At first sight, it isn't clear that the idea of sin has much of a role to play as a determinant of twenty-first century thought and behaviour. Nowadays, perhaps, 'pollution' portends a comparably discomfiting sense of offence against the natural order.
It was all so different a hundred years ago. Where we worry about human impact on the environment using the abstract term 'pollution', they would have deplored the less euphemistic, if more localised, 'poisoning'. Conversely, the formula "pollution is the consequence of sin" would have found commonplace concurrence in the Victorian era. Sin was all too palpable a temptation, followed all too inevitably by the rapid jism of shame.
Thanks to Papa Freud and Onkel Willi Reich, we now realise that this trivialisation of vice gives sin a bad name. The universality of the temptation made the sex drive an easy target of ideological manipulation for purposes of social control.
For too many centuries, the idea of sin, the fear of sinning - worst of all the fear of being branded a sinner - has been the object of cynical psychosocial engineering in the interests of one hierarchical establishment or another. In practical politics, despite the ideology, it scarcely matters which party or institution rules, as long as the people are made to believe that it is in their interests to submit to authority. Any opposition seeks to take over the reins of power, never to sever them.
The idea of sin is the idea of powerlessness. A populace imbued with shame for imputed sin is the constituency of the submissive.
The modern secular mind finds as both comic and repulsive the concept of sin as transgression of arbitrary prohibitions of a mythical superbeing. And yet, the idea of pollution still invokes in us a shudder of quasi-supernatural dread and horror. This is a button that fascism has been quick to press, especially since it is easily given a racist slant - if genes are selfish, then racism can be portrayed as a biological mechanism for self-protection of the pristine sacred genome. Superstition is the mask ignorance adopts to disguise its impotence from itself.
For the ancient Greeks, the presumption of personal power (hubris) was certain to arouse the antipathy of the gods whose primordial prerogatives had been abrogated, and so lead to the inevitable downfall and humiliation (nemesis) of any mortals who attempt to take their destiny into their own hands with fatally inadequate understanding of all the issues that are at stake.
Both hubris and pollution represent the dislocation of established patterns of order - a dialectical challenge which cannot but arouse countervailing forces of rectification and correction.
So, I'm looking for a dialectical sin thesis. The biochemistry at a socio-personal level is all about hormone-mediated dominance and submission behaviours, but I want the big picture, the ecology of sin...
We live at the culmination of the Neolithic revolution. About ten thousand years ago, humanity started to settle down, to get a steady job and bring up a family. As soon as we had walls, the writing was on it.
Palaeolithic style nomadism now exists only in virtuality - we are always, if only symbolically, on the move, usually to work, annually or seasonally off to holiday playgrounds. In reality, there's nowhere to go that isn't already fully populated. The human race is about to settle down once and for all - that's what global sustainability means.
The first farmers could no longer walk away from their own environmental depredations - they had to invent sustainability on the spot. Now on a global scale it's up to us alone whether or not we survive into the foreseeable future. It's our own behaviour that has to wise up fast. Genetic evolution didn't get us into this situation - it all happened far too quickly for that - and it won't get us out of it ditto.
When we were Palaeolithic, we never knew what might be over the next hill. Now we know only too well - more of the same. The Neolithic intelligence cannot rely on the gambling instinct to carry us through - the old goddess, Fortuna, is too fickle a spirit to personify the new aspiration. It is knowledge and understanding that we must cultivate - Sophia who must be our guide.
Culture begins with science in the life of the intelligent peasantry - polynucleated localised application of shared knowledge. Lewis Mumford recalls, "Domestication in all its aspects implied two large changes, permanence and continuity in residence and the exercise of control and foresight over processes once subject to the caprices of nature. ...Into this life with its erotic exuberance, a new order, a new regularity, a new security had entered [providing] for the vital energy and loving nurture that made possible man's further development."
('The City in History', Pelican Books,1961, p20)
Romantic love as the necessary rooftree of settled home life is the first innovation of the Neolithic - and the not-so-hidden but not-yet-completed agenda is the domestication of mankind.
The invention of agriculture in the Middle East, Africa, the Indian sub-continent, China, the Americas and Oceania spread out over thousands of years at an average speed of about a mile a year. The characteristic plants domesticated in each bionomic region tell the story - wheat barley oats lentils millet cassava buckwheat rice maize yam potato - a veritable edible pantheon of the Neolithic revolution. The name of the goddess is Isis, Kuan Yin, Demeter, Ceres. She stands both for the organic exuberance of greenlife and the rewards available to the sustained devoted toil of the peasantry.
The Palaeolithic economy is nomadic because it depletes the resources of the habitats it occupies. Hunting and gathering is a mobile economy. The Neolithic agricultural economy, by contrast, represents the first step towards a locally sustainable and self-renewing system. Under Palaeolithic exploitation, sustainability is only achieved over a much wider area — local depredation is eased by infrequency of return. Under Neolithic management, the same process is mimicked by a rotation of fallow years or is offset by deep cultivation of the soil and/or importation of fertiliser.
Further efficiency is achieved by planting vegetables (so you don’t need to waste energy looking for food plants), the domestication of animals (so they don’t run away when you need to kill them!) and by the selection of higher yielding variants of domesticated plants and animals. This economy permits (and is demanded by) density of population orders of magnitude greater than under the Palaeolithic regime.
Pollution is anathema to the Neolithic economy — settlement means having to live with your own wastes. Palaeolithic peoples, on the other hand, are used to walking or, preferably, riding away from problems and responsibilities — there’s always virgin territory to rip off over the next hill or valley.
The peasant abides.
I believe that it is impossible to underestimate the significance of the Neolithic social mutation (pace the neo-Darwinist creed "there is no such thing as group selection"). The agricultural revolution is the historic shift towards the settlement, the domestication, of humanity ourselves. It represents an evolutionary quantum leap in ‘time-binding’, in exercise of foresight and forbearance, in commitment of present resources towards future sustainability, in the assumption of full directive control over a whole local ecosystem. The invention of agriculture is evidence of a very high intelligence indeed at work, for this is no mere technical innovation but demands both moral responsibility and spiritual vision of its practitioners.
It is no accident that we may talk of humans taking ‘god-like’ powers on ourselves through the invention of agriculture (and increasingly through the subsequent elaborations of technical culture), for I would maintain that the invention of gods is itself an unconscious reflection of our realisation of the enormity of the obligations we have imposed on ourselves through this revolutionary institution. The sense of hubris, of self-banishment from the garden of innocence, the myth of the dying and resurrected god or of the sacrificed virgin, the awful fate of Prometheus or Faust, the very idea of sin as a normal state rather than an exceptional one-off occurrence — all express this feeling of self-imposed obligation of fair dealing in the face of environmental happenstance, coupled with moral inadequacy to live up to the required standards of peaceful cooperation and trust.
The crucial step from merely anthropoid intelligence to the human is the laying aside of seed for next year’s harvest from this year’s meal. The feast/fast rituals of all religions re-enact this archetypal transcendence of merely instrumental consciousness. The charisma or sign of grace bestowed on an initiate is the gift of abstention. Whether it is pork or sex or alcohol, the abstainer becomes a holier person in return. In alchemy, too, the critical first step of the magnum opus is known as the withdrawal. Traditional agriculture requires of its practitioners an unprecedented spiritual forbearance as a normal state of being.
Sin is very simple to subsistence farmers - it is anything which takes food out of the mouths of their children, including any behaviour which threatens the stability of family life on which their survival depends.
Unfortunately the Neolithic system has one fatal flaw — it is prone to co-optation by marauding Palaeolithic throwbacks! Agricultural produce is far easier to steal than it is to grow. A robber class soon arose, worshippers of Fortune and her consort Mars (for luck favours the bold). The muscled baboons seized the reigns of power through the terror they were able to exercise over the more domesticated settled folk.
According to Gordon Barker, Principal Inspector of Ancient Monuments with Historic Scotland, the archaeological evidence shows a transformation from "an early Neolithic society in which overt expression of individual status was avoided in life and death, through the more hierarchical society of the late Neolithic and finally to the fully-fledged tribal chiefdoms of the Iron Age."
Lewis Mumford tells how the beginnings of history were in the conflict between the opportunistic Palaeolithic remnant and the settled Neolithic agricultural peasantry. The ironic consequence is a Neolithic economy and people governed - which is to say, exploited, and so, degraded - by a Palaeolithic ruling class. The patriarchal warrior caste, right through to their modern aristocratic or entrepreneurial descendants, have never been properly civilised. They perpetuate Palaeolithic (or, as they were once known, Barbarian) habits of business and government, trading on a Neolithic majority of decent hard-working Jills and Joes.
For Barbarian thinking, sustainability is not enough — there has to be a surplus to be creamed off, or to ward off hard times into which you may wander over the next ridge. Both taxes and profit (the appropriation of surplus) are Palaeolithic post-Neolithic inventions dating from this period when the Barbarians invade and seize nominal control.
Aristocracy is a ten thousand year old protection racket. Look out from now on for signs of a hidden agenda of social control in the official culture, especially in the promulgation of organised religion.
"The woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise... And the Lord God said behold the man is become as one of us... sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground whence he came... In the sweat of your brow shall you earn your bread...."
Agriculture is the original sin, presumptuous and unprecedented. "For Cain was a tiller of the ground..."" Palaeolithic innocence - or, rather, self-blindness - is lost for ever, we have to live in consciousness of our absolute dependence on our own good sense and application to the necessary routine and circumscribed horizons of settled life.
The global concern for sustainability of our modern multinational economy, indeed of our planetary life support systems, is proof of the necessity for full implementation of the Neolithic sensibility — the settlement of humanity in local interchange and global interrelation; responsible farming of our entire planet. The last vestiges of Barbarian thinking have to be reformed and re-educated in the verities of ecological economics — there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, what goes up must come down etc. There are no 'others' to exploit, nowhere else to go to get away from ourselves or the natural consequences of our behaviour.
It is no coincidence that the sense of identity with nature, personified in the figure of the Goddess of sustainment, Gaia, is expressed both at the start of the Agricultural Revolution and at the point where we are faced with the reality of the inter-related unity of the living systems of one small planet.
Our identity as a species compels us into global community. This is the insistent message of the 21st Century — one Earth, one humanity, no outs. Our identity with living Earth demands that the compassionate Mother Goddess of the Neolithic folk must subdue the war gods of the Palaeoliths.
'Them and Us' thinking — where 'They' are fair game for 'Us' and vice versa — can no longer be sustained. We have to be aware of the cultural bias that we have inherited — the Barbarian inability to perceive the significance of cultured behaviour. Unbiased investigation finds deep ecological understanding, even wisdom, in many rustic practices often condemned as pagan superstitions. ‘Pagan’ and ‘peasant’ both mean ‘belonging to the country’. The pejorative connotations are superstitious, ignorant, dull and worthless. The converse is not so much ‘civilised’ as ‘urbane’ - which country folk have no difficulty in interpreting as superficial, pretentious, flash and parasitic.
The Neolithic endeavour is one of cooperation with nature, of patient sustained collective and individual effort towards sometimes distant goals, exploiting natural mechanisms wherever possible and advantageous, carefully husbanding scarce resources. Opportunism — the mainstay of the Palaeolithic culture — has only a peripheral place in the Neolithic economy. The operations of Fortune (the goddess of blind chance) are what the Neolithic family group tries to minimise — their fortune is what they are building and sustaining in the very soil itself. The proverbial dullness and meanness of the peasant disguises a profound and acute intelligence — a commitment to self-providence and to endurance in time that is truly religious in its intensity and perseverance.
Not silenced but merely masked by the strident voice of the barbarian tendency, the Neolithic mutation is still weaving its integrative influence through the genes of humanity. From me first to us together always. From economic opportunistic competition and class warfare to mutual aid.
In the first place, the Neolithic revolution is the product of a new way of seeing the world, as is emphasised in the Chinese myth of the invention of agriculture. "Shen Neng split wood to form a ploughshare and bent a piece of wood to make the plough handle and taught the whole world the benefits of ploughing and weeding... When the sun stood at midday he held a market. He caused the people of the earth to come together and assemble all their respective wares. They made their exchanges and went home, each having got what he wanted."
Even in the Genesis account, the author of the revolution is humanity itself. The Chinese account is authentically Neolithic in its emphasis on the dialectical mutuality of human social evolution whereas the biblical story is suffused with the idea of rulership and the prerogatives of unchallengeable authority essential to the neo-Palaeolithic gameplan.
Shen Neng is neither a god nor a prototype, like Adam, nor any kind of prophet bringing mysterious messages from beyond. He is not a king nor an entrepreneur but a sage - someone who has developed their understanding beyond the normal, suboptimal, range and sees what will soon be clear to all.
Culture turns human society into something like a gigantic brain in which the neurons are individual humans - or families- linked in a hyperfractal self-organising system of social interaction. Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon at the social (cultural) level as it is at the organismic (individual) level. Bodies cannot be changed as fast as minds; the environment not so fast as the technology. Human nature is not a given, any more than human rights are - they are products of negotiation between the collective and its individual political members.
As well as the generalised sense of ecological anxiety that comes from arbitrarily transforming the world, we live with genomic anxiety from attempting to reinvent ourselves as a species. The Neolithic revolution required us to stop behaving like pack animals and start being territorial animals. Of course, both tendencies are well ensconced in our genetic repertoire and have by no means been lost, merely socialised - or, increasingly, not. There's no sin so great or so recurrent as high-minded brutality, savagery in the name of some allegedly transcendent symbolism or other.
The message of sin is that we are neither fully animal nor wholly god - and we pay when we stray from the human way. Modesty and dignity are the two sides of the unminted coin of humanity. Sin is when we succumb to the less than human or pretend to the more than human.
Metaphysical ideas are those that purport to tell the 'whole story' — the reality behind the appearance. Religious belief or practice is the personal adoption of some whole story. It is also the acceptance of a social role or niche in the enactment of this metaphysic by the community of subscribers, whether it be in special ritual or everyday routine. The twin benefits of religion — why it is so popular — are elevation and participation. If we say excitement and satisfaction, the parallel is clear. Good religion is like good sex — it is its own justification, it fulfils a need in the participant, and full enjoyment benefits from whole-hearted joining in. Perhaps religious doubt in a believer is like wondering if you really fancy your wife any more.
Similar processes of elevation of individual consciousness and merging with a wider self or community are enacted through music, in drama, in literature and art, even in business. Nor is the process necessarily limited to specifically human forms. Nature abounds with bonding 'rituals'. Like iron filings rising in concert to the influence of a magnet and seeking alignment within the magnetic field, a higher level of order seems to come into operation. The very mechanicalness of this analogy seems somehow appropriate, as if the participants have to surrender a degree of individual autonomy to the integrating process.
I lose my limited self and find my true self in love. Experienced as compulsion, as a literal loss of freedom, the process encompasses all the states of torment; experienced as a loving giving of self, the process liberates all the hidden potential, unifies and merges the chaos of mechanical experience in the unanimity of bliss.
For all the rationalist pretension of modern culture (its lack of overt metaphysic), the true romanticism of present-day society is clear from the centrality given the experience of falling in love in social formation. The marriage ceremony enacts the losing of smaller (individual) self in larger (social) self. It sacralises the process of family making even when it is, as often these days, followed shortly by a joint mortgage rather than a biological happy event. The plighting of troth in long-term mutual commitment is itself a profoundly romantic gesture.
In this, as in traditional communities, a no less important or numinous dimension of the marriage ceremony is not just the joining of two people in one flesh, but the joining of the interests of each individual member of the couple, and of the formative family as a new whole with all the other adult members of the community.
The binding of families into the genetic and social community is a crucial element in the replication of social mutualities through the generations. The sharing of resources within the extended family offers a far healthier model of proper economic principles than the harum-scarum hurly-burly of the marketplace. Altruism is not economic weak-mindedness but a sign of higher intelligence — that the person has recognised unity and mutuality of interest with other beings.
The good Samaritan in the gospel was precisely the type who might be expected to defraud you in the marketplace. As the high priestess of free market economics herself pointed out, it was only because he had made a bob or two on the market that he was in a position to lend a hand at all. His altruism was his doing his bit without thought of gain or reward, exercising intelligent compassion.
The benefit of acts of merit or charity is in stepping out into a higher more inclusive self, where one’s relationship with the world is an exploration of love, rather than a matter of trade, maximising gain and minimising loss. The altruist plays for higher stakes than short-term profit or self-advantage.
It was precisely Jesus’ point in selecting a Samaritan as hero of the parable, that altruism goes beyond the mere acting out of ideology. The Levite, who might have been expected to act out of high-minded belief or prescription for right living, passed by on the other side of the road. He was too busy and too set on higher things to notice the distress of an insignificant beggar. For the real altruist, there is as little chance of him ignoring human distress as he would of a member of his own family. He does what anyone would have done in all modesty.
It is this model of enlightened altruism - that is to say the normal concern, sharing and mutual support expected within a family also operating in the wider social arena - which is the essence of socialism. This is the sense in which the Dalai Lama could envisage communism as social Buddhism in action. Conversely, the cynical Philistine, proverbially unaware of the true value of the goods which he trades or pillages, epitomises the capitalist model of humanity, steeped in a mature acceptance and exploitation of sin.
The promised land of full realisation of humanity is inhabited by Samaritans rather than Philistines. A society whose economy is constituted on predatory lines produces predators as the ideal type of human being — those who are at home in the jungle. A society whose economy is based on mutuality and cooperation produces a much wider range of ideal types — those who are at home with humanity. Humane behaviour generates and reinforces trust and sharing.
Alienated transactions engage only the abstract medium of exchange — buyer and seller are only interested in the profit to be turned or the advantage to be gained. In convivial exchange, the actual transaction is a minor incident in a long established and developing relationship of the participants. Each addresses the other’s humanity as a known person, never as a mere social functionary. Each is ready to do the other a favour, to help him or her out, to exchange resources, knowledge and skills.
The prophet of Islam is said to have given as an example of sin, a merchant who holds back stocks of grain in order to sell them at a higher price when the resultant shortfall drives up demand. The basic premise of Islam is that life is the bountiful gift of Allah out of the infinite beneficence of divinity. To seek to misappropriate this free gift to one's own glorification is to commit the sin of ingratitude. Deliberate manipulation of scarcity is the sin of usury, equivalent to wilful refusal of the grace of generosity.
The cross purposes between religionists and evolutionists obscures the paradoxical truth that religion is undoubtedly a highly-advanced product of evolution, grounded in the physical biochemicality of the human social organism, whereas naive evolutionism is a very poor sort of religion, wholly unconscious of the emotional intelligence of higher level human functioning, and as such cannot be expected to survive very long.
It is no surprise that Charlie Windsor, blue-blooded heir of the Palaeolithic usurpers, fastidiously eliding any mention of considerations of economic interest, should identify sin with scientific rationality. The establishment wants you to believe that they have everything under control and that what is established is sacred by authoritarian fiat. This is the chinstrap model of human evolution - Jist haud yer wheesht and dae whit ye're telt! Sin is anything which tends to change the existing order of things. The danger of rationality is that it encourages people to ask importunate questions.
Of course, rationalism - if not capitalism - is of the spirit, not a vice. Ultimately, sin is a failing of understanding, not of morality. As humanity continues to evolve, the parameters of sin flow, melt and recrystallise. A truly complete map of the human genome would have to include every possible variation at every possible genesite, with new permutations - peaks, valleys, channels and tunnels - arising in every generation. In actuality what we have so far is more like a mediaeval mappa mundi - with Here Be Dragons marked in the boldest face.
We're talking about the lifespace of the dominant organism (homo sapiens - no normal species) on planet earth. As far as every other species is concerned, we are the environment. Who you calling peasant? Agriculture was us when we were young; now that we are mature in the sin of abrogation - annulment of the power of any gods who stand in our way - only orbiculture will do. Our field is the world. Only the most primitive lifeforms thrive outside our purlieu.
For all its drama and unending ramifications, the Neolithic revolution was but a step change in a process whose culmination is only just in sight. We can now see that what really happened ten thousand years ago was the initiative phase - indeed the first productive consequence - of 'wiring up the human species.'
The hidden evolutionary agenda has always been the next stage towards the sophistication of intelligence - the construction of a participative hyperstructure of human intercommunication. Nowadays, our survival, even on an individual basis - the level of DNA sequestration - no longer depends upon individual aptitude, nor on the social performance of a family, local community, tribe or nation. We each survive because we can call on the combined knowledge of our entire species to identify and apply the most appropriate technology to resolve any given environmental challenge or opportunity in the optimal manner.
History, poverty, starvation, disease are no more than blips on the integrative graph of localised global human totipotence. Factions have sought to seize temporary tactical advantage but every attempt to manipulate and control local scarcity has eventually been swept up in the rising Neotechnic tide.
The limiting resource is not the physical capability of the earth but the moral empowerment of all humans. In the end perhaps sin means exactly that which causes pollution of the collective and individual soul.
Questions of morality are central to the human project, precisely because of the malleability of human behaviour, individual or collective - its relative independence from genetic determinism. DNA is our resource, not our governor.
Equally, our systems of governance are adaptations which are not decreed from on high but invented to facilitate the evolution of productive community. Tinkering with the world is nothing new - though not as primeval as messing with each other's heads - and the greater the precision with which we can tinker, the less risky the outcome.
It isn't all peace and love on one side and ruthless collective efficiency on the other, it all depends on what you see as being at stake survival-wise. The greatest threat to Neolithic (or Neotechnic) culture is its inherent tendency to totalitarian simplifications. In excess, anything can become pathological. Life is flexibility, rigidity is death. In the healthy (i.e. still developing) psyche, all tendencies are quite rapidly self-correcting. In nature - of which we have never ceased to be a part, whatever the ideology or fantasy - every up has its down, for every mania there is a succeeding depression, for every elevation the inevitable degradation. In ecology, every boundary is elastic not deterministic. Simplification always brutalises but human-type brains need complexity - which is to say variety - to stay sane.
Since we've devoted so much time and energy to maximising the quantity of grey matter strewn about the planet, we'd better make sure it is kept productively occupied. Unhappy humans are the greatest threat we will ever face!
You can get good odds in the cosmic casino on whether it will be asteroids, volcanoes or own dear damned selves that blow up the planet first. What do you expect when you've eaten a jungle for breakfast? Junglivores are, have to be, pretty scary organisms.
All our ifs and buts are on the line. Do you feel lucky, punk?