“They lived like gods, having carefree
hearts,
Apart and aloof from toil and grief: no
miserable
Old age was upon them, and, always the same
as far as their feet and hands were concerned,
They enjoyed themselves in good times without
any troubles at all.”
Hesiod, Works
and Days (8th century BCE)
The archaeology gallery1 began,
as one might have expected it to, with prehistoric stuff. Stone tools.
Spearheads. A tiny little carved object that is apparently the oldest piece of
artwork known to humankind, though I must admit I struggled to recognise in it
the female figure that it’s believed to represent.2 I knew going in
that this wasn’t going to be my favourite bit; for one thing, there weren’t any
inscriptions to stare at, or named characters, or corroboration from literary
sources – any of that story-creating stuff that tends to pique my interest. But
what did pique my interest in the prehistory section was a comment made
by my friend to the effect that, wow, to think humans spent all those aeons as
hunter-gatherers, living free and easy, only to then imprison ourselves with
the invention of agriculture – a recent innovation, in the grand scheme of
things. And it’s been all downhill from there.
 |
| I have just discovered that a nice chap called Gary Todd has archived a huge number of history-related photographs he’s taken (including this one of stone tools from the Israel Museum) online here, https://worldhistorypics.weebly.com/, and get this, they’re all public domain. Gary, you star. |
The comment piqued my interest because, as
I told her, that isn’t how I’m inclined to view things at all. The past few
millennia of human progress strike me as, well, progress. She elaborated (with
another of my friends also chiming in too). Apparently research suggests that life
expectancy for prehistoric hunter-gatherers was long, and shortened with the
emergence of cities because the more concentrated population facilitated the
spread of disease. Apparently the two sexes were of pretty equal status in
prehistoric societies: it was only after people started acquiring property that
men began oppressing women and claiming ownership over them, because they
needed guaranteed heirs to whom to pass on their possessions. Apparently, the
scientists say, your average hunter-gatherer only needed to do about four hours’
work in the day in order for the needs of the tribe to be supplied; the rest of
the time, these guys could just hang out having fun, telling stories, creating
tiny pieces of carved artwork if the fancy so took them. And we’re all trying
to get back to that, all the time, my friend claimed. Every new labour-saving
device or technology we try is an attempt to claw back something of the leisure
of that hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but every development just augments the
problem. Emails, for instance, were supposed to streamline and simplify the
process of communication with colleagues, but what’s actually happened is that
we all now spend vast swathes of our time answering annoying emails. We think
we’re digging a tunnel out of the prison that is work, but all we’re really
digging is a new cell of the same prison.
It was a perspective I’d never heard before,
and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe there was some
kernel of truth in it. Sometimes it does seem as if every new
technological development that’s supposed to make life easier actually makes it
more of a pain – just get me started on the university finance system, for
instance. And there is something wistfully, primally appealing about a
simpler, less urban, less high-tech lifestyle – a sort of untainted
wholesomeness, you know. But at the same time, I love living in a world of
progress. I love living in a world of the pursuit of knowledge, of pulling
things apart to see how they work and putting them back together again in new
ways; a world where you can have a dream and build it in reality, where you can
face up against what’s considered impossible and carve bold new chunks of
possible out of it. Hunter-gatherers might have only had to work four hours in
the day, but they could never have, I don’t know, written Dvořák’s
New World Symphony,3 or built the Hungarian Parliament Building,4
or animated Your Name, or made cookie dough and ice cream, or crafted a
hat like the one I bought in Lyme Regis three years ago (to select just a few
of my favourite extraordinarily beautiful things). They could never have explored
the depths of the oceans or walked on the moon. And sure, they might have lived
longer before they started living in cities, but a serious infection would
doubtless still have constituted a death sentence without antibiotics. They
might have lived longer before they started living in cities, but last century,
humanity went toe-to-toe with arguably the deadliest disease in history, and
only blooming went and won.5 Annihilated it from the face of
the earth, indeed. So yeah, progress, I maintain, is still progress.
But the fact remains, and niggles, that,
well, the modernist project failed. We progress, we learn and we dream and we
build and we win, but our advances do seem to cause as many problems as they
solve. We have striven for utopia, but we have never reached it, and the
corpses of those to whom our experiments in progress have not been merciful are
piled high under our feet. Given that our capacity for violence and destruction
has increased with every step forward, I understand where the disillusionment
that suggests we stop trying and go back the other way is coming from.
Mind you, I might frame this stuff in terms
of modernism, but wrestling with the tension between simplicity and technology,
rural and urban, nature and culture, is far from a modern pastime. In the third
year of my undergraduate degree, I wrote an essay about the relationship
between nature and culture in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, a Greek novel
written in the second century CE; my Latin tutee and I are currently
discovering the prominence of the same theme in Horace’s Satires,
published in the first century BCE; and, on a slightly different note, Hesiod’s
Works and Days, probably eighth century BCE, describes a former Golden
Age when human beings lived far longer and didn’t have to do any work, as I
quoted above (my own translation). Maybe we’ve been wondering to what extent
technological development is a good thing, harking back to the utopia of a
simpler past, and trying to find the balance between nature and culture, ever
since we were using those stone tools I saw in the archaeology gallery.
 |
| I like this depiction of Daphnis and Chloe by Paris Bordone because of how he included Eros asleep at the side there, to show that the pair haven’t quite figured out what to do about the fact that they’re in love yet. |
So what’s the answer? Where do the
scriptures stand on this question? Well, for starters, you’ve probably noticed
that the paradise granted to our first ancestors to live in was a garden; that’s
actually what ‘paradise’ means. So that would seem to be a tick on the ‘nature’
side. But then again, the human was put in the garden to work it and keep it;
in fact, the way that the initial lack of bushes and small plants on the earth
is explained as being partially because there were no human beings to work the
soil, at least implies that some sort of human agricultural activity was a
desideratum so that the earth might better fulfil its potential.6 Hmm.
What about after the fall? It’s the descendants of Cain – archetypally unrighteous
Cain – who are spoken of in connection with technological developments like
musical instruments and metallurgy. But then the ark, built by righteous Noah
and representing the salvation of humanity, sounds as if it was quite a
technologically complicated building project for the time: three hundred cubits
long, three separate decks, the whole thing covered in bitumen. Hmm again. What
about the matter of cities? The OG city in the Bible is Babel – that is,
Babylon (same word in the Hebrew, I can’t fathom why the translations don’t
render it consistently) – and it’s definitely Very Bad. It’s founded in direct and
conscious opposition to God’s command to the postdiluvian humans that they
spread out across the earth; in a lack of faith that he’ll keep his promise
never to flood the earth again (why else did they want that massive tower?);
and in self-elevation of the builders, who want to make a name for themselves
(an idiom that, pleasingly, works just as well in English as in Hebrew). It’s also
the beginning of the kingdom of Nimrod, whose name means ‘we shall rebel’ and
who is described as a ‘mighty man’, a title which at this stage in the
narrative definitely recalls the Nephilim produced by the union of the sons of
God and the daughters of man. Bad bad bad. So cities are bad, then? Well, yes,
except for the fact that when you flip to the other end of the book and find
the description of the perfect new heavens and new earth that God will create,
its most prominent feature is new Jerusalem – the holy city, coming down
from God out of heaven.7
The problem, it must be concluded, isn’t
technology, or urbanisation, or culture, in and of themselves. The problem is
humans. Humans build a city and it’s bad, because it’s done in disobedience of
God; but God builds a city and it’s good, because everything he does is good.
And our disobedience isn’t brought on by our technological circumstances; it’s
brought on by our sinful nature. We disobeyed God when there were no cities and
we still disobey him now that the earth is covered in them. We disobey God at
every stage of development. The reason our progress doesn’t make things better
isn’t because it’s our progress, but because it’s our progress.
Pessimistic of me? Not really. Not in view
of the perfect new heavens and new earth that are coming. On the contrary, it’s
very freeing to know that it’s not either our technological advances, or our
lack of them, that make life and work difficult for us; that it isn’t on us to
either learn and dream and build until we fashion utopia for ourselves, or to
throw off the shackles of our ancestors’ choices to recapture the lost golden
age of longevity and leisure. The reason life and work are difficult is because
we live in a world full of sin, and there isn’t a thing we can do ourselves to
get rid of that sin. But if we accept Jesus’ mind-bogglingly merciful death on
our behalf, and lay the burden of our sins on him to be paid for and brought to
nothing, then we become ambassadors, in the present world, of the true utopia
and the true golden age to come – which, unlike Hesiod’s, will never end. Behold,
the LORD creates a new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not
be remembered, nor come into mind. Live as if you believe that, brother or
sister of mine; live as if that’s where your hope is. It’s all uphill from
here.
Footnotes
1 At the Israel Museum. Did I mention yet how insanely cool it
was? https://www.imj.org.il/en/node/130
2 I also remember it from the first episode of Civilisations,
which I massively recommend: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p05xxp5j/civilisations.
It’s basically a nine-hour history of the world told through the lens of art;
now, I don’t care about art any more than your average person, but the
connections that Civilisations made, the great big story it placed this
stuff in, really took hold of me.
3 My gosh it’s wonderful. Try the fourth movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGdtkUiKaA8.
4 Currently up there with the Founders’ Building at Royal
Holloway on my list of favourite bits of architecture. I’m sure you’re capable
of Googling the pics yourself.
5 Smallpox, in case you weren’t sure. My new favourite YouTube
series, Extra History, will happily tell you all about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke6tT3_QTuM.
6 I’ll give you Genesis 2 here, and you can just click forward
through the next few chapters to cover the references in the best part of the
rest of the paragraph: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+2&version=ESVUK.
7 Revelation 21 – but you already knew that: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+21&version=ESVUK.
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