Pandora's Seed

by Spencer Wells

  Al-Qaeda in particular has taken Sayyid Qutb’s writings to heart, and much of Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric is lifted directly from his writings. The organization’s recruiting materials espouse radical interpretations of Islam that bear no resemblance to the religion practiced by the vast majority of the world’s Muslims. In fact, this is used by the organization to justify killing them in the name of jihad: Muslims who do not practice the extreme form of Islam championed by al-Qaeda are considered by the organization to be takfir—apostate sinners who are, in effect, denouncing their religion. We can trace this belief directly to Qutb, who said that it was permissible in the name of jihad to kill such people.

  This history helps to explain how we ended up in the frightening position in which we find ourselves today. Members of the American religious right killing doctors at abortion clinics; al-Qaeda members using bombs and hijacked planes to kill thousands in a global war against Western secularism; Aum Shinrikyo followers killing a dozen people and injuring hundreds more in the Tokyo subway—all seem like the inhuman acts of crazy zealots, unable to separate right from wrong, but this is a crude oversimplification. Any sort of mass murder is possible only because the human faces of the victims have been dissociated from the action of killing; unlike previous movements that have advocated violent solutions to social problems, however, such as the PLO or the IRA, with their territorial desires, today’s violent fundamentalist movements claim to be doing God’s will, giving them a sense of higher purpose. Success means not simply achieving proximal goals such as political autonomy, for instance, but changing the world order in the name of God. Crazy though it may appear from the outside, it is not insanity that drives terrorism in the fundamentalist world; rather, it is the God-given certainty that what one is doing is morally just.

  Of course, most fundamentalists will never commit acts of terrorism. Nevertheless, their decisions on a daily basis help to forge an opposition to liberal secularism. The battle over evolution in the United States is a good example. When Charles Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859, it met with widespread opposition from the religious establishment. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who famously debated evolution with Darwin’s ardent supporter T. H. Huxley in 1860, parodied the notion that humans could be descended from apes, but such views were ultimately to fade into the minority. By the early twentieth century, Darwinian evolution was widely accepted, in part because of its misappropriation by proponents of “social Darwinism” as a way to justify the hardscrabble economic competition of the Victorian era. While the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” in 1926, briefly brought anti-evolutionist thinking back into public view, ultimately the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the growing prominence of science during the Cold War would squelch much of this fundamentalist backlash. A 1968 Supreme Court decision overturning an Arkansas law banning the teaching of evolution in schools effectively ended the debate for the next decade.

  In the 1980s, flush with Ronald Reagan’s victory in the presidential election and the concomitant increase in the prominence of the Moral Majority, anti-evolutionist thinking began to claw back support it had lost during the secular mid-twentieth century. A study published in 2006, examining public acceptance of evolution around the world, found that around 80 percent of the people in major European countries and Japan accepted evolution. In the United States the number was only 40 percent, and among the thirty-four countries surveyed only Turkey ranked lower, at 25 percent. The poll figure in the United States actually represented a decline from 45 percent in 1985, and between 1985 and 2006 the number of people who were “unsure” about evolution increased from 7 percent to 21 percent. One of the study’s coauthors, Jon Miller of Michigan State University, noted that “American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist.”

  Clearly, the past few decades have seen an unprecedented rise in fundamentalist thinking as people have felt increasingly left out of the secular future. According to Stephen Ulph of the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank focused on terrorism, at least 60 percent of the material on Islamic jihadist websites concerns ideological or cultural questions rather than pragmatic issues. He noted in an interview in the Economist that jihadists are fighting less a war against the West than “a civil war for the minds of Muslim youth.” Similarly, American fundamentalists view their struggle in terms of a battle with the forces of secular humanism for the hearts and minds of America—according to the Moral Majority Coalition website, they plan to “mobilize people of faith to reclaim this great country.” Both movements, while rooted in their desire to return to what they see as a golden age of religious mythos, are making ever-greater use of the methods of logos in their mobilization. In their effort to return to a past they imagine to be more pure, they are using the technologies of the present to reach out to more and more people.

  A few hundred years ago, the world might as well have been composed of separate planets, each one with its own culture. In some (e.g., South America or Africa) mythos dominated, with significant emphasis on religion and tradition as the bedrock of society. Others (those in western Europe, for instance) were rushing toward a logos establishment. What happened over the succeeding centuries is that these previously separate planets were thrown into contact, often violently, in a way that created the modern logos-dominated world. Those cultures that looked to mythos for guidance were either marginalized or conquered, their people incorporated into the secular. What we are witnessing with the rise of fundamentalism in the past half century is a process whereby some of the people who sense the loss of mythos are trying to regain it. One of the dominant features of fundamentalist teachings, regardless of the religious sources underpinning them, is that of separatism—a desire to build an alternative culture outside the mainstream of the modern world.

  The world, it seems, has always been Balkanized in this way. It allows us to make sense of the mass of humanity we jostle with in modern society. The American melting pot has always been curdled, with hyphenated Americans (African-Americans, Italian-Americans, and so on) the norm. The world today is far more mobile than it has ever been, and cultures are mixing to a far greater extent than they have before. Rewind the clock a few centuries, back before the dawn of the European Age of Exploration, and it would have been a different place. There were perhaps fifteen thousand languages spoken in the year 1500, as opposed to today’s six thousand—and those six thousand will probably be reduced to fewer than three thousand by the end of this century. This is one way to chart the march of globalization, as previously isolated groups all over the world join the global melting pot at an ever-increasing rate.

  This desire to find a small community within the dizzying demographic cacophony of the modern world is nothing new. Whether inspired by fundamentalism or not, it is something we do all the time, even in the most modern places.

  FACEBOOK FORAGERS

  One of the things I do for amusement on the Internet is to share information about myself with a small group of friends on Facebook. The status updates are always an opportunity to be clever, funny, or offbeat while letting your friends know what you are up to; along with uploaded photographs and shared YouTube videos, the site gives you a chance to carve out an online presence in a forum that’s substantially more intimate than a blog. I’m hardly alone in my Facebook activities, either—as of early 2010 it boasted more than 400 million members in more than 180 countries, and it was growing at a rate of around 10 million members a month. Begun in 2003 by Mark Zuckerberg, then a Harvard undergraduate, as a way for his fellow classmates to stay in touch with each other, its growth has been nothing short of phenomenal. If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third largest, smaller only than China and India. But what an unusual country it is.

  Facebook reveals details of what you post only to your friends—people you know and are willing to share such information with. Unlike a real country of hundreds of millions of people, you
can’t simply walk down a street in Facebook and bump into random strangers. Actually, you could, but such random introductions would likely be met with a brush-off where the person approached for “friendship” clicked the “Ignore” button on the screen. There is a whole mini industry built around Facebook etiquette, attempting to sift through what is and isn’t advisable to share with your community. Embarrassing photos from last weekend’s party? Probably not a good idea, especially if your friends include work colleagues. Membership in a radical organization? Perhaps better left unmentioned. It is this combination of publishing the details of one’s life to a group of people while retaining control over what is revealed that makes Facebook and other social networking sites so popular.

  Despite its position at the forefront of the Web 2.0 revolution, the powerful servers that provide its infrastructure, and the esoteric topics that can be found in its fan clubs and groups (want to let everyone know how much you love seaweed?), what is so striking is how much like the real world Facebook is. The most popular fan sites are for Barack Obama (who famously used Facebook to build support during his election campaign), Coca-Cola, Nutella hazelnut spread, pizza, and the television character Homer Simpson. Pop stars, other foods, and film and sports personalities round out the top twenty. In their Facebook world, users are consciously recreating the aspects they love about the real world, populating their virtual communities with people and items from their everyday lives.

  Not so obvious, but still present, is something that creates a link between the brave new world of the Internet and our distant past in hunter-gatherer groups. The average number of Facebook friends people have is around 130. This is close to the number we learned about in Chapter 4—Dunbar’s average number of close acquaintances, predicted by the size of the human neocortex. It seems that even in a virtual world where we could have thousands or millions of “friends,” we don’t want to tell that many people about our fondness for Chinese food or share pictures of our children with them. And perhaps the deep connection between our ancient hunter-gatherer brains and the worlds we create online can show us a path through the ideological thicket, pointing a way toward a new mythos in the twenty-first century.

  WANT LESS

  One evening, back at camp, I asked Julius how the Hadzabe dealt with their dead—burial or, perhaps, cremation? He smiled and shook his head. “No,” he explained, “we don’t bury the bodies or burn them. We leave them out in the open in a sacred place, near a baobab tree, and let the animals eat them. Usually it is the hyena. There is a small ceremony performed by the elders, and we leave food for the passage to the afterlife. We return a few months later to find the bones, and then hide them in the bush. The land we live in is full of the remains of our ancestors, and it connects us to them.”

  The simplicity of his answer is what struck me most. The entirety of the Hadzabes’ land is a burial ground, with no separate place for the dead to spend their afterlives. They continue on in the landscape after they are dead, and this is part of the reason that the Hadzabe feel such a close connection to their territory. Land, to the Hadzabe, is not just about something that provides subsistence, though of course that is important—it’s also a tangible connection with their ancestors. The land and the people are inseparable, and this connection is the essence of their mythos. To attempt to separate them or to exploit the land in some way would be an insult to the entire Hadzabe worldview. It was and is unthinkable.

  Many traditional cultures around the world feel such a connection to the land where they live, but perhaps none more so than the hunter-gatherer. The agriculturalist relies on favorable weather to grow his crops, but the mythos of agriculture is ultimately one of production and extraction: if I plant the seeds, tend them, protect them from pests, and harvest them, then I will be able to feed my family. Through my labor I change the environment into something I can control, and that allows me to grow enough food to survive. If the land ceases to be productive, I will have to move on to find new land. For agriculturalists, the land itself is simply a conduit, a way to turn seeds into something useful. Slash-and-burn agriculture is simply the most egregious example of this approach to land use.

  The problem with such a mythos, as any environmentalist will tell you, is that it is simply not sustainable in the long run. Ultimately, the era of Manifest Destiny must come to an end when there is nowhere else to move. The seeds that set in motion the Neolithic Revolution have bloomed into a wholesale rush to extract and exploit most of the earth’s resources, largely because it was possible to do so and it seemed that their supply was infinite. But as we enter the twenty-first century, this old mythos is becoming increasingly untenable, as we saw in the previous chapter. As resources become more limited, that scarcity challenges the old models of development and progress.

  Similarly, the lurch toward fundamentalism in the Islamic world and in the United States has been largely a reaction to the increasing loss of mythos. The loss of cultural traditions leaves many people feeling adrift and exploited, human mirrors of our ravaged ecosystems. Logos is great at explaining how things happen, but it is less helpful in providing an answer to why. Humans need such explanations to make sense of the world, and if we don’t know about the science—or don’t buy into that worldview—we will invoke religious or mythological explanations. Does the sun rise every day because the earth rotates on its axis or because the gods are smiling on us and want to provide its life-giving rays? It all depends on what culture you grew up in.

  I am not advocating conversion to fundamentalism, any more than I am urging us to abandon our plows and return to hunting and gathering. But I do think that the current cultural conflict should cause both sides to reexamine their underlying tenets. The modern, secular West should ask what it is that fuels the flames of fundamentalism, just as the advocates of jihad should ask why such a war is justified. Ultimately, fundamentalism can exist only in opposition to something else; it is a protest movement. If there were nothing to protest, it would lose its raison d’être.

  What can we do to encourage such a consilience? The Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out that is is not the same as ought—simply because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. But exactly the opposite seems to be the case today: if we can do something, that seems to provide a justification for doing it. And as we learn to do more things, we want even more—a vicious cycle thriving off the illusion that resources are unlimited. This process started 60,000 years ago as our species expanded from its African homeland to populate the world, and it accelerated abruptly after the Neolithic Revolution. With agriculture, as we have seen, came the power to create far larger problems than we could have even dreamed of as hunter-gatherers, and the driving force behind most of them was greed. While we can never go back to the preagricultural era, we can perhaps take as a moral guide the mythos of the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers: we can learn to want less.

  It is only by wanting less that we will be able to come to terms with the challenges of climate change. Wanting less will also give us a better insight into how best to apply powerful technologies such as genetic engineering, by forcing us to accept that there are limits to human perfectibility. And, by making a bit of room for mythos at the cultural table, it will probably mitigate some of the extreme forms of fundamentalism. After all, it is the “crass materialism” and “cultural imperialism” of the West that is cited by so many Islamic fundamentalists as a reason for jihad. Sayyid Qutb developed his hatred for the modern, secular Western lifestyle after living in the United States; he wrote disparagingly of its “utilitarian” culture, “dominated by…materialism.” Reducing the importance of such materialism wouldn’t put Islamic fundamentalism out of business, of course, but one of its major justifications would be gone.

  Continued expansion at the rate we have seen in the past few centuries simply isn’t tenable. We are currently using far more of the earth’s natural resources than will be sustainable in the long run. Even technological innov
ation won’t create unlimited new supplies of fresh water; nor will it allow everyone to live American lifestyles. Knowing when to say no is sometimes more important than discovering a new way to say yes. Perhaps one of the few positive things to come out of the severe global recession we are experiencing as I write this is that materialism has become less important than it was in the past and the late-twentieth-century substitution of money for mythos has lost some of its luster.

  Writers such as Bill McKibben and James Howard Kunstler have tapped into the new sense that we need to downsize our lifestyles. McKibben, alarmed at the proliferation of “transhumanist” technologies like genetic engineering that threaten to change the essence of what it means to be human, asks, “Must we ever grow in reach and power? Or can we, should we, ever say ‘Enough’?” Kunstler, a critic of American suburbia and the author of The Geography of Nowhere, wrote in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, “No combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system—or even a fraction of these things—in the future. We have to make other arrangements.” These other arrangements, for Kunstler, involve changing the relationship we have with where we live and closing the door on suburban sprawl. In essence, he’s telling us we need to want less: less commuting, smaller houses, more energy-efficient forms of transportation, food that is more cottage than industry.