Many thoughtful people on all sides of the ADD issue have asked me this question. One of the most articulate put it quite succinctly when he said that if he’d been alive 10,000 years ago he would have been doomed because “I’d forget to take my spear with me when we left for the hunt!”
Others have taken pains to point out to me the necessity of organized cooperative action for most primitive hunting parties. The ideal of a hyperactive loner going through the woods looking for dinner doesn’t at all characterize how most anthropologists describe primitive (or today’s) hunter/gatherer methods.
At first glance, it would appear that these considerations blow a hole in the hypothesis that modern people with ADD are carrying around a remnant of hunter/gatherer genetic material. It lends credibility to the notion that ADD is, in fact, a “disease” or at least “not normal,” and may not have ever been “normal” in human history.
But that overlooks a critical issue: cultural context, the effect of what we learn to believe about ourselves as we’re growing up.
Cultural anthropologists are quick to point out that it’s extremely difficult for any one culture to clearly view another. We instinctively assume when observing their behaviors that they’re motivated in the same ways we are, that they behave the way they do for the same reasons we would if we were in their situation, and that they share our assumptions about how the world works and humanity’s role in the world.
This is a dangerous error, which even tripped up Margaret Mead when she was writing Coming of Age in Samoa. Since her well-intentioned but well-publicized error, few anthropologists would make this mistake. But it’s easy for somebody untrained in the field.
The problem, essentially, is that most people, when thinking of “primitive times,” imagine themselves running around in the woods wearing animal skins and carrying a spear. In their mind’s eye, they transport a twentieth century person back into a fantasy past. But these “Connecticut Yankees in King Arthur’s Court” don’t represent what it was like to grow up in those times; they arrive in a different era complete with all our acculturation, carrying along all the damage done to them by our culture. They haul along the preparations we’ve received for a Farmers/Industrialists life, but utterly lacking preparation for a Hunters/Gatherers life.
The fact of the matter is that people in hunter/gatherer tribes live very different lives than we do, and therefore grow up to be very different persons from us.
ADDers are damaged by growing up in our society, but not in hunting cultures
Cultural anthropologist Jay Fikes pointed this out to me when we first discussed the idea of hunters and farmers as an explanation for many modern psychological differences among people. His research showed that individuals living among the historically agricultural Native Americans, such as the Hopi and other Pueblo Indians, are relatively sedate and risk-averse. On the other hand, Fikes said, members of the hunting tribes such as the Navajo are “constantly scanning their environment and are more immediately sensitive to nuances. They’re also the ultimate risk takers. They and the Apaches were great raiders and warriors.”
Navajo children grow up in a society of Navajo hunter and warrior adults (at least they did before we conquered them, destroyed their culture, shattered their religions, stole their land, and murdered most of their citizens). The Navajo raised their children as hunters and warriors. Until we arrived with horses and guns, they were extraordinarily successful, and had survived as an intact culture for thousands of years longer than we have.
But we today are not a society of hunters, raiders, and warriors. We are farmers, office- and factory-workers. Therefore, we punish and discourage hunter and warrior behavior in our children and adults.
When people grow up being punished for being the way they are, they become damaged. They think of themselves as misfits and incompetents. They lose their own personal power, become shaken and fearful, and develop a variety of compensating behaviors—many of which are less than useful.
What you—the parent, teacher, counselor, or physician—what you tell the ADD child about himself can have a decisive effect. Children respond very differently to being told “This is how you work” instead of “You just don’t work right.”
To think that these modern ADD people—damaged, shaken, hurt, and weakened by growing up in the wrong time and culture—could somehow solve all their problems by simply transporting themselves back to some mythical prehistoric hunting era is a fantasy. It wouldn’t work. They weren’t raised and trained to survive in that environment; they weren’t taught to channel their energies into being hunters and warriors.
Instead, they were spanked and slapped, told to shut up and given detention, and—the ultimate insult—told that they are damaged goods and have a brain disease worthy of the labels “deficit” and “disorder.”
Hunters are both born and made
Every type of culture puts enormous amounts of effort into educating and inculcating cultural values into their citizens. That’s how it becomes a culture.
In hundreds of ways, we are daily taught and reminded of what is expected of us, what the limits and boundaries are, and what are appropriate and inappropriate goals and behaviors. Most of this teaching is so subtle we’re totally unaware of it — a glance from a stranger when we talk too loud in a restaurant, for example — but our days are filled with it. It shapes us and molds our beliefs, our assumptions, and ultimately our reality.
We come face-to-face with these differences when we encounter other cultures. I remember my shock and dismay at discovering, the first time I was in Japan negotiating on behalf of my company, that I had committed dozens of major cultural blunders in my interactions. Even more shocking confrontations occur when we meet people from far disparate tribes: I remember how odd I felt when, deep in the jungle of central Uganda, I stood in a village of people who were mostly naked. My jeans, shoes, shirt, and carried jacket seemed an oddity to them, and began to seem that way to me after a few hours.
And so we train our young. We reinforce and strengthen in them those behaviors, assumptions, and beliefs that we find useful as a society, and we discourage or crush in them those that are not useful or even counterproductive to the orderly flow of our culture and its work.
Farming societies teach their young how to be good farmers. Hunting societies train their children in the ways of the hunt. Industrial societies raise their children to be good factory workers. Warrior cultures teach warfare to their children.
