" Most people most of the time in the history of civilization have lived under tyrants and demagogues, cued to despair and hopelessness. Today we are subject to progress, centralized power, entertainment, growthmania and technophilia that produce their own variety of "quiet desperation." This desperation arises not only from lack of attachment to place, but also lack of kinship with the larger community of all life on earth. History is not a neutral documentation of things that happened but an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past. It is a kind of intellectual cannibalism which creates from those different from us a target group that becomes the enemy, upon whom we project our unacknowledged fears and insecurities."
Paul Shepard in Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998) pp.14-15
Projection of our fears about ourselves onto whatever Other is currently available is familiar to us even from our politics and even from history. The mistake of history, especially when applied to the deep past of humanity, is to project a sense of "human nature" that in large part reflects the "nature"--or behavior-- of people as molded in the period we call civilization of the last 12,000 years. But our species properly began some 300,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Pleistocene. What we call civilization--marked by the beginning of a farming economy and fast population growth--is a small fraction of the intervening time. For most of those hundreds of thousands of years, humans were what is commonly called hunter-gatherers. And in that time, we were very different, partly because our relationship to where and how we lived was very different.
We were not ruthless savages--that is one of many prejudices of history that sees only the ruthlessness and savagery of civilization. In The Wandering God, a mostly unacknowleded but valuably different riff on Shepard's books, Morris Berman urges great skepticism about such culture-bound definitions of human nature, as well as much of what was written (and later disproven) or is still standard though the evidence is contradictory, that has formed ordinary views of what we were like over the hundreds of thousands of years that physically formed our current minds and bodies.
Shepard's work--poetically summarized in this, his last book--seeks to provide a different view. In doing so, he shows how human life and society can be better, in a world which we deeply share with other life, rather than mostly just use it and systematically destroy it. We who are alive now will never have direct access to this way of life, except perhaps partially and fleetingly through an informed imagination. So let's inform it. And see that we may be a tragic species, but not a completely or inately evil or psychotic one, as the history of civilization up to this moment might suggest.
