Daniel. Here’s a tricky little question that came in recently: “What biological mechanisms would allow us to keep our population at a level compatible with our food supply?”
Elaine. What does he mean by “biological mechanisms”?
Daniel. I doubt if he knows himself. I think what he means are mechanisms that are not political — for example, government limitations on food production that are not legalistic, like limiting family size by law, and that don’t depend on self-restraint, like birth control.
Elaine. That still doesn’t tell me what a biological mechanism is.
Daniel [after some consideration]. I’m beginning to see this as a tendency of yours: to pick out one element of a question and fixate on it. You’re not thinking about the question as a whole.
Elaine. I guess you’re right. How does it go again?
Daniel repeats the question.
Elaine. Okay … Well, I can see one assumption he’s making: that there are biological mechanisms that would allow us to keep our population at a level compatible with our food supply.
Elaine [after a long silence]. What else can I say? You’ve never said there are biological mechanisms that would allow humans to keep their populations at levels compatible with our food supply, have you?
Daniel. No, I’ve never said anything like that.
Elaine. So he’s making an unwarranted assumption and asking you to verify it.
Daniel [sighing]. Elaine, this person is fundamentally confused, and you’ve bought into his confusion. In effect, you’re saying, “Okay, I’ll accept without question that what you’re saying makes sense.” He didn’t really look at what he was saying, and if you don’t really look at it, then you’re no better off than he is. You did the same thing with the person who suggested that the one right way for people to live is to let everyone live the way they want to live. You’ve got to stop meeting every challenge with acquiescence.
Elaine. Well, this is discouraging.
Daniel. You shouldn’t think of it that way at all. I have to assume that the person who wrote the question, being a reader of serious books, is of above-average intelligence, and the question itself isn’t a dumb one, despite its fundamental confusion. And … you know it’s my intention to publish a transcript of this conversation we’re having.
Elaine. Yes …?
Daniel. I’ll wager that, at this point, among the readers who are following the discussion of this particular question, 99.99 percent of them will be just as stumped as you are.
Elaine laughs. I suppose that’s reassuring.
Daniel. The answers I give to people’s questions — and the conclusions I reach in general — seem to astonish my readers, seem to be unexpected … alien. And the whole purpose of what we’re doing here is to shed some light on how I produce these answers and conclusions. The process seems unexceptional to me, but it obviously doesn’t seem so to my readers — or to you.
Elaine. That’s certainly true.
Daniel. All right. So let’s return to the basics. What are this questioner’s assumptions?
Elaine. Well, let’s see. First, there’s the assumption that there are “biological mechanisms” that will achieve what he wants to achieve.
Daniel. We’ve already looked at that one.
Elaine. Okay. Then there’s his assumption that … I’m trying to remember how he put it … It’s his assumption that we need to keep our population at a level compatible with our food supply.
Daniel. Yes, that is one of his assumptions.
Elaine [after some thought]. I’m stuck. I don’t see any others.
Daniel. It isn’t stated directly. It’s implicit in his question. That’s why you have to look behind the words.
Elaine spends a couple of minutes on it, then shakes her head.
Daniel. I’d rather not ask you leading questions, but it looks like I’ll have to. What is his concern, his worry?
Elaine. That our population is not at a level that is compatible with our food supply.
Daniel. Yes, this is implicit in his question.
Elaine [doubtfully]. Okay.
Daniel. Well, look at it.
Elaine [after a minute]. Are you saying that our population —
Daniel. No, don’t do that. Don’t go fishing for the answer in my head. Work it out yourself.
Elaine. But the only alternative I can see is that our population is compatible with our food supply.
Daniel waits.
Elaine. Okay, I’ve got it. Or I think I do.
Daniel. Which is it?
Elaine. I’ve got it.
Daniel. Go ahead.
Elaine. Our population is compatible with our food supply. At all times. When there was food for three billion of us, there were three billion of us. When there was food for six billion of us, there were six billion of us. If there hadn’t been food for six billion, there wouldn’t be six billion.
Daniel. So what “biological mechanism” makes population “compatible with food supply”?
Elaine. I don’t know what to call it. Supply and maintenance? The population of every species grows to a point that is “compatible” with the food available to it. When food availability increases, its population increases. When food availability decreases, its population decreases … But not everyone agrees that this is the way it works, do they?
Daniel. For nonhuman species, there’s no disagreement at all. But many people — including even many biologists — still cling to the doctrine of human exceptionalism, the way many Christian fundamentalists still cling to the doctrine of creationism.
Elaine. I don’t think I’ve heard of that — human exceptionalism.
Daniel. In this context, it’s just the doctrine that, among all the hundreds of millions of species in the living community, the human species is the sole exception to the rule you just described: that population increases or decreases according to food availability.
Elaine. How do they explain that? I mean, what are their grounds for accepting this idea?
Daniel. I’ve never seen a defense of it, but I imagine it stems from the fact that, as individuals, we can choose to reproduce or not. The fact that — as a species — our growth began to soar as soon as we began to increase food availability at will seems to them a mere coincidence. The record of the past ten thousand years, after some three million years of relative population stability, holds no significance for them.* In effect, they deny that the Agricultural Revolution had anything to do with our growth from a few hundred million to six billion.
Elaine. That hardly seems rational.
Daniel. Almost nothing exerts a more powerful hold on people’s minds than unexamined and unchallenged received wisdom — and human exceptionalism is certainly a part of that legacy. In fact, it must have seemed quite daring back in 2001 when a peer-reviewed scientific journal actually published a paper affirming the connection between population and food availability.*
Elaine. It’s amazing to me that that should seem daring.
Daniel. Trust me, the doctrine of human exceptionalism is deep set in Mother Culture’s heart … Here’s a little story you’ll find amusing that isn’t entirely off the point. [Goes to get a book.] In the very early stages of work on the book that ultimately became Ishmael, I wanted to know if there was any estimate of the human population before the Agricultural Revolution. As I later learned, there are many different estimates, but I first turned to a reference I had on hand, the Dunlop Illustrated Encyclopedia of Facts, published in 1969. Unlike like most books of its kind, which are either assembled by nameless staff workers or are collections of articles by various authorities, this one had a single pair of authors, Norris and Ross McWhirter, who were clearly not averse to expressing conclusions as well as facts. They didn’t have the particular information I was looking for, but in an article on “Growth of the Human Population” I found a very useful chart of population estimates for roughly the past two thousand years and extending thirty years ahead to the year 2000, where they correctly estimated it would be around six billion. Following the chart was this observation: “If this trend continues, the world has only fifteen generations left before the human race breeds itself to an overcrowded extinction. By 2600 AD there would be one person per square yard of habitable land surface.” It’s their next statement that was of special importance: “Increasing food production merely aggravates the problem by broadening the base of the expansion and hastening rather than postponing the end.” And I thought, “Well, of course. That’s obvious.”
Daniel. And because it seemed so obvious, my original presentation in Ishmael of the connection between food production and population growth was almost offhand. I soon found out that what is obvious to you and me is very far from being obvious to the public at large. I expanded my presentation of the subject for the paperback edition, but from the public’s reaction I could see that this was still not enough. In The Story of B I presented the subject at even greater length — and it still wasn’t enough. One night at some personal appearance (I don’t recall where it was) the subject of food production and population growth came up again, and after some discussion one audience member stood up and stormed out after declaring that I was the most obscene person she’d ever encountered.
Elaine. I can’t understand that.
Daniel. Ah, but you see, despite the fact that “Increasing food production merely aggravates the problem by broadening the base of the expansion,” we must increase food production.
Elaine. Why?
Daniel. You know the answer to that.
Elaine. To feed the starving millions.
Daniel. Of course. You see, the assertion had been made that I couldn’t just “let the starving millions starve.” My reply was that I’m not God. I don’t “let” earthquakes happen, I don’t “let” plagues occur, I don’t “let” hurricanes and tornadoes happen — and I don’t “let” people starve. This reply is what made me an obscenity.
Elaine. Yes, I see. But — forgive me — we don’t have any choice in the matter of hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes.
Daniel. First, I don’t want to hear any more of that “forgive me” stuff. I don’t want your acquiescence. I don’t want you to accept things just because they come out of my mouth.
Elaine. Okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t even hear myself saying it.
Daniel. Okay. We can’t as yet do anything about hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes, but we can do something about hunger. The example I hear about most often is the starving millions in Africa. We can ship enough food over there to feed them all. So? Take it from there.
Elaine looks at him blankly.
Daniel. You’re not here to listen to my answers. You’re here to find them for yourself.
Elaine. God … I don’t know where to begin.
Daniel. All right, I’ll get you started. Why are they starving?
Elaine. Well, obviously because they don’t have enough food.
Daniel. Come on, Elaine. That’s just the definition of starving. Why don’t they have enough food?
Elaine. Because … because the population has outstripped local resources.
Daniel. And why has this happened?
Elaine. Well, either their local resources have diminished or their population has grown beyond the point where it can be supported by local resources.
Daniel. Or both. As any population grows, its food supply diminishes. This is perfectly predictable. It’s a cycle familiar to any biologist. As a population grows, it depletes its food supply. And as its food supply diminishes, the population begins to decline.
As the population declines, its food supply begins to recover. As its food supply recovers, the population grows. As the population grows, its food supply begins to diminish. And so on. This is the way it works throughout the living community: populations growing and declining as food availability grows and declines.
Elaine. I see that.
Daniel. Then why are so many millions of Africans starving?
Elaine. Because they’ve outstripped the food that’s available to them locally.
Daniel. So their population is declining.
Elaine. No, because we’ve said, “We’re not going to let their population decline.”
Daniel. They’re starving, but, thanks to our generosity, they’re staying alive. And because they’re staying alive …?
Elaine. They can reproduce and bring up a new generation to starve.
Daniel. Which we can generously keep alive so that they can reproduce and bring up yet another generation to starve. Our benevolence is breathtaking.
Elaine. If we left them alone, their population would decline to the point where they could live within their own resources.
Daniel. But it would be immoral to let that happen. Better that more of them should starve on our beneficence than fewer live tolerably within their own food resources.
Elaine. Yes, apparently.
Daniel. How did it come about that their populations grew to a point where they could no longer live within their own local food resources?
Elaine. I hadn’t thought about that … We’ve put a lot of effort into helping them build up their populations. Eliminating disease, lowering infant mortality. Showing them how to increase food production. Helping them convert their lands to cash crops for export.
Daniel. For hundreds of thousands of years they’d been living perfectly well where they were and as they were, but they weren’t living up to our standards, and it’s our divine mandate that everyone in the world must be made to live the way we live, whatever the cost. It would have been immoral for us to leave them alone, just as it would be immoral for us to leave them alone now. Much better to send them food to maintain them in a state of perpetual starvation than to let their populations decline to a point where they can live within their own resources.
Elaine. I suspect that would be the typical reaction.
Daniel. What would God do, if we stopped feeding them?
Elaine. God?
Daniel. God wouldn’t let them starve, would he?
Elaine. Based on past performance, I think he would. He hasn’t intervened in human affairs in a long, long time.
Daniel. God would let them starve, but we have to be better than God. We are better than God, which is why it’s so appropriate that we should rule the world.
Elaine. Yes. I can see why this woman thought you were the most obscene person she’d ever met.
Daniel laughs. We Martians are fiends … Let’s move on. I hope we’re finished with these issues for good.
Elaine. There’s one more I have to bring up, because people keep bringing it up to me.
Daniel. Okay.
Elaine. It goes something like this. If population is a function of food availability, then why is it that the developed nations, in which food is plentiful, have the lowest growth rate — and sometimes a zero or negative growth rate — while undeveloped nations, in which food is scarce, have higher growth rates?
Daniel [sighing]. Yes, of course, there’s that one. This represents a kind of misdirection called “changing the subject.” Have I said anything connecting growth rate to food availability?
Elaine [after thinking for a moment]. Not that I recall.
Daniel. I’ve said only that the population of any species will grow if more food becomes available to it, and our population is currently growing by about seventy-seven million every year. That may not sound like much, but I once took the trouble to do some research, and found that this is equivalent to the combined populations of Canada, Australia, Denmark, Austria, and Greece. Every year.
Elaine. That’s impressive, when you put it that way.
Daniel. The fact that it’s growing at a faster rate in some places than others is beside the point. The point is that the human population is steadily growing because we’re steadily increasing food production.
Elaine. I see that.
Daniel. The reason why growth rates differ in developed and undeveloped nations has nothing to do with food availability. It has to do with family economics. In developed nations having a multiplicity of children is a burden, no matter how abundant food is, whereas in undeveloped nations it’s a blessing, no matter how scarce food is. Do I need to explain why this is so?
Elaine. No, I don’t think so. In developed nations it costs a lot of money to raise children, and they’re not expected to contribute anything to family income. In undeveloped nations it costs little to raise children, and they generally contribute a lot to family income.
Daniel. I’m sure you realize that we don’t consume all the food we produce in the United States.
Elaine. Of course. I assume we export huge amounts of it.
Daniel. So this food isn’t being turned into human biomass in the United States. Since it’s not here, it can’t be used for that purpose.
Elaine. Right.
Daniel. So what’s happening to it?
Elaine. It’s being turned into human biomass in other parts of the world.
Daniel. So while we’re not interested in increasing our own population, we’re very interested in producing surplus food to support population growth elsewhere.
Elaine. True. [After thinking for a bit.] But when this business of growth rates is brought up, one of the points that people make is that when currently underdeveloped nations reach our level of prosperity their growth rates are likely to go down just the way ours has.
Daniel. And at that point population growth will be negligible.
Elaine. That’s right.
Daniel. All right. We need a reality check here. First, it’s been estimated that we’d need the resources of six planets the size of the earth if all six billion of us were living the way people live in developed nations. Second, the US Census Bureau estimates that by the year 2050, there will be nine billion of us, and while the growth rate will have declined substantially, we’ll still be adding an annual population the size of New York City and Los Angeles combined. Third, you understand that our present system of food production is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel at every stage between fertilization of cropland to delivery of processed, packaged foods to your grocery store.
Elaine. Yes.
Daniel. Fourth, the projected increase in our population to nine billion assumes that food production is going to increase. But this projection doesn’t take into account the fact that, in order to reach nine billion, we’re going to have to steadily increase the amount of fossil fuel we pour into agricultural production during a fifty-year period when the world’s supply of fossil fuel is going to be steadily diminishing. It’s estimated that oil production is going to decline by 60 or 70 percent between now and the year 2050.
Elaine. So it sounds like that projection is based on a fantasy.
Daniel. Yes. If our system of agriculture and the percentage of oil used for agriculture remain the same for the next fifty years, then our population is also going to decline by 60 or 70 percent.
Elaine. The die-off predicted by the Peak Oil theory.
Daniel. That’s right. At a conference this year in Dublin* a paper was read that examined what we’d need to do to restructure our agricultural system to one that is fossil-fuel-free and concluded that this was not beyond possibility.† So the threatened die-off is not necessarily inevitable, at least during this period. I seriously doubt that the planet’s ecological systems could survive a human population of nine billion — nine billion and still growing.
Elaine [after thinking for a minute]. So — in light of all this — the difference in growth rates between developed and undeveloped nations really seems like a nonissue.
Daniel. It’s a red herring. Thrown out to distract from the fact that, like all other species, our overall population grows when our food supply grows, no matter whether growth occurs faster in one place or another … Well, let’s see … [Picks up and begins looking through a stack of index cards.]
Elaine. I have a question.
Daniel. Go ahead.
Elaine. Is it the plan that we’re going to continue with questions you’ve received from readers?
Daniel. Well … I hadn’t so much thought of it as a plan as … Do you have a problem with it as a procedure?
Elaine. Not a problem, exactly.
Daniel. But?
Elaine. I guess I expected something more … systematic.
Daniel. Talk some more.
Elaine. You’re teaching me how to deal with questions. But in reality — in my day-to-day life — I don’t have to deal with questions. No one has ever asked me questions like the ones we’ve been discussing.
Daniel. I’m not teaching you how to answer questions. Have we ever actually answered any of the questions I’ve brought up?
Elaine. Well, no, not specifically. I mean, we’ve never ended up framing an actual answer.
Daniel. The questions are just raw material. They give us opportunities to examine what’s going on in the minds of the people around us.
Elaine. I don’t know …
Daniel. Consider this. Once I was listening to a talk show in the car, and the subject under discussion was the protection of endangered species. The host said something like, “I don’t know. Personally, I can do without songbirds.”
Elaine. Uh-huh.
Daniel. You see that I could have used this as a springboard for an examination of what was going on in this person’s mind.
Daniel. But it’s not a question that someone sent to me. It’s something I picked out of the air.
Elaine. I get that.
Daniel. My point is that I don’t have a stock of material to look at that I’ve heard on the radio. What I have is a stock of questions and comments that people have sent to me.
Elaine. I see that …
Daniel. But?
Elaine. I don’t know.
Daniel. Take your time. Take all the time you need.
Elaine [after a few minutes]. Right at the beginning, you talked about one big question that you felt you’d never answered adequately. And the idea seemed to be that you were going to answer it here, in this conversation.
Daniel. The question being “How do I do what I do?”
Elaine. That’s right.
Daniel. And you feel we’re not getting at that question.
Elaine. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I’m not getting at it. At least that’s the way I feel.
Daniel. Well, if that’s the way you feel, then that’s the way it is. Tell me more about it.
Elaine. I guess what I’m looking for is your method. A coherent, systematic description of your method.
Daniel. You’re looking for something like that classic by Charles Van Doren and Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book. That was very methodical, very coherent and systematic.
Elaine. I haven’t read it, but I’ll take your word for it.
Daniel [after a few minutes]. Back in the mid-1970s I had a wonderful tennis instructor. I hadn’t played tennis in twenty years, and I’d never had any formal instruction at all. So the first thing he did, once we had me properly outfitted, was to put me on a court, stand three or four yards away, and bounce a ball to my forehand to see what I did with it. Then after a while he started bouncing balls to my backhand. Then he said, “Okay, we’ve got to work on your basic strokes.” So he taught me the proper way to step into a ball coming to my right or left. I practiced these strokes — oh, I don’t know — five thousand times, so many times that I could stand up right now and without hesitation show you exactly how the ball was addressed in the era when Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe were superstars of tennis. When we had these strokes down, we added volleys at the net, then smashes, then serves. During this long, long period we never “played tennis,” never just rallied, never played games and kept score. I don’t suppose you see why I’m telling you this.
Elaine. You’re right, I don’t.
Daniel. I can’t teach you that way. Call it the technical way, in which you perfect all the individual techniques and only then begin to put them all together.
Elaine. Okay. I guess I can see that.
Daniel. I suppose you could say that the technical way is opposite from the way you learn to ride a bicycle. You can’t learn to ride a bicycle first by practicing steering for fifty hours, pedalling for fifty hours, and keeping your balance for fifty hours. You get all those skills at once, in one instant, or you never get them at all. One minute you’re just falling down a lot and the next you’re riding a bicycle.
Elaine. That’s true.
Daniel. But it may be useful to you — or give you a feeling of coherence and system — if we review the various skills that are involved in doing what I do.
Elaine. I think so, yes.
Daniel. I guess the first of these is simply alertness to nonsense. When that talk-show host said he could get along perfectly well without songbirds, a million people heard him and thought nothing of it. I picked up on it instantly and recognized it as the blather of an empty-headed fool.
Elaine. I think I would’ve, too.
Daniel. Ten years ago? That’s about when I heard it.
Elaine [after thinking about it]. Honestly, probably not. I probably would’ve thought, “Well, that’s true. I’d miss them, but I could live without them.”
Daniel. Okay. So you’re more alert now than you were then. But you can see that there’s no way to give you lessons in alertness. I mean, I can’t say, “Now we’re going to spend the next ten hours working on your alertness to nonsense.”
Elaine. No, I don’t see how you could do that.
Daniel. So what’s the second step in the “Quinn method”?
Elaine. You try to understand the thinking that produced the nonsense. You look for the assumption or assumptions behind it.
Daniel. And what’s the assumption in this case?
Elaine [after a moment’s thought]. That the reason birds are here — their function in the workings of the world — is to provide humans with entertainment.
Daniel. And what’s the third step?
Elaine. I guess I’d say it’s … extending this assumption … connecting it to more general assumptions.
Daniel. In this case?
Elaine. The assumption that the world and everything in it was made specifically for Man’s benefit.
Daniel. Do you see a fourth step?
Elaine [after some thought]. No, I can’t say that I do.
Daniel. Having found the more general assumption behind this particular notion, you look at some of the other notions or actions this assumption gives rise to. For example?
Elaine. I’d say … working from this assumption, we’re free to eliminate any species that inconveniences us. Wolves, coyotes, and so on. If they’re valueless to us, then they’re superfluous. They don’t do anything for us, so they don’t need to be here, and we can get rid of them … And in general we can do anything we want to the world. It’s our toy — God gave it to us — and we can do anything we like with it, including smashing it to bits.
Daniel. Very good.
Elaine. But I’d still like to see … “How you do what you do” isn’t just limited to little things like this. I’d like to see how doing what you do produces your books.
Daniel. Well, you remember that I did start with the bit of nonsense that got me started, the idea that a nuclear holocaust would throw us back to the Stone Age.
Elaine. And what about Ishmael?
Daniel. I talked about that some. The received wisdom that the true story of Man begins with the Agricultural Revolution — that the first three million years didn’t amount to anything worth talking about.
Elaine. And what did they amount to?
Daniel. You mean in terms of opera houses built and flying machines invented? Symphonies composed? The laws of physics described? Nothing, of course.
Elaine. What then?
Daniel. You don’t think you can answer this?
Elaine. I wish I could. Don’t you think I’ve thought about it?
Daniel. And came up with nothing?
Elaine. Nothing but trivial things like fire, the bow and arrow, and maybe the wheel.
Daniel. You know these things are trivial?
Elaine. Of course.
Daniel. Well, that’s something. What humanity came up with and held on to during its first three million years was a social organization that worked well for people. It didn’t work well for products, for motorboats and can openers and operettas. It didn’t work well for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power hungry. That’s what we have, a social organization that works beautifully for products — which just keep getting better and better every year — but very poorly for people, except for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power hungry. Our ancestors lived in societies that every anthropologist agrees were nonhierarchical and markedly egalitarian. They weren’t structured so that a few at the top lived lives of luxury, a few more lived in the middle in comfort, and the masses at the bottom lived in poverty or near poverty, just struggling to survive. They weren’t riddled with crime, depression, madness, suicide, and addiction. And when we came along with invitations to join our glorious civilization, they fought to the death to hold on to the life they had. You knew that.
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.
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).