If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.

by Daniel Quinn

  Daniel. Obviously. A whole lot of people think they have the right to decide what people can and can’t do in their bedrooms. This was the only tool they had to use against them. The asserting of rights has become an important tool for the people of our culture, but my point is …?

  Elaine. That it’s only the people of our culture who need to use it.

  Daniel. To us, having to assert a right in order to have the things we want or want to do is taken to be a sort of human norm. It seems to make perfect sense — to be not in the least bizarre. One of my tasks has been to pull people far enough away from our culture to see how very bizarre it really is. I don’t mean that it’s uniquely bizarre. I just mean that, seen from a distance — from the point of view of a Martian anthropologist — our culture is no less bizarre than cultures whose customs seem to us outlandishly grotesque. Our way of doing things would seem as bizarre to the Gebusi of New Guinea as the Gebusi’s way of doing things seems to us.

  Daniel [after a half-hour break]. In Beyond Civilization and elsewhere I presented an important observation made by Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

  Elaine. Yes, I remember.

  Daniel. This is a “hard saying,” and I’m glad to have Bucky Fuller to blame for it.

  Elaine [after some thought]. People have a lot of faith in the utility of fighting the existing reality.

  Daniel. For most people, or at least a great many people, fighting is all they can see to do — or, practically speaking, all they can do — even if it doesn’t “change things.” I had this question from a reader: “Do we never resort to battle? I mean, if the last two ibex are standing in the last unplowed field and are about to be shot, and all attempts at mind change have failed, what do we do?” How would you answer this?

  Elaine. Well … battle? I’d have to say yes.

  Daniel. Who do you suppose is about to shoot these last two ibex?

  Elaine. I don’t know. Poachers, I’d assume.

  Daniel. So you drive off these poachers or kill them outright. The problem’s solved.

  Elaine. No … The poachers can always come back, or other poachers can come.

  Daniel. So?

  Elaine. So you’d have to post an armed guard. Five or ten men.

  Daniel. For how long?

  Elaine. I don’t know … Until the ibex multiplied.

  Daniel. Then you could withdraw the armed guards.

  Elaine shakes her head.

  Daniel. No? What then?

  Elaine. If poachers — or hunters or whoever — killed off all but two ibex in the first place, there’s nothing stopping them from doing the same thing again.

  Daniel. So you’d need to maintain the guards, even increase their number, since they’d have more ibex to protect. For how long?

  Elaine [sighing]. Indefinitely. Forever.

  Daniel lets her think about it.

  Elaine. Fighting the existing reality certainly doesn’t change things in this case.

  Daniel. In all my writings I stress the fact that if people go on thinking the way they generally do now, we’re doomed. Nothing can save us but changing the minds of the people around us. Lots of readers don’t like to hear this, because they want action, and this doesn’t seem like action to them.

  Elaine. Battling the poachers is action.

  Daniel. Yes, exactly. The fact is, however, that if most of the people who live around those two ibex don’t care whether they live or die, then those ibex are doomed. But if the people who live around those ibex see the world in a different way, then it’s the poachers who are doomed. There’s just no shortcut. The present existing reality is that people in general fail to see that systematically attacking the diversity of the living community is going to be fatal to us. Until that changes, no amount of fighting is going to save us.

  Elaine. That makes our situation look hopeless.

  Daniel. Not at all. The intellectual climate has changed dramatically in the past fifteen years. The number of mind-changing books that are being published climbs every year. What we’re looking for is what Malcolm Gladwell called the “tipping point,” the point where an accumulation of very small things — often quite suddenly and unexpectedly — produces an enormous change. The collapse of the Soviet Union is an excellent example. No intelligence service in the world predicted it or had the slightest clue that it was about to happen. The chance that significant change could occur there also “looked hopeless” — until it suddenly happened.

  Elaine. What things do you think contributed to that tipping point?

  Daniel [laughing]. A few years ago, in some speech or other, I suggested (not very forcefully) that rock music played an important role in it. I would never have dared to put such an outrageous idea in print until Andras Simonyi, Hungary’s ambassador to the United States, said the same thing, very forthrightly, last year. He spent an hour talking about it at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I remember that Western music was described as “an open window of fresh air in a very repressive society.” That window stayed open for decades and clearly affected the way young people saw their world.

  Elaine. I was wondering … Someplace you once said that politicians would be the last to “get it.” Why is that?

  Daniel. You can figure that out.

  Elaine. Oh. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder why I’ve got a head.

  Daniel. Don’t be too hard on yourself. I’ve been asked the same question by other people who couldn’t figure it out either.

  Elaine. We’re used to thinking of politicians as leaders. Or that they’re supposed to be leaders, want to be perceived as leaders.

  Daniel. Uh-huh.

  Elaine. Whatever you may think about it, George Bush certainly did lead us — or mislead us — into the war against Iraq.

  Daniel. No argument there.

  Elaine. What am I missing here?

  Daniel. What do I keep telling you to do when you get stuck?

  Elaine. Pull back. Look at it from a higher angle.

  Daniel offers no help.

  Elaine. Okay … I’ve been fixating on their role or supposed role, once elected. I need to look at how they get elected … Or rather, who elects them. The public is not going to elect a president who says … “Look, we can’t just think about the next four years. We’ve got to think about the whole human future — that’s what’s at risk.”

  Daniel. Why couldn’t such a candidate get elected?

  Elaine. Because the segment of the public that would vote for him is too small at this point.

  Daniel. Go on. You still haven’t explained why I say that politicians will be the last to get it.

  Elaine. They won’t get it till they have to get it. In other words, they won’t have to change until the electorate changes. When a majority of the electorate gets it, then only the candidates who get it will get elected.

  Daniel. Good. Now see if you can wrap it up.

  Elaine. Wrap it up?

  Daniel. In a neat little package.

  Elaine [after some thought]. Politicians don’t educate the electorate. The electorate educates politicians, with their votes.

  Daniel. For good or ill.

  Elaine. Yes.

  Daniel. Excellent.

  *President Kennedy repeated the assertion in his inaugural address, saying, “The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.”

  *Allegedly produced by chemists Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton.

  Saturday: Morning

  Daniel. Here’s a tricky little question that came in recently: “What biological mechanisms would allow us to keep our population at a level compatible with our food supply?”

  Elaine. What does he mean by “biological mechanisms”?

  Daniel. I doubt if he knows himself. I think what he means are mechanisms that are not polit
ical — for example, government limitations on food production that are not legalistic, like limiting family size by law, and that don’t depend on self-restraint, like birth control.

  Elaine. That still doesn’t tell me what a biological mechanism is.

  Daniel [after some consideration]. I’m beginning to see this as a tendency of yours: to pick out one element of a question and fixate on it. You’re not thinking about the question as a whole.

  Elaine. I guess you’re right. How does it go again?

  Daniel repeats the question.

  Elaine. Okay … Well, I can see one assumption he’s making: that there are biological mechanisms that would allow us to keep our population at a level compatible with our food supply.

  Daniel. Uh-huh.

  Elaine [after a long silence]. What else can I say? You’ve never said there are biological mechanisms that would allow humans to keep their populations at levels compatible with our food supply, have you?

  Daniel. No, I’ve never said anything like that.

  Elaine. So he’s making an unwarranted assumption and asking you to verify it.

  Daniel [sighing]. Elaine, this person is fundamentally confused, and you’ve bought into his confusion. In effect, you’re saying, “Okay, I’ll accept without question that what you’re saying makes sense.” He didn’t really look at what he was saying, and if you don’t really look at it, then you’re no better off than he is. You did the same thing with the person who suggested that the one right way for people to live is to let everyone live the way they want to live. You’ve got to stop meeting every challenge with acquiescence.

  Elaine. Well, this is discouraging.

  Daniel. You shouldn’t think of it that way at all. I have to assume that the person who wrote the question, being a reader of serious books, is of above-average intelligence, and the question itself isn’t a dumb one, despite its fundamental confusion. And … you know it’s my intention to publish a transcript of this conversation we’re having.

  Elaine. Yes …?

  Daniel. I’ll wager that, at this point, among the readers who are following the discussion of this particular question, 99.99 percent of them will be just as stumped as you are.

  Elaine laughs. I suppose that’s reassuring.

  Daniel. The answers I give to people’s questions — and the conclusions I reach in general — seem to astonish my readers, seem to be unexpected … alien. And the whole purpose of what we’re doing here is to shed some light on how I produce these answers and conclusions. The process seems unexceptional to me, but it obviously doesn’t seem so to my readers — or to you.

  Elaine. That’s certainly true.

  Daniel. All right. So let’s return to the basics. What are this questioner’s assumptions?

  Elaine. Well, let’s see. First, there’s the assumption that there are “biological mechanisms” that will achieve what he wants to achieve.

  Daniel. We’ve already looked at that one.

  Elaine. Okay. Then there’s his assumption that … I’m trying to remember how he put it … It’s his assumption that we need to keep our population at a level compatible with our food supply.

  Daniel. Yes, that is one of his assumptions.

  Elaine [after some thought]. I’m stuck. I don’t see any others.

  Daniel. It isn’t stated directly. It’s implicit in his question. That’s why you have to look behind the words.

  Elaine spends a couple of minutes on it, then shakes her head.

  Daniel. I’d rather not ask you leading questions, but it looks like I’ll have to. What is his concern, his worry?

  Elaine. That our population is not at a level that is compatible with our food supply.

  Daniel. Yes, this is implicit in his question.

  Elaine [doubtfully]. Okay.

  Daniel. Well, look at it.

  Elaine [after a minute]. Are you saying that our population —

  Daniel. No, don’t do that. Don’t go fishing for the answer in my head. Work it out yourself.

  Elaine. But the only alternative I can see is that our population is compatible with our food supply.

  Daniel waits.

  Elaine. Okay, I’ve got it. Or I think I do.

  Daniel. Which is it?

  Elaine. I’ve got it.

  Daniel. Go ahead.

  Elaine. Our population is compatible with our food supply. At all times. When there was food for three billion of us, there were three billion of us. When there was food for six billion of us, there were six billion of us. If there hadn’t been food for six billion, there wouldn’t be six billion.

  Daniel. So what “biological mechanism” makes population “compatible with food supply”?

  Elaine. I don’t know what to call it. Supply and maintenance? The population of every species grows to a point that is “compatible” with the food available to it. When food availability increases, its population increases. When food availability decreases, its population decreases … But not everyone agrees that this is the way it works, do they?

  Daniel. For nonhuman species, there’s no disagreement at all. But many people — including even many biologists — still cling to the doctrine of human exceptionalism, the way many Christian fundamentalists still cling to the doctrine of creationism.

  Elaine. I don’t think I’ve heard of that — human exceptionalism.

  Daniel. In this context, it’s just the doctrine that, among all the hundreds of millions of species in the living community, the human species is the sole exception to the rule you just described: that population increases or decreases according to food availability.

  Elaine. How do they explain that? I mean, what are their grounds for accepting this idea?

  Daniel. I’ve never seen a defense of it, but I imagine it stems from the fact that, as individuals, we can choose to reproduce or not. The fact that — as a species — our growth began to soar as soon as we began to increase food availability at will seems to them a mere coincidence. The record of the past ten thousand years, after some three million years of relative population stability, holds no significance for them.* In effect, they deny that the Agricultural Revolution had anything to do with our growth from a few hundred million to six billion.

  Elaine. That hardly seems rational.

  Daniel. Almost nothing exerts a more powerful hold on people’s minds than unexamined and unchallenged received wisdom — and human exceptionalism is certainly a part of that legacy. In fact, it must have seemed quite daring back in 2001 when a peer-reviewed scientific journal actually published a paper affirming the connection between population and food availability.*

  Elaine. It’s amazing to me that that should seem daring.

  Daniel. Trust me, the doctrine of human exceptionalism is deep set in Mother Culture’s heart … Here’s a little story you’ll find amusing that isn’t entirely off the point. [Goes to get a book.] In the very early stages of work on the book that ultimately became Ishmael, I wanted to know if there was any estimate of the human population before the Agricultural Revolution. As I later learned, there are many different estimates, but I first turned to a reference I had on hand, the Dunlop Illustrated Encyclopedia of Facts, published in 1969. Unlike like most books of its kind, which are either assembled by nameless staff workers or are collections of articles by various authorities, this one had a single pair of authors, Norris and Ross McWhirter, who were clearly not averse to expressing conclusions as well as facts. They didn’t have the particular information I was looking for, but in an article on “Growth of the Human Population” I found a very useful chart of population estimates for roughly the past two thousand years and extending thirty years ahead to the year 2000, where they correctly estimated it would be around six billion. Following the chart was this observation: “If this trend continues, the world has only fifteen generations left before the human race breeds itself to an overcrowded extinction. By 2600 AD there would be one person per square yard of habitable land surface.” It’s their ne
xt statement that was of special importance: “Increasing food production merely aggravates the problem by broadening the base of the expansion and hastening rather than postponing the end.” And I thought, “Well, of course. That’s obvious.”

  Elaine. It is obvious.

  Daniel. And because it seemed so obvious, my original presentation in Ishmael of the connection between food production and population growth was almost offhand. I soon found out that what is obvious to you and me is very far from being obvious to the public at large. I expanded my presentation of the subject for the paperback edition, but from the public’s reaction I could see that this was still not enough. In The Story of B I presented the subject at even greater length — and it still wasn’t enough. One night at some personal appearance (I don’t recall where it was) the subject of food production and population growth came up again, and after some discussion one audience member stood up and stormed out after declaring that I was the most obscene person she’d ever encountered.

  Elaine. I can’t understand that.

  Daniel. Ah, but you see, despite the fact that “Increasing food production merely aggravates the problem by broadening the base of the expansion,” we must increase food production.

  Elaine. Why?

  Daniel. You know the answer to that.

  Elaine. To feed the starving millions.

  Daniel. Of course. You see, the assertion had been made that I couldn’t just “let the starving millions starve.” My reply was that I’m not God. I don’t “let” earthquakes happen, I don’t “let” plagues occur, I don’t “let” hurricanes and tornadoes happen — and I don’t “let” people starve. This reply is what made me an obscenity.

  Elaine. Yes, I see. But — forgive me — we don’t have any choice in the matter of hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes.

  Daniel. First, I don’t want to hear any more of that “forgive me” stuff. I don’t want your acquiescence. I don’t want you to accept things just because they come out of my mouth.

  Elaine. Okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t even hear myself saying it.