Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-90012

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc

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eISBN: 978-0-307-80103-6

v3.1

TO

LESTER GRINSPOON,

WHOSE EXAMPLE REASSURES US

THAT OUR SPECIES

MAY HAVE

WHAT IT TAKES

Thus she spoke; and I longed

to embrace my dead mother’s ghost.

Thrice I tried to clasp her

image, and thrice it slipped

through my hands, like a

shadow, like a dream.

HOMER

The Odyssey

Contents

CoverOther Books by This AuthorTitle PageCopyrightDedicationEpigraphIntroductionPrologue: The Orphan’s File

  1 On Earth as It Is in Heaven

  2 Snowflakes Fallen on the Hearth

  3 “What Makest Thou?”

  4 A Gospel of Dirt

  5 Life Is Just a Three-Letter Word

  6 Us and Them

  7 When Fire Was New

  8 Sex and Death

  9 What Thin Partitions …

10 The Next-to-Last Remedy

11 Dominance and Submission

12 The Rape of Caenis

13 The Ocean of Becoming

14 Gangland

15 Mortifying Reflections

16 Lives of the Apes

17 Admonishing the Conqueror

18 The Archimedes of the Macaques

19 What Is Human?

20 The Animal Within

21 Shadows of Forgotten AncestorsEpilogueNotesPermissions AcknowledgmentsThe Authors

Introduction

We were very lucky. We were raised by parents who took seriously their responsibility to be strong links in the chain of generations. The search that informs this book may be said to have begun in childhood, when we were given unconditional love and protection in the face of real adversity. It’s an ancient practice of the mammals. It was never easy. In modern human society, it’s even harder. There are so many dangers now, so many of them unprecedented.

The book itself began in the early 1980’s when the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was making a potentially fateful intersection with 60,000 nuclear weapons that had been accumulated for reasons of deterrence, coercion, pride, and fear. Each nation praised itself and vilified its adversaries, who were sometimes portrayed as less than human. The United States spent ten trillion dollars on the Cold War—enough to buy everything in the country except the land. Meanwhile, the infrastructure was collapsing, the environment was deteriorating, the democratic process was being subverted, injustice festered, and the nation was converted from the leading lender to the leading debtor on the planet. How did we get into this mess? we asked ourselves. How can we get out? Can we get out?

So we embarked on a study of the political and emotional roots of the nuclear arms race—which led us back to World War II, which of course had its origins in World War I, which was a consequence of the rise of the nation-state, which traces straight back to the very beginnings of civilization, which was a by-product of the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals, which crystallized out of a very long period in which we humans were hunters and foragers. There was no sharp division along the way, no point at which we could say: Here are the roots of our predicament. Before we knew it, we were looking to the first humans and their predecessors. Events of remote ages, long before humans came to be, are critical, we concluded, for an understanding of the trap that our species seems to be setting for itself.

We resolved to look inside ourselves, to retrace as many of the important twists and turns of the evolution of our species as we were able. We made a compact with each other not to turn back, no matter where the search might lead. We had learned much from each other over the years, but our own politics are not identical. There was a chance that one or both of us might have to give up some of those beliefs we considered self-defining. But if we were successful, even in part, perhaps we could understand much more than just nationalism, the nuclear arms race, and the Cold War.

As we complete this book, the Cold War is over. But somehow we are not home free. New dangers edge their way onto center stage, and old familiar ones reassert themselves. We are confronted with a witches’ brew of ethnic violence, resurgent nationalism, inept leaders, inadequate education, dysfunctional families, environmental decay, species extinctions, burgeoning population, and increasing millions with nothing to lose. The need to understand how we got into this mess and how to get out seems more urgent than ever.