Page 59 - Effable Encounters

Kids’ Krusade for Krissendom

Archaeology and anthropology suggest that the reorganization of
human affairs on a larger scale of economic specialization and
political control based on increasingly attenuated and distant
oligarchies was accompanied and enabled by the establishment of
patriarchal authority justified by a monotheistic religion and a priestly
caste supporting and interpreting the divine right of kingship. Slowly
the world divided into sacred and profane realms, hastened by the
application of our large brains to solving problems. Genetically we
did not evolve as a species through this revolution: you and I were
born into a high-technology environment with the same overriding
mechanisms in our brains and nervous systems as hunter-gatherers
living ten thousand years ago.”
Easton stroked his chin as if in memory of a phantom Viennese
goatee.
“Thus we are capable of believing the most outrageous nonsense.
Before the invention of childhood as a formal status of dependency
more than a century ago, most young humans had a very good idea
of the separation of otherworldly and secular concerns because they
were integrated into the work force at an early age. It is not
coincidental that the formalization of childhood occurred during of a
period of rapid intellectual and scientific activity, an age of
enlightenment culminating in the twenty-first century. But that
required an even longer stretch of dependency in order to gain a
formal education. So a reversal started at the dawn of the modern era,
in retrospect a resurgence of neoteny ironically stimulated by the end
of the old world of mystical childish illusions conjured in flickering
firelight.”
“Now, the so-called Children’s Crusades were in fact movements
of unemployed and displaced rural people looking for opportunity;
an error in translation led to their participants being misidentified as
youngsters. The real crusaders were conquerors under the banner of
Papal authority, their troops largely mercenaries. It is no different
today: our troops are sent out to wage a holy war: its leaders are in
search of plunder—or, at the least, of shoring up an untenable global
economy of which we are the primary beneficiaries—and the rank
and file consist of foreign and domestic soldiers of fortune plus the
effectively unemployable and unsophisticated urban poor signing up
to fight in return for dubious educational benefits. I’m sure you don’t

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