“It will be hard for you to imagine such a thing, but the laws of each tribe are completely sufficient for them. Because they’ve been formulated over the entire lifetime of the tribe, thousands of years, it’s almost inconceivable that some situation could arise that has never been faced before. Nothing is more important for each generation than to receive the law in its entirety. By becoming Enns or Emms, the youth of each generation are imbued with the will of the tribe. The tribal laws represent what it means to be an Ell or a Kay. These are not your laws, Julie, which are largely useless, widely ignored and despised, and forever subject to change. These are laws that do what laws are supposed to do, year after year, generation after generation, age after age.”
“Well,” I said, “that sounds great, I guess, but it also sounds sort of stagnant. To be honest.”
Ishmael nodded. “Of course I want you to be honest, Julie. Always. Remember, however, that in every case these laws represent the will of the tribe, not the will of some outsider. No one forces them to embrace these laws. No court will send them to jail if they scrap their heritage. They’re perfectly free to abandon it anytime they want to.”
“Okay.”
“Only one thing remains to be done before we quit for the day, and that is to examine competition among the Cawks. The patterns that have evolved among them are very similar to those that prevail among the Bawks. Within the tribe, what works best for every individual is to support and defend the tribe; even though each tribal member needs the same resources, his or her best way to get them is to cooperate with other tribal members. As with the Bawks, whose competition is troop against troop, competition among the Cawks is tribe against tribe. In this area we notice that a new strategy is in play in addition to the ones we’re familiar with. This might be described as a strategy of erratic retaliation: ‘Give as good as you get, but don’t be too predictable.’
“In practice, give as good as you get means that if the Emms aren’t bothering you, don’t bother them, but if the Emms do bother you, then be sure to return the favor. Don’t be too predictable means that even if the Emms aren’t bothering you, it will be no bad thing if you make a hostile move against them from time to time. They will of course retaliate, giving as good as they get, but this is just a price to be paid for letting them know that you’re there and haven’t gotten soft. Then, once the score is even between you, you can get together for a big reconciliation party to celebrate your undying friendship and do some matchmaking (because, of course, it doesn’t do to breed endlessly within a single tribe).
“Although the strategy of the ‘Erratic Retaliator’ may sound rather combative, it’s actually a peacekeeping strategy. Think of two people who are quarreling over whether to go to a movie or to a play. Instead of settling the argument with blows, they flip a coin, agreeing beforehand that they’ll go to a movie if it’s heads and to a play if it’s tails. The same purpose is served by agreeing to attack if you’re the resident and to flee if you’re the intruder. Combat is avoided if both parties follow the same strategy. Even so, if you spend a year observing the Jays, the Kays, the Ells, the Emms, the Enns, the Ohhs, and so on, what you see is that they seem to be in a state of more or less constant but very low-level warfare with each other. I don’t mean daily or even monthly warfare, though there will be border skirmishes as frequently as that. I mean that every tribe exists in a state of perpetual readiness. And once or twice a year every tribe will initiate a raid against one or more of its neighbors. To a person of your culture, this will seem puzzling. A person of your culture will want to know when the Cawks are at last going to settle their differences and learn to live in peace. And the answer is that the Cawks will settle their differences and learn to live in peace as soon as mountain sheep settle their differences and learn to live in peace and as soon as st
icklebacks settle their differences and learn to live in peace and as soon as elephant seals settle their differences and learn to live in peace. In other words, the competitive strategies practiced among the Cawks mustn’t be viewed as disorders, as character defects, as ‘problems’ to be solved, any more than the competitive strategies of white-footed mice, wolves, or elk are these things. Far from being defects to be eliminated, they are what is left over when all other strategies are eliminated. In short, they’re evolutionarily stable. They work for the Cawks. They’ve been tested for millions of years, and every other strategy tested against them has been eliminated as a failure.”
“Whew,” I said. “That sounds like a climax.”
“It is,” Ishmael said. “One last point and we’ll call it a day. Why do the Enns just retaliate to attacks from their neighbors and occasionally initiate an attack of their own? Why don’t they just go ahead and annihilate their neighbors?”
“Why would they do that?”
Ishmael shook his head. “That’s not the right question, Julie. It doesn’t matter why they’d do it. The question is, why wouldn’t it work? Or maybe it would work. Maybe it would work better than the other strategy. This time, instead of just raiding the Emms, the Jays go in there and wipe them out.”
“That changes the game entirely,” I said.
“Go on.”
“That would be like agreeing to flip a coin and then refusing to abide by the call.”
“Why is that, Julie?”
“Because Emms can’t retaliate if you wipe them out. The game is, ‘You know I’ll retaliate if you attack me, and I know you’ll retaliate if I attack you.’ But if I wipe you out, then you can’t retaliate. The game’s off.”
“That’s right, but then what, Julie? Let’s suppose the Jays have annihilated the Emms. What are the Kays, the Ells, the Enns, and the Ohhs going to think about this?”
The light dawned at last. “I see where you’re going now,” I told him. “They’re going to say, ‘If the Jays are going to start annihilating opponents, then we’ve got to adopt a new strategy toward them. We can’t afford to treat them as though they’re still playing Erratic Retaliator, because they’re not. We have to treat them as though they’re playing Annihilator, otherwise they may just annihilate us.’ ”
“And how do they have to treat them if they’re playing Annihilator?”
“I’d say it would depend. If the Jays go back to playing Erratic Retaliator, then they could probably just let it be. But if the Jays continue to play Annihilator, then the survivors are going to have to join forces against the Jays and annihilate them.”
Ishmael nodded. “This is what the Native Americans did when the European settlers finally made it completely clear that they were never going to play anything but Annihilator with them. The Native Americans tried to put aside old intertribal grudges and join forces against the settlers—but they waited too long.”
Intermission
Between sessions at Room 105 I feel like I should present a musical interlude or share some Deep Thoughts or something so folks can get up and stretch, visit the bathroom, and get a snack. I have to admit that Alan handled this sort of thing really well in his book, but he’s a professional, right? He should handle it well. The best I can do is tap-dance around for ten or twenty seconds.
No, the truth is, I’m a little bit lazy. I don’t want to think about what was happening to me in the forty-eight hours that passed between the session I’ve just described and the next.
No, that’s not right. The real truth is, I don’t want anyone to know what was happening to me. It was too important. Ishmael was turning me inside out and upside down, and I couldn’t share that with anyone. Still can’t. Sorry.
I also admire the way Alan made every new visit into an event. As best as I can remember, however, the next time I went to Room 105, I just walked in and sat down, and Ishmael glanced up and shot me a questioning look
I looked back and said politely, “Is that celery?
He frowned down at the stalk in his hand. “It is celery,” he replied solemnly.
“I think of celery as something served at bridge parties, spread with tuna salad.”