Creating a Critical Mass of people who understand our present, worldwide culture is flawed at its very foundational level is the key to saving the world. Right now, as you read these words, there are millions of people who already understand the truth of what I am saying and stand ready to help make the necessary changes. But those of us who already “get it” also understand there are not yet enough brothers and sisters standing with us. The best thing we can do right now is to help other people understand our situation. There must be enough people who understand the need for change, and stand ready to make it happen, so that the changes can be made even as those opposed to changes attempt to prevent the cultural shift from happening. In order to achieve this, we are going to have to change a few million more minds.
Are you ready to do your part to save the world? If so, then you need to become a part of the growing group of people who understand that our culture is flawed and doomed and must be replaced with a new culture that actually functions well for humans, as well as all other living things. Once your consciousness joins mine, and all of the others who have already reached this understanding, the task for all of us, is to do everything we can to influence others to make the intellectual leap that enables them to join as well. That all-important Critical Mass must be achieved so that changes can be made before this flawed and doomed and insane culture comes crashing down on its own.
For many of us, a review of how things came to be this way will be sufficient to enable us to become members of the critical mass who understand the reality of our cultural situation.
Perhaps this will help.
Through his novels, Daniel Quinn explained to us how our culture began roughly ten thousand years ago when some early adopters of agriculture decided to lock up the food. But until recently, nobody understood that. Ten thousand years ago, the culture that became our present culture was one of thousands of cultures that existed here on earth. Now, ten thousand years later, our culture covers the entire planet, and it has either conquered and destroyed, or assimilated all but a very few of those thousands of other cultures.
Another important concept we didn’t understand until recently was evolution. It was Charles Darwin who enlightened us about the process of evolution and how it explains our existence here. And in the century and a half since then, archaeologists have assembled fossil evidence and other scientific proof telling us that our particular animal species, homo sapiens, has been walking on this earth for at least 250,000 years. Our species evolved out of a branch of warm-blooded mammals called primates. Six to eight million years ago, the branch that ultimately leads to us, split into two branches, and one of these branches leads to us, and the other to chimpanzees. One big point from Chapter 1 that needs to be repeated here to help people understand how things came to be this way, is that until recently (about 200 years ago), everyone thought humans had only been around for perhaps five thousand years. Before that time, people actually thought man’s appearance on this world roughly coincided with the onset of our written history and the beginning of civilization. Other misconceptions included thinking our world was a stationary object around which the moon and the sun and the stars and everything in the sky rotated. (At least they were right about the moon.) Also, we had no idea of the spherical shape of our world. We presumed it to be flat. Otherwise, how could it have been possible for us to be standing on it? Of course, we had no idea that the stars we saw in the night sky were actually similar to our own Sun. Likewise, we didn’t have the slightest clue that many of the points of light we called “stars” were actually distant galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars. We didn’t have the slightest clue that our world and everything we saw when we looked up at night was actually billions of years old.
These misconceptions shared by people of our culture until science was able to enlighten us, served as the very foundation of the flawed and doomed culture that we are all a part of today. We thought man was only a few thousand years old, and when he arrived, he immediately set about to build civilization. Many people even assumed that tribal people had somehow tragically regressed into a savage and brutal existence from a civilized way of life practiced by their ancestors. We thought God created this world especially for humans to conquer and rule, and that the sun and the stars and everything in the Universe revolved around us.
Now, however, we know our Universe is billions of years old, and that our planet Earth revolves around the Sun, as do all of our other sister planets in our Solar System, which resides in the outer reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one of hundreds of billions of similar galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars in this vast Universe. And that all life on this planet has evolved from the same, simple beginning, slowly, over billions of years. And, we know that humans, just like us, have been walking on this planet for the past 250,000 years.
Maybe, as a result of having this new information at our disposal… information that contradicts the facts on which our present culture is based… it is time we made some adjustments in the way our culture is structured. Besides, as evidenced by the list of problems from Chapter 1, something definitely needs changing.
People who are alive today have the great privilege of understanding a whole myriad of facts about our natural world that people born previously did not have access to. For instance, have you ever stopped to consider how remarkable it is that almost eight billion of us are all standing on this tiny, little rock called Planet Earth, which we now know is one of eight (or nine, depending upon whether you want to count Pluto) planets orbiting our Sun, which we now know is one of hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, which we now know is one of hundreds of billions of similar galaxies in our Universe. And, we can now explain with relative certainty to each other, remarkable facts about our existence, which we know because our scientists have figured them out for us.
For instance,
Our Universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. 13.8 billion years ago, our Universe was actually very small. Then, with a Big Bang, it began expanding very rapidly. Now it is so immense, we cannot possibly imagine how far it is from one side to the other.
Then, there is this…
The periodic table of elements contains 118 elements. Our children learn in their school chemistry classes that everything in our physical world is comprised of some combination of these elements. We now know that only three of these elements were present in our Universe immediately after the Big Bang… these being lots of hydrogen, some helium, and trace amounts of lithium. We also know that all of the 115 other elements that make up our world of today were formed as a part of nuclear reactions within stars, and then dispersed across the Universe when those stars exploded as supernovae. Certainly, one of the most remarkable facts any person could ever wrap their head around is that everything in our world, including even our own physical bodies, is made of stardust.
The first stars in our Milky Way Galaxy formed shortly after the Big Bang, and our particular star was a second or third or possibly even a fourth-generation star that formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago, mostly utilizing debris from earlier generation stars that had gone supernova. Our Planet Earth, which orbits around this star, is around 4.54 billion years old, and is also composed mostly out of the same leftover debris. Simple single-cell life began here on Earth about 3 to 4 billion years ago. Although we don’t know the exact process by which life first began, we have identified several ways in which it could have occurred. If the origin of life did begin here, perhaps it could have been the result of a lucky lightning strike on some primordial soup that contained the right constituents in the necessary proportions.
Another popular theory is the deep-sea vent theory that tells us life could have begun at submarine hydrothermal vents. At this time, there are several other plausible scientific theories out there setting out how life might have begun here on Earth. Many have tried, but so far no one has been able to create life out of inanimate materials in a laboratory setting.
Then, there is the possibility that life began somewhere else. If life came from elsewhere in the Cosmos, then certainly, it is possible that early life on our planet hitchhiked its way here on a meteor, or maybe a comet. However, whether or not life “just happened” here or even somewhere else, or whether the origin of life can be attributed to Divine creation, or to extra-terrestrial intelligences from elsewhere in the Cosmos, is not really important to the discussion herein about our culture. The important point for this discussion is that once life got its foothold here, the fossil record, and all other evidence, supports Darwin’s theory of evolution. I do think it is important to state that I don’t see any aspect of this scientific creation story that tells us our planet or our solar system or our galaxy is unique within this vast universe, although I must assume that planets like ours, with our extremely diverse and beautiful, carbon-based life forms, are rare, and would most certainly be prized discoveries to any intelligent beings who happened upon this precious blue jewel called Planet Earth in their travels.
Also, when considering this question of the origin of life, I think it is important for us to keep in mind the age of our solar system relative to the age of our galaxy, and also relative to the wider Universe. Whether life began here or elsewhere through an accidental chemical reaction, or whether life began here through the active intervention of a higher consciousness from somewhere else, there are certainly a lot of other places within this vast Universe, where the same thing could have occurred billions of years earlier than it did here on Earth. And, assuming those ancient beings were able to figure out the things we are addressing in this book, and thus avoid the problem of going extinct through their own ignorance, these extra-terrestrial life forms might have quite a head start on us in terms of their understanding of the true nature of our shared reality.
Charles Darwin demonstrated with his On the Origin of Species, which was published in 1859, that life has evolved here on Earth, over time, from simple to more complex organisms. Historians tell us he already knew it many years before his book was published, but Darwin was reluctant to take the ridicule he knew would come if he stated in his book that humans and apes have common ancestors, so he did not make that case in Origin. However, the fact that man, along with every other living thing on Earth, has evolved from earlier and simpler iterations of themselves, can be easily reasoned out of Darwin’s work by anyone who reads it. Of course, this fact did cause considerable controversy within the religious community, who were heavily invested in their fairy-tale story about God having created the world especially for man in only seven days. If it was not evident from the Introduction, I want to state here and now that I have no qualms whatsoever about the possibility of this book causing some controversy within the religious community. To be fair… If Darwin was alive today, I’m sure he would no longer be concerned about it either.
Since Darwin’s book was first published, two years before the beginning of the American Civil War, a lot has happened in regard to the quest to understand the evolution of humans. Much of the progress in this area involves the discovery of thousands of fossil records, some of which have been demonstrated to be more than 4 million years old. Other major developments are the discovery of DNA, which has resulted in the development of an entirely new scientific field of study called genetics. Also very important has been the development of more and more sophisticated dating techniques, with some of the most relied upon and apparently some of the most accurate of those, coming out of genetics.
Today, scientists are able to compare dating estimates made by archaeologists and paleontologists with estimates made by molecular biologists, and they are finding a lot of agreement. DNA analysis gives molecular biologists the ability to estimate with relative certainty that chimpanzees and our human forefathers diverged from each other about six to eight million years ago. We now know from genetics that chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than they are to any of the other primates. By the way… The separation in sub-species that occurred immediately prior to the human and the chimpanzee line was the one between our line and the line that leads to gorillas.
The main trait that distinguished early man from early chimpanzees and from all other primates was man’s bipedalism. Advantages to humans arising from this development included the freeing up of the hands for other tasks, the ability to travel longer distances in less time, and an enhanced field of vision. In the first one to three million years after the two species diverged, our ancestors were probably not much more advanced than their chimpanzee cousins. However, as time passed, fossil records show that our brains grew larger and larger. Archaeological evidence indicates early humans began been using crude stone tools at least 3.3 million years ago, and our ancestors probably controlled the use of fire for warmth and cooking more than a million years ago.
According to the fossil record, as confirmed by DNA analysis, anatomically modern humans first appeared 250,000 to 400,000 years ago. However, archaeological evidence indicates these early anatomically modern humans may have existed as little more than smart, bipedal chimpanzees who could cook, from the time they first evolved until some unknown event caused the “Great Leap Forward” about 50,000 years ago. Humans after that time are considered to be both anatomically modern, and also behaviorally modern. Archaeological evidence of the Cro-Magnon man from 43,000 years ago found in France, are the earliest records found to date of anatomically modern humans with more sophisticated stone tools, including hafted axes and knives, awls, needles, and even spear throwers. Also significant to the Great Leap Forward is the fact that cave paintings dating back to around this period have been located in Spain and France, as well as Indonesia and Australia.
The particular development that enabled this Great Leap Forward is much debated. Many scientists hypothesize the reason may have been the development of complex language. There are good reasons supporting this school of thought. For instance, logic and abstract reasoning may have developed, or at the very least been greatly enhanced, when humans first began to utilize complex language. Without a doubt, collaboration on hunting strategy and brainstorming on potential tool making improvements, as well as tribal debates about where to locate, and other important matters, would have certainly been enhanced whenever spoken language was developed.
Piecing the story of humanity together from the available evidence, it appears that after reaching the behaviorally modern plateau 50,000 years ago, our best guess is that for the next 35,000 years, humans continued living as hunter-gatherers in small bands of less than 100 members. I say this is our best guess, because, other than the stone tools we have found from this period, we really don’t have a lot of tangible evidence telling us what, exactly, was going on. There is no physical evidence of villages or settlements dating back farther than 12,000 years ago, and such evidence from earlier than 9,000 years ago is extremely rare. And remember… we are talking about more than 35,000 years of pre-history involving human beings who were just like us. That is a period of time that is more than five times longer than all of recorded history… a very long time, indeed.
As a mental exercise to help you wrap your head around the significance of a missing 35,000 years of human pre-history, just consider how closely you identify your current existence with the people who were alive during the height of the Roman Empire, which, by comparison, was a mere 2,000 years ago. When you think about everything that happened within the last 2,000 years, you realize that a lot could have happened both culturally and otherwise during this 35,000 yearlong stretch of pre-historical time. And, unless someone would invent a time machine that could take us backwards in time, we would have no way of knowing about it. The stone tool archaeological evidence indicates that during this time there were people living pretty much everywhere on the planet that was not covered in ice, with the only possible exception being the Western Hemisphere, which many experts believe was not inhabited by humans until around 14,000 years ago.
One of the competitive advantages that humans have over many other species is the fact that we are omnivores, meaning our bodies are capable of processing either meat or plant-based foods to provide nourishment for our sustenance. That is why humans are able to live as hunter–gatherers (carnivores-herbivores). Fifty thousand years ago, when behaviorally modern humans finally started down the road that led to improvements in stone tools, etc., they must have had a real zeal for figuring out other ways in addition to better stone tools that could make their lives even easier. I imagine it would not have been too great of a leap for some of the members of some of these hunter-gatherer tribes, who were enjoying better hunting successes with their improved stone tools, to also decide to attempt to improve the gathering side of their hunter-gatherer lifestyle by beginning to practice some limited forms of agriculture.
Eventually, these agricultural efforts resulted in very tangible agricultural innovations. For many pre-historic people, this meant the end of hunter-gathering, and the beginning of agricultural based settlements. This is a hugely significant innovation in the way of life of certain humans. For the first time in the entire 250,000-year history of Homo sapiens, people were beginning to live in settlements and procured their food in a manner other than as hunter-gatherers.
As it turned out, this was also a hugely significant innovation for not only everyone who is alive today, but for the entire planet, and every living thing on it. If you have read Ishmael, or if you have read Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond, then you know how significant the appearance of these first settlements were. They lead directly to us… And to everything that is good and bad about us, including all of those terrible problems outlined in the beginning of Chapter 1.
Most experts believe the earliest of these agricultural-based settlements was the one in ancient Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in an area occupied by present day Iraq. The big breakthrough for these people happened when they discovered wheat and barley could be cultivated, harvested and then stored safely for long periods, leading to surpluses and increased food security. Archaeological evidence indicates that wheat, barley, and cotton were also cultivated very early in the Nile River valley in present-day Egypt. Rice, barley, beans, and other crops were cultivated in the Indus River valley in present-day India. And rice, wheat, and lentils were cultivated in the Yellow River valley and the Yangtze River valleys in present-day China.
Additionally, there were at least two early centers of agricultural development in the Americas, these being Mesoamerica, where maize was successfully bred in a generations-long process from a grain called tesotine, and eventually grown in fields called milpas, along with beans, squash, melons, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potatoes, yuccas, and avocados. The final agricultural center, Norte Chico, sometimes referred to as Caral-Supe, was located in coastal and near-coastal present-day northern Peru. Because of its use for fishing nets, cotton was one of the most important early crops there. Other edible crops grown there included squash, beans, and sweet potatoes. The food surpluses, which were the result of these agricultural innovations, were extremely significant and led to increased populations and many changes in the way these previously hunter-gatherer people lived.
Jared Diamond, like Daniel Quinn, and Charles Darwin, is a hero to me for all of his thought, and effort… and his success… in figuring out how things came to be this way. Like Quinn, he believes our worldwide culture got its start ten thousand years ago, when formerly hunter-gathering people living in ancient Mesopotamia, learned how to create food surpluses for themselves by farming wheat and barley. The grains could be stored for long periods without spoiling, and the resulting food surpluses opened up many new possibilities, including specialization of skills, division of labor, and ultimately, a stratified class society with an elite ruling class. The next big step for these hunter-gatherers turned agriculturalists was the domestication of goats, sheep, and eventually, cattle, pigs, and the rest.
The increased food supply soon led to an increased population. As things turned out, these improvements gave these early farmers and herders such an advantage over their hunter-gatherer neighbors that, this new, innovative culture never stopped expanding until it had gobbled up the entire planet by either conquering or assimilating neighbor after neighbor, until finally, there were no more neighbors left. Today, with very few exceptions, you and I and almost every other person on the planet, are members of the culture that began in this manner, in ancient Mesopotamia. But, as we shall see… It didn’t have to turn out this way.
As Diamond tells it… his quest to understand how things came to be this way began forty years ago when a New Guinea native asked him why the white men had so much “cargo”, and the New Guinea people so little. Ultimately, after many years of thought and research, Diamond was finally able to answer that question in a book titled Guns, Germs, and Steel, which won the Pulitzer Prize. And, the answer was… It all came down to geography. The white man was not smarter or more capable in any way than the primitive New Guinean people Diamond came to know on his travels there. There was no genetic or racial component whatsoever to the answer of why the white man had so much cargo. The answer, according to Diamond, was the luck of geography… pure and simple.
When that ancient tribe of hunter-gatherers in Mesopotamia figured out how to cultivate wheat and barley and domesticate animals, they did so on Eurasia, which is a huge, east-west trending landmass that is also connected to North Africa. Once they figured out this new way of living, there were thousands of miles of similar land lying on the same geographical latitude, both to the east and to the west, where the climate and the growing seasons were similar, and where their new form of agriculture could be copied simply by taking the seeds, the animals, and the know-how to those sites.
Diamond did some research on domesticated animals and discovered that of the fourteen large mammals that man has successfully domesticated, only the relatively insignificant llama/alpaca came from the Western Hemisphere. The five most important ones, being sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, and horses, as well as all of the others except the llama, all originated on Eurasia. The fact that all of the domesticated animals came from Eurasia gave the people living there huge advantages over people living elsewhere. Among them were increased food security, help with transport, an ability to till more land, and to plow deeper into the soil, all of which led to increased populations. Eventually, these increased populations led to technological advances, two of which were the Guns and Steel from the title of Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book.
It turns out that the other word in the title… Germs… also had much to do with domesticated animals. Certainly, the guns and the steel gave the Spaniards and the other Europeans some advantages over the Native Americans when they arrived here. And, similarly, the Europeans that colonized South Africa and Australia had the advantage of those inventions over the native populations there as well. But if it wasn’t for the germs, the colonizers and conquerors would have undoubtedly had a much harder time getting their way.
The reason the transfer of germs was so one-sided was because the diseases had been present in Europe and Asia for thousands of years. These diseases were originally present in cattle, pigs, ducks, chickens and other domesticated animals, and because of the domesticated animal’s proximity to people, the disease was able to “jump” over to humans. The European advantage in this unintended and unplanned transfer of germs by the Europeans to the Native Americans was due to the fact that the diseases had been present in Europe for many generations. This meant that over time, those Europeans possessing a genetic resistance to these diseases tended to be more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on those disease resisting genes to their offspring. Hence, statistically speaking, Europeans were much more likely to be able to survive these diseases than the Native Americans, whose entire population consisted of people who had never been exposed to any of them. Also, the European invaders were all adults, and many had already survived exposure to these diseases earlier in their lives. Generally speaking, you only have to survive chicken pox, measles, pertussis, mumps, or smallpox once. After that, you have a lifetime of immunity.
The Europeans that came to the Western Hemisphere, beginning in 1492 with Columbus, came here with the intention of colonizing, exploiting, and conquering whoever and whatever they found. When I was learning about this in public school, we were told the Western Hemisphere was largely empty and unoccupied when the Europeans arrived here. Now, new research is not only saying there were more than 100 million Native Americans thriving here when Columbus arrived, but that they were much more advanced, civilized, and sophisticated than previously understood. It was the smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus, along with the diphtheria, malaria, mumps, pertussis, plague, tuberculosis, and yellow fever that infected and killed the native population, and really turned the tide for the conquerors. It is now being speculated that these diseases spread out across the two continents ahead of the conquerors, and decimated the native populations in advance of actual, physical contact. For the most part, the Europeans were unaware that it had even occurred.
Diamond has much to say about this subject in Guns, Germs, and Steel… And rightfully so. If this unintended and unplanned transfer of germs by the colonizers and conquerors to the native populations had not been so one-sided, the outcome would certainly have been different. Without it, the Europeans may have prevailed in the end, but most definitely, they would have had a much harder time doing so. And, if the Native Americans had developed their own genetic resistance to similar diseases originating from their own domesticated animals that the Europeans had never been exposed to, then the outcome might have been very different indeed. Imagine if Columbus had brought back germs on his return to Spain from his initial voyage to the New World… and those germs ended up wiping out more than 90% of the European and the Asian populations. Certainly, if that had occurred, we would be living in a much different world today. If there had been more domesticatable animals in the Americas, that might very well have been the outcome.
It goes back to his basic premise… After thirty years of cogitating on it… Diamond’s answer to his New Guinea friend was that the white man has so much cargo because of pure luck. The lucky white man’s ancestors had resided in Eurasia. Wheat and barley originated there, as did the wild ancestors of the animals they domesticated. Eurasia was a large land mass oriented on an East to West axis. Once the farming techniques were developed and those animals domesticated, there was a lot of room for the increased populations to do the same thing on other lands with similar climate and growing conditions. Those increased populations eventually led to the technological advances that included the smelting of steel from iron, and the invention of gunpowder, which was then used in guns to fire projectiles to kill game in hunting, and to kill enemies in war.
Of course, this is a somewhat simplistic explanation of Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book. However, for the most part it is an accurate account of what he says occurred. For instance, a lot of formerly tribal people adopted the new farming and animal domestication innovations on their own, without any coercion. Afterwards, they became de-facto members of our culture, even though they might have considered themselves and their ways separate. An example of this would be the Oriental people who have always, throughout history, remained somewhat separate, culturally, from the rest of the world. Never having been conquered from the outside, they have developed a rich culture that is a part of ours… yet separate. Still, there is no question that China, and her 1.4 billion citizens, are a part of our worldwide culture of today… At least in every way that matters to this discussion of how things came to be this way.
Also, it needs to be said that the process involving the conquest and assimilation of all of the world’s other cultures into our culture of today took thousands of years to accomplish. For instance, the American Indian wars ended here in the U. S. only about 135 years ago. Plus, there are a few indigenous people scattered around the world in remote areas today who are still living tribally as hunter-gatherers, who have not been conquered by or assimilated into this worldwide culture that you and I are a part of. However, I think it is pretty safe to say, as well as very sad to think about, that one way or the other, it does not appear they will be doing so for much longer.
On the face of it, learning how to cultivate wheat and barley, and learning how to domesticate goats, sheep and cattle, and pigs seems like excellent progress over hand to mouth hunting and gathering ways. And, to be sure, adding these farming and animal husbandry tools to our survival toolkit was certainly a big plus. However, as we shall see, the progress had a huge price.
Archaeological evidence indicates that, give or take a thousand years or so, the first civilizations arose around 5,000 to 7,000 years ago in each of these six agricultural centers as a direct result of the increased agricultural bounty supporting denser populations, leading to specialized labor and class-based societal structures. For the purposes of this examination of how things came to be this way, we are especially interested in the cultures that humans were a part of during this time period… or we would be interested in them, if it were possible to know them. While we do not have specific data, we can speculate on the existence of thousands of relatively small, tribal, hunter-gatherer cultures that we imagine were present around the world during this time, some of which were located near these early civilizations. Probably, these tribal cultures, being based as they were, on their hunter-gatherer lifestyles, were similar to cultures of tribal peoples encountered and studied in our own time.
Unfortunately, we don’t know enough about these ancient civilizations to be able to judge whether the basis of their culture was “Everything is separate”, or “Everything is connected.” I, for one, would love to know the answer to that one. All we can say for sure is that at some point, the ruling class must have become corrupt and began exploiting their powerful positions for their own personal benefit. Whether it happened at the time our culture first developed, or at some later point in time, the oppressed and exploited people within our culture, along with the rest of the Community of Life, have suffered the consequences ever since.
Ten thousand years ago, when our culture got its start, there were maybe 10 million people alive on this planet, and most were living tribally in bands of no more than 100 to 150 people, just as they had ever since humans evolved from their primate cousins millions of years previously. To be sure, a world occupied solely by tribal people was no utopia either. For instance, even though there were certainly situations where neighboring tribes regularly interacted peacefully with each other, inter-tribal relations were often quite problematic. And, as demonstrated by Quinn, each tribe represented its own, unique culture. I imagine that many of these tribes provided settings for their tribal members that were quite idyllic. However, there is no doubt that many of those unique cultures were also quite flawed to the point that they did not work well for their tribal members, or even for the landbase on which they were located, or with the Community of Life within that landbase.
Eventually, though… given enough time… those problems would have been worked out in the evolutionary process that includes Quinn’s peacekeeping law, through which the tribe either made the necessary adjustments or ceased to exist. In terms of our discussion of how things came to be this way, it is important to understand that for the most part, it has been demonstrated by anthropologists that people within tribes took care of each other. In most tribes, no member was cold or hungry unless every member of that tribe was cold or hungry. In general terms, tribal people also had extremely light footprints on the ecological systems in which they existed. Plus, without question, they were more in touch with the natural world, and had a much closer sense of connection with nature and also their fellow tribesmen. To quote Daniel Quinn… The Leavers’ (tribal people’s) cultural story told the tribal members, “Man belongs to the world.”
Imagine if you can, our beautiful planet as it existed ten thousand years ago, in the time just before that tribe in Mesopotamia began practicing totalitarian agriculture. Ten thousand years ago, planet earth was populated by maybe 10 million humans, all of them living sustainably on their own landbases as hunter-gatherers, many of who were also practicing limited and sustainable forms of agriculture. But whatever their particular lifestyles consisted of, and whatever methods they were utilizing to secure food and shelter, and however they chose to relate to their particular environment and to the Community of Life that surrounded them… all of these things had evolved over many generations, through an interaction between themselves and their particular landbase and everything on it and in it. And for many of these tribal peoples, this process had been ongoing for millennia.
Except for the fact that today’s population is much more racially mixed than were the people of ten thousand years ago, those people were just like us in every way. Each of our present physical characteristics had evolved and had been present for more than two hundred thousand years already. And this includes our brains and our mental capabilities as well. The individuals who made up the human population ten thousand years ago were each born into an environment where customs and processes were in place to care for and to nurture them and to instruct them in regard to their way of life, just as our children of today are born into environments that provide customs and processes to nurture and care for and instruct them also.
Ten thousand years ago there were no cities, no towns, not even any villages. Ten thousand years ago, humans had a presence on every continent that wasn’t completely covered in ice. North and South America, two of the last of these ice-free continents to be inhabited by humans, had a population that had been there for at least 4,000 years.
With very few exceptions, these ten million inhabitants of ten thousand years ago were all living tribally in groups of no more than one hundred or so. Their “technology” consisted of bows and arrows and spears and spear throwers, and fire-starting tools, and knives made of stone, and other tools and implements made of stone or bone or antlers, in combination with animal skins or twine or rope made from other handy materials.
Ten thousand years ago there was no significant man-made degradation of the environment anywhere on earth. All of earth’s life forms and all of earth’s ecosystems had evolved to their then present state without any interference whatsoever by man. A possible exception to this could be the many species of large mammals, as well as other species, in many areas around the globe, that may have been hunted to extinction by man. Today, we see this man-made environmental destruction almost everywhere we look.
Can you imagine how beautiful our planet was before the people of our culture began destroying it? Ten thousand years ago, people drank water from the stream. Ten thousand years ago habitat for game and for all forms of life throughout the planet was undisturbed by man.
Ten thousand years… It really wasn’t that long ago. When viewed either from the perspective of the three million plus year history of man, or even from the perspective of the two hundred fifty-thousand-year history of our particular species of man, it was only the blink of an eye ago. Think about it… Ten thousand years ago man had existed on the planet for more than three million years already. And our particular species of man had been here for more than two hundred fifty thousand years. Yet the earth and her ecosystems and her millions of life forms were still completely and totally unmolested by our presence.
Fast-forward now, ten thousand years to the present time. Think for a moment about the present state of our planet. Instead of ten million people all living sustainably on their own landbases, we have almost eight billion people living mostly in cities, and the only ones who are living sustainably are those few tribal peoples who are still living on their ancestral lands in their ancient and proven ways as members of indigenous tribes. By now, tribal people across the globe have almost all been completely wiped out. But there are still a few who are lucky enough to have not been killed or assimilated into our culture only because they live on lands so remote or inhospitable that some of us have not yet figured out a way to profit by stealing their land… at least not so far. I think each of us realize by now that there is no real mechanism in place which will prevent these last few tribal people from eventually being killed or assimilated in just the same manner as all of those who preceded them.
Today, there are several cities whose population is more than double the entire world’s population of ten thousand years ago. In fact, there are twenty-two cities around the globe with more than ten million inhabitants. The very air we breathe around these cities is terribly polluted, mostly from the exhaust from our automobiles, but also from industrial activities. In Los Angeles and in many other cities, this air quality situation is monitored daily, and it is not at all uncommon for the city officials to issue air quality warnings and to advise the population that it would be better if they remained indoors at least as much as possible on certain days. Is this really how we want to live?
Most of man’s destruction of the planet’s ecosystems has been the result of the cutting down of ancient forests. In Europe and Asia, where civilization is older, this process began long ago, but was speeded up by the inventions and necessities brought on by the Industrial Revolution of the past one hundred fifty years. Now, as a result of new technology, namely chainsaws and bulldozers, etc., the other continents have caught up very quickly. The forests were cut down, the timber was sold for profit, and the land that had once represented an ancient ecosystem was put to use for some other profitable purpose. Today, our last remaining ancient forests, our tropical rainforests, are being quickly cut down and replaced by pasturelands mostly so Americans, Europeans, and Asians can enjoy eating hamburgers from fast food restaurant chains which can be found in any city or even in many small towns across the globe. With the cutting down of these last remaining forests, we are not only losing precious ecosystems and all of the ancient life forms within them, we are losing the very capability of these tropical forests to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen. This is beyond pollution. This is beyond even the thoughtless destruction of ecosystems resulting in the extinction of whole species. This is the destruction of the last remnants of a system we absolutely cannot live without.
In his first sequel to Ishmael, another novel called The Story of B, Quinn wrote a piece he called The Boiling Frog, in which he told the history of our civilization from the standpoint of population doublings and their effects. Again, all credit goes to Quinn for shining a light on the story that was right in front of us, but so hidden behind cultural myths that nobody else before him had been able to see through them. The connection Quinn is able to establish between overcrowding, as the cities first appear and then get larger over time, and problems that arise like war, famine, plague, crime, and so on, is undeniably real.
In the piece, Quinn effectively showed how dramatically and consistently each doubling of the population of our culture happened in less and less time and also how new problems arose with every doubling. When our culture was just beginning, the first doubling from 10 million to 20 million people took five thousand years. The last doubling from 3.9 billion to our present population of 7.8 billion people has occurred since 1974. Are there any of us out there who actually thinks that having 12 billion of us crowded onto this struggling globe is going to be a good thing?
Showing us where we came from, showing us how we came to be here, and enlightening us about the events that caused this to happen. This was Quinn’s first great accomplishment with Ishmael. With the novel as his vehicle, he showed us how things came to be this way. He explained to us how our culture was born ten thousand years ago when that one tribe in ancient Mesopotamia threw away their ancient tribal ways, rejected their position as a responsible member of the Community of Life, and began practicing totalitarian agriculture. And he explained to us how just prior to that time there were ten million of us living here sustainably and tribally on a planet that was totally and completely free of damage by human activity. He pointed out the cultural myths that controlled the behaviors of the people who lived tribally, and also the cultural myths of the people of the new culture (ours).
For this, I am and will always remain grateful to Daniel Quinn, a man who is undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers to ever set foot on our planet. By the way… Here are those cultural myths that are the basis of the two types of cultures.
For the tribal peoples who preceded us and for those tribal peoples who are still hanging on against all odds…
We are a part of the world and a part of the Community of Life.
And for the rest of us…
The world was made for man to conquer and rule.
As evidenced by this cultural myth that is the very basis for our culture… Our culture is insane. It is flawed at its most basic level because its very basis is a fallacy. It cannot succeed and it cannot be fixed. We must return our culture to one based upon the truth that everything is connected and we are a part of the Community of Life.
Are you ready to do your part to save the world? If so, then you need to become a part of the growing group of people who understand that our culture is flawed and doomed and must be replaced with a new culture that actually functions well for humans, as well as all other living things. Once your consciousness joins mine, and all of the others who have already reached this understanding, the task for all of us is to do everything we can to influence others to make the intellectual leap that enables them to join as well. That all-important Critical Mass must be achieved so that changes can be made before this flawed and doomed and insane culture comes crashing down on its own.
