Paradise & Capitalism & Survival & Forgiveness

This blog is repeating itself, but every version may be different.

Judaism may try to own the Garden of Eden as its own, but the story is much bigger and belongs really to the near East and that primordial time before writing. Like the Great Flood story it records something in our past that has been handed down through generations. Another example of truth in myth I heard is the Nepalese story of how the great lake that once filled the Kathmandu valley was emptied by Manjushri. This obviously happened a long time before Buddhism, geologists think around 100,000 years ago. But it suggests that people from the first wave of human migrations into Asia witnessed this and recorded it in myth. The same is undoubtedly true of the Curse of Work recorded in our expulsion from Paradise.

The Bible continues with people lamenting work. Ecclesiastes is full of lamentations over work:

For what does a man get for all the toil and striving with which he labours under the sun? Indeed, all his days are filled with grief, and his task is sorrowful; even at night, his mind does not rest. This too is futile.… [2:22-3]

This is not a man who enjoys his work. No one enjoyed work, not until very recently under modern economies.

The solution to the problem of work was Slavery. There is a reason that people went to war. It was not just for physical plunder it was the get slaves to work their economies. The Ancient Athens of Plato much lauded as the birth place of Democracy was a city composed of 90% slaves. The Greeks that we read about living lives of freedom and democracy were just 10% of the population and half of the Greeks were women who lived under veils without any access to public life like the Taleban treat women today. Work was something that people have never wanted to to do, it was given to slaves.

The great change occurred with the Industrial revolution. Machines were cheaper than slaves and more productive and so slavery was ended and the "hard work" given to machines. Now in the West people do not really work. They sit at computers typing, or designing things, or doing modelling or sitting in meetings planning these things. The work is then farmed off to machines. This is slightly futuristic the West still relies on sweat shops in the 3rd world where people are essentially slaves to the manual labour that machines are still unable to do.

Modern economists will argue that people working in factories in the 3rd world are not slaves. They get a salary and a work contract and are free to come and go as they please. This is the biggest self serving lie in history. People in modern economies have only the freedom to go from one factory to another factory. They need to work to survive because all other means of subsistence have been bought and are owned by other people. There is no living of the fruits of the forest unless the forest belongs to you! Which every way they look at it they will spend their days working in a factory, they have no choice. And in fact slaves had a better time than modern workers. Modern workers still need to find a place to live and find food and healthcare. An ancient slave would be looked after by their slave owner as someone would look after their car today. It would be a source of pride, and a well looked after slave would work better and be a better investment than one left to fall ill and perish.

The life of slaves changed dramatically under Capitalism where they were employed en masse to run industry "for profit." No longer was a slave a personal possession, they were a company possession and were viewed only in terms of the profit they could return. A slave that was no longer profitable was killed. But the average slave on a sugar plantation only lived 4 to 7 years anyway so little change to become unprofitable. This is exactly where the Nazis got their ideas from. Nazism was identical in every way to the system that built America. Perhaps this is why the Americans are so at pains to criticise Nazism, its a way of diverting attention from their own identical crimes that lie in the foundations of America.

But the point is that work is unpleasant and no one has ever liked it.

So why did mankind ever adopt the system of work if it was so unpleasant? Why did mankind ever transition out of the Paradise that animals still inhabit?

Firstly be under no illusion it was a paradise. Hunter gathers who still exist in a state similar to the ancestors of humans do not understand "work" or the modern system. I have heard them say on TV documentaries that "work" and "money" makes no sense. Why would I work all day for money to buy things when I can just go into the jungle and pick what I need.

Modern humans do not have a relationship with nature. It has been broken. They have been cast out of Paradise so they do not know how easy life can be. We have reality TV shows now with modern people trying to survive in Nature and you can see how total the expulsion from Eden has been. Even experts struggle to survive in Nature now. For our ancestors it was as easy as a walk to the shops.

Part of the reason is that our divorce from Nature has results in immeasurable damage to Nature. Nature is broken, and as a result no longer gives man anything.

If you cut the hand that feeds you it will no longer feed you.

North America for instance used to host tens of millions of bison. Americans used to be surrounded by food and everything they needed. True there was work required to kill and process a bison into clothing and tools but this was work done by communities and would have been a fraction of a day's work. Studies of apes show that Gorillas work about 4 hours a day which includes social grooming and cleaning. Ancient humans cooperating in groups and with ancient knowledge of their environments would have found life easy. And it would have been luxurious. Humans tend to have a diet of around 200 raw food items like Chimpanzees. I wonder how many people today can claim such a varied diet. And fur is still a much sort after clothing item that few can afford now, even when it is legal. Life was good. This is why it didn't change for millions of years.

So why did we ever leave Nature and get cast out?

Well I discussed the spiritual side that Genesis discusses a few posts ago. Mankind no longer worshiped, respected and listened to Nature as the source of all but began to see that they could control nature. The belief developed that mankind could replace God and become creator himself. This really took off quite recently in history with the Renaissance in Italy where the West finally gave up all respect for Nature and started to see Nature as an unworked, dead raw material for industry. This is the step that allowed the Industrial Revolution to take over our thinking.

But a key thing here was famously noted by Thomas Malthus. You feed people and their population grows until there is no longer enough food and people are starving again and the population stops growing. This is the argument against support for the poor. The poor make themselves poor by breeding too much. And there is truth to this. The rich are different, and Capitalism actually reduces fecundity as people are worried about claims to their family title, wealth and capital. When all your money is going to a single Son you will invest a lot more in them. Other children are less important, and those left with prostitutes may as well die.

And the wealth of our ancestors lay in the low populations. Very recent archaeological analysis of ancient footprints gives amazing glimpses into the lives of our ancestors. Invariably the woman is walking with weight on one side as she carries a child on her hip. The need to carry children puts an automatic limit on population growth in nomadic people. And perhaps people were sensible. Perhaps they realised that too many mouths to feed would put obvious pressure on the community. [I need some study of existing nomadic people to flesh this out.]

The change came in the near east where people began to settle. Previously people would follow herds, or harvest as they went. But one community began to focus on grass grain. They realised that if they returned some of the grain to the soil they could get a crop. The quality of their diet quickly plunged as they began to depend on grain. And they needed to work hard to grind this grain to make bread, and collect wood to cook it. And what started as just a casual relationship with the fields of grass developed over time into an intense dependency.

Now why did they abandon hunter gathering? The problem is that grain gives more calories and so their population grew. And being static and now living beside the grass fields there was no limit to population growth. Quickly more children were being born in farming communities than in the nomadic communities around. And the farmers quickly began to out number the nomads and expand their field systems, cut down the trees and transform the landscape to their way of thinking. It was an unavoidable ratchet that was inevitable as soon as humans found more calories.  

And this marks the start of the Curse of Capitalism. The moment you return some grain to the ground in the hope of getting "growth" on your investment you want to hang around that field and make sure other people don't get your crops. The concept of theft was invented. This was the start of "ownership." Famously the nomadic Americans that the colonists encountered did not understand property while the Europeans did not understand non-property and interpreted much of the American behaviour as theft which led to the start of hostilities between the originally sharing and caring Americans and the demanding and possessive colonists. And this is the beginning of the destruction of the world by the West that has been spearheaded by Britain and America. Far from liberating the world the West has amplified this trap and caught all people in it.

So the original farmers learned to "own" their fields and keep other people off. This was the beginning of conflict that has led in the millennia afterwards into wars of unimaginable violence as people fight to protect what they see as "theirs" or to steal what they see as "others."

The wedge was forced not just between Man and Nature as Mankind starting to fence off the outside world to protect "their" inner world. But the wedge was forced between man and man as each person now had an "inner" world that they owned.

This escalated into cities and civilisation so that now today the world is dominated by the idea of "private" space, with an owning person at the heart of it. And, as began ever so gently with our distant ancestors 8,000 years ago, once we invest in that private space we look for profits from that.

But this idea of "making profit" from our investment is what has really destroyed our relationship with Nature. Its a stereotype that this began with the Jews but they have certainly become associated with it. The idea of investing just for the purpose of profit is the sin that has ensured we will never return to Paradise. If you look at the history of the Jews it is littered with persecution that has almost all come from the Jews trying to profit from non Jews. Jewish law says that you can only "lend at interest" to a gentile. But this created much resentment between Gentiles and Jews. So Jews are a great example of how this casting from Eden has polluted all relationships.

In the ancient Near-East farmers used the same ideas as their nomadic compatriots. They only farmed "what they needed."

But at some point people realised they could sow more than they needed and then exchange the profits to other people. On one hand this is logical. But what invariably happens is that people in "need" end up indebted to people with "plenty." This idea of profiteering from the less fortunate has now grown to become the dominant idea across the globe. Not least through the growth of the British and now American Empires.

What began as a simple casting out of the Garden of Eden has snow balled now to cast the whole human world into gradually descending levels of Hell. And there was a strange flourishing in religions just at this process began to take hold in the Iron age. There was Buddhism in India and Daoism in China both in the 6th BC. And the Pre-Socratic thinkers in Greece at the same time also told a similar tale of Logos. And then Christianity in the Near East at 0AD. All these religions warn people away from Ego and worldly possessions. We are taught that suffering comes from petty worldly thinking, and especially in owning and grasping at things. That freedom and liberation are really found by letting go of worldly certainties and cannot be found by erecting fences and boundaries around things,. All things are interconnected and inter-dependent says Buddha, you harm this over here then you harm that over there. And Yin-Yang is the ultimate weapon against the Capitalist who seeks to own the profitable white and off load the unprofitable black only to find that they are really indistinguishable. As we progress the human race into wealth and profit, the world from which we are born is destroyed. This rise of religions I wonder was not a final recognition of the Paradise that the world was on its last crusade to forget and destroy. Buddha himself said that by 2000AD the world would have forgotten the true wisdom. Was that wisdom the one everyone knew in Eden?

But as explained in the Spiritual post on Eden a few ago. Eden is still here right now and we can access in a moment when we know how. But we need to put our egos away and remembers that all things come from God. And we can start to train ourselves in this simple truth by watching our breath that issues all by itself from our bodies. Watch our breath, appreciated it, get to know it, love it as the source of life, and as we get to know it well--gently rising in and falling out ever moment of our lives--we will steadily open the doors once again to Eden and God will forgive us and welcome us back in.