Ep11: The Lost Paradise
it was ours to lose -- and it is ours to bring back
The most ancient human beings lived with no evil desires, without guilt or crime, and, therefore, without penalties or compulsions. Nor was there any need of rewards, since by the prompting of their own nature they followed righteous ways. ~Tacitus, 1st century AD
In [the Logos] was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light in darkness shined; and the darkness comprehended it not. ~John 1-4:5
Imagine being born in a concentration camp — imagine this is the only life you ever knew. It would still be life. You’d have good days and bad days. Death will never be too far away, and you would suffer a lot — but there is that in our real lives as well. And even in a concentration camp there will be fleeting moments of happiness — fleeting, as they happen in our real lives.
One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, "How beautiful the world could be...”
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
It is hard for us to see how the life that we live is, in many crucial aspects unnatural, antithetical to our nature — just as it would be hard for a person born in a death camp to imagine how their life could be different. But there are clues, many in fact. Things that should not be acceptable, which we only accept as normal because we don’t know any different. Things like the pandemic of loneliness, the ubiquity of trauma, like violent conflicts… Like wars — of which not one was necessary or a benefit to anyone, at least not in the big scheme of things.
For all we know, we still live in hell. And it is true that things are not as bad as they used to be. Still, they are not even close to the paradise that used to be.
The legends of the Golden Age, of the lost Paradise are found in nearly all “civilized” cultures, from Greece to China. Yet with the passage of time, with every new century attesting to the fallibility of human nature, those stories grew ever more mythical, sounding way, way too good to be true. Still, what if human nature as we know it is not representative of our humanity? What if it only reflects an incomplete and traumatized person, someone who is yet to discover and develop some critical side of their humanity? The part that was supposed to make us human — and unlike any other species on this planet?
The Indus Valley Civilization might not have been the most epic or well known Bronze Age civilization, but it was by far the largest. Spanning across a thousand miles along the present-day border between India and Pakistan, its population reached 5 millions at its peak. What makes it truly remarkable is its… alien culture — and alien inhabitants. And don’t mean they come from a different planet but… well, maybe see for yourself.
IVC lasted for more than a thousand years, from 3d millennium till the end of 2d millennium BC (they would not start writing the Bible until a few hundreds years after that). And over that life span — perfectly planned cities of tens of thousands people, quality constructed two-story homes with water supply and a sewer system that was better than anything we had till 19th century London. Standard brick sizes and standard weights across their realm and what looks like… personal IDs? A great seafaring nation, it established a flourishing maritime trade network across the Arabian Sea, including trade outposts in Sumer. And Dravidian languages — the descendants of the language of IVC — remained the lingua-franca of sailors of the Arabian Sea well into the Middle Ages.
What makes IVC truly remarkable, however, is that it managed to achieve all that while having no apparent elites, no rulers, no wealth concentration, no courts, no laws or law enforcement, no armies… and no weapons? Well, talk about civilization!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the relationship and family dynamics in the IVC culture would appear similarly alien to a modern man. Despite becoming civilized in many other senses (cities, etc.), IVC managed stay a matriarchal — or matrilocal — society, featuring what Wikipedia article describes as “visiting marriage”:
Frequently, visiting marriage is being practiced, meaning that husband and wife are living apart in their separate families, seeing each other in their spare time. The children of such marriages are raised by the mother's extended matrilineal clan. The father does not have a significant role in the upbringing of his own children; he does, however, in that of his sisters' children — his nieces and nephews.
Reading that passage, one might wonder if the “visiting husbands” would even know — or cared to know — who their biological children were.
Imagine a society where men treat every child as their own and each other as brothers. Contrast those secure, generous, tolerant attitudes with the competitive, conflicts-r-us scarcity mindsets of patriarchal cultures, and “the sins of our fathers” expression gains a totally different dimension to it.
Maybe we can live in peace. But, maybe, for that to happen our idea of who we are, even our very concept of a family must change?
And, of course, one doesn’t need to go back thousands of years to find the examples of pre-civilization cultures — or how a contact with such a culture could be an eye-opener for a “civilized” individual.
In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one.
This struck them as strange. Colonial society was richer and more advanced. And yet people were voting with their feet the other way.
The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. Benjamin Franklin observed the phenomenon in 1753, writing, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble (sic!) with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”
During the wars with the Indians, many European settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. After a while, they had plenty of chances to escape and return, and yet they did not. In fact, when they were “rescued,” they fled and hid from their rescuers.
Sometimes the Indians tried to forcibly return the colonials in a prisoner swap, and still the colonials refused to go. In one case, the Shawanese Indians were compelled to tie up some European women in order to ship them back. After they were returned, the women escaped the colonial towns and ran back to the Indians.
Even as late as 1782, the pattern was still going strong. Hector de Crèvecoeur wrote, “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European.”
I first read about this history several months ago in Sebastian Junger’s excellent book “Tribe.” It has haunted me since. It raises the possibility that our culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.
— David Brooks, The Great Affluence Fallacy
Did you know that wars are a relatively recent invention — the earliest known armed conflict having happened only around 13 thousands of years ago? “Only”, of course, when we compare it with the length of time the anatomically modern humans have been around — which is over 300 thousands of years. We lived in peace almost until the end of that timespan — and we did so even while sharing Europe with neanderthals. We had contacts, we interbreed with them — but we never fought them. For that there is no archeological evidence.
What we do have plenty of the evidence for is the mental and physical toll that the transition to agriculture took on humanity. Perhaps it is then the trauma reached the point when it became self-sustaining and intergenerational — changing our nature, changing who we are, how we live, and how we see the world and each other.
And yet, none of that is irreversible. We share the same reality, the same world, and the same human nature. When we understand how it all works, we see no reason for disagreements, no reason for conflicts, for power hierarchies and for competing for a place in them.
Just imagine — nothing to fight for, nothing to die for… for the good Earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
The paradise that we have lost, we have the power to bring back. What we lack is not even the truth or the knowledge of it — that truth has been told many times over thousands of years. What has been missing is the capacity for understanding of that truth. The capacity to critically evaluate the beliefs that had been handed down to us by our parents and peers, and by society as a whole. The imagination that it takes for us to understand a proposition or a person even if we didn’t agree with them. Those elusive critical thinking skills, if you will, teaching them to someone who hasn’t acquired them already — this is the missing link. This is the obstacle that to this day no prophet, no philosopher, no teacher had managed to overcome.
Stay tuned.