In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan describes learning to hunt for the first time. Not only did he do this by, you know, actually going out and hunting, he apparently also read some hunting philosophers, or rather, he read stuff by people who were philosophizing about hunting. The hunting philosophers wrote very purple prose, and so did Pollan after he killed his first feral pig.
I passed the borrowed book on so I can’t open it up and quote the book, but I wanted to share a reaction I had. One of the hunting philosophers that Pollan quoted wrote that hunting was the only way for modern humans to really get in touch with their pre-industrial selves, you know, the animal that humans evolved to be. Not just a way; the only way to really go back to human nature, Paleolithic style.
My reaction was to hoot: Ah yes, a man might think this.
I don’t at all mean that as a criticism, e.g. "only a man would refuse to ask directions" or some such silly sexist standard. It’s just that in my own past armchair philosophizing — hey, wait, what’s wrong with philosophizing in an armchair? seems appropriate to me — I actually have had the thought that there is one way to really go back to human nature, Paleolithic style, and the words I might have used are very similar to the words the hunting-philosopher used to say that about hunting.
Of course, when I was having those thoughts, I was thinking of childbirth. I mean, it’s certainly possible to give birth in a very post-industrial, heavily cultural-modern setting, completely obliterating its human-animality. (And I mean no criticism in this post of the choice to do so.) But, you know, I’ve given birth three times now in an out-of-hospital, drugless setting, and it really is hard to come up with another modern, accessible experience that lets you get quite as close to how things might have been for Paleolithic man, or, rather, woman. I mean, if you want to get that close. I acknowledge that not everybody expresses that desire.
Let me just tell you that it is very interesting, at least to me, to have been there and done that. (Pollan also used the term interested in an odd place, now that I think about it, to describe one of the intense reactions he had to killing his pig. I just now thought of a third point of similarity: Pollan was shocked and revulsed to see, later, photographs of himself thoroughly enjoying the experience of hunting. I have a lot of revulsion toward my just-after-birth photos. The intensity of the experience shows in my face, and … it’s just not the way I’m used to seeing myself.)
Anyway, I never thought of hunting as another potential such experience, possibly because I have never been hunting. I can tell that the hunting philosopher had not thought of childbirth that way. Certainly he had never given birth. Perhaps he had also never been around a woman giving birth, or maybe all the births in his experience were of the more acculturated and mechanized and anesthetized type. At any rate, it amused me that there was this guy out there who thought of hunting in the same sort of way that I thought of childbirth.
Later on, I thought of one more experience through which the modern human being might commune with his or her ancestral experience, one that is pleasingly gender-neutral, but not probably very popular: fighting off a deadly attacker. Mark suggested that one could perhaps make a lot of money creating such experiences for people, provided that you worded the advertisements properly.
Well. There’s always death itself. I suspect that has not changed much, either, in ten thousand years.
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