A New History of the World

WinstonSmith

A New History of the World

Everybody thought that man had reached the highest point of its evolution around the turn of the twenty first century. The only way forward at that stage was backwards. The only way to go at that stage was down and back towards the dirt, returning to the clay from which man was made. The potential for man to destroy itself would be too much; the pressure would eventually be released in the same way as a great volcano reaches deep into its stomach, reaches to the very depths of its being, further and further down until it can reach no further and is forced by the laws of nature to release its bellyful of lava into the world above destroying and creating the ground around, changing its surroundings to better suit the needs of nature. Everybody was wrong.

Man had not reached its highest point of evolution at this time, but had simply reached the end of a certain stage. It had happened before; it was directly in front of the eyes of man, patterns were to be observed around them everywhere: in the history of the beasts and in the history of themselves. Man had continually refined itself in the past: The leap from apes to homosapiens; the link therefrom to primitive man. The jump in intelligence that allowed man to use tools. The genius of man to work together, concoct settlements, civilisations even; the genius to utilise nature; the genius to create art was the one thing that set man apart from the beasts more than anything else. Several jumps had been made and ignored as individual events, but the ability to create art was not seen as an evolutionary jump. It was. As man evolved from belonging in the caves to belonging in settlements we see a massive surge in the generation of art. Granted, art was created in caves, but this just goes to show how gradual the evolutionary progression was for man. The biggest increase in the amount of art created, was created after man housed together in civilisations. From an objective viewpoint, this ability to create large amounts of art was unbelievable: it set man on a par with the very gods themselves (who also had the ability to create out of only aesthetic wants- begging the question of man’s purpose in life) and set the standard for a new stage in evolution. This age lasted many thousands of years. Many millions of artforms were experimented with, but no matter how much the experimentation, they all fitted neatly into the being’s ability to create art.
There is no doubt that we are descended from these creatures. There is no doubt that their art exists and there is no doubt that men were gods themselves and never realised their potential, but now that we have left the hunter-gatherer age behind us, man has evolved yet again and there is no longer any desire for us to create art wherein we pine after the heroic chases of the preceeding age. There will be no art in this age to commemorate the death of man. There will be no art. Man has evolved.