“As an explosive mixture, our culture also consists of three essential ingredients, and if any one of them had been missing, no explosion would have taken place here on this planet. We’ve already identified two of the ingredients: totalitarian agriculture and the belief that ours is the one right way. The third is of course the Great Forgetting.”
I thought about it some but finally told him I couldn’t see how the Great Forgetting had contributed to the explosion.
“It contributed to the explosion roughly the way that charcoal contributes to the explosion of gunpowder. How did we come to have the strange idea that our way is the one right way?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s go back again to the foundation thinkers of our culture—Herodotus, Confucius, Abraham, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Socrates, and any others you can think of. Assemble them all in one room and ask them this question: How long have people been living the way we live? What would be their answer?”
“Their answer would be, people have been living this way from the beginning.”
“In other words, Man was born living this way.”
“That’s right.”
“And what does this tell you about the nature of Man?”
“It tells me that Man was meant to live this way. Man is meant to live as a totalitarian agriculturalist and a city builder the way bees were meant to live as honey collectors and hive builders.”
“So tell me, Jared: What else could this be except the one right way?”
“Yes, I see that.”
“What was missing from the education of these thinkers? What was forgotten during the Great Forgetting?”
“What was forgotten was the fact that Man was not born a totalitarian agriculturalist and a city builder. What was forgotten was the fact that our way was not ordained from the beginning of time. If this hadn’t been forgotten, then we would never have been able to persuade ourselves that ours is the one right way. This is why the Great Forgetting was an ingredient essential to our cultural explosion.”
“Let’s go for a walk,” B said. “There’s something I have to pick up for you.”
“Something for me?”
“Something you’ll need later.”
I started to head out the way I’d come, but B beckoned me in the opposite direction, down a hall that opened up behind his chair, the same hall from which Monika and Heinz Teitel had appeared with refreshments the night before. The hall soon widened to accommodate concrete benches on either side, and B told me it had been designed to serve as a bomb shelter for both the theater and a government office building the next street over.
“But I don’t believe it was ever needed for that purpose,” he added.
After a couple hundred meters the tunnel angled up and terminated at a heavy fire door that opened into the subbasement storage room of a government building of some kind. Surprisingly, to me, there was a desk here, and someone manning it, evidendy to monitor access to the storage areas. This person, a middle-aged soldierly type who looked like he would have felt more comfortable in any sort of uniform, glared at us with disapproval but made no vocal objection to our passing through his territory. Two flights of stairs took us up to the ground floor and the street.
Monday, May 20 (cont.)
A visit to the Cretaceous
It was barely eight-thirty when we came out—hardly more than late afternoon in this northern city just weeks before the summer solstice. Despite the early hour, the shops were mostly shuttered, and the streets were all but deserted. Radenau is not to be visited for its exciting nightlife.
B is a stroller, as I am. He seemed to be going nowhere in particular, and I was glad to tag along.
He said, “I’m sure you’re beginning to see why it isn’t possible for me to carry mass audiences of listeners along in this direction.”
“Yes, I see that,” I told him. “But I’m not sure I see the direction.”
“Remember that we’re working on a mosaic, not a narrative or a syllogism. After this conversation, you still won’t have a conclusion, but you should have a more complete understanding of everything you’ve ever heard me say.”
“Yes, that’s true. The figure in the mosaic is still a little vague, but it’s not as vague as it was two hours ago.”
“A while ago you said that, the way I was talking, it’s a wonder that our cultural revolution ever took place. It really is a wonder. It wasn’t destiny, it wasn’t divinely ordained from the foundation of the universe, it wasn’t something that was just inevitably going to happen. It hadn’t happened in two hundred thousand years of people as smart as we are. It might not have happened in another two hundred thousand years—or in another million. It was a quirk, a fluke. Combine one never-before-seen cultural element with a second never-before-seen element, add a third just as odd, and you come up with a cultural monster that is literally devouring the world—and will end by devouring itself if it isn’t stopped.”
We sloped along for a while, then I asked B if the figure in the mosaic was going to turn out to be our culture.