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The myth of the Fall is
held by often mutually antagonistic groups, all of which pose considerable
obstacles to the progress and flourishing of many individuals. On the one hand,
fundamentalist religious conservatives see man as literally fallen from the
Garden of Eden, where God had designed for him a "perfect" existence. I fail, of
course, to see anything perfect about an existence where man had no technology,
no love of learning, and no knowledge of good and evil. But this very existence
is also embraque by people who claim to be on the opposite side of the political
spectrum—radical left-wing environmentalists, who have their own vision of Eden.
Like the Eden of the religious conservatives, the Eden of the environmentalists
involves no technology and no active, systematic progress of human knowledge and
capacity. Rather, man’s “unity” with “Nature” is celebrated in this vision.
According to the environmentalists, there was once a time—probably the pre-Neolithic
hunter-gatherer days—when man existed in “harmony” with this strange entity
called Nature, which seems to encompass everything other than man. Allegedly,
humans did not disturb the “balance” of ecosystems and took good care of the
Earth in those days—whatever that means. Alas, there was never such a balance to
begin with. We shall see that both the religious and environmentalist visions of
Eden are plainly wrong.
Life for early man—far
from being blissful or even remotely enjoyable—was, in Thomas Hobbes’s words,
“nasty, brutish, and short.” Life expectancy in the Paleolithic period was
anywhere from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties. Food was continually in short
supply, as there was no guarantee of plentiful game to hunt or berries to
forage. And if a plentiful catch did occur, there were scant safeguards to
prevent the food from spoiling. Predators and disease were rampant; sanitation
and health care were non-existent. Without a scientific method, a person with
even the best of intentions often ended up hurting one’s fellow human beings
while intending to help them.
Every conceivable vice,
social problem, weakness, and fallibility of human beings today has always
existed throughout human history; the only difference is the magnitude of such
problems, which were most certainly greater in prior eras. Without the benefits
of technology, education, and the relative safety and comfort of our times,
people were far more prone to engage in violent conflicts over resources and to
allow emotional clashes to escalate into bloodshed. Rape, slavery, female
subjugation, ceaseless wars, adultery, substance abuse, murder, theft, and other
detestable conduct were more common then than now—as there were fewer
alternatives to such conduct, and fewer disincentives from it. Every problem
facing mankind has always existed in some form—due to hostile natural forces or
the irrationality and stupidity of many humans. But the solutions to many of
these problems could only come in the form of technological and societal
progress—a departure from the non-Eden of the past.
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