Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Read Free

separated from our origins, not through some amnesia or lobotomy, but because of the brevity of our lives and the immense, unfathomed vistas of time that separate us from our coming to be.
    We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep, with no note explaining who it is, where it came from, what hereditary cargo of attributes and disabilities it might be carrying, or who its antecedents might be. We long to see the orphan’s file.
    Repeatedly, in many cultures, we invented reassuring fantasies about our parents—about how much they loved us, about how heroic and larger than life they were. 3 As orphans do, we sometimes blamed ourselves for having been abandoned. It must have been our fault. We were too sinful, perhaps, or morally incorrigible. Insecure, we clung to these stories, imposing the strictest penalties on any who dared to doubt them. It was better than nothing, better than admitting our ignorance of our own origins, better than acknowledging that we had been left naked and helpless, a foundling on a doorstep.
    As the infant is said to feel it is the center of its Universe, so we were once sure, not just of our central position, but that the Universe was
made
for us. This old, comfortable conceit, this safe view of the world has been crumbling for five centuries. The more we understood of how the world is put together, the less we needed to invoke a God or gods, and the more remote in time and causality any divine intervention had to be. The cost of coming of age is giving up the security blanket. Adolescence is a roller coaster ride.
    When, beginning in 1859, our very origins, it was suggested, could be understood by a natural, unmystical process—requiring no God or gods—our aching sense of isolation became nearly complete. In the words of the anthropologist Robert Redfield, the Universe began to “lose its moral character” and became “indifferent, a system uncaring of man.” 4
    Moreover, without a God or gods and the attendant threat of divine punishment, will not humans be as beasts? Dostoyevsky warned that those who reject religion, however well-intentioned they may be, “will end by drenching the earth with blood.” 5 Others have noted that drenching has been in progress since the dawn of civilization—and often in the name of religion.
    The distasteful prospect of an indifferent Universe—or worse, a meaningless Universe—has generated fear, denial, ennui, and the sense that science is an instrument of alienation. The cold truths of our scientific age are uncongenial to many. We feel stranded and alone. We crave a purpose to give meaning to our existence. We do not want to hear that the world was not made for us. We are unimpressed with moral codes contrived by mere mortals; we want one handed down from on high. We are reluctant to acknowledge our relatives. They are strangers to us still. We feel ashamed: After imaginingour Antecedent as King of the Universe, we are now asked to accept that we come from the lowest of the low—mud, and slime, and mindless beings too small to be seen with the naked eye.
    Why concentrate on the past? Why upset ourselves with painful analogies between humans and beasts? Why not simply look to the future? These questions have an answer. If we do not know what we’re capable of—and not just a few celebrity saints and notorious war criminals—then we do not know what to watch out for, which human propensities to encourage, and which to guard against. Then we haven’t a clue about which proposed courses of human action are realistic, and which are impractical and dangerous sentimentality. The philosopher Mary Midgley writes,
    Knowing that I have a naturally bad temper does not make me lose it On the contrary, it should help me to keep it, by forcing me to distinguish my normal peevishness from moral indignation My freedom, therefore, does not seem to be particularly threatened by the admission, nor by any light cast on the meaning of my bad temper by