For example, Aka Pygmy women interviewed by Bonnie Hewlett mentioned the following reasons for abandoning their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the forest to settle down as village farmers: material goods such as salt, pepper, palm oil, pots and pans, machetes, beds, and lanterns; good clothes and shoes; a healthier life; the opportunity to send one’s children to school; that it is easier to obtain plant food from fields than to gather it in the forest; and that it is easier and safer and faster to hunt animals with a gun than to make nets and extract kicking, biting, and slashing animals trapped in nets. Ache Indians interviewed by Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado named their motives for giving up life in the forest and moving to reservation settlements: to acquire a shotgun, a radio, and new clothes; to keep themselves and their children well fed and healthy; to live longer; and to have many children survive to become adults. Western material goods that my New Guinea friends value include, most notably, matches, steel axes, clothes, a soft bed, and an umbrella. (To understand the value of an umbrella, remember that rainfall in New Guinea ranges up to 500 inches per year or higher). New Guineans also value non-material benefits such as medical care, schooling for children, and the end of tribal warfare. Ishi, the Yahi Indian of Northern California who gave up his hunter-gatherer lifestyle around the age of 50 to spend his last years in San Francisco, initially admired matches and glue above all other European inventions, and with time also grew fond of houses, furniture, flush toilets, running water, electric lights, gas stoves, and railroad trains. Sabine Kuegler’s sister Judith, upon moving for a year from her family home in the New Guinea jungle to Germany, was astonished by all the different brands of chocolate bars available in a German supermarket.
These are among the many obvious and concrete advantages of the Western lifestyle mentioned by people who have grown up among the insecurities, dangers, and discomforts of traditional societies. Other, subtler advantages are mentioned by educated New Guinea friends whose survival needs were already being met in their New Guinea village, and who admire other things about life in the United States. They cite access to information, access to a broad diversity of people, and more rights for women in the U.S. than in New Guinea. One New Guinea friend surprised me by telling me that what she most likes about life in the U.S. is its “anonymity.” She explained that anonymity means to her the freedom to step away from the social bonds that make life in New Guinea emotionally full, but also confining. To my friend, anonymity includes the freedom to be alone, to walk alone, to have privacy, to express oneself, to debate openly, to hold unconventional views, to be more immune to peer pressures, and not to have one’s every action scrutinized and discussed. It means the freedom to sit in a café on a crowded street and read a newspaper in peace, without being besieged by acquaintances asking for help with their problems. It means the freedom of Americans to advance themselves as individuals, with much less obligation to share their earnings with all their relatives than in New Guinea.
Advantages of the traditional world
Now, let’s hear the other side of the story. What do people who have lived both in traditional societies and in WEIRD societies value about the former and find missing in the latter?
The most frequent and important observations involve life-long social bonds. Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions. In the smaller traditional societies (tribes and bands of just a few hundred people or fewer), no one is a stranger. While either girls or boys (in most traditional societies, girls) move from their natal group upon getting married, the move is usually over a sufficiently small distance that one can regularly visit one’s blood relatives.
In contrast, the risk of loneliness is a chronic problem in populous industrial societies. The expression “feeling alone in a crowded room” isn’t just a literary phrase: it’s a basic reality for many Americans and Europeans living in large cities, and working among people whom they barely know. People in Western societies frequently move long distances, their children and friends also independently move long distances, and so one is likely to end up far from one’s closest relatives and childhood friends. Most people that one encounters are strangers and will remain strangers. Children routinely leave their parents’ house and set up their own household on marrying or becoming economically independent. As one American friend who spends much time in Africa summed it up, “Life in Africa is materially poor and socially/emotionally rich, while U.S. life is materially rich and socially/emotionally poor.” Other frequent observations are the greater time pressures, scheduling constraints, stress levels, and competitiveness in Western societies than in traditional societies. I emphasize once again that there are respects in which features of the traditional world persist in many parts of modern industrial societies, such as rural areas, where everyone knows everyone else and most people spend their lives near their birthplace.
To put a personal face on these generalizations, I’ll quote some poignant observations by children of American businesspeople or missionaries who grew up in New Guinea, the Philippines, or Kenya and then moved to the United States as teen-agers and told me about their experiences:
“American boys are macho, talk macho, and beat up other kids. Nice kids don’t do well in the U.S.”
“After growing up with kids in New Guinea, the first thing that struck me as different about the U.S. was that kids go into their houses, close the doors, play video games, and leave their houses again to go to school. In New Guinea, we kids were constantly out of doors, playing with each other.”
“African children are with people all of the time. We kids were indoors only to sleep. We could go into any house, knowing that we were welcome there. But American children are often not with other children. Nowadays, with the availability of video games, the problem of staying in your house by yourself is even worse in the U.S. than it was when I was growing up and there was only TV and no video games.”
“Out in the Philippines, children call all adults ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle.’ We’re in and out of any house in the village. When it’s dinnertime, we eat in whoever’s house we happen to be in at that time, with other children.”
“American children are less sociable than New Guinea children. In New Guinea, I’m used to smiling and saying hello to anyone that I pass, and to starting a conversation. But American children walk past each other or walk past strangers, don’t start a conversation, and don’t say hello. When I smile and say hello, then they respond, but they don’t initiate it themselves.”