A recent e-mail reminded me of the allegory of Adam and Eve, the garden of Eden, and the fall of man. Adam and Eve, in this allegory, are cast out of the Garden of Eden because they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And they do this because they are persuaded by the devil himself who takes the form of a serpent to make the argument.
Ever since I can remember - and I can remember much of my life at six and some at two and three - I have been amused that people take the Adam and Eve story literally. It is clearly allegorical. We know this from the talking animals. In allegories animals talk. If the serpent were not meant symbolically, it would be cast as a person. The tree, too, is a symbol of something, its fruit is a symbol of something. Proper interpretation of the allegory requires proper interpretation of the symbols.
There are plenty of biblical and theological interpretations of this allegory. And I am afraid that the one or two to which I have been exposed have fallen far short of impressing me as being in the same league as the allegory itself. All of them possess a "Cinderella's sister" sense. Cinderella's sisters had feet that were simply too big to fit into the crystal slipper, despite the strongest of motivations and the most punishing of efforts. Most interpretations simply don't deal with the issues that frame the allegory. Nor do they deal with all of its parts. They simply don't fit.
I wish to offer a different interpretation, one that is integrally tied to the two conditions of man that the allegory connects and contrasts in the experience of Adam and Eve. In order to understand the interpretation, one must understand in a fairly profound way the differences between pre-agricultural society and post agricultural society. One must understand not just the material outward manifestations of the differences, but also the differences in societal structure, the differences in culture, the differences in human experience.
In the former case, man exists in an unencumbered state, gathering food as he needs it, spending his days in leisure, communing with his maker. It is rarely an existence of great, magnificent bounty. It is frequently an existence characterized by some amount of want. But it is also rarely an existence characterized by profound want. We intend to argue that such a state hews very closely to the definition of the Garden of Eden. Jared Diamond comes close to suggesting the same in his descriptions of the lives of the indigenous people of the Chatham Island in Guns, Germs, Steel. On this small, remote South Pacific island people existed in an egalitarian society, plucking fish and shellfish from the seas when they are hungry, and dealing with each other as equals. There were no soldiers. There was no government. There was no powerful authority. There were no priests or religious rituals. There was no agriculture. There were no sacrifices involving blood.
In the latter case, by contrast, man exists by virtue of the cultivation of grain in fields. He must plow furrows, plant grain, cultivate it to suppress weeds, fertilize it with the blood of animals or humans, wait for the harvest, harvest the grain, thresh it, mill it, and cook it into bread. All of this requires toil. The reason it exists as a human way of life is because such toil produces huge amounts of food, allowing huge populations. Civilizations with such populations tend to overwhelm those that exist outside the bounds of agricultural society. There is, then, a kind of evolutionary inevitability to agricultural societies. Once the process is started, man is sentenced evermore to "live by the sweat of his brow."
It is a life of toil and of uncertainty. And as man reproduces and presses the earth's natural resources ever harder for sustenance, his toils must similarly either grow ever more productive either through greater diligence or through greater use of knowledge. Or he engages in great slaughters of military conquest. Or he dies of hunger and pestilence. Regardless, the choice to live in an agricultural world sentences one to work longer hours behind the plow or before a book.
In lands where population densities are high and have been for hundreds of generations one frequently finds a kind of frenetic activity that is less evident in lands that have recently been frontiers, or lands where populations have historically been checked by severe diseases and other similar natural phenomena. In southeast asia, I am told, humans work long hours at a frenetic pace that westerners simply cannot imagine.
The story of the fall of man, then, is an allegory describing how man's life changes as societies change from being tiny, local, low-density hunter-gatherer societies where people live in villages, knowing and being known, to being large scale societies where people live in cities and exist without reputation, toiling away in specialized jobs that have little obvious connection to the needs of society. This transition has a meaningful existence in place and time. It coincides very roughly with the first wriitings in the Old Testament.
Geography and history frame it. In a Western context, the transition might have occurred first in the lower Nile region of Egypt six or eight millennia ago. The Sphynx has been dated to that time, and it is clearly the product of an agrarian society organized on a rather large scale.
The same transition to farming communities occurred next in Mesopotamia, in the fertile crescent. Later in Persia. It occurred next in Greece. Then in Italy two and a half millennia ago. In Spain. In France. Then in England. These same agricultural methods, adapted through millenia of practice, reached North America two to four hundred years ago. And North America has been civilization's frontier now as Greece was in Aristotle's day. In the West frontiers arose and declined. New lands gave rise to a glorious flowering of civilization, expressed with some freshness in each case. And in each case, just as the civilization flowered and fruited, it declined.
The causes were many. In some cases the decline was a result of environmental degredation brought on by destructive agricultural practices. In almost all cases, as populations soared above the levels that provided vast agricultural excesses social pressures mounted as did preasures on public health. Great dislocations such as the black plague or the French revolution resulted. And as climates warmed and made soils of these regions drier and less inherently fertile, the areas at the trailing edge of the frontier have had to deal to some extent, with shortage, dwindling resources, perpetual want. Plato was already complaining about the decline of fertility of Greek land, roughly two and half millennia ago.
Whatever are the merits of the western frontier civilization phenomenon, its weakness seems to include taking for granted the very gifts of nature that make the whole thing possible in the first place.
In the history of the West, arrival of agricultural methods to fertile and underpopulated frontiers necessarily created a temporary flowering of civilization. What distinguishes European civilization from civilizations that have flowered and collapsed completely, is that European civilization has been fueled by an ever-expanding resource frontier. It is fueled by the discovery of the Americas and the development of colonies in Africa and Asia as sources of natural resources that proved hundreds of times as broad and deep as Europe herself offered.
An observation by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations is useful here. He points out that most of the lands of Europe were once forested. And that while forests provide rich sources of shelter and fuel, they are poor sources of food. Grasslands, by comparison, are poor sources of shelter and fuel, but rich sources of food. Thus, if one wishes to find highly dense human populations, one finds lands that support the agricultural practice of farming grain. But if the standard of living is to be high, with warm and well decorated housing, woodland must figure into the equation.
It is, in fact, a generally accepted fundamental condition for all of what we call civilization, that man cultivates grain. A person on a frontier is capable of growing enough grain for twenty or more people. This makes it easy to support other kinds of activities - those of artisans, relgious and political leaders, and soldiers. It is standard fare for academics who study anthropology. Jared Diamond makes this point anew in his Guns, Germs, Steel.
There are two ways in which lands are transformed from forests to grasslands. In Europe it was by the activity of man. Man cut down the trees and used the clear-cut land as farm land. Access to iron tools in the late middle ages sped this process. Clearing of forests was also part of the agricultural development of North America. And it is now part of the development of equatorial South America, equatorial Africa, and Indonesia. It may have been the same in the middle east four or six millennia ago. The cedars of Lebanon that built Solomon's temple are now principally found on large European estates at the other end of the Mediterranean where the summers tend to be cooler and more generous with precipitation.
In other cases, trees may have given way to grassland with natural changes in climate that have been going on for the last twelve millennia. The earth has been getting warmer since the last ice age. Twelve or fifteen millennia back, northern Europe would have been glaciated, southern Europe would have been cold. And there is reason to believe that parts of the Sahara may have been vast grasslands. So if one imagines the globe to be divided into climatic bands that shift in time, the line demarcating glacier from forest moves northward. So, too, the line demarcating forest from grasslands, and grassland from desert. It is reasonable to assume that one or more of these lines might have crossed parts of the mideast in the last five millennia.
The description of "the promised land" describes a land rich with fruiting plants. There is a sense of lushness to the account that is suggestive a long term change of climate to warmer and drier: those same lands approach desert-like conditions today. The allegory of Adam and Eve would be set in a middle eastern setting that is no less rich and fertile than the legendary land of Canaan, flowing with milk and honey. Since it is an allegory, the setting is prototypical, not actual.
This fortunate couple would have lived in a place rich with fruiting plants and animal life. They would have lived in a place where gathering food was not a matter of toil, but of discovery and joy. They would have lived in a place sunny but well watered. They would have enjoyed open grassy spaces, fruiting and flowering shrubs, and trees bearing fruits and nuts. They would have lived by a river, probably with comfortably worn bolders and a nice waterfall. Adam and Eve are sometimes taken to be actual people, but again, this is an allegory. And allegories are fictional, mythological. Nor are they meant to represent particular people so much as cultural prototypes.
They are representatives of a culture that undergoes a fundamental change. And the fundamental change is from being hunter gatherers to being farmers and city-dwellers. They are warned "not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil." There has been a practice among religious mystics and theologians to interpret this in a particular way. But the way that it is interpreted creates the premises for a series of rather bizarre and ugly theological arguments. We might reject some of the theological arguments because of their effects alone. For instance, the argument that women bear some differential responsibility for the fall of man. It is like arguing "the devil made me do it." It is an argument justifying a cultural practice that arises naturally from the same forces that create the need for the rest of the Biblical writing - a need for law and for morally informed behavior arising from social conditions. We intend not to venture onto that ground.We admit to an unpreparedness to take on theological arguments. Only theologians are allowed to do that, and one is only allowed to be a theologian if one accepts a number of premises that derive in whole or in part from the mistaken interpretation of the allegory.If one frames the whole work of the Bible incorrectly, it is hard to recover from the mistake.
We intend to offer a very different approach. We intend to argue instead that the invocation of God in this allegory is actually a sort of flashing neon sign or a gruff teacher yelling "pay attention." And the "fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" is just that. It is a kind of functional knowledge of good and evil that can only be arrived at through first hand experience, direct acquaintance, as compared to being arrived at through study, reading essays, thinking about ethical questions.
One only understands what it is like to be the victim of a theft if one has actually lost something to that practice. On the other hand, if one lives in a society where the idea of personal property is not taken very seriously and all the acts of goodness that earn one property in a post-agrarian society are rewarded in kind, theft is a meaningless category. It cannot exist. The experience of Adam and Eve is a purposeful contrast of the pre-agrarian society with the post-agrarian one. In the first society agriculture does not exist. Personal property amounts to what one can make and carry, if it exists at all. In the second society agriculture does exist. Food, at least for some time, is plentiful. And as a result much of society becomes artisans. Artisans make goods of all sorts, some of which might be houses and buildings, others might be the decorations and furnishings for those places, others yet might be cultural arts, music, and literature.
The kinds of property that exist is great and varied. And almost every object made by man manages to have some attraction to another person. When a man tills fields, he must own the fruits his labors, else he would not do it. The practical way to organize such a world is to establish ownership of land as a permamanent thing. There are rare cultures in which the cultivation of land constitutes the defacto claim to its fruits. But when land requires time in fallows to recover fertility, this presents certain logistical problems. In western civilization and in most other civilizations with written records, land then becomes property and is passed along from generation to generation, either dividing in equal portions to children as is the case in countries in sub-saharan Africa, or staying in large estates passing to the first-born child as was the case in feudal Europe.
The rules of ownership and the orderly passage of property from one generation to the next have profound powers over the long term shape of society. We discuss some of the evolutionary forces of these rules in our work on Sociobiology. In a system with fixed geographical boundaries. the fair methods of the Rwandans reduce everyone to destitution, given enough time. The less fair methods of the feudal Europeans only reduce 95% - 98% of people to destitution. The remaining lords and ladies congregate in cities creating what was once referred to as civilized society.
Hunter-gatherers, meanwhile, may live in the same mean conditions as those of the poor in agricultural societies, but they are not strapped to the yoke like oxen. They may enjoy their destitution in leisure. It is one thing to starve for lack of food, a failure of providence to provide. It is another entirely to starve for lack of proper compensation for labor.
We have assumed here a kind of Malthusian world that arrives at uniform poverty. The world is not perpetually in such a state; but it is more so than the last five centuries of western history might suggest. Much of western history over the last four millennia denies Malthusian equilibrium as a perpetual state of man. But the reason for the whole arc of western history can be traced to an expanding frontier brought on by climate change and discovery.
Yet it is not every five hundred years that a population - in this case the Europeans - discovers a fertile frontier ten times as large as the one it currently inhabits, manages to colonize it, and to effectively extract its resources; food, fiber, and mineral wealth. This is not a complaint by any means. America has done well doing exactly this. America does provide a compelling set of reasons why Europe did not succumb to Malthusian limits, at least not for long.
But the model is not a sustainable one: There is no such frontier on our own planet. Nor is there one in our own solar system. Nor are we aware of one in another solar system. So the last five hundred years of western history are not necessarily representative of the history of man. Nor for that matter of fact are the previous three millennia. Nor are they properly representative of what we can expect of the future. All of what we read that depends on reasoning that is completely reliant on the expanding western frontier - whether that is something drawn from Greeks, Romans, French, English, or Americans, must be measured against a skepticism about sustainability in the absence of new frontiers. All of western thought is built within the context of exploiting a fertile, expanding new frontier. But the world has just about run out of these.
One of the attractive features of the garden of Eden was its inherent sustainability. It is a feature that is not quite so strongly evident in a Western agricultural model - not one built on the implicit assumption of expanding frontiers, anyway.
One of the metaphors that thrived in middle age Europe was of the cyclic nature of everything. All the universe was a closed system, operating in complex but predictable cycles that had an almost perfect analogue in the way stars moved in the heavens.
A culture informed by such ideas is one that has gotten used to the idea of being closed, isolated, static. Even the Europe that had recently been a frontier, grew to a point of relative stasis and accepted the rather profound limitations imposed by a static, locally bounded geography. But this kind of thought ceased when the New World was discovered.
The sense of living in a closed system and the sense of a cyclic nature to history are more pronounced if one looks at Chinese history. The Chinese have had civilization for roughly five millennia. The civilization is older, but its written history is at least that old. Chinese history suggests distinct phases. The society goes through cycles of growth, stagnation, collapse, and rebirth periodically.
A recent Economist article on China's recent rebirth showed that in the seventeenth century China accounted for fully 35% of the world's GNP. By 1870 it had dropped to half that. By WWII it was less that a quarter of that number. But it has grown strongly since 1972. And today China is the world's leading exporter, just in the last six months surpassing Germany. China today approaches the level it held prior to the industrial revolution in Europe. Stagnation may have already been affecting China in the seventeeth century, so the collapse that lasted from the 1870's to the 1950's was preceded by several centuries of stagnation.
What has occurred since the 1950's is a resurgence To the extent that this is an industrial resurgence it is the first to be fuelled by a look outward. China, for almost four decades, has been cultivating relationships with far flung nations, nations that harbor vital natural resources. And it has been looking to the west for business models, technology, and investment capital. China's success has come to a large extent by adopting all of the ideas that worked for Europeans. This resurgence, then, depends to a great deal on the exploitation of external resources.
But it is also fueled by a normalization of agriculture. Whereas China's industrial resurgence is based on a new phenomenon, its agricultural resurgence is based on an old one. Agricultural land ownership goes through cycles that roughly approximate the growth cycles in China. During growth cycles, plots of land move from common ownership or widely held individual ownership into more highly concentrated holdings. Single owners own or control increasingly large plots of land. This process of concentration comes as the ones most successful in cultivating it gain advantages over those who are less so. The process of concentration itself is a process that leads to higher output. It can also lead to returns to scale which also increase the effectiveness of agriculture. So while the process is going on, agricultural production tends to grow in a robust manner, providing plenty of food.
But the advantages are not perpetual or automatic. Eventually the large land owners become less interested in the process of agriculture than they are in other pursuits. Land becomes an exponent of power rather than a competitive tool whose wise husbandry brings economic advantages. Large land owners grow less interested in competitive advantages. They stop being interested in being maximally productive. Food production stabilizes or declines. But while the harvests were plentiful the population will have bourgeoned. If food production plateaus too quickly the cycle reaches a point of bourgeoning population but static or declining food production. Famine is the result.
In any case, after a few centuries of expansion, food becomes scarce to major portions of society, and large land holdings characterize the wealthy. This static condition can go on for centuries, but so long as the condition persists, the land-holding class typically drifts out of contact with the lowly labor class. Their interests diverge. Eventually this causes social instabilities, institutions fracture and fail, and society collapses. These collapses are not characterized by brief moments in time. The last one lasted more than a century. The collapses necessarily bring some sort of change of government. Sometimes the new rulers have implemented social changes that affected the structure of land ownership, occasionally redistributing land ownership to the people who actually worked it.
In the latest instance, large land holdings were broken up and allocated as collective farms by Mao in the 1950's. This was a painful experience for China because collective farms were actually less productive than the large land holdings that preceded them. Tens of millions starved. Yet the resurgence of China today is built on the privatization of these same collectives. It depends strongly on the widely held vested interests of the rural farmer in the success of the harvest. The current resurgence of Chinese agriculture owes much to the alignment of interests and to a kind of hopefulness that success will bring more success.
And so long as those interests remain effectively aligned there is hope that further developments in the realm of privatization will lead to still more improvements in outcome. On the high grassy plains of Africa and on the high grassy plains of Mexico vast fires send up billows of smoke many miles wide once a year. These vast conflagrations occur just weeks before the rainy season. It is a destruction of the old and degraded to make room for the new. From burnt fields fresh blades of grass emerge with the rains. It is an agricultural process of rebirth that serves as a metaphor for the process of changing agricultural land ownership in China. Mao's collectivization destroyed much. It was very painful. Perhaps it was even morally depraved. But the very wake of destruction itself made room for fresh new growth. It set the stage for China's resurgence. And the cycle repeats once again.
Not all civilizations endure agricultural collapse and rebirth in the way China's seems to do. Jared Diamond in Collapse discusses a number of civilizations that collapsed permanently. Some disappeared without a trace: the Chaco Canyon people, for instance, disappeared completely with just a few year's worth of almost total crop failures. Other civilizations collapse and take on odd hybrid forms.
Some decades ago I watched a television program about some indigenous inhabitants of Mesoamerica. This particular tribe once flourished, built a great city, or several. Then it collapsed. Its descendents occupy the same lands. They live now primarily by hunting and gathering. They also grow beans. Growing beans is not unusual in and of itself. In fact, Thoreau advocates a bean-centric way of life. But this particular culture had a unique way of doing it.
Men were allowed to eat beans, but they were not allowed to plant or tend them. Why should this be? What is it about men and beans that wouldn't work? One would have to look at the history of this culture. As ever, we don' t know the answer but we are ready with an idea. The culture had an ascendent period driven by agriculture. Then agriculture failed and the culture collapsed. We do not know what led to the failure and collapse. We can only conclude that the rules about agriculture are informed by this history.
We speculate that one of the factors in the collapse of the civilization might have involved failure of a grain crop, in this case corn. Corn is highly productive. It produces more food per acre than almost any other crop, except rice. But it is a hungry plant. It requires intense fertilization. Today we fertilize corn with nitrogenous fertilizers derived from natural gas. Michael Pollan writes in Omnivore's Dilemma that fully 15% of a typical American's calories derive indirectly from natural gas and its role in fertilizing farmland. The Aztec, too, cultivated corn intensively. They, too, understood that corn was a hungry plant. They, too, fertilized corn with nitrogenous fertilizer. They, however, used the blood extracted from human sacrifice. They used people of other tribes - people who didn't count - to fertilize their crops. As Americans do Iraqis.
So one notable departure of this remnant civilization is its practice of eschewing grain as an agricultural material. Presumaby because of its hidden costs. Another notable departure is its cultural practice. The practice of not allowing men to practice agriculture prevents a kind of land-ownership society that starts out with great promise but leads to great inequities. Those cycles of growth, decay, bloody revolution, and resurgence that characterize Chinese history no longer are part of the permanent history of a society. The result is a small, local culture. Because agriculture is on a scale that is almost incidental and because it is carried out by women, land ownership is not an issue.
Henry George in Progress and Poverty makes a solid case for the negative economic consequences of land ownership. He does a fine job describing how land ownership devolves into high levels of inequality. And of how this inequality leads to social inequity and unhappiness. It is an unhappiness that might be traced to the practice of allowing men to cultivate the soil. When men cultivate the soil, there are two effects. One effect is to create food. This is common to all cultures that cultivate food. But the other effect of allowing men to cultivate grain is to set up a societal game that differentiates males on the basis of their success as farmers. It creates the idea of land ownership, territory, patriarchy. It also creates a society whose body of law and social order derives from patriarchy and land ownership rules.
In such a society one needs not only the writings of the Bible or some such work to convince people to behave in constructive ways, one needs a body of mythology to justify the relative places of men and women in society. The allegory attempts to do just this.
When agricultural societies grow successful, they enable cities. And when people live in cities they tend to be anonymous. Not totally anonymous, but substantially so. Being anonymous tempts behaviors that are unthinkable in a society where people are essentially equal and well known to each other by name and reputation.* In these large-scale societies, cooperative behavior can only exist so long as rules of cooperative behavior are enforced fairly and consistently. If people consistently gain substantial advantages by violent means or by methods that are obviously unfair, over the long term such behavior becomes more widespread, and eventually the institutions that support the civilizations are degraded into non-functionality and the civilization collapses partially or completely.
It is for this reason that it is in a society's self-interest to preserve cooperative behaviors to the extent that they can be identified and enforced. And to the extent that such enforcement does not materially degrade the ability of the society to create and express vital new ideas or constructive political dissent. The distinction between these two kinds of behaviors - being fundamentally cooperative and fundamentally undermining cooperative behavior in society - amounts to the difference between good and evil. Knowledge that allows one to distinguish between them is knowledge of good and evil. The tree that produces this knowledge is the society in which cooperative and anti-cooperative behaviors and attitudes exist. One comes to know this distinction only when one has exposure to both kinds of behavior. This is the knowledge of good and evil. Thus, the agricultural society by enabling the city gives man his taste of the knowledge of good and evil.
So far we have argued that the story of the fall is an allegory that creates a narrative distinguishing two states of man and establishes a causal connection between them. In one state he is a hunter-gatherer. Or, in the eyes of the ninteenth century romantics, a "noble savage." In another state he lives in an agricultural society, or a post-agricultural society where, in the words of Rousseau, he finds himself "bound in chains." In the former state he lives a life of leisure and relative balance. He lives with people he knows. He establishes deeply meaningful relationships. He knows and is known. In the latter state, food is derived by the painstaking and intense cultivation of grasslands through toil.
Productive lands allow many people to live in high-density cities in which they need to learn how to cooperate with people they do not know. They frequently live anonymously. They are tempted by bad behavior. Sometimes they do behave badly. In a close-knit society, one does best if one gets along with others. Good behavior is naturally rewarded; bad behavior is punished naturally by earning one ill-will. While this is never completely sufficient to cause good behavior or to eliminate bad behavior, reputation proves a powerful force in motivating good behavior in communities where people are known.
But these forces are absent in large communities where people are largely anonymous to each other. Such situations set up the conditions that are less naturally reinforcing of cooperative behavior. If the same behavior is to prevail, behaviors that exploit weaknesses of others for gain must be regulated by some other means. Otherwise the society devolves into chaos.
What we call good is essentially cooperative behavior. It is behavior that is socially constructive. It is behavior that most people naturally find satisfying. Evil is an act or a state of being that is essentially corrosive of cooperative behaviors and destructive of the fruits of such behaviors. It is behavior that violates Kant's categorical imperative. It is behavior that violates the Golden Rule. So at one level we have the operation of law. Law identifies a class of acts that are inherently anti-cooperative. But law always fails to fully describe the boundary between socially constructive and socially destructive behavior. Ethical thought manages to bridge most of the gap.
One can arrive at reasonably good ethical convictions either through religious training or through philosophical inquiry. Too frequently the former fails miserably to inculcate critical ethical inquiry. Too rarely is the latter part of education. So ethical reasoning is a skill much too rarely developed in the contemporary west, one with almost no currency in popular culture.
The allegory describes for us the fall of man. It describes why we need systems of law and moral thought. It suggests that if we are to inhabit an agricultural or post-agricultural society, we need to behave ethically as individuals, and we need to be capable of critical ethical thought as a society. If we listen carefully, we will hear it telling us "We're not in Eden anymore, Toto."
What is the role of the serpent in this allegory? In one sense, the serpent is an object of innate fear. There is a sense, in this allegory, that we ought to fear the fall of man in much the same way that we fear the serpent. Judged from the contrasting states of man in the allegory, the consequence of this transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian are as much to be feared as the serpent itself. So one purpose is to associate the fear of the serpent with the fear of a patriarchical agrarian or post-agrarian society.
But humans also tend to hate what we fear. So the serpent stands to make us hate the dysfunction that can arise from an agrarian or post-agrarian society: its abuses, scams, cheats, and acts that cheapen human life. The serpent is useful in another way. One can live with a snake, but one must understand one's relationship with it. So, too, can one live with the post-agrarian society. And so, too, must the one's relationship with society be properly defined. The role of the allegory is to set the stage for doing exactly this in the body of law that follows.
The analogy breaks down in one sense, and that is that if the whole of society behaves cooperatively even in high density cities, then the snake, if it is not essentially defanged, is at least asleep deep in the earth, or hypnotized into a harmless state by the snake charmer. But there really is no chance of the snake going out of existence, because it is in man's nature to think of himself first and to defend his own interests even to the extent that this means making life for many others much more difficult.Just like his powers of empathy, this is a fact of man's construction.
If one looks at this allegory as being a way of framing the work of the Bible, it succeeds rather well. The rise of agriculture that characterized the time and place of the Old Testament's writing was probably temporally close to the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian farmer lifestyle. The Bible, in this sense, suggests a way to obviate the dissatisfactions of this new lifestyle. It creates bodies of law and bodies of ethics. And it creates governing institutions and rituals that sustain those institutions. It is a whole blueprint for agrarian and post-agrarian living.
Though it fails to distinguish properly between religious practice and ethical thought or between religious institutions and governmental ones, and though it implicily accepts certain forms of servitude which we have since rejected, it addresses a rather substantial portion of the fundamental issues that arise complex societies - even ones of social and economic justice.
The context of the allegory suggests that societies organized around other principles of justice - primitive societies for instance - still live in a kind of state of nature that predates the fall of man. In such cultures the gospel may or may not make sense. Who is most disposed to hear it and respond genuinely is the villager arriving in the city and finding his anonymity and facelessness threatening. Those satisfied being nameless and faceless in a large city are lost already. Those who stay in the village may benefit from the transformation if they understand it correctly.
But if they fail to grasp its inherent charity, it does little but reinforce a preexisting tendency toward ethnocentrism. The allegory also suggests a method of redemption, namely, restoring people to the state of caring for each other. This we might properly interpret as a blow to the head of the snake that appears at the end of the allegory.
At its most fundamental level the standard for behavior requires doing no harm - a sort of state of behavior consistent with following the ten commandments or the whole of the law.** But this is a rather empty end. If one reads all the way to through the book one discovers that it also requires treating each other with a profound respect that is necessary for satisfaction in close-knit communities. Being open, cooperative, and trusting are all part of the equation. This is the message of redemption. It is substantially different from "do no harm."
Failure to have and to follow a well constructed body of law predisposes a society to fail, to disolve into bloody chaos. Following law slavishly or without being informed by its spirit may create a more durable society, but it will be a sad and opressive one - one where men are perpetually chafed by the chains that bind them. Following the spirit of the laws promises a somewhat happier existence.
In a psychological sense, the snake in the grass, the one that we rightly ought to fear according to this body of mythology, is our impulse to act. We rightly measure our acts, performing them as we see them fit for good society. Yet if we do this purely from a sense of duty, or obligation, or fear of punishment or reprisal or loss of face, then we live brutally meaningless lives. We live lives savaged by tensions between what we ought to do and what we want to do. We live lives rendered sick and dysfunctional by neuroses. If, on the other hand, we understand how our acts enrich the lives of others, how they connect with others, how they validate others, we regain our primal selves. Instead of being lost to fear we lose fear. And we are redeemed.
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* It will be argued that some of the largest cities have lower crime rates than rural areas. Or that within a given culture people are no more or less violent to each other inside cities than in rural villages. We know that some cultures tend to be more violent than others; violent crime in America is more pervasive than violent crime in England, for instance. Detroit is approximately 100 times more violent than London. We also imagine that cultures in which people have a long history of getting along in large cities - old oriental and European cultures for instance - will have fewer problems with urban crime and violence than cultures in which the large city is a newer development, and social cooperative structures and attitudes have not created a fully functional, cohesive, and comprehensive social ethos. A peaceful and calm city is indicative of a well adjusted society. Or of a highly repressed one.
** There is a tradition among some Jews to take the language of law very literally, but to neglect its spirit. Christ railed against this tradition. And so did Christians in Europe. Sometimes, however, the Christians who did so proved less charitable still.
Copyright: Stephen R. Brubaker, 2006. All Rights Reserved