The Last Nomads and the Culture of Fear

[Bring4th_Austin]

Great read. It reminded me a lot of the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, who I think pioneered a lot of the thought process behind this.

In the book, he theorizes that the myths contained in the Bible were created by hunter-gatherer tribes to describe their decline due to the spread of agriculture. The fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is equated to humans stepping out of accordance with nature and treating it much like is described here: "the 'civilized' mind that views the wild world as a threat to be subdued or a fragile, off-limits temple, rather than the one source of life and home that can always provide." The agriculturalists believed that "right and wrong" existed within nature and they had the power to control based upon these principles. The hunter-gatherers were seen, from this perspective, as savages, being wrong in their way of life, and systematically integrated into the "right" way of life.

But when conditions improved, wouldn’t they go back to hunting?

He guesses in Ishmael that this is what happened to the Mayans, seeming to us as a decline. They realized that their "civilized" way of life was not offering a better standard of life than when they were hunting tribes, and there was a mass exodus over a short period of time going back to the nomadic lifestyle.

It's a really great book and probably the first book I read that really challenged me to think critically of the systems we have in place today, and offers some great philosophy apart from just the musing on nomadic versus agricultural lifestyles.