“True,” I said, then sat there blinking for a few moments. “Something you said a moment ago. We’ll never know what the Leavers of Europe or Asia were up to when the people of my culture arrived to plow them under.”
“Yes?”
“I think some information about that has been dug up in recent years.”
Ishmael nodded. “If it’s recent, then I might well not have heard of it.”
“An archeologist named Riane Eisler wrote about a widespread Leaver agricultural society that existed in Europe until it was overrun by the Takers five or six thousand years ago. Except she didn’t call them Leavers and Takers, of course. I don’t know a lot about it, but evidently the culture the Takers plowed under was based on goddess worship.”
Ishmael nodded. “One of my students was aware of the book you’re talking about but was unable to explain its significance as you’ve done. It’s called, I believe, The Chalice and the Blade.”
8
“Returning to the subject of inspiration, it seems to me that these days you have another promising source of it,” Ishmael said.
“What’s that?”
“All my other pupils, when they reached this point, said, ‘Yes, yes, this is wonderful—but people are not going to relinquish their hold on the world. It just can’t happen. Never. Not in a thousand years.’ And I had nothing I could point to as a hopeful example to the contrary. Now I do.”
It took me about ninety seconds to see it. “I assume you mean what’s been happening in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the past few years.”
“That’s right. Ten years ago, twenty years ago, anyone predicting that Marxism would soon be dismantled from the top would have been labeled a hopeless visionary, an utter fool.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“But once the people of these countries were inspired by the possibility of a new way of life, the dismantling took place almost overnight.”
“Yes, I see what you mean. Five years ago I would have said that no amount of inspiration could accomplish that—or this.”
“And now?”
“And now it’s just barely thinkable. Improbable as hell but not unimaginable.”
9
“But I do have another question,” I added.
“Proceed.”
“Your ad said, ‘Must earnestly desire to save the world.’”
“Yes?”
“What do I do if I earnestly desire to save the world?” Ishmael frowned at me through the bars for a long moment. “You want a program?”
“Of course I want a program.”
“Then here is a program: The story of Genesis must be reversed. First, Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is essential if you’re to survive. The Leavers are the endangered species most critical to the world—not because they’re humans but because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there is no one right way to live. And then, of course, you must spit out the fruit of that forbidden tree. You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.”
“Yes, I see all that, but that’s a program for mankind, that’s not a program for me. What do I do?”
“What you do is to teach a hundred what I’ve taught you, and inspire each of them to teach a hundred. That’s how it’s always done.”
“Yes, but … is it enough?”
Ishmael frowned. “Of course it’s not enough. But if you begin anywhere else, there’s no hope at all. You can’t say, We’re going to change the way people behave toward the world, but ‘we’re not going to change the way they think about the world or the way they think about divine intentions in the world or the way they think about the destiny of man.’ As long as the people of your culture are convinced that the world belongs to them and that their divinely-appointed destiny is to conquer and rule it, then they are of course going to go on acting the way they’ve been acting for the past ten thousand years. They’re going to go on treating the world as if it were a piece of human property and they’re going to go on conquering it as if it were an adversary. You can’t change these things with laws. You must change people’s minds. And you can’t just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they’ve lost—something that makes better sense than the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn’t serve his needs directly or indirectly.”
I shook my head. “What you’re saying is that someone has to stand up and become to the world of today what Saint Paul was to the Roman Empire.”