“That’s right. This was the law that was being followed by every tribe in the Fertile Crescent, every tribe in the Near East, and every tribe in the world.”
“I’ve got that,” I told him.
“But when the Takers began to overrun their neighbors, they had to create a new law. They didn’t want the tribes they overran to go on fighting each other.”
“I’ve got that too.”
“So what was the new law, Julie?”
“The new law had to be ‘Don’t fight anybody.’ ”
“Of course. And as you pointed out a minute ago, this meant that the Erratic Retaliator strategy went out the window—and tribal independence went out with it. The Takers wanted to administer a world where people worked, not a world where people wasted energy playing Erratic Retaliator.”
“Yes, that’s obvious.”
“The old tribal boundaries were meaningless now—geographically and culturally—not only for the Hullas, the Puala, the Cario, and the Alba, but for the Takers themselves. The Takers didn’t bring to the new mix their old tribal ways. These would have been meaningless to the others. All the old tribal ways were equally meaningless in the new world order being built by the Takers. It was pointless for the Hullas to teach their children what had worked for Hullas for tens of thousands of years, because they were no longer Hullas. It was pointless for the Cario to teach their children what had worked for Cario for tens of thousands of years, because they were no longer Cario.
“But though they belonged to a new world order, people didn’t stop being troublesome, disruptive, selfish, cruel, greedy, and violent, did they? The same old behavior continued—but without tribal law to moderate its effects. Even if the old tribal laws were remembered, the Takers would find them impossible to administer. The Hulla way of dealing with disruptive behavior might be fine for Hullas, but it wouldn’t be acceptable to the Cario. I’m sure you can see that.”
“Yes.”
“So how are the Takers going to deal with disruptive behavior among the people they rule? What are they going to do about adultery, assault, rape, thievery, murder, and so on?”
“They’re going to outlaw them.”
“Of course. Under the tribal order, outlawing things was never the idea. Instead, the laws of each tribe served to minimize the damage and put people back together. Tribal laws didn’t say, ‘Such things must never happen,’ because they knew for an absolute fact that such things will happen. Rather, they said, ‘When such things happen, here’s what must be done in order to put things right as far as they can be put right.’ ”
“I understand.”
“We’re near the end here, Julie. There’s only one last thing to see. To the tribal mind, it’s asinine to formulate a law that you know is going to be disobeyed. To formulate a law that you know is going to be disobeyed is to bring the whole concept of law into disrepute. A prime example of a law that you know is going to be disobeyed is a law in the form thou shalt not. It doesn’t matter what you follow those words with. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not injure—every single one of these is a law that you know is going to be disobeyed. Because tribal peoples didn’t waste time with laws they knew would be disobeyed, disobedience was not a problem for them. Tribal law didn’t outlaw mischief, it spelled out ways to undo mischief, so people were glad to obey it. The law did something good for them, so why would they break it? But from the very beginning Taker law was a body of laws that you knew would be broken—and (not surprisingly) they’ve been broken day in and day out for ten thousand years.”
“Yes. That’s amazing—an amazing way to look at it.”
“And because your laws were formulated with the understanding that they would be broken from the very first day, you had to have a way of dealing with lawbreakers.”
“Yes. Lawbreakers had to be punished.”
“That’s right. What else can you do with them? Having saddled yourselves with laws that you assume will be broken, you’ve never found anything to do that makes better sense than punishing people for doing exactly what you expected them to do in the first place. For ten thousand years you’ve been making and multiplying laws that you fully expect to be broken, until now I suppose you must have literally millions of them, many of them broken millions of times a day. Do you personally know a single person who isn’t a lawbreaker?”
“No.”
“I’m sure that even at your age you’ve broken dozens.”
“Hundreds,” I said confidently.
“The very officials you elect to uphold the laws break them. And at the same time your pillars of society somehow find it possible to become indignant over the fact that some people have little respect for the law.”
“It is amazing,” I told him.
“The destruction of tribal law and the Erratic Retaliator strategy was not something that could have happened gradually, over hundreds or thousands of years. It had to begin immediately, at the site of the very first Taker encroachment. Tribal law and the Erratic Retaliator strategy were barricades that had to come down right at the outset. Whatever their real names were, the Hullas, the Cario, the Albas, and the Puala had to disappear as tribal entities. Within a few decades the surrounding tribes had to fall in the same way, willingly or unwillingly exchanging tribal independence for Taker power. The revolution spread outward from
this center, like a circle of fire burning away a cultural heritage that reached all the way back to your primate origins.
“The memory of having been Hullas, Cario, Albas, and Puala didn’t vanish in a single generation, of course, but neither did it plausibly survive for more than four or five generations—but say even ten generations and this is only two centuries. At the end of a thousand years here at the center, the descendants of the Hullas, Cario, Albas, and Puala wouldn’t even remember that such a thing as the tribal life had ever existed. It would obviously still be remembered at the perimeter of Taker expansion, but by now that perimeter enclosed Persia, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. A thousand years later that perimeter would extend well into the Far East, Russia, and Europe. Tribal peoples were still being encountered and engulfed at the perimeter of Taker expansion, but this was eight thousand years ago, Julie.
“The revolutionary heartland was still the Near East and indeed the Fertile Crescent. Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, was the New York City of this era. Here your culture’s most powerful innovation (after totalitarian agriculture and locking up the food) was just being tinkered with—writing. But another five thousand years would pass before the logographers of classical Greece began to think of using this tool to make a record of the human past. When they did at last begin to record the human past, this is the picture that began to emerge: The human race was born just a few thousand years ago in the vicinity of the Fertile Crescent. It was born dependent on crops, and planted them as instinctively as bees build hives. It also had an instinct for civilization. So, as soon as it was born, the human race began planting crops and building civilization. There was, of course, utterly no memory left of humanity’s tribal past, extending back hundreds of thousands of years. That had disappeared without a trace in what one of my pupils whimsically (but quite usefully) calls the Great Forgetting.
“For hundreds of thousands of years, people as smart as you had had a way of life that worked well for them. The descendants of these people can today still be found here and there, and wherever they’re found in an untouched state, they give every evidence of being perfectly content with their way of life. They’re not at war with each other, generation against generation or class against class. They’re not plagued by anguish, anxiety, depression, self-hatred, crime, madness, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They don’t complain of oppression and injustice. They don’t describe their lives as meaningless and empty. They’re not seething with hatred and rage. They don’t look into the sky, yearning for contact with gods and angels and prophets and alien spacemen and spirits of the dead. And they don’t wish someone would come along and tell them how to live. This is because they already know how to live, as ten thousand years ago humans everywhere knew how to live. But knowing how to live was something the people of your culture had to destroy in order to make themselves the rulers of the world.