Or Leaving It
Trying to find the way home
[Letter #021]
Good morning, son.
I have been assigned the task of researching and signing up your mother and myself for classes regarding your birth. We need to learn a few things before we decide how we would ideally do the whole thing. There’s something certainly appealing about a water birth or some sort of squatting technique or a ball, or something equally mystical. But, e’en th’ best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men might lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, if you’ll allow the paraphrase of the good Mr Burns. You might end up being a C-section with an epidural hangover, depending on how things go. It’s not a bad way to come into the world, such as it is, with pharmaceutical numbing followed by a nap. In truth, you may spend a good number of days in similar repose during your stay on our lovely space rock. If you’re lucky, that is.
Today, I want to return to what I discussed last week. I’ve had the chance to finish the third book in the Ishmael series, this one entitled My Ishmael. It follows a similar timeline as the first book, but it’s from the perspective of a then-12-year-old girl. The same character supposedly writes the book when she is 16, but the actual author is the same as the first two in the series, Daniel Quinn. The third entry gives us an alternate ending to what was experienced by the protagonist of the first. I think folks might call this alternate version the “happy ending,” but I could have been alright with it either way. I don’t really think artists should feel compelled to give an audience catharsis by providing an easy escape from bad feelings.
Last time, I was talking about the “Taker” culture. I mentioned there that the character, Ishmael, claims that this term derives from the phrase “take it or leave it,” and that it was chosen because these terms are mostly neutral in tone. Ergo, there is also a “Leaver” culture. Later on in the first book, and especially in the second and third books, this justification is changed. The “Takers” are considered to be the culture that takes matters into their own hands to produce enough food and to construct the hierarchy that enforces this production. The “Leavers” are the converse of this, leaving their fates in the hands of the gods. In several areas, Quinn specifies that he’s not insisting on the existence of actual deities, but suggests that nature itself could be synonymous with these ambiguous gods. No faith required.
People love stories. We live by them. We live them. They’re not just narratives that we use for entertainment or to teach lessons. Stories are the blueprints for how we live our lives. They’re the DNA of our culture. Everything that we think, feel, and do has been described by and is influenced by a story, which might be nothing more than a general description of the ideology behind the actions.
One of the stories that describes how modern humans think and behave comes from the Bible, actually. I was surprised not only that this was the case but also by which story the book is referring to. As I mentioned in my previous letter, Quinn gives us this interpretation through the titular character. Ishmael notes that while many Takers have heard this narrative all of their lives, particularly those who were raised in a Christian setting, it’s an account that actually comes to us from a Leaver tradition, in that it’s a warning from the Leaver perspective.
Before I get to it, I want to comment on the use of allegory in the Bible. It’s always been odd to me how some Christians will take the teachings of Christ as a parable and understand that it’s a symbolic tale that has a lesson within it. I think they’re only ok with this because the book specifically spells out that Jesus is telling a damn parable. The reason I say “only” is because if it doesn’t say it’s a parable, then the default assumption appears to be that it’s not. The other stories, such as those told in Genesis, only make sense if viewed as a parable. They’re loony if taken at face-value. And yet, that’s exactly how some loonies end up reading it regardless. Not just “New Earth Creationists” either, those unthinkers who refuse to believe that the Earth is older than about 12 thousand years. I was raised within the Southern Baptist tradition, and I can’t think of a single time when I heard these stories discussed as anything but literal truth. Not even a hint of metaphor.
The Leaver-perspective story comes right at the start of Genesis, actually. Chapters 3 and 4, if you care to look it up. I’m certain there’s a Bible around somewhere. It’s the story of “The Fall” and the “Cain and Abel” tale. The two charming anecdotes take about five minutes to read, as told in the Bible. However, Ishmael fills us in on the extra bit of the story that wasn’t included with the Sunday School version. Of course, there’s no way to know that this specifically was the “canon” version of the story, as that’s not really a thing. The shape and form of Ishmael’s telling is inferred from the biblical source, what we know from anthropology, and guesswork to fill in the blanks. Taken together with a dose of logic, as provided by the character, it’s an intriguing variation that I much prefer to the “original.”
In Ishmael’s version, the gods have found a nice savannah area where they would like to put in an ecosystem — birds, beasts, fish, and all manner of critter. They run into a problem when it comes to life and death though. They know that everything needs to eat to live, but if they make the bird available to the fox to eat, then the bird will curse them. If they save the bird from the fox, then the fox will starve and curse them. If they make the worm available to the bird, then the worm will curse them. Saving the worm will make the bird curse them. On and on it goes. They have a long deliberation session about this conundrum.
At some point, one of the gods dips out of the meeting and goes for a walk in the new territory under review. He finds a tree with some great looking fruit. Once eaten, everything makes sense to him. He goes back to his comrades and has them eat the fruit as well, and they all understand. This is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The gods then understand what goodness and evil are and how an ecosystem will appear both good and evil to every participant of the system at some point. The wisdom comes from understanding the balance of these elements to perpetuate all life. However, for mortals, it is unnecessary to know good and evil, since they are all subject to the ecosystem and thus leave their fates to the gods to understand, just as do all other living things.
And as they were talking in this way, a lion went out to hunt, and the gods said to themselves, “Today is the lion’s day to go hungry, and the deer it would have taken may live another day.” And so the lion missed its kill, and as it was returning hungry to its den it began to curse the gods. But they said, “Be at peace, for we know how to rule the world, and today is your day to go hungry.” And the lion was at peace.
And the next day the lion went out to hunt, and the gods sent it the deer they had spared the day before. And as the deer felt the lion’s jaws on its neck, it began to curse the gods. But they said, “Be at peace, for we know how to rule the world, and today is your day to die just as yesterday was your day to live.” And the deer was at peace.
– Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, Chapter 9, Part 4
The knowledge of good and evil functionally became also the knowledge of who should live and who should die. The quirk about supernatural fruit though is that it only works on gods. While humans are quite clever and can potentially gain significant wisdom on their own, they cannot gain any knowledge from the fruit at all. To humans, just as to any other animal, the fruit is just fruit. The gods feared, however, that humans might try anyway, and then they would be deceived into believing that they did have the knowledge. They instructed the humans to eat anything from the land, but that they should not eat from that particular tree. Doing so, they knew, would lead to death.
That’s the first half of the story. We know how it ends. There’s a deceiver who tricks the humans into eating the fruit anyway, and they do believe that they now have the knowledge of good and evil. It was also funny to me that the Bible School version of this always focuses on how Adam and Eve then realized they were naked, as though nudity has anything to do with evil. Oh, Puritans. An entire lifetime of shame and guilt, and for what?
Ishmael then points something out: why are the humans ejected from the garden? Why are the gods actually angry with the humans for doing this? It’s not like the fruit did anything really. To the humans, it was just fruit. Nothing special. The Christian version needed a reason for God’s sudden anger at this, so they conveniently slide it in that it was a test of obedience for the humans, but the idea that God would build a paradise for apes with all of the goodness of the world and put in one shining, glaring red button labeled “DO NOT PUSH” always felt like nonsense to me.
The actual problem, as the gods saw it, was that these humans believed they now knew who should live and who should die. They understood that this would be an extremely dangerous delusion for an animal to run around with. This is what would eventually lead to death. Indeed, it’s kinda looking these days like they were right.
I’ll get back to that, but there’s something else that’s weird about this part of the story. In the Bible, God punishes Adam to toil in the field. These days, we like to frame the coming of agricultural life as being a good thing. It’s what led to civilization, after all! How would that be a punishment? It’s also strange that, while Adam and Eve are ejected from the garden, it’s not like that was the only place on Earth that grew plants to eat. They could have just continued to hunt and gather forever, right? But they didn’t. They chose the farming life. They didn’t have to, except that perhaps they believed that God said so.
Alright, so this is just about as mythical as mythology gets, and it’s very, obviously, painfully clear that Adam (“first man”) and Eve (“life”) are personified placeholders for early humans, and this is their story. However, it’s framed as though these were the very first people. Period, end of story. There were no other people. It can make sense, if you think that all animals descend from a single ancestral pair, then a single first male and first female is a logical connection. The Bible mentions no one else by name, so why not?
The part that’s left out, and has been recently filled in by archeological evidence, is that “Adam” and “Eve” are only some of the people who would have been alive at that time. There were plenty of other people groups out there. You can infer that by way of Cain having a wife and building a city. Where did the wife come from and who was he building a city for? This would only have been about 10 to 12 thousand years ago, and we have evidence now for homo sapiens going back hundreds of thousands of years.
Speaking of Cain and Abel, they make up the second half of the story. As Adam and Eve very likely represented an entire culture of people, it follows that their “sons” would likewise represent whole cultures. That is to say that Cain and Abel weren’t literal brothers, but rather they were brother cultures. The Cain people took to the plow, so to speak, and farmed their food. The Abel people “kept the flocks.” So, you’ve got a culture of primarily agricultural types and one of herding people.
Then comes the competition of gifts. The brothers have to show off the best they can produce for God, and the Bible says that God rejects Cain’s offering. It doesn’t give us any reason for that, and I remember the famous motto of good, faithful Christians being applied to this scenario as well: “God works in mysterious ways.” Not really, as I’ve found. Christians have just always had lousy explanations, and they historically enjoyed incinerating those who had anything to contribute beyond the approved narrative.
Now, why did God reject Cain’s work? Why was it that Abel’s offering was good and Cain’s was unworthy? Well, in the “original” version, if you’ll permit the use of that phrasing, God would have been “the gods,” and the gods are not fans of farming as a full-time way of life. This would be a cautionary tale from the Leaver perspective. Animal husbandry is fine, hunting and gathering are fine, and even scattering some seeds around to revisit next year is fine. The problem is the philosophy of those who adopt the Taker point of view, what the second book calls “totalitarian agriculture.”
The Taker way of life comes from the belief that humans are entitled to declare what lives and what dies. Remember that the Takers are taking the matter of their sustenance into their own hands. They are forcing the earth to yield up food specifically for them and nothing else. If anything attempts to eat the Takers’ food, they will kill it. If there are “weeds,” which are food for other creatures, then the Takers will kill them. The Taker mentality, which is embodied as Cain’s point of view in the story, is that of making everything food for human consumption and to destroy everything that isn’t. Takers believe they know what they’re doing because of the knowledge of the fruit, you see, so this destruction is righteous work.
Cain didn’t just stop farming once the gods refused his offering. He kept on with that lifestyle, and such a strategy comes with requirements for more land. Over time, strip-mining the nutrients out will destroy soil and grow the population. Cain, which Ishmael describes as representing the people from the northern Caucasus region, begins expanding his territory southward, integrating people or forcibly removing them. These herding people are, of course, Abel. These are the people who pleased the gods with their non-destructive lifestyle. The farming folks came down, took them out into the fields, and “killed” them. That may have been literal slaughter, or it may have just been a killing of their herding lifestyle as they were absorbed into the farming culture.
The tale of Cain and Abel remains a cautionary one from the Leaver perspective because it tries to describe the destruction that comes from a totalitarian agriculture strategy. The Abel people did not presume to know what lives and what dies. They simply herded their flocks and protected them from the occasional threat, which usually just meant running off a predator. The Cain people came down from the mountains and killed those who didn’t submit to their way of life, and this was a radical shift from what came before it. “Why are our northern brothers killing us for living differently? Surely, they must believe they know what only gods know.” With that, you’ve got a perfectly reasonable origin story for Cain and Abel, with explanations for the weird bits.
In the previous letter, I provided you with Ishmael’s summary of the Taker story. “The world was created for humanity, and humanity was created to rule over it. In order to rule over it, humanity must first conquer and subjugate every aspect of it.” That’s the Taker point of view, the totalitarian agriculture point of view, the “Cain” point of view. That’s the perspective that the people of the Caucasus region held when they came down from the mountain and removed the herding people from their ancestral territory. It’s the ideology that has pervaded every aspect of civilization for the past 10 thousand years, usually as a given, unspoken assumption. Something that “everybody knows” so well that they really don’t think much about it. I don’t know if anyone would be thinking about it today, if it wasn’t for that pesky feature of the planet to correct the problems we’ve created.
But, what I was explaining last time is that our story, the story of civilization and the ideology that goes with that, is not the story of humanity. It’s just one strategy that one culture attempted 10 thousand years ago. We have learned over that time that this strategy doesn’t work. It’s destructive to everyone involved. It causes species to go extinct at dizzying rates. It destroys the environment and pollutes otherwise beautiful regions. It poisons waterways and blackens skies. It causes health problems, both physical and psychological, to humans around the planet.
This all stems from one culture’s idea to stop following the story of the old ways and to try something entirely new — something extractive, imperial, and destructive. That way of life, over the past 10 thousand years, has taken over every square mile on the planet (with extremely rare exceptions), and we are watching as the prediction of the gods finally comes into view in the near term future. The belief that we understand the knowledge of good and evil, that we know best of what lives and what dies, is going to kill us. We have never had this knowledge, and we’re proving it now. The gods did not jealously guard the knowledge from us. They knew we couldn’t know such things and tried to protect us from believing we could.
They wanted us to keep the Leaver story, the strategy that humans used for well over 200,000 years, maybe even 300,000. It’s the strategies developed by our ancestors over countless generations, and even by proto-humans over the 3 million years before that. That’s an inconceivable amount of time to allow behaviors to evolve to match our physiology and to become in tune with the environment. We know that it worked, because we’re here today. If it didn’t work, nature would have selected against it, and there would be no descendants of it today. But, humans did this practically forever, and they didn’t wipe themselves out or harm the planet on which they relied for survival.
Ishmael summarizes the Leaver story as a set of guidelines. “Compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but don’t hunt down your competitors, destroy their food, or deny them access to food.” He calls this “The Law of Life.”
I want to be clear that this law doesn’t require people to be peaceful or pacifist. It doesn’t require them to eat certain diets or practice certain faiths. It doesn’t even prevent raids against other tribes. It doesn’t prohibit the development of technology or the practice of most lifestyle concepts, such as herding, foraging, hunting, or even some agriculture. It says, “Go out there and get yours.” Nothing wrong with that.
What it does prohibit is going to war. Raids and feuding are one thing, and one could even argue that they’re beneficial in some long-term sense. But, the point at which a tribe decides they’re going to go full genocide and wipe another tribe out is the point at which the other tribes have to take notice, band together, and eradicate the aberrant tribe. That’s the way it was done in the past, and tribes lived side by side for centuries. The Cain people went to war with their neighbors because their lifestyle required expansion, and that mentality went on for so long that humans forgot there was actually a different way of life. Humans forgot that this expansionist, dominant behavior isn’t human nature.
Going to war with other species is also a bad idea. We’ve seen what has happened in our world. We’ve dumped limitless poison to “control” the insect populations, and that has wiped out beneficial insects and appears to have made some “nuisance” species even more of a problem. We have overused antibiotics to the point that even the most powerful of them are useless against some superbugs. With responsible use, we could have used antibiotics for centuries, but instead we wanted control and tried to obliterate the bacteria. That made the survivors stronger. The European colonizers mostly wiped out the American bison in order to control the native population, and they ended up causing massive desertification because the herds were no longer tending the grasslands. Pioneers hated the wolves, so they killed them off, thus causing the prey populations to increase to uncontrolled levels. Those, in turn, began to damage the ecosystem from overgrazing.
These are just a few examples. A comprehensive list of violations of the Law of Life would be impossible to imagine, much less to compose. They all feature something in common though: control. In every situation wherein our culture violates this natural law, we are seeking to impose control over some other being or some situation. As far as we know, we’re the only species capable of considering abstract ideas like “time” and “death.” Maybe this gives us anxiety about these things and the desire to control them.
Well, our desire to control is coming to a head. We have now populated all habitable parts of the planet, and we have attempted to impose our will on those parts. We see the results of our tinkering every day. Every scientist of any significant legitimacy agrees that climate change, and the accompanying destruction it brings, has been brought about by human behavior — human decisions — human attempts to control things. It’s caused by our culture’s delusion that we know good and evil, that we know what needs to live and what needs to die. Our culture’s delusion that we know what’s best for “our” world, for “our” ecosystem, for “our” waterways and skies, for “our” forests and grasslands. We are Cain’s people, and we ate that damned fruit. Nothing happened except that we became deluded into believing that we deserved to control the world. We see how well that’s working out.
Son, I’m going to raise you to understand the Taker story, but I won’t raise you to live it. The Taker story is ending. After a long 10 thousand years, the Takers are going to die out. Cain’s people are going to die out. The cost of eating that damned fruit was death, and our culture, the world as we know it, is going to die out. But, that doesn’t mean that humans have to die out. It doesn’t mean that humanity has to end.
I’m going to make sure that you understand the Leaver story, and I’m going to try to impress on you the importance of living that way. I’m going to impress on you the importance of the Law of Life. I feel like that’s the only responsible thing left to do. You and your descendants, should you choose to have them, and should they survive the climate mess that we’ve created, will have to put together a new way of life. It will have to be based on the Law of Life, but it will look like whatever works for you and “your people,” your tribe. As the Cain people fade away, the next era of humans will have to take over and try to find their way back to what our ancestors did before all of — this.
I believe in you, my boy. I know that you’re going to be the best of your mother and me. We’re going to have a good time together, despite the world around us, despite the tragedy of the transition now underway. I so look forward to meeting you. I love you.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
