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Without this leap of the imagination, no understanding is possible, but every honest historian will admit that any such leap is a leap in the dark, and that the conclusions at which he arrives—no matter how confident he may feel of their certainty—are the products of his own fantasy. A good historian is a scrupulous fantasist, but he is a fantasist nevertheless.
The zealots among my peers argue that if this is the case, then history is impossible and that everything sheltering under that name is false. They point out that the historians of the present do not belong to the same species as the people of the past and that our existential situation is radically different from theirs. I have heard this said many times in co
According to skeptics of this stripe, the people of today ca
Clearly, I have never agreed with this assessment. Nor could I side with those pusillanimous historians who took refuge in the commonplace observation that people had begun talking about a New Human Race in the early part of the twenty-second century and that we could legitimately identify with those of our ancestors who merely believed—or at least hoped—that true emortality was within their grasp. It would be a poor sort of history that derived its authority from the fact that its objects were deluded—and an even poorer sort that attempted to extend its claims deeper into the past by suggesting that the people who lived in the midst of death for thousands of years did so in a state of perpetual denial, never able to accept the all-too-obvious fact that each and every one of them was bound to die, sooner rather than later.
My belief, simply stated, is that we who have drunk of the authentic fountain of youth dostill have the ability—if we care to exercise it—to imagine what it was like to live with the inevitability of death. I believe that we need only to exercise our own powers of imagination cleverly enough to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of people faced with the prospect of a life span no more than a hundred years in duration, most of which would be spent in a state of decrepitude.
Not only do I believe that this is possible, but I believe that it is highly desirable. How can we understand the world that our ancestors made if we ca
Like every other individual in history, we pioneers of true New Humanity first learned to see ourselves as others saw us, and no matter what we have learned since then, we carry that legacy within us. While we still have that gift, we still have the ability to see those others as they saw themselves. However New we may be, we are still theHuman Race, and if we are properly to understand ourselves we must set ourselves to understand those who came before us.
Like history, autobiography is a kind of fantasy, but each and every one of us is permanently involved in constructing the story of his or her own life, and even those of us who are perfectly content to act without recording remain creatures of fantasy. Those of us who record as well as acting are attempting to grasp the substance of our personal fantasies and to be as precise as possible in their construction as well as their interpretation.
For those reasons, therefore, The Prehistory of Deathcarried an elaborate commentary that did not even try hard to be dispassionate. So far as I was concerned, in fact, the commentary was—and is—the book. The elaborate hypertextual links forging Labyrinthine pathways through the vast mass of accumulated data were, in my estimation, mere footnotes.
To anyone who still labors under the delusion that such an assertion is heresy against the scientific method I can only say: “I ca
TWENTY-TWO
The commentary attached to The Prehistory of Deathsummarized everything that was known about early hominid lifestyles and developed an elaborate argument about the effects of natural selection on the patterns of mortality in humankind’s ancestor species. It gave special attention to the evolution of parental care as a genetic strategy.
Earlier species of man, I observed, had raised parental care to a level of efficiency that permitted the human infant to be born at a much earlier stage in its development than any other, maximizing its opportunity to be shaped by nurture and learning. From the very begi
In these circumstances, I argued, it was entirely natural that the remotest origins of consciousness and culture should be intimately bound up with a keen awareness of the war against death. I asserted that the first great task of the human imagination was to carry forward that war.
It was entirely understandable, I said, that early paleontologists, having discovered the mutilated bones of Neanderthal humans in apparent graves, with the remains of primitive garlands of flowers, should instantly have felt an intimate kinship with them; there could be no more persuasive evidence of full humanity than the attachment of ceremony to the idea and the fact of death. I went on to wax lyrical about the importance of ritual as a symbolization of opposition and enmity to death. I refuted the proposition that such rituals were of no practical value, a mere window dressing of culture. My claim was that there was no activity more practical than this expressive recognition of the valueof life, this imposition of a moral order on the fact of human mortality.
Paleontologists and anthropologists had argued for centuries about the precise nexus of selective pressures that had created humanity. It was universally recognized that a positive feedback loop had been set up by the early use of tools: that the combination of a deft hand, a keen eye, and a clever brain had facilitated the development of axes, knives, and levers, whose rewards had then exerted even stronger pressure on the development of the hand, eye, and brain. Protohumans made tools, so the story went, and tools made true humans.