Diet and eating habits are an area in which there is a lot that we can do as individuals to help ourselves. Think again about the startling fact that virtually no traditional New Guineans die of stroke, diabetes, or heart attacks. That doesn’t mean that you have to resume tribal warfare and adopt a diet consisting 90% of sweet potatoes if you, too, want to avoid dying of those diseases. Instead, you can enjoy some of the world’ greatest cooking and live peacefully and avoid those diseases, by incorporating three enjoyable habits into your life: exercising; eating slowly and talking with friends while you eat, instead of gulping down your food by yourself; and selecting healthy foods like fresh fruits, vegetables, low-fat meat, fish, nuts, and cereals, while avoiding foods whose labels show that they’re high in salt, trans fats, and simple sugars. This is also an area where society (i.e., voters, government, and food manufacturers) can make things easier for us, by adopting healthier standards for processed foods, as Finland and other countries have been doing.
Another thing that we can do individually or as couples, without waiting for society as a whole to change, is to raise our children bilingually or multilingually, like so many children in traditional societies. Many Americans could have done so but refrained, because they were told that hearing two languages would confuse children. We now know that, far from confusing children, it brings life-long benefits to their thinking, as well as enriching their lives. Many American couples know more than one language: each parent could speak a different language to their children and raise them as “crib bilinguals.” Immigrant couples could speak their native language to their children, instead of preventing their children from hearing the parents’ native language: the children will quickly pick up English from other children anyway. I say to all of us (myself included) who have struggled to learn languages in school or as adults, spending thousands of hours studying grammar books and memorizing vocabulary and listening to language tapes, and nevertheless ending up speaking with an accent and without fluency: you could have spared yourself all that effort, and ended up speaking fluently and without an accent, if your parents had raised you bilingually. We should think of this when we are figuring out how to raise our children and grandchildren.
Besides multilingualism, child-rearing by traditional societies offers many other model options from which we can choose. All prospective parents should ask themselves which of the following options make sense for them: a period of on-demand nursing insofar as it’s practical, late weaning, maintaining physical contact between the infant and some adult, co-sleeping (get a firm mattress or a crib in your bedroom, and discuss it with your pediatrician!), transporting infants vertically and facing forwards, much allo-parenting, responding quickly to a child’s crying, avoiding physical punishment, giving your child freedom to explore (appropriately monitored!), multi-age playgroups (valuable for both the younger and the older children), and helping your kids learn to entertain themselves rather than stifling them with manufactured “educational toys” and video games and other pre-packaged entertainment. You may find individual adoption of some of these measures difficult if your neighborhood or local society as a whole doesn’t change: when all of the kids on the block have video games and only your house doesn’t, you may find your children wanting to spend all their time in other kids’ homes. But it’s worth thinking seriously about these choices: the independence, security, and social maturity of children in traditional societies impress all visitors who have come to know them.
Still another thing that we can do individually is to assess realistically the dangers inherent in our lifestyles, and to adopt New Guinea–style constructive paranoia selectively. My New Guinea friends figured out not to sleep underneath dead trees in the jungle, and to pay attention to seemingly innocent-looking broken sticks in the ground—even though the odds are that they could sleep for dozens of nights under a dead tree and ignore dozens of seemingly innocuous sticks without getting into trouble. But they know that, if they adopt those incautious practices hundreds of times, the odds will eventually catch up with them. For most of us Westerners, life’s major hazards aren’t dead trees or sticks in the ground, but they also aren’t terrorists, nuclear reactors, plane crashes, and the other spectacular but realistically insignificant hazards that we obsess about. Instead, accident statistics show that most of us should be constructively paranoid about cars (driven by ourselves or by other people), alcohol (consumed by ourselves or by other people), and (especially as we get older) stepladders and slipping in showers. For each of us, there are some other risks that we should also be thinking about, depending on our particular individual lifestyle.
Our religion (or lack of religion) is yet another choice that we make as individuals. Many of us go through difficult periods of life when we re-assess our religious beliefs. At such times, it’s worth remembering that our choice of religion is a broader and more complex matter than just adopting metaphysical beliefs that we’ve decided are true, or rejecting beliefs that we’ve decided are false. As I write these lines, I’m reflecting on the different choices made by three friends whom I’ve known for decades: one, a life-long Unitarian for whom her church has been a central focus of her life; the second, a life-long Jew for whom his religion and his wrestling with his relationship to Israel have been a core of his identity; and the third, a German friend raised a Catholic, living in an overwhelmingly Catholic area of Germany, who recently astonished me by converting at age 40 to Protestantism. In all three cases, my friends’ decisions to maintain or to change their religion have depended on roles of religion other than as a source of beliefs. Those various roles have waxed and waned at different times for my friends through their lifetimes, just as they have waxed and waned in different historical periods for societies over the millennia. The roles include the search for satisfying explanations of ultimate questions about the physical world; dealing with anxiety and stressful situations; making sense of the death of a loved one, of the prospect of one’s own death, and of other painful events; justifying one’s moral principles of behavior, and one’s obedience or disobedience to authority; and identifying oneself as a member of a group whose ideals one shares. For those of us going through a period of religious turmoil, perhaps it might help clarify our thinking to remember that religion has meant different things to different societies, and to be honest with ourselves about what religion does or might mean specifically to us.
Turning now to admired features of traditional societies whose implementation requires both individual action and societal action, I already mentioned one example: reduction of dietary salt intake, a goal towards which we can make some progress as individuals, but which requires actions by governments and food manufacturers if we are also to reduce our cryptic salt intake in processed foods. We can similarly reduce our individual risk of diabetes by exercise and appropriate diets, but governments can also contribute in ways such as public awareness campaigns and regulating sales of fattening foods in public school cafeterias. As for how society (and not just bilingual parents of infants) can foster multilingualism and combat language extinction, some governments (e.g., Switzerland’s) work hard to preserve their language diversity; other governments (e.g., that of the U.S.) only recently stopped working hard to eradicate their nation’s diversity of native languages; and still other governments (e.g., the French in the region of Brittany) continue to oppose retention of a native language.