If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (3 page)

Daniel
. Granted. But even in this biblical version of the story, there's no suggestion that the first agriculturalist had been preceded by fifteen or twenty thousand generations of hunter-gatherers.

Elaine
. Certainly not. We were agriculturalists from the very first generation — according to the biblical story.

Daniel
. Now at last we're poised to give our Martian anthropologist the answer to his first, overriding question. Current in our culture is this version of human history: Humanity is some three million years
old, but nothing of consequence happened until we abandoned the hunting-gathering life and became
agriculturalists and civilization builders. How did we end up with this story, prefaced by three million
years in which nothing of consequence happened?

Elaine
. You're asking me to reconstruct it?

Daniel
. Give it a try.

Elaine
. Wow. Okay. During the nineteenth century new scientific discoveries made it untenable to think that life on earth was just a few thousand years old.

Daniel
. Archbishop Ussher's famous calculation, announced in 1654, that the human race was born in
4004 BC, became scientifically untenable. Or rather, to be safe, we can say that it became untenable to
those who find scientific evidence more convincing than the belief structure on which Archbishop
Ussher made his calculation.

Elaine
. Yes.

Daniel
. The result was that, among those who generally accepted the evidence of geology and
paleobiology — and with it the emerging theory of evolution — the human story had to be revised. It
was no longer going to be accepted that Man had been born an agriculturalist and civilization builder
just a few thousand years ago.

Elaine
. No.

Daniel
. And so how was it revised?

Elaine
. It was revised to the present version: Humans were around for three million years as hunter-gatherers, but they were of no importance until they abandoned the hunting-gathering life for the
agricultural life, beginning about ten thousand years ago.

Daniel
. Why was it important to sweep the first three million years of the human story under the rug in this way? Important to the people of our culture, of course.

Elaine
. I'll have to think about that... I guess I have to say that they honestly saw nothing of value in them.

Daniel
. Did anyone look?

Elaine
. No one that I'm aware of, but that might not prove anything.

Daniel
. You're aware of Darwin and his importance to the history of human thought.

Elaine
. Of course.

Daniel
. It was imperative that
someone
make sense of the startling discoveries of the young science of paleobiology. If it hadn't been Darwin, it would have been Alfred Russel Wallace. The existence of these
findings
demanded
a reasonable explanation, and this explanation would rattle a lot of cages. It wasn't going to go unnoticed.

Elaine
. True... but I'm not quite sure what point you're making.

Daniel
. Paleobiology ultimately made it clear that 99 percent of the human story was played out before the Agricultural Revolution, but no one you can name tried to make sense of it.

Elaine
. No.

Daniel
. Let's make a conjecture: There was no
felt need
for anyone to make sense of it.

Elaine
. I'd say that was right.

Daniel
. But why? Why were the people of our culture content to sweep the first three million years of the human story under the rug and leave them there?

Elaine
. Okay, I see where you're going now.

Daniel
. But what's the answer? I said a few minutes ago that we were at last poised to give our Martian anthropologist the answer to his first, overriding question. Now we're there: Why did the people of our
culture — the vanguard and beneficiaries of the Agricultural Revolution — sweep the first three million
years of the human story under the rug and leave them there?

Elaine
[
after some thought
]. Those three million years of human history threatened us.

Daniel
. In what way? Now you've got to start working as an anthropologist. The people of our culture don't want to think about the fact that, for the first three million years of human life, people lived as
hunter-gatherers rather than as agriculturalists and civilization builders. What's behind this reluctance?

Elaine
. It's a threat to our self-image.

Daniel
. Go on.

Elaine
. The story we tell ourselves is that being
fully
human means planting crops and building civilization. This makes us the only
true
humans. In order to maintain our status as the only
true
humans, we don't want to look at the humanity of our hunting-gathering ancestors. We want to
deny
their humanity. They weren't in any real sense humans at all. They were just Stone Age brutes. So we
don't have to think about them.

Daniel
. To accord them humanity is to deny that we — and we alone — are humanity, which is an
important element of our cultural mythology.

Elaine
. Yes, that's it.

Daniel
. To be human is to live the way we live. This is the one right way for people to live, and
everyone in the world must be made to live the way we live. It was our holy duty to destroy all the
aboriginal cultures we found in the New World, in Australia, in Africa, and so on.

Elaine
. That's right.

Daniel
[
after a pause
]. Obviously we haven't been breaking new ground here, but that wasn't my purpose. I wanted to give you some insight into my development as a Martian anthropologist, into the
path I followed to assemble the answers found in
Ishmael
and my other books. I began with a rather trivial observation, that a nuclear holocaust would throw us much farther back than the Stone Age, and
from there went from point to point to discover that, according to our cultural mythology, there is only
one right way for people to live — our way — and that everyone in the world must be made to live this
way. Globalization isn't a recent policy; it's been in place among us for thousands of years.

Elaine
. Yes, I can see that.

Daniel
. I think we should take a break here. I'd like to know what your reaction to this first session has been.

Elaine
. Well, I came hoping to nail down some of your ideas — to settle them in my head. And this has had that effect to some extent. Obviously we've just scratched the surface.

Daniel
. I'm glad it's had that effect, but my own purpose is to explore my
method
, if that's what it is.
This is the question that has remained unanswered ever since
Ishmael
came out: How did I come to have these ideas? For me they're just the product of hard work and inquiry, but to others they come as
revelations. You can't imagine the hundreds of letters I've had from people who tell me that I've turned
their world upside down.

Elaine
. So what exactly are you asking?

Daniel
. I'm asking if I've given you any insight into the workings of my mind — into the workings of the mind of a Martian anthropologist.

Elaine
[
after giving the matter some thought
]. I guess I have to say some insight, yes. But the way you approach problems —

Daniel
[
interrupting
]. My "frame of reference."

Elaine
. Yes. That remains a mystery. I couldn't do it myself.

Daniel
. I wouldn't expect you to at this point. We're just beginning the journey. Before we break for lunch, I'd like to set you a challenge.

Elaine
. Okay.

Daniel
. As I pointed out a while ago, acknowledging that humanity existed for three million years
before we came along conflicts with our cultural mythology, which insists that we, the beneficiaries and
promoters of the Agricultural Revolution, are humanity itself. You understand that, while the
Agricultural Revolution began ten thousand years ago, it didn't
end
then. It's still being carried forward today as we continue to clear land for crops to grow food for ourselves.

Elaine
. Yes, I understand that.

Daniel
. The idea that humans were around for three million years before us threatens our cultural
mythology, but it threatens something much more fundamentally important than that. I want you to
examine our culture like a Martian anthropologist and see if you can come up with it. To do this, you'll
have think about all the essential elements of our culture, all the constituent parts of it.

Elaine
[
after another long pause
]. I'm afraid I'm drawing a blank.

Daniel
. To think like a Martian anthropologist, you have to float high above and look at the whole
bunch of us — Americans, Chinese, East Indians, Arabs, Europeans — to discover why affirming the
humanity of our ancient ancestors poses a deeper and more immediate threat to us than anything we've
discussed so far. I could easily lead you to it with hints, but I don't want to do that. However long it
takes, I want you to make this discovery on your own.

Elaine
[
after a pause
]. I guess this leaves me feeling rather at sea.

Daniel
. You came here in a passive capacity: to take in what I have to teach. But I want you to leave with more than that. I want you to leave with the ability to do what I do. That won't happen if I just give you all the answers — or if I lead you to the answers through a carefully sequenced series of questions
the way Ishmael did with Alan [in
Ishmael
] and Julie [in
My Ishmael
].

Elaine
. Yes, I can see that. But all the same...

Daniel
. Yes... ?

Elaine
. It's daunting.

Daniel
. Any progress?

Elaine
. You mean on the question you posed? No. I have the feeling I don't really understand it.

Daniel
. Acknowledging that humanity existed for three million years before we came along conflicts
with our cultural mythology, as you pointed out. But it poses a more dangerous threat than this.

Elaine
. To whom?

Daniel
. If I give you this, then I may as well give you the whole thing. This is probably too challenging a test for you to begin with. Don't let it worry you. You need more experience with easier tasks.

Elaine
. Okay.

Daniel
. A few years ago a reader wrote to me to express his surprise at what seemed to him all the dumb questions being asked on my Web site. For him, everything I was saying seemed quite simple: Anything
we humans do that disturbs the balance of Nature must be eliminated from our way of life.

Elaine
. Uh-huh.

Daniel
. What does this "uh-huh" mean? Are you agreeing with him?

Elaine
[
disconcerted
]. Well, yes, I guess so. In a general way.

Daniel
. In a general way. In other words, stated in a general way, what Daniel Quinn is saying is that anything we humans do that disturbs the balance of Nature must be eliminated from our way of life.

Elaine
. I take it you don't agree.

Daniel
. Agreement isn't the point. The two of you share a frame of reference, and that's what we have to examine. To put it another way, the Martian anthropologist asks himself, "What's behind this statement?
What's in their minds that leads them to say this? What are they thinking?" Or, to put it an even better way, "What does this statement reveal about their vision of the way world works?"

Elaine
sighs.

Daniel
. You're frustrated.

Elaine
. Yes, I guess so. I came here thinking I had a pretty good grasp of your vision of the way the world works.

Daniel
. It's not my particular vision. I mean it's not a vision that's peculiar to me. It's a vision generally accepted in the world of science.

Elaine
. What's the statement again?

Daniel
. Anything we humans do that disturbs the balance of Nature must be eliminated from our way of life.

Elaine
. It seems to me to be a statement that a great many people would agree with.

Daniel
. You're probably right. That's what we're looking at: the frame of reference that a great many people — possibly even a majority of people — share. That's the anthropologist's task... I've been
thinking of this as a book title for a good many years:
If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways
.

Elaine
laughs.

Daniel
. If you were to pass around a sheet of lined paper with this statement on it, most people would probably write on the next line, "Yes, that's right." I turn the paper sideways and write something else on it.

Elaine
. What would you write on it?

Daniel
[
shaking his head
]. The lines on the lined paper represent assumptions or, you might say, the received wisdom of our culture. What is the assumption on which this statement is written? — Anything
we humans do that disturbs the balance of Nature must be eliminated from our way of life.