THE OTHER STORY

We humans appear unique among species in our ability to tell stories. We are neither the crown of creation nor the goal of evolution. The universe was not made for us and we are not destined to conquer and rule it. This is the story of only one culture.

Story telling is a skill developed within the context of the hunt, reading tracks brings with it an awareness of past, present and future. “This animal came from that direction back then and will be found in this direction some time later...” The first time some terrestrial primate made this connection must have been a stupendous AHA moment, “GULP”!!!!!! The desperate need to share this realisation drove mutations to drop the epiglottis lower and lower increasing the depth of vowel sounds and the ability to articulate. (Tongue in cheek)

                                             Chimp and Human vocal apparatus

Channelling Yahuay, “ 4 Cries Ache man, when I tell you to go forth and be fruitful how you could take that to mean i’s to fill up the Earth with your own kind? You is a fruit 4 crying out loud!!! You who does get vex when they tell you you is a monkey. It make me as mad as when those ones who say they is vegetarian but they does eat fish. How you think the fish go feel? Fish is a vegetable? Man when I give you dominion over the Earth and every living thing, I ent mean i’s for you to mash up the place. I give you wisdom and understanding in my image for you to make the garden more biodiverse.”

So how did this story come about? The Hebrews inherited their creation mythology, the stories in Genesis, from their Semitic pastoralist ancestors that were part of an oral tradition that had been retold for generations. It lays out the relationship between Man, the gods (Elohim) and the world and explains how things came to be the way they were. The situation that they were trying to comprehend is how and why Caucasian farmers from the North were expanding into the Arabian Peninsula and watering their fields with Semitic blood.

These nomadic herders of sheep and goats of the desert were confronting conquering tribes of cereal grain aggreculturalists* (sic) whose populations had grown beyond the carrying capacity of their home territory (bioregion). They had to imagine a story to explain, how Adam (red [sunburned?] man) came to have adopted this most arduous of lifestyles ever conceived, why he treated his women and children so badly, why he was so afraid of snakes and how he came to have taken into his own hands, the gods prerogative of deciding who should live and who should die, or in other words, “the knowledge of good and evil”. “Adam” was not the first human, he was the first farmer and city (civilization) builder and “Cain” has been killing “Abel” ever since.  Farming was the punishment and the curse. From ground zero in Mesopotamia our culture spread west into Europa and east across the Indus into Hindustan laying waste to biodiversity in order to grow their favourite foods.

               

                                      The diffusion of agriculture                          

                                          The spread of Indo-European languages

   

                                      Spread of Indo-European DNA                  

                                     The spread of the horse-drawn war chariot

The patriarchy and the population explosion are of the same root and it starts in the “Caucasus Mountains” during the last ice age. Winter adapted, white skinned people had inhabited the far north from about 40,000 years ago when the last glacial maximum retreated 11,000 years ago. During this period I imagine there may have been times when tribes were trapped in relatively green watersheds surrounded by impassable ice for generations. This became a land of real scarcity; the providential mother had forsaken her children and the rituals of regicide and blood sacrifice to the goddess were proving ineffectual.

Having become aware of the connection between sex and procreation men and women lived in fear and dread of the temptation to bring into the world another mouth to feed. This lead to the psychological stress of the conflict inherent in the love/hate, virgin/whore dichotomy of our culture. The sound of crying coming from a hungry child became intolerable and led to the first lash and, “spare the rod and spoil the child”. Competition for ever-diminishing resources led to the need to conquer their neighbours in order to survive. (Fear and hatred of snakes sensibly goes back to our arboreal primate beginnings.) When the ice retreated for the last time leaving behind the deep fertility of the razed boreal forests and ground up rock of glacial till, the vegetation that dominated the landscape were the grasses; barley, rye, oats, emmer and eventually by selection, wheat. The humans inhabiting this landscape foraged this seemingly limitless energy source and their population exploded. This was a land of plenty but the story of our cultures traumatic gestation period has never been told and the emotions of fear, rage and grief never discharged. The feeling that there is never enough to go around, no matter how rich and powerful we become as individuals, fuels our greed and other addictions to this day.    

Driven by this irrational fear of scarcity, our culture/system (where food is locked up to create artificial scarcity and people have to work, beg or steal for it) now rewards productivity above all else. It is designed for products not for people. Our economy is based on everyone having or making products, including labour and services, in order to be able to get products = food and shelter. The measure of its functioning is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The concept of material progress with an ever-increasing improvement in products and the belief in its inevitability is the secular religion of our time. It inherited from the dominant religions a deep anthropocentricism. A blinkered mindset that engenders a culture that continues to lay waste to the ecological support system it is acutely dependent upon for survival.

The concept of separation and glorification of individualism identifies our civilized cultures whose infant nurture practices are at the root of these feelings. Primate infants never experience loss of skin contact until they decide to venture out. This embodies an innate releasing mechanism that is instrumental in the development of emotionally mature adults. When babies are put down, separated from another human, a bond of trust is broken almost irrevocably. 

In cultures that make maintaining skin contact an absolute priority no matter what else is going on the story they live in is, " the world is a sacred place and we humans belong in such a place. 

*aggre-culture: a culture of aggression: waging war on biodiversity to foster humans favoured foods. Especially wheat and dairy both of which contain addictive morphine-like exorphins that mimic the body’s endorphins, reducing pain and stimulating the pleasure centre in the brain. This is an identifiable cultural attribute that defines its expanding boundaries.