a short follow up
a few posts ago i started to deal with a problem that has us all looking for answers: human civilization is destroying the world, what is the way to stop it. perhaps it would be more accurate to say what is a way of putting a stop to all this destruction, since i'm sure there are many out there.
it has been put into my head by "ishmael" that our culture is one that, from its very beginning some 10,000 years ago has been opposed to nature. we are the masters of this world, the only intelligent life on it that we know of, and we may do with everything as we please. the earth is our gift from the gods, whichever you may believe in.
think for a moment if you will, just to humor me, about what you envision the life of a hunter-gatherer to be.
i don't know about you but i see this naked man running through the forest trying desperately to catch food for his family to eat. i see a man beset by beasts that would kill him and near the point of starvation. don't you? but this isn't the case. check with an anthropology book and you will find that they are well fed and have much more leisure time than we in the "civilized" world do. they also don't have the rates of crime, abuse, drug addiction or suicide that we developed peoples have. they are, in short, as well fed and much, much happier with their lives. true, they starve like everything else if food becomes scarce but because our diet is so richly varied they are the last to feel the pinch. still, living off the land means that we can only eat what the land provides.
the second thing to think about is the Book of Genesis. really, don't groan or begin to recite why you don't believe (i did this, i'll freely admit.) just look at the book. the Bible was written by farmers for farmers and yet the Book of Genesis has a great many confusing things that don't make sense in the context of the rest of the work. if farming is the great revolution we believe it to be in this culture, why is it looked at as a turning away from God himself in Genesis? it's like the Soviets decrying the evils of Communism. the truth of the matter is that it was written by the Semites, who would become the Jews, upon their first contact with the farmers from the Fertile Crescent. and where the Semites practiced strict population control, a must since they could have only so many sheep before the land was over-grazed, the agrarians reproduced out of control. take the story of cain and abel as an example. cain, who is a farmer, slays his brother abel, who is a shepherd. this is what was happening to the Semites at the hands of our cultural forefathers. they were being slaughtered so that we could continue our population growth and till more of the earth. Another interesting point is that Adam means "man." when they spoke of the sons of Adam they were talking about mankind, with themselves and those from the north being the two brothers. Man ate from the forbidden tree and was cast from the Garden, where he ate easily and food was plentiful. Sound like you could apply that to man cutting down the trees to farm the land and build a civilization? it does to me. and the Garden sounds an awful lot like the forests plied by aboriginal peoples the world over. they live off of the land, off of the Garden. No wonder we can't find it!
at any rate, i've realized why this modern life feels so awfully out of sorts. Because we are not following the laws that make the world work and have made the world work for millions of years! we have removed ourselves from evolution, exempted ourselves from the rules and made our own. we have committed the greatest act of arrogance ever conceived of; we have taken the power of the gods, the power of life and death, into our unable hands and have wielded it. and now, in a scant 500 generations we have taken the web of life to the point of collapse with our foolishness. it's time to drop the ball on farming and factories and our entire way of life and live from the land like everything else. when we do, we will allow for other great intellects to come about. we will be the father of the intellectual revolution of the natural world! but only if we stop being a virus upon the land and give up our pretensions of godhood.
we must not be gods but men of the earth.
it has been put into my head by "ishmael" that our culture is one that, from its very beginning some 10,000 years ago has been opposed to nature. we are the masters of this world, the only intelligent life on it that we know of, and we may do with everything as we please. the earth is our gift from the gods, whichever you may believe in.
think for a moment if you will, just to humor me, about what you envision the life of a hunter-gatherer to be.
i don't know about you but i see this naked man running through the forest trying desperately to catch food for his family to eat. i see a man beset by beasts that would kill him and near the point of starvation. don't you? but this isn't the case. check with an anthropology book and you will find that they are well fed and have much more leisure time than we in the "civilized" world do. they also don't have the rates of crime, abuse, drug addiction or suicide that we developed peoples have. they are, in short, as well fed and much, much happier with their lives. true, they starve like everything else if food becomes scarce but because our diet is so richly varied they are the last to feel the pinch. still, living off the land means that we can only eat what the land provides.
the second thing to think about is the Book of Genesis. really, don't groan or begin to recite why you don't believe (i did this, i'll freely admit.) just look at the book. the Bible was written by farmers for farmers and yet the Book of Genesis has a great many confusing things that don't make sense in the context of the rest of the work. if farming is the great revolution we believe it to be in this culture, why is it looked at as a turning away from God himself in Genesis? it's like the Soviets decrying the evils of Communism. the truth of the matter is that it was written by the Semites, who would become the Jews, upon their first contact with the farmers from the Fertile Crescent. and where the Semites practiced strict population control, a must since they could have only so many sheep before the land was over-grazed, the agrarians reproduced out of control. take the story of cain and abel as an example. cain, who is a farmer, slays his brother abel, who is a shepherd. this is what was happening to the Semites at the hands of our cultural forefathers. they were being slaughtered so that we could continue our population growth and till more of the earth. Another interesting point is that Adam means "man." when they spoke of the sons of Adam they were talking about mankind, with themselves and those from the north being the two brothers. Man ate from the forbidden tree and was cast from the Garden, where he ate easily and food was plentiful. Sound like you could apply that to man cutting down the trees to farm the land and build a civilization? it does to me. and the Garden sounds an awful lot like the forests plied by aboriginal peoples the world over. they live off of the land, off of the Garden. No wonder we can't find it!
at any rate, i've realized why this modern life feels so awfully out of sorts. Because we are not following the laws that make the world work and have made the world work for millions of years! we have removed ourselves from evolution, exempted ourselves from the rules and made our own. we have committed the greatest act of arrogance ever conceived of; we have taken the power of the gods, the power of life and death, into our unable hands and have wielded it. and now, in a scant 500 generations we have taken the web of life to the point of collapse with our foolishness. it's time to drop the ball on farming and factories and our entire way of life and live from the land like everything else. when we do, we will allow for other great intellects to come about. we will be the father of the intellectual revolution of the natural world! but only if we stop being a virus upon the land and give up our pretensions of godhood.
we must not be gods but men of the earth.
posted by Anonymous at
20:05
5 Comments:
As much as human kind tries to elevate itself above the rest of the ecosystem, we are inherently part of it. I guess the main problem with humans is that there are too many of us so we're having a huge effect upon our own environment, but until we get a dictator who can control every single person on this earth and get us all working towards the same goal, we're never going to be able to fix what we've done and we're quite powerless to get off this path of destruction.
There have been many mass extinctions on this planet in the past, and there's one going on right now, but life will prevail and the earth will survive, with or without us. And I'm okay with that.
Humans think humans are special. The rest of the fauna and flora of this world don't give a shit.
By
Maja, at 11:58 AM
you're right and you're not. as it says in "ishmael," thinking you're powerless and that it's a matter of finding the right leader is the voice of Mother Culture trying to prevent you from rebelling against this destructive method of living.
i think the most powerful thing about all this is that there is a way better way to go about this whole thing. we ditch this silly contraption of ours since it's not working and usher in all the other intelligent species sure to follow us. when the gorillas, the dolphins, whales, hell beavers evolve to the point of intelligence we'll be there to remind them of what we forgot: just because you can think about things in the abstract doesn't exempt you from the laws that govern all Life on this planet.
By
Anonymous, at 9:03 PM
I don't think I'm powerless, I think that everyone can make a difference (just look at Bush, he's sure making a difference), but I don't think that everyone is ever going to have the same vision for where our society will go and that is where we will fall. You don't often see entire species in nature working together, it's every animal for him/herself out there.
I just don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing if we wiped ourselves out.
By
Maja, at 4:52 AM
i don't think it'd be bad if we wiped ourselves out but i do think that it's sad that we, being a top-of-the-food-chain indiscriminate omnivorous race will be the last to go. we'll be killing off everything to try to survive.
but i find it so much more hopeful to usher in the intelligence epoch. we humans stewarding other species to sentience.
By
Anonymous, at 4:21 PM
Really...don't you think it is inevitable that the earth slowly fizzles out of power and dies? It's what everything else does eventually. It just won't be in our lifetimes. We are on the track of ruin just by the numbers of people alone. The earth can take just so much trash and baby diapers...then it will regurgitate on itself...and lay waste until nature takes over once again.
By
sumo, at 1:23 AM
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