CHAPTER 11

Early infections

Now that you’ve been introduced to affluenza and its multiple symptoms, you may be asking yourself how we got to where we are today. What was the genesis of affluenza? Is it a bug that’s always been there, just part of human nature? Is it culturally conditioned? Could it result from both nature and nurture? Those are the questions we’ll attempt to answer in the next section of this book. We’ll examine early efforts to contain or quarantine the disease, and attempt to understand how the virus mutated and grew more virulent over time in response to the forward march of history.

We believe it’s necessary to understand the epidmiology of affluenza in order to begin to fight it effectively. As we researched this aspect of the issue, we became convinced that affluenza is not a new disease. But during the last half century, it has been spreading faster than ever before, as cultural values that once kept it in check have eroded under modern commercial pressures and technological changes.

THE SEARCH FOR PATIENT ZERO

When epidemiologists trace the evolution of a disease, they look for the first individual known to have contracted it, who is given the inglorious label “Patient Zero.” For example, the official Patient Zero for the AIDS epidemic was a South African man who died in 1959 (though it is suspected that the disease originated as early as the 1920s).

So who was affluenza’s Patient Zero? In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, there were two of them: Adam and Eve. While they had everything they needed in the Garden of Eden, they transgressed God’s limits to eat the forbidden apple. So the first lesson in the Bible is an admonishment against coveting more than we need. Greed was, in fact, the original sin.

Some evolutionary biologists suggest that the uncertainties of primitive life meant that a hoarding orientation became part of human nature. Those folks who stored food in good times had it to sustain them in lean times. They survived and passed their hoarding genes on to their offspring.

Ergo, amassing stuff is as human as apple pie.

But on the other hand, for 99 percent of the time we Homo sapiens have existed on earth, we were hunter-gatherers. Our problem was that our food-seeking activities quickly depleted the areas we lived in of fruits, nuts, animals, and other edibles. So we often had to move on to allow those areas to rebound. Mobility was the name of the primitive game. And mobility didn’t allow one to carry a whole lot of cargo. Hence a simpler, stuff-free life was a requirement for survival. A genetic propensity toward hoarding would have been downright deadly.

ORIGINAL AFFLUENCE

Life for hunter-gatherers was fraught with danger—from wild animals, accidents, disease, and an occasional enemy. Infant mortality was high, as were infirmities. Broken bones didn’t heal well. Modern medicine might have been a godsend.

But the Stone Age wasn’t as miserable as most of us believe. Some anthropologists who have observed contemporary “Stone Age” cultures call them “the original affluent societies.”¹ Studies of such groups as the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert indicate that before modernization confined them in smaller regions and destroyed the biological habitats from which they found subsistence, these hunter-gatherers were able to provide for their basic needs on as little as three or four hours of work a day. So-called Stone Age life apparently included more leisure time than does our own.

The UCLA anthropologist Allen Johnson and his family spent two years living with a Stone Age tribe called the Machiguenga, hunter-gatherers who also practice some subsistence agriculture and inhabit the upper regions of the Amazon rain forest in Peru. He says he came to Machiguenga country loaded down with a huge footlocker full of possessions. “One of the lessons we learned over a period of just a few months, actually, was to dispense with most of our possessions,” Johnson recalls. “This kind of minimalist existence became quite comfortable to us after a while and we began to feel that all these other possessions were completely superfluous. I learned from the Machiguenga that we could be comfortable living a much simpler life.”

Johnson found the Machiguenga not quite affluent enough to get by on a four-hour workday. “Anthropologists,” he says “may have gone a little bit overboard in describing how easy it is to be a hunter-gatherer, but the Machiguenga are certainly able to meet all their needs with six to eight hours of work. And that leaves a lot of time. The Machiguenga struck me as people who always have enough time. They’re never in a hurry.”

He came to admire their gentle ways and kind interactions with each other, the pleasure they found in quiet observation of their surroundings, the fact that they never seemed to get bored.

“There seems to be a kind of general satisfaction in the things that they do,” Johnson says. “It’s just a pleasure to be around the Machiguenga when they’re working. They’re calm, they’re physically comfortable. They’re sewing or weaving, or making a box or a bow and arrow. And there’s a sense of them enjoying it as we might enjoy a hobby or a craft. No time pressure.”

“One of the things they do in the evening,” he observed, “is sit around telling stories. And as you go by a Machiguenga house in the evening, you’ll see through the slats of the walls of the house. You’ll see the fire glowing and hear people’s voices softly telling stories. If a man went hunting, he’ll tell the story with the sights and the sounds and the smells. They also tell folktales. I’ve translated a lot of them, and they’re absolutely beautiful, a real literature.”²

BACK IN THE USA

Like many other travelers who return from time spent with so-called underdeveloped or primitive cultures, Johnson had trouble returning to the fast-paced, possession-laden life in the United States. Culture shocked, he walked through a supermarket aisle entirely filled with cake mixes and wondered, “Is this really progress?”

Life in Los Angeles seemed surreal. His children complained regularly of boredom despite a plethora of toys and activities. People he met seemed constantly busy but unsatisfied with their lives, working and consuming frantically as if to fill “some kind of hole or emptiness,” an emotional state he never encountered among the Machiguenga.

Johnson doesn’t romanticize the Machiguenga’s existence. Their life expectancy was short, as they often fell victim to jungle diseases. But they hadn’t a hint of affluenza.

So it’s not “human nature.” But it’s easy to find evidence of early infection among societies that achieved agricultural surpluses sufficient to allow long-term settlements, class divisions, and the beginnings of city life. In such cultures, political and economic hierarchies flourished, and as they strove for greater riches, members of the upper echelon began to oppress the poor and subjugate their neighbors. Without naming it as such, prophetic traditions in all civilizations, East and West, challenged their lordly brethren who had been infected by affluenza. “Beware an act of avarice; it is a bad and incurable disease,” warned an ancient Egyptian proverb.³ The Buddha taught that the way to happiness and enlightenment lies in reducing desire, which he thought to be the cause of suffering.

MORAL ANTIDOTES

The Hebrew prophets railed against those who amassed riches by oppressing the poor and the weak. Moderation was the key: “Give me neither poverty nor riches, but only enough,” reads the book of Proverbs. One day each week, the Sabbath, was to be kept completely free of moneymaking and to thereby remain holy. Of the Sabbath, the great Jewish scholar Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes, “He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of chattering commerce … and fury of acquisitiveness.”⁴ The book of Deuteronomy, written about 700 BC, admonishes against wasting things, the natural corollary to a life of material desire. As Rabbi Daniel Schwarz puts it, “When you waste creation, it’s like spitting at God.”

The ancient Greeks, too, warned against affluenza. David Shi, the author of The Simple Life and president emeritus of Furman University, told viewers of the Affluenza documentary that “simplicity is an ancient, even a primordial, ideal,” explaining that the Greeks spoke of the ‘middle way,’ that midpoint between luxury and deprivation.” Aristotle warned against those “who have managed to acquire more external goods than they can possibly use, and are lacking in the goods of the soul.” By contrast he suggested that happiness would come to “those who have cultivated their character and mind to the uppermost and kept acquisition of external goods within moderate limits.” “Aristotle was the first to maintain the diminishing marginal utility of money,” writes the philosopher Jerome Segal. “His belief was that each additional increment of money is of progressively less benefit to its possessor, and beyond a certain point, having more is of no value and may even be harmful.”⁵

“Unlimited wealth,” Aristotle wrote, “is great poverty.” Two groups of Greek nonconformists, the Stoics and the Cynics, were even more critical of materialism. By the time of the birth of Christ, their ideas were widespread. The Roman philosopher Seneca, a Stoic, challenged his own culture: “A thatched roof once covered free men; under marble and gold dwells slavery.”

According to the New Testament scholar Burton Mack, early Christian teachings bore a strong resemblance to those championed by Epictetus, Diogenes, and other followers of the Cynic tradition in Greece. Living simply, the Cynics mocked the conventional culture of their affluent peers. Their ideas were widely known throughout the Mediterranean region two millennia ago.

But perhaps the strongest rebuke to incipient affluenza came from Jesus himself. He continually warned of the dangers of wealth, declaring it the major impediment to entry into the kingdom of heaven. It would be easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter heaven, he told his followers. The rich man who wished to follow Jesus was told he would first have to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor. “He went away unhappy, for he had great wealth.”⁶

Don’t store up treasures on earth, Christ commanded. Rather be like the birds and flowers, who possess nothing. God takes care of them, and their beauty is not matched by Solomon in all his glory. The earliest of Jesus’s disciples and believers lived in simple communities where they shared all things in common and preached that “the love of money is the root of all evil.”

“I think one of the most riveting passages in the New Testament is where Christ warns about mammon, which is the power of wealth, the power of money,” says Richard Swenson, a physician who lectures widely in evangelical churches. “Christ says you cannot serve both God and mammon. He didn’t say it’s hard, it’s difficult, it’s tricky. He said it’s impossible.”

In fact, one of Jesus’s final public acts was a stinging rebuke to the affluenza that had begun to permeate his society. By chasing the money lenders from the temple and overturning their tables, he challenged physically (one might even say violently) a profane commercialism that had crept into even the holiest of places.

The Christian theologian and environmental scientist Calvin DeWitt says our modern consumer philosophy turns scriptural teachings on their head: “Consume more, then you’ll be happy. Remain discontented with everything so that you’ll continue to strive for more and more. That’s the message we hear. But the biblical teaching is to be content with what you have, honor God, take care of creation, give your bread to the hungry. Then joy comes as a by-product of service. If you take those teachings and just write their antithesis, you find yourself describing our current consumer society.”

A CLASH OF CULTURES

In the spring of 1877, the famous leader of a tribe of hunter-gatherers addressed a council of his people, gathered around him on the windswept plains of South Dakota. The Lakota Sioux chief Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull) gave thanks for the change of seasons and the bounty that the earth freely provided. But he warned his people about “another race, small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing.” He described the pale-faced men and women who had come to mine and till the earth, carrying with them (and seeking to convert the Indians to) the words of a man who preached brotherhood, peace, and goodwill among all, a preference for the poor, and a life free from the encumbrances of worldly possessions.

Something, apparently, had gotten lost in the translation, because as Sitting Bull observed, “These people have made many rules which the rich may break but the poor may not. They take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. Their nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side.”⁷

Of the white invaders, Sitting Bull said, one thing was certain: “The love of possession is a disease with them.” Today he might have called that disease “affluenza.” Back then, he would have found that even among the whites, there were many who shared his fears of the virus in their midst.