“I’m Christ’s message.”
“A Lutheran minister would say the same, as would a Presbyterian minister or a Baptist preacher, even though some of their answers would differ from your own. So here you are, and I want you to understand what you’re doing here.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Though he probably wouldn’t think of it in these terms, Fr. Lulfre has sent you here to become my message.”
An icy chill skittered down my spine.
A new horizon
“If you press a group of schoolchildren to explain why we’re teetering on the edge of calamity, they’ll soon trot out all the coffeehouse cliches—all the theories the Unabomber set forth so solemnly and at such great length in his magnum opus a couple years ago: out-of-control technological advancement, out-of-control industrial greed, out-of-control government expansion, and so on. How do you think all these commonplace explanations evolved?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Forgive me for answering so promptly, but I know this is something I’ve never given any thought to.”
“Then let’s give it some thought now. One of the major obstacles to building the Panama Canal in the late decades of the nineteenth century was yellow fever. Its cause was unknown and it was unbeatable by the medical science of the day. Perhaps you know something of this.”
“Yes. At that time it was thought to be caused by night air. People who stayed inside at night caught the disease less often than those who went out.”
“But some who stayed inside at night caught it anyway.”
“That’s right, because they left their windows open. Eventually people realized they had to be very careful not to let in any night air at all.”
“But, as Walter Reed eventually discovered, the carrier of the disease wasn’t the night air, it was the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which hunts in the night air.”
“Yes.”
“What led people to think that night air was to blame?”
I shook my head, boggled by the question, and told B I didn’t know how to answer it.
“Make a start at it all the same,” he said. “Give it a shot.”
I shrugged and gave it a shot. “This is what people thought. There wasn’t anything inherently irrational in the idea, and in fact it had some merit.”
“Good. I should add that the account you’ve just given is more legend than fact, but it serves to illustrate the point. The ideas the Unabomber articulated are also ‘what people think.’ There isn’t anything inherently irrational in them, and in fact they have some merit.”
“Okay, I see what you’re saying. Vaguely.”
“Both groups are struggling under a handicap. Do you see what it is?”
“I’d say that, in both groups, their intellectual horizon is too close. They’re looking for causes too near to the effect.”
“Exactly. This is the overriding effect of the Great Forgetting. In our culture—East and West, twins of a single birth—human history is only what’s happened since our agricultural revolution began. In our culture, because of the Great Forgetting, people looking at the horizon are only looking back in time a few thousand years. In 1654 Archbishop Ussher calculated that the human race was born in 4004 B.C. Later, archaeologists calculated that this is just when the very first cities of Mesopotamia began to be built. For a people who imagined that Man was born an agriculturalist and a civilization builder, what could make better sense? The human race appeared in Mesopotamia six thousand years ago—and immediately began building cities. The Great Forgetting imprinted this picture indelibly on our cultural mind. It doesn’t matter that everyone ‘knows’ the human race is three million years older than the cities of Mesopotamia. Every molecule of thought in our culture bears the impress of the idea that we needn’t look beyond the Mesopotamian horizon in order to understand our history.”
“And you’re telling me that your horizon is three million years.”
“Always. For me, Mesopotamia is erased as a horizon. How do you think one manages such a thing?”
“I suppose one manages it by climbing a ladder, which is to say by seeing things from a higher vantage point.”
“That’s right. When you do that, events that formerly seemed huge (because they’re close) take their place in a deeper landscape and no longer stand out with the same prominence as before.”
Climbing the ladder
“We were talking about the cliches that people trot out to explain why we’re teetering on the edge of calamity: out-of-control technological advancement, out-of-control industrial greed, out-of-control government expansion, and so on. These are explanations that make sense to people of the Great Forgetting, to people who think that they’re seeing the human horizon when they look at the Mesopotamian horizon. For people of the Great Forgetting, our agricultural revolution was literally the beginning of human history. When I view the human horizon, I’m looking back three million years past the Mesopotamian horizon, so it’s simply grotesque to think of our agricultural revolution as signaling the beginning of human history. It signals something, to be sure, but not remotely ‘the beginning of human history.’”
Feeling it was time to man