“That’s right. If it had been written from the Taker point of view, the knowledge of good and evil wouldn’t have been forbidden to Adam, it would have been thrust upon him. The gods would have hung around saying, ‘Come on, Man, can’t you see that you’re nothing without this knowledge? Stop living off our bounty like a lion or a wombat. Here, have some of this fruit and you’ll instantly realize that you’re naked—as naked as any lion or wombat: naked to the world, powerless. Come on, have some of this fruit and become one of us. Then, lucky you, you can leave this garden and begin living by the sweat of your brow, the way humans are supposed to live.’ And if people of your cultural persuasion had authored it, this event wouldn’t be called the Fall, it would be called the Ascent—or as you put it earlier, the Liberation.”
“Very true…. But I’m not quite sure how this fits in with everything else.”
“We are furthering your understanding of how things came to be this way.”
“I don’t get it.”
“A minute ago, you told me that the Takers will never give up their tyranny over the world, no matter how bad things get. How did they get to be this way?”
I goggled at him.
“They got to be this way because they’ve always believed that what they were doing was right—and therefore to be done at any cost whatever. They’ve always believed that, like the gods, they know what is right to do and what is wrong to do, and what they’re doing is right. Do you see how they’ve demonstrated what I’m saying?”
“Not offhand.”
“They’ve demonstrated it by forcing everyone in the world to do what they do, to live the way they live. Everyone had to be forced to live like the Takers, because the Takers had the one right way.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“Many peoples among the Leavers practiced agriculture, but they were never obsessed by the delusion that what they were doing was right, that everyone in the entire world had to practice agriculture, that every last square yard of the planet had to be devoted to it. They didn’t say to the people around them, ‘You may no longer live by hunting and gathering. This is wrong. This is evil, and we forbid it. Put your land under cultivation or we’ll wipe you out.’ What they said was, ‘You want to be hunter-gatherers? That’s fine with us. That’s great. We want to be agriculturalists. You be hunter-gatherers and we’ll be agriculturalists. We don’t pretend to know which way is right. We just know which way we prefer.’”
“Yes, I see.”
“And if they got tired of being agriculturalists, if they found they didn’t like where it was leading them in their particular adaptation, they were able to give it up. They didn’t say to themselves, ‘Well, we’ve got to keep going at this even if it kills us, because this is the right way to live.’ For example, there was once a people who constructed a vast network of irrigation canals in order to farm the deserts of what is now southeastern Arizona. They maintained these canals for three thousand years and built a fairly advanced civilization, but in the end they were free to say, ‘This is a toilsome and unsatisfying way to live, so to hell with it.’ They simply walked away from the whole thing and put it so totally out of mind that we don’t even know what they called themselves. The only name we have for them is one the Pima Indians gave them: Hohokam—those who vanished.
“But it’s not going to be this easy for the Takers. It’s going to be hard as hell for them to give it up, because what they’re doing is right, and they have to go on doing it even if it means destroying the world and mankind with it.”
“Yes, that’s the way it seems.”
“Giving it up would mean … what?”
&nbs
p; “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.”
“Yes.”
9
Ishmael nodded to the stack of bibles at my feet. “According to the authors of that story, the people living between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers had eaten at the gods’ own tree of knowledge. Where do you suppose they got that idea?”
“What do you mean?”
“Whatever gave the authors of this story the idea that the people living in the Fertile Crescent had eaten at the gods’ tree of knowledge? Do you suppose they saw it with their own eyes? Do you suppose they were there when your agricultural revolution began?”
“I suppose that’s a possibility.”
“Think. If they’d been there to see it with their own eyes, who would they have been?”
“Oh … right. They would have been the people of the Fall. They would have been the Takers.”
“And if they’d been Takers, they would have told the story a different way.”
“Yes.”
“So the authors of this story were not there to see it with their own eyes. How then did they know it had happened? How did they know that the Takers had usurped the role of the gods in the world?”