This post includes the quiz mentioned in chapter 24 of my book. If you landed here from the book and want to skip down to the quiz click here. If you haven’t, I’ve pasted chapter 24 below so you can read it and then take the quiz. I won’t say any more about the quiz because for the quiz to produce meaningful responses, participants can’t know what it’s about prior to reading the chapter.

Here is the excerpt from my chapter 24 of New Atenism:

Chapter 24: A Conversation at a Party

“Honestly, I think we had it better as hunter-gatherers. Fewer hours of work. No rent. No bosses.”

Alex raises an eyebrow. “Jordan, you almost lost your mind when you had no cell service on our backpacking trip last year.”

Jordan marches ahead. “Foragers had balanced diets, tight-knit communities, no income inequality. Agriculture brought tooth decay, slavery, war. We’re basically living in the aftermath of that mistake.”

“Seems like I’m always hearing how bad it was. You know, that whole ‘nasty, brutish and short’ thing.”

“There’s tons of research, it’s pretty settled. Life expectancy went down after agriculture. Hunter-gatherers had it figured out. We just romanticize progress because we’re stuck in it. There’s this guy, Jerry Douglas, who says agriculture was the biggest mistake in human history.”

“Jared Diamond.”

They both turn toward the new voice joining the conversation.

“Sorry, couldn’t help but overhear. I’m Blake.”

After an exchange of pleasantries Alex says, “Doesn’t Jerry Douglas play the dobro?”

Blake smiles and points “Yes, I think that’s right. I saw him with Alison Krauss last year.”

Alex beams. “I LOVE Alison Krauss. Voice like an angel.”

Jordan is getting a bit annoyed. “Okay. Whatever, the point is, this Diamond guy proves what I’ve been saying: We were better off before agriculture. Modern life is basically a downgrade.”

With a slight grimace and tilt of the head, Blake responds. “That essay’s headline gets quoted a lot, but there’s nuance there. We should be careful not to confuse early agricultural transition costs with the total arc of civilization. I think Diamond was comparing foragers to early farmers — transitional communities dealing with malnutrition, infectious disease, and poor sanitation. That’s not the same as saying we’d be better off going back to bone tools and witch doctors.”

“Sure, but the principle still holds. Foragers had way more leisure and fewer health problems. That has been well documented. Everybody knows it.”

“Well, it’s difficult to form hard conclusions about any primitive tribes. There’s no written record and the physical evidence is pretty limited. We do know that average lifespans were shorter, but that was mostly due to far higher infant mortality rates. Evidence about violent death is harder to come by and is highly regional.

“Some forager groups did have relatively healthy diets, although it depends a lot on where they were. Your doctor would give you a thumbs up for the whole grains, vegetables, fruit and game of the Lenape people in the northeast U.S. but be horrified by the whale-blubber-focused diet of the Inuits.”

Jordan stiffens. “Look, it’s not even controversial anymore. Serious scholars have shown we were healthier and happier before farming ruined everything. I mean, Diamond basically proved it.”

“Jared and I crossed paths when we were both lecturing at UCLA — anthropology is a small world. I don’t think he was arguing that we should abandon modernity. He just thinks we often underestimate the costs of progress. That’s not the same as saying hunter-gatherers lived better than we do today. He spent a lot of time living that life with tribes in New Guinea.”

“Right. That’s what I’m talking about!” Jordan interjects.

“But he was always grateful and relieved to fly back to LA.”

There is a brief, awkward silence as Jordan looks away and Alex suppresses a grin.

Blake smiles warmly and tries to let Jordan off the hook a bit. “It’s a fascinating topic and totally worthy of discussion. We just have to be careful not to turn speculative anthropology into sweeping judgment. Most of what we ‘know’ about pre-agricultural life is still guesswork and based on incomplete evidence.”

Jordan’s attention is pulled away to the bar. “I’m going to refresh my drink.”

After Jordan’s hasty exit, Blake turns to Alex. “I hope I didn’t come on too strong there.”

Alex chuckles. “No worries. Jordan will be fine. So, you’re an anthropologist?”

“Close. Archaeologist. Same big umbrella, different toolkit. I spend a lot of time in the dirt.”

 “What’s the oldest thing you’ve found?”

 “A basket fragment that was about 9,500 years old.”

“A basket?”

 “Yeah. Which sounds boring until you realize someone made it thinking about tomorrow. Food storage. Travel. Kids. It’s like this window into what someone was planning for their life ten thousand years ago.”      

“When you find something like that, what goes through your mind?”

“Mostly awe. And a weird sense of responsibility. As in, don’t screw this up because this might be the only way this person, and their people, ever get to tell us their story.”

“That’s . . . kind of amazing.”

 “It really is.”

*           *       *          

This is an example of a failed conversation — at least for Jordan. Conversation is simply one form of communication and all forms can suffer similar failures.

In this case, the conversation didn’t break down because Jordan was stupid or malicious. It failed because language, unconstrained by reason, defaults to emotion and ego.

At the same time, Alex, through humility and curiosity, was able to learn about something – and someone – that was new and interesting.

Failures like Jordan’s are a problem because language is the technology we used to cooperate in larger and larger groups. It is the key to our amazing progress as a species.

We use language not only to communicate with each other, but with ourselves. That little narrator inside your head — I call mine my “crazy roommate^[1]”— uses language. A big part of conscious experience is the constant chattering that bubbles up from our subconscious. This is your elephant’s go-to tool for telling your rider what to do.

This broad view of communication, and how to have more balanced internal and external conversations, will be the focus of the next four chapters.

Appendix Quiz:

When you were reading the party conversation piece, as what gender did you picture Alex, Jordan and Blake?

Your answers might tell you something about your internal gender bias. Please share your answers with me online at (link).

I’ll then reveal what was in my mind when I wrote it, which will, perhaps, reveal my own gender bias.

All answers will be kept totally anonymous.

---

[1] This comes from Michael Alan Singer s book “The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself” New Harbinger Publications 2007