Hunters and Gatherers Are Still the Best Role Models For Us

  "At a fast pace through the development of our civilization: Werner Bätzing is not accepting modernity and is looking for ways out of the ecological crisis.

 

     The bird's eye view is in vogue: taking off with a problem of the present and following its development through the history of civilization has become a successful non-fiction narrative strategy in recent years. In the best case scenario, you carry the broadened view of our species into the present, feeling closer to the Maya or the Vikings from Jared Diamond's “Collapse,” who also slid into ecological catastrophes, or to the sedentary people from Yuval Noah Harari's "A Brief History of Humanity," who realize that the urge for more can also be a trap.

 

     The cultural geographer Werner Bätzing has now also flown over human development; his question is about the relationship between people and the environment. He wants to know whether humans are inevitably the nature-destroying “Homo destructor” of his book title or whether they only become so under certain circumstances and what lessons societies in which they may not have been might have to offer.

 

     In contrast to Harari's cheerful, carefree historiography that draws bold analogies, Bätzing's approach is, above all, thorough and academically honest. His presentation arose from lecture series at the universities of Bern and Erlangen-Nuremberg - at the latter Bätzing was a professor until his retirement in 2014 - which is also evident in the book. Structure takes precedence over narrative joy, a short one is followed by a ten-page table of contents, which in turn is followed by a thirty-page explanation of the interdisciplinary methodology. When it finally starts, the author spends a long time and noticeably benevolently on the origins of Homo sapiens, hunters and gatherers and, in particular, farming lifestyles. The further he works his way into modern times, the more cursory and colored by negative reviews the texts become.

 

     Species without a fixed center

 

     At the end of the book it becomes clear why: for Bätzing, the solution lies in the world of ideas of hunter-gatherer and farming societies.

 

Here we find the non-destructive environmental relationship that he identified as a salvation from today's misery. For him, both societies practice the self-limitation that evolution has taken away from humans. There is no ecosystem to which it is optimally adapted, it must first acquire its living space through cultural learning, it has no, see Helmuth Plessner, “fixed middle”. According to Bätzing, this lack of boundaries enables human to destroy his livelihood. But hunters and gatherers do not do this; they see themselves as part of a natural order. They do not intervene in nature, but rather take from it what it produces.

 

     Everything changes with the emergence of agriculture. For the farming societies that developed everywhere between 9500 and 3000 BC, the basis of life was no longer the existing nature, but rather the changed nature, useful plants and animals, and arable land. Small-scale, mosaic-like cultural landscapes are created that require constant effort to maintain. Bätzing calls this stabilization of the unstable landscape “ecological reproduction”. The rural life, as he depicts it, is determined by the shared and passed on knowledge of this second nature, which would not exist without humans, but which at the same time cannot be completely controlled by humans.

 

     Cannot be solved using the Enlightenment framework of thought

 

     The emergence of city states and great empires, of crafts, trade and wars, of writing, money economy and science, of industrial and service society - Bätzing whizzes through the development of civilization in pointed, rather lexical treatises. At the latest when he speaks of “sterile living environments” into which families in the suburbs are forced, of “unstable lifestyle groups” into which society is breaking down, it becomes clear: this is a critic of modernity itself writing. For the Heidegger reader Bätzing, the ecological crisis cannot be solved with the Enlightenment framework of thought that created today's economic and social system. For him, a rationality that makes laws absolute and abstracts economic activity in such a way that increasing money becomes an end in itself has come to an end.

 

     There are impulses for a new enlightenment of today's world, Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, for example, advocates one: The virtues of the old enlightenment - empiricism, transparency, causal thinking - should be retained, but environmental destruction should be made unprofitable. Not an option for Werner Bätzing, he wants to go back to pre-modern farming and thinking. But agriculture that ensures the quality of the soil, in which livestock fertilizes the soil, in which the choice of crop rotations allows the regeneration of the areas, which is both usable land and an ecosystem - that is farming experience, but also common sense when it comes to it “It’s about how the food system is made fit for the future.”

 

     Degrowth, values and rules that prevent growth dynamics, structures characterized by cohesion and shared traditions are Bätzing's guiding ideas. He has no suggestions for their implementation. So one cannot help but suspect that behind the rejection of modernity lies the personal discomfort of a man born in 1949 with a time that produces things that require getting used to, such as digitalization - the book is being presented as a counter-project to “short, Internet-friendly texts” – or increasingly young people who believe they can decide for themselves which gender they feel like they belong to. For Werner Bätzing, this, like the denial of differences between women and men, is another wrong path initiated by the Enlightenment.

     Werner Bätzing: “Homo destructor”. A human-environment story. From the emergence of man to the destruction of the world. C. H. Beck Verlag, Munich 2023. 463 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €32."