Which kind of culture would you prefer to get traded to? When it comes to the theistic part, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other to me. As for the other correlates, desert cultures, with their militarism, stratification, mistreatment of women, uptightness about child rearing and sexuality, seem unappealing. And yet ours happens to be a planet dominated by the cultural descendants of the desert dwellers. At various points, the desert dwellers have poured out of the Middle East, defining large parts of Eurasia. Such cultures, in turn, have passed the last 500 years subjugating the native populations of the Americas, Africa, and Australia. As a result, ours is a Judeo-Christian/Muslim world, not a Mbuti-Carib/Trobriand one.
So now we have Christians and Jews and Muslims in the wheat fields of Kansas, and in the cantons of the Alps, and in the rain forests of Malaysia. The desert mind-set, and the cultural baggage it carries, has proven extraordinarily resilient in its export and diffusion throughout the planet. Granted, few of those folks still live like nomadic pastoralists, guiding their flocks of sheep with staffs. But centuries, even millennia after the emergence of these cultures, they bear the marks of their desert pasts. Our vanquished enemies in Afghanistan, the Taliban, and our well-entrenched Saudi friends created societies of breathtaking repressiveness. In Jerusalem in recent years, Jewish Orthodox zealots have battled police, trying to close down roads on Saturday, trying to impose their restrictive version of belief. And for an American educator with, say, a quaint fondness for evolution, the power of the Christian right in many parts of this country to dictate what facts and truths may be uttered in a classroom is appalling. Only one way to think, to do, to be. Crusades and jihads, fatwas and inquisitions, hellfire and damnation.
Unfortunately, the rain forest mind-set appears not only less likely to spread than its desert counterpart but also less hardy when uprooted, more of a hothouse attribute. Logging, farming, and livestock grazing are rapidly defoliating Earth. Our age witnesses not only an unprecedented extinction of species but of cultures and languages as well. William Sutherland, a population biologist at the University of East Anglia, has shown that the places on Earth with the most biodiversity are the most linguistically diverse as well and that languages are even more at risk for extinction than are birds or mammals. And so the rain forest cultures, with their fragile pluralism born of a lush world of plenty, deliquesce into the raw sewage of the slums of Rio and Lagos and Jakarta.
DESERT, DESERT EVERYWHERE
Map by Matt Zang
Legend: Yellow: subtropical; dark blue: cool coastal; light blue: cold winter
At least a fifth of Earth is desert. As rain forests are destroyed by humans, deserts expand. Global warming, farming, and water use compound desertification. In the last 50 years, the Sahara, in Africa, which accounts for 8 percent of the world’s land area, has grown by more than 250,000 square miles.
What are we to make of the correlations between environment and cultural practices? Think of humans as the primates that we are, and it makes perfect sense. Go discover two new species of monkeys never before seen. Know nothing about them other than that one lives in the trees of an Amazonian forest and that the other walks the arid scrubland of Namibia, and a card-carrying primatologist can predict with great accuracy the differing sex lives of the two species, which is the more aggressive, which is the more territorial, and so on. In this respect, we are subject to the influences of ecology, like any other species.
Still, two big differences make us distinctive. First, human cultures allow far more—and far more dramatic—exceptions to rules than one finds in other primates. After all, our mean old Judeo-Christian/Muslim world has also produced peaceful Quakers and Sufis. In contrast, no olive baboon, living a savanna life that favors omnivory, has ever opted for vegetarianism as a moral statement.
The second distinctive trait of human culture is its existential bent. We’re not just talking about how ecology influences the kind of arrowhead you make or whether, during some ceremonial ritual, you shake the rattle before or after you do the dance with the hyena skull. What’s at stake are profound, and defining, human preoccupations: Is there a god or gods, and does your existence matter to Them? What happens when you die, and how do your actions in life affect your afterlife? Is the body basically dirty and shameful? Is the world basically a benevolent place?
In the end, if we want to understand how people find answers to these intensely personal, individuating questions, we must admit some biology in the back door. We already recognize the many ways in which genetics, neurochemistry, and the endocrinology of depression affect whether a person constitutionally views life as a vessel half empty or half full. We are even beginning to glimpse a biology of religious belief itself. There are neurological injuries that cause religious obsessions, neuropsychiatric disorders associated with “metamagical” thinking; there are brain regions that regulate how tightly an organism demands a link between cause and effect, potentially creating room for insight into that odd phenomenon we call faith.
To answer the question, How did I become who I am? we must incorporate myriad subtle and interacting factors, from the selective pressures that shaped our primate gene pool eons ago to the burst of neurotransmitters in the previous microsecond. Maybe it’s time to add another biological variable to the list: When our forebears pondered life’s big questions, did they do so while contemplating an enveloping shroud of trees or an endless horizon?
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