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Books about Religion in The Radical Academy Bookstore Click Here for New & Used College Textbooks at Discount Prices Click Here for College Education Information & Study Resources Shop Amazon Stores in the Radical Academy Bookstore Magazine Outlet Music Store Video Store DVD Store Computer Store Camera & Photo Store Computer/Video Games Software Store Outlet Store Cellular Phones Toys & Games Tools & Hardware Outdoor Living Consumer Electronics Kitchen & Housewares Baby Superstore Apparel & Accessories Gourmet Food Sporting Goods Jewelry & Watches Health & Personal Care		The Genesis Declaration, by George J. Irbe (Continued)   What we know today that Moses did not know We now know, some 3,400 years after Moses, what our Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer ancestors had wrought millennia ago. We also know that we ourselves still continue, to this day, the profligate hunting (and fishing) practices of the Cro-Magnon. Some excerpts from SHP will give an idea: The modern human animal -- our physical being -- is a generalist. We have no fangs, claws, or venom built into our bodies. Instead we've devised tools and weapons -- knives, spearheads, poisoned arrows. Elementary inventions such as warm clothing and simple watercraft allowed us to overrun the whole planet before the end of the last Ice Age. Our specialization is the brain. The flexibility of the brain's interactions with nature, through culture, has been the key to our success. [p.29] During the Upper Palaeolithic, one kind of human -- the Cro-Magnon, or Homo sapiens -- multiplied and fanned out around the world, killing, displacing, or absorbing all other variants of man, then entering new worlds that had never felt a human foot. . . By 15,000 years ago, at the very latest -- long before the ice withdraws -- humankind is established on every continent except Antarctica. . . this prehistoric wave of discovery and migration had profound ecological consequences. Soon after man shows up in new lands, the big game starts to go missing. Mammoths and wooly rhinos retreat north, then vanish from Europe and Asia. A giant wombat, other marsupials, and a tortoise as big as a Volkswagen disappear from Australia. Camels, Mammoth, giant bison, giant sloth, and the horse die out across the Americas. A bad smell of extinction follows Homo sapiens around the world. [p.37] . . . earlier people - Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and early Homo sapiens -- had hunted big game without hunting it out. But Upper Palaeolithic people were far better equipped and more numerous than their forerunners, and they killed on a much grander scale. Some of their slaughter sites were almost industrial in size: a thousand mammoths at one; more than 100,000 horses at another. "The Neanderthals were surely able and valiant in the chase," wrote the anthropologist William Howells in 1960, "but they left no such massive bone yards as this." And the ecological moral is underlined more recently by Ian Tattersall. "Like us," he says, "the Cro-Magnons must have had a darker side." . . . there would be no limit to the white man's guns that reduced both buffalo and Indian to near extinction in a few decades of the nineteenth century. "The humped herds of buffalo," wrote Herman Melwille, "not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri . . . where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch." [p.38] Modern hunter-gatherers -- Amazonians, Australian Aboriginals, Inuit, Kalahari "bushmen" -- are wise stewards of their ecologies, limiting their own numbers, treading lightly on the land. It is often assumed that ancient hunters would have been equally wise. But archeological evidence does not support this view. Palaeolithic hunting was the mainstream livelihood, done in the richest environment on a seemingly boundless earth. Done, as we have to infer from the profligate remains, with the stock-trader's optimism that there would always be another big killing just over the next hill. . . The Australian biologist Tim Flannery has called human beings the "future eaters." Each extermination is a death of possibility. . . the Upper Palaeolithic period, which may well have begun in genocide, ended with an all-you-can-kill wildlife barbecue. The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game. Most of the great human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our movable feasts. [p.39] The hunters at the end of the Old Stone Age were certainly not clumsy, but they were bad because they broke rule one for any prudent parasite: Don't kill off your host. . . they drove species after species to extinction . . [p.40] What purpose did the Genesis Declaration serve? Near the beginning of this piece I said that I was struck by the fact that what I call the "Genesis Declaration", consisting of Genesis 1:26-29, is repeated again in Genesis 9:1-3, and that in both instances it is oddly out of place, appearing out of context of the general story line. I suspected that the Declaration had an importance all its own to the author, or authors, of Genesis, and that it was included for a very human, self-serving reason, what I chose to call the qui bono factor. Could it be that the Genesis story had already been completed when the author(s) realized that an essential clause, asserting man's supreme status on, and ownership of, the Earth, i.e. the Declaration, had been omitted?; and that the author(s) revisited Genesis and hastily inserted the Declaration not just once but twice? I'm only speculating . . . We know that the vast majority of mankind never have had, and never will have, any pangs of a guilty conscience over killing other living things merely for the sake of killing. How could it be otherwise, seeing that it is frequently an effort for men to feel guilty even over the killing of their own kind. It is by no means a stretch to call the Cro-Magnon and their progeny (that means us), "natural born killers." As SHP says, "A bad smell of extinction follows Homo sapiens around the world." [p.37], and in the words of anthropologist Ian Tattersall: "Like us, the Cro-Magnons must have had a darker side." [p.38] The one thing the Cro-Magnons did not have to do while wild game was plentiful was to resort to farming. SHP recounts the progression from hunting to primitive farming to large-scale agricultural production, at which point men attained the status of "civilized society." But, as is recounted in SHP, agricultural civilizations carried within them the seeds of their own eventual demise (I have used Sumer as an example of the many featured in SHP). There was a vicious circle at work in the agricultural civilizations: more food meant a constantly increasing population, which meant a constantly increasing demand for more food, which meant having constantly to increase the acreage under cultivation, which meant razing more and more of the forest cover, which meant increased soil erosion and, (what was definitely of no concern to men), dispossession of wild animals of their natural habitat. In this the 21st Century, we humans (and here I am including all the billions of the "average" ignorant and unthinking majority of the species) have no more regard and compassion for other living creatures and as little respect for the natural environment as did our ancestors 15,000 years ago. If today the conscience of a few of us is stirring, if today we attempt to establish conservation areas and wild-life sanctuaries, we do so grudgingly and only after much debate and protest by those whose economic interests are at stake. In any case, many times the economic interests prevail in the long run, and, if conservation areas are established, in a few years they again vanish off the map. In the preceding two centuries, men almost eradicated all the whales from the world's oceans in an orgiastic killing spree. What's more, we are now well on the way to sweeping our oceans clean of fish and marine mammals and reptiles, species after species, with lethal drift-nets that kill indiscriminately everything in their path. I will now give my answer to the question of what purpose was served by the Genesis Declaration. It can be argued that, whatever was its purpose, today it can apply only to the "people of the book," namely, Jews, Christians and Muslims. The "book" is, of course, the Bible, and the three Abrahamic religions all share a common belief in the "truth" of the Genesis story. It can be further argued that at the time of its writing, Genesis and the Bible was the sole property of, and directed specifically to, the Israelites, and no one else. Therefore, the Genesis Declaration, like everything else in the Bible, applies only to the Israelites. I counter that argument by the following: Genesis 1 begins as a cosmological argument applying to all creation and, by extension, to all men of the species Homo sapiens. As I have already argued above, Moses did not have to have knowledge of his Cro-Magnon ancestors to feel like they did and view the natural world like they did. Inherited genetic traits have a power all their own. Thus, in the oddly-placed Genesis Declaration in Genesis 1, and again in Genesis 9, he is acknowledging the innate nature of man to feel and act like the master of all he surveys. If man should doubt his superiority over the rest of creation; or if he should wonder whether he should try to restrain his insatiable sexual drive; or if he develops twinges of conscience about his callous treatment of other living beings -in every case God reassures man that he is not to worry; he need not change his ways; what he is doing is right and good. Here is the qui bono factor. It can be said that the Genesis declaration merely confirmed what was true of the nature of all men for all time, but there was an extra benefit for the Israelites, and later for Christians and Muslims, in that their God enunciated their rights in direct and unmistakable terms. This fact has now been interwoven in our Western culture for 2000 years. We need not feel guilty about any of this, because, after all, God made us in his own image.   CONCLUSION The big question that we face is this: What lies in the future if Homo sapiens does not repudiate the Genesis Declaration as false, but continues to think that he is a God-like master of the Earth. Not only do we know more about our ancient progenitors than Moses did, but at least a few of us have also reached a more sophisticated understanding of our own nature. With this knowledge in hand we can come up with a reasonable prediction of what will happen in the future. I will let some selections from SHP (with page numbers) and my own GLM essay address it: The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.[p.132] The future of everything we have accomplished since our intelligence evolved will depend on the wisdom of our actions over the next few years. Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes. [p.3] By breaking the Laws man continues down the road that leads to his eventual perdition. [GLM] Contrary to the wishful thinking of too many of the human race, God, through his Laws, always administers consequences commensurate with our actions - good or bad - and the consequences are irreversible. They are not negotiable after the fact. [GLM] Our main difference from chimps and gorillas is that over the last 3 million years or so, we have been shaped less and less by nature and more and more by culture. We have become experimental creatures of our own making. This experiment has never been tried before. And we, its unwitting authors, have never controlled it. The experiment is now moving very quickly and on a colossal scale. Since the early 1900s, the world's population has multiplied by four and its economy -- by more than forty. We have reached a stage where we must bring the experiment under rational control, and guard against present and potential dangers. [p.30] Physiologically, we differ little from other higher life forms on Earth. Our only exceptional gift from God is our superior intelligence; our free will whereby to exercise it is a generous dispensation from him. Only by our free will are we in some measure autonomous. With the grant of the superior intelligence man was also granted the capability to understand the functions of the Laws, and the great privilege to comply with the Laws voluntarily. God has thus placed a great trust in us - one could also say that he has taken a risky gamble - that we would exercise our free will intelligently and in accord with the Laws, which demand of us (for our own good!) respect, moderation, kindness and justice toward each other and no less toward the rest of his creation. [GLM] If we fail -- if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us -- nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea. . . . We have already caused so many extinctions that our dominion over the earth will appear in the fossil record like the impact of an asteroid. [p.31] Whether one subscribes to the creationist or evolutionary theory, there is more evidence for than there is against the quite reasonable proposition that man has been, so far, an inconclusive, if not a failed, experiment. [GLM] Perhaps it hardly matters to the endless, eternal domain of God's creation what happens here on one insignificant speck of it that we call the Earth. [GLM] It is time mankind stops regarding itself as something very special. It is not. [GLM] . . prehistory, like history, tells us that nice folk didn't win, that we are at best the heirs of many ruthless victories and at worst the heirs to genocide. We may well be descended from humans who repeatedly exterminated rival humans -- culminating in the suspicious death of our Neanderthal cousins some 30,000 years ago. [p.31] The only contract with God that we know we have for sure . . . obliges us to treat all of God's creation here on Earth according to God's Laws. Homo sapiens continues to break the Laws at the peril of extinction for himself and most other life on Earth. [GLM] Civilizations have developed many techniques for making the earth produce more food -- some sustainable, others not. The lesson I read in the past is this: that the health of land and water -- and of woods which are the keepers of water -- can be the only lasting basis for any civilization's survival and success. [p.105] The collapse of the first civilization on earth, the Sumerian, affected only half a million people. The fall of Rome affected tens of millions. If ours were to fail, it would, of course, bring catastrophe on billions. [p.107] The invention of agriculture is . . . a runaway train, leading to vastly expanded populations but seldom solving the food problem because of two inevitable (or nearly inevitable) consequences. The first is biological: the population grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply. The second is social: all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around. [p.108] Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I call progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn't easily moved. [p.108] . . human inability to foresee -- or to watch out for -- long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer. [p.108] . . despite the wreckage of past civilizations littering the earth, the overall experiment of civilization has continued to spread and grow. The numbers (insofar as they can be estimated) break down as follows: a world population of about 200 million at Rome's height, in the second century A.D.; about 400 million by 1500, when Europe reached the Americas; one billion people by 1815, at the start of the coal age; 2 billion by 1925, when the Oil Age gets underway; and 6 billion by the year 2000. Even more startling than the growth is the acceleration. Adding 200 million after Rome took thirteen centuries; adding the last 200 million took only three years. [p.109] If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature. Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960s, humans were using about 70 percent of nature's yearly output; by the early 1980s, we'd reached 100 percent; and in 1999, we were at 125 percent. Such numbers may be imprecise, but their trend is clear -- they mark the road to bankruptcy. [p.129] Self-restraint is the virtue that man is in short supply of -- in the most advanced as well as the most primitive of his societies on Earth. [GLM] I will conclude with a statement by a wise Greek who had no religious motives up his sleeve and no self-interest in mind. Aristotle wrote, c. 350 B.C.E., that, far from being made in God's image, Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with arms, meant to be used by intelligence and virtue, which he may use for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony. (Politics, line 1253a31) If someone had said to Aristotle that man was made in God's image, he would most likely have laughed out loud at the suggestion. He believed that only the truly virtuous man had a hope of approaching a divine state, and there were very few such men in the world. But actually, believing that he is god-like is a very serious defect in the psyche of man, which he developed when he began to understand that he was more intelligent than, and could outsmart, all other forms of life on earth. A final remark: As I am completing this essay, the disastrous flood in New Orleans -- a harbinger of another failing civilization -- continues. Officialdom has now ordered a forced evacuation of the people who refuse to leave the city of New Orleans voluntarily. However, they are told that they will have to leave their pets behind. Many, if not most (bless them!), of the pet-owners say that there is no way they will leave their pets behind to what would very likely be a most horrible end. At this time the SPCA is trying desperately to persuade the officials that the pets should be evacuated with their owners. The point I want to make is that mankind as a whole still places no intrinsic, moral value on the life of any other animal. The Genesis Declaration is still in effect. < Return to Page One George J. Irbe Archive Questions/Comments? Post them in The Radical Academy Forum Mr. Irbe's Website: Classical Liberal George E-mail Address: George J. Irbe Enrich your life with a book about religion... Enrich your life with a religion magazine... Religion Resource Center Main Page
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