It is winter. The deer are starving again. And I’m reminded why women should rule.
If the snow is deep and the weather cold, they starve all winter, supplementing their fat reserves with a diet of twigs and buds. Did you think I was talking about the women? I could have been. And what about the small fawns, they starve first.
Until recently in human history, until just a second ago in evolutionary time, we, like the deer, swung from feast to famine. People are still starving—Yemen—and hungry—Vermont—but it is not because the world lacks surplus food.
Ten thousand years ago we were more like other animals, living in caves, eating whatever we could catch, freezing and starving in the winter. Now we live in houses with electricity, pizza delivery and movies on demand. Life is good, except that it isn’t in many ways. Despite our technological mastery and the resulting abundance, even in this country some people are still hungry or without adequate medical care or housing. And in parts of the world some people still starve to death.
It is not enough to grow plenty of food for everyone, you have to get it to them as well. And it’s not just food. That’s just the simplest way to envision the challenge of making sure that everyone has their basic needs filled. It is like the famous Seinfeld scene in which the car rental agency “takes” his reservation but does not “hold” the reservation. What’s the point of growing an abundance of food unless you get it to the people who need to eat it?
Is it harder to control a tractor with a satellite and a computer as it prepares the field for planting, or to figure out how some hungry kid gets enough to eat and has a safe place to grow up? You’d think the former would be harder given that the latter is mostly a problem of figuring out how to share. Wonder why it works out this way?
Check out the Seinfeld clip. For the opening joke he looks at the clerk behind the reservation counter and says, “I ordered a mid-size, but she’s a small,” and he points to the diminutive Elaine beside him. It gets a laugh and it’s a nice set up for what comes next, his “reserved” mid-size car has been rented and he has to take a compact. Elaine laughs off the humorous objectification, but, as they say, there’s a little truth in every joke. Not that long ago, women were the property of men, and still are in some parts of the world. With few exceptions, men have always had the power. Look at what we’ve done with it.
The things that men have, stereotypically at least, been most fascinated by, the tools and weapons, toys and technology, are amazing. This is where society, mostly ruled by men, has directed people, both men and women, to focus their efforts. And these efforts have given us an extraordinary abundance.
The advancements we take for granted, knowledge about physics, chemistry, biology and the technology to make this knowledge useful for agriculture, housing, medicine, the list goes on and on, achievements so extraordinary that to our recent ancestors they would have seemed like magic, this is what keeps us (most people in the world anyway) from starving like the deer.
But, as Seinfeld says, the holding of the reservation is really the most important part of the reservation.
These days, with one huge exception, the major problems facing most humans have to do with relationships between humans not between humans and nature. Wealth inequality, an insane health care system, a pathetic education system, racism, refugee migration, crony capitalism, these are not problems that will be solved by the hard sciences and technology. They are social science problems and the solutions will be discovered by students of the soft sciences, areas of inquiry that, for whatever reasons, have not been the most compelling for the men who’ve had the power.
And last but definitely not least, the one threat where we are still as vulnerable to nature as the deer are, climate change, is going to be solved by managing ourselves better not by new technology. We already have the technology necessary to solve this problem, it is just a matter of the will and organization to do it.
Correlation doesn’t mean causation but if you’re going to try to change things it is a good place to start. Maybe, if women ever control the power to the extent that men do now, we’ll discover that they are equally interested war and technology and equally disinterested in figuring out how to create better societies. Or maybe not. It’s worth a try.
Imagine the wonder of technology to primitive people. Now imagine the wonder of human social arrangements if we could improve them as much as we’ve improved technology.