Another postcard from the path
Dearest friends and fellow-travelers,
A decade or so ago I began wondering what the hell could have happened to cause humanity to end up in this ever-worsening global predicament. Like many others in the early stages of that search I ran across the writing of Daniel Quinn, first in "Ishmael" and then "The Story of B". Later I encountered anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose work conjured images of a leisurely, play-filled hunter-gatherer past, an idyll that was rudely interrupted by the inexplicable (and according to Quinn, deeply mistaken) development of back-breaking agriculture.
Recently my worldview (my "Story of the People"
has shifted away from the Rousseauian perspective of noble savages who made a terrible mistake. In its place is a view of prehistory supported by the writing of people like Lawrence Keeley and Stephen LeBlanc. They claim that there was little or nothing about those people of pre-history that was any more noble, or even much different, than our behaviour today. Far from living in idyllic circumstances, prehistoric populations were plagued with violence and warfare just as we are, and for many of the same reasons.
There are two key reasons why my story-allegiance has switched from a Rousseauian view to a more Hobbesian one. One is that the Keeley/LeBlanc viewpoint fits far better with what I see around me in the world today. Its explanatory power doesn't require humanity to have “lost our way” in some mysterious yet blame-worthy sense, it simply assumes we are more or less the same humans we've always been. Occam gets a closer shave, in other words.
That’s not to say that I think “all humanity is warlike” or some such absolutist nonsense. It’s more of an acceptance that people have always exhibited a complex mix of traits, and that our behavior in any moment expresses the unique combination of our evolutionary heritage, our cultural history and our current circumstances. Sometimes, in some places, there is peaceful idyll. In other places and times, it's quite different...
The other reason I give short shrift to Quinn et al these days is deeply personal. Romanticizing the past has inspired in me enormous guilt, blame and anger. These feelings sprang from the belief that humanity had either made an egregious, inexplicable mistake or was morally, spiritually and psychologically broken from the beginning, and thus unable to avoid the error. These feelings caused me unbearable anguish and despair, with no obvious way out. That’s not a sustainable emotional life.
Eventually I got tired of the pain, and I decided that there just might be an alternative story that could lift the load off both humanity’s shoulders and my own. That began my search for natural sources of irreversibility in human physical, psychological and cultural evolution. Lo and behold, the more I looked the more I found. After a few years of re-arranging the jigsaw pieces, I had a picture of our current situation that back-cast nicely onto our species’ previous behavior, and didn't require any particular moral discontinuities to explain how we got from there to here. At that point the pain lifted.
I think that the stories we tell ourselves personally are those that explain the world in such a way as to justify our presence in it and our feelings about it. The stories we tell ourselves collectively are a different matter. Those spring from a far deeper and less conscious well. IMO its source waters can be traced back to influences we are generally not aware of: the operation of non-equilibrium thermodynamics as expressed in principles like MPP and MEPP; the exigencies of survival in the context of natural selection; the behavioural influence of our evolved neuropsychology; and last but by no means least, the various cultural histories we are each embedded in.
Most peoples’ personal stories of course have their roots in their culture’s collective story. Even renegades like me can’t fully escape its pervasive and largely unseen pull. But one of the great glories of being human is told in the story of Icarus: we can, if we are so motivated, follow the urge to try and reach escape velocity, and view our landscape from somewhere beyond the gravitation pull of its collective story.
In the end, I've accepted that stories can't be considered as being either true or false. They are simply more or less useful to those who are telling them. This realization, in conjunction with a whole lot of meditation, is allowing me to detach from the outcomes of all this story-telling, and just live my life. Destiny will take care of itself, as it always has.
Weather is beautiful, wish you were here.
With deepest fondness,
Paul Chefurka (aka GliderGuider)
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