Daniel. So. Any progress?
Elaine. I think so.
Daniel. Did you figure out what track this reader had us on, wearing her blinders?
Elaine. The track was medicine.
Daniel. As possibly in conflict with the notion of living in the hands of the gods. And what happened when you took off the blinders she provided for you?
Elaine. I saw everything else.
Daniel. You were able to pull back and achieve a wider vision than she has.
Elaine. That’s right.
Daniel. Go ahead.
Elaine. What I saw was that disease — or at least most diseases — represent an attack by other living creatures. What I saw was that every creature has a right to defend itself from attack any way it can, and that includes us.
Daniel. Attacked by a lion, we’re going to use any weapon that’s available to defend ourselves.
Elaine. That’s right. And medicine provides us with weapons with which to defend ourselves against viruses and bacteria, among other things.
Daniel. And living in the hands of the gods?
Elaine. Living in the hands of the gods has nothing to do with it. Living in the hands of the gods doesn’t mean standing there and letting the lion rip your head off.
Daniel. Well done. What do you think? Was it hard to get to the answer?
Elaine [ponders this for a bit]. I guess I have to say it was … Maybe it’s like learning to ride a bicycle. At first it seems completely impossible, then somehow, suddenly, you’ve got it.
Daniel. Yes. Of course, being able to move forward without falling down is just the basic skill, the beginning of confidence that leads to more advanced feats.
Elaine. Of course … I have a question of my own. It’s probably been asked many times.
Daniel. Go ahead.
Elaine. We’ve been talking about living in the hands of the gods.
Daniel. Yes?
Elaine. But you never make it quite clear whether you believe in these gods, or any god.
Daniel. When Ishmael talks about the gods … Let me start that a different way. The subject of Ishmael is the unrecognized and unacknowledged mythology of our culture, which Ishmael formulates as a story that spells out the relationships among Man, the world, and the gods. In this context the gods are mythological, which is not to say that they’re unreal but rather that their reality is irrelevant. The world was made for Man to conquer and rule, and Man was made to conquer and rule it — according to our mythology. It goes without saying that this is a divinely appointed mission. The Europeans who drove the Indians off their lands and put that land to the plow sincerely believed they were doing God’s work.
Elaine. Yes, I understand that. But I don’t see how it answers my question.
Daniel. Which is, do I believe in God.
Elaine. Yes, I guess so.
Daniel. Being a Martian anthropologist, I have to pull back from your question, have to take off the blinders you’re asking me to wear. Believing in things that may not exist — or disbelieving in things that may exist — is a peculiarity of your culture, not a universal human activity. Because it’s universal among you, you assume it’s universal among humans in general.
Elaine. That’s true. It never occurred to me that it might not be universal among humans.
Daniel. You variously believe in God, though God may not exist, or you disbelieve in God, though God may exist. You variously believe in angels, though angels may not exist, or you disbelieve in angels, though angels may exist. You variously believe in extraterrestrial spacecraft that have the world under surveillance, though these spacecraft may not exist, or disbelieve in them, though they may exist. You variously believe in ghosts, though ghosts may not exist, or you disbelieve in ghosts, though ghosts may exist.
Elaine. Yes, that’s all true.
Daniel. Tell me, do you believe in supermodels?
Elaine [laughing]. Supermodels? I don’t believe in them. That isn’t the word I would use.
Daniel. For you, the existence of supermodels doesn’t require you to exercise the faculty of belief.
Elaine. That’s true. Though I’ve never thought of belief as a faculty.
Daniel. Oh, it definitely is. It’s the faculty you must call upon in the face of the absurd. As William of Occam put it, Credo quia absurdum: “I believe because it is absurd.” A thing whose reality doesn’t seem to you absurd doesn’t require belief.
Elaine. Yes, I suppose that’s true. But the existence of God doesn’t strike me as absurd.
Daniel. It’s absurd in the sense that no one can produce even the slightest evidence of God’s existence. They can produce proofs, but these are only valid if you accept the premises on which they’re based. If you don’t accept those premises, then they’re just empty exercises in logic.
Elaine. I suppose I’m dimly aware that such things exist.
Daniel. Another faculty exists that is a kind of cousin of the faculty of belief. This is the faculty that comes into play with regard to supermodels. You people the world with supermodels. Fifty years ago there were no supermodels, but in the last few decades you have peopled your world with them. A hundred years ago there were no movie stars, but since then you’ve peopled your world with hundreds of them. Europe in the Middle Ages was peopled with saints.
Elaine. Yes, I see what you mean.
Daniel. The Gebusi of New Guinea consort with spirits on a daily basis. Their world is peopled with spirits, and if you were to ask them if they believe in spirits, they would react just the way you did when I asked you if you believe in supermodels … But to return to your original question, I have to say that the faculty of belief is completely atrophied in me. It strikes me as foolish to believe in things that may not exist — or to deny the existence of things that may exist. Nonetheless, I’ve peopled my own personal universe with gods who have a care for all living things. I don’t pray to these gods or build shrines to them or expect favors from them or perform rituals for them. Nor do I expect other people to “believe” in these gods or to people their own universes with them.
Elaine. I understand. This resolves a question that was very much on my mind — and is probably on the minds of many of your readers.
Daniel. What question is that?
Elaine. I imagine a great many of your readers consider you a nonbeliever.
Daniel. I assume you mean a nonbeliever in the Judeo-Christian God.
Elaine. In any kind of god.
Daniel. I’m afraid I don’t know whether that’s true or not. But I’m not sure why this is relevant. Or what question I’ve resolved for you.
Elaine. You’ve explained how it was possible for you to write a book like Tales of Adam, in which the gods figure so prominently.
Daniel. Yes …?
Elaine. Some readers must wonder if you were writing from the heart or if it was just a sort of … poetic re-creation of the animist worldview.
Daniel. Someone might imagine that I’d merely adopted an animist persona — a false or alien persona — for literary purposes, as James Hogg did in writing his Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
Elaine. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that.
Daniel. It’s a classic that enjoys a sort of cult status. To write it, Hogg had to adopt a persona diametrically opposed to his own, that of an extreme predestinarian, one who believes that one’s salvation or damnation was ordained unalterably by God from the beginning of time. Believing himself to be of the elect, regardless of any sin he might commit, the narrator considered himself “justified” even as he murdered his brother, his mother, and others, and allowed others to be hanged for his crimes. The book, written in the early 1820s, decades ahead of its time, was received with scorn and fell into obscurity until being rediscovered by authors like Robert Louis Stevenson and André Gide … In any case, you can be sure that the Tales were definitely written “from my heart,” to use your phrase.
Elaine. I didn’t doubt it.
Daniel. So … Where are we? I take it we’ve disposed of the question of my personal beliefs.
Daniel. Let’s see … On the same general subject, how would you answer this question, which I’ve received in many different forms: “Do you think God recognizes the danger we pose to the world and therefore sends such things as AIDS, cancer, plagues, and natural disasters to keep our population in check?”
Elaine [after thinking about it]. It strikes me as a pretty silly question.
Daniel. Yes, perhaps it is. But when an anthropologist sees people doing or saying something that seems silly, he asks himself two questions: “Why does this seem silly to me?” and “Why doesn’t it seem silly to them?”
Elaine. Yes. Of course you’re right.
Daniel. So why does the question seem silly to you?
Elaine. Perhaps it would seem less silly if it weren’t a question about God.
Daniel. You’ll have to explain that. Is asking questions about God inherently silly or do you find the very concept of God silly?
Elaine. No, neither one … Would you repeat the question?
Daniel. “Do you think God recognizes the danger we pose to the world and therefore sends such things as AIDS, cancer, plagues, and natural disasters to keep our population in check?”
Elaine [after thinking for several minutes]. The questioner doesn’t seem to realize that there is any causality at work in the world except divine causality. He uses the term natural disasters but doesn’t actually accept the fact that they are natural. He doesn’t connect the tsunami that devastated South Asia with an undersea earthquake, he thinks God “sent” it.
Daniel. Or “sent” the earthquake.
Elaine. AIDS, cancer, plagues — all these things have natural causes.
Daniel. Yes, that’s what you and I and probably most people think, but you need to get inside this person’s head and understand his vision of God.
Elaine. His vision of God … I’m not sure what to say.
Daniel. Talk about his God.
Elaine [after some thought]. His God is, I’d have to assume, omniscient and omnipotent.
Daniel. I’m sure you’re right. Go on.
Elaine. I don’t see where to go.
Daniel. I’m trying not to lead you too pointedly. You have to get behind the thought processes that prompted this question. You have an omniscient and omnipotent God, and …
Elaine. He sees that we’re overpopulating the world.
Daniel. And …
Elaine. And it’s within his power to send diseases and catastrophes to reduce our population.
Daniel. Why does he need to do this?
Elaine. Ah. Because the world doesn’t regulate itself. Or you could say that God can’t depend on the world to regulate itself.
Daniel. And because the world doesn’t regulate itself — or can’t be depended on to regulate itself …
Elaine. God has to do it himself. He has to manage the world personally.
Daniel. Otherwise it doesn’t work properly. At least not automatically.
Elaine. Right.
Daniel. So he sends diseases and catastrophes in order to reduce the human population. Or at least he has the option and the power to do this.
Elaine. That’s right.
Daniel. But …
Elaine. But?
Daniel. He has the option and the power to reduce the human population by all sorts of means, but …
Elaine. He can’t manage to do it.
Daniel. So he created a world that can’t be counted on to regulate itself and that he can’t seem to regulate, either. What kind of a God is this?
Elaine. What kind? According to who?
Daniel. According to the person who asked this question.
Elaine. I don’t know, beyond the obvious — beyond the things we’ve already discussed … I mean, he’s omniscient and omnipotent. I suppose I could add that he’s benevolent. That he exerts himself on our behalf — or may be doing so.
Daniel. As always, I’m trying to get behind the words, back to unvoiced assumptions and beliefs.
Elaine sighs.
Daniel [after giving her a couple of minutes to think]. Let’s give God a performance review, starting with the Garden of Eden, where he planted a tree whose fruit Adam and Eve were forbidden to taste. Put yourself in his place in an analogous situation. You’re the mother of two children, a boy and a girl. You tell them, “You can play with anything in the house except the loaded gun I’m putting here on the kitchen table.” Then, as you leave, you knowingly allow someone into the house who will undoubtedly encourage them to play with the gun.
Elaine. Uh-huh. But a believer would say that God put the forbidden tree in the garden as a test.
Daniel. And being omniscient …
Elaine. He’d know they would fail it.
Daniel. Even a human mother would know better than to leave her children with a loaded gun in plain sight, wouldn’t she?
Elaine. Yes.
Daniel. I don’t know what sort of religious upbringing you had.
Elaine. Oh, I was raised a Catholic. Went to a Catholic grade school, had the Bible stories, learned the catechism, and all that.
Daniel. Then you’re in a pretty good position to evaluate God’s performance. His early experiences with the human race were pretty disappointing.
Elaine. Yes. He finally became so disgusted that he wiped it all out except for Noah and his family. Even the results of this weren’t too satisfactory.
Daniel. Eventually he decided to adopt a chosen people to be his own. What was his thought in doing this?
Elaine. Hmm. I’m a bit hazy on that one. I mean, on his long-term plan for the race as a whole. But the idea in the short term was to champion this one people and help them surpass all their neighbors, as long as they remained faithful to him.
Daniel. And how did that work out?
Elaine. Not too well. In the end they were so faithless that he washed his hands of them. Allowed them to be overrun first by their neighbors, then by the Romans. At least this is the way I remember it.
Daniel. But he nonetheless promised them a Messiah.
Elaine. That’s right.
Daniel. And this Messiah would do what?
Elaine. I’m not exactly sure what was promised, but the Jews assumed the Messiah would restore their independence and put them back at the pinnacle of the human race.
Daniel. And did he send them their Messiah?
Elaine. Well, obviously opinions differ on that. The Jews didn’t think Jesus was the Messiah, and still don’t. Certainly he didn’t do what they’d expected of a Messiah.
Daniel. But Jesus was the Messiah, wasn’t he?
Elaine. According to Christians, yes.
Daniel. According to Christians, he was the Messiah not merely of the Jews but of the whole human race.
Elaine. That’s right. Presumably.
Daniel. But only Christians got this message. The Jews are still waiting, and the Muslims consider Jesus to be just another prophet.
Elaine. Yes, that’s true.
Daniel. If Jesus was sent to save the entire human race, why is it that only Christians got this message?
Elaine. That I don’t know.
Daniel. If you were an omnipotent God, do you think you could have managed to get this message across to the whole human race? One way or the other — that Jesus either was or was not the promised Messiah.
Elaine. I think so.
Daniel. Naturally, Christians believe that they got the message God intended to send. But what’s ultimately happened to Christianity?
Elaine. Ultimately? I’m not sure what you mean. It’s still here.
Daniel. But very different from what it was a thousand years ago.
Elaine. That’s true. It’s become splintered into a thousand different sects, each with its own version of the message.
Daniel. They disagree on all sorts of vital issues: divorce, birth control, abortion, homosexuality. Not to mention the primacy of the pope and even the means of salvation.
Daniel. If you were an omnipotent God, don’t you think you could have made yourself absolutely clear on these issues?
Elaine. Yes, I think I could have.
Daniel. So I ask again: What kind of God is this?
Elaine [after some thought]. Strangely enough, I would have to say that he’s an incompetent God. Which is …
Daniel. Yes?
Elaine. I suppose God has been called every bad name you can think of for a ruler — tyrannical, vengeful, merciless, indifferent to our sufferings, obsessed with rules and regulations, a spy who peeks into every bedroom — but I don’t think I’ve ever heard him called incompetent.
Daniel. This is my career, uncovering the unvoiced beliefs and assumptions of our culture. For example, it’s the unvoiced belief of our culture that the world is a human possession, that it was our divinely appointed destiny to conquer and rule it, that ours is the one right way for humans to live, and that we must cling to this way of life even if it kills us. And it is the unvoiced assumption of this questioner that God is incompetent.
Elaine. You’ll have to explain that.
Daniel. Consider the inadequate means this questioner suggests that God might be using to reduce our population: AIDS, plagues, natural disasters, and so on. Our population continues to grow steadily despite such things, and has done so steadily for the past ten thousand years despite such things. If he was competent — and really concerned — an omnipotent God would be able to do something really effective, wouldn’t he?
Elaine. I’d have to think so. Though it would be, would have to be …
Daniel [after a few moments]. What sort of thing are you thinking of?
Elaine. A vast famine … a plague like none we’ve ever seen.
Daniel. You can be more imaginative than that, even if you’ve just had a few moments to think about it. Think of something that wouldn’t cause a single death, either of plague or starvation.
Elaine [after some thought]. He could strike ninety-nine out of every hundred women barren.
Daniel. Of course. That would take care of the problem in a hurry, wouldn’t it. In a single generation, our population would drop from six billion to sixty million, without anyone dying of plague or starving to death.
Elaine. Yes.
Daniel. If you’re clever enough to come up with that solution in sixty seconds, shouldn’t an omniscient and omnipotent God be able to do as well?
Elaine. You would think so. Though I don’t know what a believer would say to such a proposition.
Daniel. Believers are generally reconciled to the idea that God no longer intervenes in human affairs the way he once did. We’re on our own. He sent Jesus to open the gates of heaven to fallen humanity, and we’ll have to be content with that.
Elaine. Yes, apparently.
Daniel. Though our questioner doesn’t subscribe to this notion. He thinks God may be making efforts to save us from ourselves, even if those efforts are ineffective … But you see now why this person doesn’t think his question is silly.
Elaine. Yes. He’s reconciled to the fact that his God is incompetent. God wants to intervene and may be intervening, but the guy asking this question isn’t surprised that God’s interventions are so obviously … feeble.
Daniel. In fact, the real gods of the world — if there are any — are competent gods. They created a world that functions perfectly, without divine oversight or intervention. If we don’t curb our population growth, the built-in processes of the world will take care of it. If we continue to attack them as vigorously as we are right now, the ecological systems that keep us alive will eventually collapse, leaving a world that won’t sustain human life at all. We’ll be gone — probably along with most or all large forms of animal life — but life will go on and start rebuilding anew, just as it’s done after every mass extinction of the past.
Elaine. Not a happy outcome. At least from our point of view.
Daniel. But also not a necessary outcome. The people of the world simply must confront the fact that the period of mass extinctions that will end with our own has already begun, and that this isn’t something we can just go on ignoring.
Elaine. Yes.
Daniel. So what has exploring this silly question taught you?
Elaine. A great deal more than I expected, obviously.
Daniel. I mean about … What I’m trying to convey to you is the way I come up with answers that confound people’s expectations. What I’m trying to develop here is the answer to the last big remaining question that people have for me: How do I do what I do?
Elaine. I’ll have to think about that.
Daniel. Okay. Let’s take a break.
Daniel [half an hour later]. So did you give any thought to my last question?
Elaine. I gave some thought to it, but all I can really say is that I’m not even close to being able to do what you do.
Daniel. With the last question we explored, I really only had to give you a helping hand at one point, when I asked you what kind of God this questioner was thinking of.
Elaine. True. [After giving the matter some thought.] But that was the critical point. If you hadn’t stepped in to give me some guidance, I don’t think I could’ve gotten there on my own.
Daniel. It’s early days yet. You said it was like learning how to ride a bike. Just knowing how to stay upright is only the beginning. It takes some practice to get to a point where you can pedal with no hands.
Elaine. True.
Daniel. Here’s a question one of my readers couldn’t unravel, but I’ll bet that by now you won’t find it much of a challenge. He wrote that, when the six billionth person was born back in 1999, a writer for the National Review tried to put it into perspective by pointing out that if all six billion of us lived in Texas, each of us would have an eighth of an acre to ourselves. My correspondent asked, “This doesn’t seem like that much of a problem to me, does it to you?”
Elaine. Uh-huh.
Daniel. Just “uh-huh”?
Elaine. Well, I assume the arithmetic is correct.
Daniel. I assume so, too. Though I suspect the author of the article was working with Texas’s total area, not with its total living area, which wouldn’t include rivers, lakes, streets, and highways.
Elaine. I’m a little vague about how big an acre really is.
Daniel. I anticipated the question. An acre is 43,560 square feet. An eighth of an acre is 5,445 square feet, about the size of an ordinary city building lot. A family of four would have half an acre, a common size for suburban lots.
Elaine. Okay.
Daniel. Plenty of room.
Elaine. Yes.
Daniel. So now you have our population situation in perspective.
Elaine says nothing.
Daniel. Come on, Elaine. What’s the unvoiced assumption behind this “perspective”?
Elaine. Obviously it’s about space.
Daniel. Work it through. This is an easy one.
Elaine [after thinking about it]. A family of four has no trouble living on half an acre. Millions of Americans do it.
Daniel. I’m not going to help you with this one. Think about what you’re saying, word by word.
Elaine [after thinking some more]. All right. They’re living on half an acre, but they’re not living off half an acre.
Daniel. Of course not. What would happen if they tried to live off half an acre?
Elaine. My guess is, they couldn’t.
Daniel. Of course they couldn’t. So now put the idea of six billion people living in Texas into perspective.
Elaine. They would have to be importing vast amounts of food.
Daniel says nothing.
Elaine [after a couple of minutes of thought]. There’d be no one out there to import any food from. All the farms in the rest of the world would be untenanted. Nobody outside Texas would be growing food, harvesting it, processing and packaging it, transporting it.
Daniel. Bravo … I did a little research during our break. Roughly speaking, a square mile of farmland will feed about a thousand people. If all the land in Texas were completely deforested and put under cultivation, it would feed about 262 million people. So …?
Elaine. So the six billion people in Texas wouldn’t be living there, they’d be starving there.
Daniel. But they’d have plenty of room for houses, patios, swing sets, and swimming pools.
Elaine. Yes. That’s what the writer in the National Review had in mind.
Daniel. To be honest, I was surprised that you were initially so ready to accept this vision as plausible.
Elaine. Why? It must have been plausible to everyone at the National Review — and to its readers.
Daniel. True, but consider the original question I presented you with. The questioner said, “This makes sense to me, doesn’t it make sense to you?” You must have known my answer was going to be “No, it doesn’t make sense to me.”
Elaine. I suppose I did. [Thinks for a bit.] But that doesn’t change the fact that it did make sense to me. At that point.
Daniel. If you’re going to learn to think like a Martian anthropologist, you’re going to have to become far more suspicious of the reasonable-sounding propositions that we’re constantly being presented with. Like this one, pointing out that there’s enough land in Texas to accommodate the whole world’s population in comfort. I’m sure that tens of thousands accepted this statement without blinking an eye, and that millions more would accept it the same way if it were presented to them.
Elaine. I’m sure you’re right.
Daniel. In effect, I’m trying to break you of the habit of automatically saying, “Yes, this makes sense. I’ll accept it.” I’m trying to train you to pause and say, “Yes, this seems to make sense. But does it?”
Elaine [after some thought]. I can say that I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not really sure I do. I mean … we’re trained to pause when something doesn’t make sense. But when something does make sense …? You surely don’t pause every single time something makes sense.
Daniel. You’re right, of course.
Elaine. So it’s a matter of knowing when to pause, isn’t it? How do you know when to pause?
Daniel. That’s a very valid question. A very useful and helpful one, in fact.
Elaine. Why helpful?
Daniel. It points me in a direction I hadn’t seen, hadn’t prepared myself to explore with you. Let me see if I can explain … If you were to follow an aboriginal hunter through the forest, he’d see things that were literally invisible to you. He’d see and recognize marks in the dirt that you’d have to concentrate to see at all. He’d notice disturbances in the grass that would be imperceptible to you.
Elaine. I’m sure that’s true.
Daniel. The same would be true for the hunter if he were to follow you through the women’s section of a department store. You’d immediately distinguish between the really good clothes and the cheap ones, which he certainly wouldn’t. You’d notice a clerk having a personal conversation on the phone. Without even thinking about it, you’d be aware of the subtle differences between a personal telephone conversation and a business conversation, and the hunter wouldn’t.
Elaine. True.
Daniel. What we see are the things our circumstances have trained us to pay attention to. Your circumstances don’t require you to notice slight marks in the dust. The hunter’s circumstances don’t require him to notice the difference between beautifully made garments and poorly made ones.
Elaine. True.
Daniel. I’ve trained myself to recognize the voice of Mother Culture in the things I read and hear. You know what I mean by Mother Culture.
Elaine. Yes. Mother Culture is … the personification of all the collective wisdom that comes to us from our parents, our schoolteachers, our textbooks, our movies, our television commentators …
Daniel. And our magazines, including Scientific American and the National Review.
Elaine. Right.
Daniel. I recognized Mother Culture’s voice immediately in the National Review observation that the whole world’s population could be accommodated comfortably within the boundaries of Texas. Do you see why?
Elaine. I’m not sure.
Daniel. Take a stab at it.
Elaine [after some thought]. Mother Culture wants to reassure us that everything we’re doing is okay. Reaching a population of six billion is nothing to be worried about.
Daniel. Because, look, you could fit all six billion of us inside Texas with room to spare. I recognized it instantly as the kind of reassurance Mother Culture wants us to have. That’s what made me pause to examine it. And once I started examining it, it took me only a few moments to identify its absurdity.
Elaine. Okay. But I can’t really say that this does me much good. You say that you’ve trained yourself to recognize the voice of Mother Culture in the things you read or hear, but how does this help me?
Daniel [after thinking about this for a minute]. I guess you could say that what the hunter is looking for as he moves through the forest are tip-offs, things that signal what’s going on around him. When you examine a shirt or a dress, there are probably things that tip you off as to its quality.
Elaine. Yes, I guess so.
Daniel. I’m looking for tip-offs as well. Or, as I say, I’ve trained myself to notice them. I don’t have to look for them, they leap out at me.
Elaine. But what are they?
Daniel. I can’t give you a list — it’s never occurred to me to make one. Maybe we’ll be able to compile one as we go along.
Elaine. What was the tip-off in this case?
Daniel [after some thought]. Its obvious tendentiousness. I mean by this that the statement clearly contains an implicit argument. If someone says that if you lined up all the cars in the world on a single highway, it would encircle the globe twice, there is no implicit argument. He’s just presenting you with an interesting fact. He’s not saying that this is something that could actually be done. He’s not making any special point about cars, highways, or the circumference of the earth. He’s just using his computational skills to give us a visual image of how many cars we have. The writer who says Texas could comfortably accommodate six billion people does have a point, and he is saying that it could be done.
Elaine. Okay. But I’m not sure I’d recognize a tendentious statement if I saw one.
Daniel. Of course you would. Let me see if I can think of a couple … Here’s one from, I believe, a French military man of the seventeenth century: “God is generally on the side of the big battalions against the small ones.”
Elaine. Uh-huh.
Daniel. I’m sure you can see what implicit point of view this statement expresses.
Elaine. Yes. He’s saying that, on the battlefield, God has nothing to do with who wins and who loses.
Daniel. Of course. Let me think for a bit … Pope John Paul the Second said, “Vast sections of society are confused about what is right and what is wrong.” Implicit in this statement is …?
Elaine. That he isn’t confused about it.
Daniel. Of course … From the beginning, I’ve been saying that our job is to look behind the words people give us in order to understand the implicit notions that are generating them.
Elaine. Yes, I see that — now. What are some other tip-offs?
Daniel. Things to look for are elements of the received wisdom of our culture — received without acknowledgment or examination. For example, it’s received wisdom that everyone knows the difference between right and wrong. We imagine that this knowledge arises from the structure of the human mind itself. In fact, we use this as a measure of sanity in our courts. And by this measure, I would be considered insane.
Elaine laughs.
Daniel. In one of my early books — I think it was probably Ishmael — I made the point that missionaries were astonished to find that the aboriginal peoples they worked among didn’t know right from wrong, and I said the missionaries were quite correct in their observation. I received several indignant letters about this from people who thought I was denigrating aboriginal peoples, implying that they were somehow subhuman. Whatever the missionaries thought, of course these peoples knew right from wrong!
Elaine. I’m not sure why you say you yourself don’t know right from wrong.
Daniel. To me — as to the aborigines being evangelized — these are quite arbitrary categories that can be switched back and forth at will. For example, you know very well that abortion was very seriously wrong before Roe v. Wade. After Roe v. Wade it became right, though naturally there are still people who think it’s wrong. Which is it, right or wrong?
Elaine. I think a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion.
Daniel. You mean she has the right to do something that’s wrong?
Elaine. No. It isn’t something wrong.
Daniel. Are you hesitant to call it right?
Elaine. No.
Daniel. But I’m sure you’re aware that tens of millions of Americans would like to see Roe v. Wade reversed, would like to see abortion outlawed again.
Elaine. Yes.
Daniel. And if they succeeded in having the present law overturned, would abortion then be right or wrong?
Elaine has no answer.
Daniel. If you’d like to know how wrong abortion seemed to people fifty years ago, you should see a movie called Detective Story, based on a very successful Broadway play by Sidney Kingsley. The action takes place in a station house, where a detective played by Kirk Douglas is interrogating one of the most loathsome criminals he’s ever encountered, an abortionist. Unfortunately, his zeal leads him to a horrendous discovery — his own wife was once one of the abortionist’s clients. Now he sees his wife as almost as loathsome as the abortionist himself — and this revelation all but tears him apart. This was not a picture directed toward a bigoted, minority audience. It was nominated for four Academy Awards and won one.
Elaine still has nothing to say.
Daniel. If the present law were overturned, a woman would be imprisoned for having an abortion. Yes?
Elaine. That’s right.
Daniel. Would her punishment be wrongful?
Elaine. Not according to the law.
Daniel. Ah, the law! So by changing a law, something that’s right today can become something that’s wrong tomorrow. Isn’t that so?
Elaine. Yes. And of course the reverse is true as well. Something that’s wrong today can become something that’s right tomorrow, if the law is changed.
Daniel. Is capital punishment right or wrong?
Elaine. Some people think it’s right, some people think it’s wrong.
Daniel. So, collectively, do these people know right from wrong?
Elaine. Not in this instance.
Daniel. And in the instance of abortion do people collectively know right from wrong?
Elaine. No.
Daniel. Is sex between persons of the same gender right or wrong?
Elaine. Again, some people think it’s right and some people think it’s wrong.
Daniel. What about assisted suicide?
Elaine. The same. Some say it’s right and some say it’s wrong.
Daniel. What about using animals in scientific research?
Elaine. The same.
Daniel. But these are all people who would insist that they know right from wrong, aren’t they?
Elaine. Yes, I’d think so.
Daniel. But in fact, for some strange reason, they can’t agree on what’s right and what’s wrong in these and many other cases.
Elaine. They agree on it in most cases, I think. For example, they all agree that murder is wrong.
Daniel. Murder is defined as wrong, Elaine. Murder is wrongful killing. Isn’t that so?
Elaine. Yes.
Daniel. But not all killing is wrongful. Killing in self-defense isn’t wrongful, and it isn’t murder.
Elaine. True.
Daniel. People will also agree that theft is wrong, but again, theft is defined as wrong. Theft is wrongful taking. Everyone can agree that acts that are defined as wrongful are wrong. In other words, people know right from wrong when the law tells them which is which. But the same law is subject to change. What’s right today can be wrong tomorrow and vice versa.
Elaine. Yes, that’s true.
Daniel. Can you understand now why those aboriginals had a hard time grasping this distinction that was so clear to the missionaries? To the missionaries it seemed completely self-evident. To the aboriginals it seemed completely arbitrary — as it does to me.
Elaine. This is an example of something you described in Beyond Civilization. I don’t remember what you called it. The cultural … something or other.
Daniel. The cultural fallacy. The belief that the ideas that come to us as the received wisdom of our culture are innate to the human mind — that they actually arise from the structure of the human mind itself. According to this particular cultural fallacy, someone who can’t tell the difference between right and wrong is either retarded or insane … This looks like a good stopping point.
Daniel. Okay.
Elaine. In your writings on the food race, and I think in “The New Renaissance,” you talk about the fact that we’re attacking the biodiversity of this planet by systematically converting the biomass of other species into human mass.
Daniel. Yes?
Elaine. Isn’t that something you would consider wrong?
Daniel. You haven’t quite gotten my point here. I’m not interested in sorting things out into these categories, right and wrong. In other words, my point is not that what we’re doing here is wrong but that it’s unsustainable. It’s undermining the human future on this planet, and I’m not going to quibble over whether this is to be categorized as right or wrong. I don’t give a damn which it is.
Elaine. Okay. You’re right. I hadn’t quite gotten your point about this. I think I see it now … While we’re right here, I have another question, or maybe it’s just an observation.
Daniel. Go ahead.
Elaine. It seems to me that the most astounding single sentence in all your work is “There is no one right way for people to live.” But I have the feeling this just floats over most people’s heads.
Daniel. It does seem that way, which surprises me. It certainly hasn’t aroused any great controversy that I’m aware of, though I’ve had a few questions about it. One reader wrote, “I think I know of one right way for people to live, and that’s letting everyone live the way they want to live.” How would you reply to that?
Elaine [after some thought]. I don’t know.
Daniel. Think about it over lunch. You have a tendency … This question comes from a certain frame of reference. You can’t just accept that frame of reference without challenge. Put yourself in this person’s mind and dig into his words. Then pull back away from it and see if it makes sense … It’s like a negotiation, and this is his first offer: “I know of one right way for people to live, and that’s letting everyone live the way they want to live.” If you look closely at the terms of his offer, you’ll see why it has to be rejected. What he’s saying is nonsense. You have to formulate a counteroffer in your own terms, from your own frame of reference, then you’ll have your reply.