History As Broken Evolution

Human civilization is aborted when commodity civilization is born.

A succession of wars, genocides, and massacres, adorned by three pyramids and ten cathedrals — you’d have to be pretty bitter and cynical to dare to call this “the history of humanity”. The magic Flute, the cinema, the refrigerator, organ transplants. What they consider to be “good sense” consists in putting even a lower price on millions of sacrificed existences than they put on the coins and medallions they have their faces engraved on the backs of. Nonetheless, how can anyone really say anymore with a straight face that progress needs holocausts, the engineering of unfortunates, the bloodied gasoline, the monthly salaries of a daily ounce of fresh meat, when their moral and financial values are floundering, when their patriarchal authority is down at the heels, when a breath of death is contaminating the forests, the oceans, the fields of grain and even the air they breathe?

Their heavens are empty, their beliefs dried up, their pride in tears, their civilization in ruins. However, they persist, with a customary inertia, in falling to their knees faithlessly and glorifying unhappiness, gnawed at by their desires under the pressure of work and of economizing on themselves for the sake of a deserted future.

In the days when they threw themselves into the conquest of the earth, something conquered them, and left their vital energies and spaces corrupted in a universal corruption.

They have exhausted the name and concept of God, Nature, Fate — which symbolized for such a long time the only object of their salutes and of their perdition. I have already said that the only thing they had left, to justify a destiny so contrary to their hopes, was to invoke “economic necessity” ultima ratio. And so the circle of a spoiled civilization closes around their starting point and their finishing line, into which the economy has simultaneously embedded their birth and death.

Like the infant aborted in the adult, the promise of a human evolution sinks and suffocates in a mercantile history wherein men produce, in the form of power and profit, a wealth that dehumanizes them.

The helplessness of taking only the last pennies of prestige and marketability from others and from themselves leaves them with their infancy and their history weighing down their outstretched arms. The question is whether they will end up undoing themselves along with the history that undoes them, or instead if they will invent themselves a new childhood and remake themselves.

The Origins of Commodity Civilization

They have pillaged the riches that nature offered them freely, impoverishing the earth for the profit of the heavens.

Up till now no one seems to have been disturbed about the deliberate imposture there was in identifying as the only possible form of human civilization a civilization founded on agriculture and commerce. However, the diversity of their myths doesn’t manage to make a mystery out of the fundamental dissonance, the piercing sound of which disrupts their symphony of praises. Are they the only ones around who’re talking about a new age in the world, which they themselves illustrate the decline of? Do they not evoke, at the origin of their era, a fall, a degeneration, the misadventures of a couple chased out of the paradise of enjoyments and condemned to give birth in pain to a race devoted to the damnation of work?

Having invented a civilization where living well wasn’t really possible, they had no scruples about postulating that there was no other kind of human life possible, except in the uncertain memory of legends. When they made their discovery of savage people — that is, people without firearms and banking institutions — they were confronted with their own past, and with the curiosity of exploring it, and they immediately imagined the “savages” to be “pre-adamites” with the features of animals howling, wolfing down food in cavernous hovels, and only distinguished from beasts by the fact that they killed with spears.

At what moment did they sense that paleolithic civilizations ordered themselves according to modes of social organization that were radically different from those of commodity-societies? Not until the end of the 20^th century, at the same time that they finally discovered the specificity of childhood, the freeness of natural energies, and sustainable energy sources.

The Neolithic Revolution

What has been called the “Neolithic revolution” marks the passage of nomadic hunter-gatherers to a sedentary farming existence. After a mode of subsistence in symbiosis with nature came a system of social relations determined by the appropriation of a territory, the cultivation of the earth and the exchange of products or commodities.

Some new studies have been made which correct the simian representation, which, until a short while ago, justified men in the face of history. When the spotlights dim, what’s behind the scenes is clarified. The civilization of economy had to drink down the last backwash of bankruptcy and powerlessness in order to revise the opinion that held that the errant communities of the Paleolithic were the rough draft wherein, in a sort of childlike way, the era of agriculture, commerce and industry were sketched out. A Neolithic modernity, in a way.

The Predominance of Woman

It isn’t such an extreme presumption to conjecture that between 35000 and 15000 BCE there existed civilizations in which human beings, in the search for a human destiny, tried to emancipate themselves from the animal kingdom, from the force-relations that predominated there and spread fear in the wake of predation.

The examination of certain sites gives us a hint that men and women once lived together not in a hierarchical relation but in distinct and complementary groups. Men devoted themselves to hunting, fishing, etc., and women gathered edible plants. What exempted women from killing game was not, as patriarchy would have us believe, some constitutional weakness of their sex, but rather it was probably an analogical incompatibility: women’s menstrual blood was part of a cycle of fecundity; it stops flowing to prepare life — whereas the blood of beasts or of a wounded hunter flows as a harbinger of death.

“Everything is womanly in what one loves.” There is no epoch wherein femininity has gotten back the privileges of love — not as woman-object, made male or made to reproduce — that did not coincide with a certain favor being accorded in the same epoch to the human, by a civilization that hardly lavishes any love at all.

At the source of the general discrediting of women and of these resurgences wherein her power is revealed, is there not the original clash of two universes, the one full of the signs of feminine omnipresence, and the other propagating, from its farming roots to its industrial and bureaucratic excrescence, the aggressive phallic-worship of its monoliths, its dungeons, its cathedrals and its fortified towers of concrete?

Original Symbiosis

A certain history begins in the Neolithic. It’s the history of the commodity, of men who deny their humanity by producing. It’s the history of separation between individuals and society, between individuals and themselves.

Above and beyond it are regions into which only hypotheses reach, but from whence reign, at the very least, the obvious fact the economy is not dominant and dominating there, any more than is the particular irradiation to which it submits opinions, morals, and behaviors.

The gathering civilizations didn’t develop through the exploitation of nature, but through a symbiosis with it, just like the infant in the belly of its mother. They do not clash like antagonistic classes; rather, evolution remained essentially natural in them, and did not depart from a unity wherein the fundamental constituents of life were conserved and transformed in a perpetual becoming: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and the human.

If the walled-in picture that’s painted of the Paleolithic easily evokes half-animal, half-human hybrids, doesn’t it at least express a feeling of fusion when first seen, a religious feeling — doesn’t it feel like a mere representation of what ties together the distinct and inseparable elements of living? And this in the sense that religion is the absolute inversion of.

Humanity tends to emancipate itself from the many reigns it is issued from without there being any real rupture, separation, or rejection of them in that. Its evolution proceeds by means of continuity and by leaps and bounds, postulating a transcendence towards a new and autonomous species, conscience of its diversity and of its unitary accord with the living.

The gyne-phallic figurines, embedding in an egalitarian coupling the feminine and the masculine, in a “69” position, let us reckon with a mode of symbiotic consciousness through which a whole society affirmed itself to be simultaneously superior to and faithful to its original animalism.

Is it a fantastic presumption to sense, in pre-economic civilizations, the reality of a communication establishing itself between beings, things, and natural phenomena, less according to an intellectual process than to an analogical apprehension, by a global intelligence still attached to its sensitive and sensual roots?

Nothing can be discovered in the past besides meanings driven by the present, which have come to maturity at the heart of an individual history. I do not attribute to coincidence the fact that, at the end of a civilization that denigrated and overwhelmed them with prohibitions, new alliances between men, women, the animal, the vegetative, the cellular, and the crystalline have manifested themselves.

That it is possible to efficiently address oneself to infants in their mothers’ bellies, to babies a few days old, to wild animals, or to plants, is part of an experiential reality which brings to light the persistence, in a residual state, of a natural communication which the “primitives” practiced, and which hid, with the rationality of scorn, the peremptory verbs, the lucrative shortcut, the military and telegraphic style of business, and economized language.

Natural Man and Economic Man

Everything leads us to think that a being that lives according to nature and knows no borders aside from the limits of its whim behaves in no way like a laborer, transformed into a producer of material and spiritual riches, condemned to remain within the fences around a field, a village, a town, a State.

Gleaners of plants and game, making free use of natural resources, not for a calculated profit but for their enjoyment alone, doubtless had, in their morals, their mentality, and their psychosomatic texture, only very few traits in common with the peasant farmer, held to the exploitation of an earth which is as hostile towards him as are those who take profit and title to property from his labor. It is however from this peasant producer, exploiter and exploited, that they have extracted the essence of humanity; and they have done so to such an extent that even in their paroxysms of imaginative freedom, in their utopias, their poetic works, their fiction, chimerical sciences, etc., they have never — with the exceptions of La Boetie, Hölderlin, and Fourier — conceived of a society that wouldn’t be chained to war, money, and power.

Natural Freeness

The hunter-gatherers are the children of the earth. They travel its expanses, gathering everywhere what it offers them. These are not the conquerors that loot and pillage the earth, and then succumb in the deserts that their rapacity propagates. No master, no priest, no warrior props himself up among them to appropriate for himself the goods they’ve collected.

From terrestrial manna flows forth an immediate satisfaction — food, clothing, construction materials, techniques — a satisfaction that comes neither through money nor exchange nor the tyranny of a boss; it is a satisfaction the consistent presence of which determines analogically a form of community relationship, a way of being, a language simultaneously rational and emotional, a body of signs and symbols, engraved and sculpted, which alone could qualify as religious the maniacal, abusive attribution to the gods of what belongs to people.

Religion is Born at the Same Time As the City State

Just like they’ve only been able, for a long time, to see in children an early sketch of adults, they’ve labeled a whole era of human evolution — some forty to fifty thousand years — the “Paleolithic”, or period of the old stone, and have qualified it as a mere step on a road towards the modern era of the “new stone”, the “Neolithic.” And they speak of Paleolithic religion as if a belief in celestial phantoms were inherent in human nature, progressing in order to elevate themselves one day to perfection in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Buddhism.

This was a crude confusion of nomads living in liberty with slaves living on a plot of land, seeking out, in the spiritual tyranny of the heavens, a consolation for the material tyranny of their peers. And was it not a result of agriculture and commerce, installed by the “neolithic revolution”, that the vermin kings and priests appeared? Wasn’t it around that time that the earth, stripped of its carnal substance, was sublimated into a mother-goddess who Uranus, celestial lord, male and fecund, raped and impregnated by the work of men?

There was, properly speaking, no religion before the Neolithic revolution, but there was, in the original sense of the term, a unitary relationship between all the various manifestations of life, an analogical, omnipresent comprehension, an identity of the microcosmic and the macrocosmic, of what is above and what is below, of what is interior and what is exterior.

The separation from the self and the others had not yet destroyed thought and the living in a sickly duality. The infant has no other heaven besides its mother’s belly, the natural being knows no other reality besides nature. The horns on Lascaux’s ox depict the different phases of the moon. They signify that the earth carries out the movement of the heavens with the same solicitude that it harbors the rhythm of the seasons with.

Why refuse to admit that the errant populations of the Paleolithic had a consciousness of a living and fecund earth wherein, from birth to death, the adventure of individual destiny, renewed each day, carves out its path? Do the inheritors of the Neolithic, beyond a history which was less their history than it was the history of their alienation, do they not today discover the permanent desire to live here, now, and forever, at the breast of a nature at last once again inseparably human and earthly?

The Eden of the Heart

Have I made use of colors too idyllic to be true to paint the ages which condemned to the darkness the torches of industrial society? It wasn’t me that celebrated them with these names, “Eden,” the “golden age”, the “fertile crescent”, described as places where abundance, freeness, and harmony reigned among animals and humans. The men of economy are the ones who are responsible for such paradisiacal visions, those who take such pride, with rogue voices, in their work, their religion, their family, their State, their money, and their technical progress.

The Animalness to Be Transcended

Commodity civilization does not guarantee the transcendence of animalness in the human, it just collectivizes it by repressing it and fixing a price on its catharsis.

There is every reason to think that at the heart of the wandering paleolithic populations there was a perpetuation, to a good extent, of the behaviors of herds and flocks of the various animal species. Aurignac, Madelaine, Pech Merle cave — these were not earthly paradises, but fields of evolution, sometimes regressive, sometimes progressive, on the path of human development. Certain communities still obeyed the atavistic brutality of the predator, and others discovered new forms of association, founded on the refinement of primary needs.

Inertia plays in favor of animalness. Let us recognize that this quest for subsistence through gathering, hunting and fishing came more from the adaptive faculty of animals than from some aptitude for modifying the environment. Nomadism puts its own limits on its freedom — the seasonal displacement of the herds ruled the ballet of wanderings, obliging the hunters to follow the itinerary of the migrations in order to provide themselves with game; the mobility of the encampments was determined in turn as well by the germination periods, the variety of soils wherein edible plants grew, and the maturation of fruits.

Add to that the climactic caprices, the periods of inclement weather, lightning storms, sudden floods, sicknesses, accidents, death, and so many other unfortunate things cruelly inscribed into a destiny that seems more resigned to suffer nature’s inconveniences and tragedies than resolved to engineer its mastery, attenuating its effects or turning the inconveniences into advantages.

Ah, but the abettors of the economy, the hoarding fanatics, the programmers of future comfort, were they any more safe and protected from famine, from rigorous winters, from floods, from epidemics, from the cataclysms, from misery passed down from century to century? They sure look stupid, deploring the lamentable fate of the “cave-men”. Fall to your knees and pray, then, o good people, to the lightning rods, to refrigerators, to air conditioned hotel rooms, and don’t forget to include in your praises the wars, the genocides, the revolutions and the repressions, all so necessary to keep us sheltered from the storm, from the blazing heat!

If we assign a birthday to commodity civilization, and say it was about 7000 years before the exhibitionist of Golgotha, before the fortified village of Jericho, then it’s been around for about 9000 years, and in the last two centuries it’s gone through a frenetic snowballing of economic progress. The period preceding it covers a period five times longer, and it would be surprising if the human community had always lived in the ignorance which the spirit of civilization has veiled it with for so long, and hadn’t gone down many varied paths of evolution, many confluences of experience.

Perhaps here and there a transcending of adaptive behaviors was undertaken: the creation of natural conditions proper for the encouragement of the self-enjoyment without which there is no real human progress. Alongside hordes of hunter-gatherers, dominated by animal worries about survival, were born embryonic manifestations of a society wherein solidarity was not at all a result of a conjunction of private interests but rather was the result of a harmony of passions circling around a passionate love for life.

The heart still carries a memory of those high plateaus where the best of human sentiments once had summer grazing land, before commodity civilization excluded them from the maps, marking them “terra incognita”. And is it not the remnants of that memory that participates the most in that secret exaltation which, in spite of the mercantile law of exchange and sacrifice, lends such a sovereign power to love, kindness, hospitality, generosity, affection, the spontaneous surging forth of gift, to the inexhaustible force of freeness?

Primitive Creativity

Assuredly, the art of adapting oneself to the conditions dictated by nature postulates a kind of resignation, and at least a certain passivity. It’s only in appearances though. How can one deny that in the ingenuity of fishing, hunting, gathering, of painted and engraved messages, there exists a will to solicit natural abundance by way of the faculty of creation? Analogically speaking, the young child extracts good deal of learning in that way, from the surroundings its adventure leads it through, following a thread of sensations which is sometimes favorable and sometimes unfavorable, and pushing itself to gain more knowledge therefrom.

The idea that you can have all kinds of cereals, fish, and meat, totally prepared and ready to eat, just falling into your mouth, is a sarcastic and contemplative vision of satiety, a caricature which is made use of to justify the brutal rape and exploitation of nature by work. What’s really at stake is no more than the genius of creating abundance, multiplying natural resources, perfecting usage, and increasing pleasure.

The ecological currents, born in the last few years of the 19^th century, committed the error of dissociating, in the purest economist tradition, the market-valorizing of the sustainable energies of the earth — water, soil, the fires of the sun, the wind, the tides, the lunar mirror effect, compost — and the exigencies of an individual alchemy wherein destiny operates by transmuting patiently the materia prima of the human, by carving from the crudeness of animal impulse the crystal of refined desires. Such an inopportune incoherence condemns it to being nothing but another ideology among the rest, doomed to the same fading of belief.

The signs pointed, however, to the fact that to oppose the natural energies to the energies of death, which are spreading over the earth the shroud of chemical and nuclear pollution, made no sense outside of a vaster project which would be attached to the reconciliation of human nature and earthly nature, in order to create a whole world only to enjoy it orgastically.

The simultaneous emergence of ecological contestation and of the women’s and children’s liberation movement, which marked the end of a millenarian domination, was deserving of more attention.

Woman and Civilization

Woman is at the center of the world we must create. A civilization’s value isn’t measured by the brilliance of its art, of its riches, of its morality, nor of its technology, but by the consideration it accords to woman. In every place where humanitarian concerns have won out over the rigor of laws, woman has occupied a preponderant position. Is she scorned, humiliated, enslaved? The degree to which she is humbled is the degree of ignobility of the society that treats her like an object.

Would anyone be surprised to discover that women were omnipresent in the civilizations of the late Paleolithic? The women chose the edible plants, saved favorable seeds, and took care of the earth so it would provide food, drink, clothing, construction materials, writing tools. Like the child woman carries within her, her creative nature offers up to humanity the goods that earthly nature dispensed confusedly in a chaotic blend of the beneficial and the toxic, by selecting and improving those goods.

The majority of the graphic representations show her as both nourishing mother and as sexual being with the enticing pubic triangle. She is the athanor in which the materia prima of desires bubbles up, opening the possibility of successive transformations. In her, the Great Work takes place — which the work of the males for so long has forbidden.

Her human and fecund nature caused to avoid hunting, a bestial activity wherein the spear — and later, the gun — extended and perfected the predator’s claw and jaw. The total opposite of the brute still chained to the cycles of death, she inaugurates a cycle of life that she herself creates. Such is the reality which will invert patriarchal civilization, with its lie carried to perfection by Christianity: that the ideal woman is a virgin, abused and knocked up by a God to give birth to a man who would teach men the virtue of dying unto themselves.

Woman incarnates the natural freeness of the living. She is the abundance that offers itself. In the same way as her enjoyment is at the same time given and solicited in the game of caresses, she delivers herself over to love, which takes her to even more perfect enjoyments.

In her, and in the passional relation that she renews, a new style affirms itself that supplants little by little the tradition of rape, of the conquest of the earth and of the self. A universal womb is formed in her image, to feed, by means of the resources of a nature at last humanized, a humanity that lays in wait only for the pleasure of being born and reborn endlessly.