How to Find the Absurdist Comedy in Historical Progress
The childish foundations of social and scientific laws
We take for granted that children benefit from the maturity of the elders who raise them. And compared to a child, the average adult is wiser if only from having lived through the additional experience which the child lacks.
But suppose that adults were childlike in certain respects so that their guardianship of their offspring would be a case of the blind leading the blind: childlike adults would be guiding actual children. And suppose this went on for tens of thousands of years.
That was essentially the Stone Age.
Crucial to this assumption are the “respects” in which our prehistoric ancestors would and wouldn’t likely have been childlike. The point isn’t that they were silly, irrational, or incompetent. Instead, we should assume that the Stone Age groups lacked the ability to accumulate much knowledge or collective memory, and that their low population sizes gave them the freedom to experiment with lifestyles. Indeed, Stone Age people were free from the responsibilities of having to maintain a permanent civilization.
This picture is consistent with the anthropological evidence of prehistoric social experiments and with the observations that our social normality is sustained by something like hypnotic trance and a mass hallucination of public expectations, and that all societies are saturated with fictional narratives.
The upshot is that the foundations of culture and of behavioural modernity (that is, abstract thinking, long-term planning, symbolic art, and predatory exploitations) were laid by the childlike imagination that predominated in the interminable Stone Age. This means that, as advanced and sophisticated as we take ourselves to be in our “modern civilizations,” we’re preoccupied with what are essentially childlike constructions, which makes our progress anticlimactic.
The childish foundation of social laws
This is illustrated by the evolution of the concept of law. For thousands of years, prehistoric societies were lawless in that hunter-gatherers didn’t think of themselves as being bound by divine commandments or by necessary rules that were enforced by an all-powerful king. There were no such gods or kings.
There were leaders, social instincts, and perhaps honourable obligations, but prehistoric societies were more like experiments that were optimized for certain circumstances. As the seasons changed or as the clans moved to a different landscape, following animal herds, they had to adapt to survive so they invented new social systems. Often, that meant switching from a social hierarchy to a more egalitarian arrangement. Whatever ensured their survival under such free-flowing conditions is what the various groups of prehistoric peoples tried. (At least, that’s what Graeber and Wengrow argue in The Dawn of Everything.)
Instead of social laws there were techniques and rules of thumb, and there were expected consequences of certain actions. If someone murdered his companion and that deed were discovered, the murderer could naturally expect a reprisal.
Eventually, some of these social arrangements were codified to suit the sedentary lifestyle of those who tied themselves to city states or kingdoms. The city-dwellers had to be on the same page, and the shifting seasons were irrelevant because Neolithic and later peoples began using agriculture, technological advances, and classes of specialists to build up the surpluses of food that sustained the larger populations.
What we think of as societal laws, then, were no longer just pragmatic rules of thumb. These were commandments that had to terrify the masses into submission in a Hobbesian manner. The society’s ruler had to be glorified to domesticate the human population along with the livestock, to prevent a slave revolt.
Consequently, chiefs, kings, and emperors became sacred when they claimed that they represented the will of all-powerful, supernatural beings. As Morris Berman points out in Wandering God, the diffuse enchantment of the wilderness, as in animism, was captured, as it were, and concentrated in the Great Chain of Being, into a social hierarchy that spanned gods, human castes, and animals.
Ultimately, the point of a law was that obedience was necessary, as in mandatory, not just instinctive or probable, and the legal reasoning was typically theological: while we could violate a law by robbing, raping, or murdering, we couldn’t escape punishment because even if we evaded the human authorities, we’d have to answer to the terrifying justice of the supernatural or heavenly (outer cosmic) order.
So far, then, we can see the childlike aspect of laws. Laws are figments of our imagination that we take seriously because we hypnotize ourselves, submitting to mass trances as a precondition of flourishing within civilized confines. Of course, there are no supernatural guarantors of our social customs. The gods are literally the “invisible friends” of adults. When we grow up, we only switch our allegiance from the cartoonish playmates that we envision as children, to the more socially useful figments posited by the religions that bind populations of human adults.
The comedic discourse of “laws of nature”
But there’s a further stage in this comical progression, as we pass from societal laws to laws of nature, and from religion to philosophy and science. Encultured folks found that while they abhorred the prospect of an outbreak of chaos, and they preferred social stability, nature, too, operated with regularity in its cyclical fashion. The more we investigated nature, the more order we discovered.
Philosophers thus posited the impersonal equivalents of gods and angels to make sense of these objective patterns. These equivalents included theoretical “substances” and other abstract entities such as the Platonic “Forms” and “metaphysical properties.” Again, advances in technology and in artificial languages (namely in mathematics) enabled scientists — rather than priests, judges, or lawyers — to master this endeavor.
Yet the Western Scientific Revolution grew out of monotheistic Europe via the intermediary form of skepticism known as deism, the latter being a halfway house on the way to agnosticism or to atheism. Early modern scientific theories, therefore, were formulated as though the natural order were a society that submitted to the will of a magnificent, albeit increasingly aloof ruler the way human subjects in a kingdom bowed before the king.
That is, we found ourselves positing laws of nature that were analogous to societal laws, even as scientific methods of inquiry objectified and naturalized everything they touched, as it were, undermining the theological basis of societal laws and thus of laws as such, including nature’s.
The arch skeptic David Hume pointed out that there’s no empirical justification for speaking of the necessity of natural patterns. We presume that nature will go on working like it has in the past, and thus we reason by induction merely because, Hume said, we form that “habit” or “custom.” We might be more direct, though, and specify that the custom in question has been historically the fear of gods and kings.
Again, lawfulness as an imposed necessity is thoroughly comedic: being slow on the uptake in losing our historic perspective, we take seriously the carefree Stone Age games, building on the foundation of gleeful imaginings a legal code for society, elevating animistic and perhaps entheogenic visions and the whispers of natural impulse to the status of divine commandments, and finally objectifying the gods and turning their will into nature’s independent, freestanding, zombified order.
Arguably, the essence of comedy is the act of mistaking a silly absurdity for a serious enterprise. We laugh at another’s expense when we as insiders understand the joke, whereas the butt of the joke thinks his situation isn’t amusing. The punchline of history has been lost in the mists of deep time, in the Stone Age play which has left little archeological record.
A non-childish rationale for scientific laws?
To understand the profundity of this joke that’s been played on all of us who are hypnotized into taking for granted the talk of laws, we need merely ponder what a law of nature is supposed to be when nature seems godless, that is, when there’s evidently no lawgiver in that case.
One answer given by a Humean philosopher named David Lewis is, as summarized by a Stanford Encyclopedia article, that “the laws of nature belong to all the true deductive systems with a best combination of simplicity and strength.” Laws of nature are necessary generalizations in that they follow from logic. In this way, epistemology replaces both theology and metaphysics.
The problem with this answer is that it makes nature’s necessity subjective since reason is only a human tool. So why should nature obey our rational expectations? The presumption here is that of secular humanism, which replaces God or Platonic Forms with human ambition. We formulate rational systems, deducing predictions from axioms or “laws,” but that’s only a human practice. The mystery remains, then, as to why the universe must comply with a fallible upstart species of primate.
The chief rival of that epistemic conception of laws is a broadly Platonic or metaphysical one: a law of nature corresponds to a relation between abstract objects, namely between the types of things posited by scientific theories, whether they be atoms, masses, stars, or animals.
Once again, the question arises as to whether these relations and kinds or properties are real. Does the species tiger, for instance, exist separately from individual tigers in some abstract paradise? Isn’t this metaphysics just a secular substitute for a theology that deals with more personal absolutes?
Most scientists don’t bother with such philosophical puzzles, of course. They take the laws of nature for granted because that’s their business. We understand nature better when we speak of such regularities. As a result, we seem to advance as a species, and that practical justification is all the scientist and the engineer need.
Alas, not even that utilitarian justification is stable since progress in science and technology threatens to send us all into despair, as science conflicts with religious assurances, and as technology combines with capitalism and with economic growth to throw the ecosystems into disequilibrium.
Even if we concede the professional’s practical justification, the comedic fact remains that such progress would be technically ridiculous. After all, even children’s silly playtime advances after a fashion, corresponding to a mad sort of order. Workability is thus no guarantee of respectability if the goal is to avoid being made into a fool.
It’s just possible that there are no laws of nature. There’s a natural order of some kind, as opposed to chaos, and that order includes cycles, processes, systems, and other regularities. But when we fuss over the intricacies of so-called laws of nature, we might be victims of a profound, hilarious misunderstanding. We’d be mistaking a children’s plaything — a concept which began as a form of Stone Age play or experimentation — for serious adult business.
History as an existential comedy
Just imagine that a group of adults discovers a set of doodles that was dashed off as an afterthought by a bored child, and the group mistakes them for great works of art. The group starts a club devoted to appreciating the mastery of those crude drawings. The club develops into a cult which eventually becomes a religion governing a whole society. Having attained college degrees, then, that take the greatness of those drawings for granted, experts write academic papers slaving over the nuances of that greatness. Meanwhile, the child artist’s identity is unknown, and she grows up unaware that that industry has sprouted up in her name.
This is the special absurdity of many of our cultural practices. When we lose our historical and philosophical perspectives, and we’re preoccupied with the technicalities of our social games, we forget that in the big picture they are just games. Their core assumptions begin literally as forms of anarchic play in the Stone Age, and as we settled down in city states, we became self-absorbed and xenophobic. Lacking much evidence of what happened in prehistory, we presumed not just that society is a worthy endeavour but that cultures and ideologies, politics and religion, art and commerce are serious rather than existentially laughable.
We need to take ourselves seriously because only a masochist would want to be the constant butt of jokes. Our religious impudence and secular humanistic arrogance require that we burnish our self-image as mature, rational, sober, sane adults, not given to childish frivolities. Cosmically, though, that self-image is likely little more than a species-wide hallucination, a pretense we sustain with countless acts of self-hypnosis, of slavish, domesticated submission.
We fake being non-childish until we presume that we become existentially mature or enlightened. But real enlightenment is surely for the few alienated outsiders who recoil from the tragicomedies playing out all around them.
