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two things in particular failed to satisfy me. The first was this: It was universally agreed that “human history” was basically the same as “our history”—the history that began about ten thousand years ago with the agricultural revolution. In the three million years of human life that came before that, nothing of importance had occurred (except perhaps the domestication of fire and the invention of the wheel). The lives lived during that time were of no interest or importance, were in fact completely meaningless, and undeserving of any attention. This made no sense to me. That 150,000
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These questions couldn’t be answered until I finally realized that these stories are mysterious to us because they didn’t come to us from people who share our view of the world, of humanity’s place in the world, and of divine intentions. They come to us from an ancient people whose worldview was profoundly different from our own. This is why their account of events in the Fertile Crescent, where our agricultural revolution began, is opaque to us (and even nonsensical).
They would search for another people that could be turned into their weapon by proxy. And so it came about that, some ten thousand years ago, they played the role of the serpent in the Garden of Eden of our planet, persuading the residents of the Fertile Crescent that they had indeed eaten at the gods’ own tree of wisdom and knew as well as they how the world should be ruled.
As everyone knows, eyes speak.
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.”
“I’m telling you this because the people of your culture are in much the same situation. Like the people of Nazi Germany, they are the captives of a story.” I sat there blinking for a while. “I know of no such story,” I told him at last. “You mean you’ve never heard of it?” “That’s right.” Ishmael nodded. “That’s because there’s no need to hear of it. There’s no need to name it or discuss it. Every one of you knows it by heart by the time you’re six or seven. Black and white, male and female, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, American and Russian, Norwegian and Chinese, you all hear it. And
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“Third definition: culture. A culture is a people enacting a story.”
The Leavers and the Takers are enacting two separate stories,
The dirt and rocks over there are simply the lip of the vast bowl that holds the sea.”
the story the people of your culture are enacting is about the meaning of the world,
“In your telling of the story, you naturally left out any mention of the gods, because you didn’t want it to be tainted with mythology. Since its mythological character is now established, you no longer have to worry about that. Supposing there is a divine agency behind creation, what can you tell me about the gods’ intentions?”
But this part of the story gives no hint of their intentions toward him. They must have some special destiny in mind for him, but that’s not revealed here.”
“All right. That’s the premise of your story: The world was made for man.”
This was a very big moment—the biggest in human history up to this point. Man was at last free of all those restraints that….The limitations of the hunting-gathering life had kept man in check for three million years. With agriculture, those limitations vanished,
With agriculture, those limitations vanished, and his rise was meteoric. Settlement gave rise to division of labor. Division of labor gave rise to technology. With the rise of technology came trade and commerce. With trade and commerce came mathematics and literacy and science,
And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidity, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.”
“It’s a sorry story you have there, a story of hopelessness and futility, a story in which there is literally nothing to be done. Man is flawed, so he keeps on screwing up what should be paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t know how to live so as to stop screwing up paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about that. So there you are, rushing headlong toward catastrophe, and all you can do is watch it come.”
“And then about ten thousand years ago one branch of the family of Homo sapiens sapiens said, ‘Man is exempt from this law. The gods never meant man to be bound by it.’ And so they built a civilization that flouts the law at every point,
I mean simply that, with his very first bite, Homo habilis was in competition with something. And not with one thing, with a thousand things—which all had to be diminished in some small degree if Homo habilis was going to live.
Mother Culture talks out of both sides of her mouth on this issue. When you say to her population explosion she replies global population control, but when you say to her famine she replies increased food production. But as it happens, increased food production is an annual event and global population control is an event that never happens at all.”
In order to halt this process, you must face the fact that increasing food production doesn’t feed your hungry, it only fuels your population explosion.”
“You mean they could invade Hopi territory. Yes, absolutely. But the point I’m making still stands. If you crossed over into Hopi territory, they didn’t give you a form to fill out, they killed you. That worked very well. That gave people a powerful incentive to limit their growth.”
“Yes. Then man was certainly not made to conquer and rule it.”
It’s the idea that people living close to nature tend to be noble. It’s seeing all those sunsets that does it. You can’t watch a sunset and then go off and set fire to your neighbor’s tepee. Living close to nature is wonderful for your mental health.”
“The story the Leavers have been enacting here for the past three million years isn’t a story of conquest and rule. Enacting it doesn’t give them power. Enacting it gives them lives that are satisfying and meaningful to them. This is what you’ll find if you go among them. They’re not seething with discontent and rebellion, not incessantly wrangling over what should be allowed and what forbidden, not forever accusing each other of not living the right way, not living in terror of each other, not going crazy because their lives seem empty and pointless, not having to stupefy themselves with
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Let’s send a great multitude of locusts into this land.
“This is indeed the proper knowledge of the gods: the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die.”
‘Whatever I can justify doing is good and whatever I cannot justify doing is evil.’
And so they said to him, “You may eat of every tree in the garden save the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for on the day you eat of that tree you will certainly die.”
Hohokam—those who vanished.
“Giving it up would mean…It would mean that all along they’d been wrong. It would mean that they’d never known how to rule the world. It would mean…relinquishing their pretensions to godhood.” “It would mean spitting out the fruit of that tree and giving the rule of the world back to the gods.”
“The ancient ancestors of the Hebrews were the Semites.”
“What was happening along that border was that Cain was killing Abel. The tillers of the soil were watering their fields with the blood of Semitic herders.”
It would scarcely occur to them to understand it as a piece of Semitic war propaganda.”
Our brothers from the north are saying that we’ve got to die. They’re saying Abel has to be wiped out. They’re saying we’re not to be allowed to live.
ONE OF THE CLEAREST INDICATIONS that these two stories were not authored by your cultural ancestors is the fact that agriculture is not portrayed as a desirable choice, freely made, but rather as a curse.
In these stories, agriculture is the lot of the fallen.”
As they perceived it, the Fall divided the race of man into two—into bad guys and good guys, into tillers of the soil and herders, the former bent on murdering the latter.”
“Consider: A hundred men and one woman does not spell a hundred babies, but one man and a hundred women does.”
“But what the Semites observed in their brothers from the north was that it didn’t matter to them. If their population got out of hand, they didn’t worry, they just put more land under cultivation.”
What you should understand is that saying yes to Life and accepting the knowledge of good and evil are merely different aspects of a single act, and this is the way the story is told in Genesis.”
When Adam accepted the fruit of that tree, he succumbed to the temptation to live without limit—and so the person who offered him that fruit is named Life.”
I’m not an anthropology buff, but I’ve read enough of it to know that the Zuñi don’t think their way is the way for everyone, and that the Navajo don’t think their way is the way for everyone. Each of them has a way that works well for them.”
the Takers and the Leavers accumulate two entirely different kinds of knowledge.”
“Go ahead.” “People can’t just give up a story. That’s what the kids tried to do in the sixties and seventies. They tried to stop living like Takers, but there was no other way for them to live. They failed because you can’t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in.”
don’t know. I don’t think you can start wanting something till you know it exists.”
“The Leavers would. Throughout history, the only way the Takers have found to tear them away from that life is by brute force, by wholesale slaughter. In most cases, they found it easiest just to exterminate them.”
“This is my impression as well. Takers believe in their revolution, even when they enjoy none of its benefits. There are no grumblers, no dissidents, no counterrevolutionaries. They all believe profoundly that, however bad things are now, they’re still infinitely preferable to what came before.”
Man was as well adapted to life on this planet as any other species, and the idea that he lived on the knife-edge of survival is simply biological nonsense.
“Far from scrabbling endlessly and desperately for food, hunter-gatherers are among the best-fed people on earth, and they manage this with only two or three hours a day of what you would call work—which makes them among the most leisured people on earth as well. In his book on Stone Age economics, Marshall Sahlins described them as ‘the original affluent society.’
