THE EMERGENCE AND NATURE OF HUMAN
HISTORY
Volume One
Joseph A. Miller
Revised Edition
©2012, 2017
To
Hailey and Aubrey, Whom I Love More Than I Could Possibly Express, from Grandpa
It is not enough to say that human
action is historical, and that history is an unfolding of unique events.
Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of
physical history, whether in the stars or in organic diversity. –Edward O. Wilson
We feel clearly that we are only now
beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum-total of
what is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to
impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized
portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim
be lost for ever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis
of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some
of them, and at the risk of making fools of themselves. –Erwin Schrödinger
Volume One Table of Contents
Notes on Usages and Other
Matters vii
Prologue ix
I. First Things
Introduction 2
The Questions 14
Propositions and Premises 15
How It Looks to Us: The Human
Frame of Reference 22
A Species Lost in Both Space
and Time 26
The Human Situation 33
II. Hidden Realities
That Which Is 52
Self-Organization and
Emergence 53
The Rules of the Game:
Preface 62
The Rules of the Game: The
Original Rulebook 64
The Rules of the Game: The
New Rulebook 77
Is Mathematics the Real
Reality? 104
Randomness, Probability, and
Coincidence 112
Chains of Unintended
Consequences 121
Synergy and Feedback Loops 128
Patterns, Cycles, and Shapes 137
The World as a Set of
Interrelated Systems 145
The World as a
Non-Equilibrium System 152
The Worlds of Reality 160
III. The Emergence of Human Consciousness—A Chronology
Condensing the History of the
Universe 166
Beginning 167
The First Stars 176
The First Galaxies 182
The Sun 188
The Earth Forms 195
The Earliest Life on Earth 204
The Dominance of the
One-Celled Life Forms 226
Life in the Oceans: The Animals
Evolve and Begin to Spread 243
The Plant Kingdom Begins to
Colonize the Land 258
The Animal Kingdom Begins to
Colonize the Land 267
The Reptiles and the
Synapsids Evolve 275
The Mammals 282
A Life in the Trees: The
Primates Evolve 294
Evolution of the Genus Homo
328
The Diaspora of Modern Consciousness:
Homo Sapiens Spreads Throughout the
World 356
Human Life Since the Advent
of Written Records 391
IV. Humans as Physical Beings
Humans in the Context of Life 396
The Human Animal: A General
Survey of Its Composition, Structure, Function, Capacities, and Limitations 405
Aging and the Human Lifespan 436
Appendix 442
Chapter Notes and Sources for Volume One 443
Index to Volume One 478
Notes on Usages and Other Matters
When I wrote dates, I used the
historian’s standard usages of BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era)
rather than BC and AD. When referring to very long periods of time, I used such
abbreviations as ybp (years before
the present) or mya (million years
ago). When transliterating, I used the most current system in use for the
particular original language in question (for example, using the Pinyin system for transliterating Chinese
to the Latin alphabet, rather than the older Wade-Giles system). In dealing
with pronouns, I was not always consistent. I used the term “they” as an
all-purpose, gender neutral pronoun in most cases, but sometimes I gravitated
toward “he or she”. I hope no one is distracted by this practice.
I used standard American English
spelling, except when referring to proper nouns used commonly in British
English, or except when I was quoting a passage that used standard British
English spelling.
Scientific names for the various
types of living things were always italicized, as were the names of books, journals,
and magazines.
I used the American system for
indicating the names of large numbers.
In citing information from a
source, if I have included information in brackets [such as this], it is
information I have interjected and is not directly attributable to the source
itself.
I habitually write in the first
person. I see no reason to modify this practice in the present work. I also
sometimes use contractions. I hope neither of these practices diminishes what I
have to say.
J. A. Miller, Kapa’a, Hawaii, 2012
Prologue
He was entering what was perhaps the final stretch of a life he had
never quite mastered or understood. He had been luckier than most other humans
and yet he was immersed in darkness much of the time. Whenever he was able to
pull himself out of his tired self-absorption, he looked out onto a reality
that was deceptively ordinary, but many decades of living in the world had
taught him that life was more complicated than its mundane façade suggested.
Everywhere he looked in the larger world, humans grappled with an existence
that seemed to be governed by random chance, and what many of them called
“fate” or “luck”, as much as it was by human intent. He saw most of his fellow
humans clinging to the hope that there was a larger reality beyond their sight,
one controlled by a god or gods or spirits, a plane of existence to which they
could turn for solace, reassurance, and meaning. In their fondest hopes, most
humans wished for some form of eternal survival beyond the inevitable grave
that awaited each of them. He could no longer hold such beliefs in his own
heart, however much he wanted or needed to. He secretly hoped that he was wrong
about the unseen world, but he suspected that he wasn’t.
Everywhere the human enterprise seemed to be just barely keeping ahead
of disaster. Many times it couldn’t even do that. Everything seemed to be at
the edge of chaos at any given moment, and yet, remarkably, the human
expedition stumbled blindly forward, heading…where? Getting through the day was
the business of the vast bulk of his fellow travelers, and his kind had done
so, in one form or another, in one setting or another, in one way or another, on a continuous basis for
more centuries than he could comprehend. He had studied a little of the story
of the humans, at least those parts that had been written down, and he couldn’t
see any time in their experience when life hadn’t been either at the edge of chaos or swept up in it completely. He
thought about the twists and turns of his own uncertain life, the often strange
depths of his thoughts and feelings, the kaleidoscopic mixture of associations
that the world triggered inside of him, and the diaphanous images and inaudible
sounds that floated in the perpetual river running through his head. Standing
in the evening quiet, he realized that every one of those of his kind who had
ever walked on this tiny, insignificant planet had lived their own unique,
unscripted drama, and been the center of their own incomprehensible universe.
The history of the humans, he surmised, had been so strange, so filled with
unexpected events, so baffling in its complexity, and so difficult to
understand because it was a reflection of the interior world of those who had
made it and been engulfed by it, people who lived in a physical reality they
only vaguely understood, one that shaped them and affected them at every turn.
In his presumption, he formed an idea about why human history had taken
the course it had. The idea was his suspicion that no one really, fully,
completely, comprehensively understood themselves, or how they had come to be
the way they were, and it did not matter
if they thought they did. He decided to follow this suspicion wherever it
led him, little realizing that not only would he seek to understand history’s
course—he would eventually seek to understand why history had come to be at all.
I.
First Things
Introduction
I.
This book is my attempt to
explain, in as straightforward and comprehensive a way as I can, my ideas about
how humans acquired the ability to make and record history, the multitudinous
and interconnected variables that have shaped history, why that history has
taken such a convoluted and unpredictable course, and why attempts to draw
meaning from history and make inferences about its future course are basically
acts of futility. In a larger sense, I attempted what surely must have been a
Fool’s Errand: I tried to figure out the
place of our species in the vast context of reality itself. I tried to bring
together as many salient facts and observations about that reality as I could,
always bearing in mind an essential truth: I am inescapably trapped in the
prison of human perception and the human frame of reference—and so are you. The
challenge I faced was even more overwhelming than I had expected. It was
perhaps even essentially paradoxical: I tried to analyze a reality that I can
only experience indirectly. Naturally, I approached this task with trepidation
and a deep sense of humility. Of course, this whole exercise has, inevitably,
fallen short. It did not do all that I wanted it to do. But for my own very
personal reasons, I had to attempt it anyway.
This project is, ultimately, an
act of synthesis, a synthesis of the
largest kind, one in which I attempt to combine, in a new way, every aspect of the human
experience and the factors that affect it. There are many more qualified than I
to attempt such a thing, but I wanted to see what I would discover by doing it
myself. In writing this book, I was guided by the idea that if I piled up
simple things, stated obvious facts, brought together data from people more
educated and specialized than I, asked the right questions, and admitted what I
did not know as honestly as I could, then I would end up with a picture of
reality that at least seemed to be
right, even though I knew it would not be complete and would only seem right to
me. To put it in another way: I hoped that after I put all the pixels where it
seemed like they should go—and by pixels I mean all the individual facts,
questions, and observations I brought together in this work—that when I stood
back from them, something that made sense would
appear to me. It did, but it was not what I had anticipated or imagined.
In order to create such a
picture, I stated much that is absolutely obvious, and in reading this, it will
often seem to you that I am wasting your time telling you what you already
know. Much of what I said will strike you as common knowledge, and ordinary in
the extreme. But there is a reason for this: only by building up layer after
layer of simple phenomena could I hope to gain some understanding, however
limited, of a larger, more complicated reality. In fact, the entire scheme of
this book’s organization has been built around this concept, as I have tried to
go from examining that which is most basic to that which is most
elaborated.
Sometimes I investigated ordinary
events that are usually hidden from plain view. Sometimes I pointed out
phenomena that are not noticed because we tend to screen out from our attention
that which seems commonplace or routine. Further, I am of the conviction that
even obvious and readily apparent objects or processes, if systematically
stripped down to their essentials, can be seen in a new light. In effect, by
starting with the most basic and seemingly mundane facts, it may be possible
for us to work our way up through the levels of emergent reality. My thinking
was that if I said enough ordinary and obvious things in the right way and in
the right order, then what would emerge would be extraordinary and surprising,
even though our over-all understanding will remain severely limited. Whether I
succeeded is, of course, for you to judge. I believe, by the way, that once we have
examined reality in this way, we can never go back to our previous way of
thinking about it.
Similarly, in trying to trace the
origins of our myriad problems as a species, I tried to explain how enormous,
incredibly complicated problems emerge from masses of simple ones, like a
series of small fires combining to make a conflagration. I also tried to
demonstrate that the more variables a problem has, and the more sources of
origin from which it springs, the more difficult its solution. Further, I realized
the “solution” to a problem may simply tend to engender further problems, some
of which may be genuinely intractable. It is as if humans are trapped by their
own cognitive limitations in a never-ending game that, as a species, they
cannot leave. None of their solutions to the challenges they face is permanent,
all of them entail unknown risks and hidden costs, and all of them generate unforeseen
consequences that will compel other sets of humans to attempt their own
stop-gap measures, ad infinitum.
In the physical world, a mass of
simple things, interacting and interconnected with each other, can cause new
kinds of physical reality to emerge. The ultimate physical basis of reality as
humans perceive it is a collection of utterly simple units of energy-matter,
totally basic in both their nature and their operation. They follow
unbelievably simple rules, and do unbelievably simple things in a completely
unremarkable way. But allow enough of these operations to go forward in
space-time, and the seemingly chaotic nature of their interactions resolves
itself into a new level of organization.
In the human world, the basic
features of the human psyche and its interactions with external reality can be
very simple in nature. But a mass of simplicities interacting and
interconnecting can cause a complex psychology to emerge. When a large number
of these complex psychologies interact with each other, a phenomenon called
social life emerges. And as patterns of social life grow and merge with
patterns from other regions of the planet’s surface, a new kind of world
emerges.
And I followed this approach of
piling up simplicities for another reason: as far as I can tell, this is how
the Universe itself, and all the amazing phenomena within it, came to be.
It’s simply how reality works.
II.
In the writing of this work, I
made myself follow some rules.
For one thing, I tried to get my
facts straight. I’m sure I did not always succeed, but I tried. I do not like getting things wrong, but I have to admit that
a lot of times I do. I did the best I could.
I tried to be honest with both
you and myself. I admitted when I did not understand something. I admitted when
I could not find all the facts. I admitted when my own feelings were getting in
the way of telling you something. I admitted when people smarter than I am and
more educated than I am disagreed on some issue that seems to be pretty
important. I did not try to hide anything from you. I did not deliberately try
to mislead you. (I might have done that accidentally, though; given my absurdly
ambitious goals, it could not be helped.) I did not stop myself from saying
something I thought needed to be said, even if I did not like it and if you do
not like it or anyone else does not like it. I said it anyway.
In using words, I tried to avoid
doing the following things:
I tried very hard to not use
words that deliberately conceal
meaning rather than reveal it. I did not say someone “expired” or “passed away”
when I was trying to say they are dead now or they’ve died. In other words, I
dislike euphemisms, and I did not use
them, even if they would have made what I am saying less hurtful or not so
blunt. I also tried to avoid using “colorful” language, expressions that might
mean something to people who speak my language but would mean nothing to people
who do not. You might call these figures
of speech or idioms or figurative language. I did my best to
not let such expressions get in the way of what I was trying to say. I tried to
avoid using too many metaphors and similes, which can often be ambiguous, but I
used some.
There are some other rules I
tried to make myself follow. I tried really hard to never use the same term to
describe every person in a given situation or place or time. I also tried to avoid using some big, sweeping term to try
to describe everything that happened in a given era, or some term I thought
applied to every situation that seemed to be similar to others. In other words,
I tried to avoid generalization. I
tried not to judge people who have gone through experiences I have not had,
although I am sure my judgments were pretty obvious sometimes, anyway. And I
tried to never speak as if I have all
the answers, have everything figured out, and am always right. I am too old to
lie to myself in those ways.
There are other rules I followed,
but I can’t think of them now.
Because I consider most of what
we believe we know to be tentative, after you have read this book you may
conclude that I never took a direct stand about anything, that I used language
that was not definite, was not confident in its tone, or which did not seem to
assert that a thing is absolutely true. This may be your thinking because I
tried to avoid the error of speaking with too much certainty. By speaking with certainty I mean making a statement
that something is absolutely true beyond any doubt, and which no being, however
intelligent and all-knowing, could say was wrong. Because I used this
definition, I was pretty strict about what I would admit is certain.
It may seem to you, therefore, that I could not
decide anything once and for all. I can only say that no question ever seems to
be fully explained, and that we must always—always—leave
room for the possibility that we are wrong, and that things aren’t what they
seem to be.
You may sense that I have
repeated myself in places. This cannot be helped. In my opinion, everything
tells us something about everything else. And certain things that seem to be
true in one subject seem to be true in others, so they bear mentioning in all
of them. I hope you will be patient with me in this respect.
I think that the way we divide
the study of reality into different parts is necessary, in one way, because
reality is such a big subject, and our senses and our deductive reasoning have
acquired an enormous amount of information that relates to it. But in another
way, the divisions between subjects can lead us to focus too narrowly and
ignore subjects we either aren’t interested in or aren’t very knowledgeable
about. If we really want to form in our heads some kind of coherent idea of
reality, we have to try to touch on every area that humans have learned
something about. I really do not see how it could be otherwise. Although I
spent most of my professional life teaching history and the social sciences, I
am a generalist. I certainly do not claim to have anything like comprehensive
knowledge in all areas (I am not delusional!) but I tried to incorporate
everything I could that seems to tell us something important about the
situation we seem to find ourselves in. I made a lot of mistakes, and I left a
lot of important things out, without doubt. Any errors in the book are my
responsibility alone.
And I realize something both
obvious and easy to overlook: there is nothing I could write that would in any
way replicate the actual experience of being alive in the totality of life.
After all, reading about the world and moving through it are two somewhat
dissimilar activities, even allowing for the fact that reading is a way of moving through the world. Further,
any systematic analysis of the world seems, to many people at least, somewhat
bloodless, devoid of the feeling with which life is suffused, a dry exercise
lacking in the sensory realness of waking existence. For this, I apologize in
advance, as I acknowledge another deep challenge I faced: all attempts to
analyze and classify the characteristics of messy, complicated, warm-blooded
life must inevitably be misleading, or at best, incomplete.
III.
This book is not about me, but I
have to tell you about why I needed (yes, needed) to write it.
I suppose that I became
interested in history because I found it easy, at least at first. I’ve always
been drawn to stories, and the deeper I went into it, the more awe-inspiring
the story of the humans seemed to me. In fact, I came to see it as simply The Story, the biggest one of them all,
the biggest one there could be. Naturally, like so many boys, I was drawn to
depictions of war because they seemed so exciting and dramatic to me, removed
as I was from any actual experience with their subject matter. I would grow to
know better later on, even though I was spared from the terrors and drudgery of
combat. I matured; my perspective changed.
Later, in college, history was
one of my academic specialties, and I was immersed in its disciplines in a
serious way for the first time. I found its sheer complexity, the intricacy of
the human relationships it described, and the story of the sweep of human
events over space and time deeply compelling, even though the often mind-numbing
details of human life sometimes overwhelmed me.
I began to wonder why the story of our species was so strange, why it
took so many unexpected turns, and why human affairs so often came to
disastrous ends.
I became a high school teacher,
and plunged into the challenges of trying to educate often distracted and
disinterested teenagers. Somewhat to my own surprise, one of the subjects I
became interested in early in my career was physical anthropology. Although I
had been trained as a history and political science teacher, I found that my
research had left me without answers to some of my most pressing questions.
Since I passionately wanted to know why
human history had turned out as it did, it occurred to me that I needed to know
what kind of animal had made and been
affected by this history, suspecting that the two questions were deeply
interconnected. From that time onward my anthropological studies affected my
interpretation of human history. I studied the basics of human evolution,
taught both physical and cultural anthropology for a while (although I did not
acquire a formal degree in those subjects) and went on to complete a master’s
degree in history. I also taught sociology, government and politics, early
American history, and various aspects of European and general world history.
And as I grew and matured in my academic work, I became more and more convinced
that I could not know where we were
and how we had gotten there without knowing what
we were. Little did I know the many
avenues down which the pursuit of answers to these questions would lead me
IV.
When you teach history for enough
years, it begins to dawn on you that human life has developed in ways that seem
to defy any logical analysis. It also occurs to you that humanity’s life on
this planet today is so complex and filled with interrelated variables that no
one can really foresee in any detail what might happen in the future, despite
the tiresome cliché that humans “learn” from history. (From where I stand, it
seems that they have learned very, very little from it.) Anyone who sees a plan of some sort in all of
this is more perceptive than I, because I cannot, for the life of me, discern
one. If we were to take the most intellectually gifted human being in the world
of 10,000 years ago and show him or her something of the nature of human life
today, I am pretty sure that person would have virtually no comprehension of
it, and would be completely at a loss to explain how it got that way. If that
strikes you as too extreme of a case, let us take a person from the year 1000
CE and carry out the same exercise. Looking at the aftermath of ten centuries
of relentless change would leave that person bewildered and shaken. There would
be, of course, some institutions he or she, if a European, might recognize—the
Roman Catholic Church, for example—but even that would be fantastically
different from what it was a thousand years ago. The majority of the Church’s
adherents now live in places the person from 1000 CE, if he or she were a
European, did not even know existed.
And this medieval-era genius would, I am pretty sure, be utterly at a loss to
explain what had happened to produce the world of the 21st century.
If the most intelligent person in the world of 1000 CE were African, he or she
would be shocked at the vast upheavals that ten centuries of change inflicted
on Africa (as well as the true immensity of the continent’s landmass). If he or she were Chinese or Indian, all of
the empires and dynasties that comprised the political reality of their worlds
would be gone. If the person were a pre-Columbian Native American, the virtual
eradication of the multitudinous native cultures of the Americas would probably
seem nothing less than an utter catastrophe, the coming of which would have
been completely unexpected.
Even the most brilliant individual from the world
of 1900 would have difficulty giving a coherent explanation of how the world of
today came to be the way that it is. If he or she had not seen it or studied it
themselves, it is unlikely that they would grasp the enormity of the political,
scientific, technological, and social changes that have swept across this
planet since the last year of the nineteenth century. But we shouldn’t feel a
sense of superiority over our hypothetical observers from 10,000, 1,000, or a
little over 100 years ago—we’re in exactly the same situation in regard to the
future as they are in relation to us. Despite our confident assertions and
computer-based prediction models, we have not any more of a clue about what the
world will really be like in 100 years than our observer from 1900. And any
attempt to predict the nature of the world 1,000 or 10,000 years hence would be
laughable, or simply an example of science fiction.
Moreover—and in a more humbling
way—we still aren’t sure ourselves of how
the past produced the world we have now. In fact, it is my opinion that the
world is now so vastly complex that no person, however well educated, keenly
informed, and gifted with fluid intelligence, really understands more than a
small part of it in detail. The
dilemma, as I see it is that humans, possessing a consciousness that only
permits them to understand their own situation partially, are forced
to act on incomplete information, whether they realize it or not. There are so
many variables acting on any one of these situations, so many chains of
consequence intersecting each other at each moment, so many synergies at
work, and so many unanticipated outcomes being set into motion by them, that no
human or even set of humans can predict the ultimate effect of any given
action. Obviously, very simple actions (such as the act of picking up a pencil
off the floor) are less consequential and less affected by variables, but the
more our actions involve other people and
the larger physical world around us, the more unpredictable their outcomes will
be. Huge events, such as wars, for example, generate incomprehensibly huge and
complex consequences, ones far beyond our collective ability to understand.
Given the complexity of their
interaction, it was my objective, therefore, to consider as many of the
variables that affect human history as I possibly could, examining each in
isolation and then attempting to explain its relationships to the others.
Individually, these variables are usually explicable. But the combinations in
which they act are absolutely bewildering, as I believe you will see.
Humans are, I believe, pretty
good at creating realities too complicated for humans to comprehend. I further
contend that the innumerable and multivariate interactions of humans (as an
entire species) with each other and with the rest of the physical reality
around them, over space and time, have created problems that may be too
complicated for humans to extricate themselves from. (I emphasize the word may--I
am not wholly devoid of hope.)
V.
And then, there is the tragic
side of our experience.
All things end; all civilizations
crumble or change beyond recognition; there is nothing permanent, it would
seem, to which to cling with certitude. Death will come for all of us. Nothing
built by humans will ultimately last. These are the inescapable tragedies of
our existence, and they are likely always to be. But there are tragedies more
intimate, more immediate, and more palpable, that have weighed on us since our
genus’s emergence.
I do not want to exaggerate the
difficulties humans have experienced in their centuries on this tiny speck of a
planet. Most lives have their share of laughter, their times of celebration,
their everyday joys and satisfactions. And the point must be made repeatedly: the
vast majority of the human experience has been marked by the routine, the
ordinary, the commonplace, and the unremarkable.
However, we need to ask
ourselves, “has human life been a good experience for most people throughout
our journey from 2.5 million years ago to the present?” As I see it, the answer
must be this: most humans have survived on this planet only with tremendous
difficulty. The lot of humanity has been hardship, to an appalling degree.
Humans, as animals, are subject to physical suffering of all kinds, and our
story has been filled with disease, hunger, frequent pain, disfigurement, and
premature decline. The unluckiest among us are tormented by illnesses, physical
or mental, every single hour of their lives. Most humans have worked or still
work like pack animals every day. Most of their lives are or have been scarred,
at least part of the time, by material deprivation, fear, and uncertainty.
Natural disasters have drowned, sundered, crushed, buried, starved, or burned
countless humans through the ages.
But the most tragic part of our
story has been what we do to each other—and to ourselves. No part of our
history is more difficult for me to deal with than the terrible story of what
we are capable of doing when we deny or ignore the humanity of other people—and
ignore our own humanity as well.
War has been depressingly common
in the history of Homo sapiens.
Despite human attempts to glamorize it or glorify it, it has always been what
it is today—gruesome, horrible, stupid, and destructive of both body and mind,
however necessary it might sometimes be.
Over the last 5,000 years there has scarcely been a time when there was
no major war raging somewhere on this planet, a damning indictment of human
failure. These wars have frequently involved the mass killing of whole civilian
populations, and our ability to slaughter non-combatants has risen to the point
where we now, as a species, possess the means to exterminate ourselves
completely. Mass killing, in fact, is arguably the greatest of all human
skills. And the resources squandered in wars represent perhaps the greatest of
all examples of human waste.
Uncounted humans have been
swallowed up in the grim world of slavery, a world that still exists today,
despite all international efforts to abolish it. Torture, the most terrible and
depraved of all human actions, has a long and hideous history. Both physical and
mental torture are still widely practiced, and governments are still good at
rationalizing it. Prisoners are often kept in the most barbaric of conditions,
and justice for the poorest among us is usually harsh. And ordinary people
everywhere have groaned under the weight of political systems designed to serve
a small handful of power-intoxicated tyrants while treating the lower orders as
expendable sub-humans.
The way many of our species’
children have been treated is further cause for a sense of shame and outrage in
any decent person. Infanticide has a long and terrible history. Small children
have been used for brutally heavy labor throughout human existence. Children
have been physically and mentally abused, sexually assaulted, neglected, and
abandoned so frequently in the story of our species that most of us turn away
from thinking about it, lest we fall into utter despair.
Just as sadly, abuse does not
cease after childhood. Interpersonal violence of all kinds has marked human
life, as individuals have shown themselves capable of the most terrible cruelty
imaginable. Women have often been treated as property and subjected to the most
degrading and humiliating treatment, kept ignorant, and generally denied the
fullness of the human experience. People have cheated one another in every
possible way, have stolen without conscience, have lied to, betrayed, and
deceived each other, and ruined each other’s prospects with such regularity
that we have come to see these actions as simply part of the fabric of life
itself. People in desperate need, who could have easily been helped, have been
allowed to starve, go without shelter, die of treatable illness, or wander the
streets in madness and squalor, victims of malice and indifference.
Humans have participated in
unspeakable horrors based solely on factors such as the victim’s appearance or
religious affiliation. Persecutions, riots, pogroms, massacres, and lynchings
directed against unpopular minorities among us have been so common that we grow
numb reading about them. Even apart from these, there remain prejudice,
bigotry, discrimination, and routine injustice of every kind, often backed by
the power of law or religious custom.
Countless human tragedies have
been brought about by bad judgment, faulty reasoning, incompetence,
misinterpreted information, faulty communications, and plain old garden-variety
stupidity. Humans have misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted, misremembered,
and wrongly estimated virtually everything imaginable. They have sold themselves
to every sort of swindle, grasping at wildly illogical hopes. They have
fervently embraced ludicrous superstitions and held beliefs so absurd one would
have thought no one capable of believing them. They have started terrible
fights over simple misunderstandings, broken off personal relationships of
great emotional value over trivialities, lost contact with loved ones over old
grudges, and generally quite often acted to ruin every chance at personal
happiness that came their way. Family members have tormented, abused, and
emotionally destroyed each other so frequently that we have come to see these
things as “normal” And there are the innumerable small, petty injuries and
insults so many people heap upon non-family members in the course of daily
life, embittering and eroding the lives of all who must endure them.
Humans have, with appalling
frequency, destroyed their own homes, denuded landscapes, fouled bodies of
water, made the air stink with choking pollutants, killed off animals on which
they relied, and made their environments disaster areas. In some ways, it’s
kind of surprising we’re still here, and if we had possessed more advanced
weapons during some of the more savage eras of human history, I doubt that we
would be.
No wonder the study of humanity
has broken so many hearts and caused so many hopes to die. Finding out what our
fellow humans are capable of is, in my view, the point at which any childhood
innocence that might still remain in us vanishes forever.
VI.
At this juncture, you are probably
tempted to interject that humans have frequently, very frequently, acted in
ways the exact opposite of those I have just mentioned. You could argue—and you would be right—that humans have
shown each other countless acts of love, kindness, mercy, considerateness,
compassion, and empathy. You could point to innumerable examples of
self-sacrifice, bravery in the face of terrible evil, and a thousand forms of
everyday heroism. You could point to the good humor in the face of the world so
many have shown. You could argue that the catalogue of human decency overflows
with examples—and it does. You could hold up many, many happy families. And you
could urge us to consider the glorious crown of human creativity in the arts,
as well. All of this needs to be remembered.
There are also the everyday
miracles of forgiveness, reconciliation, repentance, and renewal that occur
again and again and again in the course of human life. These small graces are
just as real as any of our sins, and they do more to keep the human enterprise
going than many of us suspect. In these acts, ties that were severed or damaged
are healed, and new lives are made possible. We need to remember that, too.
Further, there has been some progress in the larger
course of human life. Children, on the whole, are somewhat better off now than
they have ever been, and they are certainly more widely educated than ever.
Women have improved their status in many parts of the world and have now
reached social equality in some areas. Slavery has been greatly reduced; the
more gruesome forms of torture have been made less common; and human rights are
more widely respected now than at any time in history. Health care has made
huge strides, material wealth has spread very widely (albeit unevenly), political
freedom has made genuine gains, scientific and technical knowledge have vastly
expanded, and the majority of humanity is reasonably well fed, although many
still die of malnutrition and diseases related to it. Humans in all parts of
the world have been responsible for these victories, and countless people today
experience a dignity they once could not have imagined.
And yet, this progress has been
achieved only by the most excruciating and exhausting effort, often at the cost
of innumerable lives along the way. We may well ask ourselves: Why has it taken so long to improve things?
Why was it so hard for us to get to where we are? Why have the ancient sins
persisted so stubbornly? And why have our worst instincts and tendencies so
often triumphed over our best ones? Those are good questions to bear in
mind, because there are no guarantees that any of our achievements will be
lasting.
When I look over the broad course
of human history, I see the human species lumbering on through the centuries,
gathering new knowledge and acquiring new skills, and yet still lurching from crisis to crisis,
suffering catastrophic setbacks, and often losing ground that was bought at a
fearful price. Quite frankly, I see no pattern at all in any of this. I have
studied human history for more than 40 years, and I find no great sweeping
cycles in it, I find no instance in which history has “repeated itself”, and I
find no “scientific” principles that would allow us to make predictions about
it. Above all, I see a species that evolved just enough intelligence to survive
and flourish in every region of the planet, but not enough to deal with the
consequences of its own ignorance, malice, and, in all honesty, delusional
thinking. All of our progress is threatened at every moment by these persistent
realities.
VII.
So
what is the root cause of our extraordinary abilities, our conflicts, our achievements, our
confusion, and our inability to understand ourselves and our own motives? The
fundamental fact of human history (and prehistory, for that matter)
as I see it is that some of the species within the primate order began to
evolve consciousness, and in
some of the hominids this proved so biologically useful as a survival mechanism
that its development accelerated almost exponentially. Humans, therefore, had
this amazing capability, one that set them above all other animals. But they didn't realize they had it,
and they didn’t know what it was.
(And in truth, how could they have?) They didn't realize for countless
millennia that what they automatically considered to be reality was actually a version
of reality, that the information pouring into their senses was being
filtered and organized by the most complex organic phenomenon in the known
Universe, our brains. Only now are we beginning to grasp something of the
almost frightening complexity of human consciousness. We still have difficulty
even defining the term consciousness, much less understanding more than a
fraction of its ramifications.
Our consciousness's complexity and intricacy are
the sources of much of our ideology, major components of our psychology, the
origin of our faiths (perhaps), our philosophies, what we believe we understand
about the world, and much (though not all) of our behavior. Since humans do not
fully grasp their own minds, they are less in control of events than they
believe they are. I contend that people do not completely understand their own
motives. I further contend that this poorly understood and inadequately
controlled mental reality accounts for the bizarre, tortuous ways in which
human society has developed and in which human history has unfolded. The
unbelievable complexity of the human world and the daunting problems we face
are exactly what we might have expected from a species whose members are more
at the mercy of randomness than they would like to admit, a species whose
members are inherently incapable of grasping the wholeness of their own
reality, and a species whose members are driven by internal thoughts and
instincts that they cannot fully understand.
So as I see it, human social reality at any given
moment is the sum total of all the consequences of all the incompletely
understood actions of all the humans who have ever acted, combined with the
effects, throughout our time on this planet, of the forces, influences, events,
and unconscious actions of the natural world. This reality has been shaped in
many ways by laws of probability and quantum indeterminacy that are as yet only
partially grasped.
Therefore, I see history as the story of how the
genus Homo has grappled with the nature of consciousness. We have
tended (in general) to assume that we know what we're doing and where we're
going.
We don’t.
VIII.
So I wonder if we can hold this
moment, the eternal present, in our hands. And I want to know a great many
other things as well.
Can we see at least the faint
outlines of that which truly is, or can we see only its reflections?
Can we know our origins …
our place …
our future…
ourselves?
Can we understand that all that has been has made all that
is now?
Can we hope to know, at least in
part, how we have come to be where we are in the story of our time on this
planet?
Can we accept cosmic anonymity, irrelevance, and
insignificance?
Can we bear the possibility that we are orphans in the
Universe?
Can we reconcile ourselves to the
life we must live, a life where we
cannot be certain, and yet must act?
Since I cannot be you, and you
cannot be me, can we ever really know each other’s meaning?
Even now, at this very instant,
are you and I in contact?
Can we look into the infinity of
mirrors that is the self contemplating the self, and not be overwhelmed by it?
Is there a self at all, or is there only a continuous stream
of feeling and thought?
And finally, can we say that
which cannot be said, see what is hidden from our sight, and capture that which
recedes inexorably away from us?
We are locked in the cage of
humanity until the end of our time. Reality is forever out of our grasp.
And yet, I stretch out my hands anyway. I can do nothing
else.