“Right.”
“There are three strategies here that you say are evolutionarily wwstable: Hunt your competitors down, destroy their food, and deny them access to food. Right?”
“Right.”
“But now you’re telling me that our whole culture is founded on these evolutionarily wwstable strategies.”
“Right again.”
“If these strategies are evolutionarily unstable, then how do we manage to pursue them?”
“Pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy doesn’t eliminate you instantly, Jared, it eliminates you eventually.”
“But how is it eliminating us?”
B cocked her head as if to ask why I was suddenly being so dense. “Jared, where were you the other night in Stuttgart when Charles was explaining the connection between totalitarian agriculture and overpopulation? Because six billion of us are pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy, we’re fundamentally attacking the very ecological systems that keep us alive. Just like the goat that refuses to suckle its kids, we’re in the process of eliminating ourselves. Think about the time line Charles drew in his talk about the boiling frog. For the first six thousand years, the impact of our evolutionarily unstable strategy was minimal and confined to the Near East. Over the next two thousand years, the strategy spread to Eastern Europe and the Far East. In the next fifteen hundred years, the strategy spread throughout the Old World. In the next three hundred years, it became global. By the end of the next two hundred years—which is now—so many people were following the strategy that the impact was becoming catastrophic. We’re now about two generations away from finishing the job of making this unstable strategy extinct.”
I struggled to my feet and went for a walk.
The eyes begin to open
When I returned fifteen minutes later, I told B what I’d had to get away to think about. I’d heard everything Charles had said in Stuttgart and thought I understood it, but I hadn’t. In spite of everything he said, I felt sure he was showing us that our population explosion is a social problem, like, say, crime or racism. I failed to hear him say that our population explosion is a biological problem, that if we pursue a policy that would be fatal for any species, then it will be fatal for us in exactly the same way. We can’t will it to be otherwise. We can’t say, “Well, yes, our civilization is built on an evolutionarily unstable strategy but we can make it work anyhow, because we’re humans.” The world will not make an exception for us. And of course what the Church teaches is that God will make an exception for us. God will let us behave in a way that would be fatal for any other species, will somehow “fix it” so we can live in a way that is in a very real sense self-eliminating. This is like expecting God to make our airplanes fly even if they’re aerodynamically incapable of flight.
“This will probably sound very naive,” I said, “but why is this such a secret? Why is this something I’ve never heard before? Why isn’t this taught in the schools?”
“It’s not a secret, of course. It’s just that the pieces of the puzzle are scattered among so many disciplines—so many disciplines that rarely talk to each other—archaeology, history, anthropology, biology, sociology. And who exactly would teach it in the schools?”
“Everyone should teach it,” I told her. “They should teach this first. Reading, writing, and arithmetic can wait.”
“Well, naturally I agree with you. This is the word of B, Jared: If the world is saved, it will not be saved by people with the old vision and new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with a new vision and no programs. This is because vision propagates itself and needs no programs. In the last half hour your eyes have begun to open to that new vision. But as yet you have only the bleak side of the vision—the shadow side.”
I had to agree with that.
“So we come again—as we must, again and again, Jared—to these two visions, the Taker vision and the Leaver, or animist, vision. A few minutes ago, you did a fine job of articulating the Taker vision, the vision that has driven our culture through its ten thousand years of triumph and catastrophe. As the Takers see it, the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. The next question is: Where did this vision come from?”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand the meaning of the question,” I told her.
“That’s all right. Charles would have insisted on prodding you across this gap, but I’ve promised not to follow his example. I’ll tell you where the vision came from, and you can tell me whether my explanation is plausible and persuasive. The Taker vision came from the Taker experience of the world—from the way the people of our culture made their living, which was, after all, by conquering and ruling the world. The practice of totalitarian agriculture over thousands of years gave them the idea that the world had been made for Man, and Man had been made to conquer and rule it. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, it makes perfect sense. I suppose you could call it a sort of rough-and-ready empiricism: ’We’ve always lived as though the world was made for us, so it must have been made for us.”
“The important thing to note is that the vision grew out of the lifestyle, the lifestyle didn’t grow out of the vision. Is that clear?”
“Well … it’s almost clear.”
“What I mean is, one day eleven thousand years ago, the Mesolithic hunters of Iraq didn’t get together and say, ‘Look, we’ve examined the world and conclude that it was made for humans to conquer and rule. Therefore we should get off our duffs and start conquering and ruling it.’ Rather, what happened was that, over thousands of years of living like conquerors and rulers, the people of our culture gradually began to conceive the curious notion that the world had actually been created for us to conquer and rule. They began to imagine that they were fulfilling human destiny itself.”
“I understand. The Taker vision grew out of the Taker lifestyle, not the other way around.”
“Now, what do you suppose the Leaver vision grew out of?”
“I’d suppose it grew out of the Leaver lifestyle.”
“And you’d be right, of course. And what do you know of that lifestyle?”
“To be honest … nothing at all.”
B nodded. “That’s our challenge for today, Jared. I have to reveal to you the vision that grew out of a lifestyle you know nothing about.”