It would be a wonderfully rewarding task to produce a telling of the human story that would dispel the lie that human life was meaningless except for the last half one percent of it.
It seemed to me it would be a wonderfully rewarding task to produce a telling of the human story that would be a healing of that story. A telling that would dispel the lie that human life was meaningless except for the last half of one percent of it. A telling that would enable that young African American to perceive our common roots in the human story. A telling that would show why our ancestors needed no help from ersatz gods in UFOs to become human or to produce wonders that are still wonders today.
But I had other objectives as well.
The songs of the sixties and early seventies had warned that a hard rain was gonna fall and that the times they were a-changin’, but I had little hope that these things were going to happen in fact. The kids had lots of slogans, but a revolution needs more than that. A revolution needs a brilliant new vision and a foundation to build on, and these things the kids had not. They had no text, such as idealists of the past century had found in the Communist Manifesto. The revolution was going to fail in this generation, but I felt sure that the conditions that had stimulated the desire for revolution were not going to go away—worse luck for us. The day would come in twenty years or fifty years when children would again stand up and say, “No more, we’ve had enough of this.” And this time I wanted them to have a text in hand, ready for use.
These were the ideas and ambitions that were chasing themselves around in my head in that spring of 1977 as I sat down to start a book called Man and Alien, a book I thought would keep me busy for six months and ended up keeping me busy for the better part of twelve years.
There was one other matter at the back of my mind—as it had been for the past twenty years. I was still looking for a way to understand what had happened to me that morning at Gethsemani. Though I was by now for all practical purposes an atheist, I knew I’d never be able to dismiss or deny this experience—or to forget it.
ELEVEN
Thinkers of the Abrahamic religious tradition—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—have always been prepared to find God in human history. Naturally, this means the abbreviated form of human history that was known when these religions came into being. In each of the religions of this tradition, it was understood that man (and indeed the world) was only a few thousand years old. This was the foundation: Man was born a few thousand years ago, immediately fell from grace, and began to build civilization. This was the history in which they expected to find God and did indeed find God.
When Darwin and his successors made it clear that man is millions of years older than this history, the thinkers of these religions at first perceived this as a crisis. Some still do perceive it as a crisis and reject all evidence of human antiquity, but most found another way to deal with the crisis. They ignored it. They agreed to pretend that it never happened. This worked very well for them. Least said, soonest mended.
History, philosophy, and religion joined hands on this issue. They had all come into being accepting a premise that seemed almost self-evident: Man was inherently an agriculturalist and a civilization-builder, just the way bees are inherently honey-collectors and hive-builders, and this meant he was just a few thousand years old. They had all grown to maturity with these notions at the base of all their reasoning and all their conclusions, and none of them, here at this late date, wanted to shake the foundations on which their sacred institutions were built. History, philosophy, and religion therefore joined hands and said—quietly but firmly—“The first three million years of human life are meaningless. They’re there, but we’re not going to look at them or think about them, because they were empty. Truly human life, the human life that counts, began just a few thousand years ago, and we will concern ourselves with no other.”
The God of the Abrahamic tradition began to concern himself in the affairs of men just a few thousand years ago. Before that, we must assume, he was occupied elsewhere. Or perhaps he looked down on our ancestors and said, “Yech! What lowbrows! I snub them! I will have nothing to do with them.” He turned up his nose at Homo habilis, at Homo erectus, and even at Homo sapiens for hundreds of thousand of years. Even Homo sapiens sapiens he wouldn’t touch at first: Ten thousand generations of people every bit as smart as you or I went down to death ignored by God. But finally, just a few centuries ago, God looked down on man and said, “At last man is worthy of my attention. For three million years, I have let him welter in ignorance, error, and despair, but now I’ll begin to talk to him.”
Well, of course, I began by rejecting this priggish god. I went beyond that. I refused to concede that the singularity of this priggish god made him morally superior to all others. Looking at the universe, I find nothing in it that indicates the numerosity of the divine. Atheists claim to know the number of the gods; they say that number is zero. Monotheists also claim to know the number of the gods; they say that number is one. I personally don’t know the number of the gods and don’t know where to look for it. It doesn’t trouble me to be ignorant of this number; I’m even comfortable with the notion that it may be zero. The presence of the divine in the universe doesn’t necessarily depend on or argue for the presence of gods.
Like the thinkers of the Abrahamic tradition, I too expected to find the gods in human history—but in the whole of it, not just in the last tenth of one percent of it.
But I was like the thinkers of the Abrahamic tradition in one respect: I too expected to find the gods in human history—but in the whole of it, not just in the last tenth of one percent of it. But how was I to look for them? Where was I to look for them? They were certainly not to be found in what occultists call the Old Gods, the pagan gods. Those gods are not old at all, are scarcely older than Yahweh; these are farmers’ gods one and all, gods of the fields and the orchards, gods of fertility, gods whose birth and death foreshadow the growth and harvest of the crops. I wasn’t looking for Osiris and Astarte and Adonis. The gods I sought were unknown, would not have been imaginable (much less nameable) to our earliest human ancestors.
I won’t lead you step by agonizing step to the realization that I’d been given a compass to use in the search. It had two points to fix its direction, as a compass must if it’s to be usable. One of these was my childhood dream, which had directed me firmly toward the community of life. The other was of course that hour at Gethsemani, which, like the invisible magnet of the north pole, pulled me forward with a wordless message so completely unrelated to the monastic life or to the Christian life or to Jesus or perfection or holiness or heaven that I couldn’t begin to make it out till I’d rid myself of all that impedimenta and was ready to step off the sidewalk and follow the deer into the forest.…
I understand. You’d like to know what was said, even if it wasn’t said in words. I’ll do the best I can. It was something like this: I am the fire of life that animates the world. I am not to be found in the sky, not to be found in some remote heaven. I live in your midst, and all that lives lives in the midst of me. I am HERE and I am never absent.
I apologize that I’m unable to infuse those words with the thunderous emotions I felt. I produced something more satisfactory in a kind of canticle or paean that I wrote for the fourth version of the book, The Book of Nahash. When you leave, I’ll give you a copy to take with you.… No, it’s not a prayer. Gods like these don’t need prayers or praise or adoration, and we can’t buy their patronage with such things.…
I understand. In the case of this hour at Gethsemani, why did I say that “the god spoke” instead of “the gods”? I speak of “the god” in this case because—I lament the fact that English has no genderless personal pronoun. To hell with it, I’ll call it it. This was not a divine chorus chanting in the sky. This was the god of that particular place. This god was there. This was not a god whose home was in the clouds or beyond the stars. This was a god whose home was in the hills of Kentucky. Nowhere els
e in the universe will you find that place. It’s the place that has been shaped by that god. Or that place is that god. The fire that animates that place, unique in all the universe, is the god who spoke to me that day, is the god who let me watch it breathing that place.
The god who animates that place is not the god who animates Great Bear Lake or the prairie of southern Illinois or the Black Forest or the Greenland tundra or the Kalahari Desert. This is not a generic god, not an abstraction of divinity. Aboriginal peoples everywhere understand this, because they too are there.
I’m getting ahead of myself, but I have to say this before you leave: The gods are not invulnerable or all-powerful just because they’re gods. The association of omnipotence with divinity is just a lunatic notion that grew up among a people obsessed with power. Drop a nuclear bomb on those hills in Kentucky, and the god of that place will be silent. I assure you of that.
The god of this place, Austin, isn’t dead or even injured. Even in cities, humans do not constitute an alien presence on this planet. There’s room for us here. One of the nice things about Austin is that its citizens don’t want to kill off the god who animates this place (though of course they don’t think of it in these terms).
Now, where was I? I was in search of the gods.…
Having listened to the god in the hills of Kentucky, I knew that it wasn’t burning there just for us. Fifty thousand years ago, when this continent was uninhabited by our kind, this god was there, burning with not one whit less exuberance and joy than today. What I perceived that day was the overwhelming preciousness of life and the laughable insignificance of the things we humans puff ourselves up over. Theologians of the school of Teilhard de Chardin conceive that the universe yearns to be “hominized” and so turned a great corner when man was born. In us, as they see it, the universe became conscious. This is rather like thinking that, when Edmund Hillary stood on top of it, Mount Everest became tall. Standing in the midst of those hills charged and thrumming with the divine fire, I knew that the world needs our consciousness the way the sun needs a kitchen match. But, because consciousness is peculiar to humans, we like to think it’s the most valuable treasure in the cosmos; if birds were capable of self-congratulation of this sort, doubtless they’d think the same about flight, or perhaps about birdsong. I don’t mean to imply that consciousness isn’t a treasure. It’s all a treasure: the flight of the bird, the stride of the cheetah, the song of the whale, the web of the spider, the veins of a leaf. But to nominate consciousness as something grander than all the rest is just more of the usual anthropocentric nonsense.…
Ah. Yes, that’s a valid point. In Ishmael I argued the necessity of giving other species the time and room to reach for consciousness. Indeed we must. But I certainly didn’t mean to recommend a special dispensation for creatures with the potential for consciousness. I didn’t mean that we should protect gorillas more carefully than squids. We must give every species the time and the room to reach whatever potential it possesses. To do otherwise is to preempt the wisdom of the gods, is to exercise the knowledge of good and evil that was forbidden to Adam.…
Ah yes, our “stewardship.” People with good intentions often tell me we have an obligation to be “good stewards” of the earth. I must ask, who gave us this stewardship? Those who believe Genesis contains actual words spoken by God will say He gave us this stewardship when the earth was created, and I wouldn’t dream of arguing with them. But people who know that the earth got along just fine without man for three billion years have no such excuse for believing in our stewardship, which is again nothing but arrogance and vanity and anthropocentric tomfoolery. We have as much business being stewards of the world as infants have being stewards of the nursery. It’s we who are dependent on the world, not the other way round.
Having listened to the god in the hills of Kentucky, I knew that it wasn’t burning there just for us.
Following the arrow of my compass, I went back to our beginnings to find meaning that historians and philosophers and theologians say is not there. Let me read to you from the fifth version of the book, The Book of the Damned. Here the people of our culture are identified as a new, self-defined subspecies of man called Homo magister—Man the Master. I never found a way to say it better than this:
When Homo magister looks at the history of our ancient ancestors, he naturally perceives it as a void, as nonhistory. How else can you characterize it, except as what was going on before anything happened? It’s just before-history. Prehistory. It’s a period of time as empty as the lives that created it. It’s empty because nobody was doing anything. Except hunting and gathering. And of course battering stones. It was the Stone Age. Definition by product.
Homo magister would naturally see it that way. But it’s not the only way to see it. Be imaginative. Forget products. Forget occupations. Imagine it a different way.
Imagine that our ancestors were enacting a story.
You know what enacting a story is. We’re enacting a story here. A story about man becoming the master of his environment. A story about man’s conquest of the world. A story about the fulfillment of man’s destiny—as defined by Homo magister. We’ve been enacting that story for some ten thousand years.
Imagine our ancestors enacting a different story from ours. Not a story about man mastering his environment. Not a story about man’s conquest of the world. Not a story in which products and productivity figured at all.
Stretch yourself. Imagine that the story our ancestors were enacting shaped their lives. The way the story we’re enacting shapes our lives.
Different stories: different lives.
Imagine that our ancestors’ lives had a different shape from ours because they were enacting a different story from ours.
Imagine that their lives had a different shape from ours because they were enacting a different story from ours.
Go further. Imagine that enacting their story made their lives meaningful to them. The way that enacting our story makes our lives meaningful to us.
Different stories: different meanings.
Imagine that enacting their story, generation after generation, gave their history its shape. The way that enacting our story, generation after generation, has given our history its shape.
Different stories: different histories.
Imagine that their history had a different shape from ours because they were enacting a different story from ours.
It’s hard, I know, to imagine such things. It’d be like asking an eighteenth-century slave-ship captain to imagine that the wretches chained up in his hold were actually human beings like himself, like his wife, like his parents. He’d have thought you were pulling his leg.
It gets worse.
Think biologically. Imagine a completely different kind of story from the one we’re enacting. A story for the entire lifetime of a genus. The genus Homo. Think of an outline for such a story. Not three million years of nothingness, followed by an explosive flourishing so violent that it consumes the world in ten thousand years, followed by extinction. That’s not a story for the lifetime of a genus.
Imagine a different story entirely. A story for tens of millions of years. For hundreds of millions of years.
A real story. A story to be enacted. A story whose enactment shapes the history of those who enact it. Now imagine that that’s the story our ancestors were enacting. It had nothing to do with mastering the world. Nobody was trying to master the world. All of it was about something else.
Stretch yourself.
Imagine that during the first three million years of human life people were enacting a story. And that it was man’s destiny to enact that story. Not for three million years. For thirty million years. For three hundred million years. For the lifetime of our planet, perhaps. Billions of years.
It was that good a story. Good enough for the lifetime of a genus. But it was not a story about power—about conquest and mastery and ruling. Enacting it didn’t make people powerful. Enacting it, peopl
e didn’t need to be powerful. Because, enacting it, people didn’t need to rule the world.
Imagine that ruling the world was something they thought they didn’t need to do. Because it was already being done. As it had always been done. As it had been done from the beginning.
Imagine that they had a different supposition about the world and man’s place in it. Imagine that they didn’t suppose, as Homo magister does, that the world belongs to man, that it is his to conquer and rule. Imagine that, in their ignorance, they supposed something else entirely.
Be outrageous.
Imagine that they supposed something completely absurd. That man belongs to the world.
Imagine that ruling the world was something they thought they didn’t need to do. Because it was already being done.
It was never hidden. It was only hidden from Homo magister because he was sure that what had shaped their lives was nothing—an absence of knowledge, ignorance.
Not something. Not a different supposition about the world and man’s place in it.
Man belongs to the world.
Actually, it’s plainly written in their lives. It’s plainly written in the general community to which they belonged: the community of life on this planet. Anyone can read it. You just have to look.
Every creature born in the biological community of the earth belongs to that community. Nothing lives in isolation from the rest; nothing can live in isolation from the rest. Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life in the community is owed to the community—and is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest.