Nature and Culture 1: The Beginning

“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 (8^th 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.

Blessed Dissatisfaction

“I’d stay here, happy forever, playing games forever, and soon I’d forget my mom, and my quest, and maybe even my own name.”

Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief (2005)

There’s a bit in the ninth book of Homer’s Odyssey where he tells the story of how he and his men once arrived on an island filled with people who subsisted on eating lotus flowers. Odysseus sends out two scouts and a herald to make an assessment of the place; contrary to usual, the inhabitants plot no violence against them, but only offer them to partake of their tasty floral food. Having done so, the three men lose any desire to report back to Odysseus or ever to leave the island at all. They forget all about going home – going home being kind of the entire point of the Odyssey, if you didn’t know – and prefer to stay where they are eating lotuses. In the end, Odysseus has to physically drag them kicking and screaming back to the boat.¹

 

Probably not that kind of lotus, actually. It was apparently more likely a kind of jujube.

In Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series – which I gather, as a Classicist, I’m really supposed to hold in contempt, but then I’ve never been very good at doing what Classicists are supposed to do, and I’m a big Percy Jackson fan – the island of the lotus-eaters is reimagined as a Las Vegas casino, which is so much fun to spend time in that time really does fly, and Percy is dismayed to find that what he thought was a few hours spent there was actually a few days.² In the only Asterix story to go from screen first to page second rather than vice versa, The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, the lotuses themselves are dispensed with, but the Isle of Pleasure is still a pretty obvious reworking of the trope, given that the whole of the challenge posed by that particular task is to not forget about progressing with the journey at hand and not stay on the island forever.³ In the final instalment of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, The End, the motif makes a yet less explicit appearance in the form of the island where the Baudelaires end up shipwrecked, run by a man called Ishmael who keeps his subjects drugged on coconut cordial so that they never have any desire to leave, or indeed to question his governance.⁴ But there’s a heck of a lot else going on in The End that I might want to write about at some point, so as far as the rest of this post is concerned, I’ll confine myself to the previous examples.

As far as the matter of plot is concerned, the point of the island of the lotus-eaters (or its reworked equivalent) is as an obstacle hindering the heroes from completing their quest. I mean, that’s the nature of a quest, really: they’d be a bit boring and not very epic if there was never anything getting in the way of the heroes’ pursuit of their goal. But the lotus-eaters are different to most obstacles in that they’re not, as Odysseus takes care to emphasise, plotting any violence against the questers. They’re different in that you can’t tell they’re an obstacle. They’re different in that, instead of barring your way to your goal, they make you stop caring about reaching it. They’re different in that instead of refusing to allow you to satisfy your ambitions, they just give you different ambitions instead – and satisfy those ones.

The lotus-eaters are satisfied. They’re perfectly content. They’re loving life. And yet it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain who isn’t drugged up on lotuses that this is not a desirable state in which to exist. When Odysseus’ men tasted the flowers, they lost any sense of duty to their friends, or of the greater purpose with which they were occupied, or of where they really belonged. Existence as a lotus-eater might be satisfying, but you’d be hard pressed to call it meaningful.

Odysseus had to forcibly remove his lotus-eating companions from the island in order for them to recover their sense of the bigger picture. Percy Jackson and Asterix, in their own versions of the encounter, aren’t so lucky as to have anyone to do that for them. What snaps Percy out of his trance is realising that the other patrons of the Lotus Casino, though of not dissimilar age to his preteenaged self, all hail from different time periods, outfits and slang to match, but haven’t the faintest idea that they’ve been there playing games for literally decades; he recovers his fellow-quester Annabeth’s attention by making her think about spiders, which she really hates. What persuades Asterix and Obelix to leave the Isle of Pleasure, on the other hand, is of a different nature. The conversation goes like this:

“And now you’ve seen our island, the isle you will never leave again,” says the High Priestess to Obelix. “Your lightest wish shall be our command, forever and ever. What would you like, bold warrior?”

“Some food,” is Obelix’s immediate answer.

“Some food?” The High Priestess is clearly taken aback, but after some minor protests composes herself and offers: “All right, we can provide nectar and ambrosia.”

“Nectar?” Obelix is not impressed. “No fear, no fear, oh no, none of that boring old stuff; I want a nice wild boar. Wild boar’s very tasty.”

“You call nectar and ambrosia boring?” echoes the High Priestess in disbelief. “But that is the food of the gods themselves! Well, are you gods, or aren’t you?”

“I suppose we may be gods, but we eat wild boar,” persists Obelix.

“But – but there aren’t any wild boars on this island,” responds the High Priestess helplessly.

“What? There aren’t any boars, and you expect me to stay with you for good? You must be off your head!” concludes Obelix.

 

A nice wild boar.

Obelix wasn’t satisfied with the Isle of Pleasure, because, for all its myriad charms, it couldn’t offer him the one thing he craved most of all. And so he left. That’s always what our heroes have to do when they encounter some iteration or other of lotus-eaters: they have to get the heck off that island and back to the real business at hand. But suppose for a moment that the real business at hand involved staying on the island – not just for the sake of it, to enjoy yourself like everybody else, but for some other, greater purpose. Suppose you saw behind the curtain to how thoroughly messed up the whole thing was, and knew that you’d never be able to get the things you really wanted here, and yet you had to stay anyway. Suppose you remembered that you wanted to go home, to reach the end of your quest, but the very nature of the quest was that it demanded your remaining where you were – however dissatisfied that might leave you.

Imagine Obelix having to stay on the Isle of Pleasure despite its wild boar deficit. Hard to conceive of I know, but I reckon he’d basically have two options as to how to go about it: either he could continue to pine after wild boar and forfeit any chance at all at contentment, or he could give up on that and learn to like nectar and ambrosia instead. It’s not as if he hasn’t been enjoying himself on the Isle of Pleasure; there’s a lot about it that he likes. Instead of putting up with the continued the frustration of his desires, he could allow prolongued exposure to his environment to foster in him a different set of desires – desires that that environment could satisfy. It’s hard work, after all, maintaining a longing for something one can’t have. It’s not an appealing task. It’s not fun. On the contrary, it’s profoundly dissatisfying.

But then, according to our Lord, there’s a blessing in being profoundly dissatisfed if that dissatisfaction results from a desire for righteousness.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, in that theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.

Blessed are the mourning, in that they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the gentle, in that they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those hungry and thirsty for righteousness, in that they shall be fed.⁵

You can chop the Beatitudes quite neatly in half, I think:⁶ this is the first half, and its overall concern is with people who lack something and are aware of the fact. (The second half is more about how the designated ‘blessed’ relate to other people: the fact that it’s also four verses, with the last one pertaining to righteousness, is a large part of what leads me to make the division.) Blessed are those who can see how deficient they are in spiritual terms; blessed are those who lament what’s wrong with the world; blessed are those who are soft and lowly and vulnerable; blessed are those who harbour a desperation for a righteousness that hasn’t yet been fully manifested. Blessed are the dissatisfied.

One of the deficiencies, I think, of the ‘Christian hedonism’ model spearheaded by John Piper – God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him⁷ – is that, if portrayed without the necessary concern for nuance, it can ignore the fact that, by the very nature of the thing, to derive one’s greatest satisfaction from the kingdom of God and his righteousness is to derive one’s greatest satisfaction from something that one sort of doesn’t have yet. To place the source of one’s greatest desires in heaven is to forfeit any chance at contentment on earth. To be most satisfied in God whom we don’t yet see face to face is, in the present time, to be dissatisfied. And so the Christian life done right is a life of profound dissatisfaction. Not exactly an easy sell to anyone who’s acquired a taste for lotuses.

But still we’re to do our best to sell it. And here is the heart of that greater purpose that requires our continued presence on the island of our dissatisfaction: some people are content with their lotuses, with the pleasures of the present age, and don’t see the future homecoming they’re missing out on. When Percy Jackson and his companions managed to extricate themselves from the Lotus Casino, surely a pang of sorrow was warranted for the time-lapsed kids they left behind there? Percy and Annabeth had realised how meaningless it all was; they knew that there were things beyond this little world they were in that were of impossibly greater importance; they perceived what a sad and terrible thing it would be not to know that – but they didn’t tell anyone else before they ran.

Maybe they didn’t think anyone would believe them. Or care. But it had to be worth a shot, didn’t it? Plus, if they had stopped to tell anybody, their argument would definitely have been made more persuasive by their own dissatisfaction with all the joys and entrancements of the Lotus Casino: a total lack of regard for the things these kids were devoting all their time to would be a jolt, wouldn’t it, a compelling witness to the authenticity of the belief that more important things were to be found elsewhere. What are nectar and ambrosia to someone who really wants a nice wild boar? Let the world be taken aback at what you think is really important; let it marvel, and, God willing, let it come to see the truth of your perspective.

So live as one dissatisfied with the world and all it offers. Live as one whose profoundest satisfaction simply isn’t available on this island. Live as one who remembers, amid every variety of lotus on the market – money and fame and status and relationships and achievement and legacy and whatever else they’re trying to entice you with – that there’s a far greater purpose, a homecoming for the rescued people of God, that will be satisfying to a degree of perfection light years beyond what any of us could dream of in the present age. This is your quest, to love him and serve him and make him known, even on the island of the lotus-eaters: after all, you were one of them once, until he dragged you kicking and screaming to freedom.

Be dissatisfied. It’s not an appealing prospect, I grant you. It’s not fun. It’s not the kind of Christian life they sell you when they quote ‘life to the full’ and tell you everything’s a good gift to be enjoyed. It’s not easy. But the point is, brothers and sisters, that our Lord Jesus Christ calls it blessed.

Footnotes

¹ Here’s the story so you can check that I’m paraphrasing accurately: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D9%3Acard%3D82.

² I’m not going to link to the relevant clip from the 2010 film based on the book, because the film is not good. I really liked it when I first saw it, but that was basically because I thought the concept was brilliant, and then I went and read the books and realised how much better they executed that brilliant concept. Why don’t you enjoy some beautiful artwork of the series’ major characters instead: http://rickriordan.com/characters/.

³ This one I will give you a clip for – or strictly speaking, I’ll give you the whole film, with thanks to the kind soul who uploaded it to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOhRhq6Pr6g.

⁴ The Netflix adaptation is now fully available; I enjoyed it very much: https://www.netflix.com/title/80050008.

⁵ That’s Matthew 5, of course: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+5&version=ESVUK.

⁶ They’re called the Beatitudes because beatus (or beati in the plural) is Latin for ‘blessed’, and hence beatitudo means ‘blessedness’. But it would be a little unwieldy for the tongue to call them the Blessednesses.

⁷ A maxim I’m sure you’re familiar with from Desiring God: https://www.desiringgod.org/. I don’t disagree with it, just to be clear; it’s actually a really helpful approach. But every approach has its weaknesses, and this is Christian hedonism’s.