The Fall (new edition with Afterword): The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of a New Era - Softcover

Steve Taylor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785358049 ISBN 13: 9781785358043

Publisher: Iff Books, 2018

Synopsis

A new edition of Steve Taylor's bestselling classic, in which the author provides an Afterword, including research developments that have occurred since the book was first published in 2005. ""An important and fascinating book about the origin, history and impending demise of the ego - humanity's collective dysfunction. The Fall is highly readable and enlightening, as the author's acute mind is at all times imbued with the higher faculty of spiritual awareness."" Eckhart Tolle

About this title

About the Author

Steve Taylor PhD is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Metropolitan University, based in Manchester. He is the author of several best-selling books including The Fall, Waking From Sleep and Back to Sanity, and a book of spiritual poems titled The Meaning. Steve was named number 72 on the 2018 Spiritual 100 List in Watkins Mind Body Spirit magazine. A new edition of The Fall publishes in summer 2018. www.stevenmtaylor.co.uk

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Fall

The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of a New Era

By Steve Taylor

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2005 Steve Taylor
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-804-3

Contents

Foreword by Stanley Krippner, 
Introduction, 
PART ONE: THE HISTORY OF THE FALL, 
1. What's Wrong with Human Beings?, 
2. The Pre-Fall Era, 
3. The Fall, 
4. Unfallen Peoples, 
5. The Ego Explosion, 
PART TWO: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE FALL, 
6. The New Psyche, 
7. Escaping from Psychological Discord, 
8. The Origins of Social Chaos 1 – War, 
9. The Origins of Social Chaos 2 – Patriarchy, 
10. The Origins of Social Chaos 3 – Inequality and Child Oppression, 
11. The Origins of God, 
12. Separation from the Body, 
13. The Origins of Time, 
14. The End of Nature, 
PART THREE: THE TRANS-FALL ERA, 
15. The First Wave, 
16. The Second Wave, 
17. A Question of Time, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
Afterword: The Fall Revisited (2018), 

CHAPTER 1

What's Wrong With Human Beings?

IF ALIEN BEINGS have been observing the course of human history over the last few thousand years they might well have reached the conclusion that human beings are the product of a scientific experiment which went horribly wrong. Perhaps, they might hypothesise, other aliens chose the earth as the site for an experiment to try to create a perfect being with amazing powers of intelligence and ingenuity. And create this being they did – but perhaps they didn't get the balance of chemicals exactly right, or maybe some of their laboratory equipment broke down half way through because, although the creature did possess amazing intelligence and ingenuity, it also turned out to be a kind of monster, with defects which were just as great as – or even greater than – its abilities.

Imagine if you had to draw up a balance sheet for the human race, listing our positive achievements on one side and our failures and problems on the other. On the plus side there would be the amazing scientific and technological feats which have made us the most successful species in the history of the earth – the advances of modern medicine, for example, which have doubled our life span, massively reduced infant mortality rates, controlled ailments which made life a misery for our ancestors (such as toothache, deafness or short-sightedness), and controlled diseases which killed them, such as smallpox or tuberculosis. Then there are our feats of engineering and building – 100-storey buildings, aeroplanes, space travel, tunnels underneath the sea. And then the incredible advances of modern science, which have enabled us to understand the physical laws of the universe, how life has evolved, to uncover the chemical structure of living beings and the physical structure of matter.

The plus side would also include the magnificent achievements of human creativity. The symphonies of Mahler or Beethoven, the songs of the Beatles or Bob Dylan, the novels of Dostoyevsky or D.H. Lawrence, the poems of Wordsworth or Keats, the paintings of van Gogh – in their own way, all of these are just as impressive as any great building or scientific discovery, if not more so. There, too, would be the wisdom and insight of great philosophers and psychologists, which has helped us to understand our own psyche, and our predicament as conscious living beings.

And if, as some scientists believe, the only real purpose of life – for all living beings – is to survive and reproduce, then the human race has been massively successful in this regard too. Analysis of DNA suggests that all human beings alive today are descended from a group of a few hundred to a thousand people who left Africa 125,000 years ago. In just 125,000 years, therefore, this group of human beings has increased in number to a staggering 5 billion.

However, it seems to be a law of nature that great development in one area is offset by a lack of development in another. Great talent always seems to go hand in hand with great deficiency. Think of the great creative artists, like van Gogh or Beethoven, who paid for their genius with mental instability, depression and a lack of social skills. Or think of the archetypal absent-minded scientist who forgets to tie his own shoelaces and can't remember his grandchildren's names. Genius always has a price, it seems.

But the best illustration of this law isn't any individual human being but our species as a whole – because the bright side of the human race's achievements is balanced by a devastating and depressing dark side.

THE DARK SIDE OF HUMAN HISTORY – WAR

As well as being the most successful species in the history of the earth, the human race has been by far the most destructive and violent. It's impossible to read any history book – dealing with any period of history over the last five thousand years – without being shocked by what the historian Arnold Toynbee called "the horrifying sense of sin manifest in human affairs." For most historians, history begins with the civilisations of Egypt and Sumer, which emerged at around 3500 BCE. And from that point on, right until the present day, history is little more than a catalogue of endless wars: conflicts over boundaries, raids to win slaves or victims for sacrifice, invasions to win new territory or increase the glory of the empire. In fact, these outward reasons for fighting aren't so significant, since the real cause of it all is the inner need which human beings have always had for conflict.

It's sometimes said that war is "natural," either because of certain chemicals (such as a high level of testosterone in men, or a low level of serotonin) or because we're made up of "selfish genes" which are determined to survive at all costs and make us compete against other individuals or groups for resources. But there are two important facts that contradict this view.

The first is that war is completely unknown amongst the rest of the animal kingdom. There are some primates who show a degree of aggressive behaviour, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, but even they are nowhere near as war-like as human beings. Their small degree of war-like behaviour only seems to occur when their natural way of life or their habitat is disrupted. This appears to have been the case with the chimpanzees of Gombe in Tanzania, who were famously studied by the primatologist Jane Goodall. They have been used as the basis of a "demonic male" hypothesis, suggesting that male primates – including human beings – are genetically programmed to be violent and murderous. However, it's now clear that the violence of the chimpanzees at Gombe is the result of social and environmental disruption caused by human beings. As Margaret Power points out in her book The Egalitarians, Goodall's own early studies of the chimpanzees showed a lack of violence. It was only later, after their feeding patterns had been disrupted, that they began to be aggressive. Recent studies of other chimpanzee groups in their natural environment show them to be extremely peaceful. As the psychologist Erich Fromm noted, "If the human species had approximately the same degree of 'innate' aggressiveness as that of chimpanzees living in their natural habitat, we would live in a rather peaceful world."

But most other species are even more peaceful than primates. Of course, many animals kill other species for food, but aside from this, as J.M.G. van der Dennen writes in his book The Origins of War, "Genocide, genocidal warfare, massacres, cruelty and sadism are ... virtually absent in the animal world." Apart from the killing of prey and the occasional practice of infanticide, the only type of violence which occurs amongst animals is what van der Dennen calls "ritualised interindividual agonistic behaviour" – in other words, aggression between the members of groups, usually connected to dominance or mating issues. But even here, actual fighting is quite rare. In fact, most animals go to great lengths to avoid real conflict. As the zoologist Glenn Weisfeld notes, "The animal usually threatens its opponent initially, as by hissing, vocalising, teeth-baring. Attack comes as a last resort." And even if fighting does take place, animals also have appeasement signals, or displays of submission (such as when a dog rolls over), which abruptly end the fight before any killing occurs. Human beings are one of the very few species that does not have these instinctive inhibitions against killing, and are the only species that practises collective aggression and attempted conquest of other groups. In Erich Fromm's terms, whereas animal aggression is "benign and defensive" – only occurring when survival interests are threatened, and rarely going beyond threats and warning signals – human aggression is "malignant."

The second reason is that, far from being "as old as humanity," war is actually a relatively recent (at least in terms of our whole history as a species) historical development. There is still a general assumption that early human beings were primitive "savages" who were much more aggressive and war-like than modern human beings – but archaeological and ethnographic evidence which has accumulated over the last few decades has now established that this isn't true. I'm not going to detail this evidence here, since it's one of the main themes of the next chapter, but there's now a general agreement amongst scholars that so-called "primitive" human beings were free from intergroup aggression and also from much of the "interindividual" aggression which van der Dennen speaks of. Van der Dennen examined the data on over several hundred primal peoples and found that the majority of them were "highly unwarlike," with "war reported as absent or mainly defensive," while the others only had "allegedly mild, low-level and/or ritualised warfare." While another scholar, the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, has written that, "the global pattern of actual evidence indicates that war as a regular pattern is a relatively recent development in human history, emerging as our ancestors left the simple, mobile hunter-gatherer phase."

As we'll see, warfare only seems to have begun at around 4000 BCE. Since then, however, as if to make up for lost time, human beings have turned large parts of this planet's surface into a constant battleground. Until the nineteenth century, European countries were at war with one or more of their neighbours for an average of nearly every second year. Between 1740 and 1897, there were 230 wars and revolutions in Europe, and during this time countries were almost bankrupting themselves with their military expenditure. At the end of the eighteenth century, the French government was spending two-thirds of its budget on the army, while Prussia was spending 90 per cent. Warfare actually became slightly less frequent during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but this was only because of the awesome technological power which nations could now utilise, which meant that wars were over more quickly. In actual fact, the death toll from wars rose sharply. Whereas only 30 million people died in all the wars between 1740 and 1897, estimates of the number of dead in the First World War range from 5 million to 13 million, and a staggering 50 million people died during the Second World War.

And, of course, at the same time as war between different human groups, there has always been conflict within individual groups. Internal conflict has been as rife as external. Members of the ruling classes have continually battled with one another for power, religious groups have continually fought over their beliefs, and oppressed peasants have frequently rebelled against the ruling classes. The Roman Empire was so riddled with in-fighting that to become emperor was practically to condemn yourself to a premature – and usually a terrible – death. Of the 79 emperors, 31 were murdered, 6 were forced to kill themselves, and several more disappeared under suspicious circumstances after feuds with enemies. And in terms of class conflicts, historians have estimated that in medieval China there was a major peasant revolt almost every year, while one 60-year period of Russian history (1801-1861) saw 1,467 revolts.

PATRIARCHY

It's possible, I believe, to say that there have been three main characteristics of human societies throughout recorded history (although, as we'll see later, there were peoples in some parts of the world who this doesn't apply to). War is the first of these; the second is patriarchy, or male domination; and the third (which we'll examine in a moment) is social inequality.

Feminist readers might already have objected to my statement that "the human race" has always waged war. In actual fact, only half the human race has waged war, since war has always been an almost exclusively male occupation. And in a sense men have always fought against women too. As well as being a catalogue of endless wars, the last few thousand years of history have been a story of continuing brutal oppression of women by men.

It has been suggested (by the sociologist Steven Goldberg, for example, in his book The Inevitability of Patriarchy) that patriarchy – or the dominance of men over women – is inevitable too, because of the higher levels of testosterone which men have, which makes them much more aggressive and competitive than women. But in actual fact, again, this view is contradicted by the fact that patriarchy is a relatively recent historical development. The artwork, the burial practices and the cultural conventions of human societies from the Palaeolithic and early Neolithic periods of history (that is, the Old Stone Age and the early part of the New Stone Age) show a complete lack of evidence for male domination. Women seem to have played just as prominent a part in these societies as men, and to have had exactly the same kinds of freedoms and rights. Many of these societies appear to have been "matrilinear" and "matrilocal" – that is, property was passed down the female side of the family, and on marriage men went to live with the bride's family. In addition, in some cultures children would take the mother's name rather than the father's. We'll also see that there are many primal peoples who have similar practices, and no traditions of male domination.

Like war, patriarchy only seems to make its first appearance in history at around 4000 BCE. In large parts of the world since then, however, the status of women has been only a little higher than that of slaves. In almost every society in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, women were unable to have any influence over the political, religious or cultural lives of their societies. It was taken for granted that they weren't fit to, since they were, in the words of the misogynistic philosopher Schopenhauer, "childish, foolish and short-sighted ... something intermediate between the child and the man." Women often couldn't own property or inherit land and wealth, and were frequently treated as mere property themselves. In some countries they could be confiscated by moneylenders or tax collectors to help settle debts (this was, for example, a common practice in Japan from the seventh century CE onwards). In ancient Assyria, the punishment for rape was the handing over of the rapist's wife to the husband of his victim, to use as he desired.

Most gruesomely of all, some cultures practised what anthropologists have called ritual widow murder (or ritual widow suicide), when women would be killed (or kill themselves) shortly after the deaths of their husbands. This was common throughout India and China until the twentieth century, and there are still occasional cases nowadays. In India, the wives of Brahmin men would throw themselves – or else be thrown – on to their husbands' funeral pyres. According to Hindu tradition, once her husband dies, a woman becomes incomplete and sinful; she is a social outcast and cannot remarry. As a result, women sometimes chose suttee as a better option.

In Europe and North America, we're now used to a degree of sexual equality, but elsewhere women are still effectively slaves. In many countries – particularly in the Middle East – women live in seclusion in their own quarters, and can't go out unless accompanied by a male relative. If an unmarried girl has sex – even if she is raped – there is the possibility that she will be murdered by a male relative. In Saudi Arabia, women must wear a black gown – the abaya – which covers them completely save for a slit for the eyes. They can't drive a car or ride a bike, and can be stoned to death for committing adultery, while a man is permitted to marry four times.

In addition to this institutionalised oppression, women have continually been subjected to actual physical violence. In many cultures, female adultery, sex before marriage and abortion were punishable by death. In China, women were permanently deformed and disabled by having their feet bound, partly because men considered this erotic and partly because, as one Confucian scholar wrote, it would "prevent barbarous running around." Wife-beating appears to have been common everywhere, and even to have been regarded as necessary. Women were seen as emotional and undisciplined creatures who needed to be taught self-control through violence.

Perhaps, however, there's no better symbol of the low value of female life and the domination of men than the widespread practice of female infanticide – that is, the killing of baby girls. This was rampant throughout Europe until recent centuries. During the ninth century, for example, the European population is estimated to have averaged three men for every two women, mainly because of infanticide. By the fourteenth century this had risen even higher, to 172 men for every 100 women. Similarly, a scholar has estimated that in nineteenth century China, in some districts as many as a quarter of the female infants were killed at birth. And perhaps there's no greater sign of the hostility and mistrust of men towards women than the state-sanctioned mass of murder of European women as "witches" that took place during the middle centuries of the last millennium.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Fall by Steve Taylor. Copyright © 2005 Steve Taylor. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Edition details

• Publisher: Iff Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1785358049
• ISBN 13: 9781785358043
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 360