WHAT COMES NEXT?

“Recovering evangelicals” who have been oppressed and bamboozled in the name of God (not Jesus, because why fool around with the Son when you could just as easily deal with the Father — He’s the dangerous one.) and who have joined the secular A-theists who cannot give up their attacks on the God they no longer believe in, will mock the Bible talk about sheep. They don’t talk about holocaust sacrifices in which the whole animal is burned on an altar. Instead, they go to the weak Son and make fun of his shepherd’s crook, nightgown, and soulful face.

This is as much about sheep and God as it was when they were telling the stories and singing the songs. (And putting their tithe in the plate.) They don’t dig under the surface to see what the dynamics were that had them so captivated. I suggest that aside from the family trope (which is at the heart of all three Abrahamic religions, based on three cousins) the main struggle of the area was to come to terms with the end of hunter/gatherer society and beginning of domestication. Crops, animals and people were all being domesticated.

The markers are confinement (keeping the sheep in pens and the cows in barns), ownership (taxation rolls, surveyed land, certificates for marriage, birth and death), identification, which was a lot easier when everyone knew everyone, and staying in one location. A kind of wary hospitality of unknown travelers was practiced on the principle that it’s better to keep them where you can watch them and obligate them with food and shelter. (Sharing daughters? We’re thinking about it.)

The fact of everyone being close together, even in regular contact sharing space, meant that this was the beginning of a series of species-jumping diseases. Measles, smallpox, tuberculosis — there are over 200 of various kinds: bacteria, virus, fungi, parasites. This is a triangle: people, vertebrates, and ecology. All three must be present in mutual relationship in order to shape domestic zoonoses, but new carriers of infection mean a tumbling of relationships and contagions. This is most true of humans. So drought, erosion and hunger made cracks for zoonoses to occupy, just like today.

Animals are kept domestic by certain strategies. The most obvious is confinement or tethering. The second is the identification of individual animals or classes of animals by tattooing, painting, attaching ID, slashing ears, branding, and implanting microchips. This information is used to keep track of the animals at all times. One of the dangers of admitting we are animals is acquiring these markers ourselves. Of course, we already mark ourselves.

The next step, which rests on identification and ownership, is commodification, which includes permission to kill, perhaps for their meat or hides. That was the whole purpose of some domestic animals. Commodification is the entry into industrial relationships, making machines out of living beings and herding them into warehouses. In times of war, men are commodified.

Now go to the problem of feral boys, thrown out by the families, escaping from family abuse, or produced by households that are shifting, drug-addled, migrating, and secret. Feral means they were domestic once, but escaped and went wild. We have whole populations like that, not necessarily boys. But the easiest way for boys to make money is sex and drugs — or interstitial messengers or guides or pizza deliverers who aren’t carrying pizza, or other uses not under the control of institutions and authorities, not even mafia.

What they are best at being is vectors, whether they are carrying memes (style, language, accoutrements like skateboards and smart phones or certain shoes) or any of the diseases of the domesticated. Part of the bargain for domestication is medical treatment. Part is education. Part is religion. At present all three are questioned because they are in disarray and therefore don’t really work that well.

Institutions have lost touch with reality and fallen into bad old habits and beliefs that are no longer true or worthy. If the feral take advantage of the breakdown of the industrial world — including their institutions and infrastructures — then the time will have come to create a new and more effective culture, NOT human based but ecology based.

We should think about that. What comes AFTER domestication AND feral? Because no one wants to go back.

It will be like smart phones in Africa. A whole new dimension of relationships.