CIVILIZATION
September 27, 2009
Why is civilization trying to survive? Is it keeping the party going for the sole purpose of keeping the party going?
Individuals are prompted by a primal urge to survive. Such urges are inexplicable, tendencies built into the DNA.
Can we say the same for civilizations and/or cultures?
Everyone seems to want civilization because it makes their personal lives easier. But easier is not necessarily enriching, even rewarding.
Paleolithic humans had no civilization, at least as we know it, but their lives (I daresay) were a great deal richer than ours. Compared to the paleolithics, I sense a virtual mental illness pervading the psyche of modern humans.
Consider the idea of a career or profession. We cannot begin to imagine a paleolithic type thinking of something like this. They were completely immersed in their environment, not removed from it by the constructions we call buildings (and social decorum). They lived with nature, not against it.
In a very real sense, they made it up as they went along.
They basically ate, slept and procreated (which probably left them plenty of time for leisure).
On the subject of eating, for example, they had it all over us. To them, eating was in no way cerebral. Today it is just the reverse. We cannot just eat what we feel like eating (which we should). We are prompted (ever prompted) by society to think about what we eat. We never just pick up a piece of meat, cook it and eat it. We have to stop and think about it. "How much fat and cholesterol is in this meat? Is it going to clog my arteries? Is it going to shave some years off my life?" In short, we are cerebral about food. Paleolithic Man was gustatory about it. When he was hungry he simply ate.
And he ate what tasted good to him. Sure, he may have had a more difficult time getting his hands on the food he wanted, but he managed. And the time he spent getting his hands on that food was meaningful. There was never a question in his mind about what the hell he was doing. He would have never wasted his brain on such thoughts. Compare this to a modern human working in an office typing characters on a computer screen. What does such a behavior have to do with getting food? Now we all know that it does indeed have something to do with getting food, but the connection is an indirect one, at least once removed. It is, in other words, a complication built into the life of a modern that paleolithic man never had to struggle with.
I define illness (in humans) in terms of separation from nature. The further the separation the more pronounced the illness. And considering how much further removed from nature modern man is from his paleolithic predecessors, I would say that he is also just that much dis-eased.