“Nice folks to know,” I put in.
“Oddly enough, they are, on the whole, very nice folks to know—not saints, obviously, but pleasant, well-meaning people. If you were to ask them why they are so inclined toward violence, they literally wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. They aren’t notably inclined toward violence, and if you wanted to interview them about crime in their society, you’d have to begin by explaining what crime is. They do things that annoy each other, of course, and there are just as many greedy, boorish, inconsiderate, and selfish people among them as there are among us, but crime as we understand it is nonexistent.
“Apart from homicide statistics, the main difference between them and us is their theory of sickness and death. We believe that sickness occurs when invisible creatures called microbes or germs or viruses invade our bodies. This theory seems nothing but blandly factual to us, but to thinkers of the twenty-third century (should there happen to be any) it will probably seem as quaintly fanciful as the humoral theory of the Renaissance seems to us today. Do you find that imaginable?”
“That our present theory of sickness will someday seem quaint? Oh yes. I find that entirely imaginable.”
“Good. In the Gebusi theory, there’s nothing that corresponds to our notion of death from ‘natural causes.’ All causes of sickness and death are supernatural, and every sickness and death is caused by someone who literally ‘wishes you ill.’ This may be a sorcerer or it may be the spirit of someone living or dead or even the spirit of an animal. To achieve a diagnosis in the case of illness, a medium visits the spirit world in order to discover the guilty party, and this information indicates the best means of treatment. If someone dies, the medium conducts an inquest in consultation with the spirits. Not every inquest leads to the accusation of a living person, but when it does, the accused sorcerer is given the chance to demonstrate his or her innocence by performing a sago divination, a cooking feat so difficult that skill alone can’t assure success. You might compare its difficulty to cooking a perfect souffle the size of a bathtub. Complete success is taken as a sign that the spirit of the deceased was on hand to help out and thus exonerate the accused. Partial success leaves the matter in doubt, and the accused will be spared for a while as other indicators are considered, such as the behavior of the corpse in the suspect’s presence. As the result of the sago divination falls farther and farther short of success, guilt becomes clearer and clearer. In this event, since denial of the crime is pointless in the face of such evidence, the sorcerer will generally express remorse and try to persuade everyone that the anger that moved him or her to practice this sorcery has spent itself. Everyone wants to believe it and reassures the sorcerer that all is forgiven, but, chances are, the miscreant’s days are numbered.
“Among the Gebusi, the spirits of the dead soon return as animals. Those who die young return as small animals—birds or lizards. Those who die at a more advanced age return as larger animals—cassowaries or crocodiles, for example. But executed sorcerers invariably return as wild pigs, which is why (I suspect) executed sorcerers are invariably cooked and eaten. My guess is that, being sorcerers, they are already in some sense wild pigs, which are hunted not only because they’re good to eat but because they’re inhabited by malevolent spirits.”
I interrupted to ask if the Gebusi practice cannibalism in other circumstances.
“As far as I know,” B said, “the only human item on their menu is roasted sorcerer.”
“Fascinating.”
“Now to the point of this anthropological exercise. I want you to imagine that it was not the people of our culture who teemed over the world and made it their own but rather the Gebusi. I want you to imagine a world where every death is routinely avenged by killing and eating a sorcerer. I want you to imagine a world where, if you were a telephone installer, legislator, symphony conductor, or fashion designer in Berlin or Beijing or Tokyo or London or New York City—or Box Elder, Montana—you might at any moment be required to perform a successful sago divination in order to save your life. I want you to imagine a world where eating sorcerers is a perfectly normal thing to do—as normal as sending your children off to educational concentration camps when they reach the age of five or six. I want you to imagine a world where killing a man will turn him into a wild pig as surely as punishing a man will turn him into a good citizen.”
B paused at this point and gave me a hopeful look that I wasn’t sure how to answer. I said, “I think you’re telling me that every culture’s lunacy seems like sanity to the members of that culture.”
“That’s certainly so,” B said. “If I were to tell you that the Gebusi believe that the creator of the universe has spoken to only one people on this earth during its entire history, and that one people is the Gebusi, you would smile patronizingly. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose I would.”
“Yet this is precisely what the people of our culture believe, isn’t it? Has the creator of the universe spoken to anyone but us?”
&n
bsp; “No.”
“Modern humans have been around for two hundred thousand years, but according to our beliefs, God had not a word to say to any of them until we came along. God didn’t speak to the Alawa of Australia or to the Gebusi of New Guinea or to the Bushmen of Africa or to the Navajo of North America or to the Ihalmiut of the Great Barrens of Canada. God didn’t speak a word to any of the other hundreds of thousands of peoples of the world, he spoke only to us. Only to us did he reveal the order and purpose of creation. Only to us did he reveal the laws essential to salvation.”
“That’s right. Speaking with the voice of undoubted faith, that’s right.”
“But this isn’t lunacy.”
“No. Again speaking with the voice of undoubted faith, this isn’t lunacy.”
“It would be completely silly for the Gebusi to believe that they are in direct, exclusive contact with the creator of the universe, but it’s perfectly reasonable for us to believe it.”
“That’s right.”
“Evidently it isn’t just the history of the world that the victors get to write, it’s the theology of the world as well.”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“All the same, right now I’m not asking you to understand something, I’m asking you to do something.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to imagine that the world—this world right here—is a Gebusi world. You, as a Roman Catholic priest, would be tolerated as a vestige of a quaint and harmless superstition. At night men would cluster in bars, not to watch televised sports but to hold raunchy conversations with female spirits clinging to the rafters. Spirit mediums would be on hand to diagnose and cure minor illnesses—and to conduct inquests into community deaths. Friends would invite you to a restaurant to celebrate a killing—and send you home with a slice of roast sorcerer for your family. What more can I tell you? The films would be Gebusi films, the novels Gebusi novels, the politics Gebusi politics, the sports Gebusi sports, the fun Gebusi fun.”
I told him I could imagine it—more or less. “But I can’t imagine what you want me to say.”
“How does it seem to you?”
“How does it seem? It seems insane. Obscene.”