HUMN CONDN

The following picture of a group of bonobos resting in a grassy glade perfectly equates with the description that Plato gave earlier about what life was like for humans back in the ‘Golden Age’ of nurtured togetherness: ‘And they dwelt naked, and mostly in the open air, for the temperature of their seasons was mild; and they had no beds, but lay on soft couches of grass, which grew plentifully out of the earth.’ Clearly we have a perfect instinctive memory (if we don’t choose to deny it) of what life was like before ‘the fall’ because Plato didn’t know of the existence of bonobos and yet knew exactly what our bonobo-like life before ‘the fall’ was like.

Your next question may well be, ‘But why haven’t I heard about this reasonably obvious nurturing explanation for humans’ moral nature before now?’ Well, just like the obvious truth that our species once lived cooperatively and lovingly, this truth that we acquired our moral instincts through nurturing has been an unbearable truth while we couldn’t explain why we humans became so competitive and aggressive and as a result lost the ability to adequately nurture our offspring with unconditional selflessness or love. The truth of our species’ Edenic cooperative, innocent and loving past, and the truth that nurturing is what made us human, have both been impossible truths to accept while we couldn’t truthfully explain the human condition, explain why our species became corrupted and lost the ability to fully nurture its offspring. As it has been observed, ‘parents would rather admit to being an axe murderer than a bad mother or father’!