After I’d finished my previous entry arguing for the existence of a global civilization 50,000 years ago, I recalled that I’d attempted to write something similar a few years back. So I pulled out my old notes and partial draft and found them offering many of the same conclusions, though in rougher form and without the benefit of the latest discoveries.
My primary focus in that earlier version, however, was on a point that I haven’t previously touched on here.
I believe there is a crucial message about the past that we’ve been trying to get across to ourselves for over a century. Ever since we started digging up ruins and translating old inscriptions in the 1830’s and 40’s, we’ve been haunted by a sense of something enormous and ancient and unexplained lying just underneath our feet.
Conventional accounts of prehistory seem designed to ward off that disquieting perception, but it stubbornly hangs on. The irreducible fact is that the last 5000 years of recorded history are like a small house built over an ancient and cavernous basement, whose true extent and contents we do not yet fully comprehend.
The realization that our own past is largely unknown crept up on the Victorians gradually, but by the end of the 19th century it had become undeniable. In 1890, for example, the young H.G. Wells wrote an essay titled “The Rediscovery of the Unique,” which emphasized the limits of scientific knowledge using a metaphor that appears to be drawn specifically from the study of prehistory:
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I’ve been developing a bunch of unorthodox theories here, and at times I can start to wonder if I’m just letting my imagination run away with me, so it’s nice to get occasional confirmation that I’m on the right track. Case in point: an article the other day summarizing a paper by archaeologist John Shea, who argues that there is no significant biological difference between the earliest modern humans of 200,000 years ago and their more recent descendants, including ourselves.
“For decades anthropologists contrasted these earlier ‘archaic’ African and Asian humans with their ‘behaviorally-modern’ Upper Paleolithic counterparts,” the article notes, “explaining the differences between them in terms of a single ‘Human Revolution’ that fundamentally changed human biology and behavior. … Shea argues that comparing the behavior of our most ancient ancestors to Upper Paleolithic Europeans holistically and ranking them in terms of their ‘behavioral modernity’ is a waste of time. There are no such things as modern humans, Shea argues, just Homo sapiens populations with a wide range of behavioral variability.”
As anyone who’s been following this blog may have noticed, I’ve arrived at much the same conclusion over the last year, as it’s become apparent to me that my chronology for the sequence of visions requires the earliest visions to go back to the dawn of modern humanity.
But even though it’s nice to see someone else rejecting the old Eurocentric delusion that the important part of human history began only when modern humans arrived in Europe, I’d still take exception to Shea’s reductionist notion that all we’re seeing over the last 200,000 years is “behavioral variability” involving “the varying costs and benefits of different toolmaking strategies.”
The human knowledge base has expanded enormously over that period, art and technology have grown increasingly complex, and the pace of change has constantly accelerated. A theory like Shea’s which describes history as essentially flat has to be omitting something vital.
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Years ago, before I had a blog or even a website, I used to collect my stray thoughts and possible story ideas in an old-fashioned school notebook. One day it struck me that if sexism means discrimination based on sex, and ageism means discrimination based on age, then real-ism ought to mean discrimination based on degree of reality.
So I jotted down a few sentences about a world in which mythological creatures are the targets of prejudice and segregation — although some that are less fantastic in appearance might manage to “pass” as real. The politically correct, of course, would insist that all such beings were merely “differently realized.” And the excluded themselves would finally stand up for their rights and insist, “I’m exactly as real as I need to be!”
It never seemed to be more than a whimsy, though, so I left it at that and moved on. But recently, I’ve been getting a sense that other people have had the same thought — and perhaps took it more seriously than I did.
A few weeks ago, one of my favorite websites, The Daily Grail, commemorated the recent death of venerable British occultist Kenneth Grant by linking to a review of one of his books written in 2002 by graphic novelist and chaos magician Alan Moore.
Moore begins the review cautiously enough, with a general discussion of Grant’s life and the “onslaught of compulsive weirdness” in his work, before tackling the vexing question of whether Against the Light should be taken as a novel masquerading as autobiography or a particularly deranged piece of non-fiction:
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I’ve got the midwinter doldrums and heavy-duty posts are coming hard. So I’m going to take a break by doing a simple round-up of some of the trends and movements that I see as about to coalesce into a holism-based counterculture.
Trends alone are not sufficient, of course. A counterculture explodes only when there is both a volatile mixture of elements and a spark to ignite that mixture. But these trends are what will fuel the fire — and each of them is already displaying the distinctive pattern of thought that will shape the next decade.
The movements that have been catching my eye are primarily offshoots of the environmental activists and computer hackers that I previously described as heretics of the 1980’s. Their roots go back to the potent blend of holism, multiculturalism, and do-it-yourself-ism nurtured by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog in the late 60’s and early 70’s. But what I’m seeing now suggests a new degree of assertiveness and philosophical self-awareness, along with a dedication to the nitty-gritty of everyday life that is very different from the ecotopian romanticism of the 80’s.
These movements fall into three broad groups, which intermingle at many points. The first is typified by WikiLeaks and Anonymous. It is rooted in the hacker ethic and in the belief that access to tools and information should be considered a fundamental human right.
The second, which I’ve only become aware of recently, involves a new wave of environmentalism that over the last two or three years appears to have moved away from any expectation of government-based solutions and applied itself instead to direct action.
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I learned a new word this week — “horizontalism.”
I’ve actually run into it twice now, both times in the context of the Egyptian protests. The first use I spotted was from a poster in the anarchism forum at reddit, who wrote:
I finally heard on the Al Jazeera stream an answer from a real protester, instead of a talking head, to the question they keep flound[er]ing over, “Don’t the protesters need a leader?” — the answer finally came from a blogger who has been in the square, “the people are self organized, there’s no need for a leader to tell them what to do…people are feeding each other, cleaning the square, we all have the same demands, there’s no need for any leaders to tell us what to do”. …
People of reddit, and the anarchism subreddit specifically, I call on you to spread the anti-authoritarian / horizontalist analysis of what’s happening, the reality on the ground is different than how the media, yes even Al Jazeera, is playing it. The ‘international community’ is waiting to figure out who the new authoritarians they can interface with will be… but what is happening on the ground is a rejection of that failed model.
That post really jumped out at me because it sounded so much like what I’ve been saying here about the difference between the failing democracy vision, with its continuing reliance on hierarchical authority, and the completely self-organizing multiculturalism vision.
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In writing about the remote past, I’ve had two primary objectives. One is to use the cycle of historical visions that I’ve developed based on events of the last few centuries to shed light on the vast blank spaces of prehistory. And the other is to use the known facts of prehistory to better understand the cycle of visions.
In previous entries, I’ve suggested that the first three visions were formed as much as 200,000 years ago, when the earliest modern humans began to shape their knowledge of the world into coherent theories: the transformative vision to structure their observations of the natural world, the kinship vision to codify their social relationships, and the spirit vision to explain the powerful inner experiences of the early shamans.
I’ve further suggested that the transformative and kinship visions came together in the first dominant partnership around 100,000 years ago, following a complex intellectual process that may initially have been catalyzed by the spirit vision but which ultimately subordinated that vision’s more disruptive, trickster-like aspects to a need for social stability and order.
And I’ve speculated that a vast disillusionment resulting from the return of ice age conditions 75,000 years ago could have prompted the first “romantic break,” when people lost faith in the ability of the transformative-and-kinship partnership to explain an increasingly hostile world and turned instead to the spirit vision for guidance.
If that was so, then the lost of faith would have been most far-reaching in the Middle East, where modern humans were nearly wiped out by the extreme cold and drought. And the people of that area who moved further north after the cold moderated 50,000 years ago would have carried with them a growing dedication to both the spirit vision and the newly-emergent cosmic order vision — a dedication reflected in the great cave art of Europe.
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I’ve been thinking over my previous entry, in which I suggested that the imposition of group identity towards the end of the ice age resulted in a devastating loss of individual potential. That may be true, but it’s still only half the story — because at the same time as the social outlook was contracting, the scientific outlook was expanding wildly, culminating in the domestication of plants and animals.
In terms of the theory of historical visions that I’ve been laying out, this kind of seesaw effect is typical of the final stages of any dominant partnership. By 20,000 years ago, the ancient transformative-and-kinship partnership was nearing the end of its useful lifespan, and the kinship vision in particular was showing the strain. Where it had once been inclusive — a means of extending people’s sense of relatedness beyond the immediate family — it had become exclusive and xenophobic. Where it had previously made possible new forms of thought and behavior, it had been turned into a means of social control.
The kinship vision at that point might be compared to the democracy vision in the 1950’s, when it had lost much of its earlier idealism and had been reduced to serving as an ideological basis for the Cold War and a means of keeping a lid on political discontent. What was freshest and most exciting in those years came out of the science vision, which was enjoying its last burst of creativity as it helped usher into being the brave new world of television, computers, and space travel.
In much the same way, the transformative vision went through a final phase of visionary potential at the end of the ice age. By then, it had grown far beyond its original geeky focus on throwing rocks in the fire to see what would happen and had become capable of imagining a complete transformation of the natural world.
And just as that final flare-up of the science vision was most intensely realized in the United States, the climax of the transformative vision was strongest in Southeast Asia, where agriculture began.
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One of the great mysteries of the past is that there seems to be a strange kind of event horizon at the end of the ice age. Every historical stage since then is still represented by one present-day culture or another, but there is no society to which we can point and say with confidence, “This is what the Late Paleolithic looked like.”
In my entries here, I’ve attempted to identify certain cultural elements as probable Paleolithic survivals — but that can only get you so far. The art of the European caves, for example, appears to have employed a consistent symbolic system which has never been deciphered.
But the greatest mystery isn’t what things were like back then so much as how and why they changed. Was there an abrupt phase-shift around 11,000 years ago or merely a gradual accumulation of small adjustments? And either way, should the end result be taken as a leap or a fall?
The version of the story that we were all taught in school presents the so-called “Neolithic Revolution” as a major advance that brought us from a primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one involving a far greater degree of knowledge and control.
But there are also indications that the development of agriculture had less to do with “progress” than with a response to crisis which left us working harder just to keep up. And there’s even a persistent “Atlantean” strain in present-day thought which argues that important aspects of knowledge and self-awareness were lost in the transition.
I definitely have a leaning towards this second attitude. I don’t for a moment buy the idea that something resembling modern technology was present back in the Old Stone Age — but I do believe there was both a fall and a great forgetting.
So what might have been the nature of that fall? What was lost then and what has been forgotten?
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When I began working on the previous entry, I intended to discuss a number of ways in which the holism vision is overturning the old concept of the autonomous individual. But I wound up focusing entirely on recent developments in biology — and that tells only half the story. The other half has to do with the emerging concept of a global community of mind in which every one of us participates — what is coming to be known as the hivemind.
The idea of the hivemind is not new. It has been associated with the holism vision since the 1920’s, when the South African writer Eugene Marais theorized that every termite nest functions essentially as a single organism. Marais’ ideas were plagiarized by the prominent Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck in his enormously influential The Life of the White Ant (1926), and from there they quickly passed into science fiction.
Initially, any speculation that human beings might have hiveminds of their own was treated as a grounds for almost Lovecraftian horror. David H. Keller’s trail-blazing The Human Termites (1929), for example, begins by hypothesizing that wars occur because nation-states are “really collections of human beings organized as the termites are, each under the control of a Supreme Intelligence” — but it soon veers off into nightmarish fantasies about human-termite crossbreeds and giant insects destroying New York City.
Even 25 years later, J.R.R. Tolkien could use a grotesque image drawn directly from Maeterlinck to describe the effect on the armies of Mordor of the destruction of Sauron’s Ring: “As when death smites the swollen brooding thing that inhabits their crawling hill and holds them all in sway, ants will wander witless and purposeless and then feebly die, so the creatures of Sauron, orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved, ran hither and thither mindless.”
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As each vision matures, it takes on a broader philosophical dimension that enables it to challenge the underlying assumptions of earlier visions. The holism vision is currently undergoing just such a development, as demonstrated by the recent flurry of doubts being raised about the concept of the autonomous individual.
For the past several centuries, we in the West have been living in an intellectual climate where the isolated individual was perceived as the fundamental unit of existence on every level of reality. It began with the image of atoms zooming through the void that was the basis of the science vision. It continued with the self-sufficient citizen of the democracy vision, equal to but independent of every other self-sufficient citizen. And it climaxed with the chaos vision, in which individual consciousness becomes the sole determination of value and meaning.
But now we have reached a turning-point where the concept of absolute individuality and freedom that was formerly a path to liberation from hidebound tradition has become toxic and destructive. We are in desperate need of an alternative — and holism, with its central message that the whole is always more than the sum of its parts, is ready to provide it.
That message was already present when the holism vision was coming together in the 1920’s and 30’s, but mainly as a grounds for arguing against scientific reductionism. The notion that we personally might also be part of something larger began to take hold only in the psychedelic 1960’s, when a musician like John Lennon might sing “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
But what was still no more than an acid-fueled insight forty years ago has since become solid science — and that science in turn is actively generating new philosophical insights.
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