Reversing into the future: welcome to the paleo world

Anthropologist Emmanuel Todd’s account of the palindromic nature of human affairs – the more sophisticated we are, the more primal; what we came from we shall return to – is one way of coming to terms with our present condition, says Andy Martin

In ‘Lord Of The Flies’ (Peter Brook, 1963), schoolboys trapped on an island are soon slaughtering each other and worshipping idols – but in some ways it’s not fiction (Rex)

Madam, I’m Adam.” Garden of Eden chat-up line. Notice anything about that sentence? Or what about this, a brilliant snapshot of the works of TS Eliot by WH Auden: “T Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.”

As per the previous, it’s a palindrome, one of those weird and wonderful linguistic constructs that reads exactly the same backwards as forwards. There’s a letter in the dead centre (“I”), like a fulcrum, on which everything else hinges. The great French virtuoso Georges Perec (his parents were Polish), came up with one in French (“Le grand palindrome”) over 10 pages long. Eccentric, certainly, possibly mad. But what if all human history is like this, and with every step forwards we are just as certainly going backwards? Welcome to paleo world.

Perhaps the best recent example of palindromic history is the fall of the Berlin Wall – after which all those bricks were neatly recycled to build other walls, and people are still calling a halt to government with a view to building another one, bigger and better than the last. Even though it’s going to be hard to beat the Great Wall of China. Or even, in its more modest way, Hadrian’s Wall, all designed to keep the barbarians at bay. Which is ironic, because we are the barbarians, gorillas who can hold a pen or a phone. The more sophisticated, the more primal. The more advanced, the more primitive. Behold, homo americanus, a species newly depicted in anthropologist Emmanuel Todd’s vast and mind-expanding Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus, which posits that “It is the very primitiveness of America that has made it successful.”