The Values of Belonging

Carol L. Flinders

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062031679
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Values of Belonging breaks new ground by examining human value systems from the perspective of how we live, not our gender. "There is a way of being in the world that recoils from aggressiveness, cunning, and greed, " writes bestselling author Carol Lee Flinders. This way of being arose out of the relationships our hunter-gatherer ancestors had with the natural world, one another, and Spirit -- relationships that are most acutely understood in terms of trust, inclusion, and mutual reciprocity. This society's core values, which include intimate connection with the land, empathetic relationship with animals, self-restraint, balance, expressiveness, generosity, egalitarianism, playfulness, and nonviolent conflict resolution, are what Flinders calls the "values of Belonging."

But with the Agricultural Revolution, as people took charge of what they could grow and where, the nature of human society changed. Once we could produce enough food to have surpluses, food could be bartered. The concept of ownership took on new meaning; more complex economies evolved, and with them came social and economic inequities. Qualities that had been reviled, such as competitiveness, acquisitiveness, and ambition, became under these new conditions the means to success. God underwent a transformation as well, becoming masculine, supreme, and finally located above and beyond us in the heavens. Flinders observes that these "values of Enterprise" have played a crucial role in the development of human society, having given us our passion for innovation and exploration of our world. But, whether negative or positive, the values of Enterprise, which became associated with men, overwhelmed the values of Belonging, which were identified with women. This division has impoverished us all.

The values that shaped the hunter-gatherer's life reflected the need for connection, while those that fueled the Agricultural Revolution, and the subsequent rise of civilization as we know it, resulted in disconnection -- from nature, other people, and Spirit. The two value systems could not be more deeply at odds. Because the values of Enterprise have prevailed, the entire world stands in acute and perilous imbalance. And yet there are those who have managed to keep the values of Belonging alive, while successfully negotiating Enterprise culture.

In this fresh look at gender relationships, Flinders moves away from the dichotomy of male as oppressor and female as victim. She sees models for a new balance in the lives of visionaries, artists, and mystics such as the Buddha, Baal Shem Tov, Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Muir, and Martin Luther King Jr., each of whom mirrors the essence of Belonging values for the world. This thought-provoking book adds an exciting dimension to the debate about Western values and where we are headed.

PART I

The Values of Belonging

On the Willamette Valley farm in Oregon where I spent my childhood, it wasn’t uncommon to find arrowheads chipped out of obsidian flakes or flint, and one spring when my father was plowing the bottomland near the creek he turned up a bowl made of stone. Nearby was another stone that fit a hand nicely and looked as if it had been used for grinding. We kept these on the hearth, never using them to crack walnuts or filberts because they seemed precious to us—antiquities from the remote past.

Not long ago I realized that the grinding bowl and stone could well have been in use as little as a hundred (maybe a hundred and twenty) years before we found them. If you’d told me that as a child, I’d have thought a hundred and twenty years was an eternity, but now, well aware how quickly three, four, and even five decades can pass, I see how brief the interval actually was between our tenure and that of the Native Americans who’d lived near that creek for hundreds, maybe thousands of years before the first white settlers arrived.

That small epiphany became part of a larger one. I began to think about the culture that preceded the arrival of white settlers, when the Native Americans who lived by “our” creek were still hunter-gatherers. Their way of life had effectively vanished from most of the world thousands of years earlier. Realizing this, I began to see the displacement and near annihilation of American Indians by white settlers and their government in a light that I hadn’t before.

When Europeans spread out across this continent, what actually took place was a head-on collision—in fact, innumerable head-on collisions—between representatives of a culture fast outstripping all others in the world in its technological prowess, and small bands of people who hadn’t taken even the first steps in that direction.

When my grandmother’s grandmother crossed the Great Plains on her way to Oregon, therefore, and met up with Indians along the way, those brief encounters (and innumerable encounters like them) had extraordinary historical significance. Across an immense cultural divide, humanity as it had been for its first few million years gazed at humanity as it had become over the past ten thousand years. For a time, at least, the culture of Belonging was right here, plainly visible to the culture of Enterprise. Here at the far end of the extraordinary trajectory that has been Western civilization in the making, Americans in particular (the greatest beneficiaries of that civilization) have had the chance, and the obligation, to reflect upon all that had been set aside, silenced, and discredited in order to get us here. To the extent that that obligation has been taken seriously at all—to the extent that this continent’s indigenous people have been honored, studied, and recompensed even a little—to that extent, the impetus of Enterprise culture has been slowed here and there, and its more destructive impact grasped.

That same terribly important scrutiny has been taking place in other parts of the world where the last hunter-gatherer cultures have all but succumbed to the same pressures the American Indians did—among them Australia’s Aborigines, the Kalahari San of southern Africa, the Bambuti Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the very heart of Africa, and the Inuit of North America’s Arctic region. By awakening the rest of us to the strengths of these cultures, several generations of anthropologists have helped us substantiate the intuitive feeling that all is not what it could be in this wealthiest, most powerful society ever. But their work also compels us, by way of pursuing that intuition, to revisit and even reconstruct our sense of what constitutes human history.

Until very recently, everything that happened before the rise of agriculture was labeled “prehistory.” By extension, our earliest ancestors were “pre-humans.” Today, though, we know way too much about hunter-gatherers to go on pretending that the two or three million years of human existence that preceded recorded history was a vast emptiness.

Long before people lived in cities, wrote letters, and cultivated and stored food, they lived in community. They told stories and sang songs that preserved the memory of their collective experience. Beauty dazzled them, and they found ingenious ways to reproduce it. They loved each other and lost each other, and grieved at the losing, struggling to make sense of it; and, they did all of that just as we do, inside a framework of values—a complex of values that is fully within our capacity to grasp.

Among the important insights into those early life-ways that anthropologists have given us is the understanding that those values are, in fact, adaptations. They arose directly and even organically out of the relationship of human beings to their environment and one another as surely as the capacity to walk upright did, or the visual astuteness to tell ripe berries from green ones.

CHAPTER 1

A Sturdy Web, Closely Woven

Before the advent of agriculture, all human beings were foragers. They didn’t till the earth, and they didn’t domesticate animals. They relied on the plant and animal resources of their own locality. The foraging strategy has been called mankind’s most successful and persistent adaptation. What that word “adaptation” implies in this context is that human beings spent their first couple of million years becoming the ideal inhabitants of specific niches in a wide range of local ecosystems. Through the mechanism of biological evolution, they gradually became fine-tuned so as to fit perfectly into the more-or-less steady-state equilibrium of the shoreline or foothills or ice-scape they called home.

Human beings had to be able to eat whatever was available in their bioregion from one season to the next. Carnivores in some places, omnivores in most, they developed strong jaws, teeth that could tear as well as grind, a long digestive tract, and all kinds of enzymes for breaking foods down. Because in areas where food resources were few or sporadic in their appearance, the ability to walk long distances without tiring was an asset, as was the capacity to store calories as fat until needed, human beings acquired those traits in due time too.

The fact that our earliest ancestors were foragers shaped us in innumerable other ways, among them the physiology of infants and mothers. Helpless for a much longer time than other mammal babies, and unable to obtain their own food, the children of foraging mamas stayed on their hips and at their breasts well into toddlerhood. That extended propinquity allowed human offspring to learn by osmosis and observation much of what they would need to know as adult foragers.

Biological adaptations take place slowly, and they’re not swiftly undone just because surrounding conditions change. When most of us stopped being hunter-gatherers about ten thousand years ago—which in evolutionary terms is no time at all—our diet changed sharply, reducing the variety of foods we ate even as food itself became more easily available. Life scientists across the spectrum have noted over the past hundred years the many areas in which health is compromised because our bodies have still not adjusted to that shift. Cardiovascular disease and diabetes are just two of the illnesses that are caused and/or exacerbated by diets composed largely of separated refined foods such as butter-fat, corn oil, sugar, and white flour.

But biological adaptation involves much more than biochemical interactions. Exercise, for instance, plays a crucial role in health. Our bodies were clearly designed, by the long process of genetic “sculpting,” to flourish at high levels of activity. Muscular exertion stimulates the growth of bone mass, for example, sweating removes toxins from the bloodstream, and deep breathing strengthens the muscles in the heart. All these relationships can be traced back to our having been very active while we were evolving, and we ignore them now at real cost.

There’s still another dimension to the adaptations that made us who we are. Take a troubled mind for a long walk in the woods, and watch the tensions dissipate as you fall into a rhythmic pace. As anxiety levels drop, the likelihood of developing stress-related digestive and circulatory problems drops as well. In addition, the natural “high” of released endorphins is palpable—that is, if we move in the ways our bodies need to move, we receive the immediate bonus of feeling great.

As for the infant on her mother’s hip, the hormonal secretions released in the long-ago mother while she nursed her baby made it unlikely that the woman would conceive again soon, which was typically a good thing for hunter-gatherers, because it was important that the size of the group not exceed the carrying capacity of their environment. But delaying the next pregnancy also meant that the child would have her mother’s exclusive companionship all the longer. In addition, hormonal secretions induced in both mother and child feelings of deep delight in one another.

All around, it was a nice package.

Our unconscious emotional needs, then, were shaped as powerfully by the experience of foraging as our physiological characteristics were; they didn’t develop separately. We don’t have to meet those needs in exactly the way they once were met (even nonhuman primates avail themselves of babysitters: anthropologists call them “allo–mothers,” or “other-mothers”), but we do have to reckon with them, because they’re so deeply a part of who we are. They were “adaptive” to the conditions we lived in for our first few million years, but they haven’t gone away just because external conditions have changed.

VALUES AND DESIRES

The massive sum of adaptations that allowed hunter-gatherers to live successfully and sustainably on every continent extended beyond the physiological and the emotional. What enabled human beings to live in such finely tuned harmony with their environment was that particular constellation of values listed earlier, universal among hunter-gatherers, hammered out over time in the context of a foraging life as inexorably as peripheral vision, the opposable thumb, and “fight-or-flight” reactions to immediate danger.

We’ll describe the relationship between a foraging life and the values it generated much more extensively in the next chapters. But for now, consider the following:

In a nomadic, subsistence economy it was folly to be anything but generous and forbearing toward one’s companions, because everyone depended entirely on one another: parents and children, gatherer and hunter, woman and man, old and young. Intimate knowledge of the natural world was synonymous with survival, and so was restrained use of that world’s resources.

The simple fact that over long reaches of time a band or tribe had been able to eke out its subsistence in a particular region gave rise to a strong sense of connection and mutual reciprocity with that place—a sense that you and I would be tempted to call “reverence” or even “worship.” Though most of these cultures didn’t have a word for “religion,” a strong sense of the sacred, and of sacred presences, pervaded the whole of life.

Cultivation of a rich interior life, a certain serenity and balance, the capacity to take great pleasure in small things: all of these were survival skills in societies where external stimulation and intellectual engagement were minimal.

These values support and imply one another, forming together the living constellation that I’ve chosen to call the culture of Belonging: a system of meanings within which the interdependence of all life–forms is the central truth—a way of being in the world that presumes connection, balance, mutuality, and self-restraint.

The values of hunter-gatherer cultures aren’t the cardinal values of contemporary postindustrial life. But because we lived by them for so very long, I would argue, our current slighting of them comes at great cost. Because we act against their promptings so regularly, social, political, and spiritual problems have arisen that are as real and palpable as diabetes, hypertension, appendicitis, and asthma.

Admittedly, the mind does stumble over the word “values.” Family values. American values. Christian values. End-of-season, empty–the–warehouse, blow-out-the-competition shopping values. Popular usage has rendered the term all but meaningless. But we need it, so I want to take just a moment to administer etymological CPR.

The word “value” is rooted in the Latin verb valere: to be strong or well. The value of a coin is the measure of its strength in the marketplace—the weight it can pull compared to other currencies: the euro up against the dollar, the peso facing down the ruble. If I’m wavering between two courses of action and one calls me more powerfully than the other, that’s a value declaring itself.

A value, then, isn’t an idea or an abstraction; it’s a force in consciousness closely connected with desire. In the Upanishads, it’s said that a man is his deep, driving desire. As his desire is, so is his deed; and as his deed is, so is his destiny. To find out what someone’s values are, you don’t ask her; you look at the choices she makes. From deep down, well out of sight, values direct the course of our lives like the rudder of a ship. Just so, the values shared by an entire people are forces in their collective consciousness.

The values of pre-agricultural people weren’t thrashed out in parliament or fine-tuned on radio talk shows: conscious choice played almost no part in the process. Their values arose directly out of the contingencies of their lives. So to know what those values were, we need to know how people lived before the so-called Neolithic Transition. If we had to depend only on the archaeological record, our knowledge of pre-agricultural life would be very limited indeed.

But in fact, thanks to the work that anthropologists (both amateur and professional) have carried out this past century and a half, we know a great deal about more recent hunter-gatherers. Combining their information with the rich archaeological record yields a picture of life that is rich and suggestive. I draw gratefully on the work of these many dedicated scientists to elucidate the relationship between the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the values of Belonging.

Vocabulary, of course, is problematic. The more we learn about the “prehistoric” people in question, the more unsatisfactory all of the conventional labels become:

Prehistoric is accurate in that what happened in the world wasn’t recorded as “history” until there were alphabets, but the term feels injurious nonetheless.

Hunter-gatherer is bulky, and since it implies that more calories came from hunting than gathering, it doesn’t describe all hunter–gatherer cultures accurately. Gatherer-hunter is an even bigger mouthful, though. Since we know now that a bit of cultivation did slip in here and there, neither term is strictly applicable to everyone we’ll want to discuss.

Tribal is dicey also, given that anthropologists distinguish meaningfully between “bands” and “tribes” (the former being smaller than the latter), and yet there’s no parallel label “bandal,” even though an...