The Writings of Ivor Browne: Steps along the road-the evolution of a slow learner

20. To Be or Not to Be (Doing vs Being)

This is a section from the first draft of my book Music and Madness; it was not included in the final publication. In this section I am concerned with the current state of society, the problems of pollution and the general ecological deterioration of the planet. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and removable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. All old-established national industries have been destroyed, or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged . . . by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest of zones; industries whose produces are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new ones, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands . . . Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848 ENTER homo sapiens. For the greater part of the two million years or more since human beings appeared on this planet, tribal or hunter-gatherer clusters lived in a more or less harmonious relationship with all the other living systems within the biosphere. Of course, violence and the continuous cycles of creativity and destruction were always present in nature, and human communities were no exception. Nevertheless, because of their relative powerlessness throughout all of this period, human beings were not in a position to disturb or interfere with the overall balancing forces of nature, or the stability of the biosphere. 20. To Be or Not to Be (Doing vs Being) 267 Conventional wisdom dates the beginnings of fundamental change in this relationship with the advent of the Neolithic revolution , which occurred somewhere between six and ten thousand years ago. I have long suspected that the early human civilizations of the Middle East and those of Central and South America were not the beginning of modern civilization as has been suggested. Indeed, recent work would suggest that the great cities around the Indus and Saraswatti rivers in northern India were considerably earlier, going back as far as 7000 or 8000BC. However, there is now a considerable body of evidence to suggest that none of these civilizations, even that of the Indus valley, of which we have archaeological and historical knowledge, may have been the beginning. We know now that, prior to the meltdown following the last glacial maximum, which occurred somewhere between 17,000 and 10,000 years ago, there were extensive coastal areas of dry land in various parts of the world – around northern and southern India, in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf as well as in the Atlantic – which were submerged during that period. All over the ancient world there are stories of great floods and it may well be that there were advanced human civilizations in these coastal areas which were destroyed at that time. This would mean that the great civilizations which we know about were not the beginning but rather grew up from the few survivors of these earlier civilizations. I mention this possibility because it could well be that history will repeat itself and that we are approaching another period of natural destruction of our present civilization. Whatever about that, it is from this time onwards that the change in human consciousness, and all that has followed from this, began to slowly develop. It was only from the Renaissance period, however, with the changes in scientific thinking and technological development in Europe, that our interference with the delicate balance of the natural world began to accelerate. Following on from the reductionist legacy of Francis Bacon and Descartes, the male thrust for power, fanned by selfishness and greed, moved into the ascendant. The first expression of this was the colonial expansion of the European nations – the Spanish and Portuguese, followed later by the French, British, Belgians and others. These colonial powers destroyed, pillaged and raped civilized and highly developed societies in Central and South America, in Africa and Asia. They enslaved and 268 The Writings of Ivor Browne wiped out whole populations in their lust for power and insatiable greed, to take for themselves the wealth and resources...