Awe and loathing at the deli counter

Everyone likes a good time travel story. Whether it be H. G. Wells' 1895 The Time Machine, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Back to the Future or even the Terminator, we’re fascinated by the possibilities. Forward or backwards in time doesn’t matter much; either direction gives us a chance to compare and contrast the cultures, values and ideas of various ages.

All these stories are great fun, but the time travel story we really need at this moment goes like this: a small group of hunter-gatherers consults a shaman who organizes a trip into the deep future, the world of the early 21st century. The shaman–a woman of exceptional powers–guides the party into a trance state and delivers them into modern day America or Western Europe. By chance, our intrepid protagonists find themselves transported to a modern, fully-stocked grocery store. (And by the unique abilities of their shaman, they can both understand and speak the local language.)  

This premise might seem odd on its face, but not when we consider the fact that these hunter-gatherers are representative, typical human beings, just like you and I. In fact, when we look at the big history of the human species, we’re struck by the realization that the Paleo–that immense period of time before the dawn of agriculture–is the historic norm, the status quo. Hunter-gatherers are us and it’s essential that we see our world through their eyes, especially today.

really? all we can eat?

So what of our hunter-gathering party and their abrupt arrival in the modern supermarket? Quite obviously, they’d be staggered into a state of radical awe and wonder. Long accustomed to the rigors of walking, running, tracking and pursuing their food across vast landscapes, the party is astonished to find a cornucopia laid out right before their eyes, all of it within arm’s reach. The situation is unimaginable; a thousand miles of habitat, all of it condensed into a few thousand square feet of building space, all of it climate-controlled and arranged for maximum convenience. To their Paleolithic minds, this is the greatest affluence imaginable. Nearly free food in a thousand varieties! Just load up your cart and take what you like! If you can get your hands on one of those little cards, you can get as much as you want. And then you can climb into a motor vehicle and take it all to a house with a warm bed and a shower. It’s simply unbelievable. 

the shadow

But after a few days of eating and marveling, the novelty begins to wear off and our hunter-gatherers begin to ask questions. How did all this affluence come to pass? Who built this and how did they make it happen? What drove this incredible invention? As curious primates, they want to know the back story and they start asking around. It takes some persistence, but little by little, the story is revealed. 

At first the supermarket sounds like the culmination of clever discoveries and hard work; resourceful humans inventing better ways to get what they want. But digging deeper, they begin to see a shadow side to the entire enterprise. It turns out that the food doesn’t simply appear in the supermarket. It’s neither hunted or gathered; more accurately, it’s grown, harvested, slaughtered, and produced, even manufactured. It comes to market in trucks and aircraft, from habitat far away. But those vehicles burn a dangerous and toxic fuel that is poisoning the atmosphere and rendering the earth increasingly uninhabitable.  

Digging further, they begin to understand that the entire chain of events is toxic in one form or another. The very act of agriculture is destructive not only to the land itself, but also to biodiversity. To produce food in such large quantities, conditions on the ground must be held constant with fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Every link in the chain is toxic in some way or another. Suddenly, our hunter-gatherers come to blunt-force realization: it’s all tainted. There’s almost nothing in the modern supermarket that isn’t destructive in one way or another.  

Over time, our party begins to see that their descendants have engineered a brutal and ultimately self-destructive trade-off. In short, you can have a supermarkets and shopping centers with all the most awesome creations of civilization, but the price is extremely steep. You can have all the juiciest foods and riches, but you’ll have to trade away your future to get it. To the hunter-gatherer mind, this seems like a horrible, insane bargain. Trained by culture to honor ancestry and value the future, our intrepid time travelers begin to see the supermarket cornucopia as a deadly illusion. And who would trade their habitat for a temporary surge of wealth and comfort? And what will people do when habitat can no longer provide? 

a culture of neither

Raised in a wild, natural, outdoor setting, our hunter gatherers see the situation with great clarity; the awe and the shadow, the astonishment and the revulsion, the respect and the loathing. But ironically, modern people are mostly blind to all of it. We behave as if it’s all quite normal to live in the midst of such extravagant abundance. We shop, compare products and prices, load our carts and carry on as if nothing whatsoever is out of the ordinary. 

Our blindness comes from two places: The first is simply our innate ability to adapt. Our plastic nervous systems are always adjusting and it doesn’t take long for conditions to feel familiar and normal. And when we’re born into a set of circumstances, we’re inclined to assume that life has always been this way. Haven’t people always lived with instant everything? And so we fail to be astonished. This is just how life is; routine, familiar, comfortable and unremarkable. 

But our blindness goes deeper, facilitated by advertisers and their stories of advantage, benefit, and even perfection. It’s all part of the presentation and the strategy. Advertisers never talk about the shadow side of their products and services and they never talk about the backside story, except in exceptional circumstances. It’s always upbeat. Every product and service has a host of advantages, but no downside. Just click the “buy now” button and your life will improve. End of story.  

In this way, all modern advertising is falsehood. When you’re trying to get people to buy your stuff, you aren’t going to tell them about climate effects, toxics, plastics, endocrine disruptors or the downstream consequences of owning the product in question. Any advertiser who actually told the whole story of their product or service would be fired in short order. In fact, the entire industry is built on deception and the intentional manipulation of reality.

Taken together, our powerful adaptability, coupled with fantasy advertising, adds up to an epidemic of blindness, delusion and sleep living. By all rights, modern shoppers should be in a state of constant amazement and revulsion, but we feel neither of these things. Seduced into a state of minimal consciousness, we compare products, shop for services and consider ourselves successful when we get a good deal. Seen from the hunter-gatherer perspective, this modern mind-set comes across as ignorant, delusional, and even pathological. Indeed, the arc of history actually begins to appear reversed, towards decreasing awareness and diminished consciousness. 

stay awake

So what does this encounter tell us about our modern lives? How are we supposed to live in a modern world that is both radically awesome and profoundly self-destructive? 

Obviously, the first and most important thing is to see and feel the awe. As an exercise, go to the local supermarket, stand in the center aisle and soak it in. Feel the affluence. Think like a hunter-gatherer. Appreciate the incredible fact that you can choose what you want, eat what you want, in whatever combination you choose. This is historically unprecedented and to be honest, historically abnormal. And it is wildly, outrageously impressive. Once you understand this fact, you’ll never look at a supermarket or an automobile the same way again (much less a drive-through!)

Next, bear witness to the shadow. Don’t get seduced by one-sided, upbeat advertising. Understand the abnormality of the situation and remember that there’s always a shadow side. Remember the level of destruction that makes all this possible; habitat, animals and future generations are paying a heavy price for our convenience and our affluence. Hold the destruction in your consciousness without denial or escape attempts, then participate minimally and with awareness.

Above all, remain awake. Remain awake to the destructive back story of our world, our products and our life-style. Don’t go blind. Don’t be lulled to sleep by utopian advertising and upside narratives. 

In light of our modern extremity, all of this may not seem like much of a solution, but it’s far, far better than the blindness that we’re guilty of today.