12.

Lascaux, France.

How Far Is It to the Next Lascaux?

Puffed with pride we turn photons into information carriers, hurtle bits of metal and plastic into distant voids, split atoms explosively, applaud each other’s messages from the gods called "art", and so on.

Indeed, progress is our most important product, from Diet Sprite to the Maybach, from Homer the Greek to Homer the Simpson, from Lao-Tze to Laertes.

Consider, please, those benighted souls daubing stuff on the caves of Spain and France 30,000 years ago. Some daubing. As always, photographs fail to communicate the presence of great art. You have to stand in front of the horse at Lascaux to get the effect. And some effect it is.

Standing there, you think about distances: how far they—who clearly were us—had come from the Olduvai Gorge in Africa, and how far we have come from, well, Lascaux.

In the presence of their art, you sense how much greater the distance they had traveled. From the heart of Africa, walking this long way, they had got not only language, survival skills, and some kind of community, but the need, the time, and the talent for great art.

All our clever stuff since is built on the foundation of consciousness that they were already constructing. Sure, we’ve gotten a lot better at manipulating things, at making stuff out of other stuff, but stand in front of the horse at Lascaux and it’s hard deny that we haven’t advanced even a centimeter, a nanometer if you will, in manipulating symbols. Which of course all us symbol manipulators agree is the true test and measure of intelligence.

The road from Lascaux to here is thus no road at all but one giant—if fascinatingly decorated—rut.

They, with their new clevernesses, had vanquished their less clever predecessors (Neanderthal). We, meanwhile, plow on in the rut, dully unaware that our own Neanderthals (known in the United States as "Republicans"), clumsily greed- and fear-driven as they are, continue to amass wealth and power as if tomorrow belongs to them, just as so many yesterdays have.

To what new wheel must our own shoulder be applied in clever new ways to ride up and out of their ancient rut?

The Peaks of Otter continues >>

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