Introduction
Contentment: The Old Ways
May 2013. I have a sampler framed and hanging on the wall a few feet away. I can see it from where I’m sitting now. You know what a sampler is, right? . . . a piece of cloth embroidered with flowers or little animals or wise sayings. Making samplers used to be part of a young girl’s education many years ago. Not any more. So anyway, the sampler I have says, “Contentment is not the fulfillment of what you want, but the realization of how much you already have.”
Hmm. Well, yes. I like that. After all, I’m the one that bought the sampler and hung it on the wall. I must have liked it at the time I bought it, but I’ve been thinking about contentment lately and wondering if there’s another side to this story. I mean, what’s the difference between contentment and stagnation? If we had known more contentment in human history wouldn’t we all still be Hunter-gatherers, or at most agrarian types?
Where have all the Hunter-gatherers gone? The Amish are here and apparently content with their self-imposed eternal Agrarian Age, preferring buttons to zippers, which they consider too technical. When I get frustrated with my computer I’m inclined to agree with them. There are about 273,000 Amish here in North America, and they always have the most beautiful farms wherever they settle. The Hunters and gatherers—who were also content with the way things used to be—are mostly gone now. We’ve killed them off to get their land or their gold, or both. I guess there are a few hundred left in the Amazon region. Why didn’t they want to make progress the way the rest of us have? Was it because they were content with the old ways?
For the Hunter-gatherer the “old ways” were living not just in agreement with Nature but actually 100% in it. Nature was both mother and father, nurturer and teacher; and, despite what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) said, living in a state of nature does not condemn one to a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” That’s only the opinion of one, so-called civilized man, and one that freely admitted he lived entirely apart from nature due to an overwhelming fear of it. Hobbes was afraid of nature.
Philosophers today may consider Hobbes to be a second-rate intellectual, but Hunter-gatherers would consider him to be a complete fool. Listen to what Chief Luther Standing Bear (1868-1939), Oglala Sioux, said on the subject of living in harmony with nature:
Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness” and only to him was the land “infested” with “wild animals and savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families that we loved was it “wild” for us (Land of the Spotted Eagle [1933]).
Nothing the Great Mystery placed in the land of the Indian pleased the white man, and nothing escaped his transforming hand…But because for the Lakota there was no wilderness, because nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly, Lakota philosophy was healthy—free from fear and dogmatism. And here I find the great distinction between the faith of the Indian and the white man. Indian faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings…For one man the world was full of beauty; for the other it was a place of sin and ugliness to be endured until he went to another world, there to become a creature of wings, half-man and half-bird…But the old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature’s softening influence (The Wisdom of Native Americans, MJF Books, 1999, pp. 39-40).
