If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (14 page)

Daniel
. Well, you remember that I did start with the bit of nonsense that got me started, the idea that a nuclear holocaust would throw us back to the Stone Age.

Elaine
. And what about
Ishmael
?

Daniel
. I talked about that some. The received wisdom that the true story of Man begins with the
Agricultural Revolution — that the first three million years didn't amount to anything worth talking
about.

Elaine
. And what
did
they amount to?

Daniel
. You mean in terms of opera houses built and flying machines invented? Symphonies composed?

The laws of physics described? Nothing, of course.

Elaine
. What then?

Daniel
. You don't think you can answer this?

Elaine
. I wish I could. Don't you think I've thought about it?

Daniel
. And came up with nothing?

Elaine
. Nothing but trivial things like fire, the bow and arrow, and maybe the wheel.

Daniel
. You know these things are trivial?

Elaine
. Of course.

Daniel
. Well, that's something. What humanity came up with and held on to during its first three million years was a social organization that worked well for
people
. It didn't work well for
products
, for motorboats and can openers and operettas. It didn't work well for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power
hungry. That's what
we
have, a social organization that works beautifully for products — which just keep getting better and better every year — but very poorly for people, except for the greedy, the
ruthless, and the power hungry. Our ancestors lived in societies that every anthropologist agrees were
nonhierarchical and markedly egalitarian. They weren't structured so that a few at the top lived lives of
luxury, a few more lived in the middle in comfort, and the masses at the bottom lived in poverty or near
poverty, just struggling to survive. They weren't riddled with crime, depression, madness, suicide, and
addiction. And when we came along with invitations to join our glorious civilization, they fought to the
death to hold on to the life they had. You knew that.

Elaine
. Yes.

Daniel
. Back in the 1990s I kept track of South American tribes whose members were committing
suicide in preference to being sucked into our orbit. Hold on a second. [
Goes to his computer, brings up
a file, and reads from it.
] Just a few examples... July 1993: "The Yanomami, an ancient Amazon tribal people, are committing suicide.... The rape of their land, in the rain forests of Roraima in northern
Brazil, by thousands of
garimpeiros
(wildcat gold and tin miners) and the diseases they bring that are killing the Yanomami in frightening numbers, are too much for these primitive people to bear. What
pressure groups refer to as a genocide has led three young Yanomami to kill themselves in the past six
weeks, a phenomenon alien to their culture, which forbids even talk of death." May 1997, Brazil:
"Anthropologists say the Guarani-Kaiowa already have lost more than half their ancestral lands to
ranchers. Rather than give up their traditional lifestyle, at least 235 of the Indians have taken their lives in recent years, according to official records." June 1997: "In Colombia, the U'wa tribe... has threatened mass suicide if Oxy" — the Occidental Petroleum Corporation — "encroaches on its territory."
December 1997: "Every 15 days, a Guarani-Kaiowa Indian commits suicide, a Brazilian Indian rights
group says. In 1997, 27 members of the Brazilian tribe committed suicide, bringing the total to 158 in
the past 11 years."

Elaine
. Uh-huh. Of course most people probably just think they're foolish — don't realize what they're missing.

Daniel
. Just as most people don't realize what these peoples
have
— don't realize why they'd rather die than give it up... In any case, what humanity came up with during these first three million years was a
way of life that works well
for people
and that is
sustainable
— that could have promised life for humankind for millions of years more — an accomplishment greater than any of ours, though of course
less flashy.

Elaine
. But you're not suggesting that "coming up with it" was a conscious achievement. I mean, nobody
invented
the tribal life.

Daniel
. Of course not. It was nonetheless the outgrowth of human intelligence and experience. What
didn't
work (and one has to suppose that things were tried that didn't work) was abandoned — and
abandoned by people who
knew
it wasn't working. What was left after all the trials was the tribe, which was
evolutionarily stable
, meaning not that it was perfect but that hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection — on a social level — was unable to produce an organization that worked better. To
my mind the evolution of the tribe was an accomplishment of greater importance to the human race than
all the advances of the Industrial Revolution put together. If we were still living tribally, we'd be facing a future measured in millions of years. As it is, we've walked on the moon but are now facing a future that
can be measured in decades, if we go on living the way we're presently living.

Elaine
. Well, I can certainly see that... While I think of it, a friend once asked me how I know that people ten thousand years ago were living the way present-day aboriginal peoples live.

Daniel
. That's interesting. A friend of
mine
asked the very same question. He is, or was, a historian.

Elaine
. How did you answer him?

Daniel
. What's the thinking behind the question, coming as it did from a historian?

Elaine
. I would say he was thinking... people in historical times have constantly changed their style of living. I mean the organizational systems under which they live.

Daniel
. Give me some examples.

Elaine
. Oh, it's been too long... After the fall of the Roman Empire, there was feudalism. After
feudalism...

Daniel
. The secular, centralized state. Mercantilism, Free trade, capitalism, and so on. The evolution of modern democracies. As Heraclitus said, change alone is unchanging. You can never step in the same
river twice.

Elaine
. And what's your response to that?

Daniel
. What was Heraclitus looking at?

Elaine
. I'm not sure how to answer that... If you look at what's going on around you, nothing stays the same from one minute to the next.

Daniel
. So we have to look at something he
wasn't
looking at. Lions change from one minute to the next, from one year to the next, from one generation to the next, but what remains the same?

Elaine
. The way they live. Their social organization.

Daniel
. Of course. Like every species of animal we know of, their social organization is evolutionarily stable. You won't find a single naturalist or biologist who wonders if lions might have been living
differently ten thousand years ago. You won't find a single naturalist or biologist who thinks, "Golly, maybe geese didn't live in flocks ten thousand years ago. Maybe wolves didn't live in packs ten
thousand years ago. Maybe whales didn't live in pods ten thousand years ago."

Elaine
. So there's no reason to suppose that humans weren't living in tribes ten thousand years ago.

Daniel
. Or a hundred thousand years ago... What we've done here might be called step five of the Quinn method — though it doesn't necessarily occur fifth. We've pulled back from the focus of the original
question to gain a wider vista. The historian's vista is naturally that of the historical era, in which our social organizations have been more or less in constant flux... You understand that every species of
animal evolves within a social organization. They don't evolve as individuals and then get together and
start trying out social organizations.

Elaine
. Yes... but you indicated that humans might have experimented with variations on the tribe.

Daniel
. They might have. We have no evidence either way. But if they did, those experiments didn't
survive. What survived is what we saw in place all over the world when we finally went looking — in
the Americas, in Australia, in Africa, and so on. The tribe. To suppose that humans in those regions just
recently began living in tribes is as silly as supposing that bees just recently began living in hives.

Elaine
[
doubtfully
]. I see that...

Daniel
. But... ?

Elaine
. But I'd like to get back to something I brought up earlier. How you do what you do in your
books.

Daniel
[
after some thought
]. I've talked about some specific bits of received wisdom that I've challenged in my books, and I could talk about others. But the question I'm asked — and the question I'm trying to
answer in this conversation — is not "How do you come up with these books?" but rather "How do you come up with these strange ideas?" The way I come up with my books is very much the way all authors
come up with their books.

Elaine
. Okay, I see that. But I have a question of my own that I think is relevant.

Daniel
. Go ahead.

Elaine
. As far as I'm concerned, the most original thing in
Ishmael
is your reinterpretation of the Genesis stories of the Fall and the murder of Abel. I hope you won't be offended if I ask if that was
original to you.

Daniel
. I'm not at all offended, and the question has been asked before. The answer is yes, it was
original to me.

Elaine
. Can I ask how you came up with it?

Daniel
. Certainly. I came up with it using the method I've already described. First, the alertness to nonsense. The specific piece of nonsense that nagged at me was this: that the Agricultural Revolution is
judged in our culture to be humanity's greatest blessing, while in Genesis it's judged to be a curse, the
punishment meted out by God after the Fall. How is it possible for these two judgments to exist side by
side in our culture without anyone noticing that they're contradictory?

Following my usual protocol, I pulled back to look at the matter from a wider point of view. For
what sin was Adam being punished? He was being punished for eating the fruit of a tree specifically
forbidden to him: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This gave me another bit of nonsense to
think about. In our culture our possession of the knowledge of good and evil is taken for granted: It's a
fine thing, a wonderful thing. Why on earth would it be forbidden? If we translate it as "knowing the difference between right and wrong," it's the very measure of human sanity.

I'd never seen a gloss on "the Knowledge of Good and Evil" that made any sense. In
The
Dragons of Eden
, Carl Sagan proposed the silly idea that it was intelligence itself, which simply turns the story into nonsense (From the chapter "Eden as a Metaphor": "It is interesting that it is not the getting of any sort of knowledge that God forbids, but, specifically the knowledge of the difference
between good and evil — that is, abstract and moral judgments..." Carl Sagan,
The Dragons of Eden
, New York: Random House, 1971). How could God make a creature intelligent enough to understand his
commands and then punish him for acquiring intelligence? Most exegetes treat "the Knowledge of Good
and Evil" as a sort of placeholder. God had to forbid Adam
something
, and it doesn't matter that it makes no sense to a people to whom possession of that knowledge is counted a supreme blessing.

Pulling back still farther, I went looking into the geography of the matter and found that the
Agricultural Revolution began among the Caucasians, who lived directly north of the Semites. This
meant that the account of the origins of agriculture found in Genesis didn't originate among our cultural
ancestors, the Caucasians, because, of course, Genesis is a Hebrew, Semitic, text. Pulling back again, in
a different direction, I looked again at the story of Cain and Abel and conceived the theory that the two
of them were not individuals but rather allegorical figures, Cain representing the Caucasian
agriculturalists of the north and Abel representing the Semitic herders of the south.

If this made sense as a hypothesis (and it did to me), then Cain's murder of Abel represented not
a single deadly attack by one individual on another but a border war: Caucasian farmers were taking
Semitic land to turn it into farmland just the way European farmers — the cultural descendants of these
Caucasians — would later take Indian land to turn it into farmland. If my reading of this was correct,
then the story of the Fall becomes a kind of "explaining" story, and what needed explaining was the
extraordinary behavior of their neighbors to the north. Assuming that these Caucasians were practicing
the same kind of agriculture that their cultural descendants practiced for the next ten thousand years to
the present moment, how
were
they behaving?