My nephew was in the emergency room after he was hit in the eye by a pine cone during a melee with cousins. My sister knows my son and I were often in the ER when he was a kid, so she asked, what was he thinking?
He probably wasn’t thinking. Sometimes a guy just has to throw things. It’s hard wired in male brains. When I see a lake, I throw a stone into the water. After a snowstorm, I throw a few snowballs, testing whether I can hit that boulder/streetlamp/cousin. Why the test? Because way back, boys’ skill in throwing accurately was useful to the tribe.
Homo sapiens, people who were physically identical to us, arose maybe 250,000 years ago. We were hunter-gatherers, moving with the seasons or the herds, living in small groups of 35 or 40 people. Even in a clan that size, people had specialized skills, and a male’s ability to hit his target was important.
Things changed about 15,000 years ago, when we domesticated animals. Some smart wolves figured out how to be dogs and chose to hang out with us. We began to plant crops about 10,000 years ago, so people who don’t like dogs off the leash should remember that dogs have been helping man since a time before we raised wheat. Farming led us to more settled ways and vital discoveries like how to brew beer. Food surpluses gave us time to experiment with writing. Civilization was under way, for good or ill.
Our current way of life is rather new. We now know how to co-exist while living elbow-to-elbow in cities, and how to cross four lanes of heavy traffic to reach the off-ramp. Our deeper ways of thinking, useful for most of our history, are still with us, but they fit better in a little band of hunters than they do in a big city. Some of those old habits of mind are counterproductive now. The one I think most harmful is tribalism.
Having a tribal identity and an instinctive loyalty to “us” as opposed to “them” was for most of our history a good thing, important for our collective survival. We needed our tribes for group enterprises like hunting, to pool resources in hard times, and to compete for scarce food supplies against other clans. You can see vestiges of that tribalism, dressed in new costumes: Crips and Bloods, Broncos fans and Chiefs fans. The tribe can be small, like residents of my block or the next block, or it can be large, such as Americans versus Chinese. Belonging to a tribe is a basic human trait.
But tribalism has lost its value and now interferes with our progress, even threatening our survival as a species. Why? Because the world has grown smaller and the problems we face are larger. All of us homo sapiens are increasingly dependent on one another, from one side of the planet to the other, and our problems are worldwide in scope, such as global warming and depletion of ocean fisheries. These threats require global solutions that go far beyond narrow tribal interests.
For example, Salida and Buena Vista have a tribal rivalry, but we will have to think like residents of Chaffee County, a bigger tribe, to deal with the development juggernaut heading toward the Upper Arkansas Valley. If Americans worry more about the cost to our tribe of carbon dioxide controls than we do about global warming, then climate systems will change and millions of Bangladeshis will starve – but those people are a different tribe, so it’s not our problem, right? We can even contemplate drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge because we see ourselves as a different tribe than our grandchildren, and our greed for oil outweighs their need for wilderness.
I explained to my sister that adolescent boys’ enthusiasm for doing dangerous things without regard for consequences was good for the tribe as a whole, not so long ago. Throwing pine cones is an efficient way to find out if a motionless cave bear is dead, and therefore edible, or merely asleep.
Nowadays, the great tribe of humanity faces threats that are broader in scope than one angry bear. We need to adjust our thinking.
F.R. Pamp is a lawyer, adjunct professor of environmental law and a consultant to non-profit organizations.
