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| Patan Durbar Square |
I am sitting in a well known tourist café overlooking Patan Durbar Square; one of the three ancient cities now collectively known as Kathmandu. Four Stupas were erected at the corners of Patan as early as 250 B.C., and many other temples and religious buildings have been added since then. Patan contains some of the finest wood and stone carving in Nepal and much of it is still well preserved. The moment one steps into the Durbar Square, its architectural style is an instant overwhelming mark of an era long gone.
Patan is on the list of just about every tourist visiting Kathmandu. They congregate around the little wooden booth to pay their entrance fee, while the freelance guides hover close by in the hope of picking up a group, and a day’s earnings. Each nationality is abundantly obvious to the waiting guides, who always manage to greet them in the right language. Primarily their clues are fashion, and size. It is the latter of these features that got me thinking.
When observing western foreigners passing through Nepal, it is a fact that the majority are significantly overweight, pale and puffy faced, uncoordinated, have very poor muscle tone and generally look rather unhealthy. Despite having plenty of disposable income to eat well, they present themselves as perfect examples of having sedentary lifestyles and malnourishment in times of abundance. Abundance and quality in food are exclusive states. This reality is all the more stark in a place like Nepal where most eat the bare minimum but perform hard manual work daily. For men here, a good well toned physique is the norm.
From my observation post, I consider an idea proposed by an anthropologist (whose name I forget) some years ago. His idea predicted the human race will, or has already, divide into two distinct factions. One may even consider these divisions to be distinct species. There will be the well educated city dwellers and the less well educated rural folk; the haves and have nots, if you were to consider it from a materialist view point. A less popular part of this idea proposes the split maybe predominantly white skinned Caucasoid intellectuals on one hand, and Negroids on the other.
The longer we live the city life, the further from our evolutionary roots we are drawn. Societies develop far quicker than we evolve biologically, and our animal instincts still influence us powerfully at a deep subconscious and biological level. These instincts remain mostly hidden, emerging only at times of strong emotional stimulation. On a day-to-day basis suppression of our instincts directs us on paths which conflict with our biological templates. The change from pure hunters to farmers and later, city living humans, has occurred only in the last few thousand years. In evolutionary terms this is next to nothing. Biologically, we are still cavemen and first farmers.
So instead of concerning ourselves with finding food and maintaining our places within the ‘pride’, we find ourselves doing unnatural trivial meaningless things, just to keep our hugely underutilized brains distracted from the roles they still think about biologically. These preordained thoughts, what we call ‘instincts’, are ‘hard-wired’ into every facet of brain function. We might choose to override these instincts, but in doing so we create emotional conflicts, or thought processes which go against the grain or natural flow. Our unrestrained desires are suppressed in favour of what is considered more fitting for modern society. For example, the instinct to forcibly resist an intruder in your house or even your personal space is still very strong at an emotional level We tend to suppress these instincts as reason tells us it would be frowned upon by today’s society.
We humans like to consider ourselves intelligent rational beings, who have everything under control, but this could not be further from the truth; our brains work almost exclusively on emotions. If we looked at every response at the subconscious level, they are all about protection or fear of something.
Our brains are capable of so much more than they are used for. Much of their effort is spent dealing with the emotional conflicts created by not living in tune with the true function they have evolved to perform. Clearly we cannot go back to a pure hunter existence, but that means we must learn to tolerate some of the problems we see in modern societies until we have evolved biologically to deal with them better. Evolution is a slow process, so we must learn well to tolerate. Learning requires practice also, not just understanding. The genome project completed a few years ago was trying to identify the function of the codes contained within our DNA. But at this time, still 50% of our entire DNA reserve is labeled ‘Junk DNA’ because as yet no function is attributed to it. But in nature there is no redundancy. Everything has a purpose. So the question is, ‘what is 50% of our DNA used for’?
We are the products of our minds, and from an evolutionary standpoint those minds are still in the times of hunters or hunter-gatherers. Arguments we see today between politicians for example, are a bit like alpha males fighting for the dominant position; prospective alphas attempting to show their strength and power. But there is a difference between this and a true fight for dominance. In a true fight there is a clear winner and a loser. The loser is ousted from the pack, or even killed, the winner conclusively stamping authority for all to see. Now, with reason and discussion, there are only degrees of compromise, and therefore no true conclusion to any encounter. This again contradicts our evolutionary template. There is no winner, and thus no true perception of authority, and there is no loser, thus ‘losers’ are able to succeed in society, watering down its overall strength, and ‘polluting’ its cause.
This suppression of true evolutionary expression creates deep rooted emotional conflicts within us. Different societies keep these conflicts under wraps in different ways, but each manifest as the emotional ‘ticks’ we see in all city dwellers today. Our ‘packs’ have no true dominant character anymore, but instead are run by many weak ‘beta’ characters. Beta characters by their very nature don’t like conflict, they tend to avoid confrontation and settle for compromise rather than conclusive actions.
Thus overall in human society there is a general lack of true ‘genetic’ satiation or satisfaction. There is only ‘conscious’ satisfaction, i.e. what we kid ourselves is satisfying, what we kid ourselves is important, meaningful or a measure of success. More often than not however, our perception of success is measured against our beliefs about the opinions of others, but these beliefs are very often wrong.
So not only do we live in a world where true satisfaction is rare, we also live under the misapprehension of the way we are perceived by others.
For every step forwards we make technologically, we take one step further away from our genetic template. As technology progresses much faster than evolution, this gap inevitably will widen at an ever increasing pace, hastening us towards the differentiation of our species, perhaps.
Back in Patan Durbar Square, the fat western tourists in their super duper XXXXL tea shirts, with their bellies overhanging their waist bands, baggy shorts concealing chubby sun-burned thighs, and pristine white trainers feigning association with some sort of physical exercise over and above carrying their own bulk, pay their entrance fees, blissfully unaware they are the forerunners for a new species. If we are in assent with the idea of survival of the fittest, then this new species is unlikely to make it. But technology and modern society allows us to flaunt those laws. The ‘fattest’ can now win dominance because it’s no longer just about strength and aggression; these two characteristics in themselves being the products of health and vitality. Now unhealthy members of society can win through, if measured by material wealth. Stick them back in the jungle, and of course the result would be a very quick return to the laws of nature that have held true for millions of years.
The muscled physiques of their guides, who are wondering why foreigners generally look so unhealthy, are probably also unaware there is a splinter group of their species forming, and they are being left in the ‘old world’.
Maybe there will be a third group; those who appreciate we cannot flaunt nature’s laws for long, but we can work with them for continuation of the species.
