PROOF!! hour 2

PROOF!!

The second hour, a pair of tracks from each of the years 1992 to 1994. Trust me I was astonished as you were when I realized how many amazing projects dropped in the early 90s, of course perhaps it’s simply a problem with my historical perspective. Crazy times, back then, crazy times. For me that is. With the 20/20 employed sure there was plenty I would have done differently, but I wouldn’t trade any of it the way it ended up panning out. No regrets, this machine only goes forward.

PROOF!!

And now to return to our excerpts from The Story of B.

In absence of any other theory, it seemed reasonable (even inescapable) to suppose that the human race must have begun with a single human couple, an original man and woman. There was nothing inherently irrational or improbable about such a supposition. The existence of an original man and woman didn’t argue for or against an act of divine creation. Maybe that’s just the way things start. Maybe at the beginning of the world there was one man and one woman, one bull and one cow, one horse and one mare, on hen and one cock, and so on. Who at this point knew any better? Our cultural ancestors knew nothing about any agricultural “revolution.”

PROOF!!

As far as they knew, humans had come into existence farming, just the way deer had come into existence browsing. As they saw it, agriculture and civilization were just as innately human as thought or speech. Our hunting-gathering past was not just forgotten, it was unimaginable.

The Great Forgetting was woven into the fabric of our intellectual life from its very beginning. This early weaving was accomplished by the nameless scribes of ancient Egypt, Sumer, Assyria, Babylon, India, and China, then, later, by Moses, Samuel, and Elijah of Israel, by Fabius Pictor and Cato the Elder of Rome, by Ssu-ma T’an and his son Ssu-ma Ch’ien in China, and, later still, by Hellanicus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon of Greece.

PROOF!!

(Although Anaximander conjectured that everything evolved from formless material—what he called “the boundless”—and that Man arose from fishlike ancestors, he was as unaware of the Great Forgetting as any of the others.) These ancients were the teachers of Isiah and Jeremiah, Lao-tzu and Gautama Buddha, Thales and Heraclitus—and these were the teachers of John the Baptist and Jesus, Confucius and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle—and these were the teachers of Muhammad and Aquinas and Bacon and Galileo and Newton and Descartes—and every single one of them unwittingly embodied and ratified the Great Forgetting in their works, so that every text in history, philosophy, and theology from the origins of literacy to almost the present moment incorporated it as an integral and unquestioned assumption.

PROOF!!

Now I hope—I sincerely hope—that there are many among you who are burning to know why not a single one of you has ever heard a word about the Great Forgetting (by any name whatsoever) in any class you have ever attended at any school at any level, from kindergarten to graduate school. If you have this question, be assured that it’s not an academic one by any means. It’s a vital question, and I don’t hesitate to say that our species’ future on this planet depends on it.

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