How did we human beings become the hypersocial creatures we are today?
The biologist E. O. Wilson credits fire, among other causes. In a recent history of human evolution, Wilson offers the following explanation: Fire was precious because it flushed animals out of the brush, then made it possible for people to cook them. Campfires had to be guarded, which made them like “nests” and made us feel safe enough to be “eusocial” or altruistic. Sounds plausible to me.
But I like to imagine that Wilson missed a step in his account of our early socialization: the moment someone first got up in front of the fire and told a story that showed the others — especially the children — the magnificence of the universe around them, and made them want to be bigger-souled than they’d been so far.
Somewhat further down the evolutionary path, our family does its campfire storytelling by way of audiobooks in the car. This is not quite as silly as it sounds. My husband and children and I live the temporally discombobulated life of so many New York City families. The only time during the week when we’re all physically together for an extended period of time is when we drive upstate to our weekend house in the mountains. For my daughter, who is 8 years old, and my son, who is 10, that’s two and a half hours of being strapped into the back seat. For us, it’s two and a half hours of uncommon power, in which we get to pick the books we feel like hearing rather than the ones they might have chosen had they not been under restraint. The MP3 files or CDs we plug into the car stereo are children’s books, of course, but that’s no hardship for us, because they’re books from our childhoods or they’re the Great Books themselves or they’re books we’ve always meant to read but needed children as an excuse to do so. Our son scowls and demands a download from whatever violent young adult fantasy series he’s reading. We smile sweetly and turn on “The Chronicles of Narnia,” or the “Odyssey,” or “The Railway Children,” or “Peter Pan,” or even “Ramona Quimby, Age 8.” We don’t tell him what we’re playing. We just wait and see what happens.