by Daniel Quinn
In school, this was the history their children learned. People like them had been around for some three million years, but for most of that time they were unaware of the fact that dancing would encourage the regrowth of their favorite foods. This fact had been discovered only about ten thousand years ago, by the founders of their culture. Joyously locking away their food so that they couldn’t get at it, the Takers immediately began dancing eight or ten hours a day. The people around them had never danced before, but they took it up enthusiastically, seeing at once that this was the way people were meant to live. Except for a few scattered peoples who were too dim-witted to perceive the obvious advantages of having their food locked away, the Great Dancing Revolution swept across the world without opposition.
The Parable Examined
Ishmael stopped talking, and I stared into the space in front of me like a bomb-blast victim. Finally I told him I had to go out and get some caffeine and think about this. Or maybe I just staggered out without a word, I don’t really remember.
Actually, I went back to Pearson’s department store and rode the escalators for a while. I don’t know why this soothes me, but it does. Other people go for walks in the woods. I go for rides on department-store escalators.
Then I stopped for a Coke. Looking back, I see that this is the second time I’ve mentioned Coke. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was giving it a boost here. Everyone in the world should stop buying Coke as far as I’m concerned, but I’m afraid I do occasionally suck one down.
After forty-five minutes I was still feeling like a bomb blast victim, except that I wasn’t suffering or anything. I felt that I now understood what learning is. Of course, learning can be like looking up the meaning of a word. That’s learning, for sure, sort of like planting a blade of grass in a lawn. But then there’s learning that is like dynamiting the whole lawn and starting over, and that’s what Ishmael’s tale of the dancers did. Eventually some questions began to form in my mind, and I headed back to Room 105 to get them asked.
I said, “Let me see if I actually understand what I heard.”
“That’s a good plan,” Ishmael agreed.
“By ‘dancing’ you mean the practice of agriculture.”
He nodded.
“You’re saying agriculture isn’t just the full-scale, all-out farming we practice. You’re saying agriculture is encouraging the regrowth of the foods you favor.”
He nodded again. “What else could it be? If you’re stranded on a desert island, you can’t grow chickens and chickpeas—unless you find some already growing there. You can only regrow whatever is already growing.”
“Right. And you’re saying people were encouraging the regrowth of their favorite foods long before the Agricultural Revolution.”
“Certainly. There’s nothing mysterious about the process. People as smart as you had been around for as long as two hundred thousand years when your ‘revolution’ started. There were people in every generation smart enough to be rocket scientists, but you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that plants grow from seeds. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that it makes sense to stick a couple of seeds in the ground when you leave an area. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to do a little weeding. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that when you’re hunting game, it’s always better to take a male than a female. Nomadic hunters are only a step away from being hunter/herders who follow the migrations of their favorite animals, and these are only a step away from being herder/hunters who exert some control over the migration of their favorite animals and chase off other predators. And these are only a step away from being true herders, who control their animals completely and breed them for docility.
“So you’re saying that the revolution just consisted of doing something full-time that people had already been doing part-time for thousands of years.”
“Of course. No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing. Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric lightbulb.”
“Yeah. But you’re also saying that the real innovation of our revolution wasn’t growing the food, it was locking it up.”
“Yes, that was certainly the key. Your revolution would have ground to a halt without that feature. It would grind to a halt today without that feature.”
“That was the last thing I was going to bring up. You’re saying the revolution never ended.”
“That’s right. It will end shortly, however. The revolution worked fine so long as there was always more space to expand into, but now there just isn’t any more.”
“I suppose we could export it to other planets.”
Ishmael shook his head. “Even that would be a stopgap measure, Julie. Let’s say that six billion inhabitants represents a reasonable planetary maximum for your species (though I suspect that six billion is actually much more than a healthy maximum). You’ll reach that six billion well before the end of this century. And let’s say that you had instantaneous access to every habitable planet in the universe, to which you could immediately begin exporting people. At present your population is doubling every thirty-five years or so, so in thirty-five years you’d fill a second planet. After seventy years four planets would be full. After a hundred and five years eight planets would be full. And so on. At this doubling rate a billion planets would be full by the year 3000 or thereabouts. I know that sounds incredible, but, trust me, the arithmetic is correct. By about 3300 a hundred billion planets would be full; this is the number you could occupy in this entire galaxy if each and every star had one habitable planet. If you continued to grow at your present rate, a second galaxy would be full in another thirty-five years. Four galaxies would be full thirty-five years later, and eight would be full thirty-five years after that. By the year 4000 the planets of a million galaxies would be full. By the year 5000 the planets of a trillion galaxies would be full—in other words, every planet in the universe. All in just three thousand years and working under the improbable assumption that every single star in the universe has a habitable planet.”
I told him these numbers were hard to believe.
“Do the arithmetic yourself sometime, then you won’t have to believe it, you’ll know it. Whatever grows without limit must inevitably end by overwhelming the universe. The anthropologist Marvin Harris once calculated that if the human population doubled every generation—every twenty years, as opposed to every thirty-five—the entire universe would be converted into a solid mass of human protoplasm in less than two thousand years.”
I sat there for a while trying to bring it all down to a manageable size. At last I told him about someone I knew, a girl who almost went off the deep end when someone finally got around to telling her where babies come from. “She must have grown up at the bottom of a well or something,” I told him.
He rewarded me with a look of polite inquiry.
“I guess she felt betrayed by God first, that he would have come up with such a nasty method for human procreation. Then she felt betrayed by everyone around her who had known and hadn’t told her. Then she felt humiliated to know that she was the last person on the face of the earth to hear this very simple fact.”
“I take it this has some relevance to our conversation?”
“Yes. I’d like to know if I’m the last person on the face of the earth to hear what you’ve been telling me today in this story of the dancers.”
“First, let’s make sure we know what I’ve been telling you. What does the story accomplish?”
That wasn’t too tough a question. This was what I’d been thinking about as I traveled the air inside Pearson’s. I said, “It demolishes the lie that ten thousand years ago everyone gave up foraging and settled down to become farmers. It demolishes the lie that this was an event that everyone had been waiting for from the beginning of time. It demolishes the lie that, because our way has become the dominant way, this must prove it’s the way people are ‘meant
’ to live.”
“So, are you the last person on the face of the earth to know all this? Hardly. There are many who, on hearing the story, would feel that they ‘knew it all along’ or suspected that it was ‘something like that.’ There are many who might have worked it out—who have all the facts at their disposal—but who didn’t. The will to work it out isn’t there for them.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that people seldom look very hard for things they don’t want to find. They avert their eyes from such things. I should add that this is not an observation of any great originality on my part.”
“I’m lost,” I told him after a bit. “I think we’ve wandered off the main road again.”
“We weren’t wandering, Julie—at least not aimlessly. Some of what you need to examine can’t be seen from the main road, so we have to take a secondary road now and then. But these always lead back to the main road. Do you see where it’s leading?”
“I have a sense of it, but I’m not sure.”
“The main road leads to why the people of your culture have to look off-planet to find wisdom—into the heavens, home of God and his angels; into outer space, home of ‘advanced’ alien races; into the Great Beyond, home of the spirits of the departed.”
“Wow,” I said. “Is that where we’re heading! It never occurred to me that my daydream fit this sort of pattern. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“That’s what I’m saying. You perceive yourselves to be deprived of essential knowledge. You’ve always been so. It’s your nature to be so. The very inaccessibility of this knowledge makes it special. It’s inaccessible because it’s special, and it’s special because it’s inaccessible. In fact, it’s so special that you can only access it through supernormal means—prayer, s´eance, astrology, meditation, past-life reading, channeling, crystal gazing, card reading, and so on.”
“In other words, hoogy-moogy,” I put in.
Ishmael glared at me for a moment, then blinked, twice. “Hoogy-moogy?”
“Everything you just mentioned. Séances, astrology, channeling, angels, all that stuff.”
He gave his head a little shake, the way you do a salt-shaker to see if there’s anything in it. Then he went on. “What I want you to see is that the people of your culture accept the fact that this knowledge is inaccessible. It doesn’t amaze them or even puzzle them. It needs no explanation. They fully expect this knowledge to be difficult to come by. You, for example, felt sure that nothing less than a galactic tour could deliver it to you.”
“Yeah, I do see that now.”
Ishmael shook his head “I still haven’t quite managed to articulate what I’m getting at. Let me try again. Thinkers aren’t limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they’re limited by what puzzles them, because there’s no way to become curious about something that doesn’t puzzle you. If a thing falls outside the range of people’s curiosity, then they simply cannot make inquiries about it. It constitutes a blind spot—a spot of blindness that you can’t even know is there until someone draws your attention to it.”
“Which is what you’re trying to do here with me.”
“Exactly. The two of us are exploring an unknown territory—a whole continent that lies inside your culture’s blind spot.” He paused for a moment, then said that this seemed like a good place to stop for the day. I guess I agreed. I wasn’t exactly tired, but I did feel as though I’d just finished three pieces of pie.
I stood up and told him I’d see him next Saturday then. When this produced no reaction after about thirty seconds, I said, “Isn’t that all right?”
“It’s not exactly ideal,” he said.
I told him school had just started, and I always tried to set a good example for myself during the first few weeks. Which meant being serious about homework on school nights.
“Let me explain the situation, Julie. I’m in a difficult position.” He waved a hand at his surroundings. “Maintaining me in these quarters has been the undertaking of a friend of long standing, Rachel Sokolow. She died two months ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said, the way people do.
“I called my position difficult, but it’s much worse than that. In two weeks I’ll be forced to vacate these premises.”
“Where will you go?”
He shook his head. “I’m still working that out. What you must understand just now is that I don’t have much time left here. This means it isn’t practical for you to think of coming just on weekends.”
I picked at this for a minute, then asked if Alan Lomax was helping him.
“Why do you ask that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just figured you could hardly move out of here without help.”
“Alan isn’t helping me,” Ishmael stated. “He knows nothing about it. There’s no need for him to know about it. There is a need for you to know about it, because you were thinking we had all the time in the world.” I guess he could see that I wasn’t satisfied with what he was telling me, because he went on. “Alan has been with me for a couple of weeks already, almost daily, and we will soon have gone just about as far as we can go together.”
Even so, there was obviously something he was carefully not explaining, which was why Alan was being kept in the dark. Even if he didn’t need to know about Ishmael’s forthcoming move, why not know about it?
It was then that Ishmael showed me he could “say” things without using words. He could sort of beam me an attitude, and the attitude he beamed at me was: This is none of your business.
It wasn’t nearly as flat and gruff as it looks spelled out in words. And of course I already knew it was none of my business. Snoops always know exactly what is and isn’t their business.
A visit to Calliope
Ishmael seemed relieved to have his problem out in the open. We were working under a deadline and could not afford to shilly-shally. All the same, I did begin our next session with a question that was probably superfluous:
“If you knew you had only a few weeks left here, why did you put that ad in the newspaper?”
He grunted. “I put the ad in the newspaper precisely because I have only a few weeks left here. This may well be my last chance.”
“Your last chance to do what?”
“To get someone to take this away.”
“ ‘This’ being what’s in your head?” He nodded. “Excuse me if I’m being dense, but I thought you’d already had lots of pupils.”
“That’s right, but none of them has taken away what you’ll take away, Julie. None of them has taken away what Alan will take away. Each of you encodes the message differently. Each of you has received a different telling and will transmit a different telling—of the same message.”
“Alan hasn’t heard the story of the dancers?”
“No, and you won’t hear the story of the hapless airman. The stories you hear are stories created for you in particular, at particular times when you need to hear them, as the stories Alan hears are stories created for him in particular, at particular times when he needs to hear them. And with that as an introduction, I’ll present another one I prepared for you last night. You remember I said that the story of how you came to be this way would take several tellings.”
“Yes.”
“The story of Terpsichore was the first telling. This, the story of Calliope (named after the muse of epic poetry), is the second.”
“This is another planet you would definitely want to visit on your quest for enlightenment,” Ishmael began. “Life emerged on Calliope in much the same way it did on earth. Those who wish to imagine that God called every species to life in a final, changeless form are welcome to do so, but I’m incapable of embracing such a primitive scenario. If one accepts the invitation to think of God as a parent, then one must wonder what sort of parent would actually care to bring his or her children into being as fully formed adults, all ready to soar like eagles,
see like hawks, run like cheetahs, hunt like sharks, and think like computer scientists. Only a very unimaginative and insecure one, I feel.
“Be that as it may, the creatures of Calliope came into being by means of the process generally known as evolution. There’s no reason to imagine that this process is unique to earth. On the contrary, for reasons that will become plain, it would be very surprising if it were so.
“There’s no need or reason to go through the process in detail. It will be enough if you see and understand even a few of its results. For example, I would recommend to your attention a creature that made its appearance on Calliope some ten million years ago, a quilled lizard with a long snout suitable for browsing in anthills. When I say that it made its appearance, I don’t mean that it had no predecessor. Of course it did—I trust you understand that.”
I said I did.
“This quilled lizard (let’s call it a porcuzard) was nevertheless a strange creature—or would certainly seem strange to you or me, as does the porcupine or the anteater. Now let me ask what your expectation is for this creature. Is it your expectation that it will be a successful addition to the community of life on Calliope?”
I said I didn’t have any basis for an expectation. How could I? Ishmael nodded as if he could see the sense in this reply.
“Let’s transpose the matter to a locale closer to home. Suppose biologists were to discover a porcuzard living in the deepest jungles of New Guinea. Such a thing is not at all impossible. New species are being discovered all the time.”
“Okay.”
“What would be your expectation in this case? Would you expect a creature like this to be a successful inhabitant of the jungles of New Guinea?”
“Certainly. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“That’s not the question I’m exploring here, Julie. The question I’m exploring is: What is your expectation? And you’ve answered that: You expect it to be successful. The next question is, why do you expect it to be successful?”
