The Myth of Normal 102

they generated, passed down from parent to child, generation to generation, characterized human life throughout most of our existence. Yes, there was violence and bad behavior and all the rest; we have never been “perfect.” But we knew something about setting the collective context for our humanness to flourish fruitfully; arguably, we knew nothing else. Such guidelines, and the traditions that inscribed them into cultural behavior, survived for a long time even as societies became settled (i.e., not nomadic), as Westerners in contact with Indigenous peoples have found for many hundreds of years. “The community is there for them, and they are there for the community,” wrote Frans de Waal about the Bushmen of the Kalahari, also known as the San people, a group widely thought to represent ways of life reaching back far into prehistory. “Bushmen devote much time and attention to the exchange of small gifts that cover many miles and multiple generations.”[7] No hominin species could have survived long enough to evolve had its members seen themselves as atomized individuals, pitted by Nature against their fellow beings. Contrary to our present ways of operating, a traditional view of self-interest would be enhancing one’s connection and membership in the community, to everyone’s benefit. Authentic self-interest need not be conflated with a suspicious and competitive stance toward others. Hence my working assumption that our nature, all else being equal, expects or even prefers as its baseline state a condition of caring, relative harmony, and equilibrium, of the kind that obtains when interconnectedness rules the day. It is not that our nature is to be those ways, but that it wants them to be present. When they are, we thrive; when denied, we suffer. What to make, then, of the modern received wisdom that we are fundamentally aggressive, selfish? Where does such an idea come from? Under a capitalist system notions and expressions of human nature will both mirror the individualized, competitive ideal and justify it as being the inevitable status quo. It makes sense: if what’s normal is assumed to be natural, the norm will endure; on the other hand, when suspicions emerge that the way things are may not be how they’re meant to be . . . well, the quo may not be status for long. Thus do materialistic cultures generate notions— myths, in effect—of selfish, aggressive striving and dominance as behavioral baselines, encouraging characteristics that place a lesser value on connectedness to others and to Nature itself. In our present capitalist society, Darcia Narvaez suggested to me, we have become “species-atypical,” a sobering idea when you think about it: no other species has ever had the ability to be untrue to itself, to forsake its own needs, never mind to convince itself that such is the way things ought to be. As the following chapters will explore, today’s culture hastens human development along unhealthy lines from conception onward, leading to a “normal” that, from the perspective of the needs and evolutionary history of our species, is utterly aberrant. And that, to state the obvious, is a life-size health hazard