A VISION BASED ON THE GRATITUDE OF AYLA TOWARDS THE
NEANDERTHALS IZA AND CREB
Sun. August 12th, 2018
I am reading the saga of Ayla and Jondalar by Jean
Auel. The first book in the series is
The Clan of the Cave Bear; the second book in the series is The Valley of
Horses. The series as a whole is called
Earth's Children. It is set in cave man
days, and it has an interesting structure like Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (which
is a saga about the relations between a species of beings who can live a
hundred years, a smaller species of beings who can live one hundred and ten
years, a third species of beings who live four hundred years, and a fourth
species of beings who have two strangely paired capabilities, first, that they
never die of old age, but second, that they can be killed in battle or killed
by wild animals, or die any violent death if it happens upon them -- and these four
species of beings -- which Tolkien calls the "speaking peoples" -- communicate
with each other, and interact with each other in the world's history).
But the structure or premise of Auel's Earth's Children
series of books -- six in all, and I have not finished the series -- is that
the heroine Ayla, a Cro-Magnon, was orphaned when she was five years old when
all the rest of her family died in an earthquake, and she was raised by Neanderthals. That is, she was a member of the more
advanced species of human beings, but was adopted and raised by the more primitive of the
two species of human beings that existed side by side on this earth thirty
thousand years ago.
I have gotten to the sentence in chapter 26 of The Valley of
Horses, page 478 in the paperback edition, where Ayla is thinking about
Jondalar, the first Cro-Magnon she has met since she became an adult and was
sent off by the Neanderthals to live by herself. "He [that's Jondalar]
hadn't noticed, and that pleased her more.
He was thinking of the Clan [that's the Neanderthals] as people. Not animals, not flatheads, not abominations
-- people!"
Ayla is thinking to herself: "For the first time, this
Cro-Magnon man I have met is thinking of the Neanderthals as human
beings."
Ayla herself is a Cro-Magnon, but raised by Neanderthals,
and she is grateful to the Neanderthals who raised her and taught her how to
survive in a harsh world, not too far south of the towering walls of ice which
mark the northern edge of the habitable world in the prehistoric Europe of the
Ice Age. Ayla is a witness, before the
Cro-Magnons, of the humanity of the Neanderthals.
James 1:17 says "Every good gift and every perfect gift
is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights . . ." Gratitude is a good and perfect gift; it must
be from God. That is, the gratitude
which people feel towards their parents and towards their step-parents -- if
their parents or their step-parents raised them well -- is a gift from God.
Now this gift of gratitude, present in Ayla, which is,
according to my lights, a gift from God -- it gives me a political vision. It makes me dream a political dream. Please imagine with me a conservative child
raised by liberal step-parents, well-raised by them, and the conservative child
is grateful to his liberal step-parents.
Now, please imagine with me a liberal child raised by conservative
step-parents, well-raised by them, and the liberal child is grateful to her
conservative step-parents. Won't this
child, raised by step-parents of the other political party, the other political
denomination, the other political tribe or species, and grateful to the party,
denomination, tribe, or species of their step-parents -- because they are
grateful -- defend the political party, denomination, tribe or species of their
step-parents when they are surrounded by their own political party and
denomination? Just as Ayla, out of
gratitude, defended the Neanderthals in the presence of her own kind, the Cro-Magnons?
Let us go back now for a time and a paragraph to the two
species of human beings that existed side by side thirty thousand years ago,
the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals. And
let me add a note to this discussion about my Christianity. I am a liberal Christian, the type of Christian
who believes that the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals belong to the realm of
fact, or at least are endowed with all the high probability which modern
science can confer on them -- these two kinds of cave men are not fake
news. Moving onward with that belief,
then, we have to add that, in the end, the Neanderthals died out and the
Cro-Magnons survived. I cannot picture
the end of the Neanderthals, but I fear it was characterized by a skrinking
ability to do favors for the more advanced kind of human beings. That is, events like the adoption and raising of
an orphan Cro-Magnon by a group of Neanderthals may have become rarer as time
went on. It is painful to think about
the end of the Neanderthals, but the cartoon movie named Ice Age, which treats
the subject of woolly mammoths becoming rare (and ultimately extinct), gives us
some glimpse into the end of a species. Darwin coined his phrase "survival
of the fittest" to describe extinction.
Now returning to my vision, how should we unpack the
metaphor of the vision? Are the
conservatives the advanced Cro-Magnons, making the liberals the less advanced
Neanderthals? Or are the liberals the
advanced Cro-Magnons, making the conservatives the less advanced Neanderthals?
My answer is this: it does not matter how the comparison is
drawn. What comes before the throne of
God is the gratitude. The victory -- the
win of one species or kind, and the loss of the other species or kind -- is not
recorded in God's almanac or record book.
The gratitude is recorded in God's almanac.
Parents who raise their children well are creating resources
for their country. A well-raised child
is a gift to the nation. A well-raised
stepchild is the same.
A child well-raised by parents or step-parents of the opposite
political party, with their gratitude intact, is a special resource for the
nation. That is the last wing of my
vision: we should seek them out. We
should interview them. We should publish
what children well-raised by parents or step-parents of the opposite political
party can tell us in our magazines -- in Field and Stream, and in The Insurgent
Sociologist -- and on the internet. I
have observed that their gratitude comes before the throne of God. But human beings should notice, cherish, and
study their gratitude, too.
Frank Newton
