When Western anthropologists go to non-Western societies, they are able to show how those societies are generated out of particular mythologies. The most foundational mythology that integrates a society comes out of the origin narrative. The origin narrative is a culture's story of what the human is and where we come from. Metaphorically, an origin narrative is the root of the cultural flower and as such it is the locus of production for socio-economic hierarchies. In our present order, Evolution, the continuist paradigm, is our order's founding discourse of who we are, where we have come from, and how we should live. It is the ultimate account of how things are, and is therefore the essential foundation for discourse about which things matter.
Anchoring our present social order in Evolution enables our society to experience its own hierarchies, role allocations as the realization of a true, because biologically mandated, "natural" order. (Rather than supernaturally mandated by God, gods, ancestors, etc.). From this reference point, phrases like "all men are created equal," etc., take on their actual meaning and representationÑa whole lot of rhetoric. On one hand, Evolution verifies the wealth and status of those who have competed successfully for their material well-being; on the other hand, Evolution verifies the enslavement of certain population groups to lesser degrees of evolvedness, which manifests itself in low I.Q. and its correlation of poverty. This issue was essentially unmasked by W.E.B. Dubois in 1903, but is not limited to the issue of the "Color Line" between whites/non-whites. It extends itself within the entire matrix of this order's distribution of wealth and resources.
Fundamentally, in the terms of Evolutionary discourse, the rich have proved themselves more genetically selected than the poor. That so-called blacks, or non-whites in general, live in proportionately more poverty makes absolutely logical and objective sense within the discourse of the continuist paradigm, Evolution. And though some critics might not want to face it, the social order and its concentration of resources in the hands of a ruling group seems rather normal to most of us. Although most of us are certain that "racism" is wrong, we are faced with an organization of knowledge that rigorously trains us to see our present social order as reality and our hierarchy as normal. Evidence the lack of challenge to our present disparities in resource distribution. The same goes for the destruction of the environment. No matter how much we feel it is wrong to destroy the planet, our disciplines of human biology, economics, history, etc. all legitimate it (always implicitly, and more often than not, explicitly). If the human is seen as a purely biological organism, the social order and our collective behaviors are in fact legitimate and normal.
The irony of all this is that we invented this problem for ourselves. Humans are not genetically programmed to know the world any certain way. Whereas animals know the world according to their genetic descriptive statement, humans are genetically programmed to be able to program ourselves through language. So, having defined ourselves as purely biological beings we manifest this conception of ourselves in an analogous way to which other societies have defined themselves as Muslim, Pomo, Aztec or however else we have programmed ourselves in the past.
Evolution is a half-mythic/half-scientific description of human origin. We are a fundamental species rupture with purely biological life. We presently do, and from our origin always have, defined ourselves. The upshot of this is that the organization of knowledge that makes this world seem like "reality" is being deconstructed. And when we teach ourselves a new truth we will have new behaviors. I believe part of this will be the realization that as a species we are free to define for ourselves how we want to live. Hierarchy is a human invention and evolution did not make the world around us the way it is today any more than God, gods, ancestors or spirits of nature did.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2002
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