And so, by using humor to promote humility and peace, hunter-gatherers capitalize on the human instinct to relate humor to play. Those who are criticized through humor have three choices: They can join the laughter, thereby acknowledging implicitly the foolishness of what they have done, which puts them immediately back into the social game. They can feel and express shame for acting in a way that led to the ridicule, which brings them back into the good graces of the others and allows them more gradually to re-enter the game. Or, they can stew in resentment until they either leave the band or decide to change their ways. A great advantage of humor as a means to induce behavioral reform is that it leaves the punished persons free to make their own choices and does not automatically end their senses of autonomy and play, as would happen if the punishment involved incarceration, physical violence, or forced banishment.
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I hold no illusions that we, today, can do away with hierarchical government. Our social world is much too large and complex to govern entirely through the method of play. At the civic, state, national, and world level we need rule of law and some forms of power--preferably formulated through democratic means--to back it up. But at the more local level--for example in our schools and businesses--I think we have a lot to learn from hunter-gatherers. By following the hunter-gatherer model we can, I believe, remove coercion and institute a spirit of play in almost all of the day-to-day local aspects of our social lives, including our education and our productive work. I'll say much more about this over the next several installments.
As a final note I ask you to imagine how today's world might be different if those "titans" of industry and finance--who believed they were above the rest of us and deserved outrageous salaries and bonuses, and who were so lacking in concern for others--had been subjected early in their careers to the hunter-gatherer mode of leveling. What a different world we would have. Today those people are quite appropriately the butts of humor everywhere, though it is too late for that to rectify the damage they caused. But if we keep up such humor, and begin to apply it at the earliest signs of arrogance, we may see some improvement in the business world of the future.
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References
[1] Peter Gray. Play as the foundation for hunter-gatherer social existence. American Journal of Play, 1, 476-522, 2009. All of the ideas presented in this essay are elaborated upon in this academic article. Also, some of the specific wording in the final section of this essay is taken from the article.
[2] Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (1968), p 114.
[3] Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way (2006), p 218.
[4] Richard B. Lee, "Reflections on Primitive Communism," in T. Ingold, D. Riches & J. Woodburn (Eds.), Hunters and Gatherers I (1988).
[5] Richard B. Lee, The Dobe Ju/'hoansi, 3rd Edition (2003).
