If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (22 page)

What they observed about their brothers to the north was this peculiarity: They seemed to have
the strange idea that they knew how to run the world as well as God. This is what marks them as our
cultural ancestors. As we go about our business of running the world, we have no doubt that we're doing
as good a job as God, if not better. Obviously God put a lot of creatures in the world that are quite
superfluous and even pernicious, and we're quite at liberty to get rid of them. We know where the rivers
should run, where the swamps should be drained, where the forests should be razed, where the mountains should be leveled, where the plains should be scoured, where the rain should fall. To us, it's
perfectly obvious that we have this knowledge.

In fact, to the authors of the stories in Genesis, it looked as if their brothers to the north had the
bizarre idea that they had eaten at
God's own tree of wisdom
and had gained the very knowledge God uses to rule the world. And what knowledge is this? It's a knowledge that only God is competent to use,
the knowledge that every single action God might take — no matter what it is, no matter how large or
small — is
good for one but evil for another
. If a fox is stalking a pheasant, it's in the hands of God whether she will catch the pheasant or the pheasant will escape. If God gives the fox the pheasant, then
this is good for the fox but evil for the pheasant. If God allows the pheasant to escape, then this is good for the pheasant but evil for the fox. There's no outcome that can be good for both. The same is true in
every area of the world's governance. If God allows the valley to be flooded, then this is good for some
but evil for others. If God holds back the flood then this, too, will be good for some but evil for others.

Decisions of this kind are clearly at the very root of what it means to rule the world, and the
wisdom to make them cannot possibly belong to any mere creature, for any creature making such
decisions would inevitably say, "I will make every choice so that it's good for me but evil for all others."
And of course this is precisely how the agriculturalist operates, saying, "If I scour this plain to plant food for myself, then this will be evil for all the creatures that inhabit the plain, but it'll be good for me.
If I raze this forest to plant food for myself, then this will be evil for all the creatures that inhabit the forest, but it'll be good for me."

What the authors of the stories in Genesis perceived was that their brothers to the north had taken
into their own hands the rule of the world; they had usurped the role of God. Those who let God run the
world and take the food that he's planted for them have an easy life. But those who want to run the
world themselves must necessarily plant
their own
food, must necessarily make their living by the sweat of the brow. As this makes plain, agriculture was not the crime itself but rather the result of the crime, the punishment that must inevitably follow such a crime. It was wielding the knowledge of good and
evil that had turned their brothers in the north into farmers — and into murderers.

But these were not the only consequences to be expected from Adam's act. The fruit of the Tree
of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is harmless to God but poison to Man. It seemed to these authors
that usurping God's role in the world would be the very death of Man.

And so it seemed to me when I finally worked all this out in the late 1970s. This investigation of
the stories in Genesis was not, for me, an exercise in biblical exegesis. I'd gone looking for a way to
understand how in the world we'd brought ourselves face-to-face with death in such a relatively short
period of time — ten thousand years, a mere eyeblink in the life span of our species — and had found it
in an ancient story that we long ago adopted as our own and that remained stubbornly mysterious to us
as long as we insisted on reading it as if it
were
our own. When examined from a point of view
not
our own, however, it ceased to be mysterious and delivered up a meaning that not only would have made
sense to a beleaguered herding people eight thousand years ago but would also make sense to the
beleaguered people of the twenty-first century.

As far as I was concerned, the authors of this story had gotten it right. In spite of the terrible
mess we've made of it, we
do
think we can run the world, and if we
continue
to think this, it
is
going to be the death of us.

In case it isn't evident, I should add that of course my reading of Genesis is only a theory. This is
what creationists say of evolution, that it's "only a theory, it hasn't been proved" — as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make
sense of the evidence. So far Darwin's theory remains the very best way we've found to make sense of
the evidence, and my own theory has to be evaluated in the same way. Does it make sense of the
evidence — the stories themselves — and does it make more sense than any other theory?

But solving this particular riddle only
began
to alleviate the pressure I felt for answers that were not being looked for at any level of our culture. The philosophical and theological foundations of our
culture had been laid down by people who confidently believed that Man had been
born
an agriculturalist and civilization builder. These things were as instinctive to him as predation is to lions or hiving is to bees. This meant that, to find and date Man's birth, they had only to look for the beginnings of agriculture and civilization, which were obviously not that far back in time.

When in 1650 Irish theologian James Ussher announced the date of creation as October 23, 4004
BC, no one laughed, or if they did it was because of the absurd exactitude of the date, not because the
date was absurdly recent. In fact, 4004 BC is quite a serviceable date for the beginning of what we
would recognize as
civilization
. This being the case, it's hardly surprising that, for people who took it for granted that Man began building civilization as soon as he was created, 4004 BC would seem like a
perfectly reasonable date for his creation.

But all this soon changed. By the middle of the nineteenth century the accumulated evidence of
many new sciences had pushed almost all dates back by many orders of magnitude. The universe and
the earth were not thousands of years old but billions. The human past extended millions of years back
beyond the appearance of agriculture and civilization (Only those who clung to a very literal reading of
the biblical creation story rejected the evidence; they saw it as a hoax perpetrated on us either by the
devil — to confound us — or by God — to test our faith. Take your pick). The notion that Man had been
born an agriculturalist and civilization builder had been rendered totally untenable. He had very definitely not been born either one.

This meant that the philosophical and theological foundations of our culture had been laid by
people with a profoundly erroneous understanding of our origins and history. It was therefore urgently
important to reexamine these foundations and if necessary to rebuild them from the ground up.

Except, of course, that no one at all thought this was urgently important — or even slightly
important. So human life began millions of years before the birth of agriculture. Who cares? Nothing of
any
importance
happened during those millions of years. They were merely a fact, something to be accepted, just as the fact of evolution had been accepted by naturalists long before Darwin.

In the last century we'd gained an understanding of the human story that made nonsense of
everything we'd been telling ourselves for three thousand years, but our settled understandings remained
completely unshaken. So what, that Man had not in fact been
born
an agriculturalist and a civilization builder? He was certainly born
to become
an agriculturalist and a civilization builder. It was beyond question that this was our foreordained destiny. The way we live is the way humans were
meant
to live from the beginning of time. And indeed we must
go on
living this way — even if it kills us.

Facts that were indisputable to all but biblical literalists had radically repositioned us not only in
the physical universe but in the history of our own species. The
fact
that we had been repositioned was all but universally acknowledged, but no one felt any pressure to develop a theory that would make
sense
of the fact, the way Darwin had made sense of the fact of evolution.

Except me, and I have to tell you that it gave me no joy. I had to have answers, and I went
looking for them not because I wanted to write a book someday but because I personally couldn't live
without them.

In
Ishmael
I made the point that the conflict between the emblematic figures Cain and Abel
didn't end six or eight thousand years ago in the Near East. Cain the tiller of the soil has carried his knife with him to every corner of the world, watering his fields with the blood of tribal peoples wherever he
found them. He arrived here in 1492 and over the next three centuries watered his fields with the blood
of millions of Native Americans. Today he's down there in Brazil, knife poised over the few remaining
aboriginals in the heart of that country.

The tribe among aboriginal peoples is as universal as the flock among geese, and no anthropologist seriously doubts that it was humanity's original social organization. We didn't evolve in
troops or hordes or pods. Rather, we evolved in a social organization that was peculiarly human, that
was uniquely successful for
culture bearers
. The tribe was successful for humans, which is why it was still universally in place throughout the world three million years later. The tribal organization was
natural selection's gift to humanity in the same way that the flock was natural selection's gift to geese.

The elemental glue that holds any tribe together is tribal law. This is easy to say but less easy to
understand, because the operation of tribal law is entirely different from the operation of our law.
Prohibition
is the essence of our law, but the essence of tribal law is
remedy
. Misbehavior isn't outlawed in any tribe. Rather, tribal law prescribes what must happen in order to minimize the effect of misbehavior and to produce a situation in which everyone feels that they've been made as whole again
as it's possible to be.

In
The Story of B
I described how adultery is handled among the Alawa of Australia. If you have
the misfortune to fall in love with another man's wife or another woman's husband, the law doesn't say,
"This is prohibited and may not go forward." It says, "If you want your love to go forward, here's what you must do to make things right with all parties and to see to it that marriage isn't cheapened in the eyes of our children." It's a remarkably successful process. What makes it even more remarkable is the fact that it wasn't worked out in any legislature or by any committee. It's another gift of natural selection.
Over countless generations of testing, no better way of handling adultery has been found or even
conceivably
could
be found, because —
behold
! — it
works
! It does just what the Alawa want it to do, and absolutely no one tries to evade it. Even adulterers don't try to evade it — that's how well it works.

But this is just the law of the Alawa, and it would never occur to them to say, "Everyone in the
world should do it this way." They know perfectly well that their tribal neighbors' laws work just as well for them — and for the same reason, that they've been tested from the beginning of time.

One of the virtues of tribal law is that it presupposes that people are just the way we know they
are: generally wise, kind, generous, and well intentioned but perfectly capable of being foolish, unruly,
moody, cantankerous, selfish, greedy, violent, stupid, bad-tempered, sneaky, lustful, treacherous, careless, vindictive, neglectful, petty, and all sorts of other unpleasant things. Tribal law doesn't punish people for their shortcomings, as our law does. Rather, it makes the management of their shortcomings
an easy and ordinary part of life.

But during the developmental period of our culture, all this changed very dramatically. Tribal
peoples began to come together in larger and larger associations, and one of the casualties of this
process was tribal law. If you take the Alawa of Australia and put them together with Gebusi of New
Guinea, the Bushmen of the Kalahari, and the Yanomami of Brazil, they are very literally not going to
know how to live. Not any of these tribes are going to embrace the laws of the others, which may be not
only unknown to them but incomprehensible to them. How then are they going to handle mischief that
occurs among them? The Gebusi way or the Yanomami way? The Alawa way or the Bushman way?
Multiply this by a hundred, and you'll have a fair approximation of where people stood in the early
millennia of our own cultural development in the Near East.