Some Thoughts on "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

“THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man’s emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had now come of age.

Beyond this, there was another implication of which the framers of the declaration were only half aware. The proclamation of human rights was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before God as Christians. In other words, in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces. Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society.

Since the Rights of Man were proclaimed to be “inalienable,” irreducible to and undeducible from other rights or laws, no authority was invoked for their establishment; Man himself was their source as well as their ultimate goal. No special law, moreover, was deemed necessary to protect them because all laws were supposed to rest upon them. Man appeared as the only sovereign in matters of law as the people was proclaimed the only sovereign in matters of government. The people’s sovereignty (different from that of the prince) was not proclaimed by the grace of God but in the name of Man, so that it seemed only natural that the “inalienable” rights of man would find their guarantee and become an inalienable part of the right of the people to sovereign self-government.

In other words, man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated, completely isolated being who carried his dignity within himself without reference to some larger encompassing order, when he disappeared again into a member of a people. From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an “abstract” human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived in some kind of a social order. If a tribal or other “backward” community did not enjoy human rights, it was obviously because as a whole it had not yet reached that stage of civilization, the stage of popular and national sovereignty, but was oppressed by foreign or native despots. The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s own people, seemed to be able to insure them. As mankind, since the French Revolution, was conceived in the image of a family of nations, it gradually became self-evident that the people, and not the individual, was the image of man.

The full implication of this identification of the rights of man with the rights of peoples in the European nation-state system came to light only when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were as little safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of nation-states in the middle of Europe as they would have been in the heart of Africa. The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as “inalienable” because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them. Or when, as in the case of the minorities, an international body arrogated to itself a nongovernmental authority, its failure was apparent even before its measures were fully realized; not only were the governments more or less openly opposed to this encroachment on their sovereignty, but the concerned nationalities themselves did not recognize a nonnational guarantee, mistrusted everything which was not clear-cut support of their “national” (as opposed to their mere “linguistic, religious, and ethnic”) rights, and preferred either, like the Germans or Hungarians, to turn to the protection of the “national” mother country, or, like the Jews, to some kind of interterritorial solidarity.

[...] The failure of all responsible persons to meet the calamity of an ever-growing body of people forced to live outside the scope of all tangible law with the proclamation of a new bill of rights was certainly not due to ill will. Never before had the Rights of Man, solemnly proclaimed by the French and the American revolutions as the new fundament for civilized societies, been a practical political issue. During the nineteenth century, these rights had been invoked in a rather perfunctory way, to defend individuals against the increasing power of the state and to mitigate the new social insecurity caused by the industrial revolution. Then the meaning of human rights acquired a new connotation: they became the standard slogan of the protectors of the underprivileged, a kind of additional law, a right of exception necessary for those who had nothing better to fall back upon.

“The reason why the concept of human rights was treated as a sort of stepchild by nineteenth-century political thought and why no liberal or radical party in the twentieth century, even when an urgent need for enforcement of human rights arose, saw fit to include them in its program seems obvious: civil rights—that is the varying rights of citizens in different countries—were supposed to embody and spell out in the form of tangible laws the eternal Rights of Man, which by themselves were supposed to be independent of citizenship and nationality. All human beings were citizens of some kind of political community; if the laws of their country did not live up to the demands of the Rights of Man, they were expected to change them, by legislation in democratic countries or through revolutionary action in despotisms.

The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable—even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them—whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state. To this fact, disturbing enough in itself, one must add the confusion created by the many recent attempts to frame a new bill of human rights, which have demonstrated that no one seems able to define with any assurance what these general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of citizens, really are. Although everyone seems to agree that the plight of these people consists precisely in their loss of the Rights of Man, no one seems to know which rights they lost when they lost these human rights.

The first loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of their homes, and this meant the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born and in which they established for themselves a distinct place in the world. This calamity is far from unprecedented; in the long memory of history, forced migrations of individuals or whole groups of people for political or economic reasons look like everyday occurrences. What is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one. [...]

The second loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of government protection, and this did not imply just the loss of legal status in their own, but in all countries. Treaties of reciprocity and international agreements have woven a web around the earth that makes it possible for the citizen of every country to take his legal status with him no matter where he goes (so that, for instance, a German citizen under the Nazi regime might not be able to enter a mixed marriage abroad because of the Nuremberg laws). Yet, whoever is no longer caught in it finds himself out of legality altogether [...]

By itself the loss of government protection is no more unprecedented than the loss of a home. Civilized countries did offer the right of asylum to those who, for political reasons, had been persecuted by their governments, and this practice, though never officially incorporated into any constitution, has functioned well enough throughout the nineteenth and even in our century. The trouble arose when it appeared that the new categories of persecuted were far too numerous to be handled by an unofficial practice destined for exceptional cases. Moreover, the majority could hardly qualify for the right of asylum, which implicitly presupposed political or religious convictions which were not outlawed in the country of refuge. The new refugees were persecuted not because of what they had done or thought, but because of what they unchangeably were—born into the wrong kind of race or the wrong kind of class [...]

This situation illustrates the many perplexities inherent in the concept of human rights. No matter how they have once been defined (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, according to the American formula, or as equality before the law, liberty, protection of property, and national sovereignty, according to the French); no matter how one may attempt to improve an ambiguous formulation like the pursuit of happiness, or an antiquated one like unqualified right to property; the real situation of those whom the twentieth century has driven outside the pale of the law shows that these are rights of citizens whose loss does not entail absolute rightlessness. The soldier during the war is deprived of his right to life, the criminal of his right to freedom, all citizens during an emergency of their right to the pursuit of happiness, but nobody would ever claim that in any of these instances a loss of human rights has taken place. These rights, on the other hand, can be granted (though hardly enjoyed) even under conditions of fundamental rightlessness.

The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly ‘superfluous,’ if nobody can be found to ‘claim’ them, may their lives be in danger. Even the Nazis started their extermination of Jews by first depriving them of all legal status (the status of second-class citizenship) and cutting them off from the world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps; and before they set the gas chambers into motion they had carefully tested the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people. The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged.

The same is true even to an ironical extent with regard to the right of freedom which is sometimes considered to be the very essence of human rights. There is no question that those outside the pale of the law may have more freedom of movement than a lawfully imprisoned criminal or that they enjoy more freedom of opinion in the internment camps of democratic countries than they would in any ordinary despotism, not to mention in a totalitarian country. But neither physical safety—being fed by some state or private welfare agency—nor freedom of opinion changes in the least their fundamental situation of rightlessness. The prolongation of their lives is due to charity and not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed them; their freedom of movement, if they have it at all, gives them no right to residence which even the jailed criminal enjoys as a matter of course; and their freedom of opinion is a fool’s freedom, for nothing they think matters anyhow.

These last points are crucial. The fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective. Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which are rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice, or when one is placed in a situation where, unless he commits a crime, his treatment by others does not depend on what he does or does not do. This extremity, and nothing else, is the situation of people deprived of human rights. They are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion. Privileges in some cases, injustices in most, blessings and doom are meted out to them according to accident and without any relation whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do.

We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation. The trouble is that this calamity arose not from any lack of civilization, backwardness, or mere tyranny, but, on the contrary, that it could not be repaired, because there was no longer any ‘uncivilized’ spot on earth, because whether we like it or not we have really started to live in One World. Only with a completely organized humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether.”

[It should be pretty fucking obvious we have gone much further these days into this One World paradigm than what far-seeing Hannah Arendt perceived of her time. To take just the most glaring example, she was writing long before the WTO and IMF and the neoliberal dogshit doctrine of ‘free trade’ existed. Still, the generations-long plight of the Palestinians (or the more recent plight of (non-Japanese) Americans who find themselves dumped in Floridian or South American concentration camps) clearly demonstrates she was correct in her analysis. We seem no closer to having an enforceable universal framework for human rights that are not in fact merely some particular nation’s civil rights, so that those who are stateless are still also for all intents and purposes rightless. Even worse: I think it can be argued that we’ve built the institutional infrastructure to enforce ‘human’ rights for commodities—at least insofar as ‘stateless’ commodities (those produced by multinational corporations) enjoy a whole host of international legal protections, including an entire fucking kangaroo court judicial system—instead of finding a way, any way, to safeguard those who’ve been expelled from some particular polity.]

Before this, what we must call a ‘human right’ today would have been thought of as a general characteristic of the human condition which no tyrant could take away. Its loss entails the loss of the relevance of speech (and man, since Aristotle, has been defined as a being commanding the power of speech and thought), and the loss of all human relationship (and man, again since Aristotle, has been thought of as the “political animal,” that is one who by definition lives in a community), the loss, in other words, of some of the most essential characteristics of human life. This was to a certain extent the plight of slaves, whom Aristotle therefore did not count among human beings. ... Yet in the light of recent events it is possible to say that even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society—more than the abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human. Not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity.

“... This new situation, in which “humanity” has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible. For, contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international organizations, it should be understood that this idea transcends the present sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere that is above the nations does not exist. Furthermore, this dilemma would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of a “world government.” Such a world government is indeed within the realm of possibility, but one may suspect that in reality it might differ considerably from the version promoted by idealistic-minded organizations. The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. (Hitler’s motto that “Right is what is good for the German people” is only the vulgarized form of a conception of law which can be found everywhere and which in practice will remain ineffectual only so long as older traditions that are still effective in the constitutions prevent this. [This should be blowing up all the alarm bells in your head right now, since this is exactly what the Christian nationalists are doing in America through the decaying zombie corpse of the Republican party, and what other Nazi-like types are doing in other nations like Russia, India, and most or maybe even all European states; it is also precisely what the oligarchs and charlatans pushing AI are doing; and it is the entire rationale behind neoliberal global free trade.]) A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for—for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number—becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the “good for” applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: “Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things.”

– From Part II: The Perplexities of the Rights of Man, Chapter Nine: The Declaration of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man, from The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, 1951.

I’ll summarize, because reading comprehension is (once again) a vanishingly rare skill. In 1789, the Rights of Man were Declared. This declaration placed the authority over human rights within the individual for the first time in recorded history. What does this mean? Well, first, human rights cannot simply be declared, like bankruptcy or the winner of a race, because they are not a temporary condition; they’re supposed to be inherent traits, like the number of nipples or organs you have. Rights must be embodied, literally given some kind of form. The same is true for government which, although it doesn’t include the buildings that make up a nation’s government (as we know from when action heroes play politicians in movies and continue to represent constituents kick ass even after everything has been blowed up¹), does have a socially agreed upon location where The People go to embody the government and make it really real and—at least in theory—effective. (The same is true for many other things in human society, like corporations, markets, the whole concept of the economy as something separate from regular human life, and even money itself (which is a unit of measurement, exactly like milligrams or lightyears, and all units of measurement are all nothing more than representations of concepts: the concept behind a millimeter is distance; behind a lightyear is distance over time; and behind money is the concept of a plan value. (And you may have noticed that ‘distance’, ‘time’ and ‘value’ are also concepts. It’s concepts all the way down, baby! (No, but seriously: we have no idea what, if anything, lies beneath all these concepts (other than, presumably, the assortment of molecules and physical forces—known, often in sci-fi, as ‘handwavium’—that make up what we call our thinkin’ caps).))).)

Anyway, previous to 1789, what we call human rights were generally embodied in either history (ie, tradition, like when a son assumed his father’s place in a guild, or a mother died in childbirth), or Nature/God, where it might be described as a covenant (or a contract, if you’re OG Roman). The point is, human rights have to be in direct contact with human society in order to have any effect on the humans that make society—and in this way human rights are surprisingly similar to the laws of thermodynamics. But the issue with embodying human rights within the individual is that such rights don’t seem to have any effective contact with society. This is proved by the phenomenon of stateless people, who, despite being nothing more than individual humans—ie, precisely the kind of human who should be protected by ‘inalienable’ human rights—are also utterly rightless: it is seemingly impossible for them to legally force any social authority to respect their rights, and thus they can only depend on the arbitrary mercy and charity of others—such as the aptly named Non-Government Organizations—rather than on the disinterested (ie, unbiased) responsibility of society itself. Think of Mehran Karimi Nasseri—unseriously portrayed by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg—who was stuck in a French airport departure lounge for ~18 years (August 1988 – July 2006) because he didn’t have the correct paperwork and no nation would claim him as a citizen, to imagine what it might be like to try and defend your rights without any government or other recognized legal authority to back you up. (Nasseri ended up dying in that same airport in 2022, although he had left it in 2006 when he was hospitalized and had then spent the intervening years mostly living in near-by homeless shelters before ultimately returning. Altogether he had been helplessly stateless for 45 years—since 1977, when Iran kicked him out—or what amounts to nearly 60% (58.44%) of his life.)

“The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.”

(This is also how you can attempt to prove to mouth-breathing morons and criminals like Friedrich Hayek and Larry Summers that markets are no more capable of existing ‘rightfully’ without governments than humans are, although I doubt they’d listen—as has been said, it is exceedingly difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheque demands they don’t (also Hayek’s been dead for quite awhile, so). And I think it’s even more important to note that this is exactly the political situation all non-human living beings (flora, fauna, fungi, etc.) find themselves in: they have no universal rights that can overcome the extralegal (from their perspective) force of any particular state. Which is also to say that stateless people are, with respect to their supposed ‘human’ rights, treated exactly as if they were not human beings (similar, in fact, in an unfortunate way, to how most people treat (and breed) their pets: arbitrarily and mostly for their own benefit rather than the pets’ well-being).)

This paradox was left unresolved because the historical process of the French Revolution had combined universal human rights with national sovereignty. European political thinkers had no experience with individuals outside any political organization (even so-called ‘savages’—remember: every accusation is a confession—were part of some kind of polity, whether it was a tribe, clan, moiety, etc.), and therefore saw civil rights as the legal mechanism by which to enforce human rights. And this was mostly fine, at least so long as every human was also a citizen of some kind of political state, because if their particular civil rights did not in their opinion satisfactorily conform to the universal template set out by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the affected people could at least force an improvement, either by legislation in democratic polities or by direct action (ie, revolution) in undemocratic ones.

So, even though actual human rights were not legally enforceable unless they were converted to civil liberties, this degradation of the universal to the particular went ignored or unnoticed until large numbers of people who belonged to no polity whatsoever began to appear. These people were, ironically, the almost immediate result of the very nationalism that the French Revolution began: European polities began organizing themselves into culturally exclusive nation-states in reaction to Napoleon’s gluttonously and vaingloriously violent attempt to ‘spread freedom’ (as we might describe it today), and it turned out there were actually quite a lot of people who either belonged to no nation-state at all (like Jews or Roma peoples), or who culturally—or ‘racially’ as it was often incorrectly described then, and sometimes still, equally incorrectly, is—didn’t belong to the nation-state it suddenly turned out they had been living in for generations (such as German-speaking peoples in eastern Europe). But what to do with these people—other than expel them from the nation-state, jail them individually for something like vagrancy, or herd them collectively into interment or work camps—has been a political problem punted down the generations with few changes to us today (the Nazi death camps were the mass industrialization of what had until then been more akin to a cottage industry tradition, sort of like Dylan going electric but for state-organized racist oppression and terrorism).

Finally, Hannah Arendt makes it clear that, even supposing human rights to be inherent in each person and therefore humanity itself, establishing a world government (ie, a government purportedly of humanity, by humanity, for humanity) will not solve the problem of stateless-thus-rightless humans. Such a government would all too likely fall into the temptation to, as she says, “liquidate” such people for the alleged benefit of the whole. In (what I’ve chosen to be) the end she concludes the paradoxical development of individual human rights alongside the development of nation-states into which every individual was and is legally expected to dissolve has once again made clear the fundamental political problem of human community: who gets to decide what’s right, and how can they be trusted?

That the ‘liquidation’ of certain parts of humanity is also a feared consequence of having an AI overlord whom we trust to decide everything because it’s ‘better’ than us (which has so far only meant ‘faster’ while also far too often meaning ‘worse’) only goes to show the pathetic limitations of our current socio-political imagination (and the genius of Arendt’s analysis, which is now nearly 80 years old): we cannot seem to help coming back around to the same ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of having to live next to ‘those’ people. And that we also cannot seem to move past a largely or even wholly materially-based conception of utilitarianism to define what’s ‘good’ seems to me a consequence of our mindless enslavement to the idolators of growth for greed’s sake (“We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas man!”). In any case, I agree with Hannah Arendt and Plato (who are, pretty fucking obviously, in absolutely no need of my support) in that we are ultimately confronted with the problem of finding some sort of solid foundation to build what we used to call our public lives on, some kind of constant that we can base all our social relationships on, some objective standard we can all be fairly and equitably subjected to.

If anyone wants my suggestion, it is that we shouldn’t try to make a “sphere above nations” on which to base our social relationships—that just seems like neurotically forcing ourselves even further up our own fucking asses—but that we should use Nature as a Platonian (or Spinozaian) ‘god’ to be the measure of all things. It doesn’t seem at all Farfetch’d far-fetched to me that the moral and ethical foundation of our communities should also be the actual foundation that supports us all, which is the Earth and specifically Nature itself (or herself, or himself, or themself, or who-gives-a-fuck-self, because Nature sure doesn’t).

And it’s not like this is even a remotely new idea: it’s at least as old as indigenous American polities, which suggests to me that it’s at least as old as humanity itself (I would in fact bet it actually began with our pre-Sapien ancestors, whom I believe must have sat around a fire or two at the end of the day and, looking out into the incomprehensibly vast and terrifyingly unknowable dark that utterly surrounded them, probably couldn’t help but wonder what exactly the fuck was going on and where the hell they might fit—safely, preferably—into it²).

But regardless, should we really aim for constructing yet another distant, oppressive, and unaccountable bureaucracy of authority as a world government—one that will undoubtedly be made by the rich, for the rich, and of the rich (as El-P from Run the Jewels has accurately stated, “[we] will not travel towards the light if they are in charge of [our] departure.”)—merely to justify ourselves to ourselves, when we have perfectly good and blessedly wholesome earth beneath our feet, from which spring forth the endlessly and miraculously diverse ecologies that from which and in which all of us spring forth into this numinous existence, and to which all of us will return when our own numinous existences cease? It seems to me, in fact, that Nature has already solved the problem of living as individuals amidst uncountable and uncontrollable diversity at least several billion years ago; and that all we really need to do is shut the fuck up, grow the fuck up, and learn a goddamn fucking lesson for once, instead of continuing an exceedingly long and now perhaps finally suicidal tradition of psychotically hoarding each other’s bananas and savagely hurling our shit all over everywhere each and every goddamn time some completely average fuckface somewhere on this now absolutely beshitted planet has a contrary fucking idea about how to spend their day.

1 I would just like to pause here and appreciate the lunatic absurdity of imagining someone like John Cena or Idris Elba playing a head of state in the middle of some FUBAR shoot-out with terrorists, but, instead of punching and shooting everything in sight, they diligently attempt to gather a quorum of congressional or parliamentarian representatives in order to fulfill their legally mandated responsibilities of representing their constituents by compromising their political positions and advancing broadly agreeable legislation that upholds and advances the ideals of their nation-state. (Although, by that description, it’s pretty fucking obvious that practically all contemporary politicians have an entirely different—you might even say diametrically opposite—idea of what their actual responsibilities are.)

2 Imagine yourself mostly as you are, but with an even weirder, hairier, and less foreheady body, and without anything modern, like clothing made out of petrochemicals (in fact, clothing made out of anything other than animal skins sewn together with animal guts, because even cotton, flax, and wool won’t be invented for millions of years), food you and/or your family and friends haven’t found and prepared for yourselves, the ability to communicate with people who aren’t basically directly in front of you, writing (or any ability at all to visually represent something abstract, like numbers, or maps, or weather forecasts, which are all also millions o’ years in the future), the knowledge of how to build a flat floor and a straight wall (or any floor and wall that aren’t made from animal skins or perhaps something like woven reeds), or any of the innumerable other modern luxuries we take as for granted as air and water and gravity. What you do have, in terms of technology, are some relatively sharp rocks and sticks, and perhaps the brand-new idea of throwing them, as well as the aforementioned fire, but even the worst bow and arrow of all time won’t be invented for at least a million years (the next ‘big thing’ in tech will in fact be the spear, but you’re certainly not going to be around to see it; think less Silicon Valley and more Great Rift Valley). Do you think you’d sit around the fire at night with your family and friends and declare that you all are self-evidently or God-givenly ‘above’ or in any way ‘separate’ or ‘better’ than the rest of Nature (which, at this point, still includes sabre-toothed tigers and wooly-furred mammoths among many other big ol’ beasties, not to mention several other entire species of humans)? Do you think if you did declare such a thing you wouldn’t immediately be labeled a dangerous lunatic and ostracized or even simply killed outright for everyone else’s safety? And—now for something completely slightly different—it seems to me that the almost eldritch horror this scenario may conjure up in our minds is perhaps largely why anti-evolutionists fight so hard against believing it is exactly from such peoples’ loins from whom we have undoubtedly sprung. I also think, more broadly, we do not give enough credit to these kinds of unconscious terrors in terms of our ‘modern’ society’s motivations and prejudices, perhaps because we—even those of us who reckon the Earth is six thousand years old—believe we are far too sophisticated and ‘advanced’ to still be scared shitless by such nightmares. Because, to me, the conviction that we’re somehow ‘superior’ to Nature seems like nothing so much as the child who convinces themselves they’re not scared of the dark by shouting, instead of by going into the dark.