The Nomadic Alternative – Page 234

But if we tamper about with our playing equipment - if we play it too fast or too slow or allow it to get stuck in a groove - what was music, degenerates into random noise.

The metronomic activity of a wandering life provides the basic rhythm to synchronize arrival at a right death, and the ideas of retribution haunting our civilization are anxieties of mistiming.

The 'civilized' soul is unhinged from the 'civilized' body. We are stuck in a groove, and our urge to produce and advance materially signifies a fear of playing the next movement in ourselves. Civilized men have complained of the innate childishness and low intelligence of the so-called savage. Yet we shall want to know why they are content with their situation and we are not. Why are they uninter-ested in the NEW? Why is it a drug to us? Why do they achieve ataraxý, or mental calm, young in life? Why is suicide unknown among them? But why does our 'superior intelligence' seem to be purchased at the expense of our mental and sexual balance? Why are sexual transgressions and the violence of man to man minimized among them?

And why has the progress of civilization (in the sense of 'life in cities') been the progress of violence, neuroses and repressions?

The answer, I believe, is this. We are stuck uneasily in a condition of suspended adolescence, and suffer adolescent torments for most of our lives. What we call our civilization is the compound inheri-tance of juvenile delinquency and the cure for its discontents is to grow up.

To Freud we owe the insight that the experiences of early childhood affect the character of the child. These experiences aggre-gate to determine the character of the society in which the grown-up children live. And if the character of the wandering hunters is so radically different from that of modern man, these differences will find reflection in the two different ways of bringing up children. A full account of child-rearing techniques among surviving hunters and gatherers has yet to be written - if indeed it can now be written - but anthropologists have scattered the literature with comments and a general picture is clear.