Saturday, November 29, 2014

An Ancestral Dogmatic Hypothesis

I came across an old note wondering about the reaction our ancient ancestors must have had when first creating something they perceived to be permanent. It was probably a piece of art, either a figurine or a painting on a cave wall, maybe a body ornament. This idea interests me because the experience of life is normally filled with constant change, and our very ancient ancestors must have experienced—and expected—nothing else. Flora and fauna grow and die; rivers rise and fall; weather is unpredictable; the motion in the skies is a constant series of changes; there are periods of plenty and periods of scarcity; etc. When those ancestors of ours first began to create anything seen as stable, I'm guessing there was a magical feeling they experienced by being able to create something exempt from change.

Maybe this uplifting feeling of control was an eventual catalyst for doing other things with a sense of permanence like building shelters and coming up with regularly scheduled rituals. Existing within a reality that is unpredictable can be unsettling so it's understandable how as desire to mitigate that feeling would result in efforts to create things known to be (or thought to be) stable.

I think this idea of permanence also got another huge boost with the later invention of writing. When our ancestors developed systems to transfer their words to the permanent media of stone and clay, the feeling of creating something truly magical must have been off the scale. The power that must have been felt when exercising this ability must also have been tremendous.

But there was an unfortunate side-effect that came with this ability that hounds us to this day: dogma. Until the creation of something that literally froze ideas in stone, it must have been much easier for our ancestors to adapt to whatever came up. Pre-writing civilizations certainly had developed a body of rules and traditions to maintain their cultures and guide their decisions. But without a physically tangible history to which everyone could refer, a society's leaders could more easily make adaptive decisions because authority rested with a person(s), not a set of tablets, who was probably the official keeper of the society's collective knowledge. It is likely that this process was eventually determined to be inferior to the inferred magical nature of something written and preserved, giving birth to the concept of dogma. 

Of course, different cultures adopt varying levels of dogmatic ideas and practices, allowing some manner of change to be considered and adopted. But dogma, to any degree, is harmful because relying on anything that is declared to be always applicable and unchangeable is anathema to existence.

As mentioned above, we live with this unfortunate situation today, with people ready to kill in order to keep their preferred dogma from being altered. The most common modern examples are religion and nationalism. In both cases there are collections of written words (religious texts and constitutions) that are supposed to be treated as if they are perfect and always applicable. This is a framework that is bound to fail because living in an ever-changing existence can only be accommodated by constant adaptation. Trying to serve our desire for stability actually hurts our ability to treat ourselves with dignity.

So, like a lot of things within the human experience, we get good and bad together from our actions and often fail to deal with them appropriately. Writing has certainly been a positive tool for humanity, but it has also been a tool used to hurt us terribly. I can only hope our descendants figure out a way to do better with this tool than their ancestors have done.

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