My extrapolated, speculative theory of neurodiversity ought to turn the existing human origin story on its head.
It’s difficult, maybe impossible to express it, but I cannot stop trying.
First, the existing view is new, since Wallace and Darwin, kind of thing – and in the sense that the existing origin story isn’t that, but the same as since we started keeping any sort of history – that’s new too, in this conversation, in deep time where our species is hundreds of thousands or millions of years old.
The current view, looking back, is new, in terms of our species’ existence. Stretch it to the neolithic revolution, still new, relatively.
You would have to convince me that this present view of a progressive trajectory existed before then, during the tens of thousands of years when we were all sort of Indigenous the world over and not building big permanent cities, and I can’t imagine how you would. Perhaps it existed intermittently, during the empire parts of the cycle the Davids identified in The Dawn of Everything, but it didn’t rule always and forever. I don’t suppose we know how far into the past that pattern extends either.
But that’s step one, everything we think about the deep past is new, coming from modern minds.
New thought:
in creation stories, we arrive fully formed, human-hairless, and this suggests what I’m getting at: that the current origin stories tell of the creation of the new human, fully formed, suggesting that the story is recent, not an ape man story, that this mythical creation takes place in literal modern times, while upright, hairless, story telling people already inhabit the Earth.
For me, it is as easy to imagine these stories as describing the arrival of a type of person, the modern sort, rather than all people. Saying it is “the people,” like all the people – this is one thing this modern sort continues to do ever since also.
This idea, that creation stories take place during literal times, is borne out by the fact that every human group has its own, and generally does not credit their creator with making all the other peoples. They have their own, so this must be the case, that these stories all somehow acknowledge a creation event while acknowledging the existence of other peoples at the same time?
Ah, like Adam and Eve’s kids finding wives from somewhere, right?
I’m sorry, it’s a stretch.
But if anyone does build an Autistic origin story, it isn’t going to be compatible with the existing framework, a good version of this attempt is going to be a leap too.
But for me, the Allistic origin story, with the patriarchy and the rough Nature, has always been too much of a stretch, a leap this Autistic mind has never been able to make.
But whether their origin stories acknowledge creation as a neurotype event or not, the point is, the origin stories (and so the law and the philosophy and the science) are new and Allistic, our origin stories are only the Allistics’ origin stories.
This is a sliver, a thin slice of the logic from the other side here, but it’s long enough to pretend to draw a conclusion, at least, and then we can argue about that.
It ought to turn the human story on its head because it makes everything they claim as the way of the world forever not that at all, and it makes the mad human lifestyle not at all sustainable over three million years but rather as having destroyed the world in no time, since the neolithic revolution.
It ought to make clear what the problems are and stop burying them in an invented eternity.
Allistic “forever,” is NO TIME AT ALL, and if we were allowed to see it , we would see a new thing that isn’t working, at ALL.
I am about one beer from saying that spanking hails back to the neolithic revolution, and that seems radical as fuck, but farming changed lifestyles massively, didn’t it, and . . . and it sort of has to be that way, everything dates to then.
If not then, even earlier.
OK, not yet. There isn’t much about spanking in the Dawn of Everything, and a great sense that it wasn’t a thing on Turtle Island.
Twelve thousand years old in the Euro’s “Old world,” but hardly thought of here, is a little difficult, but . . . maybe? There are big differences. Speculation, to be sure.
That’s a new one, I think there’s an idea that spanking and childhood generally are far newer than that, even as recent as the enlightenment, this is the reachiest reach I will have made yet, how could it possibly be?
Ah, The Dawn of Everything again – what if it wasn’t a thing for the Turtle Islanders and what if the enlightenment they started meant that for the first time anyone in Europe bothered to NAME children and childrearing, and abuse?
Not proof, obviously.
But maybe?
I could be like a TV producer sort about it, like Ancient Aliens, refer you to “many legends,” that suggest something happened suddenly around twelve thousand years ago, of course there was a great leap in global warming and floods, inundation of any possible coastal cities, and there was the agricultural revolution and people have theorized many things to explain something sudden, from creation stories, to alien visitors to the far more reasonable and common weird magic that happened, “due to increased population/city size,” with no agreed upon mechanism for that.
I have seen talk of another sort of mind in or before ancient times, the “bicameral mind,” and this is closer to saying “a neurotype event,” like I’m trying to make happen.
It would seem self evident that if the common sort of mind changes, that the world would change subsequently, so perhaps, rather than thinking some Autistic savant created the agricultural revolution, it makes more sense to think that the population of Allistics passed some tipping point then, and people gave up their freedoms for something else – security from one another, they’ve always said this was it forever, maybe more so this recently – and started building fences and whatnot.
I suppose I’m talking about the same event the Chalice and the Blade was about too. Of course some of these things are more recent than that twelve thousand years. Was a long time ago, reading that one, I don’t remember the timeline.
Jeff
Feb. 28th., 2024