The tale of the human experience is of course brilliantly and extensively covered elsewhere. All such tales are subjective, regardless of how objective the author wishes to be. The tale will always be circumscribed by certain ideas of what constitutes the ‘real’ world. The author then naturally takes these understandings, and uses them to weave a structured tale out of the myriad of facts, events, people and ideas that constitute the human experience entire.
The problem with this is that each tale is shaped by the individual’s own mind-set, with all its prejudices, its experiences and its cultural cliques. At its heart this is truly a great thing. It shows sophisticated minds weaving tales of massive proportions that will add to the grand tapestry of human culture overall.
Problems arrive, however, if you wish to truly understand the human experience in the context of the universe, and particularly in the context of the earth as it has evolved over the last 4.6 billion years.
The only analogy I can make is that it is like sitting with a group of people as they each tell their own version of the same story. All of them of course will be objective. They will highlight certain events that stood out to them on a personal level. They will interpret similar events in a different way. This is where most of the histories of the human experience fall short.
It is in defining this tale as world history that most of them do so, first and foremost.
It is not.
It is the tale of the evolution of a particular species, its ideals, its practices, its stories and its experiences over a very short space of time when you consider actual world history. Crucially, it is in its definition of what constitutes the human, human nature and the human community that most of these tales fall short.
Why is this important?
Because it is impossible to truly understand the tree if you do not understand its roots.
Less philosophically, it is impossible to understand the tree if you do not understand plant life, and it is impossible to understand plant life if you do not understand the basis of life itself. You can weave the tale of what you witness on the surface, but you will never get to the heart of what drives it.
Similarly, if you do not get to the heart of what drives us as human beings, and I am talking here about human nature, then you will never be able to paint a comprehensive picture of the human experience entire. You can witness from above, record and comment, but you will never get to the heart of the tale.
For example, ‘world history’ usually begins with the story of the ape that walked upright out of the jungle and onto the plains of Africa like Superman emerging from his celestial pod. He gathered and he hunted for quite some time, he became far more interesting when he learned to plant crops, keep animals and do some pottery, and around 5,000 BC, BOOM, civilisation began, the human as we understand him today had arrived.
Thankfully world historians have become far more inclusive in dealing with the human experience after this. But I can’t help thinking that this narrow view of what constitutes ‘humanity’ is slightly flawed.
Is civilisation the key to being human?
Does what came before ‘homo-sapien’ not make us just as human (if not more so) than what came after?
Are we just using our contemporary understandings of how the world works as a way of piecing together not just the human experience, but our understanding of ourselves as well?
Much of this can be fobbed off as academic and semantic.
The reason I am pushing on with this in the public sphere is that I am worried we are missing out on something. We don’t truly understand ourselves and our place among the earth’s grand systems. We’re ignoring the innate optimism that should come with our unique talents and abilities.
I am also extremely aware of how this view of ourselves and the world around us (one that begins with Homo sapiens, agriculture and civilisation and then marches through thousands of years of wars and conquests, inventions and ingenuity, culture and achievement, progress and modernity) is affecting our society today and how it may do on into the future.
I look at the human and I see nature.
I see a natural being that evolved in a very unique way, one that allowed it to build its own uniquely human ways of life. World history is the tale of the earth entire. The Human Experience is the tale of one unique and fascinating species within that broader framework. Everything that makes us truly human was built up, layer upon layer, over an unimaginable expanse of time, long before our own age began.
There fore to understand the human experience, you must first formulate an understanding of the human as a natural being, borne from the earth, and then use that to follow the tale through time to today.
How do you do this and remain as completely objective as possible?
To say that you can be completely objective is of course ridiculous. But you can attempt to be a passive witness to the tale as it unfolds.
You start at the beginning of what you can know, based on the evidence that is in front of you.
You do not presume to know what is coming next.
Tempting as it is, you do not pick a point in the future and attempt to carve a path through the sands of time to its doorstep. You are moving forward through time recording the reality around you as you go, rather than planting yourself on the timeline, looking back for answers.
You concentrate on the elements that make up our universe and the evolution of systems over time to today – chemical, physical, planetary, atmospheric and living.
You ponder in detail the driving forces behind all living organisms.
You use this to follow the path of evolution, recording the various value systems and ways of life that emerge.
You pause at the dawn of the human species and again you ponder the natural community, the culture, the value system and the way of life that this unique species is emerging from.
You attempt to define what it is that drives the human, what abilities it possesses and what natural purpose it is attempting to fulfil, based on all of the above.
At this point, you may feel you have to decide what tools, what understandings, what boundaries and what definitions you will be using to take you through the tale of the human experience. But at least it will be from a standpoint of someone who has attempted to really get to the heart of what it is to be human, what drives us, and so on.
You then ‘walk’ with the humans, out of Africa, into Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australasia, recording events and the individual ways of life as you go.
Rather than saying ‘these are the tools that must be used’, I am asking people to approach the subject with this mindset.
What follows are my suggestions as to how to deal with the actual history of the world, based on this overall mentality.
We need to rethink our place among the living systems of the earth, and this obliges us to rethink our past, present and future in that light.
Do not for a second believe that we are somehow separated from nature because we drive cars and work in factories. We live very natural lives, though we may not live ‘among nature’ in the classic sense of the word.
Do not attempt to decide on a particular idea of what human progress entails and then use this to structure a version of the Human Experience entire, tarring every way of life, every culture and every individual with the same brush.
As with everything else in this universe, the tale of the Human Experience, and the ideals, values, cultures and ways of life that make up its vast tapestry, are evolutionary, and if we are to get an overall perspective on it, then we must record and understand them as such.
I like to compare this process to a digital rendering of an animated character. You can visualise the body on the outside, but to recreate that, as any good computer animator knows, you must build it from the inside out. So you begin with the DNA (stick with me on this one as they are, after all, the true building blocks of the body) moving onto the skeleton, the organs and veins, the muscles and then the skin. You can then move on to the creation of the character.
Similarily with the earth and the Human experience. You must build up the physical, checmical and biological layers in order to understand the culture of humanity. This is the stuff that is within us, and therefore we must understand it and its evolution over the last 14 odd billion years to truly know ourselves and therefore prosper as human beings.
You begin with the DNA, and for that, you must go back to the beginning.
