In an effort to decipher our own social and planetary trajectories as they intertwine -- possibly to bring us down -- we’ve become very interested in things like dinosaurs and Roman empires. I’ve been fascinated to watch the dialogue about what the discovery of agriculture (and then walled cities which led to organized armies) have done to our humanness, which developed much earlier (in some kind of brain explosion) into a kind of thinking we now call “art” or “humanities” or even “religion” -- when people began to paint on cave walls and strew burials with flowers.
Lately some people are getting impatient with the use of the word “culture” because so many use it in a personal way to justify their “life-style” and prevent change, so let’s just say that people began to responding to circumstances in a new way. Indeed, they began to manipulate their perceptions (or vice versa) so that a simple object carried an aura or penumbra: dreams, symbolism, meanings outside time and place, poetry.
The time-line seems to be something like this: the Paleolithic (ca. 35,000-10,000 BCE) when people continued to respond to things as they were, even with the extra dimensions, by being nomadic, hunting, and gathering. Then as the glaciers withdrew and the climate stabilized, the Neolithic era began (ca. 10,000-2,000 BCE) in which humans became stationary, raising animals, planting crops, inheriting wealth within lines of descent. In short, there was a transition from adapting to conditions to trying to hold the status quo stable. The line between the two is the beginning of the Holocene.
When the glaciers began to recede, changing in particular the way water acted in the world, the art of irrigation developed, then surveying and writing (recording). For a while there was a sweet spot -- but now the interglacial period, partly due to our attempts to control, has gone beyond to something scary, the anthropocene, when humans began to change climate.
It’s not a smooth graph line. The five chronozones of the Holocene are:
The preboreal: 10,000 to 9,000 years ago before the trees came back and when humans spread over the world, including the Americas.
The boreal: 9,000 to 8,000 years ago. I assume from the name that the great forests began then, at least in Europe.
The Atlantic: 8,000 to 5,000 years ago. I presume it refers to the ocean.
The subboreal: 5,000 to 2,500 years ago, which would be when the Mediterranean religious trinity of Judaism/Christianity/Islam began, all three centered on “the book,” and governing classes.
The Subatlantic: 2,500 to the present. Does this mean the Pacific is “under” the Atlantic in some Eurocentric way? My guess is yes. The divisions were devised for north Europe by north Europeans not connected to Asia or America.
These divisions depend upon what one uses as indicators. Those above are vegetal: plant remains. Using animals is not so often done, except perhaps in the Americas where the mega-mammals are of major interest. Using humans depends on their technology, largely metallurgy, thus: the Bronze Age, 5500 years ago starting roughly from the current site of war in Iran and Iraq.
This point in time accompanies the earliest human civilizations in Asia and Africa, which then cools to the Neoglacial, sort of like today. From the 10th to the 14th centuries, it heated to the Medieval Warm Period and then cooled from the 14th to the mid-19th century in the Little Ice Age. Possibly it was the cooling that drove Euro exploration. Predictions now are that we are heating rapidly past any previous level in the Holocene.
We know that climate is affected by the atmosphere (including water vapor) and the circulation patterns of both oceans and atmosphere (the Japanese current, etc., in the thermohaline circulation of the oceans, moving both horizontally and vertically). When water is in the form of glaciers, it holds the land down and makes dams. When the glaciers melt, the land rises, pouring water into the ocean, diluting salinity. Plants and animals must evolve (if they have time) or move or simply die. A source of instant and possibly catastrophic change is “bolides” -- intervention from outer space in the form of meteorites or comets. A source of catastrophic change from the core of the planet is volcanism. I see it simply because I'm largely uneducated about the technical complexities.
Because I read so eclectically -- having evaded academic monitors -- I read Paul Shepherd with his longing for hunting/gathering alongside Peter Gay, “Education of the Senses: the Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud.” No one is as interested in preventing social change as the “Bourgeois.” In order to maintain their comfortable and righteous status quo, they criminalize, stigmatize, imprison, and even kill. They insist on monogamy for others while keeping mistresses and patronizing brothels.
I love this quote from Gay. (p. 31) “The need to live by secure, sharply etched classifications is buried deep in the human mind and one of its earliest demands; simplicity allays anxieties by defeating discriminations. Real situations are rarely clear-cut, real feelings often nests of ambivalence. This is something the adult learns to recognize and to tolerate, if he [sic] is fortunate; it is a strenuous insight from which he will regress at the first opportunity. That is why the liberal temper, which taught men to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, the most triumphant achievement of nineteenth-century culture, was so vulnerable to the assaults of cruder views of the world, to bigotry, chauvinism, and other coarse and simplistic classifications.”
I’ll suggest this: the Holocene is the geological period when climate allowed the responsive human to stay in place, developing domestic animals and dependable storable crops. This stability allowed a highly productive and hierarchical culture that supported science to an incredible degree, but abandoned the whole for the sake of the specialized part. By now the masses of individuals who are unsheltered, exposed to disease, starved, bombed, confined, excluded and drowned have calloused the compassion of late Holocene global society. Even those who remain responsive are severely tested by the exhaustion (literally) of natural resources and overwhelmed by the Hobbsian prosperity ethics of international corporations.
The difference between Tim Barrus and myself is that his style is nomadic: he is a hunter/gatherer in the jungle of society. My style is domestic: here I stay in grain and cattle country. Where we share is that towering internal cumulus of vision (sometimes stained by diminishing light) that preceded the Holocene and defined humans as we know them.
Call it art, call it the liberal temperament, call it creativity; it is quite different from the bourgeois class-ridden use of art for status and wealth. It despises the status quo and reaches for the beyond, the as-yet-unimagined, the edge of the cosmos. A global movement in this direction started in the Sixties and Seventies. Let’s go back to resume this wave of energy, rudely interrupted by the bourgeois. I live here because of the Blackfeet who were so recently hunter/gatherers. It is just under the surface in them. They are remembering how to be a tribe instead of a chief.
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