“Okay,” I said. “I guess I see what you’re doing. You’re answering all the objections before they’re raised.”
“All the objections to what?”
“To your thesis.”
“Which is what?”
“Which is that our agricultural revolution signaled the appearance of a mind change. It wasn’t just starving people trying something new out of desperation. It wasn’t just people looking for an easier life. It wasn’t just people looking for more security.”
“That’s right. Far from having an easier life or increasing their security, they actually worked harder and were less secure than their hunting-gathering ancestors. So there’s no question here of people doing something just because it was more comfortable.”
It seemed to me that B was in danger of defeating himself with his own arguments. I said, “To hear you tell it, our agricultural revolution had so little going for it that it’s a wonder it happened at all.”
“It truly is a wonder that it happened,” B said emphatically. “That’s precisely what I want you to see. And when you see it, your vision of human history will be changed forever.”
The peace-loving killers of New Guinea
“I find at this point that I need a mosaic piece with a particular feature that will be supplied by the Gebusi of New Guinea.”
“Okay,” I said.
“It’s become popular in recent decades to speak of ‘demonizing’ people who are especially feared or hated, turning them into monsters of depravity. I’ve never actually heard the opposite tendency mentioned, but of course it’s equally possible to ‘angelize’ people who are especially admired or revered—to turn them into perfect beings who embody all desired qualities. For example, there’s been a recent tendency for people to angelize Leaver peoples wherever they’re to be found, to imagine them as infinitely wise, selfless, farseeing environmentalist saints who practice perfect gender equality and never speak in contractions. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Certainly. I don’t live in a refrigerator. I’ve seen Dances with Wolves.”
“Good,” B said. “Since angels are more or less all the same, the process of angelizing these peoples—call them Leavers or aborigines, it doesn’t matter which—tends to make them out to be all more or less the same as well, which is as far from the truth as you can possibly get. This is where the Gebusi of New Guinea come in. I’d like to take a few minutes to describe them to you.”
“Okay.”
“The Gebusi are one of those agricultural peoples whose agricultural style owes nothing at all to our revolution. In fact, it would make better sense to call them hunter-gardeners than farmers. They’re villagers who love to socialize, celebrate, and party with a lot of shouting, singing, and joking. Two thirds of them die of what we would call natural causes, and one third are murdered by friends, neighbors, or relatives. Murder is male business, and at any given time, two thirds of the men have murdered someone.”
“Nice folks to know,” I put in.
“Oddly enough, they are, on the whole, very nice folks to know—not saints, obviously, but pleasant, well-meaning people. If you were to ask them why they are so inclined toward violence, they literally wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. They aren’t notably inclined toward violence, and if you wanted to interview them about crime in their society, you’d have to begin by explaining what crime is. They do things that annoy each other, of course, and there are just as many greedy, boorish, inconsiderate, and selfish people among them as there are among us, but crime as we understand it is nonexistent.
“Apart from homicide statistics, the main difference between them and us is their theory of sickness and death. We believe that sickness occurs when invisible creatures called microbes or germs or viruses invade our bodies. This theory seems nothing but blandly factual to us, but to thinkers of the twenty-third century (should there happen to be any) it will probably seem as quaintly fanciful as the humoral theory of the Renaissance seems to us today. Do you find that imaginable?”
“That our present theory of sickness will someday seem quaint? Oh yes. I find that entirely imaginable.”
“Good. In the Gebusi theory, there’s nothing that corresponds to our notion of death from ‘natural causes.’ All causes of sickness and death are supernatural, and every sickness and death is caused by someone who literally ‘wishes you ill.’ This may be a sorcerer or it may be the spirit of someone living or dead or even the spirit of an animal. To achieve a diagnosis in the case of illness, a medium visits the spirit world in order to discover the guilty party, and this information indicates the best means of treatment. If someone dies, the medium conducts an inquest in consultation with the spirits. Not every inquest leads to the accusation of a living person, but when it does, the accused sorcerer is given the chance to demonstrate his or her innocence by performing a sago divination, a cooking feat so difficult that skill alone can’t assure success. You might compare its difficulty to cooking a perfect souffle the size of a bathtub. Complete success is taken as a sign that the spirit of the deceased was on hand to help out and thus exonerate the accused. Partial success leaves the matter in doubt, and the accused will be spared for a while as other indicators are considered, such as the behavior of the corpse in the suspect’s presence. As the result of the sago divination falls farther and farther short of success, guilt becomes clearer and clearer. In this event, since denial of the crime is pointless in the face of such evidence, the sorcerer will generally express remorse and try to persuade everyone that the anger that moved him or her to practice this sorcery has spent itself. Everyone wants to believe it and reassures the sorcerer that all is forgiven, but, chances are, the miscreant’s days are numbered.
“Among the Gebusi, the spirits of the dead soon return as animals. Those who die young return as small animals—birds or lizards. Those who die at a more advanced age return as larger animals—cassowaries or crocodiles, for example. But executed sorcerers invariably return as wild pigs, which is why (I suspect) executed sorcerers are invariably cooked and eaten. My guess is that, being sorcerers, they are already in some sense wild pigs, which are hunted not only because they’re good to eat but because they’re inhabited by malevolent spirits.”
I interrupted to ask if the Gebusi practice cannibalism in other circumstances.
“As far as I know,” B said, “the only human item on their menu is roasted sorcerer.”
“Fascinating.”
“Now to the point of this anthropological exercise. I want you to imagine that it was not the people of our culture who teemed over the world and made it their own but rather the Gebusi. I want you to imagine a world where every death is routinely avenged by killing and eating a sorcerer. I want you to imagine a world where, if you were a telephone installer, legislator, symphony conductor, or fashion designer in Berlin or Beijing or Tokyo or London or New York City—or Box Elder, Montana—you might at any moment be required to perform a successful sago divination in order to save your life. I want you to imagine a world where eating sorcerers is a perfectly normal thing to do—as normal as sending your children off to educational concentration camps when they reach the age of five or six. I want you to imagine a world where killing a man will turn him into a wild pig as surely as punishing a man will turn him into a good citizen.”
B paused at this point and gave me a hopeful look that I wasn’t sure how to answer. I said, “I think you’re telling me that every culture’s lunacy seems like sanity to the members of that culture.”
“That’s certainly so,” B said. “If I were to tell you that the Gebusi believe that the creator of the universe has spoken to only one people on this earth during its entire history, and that one people is the Gebusi, you would smile patronizingly. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose I would.”
“Yet this is precisely what the people of our culture believe, isn’t it? Has the creator of the universe spoken to anyone but us?”
&n
bsp; “No.”
“Modern humans have been around for two hundred thousand years, but according to our beliefs, God had not a word to say to any of them until we came along. God didn’t speak to the Alawa of Australia or to the Gebusi of New Guinea or to the Bushmen of Africa or to the Navajo of North America or to the Ihalmiut of the Great Barrens of Canada. God didn’t speak a word to any of the other hundreds of thousands of peoples of the world, he spoke only to us. Only to us did he reveal the order and purpose of creation. Only to us did he reveal the laws essential to salvation.”
“That’s right. Speaking with the voice of undoubted faith, that’s right.”
“But this isn’t lunacy.”
“No. Again speaking with the voice of undoubted faith, this isn’t lunacy.”
“It would be completely silly for the Gebusi to believe that they are in direct, exclusive contact with the creator of the universe, but it’s perfectly reasonable for us to believe it.”
“That’s right.”
“Evidently it isn’t just the history of the world that the victors get to write, it’s the theology of the world as well.”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“All the same, right now I’m not asking you to understand something, I’m asking you to do something.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to imagine that the world—this world right here—is a Gebusi world. You, as a Roman Catholic priest, would be tolerated as a vestige of a quaint and harmless superstition. At night men would cluster in bars, not to watch televised sports but to hold raunchy conversations with female spirits clinging to the rafters. Spirit mediums would be on hand to diagnose and cure minor illnesses—and to conduct inquests into community deaths. Friends would invite you to a restaurant to celebrate a killing—and send you home with a slice of roast sorcerer for your family. What more can I tell you? The films would be Gebusi films, the novels Gebusi novels, the politics Gebusi politics, the sports Gebusi sports, the fun Gebusi fun.”
I told him I could imagine it—more or less. “But I can’t imagine what you want me to say.”
“How does it seem to you?”
“How does it seem? It seems insane. Obscene.”
“Of course it does. Confined to their own few hundred square miles, the Gebusi are quaint and bizarre. Blow them up into a universal world culture to which every human must belong and they become an obscenity. The same is true in general. Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong. Confined to the few hundred square miles in which it was born, our own culture would have been merely quaint and bizarre. Blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong, it is a horrifying obscenity.”
“I think I’m beginning to see,” I told him. “I think I’m beginning to see what you’re getting at as a whole.”
B nodded. “You probably don’t remember why I brought up the Gebusi in the first place. You said it was a wonder that we ever adopted totalitarian agriculture, considering the fact that, far from making life easier or more secure, it actually has the opposite effect.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“I wanted you to see that lifestyle strategies adopted in a culture aren’t necessarily logical. They don’t necessarily benefit people in obvious ways. They aren’t necessarily adopted because they make life more comfortable—though people may use this rationale to explain them to children and outsiders. In our culture, for example, the adoption of our style of agriculture is presented to our children as an inevitable step forward for the human race, because it makes life easier and more secure.”
I asked B what it did do if it doesn’t make life easier and more secure.
“That’s exactly what we’re trying to understand here. We’re presented with a complex of behaviors and we’re trying to figure out how they work together to produce the result that we see. Right now, sort through the peculiarities of the Gebusi and see if you can find a mechanism that would tend to make them blow up into a universal world culture to which all must belong.”
I asked him what sort of mechanism he meant.
“Some dynamic within the culture. Some custom, some deeply held belief.”
I spent a minute or two on it but could find no mechanism that would produce that effect.
“Invent one then,” B said.
“I suppose territorial ambitions would have that effect.”
“Not by themselves,” B said. “The Aztecs had territorial ambitions, but once they conquered you, they didn’t give a damn how you lived. They weren’t interested in turning their neighbors into Aztecs. This is why, vile as they may have been, they were not us—not what Ishmael calls Takers.”
“Okay, I see where you’re coming from. You’d have to make them cultural missionaries if you wanted them to blow up into a world-dominating culture.”
“And in order to make them cultural missionaries, you’d have to endow them with a belief. Missionaries are nothing if not believers. What kind of believers would the Gebusi have to be?”
“They would have to be believers in the rightness of their way of life.”
“Exactly. If the Gebusi believed that theirs was the one right way for all humans to live (which they don’t, by the way), this would motivate them to become cultural missionaries to the world. But the belief alone wouldn’t be enough. The people of our culture have always held this belief—have throughout history demonstrated that they held this belief—but they needed another mechanism as well. I suppose you could call it a spreading mechanism. A mechanism that would push them across the face of their earth as they spread the gospel of their cultural enlightenment.”
“Agriculture,” I said.
“Agriculture of a particular design, Jared, because not every kind of agriculture will push a people across the face of the earth. The modest agriculture of the Gebusi simply wouldn’t support such an expansion.”
“I understand.”
“In our culture, to support one peculiarity, we needed a second peculiarity, and the two reinforced each other. We believed (and still believe) that we have the one right way for people to live, but we needed totalitarian agriculture to support our missionary effort. Totalitarian agriculture gave us fabulous food surpluses, which are the foundation of every military and economic expansion. No one was able to stand against us anywhere in the world, because no one had a food-producing machine as powerful as ours. Our military and economic success confirmed our belief that we have the one right way for people to live. It still does so today. For the people of our culture, the fact that we’re able to defeat and destroy any other lifestyle is taken as clear proof of our cultural superiority.”
“Yes, I’m afraid that’s so. When it comes to cultural ‘survival of the fittest,’ we’re the champs.”
“You mean that we’re champion exemplars of the process of natural selection.”
“Well … yes, I guess that’s what I mean.”
B shook his head. “It shouldn’t be looked at that way—evolutionary ideas always make risky metaphors. The tendency of biological evolution is toward diversity—is now and always has been. Evolution isn’t tending toward ‘the one right species.’ From the beginning, it has been tending away from the singularity from which all life sprang in the primordial stew. I remember as a boy reading a science-fiction story about a mutant organism that was born in a drain, in the fortuitous confluence of a dib of this and a dab of that. This organism was driven by a single tropism, which was to turn living matter into itself. Unstopped, it had the capability of reversing in a few days billions of years of biological evolution by devouring all life-forms on this planet and turning them into a single form, itself. This mutant organism is a perfect metaphor for our culture, which in just a few centuries is reversing millions of years of human development by devouring all cultures on this planet and turning them into a single culture, our own.”
“An ugly thought,” I said.
“I
t’s an ugly process.”
“Gunpowder,” B said, “is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur, and I suppose you know that if any one of these ingredients is missing, then the mixture isn’t explosive.”
“Of course.”
“As an explosive mixture, our culture also consists of three essential ingredients, and if any one of them had been missing, no explosion would have taken place here on this planet. We’ve already identified two of the ingredients: totalitarian agriculture and the belief that ours is the one right way. The third is of course the Great Forgetting.”
I thought about it some but finally told him I couldn’t see how the Great Forgetting had contributed to the explosion.
“It contributed to the explosion roughly the way that charcoal contributes to the explosion of gunpowder. How did we come to have the strange idea that our way is the one right way?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s go back again to the foundation thinkers of our culture—Herodotus, Confucius, Abraham, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Socrates, and any others you can think of. Assemble them all in one room and ask them this question: How long have people been living the way we live? What would be their answer?”
“Their answer would be, people have been living this way from the beginning.”
“In other words, Man was born living this way.”
“That’s right.”
“And what does this tell you about the nature of Man?”
“It tells me that Man was meant to live this way. Man is meant to live as a totalitarian agriculturalist and a city builder the way bees were meant to live as honey collectors and hive builders.”
“So tell me, Jared: What else could this be except the one right way?”