Culture of the Demiurge
by Jason GodeskyI was once a good little Catholic boy. I believed the earth was set here by G-d for our use. I wasn’t terribly concerned about environmental issues or animal rights or any of the problems that concern me now. When I first read Ishmael in high school was when that worldview was broken open, but not for the first several chapters—not until Quinn came to his exegesis of the Creation story in Genesis.
Ishmael took the fairly radical step of assuming the Creation story meant exactly what it seemed to say, that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was where the Knowledge of Good and Evil came from. But what is that knowledge? If a lion catches a gazelle, that’s good for the lion, but evil for the gazelle, and if the gazelle gets away, that’s good for the gazelle, and evil for the lion. In other words, there are no moral absolutes. Everything in this world is good for one thing, and evil for another. As overwhelmingly evil as the Shoah was for humanity, for instance, it was still good for microbes, worms, and insects oblivious to where so much food was coming from. A statement like that sounds chillingly vile, yet if I turn the tables and talk about killing billions of insects to free humans from a nuisance, you might start trying to have me elected president, so is it so evil, or are we so anthropocentric as to see that even our worst tragedies always benefit something else in this world?
And more importantly, who could blame us for being anthropocentric, being anthropes ourselves? Haven’t we an obligation to look out for ourselves? Of course we do! And that is why we can never know good and evil.
We don’t allow judges to preside over cases where they, themselves, are the accused, or even where they might know the accused. Judges in those positions are required to recuse themselves, and allow a different, impartial judge to preside over the case. Anything in this world that deems to judge good and evil is presiding over a case they’re intimately involved in.
In a world where everything is good for one and evil for another, nothing in that world can ever accurately judge those things. Distance is required. The gods—and Quinn reminds us this could be one god, a thousand gods, or none at all but simply the impersonal forces of nature—and the gods alone have this knowledge. They alone are removed from this dynamic. They alone have the impartiality to judge right and wrong, good and evil. They are the only impartial judges available. We’re very good at judging what’s good for us, and what’s evil for us, but these are not the only things to be considered. Our problem is that we do not simply say what is good for us, or what is evil for us; we say what is Good, and what is Evil.
Quinn’s interpretation says that there were two trees in the garden: the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Life was meant for humans and all other living things, life in the “community of life,” as part of the living world. The Tree of Knowledge, though, only nourishes the gods. In Quinn’s telling of the story, when humans eat of this tree, it makes them sick. In Genesis, G-d’s punishment when Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge is explusion from the Garden of Eden where food was abundant and there for the taking, and (quite explicitly) the damnation of Adam’s descendants to be agriculturalists: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:17-19)
For Quinn, that means that those who followed Adam into the Agricultural Revolution were exiled from the “commuity of life” and forced to eke out an existence as farmers, less as punishment than as the simple consequence of eating from the Tree of Knowledge, because that tree only nourishes gods. It did not actually give us the Knowledge of Good and Evil; rather, it gave us the illusion of knowledge. One is immediately reminded of the serpent’s explicit temptation in Genesis: “For G-d knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like G-d, knowing good and evil.” (3:4)
Believing we know good from evil, and confusing what is good for us with cosmic Good, or evil for us with cosmic Evil, we set about to make sure that everything was always good for us and evil for others. That gives us the “totalitarian agriculture” (a redundant phrase; what Quinn implies as non-totalitarian “agriculture” is called “horticulture” by anthropologists, or “permaculture” by modern activists) that Quinn writes about. This campaign to turn the world into a human world is the essence of civilization in Quinn’s work, driven by our hubris in which we believe ourselves to possess the knowledge of the gods: the knowledge of good and evil.
But of course, because we don’t actually possess this knowledge, our attempts have failed utterly, and the more we try to turn the world into a purely human place, the more miserable we make it not only for humans, but for everything else (save, perhaps, the microbes and pathogens that have flourished in domesticated hosts).
When we began the Anthropik Network, I was partcularly delighted to see such an intersection of anti-civilization writing with Gnosticism, as with Fantastic Planet. Gnosticism had interested me before I was drawn into primitivism, and if I’m a Christian at all anymore, it’s certainly only meaningful in terms of Gnosticism. So, I’d like to take this interpretation one step further, by telling the Gnostic Creation story.
In Gnostic traditions, Divinity is the Pleroma, or “Fullness,” one aspect of which is Sophia, or “Wisdom.” Sophia, though, did a very unwise thing: she wanted to create something of her own, that was not part of the Pleroma like everything else, and that she had made without it. What she created was a monster, which she hid away in shame for what she had done. Hidden away, the monster did not see his mother (wisdom), or anything else, and thus concluded that only it existed. The Apocryphon of St. John from around 200 CE and recovered with the Nag Hammadi library says this of that monster:
Now the archon who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaltabaoth, the second is Saklas, and the third is Samael. And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, “I am God and there is no other God beside me,” for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.
Yaltabaoth is a complex declension of Hebrew that translates roughly as, “Come here, child”; Samael means “blind god”; Saklas simply means “fool.” All the names of this Demiurge denote his blindness to the Pleroma, and his foolishness in failing to understand the simmering, relational nature of existence. The Demiurge believes himself something set apart, the only thing that truly exists. He imagines himself god, and this is his greatest sin, a sin of foolishness, a sin of blindness. He is not god; he is far, far removed from divinity. Yet he fancies himself god, nonetheless, and because he acts like a god without the power or wisdom of a god, he creates all the calamity and woe and suffering in our world.
How much of this were the Gnostics really aware of? Did they understand ecology and primitive lifestyles, and the relationships that bind the world to come up with their idea of the Pleroma, of “Fullness”? Probably not; they were keen on the division of spirit and matter, and in fact, they make the Demiurge the creator of the material world, infused with captured sparks of the Pleroma’s divinity (i.e., “souls”). Nor, then, were they likely to have followed much of the connection between the Demiurge they imagined, and the civilization they lived in. All the same, I cannot help but wonder how much of the ancient forager wisdom survived: in echoes of ancient myths that might have inspired the Gnostics, or even hard-wired into our hunter-gatherer brains and glimpsed in visions, dreams and trances.
Regardless of how the story was transmitted, we have in the Demiurge an almost perfect likeness of our own culture, the god of civilization, as St. Paul might have said it, “the god of this world.”
I’m right there with you, if I’m a Christian at all anymore, it’s as a kind of Christian Gnostic.
[quote]Probably not; they were keen on the division of spirit and matter, and in fact, they make the Demiurge the creator of the material world, infused with captured sparks of the Pleroma’s divinity (i.e., “souls”). [/quote]
Yes, that’s mostly true. There were a pretty wide variety of gnostic sects, tho’ and most of them [b]were[/b] extreme dualists, and others… well, not [b]quite[/b] so much so.
When it comes to Gnostic dualism, it doesn’t really seem that strange to me. When I read Gnostic texts, they seem to open up like a doorway from a divided world to an integrated one and heaven and earth spreads out before me, beautifully whole.
Comment by jhereg — 29 September 2006 @ 12:33 PM
You’re absolutely right, Jhereg, I was just afraid of getting too deep into the complex nuances and variations of Gnostic theology. One thing I love about religions that depend on personal religious experience is how they’re all over the map.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 September 2006 @ 12:40 PM
Yeah, Gnostics are a varied bunch, generally tho’, you’re spot on with the odd material vs spiritual dichotomy. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how that dichotomy got pulled into Gnosticism (although, I suppose it might have been the other way ’round). It seems a mystery to me, especially when so much of the texts seem to be so obviously animistic.
Here’s a great one from The Gospel of Thomas:
[quote](113) His disciples said to him: [quote]On what day will the kingdom come?[/quote] [quote] It will not come while people watch for it; they will not say: Look, here it is, or: Look, there it is; but the kingdom of the father is spread out over the earth, and men do not see it. [/quote][/quote]
Comment by jhereg — 29 September 2006 @ 1:09 PM
Nice post, thanks. It’s a good connection I hadn’t made before.
Comment by Martin — 29 September 2006 @ 9:52 PM
I think the dualism might be one of the more essential elements of Gnosticism, with the holistic, animistic elements being primarily a holdover from animism. The emphasis on personal religious experience means that animism is going to make its way in, since no matter how much you train people to think in dualistic terms, our direct experience is always fundamentally animist.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 30 September 2006 @ 12:37 PM
This kind of accords with my own take on the tree of knowledge: it conferred knowledge that there IS good and evil, but not necessarily the ability to distinguish them…
This demiurge business was of course the reason why the Inquisition burned all those Cathar heretics all those years ago. Proposing that the entire Catholic church was a sham organisation designed to cover up the real glory of creation just didn’t fly back then.
I had a little vision a while back, which I’d like to share. I was looking out of my window at a ploughed field. A strange feeling came over me, which I remembered having before. It was the same feeling as I used to have looking at a computer screen with nothing but a flashing cursor on it: a world of possibility. Now, it’s been a long time since I saw a computer screen like that. In 25 years I’ve watched the world of computers build a city on that ploughed field, so now only the most skillful can dig down to the earth beneath. If you want to eat, you go to a restaurant. And it occurred to me that that was like your description of civilisation, just at an accelerated pace. Now I don’t know if this transformation is inevitable, though this site suggests so and my gut instinct suggests not. But it is interesting to compare the process with the Fall, and especially the role of the Serpent, in the light of the earlier post here about the so-called Lords of the Outer Darkness.
Comment by speedbird — 2 October 2006 @ 7:58 AM
Jason,
I’d love to hear your response to Matt Savinar’s post When is the Revolution Coming? ( http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/OriginalArticles/WhenIsTheRevolutionComing.html )
His main points are that humanity is hardwired to maximize consumption and that status is closely related to how much an individual consumes. In other words, forget about having an egalitarian social structure after collapse–if there is indeed a collapse. The intense competition for status, the hottest wife, or the richest husband will continue as always.
Part of the original allure of Anthropik, when I first discovered it two summers ago, was all the talk of a non-hierarchical egalitarian society post-collapse. But after having the opportunity to think it through for a year, I’m doubtful that it will ever happen. I think Matt is correct about people being hardwired to maximize consumption and status.
(Sure, there’s a minority which is the exception to this rule but it’s so tiny as to be insigificant.)
For the past year, I have just sat back and observed what’s going on in the world. It’s truly frightening. We are being turned into a Police State. As of last week, it’s safe to say that we already are one. My belief is that the elites know that the shit is going to hit the fan over the next 10 years and are preparing for it with these new laws which can now be used against dissidents just as easily as against “terra-rists”. Add in all the surveillance and crowd control gadgetry they are stockpiling and it’s impossible to come to any other conclusion.
The vision I have of the future for North America in 2020 is a World War II scenario where rationing is in full effect, and one only gets to drive a car on official business. (For a taste of this life, rent the superb British series Folyle’s War which is set in the early years of the war.)
In other words, no way are the &^%$# in charge today going to surrender any of their powers. People who talk about living in an egalitarian tribe which has dropped English in favor of a newly concocted “gender-free language” within their life-times need to take a badly needed reality check.
As I haven’t been by Anthropik all that much over the past 6 months, I may not be aware of how your thinking has evolved regarding how things will play out over the next two decades. Perhaps it’s changed from two summers ago?
So, if you can find time to respond to Matt it would make for a lively debate.
Comment by Peter — 4 October 2006 @ 12:12 PM
I’ve heard Matt voice that one over at the Oil Drum. I’ll gladly take a charge at it, since it’s a pretty easy one to knock over. Basic, bottom line: if it’s so “hard wired,” why is it so unusual for us to do it?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 October 2006 @ 12:52 PM
I don’t see it as unusual at all. In fact I see it as the norm.
I make this observation as a bit of an “oddball” in society. By this I mean that I have never been much of a consumer and have always had a struggle with understanding the rules of the status game. This has put me at a life long disadvantage in some respects.
I blame my weakness in this area to missing a critical year of development. After the sixth grade ended, my parents dragged me off to Europe for a 16 month immersion in culture. Upon my return to the 8th grade, I was baffled by my friend’s new interest in status symbols. I recall being confused for days by a friend’s bragging about his cowboy boots costing $150 (or whatever). Why did he need to share the price with me, I wondered.
Suddenly in the 8th grade it was a whole new way of being despite the fact that I had started school with these same kids. (Up to the end of the 6th grade it was all solely about friendship. ) I never caught up with my classmates or with the public in general but that’s not to say that I don’t play the game myself to a degree. We all do.
Anyways, my point is that all around me I see this competition for resources and status. Being the lowest common denominator, it forces everyone to play by the same rules. (Think Parable of the Tribes.) There’s no escaping it.
Comment by Peter — 4 October 2006 @ 1:22 PM
Related to this issue of status seeking is this BBC documentary on the father of modern Public Relations Edward Bernays, who was a nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays is considered to be the man who turned us from a nation of citizens into a nation of consumers.
If just one man can lead the sheeple around like this, what hope is there?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2637635365191428174&q=The+Century+of+the+Self
Comment by Peter — 4 October 2006 @ 2:02 PM
If it doesn’t seem unusual, you need to take the much longer view of human history. The oldest evidence of such behavior goes back around 0.16% into our species’ history, and it appears only in food-producing cultures that make up a small minority of our cultural diversity. In other words, it’s about as common a human behavior as forming pyramids for baby elephants. Don’t mistake conquest for “naturalness,” that’s precisely what Daniel Quinn called “the Great Forgetting.” We are not humanity.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 October 2006 @ 2:23 PM
“In other words, it’s about as common a human behavior as forming pyramids for baby elephants. ”
You’ll have to excuse me for not taking any consolation in this. It’s all that I have ever known and all that I see.
Comment by Peter — 4 October 2006 @ 2:38 PM
That’s true, but we’ve both been raised in a circus.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 October 2006 @ 3:00 PM
Peter, actually, I think your story supports the idea that status seeking isn’t hard-wired into us. From what you relate, it seems very much tied to cultural conditioning, rather than any biological impulse.
Comment by jhereg — 4 October 2006 @ 3:45 PM
I’m in a pessimistic mood about this country’s future. When I was a kid growing up in the Cold War, we were constantly reminded that in the Soviet Union “people could be arrested in the middle of the night never to be seen or heard from again.” As of last week, we have the same situation in this country.
Did the American public even take 5 to discuss this? Nope. Ninety-nine percent of the population doesn’t even know about it.
Then there’s the upcoming mid-term in November. Despite Pedogate, I can’t see the Grand Old Pedos losing their grip over either senate or congress.
So on the 5th it will be business as usual with the Orwellian Nightmare continuing for another two years.
How the fuck did we end up with so many morons in this country? You would have thought that America would have tossed these assclowns out in 2004.
Comment by Anon — 4 October 2006 @ 3:53 PM
Ask and ye shall recieve, Peter. Thanks for the link to the documentary, too—it inspired Giuli on a different article she’s working on now.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 October 2006 @ 2:25 PM
Thank you.
Glad to be of service.
Comment by Peter — 7 October 2006 @ 3:14 AM
And more importantly, who could blame us for being anthropocentric, being anthropes ourselves? Haven’t we an obligation to look out for ourselves? Of course we do! And that is why we can never know good and evil.
So if we can never know good and evil as humans, then how can people like you argue that things like hierarchy are evil? This seems to be a contradiction.
Comment by Ran — 29 December 2006 @ 9:44 AM
Ditto to Ran!
Comment by Devin — 29 December 2006 @ 10:35 AM
Ran and Devin,
There is no contradiction. What the knowledge of good and evil signifies in the Bible (or rather, what it signifies according to Quinn’s interpretation of the Bible) is the knowledge required to rule the world, whereas what Jason is talking about when he says that hierarchy is bad is simply that it’s bad for us (it puts way too much pressure on our psyche, and it’s helped us get ourselves into the current mess). Quinn never said we didn’t know what was bad for us - every creature (more or less) knows what’s good and bad for it. (But do not confuse this last statement with the much stronger claim that every creature knows what’s good and bad for its whole species in the long run.) But Quinn’s point is, nothing is good and bad, period; instead, everything is good for some and bad for others (to take Jason’s example, the Holocaust was very bad for just about all humans involved, but it was very good for various parasites). The problem lay in the fact that we tried to make the whole world so that everything is always good for us, even at the expense of everyone else. And of course, in doing so, we got, not only everyone else, but also ourselves into trouble. Quinn, for instance, says that if a quail catches a grasshopper, that’s good for the quail, but bad for the grasshopper; and if the grasshopper gets away, then that’s good for the grasshopper but bad for the quail. Now imagine the following scenario: the quails decide that they’ve had enough of grasshoppers’ getting away, and so they devise some fancy technology so that grasshoppers virtually never get away. What happens then? The quail population sky-rockets, the grasshopper population plummets, and then the quail population winds up crashing because there’s nothing left to eat. Well, that’s pretty much the situation that we’re facing now.
So to sum up… When Jason says that hierarchy is bad, he’s saying that it isn’t serving *us* well. It’s not a matter of its being good, period, or bad, period. In fact, it is very good for some, for instance, for various parasites that thrive whenever they find a dense human population; and in retrospect, it will have been very good for any species that evolve only because the mass extinction that we caused will have opened up some new niches that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (much as we never would, presumably, never have evolved had there not been for the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs). But it is very bad for humans. In the long run, it is bad for us, no question about it. In the short run, it’s causing us individually a lot of pain, but it is the only thing that’s allowing us to survive in our billions (but this of course can’t last), which is, I suppose, what keeps us from getting rid of it.
Comment by Hasha — 29 December 2006 @ 1:02 PM