Notes: The Way We Were
NOTES
THERE IS A famous saying of Bacon‘s to the effect that modern times are really the oldest ones (the world, after all, is not getting any younger), and that what we think of as antiquity, “by a computation backwards from ourselves,“ was actually a time of youth. This is an attractive and nicely counterintuitive notion, and one that is nearly impossible to keep in your head as you go about daily life. People just don’t tend to think this way. And yet we all feel powerfully the loss of youth, especially if ours has been misspent; we have similar feelings about the lost youth of our race, about a world that was brasher and less proud and perhaps more suited to our natures. The myth of the noble savage may have been given a name by Rousseau, but it is probably one that even noble savages entertained.
What is surprising, though, is not that we harbor an affectionate attitude toward times gone by—many things, including beer, literature, and New York City, did use to be better—but that we so often move beyond passive nostalgia and attempt to bring back the past. I would not go so far as to say that civilization’s every step forward compels a compensatory step in retreat, but it does seem to me that as society ratchets onward there is always a bit of slippage in the gears. The last few millennia offer several thousand examples, but let me present some from my own lifetime.
The La-Z-Boy reclining rocker, a state-of-the-art platform for the human frame in sentient repose, was introduced in 1961, well in time for the first Super Bowl; it was countered by that strange pretzel-shaped chair with no backrest which is supposed to be the ideal seating arrangement for creatures who were once arboreal. In the late 1960s the design of running shoes became a focus of Space Age ingenuity; the Stone Age response, in the early 1970s, was the Earth Shoe, a sloped-backward affair designed to induce the natural gait of Brazilian aborigines. In 1982 the first Jarvik-7 artificial heart was installed in a human subject; around the same time doctors began taking a second look at the medicinal properties of leeches. More recently, in the dawning age of the computerized, or “smart,” house, there have been reports of people choosing to live underground or in caves.
This sort of thing—this resuscitation of the old and even of the primitive—is happening all around us, and once one becomes aware of the pattern, its new manifestations seem eerily predictable.
THAT is WHY students of the phenomenon sat up and took notice not long ago when the trade journal Frozen Foods Age reported that sales of frozen convenience dinners, which had increased by 33 percent in the course of a single recent year, had achieved a historic high. Within months of this news the inevitable counterpunch was delivered, in the form of an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, “Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications.” The article, by the physicians S. Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner, bluntly asserted the superiority of Cro-Magnon man’s diet. The article has now been expanded into a book, one that offers not only a “program of diet and exercise” but also a complete “design for living.”
The Paleolithic Prescription, by Eaton, Konner, and Marjorie Shostak, an anthropologist, opens on a needlessly defensive note; “To some people, this book will be worth a lot of laughs.” Oh, there are sure to be those who will have their fun (“Pass the mammoth, please”), but in the main the argument of the book strikes me as unassailable. Homo sapiens, the authors say, evolved in the context of a certain environment and way of life. For the most part, the conditions to which man was ideally suited no longer obtain, and yet man himself is little changed in any fundamental genetic way. We are still turning out the basic Cro-Magnon type of fellow, except that now he is working at a desk job, is afflicted by high levels of stress, is eating foods he wasn’t meant to—and, not coincidentally, is looking forward to a date with high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, or heart disease.
In contrast, the cave person, according to The Paleolithic Prescription, was lean, tall, strong, and aerobically fit. He did not smoke. If he drank, it was haphazardly. If he had a sweet tooth, it was difficult to indulge. If he liked meat, it was meat that was low in fat, because wild animals have a lot less fat than domesticated animals do. And he consumed a good deal of roughage: apparently about three pounds of raw vegetable matter a day. Cave persons also got lots of exercise. And they were not really the benighted captives of traditional sex roles we make them out to be. “If human societies were ranked along a continuum according to the status of women,” the authors write, communities of cave persons “would be positioned near the end closest to full equality.” Chronic degenerative disease, by the way, was almost unknown.
It sounds almost too good to be true, and in one or two particulars maybe it is. Some scientists argue that cave persons consumed more sugar, especially in the form of honey, than other scientists have cared to acknowledge. Rhodesian Man, a Paleolithic citizen whose remains were uncovered in Zambia, has been described by one analyst as a “dentist’s delight.” As for alcohol, a controversial new theory holds that not only did cave people have a taste for it but they made the leap to agriculture precisely in order to be assured of reliable supplies of grain for beer. An archaeologist friend of mine has also pointed out that whereas cave persons may have been aerobically fit, we all might be if we shared our dwellings with eighteen-foot-tall cave bears. We might suffer a bit from hypertension, too.
STILL, The Paleolithic Prescription makes good general sense, and I am giving serious thought to it. I am troubled, however, by the authors‘ tolerance of halfway measures, by their insufficient zeal. They note, for example, that cave persons were ardent insectivores, and yet nowhere on any of their suggested menu plans do insects, which are rich sources of protein, appear; rather, we are urged toward the usual vapid substitutes, such as chicken breasts (skinned) and cottage cheese. And though we are informed that your typical cave person, for all his clean living and egalitarianism, lived to only about thirty years of age, the matter is simply dropped and the provocative implication left unpursued.
Can I be alone in wondering whether a human life-span limited to three decades or so isn’t what God really intended, and isn’t such a bad idea regardless? Most of life’s minor irritations are, to be sure, caused by people under thirty, but most of the real damage to the world has been done by people who are older. If life ended at thirty, the occasional Alexander the Great would still wreak havoc from time to time, but the First World War would never have happened and probably neither would the Second. We would still have most of Mozart but a lot less of Friml, Dickens, and Michener. If life ended at thirty, there would be no more Dr. Ruths, no more aging rock stars, no more graduation speakers of the most compulsory and tiresome kind, and no more nostalgia booms that couldn’t be dismissively put down. The Social Security Trust Fund would turn into pure plunder, and could be used to pay off the federal deficit. And no one, at long last, would be eligible to run for President of the United States.
I would be surprised if such a regime, provided that it was adequately grandfathered, did not find wide acceptance.
—Cullen Murphy
