From Section 5: Life Above the Clouds

Herald: Oh you, who have founded so illustrious a city in the air, you know not in what

esteem men hold you, and how many burn with desire to dwell there. - Aristophanes, The Birds

Aristophanes' famous comedy begins when a pair of fugitives fed up with life in Athens - whose names roughly translate as the persuader and the optimist - wander into the hills carrying caged birds, which they hope will aid them in their search for a place where they can live free of debts, litigation and the other irritants of Greek civilization. In their wanderings they meet up with a bird that was once the king of Thrace, who according to legend was transformed by the gods along with his wife and a devoted slave as punishment for an ancient transgression. The fugitives tell the humans-turned-birds of their quest and in the course of the conversation it becomes clear that the kind of life they are looking for could be found among the birds, provided they are willing to take the persuader's advice on a few matters.

His proposal prompts the calling of an avian conclave, which has no sooner begun to assemble when several birds begin to advance menacingly upon the intruders, intent on tearing them to pieces in revenge for countless outrages suffered by their kind at the hands of men. In desperation the fugitives launch into a rambling rhapsody to the avian race, dredging up tales about birds having been present on Earth before all other living things and of their having once been kings of several great nations, where they were traditionally given the first taste of all sacrifices to the gods. Mollified by this flattery the birds relent and allow the persuader to present his plan, which is that they create a city in the air that would span the route between Earth and Olympus, thus rendering the gods above powerless by cutting them off from the smoke of sacrifices (and mortal women), while making the mortals below dependent upon the birds as their new gods.

The birds are delighted by the proposal and they put the persuader - who along with his companion is rewarded by being transformed into a bird - in charge of the project. After dealing with a succession of timewasters and opportunists, such as a poet selling hymns to the ancient glories of a city that has not been built and an inspector angling for bribes, he finally gets the city of Nephelokokkugia (i.e. Cloudcuckooland) up and running, and the response is immediate. The immortals send a messenger from Olympus threatening dire consequences if the flow of sacrifices is not resumed while the mortals not only accept their new gods they begin flocking in their thousands towards city, hoping to don wings and claws of their own (in most cases for selfish or nefarious purposes). Eventually the gods realize they have been snookered and make a deal with the persuader, who triumphantly enters Nephelokokkugia carrying the sceptre of Zeus to take his throne alongside an immortal queen as emperor of the three worlds.

It may have been a comedy, but Aristophanes' play touches upon some serious matters at a critical point in Athenian history. The great Peloponnesian war had been underway for a generation by the time he wrote The Birds, and after a brief lull the conflict had flared back into flame with an adventure that led many of those who would have otherwise been attending the premiere to Sicily as participants in an invasion instigated by a great persuader named Alcibiades. The grand plan had been to cut the Spartans off from their main sources of support outside of Greece and in the process win Athens new dominions that would make her master of the known world, but what actually resulted was an unmitigated disaster - although at the time Aristophanes' play was presented the situation was still at the stage where a bit of burlesque was not in bad taste. This is not to say that the great comedian was merely poking fun at current events. Aristophanes' play can also be read as a broad satire of a society that had become so corrupt, rudderless and self-serving that it was susceptible to being hijacked by the kind of people his contemporary Euripides described in Electra (presented around the same time as The Birds) as sportsmen: long on muscle, short on brains and lacking in courage. Men like Alcibiades, whose main claim to high office stemmed from his accomplishments in the Olympic chariot races and whose career as a general ended when he defected to the Spartans soon after the Athenian fleet arrived in Sicily (he later went over to the Persians, then back to the Athenians and was finally exiled again and murdered). And of course on an even less immediate level, The Birds can also be read as a tale of people so exasperated with the trials and tribulations of everyday life that they are willing to change species in search of a better existence, and in true comedic fashion they happen upon a lucky scheme that allows them to satisfy all of their desires, live in high luxury and poke fun at gods and men alike.

I am content to leave discussions of what Aristophanes may have actually had in mind when he wrote his play to the experts, or a least those that can read him in the original Greek. I mention his story here because our ability to find it interesting and amusing across such a vast gulf of time, language and culture shows how much we have in common with the acknowledged founders of the modern civilized world, and because the plot of The Birds highlights elements that have featured in the evolutionary stories we have assembled for both the civilized world and some of its more prominent macromalignancies. Two of those elements are detachment and desire, as in the detachment of civilized people from each other and their natural surroundings and their desire to pursue visions they have created for themselves. We saw these elements at work in the story of the classic Maya, which as we have reconstructed it can be cast as a tale of ecological detachment that eventually reached such extremes that the entire civilization lost touch with its natural supports. That ecological detachment was propelled by a variety of factors which included the growth of populations, the proliferation of communities, the long-term consequences of agricultural techniques, climate changes and the activities of the Maya elites, who seem to have been driven by a powerful desire to rise above their physical, social and spiritual origins to become celestial deities. This desire was not merely self-serving, since the astronomical calculations of Maya priests and the rituals, self-mutilations, wars and sacrifices of Maya princes were intended to maintain the connections they perceived between themselves and the forces that ultimately governed the survival of their societies. Nevertheless, the net effect of many elite activities - and the desires that motivated them - seems to have been to hasten the erosion of the ecological, economic and social viability of Maya communities.

These elements were certainly not peculiar to the Maya. They can be detected in societies going all the way back to the dawn of civilization, where in many instances we find people occupying dominant positions - be they associated with hierarchies of command, wealth or knowledge - showing a consistent tendency to create social and/or physical distance between themselves and others, together with a marked preoccupation with the supernatural as it has been variously conceived. Both of these tendencies may have origins in precivilized life - for instance tribal chieftains often live apart from others and shamans are wont to make solitary journeys into the underworld - but it is only among civilized people that we find entire classes and in some cases entire societies turning their backs on their social and natural origins in pursuit of the stars. Many civilized folk have also shared another aspect of life that features in the plot of The Birds and the history of the civilization the fugitives were trying to escape: displacement. As we saw in our potted histories of early societies, substantial numbers of people have been on the move ever since there were substantial numbers of people eligible to be on the move, and as a result many of the major centres of the ancient and classical worlds started out, like Nephelokokkugia, as colonies, containing populations that were typically one or more migrations removed from their ancestral origins (those migrations were often encouraged by other invaders). That pattern of displacement and dispersal continued with regional ebbs and flows throughout the civilized world for many centuries, and then around the dawn of the second millennium events began to unfold in Europe - ranging from the rediscovery of some of the knowledge produced by the ancient Greeks to a favourable shift in the weather and a regional population boom - which culminated in the most rapid and extensive dispersal and displacement of human populations since people like us started leaving Africa.

After some initial forays and retreats in the north Atlantic things really began to pick up around the mid-13th century when Europeans spread out across the globe as explorers, mercenaries, colonists, entrepreneurs and conquerors. Some went in search of their own fortunes, some were sent by overlords keen to enhance their power and wealth, a few succeeded and many perished, and collectively they contributed to an irresistible wave that in the course of a few centuries plundered, enslaved and exterminated its way throughout the human world - civilized and otherwise - and out into vast expanses that had only known the lightest of human touches if any at all. Massively destructive as it undeniably was, the great wave was also vigorously creative, especially in places like the Americas where enormous new societies emerged in a matter of generations via emigration, population expansion and the co-opting of indigenous peoples. Those new societies and many of the older ones that set them on their way continued to undergo substantial population expansions, displacements and dispersals as well as a host of other rapid and radical changes that contributed to the emergence of a modern civilized world that is immense, immensely powerful in terms of its reach and impact upon the natural world and largely populated by people and communities that have had little chance, incentive or desire to form deep, lasting or even conscious connections with their surroundings, natural and/or social. Thus largely by chance much of modern civilized humankind has achieved the ancients' desire to live between heaven and earth in worlds of their own creation.

So there we have in a few breathless paragraphs the civilized vehicles of detachment, desire and displacement combining with the old engines of growth and change to spin the magic megacycle of civilization along from the dawn of civilization through the classical world and on to the world we live in today. This is of course a travesty from a historical perspective, but it is consistent with the biological viewpoint we have been assembling throughout our exploration and it also seems to jive with some of the romantic and poetic traditions of Western civilization. Indeed I think it would be appropriate to credit Aristophanes with the discovery of what was to become a significant biosocial phenomenon, which in remembrance of the old comedian's lexical excesses we can dub nephelokokkugiagenesis: the creation of cities - and communities, societies, nations and civilizations - in the clouds. In doing this I am taking on the obligation of explaining more thoroughly how this phenomenon was involved in the emergence of the modern world, and in order to do that from a historical perspective a book that is already substantially longer than I originally intended would have to expand out of all reasonable compass. Fortunately the ancients can also help us here by pointing towards another option, which in this case arises from an experience I had some time back when I was fretting over how to bring the search for our macromalignant roots to a conclusion. I decided to go hiking in the hills like the persuader and the optimist in The Birds, not so much to escape civilization - I had no caged bird with me at the time - as to gain a bit of distance from the everyday hubbub. As it turned out I got more than I was looking for......

Final scene of a visit to the Fossa Fortuna:

I passed the threshold tentatively, then stepped quickly out of the way as the door swung shut again. The panel left no sign of its existence as it merged into a featureless wall that was the same light turquoise as the ceiling and floor, which were hard to distinguish from the walls because the entire room was bathed in a rippling greenish-gold light. It was like being in the bottom of a swimming pool only instead of water there was a fine mist, or it may have been the light itself glowing in the air as it radiated out from a giant crystal sphere that hung in the centre of the room with no visible means of support, except perhaps for the broad cylinder of brilliance that ran between the sphere and a bright hole in the ceiling, through which could be glimpsed the distant city the Grandly Fortunate Nabob had revealed earlier (at least I am assuming it was the same one). I was trying to determine whether the beam was ascending or descending when J.C. motioned to come closer from his position about three paces from the sphere. The crystal orb seemed to become disproportionately larger as I approached, and the low hum that we had been hearing ever since we left the main chamber also became perceptively louder and higher in pitch.

"Still sceptical?" whispered J.C. hoarsely.

"What exactly are we looking at here?" I could barely hear my own words, which seemed to be absorbed by the atmosphere in the room as soon as they were spoken. "Last time I saw something like this it was supposed to be channelling the supramental oo-topia or some such thing."

"The engine of the machine." J.C. pointed to the sphere. "The heart of fortune." he took a step back with head bowed like a monk facing a golden buddha. "Where all questions end."

It took a moment for my eyes to accommodate to the strange light, and as they did it became possible to make out a series of nested rings of various sizes and metallic colours spinning and rotating around centre of the sphere. The effect was quite hypnotic, or at least I suspect it would have been to someone who was susceptible to that sort of thing.

"Fascinating." I whispered out of the side of my mouth, keeping my eyes on the sphere. "For some reason it brings to mind that Rushdie story about the red slippers." J.C. said nothing as he took another step back out of my field of view, and I carried on from memory with typical inaccuracy. "When money has become just a way of keeping score we become detached from the earth. Floating in the capsule of the struggle we cross a delirious frontier and our survival becomes a fiction. In its grip we will mortgage our homes and sell our children to have what we want, or simply float away from our desires and see them from a distance where they become weightless and trivial. We let them go and like those dying in a blizzard lie down in the snow to sleep."