325 pages
FRIDAY MAY 10
4
I was expected to be another jewel in the crown - but by the time postdoctoral studies rolled around, I'd been spotted as a rhinestone - plenty of flash but pure paste. I was a big disappointment to everybody, most of all to me, of course.
5
I say I'm not a very good priest. ... -the priest is only a mediator of grace, not a source of grace, after all. Sure, you've got to be even-tempered and patient and tolerant of human shortcomings but...the way things are going nowadays, you'll be considered a bloody treasure if you don't turn out to be a child molester or a public drunk.
...although belief in the afterlife may have given rise to the practice of burying the dead with their possessions, it's just as plausible to suppose that the practice of burying the dead with their possessions gave rise to a belief in an afterlife...
6
I've been around enough brilliant men to know that they're seldom brilliant in real time...
7-9
In studying the history of the Laurentians, every novice learns that the original charter of our order includes a special mandate regarding the Antichrist, enjoining us to be in the vanguard in our vigilance. We’re to know before all others that the Antichrist is among us and we’re to suppress or destroy him, if that should prove to be possible.
At the time the mandate was written, of course, it was taken for granted that the identity of the Antichrist was a settled matter: It was Luther and his hellish company. As this confident understanding gradually became unfocused, the Laurentians began to argue among themselves about the means by which the mandate was to be fulfilled. If we were to be vigilant, what were we supposed to be vigilant for? By the middle of the seventeenth century, everyone in Europe had heard so many people accused of being the Antichrist that they were heartily sick of the whole subject, and speculation along those lines became more or less what it is today, the domain of religious cranks—except among the Laurentians, who quietly developed their own distinctive (and unsanctioned) Antichrist theology.
The Antichrist comes to us from a prophecy of John, who wrote in his first letter, “Children, it is the
final hour. You’ve been told that the Antichrist is coming, and now not one but a multitude of
Antichrists have appeared, so there can be no doubt whatever that the final hour is upon us.” When this
“final hour” failed to arrive during the lifetime of John’s contemporaries, Christians of each succeeding
generation looked for signs of the Antichrist in their own era. At first they looked for persecutors of the
Church, preeminently Nero, who was expected to return from the dead to continue his war against
Christ. When Roman persecution became a thing of the past, the Antichrist degenerated into a sort of
folktale monster, a huge, bloody-eyed, donkey-eared, iron-toothed bogeyman. As the Middle Ages
wore on and more and more people became disgusted with ecclesiastical corruption, the papacy itself
began to be identified as the Antichrist. Finally popes and reformers spent a century belaboring each
other with the bad name. When the Laurentians, with their special mandate, began to rethink the matter
in the centuries that followed, they went all the way back to fundamentals and took note of the fact that
prophecies are seldom literal predictions of future events. Often they’re not even recognized as
prophecies until they’re fulfilled. Numerous examples of this occur in the New Testament, where
events in the life of Jesus are described as fulfilling ancient prophecies that were not necessarily
understood as prophecies by those who enunciated them. Laurentian theologians reasoned this way: If
prophecies about Christ must wait upon their fulfillment to be understood, why shouldn’t the same be
true of prophecies about Antichrist? In other words, we can’t really know what John was talking about
until it actually happens, so the Antichrist is almost certain to be different from whatever we imagine
him to be.
If someone tells you that Saddam Hussein is the Antichrist (and he has in fact been nominated for
that honor), you’re absolutely right to laugh. The Antichrist isn’t going to be a worse sort of Hitler or
Stalin, because worse than them will just be more of the same in a higher degree—sixty million
murdered instead of six million. If you’re going to be on guard against the Antichrist and not just some
ordinary villain, you have to be on guard against someone of an entirely new order of dangerousness.
And that’s where things stand at the end of the second millennium. But not exactly. This is just the
“official” word, and the impression you get on receiving it in the Laurentian novitiate is that the
Antichrist thing is a dead issue and has been so for nearly two centuries.
What I now learned from Fr. Lulfre was that this impression is a false one, engendered as a
deliberate policy in the novices, primarily to forestall babbling that could end up as an embarrassing
story in the sensationalist press. The policy works. Among the peasantry of the order, the subject of the
Antichrist never comes up. At the topmost levels, however, a discreet watch is still kept. Very
occasionally—maybe once in fifty years—a worrisome individual pops up, and someone from the
order is sent out to have a look.
Someone like me. Someone exactly like me.
9-10
The candidate was one Charles Atterley, a forty-year-old American, a sort of itinerant preacher who
had been circling the middle states of Europe for a decade, picking up a fairly large but unorganized
following that seemed to defy all demographic sense and wisdom. It included young and old and
everything in between, both sexes in roughly equal numbers, mainstream Christians and Jews, clergy
of a dozen different denominations (including the Roman Catholic), atheists, humanists, rabbis,
Buddhists, environmentalist radicals, capitalists and socialists, lawyers and anarchists, liberals and
conservatives. The only groups notably unrepresented in the mix were skinheads, Bible-thumpers, and
unrepentant Marxists.
Atterley’s message seemed difficult to summarize and was typically characterized as "mind-boggling" by those who were favorably impressed and as “incomprehensible” by those who weren’t. I told Fr. Lulfre I didn’t understand what made him seem dangerous.
“What makes him dangerous,” he said, “is the fact that no one can place him or his product. He’s not
selling meditation or Satanism or goddess worship or faith healing or spiritualism or Umbanda or
speaking in tongues or any kind of New Age drivel. He’s apparently not making money at all—and
that’s disquieting. You always know what someone’s about when he’s raking in millions. Atterley’s not
another example of some familiar model, like David Koresh or the Reverend Moon or Madame
Blavatsky or Uri Geller. In fact, his presentation and lifestyle are more reminiscent of Jesus of
Nazareth than anyone else, and that too is disquieting.”
“Disquieting I understand,” I said. “Dangerous I don’t.”
“People are listening, Jared—possibly to something quite new. That makes it dangerous.”
This I could understand.
Anyone who thinks the Church is open to new ideas is living in a dreamworld.
10
“You seem to be taking him very seriously.”
Fr. Lulfre shrugged. “If we don’t take him seriously, then we might as well not take him at all.”
11
"...I feel it’s an unspoken assumption that this would mark the beginning of something new for you.”
“I’d rather hear it as a spoken assumption, Fr. Lulfre.”
There’s something else on my mind that should go in here (maybe a lot), but I don’t quite know what it is and
won’t have any leisure to look for it till I get on the plane to cross the Atlantic.
TUESDAY MAY 14
12
If a spymaster in Len Deighton or John Le Carré sends you to have a look at a man in Salzburg,
chances are the man will be found in Salzburg. Real-life spymasters are not as reliable as this. Charles
Atterley is not in Salzburg. As far as I’ve been able to learn in two days, he’s never been here and isn’t
expected here. In fact, no one has ever heard of him.
Salzburg, however, is very cute and full of Olde Worlde Charm, and the locals tell me again and
again, “Your friend is probably waiting for you in München.” They make it sound as if Munich is
packed solid with American friends that have been mislaid in Salzburg, and one of them is bound to be
mine.
I may as well have a look.
THURSDAY MAY 16
13
To this point, I’ve been behaving rather compulsively (though that may not be quite the word I’m
after). I’ve been acting as though I could find Charles Atterley by dint of sheer, unremitting
determination. This strategy certainly hasn’t worked, and pursuing it has left me feeling ridiculous and
inept.
The following are facts: I wasn’t given a deadline, no special urgency attaches to my mission, and I
have no idea what to do next. Therefore (therefore!) I might as well relax and go with the. flow for a
while.
14
I went for a walk.
I’m not, in truth, an adventurous traveler. As I say, I went for a walk in the vicinity of my hotel and
looked in shop windows. I paused here and there to study a menu in a restaurant window, as if I knew
what any of it meant. There went an hour, frittered away like a carefree vagabond.
I had long since invented a flimsy but apparently adequate cover story to explain my interest: I am a freelance writer investigating a man said to be leading a new religious movement.
“A new religious movement?” Herr Reichmann inquired with amused incredulity. “You know, we
Europeans are not so gullible as you Americans, with your angels and your magic crystals.”
“Exactly so,” I replied smoothly. “That’s just why Atterley seems so significant.”
18
Atterley was talking about matters close to my life and even closer to my work—and I didn’t like
what I heard. This wasn’t because it wasn’t true but for exactly the opposite reason: because it was true
and I’d missed it. He was making acute observations about phenomena I’d witnessed a thousand times
and never thought to notice. I’d been living like a horse in the winner’s circle at Ascot; the horse isn’t
at all impressed if he receives a royal visit, but this isn’t because he’s a republican, it’s because he’s a
dimwit.
Everything Atterley was saying was obvious, and all of it was new. This made it maddening, because
what is obvious should be old—and therefore well known, boring, and unnecessary to say. I glanced at
the listeners around me, and seeing them riveted by Atterley’s words, I wanted to kick them in the
shins, grab them by the hair, and shake them, screaming, “Why are you paying attention to this? You
know this! You could have worked it out yourself!”
But they hadn’t worked it out—and I hadn’t worked it out either
FRIDAY MAY 17
21
Sitting here in my room—sitting, pacing, staring out the window—it suddenly popped into my
memory that, when the heroes of fairy tales don’t know what to do, they just sit down and weep. In the
same circumstances, a modern hero can slug somebody or go out and get drunk, but he can never just
sit down and weep.
I’ve read enough detective stories to know I should go pry some information out of somebody, but
whom?
Isn’t it grand to be educated?
SATURDAY MAY 18
12
If a spymaster in Len Deighton or John Le Carré sends you to have a look at a man in Salzburg,
chances are the man will be found in Salzburg. Real-life spymasters are not as reliable as this. Charles
Atterley is not in Salzburg. As far as I’ve been able to learn in two days, he’s never been here and isn’t
expected here. In fact, no one has ever heard of him.
Salzburg, however, is very cute and full of Olde Worlde Charm, and the locals tell me again and
again, “Your friend is probably waiting for you in München.” They make it sound as if Munich is
packed solid with American friends that have been mislaid in Salzburg, and one of them is bound to be
mine.
I may as well have a look.
THURSDAY MAY 16
13
To this point, I’ve been behaving rather compulsively (though that may not be quite the word I’m
after). I’ve been acting as though I could find Charles Atterley by dint of sheer, unremitting
determination. This strategy certainly hasn’t worked, and pursuing it has left me feeling ridiculous and
inept.
The following are facts: I wasn’t given a deadline, no special urgency attaches to my mission, and I
have no idea what to do next. Therefore (therefore!) I might as well relax and go with the. flow for a
while.
14
I went for a walk.
I’m not, in truth, an adventurous traveler. As I say, I went for a walk in the vicinity of my hotel and
looked in shop windows. I paused here and there to study a menu in a restaurant window, as if I knew
what any of it meant. There went an hour, frittered away like a carefree vagabond.
I had long since invented a flimsy but apparently adequate cover story to explain my interest: I am a freelance writer investigating a man said to be leading a new religious movement.
“A new religious movement?” Herr Reichmann inquired with amused incredulity. “You know, we
Europeans are not so gullible as you Americans, with your angels and your magic crystals.”
“Exactly so,” I replied smoothly. “That’s just why Atterley seems so significant.”
18
Atterley was talking about matters close to my life and even closer to my work—and I didn’t like
what I heard. This wasn’t because it wasn’t true but for exactly the opposite reason: because it was true
and I’d missed it. He was making acute observations about phenomena I’d witnessed a thousand times
and never thought to notice. I’d been living like a horse in the winner’s circle at Ascot; the horse isn’t
at all impressed if he receives a royal visit, but this isn’t because he’s a republican, it’s because he’s a
dimwit.
Everything Atterley was saying was obvious, and all of it was new. This made it maddening, because
what is obvious should be old—and therefore well known, boring, and unnecessary to say. I glanced at
the listeners around me, and seeing them riveted by Atterley’s words, I wanted to kick them in the
shins, grab them by the hair, and shake them, screaming, “Why are you paying attention to this? You
know this! You could have worked it out yourself!”
But they hadn’t worked it out—and I hadn’t worked it out either
FRIDAY MAY 17
21
Sitting here in my room—sitting, pacing, staring out the window—it suddenly popped into my
memory that, when the heroes of fairy tales don’t know what to do, they just sit down and weep. In the
same circumstances, a modern hero can slug somebody or go out and get drunk, but he can never just
sit down and weep.
I’ve read enough detective stories to know I should go pry some information out of somebody, but
whom?
Isn’t it grand to be educated?
27
"tonight I'd like to talk to you about the boiling of a frog"
28
"I considered the idea that the signal had been picked up only by me because it was meant for me."
"tonight I'd like to talk to you about the boiling of a frog"
28
"I considered the idea that the signal had been picked up only by me because it was meant for me."
32
"I nodded, suddenly feeling detached, like a page torn from one book and inserted into another."
33
"When he arrived, the sage commended Monkey for insisting on a wisdom beyond what others would accept and make a magical revelation so powerful that Monkey received Illumination on the spot.
34
“Why did the sage have two sets of teachings? I’d say it was because he wouldn’t be much of a sage
if he didn’t. The public teachings are the ones that everyone hears, because those are the ones that can
be articulated. The secret teachings are the ones that cannot be articulated at all—because they don’t
exist.”
B nodded thoughtfully. “A very good, modern answer. The answer of a cynic.”
“I don’t think of myself as a cynic.”
“But you’re quite certain there are no secret teachings.”
“Absolutely certain.”
“Jesus didn’t have any special nuggets for his disciples.”
“No.”
“Nor did Gautama Buddha or Muhammad for theirs.”
“No.”
“You may be right, of course, but this misses the point of my story.”
“Okay. Why did the sage have two different sets of teachings?”
“One was a set of teachings that are easy to disclose, the other a set of teachings that are very
difficult to disclose. The first was the public set, of course—the set to which all the novices were
exposed. The second was the secret set, the set that only exceptional students can aspire to—or accept.”
“In other words . . . ?”
“In other words: Secret teachings aren’t ones that teachers keep to themselves. Secret teachings are
ones that teachers have a hard time giving away.”
I shook my head. I damn well had to shake my head, of course. I’ve never seen it spelled out, but it’s
implicit in every text that—aside from forbidden (and probably illusory) lore like witchcraft and
necromancy—there are no relevant secrets. There are plenty of things we don’t know and will never
know, but everything we need to know has been revealed. If this isn’t the case, if Moses or Buddha or
Jesus or Muhammad held something back for an inner circle, then revelation is incomplete—and by
definition useless.
40
I shrugged at him over four thousand miles of cable.
41
"I don't want to think. I don't want to write. So I make careful records of the time.
It's 2:50, and I wonder what's wrong with me.
It's 2:52, and I think my life is falling apart."
42-43
The fact that I find anything here to be disturbed about . . . disturbs me. I shouldn’t be disturbed at
all. I mean, I’m a good soldier, aren’t I?—smart as hell but basically a simple, uncomplicated kind of
guy. What’s the name of the tormented preacher in The Scarlet Letter? Dimmesdale? I’m no Arthur
Dimmesdale, not by a million miles. I’m no tormented anything. You want me to spy on some guy
who’s being talked about as the Antichrist? Sure, why the hell not? Where’s my plane ticket? What’s
the limit on my credit card?
Hey, that’s why the great minds of the Laurentians chose me, isn’t it? They wanted someone bright,
controllable, and loyal—not necessarily strong in faith but maybe just a bit weak in imagination.
The joke is, however (and it really is a terrific joke), that, because I’m just a good soldier, simple and
uncomplicated, I listen to the guy I’m supposed to be spying on. And, having listened, I say, “Yeah, I
see what he’s saying. This is something new. This is something really new. This guy is making sense.
He’s making as much sense as I’ve ever heard anybody make. What’s the problem?”
Then the guy takes me aside and says:
Then the guy leads me halfway across the city on foot and says:
Then the guy,buys me sixteen-year-old Scotch and says:
“There are some teachings that only exceptional students can handle. I hope to lay some of those
teachings on you.”
I think maybe the great minds of the Laurentians should have found themselves a soldier who was
not quite so good—or perhaps much better.
Of course, I’m not quite sure where I stand with B at this point. Looking back on it now, I see that I
was a lot more upset by Shirin’s revelation than he was. The truth is, I was just projecting. Having been
found out, I took it for granted that he’d be disgusted or disappointed. In fact, he was neither. He was
amused.
Okay, I’m still not sure where I stand with him, but I don’t think I’m exactly in the trash heap. I
didn’t come off looking brilliant, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t come off looking like scum.
SUNDAY MAY 19
At the time I felt like a man at the wheel of a sinking ship - purposeless since any ship can find its way to the bottom.
I've been living in a sort of time capsule, or perhaps in a special ward of the hospital that hadn't changed since, oh, the 1950s. It was a ward in which my parents and their friends would have been happy. ... In this ward, Glenn Miller is still cool, not as a figure of nostolgia, but as he was to my parents when they were in college. In this ward, kids have big weddings and spend their honeymoons trying to figure out what it's all about. In this ward, they use the rhythm method and have kids when it fails. In this ward, there are no crack babies, no lunatic cults, no terrorists.
48 - 52
"Just before you arrived, I had made some remark about saving the world, and
Michael there”—he nodded at a tall man in the audience—“had objected to this language on the
grounds that the world doesn’t need us to save it, it only needs us to leave it alone. I was explaining
that I hadn’t been using the word world in a biological sense but rather in a traditional biblical and
literary sense, which doesn’t refer to the planetary biosphere we call the world but rather to something
that would be better described as ‘the sphere of human material activity.’ This is the world Wordsworth
meant when he wrote, ‘The world is too much with us.’ This is the world Byron meant when he wrote,
‘I have not loved the world, nor the world me.’ This is the world John meant when he wrote, ‘Anyone
who loves the world is a stranger to the Father’s love.’ Wouldn’t you agree, Fr. Osborne?”
“Yes. John certainly wasn’t referring to the biosphere.”
“What I said was this: If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people
with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with old minds and new programs. It will not be
saved by people with the old vision but a new program.”
Everyone in the room seemed to be looking at me, awaiting my reply. I couldn’t imagine why this
was so, but there was no mistaking it. I said, “I’m not sure I know the difference between a vision and
a program.”
“Recycling is a program,” B said. “Supporting earth-friendly legislation is a program. You don’t
need a new vision to engage in either of these programs.”
“Are you saying that such programs are a waste of time?”
“Not at all, though they do tend to give people a false sense of progress and hope. Programs are
initiated in order to counter or defeat vision.”
“Give me an example of what you mean by vision.”
“Vision in our culture supports isolation, for example. It supports a separate home for every family.
It supports locks on the doors. It powerfully supports staying isolated behind your locked doors and
viewing the world electronically. Since this is the case, no programs are needed to encourage people to
stay home and watch television. On the other hand, if you want to get people to turn off their television
sets and leave their homes, that’s when you need a program.”
“I see—I think.”
“Isolation is supported by vision, so it takes care of itself, but community building isn’t, so it has to
be supported by programs. Programs invariably run counter to vision, and so have to be thrust on
people—have to be ‘sold’ to people. For example, if you want people to live simply, reduce
consumption, reuse, and recycle, you must create programs that encourage such behaviors. But if you
want them to consume a lot and waste a lot, you don’t need to create programs of encouragement,
because these behaviors are supported by our cultural vision.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Vision is the flowing river. Programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede the flow. What I’m
saying is that the world will not be saved by people with programs. If the world is saved, it will be
saved because the people living in it have a new vision.”
“In other words, people with a new vision will have new programs.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I repeat: Vision doesn’t need programs. Vision is the flowing river.
The Industrial Revolution was a flowing river. It needed no programs to get it going or to keep it
going.”
“But it wasn’t always flowing.”
“Exactly. It wasn’t a river in the second century or the eighth or the thirteenth. There was no sign of
the river in those centuries. But, one after another, tiny springs bubbled up and began to flow together,
decade after decade, century after century. In the fifteenth century, it was a trickle. In the sixteenth, it
became a brook. In the seventeenth, it became a stream. In the eighteenth, it became a river. In the
nineteenth, it became a torrent. In the twentieth, it became a world-engulfing flood. And through all
this time, not a single program was needed to further its progress. It was awakened and sustained and
enhanced entirely by vision.”
“I understand.”
“It’s a sign of our cultural collapse that supporting our vision has come to be seen as wicked, while
undermining that vision has come to be seen as noble. For example, children in school are never
encouraged to want the material rewards of success. Success is something to be sought for its own
sake, certainly not for any wealth it might bring. Business leaders might be offered as role models
because of their ‘creativity’ and their ‘contributions to society,’ but they would never be offered as role
models because they have luxurious homes, exotic cars, and servants to attend to every need. In the
world of our children’s textbooks, an admirable person would never do anything just for money.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“The people of our culture are tremendous bullet-biters. For those of you who are unfamiliar with
this idiom, ‘biting the bullet’ supposedly helps one tolerate pain. One first tries to avoid the pain, but if the pain absolutely must be borne, then one must ‘bite the bullet.’ For most who write and think about our future, it’s a foregone conclusion that we’re all going to have to bite the bullet very hard in order to
survive. It doesn’t occur to these thinkers and writers that it would be far less painful to start fresh. As
they view it, our task is to grit our teeth and cling faithfully to the vision that is destroying us. As they
see it, our doom is to go on indefinitely hammering ourselves in the head with one hand while using
the other to dispense aspirin tablets for the pain.”
I asked, “Is it so easy to change a cultural vision?”
“The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and
unreadiness. If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the
time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire. The people of Rome were ready to hear what St.
Paul had to say to them. If they hadn’t been, he would have disappeared without a trace and his name
would be unknown to us.”
“Christianity didn’t exactly catch on like wildfire.”
“Considering the rate at which it was possible to spread new ideas in those days, without printing
presses, radio, or television, it caught on like wildfire.”
“Yes, I suppose it did.”
“The point I want to make here is that I have no idea what people with changed minds will do. Paul
was in the same condition as he traveled the empire changing minds in the middle of the first century.
He couldn’t possibly have predicted the institutional development of the papacy or the shape of
Christian society in feudal Europe. By contrast, the early science-fiction writer Jules Verne could make a century’s worth of excellent predictions, because nothing changed between his time and ours in terms of vision. If people in the coming century have a new vision, then they’ll do what is completely unpredictable by us. Indeed, if this were nor the case—if their actions were predictable by us—then this would prove that they didn’t have a new vision after all, that their vision and ours were essentially the same.”
I said, “It seems to me that you do, however, have a program. You mean to change minds.”
“Would you say that Paul had a program?”
“No, not really. I’d say he had an objective or an intention.”
“I’d say the same for me. Program isn’t the right word for what I’m doing, though I know it’s the
word I used in answering that woman’s question tonight. In our culture at the present moment, the flow of the river is toward catastrophe, and programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede its flow. My objective is to change the direction of the flow, away from catastrophe. With the river moving in a new direction, people wouldn’t have to devise programs to impede its flow, and all the programs presently in place would be left standing in the mud, unneeded and useless.”
“Very ambitious,” I remarked dryly.
“You could call my delusions messianic,” B said with a smile. “Others have—those who denounce
me as the Antichrist.”
Those words came to me with a little shock, and I spent a moment mulling them over before
replying that I didn’t see what the Antichrist had to do with it.
“That’s because you haven’t heard enough—or haven’t followed what you’ve heard to its logical
conclusions.”
He had me there. There was no doubt of that. Or at least, so I thought.
55
“Really smart wolves know that the most suspicious-looking wolf in the pack is the one disguised as a sheep.”
“So you’re saying what? That really smart wolves don’t fool with disguises?”
B looked around the room and finally nodded at Michael, who grinned at me goofily and said, “Really smart wolves disguise themselves as friendly wolves.”
Three snappy comebacks flashed through my mind, but I knew that nothing I could say was going to shake the truth of the implied charge. The woman I’d thought of as a school principal piped up at this point in heavily accented English. “Always has been my guiding principle for forty years to say ‘Never trust a Christian.’ Not once has ever Christian given me reason to change.” “May I ask why?” I said (glad for the diversion). She stared at me with frank loathing. “Always your allegiance is in doubt, is . . . tainted.” Unable to find the words she wanted, she spoke in German to Michael, who translated: “Your loyalty is always subject to change, Frau Hartmann says. Always subject to revision according to some
undisclosed standard. Today you’re my friend, but there’s a hidden line inside of you that marks the beginning of your allegiance to God. If I unknowingly cross that line, then, although you continue to smile at me like a friend, you may see that it has become your holy duty to destroy me. This week you’re my friend, but next week they say I’m a witch and God wants witches to be burned, so you burn me. This week you’re my friend, but next week they say I’m an Anabaptist and God wants Anabaptists to be drowned, so you drown me. This week you’re my friend, but next week they say I’m a Waldensian and God wants Waldensians to be hanged, so you hang me.”
B’s gargoylish face twisted into a scowl that seemed half-serious, half-humorous. “Why do you keep referring your problems to me? It’s Shirin you have to satisfy. Talk to her, not to me.” I was stunned by this gender betrayal, and equally stunned by my own self-betrayal. I had tried, unconsciously, to nudge B into lining up on my side—us guys against the common enemy. I was profoundly disappointed in myself; I’d imagined I was at least a decade beyond such schoolboy games
“So you’re saying what? That really smart wolves don’t fool with disguises?”
B looked around the room and finally nodded at Michael, who grinned at me goofily and said, “Really smart wolves disguise themselves as friendly wolves.”
Three snappy comebacks flashed through my mind, but I knew that nothing I could say was going to shake the truth of the implied charge. The woman I’d thought of as a school principal piped up at this point in heavily accented English. “Always has been my guiding principle for forty years to say ‘Never trust a Christian.’ Not once has ever Christian given me reason to change.” “May I ask why?” I said (glad for the diversion). She stared at me with frank loathing. “Always your allegiance is in doubt, is . . . tainted.” Unable to find the words she wanted, she spoke in German to Michael, who translated: “Your loyalty is always subject to change, Frau Hartmann says. Always subject to revision according to some
undisclosed standard. Today you’re my friend, but there’s a hidden line inside of you that marks the beginning of your allegiance to God. If I unknowingly cross that line, then, although you continue to smile at me like a friend, you may see that it has become your holy duty to destroy me. This week you’re my friend, but next week they say I’m a witch and God wants witches to be burned, so you burn me. This week you’re my friend, but next week they say I’m an Anabaptist and God wants Anabaptists to be drowned, so you drown me. This week you’re my friend, but next week they say I’m a Waldensian and God wants Waldensians to be hanged, so you hang me.”
B’s gargoylish face twisted into a scowl that seemed half-serious, half-humorous. “Why do you keep referring your problems to me? It’s Shirin you have to satisfy. Talk to her, not to me.” I was stunned by this gender betrayal, and equally stunned by my own self-betrayal. I had tried, unconsciously, to nudge B into lining up on my side—us guys against the common enemy. I was profoundly disappointed in myself; I’d imagined I was at least a decade beyond such schoolboy games
57
“I’m talking about us guardians of the faith, you understand. The professionals. We know how to
deal with our suspicions—we have to, because it’s our job to deal with the suspicions of other people.
We are, in large part, professional soothers, professional reassurers, professional dispellers of doubt.”
Shirin nodded faintly, a millimeter or so, to let me know that she was beginning to follow me now,
shakily.
“Our message to those we must reassure is: ‘Don’t worry, nothing’s happened. The world is just
what it was. Don’t be anxious, don’t be alarmed. The foundation is solid. The pillars are still standing.
Nothing has changed since . . . the year 1000, the year 200, the year 33, when the gates of heaven were
opened for us by Someone who laid down His life for our sins and on the third day rose from the dead.
Not a thing has changed since then. Though we go to war with smart bombs and nerve gas instead of
swords and rocks, and write our thoughts on plastic disks instead of parchment scrolls, these days are
still those days.’ ”
“I’m talking about us guardians of the faith, you understand. The professionals. We know how to
deal with our suspicions—we have to, because it’s our job to deal with the suspicions of other people.
We are, in large part, professional soothers, professional reassurers, professional dispellers of doubt.”
Shirin nodded faintly, a millimeter or so, to let me know that she was beginning to follow me now,
shakily.
“Our message to those we must reassure is: ‘Don’t worry, nothing’s happened. The world is just
what it was. Don’t be anxious, don’t be alarmed. The foundation is solid. The pillars are still standing.
Nothing has changed since . . . the year 1000, the year 200, the year 33, when the gates of heaven were
opened for us by Someone who laid down His life for our sins and on the third day rose from the dead.
Not a thing has changed since then. Though we go to war with smart bombs and nerve gas instead of
swords and rocks, and write our thoughts on plastic disks instead of parchment scrolls, these days are
still those days.’ ”
62
The Antichrist is a central figure in the mythological history of the cosmos as it was
widely understood in ancient times—in our culture, as B would say. The culture of the Great Forgetting
perceived the universe and humankind to be the products of a single creative effort that had occurred
just a few thousand years ago. It perceived the events of human history to be the central events of the
universe itself, unfolding over a fairly brief period of time. Only a couple hundred generations of
humans had lived from the beginning of time, and it was imagined that only a couple hundred more
would live before the end of time—perhaps even less than that. It’s important to realize that the people
of this time had no conception of a universe billions of years old and with more billions of years ahead
of it. As they imagined it, the cosmic drama was only a few thousand years old—and was not far from
being over. The central issue of this cosmic drama was a struggle between good and evil being waged
on this planet. Among the Jews, who were probably the most potent religious mythologists of the age,
the issue would be settled by two champions. God’s champion, the messiah, was expected
momentarily, and his appearance would mark the beginning of the final days. An adversary would also
appear—Satan’s champion, a Man of Sin. The two champions would battle, the forces of evil would be
vanquished, and history and the universe would come to an end.
“Early Christian authors had the same vision of history, but for them, of course, the messiah had
already come, and all that remained was for the Man of Sin to come. Now that the messiah had been
named as the Christ, his adversary could be named as the Antichrist. Now that the messiah’s mission
was plain, his adversary’s mission was plain. Since Christ came to lead all humanity to God, Antichrist
will come to lead all humanity to Satan. And Antichrist will not fail, any more than Christ failed.
Antichrist will be loved and followed as fervently as Christ—but only for a time, of course. Ultimately,
after a cataclysmic battle, the forces of God will triumph, bringing history to its conclusion.
“This clear vision of the Antichrist became muddled and trivialized in succeeding centuries as one
generation after another found someone to lambaste with the name. Anyone widely feared or hated
could expect to be called the Antichrist, and eventually both sides of the Reformation had to bear the
label. After this period, from the seventeenth century on, people were sick of the whole idea. Every
generation continues to nominate a candidate of its own—Napoleon or Hitler or Saddam Hussein—but
no one takes it very seriously.”
64
“This situation was foreseen by the early Christian theologian Origen. I don’t mean this exact situation. I
mean that what he foresaw is applicable to this situation. He said, in effect, that every generation will
produce forerunners and prefigurements of the Antichrist, and these will deserve the name insofar as
they embody the spirit of the Antichrist. It’s from among this number that at last one will come who
deserves the name in its proper sense. It is for this one that we maintain our vigilance.”
“What does that mean—one who deserves the name in its proper sense?”
“This is precisely what can’t be known in advance. It can only be known in the event itself. That is,
when we see the real Antichrist, then we’ll know what the name means. Then we’ll say to ourselves,
‘How could we have imagined that Nero was the Antichrist—or the pope or Luther or Hitler?’ The real
Antichrist will reveal to us the meaning of the prophesy itself Indeed, that’s how we’ll know him. He’ll
be the one who shows us what it means to be the Antichrist.”
70
A maieutic teacher is one who acts as a midwife to pupils, gently guiding to the light
ideas that have long been growing inside of them.”
I thought about this for a moment, then asked him if one can choose to be a maieutic teacher or if
this is dictated by one’s subject matter.
“Not every teaching objective lends itself to the maieutic approach. For example, it would have been
inane for Isaac Newton to try to draw his discoveries in optics from his pupils’ heads—inane because
they weren’t in his pupils’ heads. On the other hand, he might have used the maieutic approach to show
pupils why his alchemical studies seemed worthwhile to him. Socrates was of course famous for his
use of the maieutic method. Jesus only dabbled in it, usually as a means of helping people understand
their own questions, as when he said, ‘If it is by Beelzebub that I cast out devils, then by whom do your
children cast them out?’ ”
Again I gave this some thought before saying, “I assume this means that what you have to teach me
is not something that can be drawn from my head.”
“This is largely the case, yes.”
71
“You know what a curriculum is, I suppose.”
“I’d say it was a sequence of teaching objectives.”
“A sequence that proceeds on what basis? Presumably it’s not an arbitrary sequence.”
“I suppose ideally it proceeds from the familiar to the unfamiliar or from the simple to the complex.
A curriculum is structured like a pyramid, building from the ground up. You have to know A to learn B,
you have to know A and B to learn C, you have to know A, B, and C to learn D, and so on.”
“Exactly. But as I say, I have no such curriculum. Rather than a pyramid, I’m constructing a mosaic.
The pieces can be added in any order. In the early stages, there’s nothing like an image, but as pieces
are added, an image begins to emerge. As still more pieces are added, the image becomes more distinct,
more definite, so that eventually you feel sure that the basic picture is before you. From this point on,
the picture can only gain in sharpness and detail as pieces continue to be added. At last it seems that
there are no ‘missing pieces’ at all, and only the cracks between contiguous pieces remain to be filled
—with ever tinier pieces. As the cracks between pieces are filled, the picture begins to look more and
more like a painting—a continuous whole rather than an assembly of fragments—and in the end it no
longer resembles a mosaic at all.”
73
“When Jesus departed, he left no one behind who was the message.”
I managed to suppress an urge to blurt out a “Wow,” but wow was certainly what sprang to mind.
This was undeniably true—not in any sense a condemnation, but undeniably true. Jesus left behind no
one who could speak with his authority, no one who could say “This is what’s what.” There were very
elementary questions the apostles couldn’t answer with confidence, like: To what degree were those of
the new dispensation bound by the laws of the old dispensation? You can hardly get more fundamental
than that. In fact, it was St. Paul—a man who had never even seen Jesus—who ended up saying “This
is what’s what” with more authority than anyone else could muster. More than John or Peter or James
(as far as we know), Paul was the message. But even with the writings of Paul and all the evangelists, it
still took three hundred years of Christian thought to reconstitute Christ’s message—to piece together
the hints, reconcile apparent contradictions, cut away heresies and lunacies and irrelevancies, and
organize it into a self-consistent, coherent creed that more or less everyone could agree on.
78
“Which is that our agricultural revolution signaled the appearance of a mind change. It wasn’t just
starving people trying something new out of desperation. It wasn’t just people looking for an easier
life, It wasn’t just people looking for more security.”
“That’s right. Far from having an easier life or increasing their security, they actually worked harder
and were less secure than their hunting-gathering ancestors. So there’s no question here of people
doing something just because it was more comfortable.”
81
“Modern humans have been around for two hundred thousand years, but according to our beliefs,
God had not a word to say to any of them until we came along. God didn’t speak to the Alawa of
Australia or to the Gebusi of New Zealand or to the Bushmen of Africa or to the Navajo of North
America or to the Ihalmiut of the Great Barrens of Canada. God didn’t speak a word to any of the other
hundreds of thousands of peoples of the world, he spoke only to us. Only to us did he reveal the order
and purpose of creation. Only to us did he reveal the laws essential to salvation.”
82
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.”
84
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.”
“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.”
“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.
“It’s an ugly process.”
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.”
94
I told him about a famous psychological experiment of the late 1950s. An electrode was implanted in the pleasure center of a monkey’s brain. Pushing a button on a small control box delivered an electric pulse to the electrode, giving the monkey a tremendous jolt of sheer, whole-body pleasure. They gave the box to the monkey, who of course had no idea what it was but by accident eventually pushed the button, giving itself this tremendous jolt of pleasure. It didn’t take many more repetitions for the monkey to catch on to the
connection between the button and the pleasure, and once this happened it just sat there hour after hour
pushing the button and giving itself jolts of pleasure. It passed up food, it passed up sex. If they hadn’t
eventually taken the box away, the monkey would have sat there and literally pleasured itself to death.
Here is the question I asked back to my questioner: ‘Was there something wrong with this monkey?
Was the monkey flawed?’ What do you think, Jared?”
I would say no, the monkey wasn’t flawed.”
96
According to totalitarian agriculture, cows may live but wolves must die. According to totalitarian agriculture, chickens may live but foxes must die. According to totalitarian agriculture, wheat may live but chinch bugs must die. Anything we eat may live, but anything that eats our food must die—and not merely on an ad hoc basis. Our posture is not, ‘If a coyote attacks my herd, I’ll kill it,’ our posture is, ‘Let’s wipe coyotes off the face of the earth.’ When it came to wolves and cows, we said, ‘Let the wolves be destroyed,’ and the wolves were destroyed, and we said, ‘Let there be cows by the billion,’ and there were cows by the billion.”
108
“It’s well known,” B said, “that every piece of hand-woven cloth has an element of magic in it, which
is the special magic of its weaver. This magic doesn’t necessarily die with the individual weaver but
rather can be passed on from generation to generation and shared among families and even whole
nations, so that one who is sensitive to such things can tell in a moment whether a piece of cloth was
woven in Ireland or France or Virginia or Bavaria. This is true on every planet in the universe where
weaving is practiced, and it was true on the planet I’d like to tell you about right now.
“It happened on this planet that a weaver named Nixt came along who was a strange compound of
genius and insanity, violence and artistry, ruthlessness and charm—and this was the magic he wove
into his cloth, and those who wore garments made from it became just like the weaver. The weaver was
quickly renowned, and everyone wanted clothes imbued with his magic. Wearing such clothes, artists
created masterpieces, merchants got rich, leaders extended their power, soldiers triumphed in battle,
and lovers left their rivals in the dust. Almost immediately it was noticed that Nixtian magic had some
drawbacks. It was so powerful that it tended to devour what it touched. Instead of lasting for centuries,
artists’ masterpieces tended to disintegrate after only decades. Instead of lasting for generations,
merchants’ riches tended to melt away in a single lifetime. Instead of lasting for decades, leaders’
power tended to ebb away in years. Instead of lasting for years, lovers’ charms tended to pall in
months. No one cared. Artists wanted masterpieces, merchants wanted money, leaders wanted power,
and lovers wanted conquests.
“Naturally every weaver in the land wanted to weave with Nixtian magic, and Nixt himself was soon
so extravagantly wealthy that he was glad to share it with them. Within a generation, every single
weaver in the realm was practicing only this one kind of magic and all others had been forgotten. From
swaddling clothes to shrouds, everyone in the land wore clothes woven with Nixtian magic—and, as
you can easily imagine, this nation almost overnight became preeminent among the nations of the
world. There wasn’t a thing to stop them from taking over the entire planet, and they proceeded to do
so in just a few generations, and in every land they conquered, weavers who were practicing other
kinds of magic either learned Nixtian magic or they took up some other occupation.
“The spread of Nixtian magic revealed another of its drawbacks. Its exhaustive qualities seemed to
increase exponentially. When twice as many masterpieces were created with Nixtian magic, they
disintegrated four times as fast. When three times as many merchants were getting rich with Nixtian
magic, their money melted away nine times as fast. No one liked it, of course, but artists still wanted
masterpieces, merchants still wanted wealth, leaders still wanted power, and so on.
“Within a thousand years, every weaver on the planet knew only one kind of magic and all others
had been forgotten. Within another thousand years, it was forgotten that any other kind of magic had
ever been practiced in weaving, and people soon ceased to think of it as magic at all; it was just part of
the process of weaving, and for all they knew, this had always been the case. In other words, they
experienced a Great Forgetting of their own. They eventually came to view Nixtian magic as just part
of weaving—just the way people of our culture eventually came to view totalitarian agriculture as just
part of being human.
“The trouble was that once every man, woman, and child on the planet was wearing clothes woven
with Nixtian magic, the exhaustive power of this magic was operating at such a high level that
masterpieces were lasting only weeks—and no one wanted them. Fortunes were made and routinely
lost within days, and merchants lived in a state of suicidal depression. Governments and whole
political systems came and went like seasons of the year, and no one even bothered to learn the names
of presidents or prime ministers. Romances and love affairs seldom lasted for more than two or three
hours.
“It was at this point of total systemic burnout that some enterprising paleoanthropologists happened
quite fortuitously to discover that weaving had existed long before the time of Nixt, and that people
had for hundreds of thousands of years been very happy to wear clothes woven with other kinds of
magic. And amazingly enough—even without Nixtian magic—artists had still occasionally produced
masterpieces, merchants had gotten rich, leaders had become powerful, and lovers had made
conquests. And, more important, these achievements had, by modern standards, been durable to an
almost unthinkable degree “Terrifically excited, these paleoanthropologists brought their discovery to the attention of their department head and asked to be released from other duties so they could study ancient weavings and possibly even rediscover the magic employed in their production. ‘I guess I don’t get it,’ the
department head said, after patiently listening to their proposals. ‘Why is it important to know what
weavers were doing before the age of Nixt?’ ”
He shrugged elaborately. “Charles was a man who was bound to be killed.”
He seemed to think this explained it.
120
“A while ago I called you a stupid man, and I really have to say that you’re one of the
stupidest men I’ve ever known. Do you understand why?”
I admitted I didn’t.
“I’ve known a lot of men who were less bright by a long shot—a lot of men with no mental
equipment to speak of—but I’ve never met one with so much mental equipment being put to so little
use.”
“I have to adjust my own thinking to this, Jared. You see, what I find maddening about you
is just what Charles found useful. You’re able to hold information in your head for an incredibly long
time without drawing a conclusion. To me, this looks like stupidity. To Charles, it looked like . . .
something else.”
“You mean it takes me a long time to get things.”
“That’s the way it looks to me. To Charles, it looked like you had a terrific capacity for not jumping.
For resisting the temptation to understand too quickly. For resisting the temptation to grab onto
something, even if it wasn’t what he was saying.”
“Wow,” I said. “What a fabulous thing to be good at.”
“A while ago I called you a stupid man, and I really have to say that you’re one of the
stupidest men I’ve ever known. Do you understand why?”
I admitted I didn’t.
“I’ve known a lot of men who were less bright by a long shot—a lot of men with no mental
equipment to speak of—but I’ve never met one with so much mental equipment being put to so little
use.”
“I have to adjust my own thinking to this, Jared. You see, what I find maddening about you
is just what Charles found useful. You’re able to hold information in your head for an incredibly long
time without drawing a conclusion. To me, this looks like stupidity. To Charles, it looked like . . .
something else.”
“You mean it takes me a long time to get things.”
“That’s the way it looks to me. To Charles, it looked like you had a terrific capacity for not jumping.
For resisting the temptation to understand too quickly. For resisting the temptation to grab onto
something, even if it wasn’t what he was saying.”
“Wow,” I said. “What a fabulous thing to be good at.”
But where it kills you is in dealing with
someone like Fr. Lulfre. You think pawn to queen four is a brilliant first move, but while you’re
shoving up that pawn, he’s bringing out both knights, both bishops, and has castled. He’s always eight
moves ahead of you.”
“How does Fr. Lulfre come into this?”
“He comes into this by way of you, of course. He dropped you into this action two weeks ago and
can pull you out whenever he pleases.” She cocked her head to one side. “Unless you’re ready to walk
away from your vocation.”
“I’m not.”
“Then here’s what you have to face right now: Fr. Lulfre knows you at least as well as I do. This
means that, consciously or unconsciously, he chose you because you won’t leap ahead to conclusions
he wants to reserve to himself.”
“Now I have an inkling,” I said, “of how a retarded person must feel when he finally realizes that he
is retarded.”
Friendships like yours are one in a billion. You were damned lucky—the two of you.”
“Charles didn’t want to carry you across the gap, Jared. He wanted you to leap across it yourself,
that’s why he proceeded as he did. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Are you talking about the leap I have to make to reach the conclusion he wanted me to reach?”
“That’s right. Every sentence he spoke was designed to extend the road for you by a centimeter. He
was closing the gap pebble by pebble, hoping you’d eventually make the leap by yourself.”
“But I never did.”
“You never did. I don’t have the patience to follow that procedure, Jared—the patience or the time.
I’m going to throw you across the gap. I’m going to start with the conclusion.”
136
Science vs. religion
“Religions like yours, revealed religions, are all perceived to be at odds with scientific knowledge—
at odds with or irrelevant to. I wonder if you see why.”
“I think it’s come to be seen that religion and science are just inherently incompatible.”
B nodded. “Following the usual Taker pattern: ‘We are humanity, so if our religions are inherently
incompatible with scientific knowledge, then religion itself must be inherently incompatible with
scientific knowledge.’ ”
“That’s right.”
“But as you’ll see, animism is perfectly at home with scientific knowledge. It’s much more at home
with your sciences than with your religions.”
“Why is that?”
“What’s that out there?” she asked, making her usual sweeping gesture.
“That’s the world, the universe.”
“That’s where the real gods of the universe write what they write, Jared. The gods of your revealed
religions write in books.”
“What does that have to do with animism?”
“Animism looks for truth in the universe, not in books, revelations, and authorities. Science is the
same. Though animism and science read the universe in different ways, both have complete confidence
in its truthfulness.”
She poked around among her building blocks, picked out the cartridge fuse, and held it up for my
inspection. “This is science,” she said. “Religions like yours, Jared, are skeptical about it, are afraid to
use it. They say, ‘Suppose we use it and it blows up in our face! Better not trust it.’ But animism isn’t
worried about anything that can be revealed about the universe, so science belongs right here beside
it.” She slid the fuse under the thread holding the film canister to the fossil. Then she asked me to
describe what I saw.
I said, “Animism is flanked by the Law of Life on one side and by science on the other. All three
face the community of life.”
140
‘If your resources are of doubtful sufficiency for two offspring, then you’re better off giving all to one than half to each.’ ”
“Not the law of kindness.”
“I would say rather, ‘Not the law of futile kindness.’ I think most mothers would rather have one live
child than any number of dead ones. Nonetheless, it’s certainly true that, if the two are in conflict, the
law favors life over kindness. Those who follow the contrary law—the law that favors kindness over
life—will tend to lose their representation in the gene pool of their species. This is because their
offspring will tend to survive and reproduce less often than the offspring of those who follow the law
that favors life.”
“I understand.”
“On the subject of kindness . . . I don’t know if you know David Brower—one of the century’s
foremost environmentalists, the founder of the John Muir Institute, Friends of the Earth, and Earth
Island Institute. He tells this story of one of his earliest adventures as a naturalist. At the age of eleven
he collected some eggs of the western swallowtail butterfly and kept an eye on them as they hatched
into caterpillars, which later turned into chrysalides. Finally the first of the chrysalides began to crack
open, and what Brower saw was this: The emerging butterfly struggled out, its abdomen distended by
some sort of fluid that was pumped out over its wings as it hung upside down on a twig. Half an hour
later it was ready to fly, and it took off. As the other chrysalides began to crack, however, Brower
decided to make himself useful. He gently eased open the crack to facilitate the butterflies’ emergence,
and they promptly slid out, walked around, and one by one dropped dead. He had failed to realize that
the exertions he had spared the butterflies were essential to their survival, because they triggered the
flow of fluid that had to reach their wings. This experience taught him a lesson he was still talking
about seventy years later: What appears to be kind and is meant to be kind can be the reverse of kind.”
144
She was wafer pale, nervous, and visibly shrunken, as if she’d aged ten years overnight. The life had gone out of her hair and her eyes, and I thought I saw a tremor in her left hand. Until then, in truth, I’d never really believed in her illness. Now I thought she should be in a hospital bed—or at least in some bed, with someone bringing cups of tea laced with honey, stoking a small, cheery fire, and reading aloud from The Wind in the Willows.
She was wafer pale, nervous, and visibly shrunken, as if she’d aged ten years overnight. The life had gone out of her hair and her eyes, and I thought I saw a tremor in her left hand. Until then, in truth, I’d never really believed in her illness. Now I thought she should be in a hospital bed—or at least in some bed, with someone bringing cups of tea laced with honey, stoking a small, cheery fire, and reading aloud from The Wind in the Willows.
148
“I told you that animism was once a universal religion on this planet. It’s still universal among
Leaver peoples—peoples you identify as ‘primitive,’ ‘Stone Age,’ and so on. But if you go among
these people and ask them if they’re animists, they won’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking
about. And in fact if you suggest that they and their neighbors have the same religious beliefs, they’ll
probably think you’re crazy. This is because, like neighbors everywhere, they tend to be much more
aware of their differences than their similarities. It’s the same with your revealed religions. To you,
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the
same. Many of you would say that something like Buddhism doesn’t even belong in this list, since it
doesn’t link salvation to divine worship, but to me this is just a quibble. Christianity, Judaism, Islam,
Buddhism, and Hinduism all perceive human beings as flawed, wounded creatures in need of salvation,
and all rely fundamentally on revelations that spell out how salvation is to be attained, either by
departing from this life or by rising above it.”
“True.”
“The adherents of these religions are mightily struck and obsessed by their differences—to the point
of mayhem, murder, jihad, and genocide—but to me, as I say, you all look alike. It’s the same among
Leaver peoples. They see what’s different between them and I see what’s alike, and what’s alike is not
so much a religion (as religion is understood by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus) as
it is a religious vision of the world. There is in fact no such religion as animism—that’s the construct:
animism as a religion. What exists—and what is universal—is a way of looking at the world. And
that’s what I’m trying to show you here.”
“I understand . . . I guess.”
“Always keep in mind what we’re about here, Jared. We’re here about visions, you and I. One vision
is sweeping us toward catastrophe. This is a vision peculiar to a single culture, our culture, focused and
sustained by the revealed religions of our culture during the last three thousand years. I’m trying to
show you another vision, healthy for us and healthy for the world, that was embraced by hundreds of
thousands of cultures through hundreds of thousands of years.”
152
This is the Law of Life for goats not because God decided goats should behave this
way but because, in any mix of strategies, goats that suckle only their own will tend to be better
represented in the gene pool than any others. It’s actually a very elegant concept.”
154
“It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or
rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That’s what our agricultural revolution is
all about. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy
their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian.”
161
“Unlike the God whose name begins with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can
you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb—
silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half
a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a
rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble—but not dead, not wholly
extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days that place will be pulsing
with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to
take care of that place. It will never be what it was before—but nothing is ever what it was before. It
doesn’t need to be what it was before. You’ll hear people talk about turning the plains of North
America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were
five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them
from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is
on the way. Everything here is in process.
163
“Every creature born in the living community belongs to that community. I mean it belongs in the
sense that your skin or your nervous system belongs to you. The mouse we saw didn’t just ‘live in’ the
park community, the way you might live in an apartment in Chicago or Fresno. Every molecule in the
mouse’s body was drawn from this community and eventually had be [sic] returned to this community.
It would be legitimate to say that this mouse was an expression of this community the way Leonardo
da Vinci was an expression of Renaissance Italy.
“The individual lives in dynamic tension with the community, withdrawing to burrow, hive, nest,
lodge, or den for safety’s sake but never totally self-sufficient there, always compelled to return and
make itself available, as this mouse did. This tension is a phrase of the law, inspiring the trapdoor
spider to seal its burrow like a bank vault and inspiring the spider wasp to become a safebreaker.
“Nothing in the community lives in isolation from the rest, not even the queens of the social insects.
Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing
nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life is on loan from the
community from birth and without fail is paid back to the community in death. The community is a
web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt or excused.
Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest. As you saw yesterday,
nothing is wasted, not a drop of water or a molecule of protein—or the egg of a fly. This is the
sweetness and the miracle of it all, Jared. Everything that lives is food for another. Everything that
feeds is ultimately itself fed upon or in death returns its substance to the community.”
