On Clothing, Human and Divine
What Genesis Teaches About Human Nature and Technological Innovation
In Genesis (3:7), the first piece of clothing, the fig leaf, is used by human beings, to hide their shame.
The second piece of clothing, an animal skin, is made by God, to protect humanity from the cold. (Genesis 3:21)
What does this teach?
First, that the invention of clothing is attributed to an emotional rather than physiological need. (Much like the monkeys who prefer the furry monkey doll that gives no milk to the skeletal one that does—some will die of hunger if they can get nurture, rather than get food on condition of loneliness.)
Second, that the origin of technological innovation is self-consciousness. Animals need protection from the elements, but humans need protection from judgment. Human motivation goes well beyond the need for survival—sometimes, it even contradicts it. In the Greek tradition, we would say that Adam and Eve are motivated by thymos.
Third, that the God of the Bible is not entirely punitive; despite the fact that humanity uses clothes to distance itself from God, God uses clothes to reach out to and help humanity.
Fourth, clothing as a metaphor is ambiguous, signifying both the covering up of an uncoverable shame and a kind of divine gift, a symbol of generosity.
Fifth, the ordering of human vs. divine creation of clothes is the inverse of what we find with the 10 Commandments. There, God writes the first set of tablets, and Moses writes the second set. With the 10 commandments, the idea is that a perfect original is replaced by a lesser, though more empowering substitute. With clothing, the idea may be that the lesser view of tech as merely ornamental, merely identitarian, merely aesthetic needs a divine hand and guidance to become rational and useful.
Sixth, it’s deeply ironic that the first thing humanity does when it gains knowledge of good and bad is service a need it didn’t have before gaining that knowledge—which suggests a kind of hedonic treadmill effect to technological progress: to what extent do we create problems so as to create solutions to them? We have more tools for knowledge and memory today than ever—you can get a PhD level education just from reading Wikipedia articles on your phone—and yet many of these same tools have messed with our brains, making us less attentive, less focused, more reactive, and more distracted.