I thought about it for a while and told him it was a good question.
“The whole art consists of asking good questions, Julie. This is information I need to draw from you right at the beginning. It will be the basis of all our later work.”
“I see,” I said, and went back to thinking. After another while I said, “It’s hard to explain.”
“Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain, Julie. Showing someone how to tie a shoelace is easy. Explaining it is almost impossible.”
“Yeah,” I told him. “That’s so.” I worked on it some more. Finally I said, “I don’t know why this example works, but it does work a little bit. Let’s say you have a dozen ice-makers put out by a dozen different companies. One or two of these ice-makers will turn out to be not worth a damn. But most of them will work pretty well.”
“Why is that?”
“I guess because you wouldn’t expect every single one of these companies to be incompetent. Most of them have to be sort of averagely competent to be in business at all.”
“In other words, if you lived on a world where a lot of people made ice-makers, but not a single one of them worked, you’d figure your world was exceptional. If you visited other worlds, you’d expect to find people who knew how to make viable ice-makers. In still other words, it seems to you that there’s something abnormal about dysfunctionality. What’s normal is for things to work. What’s not normal is for things to fail.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Where do you get this impression, Julie? Where do you get the impression that what’s normal is for things to work?”
“Wow,” I said. Where did I get that impression? “Maybe this is it. Every other thing in the whole universe seems to work. The air works, the clouds work, the trees work, the turtles work, the germs work, the atoms work, the mushrooms work, the birds work, the lions work, the worms work, the sun works, the moon works—the whole universe works! Every single thing in it works—except for us. Why? What makes us so special?”
“You know what makes you special, Julie.”
“I do?”
“Yes. This will be the first piece of knowledge I tease out into the light from you. What does Mother Culture have to say about this? What makes you different from turtles and clouds and worms and suns and mushrooms? They all work, and you don’t. Why don’t you work, Julie? What makes you special?”
“We’re special because everything else works. And it’s because we’re special that we don’t work.”
“I agree that there is a circularity in what you learn from Mother Culture on this point. But it will be useful if you define that specialness.”
I squinted at him for a while, then I said, “There’s nothing wrong with turtles and clouds and worms and suns. That’s why they work. But there is something wrong with us. And that’s why we don’t work.”
“Good. But what is that, Julie? What’s wrong with you?”
I spent some time on it. Finally I said, “Is this what maieutic teaching is like?”
Ishmael nodded.
“I’m impressed. I like it. No one has ever done this with me before. Anyway, what’s wrong with us is that we’re civilized. I think that’s it.” But as I went on thinking about it that answer lost some of its certainty. “That’s part of it,” I told him, “that we’re civilized. But there’s also something about the way we’re civilized. We’re not civilized enough.”
“And why is that?”
“Wow,” I said. “The reason we’re not civilized enough is that there’s something wrong with us. It’s like there’s a drop of poison in us, and this one drop of poison is all it takes to ruin everything we do.” I guess I was sitting there with my mouth open, because finally Ishmael told me to go on. I went on.
“Here’s what I hear, Ishmael. Is it okay to call you Ishmael?”
The gorilla nodded, saying, “That is how I’m called.”
“Here’s what I hear: We’ve got to evolve to a higher form in order to survive. I’m not exactly sure where I hear this. It’s like it’s something in the air.”
“I understand.”
“This form we’re in right now is just too primitive. We’re just too primitive. We have to evolve into some higher, more angelic form.”
“In order to work as well as mushrooms and turtles and worms.”
I laughed and said, “Yeah, that’s funny. But that’s the perception, I think. We don’t work as well as mushrooms and turtles and worms because we’re too intelligent, and we don’t work as well as angels and gods because we’re not intelligent enough. We’re in an awkward stage. We were all right when we were less than human and we’ll be all right when we’re more than human, but we’re washouts as we are right now. Humans are just no good. The form itself is no good. I think that’s what Mother Culture has to say.”