Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

We have been dismantling ancient institutions that no longer serve, and are tentatively trying out others. Our species is becoming an intercommunicating whole, with powerful economic and cultural bonds linking up the planet. Our problems, increasingly, are global in venue, admitting only global solutions. We have been uncovering the mysteries of our past and the nature of the Universe around us. We have invented tools of awesome power. We have explored the nearby worlds and have set sail for the stars. Granted, prophecy is a lost art and we are not vouchsafed an unclouded view of our future. Indeed, we are almost wholly ignorant of what is coming. But by what right, what argument can pessimism be justified? Whatever else may be hidden in those shadows, our ancestors have bequeathed us—within certain limits, to be sure—the ability to change our institutions and ourselves. Nothing is preordained.

We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologizing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections. Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows. In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home.

EPILOGUE

It is not possible to be ignorant of the end of

things if we know their beginning.

THOMAS AQUINAS

Summa Theologica¹

We have described the Earth before humans set foot upon it. We have tried to understand something about our ancestors, using as our guide the fossil record and the gorgeous panorama of life that now graces our planet. While there are still vast numbers of missing pages in our orphan’s file, the progress of science has enabled us to glimpse a few of the lost or forgotten entries—perhaps even many of the important items. But we have explored only the early chapters of the file. Its key central section—chronicling the dawn of our species and its evolution up to the invention of civilization—is the subject of the next book in this series.

Notes

Prologue

THE ORPHAN’S FILE

1. Attributed to Empedocles by Sextus Empiricus, in Against the Mathematicians, VII, 122–125, in Jonathan Barnes, editor and translator, Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 163.2. Science and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). Schrödinger was one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics.3. In many scientific accounts of the origin of the human species, there is a story something like this. (Cf., e.g., Misia Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991].) But rather than being imposed on the evidence, we hold that it flows naturally out of the evidence. Human origins have in fact been very humble. We have in fact, by many standards, become the dominant species on the planet, and done it partly by dint of our own efforts. We are in fact profoundly ignorant of many of the details of our origins. It is natural to represent ourselves in metaphor as a favored child brought up in obscure circumstances, and then as hero venturing forth into the world to seek our identity. The principal danger of the metaphor would be if we thought our success due to one generation or people or nation; or if our success were to blind us to the danger we have placed ourselves in.4. Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953), p. 108.5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov

(1880), translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), Book Six, Chapter 3, p. 318.6. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 4, 5.7. A similar metaphor was employed in The Origin of Species, Chapter 10, where Charles Darwin compared the geological record to “a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history, we possess the last volume alone … Only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page only here and there a few lines.”

Chapter 1

ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN