Since this essay is about history, I thought I'd begin with the very first historical act: the creation of Adam by God.
We have it on good authority that in the beginning, Adam lived in idyllic isolation in Paradise and spent his time naming things – we have to assume he did this for his own amusement as there certainly wasn't anyone to use these newly invented names with. A 'Noble Savage,' he had inborn in him all the Natural Rights of Man undiminished in his isolation, just as God intended. Unfortunately, these rather abstract rights got in the way of more concrete luxuries like sex, conversation, and keeping the Garden of Eden in reasonable order. So, in the usual seek-and-you-shall-find fashion, God caused Eve to be born from the left side of Adam's chest. We don't need to get too much into the details of what happened next, suffice it to say, they were fairly tawdry and may or may not have involved an illicit affair with a snake; but eventually Adam and Eve were booted out of Paradise.
Things are pretty grim in this Post-Lapsarian world and nature can be rather uncooperative in terms of yielding the requirements for human subsistence, but one way or another, Adam and Eve managed to be fruitful and multiplied. All in all, however, it's pretty clear that Adam would have been better off had he just left well enough alone and never asked for a companion in the first place.
What happened next is the subject of some debate. Some argue that all of humanity's problems really started from there, and because quantity does not turn into quality, these problems have only multiplied but have not essentially changed. Others, Francis Fukuyama, for example, argue that things were indeed tough for a bit, but we eventually figured things out and all lived happily ever after. There has been history, there isn't any longer.
This is, of course, a fairly uncharitable version of certain variants of the Judeo-Christian view of history. It is meant to bring out what is absurd in the anthropology of certain readings of the Bible. But it is worth noting that this fundamentally mistaken and mysterious theory of human society informs even some of the most ardently secular social theories. Rousseau's Social Contract, for example, seems to imagine that society was invented when a couple of men – never women – in the wild happened upon each other and decided that it might be convenient to hang around. This theory was complicated by the realisation that if three rather than two noble savages should have entered into the Social Contract, than two could gang-up and oppress the one. That these social contracts were always entered into in odd numbers seems therefore be the root cause of oppression – the fact that the oppressed fairly often outnumber the oppressors should not get in the way of such neat philosophising. Engels demolishes this view with some humour in Anti-During.
Marxists, in spite of our scathing satirical wits1, have not really had the opportunity to engage everyone in reasonable, one-on-one conversation2 with the unfortunate result that there still exist the sort of rugged individualists who regard society as nothing more than a multiplication of individuals – some, rather more absurdly regard it as nothing more than the multiplication of individual men.
1Das Kapital is a real romp.
2Not really our goal at all.
I’m not sure Rousseau ever meant his statements on the origin of civil society to be interpreted as statements of matters-of-fact. In fact, from what I’ve read of the influence of Grotius on R.’s thought, he observes that G. had the tendency to obscure his political philosophy with empirically-falsifiable presumptions, and this was a tendency that Rousseau did his best to avoid. The ‘social contract myth’, from my readings of ‘Du Contrat Social’ (though these were not particularly deep readings; enough for an essay), was perhaps more likely a historical means to express a more important normative point, rather than any hypothesis of the factual birth of mankind (i.e. man-in-society).
ReplyDeleteAlso, on the story of Genesis; apart from its capacity to σωζειν τα φαινομενα (save the phenomena), I often find myself, in the bathroom, kitchen, around the pets, etc. naming them with Spanish words. This is so I can memorise the nouns, of course, but I still feel a bit like Adam, naming; differentiating things one from the other; el fregadoro, el lavabo, la mascota, las cortinas . . .
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