While visiting family in Sevierville, Tennessee, my wife and son stopped by the McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture in Knoxville, a quaint if rather small museum with a very interesting human evolution exhibit.
As someone who procrastinates with productivity tools, most likely due to family genetics (my father is an industrial engineer) and to fact that I grew up with plenty of tool transitions—from typewriters to internet word processors in such a short span of time—I have been always struck by how humans have argued about tools.
When I was younger, I was frankly more interested in important things, like whether nuclear bombs were ethical or whether we should be installing solar panels on the roofs of every building. But when I got my first teaching job, I was game for trying out any big or small tool that would help me be successful. This is what human beings do best: Is there problem? What’s the best tool for the job?
As a teacher, I was fascinated by tools most of us would deem mundane, like stationary—fountain pens, pencils, and notebooks—or computer apps. I was also interested in what tools the students used and to what effect. (This was about the time that studies came out that taking notes by hand instead of typing was far superior.)
In retrospect, all this tool fussiness seems rather nuanced in a way that to me, strikes a level of too muchness.
But I am human and human lives are run by tools, whether it’s our use of refrigerators for storing food or typography for ease of reading. They shape us in various ways. Identities are even established by tools, down to the brand level.
When I saw Michael Pollan’s Cooked, I was surprised to find how much cooking affected the nutrition in our food, giving us lots more nutrition than without it. This had drastic effects on the size of our ancestors’ brains. And then when I read Breath by James Nestor two years ago, I was confronted once again with the fact that the invention of cooking, this time in terms of how eating cooked food changed the physiology of our jaws and even the way we breathed. Our brains needed room to grow with all that cooked nutrition, moving a lot of other things in our head to the side, as it were.
Cows spend their whole day eating to gain the energy for their existence. Heat allows us the ability to have leisure. And this doesn’t even include how smoking food can preserve it for later, which allows for planning, something other animals know little about. (Well, that’s not true. Squirrels and bears stockpile, in their own ways, for winter.)
There was, of course, costs to this increase in brains: loss of muscle, loss of efficient breathing, and loss of the ability to gain sustenance out of the raw foods our ancestors ate. But these costs did not deter our ancestors and certainly haven’t deterred us now.
And this brings us to the excerpt I read at the McClung Museum in a display case describing our species, home sapiens:
The more delicate build of the first modern humans is likely due to the greater complexity of tools and their reliance on them. For example, projectile hunting weapons like the spearthrower put more distance between hunter and prey and made hunting injuries less frequent.
I love the use of the word “delicate.” Sacrificing our once ape-like strength seems akin to Superman sacrificing his enormous powers to be mortal. It seems needless, unless you gain something huge in return. What Superman got in humanity and a sense of mortality, we got with a brain upgrade. We are real world mages in a land of barbarians.
But the part where it talks about the spearthrower, that part got me. Food is an obvious tool with far reaching, even surprising, effects. If you apply that some lens to other things, like the distance that a well-designed spear allows, the effects are just crazy huge if not endless.
And that’s where I hit upon the following obvious and probably cliché thought.
As anyone with a knowledge of apocalypse fiction tropes knows, it is not the zombies that are the true villains. It’s other people. More specifically, groups of people. And while tools can mean survival for a human in such a world, a group of people working together usually trumps any tool.
Yes. I’m going there.
All this fascination about the cutting edge of our technology–drones, electric cars, brain implants, cancer cures, AI improvements–are not getting anywhere without a group of humans involved. In fact, they will not even be used if a large group of people doesn’t buy into them.
We often think of ourselves as contentious beasts, but we work together in creative ways that more “in line” animals–like ants or bees–couldn’t dream of. I don’t think there is anywhere in my neighborhood where I would not able to find the way human activity has shaped the environment with human tools.
A group of people, let’s call it a community, is more than functional and practical. Studies have shown that people who have a good community around them actually live longer despite other unhealthy habits in their lives like not eating right or smoking.
If I was to go back and impart some wisdom upon my first year teacher self, it wouldn’t be advice on what tools to use or how to grade or which classroom management practices to embrace, it would be about all of the things I’ve learned in my relationships with other humans, whether it’s the power of empathy, listening without judgment, or the way to help nudge someone to success (the hardest skill to learn, in my opinion).
Recently, I read The Year of Living Constitutionally by AJ Jacobs. I was struck by all of the things I did not know about the founding of America, most especially all the different views of the 55 delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. But it was that generation’s understanding of virtue that really got me.
Being in an organized society means that we need to look out for each other first and foremost. It is why in a land with the newly established first amendment that state-level anti-profanity laws were allowed to be enforced. Though obviously this has not aged well, along with many other practices in our history, what we can take from it is that giving to our communities and being good role models, no matter how that’s done, is the pinnacle of human existence, and it was built into the culture surrounding our country’s founding documents, if not between the lines in the document itself. (I mean, you could argue that the document itself is the ultimate community tool.)
You don’t need technology for community, though our modern technology does help. But in the classroom, presence is all that matters. That’s one less thing I need to purchase this year for my teaching supplies.