Ever since the dawn of time, we humans have struggled with one thing: our ego. This struggle is evident and emphasized in religious scriptures, language (e.g., We are humans instead of animals) and how we perceive. The modern narrative is that we have evolved from such narcissism through the various scientifical blows.
Firstly, the copernicium revolution, where humans understood that they are not the centerof the universe, then Darwinian evolution, and lastly, understanding that most things happen in the unconscious mind. Yet, with the same ink, we still perceive that humans are endowed with “Rationality” and can comprehend an objective, unchanging, independent world (truths) as if we are ‘wanderers above the sea of fog’ looking down from Friedrich’s painting.
With such ability to make “objective” knowledge claims (on what truth weighing that’s a mystery), we have tarnished and diminished the wonders of our past. And labelled our ancestors with words such as pre-modern, primitive, archaic, savage and gave them economic terms such as ‘mere subsistence economy’, ‘limited leisure’ and the list goes on.
To truly become enlightened, we have to skeptically analyze moral claims such as rationality, advancement and progress, but that’s impossible to do in a mere article. So let’s just take a look, for instance, at pre-historic times of hunters and gatherers; this’s commonly scrutinized and is associated with diseases, subsistence levels, savagery, and primitive.
However, when one looks at the lives of such times, another story seems to appear. The theory of original affluence stated by Marshall Sahlins mentioned that hunters and gatherers lived an affluent life if we dismiss our narrow sense of affluence. Firstly, he says inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest people. The famous problem of scarcity summarizes this: “we have unlimited wants and finite recourses”, creating this inadequacy of economic means. By analysis of hunters and gatherers like the !Kung Bushmen the paper concludes that they lived in affluence.
Such content lies in their undemanding of material needs except for what can be made by easily extracted surroundings. ‘Want not, lack not’, you might say; such attitude is not because they lack free time, as most ethnographic studies indicated hunter-gatherers don’t even know what to do with half their time. This content came from wealth being a burden to their nomadic life. The ultimate value of such nomadic life “is freedom of movement”. Western scholars called such content “their undeveloped sense of property” or “lack interest in developing their technological equipment”, such orientalist phrases.
Researchers on hunters and gatherers were surprised by how they treat their possession as if they assign no value to them.
In our modern terms, we would say such an attitude of the ‘uneconomical man’ didn’t allow him to ‘develop’; it seems his problem is that his wants are scarce, and his means are plentiful! It is hard to imagine that what is perceived as natural features or impulses of humans is amplified by its institutionalization.
The values of the ‘uneconomical man’ have been present in different religions and philosophies. “Serving the body is granting it whatever it seeks of pleasures and desires and what it lusts, but in this is the destruction of the soul” by Rashidun Ali, “Greater in battle than the man who would conquer thousand-thousand men, is he who would conquer just one — himself.
Better to conquer yourself than others. When you’ve trained yourself, living in constant self-control.” by Gautama Buddha, this denial of desires or refinement of the self is seen in the life and philosophy of Pythagoras, in pagan ascetic-philosophical traditions, in monotheism etc. Wary of not falling into the trap of idealizing the past, as we all only have stories of it. We still can safely conclude that modern men have undeveloped in some respects and that we are not a part of some comprehensive progress.
