Devising new living conditions for our elderly, appropriate to the changing modern world, remains a major challenge for our society. Many past societies made better use of their elderly, and gave them better lives, than we do today. We can surely find better solutions now.
PART FOUR
DANGER AND RESPONSE
CHAPTER 7
Constructive Paranoia
A night visit A boat accident Just a stick in the ground Taking risks Risks and talkativenessAttitudes towards danger
On one of my first trips to New Guinea, when I was still inexperienced and incautious, I spent a month with a group of New Guineans, studying birds on a forest-covered mountain. After a week camped at low elevation and inventorying birds there, I wanted to identify the bird species living at higher elevation, so we moved our gear a few thousand feet up the mountain. For the campsite at which we would be based for the next week, I selected a gorgeous location in tall forest. It was on a long ascending ridge at a point where the ridge flattened and became broader, offering lots of gentle terrain nearby in which I could comfortably walk around and watch birds. From a nearby stream, we could obtain water without having to go far. The campsite was at one side of the flat ridge crest, overlooking a steep drop-off into a deep valley over which I would be able to watch soaring hawks, swifts, and parrots. As the place to erect our tents, I chose the base of a glorious giant of a forest tree, with a thick straight trunk covered with moss. Delighted at the prospect of spending a week in such beautiful surroundings, I asked my New Guinea companions to build a platform for our tents.
To my astonishment, they became agitated and refused to sleep there. They explained that the tall tree was dead, so it might fall over on our camp and kill us. Yes, I did see that the tree was dead, but I was still surprised at their overreaction and objected, “It’s a huge tree. It looks still solid. It’s not rotten. No wind could blow it over, and there isn’t wind here anyway. It will be years before this tree falls over!” But my New Guinea friends remained frightened. Rather than sleep in the shelter of a tent under that tree, they declared that they would instead sleep exposed out in the open, far enough away that the tree wouldn’t hit and kill them if it fell.
I thought then that their fears were absurdly exaggerated and verged on paranoia. But as my months of camping in New Guinea forests went on, I noticed that, at least once on almost every day, I heard a tree falling somewhere in the forest. I listened to stories of New Guineans killed by tree-falls. I reflected that these New Guineans spent much of their lives camped in the forest—perhaps a hundred nights a year, or about 4,000 nights over their 40-year expected lifespan. I eventually carried out the math. If you do something that involves a very low probability of killing a person—say, just once in a thousand times that you do that something—but you do it a hundred times per year, then you are likely to die in about 10 years, instead of living out your expected lifespan of 40 years. That risk of falling trees doesn’t deter New Guineans from going into the forest. But they do reduce the risk by being careful not to sleep under dead trees. Their paranoia makes perfect sense. I now think of it as “constructive paranoia.”
My choice of this oxymoronic, seemingly unpleasant term for a quality that I admire is intentional. We normally use the word “paranoia” in a pejorative sense, to include greatly exaggerated and baseless fears. That’s how New Guineans’ reactions to camping under dead trees initially struck me, and it’s true that usually a particular dead tree wouldn’t fall on the particular night that a person chose to camp under it. But, in the long run, that seeming paranoia is constructive: it’s essential to surviving under traditional conditions.
Nothing else that I have learned from New Guineans has affected me as deeply as that attitude. It’s widespread in New Guinea, and reported in many other traditional societies around the world. If there is some act that carries a low risk each time, but if you’re going to do it frequently, you had better learn to be consistently careful if you don’t want to die or become crippled at a young age. That’s an attitude that I’ve learned to adopt towards the low-risk but frequent hazards of American life, such as driving my car, standing in the shower, climbing a ladder to change a light bulb, walking up and down stairs, and walking on slippery sidewalks. My cautious behavior drives crazy some of my American friends, who consider it ridiculous. The Westerners who most share my constructive paranoia are three friends whose lifestyle made them, too, alert to the cumulative hazard of repeated low-risk events: one friend who piloted small airplanes, another who was an unarmed policeman on the streets of London, and a third who floats rubber rafts down mountain streams as a fishing guide. All three learned from examples of less cautious friends who were eventually killed after years of that job or activity.
Of course, not just New Guinea life but also Western life has its dangers, even if one isn’t a pilot, bobby, or river guide. But there are differences between the perils of modern Western life and of traditional life. Obviously, the types of dangers are different: cars and terrorists and heart attacks for us, lions and enemies and falling trees for them. More significantly, the overall level of danger is much lower for us than for them: our average lifespan is double theirs, meaning that the average per-year risk that we face is only about half as great. The other significant difference is that the effects of many or most accidents that we Americans suffer can be repaired, whereas accidents in New Guinea are much more likely to prove crippling or fatal. On the sole occasion when I became incapacitated and unable to walk in the United States (from slipping on an icy Boston sidewalk and breaking my foot), I hobbled to a nearby pay phone to call my physician father, who picked me up and took me to a hospital. But when I injured my knee in the interior of Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville Island and became unable to walk, I found myself stranded 20 miles inland from the coast, without any means to obtain outside help. New Guineans who break a bone can’t get it set by a surgeon and are likely to end up with an improperly set bone that leaves them permanently impaired.