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My narrative, or, the dawning of ‘homo humilis humilis’

by Paula | 24 October 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: collapse, evolution
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As humans we are wired to navigate the world via stories and narrative, and I am no exception. My overriding motivation comes from a very clear narrative that has cobbled itself together in my head over the years, and I want to lay out that narrative here to provide context both for myself and for whoever happens by. I’m sure none of this is particularly original… it’s been very heartening along the way to discover others who’ve come to the same conclusions as me, often long before I ever had.

My narrative is simply this: the project we call “civilization” is an evolutionary dead end for the human species. It is in the process of drawing to a close, and our species’ only available response is adaptation to this reality and evolution into something new.

This view is, at its heart, both primitivist and biblical-with-a-small-“b.” In fact, for me “primitivist” and “biblical” (with a small “b”) are one in the same. Each offers the same set of observations, made by two very different and separate groups of people: one witnessed the birth of the evolutionary dead end as outsiders, and one is witness to its close from within.

Primitivists contend that the narrative of civilization we in Western culture have been taught is the view of those who’ve benefited from it at the expense of those who have not. The story that tells us the advent of agriculture gave rise to science, the arts, and all manner of imperial glory is technically correct; however, it negates the experience of those who provided the fuel for all of this to happen. The leisure time required to develop science and to produce art, and the energy required to build both the infrastructure and the wealth of empires, came at the expense of the vast majority people, most of whom toiled as slaves, serfs, and servants; or who suffered the brutal seizure of their land, resources, and families in the service of those few ruling from the top of some far-off, extreme social hierarchy.

Moreover, agriculture itself was not something people took up because of its obvious superiority over hunting and gathering. It was either a stopgap measure in the face of climate instability, or was a maladaptive cultural mutation born of a new, abstract cognition. The archaeological record clearly shows that when people switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture their health plummeted dramatically, while the quantity and intensity of their labor increased equally dramatically. It is a mystery why anyone would choose such a lifestyle unless he was compelled to do so against his will. This is why indigenous tribes universally resist assimilation into Western colonialization: they have not been inured to the misery of civilization and to them assimilation represents a living hell, a fate worse than death.

This view is substantially identical to the biblical account of the fall of mankind from grace. It is also a good entrance point into biblical considerations stripped of their obscene, bloody religious baggage. Setting aside the racism, sexism, violence, and the legions of atrocities that have been committed under the bible’s aegis, the biblical account becomes simply the oral history of a particular people who later committed that history to writing. It is a cultural artifact that carries a staggering weight for those of us who’ve inherited Western culture, if we can unpack it dispassionately.

The story of the fall is a tale told from the point of view of an observer, a narrator, someone not involved in the events as they unfold. It is the story of something that happened to someone else, and this someone else’s story is, literarily speaking, exactly the same as the story we Westerners tell ourselves about our origins. It was this someone else who once lived as wild tribes; this someone else who took up agriculture; who began to settle into villages, towns and cities; who experienced the rise of deities and kings; who created a system that eventually became the grand empires of the ancient near and middle east. Westerners, and Christian Westerners in particular, like to identify with the biblical observer and to think of this “someone else” as, well, someone else — the pagans of old against whom the righteous God has set his judgment. We fail to see that we are the “someone else;” we are not the biblical observer, we are the observed. The pagans of old are our cultural forebears, and our culture is the continuation of theirs. We are the irredeemably fallen. Our empires are not the shining, crowning achievements of our species; they are instead the manifestation of a deep illness first identified by the biblical observer.

The biblical story symbolizes the moment of our infection in the image of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit: upon eating it, they experienced shame because they were naked. This is not related to sex as the church has insisted for millennia. Rather, it is a fairly simple illustration lost on us today. Shame occurs only in the presence of an other; Adam (the adama or “first man”) suddenly perceived an other where there had been none before. He perceived himself as separate from the living world around him, and, for the first time in Earth’s multibillion-year history, introduced a massive fracture into the unity of our planet’s natural systems.

This is indeed the fruition of a new knowledge, just as the biblical account states. It is also a self-chosen death sentence, again in line with the biblical story: “On the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” No species can survive apart from the natural systems of Earth. And yet all of Western culture’s frenetic empire-building has been little more than an attempt to stave off the inevitable death this separation ensures.

However, the very fact that we Westerners have glommed onto the outsiders’ account of the beginning of our own demise indicates that somewhere in the recesses of our cultural memory, and perhaps coded into our DNA as biological memory, we understand the truth. We do have an idea of what it means to be a part of a living, evolving, unified, organic, self-organizing natural system; we can intuit what participation in such a system would entail, and we can feel in our bones that an animating force really does flow through everything, propelling us to seize hold of life and joy. But in our culture fallen so far from the graces of the natural world, our inclination to join in the rhythm and flow of Earth’s living systems is tragically thwarted without our realization, and instead manifests as free-market capitalism.

Capitalist economies function in ways strikingly similar to ecosystems. Money parallels the solar energy that producers turn into the materials which primary, secondary and tertiary consumers consume, concentrating into denser quantities as it rises up the food chain. Innovation parallels mutation and gives rise to new industries, which parallel species, even to the point of displaying features of punctuated equilibrium. Our drive to accumulate money is ultimately the same drive that propels salmon upriver or that bends a plant in the direction of sunlight — except our fallen culture has perverted this drive into greed. The “invisible hand” of the marketplace bears a far greater resemblance to indigenous and tribal peoples’ conception of an animating spirit-force than to the avenging judge in the sky to which critics liken it. Environmentalists wish to leave ecosystems undisturbed for the exact and precise reason free-market capitalists wish to see economies unregulated: both are dynamic, self-organizing systems that will achieve homeostasis on their own, if only they are allowed to do so.

It is an understandable mistake that economists should think markets are an all-encompassing arrangement larger than ourselves, from which come every last thing imaginable and in which we must compete and cooperate to survive. Humans evolved and are genetically programmed to thrive and grow within such a system; it’s the only thing we know or even can know. Economics has simply mistaken markets for the natural world.

I find great hope in this dim reflection of natural systems we have created. Clearly capitalism in its current state is as corrupt and fallen as the civilization that spawned it. But the proliferation of open-source companies and the drive toward entrepreneurship that the internet has inspired represent a potentially serious competitive threat to those institutions that maintain a stranglehold on the economy as civilization shifts into decline. These massive institutions will either fail or radically change in coming years due to resource depletion, climate change, the loss of government legitimacy, and financial crises; and there will not be enough of any of these left to reconstitute new behemoths where the old ones once stood. Only those decentralized companies based on open-source models and very small individual businesses will be quick enough to maneuver the changes. It is not too far a stretch to envision natural selection operating as both an economic and ecological force in the affairs of humans once again. Those businesses that adapt will by necessity evolve into the basis of truly sustainable economies that emerge from the wreckage of decline.

Thus my hope is that what is now a dim, corrupted reflection of participation with the natural world can serve as a bridge from our evolutionary dead end, across the chasm and back into unity with the rest of Earth’s living systems. I believe that the emergence of the internet and the legions of small businesses it has spawned presage the economic changes to come and are a manifestation of what we all know in our collective unconscious. Homo sapiens sapiens is about to evolve into homo humilis humilis — doubly humble man — and I believe entrepreneurship to be the most likely vehicle to carry us there.

So that is my narrative, for better or worse.

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