On Being Uncivilized (At the Margin)
My colleague has claimed that adoption of the paleo diet and lifestyle constitutes a rejection of society, or, perhaps more fundamentally, of even civilization. Bread “goes hand in hand with civilization. It is the embodiment of social cooperation, of order itself.” And bread has a central role in our traditions. At the Last Supper, he notes, Jesus and his disciples broke bread, and not a steak.
While I think my colleague skates too quickly by the thorny doctrine of transubstantiation — Roman Catholics believe that bread in the eucharist is literally transformed into the presumably gluten-free and paleo-friendly flesh of Christ — he makes a good case. The paleo mindset is to a considerable extent (pace Stan) anti-tradition and anti-civilization. But if we find that forgoing grains, getting plenty of sunshine, lifting heavy things, and wearing toe shoes make us happier and healthier, then that is as good a reason as any to reconsider, or consider for the first time, the extent and quality of our commitment to civilization and the demands it places on us.
To start with, it is not obvious to me that my colleague’s argument from religious tradition is internally consistent. Even setting aside the mysterious cannibalism of the Roman church, he offers a rather selective reading of scripture. To use the Good Book to contrast paleolithic life with civilization, one must start with the Fall of Man. Here we find Man and Woman living in a Garden, eating a grain-free diet, in harmony with God and nature. Then they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and were expelled from the Garden, condemned to toil in agriculture for the rest of their days. We are an evolutionarily dislocated species; we have fallen off the paleo wagon, and the way back on is blocked with a flaming sword.
It intrigues me that the author of Genesis binds up the Fall with “the knowledge of good and evil.” The civilized man recoils at the idea that ethics, of all things, could lead to the loss of paradise. But in the liberated, paleolithic recesses of my mind, this construction makes considerable sense. Civilized life is, after all, rather…judgy. Living together in agrarian communities requires a high degree of enforced conformity. To secure this conformity, communities adopt strict behavioral expectations and moral codes, to which they often accord metaphysical or divine status, placing them beyond the limits of what may be questioned. The knowledge of good and evil, then, is a tool of social control, and eating of it to live in civilization is our original sin.
Self-deception prevents us from seeing or dwelling on the degree to which social approbation and disapprobation is used as a tool of control in our own lives. We might develop social Stockholm Syndrome, in which we form the belief that “the rules” are not so bad, and perhaps even good for us as individuals. Alternatively, we may see that social judgment is stifling for others, but believe ourselves to be immune from the phenomena that control smaller minds. Look at how original and autonomous you are! This has nothing to do with the fact that originality and autonomy, or the appearance thereof, are relatively high-status traits in our civilization.
We might also reckon that civilization has made considerable collective material progress. While this is undeniably true, it has come at significant individual cost. Billions of human animals have been made to stifle their animalistic instincts; a part of each of us has surely died. Whether the collective gains are worth the individual sacrifices is beside the point. It is not clear how we, who have been so thoroughly socialized into our own civilizations, could possibly answer such a question objectively.
And in any case, I am not proposing to destroy civilization. The real question is the marginal one: should I be more civilized, or less? And the answer, I think, is less. Imagine the freedom of not caring what other people think, not merely because you want to be seen as not caring what other people think, but because you actually don’t care. If we all actually didn’t care at all, then civilization really might collapse. But at the margin, being a little less civilized and a little more animalistic is both harmless to material progress and substantially liberating.
The paleo diet and lifestyle might both be silly and in opposition to civilization, as my colleague suggests. But deep down, we all long for a life less civilized, at least on some margins. There is value in having one’s own projects, and whatever its virtues, civilization cannot be one of them — it is too big, too complex, the product of human action but not of human design. Just because society has been largely successful in molding us into civilized human beings does not mean that we should forgo a quiet, marginal rebellion against civilization, in which we reclaim a small bit of Eden.
