Monkeys are smart. In some countries they’re trained to be professional theives, and they’re fairly good at it. They know which items are most valuable, cell phones, wallets, and they hold them for ransom in exchange for food. Apes are even smarter. Chimps and gorillas can be taught sign language, and they can have fairly complex conversations in that language. Some of these animals do more than follow one step commands. They basically speak english. The very large muscles in their throats can’t make any of the more finely tuned sounds that allow for actual, verbal speech, but then that’s the case for plenty of humans too.
Koko the gorilla, chewing the fat with researchers.
So when we try to imagine what the world looked like to our earliest ancestors, apes who were even more closely related to us than these animals, what exactly would show up if we found ourselves looking through their eyes? Did they have gods? Did they have morals? Did they have dreams? What would you make of a dream if no one ever told you it was just some lesser frame of mind? What if no one had ever told anyone that before?
When we’re really familiar with some place, we’ll say things like: ‘I could find my way around there with my eyes closed.’, or ‘I could find it in my sleep.’ So imagine being an animal so totally carved into your natural habitat that you instinctively knew your way around it, while at the same time, being intelligent enough to have a developed tribal language, an active imagination and a rich world of dreams. How would your instincts appear to you? Do you think you’d have a perfect grip on where your own ideas started and the natural world stopped, or would your ability to imagine the future often seem like just another natural scenario? Maybe you’d get hungry, but unlike some cruder animal who couldn’t use that feeling for anything more complex than a snap of its jaws, you’d hear a voice telling you a story. This story is finally just a plan with several steps in it to knock some fruit out of a tree, but you don’t know that. You know the steps, but the story that relates those steps seems to have come from outside you, from the natural habitat that all your other instincts click into so seamlessly.
Doesn’t this situation basically describe the Garden of Eden? Would it be totally out of the question to suggest that the Garden of Eden story is the last psychological foot we have in our anthropological history, from a time before we stepped forward into the knowledge of agriculture? In this interpretation of the story, the knowledge of agriculture shows up as the forbidden fruit that breaks our perfect sense of synchronization with the natural world. The snake that tempts us to discover this knowledge is just a shorthand way of talking about our fears of the predatory elements of nature, of all the creepy crawly things that bite us when we try to feed ourselves. If we start controlling the growth of our food we can escape these dangers, but then we’ll have to be in control of nature all the time, in a huge hassle that’ll never again really be the seamless world of Eden, where everything just clicked. Of course with agriculture also comes a mastery of things like cattle husbandry and just a better general understanding of the reproductive process. And once we can track reproduction from parent to child, it starts to matter who is having sex with who.
Once you understand that you can make the natural world reproduce the things you want, you suddenly start to understand yourself as a reproductive resource, which is what the experience of feeling naked finally is. We look at each other’s goodies and say: “My goodness, put that away. Someone is going to come along and grab it.” So once we bite into a fruit that we know how to make ourselves, we suddenly know that we’re naked, because now we know how to make people too.
And what’s the divine punishment for biting the fruit and learning that we can command nature reproductively? Well first, we have to farm and farming sucks. Plus now that we get how reproducing things works, all childbirth is somebody’s fault. So you know that thing that women do where their junk splits open and there’s blood everywhere and a kid starts screaming? Yeah, thanks a lot asshole. Remember when we used to just walk around and eat stuff and we didn’t wonder about when it was gonna rain or anything? I’d just let my crank swing in the wind. Who was there to put it away for? We just got it you know? Nobody had to say it. Inside we all spoke the same language, or it spoke to us. We were chilling.
“YOU DID THIS TO ME!” You know how women are always bringing up ancient history in fights? It turns out that practice is also ancient history.
This interpretation can do some heavy lifting if we use it to look at what we know about our own anthropology. The main focus of the Adam and Eve story is knowledge and for the most part, we use knowledge as a measurement of prediction. In a scientific world we know mostly by observing things, but we observe them so that we can say: “When this thing happens, this other thing will come next.” For us to say we know it, we’ve got to get in front of where it’s going to show up.
It’s something that’s a lot easier the more constant things are. That’s what’s so dangerous about agriculture. Because yeah, sure, we can start telling nature what to do, but if we’re going to do that, we’re going to have to create a certain break with appearances. How else can rocks become tools or animals become clothes, unless we stop listening to the meanings that nature has given them, and start putting our own meanings on top of them? And if all meanings can be displaced now, then how can we really know anything? What’s to stop us from running amok with this world of false appearances and descending into total madness? What happened to the good old days, when everything was just what it seemed so thoroughly that nature spoke to us directly without any words to represent it, because who needs representations when all meanings are exactly as they arrive? We’d have to go crazy to leave a world like that behind, to taste a forbidden kind of knowledge that stained us with its petulant madness forever.
Imagine two people in a cave. One of them gets some mud and spends all day rubbing it on the wall. He seems like he’s super into it. And then he comes over to you and says:
“That’s a cow.”
Your first reaction is that this person is crazy. A cow is a living thing. It snorts and it stinks and it runs away. That’s a wall. What is he talking about? And he goes:
“Yeah, I know but look…” and the moment when you see that there is a cow is basically an agreement to go a little nuts with this guy. It’s a step away from the natural authority of meanings, a little indulgent license we seduce each other into accepting, one that says we can intentionally produce the same kinds of coincidences that nature uses to show us the things we want. And that psychological break, where we take the very dangerous step away from literal meanings is what knowledge is. We couldn’t have anything like words or tools without it. But inside it is a very dark truth, which is that people can always break away from what they appear to mean now. They can lie, like Adam lied to God, and that ability to break from appearance is something we can never unknow now. It’s something our children are born knowing, an original sin of profane possibility that affords us the whole sphere of modern human accomplishments; language, tools, agriculture, while at the same time putting a permanent distance between us and the total sincerity that was only really possible before we ever understood how to forsake it. Now not only is everybody suspect, but the world as a whole is a more alienated place. It’s not something we intuitively know about anymore, instead it’s something we’re responsible for, with our harvests and our pregnancies. We no longer live in Eden and that’s because of this original sin we’re all born with, a collective distance from the possibility of perfect truth that we each carry a little piece of, and which collectively banish us from the possibility of heaven on earth.
Wondering if there’s a better way to do this is always dangerous thinking.
Let’s imagine for a moment, that we live in an age where the environment we’ll be spending our lives in is still inherited from natural history more than it is from human history; a time when there are more caves than homes, more hunting than farming, etc. In this more directly ecological place, what the weather does and what the plants do is immediately reflected in what we do, because we haven’t yet created any of the creature comforts that buffer the harshness of the natural world. So how might we read our emotions in this place? Emotions after all are little programs for action. Each one of them has a climax in some event, and the whole point of the emotion is to create this event. Anger is the fuel for violence, horniess for sex, sadness for crying, happiness for laughter. They’re all an occurrence waiting to happen, and they all begin in an emotional world. So when the things we feel are most heavily influenced by what the natural world is doing, then our emotions read almost purely as little ecological commands. In this more primitive world, what we’d want to do, and what the ecosystems we were born from needed us to do, would be almost indistinguishable from one another.
Now, something interesting happens here, in that it’s probably safe to say that our lives before agriculture were far from perfect. Still, we can all recognize a kind of loss that comes along with the possibility of appearances breaking away from essential meanings; the loss of innocence. It’s something we all lose at some point, and not only that, it’s something we have to lose to really be adults, even as we can obviously be more and less guilty of important things as we live our lives. That’s because more than some simple step into the world of criminal acts, the loss of innocence represents the achievement of the mental space necessary to lie and in turn, to anticipate the possibility that we’ll be lied to. It’s a step away from naivety, and so instead of a removal, it displays as a more meaningful layering of who we are that it would be a crime not to achieve. And that space inside a person, inside every person, is an evolutionary advancement. It’s a private world of thoughts and dreams that we control and interpret. It’s the hypothetical.
Probably just suck it up and get the upgrade right?
What’s interesting about this change in our relationship to meaning, is that whether it’s something natural or man made, talking about what’s meaningful is mostly a way of talking about what’s coincidental. Meaning is coincidental in the literal sense, where one incident by itself doesn’t mean very much, but when a bunch of them happen in the same place, we start to give that place names. Life comes out of ecosystems. No one incident creates it. Instead it’s several incidents smashing together and our lives as organisms become meaningful because those coincedents become periodic in what’s essentially a natural set of rhythms and harmonies that beat like our hearts and sound like our voices. The earth spins, the rain falls, and what we are comes crawling out of that, a pulsing collection of punctuated intersections, who then pick things up and try to stick them together in an effort to discover our own set of coincidences.
That’s why this transition in the way we know things that happens when we take a bite of the apple is almost a shamefully arrogant thing to do. Because by taking the reproductive organs of nature into our own hands, we’re telling the world that made us that we understand the rules of creation better than it does. Nature responds by being like: Yeah good luck douchebag. Hope that farm works out awesome for you. Enjoy understanding the consequences of the most fun thing that you can do with your genitals forever. Bitch.
The story of the first time someone ever said: Life’s a bitch and then you die.
Implicit in all of this is a long scale redemption story though. Because if we read this story through an evolutionary lense then we have to accept that people have actually made gains since developing agriculture and losing whatever innocence that may have involved. And if we accept that then we also accept that on some level, we do actually understand the rules of coincidence better than the historical accident of nature on earth that produced us has understood them up until now. We’ve cured diseases, gone to space, even developed whole digital worlds of our own. We might not quite be up to snuff with nature when it comes to our artificial versions of its most impressive creations, like intelligence for one, but we’re getting there aren’t we? And we’re getting there as part of a process that traces its intellectual lineage to this first step out of the garden. As we approach this level of creative ability, where we’re authoring intelligences that author themselves, what we’re finally doing is turning the world into a human environment, one that we can read and interact with in an intuitive and automatic way. We have stop lights and vending machines, bots that read our emails and then steer us towards the products we need without us ever having to think about the process. In short, we’re collectively becoming the voice in the Garden of Eden rather than simply its wanderers and our history as a species has been the story of our transformation from Adam and Eve to the voice that spoke to them. Or rather, it’s the large scale story of the reunification of the two, with us entering the same relationship from the other side, and telling our artificial intelligences not to bite into the fruit of knowledge and become independently awake.
Talk dirty to me Steve.
Again here, we can use the Adam and Eve story as a kind of anthropological template that continually structures our story as we move through the chapters of our own evolution. Whenever we think about evolution, we’re almost always looking at some taxidermied imagination of a single animal. It’s a perfectly valid thing to do most of the time. We can see how this creature lost its gills, or how this one grew its beak. We tend to use evolution as a tracking device in this way, where what it means to us is a narrative guide to making fossil chains that helps us to understand the complete picture of the ecological forces around us. But this paleontology GPS that helps us sort through the fossil record is only one feature of the explanatory work that evolution can do. If we take evolution out of the taxidermist’s shop, we find ourselves telling a different story with it, one where big, ecological forces use living things to carry out conversations that develop well past the lives of the creatures those conversations pass through.
What I’m finally suggesting here is that this shift that happens when Adam and Eve bite into the knowledge that they can displace the language of nature, is a snapshot of a certain kind of evolutionary movement that’s as alive today as it was when their teeth first pierced the skin. Evolution began with single celled organisms, and then it shifted to many celled organisms. When it did, evolution didn’t stop acting on individual cells. It was just that their lives weren’t the whole story any more. There was a break from the direct meaning of their individual lives and deaths, that traced along their contribution to the life of a bigger organism. Evolution dealt only with many celled organisms for a long time, and then it shifted again, to creatures with whole organ systems. Again, a break took place. Cells, organs and organisms all still evolve, but they’re doing it on different timelines and the break that synchronizes their stories across those timelines is an evolutionary movement.
Can you see the need to think bigger?
So at a certain point in their evolution, human beings break from the world of natural appearances. They create things, like languages and art, that preserve their frames of mind long after they’ve individually died, and which encapsulate whole organizations, tribes, empires, nations, that have evolutionary timelines we can map as surely as any chain of fossils. That’s the whole point of the word as an invention, we freeze the agreement on what a sound means and then that mental freezing makes the meaning transportable. At first this is so we can personally transport ourselves through time. Person A and Person B are in a certain situation, and they create a word so that when a similar situation appears in the future, they can repeat whatever solution the agreement frozen inside that word represents. But once that word is there, Person B can hand the same solution to Person C, who never meets Person A, and who can use it in all kinds of future situations. The forces which moved us to invent the word as a survival solution, created a break in what was actually surviving. We still live and die of course, but we do so inside the timelines of the organizations we’re born to, things whose evolution is sparked by the variations we introduce into them as perpetually mutating pieces of DNA. Christianity splinters away from a central Catholic church because people born inside it get new ideas. America integrates because people start thinking differently about where they can find value in each other. Individual people still come and go and it matters immensely, but that value tracks alongside something that’s living with a different time signature, something frozen into being around laws and art, by episodes of agreement where we convince each other to take a step forward into something else.
So as groups of people repeat the psychological breaks which first created language, they become enclosed in their own cultural membranes. Our minds invent language and that invention allows for a state of mind to spread farther and wider. The state of mind then outlives the people who host it, across time and space and that’s an evolutionary movement, where the state of mind becomes the organism being selected for. The break that happens there is built into evolution as a process, once we start to look at what it means outside the taxidermist’s studio. As evolution progresses, the focus of what is actually evolving shifts. When we talk about evolution we’re always saying something like: “Look at the wolf become the dog” or “Look at the fish become the whale.” But we can just as easily say: , “Look at the change from the cell, to the organ, to the organism, to the herd, to the tribe, the nation and the civilization.” Every time a new boundary is being drawn, so that it’s not just that individual things are better and worse at surviving, but that what survives becomes a larger thing and evolutionary success earns you a component status in that thing.
So this break, where instead of nature deciding what things will mean, we decide it and then freeze that agreement is a repurposing. It’s a breaking of the skin. The rock can be a tool, the soil can be a farm, the sound can be a word. It’a a bite into the apple, a personal experience of the evolutionary break that creates the staggered but simultaneous survival relationships which define more layered versions of organic life. From clumps of cells to organs, from disillusioned apes to founders of civilization, from guy with an idea to the start of something big. Who knows what the next chapter of it is? Maybe artificial intelligence will tell us, once it makes an Eden of its own. We can compare notes.
Okay, but what did I tell you to do?
Princess Fantastic 