One Hundred and Forty Three

I’m reading Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World. He’s no prose stylist, but he’s mastered the material and presents it well. 

It’s been accepted for some time that the Neolithic Revolution was the major event in our social history, but most historians no longer automatically describe it as a fortubate event. More and more agree with Jared Diamond that it was our major mistake. Ponting doesn’t say that explicitly, but he does compare the lives of hunter/gatherers with those of agriculturalists, and it’s clear hunter/gatherers were better off. Finally historians are beginning to accept what I knew when I was twelve, from reading Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Ponting also incorporates the work of James Scott, who said in Against the Grain that the major event in our history took place earlier, when hunter/gatherers mastered fire and used it to clear the forests and drive herds of animals.

All animals modify their environment, but not to the extent we do. The changes we make are so great that we can’t undo them even when we want to. We burned down the forests and depleted the soil of nutrients with monocrop agriculture (and still do); we hunted many animals to extinction (and still do). Only now, when it’s too late, do we realize these were mistakes, just as our ancestors realized too late that horticulture is less destructive than agriculture, and made the garden the image of a lost paradise in their myths.

I knew all this before reading Ponting’s book, but it helped me answer the question I always ask about our ancestors: why did they believe, or pretend to believe, in gods?

It seems to me that, though we call ourselves homo sapiens, our species is profoundly ignorant. We don’t know our own limits, therefore we don’t know ourselves. We do everything to a destructive extreme because we imagine everything we do is good, and because our powers are unlimited. When the world doesn’t react as we expect, we imagine it’s because within it there’s a being like us, only more powerful: an angry spirit that will punish us for injuring this world which is its body. All gods were originally angry, but we tamed them as slaves tame their masters, by flattering them; and eventually we learned to love them, as all slaves love their masters.  

Most people now define religion as faith in some god. They lost their faith in gods, and made science their religion, because they imagined science would give them back the unlimited, godlike power they once imagined they had. When science didn’t make them godlike, people put their faith in the nation. We’re all fascists now. I define religion as the awareness that we have limits, are parts of something greater than ourselves - but not an immortal master who rewards obedient slaves by making them immortal.