by Daniel Quinn
There are many who think it’s too late for humankind to save itself. I hear from them daily, and my heart goes out to them. Their hopelessness is understandable, because they mistake the workings of the drug for human nature itself. There is time for us to stop taking the drug and to stop feeding it to our children. There is time for us to begin the Great Remembering.
The obliteration of tribalism
I explained a little while ago that the Great Forgetting fostered the delusion that the world was empty of humans until the people of our culture made their appearance just a few thousand years ago. As a corollary of this delusion, it was understood that our culture was not only the first and original human culture but the single culture that God intended for all humankind. These delusions remain in place today globally—East and West, twins of a common birth—even though the true (and well-known) story of human origins obviously gives them no support at all.
As the foundation thinkers of our culture reconstructed the story, humans appeared in the world with an instinct for civilization but of course no experience. They soon discovered the obvious benefits of communal life, and from there the course of civilization was clear. Farming villages grew into towns, towns grew into cities, cities grew into kingdoms, and so on. All was clear, but all was not smooth, because a key social instrument had yet to be invented, that instrument being law. Ignorant even of the concept of law, the citizens of these early cities and kingdoms were compelled to suffer crime, turmoil, oppression, and injustice. Law was a vitally important enabling invention, on which orderly social development had to wait, much as oceanic navigation had to wait on the invention of the astrolabe.
One would expect to find that laws existed long before literacy, but this appears not to have been the case. If laws had been formulated orally in preliterate times, then the earliest writings would surely have been transcriptions of these laws—but no such laws are found in these writings. In fact, the earliest written code of law, the Code of Hammurabi, dates to only about 2100 B.C.E.
Roughly speaking, this is what the foundation thinkers imagined, and this is what became the received wisdom of our culture, embedded in all social thought—and in the textbooks used by schoolchildren around the globe, even to the present moment. Needless to say, it’s about as close to the truth as the fairy tale that babies are delivered by storks.
Now let’s take off the obscuring lenses of the Great Forgetting and have a look at what was really happening in the world ten thousand years ago. Members of Homo sapiens had been moving outward from their African birthplace for more than a hundred thousand years and had literally reached every corner of the world—and I don’t mean recently. By the time I’m talking about, ten thousand years ago, the Near East, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the New World had all been occupied by modern humans for at least twenty thousand years. And far from being empty, the Near East was among the most densely populated areas of the world—densely populated, that is, by tribal peoples, such as were found everywhere in the world at that time and such as are found still today where they’ve been allowed to survive.
So we’ve made two steps beyond the fairy tale: The founders of our culture didn’t live in an empty world, they were a tribal people surrounded by many other tribal peoples—and none of them were newcomers to the business of culture. These were old, old, old, old, old, old hands at culture, which means that not a single one of them was a stranger to the concept of law. Never once in the whole history of anthropology has a tribal people been found unequipped with a complete set of laws—complete, that is, for the lifestyle of that particular tribe.
The names of the tribes inhabiting the relevant area at this time will never be known to us. The name of the tribe in which our own quirky approach to life was born is similarly unknown. Since their descendants have come to be called Takers, Fll give them a name that echoes this a bit. Fll call them the Tak. With this as a beginning, Fll tell you a story of my own—obviously not intended to be taken as literal history, to be sure, but also not a ridiculous fairy tale, like the one we hear from those who are still blinded by the Great Forgetting. There certainly was such a people as the Tak (there had to be or we wouldn’t be here!), and they were certainly a tribal people surrounded by other tribal people, whom I’ve shown here as the Ak, the Bak, the Cak, and so on up through the Kak.
This drawing reflects two vitally important realities of tribal life. First, the dark background of each tribal area is what makes the tribal name stand out. What this is meant to show is that each tribe is defined by the solidity and density of its own laws and customs. There is literally no other way to tell them apart. The laws and customs of the Ak are what make them distinguishable as a tribe. The laws and customs of the Bak are what make them distinguishable as a tribe. The laws and customs of the Cak are what make them distinguishable as a tribe. And so on. Second, the solid border around each tribe makes it clear that the cultural boundaries between tribes are impenetrable. A member of the Bak can’t just decide one day to become a member of the Hak; such a thing is quite unthinkable among tribal peoples anywhere in the world.
Probably at this time some of these tribal peoples were agriculturalists and some were hunter-gatherers. There’s nothing at all unusual about finding the two living side by side. In any case, we know that the Tak (the tribal founders of the lifestyle we’re used to calling the Taker lifestyle) were agriculturalists—though there’s no reason to suppose that they invented agriculture. Their invention was a new style of agriculture—the totalitarian style.
But the stupendous innovation of the Tak was not just a new style of agriculture. The Tak had the remarkable and unprecedented idea that everyone should live the way they lived. It’s impossible to exaggerate how unusual this made them. I can’t name a single other people in history who made it a goal to proselytize their neighbors. Certainly no tribal people in history has evinced any interest in converting neighbors to their way of life—and I know of no civilized people who evinced such an interest either. For example, the Maya, the Natchez, and the Aztecs had no interest in spreading their lifestyle to the peoples around them, including those they conquered. The Tak were definitely revolutionaries in this regard. By inspiration, persuasion, or aggression, the Tak revolution began to engulf its neighbors.
By adopting a common culture, the Tak, Dak, and Fak have necessarily lost some of the solidity that once defined them. This is why they’re depicted as somewhat grayed out. The laws and customs of the Tak mean little to the Dak or the Fak. The laws and customs of the Dak mean little to the Tak or the Fak. The laws and customs of the Fak mean little to the Tak or the Dak. Because they now share a common lifestyle, the cultural borders between them grow faint. It’s not as easy to tell one from another now. Being a Dak or a Fak isn’t as important as it once was. Now what’s important is that they’re allied with the Tak. It should be kept in mind that in this alliance the original laws and customs of the Tak are no more relevant than anyone else’s. The Dak and the Fak have not become Tak. They’ve just largely ceased to be Dak and Fak.
The process continues. The laws and customs of individual tribes continue to fade into irrelevance. By now the Dak and the Fak have virtually lost their tribal identities, and the Hak and the Kak soon will join them.
At last the original dozen have been assimilated into a single vast farming collective. Because tribal laws and customs have been reduced to nothing, tribal identities are all but unreadable. It’s as easy for one of the Ak to live among the Hak as it is for a Belgian to live in France or for a New Yorker to live in San Francisco.
Now we’re ready to depict the state of law in this farming collective.
The foundation thinkers of our culture imagined that our culture was born in a world empty of law. As this series of drawings shows, our culture was born in a world absolutely full of law, and then proceeded to obliterate it—quite inadvertently, I’m sure (at least in the beginning). Even the law of the original Tak tribe disappeared, rendered by this
process as irrelevant as all the rest.
I want you to notice that this reconstruction is not entirely a work of imagination. Study the spread of our culture into the Americas, into Australia, into Africa and elsewhere, and you can hardly fail to see the steady obliteration of tribal law in the path of its advance—and with the obliteration of tribal law, the obliteration of tribal identity.
On the nature of received laws
As time went on, and the vacuum increased in size, it became obvious that some new form of law was needed. Since tribal law had been rendered obsolete, nothing remained now but to begin to invent laws….
I think anyone who does a lot of public speaking eventually learns to sense when a chord has been struck and the audience is ringing with it. That’s what I just sensed after saying that nothing remained but to begin to invent laws.
This is of course a startling idea, the idea that laws could be anything but invented—but that’s exactly the point to be made about tribal laws. Tribal laws are never invented laws, they’re always received laws. They’re never the work of committees of living individuals, they’re always the work of social evolution. They’re shaped the way a bird’s beak is shaped, or a mole’s claw—by what works. They never reflect a tribe’s concern for what’s “right” or “good” or “fair,” they simply work—for that particular tribe. An example will show you—
I see this woman here has an urgent question. Please go ahead….
Yes. I’ll repeat the question for those of you who were unable to hear it. It’s about the genital mutilation of women among tribal peoples, specifically the excision of the clitoris disguised as a form of female circumcision. I’ve looked into this and haven’t found any untouched tribal people who follow this abominable practice. It’s found only among peoples who have been all but completely absorbed into Taker culture—and specifically Taker culture in the Islamic sphere. Clitoral excision isn’t advocated in the Koran, but its practitioners clearly have the impression that it’s Islam-approved and a very Muslim thing to do, and the practice isn’t found outside areas under Muslim influence. A strong confirmation of the fact that this is not a “tribal” practice is that it’s not found among peoples who are still living tribally, like say, the Pagibeti or the Yaka. It’s found only among people who have abandoned tribal identity, laws, and customs, and now belong to the wider Taker community of some recognized political entity like Senegal or Mali.
Okay?
I was saying that an example will show you the difference between received tribal laws and laws invented by committees. Here’s how the Alawa of Australia handle adultery.
Let’s suppose that you’re a young unmarried man of the Alawa. You find yourself in the unhappy circumstance of being attracted to your second cousin’s wife, Gurtina—and of knowing that she is attracted to you. Now, your second cousin is a fine fellow, and you wouldn’t intentionally hurt him, but these things happen: You and his wife are possessed by the love madness.
It’s really very touching and pathetic. Living in the same camp, you can’t help but see each other daily. You circle each other like binary stars, drawn together by one force, thrust apart by another. What you read in each other’s eyes is plain but untested. You yearn to test it, but … you know what the testing will inevitably cost.
No matter. Soon you can endure it no longer. The fire of love is burning you alive. One day in passing at the outskirts of camp, you confront her. She lowers her eyes modestly, as always, but your determination is fixed. “Tonight,” you whisper, “past the saltbush on the other side of the stream.”
She hesitates a moment to consult her own heart, but she too knows that the time has come. “At the setting of the moon?” she asks. “At the setting of the moon.” She nods and hurries away, her heart bursting with joy and dread.
That night you’re there a little beforehand, of course, to prepare your bower of love, your nest of passion. Gurtina comes to you at last. Your hands touch. You embrace. Ah!
A few hours later, exhausted with delight, you sit by a tiny fire and watch it grow pale in the burgeoning dawn. You exchange a glance, and more is written in that glance than in all your night’s endearments and caresses. You have tested your passion. Now, this glance says, it’s time to test your love.
With a sigh, you smother the fire and head back to camp, trying not to let your feet drag. Your faces are a careful display. Exultation would be childish and insolent. Shame would be a denial of your love. Instead, what’s seen there is something like repose, acceptance, fortitude. You both know what you’re going to see, and without fail you see it. At one side of the camp the men are arrayed, already hopping with fury. At the other side wait the women, smoldering.
You and Gurtina exchange another glance—this one briefer than the beat of a gnat’s wing—and then you’re engulfed in a wave of wrath. The men descend on you, the women on her. Rocks and spears and boomerangs are flying through the air, clubs and digging sticks are being wielded with abandon. But you don’t just stand there and take it—far from it. You both battle back in defense of your love, answering screams with screams, rocks with rocks, spears with spears, blows with blows, until all weapons and combatants are finally exhausted.
Gurtina, bleeding and battered, is returned to her husband, and you’re told to roll your swag and get the hell out if you know what’s good for you. For a while the men’s bodies are exhausted, their fury isn’t, and when they revive, you’ll be fair game again. So you roll your swag, thinking. Thinking very hard. The test of your love isn’t over, it’s just begun. The next few hours will be the true test, and this test will be in your head and heart alone. You leave camp, knowing that as yet you have a choice….
The question is: Do you really want this woman? Do you want her more than anything you hold dear in the world? If you don’t, if there’s the slightest doubt … you will just keep going—go on walkabout for a few weeks. When you come back, the men’s fury will have abated. They’ll jeer at you for a few weeks and then forget all about it. Gurtina … ah, Gurtina will know you for what you are, a craven seducer, a hollow man, and she’ll never forget. And of course there’ll be a price to be paid to your cousin. But all these are bearable. The alternative, on the other hand … You circle the camp all day, staying out of sight and out of reach, thinking. But by dusk you know that your doubts have vanished. In the gathering darkness, you approach camp stealthily, to the spot where your loved one is being guarded. Lightly guarded.
Lightly guarded—to keep her from running away with you. Ah, the exquisiteness of that guard! Do you see its effect?
Gurtina has her own choice to make, you see—the same terrible choice as yours. And the restraint provided by those guards defines and delimits her choice. For she’s guarded. You’re not. You have to prove your courage by coming for her. She doesn’t need to prove her courage by coming for you. And in fact, she can’t. She’s guarded, you see. So that, should you not come for her, she will not be shamed. Rather it will be you who is shamed.
But this is only half of it. The guards are there to protect you as well, because Gurtina too has her choice to make. Does she really want you? Does she want you more than anything she holds dear in the world? If not—if there’s the slightest doubt—when your signal comes at dusk, she need only shrug helplessly, as if to say, “See? I can’t get away, my love. I’m being too well guarded.” Thus the presence of the guards enables her to express her choice in a way that does not crush your self-esteem. The presence of the guards makes it possible for her to end the whole episode in a moment, without a single word, as painlessly as possible.
Now note very well that none of this is or was worked out rationally or consciously, of course. Nevertheless, the guard on Gurtina is in fact curiously inefficient. Efficient enough to serve all the purposes I’ve just mentioned—but inefficient enough to allow her to escape at your signal, if that is her will. Because of course the Alawa are sensible enough to know that if she wants you this much, it would b
e foolish to make escape impossible.
The testing is over now. You and she have made your decision. Now the price must be paid. The price for disrupting the life of the tribe, for cheapening marriage in the eyes of the children. And that price is, next to death itself, the heaviest that can be paid: detribalization, lifelong exile.
At your signal, Gurtina slips away from her guard and, together at last and forever, the two of you hurry away into the night, never to return. You are journeying into the land of the dead now. Detribalized, you are dead to all you left behind and to all you shall ever meet for the rest of your lives. Now you are truly homeless, by your own choice, alone and adrift in a vast, empty world. Your home is now each other, which you chose above the tribe. There will be no comradeship for you forever except what you find in each other: no friends, no father and mother, no aunts and uncles, no cousins, no nieces and nephews. You have thrown it all away—to have each other.
And you know that this is truly a price you’ve paid of your own choice, not a punishment. To have each other and go on living with the tribe would be unthinkable, disgraceful, even worse than exile. It would in fact destroy the tribe, because once the children saw that there was no price to be paid for adultery, marriage would become a laughingstock, and the basis of the family and of the tribe itself would disintegrate.
What you see at work here in this example is the stupendous efficacy of tribal law. Nothing like invented law, which just spells out crimes and punishments, tribal law is something that works. It works well for all concerned. A man and woman whose love is as great as this must of course have each other. But for the sake of the tribe, they must be gone—out of sight, out of mind forever. The children of the tribe have seen with their own eyes that marriage and love are not the trifling matters they have become among “advanced” peoples like us. The husband’s dishonor has been avenged—and there will be no snickering among his comrades about it, for they stood side by side with him to lambaste the adulterer.