"Civilization" Is a Human Project; Not THE Only Possible Human Story

It may have been the gorilla, Ishmael, (Dan Quinn’s book Ishmael) who first burst open the container in my mind that equated “civilization” and “human history.” Separating them sent me exploring like an animal first released from an enclosure. My mind began to laugh; my heart elevated. I am ready to speak loudly through the megaphone: “We humans contribute our best capacities to Earth through our wild, full, and loving humanness, not through the rules of the civilization project underway since 10,000 BCE.”

Click to read more ...

Think Like a Gorilla: Civilization Is Not Such a Great Project Really

It’s not as if civilization just happened to us humans! We have been shaping it for 12,000 years—ever since the glacial ice receded and the climate stabilized. That’s a long time until we compare it to the 200,000 years that we humans have been on the planet. Which begs us to ask: what was happening those other 180,000 years and why did we humans feel a need to civilize it?

Click to read more ...

Multi Earthers Continue 12,000 Years of Secession from Earth's Community of Life

But Ishmael taught his student a different story. He told about a great separation that had happened in the storyline. Some of our human species became so sure that there was a better way than what had sustained us in Earth’s community of life for a couple hundred thousand years or longer, that we seceded from our union with that community. We began a different storyline. But that did not, therefore, end the lineage of all who continued to creatively live in the succession of Earth’s community.

What happened was that now two macro-stories were underway, each shaping differently what would follow. A more accurate diagram, Ishmael said, looks like this, with the Multi-Earth secession happening in the centuries as the Holocene Era began, around 10,000 B.C.E., ushering in a relatively stable, post-glacial age. It’s the only age that the story of western civilization has known.

 One-Earth Story _________________________________________________

                                                    \__Multi-Earths Story__________

According to Ishmael’s correction, what has been called prehistory in the schools of civilization, and commonly treated as inferior, is actually a long period when One Earth living was working for all species. It was Eden. 

Because of Ishmael and other teachers, what Eden means has changed for me. As I’ve come to see how healthy bioregions are the organic units comprising larger, life sustaining ecosystems, Eden has come to represent for me a planet that is a massive interplay of healthy ecosystems. The garden story of Genesis 3 portrays Eden, not as a perfect utopia, but as an evolved creational order of interdependence. Multi Earth living is hellbent on making the secession from it as complete as possible.

Please comment: Isn’t it stunning that Multi Earth living insists we can’t get away from our greed and selfishness so we need The Market to managae it? Yet, such thinking is a recent mutation of thought about our species given that we lived as One Earthers for nearly 200,000 years.

Is Human Prehistory Really Inferior to Multi Earth History?

Two diagrams have contributed to my awareness of the One Earth and Multi Earth stories as I see them operate both in and out of the consciousness of our species today. I first saw a version of these diagrams when Juanita and I read aloud to one another Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael.

In that story Ishmael, a gorilla, teaches a person about a way of viewing the world that includes not just humans but gorillas and all species. As his adult student returns regularly to the gorilla’s cage for more lessons, Ishmael challenges his student’s understanding of history. As Juanita and I read, my own view of history also came under the microscope. I, too, had been schooled to equate the history of human civilization with all of “history.”

Even more narrowly, most of what was called “world history” in my schooling was, as I said earlier, no more than the significant, but limited, story of western civilization. As I learned it, whatever came before that “history” was simply lumped together as “prehistory.” Prehistory was inferior to history. So I came to understand that we humans are an advanced species, having ascended from prehistory into history by way of one long continuous storyline that leads to the shining present. It could be simply diagrammed as follows.

Prehistory ————————-> History (10,000 BCE) ———————>

Before getting to the second diagram, the one that rattled my worldview, how about you? What were you taught about the relative significance of prehistory and history? And did your “world history” include more than the history of western civilization? Hopefully, my schooling was the exception.