by Daniel Quinn
“Yes, I see that.”
“What was missing from the education of these thinkers? What was forgotten during the Great Forgetting?”
“What was forgotten was the fact that Man was not born a totalitarian agriculturalist and a city builder. What was forgotten was the fact that our way was not ordained from the beginning of time. If this hadn’t been forgotten, then we would never have been able to persuade ourselves that ours is the one right way. This is why the Great Forgetting was an ingredient essential to our cultural explosion.”
“Let’s go for a walk,” B said. “There’s something I have to pick up for you.”
“Something for me?”
“Something you’ll need later.”
I started to head out the way I’d come, but B beckoned me in the opposite direction, down a hall that opened up behind his chair, the same hall from which Monika and Heinz Teitel had appeared with refreshments the night before. The hall soon widened to accommodate concrete benches on either side, and B told me it had been designed to serve as a bomb shelter for both the theater and a government office building the next street over.
“But I don’t believe it was ever needed for that purpose,” he added.
After a couple hundred meters the tunnel angled up and terminated at a heavy fire door that opened into the subbasement storage room of a government building of some kind. Surprisingly, to me, there was a desk here, and someone manning it, evidendy to monitor access to the storage areas. This person, a middle-aged soldierly type who looked like he would have felt more comfortable in any sort of uniform, glared at us with disapproval but made no vocal objection to our passing through his territory. Two flights of stairs took us up to the ground floor and the street.
Monday, May 20 (cont.)
A visit to the Cretaceous
It was barely eight-thirty when we came out—hardly more than late afternoon in this northern city just weeks before the summer solstice. Despite the early hour, the shops were mostly shuttered, and the streets were all but deserted. Radenau is not to be visited for its exciting nightlife.
B is a stroller, as I am. He seemed to be going nowhere in particular, and I was glad to tag along.
He said, “I’m sure you’re beginning to see why it isn’t possible for me to carry mass audiences of listeners along in this direction.”
“Yes, I see that,” I told him. “But I’m not sure I see the direction.”
“Remember that we’re working on a mosaic, not a narrative or a syllogism. After this conversation, you still won’t have a conclusion, but you should have a more complete understanding of everything you’ve ever heard me say.”
“Yes, that’s true. The figure in the mosaic is still a little vague, but it’s not as vague as it was two hours ago.”
“A while ago you said that, the way I was talking, it’s a wonder that our cultural revolution ever took place. It really is a wonder. It wasn’t destiny, it wasn’t divinely ordained from the foundation of the universe, it wasn’t something that was just inevitably going to happen. It hadn’t happened in two hundred thousand years of people as smart as we are. It might not have happened in another two hundred thousand years—or in another million. It was a quirk, a fluke. Combine one never-before-seen cultural element with a second never-before-seen element, add a third just as odd, and you come up with a cultural monster that is literally devouring the world—and will end by devouring itself if it isn’t stopped.”
We sloped along for a while, then I asked B if the figure in the mosaic was going to turn out to be our culture.
“I suppose you might say so, though I’ve never thought of it that way myself,” he said. “I think of it as a mural composed of many interrelated scenes, like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. What you call ‘our culture’ appears in many of the scenes at different moments in its history, but then there are also scenes within scenes. There are scenes depicting the history of the universe, and among these there are scenes depicting the development of life on this planet. Among these are scenes depicting the emergence of the human race. Among the scenes depicting the emergence of the human race are scenes depicting the origin of hundreds of thousands of cultures, including the Gebusi and our own. Among the scenes depicting the development of our culture are scenes depicting many other things, such as the conquest of the world by our culture, such as the appearance of Salvationist religions in our culture, such as the Industrial Revolution. We move from scene to scene, we step back from the mural to try to see relationships between scenes, we move in again to focus on details, and so on. As time goes on, the whole composition begins to come together for us—but it’s not a process that has an end point. There will never come a time when we insert a final piece and say, ‘There, that’s it, every last piece is now in place.’”
We came to a stop at a sign reading MEYER—ÜBERBLEIBSELEN, whatever that was. B looked over the huge, gray, steel shutter as if in hopes of locating a button he could press to make it go away. When he didn’t find it, he began unceremoniously pounding on it with his fist. After a minute a window above shot up, and the Ghost of Christmas Past leaned out to ask in German what the hell we were doing. This I soon learned was Gustl Meyer. Meyer and B yelled at each other for a bit, in English and German, then the window was slammed shut.
B gave me a smiling nod as if to assure me that everything was going really well, then a couple minutes later the shutter clattered up and we were admitted to the dim interior of Meyer’s shop, which was stocked exclusively with the castoffs and leftovers (Überbleibselen) of museums devoted to every sort of thing except art: military history, political history, natural history, science, technology, and industry. As soon as we crossed the threshold, B started vibrating with a kind of electric joy, like a five-year-old in a toy shop, and I began to realize he was a man with the heart of a completely lunatic collector of curios. He was enchanted by a working miniature of an early “safety” elevator, by a life-size wax Neanderthaler who sat cross-legged on the floor absorbed in some hand work that was no longer in his hands, by an exquisite cutaway scale model of a copper mine, by a hideous (and wholly improbable) stuffed dodo that Meyer claimed had been made from an actual skin, by a battered one-man submarine of the Napoleonic era, by a transparent talking head that described the operation of the brain (in Dutch) while pinpoint lights within indicated the areas under discussion.
There were crates of ore samples, piles of tarnished brass instruments, boxes of disintegrating scrolls, racks of entomological specimens, tubs of fossils of every kind—and it was at one of these that B finally paused to begin rummaging in a serious way. He took out and examined trilobites, crinoids, and things I assumed were dinosaur eggs, teeth, and claws. Finally he stopped at a doughnut-sized object rather like the shell of a chambered nautilus except that it was corrugated like the curling horn of a mountain sheep.
“An ammonite,” B said, “cephalopod—same class as the nautilus.” He dropped it into my hand, saying, “Been extinct for about sixty-five million years.”
I said something brilliant, like “Really?” and started to give it back, but he turned to Meyer to ask its price. After dickering a bit, B handed him what looked like enough cash to cover dinner for two at a pretty good restaurant.
“A collector would have paid a lot more,” B explained when we were outside, “but Meyer doesn’t expect to get premium prices, certainly not from me.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?” I asked him.
“Put it in your pocket. Keep it with you, I’m not sure when we’ll get around to it.”
The wired monkey
We stopped at a nondescript Gasthaus for dinner, and B told me to have beer, not whiskey. “Did you like Little Bohemia? We’ll go there later for a real drink.”
I told him that would be fine. I think he has the impression that all of us Romish padres are booze hounds.
“I have to go back to the first piece I tried to put in place tonight,” B said. “I know it’s not s
et in solidly.”
“Okay.”
“Last night in the theater I talked about changing minds. I said that if the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds—not by programs but by people with changed minds.”
“I remember.”
“It’s difficult for people to credit this notion, because they don’t see that what we have here, every bit of it—all the triumph and glory and catastrophe of it—is the work of people with changed minds.”
“I don’t see it myself,” I told him.
“I know,” B said, “that’s why we’re coming back to it. Let’s make sure we’re agreed on basic facts. The mind change I’m looking at occurred about ten thousand years ago in what has been called the Fertile Crescent—an area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers now encompassed by Iraq. It was the inhabitants of this area, ten thousand years ago, who laid the foundations of what is now our global culture. Is this what you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now I’m sure you realize that the human race didn’t originate in the Fertile Crescent. The evidence we have right now indicates pretty conclusively that the human race originated in Africa.”
“Right.”
“It originated in Africa and then very slowly spread into every part of the world: the Near East, the Far East, Europe, ultimately reaching the most distant regions—places like the Americas, Australia, and New Guinea—about thirty or forty thousand years ago. The Near East, being next door to Africa, has been inhabited by modern humans for an immensely long time, a hundred thousand years or more. This includes the area of the Fertile Crescent. Do you see the point I’m making here?”
“No, not really.”
“The area we’re looking at, the Fertile Crescent, was inhabited by modern humans for something like a hundred thousand years before our agricultural revolution began.”
“Okay. I think I understood that already.”
“I’m pointing out that the revolution we’re looking at occurred among people who had been living there for tens of thousands of years. People were living there, and a revolution occurred. The revolution wasn’t a meteorological event. It wasn’t an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. It was something that happened among people. About ten thousand years ago people who had been living in the Fertile Crescent for tens of thousands of years began to live a new way, the way I’ve called the Taker way.”
“I see that.”
“They didn’t begin to live a new way because they were starving, because, as I’ve said, starving people don’t invent lifestyles any more than people falling out of airplanes invent parachutes. And their new way to live wasn’t adopted because it was so pleasant that it was just an inevitable next step forward. What these founders of our culture fundamentally invented for us was the notion of work. They developed a hard way to live—the hardest way to live ever found on this planet.”
“But it gave them some other things besides a hard life.”
“Exactly. Now you’re running with me, Jared! Now you’re beginning to see why I say that these people represent changed minds. They didn’t think like the Gebusi or the Cheyenne or the Alawa or the Ihalmiut or the Micmac or the Bushmen—or any other of thousands of peoples I could name. What they were doing didn’t make sense to their neighbors, but it didn’t have to. What they were doing wouldn’t have made sense to their great-great-great-grandparents, but again it didn’t have to. What they were doing made perfect sense to them, the way that what the Gebusi do makes perfect sense to them. What they were doing made perfect sense to them, because they saw things differently—differently from the way their ancestors saw them and differently from the way their neighbors saw them. Do you see now why I say that these people represent changed minds?”
“I think so.”
“Because we share that mind change, we look at what they did and say, ‘Well, of course. This makes sense. What could be more obvious? This was bound to happen. Humans were meant to live as Takers.’ Because we share their mind-set, their revolution makes perfect sense to us. To us, it looks logical and inevitable, the way eating sorcerers seems logical and inevitable to the Gebusi.”
“Yes, I see.”
“We know what ethnic group these people belonged to—evidently they were Caucasians—but there’s no reason at all to suppose that every Caucasian people took part in this revolution. The Gebusi and their neighbors the Kubor, the Bedamini, the Oybae, the Honibo, and the Samo all belong to the same ethnic group, but they certainly don’t have a common culture. Are you following me?”
“I think so.”
“We’ll never know what the people of the revolution called themselves, but let’s make up a name for them. Let’s call them the Tak. This will link them to the way I’ve called the Taker way.”
“Okay.”
“The Tak didn’t become agriculturalists because they were hungry or because they liked hard work better than loafing. Quite on your own, you grasped the key fact that they got something out of their toilsome life that compensated them for it. Why did they become agriculturalists? What did totalitarian agriculture give them that foraging didn’t give their neighbors and their ancestors?”
“You already showed me this. Totalitarian agriculture gave them power.”
“That’s right. Their revolution wasn’t about food, it was about power. That’s still what it’s about.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“Someone once asked me how I could go on maintaining that the human race isn’t flawed if it’s so enamored of power. ‘The Tak succumbed to a lust for power,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that a flaw? All their cultural descendants succumbed to a lust for power. Isn’t that a flaw?’ I told him about a famous psychological experiment of the late 1950s. An electrode was implanted in the pleasure center of a monkey’s brain. Pushing a button on a small control box delivered an electric pulse to the electrode, giving the monkey a tremendous jolt of sheer, whole-body pleasure. They gave the box to the monkey, who of course had no idea what it was but by accident eventually pushed the button, giving itself this tremendous jolt of pleasure. It didn’t take many more repetitions for the monkey to catch on to the connection between the button and the pleasure, and once this happened it just sat there hour after hour pushing the button and giving itself jolts of pleasure. It passed up food, it passed up sex. If they hadn’t eventually taken the box away, the monkey would have sat there and literally pleasured itself to death. Here is the question I asked back to my questioner: ‘Was there something wrong with this monkey? Was the monkey flawed?’ What do you think, Jared?”
“I would say no, the monkey wasn’t flawed.”
“I’d say the same. Nor were the Tak flawed. Pushing the button of totalitarian agriculture gave them a tremendous jolt of power. It gave the same jolt of power to the people of China and to the people of Europe. It gives us the same jolt of power today. And just like the monkey, no one wants to quit pushing that button, and we’re in serious danger of pleasuring ourselves to death with unending jolts of power.”
I nodded. “I guess this is what you mean when you say that if the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds. People with unchanged minds will say, ‘Let’s minimize the effects of pushing the button.’ People with changed minds will say, ‘Let’s throw the box away!’ ”
B nodded. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me to say it that way, but of course you’re right. As soon as the people of our culture decide to throw the box away, things will begin to change dramatically. And when you start saying things better than I could have said them myself, this is a clear sign that you’re on your way to becoming the message.”
The Tak
Our food came at this point, and we both fell silent to give it our attention. Finally B said, “There’s one connection I’ve tried to put off making for you, thinking I could avoid it or skip it, but I’d better go ahead and make it.”
I asked him why he’d been avoiding it.
; “I’ve been avoiding it because I feel under some pressure to be economical of time here.” He shook his head, dissatisfied with this statement. “That’s not quite direct enough. I want to be rid of the hovering specter of Bernard Lulfre as soon as possible. I want to satisfy his curiosity and get him out of here.”
“I understand. What’s the connection you’ve been avoiding?”
“I’ve told you the Tak seemed like lunatics to their neighbors, just as the Gebusi seem like lunatics to us. Do you find that hard to believe?”
“Yes, I do, but I suppose the Gebusi find it equally hard to believe that they seem like lunatics to us.”
“Just so,” B said. “The Tak seem perfectly reasonable and ordinary to us, because we’re their cultural descendants. We have the same worldview they had.”
“I understand. But even so, we can’t actually know what the Tak’s neighbors thought of them.”
“In this case, by a great fluke of history, we can know what at least one of their neighbors thought of them. Or rather, we do know, because we have their version of what happened. Again, we know what ethnic group these neighbors belonged to, but not what they called themselves. Let’s call them the Zeugen—in other words, the witnesses. In terms of lifestyle, the Zeugen were rather like the Masai of East Africa. Do you know the Masai?”
“I’ve heard of them. They’re nomadic herders, aren’t they?”
“That’s right. The Zeugen too were nomadic herders, and when they looked at the Tak revolution, they didn’t see a technological advance or anything remotely like a technological advance. What they saw was an overturning of the order of the universe. They saw, as you have, that totalitarian agriculture isn’t about food, it’s about power—power over who lives and who dies in the world. Is it clear why they would see it that way?”
“Talk about it some.”
“The easiest way to see it is by example. According to totalitarian agriculture, cows may live but wolves must die. According to totalitarian agriculture, chickens may live but foxes must die. According to totalitarian agriculture, wheat may live but chinch bugs must die. Anything we eat may live, but anything that eats our food must die—and not merely on an ad hoc basis. Our posture is not, ‘If a coyote attacks my herd, I’ll kill it,’ our posture is, ‘Let’s wipe coyotes off the face of the earth.’ When it came to wolves and cows, we said, ‘Let the wolves be destroyed,’ and the wolves were destroyed, and we said, ‘Let there be cows by the billion,’ and there were cows by the billion.”
