“I don’t feel safe in this world no more

I don’t want to die in a nuclear war

I want to sail away to a distant shore

And make like an Apeman” -Apeman, The Kinks

The garden of Eden

While I don’t have evidence for it, I think the durability of religious faiths is intrinsically linked to the allegorical strength of their founding myths. One of the most beautiful of these is the Judeo-Christian tale of Adam and Eve.

Rather than try to recount it myself, let’s leave it to Wikipedia:

The first man and woman are in God’s garden of Eden, where all creation is vegetarian and there is no violence. They are permitted to eat of all the trees save one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the woman is tempted by a talking serpent to eat the forbidden fruit, and gives some to the man, who eats also. God curses all three, the man to a lifetime of hard labour followed by death, the woman to the pain of childbirth and to subordination to her husband, and the serpent to go on his belly and suffer the enmity of both man and woman. God then clothes the nakedness of the man and woman, who have become god-like in knowing good and evil, then banishes them from the garden lest they eat the fruit of a second tree, the tree of life, unmentioned up to this point, and live forever.

Religious allegory aside, there is a profound truth hidden in this narrative, one that speaks to our ancient origins.

It goes something like this.

The garden of Eden is our pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer existence, a time when we lived in communities not much larger than maybe a few hundred people, and subsisted mostly on foraging for food and hunting game.

According to some researchers, contrary to Hobbesian myth, this existence was neither nasty, brutish nor short. Some believe, though it is still a controversial subject, that hunter-gatherer societies were more or less egalitarian. By avoiding clumping into large, unfamiliar groups, they avoided the scourge of communicable disease. They were highly social in nature. Nature provided them their basic daily regimen of calories, and people did, at most, about three to five hours a day of what we would call ‘work.’ However, this work was more than enough to maintain good cardiovascular health.

Then, at some point roughly 10,000 years ago, humanity talks to the serpent, which we might read as a metaphor for their now highly developed prefrontal cortex. This serpent tempts Eve and Adam to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which gives them the ability to weigh positive and negative, ie to plan.

No longer hewed to the demands of their natural environment, humanity has the foresight to improve their lot through their own strength of will. They can improve on nature itself, and the first order of business involved bringing their food source into their own backyard.

Soon after the advent of farming, the leaders of this society decide it may be a good idea to take some of the proceeds of these agricultural yields, and use it to exchange for more involved forms of labour such as building roads, palaces, and irrigation canals.

Soon, these demands radically transform the quality of life of those living in the community, and not always, as it turns out, for the better.

Agricultural life extends the work day indefinitely (“in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground”).

Inequality rises as this newfound wealth moves quickly up the hierarchical chain.

Women are increasingly subjugated, slavery is normalized, and the pain and confusion of suddenly ballooning populations well above what human beings are used to gives rise to religious moralism and the concept of shame.

Moreover, as these cities grew in size, disease spread more easily, the pressure on natural resources increased, and in some cases, environmental degradation and collapse eventually followed.

Today, human beings suddenly find themselves humped together in crowded masses but emotionally isolated, members of a incretechnologically-advanced yet psychologically-scarred society, forever banished from the garden where they were born and where they spent most of their existence.

Humanity’s ‘worst-ever mistake’

If all this sounds overwrought, consider an avalanche of social and biological science which traces most of our modern ailments, from the fatal to the mundane, to the decision to abandon our hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Our natural sleep patterns, vital for our health and well-being, have been in some cases permanently disrupted by a crushing work schedule and artificial light.

The rise of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease can be traced to our ability to mass produce carbohydrate-rich foods that are, in natural environments, entirely scarce or non-existent.

Deadly communicable diseases spread more easily in densely-packed urban communities.

The over-extraction of natural resources to fuel our modern habits now threatens the earth’s finely-balanced ecosystem.

Societal conflict today happens on a mass, international scale, with weaponry capable of wiping out billions at a time, rather than between small, localized tribes.

Human beings have for centuries now relied on their impressive, future-seeing brains to plan and design an elegant square hole for what is essentially a round peg.

The idea the decision to abandon our hunter-gatherer lifestyle was a terrible misstep isn’t some crazy hippy notion either, but one supported by academics like James C. Scott, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, and Jared Diamond, the latter of whom famously called the decision to abandon hunter-gatherer societies the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

Of course, we couldn’t have known any better. Evolution had crafted minds that were capable of future planning, but without the ability to foresee or even contemplate the notion of unintended consequences.

As many psychologists love to point out, we’re much better at noticing present benefits (“abundant food in our own backyard!”) than hidden disadvantages (pandemics, obesity, violent civilizational conflict, massive urban communities, wealth inequality etc). Lest you think we’ve broken this habit, look at the actions in the past decade of any tech company, particularly those who profess as their motto, “don’t be evil.”

All that said, the mistake has been made, and here are. Nostalgia for a bygone age isn’t going to save us here in 2017.

So what will?

The Tree of Life

Perhaps, knowing what we know now, we should work harder to incorporate our prehistoric behavioural and physiological inheritance into the way we design our communities, our economies, and our personal lives.

This idea isn’t exactly original. A lot of self-help literature now focuses on the latter in particular, with paleo diets, sleep hygiene regimens and special reports on ‘blue zones’ where people live in ‘goldilocks’ communities that are neither too big or too small.

When it comes to broader, societal habits, there are others who espouse something similar to Richard Thaler’s ‘nudge’ ethos, that we should focus on allowing people to make decisions freely within the soft confines of strictures meant to move us toward more optimal choices.

While these seem like okay solutions, they do not address the core driver of hunter-gatherer societies: necessity. The fact is, any attempt to ‘recreate’ the conditions of a hunter-gatherer society would be artificial, and therefore largely ineffective. The urge to eat burgers and get rich or die tryin’ may lie too deep.

Moreover, the cat is already out of the bag — iphones, cars, fast food, longhaul flights and the nation state are here to stay. Outside of dropping out of society to start up a hippie commune, or the forced option of the aftermath of global thermonuclear war, we’re stuck in the square peg for good.

A second option might be to simply hope that our bodies gradually evolve to catch up with the demands of the world we’ve designed for ourselves. However, the prefrontal cortex moves light years faster than the speed of evolution. It will probably take millions of years of office living before our ancient minds and bodies catch up with us.

Finally, we might be saved by the very thing that cursed us: technology. We might invent nighttime lights that don’t negatively affect sleep, or a pill that prevents us from gaining weight. We may also discover a technological solution for online networking that more closely resembles the IRL kind, or to prevent the environmental calamity set to befall us over the next century.

However, even if these fantastical developments all come to pass, they essentially recreate the problem of the farm: they will almost certainly give rise to side effects that negate the benefit of the cure.

So where does that leave us? It might behoove us to return now to the story of the garden of Eden, which sadly doesn’t end on a happy note:

And Jehovah God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever. Therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

In other words God, not wanting us to become too godlike after our sudden understanding of good and evil, kicked humanity out of the garden lest they eat from the ‘tree of life’ and live forever.

In other words, there is probably no going back to Eden. Whether it comes at the hand of a ruined global ecosystem or the tip of a nuclear warhead, our destiny, whether individually or as a whole mass of people, may be death.

Happy Halloween!