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.*
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?
Elaine. They were behaving as if the world belonged to them.
Daniel. Yes … But I’m trying to understand the explanation the Semites provided. According to them, these people had eaten the fruit of a tree of knowledge that was forbidden to Adam — to Man. What knowledge would God naturally want to protect, to put off limits to Man?
Elaine. His own knowledge. The knowledge he uses to rule the world.
Daniel. And why would this be the knowledge of good and evil?
Elaine. Because — and at this point I’m basically just reciting — in ruling the world, everything God does is good for one but evil for another — of necessity. As you put it, if the hunting fox gets the quail, then this is good for the fox but evil for the quail. But if the quail escapes the fox, then this is good for the quail and evil for the fox.
Daniel. And only God knows whether the fox should catch the quail or the quail should escape.
Elaine. Yes. Only God knows who should live and who should die.
Daniel. But what about those who practice agriculture the way we do?
Elaine. They act as if they’ve eaten at God’s own tree of wisdom and know who should live and who should die. If wolves are attacking your cattle, then the wolves should die and the cattle should live. If foxes are eating your chickens, then the foxes should die and the chickens should live.
Daniel. And having taken this knowledge into their own hands, it made sense that God would condemn them to live by the sweat of their brows. They’d formerly lived an easy life, simply letting God rule the world and taking what he gave them. If they weren’t content with that and wanted to rule the world themselves, then they were going to have to do all the work that God had formerly done for them. Formerly, they’d just taken whatever God planted for them. Now, having displaced God as the ruler of the world, they were going to have to plant their own food. To Cain, the tillers of the soil, planting their own food seemed like a blessing, just as it does to us. To Abel it seemed like a punishment. To us, the Agricultural Revolution seems like a technological event and a triumph. To the Semites, it seemed like a spiritual event and a catastrophe.
Elaine. Yes.
Daniel. I might add this as a footnote. I believe it was in his autobiography — though it may have been in one of his speeches — that Malcolm X identified the white race as Satan. I knew at the time I read it that this was the wrong mythological connection. Only later did I realize it would be much more appropriate to identify the white race as Cain, sweeping across the world to water his fields with the blood of his brothers.
Elaine. Well, this has largely been the occupation of the white race.
Daniel [after a pause]. So what do you think? Was this a useful exercise for you?
Elaine. Yes. It was useful to me to see the “method” being applied to a large, complex problem like this.
Daniel. I’m still inclined to think it will be more illuminating for readers to see you struggling to apply it right now in living color than for them to see me talking about applying it twenty years ago.
*Peter Farb, a distinguished naturalist, linguist, and anthropologist, perceived it as a paradox: “Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.”
*“Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply” by Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel, Environment, Development and Sustainability 3 (2001): 1–15.
*“What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?” organized by the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (FEASTA), 2005.
†“Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply” by Richard Heinberg, author of two important books in the Peak Oil canon, The Party’s Over and Powerdown.
* 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).
Saturday: Afternoon
Daniel. Here’s a question I’ve received in many different forms: “Mr. Quinn, I’d like to know if you walk or ride a bicycle to work, if you use electricity, if you have central heating and air-conditioning.”
Elaine. Uh-huh.
Daniel. What do you think this person is really getting at?
Elaine. I’d say he wants to know whether you practice what you preach.
Daniel. He suspects I may be a hypocrite.
Elaine. Yes.
Daniel. What assumption is at the base of all this?
Elaine. That what you preach is … He has his own assumptions about how to go about saving the world. We need to give up driving automobiles and walk to work. We need to turn off the electricity. Things like that.
Daniel. He has his own assumptions, and …
Elaine. And he figures that, if you want to save the world, then you must share them. You must be advocating the same things he advocates.
Daniel. And have I ever advocated such things?
Elaine. Not that I know of.
Daniel. I haven’t. It isn’t that such things would be useless, I just haven’t anywhere prescribed them, because most people are already aware of them. So really his question boils down to, “Mr. Quinn, do you practice what I expect you to preach?”
Elaine. That’s right.
Daniel. And what do I preach?
Elaine. Well … again, I’m just reciting. I think the clearest statement of it is this: If there are still people here in two hundred years, they won’t be thinking the way we think, because if people go on thinking the way we think, then they’ll go on living the way we live — and if people go on living the way we live, there won’t be any people here in two hundred years.
Daniel. In other words, my books don’t contain lists of do’s and don’ts. My books are about changing minds.
Elaine. Yes.
Daniel. A lot of people find this hard to stomach. They put it this way: “I know things are screwed up, but changing minds just isn’t enoug
h.”
Elaine. What do they think would be enough?
Daniel. That’s a question for you to answer, of course.
Elaine. I’d say they want to see some action. Changing minds doesn’t seem like action to them.
Daniel. And what likely seems like action to them?
Elaine. Well … passing new laws would probably count as action.
Daniel. I’d think so. What laws?
Elaine. That I don’t know. Stricter environmental laws.
Daniel. In the case of the US, which branch of the government enforces the laws?
Elaine. The executive.
Daniel. And if you happen to have a chief executive like George W. Bush who doesn’t give a damn about the environment?
Elaine. Then stricter laws are going to be ignored or repealed.
Daniel. And who put George Bush in office?
Elaine. People who don’t give a damn about the environment. People with unchanged minds.
Daniel. So …
Elaine. That’s the general rule. Passing new laws only helps if the electorate really wants to see them enforced.
Daniel. So sending letters to your legislators demanding change — which can also be counted as action — isn’t going to do much good, either.
Elaine. No.
Daniel. What are some other things that count as action?
Elaine [after some thought]. There’s protest.