A Better Human Story: #11-- Humankind as Tragic Hero

In a sense, the tragedy that unfolds for the civilization-making creature amounts to a re-telling of the story told in the Bible's book of Genesis.

To a degree, that first stage -- the crafting of our nature, by the evolutionary process, for life -- creates a kind of Eden.

Not that what biological evolution creates is paradise, of course. All living things have always had to contend with the first two sources of brokenness described in the previous chapter: the persistence of untamed forces from the non-living world (asteroids, etc.); and the conflicts of interest (predation, parasitism, etc.) that the purely opportunistic processes of biological evolution inevitably build into life's systems.

The resultant system is hardly perfect from the vantage point of any one part of the system that inevitably develops to contain manifold conflicts among the many components of the whole system. But even if life's condition has always been imperfect in such ways, the correlation between what serves LIFE and what must necessarily be the nature and the basis of THE GOOD is fundamental.

We have a kind of Eden -- not perfection, but a kind of wholeness -- because LIFE, as we saw in the previous installment, depends on structures characterized by WHOLENESS. And thus, being crafted for life, we humans are inclined by nature to find fulfillment in the experience of wholeness: in all its forms, such as love, peace, justice, beauty, honesty, integrity, etc.

In the niche in which we evolved biologically, where our fulfillment tended to derive from those things that, during the countless generations of our ancestral origins, tended to confer and preserve our kind of life-- that correspondence between the requirements of survival and the natural inclinations of the creature in itself represented a kind of Wholeness.

That is our Eden: a system, created by biological evolution, in which every creature is probabilistically rewarded for living according to its inborn nature.

But then comes the Fall. It is a fall precipitated by the departure from the wholeness of that biologically evolved order.

And, as in Genesis, the issue of "good and evil" has a central place in the tragedy of the Fall.

In place of the disobedience to God's command, this Fall derives from the creature's leaving the way of life for which the requirements are inscribed in its nature and moving into a new situation inevitably beset by disorder, including the disorder of the creature being caught between conflicting sets of demands.

And so that "knowledge of good and evil" -- which was the fruit of the tree that God commanded Adam and Eve that "thou shalt not eat" -- comes to humankind as the inevitable fruit of the disorder our too-smart-for-our-own-good species inadvertently unleashed.

In other words, instead of the Fall being the result of our involvement with "the knowledge of good and evil," this Fall became the cause of our being compelled most painfully to gain such knowledge.

Except that humankind has traumatically experienced "good and evil" far more than it has clearly understood it.

The 4^thand5^th installments in this series demonstrated two things:

• That a creature starting to invent its own way of life (civilization) represented a fundamental discontinuity in the history of life on earth;
• That there inevitably arose from that breakthrough a new social evolutionary force -- the selection for the ever-escalating ways of power --that drove the shape of the new form of society in directions that the creature did not choose but could not prevent.

The inescapable logic that mandates this "reign of the ways of power" is laid out in the brief piece, "Step-By-Step Proof: A Creature's Escape from Its Biologically-Evolved Niche Subjects It to the Reign of Power." But here are the key points:

• Whereas it is the nature of biological evolution that it creates communities of organisms whose interactions are regulated to maintain the synergy and viability of the system as a whole, the newly emergent life-form -- the civilized society -- inevitably emerges totally unregulated. That is to say, the interactions among civilized societies are regulated neither by the biologically evolved order, from which such societies have escaped, nor by any human-created order, which cannot be instituted so long as the overarching system of civilized societies remains fragmented (as it inevitably will be for many millennia).
• The inevitable result of this new form of anarchyis a new form of disorder, i.e. an unceasing struggle for power among the actors/societies or, as Hobbes described anarchy, a "war of all against all."

In this anarchic system, any one actor can impose upon all the actors the necessity for the kind of power required to survive in that kind of unending competition. The fragmented nature of the system makes it inescapable that the only outcomes possible for a threatened society (destruction, conquest, retreat, or emulation) all spread the ways of power further through the inter-societal system.

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