A Brief Natural History of Civilization by Mark Bertness

Author:Mark Bertness
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300245912
Publisher: Yale University Press

P A R T I I I

Fate: Where We Are

Going

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may.

—BUDDHA

C H A P T E R E I G H T

Our Ethnocentric, Entheogenic

Universe

WHEN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY French philosopher René Descartes famously declared, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), he was expressing the widely believed perspective that we humans are superior to other forms of life. We love our dogs, cats, and other pets, but few of us consider them to be deep thinkers who wonder where they came from, who they are, or where they go when they die. Even ardent animal lovers don’t advocate dog mythologies or think about pet heaven. For humans, then, the high peaks of culture that religion often represents might be seen as the culmination of what truly separates us from the rest of the natural world. The mythologies, religions, and beliefs that came from cooking meat in fire pits—which led to greater energy from our food, which led to brain growth, which led to communication, cooperation, language, and problem-solving, which in turn selected even higher-level brain development—are as human as human can be, aren’t they?

After all, though the brain biochemistry that gives humans consciousness is not yet fully understood, the consequences of our high-functioning cognitive abilities are clear: they have led to our questioning the meaning of life, what we are doing now, and what we will do later.1 They have produced psychology, sociology, the sciences, and religion. They created J. S. Bach, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and civilization. They are what make us able to do other things with our days than plan for food. They are what make us able to read this book.

In other words, we might be tempted to believe that religion, philosophy, and art, these arenas wherein we search for (human-centric) meaning, represent the essential break between our species and every other species—and indeed, the ability to think, to become Aristotle’s “rational animal,” has been used for precisely these categories. There are animals, and there are humans.

Natural history says otherwise. While it may indeed be true that we are the only species capable of mythology, such a power did not arise in a vacuum, but rather from the same symbiogenetic processes of cooperation that have led to human dominance over the planet. The story of mythologies that grew into religions that became integral to the wielding of social power over others is one that involves some of the strangest and most creative theories and hypotheses of cooperative evolution in natural history. Namely, it is the story of our continual fascination with and understanding of plant chemistry—not simply for medicinal purposes, as I will explain later, but also for various plants’ hallucinogenic and mind-altering properties. While some of these hypotheses are more speculative than others, all of them point to an intimate relationship between human cooperative social structures and the chemistry of plant defenses.

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