When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

INTRODUCTION

by James V. Morgan

Relatively few Western humans are willing to acknowledge how bad things really are now, the actual depth of it all, the reality of what is gone; not just the ecology, but the whole package; the social, the psychological, and physical array of what it actually means to be human; what has worked and what has not; the truth about what Homo sapiens’ evolutionary fitness actually is, and the lies about what it isn’t.

John Zerzan is one of the few who unflinchingly tells it how it is. Not in theory. John’s writing as a whole offers arguably the most complete package of multifaceted objective reality to inform us what has actually happened to humans since a few of us (who were sociopaths) developed socioeconomic and political complexity a very short time ago. What has happened as a result of the emergence of elite-driven socioeconomic complexity? Rapid-fire evolutionary maladaptation has happened, and the effects accelerate every minute of every day in the 21st-century hyper-techno-domestication world.

Not only do most people have zero answers, most people incessantly avoid coping with the answers. Mind that there is an entire industry called academia supposedly tasked with providing answers (data) that will inevitably solve our human problems. Yet it is such an irony that academia, in so many ways, did develop its own quite accurate map(s) to the maze decades and decades ago. Academia has long acknowledged in so many ways that the complex, stratified, ultra-domesticated mass-society pathway is a catastrophic one, but the experts from the academies have simultaneously snake-oil-peddled their postmodern excuses to the masses, ultimately just to protect their own skins, as any threat to domesticated life means also a solidified threat to their own lives of complete domesticated dependency.

Never mind the world, or the integrity of our species, let me just log this new journal article in my CV so I can pick up the next research grant and get tenured with six digits. Meanwhile, yes, the world is fucked and most humans have fallen into utter madness. Read between the lines of whatever latest scientific publication you can find and you’ll see it’s all there. The scientific experts do certainly say we are fucked. But they also love postmodern excuses.

Ever since John got me tuned in to what postmodernism really is nearly two decades ago, identifying PM rationalizetions and excuses has become daily fare for me. Nearly every person one might attempt speaking to about the reality of our situation seems to have mastered the PM gaslight as a response. It’s their day-to-day self-preservation: abandoning the death ship means giving up on all of this, abandoning my domesticated mental and physical ‘Life Ship’; so at all costs Do Not Abandon. Easier to chirp snide PM remarks and go back to poking away at my (Poison) Apple.

Did you ever consider what that logo on your little toy means? The Programmers obviously have known what they are ultimately reaching toward.

For the good of all, it’s time for all willing accomplices to start reading and listening to what John Zerzan has to say. John has got things figured out on a level that most people just don’t, even the so-called experts—academic, activist, anarchist or whoever else. This is not just about reading some literature. Take JZ’s analysis and figure out how to apply the critical points to your life and your future plans. Even better, take JZ’s analysis of our predicament and figure out how to apply it to raising your children.

As a ‘professional’ academic myself, my take is that in the future the Zerzanophiles will maybe have inherited the earth and things will be light-years better than they are now. There is Hope. Abandon the death ship and step onto the authentic Life Ship. It’s still there waiting for you to get on board. The gangplank is right before your eyes. First step: trash that stupid Bite-of-the-Poison-Apple-Phone and start learning how to be a human being again. What to do from there will become increasingly obvious with every step. It’s When We Are Human.

The wide-ranging essays that comprise this book are so many points of light in a kaleidoscope you won’t likely find elsewhere. Taken together—or separately for that matter—they illumine basic realities and may just help in these dark days.

1

PRE-HISTORY

Systems-wide failure everywhere one looks. What ISN’T failing? Every civilization so far has collapsed. Now there is only this global civilization and it is FAILING.

The perils and pathologies of modern life have come as a surprise to many. These pitfalls didn’t show up overnight. The current reality––or unreality––can’t be understood without some grasp of how it began, what drives it.

Umair Haque (Eudaimonia, July 3, 2020) wrote, If Life Feels Bleak, It’s Because Our Civilization is Beginning to Collapse. The coronavirus is one of many warnings that we can now see the end of civilization.

How did we get to this terminal place?

These essays try to shed some light on how it happened, and what’s at stake.

NEWS FROM PREHISTORY: AN UPDATE

Symbolic culture, the defining feature of modern humans, is quite recent, while non-symbolic culture––and intelligence––go back very much farther. About 30,000 years for the former, three million years in terms of the latter. I’ve addressed this before, most recently in The Way We Used to Be,¹ and the following is largely an extension or update of that essay.

Contra Henry de Lumley, the symbolic is not one of the essential dimensions of human cognition.² We are the only human species to symbolize, and yet cognition certainly extends to our very, very distant forebears. We are symbolic animals, living within layers of symbolic representations where nothing is allowed to be merely itself. This conceit defines reality in countless ways. Consciousness, for example, can only take place within the symbolic. Erich Neumann sees the origin of consciousness in myth, to cite one baseless example.³

Communication cannot be properly said to take place unless it is symbolic. Michael Haworth has explored Telepathy and Intersubjectivity in Derrida, Husserl and Levinas,⁴ and Freud had no trouble assuming that early humans were telepathic.⁵ The cognition that enables expertise is not usually reliant on the symbolic, including language. We are slowly discovering more about the richness of pre-symbolic culture, including ever-earlier examples of Paleolithic intelligence.

Culture in the widest sense is far from solely possessed by humans. A fine reminder is The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell,⁶ about cetaceans who think, feel, and live communally in a web of culture developed about 30 million years ago.

Concerning our own family tree, in the beginning there were the hominin species (e.g., Ardipithecus, Australopithecus) and the Homo species. We were fully bipedal this side of six million years ago, but not yet human. A fairly recent Ardipithecus ramidus find is a fossilized skeleton nicknamed Ardi who lived about 4.4 million years ago; a more famous ancestor is Lucy from 3.4 million years ago. Much debate continues as to the earliest appearance of humans (e.g., Homo erectus, Homo habilis).⁷

In March 2015 Kaye Reed of Arizona State University and her colleagues reported finding the oldest Homo fossil, dating back 2.8 million years, found in Ethiopia.⁸ In June of the same year there was another Ethiopian find, half of a jawbone, dated from 3.3 to 3.5 million years. The latest evidence fuels the hominin vs. Homo discussion, but also raises questions as to the adequacy of those distinctions. It makes us stop and rethink everything, said American paleoanthropologist Carol V. Ward.⁹

The fact that some extremely old fossilized remains have distinctly human features (e.g., shape of hands or feet, arm length)¹⁰ only deepens the confusion, but the extent of cognitive capacities is a question of still greater significance.

Analysis of stone tools found near Lake Turkana, Kenya in 2011 verifies that they are 3.3 million years old, some 700,000 years earlier than those previously known.¹¹ The earliest previous evidence of tool-making, also from east Africa, was dated 2.6 m.y.a. A similar, supportive find is that of bones from before 3.39 m.y.a. that show unambiguous stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access.¹² The fashioning of even the simplest of stone tools is a feat of mind not exhibited by non-human primates even when trained by humans.¹³ Much of what we know is extrapolated from the evidence of stone tools; they are artifacts that endure. There was likely a wealth of other activity whose traces have disappeared, e.g., woodworking, bone and antler tools, cordage from similar periods. A 2019 finding in southern Israel included 283 small precision tools used for butchering an elephant, dating from some 500,000 years ago.

We know that Homo erectus managed repeated sea crossings to the Indonesian island of Flores, a distance of at least 20 kilometers.¹⁴ The discovery of 500,000-year-old stone-tipped spears in South Africa upset the long-standing opinion that such hafting was unknown before 300,000 years ago.¹⁵

The evidence record shows a clear pattern of developed abilities at ever-earlier times. Other recent findings support this, including a Journal of Human Evolution article that focuses on cooking at around 1.9 million years ago.¹⁶ It discusses scavenged meat, arguing that Homo erectus would not have emerged without cooking. Eating carrion, which clearly took place at least this early, would not have been safe unless the meat was cooked. Ewen Calloway looks at 1.5 m.y.a. human footprints in Kenya as evidence of an early antelope hunt.¹⁷ A September 2015 sensation was the announcement of a new species, Homo naledi, found in South Africa and dating from 2.5 to 2.8 m.y.a., of unusually modern appearance and possibly practicing deliberate burial vastly earlier than any known symbolic activity.¹⁸

We were beings who lived in direct touch with this Earth while avoiding the virus of symbolic pseudo-life, domestication, and civilization––but not for want of intelligence. Our species is unique, mainly in a negative sense, having brought ruin and estrangement to every corner of the world.

Women as Paleolithic tool-makers¹⁹ brings to mind another dimension of hunter-gatherer band society. A 2011 study of 32 hunter-gatherer groups overturned an earlier assumption that such groups were composed mainly of people who were genetically related. Anthropologists Mark Dyble and Andrea Migliano found that most of them were not related, and that the level of non-relatedness increased with the level of gender equality in the band. They attributed the well-known band features of egalitarianism and cooperation to the conscious influence of women,²⁰ a powerful reply to those who have characterized references to hunter-gatherer gender equality as an illusory modern/Romantic/leftist projection.

I think pre-domesticated life may remain an intriguing mystery in many, if not most respects. The perspectives it has already revealed, however, may be of profound importance in the always-worsening straits where Progress places us.

WHEN WE WERE HUMAN

When did modern Homo sapiens show up? That is, how long have there been people like us? The answer has changed dramatically in recent years, with highly interesting implications.

The long-prevailing consensus was that Homo became modern about 40,000 years ago, in the Upper Paleolithic, around the time of the European cave paintings.¹ Wow, has this judgment been radically revised. In 1998 paleo-anthropologist Bernard Campbell found that we were modern 100,000 years ago.² 2002 saw John Noble Wilford claim that we were modern by at least 130,000 years ago.³ Robert Foley, in 1995, had already put the date as certainly as far back as 110,000 years ago, and possibly as old as 140,000 years.⁴ Homo sapiens is 150,000 years old according to Kenneth J. Guest, as of 2014.⁵ In 2017, Tibayrenc and Ayala set the date at 200,000 years.⁶

The direction of this revision, and the rapid shift involved, are starkly clear. Galway-Witham and Stringer’s "How Did Homo sapiens Evolve? (2015) refers to evidence for Homo sapiens in Morocco as early as 300,000 years ago."⁷ In fact, in 2003 P.S.C. Tacon had already contributed Behaviourally Modern at 300,000 Before Present: Was My Ancestor Brighter than Yours?⁸

Precisely what the term modern involves/includes probably varies among the anthropologists and archaeologists just cited, but an overall updating and reassessment has arrived. Grant McCall argues that patterns of residential or home base activity in the Lower Paleolithic, as well as shared foraging and hunting practices, are the same as those of modern hunter-gatherers.⁹ Home base development and use of fire by circa 400,000 years ago has led Nicholas Roland to a similar conclusion, based on evidence from China.¹⁰ New fossil discoveries have overturned conventional thought about early Homo capacities, according to Leslie Aiello and Susan Anton.¹¹

A key explanation of the depth of early Homo humanness is The Revolution that Wasn’t, by Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks (2000).¹² They argued that the cognitive abilities of early members of our species were indistinguishable from our own. In a 2013 follow-up essay, they presented further research supporting the idea of a cognitive unity throughout members of the Homo sapiens species.¹³ John J. Shea’s work, for example "Homo sapiens Is as Homo sapiens Was," is founded on the same premise, as the title makes clear.¹⁴

A new paradigm has emerged.

Looking back much further, we were walking upright more than four million years ago. 3.6-million-year-old footprints found in east Africa show two people walking together with a modern gait.¹⁵ Until recently, the earliest known intentionally modified stone tools (from an Ethiopian site) were dated at 2.6 million years ago. But a 2015 discovery in Kenya has pushed that date back to 3.3 million years ago––a major find.¹⁶

In 2019, Justin Pargeter and John Shea provided the first extensive overview of prehistoric tool miniaturization, a practice that goes back to extremely early lithic tool-making.¹⁷ That is, to at least 2.6 million years ago. These are often stunning creations, finely crafted tools less than half an inch long. They were used for cutting, piercing, scraping, etc. It becomes increasingly easy to grasp that we possessed significant capabilities far earlier than the lack of social and material complexity might imply. For this reason, Gowlett, Gamble and Dunbar have argued that there is at least a 2-million-year social record that must be explored.¹⁸

From at least 1.5 million years ago, fire was a key development.¹⁹ Hunting of small animals (e.g., rabbits by 400,000 years ago) and larger game (goats and deer) began much earlier than previously thought, according to 2019 Science Advances research.²⁰ The cognition required in stone knapping has long been understood as not substantially different from our own today.²¹

What stands out most to me is the absence of symbolic functioning among these early people. Recent findings underline impressive human capacities at earlier and earlier stages, but with no evidence of symbolic activity, much less of symbolic culture.

Civilization has made the symbolic the measure of intelligence and even of consciousness. Human capacities at remarkably remote times render this notion utterly ridiculous. There was a time when communication wasn’t about trading symbols, when the symbolic dimensions of art, number and time awareness did not exist. Robert Bednarik has addressed Concept-Mediation Marking in the Lower Paleolithic,²² regarding very early intelligence in a non-symbolic world.

To me, what we now know of our very distant past leads to the question of the very nature of symbolism’s reign over the planet. How to somehow get outside of representation, the symbolic, is a challenge that has been lurking––if not directly posed––for some time. Edmund Husserl’s to the things themselves comes to mind, the search for a way to be before/beneath the merely conceptual.

A recent entry in the effort toward the direct and unmediated goes by the name of Thing Theory, kicked off, at least in part, by Bill Brown’s 2004 cultural studies book Things.²³ Cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris turned this emphasis into what he calls Material Engagement Theory.²⁴ His outlook foregrounds the role of things in the processes of human cognition, stressing the active collaboration between individual and material. As he puts it, with emphasis, to think through things, in action, without the need of mental representation.²⁵

We may be getting closer to directly challenging––and indicting––symbolic culture, whose advent and emergence became viral with domestication and civilization. The realm of estrangement and ruin, in every sphere. Each step into the symbolic has moved us toward alienation and destruction, as we now can more clearly see.

HUMAN NATURE

It’s just human nature to _________________. Women are by nature _________________.

Fill in the blanks. Unexamined essentialism, usually in service to the dominant order.

But a blanket condemnation of essentialism, applied to everything, is its own error. Domestication, for instance, has an essential, core quality: control. It grows broader and deeper, according to its inner logic, and that is easy to see. An open-and-shut case of essentialism!

Human nature is certainly to be rejected in a generally postmodern, no stable meaning or truth culture. Rousseau found our true nature to be that of pre-civilized freedom. His noble savage conception is roundly mocked on all sides. But doesn’t anarchism rest on the (essentialist) notion that at base, humans are good? And that, as per Rousseau, the problem is that we have been debased and corrupted by various institutions?

Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents portrayed domestication as an incurable wound to our nature, an unending source of pain that represses our original condition of Eros and freedom. Only the end of domestication/civilization, Freud strongly implied, could cure this fundamental unhappiness. Definitely an essentialist perspective.

For more than 99 percent of our two to three million years as Homo species, we lived as mobile hunter-gatherers/foragers. How could this be other than foundational?

Edward O. Wilson proclaimed a predisposition to religious belief…in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature.¹ This is an absurd judgment, given how very recently (about 3,000 years ago) organized religion entered the picture. Much closer to the mark is the effort by Maryanski and Turner to discover our ‘human nature’ by looking at the past––the very distant past.…² Our past as foragers and hunters is distant in terms of its duration, but is also recent, considering that domestication is barely 10,000 years old.

We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse of living in balance with the world.… it is the inherent possession of everyone, in the words of Paul Shepard.³ Similarly, Fredy Perlman referred to the constancy of resistance to Leviathan, the death culture that is civilization.

On a very deep level, it is our nature to want what we have lost.

FIRE

Evenings are my time to stare at the fire, through the glass of our wood stove. With a nightly martini, maybe with an audiobook playing, whether or not a source of warmth is needed. Seeing the ever-changing flames, letting wordless thought come forth––or not. Staring into the mystery that we all share.

A passage from Hermann Hesse’s Demian says it well: Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak…surrender to them. Don’t ask first whether it’s permitted, or would please your teachers or father, or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.

When we anarchists gathered around a fire pit for weekly get-togethers, it seemed so satisfyingly appropriate, the perfect space for conviviality and focus. It was the fact of the fire as a centerpiece that made those sessions so special, I think.

In a September 1954 Scientific American article, Loren Eiseley wrote that the use of fires was doubtless one of the earliest human practices. Timothy Ingalsbee’s entry on the topic in Bron Taylor’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Vol. 1) concluded, "Homo sapiens became human beings with their knowledge, control and use of fire."

The sense of Ingalsbee’s statement is valid, but Homo species’ fire practices greatly predate the appearance of H. sapiens. In his