(A rambling dissertation on origins and religions with a subscriber.)
Monica, here are my rambling responses as I read your essay:
As an alternative to religion of a cosmological origin, may I refer you to a rather erudite thesis, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” by Julian Jaynes. He says that when the Iliad mentions that Achilles goes to battle after being roused by a god, that god is the primitive part of a human organ of cognition which we now call consciousness. It manifested itself as a voice of authority in the head. All authors in that time period reported similar things, things we now suspect were literary devices. No, says Jaynes, they were literal description of what people experienced before humans evolved modern consciousness. The remnant of this “god in the head” is a religious organ. In this reading, the cosmogeny is what you psychologists call “scripting”. I go for that.
I credit myths, particularly cosmogeny myths, as very useful codifications of culture, useful in the sense of providing, at once, a source of awe and a sense of belonging. When your cultural parent tells you are descended from a god, through divine means, to carry out a higher task here on Earth, you are put into a spiritual orbit. That exalted state is important. It delivers perspective, opens up the seventh chakra, relieves you of petty concerns. If I could find an honest way of delivering that kind of myth, but with the objective backing of scientific evidence, I would have the lever to move the world.
Before I can accept your thesis, “globalization is a historical-evolutionary inevitability”, I have to lose some baggage: globalization does not necessarily mean the loss of ethnic cultures, and it does not imply coercion from a massive central authority, because if it does, it’s evil. Without liberty and choice and a stake in the outcomes of things in our lives, we might as well be ants. Evolution follows the successful proliferation of life with speciation. Always! The successful life forms diversify and compete for selective advantage. So must it be with cultures.
Predation is not the top rung of this ladder. Generality may be. That’s why there are far more beetle species than bird species. Predators are limited to small fractions of their prey, numerically. Humans are not true predators in that sense. Humans compete, not as predators, but as a social hierarchy amongst ourselves. As omnivores, we have no predator/prey relationship to be preserved. The very lack of such a balance is one of our problems.
The persistence of inappropriate predatory survival mechanisms among humans is not really a main theme of our makeup, in my opinion. I perceive our main theme as our ability to cooperate towards intangible goals, and to cooperate in limitless numbers. Our history is the building, through trial and error mostly, of tribes, villages, city-states, nations and empires. You assume this process will continue toward globalization. I tend to agree, but perhaps only when this globe is but one component of a larger system will it happen. That means we are driven to get off this globe. Like a flower that must eventually go to seed, our planet will force us to spore off, perhaps after sacrificing a great deal of its resources to the process of reproduction. Or, we will simply die off, a new spacefaring species will arise and Gaia will try again. How’s that for a cosmogeny myth?
Have you ever actually hunted for food? I have, and so has my spouse. I can tell you that no hunter, and certainly no successful hunting society, acts anything like despoilers. No one is more concerned with preserving the environment than a hunter. A hunter-gatherer society does not want to ruin the game preserve, wiping out the source of their food supply. The despoiling we see is not hunting, but commercial exploitation. The idea that an agent of a non-hunting, non-exploring culture will ransack remote areas for wealth and the related social status is anathema to a hunter. The very idea of killing a rhino for its horn, or capturing porpoises for an entertainment consortium, is a desecration.
The invention of farming was responsible for the three bases of civilization:
For the first time, a minority group of rather unspecialized people could provide sufficient food for the masses.
The rulers, released from incessant need and with excess people and resources, could build cities and monuments.
Architects, warriors of various kinds, administrators and artisans arose to provide the infrastructure of cities and empires.
Bounded property was the province of kings. The words “real estate” are etymologically derived from the same root as “royal” and “state”, meaning property of the king. In fact, old titles are still traced routinely back to king’s grants. These grants were lands derived from the fruits of the invention of farming, described above.
Contention over land, and the slippery grasp of authority by traditional kings, led to greater consolidation of the power of a craftier few. Whether it was pure rapacity, as in the case of the early Chinese warlords, or attrition, as in the case of some old colonial powers, or contrivance backed by threat of force, as in most modern treaties, power aggregates territory. The form that government took was shaped in the short term by the possession of the reins of power, but the slippery grasp of the power holders in the face of constant and increasingly creative challenges to that power eventually led to many compromises. Those compromises survive: nepotism, bribery, taxation, terror, and more recently, co-opting, alliance, and that peculiar form, democracy, in which everybody stands to be bribed and co-opted, but with a stamp of approval called “elections”.
Perhaps we are both cynical, but about different things. I don’t think the tiny scurrying mammals that hid under the massive feet of the dinosaurs, those pre-Jurassic primates the size of mice, were any pinnacle of predation. We haven’t been around as weapon-wielders long enough to assume that title. We may be apex competitors, but we are not nearly at the level of Eocene or even Cenozoic predators.
“The unequal distribution of wealth” is an interesting catch-phrase. If interpreted as a statement about the statistics of human prosperity, it is undeniable. However, the word “distribution” smacks of a process, and the implication is that this process somehow went awry. But who is responsible for this distribution, on what basis, and for what motivations? These are suddenly our central concerns. For the bulk of our history we know nothing about such distributions. We could see only a tiny local slice of humanity. Our concern was for our relative position in that slice, and we cared nothing for the starving millions elsewhere. Now we have several ideas about just how prosperity should be, well, honestly, the word should not be “distributed”. We have a crop of ideas about how prosperity should be RE-distributed. We imply that there is an ultimate shortage, that we are all victims of some global zero-sum game, and that RE-distribution will make things better.
But is it really true? What if there is NO WAY to make a fair distribution of prosperity? What if the notion of prosperity is so relative to social position that it CANNOT be equitably distributed, simply because we all can’t be chiefs — there has to be more indians. Then we have to deal with a more tenable concept — sufficiency. That brings us to consider the portion of food, water, clothing and shelter needed to sustain a minimal existence. Of course, if we re-distribute Everything, and if everyone is indeed equal in the basics, there is no incentive to work harder, to strive, to gain more. There Is no more!
OK, back off a bit. Leave some slack. Let the mass of people have somewhat less so that a pool can be left for those who desire to strive for it. The strivers will gain more prosperity. They will establish a social hierarchy a rank above the masses. Strivers will get better looking women, they will eat better and be healthier. Oops, we are back where we started, looking at re-distribution again.
I propose that the proposers of re-distribution, the ones that shriek about fairness and all, are simply purveying a massive con, a shell game that no one can win. Except, of course, the con artists themselves. The only answers to this issue of the unequal distribution of wealth are an occasional tree pruning when the top branches grow too high, an attempt to keep the tree rather bushy, not twiggy. Or, alternatively, some manner of revolution, where the have-nots gather, find a cause and a means, and throw down the haves. History showcases both methods.
Monica, when you get to media/education/religion, I think you are approaching an interesting vision. Your tripod is really a multi-modal network, no longer a hierarchy. A professor is at the top of her hierarchy, while a soldier is measured by an entirely different standard. We no longer have a single hierarchy. Perhaps we have interleaved hierarchies of various kinds. But this cannot be true. A warrior-priest, owning a great, finned Cadillac with a row of small VW bumper stickers, each X-ed out, is actually driving around L.A. Many powerful Catholic priests and Jewish Rabbis are great scholars. The shape of the social structure cannot be interleaved hierarchies, it’s too messy for that. Let’s call it a network.
In a network you still have topology. The nodes with large numbers of connections have more influence. Nodes that have large numbers of large nodes connected to them have great influence. That is the actuality of power today — a tangled multi-modal set of connections and standards that is anything but feudal. The only way you can determine that a particular government official is of higher rank than a well-known economist or a Marine Corp Captain is by … well, there is no way. The guy who was on top yesterday turns out to be Angela Merckle today. And who is George W. Bush? I can’t remember.
More when I can get the time to finish your opus.
Kenn Brody
Author, physicicst
Broken Symmetry Publishing
