We all know .. Actually, no we don’t. Not any more. I was going to say we all know the story but plenty of children born in the 21st century have actually never heard the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis, the first book of the Bible. So let me recap; on the face of it, it’s pretty cheesy.
God makes Adam and drops him into this paradise called the Garden of Eden. After a while, Adam realises he’s lonely so, while he’s grabbing forty winks, God whips out one of his ribs and fashions it into a woman, called Eve.
God told Adam that he could have anything he wanted in his garden of plenty with one caveat – he must never eat any of the apples from that tree! Fine. Adam is happy. Plenty to eat, a shiny new wife. Who needs an apple?
But Eve, strolling through the garden on her own one day, hears a hissy sort of voice calling her.
“Hey. You there. These apples. They’re the best.”
It’s a talking snake. He tells her God isn’t really their friend because those apples are actually magic and anyone who eats one will know all sorts of secrets God doesn’t want getting out. Eve goes for it. Of course she does. She’s nosy, mischievous and disobedient. (Getting the misogyny and stereotyping here? The writers skate right over the obvious question: why did God make her like that if it’s such a problem?)
She eats the apple, likes it and immediately makes sure Adam also has a bite or two. Suddenly they realise something awful – they are stark naked! Overcome with shame they quickly grab some fig leaves and cover their bits. Then God comes along, finds them hiding and drives them out for a life of toil. Interestingly, he specifically tells them that they will henceforth be tilling and weeding and living on bread.
You may have read Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens, in which he effectively describes agriculture as a dirty trick played on humans by the order Graminales, including all the various cereal crops, which enslaved them and ensured it would become successfully dispersed far and wide.
I was nosing around in the Bible and realised that this was the story of Genesis. Even there we are told that the suffering, the diseases, the wars and the interpersonal strife arising from agriculture were not our natural state, but that observation quickly gets lost as the Bible rattles on with its bloody and bitter story.
On the evolutionary time scale the Bible, indeed all books, are new publications. What we had for hundreds of millennia preceding the short 10,000 years since agriculture came along were shared stories, oral histories and myths. We hunted and we gathered. We certainly had short tribal wars but never armies or defensive fortifications because we had few or no significant possessions. God gives Mr and Mrs #1 enmity and division at the same time as he sentences them to living on crops. This was extremely perceptive of the Bible writers, who must have known hunter gatherers and saw that they stored no crops and hence had nothing to defend. I find it fascinating that, right back at the beginning of our recorded story the writers understood that we had a natural state and it was that of the hunter gatherer. This is really what the Genesis story is about. They just drew the wrong conclusion, namely that God had sentenced us to this miserable, unnatural life and we should knuckle under and accept what His Omnipotence had ordained.
And why? Because it was in their interest to do so. The writers were the ones at the top and they, as has always been the case since the dawn of settled society, sat back and farmed us while we farmed the land.
Actually, this is a very modern interpretation of the writers’ motives. Greedy capitalist priests rorting the rest of us while they lived in comfort. Maybe, but I suspect they may have had different motives, rooted in tribalism. We know now that the progression from hunting and gathering to agriculture was a staged progression and even know of some places where they experimented with agriculture and returned to their previous way of life. So the writers of Genesis could have had plenty of opportunity to compare the pros and cons of either lifestyle. They may have been primarily motivated by the desire to increase. They would have known that hunter gatherers had small families. This was a necessity where a group constantly on the move had to carry their infants. A carrier can neither hunt nor defend and their ability to gather was limited by the burden they already carried, so any group could only sustain a small number of infants at any time. How they limited their progeny is unknown, but it likely to have been by infanticide. Not attractive.
It is fascinating to me how this mandate to become agricultural and suffer the known consequences is the product of the people of the Bible’s peculiar theology, their belief in one, omnipotent being. All their neighbours near and far, as far as we can tell, were polytheistic. As we can see from other ancient writings, the polytheistic gods were only passingly interested in humans. They had their Olympus or similar where they hung out, fighting, feasting and fornicating and largely regarded humans as playthings, or as instruments to meddle with rival gods.
Not so the one omnipotent God. Anthropomorphising him as they did, the Bible folk saw themselves as his only company and the entire object of his interest. So he chose them, promised them great things provided they settled to agriculture and increased. Greatly, indeed. A couple of pages after Adam and Eve he is promising one of them that he would be the ancestor of nations. They were all about increase, and as we know and as they almost certainly knew, agriculture was the only option if that were to come true.
I have to say this belief in one God who regarded them as his special and favoured people hasn’t worked out well for them. It is problematic enough to hold that belief, but telling others about it has been catastrophic.
“You’re think you’re better than me?”
“Absolutely. Far better.”
It never plays well.
This has been a bit of a ramble, I’m afraid. My point, on which I am something of a bore, is that most of us are a couple of centuries beyond believing that we should toil on the land and suffer because that was God’s command. So the smart thing to do is live as much like a hunter gatherer as you can because ten millennia is an evolutionary eyeblink and we are still wired up emotionally and physically to live the way we did for not ten but hundreds of millennia. I was fortunate to have seen a documentary decades ago made by a couple who followed a group of Australian aboriginals as they rambled around central Australia. This came back to me when I was walking the Camino de Santiago and wondering why, in spite of their strenuous days, everyone seemed so content. Of course! We were living in the way were designed to live, picking up our few possessions every day and walking, just like those aboriginal hunter gatherers who lived lives free of neurosis and stress, deeply connected to nature and to each other.
That moment of realisation changed my life. I walk every day, a proper walk, a brisk nine or ten kilometres. I own little and do work that I enjoy, which I am free to do because I am not interested in acquiring stuff. At 77 years of age I can still put in a full day’s work, although I rarely have to. I am an omnivore and most of what I eat is made at home from ingredients my grandmother would recognise.
In respect of accumulating belongings I received a great gift early in my life. I had moved to live with my sister in Singapore; she was married to a wealthy American who worked away a lot of the time. She was, sadly, an alcoholic who rarely drove their late-model luxury car. So I got to tool around this intoxicating city, in 1968 nothing like today’s modern metropolis, in a flash new motorcar. After about three weeks of this I parked downtown one day, got out and walked away. A sudden realisation hit me: the late-model air-conditioned leather-seated electric-windowed all-singing all-dancing Opel sedan was already just … the car. I had driven all the way thinking about and looking at this and that with never a moment of Wow! This car! I made a note to myself: never strive for flash stuff because it turns ordinary overnight.
So I have very few possessions, but they are good ones that I value highly. A Jose Romero studio-built flamenco guitar. An OM-1 Martin guitar that I rarely play but that was not the case when I bought it decades ago. A twelve-year-old MacBook Air – essential. An old Toyota car that is really a tradesman’s van. A few pieces of art that I love. A digital camera that cost a lot when new but is now worth a fraction of that, thanks to the ubiquitous cellphone. A backpack and very good walking shoes. That’s about it. Oh, and a 1994 Harley Davidson Sportster 1200 that will never, ever be just the bike. It’s not just a source of great pleasure, it is a shared enjoyment with my son and his friends who all ride old Harleys. Added up in monetary value it would amount to so little it would terrify most men in their 70s but for me it is everything in the world I could wish for.
You really can live like that, and live well. Of course you can – it is in our nature.
Play With Strangers 