If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (23 page)

When you gather up a hundred tribes and expect them to work and live together, tribal law
becomes inapplicable and useless. But of course the people in this amalgam are the same as they always
were: capable of being foolish, moody, cantankerous, selfish, greedy, violent, stupid, bad-tempered, and
all the rest. In the tribal situation, this was no problem, because tribal law was
designed
for people like this. But all the tribal ways of handling these ordinary human tendencies had been expunged in our
burgeoning civilization. A new way of handling them had to be invented — and I stress the word
invented
. There was no received, tested way of handling the mischief people were capable of. Our
cultural ancestors had to
make something up
, and what they made up were lists of
prohibited
behavior.

Very understandably, they began with the big ones. They weren't going to prohibit moodiness or
selfishness. They prohibited things like murder, assault, and theft. Of course we don't know what the
lists were like until the dawn of literacy, but you can be sure they were in place, because it's hardly
plausible that we murdered, robbed, and thieved with impunity for five or six thousand years until
Hammurabi finally noticed that these were rather disruptive activities.

When the Israelites escaped from Egypt in the thirteenth century BC, they were literally a
lawless horde, because they'd left the Egyptian list of prohibitions behind. They needed their own list of prohibitions, which God provided — the famous ten. But of course ten didn't do it. Hundreds more
followed, but they didn't do it either.

No number has ever done it for us. Not a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Even
millions don't do it, and so every single year we pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter
how many prohibitions we come up with, they never do the trick, because no prohibited behavior has
ever
been eliminated by passing a law against it. Every time someone is sent to prison or executed, this is said to be "sending a message" to miscreants, but for some strange reason the message never arrives, year after year, generation after generation, century after century.

Naturally, we consider this to be a very
advanced
system.

No tribal people has ever been found that claimed
not
to know how to live. On the contrary,
they're all completely confident that they know how to live. But with the disappearance of tribal law
among us, people began to be acutely aware of
not knowing how to live
. A new class of specialists came to be in demand, their specialty being the enunciation of
how people are supposed to live
. These specialists we call
prophets
.

Naturally it takes special qualifications to be a prophet. You must by definition know something
the rest of us
don't
know, something the rest of us are clearly
unable
to know. This means you must have a source of information that is beyond normal reach — or else what good would it be? A transcendent
vision will do, as in the case of Siddhartha Gautama. A dream will do, provided it comes from God. But
best of all, of course, is direct, personal, unmediated communication with God. The most persuasive and
most highly valued prophets, the ones that are worth dying for and killing for, have the word directly
from God.

The appearance of religions based on prophetic revelations is unique to our culture. We alone in
the history of all humanity needed such religions. We
still
need them (and new ones are being created every day), because we still profoundly feel that we don't know how to live. Our religions are the
peculiar creation of a bereft people. Yet we don't doubt for a moment that they are the religions of
humanity itself.

This belief was not an unreasonable one when it first took root among us. Having long since
forgotten that humanity was here long before we came along, we assumed that we were humanity itself
and that our history was human history itself. We imagined that humanity had been in existence for just
a few thousand years — and that God had been talking to us from the beginning. So why
wouldn't
our religions be the religions of humanity itself?

When it became known that humanity was millions of years older than we, no one thought it odd
that God had remained aloof from the thousands of generations that had come before us. Why would
God bother to talk to
Homo habilis
or
Homo erectus
? Why would he bother to talk even to
Homo
sapiens
— until
we
came along? God wanted to talk to
civilized
folks, not savages, so it's no wonder he remained disdainfully silent.

The philosophers and theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries weren't troubled by
God's long silence. The fact alone was enough for them, and they felt no pressure to develop a theory to
make sense of it. For Christians, it had long been accepted that Christianity was humanity's religion
(which is why all of humanity had to be converted to it, of course). It was an effortless step for thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin and Matthew Fox to promote Christ from humanity's Christ to the Cosmic
Christ.

Very strangely, it remained to me to recognize that there once
was
a religion that could plausibly be called the religion of humanity. It was humanity's first religion and its only
universal
religion, found wherever humans were found, in place for tens of thousands of years. Christian missionaries encountered it wherever they went, and piously set about destroying it. By now it has been all but
stamped out either by missionary efforts or more simply by exterminating its adherents. I certainly take
no pride in its discovery, since it's been in plain sight to us for hundreds of years.

Of course it isn't accounted a "real" religion, since it isn't one of ours. It's just a sort of half-baked
"pre-religion." How could it be anything else, since it emerged long before God decided humans were worth talking to? It wasn't revealed by any accredited prophet, has no dogma, no evident theology or
doctrine, no liturgy, and produces no interesting heresies or schisms. Worst of all, as far as I know no
one has ever killed for it or died for it — and what sort of religion is
that
? Considering all this, it's actually quite remarkable that we even have a name for it.

The religion I'm talking about is, of course, animism. This name was cut to fit the general
missionary impression that these childlike savages believe that things like rocks, trees, and rivers have
spirits in them, and it hasn't lost this coloration since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Needless to say, I wasn't prepared to settle for this trivialization of a religion that flourished for
tens of thousands of years among people exactly as smart as we are. After decades of trying to understand what these people were telling us about their lives and their vision of humanity's place in the world, I concluded that a very simple (but far from trivial) worldview was at the foundation of what they
were saying:
The world is a sacred place, and humanity belongs in such a world
.

It's simple but also deceptively simple. This can best be seen if we contrast it with the worldview
at the foundation of our own religions. In the worldview of our religions, the world is anything but a
sacred place. For Christians, it's merely a place of testing and has no intrinsic value. For Buddhists it's a place where suffering is inevitable. If I oversimplify, my object is not to misrepresent but only to clarify the general difference between these two worldviews in the few minutes that are left to me.

For Christians, the world is not where humans
belong
; it's not our true home, it's just a sort of
waiting room where we pass the time before moving on to our
true
home, which is heaven. For Buddhists, the world is another kind of waiting room, which we visit again and again in a repeating
cycle of death and rebirth until we finally attain liberation in nirvana.

For Christians, if the world
were
a sacred place, we wouldn't belong in it, because we're all
sinners; God didn't send his only-begotten son to make us worthy of living in a sacred world but to make
us worthy of living with God in heaven. For Buddhists, if the world were a sacred place, then why
would we strive to escape it? If the world were a sacred place, then would we not rather
welcome
the repeating cycle of death and rebirth?

From the animist point of view, humans belong in a sacred place because they themselves are
sacred. Not sacred in a special way, not
more
sacred than anything else, but merely
as
sacred as anything else — as sacred as bison or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers.

This is by no means all there is to say about animism. It's explored more fully in
The Story of B
, but this, too, is just a beginning. I'm not an authority on animism. I doubt there could ever
be
such a thing as an authority on animism.

Simple ideas are not always easy to understand. The very simplest idea I've articulated in my
work is probably the least understood:
There is no one right way for people to live — never has been
and never will be
. This idea was at the foundation of tribal life everywhere. The Navajo never imagined that they had the
right
way to live (and that all others were
wrong
). All they had was a way that suited
them
. With tribal peoples on all sides of them — all living in different ways — it would have been ridiculous for them to imagine that theirs was the one right way for people to live. It would be like us
imagining that there is one right way to orchestrate a Cole Porter song or one right way to make a
bicycle.

In the tribal world, because there was complete agreement that no one had the
right
way to live,
there was a staggering glory of cultural diversity, which the people of our culture have been tirelessly
eradicating for ten thousand years. For us, it will be paradise when everyone on earth lives
exactly the
same way
.

Almost no one blinks at the statement that there is no one right way for people to live. In one of
his denunciations of scribes and pharisees, Jesus said, "You gag on the gnat but swallow down the
camel." People find many gnats in my books to gag on, but this great hairy camel goes down as easily as a teaspoon of honey.

May the forests be with you and with your children.