Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  Jean Piaget suggested that human evolution follows the schedule of a single child.† Think of the life cycle of the entire Homo sapiens species as analogous to the life span of an individual. The average human life expectancy is approximately eighty years. Our species is 150,000 years old, and we do not know how long, in the natural course of events, it will last before going extinct or become the precursor to an entirely new hominid successor.

  Using a similar analogy, let us superimpose a child’s schedule of “insight” milestones onto what we have proposed was the timetable for the human species’ major quantum leaps of awareness. Was the point our species attained forty thousand years ago analogous to the moment in a seven-year-old-child’s life when the child understands for the first time the full implications of death?* If it was, that implies that, even with their new big brains, the earliest Homo sapiens did not collectively comprehend personal death for the first 110,000 years of our history.† I propose that the detonator igniting the Creative Explosion was a critical mass of sapients’ minds individually realizing, “Omigod! I’m gonna die!” Terror of death was an insight so powerful that it set off a chain reaction, and this in turn spurred the rapid advancement of human culture—as it still does.

  A woman most likely was the first to have this revelation, since it was she who first embarked into the dimension of the future. But a woman’s attitude toward death is markedly different from a man’s. In general, women tend to accept its inevitability with greater equanimity. When the poet Dylan Thomas urged his failing father, “Do not go gentle into that dark night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” he inadvertently called attention to this gender gap.

  I base the conclusion on my personal observations. As a surgeon for thirty-five years, I have had to inform many patients after an operation that they had a terminal illness. On average, men, in all age groups, take this news much harder than women do. They more often insist on heroic and drastic measures to stave off the inevitable. Men fear death more—though, of course, there are many exceptions to this generalization. I have witnessed many women fight tenaciously to forestall death, and I have attended many men during their gracious and courageous last days. Nevertheless, art, custom, culture, religion, mythology, and literature provide ample supporting evidence of this gender difference.

  Asked to create a metaphor for time, a woman will usually draw a circle. Ask a man the same question and he will, as often as not, draw an arrow. Perhaps women, being closer to the cycles of life, view death as an ineluctable phase in the turning wheel of fate. Men, on the other hand, tend to conceptualize life as moving along on a linear trajectory with a beginning and an end.*

  Women face death on a more intimate basis than men. Every woman is aware of the danger of child-bearing—a truth more trenchant in ancestral times than in the present. Each menses to a woman trying to conceive represents a petite mort. She knows the pain of the death of her children, both before and after birth. She lives with the knowledge of death from the moment she knows she can give new life. Men must seek out death experiences actively, as they do not confront them on a routine basis. Mini-deaths do not greet them monthly whether they want them or not.

  Women attempt suicide more often than men. Men, for their part, kill others more often than do women. The first statement implies that fear of death does not deter women as much as it does men; the second statement implies that men much prefer that someone else do the dying. The World War II commander General George Patton told his soldiers on the eve of a great battle that the point of war was not to sacrifice your life for your country but, rather, to force the other dumb bastards to sacrifice their lives for their country.

  Men risk greater harm to life and limb than women do in many endeavors. They use their flirtation with death to test their courage, to tempt finis and return to tell about it. The point of these exercises, however, is not to satisfy a death wish but, rather, to get so close to death that one can thumb one’s nose at it, thus proving one’s manliness to both oneself and others.

  Because men do not bear children, they are disconnected by nine months from their transitory act of insemination and the birth of their child. Women feel more connected to the rhythms of their cycles and the turnings of the seasons. Through their act of birthing life, they know that they can live on through their children, an option only lately understood by men. This subject will be more thoroughly discussed in the next chapter.

  Recently, geneticists identified the gene that causes Huntington’s chorea, a fatal hereditary illness that typically strikes adults in their early thirties without any warning. Members of families that carry the gene do not know as they age whether or not they have the full-blown form of the disease until the first symptoms appear. There is no cure or treatment, and death inevitably follows after the illness’s appearance. By locating the gene, scientists are able to offer people who are at risk the opportunity to learn if they are doomed to die an early death.

  The response of those contacted has been revealing. Men are three times more likely than women to decline the offer. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this gender skewing is that men feared discovering that they were destined to die more than the women did. The men preferred ignorance over knowledge in so crucial an area as their life span. Women expressed more concern than men about passing on the gene to their offspring, and by agreeing to take the test indicated that they were less fearful than men about learning the dreaded truth.13

  Similar differences between the sexes regarding fear of death became evident in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. At a time when there was no effective treatment for the disease, middle-class women, who were at minimal risk to have contracted it, were eager to learn whether they were carriers. In contrast, many men, who were far more likely to test positive because of their risky past behavior, behaved as if in denial. Men, much more than women, simply did not want to know they were fatally infected.

  The correlation between her menses and the moon led Gyna sapiens to appreciate the significance of a month. After she had vaulted over a bar set at 29.5 days, she raised it until she cleared nine months, and by so doing finally connected sex with birth. Men learned the art from the women, and, to their eternal dismay, they also learned that their life was limited.

  Sex (marriage), birth (children), and death (funerals) are the three most central rituals in the human life cycle. Burned into our memory banks are the details of our first sexual adventure, the pomp and ceremony enveloping our marriage, the drama attendant upon the birth of our first child, and the circumstances surrounding our parents’ deaths. Sex and death percolate through all the interstices of human existence.

  Many religious convictions arose from a yearning to believe in an afterlife prompted by the terror of death.

  Chapter 19

  Superstition/Laughter

  With me the horrid doubt always arises as to whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy.

  —Charles Darwin1

  We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve.

  —Albert Einstein

  Gyna sapiens’ awareness of the cause and implications of pregnancy constitutes the first major breakthrough sapients experienced as a result of acquiring a knowledge of deeptime. The second momentous insight—the certainty of death—would be the prime mover behind a spray of unique mental states and behavior patterns. Some have appeared in rudimentary form in a few scattered species; others have never been observed within any animal’s cultural repertoire.* Chief among these states and behaviors are self-delusion, superstition, irony, humor, greed, anxiety, ambition, suicide, heroism, and that most enigmatic of human endeavors—art. Since their advent, each has become an integral part of the human condition.

  The first on this list is the peculiar mind-set called “self-delusion.” The vast ma
jority of creatures do not have an awareness of self, and therefore are incapable of deluding themselves. Those few that do possess self-awareness (e.g., apes, dolphins, elephants) do not possess sufficient mental acuity to engage in serious self-deception. Observers have documented numerous instances of chimpanzees employing sophisticated subterfuge in their social interactions, but they do not appear to turn this behavior inward. Only humans, endowed with a hyperactive (and, in some cases, riotous) imagination, can fool themselves.

  We are the only creature that relies heavily on the if = then algorithm for our success. Philosopher William Irwin Thompson warned, “Even a positive thing casts a shadow. Its unique excellence is at the same time its tragic flaw.”2 The ability to reason was among the major factors that propelled our species so rapidly up creation’s steeple. Unfortunately, behind shining reason lurks a malignant defect that could ultimately knock us off our high perch.

  All syllogisms begin with a set of premises. Premises, unfortunately, are often based on unreliable beliefs, and therefore are often not put through the same rigors as the reasoning process that follows. If the premises of a particular if = then algorithm are flawed, then the answer will be false. A human usually sets the premises in place before activating the logic process.

  Faulty logic, leading inexorably to self-delusion, gained an easy foothold in the evolving human mind because of the overarching need to mitigate one fear in particular. Lucretius, the Roman philosopher, opined, “Fear was the first mother of the gods. Fear, above all, of death.” Once having discovered the end of their own personal time, individuals were no longer able to accept the deaths of others as extraneous events of no particular interest to them personally. “And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” wrote poet John Donne. “It tolls for thee.”

  Unlike other animals, the new deeptime primate was under considerable psychic pressure to insulate himself somehow from this newly gleaned and very spooky epiphany. To alleviate his angst, reason was put to an inventive use for which it was not originally intended. Ancestral humans, continuing right up to the present, concocted fantastic stories about what happens after death. Through the transmission from one generation to another, these phantasmagorias eventually took on a reality all their own. Thus was born superstition, the shadow side of logic. Ironically, reason became the primary vehicle for this complex self-deception. All superstitions “make sense”: If this, then that. If that, then this. Given fallacious premises, an algorithm may begin to sound plausible: If you step on a crack, then you’ll break your mother’s back. The psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi once said, “Pure intelligence is in principle madness.”3

  Each superstition hastily patched a newly discovered hole in the fabric of Homo sapiens’ ever-expanding knowledge of nature. For the first animal that began to understand how the world worked, ignorance of the reasons behind events generated anxiety. If the event happened to concern one’s personal well-being, then not knowing became unbearable. Thus, superstitions were increasingly deployed as protection, as insurance, and for peace of mind. If one could perform a ritual, intone a chant, clutch a talisman, participate in a rite, or make a wish—devoutly believing that these activities could influence the outcome of future events—then one gained a modicum of control over a mysterious and unpredictable world.

  Philosopher Nathaniel Shaler observed, “The ancestral men who experienced the most terror were those that were the most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value.”4 The Homo sapiens that emerged is the modern man as we know him: a hyperanxious creature who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even when none are present. But here was the quandary: Not to invent superstitions would bring about another form of anxiety. Blaise Pascal commented, “Men are necessarily mad because not to be mad would constitute another form of madness.”

  Excessive anxiety interferes with the normal mentation necessary for survival and reproduction. In numerous studies, psychologists have demonstrated that stressed animals do not live as long or reproduce as prolifically as contented ones.5 Superstition can be viewed as a novel adaptation that humans evolved to mask unpleasant truths with which no other animal has ever had to come to terms.

  The puzzle of death was the most vexing of these unpleasant truths. Stone Age people observed that when a warm, animate, rosy-cheeked person expired, he stopped breathing and became very still. Color drained from his face, and his body turned cold. He donned what the poet Homer described as a “garment of clay.” Within hours, the body began to decay, and the vividness that had characterized life slowly rotted away. After the passage of years, all that remained were disconnected bones and a hollow-socketed skull, the sight of which continues to give the living the heebie-jeebies.

  Terrified by the prospect of personal annihilation, the human species (especially men) used its collective wits to embark on a witless errand. Approximately forty thousand years ago, ancestral humans, whistling bravely in the dark, arrived at the astonishing conclusion that no one really died. Despite clear, incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, they declared death entirely illusory. A belief in the afterlife seems to have became embedded in the human psyche around then, in the period when the consistent use of mortuary rituals first appeared in the archeological record. Early peoples conjured an invisible component that resides internally and that did not expire with the body, an incorporeal essence they called a soul. This ectoplasmic entity departed the body at the moment of death and began a journey to another realm. So entrenched is this belief that in the majority of cultures, when a man dies, others consistently refer to him as “the recently departed.”

  Because the soul was invisible, no one seemed troubled that no one had actually witnessed it departing a body. That is one of the convenient aspects of self-delusion. Hell, Hades, Purgatory, Avalon, Valhalla, Paradise, Limbo, Reincarnation, the Netherworld, the Happy Hunting Ground, the Land of the Dead, and the Kingdom of Heaven were all places invented by humans, particularly men, to assuage their fear of death. These insubstantial, ephemeral worlds arose to obscure the unacceptable evidence of their senses—to wit, that death has the distinct look, unmistakable smell, and cold and waxen feel of permanence.

  Homo sapiens embroidered this core self-delusion by enshrouding death in elaborate ritual. Undecided as to whether the body might come in handy as an adjunct to the soul when it traveled to the next realm, ancestral people hedged their bets. Corpses, they decreed, should remain intact, no longer abandoned where the unfortunate had died, to be torn apart and scattered by wild dogs and vultures. Before being buried deep in the ground or in tombs, the dead were laid out in finery and often oriented toward the rising sun. Limbs were carefully arranged prior to rigor mortis. The favored position was the fetal one, presumably because people wished to believe that rebirth followed death. “Tomb” and “womb” became synonymous in people’s minds.*

  The body was washed and dressed, and in many cases bedizened with ivory beads, perforated seashells, and finery unlike any that had ever adorned the deceased during his or her life.† No other animal engages in similar behavior. Notes the Spanish novelist Miguel de Unamuno, “The gorilla, the chimpanzee, and the orangutan and their kind, must look upon man as a feeble and infirm animal whose strange custom is to store up his dead.”6

  A long journey requires elaborate preparation. Practical items were placed alongside the corpse to accompany the soul. Food, valuables, and weapons were consigned to the grave. In many early-historical cultures, whole armies of slaves, attendants, relatives, wives, concubines, and/or guards were buried alive so that they might accompany a deceased ruler on his mysterious journey.*Imagined spirits were conjured to convey the dead. And the dead themselves often became supernatural beings whom the living imbued with supernatural powers.

  Most important was the need to invest the passing of a life with communal ritual. Shamans recited incantations to help ease the travails of the dead through
what would surely be their frightening gauntlet. Communal mourning alleviated the survivors’ sense of loss.

  Early peoples fashioned an elaborate Land of the Dead out of the whole cloth of their imagination. It was natural that they would use human society as the template for this complex spirit world. Some spirits controlled destiny, just as parents dictate the fates of their young children. The living endowed supernatural beings with omniscient and omnipotent powers, just as absolute rulers in the world of the living exercise powers over their subjects. People readily accepted these potent beings as the cause of natural events that, to them, were inexplicable. And they could plead with and try to influence these “higher powers” to help them negotiate the hardscrabble of daily life. It would be natural for the living to summon those spirits with whom they were most familiar, their dead relations. Ancestor worship is an enduring feature of all early and many contemporary societies. An alternative spirit world has been an abiding feature of the human condition; it came into existence when Homo sapiens learned the awful truth that he was doomed to die. As the writer José Ortega y Gasset observed: