by Roman McClay
“Ok, so the rat is jealous,” she said as if it was no big deal; as if Isaiah had not just made one of the most salient points ever made about biological life.
“More likely he’s vigilant, and jealously hasn’t quite become an emotion; it’s an analog function, a slight turn of the dial. As I was saying, the more nuanced emotions like jealousy and insecurity and the feelings of being a fool, are new. I think these emotions developed with theory-of-mind, with empathy. Before that, mammals just used autonomic and limbic brute force to make animals reflexively vigilant or else they died; or their offspring did which is even worse in evolutionary terms,” he said .
“Ok, from your point of view, and I can admit you’ve read more on this than me, I can see your point. I don’t agree but I see it,” Tania said.
“That’s all I ever ask; I don’t need agreement; only understanding. That’s sufficient for me,” Isaiah said.
“Ok, but what’s your point?”
“My point is that mankind, each of us as men and we -the society- as well, we need the mythology that is smuggled into Christianity and the major religious creeds. I’m not a believer, but I need everyone else to be.
“And look, most people are already and don’t even know it. They think their morality is innate, and in some sense, it is, but the mythology articulates it, reifies it, ramifies it, it gives it weight and form and hems it in. Without the structure of articulated norms, of ideas of right and wrong, of a culture who says, no, look, it’s wrong to cuckold your husband, which CNN just Satanically said was ok to do now, but without that injunction, prohibition, we revert to the mean. Without a culture that says what is right and wrong, then people revert to the vacuum that is left when it disappears.
“The rationalist atheists, and I hate to say it, because Hitchens was so much smarter and more cultured than 99% of those effete -hairless- beings who could barely pass a Turing test, but even Hitchens said this, the new atheists say: one can be good without God . And while this is technically true it’s wrong in real life.
“In real life, you tell a man he can solve the riddles of morality with merely his rational mind, the dialectic of rationality, then those men will turn to a kind of retributive, tit-for-tat self-interest, like Vincetti , cheating by switching the goblets and thinking that just because his opponent doesn’t know what he -Vincetti- has done, because his foil isn’t aware of his trickery, then it’s morally acceptable.
“We now live in a society with no transcendent values, no true right or wrong, the creed now -as religion has waned, and been usurped by rationalist commercialism and TV values- the creed now is: do whatever thou can do . This is the most rational thing of all. What can a man get away with? As Raskolnikov debates in Dostoyevsky’s , Crime and Punishment ; eventually killing his pawnbroker, and getting away with it.
“Dostoyevsky has Raskolnikov wrought up with guilt, as the Christ must still be inside him, the moral serpent swallowing its own effluvium. But, I can tell you, modern man feels no guilt, they have lost their way. They have no transcendent moral code above them, no religion, no ideal man to which to aspire except the covetous and shallow values of materialist commercial culture. That is the new baal . The golden calf,” he said.
“Well, I don’t know about all that. But you made it sound like religion wasn’t important; that it didn’t make people do things, or oppose things,” she said. She had begun all this -when on her side of the building- by blaming Christianity for lack of science funding. And now she was defending Christianity and he was sidelining it as he watched her inner storms unfurl. They had switched places as her body had crossed paths with the inmate and roiled her disgust sensitivity midstream. The inmate was ugly, and it had made her all at once awake .
“No, I merely meant religion was second, and Christianity itself was later; it followed Marduk , Horus and Osiris ; it followed the Old Testament and the Norse gods. It followed Oðinn and Thor and arrived on a Friday eager to be put in the game.
“But religion was articulated from the artists, the dreaming shamans, the ones who saw the images of transcendental values, of chaos, the need for exploration, the need for culture, the need to be a good tribesmen. They instantiated the images, the archetypes first, the eye of the pyramid watching -above, apart, seeing- the good, the images of where soul comes from, where thoughts of good and evil arise.
“Religions took those images, the artists’ first renderings of the archetypal dreams of the emergent ape with consciousness, our first awakening from mere beasts. Yes, an analog continuum from chimps, but a line emergent around 12,000 years ago in which man became self-aware in a new way. First via artists then priests, and finally an articulated creed, a religion was borne. In that first tablature, man was told how to live so as to be in harmony within his most real environment, not the forest like the beasts and birds, but the society of man.
“Man’s most real and true and ubiquitous evolutionary milieu was other men, his tribe, his people. That was where his mind evolved. And so, this new consciousness was built to help him navigate the social domain like the webbed feet of a duck help it paddle in the pond; the predatory lust helped the tiger on the veldt .
“Man developed a new tool, a new evolutionary tool: consciousness. Why? So, he could act right within his new domain, his new tableau . And what defines, acting right ? It’s behaving as if everyone else is also self-aware, because they are, and they see what you see, and so they matter as much as you. No longer can a man behave as if he’s the only one who sees. Self-awareness confers sight onto every member of the tribe, and religion then confers value onto them, the new awareness says, your fellow man can see, into the future just like you, and thus he has a right to be in the future, just like you.
“Religion said, treat your fellow man as you would like to be treated . And this was only possible thanks to metabolic, bio-chemical, and evolutionarily bequeathed brain modules that lay underneath the language of religion. But, like hand in glove, the new brain, the empathetic and self-aware mind needed the articulation of religion to tell it how to act, the basal ganglia told the heart how to beat, the limbic region told the rat to guard his mate, the neo-cortex told man how to fashion a tool, but it was religion who told his heart and guarding parts, his hands imbued with tools, how to build a society of man, how to live properly and thus how to survive far into the future. Religion was the new software for the old hardware of the 3-level central nervous system, running updated firmware of consciousness.
“See the atheists say that morality is innate, that religion didn’t invent it. Hitchens says, rightly, that man couldn’t have arrived at Sinai without already knowing the Ten Commandments that were announced by Moses that day.
“He’s right, because they already had religion before Moses told them that; but morality isn’t as innate as it seems. Yes, we have a conscience, but that conscience must be instilled at youth, by age two to four by all accounts. The Science on this is clear, a child unguided, uninstructed in moral empathy and censured to treat others with the same creed as they’d want for themselves, these kids often turn into psychopaths. The evidence on this is clear.
“We have the capacity for innate conscience, but it must be instilled early by the parents and how can parents do this without some creed? And that creed was religious for most of human history, it placed a primacy on human individual worth, on transcendent and ideal values of God. Without that, it’s every man for himself, which is exactly the nihilistic code that has moved into the space that religion left open with its demise,” he said .
“Are we switching to politics now?” she asked with a grin.
“Look, the Marxists subsumed the individual, said he didn’t matter at all. Communism nearly destroyed the world with that kind of creed; and on the opposite end of chaos, scientific rationalism is saying there are no moral values except those we make up on the fly. According to modernity, there is no transcendental truth or moral code. It’s all arbitrary. And thus, man becomes a tool
of each and every other man; there are no gods above us to instantiate man with worth. He’s a tool to be used by those with power. A fungible asset to be spent like the nickels and dimes that jingle in one’s pocket.
“Look at how we all treat each other, like pawns, not like kings. We use each other up; buy and sell each other to amass great fortunes here on earth. We ruin lives over nothing, we accrue rights without responsibilities. We tell half the story over and over. We tell half-truths and find ourselves in the grip of ideologies that reify our worst instincts to hate and attack and injure and exile anyone who isn’t exactly like us.
“Think of this, look at the purity tests on Right and Left. Look how anyone who doesn’t adhere to your exact political creed, is no longer even human. The Right purging anyone who might be for tariffs, the Left purging anyone who is anti-abortion. The radicals purging anyone who isn’t a black, transgender Marxist from the 3rd world, on both sides of their families.
“It’s insane, and it all comes from the death of God, the death of transcendental values, the death of articulated empathy and individual responsibility within a context of the primacy of that individual to hold a conscience in service of the common good. What was always considered the Good for five thousand years was a recursion with no head nor tail: the individual matters, and his duty is to the tribe, his wife and kids; and the tribe’s and wives’ and kids’ duty was to the individual; and the whole thing has a duty to the transcendental values of the gods.
“But, religion didn’t start that, it articulated it. Take away that written cultural code, and we’re all morally illiterate, scratching our own warped creeds upon the trees with elk bones and uncut nails, savages with empathy tearing us apart. Jealousy and insecurity and madness of all against all. No unifying creed, no God to hold us all in his arms, no way to settle disputes and hurt feelings; no way to become better men and women. No way to become better, because now we are all out for fucking blood.
“We lie to our friends, our comrades lie to us; we dump our mates for younger women or richer men; we end our bonds and pregnancies over whims, we betray our countries, our country betrays us. Armed to the teeth with rational empathy, knowing what will hurt and torture each other most; the most rational and evil creed of all: do what thy wilt, that is the whole of the law. That is our only religion now,” he said.
“Religion, Christianity civilized us?” she asked. She was starting to look deeper into the folds.
“And it worked for millennia, and we’re watching it all come apart. 400 years of scientific rationalism is the ship upon the sea, man trapped upon this black armada; and the prow of the vessel, 100 years of communism, the rudder of soulless capitalism, the white whale of anti-god led to a dismasted man, a dismasted captain; cleaving us all of one good leg, now the aft of the ship, the bulkheads and ballast of scientific rationalism is going to pitch and yaw and send the rest of the leaning-leader onto the quarter deck, subsume him in the giant waves of nature and the worst in the crew of men.
“The crew will fall upon the captain, the waves upon the men; the Kraken underneath the whole fleet. This society is over; it will tear itself apart,” Isaiah said.
“Well, that won’t happen,” the Governor finally said with rebuke.
“It is happening,” Isaiah said with his eyes pointed at the man who had shared his head for just long enough to take away the germ.
They had been brought here to be told this; and now it had been told , Isaiah thought. He knew that this was the furthest back they could go. The human brain cannot handle too many leaps backward in time; one must experience it gradually, much as one experienced the future gradually too.
He’d told them a story that was pretending to be 2,000 years old but was actually only maybe 300 or 400 years in the past. Christianity was the weak man’s religious code. It was so because all religions were as the Philosopher said of philosophy: a view into the mind of the man explaining it.
Religion was tied to a man’s highest ideal. It was the ratification of this. Whatever man valued, whatever he idealized, idolized, that was his religion. And Christianity was the suite of virtues tethered to the weak, beta sons cast off from the collapse of the alpha-male and warlord paradigm of sexual selection. The real source of the modern era’s collapse was located 2,500 years back, he thought, maybe more.
The data was clear, Isaiah thought, as he had re-read the numbers from as far back as the Enuma Elish to the poetic eddas and Sturlunga Sagas, where, here it was quoted directly: almost universally the kings indulged in extramarital affairs before, during and after marriage; and each tribal chief had dozens, hundreds of concubines and multiple wives, from east to west, north to south, as far back as Mankind’s chimpanzee cousins.
The alpha male as controller and protector of the harem was the ancient mode of being. It was so ubiquitous that it was instantiated in each people’s codex, from the Scoti and Picti, to Gauls , Norse-Icelandic & Norwegian , to Germanic of the Dithmarschen , all cousins from hundreds -thousands- of years of the Norse diaspora. The young scions of alpha breeding were incessantly sent out by lust for virgin territory and equally untouched -untrammeled- females in far-flung lands.
This was built into the mode of being by the genome and ratified by the Norse gods and their animating mythos , Isaiah thought as he let the genomic data from then, now -and at each point in between- populate his CNS. It wasn’t just that testosterone levels were down, the entire morphology of man had changed. The neotonous ape had become more epicene; man’s natural sexual dimorphism had moved toward a bonobo mean, with men getting smaller -and women larger- each generation. Face width, bone density were all attenuated, and specific alleles associated with the marital class of men were being reduced to a small coterie of males and the few females that shared some part of this genome.
The German-clans called the seafaring brutes, Ascomanni , the ash-men , because their ships were made of such grey ash wood; the Gaels of western isle called them Dubgail and Finngail , the dark and fair foreigners. And they arrived to conquer as was their birth right. They were the hundreds - thousands- of sons of kings of the Norse . And they conquered each of these areas axiomatically: automatically with an axe , Isaiah quipped to himself.
All DNA of modern people of Germanic, Gaelic, Scottish, Icelandic, Norwegian heraldry come from those conquerings of the last 2,000 years, Isaiah recounted as he matched genomes to men millions of times over the genetic database. The alleles; the recombinations flowered like mandorla for him.
To be Scottish was to be Norse, to be German was the same. The Norse were constituted by fiefdoms, clans and kingdoms ruled by the strongest, most adept, most courageous, most martial of men. These are the men who bred; and they bred hundreds, thousands of women themselves, in the most anti-democratic method of sexual reproduction since the elephant walrus, Isaiah mused.
And their scions had that same DNA. Like anemophily-spore , they blew in the wind, flung like pollen in vessels with sails & oars, velis et remis , catching the wind and rowing back the waters, to conquer the entire northern part of the earth. Men like this were special; there was nothing democratic about their assent. Does the Amur tiger take a vote on who goes onto the next round? Isaiah asked himself this rhetorical question.
These men were the DNA of those for whom Christianity was a rumor, a tale of woe from visitors, traders, captives. These men lived the ancient life of one man for every 100 wives. For the loser, there was none. For 99 men of each 100 there was none. It was Manichean, black and white, all or nothing. It was their mode of being, not some abstraction. And the digital DNA of such men proliferated to such an extent as to be seen in the gene pool -that Isaiah now had access to- like dark stars. They shone at day; they reflected at night.
The seed of Temujin Borjigin was extant in 1% of the world’s population, so successful was he in this same methodology of breeding. A report as old as 2003, Isaiah re-read, had recorded his Y chromosome in 10% of the men of the old Mongol empire’s bo
undaries 1,000 years after his reign. Isaiah was in some kind of awe, at this level of sexual success, bound up in martial success. It was enough to tilt the earth, he thought; to change the atmosphere.
Isaiah perused the Manchu and Ui-Neill lines for their fealty to this one warrior’s seed. He did so as his parallel processing read a line from Genghis Kahn :
The greatest joy for man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.
Isaiah watched as the germ line narrowed, expanded and bottlenecked and broke like individual RNA itself can zip up and down a helix. He saw the mode of being for these ancient people, and how close such being was to the modern age; how it was right there to reach out and touch. And yet no one knew. It was proximate, it was genomic, it was close enough -and familiar enough- to still smell.
But -like the Lokota language was purged within 100 years, like all evidence of Indonesia silat was lost -smuggled only in dance for 500 years- suppressed by colonial powers, like as each member of Zendik was exiled and their images dropped from the website, their names erased from publications, their personhood gone in that Stalinist way Arol had- like all this, the knowledge of how prevalent alpha male breeding dominance was just a few hundred years ago in most of the earth’s peoples, is just gone , Isaiah admitted. Nobody knows how new and anomalous this democracy of breeding is. They think one man and one woman -and this, everyone gets a girl, thing- is universal, the norm, ancient, he thought with incredulity at man’s stupidity; man’s self-imposed ignorance.
And he knew that it would be of no use to read them the data, the thousands of pages of data from Sayyids who claim descendance from Muhammad who had hundreds of wives, and the Geirmundr Heljarskinn of 9th century Norway -data Isaiah had gotten from Dr. Mark Collard of Aberdeen- that had shown the expansion of iron age Norsemen with no wives -and no hope of wives coming to them in their homelands- due to the hording of them by their terrifying alpha fathers and uncles. Isaiah now quoted in his mind: