If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (19 page)

Elaine
. That universe makes more sense to me, personally.

Daniel
. Having reached this point, do you want to take on the problem of evil?

Elaine
. How do you define that?

Daniel
[
after some thought
]. If God is willing to prevent evil but unable to do so, then he's impotent. If he's able to prevent evil but not willing to, then he's corrupt. And so, since evil certainly exists, God is either impotent or corrupt and therefore cannot be God. I'd have to do some research to be sure that this
is the classical definition.

Elaine
. How do you define evil?

Daniel
. How do
you
define it?

Elaine
. Well, it obviously goes beyond disease. It would have to include natural disasters like
earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes, as well as all the evil that humans are capable of.

Daniel
. Uh-huh.

Elaine
[
after some thought
]. I'm having a hard time seeing... No, the problem is in the definition itself.
In the terms of the definition. In effect... If you take this definition of the problem of evil... In effect, according to this definition, a good God couldn't have made the world at all or peopled it with humans.
To be honest, I'm not sure what the hell I'm saying.

Daniel
. Always a good sign.

Elaine
[
laughs and spends a few minutes thinking
]. The god of the definition is a particular kind of god, one who is both omnipotent and "good" — and here that
good
is in quotes. Or one who must
be
both omnipotent and good — or he fails to qualify as God. But it seems possible to challenge that definition...

Daniel
. Uh-huh.

Elaine
. Why not a god who is just supremely
competent
? A god who has created a world that functions independently of his relentless scrutiny and control.

Daniel
. Why not, indeed.

Elaine
. A competent parent produces children who don't need second-by-second supervision. A
competent engineer designs machines that operate without his constant oversight.

Daniel
. Where does this leave the problem of evil?

Elaine
. This is what I would say: The problem of evil only arises if you posit a god who is a supreme puppeteer, controlling the movement of everything he creates, down to the atomic level. This kind of
god supervises the fall of every leaf, the rise and fall of every wave in the ocean. For me — and I expect for you — the problem of evil doesn't exist.

Daniel
. You're right about that.

Elaine
[
after a couple of minutes
]. I'm thinking about those golfers against cancer.

Daniel
. And?

Elaine
. I'm not sure what conclusion I should be drawing about them after all this.

Daniel
. Who said you should be drawing some conclusion about them? They represent a cultural
phenomenon that gave us something to think about. That led us to some interesting insights.

Elaine
. Was your train of thought the same as mine?

Daniel
. Actually, you dug up something I didn't, the point that the problem of evil only arises if you're talking about a particular kind of god.

Elaine
. So I get a passing grade on the final?

Daniel
. You get an A plus.

Elaine
. So do you think the effort paid off? In terms of the book you hope to produce.

Daniel
. I wish I had more questions of the same quality to explore.

Elaine
. I don't suppose you can just make them up.

Daniel
[
laughs
]. No, I couldn't manage that. But what about you? Did you get what you came for?

Elaine
[
thinks about that for a while
]. Not exactly, but I got something better. What's the proverb? Give
a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. I guess I
have to say that I came looking for some fish and you taught me how to fish.

Address delivered at the University of Texas

Health Science Center at Houston, March 7, 2002

Twenty-five years ago, when I began working on a book that would someday become a novel
called
Ishmael
, very few people thought humanity was in much trouble, provided the Cold War didn't turn into a nuclear war. Everything looked fine, to most people. That's changed around very drastically
in the last ten years — perhaps not
completely
around.

Back in 1995, when I was visiting a school in Albuquerque that had used
Ishmael
as the year's
focus book, I was asked to meet with a very high-level group of health care professionals — the
assembled department heads of Presbyterian Health Care Services, which functions as a regional hospital system. I accepted the invitation but wondered what I might have to say that was relevant to
their professional concerns. I know nothing about hospitals or health care or the medical profession. I
don't even watch
ER
.

It was clear when I sat down with them — perhaps twenty men and women — that they'd all
been deeply moved by my book. But none of them could quite explain why it was relevant to them in
their profession. I think what it really came down to was that, as a result of reading
Ishmael
, they
themselves
had changed, simply as human beings, and they were trying to figure out how this change would or could or should change them as health care professionals.

I'm afraid I wasn't much help, but I don't think I need to apologize for this. I had no way of
knowing how their professional lives needed to change; only they could know that.

I had a similar experience a year later when I was asked to address an annual conference of high-
level executives involved in the design and manufacture of commercial floor-covering systems. Don't
laugh. This is a multibillion-dollar global industry — and an industry that at that time was highly
pollutive, a huge contributor to landfills, and totally dependent on and extremely wasteful of nonrenewable resources (petroleum, mainly).

They, too, had been profoundly changed by my work, but thereafter the similarity between the
two groups ended. These people weren't in any doubt about how to translate this change into a change in
their professional lives. Which is a good thing, because of course I wouldn't have had a clue. They knew
what they had to change, and they'd already put into place a set of long-range goals that not only
transformed their industry but compelled associated industries to change as well. In order to retain their position in this industry, giants like DuPont were literally forced to start thinking a different way themselves.

If I were asked to address a group of investment counselors or chemical engineers or airline
executives — and none of these are out of the question — it'd be the same. My task would not be to tell
them what changes to make in their professional lives, because I know nothing about investments or
chemical engineering or airline management.

With every group, no matter what principle or profession draws it together, my task is the same:
to send people home with a new and deeper insight into the central problem that draws us
all
together as humans, regardless of our occupations — and that problem is nothing less than the survival of our
species.

People often ask me if I have any hope for our survival. What they really want to know, of
course, is whether I can provide
them
with some grounds for hope.

I
am
hopeful, because I feel sure that something extraordinary is going to happen in your lifetime
— in the lifetime of those of you who are three or four decades younger than I am. I'm talking about
something much more extraordinary than has happened in
my
lifetime, which has included the birth of television, the splitting of the atom, space travel, and instant, global communication via the Internet. I mean something
really
extraordinary.

During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on
this planet — or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then humanity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that
extends into the indefinite future. If they
don't
figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day — as many as two
hundred
every day
.

As people like to say nowadays, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. The
people who keep track of these things and make it their business to predict such things agree that the
human population is going to increase to nine billion by the middle of the century. It isn't just the
doomsayers who say this. This is a very conservative estimate, recently endorsed by the UN.

Unfortunately, most of the people who make this estimate seem to have the idea that this is workable
and okay.

Here's why it isn't.

It's obvious that it costs a lot of money and energy to produce all the food we need to maintain
our population at six billion. But there is an additional, hidden cost that has to be counted in
life-forms
.

Put plainly, in order to maintain the biomass that is tied up in the six billion of us, we have to gobble up two hundred species a day — in addition to all the food we produce in the ordinary way. We need the
biomass of those two hundred species to maintain
this
biomass, the biomass that is in
us
. And when we've gobbled up those species, they're
gone
. Extinct. Vanished forever.

In other words, maintaining a population of six billion humans costs the world two hundred
species a day. If this were something that was going to stop next week or next month, that would be
okay. But the unfortunate fact is that it's not. It's something that's going to go on happening every day, day after day after day — and that's what makes it unsustainable,
by definition
. That kind of cataclysmic destruction
cannot
be sustained.

The extraordinary thing that is going to happen in the next two or three decades is not that the
human race is going to become extinct. The extraordinary thing that's going to happen in the next two or
three decades is that a great second renaissance is going to occur. A great and astounding renaissance.

Nothing less than that is going to save us.

The first Renaissance, the one you met in your history textbooks, was understood to be a rebirth
of classical awareness and sensibility. It could hardly have been understood to be what it
actually
was, which was the necessary preface to an entirely new historical era.

A few key medieval ideas were jettisoned during the Renaissance, but they weren't replaced by
ideas that would have made sense to classical thinkers. Rather, they were replaced by ideas that were
entirely new — ideas that would
not
have made sense to classical thinkers. These were ideas that make would sense to
us
. In fact, these ideas
still
make sense to us.

The Renaissance (and indeed the modern world) came into being because during the fourteenth,
fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries an interrelated complex of medieval ideas came under challenge. The
centerpiece of the complex related to the means of gaining certain knowledge. During the Middle Ages
it was understood that reason and authority were the chief means of gaining certain knowledge. For
example, it seemed perfectly reasonable to suppose that the earth was a stationary object around which
the rest of the universe revolved. It was reasonable — and it was affirmed by a towering authority, the
great second-century astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus, Ptolemy. Similarly, it seemed perfectly reasonable to suppose that heavy objects fall to earth faster than light objects — and this was affirmed
by another towering authority, the polymath genius Aristotle.

But during the Renaissance, reason and authority were toppled as reliable guides to knowledge
and replaced by... observation and experimentation. Without this change, science as we know it would
not have come into being and the Industrial Revolution would not have occurred.

During the Middle Ages it was taken for granted that our relationship with God was a collective
thing that only the Roman Catholic Church was empowered to negotiate. During the Renaissance this
dispensation was challenged by a completely new one, in which our relationship with God was seen as
an
individual
thing that each of us could negotiate
independently
with God. In this new dispensation was
born the magnification and sanctification of the individual that we take for granted in modern times. We
all see ourselves as individually valuable and quite fantastically empowered — literally bristling with
rights — in a way that would have been astonishing to the people of the Middle Ages.