They are the descendants of the
utter simplicity with which their reality began. They are the products of the
first patterns of organization, the first interrelationships of matter and
energy, and the nucleosynthesis that was born in raging stellar furnaces. They
came down from the first metabolic processes, the first chemical tests of
reproductive success, the mindless chains of amino acids that gave rise to
proteins, and the primitive, pre-RNA world. They were born of the remorseless
Law of Whatever Works, as free-floating bits of nucleic acid were pitted in a
ceaseless death match with each other. They are the inheritors of cells with
membranes, and then clusters of cells, and then, after inconceivable lengths of
time, of undulating organisms in prehistoric seas, organisms that were rewarded
or killed off in a blind contest of sheer survival. They are the offspring of
the vertebrate fish, the first gill and lung possessing animals that had pulled
themselves onto shore, the synapsids who had become warm-blooded, the first
ones who had given birth to live young, and the terrified, hairy animals who
fled into the trees, perhaps to escape the ceaseless carnage on the ground, or
simply to pursue food.
Their kind was honed, sharpened,
and shaped in the terrifying environment of the world a hundred feet above the
Earth’s surface, a world where being able to grasp objects with the end of
one’s appendages, see dangers in color, perceive depth, and react quickly were
the difference between being able to pass on these abilities and unmourned
death. Their direct ancestors were forced to live once again at ground level,
staggeringly different from those of their forebears that had initially escaped
to the trees. They could stand upright. They could manipulate objects better
than any other animal on the planet, the legacy of hands that had developed to
defy gravity’s death pull. And in their heads was a mass of energy-matter that
allowed them to see the world as a place of objects and causes and effects.
They were more able to survive in the brutal, dangerous world of the savannah
than their less gifted relatives scrounging the plains for food. They were the
most intellectually advanced animals on the planet, but animals nonetheless. It
was why they had to breathe, why they thirsted, why they hungered, why they
felt pain, why they experienced pleasure, why they fought or ran away from
danger, why they craved sex, and why they moved.
The world they lived on was an insignificant
dust mote, orbiting in space around an utterly ordinary star, a star burning
its resources in one of hundreds of billions of aggregations of stars of
various sizes, in a physical reality so immense that their own little world
practically vanished in comparison to it. The story of how they had come to be
standing on that dust mote had taken the equivalent of almost 14 billion
rotations of their tiny planet around their somewhat less tiny star. Their
world had gone through vast upheavals, where the very continents themselves had
split, clashed, been partially submerged, and pushed up against each other in a
continuous, slow-motion, unconscious war. Life forms had come and gone in
incomprehensible varieties and numbers. Objects from outer space had crashed
and raised havoc, temperatures had fluctuated wildly, deserts had receded and
advanced, forests had flourished and been wiped out, rains had been torrential
and then absent, and sheets of ice had rudely shoved their way through the
landscape and then melted away repeatedly. The upright animals had come on to
the scene in only the last moments of this epic temporal journey. Their bodies
had emerged from and conformed to the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry,
and the laws of biology in succession.
They were fully the product of the natural world, and an integral part of it.
The energy-matter in their heads was there to help them survive long enough to
reproduce, and it played ceaseless tricks on them, hiding as much as it
revealed. And how much did these little upright animals, standing on the east
African plain in small, mutually-protecting clusters, know about all this? How
much of their own place and their own story did they comprehend?
Absolutely none of it. None of it
whatsoever.
They were left entirely to their
own devices to figure out the world around them, and it could not have been any other way. They learned how to take
and shape objects from the environment to do work their bodies couldn’t do
unaided. They stuck together in the frightening world of predators, defending
each other and learning the refined ways of violence. They reveled in the kill
of game, and did the ordinary, back-breaking work of gathering plant food. They
set up rules to govern the group, and punished those who broke them with death
or exile. They fought with or made allies of other wandering groups. They
learned to use sounds to convey messages to each other, and they learned to
imitate the animals, especially the birds and their enchanting songs. They made
babies and watched most of them die. Countless centuries of wandering and
fighting for survival made their habits of life bone-deep. One group of them
eventually became the genetic ancestors of all who would follow, and their
descendants made the epic journey across the seemingly endless landscape,
suffering and surviving in dramas that were forever to be unknown in all but
the broadest sense. (Did they grapple with or intermingle with other, vanished
types?) Their bodies and the minds that
were part of those bodies were devoted overwhelmingly to the tasks of trying to
get by from one day to the next.
But sometimes, around the
campfires at night, they wondered aloud about the amazing world in which they
lived, conjuring stories as the sparks flew upward into the darkened sky. Some
of them wanted to know where their people had come from. Others asked how the
world itself had come to be. Still others speculated about the mysterious world
that jumped into being only during sleep, or the strange sights and feelings that
came into view when certain kinds of plants were eaten. There seemed to be someone else living inside of them,
someone watching more than participating. And there seemed to be something that existed beyond their
sight, a world of phantoms and powers and beings that exercised tremendous
influence on the world of sight, sound, and feeling. The impulse behind their questions was
powerful and deep—the need for an explanation
of why things were. The people who were inquiring into these mysteries
possessed the ability to construct narratives and an unconscious propensity to
see causation and pattern where none existed. Many of them also craved certitude; they wanted answers to their
questions, answers that were definite in every sense, answers upon which they
could build their beliefs about the world.
And so, as their languages grew
and evolved and their powers of narrative deepened, they wove elaborate stories
of creation. They constructed ideas about the role and nature of the animals
and the other objects around them. They devised stories to explain the workings
of the mysterious spirit world that seemed to pervade physical reality, and
they came up with ways of trying to influence this unseen world through the
construction of altars, the painting or drawing of pictures, the creation of
chants and songs, deep meditation, and various rituals which would allow them
to enter its portals. And explanations flooded out of them, at least out of
those who had the time and energy to devote to thinking about such things:
The stars are just beyond our reach and are appreciably closer if one
climbs a tall mountain.
The night sky is where the gods live. It is perfect there.
The vault of heaven rotates around us, as does, of course, the Sun.
People get sick or go crazy because they are being attacked by unseen
beings.
Illness can be cured by chanting sacred words.
The night is filled with demons, monsters, and all manner of vile,
dangerous spirits.
The earth is a disk that is supported on the back of a huge animal, and
the ocean surrounds the disk on its edges.
It is necessary to sacrifice things to the gods to guarantee a good
harvest.
The world is exactly the way it
looks.
And so on. Since they had moved
to every corner of the Earth, and had adapted to every kind of environment,
they had devised countless individual ways of life, what those who came much
later called cultures. Every culture had its own explanations and used its own
symbols to express them. But no matter what culture had generated them, these
explanations all had something in common:
They were wrong. Every single one
of them. We can’t fault our ancestors for this, because they were
trying to figure everything out “from scratch”, and we would have done no
better were we in their place. But the overwhelming falsehood of all their
ideas of ultimate (not proximate) causation remains notwithstanding. The people
who had constructed them were very good at the practical arts of everyday
survival, and they passed their skills on with surprising effectiveness. They
knew how to kill and process animals and utilize their flesh in a dozen
different ways. They devised increasingly varied and sophisticated tools. They
learned how to build more and more elaborate structures. They devised complex
rules of conduct to govern themselves, and began the first large established
ways of accomplishing big tasks, institutions. They tamed the wolf-like animals
that had appeared at the edge of their camps, and soon learned to tame other
animals. They eventually learned how to make plants grow where and when the planters
desired. They found a method of storing information outside of their heads—writing—
when they learned too many things to remember. They learned first to count, and
then to measure, and then to calculate. Hierarchies arose, and true governments
were their outcomes. They forged weapons and organized groups of the strongest
men into packs of warriors. Some ventured out on the sea and discovered
previously unknown regions of the world and their strange inhabitants. They
traded with others, fought with others, and formulated ideas about everyday
life. Some began to compose and write down stories about the world. In some
places true cities were built, and new divisions of labor arose that no one
could have predicted. All of these practical arts and achievements were
undeniably impressive, especially when measured by the standards of their
ancestors, some of whom had kept the same technologies for hundreds of
thousands of years.
But their ideas about the nature
of the world itself remained just as erroneous and confused as ever. And life
in organized societies and cultures had caused other ideas to arise in their
minds. Some of these ideas had been taught to them by bitter experience. Others
came to be seen as “natural” simply through custom and long tradition. Some of
these ideas were:
The way we do things is both normal and right.
Other people must be viewed with suspicion. The world is us vs. them.
Those who look different from us or who speak differently than we do are
less than we are.
Our gods are the best gods (even though we might borrow gods from
others sometimes).
Men should govern, because women are weaker and therefore lesser than
they.
It is right that those who violate the rules should be tortured.
And there were errors that arose
simply because they didn’t understand the nature of their own senses, the
fallibility of memory, the way emotion inevitably colors judgment, errors of
perception, the prevalence of misjudgments, the power of sexuality, the dark origins
of hatred and violence, the limitations and errors inherent in language, the
extent to which they were ruled by their fears and hopes, and the most
important error of all: the failure to
understand that their brains were presenting a picture of reality that was not
“objective” in the ultimate sense. (In truth, how could they have known
such things?) Add to this their unique understanding of the inevitability of
physical death, and the fervent hope that death was not the end of the
individual ego’s existence, and it is little wonder they constructed systems of
ideas so utterly at odds with what seems to be reality now.
Most of them thought they were in
a category apart from the animals, failing to see that they themselves were animals. They thought (naturally
enough, in light of its size compared to their own bodies) that the Earth they
lived on was immense. They (naturally, again) came to see the Earth and
themselves as the center of all that existed. Their great faiths came into
being during the period when these ideas were at their height. And when these
same faiths promised that they, ordinary flesh-and-blood mortals, could live
forever in bliss (or suffer eternally for wrongdoing), their sense of their own
importance skyrocketed. God or the gods or the Universe cared about them
specifically and personally. The conscious
inhabitants of the little planet were engaged in a great cosmic drama
with the Divine, however the term “divine” was understood. Their conduct and
their beliefs were of supreme importance to the Divine. They mattered in the scheme of things.
In short, in my view, much
of our historic inability to understand
the reality of which we are a part is rooted in psychological gaps, gaps that
first manifested themselves in the thinking and expression of our ancestors.
There was the gap between what they thought
they were and what they really were.
The gap between how they believed
they had come to be and how they had actually
come to be. Their desired place in
reality as opposed to their true
place in it. The world and the Universe as they seemed to be as opposed to how they actually were. The reality they thought
was real as opposed to the reality that was beyond their grasp.
Our pre-modern ancestors
accumulated an enormous store of practical knowledge about the world and how to
survive in it. But their understanding of why
the world worked the way it did was unbelievably inaccurate, as was their
understanding of the nature of physical reality itself. Not just some, but ALL
of their ideas about the world’s origins, physical composition, mechanical
workings, and place in reality were utterly, totally, completely, absolutely
false. This could hardly have been otherwise, for they had been handed an
all-but-impossible task: figure out reality entirely on their own. I do not
fault them for getting everything wrong. But I do fault them for thinking they were in possession of answers they
didn’t actually have.
They saw the effects; they did
not see the causes. They attempted to make inferences about the causes based on
their woefully incomplete knowledge, and it led
them astray. They did not understand what they thought they understood.
Only in the last few hundred years did some of them begin to understand something
about reality as it actually is in the human frame of reference.
And we are their inheritors.
