Is humankind going into reverse?
Imaginarium — Myriam Fraga
Between vomit faeces between desperate silences
bleeding between impossible syllables gnawing at the
throat between the seen and the named we constructed
the world
in polished stone
in splintered stone
in silica
in the womb
of the goddess
in callipygian tenderness
of a curvaceous stone.
OK I admit I had to look up “callipygian” which seems to mean having well-formed shapely buttocks. Which all goes to show that you can be passionately interested in something without even knowing what it is called. And although I have a colleague whose callipygian characteristics are quite superb, I haven’t told her of my views. In the era of #metoo I can add that my colleague’s finest features are her spirituality and loyalty.
I can’t resist what the Urban dictionary contributes while we speak of buttocks:
dude 1 — yo, you see dat fine ass bitch ova deah? dude 2 — yeah, man. i would uze da woid callipygian to describe dat shit, yaknowwhatimsayin
I want to speak rather about the way we construct the world between vomit faeces, also not something I often say. The case that I grew up on so to speak was Darwinian evolution, how the very Victorian views of economic competition got projected into Darwin’s theories of evolution, and then the theories of evolution, obviously deeply scientific, were projected back into really bad economic theory. That is the way we construct our world. My mental image of this is the patterned flock wallpaper that made its way from Victorian dining rooms to the poshest of restaurants in India under empire and then back to England as being authentic curry décor. I hate the Darwinian error too.
One dimension of the Darwinian error is to allow the notion that we are not animals, not part of the ecosystems we live in. In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, her class of ecology students at university cannot between them name a single way in which humans can benefit the ecosystems they live in. Oh dear.
This is not just a matter of words, though carried by words especially right here. The Darwinian error is wrecking the physical ecosystems of the world. How ironic. Our way of understanding ecosystems is/was the major vector of their destruction and we haven’t even definitely corrected the theory that obviously doesn’t apply to itself. That is the world we create. Inconsistent, fatally flawed, self-destructive, blind to itself, I could go on.
Creating the world
As with Darwin, we create the world in our own image. In shrink language we project our internal concerns into the world and hey presto that is how the world works. For us it works that way and as with Darwin the world can genuinely take on our projected concerns. We live in a world that is often foul because what has been projected is foul. Governments project scrounging and lo! the world is full of people actually scrounging. I think elsewhere we have called that the fascist turn. Tell people to earn a living and remove most of the possibility of doing so.
The drift of this blog is to look at some major projections and see if we can reclaim our own, and correctly attribute the public ones. So when the government projects scrounging, or deplores economic migration, or beats up on teachers we can see more clearly what needs to change: and it isn’t benefit claimants, immigrants or educators!
I have been following James Scott into ancient Mesopotamia. Agriculture: cereals and livestock, is difficult to paint as a step forward given the actual evidence. This is my own list so don’t blame the brilliant Prof Scott at Yale.
Firstly agriculture is economically inferior in several dimensions. You have to work harder to feed yourself, your family and your animals. It is more insecure because new diseases wipe out your family, you animals and your crops. And it exposes you to people who think they should tax you because they can see what you have, and you owe them 20%.
Secondly, it is really bad for your health. You will be shorter and weaker, with a smaller brain. Your kids’ mortality will be about 50%. You will be anaemic and have characteristic bone deformities. You will have a raft of parasites both microscopic and macroscopic.
Thirdly, you will become domesticated. Just as your livestock will rapidly evolve to be rather tame and biddable so will you. Your animals will have 30% smaller brains too, because they don’t need to fend for themselves anymore. Rather than understand three or four or five different food webs and how they all work, you enclose yourself.
There is one advantage, if you want to see it as that. You and your animals will reproduce faster, indeed at such a rate that it outpaces the far higher mortality rate. So eventually you will out-populate those pesky foraging hunters (barbarians) who are so much fiercer and cleverer and stronger and taller than you. Welcome to our world.
How Darwinian is that? The least fit, worst selected humans get to be our ancestors because they breed like rabbits! Now of course I want to understand where the history that we are taught comes from and what is being projected by whom.
Going backwards fast
Making everything much worse for almost everyone: this is not an experiment that anyone could ever do, is it? Well we seem to be doing it at least twice.
What was this experiment? Well we totally, completely and fundamentally changed our ecological context. We stayed in the same location and shared it with many other people, a small selection of animal species and all the hanger-on species that arrived. We changed our diet from highly diverse animal, fish, shellfish, plants across hundreds of species to wheat and barley plus some sheep and goat and milk. The soil, the domestic animals, the social structures, the diseases all evolved really fast to produce a new context for living. And we know from Maturana that we must fit our environment or we are dead.
In 4000 years of the Neolithic, it seems that an experiment in Mesopotamia, Egypt and China had similar results. Many things we care about but especially brain size (our defining feature as humans, right?) suffered rapid reverse selection. Not that many generations and an amazing rate of change. We didn’t need or use all that intelligence and we lost it.
Robert Lustig says that our current experiment in processed food has failed. We tried a version of the same experiment. We totally changed our diet (no matter we produced erroneous guidelines as part of the change) and we totally changed our environment and social structures. I don’t think anyone dare do the research, but I am guessing we are taking another massive step backwards. The health decline is very obvious, we have not really had long enough to reduce our brain size by another third, but maybe the work is in hand. That is what a projected myth of progress does.
We tell ourselves I think that humans are so flexible and clever we can live just about anywhere, including in space it seems. But we are part of our environment no matter how artificial and man-made it is, and we cannot be other than the animal that fits in that environment. Our food environment makes us ill, as if that is not warning enough, but what else it makes us is still unfolding.
I hate the vacuous language of “going forwards” so I am going to censure myself for “going backwards” though it is clearer. We are creating an environment of pap. Pap for food, pap for culture, pap for social structure, pap for work. Almost nowhere is real, live intelligence a necessary asset. We make everything “safe” and free of skin in the game. We have no initiation, no rites of passage. The very idea that a man could live free and strong in the natural environment becomes strange and inconceivable, the stuff of reality TV.
In all my reading, I can recall only one experiment that showed a decline in our powers, so strong is the myth of progress. As I recall at the University of Tubingen there was an experiment to test the auditory perception of students over the years. Each new annual intake had a small but marked and consistent reduction in tonal perception from the previous year.
What is being projected?
So here is the $64,000 question. Why? Who is projecting what and producing a second wave of domestication and stultification?
The key to this puzzle is I think slavery. I was very struck by David Graeber’s analysis that it has never been economic to breed slaves, Tolkein notwithstanding. Graeber think that the deep south of the US is the only time in history when people tried, but it is just too expensive to rear people until they are useful. So over the whole of history, if you want a slave you go and capture one.
The rulers of early mini-states needed to enclose their own people: it is this that implied agriculture. Agriculture came first and the triggers for that are possibly climatic, but working the land for someone else is never an attractive option compared with hunting. This was never really a freely made agreement. And when there is not enough labour locally, well we had better go and raid another town for some slaves. Neolithic wars were about capturing people not territory!
What is being projected is: I am the boss and you are grist for my mill. You are never a person like I am. I don’t have to bear the cost of owning you. This is the fundamental stultification compared with bands of hunter-gatherers. You are a lesser person, often rather indistinguishable from domestic animals. The problem we face as with Darwinian errors is that this attitude becomes real. This is Orwell’s Animal Farm but played out via physiology. Stultification is both a result and a cause. And this is the context of making sure people eat pap.
How many of us believe that government is necessary? That people are naturally wayward and unruly and need to be kept in line? That we need to be trained to behave in schools, and told what to think? That some expert somewhere knows better than we do what we need to next and how we need to do it? How many of us believe that at some level we have a social contract with our governments and that they do things on our behalf, for our benefit?
So we too are projecting: we are fundamentally free within states that protect our interests. We choose who governs us and what their programmes are. We have consumer choice and legal rights. Here is Scott again:
As Aristotle held, some peoples, owing to a lack of rational faculties, are, by nature, slaves and are best used, as draft animals are, as tools.
By the way, in Greece at that point two mules were worth three slaves, with “slave” being essentially a unit of currency. Scott points out that the checks and balances on slavery revolve around slaves escaping and going somewhere else. Once everywhere is a state then the options for running away are more limited: the world as we know it.
What on earth makes us think that the fundamental form and real economics of a state has changed? Estimates are that as late as 1800, three quarters of people in the world were unfree. I put it to you that that has not changed, only the sleight of hand has changed to keep us bound in ways that we attribute to ourselves not our masters. Is not the truth that we are much closer to being tools that to being free citizens? And that the responsibility to become useful and productive tools rests with ourselves so that we can be appropriated more profitably?
Lots of questions here, I am sorry, but how would we know? Can you think of a controlled experiment that would evaluate the nature of our freedom or lack of it? I guess the nature of the evidence and debate around a Basic Income starts to explore that territory. And many political slogans ring very hollow: “every child matters”? Really?
Draft animals
Our concern in this blog is the way that projections become reality. We are no longer draft animals in the sense of doing endless hard labour, although human hard labour still happens. Nor are we clerks and errand boys. What might be the evolutionary consequences of being a call centre operator? Or a lorry driver? Or indeed a teacher on the current model? We have noted in another blog that school makes you stupid.
The problem with slaves is that you have to feed and house them, if only to stop them dying. Clearly there is a system in which most people are too stupid to earn much money and therefore we have to produce cheap food that we can afford to buy and put them in temporary accommodation when they can’t afford inflated rents. I think that system is someone’s highly unpleasant projection of their own inner lack.
In the US there is a subcategory or subclass for which these lies are painfully obvious and observable. No experiment needed. Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow lays out the arguments. Half of urban black youth have a criminal record that means they can’t vote, serve on juries, have no rights to housing, employment, etc. And no, you don’t have to do anything wrong to acquire a criminal conviction!
The argument from our declining powers as evolution moves to match us up with the environment we have put ourselves in, seems to me to go in quite the opposite direction to those who think we are on the cusp of a new age and some sort of spiritual breakthrough. (I completely discount technical breakthroughs which seem to me to be the cause of our decline not the answer to it.) This is the bleeding edge where arguments about underlying reality and mere projection bite the road. Do bleeding edges bite the road? Oh well.
There is an argument about whether when we meet an angel we can understand their superior intelligence: how could we? So there has to be a serious question about whether we can ever appreciate the intelligence we had and lost. What it would be like to have a brain that was half as big again. The feeling of losing our ability to understand the slide we have started.
Try Jordan Peterson:
Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand. The thing we cannot see is culture, in its intrapsychic or internal manifestation. The thing we do not understand is the chaos that gave rise to culture.
And the chaos is nothing other than the patterns we longer have the intelligence to recognise.
