Before rules and laws

The earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Although our ancestors have lived here for 6 million years, modern humans have only been around for 200,000 years and civilization as we know it is only 6000 years old. That suggests that humans had to learn how to exist with each other long before the serpent talked to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Early man had no a priori knowledge of the world or anything in the world when he was born because knowledge has to be learned and is cumulative; building up generation after generation as we improve on things invented or created in the past. That means that early man had no rules or laws. It was truly survival of the fittest. The biggest, strongest, and meanest survived, the small, weak and sickly did not. And the driving force of this desire to survive was the male hormone, testosterone, which made our ancestors the baddest boys on the block.

They’re the ones who made the first rules and assigned work duties and responsibilities to people based on their abilities to carry them out successfully. Women were seen as weaker than men so men did the hunting and the fighting and women took care of the home and raised the children. There was no political correctness in the early days of man on this planet. You did what you were best suited to do physically and psychologically and there was no discussion. So if a woman could prove her worth on the hunting grounds or the battlefield, she was allowed to do so and the same for men with more effeminate than masculine skills. For the group to survive, everyone had to do what they could do best.

This is how tribes of people first formed. Our ancestors quickly realized that more is almost always better than few so they formed into groups, usually called tribes, to not only work together towards a common goal but also as a means of protection against outside forces, from wild animals to warring neighbors.

Without knowledge, the world would surely have been a strange and scary place. Can you imagine what went through the minds of our ancestors when they saw the first flash of lightning in the sky, or heard the first clap of thunder, or experienced the first snowfall or any of the other acts of Mother Nature that these early humans had no answer for. There’s going to be a massive migration along Interstate 80 in Nebraska from west to east in August to witness first hand a total eclipse of the sun. But can you imagine the fear, dread, even panic that our ancestors felt when they observed a solar eclipse for the first time? This is when Gods and religions were created to answer the unanswerable questions. Why were these things happening and who was causing it?

They had no answers because they had no scientists or scientific instruments. And so they let their fears be their guides.

We know so much more about the world we live in today but there’s still a lot we don’t know. We don’t have adequate explanations for why crime is still a problem and why some people choose a life of crime even though they were born in the best country in the world for a person to pursue his dream and achieve his full potential. How any American could not see that is beyond the understanding of most law-abiding citizens because they figured it out long ago.

No matter what a person’s plight or experience is in this country, they’re still better off than most of the people in the world.

So for the next few weeks, I’ll be using this column to look at some explanations of criminal and deviant behavior to see if any of it makes sense to most of the people most of the time. If it does, then it’s something we should work harder at implementing; if it doesn’t, it’s time to move on to a different conclusion.

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I’ll be in Denver this weekend hanging out with an old friend Norm (Scott Kacsh) who I haven’t seen in over a year.

We’ll be attending the downtown rock concert on Saturday afternoon, then going to the Rockies-Cardinals baseball game on Sunday afternoon.

In between, I’ll be hosting Chante Church, our former All-American point guard at MCC who’s holding basketball camps in Denver this weekend on Saturday night for some adult beverages. Hopefully, the weekend will be a good time for all involved!