention women who rely on coitus to achieve sexual repletion will remain perpetually unsatisfied. Because that lack of satisfaction produces higher rates of successful reproduction. It’s a good strategy.
Enter, the articulate, uninhibited and informed human beings of the 21st Century. How do we deal with it?
The answer is, for a long time, very badly. When we eventually got around to even mentioning it we tried to brand the female orgasm a myth. In Victorian times male doctors called it ‘hysteria’ (from the Greek word for the uterus), i.e. a kind of madness. The good ones invented a machine to discharge the dangerous ‘hysterical paroxysm’,  the bad ones simply carved off women’s clitori or even performed full hysterectomies to settle them down. I had a second cousin who had her entire uterus removed in the early 1950s as an attempt to treat her schizophrenia; even that late in history the belief persisted in some dark corners of the asylum that there was some connection between a woman’s reproductive instincts and insanity.
In the 70s, the feminists came up with an answer which really sucked, and was drivel into the bargain. Women are unsatisfied because men are pigs who don’t care. A miserable time was had by all, because could there be anything more stupid, more filled with self-hatred, than the belief that Nature got it all wrong, that the universe doesn’t work?
All along, women have combated Nature’s heartless design using two principal methods that I know of. Masturbation, obviously, and in a couple of lovers in my life, aggressive and (to me) painful grinding, probably the origin of the notion of the vagina dentata. Ouch!
We’re almost there, but let me chuck in another consideration. Conservative Christians, Muslims and probably Jews like to say that the only purpose of the sexual act is reproduction. As a Catholic, I find that a damn shame. I am proud that the Catholic Church was the first major religious group to recognise the truth of evolution. Many eminent scientists are Catholic and the Vatican even has a Jesuit-run observatory which works at the forefront of astronomy and astro-physics. But when it comes to biology, sociology and palaeobiology as it informs our knowledge of sexual behaviour, they remain firmly cemented in the Stone Age. The idea that human sexuality is exclusively about reproduction is utterly anti-scientific. It defies a large body of evidence.
Homo sapiens is one of many species that use sex for far more than reproduction. Just look at all those homosexual giraffes. Stops the victorious bull male from constant challenge by the unsuccessful losers, I suppose.
But even by that standard we’re out on a limb as one of the few in which the female will willingly engage in, even seek sex when she is not ovulating, and the male will oblige at any time in the menstrual cycle. We have evolved to use sex as a means of communication. Not only that, but I am convinced that for us this is an important and highly effective compensation for the confusing complexity of our verbal and non-verbal communication. In sex we communicate body-to-body, heart-to-heart at a depth and with a simplicity which transcends the verbal.
Especially when both the man and women have orgasms, and very especially when they occur either together or in close sequence, in blatant defiance of Nature’s plan.
So let’s hear it for the clever, delicious woman who gives herself orgasms during sex. Any male who has been lucky enough to experience this has enjoyed the incomparable pleasure of being brought to stupendous orgasm by the sudden rise in intra-uterine temperature and a flood of natural lubricant.
What can I say? Tell your friends. Put it on Facebook. Tell everyone.
It’s the best.