Why is everything so shit?

There’s a simple key to understanding the big patterns in human history and how they brought us to now: it’s to take a long view—something most educational and other cultural systems tend, perhaps surprisingly, not to do. By a long view I mean we need to understand that human “history” didn’t start with the invention of writing.

Properly speaking, of course, history is the scientific study of the past, but in common parlance “history” is the story of humanity: an account of our evolution, our civilisations, our wars, our ways, our world. Before written history, oral history goes back many tens of millennia, broadly in accord with the modern sciences of palaeontology, anthropology and so on, but reactivating the worlds those sciences taxonomise with iterations of living memory. A precious few cultures still live without writing; many more preserve their oral cultures as best they can after the impact of literacy and its attendant impositions.

But we moderns work hard to forget all that. In fact, a few thousand years of reading and writing have so distorted our view of humankind’s past that we don’t see most of it at all. We use graphs like this one to visualise our history:

This timeline covers roughly three million, twelve thousand years in diminishing eras of 2,990,000 years, 7,000 years, 3,476 years, 1,016 years, 297 years and, well, two-hundred-and-something years, depending how long we last. It illustrates the general consensus that for the first three million years of human evolution, apart from the control of fire and the development of agriculture, nothing much happened.

But while it’s true that the first couple of million years of human evolution make for a rustic tale of brain and tool development, the last million rather pick up the pace and the last 100,000 years fairly kick along. If we take the control of fire about a million years ago as a starting point for what we think of as human history, and use the University of Southampton’s Timeline of the Human Condition, we can sketch a very different past with a rather less distorted timeline.

timeline2

In the 900,000 years after mastering fire, humans developed hunting weaponry, food storage, language (when do you reckon people started giving each other names?), the use of hides; rudimentary construction, burial of the dead, and art. No one knows when we started singing. The earliest known surviving examples of symbolic art—marine shells painted with mineral pigments by Neanderthals in Spain, and shell beads made by modern homo sapiens in the Levant—date to around 105,000 years ago, but the earliest known abstract etchings are much older, from half a million years ago.

By a hundred thousand years ago someone—perhaps a few someones—had a dedicated space for mixing and storing pigments. This one had ochre mixed with animal fat in abalone-shell containers, and charcoal, bone, hammerstones and grindstones. The colours were for anointing rather than rock painting.

In the ensuing eighty-four thousand years, people developed rock etching, funerary rites, jewellery; beds made of grasses covered with aromatic, insecticidal leaves; emigration, cave painting, notation, sewing, the principles of medicine, representational art, recorded mythology, musical instruments; figurines, fertility symbols and hand stencils; food processing, woven fabrics, the domestication of animals, pottery, and building and settlement, and all that’s still 11,000 years before we get to writing. The earliest evidence of ritual burial—itself considered evidence of spiritual “beliefs”, that is, a spiritual outlook on the world—goes back 78,000 years, and that’s just the sites that survive. Ritual burials designed to merge back into the ecosystem around them would long since have done just that. Either way, people have felt—and interpreted—the Spirit of this place, this planet, for something like eighty millennia.

But only for the last couple of thousand years have we insisted that the central essence of that Spirit is masculine power, and only for the last few decades have we struggled with the dreadful temptations of the power of life and death over the mastered Mother—the power simply to destroy the very principle of life on Earth. Kill the Goddess all over again, and this time make her stay down; really fuck her. Thrust further into her, take more from her; she has no mind, anyway; it’s all about you. Crash and burn, who cares.

That’s why everything is so shit. We have to get that raping, pillaging, tumescent Patriarchal Abstraction off the body of Mother Earth before it kills her, and us.

Big job, obvs—metaphorical or otherwise. It will take hundreds of millions of us pulling together, which is why this site offers the Network—a hub where you can explore your issues of interest, choose your activism, find your people, and help change the world.

Also, if you’ve funds to contribute, you can become a Philosophilia Patron. We’d really love that.