The Modern Era 3
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 01.3
Ethnological Humanism
The new reality is that Humanity is now more globally interconnected then it ever was— online and in the material world — and it is becoming aware that cooperation is the only key to survival, in face of the unprecedented challenges that threaten our species and the planet as a whole. Both the archaic eschatologies of the African tribes and the modern ones formulated at the MIT must address the same pressing issues, issues of a magnitude that recalls those events that preceded the appearance of homo sapiens, those critical moments in the evolutionary development during which, between a cataclysm and the other, life’s adapting genius emerged and thrived beyond any unforeseen circumstance.
There’s a great lesson to be learned from the tree of life,
I mean in those ramifications where the original èlan vital was able to sustain itself, at times succumbing and at times exploring new possibilities, up until the crossroad at which our species was formed. Humanity these days is navigating from planet to planet, but its feet remain clay-like and fragile.
If we just glance at the future, the question we face is if we’ll have enough water to drink, air to breath, land to grow food.
Everything that was given as implicit in our western Weltgeschichte turned out being contingent and we know now that we won’t have if we didn’t want it, and we won’t have wanted it enough if we won’t accept, as a basis for this new humanism, a biological solidarity with all living beings.
By overlapping with the organic, the ethical necessity doesn’t die, but rediscovers its profound meaning that, despite all spiritualisms, is the custody of the fire of life on this planet and, despite all materialisms, reveals the priority of human choices on the natural processes.
This radical viewpoint shift inaugurates what Ernesto De Martino would call “the difficult path of modern humanism”, and that we could call, fashionably, the path of post-modern humanism or even, revealingly, the path of ethnological humanism.
The symptoms of this emerging humanism were noticed by De Martino already a few decades ago, not only within the growing interest into ethnographic research — true redeeming effort of modern culture — but also in the reflections that non-western cultures shine on the European one, easily detectable in the “realization of the importance, even for the West today, of the archaic, the mythological, the subconscious, not quite as a primitive phase on the progressive and triumphant path of a positivistic history-line, but else as a permanent anthropological dimension that the West had prematurely repressed”. Following De Martino’s text, we could say that this new ethnological humanism, contrary to the philological and literary ones that would hold as example the classical symbolisms, finds its own direction towards “the challenges of the culturally alien”, feels “outraged in front of the systematic exploitation of the other humanities”, “guilty in front of its ‘enslaved brothers’ and of the repression of the indigenous cultures around the earth”, and (De Martino is referring directly to the ethnographers) “by accepting a mutual exchange with different living communities, exposes itself to the deliberate mocking of the dearest cultural traditions;
those who cannot tolerate this mocking and are not able to transform it into a constructively conscious self-examination” won’t participate to this new season of humanity, where “all our cultural heritage, the world we were born and grown in, is questioned”.
It’s precisely this new humanistic ethos that allows us to examine, with the necessary intellectual mood, the question we asked since the very beginning: what are the causes that triggered the crisis of modernity? And what are the likely developments of such a crisis?
The original sin
From the ethnological history’s perspective, the modern era is the last phase of that revolution — arguably the most important of the ones achieved by humanity — that marked the passage from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, around 10,000 years ago, in that portion of land that goes from Greece to Iran. It was back then, that for the first time in its history, mankind managed to become autonomous from mother nature, by undertaking, by his own will, the cultivation of the agri (fields), the domestication of plants and animals and, gradually abandoning his previous nomadic lifestyle, organized a sedentary living by building villages and cities. It was back then, in that long period that preceded proper history, that was born the anthropological model that developed in the following millennia into what we call civilization, a model that today appears destined to a mutation.
It was such a step forward in lifestyle of homo sapiens not because its novelty, reason, had completely replaced aggressiveness, but since aggressiveness started to be regulated by a ‘social pact’, hence by rules of reason, in the perspective of a collective project. The founding principle of that project was the domination of mankind over nature (the ecological disequilibrium started then), of males over females, of man over other men, of a class over another, of a city over another, until the creation of the ancient empires and the modern national states.
The typical expression of our original civilization was war, the organization of collective aggressiveness whose objective was to rule or vanquish the ‘other’.
The cultural elements that constitute the biblical myth of the ‘original sin’ indeed reflect this phase of the Neolithic revolution during which man aspired to be venerated as a divinity by other men.
Nothing is more helpful to understand the premises of the present crisis than to expose this monstrous cultural model that transmitted itself generation after generation, acquiring the sacrality of a natural law. In fact, nothing in man is merely natural, everything, even his physical appearance, is influenced by the adaptive and inter-relational processes between species and environment, and, within the species, between the groups and individuals around which the life of the species evolved. The bio-psychic structures inherited by homo sapiens had been developing for millions of years, during which survival was left to the chances and challenges of natural selection, and hence were mostly revolving around competitiveness, by the ruling of the strong over the weak. The impulse of imposing oneself until the annihilation of the other is, in man, a residual of the pre-human, whose symptom is, still today, the substitution of physical might over reason as a strategy to end any conflict of interests.
The Neolithic revolution was then, in conclusion, this amazing combination between destructive aggressiveness and rationality, a combination to whom the first cities stand as a monument. For the Neolithic cities, as proven by the archeological findings, the cohesion between the citizens was granted by a sacralized power whose absolute authority, at least within the walls, required complete obedience.
And yet mankind always dreamed of a city without walls.
Closely intertwined with the impulse of self-affirmation, main cause of its aggressiveness, was the opposed impulse that seeked other ways to manage human relationships: the way of recognizing the other as a necessary step in one’s self-development, of sympathy as a much more effective cohesive principle that the fear of power. Even if war was the main ethical expression of the ancients cities, never, not even during a war, was completely missing that other principle in which was manifested that new quality that had distinguished homo sapiens from the rest of the animal world.
Using freudian terminology, we can say that our entire civilization was the product of two opposing principles, to the point that we can look at history as a long sequel of massacres or as a continuous dilatation of empathy from the borders of a tribe to those of a city, then to those of a nation and finally, to those of the planet.
To regulate the dynamic succession of the two principles was the supreme imperative of the species, that of the custody and development of life.
There where the necessity of fear becomes obsolete, empathy grows and takes it place. The nature of man is plastic, flexible, contingent to the historical moment because adaptable to every mutation required by its supreme motive. Darwin himself, projecting to the future the results of his research on the origin of man, would write, in 1871:
“as man evolves culturally and small tribes join larger communities, the simplest considerations suggest to the individual to extend its own instincts and social sympathies to every man of every nation, even when it doesn’t know them personally. Once reached this stage, only an artificial border prevents man to extend his sympathies to every man of every nation and every race”.
The artificial borders
Since 1945, when humanity realized that the tools available to carry out her old aggressive instincts had the potential of destroying her altogether, the artificial borders went crumbling, decade after decade.
The psychic and physical structures of antagonism, after peaking to the planetary dimensions of the cold war and after pushing the productive competition to the brink of ecological disaster revealed to be not functional anymore to the evolution of the species.
It’s significant to remember what US President Ronald Reagan recalls of his encounter with Gorbaciov in Geneva, in 1985. While sitting next to the fireplace, he told the rival leader: “We are both sons of humble families, of simple farmers, and we have the choice of saving or annihilating humanity. As a president I carry nothing in my pockets, not even wallet and keys, but I have one card with the cyphered code to trigger the holocaust. I know that in a nuclear war against you, we would win, but I also know more than 150 million Americans would die and that would mean the end, if not of history, of civilization”. Here you got a prosaic yet honest way to explain the present paradox within a law that once made history. The disarming process started with mutual agreements and hints to a future ‘Gerico city’ with no walls nor fortifications. All the international peace congresses trying, one after the other, to tackle the pressing issues of the sustainability of the planet and of the need of finding new relationships between technology and environment, confirm us it’s finally the time for homo sapiens to comply with what had been preparing for a long time in the depths of its psiche:
the transition from antagonism to empathy as the main drive of survival.
Odysseus’ myth is fading, melancholically, on the bottom of our imagination.
The humanity of the future will hold a virtue that we used to consider a primitive trait: conscience, and respect of the limits.
The illusion of unlimited domination, emerged in the Neolithic villages, is dissolving at the other end of its evolutionary line, when mankind reached, after a long technological progress, the sanctuary of atomic energy.
We are able to date with absolute precision that moment we lived — what a coincidence — with reference to Cristopher Columbus. It was 4 pm of December the 2nd, 1942, in a gymnasium somewhere in Chicago. Enrico Fermi and his team were sitting since 9:45 am around the great reactor from which were extracted, at the set times, the cadmium bars. At one point Fermi said, simply: “now it’s working”. The reactor was autonomously producing energy. Not a lot, just what it took to switch on a light bulb, but the chain reaction was working. The proof of the theory was abducted. The gym erupted in a cry of joy. It was a big moment. If there hadn’t been the war, the announcement would have spread sensationally around the world and the next day it would have made the first pages of every newspaper: a peak was conquered, a dream had become reality. Mankind had freed the energy of the atom and at the same time it could control it. But the world couldn’t know. The event was the best hidden secret in America. It was the key step towards the bomb. Arthur Compton (Managing Director of the Lab), witness of the première, went on the phone and called James Conant in Washington DC, head coordinator of Project Manhattan. He said: “The Italian sailor landed at this moment in the new world”. It was the agreed code word. Inside the indoor tennis court, Eugene Wigner took out a flask of Chianti, a rarity in those years of war. Fermi poured it in paper glasses, and they cheered. Only Szilard, the prophet, wouldn’t laugh. “This is an unlucky day in history, he said, shaking Fermi’s hand”.
Lucky or unlucky? Even if in 1983 the catholic bishops in the USA called for their country to feel a “profound contempt for the nuclear bombing of 1945”, the western conscience appears to have metabolized that crime under the excuse of the painful necessities of history. The dilemma, anyway, is still open, and will be overcome only when, as hoped by Einstein, humanity will be able to change its ‘way of thinking’, at his time still too attached to th eideology of domination. It is a change driven not by abstract logic but by the same nature of atomic energy. Indeed, we cannot define it in the order of the tools, since it is instead in the order of the causes. “We can’t talk anymore, wrote in those years Teilhard de Chardin, of a simple manipulation of something that already existed, readily available in the material world. This time we are witness of a door that has been definitively forced open, an access to another compartment, once considered inviolable, of the universe. Man would play with matter. Now he managed to get hold of the wheel that drives the genesis of such matter”. If to get hold of that wheel is the man inspired by the culture of competition, mankind how we still see today, the atom, even the so called ‘atom for peace’, as Chernobyl reminded us, brings with it the risk of a definitive disappearance of human life from the planet.
May humanity change?
It’s upon this threshold that we must get the mutation going.
If at the wheel of the atomic spaceship is an aggressive mankind, these are the last years for our species.
But can humanity change? Become the creator of its rebirth?
We can, since, if we look at the history of our species without focusing only on the last 10k years, we see how adapting to cyclical change is life’s natural talent .
If instead of exhausting our eyes on the relatively recent texts (23 centuries) from Aristotle we would consult as a reference the anthropological and biological research on our species, we would learn useful lessons on this issue. I’m going to report a most suggestive one.
We wouldn’t be here, today, on this planet, to discuss the future of our civilization if about 7 million years ago a huge earthquake hadn’t shooked Africa and produced the Rift Valley, that tectonical system extending from Lake Tanganyika over to the Dead Sea. The hominid line diverged from the primates that remained on the rainy west side of the rift only because their descendants on the east, and that’s us, “had to adapt to a drier environmental condition without trees. Hominids, at first Australopithecus and later homo habilis, gradually evolved a standing posture and their brain started to get bigger”. Homo habilis is the progenitor of homo erectus, in turn ancestor of homo sapiens.
Figuratively, in the 40-year span that goes from Hiroshima to Chernobyl, a Rift Valley was created: we find ourselves on this side of the channel, and if we’ll respond to the same drives that once inspired the new creative edge of the East-African hominids, we’ll succeed in getting rid of the excess of destructive aggressiveness that characterized our past.
Our old structure is not suitable anymore to take on the new challenges we are facing. Even scientific biology confirms that while we are 99% genetically alike to the chimps and bonobos, only a 1% difference holds the potential for all the transformations that made us what we are today. By now, willing or not, the evolutionary future of a large share of life on Earth is in our hands, brains and hearts.
But I repeat the question, can humanity really change in time? From a long history of biological mutations can we deduce the possibility of a psychic one so deep and so fast? I’d like once again to refer to the opinion of an expert not inclined to utopistic extravaganzas, as Sigmund Freud. In the correspondence with Albert Einstein dating 1932, 13 years before the nuclear breakthrough, he deals with the prospect of our coming psychic mutation. Einstein asked: “Is there a chance to steer the psychological evolution of humanity so that we become resistant to the psychosis of hate and violence?”. We recall that Freud, after the brutal experience of WWI, had upgraded his views from an unilateral libido-driven psychic arrangement “beyond the pleasure principle” to a twofold dynamics between two opposing impulses, love and death, eros and thanatos. Freud finally admits the possibility of a psychological mutation. Due to the developments of weapons of mass destruction, he foresees 13 years before Hiroshima, war will increasingly imply the extermination of both contenders. If this is true, the two main functional drives of civilization, the reinforcement of intellectual means and the interiorization of aggressiveness, could eventually find in the mutated nature of armed conflicts the case for a radical transformation of the subconscious dialectic between love and death towards a structural subordination of the destructive force to the unifying one.
The thesis I’m advancing is precisely this.
This psychological metamorphosis is already in act.
And we cannot expect it to complete over some million-year span, as the past ones.
This time, thanks to the current technological acceleration and to the unsustainable ecological situation it created, our transition will have to realize itself in a couple of generations.
