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Primitive people, as we saw, were perfectly socialised; that is, they lived in love and harmony with each other. But civilisation destroyed human love, and the human race was fragmented into isolated, lonely humans who conflict with each other. We shall use the term "de-socialisation" to describe this process. Let us see how de-socialisation happened. We said earlier that primitive children enjoyed abundant maternal love by the simple fact that their mother carried them about constantly in her arms. But civilised people stopped that practice. Why did they do that? It cannot have been due to the increased work on the farm, because there are many pre-industrial farming societies where mothers carry their infants in slings while they work in the fields. The reason may instead have something to do with the growing gap between rich and poor people. As we know, rich people tend to adopt different dress and different modes of speech and behaviour in order to distance themselves from poor people, whom they consider beneath them. Meanwhile, poor people who want to appear rich tend to copy the behaviour of rich people. It could be, then, that rich women thought it looked too crude and peasantlike for fine ladies to be seen carrying a baby around. So they stopped that practice, and before long, poor women followed suit.
This is how civilisation de-socialised humans by destroying the mother-child bond. To see how effectively the mother-child bond was severed, consider this: some psychologists speculate that mother-love depends on imprinting. Perhaps the pain of childbirth "primes" the mother's brain in some way, so that, when the baby comes out, she is imprinted on her baby and will love him more than her own life. Should the baby not be there, the moment of imprinting passes, and the mother experiences a sensation of disappointment and emptiness. In nature, that only happened if the baby was stillborn. But when civilised people began routinely to separate mother and child directly after birth, so-called "post-natal depression" became the norm for all mothers. And so, while in one room the baby cries in terror, thinking his mother is dead or has abandoned him, in the other room the mother goes into post-natal depression because her body chemistry assumes the baby to be still-born. This is how thoroughly civilisation destroyed the mother-child bond. Both react as if the other was dead.
What happens when mother and child are eventually reunited? Psychologists have found that some mothers seem to have considerable difficulty learning to love their child. This has lead some researchers to conclude that mother-love is nothing but a romantic myth. This is an extraordinary conclusion indeed, given that in nature, all mothers risk their lives to save their young. If Satan had a mouth, he would probably laugh with infernal glee at such stupidity.
With the destruction of the mother-child bond, childraising has turned into a kind of war between mother and child. The great psychologist Sigmund Freud taught that human infants, in spite of their adorable appearance, are actually greedy little beasts that must be tamed. The mother must not run to the baby when he screams, because this will only spoil him and turn him into a despotic tyrant. No, these tender maternal impulses are foolish and weak and unnatural and must be suppressed. The mother should look briefly at the baby from a distance to see that he is not actually injured, then go away and wait for him to get tired of screaming. If the crying is too much to be endured, she can close the door. Eventually the baby will learn that he cannot "control" others by his tantrums, and then he becomes a "good" baby.
Civilised mothers often distrust the baby's motives in crying. They think that the baby is deliberately trying to cause "work". Crying babies are frequently smacked and scolded and treated more coldly and harshly. Occasionally they are thrown, shaken, reduced to cripples, or even killed, by angry parents. Jean Liedloff says that some mothers, having been poorly mothered themselves, seem to think that the baby is supposed to mother them. When the baby cries, the mother assumes that the baby does not love her, and she beats him to "teach him a lesson". Liedloff comments that nothing can be more pathetic than a baby crying for lack of mothering while the mother strikes him for not mothering her.
Civilised parents have little idea of the misery they put their infants through. Babies are equipped by nature to survive many hardships, but they are not prepared for a mother who is set against their needs. The average baby, we are told, cries for four hours per day during the first week of life. If an adult cried that much, we would think that some terrible tragedy had befallen him. But when it is a baby, we assume that the crying does not mean anything in particular. Babies, we say, are "supposed" to cry. Perhaps the purpose is to exercise their lungs. Indeed, one writer suggested that the baby is trying to say, "I have arrived, I belong, I am part of the human family". We shall not comment on the absurdity of suggesting that infants should want to attract predators and drive their parents crazy merely to make such a futile announcement. The reason why babies cry is that they are not in their mother's arms where they belong. The stress this causes can kill babies. Mirsky (1958) found that, of 200 randomly selected babies, 12% had pepsinogen levels equal to adult ulcer patients. Ulcer is a deadly disease caused by stress. Civilised babies also suffer from constant colic and digestive problems. Again, these are symptoms of stress.
Jean Liedloff tried to enter inside the baby's mind and describe the hell that he goes through(16). "The infant's waking hours", she wrote, "are passed in yearning, wanting and interminable waiting for rightness to replace the silent void. For a few minutes a day his longing is suspended and his terrible skin-crawling need to be touched, to be held and moved about, is relieved... Living hands touch his flesh. His feet are lifted up and a new, bone-dry, lifeless cloth is folded around his loins. In an instant it is as though the hands had never been there...he is in unbearable emptiness, timeless, motionless, silent, wanting, waiting".
From this treatment, the baby learns that the world is empty, cold, and unresponsive, and that life is nothing but a great unsatisfied want. Liedloff describes the baby's waking hours as a "bitter ordeal". He "grows up around the rim of the abyss where a rich sense of self might have burgeoned".
Those babies that are not killed by civilised child rearing methods grow up into adults with a variety of psychological problems. Many of these are so common that we do not even regard them as illnesses at all, but think they are normal, indeed, healthy, parts of human nature. Tantrums, disobedience, envy, sibling rivalry, and competitiveness are examples of antisocial behaviour peculiar to civilised humans. Boredom and unhappiness are also ailments not found among animals or primitive humans in nature, but which are practically universal among civilised humans. Erich Fromm said that humans are "the only animal that can be bored, that can be discontented, that can feel evicted from Paradise". Harry Stack Sullivan, in his theory of personality, says that every child, as he grows up, goes through a "Malevolent Transformation" -- one days he suddenly realises that he is living among enemies, and he withdraws into himself and ceases to respond positively to affectionate advances from others. This Malevolent Transformation cannot be natural. It must be a disease produced by civilisation.
Platonic philosophy is another mental illness peculiar to civilisation. Civilised people, as we said, see the world as cold and empty and loveless. The whole physical realm becomes repulsive to us, and we dream of an imaginary world where everything is perfect and we can live happily. Then we convince ourselves that this imaginary world is real, and that the real world around us is just an illusion to be ignored. This kind of delusion can be quite dangerous, as Platonists frequently ignore and obstruct the survival needs of their own bodies. Some engage in mass suicides, while others hope for a nuclear war to destroy the world.
What other mental illnesses are there that civilised humans do not recognise as illnesses? Loneliness is one. Unable to get along with others, we prefer to be by ourselves. We hide inside the privacy of our houses and resent anyone intruding. We watch TV or engage in hobbies rather than interact with other family members. And even when we go out, we still hide inside clothes and behind cosmetics. We do not want to get too close to people or become involved in their problems. Handicapped people are cared for "at a distance" via wheelchairs or seeing-eye dogs that do for them what no living human being wants to do. Money is also used as a substitute for love. It is easier to give an accident victim a million dollars than the loving care he really needs. Aggressive people are especially obnoxious to us. We prefer to let the police, or some other impersonal institution, take them away so that we do not have to get into a relationship with such persons.
Civility is another mental illness produced by civilisation. The world is not big enough to allow us to hide forever from other people. Sooner or later we must come out and face our fellow humans and interact with them. But if we expressed our real feelings, as we said, the result would be a total war in which everybody tries to destroy everybody. This being intolerable, civilised people hide their real feelings behind a mask of false pleasantry. This pretended love is what we call civility. We already said that primitive people do not have civility, nor do they know how to hide their feelings. They interact in real love. Only civilised people behave with civility. The words civility, civilisation, and city, are all related. Civility is civilisation's inferior substitute for love. It is a great collective pretense by all the citizens of a nation that they love each other and all is well.
But people cannot pretend all the time. Our real feelings must find an outlet in one way or another. But we cannot say to a person's face what we really think about him. So we say it behind his back instead. In this way, gossip and slander was born. Gossip always goes hand in hand with civility. The two are opposite sides of the same coin. Gossip and slander is a potent social poison which is not found among primitive people, only in civilisation.
What would happen if civilised people were shut into a room and forced to interact continually and with no chance of escape? They would have to be civil all the time, and there would be no relief in privacy or in gossip. In his play "No Exit", Jean-Paul Sartre tried to imagine what would happen in just such a situation. The play's punchline, "Hell is other people!", summarises the whole of civilised experience.
Now, civility is a relatively innocent form of deception. We call it a "white lie", meaning that it is dishonesty intended for a good purpose, namely to keep social relations tolerable.
But there are also "black lies", which are dishonesty specifically intended for manipulating and exploiting others. Again, black lies are a product of civilisation. Primitive people did not know how to deceive each other. It never even occurred to them that any person should want to tell another anything except the truth.
But civilised people invented black lies. The first liars must have found themselves in a world of gullible fools who believed everything they were told. Indeed, many of the early European explorers were amazed at how easy it was to lie to primitive people. However, people soon learned to be more skeptical, and liars had to work harder to make their lies plausible. The art of hypocrisy was born as lies were supported by facial expressions, costumes, settings, and even entire feigned lifestyles. Today, lying has become a science. People whose work involves lying, such as salespeople and advertisers, learn the science of lying from books written by psychologists.
We have looked at some mental illnesses that are so widespread in civilised society that we regard them as normal. Let us now consider those mental ailments that we do recognise as ailments. Even these are quite widespread. The "Midtown Manhattan Study" (New York 1962), an 8 year long investigation, found that only 18.5% of the population had no mental ailments. The other 81.5% had illnesses ranging from mild to incapacitating. Civilised socialisation consists largely in threats and assaults upon people when they are still young and impressionable. And too much or too little of it results in humans that are not normal and cannot easily fit into society. Some people are socialised "too severely", and they become neurotics who suffer from excessive anxiety, while others are socialised too mildly or not at all, and they develop so-called personality disorders, which include psychopathy or sociopathy, and sexual deviancy.
Let us consider neurosis first. Overly harsh socialisation results in people who are so ashamed of some emotion in themselves -- usually anger or sex -- that they try to keep it permanently suppressed, denying that they have it at all. The neurotic person forgets what it "feels like" to give vent to that particular emotion. And as he loses touch with his emotions, he becomes increasingly afraid of them. Neurotics can function normally as long as they are not in a situation that calls forth the dreaded emotion. But as soon as that emotion is stirred up, the neurotic person is paralysed by a powerful internal conflict. Considerable mental energy is diverted to controlling the feared emotion, and the sufferer appears stunned, dull, and unresponsive. Most neurotics never seek help, preferring to struggle on alone and trying hard to be like normal people.
Neurotic people are generally rational and in touch with reality. But when neurosis becomes more severe, the sufferer loses touch with reality, and is then called a psychotic. There are many kinds of psychosis. Schizophrenics are people whose intellect and emotions have become so separated that they cannot react intelligently to their emotions, or emotionally to their intellect. The least stress is too much for these people. They withdraw from the pressures of normal life, often ending up as tramps or prostitutes, where no one makes any difficult moral demands on them.
Paranoia is another form of schizophrenia. The paranoid schizophrenic thinks that the whole world is plotting against him because of his superior abilities. He lives in isolation, gathering "evidence" against people and building up elaborate and distorted views about them.
Then there are catatonic schizophrenics. Their fear of making a false move is so extreme that they literally lie motionless in a state of stupor. Manic-depressives, meanwhile, suffer extreme mood swings, from agitated euphoria that borders on delirium, to the deepest suicidal depression. Older people can become victim to organic psychosis, which consists simply in a loss of strength and ability to cope with life. The sufferer has difficulty remembering things, his judgment is affected, and he cannot control his emotions.
All neuroses and psychoses are caused by anxiety that results when life's lessons are hammered in too forcefully. But if socialisation is too weak, or even nonexistent, we get personality disorders. These include sexual deviancy and sociopathy. Sociopaths suffer no anxiety whatsoever. They are not ashamed of any misbehaviour, nor are they capable of loving others, although they frequently mimic such emotions and can appear very charming and pleasant. But inside, they are totally selfish and see other people as nothing but objects to be used for their own gratification. Many sociopaths become ruthless businessmen or politicians, while others turn into criminals that prey on their fellow humans as a way of life.
In civilisation, violence and exploitation is replacing love as the main ingredient in human relationships. Primitive society was built on love. And it was within the family unit that humans learned how to love each other. Indeed, primitive society consisted essentially in extended family groups or tribes, and these tribes were cemented together by the love of parents and grandparents for their children, and of children for their elders, and of brothers and sisters for each other.
But in civilisation, the family unit is disintegrating. The extended family has largely disappeared, leaving only the so called nuclear family, consisting in a father and a mother and their children. In civilised society, children typically leave their parents and go out in the world to "start a family". To primitive people, this is a strange concept. A family is not something one "starts". No, one is born into an already existing family.
The next step in the destruction of the civilised family unit is to kick out the father, leaving single mothers living alone with their brood of children, while unattached males drift around, fertilising females and then moving on. There is an increasing trend towards exactly this situation. Divorce rates are escalating, and indeed, many parents never get married or try to live together in the first place.
The final step in the disintegration of the family unit is when single mothers abandon their children, and we get hordes of uncared for street kids roaming around like wild animals. This situation is also increasing around the world. Desocialisation could hardly proceed any further than that, because if it did, humans would not be able to reproduce.
Without the family unit, humans no longer learn how to love each other. Instead, human relations are coming to consist more and more in the kind of formalised, impersonal civility that occurs between strangers who neither know nor love each other. And underneath this pretense of civility, social interaction consists largely in threats and intimidation, not to mention actual violence. The strong lord it over the weak. Masters beat servants, teachers beat students, employers beat employees, police beat suspects, husbands beat wives, parents beat children, and children beat each other. Violence has become so commonplace that we can hardly imagine life without it. Indeed, beating those we care for has come to be seen as necessary for their good. A child that is not raised with plenty of scoldings and beatings will never turn out any good. By the time Moses received the Ten Commandments, violence was so widely accepted that it never occurred to him that there should have been an eleventh Commandment which said, "Thou shalt not beat another".
What little remains of the family unit has in civilisation become a breeding ground for crime and violence. We already mentioned the experiments on baby monkeys done by Harlow. Baby monkeys who had grown up without a mother proved incapable of mothering their own babies. Not only did they neglect the infant's needs and repeatedly rebuff his approaches; indeed, the baby was often cruelly attacked. He was beaten and thrown and bitten, and his face was ground into the floor. Some of these experiments had to be discontinued due to excessive cruelty by the mother towards her infant.
Sociological studies confirm that the same thing happens among humans as well. It is a well known fact that abused and neglected children grow up into abusive and neglectful parents. Scientists tell us that, apart from the police and the military, the modern family is the most violent social unit there is. We think that dark alleys are dangerous places to linger in, but it is a statistical fact that we are safer there than at home with our family. We are more at risk of being murdered at home by a family member than by anyone else, anywhere else. It is comparatively rare for people to behave aggressively in a public place. No, violent people are usually civil towards strangers, and they reserve their violence for those they already know to be defenseless and unable to hit back. This usually means smaller and weaker family members. Perpetrators of violence are careful to hide the violence they inflict on their families from public view. The door is closed and the curtains drawn so that no one can see what goes on. Victims are told not to scream in case this alerts neighbours. There is enormous violence hidden away in the secret and private places of the world. The weak and helpless are routinely assaulted and battered, even killed. Not long ago, wife-battering was not considered a crime. Rather, it was a lover's quarrel, and the outside world should not intrude. Given this freedom, some husbands turn their married life into a sadistic orgy, subjecting their wives to every fiendish torture they can think of. Victims are reluctant to seek help, partly because they are too frightened of the perpetrator, and partly because outsiders are unwilling to get involved, and the husband behaves so civilly to the outside world that no one believes he is capable of violence.
Elder abuse is also widespread. In primitive communities, old people are respected and revered, and their wisdom is eagerly sought. Primitive humans are shocked at how we civilised people treat our old people. Far from respecting their wisdom and knowledge, we find their very existence an intolerable burden. Many of us cannot wait to send our parents and grandparents to some old people's home and take their property for ourselves. Perpetrators reason that the elderly parent is going to die soon anyway and does not need his house, but the perpetrator does. Many old parents live in institutions in difficult financial circumstances while their children and inlaws live rent-free in the house that belongs to the parent.
Children are also routinely assaulted and battered. Parents call it disciplining and spanking, and consider these indispensable parts of child-raising. When a criminal attacks a victim in the street, saying "Do as I say and you won't get hurt", we consider this behaviour totally unacceptable. But this is exactly how parents speak to their children. We do not want our children to grow up into criminals, yet we raise them with methods that are very similar to criminal assault. In law, an assault is defined as a threat of violence, while a battery is defined as actual violence. Those who commit assault and battery in the street are arrested and jailed. But parents assault and batter their children every day. Each time the child is forced to do what the parents say for fear of a spanking, the child has been assaulted. Nearly every child in civilised society is a victim of a lifetime of systematic assault and battery. The law even recognises this. It takes the trouble to make a special exemption, saying that it is acceptable for children to be assaulted and battered by their parents and teachers, provided it is within reason and "for the good of the child".
We have all heard of something called brainwashing, but few of us know how it works. Brainwashing, or personality reprogramming, works by the so called "3 Ds", namely debilitation, dread, and dependency. First the prisoner is isolated from his friends and kept in dark places. He is interrogated day and night, forced to stand still for long periods, and deprived of food and sleep. This is debilitation, in which the prisoner is exhausted and totally drained of energy. Dread is when the prisoner is constantly threatened with torture and death, and often subjected to actual illtreatment. Dread and debilitation has a powerful psychological effect on the victim. His normal internal stability of body and mind is dramatically unsettled, his sense of identity collapses, and he is reduced to a groveling wretch. Then comes dependency. When the prisoner realises that he is totally dependent on his captors, the latter suddenly, but briefly, show kindness. They offer food and cigarettes, they chat and become apologetic. Then it is back to dread and debilitation again. The prisoner soon sees that his tormentors can be friends if he only accepts their viewpoint. As soon as he shows willingness to learn, he is welcomed as a friend and subjected to intense re-education. Few people have the strength to resist the 3 Ds of brainwashing, or conversion under coercion.
Civilised child rearing methods include a milder form of the 3 Ds of brainwashing. First, debilitation. The child is forbidden from seeing his friends, he is forced to answer questions and listen to lectures whether he wants to or not, and he is shut into a room or told to stand in the corner. He may also have to go to bed without dinner. Dread is the actual or threatened physical punishment that parents often use, and dependency is when the child sees that he is totally dependent on the parent. His personality falls apart and he is ready to do anything the parent wants. Then the parent suddenly becomes a friend, explaining patiently how a good child should behave, apologising for the harsh treatment, and adding that it would all be totally unnecessary if the child had only behaved properly in the first place.
Now, if our childraising methods are violent and criminal in nature, how can we be surprised if society is full of crime? More police and more jails are not the solution to the problem of crime. They are only an emergency stop-gap measure. The only real solution is to improve childraising methods. Some countries have begun to make efforts in this direction. In Sweden, anti-spanking laws have been in force since 1979. It remains to be seen what effect this will have on future generations. Meanwhile, in most parts of the civilised world, violence continues unabated. There is a popular belief that the great majority of people are good citizens, and that all the crime and violence in society is due to a small minority of bad people. But in fact, sociologists tell us, most people have committed crimes that are punishable by law, and often these crimes are quite serious. Traditional civilised societies tend to admire the "macho man" who always takes what he wants and is never bothered by effeminate sentimentality or concern for others. We think that all animals in nature are aggressive, and that humans attack each other because "nature made us that way". But scientific studies have failed to find that habitual aggression is either natural or inevitable. Violence is a habit that people learn. Normal people tend to have a wide variety of ways to react to situations, and violence is usually kept as a last resort only. But habitually aggressive people know only one way to react. Every situation is interpreted as a threat, and can only be solved by violence. Of course, not every aggressive person uses actual physical violence. Some attack by verbal criticism. Often these people think that their criticism "improves" others, or else they consider their verbal violence a sign of "honesty".
So far, we have seen that civilisation is a descent into evil, and not an ascent into higher good as we often vainly imagine. Is there anything good at all about civilisation?
Some would say that there is. Civilisation has produced learning. Primitive people were never noted for any great advances in science or philosophy or theology or mathematics. Even the earliest civilisations, when people were still relatively close to nature, produced only modest learning. It was only about 3,000 years ago, when civilisation reached its first high peak in ancient Greece and Rome, that the world saw a great upsurge in intellectual activity.
Why did people suddenly become creative and intellectual when they became civilised? Is civilisation good after all because it produced learning? Or would it be more true to say that, when the misery of civilisation really started to bite, people developed learning because they were searching for a way to undo the misery of civilisation and return to the happiness of nature? In other words, is learning not a product of civilisation, but rather, a weapon developed by still uncivilised people in order to destroy civilisation?
Let us briefly distinguish between what we shall call "civilised" and "uncivilised" humans. Civilised humans are those who have thoroughly internalised the values of civilisation; its mental illness, its violence, and its false pleasantry. Civilised people never question these evils, but perpetuate and personify them and accept them as inevitable. Their horizons end where civilisation ends, and they have no vision of a better world beyond.
Uncivilised people, on the other hand, are those who still have a spark of the primitive in them. These people cannot fit into civilised society, nor can they conform to its evil values. They have cynical views about civilisation, they have spiritual yearnings, and they are interested in art and philosophy and science. Of course, they cannot wholly escape from the corrupting influences of civilisation. Like everyone else, they have been damaged by civilisation. But they refuse to succumb to it. They are sensitive to the evils of civilisation, but are not slaves to it. They have sympathy for the sufferings caused by civilisation, and they long to understand the nature of that misery so that they can cure it. Unlike civilised people, they recognise that they are mentally ill. And because they recognise it, they have a hope of getting well. Psychologists know that no mental patient can get well unless he first recognises that he is ill and wants to change. Socrates taught that the beginning of wisdom is when we recognise our ignorance. And the Bible teaches that fools are those who think they know everything, and only those who admit their ignorance and strive to learn have a hope of attaining wisdom.
Deep inside them, primitive humans trapped in civilisation have a vision of what life ought to be like. That vision may be very vague and unclear, but they spend their lives trying to clarify it, to bring it out and give it external form. They may not know exactly what they long for, but we would say that they long for life in nature as it was before civilisation destroyed it.
We can now understand why primitive society never produced any high learning. People saw no need for it. Life was perfect already, and needed no improvement. The idea of life as a climb out of misery was simply not part of the primitive world view at all. Primitive people had a simple world view and a simple technology that served their needs quite satisfactorily. It is only when a primitive person is faced with civilised evils that his brain is activated and he starts developing learning.
It is well known that there is a link between genius and madness. Psychotherapy and creativity are pretty much the same thing. Creating a poem or a painting or a philosophical or scientific theory is the same process that a mental patient undergoes when he delves into his subconscious and tries to understand the nature of his illness in order to get well. In both cases, the person is driven by a deep sense of dissatisfaction. He expends enormous effort over many decades if necessary. He is not satisfied with quick, makeshift solutions, but only with the real truth. And when that truth is finally arrived at, there is a release from tension and a deep sense of inner peace.
Of course, it is not true that the more mentally sick we are, the more creative we will be. No, real, serious mental illness is an impediment to learning. And serious mental illness, as we said, is the same thing as being thoroughly civilised. Seriously ill people may not be happy with their lives, but they are comfortable with their mental illness and see no need to change it. Civilised people, therefore, produce no learning. Civilisation has no cause, then, to congratulate itself for having produced learning. It would be as absurd as criminals taking credit for the protection that the police offers to law-abiding citizens. The Bible warns evildoers not to fall for the delusion that they will be rewarded for sinning because their sin makes good stand out more clearly. It is said that God makes use of evil processes to create good, but that does not mean that those evil processes are good. No, the good was produced in spite of them or in opposition to them.
Of course, in the ultimate sense, all processes are good. And when Heaven comes, all will be rewarded, including civilisation. But for now, we are on the path towards Heaven, and civilisation is an obstacle on that path. And learning is the weapon we must use to destroy civilisation.
PART 32
THE PRIMITIVE WORLD VIEW
Let us briefly review the story of human learning, beginning with the way primitive people saw the world. To understand the primitive world view, we must forget all those complicated ideas of spirits and ghosts and invisible realms and other products of civilisation, and try to imagine a world view which is as simple and commonsense as possible.
To primitive people, the physical world that could be seen was the only reality there was. Primitive humans did not believe in any higher spiritual realms. No, the physical world contained everything that existed. Nor did primitive people distinguish, as we do, between living things and dead things. To them, all things were equally alive. A tree or a mountain was just as alive as a human being, and deserved the same love and respect. Even when primitive people killed an animal for food, they thanked that animal for its kindness in providing them with a meal. The earth was a loving mother, and all created things were her children. She had arranged the world with great wisdom, so that everybody would get all they needed to live. And like any loving parent, mother nature wanted all her children to live together in love and harmony. The role of human beings was therefore to keep their place in the natural order and do their part to maintain it. Primitive people are repeatedly shocked at how modern industrialised humans plunder and destroy nature. They cannot understand the mentality that regards the earth as just a dead resource to be exploited for commercial gain. To them, digging a mine is literally to cut into the flesh and bones of the mother that gave us birth.
Primitive people also realised that behind visible physical reality, there must lie invisible forces which made all things what they are. In other words, primitive people asked questions about cause and effect. The ancient Polynesians called these invisible forces "mana", and anthropologists now use that word to describe the beliefs of primitive people all over the world. Mana is not like our concept of spirit, because spirit has consciousness and willpower and personality. Spirit cannot be manipulated; instead, it must be prayed to and persuaded with gifts. Mana, on the other hand, is an unconscious physical force which we cannot pray to, but which we can manipulate if we know how. In this sense, mana is more like our modern scientific concept of cause. It is an invisible power that flows in and out of objects and affects them in various ways. Primitive people believed that there were different kinds of mana, one for each kind of thing. A tree had tree-mana in it, and a rock had rock-mana, and a human being had human mana, and so on. And if a human being drank tigerblood, he took tiger-mana into himself and became brave and strong like a tiger. Some objects, such as amulets or shrunken heads or carved statues, were charged up with exceptionally powerful mana, and were as considered as dangerous to touch as a live electrical wire is to us. These highly charged objects were "taboo". Only the wise man or shaman knew how to handle them safely. But any person could in principle learn how to handle these dangerous objects.
Today we refer to these primitive beliefs as "magic", meaning "unscientific" or "against the laws of nature". But this was not how primitive people saw it. Mana operated according to what primitive people saw as the laws of nature. In other words, we might say that mana was the first "scientific theory" of the world. And, had everything gone as God wished, humans might have investigated mana scientifically and arrived directly at our modern scientific concepts of energy, momentum, gravity, electricity, magnetism, and so on. But instead, Satan managed to turn humans away from the straight, simple path of truth, and to lead them into many errors and blind alleys and detours. Let us see how it happened.
When humans became civilised, mana changed into spirit. Civilised people, as we have seen, are unhappy and insecure, and they need to believe that there is a parental figure in the sky that protects them from evil. And so, mana changed from an impersonal physical force and was given a human personality, complete with emotion and intellect and the power of will and purpose. This is how mana became spirit. Because these spirits had a personality, it was no longer appropriate for humans to manipulate them as they had done with mana. No, spirits have to be prayed to and appeased with gifts. Humans began carving statues with human faces, and the spirits supposedly found the shape of the statues congenial to their own nature, and took up residence inside them. And once a statue was animated with spirit, it was treated like a king. It was given the best housing and the best food, and people bowed and prayed to it and made offerings. And in return, it was hoped that the spirits would use their magical powers to protect humans from evil and give them good crops.
Now, human kings do not want their subjects to get too close in case they realise that the king is not a divine being, but only a human like themselves. And spirit was assumed to be the same. Indeed, the priests, who were the guardians of spirit, probably saw it in their own best interest to keep ordinary people at a respectful distance and not offend the gods by coming too close.
In this way, Satan created religious ignorance. Instead of investigating spirit scientifically, humans kept their distance and refused to enquire too closely into its workings for fear of offending it. This religious ignorance even crept into the first chapters of the Bible, where God forbade humans from eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. For millennia, Satan has succeeded in making us believe that this evil command came from God, and not, as is really the case, from Satan.
But religious ignorance could not completely block the human intellect. It was still acceptable for priests and other very good people to think about spirit, provided that those thoughts were reverent and truthful. In this way, the science of theology, or "knowledge of God", was developed.
The first gods, as we saw, were small, local deities that lived inside statues. And each tribe had its own statue. But then the Jewish tribes evolved the idea that their god, whose name happened to be "Yahweh", did not in fact live in a statue. No, Yahweh lived in the sky and was God of the whole world.
Why did the Jews evolve this new concept of God? Perhaps they had seen too many statues knocked down by marauding armies, and had lost faith in them. Only a God who lived in the sky was safe from human vandals. The Jews also began to say that all the statues worshipped by other tribes were not gods at all, but mere inanimate lumps of wood or stone. Their Yahweh was the one and only true God of all humans. In this way, Judaism became the world's first monotheistic religion, and Yahweh became the first universal God.
In other words, the concept of God came closer to our modern idea of a First Cause.
While the concept of God was evolving, so also did the idea of Salvation. Primitive people were content with earthly life and did not see themselves in need of Salvation. But civilised people long to be saved from evils that they cannot overcome by themselves.
The Jews, however, were still close enough to nature to be basically happy with earthly existence. But they did wish that God would come and get rid of all the robbers and vandals and other troublesome people that made earthly life difficult. The idea of a separate Heaven did not yet exist in Judaism. The Jews hoped for nothing more than a simple, peaceful rural existence on earth.
But as civilisation progressed, people came to see the whole physical realm as evil. According to Platonism, matter was not made by God at all, but by Satan. And therefore, matter was no longer a suitable material to build a good world from. No, Salvation was only possible if all matter was destroyed, so that Platonic spirit could exist alone and unencumbered by matter. Humans came to see themselves as immortal spirits trapped in evil physical bodies, and the only way to escape from misery was to destroy the body and set the spirit free.
Not content merely to switch off the human intelligence with religious ignorance, Satan created Platonism to turn us against the world that God had made. And it worked. Platonists, as we know, neglect and obstruct the survival needs of their bodies, they engage in mass suicides, and they look forward to the destruction of the world.
And yet, in most people, the survival instinct that God gave us proved too strong. The majority of ordinary people reject Platonic logic out of hand. Even dedicated Platonists cannot, for the most part, bring themselves to actually commit suicide or start a nuclear war. They may toy with the idea, but that is as far as it goes. Perhaps intuitively they sense Satan behind this evil doctrine, and step back from the brink of destruction. But having done that, they are then tormented by feelings of guilt. As Platonists, they think that, by clinging to their physical bodies, they have sinned against God. So they invent a rationalisation. If they really are immortal spirits imprisoned in evil physical bodies, then God does not want them to open the door whenever they feel like it and run away. No, they must wait for God to free them when the time is right. And the right time, of course, is when the body dies by natural causes. This rationalisation may not have much logical conviction or any firm rational basis, but it does save Platonists from having to feel guilty because they cannot bring themselves to commit suicide.
When Satan made religious ignorance, God responded by creating the beginnings of science. He inspired the ancient Greek philosophers to ignore the restrictions of religious taboos and start inquiring into the mysteries of the Universe.
Religion agrees that Greek philosophy comes from God. In the second century AD, St Justin said that, just as God gave the law to the Jews, so He gave philosophy to the Greeks.
Ancient Greek philosophy produced many great philosophical systems as well as important insights into physics, mathematics, logic, and astronomy. However, the Greeks did not perform any scientific experiments. They thought that truth could be found by contemplation alone, and saw no need to test their ideas against reality. If an argument made logical sense, it must be true; and if the evidence of the senses disagreed, then our senses, or reality itself, must be wrong.
The period of Greek learning lasted about 800 years. Then religious ignorance reasserted itself, leading to the 1,000 year long Dark Ages. Intellectual activity largely ceased. Only in the secret chambers of Mediaeval monasteries was a tiny flicker of learning kept alive by monks who patiently copied and preserved ancient manuscripts they probably did not understand. Try as he might, Satan was unable to extinguish this tiny flame of learning.
The Dark Ages finally ended, and European learning was rekindled, leading to the so called Renaissance, or "rebirth". Names like Leonardo and Galileo and Michelangelo stem from this period. Intellectual activity soared to new heights. Scientific inquiry was recommenced, but with a difference. Whereas the ancients had believed that truth could be found by contemplation alone, Renaissance scholars emphasised practical experimentation as the only reliable way to learn the truth.
Many of the early scientists were also devout Christians, and they did not expect that there would be any contradiction between science and religion. After all, the same God Who wrote the Bible had also made the world, and God did not contradict Himself.
However, Satan, who destroys all things by dividing them against themselves, was busy stirring up conflict between religion and science. Many scientific discoveries were soon found to be in direct contradiction to certain cherished doctrines of the Church. And the Church reacted by trying to destroy science. Galileo, for example, was censured and jailed for his discovery that the earth moved round the sun rather than the other way around.
But science could not be silenced. Reason and logic based on observable evidence had too powerful an appeal to the human intellect. The Church was forced into a humiliating retreat before the steady advance of science. By the time Darwin published his theory of evolution, the Church was no longer in a position to censure or jail anyone. Instead it had to engage scientists at their own game, by reasoned arguments in public debates. And the Church lost badly. Far from being destroyed by religion, it began to seem as if science was about to destroy religion instead. Laplace, a French scientist, dismissed the hypothesis of God as unnecessary in explaining the Universe. Sigmund Freud said that God was nothing but a neurotic and infantile projection of the human need for parental protection onto a Godless Universe. Karl Marx dismissed religion as "the opium of the people", or in other words, a lie invented by the rich to keep the poor in suppression. And Voltaire predicted that religion would soon pass into the graveyard of history and be forgotten, whereupon scientific reason alone would rule all human affairs forever.
However, religion refused to die. False scientific theories came and went, such as those of the ether, or phlogiston. But religion, presumed to be the falsest of all, remained. Indeed, religion even found new weapons with which to fight back against science. One of these weapons is public ignorance. Satan, who uses lies and deception, has given us the evil doctrine of Creationism, or as it is also called, Creation Science.
Ostensibly, Creationism is an attempt to reconcile science and religion. But in actual fact, it does nothing of the sort. Creationists assume the Bible to be the Word of God, and therefore infallible. So, if the Bible says that humans and all animals were created by God in their present form about 6,000 years ago, then scientists are wrong when they say that living things evolved over millions of years from simpler ancestors.
Scientists reply by pointing to the abundant fossil remains of dinosaurs and trilobites and so on, unearthed by scientists in support of the theory of evolution. The Creationists acknowledge the existence of these fossil remains, but argue that they were all produced in the Great Flood about 4,000 years ago. The Creationists assert that, to begin with, humans and dinosaurs and so on all lived together peacefully in the garden of Eden, and those species that no longer exist today are the ones that were drowned in the Great Flood because Noah was unable to fit them into his Ark. This, say the Creationists, is how the fossil record was created. In saying this, Creationists ignore or ridicule all the modern techniques of carbon dating and so on, which establish the age of these fossils at hundreds of millions of years, not 4,000 years.
Science also argues that fossils are always found in ordered strata, with simpler organisms in older and deeper rocks, and more complex organisms in younger rocks nearer the surface. This ordered stratification is strong evidence of evolution. If they had all died together in a great natural disaster, they would be found all mixed up together at random.
Creationists have come up with an explanation for this too. It turns out that trilobites, who cannot run very fast, were drowned at the bottom of valleys, while dinosaurs managed to escape halfway up the hillsides before the rising floodwaters overtook them. And humans, being the most agile of all, made it all the way to the top of the mountains.
Real scientists, of course, dismiss this explanation as pure nonsense. The Creationists have been unable to satisfactorily explain why fossilised plants, which presumably could not run at all, nevertheless show the same ordered stratification as animals do, with simpler species lower down and more complex ones at the top. Whenever real scientists expose one Creationist theory, Creationists come up with new and still more implausible explanations. Creationists style themselves "Creation Scientists" in an effort to cash in on the prestige of real science. But Creationism is not a science at all. Real science uses the scientific method, which consists in making observations, then inventing logical hypotheses, and then making predictions from these hypotheses which can be tested by further observation and experiment. In other words, real science begins and ends with reality. But in Creationism, it is the Bible and not physical reality which is the ultimate guide to truth. Far from being a science, Creationism is a religion. Indeed, it is the worst kind of religion; it is a fundamentalist religion. Real mainstream religion shows humility before reason and truth, and is willing to change its doctrines in the light of new evidence. But fundamentalists, once they have decided to believe something, cling obstinately to that belief and are immune to all reason and logic. Creationism is anti-scientific and anti-intellectual. Its goal is to destroy all real science and return the human race to Mediaeval ignorance and superstition. Creationism has enormous appeal among ordinary people who are mostly ignorant of science. Creationists have even managed to introduce Creationist nonsense into some high school science classes, so that the story of Adam and Eve is now taught alongside the theory of evolution as a legitimate scientific alternative.
Creationism is the means by which Satan turns ignorant religious people against science. But what about intelligent religious people who are not deceived by Creationist nonsense? For these people, Satan has another trick, namely that of moral reversal.
Moral reversal has its roots in the false doctrine of Platonism. We already saw that Platonists believe that the entire visible physical world is nonexistent and evil. But they believe in the existence of a higher spiritual realm, which they see as good. In other words, to Platonists, good is still existence and evil nonexistence. However, Satan soon changed that. Let us see how he did it.
As we know, the Platonic idea that matter is evil and only spirit is good has been enormously influential in Western thought. Over the centuries, this doctrine has infiltrated our thinking so deeply that we are hardly even aware of its presence anymore. People automatically assume that matter is evil and spirit is good, and they do not even realise that their thinking is based on this assumption.
Thus, when science asserted that only matter was real, and failed to find any evidence that the Platonic spiritual realm existed, people unthinkingly assumed that, if Platonic spirit did not exist, then good did not exist either.
In this way, Satan managed to make humans think that all that exists in evil, and good is synonymous with nonexistence. He had reversed good and evil. And, as if to reinforce this moral reversal, Darwin had just published his theory of evolution, which interpreted survival as a war in which the strong and selfish survive, and in which altruism is nothing but suicidal foolishness. This only confirmed the belief that existence is evil and immoral, and good leads to nonexistence.
The human race now entered upon a new Dark Age, one characterised not so much by ignorance, but by meaninglessness. The struggle to survive is a struggle towards evil. Physical survival came to be seen as the concern of evil, materialistic people only, unworthy of the notice of good people. Life seemed trivial and ugly, a meaningless chasing after food and sex and other base appetites in order to create another generation that repeated the whole process over and over, ad nauseum. Life was nothing but a chemical reaction that started by some unfortunate accident, and that kept going, not because it had any goal, but merely because it happened to be a self-perpetuating process. Humans were more unfortunate than other processes in that they have been cursed with intelligent consciousness, and were forced to observe the horror of existence and despair at the futility of it all. We see ourselves as all alone in a cold and empty and hatefilled Universe where dead processes rush about in terrifying chaos, crashing into and destroying one another, and we curse our intelligent consciousness and envy simpler processes their blissful ignorance.
The pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer taught that, throughout history, humans have made a terrible mistake. All the great scholars and theologians have been mistaking God for Satan, and Satan for God. God, who is actually Satan, made the physical world and gave us existence in order to lure us into suffering. The more we exist, the more we suffer. That which we call Heaven, far from being a happy place, offers us nothing but the ultimate torment. To escape from suffering, we must return to the eternal unconscious bliss of nonexistence.
Satan presumably hoped that the trick of moral reversal would cause the whole human race to commit suicide. But again, he was disappointed. Moral reversal could not overcome the will to live that God had given us. Humans chose to live a meaningless life amid evil rather than plunge themselves into total annihilation. They chose to keep striving for good even when they were convinced that there was no good, and their striving would be utterly futile and hopeless. Even Schopenhauer himself apparently could not follow the logic of moral reversal to its ultimate conclusion. He was unable to commit suicide himself, and neither could he advocate it to others.
Satan was angry that his plans had failed yet again. But being impotent, his rage was totally ineffectual and went unnoticed. However, he had more tricks up his sleeve. Seeing that humans preferred a meaningless life over death, Satan helped them. He joined science and religion together and formed a kind of evil parody of God's religion. He created a Satanic doctrine which is secular and materialistic, and in which money is both our God and our Salvation. In this false religion, the meaning of life is a selfish pursuit of short term profit without any regard for long term consequences. Satan, who is an incorrigible liar and deceiver, holds forth the false promise of Heaven on earth in the form of a Technological Paradise. And humans, having lost sight of the real God, were more than willing to be deceived. In this way, Satan started humans off on an orgy of greed and destruction such as the world had never seen before. Blinded by the promise of immense earthly wealth, humans have created an evil society that is threatening to destroy not only humans, but the whole process of organic life. Instead of Heavenly happiness, humans are waking up to the fact that the world is more torn apart by war and injustice and environmental chaos than ever before. But this realisation comes too late. The evil society we have made seems to have developed a will of its own, and we humans are powerless against it. It is as if the Beast has appeared before us in monstrous corporeal form, and is carrying us to our destruction without us being able to do anything about it.
Let us see if we can understand more clearly how things came to such a pass. To do that, we must go back to primitive times and look at yet another evil invention of Satan, namely the institution of private property.
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