The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: Human Domination

Kirkpatrick Sale, from After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination (2005):

Think of it: ours is the only species in all the long history of life on earth that has ever spread around the entire world, occupying every continent and nearly every island, effectively subjugating all the animals and plants and natural systems it has encountered and over a relatively short period of time establishing itself in vast numbers as the single most dominant species of all.

It is a wonder that this singular fact seems not to have imprinted itself powerfully upon the consciousness of us all, filling us with daily amazement, or bewilderment, or awe. Nor has it been the bedrock of religions, regarded as a phenomenon worthy of praise and gratitude and homage; nor the preoccupation of scholars, recounting how this marvelous and unique transformation has taken place and investigating why it is that humans, and only humans, are everywhere; nor the inspiration of the arts, celebrating the immensity of this achievement and the treasures it has devolved upon us.

Instead, we take it for granted. That is the way things are, and why not?

But in the preceding two million years, none of the earlier hominid species did anything like that. Their effect on the environment was very limited, as were their numbers at any one place, and they lived in settings confined in space and impact, not terribly different from other mammalian species, except that they had stone tools and intimate social groupings. ‘Homo erectus,’ it is true, did spread out of Africa several times, into the Levant, the Caucuses, and southern Asia and China, but in only modest numbers and with limited technologies insufficient for widespread conquest and dominion.

It was not until our species—‘Homo sapiens,’ we pridefully call it—came upon the earth and began to use its bigger and more pleated brain, its more complex technologies, and its more elaborate social networks, that any creature was able regularly to control an increasing number of the other elements of the natural world for its own use and pleasure. And it was not until our species that any creature developed the psychological perceptions, and then the behavioral manifestations, that allowed it to stand distanced from that world—indeed, in many ways opposed to it—so that it was able to expand its control and dominion in a totally unprecedented way, justified in the name of survival. The evolution of human dominance is the evolution of ‘Homo sapiens’ into a creature that could kill ‘every beast of the earth’ and thus in time conquer and transform the world.

Consider the extent of our domination. Modern humans, now numbering six billion and predicted to go to ten billion, have left not one ecosystem on the surface of the earth free of pervasive human influence, transforming more than half the land on the planet for their own use (a quarter for farming and forestry, a quarter for pasture, 3 percent for housing, industry, and transport), consuming more than 40 percent of the total photosynthetic productivity of the sun, using 55 percent of the world’s freshwater, controlling and regulating two-thirds of all the rivers and streams, and consuming a vast variety of plant, animal, and mineral resources, often to depletion, at a pace that is estimated not to be sustainable for more than fifty years. Like volcanoes and earthquakes, humans have become a force in nature. Only more so—humans now produce about three thousand times more heat energy on average than the world’s volcanoes—and on a worldwide scale without precedence.

It is this extraordinary dominance by one single bipedal species that has brought us to the present imperilment of the earth, including the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems, the alteration of climate, the pollution of waters and soils, the exhaustion of fisheries, the elimination of forests, the spread of deserts, and the disruption of the atmosphere. There is some dispute about when the ecological catastrophe as a result of all this is likely to hit us full force, and in what ghastly form, but it is no exaggeration to say that the undeniable scientific and informed consensus is that if western civilization continues its reckless policies and practices toward the earth we are headed toward ‘ecocide’.

How did we get into this predicament? How did humankind develop the attitude that it was right and good for it to dominate nature as much as possible, to regard the earth and its creatures and its habitats as there for unconstrained human consumption and manipulation? And how can humankind possibly alter that perception, learn to live in balance with nature as we once did during the long ages that made up 99 percent of the time humans have been on earth?

Saturday Lecture: Our Animal Nature?

“It is only through real understanding of the ways in which chimpanzees and men show similarities of behavior that we can reflect, with meaning, on the ways in which men and chimpanzees differ. And only then can we really begin to appreciate, in a biological and spiritual manner, the full extent of man’s uniqueness.” (Jane Goodall)

Raymond Tallis (from Enemies of Hope):

Critics of civilization believe that where we come from is the Animal Kingdom and that consequently many of the discontents of civilization arise from the conflicts between the demands, values, and beliefs of civilized society and our animal instincts. We are animals, yes, but we are sick animals, because life in human society denies expression to our animal nature and, worse, even prevents us from acknowledging that nature. We are possessed by instincts that we can neither express nor even admit to. The result is that, at best, we suffer in secret the consequences of inner division between our civic and our instinctual beings and that, at worst, we give distorted external expression to our denied instincts, so that others suffer—in, for example, the gratuitous violence and petty tyrannies of domestic life and the oppressions, wars, etc. of public life.

This story of human beings as frustrated animals—or as frustrated primitives (who once enjoyed a closer relationship to our common animal nature—seems to have received a huge boost from the recent advances in life-sciences: Darwinian evolutionary theory, ethology, and molecular biology all seem to point to a closer kinship between mankind and animal-kind than [we are] comfortable with. The message from the biologists has inspired many twentieth-century novelists, who see the truth about character as being located in those immemorial primitive tropisms and animal instincts that really regulate behavior and belief. They believe, as D.H. Lawrence did, that underneath personality there is something much more important and powerful and true than personality—the impersonal inheritance from the primitive and animal past. For such writers, civilization is always assumed to be a ‘thin veneer’ over a seething, pullulating mass of uncivilized appetites, instincts, and emotions.

There is hardly a schoolchild who has not learned from a compulsory study of Lord of the Flies that, left to themselves, human beings will naturally revert to a condition of primitives and wild beasts, creating a lawless society in which the strongest rule and the weakest are exploited or become the object of arbitrary cruelty or the unwilling victim of a blood sacrifice. The influence of the novelists has, in its turn, greatly amplified the influence of the biologists. And biologism has also been mediated to the wider public by quasi-scientific writers such as Freud, who in their turn have had an incalculable impact on the literary imagination.

[For these critics] the assumption is that there is no sharp break between humans and other animals [and that] the enormous distance between animal origin and contemporary human destination that has accrued over millions of years since a distinctively human species appeared amounts to nothing. Man may remove himself from within the animal kingdom but the animal kingdom cannot be removed from within mankind. However the fundamental opposition between (animal) Nature and (human) Culture may dominate human experience, discourse, attitudes, and behavior, this opposition is simply the master-myth by which humans organize their pictures of the world and make the world over into their thing. Our human nature remains rooted in our animal origins; we are up to our leaves in our roots. 

According, then, to biologists, anthropologists, and others, the stories we tell ourselves about our origins exaggerate the sharpness of the distinction between man and the infra-human animals. In contrast, I contend that eliding the absolutely fundamental difference requires us to overlook, indeed traduce, humankind and to deny the central mystery of what we are. Understanding humanity in terms of animality, and seeing men as beasts self-deceived by a surface rationality as to their true nature, prevents us from thinking about our own natures in a helpful and constructive way. It is a crucial factor in the emptiness of much contemporary social thought and cultural criticism.

Saturday Lecture: "The Company of Strangers"

Paul Seabright, from The Company of Strangers:

Our everyday life is much stranger than we imagine, and rests on fragile foundations. This is the startling message of the evolutionary history of humankind. Our teeming, industrialized, networked existence is not some gradual and inevitable outcome of human development over millions of years. Instead we owe it to an extraordinary experiment launched a mere ten thousand years ago. No one could have predicted this experiment from observing the course of our previous evolution, but it would forever change the character of life on our planet.

Around that time, after the end of the last Ice Age, one of the most aggressive and elusive bandit species in the entire animal kingdom began to settle down. It was one of the great apes—a close cousin of chimpanzees and bonobos, and a lucky survivor of the extinctions that had wiped out several other promising branches of the chimpanzee family. Like the chimpanzee it was violent, mobile, intensely suspicious of strangers, and used to hunting and fighting in bands of close relatives. Yet now, instead of ranging in search of food, it began to keep herds and to grow crops, storing them in settlements that limited the ape’s mobility and exposed it to the attentions of the very strangers it had hitherto fought or fled. Within a few hundred generations—barely a pause for breath in evolutionary time—it had formed social organizations of startling complexity. Not just village settlements but cities, armies, empires, corporations, nation states, political movements, humanitarian organizations, even internet communities. The same shy, murderous ape that had avoided strangers throughout its evolutionary history was now living, working, and moving among complete strangers in their millions.

Homo sapiens sapiens is the only animal that engages in elaborate task-sharing—the division of labor, as it is sometimes known—between genetically unrelated members of the same species. It is a phenomenon as remarkable and uniquely human as language itself. Most human beings now obtain a large share of the provision for their daily lives from others to whom they are not related by blood or marriage. Even in poor rural societies people depend significantly on nonrelatives for food, clothing, medicine, protection, and shelter. In cities, most of these nonrelatives crucial to our survival are complete strangers.

Nature knows no other examples of such mutual complex dependence among strangers. Cooperation through a division of labor has never evolved in any species other than man. Members of the same species occupy the same environment, eat the same food, and—especially—pursue the same sexual opportunities; they are rivals for all these things in a much more intense way than are members of different species. Nowhere else in nature do unrelated members of the same species—genetic rivals incited by instinct and history to fight one another—cooperate on projects of such complexity and requiring such a high degree of mutual trust as human beings do.

No solution to this puzzle can be found in evolutionary biology alone. Ten thousand years is too short a time for the genetic makeup of Homo sapiens sapiens to have adapted to his new social surroundings. Yet evolutionary biology has something important to tell us all the same, for the division of labor among human beings has had to piggyback on a physiology and a psychology that evolved to meet a far different set of ecological problems. These were problems faced by hunter-gatherers, mainly on the African woodland savannah, over the six or seven million years that separate us from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos. Some time in the last two hundred thousand years or so—less than one-thirtieth of that total span—a series of changes, miniscule to geneticists, vast in the space of cultural potential, occurred to make human beings capable of abstract, symbolic thought and communication.

The first evidence of the new cultural capabilities to which those genetic changes gave rise is found in the cave paintings, grave goods, and other symbolic artifacts left by hunter-gatherer communities of anatomically modern man, which are no older than sixty or seventy thousand years—and most are much younger. These capabilities seem to have made a move toward agriculture and settlement possible once the environmental conditions became favorable after the end of the last ice age. These capabilities also enabled human beings to construct the social rules and habits that would constrain their own violent and unreliable instincts enough to make society possible on a larger, more formal scale. And they laid the foundation for the accumulation of knowledge that would provide humanity as a whole with a reservoir of shared skills vastly greater than the skills available to any single person.

But these cultural capabilities did not evolve because of their value in making the modern division of labor possible. Quite the contrary: modern society is an opportunistic experiment, founded on a human psychology that had already evolved before human beings ever had to deal with strangers in any systematic way. It is like a journey to the open sea by people who have never yet had to adapt to any environment except the land.

Unfortunately, the human capacity for cooperation is double-edged. It is not only the foundation of social trust and peaceful living but also what makes for the most successful acts of aggression between one group and another. Like chimpanzees, though with more deadly refinement, human beings are distinguished by their ability to harness the virtues of altruism and solidarity, and the skills of rational reflection, to the end of making brutal and efficient warfare against other groups. What we need, then, is not more cooperation, but better-directed cooperation.

How optimistic can we reasonably be, knowing that some of the very qualities that have made the great experiment of modern life possible are also those that now threaten its very existence? Just how fragile is the great experiment on which our species set out ten thousand years ago? And what can we do to make it less fragile now?

The unplanned but sophisticated coordination of modern industrial societies is a remarkable fact that needs an explanation. Nothing in our species’ biological evolution has shown us to have any talent or taste for dealing with strangers, and the very talents for cooperation and rational reflection that could provide solutions to our most urgent problems are also the source of our species’ terrifying capacity for organized violence between groups. Trust between groups needs as much human ingenuity as trust between individuals. And the last ten millennia have shown repeatedly that those who have not learned from their history may never notice their deficiency until, fatally, they are pitted against adversaries who have.   

"Ich Und Du"

In the beginning is relation...all real living is meeting. (Martin Buber, I AND THOU)

Martin Buber's "I-Thou" is one of the more important and fruitful concepts of modern philosophy, distinguishing our proper relation to other persons from our relation to objects and things ("I-It") and also insisting that true personhood comes into being only through such "I-Thou" interactions. The clinical designation of "sociopaths" refers to people who are deficient in, or incapable of, "I-Thou" relationships; for them, other people are no different from objects to be used and manipulated for pleasure, gain, or out of sheer caprice.

That said, Buber is notoriously difficult to read and to understand, which is why I have turned for clarification to Maurice Friedman's biography MARTIN BUBER: THE LIFE OF DIALOGUE. Here is Friedman's explanation of Buber's notions of "personality" and "personhood":

Personality is neither simply an individual matter nor simply a social product, but a function of relationship. Though we are born ‘individuals,’ in the sense of being different from others, we are not born persons. Our personalities are called into being by those who enter into relation with us...[a person] is to be understood, in general, in terms of his relationships rather than taken in himself.

Too many modern thinkers, beginning with Descartes (and including, among others, all modern economists), treat individual human beings as utterly autonomous: existing in, of, and for themselves while interacting with other similarly autonomous individuals. Buber believed that view to be false; he believed that our very existence as "persons" both originates and is sustained through genuine and open encounter with others--what Buber famously called the "I-Thou" relationship.

This relational anthropology even extends to man's relationship with God, as Friedman wrote:

[Buber resists] the tendency to submerge man in a mechanistic universe or to reduce God to an impersonal and indirect first cause, an abstract monistic absolute, or an immanent vital force. The answer which Buber finds in the Book of Job...is not an answer which solves or removes the problem. Wrong does not become right, yet God is near to Job once again, and in this nearness Job finds meaning in what has happened to him, a meaning which cannot be stated in any other terms than those of the relationship itself. This answer is not implied in the statement of the question [and] It does not make any the less real the ‘silence’ or ‘eclipse’ of God when He appears to hide Himself and we cut ourselves off from relation with Him.

The significance of God's response to Job, out of the whirlwind, was simply that it was a response, and that in responding God entered into the "I-Thou" relationship with Job. While God's actual words may have been intended to reduce Job to fear and trembling--at which they succeeded admirably--Job nonetheless felt justified in that God had bothered to answer him at all.

Maurice Friedman also highlighted Buber's "hallowing of the everyday" and his belief in "the redemption of evil":

Buber has demanded, as no other modern thinker, the hallowing of the everyday -- the redemption of evil through the creation of human community in relation with God... redemption does not depend on God alone. ¹ Each man helps bring about the unity of God and the world through genuine dialogue with the created beings among whom he lives. Each man lets God into the world through hallowing the everyday.

Such a perspective is reminiscent of process theology and relational theology, both of which insist that human actions affect God and that humans are active participants with God in a cosmic drama.

Moreover, according to Buber, good and evil are not to be understood dualistically but dialectically:

"The crucial religious experiences of man do not take place in a sphere in which creative energy operates without contradiction, but in a sphere in which evil and good, despair and hope, the power of destruction and the power of rebirth, dwell side by side. The divine force which man actually encounters in life does not hover above the demonic, but penetrates it."

Friedman elaborated:

For those who hold the dialectical attitude toward evil, good cannot exist in solitary splendour, nor is it opposed by a radically separate evil with which it has nothing to do. Evil... is bound up with good in such a way that both are parts of a larger process, of a greater whole, which is at once origin and goal. Thus evil is in one way or another recognized as having reality, even if only that of a temporary accompaniment of unredeemed creation, but its reality is never permanent, nor is it ever completely divorced from the good. Hence it is capable of redemption by the process of the world spirit, the grace of God, or the redemptive activity of man.

[Buber] has never considered evil an absolute, nor has he lost faith in its possible redemption. Elizabeth Rotten has quoted Buber as saying, ‘One must also love evil . . . even as evil wishes to be loved.’ This statement is symbolic of the way in which he has consistently answered this question: good can be maximized not through the rejection or conquest of evil but only through the transformation of evil, the use of its energy and passion in the service of the good.

That our humanity depends not on each of us individually but on the "I-Thou" relationships we experience, and that the ultimate purpose of love is to transform and redeem evil: the claims at the heart of Martin Buber's philosophy represent either keen insight or lofty idealism. Either way, they are, in a word, extraordinary.  

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http://www.religion-online.org/book/martin-buber-the-life-of-dialogue/

¹ The phrase "redemption does not belong to God alone" will strike most Christians as heretical, but it is squarely in keeping with Jewish tradition. See, for instance, Howard Schwartz's poem "Gathering the Sparks":

That is why we were created-- / To search for the sparks / No matter where they have been / Hidden / And as each one is revealed / To be consumed / In our own fire / And reborn / Out of our own / Ashes

Quite frankly, the Jewish perspective makes a whole lot more sense: if we're not here to help God with something, then what good are we?

https://search.proquest.com/openview/17e31c342a257d16200c9ca73cf53f51/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1817128 

To Whom Do We Belong?

"Some of my friends don't know who they belong to / Some can't get a single thing to work inside" (Gram Parsons, "A Song for You")^

The modern Self is a troubled and a troubling phenomenon, provoking such questions as: Where does it come from, what if anything does it owe to others, and to whom does it belong?  

Rod Dreher is a constant critic of the modern Self and its, well, Self-centeredness. He recently quoted, with approval, Alan Jacobs' summation of the gospel of the modern secular left: "[It] is not essentially about sex but rather may be summed up as: “I am my own.”  That notion, according to Dreher, is at the heart of modernity's failures, and Jacobs has provided him with an "aha" moment: 

 “I am my own” — yes, that’s it. That’s at the core of this whole thing. Sex and sexuality is the most contentious way it manifests itself today, but that’s the core of it. A Christianity that surrenders to this is not going to be long for this world, nor deserves to be, because it will have betrayed a core truth of Biblical anthropology. 

The "core truth" which Dreher leaves unspoken (because the initiates will understand and outsiders would just be baffled) is that we are not our own but that we belong to God.* In contravening this fact, secular modernity (so goes Dreher's claim) recapitulates the prideful defiance that took place in Eden:  

What’s important for conservative Christians to grasp here is that it’s not really about sexuality. You surrender on this, and there will be something else, because the orthodox Christian faith stands in defiant contradiction to this false gospel that proclaims the Unholy Trinity: Me, Myself, and I.** The Christianities — some of them right-of-center — that accept that have already surrendered, even if they are, for today, on the orthodox side of the sex and sexuality question. They can’t hold out because they have accepted the logic of postreligious modernity — a logic as old as humanity itself: “We shall be as gods.” 

For the same reason, Rod Dreher has frequently derided Justice Anthony Kennedy's assertion that "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life..." It is difficult for those of us steeped in secular modernity (that is, almost all of us) to understand the antipathy that conservatives like Dreher have for this seemingly anodyne statement; most of us have no problem whatsoever with Justice Kennedy's gauzy assertion, regardless of whether we agree with his ruling on same-sex marriage, but it absolutely infuriates religious traditionalists. 

In another recent column, Dreher quoted at length from Erin Manning, who offered some historical context, and a certain amount of sympathy, for what has taken place: 

Anybody who has read any of the writings of the late 19th and early 20th century has seen a frequent expression of this one idea: the old order, whatever it was, was about to change, was indeed already passing away, and whatever would replace it would be something very different from what had gone before...The age of the atomized individual, in fact, had begun to rise...you can say that the trajectory of deterioration from the first deliberate detachment of the Self from home, family, tribe, nation, religion, community, and so on to the motto today of “I am my own,” which implies that the Self itself is a Thing which one owns like property and can make use of in pretty much the same way, was already set out in those early days of at least the early 20th century, if not before.  

Manning does not dismiss the Self, but only its deification. In the process, however, she unwittingly commits the very error she decries: 

"This does not mean that one’s sense of self is unimportant or meaningless; it just means that the elevation of that sense of self above all else tends to invert those structures which help us find a place in the world that is bigger than we alone are–that, in a way of speaking, can help us to put ourselves at the service of others in that solidarity and brotherhood which is so necessary to human thriving." [emboldening added] 

If I am to put myself "at the service of others"--or, for that matter, to give myself up to the service of Jesus—I must first be in possession of myself; that is, I must be my own to give. If the Self is not sovereign over itself, it cannot give itself to anyone or anything; in which case, it is merely an instrument for others to use and a mere vessel for the demands and obligations of tradition and authority. That view may find favor with the custodians of tradition (of which there are, of course, myriad and conflicting) and with authorities (of whom there are, of course, myriad and conflicting), but it seems unworthy of a higher view of human dignity—especially, one would think, the scripture-based view that human beings are created in the image of God. 

In Dreher's citation, Erin Manning goes on:  

No society can endure for long as a mere collection of disassociated individuals who owe loyalty to the Self but no one else. The fact that we are not completely dissolved as a nation yet has more to do with the lingering echoes of the old loyalties to place and people and tribe and nation and religion and community, etc., than to some power of the Self to balance the paradox between doing what is in its own best interest and pleasing others...We don’t yet really know what it is like to have, in place of a community, a loose assortment of uncollected individuals who owe no loyalty to anyone but themselves, but I suspect that day will arrive. 

Manning has taken a narrow—and, I would argue, mistaken—idea of the implications of "I am my own"; she interprets that phrase to mean that we are therefore "disassociated individuals who owe loyalty to the Self but no one else." That is not, and certainly need not be, the case; to say that "I am my own" means not that I have no other loyalties but that I choose my loyalties and order them in a way that makes sense to me and that coheres with my understanding of a meaningful life. I need not be "disassociated" just because I am free to determine the associations I prefer. 

Rod Dreher will no doubt still find that objectionable; for him, the Self that both chooses and defines the ground and scope of its choosing is anathema. That is a choice he has made, based on how he has come, in the course of his experiences, to make sense of this puzzling world; he has chosen certain loyalties and rejected certain others. Dreher, Alan Jacobs, and Erin Manning: all of them, in rejecting "I am my own," assert their sovereignty over themselves; they display their ability to resist both contemporary culture, intellectual trends, and the norms of any particular community in the name of whatever it is they value. In other words, they each exemplify what they denounce: an autonomous Self that can stand apart from the crowd, that can resist the call to conformity, and that insists "Here I stand, I can in conscience do no other."  

If there is an escape from the Self that doesn't depend first on the existence and then on the sovereignty of that Self: I for one haven't figured it out. 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/why-dont-people-want-to-know-benedict-option/  

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-selfishness-of-the-self/  

^There is abundant, and tragic, irony in Parsons' lyric, given his death at the age of 26 from a lethal accidental overdose of morphine and alcohol; the evidence is that, for all of Gram Parsons' undeniable talent and charisma, he couldn't get much to work inside. 

*Atheist that I am and untrained in exegesis, I do not believe that the Biblical God created human beings to be His property. It is more accurate to say that God created us to belong with Him, not to Him; that is, to find our true happiness in Him and through Him and with Him. But for all that, the Bible indicates that He created us to be free to find our way to Him if we can (with His help, of course) or to walk away from Him if we choose, whether from ignorance, willfulness, or sheer perversity. The Christian notion of "free will" is impossible to reconcile with any view of mankind "belonging" to God in the sense of "being owned by".

**Credit where credit is due: "the Unholy Trinity" ("Me, Myself, and I") is clever. It would also be a great name for an alt-bluegrass band along the lines of Split Lip Rayfield.

Our Quarrel With Death

Stephen Cave (IMMORTALITY: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization) articulates the cognitive dissonance that plagues us: we are biologically programmed to seek survival but our evolved brains tell us that death is inescapable. There simply is no way out of here:  

We realize, as we see the other living things around us fall one by one, that no one is spared. We recognize that death is the real enemy; with our powerful minds we can stave him off for a while with sharp spears or strong gates, full larders and hospitals, but at the same time, we see that it is all ultimately fruitless, that one day we not only can but surely will die.¹ This is what the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously described as “being-toward-death,” which he considered to define the human condition. We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. “Man has created death,” wrote the poet W. B. Yeats. Other creatures blindly struggle on, knowing only life until their moment comes. “Except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death,” wrote the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. But we bring death into life: we see it coming for us in every storm or forest fire, snake or spider, illness or ill omen. This is a central theme of philosophy, poetry and myth; it is what defines us as mortals. It is represented in that most ancient and influential of stories, the book of Genesis: if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are told, they will die—mortality is the price of knowledge. Since we attained self-awareness, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, “death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.” No matter what we do, no matter how hard we strive, we know that the Reaper will one day take us. Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose. 

And yet we resist this obvious conclusion: 

[We believe] that our own obliteration is impossible. The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the reality of our own deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there—the observer, the envisioning eye. The very act of imagining summons you, like a genie, into virtual being. We therefore cannot make death real to ourselves as thinking subjects. Our powerful imaginative faculties malfunction: it is not possible for the one doing the imagining to actively imagine the absence of the one doing the imagining. “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators,” wrote Sigmund Freud in 1915. He concluded from this that “at bottom no one believes in his own death … [for] in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.” Or as the English Romantic poet Edward Young put it: “All men think all men mortal, but themselves.” 

The objective knowledge of mortality collides with the subjective sense of immortality, and voila: 

We have a paradox: when we peer into the future we find our wish to live forever fulfilled, as it seems inconceivable that we might one day cease to be. Thus we believe in our own immortality. Yet at the same time we are painfully aware of the countless possible threats to our being, from poisonous snakes to avalanches, and we see all around how other living things inevitably meet a sticky end. And thus we believe in our own mortality. Our very same overblown intellectual faculties seem to be telling us both that we are eternal and that we are not, both that death is a fact and that it is impossible. In Zygmunt Bauman’s words, “the thought of death is—and is bound to remain—a contradiction in terms.” Both our immortality and our mortality present themselves to our minds with equal force. 

What happens when the irresistible force of our hard-wired will to survive encounters the immovable object of our inevitable mortality? According to Cave (as according to Ernest Becker and many others) what happens is, essentially, civilization as we know it: 

Such a state would be a continuous, paralyzing struggle between dread and hope. But that is not how most of us live; we are not, as a rule, paralyzed by the contradiction at the heart of the human condition. This is because we have developed stories that help us make sense of this existential impasse... 

Those stories are what Cave calls "immortality narratives," and they are, he says, "the engine of civilization". The narratives are sometimes religious and sometimes cultural in nature; they are inculcated in us almost from the moment of birth and we are rarely encouraged or even allowed to question them. They are often implicit, which makes dissent from them even more difficult; and they all reinforce, one way or the other, the notion that our efforts matter, that there is meaning to what we do. That is a more palatable perspective for most of us than "Life's a bitch and then you die," though the latter narrative has a pretty strong claim to being more accurate. 

William Butler Yeats wrote, “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”  Let's add to that, "Out of the quarrel with death, we make life." 

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Stephen Cave, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization.  (Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.)   

¹ It is impossible to read this passage (particularly the phrase "death is the real enemy") without thinking of St. Paul, whose writings betrayed both a terror of mortality and an exultant conviction that, thanks to the resurrection of Jesus, mankind has triumphed over its oldest, most implacable enemy. Writing to the Christians at Corinth, Paul reminds them what is "of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures." Paul then catalogues various appearances of the resurrected Christ, before arguing: "But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith...if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either." Paul allows no leeway on this critical point, no room for respectful disagreement: to be a follower of Jesus is to be destined for glorious immortality! Paul continues and then concludes, "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" 

Nothing that Jesus did in his life and his public ministry mattered all that much to Paul—at least, Paul never mentioned, in the letters we have from him, any of Jesus' teachings, healings, or parables. What mattered to Paul was simply that Jesus died and then emerged triumphantly from the grave; from which Paul concludes that all who believe in Christ will similarly triumph. It is that belief which set Paul aflame and inspired his ministry, and it was that message which he sought to spread: not so much "the meek shall inherit the earth" as "those faithful to Christ will live forever".  The hunger for immortality is explicit; the terror of extinction is palpable.

Our Dark Little Hearts

{TRIGGER WARNING: The following features a discussion of Original Sin.} 

In her dismissive review of Stephen Greenblatt's THE RISE AND FALL OF ADAM AND EVE, Jessa Crispin takes to task not only Greenblatt but anyone who subscribes to the idea "that history is a journey of linear progress". In particular, she savages modern secular naivete and its insistence that "once there was superstition, and because of that we have misogyny, war, and misery, but through time, we have been able to replace faith with science, and the world has steadily improved as a result." 

Anyone paying attention knows, of course, that "misogyny, war, and misery" have not disappeared under the aegis of widespread secularization; rather, such travail persists—you can argue whether it is decreasing, and you can argue whether the world is improving, but you cannot deny the persistence of such evils. 

According to Ms. Crispin, Stephen Greenblatt blames it all on the Augustinian/Christian interpretation of the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve, which he sees as the "source material for all misogyny, a kind of virus “strain built deep into the origin narrative itself.” Crispin notes that Greenblatt's understanding of the Genesis text "is not much different from the interpretations of preachers and patriarchs who have used the story to condemn women and justify their subjugation." She also notes that Greenblatt follows in a long tradition of critics' oversimplifying the issue of Original Sin by ascribing it to Augustine's personal neuroses: 

Greenblatt [sees] Augustine’s idea that Adam and Eve created original sin as a personal problem that accidentally had repercussions for all of the Western world. Augustine famously wrote about his difficulty in keeping it in his pants, and his agony over his rampant libido’s conflict with his Christian desire for purity. This provides an easy answer for why the doctrine of original sin came about: Augustine needed to figure out a reason why his dick was such a problem, and he needed to pawn that responsibility off on someone else, and that someone else was Adam and Eve. We are born into sin, Augustine decided, because we are the descendants of that first disobedience. We are born sinners, we will die sinners, and it is only through the grace of god that we can find redemption and salvation. 

Set Augustine aside, however, and we are still confronted with the Biblical story itself; which, as Ms. Crispin observes, "is as simple as a nursery story, yet as complex as any other creation myth." She reminds us that "A culture will hear in a story what it wants to hear..." and she asks us, not unreasonably, to take the scriptural text, and its author(s), seriously: 

Like all creation myths, the [Genesis] story is a mind’s way of thinking through a problem: why is the world garbage? Why is there violence and death? Why is there a world at all? If there is a god, why is he such a dick? Why is there variety instead of just one kind of thing? And why do humans, seemingly unlike some other animals of the world, have consciousness and awareness of mortality? The allegory of Adam and Eve answers many of those questions, but what you interpret those answers to be will tell you much more about your culture and your identity than about religion itself. 

Jessa Crispin has no doubt what our secular modern interpretations say about us: 

We live in an era in the Western world where we believe our behavior should not be restricted by anything. Not religion, not a social contract. We should be able to consume what we like, say what we like, fuck what we like. So, of course, in our era we interpret the idea of sin as old-fashioned and outdated and useless. In our era, we find scientific and evolutionary justifications for our behavior, but those are stories just like any other. We have sexual urges because of our biological imperative to spread our genes, and so on. That is a story that grants us permission to do what we like, and so we prefer it over the story of original sin. 

Given humankind's historical resume, says Crispin, we ought to be cautious about granting ourselves such license; there is little or no evidence that we can be trusted to use it wisely. Echoing philosopher John Gray, Crispin writes: 

[The idea of] original sin can be useful to us, taken out of its religious context. There is, in fact, something broken deep at the heart of human beings. No other species is as uselessly violent, as destructive to the habitat that should sustain us, as set on domination and control.  

Stephen Greenblatt, says Crispin, wants to blame human destructiveness on religion, on religious texts, and on the mythical gods claimed by various religions as authorities, believing that "If we get rid of the text and the gods and the whole culture of religion, we can rid ourselves of these urges." 

Not so, declares Ms. Crispin; instead, "The fault lies in all of us [and] not in our self-selected belief systems."  She elaborates: 

The violence originates in us. Religious concepts like original sin help us understand this about ourselves, and offer suggestions on what to do about it. If, then, we place original sin outside of its Christian context, we can still use it to understand this brokenness, this illness that exists in us. There is no amount of external maneuvering that can wash us clean of this inborn stain. We can only acknowledge it, try to reckon with it, and then struggle to choose to behave differently. Religion is simply one context in which to accomplish this.* 

In the end, Crispin tells us, and despite the best efforts of secular skeptics like Stephen Greenblatt, there is a very good reason "why the fall of Adam and Eve retains such power: Adam’s story is not the story of one man, and Eve’s story is not the story of one woman. It is the story of all of us, and our fucked up, dark little hearts." 

Atheist that I am, I have a hard time of late rejecting that conclusion.

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https://thebaffler.com/latest/paradise-tossed-crispin  

*In her argument, Ms. Crispin cites the writing of John Gray. She might also have cited the recent work of Terry Eagleton, another British secular thinker who finds much value in the Christian thought tradition (including Paul and Augustine). Both Gray and Eagleton caution those of us who cannot believe in the Christian God that we ought not to reject the entire Christian anthropology as a result; that is, we should take care, while getting rid of the unwanted baby, not to discard the bathwater. 

The Invention of Sex

At Aeon, Holly Dunsworth and Ann Buchanan have a fascinating essay on the transformative role of human "reproductive consciousness," i.e. our knowledge that babies don't really come from the stork:

Our understanding that sex makes babies has done much more than shape human destiny. It has changed the entire planet through our manipulation of other species to our own ends.

That's quite a claim, but the authors are more than prepared to back it up, as their essay makes clear. When and how did people make the connection between sex and reproduction, between a brief carnal encounter and the subsequent growth of a child within the woman? Whenever and however it made, that connection was to prove momentous:

Throughout most of evolutionary history, sex was just sex [and] for most species, sex still is just sex. But for our own peculiar species of primate, sex is about something more. Sex is about babymaking. Contemplating sex and where we come from has played a fundamental role in human mating, partnering and raising children, and in forming families, communities and alliances, and more. Recognising this fundamental difference between us and the rest of Earth’s sexual beings overturns conventional evolutionary thinking, which has long understood human sex, reproduction and kinship as fundamentally the same for us as for any other mammal.

How does an instinct-driven procreative act become something more? According to Dunsworth and Buchanan, that occurs when a creature becomes aware of what it's doing:

[It is] our reproductive consciousness that sets humans apart. Sex isn’t something that just happens to human beings. It’s the fact that we know what can happen when we do it that might be one of the turning points in making humans unique inhabitants of the planet. Because of reproductive consciousness, humans know that they are related to one another: grandparents, parents, siblings and children. And this knowledge – sex equals babies, and babies equals kinship – marks one of the turning points of the history of life.

Having set the stage, Dunsworth and Buchanan get to the question itself:

So how did we work it out in the first place?

Beats me, really, but Dunsworth and Buchanan seem to think we did it because of our capacity for abstract thought, our capacity for language, and the fact that we are social animals who share information:

Understanding where babies come from can’t simply be observed. It requires grasping that a rather routine activity today will have long-term consequences in the future – connecting a long-ago act to the baby mice, kittens, baby gorillas or newborn whales and elephants born 20 days, two months, eight months, or almost two years later. Among the few of us, including bonobos, that copulate while pregnant – which can shrink the time between cause and effect – being able to link the business and substance of sex to pregnancy and its outcome would still take the kind of wild imagination that only humans are thought to possess. That, plus language, helps us to think these sorts of abstract creations and to communicate them. Once we’re a few years old, humans begin to explain the unobservable. Soon thereafter, we’re weaving and repeating stories about where babies come from. And it’s not much longer until we’re seasoned gossips about tribe members.

It's worth noting that explanations--whether of where babies come from or of why the sky is blue or of why what goes up seems invariably to come down--are, first and foremost, responses to questions; and questions are posed out of curiosity, that is, out of a desire to know. Though the Book of Genesis claims that grasping at forbidden knowledge was our ancestors' downfall, it also seems to be the fundamental trait that sets us apart from other animals.

Buchanan and Dunsworth offer a tentative timeline:

We don’t know when our human ancestors first began to reason abstractly in a deeply imaginative way, and we certainly don’t know when any first moments of a-ha occurred, when anyone grasped that man + woman + whatever else they might imagine = baby. Scenarios for the origins of reproductive consciousness play out in fantastic works such as Jean M Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) and its sequel The Valley of Horses (1982) but, outside of speculative fiction, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever know what happened with any certainty.

If reproductive consciousness is as old as the earliest archaeological evidence for our unique ability to think about the future, the past and present, and to link far out causes and effects together, then it might have originated as far back as 1.75 million years ago when Homo erectus began deliberately shaping stones in the form of tear-dropped hand-axes. But ultimately we can’t know for sure what erectus brains could think about sex and kinship. If reproductive consciousness is possible only with our species-specific brains, then it could have dawned on the first of our species, Homo sapiens, which means it could still be very ancient, going back some 200,000-300,000 years. Given that it’s likely that sapiens took some time to fire up its brain to modern capacity, then it’s possible that reproductive consciousness originated within the past 100,000 years when the archaeological record starts to boast the products of sophisticated abstract thinking with those engraved eggshells, and also in etched rocks, carved stones and painted caves.

Whenever the cognitive ability arose, reproductive consciousness is almost certainly as old as 100,000 years, and so the cultural byproducts of it must be ancient too. Dowries, engagement rings and marriages are influenced by our unique cognition and culture, even if such traits have long been seen by evolutionary biologists as the bipedal ape’s versions of what bush crickets, bower birds and wolves do.*

The authors itemize the various consequences of our sexual knowledge:

Reproductive consciousness likely...played a role in the evolution of people’s ability and desire to form exclusive sexual partnerships within a larger community. Beliefs about relatedness and about babymaking could have factored into mate choice and competition for a long time, in a particularly human kind of sexual selection. Reproductive consciousness would have increased attraction to and competition for mates, male or female, who are observed to be good community members and good parents, or who have potential to be. It would have increased competition for mates or for families with resources they’re willing to share.

Reproductive consciousness is a powerful context for boosting male-female cooperation, even beyond mates and into adult brother-sister relationships – effectively a uniquely human phenomenon. The understanding of paternity would also have boosted brother-brother bonds...Humans take nepotism far beyond where other primates go because we know about relatedness, and we encode it with meaning and value.

Dunsworth and Buchanan argue that, because humans create and inhabit cultures, our behaviors, whatever their evolutionary roots, cannot be explained merely by biology, instinct, or selfish genes:

Reproductive consciousness is just one element in the invention of human culture – a whole cluster of behaviours, knowledge, values and beliefs that unhooks human destiny from the standard evolutionary model of other species. We humans do many things that undermine our evolutionary interests. We practise religious celibacy, contraception, abortion, suicide bombing. We adopt infants who aren’t our kin, we go to war, we kill our siblings. A lot of this we do voluntarily, and none of it perpetuates our own genes. In fact, it actively does not.

Reproductive consciousness transforms human beings and families into human lineages, inextricably intertwined with other bloodlines, passing along and exchanging genes just like any other animal, but also transmitting immaterial and material culture across and down through the generations, which in turn affects the fates of the genes going forward as well. Understanding that sex makes babies has allowed us to create social norms and expectations about when and with whom we reproduce that biologically driven behaviour alone could never have done.

Again, the Book of Genesis says that the forbidden fruit was "the knowledge of good and evil," but Dunsworth and Buchanan suggest that a more specific knowledge was entailed:

Because we are human, our ability to explain the unobservable, to understand that men help to make babies and that we are related to one another, has profoundly affected the social structures we’ve devised, the rules about who can have sex with whom, and formed a basis for wide-ranging cooperation on large-scale projects. It has driven our relationship with the plants and animals we’ve domesticated for food and labour, and this in turn has altered the land on which we live. If it didn’t spark the Anthropocene, reproductive consciousness has certainly deeply affected its trajectory. Knowledge is evolutionary power.

Knowledge, born out of a desire to know: alert readers (and pubescent Catholic boys)** will recall that in the Bible, sexual relations were sometimes described as a form of knowing, as in "And Adam knew his wife, and she conceived." Knowledge and desire, sexual and otherwise, may be what distinguish us from other animals; and they may be precisely what stirred the gods to wrath against us. No wonder so many religious people make such a big deal about sexuality: every coupling re-enacts, depending on your perspective, either our primordial liberation or our primordial fall.
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https://aeon.co/essays/i-think-i-know-where-babies-come-from-therefore-i-am-human

*"Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it..."

**There was just nothing funnier in eighth grade at St. Michael School than asking a girl, "Hey, do you 'know' my friend Jim?" The girl would say yes and all the boys would snicker knowingly (see what I did there?).

Our Ethical Predicament

At Public Books, Philip Gorski writes about Webb Keane’s ETHICAL LIFE and about "the failure of the social sciences to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical life. A theory that could explain why humans are constantly judging and evaluating, and why we care about other people and what they think of us." Theories abound, writes Gorski, but they are all unsatisfactory in one way or another, perhaps because the task to which they are committed is so daunting:

A good social scientific theory of ethical life would need to be compatible with both our current understanding of human evolution and the brute fact of cultural diversity. It would need to show how natural selection could give rise to human ethics. And it would need to show how human history could lead to variation and change in ethical life. It would somehow have to square universalism and historicism. 

Gorski’s essay explains Webb Keane’s multi-faceted approach to “ethical life,” an approach in which “Keane tacitly distinguishes at least four levels of social reality. Let’s call them the physiological, the psychological, the sociological, and the anthropological. Each emerges out of the other. Human culture emerges out of human interactions; human interactions depend on psychic capacities; psychodynamics are rooted in our bodily makeup.”

The reader had best be prepared for such terminology as “joint attention,” “ethical affordances,” “downward causation,” and “phenomenological tension”.  But if you can make it through the terminological weeds, you get to this:

In his magisterial essay, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” the German sociologist Max Weber painted a tragic picture of our ethical situation.⁸ In the premodern world, he lamented, life and the world were of a piece. Abraham could die in peace, knowing that he had lived a life in full. He had been blessed with wives, progeny, and property. There was nothing more to want. But “cultural beings” (Kulturmenschen) such as ourselves can never experience this sense of completion. There is always more to know and experience. Nor is that the end of the tragedy. We also live in a world of multiple and competing “value spheres”: religious, economic, political, aesthetic, erotic, and intellectual, among others. Each sphere is held together by a particular value, an “ultimate value” that demands our total devotion: salvation, success, power, beauty, pleasure, truth, and so on. What to do? Some would be dilettantes, flitting from one experience to another, collecting stories along the way. That is perhaps the dominant ethos of the present age: “YOLO!” But that was not Weber’s creed. He longed for the unity of life that Abraham had enjoyed. The only way to achieve this, he believed, was to devote one’s life to a single god, the “daemon” that seized the very fibers of one’s being. Not monotheism, the worship of the one true god, then, but monolatry, devotion to one’s own true god—that was Weber’s ethos.¹

What is Keane’s? He, too, paints an arresting picture of our ethical predicament, albeit a less tragic one than Weber. Where Weber saw multiple and competing “value spheres,” Keane sees multiple and competing cultural worlds, both past and present. Once upon a time, these worlds were separate. Some chose to visit other worlds; others did not. No more. Now, one cultural world bleeds into the next, sometimes quite literally, but more often via the global flow of people, artifacts, and ideas. We are all anthropologists now. What are we to do? Stay home? Go native? Be hybrid? Keane does not venture an answer to these questions.²

However we answer these questions for ourselves, we cannot escape the phenomenological tension between the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives on ethical life. Some will seek refuge in the first person. They will seek to be “true to themselves,” to “listen to their inner voice,” and they will respond to challenges with a mix of apology and indignation. Others will immerse themselves in the second person. They will value loyalty to the “tribe,” and respond to “outsiders” with a mix of indifference and hostility. Still others—intellectuals, mostly—will take shelter in the third person. They will place a high value on toleration and acceptance, and they will respond to challenges with a phlegmatic aloofness. The problem is that none of us can stand still in any perspective for very long. The affordances of our minds and our languages, and the demands of social cooperation and interaction, will not permit it for long. We cannot escape ethical life. Nor can we find peace in it, either. That, for Keane, is our predicament.

Difficult stuff, no doubt; but the difficulty of theorizing about ethics is nothing compared to the difficulty of living ethically in a complicated, conflicted, and crowded world that offers neither certainty nor refuge but that nonetheless demands our attention and our action.

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http://www.publicbooks.org/nonfiction/where-do-morals-come-from

¹ Fidelity to one's daemon was also, explicitly, Socrates' ethos; on the other hand, it was also, implicitly, Hitler's.  The value of "monolatry" seems very much to depend on which daemon has "seized the very fiber of one's being." We might in fact be better off if we just got rid of the various daemons entirely or at least stopped granting them such authority over us; for all we know, they may be no more than "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. "    

² "Keane does not venture an answer to these questions": is it impertinent, then, to ask why he wrote his book in the first place?

Our Imagined Orders

Is our human world something objectively real, as was traditionally believed, or is it “socially constructed,” as the kids like to say?

In SAPIENS, an entertaining survey of human development, Yuval Noah Harari comes down squarely on the side of the kids.  Harari does not deny that the physical world around us is objectively real; rather, he makes the sensible observation that the cultures in which we live and through which we understand the world, are human inventions--and essential ones at that.  

As humanity has gone from small, scattered tribes to larger and larger groupings (villages, towns, cities), people have had to learn to live in close proximity to, to get along with, and even to trust strangers; which is where culture comes in. According to Harari, the secret of getting large numbers of humans to cooperate successfully lies in what he calls “the appearance of fiction”.  Homo sapiens is above all else a story-teller, the only animal (we know of) capable of imagining things which do not exist:

“Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.  Churches are rooted in common religious myths.  Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins.  States are rooted in common national myths.  Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag.  Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths.  Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights—and the money paid out in fees.

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another.  There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire.  What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.  Take for example the world of business corporations.  Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers.  The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.”

Myth-making, says Harari, “gives Sapiens immense power:

It enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals…Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories…The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions,’ ‘social constructs,’ or ‘imagined realities.’”

Imagined realities are not lies, Harari cautions us:

“An imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.”

Harari goes on to point out (to a reader’s likely discomfiture) that such notions as “liberty,” “equality,” and “rights” are all obvious fictions which do not exist in nature but have been conjured by sapiens’ fertile imagination—conjured, Harari acknowledges, for good reasons:

“Advocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this line of reasoning.  Their response is likely to be, ‘We know that people are not all equal biologically! But if we believe that we are all equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.’ I have no argument with that.  This is exactly what I mean by ‘imagined order’.  We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.  Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages.  Rather, they are the only way large numbers of people can cooperate effectively.”

Social constructs and imagined orders: why should we be surprised, much less outraged, that the human world bears the stamp of human creation?  Our changing/evolving values, ethics, and mores are merely ways we have devised to live together; tales of law-giving, jealous, and punitive gods are invented simply to cement and to reinforce our own codes of behavior (which doesn’t mean those tales are not taken literally and believed in sincerely, even by their originators).

There are, of course, limits to our effective imagination; we can imagine the sun to be a god, for instance, but we cannot imagine away its heat.  But sapiens' ability to construct myths, and then to discard them when they are no longer useful and to replace them with new ones in which we believe as fervently as we previously believed the old ones, is clearly a key to the species' success.  Whether, in the long run, our myths are good for the planet or for the multitudinous creatures with whom we share the earth is another question altogether.