Idea for the house of humanism

Since the openly out broken Jihad of the Islamists against the globalizing Western civilisation many thinkers[1] refresh their view on our own Western belief. In the times of the Crusades both camps had their One and Only God, as the ideological flag in an economical clash of civilisations. But how is this situation today? Is the jihad an economical clash anyway? Is it a clash of civilisations (a war of two civilisations against each other) anyway? The camps economically depend on each other. The Western camp doesn’t conduct an ideological war against the Islamic world. The jihad is the attack against Western ideas, persons and objects through an ideological motivated small part of the Muslim world, financing fundamentalist groups and mosques with oil and drugs money, who recruit and fanatize influencable mentally unstable individuals, supplying them with Western weapons and technology.

One can say: this is no war. There is only the Al Qayda attack against Western people and objects on one side and on the other side the war of America in Afghanistan and Iraq, being a self-defence action after 11-9 and meaning to bring democracy in this country’s.

Okay, let us say so, but in the ideology of the Islamists jihad is a war. So the Western world is in war, if you want it or not. An ideologically motivated war (from the side of the enemy at least), a war with – besides real deaths and weapons – ideas and beliefs as weapons.

Ideas and beliefs, that’s the point. The belief of the Islamists in the rule and sovereignty of their One and Only God and the establishing of the House of the Islam all over the world.

In the Middle Ages the beliefs, weapons and economical goals were equal and so the victories interchanged. How is this situation today? Economical goals, weapons and beliefs are totally different. What about the victory? For Samuel Huntington it’s clear: the victory will be on the Muslims side. Because they overnumber us widely and outclass us widely with a much stronger believe in their God.

Huntington oversees the economic goal and the military force, but in the ideological motivation he’s right. Our God is our weak point. So many thinkers rethink our Western belief.

Have we to give our old One and Only God a rub up? People who turn over this in their minds, have to bear in this too the economical drive of the world. The economic reality today is the free market, with television and internet as a motor.

The economic drive that activated the old world to overcome tribalism and led to monotheism, is today driving the modern world to universalism. The jihad, and also the evangelical movement in the USA, is – it is my strong opinion and hopefully I’m not too optimistic! – a rearguard action of a faction in the monotheist world, a struggle against death from drowning in the worldwide high tide of the free market, rising in the Far East.

A better idea is, to give the free world a new believe: in humankind.

Let we first take a better look to the situation in the old world and the birth of the One and Only God. Because the wisdom of the present comes from the knowledge of the past.

The One and Only God is born in the seventh century BP, in the Temple of Yahweh of Jerusalem. Before that time humanity knew only goddesses and gods. The sanctuaries in the Middle East of 700 BP were, beside the kings courts, often big businesses and undertakings, competing with each other for the most offerings of and in promoting their product under the full-religious working mass. For better understanding you can look to the Egyptian world, the leading civilisation in the Middle East of that times[2].

In 638 king Amon of Jerusalem, who had promoted, like his father Manasse, the offerings to the old goddesses and gods of the Jews, was murdered in a palace conspiracy. His son Josiah, eight years old and heir to the throne, was instructed by the priests of the Temple. He got inspired by the idea of restoring the old empire of David and Salomon, and to reunite the tribes of Israel under his reign. Therefore, emphasised the priests, the god of the Temple had to be the only god of all Jews. Under his reign all the money, gathered by the ‘threshold waiters’, went to the Temple. In 620 Josiah ordered by decree the destroying of all other shrines and sanctuaries in whole Juda and even Samaria. For all the offerings of the tribes of Israel was from now on only one Holy Place: the altar of Yahweh in Jerusalem.

High priest Hilkiah had rewritten the two old book rolls and ‘found’ a third, and so the history of the Jews became the tiring adventures of the Only True God with his ‘chosen people’. A jealous god, who declared all others gods and special goddesses as idols. (A new edition and extension of the Jewish Bible dates from Ezra, after the return of the True Believers from Babylon, and the oldest survived edition is written in the Diaspora.)

After Josiah’s early death the Jewish tribes and clans restored their old sanctuaries, but in the Temple survived the idea and the worship of the One and Only True God.

A political invention, in the first instance. But the belief in a Most High, in a All Creator, has a strange effect on unbalanced people. For people who are discontented and unhappy with their (or the) life, it is inviting to throw themselves in the worship of the One and Only True God and to let all the trouble behind. It is a kind of blindness: in the Light of the Most High in Heaven all earthly anxiety and persons shrink and shrivel in insignificance – at least when there is money enough for the daily bred for the believers. It makes believers blind for human responsibility, even for their relatives, even for their own life. It makes them fit for martyrdom. Many individuals can, in an unstable moment of their life, ‘see the Light’. With a little help of their (organised and facilitated) ‘friends’.

It was a new phenomenon in humankind. And it left deep traces in human history. Maccabees, zealots, Christian martyrs, Christian zealots who destroyed the University of Alexandria. The Wahabism sewed, especially after 1973 (the rising of the oil prize), a plethora of Islamism in Egypt, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Western China, East Africa and Central Asia. Taliban and Al Quayda are ‘flowers’ of this seed of zealot monotheism.

A political invention of the Temple priesthood of Jerusalem anno 650 BP. But this is one thing. The other thing is the economical drive. The try of Josiah aimed the reunifying of the Jewish tribes in one kingdom. The aim for Constantine to make the Christian belief to state religion was the same. Also was Mohammed’s aim: unifying the tribes of Arabia with his Arabic variant of especially Jewish monotheism. It was the tide of that times: making an end to tribalism. Economic (and cultural) flourishing was the salaire de la peur – as long as there was some freedom of believe and trade.

Now we live in the time of the free market, broken loose through the invention of television, in the sixties, and internet in the seventies. The time of globalizing capitalism. A totally new period in the history of mankind (not the "End" of it!). So we need another Idea than the Only True God who divides mankind in hostile confessions. Now we need a global unifying believe: in Mankind. Only with this new unifying believe we may hope to handle the capitalism, to keep the market free and to survive on our lonely planet.

For this new believe we need a new Creation Story. Because the wisdom of the present comes from the knowledge of our past.

The ultimate new universal Origin Story has to be written by a team of science writers. No, it is not written yet! The scientists overwhelm us with the results of their fieldwork, excavations, fossils and datings. But they can only deliver the building stones, not the ultimate Origin Story. Because: this is a PROJECT. A never ending PROJECT, because the sciences never stop research and investigation. Another point is: the new ultimate Origin Story can only work in saving humanity when it is officially embraced and facilitated by the governments. Because individuals are free in believing what they choose to believe. But governments have to maintain an official belief – and this has to be universal, scientific and democratic. So: a never ending PROJECT onto which each individual may contribute, in theory. Practically it is the job of the Project Team of science writers, to bring each five years an updated version of the Ultimate Origin Story. (Imagine: the whole scientific world in stress and suspense which opinion is winning! But the Team is, bound to a strict statute, not open to political interests and it maintains by cooptation.)

Before I can loose myself in daydreams I have to work on my first step: to find the first person in the world who finds that my Idea makes sense. So that we are two of us. So that we can cooperate to find a third.

Here comes MY endeavour of our ultimate origin story. Direct your arrows on it, please, I do it daily myself, with everything I read. The special character of MY origin story is that it describes the continuum between our ape origin till our present situation. It shows why and how our earliest ancestors developed names for the things, and it shows the outcome of this serendipity: feeling of distance and independence between the hominids and their natural environment. This leading to the use of fire around 2mya and the migration out of Africa. It elucidates the stubborn conservatism of our ancestors, the ‘birth of God" and our religious feelings. And in the end the roots of technological development, machism and stratification.

But my endeavour is only to show how easy we can make a consistent Ultimate Origin Story and an explanation of human nature. My real point is the need for a new universal non-patriarchical ‘creation story’. Hopefully I made sure you of this need.

THE STORY OF HUMAN ORIGIN

how it started

Ten million years ago (mya) the climate became cooler and dryer. Jungles turned into open savannah’s. Eight mya it the jungle where our earliest ancestors lived, in Northeast Africa, underwent this change. Then and there our story begins.

Our earliest ancestors were apes. A kind of chimpanzee. Frans de Waal (Bonobo 1997) says when we want an image of our earliest ancestors, we can look at the bonobo’s. Because they are the only kind of chimpanzee whose environment has never changed in all this time – a kind only changes when his environment changes.

So we name our earliest ancestors anbo’s (ancestor-bonobo’s).

It took tens of hundreds of thousands of years for their jungle to turn into savannah. The anbo’s never had any idea of this change, so the adaptations to the new conditions passed unperceived. But for our story this adaptations are important.

Savannah is a diversified environment. Open woodlands interspersed with impenetrable shrubs and with grasslands with herds of many kinds of grass eaters.

The anbo’s lived in the woodlands, where they spent the nights in nests high in the trees. But these woodlands, along the shores of rivers and lakes, didn’t contain the fruit trees their ancestors lived from. For their food the anbo’s had to roam the open grasslands. Very dangerous for apes, because of the big cats that predated the grass eaters. Big lions and sabre tooth tigers and other formidable predators. The sabre tooth tigers where specialists in predating pachyderms, like rhinoceros and hippopotamus and (ancestors of the) elephants. They ripped open the bellies with their sabre teeth and fed on the entrails (nature is cruel and doesn’t know empathy). The rest of the cadaver they left to the hyena’s and because of the surplus of the cadavers of the sabre tooth tigers it were giant hyenas. So the Miocene (22 – 5 mya) savannah was much more dangerous than the nowadays Serengeti. Though the anbo’s were much stronger than we now, they needed special armament to roam the grasslands safely.

The ancestral ape-armament against their predators is throwing with something, with all they can grasp at the moment.

Jane Goodall tells the story of Mister Worzle. The bananas she put down for the chimpanzees to hold them in her neighbourhood for studying their behaviour, allured baboons too. Big and brave monkeys, who frightened some chimpanzee-women. But Mister Worzle gave not a centimetre of ground and threw with everything he could grasp: grass, branches, one time (baboons happy) a bunch of bananas, but soon he discovered that stones worked best and shortly he used still bigger stones.

The anbo’s had to become professional stone throwers for their living. They could not take a step on the savannah in safety without the armament of their stones. One stone is not enough for the safety, you need a handful of stones. But how can apes carry stones?

Hides enough everywhere on the savannah, because hyena’s eat everything, even the bones they can break with their mighty jaws but hairy skins are not that edible. So hides to carry things all over the place. And with 20 millions of experience in braiding and wattling sleep nests making ties is nothing.

But how must apes carry bags studded with stones?

How do apes carry heavy things? In their hands and then they go on their feet. In tens of hundreds of thousands of years the anbo’s turned into professional biped’s: longer and stronger legs, special pelvis and buttock muscles, special midriff and blood circulation. At least they made a good start developing these things, good enough for foraging on the savannah. With maintenance of the climbing facilities of hands and feet: they could not yet sleep on the floor because they had no campfires.

Women carry their babies and they had to gather food for them and everybody, so they couldn’t carry and throw stones. Men couldn’t gather food because the predators are always alert to moments of un-alertness. So the anbo’s cultivated a division of labour from the very beginning. Women and children gathered the food: grass seeds, tubers and roots (with digging sticks), larva’s and insects, eggs and little animals. The adult men did nothing but care for safety. Anyhow, the groups who cultivated these behaviours the most, flourished and kept more children alive and outnumbered the groups which were clumsy at these things. In tens of hundreds of thousands of years. In hundreds of generations groups with this behaviour survived.

The same mechanism for group harmony. Bonobo’s live in groups with female dominance, and group harmony is characteristic of them. They solve all tensions with sex. It is clear that the anbo’s professionalised this behaviour too. Nice breasts and buttocks for the women (the ‘attractive’ red vagina’s of the chimpanzee-women were not maintainable for biped’s), nice big penises for the men, and permanent sexual willingness and ceiled oestrus of the women, all mechanisms for reducing tensions in this necessarily staunch living groups.

names for the things

Food enough on the savannah. But especially the women had to know when and where which food was available. Living was far more complicated on the savannah than in the jungle where the food hangs on the trees and the only thing you have to know is where the next fruit is ripe when your tree is emptied. So the anbo’s needed more communication than the normal rain forest communication (cries, gestures, facial expressions and other body language).

It started in one group. One women developed the practice of imitating with her hands and fingers what she meant: [water], [stone], [a special plant], [a special larva], [sabre tooth tiger], [a special place], [a special act or operation] or whatever. Her daughters and other women became familiar with her useful habit and followed this practice. The better communication improved the cooperation in the group, benefited survival, the group flourished more than groups with clumsy communication.

But these gesture-imitations of the things were (the beginning of) names for the things. There is something going on with an animal that can name the things. It is not only the better communication and cooperation, it creates a distance between the namer and the object. It is a mental professionalising of the ape ability of throwing, which enables a distance between the thrower and the object. It creates a feeling of power over the object, even – or just – when you aren’t powerful.

It started with nothing, but I think it started from the very beginning. Because the need for more communication was there from the beginning and the free hands with those ten fingers were available from the beginning.

It started with nothing and it started slowly. Like all developments in nature. Like the beginning of life on earth. For three billion years (a short side-leap here) there was nothing to see – there weren’t eyes anyhow; only the sky turned from brown into blue. And then, from 900 mya on, little worms and crabs and plants, fishes, plants and amphibians on the land, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals, apes, us.

Still more names for still more things. The flourishing group mixed with other groups and also the new habit of communication spread, like in later times agriculture spread from Middle-East over Europe. The anbo-population grew to a very special kind of animals, with more flexibility and inventiveness than other animals, even than other hominids whose groups were without such a cultural habit of communication. Hominids is the name palaeontologists give to bipedal apes of the Mio-Pliocene. (Pliocene 5 – 1.4 mya) The common name for the Pliocene hominids is Australopithecus. My abbreviation: AP’s. From now on I name our ancestor-apes AP-an’s.

The AP-an’s developed more flexibility and inventiveness than other animals and even than other AP’s. Why? The result of the possibility of conferring one another. Two know more than one and as a group you can solve big problems. Separated hooligans are nothing but as a group they are terrifying. It is the stack up of inventiveness. AP-groups devoid of this facility – boisei, robustus, aethiopicus, even afarensis– died out. I presume with some help of the AP-an’s.

fire

The AP-an’s (we don’t know which fossil – if any – belongs to the AP-an population[3]) detached slowly but inevitably from the animal world. 2 mya they made a big jump.

It was again the climate that triggered the jump. During five million years the climate was stable and gave no reason for changing behaviour. But then began the Ice Ages, the periodical increase of ice caps on the poles and around the high mountains. Cold periods (maxima) interspersed with warm periods (minima). It started with a dramatic cooling and drying. Jungles receded to a narrow and interrupted belt around the equator, savannahs turned into deserts.

It was again a woman who had the courage to take a glowing branch of an extinguishing natural fire. She took it, trembling with fear, to a safe place, fed it with dry grass and wood and breathed in new life: fire.

Of course the AP-an’s knew the attractive qualities of fire, and they were not the only animals who were lured by the far clouds of a fire. Vultures and other carrion eaters and even antelopes approached carefully, enticed by carrion and salty ashes. The AP-an women knew that some tubers and other plants, normally not edible, were edible after the work of the fire.

Why a woman again? Women have to feed their children and do everything for more and better food for their children. Perhaps it was an old and experienced woman. Perhaps she had as a young girl swayed around a glowing stick and had seen it took flame again. But nevertheless trembling with fear: she was the first animal in the history of life on earth that managed to suppress the normal animal impulse to flee. As an effect of the distance, created by names for the things, by having a name for the fire. The feeling of power through the name giving.

How can I assume the point in time of 2 mya? Two ‘hard’ evidences. The AP-anbo’s started from now on growing in shape, because of the better food, and turned from AP-an to Homo erectus. Second: palaeontologists like Ralph Rowlett and Randy Bellomo studied the different influence of a natural fire and a campfire on the underground. The soil under campfires reach much higher temperatures and the fire leaves behind a bowl-shaped layer of highly oxidised and magnetized soil. In Koobi Fora were found such remains of campfires of 1.6 mya. The start of the control of fire began a long time before that moment. ‘2 mya’ is not a date, it is only an easy story number, like ’10 mya’ and ‘8 mya’.

The control of fire turned the AP-an’s into Homo erectus. So time for a new abbreviation: HE’s. Again it was one group of AP-an’s wherein this invention started, but it dispersed soon in all other AP-an groups, again like later the agriculture, through intense exchanges of sexpartners and meetings. The HE-population dispersed over Africa and started the Out of Africa dispersion over Eurasia.

The last findings in the paleoanthropological sites Dmanisi (1,7 mya) and Flores (descendants of hominids of Java from 1.6 mya) point, for the first emigration ‘out of Africa’, to the ancestors of the HE’s: the H.habilis. The HE’s are from 1.64 mya and the investigators find a more primitive hominid, with a more primitive tool box. My date of 2mya for the start of the use of fire gets reinforced!

linguistic creatures

Our kind is the only in nature which controls fire. The cause is: only our AP-an’s became linguistic creatures, as the consequence of developing names for the things.

A linguistic creature experiences his world as a named world. It knows his world, but it knows the things only to the extent of having a name for them.

Only several names for several things is not enough to become a linguistic creature. Look at the family Washoe. This is the group of chimpanzees who learned ASL (American Sign Language) when they were young and in a human family setting, today living in Ellensburg, in the lifelong care of Roger and Debbie Fouts (www.cwu.edu/~cwuchci/). Family Washoe uses 300 names for 300 things. Far to little to experience their world as a named world.

What enables an ape to become a linguistic creature?

What makes – in other words – an animal communication to a language?

A stock of words, a vocabulary. A innumerable stock of names for a countless number of things.

How do we make our vocabulary? With phonemes: speech sounds with no sense of their own (say the letters of the alphabet), the building stones of an endless number of words.

We make the phonemes with our speech apparatus: throat, tongue, lips and cheeks. But … apes cannot make (enough) phonemes because their throat is too short and their tongue too narrow. Experiments in training a young chimpanzee to speak resulted in nothing. Another ‘handicap’ is: they cannot control their cries. Their cries are neurologically driven by the limbic system, an older part of the brain. Like our own cries of pain and anguish: when we hit our thumb with the hammer, we cannot withhold a cry of pain. With a tickling in our throat we cannot withhold a cough.

How could our ape ancestors – even the Neanderthals lacked the modern speech apparatus – have a language without phonemes at their disposal? They had the sign-alternative for phonemes, cheremes: language signs without own sense, but the building stones for an endless number of sign language words.

This process: a start with several names for several things to the ability to make a stock of names, reminds me always of the development of the writing.

8.000 ya still more people in the Middle East lived as farmers in villages. Each family contributed a part of the yield of fields and cattle to the temple, for the anniversaries, the barter with other villages and the emergencies. The temple functionaries needed, to forestall parasitizing and envy, to note what exactly each family tributed to the temple. The notes were engraved in the clay of the storage urns (later on tablets). The first notes were pure imitations, drawings. But … not artworks, utmost ‘minimal art’: the representation was divested of all that was not strict necessary for the identification. It became more and more stylised symbols.

So started Sumerian writing: pictograms, simple representations of what was meant. So a simple depict of a head stood for <head> and two wriggling lines for <water>. But soon this two symbols meant <drinking> and even <drink>. The pictogram’s became more and more schematic and only comprehensible for a writer.

The big jump came when some pictograms got a sound value, mostly the initial sound of the word-symbol. Soon there was a complete alphabet. The big jump to the written language: personal messages, enactments and laws, record of the oral tradition, the heroism of the successive warlords (history writing), schools, scholarship.

Like this process the cheremes came into the human communication. The gestures were not more elaborated than enough to the wise. The less elaborated the gesture, the more gestures one can make in a communication moment. In most discussions you get little time to make your point, isn’t it? In a group of gossiping women each woman wants to contribute her share. Soon some gestures got the sense of syllables, building stones of sign words.

I’m to old for sms, but in this communication we can see the same evolution, I suppose.

the birth of God

Our ancestors, now HE’s (Homo erectus) spread from the tropics to the temperate zones in Africa and Eurasia. It was a slow migration, about 30 miles each generation. When a successful group became too numerous, tensions rose and then soon a little group of young women, children and men decided to put in use a new territory. This land was already known because each young woman or man made – as the initiation of adult life – a big journey. By safe and sound return they could tell till their old age of far worlds and strange people.

The settlers were the first humans who gave the mountains and rivers and lakes and marshes and fruit trees and wild animals of the new territory their names. As I said, for humans the things only exist to the extent they have a name for it. For their descendants these settlers were the creators of the tribe territory. Men always had (and still have) the practice of defining a total group as one person (The American for all Americans, The Australian for all Australians) and so the descendants spoke of The Big Ancestor.

Linguistic creatures. But humans are part of the animal world. In the mind of the HE’s they were not linguistic creatures (not even in your mind, dear reader, you are a linguistic creature!) but animals. They felt themselves animals and born of a special kind of animal.

It is something like our babies. Newborn babies live with the idea they are still part of their mother, like it was all their life time in mama’s belly. During their sleep (dream – mind this word) this situation goes on, especially when the normal moves, shakes and sounds continue. When they are awake, the unceasing and loving attention of mama and others give them the confidence of safety, and then the neurological programming can do its work in growing up, step by step, to normal childhood and maturity. The same step by step development characterises the experience of the environment (world) of our ancestors. They thought their origin in Dreamtime. And they thought totemistic.

Now comes the point.

Linguistic creatures live in a named world. A world full of things, full of names. This would be a chaos in their heads when they had no structure in this mass of names. The obvious structure is the story, the A to Z story, the creation story. The story of their world and humanity. Their ‘world’ was the tribe territory, and ‘men’ were the people of their tribe. (People of other tribes, with strange languages, were not real men because they ‘couldn’t even talk!’; but they could become human by adoption or marriage: by incorporation in THE tribe.)

The creation story of the tribe tells how The Big Ancestor (never a man or a woman – fits! it was a group – but something between animal and human) in the Dreamtime entered the tribe land on a special place and made his journey through the land. Everywhere on his journey He left behind the mountains, lakes and trees and all the special things of the land. He also left behind, on a special place, the little souls who could fly in the belly of a woman when she passed by that place, the same place where the soul returns when the person dies. The Big Ancestor could travel through the sky or under the ground. At the end of the story He leaves the land on a special place under the ground.

This Story our ancestors sang/danced at every occasion. Special creations (mountains, trees or animals) were also important Figures in the Story, with special tasks or abilities. This Story of the creation of their world was so important to them that they believed their world would come to an end when they no longer sang/danced their world.

In the old times there has never been a tribe that did not have his sung/danced Story. Thousands of generations of sang/dancing our world and our community, this practice has become part of our genome. We are born with the inclination to singing/dancing perceiving of the world. When the baby cries, it will be quiet when mama sings/dances with the baby in her arms. This inclination is the religious feeling that remains even when we are brights (www. the-brights.net). It is this ancestral practice that makes us “incurably religious” as Dorothee Solle († 2003) defined it – without further explanation of course.

The creation story as described above evolved with the thousands of generations and in only a few of the tribes you can recognise the original form of it. In most tribes only some myths are left. One epidemic which the old people decimate and a total sung/danced creation story can disappear forever.

consciousness

There must be a ‘moment’ in exchanging acting from instinct to acting from deliberation and consulting. No two captains on the ship of your thinking! That they no longer acted by instinctive reaction on a sensual impulse, like a normal animal, they showed with the control of the fire.

Thinking? Animals? Of course animals think. The ‘higher’ kinds of mammals and birds make ‘scenario’s’ in their brains, possibilities of what can happen or be done, in order to choose what’s best. Intelligence. Some kinds of animals or birds we see as more intelligent than other kinds, but every kind is the most intelligent in its special niche. The tortoise is the most intelligent animal in the tortoise niche. And where instinct is concerned: only lower kinds of animals act only by instinctive reaction. Group animals act for a great deal by learning, example and intelligent trial and error.

But consciousness is unique to humans, isn’t it?

It depends on what you mean by ‘consciousness’. Do you mean: aware of your environment? Every animal can be knocked out. Do you mean: self-conscious? Apes evidently display self-consciousness, plenty of examples.

What’s then unique to humans? That we have names for the things when we think. The animal thinking is the manipulating of the things with representations of the things in the brain. In our human thinking the representations have labels, ‘handles’, ‘grips’, with which we can grasp the things. So we can better ‘handle’ the things, not only to communicate the things but also for easier and better thinking.

So when we speak about the concept of ‘consciousness’, we can better name it linguistic consciousness. Linguistic consciousness is unique to humans.

the dramatic consequences of becoming linguistic creatures for our kind

1 . The first dramatic consequence is for Nature (Universe). It is the insight of the American astrophysicist Eric Chaisson, that the Universe started with – in the primordial stars – the simplest kind of complexity: the mere fusion of hydrogen and helium. In this fusion developed complex molecules, that endured in the clouds of dust around the implosions of this stars. In favourable environments, on some planets of the second generation stars, these complex molecules (matter) could generate more complex combinations, like DNA on Earth. In the rare ideal circumstances on Earth the complexity of matter made progress, step by step, in the evolution of life forms. The incentive to this evolution is: finding ever refining tricks for taking energy from the environment. The cell was a step, and so was the super cell, was multicellularity, were organisms, were sense-organs, were brains, was intelligence. Living in groups was a step. The linguistic consciousness of humans is the ultimate trick, the (provisional?) culmination of complexity of matter in the Universe. But: still for taking energy from the environment for staying alive and procreating.

2. The linguistic consciousness, the grasping, comprehending, understanding of the world (ratio), started by zero, with little. It was hopelessly deficient. Nevertheless the humans had to rely on it: they had put their instinct on the second level. When you no longer use an organ, it shrinks and so faired our instinct.

Because the humans started to understand their world with a weak and unreliable understanding, they fell prey to uncertainty. We became ‘The Worrying Ape’ ( title of another text of mine).

Not a new phenomenon in the Universe: uncertainty. When an animal comes in a situation in which his instinct cannot give an impulse, uncertainty is there. But for humans uncertainty became a constant, became part of the ‘human condition’.

Humans cannot live with constant uncertainty, so they developed two anguish allaying mechanisms.

a. repeat: rhythm, dance/singing (“in the dark”!), rituals and traditions (doing things like they always did)

b. belief : that things are like we want them to be, or like somebody with status and/or authority says they are. But in primitive times humans weren’t acquainted with the concept of authority, they were equal. Their most important part of belief was magic (fear allaying actions) and myths (unscientific elucidations of their world). Read my lips: for our ancestors it was never important if a story was true. The only importance of a story was if it was a good story: a story which they wanted to be true. The story of the birth of Eva out of a rib of Adam was, in the time of patriarchy, a good story because the men wanted to hear this: it gave them the believe of supremacy on top of the women.

3. The thus allayed uncertainty enabled the humans to intervene in their environment. Names for the things gave also (a feeling of) power over the things. It created a distance between the understanding brain and the object: the understood thing or phenomenon. The first critical intervention was the control of the fire. Humankind became a factor in Nature that got a mental but also an instrumental power over the world. The conviction (idea with a reality of which a person beliefs, has to convict himself! e.g. the honour of the Muslim men) that some words – like incantations, charms or spells – can evoke magical forces and can create or destroy, is ancient. Knowing somebody’s name gives a feeling of power over him.

Besides this the ability to exchange complex thought scenarios with each other is a powerful device: two know more than one and with a brainstorm people can overcome the biggest problems.

4. Between the linguistic creatures and the environment rose an apparatus of thousands of concepts (sign language codes with associated representations in the brains) which created a ‘virtual’ world. Only named things are part of our world, but how can we be sure that this is the only world? Much philosophers, Plato with his cave metaphor; Emmanuel Kant with the thing as representation and the thing in itself; and many other thinkers wrestle with the feeling that, beside the world we know, there is a world which we are but which, just because we want to name and know it, slips from our hands. So it is difficult to talk about this world. But linguistic consciousness takes only 20% of our thinking. Perhaps that philosophical ‘second’ or ‘real’ world exists in the other 80% part of our thinking. Hey! Here I open a nice window for our modern ‘shamans: a new region for their spiritual speculations! Better to stay on our human ‘garret’ of linguistic consciousness.

5. the bastion of holyness. Our ancestors kept the uncertainty liveable with belief and magic rituals. You believe when/where you don’t know – even when/where you don’t wánt it to believe. So it were imaged certitudes, pseudo-elucidations, not evidences. Deep in their minds the uncertainty’s lived on. So the elucidations were canonicated to holy elucidations. Holy is: unassailable. No touch! May not be doubted or called in question! (E.g. the honour of the Muslim men.)

But this is at right angles to the progress of our linguistic consciousness, our knowing, our ratio. To the only ability which can really free us from uncertainty. This is really dramatic!

good natured

This is the title of the – for the matter of philosophy – most important book of Frans de Waal (1996).

In the eyes of our philosophers humans are bad, fierce and violent by nature. Only through education and civilisation the man is socialised and good. But what is the scientific evidence for this assumption? Oh (is their answer), the old philosophers, our science, always said so. Plato, Hobbes, you know.

But what was the scientific evidence for Plato? None, there weren’t any social sciences in Plato’s time. Plato lived in a time of civil war and slavery and this observations coloured his concept of man. A concept of feeling and observation.

Feeling? Do you feel bad and fierce and violent? No. Observation? You never see a person who cares about another person? You never hear of a person who saves another person from a burning house or the water? A person as the Potamac man? Are this persons un-natural?

When humans were fierce and violent by nature, we would enjoy a war and have a good time seeing a rape or a murder. But no, we are shocked and grieved and afflicted. How can our philosophers persist in their assumption? Because they only study their science: philosophy, and no other social sciences. To appreciate the book of Frans de Waal philosophers have to change their paradigm. Safer for them is nót to study such books. They are to busy with their (postmodern!) philosophy anyhow. But … they still have much influence on the other Public Intellectuals. Dramatic!

As we saw at the sabre tooth tigers: nature is cruel and doesn’t know empathy. This is the point of departure. Humans are Nature. They know empathy because they are a kind of chimpanzee. Chimps know empathy because they are higher group animals. Humans ‘professionalised’ this behaviour, we are the most social animals in Nature. Perhaps we are ‘un-naturalised’!

Nature is eating or being eaten, is food-chain. About the evolution of life, the principle of Eric Chaisson is: finding still refining tricks for taking energy from the environment. But another incentive for an organism is: passing-on its DNA. A lovely thing as maternal care is from this point of view: the incentive to pass-on her DNA.

Good for an organism is: taking as much energy from its environment to be strong enough to pass-on its DNA. Sense-organs and intelligence are beneficial, but also weapons, for defence or attack are beneficial. And violence. And poisonousness and so on. These are all good qualities for an organism. In the struggle for life.

But in birds and perhaps in more dino’s mother care developed, a refining in passing-on DNA and sacrificing immediate egoism. Living in groups, with accompanying give and take and compassion for group members, is a next refining in taking energy from the environment to pass DNA. Perhaps already in dino’s. A group animal – elephant, whale, ape – cannot live well without his group: then he deserves the protection but also the knowledge, stored in the culture of the group. He is not born with this knowledge, he has to learn it in his youth. An ape cannot even copulate when he never saw it from adults when he was a young ape; young apes are very curious to see the adults copulate. An ape-woman cannot care for her baby when she never saw mother care in her youth. (What did I say about instinct?!)

Group animals like chimpanzees, our next of kin in the animal world, have an extensive repertoire of social skills (compassion and console, reconcile, commitment, good leadership, altruism, devotion and friendship, sorrow and communal sense. These are all good qualities for a group animal. We were already social creatures before we were human, philosophers! And we ‘professionalised’ these social skills in our evolution to humanity.

It were special circumstances who made chimpanzees and us to be fierce and violent. Study this circumstances but depart from social inclination!

Group animals are moved by two impulses: egoism (passing-on your DNA) and altruism (you have more chances to pass on your DNA in an harmonious group, so you must curb your egoism). These two impulses are at right angles and would condemn the individual to a paralysing indecision if they hadn’t a calming mechanism at their disposal: manners, rules for social intercourse, culture, ‘norms and values’. When two chimpanzee-males had a fight, they try desperately to reconcile because they need each other against aggression from the neighbour group. The same mechanism works in humans.

But … this is the egoism-as-a-group. With aggression and violence against other groups. Xenophobia.

The unique position of humanity in Nature is that we have the capability to reflection. The Iroquois confederacy, the league of the Kayapo Indians of Brazil were fruits of their capability to reflect on xenophobia. A further refining step on the path of extracting energy from the environment and of passing-on DNA. Today we can realize: all groups of humans have the same interest: survive on the planet Earth. There is no other place outside our planet for us for extracting energy and for passing-on our DNA. Humans have the capability to make the final step beyond group harmony: harmony between all our groups.

Our real creation story will be a great help in this reflection.

fierceness and violence, or: why we wage war? why machism?

Our kind started in very harmonious groups with the women as the dominant gender. The survival on the savannah’s was extremely precarious, in harmony living groups flourished better than groups with tensions. The natural selection advanced harmony. Millions and millions of years in harmony, this is what made us the most social kind in Nature and what made us good natured.

Why then, for Gods sake, did Plato live in a time of civil war and slavery? Why Holocaust, Rwanda and Srebrenica? Or, in other words: why are men the dominant gender now?

We find the answer in the chimpanzees.

We may assume the ancestors of the chimpanzees, the ‘chibo’s’, lived more harmoniously than their descendants now and the cause is the climate again. 2 mya the Ice Ages started. The shrinkings of the rain wood, each Ice Age maximum too little rain wood for too many living groups, means every time overpopulation. So: struggle for survival. Groups with the most violent men survived.

For our kind overpopulation would play his role in far later times.

200 thousand years ago (200 tya) in Northern Africa developed, as descendants of the African HE’s, the Anatomically Modern Man (AMM). The tropical HE’s over there were long and slender. Where the stocky figures of the Neanderthals adapted to a cold climate, their African contemporaries (I name them Afro-HE’s) were adapted to a hot climate. Long and slender, so longer necks also. More place for lower throat and bigger pharynx. Our pharynx plays an important role in making vowels.

I told you of the communication moment. In most discussions you get little time to make your point and each woman wants to contribute her mite. From the very beginning their voices played a role in the sign communication. With communication in the dark, or with full hands, always was the pressure there to more linguistic load in their voice sounds. For the long and slender Afro-HE’s the longer necks facilitated this process and 100 tya the communication of the population over there was in a transition from still more speech and a subordination of the sign language.

I think it was a female development in the first place. And a ceremonial – so female – development. Males would never risk the success of their hunting with a prayer to the Big Ancestor or another mighty animal ghost with a female speech, they clung on the sacral sign language for their prayers. Nowadays the Semai hunters still pray to their God in sign language before each hunting trip. Also for the sacral singing/dancing of their Creation Stories which had a so dominant place in the life of our ancestors, the sign language must have survived long-time – when we look to the important role of the gestures in sacral rituals today.

But there is something going on with a person who speaks only with his voice: he can lie. Telling lies is difficult or even impossible for you as a sign language speaker, because your whole body lies with you and your company is experienced in reading body language. The American deafs could be very angry at a speech of Reagan: they saw when he was lying! So I think the transition to speak, with a straight face, altered their community a bit. They became more individualistic than they were before. Their independence of their world grew. The bond of the tradition loosened a little bit.

Just as newborns like tight swaddling-clothes, so too did our early ancestors like the very tight bonds of tradition, as cover from the uncertainty after loosing their animal instinct certitude. The NT’s and also the Afro-HE’s still clung to rigid tradition. But the AMM’s got a little more self-confidence and individualism by the new and faster communication. From the NT’s is not known the use of tools made from bone or ivory. But the AMM’s started to make harpoons and fishhooks (is not possible with stone as raw material). From the African AMM’s is known that they eat fish and sea-food, not from the NT’s or Afro-HE’s. I agree it is an unprecedented speculation to connect this new behaviour – some authors speak of “The Great Leap Forward” – with the new equipment for linguistic communication, but perhaps it makes sense. Sure is the increase of the pressure of overpopulation and the migration to Middle East and Eurasia: the second ‘Out of Africa’– migration. This time also over Western-Europe, where they in 10.000 years caused the extinction of the NT’s.

Back to the point now: why war and why male dominance?

We saw it in the chimpanzees: overpopulation brings war and foster violence in males. The same mechanism works in humans. The longest times of the evolution of our kind the populations grew slowly and the world was wide. So equality between the genders or even female dominance. Because women fight for their children and children need quarrels to find their place in the status order, women always look for a hulk as an arbitrator. It is quite possible that communities, even with female dominance and leadership, had from the earliest times, a headman. In greater and later groups possibly males and females lived apart for most hours of a day, and had their own rituals.

But also in humans overpopulation manifested itself, in later times and in some places. In shrinking regions, in deteriorating climatical conditions. Then the groups with the most violent males survived, and found women violence in males good. We see it still in all tribes with incessant and hopeless tribal wars: it occurs always and only in a situation of overpopulation.

But why do all these tribes know machism (male dominance) and sometimes severe violence against their women? Why this unproductive suppression of their indispensable and attractive partners in life?

In my eyes this is the ‘hard evidence’ of the female dominance in the long, long times before the overpopulation situation. In times of survival the ‘fittest’ groups are the groups with the most violence males, as we saw, and then the women see violence as a good quality in males. So they promote this quality in their men and sons. The males, next these prestigious women who could bleed and bear children and cared for the food, hadn’t been in the division of labour long-time no much more than hulks for the defence and later for the provision of meat. They had always felt themselves the second-rate sex.

Now all at once the males ‘found out’ they were very, very important! They ‘found out’ that their rituals were far more important than the rituals of the women! And they got hold of the holy flutes! (This element we find in many myths.)

But it was only their situation that had changed (war), not the males and not the women themselves. So the males had to suppress their uncertainty, to allay their own doubts, and declared the new relations holy. The deep uncertainty of the males force them to a constant denigration of the female abilities. The fundamentalist males still display this primitive uncertainty, with their honour, their conviction.

At what point in our history can we date the start of war and male dominance (machism, better word than patriarchy)? When you see the state of machism in all American tribes up to the south of South America – a situation of overpopulation of a tribe makes a great difference; the egalitarity of the Iroquois have a totally different source – we may assume it was a cultural legacy of the first settlers from Siberia 14.000 ya.

A good question is: was it not a legacy of the AMM’s already? Was their immigration Out of Africa not a result of overpopulation already? Even the most egalitarian tribes like the Mbuti (Congo) know machism. In the past the Mbuti males annexed the molima, the rites of the holy flutes and excluded the women of it. The women still disturb the molima and cry that the men have stolen the molima and the holy flutes from them! We can learn very much of the Mbuti in concern of our past.

So when you say: machism is 50.000 years old, I agree. But when you say: machism is part of human nature, I say definitely no! Even 50.000 years is not enough to change human nature. Machism is a result of overpopulation, and overpopulation is not that old in human history. Machism is unnatural. Women know that.

AND NOW THE IDEA FOR THE

HOUSE OF HUMANISM

(HoH)

Dear reader, this was not THE new Origin Story of our globalizing western society. It is an example of a consistent origin story of how our kind evolved from apes to humans. Consistent with all the phenomena of our human condition. (When you can tell a more consistent origin story, I give up mine immediately and ask all my thousand women to lay off all the gold of their necklaces and bracelets, ears, eyebrows, underlips and nipples and I make a golden statue for you.) It was an endeavour to help to open the discussion.

That we desperately need a new Origin Story, demonstrate the Creationists who want to fight against human progress toward more humanity. They feel no responsibility for our surviving on our planet, they only feel responsibility for their conviction (idea with a reality of which a person has to convict himself!).

That we desperately need a new Origin Story, demonstrate the Islamists, who want to fight against human progress in the same mentality as the Creationists, but with the political premises that human progress is an American or western interest.

That we desperately need a new Origin Story, demonstrates our youth, who feel themselves floating in a world with “no future”, because of no past, no Story.

That we desperately need a new Origin Story, demonstrates our morality.

That we desperately need a new Origin Story, demonstrate our governments, who lack orientation and compass to steer our societies in the turbulent sea of financial capitalism and globalisation.

I repeat: my IDEA aims a team of science writers, paid by the international community (UNESCO) with the mandate to reconstruct the story of human nature and mentality, by means of the human sciences. The results of their explorations are not a Book but periodicals. The team is permanent, and stays in life by cooptation.

And I repeat: the new believe in mankind is not intended (not in the first instance) for individuals. Because a believe is everybody’s own choice. The new universal believe is intended for our governments. As ground for their identity and conduct.

I wait for your opinion.

Frans Couwenbergh

fcouwenb@mens2000.nl

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[1] I read Jonathan Kirsch God against the gods (Viking Compass, 2004)

Jessica Stem Terreur in naam van God (Spectrum, 2004)

Marilyn French From Eve to Dawn: A Women’s History of the World (1995)

Rosalind Miles The Women’s History of the World (London, 1988)

[2] I read: Nicholas Reeves Achnaton (Tirion, 2002)

Harry Wilson Het volk van de farao’s (Bosch & Keuning, 1998)

Bible in Dutch Handbijbel in NBG-vertaling 1951

[3] when I have to choose: I guess (a branch of) AP africanus