There’s a drug known as angel dust or PCP that has the effect of blinding people to their physical limitations and vulnerability. Under its influence, people will manically plunge into feats that are beyond the design limitations of the human body, so that they heedlessly break bones, rip flesh, and tear ligaments, imagining themselves to be indestructible, only becoming aware of the damage they’ve done to themselves when the drug wears off.
Our culture has its own form of angel dust, which blinds us to our biological limitations and vulnerability. Under its influence, we have manically plunged into feats that are beyond the design limitations not only of our species but of any species on earth, so that we have heedlessly broken bones, ripped flesh, and torn ligaments, imagining ourselves to be indestructible. Only now, like the addict when his drug begins to wear off, are we beginning to count the wounds we have inflicted on ourselves during our maddened riot. But even as we make that count, we keep taking the drug, because we haven’t yet identified it as the source of our mania.
The drug I’m talking about is the Great Forgetting. Just as angel dust blinds its users to the fact that they’re flesh and bone, the Great Forgetting blinds us to the fact that we are a biological species in a community of biological species and are not exempt or exemptible from the forces that shape all life on this planet. The Great Forgetting blinds us to the fact that what cannot work for any species will not work for us either. As angel dust tempts people to do things that would be mortally hazardous for any human, the Great Forgetting tempts us to do things that would be mortally hazardous for any species.
There are many who think it’s too late for humankind to save itself. I hear from them daily, and my heart goes out to them. Their hopelessness is understandable, because they mistake the workings of the drug for human nature itself. There is time for us to stop taking the drug and to stop feeding it to our children. There is time for us to begin the Great Remembering.
The obliteration of tribalism
I explained a little while ago that the Great Forgetting fostered the delusion that the world was empty of humans until the people of our culture made their appearance just a few thousand years ago. As a corollary of this delusion, it was understood that our culture was not only the first and original human culture but the single culture that God intended for all humankind. These delusions remain in place today globally—East and West, twins of a common birth—even though the true (and well-known) story of human origins obviously gives them no support at all.
As the foundation thinkers of our culture reconstructed the story, humans appeared in the world with an instinct for civilization but of course no experience. They soon discovered the obvious benefits of communal life, and from there the course of civilization was clear. Farming villages grew into towns, towns grew into cities, cities grew into kingdoms, and so on. All was clear, but all was not smooth, because a key social instrument had yet to be invented, that instrument being law. Ignorant even of the concept of law, the citizens of these early cities and kingdoms were compelled to suffer crime, turmoil, oppression, and injustice. Law was a vitally important enabling invention, on which orderly social development had to wait, much as oceanic navigation had to wait on the invention of the astrolabe.
One would expect to find that laws existed long before literacy, but this appears not to have been the case. If laws had been formulated orally in preliterate times, then the earliest writings would surely have been transcriptions of these laws—but no such laws are found in these writings. In fact, the earliest written code of law, the Code of Hammurabi, dates to only about 2100 B.C.E.
Roughly speaking, this is what the foundation thinkers imagined, and this is what became the received wisdom of our culture, embedded in all social thought—and in the textbooks used by schoolchildren around the globe, even to the present moment. Needless to say, it’s about as close to the truth as the fairy tale that babies are delivered by storks.
Now let’s take off the obscuring lenses of the Great Forgetting and have a look at what was really happening in the world ten thousand years ago. Members of Homo sapiens had been moving outward from their African birthplace for more than a hundred thousand years and had literally reached every corner of the world—and I don’t mean recently. By the time I’m talking about, ten thousand years ago, the Near East, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the New World had all been occupied by modern humans for at least twenty thousand years. And far from being empty, the Near East was among the most densely populated areas of the world—densely populated, that is, by tribal peoples, such as were found everywhere in the world at that time and such as are found still today where they’ve been allowed to survive.
So we’ve made two steps beyond the fairy tale: The founders of our culture didn’t live in an empty world, they were a tribal people surrounded by many other tribal peoples—and none of them were newcomers to the business of culture. These were old, old, old, old, old, old hands at culture, which means that not a single one of them was a stranger to the concept of law. Never once in the whole history of anthropology has a tribal people been found unequipped with a complete set of laws—complete, that is, for the lifestyle of that particular tribe.
The names of the tribes inhabiting the relevant area at this time will never be known to us. The name of the tribe in which our own quirky approach to life was born is similarly unknown. Since their descendants have come to be called Takers, Fll give them a name that echoes this a bit. Fll call them the Tak. With this as a beginning, Fll tell you a story of my own—obviously not intended to be taken as literal history, to be sure, but also not a ridiculous fairy tale, like the one we hear from those who are still blinded by the Great Forgetting. There certainly was such a people as the Tak (there had to be or we wouldn’t be here!), and they were certainly a tribal people surrounded by other tribal people, whom I’ve shown here as the Ak, the Bak, the Cak, and so on up through the Kak.
This drawing reflects two vitally important realities of tribal life. First, the dark background of each tribal area is what makes the tribal name stand out. What this is meant to show is that each tribe is defined by the solidity and density of its own laws and customs. There is literally no other way to tell them apart. The laws and customs of the Ak are what make them distinguishable as a tribe. The laws and customs of the Bak are what make them distinguishable as a tribe. The laws and customs of the Cak are what make them distinguishable as a tribe. And so on. Second, the solid border around each tribe makes it clear that the cultural boundaries between tribes are impenetrable. A member of the Bak can’t just decide one day to become a member of the Hak; such a thing is quite unthinkable among tribal peoples anywhere in the world.
Probably at this time some of these tribal peoples were agriculturalists and some were hunter-gatherers. There’s nothing at all unusual about finding the two living side by side. In any case, we know that the Tak (the tribal founders of the lifestyle we’re used to calling the Taker lifestyle) were agriculturalists—though there’s no reason to suppose that they invented agriculture. Their invention was a new style of agriculture—the totalitarian style.
But the stupendous innovation of the Tak was not just a new style of agriculture. The Tak had the remarkable and unprecedented idea that everyone should live the way they lived. It’s impossible to exaggerate how unusual this made them. I can’t name a single other people in history who made it a goal to proselytize their neighbors. Certainly no tribal people in history has evinced any interest in converting neighbors to their way of life—and I know of no civilized people who evinced such an interest either. For example, the Maya, the Natchez, and the Aztecs had no interest in spreading their lifestyle to the peoples around them, including those they conquered. The Tak were definitely revolutionaries in this regard. By inspiration, persuasion, or aggression, the Tak revolution began to engulf its neighbors.
By adopting a common culture, the Tak, Dak, and Fak have necessarily lost some of the solidity that once defined them. This is why they’re depicted as somewhat grayed out. The laws and customs of the Tak mean little to the Dak or the Fak. The laws and customs of the Dak mean little to the Tak or the Fak. The laws and customs of the Fak mean little to the Tak or the Dak. Because they now share a common lifestyle, the cultural borders between them grow faint. It’s not as easy to tell one from another now. Being a Dak or a Fak isn’t as important as it once was. Now what’s important is that they’re allied with the Tak. It should be kept in mind that in this alliance the original laws and customs of the Tak are no more relevant than anyone else’s. The Dak and the Fak have not become Tak. They’ve just largely ceased to be Dak and Fak.
The process continues. The laws and customs of individual tribes continue to fade into irrelevance. By now the Dak and the Fak have virtually lost their tribal identities, and the Hak and the Kak soon will join them.
At last the original dozen have been assimilated into a single vast farming collective. Because tribal laws and customs have been reduced to nothing, tribal identities are all but unreadable. It’s as easy for one of the Ak to live among the Hak as it is for a Belgian to live in France or for a New Yorker to live in San Francisco.
Now we’re ready to depict the state of law in this farming collective.
The foundation thinkers of our culture imagined that our culture was born in a world empty of law. As this series of drawings shows, our culture was born in a world absolutely full of law, and then proceeded to obliterate it—quite inadvertently, I’m sure (at least in the beginning). Even the law of the original Tak tribe disappeared, rendered by this
process as irrelevant as all the rest.
I want you to notice that this reconstruction is not entirely a work of imagination. Study the spread of our culture into the Americas, into Australia, into Africa and elsewhere, and you can hardly fail to see the steady obliteration of tribal law in the path of its advance—and with the obliteration of tribal law, the obliteration of tribal identity.
On the nature of received laws
As time went on, and the vacuum increased in size, it became obvious that some new form of law was needed. Since tribal law had been rendered obsolete, nothing remained now but to begin to invent laws….
I think anyone who does a lot of public speaking eventually learns to sense when a chord has been struck and the audience is ringing with it. That’s what I just sensed after saying that nothing remained but to begin to invent laws.
This is of course a startling idea, the idea that laws could be anything but invented—but that’s exactly the point to be made about tribal laws. Tribal laws are never invented laws, they’re always received laws. They’re never the work of committees of living individuals, they’re always the work of social evolution. They’re shaped the way a bird’s beak is shaped, or a mole’s claw—by what works. They never reflect a tribe’s concern for what’s “right” or “good” or “fair,” they simply work—for that particular tribe. An example will show you—
I see this woman here has an urgent question. Please go ahead….
Yes. I’ll repeat the question for those of you who were unable to hear it. It’s about the genital mutilation of women among tribal peoples, specifically the excision of the clitoris disguised as a form of female circumcision. I’ve looked into this and haven’t found any untouched tribal people who follow this abominable practice. It’s found only among peoples who have been all but completely absorbed into Taker culture—and specifically Taker culture in the Islamic sphere. Clitoral excision isn’t advocated in the Koran, but its practitioners clearly have the impression that it’s Islam-approved and a very Muslim thing to do, and the practice isn’t found outside areas under Muslim influence. A strong confirmation of the fact that this is not a “tribal” practice is that it’s not found among peoples who are still living tribally, like say, the Pagibeti or the Yaka. It’s found only among people who have abandoned tribal identity, laws, and customs, and now belong to the wider Taker community of some recognized political entity like Senegal or Mali.
Okay?
I was saying that an example will show you the difference between received tribal laws and laws invented by committees. Here’s how the Alawa of Australia handle adultery.