Three thoughts

Three thoughts occurred to me in quick succession today.

It's not so much about choices; there really are very few choices we make. We are guided, shepherded, into behaviours, funnelled into opinions. Whether by neural pathways or social pressures or simply the apparent logical necessity of one idea following another, of evading cognitive dissonance. The internal logic, whether physical or psychic, is oftentimes impossible to escape. But it feels like free will (and this isn't an argument for determinism as much as it is an argument for self-awareness; a call to be aware of the choices we don't make, and the opportunity for breaking our habits). Personality feels like something we own; like a choice of behaviours we make. In fact it is something more like a cage from which we cannot escape, or an opaque, striated net through which our being takes form; the most prominent features we possess are already carved into our external presence, and we assume that it is "us" that makes them so. In fact, it makes us.

Much, so much, has changed in our ways of life in the last century. And we have forgotten very quickly what life used to be like. We - those of us living since the Second World War - are the first generations ever to have not had an overriding concern with acquiring food. This to us now seems unbelievable: food is a natural resource, it simply grows from the ground around us (or even more simply - we are surrounded with opportunities to buy food in shops. The shelves are never empty. How could this change?). How could acquiring and assuring food be a problem? The system of global colonial-capitalism locates us inside a bubble almost at breaking point, but one beyond which we can see no horizon. Food is grown and sold to us; our gardens and natural areas grow plants, we can buy seeds easily for our own use. But if a shift were to occur in how global civilisation operates these finely tuned trade routes can cease to exist and communities will find themselves once more at the mercy of nature - a nature now more violent, more unpredictable, more prone to chaotic and destructive events than pre-industrial society survived.

The rate at which we are degrading the environment ("sawing off the branch we are sitting on" as one climate scientist put it) and the predictions of scientists regarding the medium-term future for our species and planet have made almost no impression on the majority of people. Governments half-heartedly pursue half-baked schemes to reduce carbon emissions but whatever good intentions exist are scuppered by more pressing short-term needs to stay near the top of the civilisation-food chain. At some point in the 21st century, the populace will experience a shock akin to Seth Brundle's son Martin: in the film The Fly 2, Martin is unceremoniously told there is nothing that can be done to prevent his - increasingly rapid - mutation into another form of "life" (to put it kindly - his genetic inheritance is 50% fly, and it is about to assert its dominance). But the injections, they help me - he protests. The injections were just water, Martin. Just for your peace of mind.

The Apple

The more i read about human history, and the currents of change and development that emerge through slotting pieces into place, the more it seems that humanity has never had any reprieve...we have always been pushed and pulled, tossed by innumerable spirits and contraflows, malign forces which never let us rest, never give us space to breath but always tug and drag and pummel the human spirit to different heights and troughs - different but not new, for the human condition remains the same now as twentyfive hundred years ago. Still, we ask the same questions, still, we await any answer, still, the challenges of work, society, war, family, friendship and love are what ultimately drive us.

Twentyfive hundred years is not long in the span of the world. To geology this is nothing. But it makes up most of recountable human history. It is the entirety of our sociological context, and more. The Upanisads, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Plato, Jesus and Muhammed...Al-Ghazzali, Averroes, Maimonides, Aquinas, Copernicus, Newton, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Einstein. All these, but none seem to have really asked any new questions...just variations on ways of saying 'why are we here?'

But still I wonder...in the metaphor of Genesis, we were expelled from the Garden of Eden, from the blissful existence of animal-like consciousness at one with the world around us. We took the advice of the serpent and our eyes were opened, we became like God, able to see and analyse, aware of ourselves as distinct entities. For what? What has this knowledge done for us? What has our Godlike ability to know good and evil enabled us to do? To sit in our centrally-heated houses, eating junk food, watching brain-dead entertainment, and working our lives away to be able to ensure our children have the same mundane existence we do. And this is the lucky ones. The rest are struggling to survive in war-torn nations, the environment so torn from nature and so overpopulated that there aren't enough natural supplies to even feed the local population. What have we done with the knowledge we suffer for?

Eve condemned to suffer in labour, the reduced gestation period of the human race: human offspring are almost twice the mass when born of our nearest primate relatives, and most of this is carried in the head. Evidence shows that naturally, the gestation period would have been much longer (as the human newborn is so pathetically incapable) but for the development of bipedalism, which restricted the birth canal and made childbirth the painful (and dangerous) experience it is now. These two factors, increased intelligence and walking on two feet conspire to force the human young into artifically increased dependence...meaning both that community becomes crucial to sustain young and protect women in labour, and that the neural pathways are immensely malleable: the knowledge which would otherwise have been hardwired into the brain in the womb, instead has to be learnt. This all gears us towards increased adaptability, flexible intelligence and dependence on others throughout every stage of our lives.

Interestingly, the first curse of Genesis - that placed on the serpent - is also evident in evolutionary terms. Many snakes are born with withered legs, useless for transport but obvious as a genetic throwback.

So, I find myself asking the question that has perplexed humanity ever since we developed the ability to wonder: Why are we here? What does the future hold for our species? Is it even to the future that we should be looking, when we seem to be getting the present so badly wrong? Is it transcendence that we're searching for, and if so, transcendence to what and where? Or is it merely transcendence of our own etiolated, concept-bound selves? If the future does not hold hope of some new, heavenly existence (either for our children in a material utopia or for us all in a spiritual realm), why do we persist in making the present a place of struggle?

Genesis offers no answers. This is the final of the three curses, man doomed to till the soil with the sweat of his brow. Perhaps this simply is our punishment for leaving eating the apple and presuming the Knowledge would make us happy.


There's plenty of info around on the irregularities of human gestation and development relative to other primates. Ashley Montagu's Growing Young (p66 onwards) is a good introduction, and also available free on Googlebooks.

The Structure of Time and History

It's funny that the bible technically places the creation - and man's subsequent fall from grace, where he is condemned to work in order to survive, to till the land with the sweat of his brow in order to eat - at roughly the moment in history when agriculture began, and civilisation in the Near East first spread its wings. It also ties in almost perfectly with the first written language. I wonder what change in the mode of consciousness this development had.

The use of writing forces man's apprehension of the world into a strictly linear sequence. Words are always read in order, and form a static unchangeable structure. The power of language to change consciousness is a topic I can't go into detail here, but it's clear that the development of writing and the emergence of civilisation happen at eerily similar times. The ability to view ourselves objectively, to be 'self-aware' forces an appreciation of change, development, and therefore places consciousness outside of the present in which the rest of the kingdom of nature is bound.

The Bible effectively tells history from the point of view of human civilisation. All of prehistory is given a cursory few paragraphs of mechanical progress, all well and good, until mankind-proper comes onto the scene, homo sapiens-civilisatiens. Perhaps the Israelites of 900BCE who were consolidating their tribals myths (which would be written down in the Torah a few hundred years later), knew that really there had only been 3 or 4 thousand years of history prior to them. Those 3,000 years were all they cared about - the rest was just context. Those centuries contained all the developments from the point of mankinds real inception - all our drama and cultural/conscious evolution has happened in that miniscule space of time. By then we were distinct from the animal kingdom, and our "noosphere" of self-aware consciousness had formed a world independent of the material environment. Prior to that, man was just another species at the mercy of our environment.

So, I wonder what the relation between the point that mankind became able to conceive its own history, mankind's awareness of itself, and the actual event of history is. We take for granted a particular view of time: we think of the beginning (big bang), a series of moments, billions of years, all progressing through to the point of 'now' that we inhabit. But this reductionist view is only one way of understanding.

It has been mooted in physics circles that the past only happens when consciousness is able to think backwards - ie, the past is created retrospectively from the point of the present. This implies that there is no past, only the now: the point of awareness creates the illusion of previous moments in a linear sequence. So we in fact create a history that never was. There was no beginning, only the now, looking outward and imagining concepts such as 'before' and 'after'. The past being an established 'fact' which leads mechanically to the 'now' is a view we have to challenge. The past is just as much a fiction, a creation of the single truth of consciousness (which exists only in the eternal present), as the future.

dates and facts for those interested: agriculture was developed somewhere between 8,000 and 4,000BCE. The first sproutings of civilisation were in Mesopotamia (Sumer, as it was known then; Iraq as we call it now) and Egypt between 4,000 and 3,000BCE, with the first evidence of 'cuneiform' writing dated to 3100BCE in Mesopotamia...the biblical 'year of creation' is 4004BCE. Human civilisation, human existence as we know it, has existed for a mere five to six thousand years. Absolutely everything that we know of humans doing has happened in that infinitessimal dot of time.