“But won’t they just compete all the harder for foods D, E, and F?”
“Of course. That’s why you need the third strategy. You want to deny them access to foods D, E, and F. That way your competitors will be totally out of luck. You’ll be denying them access to half the foods they favor and destroying the other half.”
“But as you say, this doesn’t happen.”
“It doesn’t happen in the nonhuman community, but this isn’t to say that it cant happen. To say that it doesn’t happen is to say that it isn’t found, and it isn’t found because it’s self-eliminating. Do you see what I mean? It doesn’t happen that goats refuse to nurse their young, but that isn’t because such behavior is impossible. There surely have been goats that refuse to nurse, but you seldom or never come across them, because their offspring die and they lose their representation in the gene pool.”
“I see that,” I said.
“It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That’s what our agricultural revolution is all about. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian.”
My mind reeled for a bit over this. It took me a while to figure out what it was reeling over. Finally I said, “Look, the subject here is evolutionarily stable strategies, right?”
“Right.”
“There are three strategies here that you say are evolutionarily wwstable: Hunt your competitors down, destroy their food, and deny them access to food. Right?”
“Right.”
“But now you’re telling me that our whole culture is founded on these evolutionarily wwstable strategies.”
“Right again.”
“If these strategies are evolutionarily unstable, then how do we manage to pursue them?”
“Pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy doesn’t eliminate you instantly, Jared, it eliminates you eventually.”
“But how is it eliminating us?”
B cocked her head as if to ask why I was suddenly being so dense. “Jared, where were you the other night in Stuttgart when Charles was explaining the connection between totalitarian agriculture and overpopulation? Because six billion of us are pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy, we’re fundamentally attacking the very ecological systems that keep us alive. Just like the goat that refuses to suckle its kids, we’re in the process of eliminating ourselves. Think about the time line Charles drew in his talk about the boiling frog. For the first six thousand years, the impact of our evolutionarily unstable strategy was minimal and confined to the Near East. Over the next two thousand years, the strategy spread to Eastern Europe and the Far East. In the next fifteen hundred years, the strategy spread throughout the Old World. In the next three hundred years, it became global. By the end of the next two hundred years—which is now—so many people were following the strategy that the impact was becoming catastrophic. We’re now about two generations away from finishing the job of making this unstable strategy extinct.”
I struggled to my feet and went for a walk.
The eyes begin to open
When I returned fifteen minutes later, I told B what I’d had to get away to think about. I’d heard everything Charles had said in Stuttgart and thought I understood it, but I hadn’t. In spite of everything he said, I felt sure he was showing us that our population explosion is a social problem, like, say, crime or racism. I failed to hear him say that our population explosion is a biological problem, that if we pursue a policy that would be fatal for any species, then it will be fatal for us in exactly the same way. We can’t will it to be otherwise. We can’t say, “Well, yes, our civilization is built on an evolutionarily unstable strategy but we can make it work anyhow, because we’re humans.” The world will not make an exception for us. And of course what the Church teaches is that God will make an exception for us. God will let us behave in a way that would be fatal for any other species, will somehow “fix it” so we can live in a way that is in a very real sense self-eliminating. This is like expecting God to make our airplanes fly even if they’re aerodynamically incapable of flight.
“This will probably sound very naive,” I said, “but why is this such a secret? Why is this something I’ve never heard before? Why isn’t this taught in the schools?”
“It’s not a secret, of course. It’s just that the pieces of the puzzle are scattered among so many disciplines—so many disciplines that rarely talk to each other—archaeology, history, anthropology, biology, sociology. And who exactly would teach it in the schools?”
“Everyone should teach it,” I told her. “They should teach this first. Reading, writing, and arithmetic can wait.”
“Well, naturally I agree with you. This is the word of B, Jared: If the world is saved, it will not be saved by people with the old vision and new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with a new vision and no programs. This is because vision propagates itself and needs no programs. In the last half hour your eyes have begun to open to that new vision. But as yet you have only the bleak side of the vision—the shadow side.”
I had to agree with that.
“So we come again—as we must, again and again, Jared—to these two visions, the Taker vision and the Leaver, or animist, vision. A few minutes ago, you did a fine job of articulating the Taker vision, the vision that has driven our culture through its ten thousand years of triumph and catastrophe. As the Takers see it, the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. The next question is: Where did this vision come from?”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand the meaning of the question,” I told her.
“That’s all right. Charles would have insisted on prodding you across this gap, but I’ve promised not to follow his example. I’ll tell you where the vision came from, and you can tell me whether my explanation is plausible and persuasive. The Taker vision came from the Taker experience of the world—from the way the people of our culture made their living, which was, after all, by conquering and ruling the world. The practice of totalitarian agriculture over thousands of years gave them the idea that the world had been made for Man, and Man had been made to conquer and rule it. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, it makes perfect sense. I suppose you could call it a sort of rough-and-ready empiricism: ’We’ve always lived as though the world was made for us, so it must have been made for us.”
“The important thing to note is that the vision grew out of the lifestyle, the lifestyle didn’t grow out of the vision. Is that clear?”
“Well … it’s almost clear.”
“What I mean is, one day eleven thousand years ago, the Mesolithic hunters of Iraq didn’t get together and say, ‘Look, we’ve examined the world and conclude that it was made for humans to conquer and rule. Therefore we should get off our duffs and start conquering and ruling it.’ Rather, what happened was that, over thousands of years of living like conquerors and rulers, the people of our culture gradually began to conceive the curious notion that the world had actually been created for us to conquer and rule. They began to imagine that they were fulfilling human destiny itself.”
“I understand. The Taker vision grew out of the Taker lifestyle, not the other way around.”
“Now, what do you suppose the Leaver vision grew out of?”
“I’d suppose it grew out of the Leaver lifestyle.”
“And you’d be right, of course. And what do you know of that lifestyle?”
“To be honest … nothing at all.”
B nodded. “That’s our challenge for today, Jared. I have to reveal to you the vision that grew out of a lifestyle you know nothing about.”
“Sounds difficult,” I said.
“It is, but I don’t have to teach you everything there is to know about this lifestyle. To articulate the Taker vision, a
ll you really had to understand was how Takers make their living. Takers make their living by behaving as though the world belongs to them—and the Taker vision supports that behavior. There’s a lot more to the Taker lifestyle than this, but this was all you needed in order to articulate that vision.”
“Yes, I see.”
“I can be—and will be—just as selective as that when it comes to the Leavers.”
Silencing the inquisitor
Having said this, B fell silent. After a few minutes I made a mental check to see if I was supposed to be working on some question or other, but of course I wasn’t. She wasn’t in a trance or anything, just seemed to be staring vacantly into the middle distance. Soon I began fidgeting, and she slanted a look at me.
She said, “I’ve never done this before, Jared, and now that I’m right at the point of doing it, I don’t know how to begin. I know everything I want to happen, I just don’t know how to accomplish it. I know where I want to end up, I just don’t know how to get there.”
Since I didn’t really understand the problem, I couldn’t see any way to help, beyond giving her a reassuring pat on the back, which probably wouldn’t have done either one of us much good.
Finally she said, “I have an idea, but I’m not sure how you’ll take to it. I think my problem is that our relationship is inherently adversarial. I don’t mean it’s entirely adversarial, but it has an adversarial aspect to it that just won’t go away. This isn’t your fault or my fault, it’s simply what is. You were sent here to satisfy yourself and others, to ask questions you would ask and questions they would ask, so your role here, like it or not, is that of an inquisitor. ‘Like it or not’ is the right way to talk about it, I think, because you mostly don’t like it but feel you must do it anyway. You must ask for yourself, and you must ask for those others who sent you here.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“What I’ve done so far has been fine for the inquisitor.” She laid a finger on our work of bricolage. “This worked perfectly well for him, didn’t it?”
I nodded.
“My trouble right now is that I can’t think of any way to fill an inquisitor’s eyes with the animist vision. I really don’t think it can be done. This means we have to take on a pair of new roles.”
I nodded again.
“I had a son once, Jared—not one of the lucky ones. He lived only a few hours, not long enough to be named, really, but privately I named him Louis, somehow a very grown-up name. I won’t be having others, for obvious reasons—or if they’re not obvious, you can work them out at your leisure. If Louis were alive, he’d be eight years old, and I’d certainly be teaching him what I now need to teach you.”
“So what are you asking?”
“I’m asking if you can turn off the inquisitor for an hour and listen to me the way Louis would.”
I told her I thought I could manage that.
“I don’t know whether I’m asking of you something easy or something hard. Probably a lot of men would find it impossible.”
“I don’t know either,” I said. “But, to be honest, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Let me ask this, though. Are you saying that you want me not to ask any questions at all? That doesn’t sound right to me, because Louis would certainly be asking questions if he were eight years old.”
She seemed disconcerted by this, maybe even a bit irked. It couldn’t be helped, the question had to be asked.
She said, “An eight-year-old isn’t an inquisitor.”
“I know that. Give me a little credit.”
She gnawed on it for a while, then said, “Louis would ask questions.” I didn’t bother to point out that I’d just told her that. “Do you think you can ask his questions and not Fr. Lulfre’s?”
“I think I can, Shirin. Give me the benefit of a doubt.”
She shrugged an unenthusiastic agreement. After spending a few moments in thought, she looked away. “Don’t be surprised if I say things you don’t expect to hear. These are the things I have to say.”
“I understand.”
“I wish you knew sign language,” she added rather wistfully. “Barriers fall right away in sign.”
I wished I knew it too.
The web
I don’t know what she did during the next few minutes, I wasn’t watching. At junctures like this, you leave people alone, turn your attention elsewhere, and give them a little room to work in. When she was ready, she started talking in a low, firm voice—and I unobtrusively switched on my tape recorder.
“I’ve told you I’m dying,” she began. “I know it makes you unhappy to hear this, Louis, but the closer you come to understanding it, the less unhappy you’ll feel. By the time we’re finished here today, you still won’t feel good about it, but you’ll be able to bear it. In any case, this is where I have to begin. You want to understand me and you want to understand what’s going on, and that’s what we’re going to look at right now. If I were someone else, I’d try to console you with a fairy tale like the one they tell about Santa Claus every Christmas. I’d tell you that Mommy’s going to be taken up to heaven to live with God and the angels, and from there I’ll look down and watch over you. The truth is better than this—partly because it is the truth.
“Let me begin with the great secret of the animist life, Louis. When other people look for God, you’ll see them automatically look up into the sky. They really imagine that, if there’s a God, he’s far, far, far away—remote and untouchable. I don’t know how they can bear living with such a God, Louis, I really don’t. But they’re not our problem. I’ve told you that, among the animists of the world, not a single one can tell you the number of the gods. They don’t know that number and neither do I. I’ve never met one or heard of one who cares how many there are. What’s important to us is not how many they are but where they are. If you go among the Alawa of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa or the Navajo of North America or the Kreen-Akrore of South America or the Onabasulu of New Guinea—or any other of hundreds of Leaver peoples I could name—you’ll soon find out where the gods are. The gods are here.”
For the first time B looked directly into my eyes as she spoke.
“I don’t mean there, I don’t mean elsewhere, I mean here. Among the Alawa: here. Among the Bushmen: here. Among the Navajo: here. Among the Kreen-Akrore: here. Among the Onabasulu: here. Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied truthfully.
“This isn’t a theological statement they’re making. The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, ‘Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.’ The Kreen-Akrore are not saying to the Onabasulu, ‘You have no gods, only we have gods.’ Nothing of the kind. They’re saying, ‘Our place is a sacred place, like no other in the world.’ They would never think of looking elsewhere to find the gods. The gods are to be found among them—living where they live. The god is what animates their place. That’s what a god is. A god is that strange force that makes every place a place—a place like no other in the world. A god is the fire that burns in this place and no other—and no place in which the fire burns is devoid of god. All of this should explain to you why I don’t reject the name that was given to us by an outsider. Even though it was bestowed with a false understanding of our vision, the name animism captures a glimmer of it.
“Unlike the God whose name begins with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb—silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble—but not dead, not wholly extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days that place will be pulsing with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to take care of that place. It will never be what it was befo
re—but nothing is ever what it was before. It doesn’t need to be what it was before. You’ll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process.
“Here, I’ll tell you a story. When the gods set out to make the universe, they said to themselves, ‘Let us make of it a manifestation of our unending abundance and a sign to be read by those who shall have eyes to read. Let us lavish care without stint on every thing: no less upon the most fragile blade of grass than upon the mightiest of stars, no less upon the gnat that sings for an hour than upon the mountain that stands for a millennium, no less upon a flake of mica than upon a river of gold. Let us make no two leaves the same from one branch to the next, no two branches the same from one tree to the next, no two trees the same from one land to the next, no two lands the same from one world to the next, no two worlds the same from one star to the next. In this way, the Law of Life will be plain to all who shall have eyes to read: the rabbit that creeps out to feed, the fox that lies in wait, the eagle that circles above, and the man who bends his bow to the sky.’ And this was how it was done from first to last, no two things alike in all the mighty universe, no single thing made with less care than any other thing throughout generations of species more numerous than the stars. And those who had eyes to see read the sign and followed the Law of Life.
“Do you understand that story?” she asked.
“No, I don’t think I do.”
“No two things alike in all the mighty universe, Jared. That’s the key. That’s why everything here is on the way and not in its final form. I told you this yesterday when I was talking about the mites that travel with the burying beetles. If you put these mites under a microscope to study the final form of this species, you’ll be defeated, because the closer you look at them, the more clearly you’ll see that no two of them are alike—and if no two are alike, what sense can it possibly make to hold up any one of them and say, ‘Here, here is the final form of these mites’?