Imagining the World After the Ice

March 9, 2007

The opening chapter to this book by Steven Mithen has an unusual emphasis on the imagination. Its subject is human history between 20,000 and 5,000 BC. The catalyst for this history is the development of the modern mind.. which is to say a mind "with seemingly unlimited powers of imagination, curiosity and invention" (3). This is an odd way of thinking about history. It is not made by powerful leaders, nor by human greed and lust.. rather the imagination leads the way. History is the result of the human ability to imagine the world in a new way and to combine cognitive domains. It is hard not to paraphrase Shelley: the imagination is the unacknowledged creator of history.

After a couple of pages the imagination returns with a new sense.. this time as it relates to methodology. The challenge in telling the story of human beings from 20,000 to 5,000 BC is the lack of written records and monumental remains. Mithen must piece together events through scarce archeological evidence.. excavated camp sites and some rock art. The portrayal of this ancient world will thus require a healthy dose of imagination on the part of the historian.

Mithen goes on to assign a value to this kind of imaginative work:

This is what archeology can do for all of us today. As globalization leads to a bland cultural homogeneity throughout the world, imaginative travel to prehistoric times is perhaps the only way we can now acquire the extreme sense of otherness by which we recognize ourselves. [6]

That might be a surprising claim: if we want to experience human cultural difference we should not travel to some far-flung corner of the contemporary world and live among the natives. The "bland cultural homogeneity" has spread broadly.. so that even in that far flung corner you will encounter Coca-Cola and television. I remember reading an Arabic newspaper years ago and coming across the statement that George Bush gave Ariel Sharon the "green light" to carry out some plan. I realized then that I was reading Arabic but taking in a modern view of the world. Mithen points us to the really distant past as the true far-flung corner where we can get out of ourselves. Through an act of the imagination which allows us to inhabit that world and even see human beings as they once were we are able to return and see ourselves differently.

This is similar to the stated goal of Old Roads.. except we are not insistent on archeology as the main path to "extreme otherness". Old texts can be as useful as abandoned campsites for getting outside the modern world. Our guiding principle is the importance of human cognitive diversity.. and that diversity naturally results whenever the human imagination is given free play to create and find meaning. There could be not greater subject than to meditate on that process.