“Of course it does. Confined to their own few hundred square miles, the Gebusi are quaint and bizarre. Blow them up into a universal world culture to which every human must belong and they become an obscenity. The same is true in general. Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong. Confined to the few hundred square miles in which it was born, our own culture would have been merely quaint and bizarre. Blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong, it is a horrifying obscenity.”
“I think I’m beginning to see,” I told him. “I think I’m beginning to see what you’re getting at as a whole.”
B nodded. “You probably don’t remember why I brought up the Gebusi in the first place. You said it was a wonder that we ever adopted totalitarian agriculture, considering the fact that, far from making life easier or more secure, it actually has the opposite effect.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“I wanted you to see that lifestyle strategies adopted in a culture aren’t necessarily logical. They don’t necessarily benefit people in obvious ways. They aren’t necessarily adopted because they make life more comfortable—though people may use this rationale to explain them to children and outsiders. In our culture, for example, the adoption of our style of agriculture is presented to our children as an inevitable step forward for the human race, because it makes life easier and more secure.”
I asked B what it did do if it doesn’t make life easier and more secure.
“That’s exactly what we’re trying to understand here. We’re presented with a complex of behaviors and we’re trying to figure out how they work together to produce the result that we see. Right now, sort through the peculiarities of the Gebusi and see if you can find a mechanism that would tend to make them blow up into a universal world culture to which all must belong.”
I asked him what sort of mechanism he meant.
“Some dynamic within the culture. Some custom, some deeply held belief.”
I spent a minute or two on it but could find no mechanism that would produce that effect.
“Invent one then,” B said.
“I suppose territorial ambitions would have that effect.”
“Not by themselves,” B said. “The Aztecs had territorial ambitions, but once they conquered you, they didn’t give a damn how you lived. They weren’t interested in turning their neighbors into Aztecs. This is why, vile as they may have been, they were not us—not what Ishmael calls Takers.”
“Okay, I see where you’re coming from. You’d have to make them cultural missionaries if you wanted them to blow up into a world-dominating culture.”
“And in order to make them cultural missionaries, you’d have to endow them with a belief. Missionaries are nothing if not believers. What kind of believers would the Gebusi have to be?”
“They would have to be believers in the rightness of their way of life.”
“Exactly. If the Gebusi believed that theirs was the one right way for all humans to live (which they don’t, by the way), this would motivate them to become cultural missionaries to the world. But the belief alone wouldn’t be enough. The people of our culture have always held this belief—have throughout history demonstrated that they held this belief—but they needed another mechanism as well. I suppose you could call it a spreading mechanism. A mechanism that would push them across the face of their earth as they spread the gospel of their cultural enlightenment.”
“Agriculture,” I said.
“Agriculture of a particular design, Jared, because not every kind of agriculture will push a people across the face of the earth. The modest agriculture of the Gebusi simply wouldn’t support such an expansion.”
“I understand.”
“In our culture, to support one peculiarity, we needed a second peculiarity, and the two reinforced each other. We believed (and still believe) that we have the one right way for people to live, but we needed totalitarian agriculture to support our missionary effort. Totalitarian agriculture gave us fabulous food surpluses, which are the foundation of every military and economic expansion. No one was able to stand against us anywhere in the world, because no one had a food-producing machine as powerful as ours. Our military and economic success confirmed our belief that we have the one right way for people to live. It still does so today. For the people of our culture, the fact that we’re able to defeat and destroy any other lifestyle is taken as clear proof of our cultural superiority.”
“Yes, I’m afraid that’s so. When it comes to cultural ‘survival of the fittest,’ we’re the champs.”
“You mean that we’re champion exemplars of the process of natural selection.”
“Well … yes, I guess that’s what I mean.”
B shook his head. “It shouldn’t be looked at that way—evolutionary ideas always make risky metaphors. The tendency of biological evolution is toward diversity—is now and always has been. Evolution isn’t tending toward ‘the one right species.’ From the beginning, it has been tending away from the singularity from which all life sprang in the primordial stew. I remember as a boy reading a science-fiction story about a mutant organism that was born in a drain, in the fortuitous confluence of a dib of this and a dab of that. This organism was driven by a single tropism, which was to turn living matter into itself. Unstopped, it had the capability of reversing in a few days billions of years of biological evolution by devouring all life-forms on this planet and turning them into a single form, itself. This mutant organism is a perfect metaphor for our culture, which in just a few centuries is reversing millions of years of human development by devouring all cultures on this planet and turning them into a single culture, our own.”
“An ugly thought,” I said.
“I
t’s an ugly process.”
“Gunpowder,” B said, “is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur, and I suppose you know that if any one of these ingredients is missing, then the mixture isn’t explosive.”
“Of course.”