Posts
All stories have a beginning. The story is not as old as time, for time is considerably older than any story. It is, however, a story that begins before history began. It begins in a world far different from ours. It begins with people living in that world and making sense of their lives. They lived in a very different way to us now, here, in Europe. For there were no cities, no roads and not even the smallest farm. And it was in this world where human beings lived, loved and died for the most of the history of our species. Then something happened.
There is a lie at the root of our civilisation.
Or if not a lie then at least a grave misapprehension, albeit one
promoted and enforced by rulers and armies.
It began in the past, not that long ago, and it has since spread its
poison throughout the world. Nobody is immune from its effects - from the
loftiest dignitary in the West to the indigenous inhabitant in the rainforest.
All are affected if not infected by it. It is hard to say when this
lie first began to be believed, or who first told it, since it is clear that it
was already present when the first words were written by scribes in Sumer and
what we know as history began. All that went before was prehistoric. And
before was a very long time indeed. Until recently, it was thought that
modern humans emerged in Africa around 200,000 years ago but recent finds in
Israel indicate that there were likely to have been modern humans there as long
ago as 400,000 years. It is highly possible that other findings may push
the date even further back.
Whatever the exact figure, it is clear that the
6,000 or so years of recorded history represent a mere fraction of the human
story. A blip. And yet it is presented to us as if it
represents the whole. From it have been
derived many assumptions about what it is to be human. Last night, I watched a television discussion
programme and one of the speakers said that there always have been wars and
there always would be. To be sure, any
reading of history will confirm his statement.
Always, however, is a long time.
It is certainly longer than 6,000 years.
In another debate, he might well claim that the desire to accumulate
private wealth is a basic universal human drive, citing the failure of the
communist experiments of the 20th Century. I would not wish to argue with him that those
experiments were anything other than disastrous failures. This, however, does not take account of
cultures in which the notion of sacrosanct private property appeared to be
unknown until contact was established with other cultures, primarily
European.
In the mid 17th Century Archbishop Ussher
calculated that the creation of the world was on the nightfall before 23
October 4004BCE. Although much derided
in later years, this represented a remarkable feat of scholarship at the time
and one not out of step with the thinking current in his day. No less a figure than Isaac Newton thought it
to enough of a worthy endeavour to attempt such a calculation himself. And in one sense, it is perhaps still remarkably
accurate. We now know the world was not
created on that particular day but it is around that time that, in the words of
the title of one of Samuel Noah Kramer’s works, “History Began at Sumer”. And
the history of what we now know as western civilisation is based on the stories
collected in that bible that Ussher studied so assiduously.
It is only in the last couple of centuries that
scholarship has moved beyond that bible.
It started with the birth of the science of geology and swiftly moved from
this into biology. Alongside these came
the development of archaeology and anthropology. And the world became much older and much more
diverse. And, for me, far more
wonderful and mysterious. Every year,
archaeologists unearth new finds and our picture of the past gets larger and
larger. No longer can the Garden of Eden
story hold sway for any other than the wilfully blind. As well as looking at the physical evidence
around us, scholars began to cast a critical eye on the Bible itself. They discovered it to be not the seamless,
revealed, account of the covenants between a god and his people but a
collection of writings from different sources, often heavily edited and
re-edited, some of which were in direct conflict with others. Science and Christianity found themselves
often at odds and sometimes in direct conflict, with some on each side taking
very extreme positions.
Then, in the latter half of the last century a new
understanding began to emerge.
Spearheaded by such writers as Merlin Stone, Asphodel Long and others
too numerous to mention here, it began to question the basic assumptions of the
Abrahamic scriptures. In doing so, they
focussed on the gender of the creator.
And by so doing they uncovered the lie.
It is a profound one, based on an absurdity, maintaining as it does that
all creation emerged from the unmediated action of a male god. The absurdity of this is evident from the
briefest of looks at biology. Sexual
differentiation is not universal in Nature.
The vast majority of life forms reproduce asexually and have done so
from the beginning of time. Mothers give
birth to daughters and so on. Even in
human beings, all foetuses begin life as female, only differentiating later in
gestation. Some vestiges of femaleness
remain, for all men have nipples.
As in human beings, so in creation. The earliest myths have a female deity giving
birth to the universe in some way or other.
This makes sense, for all human beings knew that they emerged from a
womb and that this womb belonged to a woman. It is not a huge step to imagine
that world similarly had a mother. The Babylonians called her Tiamat, and the
universe was created from her dismembered after
she is defeated in battle by Marduk, one of her sons, A remnant of this myth is found in Genesis,
where Tiamat is called “the deep” and the universe is created by a process of
division of that deep; earth from sky, land from sea, day from night and so
on. Genesis, however, was written very
late in human history and reflects a world view vastly different from that
which was held by our ancestors for a far, far longer time.
It is a trait of human beings to create
representations of those things that are held sacred by them. For some, these take iconic form and for
others they are in forms of words. Thus
some bow down before a statue while others venerate a book. Christianity, particularly in its Catholic
and Orthodox varieties, has a mixture of the two and there has, throughout the
history of the church been a tension between them. The urge to venerate, however, is
constant. It is seen in every society on
the planet today. It takes many forms. Some are decidedly secular, such as the
devotion shown to pop stars or football clubs, and others more subtle, such as
the high towers of the financial industry that now dwarf the cathedrals of
western cities. To a large extent, we can gauge the values and beliefs of a
culture by its artefacts. It is to these
we must look in order to gain some understanding of the cultures of pre-history.
When we do the results are fascinating, giving a picture completely contrary to
conventional wisdom. We see a world with
a radically different mindset in which normal human beings interacted with other
each other and with the world about them.
We see a different way of being a human being and this has profound
consequences for the world today. Human
nature is not as fixed as we have believed. We do not have to continue in the
way we have – we can choose another way.
It is not a way that can be initiated by
governments, for they are part of the problem.
All current forms of government are based on the same core set of
beliefs. In her book, Sacred Pleasure, Riane Eisler speaks
about two forms of human organisation, the dominator model and the partnership
model. Starhawk, in her works, refers to
power/over and power/with when describing these two. Such a recognition is not new; William Blake,
in a different context, speaks of “the prolific and the devouring”. The Lollard, John Ball, preaching to the
people assembled at Blackheath during the Peasants Revolt of 1381CE asked a
very profound question:
When Adam delved and Eve
span,
who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were
created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of
naughty men.
Although he would perhaps not have framed it in such
words, Ball was here contrasting what he believed was the original condition of
human beings, partnership, with the way in which his society, and all
mainstream historical societies before and since, was structured, domination. What is really interesting about this is not
the reference to the mythological situation in Eden but that despite the
rigidly hierarchical dominator society in which he lived Ball could imagine
something different as a very real thing.
He had a vision of some other way of being human.
Ball was not alone in his vision. It has been constant throughout history,
manifesting in the many versions of the Golden Age myth. Radical thinkers and
dreamers, poets and artists, preachers and mystics have all spoken of it. All
attempts to recreate it, however, have ended in failure, if not total and
bloody disaster. The history of the 20th
Century is to a large degree a history of utopian visions becoming state policy
and then foundering in genocidal ruin. Their
flaw was that they tried to enact one model within another without allowing for
the fact that the enactors were all infected by the fundamental lie which was
exemplified in the idea of ex nihilo creation by a male. Nevertheless the vision of some other way of
looking at the world has persisted and has tried to make itself manifest. Its growth in the real world, however, has
been twisted and distorted by the structures, both in the material and the
mental worlds, of the ideology of domination, of power/over. It is somewhat like the distortion of growth
that exists in a topiary bush sculpted to form the image of a tank – or a boot
on human faces.
Whence, however comes the vision? Why does it, despite overwhelming evidence of
its “impossibility”, keep its hold on human hearts? How has it survived up until today? Louis MacNeice, in the dark and ominous
winter of 1938 with war appearing inevitable, evoked the dream thus:
... dream of a possible
land, not of sleepwalkers, not of angry puppets
But where both heart
and brain can understand the movements of our fellows
I first read these words when I was around 16. They spoke to me then and they continue to do
so today. My life has been varied and I
have gone through many different stages but certain things have been constant. Where
did this constant conviction come from?
It appeared, and still appears, to me as a dimly remembered memory. It has been with me for as long as I can
recall. Perhaps it is simply as
Wordsworth put it, a memory of childhood innocence:
Heaven lies about us in our
infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin
to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and
whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
It may be.
But I think not. There is more to
it than that. Wordsworth was here
writing from a platonic perspective and speaking of the soul being imprisoned
within the body with the awareness of a previous immaterial existence slowly
being erased as one grows. I can see
where he is coming from, but do not think I agree. Blake, I think, used the image of a prison
better when he wrote:
Both law and religion are human constructs and are
not, therefore, part of the natural order of things. It is not, as Wordsworth put it our birth
that is a forgetting but the process of socialisation. We are all, as Bob Dylan
put it, “bent out of shape by society’s pliers”.
I came of age in the 1960s. I am of the boomer generation - a child of
the immediate post-war - born in the twin shadows of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. We came into a world, particularly in Europe,
that had been militarised to a degree never known before. We played in old bomb shelters and the
dereliction caused by aerial bombing was still evident. Rationing persisted our parents, still dazed
and with their youth stolen, tried to create a new order of plenty – to salvage
something good from the carnage. In this
they succeeded to a very large degree.
In the midst of austerity and with the country nearly bankrupt a
National Health Service was born and the Welfare State created. No more, was the dream, would poverty condemn
millions to a life of disease and misery.
This our parents achieved. And we
threw it back in their faces as we embraced lives of hedonism and
self-indulgence. We knew and cared
nothing for the sacrifices they had made.
We drank the welfare orange and free school milk and were cared for with
the latest medicines. Childhood diseases
which previously killed were to a large extent brought under control. Yet we rebelled and made a virtue of
ingratitude.
That is one way of looking at it. It is not, however, the only way. There is also the very real fact that the
years preceding our birth had revealed that there was something deeply wrong
within the fabric of our civilisation.
Auschwitz and Hiroshima had happened and yet the world continued to
perpetuate the horror. Nothing seemed to
have been learned. Bigger and bigger
bombs were created and the combined arsenals became large enough to destroy
human life many times over. And they
still persist and proliferate. As I came of age, the richest and most powerful
nation on the planet was engaged in a war in a small south-east Asian
country. In the course of this they
dropped more high explosives on that country than had been dropped by the
Allies in the entire course of World War II.
By the time the US forces left in 1975, 59, 000 mainly young Americans had
died and by the time the North Vietnamese took Saigon between 4-6million
Vietnamese on both sides had died.
Since then we have seen the atrocities of Pol Pot, Rwanda,
Yugoslavia, and others. Now, Iraq and
Syria are being ripped apart by sectarian and ethnic conflict. It would be tedious to extend the list and,
in any case, it will no doubt be added to before what I write is read by anyone
else. The point is that the ideology
which enabled Auschwitz is still operative.
This was not the Cold War divide or the endless squabbling in the
legislatures of the democracies. It was
far deeper and older than the nineteenth century constructs of capitalism and
socialism. It is, purely and simply,
patriarchy and it has been around for a long time.
But, as explained above, it has not been around
forever. There was a time before it was
dominant. Around 5,000 – 7,000 years ago
something shifted and human consciousness underwent a massive change. After many millennia of our development as a
species, human beings decided that one sex was divinely ordained to dominate
the other and built power structures to entrench and extend that power. A dominator society was born and still
prevails today, with all the manifest evil that it entails. We are currently seeing its latest
manifestation in Syria and Iraq. How and why this happened cannot be definitively
determined but this is not the really important issue. What is important is that this is not the
only way to be. Nothing I have seen yet
has convinced me that we cannot choose for the better. I amy be a fool, but frankly, my dears, I don’t
give a damn.
