Hackers and Trackers?
by Jason GodeskyThere is a significant overlap between techies and primitivists. Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, wrote “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us“—in Wired magazine, to boot. There’s also Stephen Figgins, an editor for O’Reilly, who’s also a graduate of the Wilderness Awareness School, and runs plainscraft.com (and I suddenly realize, is the same Stephen Figgins I corresponded with regularly on the Yahoo! Ishmael discussion list once upon a time). Stephen believes that with the modern computer hacker, “[a] long unused area of our brains is beginning to come alive”—the tracker brain.
For the most part, the area of our brain dedicated to understanding the natural environment has stopped working. Some of this awareness is applied to other tasks, such as surviving in the political landscape (the art of politics) or surviving in battle (martial arts). But this has not become a general literacy of the people. The compelling survival need is not there.
With the rise of the Internet, there is a new wilderness—a new ecology made from the interactions of billions of communications from billions of devices. They are being woven together in a web that is just as complicated as the web of life. And our success as individuals, as a culture, is going to depend on our ability to understand and manipulate that environment.1
Certainly the argument has been made before: that the modern human “hunts and gathers” from a supermarket, etc., but this misses much of the point of what we engage in hunting and gathering, versus shopping. I will give Stephen credit that at least there is a greater similarity in the mental engagement, but a hacker does not engage his senses the way a tracker does; he does not engage a more-than-human world the way a tracker does. A hacker works out a puzzle; a tracker pursues a relationship. This is a very critical difference.
Even so, hackers have developed a number of things that have pushed them to a more primitive state than we have, and much of that comes from the free software movement, a.k.a., “open source.” For years now, it has been open source, not primitivists or anarchists, that has provided the clearest, working examples of how life can work without hierarchy. Free software has ended up reflecting many tribal models, not through any conscious emulation, but because they work. One excellent example is “FooCamp.”
In computer science, by convention, an arbitrary string is “foo”, hence the name. FooCamp was O’Reilly’s “unconference“, or what others have called “Open Space Technology.”
This year’s Foo Camp, held in early October, was extraordinary for many reasons, but perhaps mostly for its structure—or lack thereof. Tim O’Reilly, Foo’s founder, made sure that basics like food, showers, and meeting space were available, but then quickly turned over the weekend’s agenda to the geeks (literally—there was no agenda until Friday night, when the attendees made one up on the fly).
The idea: Get 200 or so smart folks with a lot in common together in one place at one time, let them pitch tents, toss in a Wi-Fi network, and see what happens. Turns out, quite a lot. …
Talking with attendees, I couldn’t help thinking that Foo was more than fun—it was important, and not just to the characteristically self-involved lot who proudly wear the geek label. After nearly three years of nuclear winter in the technology industry, the folks who gathered in that Sebastopol orchard were … well, they were happy again. Optimistic even.
“It felt like we were poking our heads up out of the ice and seeing spring,” noted Ross Stapleton-Gray, a security researcher.2
There were some who weren’t entirely pleased with FooCamp, though, particularly in its invitation-only aspect. By the same conventions in computer science, a second arbitrary string is “bar,” so “foo” and “bar.” So naturally, the hackers started BarCamp. BarCamp is open to everyone, with only an initial session planned, where the rest of the camp is planned out. Everyone who comes must present; there are no simple observers, everyone is involved.
I wish I could say that I had figured out this parallel myself; there’s really no excuse, being steeped in computer science and primitivism, why I didn’t put this together, but I didn’t. No, that was Urban Scout, and apparently, Feral Visions and 10,000 Ways have already begun employing “Open Space Technology” for rewilding gatherings. But there’s still a long way to go.
By using these civilized forms of information sharing, primitive skills knowledge remains under lock and key by forcing people to participate in the economy of civilization for access to the information. As long as this remains true, we will never have what it takes to form these communities. I do not mean to de-value schools, books & rendezvous. I only point out that if you use money, civilization still owns you. Schools can work as a great first step, but if we yearn to move beyond civilization, if we wish to get the knowledge that will allow us to unlock the food, and live socially, we must work to unlock the knowledge. In order to accomplish this, we need change our strategies for sharing this information. Or add more strategies to our already existing list.3
Urban Scout is already organizing one in Portland, and we’re just starting to plan this year’s Mountain Festival along the same lines. If you’re interested in joining us, now is the time to say so.
You know, when I was at your house I noticed you the Hackers DVD on your shelf, sitting next to the Guns, Germs and Steel DVD and I smiled to myself. I thought to myself, “Only people like us would understand this.” I once watched Hackers 7 times in a row and then wrote a treatment for a “spoof” called “Trackers,” where the trackers were framed by the Forest Service because, while they were “ground-truthing” a national forest, using the Cyber-Tracker software had discovered that an owl or some endangered species was there. In order to save the forest they had to go all “invisible-high-speed-survival-scout-mode” and prove their innocence while also getting solid proof that there were endangered species in the forest. I wonder what ever happened to that treatment… it was pretty funny. Oh well. I’d say, “Someday,” if there was a someday… but now that were at the oil peak and all, I kind of doubt many movies will be getting made “someday” in the future.
Comment by Urban Scout — 11 July 2007 @ 5:15 PM
Oh, I dunno, it’s going to take a while yet for Hollywood to fizzle out.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 July 2007 @ 5:20 PM
I don’t know. I’d think Los Angeles would be one of the first places to feel the stress of collapse in the United States. But of course, it may just be that “Hollywood” will move away from Hollywood.
Comment by locke — 11 July 2007 @ 5:24 PM
If that’s how it goes, then definitely–you’ll just see “Hollywood” somewhere else. While there’s still civilized folk, there will be movies, and someone out there making it for them.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 July 2007 @ 5:28 PM
One good thing about collapse: say goodbye to the multi-million dollar blockbusters. Hollywood will be looking for less expensive alternatives, and they’ll come to the same conclusion a bombed-out 1940’s-era Japan came to: anime. Or, if not anime exactly, they’ll return to traditional animation for stories other than children’s flicks or crude comedies. Good news for those of us who love old-fashioned cell animation.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 11 July 2007 @ 9:18 PM
I can agree that similar areas of the brain are engaged in the internal aspects of tracking (synthesis and higher level analysis of the sense data that has been gathered) and hacking, but I would disagree that hacking is working out puzzles as opposed to tracking as pursuing a relationship, and that the two are distinctly different.
The tracker entering into a relationship with the prey is a form of systems analysis. They take all that they know of the prey and form a representation via analysis that becomes a symbolic understanding for the creature in their mind. This is then applied to “solving the puzzle” of where the creature has gone. It’s a relationship, but it’s only a relationship with the analysis of the knowledge about the creature. Primitive peoples would no doubt do a better job of tracking than modern people, but only by virtue of the fact that their knowledge of the creature was that much better/more intimate.
In the same way hacking is about gathering information and forming symbols, entering into a relationship with the systems that need to be represented (as electrons in this case). The problem solving skills that kick in would be the same as those applied in understanding and anticipating the actions of any system.
To the extent that either of them engage in a “more-than-human world” I would say both groups do, though one can more readily be recognized as being representative of the natural world, and the other as being representative of the purely human world. The fact that both are dealing primarily with symbolic abstractions makes them equal.
That the “hacker” doesn’t engage his external senses bears little on it. How the data is gathered would seem to be irrelevant. It’s what’s done with the data once gathered that’s important, the relationship that’s entered into with the amalgam of information.
The fundamental question should be, would a hacker make a good tracker? Perhaps, once they figured out how to walk again, and learned to recognize “trees”, “dirt”, “rocks” and those other outdoor, alien environment things.
Perhaps a bit more substantial research is needed on your part here? Most open source projects fade without strong leadership, a strong vision of direction. On top of that, the structures the programmers engage within are an hierarchy in and of themselves. Software to create accounts, allow and deny access, CVS to maintain branches to ensure viability of code bases, feature reviews to determine what would be included etc etc etc. To say there is no hierarchy in the open source movement is to dream of pigs with wings.
They are a more free-form, an open network kind of hierarchy, but that still does not qualify as “no hierarchy”.
Comment by Geoff — 11 July 2007 @ 9:20 PM
Claiming that a living, breathing deer is a “symbolic abstraction” should raise all kinds of big, red flags all over the place. A tracker is following tracks and signs; the impression in the living soil where another living thing stepped. He’s following the signs of where another animal went. It’s all leading him down to that one moment where he encounters the Other.
A hacker is working out a puzzle, essentially. He’s manipulating logic rules inside of a system designed, implemented, and controlled by other humans. A tracker is engaged in a world formed not just by human intelligence, but by the active participation of every other animal and plant. This is the difference between a conversation with friends, and a man mumbling to himself in a padded room.
The success of primitive peoples in tracking only partly derived from their more intimate knowledge. The larger part of their success owed to empathy. When does empathy become crucial to a hacker’s success? When is a hacker forced to recognize the personhood of some non-human in order to make his living? These are the most important points that define a tracker, but they’re absent among hackers. That makes the comparison superficial.
Only to someone alienated from his senses. That’s nearly all of us, but the first step in rewilding is understanding exactly how much that means. It’s not just data to be gathered, it’s our sensuous experience of a living world. If you think that it’s just data to be collected, just a cold machine to be manipulated, then you’ve stumbled on the vast, yawning gulf between trackers and hackers.
I’m a software engineer in my day job. I’ve programmed for open source projects. They do not “fade without strong leadership.” Jimmy Wales is not a particularly strong leader on Wikipedia; at most, he’s a glorified janitor. Linus Torvalds did take the benevolent dictator approach, but other open source projects have expanded that dramatically. There’s usually a core that’s more committed than the rest, but a hierarchy of interest is not something I really feel comfortable calling a hierarchy at all. If you really think that “To say there is no hierarchy in the open source movement is to dream of pigs with wings,” then perhaps a bit more substantial research is needed on your part here? There are many open source projects now that come very close to being completely non-hierarchical. Many projects still are hierarchical; many are not.
Now yes, programs do use an awful lot of hierarchies for files. Works great for files. Works great for some animals. Doesn’t work for humans.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 July 2007 @ 10:05 PM
“…the area of our brain dedicated to understanding the natural environment has stopped working.”
Well, there isn’t an area of the brain devoted to dealing the natural environment as opposed to other kinds of tasks dealing with other kinds of environments. It is the abstracted environments of civilization which trick us into believing such compartmentalization is natural and meaningful, but we didn’t evolve halfway between two worlds as we now live. The suggestion of a natural area of the brain which has now atrophied due to civilization has the faint echo of the 10% myth–that we only use 10% of our brains–repeated in just so many self-help books.
The brain is an adaptive system. It reflects the complexity of its environment. Our abstract modern environment stresses the routinization of activity and the simplification of sensory experience, the compartmentalization of tasks and of disciplines.
Neurogenesis–the constant building of new brain cells from neural stem cells–has only recently been demonstrated in birds and monkeys. For nearly 100 years, it was believed that the number of brain cells in the human brain was fixed at birth and would gradually decline over the course of life as cells died off. With the demonstration that it occurs in monkeys, it’s generally accepted that it also occurs in humans. Just as cells are constantlly being replaced in every tissue in the body.
Elizabeth Gould, a Professor of Psychology at Princeton, demonstrated this in marmosets. She later went on to show that the success or failure of these new brain cells was directly tied to the complexity of and satisfaction derived from the environments which the animals subsisted within. The brains of animals in sterile cages did not produce new brain cells. (And this is part of the reason why it was so long believed neurogenesis does not occur.) The brains of animals in wild-like constructed environments fared much better. Later, other researchers showed that the brains of animals in the actual out-of-doors fared even better than in Gould’s manufactured wild-like enviroments.
Gould has been conservative about her findings. The most she’s said is that “poverty is stress,” tentatively linking depressed neurogenesis with social strata. Of course, this ignores the 600-pound marmoset in the living room, that wealth is itself an abstraction.
A couple of years ago, someone told me of a longitudinal study that was done which showed that people who took a different route to work every day were at less of a risk of developing Alzheimer’s than people who took the same route to work every day. Novelty matters. And no environment created by humans can match the novelty and complexity that Earth, the laws of physics and biology have already provided for us.
Comment by thistle — 12 July 2007 @ 12:37 AM
“…wealth is itself an abstraction” should read “…civilized wealth…” etc.
Comment by thistle — 12 July 2007 @ 12:41 AM
You might need to go back and read my post again. The animal is not the symbolic abstraction, it is what lives in the mind as the hunter draws together the external inputs into a whole to engage in the act of tracking that is a symbolic abstraction.
Perhaps you lend empathy some spiritual meaning, and perhaps it has such a meaning, but when we come down to basics empathy is simply the ability to represent some other creature in our mind and then to make assumptions and predictions about the actions/feelings/thoughts of that creature based on systems analysis.
Whilst we cannot invest emotion in an economic system, for example, we can certainly represent it in the mind and make assumptions and predictions based on analysis.
You don’t need to recognize the “personhood” of a creature to be able to track it. That’s a pretty romantic notion.
I can appreciate what you’re aiming for, bringing people back to an emotional experience of nature, but that does not preclude the fact that tracking can be a fundamentally logical activity. Just because you can romanticise it doesn’t mean it won’t work without the romantic dressing.
And that committed core will be the ones making decisions about the direction of the project, meaning they are defacto rulers of it aren’t they? As for whether they fade without strong leadership, this is a wonderful time to pull out the argument that if it hasn’t been around for millenia then it cannot possibly be sustainable.
Could you give me the name of one of these open source projects that is non-hierarchical?
Comment by Geoff — 12 July 2007 @ 2:51 AM
These seem to be conflicting views of empathy. I’m more inclined to agree with the latter, not the former.
If we accept the latter view of empathy (which I do), then recognizing the personhood of a creature becomes much more of a reasonable requirement. Although, I have to confess, I think it’s a mistake to call it a requirement. A requirement to do it well, perhaps. Consistently, certainly.
Ah, Spectrums & Continuums….
Comment by jhereg — 12 July 2007 @ 8:08 AM
When does empathy become crucial to a hacker’s success?
When he is working on a user interface to be used by someone else.
When is a hacker forced to recognize the personhood of some non-human in order to make his living?
I would bet that most hackers recognize the personhood of their computers, though most would also deny that.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 12 July 2007 @ 9:23 AM
Good points, thistle. I remember doing a literature review in my freshman biopsychology class, right after Gould first published her paper on adult mammalian neurogenesis. Really changes everything.
I’m not imbuing empathy with any spiritual significance, but I think your definition here falls short. Empathy is our ability to appreciate another being’s personhood, and to put ourselves in the place of that person, to feel what it is like to live as that person. It has more to do with emotion than data, and more to do with imagination than analysis.
It’s also what every half-decent tracker will tell you. If you can’t recognize the personhood of what you’re tracking, you can’t empathize with it. There’s a word used to describe trackers who miss that point: hungry. Tracking might look like it’s just mechanically following tracks and signs, but it’s more than that. If you don’t think empathy and the recognition of personhood has anything to do with tracking, that just goes to show you’ve never done any tracking.
This isn’t my romantic gloss. Every half-decent tracker has had to come to terms with this, even when they really had no interest in it and thought of it as a purely logical activity. Without empathy, approached purely through logic, a tracker fails. Simple as that. Any tracker will tell you that.
Yes, but those decisions have the most bearing on the people who are most invested in the project. Someone who’s barely involved barely has a say. Someone who’s heavily involved has a great deal to say. Is that a hierarchy, or is that just what egalitarianism looks like when not everyone is 100% involved? I’ll tell you what, if I committed huge amounts of time to a project, and there was someone who’d written a line or two of code who had as much say about the project as I did, I wouldn’t see that as particularly egalitarian. That would be hierarchical—a tyranny of the passer-by.
Software projects have somewhat shorter life-spans than societies.
Wikipedia, like I said. You’ve got an elected board that appoints sysadmins, but they don’t get to establish where Wikipedia goes all by themselves.
Spoken as someone who’s never run desktop Linux.
In fact, if you get into some discussions on open source GUI’s, you’ll find a certain amount of pride taken in forcing the user to understand the same arcane routines they understand. A lack of empathy in this regard is routinely held up as a virtue among hackers.
I’m not so sure. Pseudo-mystical rites aside, I don’t know too many hackers that take a too animistic approach to their computers.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 July 2007 @ 10:05 AM
Sort of true, I’m a Slackware guy (since version 0.97 which I’m not sure was called Slackware yet) and I use fvwm. Of course, I’m also running it on a PII-300 even KDE is awful.
I’m not sure I would call everyone who works on an open source project a hacker. And certainly UI design is the biggest PITA in programming. However, this highlights one of the biggest problems with open source as a model of egalitarianism. The User is completely left to fend for themselves. In an egalitarian society the ones who cannot hunt are not left without meat. A related problem is the ability in opensource to easily fork the project. Have a disagreement, don’t resolve it, just make a copy of the ball and create a new playground. Look at OpenOffice vs. NeoOffice as an example.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 12 July 2007 @ 11:20 AM
No, I wouldn’t, but the folks who were saying that they shouldn’t build intuitive UI’s, the users should stop being so stupid, those were definitely hackers.
That’s not true at all. In an egalitarian society, there are lots of things that are needed besides hunting. Everyone’s good at some of them, at least. He may not be good at hunting, but he makes the best spears. If nothing else, he’s part of your family and he’s got your back in a fight. In an egalitarian society, you share everything you have, not because you’re generous, but because the most immediate kind of wealth you have is in your friends and family.
That is a problem with open source projects, though it works really well for hunter-gatherers. That ease of splitting is precisely one of the most effective measures to keep hierarchy from forming among hunter-gatherers.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 July 2007 @ 11:26 AM
Jason,
You need to read what I said. I said exactly what you said.
I think that the bar for splitting among hunter-gatherers is distinctly higher than in Opensource. There is a large incentive in an hg band to resolve differences instead of taking the ball and going home. The ability to split is essential, but I don’t think it is as easy as you are indicating here.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 12 July 2007 @ 11:35 AM
Oh, oops, I missed that crucial “not.”
Hunter-gatherer bands actually fission (and just as fuse into one) very commonly. Among the Bushmen, you’ll typically have one or two fissions in a band in a single season. All the bands join up into much bigger bands through the rainy season, and then they fission off into smaller bands in the dry season.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 July 2007 @ 11:43 AM
I haven’t done much tracking of animals, most of my tracking has dealt with plants–what Euell Gibbons called “stalking the wild…”. I have done a fair amount of programming and development over the past 5 years when I fell into the world of databases.
I used to take a logical approach to foraging plants. Get to know the specifics, taxonomy, uses–keep the information categorized as facts and data. I had a dream of creating WPDB (the wild plant database) as a place to log all of the wonderful data and keep it pristinely categorized and systematized.
Then I got into real rewilding. I met Urban Scout and Jason through their writing, I started reading “Spell of the Sensuous”, I started doing admin work with Scout on the REWILD wiki and forums, and all my ideas about systematizing data started changing.
While it’s true that you can follow a set of tracks using logical systems analysis principles, that does not encompass tracking. In the plant world, I can say “jewelweed habitats include sunny or partially shaded riparian areas and marshes” or I can say “jewelweed really likes regularly damp ground.” It may not seem like much of a difference to move from “where it you can find it” to “what it likes” but once you move from the systematology of habitat categorization into actually getting to know the personhood of the plant you start developing a relationship.
I find that as I type this, it is not an easy difference to explain. But it all lies at the need for empathy. And the difference between tracker and hacker empathy. Tracking definitely encompasses the logical data analysis that you need in order to be a good programmer, but it takes more than that to know what to do when the scat/print trail disappears. When you put yourself in the animal/plant’s place and know how to think like they do, then you have a way to track without prints and scat.
The empathy also moves you out of the realm of thinking of the objective of your hunt as a “resource”. When you acknowledge the personhood of the animal or plant and meet them empathetically, you preserve your own life by preserving theirs–by not over-hunting or over-gathering, by limiting your taking in a way that benefits the prey (thinning out crowded plants, killing weaker herd members).
But when you follow the typical developer’s mindset of “my program is the law, and all users should be force to do things the right way” within the realm of plants and animals, you wind up with the Taker practices of domestication–these cows need to live the way I tell them to; these plants need to grow where I plant them–an you lose the wild relationship that the tracker has.
That’s not to say there aren’t any empathetic devs out there. I strive to be one myself. What good is my programming if it doesn’t meet the real-work needs of the users? But I have to balance those user needs with the end-product results of the reporting needs and keep it all within the balance of budget needs. In the wild, those things work themselves out: the systems analyze themselves. The tracker is as much a part of the system as he is a unit outside the system analyzing it: the Matrix really has him.
Comment by Rix — 12 July 2007 @ 11:57 AM
I think there’s an economic influence on that situation, for the time being anyway. UX is such a hot field right now, anyone with even a couple classes or workshops under their belt can get paid work. Plus, I don’t think the ux/usability/tech-comms folks see themselves as part of the programmer “tribe.” They could easily take it upon themselves to create intuitive UIs and documentation that is easy to use, entirely independent of the sausage-fest, but they don’t.
Comment by Paula — 12 July 2007 @ 9:16 PM
This begs the question, what is the mental mechanism that underlies this ability to undertake:
Unless we really are touching on spiritual beliefs then we can never truly know another entities’ inner workings. We can draw parallels with our own inner world and make assumptions that we project out onto the other entity. What we cannot do for instance, is undertake to feel an emotion that is alien in our own experience.
It’s my belief that we achieve this empathy through a form of internal analysis, even though we might not generally recognize or identify it as such. And I also believe that this can incorporate our emotions, it is an analysis at all levels of being, rather than a superficial “logical” analysis.
That isn’t really what I was getting at as I’ve said above.
So we can have non-equal equality. That’s just super.
It would be egalitarian on your part to allow that person to have an equal say even though they had contributed less, but that aint generally going to happen, is it? Another subtle (or not so) power play, another hierarchy, “regular” over “visitor”.
I guess I should have qualified “project” with “software development”. Wikipedia is a collective effort at gathering knowledge, sort of like a collective effort at gathering nuts in the autumn, rather than a collective effort to arrive at a destination. Even so, Wikipedia has it’s problems, and someone is on hand to remove offending sections when they crop up. There are people with more power than others within the framework of the project.
The very fact that splitting is one of the most effective measures to keep hierarchy from forming implies that there is a pressure for hierarchies to form in such societies. If the nature of the people involved in the community was not inclined to this formation why would there need to be mechanisms to reduce such pressures?
Splitting of open source projects (or any project for that matter) reduces the available workforce, and results in the duplication of effort. Translate this to a split HG group? There is a minimum sustainable size of group so at some stage splits can no longer be allowed to occur for the good of the whole.
Comment by Geoff — 13 July 2007 @ 12:15 AM
And the same applies in reverse
Comment by Geoff — 13 July 2007 @ 12:20 AM
I’m not familiar with the example, but are they fissioning back into the SAME (with some variation due to marriage/death/etc) smaller bands or distinctly different smaller bands than they showed up with? If the same bands are formed, I’m not sure I’d call that fissioning.
My impression is that such fissioning occurs due to population pressures more than internal disputes. Also, such fissioning is generally done by/as a group not an individual.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 13 July 2007 @ 11:07 AM
In the historical record of the Native American tribes, both sides of this are found.
Comment by jhereg — 13 July 2007 @ 11:25 AM
That’s called “empathy.” But there are only a small handful of core emotions, and the rest are various mixtures of them. From observing another, we can feel something alien to our own experience, because we’ve felt each of the constituent emotions, and we can see how another has combined them. We can mimic that combination, empathize with it, put ourselves in that place, and feel what they must feel. Otherwise, nobody can play Hamlet except for madmen, and no one can play Iago except for sociopaths. Stretching from what you know to what you don’t is what empathy is all about.
It’s not non-equal at all. Your say is commensurate with your involvement. A computer programming project differs from a tribe in that not everyone is 100% committed to the project. In fact, no one is. So, should someone who’s barely contributed have as much a say about the project as someone who’s been in there from the beginnng and contributed some huge percentage of the source code? Would that be egalitarian? I would say not.
How would that be egalitarian? Whoever contributes least will have the most power; whoever contributes most will be slaves to the whims of passers-by. This isn’t a hierarchy of any kind, soft or hard; it’s an egalitarian mode of decision-making in a unique situation where degrees of involvement differ.
People who clean up problems are wielding greater power? Have I been ruled over by janitors and garbage men all my life without realizing it? Yes, it has its problems; I didn’t say it was perfect, said it was egalitarian.
This is an etic perspective. That’s not why Bushmen say they fission their groups. This is how anthropologists from hierarchical societies explain how the Bushmen avoid developing hierarchy. But no, I don’t think that understanding the mechanisms that defuse the development of hierarchy invalidate them. In a human context like this, hierarchy cannot develop. When removed from our evolutionary context, that can break down, and hierarchy develops.
This is another vital difference between computer programs and the real world. Duplication of effort isn’t redundant for hunter-gatherers. If my band brings down a deer, and your band brings down a deer, that just means we have two deer. But if we both program a new string concatenation function, that’s just a waste.
Among the Bushmen, it’s usually new bands, but as jhereg points out, both can be found in the Americas.
Right; it’s an etic perspective. Most of the time it’s just because different people want to go different ways, but it could well be that a bunch of one band find one guy really annoying and leave him behind, too.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 July 2007 @ 2:34 PM
An excerpt from a new book about to be published may contribute to the discussion you are having here …
Maps and Metaphors of the Human Heart
1, 2, 3 – Mystery
Dr. Damian Vraniak
maaingan@centurytel.net
Introduction
What this book is about.
Individual happiness in America has declined during the last three decades. Above a minimal level, the money and material goods we put so much effort into securing do not provide the happiness we expect. What would help us to become more balanced and happier as individuals?
Interpersonal harmony has also declined over the past two decades, as measured by the decreasing number of people with whom we confide important matters. It seems that we are not only unhappy within ourselves, but that we are also disappointed in our most intimate relationships. What would foster more satisfying companionship?
Social health has been deteriorating for decades as well, as we have withdrawn from substantial participation in small community groups, making fewer civic contributions than in the past. What would help us to rejoin beneficial social groups and effectively reinvest in common community causes, thereby increasing social fulfillment?
If material goods and money do not lead to contentment, if as friends, partners and spouses we are disappointing confidants and companions, and if family, group and corporate life comprise an insufficient sense of community, then how are we to begin to rectify this awful situation, meet these three challenges?
One primary proposition I will develop later in this book is that the balance of individual happiness is recognized and realized only through play, the harmony of interpersonal satisfaction is realized only through passion, and the synchrony of social fulfillment is realized and represented only through purpose, (and the integrating peace of the sacred is recovered and re-composed only through pause). I will suggest to you that all human activities may be placed usefully within these four categories. Let us briefly review what a few articulate authors have said about play, passion, purpose and pause.
What others have said about play, passion, purpose and pause.
There is a great need to offer an overall map of individual, interpersonal, social and spiritual functioning that defines boundaries, specifies linkages and clarifies the dynamics among these primary layers of human functioning. In the language of the parssittern paradigm (Vraniak, 1990; 2004), this challenge is to map these four systemic levels clearly and simply. I propose that the activities of our lives may be simply and comprehensively described within and across four domains – play, passion, purpose and pause – and that there are clear and distinct fruits that may issue from successful and healthy pursuit of each: from play comes happiness (the sign of which is delight), from passion comes the satisfaction of desire, from purpose comes the determined fulfillment of common cause and contribution, and from pause comes the peace inherent within devotion. Let us look at recent writings focused within each of these primary domains that have prompted much of our current discourse about health and wellbeing in America.
Play
It is my proposal that it is in childhood play that the foundations of happiness are first established. Richard Louv, in Nature Deficit (Orion July/August 2005) and Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (2005) describes how in the not-so-distant past, kids ruled the country’s woods and valleys — running in packs, building secret forts and tree houses, hunting frogs and fish, playing hide-and-seek behind tall grasses …
Passion
My neighbor of many years, Nobel laureate James Tobin, shared with me the writings of his life-long long friend and colleague Robert Lane, who wrote The Joyless Market Economy (1996) and The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (2000) in which Lane describes the decades long decline in individual happiness of the individual in America while per capita income and material prosperity has risen for individuals. He considers many of the same informational sources that Robert Putnam explores in Bowling Alone and yet offers with a more fine-grained analysis …
Purpose
Robert D. Putnam (2000), in Bowling Alone, frames our perspective of social purpose by exploring the changing character of American society in terms of the concept of “social capital”, particularly in the core idea of social capital theory that social networks have value and that social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups …
Pause
There have been an incredible variety of authors who have paused and reflected upon the overall relationships of these primary activities of play, passion and purpose, implicitly taking up Gregory Bateson’s search for a ‘pattern of patterns’ in his book Mind and Nature A Necessary Unity. A sampling of those used in my explorations include Stuart A. Kaufman’s The Origin of Order, Lewis R. Binford’s, Constructing Frames of Reference, Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle, The Good Heart by the Dalai Lama, Knowing How to Know by Idries Shah, and Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart by Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield, and especially Transformations of Consciousness by Ken Wilbur, Jack Engler and Daniel P. Brown, among many others …
Historically exploring how these shifts in the way we participate in group life, care about intimate relationships, and perceive individual reality came into being might direct us fruitfully toward answers to these questions.
How these difficulties came about.
Increasingly we are disillusioned individually, disconnected interpersonally, and disengaged socially. What are the historical mechanisms by which this weakening of the social fabric has occurred?
Critical to answering this question are seminal studies of technological innovation, human migration, population growth and settlement, that illuminate historical shifts in three areas: Innovation (things, tools, technologies), increasing ease and speed of travel and transportation (time), and inverting people and production priorities (timing and placement of transactions).
While changing from using moccasins to using shoes and trading lodges for houses has meant more effective protection from the elements and easier survival … insulation against natural forces contribute to our being oblivious to the consequences in the human use of force; we have reduced harm by encapsulating ourselves, as we increase harm to all else, fundamentally changing personal agency and power.
While shifting from using walking trails to using canoe routes, wagon roads, canals, railways, highways and finally airways has created more links, the result is often less connection … making the flow of things, people, information and energy easier, faster and more efficient isolates and disengages us from one another, fundamentally changing how we attach and connect.
While moving and managing objects, people, energy, and information among corporate entities at a faster and faster pace leads to more productivity, it may also lead to less contribution to those we care about, during our unavoidably busy work engagements… constructing group forms which organize individuals more productively separates us from our families and neighbors, alienating us from proximal communal life … fundamentally changing our priorities and values.
I call these major historical shifts individualization of force (which, at its extreme, for instance, fosters road rage, urban snipers, and the creation of IED’s), acceleration of flow (long to-do lists, multi-tasking, and virtual relationships via cell phone), and reversal, inversion of form (a shift from ‘many serving the one’ to ‘one serving the many’). These shifts begin to describe the specific mechanisms whereby we are losing personal happiness, interpersonal harmony, and social synchrony.
How we can respond to these challenges.
Based upon such findings, a re-conceptualization and specification of the most salient components within and across individual, interpersonal and social domains is long overdo, in order to slow and turn around this long-running deterioration. How might these trends be counterbalanced? What are the primary facets and features of individual happiness, interpersonal harmony, and social synchrony … and how might they be strengthened?
In any such attempt, you and I need a few basic tools:
• As a person I need clear and simple maps of where I have been, where I am, and where I wish to go.
• You and I need proven methods for repairing and renewing healthy connections with each other person with whom we partner.
• All together we need shared meanings and mileposts to which we can devote ourselves in reshaping our communities in small and larger groups.
With a system of maps, methods, and shared meanings, we might redefine our individual lives, interpersonal relationships, and social communities by recognizing reality in new ways, realizing new relationships, and representing these new relations to others who are also searching for a more positive and beneficial life experience.
In order to accomplish these challenges, I offer you an innovative approach, called 1, 2, 3 – Mystery, that provides a sequenced set of relevant skills that can be learned in the context of individual study, dialogue with a partner, and discussion in a small social support group of 6-12 people reading my book, Maps & Metaphors of the Human Heart.
Why it goes this way and why can it go differently.
If the primary questions that concern us focus upon increasing individual happiness, interpersonal satisfaction, and social fulfillment, then it would be helpful for me to define my key concepts and my conception of why it goes the way it does and why it can go differently. Let me begin this brief overview by considering an unborn child and then quickly explore the primary challenges the child faces as it grows older….
The human embryo, nestled in the lining of the uterus, is a singular entity that has two basic concerns, itself and its context. There is perfect local goodness-of-fit between this small life and its environment. However, the embryo does not know that the haven in which it lives is inside a human being, and that this human host lives within a home, which is located somewhere in a community, that provides the human with more or less what she needs to survive, while holding another living being within.
Unknowingly supplied with all it needs, the fetus grows until it is born, until it drops out into the light of this much larger world, when it then begins to learn of these layers nested within larger dimensions. Yet even in the light, these layerings are but shadows, high in the sky of this newborn baby’s short experience.
Though much of our lives are spent exploring and coming to understand important aspects of these various planes of existence, so much remains unseen, unknown or only vaguely sensed. To begin to grasp the great mystery we are born into, we are wired to try to simplify the infinite points of light and impenetrable shadows into shapes and patterns that form the foundation from which we lurch forward into our lives, always seeking the clear meanings and mileposts of our passage. After many decades of trying to do this for myself, my children, and others, I offer you Figure I. on the following page …
I have broken the world up into four nested layers, each one a context for the one below it. At the bottom, the first and smallest layer is within the individual; the primary challenge of this dimension is recognize what is within me and what is outside of me. The second layer occurs between me and each other individual (or object); it is interpersonal and the primary challenge of this dimension is to realize some sort of relationship between my self and each other person. The third layer enfolds and encompasses the first two dimensions - it occurs when three or more individuals have relations among one another; the primary challenge of this layer is to represent these social relations in a way that makes common meaning for us. Of course there is a fourth layer and this dimension integrates and penetrates through all of the other three layers, if we learn how to rest and recompose ourselves within it.
Progressing through these layers becomes our life’s work as human beings. It is not easy, especially in the beginning when each layer is brand new territory. One day we fall out of the womb into a very large and unfamiliar world. Another day we are taken from home and left in a completely new place called school. Yet another day we graduate from school. Eventually we may marry and become a parent, witnessing our first child’s birth. Such abrupt shifts are challenging and each layer is utterly transforming in its own way.
Indeed, when we are small, our only concern is with ourselves. Someone else, like a parent, takes care of the interpersonal and social contexts above and around us. However, once we get a little older and move more frequently into the interpersonal plane, it becomes necessary to focus on two things. We attempt to harmonize our individual balance with the balance of the person with whom we are in relationship. It then gets quite complex when we add more people and start inhabiting larger social communities for ourselves, and we have to figure out three layers at once – the individual, the interpersonal and the social.
And how does this growing and exploring go for the developing child as s/he emerges into the world over time? Each of these stages of growing and developing, becoming ourselves, seems to me to have some particular purpose for each of us to accomplish, if we can, and certain particularly dark corners for us to stay if we do not, shadowy places that are tailored by current cultural conditions.
Every young child begins as a little physicist, learning how to move and apply agency in the world. Moving through and across a mud puddle is an experiment in self-locomotion at a very personal scale, as is trying to catch the evading frog which jumps from the puddle into the taller-than-the-top-of-the-head grasses of the surrounding meadow. Learning the immature pulses and motives of the nascent agency within is to begin to sense that all the frightening force out there in the world might be met and matched by a mysterious personal power from within, and so we begin to cross puddles, chase frogs (and briefly share the images of small successes and failures with those closest to us afterwards). We find that we are so humbly small, but we also find that we are not powerless and that our small agency is growing larger day by day as we explore our small places close to home.
On the other hand, driving a four wheeled all-terrain vehicle in the lap of your father through the puddle and over the frog (or traveling to the far ends of the world on your mother’s laptop computer, with her help), is an exercise in the use of power and mobility unmatched in the experience of children of previous generations. The use of technological force and power with such immediacy, ease and control, which defines the speed and pace of modern mobility, has displaced the smaller, more personal and more appropriately scaled developmental opportunities that family culture has crafted over the millennia for children. Today, as we grow from children into adults, we quickly move from walking to using tricycles and bicycles, then cars, trucks and jets, from using play phones to cell phones and from video games and television to teleconferencing, in an ever increasing individuation of power and pace. There are at least two consequences of this displacement and dislocation: we move too fast across the landscape to sense and experience its details, that is, we lose the opportunity to have the contact with important aspects that might catch our attention and awareness; and we move quickly past the consequences of the use of such power upon the landscape and within ourselves, not accountable or responsible since we do not see and feel what has happened where we no longer are, having moved on elsewhere … always moving on to somewhere else. And so, we learn that we are as proud of our greatly assisted power as our father and mother are proud of us using such vast power; and we pretend to be taller and bigger than we really are and begin to live in virtual realities very different than our home and places close to where we live. With the help of the tools of our parents we surpass ourselves and the more natural places where we might more truly live. Our primary learned principle is just ‘Do it!’ without the qualifying phrases concerning accountability and responsibility for the consequences of the enhanced agency we use. We go quickly, we go straightly, no longer do we meander, pause and explore with curiosity our own imagination and humble human condition.
Every youth becomes a biologist and then a young psychologist, learning how to engage other living beings in more and less satisfying ways. Gathering the caterpillar and the milkweed into the perforated jar and watching it spin the chrysalis, and, eventually, watching the butterfly emerge with your best friend is an intimate engagement, a connecting with both of quiet, patient proportions. Now that we have a certain agency, what do we desire to engage it with in the world … do we collect pretty rocks, watch birds, listen to and make music, dance, write, cook … and with whom do we connect and share our growing interests, excitements and attachments?
On the other hand, chatting on the internet and playing a violent video game in virtual reality with a person you’ve never met - or going to a fast food joint in the mall with your girlfriend and buying yet another nice pair of shoes for the next prom, or quickly text-messaging a dozen friends who are somewhere else, doing something else -are quite different engagements in controlling the nature of what happens in relationships and easily collecting material goods that we desire. The modern consequences of habitually getting and keeping material objects is a disconnection with and detachment from the flow of living relationships to which we might be more fully present. Averaging over six hours a day in front of the TV or computer, on the cell- or tele-phone or at the movies, is a practice of not being where we actually are and the loss of crucial time more directly conversing with partners in our interests-becoming-passions; our pretending is enhanced.
Every teen-ager and young adult becomes a sociologist and eventually an economist, coming to negotiate the most important provisions and priorities of social life in the larger world. Helping your extended relations or neighbors harvest wild rice, lamb or put up a shed all secure lessons in ways to contribute to common cause with generous but different benefits for all participants. Coming to a vocation that fulfills and sharing the fruit of that fulfillment with your growing family and dear friends is paramount at this stage.
On the other hand, persuading your boss to give you a raise, your wife to allow you to buy the four-wheeler and your uncle to permit taking the four-wheeler on his land, and then trying to find some time out of a busy schedule working two jobs, transporting kids to school activities and doing house projects to do so, are all part of a modern purpose-driven, product-driven lifestyle. The consequences and disruption of working hard and long ‘getting the good things in life” is that the living of that life in relation with others rarely occurs and when it does occur it often occurs as conflicted negotiation (distrust) rather than as considerate contribution and participation.
Finally, in an ideal world each adult might eventually become priest and pastor, clergy and cleric, humbling to the great mystery of learning, loving and living. When we pause and pray, sit quietly and watch a sunset or a butterfly, we listen to the silence that is sacred.
However, as we travel too quickly across the landscape noisily displacing our perception of reality, using technology in powerful ways primarily to secure material objects we desire disconnected from the flow of relationship around us, and as we work ever more busily to in pursuit of our individual objectives apart from and disturbing the relations among us, our minds become filled and our hearts become flooded with the emptiness of our passage; we often come to despair as we lose healthy landscapes, healthy marriages and healthy families and communities.
The opposite pattern is simple yet elegant: Simply this is a 1, 2, 3 and Mystery (3-in-1) sequence … there must be regular contact (allowing attention) before there can be connection, caring connection (attachment and affection) before there can be considerate contribution (appreciation and worth); and unless we cease (allow) in order to affirm and re-compose the health of this sequence, we cannot but continue on the current path leading to destruction, desolation and despair. How can we realize this healthy pattern?
Comment by Waubishmaa'ingan — 31 July 2007 @ 9:48 AM