Time for a new world order

by Felipe Fernndez-Armesto

OUP, 14.99

Given the current obsession among the anorak classes for creating lists of the best of everything on earth, I am surprised that no-one has yet come up with the idea of identifying the most significant sentences in history or the most enduringly powerful myth.

When they finally do get round to it I will offer two sentences as a joint entry for both competitions. Indeed, I would go further and claim that they are, by far, the most potent words in human history. You will find them in the Book of Genesis, chapter one, starting at verse 26: "And God said let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

The thing to notice about the great creation myth from Genesis is that its real sting is in its tail. The anonymous authors were not too bothered about the precise chronology of the claim that God created everything in six days and rested on the seventh. They were pretty flexible in their understanding of time, which is why many fundamentalist interpreters of the Bible today claim to be able to fit the Genesis narrative around what we now know to be the real age of the universe. No, time is a side issue. The real point of the myth is not chronology, it’s anthropology, it is the crowning role it gives to Man, and I say Man advisedly.

There are two versions in Genesis of the creation of humanity. There’s the version I’ve given you, the first version, the inclusive version, which suggests that Woman as well as Man shared the high and privileged status of the divine image. But in the next chapter that momentary lapse into inclusiveness is well and truly squashed in the name of real male dominance, where Woman is cloned from Man’s rib to be a helpmeet for him.

Now we’re really talking. Man, not WoMan, is the king of creation, given dominance over every other living thing, including women, which are all created for his benefit. It’s the most potent myth in history and it still reigns supreme, though it is under threat, as this fascinating book clearly demonstrates.

One of the many ironies revealed by this book is the way it shows that the dominant secularist myth in our culture is still in hock to the old biblical one, mainly because it missed its main point. Today’s secularist thinkers dismiss Genesis because they know that evolution was not a divine version of planned parenthood, but a chaotic and disorganised system, "full of untraceable paths, untrackable causes and unpredictable effects". As Jesus might have put it, they strain out the gnat of a six-day creation, but they swallow the camel of human uniqueness, the main and most dangerous part of the old myth. And most of us still buy it. We still think we are special, unlike every other animal, so we ought to have special privileges.

Among these privileges is the right to enslave all other creatures and turn them into food, entertainment or ways of embellishing our own persons. You like to eat chicken? OK, but let’s do it efficiently. Let’s pack them into long huts where we won’t have to chase ’em every time we want chicken soup. In fact, let’s enslave them. After all, we have dominion over them. You want to drive an RV that does ten gallons to the mile? No problem, it’s our God-given right. We can dig that black stuff out of the earth and who cares if the emissions puncture the ozone layer and the resulting heat melts the ice cap and floods Bangladesh? After all, we are lords of creation. Well, not everyone, of course, but certainly everyone in Texas and one or two other post codes. I exaggerate, but you get my meaning.

That old myth of human uniqueness and dominance is not just a fairytale we tell ourselves; it has profound practical consequences for the planet and the other forms of life we share it with. But if you don’t buy Genesis, how do you account for the idea? Where did it come from? Is there any truth left in it?

These are some of the questions that the historian Felipe Fernndez-Armesto tries to cover in this unique little book. It is subtitled "A brief history of humankind" but it is really a look at the idea of the uniqueness of humankind. And the fascinating thing about it is that the closer you look at human uniqueness the more it unravels before your eyes.

Is it language that makes us unique? Well, other species have language, maybe more of it than we know. Is it culture? Depends on your definition of culture, but a good definition is that culture is learned as opposed to determined behaviour. But by that definition other species have culture too. Is it physical? Sorry, we share 95 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees. Anyway, we now know that every species on the planet evolved from oysters. So where do we go from there?

On the evidence of this book the answer is, round in circles. One of the most attractive things about it is the way the author clearly upsets himself by some of the things he forces himself to look at. He splutters and opinionates a bit towards the end, but his heart is clearly in the right place. What he seems to come down to in the end is the certainty that we are not, after all, unique and we probably don’t have immortal souls. But I suspect that for romantic reasons Fernndes-Armesto wishes that we were, because it might encourage us to behave better. The answer to that is that it doesn’t seem to have helped us in the past. Maybe what we need to do is not try to rehabilitate old reasons for behaving well, but find new ones.