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ContentsContents............................................................................................2
Preface...............................................................................................5
Introduction.......................................................................................7Humans cause their own suffering as an insane matter of course. 7The brain that must find a cure for the tumour is itself affected by the tumour....................................................................................11
The human animal...........................................................................16Appearance and meaning............................................................16The invention of mind and the death of matter.............................20To exist is to inhabit an environment............................................26The power of our mind is not its capacity for truth, but its capacity for hope........................................................................................30
The seeds of famine........................................................................34The more food production is accelerated, the more shortage prevails.........................................................................................34Forced labour made abundant offspring a blessing......................34Not a single agricultural revolution, but a global demographic flood.....................................................................................................37Exhaustion, migration and the struggle for resources...................43The inventive power of man and the limits of growth....................46Landscapes are the only transcendent experience we will ever have..............................................................................................52
Evolution and innovations.............................................................55The hundred-years horizon of culture and the labyrinth of change.....................................................................................................55Innovations, David Landes and the myth of Western superiority. .57A general theory of innovations...................................................61Triggers of scientific revolutions and progress.............................64
Civilizations.....................................................................................66Grounds and groundworks of civilizations....................................66The drive to expand and the enslavement of savages.................68Emergence of clerkdom: temples, monasteries, academies .......70From the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.........................72
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Ideology...........................................................................................73The fuel of violence......................................................................73Language evolved together with ideology....................................73Cosmologies, king lists and myths................................................74Burners of books..........................................................................77Natural religion or natural atheism................................................79The legend of the fat goddess......................................................84Forefathers and the religions of fear.............................................86The invention of afterlife...............................................................90
Submission of women and children..............................................93Forced labour turned women and children into economical assets.....................................................................................................93Bride price and dowry...................................................................94Religion and prostitution, war and rape........................................95Children: an easy workforce, an easy sexual commodity.............96
Slavery.............................................................................................98Commonness of slavery...............................................................98Commonness of slave revolts......................................................99Christianity and slavery..............................................................101Slavery in the twenty first century...............................................102
Cultural violence...........................................................................104When shortage is endemic, violence becomes cultural..............104Tradition of violence...................................................................104Executions, carnivals, masses...................................................105Animals: betrayed companions, ravaged machines...................107Sociobiology: a comedy of errors with a smirk...........................107Cultural violence in the Atlantic civilization.................................110Hunger refugees.........................................................................111Human rights..............................................................................112
War.................................................................................................116Forced labour and war: two aspects of one social system.........116Just War Doctrine and Judged War Doctrine ............................117Sociology of war.........................................................................121Practice of war and practice of peace.........................................126
Modernity.......................................................................................132Progress is the residue of a multitude of failing histories............132The difference between progress and civilization.......................133The difference between progress and democracy......................135
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The difference between progress and development ..................136Ancient and recent modernity.....................................................138
India................................................................................................146A manifold of cultural encounters...............................................146The oldest Upanishads on the first principle of nature................147The oldest Upanishads on being, form, ether and atomism.......150
Egypt..............................................................................................153A river of time.............................................................................153The seven foundations of life and the conquest of eternity.........154Scientific progress (medicine, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy)...................................................................................................156
Babylon..........................................................................................158Tower of Babel...........................................................................158Mazdaianism and the classification of creatures........................159Fusion and diffusion of Indian and Egyptian imageries..............160Scientific progress (astronomy, history, biology, medicine, algebra)...................................................................................................160
Greece............................................................................................165Colonization, warfare and cultural exchange..............................165Persian influence........................................................................166Alexander the Great...................................................................168Fusion and diffusion of Persian, Indian and Egyptian imageries 169
Judaism.........................................................................................171Why the Bible was written, and who did it..................................171Wars and war gods of the Iron Age............................................171Babylon, the promised land and the temple...............................174
Christianity....................................................................................177Jesus: from nationalist rebel to defector god..............................177The morals of the Christians the same as those of the heathens...................................................................................................179Daily bread versus temple feasts...............................................179Constantine: in search of a war god equal to enemy magic.......180Saint Augustine: throwing Christians to the lions........................181The all-mighty Church is the body of the all-mighty God............184
Islam...............................................................................................186Mecca: a thriving metropolis blessed by three hundred gods.....186The powerful tradition of fratricide..............................................187
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The splendour of progress and the shame of tradition...............188
Europe............................................................................................191From the Trojan war to the End Of Times..................................191Córdoba: Europe’s first great border crossing............................191Roger Bacon, the devil and the saints........................................193Jan Van Eyck and the pursuit of the Boundless Light.................195Columbus and Copernicus: Europe’s second great border crossing...................................................................................................197Two-faced truth: the separation of science and religion.............199The Atlantic civilization...............................................................200
Conclusion....................................................................................216Conditions of modernity..............................................................216Our longing for an enjoyable life is genetic if anything is............218
Appendix A: overview of world civilizations..............................220
Appendix B: old world civilizations chart...................................222
Literature.......................................................................................223
Notes..............................................................................................226
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PrefaceThe oldest motion picture I remember is a black and white projection of a row of refugees, bearing heavy loads down a narrow road. A military transport progressed in the opposite direction, pushing the refugees against the border. This military colon consisted, it seemed to me, of vehicles with neither windows nor doors. I remember this as a constantly moving image, not as a motion picture with a beginning and an ending, but as a continuing stream. As every Sunday afternoon, the projection took place in a back room of the only café in our little town. The session always started with a news programme, followed by a movie, and since this was before television the whole town was gathered. I was deeply shocked because the people on the screen looked exactly like the people in the audience – the only real people I knew.
Today I realise that my view as a five-year-old was surprisingly accurate. The stream of refugees never stopped; it continued in colour, on a wide screen, on television - and they are indeed neighbours from any street or village.
I was drafted for the military service at the very moment a law was voted allowing conscientious objectors to serve double time as a Civil Protection agent. The main reason for me to apply was that I could not accept ever to kill someone unknown to me, simply at the command of some other unknown: at the time, this blind submission disgusted me more than aggression as such. Only as the years passed, my opinion shifted to plain rejection of the very insanity of violence.
The first months I lived in the company of three Jehovah witnesses, who had already spent part of their time in prison. The last two months four pacifists came in - it was the time when many people were protesting against the Vietnam War. For more than a year however I was alone to benefit from facilities built to house and feed two hundred men. I had become a fly on the wall of my country, not important enough to be discussed, a nil in the governments’ statistics. This gave me an unexpected sense of independence from any party, state or nation. Free to think any thought, I had to answer to nobody but myself. I decided to use this freedom to start a systematic search for the answer to the most fascinating question on earth: why do
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people cause their own suffering as an insane matter of course? At first sight, such a plan seems too pretentious. I was however twenty-four years old and had a whole life ahead of me. Many people claim to know the truth about the origin, purpose and ending of the universe, about a cosmic conflict between good and evil, and about life after death. Many even claim to have received privileged information on those subjects. Compared to all this it seems a rather humble task to examine the causes of our own shortcomings. And as time passed, I became aware that to search for a better existence is the most natural occupation among living beings, and not overly ambitious at all. While digging deeper and deeper as answers seemed to near and fled once again, I managed to make a good living in the development of computer networks, and kept my independence from professional scholars who, in my view, had not even found the question.
Thirty years later I was struck by a serious illness. Hit by the bumper of life I realized that an end might come to the freedom I won as a young man, and decided to conclude my enquiry. This essay is the result. And thanks to modern medicine, I can deliver it in perfect health.
Despite all shortcomings in this essay, I am convinced that its subject – both the question and the answer - is the most important issue of this century. If we do not deal with the issues presented here, the twenty first century will become the ugliest and most atrocious monster humans ever created - if we survive it, it will only be to lament our fate.
I started my enquiry in a world very different from the present, up to the point that many of my sources have only been written when I was already under way. I considered the concept of child submission seemingly without sufficient justification, but then stumbled upon the work of Lloyd DeMause, and found so many arguments It made me sick. I was racking my brain to present the need to destroy borders in a more convincing manner and one day, unexpectedly, saw a crowd hammering down by hand the concrete wall of Berlin.1
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that he wanted his books to be ruminated, and I must admit that the books I value the most are those that made me stop reading each page, and sit back and contemplate. But even if evoked by a gripping author, I never felt my thoughts obliged by his
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or her opinion. I hope some people will feel the same about this essay.
Rafael Leyre
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Introduction
Humans cause their own suffering as an insane matter of course
In the past century dreadful diseases like diphtheria, leprosy and typhoid were halted; sterile women have been given children; numerous devices have been developed to let handicapped people participate in society. Many of the things we prayed for during ages have been achieved by means of expensive scientific research.
What is hard to understand however is that humans spent even more scientific efforts and even more finances to destroy all those benefits. For each disease we have overcome, we have created weaponry to introduce more and worse. For every feeble child we brought to life in a sophisticated hospital, we killed thousands of children in wars of hysteric madness. A few blind we gave sight and a few paralysed we made walk, but we have willingly crippled millions for reasons no sound reasoning can grasp.
This is more than just an interesting academic enigma, a profound religious mystery, or a rewarding literary subject: It is a matter of everyday survival, and the most urgent question of this century.
People are accustomed to violence for a long time. Throughout history, wars seemed to be natural misfortunes, like plagues, famine or hurricanes. In all civilisations people have been tortured and sacrificed; from the swamps of early Mesopotamia to the manufactories of modern times, humans were chased, deported, abused, starved and destroyed as cattle, and left to die on battle fields or from exhaustion – all by other humans. The victims were slaves and workers, natives and minorities, children, women and men.
Such massive and recurring aggression between humans begs for justification. Aggressors uphold that their actions are rightful and meaningful, a step towards an improved world, the warding off of evil worse than all the victims sacrificed. But the other party tells the same
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story the other way around. While it is wrong to accuse all parties equally, it remains surprising that no one ever waged war with motives that were wicked from his own point of view. While each warrior claims to make the world a safer place for his kinsman, the world becomes an ever more dangerous place for everyone as long as wars are fought. While politicians on all sides claim that only a strong army can secure peace, wasted wars proliferate together with arms and armies.
Most generals have declared one time or another that their trade is peace. This is an attractive catchphrase. How could a country ever have too much soldiers and too strong weapons, how can an army ever strike too soon, if the goal is that noble? Peace however is a political trade, and can only be reached by means of diplomacy, openness and international justice, long before war is even considered.
As long as it is widely accepted that starting a war is an effective way to solve difficult problems, despite all historical and statistical proofs of the opposite, leaders will send their citizens into agony whenever they fail to see other solutions. War is not the continuation of politics with other means, as von Clausewitz wrote, but its negation. Once war is the only option left, nothing is assured about the outcome but suffering at all sides. If an army reaches its goal – they hardly ever do – it will be submission, occupation or destruction: all precarious situations crying for revenge and new violence whenever circumstances allow.
Sacred submission Since the first civilizations, humanity has been told by undisputed authorities that it is dangerous to counter this endless procession of self-inflicted misery. Priests told us that we will be saved in the end if we just carry our yoke patiently, and honoured academics upheld the same dogma by decreeing, undisturbed by the absence of supporting scientific data, that our offspring is forever cursed by aggressive genes, branded every critical analysis of our violent behaviour more dangerous than violence itself, and even blamed pacifism for atrocities committed by unchecked totalitarianism.
Sometimes indeed one must be big enough to cede for an undesired fate: we must appreciate the courage of a patient who accepts a fatal disease, or of an officer who surrenders to avoid a useless slaughter.
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But to preach submission to our own bloody madness is a shocking absurdity.
Harvard professor E.O. Wilson only needed a few examples (one of them that the peaceful Samai of Malaya behead chickens before cooking) to demonstrate once and forever that 'human beings have a marked hereditary predisposition to aggressive behaviour.'2 No genetic research is presented to back this claim of innateness. We were violent in the past, so it must be in our genes, so only naïve people do believe it is possible to put an halt to war ever. This viewpoint became common sense during the twentieth century at a rate only comparable with other convenient pseudo-scientific dogmas, like the impossibility of pain in animals made up in the seventeenth century to support the abuse of animal power, and like the race theories of the nineteenth century made up to back colonialism. Genetic research is a possible source of medical relief for ill people, but ideological speculations in the same field are unscientific and despicable. Wilson was even honoured with a Pulitzer Prize. To provide excuses for public life as it goes is a fast lane to popularity and success.3
Another Harvard professor, economist David Landes, sanctifies aggression from an historical point of view: ‘Imperialism has always been with us. It is the expression of a deep human drive’.4 But only a few decades ago it was equally possible to say that slavery and human sacrifices had always been with us. Yet both disappeared from most places since. Obviously, their longevity was no proof that they were the inevitable expressions of a deep human drive. Imperialism was only with us the last five thousand years, while slavery exists twice as long, and solidarity and cooperation are older than humanity.
Whenever the nation of such ideologists gets involved in an armed conflict, they spontaneously replace their philosophies about an inevitable human condition with a peculiar kind of dualism. The innately violent humanity is magically split up: one party - the own - has a history of peace, justice and kindness, while the other party has a history of psychotic malice. Soon books, reviews and documentaries illustrate the looked-for wickedness or righteousness with ancient myths, historical anecdotes and recent news stories. There is always enough such material to be gathered for all parties.
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This essay sticks with an analysis of our common behaviour, because all other viewpoints risk ideological contamination. It agrees with Wilson, Landes etc. that we, humans, are occasionally violent. It also agrees that we are not always violent. The important difference is that this essay rejects that violence is an inevitable normality. It wants to understand processes, not natures. It asks what causes violence, not who is violent. It asks the difficult questions about Us, in contrast to an easy slapping of the scapegoat Them.
PredestinationEven if it would be true at all that violence is innate, it would be meaningless, since people can evidently live in peace as well as participate in war, as circumstances change. Compulsory genes can not explain the ever recurring outbreaks of violence beyond measure between periods of peace and prosperity. The Spanish and Norwegians – to name any at random - once violently submitted large parts of the world. Today, neither of them seems to hold such plans, but instead build economies on internal cohesion and international cooperation.
Nothing is so far from science as to predict that the future will repeat the past, without considering the always evolving prerequisite constraints. To predict today’s circumstances for tomorrow might yield two hits out of three for weather forecasters, as the weather changes between known patterns every three days on the average - it certainly brings no benefit to historians.
Our academies are still haunted by the Platonic fantasy that something ‘innate’ is a forever fixated stamp from an immovable higher world. This fantasy has been nurtured for ages to keep oppressed people meek.
One of the worlds’ leading geneticists, Richard Lewontin, has refuted such biological determinism. It is, he wrote, ‘a fundamental principle of development genetics that every organism is the outcome of a unique interaction between genes and environmental sequences, modulated by the random chances of cell growth and division…'5 The only thing we know for sure about the influence of each of those three actors - genes, shifting environments and random chances - is that the unpredictable variation of their influence is essential to life. Not only is the influence of genes on the development of individuals
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unpredictable, there are simply not enough genes to determine our behaviour:
There is enough human DNA to make about 250,000 genes. But that would be insufficient to determine the incredible complexity of human social organization if it were coded in detail by specific neuronal connections. Once we admit that only the most general outlines of social behaviour could be genetically coded, then we must allow immense flexibility depending on particular circumstances.6
250,000 genes is the number of words in a weekend edition of an average newspaper; a decent library contains this number a million times. If genes would be mere prescriptions, humanity would be composed of a surveyable number of stereotypically acting look-alikes. But in reality genes constitute a grammar in which all the unpredictable books of all our libraries were written and will be written, without ever running down. To claim without proof that aggression is inevitable, is to leave the field of science and take the path of ideology. Such best-sellers furnish pretexts for scum and destroy the hopes of unfortunate people.
The predisposition to violence we have inherited lies not in our genes, but in the ideological platitudes we have embraced in the course of the last ten thousand years. Wilson can not show the violent genes he so enthusiastically writes about. This essay shows that ideologists like Wilson are the true carriers of inherited violence.
if repeated and acclaimed, such ideological platitudes become excuses for more warfare and other brutalities, and thus turn into self fulfilling prophesies. This is for instance how historians produced the indogerman myth, on the basis of which Nazism wrote history. It is easier for historians to ignore history, than for history to ignore historians.
Forced labourThe thesis of this essay is that the circumstances that drive humans from peace to war and back, and make us act violent one time and caring another, shifted to the worse when forced labour was established. But humanity as a whole however never accepted this outcome: our longing for peace and justice is as old as forced labour.
When humans become entangled in forced labour, more children are raised for profit, either as a work force, as a social security, as an asset or as a merchandise. But when children become adults they find themselves in the same need as their parents. The relief they
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were meant to be returns as the problems they were meant to solve. Each generation holding the same mode of production will need to multiply its population with the same factor as the previous one, and caring childbirth turns into a human avalanche. If each generation doubles its number, a population would become its tenfold each century, its thousandfold after three centuries and its millionfold after six. Thomas Malthus once wrote that humans, if unchecked, multiply ever faster, while their means of subsistence increase only steadily. He was too optimistic: even if actual means of subsistence increase, potential resources are depleted by ever intensified exploitation.
Early farming is exemplary for the introduction of forced labour. It started ten thousand years ago, and continues to spread globally. The ensuing flooding by humans of a limited planet forces us to intensify ever further our procurement of life necessities. In the course of this process, growing violence is directed towards fellow humans as well as to the environment we have to live off. We gradually destroy our habitats and our neighbours, and tangle ourselves ever further up in a global destitution trap. Mass production of humans causes mass production of goods, while intensified marauding for food, space and resources are presented as just wars or as scientific progress.
Almost thirty years ago, Marvin Harris considered the role of child labour, while summing up probable origins of farming:
One of the strongest pulls was the possibility to intensify agriculture and stock raising through the use of child labour. In many hunter-gatherer groups, children play only a marginal role in the labour force until adolescence. Child labour, however, can be extremely productive in such operations as weeding, harvesting, herding, and retrieving animal droppings.7
But Harris denied the possibility of an ensuing population explosion with the remark that ‘four or five children could probably be reared per mother at a low cost [..] without depleting the necessary non-renewable resources’. This remark is in strong contradiction with the worldwide presence of forced labour. Farming households, then and now, do not worry about non-renewable resources, and are not interested in adjusting their number to it. If early farmers had done so, the immigration of farmers in Europe, the fall of Troy nor the colonization of America, and for that matter not much of anything else in history would have happened. Still today farming populations outgrow their living space on all continents, and youths struggle
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everywhere for a place to survive while fathers consider a large progeny a blessing.
Shortage today has its origins in child exploitation: it is the consequence of violence exerted on children. The calamities caused by the resulting population pressure lie not only in the future: they are on the rise for as long as forced labour exists, and news broadcasts show them day by day. They grow still together with the violent exploitation of the environment we have to live in, and with genocides, wars, urban showdowns, exploitation and abuse. Whenever we hear news bulletins about hunger, plagues, landslides, floods or other crises, we must bear in mind that most of the time we do not witness the blind fate of natural catastrophes, but the outcome of violence inflicted by ourselves.
People learn from catastrophes happening within the hundred-years horizon. But today we can no longer, in a peaceful way, restrict our dwellings to places protected against storms and floods, or migrate to greener valleys when our land is hit by drought, or temporarily avoid exhausted grounds. We believe that we have mastered nature but accept the fatality of hunger, natural catastrophes and plagues as if we have nothing to do with them - as if we did not force them upon us, and can do nothing about them.
The human avalanche destroys reserves and shelters that were self-evident before. As long as there is still enough space, people avoid hazardous places. This goes for small as well as large disasters, because infrequent catastrophes stay longer in our memory. Today houses are built in river beds and on beach level, places that were still commonly avoided only a century ago. The inhabitants of those houses undergo casual floods patiently, until one ‘unexpected’ deluge drives the survivors uphill again, if there is still a little space left. After one tsunami, people avoid to live at the shoreline for a few generations, until population pressure pushes them back.
Ill-treating children is not, as it seemed to be, a private family matter, but the nearly unnoticed fountain-head of the massive cruelty that governs humanity. There is an immediate connection between the exploitation of children and the most ruthless social, civil or international structures and outbursts. This straightforward relation is however carried out by complex and fuzzy mechanisms. Meticulously trying to follow each detail of the causal chains of violence as it spreads, can hardly make its all pervading origin transparent. Neither
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is it sufficient to pinpoint at isolated aspects like environmental politics, capitalist exploitation, corrupted leaders or bad morals: if those elements play a part then it is the part of cogwheels, driven as well as drivers in one immense machine fuelled by child exploitation.
Population and violenceSimple arithmetic demonstrates that the gathering of supplies becomes more violent when the number of people grows significantly. This violence is not especially directed to other humans, but to whatever comes in the way: the environment, other tribes etc.…
Intensified exploitation often displays human cleverness, and always reveals human failure.
Suppose you lived on a bountiful island together with your loved ones. On this island dwells another similar group, and the relations between both are distant but courteous. Then climatic conditions change and suddenly the plants and animals that provided food for free demand increasing attention. In order to bridge periods of scarcity, fields must be watered, sheltered from birds and rodents, planted, weeded, reaped, stored. Animals must be kept, fed and sheltered. All those techniques are self-evident to people observing nature forever. The only thing new is the rising exploitation of falling resources.
If the good climate returns, you would soon forget this troublesome interlude, and take up the old way of gathering abundant food at minimal effort. But if the bad climate keeps returning, new evolutions can emerge.
If the climate change persists for just one generation, the benefit of child labour becomes apparent, and is called upon in case of need; if climatic crises keep reappearing during three or more generations, occasional child labour can become systematic. Once child labour is systematic, it will find ideological backing and child breeding will become an economic factor. Women become part of production - as breeders of the workforce and as part of the workforce themselves.
Because more children are raised, each next generation will be bigger, and each new generation will have to work harder.
Technology is pressed to speed up exhaustion of the environment because resources shrink, because the climate gets worse, and because more mouths must be fed. Because there is ample room on
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your island, the first generations will find more or less bountiful virgin grounds. But every settlement thriving on children will overflow sooner or later. Although the population threshold depends on technological advances and on the fertility of the land, sooner or later new emigrations are inevitable. Some will be chased away with ideological pretexts, some will follow a promising leader, or buy their selves a place on a precarious lifeboat.
The other group on the island lived through the same circumstances and expanded in the same way, and a violent confrontation is only a matter of time. Warfare - violence between groups - is not the continuation of politics, but a the continuation of violence against women and children. While technology and ideology grow grimmer, the harshness of war also hardens the rules of society.
From this point on it is no longer sufficient to bring the population in balance with the environment again, in order to recover a peaceful existence. By that time youths will be raised with the ideological brain cancer that brutality is honourable; that the other groups are born evildoers; that criticism is disloyalty and even enmity. If the bountiful climate and the fertility of the land would return, it would be too late: ideology and economy no longer allow to feed the extended population in the older, more relaxed manner.
Summarizing the history of your island, it is obvious that coercion was first imposed on women and children; then on the natural environment; then on neighbours.
A choice of solutionsTraditionalists tend to ridicule this population worry with the observation that we will always find solutions to shortage. This might be true, but the solution found could well be undesirable and even unacceptable. Child labour was itself a solution to shortage. Emigration to other planets, eating toxic food and waste-burgers, farming fish and wildlife, wars, earthquakes, hurricanes and even starving to death are solutions, at least if they are applied with sufficient intensity and keep an adequate distance.
The human intellect can do much better than dig new pits to fill up the old ones. Besides to invent or to undergo solutions, we are obviously capable to chose between solutions on practical, moral and social grounds. And, even better still, the human intellect has the capacity to avoid problems for which no acceptable solutions are known yet.
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Prevention of problems - a common practice in daily life - is usually the most humane and cheap solution, and the most intelligent all together. If problems are not tackled on time, only horrible solutions might remain.
The availability of natural resources – provisions, energy, space – has a fluctuating character. At intervals climatic conditions, plagues, geological catastrophes reach a critical magnitude. At times those crises are harsh, and on rare occasions they strike with lethal power. Complex animals and plants learned in the course of time to divide their efforts between cautious procreation and safeguarding their offspring from environmental crises by maintaining an optimal number. Bacteria, yeasts and flatfish, on the other hand, invest little in individual offspring, which is continually produced and destroyed.8
When we embraced forced labour, we started to differ from child nursing primates. When we proclaim that we need not to worry about the well being of our offspring, we shift in the direction of child wasting flatfish. This attitude is not in contradiction with genuine love from parents for their children, or with child care established at great effort by many societies. We can raise children with tender emotions and utmost dedication, and surround them with all comforts, and yet do not understand why they end up hopelessly entangled in catastrophes. Then still more love or still more riches without more insight will change nothing. The mechanisms described here are from a wider domain, and, as long as we remain unaware of them, will overtake all our well-meaning efforts.
The brain that must find a cure for the tumour is itself affected by the tumour
Violence is carried out with a suitable technology, and in a fitting state of mind: it has an industrial as well as an ideological component. The difficulty to grasp this state of affairs lies not in its complexity, but in the fact that our mind is shaped by the very ideologies that are essential components of this violence. During the last ten thousand years our minds and language have been captivated and conditioned by the disease they urgently need to understand and overcome. We have no problem to imagine that the world is ruled by an absolute
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super-power though we have never seen it, and we have been conditioned by mutual fear for such a long time that living in fear feels natural. We panic by the simple idea that people can get along by giving in a little, although we see everyday the catastrophes caused by lack of consideration. Everyday we can count each others fingers and teeth, and yet we can not accept that we are all the same humans, and that it is superstitious to tremble for those and trample on others.
Thoughts are no neutral propositions, descending from the clear sky on a stairway of logical steps. In real life thinking, reasons always operate before reasoning. The most urgent critique of reason is not about logic, but about means and motives. The issue at hand is not the working of a calculator within our skull, a brain in a jar or a bladder filled with compelling instincts. It is the way we interact with our society and with our environment.
SkepticismToday skepticism is known mainly from caricatures created by adversaries. Yet it is nothing but cautious thinking. It is not rejecting every conclusion always; it is, on the contrary, staying aware that some day a better conclusion might pop up. For an unpredictable time ideas stand on their own ground. Because they might be falsified in the end, they are never worth swindling or killing for.
The turn of the century has learned us some new lessons. After the fall of the Soviet Union, we learned that not industrialization, but the destruction of borders is a prerequisite for modernity. Since the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in the U.S.A. we know that security can only be attained by international cooperation and democratic law enforcement, and not by closing borders and sending out armies.
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After the many just and evil wars fought without end, we must conclude that while bombardments are inapt to better society, dignity of women and children will change the world. To control population by force is absurd: all what is needed is to stop disgusting practices like breeding premiums or other incentives on children, and like hampering or punishing the use of preservatives. World population would evolve to a balanced number all by itself if only women and children became more valued worldwide. And the price of this liberation is nothing compared to the mind baffling cost of warfare, in dollars and in grief.
Traces of the world-views of prehistoric hunter-gatherers and early farmers span vast territories. The Fat Goddess and the Sacred Bull for instance are attested throughout Eurasia; animism and shamanism are attested in every band or tribe on the planet, and forefather cults in every settlement. The surprising similitude and omnipresence of those imageries can only be explained by the absence of effective borders until deep in the New Stone Age. Such an absence of borders allowed thoughts to wander in search for fertile ground, and to spread among fascinated audiences however distant, while adapting and expanding continually. The human primate could never have evolved so fast and so far without fresh thoughts propagating at walking speed - the speed of travellers forever before the first rail roads.
The history of forced labourThe history of forced labour is complex and yet monotone. It is a steady returning pattern of population explosions in a few spots where child labour was established, predictably followed by emigrations. Where the emigrants settled, surviving hunter-gatherers were (and are still in the last tropical forests) driven back to barren deserts, and the next generation of workers was raised to emigrate in its turn. During this repetitive process conflicts intensified as encounters with other labourers multiplied, and harvesting became more troublesome because always poorer grounds remained vacant.
The technological evolution from tomahawk axe to tomahawk missile is exemplary for the outcome of this history. But technology can not evolve without an ideology. Things animals do have a back end in their nervous system, and it is impossible to build weapons capable to destroy the planet without ‘making up’ a suited mind. This mind evolved along a few stages.
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In primeval villages, awe for the household master implanted in the workforce surpassed generations, and evolved to a belief in the magical powers of querulous forefathers.
When kingdoms arose, those forefathers had evolved to war gods, and their uncertain assistance had to be bought: the worse ordeal demanded the highest sacrifice.
Some kingdoms grew ino to civilizations with universal posturing. Within those civilizations a clerkdom devised a cosmic dichotomy between good and evil, between the own civilization and surrounding chaos. The highest divine assistance, the clerks asserted, was won by the compliancy of kings and their subordinates.
During the second millennium BCE the first large wave of civilizations flourished in a deliberate seclusion, contrasting with the openness of prehistoric life. Although clerks and kings directed foreign trade, and exchanged for their own use physicians, luxury goods etc.…, to hide similar societies from the public was essential when forebears were linked with the beginning of the cosmos, and the clerks were presented as the wardens of the universe.
Predictably those civilizations declined and were crushed by new migrations.9 The unseen severity of those wars is illustrated by the introduction of iron weapons and of horseback-riding. The terror instigated by the latter is still visible in the legends about centaurs and in the nightmare of the Trojan horse carrying a whole army unit.
No flourishing civilization remained by the end of the millennium. Anyone educated in awe for the great ancient civilizations might see this as a loss, but the opposite is true. The collapse of civilizations drove back - for the time being - the sclerosis of tradition, and set off a gulf of modernity, traceable in science, art and literature. Imageries from Africa to Asia wandered over borders and ruins , mingled, fertilized and flowered.
This movement could only prosper in the educated administrative force, now liberated from central dictates and powerful hierarchies, their minds suddenly opened by the encounter of exotic visions. The first traces are found in the oldest Indian Upanishads and in the Egyptian Osiris cult. Both influenced the Zoroastrians of Persia and from there spread as a fresh amalgam over the entire known world, influencing Greek philosophers, Biblical prophets, Hinduism and other eastern philosophies.
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The life cycle of civilizationsAs all previous civilizations, the actual Atlantic civilization claims to be the source of all progress, starting from the ancient Greeks, over Hellenism, to the European scientific revolution. Civilizations always install traditionalism and claim progress, but minds are only opened in proportion to borders crushed.
Civilizations are the most complex social organizations before the birth of the League of Nations. They are also the social organizations that deteriorate their human and natural environment the most, and push environmental and social risks to the highest level – and into the catastrophes behind. Inevitably civilizations are ruined by self-called catastrophes and warfare: they are born in violence, and after the time needed to exhaust their human and natural environment, collapse in violence.
Full-grown civilizations live about four centuries: the first century is an age of accumulation marked by beneficial warfare; then follows a golden age and an age of exhaustion, marked by the start of runaway deficit wars, when every war ever won turns back to be lost. The final century is the age of decay.
ProgressCivilizations are enemies of progress because they need to claim persistence – absence of change. The level of scientific progress attained when they rise to pwer is fixated in myths and ideologies, and consecrated in a new body of immutable sacred texts. Civilizations, for the time of their existence, bless science into hibernation.
Modernity is the valuing of every individual. Genuine progress is progress towards modernity. Modernity can have technological, industrial and urban effects, but does not depend on any of those. Progress towards modernity is at its strongest in the age of decay of civilizations, and to assume modernity to the full the wheel of rebirth of civilizations must be halted.
Progress is as old and as widespread as humanity. It is built up, step by step, by humanity as a whole, and bestows humanity as a whole with rights and responsibilities. Every flourishing civilization once claimed to be the sole golden spot in a barbaric world, and the Atlantic civilization of today is no different. Yet, if Europe had been the only island on earth, metal working would never have been
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known, and neither would writing, printing, propulsion, chemical elements, afterlife, atomism or science, because all this was once given to Europe by foreign sources. Europeans would be living more elementary than the Tasmanians a few centuries ago. The only difference would be that there was no risk of a lethal invasion by other humans.
Progress is the residue of many failing histories, of which not everything was lost every time.
The histories of tradition and modernity are closely intertwined. Respectable scholars of all times carried curiosity on one shoulder and obedience on the other. Whenever they had to chose sides, they could either be burned a the stake because of some minor misadventure, or with a bit of luck could end up in a well honoured prosecutor’s office.
Four assumptionsThe only way to grasp the machinery of violence, tradition and modernity is to find an escape from the mental fabric of your own sheltering tradition to critically examine the ideas taken for granted by your society. And it takes more courage to cross this cold alone, than to commit suicide under warm applause of an ideology.
One can not come to new insights bit by bit. As long as the whole picture is not evaluated, the parts remain awkward. Each part can only be appreciated when the other parts are already established. For this reason new paradigms are often accepted because they are needed, not because abstract reasoning stumbled upon them. This essay starts from four preliminary assumptions.
The first of those assumptions is that any worthful theory applies equally to all people and groups, be it the West, Islam, Jews, the Chinese….
This essay cites the Atlantic civilization more than any other only because we are best informed about it, and because everything mentioned about one civilization is exemplary for civilizations as a category. The West is not the cause of all the misery in the world: most peoples have somewhere in their history overpowered weaker populations when they had the chance and felt the need, and all have clerks explaining that they did it in a more humane way than other assaulters. The West neither is the sole champion of civilization:
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civilizations on all continents have called themselves the best and final civilization for a few centuries, and disappeared.
The second assumption is that not just one faction of humanity is the main destroyer or creator of peace: the West, a particular religion, dictatorship, morals, society, genes, race etc.…have all been admired and accused, and called the root cause of the worse and of the best. Such primitive hunting of evildoers or praise of heroes should be abandoned in favour of a search for the circumstances that push people towards violence or towards cooperation.
The third assumption is that we are ourselves, individually, responsible for how we live, for our noble acts as well as for the atrocities we commit. We are not dependent on the examples of prehistoric people, on animal behaviour, on prophets, genes or economic laws.
What happened ten thousand years ago should not refrain us from producing food, communicating etc.… in the best suited manner we know today. Animal brains would not be that complex if they only had to chose from a list of beaten tracks. It is impossible and unnecessary to return to the past. The future is whatever comes next, it is the cumulation of past experiences, even if we like to emulate, in an always awkward manner, what we believe to be ‘the old way’.
Prehistory was not one culture clearly demonstrating our limitations or vocation. It is not synonym with ‘small communities’, nor was there ever one homogeneous primitive population.10 Even with the little we know today it is clear that prehistoric cultural variance was broader than the cultural variance in historic times. Big game hunters, hunter-gatherers and the first farmers rotated, combined and clashed as millenaries went on and as climates oscillated between ice ages and tropics.
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The fourth assumption is that groups can not have rights as if they were individuals. While an ethnical, religious or cultural group can defend itself against collective discrimination, liberties should never be given to a group. Groups have no rights. It is often said that a group thinks this or that, but a group can not really think or feel, and it is impossible that all members of a group think or feel the same, even if they want to. Unless rights are given to each and every person individually, they are unjust. One of the worse elements of group discrimination is that it can enforce the identity of this group above its members' individual self-esteem.
If only one or a few individuals disagree or are ill-treated within their group, they are exactly the individuals human rights are meant for. ‘Equal rights’ dedicated to Blacks, Indians, Pygmies… are impossible: the requirement of equality implies that all individuals are given the same rights, without invoking ethnicity, religion or other discriminators. Differing individuals - sometimes many, sometimes a few, sometimes just a possibility, but always as important as You and I - always fall victim to generalization. On the other hand, exactly because individuals are not defined by their society, their responsibility is far-reaching: an individual can not at once hide behind tradition and claim liberties. Whoever opposes discrimination, must realize to be striving, wittingly or unwittingly, against tradition and for modernity.
Those assumptions will be defended further in this essay. But readers who believe to be part of a chosen elite or to be submitted to some collectivity, or who believe that they must obey ideologists speaking infallible truth (be this truth religious, scientific or whatever), will remain unconvinced – unless they have the courage to leave, be it provisionally, the seemingly safe shelter of their tradition.
Three prioritiesThree conditions must be fulfilled before the wheel of rebirth of civilizations can be halted.
One condition is to stop encouraging childbirth: if fewer children will be born, they will be more valued, will find more opportunities and inhabit a more delightful environment. Too many ecologists today preach austerity, while shortage is a sure path to aggression, and affluence is the consequence of a relaxed population size.
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Another condition is the abolition of borders. Governments should strive for the progressive and controlled opening of borders to people, goods and information. When this rule is applied to borders between countries, it will prevent impoverishment, frustration and tensions. It will also hinder the secret preparation of war, including terrorism. When this rule is also applied to internal information from government, industry and other public powers, it will counter corruption and coups d'etat, and lead to genuine democracy and durable security. This step will also promote education and awareness about foreign populations, and break the isolation needed for ideological indoctrination in whatever direction. Because this awareness is the first essence of real democracy, the only possible way to spread democracy is to open borders.
Still another condition is to phase out the development, production and marketing of weapons of war, and to change the military into a strong police force submitted to civil law and unrerstricted democratic control.
The race between tradition and modernity, between destruction and survival, will reach the finish in the twenty-first century, and nobody knows which will win.
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The human animal
Appearance and meaning.
Each animal is conscious of its world in its own complete way. A worm is not ‘unaware’ of the backside of the moon: since it lacks the question as well as the answer, it lacks in fact nothing. It is naïve to think that a snake lacks legs or a chimpanzee lacks pronunciation. None of those faculties are missing within the full existence of the animal.11 The same goes for humans. Ice Age people did not need farming, and the first Homo Erectus did not constantly fell over because his hips were maladjusted, as was often suggested by twentieth century authors. Illustrations representing the evolution from ape to modern man as a strive to ever more erect humans are misleading: every step in evolution had its own integrity. Only if we accept this integrity, artefacts can reveal a glimpse at the prehistoric world.
Primeval cultureA band of primeval humans typically consisted of around fifty members, fluctuating with available resources. Such bands lived in ephemeral villages. Individuals could decide to follow a remarkably successful hunter for some time, and consequently bands decomposed and regrouped as chances turned. Hierarchical structures were inconceivable, and thus semantics to describe gods were unavailable. Primeval hunters believed in sometimes visible and sometimes hidden beings. Shamans traced and interpreted invisible things. Sometimes magic was tried, for example to find new hunting grounds. The reading of cracks in heated shoulder blades of a prey animal (‘scapulimancy’) is testified worldwide.
Big game hunting was paramount throughout the Ice Age. The Sami of northern Scandinavia and Russia, today forced into farming and herding today, were still big game hunters in the seventeenth century CE. Travellers have accounted how parties of men, women, children and dogs drove hundreds of reindeer in corrals of piled rocks, and slaughtered them all in blood-soaked excitement.12 In our times, only
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a remainder of the Bambuti Pygmies of Africa still mobilizes the whole clan to drive game into nets.
Drive hunters have little interest in demons or ghosts. Colin Turnbull recounts how a Bambuti carried home a heavy cluster of bananas from a Bantu field, without having exchanged the usual prey. The Bantu farmer had readily believed that one of his forefathers had taken the loot from the Bambuti right at the verge of the Bantu village. The Pygmies had a good laugh at the expense of the gullible farmer.13
At the end of the Ice Age, the large herds disappeared and foraging shifted to a wide variety of rodents, insects, fish, shells and plants. Collective drive hunting turned into more solitary observation and stalking, a new way of food gathering demanding its own world-image.
Primeval foragers were focused towards the outside, were rather world-conscious than self-conscious.
Reality was made up of appearances. It was laden with the unexpected, set forth in a manifold of particular, surprising experiences and recounts. Coming to terms with this environment requires careful reading of covert signs, searching for hidden relations, and marking thin threads of recurrence and resemblance in a turmoil of perceptions. This environment was too complex to ever be confronted entirely. Yet, it had a decisive impact on food, health and safety.
Each encounter was emotional, had meaning: it could be frightening, comforting or stunning. Entities could appear, change, join, get any size or any power, or hide again. In this world-image, nothing was inert. To be was to arouse, to impress, to live. To change meant truly becoming, not changing, because form nor body existed.
Everything was as rich in meaning as it was poor in reliability.
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Ancient foragers re-enacted, replayed, strengthened, extended and exchanged those encounters: rhythmic repetition created an illusive universe, steadily expanded by fresh signs. Words were caused accidentally, by the need to recount - not as sounds obtaining meanings, but as meanings acquiring sounds, each meaning its own sound at its own time. Evocations grew into patterns and tokens, and into language and myths. First was art, then came words, and then came myths.
Those people were not actors themselves, but were totally predisposed at responding to the agile environment. However puzzling the behaviour of encountered entities, it was essential to make the best out of the world as it appeared; good and bad were no directives, they rather were a challenge to the forager’s creativity. This world-image was designed to provide the best possible life, nothing less and nothing more.
AnimismFor a million years humans observed sounds, quiverings and other signs, and bestowed them with successive layers of meaning. The resulting world-image, roughly labelled as animism, assumes that our world is working by the anarchic forces of sometimes visible, sometimes hidden beings. Those beings are not modelled after the human example, but after carefully watched animals.
Animism knew no soul nor matter, only animals, plants, stones, anything able to raise emotions, to pose danger or to provided comfort.
If we move (are moved) without a visible being around, we imagine a power right inside our body, where the effect is felt. This power inevitably resembles powers known from the outside. Today we imagine a soul or an electro-chemical cause of those internal movements (e-movements) or sensations. Primeval humans interiorized the powers they knew. Movements of muscles and intestines were imagined as animal acts, even more so because the inner side of a gaping wound looks the same as a prey ripped open. The ancient Fins believed the mice of life turned the eyeballs. ‘Muscles’ are named after the Latin for ‘little mice’. The Irish still talk of ‘butterflies in the stomach’ when they are nervous. In Estonia life was animated by dung beetles, in eastern Asia often by flies or bees.
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The same beings impregnated women. Therefore newborns, like everything else, are more than human. They grew up as animals, with a complex, uncounted set of attributes like power, ability, trail, resistance, colour, kinship, pledge, leaning, speed, smell, menace, bearing, sound. An Australian member of the Kangaroo band can think of himself as a kangaroo, because the way a kangaroo looks on a photograph is only a very weak representation of it.
Artefacts are magically animated. Blacksmiths and other artisans are magicians, and a spear or an iron knife ‘works’ – is ‘alive’ - because of this magically initiated power.
Gift economies are based on emotions like animism. In this type of economy goods are traded for emotional credit. Such exchanges are not restricted to humans, but are also observed in communities of birds, fish and mammals. Neither are gift economies restricted to primeval society: gift exchange remains essential to maintain good relations in family, friendship, business and politics, and plays a role in romantic dating as well as in global scale politics, when powerful leaders meet and exchange presents. Pure gift economies however are only possible in affluent societies. When the balance between resources and population deteriorates, barter, currency, atonement and other practices arise to assess tradeoffs and get even.
In the Middle Stone Age animism had become a general human cultural trait, diffused as widely as the use of tools or of fire. All later philosophies, from the various concepts of the soul to Newton’s account of gravity, are derived from the animist paradigm that movements have a cause different from the moving selves.
The further growth of knowledge is rooted in the animistic world-image, because this world-image governed humanity for the very largest part of its existence. It has risen with humanity and is an inseparable essence of our being, even today. This does not mean that the animistic imagery is more truthful than other paradigms. It only means that we are better suited to make useful theories based on animism, because animism is ‘trained’ better towards the requirements of our reality. Gravity for instance was not discovered as long as Hellenistic mechanics were prevalent. It was discovered when mechanistic materialism was left (by Bruno, Newton etc.) and immaterial forces were envisaged after the model of animism.
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The last remaining hunter-gatherer bands, passed down legends and their traces in myths show how animism evolved to complex world-images. We would not be able to enjoy the same actor in two different movies, nor would we be able to appreciate a novel one day and a weekly the next, nor would religion, art or science be possible, had we not inherited this gradually shaped talent to cope with the manifold, the mysterious and the incoherent.
ShamansSometimes a child developed a peculiar trait which betrayed the influence of powers invisible to other band members. This trait could be a harelip, epilepsy, melancholy, androgyny, transsexualism, or any other extraordinary mark or event. The child seemed to have a special talent to perceive and contact the beings that were reluctant to make themselves known to common people. The Manchu of Siberia named such persons shamans, but the same phenomenon is encountered everywhere.
A band wants a shaman in the manner a blind person wants a guiding dog, and therefore the child is left no choice but to immediately start the elaboration of his or her talent. During a period of exile with severe deprivation (which reminds of Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad,... ), the new shaman develops a magical quality that is totally alien to his or her band. What followed was only possible if the novice was banished from his safe, trusted community. Unknown entities arose from the desert, and the novice was, at first, powerless against the turmoil of haunting emotions. Like the others it was still unable to drive back frightening images, or to hold tightly to images of consolation. This world was frightening to the bones, a nightmare going on for days. But if all ended well, the new shaman found the power to to keep upright amidst the terror and to tame the mad multitude, and returned to the band as the master of its own imagination, a conqueror of the inner domain.
Despite claims of many audacious authors, genuine shamans are not educated to their task by anyone, nor instruct followers. They possess a power, out of which other crafts - medicine, physics,… - will emerge in the course of cultural evolution.
Out of a physical defect, pressed into lonely suffering, the shaman discovered an inner reality still unknown to world-conscious foragers. Inside the grottos of his or her mind, the shaman dealt with wild
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demons, and forged the new, astonishing capability to summon imageries by deliberate choice. Although opposed by organized religions as rivals, shamans still play their part in most farmer communities, and their traces can be discerned in religions and myths on all continents.
Shamans animate gatherings by dancing and singing, enter in trance or lose consciousness, and awake with stories about the invisible and directives for hunting, remedies for illness, solutions to danger. Their spectacles provide suspense, laughter, fantasy and significance.
Since the very beginning of the human intellectual enterprise, they fully exploited the power of imagination, if necessary defying restraints imposed by tradition, sometimes leading a band out of unprecedented disasters by calling for daft action when no way out seemed possible. The shaman’s society demanded messages from the unseen, new remedies. The response was often dreadful and certainly full of trickery, but the power of hope overruled all doubts.
Deceit lies at the origin of autonomous thinking. The only escape from an unknown ordeal could be fraud which sometimes turned out right, and only trial and error could separate futile from useful ideas, and cause the evolution from fraud to knowledge.
Often shamanistic remedies are barbaric as the performances are gross, for instance when a human sacrifice seems to be the last resort to escape a catastrophe. This happened for example in Chile where a shaman (machi) was convicted for sacrificing a child. In 1950 CE a five-year-old boy, at the time staying with his grandfather, was murdered to halt a flood. Patrick Tierney had the opportunity to interview the child’s mother a few years after the shaman was tried:
“The machi sent for the boy. And what could my father say? The machi demanded the boy because he didn’t have a father and a mother. After all, I wasn’t there. And the machi promised that if they sacrificed my boy the ocean would stop rising. [the boy] told his grandfather he wouldn’t be lazy any more in watching the sheep […] but since his grandfather had already turned him over to the machi, they just took him and did it. They say the boy cried an awful lot for help, because they killed him by cutting off his arms and legs.” 14
Totems Some beings - animals or others - caused extraordinary emotions. This led to the belief that a special relation was possible between a human and an other being: the totem.
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Children of the Australian Euahalayi-tribe are informed by their medicine man about the identity of their yunbeai. Whoever eats his own yunbeai will die. Any injury to his yunbeai also hurts the person. When in great danger, it is possible to assume the shape of the yunbeai. K. L. Parker heard from an old Euahalayi man:
when he was going to a public-house he took a miniature form of his yunbeai, which was the Kurrea-crocodile, out of himself and put it safety in a bottle of water, in case by any chance he got drunk, and an enemy, knowing his yunbeai, coaxed it away.
The bush soul of the West African coast has the same function. It may be a leopard, a fish, a tortoise, or any other wild animal. James Fraser wrote:
Unless he is gifted with second sight, a man cannot see his own bush soul, but a diviner will often tell him what sort of creature his bush soul is, and after that the man will be careful not to kill any animal of that species, and will strongly object to any one else doing so.15
A Meso-American Indian ready to receive his nagual went into the forest to sleep. The animal that first appeared in his dreams or in his sight when he awoke, was his particular nagual. When this man died, his nagual also died - and vice versa.
Other personal totems recorded by anthropologists are the manitou of the Algonkins, the ari of north-east Australia, the atai and tamaniu of Melanesia, the augud of Torres Straits, the kinajek of Tlingit, the oubarre of West Australia, the sulia of British Columbia, the nyarong of Borneo and the tamanous of the Twana Indians.
The Greek personal demon, the Roman genius, the Christian guardian angel and the Islamic jinn are totems in origin. Roman military deities, as most gods, had their own genii. When Christianity engulfed the Roman legions, those genii turned into the Christian ‘Holy Ghost’, and allowed the composition of the dogma of the ‘Holy Trinity’. This dogma says that there exists only one god, but that this god holds three different personalities: a father, his son and his ghost. In this way totemism saved Christian monotheism.
Snakes Among the many exceptional animals snakes have still distinct qualities. Living close to earth with almost no body at all, vanishing and reappearing through cracks to the dark beneath, gifted to kill with just one small bite and to cast off their old skin, they might apprehend better than anyone the roots of life and death. A tale of the Blackfoot
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of the North American Plains says their maker wanted to be mortal as everybody else. He asked a village woman to mate with a rattlesnake, and was born as the sun, enjoying death each nightfall.
Power over death suggested also power over the opposite, immortality. For ages, humans have dreamed of discovering the snakes’ secret to slough their parching skin of age. In a four thousand years old Mesopotamian legend, King Gilgamesh took on a long voyage in search of the plant of youth, but a snake stole it from him while he slept. Since then snakes can slough their old skin. When Gilgamesh awoke and discovered his loss, he mourned:
For whom have I travelled? For whom have I suffered? Everything is lost for me,The snake, the lion of the earth, will live.
A thousand years later, scientists studying plants and animals in the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon were still searching for the same plant of yought, and the authors of the bible expressed their aversion to this blasphemy by having Adam and Eve thrown out of the Garden of Eden before the snake could guide them to it:
The man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever. Therefore the Lord sent him forth from the Garden of Eden.16
The snake, guardian of the precious plant of life, was the companion of Aesculapius and appears on the emblems of medical doctors until our days.
Living snakes of the most dangerous kind still provoke awe on religious gatherings. Today cobras are used in such exhibits in India and Burma, pythons around the African lakes, and rattlesnakes in the U.S.A.
DemonsWhen humans started to classify beings, only exchange of observations over wide areas could distil science from legends and fantasies. The Indian author of the Chandogya Upanishad classified life forms following their manner of procreation, omitting all occultism, in ‘that which springs from an egg, that which springs from a living being, and that which springs from a germ’.17 But in most places demons remained part of reality. The Zoroastrian priests of Persia divided nature in dangerous animals, poisonous plants and malevolent demons on the one side, and of useful animals and
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plants, and benevolent demons on the other side. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, unable to always tell legends apart from nature, described the lethal confrontations between elephants and dragons.
A Roman mural from the first century CE, exposed in the Paris Louvre Museum, shows a subtly painted vineyard foliage, wherein small birds frolic around. At a closer look, the birds are really tiny winged toddlers with bows and arrows, amors. In medieval times a bat could also be a ‘young devil’. The difference was hard to tell while the beasts fluttered around, and witches have been executed because the inquisitor discovered a little devil hurrying near, alarmed by the cries of their victim.
Until the rise of contemporary medicine, demons were the entities thought to cause feelings, emotion, ailment and distress. The Greeks for example used the word eudaimonia, today translated as ‘happiness’, but which literally means ‘good demon’ (eu-daimonia). The following Sumerian prayer is as familiar in its emotion as it is unfamiliar in its imagery:
In the street my friend would not talk to me; he bent his head down [..]. If it pleases you, my god, allow me to soothe your angry heart, so that your spirit will be assuaged. May the mackim demon that perpetrates evil be ripped apart, so that he will flee my body. May the asag demon be extirpated from my limbs, so that my dark days will become bright.18
The invention of mind and the death of matter
People usually think of mind and matter as opposites, even with a separate beginning. Creationists and materialists largely agree that matter existed on its own until the advent of mind breached the cosmic silence. There is for example little difference between Genesis:
God created the heaven and the earth [and] the beasts of the earth after his kind [and] man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.19
And this materialist counterpart:Organic nature grew out of dead nature; living nature produced a form capable of thought. First, we had matter, incapable of thought; out of which developed thinking matter, man.20
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Yet to us mortals there is no matter without mind, and no mind without matter. The imagery of dead matter on the one side and mind-beings on the other is conceived in the course of our cultural evolution.
Until some point in the Old Stone Age there was no difference between living beings and dead objects, nor between body and mind, nor between flesh and spirit. Matter was simply that which matters. All things were either erratic entities inflicting fear, hope, pain or ease, or they were unnoticed and inconceivable. Imagination was crammed with those entities: there was nothing but them, no vacuum between them and no space around them. They filled the invisible and the visible, the inner and the outer domain. There was no dead matter.
Life and deathA hunter ripping open an animal often found a heart still beating or convulsing, embedded in blood like his own. Some realized that the movements felt in their breast where akin to this heart. It was the living heart that jumped for fear or hope, and broke away for anger or challenge. It was difficult to grasp how this animal and the heart within stopped moving. In the hunter's world-image, the only instance of motion coming to an end, and thus the only theory available, was the silence when a prey had escaped. Death was the fleeing from the corpse of a mover animal, and this animal fled to escape the grim agony of death. In this imagery pain did not come with dying, but was its very cause, which posed the problem to Saint Augustine how a sinner could endure the pain of eternal hell-fire without loosing his soul.
The famous Plotinus, who lived in the third century CE, dedicated his life to explain the etherical nature of the human soul. But when he died near the coast of Campania, his friend Eustochius saw a snake hurrying away from under his bed.21
Throughout antiquity the heart remained the seat of life. The brain of an Egyptian Pharaoh was pulled out through the nose and discarded as a formless, colourless slime, but his heart was carefully embalmed and preserved. In Ancient China, the word for heart, Xin, became the name for ‘mind’. In Sanskrit the world for heart or breast, hraday, also means intelligence. The Vedantas spoke about ‘the ether within the heart, and in it there is the person consisting of mind.’22 The Bible reprimands the Jews continually about the evil thoughts they
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conceive in their hearts.23 In Roman times the breast remained the place of the ‘counsel which we call the mind, and that cleaves seated in the midmost breast.’24
In the seventeenth century CE, Descartes, to many the founder of modern science, still imagened how our movements were caused by animal spirits:
Now in the same proportion as the animal spirits enter the cavities of the brain, they pass from there into the pores of its substance, and from these pores into the nerves. And depending on the varying amounts of which enter [..] some nerves more than others, the spirits have the power to change the shape of the muscles…25
Moving animals lived on as demons and devils, as bringers of disease or misfortune, and eventually as electric pulses and as laws of physics.
The raven and the bullMost scavengers fleeing a carcass when spotted were candidate mover animals. Raven (or crows) especially were birds of life, and therefore became companions of shamans, gods and witches. A nineteen thousand years old drawing discovered in the the deepest part of a cave in the village of Lascaux in southern France, is the oldest testimony of this bird of life.
The drawing shows a Bull which is speared in the abdomen, but which has already wounded to death his killer, a bird-headed man with upright phallus. There is also a herd of seven rhinos leaving the scene: one drawn, accompanied by six dots. On the same wall is also the intriguing picture of a bird sitting on a spear which is heading down. This bird is a double of the hunter’s head.
The hunter is represented in a clumsy way compared to the more accurately pictured animals. For a long time in prehistory depicting humans was difficult, unnecessary and frightening. It was difficult because the features of a face were hidden behind its emotional display, the only, irreproducible, aspect that mattered. Still today art students turn their plaster model upside down in order to see proportions undisturbed by emotional content and to rule out, as it were, the subjectivity of the subject. Depicting humans was, generally speaking, unnecessary as long as there was no reason for coercion. It was also frightening, because to paint a living being was to kill it in
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some way: the artist used dead animals for models, and even made prints with dyed corpses.
Less refined than the many colourful paintings along better accessible walls in the same labyrinth, the scene with the raven and the bull was a scripted revelation rather than an attractive tableau. The difficult access reveals that only by exception a chosen individual was guided to this inner sanctum, with only a quivering fat lamp to light their footsteps. During this penetration weak stains of light glided along the walls, exchanging series of painted creatures like images crossing the earth's mind. At the end of this corridor the novice was lowered down on a rope in the deepest crack, towards the threshold of the underworld. Then a hollow voice recited the most secret song, elucidating the scene. The bird of life left the dying hunter while sitting on his last launched spear, because what animated the hunter – his phallus still bears on it - also had animated his weapon. The raven anxiously searched for a new host, but since the Bull was dying and other animals had fled, the bird of life had no other option than to give in to the call from the dark beneath.
This cave painting reminds of the Egyptian Ba and Akh, both originally depicted as birds of life. In Egypt Pharaohs were guided to a narrow, dark shrine at the heart of the temple to hear a frightening voice out of nowhere, uttering guidance. In the ruins of the Kawm Umbu temple one can still see a secret entrance, used by the priests to perform such oracles.
The painting also reminds of the Assyrian legend of Enkidu, a man roaming with wild animals. His awesome sexual lust – the hunter’s erection - took a temple prostitute a week to satisfy. One day Enkidu killed the Bull of Heaven, and was banned to the underworld, where bird men awaited him. The Bull of Heaven was the constellation called Taurus by the Greeks
There is also a resemblance with a myth from Vedic India in which the sun god Mitra sacrificed a Bull, which is the moon (Soma).
In ancient Persia, Mithra killed the Primeval Bull at creation. Mithra was reborn into a human child, each year at winter solstice, to ease human suffering. This celebration later became Christmas.26
Finally, a myth of Roman times recounts how the sun god sent a raven to Mithras with the command to slay the White Bull, which is the moon. The association of the Bull of Heaven with the moon is
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frequently encountered and is reasonable: the the waxing crescent can be imagined to be bull’s horns. The legend of the Primeval Bull has played an uninterrupted part in the world-image of Eurasia and Africa. Contrary to Greece, Rome and the West, the moon is masculine in the Indian, Persian, Semitic and Arabic idioms. The churchfathers called the followers of Mithra 'miserable wretches of human kind, who consider that God utters his voice by the raven and the jackdaw, but says nothing by man.’27 and 'the crow, they say, knows God, and the raven likewise, and they possess gifts of prophecy, and foretell the future.’28 Yet ravens were not only the companion of Apollo and Odin, but also of the prophet Elijah, of Saint Paul the Hermit, of Saint Vincent and of Saint Benedict.To the North American Lillooet, ravens were bringers of death. The Celtic god Raven (Brân, etymologically linked with ‘brain’) helped those who carried with them his cut off head. Following the Jewish Talmud, Adam and Eve learned how to bury the first human corpse (their son Abel, murdered by his brother) from a raven:
Adam and Eve, sitting by the corpse, wept not knowing what to do, for they had as yet no knowledge of burial. A raven came up, took the dead body of its fellow, and having scratched at the earth, buried it thus before their eyes. Adam said, “Let us follow the example of the raven,” so taking up Abel’s body, they buried it at once.29
The Koran agrees with the Talmud: ‘Allah sent a raven, who scratched the ground, to show [Cain] how to hide the shame of his brother’.30
ReflectionPrimeval foragers were spectators in a theatre with many actors; primeval labourers repeated the same monologue over and over in a fading world, and slowly the strokes of their sickles carved new contours to our minds.
Where people started to dominate each other’s lives, attention shifted from the environment to fellow humans and eventually to the self. In the new paradigm self-consciousness, until then a rare magical skill of shamans, pushed back world-consciousness. Images of deceased notables were less easily forgotten, and disturbed dreams and thoughts. The more a deceased had been lovable or frightening, the more intense the haunting:
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…31
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Those images - ‘ghosts’ or ‘spirits’ - were totally different from the animist movers in our guts: each of them looked exactly like one particular person. Ever since the New Stone Age, people tried to understand what those spirits are, and where they came from.32
The first widespread theory was that spirits were deceased people awaiting their final death, and in the mean time needed food, caring and consolation. Just like other humans they had their moods, and could either help whoever pleased them, or disturb those out of faveour. Sometimes they were given a place in the house, but their abodes could also be difficult accessible caves, or remote islands or secluded valleys.
Spirits appearing in dreams must have left their bodies behind. And indeed, when one person appears in the dream of another, both bodies are usually motionless. From the observation that ghosts evidently passed through walls, it was concluded that their substance was thin like morning haze, which has no reflection while the bank behind it brightly reflects in the water. Therefore Hindu gods, vampires, Muhammad, and Persian gods if they are masculine, cast no images.
Since spirits could leave their bodies, it was not too difficult for onetime animists to imagine that a person was not animated by animals, but by his own thin double. One spirit, fitting in the body like a hand in a glove, could move every detail of the body. Unpredictable animal movers became superfluous. The body was just a glove puppet, and living bodies a cheap performance. Only the spirit within was alive.
Now the world was no longer a living world, and death was no longer a flight of life. The universe became an almost infinite mass of dead matter, where the heirs of spiritism survived as miraculous sparks in the dark.
Sleepers can die if awakened too soon, because their spirit might be absent. This is known among various tribal societies and was also known by the ancient Greeks. Jamblichus relates that Pythagoras once was seen at the same moment in Metapontum and in Croton. Herodotus relates how, interestingly also in Metapontum, the famous poet Aristeas was found dead on the floor. An accidental traveller, returning at that moment, related that he had just met the poet miles away. When his funeral was in preparation his body vanished. After
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seven years Aristeas reappeared and – typical an ancient Greek – claimed a statue. Similar stories are found in Pliny and Appolonius. Hermotimus of Clazomenae used to leave his body and roam far away, bringing back amazing stories to his audiences. One day, when his spirit was abroad, his enemies deliberately committed his body to the flames, after which the people of Clazomenae built a temple for him. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, credits the same Hermotimus for the theory that reason is present in all beings throughout nature.
In the ancient Indian Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the theory that the ghost of a sleeper wandered around was refuted by observation: although the dreamer remembers to have been in another place, others never saw him there:
People may see his playground but himself no one ever sees.33
This critical remark is followed by the comparison of various theories, and the conclusion is that the person asleep is ‘self-illuminated’. In other words, the sleeper sees only what he projects himself:
And when he falls asleep, then after having taken away with him the material from the whole world, destroying and building it up again, he dreams by his own light. In that state the person is self-illuminated. There are no chariots in that state, no horses, no roads, but he himself sends forth chariots, horses, and roads. There are no blessings there, no happiness, no joys, but he himself sends forth blessings, happiness, and joys. There are no tanks there, no lakes, no rivers, but he himself sends forth tanks, lakes, and rivers. He indeed is the maker.34
The mind is not a wandering ghost, it is fastened to the physical person. Following quote recycles the animistic bird of life to illustrate a more intelligible theory:
As a bird when tied by a string flies first in every direction, and finding no rest anywhere, settles down at last on the very place where it is fastened, exactly in the same manner, my son, that mind, after flying in every direction, and finding no rest anywhere, settles down on breath; for indeed, my son, mind is fastened to breath.35
Spirits not only appear in dreams. Reflections, in ponds, metal and mirrors, are spirits. Shadows are reflections, and spilled blood is a moist, sloughed off shadow.
Individuals can be harmed in their shadow or reflection. Central-Asian shamans carry a mirror in which they can see the dead. The ancient Chinese, Egyptians and Japanese use magic copper mirrors against dangerous spirits. For some Congo tribes it is very rude to step on a
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married wife’s shadow, and in Polynesia, one could be executed for touching the shadow of the chief. In many cultures persons pay attention that their shadow does not fall in pits, with special attention to graves, or under a dog (or its shadow).
Gods dreaming usIf our dreams are real, then the world we live in might be the dream of a god.
In India Prajapati was said to have imagined his too attractive daughter Dawn, and life arose out of his semen, spilled all over earth. In late Vedic times, thinkers believed the universe was nothing but a thought of Brahma:
There is one eternal thinker, thinking non-eternal thoughts.36
In one myth the Egyptian Ptah created even himself: ‘I brought my own name into my mouth as a word of power, and I forthwith came into being’. Next Ptah created all other things by calling their names one by one. The Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom assigned the same power to Ra.
The Bible echoes this vision:The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth;by understanding hath he established the heavens. by his knowledge the depths are broken upand the clouds drop down the dew.37
Universal self or individual soulPeople can converse about their thoughts - they are not confined to their own minds. Words are spoken and heard, and whoever hears them can try to see what they mean. Our thoughts live in a house with open windows.
The Upanishads tried to discover the substrate of this communal thinking. Both breath and fire had been tried, but the four elements fell short to solve this riddle. Eventually a fifth element, the omnipresent and invisible ether was invented:38
Ether is better than fire. For in the ether exist both sun and moon, the lightning, stars, and fire. Through the ether we call, through the ether we hear, through the ether we answer. 39
But the sum of all minds could hardly be just another dormant element. It was fair that the sum of all minds was itself made of mind. The sum of all thinking selves had to be one universal self. This
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universal self (Brahman) is not a god, it is a profound yet natural theory:
The Universal Self is the same as the ether which is around us; and the ether which is around us, is the same as the ether which is within us. And the ether which is within, that is the ether within the heart. That ether in the heart is omnipresent and unchanging.40
Not long after the Persian armies invaded the Indus valley, this universal self appeared in the writings of a Persian who lived in Athens, Anaxagoras. He called it the Nous, ‘the thinnest of all things and the purest which has all knowledge about everything,41
Socrates complains in Plato's Phaedo that he 'heard someone who had a book of Anaxagoras, as he said, out of which he read that Nous was the disposer and cause of all'. Socrates hastily studied the book hoping that 'if mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best.' He ended up disappointed. Clearly he had wished for something more humanlike at the top of the universe. Brahman and Nous don't care about what is the best, because they are all-embracing.
The power of Athens - as later of Rome - was built on slavery as nowhere before. Under this rule the distinction between who toiled (the working body) and who commanded (the immaterial soul) eventually pushed the mind from the heart to the head. Plato pointed out that the head was a sort of watchtower overlooking the quarries of civilization:
so in the vessel of the head [the gods] first of all put a face in which they inserted organs to minister in all things to the providence of the soul, and they appointed this part, which has authority, to be by nature the part which is in front.42
The task of the soul was reasoning and understanding, the task of the body passion and sensation: ‘the soul views some things by herself and others through the bodily organs’.43 The physical world was of a lower order, like the dirty labourers who dwell in it: ‘the only being which can properly have mind is the invisible soul’.44 Because the soul had no senses, its source of knowledge was introspection, recollection. Under those circumstances judgement of the dead got a different meaning. The vile body was disposed of as ballast, and only the soul survived in the hereafter.45 The soul was no longer a part of a human, but a complete heavenly being captivated in a gruesome carcass. The world of ghosts had become the only real world.
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The shift of the mind from heart to head allowed that ‘warm’ feelings were separated from the ‘colder’ intellect. Shortly after Harvey discovered the role of the heart in the blood circulation, in the midst of the European scientific revolution, a French nun had a vision of Jesus Christ showing his bleeding heart. This inspired Catholic laity and Jesuit priests to the creation of the cult of the Sacred Heart of Christ, and led to the building of the Sacré Coer (church of the Sacred Heart) in Paris. The heart was now the seat of religious feelings and morals, as opposed to the unfeeling and amoral rational mind. Today we still speak about ‘knowing by heart’ and ‘a broken heart’ while we see the brain as the unpitying organ of ‘pure’ reason.
But the most important effect of the new preminence of the head was that good and evil became synonyms of respectively soul and body. Like a slave the body always tried to escape its duties; like a master, the soul was always right. The body wanted to fraud and fornicate; the soul strived to purity and restraint. The soul was pure, while the body was bestowed with sins. ‘The works of the flesh,’ wrote Saint Paul, are ‘adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies.’46
No religion has ever been able to make such a dangerous philosophy very popular, but chances grow whenever life becomes more troublesome. In mainstream Christianity and Islam, only divine grace or mercy can cure sin and save the body. Therefore the individual soul waits for the resurrection of their matching corpses at the End of Times, because not the soul lives forever, but the complete, renovated human.In the Corpus Hermeticus Hermes Trismegistus assured that a soul without the mind 'can neither speak nor act':
For often times the mind doth leave the soul, and at that time the soul neither sees nor understands, but is just like a thing that hath no reason. Such is the power of mind.’.47
Chruchfathers from Tertullian on fulminated against the followers of Anaxagoras for separating the mind from the soul,48 The mind becme the soul's captive, no longer free to roam the world of ideas. Together with the soul, the mind would be punished with ethernal hellfire for inappropriate thinking.
More than a thousand years later, in Abassid times, Persia became again a turntable of knowledge. Persians like Alfarabi and Avicenna
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studied Greek, Indian, Chinese and other texts,49 and rediscovered the universal intellect encompassing all minds. With Averroes, an Arabian scholar at the court of Córdoba and a student of Avicenna, the Nous became the subject of a fierce debate in Medieval Europe. More will be said on this below.50
If we accept that the knowledge we arrived at today can only have been accumulated by exchanges crossing civilizations and continents as long as humanity exists, the concept of a universal mind is the most adequate theory of knowledge imaginable. This theory is however more than an account. For all those longing for modernity, and for the whole suffering humanity, it is a profound consolation that we all take part in one strive encompassing all times and places.
The human brainThinking is an involuntary process, and in a sense always happened just before we arrive. To have a thought, on the contrary, is a resolute act. We do not have a thought as the outcome of a rational process, but because we decide it is suitable to us at that moment in time. That our thoughts are the result of a rational process is one of those suitable thoughts, and the lesser reasoning is involved, the more justification is spawned afterwards.
It is very easy to predict the thoughts of someone born in a Catholic, Muslim or Hindu country, or of someone born in the USA or in China: out of need of social comfort, the overwhelming majority takes on the beliefs of the nurturing milieu. To make daily life possible we agree to the laws of whatever land we happen to be born in, and to be accepted and valued in a group we pick up its prevailing convictions. Fearing distress or hoping for advantages, we justify wrong to some extend, while we loudly scorn wrongdoings in distant places. To maintain a good name and a good conscience we condemn injustice, up to a trade off between risks and benefits. And if things go wrong once in a while, we can always summon to our defence the benevolent demon called the Spirit of the Age.
But such a life is of no value for a human being, John Stuart Mill wrote:
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He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgement to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. [It] is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being?51
To leave comforting prejudices behind might hurt more than flesh-cutting shackles, but it is the only path to a better life.
The brain is one of those strange organs that animals have to improve living. As all of living nature it evolves by the game of trial and error. We select, colour and frame experiences, in order to seek or avoid their recurrence. This goes on as long as we live, constantly adapting our imagination to new circumstances, and it only slows down when high age makes our muscles rigid and our imagination slow. When it comes to a standstill, we die.
Our brain has developed over thousands of times the lasting of any natural experience. Its complexity is cumulated by beings which, by adapting to their environment, changed this environment in such a degree that they had to adapt again, and as a result again influenced environment. Species take part in the environment of each other: life has one common past. We are possible because other species are. We are just another unique animal.
The brains of a fly, of a snail or of a brilliant scientist have all the same mission: to bring old and new sensory pulses together, and derive from experience the best reaction for optimal living, nothing else. But, John Locke wrote:
We shall not have much reason to complain of the narrowness of our minds, if we will but employ them about what may be of use to us; for of that they are very capable. And it will be an unpardonable, as well as childish peevishness, if we undervalue the advantages of our knowledge, and neglect to improve it to the ends for which it was given us, because there are some things that are set out of the reach of it [..] The Candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes. 52
All what is in our head at any moment – even the image that anything is in our head – has been tinted, made an image, is imagined. Those images can be valuable, or nonsense, or even harmful. Descartes imagined an inner space, and made his most important discoveries
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while roaming in it; he also imagined an eternal soul without extent or matter, and then believed that this, of all images, was the only thing one can ever be sure of. I think, therefore I am thought.53
To exist is to inhabit an environment
The founder of Jainism, Mahavira, is reported to have said:One who neglects or disregards the existence of earth, air, fire, water and vegetation disregards his own existence which is entwined with them.
It is pointless to describe living beings separated from their surrounding world, or to reflect upon ‘being’ as an independent subject matter. To be is to be some thing some way; it is to act with and within an environment, and this environment is an ongoing process of change and exchange.
Humans and other animals need to exchange water, food, air, sound and images. When we drink a glass of water, this water has poured from innumerable sources, and streamed down to the sea through countless but always different landscapes; it has been swept up from the sea by winds caused by the earth’s rotation caused by the explosion of our galaxy, and rained down to drench deserts, prairies and forests before it welled up from yet different springs. And part of it it will return in this perplexing roller coaster of being only a few hours after we drank it. Each of us carries a few water molecules which one time were part of the living body of Tutankhamen, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus…54 Heracleitus has said that you cannot step twice in the same river, because the water is always renewed. But not only the water, also the bather is new at every trial.
We cannot raise a question or make an assertion without exchanging with our environment. Even when we believe to express transcendent truth, the words that form our thoughts, the air that makes our voice sound, the movements of our lips and the ink on the sheet of paper before us, are borrowed from the environment that streams along. If we were made of a different substance than the rest of nature, we would know and feel it beyond reasonable doubt. Such a crucial structure at the centre of or awareness could never become an undecided subject of dispute between believers and disbelievers.
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No matter which theory we embrace to relieve our existence: without salt we would have no muscles; without muscles we would have no language; without language we would we be inapt to create theories, and in our dumbness we could not even be enlightened or inspired.
RealityOut of exchange with the environment we construct an image of our world. This image is unfinished as long as exchange goes on. Absolute, unchangeable truth is the sclerosis of a world-image.
Philosophers have sometimes questioned the existence of a real world separated from our selves. George Berkeley for instance wrote:
It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding.55
We can know objects only by the power of our understanding. Consequently, it is the only way they can exist: talking about other objects is nonsense. But our understanding is not a flickering beam of light, it is an integral and continuous part, even the carrying out of our being. Berkeley mixed up when he continued:
For, what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?56
In the previous quote, Berkeley admitted that we perceive houses, mountains and rivers, but in the next sentence those houses, mountains and rivers become spirits and sensations. First the objects of our understanding are things that are built, climbed over and travelled across at great effort, and the next we know those things are nothing but unreal delusions. This contradiction, also found in Parmenides, Plato and Augustine, is too obvious to be a neutral and accidental mistake. To confuse hard objects with their vaporous apparition pertains to religious ideology. It is meant to disqualify our daily reality in favour of an higher goal.
The real world is not something hidden behind a smokescreen, it is the reality of our ongoing exchange, grasped with our indispensable imagination. With this imagination we continuously try to find suitable schemes to impose on this reality. Like ancient Navajos we can imagine a little man looking through our eyes; like Descartes we can imagine an even smaller man looking at a projection in a cavity of our brain; or we can keep busy forever by imagining living ghosts and
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dead matter and make all sorts of mishmashes with them. But all there is is a living, changing environment in which we take part.
Whoever is still confused could send a letter to oneself with any content. When it arrives a few days later and the content is unchanged, the world clearly is real. We obviously partake in various chains of exchange, even if the major part is out of sight. We can only try to grasp those links by our imagination, and constantly renew our projections and predictions by trial and error, as we have done as long as we exist.
This is no materialism, because it does not answer the question of what the world is made. That question is false, because for the world to be made of something, there must be something to be taken from outside this world. If the world is everything - and why would we call it the world if it was only some god’s fish-bowl - then it is made of everything. This is the simple answer the oldest Upanishads already new.
We are pebbles polished by an endless stream, and our essence is on the outside, where we are touched by this stream. This does not imply that we are herd animals, because exchange does not require similarity. But even stranded in the most lonely place, we can but think with the sentences and emotional displays of the society we come from. When we leave our homeland we drag its image behind us like nomads carry the parts of their tents. The most solitary hermits see themselves through the eyes of their distant followers, and draw their courage from the community they seemingly left behind.
Astonishing chaosThe root of thinking is astonishment. If nothing would happen, there would be no awareness. Therefore our reality can only be the sum of endlessly moving, changing, interacting and transforming encounters.
Many people take an evidently stable world for granted. We can hardly believe that the world was totally different only a short time ago, and can not imagine that soon everything will have changed. We are surprised when we encounter something exceptional, but a snake with one head is really as astonishing as a two-headed snake. If our memory would be completely blanked out and would have lost its capacity to absorb, the usual should not exist any more, and we would be surprised and terrified every second of our existence.
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In this torrent of change, kings and priests claim eternal power by means of persistence myths. Yet in all ages scholars have been amazed by the diversity and transformation of being.
The Indian Upanishads reveal a notion about existence that travels through animals, clouds, humans and various other aspects of the universe. Contrary to the popular notion of reincarnation, this is no creepy story about ghosts popping out and in bodies, but it is the observation of beings with some reminiscence of primeval animism:
Then the sacrificer, having become air, becomes smoke, having become smoke, he becomes mist, having become mist, he becomes a cloud, having become a cloud, he rains down. Then he is born as rice and corn, herbs and trees, sesamum and beans. From thence the escape is beset with most difficulties. For whoever the persons may be that eat the food, and beget offspring, he henceforth becomes like unto them. Those whose conduct has been good, will quickly attain some good birth, the birth of a Brahmana, or a Kshatriya, or a Vaisya. But those whose conduct has been evil, will quickly attain an evil birth, the birth of a dog, or a hog, or a Kandala. On neither of these two ways small insects and worms are continually returning of whom it may be said, live and die. Theirs is a third place. Therefore that world never becomes full.57
The Chinese Tao-te-ching evokes the fundamental multiplicity of being in a beautiful verse:
Tao produced one, one produced two, two produced three.Three produced the myriad things.The myriad things leave obscurity and embrace brightnessand come to harmony by material force. 58
The wu hsing, the ‘five movers’, are the counterpart of the four elements known west of the Himalayas. Those elements are rather a classification of matter we see around. While the Indian elements are enduring building blocks of reality, the Chinese elements move and revolve between heaven and earth, without ever ceasing, hence they are named ‘movers’ (hsing). A fragment from the Shu Ching (‘Book of History’) from the second millennium BCE, evokes those changes:
The first hsing is water; the second is fire; the third, wood; the fourth, metal; and the fifth, earth. Water soaks and descends; fire blazes and ascends; wood becomes crooked and straight; metal yields and changes; earth is sowed and in-gathered. That which soaks and descends becomes salt; that which blazes and ascends becomes bitter; that which is crooked and straight becomes sour; that which yields and changes becomes acrid; and from seed-sowing and in-gathering comes sweetness.59
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When the Zoroastrian scholars of Persia tried to take hold of this astonishing universal diversity, they arrived at the conclusion that every appearance in the universe must have an individual image called fravashi, originally meaning ‘growing force’. Fravashi exist for everything existing, in the past, now and in the future. They explain why combinations of the four Indian elements, well known to the Zoroastrian scholars, did not produce an infinite number of random monstrosities, but most of the time delivered beings in an enormous variety of yet so scrupulously pre-designed forms, all fit to subsist wherever they show up.
A Persian (Avestan) litany of hundreds of incantations shows that humans, but also sky, the waters, earth, plants, animals, heavenly bodies, souls, heroes, the prophet Zoroaster, the highest god Ahura Mazda himself, have their individual Fravashis:
They come on this side, they come on that side, never resting [..] We worship their Fravashis. We worship all the waters; We worship all the plants; We worship all the good, strong, beneficent Fravashis of the faithful. We worship the waters by their names; We worship the plants by their names; We worship the good, strong, beneficent Fravashis of the faithful by their names. Of all those ancient Fravashis, we worship the Fravashi of Ahura Mazda. 60
The Shinto religion of Japan knows a concept of innumerable singled out powers named Kami.
‘Shinto’ literally means ‘the way of the spirits’ (the word stems from the Chinese ‘shen tao’), and not ‘the way of the gods’ as is usually claimed.61 The difference is important as Shinto is a world-image closely related with ancient animism and spiritism, and therefore perceives all imaginable entities as forces. Sometimes it is said that entities are ‘blessed’ by spirits, but this dualistic vision is not it in accord with genuine Shinto.
There exist no material and immaterial entities. In the animistic way of thinking, entities have their own power. Since everything is ‘inspired’, or better is ‘inspiration’, to talk about a god in the authoritarian sense is nonsense, possibly dating from the eight century CE, when for the first time divine origins were claimed by the Japanese emperors.
Kami are gods as well as stones – not only gods or stones in general, but each individual god and each individual stone as well. Kami also are evil, the sun, goodness, ancestors, spirits, plants, animals, beings
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of the water and the water, beings of the air... 62 Continually new Kami are discovered through meditation.
Kami are contemplated one by one, un-summarized, as if strolling through a lane where each leaf on a tree and each quivering spot of sunlight or shadow benevolently blesses the walker. Whoever contemplates Kami is silently drawn into awareness of the unbound shower of altering existence. The world is a kaleidoscope of expanding, ever turning and reshuffling entities, leaving the meditating person at rest by the broad stream of being. A Shinto prayer calls upon
the 800 myriads of celestial Tami, the 800 myriads of ancestral kami, all the 1,500 myriads to whom are consecrated the great and small temples in all provinces, all islands and all places in the great land of eight islands, the 1,500 myriads of Tami whom they cause to serve them. 63
The endless diversity and transformation which is the essence of the universe, is at odds with the need for organization of civilizations.
Only a structured, hierarchic universe is able to justify a hierarchic society.
No kings without humans, no kings without gods: kings are in between both. In order to feign similarity with immortal gods, they put on the name of their predecessors and wore their clothes, bounded through forefather cults and joined mythologies.
Kings had one foot in the cosmic order, and the other resting on lower humanity. On their pinnacle the relation of kings with their subordinates is one of control and terror. In the Mahabharata prince Yudhishtira is educated with a book named 'the science of chastisement’:
the divine Lord cheerfully said unto the deities having Indra for their head, these words: “for the good of the world and for establishing the three ends of man I have composed the science of speech! Assisted by chastisement, this science will protect the world….” 64
In the Mahabharata and in the Bible gods fear that they might become degraded to humans - a fear well understood by clerks and kings of all times. But there is an important difference between both texts. The clerks who wrote the Mahabharata express the mentality of older forefather cults: when things go wrong not men will triumph, but gods will become mortals, and eventually disappear behind the hundred years horizon.65 Genesis, on the other hand, was written by clerks shocked by Babylonian scientific and technological progress.
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The gods in their text express the fear that men will become their peers by discovering the immortality drug, or by building a tower reaching to their dwellings.
Most civilizations lacked the audacity to proclaim absolute cosmic stability, and were satisfied to occupy only a delimited land of order. The remaining part of the universe was no longer a fountain of diversity and transformation, but became dark chaos, the frightening anarchy of nature, cosmic entropy. This chaos was like a sea or an ocean: a restless foam stretching not only around and below earth but, as rainfall demonstrated, also above the sky. From the last millennium BCE on benevolent more and more gods became evil demons dwelling in this chaos.
Amidst this chaos (the own) civilization could be an island lifted from the bottom of the sea or the corpse of a mythical animal. In myths from Africa (Egypt, Mali), Asia (India, China, Japan), Greece and Polynesia it was the inside of a cosmic egg, often with the sky for upper half shell and the sun for yolk.
Greek myths call the primeval ocean Chaos (‘Yawn’). She mated with Eros out of boredom by, and so produced the cosmic egg.
The Chinese called the primeval ocean Hun-Tun, incorrectly translated with the Greek word ‘chaos’. Professor Fung Yu-Lan has proposed the far better ‘Primitivity’.66 The following Tao myth is often interpreted as a story about the cosmic egg. However, a cosmic egg never dies. It is better to imagine a primeval stew - a cosmic soup - wrapped in a wonton roll, a word derived from the primeval ocean Hun-Tun:67
The emperor of the South Sea was called Shu [fast, brief, change] the emperor of the North Sea was called Hu [furious, sudden, uncertainty] and the emperor of the central region was called Hun-tun [soup, primitivity]. Shu and Hu from time to time came together for a meeting in the territory of Hun-tun, and Hun-tun treated them very generously. Shu and Hu discussed how they could repay his kindness. “All men,” they said, “have seven openings so they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Hun-tun alone doesn’t have any. Let’s trying boring him some!” Every day they bored another hole, and on the seventh day Hun-tun died. 68
In many myths the primeval ocean, the threatening, uncontrolled outer world, was embodied by an enormous monster. This monster wanted to throw the whole universe in chaos (and did so every few centuries) and only kings, clerks and gods could save the world.
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Often myths define the beginning of their civilization as a victorious battle with this monster. In the Middle East it is called Tiamat, Leviathan or Yam, which is also the Hebrew word for ‘sea’. Marduk killed Tiamat and installed the world in his carcass, and Yahweh ‘didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces…’69
Animals and humansThe fabric we paint our image on is a living animal. It has the same eyes, the same number of toes and fingers, and the same kind of heart, lungs, sex and brains as mammals, birds and reptiles. We know this and try to hide it. Most biology textbooks have considerable paragraphs on what separates humans from animals, because we need such assertions once in a while. But unfortunately, all species have distinct qualities: whoever points out what really separates us from other animal species, only stresses that we really are one of them. By highlighting our differences from other animals, and not from oak trees or granite rocks, we admit our relation.
One or two million different species live on earth, because life blindly revealed that amazing abundance of ways to be lived, while a manifold was tried and failed. There is no contest, no jury, no reward. Every living species is an astonishing success in living the life it has grown into - it was never challenged otherwise.
Seeds of many plants are designed to be transported by animals, and molluscs move around while sitting on crustaceans; parasites live their whole life in intestines, and the female of the Japanese blood fluke lives her whole life within her males’ body; humans keep numerous animals, from song birds to fighting dogs, for company. People and animals inhabit the same space, even up to women breast-feeding animal suckling, as in Polynesia, among the Guaharibo of South-America, during the Greek Bacchanalia and so on. A minority of animals is welcomed as companions, beasts of burden and food stock, or as defenders against the remaining majority, an overwhelming number of rodents, insects and parasites.
Animals in human communities live under human morals. We know of eighty convictions of animals – either death sentences or excommunications - in Europe from the twelfth until the fourteenth century CE.
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In the Swiss canton Chur a plague of may bug grubs damaged the fields. The insects did not appear when convoked, and as a consequence a legal representative was assigned. The verdict stressed that all Gods creatures have the right to live, and banned the insects to the wastelands. A similar action was prosecuted against Spanish fly. The judge, mislead by the small size of the beetles, invoked their youth as an extenuating circumstance. Caterpillars were banned in the region of Valence in 1585 CE, and in Auvergne in 1690 CE. A French fifteenth century lawyer, Barthélémy Chassanée, was famous for his effective defence of rats.
Pigs were burned alive in 1226 CE in Fontenay-aux-Roses, and in 1268 CE in Paris. Sows were hung in 1349 CE in Châtillon, in 1366 CE in Falaise, in 1408 CE in Saint Mihiel and in 1499 CE in Josaphat. All were accused of child murder, since unwanted newborns were often fed to sows, which are much larger than boars and have an upsetting appetite. If the killing was ever discovered, the pig was blamed and punished accordingly.
Sexual intercourse of humans with animals was feared because it could lead to the birth of repugnant and dangerous demons. In 1565 CE a mule and his master were convicted for fornication. First the feet of the animal were cut off, and then both were burned alive together. In 1679 CE a lonely woman and her dog were hanged for the same crime in Massachusetts.
Not only do animals live under human rule; occasionally humans also live with animals. The oldest recorded cases, the wolf children from Bayern and Hesse, date from 1344 CE. In 1661CE hunters in Lithuania found a bear child, fighting with teeth and nails to resist capturing. In 1672 CE a sheep child was found in Ireland, and a bull child in Bayern. Another bear child was found in Lithuania in 1694 CE. In 1719 CE two children where found in the Pyrenees, jumping from rock to rock like wild chamois. In 1767 CE a third bear child was found in Hungary. In 1993 CE, the news agency AFP reported the discovery of a boy living for fifteen years among a herd of buffalo in Ivory Coast.
Detailed reports only exist of a few cases. Peter van Hameln was abandoned by his father in the woods near Hanover. After one year he reappeared at his parents’ door, but was beaten and chased away. Found at the age of thirteen he was displayed as a curiosity at the court of George I. In 1801 CE a French physician published the
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study of an eleven-year-old boy found running naked and wild in the woods of southern France.70 Two Indian girls lived for many years in a family of wolves, until captured in 1920 CE. The children were brought to an orphanage in Midnapoor. Both had callosity on hands, elbows, knees and feet. Active mostly at night they scared people with loud and long howling, and devoured living chickens. Harper’s magazine and Scientific American featured their story.
The power of our mind is not its capacity for truth, but its capacity for hope
We can not align our thoughts unhindered. Thoughts are carried around in osmotic brains, picking up images while passing by, forgetting some on the side, often unaware and never able to have it all fit together. We can only think one sentence at one moment. We don’t know if our thoughts are as consistent as we like them to be, no matter how hard we study, close ourselves off, chant professions of faith, or cry convictions aloud. Mind is meant to mind, intended to transform, it is our device dedicated to change. It is possibly the most fluid faculty in the universe, even more fluid than water or air. Like the wind it can never be brought to an end, completed or settled, unless it dies. John Milton referred to this fluidity of knowledge when he pleaded against censorship in the English parliament:
Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool…71
Our osmotic brain is as important to humans as muscles to worms or gills to fish. Inconsistency is our mental ear. If our brain had been a sort of hardened crystal bowl with immutable reflections of eternal spirits, humans would have perished a long time ago. Unquestionable knowledge is poison in a world of shifting environments and unpredictable challenges.
A tapestry of mindsThe strength of our minds is at the outside: they only serve if joined together, and their power is proportionate to their discrepancy. Only exchanged thoughts can work, and working thoughts are changing thoughts. Ice is not the real water.
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Our minds produce a picture together, like the knots of a tapestry or the pixels of a photograph; but unlike those knots or pixels, each mind is a pixel in many pictures at once, and can reflect each full image on its own.
It is better to say that each mind is like one of the millions of droplets composing a rainbow. Each droplet has all the colours of the whole rainbow in it, but from its own spot projects only one definite colour onto the eye. As the drop falls its colour changes, but at the same time a new drop takes its place and casts the old colour anew. While the entire rainbow falls, drops hastily exchange colours between them to keep the total image unbroken. Like no one can take a bath in the same river twice, no one can look at the same rainbow twice. This does not mean that rivers and rainbows are unreal, as Parmenides and Plato asserted, it means that change and exchange are fundamental to reality.
Diversity and transformation is the essential law of nature, and of human culture in all times. It is absurd to declare oneself solemnly to be Catholic, Muslim, Communist and so on. At most, this reflects our submission to a group of people at that moment in time. Unless we are super-human geniuses, we cannot know for sure if we really comply with all the judgements and imaginations held by that group of people. And if such a super-human would exist and submit fully, he cannot know for how long, because unless he gets brain-death on the spot, he will reconsider his submission every hour. A profession of faith does not reflect the possession of well defined ideas, but the submission to a raving pack of prehistoric scavengers.
History of philosophy presents a long series of ingenious thoughts, but in the course of many centuries dedicated minds have rather added to their variety than to their convergence, and never put forward one final unified theory. Ironically, the more a philosopher claimed to unify philosophy in one unshakable system, the more contradiction and debate he provoked. Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel both claimed to create an all encompassing world system, and as a consequence brought about numerous contradicting schools.
Our head is no camera that, if well adjusted, generates sharp photographs of truth.
Karl Jaspers wrote that ‘we can ask primal questions, but we can never stand near the beginning’.72 Likewise we can try to approach
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absolute truth but can never reach or hold it, like directions of wind are nowhere and yet indispensable. The Truth of authority and religions is not as much ‘what really is’ as it is ‘what befits our imagination’. And this imagination is dispersed over small compartments with narrow entries: in one compartment we can appreciate a truth that we dismiss in another, following circumstances, without ever noticing or caring.
Truth can only be an attribute of doubtful reality; statements claiming to be truth themselves should never be trusted. Often the most unlikely, obscure and fuzzy statements are named truth, while likely, simple ones are just put forward.73 The more truth is doubtable, the more it is called a crime to doubt it, and many have been put to death for the crime of doubting unbearable nonsense.
The simple reality that our mind is not given by a higher being, but is imagined by ourselves, is difficult to match with ideologies that claim solid truth to be their inherited privilege. But the Guardians of Truth adapt their eternal wisdom every hundred years, or else are flushed away by the stream of change.
The geometriciansThe erroneous concept of innate knowledge follows an ancient tradition, difficult to eradicate because it implies the supremacy of a spiritual world over matter or, politically, sacred supremacy over submitted toilers. Its Eurasian version stems from Persian rulers who inspired Plato, who passed it on to the church father Augustine and to the prophet Muhammad.
Abstract thoughts are thoughts about a group of similars. Such thoughts are indispensable in everyday thinking: when an Eskimo recognizes a polar bear, he uses the abstract thought ‘polar bear’ that covers all individual polar bears, including small ones and dirty ones. Abstract thoughts become non-sense very fast if not constantly checked with reality. Spiritual thoughts for example can not be checked with reality. Mathematics do not belong to an eternal reality, but grew among living people through history, from stacking pebbles to launching rockets. Mathematics originate in real world calendar design, construction works, armament and so on. As all thinking, mathematical procedures are more or less abstract, but are never spiritual.
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In seventeenth century Europe the Elements of Euclid of Alexandria, an African scientist living around 300 BCE, was portrayed as the work of a Greek genius, who only needed the definition of a point, a line and a circle to prove a vast geometrical universe of propositions, thus building up a fabulous construction of huge insight, created only by meticulous thinking, the power of the mind.74
But even the most abstract mathematics can only be the application of trained procedures derived from experience, or of a search by trial-and-error for new procedures. The Elements of Euclid is a clever compilation of accidental and casual knowledge of engineers, architects and arms builders in Asia, Africa and Greece. The knowledge had been accumulated, directly or roundabout, during centuries of massive trials, experience and exchange of practice, accelerated first when Cyrus, and again when Alexander shattered the borders that separated civilizations and caused the emergence of
a new meta-culture. Euclid himself named many of his sources and did never conceal that his famous work was a compilation.
Fooled by this misrepresentation of Euclidean geometry as the pinnacle of the pure deductive mind, René Descartes interpreted the methodology of the Elements, derived from the handling of complex engineering projects, as a new and powerful method that would lead scientific speculation to its summit:
Those long chains of reasoning, very simple and easy, of which the geometricians use to arrive at the most difficult demonstrations, allowed me to imagine that all things knowable to men are linked in the same manner, and that, as long as nothing is taken for truth which is not and if the correct order of deductions is followed, nothing can be too difficult to be discovered. 75
A few years after Descartes, Benedict de Spinoza wrote his Ethics 'in detailed geometrical fashion', demonstrating the relation between God, man and universe by nothing but genuine brain work in the style of the Elements.
The ten year younger Blaise Pascal – or his relatives – demonstrated to be fooled by the same neatly arranged deductions when claiming that he had discovered the first thirty-two propositions of the Elements at age twelve all by himself, without any preceding knowledge of mathematics.
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A century later Immanuel Kant geared up to cause a complete revolution in metaphysics ‘after the example of the geometricians’.76
But there is are no theories devoid of experience, and no future without the unexpected. Albert Einstein wrote that:
Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. 77
A man stuck in a maze will not manage to escape by formal logic. He has better chances using the rat’s strategy, and rage through the corridors until a solution crops up in the turmoil of trials and errors.
People imagine how they shrewdly work out solutions, but geniuses do not follow logical steps, they are rather haunted by mind-storms raging to the limits of insanity, and when finally they grab hold of a fresh idea, they tend to write books presenting it as the outcome of a series of logical steps.78
We might have forgotten the genesis of certain knowledge because it happened too long ago, or because our brains are too small, but all knowledge is generated during trials to attain an enjoyable existence in between the origin of life and the present day. No clerk can step aside this frame and fly away on the wings of metaphysics, seemingly detached from all earthly worries but always returning with new theories about eternal truth and universal power.
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The seeds of famine
The more food production is accelerated, the more shortage prevails
Small bands roamed over earth a million years ago. Some became successful hunters of the plains, and followed wild herds up to the northern tundras. To those bands the ending of the Ice Age was a catastrophe. The tundras followed the retreating ice border, shifting further away from the fertile sun, and the herds that grazed on those tundras decreased and eventually disappeared. At first dense forests replaced the tundras, and later deserts replaced the forests. At that time, the whole human population was still below four million souls, nearly invisible in the landscape, and shrunk when game became scarce: bands adapted their population size to available resources as they had always done.
As long as all humans subsisted on hunting and gathering of food, the natural low calorie diet, combined with extended breast-feeding, kept population size in line with available resources. This low calorie diet was not the same as starvation. It was a consequence of eating wild animals and plants, all with low natural proportions of fat.
But at the end of the Ice Age the equilibrium between population and resources was destroyed.
It seems to be a simple rule that production of food is all what is needed to avoid famine. Labour brings about food and wealth, while idleness, its opposite, leads to shortage. There is however one important catch to this rule. I do not refer to the old saying that the labourer usually ends up in poverty and the idle one ends up in wealth. I refer to a more fundamental catch, in which production fails already before distribution of wealth comes to mind: the catch that if food production involves the production of workforce - of children - simultaneously, in the end the growing number of mouths can surpass the production of food. The more production is accelerated under such conditions, the more famine will prevail.
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In the best case innovations might circumvent this pitfall by boosting the productivity of labourers. But such innovations will confront us even sooner with depletion of resources, and will eventually have to introduce new sorts of food.
All imaginable alternative foodstuff – wood, polymers, earth, cannibalism,... - have been tried somewhere by creative tribes, but has nowhere lead to a more enjoyable life. Cannibalism is not as exotic as it may seem. We have already introduced cannibalism in cow raising, and already recycle human organs on a massive scale. A back or a side is not so different from a heart or a kidney when it comes to saving lives, and in some cultures people might rather agree to donate their side than their heart. Of course our scientist must first find a vaccination for the hideous Creutzfeldt Jacob disease or Kuru. But if the food is carefully handled and stored, it is the least prone to depletion. In fact, the depletion rate would match with population growth, which seems fair. Anyhow, only if a population becomes really desperate such innovations would become attractive.
A population caught in forced labour will grow without end, and come in conflict with concurrent populations and with its environment. No matter how small in the beginning, in time such a population will have to fight rivals until it destroys itself by exhausting resources. A contest with our own environment can never be won in an acceptable way.
Forced labour made abundant offspring a blessing
In a few places, the end of the Ice Age imposed the diet of grazers - wild grasses – on the hunters. This kind of food was hardly fit for human consumption: hours of gathering, grinding and cooking were needed to make one meal, comparable to the damping substance found in stomachs of slaughtered ruminants – the only part of a prey that can be produced by craft, and that was still craved for by the last hunters of the African Kalahari and the American Prairies. The same rigidity that made grains so arduous to toil, made it also storable for the always faster returning periods of hunger, and allowed the population to survive on territories with uncertain yield.
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At times the environment deteriorated severely before already born children became adults. Under such circumstances women and children might be forced to carry out the mindless, repetitive manipulation of grasses.79 If such a situation persisted for more generations, child labour could grow into routine, and it could become conceivable to breed children to carry out the labour that had become indispensable.
Where eating grasses was the last dreary alternative, food was no longer provided by skills and knowledge about the natural world, but by simple, recurring, mindless work. No forager would choose for such labour: children and women were forced into it by means of violence and forgery.
Grasses – corn, barley, millet and rye - are the exact opposite of the food procured by hunters. They are not difficult to trace, but grow like weed. You do not stalk them with thrilling vigilance, but endlessly step forth with your back bent. You do not capture them in one enchanted strike, but repeat the same reaping gesture from sunrise to sunset. And this is only the first part: grinding with a grinding stone takes more hours each day than the whole hunting and gathering craft before. Then water and firewood must be carried, and the bread kneaded. And the next day was like yesterday again, over and over until the last day of your life.
When Gilgamesh doubted that he had really slept for seven days, his hostess showed him seven breads, because it was impossible to make so many breads in a shorter time.
The British palaeontologist Theya Molleson studied the bones and teeth of 162 individuals gathered at excavations in northern Syria. The deposits span three millennia and cover the beginning of agricultural labour. Where cereals were cultivated the skeletons showed signs of degeneration: excessive loads were carried by adolescents; long hours of grinding had caused gross arthritic big toes and injured and deformed backbones, legs and forearms. Molleson wrote:
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It was the preparation of grain for eating that was the most demanding and labour-intensive activity of the settlement, as it still is in many places. The grain had to be pounded every day because the seeds would not keep once they were dehusked. The dehusking with mortar and pestle and the subsequent grinding in a saddle quern80 would have taken many hours. What we had found on the bones, then, were the tell-tale signs of long hours spent at such labour.81
The bones revealed also that this grinding had been the work of women. Molleson also discovered many marks of injuries, and wrote that using the saddle quern with too much enthusiasm or haste might have caused them. Surely enthusiasm was not as much the drive as was compulsion.
Marvin Harris writes that in the villages of Java, boys of twelve to fourteen years contribute thirty three hours of labour per week, and girls of nine to eleven almost forty hours, while the population of Java rises fast. A study shows that in Bangladesh boys compensate their cost of raising already after three years of child labour. Marvin Harris continues:
Contrary to the popular perception that people in less developed countries have large numbers of children simply because they do not know how to avoid conception, there is much evidence that more children and larger households mean a higher, not a lower, standard of living in the short run. In explaining why they did not want to join any family-planning programs, the men of Manupar village in the punjab explained: “Why pay 2,500 rupees for an extra hand? Why not have a son?”.82
Cambridge professor Partha S. Dasgupta writes that in poor countries ‘members of households may spend as much as five to six hours a day fetching water and fuel’. He stresses that in such countries
small households are simply not viable; each one needs many hands. In parts of India, children between 10 and 15 years have been observed to work as much as one and a half times the number of hours that adult males do. By the age of six, children in rural India tend domestic animals and care for younger siblings, fetch water and collect firewood, dung and fodder. It may well be that the usefulness of each extra hand increases with declining availability of resources, as measured by, say, the distance to sources of fuel and water. 83
Leaders in industrial societies, relying on children to bring in social funding, act in the same manner when they try to counter negative birth ratios by handing out breeding premiums. A German politician proposed to pay a monthly fee of a thousand euro per child. A society where life expectation grows with months every year, and
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where many play their weekly game of tennis twenty years after their retirement, still needs children to do the work. Equally perverse is selective immigration. For a long time uneducated workers have been sought in hinterlands of poor countries, which jeopardized the already difficult growth of modernity in Europe. Now the West, lead by Canada, starts to selectively import educated foreigners. This is the reverse of ‘development aid’: civil engineers, doctors and so on, trained at the expense of poor countries, are deployed in countries rich enough to buy them out. Only free migration regulates wealth beyond the short term in a stabilizing manner.
Growing violence is the inevitable result of the economic exploitation of children, because in this manner problems are multiplied and postponed each generation. If more inhabitants have less resources at their disposal, more coercion is inevitable. This can only lead to an exponentially growing judicial and repressive system, and to pitilessly fortified borders. If less resources are available to more inhabitants, crime, uproar, repression and wars will rise.
Emergence of forced labour is often presented as the glorious invention of agriculture or the agricultural revolution. It has often been written that thanks to the ‘invention’ of farming, humans ‘finally’ could build complex societies, and could spend more time at cultural developments. Jared Diamond wrote that rather the opposite is true:
the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism,that curse our existence.84
A more complex society is nothing people were ever waiting for, and the time spent at cultural developments was not the satisfaction of an ancient longing, but the response to a need for suppressive ideologies.
Birth control is older than civilizations, and childbirth is a cultural choice per sé. Primitive bands applied condoms made of fruits or bladder, used herbs or provoked abortions. But when forced labour turned children and women into battered workers, offspring became a valued asset to production, a blessing to the fathering master. Birth control became a sin, and far into the twentieth century CE western states prosecuted the use of contraceptives as a sexual obscenity. Even before man knew how to breed animals, he learned how to breed humans for profit.
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Until that moment forced labour had only existed in insect communities. Now this new way of living spread rapidly, driven by its own nature: more children were wanted because their labour provided survival, but once grown up, the new generation needed more grounds to grow food for more people - and more children to toil them. And when those children had grown up in their turn, the cycle started all over. The old population balance was broken and replaced by a human avalanche. Forced labour spread over the continents as a plague - as fire lit by an accidental spark. In this process existing foraging communities, who had escaped starvation by adapting their population size, where assimilated as labour force, or annihilated – a process started ten thousand years ago and going its last steps in the tropical forests on various continents today.
In the final part of the New Stone Age, four million humans had multiplied ten times. Workable grounds became sparse, and tribes stored the hard won harvest to defend it against rivals. Villages were walled in and war was invented.
When multiplied ten times more, to four hundred million, war became the sacred centre of civilization in Rome and elsewhere. Peace was no longer the normal state, it became a break between wars.
When humans once again had multiplied ten times, the planet was divided among nation states with armed borders, standing armies and patriotic ideologies. Such nation states focus on the production of expensive weaponry, and defend themselves heroically against famished families searching for a speck of living space.
During the roughly ten thousand years from the dawn of forced labour until mid twentieth century, population has grown exponentially from four million to four billion. During the twentieth century alone our number tripled, from less than two billion to over six billion.
Today, with a too large but still expanding earth population, the cruelty of wars for resources between nation states is being overtaken by nearly insolvable civil conflicts. Those conflicts range from urban gangs in overcrowded cities to ordinary genocides. Peace is no longer a break between wars, but an occasion to buy groceries.85
Simultaneously epidemic diseases spread among dense populations of plants, animals and humans; suitable land is ever faster declining because of exhaustion and salination; hazardous mountain slopes
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and river valleys were and are invaded; continuous deforestation causes floods, wind storms, mud- and landslides. Whenever scientists found remedies for the most recent catastrophe, the population flood accelerated and new, more dangerous plagues took shape.
Until the eighteenth century CE, only half the human population grew older than twenty, and only one out of ten reached a lifetime of forty years. Since life expectancy did not rise, the sudden population growth after the Ice Age can only be explained by a growing production of children.86 Population grew, not because agriculture bettered the living conditions – if this were the case people would have lived longer – but because children were labourers.
Once grown up child labourers become superfluous and even a burden: the surplus had to leave and reclaim land of their own. As a result forced labour spread rapidly, and after a few thousand years the remaining hunters and gatherers were either annihilated or forced back to the most hostile forests, deserts and wastelands. Once every suitable location on earth was taken by farmers, all further expansion, even continued existence, required more exertion. This accelerated again the capturing and submission of humans, either for meat, for sexual reward or to labour.
In all agricultural societies, youngsters are expected to leave the household and reclaim land of their own. In this manner boys of the Nyakyusa of Tanzania leave their paternal home and establish a new hamlet of their own, eventually marrying and taking their wives there. Today population density has left no more space for non-violent migration. European farmer sons were expected to leave for America in the eighteenth century CE, and by the twentieth century Europe had colonized most of the earth. Boys in Moroccan villages are expected to take the dangerous route for Europe, and Mexicans risk their lives along the iron curtain shielding the US.
Technical differences become a matter of life and death on the borderline. This provokes a never ending competition in metallurgy and engineering. New production techniques – consecutive application of animals, ploughs, wheels, metals, guns - allowed higher population densities, organized in more complex societies, at the cost of higher efforts and more coercion. While people from poor countries put everything at risk to escape to the promised land, rich
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countries boost hazardous production and develop new weapons to secure primary resources in the countries the poor try to escape.
The need for expansion can only be postponed by those innovations: after a short period of relaxation, it becomes clear that more intense labour processes demands more violence, and violence always has the last word.
When emigrants– such as the early European colonists arriving in America – encountered land with less intensive methods of subsistence, the new land seemed free while it was only used – completely - in a less intensive manner. The last five thousand years all land on earth was entirely occupied in various grades of intensity, depending on the accidental stage of violence. It is only because of lack of insight in exotic economic systems, that valleys, deserts and forests seemed vacant. With every new emigration the more archaic economy lost the confrontation, and new technologies lead rather to more people suffering more coercion, than to better living.
Not a single agricultural revolution, but a global demographic flood
Agriculture can not be regarded as one invention, nor as a revolution. The sum of all kinds of labour we now call farming, was not one industry; neither was there a burst of innovations at one moment in time. Agriculture evolved over millennia, and exploited different techniques at different times and places. What really made the difference in the long chain of innovations made by humans over millions of years, was not the invention of agriculture, but the demographic explosion caused by submission of women and children. This demographic explosion, and not the splendour of one magnificent innovation, has left its imprints in the archaeological records.
Long before the New Stone Age humans must have known enough about wildlife and plants to influence natural productivity. They cleared the wilderness when needed, facilitated the increase of useful plants, dammed waterways to catch fish, built traps and diverted animal tracks. The well-documented progress in equipment of ancient hunters and gatherers – gradual refinement of artefacts of stone,
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wood and antler – indicates a steady technological progress. This progress must have been accompanied by changes in the way people perceived and used their environment, even if time has wiped out the softer traces of their skills.
Foragers interact with their natural resources as anyone else, but lack reasons for intensive, damaging acts. This is the reason why foraging has nowhere been eliminated totally. In many societies the men despise labour and continue hunting, either as a necessity or as an amusement, and at times as an amusement disguised as a necessity. Such pretexts are uttered by villagers who disappear for ineffective tracking while women and children labour, but also among nobles and notables, who defend their time passing as the sustaining of a natural balance while game is raised and released before their feet. From Bantus to Carolingians and beyond, hunting remains an occupation for the lucky, while toiling the land is an occupation of women, children and slaves.
The Wichita and other American Indians did grow tobacco but stayed with gathering and hunting for most of their other needs. Many colonial missions, as today many development workers, educate the natives in the raising of crops of their own choice and call this 'development’, while local 'primitive' subsistence is abolished. The ensuing misery became a new argument for more import of ‘care' and ‘development’.
Agriculture appeared in the archaeological records in Asia, Africa and America whenever forced labour was established. It expanded on all continents for thousands of years, and this expanding is still going on. It is not a ten thousand years old invention: it is still being ‘invented’ today in fish farming of fish, deer etc.…. Agriculture is inflicting violence upon humans, animals and plants, applying force to long time known natural processes. It is the export of human overpopulation – including all its problems - to animals and plants. It is a reaction – yet not a remedy - to a deficient environment.
The recent emergence of fish farming positively demonstrates how deterioration of the environment causes the disappearance of gathering and the proliferation of labour, and at once allows a realistic glimpse at how the ‘invention of agriculture’ might have happened in the late Stone Age.
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Although fish farming is presented in the media as a huge technological advancement, the ancient Egyptians knew already how to raise fish to enliven their garden ponds, but preferred to catch more flavoursome fish for consumption in the wild, a sport enjoyed by all classes; also Medieval convents farmed fish, and monks have been known to revolt against their daily salmon diet.
Still in eighteenth century Europe, anyone could make a living by casting nets in brooks and waterways and selling the surplus on the village market. Since that time, many sweet waters have become too polluted and river fish disappeared or diminished. Consequently fishing at sea was intensified until sea fish diminished in its turn. Towards the end of the twentieth century, sea fish became farmed for the first time at an industrial scale. Since it is undeniable that our ancestors knew how to farm fish, the only possible reason for this transition is that the human population explosion destroyed river life and emptied the seas.
Fish farms multiply along the coasts only because seas are polluted and exhausted, and contribute to more pollution and exhaustion. Intensified fishing followed by environmental catastrophes and plagues, made fish farming beneficial only in the twentieth century CE. At the beginning of a large scale fish farming project, industrialists engage in discussion sessions with unconfident local fishers, in the course of which they appease the fishermen and learn from them the best breeding spots. In those spots cages are installed and overcrowded with fish, swimming in a curtain of excrements and chemicals. Salmon, for example, is fed with artificial colours to keep its flesh red, but there is also a contest going on to develop new antibiotics – pots of gold - to counter the new plagues that emerge in the crowded containers and contaminate their environment. Even wild fish swimming near farming cages can no longer be regarded a natural product. In general, farmed fish is fed with waste, but also with fish brood, gathered in big scale plunder of poor countries with little environmental laws or control, to the extend that also those countries import the same detrimental chain of events.87
In the last thirty years game was ever more raised on farms in New Zealand, Europe and North America. The number of ‘wild’ game raised in captivity has doubled in ten years, and must amount to millions. In the USA industrialization has evolved to the point where
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‘wild’ female deer have electronic devices implanted to preset ovulation ready for artificial insemination.
PestsNeither pests nor epidemics existed before forced labour. Whenever labour intensified, more parasites – viruses, bacteria, insects – became dangerous competitors.
Before agriculture intervenes, plants and animals are scattered over the landscape, and parasites have to establish efficient methods for the difficult migration between dispersed hosts. But when plants and animals – including humans – are concentrated in limited areas, the distance between hosts no longer hamper this migration: parasites then propagate explosively and a new pest is created. Farming, by its own nature, turns trivial diseases into catastrophic plagues. Those plagues are no accidents as farmers tend to believe, but play an essential role in the necessary selection of genes suited for agriculture. Not human intelligence, but feared pests turned wild animals and plants into livestock and crops. Intensified farming is itself one complex catastrophe, a meta-pest.
Animals and plants living in high densities and uniform environments are not only prone to regular outbreaks of familiar pests, but also provide the ideal nursery for new, more virulent plagues: accelerated and manifold procreation exponentially boosts mutations. The most feared mutations are parasites resistant against pesticides, more efficient transmission paths, and adaptation to human hosts. Those mutations are selected when they survive exhaustion or pesticides, and wait, in an undetectable quantity, to hit again by surprise.
In societies based on intensified farming, worldwide traffic of farm products is the tail piece of the actual epidemiological menace. Industrial farms can only survive if their products are marketed in a wide field, and the last century has witnessed a fast increase in traffic of farm products, both slaughtered and living. While farms become better organized to nurse all kinds of plagues, transports help to propagate them between enterprises.
Wild animals can transfer infections between farms, while predators restrict those infections as long as they can remove infected animals in sufficient measures. When natural surroundings shrink below a certain limit predators first disappear, or are even purposely removed, from the natural environment. When this level is reached, infected
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animals – birds, rodents, game, fish - are no longer eliminated, and the transmission of a pest becomes unchecked, even up to where pests are allowed to evolve to a threat to the predators. Leisure hunting can only replace this selective predating if hunters run after their prey to catch it with hands and teeth.
Europe was believed to be free from foot-and-mouth disease for thirty years, when in 2001CE it ran into the most terrible outbreak ever. It took a year to stop the epidemic: in that time span two thousand infected animals had been detected in Great Britain alone, and ten million sheep had been preventively slaughtered.88 The previous outbreak, in 1967 CE, was mostly transmitted by wind, birds and game, and never evolved to a national crisis. But in 2001 CE, nationwide transport of industrial farm products provoked a catastrophe of unseen dimensions. At this moment foot-and-mouth disease is rapidly spreading in Africa, of course with much less attention of the international media.
Avian influenza has attacked fowl farms in the USA for half a century. One outbreak in 1983 CE led to the preventive slaughter of almost twenty million turkeys, at a cost of nearly sixty-five million dollars.89
Outbreaks in Hong-Kong in 1997, 2001 and 2003 CE led to the killing of three million chickens and ducks – more than twice (literally) all the birds on the island. Disturbingly, in 1997 CE eighteen humans were infected also, six of which died. In 1999 CE two girls, aged one and four, recovered from the disease, but in 2003 CE a girl of eight died of avian influenza in the Fujian Province of China. While her one year older brother recovered, their father died of the same illness in a Hong-Kong hospital. In The Netherlands and Belgium in February 2003 CE, avian influenza lead to the death of twenty million birds, but also infected eighty-four humans. One veterinarian died of pneumonia after contracting the avian influenza virus during a slaughtering operation. It is inconceivable what will happen when the virus eventually crosses the species barrier with humans definitively.
Farmers constantly seize more of the remaining wild areas of Africa, forcing wildlife on ever smaller parcels. High concentration, stress and malnutrition provide the ideal climate for plagues. At the end of the nineteenth century CE, nine out of ten cows in Sub-Saharan Africa were wiped out by rinderpest that was imported with livestock.90
Rinderpest has not yet infected humans, but is highly contagious and fully destroys every herd it infects in less than two weeks. In 1982 CE,
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after ‘a very successful’ international vaccination campaign that took twenty years, a new African outbreak, of equal magnitude, caused a loss of two billion dollars. The reaction of the FAO was that ‘the lesson of these events is that near eradication is not good enough’, but never mistrusted the strategy or even the actual feasibility of eradicating the last of any virus from our planet. At about the same time rinderpest raged through Asia and reached the borders of Europe. Outbreaks occurred from Africa to Russia in during the last decade of the twentieth century. In 2002 CE the FAO expressed the fear that the virus may re-infect a part of the world free from the disease since the 1950s.
Hardly recovered from repeated rinderpest outbreaks, Africa was already confronted with an even more dramatic epidemic, bovine tuberculosis, which is contagious for humans and predator animals. As a consequence the 230.000 African lions, mostly feeding on ruminants, were reduced to a mere ten thousand in the course of the last decade of the twentieth century, and constantly new exhausted animals and cadavers are found. In safari parks and zoos of the USA, several lions died of bovine tuberculosis and the import of lions was blocked, which seriously damaged African economies.91 South Africa imported Cape buffaloes back from Singapore in an effort to breed disease-free animals. Lions might well disappear from the African wild parks altogether, which will give a tremendous blow to the crucial tourist industry. At least one cynical park director compensated the loss by having wealthy tourists to pay for shooting the sick animals.
Risks caused by farming are inevitably also imposed on the oldest farm animals, humans:
What makes [the Ebola] outbreak alarming is that it is not the only case of a recent epidemic of an infectious disease. There have been a number of newly identified infectious diseases within the past few decades, including the HIV virus that causes AIDS. Other examples include Lynn disease, the Kyasanur Forest Virus, the O’nyong-nyong virus, hepatitis C and E viruses, Legionnaire’s disease, toxic-shock syndrome, and cat-scratch fever, among others. There have also been new variants of old diseases, such as a new type of cholera bacterium and strains of tuberculosis that are antibiotic-resistant. 92
A swine flu mutation, the ‘Spanish flu’, of 1918 CE killed nearly 50 million people, despite all claims of progress a death toll comparable with medieval plagues, and with smallpox, yellow fever, malaria and polio. Completely new however was that so many people were killed
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by one epidemic in such a short time: the Spanish flu opened the era of global epidemics or pandemics. Numerous outbreaks of swine flu followed, and millions of animals have been destroyed to ward off the next human catastrophe. Two lethal pandemics have swept the world since the ‘Spanish flu’, one in 1957 CE and the other in 1968 CE. Each time the virus had altered its structure to trick human immunity. Influenza viruses recently found in pigs in the USA have genes from both human and bird viruses. This evolution is instigated by increased vaccination.93 During a recent crisis in The Netherlands, bird viruses were again detected in pigs,94 and it is only matter of time before the next human-killing virus turns up. Dr Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, comments:
Because the influenza virus constantly mutates, and because only a few changes can make a non-pathogenic virus highly pathogenic, we should assume that an outbreak of any new strain or subtype is potentially dangerous to humans. 95
The list is not conclusive and will keep growing . It is generally presumed that SARS recently crossed the species barrier, and a mutation of the ‘plain’ cold virus is suspected by many specialists to be the source of this lethal disease that rapidly penetrated the continents. BSE (mad cow disease) was first detected in Britain in 1986 CE, and seven years later the ten thousandth case was confirmed.96 CWD (chronic waste disease), a relative of BSE, was first found in deer in Colorado in 1970 CE, and has since spread among wild and captive deer and elks in the northern states of the USA and in Canada. The human form, CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) is caused by eating infected meat.
No remedyScientists have long been captives of ideological paradigms created in the nineteenth century CE, saying that barriers between species and populations are firm, and that each species, nation or subculture has its private plagues. Today they are overwhelmed by reports on always mutating parasites, crossing borders of sexual preference, embarking on intercontinental flights and migrating from bovines to their predators (lions and humans), from pigs to birds, from birds to us.
Despite expensive research going on for more than a century (in the case of tuberculosis) or in recent years (in the case of mad cow disease), and despite the propaganda, none of the diseases
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mentioned above can be cured, or prevented by other means than test-and-burn. Vaccines are unavailable, impractical or indecisive – the distinction is academic.
It is not feasible to stop a virus, too small to be seen through a conventional microscope, by closing borders, forbidding travelling, or building walls. The quarantine methods conceived in nineteenth century labs are useless in the twenty first. On the other hand we can not afford to continue and even accelerate the already massive test-and-burn slaughters, or besiege society for ever.
Official institutes do not stress the numbers of victims and, despite the absence of solutions during a whole century, prefer to communicate to the public that the end of an eradication campaign, or the design of a vaccine is only a few years away, and sometimes a brave politician is tempted to firmly declare a plague wiped out – only to be contradicted too soon by reality.
Mass reproduction of living organisms which were manipulated chemically and genetically constitutes the most effective laboratory of pest evolution ever. We are the sparring partners of those pests rather than their terminators.
If we continue with intensified, industrial handling of plants and animals, in time preventive killing of humans will become inevitable, because it would only be a matter of time before the threat of a too lethal pandemic is posed by a sudden mutation erupting in Toronto, Oran or Fuji. In a few hours the ignorant inhabitants of such a city can become a threat bigger than ever posed by the families living in Dresden or Hiroshima, and it is likely that governments will decide to an equal measure to save the rest of the world population – unfortunately only for the time being.
We can not defeat the menace of pandemics, and we don’t have to - we just need to stop causing it.
Genetic engineeringGenetic engineering is one step further in intensified farming, and therefore one step further towards an outbreak beyond the most terrifying nightmare possible.
It is a dangerous misconception that the variety of parasites is forever fixed and can be catalogued for once and forever. Pests evolve continuously: viruses only make themselves known by repeated
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attacks, and, once known and countered, change into other unknown parasites. Only a limited number of those transient viruses can ever be known to science, and then only when serious damage has already been inflicted. Of those known parasites, again only a part can be contained with the available range of remedies: massive preventive slaughter, therapy, vaccination and genetic engineering. But despite this broad arsenal, parasites are so small, and the earth so diverse, that no parasite can ever be eradicated definitely, unless the global environment is at the same time made nearly unfit for all other life forms as well.
Genetic engineers try to reduce the variation in livestock to an ever smaller number of genotypes. One of the seeming benefits is that livestock becomes ever more resistant to life threatening pests, which number is growing because of our ever intensified meddling. Cloning will then be used to reproduce as many ‘mono-genetic specimen’ as possible, all programmed with one identical reaction to certain parasites. But unfortunately no genotype can ever be engineered that resists all possible parasites, no only because this is infeasible technically, but also because many remain unknown. Even if we knew them all and could produce a plant or an animal resisting them all and yet still be edible, new parasites will emerge: by making specimen resistant to the parasites that recently bothered us, we invite those parasites to mutate, and by doing so open the gates to a brood that will be more effective and therefore more disastrous.
When finally a parasite breaks through containment and finds access to the mono-genetic livestock, it enters an unlimited and unprotected target population, and will burst out as never before a parasite could. If this parasite can be refrained from annihilating its prey immediately and completely – which will not be easy -, it will become the most successful creature that ever lived on our planet – and it will owe this to our huge investments, government spending and scientific effort.
At first all will be done to fight contamination: free roaming game, wild birds and all wildlife will be exterminated like pests because they might transport diseases between sealed off production units – and the chemical pollution of the environment, still feared in the twentieth century CE, will be begged for and purposely carried out in the next. The one time fear for a silent spring will turn into a desired relief. After the first outbreaks, farms will evolve to sterile cellars surrounded by armed guards, with intravenous administration of foods, hormones
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and drugs. But farming serves no goal if matter is not in some way exchanged with the outside world, and some minor but unforgiving error will lead to an unheard-of tragedy.
In time some political leader will solemnly proclaim the threat ended, and accordingly the expensive security burden will be relaxed. Since the entire livestock was programmed to react uniformly, the parasites will return unhindered, and almost immediately cause the global pandemic we dutifully prepared and facilitated by every scientific effort and with every technological means. Worldwide preventive killings will lose the race with raging infections, and lead to a famine, and from there to a black market of contaminated food. Then it will only be a short time before the virus mutates and attacks humans, and make seem trivialities everything that happened before.
Economy and valueFarmed fish and game taste poorly, and are cheaper only for a short time because we destroyed the seas and forests where they roamed for free. Exactly in the most evolved societies, game and fish gathered in the wild are valued highly and paid the manifold of their elevated counterparts. If human population growth had been halted a few decennia ago, we would never have made this expensive pseudo-progress.
It would be reasonable to consider the cost and benefit of various modes of production, from foraging to industrial farming, before we voluntarily bankrupt the planet we live on. In order to broaden this choice our number must descent, not rise.
To substitute labour by the management of natural resources in a variety of cases, is not a return to the primitive state, but can be the application of modern insight and technology. It might comprise the use of radar or satellites to gather animal migration data, and computers to simulate vegetation development. It could broaden tremendously our choice of ways to live, redirect human migration streams for the better, and provide a variety of opportunities for people who before remained unsatisfied in their accidental culture. Prosperity is not proportionate to the industrialization level, on the contrary: the combination of acceptable investment and high product quality can provide incomes far above those provided by the miserable manufactories now appearing everywhere in poor countries.
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In recent times we have already destroyed some valuable opportunities, mostly when extensive production in the perimeter countries was boosted by metropolitan agents. Ironically, the catastrophe always starts disguised as economic growth.
‘Savages’ had survived the crises in the remainders of European forests and moors, keeping off destructive market rages by primitive farming, poaching and selling wild products. Then their way of living was threatened by the ever-increasing demand for fuel by an industry burning up entire forests each year. To the industrialists and their Christian ideologists, poverty was God’s punishment for the sin of idleness, and wild, untilled nature was wasted, ‘waste’-land. European countries one by one decided that those remaining wastelands should be brought under cultivation to create labour and counter the growing poverty. During the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century CE, enclosure of fields ended the ancient institution of communal grounds.
Representatives from the most afforested provinces argued in vain that the number of arrested beggars in their regions was less than one fifth of other provinces, due to the wild products of uncultivated pastures and forests. But the destruction of natural resources had become a moral task.
The traces of the European ‘savages’ have been eradicated when racial ideology had to link civilization with their continent, and savagery with all others: even their names disappeared from the dictionaries. Yet there is no reason why one continent would have no ‘savages’ in their forests and moors, as long as they withstood population pressure. French speaking countries had their ‘Masuirs’, named after their huts (‘masures’). German speaking countries had their ‘Amborger’, named after the river bends they lived on (‘ham’, as in ‘hamlet’)), and Britain had its ‘hovellers’, a term only surviving as a synonym of ‘beachcomber’.
As a pinnacle of cynicism those savages, once uprooted by deforestation projects, were hired as day labourers to cut down and feed to the ovens of industry the very environment they had survived in, only to become beggars or deplorable industrial workers themselves. Those savages, rather than farmers, provided the proletarians.
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In the nineteenth century CE, industrial society had impoverished its defenceless population on a scale never seen before. Workers, many with little children still sleeping in their arms, marched to hideous working places, hoping for nothing but enough food to live the other day: and even then wages dropped when the market failed and the next crisis arrived, always within a few years.
In the USA, cattle grazed freely in the northwestern Open Range, until the system destroyed itself by giving in to the growing demand for meat on the international markets. The cattle population had reached five million when the exceptional cold winter of 1886 CE reprimanded the too intensified production and wiped out the trade forever. Today cattle are still raised semi free in harsh climates and mountain ranges on various continents, but many affluent pastures in suitable river valleys and on loam soils have been turned into intensively cultivated fields, only to be occupied by dwellings when the population raised further: during the previous century numerous fertile winter beds changed into life-threatening traps for its inhabitants.
An equally dramatic example is the fate of African wildlife. Export of ivory has flourished for at least four millennia, and had an important part in the wealth of the continent. A thousand years ago Europe became its most important buyer. When the British abolished slave trade in the nineteenth century CE, their fleet extended the trade of African ivory on the European markets. Some Bantu tribes specialized in hunting elephants to provide the British with ivory, and were soon equipped with firearms. The African elephant was almost extinct at about 1880 CE, and a century later, in 1989 CE, when farming had destroyed most of their habitat, the six hundred thousand remaining animals were entered on the list of endangered species. Then the growing human population conflicts with scanty remaining territories, and elephants are purposely killed off by park officials or become constrained to too small natural reserves. The prohibition of ivory trade, once the richness of Africa, was illustrated by pyres in Kenya, where mounts of valuable tusks was set on fire by romantic Europeans and hailed by the world press, while an impoverished population looked at the spectacle. Now the last elephants are being enclosed in fences, and once abundant resources are turning into the next trivial, depressing tourist curiosity.
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Other African victims of population pressure are the Pyramids of Giza, the last of the Seven Wonders of the World. The pyramids were erected in spacious plains, but as today Cairo’s roughly fifteen million inhabitants still expand year by year, and slums and tenement buildings start to wash over the valuable capital that those monuments are, and thus threat at once an already impoverished economy and a human heritage of the highest order is disappearing.
If humans had not been decimated at regular intervals by wars and plagues, earth would have become unsuited for agriculture a long time ago. Agriculture, war and plagues are all aspects of the same cultural system of forced labour, and persist together.
Today it is possible, and even necessary, to reduce human population and set up a relaxed economy, and the only way to attain this is to amend the dignity women and children. If the total world population would be at the average of 1900 CE (a too high number already), and would coexist with the technical instruments of today, impoverished societies could again found their economy on their own valuable resources; people, today condemned to slums or dullness, could discover a more rewarding life; individuals everywhere would regain the permanent liberty to chose and change a life varying from the solitude of unspoilt nature to the most dynamic metropolis.
When population pressure is stopped, subsistence on the individual, local, national and global level can be repaired. Therefore mass production of goods must be halted next to the mass production of people.
The Third World will be the most important beneficiary from this transformation. Production of valued goods with technological knowledge, extensive farming and gathering, and scientific and touristic exploration of unspoiled landscapes and monuments, will lead to the progress that never succeeded by means of industrial development designed for cheap mass production.97
Exhaustion, migration and the struggle for resources
Swamps and deserts hardly affected before, were invaded by societies based on forced labour. Where humans never went
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because the circumstances were too harsh, labourers were forced to face hardship.
This system worked in warfare also: labourers of different sides were forced into battlefields of unseen terror, by always more effective methods of coercion. Legends and chronicles recount about heroic bravery and brilliancy of generals, but the outcome of a confrontation is only the result of the accidental power balance - unfortunately, this power balance becomes only apparent after the confrontation, and is hardly ever as expected. Parties can find themselves in endless battles, uncertain alliances or ultimate integration, Or one of them is destroyed, submitted or escaped by further migration. If the victor wins many such battles, he builds a vast standing army, a growing administration and a pompous ideology. From those battles grow powerful cities and eventually civilizations. Then comes a moment when the expenses overtake the benefits. What seemed a glorious conclusion turns out to be just one random moment in the ugly, tedious and lingering course of the history of war. It was an ephemeral stage in the cycle of rebirth of civilizations.
Early myths testify of the population pressure caused by production of children as a workforce, and of the ensuing migrations. In forager myths, the maker of all things had left because his work was done, and from then on he and his creation ignored each other without remorse. In myths of early farmers, on the other hand, women are often belittled, while both women and children are scorned. The maker often retreats in disappointment. He is aware of his creation, and is not pleased at all.
In a myth of the South American Arawaks, the maker was imitated covertly by his wife, but all she obtained was women. A tale of the African Basuto goes that once upon a time humans, like other animals, discovered sex and bred unrestrained. The world became so noisy that their maker climbed the sky-hill to escape this commotion, and he is climbing ever since. The African Barotse have a myth saying their maker was badgered by his neighbours all the time, and in vain called for a tribal gathering to discuss his problem. Eventually he left earth and was never heard of again. Among the neighbouring Koko a myth says, on the contrary, that he left in regret because so many of his tribe had emigrated. An Egyptian myth has a similar ring
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where Ra is disappointed about the constant nagging of his creatures:
Then Ra spake unto Nu, saying: - “O thou first-born god from whom I came into being, O ye gods of ancient time, my ancestors, take ye heed to what men and women are doing; for behold, those who were created by my Eye are uttering words of complaint against me.”98
Many migrations went over sea. A northern Australian myth goes that Mother-of-All and her companion walked out of the sea. Mother-Of-All was aching for sex, while her companion had a penis that was so long he had to carry it around his neck. Yet, they had no idea how to mate. Then the penis became stiff, searched its way to the vagina of Mother-Of-All and impregnated her. All beings streamed out of her womb. Afterwards both disappeared and were never seen again. In another northern Australian legend, three children of the sun had to escape the land of death in a bark canoe, and arrived in uninhabited Arnhem land: two of them had a vagina and a penis, while the third had only a penis. All those organs were enormous, and wherever they arrived they copulated, each time fathering a new kind of beings. Then, one night, the undivided male took advantage of the dark, and hatched off the penises of his bisexual companions, and by his jealousy caused women into being. This legend reminds of the bible, where the maker first tried to resolve Adam’s solitude by creating all kinds of animals, and finally counterfeited Eve out of his side.99
Foragers expelled from open landscapes to dense forests remember the open sky of their past. A tale of the Warrau of Guyana says they were kept as slaves in heaven. When one of them heard the birds talk about how beautiful everything was in the world below, they escaped down on ropes through a hole in the floor. A fat woman held the rope, but when she wanted to leave, she got stuck and sealed the hole with her body. Later women discovered sex, and this disgusted the master so much that he never let them in again. Both he African Pygmies and the North American Cherokee have a legend telling that their maker lowered them from the sky on ropes, and then lifted the rope to leave them on their own forever.
In sub-Saharan Africa forced labour appeared first in South Cameroon. This caused the expansion of Bantu farmers over the whole continent, pushing back the Khoisan to the Kalahari Desert and the Pygmies to the heart of the tropical forests. Hutu and Tutsi, both Bantu people, arrived in Rwanda and Burundi separated by a few centuries. European colonialism and the succeeding ‘development
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aid’ again intensified the destruction and pillage of natural resources. At this moment, the Rwanda soil is completely exhausted by farming, except for a Mountain Gorilla Reserve, now destroyed by half in favour of a new, but already failed, agricultural project promoted and subsided by the European Community. The Bantu regards the remaining Bambuti and Batwa Pygmies as their vassals. The recent civil wars in Central Africa discharged into a gruesome genocide exemplifying the inevitable outcome of sustained forced labour. In this drama the Batwa pygmies are the silent victims.
In South-east Asia forced labour arose between Borneo and Australia on shrinking islands, when the ending of the Ice Age made sea levels rise by ten to twenty meters. The resulting population explosion took the direction of the Pacific. Canoes loaded with pigs, chickens, dogs and taro roots reached the Solomon Islands six thousand years ago. After one thousand years, farmers had occupied Fiji and headed for Tonga and Samoa. Three thousand years ago the Polynesian triangle was reached. Within a few centuries the Marquises islands and New Zealand where inhabited, the last grounds on earth attained by humans. By then the Polynesians had adapted a fatal culture of unlimited growth. There was always a new island behind the horizon, waiting for a canoe to be discovered, and to be colonized by brave youngsters when the motherland became too crowded. Easter Island was occupied as the last of Polynesia. Its famous statues were originally directed east, facing and endless ocean with no grounds left to be taken. When the first Europeans arrived the indigenous forests had already disappeared. The original population had multiplied to seven thousand inhabitants, but collapsed when the exhausted soil did not yield enough plant fibres any more to make or even repair fishing nets, nor wood to build boats to escape the dying island. Eventually cannibalism was adopted to fill the need for fat and proteins. The islanders divided themselves in fictional Short-Ears and Long-Ears, and started a civil war in which the large monuments were destroyed with the same zeal as they were once erected. Population was reduced to six hundred men and thirty women when Captain Cook visited the Island in 1772 CE. After a slave raid launched from Peru in 1862 CE, only a hundred and eleven remained. The last indigenous tree of Easter Island, of the Toromiro species, died in 1950 CE.
On Sri Lanka forced labour emerged at about 3000 BCE. The Veddah, the oldest inhabitants of the island, were still five thousand in
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1911 CE, but were reduced to four hundred in 1963 CE, and have disappeared since.
On the 8th of May 1876 CE, Lalla Rookh, the last Tasmanian Aboriginal, passed away in Hobart at the age of seventy three. For one hundred years, her bones were exposed at the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart, until she was allowed the meagre dignity of cremation, and her ashes were scattered on the waters near Bruny Island.
Forced labour was established in the Middle East at nearly the same time as in eastern Asia. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has demonstrated that farmer villages invaded Europe at a pace of one kilometre per year, or about twenty-five kilometres per generation.100 Except for the ancestors of the Basks, the original hunters and gatherers were annihilated.
When forced labour reached the northern steppe once abandoned by the old drive hunters, climate fluctuation acted as a pinball machine for a series of Southward expansions, assaulting civilizations from the Iron Age until the Middle Ages. Jordanes called Scandinavia ‘a hive of races or a womb of nations’, where from also his own nation, the Goths, came forth.101 In the last centuries BCE, Rome was under pressure of the savage Kimbren and Teutons. In the first centuries CE new tribes, originating in the Baltic and Scandinavian regions, destroyed those tribes and subsequently flooded the Roman territory. In the next centuries the Mongolian Huns, migrating from the Central-Asiatic steppes, swamped them in their turn. The Roman Empire was destroyed in 500 CE, causing famine followed by a plague killing half the population.
Between the eighth and twelfth century CE, Normans invaded the European coasts of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century CE 20 million Europeans migrated to America; during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century CE, some 14 million European Russians migrated voluntarily to Siberia. None of those emigrants were triumphant people: they did not go to underdeveloped continents to bring civilization, they were unemployed poor trying to escape the terrible slumps of industry, or exhausted mud and ramshackle farm sheds. After those poor followed merchants, clerks and soldiers. In the second half of the twentieth century CE, Asians and Africans fled their destitute homelands: 15 million made it to Europe, and 12 million to the USA.
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In America forced labour, based on maize, spread from Mexico from about 3000 BCE on. Arriving farmers either supplanted hunter-gatherers, or created some kind of symbiosis in those spots where the environment was not yet suited for agriculture as it was at that time. Slavery, manhunt and cannibalism swamped both continents. From 200 BCE, farmers spread over the eastern Plains. Around 700 CE others invaded the Mississippi valley. Pueblo farmers spread at the same time in the northern regions of Arizona and New Mexico, but were destroyed by the Navajo and Apache, migrating south from Canada just before the Europeans arrived.
In South America, forced labour first appeared in the lower Amazon basin. Warfare became an important source of (human) meat, since no beef was available. The South American Mbaya were hunters who received tribute from Guana farmers, and in turn protected the Guana from tribes competing farmers.
While European governments punished anyone who just dared to name contraception with imprisonment or worse, earth was drowned by their masses: In 1875 CE, a band of Chono, a hunting tribe of the Chilean Archipelago, was encountered for the last time. Then they disappeared forever. Of the Alakaluf, of the same area, only fifty were counted in 1971 CE. The Yamana, hunters of Tierra del Fuego, were still three thousand in the nineteenth century CE, of which only forty were still counted in 1933 CE. The last Selk’nam, also of Tierra del Fuego, died in 1966 CE, at the age of eighty.
The inventive power of man and the limits of growth
In 1972 CE a study called The Limits of Growth: a Report for the Club of Rome stated that ‘the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next hundred years’. Once recovered from the first shock, most players in the economic field decided that they better hurried if they wanted to beat the competition, and the main impact of the report was not the search for a structural solution, but an intensified rush to lay hands on whatever resources were still available, and to gulp it down before anyone else. But energy sources are not used up like a bottle of ketchup: they slowly fade while prices increase over decades. Many things called ‘progress’ are nothing but finding ways to squeeze a bit more of the leftovers out of nature at an
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higher cost - perpetual motion and the goose that lays the golden eggs have often been promised, but are not expected anytime soon.
The Report for the Club of Rome is proven right by the grim rivalry for the available energy sources raging today all over earth in - both humanely and financially - disastrous wars: the violent confrontation between the Atlantic civilization and the Middle East in recent decades, can only be understood in relation to the problems studied in the Report for the Club of Rome.
WealthThe idea that wealth comes from labour is natural in a society where the pace of the human avalanche has reached the level at which the products of nature are no longer abundant, but need labour, slavery and warfare to acquire. Just like householders feel blessed by an abundant offspring, rulers are blessed if a large population is toiling for their benefit.
Persian governors received about the same admonition from their scholars:
Good government is that which maintains and directs a province flourishing, the poor untroubled, and the law and custom true, and sets aside improper laws and customs. [..] It causes friendliness and pleading for the poor.102
Under conditions of modernity, when the inherent value of each individual requires that the needy should be given - at least some – relief, humans can become a cost instead of a benefit. If not for this cost imposed on labour by modernity, rulers can have their subjects controlled by epidemics and famines, and let them live for profit or die for free.
Ancient records show that the Chinese population increased from some ten million, a thousand years BCE, to a hundred million, two millennia later. European population records date back to the sixteenth century CE. The oldest demographic theory in the West, the so-called ‘utopian model’, was elaborated by Marquis de Condorcet in the midst of French Enlightenment.103 Condorcet claimed that humans will always find new techniques to solve the problems caused by their growing number. The progressive Condorcet was a fierce opponent of the Catholic Church, but his theory has in time been recuperated by the latter as a suitable argument against the use of contraceptives. In the following upsetting quote from the Catholic Encyclopaedia the
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Church prefers population checks by means of war and environmental disasters rather than by horrendous family planning:
we can set no definite limits to the inventive power of man, nor to the potential fertility of nature. [..] subsistence will keep pace with population as long as men have standing room upon the earth. [..] The assurance that population, if unchecked, will inevitably press upon subsistence does not terrify us, when we realize that it always has been checked, by celibacy, late marriages, war, natural calamities, and other forces which are not due to scarcity of subsistence. The practical question for any people is whether these non-scarcity checks are likely to keep population within the limits of that people’s productive resources. So far as the nations of the Western world are concerned, this question may be answered in the affirmative.104
If the inventive power of man is unlimited, then it is sad that so many people have been slaughtered in the rush for space and resources going on as long as history. Where was this inventive power when young lives were sacrificed for land, for oil, for copper, for uranium and for a hundred other resources?
There is no reasonable ground to call the ‘inventive power of man’ unlimited, as Condorcet did and as traditionalists do today. Theologians would even call such a claim presumptuous and even a blasphemy, if they did not find it useful to deride contraceptives. And the implication in the quote above that sexual habits, conflicts and calamities are not influences by scarcity, is unfounded and even contradicted by observation.
It is true that humans have repeatedly intensified production by introducing new techniques, thereby often increasing costs, risks and depletion speed, but no law certifies that new inventions will always pop up in time to save our skin. On a micro-economic level it can be possible to increase crops by adding fertilizers. On a macro-economic level however, adding fertilizer to one spot is only possible if fertilizers are taken away somewhere else at a certain effort, cost and risk. The price of this fertilizer mounts when the range where it is taken grows, and when the process by which it is prepared progressively needs to be intensified. The same goes for emigration: it seems to solve the problem in the original place, but really exports it to the promised land. Emigration to America relieved pressure in Europe, but was fatal to the original Americans. Small scale interventions might be harmless, but as a rule miracles are expensive: the price can either be the ruin of populations or environments Even if we get fertilizers
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from Mars, we will have to pay for the transport. The price is not only economical, it is also political and social.
Extensive economics are represented, with an unwittingly racist undertone, as a consequence of ignorance, and the world is flooded by Western aid professionals, youngsters and misfits, all ready to ‘educate’ dumb natives. This results in cooking lessons for women in starving African villages, in puppet theatre for homeless children in Central America, and in splendid careers for Western people in poverty management, all around the globe. In this ‘development’, intensified agricultural techniques and the creation of industries are represented as scientific breakthroughs and magical cures of the free market. In reality they mean pillaging to feed the West at sell-out prices.
In this regard Western ideology cleverly represents the finest technological tweak as a major development. One sad example is advertised as the 'Green Revolution'. From 1962 CE on the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations financed the testing of thousands of varieties of rice gathered on all continents, and outbred plants yielding double weight. Despite the worldwide exalted praise in the media, it soon turned out that poor farmers were not able to procure the enormous amount of water, insecticides and chemical fertilizers needed to grow this new rice. Clearly the various old rice forms had been used because they were best adapted to local circumstances, not because the local farmers were hopelessly ignorant compared to Atlantic science. Eventually expensive industrial rice production pushed local farmers deeper into poverty. In 1972 CE a drought killed more than a million people in India and Bangladesh, and threw a manifold in the deepest misery. All what is left of the ‘Green Revolution’, once presented as the new horn of plenty, is a hollow drum beaten by deceitful ideologists. In reality it was just another escalation in our violent attack on natural resources.
This fiasco is the simple result of an economical law known as the ‘principle of diminishing returns’, which predicts that productivity increases ever slower as more efforts are spent. Curiously, this principle is common knowledge among economists for almost two centuries. It not only predicts the outcome of the Green Revolution, but also explains why foragers have a more relaxed life than labourers.105
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Warnings for the outcome of the ‘Green Revolution' were seldom uttered and never heard, because we are accustomed to an ideological representation of science as a lucrative form of treasure hunting. Glossy science magazines keep us constantly ‘at the brink of’ the most amazing discoveries, and depict scientists as magicians who at the most dramatical moments are told by a lightning of insight under which tree exactly a pot of gold is buried. Of course, pots of gold buried under trees do exist, but their discovery can hardly be considered a law of economics. Daily science usually searches to intensify the effect of human activity, at rising costs and risks.
It is as Eve climbing ever higher in the Tree of Good and Evil, to gather more apples as more Adams get interest. For some time she will hit upon new apples, but each new apple will require more effort because it is more difficult to locate, and because the climb takes longer while the branches become thinner. As she discovers unexpected reserves or better climbing techniques, her optimism strengthens. And right when she starts to believe that the tree is infinite and that the law of diminishing returns is false, she will break a leg or worse. In our time we have added insecticides and genetic manipulations to boost up apple production, but the basic rule of rising costs and risks remains the same.
The energy deadlockOne of the many real life examples of the limits of growth and the role of innovations is found in the procurement of energy – a key element of western society.
For a long time humans, on all continents, gathered wood to cook, to harden pottery and to produce charcoal for the smithery. But wood becomes scarce when the population grows. An average bronze age family needed two square kilometres of forest to gather the necessary firewood without depletion. When population pressure is too high, the forests will become exhausted and will turn into grass- and shrub lands, and women and children have to search ever further. In our time many families in poor countries spend hours each day fetching fire wood.
In the nineteenth century CE, when the European industry had already exhausted animal power to the limit, furnaces of factories burned up whole forests. When almost all trees had disappeared from the continent, and numerous wild plants and animals had been
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extinct, the ‘inventive power of man’ turned to a commodity that was already known and moderately used by medieval villagers: fossil coal found at the earth surface.
Again this combustible was eliminated in a few decades, and the ‘inventive power of man’ started to dig always deeper. Open pits then evolved to hazardous shafts which gradually reached a depth of two thousand meters, while energy became ever more expensive. Today explosives are embedded at regular intervals to make shafts collapse on purpose, if necessary with everyone in it, thus avoiding propagation of accidental floods and fires. Each year hundreds of miners, of which many children and women who spent most of their lives in the dark, died in such disasters.
It is a misrepresentation to say that today ‘advances in technology make it possible to mine thinner beds at greater depths at reasonable cost’.106 In the long run the cost of energy never became reasonable by means of technological innovations, but rose continually. Technological innovations did not relieve the price of energy. Exactly the opposite is true: exhaustion boosted the cost of energy, and only the resulting high price made technological innovations worthwhile. Technological innovation is not some mysterious free-of-charge revelation that amazingly happens when it is the most needed. Innovations become economical when depletion has boosted prices beyond their costs.
Already after one century of intensifications presented as technological progress, coal became scarce, and the price rose to such a level that the ‘inventive power of man’ turned to a combustible already moderately utilized in ancient Persia: petroleum.
In less than one century, ever intensified exhaustion made petroleum reserves shrink. Consequently the price mounted until the dangers and expenses of nuclear energy became an economical alternative.
If this whole evolution would be a triumph of human intelligence, energy would today be cheaper, safer and more reliable than a few centuries ago. In reality it is a chronicle of intensified exhaustion of successive energy sources.
Today the even more expensive and more hazardous hydrogen cell technology is developed. It is hoped to commercialize hydrogen by 2015 CE, when gasoline, before taxes, will cost between two and three dollar per gallon.107 Then higher prices will be defended with the
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argument that everything must be done to save nature’s last oil reserves (they will be primarily saved for military purposes, because vast military equipment can not be replaced in a few years time.) Occasional catastrophes will lead to increasing security costs, and the ‘inventive power of man’ will once again dig a big hole to fill up a smaller one.
Energy consumption in the Atlantic civilization is a manifold of what is used in the rest of the world. Because of the growing cost of energy, this geographical split will eventually be matched by social differences.
SolutionsThe question is not if we will be able to substitute depleted resources or (the most radical substitution) emigrate to other planets, the question is what such solutions will cost. To live on an unsuited planet will require to tackle its environment with an intensity never seen before, after we burst the exploitation of our own planet to provide transportation. The development of a suitable propulsion might require experience accumulated in many nuclear wars. The more bombs will have been exploded, the more we will be told that we need them bigger, and after each war distant planets will become more attractive. Survivors will always be asked to accept rising taxes to destroy this planet more and bring another closer. Eventually, to set foot on another planet will be something as the beginning of farming: it looks fantastic if you have destroyed everything you had, and if you brought enough poets to create a sense of wisdom.
As a rule of thumb every next planet will have to be exploited at a higher rate in order to be able to reach the next, and we will infect outer space with our violence just because we couldn’t stop breeding.108
To blindly count upon technological or scientific solutions of which nor the probability, nor the hazards can be foreseen, while the problem can be avoided without any damage or drawback, is a rare proof of unreasonable and irresponsible fanaticism. Western pseudo-scientific ideology deceives the public opinion by confusing intensified exploitation techniques, including the 'discovery' of more cumbersome base materials, with solutions to depletion. The first is regular economy, and abides by the ‘law of diminishing return’ without
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exception. To say that we do not need to use our intelligence because our intelligence allways comes up with a convenient solution, is the same as to throw out the brakes because the car always stops at crossroads.
Of course our academies will come forward with adjustments and even solutions whenever suffering becomes too high. But the most important novelty will be a price no one wanted to pay before. We will have no choice but to accept the destruction of nature and to live with more risky energy sources and irreversible pollution – all problems that in their turn will raise new problems for the ‘inventive power of man’ to deal with. And we can not fear unforeseen consequences: just as traditionalists count on yet unknown scientific solutions, we can not dismiss yet unknown dangerous effects. All we know today is that in the past those effects raised exponentially: a few hundred coal workers die when a mine collapses, but the failure of a nuclear installation destroys, in the best case, vast natural surroundings, and in the worst case populations of whole cities and regions. The public is fooled when it is claimed that nuclear catastrophes are impossible. Security systems depend on human checks, and humans are no guaranteed constants. They can become understaffed, distracted, frustrated etc...
At the occasion of the International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo in 1994 CE, the Catholic Church declared that the earth can easily feed forty billion people. This was clearly an arbitrary number to ward off criticism on the absurd position taken previously, that the only limit is ‘standing room’. But the new number was gambled without considering how poverty and violence, in various forms, already is boosting in function of our number today, and without pointing out the new techniques they thrust will come to rescue. Governments and academies participate in developing synthetic hormones, in genetic engineering, in precarious drugs and mass destruction devices. Cynically, the same governments that finance this research and inherently anticipates their introduction at the right moment, also finance police actions to keep the resulting chemicals out of circulation for reasons of public health.
To count on unknown scientific solutions is dishonest, because it provokes upsetting but inevitable choices to come up in the future. At a certain moment we will have to choose to either let people live in
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misery or dismantle natural landscapes, deploy more military force, and engage in precarious industries. Chances are that the public opinion then will not turn against those who have willingly provoked the situation in which this sinister choice became inevitable, but against the last few who – out of hopeless nostalgia, without possible success - try to defend the last remains of a decent society and a sound environment.
In this entire discussion human needs are limited to food, and humans are reduced to food ducts ignorant of space, landscapes, health or enjoyment. The emerging technology of resource surrogates will try to degrade humans to genetical pigs crammed in dreary shacks, their excrements cleverly recycled into abundant porridge with artificial taste and colour. Those techniques exist and are already applied in fodder: mad cow disease is a well-known consequence. Unless the population explosion is halted, the same ‘technological advances’, will in the near future be applied to human food, as another instance of the ‘inventive power of man’. By that time laws against suicide, stemming from slave societies, will gain importance again, because each life that is made possible by means of such an ‘inventive power’ will lack a reason to stay alive.
The Reverend Thomas Malthus became famous with an attack – at first anonymous - on the utopianism of Condorcet and on Enlightenment in general.109 His pamphlet tried to demonstrate mathematically that any society without sexual repression was heading to disaster, since a ‘morally unchecked’ population doubles every twenty-five years while food production only increases steadily.110 The Jesuit Father Pesch, celebrated as a prominent challenger of Malthusianism, unwittingly expressed the same old moralistic vision as the despised Malthus when he summarized his own viewpoint:
Where [the sexual morality of] a people is safeguarded, there need be no fear for its quantity. 111
Just like the progressive Condorcet has been recuperated by conservationist churches, the conservative Malthus has only followers left among progressive authors. Those authors maintain the fear for growing poverty caused by overpopulation, but replace the sexual coercion proposed by Malthus with techniques of family planning.
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Demographic transitionMany late twentieth century demographers adhere to a third model, known as the ‘demographic transition theory’. This model holds that a population stabilizes when it reaches the level of wealth at which the cost-benefit balance of children reaches a break-even. The important contribution made by this theory is that it acknowledges that human childbirth is always a human decision based on economic factors, and was never a plain biological necessity.
Many demographic transition theorists expect that our number will stabilize around ten billion. To perceive a weak glimpse of the nightmare that will arrive when we approach this number, it is sufficient to look at the massive suffering going on today: at the relentless killing of hunger refugees, at the proliferation of increasingly cynical genocides, at poisonous agriculture, at environmental devastation, at social detriment, at always new plagues spreading among plants, animals and humans, at resource wars, at urban aggression. All those issues are mortgaged by the population number of six million attained already in the twentieth century CE, and will steadily become worse as the earth population grows: more poisoned food will be distributed by aid organizations to fight famine; more peace treaties will be broken and more furious wars will break out between countries no one suspects today: in time the resource wars for energy will be followed by wars for clean water and even for toxic disposal or other pollution licenses: in an intercontinental mud fight, special forces will assault distant coasts, empty their waste containers under a spray of gunfire and retreat before dawn, disinfecting on the way their vessels from parasites and stowaways;112 pandemics of always faster mutating viruses will urge military control of society and devastate economy; drifters, hunger refugees and back street gangs will get well armed and organized; brutal plunder and callous security will escalate to the verge of civil war, and turn residential areas in fortified encampments; seemingly pointless urban suicidal bombings and shoot outs will grow in number of victims and number of locations, and will grow in fury and in madness; gruesome genocides by suddenly dazed masses of common neighbourhood people will proliferate until no continent, no country and no town remains secure.
The demographic transition theory is based on observations made in prosperous societies. We can not foretell if childbirth will also drop under other circumstances. Even if population should stop growing,
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there is no possible reason why this should lead to the optimal density, as long as child birth is politically and morally pressed and socially rewarded. In a growing violent and perilous milieu new generations might well chose again to win by numbers, and despite, or because of, disgrace and misery, chose for more offspring instead of fewer.
The demographic transition depends on the cost-benefit balance of offspring, and any reaction to a change in benefits becomes effective only after the average time needed for a newborn to become a reproductive adult. This was the case in hunting societies as well as in labouring societies – but the cost-benefit balance was different, and therefore the population of hunters was stable while the population of labourers grew exponentially. If people live well without the economic input from children, children are only born for their love – their bottom-line benefit and the only acceptable reason for having a child.
It follows that the forbidding catastrophe can be avoided without compulsion – the remedy lies even in removing the moral compulsion today exerted on women and children, and in radically raising the efforts spent on children’s and women’s dignity, including a minimum standard of living and human rights, qualitative education, lively leisure, travel and natural surrounding. Governments or other central institutes must either provide those rights, or just remove the obstacles that are maintained now. Only under those conditions the cost-benefit of children will lead to the needed population decrease and eventually to a relaxed ecological optimum, and open the path to an enjoyable life for humanity.
Standard of livingWhile it is asserted by various religious authorities that there is still room for more people, most economists agree that already the actual world population can not possibly reach the standard of living held up in the West today. Unfortunately nobody stresses the possibility to reinstate the natural relation between population and carrying capacity by amending the dignity of women and children. The ecologist-minded Worldwatch Institute regrettably follows the austerity dogma of religions who at the same time defile birth control. The Institute is wrong to say that criticism towards excessive consumption is the last taboo. This criticism is as old as monotheism:
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Part of the answer is for consumers in the wealthy nations to greatly reduce their consumption burden to make way for the billions of poor around the world to improve their quality of life. Of course, the wealthy nations need to lead the way in consumption reform, but our message to the developed and developing world was not that they should not consume, but that there are opportunities to consume differently [..] We think that excessive consumption is the last environmental taboo, in the sense that no one—environmental groups, governments, consumer groups—wants to discuss it, and that its neglect has allowed it to spiral out of control.113
Most free market economists will refute this statements in the open, but do imply all the same that there will be less wealth available. David Landes expresses their mainstream opinion when he writes:
The present tendency to global industrial diffusion will entail, for the richer countries, a levelling down of wages, increased inequality of incomes, and/or higher levels of (transitional?) unemployment. No one has abrogated the law of supply and demand.114
In 2003 CE the Chinese government announced its ambition to provide a Western standard of living for its population within a decade. The most important question then seems today: what will happen if the available resources – environment, fuel,… - fall short? Will the Atlantic society be persuaded to voluntarily abandon for their offspring the good life they enjoyed themselves? Will the impoverished continents follow new ideologists of sobriety, when they preach to abandon the longing for health, well-being and comfort?
It is better to take a sharp look at the real world today before pondering too long over hollow speculations. Although the Atlantic civilization is prepared to take necessary measures of good housekeeping in order to improve the own life quality, like filtering effluent water and recycling garbage, it is clear that the West will never voluntarily give up benefits like transport and energy consumption. Atlantic society seals already today its borders for hunger refugees and competing goods, and fights a growing number of uncompromising wars for deteriorating resources, of which oil is now the most prominent.
Neither Europe nor the US do conceal their readiness to send armies to any place in the world where their national interests are menaced. If such a viewpoint is morally acceptable, there is no reason for people on other continents to take up the same stance when the occasion inevitably will arise.
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Civilizations never give in by themselves: they naturally fight on until ruined. Impoverished continents on the other hand are already frustrated to the edge of insanity: everyday they sacrifice lifers while trespassing borders, only to get hold of a spot in the Atlantic world most dogs would refuse, or retaliate with ferocious terror and desperate suicides. Their flaming anger grows while the anxious Atlantic civilization takes an eye for an eye, and spills blood of revenge over blood of despair.
Since available resources are inadequate to allow an enjoyable life for all people that rightfully desire it, we must either chose to continue the ongoing world-scale civil war, and finally be dragged into the worst – and probably last – century of bloodshed ever seen, or politicians on all continents must urgently elaborate a policy of concern for all individuals, starting with women and children. Such a policy has no room for birth promotion.
Breeding bonusesPopulation explosion was set off by a seemingly minor coincidence. It lead however to ideologies as devices needed to participate in violent confrontations. Now we are trapped in the population explosion by the same ideologies it created.
Europe has one of the highest population densities of the world. Yet the use or propagation of contraceptives remained punished by law until the second half of the twentieth century CE. Until 1965 CE jail sentence was the punishment for just mentioning birth control in the USA, and in Ireland the use of contraceptives remained persecuted until 1973 CE.115
The mind-bogging practice of punishing women for not bearing continues to exist in almost all countries. In 2006 CE the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology revealed that the Morning-after pill could prevent one out of every ten teenage pregnancies, if it was free for sale. Since the drug needs to be taken within three days, the required doctor’s authorization is rather a delaying manoeuvre and even an obstruction than a medical advantage - if the remedy is not bluntly refused on moral grounds by a religious-minded practitioner.
Most European countries today still encourage childbirth while hunger refugees are expelled and left to die with the message that ‘Europe is full’. Countries like Spain and Italy largely rely on religious pressure, while other countries like France, Belgium, East Germany and
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Sweden vulgarly hand out bonuses in order to incite their inhabitants to breeding.
The religious and other motivations are varying, but have in common that the love of children is superseded by greed for economical profits, social security, military advantage and so on.
One often heard irrational argument is that every death should be matched by one birth: this ‘replacement level’ assumes without reason that a shrinking population is dreadful – even if this population, as in Europe, is amongst the highest of the world.
The most upsetting argument is the appeal to breed children for the national war machineries, or the assertion that the world would be better off if ‘lesser races’ refrain from reproduction while the own ‘superior race' continues to propagate. The Catholic Encyclopaedia for example asserts that the Western world is confronted by a problem, ‘not of excessive fecundity, but of race suicide.’116
Landscapes are the only transcendent experience we will ever have
When I had reached te age at which people are supposed to have learned everything required for their adult life, I still was puzzled by the massiveness of human violence. Reading on the subject I got the idea that nature might well hold ways of coexistence humans forgot or had never known.117
While travelling Europe and abroad, I searched natural landscapes for a hidden code, but was constantly disappointed. Then by coincidence I caught a Mozart divertimento on the car stereo. The constantly surprising forms, colours and movements, the breathtaking moments of silence, now broken by a tender violin, and then by a weighty cello, the sudden chaos rising and dissipating in a variance of themes – it felt exactly as what I had been looking for all this time. Mozart has experienced and described what I had never been able to discover first hand.
An ancient Indian verse says that ‘as there is that sun in heaven, there is this eye in the head’,118 and Goethe wrote that ‘If the eye were not sun-like, the sun’s light it would not see.’ I realized that I had
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finally found the hidden code: as all things dead and living, we are the continuous reflection of the environment that created us, and surrounds us every moment of our existence.
In order to experience a landscape, one must remain quiet for at least an hour. Then natural surroundings give way to the sounds of insects, birds and leafs, and animals of various sizes begin to pursue their daily business at a dreamlike pace. To sit in silence however is hard when only a few small remnants of natural spots are left in a crowded world.
Once I was looking down a little valley hidden in the remainder of an old beech-and-orchid forest, when I had to jump off a steep hill to escape a bunch of motor riders, of which the last one politely waved at me. I also learned that cultivated dogs interpret landscapes in such manner that whoever walks off the prearranged paths is alien and must be attacked without warning. Another time I found a perfect place with no drawback but the remote sound of a highway. Ferns trembled, and it seemed that a roe was nibbling the leaves. When the animal crossed a clearing, I hurriedly took a photograph, but later was horrified to see how it had been malformed by repeated traffic hits. I destroyed the negative, hoping to forget the image. I noted down interesting places in order to return in other seasons, but often found everything destroyed by bulldozers before I had the chance of a second look, and once a bulldozer nearly buried me alive with a rare snakeroot I tried to save from its iron fangs. Another time I found a small, unspoiled bush with mosses, oaks and birches near a graveyard, but in midsummer was suddenly covered with snow - it turned out that the wind had blown away the scattered ashes of a deceased.
Obviously, the most dangerous places were the least disturbed. A warning for poisonous snakes became an invitation. An army plot, forbidden because of unexploded mines, was a wonderful place to experience silence in the mean time.
I was deeply moved by a little spot in the Ardennes that was reachable by no other means than a railway bridge, followed by a dark tunnel. At the end of this tunnel gleamed a warm radiation of green and yellow light, inviting to an astounding scenery. In some rare spots your whole being fits so well that it makes you feel like the
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last missing fragment inserted into a jig-saw puzzle, a piece that never understood its awry design before, and the experience hurts your entrails. Occasionally music bears a similar experience, and religious ecstasy might resemble it, but only immersion in an unspoiled landscape can bring about the original thrill of splendid, deep, complete existence. In a world without such landscapes, poets will be rid of as jabbering fools. No Mozart will grow up again, and the sonatas he left behind will slowly turn into soundless scrawl. At the time it felt just that to reach this place, one had to risk a train blow.
When the forest is down, Pygmies adjourn all other activities and dance and make music to cheer it up, and will not stop until their environment revives. Only when this is accomplished it makes sense to build a cabin, go hunting or cook a meal. In Peru and Central America sacred places like fountains, lakes and forest spots were called huaca, and worshipped like gods. The ancient Greeks called a feeling of enchantment raised by an unusual landscape thambos, a word older than their own language. Here certainly a god was dwelling, invisible but distinct, reposing at the border of a crystal-clear well, while sunlight filtered by shades of gently whispering foliage, with flowers and rocks in astonishing agreement, and the sky gleaming blue as never seen before. The witness alerted his community at once, and plans were set up to sacredly devote a tree, a cave or a rock, or build an altar to the god unseen, but felt so real.
Our maker is an open landscape, with scattered trees and tinged light, a valley where a river lingers, with dispersed groups of grazers, and flocks of birds. Here we are shaped, cell by cell, nerve by nerve, limb by limb, until after ages we crawled up in the grass, and still shivering shook off the last membrane of birth. This landscape is our outer half. It is the mirror of our essence, and the only real transcendent experience we will ever have. It connects stars and insects and all other things, and presents the universe to our senses as if it were in harmony, even with ourselves.
To destroy this landscape is to disfigure our face.
The essence of reality is not the thing, nor its beholder: the only real substance is the encounter of both, and beauty is the most blessed kind of encounter. It is a token of relief and a sparkle of hope.
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The beauty of landscapes is the trunk from which all other beauty shoots. It was only after human beings discovered the tokens dormant in the essence of landscapes, that they learned the skills of the arts and of enjoyment. If we would accept that the beauty of a landscape is just a useless fancy, something wanted by a few singular people but superfluous to those who have no time or no money for nonsense, we would in the end degrade ourselves to rusted springs in a pointless clockwork. If we discard the beauty upon which our being is established, we will in the end loose our ability to joy, desire and affection; we will hate our loved ones as if they were chains tying us to ruins of distorted concrete; we will start to hate our kin, then our neighbours, then humanity and then the universe. Tired and disappointed, hating ever being born, we will continue to toil in silent anger while our faces turn grey as the walls of our cities. No matter what our past has become by then, it will only rouse our irony and mockery, and a deep, hopeless craving for the times before we were cursed with existence.
Maybe we can go on without natural landscapes. Maybe some day we will have no other choice. But in our deepest, colourless boredom we will not know what for, or whereto. We might live on, but only in a universe devoid of light.
Wasted landThe rise of the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia involved the decay of woodland and steppe and the expansion of deserts, all because of overgrazing, wood burning and irrigation.
Solomon once ordered trees from the legendary Lebanon forests to build the temple of Jerusalem. A few centuries later, rocks and dust was all what was left of the vast reserve of building materials. By that time the evergreen forests bordering the Mediterranean had disappeared, and the eroded soil was invaded by barren garrigue. Already in Plato’s days, Athens had witnessed the deforestation of the surrounding hills in only a few generations. Once Carthage had been settled by Phoenician colonists to serve as a granary for Tyre, and the name of Agadir descends from the Phoenician word for ‘granary’. Today, the Mahgreb is mostly desert land.
During the last half of the twentieth century CE, a period full of scientific optimism, one fifth of all fertile soil on earth became affected
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by exhaustion, salination caused by irrigation, inhabitance and construction.
Agriculture is by definition extraction from the natural environment: it is impoverishment of the environment per sé. And to impoverish the environment is also, on a longer term, the impoverishment of whoever lives in it, in all mental and economical aspects.
Something like ‘sustainable farming’ can be desired, preached and even approached, but as long as we want to get something from toiling, sustainability means only a more gentle way of deterioration. On the other side of the spectrum, scientists are developing techniques to intensify agriculture and feed growing populations. They try to get more out of the same reserve, and thus speed up exhaustion while claiming the opposite. The difference between extensive and intensive agriculture lies in nothing but the pace of exhaustion.
If not just the wealthy need to experience unspoiled landscapes and to be secured from epidemics, violence, catastrophes and hunger, while a majority lives on minimum space and energy, human population has grown far beyond its limit.
How many humans the earth can support is a useless question. A telephone boot can hold twelve people, but, apart from a few silly youngsters trying to break a record, nobody thinks of using it that way.119
Too many people believe we must reach our maximum number on earth, and present dumb procreation as a way of caring, and the misfortune of poverty as a virtue. We produce too many humans too fast, like a meat factory pushing production far over red alert, regardless risk or damage. The result is destruction of space, rising violence, growing demand and declining supply.
The necessity of an enjoyable life needs no theoretical defence. Sometimes scorned as weakening, materialistic selfishness, it is self-evident to all living beings, and a legitimate desire of unindoctrinated humans. Every person should be able to enjoy a good life most of the time.
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Evolution and innovations
The hundred-years horizon of culture and the labyrinth of change
We are struck with the terrible curse of conscious death, but we are also blessed with the ability to ‘recall’ deceased loved ones, and even talk with them and hear their soothing voice. An elder who buried a lifelong companion has no other solace left than the evocation of a friendly face; an adolescent who suddenly lost her mother will only find consolation behind the intimacy of her closed eyes, when the image almost reaches out to ease the unbearable pain of solitude. But all those merciful enchantments end within a hundred years.
The hundred-years horizon within which we live is the rule-of-thumb to discern between myth and reality. Only assertions about the last hundred years can be verified, and the people we are responsible for do not live before this frame.
We do not really know the whereabouts of our relatives before this boundary. If we want to go beyond we must rely on second hand sources such as storytellers and history-books, entering the reality of myths and epics merely produced to charm, to assure or to convince. Claims of one hundred years old cannot be proven, or can be proven by various rivalling parties at once.
What happened more than a century ago happened in another world, where none of the living bears responsibility, owes anything, or can find identity or pride. There is no reason to expect satisfaction or benefit from events one or more centuries ago, in an age beyond our own reach or merit. The deeds of old dead corpses taken to be our forefathers happened in another world, where none of the living bear responsibility, owe anything, or can find identity or pride. Fantasies of old have nothing to say in favour of someone living today, and nothing can be delivered to the past. No one living today carries a pledge coming from behind the hundred-years horizon.
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CultureAnimals change their foraging routines when imposed by circumstances, and finches sing in other dialects in different territories. The evolution of any life form is embedded in an immense labyrinth of change, and all life forms in their turn transform the environments of all others.
Ever since life exists on our planet, life and environment transform incessantly. All earth’s free oxygen available today, which each of us breaths every minute of our lives, is the excretion of bacteria and algae who ruled the planet a billion years ago. Abounding limestone rocks are deposits of shels and skeletons of sealife prospering half a billion years ago.
Evolution of genes leads to transformation of environments, environments influence cultures and cultures lead to further evolution of genes.
Religious people claiming preferential treatment are appalled by the idea that we belong in nature. Yet, the bible leaves them no hope: we are made of mud and will return to mud. The Latin word homo – man - is etymologically akin to humus – earth. We are humus sapiens sapiens: very worrying mud.
Human physical characteristics have not altered during the last forty thousand years. Adaptations to different environments as hair grow, skin colour and body size are literally superficial.120 Compared to older ancestors our skull is no longer built to support strong muscles, and allows a larger cortex. This is true for all human populations living on the earth today, even for the strongest or the dumbest among us. Since we have a great talent for maltreating the divergent, the absence of human variants proper could be appreciated as a blessing; on the other hand, it might have been exactly this talent that exterminated humans of a different species, and racism might have been invented only to provide surrogates for them.
Our physical stability of the last forty millennia has been matched with an immense cultural diversity. The same humans can live near the North Pole and in tropical forests; forage on either mammals, plants, fish or shells; live happily in bands of fifty individuals, or in cities of millions. Those differences prove that cultural variation and transformation is innate to human nature, and is even its most striking
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characteristic. It is the fabulous gene that turns all our other genes irrelevant.
A tale of the African Khoisan – one of the last foraging peoples - goes that a long time ago a lion could build a nest in a tree and fish could live on land. Then Heitsi-Heibib gave each animal its own way, and left only humans free to choose their actions. It is remarkable that the same Idea pops up in the Intalian Renaissance, when Mirandola has the creator revealing to Adam:
The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws we laid down; you, by contrast, not impeded by such restrictions, may [..] trace for yourself the traits of your nature.121
Explorers always introduce their written or filmed reports about exotic natives with a reference to a ‘thousand years old' culture, even if they were never there before, and even if the remembrance of the natives do not surpass the hundred-years horizon. Anthropologists are used to describe foreign cultures in a deterministic, almost botanical way, as if beliefs and customs are immutable. Yet wise men continuously alter food taboos if supplies become scarce, invent new ceremonies to press idle demons or initiate migration when resources run dry.
Prehistoric bands built alliances by gifts, among which women were highly appreciated. Exogamy - the offering of women – allowed to combine variations in behaviour into broader language, notion, understanding and industry. In this way, otherwise short-lived cultures blended into larger, more viable tribes, and eventually into the cross-breeds we call nations.
At first a limited aggregate of sounds, words, images and techniques was confined to isolated bands of hardly more than fifty individuals. Most of those bands disappeared forever, but where different customs mingled, and complexity of language inevitably followed fusion of cultures, the variety of tools and crafts grew. Isolated primeval bands were unfit to survive, let alone to contribute to long term cultural evolution and enter history.
But where exchange occurred, progress became possible. The few living bands of foragers we know today give proof of two ways of exchange: the past exchanges that made them survive up to the present moment, and the present interaction with explorers, tourists and anthropologists.
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Culture embraces the most trivial as well as the most sophisticated human activities. It is how populatio ns live and think day by day, including skills, customs, world-image etc. Culture has neither organization nor borders: it is a dynamic multi-layered amalgam of historical, geographical and intellectual influences, and can only be frozen by ideology and repression.
All animals have culture. Less complex animals alter their culture slowly, while humans dispute all the time about how their culture should be. Civilizations can house various cultures, and cultures can span more civilizations. Cultures try to make the best of given circumstances. They necessarily change over time because circumstances change.
Cultures are not equal. Every cultural expression is a human choice right or wrong, never a spell of ancient folklore. There are differences in individual dignity, in communication, in mutual aid etc.… Those differences are not related to race or nature: all populations have somehow proven to be able to exploit possibilities for the best as they rise.
Ideologists claim to be keepers of culture, invest it with antiquity and spread panic about its fading in order to prolong their own power. In the process they produce a mix up between terms like ‘a civilization’, ‘to civilize’, ‘culture’, ‘religion’ and ‘ethnicity’. But culture itself is not threatened by interactions the way bureaucracies are - change is even the blood in its veins. There is no loss in a culture disappearing or changing by the choice of the individuals living it.122 The volatility of culture implies that no free society remains multi-cultural for long. People freely and prosperously living together necessarily evolve to one skeptical, lively meta-culture, an eclectic collection of altering individual choices.
History demonstrates time after time that people easily accustom to new habits, and can learn any skill, in only three generations. The first generation is stuck in the old frame; the next understands the new but is still tributary to the first, feels stranded between; but the third generation is the natural child, candidly confronting the new environment.
Every living being is entitled to an enjoyable life, with or without profitable stories about the past. We have no excuse for bragging over deeds of old dead corpses taken to be our forefathers, while we
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should take pride in our own conduct right now, as an individual responsibility in which neither holy books nor history can help us.
We must not ask ourselves if our deeds are compliant with the wishes of dead people we do not know, because we never lived in their company. We must ask ourselves instead if we make a world where we, and those who lived or live with us, or will live after us, enjoy their lives.
We are always tempted by ideologies to make terrible, irreversible mistakes while appeasing ourselves with backward reasoning, preferably in the safe haven of a mutually reinforcing group. To protect ourselves from those terrible mistakes we must stay aware of the difference between ideological nonsense and reasonable sensibility. Ideological nonsense claim definite certainty and demand sacrifice. Sensible reasoning yields only provisory knowledge and demands caution.
Innovations, David Landes and the myth of Western superiority
David Landes brands the view that the actual scientific progress is indebted to anyone else but Europeans as ‘the new myth’ or ‘the new gospel’. He wrote:
The myth is misleading by implying a kind of equal, undifferentiated contribution to the common treasure. The vast bulk of modern science was of Europe’s making, especially that breakthrough of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that goes by the name “scientific revolution”. 123
Indeed the vast bulk of modern science was of Europe’s making: this is even a tautology, because in this sentence both ‘modern’ and ‘Europe’ refer to one and the same place and period. One might ask what exacly Landes wants to gain by this assertion. If he would want to make up a theory, where would he go from here? His statement is as true or false for Europe today as for Persian Babylon in the sixth century BCE or for African Alexandria in the third century CE. It proofs only something to people who manage to believe that history had never an other goal than their own little moment in their own little spot. The rest of humanity regards the argument meaningless, and
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finds no basis to attribute the human talent for progress and modernity to one small but arrogant group.
Until we find suffcient comparable planets, modern scientific accomplishment remains unique, and therefore average per sé.
If Constantius Chlorus had kept his hands off a nice girl in a Serbian inn where he had stopped for the night, Constantine had never been born to make Christianity the leading religion of Europe. We will never know if the result would have been more progress or less. We only know that Europe knew breakthroughs, for instance the two centuries referred to by Landes, as well as stand-stills, for instance the eight centuries between the condemnation of Nestorius and the condemnation of Roger Bacon.
There has never been declared a science contest with a finish set in the year 2000 CE. Nobody ever planned or wrought scientific revolutions. Our scientific knowledge is the accumulation of whatever remained from many futile trials in many places and times. If there is a contest at all, it is not a contest in deep space travelling or electric teeth brushes, but in supporting and furthering modernity, which is the valuing of every individual. And to this goal all civilizations, including this one, are obstructions, while all cultures of humanity have contributed to it.
Trial and errorScientific knowledge grows with trial and error. This implies that erroneous theories are as functional in this process as are accepted theories. Scientific progress depends not on the presence of correct theories, but on the ability to replace one theory by a better one. It depends not on claims of definitive truth, but on the overturning of claims of absolute truth.
It is pointless to interpret history as a race towards twentieth century science, predictably won by the West. Ancient hypotheses, even if expressed in a magical or mythological frame, are the very substance of progress. Without considering them, a realistic understanding of the nature and evolution of knowledge is impossible.
The perception that present-day science is above suspicion is contradicted by the almost daily stream of corrections published in scientific journals. Those corrections do not ridicule modern science. Rather the contrary is the case: they stress that knowledge – as
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opposed to ideologies - is fluid per sé. Science advanced because it was wrong all the time, not because it was truth forever.124
Western authors easily trust that their society has dealt forever with naïve superstition and tradition, and, contrary to the rest of the world, is founded on nothing but science and pure reason. Yet in reality none of us can escape from the natural order of primates, from the therein fitting family of hominids, and again from the there included sometimes clever, sometimes frankly stupid human species. Instead of investigating ancient documents and artefacts and to classify stages knowledge in relation to circumstances, those authors devised a firm watershed between science and superstition. This division is then mapped on continents, civilizations and races to establish the myth that somewhere on the fringe of Europe a few heroes started to use brains for the first time ever, and engendered the triumph of humanity. But since more than a century, sufficient ancient texts allow an improved judgement to whoever wants to. It has become absurd to maintain that non-Greeks only told myths while only Greeks reasoned.
Progress towards more effective science requires the continuous disagreement between science and ideology, between curiosity and traditionalism. This disagreement is present in all societies and all people. But when a civilization wants to establish its power on firm ground, it shifts towards convention; when central power fades, minds shift towards openness and curiosity. A scientist knows he might be wrong, a priest can’t be wrong; a scientist is delighted by a new idea, a priest is offended by it - and most scholars of all times are a bit of both.
A valuable history of science must not only include the beginning of writing and granite cutting, but also investigate why this beginning happened at that place and time, and for which categories of place and time this instance is exemplary; it must also investigate how such innovations engender new requirements and possibilities. To proclaim geniuses is mythology; to trace series of encounters, exchanges and changes is history.
The sudden burst of innovations in the West needs to be explained by external factors: leaning on Western peculiarities to explain the same Western peculiarities is circular reasoning. To claim superior morals, character or genius for Europeans, emulates the superstition Western science claims to have shaken off.
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One example of how superstition can be used to explain modernity – or how tradition can be used to explain innovation - is given by David Landes when he wonders: ‘why this peculiarly European joie de trouver? This pleasure in new and better? This cultivation of invention?’. He then summarizes four reasons he found in the works of various scholars. Predictably, three out of four praise the Judeo-Christian tradition.125
The Judeo-Christian respect for manual labourThe first reason for European inventiveness presented by Landes is the Judeo-Christian respect for manual labour. He gives the following example:
when God warns Noah of the coming flood and tells him he will be saved, it is not God who saves him. “build thee an ark of gopher wood,” he says, and Noah builds an ark…
But God gives a painstakingly detailed work order to Noah, and this order must be followed without conceited thinking or inventing – such disobedience is exactly the sin of the people that will perish in the flood. Whatever Yahweh expected from Noah, it was certainly not a ‘joie de trouver’. The way the ark was built is no proof of respect for labour, and certainly no cultivation of invention. It is rather the way of mindless slaves. After all, the Bible leaves no doubt that God sent the flood to punish man for his arrogance, not to stimulate his inventiveness:
every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.126
The Bible book with the story of the flood, Genesis, has many stories to illustrate that man should not try to understand or create anything – not surprising if one remembers that the book is written by religious fanatics upset by the superiority of Persian scholars. To Adam and Eve, knowledge was forbidden formally. If the Bible had ever influenced human curiosity, then the command that ‘of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it’ points out that this influence was definitely negative. Adam was sent forth from Paradise to till the ground not as an endorsement, but as a punishment.127
The labour spent on the Tower of Babel caused divine fear and outrage because it was self-directed, and Yahweh destroys human initiative once more:
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Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.128
Prophets, church fathers and reformers in their sermons never explained the legend of the flood as a praise of manual labour, and certainly not as a praise of initiative or inventivity: from Paradise to Babel, men were punished for the sin of pride and ambition.
The Judeo-christian tradition is not marked by respect for labour, but by labour as a sin and as a punishment. Other religions respect manual labour more, either with or without ‘pleasure in new and better’, for example in this Zoroastrian text:
It is necessary for man that he be continuously employed on his own work, and then the work becomes his own. For it is declared in revelation, that every one who hereafter becomes employed on his own work, if in the midst of that work any trouble and discomfort happen to him, obtains in that other world twelve recompenses for every single instance.129
The Judeo-Christian subordination of nature to manLandes’ second reason for the growing number of inventions in the West, is the Judeo-Christian subordination of nature to man, a notion stemming from Hegel.130 This subordination of nature to man certainly refers to farming, which existed for thousands of years before the beginning of a Judean or a Christian tradition, and even before immigrants brought it to Europe.
Landes continues: ‘this is a sharp departure from widespread animistic beliefs and practices [..]. No one was listening to pagan nature worshippers in Christian Europe’.
Nature worship is today mostly found in adventure books for boys, or in Tarzan movies when the heroe sneaks along a tribe of blacks dancing silly by the moonlight to rescue another white woman. This ‘nature worship’ is invented in the eighteenth century by people who imagined that it would fit degenerated savages who had forgotten their divine (monotheist) creator, and in their desperate confusion pray to stones and animals. Hegel for example, with his talent for bad observation, derided a baloney ‘Hindu nature worship’ as a primitive stage on the path to Christianity:
Everything, therefore - sun, moon, stars, the Ganges, the Indus, beasts, flowers - everything is a god [..]. And while, in this deification, the finite loses its consistency and substantiality, intelligent conception of it is impossible.131
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Expecting exotic people to worship the Western concept ‘nature’ is as ridiculous as hoping to discover an isolated band of electrical engineers in the Amazon forest. Many myths and legends elucidate on rain and crops, but rain ceremonies never worshipped rain, and season festivals never worshipped crops. Ancient tales connecting celestial bodies to gods are explanatory, using the semantics at the time available. In their particular manner, religions tend to recuperate natural singularities as signboards of personal gods. Like the Egyptian Ra was associated with the sun, the Bible says that Yahweh ‘thundered from heaven’,132 but this does not mean that the physical sun was Ra or that the Israelites worshipped thunder. Medieval Europe associated Jesus Christ with a lamb and the Madonna Immaculata with the crescent moon, but they hardly worshipped a lamb or the moon. Divinities are persons per sé. Until Columbus, the vast majority of the world population, including Europe, faced nature roughly in the same way: sometimes as a frightening defeater, sometimes as a frail victim, sometimes as a pleasant shelter.
Neither the Bible nor historical records offer any foundation for the racist viewpoint that Christian European worship had a different, less ‘savage’ nature than religions of analogous societies. Animism is a magical world-image, not a religion. It was the predominant world-image of ancient hunter-gatherers and early farmers on any continent. When farming intensified from the New Stone Age on, animism was progressively pushed back by the worship of forefathers, who in their turn led to covetous war gods and finally to civilization lords with universal posturing. In Europe as everywhere, remains from animistic times lingered between official religion, and even provided the substrate for it.
Andrew Dickinson White has demonstrated and illustrated medieval animism beyond doubt. Georg Agricola, the father of modern mineralogy, believed that gases in mines were manifestations of either 'malignant imps, who blow out the miners' lamps, and the other of friendly imps, who simply tease the workmen in various ways.' One of these spirits killed twelve miners at once in Saxony. Mines were abandoned because they were possessed by evil spirits. It took centuries to depart from such 'widespread animistic beliefs and practices':
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In 1715 a cellar-digger having been stifled at Jena, the medical faculty of the university decided that the cause was not the direct action of the devil, but a deadly gas. Thereupon Prof. Loescher, of the University of Wittenberg, entered a solemn protest, declaring that the decision of the medical faculty was "only a proof of the lamentable license which has so taken possession of us, and which, if we are not earnestly on our guard, will finally turn away from us the blessing of God."133
The following quote is an excerpt of a bull written by pope Sixtus IV to authorize the Inquisition. It was written just a few years before Columbus reached America, while Erasmus was desperately defending understanding between human beings:
[Persons] give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth, the grapes of vines, and the fruits of trees, as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind, vineyards also and orchards, meadows, pastures, harvests, grains and other fruits of the earth; that they afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women, cattle, flocks, herds, and animals, and hinder men from begetting and women from conceiving, and prevent all consummation of marriage [We grant to the inquisitors that they] may exercise against all persons, of whatsoever condition and rank, the said office of inquisition, correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising, according to their deserts, those persons whom they shall find guilty as aforesaid.134
This bull appeared at the head of every copy of the Malleus maleficarum, a famous handbook for inquisitors. To the question ‘whether witches can by some glamour change men into beasts’ this handbook answers:
Our bodies naturally are subject to and obey the angelic nature as regards local motion. But the bad angels, although they have lost grace, have not lost their natural power, as has often been said before. And since the faculty of fancy or imagination is corporeal, that is, allied to a physical organ, it also is naturally subject to devils, so that they can transmute it…135
Demons and witches disguised as all kind of animals appear in any of the hundreds of transcripts of inquisition interrogations. The devil appeared as bats, toads and goats (especially the three-horned kind). Witches changed in all kinds of animals: in crows and cats (mostly black) to spy on people; in hares destroying crops on the fields, in bees, butterflies, spiders….
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On the average, every two years someone in Europe dies from exorcism, a worldwide relict of animism.136 In Europe it is present among Muslims and Christians. An exorcist course was still organized by the Catholic Vatican University in 2005 CE.
The Judeo-Christian sense of linear timeThe third reason, following Landes, is the Judeo-Christian sense of linear time: 'Other societies thought of time as cyclical, returning to earlier stages and starting over again'.
But again Landes provides no observation nor proof for his statement, and the assumption that Judeo-Christian tradition handled time different than any other comparable culture is manifestly wrong.
Myths about a beginning of time existed from primeval bands to the greatest civilization.
Myths about a great imminent victory are common among farming tribes. In Egyptian texts linear time is especially documented with regard to Osiris and immortality, and from there it reached Persia. The Persians transposed myths about tribal victories to the measure of their nearly universal empire. From there it was mixed with eastern imageries and eventually inspired the authors of Genesis. Jews, Christians and Muslims, as well as many religious factions in the East, adopted the imagery of the End Times, which is the most linear notion of time around.
A cyclical time concept is indispensable to farming and herding societies whose life follows seasons, including Judeans: the introduction of the seventh day Sabbath made Judean time possibly more cyclic than neighbouring civilizations, and agriculture in Europe thrived on recurring seasons and feasting days as in any other agricultural society.
On the other hand every metropolis, no matter its place or time, recorded the past to claim longevity, thereby necessarily implying, and even manipulating, linear time. Sacred texts assign to the own civilization a significant place in a progressive time frame by means of a justifying historical account. The chronicles composed by all civilizations of the last five thousand years are meaningless without the sense of linear time. A kingdom can not exist without a history culminating in the victorious ruler, and time is just one of the lines that converge in the metropolis. Assyrian king lists go back to 1700 BCE,
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Sumerian king lists to 2400 BCE. Ancient Chinese chronology goes back to 2700 BCE, and the chronology found in the Egyptian Turin Papyrus goes back to the first Egyptian dynasty of 2900 BCE.
An Irish prelate by the name of James Usher calculated about 1650 CE that the biblical creation must have happened on Sunday 23 October 4004 BCE, a date generally accepted until the nineteenth century CE in Western academies. Depending on when you expect to be surprised by judgement day, this date results in a linear time of six or seven thousand years. One millenary before James Ussher, the Central-American Mayas calculated their history in millions of years, and the Indian Vedas calculated a linear lifetime of the actual universe of 864 billion years. In the Christian and the Vedic cosmology, the ‘linear’ period of time ends with a cosmic catastrophe, but only in the Vedas a new Brahma will be born after another time span of billions of years, and a new universe will arise.
Clerks have always conceived reasons why their own civilization was the exceptionally blessed culmination of progressing history. The line from the ‘beginning of times’ to the present is certainly not invented by Hegel. Also in this respect the Bible is not the oldest composition, and Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations not the last. The misreading by Landes might have been excusable before ancient Asian and African texts were translated, but today scientists have to take such texts into account, not only because of their influence on the much younger Bible, but because without them we can not understand long-term cultural evolution of humanity as a whole. The Judeo-Christian peculiarities summed up above are prejudices, not confirmed by careful comparison with other periods and cultures.
A general theory of innovations
A correct understanding of innovations can only be based on a general theory, not on premises specially devised for the occasion, tailored to characteristics found in one favoured civilization. Such a general theory must be evaluated in various cultural settings, including, but not promoting, the Western. The theory established below is in accord with cultural observation, and confirms that scientific evolution does not depend on super races or superior
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morals, but, much as all of nature, is driven by consecutive circumstances and interactions.
Innovations occur when three conditions are met simultaneously: the first condition is the availability of material resources; the second is the availability of mental resources - ideas; the third condition is that the innovation yields a positive cost-benefit balance to decision makers. In other words, innovations need to be feasible, conceivable and acceptable. Innovations are produced and maintained by none but those three conditions, and only if they are present simultaneously.
The three conditions for innovations cumulate throughout a network of exchange embracing prehistorical and historical times. Materials and ideas are acquired by means of techniques and skills created by previous innovations, locally or elsewhere, and so on. Therefore the probability of innovations grows together with the change and exchange of cultures. The richness and variety of our joint vocabulary and imagery could only emerge under a condition of always altering divergence and convergence.
Without continual change and exchange progress is impossible.
Innovations disappear again when one or more of those conditions fail for a hundred years, since behind the hundred-years horizon the necessary knowledge dies out. Even if objects and texts remain, the interpreter has disappeared. In 1938 CE Wilhelm Konig described a two thousand year old jar found near Baghdad, which resembled an electric battery: it was sealed with asphalt and pierced by an iron rod covered with copper. Dr. Arne Eggebrecht, experimenting with a reconstruction of such a battery, suggested that ancient works of art might have been gold-plated with it. Europe employed the wheeled plough seemingly from the eleventh century CE on, but a millenary before, Pliny the Elder reported wheeled ploughs being used in Cisalpine Gaul.
Archaeology risks to underestimate the frequency of short-lived artefacts, because it can not perform random sample excavations on an intercontinental scale. Thankful for every occasion to discover, it is not in the position to pick arbitrary sites or perform blind trials otherwise. As a result, archaeology always risks to fulfil its own prophecies, and too often takes absence of proof for proof of absence, especially when large areas are left out because nothing is
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expected, or, even worse, because results would compromise the ruling ideology.
Materials As stated above, the first condition for innovation is the availability of base materials. The impressive scientific advances in Alexandrian times had been impossible without the papyrus growing in the marches of the Nile delta. The famous library of Alexandria was purposely erected in the midst of this delta, and the influx of papyrus was as essential to it as the influx of scholars.
Materials can be replaced. Papyrus has been replaced by parchment, and parchment by paper. Coal has been replaced by oil, and so on. This does however not mean that materials are less irrelevant. Even if replaced after a short time, they were often essential in the network of exchange of innovations, and their replacement was an innovation by itself.
In Medieval Europe, books were more expensive than paintings, and only when cheap paper became known it made sense to intensify the production of books and start printing. Metallurgy required fire, and electric light required coal workers.
Despite the romantic imagery of creative starvation, this need for materials, among other things, makes wealth an important factor in the development of arts and crafts. This is more true in every new decade as modern science requires ever more expensive equipment. One example is the fraud case of Mostafa Mansour Imam, an Egyptian scholar working in Saudi-Arabia. After publishing several photographs of fossil algae, he sent an article to a Spanish journal where a stunned editor identified the presented photographs as his own. Although his study was valuable, Mansour Imam had lacked funds to acquire the expensive photographic equipment. After sending an e-mail with excuses, he died from a heart attack.137
Many innovations happened in China long before they arrived in the West, but novelties did not continue to appear within China at the same rate. Because of the presence of vast plains of loess deposits, farming was less centralized along river banks, and China was less pressed for accumulation of power and wealth in a few single spots. Those conditions, and not some racial or national superiority or inferiority, weakened the first condition for innovation in China.
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Wealth is unevenly distributed over individuals. This distribution needs to be assessed before any interesting conclusion can be drawn about the prospect of innovations in one nation. Often the most productive niches have been decadent courts, already alienated from centralist power and ideologies, but nonetheless gathering luxury, dancers, musicians, prostitutes, poets and philosophers. Plato’s most impressive attacks on materialism are uttered around affluent tables in wealthy houses. When a famine stroke Milan, Augustine was appalled to see that scholars like himself were banished from the court, while the dancing girls were allowed to stay. Avicenna made music and conversed with his pupils throughout the night at the court of Hamadan.
IdeasAnother condition for innovation is ideas. Much of what is said about the propagation of materials, applies to ideas as well. The mere fact that Alexandria was built on the crossroad of three continents, was as important as the mere fact that is was built amidst papyrus marches.
Whenever scholars were enslaved and deported after a military victory, or fled famine or repression, ideas migrated, integrated and impregnated. Ideas were also locked up in materials: goods can betray their maker.
But there is more to ideas than migration in the way of materials. Each time our physical or social reality changes, some thoughts disappear and others become thinkable. As Locke wrote, the variety of ideas we have is caused by varying cultural circumstances. New horizons cause new ideas to prop up besided the ideas that are imported. A researcher will only ‘find’ his thought if the evolution of our species and the experience of our culture has made it conceivable. Einstein was a brilliant thinker, but he might not have found the principle of relativity if his family had been more concerned with ornithology than with mathematics, and those mathematics in their turn date back to the dawns of many histories. Ask a sailing champion what it took to win a race, and chances are that he will not mention the ocean.
During the first half of the twentieth century, many scholars tried to decipher the earliest Greek script, until Michael Ventris eventually succeeded. Andrew Robinson described his approach as ‘hypothesis and experiment which jump back and forth’, and follows:
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There is no thread like Ariadne’s running through the linear B decipherment labyrinth. Even Ventris himself was unable to produce a coherent narrative of his method.138
The French scientist Sadi Carnot fashioned the theory of thermodynamics in 1824 CE. This superb intellectual exploit, in spite of the conventional perception, did not lead to the steam engine. Already half a century before, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot had designed such an engine to be mounted on a vehicle, without waiting for a theory. The device inspired the inventor of the theory it applied.139 The electric light bulb, maybe the most important invention ever, has only been discovered after almost a century of random trials and errors. Thomas Edison, the man who finally succeeded, admitted voluntarily that he could never explain how his best ideas came about. And the most impressive scientific development of the twentieth century, the discovery of the DNA structure - the formula on which every living being is built - was equally made by trial and error, involving scissors, paper snippets and lots of despair, as is described with humour by one of the involved Noble Prize winners, James Watson.140
Doubt - the essence of unbound thinking - is only possible if we know of different world-images, and realize that still others are possible we don't know yet. Only then we realize that thoughts are made and can be made, changed or rejected. This is the modern concept of ‘thinking’.
In an isolated culture, gods and rites are as solid as mountains and seasons. But when we hear of another population with a different world-image, we react either with aggressive dispute, demonization, recuperation etc.…. But as more borders are crossed and we hear of three, ten or more supreme truths, universal temples or chosen peoples, the insight grows that thoughts are just constructed by humans, and can be changed or disposed at will. This stretching of our mind is one of the biggest steps forward in thinking, and will eventually become the deathblow for Truth. It is the gift to create wild ideas, evolving towards reality by means of trial and error.
Inventors often fall victim to myth building. Ideas are never in the hands or head of one person only. The actual state of the art is learned from masters and fellows; skills are embedded in social settings and exchanged over borders of time, social groups and distance. In contrast with the commonly held notion that the only limit to ideas is the ‘brightness’ of someone’s ‘grey matter’, thoughts only become conceivable in a society through a long-winded evolution.
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Andrew Robinson wrote that deciphers of lost languages, besides their intellectual power, all were so lucky, to some extend, to be present at the right moment and
did not always admit their debts. Rivalry, sometimes with a touch of skulduggery, is endemic in archaeological decipherment141
This remark must be applicable for much of scientific thinking.
The most innovative societies always had the most outward interactions. This is because knowledge can only be maintained and developed over a long time within a network of different cultures, serving in turn as mutual shelters for periods of decay and disaster, but also because the opening of borders, and the resulting doubt towards official cosmologies, provokes skepticism by itself.
Archaeological finds in remote Tasmania contained fish-hooks, while the Aboriginals did not know fishing when Europeans first visited their island. The Greeks of the second millennium BCE knew writing – the Linear B alphabet - but lost it in the succeeding dark ages. Contrary to the isolated Tasmanians, the Greeks got a second chance, because they lived in the shadow of African and Asian temples and, while the Tasmanians never learned to fish again, because the art had had no opportunity to take shelter in adjacent cultures, in due course all classical Greek texts were written in, as they coined the new script themselves, Phoenician letters. If the Tasmanian Aboriginals had lived in Greece, they would have produced Aristotle.
The age that followed the wars of Alexander the Great was marked by the exchange of ideas over two vast continents and many destabilized civilizations. When Hero of Alexandria wrote his Pneumatics in the first century CE, the work summarized Asian and African mechanical inventions known and exchanged in his time. As in every society, some of those inventions were useful, other fanciful. He described, among other things, a steam engine to pump up water and a vessel to change water into wine - a device John the Evangelist might have noticed before composing his gospel.
BenefitThe third condition for innovation is cost-benefit. Perceived benefits allow innovations, while ineffective innovations will disappear after time. Those benefits are not just financial, but money should not be discarded as a reliable indicator. Benefits created by innovations will contribute to wealth in their turn, leading to a reinforcing feedback of
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innovations. In this regard cost-benefit reacts different from materials or ideas. The latter might become exhausted which might break the reinforcing feedback of wealth. This is even bound to happen in a wealthy but isolated society.
An innovation must be beneficial to sovereign decision makers in a society. As a consequence, more decision makers lead to more innovations, and authoritarian societies are the least receptive for innovations, because there is only one decision point available. This is one other reason (besides growing exchange of ideas) that most innovations happen when civilizations fall apart.
Leonardo Da Vinci designed a calculator more than a century before Blaise Pascal. He never actually made one because nobody needed it: the cost-benefit condition failed and the idea was forgotten. A few years later, Schickard built a calculator to help Kepler with his astronomical enquiries, but it was never distributed because nobody else was interested. Pascal convinced the Catholic authorities to forbid the development of more calculators, after which his model flourished and made him famous.
Printing was known in the Old Stone Age to decorate cave walls with hands and animal corpses; it was used since the third millennium BCE in seals to stamp clay documents, in India and Mesopotamia; it was also used for a thousand years in the East and elsewhere to embellish fabrics and walls; in ancient Alexandria it was used by prostitutes to print obscene drawings in the sand with the engraved soles of their shoes, and at about the same time, the second century CE, paper sheets were printed in China. Also from China stems the first known printed book, the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, printed in 868 CE. In Europe, books were printed only when the benefits were raised by the exchange with distant continents, in its turn causing the weakening of central ideology and growth of decentralized wealth, while the cost diminished by the introduction of Chinese paper recipes. Today almost every European nation claims to have invented printing.
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Triggers of scientific revolutions and progress
In an established civilization the task of a scientist is to study the massive body of knowledge, find a missing brick in the solid building of answers and write a new book to fill the gap. In the twentieth century CE Thomas S. Kuhn contested that such ‘normal science’ was the whole story. In his view scientific progress does not merely consist of extending the scientific collection by means of logical operations.142
To Thomas Kuhn, great scientific progress stems from the conflict between accepted convictions and apparent anomalies. Generally accepted convictions are consistent and persistent paradigms, while occasionally anomalies challenge scientists to search for alternative concepts, leading to the replacement of those paradigms. Science is no longer just adding bricks to the tower of knowledge, but demolition and renovation. Scholars had been ‘unconscious’ of the nature of their own acts for centuries.
Kuhn refrains from considering the relation between society and scientific paradigms. He insists that paradigm shifts do not influence the way a society looks at reality. Yet ideologies are based on carefully selected paradigms: without the paradigm that the earth was in the centre of the universe, the Catholic Church could hardly claim to be the custodian of creation, and without the paradigm of Germanic supremacy, Hitler could hardly have invented Nazism.
Paradigms in general bear social relevance: society provided the scientists’ environment, and science provides ideas to shape society. Many seemingly neutral scientific theories are conditioned by ideology. If this had not been the case, Galileo and Darwin would have been treated differently.
It is important to know why some paradigms are discarded and others are accepted in the first place, despite the anomalies they bear, and how it is possible that anomalies can survive for centuries without causing unrest. The answer is that we are neither hurt nor disturbed in any way by inconsistencies in our thoughts. Socially relevant paradigms are accepted if they are beneficial to the ideology in place, and if this benefit outweighs the discomforts created by inherent anomalies. Those discomforts are the price of censorship and repression and the cost of checking dissidents. To official ideology,
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the cost-benefit equation of innovations appears as a dissent-ideology argument.
Anomalies are no sufficient triggers of progress. Old paradigms must either become inappropriate to the power in place, or wither with them. New ideas become conceivable and acceptable under pressure of altering borders and environments.
That our brains cannot stand inconsistencies is a grave underrating. The most naïve mind is never aware of inconsistencies, while the most educated mind manages inconsistencies as a herdsman manages his flock: although the sheep never come to rest, it is a satisfying business to keep them together and account for them.
Without radically changing circumstances, a world-image can easily bear anomalies when it is supported by official institutions: just see how often academics make use of the phrase ‘it is generally accepted’ where some kind of scientific line of reasoning would be more appropriate.143 Accidental fissures can be ignored or, if threatening, solved by means of ritual cleansing, and ideologies can be saved by moral display or by casting out dissidents and other demons.
One example is the Big Bang theory about the origin of the universe. Despite its anomalies, among which creation out of nothing, it is well accepted among academics.144 Sir Fred Hoyle, as a new Thomas Aquinas, managed to resolve this anomaly by reconciling Einstein’s theory of relativity with the Aristotelian uncreated universe. This interesting alternative became known as the Steady State theory. But the concept of a universe without a beginning or an ending was incompatible with traditional European ideology, still influenced by the Christian creation myth, and Fred Hoyle paid for this discord with his dismissal as a Cambridge professor.145 Each paradigm has its flaws to bear, but it is sufficient to burn the heretics in order to live with those minor defects.
Progress is no necessity; it is not even what civilizations deliberately look for. Academies constantly search for the ultimate, final theory that will explain the universe for all times to come, just like ideologists claim to establish a definitive, unchanging world-image. The only real danger to both is the dreadful instability of the universe.
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Civilizations
Grounds and groundworks of civilizations
'Civilization’ is not a synonym for ‘being civilized’, ‘progress’, ‘religion’ or ‘culture’. Civilizations are broad societies, striving for the accumulation and consolidation of wealth and power in one center.146 A civilization has vague borders, and power tends to be centralized in a metropolis. Although it is in the habit of civilizations to present an image of stability by means of myth, history writing, rituals and laws, civilizations rise by compulsive accumulation of goods, and thus inevitably disintegrate when resources – human and natural – become exhausted. Endorsed innovations are mostly meant to intensify this exhaustion. Civilizations crave for eternity, but like rare plants, they only grow on special spots for a limited amount of time – typically three to four centuries. As all life forms a civilization can be hampered or aborted at any moment.
As other human organizations, civilizations are neither exclusively material, nor solely spiritual.
Civilizations are conservative by nature. Culture, as a dynamic process, is their opposite. In the best of times they are in conflict. The persecution of Protagoras or Galilei are conflicts between the natural sclerosis of civilizations and the natural dynamics of culture.
Civilizations and empiresWebster defines an empire as ‘an extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority’, but defines imperialism as ‘a policy of extending a country’s power’.147
Civilizations could be regarded superstates, and imperialism a phase in the lifecyle of a civilization.
The widespread confusion between empires and civilizations is due to the interference of ideology in the science of history. Civilizations are no spiritual or psychic unions in the style of Hegel or Toynbee. There are no objective criteria to detect such unions: their demarcation depends completely on subjective appreciation by
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occasional observers or on mythology. If it would ever be possible to objectively determine mental states from the past, it would show that they never outlived the hundred-years horizon.
When civilizations collapse from exhaustion or remain curtailed and unfinished, the void might be filled in various ways: a new metropolis might rise, decades of tribal or nation warfare can follow. A period of decentralized wealth and civilian autonomy might appear as a window for modernity.
The successor of a civilization is not necessarily its challenger. If both are exhausted by the struggle, centuries of anarchy may follow. Then it is likely that a third, fresh party will take power, and start to elaborate its own persistence myths out of the chaos left behind by its predecessor.
Europe has been the home of three main civilizations: the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and the Atlantic civilization. Larger continents have produced more civilizations sooner.
Civilizations and idealismScholars like Allan Bloom have proclaimed affinity of American academies with ancient Athens.148 There exists however no bridge strong enough to span twenty four centuries: the ancient Athenians believed that a vacuum was impossible, that gods dwelled among them, that women were despicable. They had sex with their slaves. Furthermore, America never benefited from the trade of ancient Athens. The economic disparity between both is as wide as the philosophical and cultural alienation. Between ancient Athens and contemporary Harvard no objective relation exists - therefore they do not pertain to the same civilization.
Recently Stephen Blaha defended that a civilization is defined by the inner strength or the psyche of its people. This Hegelian spirit can be measured in
political and social institutions, social cohesion, ability to innovate to solve social problems, capacity for technological innovation, flexibility in finding solutions, enterprise in meeting challenges.149
This standpoint is consistent with the general attitude of Atlantic ideology. There is however no historical ground to connect innovation with social institutions or social cohesion. Social institutions
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persecuted and killed innovators like Ibn al-Muqaffa and Vanini. Descartes wrote during the social non-cohesion of the Thirty Years War, and American institutions attacked the cohesion of enterprises like AT&T with anti-trust laws. Ernst Bloch and Carl Jaspers fled the social and political institutions of Nazism and the cohesion of Nazi mobs. Above such simplifications shines the halo of Atlantic civilization. All good things are attributed to civilizations, and the own civilization is the highest civilization of all.
Still today the thriving of a civilization is explained as a proof of superiority, either expressed in the excellence of a war god, the blood line of the ruler or racial superiority. The latter ideology has been propagated by Hegel, Weber, Landes and many others. In line with this imagery the death of a civilization is interpreted as a celestial or moral chastisement. When a metropolis was set on fire, the resistance crucified and survivors enslaved, there was no doubt that it was punished for its decadence. The Roman Empire was blamed for the same by Augustine. His verdict was adopted by Edward Gibbon (who also blamed Augustine) and has since become common speech.
Toynbee believed that civilizations can last for some thousand years, but within this life span allowed ‘times of troubles’, ‘interregnums’ and all kinds of collapses. Such collapses obviously are devised to bridge centuries of decay to knit separated civilizations together, emulating endurance where there was none. In this way the propaganda of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom is endorsed for cleverly imitating the style of the Ancient Kingdom, two civilizations separated by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles.
Civilization life cycleA typical civilization exists about four centuries, divided as follows.
The first century is a century of accumulation. This accumulation is triggered by occasional circumstances, not by some national character or virtue. Such circumstances can be a discrepancy between power balance and resource balance, or the discovery of a new land or route. In this century military action is always successful, simply because accumulation is only feasible amidst weaker adversaries, not because of mythical qualities of this one civilization. In the first century of a civilization the cost-benefit balance of war is positive, or there will be no civilization.
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The second century is a ‘golden age’, excelling in power, luxury, art, architecture, cultural (racial) inclusion, bureaucracy and mythology. Old civilizations are examined and imitated to fabricate a glorious, ancient past. The own superclass is regarded as forever superior, while others are maltreated and exploited without remorse or fear for retaliation. Luxury and power are taken for granted, change becomes inconceivable.
But just when all major problems seem to be taken care of, resources fall short, and the accumulated power must be spent to obtain supplements, both from people by means of political and military efforts, or from increased pressure on the environment. In this third century the cost-benefit balance of all excerted violence, most visibly warfare, turns negative. In spite of the further expanding mythology, the death-sentence is already signed by inflation.
In its final century a civilization dies of the growing cost of standing armies, and of the critical mass of the exponentially growing bureaucracy. Dissidents are attacked increasingly while ideology spreads over the emerging ruins. The metropolis tries in vain to defend its position with increased compulsion and intensified production. Prophets fling visions of defeat, exclusion (racist and other) and restoration. Finally exhaustion of human and environmental resources become irrevocable. Those root causes remain hidden. As the civilization’s resilience dwindles, it is eventually broken by an occasional dramatic catastrophe, either military or environmental.
OriginsCivilizations are founded on forced labour, and the most prevailing kind of ancient forced labour, agriculture, was initially only feasible on soils deposited by either wind (loess) or water (clay). Those deposits are finer than sand originating from weathered rocks. They are free of rubble and can hold moist for a long time.
A belt of fertile loess soil demarcates the ice borders during the latest glacial period. It was deposited in thick layers by tundra storms, out of sea beds after the water was accumulated in the northern icecap. Once defrosted, this loess was invaded by vast beach and oak forests, and foraging bands came to live on its rich variety of plants and animals. The first farmers emigrated along the loess belt, burning down vegetation to sow their grains. Initially, when the harvest was
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gathered the exhausted soil was left behind. When population increased, the same parcel needed to be toiled again: the time before it was reused became shorted as population pressure grew. Ever more free land was submitted to ever intensifying agriculture. Foragers, if surviving at all, saw their hunting grounds decline year after year, and eventually had no other choice than to be exterminated or to submit to hard labour.
Clay of oases, pounds, confined riverbeds and marshes also allowed primitive agriculture. Like loess soils, they attracted emigrating farmers who drove back foragers, but neither were suited to engender civilizations.
Civilizations only arose on soils that by their nature pushed towards central power. Rivers fertilizing their borders with fresh layers of clay year by year, and yet surrounded by barren grounds, attracted the most immigrants, and allowed effective concentration and control of vast numbers of labourers. Large rivers were the environments pushing for civilizations. On all suitable continents, among different races and in all kinds of climates, large civilizations appeared along riverbeds whenever forced by population pressure.
Each erring band coming across such a river valley would stay, either as slaves or as enslavers. Some would become thieves, robbers, masters or kings - warlords, landlords or Mafiosi. While already worn out families were pushed ever deeper in the river mud or died in the recurring confrontations about land or power, hierarchical society developed, sometimes as a submission and sometimes as a disparate armistice. Emerging river civilizations are similar to a savannah drinking pool, where predators lie in ambush, awaiting the cattle.
Yet societies on river banks have no longer lifespan than other kingdoms. Intensified production inevitably lead to increasing risks. Plagues – in humans, plants and animals - prosper in more dense populations. Natural catastrophes are closer, and strike harder in a dense society. Rivers overflow their banks year after year, fertilizing the soil with clay minerals, but every few years inundations surpass the usual, and once or twice in a century, always when the least expected, a disastrous flood occurs. Such floods, possibly in combination with cloudbursts and thunderstorms, could dissolve and swipe away farms, settlements and villages made of dry mud,
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annihilated populations, and only leave behind the stuff for new civilization myths.
HeritageAs long as there remained still new land to toil, heritage was split even, and superfluous heirs emigrated to set up new households. When all suitable land was occupied, emigration became problematic. Sons now competed for succession, and the ill fated were cut out in many ways. In Israel, king David drew on the custom of sacrificing young men in times of famine to get rid of all competing princes of the Saul dynasty: after the hanging Yahweh was ‘entreated for the land’.150 It was told in ancient Rome that one time Amulius killed his brother and made his brother’s daughter a Vestal Virgin, in order to prevent a rivalling dynasty to rise. The plan failed as Mars raped her and she begot Romulus and Remus. Three years before his conversion to Christianity, Constantine had murdered his father in law, the emperor Maximian. Ten years later, in 324 CE, Maximian's son Licinus and his grandson were executed. Still two years later Constantine was celebrated in Rome as the first Christian emperor, while that very moment he had his wife Fausta and his eldest son Crispus killed at home.151 When Selim I assumed power over the Ottoman Empire in 1512 CE, he killed all his brothers and all their sons, and killed all his own sons except the crown prince of his choice. In Buganda before the eighteenth century CE, all brothers of each new king were exiled; later, when no space remained for exiles to start a new life, the queen mother waited for the birth of a crown prince, and then ordained the execution of her other sons.152 During the eighteenth century CE, the third generation of European immigrants in New England found no more land fit for expansion, and the custom to split inheritance was replaced by the exclusive right of the firstborn.153
The drive to expand and the enslavement of savages
Once human emigration had reached all corners of the earth – Polynesia and last of all New Zealand, three millennia ago – further migration was at the expense of natives.
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N contrast with the impoverished homeland, the promised land always seemed free to be taken. This was for instance the case when Europeans entered America. The land seemed untouched in the eyes of people who had lived through a dissonance of burning, fighting, hunger and plagues. In reality the new land was in its entirety used for the more relaxed production modes of hunter-gatherers and extensive farmers. But savages were easy to eliminate – and, as the Bible said, they deserved to be thrown out of paradise and to toil.
While ever more land was occopied by more intensive farming, a variety of relations with the remaining hunter-gatherers was established, although never with a long time assurance of the latter’s independence. The Egyptians bartered with bashful foraging tribes by leaving goods on sacred places near the woods, and returning the following day to pick up whatever was exchanged for it. Bantu farmers in Central Africa regarded the Pygmies as vassals, but complained a lot about ‘their’ labourers disappearing in the forest when work has to be done. In South America, some Indian farmers rely on hunting bands for armed protection against competing villages.
But in the end, the proliferation of labour was unstoppable and nearly all foragers became extinct or enlisted. Mesopotamian squads raided mountain hamlets for slaves, and wrote ‘slave’ as a combination of ‘mountain’ and ‘man’ or ‘woman’. The Slavs provided the word ‘slave’ when the Holy Roman Empire chased them from the ninth century CE on – a practice Hitler planned to reintroduce. In nineteenth century Europe, the last savages were hired as day-labourers to fell trees for the hungry furnaces of industry, and in this manner became themselves the destroyers of the woods they had lived by. Eventually they delivered themselves as industrial workers, as before they had delivered their environment as industrial fuel.
As labour expanded, foragers had to give up their freedom to survive as slaves, serfs or day-labourers. Poor families were labouring families. In good times poverty might be tolerable, but climate and politics were never certain, and most of the time labourers lived worse than less reproductive animals. In the toiling seasons they were driven to the fields as mindless cattle, fearing the clerks’ pen when the harvest was counted, and fearing the whip when the harvest fell short. The poor lived in fear forever, for punishment, hunger, plagues, even in fear for hope as yet another source of pain: after centuries,
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want was blamed instead of shortage, and it became a new religious zeal to submit with all your heart, and to give up all desires and dreams.
Working and feastingIn seasons requiring less land labour, temples and palaces were built. There is no mystery involved in ancient monuments: because the size of monuments was meant to show the power of the ruler, and not his wit, the only important technique was to mobilize as many labourers as available, and make them work without mercy.154 It is even possible to roughly calculate population numbers from the quantity and distance of displaced rock and earth.
No work done was ever enough. Women were even refused a working stop to give birth, for example when they were baking bricks or were driven together with the whip, in one close formation to thump the earthen floors of a new construction. When, after endless stamping, a girl lost her foetus, the whipping and thumping continued back and forth, and the foetus was mashed under the feet and smoothed away in the hardening floor.
Labourers received a minimal portion of grain daily, while regular temple feasts or religious carnivals were organized to distribute anything above a bowl of porridge or a piece of bread, especially fat, meat and ale. Before weeks were introduced, labourers depended fully on such temple feasts for surviving. People consumed meat only on religious occasions. An uncertain chain of propagandistic food distributions was not a fancy: it was propaganda for the powerful and a life necessity for the less fortunate. Already in early gift economies, big men and chiefs gathered prestige by organizing feasts. Potlatches are a kind of giving contests, found by Franz Boaz among the North American Kwakiutl, by Poseidonius among the Celtic Arverni (from Auvergne in France), by captain James Wilson155 in Tahiti and in contemporary election campaigns and business relations. Guests are loaded with gifts in order to win power. Potlatches sometimes lead to massive destruction of goods when chiefs get entangled in direct rivalry. Goods were burned, slaves were sacrificed, and one Kwakiutl chief, carried away by the moment, even threw his daughter in the bonfire.
Temple feasts had to appeal to all layers and sorts of the community, and nothing was left out to obtain this goal: dancers and singers,
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phallic representations, enticing harlots, decorated gods, enacted myths, obscene, grave and frightening spectacles, colours and flowers, fattened animals. When populations became to large and widespread for solemn gatherings around temples, the riches and spectacles were carried along the masses in the style of the triumph marches of armies returning with their booty.
Religious processions were clearly inspired by kings returning from the battlefield, in triumph displaying their booty, and at times the difference between religious processions and triumph marches was hard to tell. Returning from a military campaign, Assyrian kings assigned a large part of the booty to the maintenance, restoration and treasures of the temples. Tiglat-Pileser I offered even the gods he had conquered. Ashur-bani-pal, on his victorious return from his campaign against the Elamites, sent the best slaves and the most valuable pieces of loot to the temples. Citizens offered land, slaves, valuables and even children.
Feasts were always connected to events in the lives of kings or gods: in this manner all of society sympathized with the birth or marriage of a prince, the resurrection of a godhead or any other elevated occasion: worship, submission, joy and relief were forced into emotional alignment. In Ancient Egypt, before the weeks were counted, festivals took place every three or four days on the average. In Medieval Europe half of the days were ‘holy days’, in French jours de fête, days of feast.
Altars played an important part in offering feasts. Humans or animals were slaughtered, cooked and consumed in communion with the gods. Of course, those gods usually received only a symbolic part of the sacrificed animal – a libation, or blood, bones -, as the rest was a sacred meal consumed by the community. Exceptionally, when a god had to be urged in the strongest way, the god through fire consumed the entire sacrificed animal. This is what the Greeks called a holocaust.
The Aztecs – living on a continent lacking bovines – organized raids on neighbouring villages, and thousands of captured humans were fattened in anticipation of the feast. Then their hearts were ripped out and consecrated to the sun god, while the bodies were thrown off the temple stairs and grabbed by the populace, to be cooked and consumed. Local temples subsisted on gifts from people in need of exalted relief. Sometimes – as under Solomon – only animals farmed
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by the temple staff were accepted as a valid sacrifice, and must be paid for by the faithful.
Altars were built in the open to air out the appalling smell of rotting flesh and blood. In Central America altars were located on top of the temples, while in the Middle East they were situated in their vicinity, often within the courtyard. An important trade in incense and myrrh, aimed to overcome the rotten smell, brought wealth to kingdoms in eastern Africa and Southern Arabia. The Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, when building her temple west of Thebes, had carved on the walls an expedition into African Punt, culminating in piles of myrrh gum and thirty potted myrrh trees; and when the queen of Sheba undertook her voyage to the court of Solomon, she crossed the Arabian Desert with a train of camels loaded with incense resins.
Emergence of clerkdom: temples, monasteries, academies
A complex society needs a large administration to direct labour; to create and spread ideology, including religion; to organize propagandistic feasts and processions; to compose hymns and design cosmology; to redistribute goods gathered by warfare and labour. Clerks initially live in the ruler’s palace, but depending on the twists of history, bureaucracy can evolve to an independent commercial enterprise or even assume military power – the Indian Kayastha caste for example is represented wit an ink-pot in one hand and a sword in the other. Clerks can challenge kingship power when complexity of administration outgrows the importance of arms.
In order to rule vast territories a middle class is indispensable. But the rise of an aristocracy also increases the number of superfluous middle class youngsters. While exile and murder had worked well to eliminate challengers of the king's throne, those remedies could hardly be generally used to protect aristocratic estates without jeopardizing social stability. Those youngsters were recruited by the clerkdom and locked away in ministries, temples and monasteries. Lifelong imprisonment of oblate children became a general practice.
Depending on the prestige of their families and the gifts coming along with them, oblate children could become monk, priest, slave,
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prostitute or performer. The career of the biblical Samuel, founder and first priest-king of Israel, was started when his mother offered him to the temple:
When she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three bullocks, and one ephah of flour, and a bottle of wine, and brought him unto the house of the Lord in Shiloh: and the child was young. And they slew a bullock, and brought the child to Eli. [..] as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord. 156
In European medieval times, monasteries had children’s dormitories. For children below ten, the parents took the vow of lifelong chastity on their behalf. To break this vow – either as the child or as the parent - was a serious crime. Youngsters not always carried their fate in submission, and runaways were often chased and punished. A story about Saint Benedict allows a glimpse in the mind of an oblate:
Saint Benedict ate, and a young man which was son to a great lord held to him a candle, and began to think in his heart who is this that I serve? I am son unto a great man; it appertaineth not that one so gentle a man as I am be servant to him... 157
During the Chinese Chou dynasty in the twelfth century BCE, the Shih, clerks at the feudal courts, turned into a new class, in between nobles and commoners. Those studious people, eager for a kind of honourable alternative to knighthood, brought forth and embraced wandering teachers as Confucius and Mencius.
Thomas Aquinas was donated as a six year old to the Benedictine monastery at Italian Monte Cassino, and thus found opportunities for an intellectual career, in his days only available in this type of households.
While being trained in writing and bookkeeping, those youngsters grew into an intellectual class of clerks, taking pride not in battle, but in study. In their own view they were not discarded, but had proudly forsaken the coarse, illiterate world themselves. The pride and esteem of warfare was sided by the pride and esteem of study and office. Both as a group and as individuals, they were forever torn apart between ideology and curiosity, rage and reason. They became bearers of the worst threat to humanity, as well as its only change of deliverance.
Soldiers and clerksFor a long time clerks were a servile workforce to the palace, organising yards, writing records and singing hymns, packing palaces
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with wealth and predicting the future, all in the ruler’s favour. But while kingdoms expand their territory over a critical limit, the rulers are obliged to entrust ever more power to bureaucracy. Inevitably clerkdom evolved to a new force, seeking independence, building own households and challenging kingship. Extensions to the household of the ruler, at first built in honour of his forefather god, evolved to the god’s – read the clerk’s - temples. Those temples followed the customs of the palaces they copied, and even could surpass them in luxury with dancers, musicians, poets and warehouses. After time the palace might specialize in warfare and the temple in storage, and inevitably bureaucracy would benefit ever more of fresh supplies, either distributed, stored away or exposed in splendour.
The internal dynamics of a civilization is largely defined by the antagonism between the palace household with its king and warriors, and the temple household with its high priests and administrators. The nature of a civilization is such that those two can not exist without each other, while they are always entangled in a political conflict or worse. Rarely was the conflict between temple and palace appeased for more than one or two generations. Sometimes the clerks managed to appoint generals or kings from their ranks; sometimes they managed to make a king their marionette. Kings had to play their cards daring but cautiously, and often external warfare was needed to find the riches needed to appease the clerks. When Constantine substituted classic religion for Christianity, he replaced a too expensive bureaucracy by a dynamic new one, for the price of only daily bread.
In the Atlantic civilization the old institution of clerks is as imperative as in any other. Like in all times clerks are torn between satisfying their masters need for power on the one hand, and intellectual freedom on the other, and are sentenced forever to this plight.
Powers of clerks can turn into personal attributes, and ancient gift and barter customs can become part of the execution of their function. This can range from requiring fees - lawfully or not - to obeisance or at least some submissive display. Central power can punish such customs or, in order to construct a chain of authority, approve such practices and officalize stipends. The exact borderline between corruption and barter depends on the cultural setting and is not always clear. Priests in India and in Europe, and in many other
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places, lived by the money paid for rituals; European Church princes benefited from prebends; some African customs-officers expect fees; some judges in the Middle East today, and in seventeenth century Europe (for example in the case of Francis Bacon) expected gifts from the accused. An extreme example of a judge accepting gifts from the prosecuted is found in the final judgement of monotheism, an imagery certainly modelled after traditional practices.
From the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea
Until three thousand years ago the Arabian Sea was part of a waterway connecting the Southeast Asian islands to the east coasts of Africa. The Malayo-Polynesian language reached Madagascar along this way. Surrounded by the Indus river, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea like sunbeams, the Arabian Sea was also a meeing place of Asian and African cultures. Here the Phoenicians transported Egyptian and Assyrian cargo, and even rounded the African continent millenaries before Vasco da Gama, who is today commonly credited as the first to have achieved this feat.158
But there was more at stake than trade alone: no civilization can reach a certain level of complexity without sufficient interaction. Despite clerks zealously constructing myths to prove their exceptional status, none of the civilizations around the Arabian Sea could have grown to the full without the others.
By the twelfth century BCE new migrations had set the whole world from Egypt to Assyria and beyond on fire. An immense torrent shattered the course of the Indus river, and the Indus civilization collapsed in bloodshed. The wise Vyasa summarized this drama in only a few words when soothing a mourning prince:
“You and your brothers have done your duty. Do not mourn for the fall of the Yavadas, because their time is fulfilled. Time is the seed of victory and the seed of destruction.” Then a flood unseen before swallowed the city of Dvaraka.159
The Persians – in the opinion of Herodotus the best historians of their time – recounted that the Phoenicians migrated from the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean. Traders of old, the Phoenicians brought with them a better art of writing and of long distance travel.
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Before the dawn of the last millenium BCE, all great civilizations that had thrived in Asia and Africa had disappeared. Fresh warlords tried to rebuild and imitate the splendid ruins of ancient monuments and empires. The Mediterranean was dominated, one after the other, by Phoenicians, Minoans, Lydians, Greeks and Romans. Each of their civilizations was influenced by others through trading, warfare, travelling and enslaving, while everything was done to eradicate traces of such influences and to depict their society as the outcome of an unpolluted lineage founded by the gods. In this, there was no difference with older civilizations. But no civilization can rise on its own.
The warfare, started by large movements of populations in search of new land, grew into and incurable cancer. The immense Persian army was just one step. Cities and countries fell evermore victim to killing and plunder. After Alexander warfare gave up the illusion of society building. War between expanding populations became ordinary practice, and the growth of armies and of the catastrophes they caused raised to their power. Always larger packs were driven against each other with blades and clubs, and stole, raped and burned everything on their way. The whole inhabited world was scoured by hollow scum yelling names of gods, as a pest of rats raging through desolate ruins, parading in each devastated city as heroes clad in stylish armour, posing sturdy as saviours with victims muted by pain – an unreal nightmare breaking over and over into the daylight of reality. And all were dumb enough to believe they served a worthy cause.
By the time of the Roman empire warfare had become daily life, war for the sake of war, completely absorbed in folklore: new booty had to be paraded at regular intervals in the metropolis’ avenues. Hailing Victory had become official religion, and violence had become fashionable at the home front, where theatres were built to keep the bloodshed going in between, in continuous performances from dawn till dusk.
Amidst those ancient ruins, unstable borders, altering mythologies and hostile ideologies, uncertain tides of progress and modernity searched their way.
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Ideology
The fuel of violence
Ideology differs from science and philosophy in that it accepts theories only if they condone already defined action. Coercive religions as well as most political ‘-isms’ (capitalism, fascism, stalinism…) must be classified as ideologies. Scientific, philosophical or political speculations which are open to change do not belong to the ideological domain.
Ideologists see questions rather as introductions to their dogma's. They have no questions looking for answers, but answers looking for questions. They can only be understood from their historical genesis, leaving aside their inherent mythologies.
Civilizations need ideologies to organize their subjects. Justification myths are composed to proof righteousness. In most civilizations this proof is given by gods, oracles or pseudo-scientific theories.
Persistence myths, a special kind of justification myths, extend the own civilization with a primeval beginning and leading to the present, definitive climax of humanity. They are composed out of reshuffled fragments from various cultures, ranging from prehistory to the present day.
TraditionOne of the oldest persistence myths id tradition.
A living being dies the moment exchange with its environment stops, but to civilizations change is a threat to its structure and a disease to its institutions. The most important goal, and a matter of survival of any civilization, is to replace the anarchy of the universe with a stable past.
Tradition claims that forebears always acted in a stereotyped way, and that it is dangerous to the cosmic order to stop this ancient way. By a strange coincidence, traditions are always beneficial to clerkdom.
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It makes no sense to esteem some customs more than others because they claim to be old. Everyone can perform routines fabricated from old books. Everything we do or believe has a reason in ourselves. If we adhere to (what we claim to be) old customs, this is a choice we make with a reason. ‘Meaningful old customs’ divert us from our individual responsibilities.
In recent centuries we have learnt so much about traditions from all continents, that it has become a deliberate choice to praise just one of them. Calling the own tradition the better one is admitting that we have a choice. A tradition is a wilfull decision disguised as a necessity.
Language evolved together with ideology.
In the course of the New Stone Age, violence slowly distilled out of battle and dripped into society. Brutality against foreign villages evaporated and condensed into social obedience in the own cities and hamlets. Fear for raids from strangers could easily be overtaken by fear for the sovereign within.
Writing evolved to justify this violence.
For a long time writing had been just a way to record ship freight. Cargo was represented by a simplified picture, followed by marks to indicate quantity. This type of notation existed already in the Old Stone Age. In Lascaux, Pech Merle and many other prehistoric sites, representations of animals are accompanied by dots to indicate their number. As numbers became more frequently used, the dots evolved to geometrical patterns. The number three for example has been a row of three marks in all times and on all continents, and is still so in Chinese and Roman writing. It became the symbol 3 when those marks were connected with rounded strokes.160
When storehouses expanded, cargo-lists were adopted for bookkeeping, next to list of kings, and then to write down chronicles and myths. Eventually clerks registered the universe from the world beneath the earth to above the sky, as if it was a carefully administered warehouse - the freight lists of the cosmos could leave nothing out.
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The basis of the prehistoric world-image remained unaltered: humans, animals, demons, forefather spirits and mother idols stood out against the cosmic turmoil. But once myths were written down, forefather ghosts and mother idols were fixed in impressive pyramids of power. Only writing allowed to impose boundaries on thoughts and territories, to devise ranks from slave to warrior god, and to claim the deepest past and the utmost future as attributes of a sacred truth. By the grace of those myths, leaders command their followers in the eternal battle between good and evil, between sacred tradition and cosmic disaster, and cry relentlessly for sacrifices on the field of honour.
For a long time books, motionless objects producing vivid words, remained sacred in some way, and writers were sacred with them. Saint Augustine used his bible for divination by opening it at random and reading the first sentence as a message from his god. Almost a millenary later Petrarca, standing on the top of the Mont Ventoux in the French Provence, did exactly the same with Saint Augustine's Confessiones.
As long as encounters with other world-images remained rare, ancient texts were divine revelations petrified at the heart of their civilization. They were sacred, god-given, and therefore more complete than reality. But as populations grew and clashed, borders fell like robes unveiling the shame of clerks amidst a manifold of cultures, and their oracles turned into fancy poetry.
Today we know some hundred different creation stories. In the Bible book Genesis already two creation stories have been clumsily mingled.161 Of course there is a logical possibility that one out of those many contradicting stories is true, and all the others are false. But in order to single out the one true story, it must stand out from all the others; it also should not hold internal contradictions; and it should not be in conflict with observed reality. Clerks constantly produce more literature to claim evidence for their particular views, but they arrive only at more clumsiness flanked by abusive language, anathemas and fatwas.
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Cosmologies, king lists and myths
There is an important difference between myths of foragers, labourers, kingdoms or civilizations. In primeval society tales and legends are the carriers of values and rules. In more complex organizations, myths acquire a propaganda task and are taken over by ideology.
Animals are predominant in tales of foraging bands. Those animals can make humans and their environments, mate with humans, exchange support and protection etc.….
Myths about mother goddesses remind of periods of hunger, when birth giving became the task of one singled out woman, sufficiently fed by offerings.
Deceased forefathers, begged for assistance, evolved to male gods when forced labour engendered agriculture, bereavement and war.
Rising kingdoms recycled myths of submitted tribes and reshape them into empowering, polytheistic persistence myths. This integration of legends was often an instrument for political integration. The new mythology presents itself as a revival or renaissance of ancient imageries in order to emulate endurance.
The (ordered) cosmos and the own civilization begin at the same moment, together they constitute the universe with the powerful metropolis at its centre. Palaces and temples are built on the scale of landscapes, competing with sacred mountains and related to heavenly bodies.
Yet no civilization flourishes longer than a few generations. While agriculture destroys the land beyond repair, and wealth and power shrinks, the inevitable strokes of environmental fluctuations are felt ever harder. Then it is only a matter of time before the closing catastrophe arrives. Civilizations naturally end in chaos caused by exhaustion, materialized in all kinds of catastrophes: floods, thunderstorms, drought and so on. If eventually a new, more vigorous city takes power, new clerks must urgently provide new myths: old gods are either demonized or recuperated, ancient monuments are recycled as testimonies of a made up past, and recent calamities are rewritten as the primeval chaos out of which civilization arose.
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Each time a new civilization reworks old mythologies. Forefather gods and mother goddesses reappear in different relations. A complex genealogy is devised to reflect the actual balance of regional powers. Legendary rulers, forefathers, heroes and city gods are represented in one unified genealogy. The more the world order changes – and it changes constantly -, the more continuity needs to be confirmed. Sometimes similar gods are merged into one, either listening to different local names (the many names of Astarte), or by joining their names ( ‘Amen-Ra’; ’Apollo-Mithra’). Gods are degraded to incarnations of their successor (the avatars of Vishnu; Zeus, Dionysus, Yahweh… as manifestation of Sarapis). The cosmic relation is exemplified by connecting gods with natural phenomena like sky, earth, rain, thunder and so on.
Throughout the ancient civilizations gods had their right place in society, just like animals, slaves, labourers, masters and kings. Many times the difference between gods and kings was fuzzy. This was especially the case for the Egyptians, but for the vast majority of common people in any civilization, kings and gods had more binding than dividing aspects. Amazing stories were told about both; both lived in a distant world, unreachable, even unimaginable by the commoner; both had powers that incited at once fear, amazement and hope.
Myths wherein the earth emerges out of water are typical for river civilizations, rising and falling by the dictates of catastrophic floods. Mud is the fundament of intensive farming, and in many early farming communities, myths recount how the earth was made out of mud from the bottom of the primeval waters the first element. In a legend of the North American Pima, Great Eagle sent a flood to end the world, after which Great Eagle was killed by Mud and Rock. After terrible floods the Chinese prince Yu left home to fight the water-monster Gong-Gong. He did not return to the palace before his task was completed, thirteen years later. Completely worn out, he died in 2197 BCE. In Mesopotamia, plagues, drought and floods were feared as deeds of gods who wanted to destroy humanity. One of those gods, Enlil, tipped Athrahis of the next flood. The latter stowed a boat with a variety of creatures to be saved. Equal myths are found in the bible and Greek and Indian mythology. The first has Noah, the second Deucalion and the third Manu for helmsman. Yahweh wanted to destroy all humans except his own followers, while Deucalion, Manu and Athrahis escaped because they were tipped in time. In Hinduism,
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the world is flooded fourteen times, every 4,320 million years. Manu is the seventh survivor.
Absolute world power requires the most unforgiving divine structure – monotheism. When the tribes of Israel submitted Canaan, Muslims submitted Persia or Christians submitted America, each of them felt to be one people with one religion and one god, glued together in one seamless monolithic nation. Their justifications were based on the assumption that their god was universal and thus wanted all people to be brought under his power. Submitted populations had to be made inferior, discriminated and ill-treated citizens. Chosen peoples do not boast about equal rights and modernity, but about spreading ‘civilization’.
Vedic IndiaIndra was the most important god in Vedic India. His title ‘king of the thirty three gods’ suggests a past of competing tribal forebear cults. Much like Hercules, Indra became popular by means of legends about his heroic and debauched adventures. When post-Vedic Brahman priests challenged his position, they attacked Indra with slander and terrible curses. In one story, Indra sent three beautiful nymphs to seduce a brahman priest. It goes without saying that the attempt failed, and the desperate Indra ends up murdering the priest. Afterwards birds shrieked ‘Indra killed a brahman! Indra killed a brahman!’. In another story a brahman curse made Indra's testicles drop on the ground, but later a sheep was slaughtered for replacement parts. Still another curse covered his body with a thousand female sex organs, xhixh is considerately concealed in his title of ‘god with a thousand eyes’.
Until the second century BCE, the Brahman movement sufficed in attacking debauched acts and propagating their view on moral conduct among gods and men, much as happened elsewhere around the same time. Vishnu became the successor of Indra, and showed his power by confiscating rivalling gods as his incarnations, ‘avatars’. Among those avatars are residues of prehistoric animism (Fish, Tortoise, Boar and the combination of a man and a lion, Narasimha), Krishna (literally ‘black-skin’, a black shepherd bringing to mind Dravidic culture) and another competitor, Buddha.
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EgyptEgyptian priests told Herodotus the names of three hundred and thirty monarchs, an intimidating succession list starting with seven gods.162
But at the time of Herodotus Egypt was in fact subjugated by the Persians, as before by Ethiopians, Libyans, Hyksos. Many rivalling dynasties originated from the Nile delta to almost two thousand kilometres deep into Africa.163 The myth of a continuing tradition was kept alive, and remained so, even when the Persians had to give in to a Macedonian Pharaoh. Until then, tens of cities had competed for power, some with success and some in vain, but none had erected a civilization that lasted more than four centuries. Worship of the hawk Horus had shifted to Seth and back, then to Ptah and Atum. Ra won prestige during the civilization of the great pyramids at Memphis, where Pharaohs for the first time named themselves Sons of the sun. But when after a few centuries this civilization reached its age of decay, the cult of Ra faded together with the centralist power of the Memphite Pharaohs, and power shifted to Osiris. In the twenty-second century BCE the city of Thebes assumed power, and its clerks revised mythology to promote their own forefather god, Amon. The Theban priests identified Amon with Ra, the ancient god of Memphis, and made him ‘Amon-Ra, king of the gods’. Astarte became worshipped as a consort of Ptah, another time as a consort of Osiris. Aton-Ra rose to power and then was replaced by Amon-Ra again. In the eight century BCE, the Sudanese Pharaoh Shabaka moved his metropolis to ancient Memphis. During an inspection of the temple of Ptah his clerks found that the last holy scroll of the Ancient Kingdom was being eaten by worms, and copied it on a stone of black granite. Scholars have long believed this story, but recent studies place the origin of the text a thousand years later.164
Even when the name of a god, a sanctuary or a city remained or was revived, it represented always different concepts to always new people.
During many centuries, the only constant in Egyptian history was the capacity of each new generation of clerks to adapt old myths and monuments to ever changing circumstances, always proving the superiority of their own god and the antiquity of the prevailing order.165
Old stones and images were recuperated to connect the very new to the beginning of time. Egyptian monumental craftsmen were submitted to strict rules defining human dimensions, proportions, position of arms and legs and so on. The reason was not that
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craftsmen needed this help to obtain a good result – long before, artists had made expressive, captivating works without such rules -, but to decorate temple walls in such manner that the false impression is created a tourist still captures today: that nothing has changed over thousands of years.
Sumer and BabylonA Sumerian King List of 2115 BCE holds that five kings ruled five different cities, each for 18,600 years, before the flood swept over the land. After the flood the kingdom of Kish was rules by a succession of twelve gods and shepherds, ruling for eight thousand years in total: two of them exceed the Methuselah of the bible. Then the power passed to Eanna, the kingdom of the sun.
Uruk, the first city traceable by archeology, boomed at the beginning of the third millenary BCE. Uruk was a temple centre, a city of feast where Ishtar was worshipped. In this city the prehistoric mother goddess fell in love with Tammuz, a descendant of the ancestor gods from the underworld. Traditionally, farmers had urged the forefather god Tammuz to yield abundant crops each year, with prayers and offerings, but no offer was as powerful as a voluptuous goddess, descending in the dark and arousing life to bloom. Tammuz became the lover of Ishtar, and made his vegetation rise. Ezekiel, in the bible, found women lamenting for Tammuz in the temple of Jerusalem166, where Ashtoreth - the biblical name for Ishtar - was worshipped. This ceremonial weeping was the ritual foreplay to the union of Ashtoreth and Tammuz. A hymn celebrating this reunion has made it to the Bible as the Song of Solomon. Inspired by this myth Ezekiel foretold the resurrection of the faithful, and Jews, Christians and Muslims made this prophecy the essence of their creed. Jews still observe an annual three weeks fast of Tammuz, although the original motivation has been forgotten.
In the early second millenary BCE, calamity, warfare and famine destroyed Sumer. The old Babylonian kingdom gained power, and as a matter of course wanted to submit all conquered gods to the god of Babylon, Marduk. In the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian poem composed by the clerks of Marduk for this reason, all gods meet to discuss the catastrophe, candidly depicted as the monster Tiamat:
She hath set up vipers, and dragons, and the monster Lahamu, and hurricanes and raging hounds, and scorpion-men, and mighty tempests, and fish-men and rams...
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Then the new, ambitious Marduk addresses the meeting and proposes to slay the monster:
If I, your avenger, conquer Tiamat and give you life, appoint an assembly, make my fate pre-eminent and proclaim it.
Marduk slew the monster and formed the world out of its carcass, as humans rebuild their world with the debris after a catastrophe. After a banquet, in which they deliberately got drunk for the sake of enlightenment, the gods admitted:
Irresistible shall be thy command, none among the gods shall transgress thy boundary. Abundance, the desire of the shrines of the gods, shall be established in thy sanctuary, even though they lack offerings. O Marduk, thou art our avenger! We give thee sovereignty over the whole world.
Then Marduk created humans to provide for the gods – whom he calls my fathers - with sacrifices.
The priests of Marduk had turned the ecological crisis in which Sumer was trapped into a primeval chaos, which was incorporated in a new persistence myth hailing victorious Babylon. The ancient gods – that is, their bureaucracies - had wisely submitted to his crisis management, and Marduk was given the name ‘the god with fifty names’, like Indra had been called ‘king of thirty gods’, testifying successive takeovers and seizures. Each year, the gods of the submitted cities were carried in procession to the metropolis, and kneeled before Marduk’s temple.
Burners of books
Writing books and burning books are two aspects of the same creative process. Only by carefully searching the ashes we can prevent that the impact of book burners on history surpasses the influence exerted by writers.
To write down an exhaustive list of book burnings is infeasible, because the most efficiently burned are the books we will never know. The following are a few notorious episodes.
In Ancient Athens the works of philosophers were thrown in the flames, whenever encounters with other cultures stirred them to write critical about Greek traditions. The books of Prothagoras and others have been so efficiently destroyed, that they are unknown to us.
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Despite the fact that he was commissioned to write laws for various Greek colonies, Plato has forever counterfeited a slanderous caricature presenting Prothagoras as a preacher of immorality.
Shih Huang-ti, the founding emperor of China in the third century BCE, responded to criticism from Confucian scholars with a decree that all classical works should be thrown in the flames. Whoever dared to mention one of these works, or possessed a copy of it, was branded and sent to labour on the Great Wall. Hundreds of protesting scholars were buried alive. Part of the ancient literature was saved by the death of the emperor five years later.
Saint Paul initiated the Christian practice of book burning already when the religion was only a few years old. The Christian rhetoric of love requires that the unbelievers offered their books voluntarily:
Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.167
The library in the Mouseaion of Alexandria was ruined in a civil war in the third century CE. It revived in the temple of Sarapis but was again destroyed by Christian mobs in the fourth century CE, and ultimately burned down by Muslim Jihad three centuries later.
About 290 CE the Roman Emperor Diocletian passed a decree providing for the destruction of Egyptian books on alchemy.
From the fourth century CE on the Christians won power in the Roman Empire, and consequently the complete literature of Gnosticism, Hermetism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and really everything unchristian within their reach was forever annihilated.
In the sixth century CE, the Byzantine emperor Justinian I ordered the destruction of the Jewish Mishna and of all Manichean books. Heavy penalties were decreed against those who hid condemned books and against scholars who did not denounce their infected colleagues. No Manichean treatise survived: we can only guess their philosophical system from the smearing campaigns of their adversaries.
Some hundred years later the third Muslim Caliph, Uthman I, responded to the fast spread of Islam outside the Arab Peninsula by ordering that all copies of the Koran were gathered and burnt, and replaced by one official reading. It is upsetting that this story is always told – and can but be told - without a hint of resistance, conflict or
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repression. Since censorship of such magnitude never operates peacefully, the only conclusion possible is that the censors were ruthlessly afficient, while again a vast world of speculations and study disappeared forever.
When Gregory I ascended the chair of the Roman bishop in 590 CE and geared up to centralize the Catholic Church, he forbade the teaching of ‘profane letters’ and grammar in general, and had burned down libraries on the Capitoline and Paladine mountains of Rome.168
He was not only the architect of Medieval papacy, but also the architect of Medieval illiteracy.
Around 1000 CE the Vizier al-Mansur, despite his reputation as a supporter of science and poetry, set on fire the fabulous library of the Córdoban caliphate to appease revolting religious fanatics.
Dominican monks regularly confiscated and burned copies of the Jewish Talmud. This happened for the first time at the demand of King Louis IX of France, who later became a crusader and was beatified. His directive was readily repeated by the popes Gregory IX, Innocent IV, Honorius IV, John XXII, Benedict XIII… As a phoenix the Talmud always again arose from the ashes. Ironically, in Poland at the end of the eighteenth century CE, the same legalist Jews who had faced the flames so many times, burned books of the new Jewish Hasidic movement in their turn.
The Dutch publisher Ketel was burned alive in 1542 CE for publishing pamphlets written by Hendrik Niclaes,169 a follower of the prophet David Jorisz, a glass painter. Jorisz was also sentenced to the stake in 1536 CE, but since he was already dead for three years by then, his remains were dug up and burned together with his books. Hendrik Niclaes founded a secret mystical circle, the Family of Love, in Antwerp. This circle influenced the lives of Christopher Plantin, Pieter Bruegel, Abraham Ortelius, John Dee and other thinkers, and thus had an important part in the spread of humanism.170
In 1559 CE Pope Paul IV ruled the publication of the first official index of forbidden books.171 Until today, censors all over the world examine these extensive lists to either allow or forbid publications, and, until the eighteenth century, any printer ignoring the rules was in danger of falling to the same flames as their goods.
In 1562 CE, Friar Diego De Landa, the Franciscan Provincial of Yucatán, set up an auto-da-fé of native South-American books at the
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town of Mani. The missionaries were convinced that the bizarre signs they were unable to read were the work of the devil, and threw the books in the flames while torturing natives and singing Latin hymns all along. The Mayas were chased and tortured by thousands while they tried to hide as much books as possible in caves and holes. Many died in the process, or committed suicide out of humiliation after they were driven around with cut off hair and high pointed caps painted with flames, devils and the like.172 Yet no sacrifice could prevent that the hidden books, made of sheets of bark, were consumed by humidity in their shelters. De Landa resumed:
We found a large number of these books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there was not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree and which caused them great affliction.173
Unexpectedly three Mayan works were discovered, centuries later, in archives in Dresden, Paris and Madrid. Nobody knows how they arrived there, and they are all what is left of the invaluable culural treasure and testimony. Thanks to Diego De Landa and his fellows, nobody today can decipher them. Ten years after the burning, De Landa was promoted Bishop of Yucatan.
In March 1933 CE, students of Wilhelm Humboldt University in Berlin were ordered by Josef Goebbels to seize ‘alien’ and ‘decadent’ books from their libraries, and threw them by thousands in an enormous bonfire while singing Nazi lieder. This auto-da-fé was the starting signal for a whole series of book burnings, organized by the German Student Association, throughout Germany.
In the twentieth century CE, books were burned in Australia (Robert Close) and the USA (Wilhelm Reich). The most recent book burners are the Reverend John Birmingham of Kansas City, who burned books related to homosexuality, and the Ayatollah Khomeini who organised bonfires of The Satanic Verses written by Salman Rushdie.174
Still in 2006 CE a poster of The Da Vinci Code, a book written by Dan Brown and accusing the Catholic church of crimes, was burned by Orthodox priests in Central Moscow. In one Indian town, Mumbai , Catholics burned an effigy of Brown and in another, Imphal, the book was burned by a group of Baptists. In Ceccano (Italy) two members of the town council burned The Da Vinci Code in public. The Iranian government forbid the book on the request of Iranian Catholic
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Bishops. But the Internet has made book burnings ineffective: millions of copies of The Da Vinci Code have travelled around the globe at the speed of light, and no border could stop them.175
And finally we should be aware that the flames are still nourished by contemporary scholars who maintain that only surviving books are relevant to history.
Natural religion or natural atheism
First we must ask what made gods conceivable, because without this concept there would be nothing to discuss. Yet, if the question is considered at all – by Feuerbach, Spencer, Tylor, Frazer – it is rather an investigation of the roots of religion than of the imagery of gods. The reason for this lack of interest is either a thoughtful hesitation to upset believers, or a spiritistic overrating of our minds. In the spiritist imagery, human thoughts are unrestrained, because ideas are simply injected (‘inspired’). If we do not make our thoughts ourselves, but receive them from elsewhere, then the limit of what can be thought depends solely on the power of the sender, not on the receiver.
But if thoughts do not come from up high, but are produced one at a time by vulnerable living beings, they have to become possible through an experienced history. Before clay pottery was invented, gods creating men out of clay were inconceivable. The Egyptian sun god had to wait for humans to invent boating before he could sail towards the evening. No all mighty, all knowing god was conceivable before the entire known world was submitted to one immense bureaucracy, and no pure reason was imaginable before an all knowing god had prospered and faltered.
Primeval atheismAncient foragers did not imagine gods, but believed that reality and remarkable events were caused by exceptional animals and other magical beings. Their myths recount, often with humour, how visions or dreams by accident poured out in reality. It would be Platonic philosophy if the ideas were less vivid.
A myth of the Australian Aboriginals recounts that iguana twins travelled across the desert, creating with their sweeping tails
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waterholes, trees, plants, insects, birds, animals and humans. In one version, the iguanas saw a group of women being raped by moon. They killed moon, which remained white ever since. Then the iguana twins became the stars of Gemini, and the women became the Pleiades.
In some variants of this myths, the iguana twins are replaced by dingoes or kangaroos. In prehistory twins were more frequent than today. As an image of reproduction, they had special creation power.
In the absence of twins a creator needs a second, and in animism this second is found within someone's guts. In the Bible book of Genesis Eve is cut out of Adam, and in Plato’s Symposion Aristophanes recounts a similar myth about a man and wife forming one being to be cut in two by Zeus:
the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members…’.
This is about what happens in the older Indian Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:
A man who is lonely feels no delight. He wished for a second. He was so large as man and wife together. He then made this his Self to fall in two, and thence arose husband and wife. Therefore Yagnavalkya said: ‘We two are thus like half a shell. ‘ Therefore the void which was there, is filled by the wife.
Now that a couple has come into being, animistic creation can continue by mating as if the world depends on it. The Upanishad above continues:
She thought, “How can he embrace me, after having produced me from himself? I shall hide myself.” She then became a cow, the other became a bull and embraced her, and hence cows were born. The one became a mare, the other a stallion; the one a male ass, the other a female ass. He embraced her, and hence one-hoofed animals were born. The one became a she-goat, the other a he-goat; the one became an ewe, the other a ram. He embraced her, and hence goats and sheep were born. And thus he created everything that exists in pairs, down to the ants.176
The North American Algonkin say Hare created all plants and animals, and mated with Muskrat to create the Algonkin. A Tibetan myth asserts that Tibetans are the offspring of a monkey mating a giant rock. The Dalai Lama is a reincarnation of this monkey. The Ngombe of Africa relate that the first daughter of man was craving for
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sex, and finally escaped to the bush and mated with all sorts of animals, thus bringing a variety of life in existence.
Creation by animals has been recycled in most persistence myths of civilizations. Forefathers and gods turn into animals for a short while, in order to perform an act of creation, as if borrowing the animal’s creation capacity. The Chinese were created when Fu Xi and his sister turned into snakes and mated. Fu Xi became the first Chinese Emperor, and died in 2737 BCE. Dionysus was born when Zeus mated with his daughter Persephone in the shape of a snake. A Vedic myth recounts that, before earth existed, Vishnu (in later times Brahma) saw a lotus flower on the water. He swam down to find its origin and discovered mud, deep below the ocean. Not strong enough himself, he transformed into a boar and heaved the earth above the ocean with his tusks.177
EuropeUntil the eighteenth century CE, most Europeans were convinced that primitives knew no gods at all. Their ignorance was even one of the reasons they were primitives. Many travellers confirmed this. The first time Christopher Columbus met American Indians he wrote in his diary:
It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion.
This was still confirmed in the nineteenth century CE by Charles Darwin and others:
there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea.178
But in 1724 CE a French Jesuit missionary, Joseph F. Lafitau, leader of a Jesuit mission in New France that seized almost a million fertile acres from the Indians and was intensely involved in fur trade, proclaimed that the Indians had simply forgotten their true faith because they were degenerated. The Supreme Being he attributed to them was none other than the Christian god:
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I have seen with great pain in many reports written about the barbarian peoples, how they are depicted as folks without religion or god. [..] One of the strongest proofs that we have against [atheists] of the necessity and existence of a religion, is the unanimous consentment of all peoples to recognize a Supreme Being.179
Skepticism against ‘the necessity and existence of religion’ could now be countered with the proof that all humans had some remembrance of divine creation. Unbelieving savages were really defectors, debased 'nature worshippers', in the eyes of the followers of St. Augustine a crime worse than murder. They deserved to be driven from their idols, out of paradise, as God had ordained, and into labour in honour of Christ.180
Lafitau had both critics and supporters. Thomas Jefferson, whose parents had lived in good understanding with Indians and regularly entertained Indian chiefs in their home, wrote in 1812 CE:
[Lafitau] adopts all the falsehoods which favour his theory, and very gravely retails such absurdities as zeal for a theory could alone swallow. He was a man of much classical and scriptural reading, and has rendered his book not unentertaining. He resided five years among the Northern Indians, as a Missionary, but collects his matter much more from the writings of others, than from his own observation.
And the famous nineteenth century anthropologist Edward B. Tylor complained that
The whole class of spirits or demons, known to the Carib by the name of cemi, in Algonkin as manitou, in Huron as oki, Lafitau now spells with capital letters, and converts them each into a supreme being.
The Catholic anthropologist Father Wilhelm Schmidt promoted Lafiteau's doctrine to a serious element of academic science still appreciated today. Schmidt published, from 1912 CE on, twelve volumes to expose scientifically how divine revelation at the time of creation had for effect that degenerated savages on all continents are still vaguely aware of an hoghgott (high, read Christian, god, associated with the sky) and urmonotheism.181
Such forgeries still belong to the contemporary corpus of academic literature, albeit – as many religious constructs – in the form of a serious but undecided alternative. Ironically, descendants of natives trying to revive their ancient culture often are lured to accept and adapt this fiction when they find that all real traces of their past have been wiped out.
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Steller, who visited the Siberian Itelmen tribe in 1774 CE, did not doubt that they knew a hoghgott, but at the same time found their mythology so rude and indecent that he qualified them as degraded ‘born blasphemers’.182
The indigenous word for ‘sky’ was frequently translated by missionaries with ‘God’. This happened for example with Kwoth of the Nuer. Afterwards primordial monotheism was easily demonstrated by pointing out that the savages used the same word for both ‘sky’ and ‘god’. The South American Guarani believed thunder was the splashing paddle of a spirit called Tupan sailing the sky, and missionaries swiftly promoted Tupan to hoghgott.
The Mende of Sierra Leone were interrogated by missionaries eager to demonstrate that Ngewowa, their retreated maker, was a hoghgott. The annoyed Mende told them without a blink that Ngewowa was all around talking with deceiving spirits, of which the white ones with beards, who wanted to command everyone, were the worst. Of course the story was meticulously recorded.183
The Dutch doctor Paul Julien travelled across Central Africa throughout the first half of the twentieth century CE, gathering measurements of skulls and noses of isolated bands of natives. When he realized that only racists were interested in his endless lists of numbers, he engaged with undaunted zeal in blood group testing. But all the time he also pursued an other goal: his ‘most valuable African hours’ were when he ‘found’ evidence that the natives knew a hoghgott:
I still remember the self-evident gesture of my friend the Bakah-pygmy Nkom, when, after long and fatiguing interrogations, at last the shyness started to wither and Nkom told me the name of the Supreme Being as it was known to the Bakah. It was as if something of the unlimited greatness of creation shone around those simple brown people…184
But the Pygmies had been in contact with missions before and even knew about hell-fire Many times the answer was made up in an agitated discussion before it was translated into French. Knowing what Julien wanted to hear, and assisted by an interpreter who was experienced in such sessions, they tried to please him while begging for tobacco, the award for cooperation of which Julien took two hundred kilo on each voyage. As a rule of thumb, the 'simple' one is the one left with no tobacco.
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Kaang of the Khoisan was also promoted to hoghgott. The following amusing tale features Kaang disguised as a hartebeest carcass, stumbled across by a bunch of young girls. The tale wants to stress to children to leave corpses alone. The sexual behaviour of Kaang is quite unexpected for a hoghgott:
They say to the child: “Carry the hartebeest’s head, that father may put it to roast for you.” The child slung on the hartebeest’s head, she called to her sisters “Taking hold help me up; this hartebeest’s head is not light.” Her sisters taking hold of her help her up. They go away, they return. The hartebeest’s head slips downwards, because [it] wishes to stand on the ground. The child lifts it up, the hartebeest’s head removes the thong from the hartebeest’s eye. The hartebeest’s head was whispering, it whispering said to the child: “O child! the thong is standing in front of my eye. Take away for me the thong; the thong is shutting my eye.” The child looked behind her; the head winked at the child…185
Sir Peter Buck, a physician, son of a Maori mother and one of the world’s leading scholars on Polynesia, was appalled by such forgeries and resentfully noted that ‘the discovery of a supreme God named Lo in New Zealand was a surprise to Maori and Pakeha alike’. He demonstrated that Christian missionaries had indeed introduced the ‘tradition’ themselves, only a few years earlier. 186
The chase for urmonotheism was not limited to primitive societies. In 1839 CE, Jacques Champollion-Figeac blatantly wrote that ‘the Egyptian religion is a pure monotheism, which manifested itself externally by a symbolic polytheism.’187 Within a few years this farce had spread all over the still fresh science of Egyptology, and in 1860 CE Emmanuel de Rougé recapitulated:
The unity of a supreme and self-existent being, his eternity, his almightiness, and external reproduction thereby as God; the attributing of the creation of the world and of all living beings to this supreme God; the immortality of the soul, completed by the dogma of punishments and rewards: such is the sublime and persistent base which, notwithstanding all deviations and all mythological embellishments, must secure for the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians a most honourable place among the religions of antiquity.188
How unfortunate that this smart scientific insight was not known to the burning and murdering monks of Alexandria.
monotheism and atheismReligion varies from personal and intimate on the one hand, to public and repressive on the other hand. Many old images have grown into
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our everyday lives, and to many people the feeling to be guarded by a greater power is essential to uphold their personality and even to continue their lives. It is needless and cruel to attack those people. But intimate believers rather need a being with compassion than an almighty, autocratic godhead. They hope for consolation and happiness in order to live with the setbacks of life.
On the other end of the scale are the coercive religions, which use unrelenting violence whenever history provides the occasion. The defenders of those religions are involved in ideology and politics, which becomes apparent in the ridiculous claim of universal truth and in the intimidation of disbelievers. Monotheists vilify all gods (possibly redesignated as Satan or other demons and devils) except one.
The strongest case against the existence of one almighty godhead is that it is subject to discussion. The existence of such a godhead could not possibly be a matter of disagreement among human beings, because the existence of this argument alone already spoils any claim of universal control.
The only possible answer to this standpoint would be that the almighty godhead is purposedly testing his subjects, but since his subjects have failed this test in the most bloody way, they can hardly be admitted as a worthy witness. To claim that God tries us by voluntarily loosening control, is really saying that God himself decided not to be the only power in the universe. Then to belief in one almighty god is a sin of disobedience.
Monotheist clerkdom maintains a godhead which completes and sanctifies their hierarchic civilization, and which claims universal jurisdiction. But a godhead governing the universe would not favour one particular people, population or organization, on one particular planet.
An almighty god can judge nothing besides itself, because nothings can happen besides his decrees – even the free will of sinners is one of those decrees. To the master of the whole universe a person can only offer something stolen from him first. It is clear that nobody believes in such a god, and consequently, monotheist religions does not exist in the real world. The reason for monotheism lies in its instrumental benefit, which is nothing else but the most absolute demand for submission possible. Monotheism is politics. It is not a philosophy, but and ideology.
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Monotheism is still today an instrument for human suffering, and it is one of the tragedies of our time that this irrationality is hidden behind rational discourses: while religion is still the most bloody factor of human life, and we are all held hostage by it, we act as if society is managed in a democratic, informed and rational way; as if we dealt with superstition a long time ago.
Arnold Toynbee wrote about the origin of monotheism, the creed that there exists one, and only one god ‘far above and beyond the community’:
In the barren and land-locked highlands of Israel there was immanent a divine inspiration which made this wild and unnoticed country a means of grace to those who settled there, and a crucible for the forging of one of mankind’s greatest spiritual treasures.189
But just as those highlands were neither wild nor unnoticed before the confederation lead by Joshua destroyed its thriving cities and slaughtered those who had toiled the land for ages, monotheism is not invented there, nor by the Israelites, and as a matter of fact it is not even a spiritual treasure. By his applause the Western historian really acclaims his own civilization. The god of the Israelites was an ordinary war god like any other tribal god. Yahweh hears prayers and accepts offers, and sometimes is persuaded to help and sometimes isn’t, and at will punishes or forgives. It is unfortunate that Toynbee never uttered towards the primacy of religions the same doubt as he has uttered towards the primacy of nations.
Until the Cyrus the Great sent allies to Jerusalem to build a temple in honour of the god who ‘hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth’,190 the religion of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah had been similar to the religions of other nations in the Middle East. Solomon built his temple with a Phoenician architect on the spot where Abraham sacrificed his son. Anath, Baal (Semitic El, Arab Allah), Astarte and Tammuz were worshipped in this temple for centuries, and conflicts between palace and temple popped up regularly, as they did in other kingdoms. Like elsewhere, from the last millennium BCE on, the decay of temple economies engendered criticism towards the traditional offering feasts.
Shamanistic ecstasy and seers played an important role, although the phenomenon was recuperated in differing degrees at different times. Prophet schools, illiterate at first, instructed novice prophets in their
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own perception of wisdom and revelation. Whenever prophets saw decline or danger – they usually did - they revived the imagery of the ancient war god and blamed the people to ignore their saviour in time of need. However, in Judea and Israel Yahweh remained a tribal war god among other gods, until the concept of a mighty lord of the universe, who promised cosmic victory after nine thousand years, was introduced with Persian Zoroastrianism. The biblical prophet Isaiah, for example, believed in other gods: he bullied them and asserted that his Lord was going to chase them some time later:
And the idols he shall utterly abolish. And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.191
In the Books of Ezra the exiles, after their return to Palestine, feared the power of Baal, excerted by his propher Balaam. To be chosen by Yahweh obviously did not offer sufficient protection:
On that day they read in the book of Moses in the audience of the people; and therein was found written, that the Ammonites and the Moabites should not come into the congregation of God for ever, because they met not the children of Israel with bread and with water, but hired Balaam against them, that he should curse them.192
Unfortunately monotheism is not a major step in human progress, nor is it the end of barbarism. It has not increased tolerance towards other people or incited modesty among believers. It has not diminished violence, but created new justifications for manslaughter. If there is only one almighty and jealous dictator above all, then it is necessary to fight to death every disbeliever or heretic. The old biblical theme of fratricide is the most striking trait of monotheism, ever since Cain slew Abel.193 This fratricide is the real torch passed on to Israel, Christianity and Islam.
A divine communication problemWe are not equipped to understand divine revelation. Descartes accepted, without much proof, that God would not be so cruel as to fool us all the time. But if a supreme being wants to communicate with creatures as incompatible with it as we are, creatures from a very different category and with a very different world-image, it really has no other choice.
If the bible is God’s word, God has written about himself: ‘he has fixed the earth firm, immovable’.194 When Galilei observed that the earth moved he must swallow his words in order to escape the burning
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stake, after which, in 1633 CE, the Inquisition convicted him to life imprisonment. Today biblical scholars agree that the earth moves, but blame the unfortunate mistake on God’s poor vocabulary. The only word for ‘earth’ at his disposal when he dictated the Bible was eh’-rets, which means ‘flat ground’. Yet he dictated this fallacy knowing that honest people would once be prosecuted for doubting this divine fraud. Prophets and priests claim to translate God’s dictates, but unfortunately a go-between is of little help in this matter: if a message is left unaltered, we still would not understand it, and if it was altered, we would not receive the original message - we would be fooled either way.
To believe something we can not imagine is impossible. We could imagine something resembling it, for example a white male, yet non-human, yet endowed with human thoughts and words, yet unfathomable, yet showing feelings like its creatures have, yet unimaginable. Then we could keep this image in mind but stay aware that our dedication is meant for something different, because we can not imagine a perfect, all knowing god:
Were the appearance of Allah conceivable, heaven and earth would fall to ruin.195
.Since no one can imagine what must be believed, someone claiming to believe it is talking air. Believers confront atheists constantly with logical arguments, but note of them came ever to faith by reasoning. One untired crusader for Christianity, Dr. Phil Fernandez, summarizes his arguments as follows:
if the atheist does admit to an immaterial reality, universal truths, the possibility of human knowledge, and the existence of universal moral values, then I think he has given the theist enough rope to hang the atheistic world view.196
But immaterial reality has no relevance regarding religion. One can believe in the immaterial reality of gravity or light and yet not believe in angels. Universal truths are only useful to ideologists. Other people they remind of the burning of skeptics. And finally, coercive religions, including the religion of Dr. Fernandez, have not been known to support the advance of human knowledge or moral values (the end of slavery, executions, illiteracy, superstition...) before those rights became irrevocable.
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The question is not if a god existsIn ideologies there is no reasoning to be discovered, but there is a reason to be investigated. The question is not if God exists, because it is too confused an entity to be discussed reasonably. The real issue is why the assertion exists that gods exist.
In order to fight coercive religions not gods must be criticized, but their defenders. To believe in something unknown is to believe in nothing in particular. Such a person is not misguided, but misguides with evident absurdities; such a person does not follow a set of ideas, but an unscrupulous gang or institute stumbled upon by birth or other coincidence, or chosen freely for doubtful reasons like power, fear, vanity, relieve or rancour.
Monotheism can not be regarded a just system because its god can condemn people, or accept offerings and prayers uneven-handed. In archaic communities it is the prerogative of the king to administer justice to his liking, and trying to lure him is good practice. Where modernity rises, a judge does not accept gifts and is not influenced by flattery.
Neither is monotheism a reasonable philosophy, because it can not adequately explain the dynamics of the world without accepting that God is either unreliable or countered by a matching party. And if he is both unreliable and inadequate, why waste time on him? This fundamental criticism is never answered by reason. Whenever reason turns out inadequate, the apologist turns to moral arguments, and calls the skeptic a big-headed arrogant sinner who should better bow before God's superiority.
In a debate about the existence of God Frederic Copleston asked Bertrand Russell:
Perhaps you would tell me if your position is that of agnosticism or of atheism. I mean, would you say that the non-existence of God can be proved?197
This question is tricked. The taking of an agnostic or atheistic position does not depend on the logical demonstration of a godhead. Russell answers that he considers himself agnostic. At first sight this seems a reasonable answer from a skeptic, but it is not. Each time philosophers take the seemingly moderate position of agnosticism, ideologists interpret their caution as a halfway surrender. As a consequence the real question, which is not the existence of God but
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the programme of his advocates, is overlooked. Elsewhere Russell has unwittingly shone some light on his answer:
There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as there is of the existence of the Homeric God. I cannot prove that either the Christian God or the Homeric gods do not exist, but I do not think that their existence is an alternative that is sufficiently probable to be worth serious consideration.198
The burden of proof is not with the disbelievers. Skeptics are not required to ‘methodically doubt’ the existence of mermaids, the respectability of injustice or the claim of a trapped burglar that he mistook your house for his house. A skeptic is not compelled to doubt any ridiculous proposition that is thrown in the air, and certainly not when such propositions are created and maintained with a wicked agenda.
God is not a mysterious virus in the African rain forest - it is the biggest, most permanent thing ever, with no reason to hide at all. He is of the same order as a White Elephant hiding in Central Park. It is better to stay clear on this matter, or someday ‘methodical doubt’ might be rewarded by violent people claiming to be sent by this White Elephant (and proof it logically).
Skepticism, the way of thinking that enabled all scientific blessings of our age, is to believe that something is true or not and at once to realize that all truths can fall for the ravages of time. It is ideology to claim absolute and definitive certainty about anything. And a viewpoint that knows it might not be forever, is more convincing than a viewpoint that claims eternity. All in all, skepticism has no choice but atheism.
The legend of the fat goddess
Cultures that assign different natures to men and women, did not created gods and goddesses under the same historical circumstances. Female gods are much older than male gods, and even stem from the Old Stone Age.
When a woman has enough to eat, a bit of semen is sufficient for her to become pregnant. When food is lacking and semen is abundant, food can become the immediate cause of pregnancy. It is a feasible
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theory that children are fathered through her mouth, when not semen, but calories are the missing element.199 An African myth speaks of a cow, impregnated by eating magical grass. All three daughters of king Rama gave birth to Vishnu – each a part of him -, after drinking Soma. The semen of the Mesopotamian creator Enki was stolen and planted, and yielded the very first harvest. In Egypt, Atum impregnating himself by ejaculating in his mouth. The white sap of lettuce was the semen of Horus, and it sometimes changed into a flock of finches, flying up from the fields to greet him.
Climatic fluctuations have frequently jeopardized bands of humans as any other species. In worsening climates, as happened at intervals throughout the Ice Age, some bands - fifty people at most - started to revere fat women, and to offer them victuals, regardless of how little was gathered. If food was equally shared, none of the women would get enough edibles to become pregnant, and the band would die out in misery. Now sexual temptation by one voluptuous woman lead to childbirth, unexpected at first, but enough to keep a band of fifty in existence.
For the first time humans were confronted with a god. Offering victuals became magical rituals, and the woman grew so fat that she could barely stand. Her appearance must have been bewildering: she was clearly not of the same sort, of the same nature as the others. In an underfed band she was a miracle of fat; in a frozen landscape she was a radiating source of warmth.
Kept and guarded in a carefully isolated cabin she became a sort of breeding stove, resembling the selected village women in the French Cevennes who used to remain in bed for weeks to breed silkworms. Sometimes Indian village women in Jillelamud and elsewhere are recognised as living goddesses. Suddenly the humble house of such a woman becomes a shrine. Villagers wait in line at her window to catch a glimpse of her face, bring gifts and hope one time to be touched by the blessing Grama Devata. As the rumour spreads, worshippers travel for days to her house, seeking healing, consolation or a bit of luck. Villagers write letters to relatives abroad to tell the discovery of a new goddess, of the miracles she caused to happen, and how everybody is full of hope, how omens have indicated that she will stay on earth forever. Their heart is warmed with emotion; in tears they contemplate the joy that has come in their lives.200
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At the fat goddess’ breast not only her children one after the other were pampered: suckling taken from killed game, eggs of birds and cold blooded reptiles, nests of insects loaded with nymphs were offered to her by foragers returning to the camp-site In the moist and warm atmosphere of her cabin was the constant fussiness of crawling beasts and fluttering birds, while every moment of silence was drowned with insect humming. Snails drew slime tracks over the pale curbs of her sweated skin; shivering rodents searched nest warmth in the glowing fissures of her flesh; caterpillars carefully felt her lips, unconscious of the immanent danger. What she did not eat, lived and grew to become food for the other offerings or, occasionally, for the hunters. In some societies her cabin was set on fire by the foretold moon. In this fire the goddess was sacrificed and devoured in her turn. At the pinnacle of fat economics, the mother of the band became the highest gift in her own ritual feast.
When the climate changed for the better again, the fat goddess became a legend. Throughout many succeeding cultures, in Europe, Africa and Asia small figurines representing her silhouette were cut and planted near the fireplace. She was given a bit of each cooked meal to invoke her assistance. Some of those figurines have made it to our museums to testify of the first worship of a god. The oldest pieces – the Venus of Willendorf in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Venus of Laussel in the Musée d’ Aquitaine at Bordeaux - are surprisingly realistic creations: one can almost spot the cellulite on their thighs. Later the statues no longer represent a real life person, but become schematic symbols of the power to bear and ease.
This primeval goddess evolved to many different goddesses of desire, sex and affluence. Her image has played a role in Eurasian Stone Age cultures, many of which all other traces have been lost. In the oldest farmer villages, images of the female goddesses are still abundant. In the Middle Eastern Çatal Hüyük of the seventh millennium BCE, she was depicted on a wall with legs spread wide open, giving birth. The image reminds of the verses of the Indian Rig Veda where Aditi bears the earth ‘squatted with spreaded thighs.’201 J. Finnegan connects Aditi with the Harappan civilization, where the female goddess is seen in the company of leopards.202 Harappan seals from Mohenje-Daro, made in the third millennium BCE, show her with a tiger, even changing into one.
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The most encountered descendant of this goddess is Middle Eastern Astarte (Babylonian Ishtar, Sumerian Inanna). As elsewhere, her temples hosted orgies and prostitution. The Greeks adopted Astarte under the name of Aphrodite (Latin Venus). The Israelites worshipped Astarte as Ashtoreth. In the vast world of Vedic India, the goddess evolved to Maha-Devi (‘great goddess’), but also to Uma, Gauri, Parvati, the beautiful Durga and the frightening Kali, and in Japan to Amaterasu.
To the Nubians she became the goddess we know only by her Egyptian name, Hathor. Hathor is represented as a cow, and during the New Kingdom seven Hathor by a cradle brought good luck to the newborn.203 The biblical Joseph saw those seven cows in a dream.
To the Phrygians the primeval goddess became Cybele, to the Syrians Atargate, to the Egyptians Aset. The Greek and Romans knew Aset as Isis. After she merged with Hathor, Isis was depicted as a black woman, sitting on a throne with a baby child on her lap. In this image she was revered in many Roman military encampments. When the Roman Empire turned to the Christian creed, the Holy Virgin Mary took her place, but the worship of Isis can still be traced by the distribution of her black Nubian skin on statuettes in former Roman camp-sites throughout Europe.
Forefathers and the religions of fear
Social patterns changed wherever forced labour was put in practice. More fortunate basic families evolved to households, organizing and controlling workforce. Households were the new molecules of society.
The primeval household is the prehistoric farm, dwelled by the husband, - a word meaning ‘master of the house’ - women, children, slaves and animals. Those households were the forebears of villages, townships, palaces, temples and monasteries. Ancient kingdoms and civilizations were built on households, rather than on territories. Households are organized around the wife’s labour, but is owned by the husband,. A master is not necessarily restricted to one household: the prophet Muhammad for instance slept each day of the week in another household, organized around another wife.
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In more humble households live unmarried kith and kin, servants, labourers, children made, found or bought, and the elderly. People stranded in households in various ways. Courting could lead to one leaving or another entering for some span of time. Poor devils, retarded buggers and hobos with no roof of their own, passed by when an extra hand was needed. They gladly accepted a meal for pay, and might stay around for shelter and live on leftovers as stray dogs, waiting for another stroke of luck. In the centre of the house are the fireplace and the pantry, often built in stone or mud, while the rest of the building largely depends on wealth. E. Le Roy Ladurie described a household in medieval South of France, with paltry cottages and shelters for animals and people, leaning onto the central lodge.204 In nineteenth century Salzburg a twenty-two years old girl was found living in a pig shed for years, her deformed legs never to walk again. In the same century, European ‘welfare’ foundations auctioned homeless children, exposed on tables in pubs soaked with tobacco and alcohol.
Prosperous households have patios with colonnades, ponds and refreshing fountains, servants, musicians and poets, and a large atrium where daily life goes on and visitors are received. Such households found all required personnel at the slave market or among dependants. Even house priests are hired or bought: wealthy Hindus today still hire Brahman priests for chef, to make sure dinner is made following religious prescription. Ancient households are linked to their masters in birth, life and death, in guilt and in honour. For that reason Orestes murdered his mother who had dishonoured his father. After the battle of Jericho one of the besiegers named Achan held back some of the spoil from the destroyed city. His household paid for it as a whole:
Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had: and they brought them unto the valley of Achor. [And they] burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones.205
Pakistan village women are sentenced to rape for the offence committed by a male family member. For the same reason 'honour killings claim an estimated 5,000 women worldwide every year in overwhelmingly patriarchal cultures. Family honour is a tangible value in these societies, and women are considered family property.'206 For that reason also, Saint Paul admonished the Christians of Corinth:
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A man indeed ought not to cover his head, inasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. 207
The Sumerians called a household é, followed by the name of the master (é-Ba’u was the temple of the god Ba’u). The Akkadians called it bîtum, the Egyptians Pr (Pr-Wsir was the temple of Osiris; Pr-Ao was ‘the Great Household’, and became the Hebrew ‘pharaoh’), the Hebrews called it Bêth (Bêth-Shemesh was the household of the sun,208 Heliopolis); the Greeks oikos, the Romans domus.
The basic family only survived in hamlets and in dispersed cabins, among slaves, serfs and labourers emerging from hunter-gatherers. It was only to spread again in industrial society, among day-labourers and industrial workers.
Households often have their own gods or guardian spirits, related to forefather worshipping, and call upon them for day-to-day prosperity. In ancient Rome, the master of the household was priest to those gods, the Penates (the name is related to ‘pantry’). In Egypt the dwarf Bes hid in the house and scared bad demons off with rattles and tambourines. In Slavic countries demons (Domovoi, Kaukas, Majahaldas, Majasgars) wandered about in the woods by day but, lured by a piece of bread and salt near the fireplace, entered for the night and hid behind the fire. Many households in India and eastern Asia have little shrines to honour their favourite house god.
In times of recession part of the households shrink or disappear, and slums along the cities’ fissures and margins grow to become ready cannon fodder for the labour market. Sometimes apartment blocks are erected to cleanse those slums: in ancient Roman cities, blocks up to eight floors provided room to sleep, while the streets below were the places to defecate and haggle a meal. After the French revolution, many European households had to lay off members, which caused the subsequent rise of restaurants and caterers. Since technology today allows to supply apartments with a cooking fire and sanitary fittings, even those can act as classical household: Naipaul describes small apartments in crowded Bombay, renting sleeping seats to single persons in search of a roof.209
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Hierarchical societies are lead by masters of households, the real citizens, who constitute only a very small portion of the population. It was the master of the household who studied the Upanishads in India (where he was called grihastha), or discussed politics in Greece. In smaller societies those masters gather to make decisions, as happened in ancient Athens and contemporary Punjabi villages; in larger societies only a selected group of masters – often the wealthier - had the right to speak up, as frequently came about in European history. The power of household masters was not at risk before the twentieth century, when the first women secured their right to vote.
Masters in ancient civilizations appear in the artworks of their times as beautiful, athletic people. Papyri however mention midget slaves holding up fat bellies and supporting head, and their corpulence made it fashionable as well as convenient to be carried around in sedan beds by a sufficient number of slaves, and to lie down at banquets. Reading about such banquets, we can only imagine that classical artworks show us the bodies of slaves with the heads of masters – which after all was the real relationship.
As households differentiated, various kinds of relations arose, and women could become master of their own household, though remaining dependent on the household of their husband. Occasionally such women even reached the highest ranks, but it is significant that female Pharaohs had to wear a fake beard in order to assume royal dignity.
Sometimes a master managed to assume wider power, and turn his peers into his vassals. Depending on the magnitude of the territory and the mass of submitted labourers, households could grow to places of perplexing size and luxury, surpassing the human scale in order to display the unlimited power of the ruler. Architects were pressed to build ever-wider arches, up to atriums impossible to live in, and harems grew above the capacity of a mortal man; every human scale was transcended to prove the super human properties of the sovereign, and transcendental religion became conceivable.
The social value of persons, based on the status of their place in a household, is summarized as follows in a Persian Zoroastrian ruling:
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A healer shall heal a priest for a holy blessing; he shall heal the master of a house for the value of an ox of low value; [..] he shall heal the wife of the master of a house for the value of a she-ass; [..] he shall heal an ox of high value for the value of an ox of average value; he shall heal an ox of average value for that of an ox of low value; he shall heal an ox of low value for the value of a sheep; he shall heal a sheep for the value of a meal of meat. If several healers offer themselves together, O Spitama Zarathustra! Namely, one who heals with the knife, one who heals with herbs, and one who heals with the holy word, it is this one who will best drive away sickness from the body of the faithful. 210
Ancestor worshipUntil only a few centuries ago, worship of deceased household masters was the paramount religious expression on earth. Ancestor worship is found only in labouring communities, and where the transition to labour is relatively recent, it is the oldest or even the only religious expression. Fear among humans is crucial to communities based on forced labour, and the most feared are the intangible, restive spirits of deceased masters. We feed on the harvest they sowed and inhabit the dwellings they built. James Frazer, thinking of primitive farmers, wrote that
The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron. 211
Forefathers are worshipped ever since primitive labour became organized around households. It was the most widespread and persistent religion ever, and enabled all male-god religions.
Ancestor worship often include celebrations on graveyards with food, drinks and music. The celebrated dead belong to the same ordinary world as living humans and demons. Hidden most of the time, they suggest secret power, and are prayed for help while never entirely trusted. Ancestor worship was the natural enemy of every centralizing religion.
The Christian Churches repeatedly condemned celebrations on graves, because ancestor worship was a major competitor. Saint Augustine was horrified when his Berber mother - yet a Catholic - went to the graveyards to celebrate with her forefathers. The Council of Hippo, in 393 CE, ordained that
No one may give the Eucharist to the bodies of the dead; for it is written “Take and eat.” But the bodies of the dead can neither “take” nor “eat.” 212
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Not before the ninth century CE, the ‘Day of the Dead’ was instated as a Christian feast to supplant the forefather cults of the European Iron Age. Yet, even later than the European Middle Ages, churchyards remained the scenery of the danse macabre or Totentanz. Ecstatic people danced, ate and drank in the company of the dead. Guy Marchand and Hans Holbain made engravings of the subject. Marchand reproduced the danse macabre, a decoration on the walls of the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris, demolished in the eighteenth century CE.
In early farming tribes, deceased chiefs were venerated as ancestors by the whole community, and sometimes entered the mythical world. As in all cultures, sacrifices and celebrations were organized to obtain their assistance. A graveyard prayer from the Ba-kongo, noted down by the Reverend Van Wing, goes:
I breed some chicken, the ferret takes it; I let a goat graze, the leopard lies in wait for it; and you want honours! How shall we pay this? Do you want us to go stealing? People will talk about you. Make things fruitful for all of us…
Following Hindu hymn is another instance of the bargaining nature of ancient religion. It starts with flattering Indra, but soon turns to business directly:
His power is matchless, matchless is his wisdom; chief, through their work, be some who drink the Soma,Those, Indra, who increase the lordly power, the firm heroic strength of thee the Giver. Therefore for thee are these abundant beakers Indra’s drink, stone-pressed juices held in ladles.Quaff them and satisfy therewith thy longing; then fix thy mind upon bestowing treasure. 213
If reasonable sacrifices and flattering pleas turned out unconvincing, people tried to get assistance the hard way. In India, obstinate rain gods were carried outside the temple and into the downpour, until they made it stop. European farmers threw over worshipped statuettes along the fields, and Japanese farmers flogged their gods, if labour yielded poorly.
In a village community, the forefather needed his offspring as much as the offspring hoped for the support of the forefather. In the Mahabharata the mighty gods sometimes give away their precarious forefather nature:
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the Vedas have been afflicted in the world of men by covetousness and error! For this, we have been struck with fear [..] we are about to descend to the level of human beings! In consequence of the cessation of all the rites of pious men, great distress will be our lot…214
Sometimes dreams or hallucinations allow a glance at the dark abode where the dead remain until their shade disappears behind the hundred-years horizon – their second and final death. To the North American Wishram they dwelled in a secret valley, sleeping during the day but dancing and singing at night. Frog, upholding moon for lantern, was their guard. One day Coyote killed Frog and blew out moon, but the dead refused to follow him to the valley of the living. In many myths, there is an island besides earth floating on the primeval ocean. This is the island where the sun rests at night, and invites some fortunate deceased to disembark. However, the most common abode for the shades of the dead to dwell is a gloomy labyrinth under the surface of the earth.
Although difficult to reach, those abodes are as real as other strange and hostile places. The ancient Greeks believed the entrance of Hades was in the little town of Levadhia, where the sources of Lethe and Mnemosyne were pointed out to curious tourists. The Japanese Izanagi and the Greek Orpheus travelled to the underworld through dark and steep passages to rescue their beloved. Neither succeeded, but Orpheus almost made it with his beloved Euridice, who limped along because she had died from a snakebite.
Dante also travelled an exhausting and dangerous path to arrive at the doors of Inferno, but remained an uninvolved witness. The fallen Achilles sent the message to Hercules that he would ‘rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground, than king of kings among the dead’. In the four thousand years old Gilgamesh epos, Enkidu was punished for slaying the Bull of Heaven and thrown in the Akkadian underworld:
The house where the dead dwell in total darkness,Where they drink dirt and eat stone,Where they wear feathers like birds,Where no light ever invades their everlasting darkness,Where the door and the lock of Hell is coated with thick dust.When I entered the House of Dust,On every side the crowns of kings were heaped…
A Zoroastrian text warns that tears slow down the deceased on his path to afterlife:
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it is not proper for others that they should utter an outcry, maintain grief, and make lamentation and weeping, because every tear that issues from the eyes becomes one drop of that river before the Chinwad bridge, and then the soul of that dead person remains at that place; it is difficult for it to make a passage there, and it is not able to pass over the Chinwad bridge.215
Corpses of departed Aztec kings were laid to rest in labyrinths beneath the temples. Pallid shades wandered amid their bones: some had sneaked into this underworld to commit a painless kind of suicide; others had managed to hide here from a gruesome death on the altar of the Sun.
But in all underworlds, dwellers silently await the oblivion that lies behind the hundred-years horizon.
GodsA number of forefathers, often emigration leaders, evolved to mythical founders and – in pace with the growing ambitions of their community - to world creators. In this manner powerful ancestors could evolve to male godheads, the religious doctrine prevailing until our times.
Rising kingdoms endowed their forefathers with growing power, while the worship of conquered populations was either destroyed, encapsulated it in the own mythology or driven back to the confinement of the houses. Ancestors of the powerful were revered more than others, and the remembrance of some traversed the hundred-years horizon to become the first male gods. The more society grew centralized, the more the deity was approached with awe. Eventually religions became essentially based on fear.
Forefathers of Chinese sovereigns, such as the Yellow and the Jade Emperor, turned into gods. Japanese emperors were descendants of the gods, until Hirohito renounced this claim in the aftermath of the Second World War. In Japanese Shinto religion, village deities are referred to as clan-ancestor (Uji-gami). In the Melanesian Bismarck Archipelago, the skull of the last deceased master of the household is placed above the door for protection. When the next master dies, the old skull is discarded and replaced by the more recent one.
The Polynesian gods are mythical forebears, like many gods elsewhere. In ancient Rome, the Lares, gods of the fields, were originally worshipped ancestors. In Harappan and Vedic culture, forefather heroes killed in battle became worshipped gods. In Hinduism the forebears, called Pitri, joined the gods to share
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immortality and offerings. The king of those forefathers is Yama, child of the union of a sun ray and the shadow of a beautiful woman, the first mortal on earth, Pitra-raja. Hindus, Romans, Christians and many others call their main gods ‘father’.
When a powerful and wealthy master died his possessions suddenly remained unprotected. To grab those assets (powers, tools, land, slaves, wives, children) was tempting but dangerous, because the deceased was still around in dreams and remembrance. To bury his possessions together with him probably reconciled the deceased, but also transferred power to his clerks, the guardians of the grave.
Funeral gifts could vary from a minimal symbolic gesture to the most rich and horrid sacrifices, in pace with the growing social inequity. In megalithic graves traces have been found of food, offered to the departed – an inexpensive gesture altogether – while in Egypt each new pharaoh was urged by his clerks to start, as soon as he accessed to the throne, with the building of a gigantic funeral temple, packed with riches to spend during afterlife. Long after the pharaoh had died, such palaces and temples would remain a political centre, a safe haven and something for a rainy day for those clerks.216
Temples Gods are very powerful but lazy by nature, and need to be flattered constantly. Their tasks are therefore taken up by humble clerks. Next to the usual business, like administrating properties and directing labour and commerce, a temple economy includes offerings to be accepted from the desperate poor as well as from victorious kings. Gifts are stored and redistributed. A symbolic part of the offering goes to the godhead, a predefined part goes to the priests and the bulk goes to the people during ritual festivals. Those feasts were linked to seasonal, natural and mythical events, and became the most effective propaganda for the clerkdom. To the labouring multitudes, they offered a too simple choice between praying and starving.
Accidental conditions and urgent pleas bestowed some forefather gods with a reputation in war (Krishna, Ares), other in abundance of crops (Dumuzi, Tammuz, Adonis), and still others started a career as an adventurous hero (Indra, Hercules). Whenever early civilizations spanned various cities, male and female gods entered in a mixture of associations, and political powers decided their status and character. Ares, Dionysus and Hermes all fell for the attractive Aphrodite; The
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dying Tammuz was aroused to life by Ishtar, and when Isis tried to resuscitate the murdered Osiris, she only managed to revive his penis, and became pregnant with Horus.
The invention of afterlife
Clerks are the counterparts of soldiers. Since no army can do without an ideological backup, clerks and soldiers cooperate in violent confrontations with the outer world.
Anticipation of unlimited loot and orgies was a major motivation for warriors, and fantastic stories about legendary victories and the ensuing bacchanals brought about myths of a great ordeal ending in the final victory. After this victory, no warrior would ever be short of gold, food, drinks or sex. Tempted by this prospect, famous warriors from the past would rise up from the dead and take part in the action.
This dream was for masters only. Of course, wives, children, servants and the whole retinue hoped to share in the benefits, as they had always been subject to the vicissitudes of the household they belonged to. But knowing too well that their chances depended on the prosperity and kindness of their master, they would patiently wait, and be grateful for whatever favour came about.
Before the seventh dynasty of Egypt few people doubted the most obvious: that it was sad to die and that everybody in due time vanishes. Life and death were accepted as a barter done. The deceased was a shadow under the surface of the earth, vanishing in time after the hundred-years horizon, with nothing to do in the mean time but haunting dreams in envy. In many primitive cultures, the decomposed body is buried a second time to proclaim the end of this phase.
The gatekeepers of the underworld protected the living from the dead, not the other way around. No matter how much the deceased was missed at first, after a short time his return would mean a catastrophic disruption of a society which had filled the gaps and redistributed the possessions he left behind. In the Sumerian myth of Ishtars descent, the goddess, at the door of the underworld, utters a very clear threat:
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“I will smash the door, I will shatter the bolt, I will smash the doorpost, I will move the doors, I will raise up the dead eating the living, so that the dead will outnumber the living.”
Lifetime was the same below as above the soil, because people in the underworld remained only as long as their nearest remembered them. The hostile nation of the dead did not outnumber the living – yet. The fear for vengeance is nonetheless reasonable and widespread. In one Psalm is written that God ‘has set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth’.217
Origenes and Evagrius both taught that the psalmist referred to subterranean demons. They were denounced at the Council of Constantinople of 553 CE, and today scholars prefer to interpret the text as a reference to the primeval ocean or chaos.
Pleasing gifts could make the time below the earth less tiresome, even appease anger, or express wilting but still tender love. The custom started out with everyday necessities, but gifts grew as masters became ever more enriched and honoured. In time they were completed with weaponry. In the Iron Age swords were often left near the body of the deceased, but were broken first to make sure that they should not be raised against their offspring. As kings became more powerful, the offers became more abhorrent. Ibn Fadlan, a traveler of the eighth century CE, noted how during the funeral of a German chief near the Volga River, a slave girl was drugged, raped by the company, then stabbed to dead and thrown in the burial ship. Mesopotamian graves testify of killings and burials of entire households. In Egyptian graves on the other hand all kinds of servants and labourers were present as statuettes called ushabti.
Repugnant paradiseBrave warriors were the first to be compensated with a cheerful afterlife, the cheapest incentive for heroes. No reasonable person would go to war just to crawl in mud with acute diarrhoea; be mutilated in different degrees, at stupid random; after much deprivation conquer a crutch or two; and finally be dumped together with all his chances, dreams and expectations. If war had to become more than a quarrel between a handful of enraged men, a completely new imagery was to be created. Stories were made up about exceptional brave soldiers, and kings with superhuman allure, getting away with every brutality. Fallen heroes were promised a separate, delightful hereafter, a brothel with unlimited free drinks and women.
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Celtic warriors threw their severely wounded comrades in a lake, and after some ritual sayings, the gods supposedly admitted them fully recovered to the endless orgy in Tir Na Nog. Fallen Germanic heroes entered Valhalla, where golden-haired Valkyries sang, danced, poured sweet wine and provided sexual pleasure, and Welsh warriors fallen in battle entered Anwnn with equal expectations. In Anwnn the Cauldron of Plenty, the mug of pleasure, would be stolen by king Arthur and become the Holy Grail. The Indic Vedas promised the virtuous a heaven in the company of swan maidens (Apsaras), and even Zoroastrianism promised to the righteous an encounter with religion in the form of a beautiful woman. The Koran says that there
will wait on them youths who will not age, carrying goblets and ewers and cups filled out of a flowing spring - no headache will they get there from. In this paradise they will get as companion fair maidens with wide, lovely eyes, like pearls well preserved, as a reward for what they did.218
In the Meccan sutra 78.33 those maidens are ‘round bosomed’, but in various English translations – for example those by Malik Ghulam Farid and Abduallah Yusuf Ali - the direct sexual hint is omitted.
Towards the end of the second millennium BCE, the old world civilizations collapsed under the pressure of invigorating migrations. Epic works as the Mahabharata and the Iliad testify of those catastrophes, which involved Chinese An-Yang, Vedic India, Mycene, Assyria and the Hittites. When uprooted populations went further south, even Egyptian Thebes fell.219
As the great temple economies could no longer organize feasts to hand out offerings as they had done for centuries, the common people had to survive on the minimal diet of daily bread. At this time clerks invented a new concept of offering: suffering itself was the real sacrifice now. After the way of soldiers, the real feast was postponed to the hereafter – and disbelievers would get nothing. In the new ideology, to get anything, one must desire nothing.
Now that the gods could no longer be persuaded with meat or other sacrifices, clerks declared that they had started to dislike worldly things. Clearly one of the worldly things the gods came to dislike most was humanity as such.
The Bhagavad Gita illustrates this where Arjuna, tired of the endless killing on the battlefield, is encouraged by Krishna:
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Who, unto friend and foe keeping an equal heart, with equal mind bears shame and glory; with an equal peace takes heat and cold, pleasure and pain; abides quit of desires, hears praise or calumny in passionless restraint, unmoved by each; linked by no ties to earth, steadfast in me, that man I love!220
Clement of Alexandria wrote that ‘what is superfluous, Scripture declares to be of the devil’ .221 And not so long ago Thomas a Kempis gave this upsetting message:
When you shall have come to the point where suffering is sweet and acceptable for the sake of Christ, then consider yourself fortunate, for you have found paradise on earth.222
Life on earth started to look like the perils of the battlefield, and like soldiers before, people were promised participation in the affluent life hereafter, as a reward for deprivation and faith. While life on earth got worse each generation, the sombre after-life improved, and a paradisical afterlife became the hope of the many that suffered daily life.
Only a violent society can make deprivation an ideal, and affluence a sin.
Prophets of misery appear as true idealists preaching sobriety as the only way to help the poor of which they sell postcards and posters. But while they claim to be moved emotionally by so much poverty, it would be their loss if there came ever and end to it, and they refrain from a serious investigation into the causes. They don’t see poverty and misery as aberrations to be countered, but as inevitable reality. They brand thinking otherwise as utopianism and as a cause of suffering in itself. At the same time welfare and aid have grown into institutes with rewarding careers, and an excuse for bureaucracies eager to control distribution of natural resources.
Nobody anywhere should give up the claim of an enjoyable life, material and otherwise – it is irresponsible towards yourself, your kin and humanity. And it is the most absurd thing to do. Ideologies should never succeed in submitting the whole human population to morally approved poverty. It is fair that every human being desires comfort and health, and the most important obstruction to this goal is a population driven by aggressive ideologies beyond the availability of resources to provide such comfort and health.
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Submission of women and children
Forced labour turned women and children into economical assets
Submission is what happens to plants and animals – like ourselves – living in confinement for generations. Submission turned wild boars into pigs and bulls into oxen. When women and children were submitted to forced labour, their lives changed tremendously. Still today, many women and children are kept in the confinement of their households. Barred windows of traditional Mediterranean houses rather resemble cages than shields.
As forced labour entered the family, women and children became the first slaves of the master of the house – the ‘husband’. This was a slow but staunch process: the more labour became enforced, the more women and children became a separate brand of humans isolated on the farmyard, while men rallied into hunting, fighting or palavering.
Throughout history, women have rather been bought by a household than that they married a spouse. The price of a woman was regulated in the Babylonian code of Hammurabi at about 2000 BCE. In the Bible the price is set at fifty shekels of silver.223 Also among German tribes marriage was buying a woman. Among African farmers, ‘a wife, her labour, and her children born’ are bought with cattle.224 Customs are similar in south and southwest Asia, among the Uzbeks of Central Asia, and among the Plains Indians of North America. Since women are bought, their owner has the right to use and chastise her at will: some American Indians used to cut off a wife’s nose as a reprimand, and only recently in modern societies men have lost the right of physical punishment.
Anthropologists have listed a variety of social structures, starting from societies dominated by men and linked to herding and farming, to societies dominated by women, hardly found anywhere. This view is rather inspired by a desire for symmetry than by observations in the
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field. Robin Fox, in the midst of the twentieth century CE, was too optimistic when he attributed this viewpoint to ‘early writers’ only:
Early writers called any system that looked to them as though ‘kinship was through females only’ either matriarchal or as a system of mother-right (to contrast with the patrilineal, patriarchal or father-right). This implied that power and authority were in the hands of women in such a system. This is, of course, simply not true. 225
The same desire for symmetry is also visible when scholars study the residence of a newly married couple (from ‘patrilocality’ to ‘matrilocality’) and the number of spouses, going from one man having more women (the common practice) and one woman having more men (hardly ever found, except when one counts in the sexual rights of male household members to the bride). Feminists tend to appreciate this unrealistic symmetry because it is reassuring that women in alternative societies could be more powerful, and because at least it is a rejection of biological determinism.
The work of Robin Fox quoted above lists over seventy different diagrams with lines, loops, dots, arrows and so on, all representing formal relations between men and women found in various societies. It reminds of the eighteenth century mathematicians who wanted to interpret the whole world geometrically, 226 but the similarity is superficial: anthropologists never agreed on one common interpretation as mathematicians do. It is less demanding to make an objective statement about say a triangle, than about social relations.
As all property, women could be given away, stolen, sold, bought, exchanged or discarded. And as all property, their handling could lead to conflicts, appeasement or alliances. Anthropologists have built whole schools on the theory that bands exchanged women to build alliances. But it makes no sense to single out alliance gifts from all other types of economical transactions, just because it has a nicer ring than steeling or barter. Women have been treated as an economical asset ever since the introduction of forced labour, plain and simple. Darius offered his daughter to Alexander in exchange for peace, and Lot offered both his virgin daughters to the men of Sodom to use them as they pleased, in order to save himself.
Primeval labouring societies deal with women and children in all the ways economical assets are dealt with, as long as they match the essentials of a worker and a breeder.
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When she is born in a labouring community, a woman is the possession of her father and his male kin. In many societies she is linked with the land she has to toil, which is often erroneously interpreted as a powerful position. This happens especially in societies where men stay absent for a long time – for warfare, hunting, .. – and leave the management of the household to their wives.227 In less sedentary societies like herding tribes, her new master takes her with him.
If the value of a woman is too high for a man to pay immediately, she might be kept in her own household, as an economic deposit to her father or brothers. Possibly the man will pay for her with services, and for that goal can go live in her father's household until his debt is settled. Only if the full price is paid - if ever - , the bride moves to her husband’s house. But in labouring cultures households produce children above the replacement level, and despite all nice traditions told, simple mathematics say that the usual new residency is not ‘matrilocal’ or ‘patrilocal’, but ‘neolocal’: the farmer looking to establish his own household will either claim grounds unwanted for farming before, or fight to steel someone other’s land.
In many cultures, when the husband dies the wife falls to brothers, sons, fathers or other male household members. In parts of India, brothers share the sexual convenience of their wives. It is wrong to say that this custom is a kind of male polygamy.
Bride price and dowry
In India, China, Japan, and most of South-east Asia, the bride price remains only for buying concubines.
Virginity and faithfulness of the wife is crucial to secure the household’s capital she really is. Families jealously guard the reputation of a daughter to secure her market value, even up to mutilation, and try to get the best price out of the transaction. To secure the trade value of a girl by guarding her virginity and by reducing her sexual desire, a hundred and thirty million women worldwide underwent genital mutilation, and approximately two million undergo the procedure every year. Female genital mutilation takes place in twenty-eight countries of Africa, in some regions of Asia and
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the Middle East, and in certain immigrant communities in North America, Europe and Australia. It is an extreme life-threatening, physical and psychological suffering. A recent survey of Egyptian girls and women showed ninety seven percent of uneducated families and sixty six percent of educated families are still practising clitoridectomy. In Morocco, prostitutes regularly attend the mutilation ceremony in order to relieve the sexual tensions generated, and with the Australian Pitta-Patta Aborigines, the mutilation is followed by group rape. Girls incapable of normal sexual behaviour – either by genital mutilation or by social pressure requiring ‘virginity’ –, often have to submit to anal penetration by relatives. All this stresses even more that those cruelties have nothing to do with chastity or morality, but everything with used car economics.
In Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Turkey, and other countries, women are killed by their father or brother when the investment she really is became worthless. This could be the case if she is suspected of adultery, of premarital relationships (sexually or not), of being raped, or of falling in love with a disapproved person. The murder is justified by the claim that the honour of the family must be uphold, meaning that the master of the household does not want be ridiculed at male get-togethers. In 1997 CE, more than three hundred women were victims of these so-called ‘honour’ crimes in just one province of Pakistan. In Jordan, the official toll is rising, while many murders are recorded as suicides or accidents. The penal codes in Jordan that govern ‘crimes of honour’ sanction killing by making the penalty disproportionately lenient, particularly if a girl is murdered by a brother under eighteen years of age. On the other hand, survivors of murder-attempts are put behind bars as a protective custody.
A dowry revalues daughters. It is forbidden for Muslims and restricted for Hindus. In Western society dowry can still be spotted in the uneven burden for the marriage laid on the bride’s household, which is expected to provide the furniture, to organize the wedding banquet and to buy expensive dresses.
Originally meant to secure or enhance the value of women on the market, dowries came to serve various purposes. Often a girl, mostly when she is a land labourer, comes with land dowry. Among kingdoms, princesses bringing dowry of land became a way to alter frontiers. Where less labour was required because of changes in
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crops or environment, as in India when rice substituted wheat from 3000 BCE on, the worth of women and children was subject to devaluation, and the dowry raised to compensate this evolution.
Dowry can pose a serious danger for the woman if she was only wanted for what she brought with her. Even though India has legally abolished dowry, a UNICEF report shows dowry-related violence is on the rise. Women are killed by their husbands and in-laws in ‘accidental’ kitchen fires if their ongoing demands for dowry before and after marriage are not met. An average of five women a day are burned in India, and many more cases go unreported. The human rights Commission of Pakistan reports that husbands and family members as a result of domestic disputes burn at least four women to death daily. In Japan, Mieko Yoshihama reports that murdering by a partner accounts for one third of their deaths, and violence is the second reason for wives to seek divorce. In most cases, recurrent violence is inflicted when the woman’s behaviour diverges from what is considered acceptable female behaviour - being submissive and catering to his desires.
In most countries, marriage gives a man the right to rape and abuse his wife. Unlimited sexual access and permanent terror by the male are considered normality. In Indian households, Junko Kozu reports, patriarchal values support female inferiority, and are transmitted to younger generations with family violence tolerated as a male right to control those dependent. A close correlation between domestic violence and suicide has been found in the USA, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Peru, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Suicide is twelve times as likely to have been attempted by a woman who has been abused than by one who has not. In the USA, as many as thirty to forty percent of battered women attempt suicide.
Sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and systematic differential access to food and medical care have led to the phenomenon known as the ‘missing millions’: an estimated sixty million women are simply missing from the population statistics. The phenomenon is spread over South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and China.
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Religion and prostitution, war and rape
The main industrial form of violence is warfare; the main ideological form of violence is religion. To their victims, a ruthless religious doctrine is as hard to escape as a ruthless military campaign.
Temple economies make no distinction between religious and profane institutions. Temple prostitution existed in Uruk, Babylon, India, Persia, Egypt, Lydia, Armenia and Greece, where Corinth was the most famous centre. In the sixth century BCE Solon officially established prostitution in Athens. Since he built a temple for Aphrodite at the same occasion, scholars must accept with pain that also Athens had temple prostitution.
In Vedic India as in Egypt during the Late Kingdom, wandering holy men had prostitutes with them to uplift their spectacles and provide earnings.
In the eighteenth century CE still one hundred prostitutes (devadasi) belonged to the temple at Indian Kanchipuram. A revival of this practice is reported from the Indian states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. When parents dedicate their seven or less year old daughter to the temple, the child is violated by the Hindu priest and then sold for sexual abuse or enrolled as temple dancer and prostitute. In northern Ghana and parts of Togo, girls are donated to priests, and are forced to live as ‘wives’ and submit sexually to the shrine priests in return for protection of the family.
Collective rape was and is frequent among soldiers. Military mass rape exists from long before the ten thousand women of Susa raped by the soldiers of Alexander the Great, and persisted through the hundreds of thousands ‘comfort women’ enslaved, raped and killed by the Imperial Japanese army, until the hundreds of thousands of women raped in armed conflicts during the two decades before and after the turn of the millennium, in Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan,… Women’s associations in North Africa found that in Algeria rape is used as a weapon by Islamic armed groups in the absence of laws to protect women. In a few years more than a thousand women were the victims of systematic and collective rape, and Women’s associations believe that other North African countries are similar.
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Western universities remained, until the sexual revolution of the sixties, male environments in which women slowly gained access, and as such were male bands resembling and romanticizing armies. Mass rapes attested for the American universities in that period resemble the rape cases in armies when isolated females sign on. It has also been an epidemic and spreads through ghetto-gangs since the second half of the twentieth century.
In September 2002 CE, BBC World News reported a woman convicted to collective rape by a village council in Pakistan, who also carried out the verdict themselves. This was the reimbursement for an alleged misdemeanour of her twelve-year-old brother. Since over six months hundred-and-fifty convictions to mass rape took place in the same region, it can hardly be held that uncontrollable sexual urge is the main motive.
In European capitals, boys offer their girlfriend to his gang in order to win prestige. First the girl needs to be alienated: she is thrown on the ground, kicked from all sides, pulled up by her hair, spit in her face. Only when she was depersonalised by disfiguring beatings, uninhibited rape can begin, while cellular phones are used to call in more comrades. The fast growing number of such events alarms Justice departments, and can be estimated to be one per week in the big European cities, or two thousand cases pro year in Western Europe. Where scientific research has been done, it turned out that two-thirds of the perpetrators belong various ethnic minorities, while three quarters of the victims are native European girls, who usually knew at least one of the rapists.228 No society should ever stretch cultural tolerance to the point where contempt for women is accepted. Multiculturalism leading to contempt of individuals is despicable and dangerous.
Children: an easy workforce, an easy sexual commodity
In the Roman Empire, a father decided over the life of his children, and could command his wife to make a redundant child disappear. German tribes allowed the killing a new child before it had sucked from its mother’s breast. Cathari in Europe and Jains in India killed
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newborn children slowly by feeding them only water. Throughout history, bodies of new-borns were found on dunghills, in canals, in pig grub. Of the numerous abandoned children raised in European nunneries, eighty percent died of deprivation. In New York today, lifeless bodies of new-borns are found on garbage piles each morning.
Among the ten- to fourteen-year-old children the working rate is around forty percent in Kenya, thirty percent in Senegal and Bangladesh, twenty five percent in Nigeria and Turkey, almost twenty percent in Côte d’Ivoire, Pakistan, Brazil and India, and around ten percent in China, Egypt, and Mexico.
In countries such as Colombia, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, armed rebels force children to serve as soldiers or recruit them with promises or threats. More than three hundred thousand children under the age of eighteen are enlisted as soldiers. The problem is most critical in Africa and Asia, though children are used as soldiers by governments and armed groups in many countries in the Americas, Europe and Middle East.
Lloyd DeMause estimates that at least sixty percent of girls and forty five percent of boys, aged two to sixteen, are victim of sexual abuse within US households.229 Though no reliable statistics are available, it is feared that numbers could be even higher in Europe. A parent or guardian is somehow implicated in over eighty percent of the cases. Often parents invite neighbours to sleep with their children, or look away when older brothers molest younger siblings, or leave children with babysitters after they discover evidence of molestation, possibly with a boyfriend involved. In Latin America, anthropologists report a great deal of sexual activity within households, and widespread pederasty as part of macho masculine behaviour. In Mexico, J. M. Carrier reported a large proportion of Mexican men having sexual relations with nephews, cousins or neighbours between the ages of six and nine. In most cultures, the child sleeps in the family bed for several years. By the time children are four or five, others members of the household take them to bed. This practice reminds of the customary free sexual access to brother’s wives in some areas in India.
Like many other early civilizations, Lloyd DeMause found, ancient China institutionalised pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of small boys to abuse them as sexual eunuchs, the
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marriage of young brides with a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution and the regular sexual abuse of child servants and slaves. Sexual abuse of adopted girls was said to be common. Parents would send their boys to aristocratic households for sexual services, and possibly would have cut off their boys’ genitals, which were carried with them in a jar. At least since the fourteenth century CE Japanese shudo resembled both India and China as institutionalised anal pederasty of boys by priests and monasteries as well as by samurai. Those boys sometimes were worshipped as gods incarnate, in religious cults similar to those of the cult of the Virgin in the West. Next to shudo exists temple prostitution of both boys and girls, and widespread child prostitution, including the ancient geisha system. Japanese brothels would force girls in sexual service when five to seven years old. In Thailand a survey of 1990 CE found that seventy five percent of Thai men had had sex with child prostitutes. The remainder of eastern Asia follows the same pattern.
Patrick Tierney described how a father sent his beautiful girl to the Inca in exchange for promotion when she was ten years of age. After her return she had lost her will to live (the family claimed out of happiness for the honour she was given). She and was buried alive as a religious sacrifice.230
The Middle East is not different. Abuse includes child concubinage, temple prostitution, child prostitution, sex slavery and so on. In the oasis of Siwa mothers regularly offer their boys for sex to older men, both related and outside the family, and fathers regularly lend their young sons to each other, similar to the Central Asian tradition of bacaboz, where fathers trade their sons with others. Muslim holy men (imam) regularly have boys available for sex, saying the ingestion of the imam’s semen is necessary for absorbing his spiritual powers. One report found that four out of five Middle Eastern women recalled having been forced into fellatio between the ages of three and six by older brothers and other relatives. As in eastern Asia, young servants are particularly favoured sexual objects when wives are absent, menstruating, pregnant or frigid. Adolescents sometimes feel less guilty having sex with servant girls than with their sisters. Still recently the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini bluntly ordained that
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a man however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine, other sexual act such as foreplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed. A man having intercourse with a girl younger than nine years of age has not committed a crime, but only an infraction, if the girl is not permanently damaged.231
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Slavery
Commonness of slavery
Slavery is prevalent in labouring societies, in all times and on all continents. It existed in Africa, Asia and the Americas long before Europeans arrived. It was prominent in the classical world and persisted among Jews, Christians and Muslims.
To make slaves means more than to force people to work against their will. The victim must be dehumanised, alienated from the governing society, and framed in a world-image of infallible social order. A whole structure of ritual terror, torture, punishment and humiliation is necessary to keep the institute of forced labour in existence. Violence is the necessary ritual of disparity: the whip is not only a tool to regulate work speed, it is also a defining, clarifying instrument. Even when slave traders in all times could have made more money by treating their cargo more carefully, they rather took the loss of large numbers dying on transport and on the workplace, than to risk bigger damage by tolerating the faintest doubt on the slave’s nature and status. All world religions emerged in societies based on genuine slavery and endorsed the institution.
A slave is a human body, and his master has the right to handle this body as he pleases. Therefore a slave is a sexual object as such. In the ancient Middle East, international trade in young girls was as important as the trade in oil and wine, and the Ptolemaic Pharaohs imported large numbers of children for prostitution. The Roman word for slave merchant, ‘Leno’, is still used in modern Italian for ‘pimp’. The Koran learns that intercourse with married women is forbidden, ‘except such as your right hands possess’, meaning slaves.232 When Satyakama wanted to become a Brahman, he needed to know his cast and asked his mother from what family he was. She answered:
in my youth, I was poor and served many masters, and then I had thee: I therefore do not know of what family thou art…233
In the confinement of the household, secrecy indeed boosts the sexual liberty of the master of the house. It is this demand for secrecy
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that we know as cultural chastity. Public indecent behaviour of a woman scares and humiliates her husband, not only because his goods are smudged before his eyes, but even more because the secrets of his mind are publicly exposed.
Generations of bible readers must have sensed the imagery of the forbidden three of knowledge as the shameful secrecy of their own household. Eve was punished with shame before other things: ‘the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked’. Yet she was only a very young girl lured by a sweet fruit, and as often happens, behind the sweet raised a huge snake, the father’s terrifying penis.
The Victorian age was the pinnacle of Christian piety, of slavery and of clandestine sexuality all at once. The triad declined since in the West, but gains ground again: today Islam, in Asian and African countries, succeeds side by side with suppression and abuse of children and women, and with public rage against sexual tolerance.
Because of those sexual implications, medieval texts and paintings report little on the existence of slaves in Christian Europe. We sometimes perceive a glance however, as when in a stage play, cited by Burke, a character blames his mother of taking a black man in her home after her husband died, or in a painting as the Garden of delights, a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch at the Prado in Madrid. Captured in the obligate religious setting, the main panel presents a garden filled with extravagant flowers, birds, fountains and gazebos. In this scenery elegant naked youngsters, blacks and whites, are strolling, chatting, laughing, swimming or making love.
Slavery is alienating, because a person performs the acts of someone else; the slave is a despicable body for a hostile soul. This alienation increases further when slaves are taken away from their land, where friends could have helped to escape and provide cover, and are conveyed to live in a strange and hostile community. The very first long distance trade was marked by slave routes, along the African west coast to Mesopotamia, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, along the North African oases, and finally across the Atlantic Ocean. Celtic chiefs sold their subjects to the Romans, as African chiefs sold their subjects to Christians and Muslims. Assyrian law allowed a husband to sell his wife or child in slavery. Indians in both Americas hunted other Indians for slaves, a number of them to be ritually tortured, killed and devoured - hence the Slave Indians and the Slave
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Lakes. In the nineteenth century CE, Cherokees, Choctaws and Creeks together owned about ten thousand black slaves.234
Native slaves are often alienated by social death instead of deportation. In Europe, one ritual inflicting social death was the court of justice, and rulers repeatedly pressed the courts, with success, to provide more working forces. As their appearance did not differ from their masters, the slaves needed to be distinguished with a lifelong mark. In France, Russia and the Unites states, branding was practised until the nineteenth century.
The most alienated slave might be the eunuch. Literally cut off from his kinship, stinking because of incontinence, mocked for his weight and fatuous walk, he has no one left but his master. This made him a valued servant in palaces in Imperial China, in Christian Byzantium and in many Muslim Caliphates.
Commonness of slave revolts
Although slavery has been common most of history, it was never normal.
Wherever records allow a closer study, one finds that bondage always led to revolts. Masters always tried to conceal insurrections to avoid imitation: slaves must believe that, in Aristotle’s words, they were slaves by nature. But no human ever submitted definitively to a master, and slavery was never a given and indubitable institution, firmly locked in the so-called spirit of the age.
Chronicles from ancient Mesopotamia talk about insurrections of slaves in the marshlands of the Tigris delta, and numerous revolts in China led, since the eighteenth century CE, to the restriction of slavery to women only. The Romans had to withdraw a decision to impose uniform clothing on all slaves out of fear for mass rallies.
RomeIn the second century BCE a slave revolt broke out in Sicily when a master named Damophilus abused his slaves to excess
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and his wife Megallis vied even with her husband in punishing the slaves and in her general inhumanity towards them. The slaves, reduced by this degrading treatment to the level of brutes, conspired to revolt and to murder their masters.235
Lead by a fire-eater named Eunus some four hundred slaves marched to the city of Enna and killed everyone on their way. Their masters were discovered in a hideout and dragged into the city’s theatre. Damophilus was executed; his wife Megallis was given to her maidservants ‘to deal with as they might wish’. She was tortured and thrown off a cliff. The rebels only showed mercy to their daughter
and this was because of her kindly nature, in that to the extent of her power she was always compassionate and ready to succour the slaves. Thereby it was demonstrated that the others were treated as they were, not because of some natural savagery of slaves, but rather in revenge for wrongs previously received.236
As the revolt spread, Eunus assumed kingship and appointed a council; in a few days the crowd grew to twenty thousand rebels, of which six thousand got armed. Soon they repelled an attack by eight thousand Roman soldiers. The revolt expanded throughout central and southern Sicily. It took the Roman consul three years to defeat the slave army, by then already seventy thousand men strong:
Many armies were cut to pieces by the rebels, until Rupilius, the Roman commander, recovered Tauromenium for the Romans by placing it under strict siege and confining the rebels under conditions of unspeakable duress and famine: conditions such that, beginning by eating the children, they progressed to the women, and did not altogether abstain even from eating one another.237
Eunus was captured and died in prison ‘where his flesh disintegrated into a mass of lice’. Many followed his example. At Minturnae four hundred and fifty slaves were crucified, and at Sinuessa four thousand rebels were crushed by the Roman army. In the Athenian mines an uprising was broken, and another uprising was crushed by the citizens of Delos.238 At Nuceria thirty slaves formed a conspiracy and were promptly punished; at Capua two hundred rose in insurrection and were crushed. Then a Roman knight named Titus Minucius fell in love with a slave girl. As he could not pay for her freedom, he chose the side of the slaves and organized a revolt of four thousand infantry and four hundred cavalry.239
In 104 BCE the Cimbri, fleeing overpopulated Denmark, threatened the Roman borders. Suffering from a shortage of soldiers, the Senate decreed to free enslaved citizens in order to be drafted. After the
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liberation of eight hundred slaves in Sicily, impatience and hope flared a new revolt. Thousands of slaves, this time joined by pauperised freemen, ravaged the country. After four years of Roman onslaughts, ten thousand rebels were decimated to a thousand, who eventually surrendered and were taken to Rome to fight with wild animals. This however never happened:
They avoided combat with the beasts and cut one another down at the public altars, [their leader] Satyrus himself slaying the last man. Then he, as the final survivor, died heroically by his own hand. Such was the dramatic conclusion of the Sicilian Slave War...240
In 73 BC some seventy gladiators, Gauls and Thracians, escaped, seized weaponry and took cover on the hill slopes of mount Vesuvius. Their leader was a Thracian slave from a nomad tribe. His name, Spartacus, would become a revolutionary symbol.
When he first came to be sold at Rome, they say a snake coiled itself upon his face as he lay asleep, and his wife, who at this latter time also accompanied him in his flight, his country- woman, a kind of prophetess, and one of those possessed with the bacchanal frenzy, declared that it was a sign portending great and formidable power to him with no happy event.241
Slaves and impoverished people from everywhere joined the rebels who grew to nearly a hundred thousand and spread all over Southern Italy. While Spartacus made plans to reach Sicily to rekindle there the recent slave war, Roman armies were called back from the Spanish and Thracian borders to assist in battle. All but a few thousand of the rebels were slain. The remaining were crucified along the road from Capua to Rome, but the Romans realized that the largest threat to Rome ever had not come from foreign armies, but from lowly slaves:
But the war raised by the efforts of Spartacus I know not by what name to call, for the soldiers in it were slaves, and the commanders gladiators; the former being persons of the meanest condition, and the latter men of the worst character, and adding to the calamity of their profession by its contemptibility 242
AmericaFifty five rebellions of black slaves during their transport to America have been documented.
The Caribbean has known a continuous history of slave revolts from the sixteenth century CE on. In 1804 CE, through a revolt against Napoleon, Haiti was made the first black republic. Half a million slaves became free citizens.
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Among Brazilian slaves the branding of runaways became a sign of honour - when the slave holders realized this, they replaced branding by cutting the Achilles heel. In the seventeenth century CE, Brazilian runaways founded free republics – quilombos - in the distant province of Alagoas. In those republics runaways lived as free men who captured slaves themselves. Palmares, a federation of ten quilimbos, could only be submitted by the Portuguese after fierce warfare.
In the USA, hundreds of uprisings were counted in the eighteenth and nineteenth century CE. In the summer of 1800 CE a rebellion of a thousand slaves ended with the hanging of thirty-seven of them, while another thirty-two were banned. In 1822 CE nine thousand slaves rebelled in South Carolina. In 1831 in Southampton, six slaves killed fifty-seven whites. They soon were joined by seventy more. All were chased for days by a posse of volunteers and were eventually killed. North American Indians like the Chickasaws made good money as runaway catchers. In 1842 CE more than twenty-five black slaves of Cherokee Indians locked their masters and overseers in their houses and headed toward Mexico. On the way slaves of the Creek Indians joined them, increasing the number to thirty-five men, women and children. Cherokees and Creeks organized a posse but returned empty-handed after two days of severe fighting. The blacks continued towards Mexico and killed two slave hunters – a white man and a Delaware Indian – on their way. After they freed eight more black slaves a new posse of a hundred men captured them all.243
Christianity and slavery
Aristotle, since the Middle Ages fully integrated in Christian ideology, and still valued highly today, regarded the slave as a part of his master’s body. His vision was of course rooted in the world order of his time:
[that] which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave.244
The bible recommends using violence towards slaves:a slave cannot be corrected by words alone: he listens, but does not respond.245
And
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if a man pampers his slave from youth, he will bring grief in the end.246
If the battered slave dies from this brutality after a few days of agony the chastising master is not to blame:
if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continues [living] a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.247
Saint Paul, one of the first Christian leaders, had studied the bible as well as the work of Aristotle. He admonished Christian slaves to
be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart.248
And tocount their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed.249
Whenever his missionaries became confronted with insubordination they were expected to
exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things; not answering again; not purloining, but shewing all good fidelity; that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things.250
Many Christians, convoked by the Roman authorities to bring an offer to the emperor, saved their soul by sending a slave. Peter of Alexandria, in the third century CE, urged to discipline those slaves anyway:
the slaves indeed as being in their master’s hands, and in a manner themselves also in the custody of their masters, and being threatened by them, and from their fear having come to this pass and having lapsed, shall during the year show forth the works of penitence.251
The Council of Gangra, in the fourth century CE, confirmed once more the official Christian viewpoint by condemning bishop Eustathius for criticizing slavery. The council ordained that
if any one shall teach a slave, under pretext of piety, to despise his master and to run away from his service, and not to serve his own master with good will and all honour, let him be anathema.
Slaves in a feudal society are called serfs, and most literature on the subject emphasize that there is a big difference between ruthless unchristian slavery and the more ‘humane’ (Christian) serfdom.
One widespread hoax is that serfs lived under a social contract of ‘reciprocity under divine protection’. Priests prayed for the community, knights fought for the community, and serfs laboured for the
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community. In reality the serfs took little advantage of praying priests, and had a lot to suffer of fighting knights. Serfs were really plain slaves, and like other slaves they were owned, disdained, underfed, unprotected and abused, also sexually.
It is claimed that serfs, as opposed to other slaves, could have their own property. This is however based on a wrong presumption about slavery. Harvard sociology professor Patterson noted:
I know of no slave society in which slaves who could afford them were denied the purchase of slaves. The fact may be surprising at first, but on further reflection it ceases to be so. If slaves were the extension of a man’s person and honour, so were his slave’s slaves.252
The only difference between slaves and 'serfs' is the way slavery is carried out in a feudal economy and in a mercantile economy. Feudalism is based on land ownership, and slaves are normally sold with the land, but not always: in 755 CE the Bishop of Mains complained that a priest had traded a family of five serfs (or slaves) of the Church for a horse.253 His complaint was of course about the theft of slaves, not about their treatment. Mercantilism on the other hand is based on trade, and slaves are traded like other goods. In Europe and elsewhere, chattel slavery grew when serf slavery faded, but forced labour as a whole remained or grew. Anyhow, the difference between slaves and 'serfs' is less important than the difference between two slaves in any society. Slaves (including serfs) could have property, but their lives, their possessions and their positions remained always at the mercy of their master. In the European Middle Ages, all judicial and property documents were written in Latin, and the word ‘servus’ meant simply ‘slave’. The translation into ‘serf’ (for the Christian Middle Ages) or into ‘slave’ (for non-Christian societies) is at the discretion of the historian and depends on the picture he wants to draw.
In Medieval and Atlantic times, more than one out of six people living in Europe were slaves. Since Charlemagne Slavs were raided and sold through Venice and Sicily. Numbers are not available, but the brutality deployed by the Holy Roman empire and the fact that only the Slavs were not Christianized (it was forbidden to enslave Christians) suggests the worst.
When Christians regained territory from the Moors, as happened in 1287CE Majorca, captive Muslims were sold at the market place together with their former slaves. In 1438 CE, the Catholic queen of
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Aragon sent a letter to the Muslim king of Tunis requesting a tax-free passage for six black females. Since the queen had thousands of European men and women of all skills at her disposal, the writing suggests that the ancestors of Naomi Campbell were wanted as a luxurious erotic commodity – not surprising in a civilization that had always vilified the sexuality of its own population.
Slaves were exported from Spain to France and Italy. In 1454 CE Pope Nicolas V wrote a letter to King Alfonso of Portugal, expressing his enthusiasm that so many enemies of Christ were being enslaved. Among the slaves sold on a market of Barcelona in 1489 CE were an African and his two-year-old daughter.
When Eustace de la Fosse, a Flemish trader, moored at West African Malaquette in 1467 CE, he found his ship surrounded by prawns of natives offering their families for sale. The price for one woman and a child was a shaving basin and a few brass rings. Of course he accepted the offer, and sold the victims in Sao Jorge de Mina for gold washed from the Niger River. A few years later, African kings delivered their subjects directly to European sovereigns: the king of Senegal traded twelve slaves for one horse. From 1517 CE on, Charles I of Spain started shipping African slaves to America, where Indian slaves had died in great numbers of smallpox.
Towards the midst of the nineteenth century CE, when the Abolishment Movement rose, some five million slaves were owned by Christians in the USA alone. In Britain and the USA the established churches severely attacked the movement while citing the Holy Scriptures in their support. Opponents like William Wilberforce and Thomas Paine were savagely attacked by the churches for intending to outsmart the Bible.254 Ministers of the Christian faith wrote half of all defences of slavery published in America.255
Slavery in the twenty first century
Today at least 27 million people, coming from all continents, live in slavery. This is more than twice the number of all the blacks trafficked to the Americas.256
More than two million women and children are trafficked each year across international borders. Some, often only seven years of age,
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are forced to labour in sex industries where they suffer physical and mental abuse and are exposed to disease, including infection by the HIV virus, or work as household slaves for ten to seventeen hours a day, and in the remaining time are sexually abused and mutilated.
Destitute families frequently hire out or sell their children, who may then be forced into prostitution. Very often, the young girl is handed over as a domestic worker, in which case her masters will physically and sexually exploit her.
In Haiti the number of restaviks, little children sold by their parents as household slaves, is estimated two hundred and fifty thousand. The motivation for hiring restaviks as young as four to ten years old, is that they can easily be intimidated and trained to be particularly docile – an asset valued above the work efficiency of somewhat older servants.
In West Africa – from Senegal to Nigeria – tens of thousands of children of destitute families are reportedly sent to the Middle East each year, many of them ending up as prostitutes. Children are stolen or purchased from their parents for about fifty dollars, and sold for a tenfold as sex and household slaves. On a market in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), investigators of the BBC magazine Today discovered a “maid market” - a ramshackle, corrugated iron and wood shack where human beings were bought and sold. Teenage girls, posing serenely on long benches, can be bought for less than ten dollars. The trafficking of children from English-speaking West African states, such as Nigeria, was on an even greater scale.
Victoria Climbié, who was taken from Abidjan to Britain by her aunt at the age of eight, was tied up and forced to lie naked in a freezing cold bath in winter and was beaten and burned. When she died, after seven months of torture, she had one hundred and twenty eight injuries on her body. Ten thousand other West African children are living with strangers in the United Kingdom. One was brought to Britain from Benin by a stranger at the age of ten and worked seventeen hours a day for ten years. She was regularly beaten and starved, sometimes for days on end. When she asked why she had been brought to Britain, she was told it was “business” - meaning the woman could claim child benefits. An African boy of thirteen was taken by a white friend of his father to Italy. For three years he was a sex slave to the man and his paedophile friends. He was beaten daily and forced to eat cat food.
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Traffickers lure people from China, the Philippines, Bangladesh and other nations to the northern Mariana Islands, a USA territory promising lucrative work. Instead, many are forced into slave labour and prostitution.257
A press release by the Indian Concerned for Working Children of November 2001 CE proudly announced that a freed fifteen-year-old girl had received a compensation of a humiliating one thousand dollars. The unusual victory was due to the fact that the scars and burn marks on her body were undeniable.
Worldwide two hundred million children between the ages of five and fourteen are forced to work, and some fifty to sixty million between the ages of five and eleven are engaged in intolerable, hazardous forms of labour. Hundreds of thousands of girls, approximately ten per cent of the child labour force, work long days as domestic workers in an environment where beatings, insults and sexual harassment are all too common.
In South Africa, organized child prostitution is on the rise. In certain hill districts of Nepal, prostitution has become a traditional source of income. Women and girls are tricked or forced by their husbands and relatives into being trafficked to India for prostitution. In the impoverished areas of Thailand, where poverty has given rise to the phenomenon of debt bondage, it is regarded as the daughter’s duty to sacrifice her self for the well being of her family.
In many eastern Asiatic countries, children are kidnapped to serve in brothels in Thailand. After a few years some are sold to Western networks while others, whose youth did not withstand rape, maltreatment and hardship, are discarded in slums where no tourists dare to go. At slave markets in Pakistan girls are sold for sixteen dollars, boys for half that price. Many hundreds of thousands work as slaves in sex dens and the carpet industry. Their destiny is not all that different from the two hundred million children, from eight years on, that work for eighteen hours, under thread of flogging, in sweat shops to produce clothing sold on the European and US markets.
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Cultural violence
When shortage is endemic, violence becomes cultural
Omitting a few occasional upsurges like psychopaths or earthquakes, violence is a battle for life necessities like food, space and water. Hyenas, vultures or humans will fight for a carrion, not for nothing.
When forced procreation degrades society so profoundly that it becomes drenched with violent conflicts, within as well as with other societies, ideology makes violence a cultural merit, an honourable duty, and peace is equated with cowardice and treason.
If shortage is temporary, violence is momentary. If shortage is chronic, violence is momentous. If shortage is endemic, violence is cultural.
OriginsAmong the few foraging cultures surviving up to recent centuries, collective violence between humans was virtually absent. In all societies where the economy is still a mix of foraging and labour, violence is more prevalent where labour is more important.
Searches of Old Stone Age sites have never yielded convincing traces of massive violence between humans. Of the many hundreds of prehistoric artworks found all over the world, those produced before forced labour do not show one single image of a human being hurt by other humans. Artworks created however during the last ten thousand years, when forced labour spread, is interspersed by fighting, killing and torturing scenes.
It is hard to imagine - it should not be - that people like us have lived without major violence for ninety-five percent of their existence. Occasional violence might have existed, but the pandemic of coercion, humiliation, submission, expulsion and slaughter, only exists on our planet since ten thousand years and has grown ever since. It was unknown for millions of years, and was never witnessed
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in other vertebrates. It is a strange, exceptional situation, dangerous to the living and – because of the immense brutal force of its weapons - to life itself.
Tradition of violence
In cultures accustomed to war and repression for a long time, young boys grow up as daredevils playing with danger for fun, and believe that risks with less than two percent probability belong to the category of ‘bad luck’ only happening to others. This is demonstrated daily in automobile traffic, sports, cigarette smoking and so on, but becomes a useful asset in war, where this defying death without dying is conveniently designated as courage. But even in high-risk situations, youngsters conditioned for violence hold on to the slightest chance, if necessary a chance to afterlife. As one kamikaze pilot, his intelligence not up to his courage, expressed it: ‘there was always one percent chance that we would survive - that kept us going’.
Aggression is passed from generation to generation. Youths naturally try to learn successful behaviour from the surrounding society by catching images and emotions. It is not important if those images are considered real, like a news programme or a fight in the neighbourhood, or mere fantasy, like the Iliad or The Chainsaw Massacre. It is better that youngsters see The Chainsaw Massacre in an esteemed company despising the movie, or in a despised company approving the movie, than reading the Iliad surrounded by respected mentors glorifying the depicted wars and heroes. Isolated images have no meaning. The effect of violence, in the media and elsewhere, depends in the first place on associated emotional messages. Those associated messages do not necessarily originate in the immediate environment. They can cross distances and periods of time. A child in Connecticut or Tehran can have heard patriotic stories told by a beloved grandmother, and those stories can condition perception of news years later in a distant, desolate hotel room. Many scientific studies about the effect of violence in the media have been hampered because this effect was not taken into account.
Young people are told that it is an honour to die for their country by people expecting to survive and gain prestige, power or fortune themselves, but also by adversaries – even more so if those
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adversaries possess powerful media. American Rambo movies for example, with their recurring plot of one invincible soldier miraculously surviving suicide missions, are dubbed, copied and viewed and understood with enthusiasm in various countries hostile to their producers.
From desert hamlets to modern cities children, by nature longing for adults to follow, are given for examples the renown psychopaths of history, and they waggle towards their destruction, like geese chicks coming out of their eggs waggle behind the first one in sight. They learn to love guns and explosions, and the rest is tricky timing: if the gun goes off too soon, they are put away as murderers; otherwise they are ready for enlistment, and their name might end on one of those pointless stonewalls with names, erected ever since primitive cities burned each other down. And the walls become ever bigger, and the letters ever smaller.
Occasionally youngsters erupt in shoot-outs, and murder teachers, students, bystanders, and themselves. The cause of this madness lies not in video-games or in modern society: there is nothing surprising in a young boy entering a school yard and killing everyone on his path if he lives in a society where fire arms are a glorified status symbol; where TV channels show the blasting of village houses and he bombardment of crowded cities as a triviality, not even without regret or pity, but with pride; where generals become heroes by leading the killing of thousands of innocents while hiding in safe quarters themselves, and political leaders are celebrated if they are prepared to wage war even for the pettiest advantage, always at the cost of the lives and misery of uncounted civilians and hundreds of their own stupid but loyal soldiers.
If violence is cultural, conditioning of children can not be countered in a few lessons or reprimands. The only forces up to indoctrination is the creation of a milieu that disapproves violence, and the continuous interaction with as many other cultures as possible.
Numerous governmental and non-governmental programs have lost millions on 'education' projects. But a structurally violent society spends at the same time more millions on arms and ideological indoctrination. The latter is hardly noticed, if not secret, but even the unseen budget for propaganda is always proportional to the military budget.
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You can not honour veterans, threaten with warfare, sanctify national interest above human life, attack countries or support aggressors, and spent billions on weaponry and then think that with a few leaflets and street theatre you can divert youth from becoming violent themselves – if you ever would want to, because it makes no sense building weapons and at the same time raise yought to non-violence. To knock down urban riots at regular intervals then becomes just weeding the garden where new aggressive soldiers are bred. A country that goes for its own interests abroad can not convincingly tell youngsters in the barrios they must respect other's properties.
Executions, carnivals, masses
Cultural violence appears in many forms. Roman culture, the classic example, was in constant war with invaders, as well as with rebels impoverished in order to supply the army. As a consequence, violence became sanctified and celebrated in religion, festivals and circuses. In the same manner, British hooliganism is in line with the glorification of warfare in British society, and with the militarist jargon pervading common speech.
Overpopulation leads to scarcity, boredom, anxiety and frustration. Kindled by propaganda for violence in politics and warfare, this leads to riots, vandalism, gang rapes and other kinds of ‘pointless violence’. If a society can not afford to reject violence, it tries to redirect aggression to convenient social occasions like festivals, public rituals, trials and executions, sports competitions, automobile traffic and warfare.
Cultural aggression is easily represented as accidental debaucheries by social outcasts or alienated subcultures - elegant pockets in a culture’s coat, in which its shameful necessities are hidden. But the machinery of society is indiscernible if not the whole image is taken into account, including what is officially rejected and yet endured.258
Societies could not possibly function as they do without those eruptions, no matter how loathed verbally by the well-established part of the population.
Until the nineteenth century, there was no clear distinction between popular carnivals and public punishments and executions, while fairs
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in general were occasions for settlement and cruelty among the mobs.
Market places were always crowded with public eager to see burnings, hangings or decapitations. The difference between capital punishment and human sacrifice is very hazy: in both cases the execution follows a ritual and satisfies a raged crowd craving for thrills and looking for the reinstatement of a real or imagined balance. The public at European decapitations secretly secured pieces of the corpse for cooking, and the Aztecs sacrificed thousands of war captives by tearing out their harts alive to offer it to the sun god; then the corpses were thrown at the excited masses for consumption. Cannibalism is not a tradition in well-defined exotic tribes or in French cuisine, but, as Marvin Harris has demonstrated, it is possible in every society where animal meat is scarce, and is predictable worldwide if human population keeps growing.
In medieval Europe heretics were burned at the stake because the Holy Church does not spill blood. Convicts were carefully dressed for the show, possibly wearing only an iron penis case making the burning even more painful, and adding more excitement to the spectacle when the heat reached the metal. In Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto-da-fé, a fifteenth century painting by Berrugete, the convicts wear only an iron penis case to make the burning even more painful and a more exciting spectacle when the heat reaches the metal.259 Public arousal at hangings was of such extend, that women had to be buried alive instead of hanged because of decency. Decapitation by a wooden sword was another medieval spectacle that drew spectators from afar.
Many communities have festival days on which violent crimes are silently allowed. Public authority was suspended or altered for the time of the feast, and faces were hidden behind masks. From France to the Andes, women and children locked themselves up in their homes on those days, while the others left for rhythmic dancing and intoxication until mastered by the flush of savage revelry. Next morning the corpses were silently gathered. These could be random victims of postponed aggression, or shunned members of a close community. The latter must have felt the mood and waited for the day of feast in terror, and at the last moment tried in vain to redirect the attention of a slowly nearing mob to another victim – but by doing so only yelling for his own execution. Sometimes a sudden Roman
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holiday raged through the streets, attacking groups of neighbours by hazard or intrigue. While the blood was wiped from the village streets, festivals where concluded with an offering as atonement or satisfaction, in Christian cultures with confession and absolution, wiping the blood also from memory. Peter Burke has found that in sixteenth century Venice, seventeen were killed on one Shrove Sunday, which suggests thousands of victims – and many more injured – each year throughout Europe.260 At the same time Americans complained that their festivals were much more violent than those of the old world.
Women and children barricaded in their dwellings, were not always safe. On many places the intrudo – breaking into houses and molesting the habitants – was an accepted tradition during festivals.
In the village of Courmenterral, in Southern France, the Jour des Pailhasses is still celebrated once a year. The name of Pailhasses refers to the habit to wear for armour a bag with armholes, firmly stuffed with straw (paille). The straw served as a protection for the battle in the night to come. Until the sixteenth century the same tradition is traceable in the Ardennes city of Binche, which suggests that the practice was spread over the whole of rural Europe. To celebrate the Spanish conquest of Peru, Mary of Hungary, who resided in Binche, ordered a feast in 1549 CE. The local pailhasses were presented in new clothes inspired by Peruvian custom, still known as Gilles today, after the famous composer Gilles de Binche who had lived a century before. The Gilles now throw oranges at grateful tourists, instead of beetroots and stones, and few people know why they still stuff their laborious clothes with straw. The name pailhasse is still a common term of abuse, though its original meaning, ‘straw harness’, has been forgotten.
Animals: betrayed companions, ravaged machines
In the seventeenth century CE, Descartes propagated that animals are only automatons, with no real mind or feeling. This theory has never been accepted entirely by neither scientific nor religious authorities. Yet the new imagery spread rapidly in an economy which leaned heavily on animal labour, and was increasingly subjected to harsh competition. If animals were really machines, their labour could
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be intensified to the very limit, denying or ignoring symptoms of agony.
Violence against animals could not have reached the incredible degree it did, if it had not been ritualised, because the aim of rituals is to consolidate social complicity. Brutal ‘scientific experiments’ on living animals, often with the only purpose to prove how much pain or injury a ‘mindless’ animal could endure, became hallucinating. Horses were repeatedly cut open, sewed together and mutilated in yet other organs, and eventually presented to an applauding audience as a proof of the efficient use of lab animals.
In the twelfth century CE Maimonides wrote:It is prohibited to kill an animal with its young on the same day so that people should be restrained and prevented from killing the two together in such manner that the young is slain in the sight of the mother; for the pain of the animals under such circumstances is very great. There is no difference in the case between the pain of man and the pain of other living beings, since the love and tenderness of the mother for her young ones is not produced by reasoning, but by imagination, and this faculty exists not only in man but in most living beings. 261
At nineteenth century Universities, cats and dogs were forced to observe the torture of their young, even their ripped out foetuses, in order to investigate their emotions - of course the torture must be of a mind baffling severity, for the test to be ‘useful’.
Bulls, bears or wolves were tied in irons and, while hopelessly fighting for their lives, were slowly killed by one or more bloodhounds. Alternatively cheap theatres advertised the massacre of worn out cows, goats and donkeys by street dogs or rats. The rats made the cheapest show, but the spectator risked to be attacked if they managed to escape from the pit.
The public of violent spectacles did not only consist of the vulgar. Kings were often seated in the first row to enjoy cats slowly burning alive in an iron cage or bulls devoured by hound-dogs, while the upper class had also her exclusive killing parties. Keith Thomas has gathered many examples.262 Since James I it is a tradition that the British king personally cuts the throat of a captive deer, and honours his companions by smearing the blood on their faces. A handbook of the seventeenth century recommends training young dogs by cutting off a deer’s leg and releasing it again. When Queen Elisabeth needed distraction, she tended to take place in a gazebo, while an orchestra
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played light-hearted music. Girls dressed as nymphs offered her a crossbow while a flock of deer were driven around the gazebo, and the delighted queen massacred dozens of them. John Frederick the Magnanimous of Saxony, as many others, organised massive stag killings to entertain his guests. Cranach the Elder painted such an event twice: one team of servants drives the stags in a pond, to hamper their mobility. On the banks elegant companies of men and women, armed with crossbows, try to hit as many animals as possible. Other servants row around – not without danger - to gather the wounded or killed animals.
One of the arguments uttered against Descartes was that once animals were considered machines, it would not take long before humans would follow. Since then new weapons have indeed industrialized the killing of humans more efficiently than the best equipped slaughterhouses.
Sociobiology: a comedy of errors with a smirk
Sociobiology says that aggression has grown into our nature during prehistoric warfare, and that aggression - warfare, selfishness, sexual discrimination and intolerance - is innate.
An ever returning misrepresentation of Darwin’s evolution theory says that violence and selfishness rule the world, and that human society can only progress if we submit to this rule. Yet the evolution theory says not that living beings get better if they kill and eat everything on their way. If this would be the case, life on earth would have evolve by now to just one species with impressive fangs and bellies, crawling around in a desert sown with their bones and carcasses, searching to kill, rape anddevour.
Darwin’s great discovery was that living beings always adapt for the best coexistence with their environment. That is the real meaning of the survival of the fittest – a meaning some people find convenient to forget because they search for an excuse for our own violent existence.
E. O. Wilson dedicated most of his career to the study of insects, until he fashioned Sociobiology.263 Physics became the ideal scientific
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model for life, much as geometry had been taken as the ideal model for ethics in the seventeenth century CE. Wilson decreed
that the laws of the physical sciences are consistent with those of the biological and social sciences and can be linked in chains of causal explanation; that life and mind have a physical basis; that the world as we know it has evolved from earlier worlds obedient to the same laws; and that the visible universe today is everywhere subject to these materialist explanations.264
The ide a that humans are just another kind of animal was nothing new. It had been generally accepted until religious imageries like Gnosticism created an anthropology in which humans were presented as creatures fallen from an higher world and trapped in despicable bodies.
Wilson is however not satisfied with the humble admittance that we are just animals. He also pretends to knows how animals, including humans, function, and brags that science can explain a living animal from dead matter by causal laws. Essentially, he recycles the Cartesian view that animals are dumb mechanical robots following laws of physics, and degrades humans with them.
Sociobiology omits the active search for optimal existence and constant adjustment to environmental changes visible everywhere in nature for whoever wants to see it. Sociobiology neither considers the peculiar flexibility of life in general and of animal culture in particular. The living complexity of our organizations, thoughts, monuments and emotions makes us, animals, radically different from dumb machines. This complexity makes the question if laws of physics apply to us superfluous: our physical brain can simply not handle this physical complexity – the first is only a tiny atom of the latter.
Since for professor Wilson animals are automatons, and humans are the equals of animals, he concludes, with a few soothing sentimentalities intermingled, that humans are automatons. Cleverly made automatons, of course, but that should be no reason for optimism. Wilson exclaims with surprising enthusiasm that human aggression is innate, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Yet, this position is not a well-founded scientific hypothesis or a meticulous research program: it is a unsubstantiated dogma, stated boldly while many simple observations plead for a more cautious approach. As all dogmas, this one also short-circuits reason: since we act as we act, it is our compulsive nature, and a compulsive nature is genetic, with no research required. Saying that we are violent
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genetically, is really saying that we are definitely violent because we are noticeably violent. And the only conclusion yielded, that we are powerless against it, is nothing but another masquerade of the ideology of submission, once spread by coercive religions, and now conveyed by pseudo-science.
Humans and other animals are no mechanical creatures, assembled from reactive sphincters and forever doomed to repetition. Apart from the dull mantra ‘it’s all genes’, nobody, now or in the foreseeable future, knows laws to calculate the path of an ant for the next five seconds, and certainly not if the ant would know of the experiment and dislikes sociobiologists. Yet this is what physical laws do with a pendulum or a falling stone. If the laws of the physical sciences Wilson refers to do not even work for an ant, they must definitively be worthless with regard to birds, fish and mammals.
In contrast to dumb mechanic robots like common people, clerks like Wilson have a mind powerful enough to decipher the causes of social behaviour. The high priests of the social sciences must be allowed to apply to the lower people ‘biological principles which now appear to be working reasonably well for animals in general.’
Professor Wilson claims that ‘human beings are innately aggressive’, and illustrates his assertion with the fact that ‘during the past three centuries a majority of the countries of Europe has been engaged in war during approximately half of the years.’265 At first sight this statement suggests that European countries must have very violent genes, but if closely examined the proposition is deceitful: if not all European countries were at war half of the time, the best part must have been at peace all the time.266 But professor Wilson avoids the only reasonable conclusion, that we have a choice between war and peace, and that this choice, innate or not, prevailed even during the most violent centuries. He prefers the conclusion that violence is innate to humans (why not to Europeans, since his data only cover Europe?), even if this conclusion is contradicted by his own observation.
A similar logic is given by professor Steven Pinker, who lectures psychology at the MIT. Professor Pinker cites more recent data, very close to those of Wilson, and arrives at the same wrong conclusion with the same weird enthusiasm. Pinker cites that some sixty to seventy countries were involved in conflicts each year between 1993 and 2002 CE but, by leaving out that twice as many countries were at
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peace during the same period, conveniently stresses the feeling of omnipresent violence.267 When adding up all countries, the results line up with Wilson’s, and again the statistics - now on a global scale - hardly support the professor’s viewpoint, that the world population is compulsory violent.
Killing genesTake a family with no liveable homeland nor income, endlessly pushed around state borders by racist officers. Then one infuriated member of this family, a young man, kills an embassy official. Nobody would conclude from this story that the young man had violent genes, just because other people in similar situations might react less violent. Yet similar conclusions are drawn constantly in the real world.268
The dogmatists of innate violence are in no way disturbed by the observation that violence follows frustration. Why would the frustrated or deprived have more ‘violence genes’? No doubt we have inherited genes that allow us to kill. But we have also inherited genes that allow us to climb in trees and to dig holes. A genetic ability is not a compulsive ‘instinct’. In fact, humans can live a very happy and satisfying life without ever digging a hole or killing someone, and climbing trees might even lead to sorrow by itself.
The pulse of our heart and the number of toes we have is defined genetically. But genes concerned with behaviour are, per definition, genes of choice. There is no necessity, not even a possibility, to perform all behaviour our genes allow. This misconception is frequent among people who have studied lower organisms for a too long period of time, but also among those who live well on best sellers thriving on fear.
Until today there are no specific ‘behavioural genes’ known. Popular speech tends to use the term ‘genetic’ to denote ‘unchangeable’. Such claims of ‘genetic inevitability’ are never based on anything near scientific genetics, but on too subjective interpretations of real life behaviour. The correlation between ‘genetic’ and ‘unchangeable’ is wrong. Snow rabbits have white or black ears, depending on the season, and both are caused by the encounter of rabbit genes with their environment. This example, chosen for its simplicity, points out the nature of other complex and unpredictable life processes. We are different each year, even lazy one day and energetic another, all with
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the same genes. By our genes alone we can not even speak or walk: we speak and walk after our genes have deliberated at length with all aspects of our environment, from oxygen availability to parental worries.
The only question remaining is: what motivates someone to go for the seemingly random theory that ‘violence is genetic’? Of course there is the desire for a best seller. In this respect Wilson repeats authors like Robert Ardry who hit the same jack-pot more than a decade earlier. Sociobiology would never have drawn this attention, and would never had sold that many books, if it had not excused violence the same way Ardry did.269
But there is another motivation. Sociobiology is a thesis pleading for the old hierarchical society, implying that people should keep calm and forget their longings, because those longings are dangerous ‘instincts’. Only clerkdom understands the secret code of human existence, in contrast with the mechanical instincts of common people who have to accept whatever the clerks have decided to be better for them to think. Sociobiologists seem to have other genes and can ‘deeper and more courageous examine human nature’, because ‘the principal task of human biology is to identify and to measure the constraints that influence the decisions of ethical philosophers’. In fact Wilson says that we can all better be controlled ‘scientifically’ by clerks like himself. In this regard, sociobiology equals fundamentalist groups who want to raise their followers isolated from damaging pretensions.
Sociobiology is a jubilant plea for the foundation of a college of clerks with the authority to scientifically propagate submission among the general public. This antagonism between superior clerkdom and obtuse lay-people is typical for all centralist civilizations of the past, and firmly establishes the divide between ideology and science.
In discouraging people on false grounds from dealing with the problems of cultural violence and warfare, sociobiology is traditionalist, antidemocratic determinism.
Sex genesAnother dogma of sociobiology is the primacy of procreation in sexual encounters.
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Susan Browning defended in a study that rape is rather an act of violence and humiliation, and that sexual lust only plays a secondary part. And indeed, sexual urge can hardly be called the initial drive of prearranged gang rapes.270
Sociobiologist John Alcock has refuted the theory of Susan Browning. In his opinion Browning’s theory predicts that older and powerful women are raped more often, which, he continues, is not the case. To Alcock, rape is linked to reproductive tactics, since most victims are fertile women.271
In the oversimplifying vision of Alcock people react mechanically on plain facts, unhindered by a complex world-image built from emotion, experience and association. His assertion that most victims are fertile women is nowhere substantiated. At least one out of three victims of rape are infertile women: one out of five is below twelve, and one out of seven is above sixty. Almost one out of ten victims of rape, including anti-gay violence, are men. Furthermore one out of four rapes is incestuous, and anal rape is well known in cultures where vaginal virginity is imperative.272
Alcock refutes the theory of Browning by stating that acts of violence and humiliation must predictably aim at powerful victims. This proposition also lacks ground. The Ku-Klux-Klan does not molests powerful and wealthy afro-Americans, and the Nazi’s killed not only powerful and wealthy Jews. If they intended to oppose the threat of the growing power of their victims, the killing of poor Negroes or poor Jews would be a waste of energy, incomprehensible to sociobiologists. If, as Alcock defends, acts of violence and frustration are predictably aimed at the more powerful, exasperated workers would usually hit their boss, and never work off their feelings on their wives or children.
Life in the real world is more complicated than sociobiology seems to believe. As a general rule, aggression is directed towards the ‘weaker parts’ of enemies, victims and their surrogates. The ancient Sun Zu called this the science of weak points and strong:
in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.273
Because of this rule armies bomb civilians, vultures molest a carcass through the anus, and kidnappers take helpless children of powerful parents for hostage.
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In many cases this weakness is the only reason to pick on a surrogate. Frustration is often let off by violence in sports or exercise, or against arbitrary persons or even animals. Employees bully their spouses when thwarted at work, tamers chose meek tigers, terrorists blast supermarkets, and soldiers rape women – all real world events unpredictable in sociobiology.
The geneticist Richard Lewontin and many others have attacked the claims of sociobiology. This has however not stopped sociobiology to put back the outworn Indogermanic myth and become the next justification myth of Atlantic civilization: ‘sociobiology is the latest and most mystified attempt to convince people that human life is pretty much what it has to be and perhaps even ought to be.’274
Lewontin wrote further:No one has ever measured in any human population the actual reproductive advantage or disadvantage of any human behaviour All of the sociobiological explanations of the evolution of human behaviour are like Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories of how the camel got his hump and how the elephant got his trunk. They are just stories. 275
Cultural violence in the Atlantic civilization
In only a few centuries, Europeans killed forty million American Indians for their land. Then, to work this land, they brought in ten million African slaves, an enterprise during which twenty million perished in raids and transport.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, new population pressure in Europe caused the transition from slave trade to imperialism and colonialism. As forced labour was now carried out in the homelands of the labourers, it is much more difficult to give well-founded estimates, but there is no reason to believe that those in power suddenly became kind-hearted: one commission entirely composed of missionaries, insisted that the beating up of natives, already generally practised by civil authorities, should be legalized also for free entrepreneurs – of course no settler had ever been waiting for this verdict. Colonial administrators sent alarming petitions to their motherland, complaining that the fast decrease of the native population made it impossible to meet the imposed production quota. Of the estimated thirty million inhabitants of Congo Free State, only
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ten million remained at the beginning of the twentieth century CE. Although the international press was less focused on the pillage of other colonies, it is reasonable to expect that Europeans did not differ much in behaviour, and to estimate that during African colonialism two third of the indigenous population died of violence or misery.
In the period following colonialism, the enriched countries installed a disastrous one-sided economy, and vigorously drove back refugees fleeing the spiral of hunger, conflict and disease they mainly had brought about themselves. At the end of the twentieth century, this caused one million African casualties per year.
Extrapolation suggests that more than one hundred million people were sacrificed to Atlantic military deployment, ruthless colonial pillage and swindled economics. While adding up the victims, one must keep in mind that Europe is only one well documented instance of the way civilizations have functioned throughout history.
Hunger refugees
Societies rationalize violence away, while in practice they keep it alive as a necessary component of their social structure. As a result people recognize violence in other times and cultures at a glance, while the own society can perform a mass slaughter and never become aware.
Each year, more than one thousand African hunger refugees drown in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach the Spanish coast. For other European borders we don’t even have estimates, while Sicily alone could come near to Spain.276 Only when bodies of tens or hundreds of emigrants – often women with babies in their arms – wash ashore, they reach the media:
Coastguards operating from the island of Lampedusa, a tiny, barren outcrop of the European Union closer to Libya than Sicily, have grown accustomed to grim discoveries aboard the rickety boats which transport the migrants from Libya and Tunisia. The coastguard crew which boarded the 40ft vessel on Sunday evening found a boat laden with almost as many corpses as living people. Two bodies were stuffed into a space under the engine, with a further 12 heaped in a pile. [..] It was only after the boat had docked that rescuers realised one of the “corpses” was still alive.277
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In the last five years of the previous century two thousand perished along the American-Mexican border. In this period of time the US government spent twelve billion dollars to keep this border sealed with an iron curtain, while prosperous Americans procure Jeeps, camouflage and military gadgets for their sporty and sociable hobby: to hunt down and report hunger refugees risking their lives trying to cross the fence and the desert. Following newspaper article is about just one of those many:
Mario Alberto Diaz, a biologist nearing completion of his master’s degree, crawled under a barbed-wire fence marking the border with the United States one evening this summer. He had 48 hours to go in his illegal trek across the desert. Desperate for a way to support his family, Diaz had a lead on a job in his speciality, cultivating mushrooms, at a plant in Florida. But not far into Arizona, his dream turned into a nightmare. He stumbled and sprained a knee. Limping two nights and days, at times in 95-degree heat, left him dehydrated. On the second day, a cactus punctured his plastic bottle, spilling the last of his water. He fainted twice. Travelling companions revived him, draped his arms over their shoulders and pulled him along. Each time they crossed a road, they urged him to stay behind, flag down the next vehicle and turn himself in. Each time Diaz refused, even after the ghastly sight of a man, woman and child huddled in lifeless embrace in the desert made clear the risk of continuing. [He kept] repeating: “I promised my daughter I would get there.” He didn’t. At the end of the second day, Diaz collapsed in exhaustion in a dry Arizona gulch and never got up. His body lay there for 20 days, left behind in the biggest yearly influx of illegal migration across the U.S.-Mexico border since 2000.278
An unknown number of hunger refugees freeze, suffocate or are crushed to death hidden in airplane cavities, cargo containers or train carriages. If one of those calamities by accident reaches the press – and thus consciousness – society incriminates the hunger refugees themselves (they are for short called ‘illegals’, while they act less illegal than any native wrongdoer), but never blames the prosperous who is denying hospitality until death.
Of course there is a satisfying justification: those people must die a terrible dead because the richer economies would collapse under the pressure of their numbers. This brings us to an interesting thought experiment. We are almost unanimously shocked by the slaughter of millions of European citizens during the Nazi period. Suppose a great magician stood up, who had the power to undo those killings. Would we let him? The drawback would of course be that the European population would rise by numbers similar to the number of hunger
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refugees. Of course there is no magician: we will get no second chance a few years from now. The millions we let die today, are dead forever.
This mass killing of hunger refugees out of greed will become a shameful page in European history, comparable with the suffering on Atlantic slave ships: the number of fatal victims is of the same magnitude, their death of the same horror, and both cases have in their own time been designated as inescapable economical necessities. Once they died because we needed them, and we didn’t care; now they die because we don’t want them, and we couldn’t care less.
The fate of black slaves on the Atlantic has slipped behind the hundred-years horizon, and it has become profitable to romanticize their misfortune in books and movies. The very same public that is moved to tears by accounts of ancient events, manage to remain blind for identical present-day suffering. It is remarkable how societies heading for violence always see their cultural expressions evolve to blatant sentimentalism. Ventilating feelings in a virtual world facilitates the worst malice in reality.
Human rights
To value each individual is the essence of modernity. Therefore the Universal Declaration of human rights, as it was adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 CE, is the most important expression of modernity today. The goal of the Declaration, approved by a vast majority of states, is the protection of each individual human. It guarantees minimal rights to individual persons, nothing less and nothing more. Such a worldwide consensus was infeasible, even unthinkable at any moment in history fifty or more years earlier. Never before, exchange had caused the worldwide cultural understanding capable to inspire such an agreement.279
Despite the imperfections of both the United Nations and of the Declaration, every human being should be aware of the long struggle of all peoples on earth to arrive at this monument. Nobody can rightfully reject it with the argument that it is alien and hostile to a
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particular culture. The whole of humanity, including all cultures, has suffered too much in order to arrive thus far: those who turn down this glance of modernity spit on the graves of people in all nations who have struggled in the past to better their children’s destiny.
The Declaration of human rights of 1948 CE starts with the statement that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, and should cooperate in a spirit of brotherhood. It is no plea for relativism or pluralism, nor for any metaphysical notion of justice. It does not endorse one state or rebuffs another. It is not relative to the society a person lives in, nor to the person’s intellectual, moral or other capacities: communities will freely carry on their business, they just will not infringe on the rights of individuals under their rule or power.280
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been criticized on all continents. It is nowhere practised in its entirety, but it can not rightfully be claimed, nor rightfully discarded, by any ideology or civilization.
Article thirteen of the Declaration says that everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Unfortunately the ‘each’ word in this quote is not taken literally until now. The article guarantees the right to leave any country, but the symmetrical right ‘to enter any country’ is omitted. And the tremendous important right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution has been declared solemnly, but the plain and simple right to flee poverty is lacking. Yet this right existed everywhere in practice, but is today violated with the rise of technology allowing wealthy states to tightly seal their borders in the ever more grim contest for living space.
The death penalty has already been abolished in over half of all countries, but executions still go on in the West as well as in the East.
At the General Assembly of 1948 CE, the Soviet block abstained from voting because in their vision happiness can only be provided by the socialist state.
Canada, despite its discrimination of Canadian Japanese, American Indians, communists and Jehovah's witnesses, eventually subscribed the Declaration. In the house of commons a speaker for the Conservative Party pretended that
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human rights and fundamental freedoms exist in Christian civilization. They do not exist elsewhere. They have never existed elsewhere.281
Muslim countries, except Saudi-Arabia, subscribed the Declaration also, but the Cairo Declaration on human rights in Islam, issued in 1990 CE by a conference of Muslim governments, maintains that human rights mean the right ‘to a dignified life in accordance with the Islamic Shariah’.282 This is a contradiction, since under Shariah it is a capital crime to quit Islam, while the free choice of religion is a non-derogable human right to the Declaration. Clearly many Muslim leaders are torn between cosmopolitan modernity and the mood of traditionalist populations in their hinterlands, and during the last half century of confrontation between Arabs and the West, the latter has gained ground.
The Bangkok Governmental Declaration, composed by a conference of Asiatic governments the same year as the Cairo Declaration on human rights in Islam, claims that human rights are relative to historic, cultural and religious backgrounds.283 Various despots bluntly defended that, under ‘traditional Asian values’, an individual is less important than his community. The Chinese scholar Xiaorong Li has effectively demonstrated that values common to the whole Asiatic continent are clearly made up for the occasion. Asiatic governments never were too principled against Western culture to benefit from its market economy where possible - scruples only surfaced when those benefits risked to be distributed among their populations.284
The USA subscribed despite the continuing practice of capital punishment and the racist laws discriminating, at the time, Afro-Americans and American Indians. Some citizens feel, completely unfounded, that the Declaration is in fact the submission of the world to their own constitution.
In Western society racists propagate that human happiness would benefit from discriminating individuals,285 and inherently contest that people with unequal capacities can be equal in dignity and in rights.
It is a blunt assumption that human rights present no problem whatsoever to Atlantic society, certainly when Western powers claim that the notion of human rights is one of those Western niceties that retarded peoples all over the world must learn from ‘the free world’, if necessary with the help of ‘justified’ violence.
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Human rights in the twenty first centuryAfter the criminal attacks on the World Trade Centre of New York, the Atlantic civilization felt for the first time to be caught in a life threatening situation comparable with what most humans experience most days, and it became clear in the following weeks and months that the moral standards of the West are not much different from anywhere else.
The shock wave that swamped Atlantic civilization can not be explained by the number of victims, who was less than the number of hunger refugees hounded into death each year by Atlantic society. The number of victims was also less than the number of USA citizens that dies each year because of cigarette smoking, or because of automobile traffic, or because of medical errors. Usually, a few thousand people sacrificed for economical gain or political power is hardly news, but in the heart of New York the sudden loss of lives took the shape of a cosmic ordeal. Abstraction made of cheap symbolism, this shock can only be explained as a civilization quake: just like the Romans when their capital was raided for the first time by the Goths, the American citizens were shocked, more than by anything else, by the displacement of otherwise usual terror right into the trusted streets of their metropolis.
Two months after the attacks, the President of the USA signed an order allowing a military tribunal to secretly execute foreigners, and installed a concentration camp on its military base of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, where prisoners were detained for an unlimited time without charges, and without access to legal representation or to the outside world whatsoever. Rumours about torture keep reappearing while the government does not demonstrate their falsehood, and plans have been aired to install a death chamber for executions. As always, clerks were called in to back the soldiers:
A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal anti-torture law [..] The memo, prepared for defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture [..] Senior Pentagon officials on Monday sought to minimize the significance of the March memo [..] as an interim legal analysis that had no effect on revised interrogation procedures that Mr. Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 for the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.286
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Harvard professor Ignatieff referred to torture when he bluntly stated that ‘a principle does not become totally void if occasionally concessions are made’ and suggested that it might be acceptable for the USA to put some human rights aside to fight ‘apocalyptic and nihilist Evil’.287 He explained:
While conscientious people may disagree as to whether torture might be admissible in cases of necessity, all will agree that torture can never be justified as a general practice. The problem lies in identifying the justifying exceptions and defining what forms of duress stop short of absolute degradation of an interrogation subject.288
Ignatieff is a follower of Isaiah Berlin who, more than twenty years earlier, called it a difficult dilemma whether children should be tortured to obtain intelligence.289 Now a special UN Commission on human rights has the task to carefully study and evaluate, from an international point of view, precarious situations in which the temporary abolition of certain human rights might be necessary, but the ban on torture is one of those rights that are declared simply non-derogable. If people living in the luxury and safety of the USA find an excuse to use torture, then how could ever other people suffering injustice and poverty every day of their lives be convinced to keep from torture if they consider it a way to a better their destiny?
Berlin and Ignatieff turn the application of torture from an appalling barbarism into an interesting issue for academical debate. They resemble the Dominican monks painted by Pedro Berruguete, having philosophical discourses about the vaporous nature of the soul while strolling around the burning stake.290
Berlin has coined his philosophy pluralism. Pluralism is a theory that can be summarized in three propositions: one, that the world will always remain undecided; two, that the strive for a perfect society always leads to human disaster; and three, that we should be satisfied if we just manage to ease a little bit of the worst suffering occasionally. At first sight this theory seems reasonable, humane and even common place. In reality, it is a dangerous nihilism and a license to barbarism. Transposed it says: some ideas are so dangerous that any means - including torture and killings - are allowed to counter them.
The first proposition of pluralism is not new, but is used here to ridicule every convention against international aggression. Treaties are unreliable because of the undecided nature of life. It makes it
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‘philosophically’ acceptable to infringe on international treaties and resolutions – including those patronized by the United Nations. It will not be difficult for anyone to hear a ring of Israeli foreign politics in the background.
The second proposition is plain wrong: there is no causal relation between imageries of a better world and terror. Utopianism was never a cause of violence by itself, and has certainly caused less violence than the common ideologies of civilizations. The mass violence witnessed in the last centuries were not magically caused by some sardonic fantasy disguised in the sheepskin of utopianism; the root cause of wars is the ever more forbidding struggle for shrinking resources. It is unforgivable to incriminate the longing for a better existence, because without this longing every hope is wasted.
To depict the Reign of Terror as a sudden outburst of violence in an otherwise peaceful France, only inspired by the utopian writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is to reject that the working population of France was exhausted by warfare and unlimited war taxes, and died by uncounted thousands from hunger and misery under the Ancien Régime. Even more, to denounce Rousseau’s defence of popular sovereignty, is the same as to condemn modern democracy.291
Neither was there a relation between Stalin and utopianism. Already under Lenin the heirs of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and other utopianists had been eliminated.
The third proposition became popular as the ‘doctrine of the lesser evil’, but is really the law of the jungle put another way: cruelty, now a way of peacekeeping, is acceptable if it only claims to avoid more cruelty. It gives you the right to kill ten people, if you are convinced that one of them will kill eleven. Or extrapolated, it could mean that each of us better kills as many as possible, just to make sure. This proposition is the most dangerous, because it can be used by anyone sufficiently armed, to defend every brutality at any moment, as long as efficient propaganda accuses the counter party of worse – which propaganda always does.
The intellectual exploit of Berlin’s Pluralism arrives, through many twists and turns, at a very predictable conclusion, unfortunately drawn before by regimes with feebler academic backing: human rights only count when they are in your own interest. With its denial of international cooperation, its incriminating of all longing for an
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enjoyable life and its licence for cruelty, it comes down to the free market of bloodshed. It will, if ever generally accepted, submerge humanity in a darker age than ever witnessed before. If ‘apocalyptic and nihilist Evil’ ever existed, it must resemble Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism.
Another scholar appreciated by Ignatieff is his fellow teacher at Harvard, professor Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz simply defends that torture should be legalized in the USA. A judge should issue a ‘torture warrant’ to the police when needed, for example in a ‘ticking bomb scenario’, or in other words, when a captive is supposed to know details of an imminent attack. When asked what to do if it is not certain what the prisoner knows, Dershowitz answers:
Well, we don’t know, and that’s why [we need] a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about non-lethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva Accords, but you know, countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords.292
Now Alan Dershowitz is also an extreme defender of Zionism, and has been accused by professor Norman Finkelstein and journalist Alexander Cockburn of plagiarizing whole chapters from Joan Peters’ hoax From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, to augment his own work called The Case for Israel (2003).
Dershowitz himself revealed recently that he was a member of the Israeli ‘assassination committee’, an organization which examines in secret which foreigners are to be targeted and murdered by Israeli forces, sneaky or otherwise. Here an interesting problem arises. If Dershowitz is intellectually honest, he must admit that his viewpoint on torture also applies to Gaza, where almost all the killings ordered by the assassination committee take place. Now imagine that Dershowitz would be captured by a Palestinian commando after a session of his assassination committee. This would be a genuine ticking bomb scenario, since Dershowithz would know where another rocket will hit a crowded street to terrorize and kill innocent villagers together with the ‘convicted’. Following professor Dershowitz a Palestinian magistrate should then produce a torture license, and make the professor himself endure the effects of his own academic work. in the course of this treatment he might suddenly become a fierce defender of individual rights and international treaties.
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War
Forced labour and war: two aspects of one social system
Witnessing the catastrophe of the Second World War, many intellectuals have expressed their feelings of deep disillusion. Long-time civilization had collapsed before their eyes; the promised humane had been distorted into a cruel inferno.
Yet nothing was new except the killing speed. More than hundred-and-fifty armed conflicts have been registered in the twentieth century CE alone. In 1915 CE, all Armenians living in eastern Turkey – two million people - were deported to the deserts of Mesopotamia. On the road and on arrival they endured abuse, rape, enslaving and killing - only three hundred thousand managed to escape to Russia and survived. A civil war in Ukraine, following forced labour and deportation, lead to dislocation of hundreds of thousands of families, execution of tens of thousands of Kulaks, and eventually to death by starvation of six million people in 1930 CE. In Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Bosnia etc. etc., tens of millions were killed by warfare and its horrifying parasite: famine.
Each time the root cause was rivalry for space, for means of production or for any other scarce resource, while the immediate trigger was some calamity, intrusion, frustration or fear. All those conditions are effects of population pressure - but through the desire to win by numbers they also induce renewed population growth and a still higher probability of conflicts.
Careful reading of history reveals that the magnitude of a massacre is proportional to the population surplus, and that the means to achieve the numbers – both technical and ideological - are always found in time. When the world population reaches the expected ten million halfway the twenty first century CE, the mass slaughters we have seen until now will look like small accidents. Hitler was not a devil from hell, but from tradition, and it makes war even more appalling to
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realize how humanity has been haunted by this pandemic over and over again, while ideologists did everything to convince people that they are helpless against the brutal force of their own madness.
War is not an art or a respectable business. It is just one of the many ways in which humans afflict violence on each other. It stands in line with torture, child abuse and so on, and needs to be eradicated as yet another shameful social plague. Yet war happens because it is planned and prepared, and because society is organised and directed towards it. It is not a pity accident despite all measures taken; it is a well-planned enterprise. It is not an uncontrollable and unpredictable whirlwind killing its victims unexpectedly, it is the launch of a very delicate, studied, tested and adjusted machine of terror and destruction. It is not something started by one or more remote countries; it is the last thing all countries agree upon, no matter how much discordance on all other subjects.
There is a structural connection between forced labour and war: without forced labour, there is no hierarchy possible despising lower ranks as if they are disposable or living waste already, nor would there be orders possible up to suicide. Without the hierarchy of forced labour society, soldiers would not exist, and without industrial population pressure they would be useless.
In ancient and medieval times, as recently in Central Africa and eastern Europe, soldiers are rewarded in booty. Only in war a man can steal and burn unpunished, and ill-treat victims without any moral restraint, including rape and murder, and even be honoured for it. Only by continuing such brutal crimes the military trade has escaped the confinement of prehistory and persists until today: this is the mark of Cain all soldiers have to bear.
Drugs and alcohol have always been used by armies to enforce their ‘courage’, while many ‘great strategist’ did no more than receive in audience the local frustrated courtiers and demoted executives, listened to their suggestions and accepted their situation maps, order some killing, install regents and tax collectors, and move further each time new grounds were offered to be plundered. If all went well the army grew naturally, as surviving enemies switched sides and chose for the lucrative adventure after their kin was molested and their household destroyed. The victor’s household grew proportionally, supplemented after each battle with fresh gold, treasures and women.
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The goal of a military operation is always to overpower, plunder and destroy cities or settlements. Soldiers have their way abusing and killing citizens in the most horrendous way, after which the city is burned down and annihilated. Xenophon has Socrates, the Western champion of morally just thinking, explaining this to Euthydemus:
“Now suppose a man who has been elected general enslaves an unjust and hostile city, shall we say that he acts unjustly?”“Oh no!”“We shall say that his actions are just, shall we not?”“Certainly.”“And what if he deceives the enemy when at war?”“That too is just.”“And if he steals and plunders their goods, will not his actions be just?”“Certainly” 293
The more gruesome the previous attack, the more efficient other cities’ spirit was broken beforehand. Many cities sent a delegation to the approaching army to surrender and plea for mercy at the risk of their own life: torturing and killing such a delegation was a statement more lucid than any other slaughter. Terror-and-mercy tactics are essential to warfare: when a conqueror feels that terror is sufficient, he might chose for booty unspoiled by fire and bloodstains, and have mercy on the citizens. Mercy - or grace - is the twin brother of terror: they are the two hands of ruthless warrior kings and war gods. As an important attribute of almighty force, it is found in Christianity as God’s Saving Grace, and in Islam as Allah the Merciful.
The sexual needs of soldiers have to be fulfilled. Already in the Bible a rationalization is wrought for the presence of harlots near the military camps of the Children of Israel. Before Jericho was destroyed, Joshua remembered that two spies had stayed with a prostitute called Rahab, who dwelled on the walls of the city:
Joshua had said unto the two men that had spied out the country, go into the harlot’s house, and bring out thence the woman, and all that she hath, as ye sware unto her. And the young men that were spies went in, and brought out Rahab, and her father, and her mother, and her brethren, and all that she had; and they brought out all her kindred, and left them without the camp of Israel.294
Saint Augustine thought it necessary to explain that women raped by soldiers remained innocent, even if their body had pleasure of it:
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but as not only pain may be inflicted, but lust gratified on the body of another, whenever anything of this latter kind takes place, shame invades even a thoroughly pure spirit from which modesty has not departed, - shame, lest that act which could not be suffered without some sensual pleasure, should be believed to have been committed also with some assent of the will.295
Still during the Thirty Years War and even when Yugoslavia collapsed in the twentieth century CE, fighters were payd with the right to rape and plunder. Since 1977 CE, more than six hundred Kenyan women reported to be raped by British soldiers. No complaint was ever investigated, and the victims are still trying to obtain an independent investigation and financial support for raising their mixed-blood children.296 USA Military bases around the world are served by third world prostitutes, if necessary trafficked in from the poorest countries.297
Just War Doctrine and Judged War Doctrine
To make a war does not take months or years, but generations, and follows predictable patterns.
The root cause is always a growing shortage of life necessities. Those necessities are primarily food and water, but include also movement, security, leisure, liberties... Humanitarian measures like food distribution and refugee camps, however necessary, can slow down this evolution, but can not divert it. Measures like armed occupation or downright repression might seem to bring respite, but are really shortcuts to the violence that is feared.
The only way to avoid the coming bloodshed is to restore or at least improve the balance between population and resources by means of sound and just politics. In the first stage this is easy to do, but difficult to see. In later stages this solution becomes more and more difficult to implement, while solutions become more fuzzy as ideologies grow.
The next phase in war making is defined by the upcoming generation, in two ways: first, parents try to save their own children above the children of others, and will adapt any ideology to justify this goal. The essence of those ideologies is to allow a divide between the 'own' and 'the others'. It doesn't really matter if this goal is obtained by religious,
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nationalist, racist, socialist or capitalist movements. Secondly, when children become adolescents while living through the same deprivation, they will radicalize the ideology adopted by their parents. While we accept too easily that we live in a modern world, we forget that nearly all warfare of the last half of the twentieth century CE, and even into the next century, have used religious currents or undercurrents for justification.
In the following phase, competitors use the growing number of accidents to dehumanize each other, because no warfare can be carried out efficiently if the enemy is regarded as an equal human. This is a circular process, because the number of accidents used by this propaganda grows because of this propaganda. The ideology dividing 'the own' from 'the others', religion is reviewed, and media amplify or diminish accidental happenings, and recreate all kinds of historical heroism and rights. In a slow process families on both sides turn into dangerous monsters in the eyes of the other party. Claims of peaceful religions or of justice and democracy now assist in the dehumanizing of disbelievers.
Because the real issue is shortage, it is of no importance along which lines the parties are divided, as long as the other party is large enough to make a difference when chased from the resources, and as long as the own party is strong enough to chase them. Just as the biblical twelve tribes of Israel, most ethnic groups stem from fluky military coalitions. Physical traits are not basic to this process, but are created or stressed by it. Warring tribes used to paint their faces to make the difference, but an occasional trait already present can be even more handy. When resources ran dry on Easter Island, the small population split up in ‘long ears’ and ‘short ears’ to eliminate each other. Nazi scientists, armed with colour charts and measuring devices, spent much effort in search of fitting individuals to make a brand new ancient race. As the war was already going on for years, it seems that not the race needed a war, but that the war needed a race. In Rwanda the population was divided in Tutsis, ‘an ancient race of brave warriors’, and ‘submissive’ Hutus, before the mass killings began. The real issue was not ethnicity, but an exploding population on impoverished grounds.
The final step is the outburst of physical violence, clear and simple: civil war, revolution, genocide, terrorism, classical warfare - it can take all forms, but the aim is never a contest of armed forces, but the
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elimination of people plain and simple. This is the step at which the world community usually wakes up and, decades too late, tries to stop hostilities.
It is evident that no leader or power can ever be excused ever for deliberately heading to outbursts of violence over a long period of economic protectionism, political secrecy, international injustice, propaganda and deficient diplomacy.
An armed conflict with extra-terrestrials is the only imaginable scenario in which the attacked powers are blameless. Since such a threat is as big as the power of imagination, it is the ultimate eldorado for the arms industry and the military, who always think of price tags first, and subsequently invent enemies as required. Dr Carol Rosin, a former executive at Fairchild Industries and once spokeswoman for Werner Von Braun, believes hoaxes about extra-terrestrials are fostered in order to blow up military budgets. The militarization of space has already begun with the US ‘Strategic Defense Initiative’, also known as ‘Star Wars’, at $122 billion and counting.
Imagine that a native American soothsayer had foreseen the invasion by Europeans, and that the natives had decided to build up a defence. They would have needed central authority; enforce taxes; define probably inappropriate tactics against unimaginable invaders; produce possibly inadequate weaponry, to be abused by the own authority sooner or later. Even if they would have succeeded ever in setting up a kind of force matching the invaders, the outcome would not have been any better.
The arrival of wicked extra-terrestrials is hardly a realistic threat. The arrival of another trigger-happy fool in command of massive weaponry produced to counter such an invasion is a far more likely, and a far more dangerous hazard.
Just warsThe right of a state to go to war has been treated by famous authors like Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas and Grotius. They all agree on four basic rules, commonly referred to as the Just War Doctrine. The Just War Doctrine is generally accepted today. The first rule says that a state has the duty to defend its citizens; the second rule says that this defence is impossible without (at least the threat of) physical force; the third rule says that to harm innocent people is inevitable and thus
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acceptable; the fourth rule says that physical force be used within measure.
That only states have the right to start a war must be inspired by the ancient belief in the semi-divine nature of kings. Scholars have hardly ever criticized this strange inheritance, while all observations point at a different reality. States literally rise and fall faster than trees in a wild forest. Most states today came out of a war against other states. In such situations the just war doctrine equals the law of the jungle: if you destroy a state and erect yours on its ruins you are justified. It is only wrong to lose the contest.
The pre-eminence of the state in the West is as irrational as the authority of religion in the Arab world, or the primacy of the household in the east. Today lethal weapons and ideologies are available everywhere. A few frustrated individuals can get together and call themselves an army, and call upon the Just War Doctrine with the same self decided righteousness as any ephemere state. No state – or any other organization - ever waged war without the announcement of a just cause. The Just War Doctrine, how fancy it might be, is nothing but an excuse for warfare plain and simple.
The Charter of the United Nations attempts to separate just from unjust wars, and tries to create an impartial body like the Security Council to judge conflicts. Unfortunately, this council only handles acute treaths, which make them always decades too late. Furthermore, an international security council can only be effective after the emergence of a democratic world community, and exactly the emergence of such a democratic world community will make any justification of warfare obsolete.
The first rule of the Just War Doctrine – the obligation of the state to defend its citizens - can only serve as a justification for warfare, if warfare is indeed the best way of defence. But it never was, and most probably never will be. The best security stems from long-time diplomacy, openness and international justice. If leaders ignore those conditions for decades, they should bear responsibility for the catastrophe they made inevitable. The obligation to defend their citizens is rather an excellent argument to hold governments accountable for the prevention of war.
The right of states to use violence is proclaimed for states in general. But every state – without exception – can at an unpredictable moment
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get a malicious government, and this governement can use the Just War Doctrine for every aggression it has in mind. The obligation however to secure citizens by openness, undermines depraved governments, and strengthens the honourable ones.
The second rule says that the right to defend citizens is meaningless without the option of physical force. This physical force can be defensive, offensive (for example pre-emptive) and even punitive, as defended by the Catholic Church:
Catholic philosophy, therefore, concedes to the State the full natural right of war, whether defensive, as in case of another’s attack in force upon it; offensive (more properly, coercive), where it finds it necessary to take the initiative in the application of force; or punitive, in the infliction of punishment for evil done against itself or, in some determined cases, against others. International law views the punitive right of war with suspicion; but, thought it is open to wide abuse, its original existence under the natural law cannot well be disputed.298
If we witness an occasional street fight, we are appalled and complain about the deterioration of society, but when the whole nation goes at war, we support it as if war was a football match. Physical force is in all known societies the least common approach. Neighbours usually don’t fight over their differences, but try to talk or turn to the courts instead. The dreadfulness of warfare puts the duty on all governments to promote national and international prosperity, and to support the dignity of individuals everywhere. Today communication allows us to recognize potential conflicts many years beforehand. Hostile armies no longer pop up out of the blue, but governments often fail to anticipate conflicts with sound politics, and sometimes encourage hatred to win national popularity and to make national profit.
The third rule – that it is inherently tolerable to inflict damage to innocent civilians – is revolting indeed, but it is true that innocent civilians are also killed in traffic and in construction yards, all activities we would not stop to avoid victims. The difference is that while each accident on a wharf or on the road is deplored and becomes aserious subject of an investigation of responsibilities, in warfare the actors often despise or even hate their victims, who must not expect to be the subject of an individual court case. Only large scale sadism sometimes makes it to the courts, with punishments that are heavy but soon forgotten. Accidents are never inquired.
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Civilians are the weaker part of the enemy, and their agony, once it is made acceptable by international law, is always a strong tactical opening. Although terrorism is the most eye-catching expression of those tactics, all armies apply them, and the loudly ventilated indignation towards the killing of civilians at random by the oppsoite party – either terrorists or armies - is hypocrisy from the lips of militarists. Whoever defends war as a solution, accepts willingly the slaughter and impairment of innocent people, and will not hesitate to calculate civilian casualties in the strategic game.
Tens of millions of civilians died during the Second World War: the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were shocking, not only because of the number of civilian casualties, but because it publicly demonstrated the disgusting nature of ‘the art of war’. Recently the industry and the military have made a lot of publicity about ‘precision bombs’, and claimed that high-technology weapons now reduce damage to civilians to a neglectable level. Yet, when those weapons were deployed over Baghdad during the Second Gulf War, their accuracy turned out to be fifty percent. Lucidly, ‘twin bombardments’ were started to make sure that each target was hit once on the average. Thus it was accepted that one random civilian setting was destroyed with everyone in it, for every so-called ‘precision bomb’ that reached its target (which was possibly civilian too).
The Chinese Tao says: ‘thorns and weeds grow wherever an army goes, and lean years follow a great war.’ And indeed, the suffering following after the end of a war is always the worse. Families are destroyed; services and dwellings are ravaged; the economy is taken over by scum; people of all ages must live on with both physical and psychical mutilations, by far exceeding those inflicted to the better protected soldiers.
A war is no surgical operation or a football match. People are drawn in it by a whirl of primitive impulses, and it runs out when human misery is worn up. Each war, by its very nature, is a disaster won by primitive brutes and lost by the innocent. The only predictable outcome of war is the wreck of civilian life for decades or more, and new violence will spring from devastated societies like pus from an open wound.
The fourth rule of the Just War Doctrine – use force within measures of necessity and of proportion – is contrary to the nature of war, and is always claimed but never applied. Otherwise there would be no
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landmines, clusterbombs or napalm. Fighting parties can not restrict their force wilfully, because they don’t know the balance of strengths with sufficient certainty. But the wish to overcome forces all parties to deploy all power they can afford, with no restriction but tactical calculations.
A police force is usually better armed than occasional wrongdoers, and can use arms with constraint. But armies are blindfolded in this regard, and can not afford to inflict less damage and terror to an enemy than luck and finances allow, or they would deliberately grant their enemy the chance to retaliate. Before a war is over, it is impossible to know the measure of necessary force. In the classical theory, a war is even started to measure those forces. This last rule only provides the Just War Doctrine an undeserved aura of moderation and sensibility.
The Just War Doctrine has never held back an aggressor. It has however offered neatly arranged pretexts to all parties involved in warfare, either right or wrong, from the Roman Emperors to recent dictators. As long as there is no agreed mediator or supervising body which can judge when citizens are endangered and whether war is the only appropriate remedy left, those rights and duties are only pretexts for both rightful and repressive governments. The Just War Doctrine gives an excuse to the wrong and withholds the just, and this insight in its turn will encourage the just to surmount the wrong in malice – all in the name of justice.
When the contenders have taken their positions on the battle field, a few moments away from pulling the trigger, it is too late to start a theoretical discussion to decide which of both has or has no right to shoot. Pacifist should refuse to be dragged in such a fake discussion far beyond the boundaries of ethics, and just let them both fire away. All what can be done then is to deplore that another gruesome catastrophe will arise, hitting all sides, and on all sides hurting the weakest more - and that it is too late to stop it.
The real reasonable concern of peace loving people is to timely avoid the dead end conditions under which the dumber part of populations can be persuaded by belligerent propaganda to bring the highest sacrifice.
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Judged WarsIf governments and other representative groups really value their people, they should rather adapt a Judged War Doctrine. The Just War Doctrine and the Judged War Doctrine have both for goal the well-being of the population. But a Judged War Doctrine can meet this goal, while the Just War Doctrine can not.
A Judged War Doctrine should say that when people suffer serious damage, responsibility for this damage must always be checked judicially. It is unacceptable that someone stealing a car is tried, while a whole city can be destroyed without at least considering if anyone is responsible. Why should those in charge not undergo a ludicrously small fraction of the pressure they believe innocent civilians must accept for the sake of their just cause? Is the risk of life-emprisonment for someone responsible not more compassionate than the risk for someone innocent to be maimed or killed in an explosion? Exactly those who believe they fight just wars, should be willing to come forward and defend their case, and those who had no other choice but war should go free. But the leaders who during past decades have shut off other choices by conducting uneven politics, should be held responsible for the outcome they instigated. The probe into accountability spans the hundred years-horizon, and involves long term diplomacy, openness and international justice. As long as there exists no official court that can effectively proceed in this manner, a new permanent Russell Tribunal, composed of esteemed men and women, but now in the form of a general investigative and reporting body, might be the best way to judge wars.299
If this way of thinking gets firm ground, warfare will decrease at the benefit of less misery and more economical prosperity. If, for example, colonialism had been carried out with respect and justice towards local populations, and just trade had been used instead of plunder, many conflicts of today would hardly have existed – and the same goes for all civilizations of the past.
Only during the last century emerged a worldwide community with multifaceted historical insight, and only during the last decennium of that century communication networks emerged to spread and strengthen those insights. Half a century ago humanity became aware of its power, for the first time in history, to destroy itself completely. Today we must become aware that we have, for the first
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time in history, the power to put a definitive end to the madness of violence.
Sociology of war
In an armed conflict there often is a right and a wrong side. Hitler for one was clearly at the wrong side. But history unfolds in a certain direction because certain conditions prevail. On many occasions the catastrophe could have been avoided by the right side as well as by the wrong side, and it is a crime not to prevent a catastrophe when one has the possibility. Even when there is a right and a wrong side, all sides have the responsibility to avoid the blind disaster of war.
A decade before the rise of Hitler, a more humane peace settlement could have made the German population less frustrated, and Hitler might have remained another unknown psychopath. But the cancer of nationalism and militarism had infested the entire West for over a century when the tumour of Nazism burst open. A century before Hitler, the Atlantic civilization could have rejected the pseudo-scientific theory of racism, which was the essential prelude to Nazism.
Again, the Atlantic civilization is only as an example here. The same type of conditions has lead to tribal warfare and civilization clashes everywhere.
While the globalization of all aspects of human society proceeds, it becomes ever more visible and ever more upsetting that all parties have moments of choice between coexistence and terror. And every individual has some responsibility for the future, if only by speaking up for sensibility. Also this goes for the right side and the for wrong side.
VictimsWars are not between armies. It would make no sense, and bring no benefit, to raise armies with the only purpose to engage in battle with other armies as in a contest of fighting-cocks or wrestlers.300 The primary and final targets of military operations are civil, either as humans to be eliminated or submitted, or as industry and riches to be destroyed or taken over. To devastate civilian infrastructure by eliminating the operating civilians but preserve installations, is a
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primary goal in warfare. Despite all Laws of War and many deceitful political statements, no country in conflict can afford to omit this goal. Singular weapons to serve this purpose - such as chemical weapons, fragmentation bombs and neutron bombs - have been ordered by governments on all sides and marketed wherever demand was calling.
To outflank the other army while going for civil goals is an important element of strategy. Only in order to get hold of civilian targets, and not without careful study of alternatives, an army will engage in direct confrontation with the armed force of the enemy. This is plain military logic: the enemy must be attacked in its weakest spot. The path to victory always walks over civilian corpses. In this aspect also there is no difference between the right and the wrong party, or between offence and defence. Britain, for instance, did not fight on the wrong side in 1942 CE, and its motives were defensive; yet the Royal Air Force engaged in a total war on German civilians as a plain strategic choice. Troy was not a military camp, but a living city, as were Dresden, Antwerp, London, Hiroshima, Baghdad.
Rich countries fight wars in poor countries. Exception made for an occasional bomb, ‘collateral damage’ is for remote bunglers, which the press presents as alien as possible. Soldiers sent out by rich countries are fierce terminators, not to be hurt themselves. There is an astonishing discrepancy between protection of the soldiers compared to the protection of civilians. A man is mobilized to supposedly protect his family; yet he leaves his unshielded family behind in the line of fire, while he himself is sheltered in fortified hideouts, given a protective outfit, means of communication, armoured transport and sophisticated arms. Invulnerable shields and armour define the warrior, from Homer to the latest military vehicles. Shattered houses, smoking cities and trampled down women and children mark his track. A UN report says that
more people are killed and injured by domestic forces than by foreign military intervention. It is important to note that 90 percent of war casualties today are civilians (in contrast to the 90 percent casualties who were military at the beginning of the Twentieth Century - Twentieth Century war has become civilianized rather than civilized).301
In the First World War, the civilian casualties were estimated to match the military, amounting to thirteen million. But those numbers are distorted. Because the industrialization of forced labour and war escalate together, conscription boosted to industrialize the human
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suicide machine. During the First World War the generals and politicians were never the less surprised by the disastrous power of the industrial methods they had adopted, and they drafted civilian boys in unlimited numbers to be fed to the iron Moloch of modern weaponry.
In the Second World War things were better organised: the civilian casualties amounted to twice the fifteen million on the battlefield. In the Korean War, four million civilians died, three times the number of soldiers. Five million civilians died in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, compared to less than one million soldiers altogether. In the one last decade of the twentieth century, more than two million children died in war, a multiple of the number of soldiers killed. Today hundreds of thousands civilians die each year in poor countries, while the loss of one Western soldier, despite his firm image in movies and television shows, is perceived as a terrible accident. No doubt the loss or injury of one Western soldier is terrible, but so is the loss or injury of one villager in a godforsaken backland.
Leaders, commanders and strategists go into hiding themselves and consider casualties of war unimportant: they never published one book on the subject, while hundreds of glorifying books about the art and bravery of warfare were printed without one chapter, many not even one paragraph or an hint on the number of civilians killed or maimed. It is as if no reference to mortality would be found in a study book on cancer: it is evading a central theme and a major concern. Ever since von Clausewitz books on wars are best-sellers, not because they explain war, but because their stunning absence of human reality feeds escapism. Clearly, their authors seldom come across the killing fields.
Bombings on Iraqi shelters and convoys during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 CE took tens of thousands civilian lives. Colin Powell, the general in charge and a family man with a promising future, answered to a reporter that civil casualties were ‘not really a number I’m terribly interested in’.
Big peopleIn sociology of war, next to the victims come the settled rank of men and women of distinction: leaders, policy-makers, ideologists, industrialists and military leaders. Those categories need to hold war inevitable and justified, even at the cost of lives (not theirs), in order
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to ensure their status or wealth. Their most important justification is, that in other places people like themselves express the same justification.
One video-tape shows Bin Laden joking about the death of his own followers in the attack on New York in 2001 CE, because most believed they were performing an hijack they could survive. Such appalling images are emblematic for any country where leaders send stupid bunglers into death with the cheap lies that they are valued and respected and, looking down at their agony with a cynic sneer, count their own gain in prestige, power or money.
When a leader decides to go to war, he has assessed how many soldiers and how many civilians will die, and has considered the cause worthy of their sacrifice. Yet they would never give the order to attack if they knew that their selves or their kin would fall victim. It is appalling how again and again people accept leaders preaching the necessity of war, patriotism and suffering, while the very same leaders disappear in secret hiding places when the heat is on.
It has been suggested that political leaders should prove the sincerity of their tears for the fallen heroes and their eloquent defence of patriotism by donating all salary above the pension of a fighter’s mother or widow to revalidation clinics. But the widow is in a sense a naïve victim, while it was the leaders’ responsibility to prevent war like any other predictable but avoidable catastrophe. They are at least responsible for neglecting preventive actions in the field of international diplomacy, justice and cooperation. They should not be offered any pension, but should be brought to trial, together with their predecessors, just like the management of an airline company which neglected precautions to prevent a crash.
Ever more industrial branches are involved in the development of ever more sophisticated killing machines. As a result of their trade, common people loose their houses and goods, and are left behind praying for nothing else but to survive in misery. Though weapon industries claim to enhance the security of their fellow citizens, they never hesitated to sell to whatever client would pay the best price, and nobody knows who will be friend or enemy tomorrow. General Motors and IBM contributed to the equipment of the Nazi German army, and in full cold war the USSR sold components to the US for their nuclear missiles. Like manufacturers of tobacco and breast-implants, weapon manufacturers should be convicted to pay proper
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compensation for the physical and moral suffering, and the economical damage to civilians and other innocent victims of their merchandise. Unfortunately the opposite happens: GM and IBM both received compensation after their factories in Nazi Germany were bombed by the allied armies.302
Commanders, making speeches in battle dress about self-sacrifice at stand-up receptions and encampments, defending with passion that this specific war is so important that no sacrifice could ever be too big, should voluntarily prove that this sacrifice is not only expected from the lower ranks. They should prove their words by cutting off one of their digits each time one of their soldiers loses his life, as once was customary among mourning natives from the Americas to the Fiji Islands. Of course, in this scenario commanders will have to be replaced every twenty losses. One small finger can hardly be asked too much from people estimating and approving how many of their soldiers will be maimed and killed in the next operation, while those soldiers had placed their trust and hope in them in their greatest hardship. Is it not strange that we can seriously defend that a soldier should be prepared to give his life, while we consider it a joke of bad taste that a commander should be prepared to give one finger?
ObserversOther important players are intellectuals, reporters and other witnesses. It is in their power either to demonstrate the insanity of war, or to participate in propaganda. The line between both is not always obvious, and many times propaganda for either side is disguised as a protest against war or concern for its sufferers.
During the war against Iraq of 2003 CE, over six hundred news reporters were ‘embedded’ in the US army. If there is one thing of major interest to report from such a position, it can only be that the safest place during wartime is with the fighting units, not among the families in the streets or in air-strike shelters.
At the beginning of this war news magazines endlessly depicted US soldiers waving at bunches of children, or quenching exhausted enemy soldiers. Whoever dared to show pictures of the injured and dying civilians of Baghdad was slandered and even murdered: in April 2002 CE US troops opened fire on a Baghdad hotel where 150 journalists were staying, of which two died; at the same time a US air strike on the office of a television network killed one other journalist.
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On August 2003 CE a cameraman was shot while filming a US tank. Three other journalists were killed in a fire fight near Basra.
In the summer of 2003 CE, British TV channels had a little Iraqi boy sincerely thanking the British people. He was not thankful because the British had illegally attacked his country; nor because of the ‘precision bombardments’ which destroyed his home in Baghdad where he was with his family; nor because during those ‘precision bombardments’ his mother was killed; nor because during those ‘precision bombardments’ his father was killed; nor because during those ‘precision bombardments’ his only brother was killed; nor because during those ‘precision bombardments’ he had lost both his arms beyond his elbows. The reason for his mind-baffling staged gratitude was that he was offered artificial limbs for free, designated by the overly excited TV-presentator as ‘new arms’. Whoever is not sickened by the cynicism of such a performance, is likely to endure the coming decades.
The most important part observers of warfare can play lies in drawing the public’s attention to the fate of the victims, but the fighting parties usually control such information. If compassion towards victims is one-sided, the critique goes not to war itself, but enforces that side’s justification. Whoever deplores only the victims made by one party, lend a hand to the other party in making more victims. The same bias shines through when history is selectively searched for background information. Suddenly just one of the parties has a very old respectable culture, is peaceful by birth and generous by tradition, while the other side is illustrated with dug up events from the past to prove their rude, hostile and violent nature.
The strongest demonstration of the insanity of war is not based on neutrality or on sympathy for the righteous or the underdog, but in provoking compassion, in the most sensitive manner possible, for the suffering victims, and in reminding the audience that nobody is safeguarded from cruelty as long as there exist advocates of war on any site.
Little peopleThe most blameworthy partaker is the mediocre citizen shouting for war as if it were a rugby match, at his bar, on the streets and in gatherings, colouring his ordinary life with another’s misery, talking bold that he would give his blood for his country out of love or out of
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hate, cheering kinsmen into death with a hot sweating face and foam on his lips, agitated wildly if anyone dares to doubt his righteousness. He has a bumper sticker saying I support our boys or parades with cardboards to invigorate the soldiers up to jeopardy. He thinks ‘if they die, good for me’, and orders another beer or another tea.
But most of all I despise a mother shouting for war: she is the accomplice within the gates, horridly betraying the hope, life and love of which she was the magnificent keeper.
Nothing is sadder than a mother grieving for her child. The enchanting centre of her life turned into a distorted hump of meat; the light of day became a black corridor of pain; utmost love became a pointless cry in the void. But sometimes this unbearable agony turns into a cause of hope and a ransom for peace. On a cemetery in Flanders stands a monument, depicting a mother and her husband grieving for their boy, killed with many others during the First World War. It is a self-portrait of Käthe Kollwitz, hacked out of solid granite over many years. Russian mothers protested week after week in Moscow, against their sons being sent to the battlefields in Afghanistan. Belgian mothers and wives of ten soldiers, killed in a peacekeeping mission, accused their officers for negligence. Contrary to the principle of equal justice, This was before a military court. One charged officer defended his case with the following memorable words: if we can be brought before court each time soldiers die, it will soon become impossible to fight wars.
Every person that will be killed or mutilated in the next war, from the smallest baby to the oldest man or woman, has a face, a name, a past and expectations. Imagine that a powerful computer would calculate beforehand the identity of the victims of the next war and when, where and how they will be killed or impaired. Television broadcast companies would trace them to sign exclusive stage contracts, and soon popular reality shows would present a mother hugging one of her kids, couples sweating with their hands squeezed together, growing red spots on their whitening skin as the show continues, trying to keep up the brave talk, but some of them falling to pieces in prime time.
Most people believe that the sacrifice of soldiers and civilians should bravely be accepted as an inevitable burden of our nature. Unless those people are only speaking for their neighbour’s family and not for their own, they must be considered the best suited candidates. An
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official register should keep the names of the brave who proclaimed that people should be willing to die for their country. Uncontrolled wars can then progressively be substituted by more refined international suicide contests. The country that can offer the most volunteers to be maimed and killed by the other side then wins the dispute. We already know the correct proportionality: ten must be maimed for one killed. It is like war, but neater organized, and a more civilized spectacle: it could even be made an appealing prime time patriotic ceremony.
SoldiersNext in sociology of war come the pitiful soldiers, praised with expensive words but living at minimum wages and socially disdained. They are celebrated for skill and courage and then thrown in the flames and disposed when damaged.
When the army of Alexander the Great crossed the Granicus river into the Persian Empire, it was countered by the rage of tribal horseman ‘pressing upon them,’ Plutarch wrote, ‘with loud and warlike outcries.’ Alexander lined up his infantry - a name derived from 'infant', child - in front of his own distinguished horsemen, who now only had to chase the infantry onto the enemy’s spear points. When the battle had sufficiently disordered and weakened the enemy, the cavalry did not hesitate to trample down this own infantry to take the booty and the honour.
Hailed as the cunning tactics of a genius, this episode only illustrates another step forward in the growing intensity of warfare. Since the battle of the Granicus, officers have evermore for task to drive the own foot-soldiers in the thick of the battle, remaining brave and safe themselves. The only violence expected from the officers in a modern army is violence towards their own subordinates: officers carry short-range handguns suitable to force or execute their own hesitating troops, when neither bravery nor fear suffice to keep them meek.303
When by accident soldiers come under fire instead of women and children, they naturally fall apart as every normal person under severe risk of either being killed in agony or mutilated for life. One out of ten soldiers under heavy fire wets his pants, one quarter vomits and another quarter loses control over their bowels. The most heard shout is not ‘fire’ but ‘mother’.304
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A new illness called ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ (PTSD for short) has been coined to deal with the severe psychological problems people, soldiers and others, suffer in the aftermath of war. It is meaningful that most of the attention goes to veterans, not to local populations. There exist, for example, many medical articles about PTSD among well protected British and American soldiers, but none whatsoever about PTSD among the millions of unprotected families of Baghdad who had to live through weeks of bombings, followed by ruthless artillery fights in their streets and houses.
The British Ministry of defence stated in the Parliament:Figures from the 1991 Gulf War revealed that 20 per cent of returning servicemen and women from that conflict were diagnosed with psychological problems, including depression, PTSD, suicidal thoughts, anxiety disorders and alcohol and substance abuse. Figures also show that there is a prevalence of between 12 and 14 per cent of PTSD in soldiers who had fought in the last Gulf conflict.305
Also in Britain charity organizations declared that:one in four homeless people are former members of the armed services. Thousands live rough or in sheltered accommodation. Many abuse drugs and alcohol. Returning armed services personnel often end up on the streets or with severe mental health problems. In a survey of ex-service people staying in hostels and attending day centres in Central London, some 41 per cent were found to have spent time in prison.306
Around 650 Argentines were killed in the Falklands war, while more than 300 veterans committed suicide.307 A British veteran association claims that more veterans committed suicide after the war than the 250 that died in combat. A co-founder of the association, who lost a leg in the Falklands, stated to the BBC:
we have lost an average of 10 veterans per year since the conflict ended. That makes 200 veterans who have committed suicide and that is bound to be a conservative estimate. I am almost certain there will be dozens more that we do not know about and the figure is likely to be more than 255. 308
This number was indeed conservative: the Mental Health Foundation confirmed 329 cases. The same pattern is found in figures of the British Ministry of defense regarding the Gulf war, during which 24 soldiers died, while 107 committed suicide afterwards.309
Few people regard all this as an argument against warfare as such. It is rather an opportunity for the growing welfare branch to raise the budget. After the successful conditioning of soldiers to kill without
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hesitation, psychologists promise that, given the necessary funding, they will also make them feel good about it afterwards.
All this is rarely brought to the attention of brave soldiers learning the ‘art of war'. Higher officers are ignorant or deem it beneficial to keep such things silent. For instance Carl von Clausewitz, a nineteenth century author still highly esteemed in military and political circles today, draws a light-hearted picture of a battlefield, pointing at the flying bullets while wandering around, almost as a taxonomist observing butterflies passing by:
Let us accompany the novice to the battlefield. As we approach, the thunder of the cannon becoming plainer and plainer is soon followed by the howling of shot, which attracts the attention of the inexperienced. Balls begin to strike the ground close to us, before and behind. We hasten to the hill where stands the General and his numerous Staff. Here the close striking of the cannon balls and the bursting of shells is so frequent that the seriousness of life makes itself visible through the youthful picture of imagination. Suddenly some one known to us falls—a shell makes its way into the crowd and causes some involuntary movements; we begin to feel that we are no longer perfectly at ease and collected, even the bravest is at least to some degree confused. Now, a step further into the battle which is raging before us like a scene in a theatre, we get to the nearest General of Division; here ball follows ball, and the noise of our own guns increases the confusion. From the General of Division to the Brigadier. He a man of acknowledged bravery, keeps carefully behind a rising ground, a house, or a tree—a sure sign of increasing danger. [..] It is true that habit soon blunts such impressions; in half-an-hour we begin to be more or less indifferent to all that is going on around us …310
Despite the cool bravery depicted here, generals never install their quarter on the spot where shells and cannonballs fall most frequently. The habit of officers to call the battle a ‘theatre’ gives a better indication of their preferred position. While the battle is raging ‘before us like a scene in a theatre’ Clausewitz worries about emotions of the inexperienced, but not about injuries. Yet the 'experienced’ soldier in this citation would, statistically speaking, be dead or maimed before he had the time to gather much experience. And if after half-an-hour he paid no attention to the cannon balls any more, as Von Clausewitz fantasises, he really did not stand a chance. Clearly this exceedingly appreciated work is nothing but a dangerous fabrication by a ghastly impostor.
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More than ninety-five percent of the soldiers in any army are ‘normal’ people, ready to join the party and turn into waste by the faintest conditioning technique, while suicidal lunatics, sadists, the socially disturbed, neurotics and sexual perverts flourish in military structures, waiting for their chance in the anarchy of military operations.
But all soldiers share one conviction: it is not their decision who they kill, nor when, how or why. They can afflict the most horrendous pain to the innocent and fragile without considering or even knowing, because they do not think, their brain is proudly superfluous. They submit to orders or occasionally to instincts, in order to let off steam. And in this whole impressive process, they perform the incredible tour de force of feeling blameless.
Another useful asset of all kinds of killers is the particular form of cowardice called conformism. Isolated groups can influence individuals in their ranks to give in, even up to suicide. First those individuals are sacrificed who already were suicidal, disturbed or psychotic, and then each fatality adds to the pressure exerted on the next. Depending on the outcome of the conflict those people will be remembered as heroes or fools. Many surviving suicide-bombers or kamikaze pilots declared that they did not really act out of free will, but that the psychological pressure from their environment had left no choice but to play their part as expected.
The more ‘uniform’ a community, the stronger this conformist pressure becomes - that is why uniforms are so important. Armed forces are often isolated from normal society, while the pressure is still reinforced by naïve families and cheering patriots from the outside world. Pilots of one Japanese airbase summoned for suicide missions were given a form with the choice of volunteering ‘eager’ or ‘very eager’. All chose ‘eager’.
Practice of war and practice of peace
Non-violence is trying to achieve without violence what was pursued in a violent way before.
Non-violence has been the subject of farfetched theories, mostly put together by opponents to prove that it is antisocial to chose not to pound someone on the head, to bomb a city or to blast a shopping
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centre. Most people who take part in none-violent action however have a rather practical agenda: they use what seems the best suited way to put right a wrong. Their decision has little to do with moral purity or religious commands, nor with vegetarianism or sports.
For the majority of people who applied non-violence it is not metaphysics, but a course of action chosen as the best suited way to counter the problems at hand. The largest part of humanity has benefited from non-violent tactics during the twentieth century CE, and history might well have forgotten to put on record earlier events of the same nature. Deprived groups emancipated more and stronger by the exercise of non-violent action than ever by violent resurrections or warfare. Examples are the emancipation of workers by means of unions, the liberation of women by persistent civil actions, the emancipation of homosexuals now on the way, the emancipation of Afro-Americans, the movements for freedom in Colonial India, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the end of the USSR and the liberation of its satellites, changes in China etc.…
Especially the Atlantic civilization, when claiming to defend democracy and humanitarian values all over the planet, should realize that this democracy and those values only became reality in the West during the last half century by means of non-violent action.
Non-violence regularly surpasses and corrects official institutions as a driving force towards direct democracy and modernity. It is inconsistent to praise democracy and at the same defile non-violence. As a rule, those populations which followed the strategy of non-violence reached progress and modernity, while regions that were drawn into armed conflicts ended up in endless outbursts of genocides, ravaged families and devastating poverty. It makes no difference if this violence is carried uit by professional soldiers, civilians or radicals. Neither is there a difference between the right side or the wrong side. Terror is terror.
Militarists often claim credit for enabling non-violent protest. It is exactly to defend the freedom of speech of non-violent people, they state, that we need a strong military. Modern history shows that it is exactly the other way around: unarmed citizens could effectively prevail over the military in the USSR and China, where the massive Western arsenal was simply incapable to accomplish the same. And when arms are deployed to establish freedom, as in the Iraq war started in 2003 CE, we see only suffering, destruction and despair.
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PacifismNon-violence is effective mostly in the civil sphere. Pacifism on the other hand - the belief that peace can and should be reached by peaceful means – has mostly to do with international relations. People taking a pacifist viewpoint can be advocates of non-violence, or not. Like non-violence, pacifism is no metaphysics or morals, but a reasonable judgement and a practical strategy.
Pacifism has been defended by many, if not most, famous thinkers of the last centuries. Jean-Jacques Rousseau dreamt of a European federation of nations, which would forever ban warfare from the continent: ’never did the mind of man conceive a scheme nobler, more beautiful, or more useful than that of a lasting peace between all the peoples of Europe.’ This dream seemed naïve in his time, but became reality only two centuries later. Europe has forever proven that dreams of what never was do not have to remain unachieved forever, and that dreams do not necessarily lead to catastrophes.
Immanuel Kant, surpassing Rousseau, defended that a worldwide federation of states is the appropriate political vehicle towards everlasting world peace. This idea also evolved from an unrealistic dream to a feasible, though yet uncompleted project in our times, when first the League of Nations was set up, broke down in the violence of WW I, and rose again as the United Nations.
Famous thinkers like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey – people who lived through times of war, and none of them weird freaks or religious fanatics - defended the making of international treaties, not after, but before wars, in order to ban them forever. In 1955 Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell published their well-known Pacifist Manifesto:
We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?
The ‘we’ from this manifesto is the new global human consciousness. This consciousness is essential to pacifism. Every state or party thinks at certain moments – usually shortly before a war – to be an exception to the human condition in terms of morals and power. But in our age of communication and media it is increasingly difficult not to feel as one world, one humanity and one responsibility. Pacifism
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today looks at the problem of warfare from a global viewpoint. While our planet is shrinking and no replacement is in sight, we must search for ways, not to love or even like, but to bear one another.
Albert Einstein actively participated in the League of Nations and other pacifist organizations, and Bertrand Russell was imprisoned for leading demonstrations for nuclear disarmament in London, when he was already ninety years of age.
Not long ago every European nation maintained armies to defend itself against its neighbours. The dream of Rousseau was first derided and eventually realized, without all the gruesome consequences that traditionalists predicted to come from - what they call utopian - pacifism. Today we must strive for an equal understanding on a global scale.
It is easy to oppose militarism, but what if an evil enemy, armed to the teeth, crosses your border? What if your country, what if democracy and liberties are under immediate danger? Every pacifist will have to explain his position regarding, for example, the issue of genocide, an issue that in the minds of Europeans is utterly embodied in the Nazi plans to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. It needs to be explained how to deal with a professional machinery arresting, deporting and destroying millions of unarmed citizens, if no army is around to defend them. To bluntly abolish the only forces able to halt such major crime, must be considered a major crime itself.
But what to think if the only force capable of halting this crime is also the only force able to perform it? Genocides are not necessarily acts of war. At a certain scale however – the scale beyond a police matter - they are impossible without a military ideology and structure.
It is impossible to know which army will eventually do the right thing, and which will do wrong. Inventors of tradition will tell that the ‘own’ people, government, army is, and always will be, right by nature. But after one, ten or fifty years, a society feeling well protected can become a democracy won by fanatics, a dictatorship supported by generals, or any other nightmare of politics. Citizens, feeling safe today, can become threatened by their own soldiers overnight. After all, up to a certain moment many German Socialists, Russian Jews and Yugoslavian Muslims supported and trusted ‘their’ armed forces.
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If an army will engage in genocide, it is wrong to keep it. If an army will protect against genocide, it is wrong to stop it. Unfortunately, we cannot tell which is which - but if there would be no armies nor militarist ideologies, we would not be threatened by the first, and would not need the second. The Nazis killed six million Jews before the allied forces could stop the massacre. It was the same in Anatolia, Iraq, Israel, Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Every time the killing was performed by armies erected with international consent, while their victims had once trusted them and had financed them with their taxes. All armies deployed for destruction were put up for the good cause, but when used for the wrong cause they always had enough head-start to create a disaster before even countered. Often military counteractions, despite all efforts made to keep armed forces ready, does not happen at all or turns out to be a disaster in its own right. But the holocaust would not even have started, and millions of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals would have lived, if Europe had been free of armies altogether.
In order to further pacifism, it needs to be investigated why there is a threat of war in some places and why in other places the mere idea of war seems absurd. What are for instance the causes – behind the historical incidents – of warfare in Ireland, Afghanistan and Uganda, which are absent today in Denmark, Jordan and South-Africa? Under which circumstances does the pressure for war augment and eventually breaks?
Elements that reduce the hazard of war are: the balance of population and resources; open borders to people, products and information; open-mindedness and awareness of basic human rights for individuals; cutback of arms and army expenses. Leaders of nations who have not done everything within their power regarding those issues, both in their own country and in the international field, have a responsibility in the next war.
MilitarismMilitarism holds that for a number of problems the best solution is military intervention, and considers war a useful and respectable art. For most militarists, war is even a supreme kind of solution: because it supposedly solves what nothing else could solve, the military is a skill above all other skills.
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Militarism necessarily considers the own society to be of a different nature, and thinks that the own government and the own armed forces will forever be thoughtful towards their own citizens.
In the militarist viewpoint there is no global humanity in the style of Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell. There is only one good nation surrounded by forces that are either hostile or unreliable. Because there will always be aggressors around, the own nation will always need a stronger army than other, at best untrustworthy states. Treaties are useless: your country can better make them and break them before the other party does. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it instigates countries to outbid each other and fire up the arms race. Militarists regard the timely search for peaceful solutions as a message of weakness towards potential (but never distant) aggressors, and in this manner implicitly chose for war. They always go to war with the sound of drums, never humbly apologizing towards the own citizens and soldiers because they forsook their duty to timely avoid another primitive massacre, unafraid of being called to justice like those who caused less suffering and damage.
The militarist ideology spreads like weapons. Propaganda here inspires speech writers over there, just like arms trade blindly follows demand across borders. Patriotic heroism in American movies is dubbed and displayed around the world.
From the nineteenth century through WW II and beyond the Atlantic world cherished racism, militarism and colonialism; the looting campaigns of Alexander were represented as Indogerman civilization missions of a genius, and the Germanic peoples were represented as the only true civilization builders. This was the vision that Adolf Hitler learned at school from teachers esteemed by his society.
Militarism claims to secure peace more than pacifism, because either the own military strength will discourage aggressors or, if deemed necessary, destroy him fast and foul. Few ideas have been tried and failed so many times throughout history. Every one of a hundred or so empires of the past has tried to create peace by means of deterrence or submission, but every peace ever jubilantly declared by the military, at the cost of much suffering and exhaustion, collapsed after a few decennia at most, and gave way to new brutalities – if brutalities ever had stopped at all. The violent world today, the history of civilizations and of Europe all demonstrate this succession of failures of militarism.
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The essence of modernity is the value of every individual. Nothing is as much in contradiction with this notion as to sacrifice, simply for his or her own benefit, the life of a fellow human. And this is exactly the appalling essence of militarism: leaders sacrificing their followers; mothers sacrificing their children; men and women sacrificing their lovers, friends and brothers, cleaning their conscience afterwards with a sentimental remembrance ceremony. Even if war would be less lethal than crime and disaster, it would remain the most repulsive, because only in warfare a whole society consciously decides to sacrifice their own kin and find pride in it. And the injured soldier down on the battle field, crying out for compassion, is the same person who pompously marched with the war-horses a few days earlier.
ArmamentOne country building up an arsenal gives strong arguments to rivalling countries to do the same: the own army is the best advocate for armies in other countries. We build the armies of our opponents as we build our own, and as we maintain our army, we maintain the armies of our enemies. American citizens for example must remember how Iraq and Afghanistan were empowered by their own governments not long before they turned this power against their sponsors.
A very actual example is the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968 CE. At the time of the treaty only a few powerful countries - the USA, the UK, France, Russia and China - possessed nuclear arms, while the others had obviously lacked the financial means to bring in position a counterforce. In the treaty non-nuclear countries promised not to acquire nuclear arms, while all countries promised to work towards nuclear disarmament:
Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.311
This disarmament clause was immediately forgotten by the powerful countries, who took the treaty for a mere sanctioning of their military predominance. Friendly states (Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey) secretly received nuclear arms from the US, and ducked out of the treaty by harbouring them under US control. Non-nuclear states either did not sign the treaty or tried to duck out by
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secretly buying or developing nuclear weapons (India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, Ukraine and unknown others.)
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has become a missed opportunity because of two main reasons. The first reason is that no broad and efficient control, and thus no confidence, is possible when borders remain sealed. The other reason is that the powerful countries failed to close down their absurd nuclear arsenal at the safest moment in history to do so, spreading unnecessary anxiety instead of easing the fear of non-nuclear states. Likewise, the most frustrated non-nuclear countries, already empoverished, tried to obtain expensive weapons, however ridicule compared to the actual armament of greater powers.
No frustrated group has ever refrained from attacking because the adversary was too well armed. On the contrary, frustrated communities are the most tempted to fight, while their frustration indicates that they are the lesser armed party. The futility of military armament becomes evident as wars are usually started – even started over - by the weaker party.312
The party that started a war often proved not to be the strongest, and the stronger proved not to have deterred the adversary of attacking. Wars start merely because two armies exist and fear to be taken by betrayal. Once the war is started, all the armed forces of the world are incapable to end it, and when a war eventually comes to an end by exhaustion, both societies are worse off in costs, suffering and economic decline.
In 1956 CE, elections were to be held in the whole of Vietnam.313
There was no doubt that the votes would favour Ho Chi Minh. The US, fearing that this outcome would lead to the expansion of the Chinese military presence in South-East Asia, opposed the elections and imposed a friendly government. In this way the mere existence of two heavy armed world-powers caused the Vietnam War. Millions of civilians and soldiers were slaughtered, but the war ended after twenty years right where it would have been if the elections of 1956 CE had taken place.
In 1990 CE Iraq invaded Iran. After the Iranian Shiite revolution of 1979 CE, Iraq feared that the Shiites within its borders might provoke an Iranian military invasion, and it seemed better to act while the enemy was still in revolutionary turmoil. The result was eight years of
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war, in which one million people were slaughtered and the regional economy lost over a billion dollars. Economic progress in both countries was abruptly halted, and life conditions of both populations went down. When the war ended because of exhaustion, borders and power balance remained exactly as before it started. Various authors have ascribed the cause of this tragedy to a disagreement about a few small islands in the Persian Gulf, or even to the millennia old rivalry between Persia and Mesopotamia. But the real cause was the fear, plain and simple, for the opponent’s army.
In 1991 CE, Ethiopia, troubled by the upcoming military force of its neighbour, supported resurgences in Somalia, and a civil war plunged the latter in the darkest anarchy. Somalia decomposed and the population was delivered to numerous bands of military thug. In the wake of those events the United Nations sent armed forces. This was the first UN intervention in a national conflict ever, something inconceivable during the Cold War era. The intervention ended in 1995 CE without achieving any of its goals. Ten years later Somalia was still a poor country ruled by mobs of armed bandits. This tragedy also started because a country felt threatened by the other's army.
If armed forces are really an efficient and legitimate means of peace, it is unjust that its benefits are restricted to states only, while there is so much peace needed in the world. We must then accept and even promote that minorities everywhere get armies of their own, even that every association has the democratic right to erect its armed force because they are entitled to peace as any other population. Then we must wish well equipped armies to the Northern Irish Catholics, the Spanish Basks, the French Corsicans, various Islamist groups, the Montana Militias or whoever wants one and can afford it - just to make peace flourish everywhere.
If on the other hand armies are prehistoric habits existing only because of coincidences like the formation of state boundaries, and are not a source of peace but of mad cruelty towards the own population as well as other’s, they should be removed as urgently as unexploded land mines.
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Modernity
Progress is the residue of a multitude of failing histories
History has witnessed both magnificent and gruesome inventions, and some people wonder if it would not be better if humanity had remained ignorant, and had never constructed nuclear weapons or ravaged the earth’s biosphere. Indeed technology puts the very same people at risk who expect to benefit from it. The embankment of a riverside, built to reduce the frequency of inundations, can either bring safety or in the end kill more people, because the scarcer inundations will be more violent and less expected, or will be forced into more crowded areas.
Many people, witnessing how technology expands while their world becomes ever more aggressive, fear that technology will soon make every acceptable way of life impossible. But the real cause of growing aggression is that the human population no longer can be supported in a relaxed manner, by the available natural resources of our planet. When we see technology deployed in various problem fields, this correlation makes us blame technology. But the picture would be totally different if we would keep our population in pace with our environment and at the same time deploy technology for our comfort, safety and enjoyment.
Progress is not the simple aggregate of successive innovations, it is the growth of the dignity of each individual. Progress needs innovations, but innovations don’t guarantee progress.
It is unknown how many times humans made a slight step forward in speech, fire keeping or tool making, but to be saved from oblivion only once it was necessary that advances were dispersed over many different bands living separate histories. Sometimes a band survived long enough to keep a skill alive and pass it on. One exceptional intelligent band would not be sufficient to guard small and vulnerable technologies for thousands of centuries, through catastrophic
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changes in the environment, let alone turn those technologies into stepping-stones to further development. The progress made over the last two million years is not accomplished by one civilization or race. It is even the accumulation of innovations of three successive human species.
Progress is the residue of a multitude of failing histories, of which not everything is lost every time.
Because progress continues while civilizations disappear, it can only persist and grow if borders are crossed. Whenever technologies from various places came together and were recognized as different practices to reach similar goals, the aggregate of such variations revealed wider possibilities. Local magic joined into crafts, and crafts into theories. Still new encounters made such theories interfere, compete and evolve. In this way our minds developed awareness of alternatives and choice – qualities essential to thinking.
Take medicine for example. Still today the very large majority of prescribed drugs have a history going back to prehistoric knowledge about healing plants. Because differing cultures exchanged medicinal experiences, observations and imageries over a long period of time, this knowledge could reach our time, and inspire pharmacologists to find new synthetical drugs.
The crossing of social barriers has even so contributed to the advance of medicine. In 1883 CE Bismarck installed a health security system in Germany, in order to fend off socialist revolutionaries. In the next century public health care grew into an essential element of modernity. During this one century, more people have been examined by a doctor, and doctors have gathered more experience in diagnostics, than in all the centuries before, and as a consequence medicine changed beyond recognition. Growing public health in its turn added many fresh minds and viewpoints to the human task force, and as a consequence affected progress in all other fields. Heidegger, Jaspers, Einstein, Max Planck, Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann etc. all grew up in the shelter of this health system. Progress is not a sudden wonder of the last centuries, its origins involve the whole human past and all human strata.
Appreciated in this manner the interim balance of progress, achieved by humanity as a whole and accidentally fallen to Western society at
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this moment in time, shows a surplus beyond doubt. In the end, progress exists, and we carefully eed to consider its benefits.
The difference between progress and civilization
Progress happens out of need and good fortune, when opportunities allow the furthering of improvements made by others, in earlier times and in other places. Often more recent civilizations look down on out-dated knowledge, or at its exotic formulation. Yet the present knowledge is only made possible by the ideas that came first. Although recent ideas always seem to be more crucial, the preceding were always more challenging. The first paper sheet was more difficult to make than the billion sheets produced today, and the invention of gun powder was more difficult than the invention of a rocket. Even Aristotle, the celebrated 'father of science' of European ideology, acknowledged this:
For in the case of all discoveries the results of previous labours that have been handed down from others have been advanced bit by bit by those who have taken them on, whereas the original discoveries generally make advance that is small at first though much more useful than the development which later springs out of them. For it may be that in everything, as the saying is, ‘the first start is the main part’: and for this reason also it is the most difficult; for in proportion as it is most potent in its influence, so it is smallest in its compass and therefore most difficult to see: whereas when this is once discovered, it is easier to add and develop the remainder in connection with it.314
The difference between progress and an accidental civilization is visible in the life span of each. The famous Arnold Toynbee identified thirty-four civilizations flourishing within the last five thousand years. Some of those civilizations supposedly existed for millennia.315 This is a miscalculation consistent with mythical records of legendary lifetimes of forefathers and kings, and is explicable by Toynbee’s preoccupation with the mental, religious and ethical echoes in such records. It is meaningful that the civilizations of which we know the most, are assigned the shortest duration. When our knowledge about seemingly long living civilizations is refined, they fall apart in separate civilizations lasting a few centuries each. The Egyptiac civilization, estimated by Toynbee to have survived for three millennia, is the most remarkable discrepancy. Although Toynbee had access to data
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unavailable to Ancient Roman historians, Lucretius seem to have better understood the conceited claims of civilizations:
we live as mortals by eternal give and take. The nations wax, the nations wane away; In a brief space the generations pass, And like to runners hand the lamp of life One to another. 316
Unfortunately those verses are often interpreted as pessimistic romanticism instead of the sharp observation they are. Appendix A presents a rough reconstruction of the duration of some seventy civilizations, not by relying on their own persistence myths, but on intermittent periods of disorder and decay. Those periods may seem details if seen from afar, but in reality exceed the hundred-years horizon, and thus where unbridgeable by anything other than mythology. In this reconstruction the life time of a civilization is seldom more than four centuries.
Progress comes under pressure with each flourishing civilization. Each step of progress has been countered and recuperated by official clerkdom.. Because the dominance of the world must be unquestionable, knowledge of this world must be complete and final. New ideas become unacceptable violations of sacred power and universal truth. Knowledge, as it is right then, is frozen in a new, fixed cosmology.
In the end we see undeniable progress survive, not because, but despite civilizations. It took three to four million years to evolve from the first stone chopper with just one sharp edge, over stone axes trimmed by a mounting number of blows, up to metal knifes. Such progress is not carried as an ark of wisdom by one race or one enduring civilization, but has stone stepped over dozens of rigid civilizations while suspiciously avoiding painful blisters from their burning stakes.
The Atlantic civilization can be used to demonstrate how civilizations work. Pharmacological knowledge for example suffered during the Roman Empire, when elegant theories based on the four elements were preferred to explain illness above seemingly unstructured, unfinished lists of random plants. The only treatise on pharmacology, written by Dioscorides in the first century CE, was seldom copied, or the copyists did not bother to include the indispensable pictures.
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Whatever survived was completely eradicated during Medieval which hunts.
When the use of quinine was learned from Peruvian Indians, European clerks detested and resisted it for decades as a herb from the devil. But when its benefits could no longer be denied, quinine became a European achievement, and the same people who had resisted the drug took quinine to their missions on other continents to demonstrate the superiority of their own ancient tradition. Refutation and recuperation could happen simultaneously: while Galilei was persecuted by the Inquisition in Rome, missionaries propagated his inventions in China.
The divide between superstition and reason was never as clear-cut as historians of Western science want us to believe. Superstition did not end in classical Greece - not even in modern Europe. Descartes was convinced that ‘the knowledge of all things depends upon the knowledge of God’.317 Isaac Newton was convinced that gravitation would stop immediately if God were not actively involved: ‘blind fate could never make all the planets move.’318 Leibniz wrote that ‘God has been determined by reasons of wisdom and order to give nature those laws which we observe in it,’ and criticized the Cartesians of his days for their assumption that God had commanded the course of the universe once, at the beginning, because this would put an end to free will and make God responsible for our sins.319
Like the ideologies of all civilizations, Atlantic ideology built persistence myths by freely picking or refuting ancient texts.
The study of progressThere are two options to compose a chronicle of progress: the first is to concede to burners of books, and accept that nobody had anything useful to say before and outside the canon of the accidental civilization.
The other option is to try to reconstruct, out of the bits that have been left, the steady human progress towards modernity in the face of counteractions by succeeding ideologies. This second option stands no chance if we stick to the thesis that none but the surviving historical documents have ever existed, and abide by the dogma that the documents that were allowed to survive do not testify of humanity as a whole, but only of conveniently delimited races or populations.320
We must, for example, resolutely reject the common but unfounded
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assertion that the writings of Aristotle are representative of the Greek (read: Indogerman or European) mind. Most Greeks not even comprehend them, as neither do most people in other countries.
We must provisionally allow the hypothesis that thinkers on any continent, as far as they lived under comparable conditions, faced roughly the same challenges at roughly the same time and comparable circumstances, because during most of history ideas, by force of curiosity and excitement, moved around the world within a few years as today within a few seconds.321 Unless racial discrepancies are taken for granted, it must be expected that all civilizations arrive at simular questions and similar answers under similar circumstances. The most important circumstances in this respect are social structures, production modes and cultural exchange.
The intrinsic value of an ancient document can only be revealed by reducing the impact of three capturing frames: the first frame is the cultural environment to which the maker had to concede, possibly unaware, in order to have his work circulated; the second frame is the cultural environment of the beholder, who inevitably applies his own semantics, imagery and preferences. This frame changes the meaning of texts, works of art and monuments each century. The third frame, the most difficult to distinguish, is set up by translators, editors and spoilers in between. To evaluate a document, it must be appreciated how and why it arrived at this place and time, how it has been edited in the course of time, and if alternative versions or additional texts have been destroyed, by extrapolating ideological campaigns, by following trails of refugees, and by filling gaps by means of comparision with other cultures, without admitting cultural particularism.322
Spontaneous generation of knowledge is as ludicrous as spontaneous generation of animals. Just as mice come from parent mice and so on, and not from a pile of garbage, knowledge did not pop up in the recent civilization, but evolved while it was exchanged between passing bands, tribes and cultures. To pick out one mice and say that for that mice it ‘has not been proven’ that it had a mother would be scorned by scientists, while the same claim for their civilization is praised.
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The less traditions persist, the more tradition is stressed. In a living society more relevant things change faster. What remains unchanged are hollow symbols, meaning different things in every century.
The tremendous significance of ancient artefacts, monuments and texts lies not in their prevalence or righteousness, but in their potency to educate us about humanness and the hazards of history. Just as the destruction of an ecosystem can destroy a cure for cancer, the demolition of the world’s historic and cultural inheritance can bereave us from a path to a better existence.
Texts, monuments and artworks, whenever they overcame destruction and oblivion, should be recognized as the combined legacy of the whole of humanity. Then we un-burn the books in a sense, and even more: we invite the world community to take further part in the astounding modernity that inspires our time.
The difference between progress and democracy
Democracy is not the same as voting. Most societies are democratic, in the sense that those in power are endorsed by the majority of the people. When a demagogue can convince a sufficiently large group that he is the right dictator, he can be brought to power by the majority, if necessary by means of violence. This majority runs the economy, pays taxes, delivers clerks, troops and maybe executioners. No ballot will deny such a dictator's position. Except for interventions by foreign powers, established societies have, generally speaking, a government desired by the majority of their population. If such a government is no longer desired, it will inevitably be replaced by means of street protests, mutiny, revolution etc. In a democracy based on polls it is all the same possible that the lawful majority maltreats minorities, wages wrong wars or commits injustice in many other ways. In all those cases there is little difference between the law of the jungle and democracy.
Only progress and modernity can make a real direct democracy possible, because such a democracy requires a population of emancipated individuals, with free minds, unhampered by destitution, borders, censorship or secrecy. Only such individuals can evaluate practices of human rights, warmongering, corruption, repression etc.
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In order to present the Atlantic civilization as the cradle of modern democracy, every vote against its interests is categorized as undemocratic. Like divine grace only comes from heaven, freedom only comes from the the Atlantic civilization. Ballot victories of unreliable parties, for example in Venezuela when Hugo Chávez became president,323 or in Palestine when the Hamas movement won authority,324 are deemed undemocratic, in contrast with the bombardment of foreign cities and the handling of politics in foreign countries. A democracy imposed by armed forces from abroad – even if called 'nation building' - hardly deserves that name. It is a ghost-democracy.
Unjust freedomStill using the Atlantic civilization as a showcase for civilizions in general, we must examine the ideology behind the export of freedom. The justification is an amalgamation of a sort of democracy, invented by the ancient Greeks and brought to its highest expression in the West, and the Free Market, which must be understood as unleashed capitalism. Democracy and freedom defined in this manner are the Burger King and Pepsi of world politics. A country refusing it must either be out of its mind, or plain evildoers.
Despite all visionary claims of its superiority, this Free Market would go off the rails the moment heavily armed states would stop interfering. Never before so many borders were guarded so severely as during the era of the Free Market. It needs laws and armed forces for tax import, for the promotion of export, to regulate competition and prices, to restrict wages, to build roads, ports, railways, to provide security and so on. The Free Market is conceived together with the nation state, and can not survive without its strong arm. Al this has not so much to do with the dignity and liberties of humanity.
One example of how Atlantic civilization had changed freedom from a universal human right into vulgar greed is the Economic Freedom Index of the World, as presented in the 2005 Annual Report from the Fraser Institute. The report was created with the support of many eminent economists, most notably Noble Prize winner and free market champion Milton Friedman.325 The Fraser Institute calls it its mission to promote ‘greater choice, competitive markets, and personal responsibility.’ It should surprise nobody that the thorough research of the Institute demonstrates time and again that a
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government without income and yet defending unconstrained foreign voracity is good for everyone.
The report ‘would prefer to have components that can be measured objectively’ but leans heavily on perceptions of business leaders and investment experts.326 As a consequence, countries that promote investments score well on the Economic Freedom Index. What is best for foreign investors is also best for the local population, as long as there is no environmental or human rights regulation, no social security, no health care and so on.
But a hundred economists can’t talk straight what’s twisted. The first interesting discrepancy in the report is that a genuine scientific study which states that economic freedom ‘requires governments to do some things but refrain from doing others’, would at least estimate the taxes required ‘to do some things'. Yet countries get higher ratings if they have smaller budgets, and the highest rating if they have no budget at all. A scientific study without ideological bias should consider both the benefits and the deficits of taxes, or frankly admit that taxes are superfluous because it is bad for the economy if citizens are protected from exploitation and other calamities.
Even more bewildering is the absence of any causal analysis. The report says that the countries ranking higher on the Economic Freedom Index perform better in the fields of peace and wealth, and implicates unargumented that the first is the cause of the latter. It is evidently better to invest in more stable environments, disregarding how this stability came about. What if the scientific study of the honoured Fraser Institute - surely to everyone's surprise - would proof beyond doubt that we can become richer by investing under a reign of terror or in a society where chattel slavery is firmly established? This is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
One country featuring in the top ten list is the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, of which reports mention abuse of migrant workers to the brink of slavery, child sex tourism, offhand flogging of (mostly Asian) prisoners, and ineffective health care.327
Singapore, scoring the second best out of 127 nations on the Economic Freedom Index, is known by Amnesty International and by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child for its bad human rights record, with thirty-seven individuals held without charge or trial, and an execution rate of 86 lives in three years. Whipping and caning is
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routine; foreign domestic workers are mistreated by employers and employment agents;328 freedom of expression and assembly are curbed by legislation, censorship and government controls;329 and Jehovah’s witnesses and homosexuals are persecuted. Four out of five people live in housings built, owned and maintained by government, and the leading newspaper (the Strait Times) is closely linked to government. Maybe this are 'some things' a government should do after all.330
Just freedomDuring the twentieth century the divide between capitalist and socialist politics dominated most of the world.331 Both have made their victims. To capitalists to strive for equality kills every creativity in a population, while the market will reward who deserves it. To socialists unlimited enrichment kills a decent social contract between fellow humans, while socialism is thoughtful for the weaker of us. Capitalists see freedom murdered by state bureacracy, socialists see people selling their labour empoverished by uleashed capitalism.
It is seldom realized that the militarist state created both conservative capitalism and state socialism. The state creates its own monopolies of services, and supports commercial monopolies, at least by closing borders for competition of labour, products and information.
What if the borders of militarist states were taken out from the equation? After all a contemporary state is nothing but a bag of services of which only those related to the territory are xxxx . It is certain that we want those services, and that they only can be provided by a communal organization, but they should not be monopolies. If people are free to chose their dwelling and their social security and education, and their rights are guaranteed either by a state or by an other communal institution, One time a duke asked Confucius about the best way to govern his territory.
The Master said, “Good government obtains when those who are near are made happy, and those who are far off are attracted.”332
People have an unalienable right to freedom, because they are born that way, not because it makes money. And this right should also be unalienable to local populations, even if this makes investmens less attractive on the short term. This is an other kind of democracy.
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The difference between progress and development
The starting point of progress lies deep in prehistory. The starting point of development, on the other hand, lies in the difference in wealth between a metropolis and the outskirts of its civiliziation. Underdeveloped societies are imagined for the first time in the sixteenth century CE. Before they were degenerated, later retarded, then underdeveloped and finally developing. In any case they are seen as immature countries which must follow the guidance of the civilization to escape their age old poverty. Progress is then no longer simple improvement, but submission.
It is more accurate and a lot simpler to speak of poor countries. Poverty is not natural nor normal. Poor countries are deceived in two ways, and both hinder escape from poverty: the first deception is that their poverty is typical for savage continents, and that they are primitives growing up into full members of the civilization.333 The second deception is that all what is needed is to end poverty, is to see through the first deception.
International organizations like the World Bank and the IMF profess that progress is synonym to industrialization, based on capital investment. But if plunder is to take away masses of goods and give little in return, industry can be a plundering tool or a development tool. David Landes writes:
The Industrial Revolution made some countries richer and others (relatively) poorer; or more accurately, some countries made an industrial revolution and became rich; and others did not and stayed poor.
This sounds as if the smart guys deserved to become rich, and nobody was really harmed in the process, but it is in fact a reiterating of the degeneration theory of the first missionaries. The only difference is that missionaries took Christianity, while Landes takes economy for reference. Landes adds a few paragraphs further:
And for still others, as for the Amerindians or Tasmanians, it was apocalypse, a terrible fate imposed from without.334
Despite this casual but chilling addition the first slogan remains firmly printed and spreads unfounded relieve among whoever is in need of it: the poor have to blame themselves, they should have made an industrial revolution like normal people. Landes never really assessed in a scientific manner the poverty of countries which before
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industrialization lived happily without national income accounting, and he can not represent in financial graphs the poverty of the exterminated populations he mentions in between. Conveniently the victims are either dead, numb or lazy – anything as long as no claim can be filed against those countries that deserved to become richer. A less biased historian will under the given circumstances listen to the victims to quantify poverty and progress, and will soon dismiss the cynical proposition that some became rich while fortunately everyone else either maintained the same quality of life or died out.
The same economists who would cry for the police if a cactus was stolen from their driveway, invest much effort in rationalizing a one-sided free market in which continents are destroyed at a scale undreamed of by Alexander.
Post-colonial developmentWhen the European colonization period was over, only a few non-Western states managed to build an economy comparable to the poorest members of the European Union. They became known as ‘the four dragons’: South Korea, Hong-Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Mike Mason explains:
None of the Dragons developed on the basis of the strategies recommended by the IMF and the World Bank – that is, on the principles of the “free market.” Rather, all of them developed within the embrace of “the plan” – that is, the dirigist and protectionist state. Finally, they all were small: two of them, Hong-Kong and Singapore, are essentially islands. It is doubtful just how far their lessons can be adopted to larger, more complex societies. 335
The bulk of poor countries tried to play the free market with too massive and too cheap agricultural exports, and got entrapped in debts. Their situation worsened each time they obeyed the Western directed IMF and World Bank to industrialize production further, and made prices collapse.
Massive export of low-valued products provokes the exact opposite of progress: it leads to the deterioration of land, labour and life, and eventually to suicide on the international market place. All countries which invested in mass production destroyed or sold out valuable resources and environments, only to become victims of the oil crisis of the seventies and the recession of the eighties. It is a reiteration of the ten millennia old custom of raiding and plundering subjected ground, now called development.
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Sri Lanka came in serious debt when massive tea production, recently introduced as development in African countries, divided the tea price by two. Tanzania went down the same path when the sisal price tumbled because synthetic ropes hit the market, and Ghana suffered from the same scenario with its cocoa export…
Primary products, with very few exceptions, are a bad business to be in if you want a steady livelihood, but most of the developing countries depend on just one, two or at most three commodities. Hence their balance of payments, and the foreign exchange they need to buy machinery for their fledgling industries, is completely at the mercy of the fickle commodity trade winds.336
Once poor countries are convinced that they will become rich by massively flooding the world markets with cheap commodities, they beg for the industrialization and mass production of their own pillage. After the exhaustion of their local resources, as happened before with European forests, African ivory and American Wide Range herds, they become forever entrapped in the international aid industry.
Western dominated international organizations and multinational companies control market prices to a large extent. While poor countries are working on the edge of calamity to sell out, those in international power need only to give a little push in one direction and make a whole country go bankrupt. The debts piled up in the process are a catastrophe to the poor, while their creditors consider them a bargain price for world power.
In 1987 CE, Graham Hancock wrote, the debt-service obligations of Somalia were 167 % of export earnings. As a consequence, Somalia’s economy is dominated by foreign aid.337 Argentina took up tremendous loans to throw tons of fish and agricultural products on the world market for almost nothing. Distributors in other countries sell this food for a fraction of the price of their home-grown products. Despite the massive production, Argentinian debts and unemployment are high, and millions suffer increasing poverty. Mass production of export goods had brought about mass production of unemployment and cheap labour at home and abroad. Argentina went bankrupt.
Graham Hancock concludes that development aid most of all uses poor countries as a market for Western employment and as a garbage dump. He wrote:
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During the past twenty years millions of rural people in Africa, in Asia and in Latin America have been forcibly removed from their homes to make space for the expanding reservoirs of giant hydroelectric dams [..] In Ethiopia’s Awash valley, Afar nomads whose traditional dry season pasture lands have been sown with cash crops and surrounded by barbed wire are today reduced to absolute penury, their independence gone, their way of life shattered, their dignity destroyed as they queue in line for food handouts. Brazilian Indians whose rainforests have been felled in the name of progress now face genocide; their unique knowledge and skills are about to be lost to mankind forever. In Indonesia’s ‘thousand island’ paradise, tribal people are remorseless being extinguished and priceless ecological resources turned to ash and mud amidst the folly of the largest resettlement programme in history…338
Ancient and recent modernity
We sometimes met modernity for too short a while on the long, precarious path of progress. It survived life threatening attacks of many ephemeral ideologies: Muslim, Christian and other civilizations have executed innocent and valuable people to stop the same progress and modernity they claim as their own achievements, once they enter their golden century of power.
As abundant as traces of modernity are in recent centuries, as difficult is it to reconstruct the evolution of modernity in the rest of history. While the great civilizations have left ruins of hard granite and treasures of imperishable gold, the traces left behind by short-lived moments of modernity are made of softer clay and perishable wood. Nonetheless, over millenaries such modernity cropped up in Egypt, India, Babylon, Alexandria and Europe.
One hint of emerging modernity can be the decay of central power. Other hints are vanishing borders, either when central power is unable to control a growing territory, or when the supervision of remote territories is commissioned to local aristocrats. Since wars cross borders per sé, they engender exchange, both in the course of actual hostilities and in the anarchy of their aftermath.
A common trace of modernity is the shift of concern to the individual person. Poetry, music and arts begin to express more personal feelings; persons of all ages and classes dare to voice individual views; philosophies attach increasing importance to real life suffering.
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Living together implies that most of the time people can rely upon not being harmed by others. The only way to find out how not to harm equals, is by recalling what is harmful for oneself. The Golden Rule ‘treat others as you want to be treated yourself’ expresses the essence of those ethics. The rule was uttered simultaneously during the sixth century BCE in Persia, China and India. It has made its way into the Hindu Mahabharata, the Jewish Talmud, the Christian bible and the Islamic Sunnah, and has been defended by Socrates, Seneca and Jesus. Whenever this Golden Rule - also called ‘reciprocal ethics’ - is taken as an universal ethical conduct among equally responsible individuals, it is a token of modernity.339
Finally modernity is given away by the rise of skepticism towards official theories, if it left traces in surviving documents.
The spirit of the ageOften the Spirit of the Age is called upon to explain historical differences in dressing, artistic styles and thinking.340 Thinking is indeed different in different times, because experience evolves and thoughts stem from experience. But unfortunately the Spirit of the Age is also used endorse whatever wrong was performed in the past by ideological forebears. Backfiring, it can be used to endorse present day injustice.
Slavery, crucifying enemies, throwing heretics before the lions, burning at the stake, torture and pogroms are all absolved by the benevolent Spirit of the Age. On the other hand, throwing Christians before the lions, crucifying Jesus, stealing four grains of gold are despicable acts, throughout all succeeding ages.
It is appalling to claim that there was ever a time when victims experienced physical abuses different from ourselves, or that they were inflicted in such a way that the executers could remain ignorant of the suffering. And in this matter, as in others, there is no split between writing ideology on the one hand, and kindling the stake on the other: both are the ideological and the industrial side of the same violence.
A deplorable consequence of supposed relativity of suffering is that it allows to doubt suffering any time and anywhere. If suffering is not the same for everyone at all times, the spirit of the present age can be invoked to fabricate excuses for any atrocity. Thus a multi-cultural nephew of the old spirit has emerged. The Vietnamese did not mind
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to be killed all that much, because they mourned in white dresses. Palestinian suicide attacks are explained as a cultural curiosity, which is even more appalling if this reasoning comes from Muslims living in good health who brag that they are not afraid of dying.
Suffering is suffering. Always. Everywhere.
The Spirit of The Age is also used in a blatant circular reasoning. Believers are continuously asked to step outside the spirit of their age in order to condone acts of founders, prophets and priests, who supposedly acted in the spirit of their age. More intellectual effort is asked from followers and heathens than from venerated authorities, who are otherwise hailed as challengers of the same spirit.
Hints of modernityHalfway the third millennium BCE the civilization of the pyramid builders had worn out its golden age. While Egyptian central power withered, trade with Syria, Anatolia, Mesopotamia and tropical Africa grew, and modernity flourished for a few centuries. Archaeologists discovered, between the monumental ruins, statues of clay of this period, not expressing the reticence of the gods or the power of kings, but lively, feeling humans. One artefact is a little statue of Pharaoh Raneferef, who died in 2416 BCE without managing to build more than a few stone layers of his pyramid. He is portrayed as a man with a still smile, his head slightly bowed, as in contemplation.341 From the same time stem various other small clay statues, all portraits with stunningly personal traits; the best known is possibly the portrait of a scribe, friendly but attentively looking up from his work. Looking in one particular person’s thoughtful eyes over a distance of four millennia is a shivering experience, but also a fascinating proof of the antiquity of modernity.342
From about the same time date statuettes of a similar style, but discovered In the Ishtar temple of Mari, in the Euphrates region. At the time Mari was a border city, more aware of various traditions and thus more perceptible to skepticism. Some twenty small statuettes of men, women and couples reside in the Musée du Louvre. They all radiate a personal state of mind similar to their Egyptian counterparts, a thousand kilometres away. The most famous statuette from Mari is one made of translucent alabaster, representing the high priest Ebih-Ili as a pensive individual, silent but with astounding vivacity.343
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The hierarchic world-image was based on the presumption that living things, including gods, demons, plants and animals have their own ‘nature’ or ‘substance’, which defined their social place. A slave was naturally a slave, an emperor was naturally an emperor, and so on. This world was unchangeable.
In pre-dynastic times the Nile Delta belonged to the cultural region of the Middle East. In this region vegetation gods – Osiris, Dionysus, Baal, Tammuz - were prevalent. The worship of those gods stemmed from forefather cults.
In a temple in the Nile Delta a dinosaur fossil was revered as Osiris’ backbone, and the magical properties of this relic certainly contributed to his growing popularity.344 Osiris obtained a minor place in the Egyptian pantheon, and became involved in complex magical rituals, devised to liberate the deceased Pharaoh from the underworld and to lead him towards eternal life.
As wealthy owners of country estates, officials and nobility had always been susceptible to the imagery of an underworld god, responding to prayers for good harvests and prosperity. When the power of the deified Pharaoh declined, Osiris recruited a growing number of worshippers among them.
Osiris’ success forced pharaonic ideologists to link him to Ra, sun god and father of the Pharaoh. In one myth Ra turned into Osiris during nightfall, and Osiris was even called ‘the Ba345 of Ra’. When the Pharaoh died, Osiris guided him through darkness, and each morning the Pharaoh, like the rising sun, mounted to the throne.
Nobility followed the Pharaoh's footsteps in the underworld, and urged the priesthood to trust their own afterlife in the hands of Osiris. But to bestow immortality on regular humans remained an awkward thing to do, and in the Coffin Texts we find passages where the deceased was magically disguised as the immortal Osiris, in order to transverse unharmed the difficult path to afterlife. 346 This more ‘democratic’ connection of Osiris with nobility left traces in Osiris' hymns:
Thou art a shining noble at the head of the nobles, permanent in big rank, established in sovereignty, the beneficent power of the company of the gods.
Because of his significance for the dispersed aristocracy, Osiris acquired temples in numerous cities and evolved to the most
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widespread god of ancient Egypt. Just like the Jews demanded that there be only one temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem, and Muslims turn to Mecca wherever they say their prayers, Egyptian clerkdom tried to concentrate and check power in one chosen metropolis: it was a question of power politics, but it was also common-sense to stick to one household for one god. Now a new myth was needed to explain how the worship of Osiris had become so dispersed - how it was possible that just one god could be worshipped in so many temples. In this myth another deity, Set, was accused of tearing the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces and to have scattered them throughout the land of Egypt. This deity, Set, had been popular during the second dynasty. The myth continues with Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris, sailing the Nile and building a temple wherever she found one part of Osiris.347
For the first time we know, an escape from the underworld other than oblivion passed the hundred-years horizon, became conceivable for beings without divine nature.348 In the Book of Death the deceased, going through severe ordeals to ward off his second death, asks Atum ‘how long have I to live?’. The god answers:
Thou shalt exist for millions of millions of years, a period of millions of years.349
This new doctrine - that there exists for humans a way out to immortality – not only spread rapidly throughout Egypt, but eventually reached an even wider audience. Fresh and fascinating, it found its way into many cultures, and merged in the process with Shamanistic and Vedic imagery. It became a mysterious secret whispered in dark abodes, as well as a dogma of triumphant ideologies. It terrified the gods of Genesis, who chased the first man from paradise ‘lest he would take of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’350; combined with Indian influences it entered Greece in the Orphic mysteries and evolved to Pythagoreanism. It influenced Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle and others. It led to the transformation of the ephemeral, ghostly appearances of the dead into immortal souls. It inspired Zoroaster and Ezekiel to modify age-old legends of the victorious resurrection of tribal warriors, into a vision of the revival of the bones of the faithful and, unified with their immortal souls, living in an eternal golden age. In contrast, it made Plato and his followers, up to Gnosticism and Manicheanism, to imagine that the soul could live on by itself, without the need for a revolting mortal body. It also invoked the widespread Roman Isis-cult and the ensuing European Maria cult.
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Ancient Egyptian funerary customs were still widely practised at the beginning of the first millennium CE, but were now open to the broadest range of wealthy citizens. The Musée du Louvre (as well as the British Museum) possesses a number of burial objects dating from this period discovered in the oasis of Fayum, a flourishing community of Egyptians, Greeks, Libyans and others.
For a long time the objects from Fayum were stowed away in the catacombs of the Louvre, because the curator considered them too difficult to classify. Like illegitimate bastards, they did not fit into the Egyptian department, nor in the Greco-Roman department. This was not just a problem of arrangement – it was another testimony of the widespread academic mistake that high cultures are necessarily ‘pure’ and that exchange is synonymous to defilement. Put otherwise, the curator did not fully grasp ancient modernity, and its tremendous importance for history.
At this moment the artefacts from the Egyptian oasis have found their own spot in the museum, and especially the funerary portraits, painted on wood and placed over the coffin, are fascinating. Speaking, lucid, delicate and utterly individual, they are the most touching testimonies of modernity in antiquity.
The rather detailed historical records we have of Egypt are in contrast with our absolute ignorance of the Indian past. Yet archaeologists have discerned a period of intensive trade between the Indic civilization and Mesopotamia during the same centuries mentioned above for Egypt. Consequently, India might have experienced a local rise modernity at about the same time as Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the Rig Veda, a long list of hymns, spells and prayers, appear paragraphs with surprisingly skeptical insight, which are difficult to date but possibly were composed at the end of the third millennium BCE:
Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?The gods are later than this world’s creation. Who knows then whence it first came into being?He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.351
Towards the end of the second millennium BCE the human avalanche ruined all old civilizations. The endurance eagerly
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professed in the cosmologies of civilizations had flawed under growing population pressure, still reinforced by unrelenting immigration of northern savages.352 Humanity became trapped in warfare and repression; the rage of war either left no room for moments of modernity, or destroyed all its traces. At the time borders were still hazy. Natural obstacles like rivers, wastelands and mountain rims were never completely sealed: nomad tribes found their way through fords and gorges, and even took part in economies at either side of the frontier. As land became ever more scarce, growing conflicts with new settlers eventually changed borders into forts overlooking strategic passages, unpredictable raider encampments, and random battle fields on muddy plains. Tribal leagues gathered around warrior gods and begged them for courage and victory. Phoenicians colonized Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. Following discourse was spoken by Moses to fire his tribes when invading Palestine, but similar verses must have been heard from Africa to China, among tribes and confederations raiding the Mediterranean, and among leagues of Libyans, Hittites, Hsiung-Nu and so on:
There is none like the God of Jeshurun, who rides upon the heaven [..] and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, destroy them.[..] and thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places.353
In the course of those wars iron replaced copper as the main constituent of weaponry. Since iron is produced in the manner of bronze, it must have been found by accident many times. Yet it had been neglected until then: it needed more combustibles to build up more heat, was harder to smith, much less durable and, even more important, its sombre colour and rusting nature contradicted the glittering essence of invincible splendour, uttered in innumerable myths, and so well illustrated by bronze. Homer, tough deep in the Iron Age, chose to adorn a hero ‘all glorious in his armour of gleaming bronze’. But as fights in the real world became grimmer, the dark but sharper metal substituted the glittering but weaker. Humanity had to meet its growing numbers with more efficient killing equipment, and iron was deadly effective. The black metal’s power bestowed it with magical repute wherever it was deployed. The Khoisan foragers believed humans can be killed by nothing but the natural poison that iron possesses, a conviction that reveals the vast shift in human relations brought about in forager communities by this metal. Krishna was also killed with an iron arrow in his foot, and his death was the
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beginning of the sombre Kali age, reflected in the iron age of Persian, Greek and biblical mythology. Sir James Frazer has given many illustrations of the frightening power of iron:
Roman and Sabine priests might not be shaved with iron but only with bronze razors or shears [..]. As a general rule iron might not be brought into Greek sanctuaries. In Crete sacrifices were offered to Menedemus without the use of iron, because the legend ran that an iron weapon in the Trojan War had killed Menedemus. The Archon of Plataea might not touch iron [..]. To this day a Hottentot priest never uses an iron knife, but always a sharp splint of quartz, in sacrificing an animal or circumcising a lad. Among the Ovambo of South-west Africa custom requires that lads should be circumcised with a sharp flint; if none is to hand, the operation may be performed with iron, but the iron must afterwards be buried. Among the Moquis of Arizona stone knives, hatchets, and so on have passed out of common use, but are retained in religious ceremonies. After the Pawnees had ceased to use stone arrow-heads for ordinary purposes, they still employed them to slay the sacrifices, whether human captives or buffalo and deer. Among the Jews no iron tool was used in building the Temple at Jerusalem or in making an altar... 354
The last millennium BCE, marked by disintegrating civilizations and splendid ruins, the prospect of modernity shined briefly through periods of hopeless obscurity - like when after nights filled with thunderstorms, just before dawn the clouds break up, and light is cast low over the day ahead.
Under Persian influence Greek scholars taught that the individual was more important than the community; that religious motivation was untrustworthy; that people had to decide themselves how to act for the better; that all knowledge was doubtable, and that absolute knowledge was the most dubious of all; that races, social classes and populations had to be valued equally; and finally, that slavery was despicable.
We know those 'sophistes' mostly because of their derision in later writings, and the best preserved proof of their existence is the fierce opposition by a terrified Plato. In his writings Plato rejected the open society and progress, in favour of an immovable higher world, in which eternal power was never contested, the ideal form of earthly dictatorship with closed borders and imposed austerity. His arguments are reiterated by most coercive religions which flourish today in the East and in the West.355
Around the seventh century BCE sacrifice could no longer provide the credibility and luxury of the large temple staffs, and at the same time
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deliver enough surpluses to distribute among all segments of society. The powerful appeal of the temples in Asia and Africa started withering away. Karl Jaspers coined this moment in history the axis age, and depicted it in an idealistic manner, as if it was the sudden outbursts of new moral consciousness, an evolutionary step forward in humanness. In reality, the decay of the temples lead - occasionally - to the reappraisal of rules of conduct which civilizations had ignored and even suppressed, but had never been completely annihilated in villages and slums. The challenge of thinkers was to find a pathway through the chaotic turmoil of cosmological claims and constructions, and to rebuild the forgotten language of essential social awareness.
A growing number of people lost confidence in official ceremonies and turned to charlatans, prophets, shamans, renegade priests, philosophers and outcasts, dressed in wilfully ragged or flamboyant clothing, sometimes self-mutilated or their faces coloured with paint, blood and ashes, enticing their audience with cheap magic, or making them laugh with rude spectacle, consecrating harlots, gaining a few miserable gifts of food or drinks - and transforming humanity in the course. Some of them would retreat to a temple ruin or sacred site of pilgrimage, enhancing their performance by the fame of the scenery. Others would travel along fairs, festivals, markets and temple porches, and even gather an entourage on the route. Disciples might be sent ahead to warm the public, assisted in staged wonders, and mingled among the audience with their begging naps. Herodotus witnessed such a spectacle when a male goat on the porch of an Egyptian temple was made to penetrate a woman. Other priests appear in the Rig Veda ‘satisfied recitating hymns, wandering around, brabbling nonsense’356. The Khandogya Upanishad calls those priests dogs
holding together, each dog keeping the tail of the preceding dog in his mouth […] they began to say Hin: Om, let us eat! Om, let us drink! Om, may the divine Varuna, Pragapati, Savitri bring us food! Lord of food, bring hither food, bring it, Om!357
The Bible also seizes those omnipresent stray dogs to portray the loud-mouthed enemies of the true faith:
They return at evening: they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city. Behold, they belch out with their mouth: swords are in their lips: for who, say they, doth hear? But thou, O Lord, shalt laugh at them; thou shalt have all the heathen in derision.358
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Pythagoras was revered as Apollo Hyperboreus – god of the high north - referring to shaman powers attributed to him, while the skeptic Heracleitus called him an imposture who ‘claimed for his own wisdom what was but a knowledge of many things’.
Empedocles was said to have awaken a woman who had been dead for thirty days, and healed a madman by means of music – a Pythagorean trait. Like Pythagoras he was an apostate adept of Orphism, and like Pythagoras he claimed to be a god:
I go about among you an immortal god, no mortal now, honoured among all as is meet, crowned with fillets and flowery garlands. Straightway, whenever I enter with these in my train, both men and women, into the flourishing towns, is reverence done me; they go after me in countless throngs, asking of me what is the way to gain; some desiring oracles, while some, who for many a weary day have been pierced by the grievous pangs of all manner of sickness, beg to hear from me the word of healing.
Heracleitus also sneered at ‘night-walkers, magians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine barrel, and the initiated of Orphism, Pythagoreans…’, and Plato complains about similar swindlers in his Republic:
mendicant prophets go to rich men’s doors and persuade them that they have a power committed to them by the gods of making an atonement for a man’s own or his ancestor’s sins by sacrifices or charms, with rejoicings and feasts; and they promise to harm an enemy, whether just or unjust, at a small cost; with magic arts and incantations binding heaven, as they say, to execute their will .[..] And they produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus, who were children of the sun and the muses - that is what they say - according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only individuals, but whole cities, that expiations and atonements for sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of the living and the dead; the latter sort they call mysteries, and they redeem us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.
A few serious thinkers travelled with this jumble, while many took a position in between: not always cheating, but sometimes stressing their views with an effective piece of magic; not always jabbering fantasies, but sometimes speaking as one who had glimpsed bewildering new things. From this racket arose fresh imageries, which could not have been made by the blessed, nor by the rude on their own.
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In certain unusual crises it takes a fool to find a breakout, and the blind leading the blind sometimes is the last option available – and might by mere luck disclose passages no one else dared to go.
The most important distillates out of this boiling retort were growing skepticism towards the temples and their myths and rites, and revaluation of practical ethics. Gods responded less to pleas and offerings, and people lost interest in the ideologies proclaimed by their temples. Yet there was no way back to the ancient state of mind: cosmologies could not be narrowed away, their place could only be filled by equally elaborated doctrines with more reticent gods. Complex mythologies anticipated complex science.
At the beginning of the last millennium BCE, after centuries of migration and warfare, decay sneaked in. Wood rots, people grow old and sick, and die. Houses decay, cities become ruins, kingdoms fall. Of course this had always been the case, but now it seemed as for the first time decay crept out the far off slums, grew out of control and ruled all parts of the visible world up to the most splendid palaces. Ideologies and myths about everlasting dynasties had to compete wit a new urgent question: was there an escape, an uncontaminated shelter?
When India was exhausted, offered meat became at first restricted to the priesthood, but this caused protest and reformers banned all slaughter of cattle. Buddha stated:
Purify your hearts and cease to kill; that is true religion. Rituals have no efficacy; prayers are vain repetitions; and incantations have no saving power. But to abandon covetousness and lust, to become free from evil passions, and to give up all hatred and ill-will, that is the right sacrifice and the true worship.359
In Judah at about the same time, the temple institutions, still polytheistic, came under pressure when factions acted against consumption of certain animals and against the creation of images of living beings, and propagated the Babylonian week, with one fixed day of rest and offering replacing the declining festivals. More austere laws and commandments replaced gradually the complex Middle Eastern mythology and indulgent feasts.
Jeremiah, orating in the temple gates, warned the entering public not to trust in ‘lying words, saying the temple of the Lord’: prosperity could only be restored if bloody offerings were replaced by mutual care:
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Thoroughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye thoroughly execute judgement between a man and his neighbour; if ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place.360
And sacrifices had never been good religion anyway:Thus saith the Lord […]: I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices, but this thing commanded I them, saying, obey my voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be my people. 361
The Chinese temple economy never developed centres as powerful as those of the Babylonian or Egyptian civilizations. The Yellow River is surrounded by fertile loess soils, and thus lacked the integrative force of rivers banks in more arid regions. Clerks never created a real priesthood power, but remained committed to the feudal ministries. As elsewhere, those ministries where never entirely profane because the nearness of power, which is always sacred to some extent, inevitably caught the institution in a light of pagan devotion and solemn knowledge. A king is always sacred to some extent, and there is no clear division between ministries and monasteries.
In the time of Buddha and Jeremiah, Lao-tsu was an archivist at the declining Chou court. While barbarian invaders disintegrated the Chinese empire into warrior states fighting each other in ephemeral alliances, he became a restless wanderer, everywhere teaching the doctrine that happiness is only possible by tempering of desire. This doctrine, the Tao, is recorded in the Tao-te Ching.362 Because China had no dominating central ideology, Taoism and Confucianism had a head start in dealing with the crucial question: how can we live a good life?
Lao-tsu believed that long time ago the world lingered in a natural, paradisical state of quietude. Although it seems that he praised emptiness, Lao-tsu had a practical agenda, purposely contrasting with the bigger-than-life mythology and philosophy of which his time was tired:
In this manner the sage cares for people: he provides for the belly, not for the senses; he ignores abstraction and holds fast to substance.
Western philosophy never managed to reject entirely the fuzziness of world systems expressed in persistence myths. From Plato to Hegel the feeling remained that anything interesting should at least have mythological magnitude and pomposity. Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, tackled the issue that precedes all other issues: our tangible existence. The Tao-Te-Ching reads:
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Powerful men are well advised not to use violence, for violence has a habit of returning; thorns and weeds grow wherever an army goes, and lean years follow a great war [..] even the strongest force will weaken with time, and then its violence will return, and kill it.
The aged Lao-tsu met the young Confucius (Chinese K’ung Fu-tzu) on several occasions. While Lao-Tsu - if not his followers - was sometimes carried away by fancy exaggerations, Confucius went still further in practicality, and, witnessing how clerks not only failed to prevent the many social troubles of his time, but even caused some themselves, spent his life pondering the problems of good society.
Rather than to declare big-headed, complicated constructs of thought, both thinkers constantly replied to laborious questions with mild simplicity. In the Analects the disciple Tsze-kung asks Confucius:
“Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?”Confucius answers:
“Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others”. 363
The RomansOur perception of the time after Alexander the Great is flawed in two ways. The first is the caricature of a radiating Greek (read Germanic) genius. This caricature depicts the spread of European civilization in a barbarous, retarded world. The second flaw is the presentation of Rome as a grisly world, only changed by Christianity into a humane society at the cost of much effort and sacrifice.
The following are a few quotes from a poem written at the end of the last millennium BCE by the otherwise unknown Titus Lucretius Carus. Written by an unheard of heathen, we would never know the poem if Cicero had not published it himself. Cicero was highly esteemed by Saint Augustine, who knew him badly. As a consequence, the poem became one of the very few heathen works which, by mistake, was not burned.364
Lucretius was an adept of the besmirched Epicurus, but his work rather represents the imagery of a wider range of Roman citizens . The poem wants to counter the fear to die, much instigated by coercive religions, with the help of reason:
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But most to see with reasonable eyes Of what the mind, of what the soul is made, And what it is so terrible that breaks On us asleep, or waking in disease, Until we seem to mark and hear at hand Men’s bones that earth embraced longtime ago.
This fear must indeed be countered by putting things in a wider perspective:
Many a river seems hugeTo him who never saw a larger one;Thus huge seems tree or man. And everything Which mortals see the biggest of each class, That he imagines to be “huge”; though yet All these, with sky and land and sea to boot, Are all as nothing to the sum of all.
The gods have no part to play in society, and have no dealings with humans:
For all the gods must of themselves enjoy Immortal aeons and supreme repose, Withdrawn from our affairs, detached, afar…
Social status and destiny are not given by nature and are not innate, they are only unreliable twists of fate:
But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth, Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else Which come and go whilst Nature stands the same, We are wont, and rightly, to call accidents.
Heracleitus, ‘famous for dark speech among the silly’, is refuted for his gratuitous theory that war and fire are the roots of the cosmos. There simply is no rigid universe led by a distinct succession of causes, modelled after hierarchic society or after chains of military command. There is no central power ruling the cosmos. The universe is free of nonsense like the ‘first mover’, ‘supreme being’, ‘most perfect’, ‘highest power’, ‘almighty’. It is fluid and egalitarian, composed of an infinite shower of atoms, ‘germs of things’, merged with void, combining into transient, accidental reality.
For truly matter coheres not, crowds not tight, Since we behold each thing to wane away, And we observe how all flows on and off,
Only a few sparks of this surge of modernity remained slumbering below the surface of monotheism.365
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EuropeWe can more easily discern modernity in recent European artefacts. From the sixteenth century on we are flooded by texts, paintings and other documents celebrating the value of individuals. They are so abundant that even traditionalists do not hesitate to call upon those divergences of old to defend ‘Western values’ or ‘Western tradition’ while fending off every new divergence from their own way of life.366
It will be difficult to find a more clear division between ancient and modern art than between the works of the fifteenth century painter Jan Van Eyck and the sixteenth century painter Pieter Bruegel. All becomes clear in the comparison of two works.
The Adoration of The Lamb of Van Eyck an eternal immovable world is built around the definitive ruler of the world, Jesus Christ, enthroned in full splendour, a giant figure amidst hundreds of worshippers. The painting the most antagonistic with The Adoration of the Lamb is Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary. Bruegel is the painter of common people, alive at the verge of coarseness. The colour of holiness was not on his pallet. As in many of his works, this one shows hundreds of people in a jumble of daily occupations. Only after some time the uninformed but attentive viewer will discover that one of the small figures is struggling with a huge wooden cross on his back, while heading towards a hill in the background. Only a few of the other figures seem to be interested in the drama going on. In another background corner, a steep rock is painted. On this rock a windmill, turning with the squalls, is kept upright by ropes. A gospel quote of Jesus comes easily to mind: ‘upon this rock I will build my church’.367
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India
A manifold of cultural encounters
India, an amalgam of vast river-banks, deserts and forests, is situated at the centre of Eurasia, the largest landmass on earth. It has always harboured a variety of cultures and uncountable forager communities, nomadic peoples and kingdoms. Consequently India was subject to a manifold of cultural encounters and received compound interest of progress. Ideas survived and evolved here because they were spread, gathered, split and merged among the many refuges in its hinterland and at its borders.368
As in all times and places, no special ‘race’ was involved in the process: the accidental geographical location and relation caused this surprising human experience, not the special ‘character’ of its population.
Looking at this historical frame, it is not surprising that Indian thinking was preoccupied with the diversity and transformation of being – the essential prerequisite for the open-minded, cognisant observation that leads to progress.
The universe is per definition the sum of all things, including thinking. It is super-personal, the Universal Self, ‘the dwarf, who sits in the centre’.369 This Universal Self, Brahma, can not be prayed at, exerts no terror nor mercy, and accepts no offerings. It can only be approached by mindful contemplation: by the perceptive mind and not by reasoning – it is an insight, an awareness that can be cultivated, not a computation. Monotheism is an amalgam of this cosmic concept on the one hand and of the concept of tribal war gods on the other hand. But Brahma and gods are related like the whole and a particle, like inertia and decay, like absence and meddling. The imagery of the universal self evolved steadily from before the Avesta to after the Koran, and people raised in a monotheistic milieu should be careful not to project their parochial concepts on any philosophy from another century, let alone from ancient India.
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The oldest Upanishads present unremitting trials to grasp the real world with its ever changing appearances, and suspect one great principle, the Ultimate Reality, long before the ancient Milesians searched for the primary substratum of the world, or contemporary physicists searched for a ‘Grand Unified Theory’.
This philosophy inspired Zoroastrian thinkers in Persia and through them the Greeks Anaximenes, Parmenides and Plato,370 and remained a fruitful concept in Western science until the twentieth century, when Albert Einstein made a universe holding a mixture of matter, energy and emptiness more acceptable.
Brahman priests in the seventh century BCE have defined the Universe by means of an elaborated numerology, and made Brahma, the Universal Self, part of the wheel of rebirth.
One daytime in the life of Brahma consists of 1,000 Maha-yugas, and one Maha-yuga equals 4,320,000 human years or 2.5 equinoctial precessions. Each Maha-yuga in its turn comprises four ages, each shorter and gloomier than the preceding, and then ends in floods and fire. When Brahma goes to sleep for another 4,320,000,000 human years, there is no matter, no gods, and no universe.
Brahma departs after 864,000,000,000 human years, and as a result the world cedes to chaos. But after the same span of time another Brahma is born, and the universe starts all over. 371
The four oldest UpanishadsBelow are some scientific speculations on nature from ancient India, selected from the four oldest Upanishads. The Upanishads contain highly scientific natural speculations, and fortunately found a sanctuary in the religious corpus of the Vedas, where they are known as the Vedantas. At the time there existed no separation between metaphysics and physics. There was only careful, incisive investigation of the whole natural world. The metaphysical aspects of the Upanishads can not be negated by appraising their profound scientific learning.
While much of this learning was superseded in later ages, it remains of tremendous importance to the history of science, if we ever want to lift such a history above tribal pretentiousness. No unanimity exists about the date of the Upanishads cited here, but it is safe to locate
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their redaction before 700 BCE, always keeping in mind that their explorations must already have been going on for centuries.372
As precious stones in the treasure chest of humanity, the Upanishads change colours with each turn, and present many various speculations on nature and being: they do not present one neatly coherent, final dogma, but an affluent compilation of audacious queries. Such a treasury could only have been gathered amidst many diverse and transforming cultures, as indeed exchange of those riches with always new cultures can explain aspects of subsequent progress elsewhere.
Free, mindful inquiry into nature must have existed for a long time on many continents, but this exceptional testimony is the most ancient we know of:
Through understanding we understand [..] heaven, earth, air, ether, water, fire, gods, men, cattle, birds, herbs, trees, all beasts down to worms, midges, and ants; what is right and what is wrong; what is true and what is false; what is good and what is bad; what is pleasing and what is not pleasing; food and savour, this world and that, all this we understand through understanding. Meditate on understanding.373
The world is investigated by nothing but observation and contemplation: sparse references to Vedic imageries are just a frame in which the Upanishads needed to communicate innovating hypotheses to an archaic audience.
Readers, framed in the contemporary Western culture (even if they are Hindu themselves), often mistake the Upanishads for esoteric, obscure, nineteenth century mysticism, and look for a ‘spiritual’ philosophy distinct from speculations about the world we live in.374
Although the writers of the Upanishads never adapted such a schizophrenic world-image, many translations today have this spirituality induced in their texts. Translating âtman into ‘soul’ can lead to wrong interpretations375; translating Brahman into ‘God’ certainly does;376 satya, that which truly and really exists, should not be translated into ‘Truth’, a word used by dogmatists to designate their rigid propositions, but into ‘reality’, the subject of explorations and speculations.377 When the Upanishads say that ‘the unreal is verily death, the real immortality'’378 this is to stress that they are searching the factual world, not fabricated doctrines or god-given dogmas.
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The authors tried to understand the complex world we seem to fall into by accident, and always base their assumptions on experience, without ever claiming divine inspiration, but also without unjustified reticence. On one occasion the Brihadaranyaka bluntly says ‘do not ask too much, lest thy head should fall off’379 and on another occasion: ‘anybody may say, I know, I know. Tell what thou knowest’.380
The oldest Upanishads on the first principle of nature.
The first verse of the first Upanishad starts with questioning the traditional horse sacrifice, familiar to the author and his audience.381
The killing and separating of the slaughtered animal offered the vocabulary needed to analyse – to take apart - the nature of the world:
the dawn is the head of the horse which is fit for sacrifice, the sun its eye, the wind its breath, the mouth the Vaisvanara fire, the year the body of the sacrificial horse. Heaven is the back, the sky the belly, the earth the chest, the quarters the two sides, the intermediate quarters the ribs, the members the seasons, the joints the months and half-months, the feet days and nights, the bones the stars, the flesh the clouds. The half-digested food is the sand, the rivers the bowels, the liver and the lungs the mountains, the hairs the herbs and trees.382
The horse offering was no longer the feeding of gods, but was the feeding of the universe. The sacrificed horse and the universe were composed of the same ingredients. This essentially atheist point of view made the difference between the universe and ourselves (and all other beings) one of scale instead of substance, and enabled the imagination of universal laws of nature:
The earth, the Sky, Heaven, the four quarters, and the intermediate quarters, - fire, air, sun, moon, and the stars, - water, herbs, trees, ether, the Universal Self - so much with reference to material things. Now with reference to the body: up-breathing, down-breathing, back-breathing, out-breathing and on-breathing - The eye, the ear, mind, speech, and touch - The skin, flesh, muscle, bone, and marrow. Having dwelt on this fivefold arrangement of the worlds a Rishi said: ‘Whatever exists is fivefold.’383
Civilizations have always recovered and recycled creation legends into persistence myths, but such an easy way out did never satisfy
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the always lingering scientific curiosity. Better answers were looked for in the observation of nature.
The question arose from what matter the world was made. The oldest candidates were wood and earth. Wood, though underrated in archaeological records because it rots easily, has been the most important base material since the Old Stone Age. Then, in the New Stone Age, the use of pottery inspired to myths of creation out of earth. The Mapuche of Central Chile, the ancient Zoroastrians of Persia and many other cultures believed impressive mountains seemed to have a slow but strong growing force.384
In the Upanishads we find the oldest theory that some of this matter was elementary, while some things were a mixture of those elements. The Chinese elements – or rather types of matter - were in India reduced to the ingredients of the blacksmith.385 Wood and metals were removed from the list because they were made-up of the other elements: wind, water, earth and fire. Air was wind to stir up crops, but also breath or bellows; water was beneficial rain and drink, but also semen; earth was the field, but also bodies and all kinds of food; fire was the flames of the blacksmith, but also body heat of living beings, and the foaming of wild water. The elements are mixed by natural causes to produce all sorts of matter:
The earth is the former element, heaven the latter, ether their union; That union takes place through air. So much with regard to the worlds. Next, with regard to the heavenly lights. Fire is the former element, the sun the latter, water their union. That union takes place through lightning. So much with regard to the heavenly lights.386
From food387 are produced all creatures which dwell on earth. Then they live by food, and in the end they return to food. For food is the oldest of all beings.388
In the Prasna Upanishad, a pupil raises the question of the divine nature of the elements, but is instantly reprimanded by his tutor: no gods, but matter is our support and keeper:
Then Bhargava Vaidarbhi asked him: ‘Sir, How many gods keep what has thus been created, how many manifest this, and who is the best of them?’ He replied: ‘the ether is that god, the wind, fire, water, earth, speech, mind, eye, and ear. [..] These say: each of us support this body and keep it.
Since life decomposes and returns to its elements, it is only reasonable to expect that those elements once will return to life. The hypothesis of the elements is plausibly related with the hypothesis of reincarnation, but does not need the concept of a soul. Before
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African-Persian influence, what is born again is not the individual person, but the essence of the world behind the elements, breath, Prana:
Then Prana, as the best, said to them: Be not deceived, I alone, dividing myself fivefold, support this body and keep it.389
In the Mahabharata the monster Vritra devoured ‘the whole fivefold world: earth, air, space, water and light.’ In the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment Buddha explains:
This present body is a synthesis of the Four Elements. Hair, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, bones, marrow, brains and pigment all return to earth. Saliva, mucus, pus, blood, sputum, scum, phlegm, tears, semen, urine and faeces all return to Water. Heat returns to Fire, and movement returns to Wind. When the Four Elements have been separated, where can the false body exist? Now you know that this body ultimately has no substance. As a synthesis it appears, but in reality it is like an illusion conjured by a magician.
Via Pythagoras the elements resurfaced in Plato’s Phaedo, and indirectly influenced Saint Augustine and European thinking:
God in the beginning of creation made the body of the universe to consist of fire and earth. But two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there must be some bond of union between them. [..] but now, as the world must be solid, and solid bodies are always compacted not by one mean but by two, God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth [..] Now the creation took up the whole of each of the four elements; for the Creator compounded the world out of all the fire and all the water and all the air and all the earth, leaving no part of any of them nor any power of them outside.390
In many foraging cultures water was the basis of life. A myth of the Bushongo of Central Africa recount that in the old times Sky was married to Earth, but became tired of her racket and left together with his offspring: birds, clouds and stars. Once in a while however Sky longs for his wife: that’s when his semen comes down as rain, fertilizing the land. An Egyptian myth says that when Sky yearned for Earth her vaginal fluids fell down as rain. The bible recounts that Yahweh, on the first day, ordained that there be sky to separate the water beneath and the water above; in the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish water is called ‘Apsu, the first one’. Sumerians learned that Enlil separated earth and Sky out of the primeval waters like a tent, covering an air bubble, erected on the bed of the primeval ocean. It is no surprise that water is also named as the first element in the Upanishads: ‘everything here is woven, like warp and woof, in
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water.’391 In the Brihadaranyaka water even surpasses Brahman as the ultimate being:
In the beginning this world was water. Water produced the true, and the true is Brahman. Brahman produced Pragapati, Pragapati the gods.392
This primacy of water is discovered by means of careful observation, while the language is still indebted to ancient spirits (not unlike Descartes):
Therefore if there is not sufficient rain, the vital spirits fail from fear that there will be less food. But if there is sufficient rain, the vital spirits rejoice, because there will be much food. This water, on assuming different forms, becomes this earth, this sky, this heaven, the mountains, gods and men, cattle, birds, herbs and trees, all beasts down to worms, midges, and ants. Water indeed assumes all these forms. Meditate on water.393
An old myth in which earth was made when the gods churned the milky ocean, is recycled to explain how fluid water can become earth and other firm things. But here gods are left out and a natural process, observed when making butter, is sufficient reason:
And what was there as the froth of the water, that was hardened, and became the earth. On that earth death rested, and from this, thus resting and heated, fire proceeded, full of light.394
But if water turns into earth by frothing, and waves endlessly rise and fall on the shores, in the end the whole ocean could become land. The ingenious solution is that there is no physical contact between land and water:
The ocean surrounds this earth on every side, twice as large. Now there is between them a space as large as the edge of a razor or the wing of a mosquito.395
Another candidate for primacy is air. In the Chandogya Upanishad we find observations naming in one place water, in another place air (or wind) the first: 396
Air is indeed the end of all. For when fire goes out, it goes into air. When the sun goes down, it goes into air. When the moon goes down, it goes into air. When water dries up, it goes into air. Air indeed consumes them all.397
The primacy of breath, which is identified with air or wind, is demonstrated by means of a thought experiment. We can live without speaking, hearing, seeing, even without thinking, but when we try hold our breath, our chest revolts:
The five senses quarrelled together, who was the best, saying, I am better, I am better.
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They went to their father Pragapati and said: ‘Sir, who is the best of us?’ He replied: ‘ He by whose departure the body seems worse than worst, he is the best of you.’The tongue departed, and having been absent for a year, it came round and said: ‘How have you been able to live without me?’ They replied: ‘Like mute people, not speaking, but breathing with the breath, seeing with the eye, hearing with the ear, thinking with the mind. Thus we lived.’ Then speech went back.The eye departed, and having been absent for a year, it came round and said: ‘How have you been able to live without me?’ They replied: ‘Like blind people, not seeing, but breathing with the breath, speaking with the tongue, hearing with the ear, thinking with the mind. Thus we lived.’ Then the eye went back.The ear departed, and having been absent for a year, it came round and said: ‘How have you been able to live without me?’ They replied: ‘Like deaf people, not hearing, but breathing with the breath, speaking with the tongue, thinking with the mind. Thus we lived.’ Then the ear went back.The mind departed, and having been absent for a year, it came round and said: ‘How have you been able to live without me?’ They replied: ‘Like children whose mind is not yet formed, but breathing with the breath, speaking with the tongue, seeing with the eye, hearing with the ear. Thus we lived.’ Then the mind went back.The breath, when on the point of departing, tore up the other senses, as a horse, going to start, might tear up the pegs to which he is tethered. They came to him and said: ‘Sir, thou art the best among us. Do not depart from us!’398
Next to water, air, also earth has been named as the first element: ‘Everything that here exists rests on the earth, and does not go beyond’399.
Sound is carried through obstacles like walls where air can’t pass, and therefore there must be a still finer medium drenching the physical universe. A kind of thinner air, ether, was assumed. Ether is the medium of our senses, thoughts and dreams:
When this man was thus asleep, then the intelligent person, having through the intelligence of the senses absorbed within himself all intelligence, lies in the ether, which is in the heart. When he takes in these different kinds of intelligence, then it is said that the man sleeps. Then the breath is kept in, speech is kept in, the ear is kept in, the eye is kept in, the mind is kept in.
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But when he moves about in sleep and dream, then these are his worlds. He is, as it were, a great king; he is, as it were, a great priest;400 he rises, as it were, and he falls. And as a great king might keep in his own subjects, and move about, according to his pleasure, within his own domain, thus does that intelligent person keep in the various senses and move about, according to his pleasure, within his own body. Next, when he is in profound sleep, and knows nothing, there are the seventy-two thousand arteries called Hita, which from the heart spread through the body. Through them he moves forth and rests in the surrounding body. And as a young man, or a great king, or a great priest, having reached the summit of happiness, might rest, so does he then rest. 401
The ether is utterly permeable, and is therefore the all including selfness of the universe, from which all selves appear and to which all selves return, while ‘the world never becomes full’.402 The Upanishads present the ether however as a medium, not as a mystical unity:
When there is as it were duality, then one sees the other, one smells the other, one hears the other, one salutes the other, one perceives the other, one knows the other; but when the Self only is all this, how should he smell another, how should he see another, how should he hear another, how should he salute another, how should he perceive another, how should he know another?403
At a very early stage in Indian philosophy ether overtakes all other elements as the substrate of the universe:
“What is the origin of this world?”“Ether,” he replied, “for all these beings take their rise from the ether, and return into the ether. Ether is older than these, ether is their rest.”404
This ether, Akasa, which is around us,405 ‘is the same as the ether which is within us.’406 It is understood as an all-pervading fluid, and once more its physical nature is underlined:
Who could breathe, who could breathe forth, if that bliss existed not in the ether?407
When the Greeks first heard about the elements, they still gave them the names of gods. Empedocles, generally but erroneously considered the first inventor of the four elements, preached also reincarnation, the cyclic universe and release from the ‘wheel of birth’ by asceticism. It can hardly be doubted that Empedocles was inspired – directly or otherwise – by the Indian Vedas.
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The oldest Upanishads on being, form, ether and atomism
In the Chandogya Upanishad a father has sent away his twelve years old son to become a priest. When he returns home after twelve more years, at the age of twenty-four, Svetaketu has achieved the tremendous task of memorizing numerous sacred hymns and rituals. But to his dismay his father tells him that he has learned nothing but words, and that there is more powerful knowledge than that of the priests.408 Svetaketu begs his father to explain this knowledge, and what follows is, besides a delicate fragment of world literature, a concise overview of Indian science as it existed one millennium BCE.
The father starts out by referring to an already ongoing ontological dispute (‘others say…’).409 His down-to-earth conclusion is that time before being is impossible:
“Others say, in the beginning there was that only which is not, one only, without a second; and from that which is not, that which is was born. But how could it be thus, my beloved?” the father continued. “How could that which is, be born of that which is not? No, my beloved, only that which is, was in the beginning, one only, without a second. It thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. It sent forth fire. That fire thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. It sent forth water. And therefore whenever anybody anywhere is hot and perspires, water is produced on him from fire alone. Water thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. It sent forth earth. Therefore whenever it rains anywhere, most food is then produced. From water alone is eatable food produced.” 410
Based on observation of natural processes, living things are divided in oviparous, viviparous, and plants or fish:411
“Of all living things there are indeed three origins only, that which springs from an egg, that which springs from a living being, and that which springs from a germ. That Being thought, let me now enter those three beings with this living Self, and let me then reveal names and forms. Then that Being having said, let me make each of these three tripartite412 entered into those three beings with this living self only, and revealed names and forms. He made each of these tripartite; and how these three beings become each of them tripartite, that learn from me now, my beloved!” 413
The enthusiasm for the new physics mounts while the father continues. A hypothesis is uttered about how life force and the elements (fire, water, and earth or food) compose the lifeforms mentioned above. long before Heraclitus, the idea rose that the
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elements stem from a cosmic fire. In the course we encounter the most ancient known theory of colour - five or more centuries older than the Aristotelian De Coloribus, and yet more candid:414
“The red colour of burning fire is the colour of fire, the white colour of fire is the colour of water, the black colour of fire the colour of earth. Thus vanishes what we call fire, as a mere variety, being a name, arising from speech. What is true are the three colours415.The red colour of the sun is the colour of fire, the white of water, the black of earth. Thus vanishes what we call the sun, as a mere variety, being a name, arising from speech. What is true are the three colours.The red colour of the moon is the colour of fire, the white of water, the black of earth. Thus vanishes what we call the moon, as a mere variety, being a name, arising from speech. What is true are the three colours.The red colour of the lightning is the colour of fire, the white of water, the black of earth. Thus vanishes what we call the lightning, as a mere variety, being a name, arising from speech. What is true are the three colours.” 416
The – already old – philosophy of the elements can explain all things:“Great householders and great theologians of olden times who knew this, have declared the same, saying, ‘ No one can henceforth mention to us anything which we have not heard, perceived, or known.’ Out of these three colours or forms they knew all. Whatever they thought looked red, they knew was the colour of fire. Whatever they thought looked white, they knew was the colour of water. Whatever they thought looked black, they knew was the colour of earth. Whatever they thought was altogether unknown, they knew was some combination of those three beings.” 417
The discussion touches more biological issues in several highly fascinating paragraphs. Svetaketu will become subject of the oldest known scientific experiment on the function of memory – if not the oldest known scientific experiment altogether:
“Now learn from me, my beloved, how those three beings, when they reach man, become each of them tripartite. The earth when eaten becomes threefold; its grossest portion becomes faeces, its middle portion flesh, and its subtlest portion mind. 418 Water when drunk becomes threefold; its grossest portion becomes water, its middle portion blood, its subtilest portion breath. Fire when eaten becomes threefold; its grossest portion becomes bone, its middle portion marrow, its subtilest portion speech. 419
For truly, my child, mind comes of earth, breath of water, speech of fire.”
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“Please, Sir, inform me still more,” said the son. ”Be it so, my child,” the father replied. “That which is the subtile portion of curds, when churned, rises upwards, and becomes butter. In the same manner, my child, the subtle portion of earth, when eaten, rises upwards, and becomes mind. That which is the subtle portion of water, when drunk, rises upwards, and becomes breath. That which is the subtle portion of fire, when consumed, rises upwards, and becomes speech. For mind, my child, comes of earth, breath of water, speech of fire.”“Please, Sir, inform me still more,” said the son. “Be it so, my child,” the father replied.“Man, my son, consists of sixteen parts. Abstain from food for fifteen days, but drink as much water as you like, for breath comes from water, and will not be cut off, if you drink water.” Svetaketu abstained from food for fifteen days. Then he came to his father and said: “What shall I say?” The father said: “Repeat the Rik, Yagus, and Saman verses.” He replied: “They do not occur to me, Sir.” The father said to him: “As of a great lighted fire one coal only of the size of a firefly may be left, which would not burn much more than this, thus, my beloved son, one part only of the sixteen parts is left, and therefore with that one part you do not remember the Vedas. Go and eat! Then wilt thou understand me.” Then Svetaketu ate, and afterwards approached his father. And whatever his father asked him, he knew it all by heart. Then his father said to him: as of a great lighted fire one coal of the size of a firefly, if left, may be made to blaze up again by putting grass upon it, and will thus burn more than this, Thus, my beloved son, there was one part of the sixteen parts left to you, and that, lighted up with food, burnt up, and by it you remember now the Vedas.” After that, he understood what his father meant when he said: “Mind, my son, comes from food, breath from water, speech from fire.” He understood what he said, yea, he understood it.420
The sixteen parts of the human self are modelled after the composition of the universe, from low to high: earth, water, fire, sky, air, heaven, sun, space, moon and stars, ether…421. But the self comes into existence the other way around:
From [the Universal Self] sprang ether (that through which we hear); from ether air (that through which we hear and feel); from air fire (that through which we hear, feel, and see); from fire water (that through which we hear, feel, see, and taste); from water earth (that through which we hear, feel, see, taste, and smell). From earth herbs, from herbs food, from food seed, from seed man. Man thus consists of the essence of food. This is his head, this his right arm, this his left arm, this his trunk, this the seat.422
Each of the five elements is a medium for the previous, and consequently ‘inherits’ its properties. Now when Svetaketu fastens, only one medium remains active: this can only be ether. In this manner it is demonstrated that memories are located in ether, while
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the other fifteen help in active remembering. The later Prasna Upanishad adds Spirit and Faith to the parts of man, but in that scheme, refraining from food would have had another effect:
He sent forth spirit; from spirit faith, ether, air, light, water, earth, sense, mind, food; from food came vigour, penance, hymns, sacrifice, the worlds, and in the worlds the name also. 423
One last quote from the dialog between father and son is an intriguing scene pointing at the oldest concept of atomism we know of.
“Fetch me from thence a fruit of the Nyagrodha tree.”“Here is one, Sir.”“Break it.”“It is broken, Sir.”“What do you see there?”“These seeds, almost infinitesimal.”“Break one of them.”“It is broken, Sir.”“What do you see there?”“Not anything, Sir.”The father said: “My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there, of that very essence this great Nyagrodha tree exists”424
The importance of atomism for the history of science can hardly be overestimated. Once naïve animism is abandoned, either atoms are accepted to describe how physical substance can permeate each other, or the blind alley of Parmenides and Plato is taken. Atomism was essential to the theory of the elements. The alternative says that change is an illusion and the world a boring display.
Atomism would reach the Mediterranean coast with the Persians; Democritus would pass it to Epicurus; after time, it would reach Western Europe via Lucretius and Gassendi. Atomism became one of the main paradigms to shatter centralist myths and ideologies:
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Egypt
A river of time
Less interested in endurance than the clerks of centralized civilizations, the Indian philosophers investigated the vastness of all being, which is so all-embracing that nothing can disappear without reappearing – the cycles of rebirth. They left us a vast imagery of the complexity and volatility of the universe, but time on the other hand was rather presented as a kind of space:
That which was before the sun is non-time and has no parts. That which had its beginning from the sun is time and has parts. Of that which has parts, the year is the form, and from the year are born all creatures425
As an aphorism it could be stated that the Egyptians explored time while the Indians ventured into space. Of course both lived before an antagonism between time and space had ever been emphasized, and each of their imageries was whole as such: only when both met in Persia, people conceived the impossible: that space could be imagined without time, and time could be considered without space.426 A few centuries after the Persians the universe had become an immovable three-dimensional vessel, in which time leaked continuously, as a relentless tide. Such would remain the decorum of scientific thought until, in the beginning of the twentieth century CE, it no longer suited to explain more refined observations of the heavenly bodies.427
What we call time is the experience of a series of events - the only things living beings can deal with. This becomes apparent when we speak of ‘the next time’ or ‘the second time’. This vision of time was summarized by Aristotle:
neither does time exist without change; for when the state of our own minds does not change at all, or we have not noticed its changing, we do not realize that time has elapsed.428
In the primeval forager’s world-image those events happened at random. Their performers were capricious entities: demons, ghosts,
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animals. Later, when forced labour brought about the first kingdoms, the power of performance was given to more stable gods. But although they were prayed and begged continuously, the deeds of those gods were never completely reliable.
Scientific time measurement was only possible if events were arranged in a continuous, countable succession like the sliding of a shadow or the swinging of a pendulum. This is the notion of time we use when we speak of ‘a long time ago’ or when we press a stopwatch. But to reduce the manifold of events we call time to a countable succession is at once shackling the gods in a chain gang. Taking time away from the discretion of the gods is to paralyse them – it is the ultimate sacrilege.
Every new Egyptian civilization was conscious of its predecessors, and recycled ancient architecture, artworks and religion more meticulously than any other civilization. Along the Nile, a pumping aorta in a desiccated body, the ruins of previous civilizations are unavoidable. the past remained near, at once stressing the volatility of power and offering elements for new persistence myths. In this imagery the Nile was more than the giver of life: it became also the cosmic clepsydra, a water-clock based on the constant running of water. It is no coincidence that the oldest known clepsydra is found in Egypt, where it was made conceivable by the observation of a river streaming along an endless succession of temples, gods and Pharaohs.
Plutarch wrote after he had travelled this river of time and giver of time:
eternity whence flowed timeas from a river into worlds.429
He was accused of blasphemy, but the imagery of time as a constant, immaterial flow would conquer the world to reach Europe only in the Renaissance. It would prevail through modern Europe until Einstein rejected it and, unwittingly, returned to the ancient concept formulated by Aristotle:
Till now it was believed that time and space existed themselves, even if there was nothing - no sun, no earth, no stars - while now we know that time and space are not the vessels for the universe, but could not exist at all if there were no contents, namely, no sun, no earth, and other celestial bodies. 430
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Sundials also appeared first in Egypt, and were related to the monumental obelisks erected in honour of the sun god. Both clepsydras and sundials date from half the second millennium BCE. Herodotus wrote a millenary later, that sundials were introduced in Greece from Babylon. Thus it is reasonable to assume that they travelled along the main exchange path of knowledge: from Egypt and India to Persia, to be dispersed in the Alexandrian world from there.
The seven foundations of life and the conquest of eternity
At about 3000 BCE, after two thousand years of tribal warfare, King Narmer built the first Egyptian metropolis, Memphis, in the Nile Delta. The totem of his tribe, the falcon, would become the god Horus (Egyptian Har, after the falcon’s cry). Each new pharaoh tried to link his reign with the beginning of times, and necessarily adapted the totem of the first pharaoh, the falcon Horus. Egyptian king lists always start with seven mythological gods, of which the last is Horus, and the list of ceremonial titles of each pharaoh starts with a hieroglyph showing the falcon above his palace. This made him a tribal successor, much like Jesus was a successor of David and the Caliphs were successors of Muhammad. But when the falcon evolved from a pastoral totem to an Iron Age god, the mortal king became anointed with divine immortality – a new, staggering concept.
In early kingdoms the essence of the divine was not justice, mercy or supreme power. Despite all the superlative qualities chanted about in flattering hymns, gods could be unreliable, uncaring and, even worse, defeated by their rivals as anyone else. What really separated gods from men was immortality:
Therefore Aghatodaemon has said:Gods are immortal men; men are mortal gods.431
Nothing was easy about this completely new imagery of an immortal man. Clerks were gathered by thousands around the Pharaohs of Memphis. They travelled to the most distant places in an effort to list all spells against age, desease, snakebites and all other risks; they studied spontaneous mummification to find ways to preserve the body, but also pondered how the other faculties could be kept
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unharmed, and how to mix all those faculties again to restore a genuine living being, without leaving anything out; they developed magical formulas and complex ceremonies to reopen the mouth of a deceased pharaoh to make him breath again, and built pyramids and funerary temples as precarious attempts to eternity.
Of course, a major drive for the search for continuation of the Pharaoh's existence was business without end to his clerks. All those efforts brought, objectively speaking, more benefit to the eternally employed temple staff than to the – we must after all admit – departed Pharaoh.
Another major undertaking was the binding together of all gods in one vast mythology, wherein the Pharaoh was presented as the son of Ra, now himself a god reaching hands over the hundred years horizon, in a long chain to the mythical beginning of time. Plato has an Egyptian priest explaining to one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece:
As for those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written.432
Before creation, there was no time, because the universe was a motionless ocean. In the Myth of Ra and Isis, Ra calls himself the maker of time:
I am he who, if he openeth his eyes, doth make the light, and, if he closeth them, darkness cometh into being. At his command the Nile riseth, and the gods know not his name. I have made the hours, I have created the days, I bring forward the festivals of the year, I create the Nile-flood…433
This is the most ancient known ‘maker of the hours and the creator of the days’, preluding the ‘first cause’ of Aristotle. It would govern physical science until Medieval Europe.
The ancient Indians had looked at metallurgy for inspiration when searching for the basic elements of life. Egyptian philosophy, less concerned with the universe and more with anthropology, had to solve an equal riddle with the imagery found in African animism and spiritism, and leaned on the hypothesis that a living person was an aggregate of various independently living entities. This is illustrated
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by Egyptian literature, for example when a man discusses with his own messenger, ‘Ba’.434
By means of the observation of nature and of the study of legends, each of those entities was given the responsibility for specific faculties of the individual person. The resulting view had a tremendous effect on the history of philosophy and religion.
The seven Egyptian elements, inspired by animism, are the philosophical equivalence of the four Asiatic elements inspired by metallurgy. Both created the most ancient known theories about the essence of the world we inhabit, and about our relation to it. It is nitpicking to discuss if they really carried out scientific work: it is important to acknowledge that there would be no science without them.
The Egyptian elements can not be as easily assembled in a consistent overview as the four Asian elements. Not only are the Egyptian documents we know written in different ages, and reflect shifting world-images, it is also nearly impossible to find out which imageries existed together, and where and when they originated. Furthermore, while in India matter and atomism allowed relatively simple schemes of blending and merging, the Egyptians had many complex theories about the interaction of their elements, of which each could manifest a separate ‘psychology’. To avoid misconceptions we must suffice with a hazy but intriguing glimpse at ancient reality, rather than to distil a consistent scheme from diverse sources. After all, neatly organized thinking is rather found in military discipline than on lively markets. We must accept that it was the rich inconsistency and diversity that brought about a tremendous enrichment of thinking ever since. The following seven are the best-known Egyptian elements of life. They have only a distant historical relation with what we call a ‘soul’ today. 435
The Akh, (Khu), is a person’s imagination, not to be confused with the ‘mind’ or ‘intellect’. The Akh was related with ‘thought’, ‘memory’ and ‘sight’, because images require light, and imagination shows in the eye. The latter also goes for animal eyes, and therefore also animals had an Akh, as is confirmed by the incidence of mummies of dogs, cats, monkeys, crocodiles, birds, end even insects like praying mantises. The Akh is represented as an Ibis, like Thot, the god of knowledge, who is represented with the head of an Ibis. In
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Alexandrian times, Thot evolved to the famous Hermes Trismegistus of the Gnostics.
The Khat (Kha) is the body, which needed to be safeguarded by means of mummification. Life can only continue when all elements, including the body, are preserved and brought together by means of tricky and laborious rituals. The body is as much an element as all other parts, and mummification is one of those rituals. If the word ‘soul’ is used to translate the denomination of any other Egyptian element of life, then it is only reasonable to call the body a ‘soul’ too. Another prevalent misconception is that the Kha is the ‘mortal’, ‘perishable’ part of an individual. All elements are mortal and susceptible to decay and death, unless preserved by means of the appropriate, accurately executed rituals. The body does not differ from, nor is it the opposite of, the other elements.
Only when all elements – foundations - of life are present, there is an individually living god, man or animal, but for all three the Khat can successfully be replaced by an artefact like a statue, as long as the correct ceremonial procedures are carried out by those who have the necessary skill and power. This inspired to the conviction, in Roman times, that the Egyptians knew how to make their own gods. In a Hermetic writing quoted by Saint Augustine, Hermes Trismegistus communicates this art to Aesculapius. When Aesculapius asks Hermes if he might perhaps be referring to nothing but dumb statues, he is refuted for his distrust (but see also below the paragraph on the Ka):
“however unbelieving thou art, O Aesculapius, - the statues, animated and full of sensation and spirit, and who do such great and wonderful things, - the statues prescient of future things, and foretelling them by lot, by prophet, by dreams, and many other things, who bring diseases on men and cure them again, giving them joy or sorrow according to their merits. “ 436.
The Ba is the autonomous messenger. It bears a resemblance with the ‘spirit’ or ‘ghost’ of a deceased, who leaves the dead body to meet in dreams or visions the ones left behind. It can visit the Khat to tend it, but can also go on a journey. It is the communicator with the outside world, and as such partakes in the funerary offerings. The Ba was originally represented as a stork, the migrating bird disappearing in heaven each year, still found in contemporary birth stories. In later times the Ba was represented as a human-headed hawk, reminding of the bird-men in the Mesopotamian underworld and in pre-historic Lascaux. Where Egyptian texts address the messenger Ba, English
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translations usually have ‘soul’, which gives a distorted impression of the original meaning. More related is the ‘free will’ of later dualist world-images, including Christianity and Islam. If in documents like the Papyrus of Ani the Ba is sometimes addressed explicitly, this is rather a consequence of its communication assignment. When the influence of Osiris grew, the latter was sometimes hailed as the Ba of the sun god Ra. In this way Osiris became the privileged messenger of the most powerful god.
The Ka is the personal totem, and the sum (not the seat) of a person’s internal feelings, just like animism explained emotions as animal movements. It is represented as a pair of uplifted arms. Very similar to the Persian Fravashi, not only gods, pharaohs and humans, but also animals, plants, water, stones etc.… could have a Ka. The Horus falcon was the Ka-name of each Pharaoh, which made in fact the falcon his Ka - his totem.437 When Ptah created the gods, the priests of Memphis taught, he did this by bestowing statues – made of wood, stone or clay - with their Ka:
He made their bodies according to their wishes,Thus the gods entered into their bodies,Of every wood, every stone, every clay,Every thing that grows upon him, in which they came to be.Thus were gathered to him all the gods and their Ka,Content, united with the Lord of the Two Lands.438
The Ka has contributed to the Greek personal demon, to the Roman genii, to the Islamic jinn, and to the Christian guardian angel.
The Ren is a person’s secret name. Ptah, in the Memphite mythology, which is the most ancient, fathered all things by naming them. Grown ups carried their personal name followed by the name of their father. In the myth of Ra and Isis, Ra speaks:
I will allow myself to be searched through by Isis, and my name shall come forth from my body and go into hers.
This Ren reminds of semen, the giver of life in many African creation myths like those of the Bushongo, the Kalyl and the Dogon. 439 This is stressed even more as the pronounced name results from slime dribbling from Ra’s mouth, of which Isis fashioned a snake. In the ancient Ennead of Heliopolis, Atum creates the ancestors of the gods (Shu, ‘air’ and Tefnut, ‘wetness’) by masturbating.
Other Egyptian elements of being are the person’s shadow (Kahbit), corresponding with the worldwide shamanistic perception of which
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enough has been said above, and the heart (Ab or Ib). Ones heartbeat was thought to be the audible hammering of Ptah, who continuously sculpted ones life as it developed. The sum of things done and things not done is in the heart, and once eternal afterlife is established, the heart is weighed before Osiris during the Judgement of the Dead. If it is too heavy, it will be devoured and the deceased will die forever.
All those elements were as real and near to educated Egyptians as to us a sparrow, a tumour or a remarkable face. Moods and sickness, the growing of crops and the motions of the heavenly bodies existed within this imagery, which evolved over many centuries and had reached its astonishing complexity a millennium before Greeks learned to write their first words. Egyptian anthropology influenced generations of thinkers around the Mediterranean, and handed to the Persians an imagery that lead to the writings of Aristotle and to the paradigm of body, soul and mind. It was fundamental to all ensuing scientific developments up to our time.440
Scientific progress (medicine, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy)
Egyptian Medicine is known from several documents. The most important are the Ebers papyrus and the Smith papyrus, both dating from the sixteenth century BCE. Part of Egyptian medical knowledge pre-dates Hippocrates by two thousand years. The Ebers papyrus alone contains 877 prescriptions and recipes, including chapters on the diagnosis and treatment of intestinal diseases, eye diseases, skin diseases, parasites, diabetes and pregnancy. Other chapters handle dentistry, birth control and psychiatry. Herbs mentioned include cannabis, opium, myrrh, frankincense, senna, castor oil, fennel, thyme, henna, juniper, linseed and aloe. Herodotus wrote about Egyptian medicine:
The practice of medicine is so divided among them that each physician treats one disease, and no more. There are plenty of physicians everywhere. Some are eye-doctors, some deal with the head, others with the teeth or the belly, and some with hidden maladies...441
Mathematics is known from a number of papyri, of which the most important is a training manual known as the Rhind Papyrus.442 The
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ancient Egyptians knew linear equations, direct and inverse proportion, arithmetical and geometrical progressions and trigonometry. One of the theorems in the Rhind papyrus is a sphere fitted exactly within a cylinder – the ‘discovery’ Archimedes was so proud of that he had it depicted as his epitaph more than a millennium later.443
Fierce discussions have raged among academics about the capacity of the Egyptians to calculate the number Pi, to define the ‘Pythagorean’ theorem, and to use square roots or irrational numbers. The rage shown by all parties is more interesting than the possible outcome, because even if we will never know exactly which formulations African engineers used, their monuments and artworks proof their capability beyond doubt. The emotional tenacity with which this is denied can only be understood as deliberate or involuntary racism. It is deceiving to centre the discussion solely around the presence of specific formulas in the few, partly damaged papyri that reached our times. As in all cultures, mathematics evolve with commerce and engineering.
Clearly Egyptian mathematics were sufficiently developed and conceptualised to allow a broad variety of sophisticated applications: the involved engineering, logistics and arithmetic are analogous to those that would be mobilized by a building firm in our own century, if it was to obtain an order to conceive, estimate, devise, plan and erect the Amon-Re temple of Karnak, and to organise the yard, the supply, the workforce etc.…without any previous example available. No doubt such an order would even today be regarded as a major challenge. Aristotle, Jamblichus and Proclus all testified that Greek geometry originated in ancient Egypt, and Democritus even boasted that he equalled the Egyptians in geometry. This is consistent with most egyptologists today, who admit that the Greeks learned monument building from Egypt.
Egyptian chemistry consisted foremost of the amalgamation of metals and metal working, of the imitation of precious metals and stones, of dyeing and of similar arts. The most ancient glass-work has been found in Egypt and dates from the fifteenth century BCE.
In the third century CE the Roman emperor Diocletan tried to fight inflation by ordering that all laboratory recipes for gold making should be burned. Ironically the ancient Egyptians did never claim to know gold making, they knew how to gild artworks, which was – in their and
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our minds - more valuable than gold. Only two late chemical papyri survived the decree of Diocletian, as they happened to be buried in time with their owners in their coffins. Those copies are known now as the Papyrus X of Leyden and the Papyrus Graecus Holmienis. The formulas listed on those papyri influenced Zosimus and other alchemists of the Roman era, and still later this alchemy, partly through Arabic sources, inspired European thinkers like Albertus Magnus, John Dee, Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton.444 Indirectly they contributed to Renaissance and Flemish paintings with their distinctive colours, sharpness and luminescence.445
Astronomy is testified from the twenty-first century BCE on, with the first appearance on coffin lids of the Egyptian decans: thirty four star constellations circling the sky near the equator. The decans are still indicated on all contemporary star maps, and form the origin of the partition of the day in twenty-four hours. The Egyptians marked out, revised and changed many other constellations of the southern and northern hemisphere. Just as the Egyptian Pharaohs were divine, monuments were built on a cosmic scale as amendments of the universe, and the sky was a natural tool for the engineers, who leaned on the stars for the alignment of their construction works.
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Babylon
Tower of Babel
Babylon was a borderline city for much of the last millennium BCE. It was alternately ruled by Assyrian, Syrian, Chaldean and native kings, and the continuous shifting of borders made its population, more than other cities, cosmopolitan by nature. All this caused Babylon to flourish in between many conflicts and changes. Wealth raised and attracted adventurers and intellectuals. The Assyrians at a certain moment wanted to eradicate Babylon as an uncontrollable outpost, but decided eventually, from the seventh century BCE on, to take profit from its invaluable reputation and to rebuild it in all its splendour - and more engineers and craftsman travelled to the metropolis to assist in the reconstruction. In 614 BCE Assyria’s two centuries of eternity were fulfilled and the empire went down in a turmoil of destroyed borders and shattered exiles. The newcomer Persia empowered the cultural turntable of Babylon further when Cambyses submitted Egypt in 525 BCE, and when only ten years later Darius did the same to India.446
Babylon, now the capital of a Persian province, grew to the world’s most splendid city. In its palaces, temples and gardens ideas from India, Africa, Phoenicia and from the whole Middle East were exchanged, contrasted and interpreted.
The pinnacle of Babylon’s reconstruction was the legendary Tower of Babel. When, from the seventh century BCE on, the Babylonians were allowed to rebuild their devastated city, they also re-erected the millennia old Etemenanki, the ‘House of the Foundation of Heaven on Earth’, called the Tower of Babel in the Bible book of Genesis:
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth...447
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As was always the case with such ambitious projects, the work was done by war captives, slaves and hired craftsmen and engineers, all from different countries and speaking various languages. Contrary to the common notion and to the bible story, the scorned multilingual workforce completed the splendid tower only a few years after frustrated Jewish prophets sullied it. After one century of construction, at about 605 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar carved in its foot:
I set my hand to finish [this tower] and to exalt its head. As it had been in ancient days, so I exalted its summit.
It was the tallest building of the city ever - 91 meters high, with a floor of 91 by 91 meters - and the most lucid demonstration that communication between ancient nations of different languages existed and flourished. A short time after the completion of the Tower of Babel, philosophy arrived in Greece.
Besides the inscription of Nebuchadnezzar, the accomplishment is testified by a cuneiform tablet found in Uruk, now in the Louvre, and from Herodotus, who wrote in the fifth century BCE: ‘on the summit of the topmost tower stands a great temple with a fine large couch in it’.448 On this couch a woman, all by herself, awaited the coming of the god Marduk, the Golden Calf, disguised as the planet Jupiter.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder has made two oil paintings representing the construction of the Tower. As the first modern painter of Europe, and a humanist acquainted with a secret society deploring the endlessly ongoing Christian fratricide of his times, he purposely turned the legend about a failing human endeavour into the vision of a flourishing human enterprise: the artist had understood the real events before the historians did.449 On his painting the breath-taking construction, modelled after the Roman Coliseum, reaches already above the clouds – the region of the gods - while cooperation among workers continues in a peaceful atmosphere.450 It is remarkable that experts as well as inexperienced viewers interpret the painting following the way they are conditioned by their biblical education, and see the Wrath of God all over an evidently peaceful scene. This is exactly the obstinate submission to religious ideology that Bruegel tried to counter when he evoked the splendid power of human collaboration.
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Mazdaianism and the classification of creatures
The worship of Ahura Mazda was the most powerful religious expression in Persia at least since Cyrus II.451 Ahura Mazda is often translated as ‘Lord of Wisdom’ or ‘Wise Lord’, but literally means ‘Lord Omniscient’, because his followers maintained that Ahura Mazda had (scientific) knowledge of nature as well as foresight in the outcome of the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. Now the word ‘wisdom’ today refers to devotion and pious insight, and is not really a divine attribute. A better translation of his name is therefore ‘All Knowing Lord’ or simply ‘Lord of Knowledge’.452 Ahura Mazda allowed a glance at his knowledge when he offered a hallucinogenic drink to the prophet Zoroaster (old Iranian Zarathustra, Persian Zartosht). His knowledge demonstrates the scientific canon of the time:
Seven days and nights Zartosht was in the wisdom of Ahura Mazda. And Zartosht beheld the men and cattle in the seven regions of the earth, where the many fibres of hair of every one are, and whereunto the end of each fibre holds on the back. And he beheld whatever trees and shrubs there were, and how many roots of plants were in the earth of Spandarmad453, where and how they had grown, and where they were mingled. 454
Like other tribal religions Mazdaism spread through violence. An ancient text speaks of ‘the war of the religion, when there was confusion among the Iranians’. In the heat of this war a peak broke off a mountain and ‘slid down into the middle of the plain; the Iranians were saved by it’.455 In an oath novices pledged solemnly not to plunder dwellings of adherents, implying that non-believers were a different matter. As in the Bible the farmer’s leitmotiv - the need for space to roam and dwell - is crucial to the conflict:
I renounce the theft and robbery of the cow, and the damaging and plundering, of the Mazdayan settlements. I want freedom of movement and freedom of dwelling for those with homesteads, to those who dwell upon this earth with their cattle. [..] I vow this: I shall nevermore damage or plunder the Mazdayan settlements, even if I have to risk life and limb. 456
A practical and geographical division between Good and Evil, much as the Israelites and so many other warring tribes saw it, is also confirmed in an apocalyptic text. Notice the tribal (ethnic) undertone in the importance attributed to hairstyle and look:
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The token that it is the end of thy millennium, and the most evil period is coming, is that a hundred kinds, a thousand kinds, a myriad of kinds of demons with dishevelled hair, of the race of Wrath, rush into the country of Iran from the direction of the East, which has an inferior race and race of Wrath. They have uplifted banners, they slay those living in the world, they have their hair dishevelled on the back, and they are mostly a small and inferior race [..] the race of Wrath is miscreated and its origin is not manifest. Through witchcraft they rush into these countries of Iran which I, Ahura Mazda, created.457
According to the last Zoroastrians still around, the Indian Parsis, Zoroaster was a Mazdayan priest at the court of Vishtaspa (Greek Hystaspes), the father of Darius I. This makes him a contemporary of Confucius, Buddha and Jeremiah, all prophets who answered the environmental crisis of the seventh century BCE by shifting attention from expensive ritual feasts to individual behaviour and reflection, and their trade from the temples to the markets. As many other prophets, Zoroaster was made a poor herdsman in a humble tribe, suddenly hearing a voice out of the void - but voices usually come from people, and new ideas often come from foreign people. In the real world prophets are found on busy crossroads, not in barren solitude.
The protest against ritual feasts is illustrated in the Ahunavaiti Gatha, with a story about an ox begging Ahura Mazda for protection against its immanent slaughtering:
To Ahura with outspread hands we twain would pray, my soul and that of the pregnant cow, so that we twain urge Mazda with entreaties. Destruction is not for the right-living...458
Ahura Mazda eased the fear of dying on the altar by creating fat and milk for nourishment. Then he sent Zoroaster to teach that slaughtering had become unnecessary, and ox and cow were saved from the altar. The offering fire, and no longer the offering, became a symbol of the new religion: sacred fire and sacred light. Just like the biblic prophet Jeremiah, Zoroaster was at first a bad speaker, but was bestowed by the Lord with the charm of speech. Even more, Jeremiah introduced the Mazdayan religion at the court of Zedekiah, the regent of Israel:
Thus saith the Lord [..] he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall live…459
Jew, Christian and Muslim legends speak about encounters between Jeremiah and Zoroaster. A Muslim story says Jeremiah cursed Zoroaster because he was such a terrible pupil, and as a consequence Zoroaster became a leper.460 Jews and Christians have
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repeatedly identified Zoroaster with Baruch, the scribe of Jeremiah. Pope Clement I identified Zoroaster with Ham, a son of Noah.461
Essential to Zoroastrian mythology is the battle between the good Ahura Mazda and the evil Ahriman. This battle will last for nine thousand years and will be won by Ahura Mazda. Both Ahura Mazda and Ahriman were originally forefather gods. Ahriman clearly descends from a vegetation god of a farming community: in the golden epoch of history, he cared for ‘water, fire, plants and the earth’. Ahura Mazda originally was a nomadic warrior god. Their conflict was nothing but an instance of the century old struggle for living space between the settled farmers and new immigrants, and is found in many Mesopotamian legends, of which Kain and Abel are te best known in the West. In essence this conflict is still going on with Israel settling on Palestine land, using religious arguments.
As the nomadic party of Ahura Mazda won influence and settled, both gods were respectively pictured as light and dark, truth and lie, day and night, good and evil. Ahura Mazda had created a world in which there was only Truth, in which the sun stood forever still at high noon. Humans belong to his good creation, but no poisonous animals or demons. Ahriman, together with his demons and all vicious creatures, tried to destroy the good creation, but since Ahura Mazda is the Lord of Knowledge he already knows that the good creation will win. In the mean time each person has to make a choice between both sides. A rock inscription in Behustun near Hamadan reveals how Darius employed the ideology of Lie and Truth for goals of political propaganda - albeit with a little flaw, because he boasts to have defeated many kings, but at the same time claims that the defeated were not kings but impostors:
This is what I did by the favour of Ahura Mazda in one and the same year after that I became king. Nineteen battles I fought; by the favour of Ahura Mazda I smote and took prisoner nine kings. [..] These are the provinces which became rebellious. The Lie made them rebellious, so that they deceived the people. Afterwards Ahura Mazda put them into my hand; as was my desire, so I did to them.
Dualism was in the first place a political premise. ‘Truth’ was no longer an attribute of reality, but became a hallmark for carefully selected ideas and actions.
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Fusion and diffusion of Indian and Egyptian imageries
The expansion of the Persian Empire caused new imageries to merge into this world-image. Scholars added Egyptian awareness of historical time and individual judgement after death; they borrowed the notion of resurrection from warring tribes in Palestine and Mesopotamia; and they transformed the Indian concept of the all pervading and embracing substratum behind the cosmic diversity and transformation, into the imagery of the Boundless Light.
The multiplicity and inconsistency resulting from this Asian-African exchange stimulated incessantly provoked new explorations and speculations. The unique historical importance of this encounter is blurred today, because much of it survived only in religious texts and semantics. Eternal hell-fire, its index fossil, has spread from Zoroastrianism to Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam… But while coercive religions only repeat rigid formulas, the resulting progress and knowledge tend to hide their inspiration behind always renewed visions and semantics.
Scientific progress (astronomy, history, biology, medicine, algebra)
Persian cosmology was built following hierarchical rules: the seemingly weak stars are the nearest to earth, then follows the moon, and the highest place is taken by the sun462. Above the sun is the Boundless Light, the abode of Ahura Mazda, a region existing forever before gods and creation, and at the same time the light of day we live our usual lives by. The Boundless Light reminds of the oldest Indian Upanishad: ‘darkness is verily death, light immortality’.463
In Egypt earth – Geb – was presented as a valley surrounded by mountains holding up the sky: the most important of those mountains were called Bakhu, from which the sun rises, and Manu, in which the sun sets. Geb was depicted as a man resting with an upright knee and elbow, representing those mountains. The Persians adapted this Egyptian imagery and represented earth with a saucer shape
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surrounded by mountains, living and growing remnants of an animistic past:
The mountains have grown forth in eighteen years; and mount Alburz ever grew till the completion of eight hundred years; two hundred years up to the star station, two hundred years to the moon station, two hundred years to the sun station, and two hundred years to the Boundless Light. [..] The other mountains have grown out of Alburz, in number 2244 [..] Alburz is around this earth and is connected with the sky. The Terak of Alburz is that through which the stars, moon, and sun pass in, and through it they come back. Hugar the lofty is that from which the water of Aredvivsur leaps down the height of a thousand men. 464
The heavenly bodies were taken to be solid objects: Lucretius wrote that the Babylonians believed the moon was a sphere of which one half was painted with light. Thales made use of Babylonian knowledge to predict the solstice of 585 BCE, and to win his reputation as the first philosopher.465 The movement of the heavenly bodies was explained by turning rings of fire. Anaximander attested to have learned this theory:
From this arose a sphere of flame which fitted close round the air surrounding the earth as the bark round a tree. When this had been torn off and shut up in certain rings, the sun, moon and stars came into existence466.
Dark bodies circulating below the sun and the moon were believed to cause the eclipses, a view later defended by Anaximenes.
Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes were the first natural philosophers of Greece. They all lived in the Asian city of Miletus, which came under the Persians in the sixth century BCE, during their lifetime.
The biblical prophet Ezekiel also proved to be educated in Babylonian cosmology, but rendered it with an animistic hint:
The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl [..] they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them. 467
Professor Martin West comments:We are told where Ezekiel saw these things: near Babylon, in 593 and 592 B.C. There, in Anaximander’s youth, the invisible machinery of heaven revealed itself to an astonished priest. Within half a century the Milesian saw it too, and we may imagine that it struck him with the same awe. 468
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Evidently Jewish prophets and Greek philosophers loved to give names to their adversaries, but hated to harm their visionary reputation by revealing their sources.
The Egyptian awareness of historical time stimulated Persian scholars to search palaces and temples, and gather thousands of tablets with lists, myths and legends. The Greek Herodotus, hailed as the father of history in the West, called the Persians his superiors. The Zand-i Vohuman Yasht presents, in the first chapter, the history of the world as a tree with four branches, one of gold, one of silver, one of steel and one of iron. Ahura Mazda – the Lord of Knowledge – explained the meaning of this vision to the prophet Zoroaster. In the second chapter the same list is repeated but three more epochs - of brass, copper and tin – are inserted between silver and steel.
The paradisical golden epoch is whenAhriman and the demons rush back to darkness, and care for water, fire, plants, and the earth of Spandarmad becomes apparent.
In the epoch of silver, demons are separated from men and the Mazdayan religion rules the whole of Iran. The epoch of steel is marked by the persecution of heretics, and
that which was mixed with iron is the reign of the demons with dishevelled hair of the race of Wrath, when it is the end of the thousandth winter of thy millennium, O Zartosht the Spitaman!469
The golden, silver, bronze and iron reign inspired Hesiod as well as the authors of the Bible. Genesis copied from Zoroastrianism not only the tree of knowledge and paradise, but also invoked a time when giants or gods ‘came in unto the daughters of men’ just as the Persian Ardashir, in the silver epoch, ‘separates the demons from men’. The Babylonians inspired the Bible books Daniel and Revelation. In Daniel the hero explains a dream of King Nebuchadnezzar according to the Zand-i Vohuman yasht:
Thou, O king, [..] art this head of gold. And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron [..], whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men. 470
Via the Bible, Mazdayanism influenced Christianity and Islam. Jehovah’s witnesses still go from house to house to inform us that history will soon arrive at the end imagined by Mazdayan priests. The
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Babylonians inspired numerous world systems, and eventually Hegelian Atlantic ideology.
Babylonian anthropology has striking affinities with the Egyptian elements of personal being. In the Persian teaching humans were composed of five or six parts.
One part, Tanu, is the body, similar to the Egyptian Khat. The Ahum is the vital force of an individual, and reminds of the Egyptian Ren. The Daena is shaped during lifetime as the sum of a person’s thoughts, words and deeds. It is similar to the Ab of the ancient Egyptians, which was located in the heart. The Baodah is translated as knowledge, and reminds of the Egyptian Akh. The Urvan is the image of the deceased. It resembles the Egyptian Ba, but while the Ba is devoured forever if it does not pass Judgement, the Urvan will live forever - either in paradise or in hell. The Urvan has to cross the Bridge of Judgement after death as a flimsy double of the living body. It is the forebear of the personal soul in Christianity and Islam. All humans and all animals have an Urvan except the poisonous ones, because they belong to the demon world of Ahriman.
Finally, no being can exist without its personal Fravashi (or Fravartis in the gathic dialect), an enigmatic spirit of tremendous importance for the history of thought, reminding of the animistic totem and of the Egyptian Ka, and yet very different. It is not entirely accurate to call the Fravashi a spirit, or even a composing part of any being: it is rather a totally new type of 'form force', a motionless power waiting forever until the time has come to deploy this power to animate and guard its prearranged individual being – or even the urvan of a being.
Originally the Fravashis were forefathers spirits akin to the Iranian Pitarah or Indian Pitri, and as such are still worshipped by the last remaining Parsi of India. In the New Stone Age, forefathers, if worshipped properly, protected their living offspring, while in many cultures some of them became outstanding legendary heroes:
the good, strong, beneficent Fravashis of the faithful, who form many battalions, girded with weapons, lifting up spears, and full of sheen; who in fearful battles come rushing along where the gallant heroes go and assail the Danus.471
At a certain moment those distant heroes evolved to individualized guardians of life and death. A hymn prayed at the fourth dawn following a person’s death, begs the Fravashis:
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come to meet the soul of the blessed one, and make the immortal soul pass over the Bridge of Judgement easily, happily, and fearlessly! [..] And the Fravashis of the righteous will bring to the soul of the blessed those blessed aliments that are made at the time of Maidyo-zarm.472
An Avestan litany of hundreds of incantations shows that Urvans, Daenas, Baodahs, the waters, plants, the sky, fires, heavenly bodies, heroes and even the gods, among which the creator Ahura Mazda himself – show that everything has its individual Fravashis:
I desire to approach with my praise those Fravashis which have existed from of old, the Fravashis of the houses, and of the villages, of the communities, and of the provinces, which hold the heaven in its place apart, and the water, land, and cattle, which hold the children in the wombs safely enclosed apart so that they do not miscarry.473
The Bundahishn describes the Fravashis as ‘unthinking and unmoving, with intangible bodies’, brought in existence three thousand years before creation. In the Boundless Light they wait silently, and only dash into action one by one, on the moment that this one foetus is conceived, or that one seed springs, or that one cabin is built, for which this one fravashi has been waiting for three thousand years, and will forever remain dedicated: every detail of the whole world, as it was from creation and will be forever, lays waiting as an embryonic existence or prototype, long before it enters reality.474
In the Bundahishn, as rewritten in the ninth century CE, the Fravashis are created by Ahura Mazda, but in the thousand years older Frawardin Yasht, Ahura Mazda has a Fravashi himself. This difference reflects the important divide between a monotheistic universe watched over by a detached supergod, and a universe regulated by natural causes, in which gods have to be explained as all other manifestations. Beings lacking Fravashis are unpredictable. Because they provide reliability, fravashis allow a more scientific approach, and allowed vague speculation and frank mythology to be replaced gradually by observation and classification.
Before the notion of fravashis existed, positive descriptions could not really be trusted, because subjects must not stick for long to a description recorded here and now. The magical powers of fickle gods and demons, keeping everything in motion, always worked out in unexpected ways. Science was not most in need of reliable theories (theories never are reliable for long), but of reliable subjects. Persian scholars crossed this divide and provided a universe filled to
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the top with tangible beings, and the fravashis evolved to fixed definitions, to archai, ideas, substance, class, nature, cause.
Conscious of the huge variety of plants, Babylonian scholars pondered over their origin and the cause of their medicinal powers:
The arch-angel Amerodad, as the vegetation was his own, pounded the plants small, and mixed them up with the water which Tîstar [Sirius] seized, and Tîstar made that water rain down upon the whole earth. On the whole earth plants grew up like hair upon the heads of men. Ten thousand of them grew forth of one special description, for keeping away the ten thousand species of disease which the evil spirit produced for the creatures; and from those ten thousand, the hundred thousand species of plants have grown forth. From that same germ of plants the tree of all germs was given forth, and grew up in the wide-formed ocean, from which the germs of all species of plants ever increased.475
Animals, as well as plants, were grouped in classes (kardak), genera (khadunak) and species (sardak). Some of the divisions (foot cloven in two...) are encountered again in Biblical food prescriptions:
First, those suitable for grazing were created there from, those are now kept in the valley; the second created were those of the hills, which are wide-travellers, and habits are not taught to them by hand; the third created were those dwelling in the water. As for the genera, the first genus is that which has the foot cloven in two, and is suitable for grazing; of which a camel larger than a horse is small and new-born. The second genus is ass-footed, of which the swift horse is the largest, and the ass the least. The third genus is that of the five-dividing paw, of which the dog is the largest, and the civet-cat the least. The fourth genus is the flying, of which the griffin of three natures is the largest, and the chaffinch the least. The fifth genus is that of the water, of which the Kar fish is the largest, and the Nemadu the least. These five genera are apportioned out into two hundred and eighty-two species. 476
As everywhere plants were gathered for their medicinal properties, and the legendary plant of youth – the tree of life - provoked the same popular imagination as the philosopher’s stone in Medieval Europe. Vast pharmacopoeias described healing spices, lotions, salves, syrups, suppositories, enemas, even instruments and surgical precepts. As the most advanced medicine thrived at the courts, exchange among civilizations was only natural. When Pharaoh Amenophis II, who lived in the fourteenth century BCE, or the Hittite king Hattusilis III in the thirteenth century BCE, became ill, they had Babylonian doctors at their bedsides – and there is no reason to doubt that the same also happened the other way around.
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Exotic animals and plants have always been gifts appreciated by kings, and the scholarship necessary to keep them in good health usually came with accompanying servants. Yet the hanging gardens of Babylon, built by Nebuchadrezzar to please his Median wife who longed for her green homeland, surpassed everything known, and became one of the Seven Wonders of the World. They were stacked on terraces and drenched by artificial rivers, cascades and ponds, in their turn nourished by chain pumps. Beasts of prey were safely housed in the lowest parts of those gardens on a regime of two goats and two slaves daily. It was in such a pit that the biblical Daniel survived to defame science and glorify faith.
In those gardens the composer of the first Book of Kings witnessed the scholars he used to fashion the wise Solomon by means of scientific interest in strange plants and animals. Solomon was indeed presented as a genius of ancient science. In our age of rigorous scientific methods, this hoax has never been criticized:
And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes. And there came of all people to hear the Wisdom of Solomon, from all kings of the earth, which had heard of his wisdom.477
In Babylon, much like in China, progress was made in abstract algebra. Babylonian scholars mastered exponents, quadratic equations and compound interest. They also adapted the Egyptian hours and days, and added minutes, months and weeks. Biblical creation started on the first day of the first Babylonian week, and was accomplished at the very first day of rest. Babylonian weeks repeated from there for all times, eventually replacing random temple feasts by weekly Sabbaths.
The world started to evolve towards a world which, literally, could be counted upon.
The repute of Babylonian scholars reached as far as medieval Europe, where they became known as the sometimes revered, sometimes feared class of Magi or Chaldeans. In the seventh century CE, a puzzled Saint Isidore of Seville wrote that the Chaldeans had the power to change human beings into swine, wolves, and owls. One millenary later Thomas Hobbes still insisted that ‘the Gymnosophists of India, the Magi of Persia, and the Priests of Chaldaea and Egypt are counted the most ancient philosophers’. This
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obvious conclusion was still drawn by most scholars in Hobbes’ days, but completely disappeared from our academies since the advent of racist theories in the nineteenth century CE. Since that time it is unbearable that non-Europeans attributed to the growth of human knowledge. And Europe had no other candidates to play the role of the first mover of knowledge than the Greeks. Yet the Magi influenced Greek thought, stood at the cradle of Jesus Christ, inspired the Italian renaissance and enabled Atlantic Europe.478
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Greece
Colonization, warfare and cultural exchange
During the seventh century BCE population pressure pushed Greek emigrants to conquer footholds and to establish colonies around the Mediterranean Sea, around the Black Sea and in the Nile Delta.479 As always, this crossing of borders was followed by exchange of ideas. Although Western historians have depicted Greek colonization as a civilizing mission giving ‘foreign people the opportunity to get to know the Greek civilization’,480 there was not all that much civilization to learn from this ‘scum of Greece’, as Archilochus, a poet who witnessed the emigrations, has called them. Cultural exchange went in all directions, but one of the most prevalent exchanges was that the Greeks learned from Egypt the carving of hard granite and marble, and the construction of large monumental buildings. And this implied simultaneous transfer of the necessary skills in engineering, mathematics and astronomy.
One century later, when Persia conquered Lydia and Babylon to arrive at the borders of the Aegean Sea, some Greeks in the Asian colonies became attracted to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of an almost unlimited empire. Those Greeks substituted their fighting togs by long white robes eastern style, and put on, testified Xenophanes, decadent perfumes and conspicuous ornaments:
They learnt dainty and unprofitable ways from the Lydians, so long as they were free from hateful tyranny; they went to the market-place with cloaks of purple dye, not less than a thousand of them all told, vainglorious and proud of their comely tresses, reeking with fragrance from cunning salves.
Among those ‘dainty and unprofitable ways’ were philosophy and science.
Although closely related with Greece, the Asian colony of Miletus and its neighbours had their own dialect, lived under the rule of Lydia and were regarded Asian by the Greeks of Europe. Prosperous Miletus maintained crucial commercial relations with Egypt and Babylon, and at regular intervals merchants entertained travellers in their houses, exchanging amusing tales and exotic wisdom while their caravans
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gathered or their ships waited for favourable winds. Those encounters of merchants and nobles formed a network allowing ideas to travel from China to the Mediterranean within a few years – seconds on the chronometer of history - while distortions of strange imageries sometimes might contribute to the rise of new concepts. The importance of those distortions – occasionally genuine meme mutations – should not be underestimated, even more so as translators were usually children raised in mixed marriages, by parents of different tongues. Those parents might be either educated citizens or illiterate slaves.
What the Greeks later would call philosophy started in this milieu. The word did not set apart men who ‘loved wisdom’, as the name might suggest, because many other people loved wisdom too – an abundant wisdom literature flourished in Asia and Africa, and was recited for centuries, before attentive audiences, in slums and palaces. New was the combination of the lore of shamans, healers and sorcerers with fresh, abundant knowledge. For a century those men preferred to recite visions in a theatrical way to guarantee their reputation and singularity, and claimed the origin of their knowledge divine, rather than to point out the actual sources. Their propositions can be divided over three types: common knowledge, following the older customs, is granted an exotic origin, like Egypt or Babylon; propositions of fellow Greeks are criticized and refuted, if mentioned at all; finally the own propositions are presented as divine inspirations or visions, unmotivated and in dark, poetic wording. Only at a later stage divine inspiration was going to take the form of introspection and turn into the myth of pure reason.
The philosophers among those colourful pretenders can roughly be divided in engineers and professors: the first sold their knowledge to kings, ministers and generals, the second to princes and wealthy citizens.481 The first brought about bridges, temples and besiege machinery or defence works, the second brought about improvements in social areas like politics, business and law; the first were interested in geometry and physics, the latter in morals and discourse; the first were enumerated by means of endowments and gifts, the second by means of wages. There is no ground whatsoever to claim that this was a Greek peculiarity, absent or even impossible in similar societies.
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The Persian armies had scored the entire earth from Egypt to India with an iron plough, and as a result philosophy must have prospered wherever wealth was gathered - at the courts of Tehran, Sousa, Saïs and Kandahar, and in many cities forgotten since - in the same manner and for the same reasons as in Miletus and Athens. But because the writings of Plato and Aristotle remained of some value to ideologists who attained power afterwards, copies of their works are the only remaining testimony of ancient science.
The Milesian philosophers known to us – Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes - can all be considered professional engineers, since they were occupied with astronomy, geometry, navigation, mechanics and hydrology, while their speculations about a material substratum of the world (water, fire, the boundless, ether), was the inclusion of Eastern speculations in the constructionist paradigm of their profession. This happened centuries after the first Upanishads. Thales, the certified first philosopher, travelled to Egypt, studied Babylonian science, and was enlisted in various Lydian military campaigns for his engineering skills. He was honoured as the ‘father of philosophy’ two thousand years after the Egyptians had consecrated Imhotep for analogous accomplishments.
Persian influence
Persia was the unambiguous turntable of Asian and African imageries, and since the Greco-Persian Wars Greece underwent Persian influence in its turn.
It would have been a genuine ‘Greek miracle’ if the Greeks, throughout this turmoil, had remained isolated by a thick blind wall, and that Indian, Persian and Egyptian imageries had raced around without ever influencing Athens – but it would not be a miracle to be proud of.
In reality, Greeks who were raised under Persian influence took yet unknown ideas westward when they fled for the brutal defeater. Teos, a city on the Asian coast, was destroyed by the Persians in 540 BCE. Its citizens escaped to Abdera, the birthplace, a century later, of Protagoras and Democritus. At about the same time Pythagoras and Xenophanes escaped from Asia and fled into Southern Italy.
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Pythagoras founded his famous sect at Croton, and Xenophanes went to Elea, a city founded in 535 BCE by Asian Greek refugees. In Elea Xenophanes influenced Parmenides, at that time a follower of Pythagoras.482
In 494 BCE, Miletus was sacked and part of the population was enslaved and deported. Heracleitus however stayed at Ephesus under Persian rule until his death. He named the world ‘an ever-living Fire’ which ‘will judge and convict all things’483 – a distinctly Zoroastrian imagery.
After the earthquake of the Persian wars, philosophers travelled from city to city and from palace to palace, selling their knowledge as private professors. Those men had not only acquainted foreign insights like the engineers mentioned above - they took one step more: confronted with the traditions of various civilizations, they were struck by the variety of truth claims defended by each of them. If other countries had other gods, other oracles, other laws and customs, the own community tumbled down to one of many provinces of the world, and there was no reason any more to trust that the own traditions are always right.
AthensAthens became the official treasurer of the Greek alliance, and took the lead in the hostilities with Persia. The resulting prosperity attracted philosophers chased from Asia, together with their pupils: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Gorgias, Parmenides, all under direct or indirect Persian influence, gave Athens the philosophical splendour in which Plato thrived, and which at last attracted Aristotle and his followers. With Aristotle, the link with Persian philosophy becomes irrefutable by anyone not entangled in Western ideology.
As always when shattering of borders engender modernity, the reaction of those in power was severe. The Athenian leaders – both despotic and so-called democrats - detested free thinking: Anaxagoras, Protagoras and others were accused of impiety, or of Medism, a word giving away the Persian origin of the despised novelties.484 Book burnings, death penalties and banishments have for consequence that our knowledge about those philosophers depends almost entirely on the words of their greatest enemy, the conservative Plato, who named them ‘sophistes’ in the meaning of ‘quibbling swindlers’. Plato, one of the most distinguished notables of
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Athenian aristocracy, was a supporter of the terror regime of 404 BCE in which several of his relatives functioned. He quitted his ambitions as a playwright to spend most of his time composing dialogues in which the ‘sophistes’ are ridiculed and molested by a morally and intellectually super-human, Socrates. The former playwright continuously puts purposely ridicule propositions in the mouth of the sophistes, to have them countered by Socrates, who says to know nothing and yet knows everything better - a religious zealot, leaving no one at rest but never fully speaking his mind himself.
When convicted to drink poison, the Socrates of Plato even refused a permissible way out, only to become the celebrated martyr of absolute obedience, not motivated by justice or critical philosophy, but by some dark religious principle. Right before drinking the lethal cup this Socrates defended for his last time religious submission, as opposed to free thinking and free acting:
There is a doctrine uttered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away; this is a great mystery, which I do not quite understand. Yet I, too, believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we are a possession of theirs. 485
Plato added the first conservative voice to philosophy – a real innovation, if not a contradiction -, and thus became a well known conservative icon and the first philosopher who’s works survived succeeding despotic powers. He was the head of a corporation, later known as the Academy, where the leading classes worshipped the Muses and studied the skills of totalitarian statesmanship. This Academy, with its religious nature, with its social network and with the political ambitions of its founder, can hardly be imagined as the independent, private and speculative institute it is usually called today, and Plato was not a tragic leader who had failed in his unselfish ambitions or, following Plutarch, could not persuade anyone because of his unpleasant character.486 In reality the corporation was an ally of power like many other temples, convents, ministries and academies.
Despite the assertions of Western historians that the Greek miracle was never seriously influenced by other cultures, Plato, In his work Laws, deemed it necessary to plead for a restraint on such exchanges:
Intercourse of cities with one another is apt to create a confusion of manners; strangers are always suggesting novelties to strangers...
And poetry and music are only a cause of
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disobedience to rulers; and then the attempt to escape the control and exhortation of father, mother, elders, and when near the end, the control of the laws also; and at the very end there is the contempt of oaths and pledges, and no regard at all for the Gods ...
In the Phaedo the horrors already caused by this ‘intercourse of cities’ are summed up by Socrates:
[Some] mention as causes air and ether and water and many other strange things [..] one man surrounds the earth with a vortex to make the heavens keep it in place, another makes the air support it like a wide lid. As for their capacity of being in the best place they could possibly be put, this they do not look for, nor do they believe it to have any divine force, but they believe that they will some time discover a stronger and more immortal Atlas to hold everything together...
The Indian ether, the Zoroastrian vortex (also found in the bible book Ezekiel), the Egyptian firmament: Plato gives a good summary of ‘novelties’ from all over the known world, and in the same sentence complains that people are no longer grateful for their own familiar place.
Plato repeatedly gave away that he would love nothing more than to repair the regime of terror that collapsed before his eyes: unremitting submission to undisputed power was the essence of his ideal society. Ironically, and maybe unnoticed by him, it was a foreign, Persian philosophy - the Boundless Light filled with unmoving, intangible Fravashis - that helped him to his famous imagery that we live ‘in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light’. To Plato the light stands for an higher reality of imperishable forms, of which the actual world is but a transitional shadow. In this manner a Persian scientific theory became a political ideology. This ideology has been recycled without end to give a profound ring to plain reactionary conservatism, and eventually influenced Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim civilizations. If Plato should be renown for anything, it should be for the merging of an imported universal superstructure with local political provincialism, thereby paving the way for parish ideologies assaulting the world community with a pity sentiment of righteousness.
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Alexander the Great
Following the Persian Wars, Greece was allowed peace for only sixty years. Then Alexander of Macedonia started his looting campaigns - a chain reaction continually fuelled by ever new uprooted men, joining the next plunder after their own environment was ruined.
Despite being depicted as a fierce warrior, Alexander ‘the Great’ was 1.40 meter high, and can only have been grossly fat because of his voracious appetite for roasted chicken and wine. Even his horse, a bag of bones more than twenty years of age, is commonly depicted as a wild steed. After the murder of his father, of which historians have acquitted him for lack of evidence, Alexander had all his rivals and potential opponents killed, including his own brothers. He became heir to an army eager to plunder every town in sight, Greek, Persian or whatever, and was drawn behind this army as a spoiled kid walking bloodhounds, constantly surrounded by lifeguards who paid with their lives for the slightest negligence. He relentlessly feasted with prostitutes and courtiers at each encampment: Persepolis was set on fire by this loud-mouthed gang, but not before all treasures had been towed away by the rank and file for many days. It was the drunk Alexander who threw the first torch in the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, only for the fun of the fireworks. In Sousa he organized the biggest mass rape in history by paying his grumbling soldiers with ten thousand local women – a performance still acclaimed by historians today as an act of cultural fraternizing, as if ten thousand local women had suddenly fallen in love with an entire army after it invaded and looted their country. It was customary that the women of a taken city were booty for the soldiers; the novelty was that the taking of the booty was turned into a pompous ceremony by a warring tribesman who had discovered the splendour of the kingdoms he was destroying.
Some of Alexander’s companions died in drinking contests after days of agony, while they were tended better than wounded soldiers in tents erected for this purpose only. When intoxicated, Alexander became (or remained) a dangerous murderer, even killing his best friend in a rush when the latter alluded to his incompetence. He is said to have established an enormous empire, but there was never a central metropolis, and even when sober Alexander was unable to coordinate, let alone unify the territories ransacked by the hordes
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operating in his name, and left behind in the hands of ruthless governors and tax collectors. In Babylon, where he hoped to soak up splendour of the city like grease dripping off a plate with roasted meat, he crammed himself unconscious and died after days of agony. Within a few years his ‘empire’ fell apart: he had by then sacked whole countries for vulgar profit and destroyed numerous cities in the most hideous manner, repeatedly crucifying thousands of resisters, while selling ten times as many children and women into slavery.
The demolition of borders initiated by this warfare, was accelerated by masses of roaming armies and refugees eventually settling on alien ground. In this context the retinue of Alexander confiscated treasures of Persian and Babylonian science, already correlated with Indian, Chinese and Mongol knowledge. The Persian Book of Nativities487 reads:
When Alexander conquered the kingdom of Darius, he had all books translated in Greek. Then he burnt the original copies which were kept in the treasure houses of Darius, and killed everyone whom he thought might be keeping away any of them, except that some books were saved through the protection of those who safeguarded them, and he who could escape from Alexander by running away to the islands of the seas and the mountain tops. Then when they returned to their homes after the death of Alexander they put into writing those parts that they had memorized.
Another version adds that also inscriptions on stone and wood were destroyed, and that
books, along with the rest of the sciences, property, treasures and learned men that he came upon, he sent to Egypt.
When the storm was over, the Persians took the necessary steps to rebuild their intellectual institutes. The Zoroastrian Denkard recounts:
After the plunder by Alexander, successive kings commanded to all provinces to preserve, in the state in which they had come down, whatever had survived the pillage and plundering of the Macedonians of Alexander, to be brought to the court. This included writings on medicine, astronomy, movement, time, space, substance, accident, becoming, decay, transformation, logic and other crafts and skills.488
A few centuries later Muslim Jihad turned Zoroastrian Persia into a Muslim empire. Soon fundamentalist Hanbalites opposed every deductive method. What is, they said, has been revealed, it must only be described. When Saudi-Arabia officially accepted Wahabitism, it became an Hanbalite society in the twentieth century CE.
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While Alexander burned down his first city – Thebes of Greece, in 335 BCE - his former tutor, Aristotle, founded the Lyceum at Athens, an academy and, according to Strabo, the first library of Greece.
It is absurd to believe that Aristotle was no longer interested in the prince he had educated, and who was now ready to storm the world, crossing, looting and burning, but also running into amazing animals, plants, imageries and customs. It is evens absurd to believe that Alexander forgot the philosopher who had dominated most of his youth. For anyone travelling east, fascination with exotic marvels was as common as the attraction of gold, and Alexander had engaged many famous scholars: Anaxarchus, from the school of Democritos at Abdera; Pyrrhon of Ellis, the father of western skepticism; Onesicratus, a disciple of Diogenes; Xenocrates, a companion of Plato, and so on.489
But even more absurd than two famous men suffering simultaneous amnesia, is to believe that while Alexander and his entourage of selected scholars were daily confronted with all those marvels, they took no interest in them, did nothing to make records or gather specimen, and saw no reason to direct such records and specimen to Athens, where the most famous scholar of their times was filling the first library of Greece with innate European wisdom.
Imagine a person overlooking a river running through a valley, of which a part is hidden by a rock. If this person should claim that the upstream river evaporates behind the rock, while the downstream river is nourished by itself, everyone would call him a fool. But if the same river is described to people who were never there, and have no distinct idea about the direction of the flows and the size of the rocks, the same foolishness could easily be accepted as a fact. This is exactly what happened when western historians state that all the science of Asia and Africa suddenly disappeared at the moment Greek science freshly emerged from the Greek mind or character.
The looting of Asia by Alexander was devastating: at Hamadan six thousand soldiers secured only part of the booty.490 Inevitably, part of this booty were books and enslaved scholars and craftsmen. When Pliny asserts that Alexander gave Aristotle access to hunters, fishermen, fowlers, and overseers of forests, lakes, ponds and cattle-ranges, he must have been referring to such booty.
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The Book of Nativities maintains that Persian books were sent off to Alexandria, but only after Alexander’s death, under the Ptolemean Pharaohs, a library was established there. Demetrius of Phaleron, a disciple of Aristotle, was commissioned with its development, and the works gathered by Aristotle became the basis of the famous Museaon. Persian bookworks were indeed sent to Alexandria their intermediate station was the Lyceum of Aristotle.
Also in imitation of the Lyceum, the Museaon attracted and accommodated scholars of all nationalities: roughly half came from non-Greek Asia and from Africa, while one quarter was from unknown origin. Greek was the lingua franca, as Sanskrit or Parsian had been before, and Latin or English would become afterwards. But not everyone with a Greek name or using the Greek language was from Greek birth, just as Desiderius Erasmus was no Roman citizen.
Alexandria was the perfect location for massive duplication of texts. Its location amidst the vast papyrus marshes of the Nile Delta made that almost a million books were eventually gathered by agents inspecting archives in temples and palaces throughout the world, and examining shiploads in the harbour. Either copies were prepared for the library, or books were confiscated and the original owner was satisfied with a copy made at once by the Mouseion scholars. A legion of translators and copyists prepared the texts in and out Greek, Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Jewish, Indian, and other languages.
Fusion and diffusion of Persian, Indian and Egyptian imageries
Despite the traditional designation of this period as ‘Hellenism’, it surpassed by far the character of an achievement inspired by Hellas: it was the merger of Asian, African and Greek knowledge in African Alexandria that engendered a period of modernity of the magnitude of Babylon, akin to the Indian episode of the oldest Upanishads, and to the African and Mesopotamian eposides testified by artworks from the third millennium BCE.491
An important paradigm of this period was the natural history of air and its relatives, wind and words. In the oldest Indian Upanishads all fluids – ether, air, water – were serious candidates to be substrate of
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the universe. For a millenary the imagery of the ‘breath of life’, and air, wind and (magical) words had attested the constant presence of spirits in daily life.
In Alexandrian times air degraded to an ordinary object of physical science and mechanical engineering. Some Gnostics tried to save the doctrine by applying the name pneuma (air) to a new medium of finer matter, but soon a new candidate, the Boundless Light of the Persian Zoroastrians, gained momentum.492 Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Sufism and alchemy all eventually turned to light as the substratum of the spiritual world, and started a permanent conflict between scientific and spiritual aspirations. In the Gnostic gospel of Thomas Jesus says:
“If they say to you, ‘Where did you come from?’, say to them, ‘We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.’”493
The fourth gospel of the Christian Bible, leaning heavily on Gnosticism itself, borrows the ancient imagery of air, winds and words in Genesis,494 but connects it with the new metaphor of light:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God [..] In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.495
Plotinus, the father of Neo-Platonism, wrote that ‘to dispel the darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, [the soul] must thrust towards the light.’496
Euclid of Alexandria, in his Optica, had studied the relationship between the apparent sizes of objects and their angle occupied at the eye. To Euclid, light streamed from the eye to the object; to Plotinus, light streamed from the celestial world into this world, filling it with matter. Therefore Plotinus could not agree that some parts of the seeing eye would not receive light:
Those attributing the reduced appearance to the lesser angle occupied, allow by their very theory that the unoccupied portion of the eye still sees something beyond or something quite apart from the object of vision, if only air-space.497
The Boundless Light found its way back to its Persian origin in the Iranian Sufist al-Ghazali:
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The light upon the floor is owed to that upon the wall, and the light on the wall to that in the mirror, and the light in the mirror to that from the moon, and the light in the moon to that from the sun, for it is the sun that radiates its light upon the moon. [..] even so are the Lights of the celestial realm ranged in an order; and that the highest is the one who is nearest to the Ultimate Light. It may well be, then, that the rank of Seraphiel is above the rank of Gabriel [..] the name light is most of all due to this Heavenly Light, above which there is no light at all, and from which light descends upon all other things.498
Thomas Aquinas, himself an eager student who quoted al-Ghazali over thirty times, adapted the idea:
intellectual knowledge itself is called sight, or vision. And because bodily vision is not accomplished except through light, the means whereby intellectual vision is fulfilled borrow the name of light. That disposition therefore whereby a created intelligence is raised to the intellectual vision of the divine substance is called the ‘light of glory.’’
The alchemical treatise Liber de Arte Cemica, attributed to Marcilio Ficino, explains the supreme light as follows:
there is nothing in the soul of the firmament, beside a soul, which represents a greater similitude of God than light itself. Since everything does challenge to itself so much of God, as I may say, as they are capable of light. And since nothing is more conspicuous bright-eyed than the sun, many of the platonics chiefly imitating Orpheus herein have termed the sun, the eye of the world.499
Light would remain at the centre of European philosophy until the scientific work of Galileo led to the shocking but undeniable conclusion that it is just a natural phenomenon.500
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Judaism
Why the Bible was written, and who did it
Even though all religions claim antiquity, they are refashioned by each new generation. No matter who we are and where or when we live, it is certain that forebears of a century ago experienced religion different from today. It doesn’t matter if we pray the same words in the same edifices, or if our priests wear ritual clothes of old. The gods, the angels and the saints beget an other appeal, provide new hopes and induce different fears in every century. Therefore religions are interesting for their evolution, rather than for their antiquity.
A good insight in Judaism is not to be found as much in the Bible as in the history of its composition. Two sets of books with historical content deserve special attention – each were meant by their authors as a complete and unique bible starting with Adam.
The first set is centred around the Books of Moses, and is based on Jewish and Persian myths and on wisdom, songs, laws, and records of various ages. Its redaction was finished at about 400 BCE, by Ezra, a Babylonian scribe.501 This set of book evokes the occupation of Palestine by the Israelites in the time of Moses and Joshua, but is really a defence of the right of the followers of Ezra and Nehemiah to occupy Palestine. This right is rather based on divine promises made to forefathers, than on a notice of fairness. The divine promises guaranteed success in military occupation, not a sort of international justice. For this purpose the authors of the Books of Moses merged an ancient forefather war god, Yahweh, with the Lord (Ahura) of Zoroastrianism, the religion of their Persian rulers. Promises of victory had always been part of tribal forefather god worship. Now they were redesigned as a covenant between the ancient Israelites and the god – and at once the king - of the worldwide Persian Empire.502
The second set of books is known as the Books of Ezra. Those books mythologise the historical period of the redaction of the Books of Moses, but were finished at about 200 BCE. They evoke the submission of Palestine by the governor Nehemiah and its
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occupation by Ezra, and are especially concerned with the rebuilding of the temple and walls of Jerusalem. The Books of Ezra are really intended as a defence of the Temple and the holy city of Jerusalem: the story of the return of the exiles serves as a proof, to the many Jews abroad, that Jerusalem remained their capital and the centre of their religion. Thus, confusingly, while the story is about the return, the author was thinking of the expatriates.503
Both Moses and Ezra have been deified at certain moments in history, much as again Jews deified Jesus a few centuries later. Moses talked face to face with God in the midst of a fire storm,504 and in a non-conical bible book ascents into heaven with body and soul.505
The Koran rebukes the Jews for calling Ezra (Arabic ‘Uzair) their Messiah and God’s son.506
Wars and war gods of the Iron Age
The continual tribal wars of the Iron Age sometimes led to more or less stable confederations, and sometimes even settled in volatile kingdoms. In Palestine, success fell to one accidental alliance established by Moses. This alliance was forged around the war god Yahweh, an Egyptian god adapted by the Arabian Midianite tribe, where Moses had lived and was married. In the following quote Yahweh is for the first time presented, in connection with the armed occupation of a land ‘wherein they were strangers’. As often, the name of a worn out god was reprocessed to establish a tradition over the hundred-years horizon retrospectively. At the same time he is identified with the Mazdayan Lord. This happening is even recorded in the Bible:
I am the Lord, and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac and unto Jacob, by the name of El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh was I not known to them. And I have also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers.507
Some scholars have understood ‘El Shaddai’ (ShDI) as ‘Baal of the Mountain’ but the exact meaning remains unknown. It could be translated with ‘Baal The Strong’, as opposed to the usual but anachronistic ‘God Almighty’: the word ‘almighty’ refers to universal power, and the political concept nor the terminology of a universal
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power existed when this verse was composed: obviously power over Canaan was envisaged, not power over everything.
‘Yahweh’ is related to the Egyptian moon god ‘Yah’, and often the Bible has ‘Yah’ where the English translation reads ‘Lord’. The Sinai desert, named after the Sumerian moon god Sin, played a major role in Moses’ life at several occasions: once when he had to hide after committing a murder, another time when he led the Hebrews out of Egypt. And, the most important, it was in the desert of the moon that he adapted the religion of the moon god Yahweh.508 In Canaan the Hebrews celebrated also the goddess Astarte, who was associated with the crescent moon. Another Canaanite god and an associate of Astarte was Baal, ‘The Rider of the Clouds’, like Marduk of Babylon represented as a Golden Bull. The descent of Moses from Sinai, the annihilation of the ancient temples, the slaughter by his Levites of the worshippers of ‘the golden calf’, all are a mythical recount of the usurpation by Yahwism.
Still today Jews recite the ‘Hallel psalms’ at the New moon. The halleluyah in English Bible translations literally means “Hallel Yah!’ or “Praise Yah!’.509 Some psalms remind of the moon god Yah:
extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name Yah, and rejoice before him.510
The name ‘Moses’ is an Egyptian suffix (ms or mes), meaningless by itself. It can be translated as ‘… is alive’. Tuth-Mose, for example, could mean ‘the god Tuth lives’. Frequent Egyptian names derived from ‘Yah’ are ‘Yah-mose’ or ‘Ah-mose’, but also ‘Yah-hotep’ ('Yah is content') or ‘Aah-hotep’. A century before the final redaction of the books of Moses an Egyptian general Ahmose, the later Pharaoh Ahmose II, defied Nebuchadrezzar II, a branded enemy of Jerusalem, and led an army against Egypt up to Ethiopia in which Jews served as mercenaries.
It is obvious that the name ‘Moses’ has somewhere lost its heading part. Clearly Moses was called after an Egyptian god, and this god was omitted to wipe out traces of his Egyptian faith. Wiping out names of fallen gods and aristocrats was common in Egyptian politics, and is still testified on the walls of many temple ruins. The name Ezra is in full length Hebrew Afar-yah: ‘Yah helps’. If the full Egyptian name of Moses was Yah-Mose, his successors Joshua (in Hebrew) and Jesus (in Aramaic) bore approximately the same name: ‘Yah is salvation’.
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If Moses was indeed a pupil of an Egyptian court, the rock which he hit after his victory at the Red Sea must have been a victory stela, and the repeated strikes he made were hieroglyphic records of his victory - every Egyptian general would have celebrated such victory with equal display.511 The tradition has transformed this battered stela into a magical water source of which illiterate tribes understood the purpose much better.
A military pactThe pact of tribes gathered around Yahweh was another version of the oldest military pact on the earth, the pact between the living and the death, in which forefather gods are solicited to rise and join the battle. Such a pact often needs to be empowered by sacrifice, because gods never help for free.
As the highest sacrifice is required in the greatest urgency, fellow humans are often sacrificed at such occasions, and children are the most easy to deal with. Children differ in value: Jephthah won a battle by sacrificing his virgin daughter.512 The Bible recounts that he pledged to sacrifice the first one who would greet him, making it look as hard luck, but in reality the price was a reasonable trade-off: a daughter who had slept with a man would have been a worthless gift, while a son, the offer Abraham had to bring, was priceless. It is written that Yahweh withdrew his demand to Abraham at the last moment, but Abraham is still today appreciated for his submission, and when he returned from the offering place, his son was no longer with him.
Following illustration of the war god aspect of Yahweh leaves little room for sublimation:
Thou shalt have a place also without the camp, whither thou shalt go forth abroad, and thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee: for the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp, to deliver thee, and to give up thine enemies before thee; therefore shall thy camp be holy, that he see no unclean thing in thee, and turn away from thee.513
The authors of the Books of Moses had for main objective to instigate ruthless terror among the people of Palestine, and to promise divine backing as long as the gory instructions were followed without remorse. The Midianites, the tribe that once offered shelter to Moses, were the first to experience the meaning of the Hebrew covenant:
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And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire. And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts. And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses [..] And Moses said unto them: [..] kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.514
The furious devastation of Palestine is related in the first chapters of the infamous book that follows the Books of Moses and was named after Moses’ successor, Joshua. The first chapters of Joshua brag about annihilating prosperous cities as Ai, Jericho, Hazor, Salem,515
including the killing of their entire populations, with no other justification than the words of their war god: ‘Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you’.516 When the tribes hesitated in the mountains to invade Palestine, spies returned with an encouraging message: ‘truly the Lord hath delivered into our hands all the land; for even all the inhabitants of the country do faint because of us’.517 The inhabitants fainted because they had heard what the attackers did before to the Amorites: they took their cities and destroyed ‘the men, and the women, and the little ones. Of every city, we left none to remain: only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves, and the spoil of the cities, which we took’518. The next victim was Jericho:
They utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword. [..] And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. 519
Ai and Bethel were set on fire after their men were lured away:And so it was, that all that fell that day, both of men and women, were twelve thousand, even all the men of Ai [..] Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took for a prey unto themselves, according unto the word of the Lord which he commanded Joshua. And Joshua burnt Ai, and made it an heap for ever, even a desolation unto this day. And the king of Ai he hanged on a tree until eventide: and as soon as the sun was down, Joshua commanded that they should take his carcass down from the tree, and cast it at the entering of the gate of the city, and raise thereon a great heap of stones, that remaineth unto this day.520
The Book of Joshua has several flaws. Many of the battles bragged about have never taken place: Ai had already been destroyed centuries before. But this does not mean that the book is unhistorical, because its real aim is to incite the immigrants to Palestine of the fifth
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and fourth century BCE. When we read Joshua, we must imagine Ezra.
The Books of Moses were composed after the Judeans were exiled, to demonstrate that the land of Judah was allocated by divine proclamation. The Zoroastrian Lord of the universe was a better party than the native god of a defeated tribe. The ruling of a cosmic authority was not to be questioned for its righteousness, but to be accepted under fear of chastisement. Jerusalem belonged to the returning exiles, not to other inhabitants or immigrants. Those exiles called themselves the children of Israel, after the long disappeared kingdom of Solomon, and in the Books of Moses, adventures of ‘Israelites’ were inserted before this kingdom was established. Ancient chronicles, laws and songs - Palestinian, Egyptian or Mesopotamian – were recycled, but, following the rule of mythology, the recounted events stayed far beyond the hundred-years horizon of the editors.
The Egyptian captivity narrated in the Books of Moses projected the exile back in time and into Egypt: Yahweh had promised Palestine to all consecutive patriarchs, and now the Zoroastrian Cyrus had renewed this covenant on behalf of the Babylonian descendants. Ezra – called ‘the scribe’, which makes him a Zoroastrian clerk - was the new Moses, leading his people to the land promised by an overpowering god, punishing other inhabitants, not for wickedness, but out of aversion. A war song was put in the mouth of Moses while, just before his death, he was overseeing the land of the Palestinians. It was very actual to the returning ‘children of Israel’:
If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgement,I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward them that hate me.I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh;And that with the blood of the slain and of the captives,From the beginning of revenges upon the enemy. 521
Although many Jews returned to the Promised Land, many others remained dispersed over Asia. The history of Judaism after the Persian episode is the history of a Diaspora religion. For the dispersed Jews Jerusalem became the mythic centre of Judaism, much like the temple was the mythic centre for the returnees. People of many nationalities have been deported and chased around throughout history, from Assyrian defeaters to Portuguese
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conquerors, and most migrants ultimately blended in as the hundred-years horizon was crossed. The Jewish exception was caused by the power of the Books of Moses: a portable homeland with a spiritual history.
The Books of Ezra recount how Yahweh had once more brought his people back to Palestine; but now the claim on the land was no longer based on a military treaty or covenant; there was a new categorical unity between the land and the people, based on the categories of Babylonian science and expressed in Babylonian law - notions which have been preserved in the Organon of Aristotle. The ‘Children of Israel’ had inherited the properties of the ancient kingdom of Solomon by means of virtue, nature. Just as the Books of Moses had been written centuries after Moses, the Books of Ezra were written centuries after Ezra. The latter became as important to the Diaspora as the first to the Babylonian exiles. Like Yahweh had handed the clay tablets with laws to Moses, Cyrus had decreed to restore Judah’s riches and rebuild its temple. As the Books of Moses had predicted the return of the exiles from Babylon, the Books of Ezra predicted that the dead would rise from the underworld one day and join the living, and all would gather in Jerusalem again. A letter sent by the high council of Jerusalem to the Egyptian Jewish community reads:
We hope also, that the God, that delivered all his people, and gave them all a heritage, and the kingdom, and the priesthood, and the sanctuary, as he promised in the law, will shortly have mercy upon us, and gather us together out of every land under heaven into the holy place.522
Babylon, the promised land and the temple
In 586 BCE, the Babylonian armies destroyed the Judean kingdom. Rulers, priests and prophets with their households – approximately fifteen thousand people – were scattered over the Babylonian empire in the course of a few years. The yield of the land, still toiled by the same people as before, fell to Babylonian authority. This concluded a long episode in which Judah and Israel had been enmity with Egypt and Mesopotamia.
In Babylon, city of a thousand temples, the exiles were confronted with the most impressive cosmopolitan society up to that time in
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history - larger than ancient Rome would ever become. Some might have met Greek scholars here, inconspicuous amidst the diversity of nationalities walking along splendid boulevards and impressive gardens.
The Judean exiles reacted in various ways to this cosmopolitan environment. Many embraced its obvious modernity or added their temples to the Babylonian assortment. The Babylonian Talmud establishes that Jewish intellectual life flourished here for a millenary to come. Others, like the Deutero-Isaiah, were appalled by the depraved city-life, and contrasted their dream of a sacred Jerusalem with the repellent profane science by claiming smart oracles conveyed by their Lord who
frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad; that turneth wise men backward, and maketh their knowledge foolish; that confirmeth the word of his servant, and performeth the counsel of his messengers. 523
The book of Daniel, written in the second century BCE, still elaborates on this theme. Noble Jewish youths
such as had ability in them to stand in the king’s palace, and whom they might teach the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans
were selected by the kings’ eunuchs for education, butin all matters of wisdom and understanding, that the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers that were in all his realm.524
Babylonian science was further ridiculed in a story where scholars failed to explain a dream of the king. To search knowledge besides god – replacing oracles by soothsaying - is blasphemy:
The secret which the king hath demanded cannot the wise men, the astrologers, the magicians, the soothsayers, shew unto the king; but there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets, and maketh known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days.525
The gods overseeing the Garden of Eden are modelled after Babylonian scientists studying salutary plants and animal life, but the authors put the snake in the wrong three. The new three represents the Zoroastrian cosmic antagonism between good and evil; it pushes backward the fifteen centuries old Mesopotamian tree of life, associated with the snake since before Gilgamesh:
The Lord planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden.526
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One cannot read the second chapter of Genesis without thinking of Babylonian biologists keeping ‘savage’ humans in their gardens. Adam and Eve were naked without shame, and foraged on wild food; they lacked knowledge of civilized rules of behaviour; their abode was an artificial paradise, but it was also a barred enclosure (the Persian pairida, which means ‘enclosure’, is the original word for ‘paradise’); when they heard the approaching footsteps of their warden, they anxiously hid in the brushwood.
A Persian colonyIn 539 BCE, Cyrus initiated the migration to Judah of a selected group of confidants. This was the cheapest and fastest way to make Palestine again a stronghold against Egypt. It made Cyrus one of those men in history who burned the world - the vast kingdom of Lydia, for one, was completely destroyed together with its monuments, literature and remembrance - and yet gained a lasting reputation of tolerance.
In the course of the lobbying for power over Palestine, the confidants fashioned a religion with Persian features, and merged the tribal war god Yahweh with the Zoroastrian Lord, establishing covenants in the stile of Mazdayanism.
Cyrus was a worshipper of this Zoroastrian Lord of Knowledge, Ahura Mazda, who was accompanied by seven archangels and also by Mithra, the Lord of Covenants, until Ahura Mazda absorbed this function. Zoroaster, much like Jeremiah and much at the same time, had condemned blood offerings. Many saw as little difference between Ahura Mazda and Yahweh as modern people today see between Elohim and Yahweh. After all, one step towards universalism is the believe that all people use different names to address the same highest godhead, and universalism thrived in the metropolitan environment of Babylon. Yahweh became virtually exchangeable with Ahura Mazda, who as Yahweh had created one after the other the sky, water, earth, plants, animals, and mankind as the sixth527, and who taught knowledge about good and evil, the same way Yahweh instructed Adam and Eve in paradise. When ‘the Lord’ of the Bible calls Cyrus, the worshipper of ‘the Lord’ of the Avesta, his shepherd, there can be no doubt about this merger:
I am the Lord [..] that saith of Cyrus, he is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, thou shalt be built; and to the temple, thy foundation shall be laid.528
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For the first and only time in the bible, Yahweh calls a non-Jew his anointed, meaning the rightful king of the Israelites:
Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden [..]. I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron: And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.529
The colonists were selected by descend, and many candidates were dismissed. At arrival, conflicts cropped up with the local population, who experienced the immigrants as Persian agents with a Persian religion. Internal conflicts arose when traditionalists wanted to reconstruct the legendary splendour of Solomon, and made the temple of Jerusalem their emblem, while followers of Zoroastrian prophets like Trito-Isaiah were less interested in monuments and dreamed of a sober religious community:
Thus saith the Lord: the heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; where is the house that ye build unto me? And where is the place of my rest? For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been, saith the Lord; but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word. 530
The rebuilding of the temple was initiated but dragged on. The local population knew that exclusion from a temple economy could weaken their position in the end, and it had never been hard to honour one more god. But their proposal of assistance was turned down: this temple, unlike Solomon’s, was designed big but narrow. The colonists examined their own sins for an explanation of the fiasco: at one solemn moment they rejected, collectively and publicly, their wives taken from the local population, as well as their children.
Finally, the temple was saved by an alleged decree of Cyrus, discovered years after his death in a library in the remote Median province. Cyrus should have ordained that the expenses of building the temple ‘be given out of the king’s house’531. This was either a forgery or a miracle: for years priests had tried to raise funds without success, and now suddenly a document popped up, not even heard of by officials old enough to remember the time of its redaction. The decree left no room for doubt:
Whosoever shall alter this word, let timber be pulled down from his house, and being set up, let him be hanged thereon; and let his house be made a dunghill for this.532
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The temple of Yahweh, nearly completely financed by followers of Zoroaster, was inaugurated with a large feast in the second year of Darius. The Governor Nehemiah ordered the priests to search for the sacred fire that Jeremiah had hidden before the destruction of Jerusalem.533 They found it as a thick liquid that amazingly inflamed on the altar. It was given the name naphtha. Then the inauguration was celebrated:
The priests and the Levites were purified together, all of them were pure, and killed the Passover for all the children of the captivity, and for their brethren the priests, and for themselves. And the children of Israel, which were come again out of captivity, and all such as had separated themselves unto them from the filthiness of the heathen of the land, to seek the Lord God of Israel, did eat.534
The filthiness of the heathen of the land, as it is put in this quote, denotes the reduction of the local population to a debased labouring caste, looked upon with contempt, land labourers forever stigmatised with the mark of Cain.
As the ‘cup-bearer’ of King Artaxerxes I, Nehemiah was a powerful administrator in the Persian Kingdom and a scholar of Zoroastrianism. His task in Jerusalem was to reinforce, with regard to the local population, the immigrating epigones of central power. The wondrous fire making with naphtha was Zoroastrian, but was represented as if the prophet Jeremiah had prepared and foreseen it. However, in the books of Moses fire had been the destructive fury of God, a terrible threat rather than something desirable, and Jeremiah would never have hidden some for later. The naphtha was delivered by Zoroastrian clerks out of the Babylonian mine-pits, described in detail by Herodotus:
they draw with a swipe, and instead of a bucket make use of the half of a wine-skin; with this the man dips, and after drawing, pours the liquid into a reservoir, where from it passes into another, and there takes three different shapes. The salt and the bitumen forthwith collect and harden, while the oil is drawn off into casks. It is called by the Persians “rhadinace,” is black, and has an unpleasant smell.535
The sudden rebuilding of the temple, the eternal fire, the belief in a universal Lord, indicate that Persian Zoroastrianism had taken over the ancient tribal religion. Zoroaster had asked his Lord (Avestan Ahura):
Tell me truly, Ahura. What artist made light and darkness? What artist made sleep and waking? Who made morning, noon, and night ?536
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And the same Lord answers in the Bible:I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. 537
The campaigns of Alexander the Great destroyed borders and unsettled old beliefs and images. Greek custom, sports and clothes became fashionable in Judea, and
The priests had no courage to serve any more at the altar, but despising the temple, and neglecting the sacrifices, hastened to be partakers of the unlawful allowance in the place of exercise, after the game of Discus called them forth; not setting by the honours of their fathers, but liking the glory of the Grecians best of all. By reason whereof sore calamity came upon them: for they had them to be their enemies and avengers, whose custom they followed so earnestly, and unto whom they desired to be like in all things. For it is not a light thing to do wickedly against the laws of God. 538
Pious Jews were appalled. The high priest was accused of corruption and of plundering the temple treasures. The discussion ended in a civil war and years of bloodshed, until, in 160 BCE, the rebels conquered Jerusalem, and Demetrius II of Syria granted Judea its independence. Simon Maccabeus, the actual leader of the revolt, became the new high priest and secular ruler, but was soon contested in his turn. A new civil war over the strict interpretation of the Law of Moses, now raged between the sect of the more worldly Sadducees in power and the sect of the more pious Pharisees. The majority of people, suffering under the weight of those civil wars, were not interested in either party. The amme ha-aretz, the poor “people of the land”, had other worries than the temple treasury.
No records of this fratricide in Judea have survived outside the Bible, and it is impossible to make an estimation of the casualties. Yet the insanity witnessed in religious conflicts today imposes the most terrible assumptions.
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Christianity
Jesus: from nationalist rebel to defector god
Judea had been a theatre of fighting and atrocities for centuries when Jesus, a nationalist rebel as many before and after him, campaigned for the restoration of ancient Israel, and claimed the throne of King David. He gathered a crowd, was hailed as the new messiah, seized Jerusalem and fought his way to the temple. But the resurrection failed already after a few days. Once more a messiah had brought a short-lived eruption of hope, followed soon by slaughter and disillusion. Jesus and his men fled to their base in a grove of olive trees east of Jerusalem. After being under siege for a night, he ordered his companions to put down arms. Those unable to flee were arrested. Jesus was taken to court and executed with some of his lieutenants.539
After a few days the rumour spread that his grave was found empty. To his Jewish followers this meant that he was after all the ultimate messiah, risen from the underworld to lead the struggle of Israel to the final victory:
the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. 540
This was what Yahweh had pledged in a vision of Ezekiel:Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind [..] breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord: Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. 541
The Roman army destroyed Jerusalem a few decades later, and it became clear that the ‘exceeding great army’ had forsaken. Victory was not at hand.
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During the next century, Christianity became one of those mysterious novel sects that appealed to Roman citizens. The gospels were (re)written to turn the rebel into a Stoic pacifist, and the Jewish nationalist into a friend of Rome: following the gospels that survived up till today, the Jews had betrayed Jesus in the olive grove, and had sold him to the Jewish Sanhedrin, his greatest enemy. The Jews had shouted for his execution and had left him alone in his final suffering. The Romans on the contrary had found no evil in him, had washed their hands of his death, and never fought him by arms - they had even quenched him on the cross. Jesus himself had urged his Jewish followers to love their Roman enemies.
Paul and ClementPaul of Tarsus was born in Turkey as a Roman citizen of Jewish descent. Educated in both Jewish and Roman philosophy, he recycled the scattered dreams about the kingdom of David into the Stoic imagery of a permanent presence of the godhead
not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own [Stoic] poets have said, for we are also his offspring.542
But there was a difference. Contrary to the all-pervading Stoic deity, the presence imagined by Paul leaned to an age old, popular presence with a spiritist flavour: Christ wandered around, mostly invisible, sometimes showing his glory on a special occasion or to special people. The others could only believe what was recounted by those privileged witnesses, or try to discern reassuring tokens in the course of things.
Christ materialized on various occasions. On one such occasion, Paul of Tarsus wrote to doubtful followers in Corinth, more than five hundred people saw him simultaneously. John the Evangelist counts three occasions immediately after his death. Following Luke, Christ once asked his followers ‘Have ye here any meat?’ and enjoyed a meal, conveniently showing that he was not just a chimera.
But only a few were satisfied with a kingdom lead by a ghost, and many still hoped that at any moment Jesus would gather the faithful and direct them towards the terrified enemies of Israel: after David and Cyrus, Jesus must be the anointed, in Latin the Christus, of the time. Even Paulus, often presented as the founder of esoteric Christianity, directed his followers ’into the patient waiting for Christ’.543
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In the second century CE, at about the time of the composition of the gospels, the prophet Montanus and his retinue of female seers preached that the return of Christ was immanent. Following the gospel of Mark, the first words of Jesus in public were: ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’,544 Montanism astounded crowds with magic and ecstatic display and soon spread from Gaul to North Africa and Spain to become the common brand of Christianity:
And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.545
Towards the end of the century Montanus led thousands of his followers into the Turkish valley of Pepuza to look out for the descend from heaven of the new Jerusalem. Nothing happened, and in the aftermath of this disillusion the majority of Christians lost all hope for an immanent return of Christ to chastise the heathens.
The hope for an apocalyptic uprising was lost, and the way was cleared for more pragmatic, real life tactics to arrive at the new kingdom. Montanist preachers were slandered with charges of immorality, madness and suicide; Saint Epiphanius as well as Saint John of Damascus assured that they had sacrificed children and made bread with the blood of murdered infants. The Montanists were eradicated from history, and the church took the road of power politics. It was now taught that Jesus had ascended to heaven after wandering on earth for forty days. Clement of Alexandria, a fierce enemy of the Montanists, used some exegetic acrobacy to create a doctrine more consistent with the new pretensions. Not Jesus, but the church itself was the earthly presence of God:
that the living church is the body of Christ (for the Scripture, saith, “God created man male and female”; the male is Christ, the female the church,)546
and that the Books and the Apostles teach that the church is not of the present, but from the beginning. For it was spiritual, as was also our Jesus, and was made manifest at the end of the days in order to save us. The church being spiritual, was made manifest in the flesh of Christ [..] If we say that the flesh is the church and the spirit Christ, then it follows that he who shall offer outrage to the flesh is guilty of outrage on the church.547
Two centuries earlier Saint Paul had written to the Christians of Rome:
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to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. 548
Clement turned body in Christ - the Christians united under Christ’s blessing – in body of Christ, and distorted a plea for humility into an proclamation of arrogance and a license for repression.
This was a new phenomenon in history. Clerks had always been sacred in some way, either as collaborators of sacred kingships, or as an autonomous temple organization. Bureaucracies, because their link with power and thus, in the ancient world-image, with divinity, had always had some sacred flavour, but never before a bureaucracy had equated itself with a god. This was the bureaucracy Constantine would find at his disposal one century later.
The morals of the Christians the same as those of the heathens
The differences between the classic piety and the Christians were not about which good deeds must be done, but about which party did them better. The famous Seneca, a Stoic born in Spain at about the same time as Jesus was born in Palestine at the other end of the Roman Empire, wrote about what we call today ‘Christian virtues’ while building a career at the imperial court. Church leaders boasted that Christians were the best citizens, because they feared hell fire. Their way led to the best conduct, but the standards of conduct were those common to all right-thinking Romans. Christian writers attacked the public games – like all other entertainment - for their diversion from prayer. When the victims were Christians and the executioners heathens, the killings were criticized. But Saint Augustine, who criticized the games as frivolous, had Christians thrown before the lions himself when they did not agree with the official creed,549 and still in the fourteenth century, during the height of the Christian civilization, deadly bull games were held in the Coliseum of Rome.550
Church leaders evolved to respected citizens, and were only at intervals mistrusted for the fanatic zeal typical for all fresh, fast growing ideologies. As fundamentalists often do, they benefited from the open-minded intellectual atmosphere in the Roman Empire to
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propagate their creed, but worked at the same time towards a Christian kingdom in which other religions would be forbidden.
Eventually the Christian severity attracted traditionalist minds that were shocked by the modernity inevitably on the rise in the worldwide Roman Empire. Clement of Alexandria, in the second century CE, was appalled by outlandish novelties – the ones Plato had already feared - more than by injustice. The similarity with the Jewish upheaval about Greek hats is striking. Many times provincial xenophobia finds its place in the ideology of a fresh civilization.
Clement would have been intensely shocked if he had known that some Biblical patriarchs wore earrings:
And let not their ears be pierced, contrary to nature, in order to attach to them ear-rings and ear-drops. For it is not right to force nature against her wishes.551
He fulminates against ‘women who are crazy about stupid and luxurious purples’, because those purples ‘inflame the lust’. But it turns out that rather the exoticism than the colour itself is hideous:
Tyre and Sidon, and the vicinity of the Lacedaemonian Sea, are very much desired; and their dyers and purple-fishers, and the purple fishes themselves, because their blood produces purple, are held in high esteem. But crafty women and effeminate men, who blend these deceptive dyes with dainty fabrics, carry their insane desires beyond all bounds, and export their fine linens no longer from Egypt, but some other kinds from the land of the Hebrews and the Cilicians.552
Clement summons the female sex to bid farewellto embroidery of gold and Indian silks and elaborate Bombyces, which is at first a worm, then from it is produced a hairy caterpillar; after which the creature suffers a new transformation into a third form which they call lava, from which a long filament is produced, as the spider’s thread from the spider. For these superfluous and diaphanous materials are the proof of a weak mind, covering as they do the shame of the body with a slender veil.553
Men, furthermore, should not wear long robes (soon Jesus was going to be depicted wearing one), while women should hide their ankles. Never doubt arose that this might just be wasting energy on occasional local customs: the Platonic arrogance of one ideal world does not allow such doubts. To Clement there was only one god, and this one god wanted all people to act in the way of Clement’s little neighbourhood, up till the most ridicule details.
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Daily bread versus temple feasts
Religion in ancient societies had a highly public function, and was focused around carnivals, processions and temple feasts.
In the third century CE, the Roman Empire was still for a large part a temple economy. The temple supplied and served the community. Wealthy citizens were under incessant pressure to donate to the temples, who distributed the gifts in sacred feasts. As inflation escalated many of those citizens were forced to the brink of ruin. At the same time constant warfare made that ever more feasts evolved to expensive imperial propaganda, not very useful to a deprived population.
The Christian alternative to those pompous feasts was a daily meal of bread and wine, and the success of Christianity grew when the population of the bankrupt Roman Empire chose for the certainty of daily bread above the dwindling festivals.
The Christians saw themselves as a chosen elite, and gathered behind closed doors. Novices and sinners were locked out and wailed loudly before the entrance, as a form of imposed penitence. To the Christians the classical gods were dangerous demons, whose evil works could only be invigorated by taking part in their festivals. Resentment of those practices by the other citizens was inevitable.
Homer had called bread the food of men, because gods nor animals eat bread. Galen testifies that it was common knowledge among Greek and Roman scholars that bread changed into human blood, and that this human blood eventually forms our senses. Without bread, there is no human nature.
In the story of the Passover Jesus celebrated his last supper with his followers in Jerusalem. In the magical re-enactment of this supper -the Eucharist - and in the Roman gospels, the slaughtered sheep was omitted, and the unleavened bread was preserved and became Jesus’ body. The gospel of Philip, found at Nag Hamadi, reads:
Before Christ came, there was no bread in the world, just as Paradise, the place were Adam was, had many trees to nourish the animals but no wheat to sustain man. Man used to feed like the animals, but when Christ came, the perfect man, he brought bread from heaven in order that man might be nourished with the food of man.
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The preached sobriety of the Christians was no pretext, but perfectly lined up with reality. Since incessant warfare fuelled inflation, ever more people in need chose Christian bread above the classic festivals with always more pomposity and always less to eat. Simultaneously ever more aristocrats chose to turn their back to the official religion before they went bankrupt. Justin Martyr, one of the first upper class citizens switching camps, quoted Isaiah in his defence, with Yahweh saying:
the fat of lambs and the blood of bulls I do not desire. For who hath required this at your hands? But loose every bond of wickedness, tear asunder the tight knots of violent contracts, cover the houseless and naked, deal thy bread to the hungry.554
But wealthy converts had to deliver one way or another: Christian leaders sent spies after candidate members, and youth squads did not hesitate to dispose of cheaters. The Acts of Apostles relates about Ananias and his wife, who sold their land but had only handed in part of the revenue. Both paid with their lives:
Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? And after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? Why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things. And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him.555
A few hours later his wife Sapphira ignorantly arrived at the get-together of her new social circle. The young thugs disposed of her as they had disposed of her husband.
The heathen part of the Roman population, anxious to preserve the decaying temple economy to which they had always turned to overcome hard times, experienced the Christian evasion much as deprived people today feel about tax dodgers. It was taken as a malicious deathblow, sometimes even as the essential cause of the decline of the classical ways of life.
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Constantine: in search of a war god equal to enemy magic
In the fourth century CE, Christian politics started to pay off. Constantine the Great murdered five or more of his relatives, including one of his wives and his oldest son, and collaborated with German tribes of the Christian creed to submit Rome. The Christian tradition says that Constantine became a Christian because of a vision, but this is an interesting misreading of the source. Eusebius, the biographer of Constantine who knew him in person, clearly writes that Constantine chose the Christian god out of war tactics.
Being convinced, however, that he needed some more powerful aid than his military forces could afford him, on account of the wicked and magical enchantments which were so diligently practised by the tyrant, he sought divine assistance. [..] He considered, therefore, on what god he might rely for protection and assistance.556
Those who ‘had marched to the battle-field under the protection of a multitude of gods, had met with a dishonourable end’, while the Christian god had given many manifestations of his power and delivered military victories. Only after the calculated choice of an efficient war god, Constantine got a vision about a new corresponding standard for his troops, and somewhat later chose the Christians for his new bureaucracy, rather than the decomposing establishment.
In the Arian vision of Constantine and his soldiers (as later in Islam), Christ had been a prophet. The Catholics however took it literally that Christ was the Son of God. Expressed in the physics of late antiquity, Christ had to be of the same substance as the Lord of the Hebrew Bible in order to be equally divine. There was nothing unusual in claiming a divine nature for a revered human: many emperors in Asia and Rome had assumed the same prerogative before. For centuries the formula had been used as a strong claim to absolute power, and Constantine, although less candidly, had similar pretensions.
To make Jesus Christ the Son of God was only the application of plain classical imagery, but, since the Catholics saw themselves as the heirs of Jesus Christ, his deification worked for the Church equally, and boosted the latter’s moral and political position.557
In the course of the first decades of the Christian empire, Arianists and Catholics persecuted each other alternatively in the old tradition
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of biblical fratricide, while Constantine, god’s chosen and a divine emperor himself, tried to reconcile them. Simultaneously the Christian emperor tried to wipe out a third Christian fraction, the Donatists of the African province, a faction derived from the former Montanists, who questioned the open collaboration of the Christian prelates with imperial power.
Saint Augustine: throwing Christians to the lions
To understand Christianity as the root of Western ideology, one must however not look at Jesus, Paul or Constantine, but at Augustine.558
Saint Augustine was born in Africa in 354 CE. His father worshipped the classical gods; his mother was a Catholic. At the age of eighteen, he bought himself a concubine, to ‘let off his juvenile urge’. He used the woman for fifteen years but had only one child, a boy. A wealthy social relation of his father patronized his studies as an orator. This patron sympathized with the Manichean religion, and Augustine did the same. The chief imperial representative in Africa, the Carthaginian proconsul Symmachus, was a devotee of the art of poetry. Augustine went to Carthage, wrote his only poem ever and soon frequented the highest circles of the African province.
When Symmachus was promoted to prefect of Rome, he arranged the twenty-nine years old Augustine a position in the vicinity of the imperial court. Augustine departed for Italy, leaving his patron ignorant, and before weighing the anchor disposed of is mother, who wanted to come with him, but was sent to a chapel to pray for a safe passage.
In Milan, Augustine witnessed the vicious struggle for imperial support between the Catholics and the classical religion. The Catholics demanded a ban on all other religions; the other party wanted to give the Catholics a place among equals. In this dispute Symmachus represented the senate while his nephew, the bishop Ambrose represented the church. Symmachus addressed the emperor with an urgent plea:
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We ask, then, for peace for the gods of our fathers and of our country. It is just that all worship should be considered as one. We look on the same stars, the sky is common, the same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road; but this discussion is rather for persons at ease. We offer now prayers, not conflict.559
Bishop Ambrose replied with firm circular reasoning:Let God himself, who made me, teach me the mystery of heaven, not man, who knew not himself. Whom rather than God should I believe concerning God? How can I believe you, who confess that you know not what you worship?
Symmachus fought a lost battle. Augustine tried to find favour with Ambrose - without success. He now called for his mother, who swiftly came over and located him a girl in the Catholic elite, suitable for marriage in two years. Her family requested however that Augustine should discard his concubine, which he resolutely did: the woman must pledge to live in sexual abstinence for the rest of her life, and was locked away in an African convent. Her fourteen-year-old son remained with his father but, after he had also suffered the passing away of his grandmother, became ill and died the next year. Augustine never shed a tear for the death of his mother, a peculiarity he attributed to his firm believe in the hereafter. The death of his son is not mentioned in his Confessiones. Augustine confided to his best friend that he was unable to live without sex, and bought himself a new slave girl. He was at last baptised by Ambrose on Easter 387 CE, but the wedding never took place, and the doors of the Roman upper class remained closed. Augustine returned to Africa.
In 391 CE he was ordained priest to become spokesman for the bishop of Hippo Regius, a Greek who did not speak the local language nor Latin. While blamed by the populace for being a careerist, and accused by the primate of Africa of having an affair with the wife of the bishop of Nola, Augustine was backed by powerful friends in the African elite. Several of them, including at least one bishop, were secret agents for the emperor.
After being a clergy for only four years, Augustine was indeed appointed bishop of Hippo. The African church now revived the persecution of the Donatists and finished the work of Constantine with terror and bloodshed.560 The Donatists had deserved the same terrible fate as the accusers of Daniel in the Bible, by accusing the Catholics of collaboration with the persecutors. Yahweh had halted
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the lions before the righteous Daniel, but not before his accusers and their families:
And the king commanded, and they brought those men which had accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions, them, their children, and their wives; and the lions had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the den.561
Augustine defended that Christians had the duty to demand assistance from Christian emperors against the enemies of Christ in order to ‘save’ the heretics, and one possible way of assistance was the circus:
For the Donatists met with the same fate as the accusers of the holy Daniel. For as the lions were turned against them [..] many of them have been, and are daily being reformed, and return God thanks that they are reformed, and delivered from their ruinous madness. And those who used to hate are now filled with love. 562
A few years after those words were published, Augustine received an anonymous letter begging to moderate persecution, because ‘no one should be compelled to follow righteousness.’563 Augustine discovered who the writer was and answered with an open letter to a man named Vincentius, called with some sarcasm ‘his brother dearly beloved’. We can only imagine the terror when Vincentius, either the true writer of the anonymous letter or not, received what came close to a dead warrant:
Save yourself therefore, my brother, while you have this present life, from the wrath which is to come on the obstinate and the proud.564
The letter accused Vicentius of heresy, called him perverted, and reminded him of the succeeding imperial decrees that ‘the property of those who were convicted of schism and obstinately resisted the unity of the Church should be confiscated’.565 Still more frightening, Augustine exclaimed that ‘the lions now be turned to break in pieces the bones of the calumniators.’566
Augustine stressed that God wished one universal - ‘Catholic’ - church, obeyed by all nations. This was in his view already accomplished, but was put at risk by dissenting Christians. Persecution of heretics was therefore God’s wish. Agustine admits that no one 'can be good in spite of his own will', but wrote to Vicentius that the will of the heretic can be adjusted:
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through fear of suffering [he] repudiates the error which he was wont to defend, or seeks the truth of which he formerly knew nothing, and now willingly holds what he formerly rejected. Perhaps it would be utterly useless to assert this in words, if it were not demonstrated by so many examples. We see not a few men here and there, but many cities, once Donatist, now Catholic, vehemently detesting the diabolical schism, and ardently loving the unity of the Church; and these became Catholic under the influence of that fear which is to you so offensive.567
In line with the biblical tradition of fratricide, more Christians died in this persecution of 'not a few men here and there, but many cities' than in the Great Persecution of Diocletian, all for their own salvation - a perspective taking the meaning of Christian love to a new height.
GraceThe theoretical works of Augustine are built on four stands which are consistent with his acts and have influenced the Medieval and Atlantic civilizations.568
The first stand is the pernicious human nature. If Adam had not succumbed to sexual temptation, man still could have moved his penis by free will, like his arm or his tongue. Now for punishment the movement was involuntary and driven by lust. Humans are born less than beasts, because human babies are more helpless than newborn animals. Even suckling longing for the mother breast are sinful. Because of their nature all people must burn in hell for eternity, unless saved by divine grace. When scholars replied that eternal burning was a physical impossibility, Augustine brought up that fire salamanders live in volcanoes without injury – an at the time generally accepted fact, also testified by Aristotle and Pliny. And he had tasted himself the cooked meat of a peacock, still edible after one year – a minor remark, that yet caused the peacock to become the Christian symbol of resurrection.
Augustine agreed with the scholars of his time that the tie between body and soul collapses under severe pain, but assured that God would make this tie much stronger in hell.
The second stand is God’s arbitrariness. God is completely free to save by his grace whoever he chooses, if and when he wants to, just as he is completely free to create doomed beings whenever he likes to do so. Believers, devoured by fear and posessed by demons, could do nothing but pray, praise and beg for mercy, and endure the works of the Great Irresponsible in every misfortune or setback. Only in late
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medieval times Thomas Aquinas toned down this stand by declaring that God had enough grace for everyone, and only refused it to the wicked – a point of view later attacked by Calvinists and Jansenists.
The third stand - stemming already from Clement of Alexandria - is that God has a body of flesh and blood, and that this body, the Catholic Church, is the executor and the administrator of God’s saving grace. Consequently, excommunication by the Church is at once banishment from the hereafter and a casting into hell fire. Saint Peter, the first pope and symbol of the authority of the Catholic Church, possesses the key to heaven. Still in 1943 CE, Pope Pius XII insisted on this dogma.
The power of the Catholic Church to wash off sins - as God and his church were free to do, with no strings attached - had tremendous consequences. In a time when there was no absolution for sins yet, Augustine fulminated against heretics who defended that renegades could be baptised again. In his Confessiones, thinking of his own christening, he continually thanks God for washing away all his sins, and for putting a stop to new ones.
City of GodAugustine did not write religious books with omission of the material world. Modern European scientists invented the split between religion and science much later to fend off religious repression. Until that time it was impossible to explain divine power without explaining nature. The City of God treats natural history, psychology and politics next to theology. Pygmies, hermaphrodites, Cyclops and Siamese twins (Augustine had once the occasion to observe one) were humans only if they descended from Adam. That people could live at the bottom side of the earth with their feet upwards was nonsense. Humans could really leave their natural element earth and go to heaven, because birds have also earthly bodies and yet can fly. Christ’s ascension to heaven was possible in the same manner as iron cases float on water. Augustine was clearly not familiar with the work of Archimedes, who lived seven centuries before him, and presumably did not know that iron cases float because they are hollow – otherwise his argument would imply that Jesus had ascended to heaven as a sort of inflated balloon.
But the essence of the City of God was the imagery of the two cities taken from The Book of Revelation. The earthly city is Babylon, ‘the
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mother of harlots and abominations of the earth’, ‘a woman drunken with the blood of the saints’. Throughout history, this city appears in many forms, of which the latest was the Roman Empire.
The heavenly city is Jerusalem, ‘prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’, descending from heaven:
Her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; [..] and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones.
This city was now the Catholic Church. It had a floor on earth and a floor in heaven: both had always been geographical locations in one world, the difference was purely hierarchical. On both floors, the faithful live with body and soul - a fusion of Middle Eastern resurrection with Egyptian immortality.
Christians had for a long time believed in the immediate return of the Christ to establish a new kingdom, bringing victory and pleasure to his followers. As disillusion spread, the church had replaced the dream of a Christian revolution with Christian pragmatics. Augustine combined the dream of a heavenly kingdom with this new realpolitik: the Christ needed not to return, because already a few days after his dead he had lent his power to the church, the new kingdom, with its bureaucracy, anathemas and advantages. Because the Catholic church ruled all nations of the earth, the heavenly city was realized here and now.
At the last judgement, the bodies of the deceased will rise and join the living, and all will be rid of distortion and disease. Children, and abortions ‘if they have a soul’, will rise as adults, and women will be women. The latter is not as obvious as it seems: in late antiquity many scholars asserted that there was no place in heaven for sinful vaginas, and still in Medieval times Cathari believed a woman had to reincarnate as a man first. But Augustine argued that the female organ was going to renew its beauty in such a manner that it would not arouse lust, but would incite praise of God’s mercy and wisdom.
Whatever can be said against Saint Augustine, he did love women.
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The all-mighty Church is the body of the all-mighty God
In the numerous theological disputes of the first centuries CE, Christian leaders seemed to behave, at first sight, like difficult, nitpicking logicians, torturing and killing over words.569 However, this smokescreen hides plain and simple politics of power.
Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople was convicted, at the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE, for his position that the earthly Jesus Christ was only human, not divine. And twenty years later Eutyches, another monastic superior from Constantinople, was convicted at the Council of Chalcedon for teaching that Jesus Christ was only divine, not human.
The Catholics firmly held that Christ was fully divine and at the same time fully human, undivided. The Roman emperors had presented themselves to their public as divine humans, but this had been rather superlative pomposity than a well-considered philosophy. To an intellectual of late antiquity the Catholic viewpoint might have been disturbing, but it was the only doctrine ensuring the highest political power to the church, the body and the earthly beneficiary of Christ.
The Catholic Church claimed nothing less than divine power. Leo, the bishop of Rome who presided the Council of Chalcedon, proclaimed himself pontifex maximus, a title until then only used by the emperor. Only four centuries later, with the coronation of Charlemagne, diplomatic relations with Huns, Germans and Franks paid off, and the Holy Roman Empire would become reality. From that time Leo is known as Pope Leo I the Great.
The standpoint of Eutyches, known as ‘monophysite’, only survived among the Egyptian Copts and the Syrian Jacobites.
The conviction of Nestorius was hailed by incited masses in the streets of Ephesus as a promotion of the Virgin Mary, who could now rightfully be called Mother of God. Since prehistory, Mother Idols had played a major role in popular religion, and the temple of her Roman descent Artemis (Diana), erected in this very city, had been one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Still today Catholics believe it is the birthplace of the Virgin Mary.
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The Nestorians fled to Iraq and Iran, and their escape saved antique knowledge from the immanent closing of the European mind for many centuries. An important part of this knowledge was harboured in the famous school of Mesopotamian Edessa, where it underwent strong Persian influence. When this school was closed down by the Roman emperor, the Persian king welcomed its transfer to Nisibis, a town which had switched borders nine times in a few centuries, once every fifty years on the average.Later Nestorians set foot on India, and became the founders of an important movement in China. Later this essay will illustrate how the Nestorian heritage had an effect on, separately, the emergence of medieval Arabic science and of modern European science.
Once Catholic power was established, mobs of Christians destroyed pagan shrines, looted temples and attacked Synagogues and Jews everywhere.
The new patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril, who had already played a major part in the conviction of the Nestorians, organized mobs of monks and other faithful to burn temples, libraries and synagogues. The town prefect was murdered when he protested, an act of faith the monks were canonized for. In 412 CE, the same mobs tortured the famous philosopher and astronomer Hypatia to death. Socrates Scholasticus wrote:
they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.570
The medieval Suda recounts that Hypatia was a beautiful woman: one of her students fell in love with her and was unable to control himself and openly showed her a sign of his infatuation. Uninformed reports had Hypatia curing him of his affliction with the help of music. The truth is that the story about music is corrupt. Actually, she gathered rags that had been stained during her period and showed them to him as a sign of her unclean descent and said, “This is what you love, young man, and it isn’t beautiful!” He was so affected by shame and amazement at the ugly sight that he experienced a change of heart and went away a better man.
By replacing music by vulgar swearing, the Christian Suda recuperates a scholar applying a Pythagorean musical therapy for the same ideology that killed her - the Platonic-Christian aversion for the human body.571
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Cyril of Alexandria, who organized so many gruesome pogroms, torturings and killings, is today a saint in both the Catholic and the Orthodox Church.
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Islam
Mecca: a thriving metropolis blessed by three hundred gods
In the days of Muhammad, Mecca was the capital of Yemen and the most important city of Arabia. It was also a solemn place of pilgrimage, famous for its temple. Trade with India, the Middle East, Africa and the West flourished, and accordingly the city had become a meeting-place for merchants and thinkers from Persia, Byzantium, Rome and Abyssinia - a whirlpool of ideas and visions. Mecca was the abode of three hundred gods, worshipped by many coexisting faiths.
Yemen, and Mecca with it, had until recently been subjected to Christian Abyssinia, while in north-western Arabia, in Hijaz, Christianity still flourished. Christians and Jews lived all over Arabia, and many biblical stories and heroes belonged to Arabic popular tradition, some even since before they were written down. One of those stories was that Abraham had two sons: Isaac with his lawful wife, and Ishmael with his concubine. Now Yahweh had promised to make Ishmael a great nation second to Isaac, and many Arabs believed Ishmael was their ancestor as Isaac was the supposed ancestor of the Jews: Ishmael and Abraham had built the temple of Mecca together.
At the age of forty Muhammad was called in his sleep by the archangel Gabriel, the traditional envoy of Yahweh.572 This was in the year 611 CE. Gabriel showed him a message written on a silk cloth, and ordered to read it up three times. The message is preserved in the first verses of the Koran:
Read! In the name of thy Lord and Cherisher, Who created man out of a clot of congealed blood. Read! And thy Lord is most bountiful, he who taught the pen and taught man that which he knew not. 573
Muhammad awoke from his sleep, and the message was burned in his memory: there is only one god, without whom you would not even exist; without whom you would know nothing, not even how to write.
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The meaning of this message was very clear to someone familiar with Jews and Christians: the ancient gods of Arabia were dangerous demons, trying to lure their worshippers in hell fire by illusive trickery.
Prophets turned up all the time, and even more so since Halley’s comet had been visible as a sword in the night sky three years before, but they seldom lead to something durable. Muhammad was mocked and attacked. In reaction he received more messages, always when in trance. Many of those messages slandered his harassers by name. The situation became grim when Muhammad insisted that the revered forefathers were forever burning in hell. He must seek shelter and, after rejections elsewhere, eventually arrived in Medina, which was at the time called Yathrib.
Mecca depended on nomadic caravans for its trade, while Medina was the centre of a vast agricultural region. The latter hosted a significant number of Jews, and as a result the city was more familiar with monotheism. The local aristocracy was entangled in tribal conflicts, and Muhammad for the first time showed his political qualities, and applied his prophetic skills to pacify the tribes under firm leadership.
Initially his followers of Medina prayed in Jewish style with their heads towards Jerusalem, and followed Jewish laws and celebrations. But the community of Muslims grew fast, the more so since Muhammad proclaimed that all converts had to migrate to Medina. While Muhammad established his political and religious power, his relation with the Jews worsened. When the latter branded verses of the Koran as fabrications conflicting with the Torah, a period of growing persecution and mass executions followed, and in the end the Jews were completely driven from Medina.
The community of Muslims became larger than supportable by regular trade and agriculture, and raiding caravans on the road of Mecca became an act of faith. Now many more Arabs joined out of greed. The word Islam, submission, meant at once ‘military surrender’ and ‘religious conversion’.574 Muhammad received a message from Allah that one fifth of the spoils of war must be handed over to himself.575 Direct confrontations between Mecca and Medina could no longer be avoided. After six years of fighting which set the whole of Arabia on fire, Mecca was submitted in 630 CE. It was the beginning of a holy massacre without end.
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At the age of twenty-five Muhammad had married the wealthy Khadija, who was fifteen years older and his employer. When Khadija died, Muhammad took another wife, but was at the same time attracted to the six years old Aisha. Aisha’s father, Abu Bakr, gave her to the prophet and became his first Caliph (‘successor’). Later Muhammad was attracted to his own daughter-in-law, Zaynab. He fell in trance and received a message from Allah that ‘We have given her unto thee in marriage, so that there may be no sin for believers’. All of a sudden Zaynab had never been his daughter-in-law because ‘Muhammad is not the father of any among you, but he is the Messenger of Allah’.576 Muhammad had twenty-one wives in total. Some Muslims today take the stand that they were old and ugly, and that the marriages were rather a question of social support than of sex. The Koran nor the Hadith take this prudish point of view. Zaynab boasted that while the other wives were only given by their families, she was given by Allah. And the Sunnah, in trying to establish correct rules of behaviour, takes the prophet’s wives for useful informants about his sexual habits.
The powerful tradition of fratricide
Muhammad avoided questions about his succession. One time he answered that it would be the first by passer with mended shoes, but Aisha’s father eventually filled the position.
Disputes over power and booty led to incessant civil wars and assassinations, thereby continuing the only reliable monotheist tradition, already demonstrated above for Judaism and Christianity: fratricide. Analogous to what is said concerning Christians, it is legitimate to proclaim that more Muslims have been killed by Muslims than by any other group, despite the verse of the Koran:
Whoever kills a believer deliberately, his reward is Hell forever, and the Wrath of Allah is upon him, He cursed him and prepared a great punishment for him. 577
After Muhammad’s dead a raid on Byzantium was carried out as planned, but then several tribes refused to pay zakât to a central power without Muhammad, and soon the army returned from the frontline to fight the first civil war. Then Abu Bakr died and a new civil war for power erupted, bringing the Caliphate to Umar, who satisfied
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the voracious soldiers by expanding the empire from Persia to Egypt. (When asked what to do with the library of Alexandria, he answered that ‘if the books are in accordance with the Koran, they are unnecessary and may be burnt; if they are contrary to the Koran, they are dangerous and ought to be burnt.’) The booty was divided following affiliation with Muhammad, contribution to war or religion, and years of obeying Islam. Jews and Christians were expelled from the entire Arabian Peninsula. Then Umar was stabbed to death. His son Uthman, a very pious man, killed the murderer for revenge before assuming power, more or less following the words of the Koran:
Whoso is slain wrongfully, We have given power unto his heir, but let him not commit excess in slaying. 578
While Uthman tried to unify Islam by burning all coexisting versions of the Koran except one, the expansion slowed down. As a result the unsatisfied army, eager to plunder, started a new civil war in which Uthman was murdered while reciting the right copy of the Koran. In only one battle out of this civil war, remembered as the Battle of the Camel, Muslims killed ten thousand other Muslims. The defeated party escaped to Damascus and established the Umayyad dynasty. In Medina the new Caliph was Ali, a nephew of Muhammad, who engaged in battle with Damascus. In this war seventy thousand Muslims were killed by other Muslims. Then Ali himself was murdered by a man who had lost his whole family in the conflict. After a new clash in 680 CE, followers of Ali – the Shiites – surrendered but were all slaughtered. Somewhat later, the Umayyads pillaged Medina and Mecca in a bloody massacre, and set the ancient temple on fire.
The slaughter of the Shiites is remembered each year in Tehran by hysteric crowds of believers cutting themselves with razor blades to display the blood on their white clothes, sometimes carried away to gruesome mutilation of themselves or, more conveniently, their children.579
In the eight century CE a Shiite revolt against the Umayyad dynasty was lead by the pious Abu Muslim, an agent of the wealthy Abbasid family. Abu Muslim took control of Persia and part of Iraq; he massacred the Umayyad family and its officials, and became a hero. Now al-Mansur founded the Abbasid dynasty and had Abu Muslim executed; Abu Muslim became a Shiite saint.
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Recent pinnacles in this endless fratricide are the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq of 1980 CE and the civil war in Irak following the fall of Saddam Hussain. In the war Muslims killed one million brothers and sisters, and as this is written down no one knowns where the civil war will end, while Muslims are killing Muslims in the streets by thousands.
Innocent death is a side effect of all warfare, but is the essence of the primitive ideology of martyrdom. During recent decades this insane ideology caused countless suffering of common people – at first mostly non-Muslims, then mostly Muslims from other denominatons, and then any accidental passer-by, maybe members of the murderer's own family, as long as there is still innocent blood around to be wasted.
Today Muslims are killed continually when the worst religious scum talks unstable Muslims into suicide, and again when a suicider kills unknown citizens, of which on the average on out of three called him his brother.580
The splendour of progress and the shame of tradition
One century after Muhammad subjugated Mecca, the get-together of warrior tribes turned into a world empire, and ancient Persia offered the Abbasid Caliphs a becoming past.
In 762 CE al-Mansur founded Baghdad, a court town worthy of the old myths of Persian splendour. In the course of one century, Baghdad grew into the largest city of the world, with a population of more than three hundred thousand. Shamanistic Turks, Nestorians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and Manicheans found their way to its courts. Like Greek after Alexander and Latin in Medieval Europe, Arabic was promoted to the lingua franca of many different cultures and traditions.
Once Persia had inspired the beginning of Greek thought at the western coast of Asia. Now once more, the crossing of borders and exchange among differing societies stimulated progress. In zoology, anthropology, alchemy, as well as in mathematics and astronomy, the tradition of Indian and Persian sciences was dominant. The early Abbasid Caliphs of Persia chose their viziers among converts from
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Buddhism, the Barmak. Those viziers commanded the translation of numerous Indian scientific and philosophic works into Arabic. Nestorians carried out many of those translations, much because Muslims did not want to learn any other language than the Arabic of the Koran. Nestorians contributed ideas from Africa and the Middle East, from Mongols and Tatars, and from Siberia through China. The Nestorians of Gondeshapur delivered court astrologers and medicines for two centuries, and founded the first hospital and observatory in Baghdad. Many medical works were translated. Astronomy was for an important part based on the Indian Siddhanta. Al-Razi claimed that his views were inspired by Harran, by Syrian science and by Indian Brahmins, and studied the atomist physics adapted by Indian Buddhist and Jain sects as Vaibhashika, Nyaya and others. Harran had a library, an observatory and a university, influenced by shamanism and by Chinese alchemy and philosophy. From China came also the fabrication of more affordable paper. Al-Khwarizmi used late antique and Indian concepts in his foundation of algebra.
Al-Iransahri wrote a complete work on Indian philosophy, and Ibn-Sina (Latin Avicenna), who had access to ancient Persian court libraries, wrote an Oriental Philosophy. Both works have disappeared.
ShariaThe ancient antagonism between clergy and sovereign smouldered all the time in the background. Pious Muslims feared that the Abbasid rulers went ever further in emulating ancient Persian splendour, associated with Zoroastrianism and scientific research, rather than with Islam.
Ibn al-Muqaffa, a secretary of state, was even during his life the most famous author and translator of his time. Already before the foundation of Baghdad he advised Caliph al-Mansur to organize legal power in one common code of law for the whole empire. At the time jurisdiction was still dispersed over local qadis and various schools bearing uncertain and mostly primitive renditions. The Caliph hesitated, and Islamists started a slandering campaign against Ibn al-Muqaffa. The rumour was spread that he had boasted he could write a book as good as the Koran in just one night. It was told that he had been locked up an evening with a pen and a stack of paper, but in the morning had still not been able to write one word. He was accused of polytheism and Manicheism. Al-Mansur had him tortured and his
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limbs severed, and thrown in a furnace while still alife. This happened at Basra in 757 CE, when Al-Muqaffa was thirty-six years of age. Subsequent Abbasid Caliphs firmly supported Islamism, encouraged conversion and initiated persecutions and purifications. By the time of Caliph al-Mahdi (775 CE) the absorption of Manichean elements in Shiism allowed that even Manicheans were persecuted not as heathens, but as heretics.
Eventually the fears of al-Muqaffa were confirmed when the Sharia emerged as a religious body of law, that could even be deployed against the sponsoring Caliphate.
Fanatic Islam is complete submission to the will of Allah, and the will of Allah is sufficiently known by the directives he conveyed through Muhammad. Therefore oracles received by Muhammad under trance, written down in the Koran, as well as the life and words of Muhammad, testified in the Sunnah, are the only sources for knowledge about Allah’s will, and as always in monotheism, gods will is mandatory for the entire world. Islam theologists, the ulema, have poured the will of Allah in a set of laws. This set of religious laws, the Sharia, is the essential core of Islam. Below only the crime law aspects of Sharia are addressed.
In general, Sharia jurisdiction does not distinguish between intentional and non-intentional crimes: killing by accident is the same as killing purposely. For the major crimes a judge can only establish guilt or non-guilt: the punishment is fixed beforehand. Because the Sharia is the expression of the will of Allah it is difficult to alter. It was the only form of justice in Islam states until the nineteenth century, and makes his revival since mid twentieth century. Today Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Sudan, part of Nigeria and Malaysia apply the most severe Sharia jurisdiction, but no country is really safe since punishments like stoning and killing rely upon hateful human trash anywhere – the verdict can be proclaimed by any religious leader, and the executioner can be anyone who is around, feels like it and can get away. While cases of punishments are reported regularly, the full number of victims will never be known since Sharia jurisdiction is typical for retarded area’s lacking modern communication. It should not remain unnoticed that recently Islamists in some Western countries have demanded ‘equal rights’ for both Muslim religious law and existing law.
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A long list of crimes is punished by lashes: thirty-five whippings for kissing a boy lustfully; eighty whippings for drinking wine; seventy-five for sodomy.581 Other possible punishments are the sword, tying hands and feet and ‘hurl him down from a high place’, shaving the head and taking round in the streets and the bazaars, and so on. Muslim scholars have called burning alive the ‘punishment of Allah’ (i.e. the hell fire) not allowed to Muslim courts, while Catholic scholars in medieval times meant that the bible does not allow bloodshed, and thus concluded that burning heretics alive was lending a hand to God’s work of justice.
In Medina, when a few Camel thieves were arrested, Muhammad ordered that their legs and arms were cut off and their eyes put out. Ironically, only after the sentence was carried out Allah sent down a message restraining punishment for theft to cutting off hands only. The Sunnah says:
If a person who is adult and sane steals 3 3/5 grains of coined gold or anything of equivalent value, and he satisfies the conditions prescribed for it in law, four fingers of his right hand should be cut from their root on his first offence, and the palm of his hand and the thumb should be allowed to remain in tact. If he repeats the offence his left foot should be cut off from the middle and if he steals for the third time, he should be imprisoned for life and his expenses should be paid from the public treasury and in case he commits theft for the fourth time, whether in the prison or outside it, he should be killed.582
The Medina story, together with the sensible consideration that ‘the thumb should remain in tact’, almost gives the horrific punishment a twist of thoughtfulness, because it looks like a tempering of the original. Several amputations have been sentenced or carried out in Sudan in 2002 CE, mostly on Christians short of a fair trial. A representative of the Sudanese Embassy in Nairobi declared: ‘Amputation as a punishment occurs throughout the Islamic world, so why single out Sudan?’
Some Muslims argument that physical punishment endorsed by Muhammad and the Koran was rather the easing of more cruel practices existing before that time. This line of reasoning is often taken with amputation, beating of women and tribal raids and warfare. The stoning to death of married adulterers, as ordered by Muhammad on different occasions mentioned in the Sunnah, can hardly be presented as the easing of a still worse tradition. Modernist Muslims have attempted to blame Jewish law as the root of stoning, but in
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reality, Jews and Muslims inherited the custom of stoning from an even more primitive society, while Judaism has at least abolished the practice today. The gospel of John has a scene in which the public abandons its dreadful intend after Jesus said that - more in Roman than in ancient Jewish spirit - ‘he that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone at her.’ People were recently stoned to death in Iran, in Yemen and in Afghanistan (where couples are often stoned together).
The most abhorrent crime is apostasy - quitting Islam. Although the Koran reads ‘there is no compulsion in religion’583, Sharia jurisdiction follows the Sunnah saying ‘if a Muslim changes his religion, kill him’584. Ethnicity or even birthplace is sufficient to make someone a Muslim, and conversion to Islam in order to circumvent economic discrimination or to facilitate male divorce or polygamy backfires when the convert discovers that Islam has no emergency exit.
Intellectuals are especially vulnerable to prosecution for apostasy, because expressing any unwelcome idea can cause indictment by an occasional Imam from any retarded hamlet. Over twenty apostates have recently been convicted or executed in Iran; in Egypt, over one hundred and fifty intellectuals have been detained in maximum-security prisons for apostasy; also in Egypt Professor Abu Zaid was found guilty of heresy for writing that Islam should evolve with society, and was convicted to divorce his wife, also an academic. 585 This professor, his wife, the Indian writer Rushdie, his publishers worldwide, the Kemerovo (Siberia) governor Tuleyev, the Libyan judge al-Mahdawi all risked to be killed in the streets ‘at the first possible opportunity’. A British Pakistani murdered his daughter for her conversion to Jehovah’s Witness.
It is inevitable that prophets attract people frightened by a widening world, desperately grasping for stability in their petty, primitive, covert and cruel society. But also, modern people in countries with a Muslim majority seldom dissociate themselves from religious atrocities. Intellectuals who fear for their lives if they should only create an appearance of apostasy, seek shelter in undecided discourses, and are entangled in hazy apologies. It has become a common practice to avoid the discussion by pointing at other cruelties in other communities, thus answering critique on one malice with toleration of malice in general.
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Sharia is said to be applicable only to Muslims. This argument has been used to attract Western Investors, reassuring them in a revoltin way that Muslims only injure their own people (for example by Richard U. Moench in the work of Don Peretz). Yet it is demonstrated constantly that Sharia jurisdiction is frequently used to harass non-Muslim minorities.
At the occasion of the conviction of an unmarried mother to stoning, a spokesman of the London-based Islamic human rights Commission was brave enough to protest the ‘inhumane brand of Islamic law that will take root in Nigeria’, but like many Muslim modernists inherently accepted the gruesome practice when he added that ‘amputations and stoning are supposed to be used only as a last resort’.
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Europe
From the Trojan war to the End Of Times
Throughout most of history, Europe was a primitive outskirt of the Eurasian continent. Its inhabitants lived in huts with smoke holes, for a large part still so in recent centuries; women and children laboured while men hunted, discussed or fought; encounters with emigrants caused short-lived kingdoms to rise and fall; occasionally a territory grew by war or alliance, but as everywhere borders and palaces altered continually.
Gatherers lived in mountains and marshes not suited for agriculture, until farmers, always exhausting their land, once again adapted more troublesome techniques to force their way into less favourable grounds. Then those gatherers had to retreat still further, or submit to forced labour.
Until the fourteenth century CE, life in Europe was not different from life in Asia, Africa or the Americas: on all those continents, cities appeared and sometimes grew into civilizations. Europeans are no worse than other humans, but if they are a superior race, they surely knew how to hide it.
The always quarrelling European tribes had more affinity with the heroic legends of the Trojan War than with the next gospel, and clerks tried to compose persistence myths making their kings descendants of lost Greek heroes. Rome had claimed Aeneas as its founder, and the mythical forebear of the Franks, Francio, supposedly was a relative of this Aeneas - although the Trojan warrior Hector has been credited with the foundation of France also. In the twelfth century CE, Bishop Geoffrey of Monmouth composed a History of the Kings of Britain proving that the kings of the Celts were descendants of Trojan heroes. His work made King Arthur, a pastiche of legends about Alexander the Great, popular for centuries to come. Somewhat later a monk of Saint-Denis by the name of Primat, presented his Romance of the Kings, connecting the king of France with those of ancient Troy.
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Since Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III, all succeeding German dynasties favoured the idea that they were the true successors of Aeneas, and consistently called their forever shifting territory the Holy Roman Empire.
Medieval Europe inherited from the early Christians also a mythology of the future - of the End of Times. This was not a catastrophe, but the violent victory of Christ over his enemies. ‘The vengeance of God’, Jacob de Voragine wrote after Saint Augustine, ‘shall be so cruel at the day of doom, that the sun shall not dare behold it’.
The End of Times was the ending of the decay nourished by sin, going on ever since Adam and Eve. For the faithful, it was the beginning of everlasting enjoyment, because ageing – time – would have ended.
Córdoba: Europe’s first great border crossing
It was good fortune falling to Europe that one member of the Syrian Umayyad dynasty, Abd ar-Rahman, managed to escape the axe of Abu Muslim and fled to Southern Spain, where, as always, Muslim tribes were disputing booty.586 Abd ar-Rahman seized command, and soon scholars and executives from the Orient followed him to Córdoba, from 756 CE on the capital of a new Umayyad dynasty in Moorish Spain. In 929 CE his successor Abd-ar-Rhaman III, after expanding the emirate to North Africa and Toledo, claimed independence from Syria by proclaiming himself Caliph, the only true successor of the prophet Muhammad.
Under the new Caliphate Córdoba became the largest city of Europe and the greatest intellectual centre of the world. It sheltered four hundred thousand books, on a par with the legendary libraries of Baghdad. As always fierce resistance by conservative clerks troubled this explosion of knowledge: Islamist magistrates accused successive caliphs of the deadly sin of apostasy. Many European scholars defied anathemas and travelled to the gates of Córdoba and Toledo, often disguised as Muslim students, out of fear for Christian as well as for Muslim repression.
Among the books in the Córdoban libraries was the Siddhanta (The Opening of the Universe), an Arabic transcript of a poem written in
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630 CE by the Indian astronomer Brahmagupta. It offered the first description of the number ‘0’. Indian and Babylonian scientists had already used blank space holders a thousand years earlier, but this often lead to misreading, certainly at the beginning or the end of a number. The ancient geometricians had never suspected that ‘nothing’ could be represented by anything, and the ancient Greeks even were in awe for the number ‘1’, since you cannot arrange a figure with one pebble. Ironically, computer chips today know but the numbers ‘0’ and ‘1’. Without this knowledge, the works of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein had been impossible.
Other Córdoban manuscripts with tremendous impact on European thought were collections of animistic stories like the Kalilah wa Dimnah, added to the Arabian heritage by the Persian translator al-Muqaffa, already mentioned before. Books like the Kalilah wa Dimnah initiated a succession of fictional prose, ever pushing further the observation, imagery and understanding of human existence and emotions. This is the other, underestimated half of modern knowledge. Without this knowledge, the works of Montaigne and Steinbeck had been impossible.587
In 978 CE a twelve year old child, Hisham II, inherited the Córdoban Caliphate. His Vizier, al Mansur, mobilized an army of berbers to expand Umayyad power over most of Spain. His audacity, as well as his enthusiasm for science and poetry, aggravated clerks – Malakite cadi’s - who instigated an uprise of the illiterate and suppressed populace, hoping to overthrow him. Al Mansur saw no other way to ease the anger of the fanatic religious magistrates than by setting on fire the unique library of Córdoba, so vigilantly assembled by his predecessors. The eleventh century CE started with the death of Vizier al-Mansur and the vanishing without a trace of Prince Hisham. The Caliphate disintegrated in small states.
In 1085 CE Toledo fell to the Christians, and more European scholars travelled there to study the surviving texts. Patient monks started the vast translation work. One of them, arriving around 1110 CE disguised as a Muslim student, was the Englishman Adelard of Bath. Among his translations from Arabic into Latin is the famous Elements of Euclid, an ancient text to become the chief European work on geometry, as well as an arrangement of knowledge exemplar to most philosophers of European enlightenment. The Elements is still today subject matter in high schools worldwide. At about the same time
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Gerard of Cremona, an Italian scholar, went to Toledo to translate the Almagest of Ptolemy, besides works of Archimedes, Aristotle, Galen and many original Arabic texts on medicine, alchemy and astronomy. Gerard remained in Spain for the rest of his life and died in Toledo. Michael of Scotland followed Gerard and translated Aristotle’s History of Animals, On the Soul and On the Heavens. He also translated numerous Arabic works, including many by Averroës. The archbishop of Spanish Segovia, Domingo Gundisalvo, gathered a workforce of scholars to make translations out of Arabic on a large scale. As a consequence works by Avicenna, Aristotle and many others became available in European monasteries. At about the same time Moorish Sicily became a corridor of African knowledge. In Italy, Constantine the African translated Arabic medical works which would become the European standard for the following centuries.
In 1148 CE a confederation of berber tribes known as the Almohads took power in Córdoba.588 At first those religious fanatics collaborated with Christians to defeat their Muslim brothers, but once power was secured they did not hesitate to expel Christians and Jews. Maimonides, one of the most renown Jewish scholars ever, fled Córdoba and lived on with his family in North Africa disguised as Muslim.
Already at the start of the next century the Almohad reign disintegrated. In 1236 CE Córdoba fell to the Christians, and Sevilla followed ten years later. Throughout the thirteenth century CE, new exciting imageries flooded all European centres of learning. Alfonso the Wise, king of Castile and León from 1252 CE on, turned his court into an enterprise devoted to the copying, translation and compilation of Arabic works. The outcome varied from the establishment of the University of Seville and the introduction of chess, to the division of the Alfonsine Tables, by which eclipses and planetary orbits can be calculated. Those tables were still used by Copernicus a few centuries later.
From the time of Alfonso Moorish Spain survived only as a small province with Granada for capital. Its Nasrid dynasty paid tribute to the Christian kings until, in 1492 CE, Granada was also lost for the Moors. But before then the European institutions had expanded their patrimony up to a few hundred books on the average - an affluence never dreamt of before. In hardly one century the European mind, closed in the days of Cyril of Alexandria, was reopened.589
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It is claimed sometimes that ‘Christian science’ was prompted by ‘Muslim science’. It is clear that both Muslim and Christian powers have done everything they could - up the most gruesome and appalling acts of torture and murder - to counter progress, science and modernity. If the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘Christian’ refer to religions as opposed to era’s, there never existed a ‘Muslim’ or ‘Christian’ science. Science is renewing and progressive by its own nature, and is the definite enemy of conservative ideologies. The knowledge that entered Europe through the gates of Córdoba was indeed Arabic, but Arabic science was the result of border crossings as much as any other. Paper and black powder were Chinese, and the Chinese certainly were influenced by others before they had their impact on Arabic culture; likewise geometry was Egyptian, and Egypt had certainly constructed geometry with the help of other sources; algebra was inspired by Indian scholars and so on.
Islam has repressed progress, and Christianity also; innovative scholars were harassed under Christianity for more or less the same reasons as al-Muqaffa, Maimonides and many others had been persecuted under Islam. But in Córdoba open modernity and growth of knowledge, once more, proved stronger than the conservative ideologies of civilizations.
Progress carefully steps over conservative civilizations, and while civilizations wane, continues over the long, unpredictable road to modernity.
Roger Bacon, the devil and the saints
Roger Bacon was born in England in 1214 CE. After his studies at the Franciscan school of Oxford, where famous scholars like Grosseteste introduced enthralling Arabic and Greek texts, he entered the Franciscan order at the age of twenty. Taking the vows was the only possible path to a life of study, and Bacon was possessed by the new visions cautiously penetrating the European minds. For some time unnoticed by his superiors, he could freely follow his fascination for scientific experiments in the way of the Arabs. In 1242 CE he stumbled on an Arab recipe for black powder (the original gunpowder), and wrote it down hidden in an anagram.590 At the time black powder had been used for fireworks in China and India for more
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than three centuries. Mongols and Muslims had applied it in bamboo pipes to launch arrows and stones.
But research by means of experiments and observation, and every innovation for that matter, was forbidden by religious authorities, including his own Franciscan brothers.
In a world created and guided by one high god, experiments are a serious impertinence, like peeking under god’s robe. On the passive, explorative side, experiments always casted to some extend doubt on revelation and tradition. On the active, inventing side, experiments wanted to change creation and thus opposed the will of God, which would be a ridiculous undertaking unless the power of Satan was involved. Either way, performing experiments was a capital crime.
Nicole Oresme expressed the fundamental Medieval paradigm when he placed experiments amidst evil invocations:
other sciences are geomancy, hydromancy and such kinds, palm reading, experiments, superstitions,…’.591
Since experiments were impossible without the help of Satan, they were black magic per sé. Today we ridicule such superstition while forgetting that it has never been completely abandoned. The Church had efficiently eradicated ancient Manicheanism, but was severely contaminated by the dualist world image in the process. In the Middle Ages, the split between soul and body was day to day reality. Illiterared commoners had to toil in the realm of Satan – the material world. Educated clerks were constantly busy to chase the devils away from their commoners. An honest intellectual had no reason to engage with matter, unless he had made an arrangement with Satan. Experiments therefore were plain Satanism or, even worse, ‘Muhammedanism’. A notorious medieval manual for which hunters explains how the four elements, together the whole material world, are manipulated by devil worshipers:
Geomancy, which is concerned with terrene matters, such as iron or polished stone; Hydromancy, which deals with water and crystals; Aeromancy, which is concerned with the air; Pyromancy, which is concerned with fire; Soothsaying, which has to do with the entrails of animals sacrificed on the devil’s altars [..] all these are done by means of open invocation of devils...592
Manipulating metals, stones and liquids in shady vaults could only raise suspicion. A tale went that Bacon had casted a bronze head and had tried to make it speak with the aid of the devil. Fortunately,
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and only because of an inattentive servant, the complicated incantation failed. Andrew Dickson White recounts how religious powers, once again, called upon the excited populace for counter-action:
Oxford was in an uproar. It was believed that Satan was about to be let loose. Everywhere priests, monks, fellows, and students rushed about, their garments streaming in the wind, and everywhere rose the cry, “Down with the magician!” and this cry, “Down with the magician!” resounded from cell to cell and from hall to hall.593
At about 1256 CE Roger Bacon was predictably accused of Satanism by his superiors:
he defended himself with a most unfortunate weapon—a weapon which exploded in his hands and injured him more than the enemy; for he argued against the idea of compacts with Satan, and showed that much which is ascribed to demons results from natural means. This added fuel to the flame. To limit the power of Satan was deemed hardly less impious than to limit the power of God.594
Bacon was banned to the even more conservative city of Paris. There his jurors were again incapable of linking the use of instruments with useful scientific research. He was locked away for eleven years in a monastery, separated from his books and instruments, forbidden to publish and restricted to language teaching, which became his only contact with the outer world for many years. His warden was the later Saint Bonaventure. During this isolation, pope Clement IV repeatedly tried to smuggle out writings of Bacon, not as much because of his interest in science as in new means of warfare. Like Constantine before him the pope searched for magical assistance in battle, and possibly he was strongly interested in the formula for gun powder Bacon had found in an Arabic manuscript. Those who believe so strong in black arts that they deem harsh repression necessary, will easily be seduced in trying it for their own benefit when the occasion is there – even more so when their repression gives them power over supposed magicians.595
It is mind boggling that still in our very twenty first century CE, the Catholic Church defends the punishment of Bacon for mere divergence:
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We need not wonder then that Roger’s immediate superiors put the prohibition into execution, especially as Bacon was not always very correct in doctrine; and although on the one hand it is wrong to consider him as a necromancer and astrologer, an enemy of scholastic philosophy, an author full of heresies and suspected views, still we cannot deny that some of his expressions are imprudent and inaccurate.596
Freed after eleven years, during which many of his writings appeared under various pseudonyms, Bacon, rather than being broken, engaged in criticism towards the clerks of his society. ‘Eloquence without science,’ he wrote, ‘is a sharp sword in the hands of a furious man.’ Four errors he considered emblematic:
the example of weak and unreliable authority, continuance of custom, regard to the opinion of the unlearned, and concealing one’s own ignorance together with the exhibition of apparent wisdom.597
After only ten years of freedom, in 1287 CE, Bacon was again imprisoned for the crime of teaching novelties. After fifteen years a fresh General of the Franciscan Order released him in exchange for alchemical secrets. Roger Bacon, eighty years of age, returned to Oxford and died the following year.
Andrew White commented, in the nineteenth century:Sad is it to think of what this great man might have given to the world had ecclesiasticism allowed the gift. He held the key of treasures which would have freed mankind from ages of error and misery. With his discoveries as a basis, with his method as a guide, what might not the world have gained! Nor was the wrong done to that age alone; it was done to this age also. The nineteenth century was robbed at the same time with the thirteenth.598
And we might well add the twentieth and the twenty first century were robbed at the same time.
Jan Van Eyck and the pursuit of the Boundless Light
The triumph of the Medieval world-image is nowhere better demonstrated than in a painting known as the Adoration of the Lamb, finished by Jan Van Eyck in 1432 CE, and today exposed in the cathedral of Saint Bavon in Ghent (Flanders).
In various scenes of the Adoration of the Lamb eighteen text fragments are incorporated, which have stimulated curiosity and speculations as long as the painting exists. It is indeed obvious that
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the master wanted to convey a message. What the message was, and by whom it was meant to be seen, we might never know.599
Some of the scattered fragments can be traced tentatively to three sources: the first source is Against Heresies by Irenaeus of Lyons; the second is On God’s Vision by Nicholas of Cusa; the third is the apocalyptic Bible Book called The Revelation of Saint John.
Irenaeus of Lyons was highly valued by heretics and alchemists for his summary of the Gnostic views of the second century CE. Since all other traces of this philosophy had been destroyed, their refutation by Irenaeus was the only remaining source of information. Jan Van Eyck, an ardent researcher of colouring and the creator of new techniques of oil painting, was necessarily acquainted with alchemy and therefore with Against Heresies. While working on The Adoration of the Lamb, his primary interest in Irenaeus must however have been to obtain insight in his elaboration of the heavenly hierarchy of apostles and saints. It was a unique guidance to formally position the adorers of the lamb on the triptych.
In the Gnostic view seven planetary spheres, together called the Hebdomad, are each the abode of one of the seven archangels.600
Above those spheres is the ‘original and primary Ogdoad’, the sphere of the fixed stars, but also of the saved souls and angels, singing silent hymns. Above the Ogdoad is the ninth heaven, the highest sphere, the spiritual realm of light or Pleroma, which is an offshoot of the Boundless Light of the ancient Persia, also witnessed by Dante in his Paradiso:
And I looked at light in fashion of a riverShining brightly between two banksDepicted with a splendid spring.From this river issued living sparks,Which everywhere fell down amongst the flowers,Like unto rubies that are set in gold.601
Sparks from the Pleroma become Aeons, semi-divine beings from which emanate our souls. As in the primeval world of appearances and subsequent ancient imageries, the hierarchies of the spheres exist outside our time frame. Creation is an ongoing act as well as an – unreliable - state of affairs; as long as it exists, or happens, it is emanation of light.602 If Van Eyck wanted to paint all worshippers in their hierarchical positions, the Aeons must be transformed in apostles, patriarchs and saints, and the severely corrupted text of Irenaeus contained some hints without making the task simple:
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For it is unreasonable to suppose that the junior, and for that reason inferior Aeons, were set forth by the Saviour through the election of the apostles, while their seniors, and on this account their superiors, were not thus foreshown; since the Saviour (if, that is to say, He chose the apostles with this view, that by means of them He might show forth the Aeons who are in the Pleroma) might have chosen other ten apostles also, and likewise other eight before these, that thus He might set forth the original and primary Ogdoad.603
Nicholaus Of Cusa - or Cusanus – was a contemporary of Van Eyck, and was also preoccupied with the heavenly order, be it on a more personal level.604 Living in a time where earthly and heavenly ranks amalgamated into one hierarchy, the interest of Cusanus was mainly in his own position. A position in Heaven was just another stage of a prelate’s career. As a late Medieval scientist who inspired also Leonardo Da Vinci, Nicholaus Of Cusa was naturally occupied with alchemy.605
It can hardly be doubted that Van Eyck and Cusanus knew each other, and each other’s work. Both were acquainted with Rogier Van Der Weyden. Philip the Good sent Van Eyck on missions to prepare a crusade against the Turks, and Cusanus was sent by the Pope to northern Germany and the Netherlands – where van Eyck painted - to preach this crusade and sell jubilee indulgence, a kind of hereafter bonds, or vouchers for heaven, to finance the same. Although the holy war only took off more than two centuries later, its preparation at least must have brought both men together.
Twenty years after the completion of The Adoration of the Lamb, On God’s Vision was sent to the monks of Tegernsee. In the latter’s foreword a remarkable reference to portrait painting is found:
If therefore a painted look can appear in a picture in such manner that it sees everything at once and all things separated, then he can, because of the fullness of that look, in regard with the truth not less correspond with the truth than in regard with the appearance he corresponds with the portrait or the appearance.
And in his first chapter Cusanus cleverly applies to himself the idea that God sees everything at once and yet separated:
In no way, My Lord, You allow me to imagine or think that You would love anything more than me, because your sight does never fail me.
This book, which emphasises on how to obtain for oneself the benevolence of God, is staged in Van Eyck’s altarpiece, which brings the worthy faithful before the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of
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the world. The title of Cusanus' work appears in red letters in a book reflected on by the Holy Virgin.
The leaning of Van Eyck on the apocalyptic Revelation is the most obvious – it is almost the theme of the painting. Yet, unlike the Bible book itself and most other altarpieces, the painter omits the Last Judgement and turns immediately to the day after the day of the boundless light, the Pleroma. It is the day without sundown, when time stands still.
In contrast with most medieval artists, Van Eyck did not exploit the theme of the condemned to indulge in unadorned nudity and obscenity: here the evildoers are already cast in hell fire, and all traces have disappeared. The painter is fully absorbed by a new challenge. Eye-catching realistic details and brightness suggest that the painter was out to create ‘a new Heaven and a new earth’. Rather than making a replica of the old, soiled and superficial one, he meticulously worked his way to the only true reality of the hereafter. In this Platonic reality flowers of different seasons bloom together, and the faithful of different epochs stand side by side, not engaged with each other but all admiring the lamb in the middle. It is this delicate creature’s sacrifice that ‘shall lead them unto living fountains of waters’. Blood comes out of its chest as a still thread of translucent ruby, standing in a glittering grail: ‘that most limpid fountain which issues from the body of Christ’.606
The painting was at once a perfect classical offering, because it embellished the temple while it exposed the donator together with his valuable gift, and at once a more powerful claim to eternity than bargained indulgence. Some nobles secured their place in this magnificent, timeless future. Among the identified worshippers on the painting are of course Joost Vijd and his wife, who paid for the work; numerous patriarchs; popes and notables portrayed in personal detail; Nicholaus Of Cusa, who sold indulgence but doubted the efficacy of the same to provide a top carrier in heaven, and chose the time capsule that was the Adoration of the Lamb where it came to his own salvation;607 the painter and his brother; and, surprisingly, the twentieth century Belgian Leopold III. The king joined the scene on a panel replacing one stolen at about the time he was crowned and his wife died in a car crash. The stolen panel remains untraceable – unless, as some experts have suggested, the copy is the reworked original.608
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Joost Vijd paid not only for the painting, but also – in vain - for mass celebrations every day until doomsday. At that day, Christ was going to descend from heaven and be confronted with another eternity, empowered by art, alchemy and liturgy; he would be confronted with saints, patriarchs and popes and the others silently waiting to be called into the boundless light.
To use a painting as an entrance to afterlife might seem farfetched today, but it fits quite well in the magical world-image of the European Middle Ages. The practice is related to the custom, known from all continents, to represent persons by drawings, puppets or photographs to evoke other magical influences. Still in the seventeenth century CE, European treatises on witchcraft warned for this art609 and the French satirical poet Théophile de Viau was burned in effigy for it; when the Countess of Essex was put on trial for murder at the court of King James I, puppets were produced as serious evidence;610 and, not the least argument, everywhere statues of saints were prayed for miraculous interventions.
In ancient times images were never just illustrations, but had the magical power to influence reality. In this regard European medieval art has more affinity with the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a magical guide to eternal life, than with the views of contemporary art. The only main difference between Egyptian and Medieval afterlife is that the first follows immediately after individual death, while the latter follows the end of times, when the bodies raise from the graves and join their souls again. Consequently the Egyptian funeral images represent one deceased, while the painting of Van Eyck represents many chosen believers.
The Adoration of the Lamb is the last representation of the classical paradigm of eternity as absence of change, or time. The new paradigm - eternity as the aggregate of all time – was already emerging. Like the European Middle Ages are the last ancient civilization, the Adoration of the Lamb is its final work of art, and Jan Van Eyck its last painter.
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Columbus and Copernicus: Europe’s second great border crossing
Fear for the Ottoman Empire, and the prospect of striking the Turks from behind, drove Europeans over the Atlantic Ocean. But bumping into America caused a flood of skepticism that ultimately corroded the fundaments of Christianity. Never geographical borders that large were seized, and never a space so immense had entered human imagination. A world-image can neutralize limited influences without serious damage, but at a certain point the container breaks and ancient doctrines collapse. This was bound to happen, on a scale never seen before, when Europe encountered what Marvin Harris has called ‘an other planet’.
Columbus realized for the first time he had discovered another world in 1498 CE. He landed in Cádiz two years later, cast in irons by his rivals, but with the conviction he had witnessed the clear rivers from Paradise pouring into the sea.
When the news of Christopher Columbus’ discoveries reached Italy, Nicolaus Copernicus studied in Genoa at the university founded a century before by dissident pupils from Bologna. Genoa was the birth town of Columbus, and certainly the news was received here with even more excitement.
The consequences were tremendous: Adam’s fatherhood of all humans suddenly became dubious; the own civilization was no longer the sole climax of creation; Dante’s quest for Hell, Purgatory and Paradise were degraded to fiction. The universe tilted, the amazing crystal structure of the world collapsed, and the medieval myths of persistence received their decisive blow. Emperors were expelled from the cosmic zenith close to God, Jerusalem was expelled from the centre of the earth, and the earth was expelled from the centre of the universe.
When Nicolaus Copernicus hit upon his main idea in the decade following the discoveries of Columbus and his stay in Genoa from 1501 to 1503 CE, he had taken just one more step in the same direction.
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The opening of the European mindWhile the collapse of the ancient world-image dealt the deathblow to many certainties, new ideas inevitably broke through in many unpredictable ways.
First, the classical texts translated in the previous centuries became the lifeboat for a fast sinking self-image. But this humanism, as it was called much later, was not caused by the attraction of Hermetic and Stoic imageries alone, it was also a surrogate for the withering splendour of medieval Christendom. Christian scholars had always felt to be the proud elite of creation, but since Columbus and Copernicus it was no longer feasible to base this pride on a religion which was clearly built on shaky premises.
While the minds travelled east, economics went West: plunder of all kinds of riches, including land, silver and gold, provided Europe with the kind of decentralized wealth that is the natural niche of scientific progress.
And as always when blinkers are ripped off, a narrow window was not just enlarged, but was swept away, forever broken into a multitude of totally new views and relations. The old biblical strive between Cain and Abel, farmers and nomads, Christians and Muslims, was substituted by a world crowded with exotic gods and concurrent civilizations, all claiming to be more important than the others, and by doing so putting in perspective each other’s conceit. When it seemed ever more futile to look behind the clouds for cosmic answers, scholars turned to the worldwide diversity of plain, perceptible nature and people.
Europe’s borders were opened to the Americas as before to the Arab world, and finally medieval ideology was definitely shattered. The crumbling of sacred truth and the growing curiosity towards strange lands and distant societies caused cultural exchange and boosted progress. But like history presented the wars of Alexander and Hellenism as the propagation of high culture by civilized Greeks, the exploits of the ‘era of discovery’ was once more described as a civilization mission among degenerated savages.
Drugs In 1640 CE the Countess of Cinchón, wife of the Regent of Peru, was cured from malaria with the bark of a tree which, as we know today, contains natural quinine. This bark was just one of the many drugs
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known by South American medicine men who were preferred by injured Spanish soldiers to their own barbers. Jesuit missionaries introduced the Cinchona bark in Europe, and for more than ten years, conservative members of the medical profession and resentful Protestants opposed the use of Peruvian bark as an invention of the devil.
While the Ice Age had decimated the vegetation in Eurasia, the orientation of the American mountain chains allowed plants and animals to migrate north and South following the Ice borders. Later the extent and variation of the Eurasian continent caused civilizations to wash over prehistoric cultures again and again. As a consequence, prehistoric pharmacological knowledge nearly disappeared from Eurasia, while the same knowledge evolved ever further on the American continents.
Eventually more than two hundred American drugs were imported in Europe. The first European plant collections were set up at the universities of Pisa in 1543 CE and of Padua in 1545 CE. One century later, more than a thousand botanical gardens had been installed, and European pharmacology took off with intelligence built up by American medicine men. Various myths have been tried to make quinine a white discovery. It was discovered by a Jesuit monk, by a servant of the Countess, by her husband etc.… None of those myths explains how in a short time span this one good bark out of ten thousand possibilities was selected without being poisoned in the process of trying them all. Western magazines and documentaries often present learned explorers keenly spotting exotic plants and taking notes while crawling through the bush, but this is really a ridiculous caricature. The only efficient way to find plants with medicinal properties is to live with them for hundreds of generations. People learn drugs at the same pace as they learn what is good or bad to eat. It is genuine knowledge like any other scientific knowledge, and belongs to the most ancient fundamentals of human life.In 1717 CE Lady Montague, the wife of the British ambassador at the court of the Ottoman Empire, described in a letter the vaccination of smallpox she had witnessed in rural Turkey. While in the West vast numbers of people were killed by smallpox each year, this practice had never been noticed before by travellers who kept distance from the commoners as required by their standing. The vaccination of
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smallpox led after time to the eradication of one of the most destructive diseases, but also contributed to the emergence of modern immunology and surgery. Lady Montague wrote:
The small-pox, so fatal, and so general among us, is here entirely harmless, by the invention of engrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old women, who make it their business to perform the operation, every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened [..] the children or young patients play together all the rest of the day, and are in perfect health to the eighth. Then the fever begins to seize them, and they keep their beds two days, very seldom three [..] Every year, thousands undergo this operation.
ScripturesThe same voracious curiosity that flooded Europe with new medicaments, lead to the first translation of the Zoroastrian Avesta in 1771CE. The translation was received by fierce dispute. Half the learned world rejected it as a forgery with the arguments that it was unknown among the Ancient Greeks, who knew everything, and that it was not as monotheistic as ancient wisdom should have been.
Then followed the translation of the first Upanishads in 1810 and the Indian Bhagavad-Gita in 1875 CE. When the extent and meaning of the corpus of those Vedic texts became evident, European scholars spoke of a new renaissance. Still today not everything has been translated, but it is already evident that Europeans cannot even fully understand their own thinking without studying texts preceding the Bible by many centuries and even millenaries.
Each past wave of modernity was proportionate to the extent of the borders breached, and now it would take many pages to list the subsequent progress: unknown agricultural techniques and products broke the always returning cycles of famine; new medicines boosted the medical infrastructure, today pushing life expectancy by weeks each year, even for children and women; people in the most distant places can share thoughts in a split second; satellites connect at light speed with computer networks to predict hurricanes and floods, and so on. Objectively speaking, people in Western countries today live safer, better, longer and with more dignity than in any other time or
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place. And, although the West today gathers most of the harvest, the whole of humanity has sowed the seeds.
Two-faced truth: the separation of science and religion
Before Arabic Córdoba, there was little doubt about the composition of the world. The skepticism that had flourished in Indian and Persian times, in Babylon and in Alexandria, was for a large part burned, buried or forgotten. Bodies, souls, demons, angels and the Holy Trinity were neatly ordered following nature and vocation, on different stages ranking from the dark underworld to the highest heaven. Knowledge about the world came from God, and clerkdom, his deputies, had a theory about every aspect of the universe, from how many hours ago it was created up to the way it was going to end. The world was God’s world: study of reality was an act of faith.
Since Córdoba new philosophies reached the European universities and undermined the ideologies in vigour. At the university of Paris masters in the arts like Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Denmark fearlessly propagated three propositions that were as simple as life-threatening. The first of those proposition was that the individual mind was only lent from the common world mind (the nous), and returned in the great reservoir of human knowledge at the moment of death: whatever soul might enter afterlife, the personal mind or intellect had disappeared forever at the same time. The second proposition was that individuals could reach happiness in this world, by their own force. The third proposition was that creation out of nothing is impossible: in line with the Bible and Aristotle, and in conflict with neo-platonism and church fathers from Irenaeus to Augustine, the world was not an immovable creation, but an ever changing continuity.
Those heresies were bound to alarm clerkdom, and it was only a matter of time before the dreaded reaction would come. Knowing the gruesome sort of heretics under Islam and Christianity, it is not surprising that scholars did everything to prove that their scientific speculations were no menace to religion.
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The famous Averroes (Arabic Ibn Rushd), physician at the court of Córdoba, had teached that science and religion followed separate ways, but yet arrived at the same truth. His works were burned, he was disgraced and expelled and died in Morocco in 1198 CE. Now his works reached the university of Paris, and engendered a fierce battle between the main players of Western Medieval philosophy and politics.
The interpretion of Saint Bonaventure was the least demanding: if both science and religion arrive at the same truth, then science has no function than to illustrate religion. Saint Thomas Aquinas followed the most demanding interpretion: if both science and religion arrive at the same truth, then it must be possible to go through every word of scripture, every word of the church fathers and every word of Arabic translations and commentaries of Aristotle, and glue them all together in one consistent monument.
But then there were the Latin Averroists like Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Denmark, who rather feared that religion would hamper scientific progress, than that religion had to be saved from science. They not only adapted Averroes' teachings enthusiastically, but even went one step further. If science and religion would eventually arrive at the same truth, they argued, then there was no reason to suppress one of them, and science could chase its own truth in the (indefinite) mean time. The latter became known as the Double Truth Theory.
In 1270 CE, the university of Paris condemned thirteen philosophical propositions, including the Averroist propositions and the Double Truth Theory, and explicitly hreatened Siger and Boethius with the Holy Inquisitionamed. They did however not change their teachings, and in 1277 CE Siger had to flee for the Grand Inquisitor of France. He reached Italy where he lived in misery and was murdered under mysterious circumstances a few years later.
Two centuries after Thomas Aquinas had escaped repression himself only by ‘scientifically’ proving all dogmas right, the pain of death awaited whoever doubted Thomas Aquinas: Giordano Bruno, Lucilio Vanini, Michael Servetus, Thomas Aikenhead and many others were burned at the stake or hanged for expressing divergent speculations. In order to escape inquisition, Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes all added to their publications a solemn statement, saying that they only speculated about an imaginative world, not about reality. When Francis Bacon insisted ‘that we do not presume by the contemplation
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of nature to attain to the mysteries of God’, he also claimed an intellectual space for science separated from religion. All this was just a withdrawal for repression.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century CE, there was no longer one natural world enclosing all invisible things and mysterious places, in which angels and devils appeared and disappeared, and where steep mountain paths reach to the sky, or narrow caverns lead to hell. The idea that there was a realm of religion separated from the laws of science was generally defended by European intellectuals, while the religious authorities saw this split as disguised atheism.
In 1880 CE the Aberdeen professor William Robertson Smith was accused of heresy by the Scottish Presbyterian church, which at the time controlled all Scottish universities. Smith had written, in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that the study of the historical bible must be distinguished from its religious meaning. Only massive public support made him keep his chair.611 Nineteenth century scientists like Lord Kelvin and Clerk Maxwell cautiously followed the same irrational strategy of the two worlds.
Official Christendom has given up bloodshed after the eighteenth century. The churches today can only directly coerce their own institutions, and even then superficially and partially. Still in 1917 CE, the Catholic Church attacked modern science directly by issuing a canonical law forbidding opinions different from the medieval doctrines of Thomas Aquinas, then eight centuries old, and therefore from most of Aristotle, then twenty three centuries old. In 1950 CE, the Catholic Church implicitly claimed jurisdiction over the combined spiritual and material world by issuing the dogma that the Holy Virgin was taken into heaven with both her body and her soul. Miracles (Latin for ‘astonishment’) only exist since the last centuries BCE, when wondrous interventions of the gods had become odd in the increasingly mechanistic world-image. They stand on the frontline between science and religion. Since the beginning of his pontificate in 1978 until 2003 CE, Pope John Paul II has certified three thousand miracles and has been criticized, as a result, for diverting sick people from adequate medical assistance to quackery.612 Still today there is no doubt in religious circles that faith is the master of reason:
faith can fully show the way to reason in a sincere search for the truth.613
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To most people the religious world became the immaterial, mystic world, a notion derived from the Greek word for a citizen initiated in a mystery cult, the mustikos. Prophecy, trance and asceticism were re-interpreted as contacts with the mystic ‘other world’, the ‘supernatural’. Metaphysics acquired an existence separated from physics. The transcendent (‘climbing over’) no longer was another floor of reality, but another world frequented by ghosts, gurus and incomprehensible philosophers.
The assertion that faith and understanding are two different but equivalent functions of our mind, is invalid, because it is possible to understand a message one does not believe, while it is impossible to believe a message one does not understand. But today most Western intellectuals live comfortably with the misconception that the objects of religion are from a different realm than the objects of science.
The Atlantic civilization
Originated in the eighteenth century, the Atlantic civilization is the first civilization to comprise both Europe and North America.614 It is the third main civilization of Europe, after the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. Romantic people imagine affinities between Atlantic society and Medieval Europe or even between the Capitol of Washington and the Capitol of Rome, but the distance in time and the difference in world-image are too big. The three European civilizations are only connected by persistence myths.
As in all civilizations there is constant tension between dynamic culture – science, ethics – and official clerkdom, resisting the pressure of change exerted by culture.
Atlantic ideologists boast of Western values, a sort of singular holy grail so important to the whole of humanity. But if those values are typical for the West and the Atlantic civilization, they are necessarily a few centuries old, and must comprise slavery, discrimination of women, burning of witches and the like. If on the other hand those values comprise the dignity of individuals, democracy, human rights of Negroes, women, homosexuals etc. they are only a few decades of age and do not coincide with a Western tradition or the Atlantic civilization. Then it is more correct to speak of modernity, something
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under constant debate and strain in the Atlantic civilization as elsewhere.
There is no case in crediting the Atlantic civilization for the entire progress made by humanity. On the contrary: by pretending to have ancient roots and to be the last, and by boasting that the whole world must be grateful for its accomplishments, the Atlantic civilization is as ordinary as all other civilizations. Harvard professor David Landes assigned unique qualities to the West when writing:
Not only did non-Western science contribute just about nothing (though there was more there than Europeans knew), but at that point it was incapable of participating, so far had it fallen behind or taken the wrong turning.615
Such a blunt statement utterly ignores the origins of arithmetics, algebra, geometry, physics… . There would be no Western science without Asian writing, American-Indian potatoes or Chinese printing - without many societies patiently adding their share to progress. Progress cannot be claimed to be the product of one society, just because it happens to be its turn to be rich for a while.
Just take the example of calculus, a branch of mathematics essential to most of further scientific progress during what became known as the scientific revolution. Leibniz and Newton both claimed the invention of calculus, and ended up in a heathed debate which was eventually ruled by the prestigeous Royal Society of London in favour of Newton. Recent research has however demonstrated that
The body of mathematics we know as calculus developed over many centuries in many different parts of the world, not just western Europe but also ancient Greece, the Middle East, India, China, and Japan. Newton and Leibniz drew on a vast body of knowledge about topics in both differential and integral calculus. The subject would continue to evolve and develop long after their deaths [..]No two people have moved our understanding of calculus as far or as fast. But the problems that we study in calculus [..] had been solved before Newton or Leibniz was born. The expression of these solutions was awkward and progress was painfully slow. It took some 1,250 years to move from the integral of a quadratic to that of a fourth degree polynomial..616
The way calculus reached Europe sheds a light on how exchange between cultures can work. At the time of the debate Jesuit missionaries travelled abroad, to spread the true faith as well as to engage in local politics, trade and science. Marin Mersenne, a french Jesuit priest from Paris, became known as one of the 'clearing
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houses' of new ideas. On the one hand he maintained contacts with all famous scientists of his time – Hobbes, Fermat, Descartes, Pascal,... - and on the other hand his religious order brougth him in contact with at least Japanese, Indian and Chinese science. Leibniz corresponded with Honoré Fabri, a Jesuit scholar frequenting the circles of Mersenne, and met in Rome with Claudio Grimaldi, who brought him in contact with many other Jesuits living in China and travelling Japan and India. In Indian Kerala the astronomer Aryabhatta, who lived in the sixth century CE, had teached that the earth rotates and orbits the sun. The Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics flourished from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century CE, and used calculus-like methods to proof that solar eclipses are passings of the moon. Many Jesuits travelled to Kerala, among whom the astronomer Matteo Ricci, who spent two years in Kerala studying mathematics.617
It is a mistake to believe that, because we are clever enough to invent communication satellites and artificial kidneys, we could easily have invented fire keeping or writing as we went. How difficult can it be to invent fire keeping for someone with a cigarette lighter, or to invent writing for someone with a laptop computer? But exactly to bring about our present cleverness, fire keeping and writing had to be invented where and when they did. If fire keeping was not invented tens of thousands of years ago, none of the scientific thoughts we have today could be thought. We would be unable to imagine the immaterial force of gravity, nor electrical power, nor chemical reactions. And if we would manage to invent fire keeping on the spot, millenaries of progress, regress, exchange, fortunate revival and catastrophic loss would have to follow, in order to provoke the most minor chance to arrive at the present stage of knowledge.
Truth, science and righteousness. The Atlantic civilization is not different from other civilizations in legitimating its supremacy by claims of exceptional knowledge. But this time knowledge does not find its credentials in oracles or visions, but in pseudo-science.
Such pseudo-science has been constructed from Immanuel Kant to Georg W.F. Hegel. Kant repaired the vanity of the mind, indispensable for clerkdom but severely damaged by Hume and Locke; Hegel employed this regained vanity to place the Germanic race again at the centre of the world. Since that time, the claim of
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righteousness uttered by Atlantic ideology is no longer based on the myth of divine revelation, but on beliefs taken to be based on a scientific method.618
In this idology democracy, morality, philosophy and science itself all have been presented as exclusively European attributes. An introductory remark in a popular book about the history of British Imperialism stresses that the British not only took riches from India, but also brought valuable things from their homeland to the colonies, and names for example the custom of drinking tea on the veranda. Ironically, tea originates not from Britain but from China, while verandas are Portuguese in origin, and entered the British idiom from Hindi.
It is a common misconception that pseudo-science is the antipode of Western academies, and that both can not possibly exist together. Like the ancient monasteries and temples, academies are at once places of scientific study and defenders of the world-image that supports their privileges. Academies as well as individual academics harbour a varying mixture of valuable learning and ideological preoccupations.
Astrology is the best known example of pseudo-science rejected by academies, and this rejection is often presented as a proof of their purely scientific disposition. Yet, racism would never have acquired the status and drive it had in the last two centuries, without the academical support lent up till today. The ‘Big Bang’ cosmology, with a dramatic instantaneous creation out of nothing, much with a surprisingly Christian feel, is also generally accepted in the academic world. And history, the one science most vulnerable to ideology, is exactly the science that is still the least engaged in classification and quantification of observations. The myth of Germanic civilization builders for example, either explicit or implicit, survives all contradicting data, while unfounded chronologies demote the citizens of all continents except Europe to tribal savages.
Just like Christian missionaries used modern medicine as a miraculous proof of their religious doctrine, while the natives could not possibly know how the same people had only recently done everything possible to hamper this scientific progress, human rights are presented as a European achievement, implicitly rendering all other societies unethical.
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The Thirty Years War, raging from 1618 to 1648 CE, was yet another terrible Christian fratricide. Apart from the horror inflicted by ‘regular’ armies appearing in always other leagues with always different masters, the land was roamed by routiers, bands of soldiers paid by nothing but the license to loot, rape, kill and burn in name of religion. Whole villages and cities disappeared forever from the map of Europe, and one out of every three German citizens was slaughtered or died from famine and disease.
Ever more thinking people preferred the serene wisdom of skepticism to the blood-dripping bookshelves of Truth. The most famous of them, Pierre Bayle, was born in the last year of the Thirty Years War. He passionately advocated tolerance between Catholicism and Calvinism, and therefore was accused of the severe crime of atheism by both. This is indeed irony, but it also makes sense. the one true religion cannot share the pulpit with any other: tolerance needs skepticism and atheism, also from this point of view. Tolerance always requires a skeptic attitude towards ones own conviction. A variety of religions threatens the trustworthiness of all of them, and eventually of religion as such. A religion asserting that all other religions are dispensable, will soon become dispensable also.
The Indogermanic mythSouthward migration tides have left their traces on many European and Asian languages. In the eighteenth century CE, scientists grouped such languages in the Indogermanic family. In the succeeding century, a supposed ancient race speaking proto-Indogermanic became part of the Atlantic ideology. The Indogerman tribe had blonde or red hair and blue eyes, and was the only race capable of creating great civilizations. This notion appeared, either in the open, implied or hazy, in almost every handbook printed since. Only the original dwelling of the Indogermanic tribe remained doubtful. The esteemed Father Wilhelm Schmidt – discussed above for his invention of a universal hoghgott and of savages as degenerated humans - was convinced that Germany was the most likely birthplace of the Indogermans.619
European pseudo-scientific mythology now gained momentum. Evidently, nothing important ever had happened – or would happen - in world history unless the superb blue-eyed race was there to make it work. Serious historians discovered that even Jesus was red haired and blue-eyed:
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His hair is of the colour of wine, and golden at the root; straight, and without lustre, but from the level of the ears curling and glossy, and divided down the centre after the fashion of the Nazarenes. His forehead is even and smooth, his face without wrinkle or blemish, and glowing with delicate bloom. His countenance is frank and kind. Nose and mouth are in no way faulty. His beard is full, of the same hazel colour as his hair, not long, but forked. His eyes are blue, and extremely brilliant. 620
The Indogermans, a race of fierce horsemen superior in battle and in everything else really, supposedly reached India somewhere in the second millennium BCE, and submitted or annihilated indigenous dark-skinned good-for-nothings in order to install a civilization as only Indogermans can build. They brought with them the ancient Indian corpus of literature, the Vedas. Nobody asked why the invaders never built civilizations or wrote anything where they came from during the two millennia in which Asians and Africans created their impressive monuments, artworks and literature.
Considering that only Indogermans had the ability to build civilizations, Egyptians and other North African peoples had to be whitened to make the Egyptian civilization an Indogerman achievement. This was not a simple task, because already in the days of Aristotle the Greeks described their Egyptians neighbours as black.621 In 1991 CE an educator of Michigan contested that the US Immigration Service had classified him as a white. He stated:
My complexion is as dark as most Black Americans. My features are clearly African. Classification as the United States government does it provides whites with legal ground to claim Egypt as a White civilization. We are fools if we allow them to take this legacy from us. 622
In 1902 CE, the famous Heinrich Brugsch-Bey bear witness to the Indogerman thesis by rejecting the view of the ancient Greeks that Egypt was founded by Ethiopians, because the old Ethiopians had no monuments in their own homeland. However, the argument of absent monuments is better applicable, but never applied, to the Indogermans. Brugsh-Bey also pointed out that the Egyptian grammar indicates ‘an intimate connection with the Indogermanic’ and turns to the Labu, a tribe that in Roman times lent its name to Libya:
From the evidence of the monuments the Labu belonged to a light-coloured race, with blue eyes and blonde or red hair. It is a noteworthy phenomenon that as early as the Fourth Dynasty members of this race wandered into Egypt…623
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The blonde intruders would have arrived just in time to erect the great pyramids, but, unfortunately for Brugsch-Bey, archeology has since established that the great pyramids are the culmination of a much older African practice. In 1998 CE aligned megaliths were discovered in the Nubian Desert. They were built seven thousand years ago and reveal similarities with the pyramids.624
In 1947 CE – halfway the twentieth century - the British egyptologist Alan Gardiner provided the Labu with a kilt – they started looking ever more like supporters of the FC Celtic Glasgow football team:
The Labu are characterized by a number of features when they are depicted in Egyptian reliefs, such as fair skin, red hair, and blue eyes. They also wore ornamental cloaks, had one lock of hair, and were tattooed on their arms and legs. [..] the Labu wore kilts instead of loincloths and were uncircumcised.625
Both authors fail to produce the monuments or reliefs they allude to. A faïence image at the entrance of the Medinet Habu temple, built in the twelfth century BCE, shows indeed a Libyan warrior with tattoos or body-paint and a with a chequered skirt, but his hair and eyes are plain black. That the Labu were uncircumcized is introduced purposely to stress their non-African origin.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century CE, educated Britons ardently excavated their own country for illustrious Celtic remains, built fake dolmen in their gardens and dressed fancy for made-up druid rites. At the same time they demolished ancient Indian ruins in Harappa to cast the stones in rail road beds. British remains could only serve British self-esteem, of which there was no lack already. But when eventually, from 1921 CE on, the remainder of the Harappa ruins were valued and searched, it became obvious that the Indic civilization had by far preceded the supposed Indogerman immigration. If our academies would have been free of ideology, this could have been the death blow to the theory that only whites were capable of civilization building.
Today hundreds of sites, among which the famous Mohenje-Daro, have been discovered and are being searched. Together they testify of a civilization as old as the Egyptian or Mesopotamian civilizations, even covering a larger territory. Despite those discoveries, Indian chronology remains a subject of ideologically biased discussions.626
After the Second World War the Indogermanic hypothesis was severely burnt by Nazi enthusiasm. Consequently the designation
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‘Indogermanic’ was altered into ‘Indo-European’, while most of the old ideological contents remained haunting western academies. For instance the much translated Die Religionen Der Volker by Ringgren and Ström, with still new popular editions published in many languages during the recent half century, can serve as an example for hundreds of study books published since the Second World War: while Semites are ‘subjectivists’, the Indo-European attitude towards the world is ‘objective’, and as a result the Indogermans are better with science, better in administration, and talented founders of empires. They also are – especially, of course, when compared with Semites – superior in philosophy and literature.
In the twentieth century an alternative to the Indogermanic race theory was proposed by the influential anthropologist Charles G. Seligman.627 This variation substituted the ‘Indogerman’ super race with the ‘Caucasian’ super race, which now included Semites. The theory filled the ideological need of the post-worldwar Atlantic civilization, extended with the fresh state of Israel. It was followed, among others, by Gordon Childe and Arnold Toynbee. Professor Eisei Kurimoto of Osaka University commented:
[Seligman] argues that anything that could be worthy of the name ‘civilization’ in Africa was brought solely by the ‘Caucasians’ and Blacks with Caucasian blood, that is, ‘Semites’ and ‘Hamites’, and ‘Hamiticized Negros’. There was a strong and dominant belief that the ‘Negros’, indigenous inhabitants of Africa, were not able to develop any sign of indigenous civilization: agriculture and pastoralism, art of iron manufacture, writing system and state. 628
The conclusion of Professor Kurimoto is of far stretching importance:We, living at the beginning of the 21st century, both Africans and non-Africans, have not yet freed ourselves from such racial views. Rather, there is evidence that they are persistent and, in some cases, being revitalized. The most remarkable and disastrous consequence of this is that the racial ideology of Western origin that advocates the superiority of ‘Semitic’ and ‘Hamitic’ peoples were internalized by some African elite, and it has been manipulated in order to divide and mobilize people. It is a crucial aspect of ongoing ethnicized politics, armed conflicts and civil wars in North East and East Africa and beyond. The examination of the Semitic and Hamitic theory not only reveals the past, but proves its relevance to today’s political culture.629
Bernal and LefkowitzUntil the end of the twentieth century everything had been done to proof that Egypt was civilized from the north. Then DNA tests and
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archeology made it clear that Egyptians are indeed – as the ancient Greeks knew - related to Africans South of the Sahara.
Now everything must be turned around. Everything was done to establish that African influence never could have impacted Indogermanic Greece. Where influence was first declared to be undeniable, it was now suddenly called impossible.
The debate about Africa’s contribution to progress today has two major protagonists. The first, Martin Bernal, is an Afro-American Professor in Linguistics at Cornell University. The essence of his thesis is that Greece underwent decisive influence from Egypt at several moments in ancient history.630 Anticipating that his thesis – however evident – would meet severe ideological denunciation, Bernal underpinned his case with details which soon turned out to attract, rather than to hold off, academic confrontation. His most prominent adversary is Mary Lefkowitz.631 Lefkowitz is a Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. Her dismissal of African influences on Greece is sponsored by the same foundations that support far right organizations as The National Review, The Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Scholars, the latter in which she is involved herself.632
Lefkowitz today stresses that the Egyptian language (before, following Brughs-Bey, strongly influenced by Indogermanic) was incommutable with Greek: despite abundant records of intensive cooperation, migration, exchange, travels and trade, they could not and did not talk with each other, and capable translators were inexistent. A new mythological Tower of Babel was created for the occasion.
When Egypt was supposed to be civilized from the north, it was unforgivable for academics to express the slightest doubt. But when this dogma was made untenable by solid research, it was not changed, but blurred: even then the Egyptian civilization was not plain and simply recognized as African, but became a complex, undecided puzzle.
Mary Lefkowitz now dismissed the thesis of a northern influence on Egypt as a mistake of nineteenth century egyptologists, forgetting at once her severe denunciation of Martin Bernal when he had dared to blame the same scholars for their prejudices. But despite Lefkowitz’ assertions Brugsch-Bey, Seligman, Childe, Toynbee nor Gardiner are
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nineteenth century scholars - their theories were common throughout the twentieth century, and are intimately melted into Western ‘common sense’. As a matter of fact Lefkowitz herself leans heavily on the same scholars she dismisses as outdated in an other context. She might become outdated in her own right when the racist elements in Western historiography will at last be subjected to a serious scientific critique, if such critique will be only nearly as severe as the academic literature produced by Atlantic ideologists in order to disdain Professor Bernal.633
The story as a whole effectively demonstrates the often blurred and yet important distinction between modern science and Atlantic ideology.
Just as medieval romances honoured kings as descendants of Trojan heroes, the Atlantic ideology adopted ancient Greeks from Solon to Alexander as its ancestors. Greece was the best choice available, because of all ancient civilizations only Greek culture was on European ground – albeit only in the farthest corner, and only in part. Unfortunately for the advocates of the European genius, the cradle of Greek science or philosophy was not located in Europe. They could only have flourished on Asian ground under Persian influence, much as Persian science only could have flourished under Indian and African influence. The exalted ‘first philosophers’ – Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes - were a lot less European than the Egyptians were African, but in the new persistence myth they had to be depicted as bright Europeans surrounded by hideous barbarians.
Science came to Greece millennia after it reached its neighbours in Africa and Asia. This simple fact, testified by numerous archaeological finds, can only be denied by creating bizarre delimiting definitions of ‘science’. Yet ancient Greece was upgraded to both the beginning of science and of ‘civilization’ (read European civilization). Any pointless quote of any obscure Greek was regarded as pure science, while sky high monuments elsewhere were just dumb termite hills. To arrive at that conclusion technology and science were separated in line with Greek slave society: slaves were technological do-ers, masters lay back and imagined theories. In the course of the nineteenth century CE translations of sacred texts from Asia and Africa - the Upanishads, the Zend-Avesta, the Bundahishn, Egyptian hieroglyphs,… – proved the presence of scientific thinking in all civilizations. They might draw on the vocabulary of myths, but that
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was not different in Ancient Greece. The notion of a world ruled by impersonal but reliable laws is inexplicable without counting in the influence of Asian and African cosmologies, the exchange of ideas following the wars of Darius and Alexander, and the role of African Alexandria.
Despite the clear evidence of the opposite it is still commonly held that only Europeans were capable of making theories. This is a theory, but it clearly is ideology, not science. Encyclopaedia Britannica splits the history of natural philosophy in a ‘pre-critical’ and a ‘Greek’ period. This division is generally upheld in Western publications and academies: before the Greeks (read: Europeans) there was only naïve, childish superstition. The Greeks were the first rational adults of humanity. Before the Greeks, all happenings were explained by means of divine interventions. The Greeks however invented scientific thought.
An example of this distortion is the conception of the four elements. Aristotle wrote in On Generation and corruption that Empedocles declared fire, water, air, and earth the four elements, but he never honoured Empedocles as their inventor: ‘some advocate four [elements] from the start, for example Empedocles’. Despite this clear remark, all popular books on philosophy tell us that Empedocles discovered the four elements.
Although Empedocles named the elements gods: ‘bright Zeus, life-giving Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis who moistens the springs of men with her tears’,634 John Burnet insists:
… all the early [Greek] thinkers had spoken in this way of whatever they regarded as the primary substance. We must only remember that the word is not used in its religious sense. Empedocles did not pray or sacrifice to the elements.
But Empedocles, active in religion and politics, must have prayed or sacrificed at least to Zeus.
Yet, the Indian ‘air-god’ Vayu or the Egyptian ‘air-god’ Shu represent genuine observations and speculations on nature. A Vedic text says prosaically : ‘when water dries up, it goes into air (Vayu)’.635 Although Egyptian sailors occasionally called upon Shu for a favourable wind, we don’t know of any temple dedicated to this element so abundantly present in Egyptian literature.
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Nature framed in religious text is philosophy of nature per sé. And its merits can only be weighed against previous images, not against our momentary speculations. We might find the involved representations and deductions erroneous, but that is besides the question: if we do not admit wrong theories into our history of science, this history is invalid, and our science doubtable.
Herodotus, the best positioned source on this subject, wrote that Thales, the mythical father of philosophy, was from Phoenician descent, which made him a Semite. Western scholars rashly refuted the idea without argument or proof. This ideological seizure of Thales remains far more significant than his descent could ever be.
John Burnet, still a highly esteemed scholar, leaned on the language barrier described above to defend that early Greek philosophy, even when it emerged on Asian ground, never underwent significant influence from neighbouring civilizations: the Greek genius originated on the Asian coast of the Aegean Sea because this was the home of the oldest, less adulterated Indogerman tribe of the Ionians. 636
In 1929 CE Sir Leonard Woolley, after discovering the Sumerian cities of Ur and Tell el-Amarna, had exclaimed:
We have outgrown the phase when all the arts were traced to Greece and Greece was thought to have sprung, like Pallas, full-grown from the brain of the Olympian Zeus; we have learnt how the flower of genius drew its sap from Lydians and Hittites, from Phoenicia and Crete, from Babylon and Egypt.637
But twenty years later, Bertrand Russell still expressed the common error that the Greeks invented mathematics, science and philosophy, and were the first to write history.638
Greece and humannessAtlantic ideology has constructed a history of science starting with ancient Greece and restricted to the West. The long descent of progress and strive for modernity had to be refuted, and the birth of science and the birth of Europe were tied together and dropped in Greece. John Burnet for example wrote:
We have seen that the Eastern peoples were considerably richer than the Greeks in accumulated facts, though these facts had not been observed for any scientific purpose, and never suggested a revision of the primitive view of the world. The Greeks, however, saw in them something that could be turned to account…639
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The rest of the world then supposedly lacks an ‘inquisitive mind’ and is condemned to a ‘primitive view of the world’. This unscientific nonsense is still today teached in all academies. Despite its immense claim, it is substantiated by nothing but a few lines ascribed to Empedocles, a man famous for religious preaching and extravagant magic performances. Empedocles had said:
Just as when a girl, playing with a water clock of shining brass, puts the orifice of the pipe upon her comely hand, and dips the water clock into the yielding mass of silvery water—the stream does not then flow into the vessel, but the bulk of the air inside, pressing upon the close-packed perforations, keeps it out till she uncovers the compressed stream. 640
Despite the fact that this is just the observation of a girl playing with water and an object at the time common on all continents, Burnet promotes it to the ‘first recorded experiment of a modern type’ , and at once places Empedocles at the verge of anticipating Harvey and Torricelli.
Yet, long before Empedocles, more indisputable scientific undertakings are reported from other societies. We know that the Egyptian king Psammetichus, who lived two centuries before Empedocles, had a child brought up in isolation expectant to hear it utter the oldest language, and thirty years after Psammetichus, Necho II sponsored a successful Phoenician voyage around Africa. Still another Egyptian king had antidotes tested, with the use of control groups, on criminals convicted to death by poisoning.641 At about the same time, Indians experimented with solutions of salt to examine theories about ether and atomism, and with the effect of diet on memory.642 The assertion made by Burnet that ‘it is inconceivable that an inquisitive people should have applied the experimental method in a single case without extending it to other problems’643 is clearly meant to single out all the Greeks on behalf of one sentence of doubtful meaning, ascribed to Empedocles. But all humans are inquisitive and observing by nature, and the statement does not single out one population, but befits humanity as a whole.
The irrational denial of the intellectual capacities, needed to build the artworks that stand sky-high before us in Africa and Asia, opened the gates to a stream of ufological and pyramidological nonsense. Russell and Von Dänicken worked together on this enigma: if the Egyptians were too stupid, as Russell implies, maybe it were extra-terrestrials, as Von Dänicken defends? Recently, some academic
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summer camps have joined this mystery cult with experimental archaeology, carrying out ‘recreation’ in various meanings.644
Scientists carefully examine evidence and search for the – provisionally - best fitting theory, while ideologists fiercely defend fixed theories, and try to weaken and even denounce unsuited observations. Scientists work with an incomplete and uncertain set of propositions, while ideologists defend a definitive truth. Ideological statements often pretend knowing ‘the first’ of things, while science is very careful with this word because facts are never complete or certain. It is not difficult to fill pages with absurd and boast assertions about the Greeks, not belonging to science but to ideology: the Greeks were ‘the first’ to invent freedom, ‘the first’ to gather knowledge, ‘the first’ to use reason; the Greeks were ‘the first’ to discover nature; the Greeks performed a miracle, or the greatest achievement ever. W. H. Auden might have won this competition in folly with the most outrageous western self-glorification of all:
Had Greek civilization never existed, we might fear God and deal justly with our neighbors, we might practice arts and even have learned how to devise fairly simple machines, but we would never have become fully conscious, which is to say that we would never have become, for better or worse, fully human.645
This viewpoint implicates that the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians etc… were not ‘fully’ conscious or human, but rather a kind of insects, building monuments like dumb termites.646 When the plain idiocy of such statements is pointed out, subtle discernments are presented: the Greeks might not have invented everything, but in any case they went beyond exactly that one threshold in the long history of science, philosophy, reason, freedom… that was necessary to cause exactly that single really crucial step of the human mind. Yes, the Greeks got their second chance alphabet from the Semites, but they added exactly those few characters that caused the complete valuable world literature. Yes, cosmogonies existed everywhere, but because they were less spiritual the Greeks were the first to really reason about them. Yes, arithmetic existed elsewhere for thousands of years, but because they were more spiritual the Greeks were the first to use ‘pure abstract thinking’. Yes, tribal councils of men exist in all primitive labouring societies, but the Greeks were the first to call it ‘democracy’…
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Spreading civilizationThe nineteenth century historian Johann Gustav Droysen placed Alexander of Macedonia at the pinnacle of Atlantic mythology. Droysen was one of many Prussian politicians who orated that it was the fate of their country to submit all other German speaking populations. During the course of his career violent wars against Denmark, Austria and France resulted indeed in a German state unified under Prussian control, a major power at the centre of Europe. It was this same Prussian militarism that in time would lead to the First World War. From there the road led to Fascism and the Second World War.
Droysen wrote a number of volumes on Alexander of Macedonia and his successors. He elaborated the imagery of a genius spreading civilization through warfare – the Prussian ideal hero - and coined the term ‘Hellenism’ to characterize the era following the wars of Alexander as a generous radiation of Greek pre-eminence.647
Curiously however, there is no historical evidence that Alexander was a Greek or even spoke the Greek language, while only one fifth of his army consisted of Greeks. Greek mercenaries in the Persian army outnumbered the Greeks in the army supposedly bringing the fruits of Greek knowledge to retarded Asia and Africa.648
Ever since Plutarch wrote that Alexander by means of his expeditionseducated the Hyrcanians to respect the marriage bond, and taught the Arachosians to till the soil, and persuaded the Sogdians to support their parents, not to kill them, and the Persians to revere their mothers and not to take them in wedlock, […and brought] the Indians to worship Greek gods, and the Scythians to bury their dead, not to devour them.
Western history books in concert continue to call him a superb, exceptional genius and an exciting personality, a missionary of high culture. Yet, even if direct evidence of scientific activity outside Greece before Alexander is blurred today – and if found is fiercely refuted by western academics - there was much more science in Greece after Alexander than before him, which is awkward if Greece was really the miraculous fountainhead of scientific knowledge. It is undeniable that the main part of progress granted to the Greeks – both in arts and science -, only took place after the violent destruction of borders with Asia and Africa.
Of course the Greeks took part in the long march of progress – they were not isolated -, but if we could look at Greece as it was before the
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Persian wars from the standpoint of one of the ancient civilizations, and not against the background of ruined Rome and primitive Europe, they would appear as conceited epigones. Our world is of course blessed with their contributions, but the Greeks did not fall from the sky on a clear day, bearing visions inscrutable elsewhere. We look at ancient Greece through an history of damage and censorship, and many ancient cultures are not, or insufficiently, known to us because of the same mechanisms. Therefore every meagre piece of testimony about one moment and one place in the long struggle for progress that by accident, luck or manipulation survived until our days, rightfully belongs to the heritage of all humanity. Anyone should be able to enjoy this heritage without bitterness, and this is only possible if the Greek myth is eventually subjected to serious scientific analysis, and the multitude of ideological misconceptions is finally and openly dismissed.
Why Europe?At this moment in time a hundred publications must have been written about the questions ‘Why the West?’, ‘Why Europe?’, ‘Why not China?’ … Such questions are always tricked: the ‘why’ conveniently presupposes definitive European pre-eminence, and the authors never come up with the unambiguous ‘because’ the title promises. Their real purpose is mostly to elaborate and illustrate at large on achievements and qualities of whites, interlarded with kind-hearted remarks on colourful natives and sneers towards ‘cultural relativists’. The outcome is always that whites are superior; the others have only to blame their selves for their apparent backwardness. One of the first of those authors was Max Weber, one of the most recent is David Landes.
Both Weber and Landes find a ‘scientific explanation’ in European features like hard working, patience, tenacity and morals. Of course monotheism, Christianity, or, for those who like, Protestantism have certainly to do with the remarkable perfection of those features in Europeans. David Landes, after summarizing Weber’s thesis, adds:
The heart of the matter lay indeed in the making of a new kind of man – rational, ordered, diligent, productive. These virtues, while not new, were hardly commonplace. Protestantism generalized them among its adherents…649
This statement about western virtues opposed to non-western lack of morals is of course irrational ideology. Just imagine that a similar
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document from Abassid times would surface, assigning the superiority of Baghdad to a new kind of rational, ordered, diligent, productive man, provoked by Islam – it would be commented in our history books as an example of pre-scientific or even primitive thinking. And the construction crashes loudly when the genius of western entrepreneurship include slave trade, a ‘virtue’ known already by Cheops, Assurbanipal and Darius:
For one thing, reliance on the indigenous population meant that the Chinese never sought to incorporate foreign slaves in their workforce. (To be sure, many of their own population lived in bondage, though they were not chattel slaves).
If the Chinese have lost some race they were not invited to, it was certainly not the race for realistic self-criticism.
Unwarranted but attractive remarks carry further than well-founded analyses and natters about all white superior qualities ever mentioned since Adam Smith and, ‘enjoying his political incorrectness’,650 slanders his adversaries as ‘socialists’, ‘courting the favour of umbrageous regimes’, ‘shaping the truth to higher ends’, ‘propagating gospels’, ‘new globalists’ and so on. Real arguments on the other hand are superfluous, because the case is already proven by the impressive wealth of the West.
Landes jubilantly cries out that ‘where one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so.’ Here the high morals of capitalist diligence are suddenly replaced by pseudo-scientific jungle laws, proven wrong by history a thousand times whenever people, of differing power and differing riches, lived together sociably. Those who don’t know history must just realize that Landes’ natural law predicts that he - as everyone else – must kill his relatives for the inheritance. On the other hand he intrinsically assumes that wealth, which in the past shifted to other regions every few centuries, this time it will magically persist in the West - a proposition to be regarded as ideological eschatology rather than as economic science based on observations. This ideological agenda becomes even more clear where Landes confuses the adjectives ‘white’ with ‘intelligent’ in asserting that ‘anti-Eurocentric thought is simply anti-intellectual’.651
Most of the time Landes confuses explanation with description, as if the reasons of actual situations become clear just by relating the appearance of those situations. Each time he starts out on a
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promising path to explain the cause of Western superiority, he loses track and ends with the exuberant idealization of actual European domination. Whoever criticizes his methods then necessarily becomes an enemy of Europe, and thus an enemy of freedom, democracy, intelligence, humanness...
The scientific methodBesides the persistence myth of the Greek Genius, the Atlantic civilization needs a justification myth. This justification is not based on religious dogmas, as in previous civilizations, but on a particular Scientific Method.
One Western author asked himself: ‘were I the sole representative of my civilization, what could I transmit about it?’ He concluded that it would be sufficient to ‘transmit the notion of the scientific method’, and ‘if that approach to truth could resist beguilement by superstition, the accomplishments of his civilization would be rediscovered’. The truth claim in this sentence is an important hint. He clarifies:
Important though the influence of accumulating knowledge is, the heart of humankind’s extraordinary advance since the sixteenth century stems from a way of thinking – the scientific method. 652
This is the essence of the Western justification myth: only one civilization was clever enough to elaborate the Scientific Method, and if this civilization should disappear, science is likely to disappear with it. Other nations and continents - millenaries of scientific progress - are neglectable in comparison to the European science. ‘Beguilement by superstition’ is not a pitfall for human thinking in general, it sets the whole world apart from the Atlantic civilization, which was never troubled by it - which was never troubled by mass executions in defence of foolish doctrines, by death sentences for doubting the official explanation of miracles, or by bloody repression of free thought. Needless to say that this one assertion does not need to be subjected to the scientific method.
In reality, superstition, prejudice and misconceptions threaten most of human thinking, day after day, in all societies and in all periods. It takes place whenever a social structure fights innovations; whenever those in power hamper science by torturing and burning of thinkers; and whenever churches, governments and academies decree anathemas to ward off change. Scientific progress in the West was not boosted by superiority in thinking or otherwise, because the West obviously has the same flaws and wit as other societies. Exactly this
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superiority delusion can even obstruct progress and immobilize critical enquiry by clinging to dogmas like a fixed scientific method.
One of the first versions of the scientific method is given by Francis Bacon in 1620 CE, and proclaims the meticulous gathering of facts, the finest first, by means if experiments and observation, a method of which Marvin Harris wrote that they would have prevented the discoveries made by Galileo, Keppler and Newton.653
The scientific method given by René Descartes, almost twenty years after Francis Bacon, is still one of the most consecrated, and by many celebrated as the set off of the Western scientific revolution. If four rules are obeyed, Descartes wrote, there can be nothing so hidden that it can not be discovered. His first rule is never to accept anything as true unless it is evidently so, carefully avoiding precipitancy and prejudice; the second is to divide a problem in as many parts as might be possible and necessary in order to best solve it; the third is to think from the simple problems up to the complex; the last is always to make ‘complete enumerations’ to make sure nothing was omitted.654
Those rules are, in reality, a very general and self-evident engineering method. Descartes himself, more than his followers, admitted that his method was inspired by the engineers (geometers) of antiquity. If builders of the last five or more thousand years had not carefully considered an undertaking, had not dealt with the problems one by one, and had not composed the parts in good order without forgetting anything, they would never have erected the simplest of their edifices. But they did succeed in a variety of complex construction works, starting with prehistoric animal traps up to monuments of all times and places, always studying new circumstances.
Descartes himself infringed constantly on his methodology, which made Leibniz wish cynically that 'he had himself remembered his precept.’ Exactly in geometry, the science upheld as a model by Descartes, and in which he made his most lasting discoveries, is built on ten unproven axioms. This is in total contrast with his rule not to accept anything unproven, Leibniz wrote, and he added that ‘had they wished to postpone the invention of theorems and problems until all the axioms and postulates had been demonstrated, we might have no geometry at all to this day’.655
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The scientific method has constantly been reinterpreted and adapted: today there exist as many scientific methods as there are extolling authors, while no scientist has ever taken on a successful research project in submission to any of them. As another monster of Log Ness, it is discussed everywhere and seen nowhere.
Isaac Newton added to Descartes’ rules the importance of observation and interpretation; John Stuart Mill demonstrated how even fallible assumptions can lead to valuable theories; Karl Popper contradicted all of those men with the proposition that all true scientific theories are falsifiable, and Paul Feyerabend accordingly falsified Popper’s theory. Thomas S. Kuhn finally demonstrated that trust in a particular scientific method can never lead to scientific revolutions.656
Science always depends on the incessant recursion of observation, speculation and elimination, and this routine needs support by experiments in certain scientific fields or stages. It has however been asserted that experiments are essential to science, that they existed nowhere but in the West, and that they came only to their full power in the Atlantic civilization. But when an ideology overstresses experiments as signs of superiority, they can be reduced to repetitive rituals, to a heavy financial burden for society and to a useless source of animal suffering.657 The use of – both valuable and worthless - experiments has indeed increased in recent centuries, mostly because long time accumulative technological enhancements made them more feasible. But not all science benefits from experiments all the time, and the prospect to be praised for introducing experiments might even divert attention from more crucial observations. Many great icons of the Western academies, like Georg W.F. Hegel, John Burnet himself or Wilhelm Schmidt never performed an experiment. This did not refrain supposedly rational and critical people - at large the same people who brag about the unique critical nature of Western science - to praise their predispositions.
Although nobody agrees on the content of the scientific method, nearly all authors agree that it is the indisputable expression of the superior Western mind.
Descartes demonstrated in his conclusions that he lacked a reliable method to attain at unshakable truth like anyone else, both in physics and in metaphysics. In physics he concluded that ‘hence it follows that there can be no atoms’ - not really the biggest success of an
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infallible method.658 In metaphysics he even managed to demonstrate the existence of God. This clearly was no exception to the rule that claims of absolute truth always belong to ideology.
The first result of his method, Descartes wrote, was the phrase ‘I think, therefore I am’. But those famous words were immediately followed by the less remembered exclamation ‘that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were not capable of shaking it’. Although remembered in official history as the ultimate skeptic, Descartes really fought skepticism which could undermine his own inferences. Genuine skeptics were humanists like Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Gassendi, who died as a result of fourteen medically induced bleedings – he was obviously still not skeptic enough about the Western scientific methods.
The power of skepticism lies in its ability to tone down the great pretensions and wild assumptions of dangerous righteousness. It educates people to freely and provisionally consent, suppose, reject, assume or doubt. We know skeptics merely from their caricatures than from their actual viewpoints. Skeptics - from the Greek word for ‘to inquire’ - are not all that extravagant. They never asserted for sure that nothing can be asserted for sure, or held that everything must be doubted forever. Sextus Empiricus, the classical writer on the skeptic movements of his days, wrote that Pyrrhonists dissented only non-evident propositions, and that the academic skeptics only disagreed with a proposition if there was evidence for it as well as against it.
Science evolved over thousands of years, and surpasses cultural boundaries. It advances by the tricky game of trial and error.
Gatherings of scientists are marked by clashes of opinions, and science still advances daily by falsifying scientific claims while, as progress demands, it is only a matter of time before the falsifier becomes falsified in his or her turn. Constant skepticism towards established facts, rules and methods has driven the scientific progress of many millenaries. Descartes hid in Holland for most of his professional life, while in France heretic laymen were burned and Galileo was indicted by the Holy Inquisition. His works were entered in the index of forbidden books the day he was buried, by the same men he had tried to defend. The Atlantic civilization welcomed innovations no more than any other.
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Science is exactly the opposite of a defined method: it is the critical investigation of any sanctified dogma. Skepticism opened the way to unrestrained hypotheses, trials and tentative conclusions. It is not a superiority delusion that causes progress, but the acknowledgement not to know, paired with unbound curiosity. After millenaries of progress we must admit that the power of modern science lies exactly in its always changing and evolving nature, in the criticism of truth and authority, and not in their consecration. Only through that path we could arrive where we are today.
More than any blessed methodology, skepticism against the definite superiority of any view or method is the cause of progress. The progress of science depends on the destabilization of powers and convictions. In the case of Europe such events were mainly the result of two succeeding encounters, of which the first, the encounter with Arabic culture, repaired the broken thread with Asian and African antiquity.
The second encounter was the discovery of America, the most colossal border crossing ever. This exploit of Columbus is often used by Euro-centrists to demonstrate European superiority. A glimpse at chronology shows however that most scientific and technological progress followed the discovery. If European superiority was demonstrated by the genius of Columbus, it must have been by his miscalculation of the size of the earth.659 As a consequence of this error, he crossed borders with an unknown continent, reduced the whole ancient world to a province of a fresh universe, destabilized central power and its unquestionable truths, and crashed the sacred institutions of Europe and their ideology beyond repair.
RacismCivilizations regard the own people superior to the subjected. Until the Middle Ages this superiority was based on divine choice; in Atlantic civilization the pseudo-science of racism has the same function. Racism is more alive today than generally accepted.
On all continents skin colour varies from light to dark, following the increasing intensity of sunlight from north to South. A darker skin is a natural protection against the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun, and therefore varies on all continents with latitude. Travellers have always testified about populations of mixed skin colours on all
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continents. Tacitus spoke of the black Celts to designate Southern Europeans, and John C. Prichard stated in 1813 CE that
The American races show nearly as great a variety in this respect as the nations of the old continent; there are among them white races with a florid complexion, and tribes black or of a very dark hue; that their stature, figure, and countenance are almost equally diversified 660
A recent article in Scientific American says:Someone classified as “black” in the U.S., for instance, might be considered “white” in Brazil and “coloured” (a category distinguished from both “black” and “white”) in South Africa.661
After a few centuries of European slave trade and pillage, the native kingdoms and empires of Asia, Africa and America became annihilated and forgotten in their turn. The continents by large were depicted as the abode of savages conveniently marked by their skin colour, while all Europeans had always been ‘civilized’ by their ‘nature’.
Our mind feels at ease with simplifying tags: each continent got its distinct coloured savages, and ‘yellows’, ‘reds’ or ‘blacks’ immediately cause the matching continent to appear to the mind of whoever has learned this scheme at school; but after reflecting for one second we find in our remembrance no real-life matches for such caricatures.
Halfway the nineteenth century, Many pseudo-scientific racist works were published. Among those works were Hegel’s Philosophy of history and Joseph-Artur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines . Those works implied or stated frankly that the only race capable of civilization is the Germanic race. Another label for the same fiction, the ‘Aryan race’, is an erroneous derivation of the Sanskrit word for a caste of nobles, not an ethnic group. The super race is of course white, blonde and blue-eyed. Its mission is to spread civilization by submitting brute yellows, blacks and reds.
Few or none of the many European authors feeling to belong to the blonde-and-blue-eyed race had this colouring themselves, and such type of persons are even difficult to find in Europe or elsewhere. It is a great mystery that there are so few around of an outstanding race. Neo-Nazi publications blame Africans or Jews for their near extermination, but whoever claims to stand out can hardly blame others for their defeat. The Nazis urgently tried to breed this outstanding race during their occupation of Norway. It is obvious that, although some populations have more blonde-and-blue-eyed
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persons, they never created a civilization or even a discernible cultural unity.
Race theories have never been subjected to decisive academic criticism: sporadic articles in professional literature had hardly any influence on the public perception, and popular works and encyclopaedias still presuppose the racist dogma without naming it. From below the surface this dogma still guides many pseudo-scientific assumptions, while we have learned to speak in acceptable elliptic discourses, using ‘civilization’ when we mean ‘culture’, ‘culture’ when we mean ‘religion’, ‘religion’ when we mean ‘race’, and so on. Johann G. von Herder for example propagated, with success, that each nation has its own unchangeable character, and implied that cultural change and exchange is unnatural and weakening. David S. Landes thinks along the same lines when defending that Europeans have an unalterable superior culture, and that Eurocentrism (‘acknowledging Europe’s success’) is not only fair, but that it is also a blessing for the less talented world population. The United Nations Genocide Convention of 1951 CE has broadened the definition of ‘genocide’ to religious groups. This is a distortion of the word, and opens the path to religious repression when individuals in a community are pinned on the local religion.
In the nineteenth and twentieth century CE, racism became widely accepted throughout the Atlantic civilization. De Gobineau, himself married with a Creole from Martinique, was no outcast, but a respected diplomat, welcomed in the highest intellectual and social strata. He was friendly with, among many others, Alexis de Tocqueville and the Brazilian emperor Pedro II, and an honoured guest on the finest aristocratic occasions in Europe, America and the colonies. In France he received the prestigious title of Commandeur du Légion d’Honneur, next to major decorations from Germany, Persia, Brazil, and Sweden. De Gobineau influenced among others Wagner, Nietsche, Chamberlain and Hitler.
Georg W.F. Hegel was a Professor at Heidelberg and Berlin. He is still today considered the most brilliant thinker of the nineteenth century CE.662 His Phenomenology of Mind was hailed as a brilliant description of the universe, for the first time appreciated as a theatre of growing consciousness. Yet, when people are carried away by great theories, the real matter is usually a more prosaic justification of casual power and vulgar profit, and indeed nationalism and racism
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were the essential themes of the work. The Phenomenology is just another justification myth, of yet another civilization claiming Absolute Truth, as the clerk Hegel described the final, cosmological consciousness to which the superb Germanic race must lead humanity.
The quotations below demonstrate the ideological content of Hegel’s Philosophy of history.663 The italics and capitals are his. The premise is very simple: the earth is full of degenerated races that can only benefit from subjugation by the superb Germanic peoples, the bearers of the Christian principle. For that exalted principle, another witch had been hanged only a few decades earlier, not far from where Hegel held his lectures.664
It strikes the reader of this work today how volatile characteristics of nations really are. Hegel took into account any suitable fable of his time, and ‘all Englishmen agree’ is somewhat the strongest scientific argumentation to be found in the work. He surprisingly declares, almost half a century before the Secession War in which Christian masters and ministers fiercely defended slavery waving their bibles in the killing, that ‘under Christianity slavery is impossible’. Projecting human properties onto the outside world (an error known as ‘pathetic fallacy’), he claims to study history as a natural process guided by reason. He claims to ignore ‘the relation sustained by the Universe to the Divine Being’, but already after a few pages gives in to medieval philosophy when he declares that ‘God governs the world; the actual working of his government — the carrying out of his plan — is the History of the World’. He reschedules the Flood by some thousand years (to 3473 BCE), to save Christian persistence myths ‘when we meet with dates of a higher age than 2400 years before Christ’.665 Then Hegel directs his attention to the various human races.
First we are assured that Africans do not mind being massacred by Europeans:
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The Negroes indulge, therefore, that perfect contempt for humanity, which in its bearing on Justice and Morality is the fundamental characteristic of the race. They have moreover no knowledge of the immortality of the soul, although spectres are supposed to appear.666 The undervaluing of humanity among them reaches an incredible degree of intensity. Tyranny is regarded as no wrong, and cannibalism is looked upon as quite customary and proper. Among us instinct deters from it, if we can speak of instinct at all as appertaining to man. But with the Negro this is not the case, and the devouring of human flesh is altogether consonant with the general principles of the African race [..] In the contempt of humanity displayed by the Negroes, it is not so much a despising of death as a want of regard for life that forms the characteristic feature. To this want of regard for life must be ascribed the great courage, supported by enormous bodily strength, exhibited by the Negroes, who allow themselves to be shot down by thousands in war with Europeans.
The desperate resistance of Africans against European pillage in the nineteenth century reminds of the imaginative ‘want of regard for life’ of Palestinians today. This quote of Hegel is not the only instance of the cynical ease at which prejudices can be reversed when appropriate. The revered Aristotle arrived at exactly the opposite conclusion about the ‘great courage’ of blacks:
Those who are too black are cowards, like for instance, the Egyptians and Ethiopians.667
Then the Chinese, always mistrusted rivals, are efficiently dealt with:gunpowder [the Chinese] pretended to have invented before the Europeans; but the Jesuits were obliged to found their first cannon.[Chinese] possess some ancient accounts and notices of Lunar and Solar Eclipses; but these certainly do not constitute a science. The notices in question are, moreover, so indefinite, that they cannot properly be put in the category of knowledge.
Nobody had seriously investigated those records at the age which Hegel saw as the culmination of human knowledge. He was clearly unaware of their contents and yet called them worthless on ideological grounds only. Today we know that the ancient Chinese astrological records held meticulous observations of exploding stars, among others the beginning of the Crab nebula in 1054 CE, and proved in recent years crucial to the understanding of supernovas. 668
Although a Chinese painter copies European pictures (as the Chinese do everything else) correctly; although he observes accurately how many scales a carp has; how many indentations there are in the leaves of a tree; what is the form of various trees, and how the branches bend; — the Exalted, the Ideal and Beautiful is not the domain of his art and skill.
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Besides, the Europeans, just because of their intelligence, have not yet been able to imitate the superficial and perfectly natural cleverness of the Chinese.
India, under British rule at the time, is bashed unrelentingly. All in all the Indian race could better disappear from the earth:
The world of the Ganges and the Indus […] is in its very nature destined to be mixed with other races - to be conquered and subjugated.
A bit further we learn more about their appalling nature:Thus the moral condition of the Hindoos (as already observed) shows itself most abandoned. In this all Englishmen agree. Our judgement of the morality of the Hindoos is apt to be warped by representations of their mildness, tenderness, beautiful and sentimental fancy. But we must reflect that in nations utterly corrupt, there are sides of character which may be called tender and noble [..]. Cheating, stealing, robbing, murdering are with him habitual. Humbly crouching and abject before a victor and lord, he is recklessly barbarous to the vanquished and subject.
Towards the end of this fine philosophical monument we are relieved to see that at least the German peoples are valuable specimen of the human sort:
The German Spirit is the Spirit of the new World. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of Freedom — that Freedom which has its own absolute form itself as its purport. The destiny of the German peoples is, to be the bearers of the Christian principle.[..]. In the Crusades, indeed, and in the discovery of America, the Western World directed its energies outwards.
During the twentieth century CE the daft skin colour theory lost most of its overt supporters, while many implications of racism, like the unique and outstanding capabilities of Europeans and the Greek genius, still belong to the canon of the Atlantic ideology.
Racism feeds on physical and psychological variations that are always present between random persons or even within one family, and serves nothing but injustice. Modernity shifts attention to the capacities and merits of individuals, trying to ignore his or her accidental descent. This method works well, even if talents would be distributed unevenly among various groups in society because, when individual persons are assessed without discrimination, the group they belong to plays no part in the positive, nor in the negative sense. If the best cook is selected by capacity, and it appears that people with big ears make better cooks, it is an error to start testing ears instead of cooking skills, no matter how fiercely defended by people with big ears. Yet, recent progress in genetic science has been used
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as a new handle for racist commotion, and proves that an improper but convenient ideology is easier spread than halted among an eager public.
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), wilfully stir up racism by highlighting the known fact that black Americans today, on the average, score slightly worse than the average American citizen in IQ tests. Charles Murray, in his after word of the 1996 edition, contests that the book is primarily about race, and points out that merely twenty pages handle racial topics. 669 Yet, the title, the marketing, the hundreds of pages about hereditary intelligence and comments about genetic variation between loosely defined ‘groups’ have only meaning in reference with ethnicity, or else they would only state the superfluous, that the poor are less successful than the rich.
Although welcomed by many as a serious scientific work of courageous academics, its racist background and even Nazi association has been fairly demonstrated. Seventeen of the researchers cited in The Bell Curve have written in a publication called The Mankind Quarterly, while ten citations refer to the editors or former editors of this publication. The goals of The Mankind Quarterly become clear when we learn that one editor took part in the race science under Hitler during Nazi Germany’s rise to power, and that it receives funding from The Pioneer Fund, an organization established in 1937 CE by a Nazi Germany sympathizer. The Bell Curve makes reference to thirteen scholars who have received funding (over $4 million dollars) from this Pioneer Fund.670
The book begins with an appeal not to deny differences in hereditary intelligence out of misplaced reticence:
for the last thirty years, the concept of intelligence has been a pariah in the world of ideas. The attempt to measure it has been variously dismissed as an artefact of racism, political reaction, statistical bungling, and scholarly fraud.
But in the crucial chapter 13, Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability, we are warned not to use racial differences ‘as a license for treating all whites as intellectual superior to blacks’. As for all paragraphs, un-stated questions and implied answers linger. For example: how many whites may be treated as intellectual superior to blacks, if not all? Was perhaps meant ‘no whites’ or ‘some whites’? Are the authors just
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sloppy with words, or are they suggesting to separate a white lower class genetic group?
Even if the serious scientific criticism towards the value and interpretation of IQ tests is left aside, the rest of the work is implying much and stating nothing. It is like a wagon crunching under haystacks of statistical data, speeding through open doors while leaving behind a thick, unhealthy smoke of prejudices.
The authors agree that the average IQ of black Americans has evolved towards the general average during the preceding fifty years, but imply even so that the difference might well be genetic, and enigmatically will stop evolving the moment their book is published.
The bell curve is the statistic figure essential to the discussion. This curve became a strong icon but was not interpreted seriously. At the time of publication of the book, the IQ’s of white and black Americans, ordered in two bell curves, reflected that virtually all blacks and whites fall within the same boundaries; that the difference between the highest and lowest IQ within the white or within the black part of the population is a manifold of the difference between the average black and the average white; and that the somewhat educated black American is likely to be more ‘intelligent’ than the next fellow American he meets – if he should ever care, because healthy societies thrive well with people of various looks and differing cleverness.
The ill nature of the book is exposed definitely where it bluntly asks:How much good would it do to encourage education for the people earning low wages?
The authors, almost jubilantly, answer ‘no good’, and base their judgement, not on the need for emancipation and well being of individuals, nor on the need for progress. They base their judgement on objections of employers dreaming of a medieval society thriving on an illiterate serfdom...
an older intellectual tradition than social democracy or even socialism. In our view, it is also a wiser tradition, more attuned to the way in which individuals go about…
This older ‘intellectual tradition’ remains also vague, but can but be a hierarchic society in which clerkdom counters change and progress by means of ideological constructs, and keep the majority of the population in a state of dependency and poverty. It is the ‘intellectual
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tradition’ in which Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Isaac Newton would have been urged to find a satisfactory life in the confinement of their humble neighbourhood – the ‘intellectual tradition’ that halted progress from the fall of Rome until the fall of Córdoba.
The most important flaw of the book however is a whole missing chapter on the lack of education of black Americans in the USA in the course of the twentieth century CE, since all scholars – even the authors themselves - agree that the effects of the social, nutritional and educational setting on IQ test results surpass by far the deviations cited in The Bell Curve.
Only in 1954 CE the U.S. Supreme Court held racial segregation in education unconstitutional. Only in 1957 CE the Central High School of Little Rock adopted a gradual desegregation plan, but when nine black children wanted to enter the school, severe white riots followed. In 1962 CE Oxford was torn by white rioting over the enrolment of the first black student at the University of Mississippi. It is obvious that a chapter on black education would have demonstrated that fair IQ figures are likely to arrive at about 2062 CE, when the happenings in Little Rock and Oxford will have disappeared behind the hundred-years horizon.
To deny education is to spoil a century. Herrnstein lectured and Murray studied in Harvard while black Americans were refused appropriate education on racial grounds. The sufferers of this segregation were still alive when The Bell Curve was published to exploit the long-term statistical effects of this segregation to refuel the public’s vague sentiment that something in racism might be true. To arrive at this goal the writers did not need to write a rational, unambiguous study - science was not really required. It was sufficient to write a ‘most provocative’671 work and ‘kick up reaction’.672
Western education has meticulously upheld Atlantic ideology throughout the twentieth century. When Adolf Hitler and other boys went to school, they learned that their race was superior, that it was the noble calling of the Germanic peoples to civilize the world, that colonialism was a blessing to the submitted continents, and that Alexander’s brute killing and looting of innocent citizens was the civilizing act of a superb genius. Here little Adolf and his friends learned that Germany had not yet fully lived up to the expectations expressed in the Indogerman myth produced by Atlantic ideology – a
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thesis still slumbering between the lines in most Atlantic education institutes.
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ConclusionAt this point I have well demonstrated how people cause their own suffering, and how they try to overcome their insanity before it is too late.
But when will it be too late?
During the last few decennia world population has doubled, and as a consequence competition lead ever grimmer mass slaughter. In Kosovo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Indonesia, people made up quasi fictituous ethnicities, while the real cause became clear in the midst of the tragedy, for example when multi-ethnic crowds are teared up by explosions: the hidden cause then shows to be to reap as many heads, to whipe out as many people as possible.673 Then a debate follows about the qualification of the slaughter as a 'genocide', as if it were an honourary title.
It is a dangerous miscalculation that population problems only occur in poor countries, and that the others must only close their borders and wait. Population is expected to double again in the next decades, and we will see mass slaughter of neighbours, wrapped in ready made ideologies, spreading over all continents. Indeed poor people are the first to feel depletion, but when depletion continues it is only a matter of time for the richer countries to fall. Isolating the poor is physically infeasible. Attempts to seal them off require armed border control, remaining ineffective until violence is idolized in television programmes and political rhetorics. This will effect the domestic behaviour of unstable people and misfits first, after which common people will gradually take the retoric into their neighbourhoods. Outward violent ideology always contaminates domestic life. Ideology imports the tragedy of the poor to the rich. Present day shootouts at schoolyards and gettos are only the first timid tryouts.
It can be no coincidence that exactly when civilians must give up killing because bullets become sparse or their elbows hurt from lifting knifes, weapons are developed that could solve all their problems in one blow. It is a sad commonplace that the weaponry existing today was unimagined by the most sadistic tyrant only a century ago.
As long as the majority of people is still sane, democratic control could keep weapons in safety, if not prevent their development. But
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closed borders and secrecy make democratic control impossible. Lack of openness makes it impossible to keep dangerous weapons away from the murderer who needs them for more than a few years. This is how dictators are helped and how wars are started.
While the link between mass destruction and weapons of mass destruction is, after all, quite obvious, the link with industry and ideology is more conceiled. But only think of the growing impact of ever more perilous industrial processes on shrinking natural environments, and listen to the aggressive discourses required to support those processes. Ask yourself if the actual concurrence of massive violence of all kinds with the destruction of natural environments, with the preaching of jungle laws in warfare and commerce, with the preaching of innate predestination – ask yourself if this concurrence is merely some sad coincidence, or if it is the outcome of a population explosion as described before.
Conditions of modernity
This essay has tried to trace what makes societies switch from war to peace and back, and make us act violent one time and caring another. The root cause of structural violence turned out to be child exploitation, started in the Nes Stona Age, and the ensuing population explosion. The ideologies and mentalities that emerged during this process have become self sustaining, and will not melt away when population numbers drop.
Nobody has a recipe for modernity. But at the end of this study it is possible to reflect on some minimal conditions.
ChildbirthThe first condition is that childbirth should no longer be promoted. Only a minority of children is born out of love for children. Enriched countries should no longer encourage births to balance pension funds. Poor countries should no longer produce children as a workforce or family insurance. No nation should ever produce children to feed the battlefields.
Every woman should be free to chose the number of children she bears, but parents should take responsibility in raising their children
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to educated and forthcoming world citizens. No child should bring an other advantage to anyone but its love.
Aid and incentives meant to better the lives of children, should befall to those children. But the sums spent at this goal only demonstrate that the real security issue is nowhere understood.
The sum of military budgets worldwide amounts to one trillion dollars. This is a thousandfold of what the United Nations children's fund, Unicef, recieves to defend the rights of children.
A trillion dollars is spent each year to spread destitution and bitterness - a billion dollars and a halve to save humanity.
A Global Child Trust should be funded urgently, to create schools of quality education, whith sleeping and eating facilities and playgrounds; to provide counselling; to provide free communication and free travel; to allow children to learn at the school of their own choice, in whatever country. Finally this trust should keep track of children and secure their rights and savings.
The second task of this trust would be to define and provide no-birth compensations. Where children are used for insurance, an insurance should be given in a better manner to people with fewer children. In rich countries where children are wanted to finance pensions, investments made in public health could pay back by having healthy people work more years in an adjusted and rewarding manner.
The third task of a Global Child Trust would be the promotion of free birth control.
After just one generation this could lead to more wealth and opportunities, with a better environment, with more human talent built up and with more dignity and less frustration and violence. The cost of social security will decrease because fewer people will be poor, but also because reappearing wastelands will allow cheaper production and alternative ways of life.
BordersThe second condition is to open borders for people, goods and information.
Whenever borders were dismantled by expanding and collapsing civilizations, worlds supposed to be eternal fell apart, minds opened and skepticism became inevitable. As a result traditionalism had to
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give way to progress and sometimes modernity; collectivism had to give way to individualism; the amazing diversity of nature was no longer the work of frightening demons, but became treasured as an enchanting labyrinth.
Only since the twentieth century state borders are physically sealed and defended by arms against families fleeing hunger. Closed borders cause the isolation of countries devastated by economical and political disasters, and aggravate the risk of war in two ways.
The first way is that the closing of borders cut ancient lifelines of emigration. Migrations have always been a remedy against uneven repartition of resources and an escape from poverty, and could keep frustrations below explosive levels for a longer time.
Migration is cheaper and more efficient than ‘development aid’, which often disrupts local economies by dumping surpluses of goods, personnel and waste. For enriched countries it is also much cheaper and safer to share progress and modernity than to close borders by arms and track down a growing stream of hunger refugees. The only effective, and even beneficial way to stop streams of hunger refugees, is to allow to their homelands a flourishing economy and the prospect of well-priced, valued export – by opening borders. Sharing progress is not only beneficial economically, it is also the only practical path to security.
The second way closed borders aggravate the risks of aggression is that they allow countries to build up a war machinery unhindered. At the same time they facilitate crime, because state borders slow down police action while criminals seep through in search of shelter. Contemporary slave trade for instance, with its millions of victims yearly, is obviously not stopped by guarded borders, but employs those borders as a protection from national police forces. Opening borders makes secret armies and totalitarianism impossible, hampers crime and invigorates exchange and thus progress and modernity, the ultimate and strongest antidote to aggression.
Next to state boundaries exist information boundaries, also between citizens and administrations. The levelling down of those borders is part of the same condition for modernity. In our time the Internet makes it is possible to publicize for unlimited millions, at almost no cost, every word spoken in every room of every state department and court. Secrecy in government must be categorized as high treason.
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What is said about education above remains meaningless unless boundaries are destroyed: only if boundaries disappear, education stops to be indoctrination and ‘stupification’.
The opening of border has always been feared by ideologies, because openness leads to skepticism and unbiased learning. Ideologies will no longer be transmitted easily to new generations. It is disturbing to witness how youths are pumped up for warfare by media, politicians and history lessons. An enjoyable life for the people we treasure is only possible if we reject preachers who claim ancient traditions and knowledge, cosmic privileges or sacred power, and call for war, martyrdom and agony. No society can reach modernity without disavowing its prophets of madness urgently, completely and unconditionally. The arts hide for their responsibility in a dull entertainment industry, but failing to clean up ancient lingering ghosts will have for consequence that modernity will be chased by those ghosts at each economical setback.
ArmamentThe most obvious condition for modernity is to phase out the development, production and sales of weaponry. Since weapons are inevitably sold around the world, through both legal and illegal circuits, this measure does not favour any party in particular.
Weapon industries take arms to ever higher destructive levels, while there exists no way to keep them out of the hands of the malicious. As the latter usually starts the violence, creating and marketing more dangerous weapons is an immediate cause of disaster. Weapon industries can only survive with the help of governments: together they can redirect production to better goals.
At the same time armies should be changed into police organizations that prevent conflicts, instead of joining them. Therefore, all deviations from civil law and penalty must be omitted. Everyone in those police organizations should obey the same laws and courts as everybody else, under all circumstances, and be responsible for victims, civil and others, like any corporation is responsible for the safety of own personnel and of outsiders. This new organization is a civil institute, a new type of police force, ready to use its strong organization and huge budgets for the nearly unlimited needs of progress, in cooperation with all social forces, taking up tasks of policing, peacekeeping, improvement, protection, disaster aid and
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social research. Finally, such police force should never change or influence political situations.
It is impossible to dismantle all armies of the world at the same moment. If such an agreement would ever be reached, it would be nearly impossible to control, and certainly some countries would circumvent it and keep a secret army out of fear or malice. It is the same with scaffolding: it is certainly possible to remove it, but it must be done with care and coordination, in the right order. First, the gradually opening of borders to people, goods, media and information must enable free inspections, prevent concealment and weaken ideological fabrications. This opening will also boost education and progress, and consequently reduce world population pressure, the primary cause of frustration and conflicts. Then step by step armies can be turned into police forces answering to civil authorities.
If ever erroneous politics failed so profoundly that the short term use of weapons becomes inevitable, this police force is sufficient to enforce law – either on the national or on the international level – with the approval of all governments and the almost complete population of the territory involved, as is common in all police actions.
Our longing for an enjoyable life is genetic if anything is
If modernity would eventually win the race with traditionalism and violence, the wheel of rebirth of civilizations would come to an end. It would be replaced by a worldwide community of individuals, managing their lives with insight and agreement.
The awareness that all ideologies are created by humans with tainted motivations will lead to a universal meta-culture based on vigorous skepticism, provisory knowledge and cautious hope. This is a very old dream, more visible and more jeopardized in every new century, and this century is our last chance to realize it. There is no necessity that it we will succeed, but the only alternative is the end of humanity, which, since it found a beginning against all odds, might be justly condemned to destroy itself, and return to silence.
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The only alternative to our destruction is a society where individuals are open minded, investigative, forthcoming world citizens; where the liberty to create, change and demonstrate opinions is cherished; where all means are used to protect each individual, disregarding his or her position. It is a society without social, sexual, racial or any other discrimination. It is a society without bodily punishment and without public, private or official cruelty; without suffering, either inflicted by fellow humans or by misfortune. This society can never be reached by violence. It requires the emancipation of individuals to autonomy and dignity, and the decrease of ignorance, fear and deception. In such a society no person will be sacrificed for the advantage of a community or group: not as a slave, not as a martyr, not as a soldier, not as collateral damage.
An ancient Persian verse reads:Every one’s life is necessary for the enjoyment and pleasure of the worldly existence, and when the enjoyment and pleasure of the worldly existence are not his, and fear and even falsehood are with him, it is called worse than death.674
Each time an individual is sacrificed for others, progress of humanity as a whole is hampered. The only way to a society in which it is good to live, is found by seeking a good life for every person. If a good life for every person has become impossible because of overpopulation and resource exhaustion, a good society remains impossible.
Modernity is not a menu from which an individual, culture, religion or government can pick and at will. It reflects how each single person should be treated by any individual, any group or any regime. It has nothing to do with one particular culture, Western or other. None of it can be taken away, nor given away, unless modernity fails. It is a perversion to claim the right to give up individual rights.
Human history is of a bewildering cruelty. If this is how we are, we can do nothing but sit down and wait for our destruction. Not the cruelty of our past however, but the abhorrence in which we perceive it is our reason for hope.There would be nothing to hope for, if we would not be horrified by the past. The dream of a world without war, deprivation and cruelty is persistent in old myths about a golden age, in poets and thinkers of all times, in tokens laid down in works of art, in a piece of brain in every human being. Everywhere and over again, the notion survives that things must not be as brutal as they are.
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After all those years and all those words I have to return to the child at the beginning. And I must admit that what I have learned as an old man at much effort, is not so different from what I saw as a five year old in a little village: we are all refugees with hope hidden under ragged clothes, as a cracked and dirty passport to a better life.
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Appendix A: overview of world civilizations
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Appendix B: old world civilizations chart
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Notes1 While I review those lines, Israel is condemned by the United Nations for erecting another concrete wall in Palestine, and the Iron curtain between the USA and Mexico still stands.2 E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature. 3 Ibid. 4 David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. 5 Richard C. Lewontin, The Doctrine of DNA. Biology as Ideology.6 Ibid.7 Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism.8 A large halibut produces up to three million eggs, of which on the average two survive. 9 See appendix B: old world civilizations chart.10 For a confusion of ‘small community’ with pre-history see Napoleon Chagnon’s The Yanomamo, criticized in Patrick Tierny, Darkness in El Dorado. For a confusion of prehistoric cultures see Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization, criticized in R.B. Ferguson, The Causes and Origins of Primitive Warfare.11 Jacob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere12 Olaus Magnus Gothus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555); Johannes Schefferus, Lapponia (1673), translated The History of Lappland (1971)13 Colin Turnbull, The Forest People14 Patrick Tierney, The Highest Altar15 James L. Frazer, The Golden Bough16 Bible book Genesis 3:2217 Chandogya Upanishad 6.318 Walker, C. B. F., and Kramer, S.N., Cuneiform Tablets in the Collection of Lord Binning, Iraq 44 (1982), 71-86: 78-83 quoted in The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. 19 Bible book Genesis 1:1, 1:25, 2:720 Nikolai Buhkarin, Historical Materialism (1921)21 Porphyry, On The Life Of Plotinus chapter 222 Taittiriyaka Upanishad 1.6.123 Bible book Genesis 6:5 (‘every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually’) is the first, Acts 5:4 (‘why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart?’) one of the last, at least for the Christian Bible. The two are separated by five centuries. Spinosa has
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remarked the same: ‘the heart was considered by the Hebrews, as I suppose everyone knows, to be the seat of the soul and the intellect.’ (A Theologico-Political Treatise 3.50)24 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things25 René Descartes, Treatise on Man (1664). Translated by John Cottingham, et al. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 1 p. 100, Cambridge University Press, 1985.26 Under Zoroastrianism Mithra became the god of covenants, and was later merged with the Lord of Knowledge (Ahura Mazda), who inspired to the biblical Lord, jealously securing knowledge and establishing a covenant with Israel. See below.27 St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles IV.28 Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation of the Heathen chapter XII. 29 Targum of Jonathan-ben-Uzziah. Cited in e-text by Joseph Smith, Apologetic Paper on the Quran.30 Koran 5.31 (translation Yusufali)31 William Shakespeare, Hamlet III, i, 72-7532 In trying to impose some order on the spiritualistic confusion, I use the terms ‘spirit’ and ‘ghost’ as synonyms indicating appearances of persons. The term ‘demon’ points at non-human appearances, which are mostly prehistoric (resembling animals and so on) or religious (resembling devils or gods). 33 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.3.14. 34 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.3.9-1035 Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.236 Katha Upanishad, 5.13.37 Bible book of Proverbs 3:19-2038 Chandogya Upanishad 3.14.239 Chandogya Upanishad 7.12.140 Chandogya Upanishad 3.12.7-9 41 The Greek word for intellect, nous, is related to the Sanskrit word for intellect Manas. This etymological correspondence has no bearing on the philosophical connection between âkâsa and nous. 42 Plato, Timaeus43 Plato, Theaetetus44 Plato, Timaeus.45 Herodotus, History book II46 Letter of Paul to the Galathians, 5:19-2047 Corpus Hermeticum: The Key (second century CE)48 Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul (approx.200 CE) chapter 12.
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49W E Gohlman, The life of Ibn Sina (New York, 1974); Felix Klein-Franke, Zhu Ming, Dai Qi: American Journal of Chinese Medicine, Summer-Fall, 2001 (e-text at findarticles.com)50 See the chapter on Europe, subtitle: Two-faced truth: the separation of science and religion51 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)52 John Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding53 Throughout this essay I report on philosophy as I do on war, religion, slavery and so on, but do not presume to take part. Richard Rorty has presented an in depth critique of Cartesian philosophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.54 Much as the earth’s biosphere, the human body consists for about 60% of water. On the average, this body contains about 1 with 27 zeroes water molecules. The biosphere amounts to 1 with 53 zeroes water molecules, which are likely to be blended and dispersed by vapour and rain every 2000 years. If the water molecules belonging to a person living 2000 years ago are completely dissolved in the biosphere as it is now, every 1 with 26 zeroes water molecules in the biosphere today (53 zeoroes minus 27 zeroes) contains a molecule from this person. Since every human takes up 10 times more molecules (1 with 27 zeroes) molecules, each of us carries about 10 molecules from the bodies of Confucius, Buddha, Jesus..55 George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge par. 1.4 (1710)56 Ibid.57 Kandogya Upanishad 5.10.1. A rough imprint of this vigorous world-image has reached Europe via Orphism, Heracleitus and Pythagoras. Later interpretors of Heracleitus mixed it with the ideological apology of war and made vulgar violence a cosmic necessity. This confusion reached our times through Nietzsche and Nazism. 58 Tao-te-ching 42. ‘obscurity’ and ‘brightness’ are yin and yang, originally the shadowed and sunny flank of a mountain. The myriad of things is wan wu, literally ‘ten thousand things’, but figuratively used to mean ‘all things in existence’ (note that in ancient Greek also ‘myriad’ means ‘ten thousand’.) The ‘force of matter’ is qi. J. Legge has translated qi by ‘Breath of Vacancy’, while Prof. Wing-tsit Chan has translated qi as ‘material force’. I tried cautiously to free the english text from romantic obscurantism. 59 Shu Ching 5.4.3.1 (etext at sacred-texts.com).60 Avesta Yasht 13.73-80
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61 Most Japanese people will find this distinction unimportant, while Japanese monotheists can become very upset about it. 62 The storm god, ‘Kami-Kaze’, is made well known by the Japanese air force during World War II. 63 Hirata, A Morning Prayer, cited by George William Gilmore in: Animism, or thoughts and currents of primitive peoples (etext at sacred-texts.com).64 Mahabharata XII:59. Adapted from Ainslee T. Embree, The Hindu Tradition, Readings in Oriental Thought (New York 1972). This section of the Mahabharata is seldom published, maybe because it does not match the present-day ‘spiritualistic’, as opposed to ‘materialistic’, aura of Hinduism.65 As all sacrifice find its origin in forefather cults, sacrifice to keep gods alive is very frequent in literature It is found in African myths (Yoruba), in Japan (Shinto), in Greece and so on. 66 Fung Yu-Lan, Chuang-tzu, A New Seleted Translation with an Exposition of the Philosophy of Kuo Hsiang (Beijing, 1989)67 In the Honan province wanton soup is called ‘huntun’. In Shanghai xiao huntun soup is a popular breakfast. In the Guangdong province, known for its its coal mines, huntun it is a soup cooked with shrimp sperm.68 Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. (New York 1968) 69 Bible book of Psalms 74:13-14. In Hebrew, ‘Yam’ means sea (or sea monster). 70 Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, Rapports sur le sauvage de l'Aveyron (1807). Francois Truffaud based his film L’Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child , 1970) on his story.71 John Milton, Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The Parliament Of England (1643)72 Karl Jaspers, On My Philosophy (1941. Published in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. W. Kaufman)73 In Western philosophy up to the most recent schools, ‘truth’ refers to a theory that represents reality. Charles Sanders Peirce was of the opinion that ‘truth’ is found at the point of convergence of various scientific theories, and Bertrand Russell defined ‘truth’ as something agreed by all. But it would be dangerous to have majorities or statistics produce truth. To the philosophy of the oldest Upanishads, ‘truth’ is not a statement produced by our mind, but a synonym of reality itself. In Hinduism, only the thoughts of Brahma are reality.
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74 The Elements of Euclid is one of the scientific works that entered Europe through Muslim Córdoba. Euclid of Alexandria wrote in Greek, which was then the lingua franca of intellectual life on three continents. Just as in the case of an other famous scientist, Ptolemy, nothing indicates that Euclid ever left Africa. Proclus, the last heathen philosopher, commented that the science described in the Elements - geometry, measurement of land - was from Egyptian origin. Nobody knows for sure the nationality of Euclid, and the cosmopolitan nature of the Alexandrian era makes it even a trivial question. Yet he has been called so many times a Greek without any ground, that is is nice to be sensible for once and call him an African.75 René Descartes, Discours on Method. 76 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason (Preface to the second edition, 1787)77 Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York 1988)78 At the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Sanders Peirce has described thinking as a process in three steps: first abduction (or guessing what the case might be), then deduction (to envision the necessary consequences of this case), and finally induction (to test if the necessary consequences indeed happen). In the course of the twentieth century the notion that discoveries as such have not much to do with reasoning, has spread among philosophers of science (see Allan Newell, Herbert Simon, Hans Reichenbach…). 79 Forced labour was also involved in the cultivation of other plants like gourds, beans,… but none of them required as much labour as the family of gramineae. The hypothesis that children are produced as labourers predicts that the crops demanding most labour will become most prevalent, and this is the case with the gramineae. 80 A primitive stone mill, resembling a saddle.81 Theya Molleson, The Eloquent Bones of Abu Hureyra, in Scientific American august 1994.82 Marvin Harris, Culture, People, Nature. An Introduction to general anthropology.83 Partha S. Dasgupta, Population, Poverty and the Local Environment, in Scientific American February 1995.84 Jared Diamond, The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race (e-text at anthropology.lbcc.edu).85 The similarity between plundering gangs and regular armies has been blurred when Western observers became accustomed to well organised, disciplined and technologically controlled nation-state armies. The similarity is likely to reappear in the new century, when
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the same evlution will make weapons of mass production/destruction available to a large public. 86 Marvin Harris asserts (in Culture, People, Nature) that life expectancy for commoners during the rise of the state was lower than it was at the beginning of labour, which in turn was lower than it was among Ice Age hunters.87 February 2003 Aqua Bounty Farms (Waltham, Massachusetts) announced the successful creation of the first transgenic animal, a salmon, which needs less food and grows at double speed. 88 Daily Telegraph (London) of January 23, 2002.89 This paragraph is all about the extremely infectious and fatal ‘Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI)’, also known as fowl plague. A mild ‘Low Pathogenic Avian Influenza (LPAI)’ exists too. Tom Pennycott explained in may 2003, at the Scottish Agricultural College website: ‘It is believed that a low pathogenic strain of influenza virus, identified as H7N7, was introduced by wild birds in the southwest of The Netherlands [..]. As has occurred on numerous occasions before, the virus then mutated into a highly pathogenic form…’90 Rinderpest (a German name) infects cattle, buffalo, antelope and giraffe. It is also known as the cattle plague and steppe murrain.91 Reuters Health, July 25th 2003.92 John H. Relethford, The Human Species (1997).93 Bernice Wuethrich in Science Magazine March 7th 2003.94 Newspaper De Volkskrant, April 16th 2003 95 BBC News of September 6th, 2001. (etext at news.bbc.co.uk)96 In December 2003 the press communicates that BSE has been detected for the first time in the USA. Its origin was traced back to Canada.97 The De Beers company and the OPEC organization are excellent examples.98 The Legend Of The Destruction Of Mankind, from Legends of the Egyptian Gods. Translation E. A. Wallis Budge. 99 Bible book Genesis 2.20-22. Most scholars believe today that two legends are mixed here, and that the sentence about the creation of animals has been inserted into the legend of the creation of man and woman. Anyway, the bible has been read for the last millennia, and still today, with the maker trying to console Adam with animal companions, before thinking of a human female. 100 Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages101 Jordanes, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths IV.25. Jordanes, in the 6th century CE, referring to the far north, spoke of a fictitious
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Island of Scandza.102 Menog-i Khrad 16.15 103 Marquis de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795).104 All quotes from the lemma on ‘Theories of Population’.105 The ‘law of diminishing returns’, also called ‘Brentano’s law’ or the ‘law of marginal productivity’, has in some form been treated by Thomas Malthus, James Anderson, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Justus Liebig, Karl Marx and numerous others. Marx wrote that in his time it was ‘quite commonplace, and known to every schoolboy’.106 Encyclopaedia Britannica 2000, lemma fossil fuel.107 Price delivered and untaxed. One kilogram of hydrogen holds about as much energy as one gallon (3.8 liters) of gasoline. Information frrom the US Department of Energy at www1.eere.energy.gov.108 Below I have more to say about scientific solutions and the ‘marginal productivity doctrine’.109 Thomas Maltus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (1798).110 Malthus based his population projection on numbers observed in USA immigration. His – after all optimistic - production forecast suggest that he was not totally indifferent to the utopianism he condemned verbally. In the days of European Enlightenment, marriage was the (only) sex permit, handed out by religious authority. By a ‘moral check’ Malthus means nothing but a more severe regulation of marriage.111 Father Pesch, Lehrbuch der Nationalökonomie (1909), cited in the Catholic Encyclopedia. The quotation has the typical vagueness of Catholic ‘insight’. This ‘quality of a people’, the Encyclopedia suggests, means that it has morals rendering it ‘industrious, frugal, averse to debilitating comforts, and willing to refrain from all immoral practices in the conjugal relation’. Furthermore it embraces religious celibacy, while ‘others live chastely and yet defer marriage for a longer or shorter period, and many emigrate whenever the population of any region becomes congested’. To such a people of high quality ‘undue pressure of population upon subsistence will never occur except locally and temporarily’. Here a quite opportunistic blend of Malthus and Condorcet is presented: ‘there will be no overpopulation, and if there will be one, people must abstain from sex and emigrate’. Two important questions are not considered here: whereto exactly a
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surplus population should emigrate, - and how much ‘local and temporary’ misery is acceptable. Dangerous assertions as the one made here have no other foundation than that Catholic academics desire them to be truth 112 Possibly arms traders will develop long distance bugger fragmentation bombs, augmenting the classic atomic, biological and chemical hazards with repulsion, all in the same projectile.113 Lisa Mastny and Brian Halweil (Worldwatch Institute) in an on-line discussion of Jan 2004, about their publication State of the World 2004. (etext at worldwatch.org).114 David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.115 People were convicted under laws on moral offences.116 Catholic Encyclopedia citing Edwin R.A. Seligman, Principles of Economics (1905). 117 I think of Alfred Espinas, Des Sociètès animales (1877), Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902); Victor Westhof, Wilde Planten (1973)118 Aitareya-Aranyaka 3.1.1.7119 This is an example found on the Internet: ‘Human settlements account for less than three percent of the earth's land area, and if the entire world population moved to Texas, each person would have 1,400 square feet.’ The author does not estimate the land price in Texas by then. (Sheldon Richman, The Population Problem That Isn't, e-text at www.fff.org 1993)120 Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson, in an article called Does Race Exist, in Scientific American of December 2003, wrote that ‘The outward signs on which most definitions of race are based-such as skin colour and hair texture – are dictated by a handful of genes. But the other genes of two people of the same “race” can be very different. Conversely, two people of different “races” can share more genetic similarity than two individuals of the same race.’ Dark skin and curly hair are a protection for sun rays. People of the plains are taller, forest people are smaller. Comparison of such outward signs with the migration history of a population indicates that they were selected out within millenaries. 121 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man.122 There can however be great loss to scientific – anthropological – research if a culture disappears without leaving records. But one can hardly expect people to go on living in a way they do not desire, just because they are interesting study objects. This would anyway lead to a new culture and thus hardly solve the research problem.
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123 David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, chapter 21.124 One typical case is the theory why air planes fly, based on a principle discovered in the eighteenth century by Daniel Bernoulli. This principle says that air flowing over the curved top surface of a wing moves faster than the air flowing on the bottom surface, which results in a stronger upward pressure. During the nineties of the twentieth century this clearly scientific theory was more and more denigrated as ‘popular’, and replaced by a purely Newtonian explanation. At the beginning of the twenty first century however, a debate about the extent of the role of Bernoulli's principle is still ongoing. The new vision was presented to a wide public by Gail Craig in Stop Abusing Bernoulli! How Air planes Really Fly. (Indiana 1997). Another example is found in recent medical science. From 1995 CE on, studies were published on the negative effects of post menopausal hormones administered to prevent bone brittle. Although those hormones were administered for years, the new studies expressed that the risk of breast cancer increases with 50% to 70% after medication for five or more years, and that the costly prescriptions in the end have no clear positive balance. With those remarks it is not my intention to ridicule science, but to honour scientific progress. 125 David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, chapter 4. ‘Joie de trouver’ = ‘joy of finding’.126 Bible book Genesis 6:4-6. The verses are somewhat blurred in the available monotheistic version. ‘Sons of God’ mean worshipped idols, rivals to the Lord of the Jews. The most ancient Churchfaters saw them indeed as fallen angels, like idols and Satan. 127 Bible book Genesis 2:17, 3:23. The tree symbolizes research on medicinal plants, typical for Persia but forbidden to Jews. 128 Bible book Genesis 11:5-8.129 Sad Dar 3.1-2130 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History.131 Georg W.H. Hegel, Philosophy of history.132 Bible book 32 Samuel 22:14133 Andrew Dickson White, The Warfare of Science With Theology, Chapter XII: From Magic To Chemistry And Physics. (1896 – e-text at infidels.org).134 Pope Innocent VIII: Bull Summis desiderantes, 1484. 135 Friar Johann Sprenger and Friar Heinrich Kraemer, Malleus maleficarum, 1487, Question X
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136 Those deaths usually take place in small groupuscules, but mainstream religions are anyhow responsible by nourishing the animistic belief in demoniac possession. 137 The Scientist, October 8, 2004.138 Andrew Robinson, Lost Languages. The first Greek alphabet was from the Phoenician origin, and is known as Linear B.139 The oldest steam engine we know is described by Hero of Alexandria, in the first century CE, in A Treatise On Pneumatics.140 James D. Watson, The Double Helix.141 Andrew Robinson, Lost Languages.142 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions143 I suggest to coin this phenomenon Hegel’s proof following his scientific proof ‘all Englishmen agree’ to attest the abandoned morality of the Indian race. See below.144 The Big Bang theory was first proposed by the Jesuit priest Abbé Georges Lemaître around 1920 CE.145 John Maddox, What Remains to be Uncovered 146 See appendix A and B147 Michael W. Doyle, in Empires: ‘A metropolis is constituted from three determinative elements: first a strong, united, central government; second, a thorough sense of public legitimacy or community, widely shared among the governing population, whether elite or mass; and third, a substantial degree of social differentiation’. Spectacular wealth and resources are not a primary issue.148 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York 1987)149 Stephen Blaha, The Life Cycle of Civilizations ( Auburn 2002).150 Bible book 2 Samuel, 21151 Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians.152 Henri J. M. Claessen, The Early State153 Richard. G. Wilkinson, Poverty and Progress.154 Lewis Mumford called this a bronze age innovation in The City in History: ‘The new machines themselves have long awaited recognition, or rather, proper identification. For the earliest complex power machines were composed, not of wood or metal, but of perishable human parts…’155 James Wilson sailed the Southern Pacific from 1796 till 1798 CE and published his notations the next year in London. 156 First bible book of Samuel 1:24157 Jacobus de Voragine, Aurea Legenda (English etext at fordham.edu)
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158 Herodotes, History (book IV): ‘the Phoenicians took their departure from Egypt by way of the Erythraean sea, and so sailed into the southern ocean. When autumn came, they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited until the grain was fit to cut. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not till the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyage home. On their return, they declared- I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may- that in sailing round Libya they had the sun upon their right hand.’ This last remark, placing the sun north, proofs sufficiently that the Phoenicians indeed passed the equator. On the other hand it is almost impossible to grow corn successfully from the first time in an unknown soil and climate. Pharaoh Necos who sponsored the expedition, certainly knew of previous accomplishments – why else should he exactly hire Phoenicians and not send his own subjects? All this supports the conclusion that the Phoenicians had already passed the Cape of Good Hope before, and used an established network of trading contacts and landing places.159 Mahabaratha chap.16 160 In prehistoric art, groups of animals are sometimes painted as such, but on other occasions the multitude is represented by dots, either meandering through the landscape as it would be perceived by a distant hunter, or ordered geometrically, making it easier to keep an exact copy in memory. The latter form indicates a rising ability to visualize and define abstract quantities. The ancient painter added to those dots one image of an animal – the one image in his mind – to explain the meaning of the dots. Once this way of thinking was spread, many natural phenomena – most of all the starry firmament – must have begot a completely new and larger meaning. A beautiful example are two large opposed white horses in the cave of Peche Merle, with black dots all over their body. No grey horses existed at the time, it is clear that this is an effort to represent an all encompassing world force.
It is known that intelligent animals in general (dogs, birds…) are aware of a number of objects up to four. The ancient magical seven, which is obtained by placing a pattern of two by three dots next to the drawing of one animal, was a new perceptive limit to all humans: today it is still the highest number an average person can discern at a glance.
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Marks or dots remained in use to indicate numbers in ancient Phoenician cargo-lists and in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The high age of pictography is also demonstrated in the widespread sign for woman, a triangle derived from the vulva, traceable in prehistoric (Aurignacian) cave art, in ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform writing, in South Indian religious symbolism, in Romanian tokens (still used today by robbers to mark target residences), and so on. Used for at least twenty thousand years it is the oldest known pictogram.
It is important in this regard not to mix up symbolism with representation. Signs are simplified likes, and thus are not essentially different from other pictures. Representation has been used by craftsmen or women for twenty thousand years, and simplified representation was a smooth evolution. Symbolism is to disguise one thing as an other. It is suitable to proof anything, and often produces false claims. A national flag, a military hat, the cross and the crescent moon are symbols.161 See Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?162 Herodotus, History book II. The scroll the priests read up was a copy resembling the damaged one today present in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, which is almost two meters long and forty centimetres wide. We know the initial list of gods from Manetho, who wrote a History of Egypt in late antique times. They were Ptah (Called Hephaestus by Manetho, Vulcan by the Romans), Ra (Helios), Shu (Agathodaemon, ‘benevolent demon’), Seb (Cronus), Osiris, Set (Typhon), Horus.163 In Medieval Europe, and even until the nineteenth century, the Egyptian king list was a competitor of the official biblical world chronology. As usually (and still in many issues under discussion today) the African sources were refuted as impossible nonsense. Today historians study the Egyptian lists seriously.164 The Shabaka stone is now in the British Museum. There is no reason to accept the wondrous discovery of an ancient scroll in the first place. Remark the striking similarity with the Book of the Law (Deuteronomy 12-26) supposedly found by the Judean King Josiah in the Temple of Jerusalem at about 622 BCE.165 Examples of recuperation are various Triads modelled after the basic family, like the Theban Triad in which Amon-Ra has Mut for consort and Khonsu for child. Such triads could again be incorporated in wider constructions by competing clerks. Examples are the eight gods of the Hermopolitian Ogdoad, led by Amon, or the Heliopolitan Ennead led by Ra-Atum.
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166 Bible book Ezekiel 8:14167 Acts of the Apostles 19:11-20. Censorship of books by both civil and religious authorities is still today defended by the churches.168 John Salisbury, Polycraticus II,26169 Alistair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge: UP, 1981); H. De La Fontaine Verwey, De Geschriften van H. Niclaes.170 While the Church today still defends censorship, it has always recuperated the achievements of those burned a few centuries before, as part of the ‘Christian tradition’. That suppression, once there is no way back, claims the achievement of its victims is no silly paradox, it is the only possible survival of conservatism in a changing world. Compare with Western conservatives today, who claim to defend their values against evil abroad, while opposing rights of homosexuals and women in their own countries.171 It became the first of a succession of forty-two Index auctorum et librorum prohibitorum. The last was published in 1966 CE.172 Such hats, called ‘coroza’, were frequently used for punishment by the Inquisition.173 Cited in Robert Sharer, The Ancient Maya (1994)174 Also in the US Harry Potter books are burned at regular intervals for their which craft content.175 Attempts to impose Internet censorship were made in China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, the USA, India, Germany, Singapore and New Zealand etc... The nature of the Internet itself makes such attempts futile.176 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 4.3-4177 The oldest Egyptian creation myth also speak a lotus flower floating on the primeval ocean, and a pile of earth. Atum, the Egyptian creator, reminds of Vishnu. 178 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Chapter III.179 Joseph F. Lafitau, Mœures des Sauvages américains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps. It will be clear that the Supreme Being of Lafiteau is an euphemism for God and has nothing in common with the Supreme Being of the Vedas!180 Following God’s verdict in the Bible book of Genesis 3:23-24. Indeed missionaries destroyed free sources of gathered food in order to subject natives to labour.181 Primordial monotheism182 Steller, Reise von Kamtschatka nach Amerika, quoted in e-text M. A. Czaplicka, Shamanism in Siberia (Oxford 1914).
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183 Kenneth McLeish, Myths and Legends of the World184 Paul Julien, De Eeuwige Wildernis. Pygmeeën.185 W.H.I. Bleek and L.C. Lloyd, Specimens of Bushman Folklore186 Sir Peter Buck, The Coming of the Maori187 Champollion-Figeac was the older brother of the French egyptologist who became famous for the first complete decipherment of hieroglyphics.188 Cited by Wallis Budge. Other early egyptologists calling the ancient Egyptian religion a monotheism are Heinrich Brugsch-Bey and Wallis Budge himself.189 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History190 Bible book Ezra 1:2191 Bible book Isaiah 2:18 192 Bible book Nehemias 13:1193 Bible book Genesis 4:2-16. Abel was a herdsman; Cain tilled the land. There is a comparable Mesopotamian myth about the brothers Emesh and Enten, who is the ‘farmer of the gods’. In this legend, which is regarded widely as the model for the bible, the brothers are reconciled by the god Enlil. 194 Chronicles I 16:30, Psalms 96:10, but see also Psalms 93:1, Psalms 104:5, Isaiah 45:18….195 al-Ghazalli , Mishkat al-anwar (The Niche for Lights) (± 1100 CE)196 Dr. Phil Fernandes vs. Dr. Michael Martin, Theism vs. Atheism: The Internet Debate. Published 2000 by the Institute of Biblical Defense. See also e-texts at infidels.org and biblicaldefense.org197 Fr. Copleston S.J. vs. Bertrand Russell: 1948 BBC Radio Debate on the Existence of God. (e-text at bringyou.to).198 Bertrand Russell, Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? A Plea For Tolerance In The Face Of New Dogmas. (1947; e-text at positiveatheism.org)199 Impregnation by food is in fact an application of Liebig's Law of the Minimum200 Pupul Jayakar, The earth Mother201 Rig Veda 10.72.3202 Jack Finnegan, Archaeological History of Religions of Indian Asia.203 In Christian folklore an ox was present at Jesus’ cradle.204 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, Village Occitain205 Bible book Joshua 7:24. Possibly this is an old revenge story recycled to explain the tell of Aphek.206 Chicago Tribune Special Report, November 17 2005.207 First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians 11:6-9
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208 Bible book Jeremiah 43:13209 V. S. Naipaul, Back to India210 Zend Avesta, VIIb211 Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough212 the Eucharist is a piece of bread magically changed into the flesh of Jesus, and fed to the Christians with the formula ““take and eat”.213 Rig Veda I.54.9214 Mahabharata 12:59215 Zad Dar 96.1, translated by E. W. West, from Sacred Books of the East, volume 24.216 Imagine that the united butlers of Malibu should establish a religious sect, convincing their employers that they could live forever if only their deepfrozen bodies are preserved in the basement, as long as the butlers remain on duty to attend them by means of magic. The servants would in time enjoy a good life as masters of splendid mansion houses. Most Egyptian graves are empty when discovered in recent times, and while it is impossible to trace the perpetrators, one could ask the question known from classic detective stories: ‘who had a key?’.217 Bible book of Psalms 104:9218 Koran 56.18-25. See also Koran 44.55 and 52.21219 See Appendix A and B220 Bhagavad gita XII221 Clement of Alexandria, Peadagogus 2.11222 Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, chapter 12223 Bible book Deuteronomy 22.29224 Quoting Encyclopaedia Britannica 2000, paragraph on Contemporary southern African societies225 Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage, An Anthropological Perspective (Baltimore 1867)226 René Descartes, Discours on Method. See also the chapter on The Human Animal.227 Marvin Harris, Culture, People, Nature. Harris gives as examples the North American Iroquois and Huron peoples.228 Evelyne De Vree, Daders van groepsverkrachting, Universiteit Gent 2004 - Daphne Looije, Jan Hendriks, Catrien Bijleveld en Frank Weerman, Study Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Leiden 2004.229 The work of Lloyd DeMause is available at the Institute for Psychohistory (e-texts at psychohistory.com)230 Patrick Thierny, citing Thomas Zuidema in The Highest Altar
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231 Citation homa.org (Dr. Homa Darabi Foundation)232 Koran 23.6, 70.30, 4.24 233 Khandogya Upanishad 4.4.1 234 Art T. Burton, Black, Red and Deadly, Black and Indian Gunfightersof the Indian Territories, 1870-1907235 Diodorus Siculus, Library 34.10 236 Ibid. 34.13237 Ibid. 34.20238 Orosius, Histories, 5.9.4239 Diodorus Siculus, Library 36.2240 Ibid. 36.11241 Plutarch, Crassus 9 242 Florus, Epitome 2.8.20 243 Art T. Burton, Black, Red and Deadly, Black and Indian Gunfighters of the Indian Territories, 1870-1907244 Aristotle, Politics 1.2245 Bible book of Proverbs 29:19246 Bible book of Proverbs 29:21247 Bible book of Exodus 21:20-21248 Letter of Paul to the Ephesians 6:5249 First Letter of Paul to Timothy 6:1250 Letter of Paul to Titus 2:9251 The Canons of the Blessed Peter, Archbishop of Alexandria, canon IV252 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (1982).253 Lullo, Archbishop of Mainz, On Traffic in Ecclesiastical Serfs (755 – e-text at fordham.edu)254 Carl Lofmark, What is the Bible?255 Larry Hise, Pro-Slavery (e-text at pastornet.net.au).256 This section is largely based on Unicef data.257 CATW Fact Book, AP Online, 31 March 1998258 See Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism for a thorough analysis of emic and etic behaviour.259 The work is now in the Prado at Madrid.260 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1994)261 Maimonides, Guide for the perplexed262 Keith Thomas, Man and the natural world263 This and following remarks are about E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature 1978. After Wilson’s ideas on politics, racism and sexism had
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become too obvious, many of his followers started to use the name ‘evolutionary psychology’ instead of ‘sociobiology’.264 Edmund O. Wilson, On Human Nature.265 ibid.266 In common language a ‘majority’ can be anything above 50 percent and lower than 100 percent, say 70 percent. If 70 percent was at war half of the years, then on the average 35 percent was at war all of the years, while 65 percent lived in peace. This demonstrates beyond doubt that people have the ability to either fight wars or live in peace. It doesn’t make much difference if this is a ‘gene thing’: the terms ‘innate’ and genetic’ are not used here to call upon genetic scientific insight, but to suggest inevitability while there is clearly none. 267 National Defense Council Foundation (USA), World Conflict List, at www.ndcf.org 268 This happened in 1938 CE to a Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. Grynspan was born in 1921 in Germany, but fled to Paris when the Nazis started the deportation of Polish Jews, including his parents, brother and sister, to Poland where they were refused. After he was ordered to leave France while rejected by Germany and Poland, Grynszpan went to the German embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, the first official in sight. The Nazis used this murder as an excuse to start the pogrom known as Night of Broken Glass (‘Kristallnacht’.).269 Noam Chomsky (Language and Mind, 1968) wrote about Ardry at the time:‘It is fair to ask to what extent the enthusiasm for this curious view of man's nature is attributable to fact and logic and to what extent it merely reflects the limited extent to which the general cultural level has advanced…’. 270 Susan Browning, Against our Will271 John Alcock, Animal Behaviour272 Data from the USA Bureau of Justice Statistics report Sex Offence and Offenders. The FBI says that 3% of adult males risk to be anally raped by other males. Only a minorty of both victims and rapists is homosexual. Homosexuals can be raped by heterosexuals. 273 Sun Zu, The Art of War VI.30.274 Richard C. Lewontin, The Doctrine of DNA, Biology as Ideology.275 Ibid.276 In November 2003 CE the Spanish press reported the number of bodies washed ashore to be tree times the number for the previous year.
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277 The Guardian (British newspaper) of October 21st 2003.278 Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2004279 The votes counted 48 in favour and 8 abstentions: the Soviet block (Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia), South Africa and Saudi Arabia.280 For the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (with translations in 331 languages) see etext at www.un.org. The rights to sovereignty and self-government have no place in the original Declaration, and are even contrary to article 2. 281 William A. Schabas, Canada and the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (MCGill Law Journal Vol 43/2 1993)282 For the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam see etext at humanrights.harvard.edu.283 Two years before a White Paper was handed out by the Chinese government to defend its dealing with the student revolt of the T’ien-An Men Square in Peking. In this document it was defended that food production for the hungry prevailed over civil rights – clearly a fictitious contrast.284 Xiaorong Li: ‘Asian Values’ and the Universality of Human Rights in Report from the Institute for Philosphy and Public Policy (Maryland 1996).285 I think of academics from E. Burke to A. Jensen, R. Herrnstein and C. Murray, C. Brand, C. Rietdijk etc…286 The New York times, 8th of June 2004287 Michael Ignatieff, Mensenrechten en Terreur. Thomas More Lecture 2002 (amusingly, those lectures are named after the same Thomas More who was disapproved by Isaiah Berlin for being too optimistic about human fundamental capacities, in an essay about Vico published in The Crooked Timber of Humanity).288Ibid.289 Isaiah Berlin, The Pursuit of the Ideal, an essay from The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London, 1990). 290 Pedro Berruguete painted in 1475 CE Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto-da-fe. Now in Prado Museum, Madrid.291 The Reign of Terror in France, 1982-1983 CE. 292 Dershowitz: Torture could be justified, interview (e-text) at cnn.com, March 4, 2003. 293 Xenophon Memorabilia 4.2.15294 Bible book Joshua 6:22..295 Augustine, The City of God 1.16296 AFP communication of august 2003.
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297 See also Katharine H.S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations(Columbia University Press, 1997) A CATW-report reads: ‘During the stay of military forces in the Philippines, around 17,000 women have been prostituted in Olongapo City alone, which is site of the largest USA military base outside the USA itself. The USA Navy ensured that the men are kept safe, thus funding for social hygiene clinics flooded the cities where the bases are located. If 25% or more of the women in an establishment are unregistered with the clinic, the establishment will be declared off-limits to USA servicemen until the women are registered. Guidelines, thus, were made available to the servicemen so that they know where to go. In sum, the construction and maintenance of prostitution is integral to the USA military's strategies for keeping the male soldiers content.’ (see e-text at globalmarch.org/virtuallibrary/sexualexploitation/fil-korea.htm). The problem becomes bigger when emancipated women join armed forces in the false supposition that they will be equald of men. CBS News reported on September 22th of 2003 that at the US Air Force Academy ‘between 1993 and 2002, there were 142 allegations of sexual assault [..]. Dozens of female cadets have said academy commanders were complacent about their complaints of sexual assault and in some cases punished them for minor rules violations if they reported they were attacked.’ 298 Encyclopeadia Catholica, lemma ‘war’.299 J. Duffett et al. Against The Crime of Silence: Proceedings of The Russell International War Crimes Tribunal (New York 1968) 300 Von Clausewitz demonstrated his total ignorance of the reality of war by presenting war as a wrestling match. In a wrestling match the contestants are selected within a category of equals, the fighting area is well restricted and well defined, their families can not be harassed, and normally the fight is stopped before anyone gets hurt seriously.301 United Nations report E/1996/100: Food and Agricultultural development - Review and analysis of agrarian reform and rural development (New York 1966).302 Eric Laurent, La guerre des Bush, Les secrets inavouables d’un conflit (Paris 2003)303 The word ‘decimate’ dates from the Roman practice to execute one out of every ten soldiers until the remainder accepted to face the weapons of the enemy. For a more modern example see Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
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304 Newsweek of February 3, 2003. The outcome of this scientific study is applicable to any nationality.305 cited in Update 4.19 - The mental health of soldiers returning from conflict from The Mental Health Foundation, London.306 ibid.307 BBC News Online, Friday, 1 April, 2005308 BBC News Online, Sunday, 13 January, 2002309 ibid.310 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, chapter I.IV311 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Article VI, 1 July 1961, reviewed in 1995 and 2000.312 Look at, among others, Bohemia and Austria in 1618 CE, the English Catholics in 1648 CE, the Prussians in 1756 CE, the Americans in 1775 CE, The Greeks in 1821 CE, the Sikhs in 1845 CE, the Southern States of America in 1860 CE, the Ashanti in 1873 CE, the Sioux In 1876 CE, the Zulus in 1879 CE, Germany in 1914 and 1940 CE, Vietnam in 1946 CE, Egypt in 1967 and 1973 CE…313 Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference, July 21, 1954.314 Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations, Book 1 ch.34. It must however be added that Aristotle is quite selective in his own acknowledgments: where he names Greek sources, it is usual to outwit them, and he remains always vague about foreign sources. 315 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History. Civilizations which I consider the most wrongly delimited are the Orthodox Christian (12 centuries), The Iranian (12 centuries), the Korean (13 centuries), the Sinic (22 centuries), the Indic (24 centuries), the Egyptiac (32 centuries). Inhabitants from the first and last centuries of any of those civilizations would certainly be surprised to hear that they had anything important in common.316 Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things.317 René Descartes, On the Principles of Philosophy (1644) art. 1.13318 Isaac Newton, The Opticks (1704)319 Gottfried W. von Leibniz, What is Nature? (1698)320 Here we are confronted with Aristotelian logic, especially with the problem of classification. His classification of humans, geographically as well as socially, was at once the first logical error of the ‘inventor’ of logic.321 The longest distance anywhere on the Eurasian-African land is about 10,000 kilometers. At walking pace - the travel speed forever until the ninetheenth century CE - this distance can be crossed in 500 days of 20 kilometers each, or two years if we add 230 days of rest,
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leasure and exchange. Of course few travelled this far. The average traveler crossed various language boundaries, and each time hired another interpreter, who grew up in a bilingual environment. Wherever the voyager went, images, exchanged in taverns and in boarding houses, multiplied and traveled their own way. Not only could an idea cross the Eurasian-African continents instantly compared to the speed of history; there were inevitable sideways whenever more than two people gathered to rest, and tales scattered in different directions to turn up at other encounters. And every imagery that arrived in one spot remained there to pop up in other conversations, and from there radiate over new trajectories. Unlike what happens in Socratic dialogues, in most gatherings of friends ideas spurt from all to all.322 One example of particularism is the following. A fragment of Anaximander, one of the first Greek philosophers, supposedly learned that there were "innumerable worlds in the Boundless". John Burnet wrote that Anaximander meant simultaneous universes, while Eduard Zeller came to the conclusion that the quote alluded to worlds succeeding in time. In reality, Anaximander only meant the arrangement (kosmous) of the ‘worlds’ (ouranous), referring to the stacked spheres of atmosphere, moon, planets and stars. (see Charles Vergeer, Eerste Vragen.) The world-image of stacked spheres was widespread in virtually all civilizations (Indian texts often speak of ‘the three worlds’, meaning earth, air and above). Western scholars were unable to see the correct interpretation because they had narrowed their search down to Greek tradition only.323 The American semi-governmental ‘National Endowment for Democracy’ (NED) funded, out of the US federal treasury, US-minded election campaigns or political activists in countries like Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, France, Portugal, Spain, Ukrain. In Venezuela for example, NED paid $50.000 to Súmate, an organization trying to recall President Chávez in a referendum. After the referendum, which Chávez won by 59%, the leaders of Súmate were charged with treason and conspiracy for receiving funds issued by a foreign state (something also illegal in the US.)324 The Palestinan authority was boycoted by Israel, while the EEG and the USA stopped subsidies. International banks were forced to block support from Muslim countries.325 James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, Erik Gartzke: Economic Freedom of the World, 2005 Annual Report (2005 Fraser Institute, e-text at www.freetheworld.com)
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326 The report in particular borrows assessments from The Global Competitiveness Report (DAVOS group) and the International Country Risk Guide.327 In 1995 CE Asarah Balabagan, a 16 years old Filipina housemaid, killed her master when he was raping her. An Islamic court condenmed her to death by a firing squad. After an international outcry, another Islamic court changed her sentence into one year of prison, 100 strokes of the cane and the payment of blood money.328 Flor Contemplacion, a Filipina mother of four children, was framed for the murder of another Filipina housemaid together with a child she looked after, and was hanged in 1995 CE. Some 90 Indonesian domestic workers died, in accidents and by suicide, in the course of the five years before 2003 CE. 329 The ruling People’s Action Party is in power for half a century, and in 2006 CE occupies 82 of the 84 seats in the Singapore parliament.The leader of the opposition is continually confronted with defamation suits, and has been convicted to pay damages to the Prime Minister and Senior Ministers.330 In Singapore a company is termed a Government Linked Company when the government holds at least a 20 percent stake. Government Linked Companies produce 60 percent of the BNP of Singapore (AFP September 3, 2002.)331 When I write 'capitalism' for short I think of neo-conservative capitalism, when I write 'socialism' for short I think of state socialism. In both I analyse rather the political than the economical theories. 332 Analects 11333 For an example from Atlantic ideology see Walt.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: a Non-Communist Manifesto.334 David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.335 Mike Mason, Development and Disorder: a history of the Third World since 1945. Also the following data about development is largely based on this source.336 Harrison, Inside the third world, quoted by Mike Mason, Development and Disorder: a history of the Third World since 1945.337 Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty338 Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty: the power, prestige, and corruption of the international aid business.339 See World Scripture: a Comparative Anthology for an exhaustive (and impressive) list of occurrences of ‘reciprocal ethics’ in religious texts (e-text at ettl.co.at). In modern times Immanuel Kant elaborated
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the golden rule into his ‘categorical imperative’, while John Stuart Mill called it ‘the complete ethics of utility’. 340 The Spirit of the Age was originally an invention of Hegel (the Zeitgeist)341 Egyptian Museum, Cairo. JE 98171342 Egyptian Museum, Cairo. CG 36, CG 112 etc…343 last sentence not well said344 Osiris was originally worshipped in Busiris in the Nile-delta, in Egyptian ‘Pr-Wsir’, ‘household of Osiris’, and today the Arabic village of Abusir. 345 Ba: messenger or appearance.346 Coffin Texts are a collection of spells painted on burial coffins. They date from the first Intermediate Period on, and therefore are later than the Pyramid Texts found on the walls of those monuments. The sun god Ra, associate (father) of the pharaohs, was the most important god in the Pyramid Texts; he becomes superseded by Osiris in the Coffin Texts. Both texts precede the Book of the Dead, papyrus copies made to accompany even less whealthy deceased in their graves. The three stages, ever less expensive, of burial documents demonstrate the steady ‘democratization’ of the hereafter.347 The story is best known from Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris.348 It makes no sense to make Osiris also the forebode of Christian resurrection, which is more directly related to Tammuz. Magical resurrection to compensate a slain animal was already practiced in pre-history, and the resurrection of forefathers is a martial and agricultural image found among many pre-state kingdoms. Special to Osiris was that he became the King of the Underworld (Duat or Tuat) and never returned among the living.349 Papyrus of Ani. The papyrus dates from the thirteenth century BCE and was found in the coffin of a royal offering accountant from Thebes, called Ani. 350 Bible book Genesis 3:22351 Rig Veda 10.129.6-7352 See appendix B: old world civilizations chart.353 Bible book Deuteronomy 33:26 354 Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough355 Al-Farabi for example wrote that Plato envisaged Muhammad as his ideal ruler and the Muslim state as his ideal society. 356 Rig Veda 10.82.7357 Khandogya Upanishad 1.12.4-5358 Bible book of Psalms 59:6-9
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359 Paul Carus, Buddha, The Gospel: ‘The Bodhisattva's Search’360 Bible book Jeremiah 7.4361 Bible book Jeremiah 7.21362 Translation The Book of the Way. Sometimes also called the Lao-tsu after his author. For some strange reason the historical existence of Lao Tse has been doubted by Western scholars.363 Analects 15364 Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things (the following excerpts are taken from the e-text translation by William Ellery Leonard, with minor modifications).365 Here I refer to the monotheist Hinduism of those who worship Shiva as the creator and master of the universe (Shaivism), and other sects praying to a selected supreme God. As I am not well enough acquainted with Hinduism, I will refrain from further comment below.366 Enough has been written about the subject, always mixed up with plain Western ideology. See for example Roy T. Matthews, The Western Humanities.367 Gospel of Matthew 16:18368 The same geography had made the Siwalik Hills a strong candidate for the origin of Homo Erectus, before the results of intensive excavations in tropical Africa shifted attention away. The progress made in pre-Columbian America, as compared to Eurasia, has a quantitative relation with the surface of both continents.369 Katha-Upanishad 5.3-5370 Parmenides and Plato would use this ether to initiate the blunt denial of physical reality that would remain hunting Western philosophy until our times. 371 Jack Finnegan, Archeaological History of Religions of India.372 Max Müller wrote in the (colonial) nineteenth century CE that the oldest Upanishads had to predate 600 BCE. Jack Finnegan, in 1989 CE, placed them before 900 BCE. The oldest upanishads must precede Greek philosophy by far.373 Chandogya Upanishad 7.7.1374 Not only whites are framed in contemporary Western culture, even contemporary Hindus often reduce the Upanishads to mere spiritual, symbolic texts. The Nobel-prize winner Rabindranath Tagore is just one example. I do not mean to say that the works of Tagore are insignificant, but their message is definitely different from the first upanishads. 375 Max Müller has written in his introduction to The Sacred Books of the East: ‘When Âtman occurs in philosophical treatises, such as the
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Upanishads and the Vedânta system which is based on them, it has generally been translated by soul, mind, or spirit. I tried myself to use one or other of these words, but the oftener I employed them, the more I felt their inadequacy, and was driven at last to adopt self and Self as the least liable to misunderstanding.’ Unfortunately, since that time ‘self’ and ‘Self’ have evolved to synonyms of the words Müller wanted to avoid. 376 Brahman is the ancient sanskrit term for the ultimate self, the undifferentiated absolute, which is an a-religious concept including everything, from the four elements to the thousands of Vedic gods and their priests. In the seventh century BCE priests derived from Brahman a Supreme God they coined Brahma, while they themselves became known as ‘brahman priests’ or ‘brahmans’ for short. The most ancient Upanishads occasionally make a good laugh of priestly habits, but never show interest in devotion for something divine. 377 Sometimes this Ultimate Reality, Satya, is compared with the Kantian noumenon or ding-an-sich (thing in itself), but there is an important difference: the Satya can be approached by intellectual effort, the noumenon per definition not. To search for Satya is meaningful, to discuss the noumenon is ridicule (although Kant himself has put some effort in it). In the Gospel of John (14:6) Jesus says I am the way, the truth, and the life. When, in the tenth century CE, the founder of Sufism, al Halladj, shouted in trance ana l-haq (‘I am the truth/reality’), his head was exposed on a bridge of Baghdad while the ashes of his tortured body were thrown in the Tigris.378 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.3.27. The subject (of course not the proposition) of the quotation is related with the ideas about being pronounced by Heracleitus and Parmenides, and with the conservation of mass-energy in contemporary physics.379 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.6.1380 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.7.1. 381 All following quotations from the Vedas are largely based on Max Müller: The Sacred Books of the East382 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.1.1383 Taittiriyaka Upanishad 1.7.1384 About the Mapuche see Patrick Tierney, The Highest Altar. About Persia see Bundahishn 12:1-5, quoted in the chapter on Babylon. That mountains grow is not all together wrong. The Mount Everest for example grows several millimeters each year because of tectonic activity. See also mount Ullikummi in Middle Eastern mythology, the
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Vindhya mountains of Indian mythology, the primal mound of Egyptian mythology etc… 385 There is no decisive way to date the Chinese or the Indian theory of elements. Both predate the Greek philosophers by millenia. I call the Chinese older than the Indian, because the Indian count air as an element, which points at the bellows of the bronze age smithy, while the Chinese theory rather seems a Stone Age paradigm. Furthermore, the Indian theory can reasonably be deduced from the Chinese, while the other way around is less likely. Without doubt the real evolution comprised much more steps, directions and interruptions than can ever be described.386 Taittiriyaka Upanishad 1.3.1-2387 In the Upanishads ‘earth’ and ‘food’ are often taken to be the same element.388 Taittiriyaka Upanishad 2.2389 Prasna Upanishad 2.1-2390 Plato, Timeaus. For readability I omitted two long, obscure sequences. Notice the circular reasoning: started out to explain light, earth… the text presents God who wants to make the world and thus needs light, earth…Both are placed respectively above the sky (we see it through holes) and below the surface. The rest of the quote tries, unconvincingly, to explain why God placed water and air between both. When finally is said that ‘no part was left outside’ it is clear that Plato failed to grasp the concept of a universe, which has no outside whatsoever. Unlike for example the Stoics and the Epicurists, Plato’s followers will stick to this error for many centuries. Notice also the similarity of Plato’s scenario with the Egyptian Brehmer-Rhind papyrus: ‘no Sky existed and no earth existed...I created on my own every being...my fist became my spouse...I copulated with my hand...I sneezed out air...I spat out moist...Next air and moist produced earth and sky.’391 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.6.1392 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 5.5.1393 Chandogya Upanishad 7.10.1. Aristotle has written that Thales of Miletus, much later, said that ‘water is the material cause of all things’. Yet we do not know any reasoning of Thales, while scientific observation and causal reasoning is clearly present in this much older Upanishad.394 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.2.2395 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.3.2. That the ocean was ‘twice as large’ (67 % of the earth’s surface) is a remarkably good estimate for
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that moment in time (today water is 71% of the earth’s surface, but three millennia ago it must have been a few percents less).396 Compare with the much later Anaximenes of Miletus, who said: ‘our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air encompass the whole world’ (Theophrastus, Opinions of Natural Philosophers)397 Chandogya Upanishad 4.3.1-2398 Ibid. 5.1.6-12399 Ibid. 3.12.2400 Brahmana401 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.1.17-19402 Kandogya Upanishad 5.10.1403 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.4.13404 Chandogya Upanishad 1.9.1405 Swami Sivananda, living in India today, is caught in the Western cultural frame when he writes that ‘Here Akasa refers to the Highest Brahman and not to the elemental ether’. Only if Brahman was personal, as indeed the Western God, it would be impossible to regard Brahman and ether as the same; in the Upanishads physics and mind do not yet fear each other.406 Chandogya Upanishad 3.12.8407 Taittiriyaka Upanishad 2.7. John Burnet wrote in Early Greek Philosophy that Anaximander of Miletus, who lived centuries later, ‘taught, then, that there was an eternal, indestructible something out of which everything arises, and into which everything returns’408 This better kind of knowledge is clearly associated with the material world, since the father asserts that ’all differences are only words, and the reality is clay’. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1.5.3) conveys the same message saying that ‘speech indeed is intended for an end or object, it is nothing by itself’. The Upanishads contested the priests, who won prestige by knowing by heart a hundred thousand verses, while understanding was superseded by dull ritual reciting and singing. Despite the fact that the Upanishads have been entered in the Vedas, it is easy to discern the difference in style between the rigid hymns of most of the Rig Veda and the free, often intimate and sometimes humorous dialogs presented in the Upanishads.409 This ontological dispute is still around and animates fierce philosophical discussions even today. It appeared as a killing riddle when in medieval times Aristotelianism encountered the Koran and the Bible, but also later the dispute confronted the Big Bang,
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Creationism and Intelligent Design. Yet, as the quote correctly explains, it is a false problem, because nothing reasonable can be said about a transition from not being to being: not-being contains nothing to be reasoned about. In societies where human-created things are predominant, taking the whole world as another created thing is a common categorical error. The ontological question is really a mistaken engineering issue.410 Chandogya Upanishad 6.2. It is remarkable how all themes of Greek philosophy up to Aristotle – the Western ‘civilizer-hero’ - are presented together here in only a few lines, and even those few lines already contain links, arguments and reasoning hardly found in the mostly obscure, unsubstantiated fragments of the ancient Greeks. In this one quotation we find the first mover of Aristotle; the elements of Empedocles; the essence of the physical world as pursued by Thales and the other Milesians; speculation on being and absence of being as by Parmenides; fire as the substance of life as mentioned by Heracleitus... 411 Encyclopaedia Britannica 2000 and many other publications are evidently wrong when repeating the widespread misconception that ‘Aristotle was the first to attempt a system of animal classification.’ 412 So that fire, water, and earth should each have itself for its principal ingredient, besides an admixture of the other two (note M. Müller). Germs (blja in Sanskrit) are seeds, semen etc…. However, since the second category is ‘that which springs from a living being’, one might conclude that not plant seeds are meant but small, nearly imperceptible fish eggs were taken for germs (Aristotle, more wrong, spoke of a ‘vermiparous’ or 'grub-bearing' category.) The intention of the text is to link each category of animals to its element: birds (eggs) belong to fire (light, above air); the fish (germs) belong to water; the other animals belong to land (earth). Because each category differs from its own element, the categories of living beings must all have at least some additional ingredient, which could only derive from the other elements. 413 Chandogya Upanishad 6.3414 See Patricia Sloane, Primary Sources: Selected writings on Color from Aristotle to Albers. (New York 1991). De Coloribus is attributed to Theophrastus or Strato. 415 Or forms (note M. Müller). Compare with Plato, who teached that only forms are real.416 Chandogya Upanishad 6.4.
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417 Ibid.. The whole world - everything heard, perceived or known - is composed of a few elements only. 418 earth or food (note M. Müller). 419 Fire can be eten as oil, butter, etc... (note M. Müller).420 Chandogya Upanishad 6.2.1-6.7.6. The memory experiment suspects that mind comes from matter. Three millenia after this experiment the Society for Neuroscience (the world's largest organization of brain researchers) announced that ‘new research indicates’ that food can influence our brain (Brain Briefings March 2003). Yet most experiments on the brain today neglect the food eaten by the subjects - an irrationality induced by the Cartesian body-soul paradigm. 421 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.7.3422 Taittiriyaka Upanishad 2.1423 Prasna Upanishad 6.4424 Chandogya Upanishad 6.12.1.425 Maitrayana-Brahmaya Upanishad 6.15. The quote is centuries older than Agunstine's Confessiones (Ch. XI), which is usually credited for a supposedly profound philosophy of 'time before time.'426 When we believe to think of time on its own, we really think of time in a void space. When we believe we think of space alone, we really think of space lasting indefinite time. 427 The red shift in the light of some stars, known since 1842 CE, remained enigmatic until Albert Einstein, in his Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity (1916), reinstated the ancient time-space continuum.428 Aristotle, Physics 4.11429 Plutarch, On the decline of the Oracles.430 Albert Einstein in a New York Times article publiched December 3, 1919. To scholars before Alexander the Great, this would have been stating the obvious.431 Nag Hammadi codex VI (The Eigth and the Nineth sphere)432 Plato, Timaeus. The Egyptian priests addressed the Athenian statesman Solon.433 Translations of Egyptian texts below follow the work of E.A. Wallis Budge. About the myth of Ra and Isis published in his The Book of The Dead he notes: ‘the hieratic text of this story was published by Pleyte and Rossi, Le Papyrus de Turin, 1869-1876, pll. 31-77, and 131-138’. 434 Conversation of a man with his Ba in the Berlin Papyrus 3024.
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435 J. J. Poortman, in Vehicles of Consciousness - the Concept of Hylic Pluralism expressed the Western despair ‘to force the Egyptian idea of the soul into our traditional categories’. But the real reason for this failure is that there is no Egyptian idea of an independent soul as imagined by Gnostics, Platonists, Cartesians and contemporary mystics. The ancient Egyptian concept is rather related to animism, a philosophy in which a person is composed of living entities, including the body, and to a certain extend to Christianity and Islam, where the body will resurrect from the grave and join with the soul, because only together they can live on as sound individuals. A Medieval saint and a twenty first century Imam see no pleasure whatsoever in living on as a pure ghost. While Christians have learned from Agustine that the body will magiclly take its most splendid form before entering paradise, Muslims oppose medical transplants to avoid confusion in the hereafter. For that matter suicide bombers are mislead by their mentors, and instead of being rewarded, will remain hideous, appalling wrecks for eternity.436 Augustine The City of God 7.23. To Augustine idols were clearly no powerless stones but living, powerful adversaries. Mind that making gods was not ‘drawing a god down into a statue’. A god is a composition of elements, one of which is the statue, as the Khat. The burial of a Pharaoh was also a kind of god-making, which might have inspired this story. Gnostics have tried to make gods, by mixing plant seeds in clay, then modelling a statue from it and keeping the statue moist by means of libations, until the seeds sprouted.437 On the famous Narmer-Palette, a hawk (Horus) blesses the first pharaoh while he slaughters his enemies with his sceptre (a scene reminding us of what sceptres originally were for). The Narmer Palette is a sheet of slate found in the Horus temple of Nekhem (Hierakonpolis) and is today in the Museum of Cairo.438 Memphite theology as found on the Shabaka stone and translated by J.A. Wilson. The subordination of all gods to Ptah was just another political action, and no more monotheistic than other events in the history of ideological confrontations.439 In Persian mythology this African imagery is recycled where Gayomart (‘mortal’) creates the first human couple by masturbating.440 See below. Note that the Egyptian elements are completely unrelated to freakshow-spirits moving teacups, known from nineteenth century spiritism. A nineteenth century spiritual session draws its attraction from the fact that the company does not really believe in ghosts, otherwise the moving teacup would not make a big
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deal. The underlying prickling doubt is typical modern exotism. This misunderstanding can become awkward when European adepts start to believe that Non-European peoples have their lives organized around such magic tricks.441 Herodotus, History book II442 Other sources are the Mathematical Leather Roll, the Resiner Papyri and the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus. For the data in this paragraph I relied on Richard J. Gillings, Mathematics in the Time of the Pharaohs (New York 1982)443 Cicero discovered the thumbstone of Archimedes almost two centuries after his death. Jerold A. Mathews, Bartel L. van der Waerden and in particular Abraham Seidenberg have defended a common origin for mathematics in prehistoric rituals. Seidenberg discovered a similarity between, on the one hand, the epitaph of Archimedes and the theorem of Pyhtagoras, and, on the other hand, the formulas to build offering altars written down in the Vedas, but dating from prehistoic times. This is a very interesting hypothesis as long as is recognized that in prehistory, as in all times, mutual exchange was crucial to saveguard and advance knowledge, not concentric diffusion. The difference in reception of Seidenberg and Martin Bernal remains interesting. Despite being less speculative, less farfetched and more scientific, only Bernal was confronted with severe opposition in academic circles. When Atlantic ideology can no longer secure the position that critical thinking started in Europe (Greece), a tactical withdrawal to the ancient Indogermans (India) is to be expected. 444 Albertus Magnus (1200-1280 CE) was of vital importance for the development of Medieval philosophy; Roger Bacon (1220-1292 CE) defended the use of experiments while they were still attacked by the church as black magic; John Dee (1527-1608 CE) was a key Renaissance thinker; Isaac Newton (1642-1727 CE) boosted modern European physics.445 Cennino Cennini stated, in The Craftsman's Handbook (1390 CE), that during the Renaissance colours were produced by alchemists; the Dutch Renaissance writer Karel van Mander stated, in The Painter's Treatise, that the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck was a student of alchemy and invented oil painting. There would be no ‘Western humanities’ without Egypt.446 For India see Jack Finnigan, Archeological History of Religions of Indian Asia, who cites Xenophon (Cyropeadia 1.1.4), Arrian (Indica 1.3) and Herodotus (History 3.88).
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447 Bible book Genesis 11:3-9448 Herodotus, History 1.81449 This secret asssociation was called ‘the Family of Love’. See the chapter on Ideology.450 The larger painting can be admired in the Kunsthistorisches Museum at Vienna, the smaller at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen at Rotterdam.451 All Mazdayan texts in this chapter are from the Sacred Books of the East, Oxford University Press, as etexts at www.avesta.org. The most ancient litterature has been written in Avestan (or Zend, a dead language from the sixth century BCE on) and dates from the beginning of the last millenium BCE. From the second century BCE, Avestan was superseded by Pahlavi (the major form of Middle Persian). To avoid unnecessary confusion ancient names are used as commonly encountered in modern sources. Where necessary names in citations have been transposed for consistency. For example, in accord with many popular works the Avestan name ‘Ahura Mazda’ is used (and not the Pahlavi ‘Ormazd’) together with the Pahlavi ‘Ahriman’ (and not the Avestan 'Angra Mainyu'). 452 James Darmesteter, translator of the Vendidad, wrote that ‘All-Knowing Lord [..] is, at least, the meaning that attached to the name in the consciences of the composers of the Avesta’. 453 Spandarmad: the ruler of earth (land) (also the name of a day and a month in the Zoroastrian calendar). Ahura Mazda is accompanied by six ‘Beneficent Immortals’ (Amesha Spenta, archangels) and each has its own task. The care forn earth is assigned to Spandarmad. 454 Zand-i Vohuman Yasht 2.6-9455 Bundahishn 12:33456 Zend-Avesta Yasna 12.2-3. The last sentence seems distorted, because ‘risking life and limbs’ do rather match with attacking enemy settlements than with withholding. 457 Zand-i Vohuman Yasht 2.24-26458 I.J.S. Taraporewala, The Divine Songs of Zarathushtra. Yasna Avesta 29.5 (Ahunavaiti Gatha)459 Bible book Jeremiah 38.2460 Muhammad Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, History461 Clementine Homilies 94.462 In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the order - sun, moon, stars – is based on the opposite reasoning: weaker light means that the light source is at a greater distance.463 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.3.28
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464 Bundahishn 12:1-5465 The Babylonians used the Saros period of 223 New Moons, of which 3 are needed to predict the chance of a solar eclipse. They also knew that solar eclipses happen only at New moon, and only occur at intervals of five or six months. By the eighth century BCE, during the Greek dark ages, Babylonians could tell when a solar eclipse might take place. If nothing happened it was rather a relieve than a disappointment.466 John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy.467 Bible book of Ezekiel 1:16-20468 Martin L. West, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient.469 Zand-i Vohuman Yasht 2.16-22. Zartosht is Persian for Zoroaster (Zarathustra).470 Bible book Daniel 2:37-43471 Zend-Avesta Yasht 13:37472 Avesta Fragments Aogemadaeca 1.1.6-15473 Avesta Yasht 23:1474 The words are from translator E. W. West.475 Bundahishn 9:2476 Bundahishn 14:6-14. Compare with Bible book Deuteronomy 14 and with Aristotle’s History of Animals. The latter work speaks of elephants, Indian asses etc…, which clearly points at eastern sources.477 Bible book Kings 4:33478 Frances .A. Yates, The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science in Ch. Singleton, ed., Art, Science and History in the Renaissance (Baltimore 1967). Frances Yates wrote:’ The new work done in recent years on Marcilio Ficino and his sources has demonstrated that the core of the movement was Hermetic, involving a view of the cosmos as a network of magical forces with which man can operate.[..] It is the Renaissance magus, I believe, who exemplifies that changed attitude of man to the cosmos wich was the necessary preliminary to the rise of science.’ The Hermetic corpus is a late antique combination of Asian and African understanding. 479 The cause of the Greek colonization movement has been under discussion ever since enthousiastic German academics uttered the hypothesis that the Greeks were really on a civilizing mission. Today the subject has been marked ‘undecided’, as many other issues in which the prevailing ideology conflicts with reason. Population explosion, migration and confrontation has been a consequence of forced labour on all continents for thousands of years, and it is
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unscientific to single out one case without substantiation by positive facts. 480 The quote is from Hermann Bengtson’s Introduction to Ancient History, but it is not difficult to find hundreds of similar examples in other popular history books. 481 Plato has slandered the philosophers before him because they accepted payment, and Socrates is presented as one who was not interested in money. But it is obvious that Socrates was amply supported by the whealty social circles he enjoyed to frequent, and who’s banquets he loved to attend; and that Plato was more than sufficiently well-off to allow sniffing at filthy lucre. His contempt for payment, therefore, must rather be seen as an aristocratic disdain for labour than as a genuine rejection of materialism. 482 Martin West, Early Greek Philosophy in The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World.483 Heracleitus Diehls Fragments 20 and 26. Fire is likewise exalted in some five other fragments.484 Socrates and Aristotle were also confronted with conservatist repression. 485 Plato, Phaedo. The irrationally referenced ‘secret doctrine’ was certainly not of Greek origin: kings were often named shepherds both in Asia and Africa, where nomads had founded kingdoms, but not in Greece, which was a farming territory.486 Plutarch, On the Fortune of Alexander. 487 Conserved in Arab as the Kitab al-Mawalid488 Book IV, cited in Majid Fakhry, Histoire de la philosophie islamique. The usage of Aristotelian divisions to describe the various subjects does not proof that the Denkard refers to copies of works by Aristotle. If this division is not influenced by the background of the ninth century (Aristotelian) compilators of the Denkard, titles from the books pillaged by Alexander might have influenced Aristotle.489 Plutarch, Of the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander the Great. See also Diogenius Laertius. I take it that when Alexander payed those men, they delivered some service in return.490 Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great.491 Where possible this essay refrains from using the term ‘hellenism’ which suggests that the whole world was imitating Hellas, and names the period following Alexander the Great and Aristotle 'Alexandrian' instead – not referring to Alexander but to the famous African metropolis. I imagine the Alexandrian period from the death of Alexander the Great to the death of Constantine the Great.
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492 Centuries before the gospels, the ‘Beginningless Light’ had entered Greek philosophy(see also pag. 307); and centuries after them the ‘Beginningless Light’ entered Islam philosophy (sufism) directly from Zoroastrianism when Persia was submitted by the Arabs. See for example the Masnavi, written in Persian by a famous Sufist poet, Jalal ad-Din ar-Rum: ‘Adam was the eye of the Beginningless Light’.493 Gospel of Thomas 50 (translated T. Lambdin)494 In Bible book Genesis 1, the ‘winds of God’ (usually erroneously translated as ‘the spirits of God’) moved upon the face of the primeval ocean when God utters seven commands to create Heaven and earth. To the ancient readers of those verses, god’s wispered words were truly moulded in the winds howling over the desolate ocean, as a panting giant in a hollow cask. 495 Gospel of John 1:1-5496 Plotinus, Enneads 1.2.4497 Ibid 2.8.2498 al-Ghazali, Mishkat al-Anwar 1.4499 Ficino translated the Enneads of Plotinus from Greek into Latin. 500 Pietro Redondi, Galileo heretic (Princeton 1987)501 About authorship see Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote The Bible? (1987)502 The Books of Moses are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The redactor of Deuterenomy has also been identified as the redactor of Joshua, a book to be considered in the same context.503 The Books of Ezra are Chronicles (I and II), Nehemiah and Ezra. They were initially one work, describing the history of Israel from Adam until the return from the Babylonian exile.504 Bible book Deuteronomy 5:4505 Essene Apocrypha, The Assumption of Moses506 Koran 9.30507 Bible book Exodus 6.2. 508 Bible book Exodus 19-34509 Pius Drijvers, The Psalms, Their structure and Meaning (New York 1965), quoted in e-text by Gerald A. Larue: Old Testament Life and Literature (1968)510 Bible Book of Psalms 68:4. But also see Genesis 9:13: ‘I do set my bow in the cloud’ is usually (often in hollywood movies) interpreted as a rainbow, but a reference to the New moon is more plausible. Throughout the books of Moses, the Lord hides and moves around in
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a cloud. The Crescent moon of Islam might be a remnant of biblical times. 511 Bible book Numbers 20:8. The text of this stela might well have been Exodus 15:1-12.512 Bible book Judges 11513 Bible book Deuteronomy 23:12514 Bible book Numbers 31:10-18515 Scholars wary of those recounts (usually the same people who like to demonstrate elsewhere that the bible is always right!) have established incompatibilities with archaeological records. Of course this casts no doubt on the state of mind of the authors and readers of the Holy Bible: in no way the clearly presented mentality can be denied. Besides, Joshua was, more than anything else, written to justify the actions of Babylonian colonists into Palestine in the sixth century BCE. 516 Bible book Joshua 1:3. This is consistent with the world-image of early kingdoms everywhere: wars are fought with a chosen god; if the war is lost, the god seems too weak; if the war is won, the god gains prestige and strength.517 Bible book Joshua 1:3518 Bible book Deuteronomy 2:34519 Bible book Joshua 6:21520 Bible book Joshua 8:24-29521 Bible book Deuteronomy 32:41522 Bible book 2 Maccabees 1:17523 Bible book Isaiah 44:42524 Bible book Daniel 1:20525 Bible book Daniel 2:13526 Bible book Genesis 2:8527 The Bundahism 1.28528 Bible book Isaiah 44:48529 Bible book Isaiah 45:1530 Bible book Isaiah 66:1,2531 Bible book Ezra 6:4. Remark the striking similarity with the Donation of Constantine, which gave dominion over Rome to the pope, but was demonstrated to be a falsification in the fifteenth century CE.532 Bible book Ezra 6:11533 Bible book second Maccabees 1:18.534 Bible book Ezra 6:17
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535 Herodotus, History, book VI. Crude oil (‘pitch’) was already in use since Sumerian times.536 Avesta Yasna 44.5 translation L. H. Mills.537 Bible book Isaiah 45.7, King James version.538 Bible book 2 Maccabees 4:14539 Gospel of Mark 11,13-15540 Gospel of Matthew 27:52-53541 Bible book Ezekiel 37:9-14542 Acts of the Apostles 17:27-28543 Second Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians 3:5; also First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians 1:7544 Gospel of Mark 1:15545 Gospel of Mark 16:17-18546 Clement thinks of Aristotle rather than of the Bible: ‘that what desires the form is matter, as the female desires the male’ (Physics 9).547 Clement of Alexandria, Second Epistel chapter XIV. Inherently is said that the soul is male and the body female, a notion which is in fact the extension of the well known master-slave relationship, also found in cabbalistic texts: ‘The man is the soul and the woman the body. Therefore the man must enter the woman’. 548 Letter of Paul to the Romans 12:3549 Augustine Letter XCIII (408), chapter II550 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire - Vol 6, Chapter LXXIPart II.551 Clement of Alexandria Paedagogus 2.13552 Ibid. 2.11553 Ibid.554 Justin Martyr, First Apology 37. The quote is from Isaiah.555 Acts of the Apostles 5:1 556 Eusebius of Ceasarea, Life of Constantine, chapter XXVII. Christ appears in a dream only in chapter XXXIX. 557 To make Jesus Christ the Son of God was also flaw of monotheism, but ideology is instrumental by nature, and not a goal in itself. Torture and killing would soon fill this gap in the theory.558 The data about Augustine’s life are largely from Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo and from Augustine’s own Confessiones.559 Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers volume X560 Under strong influence of Augustine, the Council of Carthage of 405 CE sent a letter to the twenty years old emperor Flavius
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Honorius, inquiring to renew the repression decreed by his father Theodosius. This repression consisted of military action as well as of heavy fines and deprivation of receiving or bequeathing properties by gift or by will. Although Augustine claimed that fear had converted so many to 'ardently loving the unity of the Church', the Council ordained that no permission be granted to receive inheritance for those who converted under pressure. 561 Bible book of Daniel (verse 6:24)562 Augustine, A Treatise Concerning the Correction of the Donatists II.7563 Augustine Letter XCIII (408), chapter II.5564 Ibid. chapter VI.20 565 Ibid. chapter IV.14 566 Ibid. chapter V.19567 Ibid. chapter V.16568 The following data are largely from Augustine’s The City of God. 569 ‘The Spanish bishop Priscillian, with six respectable adherents of his Manichaean-like sect (two presbyters, two deacons, the poet Latronian, and Euchrocia, a noble matron of Bordeaux), [were] tortured and beheaded with the sword at Treves in 385. [..] The bishops assembled at Treves, with the exception of Theognistus, approved this act.’ James MacCaffrey, History of the Christian Church (etext at Project Gutenberg).570 Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History571 The question remains how the same people that do not mind bloody massacres are appalled by a small bloodstained piece of cloth.572 Following data about Muhammad’s life are largely based on The Emergence of Islam by Mostafa Vaziri.573 Koran 96574 In Koran verse 3.83 aslama is used to indicate submission ‘willingly or unwillingly’. In verses 27.31-33 Solomon sends an ultimatum to the Queen of Shebah. She submits out of fear: 'when they enter a township, they ruin it and make the honour of its people shame'. The arab word used in the Koran for this submission to an army out of fear is muslimeena (active participle of aslama).575 Koran 8:41576 Koran 33:37,40577 Koran 4:93. Muslims who believe from stupid swindlers that they will enter paradise upon attacking civilians - among which inevitably believers - should at least do the effort of learning this verse by heart.578 Koran 17:33
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579 The feast is in fact a (blown up?) version of the ancient lamentation of Tammuz, which has also left reminiscences in Jewish culture. Elias Canetti, in Masse und Macht, has cited a chilling account of those events from Titayana’s La Caravane des Morts.580 The number of Muslims world wide in 2000 CE was 1.9 billion - roughly one third of the world population, after a growth with 235 percent over 50 years. 581 Whipping was only abolished in 1967 CE in the United Kingdom, and in 1972 CE in the US. The history of corporal punishment demonstrates again that it is modernity, and not a specific civilization or religion, that makes the difference, and that cultural habits can change fast if circumstances want them to.582 Sunnah al-Bukhtari 2805583 Koran 2:257584 Sunnah al-Bukhari 3017585 Data from the Peace Encyclopaedia on the Internet.586 On Abu Muslim See page 359 .587 The Kalilah wa Dimnah (Kalila and Dimna, a series of animal fables) goes back to the Sanskrit Panchatantra ('five tratizes'). 588 Arabic for Almohad is ‘al-Muwahidun’, a word related to the present day ‘Mujaheddin’ of Iran.589 A comprehensive account of this great border crossing and the largest European scientific revolution would require many bookworks, and surpasses by far the scope of this essay as well as my erudition. Yet such an account would be a marvellous case study of the basic mechanisms of progress. 590 Roger Bacon refers to black powder in his Epistola de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae, et de Nullitate Magiae. The work starts with a refutation of the black arts, and ends with a long alchemical treatise in which the formula for black powder is given, partly in an anagram. 591 Nicole Oresme, Le livre de divinacions (1362). Geomancy is fortune telling with earth, hydromancy is fortune telling with water, pyromancy is fortune telling with fire, aerimancy is fortunetelling with air.592 Malleus Maleficarum (1486) ch. 1, XVI593 Andrew Dickson White, The Warfare of Science With Theology, Chapter XII594 ibid.595 After ascending to the holy sea Clement IV dropped his two daughters in a convent and spent all his time and energy in a war
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with Naples (and indeed, to the abhorrence of Dante, ‘not with Saracens nor with Jews, for each one of his enemies was Christian’). 596 Catholic Encyclopedia, lemma ‘Roger Bacon’.597 Roger Bacon, Opus Majus I, (quoted in Catholic Encyclopedia, Lemma Roger Bacon)598 ibid.599 The text fragments identifiable on the books in the painting are: ideo; propter; dilig; dicit sapiens; ut possum edificare; Numquid; hic incipit liber de virtibus dei; prologus iste estad; de visione dei; magna efficacia; osce; preparatio.600 The seven spheres are also known in the mystery cult of Mithraism. Another name, ‘Seven masters of being’, is an expression found in the Nag Hammadi Codex VI,6 (The Eight and Nineth Sphere). This tractate names the Ennead, the nineth sphere and the realm of Adam, The Ennead also reminds of the ordering of nine gods in the sun cult of ancient Egyptian Heliopolis. The Decad, lastly, is the divine, ‘unspeakable profundity’.601 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (1321), Paradiso Canto XXX 602 Irenaeus summarizes the Valentinian brand of Gnosticism. Our souls are lost in the hideous material world created by a malevolent, defective Demiurg, Yahweh. Consequently various Gnostic sects worshipped those Biblical actors who seemingly discorded with the Demiurg: Kain, snakes, Satan or Christ were all candidate messengers from the Pleroma to help defeat creation and liberate the souls into the Light. The Valentinian Pleroma is clearly inspired by the shift of the spiritual realm from Air to Light in Alexandrian times, and that paradigm shift in its turn was made conceivable by the Zoroastrian Beginningless Light and the Egyptian sun cult.
In Europe traces of Gnosticism were found in Catharism and, a few centuries after their annihilation, reappeared in humanism. Jan Van Eyck lived in between both periods. 603 Irenaeus of Lyons, Agains Heresies II,21. The text is only known from a fourth century CE translation from Greek into Latin, and has been corrupted severely in the course of time.604 Nicholaus Von Cusa, On Catholic Concordance (written in 1433 CE). 605 In Cusanus’ work De Staticis Experimentis someone asks ‘Do you think that alchemists can accomplish what they propose to?’ and the answer is: ‘the weight-scale, without which [alchemists] can do nothing certain, shows how much they accomplish. For by the verdict of fire and of the weight-scale an examination of this enterprise is
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possible.’ See Jasper Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Wisdom and Knowledge (Minneapolis, 1996)606 Irenaeus of Lyons, Agains Heresies XIV,1.607 Cusanus might be the cardinal in red – the color of martyrs - holding a pope’s (Pius II?) robe, right in front of the man showing his torn out tongue. After Cusanus had executed or murdered his adversaries in Blixen, he was summoned to the Vatican, where he became personal assistant to pope Pius II and was regarded a martyr by many.608 Leopold III is the one with the red high hat, in the midst of the panel of the Just Judges. 609 Citation in J.W. Wickwar, Handbook of the Black Arts (London 1925)610 Sir Walter Scott, in Letters on Witchcraft, relates (letter X) that ‘when the cause was tried, some little puppets were produced in court, which were viewed by one party with horror, as representing the most horrid spells. It was even said that the devil was about to pull down the court-house on their being discovered.’611 The Encyclopedia Britannica has however been reviewed and recuperated by Church censors since 1928 CE (from the 11th to the 14th edition), thereby betraying its origin as a product of Enlightenment. See Joseph McCabe: The Lies And Fallacies Of The Encyclopedia Britanica - How Powerful And Shameless Clerical Forces Castrated A Famous Work Of Reference. (etext at infidels.com)612 Each beatification or canonization requires at least one miracle, performed by the candidate after his death when explicitly prayed for. This miracle is to be certified by the Pope, who happens to be infallible. The biography of John Paul II, published by the Vatican, asserts that this Pope alone has presided so far at 131 beatification ceremonies ( 1,282 Blessed proclaimed ) and 43 canonization ceremonies ( 456 Saints ) (vatican.va). Protest rose when Mother Theresa was beatified in 2003 CE, not for her work, but for the miraculous healing of a cancer patient who had tied a photo of the nun on her stomach.613 John Paul II, Letter to Participants in the International Congress of Fundamental Theology on the 125th Anniversary of “Dei Filius” (30 September 1995), 4: L'Osservatore Romano, 3 October 1995, 8614 The name Atlantic civilization is coined by Michael Kraus (The Atlantic civilization: eighteenth-century origins, 1947.)615 David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, chapter 21.
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616 Thomas P. Dick and Charles M. Patton, Calculus Before Newton and Leibniz. (e-text at apcentral.collegeboard.com, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota)617 George G. Joseph, The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Maths. (London 1994)618 The definition is from the Webster Dictionary .619 Professor Subhash Kak of Louisiana State University wrote with much insight (e-text at ece.lsu.edu/kak) : ‘the ancient world had very many language families, and population increase and greater contacts and trade with the emergence of agriculture, coupled with large-scale political integration, led to extinction of languages and also to a transfer of languages across ethnic groups. In such a complex evolutionary process it is meaningless to pin a specific language on any racial type.’620 Schaff, Philipp: Geschichte der alten Kirche (8 volumes, Leipzig 1867) (etext at The Electronic Bible Society, Dallas, 1998).621 Aristotle, Physiognomonics622 Citation Africana.com623 Heinrich Brugsch-Bey: Egypt under the Pharaohs. The Fourth Dynasty is named arbitrarily but not accidentally: it is the first dynasty that built pyramids. 624 Nature Weekly of April 2, 1998.625 Alan Gardiner, Ancient Egyptian Onomastica (1947)626 Professor Subhash Kak (e-text at ece.lsu.edu/kak) pointed out the problems with the theory that civilization was brought to India by invading horsemen in the second millenium BCE: ‘First, the earliest Indian literature has no memory of any such entry from outside and its focus is squarely the region of the seven rivers, “Sapta Sindhu”, with its centre in the Sarasvati valleys and covering a great part of north and northwest India ranging from Indus to Ganga to Sarayu. Second, Indian traditional king lists go back into fourth millennium BC and earlier; also, the more reliable lists of teachers in the Vedic books cannot be fitted into the Aryan invasion chronology. Third, it was contended that the beginnings of the vast Vedic literature needed a greater time horizon easily reaching back at least into the third millennium BC. Fourth, astronomical references in the Vedic literature refer to events as early as the fourth millennium BC. The Puranas remember migrations out of India; such migrations were invoked to explain the reference to Vedic gods in treaties between kings and to other Indic names in West Asian texts and inscriptions in the second millennium BC; but the supporters of the Aryan invasion theory saw
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these West Asian Indic references as traces of the migratory path of the Aryans into India. Fifth, The Vedic literature nowhere mentions riding in battle and the horse was rare in Vedic times and the word ”ashva'' for horse was often used figuratively for speed. Sixth, there was no plausible process explaining how incursions by nomads could have overwhelmed the original languages in one of the most densely populated regions of the ancient world. Seventh, the Vedic literature spoke of the Aryans as living in a complex society with an important urban element; there is mention of cities, ocean-going ships, numerous professions, which is contradictory to the image of barbaric invaders from the north.’627 Charles C. Seligman, Races of Africa (1930)628 e-text at zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp629 Ibid.630 Martin Bernal, Black Athens. The periods of African influence were those of Sesostris III (nineteenth century BCE) and of the Hyksos (sixteenth and following century BCE). The civilization of Egypt was in those times without equal in the Greek tribal world or anywhere else in Europe, and this remained the case for about another millenium.631 Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out Of Africa.632 Martin Bernal (in Bernal On Lefkowitz) wrote: ‘she has found powerful helpers on the far right. In the preface to Not Out of Africa she thanks Wellesley College and the Bradley and Olin Foundations for their grants.[..] The main concern of all of these organizations and journals is to turn back what their members and contributors view as the tides of liberalism and multiculturalism that have engulfed not only society but also education and the highbrow media.’633 Most egyptologists today claim that the skin colour of the ancient Egyptians was never a matter of concern to them before they were confronted with Afro-centrist claims. This denial of something that is clearly present in all main historical and philosophical publications (of which I only mention a few in this essay) inhibits serious criticism and hampers scientific progress, because a guenine paradigm shift in cultural history is urgently needed to advance to a global scientific perspective.634 Diels fragment 6635 Khandioga Upanishad (3.4.2) 636 John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (introduction)637 Woolley, C. Leonard. The Sumerians (New York, 1929). Unfortunately the qoute is followed by pinpointing another single source: ‘… the roots go farther back: behind all lies Sumer’.
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638 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy639 John Burnet, in the introduction to Early Greek Philosophy640 Empedocles Fragment 100. The verse might well be written by Empedocles in the fifth century BCE, but it must be admitted that it does not fit well with his other verses, which are rather obscure and bombastic oracles. The actual fragment, with its observation of a playing child and interest in apparatus rather sounds as if tailored centuries after Empedocles, in Alexandria, where pneumatics flourished at the time.641 Athenaeus of Naukratis, Deipnosophistae (Banquet of the Sophists) III, 84-85642 The ‘Greenwood Publishing Group Inc.’ published recently: Robert E. Krebs and Carolyn A. Krebs, Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions, and Discoveries of the Ancient World (November 2003). I had not yet the occasion to read it.643 John Burnet, introduction to Early Greek Philosophy. The attentive reader will notice the circular reasoning in this quote: because the Greek people are inquisitive, it necessarily uses the ‘experimental method’; and because the Greek people use the ‘experimental method’, it necessarily is inquisitive.644 Apart from this superfluous kind of mystery-cults exists valuable experimental archaeology.645 W. H. Auden, The Greeks and Us in Forewords and Afterwords (New York 1973)646 This is a Cartesian slip: of course even termites must use a sort of intelligence.647 Johann Gustav Droysen, Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (Berlin 1833) and Geschichte des Hellenismus (Hamburg, 1836). 648 The only dissident might be Peter Green: Alexander of Macedon 356-323 B. C.: A Historical Biography (berkeley 1992) and Alexander to Actium : The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (Berkeley 1993). 649 David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.650 Sunday Telegraph, cited in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations on the first page of the 1999 edition.651 David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Landes in particular attacks the views of what he denotes as ‘new globalists’, but, as throughout the polemic parts of his book, the caricatural presentation of his foes leaves no possibility to hear the blamed authors.
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652 W. Ward Fearnside, About Thinking653 Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism.654 René Descartes, Discours de la Methode pour bien Conduir sa Raison, et Chercher la Vérité dans les Sciences. (1637). Discours 2 contains the method, discours 4 the first applications. 655 Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz, Critical Remarks Concerning the General Part of Descartes’ Principles, transl. P. Schrecker, A.M. Schrecker. (In Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays). Mind that Leibniz does not condemn the use of unproven axioms, but refutes the claim that all theories must be methodically proven to be useful. 656 The first formulation of a Scientific Method is, quite arbitrarily, attributed to Menodotus of Nicomedia, who lived in the second century CE. After Descartes followed Isaac Newton, Principles; John Stuart Mill, System of Logic: the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation; Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery; Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge; Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.657 For critical studies about the ‘experimental method’ see H. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice. (London 1985) and A. Pickering, Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago 1992).658 René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy art.2.20659 It is hard to believe, as some defend, that Columbus had underestimated the circumference of the earth to facilitate _funding: because he did not know of the existence of America, it would be suicide. Anyhow, even on purpose a miscalculation is a miscalculation. 660 John C. Pritchard, Researches as to the Physical History of Man661 Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson, Does Race Exist, in Scientific American of December 2003.662 Although it must be added that Arthur Schopenhauer called Hegel a lasting monument of German stupidity. Unfortunately, the few critics of Hegel complain about his ‘modernist’ obscurity, and hardly about his racism and religious totalitarianism.663 Georg W.H. Hegel, Philosophy of history, translation J. Sibree (Batoche books, Canada). The book is consists of a number of lectures given at the beginning of the nineteenth century at Jena, and was re-edited by Hegel from 1822 CE until his death. Because de Gobineau has already been discarded in the West as the racist
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scapegoat, and Hegel’s Phenomenology is too obscure, I turn to this work to illustrate conventional Atlantic racism. 664 Anna Goeldi was hanged in Glarus, Switzerland on June 17, 1782 CE. Still ten years later, in Poland, two old ladies were burned at the stake. It is hard to say if they were indeed the last victims. The reality of Satanic whichcraft was still seriously upheld by renown twentieth century scholars like the egyptologist Margaret Murray, appreciated by very naïve neopagans (The Witch Cult in Western Europe, 1921), the Catholic Cleric Montague Summers who plead for the execution of witches in his time (The History of Witchcraft and Demonology, 1926) and Pennethorne Hughes (Witchcraft, 1952).665 Martin Bernal has indeed pointed at the habit of Western scholars – especially since Protestantism - to recalculate all dates to make the events of the Bible the most ancient history. This was yet another reason to prefer the ‘younger’ Greece above India, Babylon or Egypt. Later dating methods and archeological discoveries have of course made those claims impossible to hold, but the reception of Bernal’s study has demonstrated that a comprehensive critical study of ideological constructions is still unwanted within the Atlantic academies. 666 In reality the concept of the immortality of the soul originates in Africa, as an offshoot of animism. From Egypt it travelled to Persia, and consecutively entered Zoroastrism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Hegel, as other clerks, regards the immortality of the soul as a prerequisite of civilization, because it is an indispensible tool of suppression by fear: it is a deterrent from what clerks regard as a natural unity of opposition and immorality. 667 Aristotle, Physiognomonics.668 John Maddox, What Remains to Be Discovered: Mapping the Secrets of the Universe, the Origins of Life, and the Future of the Human Race (New York 1998)669 Richard Herrnstein died in 1994.670 New Republic, October 31st 1994, New York Review of Books, December 1st 1994, Scientific American, Februari 1995. Charles Murray has replicated that there are hundreds of other quotations, but this is not a valid argument. First, many quotations not linked to the Pioneer fund are equally biased (the whole book is evidently racist, not just the mentioned quotes); secondly, if someone is accused of a fellony it is immaterial that this person acted straight in other cases (even the biggest lawbreaker is not breaking laws all the time), and
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thirdly, just one positive fascist quote suffices to demonstrate the underlying inclination. 671 Prof. Thomas J. Bouchard, Contemporary Psychology, cited in front of The Bell Curve 1996 ed.672 David Brooks, The Wall Street Journal. cited on the back of The Bell Curve 1996 ed.673BBC News, Special Report 06/99: World population (e-text at news.bbc.co.uk)674 Menog-I-Khrad 19:4-6
