What Am I Doing Here?
Bruce Chatwin is a name I had never heard before Richard Littauer gave me his book, What Am I Doing Here?. At times Chatwin is tiresome and pompous, especially when describing important people he has met. But for the rest of this collection of travel writing and essays, he is brilliant—expounding on Bolshevik history as he visits Lenin’s home on the Volga, and even farther back in history he imagines the domestication of horses and the Westward conquest of Ancient Chinese emperors. His anthropological essays draw on a wealth of his readings from studying the subject. Before he became a writer, this was his calling.
Perhaps the most interesting essay in the book so far is “Nomad Invasions,” which defines how nomadic peoples arose, not simultaneously, but after hunter gatherer societies had settled into farming. After the horse had been domesticated in Central Asia around 3000 B.C., equestrian societies roamed the steppes from Hungary to Mongolia for thousands of years, reaching a high point in their culture around 400 A.D. with the sacking of Rome, and their apogee with the dominion of Genghis Khan. Using the Bible as one of his sources, Chatwin defines how nomadic peoples arose in opposition to cities, and how the need to travel and move placates a restlessness that has long lingered in the human subconscious.
Settlement vs. Nomadism
The very definition of society as a settled people who uphold traditions is in direct competition with nomadic peoples, who are irreligious and have different conceptions of morality than their static counterparts. For this reason, the great religions of the world were given by a prophet to a society that had hitherto been nomadic: Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Which led me to think: the 20th century led to a different type of settlements and migrations following war, famine, and economic downturn. Now that we have the internet I wonder if society will become even more nomadic, repudiating the suburban lifestyle of settlement and social norms, marriage, and traditional religion, trends that are already in decline in our millennial generation. It would be a mistake however, to think that ours is the only generation that has experienced this sense of general unrest (a few weeks ago I read an article in the Times about the youths who spread around the U.S.A. after the Civil War, disdaining marriage and living with their parents).
It is also of note that Chatwin concludes his essay by defining how both structures were necessary for humankind to survive. The animal-reliant nomad society complements the barley and wheat farming of settled culture. Often the two traded foodstuffs and goods in order to survive, and in worse times, the nomads conquered the settled to take what they needed.
The Modern Nomad
But to propose the very existence of this dichotomy does more than define tendencies of liberalism and conservatism within our 21st century society; it defines the nomadic existence as an alternative to the settlement-heavy social mores that have pervaded civilization for the past few thousands of years. I use the word civilization because it is the “civilized” settlers who recorded and defined history, and the nomadic invaders who passed away into myth, from the Wandering Jews of the Old Testament to the American cowboy and Argentine gaucho.
What I hope to see in my lifetime is an embrace of this alternative lifestyle as more than a counterculture, but rather as a viable way to live a fulfilling life replete with adventure and experience. My own six month travels around the world, my life of transience in New York a year ago when I lived only to write for myself, the absence of a set routine of work, commute, home, is what I am after here. While I recognize that it is important to have stability in order to produce, the internet offers for the first time a way to live a nomadic lifestyle without a reliance on animals. It’s not uncommon to meet in any bohemian community a person who travels the world working freelance, in a way that is definitively nomadic.
In an era of the internet, of the individual as capitalist, in his way of supporting himself without being indebted to a landlord or a company, makes possible the nomadic tendencies of man in a way that the emergent mercantilism of the Middle Ages did not. I see the possibility for this trend increasing as governments take a larger role in maintaining a high quality of life for their citizens, and open borders for long-term travel and serial expatriation instead of colonization and settlement.
This is how I see life for our generation unfolding. Or at the very least, it’s how I envision my own life, eventually. What about you?
The post Why I Am A Modern Nomad appeared first on Daniel Ryan Adler.