October 10, 2024 by Louise Fabiani

Picture a New Yorker-style cartoon of a caveman with a briefcase and fedora. According to evolutionary psychology, we moderns are walking Paleolithic hominins. The cognitive skills that helped us live on the savannah still exist in our brain’s survival kit.

Unfortunately, those adaptations have helped create the current polycrisis — the set of intertwined, existential threats facing Earth, including environmental ones — and now present psychological barriers to solving pertinent issues in a timely manner. Intelligent, aware people persist in flying, eating meat, and driving cars just as often as (or more than) they did before, despite knowing the harmful effect of these actions on climate change and biodiversity loss. It is easy for environmental advocates to dismiss such people as selfish or irresponsible. While that may be true in part, the reluctance to break a number of bad habits actually lies deep in our cells, and in our past as a species.

The major segment of our prehistory was spent as hunter-gatherers. Our mental map for navigating the environment evolved alongside acquisition of an extremely wide dietary range. Could complex, diverse food-procurement strategies have driven general human behavioral evolution? That is a question I have pondered for many years. Its relevance to past and current global problems makes it more important than ever.

The first food-related adaptations, both cognitive and physical, may have been the preference to eat with others, the disgust response, and the need to balance the fear of new foods with the craving for novelty (called the omnivore’s dilemma). These and other traits, which passed down through generations as genes and culture, likely affected language acquisition, social skills, and so much more, including ways of thinking that can trip us up now more often than we know.

It is not only avoiding the pitfalls of an omnivorous diet (potential poisoning, for example) that shaped the human brain, but dealing with that diet’s unpredictability. Although we had far more options possible than, say, a eucalyptus-restricted koala, choice also required us to notice the seasonality of plants and migratory animals, among other fluctuations of supply. In a way, because we could use so much, we could actually rely on very little. That tension could hardly not leave a mark upon our consciousnesses. It may have helped create an ambivalent relationship in certain cultures, such as our own, with the biosphere: Mother Nature as benevolent provider and withholding crone.

The reluctance to break a number of bad habits actually lies deep in our cells, and in our past as a species.

I propose that those three things — variety, unpredictability, and scarcity — perhaps more than anything else, made us human, and compelled us to study and modify the natural world to suit our needs. To survive these challenges, humans required good spatial memory, exquisite pattern recognition, and other powers of discrimination to deal with the advantages and challenges of the omnivorous diet. But these necessary skills, full of contradictions like the fear of and desire for new foods and habitats, eventually led to a ubiquitous human flaw: cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases are a major consequence of “thinking fast,” to borrow a phrase from the title of Daniel Kahneman’s famous book. By one count, there are 188 cognitive biases, including the Dunning-Kruger effect, sunk cost fallacy, and confirmation bias. Back on the savannah, thinking fast could save your life in a decisive moment — assuming a curved vine in the grass was a snake, for example. Longer-term benefits arose from thinking conservatively as a response to variable supply. Put another way, a bird in the hand was indeed often worth two in the bush. Because people did not acquire particular resources (such as a favorite fruit) easily, they held onto them when they did, increasing chances of survival for themselves and their closest kin. The storage of grain surpluses, a major incentive for our invention of agriculture, seems, in retrospect, to be an inevitable result of this need to hold onto food for leaner times.

That iron grip on whatever we gain is hard to loosen. It is challenging to convince individuals that their personal contributions — good or bad — make a difference, when corporations commit crimes against nature and humanity. The scale just looks wrong. While individual misdeeds, such as creating household food waste, have to be totaled before they seem to matter, a single company’s environmental sins can be enough to overshadow everyone else’s.

Environmentalists have a neat equation: Impact equals population times affluence times technology, or I=PAT. We all know we have to reduce our individual and collective ecological footprints — but how?

We can hardly wish for a drastic population-lowering event, and declining fertility rates will take far too long to overcome demographic momentum. Therefore, our remaining option is to shrink affluence or technology, or both.

That is where those ancient traits trip us up. Human beings like their affluence, modest as it may be for the average person, and they absolutely love technology. (Of course, the two areas greatly overlap.) That is why fundamental lifestyle changes are such a hard sell; people prefer replacements to reductions. To our old instincts, less always seems less — worryingly so.

What we need is a true paradigm shift, not “more of the same but better.” The degrowth movement, with related topics like voluntary simplicity and frugal abundance, seeks to replace materialism with a more meaning-based human fulfillment — that is, emphasizing relationships, personal purpose, and ecological stewardship. When hoping for maximum compliance — in other words, minimum triggering of ancient traits — language choice matters. Avoid framing reduction as “sacrifice.” Instead, opt for “economizing” or “radical simplicity,” depending on the audience. To many, “degrowth” sounds like austerity — and no one wants that.

As we go forward, mindful of our inner caveman, let’s make it easier on ourselves. Let’s reduce capitalism’s carte blanche access to our Paleolithic brains. Not only does it promote wasteful spending, the market actively discourages more environmentally appropriate values like frugality, simplicity, sufficiency, and humility, because they don’t contribute to the GDP. Bhutan has a Gross National Happiness index. Maybe we could aim for that.

As we go forward, mindful of our inner caveman, let’s make it easier on ourselves. Let’s reduce capitalism’s carte blanche access to our Paleolithic brains.

Since primates, like us, are hypersensitive to unfairness, many people refuse to simplify their lifestyle one iota while celebrities (or even real-life friends and neighbors) flaunt second homes and exotic vacations. Therefore, let’s try to tackle the daily barrage of media imagery that activates those atavisms.

We have to realize that the buy-now, pay-later crowd manipulates our ancient thinking for its own ends, whatever the means; ideally, laws against relentless neuromarketing will follow. Then we can invite artists of all kinds to remind us what else constitutes a good life, like access to natural areas and opportunities for transcendence. Fostering those basic values in the young would be important, even if something meant to deter materialism seems to contradict the dominant social paradigm of economic expansion. Even popular entertainment can help, Joseph J. Merz and colleagues suggest in a paper on human behavior and the polycrisis: “Psychological interventions are likely to prove far less resource-intensive and more effective than physical ones.”

People will continue pursuing technological advances in such areas as energy production and efficiency. Those measures count. But only greater understanding of the ancient origins of the human mind will allow us to address multiple threats to our survival with more than Band-Aid solutions.

Louise Fabiani is a science writer, critic, and independent scholar. Her work has previously appeared in Undark, as well as in Sierra, JSTOR Daily, Slate, Science, Pacific Standard, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a book on urban wildlife.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.