The Four Mothers of Human Causality

In which a green sprig gives birth to human desire, Jared Diamond ignores the miraculous character of the Russian Revolution, an ancient Peruvian ceremony of divine kingship has erotic outcomes, and I tell a story intended to make me better at telling stories

The Child with Four Mothers

The sun was coming. The four strange sisters had talked all night, and now they were sad and frightened. They were sprawled in a circle, around the corpse of what had been a cheerful fire, and a thick morning mist pressed home their coming loneliness. Last night their father had spoken in stern tones. They were long since women, and it was selfish of them to go on living like foolish maids, denying the world a child. He had given them their pick of husbands, but they refused them all, and now the time had come for him to choose for them. Soon they would be sent away to live in the houses of strange men, and would see each other no more, and they could not bear the thought of it.

It was Khaos* who made the first birth, who brought the strange new thought into the world—and only Khaos could think a thought so strange: “We will make a child ourselves! Are we nothing but soil and plow, that we need nasty man-hands to make us fruitful?” And with that she kneeled, digging the fingernails of her unsettling thick hands into the ground and sucking in her cheeks with a force that rattled the trees and ruffled her strange thick eyebrows. Her sisters hardly noticed the mist was gone before Khaos breathed it out again and made it so: a colorless bundle of arms and legs and eyes and ears—squirming in the ashes of the fire.

* Chaos

Then Physis*, regal, calm and naked—who had laughed and clapped her hands when Khaos said the strange and wonderful saying—covered her eyes and cried out in horror: “What is this thing that you have made? It is scattered, and lifeless, and cold—it does not have its own desire! This is no child of mine!” And with that she plucked a red blossom from a broken branch that had been too green to feed the fire, and slipped it into one of the mewling mouths that gaped and drooled and chattered on the surface of the new thing. And quickly the child took shape, and she was young and well formed and eager to run and rut and feed.

* Nature

But Nomos* recoiled. Turning her painted loveliness away, she shuddered with disgust: “What is this thing that you have made? It is hot and beastly and does not know its own name! This is no child of mine!” And with that she took the child’s hand in her own soft fingers, and whispered in its ear, and gave the child her name. And now the child took her seat in the ashes of the fire, and there was pause in her movements, and consideration in her eyes, and she smiled at her mothers as she spoke her own name: “Anthropos**.”

*Custom

**Human Being

Then they heard a great snort. Pushing a hard edged set of spectacles up the bridge of her severe nose, Techne* diagnosed the child in chilly tones: “What is this thing that you have made? It is soft and foolish and will soon be eaten. It is no child of mine.” And with that she pulled the well-sewn hides from her own bony shoulders, and draped them over the child, and then Anthropos received the cold black staff from Techne’s own hand: This staff is sharp and strong and one day will command the stars: that they might move according to Anthropos' pleasure. Then the child kicked aside the embers of the fire, and stepped out into the wide world. Leaning on that cold black staff—sweeping the circuit of the cosmos with a new kind of gaze—heaven above and earth below—the eyes of Anthropos were fierce with the glint of empire. The sun cracked the top of a distant mountain, without a bead of mist to harry its path, and the four sisters saw the child, and the child was magnificent.

*Know-How

In the many years to come, the sisters would often revisit that strange new dawn—turning the moments over in their fingers. They loved the child dearly. But bitterness entered the house they built for Anthropos, and sometimes they wondered if things might have been different.

The child belonged to all of them equally, but it was not always easy to remember. There was the day that Anthropos brought home a perch and ate it raw, leaving the kitchen table greasy with spine and womb and scales. Physis thought it charming, but a disgusted Nomos insisted that the child be punished. There was the week that Anthropos discovered the forest as a place rich in adornments. Physis endured the giggling and stamping feet for as long as she could bear, but eventually there was no more restraining herself, and she burst into the child’s bedroom. When she saw Nomos and Techne painting Anthropos’ smooth skin with strange swirling shapes in the red mud of the creek-bed, and disfiguring the fine lines of her face with feather and bone, she let out a shriek that terrified them all, and told her sisters to get their hands off her child. And then there were days when Anthropos’ did things so perverse and bizarre that the three sisters could not find the words to rebuke her. Then Khaos would caterpillar her strange thick eyebrows and remind them that it was her child as well.

Perhaps they were wrong to look back on that first dawn as the source of the troubles. Perhaps if they had been more thoughtful as Anthropos grew, more careful with their words in front of the child, things would have turned out differently. But whatever the cause, Anthropos soon learned to play a terrible game. With a child’s cruel perception, she found the magic phrase that could banish any one of them—fleeing from the room in tears:

 “You are not my mother, she is my mother!” 

And although it may have begun as a child’s selfish tool, Anthropos soon found herself afflicted by the question herself: who was her real mother? And there was pain in the house, as the sisters found the child they had created to keep them together splitting them apart.

Understanding Human Causality

What exactly am I trying to get at with this story? To explain my point in full—to transition from Mythos to Logos—I need to return to two items in my blog's tagline: history and speculative fiction. A primary objective of this blog is to explore the ways in which these separate species of the same genus of craft help us to grapple with what it means to be human. Up until this point, I have been working with the laws of Divine-Humanity, laws that are meant to explore the nature of human motivation—the pistons of desire that power our engagement with the world and with each other. 

But neither the historian nor the novelist can be exclusively concerned with reconstructing the panorama from within another person's skull. The pulp of life is found in the world of desire where men and women give obeisance to their gods, but there is no pulp without an outward skin: Human action in the world. Where the Laws of Divine-Humanity were meant to illuminate the human condition, the Four Mothers are meant to illustrate the nature of human causality. The Four Mothers are meant to help us with the question common to first year English students analyzing To Kill a Mockingbird and first year history students analyzing the Civil War: Why do things happen as they do? 

The essential point of my mythic sandwich is this: cosmic chaos, human nature, human culture, human know-how, and human chaos are the four mothers of human causality and historical action. They all contribute equally to a particular human moment, and it is absurd to give any one of them an absolute priority. Let me give you an example.

The Four Mothers in the Life of Caral Supe

We travel back in time forty-four hundred years, to have dinner in the shadow of the Caral pyramids, in the Supe Valley of modern Peru. Norte Chico culture is at its height and the night is young—but the cool evening air is filled with anxiety. The stars mark this night as one like no other; every eye in the city is fixed on the crest of the pyramid, where a colorful human wind whirls and stamps and spits and snorts. The city’s chief shaman, his nose streaming with snot as the hallucinogenic snuff takes its effect, completes his transformation and makes his journey to the Upper World. For a few endless minutes, no breath is found in all the great city of Caral Supe. 

But when the eagle returns, and takes on his human shape once again, the news is good: the Staff God is pleased with the Children of the Jaguar—the king will reach his sixteen-year jubilee in perfect good health. Joy cascades down the pyramid like a rainbow tide seen under moonlight. Shouts of delight copulate with the reedy songs of pelican bone flutes in the dry evening air. In every place at once, shining silver fish are mounted on the spit and squash, beans, and clams are prepared for roasting. (But an Irishman would be disappointed—nothing will be boiled, for the whole city has not a pot to piss in). Caral-Supe throbs and swells with the rhythm of life continuing. Within the space of moments, five thousand significant glances are exchanged, marking the night for more great sex than Caral-Supe has ever  experienced in a single evening.

OK, we have our sandwich of experience, let's use the the Four Mothers to take it apart.

Cosmic Chaos

Khaos is our first mother. How has chaos brought this moment to birth? The story begins with cosmic chaos. First of all, why this improbable patch of carbon-based exuberance on this strange wet rock in the Milky Way? Life, as a temporary middle finger to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is the product of an unfathomable collision of causes, all of which had to come together to make this moment possible. Second, why the fortuitous geographic coincidence that made Norte Chico civilization viable?—the special confluence of a maize and cotton-growing inland with a fish-rich coast, making for the peculiar economic metabolism between textiles and protein that probably characterized this civilization? 

The questions can go on: Why a climate perfectly suited to the growing of hallucinogenic substances like Ayahuasca? why did possible llama domestication not lead to the transmission of epidemics capable of cutting off the civilization at its roots? Answers can of course be given to many of these questions—by cosmologists, geologists, meteorologists, epidemiologists, and a teeming mass of other specialists. But no one human mind attempting to give a narrative account can encompass all that data. For the historian and the novelist, this actor in the human drama must be characterized under the vague but powerful heading of cosmic chaos. Why did a kamikaze destroy the Mongol invasion fleet and save Japan? Why did the Justinian plague gut the Byzantine Empire a few decades before the Muslim invasions? Khaos is our strange sweet mother.

Human Nature

Physis is our second mother. How has human nature brought this moment to birth? Well, the whole scenario is oriented by the pole star of fundamental human drives. The Caral-Supe ritual is about fertility. It’s about food and sex and life’s blooming desire to perpetuate itself. Human beings are capable of an astounding variety of refinements, but they all emerge from the brute facts of our evolutionary impulses. Even medieval beguines sworn to perpetual virginity wrote of their mystical ascents to oneness with God in the language of an erotic encounter. Empathy, lust, rage, hunger, being vulnerable to adorable things—all the emotions that can strike us with tsunami force are rooted in evolved responses of the human organism to its environment. Not reducible to, but rooted in. It’s the block of marble that every human culture is given to work with.

A block of marble is not a passive thing. Every block of marble is unique in its hardness, in its grain, in the impurities of carbon, iron or mica that produce black, red and yellow, or green veins. A block of marble imposes itself on the artist—she must contour and revise her artistic vision to accommodate the unique temperament of her material. The act of creation is more a collision of wills than the smooth passage of idea into actuality. Human nature likewise has its own peculiar temperament—its own hardness and its own grain. Ancient Peruvians and ancient Sumerians had radically different cuisine and probably had different tastes in sex positions—(The provisional consensus on the Mesopotamians is that cowgirl was the most popular)—but life’s great events will always be marked by food and sex—no matter where you are. Physis is our noble naked mother.

Human Culture

Nomos is our third mother. How has human culture brought this moment to birth? Well, the entire cosmos of meaning on which the moment rests would be impossible without language and custom. Social life is a tissue of consensus fictions and convenient lies—in a positive sense. The grand spectacle of human history emerges from the infinity of possible responses to the human block of marble. If you filled a time machine with experts from a North American university—a linguist, a political scientist, and an anthropologist—and took them back to Caral-Supe, their hearts would explode with delight. The linguist would shovel down a dinner of squash and fish while diagramming an unprecedented grammatical structure; the political scientist would vanish into charts of the power relations between urban god-king, rural cotton-growing nobility, and coastal fishing communities; the anthropologist would conduct countless interviews drawing out the elaborate kinship structures of the extended family unit.

Each expert would delight in witnessing the absurd and arbitrary art of culture creation. Their joy is made possible by the teeming variety this art creates. The joy of the linguist is predicated on the arbitrary and conventional relationship between a sign and its signification. There is no necessary connection between the word “jaguar” and an actual jaguar—thus there is not a single universal language but an inexhaustible fountainhead of languages—the linguist delights in wandering Babel’s never-ending streets. The joy of the political scientist is predicated on the alchemy of power—the arcane mechanics of force, awe, and love that bend many minds to a single purpose—a process crooked and contingent and ever-shifting. The joy of the anthropologist is predicated on cultural relativism—the rainbow of perspectives that gives every form of life its own color—making every mode of structuring relationships and ordering priorities distinct.

 A single block of marble—already unique in itself—is yet tumescent with a universe of possibilities. Humans everywhere love sex. But what an extraordinary process of creation has taken place—that Norte Chico civilization is capable of making five thousand people horny at the same time. Nomos is our lovely painted mother.    

Human Know-How

Techne is our fourth mother. How has human know-how brought this moment to birth? Forgive me but this explanation will be a little longer, both because our final mother is accompanied by some unique complexities, and because she is uniquely privileged in the post-modern and post-industrial environment—the environment whose central questions this blog seeks to explore ("The Way We Live Know" being the final item in my tagline). So I feel obligated to examine her in greater detail.

Techne’s fundamental duty is to embody the meaningful cosmos created by Nomos, and above all by language. It is humankind’s peculiar burden to live in a world we cannot see. Remembering, reasoning, ruminating—despising, despairing, delighting—none of these things leave a material precipitate. Our individual concerns and social categories remain stubbornly invisible. You cannot taste the meaning of life, and no one ever strokes The Horse—only this particular horse. But we are creatures of the visible world as well, and we need our concerns and categories to find expression in this world. We are compelled to externalize. The most fundamental externalization is language. Something magical happens when you find a good friend and unload everything that is swimming around inside your head. In the ear of a sympathetic friend, your concerns become real and can be subjected to rules. The confidant’s perfect response was uttered by Albus Dumbledore: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

This drive to manifest is the origin of art and technology. Art embodies our categories in the visible world, and technology makes the world respond to our concerns. The modern West has drawn firm distinctions between art and technology, but most historical societies have done without such distinctions. Pre-industrial magical practice is both aesthetic and practical—like the Paleolithic cave paintings that ensured success in the hunt. Amusingly, certain Egyptologists have claimed that Ancient Egyptian painting was a craft rather than an art precisely because it had a magical function—as if the Egyptians conscientiously refrained from taking aesthetic pleasure in anything directed to a practical end, in deference to our modern categories. This problem of categories accounts for why the word Techne gives translators such headaches. The word is generally associated with the Aristotle, who defined it as follows: 

“Every techne is concerned with bringing something into being, and the practice of a techne is the study of how to bring into being something that is capable either of being or of not being.” 

This definition encompasses both art and technology, so it is best translated simply as “know-how.” Know-how is the ability to “bring into being,” to seize the invisible and embody it in the visible.

The modern project of science and technology is merely a subset of Techne in this broader sense—it is a quest to subject the visible to the imperatives of the invisible. Science is usually framed as the quest for universal and eternal truths, but in its pre-modern origins and post-modern practice it is aggressively practical. The Elizabethan politician and philosopher Francis Bacon is generally regarded as the founder of modern science. His inductive method—in which you accumulate empirical instances in order to ascend to theoretical axioms—privileges prediction and control. He foresaw this method being “spring of a progeny of inventions, which shall overcome, to some extent, and subdue our needs and miseries.” This imperative remains at the heart of scientific inquiry and the technologies it produces—they are oriented towards prediction and control. There are no eternal truths or universal laws in science. There are only mathematical and theoretical models that have been more successful than all previous models in their ability to predict and control.

Modern scientific inquiry still derives most of its funding from the Department of Defense, pharmaceutical companies, and all the other ventures oriented to the satisfaction of human desire. And desire is a product of the concerns and categories of our invisible world. (Here we are thrown back on the Laws of Divine-Humanity, but let us shelve those for now).  Of course the first order of business is always the satisfaction of elementary needs: health and nutrition, shelter and sex. But that accounts for only a fraction of post-industrial expenditure and ingenuity. Are nice sneakers about comfy feet or social status? Did you buy the handgun for your protection or for the feeling of power that emanates from it? (Perhaps that feeling of power makes it easier to get an erection—admittedly a more elementary need—and yet how strangely is the visible self subordinated to the invisible self, that the symbolic value of blue steel can pump blood into your penis).

The logical conclusion of this process is the creation of virtual reality—a reality that is perfectly transparent to the concerns and categories of our invisible world. Seen from this angle, the modern project emerges from Plato’s dialogue the Phaedo. Here Socrates argues that we are soiled by living in a crass material world that is stubbornly resistant to the imperatives of our rational souls. We were meant to abide in the immutable and perfect realm of the unchanging Forms, the chaste realm of pure thought. Perhaps he would be pleased to see such a world next up on the post-industrial agenda. With bodies satisfied and miseries subdued, our civilization prepares to conquer death and reshape materiality in its own image. The gospels of Transhumanism and Singularitarianism now prepare the way for the coming of the Kingdom. At the terminus of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions for the Singularity, “Infinite beings contemplate the universe”—the realization of Plato’s dream in the earthly realm.

But we do an injustice to our sharp-nosed mother if we relegate her to a purely servile role. Techne originates in a desire to embody the invisible. But when put into practice in the visible world, she reveals portions of the invisible world that we had never seen before. Know-how creates new competencies, and in doing so Techne charts and colonizes unexplored islands in our invisible world.

The impact and power of a new competency is obvious in the horse nomad cultures of the Central Asian steppe. For millennia, Scythians, Huns, and Mongols raised their children with a bow in their hands and a horse between their legs. The chroniclers of sedentary societies were in awe of these alien creatures—one could not tell where the bow ended and the human began, where the human ended and the horse began. The chroniclers were right to see these nomads as a new kind of human being. We discover wonderful things in our invisible world when we develop a new competency. We feel powerful and useful, we gain new perspectives, (how many astronauts have spoken of the paradigm shift of seeing earth as a pale blue dot?), and we gain new resources with which to describe and externalize the invisible. 

The Dothraki, fictional horse-nomads of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice novels, speak of a coming messiah as “the horse that mounts the world.” The non-fictional camel-nomads of the Arabian Peninsula are famous for their Nabati camel poetry, in which the rich vocabulary of camel description is deployed in praise of a man’s beautiful camel—while also expressing the hopes and heartbreaks of his inner life. My fiancée told me a wrenching story from her anthropology class about a young man whose new bride fled his tent and ran back to her parents. He wasn’t abusive or cruel, she was just young and scared and they were both stupid. What did he do? He wrote a poem about his camel, a most beautiful and excellent camel, who ran away and left his heart a wasteland. (She eventually came back). And of course, where sedentary chroniclers were hard pressed to identify where the horse or camel ended and the man began, so we are hard pressed to identify where the iphone ends and the teenager begins (or where the ironing board, dishwasher, and washing machine end and Mom begins—but all these have been around for long enough that we no longer notice the novelty).

But, in deference to the Unabomber, we must remember that Techne does not just create new competencies, she creates new dependencies. The sheer volume of things that you must accumulate to be a functioning adult in the American suburbs is terrifying. Windex, cars, tables, dishwashers, showers, keyboard dusters, annual iterations of TVs, movie players, gaming consoles, stereo systems—it’s Sisyphean. And many of these things are so user-friendly that they barely require a competency of you. A TV is the simplest of things—you turn it on, you change the channel, you turn up the volume—you vegetate. We quickly grow accustomed to life on the fruits of empire, a life that demands only that we eat and be entertained. Our ever-expanding material requirements are piously satisfied by the faceless labor of robotic armatures or brown, yellow, undeveloped faces, (how hard to tell the difference—is there even a difference?—how nice if there wasn’t a difference). It seems worth quoting from the David Foster Wallace essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing That I’ll Never Do Again,” about his time doing Absolutely Nothing on a Caribbean Cruise, his every  impulse facilitated by Third World workers and First World devices: 

“How long has it been since you did Absolutely Nothing? I know exactly how long it's been for me. I know how long it's been since I had every need met choicelessly from someplace outside me, without my having to ask or even acknowledge that I needed. And that time I was floating, too, and the fluid was salty, and warm but not too-, and if I was conscious at all I'm sure I felt dreadless, and was having a really good time, and would have sent postcards to everyone wishing they were here.”

We see all of the children of Techne in the Caral Supe moment. I mentioned that the whole city has not a pot to piss in. Why? Because Norte-Chico civilization never invented ceramics. All the everyday business of cooking and carrying was accomplished with textiles. And every South American civilization—from Tiwanaku to the Incas, right into the Spanish genocide—was marked by a unique and vibrant emphasis on textile culture, even after developing ceramic technology. They were also marked by an extraordinary tradition of ecstatic shamanism, enabled by the hallucinogenic harvest of Amazonian vines and desert cacti. What does all this tell us? It tells us that the contemporary hand waving over “OMG humans are merging with technology!!!!” is nonsense. We’re not merging, we’re merged. Techne is our sharp-nosed and spectacled mother.

Human Chaos

There is one more thing we must tackle before we close our analysis of this human moment. Khaos is not only our first but also our final mother. Why did the shaman conclude that the Staff God was well pleased with the People of the Jaguar? Don’t ask me. People are weird, and people are complicated, and people do make choices. The inner realm is its own strange place, and no person's is identical with any another. We cannot say what regions the shaman explored in the grip of the spirit-snuff, or what criteria governed his interpretation of the sights he saw. We could say: “Of course the Staff God was happy with his people, with all that social pressure how could he not be?” Yet a Greek army of ten thousand men stranded in hostile Persia was almost annihilated because the livers of sacrificed animals were unfavorable to their departure, in Xenophon's Anabasis. The individual human being and its decisions are a bottomless, and bottomlessly unpredictable realm.

Why did Caesar cross the Rubicon? Why did the Germans send Vladimir Lenin to Petrograd at such an improbably perfect moment? Why did Hitler invade Russia? Khaos is our first and final mother.

Maternal Equality

This blog will attempt to give all Four Mothers equal air-time in the human narrative. The petulant and hurtful behavior of Anthropos is the inevitable product of hubris and disciplinary specialization in an age of inflated egos and hyper-specialized scholarship. Contemporary thinkers generally suckle at a single breast, and they give total causal priority to the Mother on whose nipple they have latched.

Historians are disciples of Khaos, although they skirmish over what form of Khaos has causal priority. So for instance, the historian Jared Diamond is dedicated to the total causal priority of geography in human history, making him a disciple of cosmic chaos, while Victor David Hansen is an initiate of an old fashioned view where history pivots on the decisions of great men and the outcomes of great battles, making him a disciple of human chaos.

Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists are disciples of Physis. They are dedicated to uncovering the fundamental features of our biological drives and our cognitive architecture, and they have made astonishing progress in recent decades. But they frequently become absurd when they overreach. The most egregious examples are those evolutionary psychologists who find themselves trying to argue that the rich are rich because they are smart and beautiful, or that the bizarre courtship rituals produced by 20^th century Western patriarchy are validated by the unchanging Order Of Things that was established on the African Savannah In the Beginning. 

Anthropologists and sociologists are disciples of Nomos. They tend to see human beings as purely plastic, capable of being shaped into pretty much anything by the crinkled tissue of lies and fictions that makes up social life. But there is a moment in many an anthropology class where things get silly, when the students know better than the teacher that no—most women in most places tend to enjoy sex, bright colors, and will melt at least a little when they see a baby, and no amount of cultural production or representation is going to make that go away entirely, anymore than most medieval beguines were able to do anything beyond sublimating their sex drive, as opposed to obliterating it.

Programmers and engineers are disciples of Techne. It’s obvious to them that human beings are products of their tools, and that every problem will yield to a lot of data and a little ingenuity. The more thick headed and insular specimens are thus inevitably led to dispense with the human condition and human causality altogether. We will be comfortably replaced by—or integrated with—the chaste, pure, and rational computations of a Strong AI, unsullied by Khaos, Physis, or Nomos.

This blog will not try to avoid any of these tempting absurdities. It’s complicated having Four Mothers. The other kids will probably make fun of us at recess. But it took all four of them to make us, and all four of them deserve to be acknowledged and loved. Let’s learn to live in the house they built for us.