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The Ascent of Humanity.Pdf The Ascent of Humanity Charles Eisenstein Panenthea Press The Ascent of Humanity Copyright © 2007 by Charles Eisenstein Some rights reserved: Any part of this book may be freely reproduced in physical or digital format for non-commercial purposes, provided the author and title of this book is cited as the source. On-line reproductions must also provide a link to the book website, http://www.ascentofhumanity.com. Cover Painting: Turmbau zu Babel, by Pieter Brugel the Elder, 1563. Reproduced with permission of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 978-0-9776222-0-7 Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data: contact publisher Panenthea Press, www.panenthea.com 266 F, N. Arlington Ave., Harrisburg, PA, 17109 Printed in the United States First Printing: March, 2007 Dedicated to the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible And they said, “Come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.” Contents Introduction ........... 1 Chapter I: The Triumph of Technology Gee Whiz—The Future! .........13 Utopia Postponed ........................19 The Addiction to Control ......27 From Separation to Boredom....33 From Affluence to Anxiety....38 Chapter II: The Origins of Separation The Origins of Self...................51 Fire and Stone...............................57 Language and Label .................63 Mathematics and Measure ..........76 Keeping Time ...........................82 Images of Perfection ...................88 The Marvelous Piraha..............97 Cultivation and Culture...............101 The Machine .............................108 Religion and Ritual.......................113 The Playful Universe................120 Chapter III: The Way of the World The Scientific Method .............129 My Personal Age of Reason .......138 Masters of the Universe ..........142 The Quest for Certainty..............152 Reducing Reality.......................158 The Ghost in the Machine..........167 The Origin of Life....................176 Alone in the Universe..................186 Chapter IV: Money and Property The Realm of Me and Mine....195 Alone in a Crowd.........................201 The Anonymous Power ..........207 Social Capital.................................216 Cultural Capital.........................226 Natural Capital..............................236 Spiritual Capital.........................246 Time, Money, and the Good......256 The Economics of Other........262 Interest and Self-interest.............267 The Crisis of Capital ................276 THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY Chapter V: The World Under Control The Total Depravity of Man ..283 The Winners and the Losers......289 Life, Death, and Struggle .......297 Yes and No...................................304 The Pressure to Break Free....310 Molding Minds.............................316 The Great Indoors...................325 Life under Contract.....................330 The War on Germs..................337 The War on Suffering .................346 Life in a Playpen.......................353 Chapter VI: The Crumbling of Certainty The End of Objectivity...........361 Truth without Certainty..............370 Order without Design .............378 The Nature of Purpose...............386 The Purpose of Nature ...........397 Life without a Replicator............405 The Community of Life..........414 The Genetic Plenum ...................421 Chapter VII: The Age of Reunion The Convergence of Crises ....431 The Currency of Cooperation ...442 The Restorative Economy......454 The Age of Water ........................462 Technologies of Reunion........468 Work and Art United ..................477 Back to Play ..............................483 The Medicine of Interbeing .......490 The Spirit of the Gift...............499 Storyteller Consciousness...........506 In Love with the World ..........515 Chapter VIII: Self and Cosmos Human Nature Restored.........523 The Fall..........................................532 The Perinatal Matrix................537 The Gaian Birthing......................542 Eulogy and Redemption .........551 At Play beside the Tower............558 Notes and Sources....567 Index ........................591 Introduction More than any other species, human beings are gifted with the power to manipulate their environment and the ability to accumulate and transmit knowledge across generations. The first of these gifts we call technology; the other we call culture. They are central to our humanity. Accumulating over thousands of years, culture and technology have brought us into a separate human realm. We live, more than any animal, surrounded by our own artifacts. Among these are works of surpassing beauty, complexity, and power, human creations that could not have ex- isted—could not even have been conceived—in the times of our fore- bears. Seldom do we pause to appreciate the audacity of our achievements: objects as mundane as a compact disc, a video cellphone, an airplane would have seemed fantastical only a few centuries ago. We have created a realm of magic and miracles. At the same time, it is quite easy to see technology and culture not as a gift but as a curse. After millennia of development, the power to ma- nipulate the environment has become the power to destroy it, while the ability to transmit knowledge transmits as well a legacy of hatred, injus- tice, and violence. Today, as both the destruction and the violence reach a feverish crescendo, few can deny that the world is in a state of crisis. Opinions vary as to its exact nature: some people say it is primarily eco- logical; others say it is a moral crisis, a social, economic, or political crisis, a health crisis, even a spiritual crisis. There is, however, little disagree- ment that the crisis is of human origin. Hence, despair: Is the present ruination of the world built into our humanity? Is genocide and ecocide the inevitable price of civilization’s magnifi- cence? Need the most sublime achievements of art, music, literature, sci- ence, and technology be built upon the wreckage of the natural world and the misery of its inhabitants? Can the microchip come without the 2 THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY oil slick, the strip mine, the toxic waste dump? Under the shadow of every Chartres Cathedral, must there be women burning at the stake? In other words, can the gift of technology and culture somehow be sepa- rated from the curse? The dashed Utopian dreams of the last few centuries leave little hope. Despite the miracles we have produced, people across the ideological spectrum, from Christian fundamentalists to environmental activists, share a foreboding that the world is in grave and growing peril. Tempo- rary, localized improvements cannot hide the ambient wrongness that pervades the warp and woof of modern society, and often our personal lives as well. We might manage each immediate problem and control every foreseeable risk, but an underlying disquiet remains. I am referring simply to the feeling, “Something is wrong around here.” Something so fundamentally wrong that centuries of our best and brightest efforts to create a better world have failed or even backfired. As this realization sinks in, we respond with despair, cynicism, numbness, or detachment. Yet no matter how complete the despair, no matter how bitter the cynicism, a possibility beckons of a world more beautiful and a life more magnificent than what we know today. Though we may rationalize it, it is not rational. We become aware of it in moments, gaps in the rush and press of modern life. These moments come to us alone in nature, or with a baby, making love, playing with children, caring for a dying person, making music for the sake of music or beauty for the sake of beauty. At such times, a simple and easy joy shows us the futility of the vast, life- consuming program of management and control. We intuit that something similar is possible collectively. Some of may have experienced it when we find ourselves cooperating naturally and effortlessly, instruments of a purpose greater than ourselves that, para- doxically, makes us individually more and not less when we abandon ourselves to it. It is what musicians are referring to when they say, “The music played the band.” Another way of being is possible, and it is right in front of us, closer than close. That much is transparently certain. Yet it slips away so easily that we hardly believe it could be the foundation of life; so we relegate it to an afterlife and call it Heaven, or we relegate it to the future and call it Utopia. (When nanotechnology solves all our problems… when we all learn to be nice to each other… when finally I’m not so busy…) Either way, we set it apart from this world and this life, and thereby deny its practicality and its reality in the here-and-now. Yet the knowledge that INTRODUCTION 3 life is more than Just This cannot be suppressed, not forever. I share with dreamers, Utopians, and teenagers an unreasonable intui- tion of a magnificent potential, that life and the world can be more than we have made of them. What error, then, what delusion has led us to accept the lesser lives and the lesser world we find ourselves in today? What has rendered us helpless to resist the ugliness, pollution, injustice, and downright horror that has risen to engulf the planet in the last few centuries? What calam- ity has so resigned us to it, that we call this the human condition? Those moments of love, freedom, serenity, play—what power has made us be- lieve these are but respites from real life? Inspired by such moments, I have spent the
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