Monday, March 26, 2018

Wishing to end it all



Inupiat family (Wikicommons). In traditional Inuit society, people had a desire to live if they were socially active. Conversely, social inactivity seemed to set off a cascade of mental events leading to suicide.



Until 10,000 years ago, humans lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. This was a "thick" social environment where everyone interacted intensely with a relatively small number of people. These interactions were not only recurrent but also predictable, being constrained and structured by social rules. 

With the advent of farming, and the population growth it made possible, the social environment became "thinner": everyone now interacted with more people but less frequently on average with each person. These interactions were also less predictable. With the development of large urban communities and, even more so, the market economy, interaction became especially infrequent, unstructured, and voluntary.

This distinction between "thick" and "thin" social environments corresponds more or less to the German dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, except that the dichotomy is really a continuum. Social interaction has become especially “thin” in one group of populations, northwest Europeans, through a process of cultural evolution that goes back at least a millennium. Indeed, some authors have argued that this process goes even farther back, perhaps even into prehistory (Frost 2017; Macfarlane 1978; 1992, 2002; and Seccombe 1992).

Given that over the past 10,000 years our genetic makeup has been adapting much more to cultural and social environments than to natural environments (Hawks et al. 2007), adaptation to "thin" social environments should vary from one population to another, being least advanced in those people who, until recently, were hunter-gatherers, i.e., who intensely interacted with a limited number of people. Such people would show the most mismatch between past and present environments.

In a previous post I argued that such a mismatch may explain the high rate of suicide among Inuit youth (Frost 2011). According to a 1972 survey of Inuit 15 to 24 years old from northern Quebec, 28% of the males and 25% of the females had attempted suicide (Kirmayer et al., 1998). Dufour (1994) argues that Inuit society has a long tradition of people ending their lives when they feel they have become useless. In the past, however, suicide involved only the elderly:

Suicide in early Inuit society was viewed positively when the individual had become a burden for the group. "Senilicide" in particular was deemed to be acceptable and appropriate. Its pattern: a usually elderly person motivated by illness, helplessness, bereavement, dependence on the group, famine, or resource shortage who would decide after consulting family members who sometimes could be called upon to assist. In contemporary Inuit society, the elderly no longer commit suicide. The young people do.

In a forthcoming paper, anthropologist Frédéric Laugrand similarly argues that in traditional Inuit society the elderly did not fear death and would even welcome it if they considered themselves no longer useful. Birket-Smith (1929, p. 300) wrote: "Suicide is not rare, and it is the duty of pious children to assist their parents in committing it." Knud Rasmussen (1929, p. 96) described a visit to a sick Inuit woman: 

I straightened myself up [inside the hut] and went across at once to the spot where the sick woman used to lie. On coming nearer, I nearly cried out aloud: I found myself looking into a face that was perfectly blue, with a pair of great eyes projecting right out from the head, and the mouth wide open. I stood there a little to pull myself together, and now perceived a line fastened round the old woman's neck and from there to the roof of the hut. When I was able to speak once more, I asked those in the house what this meant. It was a long time before anyone answered. At last the son-in-law spoke up, and said: 'She felt that she was old, and having begun to spit up blood, she wished to die quickly, and I agreed. I only made the line fast to the roof, the rest she did herself.'

The Moon Spirit was said to help people commit suicide by calling out to them: "Come, come to me! It is not painful to die. It is only a brief moment of dizziness. It does not hurt to kill yourself" (Rasmussen 1929, p. 74). The literature on the Inuit is replete with examples of this and related customs. When a travelling family had run out of food and were facing starvation, the oldest members would offer their flesh as food, after death, so that the others might live. This kind of request appears in an account about a group of travelling Inuit who ran out of food in 1905, near Igloolik.


When he sensed his coming death, Qumangaapik said to his wife, 'It has already happened in the past, in times of starvation, that people survived by feeding on human flesh. When I die, I want you to eat my body to survive, for you have many relatives.' She refused his offer, but he insisted, 'Please, you'll have to eat me!'


The inhabitants of Kangiqsualujjuaq (George River) have similar memories about a family who faced starvation on their way to the Labrador coast. They had used up all of their reserves of food, and the grandmother convinced the other family members to let her die and then eat her to ensure their survival. She told them that if they respected her wishes, they would have an abundant posterity to preserve her memory (Saladin d'Anglure, forthcoming).

It is understandable why the elderly might wish to commit suicide. When they have become a burden, their deaths will free up food and other resources for their children. This is especially so in times of famine, which was common in the Arctic. But who benefits when young people kill themselves? Something about modern society is sending Inuit youth the wrong signal.

Inuit seem to receive this signal when they becomes socially inactive for a length of time. There then develops a feeling of uselessness, and this feeling in turn triggers suicidal ideation. Previously, this cascade of mental events happened only in old people who could no longer help with hunting, food preparation, shelter building, or other strenuous activities. Such people would stay home most of the time. Saladin d'Anglure (forthcoming) recounts the story of an old shaman who could no longer get around. He shrank the outside world to the different parts of his igloo: the sleeping platform became the land, the floor the sea ice, the ice window the sun, the opening for the entrance the moon, and the dome the vault of the heavens. For elderly Inuit, this shrinking of their world foreshadows their departure for the next one.

Today, many young Inuit likewise stay home and become socially inactive. What else is there to do? On the one hand, the old economy of hunting and living on the land no longer exists. On the other hand, the new economy doesn't generate enough employment. There is also the trouble that Inuit have adapting to the Western model of working outside the family with non-kin for lengthy periods of time. For mine work, two or three weeks is the maximum they can stand being away from their families.

Conclusion

Social inactivity seems to trigger thoughts of suicide among the Inuit and, I suspect, among former hunter-gatherers in general. Once a hunter-gatherer people had transitioned to farming and hence to a larger and “thinner” social environment, selection would then raise the threshold for this trigger. Many factors probably decide how high the threshold is raised: the recentness of this transition and, more importantly, how far the population has gone down the path to a “thinner” social environment. Social networks can be relatively “thick” even in large urban settings.

In any case, no human population has fully adapted to the asocial environment we increasingly have in the Western world. Widespread asociality is recent, even in the West. 

All of this makes me wonder whether the “White Death” is due to something deeper than the opioid epidemic. When I visit my hometown the biggest change I notice is the large number of people who live alone, particularly men in their 40s and 50s—as a result of easy divorce and relationships that never went anywhere. Most of them work, and when they’re not working they drink or get stoned. When the inevitable happens, is it due to alcohol or drug abuse? Or is the ultimate cause a death wish?


References

Birket-Smith, K. (1929). The Caribou Eskimos. Material and social life and their cultural position, Copenhagen: Gyldendal

Dufour, R. (1994). Pistes de recherche sur les sens du suicide des adolescents inuit, Santé mentale au Québec 19: 145-162.

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe, Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.
http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

Frost,P. (2011). Suicide and Inuit youth, Evo and Proud, December 10
http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2011/12/suicide-and-inuit-youth.html

Hawks, J., E.T. Wang, G.M. Cochran, H.C. Harpending, and R.K. Moyzis. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 104: 20753-20758.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Henry_Harpending/publication/5761823_Recent_Acceleration_of_Human_Adaptive_Evolution/links/0c9605240c4bb57b55000000.pdf 

Kirmayer, L.J., L.J. Boothroyd, S. Hodgins (1998). Attempted suicide among Inuit youth: Psychosocial correlates and implications for prevention, Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 43: 816-822.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/070674379804300806

Macfarlane, A. (1978). The origins of English individualism: Some surprises. Theory and Society 6: 255-277.
http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/Origins_HI.pdf 

Macfarlane, A. (1992). On individualism. Proceedings of the British Academy 82: 171-199. 

Macfarlane, A. (2002). The making of the modern world. London: Palgrave.
http://alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/end_making.pdf

Rasmussen, K. (1929). Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Vol. 7 (1) of Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, Copenhagen, Gyldendalske Boghandel.

Saladin d'Anglure, B. (forthcoming). Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth, University of Manitoba Press.

Seccombe, W. (1992). A Millennium of Family Change. Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe. London: Verso.

12 comments:

epochehusserl said...

I would say that the white death has to do with the rewarding of family breakup, racial quotas and the lack of a heritage to preserve. What precisely are these men working and living for?

Peter Frost said...

It's partly due to family breakup and partly due to families that never formed. Relationships in general have become more tenuous and self-centered.

It's also due to an ideological environment that promotes personal autonomy at the expense of traditional modes of social organization (family, kinship, ethny, nation, etc.). In Canada, we used to have a national culture that strongly emphasized the country's British and French identities, to the point of promoting a heroic vision of Canada's past. Today, that same past is vilified. Last year we celebrated our 150th anniversary as a country, and the celebration was a farce. It's impossible to celebrate something that you're continually told to feel ashamed of.

Luke Lea said...

"Given that over the past 10,000 years our genetic makeup has been adapting much more to cultural and social environments than to natural environments (Hawks et al. 2007), adaptation to "thin" social environments should vary from one population to another, being least advanced in those people who, until recently, were hunter-gatherers, i.e., who intensely interacted with a limited number of people. Such people would show the most mismatch between past and present environments."

On the other hand, some peoples have been "civilized" much longer than others. The Chinese, for example, compared to Germanic groups. I wonder if this might also be responsible for certain personality differences, e.g., degree of submissiveness?

Luke Lea said...

Speaking for myself, I would very much like to get ahold of enough Fentanyl or the stuff that vets use to put animals down with to end my life peacefully at the right time. The idea of consuming my children's inheritance on exorbitantly expensive medical treatments in the last two months of life strikes me as morally wrong.

epochehusserl said...

It's partly due to family breakup and partly due to families that never formed. Relationships in general have become more tenuous and self-centered.

It's also due to an ideological environment that promotes personal autonomy at the expense of traditional modes of social organization (family, kinship, ethny, nation, etc.). In Canada, we used to have a national culture that strongly emphasized the country's British and French identities, to the point of promoting a heroic vision of Canada's past. Today, that same past is vilified. Last year we celebrated our 150th anniversary as a country, and the celebration was a farce. It's impossible to celebrate something that you're continually told to feel ashamed of.
--------------------------------------
Well the people in charge, mostly baby boomer white liberals would rather congratulate themselves for all of their achievements than confront reality. It is astonishing how much they are out of touch. Every people has to take provision for the future or they have none and yet here we are, day after day arguing about minority test scores. A couple of years ago a judge was rebuked (albeit mildly) for damning firefighting as a "stubborn bastion of white male privilege". Is it any wonder people take drugs?

Sean said...

I seem to have read somewhere of an Inuit mother crooning to her infant "Your father is a bad man", and how some Westerner observers thought traditional ways dysfunctional.

The British philosopher John Gray said his working class parents had been brought up to feel that life was quite possibly not going to be all that great.

Peter Frost said...

Luke,

Yes, "genetic pacification." When the State imposes a monopoly on the use of violence, it selects for submissiveness and against propensity for personal violence.

There are reasons why suicide is stigmatized in our society. There's a slippery slope from "voluntary suicide" to "assisted death" and thence to "encouraged death."

Epoch,

This problem began before the baby boomers took over. Most of the key decisions were made back in the 1960s by pre-boomers and "The Greatest Generation." They were idealists, but they were naïve in their idealism.

Sean,

The Inuit are now becoming very critical of Westernization. They want modernity, yes, but on their own terms.

epoche said...

I agree that this problem has been with us for a long time but the boomers took the ball and with it further than anyone else. I'm not blaming them exclusively but the custodians of our civilization should not be seduced by their own moral preening to the neglect of reality.

Peter Frost said...

I'm less familiar with the U.S., but in Canada the baby boomers were almost evenly divided between social conservatives and social liberals, and even the latter group were socially conservative by today's standards. As for myself, I was a leftist in the 1980s. I felt that the business community was selling out the working class through globalization, and I still feel that way. Yet, today, concern about globalization is considered to be symptomatic of far right extremism.

I suppose one could say you were betrayed by the conservative baby boomers, but what else could they have done? Elect conservative governments? They did. Who elected Reagan, Mulroney, and Thatcher? And when those governments betrayed their electoral base, who tried to form alternative parties, like the Reform Party in Canada? That initiative likewise failed, being "killed by success." At the next election, I'll probably spoil my ballot.

Yes, conservatives have made mistakes, namely:

- anti-intellectualism, which resulted in intellectual leadership being delegated to business and neocon think tanks.
- accepting the strings attached to money from campaign donors.
- seeing the business community as a natural ally.
- not seeing the big picture and getting mired in peripheral issues (e.g., stem cell research)

But would you have done better? The obstacles were formidable, and still are.

Anonymous said...

Lack of obstacles may be the problem. Social bonds would logically be expected to tighten when times are tough. Where material conditions of life are good, the ideas of community, class and national solidarity go out the window. The Inuit are adapted to harsh environmental conditions of scarcity. They find themselves increasingly living in a land of plenty.

Peter Frost said...

It's not so much having enough to survive as the lack of social engagement that comes with having enough to survive. In modern Western society, you get social engagement mainly through paid employment outside the home. I know several people who can make a good income by working at home, but they prefer to commute to an office every day -- simply to interact with people. And this is the model we've imposed on the Inuit, who have limited opportunities for paid employment.

Many Inuit feel they've been duped. They've given up their life on the land and the sea in exchange for a sedentary life that offers little to do. At the same time, the government has gained control of all the resources on the land and in the sea.

epochehusserl said...


But would you have done better? The obstacles were formidable, and still are.
--------------------------
Would I personally have done better? probably not but my concern is that the "conservatives" today are probably making things worse such as never trumpers. They want to be with the cool kids and seemed disinterested in the discontent that got trump elected.