If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.

by Daniel Quinn

  Elaine. It seems to me to be a statement that a great many people would agree with.

  Daniel. You’re probably right. That’s what we’re looking at: the frame of reference that a great many people — possibly even a majority of people — share. That’s the anthropologist’s task … I’ve been thinking of this as a book title for a good many years: If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.

  Elaine laughs.

  Daniel. If you were to pass around a sheet of lined paper with this statement on it, most people would probably write on the next line, “Yes, that’s right.” I turn the paper sideways and write something else on it.

  Elaine. What would you write on it?

  Daniel [shaking his head]. The lines on the lined paper represent assumptions or, you might say, the received wisdom of our culture. What is the assumption on which this statement is written? — Anything we humans do that disturbs the balance of Nature must be eliminated from our way of life.

  Elaine. Disturbing the balance of Nature is … harmful.

  Daniel. To what?

  Elaine. To … the stability of the world. To life.

  Daniel. In other words, disturbing the balance of Nature disturbs the balance of Nature.

  Elaine [laughs]. Yes, I guess so.

  Daniel. But in any case, it’s bad.

  Elaine. Yes.

  Daniel. All right. This is the activity of the Martian anthropologist — or perhaps you could say the method of the Martian anthropologist — to pull away, to pull back and look at the whole.

  Elaine. Okay.

  Daniel. Pull back four hundred million years and look at the life of the world as it was then. Do you have any kind of picture of it?

  Elaine. Not an educated one. I’m not even sure … Let’s just say I’m not sure where things stood.

  Daniel. Well, briefly, land plants began to appear about four hundred million years ago, presumably spreading from lowland swamps. These were followed onto the land by arthropods and other invertebrate groups, and land vertebrates evolved from freshwater fish some forty million years later.

  Elaine. Okay.

  Daniel. Now repeat after me: Anything that disturbs the balance of Nature is bad.

  Elaine, perplexed, says nothing.

  Daniel. The appearance of plants on the land disturbed the balance of Nature.

  Elaine. Yes, I guess so.

  Daniel. You guess so? Obviously it did. If it hadn’t, all life would still be in the sea. True?

  Elaine. Yes.

  Daniel. Disturbance of the “balance of Nature” is the driving force of evolution. It is what makes evolution occur. If Nature, as it’s called, had ever achieved perfect balance, then evolution would have come to a halt. Mammals were an unimportant class living in the shadows during the dinosaur age. The end of that age opened the way for mammalian development, including the evolution of primates. Now, again, repeat after me: Anything that disturbs the balance of Nature is bad.

  Elaine. I can’t, of course. Now.

  Daniel. So what is your answer going to be to this reader’s statement? Anything we humans do that disturbs the balance of Nature must be eliminated from our way of life.

  Elaine. It makes no sense.

  Daniel. It makes no sense because it’s based on a false assumption: that Nature is, or was, balanced until we came along to unbalance it. In order to assent to the policy recommended by this reader, we would have to deny reality and start talking nonsense.

  Elaine. I think I’m beginning to get it.

  Daniel. What?

  Elaine. What it means to think like a Martian anthropologist.

  Daniel. Good. Let’s move on in a different direction … I’ve already mentioned that Marshall Sahlins described Stone Age peoples as the first affluent society. They lived a life of ease, compared with ours. Contrary to the popular misconception, they didn’t live on the knife-edge of survival. To put it in technical terms, they expended far fewer calories to stay alive than their agricultural descendants. In fact, the more people are dependent on cultivated food, the harder they have to work. Obviously it’s less work to gather fruit that’s growing wild than it is to plant, cultivate, and guard an orchard; less work to gather vegetables that are growing wild than it is to plant, cultivate, guard, and harvest crops.

  Elaine. Yes, that much I know.

  Daniel. In Ishmael and elsewhere I pointed out that, in addition to this, tribal peoples have a life they enjoy living. Since the tribe is not a hierarchical organization, they don’t have the frustration of dealing with societal organizations that seem to function like opponents — police, courts, governments, tax collectors, and so on. Factually speaking, where their culture hasn’t been undermined by our own, they’re not constantly struggling with anxiety, rage, depression, drug addiction, and crime. This isn’t to say that they’re sweeter, more spiritual, more high-minded, more generous, or more selfless than we are. They’re just as susceptible to selfishness, temper tantrums, bad judgment, and violence as we are, though they have a different way of handling these things than we do.

  Elaine nods.

  Daniel. Reading this, a great many readers write to me demanding to know if I’m saying that we should go back to living in caves and hunting our dinners with a spear.

  Elaine. Yes?

  Daniel. What’s your reaction to this?

  Elaine. You’ve never said anything like that. In fact, you’ve said very explicitly that that’s not what you’re saying.

  Daniel. Of course they’re also reacting to the point I’ve made about the consequences of the Agricultural Revolution. Any population of any species grows and declines as its food resources grow and decline. The Agricultural Revolution allowed us to make sure that our food resources never declined. On the contrary, the Agricultural Revolution assured that our food resources could always be increased — and in fact have been increased constantly from the beginning of the revolution to the present, so that our population has increased constantly as well. Every increase in population has been met with an increase in food production, which stimulates yet another increase in population.

  Elaine. Yes …?

  Daniel. And so people write to me to ask, “Are you saying we should go back to living in caves and hunting our dinners with a spear?”

  Elaine. Even though you’ve said specifically that that’s not what you’re saying.

  Daniel. That’s right. What am I to make of this? What do you make of it?

  Elaine. I guess that … some people are just not good readers. They just see what they want to see.

  Daniel. There’s an element of truth in that, to be sure. But I think there’s something deeper to be found here.

  Elaine [after a pause]. I don’t know where to look.

  Daniel. Pull back. Try to see what’s behind the question. Try to see what’s going on in the minds of the people who ask it.

  Elaine [after a longer pause]. I don’t know if I’m on the track here or not, but … when the surgeon general reports that smokers are more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers, it’s understood that you’d better give up smoking.

  Daniel. The description implies a prescription.

  Elaine. Yes, that’s it.

  Daniel. If I point out that tribal peoples generally lead easier, less stressful lives, this is just a description, but some people assume it must be a prescription.

  Elaine. That’s right.

  Daniel. If I point out that the Agricultural Revolution has brought about a boom in human population growth that has brought us to the verge of catastrophe, this is also just a description, but some people assume it must be a prescription — of some kind. For example, some people think I’m saying we should cut food production and let people starve.

  Elaine. Well, I have to admit I wondered about that myself.

  Daniel. You wondered what my prescription is.

  Elaine. Yes.

  Daniel. This has been a continuing problem for me — maybe you could call it
the anthropologist’s dilemma. If I describe something, simply doing my job as an anthropologist, it’s often assumed that I must also be prescribing something.

  Elaine. Well, people do want prescriptions.

  Daniel. That’s certainly true … I’ve described the problem as a food race, similar to the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In that arms race, every advance made on our side was answered by an advance on their side, which of course had to be answered by yet another advance on our side, provoking another advance on their side — a never-ending escalation. The food race is the same. Every advance on the side of food production is answered by an advance in population growth, which must be answered by an advance in food production, provoking yet another advance in population growth. For this I did have a prescription. The Cold War arms race ended when the Soviet Union simply walked away from it — refused to go on racing with us. The food race could end in the same way, if we simply walked away from it, refused to perpetuate the race between food production and population growth.

  Elaine. What would be the result of that?

  Daniel. If x amount of food feeds six billion of us this year, then x amount of food will feed six billion of us next year. Won’t it?

  Elaine. I would think so.

  Daniel. And if x amount of food will feed six billion of us next year, then x amount of food will feed six billion of us the year after that, won’t it?

  Elaine. Yes.

  Daniel. Then why increase food production?

  Elaine [after a bit of thought]. Ah! To feed the starving millions!

  Daniel. Of course. So last year they increased food production in order to feed the starving millions.

  Elaine. I assume they did.

  Daniel. You can bet on it. So this year the starving millions are being fed, right?

  Elaine. No.

  Daniel. How long the starving millions have been around I don’t know, but from my own personal experience, I can tell you that they’ve been around for seventy years. And we’ve been increasing food production for all those years to feed them. But they never get fed, do they?

  Elaine. Apparently not.

  Daniel. Why not? If we’re constantly increasing food production in order to feed them, why are they still starving?

  Elaine. That I don’t know.

  Daniel. I think you do. Or at least I think you know the conventional wisdom about it. That’s where the Martian anthropologist has to begin, with the conventional wisdom that everyone accepts without question. The food is there. Everyone agrees that we’ve got enough food to feed everyone on the planet. But the starving millions go on starving, and the question is, why?

  Elaine. The food isn’t getting to them.

  Daniel. Obviously. But why? Don’t the trains and the roads run that far? Aren’t there any ports where they live?

  Elaine. I don’t know.

  Daniel. You’re stuck in your conventional mental framework, Elaine. You’ve got to pull back and see it from a distance. Reject the conventional wisdom, with its conventional implications. Think like a Martian anthropologist.

  Elaine spends a few minutes at it and then shakes her head.

  Daniel. I told you to reject the conventional wisdom, along with its conventional implications. What is the conventional wisdom?

  Elaine. That the food is there, it’s just not getting to them.

  Daniel. The implication being …

  Elaine. The problem is distribution. The food is not being distributed to the starving.

  Daniel. Why? Because of short train lines, blocked roads, closed ports?

  Elaine. No.

  Daniel. Then why? Is it just some kind of bureaucratic inefficiency?

  Elaine. I don’t know. Maybe.

  Daniel. I’m going to check my e-mail and leave you alone to think about it, okay?

  Elaine. Okay.

  Daniel [half an hour later]. So. Make any progress?

  Elaine. I think so.

  Daniel. Go ahead.

  Elaine. I pulled back, and what I saw was that the starving millions don’t just lack food, they lack everything — food, clothing, shelter.

  Daniel. Don’t live in oceanside villas and drive BMWs but just happen to be starving.

  Elaine. No. They’re the poorest of the poor.

  Daniel. So the problem isn’t that the food isn’t reaching them. The problem is that they have no money to buy it. There are no starving rich people.

  Elaine. That’s right.

  Daniel. And how does increasing food production help them?

  Elaine. It doesn’t. No matter how much food we produce, they’re still too poor to buy it.

  Daniel. It’s well known, of course, that the slowest-growing segment of our population is found in the developed, rich nations.

  Elaine. Yes, I’ve certainly been told that.

  Daniel. So where is the growth taking place?

  Elaine. Among the poorer, undeveloped nations.

  Daniel. Where the starving millions live.

  Elaine. That’s right.

  Daniel. So as we increase food production and our population grows, year after year, where does the greatest part of that growth occur?

  Elaine. Among the poorer, undeveloped nations.

  Daniel. And in the poorer, undeveloped nations, among what classes do you suppose population growth is slowest?

  Elaine. I’d assume it’s slowest among the wealthier classes.

  Daniel. And where do you suppose it’s the fastest?

  Elaine. I’d assume it would be the fastest among the poor.

  Daniel. Among whom are the starving millions.

  Elaine. Yes. But —

  Daniel. Yes?

  Elaine. It’s going to be pointed out that we do send them food.

  Daniel. And so the starving millions aren’t actually starving.

  Elaine thinks about this.

  Daniel. Are the starving millions starving or not?

  Elaine. I guess I have to say that they’re starving.

  Daniel. If they weren’t, why would we be increasing food production every year in order to feed them?

  Elaine [after some thought]. It makes no sense.

  Daniel. What doesn’t?

  Elaine. Our rationale for constantly increasing food production.

  Daniel. We’re not creating a world without hunger?

  Elaine. No.

  Daniel. Let’s be realistic for a moment. Do you honestly believe that the companies spending tens or hundreds of millions a year to develop genetically modified foods are doing so altruistically, motivated by the thought of ending hunger?

  Elaine. It would seem unlikely. They’re motivated by the thought of making more money.

  Daniel. The scientists who do the actual work may imagine that they’re working to end world hunger, but I doubt that the top executives have any such notion.

  Elaine. I’m sure you’re right.

  Daniel. And what about the farmers who plant higher-yield crops? Are they doing it to help feed the starving millions?

  Elaine. No, realistically, higher yields mean bigger profits, and I have to assume that’s what they’re thinking about.

  Daniel. In 1960 there were three billion of us. Over the next forty years, while we continuously increased food production to feed the starving millions, the starving millions just went on starving. So where was that extra food going?

  Elaine. It was going into growing our population.

  Daniel. In forty years our population doubled to six billion. So have we demolished the idea that we increase food production every year in order to feed the starving millions?

  Elaine. Yes, as far as I’m concerned. What puzzles me is …

  Daniel. Yes?

  Elaine. It seems almost unbelievable that when we talk about increasing food production to feed the starving millions, everyone just nods as if it makes perfect sense.

  Daniel. Didn’t it make sense to you?

  E
laine. Yes, I guess I have to say it did.

  Daniel. Then where’s the puzzle?

  Elaine. To be honest, I’m not quite sure.

  Daniel. Or perhaps you’re not quite ready to articulate it.

  Elaine. Yes, it could be that.

  Daniel. Let’s move on to something simpler … In Ishmael I distinguished our tribal ancestors and their present-day cultural descendants from ourselves —

  Elaine. You called them Leavers and us Takers.

  Daniel. Yes … If I were doing it again, I wouldn’t have used those terms.

  Elaine. Why is that?

  Daniel. Because far too many readers translated these terms into Good People and Bad People. People imagined that if their hearts were in the right place, they had become Leavers. Someone once wrote to me that Governor Jerry Brown of California was a Leaver and his opponent was a Taker.

  Elaine. I noticed that you don’t seem to be using the terms now.

  Daniel. No … In Ishmael it was simpler to say “Leavers” than “our tribal ancestors and their present-day cultural descendants,” but I wish now that I’d just settled for “tribal peoples.”

  Elaine. I see. All the same, it did serve a purpose, at least for me.

  Daniel. Go on.

  Elaine. It distinguished “them” from “us” in a very … fundamental way. Leavers are those who leave their lives in the hands of the gods, and Takers are those who take their lives into their own hands. Leavers didn’t worry about where their next meal was coming from, because they knew that the food the gods left for them was never going to go away. But that wasn’t good enough for the Takers. They wanted to take control of their own food supply and not depend on the generosity of the gods.

  Daniel. Yes, the names themselves were apt enough, but many readers tended to read them as character descriptors. The essential difference between “them” and “us” is not in our hearts or in our attitudes but in the way we live.

  Elaine. Yes, I know that.

  Daniel. As I described them, tribal peoples — or Leavers — live in the hands of the gods, meaning that they take what the gods send. In good times they live well and have an easy time of it. In bad times they live less well and have to put more effort into staying alive. But there was never any necessity to sit in one spot and starve to death. If there wasn’t much food right where they were, they went somewhere else, where was likely to be more, and it was all free for the taking. Famines occur among settled, agricultural peoples. They’re stuck in their own stricken area and can’t forage for food in their neighbors’ territories, because the food there is definitely not free for the taking.