Even though choosing to revert to the hunter gatherer lifestyle seems unlikely for us at this stage – though I suppose one never knows – it is interesting to consider what we might have lost when we gradually moved to being farmers.
I am fairly certain that we lost our innate sense of direction, hearing, sight and even smell. I’d say that we also lost a lot of our sense of tuning-in to each other, our sense of depending on each other, our being at-one with nature, (e.g. tracking of animals) and many other similar traits – perhaps even long term weather prediction.
We also probably lost what we nowadays call our sixth sense. And we lost, over time, the sense of mystery in everything, and/or that there are things that we cannot understand or control that are ordering our lives.
Now, immanence is a little used word. In the context of this post I will define it as the presence of the spiritual, God, higher being or mystery in something that we physically experience, such as a tree, a mountain, river, many of which were deemed to be sacred by ancient peoples. Many pagan, or pre-Christian type religions believe that our God is present in many things that surround us, (and that we are, to some extent, part of), and does not have a separate existence. Christians believe that God exists everywhere too, but also has an existence that is distinct [1].
On our evolutionary journey I believe that among our biggest losses were the emotional skills that we had that enabled us to deal with uncertainty in respect of survival, food availability, and ultimately life and death.
Because of that loss, when we began farming, our sense of being-in-the-spiritual-world took a right bashing. I believe that there is a close connection between spirituality, uncertainty, sense of wonder, and immanence as I described above.
And this is important – rather than simply experiencing mysteries in many parts of our lives, and accepting them for what they were, we began to try and explain things.
Explanation is important here, because as we became technological, mystery after mystery was debunked. As an example, take the rain dance. Instead of considering the likelihood (or not) of rain to be a mystery, and invoking the God of rain by dancing, people began to realise that rain can be explained by understanding how pressure and temperature impacts on humidity, the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, the height of clouds, the nearness of large water masses etc.
This explanation threw a spanner in the works of those who tried to convince others that if we danced a certain dance we’d get rain. I believe that with more and more explanation (as distinct from description – which is different) wondering just for the sake of wondering became less popular.
As we got more technological, wondering had to have a goal of explaining that which we were wondering about.
It took a long, long time – but I believe that farming (and the technology that it spawned) began to affirm that part of us that tends towards arrogance.
We began to believe more and more that we could control every other species and the entire physical world, use and abuse our only home, Planet Earth, at our whim, so that we can be comfortable and our lives can have certainty. (It was, of course, a relatively short hop from that to controlling and enslaving other humans as well).
The urge within us to be certain of everything around us, that is, our desire to fix everything with technology, has made our life a lot more comfortable, predictable, healthier (though that is debatable) and indeed longer.
So it is only natural that in addition to land, goods, finance, food etc. we should try and control spirituality – lest it get in the way of our domination of everything that is so necessary in our pursuit of certainty and predictability.
The kind of spirituality that claimed that there was immanence (i.e. that a higher being was present) in things like trees, the sun, mountains, rivers etc. was overrun by unitary religion, where people in power within the religion decided, for the rest of us, on immanence, i.e. how God showed himself to us.
It says a lot about the human desire (or, one could say – desperation) for certainty that this happened. The great human paradox is that now we are at a stage where our own existence as a species is, some would say, becoming uncertain because of the damage caused to our environment by our desire for certainty.
And, if we turned back the clock,
we’d probably do it all over again!
Here is a funny cartoon that I saw on the Internet which reminds me of this paradox.
[1]. If you are interested, more can be read about immanance from many sources.