The Big Picture

We believe our laws, morals and values are what separate us from the rest of life in general and particularly from other primates - those are the attributes that make us special. But what is really special is our capacity to speak of them. As it says in the bible’s New Testament, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Indeed, the word, language, was the beginning of our coming out of our naturally embodied selves and coming to consciously create ourselves as cultural constructs. And all of our “gods” reside at the pinnacle of those mental monuments, whatever the culture.

Another attribute that totally separates us from the rest of life is the domestication of fire, which it seems to me, is related to our acquisition of speech. The use of fire was most likely developed before the development of what can truly be called a spoken language. Hominids certainly always had the ability to connect certain sounds with objects in the rudimentary way other species do, but sitting around camp fires surely provided a fertile environment within which to begin to expand on our use of sounds as a means of identifying things, giving expression to our feelings and thoughts and developing greater communication skills, thus increasing survivability. And all this would have gone hand in hand with increased brain activity.

The infinitesimal changes in verbal perspicacity along with alterations in the apparatus for vocalizations took place over long periods of time and could have been selected for within groups through the mutual attraction of those displaying greater verbal ability.

I also suspect that sitting around campfires and staring into the flames night after night for hours at a time affected the wiring of our brains. Perhaps connecting more synapses in novel ways. Certainly the frenetically dancing flames would have produced a much more mild effect than the rapid flashing of light from the video that caused seizures to occur in some Japanese children, but nonetheless mind altering in the long run. Though short term some primitives were probably driven to distraction by intensely gazing into the flickering fire.

Now, it’s interesting to note here that overcoming our nature is touted to be of great value in the civilized world where it is thought we must be trained and disciplined to develop that unnatural ability – our will power comes from some other realm than the physical one. However, in the domestication of fire primitive hominids would have had to overcome their nature in order to accomplish that feat. They had to conquer their inherent fear of fire without benefit of civilized training methods. Overcoming our nature, then, must come naturally to us.

Speech certainly fostered the view of ourselves as being in touch with something other than the physical realm. Giving voice to our thoughts seems a magical thing. If the chimps of Gombe had had language the innate laws that instructed their behavior with respect to the cannibalism of Passion discussed earlier would most likely have been formulated and articulated by one or two dominant males by virtue of their overall interest in community affairs. But they would not have had a clue as to how the laws happened to occur to them. Conscious thoughts seem to appear out of nowhere. Thoughts are the spirit of the brain. Upon hearing the newly formulated laws offered by the alpha males the other chimps of the community would have readily accepted them as absolute truth because the spoken laws were already part and parcel of their innate unconscious instructional program and they would have been in awe of the speaker’s wisdom. They would have wondered where such wisdom could possibly have come from and even though the laws were actually revelations of their own natures they would have appeared to have some other origin and credit for the laws would have been given to some higher source. And thus it was with respect to the human condition.

For example, humans obey the incest tabu as do chimpanzees. That is, not perfectly, but generally. There is something innate in both species that rules out members of one’s immediate family for sexual partnering and directs them both to seek out partners who are unrelated. The only difference between humans and chimps here is that the former can speak of the tabu and express it abstractly as law. If chimps could speak they would give voice to the tabu as well. And, like the chimps, humans were obeying that tabu long before it was ever spoken. We had employed the same unspoken rule throughout our wordless existence.

When the incest tabu was first spoken of it surely struck a chord in those who heard it, connecting as it did with a rule already operating within them, and the speaker was probably thought of as very wise indeed. Again, no one had a clue as to where such wisdom could come from. The impact was such that the now spoken tabu was thought to be of some mysterious origin and took on the aura of otherworldliness - it must be an inspiration from above!

The advent of spoken language, then, changed the perception of ourselves and opened the door to the eventuality of discounting our innate judgments about how to behave as a member of a community and overvalue pronouncements by certain authority figures. The members of a primitive group of hunter/gatherer/scavengers were not instructed by anything other than their own instinct and intelligence about how to best behave with respect to one another and maintain cohesiveness amongst themselves. It was something they just knew according to an immutable law of existence – respect those who you depend on for your survival. Every ‘thou shalt not’ of the ten commandments is an admonition against that which would otherwise bring about volatile, unstable conditions among tribal or community members. Moses needed to instruct those in his charge with commandments because as newly emancipated slaves they felt no constraints on their instincts and desires in the sudden freedom that set them loose. As slaves they had not had the opportunity to exercise their own judgment about how to behave. Nor did they have the experience of trekking through the wilderness as a close-knit group. The commandments were to serve as the catalyst that was once provided naturally by the laws of survival.

Chimps form cohesive communities without benefit of spoken or written laws. A chimp knows not to kill and eat another chimp that is a member of its own community. That is not something a chimp is taught, it is something a chimp just knows. At the same time a chimp knows that cannibalizing chimps from other communities is an acceptable practice. Human tribes that have practiced cannibalism operated under the same set of laws. Even the laws of our civilizations are not absolute in these matters. We say that cannibalism is universally wrong but do not condemn those who are forced to engage in it as a matter of survival. Our law against killing also has exceptions. In a primitive sense we might say that, while it is wrong to kill a member of one’s own tribe, to kill a member of an enemy tribe is permissible. The value judgments of chimps and humans are quite similar here and one must conclude that they are formed from a comparable template. They are not commandments from a supernatural God but judgments of survival formed from the network of natural intelligence.

Verbalizing our thoughts, feelings and perceptions elevated them into a new sphere of cultural space. It actually created that space. Such verbalization gave us a way of fossilizing our past with an oral history that was passed on from one generation to the next. We could also plan for the future. No longer trapped in the present and merely existing moment to moment we began living in a conscious continuum between past and future. We could pay homage to our ancestors who we began to mythologize as godlike. And along with our mastery of fire, language provided the means with which to develop greater survival stratagems.

As noted before, a primitive group was ordered through its shared instincts and its common goal of survival. Before spoken language our instincts and feelings informed and instructed our behavior as nameless subterranean stimulants. The stimulants and the resulting behavior were universal allowing the group to behave as a single organism. For instance, sources of nourishment were attractive while the prospect of becoming nourishment for a predator was repulsive. Hunger attracted us toward food and fear repelled us away from predators.

When our emotions and instincts were assigned names as a consequence of the development of language they were freed from the cage between our ribs and became symbolized, objectified, rarified. Expressing one’s hunger was not the same as one’s hunger. A new self-awareness was born. And the new space that we occupied began to give us a feeling of being other than earth-bound creatures. Language brought us out of ourselves and made the creation of elaborate fantasy worlds possible - worlds that we found more attractive to identify with than the one we were forced to survive in.

Before language we merely felt hunger. It was something that willed us to get food. With language we were able to say, ‘I want food’ as though it was a desire created out of one’s own consciousness. Something that was self-willed. Transposing instincts and feelings on to the idea of self was the first step along the way to the concept of a soul.

But, what about a feeling such as guilt, which seems to have no rootedness in the real world and is believed to be divinely inspired? It is a feeling of moral censure that seems imposed on us from above. How could such an emotion arise out of our base natures? How is it that our conscience can bother us even though our questionable deeds might only be known to us? And even the mere contemplation of doing wrong can bring guilty feelings upon us. A religious explanation is that God knows what we are planning to do as well as what we have done and He torments us with a feeling of guilt.

However, in reality guilt is basically the fear of exile that has been part of our psyches throughout our existence. In primitive groups one did not want to do anything to provoke the wrath of the tribe and risk being exiled. To be banished from one’s group for some egregious transgression was the worst possible fate that one could suffer. Trying to survive in the wild on one’s own was not a pleasant prospect. It was most certainly a death sentence. To remain a member in good standing of one’s group was paramount. The fear of exile was the other side of one’s inexorable need to belong to one’s group. Committing some dastardly deed in secret was no safeguard against the worry that you might eventually be found out and consequently banished by your peers. Thinking about the consequences of a misdeed and imagining what would happen if it were known can be co-opted by the idea of all-knowing gods sitting in judgment upon us. If we disobey the laws or commandments we will be exiled for all eternity

Religions, such as Catholicism, use the threat of excommunication and eternal damnation to exploit our deep-rooted fear of exile in order to bind individuals to their particular group. Law enforcement exploits that fear with the threat of imprisonment, which is a form of exile. Totalitarian regimes ruthlessly exploit it to control their populations.

So, as we can see, all our belief systems stem from the interplay between our natures and the natural world. This is the worldview of naturalism and it is one that many will tend to reject out of hand, though they would be hard put to argue effectively against it. In The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs integrates the workings of economic systems with natural systems and in her foreword she reflects on the difficulty people have accepting naturalism. She writes, “…the basic premise on which the book is constructed is that human beings exist wholly within nature as part of natural order in every respect. To accept this unity seems to be difficult for those ecologists who assume – as many do in understandable anger and despair – that the human species is an interloper in the natural order of things. Neither is this unity easily accepted by economists, industrialists, politicians, and others who assume – as many do, taking understandable pride in human achievements – that reason, knowledge and determination make it possible for human beings to circumvent and outdo the natural order. Readers unwilling or unable to breach a barrier that they imagine separates humankind and its works from the rest of nature will be unable to hear what this book is saying.”

The belief that we can outdo the natural order will be our undoing as it has been the undoing for various civilizations throughout history from the city of Ur onward.

And for all our divine civilized conceits it is a primitive tribal mentality that informs and instructs our habit of grouping into various factions that ferociously compete with one another all over the world. These factions, or tribes, seek to eliminate all rivals, each one believing that they must be the last tribe standing. They are ostensibly informed of their exalted view of themselves from worlds beyond this one. But it is merely a primitive tribalism that is at work here and they vie for ascendancy at the expense of honoring a sensible orderliness that would well serve everyone.

We get carried away with the natural tendency to be a dedicated member of a tribal faction while believing we are acting in accordance with divine principles. Tribalism is what rules the world while we believe it is mysticism.