Introduction:
Laocoon: The Perils of Knowing
Priest of the Trojans at the time of the Greek invasion, Laocoon is punished by Poseidon for advising his people to refuse the gift of the wooden horse.
What power did Laocoon possess that enabled him to see its inner dimension? What enabled him to recognize danger where others saw only the polished fineness of a practiced art?
“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” he is reported to have said.
At once impressive and pathetic, the life sized figures of Laocoon and his sons–metaphors for all future generations–struggle with the serpents sent by Poseidon as retaliation.
Striving to rise, Laocoon is pulled down. Attempting to break loose, he is confined–snakes coiling round arms and thighs ever more tightly, so that no amount of effort can set him free. Around him, the citadel of Troy erupts into flames. Its people shall soon be slaughtered, or marched into ignominious captivity. It has happened before. Often. It is also happening now.
Rescued from the rubble of Nero’s Domus Aureus where it had lain undiscovered for over a thousand years, the resurrected image of the Laocoon speaks to us of an ancient, monumental struggle. Paris has stolen something from a Greek king; but so has Prometheus. A rebellious son has shattered the sanctity of the primal horde. An avenging army has set sail under the watchful aegis of the gods, borne on a wind wildly stirred by an act of filicide.
INTRODUCTION
The following essays strive to explore humanity’s persistent failure to create a better world. Each describes our glaring inability to break with powerful forces that continue to knee-cap human history. One thing is sure: the pattern is redolent with self defeating failure, not with victory.
Long ago, our ancestors reached the outer limits of a cultural, evolutionary, and behavioral envelope. An envelope that ever since has prevented us from breaking with the dead ends of the past.
The drop-down menus for the future have all been limited by that same envelope. Such limits continue to keep our journey on the planet within certain intolerable tolerances. History does repeat itself.
Why?
Is modern humanity controlled by some tyrannical force, much as Prometheus was chained to his mountain crag?
Is the rational Self merely the servant of an evolutionary/cultural Ark of the Covenant? An ancient Read-Only scroll of outmoded commandments programmed by DNA to get us safely through the now expired Pleistocene?
Remembering the fate of Uzzah, we must ask: Dare we approach the Ark and touch it? Can we gain access to its interior? Can we lift its brazen, serpent idol to the light of reason without being struck dead?
Why didn’t the human neocortex–the sapiens part of the genus homo–do a better job when it fashioned culture and engineered Tomorrow?
Certainly it had the neural horsepower to design a future that made sense. Didn’t it?
“A Just So” Story:
Poised on the cusp that peaked at the ragged edge of neural evolution, the new human brain faltered as it stared into a dangerous and mysterious world.
There was so much to do; and so much of it had never been tried before!
Lacking experience, the newly powerful brain hesitated to assert itself in a bid to seize control of the steering wheel. Instead, brain deferred to the ancient menu as it lisped the phrases that would structure Tomorrow.
As a result, we humans act out the large and small dramas of our lives in a never changing, ever familiar world. It’s not the world which, at one time, we may have wanted. But it is the only world we seem able to have.
Adorning our fragile limbs with a gold that comes from the cores of long extinct collapsed stars, we motor down glacial-till expressways to keep an ancient appointment with the “future.” Our engines fueled by the carcasses and flora of a carboniferous past, we rush toward an illusory tomorrow, led by the high jacked sirens of the neocortex.
Traffic coming into the cultural overleaf is quickly bottle-necked, and ends in gridlock. The progress of closely following new generations that enters the flow is also quickly arrested.
Bumper to bumper, shimmering heat waves rising off windshields and hoods, we are truly going nowhere.
Nowhere, that is, except back to the single footpath in a mountain defile that united Cithaeron and Thebes. Nowhere but back to the place where three roads meet. Nowhere, but back to the repetition compulsions that mitigate prolonged infantile dependence and had become the organizing bases for adult life. Nowhere but back to the strange evolutionary adaptations that not only made culture possible, but which simultaneously pinned our collective, Oedipal heels.
Yes, human progress is an illusion. The evidence is in.
We simply cannot achieve enough velocity to escape the enormous gravitational pull of our ancestral and evolutionary heritage.
We cannot escape from the ancient, reptilian and stone age forebears who brought us here, and who clasp us to themselves via our rituals, our easy indoctrinability, and our yearnings for comforting delusion.
What reason establishes,
Custom outweighs.
(Sophocles)
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