If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.

by Daniel Quinn

Daniel. Okay. We can’t as yet do anything about hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes, but we can do something about hunger. The example I hear about most often is the starving millions in Africa. We can ship enough food over there to feed them all. So? Take it from there.

  Elaine looks at him blankly.

  Daniel. You’re not here to listen to my answers. You’re here to find them for yourself.

  Elaine. God … I don’t know where to begin.

  Daniel. All right, I’ll get you started. Why are they starving?

  Elaine. Well, obviously because they don’t have enough food.

  Daniel. Come on, Elaine. That’s just the definition of starving. Why don’t they have enough food?

  Elaine. Because … because the population has outstripped local resources.

  Daniel. And why has this happened?

  Elaine. Well, either their local resources have diminished or their population has grown beyond the point where it can be supported by local resources.

  Daniel. Or both. As any population grows, its food supply diminishes. This is perfectly predictable. It’s a cycle familiar to any biologist. As a population grows, it depletes its food supply. And as its food supply diminishes, the population begins to decline.

  As the population declines, its food supply begins to recover. As its food supply recovers, the population grows. As the population grows, its food supply begins to diminish. And so on. This is the way it works throughout the living community: populations growing and declining as food availability grows and declines.

  Elaine. I see that.

  Daniel. Then why are so many millions of Africans starving?

  Elaine. Because they’ve outstripped the food that’s available to them locally.

  Daniel. So their population is declining.

  Elaine. No, because we’ve said, “We’re not going to let their population decline.”

  Daniel. They’re starving, but, thanks to our generosity, they’re staying alive. And because they’re staying alive …?

  Elaine. They can reproduce and bring up a new generation to starve.

  Daniel. Which we can generously keep alive so that they can reproduce and bring up yet another generation to starve. Our benevolence is breathtaking.

  Elaine. If we left them alone, their population would decline to the point where they could live within their own resources.

  Daniel. But it would be immoral to let that happen. Better that more of them should starve on our beneficence than fewer live tolerably within their own food resources.

  Elaine. Yes, apparently.

  Daniel. How did it come about that their populations grew to a point where they could no longer live within their own local food resources?

  Elaine. I hadn’t thought about that … We’ve put a lot of effort into helping them build up their populations. Eliminating disease, lowering infant mortality. Showing them how to increase food production. Helping them convert their lands to cash crops for export.

  Daniel. For hundreds of thousands of years they’d been living perfectly well where they were and as they were, but they weren’t living up to our standards, and it’s our divine mandate that everyone in the world must be made to live the way we live, whatever the cost. It would have been immoral for us to leave them alone, just as it would be immoral for us to leave them alone now. Much better to send them food to maintain them in a state of perpetual starvation than to let their populations decline to a point where they can live within their own resources.

  Elaine. I suspect that would be the typical reaction.

  Daniel. What would God do, if we stopped feeding them?

  Elaine. God?

  Daniel. God wouldn’t let them starve, would he?

  Elaine. Based on past performance, I think he would. He hasn’t intervened in human affairs in a long, long time.

  Daniel. God would let them starve, but we have to be better than God. We are better than God, which is why it’s so appropriate that we should rule the world.

  Elaine. Yes. I can see why this woman thought you were the most obscene person she’d ever met.

  Daniel laughs. We Martians are fiends … Let’s move on. I hope we’re finished with these issues for good.

  Elaine. There’s one more I have to bring up, because people keep bringing it up to me.

  Daniel. Okay.

  Elaine. It goes something like this. If population is a function of food availability, then why is it that the developed nations, in which food is plentiful, have the lowest growth rate — and sometimes a zero or negative growth rate — while undeveloped nations, in which food is scarce, have higher growth rates?

  Daniel [sighing]. Yes, of course, there’s that one. This represents a kind of misdirection called “changing the subject.” Have I said anything connecting growth rate to food availability?

  Elaine [after thinking for a moment]. Not that I recall.

  Daniel. I’ve said only that the population of any species will grow if more food becomes available to it, and our population is currently growing by about seventy-seven million every year. That may not sound like much, but I once took the trouble to do some research, and found that this is equivalent to the combined populations of Canada, Australia, Denmark, Austria, and Greece. Every year.

  Elaine. That’s impressive, when you put it that way.

  Daniel. The fact that it’s growing at a faster rate in some places than others is beside the point. The point is that the human population is steadily growing because we’re steadily increasing food production.

  Elaine. I see that.

  Daniel. The reason why growth rates differ in developed and undeveloped nations has nothing to do with food availability. It has to do with family economics. In developed nations having a multiplicity of children is a burden, no matter how abundant food is, whereas in undeveloped nations it’s a blessing, no matter how scarce food is. Do I need to explain why this is so?

  Elaine. No, I don’t think so. In developed nations it costs a lot of money to raise children, and they’re not expected to contribute anything to family income. In undeveloped nations it costs little to raise children, and they generally contribute a lot to family income.

  Daniel. I’m sure you realize that we don’t consume all the food we produce in the United States.

  Elaine. Of course. I assume we export huge amounts of it.

  Daniel. So this food isn’t being turned into human biomass in the United States. Since it’s not here, it can’t be used for that purpose.

  Elaine. Right.

  Daniel. So what’s happening to it?

  Elaine. It’s being turned into human biomass in other parts of the world.

  Daniel. So while we’re not interested in increasing our own population, we’re very interested in producing surplus food to support population growth elsewhere.

  Elaine. True. [After thinking for a bit.] But when this business of growth rates is brought up, one of the points that people make is that when currently underdeveloped nations reach our level of prosperity their growth rates are likely to go down just the way ours has.

  Daniel. And at that point population growth will be negligible.

  Elaine. That’s right.

  Daniel. All right. We need a reality check here. First, it’s been estimated that we’d need the resources of six planets the size of the earth if all six billion of us were living the way people live in developed nations. Second, the US Census Bureau estimates that by the year 2050, there will be nine billion of us, and while the growth rate will have declined substantially, we’ll still be adding an annual population the size of New York City and Los Angeles combined. Third, you understand that our present system of food production is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel at every stage between fertilization of cropland to delivery of processed, packaged foods to your grocery store.

  Elaine. Yes.

  Daniel. Fourth, the projected increase in our population to nine billion assumes that food production is going to increase. But th
is projection doesn’t take into account the fact that, in order to reach nine billion, we’re going to have to steadily increase the amount of fossil fuel we pour into agricultural production during a fifty-year period when the world’s supply of fossil fuel is going to be steadily diminishing. It’s estimated that oil production is going to decline by 60 or 70 percent between now and the year 2050.

  Elaine. So it sounds like that projection is based on a fantasy.

  Daniel. Yes. If our system of agriculture and the percentage of oil used for agriculture remain the same for the next fifty years, then our population is also going to decline by 60 or 70 percent.

  Elaine. The die-off predicted by the Peak Oil theory.

  Daniel. That’s right. At a conference this year in Dublin* a paper was read that examined what we’d need to do to restructure our agricultural system to one that is fossil-fuel-free and concluded that this was not beyond possibility.† So the threatened die-off is not necessarily inevitable, at least during this period. I seriously doubt that the planet’s ecological systems could survive a human population of nine billion — nine billion and still growing.

  Elaine [after thinking for a minute]. So — in light of all this — the difference in growth rates between developed and undeveloped nations really seems like a nonissue.

  Daniel. It’s a red herring. Thrown out to distract from the fact that, like all other species, our overall population grows when our food supply grows, no matter whether growth occurs faster in one place or another … Well, let’s see … [Picks up and begins looking through a stack of index cards.]

  Elaine. I have a question.

  Daniel. Go ahead.

  Elaine. Is it the plan that we’re going to continue with questions you’ve received from readers?

  Daniel. Well … I hadn’t so much thought of it as a plan as … Do you have a problem with it as a procedure?

  Elaine. Not a problem, exactly.

  Daniel. But?

  Elaine. I guess I expected something more … systematic.

  Daniel. Talk some more.

  Elaine. You’re teaching me how to deal with questions. But in reality — in my day-to-day life — I don’t have to deal with questions. No one has ever asked me questions like the ones we’ve been discussing.

  Daniel. I’m not teaching you how to answer questions. Have we ever actually answered any of the questions I’ve brought up?

  Elaine. Well, no, not specifically. I mean, we’ve never ended up framing an actual answer.

  Daniel. The questions are just raw material. They give us opportunities to examine what’s going on in the minds of the people around us.

  Elaine. I don’t know …

  Daniel. Consider this. Once I was listening to a talk show in the car, and the subject under discussion was the protection of endangered species. The host said something like, “I don’t know. Personally, I can do without songbirds.”

  Elaine. Uh-huh.

  Daniel. You see that I could have used this as a springboard for an examination of what was going on in this person’s mind.

  Elaine. Yes, certainly.

  Daniel. But it’s not a question that someone sent to me. It’s something I picked out of the air.

  Elaine. I get that.

  Daniel. My point is that I don’t have a stock of material to look at that I’ve heard on the radio. What I have is a stock of questions and comments that people have sent to me.

  Elaine. I see that …

  Daniel. But?

  Elaine. I don’t know.

  Daniel. Take your time. Take all the time you need.

  Elaine [after a few minutes]. Right at the beginning, you talked about one big question that you felt you’d never answered adequately. And the idea seemed to be that you were going to answer it here, in this conversation.

  Daniel. The question being “How do I do what I do?”

  Elaine. That’s right.

  Daniel. And you feel we’re not getting at that question.

  Elaine. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I’m not getting at it. At least that’s the way I feel.

  Daniel. Well, if that’s the way you feel, then that’s the way it is. Tell me more about it.

  Elaine. I guess what I’m looking for is your method. A coherent, systematic description of your method.

  Daniel. You’re looking for something like that classic by Charles Van Doren and Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book. That was very methodical, very coherent and systematic.

  Elaine. I haven’t read it, but I’ll take your word for it.

  Daniel [after a few minutes]. Back in the mid-1970s I had a wonderful tennis instructor. I hadn’t played tennis in twenty years, and I’d never had any formal instruction at all. So the first thing he did, once we had me properly outfitted, was to put me on a court, stand three or four yards away, and bounce a ball to my forehand to see what I did with it. Then after a while he started bouncing balls to my backhand. Then he said, “Okay, we’ve got to work on your basic strokes.” So he taught me the proper way to step into a ball coming to my right or left. I practiced these strokes — oh, I don’t know — five thousand times, so many times that I could stand up right now and without hesitation show you exactly how the ball was addressed in the era when Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe were superstars of tennis. When we had these strokes down, we added volleys at the net, then smashes, then serves. During this long, long period we never “played tennis,” never just rallied, never played games and kept score. I don’t suppose you see why I’m telling you this.

  Elaine. You’re right, I don’t.

  Daniel. I can’t teach you that way. Call it the technical way, in which you perfect all the individual techniques and only then begin to put them all together.

  Elaine. Okay. I guess I can see that.

  Daniel. I suppose you could say that the technical way is opposite from the way you learn to ride a bicycle. You can’t learn to ride a bicycle first by practicing steering for fifty hours, pedalling for fifty hours, and keeping your balance for fifty hours. You get all those skills at once, in one instant, or you never get them at all. One minute you’re just falling down a lot and the next you’re riding a bicycle.

  Elaine. That’s true.

  Daniel. But it may be useful to you — or give you a feeling of coherence and system — if we review the various skills that are involved in doing what I do.

  Elaine. I think so, yes.

  Daniel. I guess the first of these is simply alertness to nonsense. When that talk-show host said he could get along perfectly well without songbirds, a million people heard him and thought nothing of it. I picked up on it instantly and recognized it as the blather of an empty-headed fool.

  Elaine. I think I would’ve, too.

  Daniel. Ten years ago? That’s about when I heard it.

  Elaine [after thinking about it]. Honestly, probably not. I probably would’ve thought, “Well, that’s true. I’d miss them, but I could live without them.”

  Daniel. Okay. So you’re more alert now than you were then. But you can see that there’s no way to give you lessons in alertness. I mean, I can’t say, “Now we’re going to spend the next ten hours working on your alertness to nonsense.”

  Elaine. No, I don’t see how you could do that.

  Daniel. So what’s the second step in the “Quinn method”?

  Elaine. You try to understand the thinking that produced the nonsense. You look for the assumption or assumptions behind it.

  Daniel. And what’s the assumption in this case?

  Elaine [after a moment’s thought]. That the reason birds are here — their function in the workings of the world — is to provide humans with entertainment.

  Daniel. And what’s the third step?

  Elaine. I guess I’d say it’s … extending this assumption … connecting it to more general assumptions.

  Daniel. In this case?

  Elaine. The assumption that the world and everything in it was made specifically for Ma
n’s benefit.

  Daniel. Do you see a fourth step?

  Elaine [after some thought]. No, I can’t say that I do.

  Daniel. Having found the more general assumption behind this particular notion, you look at some of the other notions or actions this assumption gives rise to. For example?

  Elaine. I’d say … working from this assumption, we’re free to eliminate any species that inconveniences us. Wolves, coyotes, and so on. If they’re valueless to us, then they’re superfluous. They don’t do anything for us, so they don’t need to be here, and we can get rid of them … And in general we can do anything we want to the world. It’s our toy — God gave it to us — and we can do anything we like with it, including smashing it to bits.

  Daniel. Very good.

  Elaine. But I’d still like to see … “How you do what you do” isn’t just limited to little things like this. I’d like to see how doing what you do produces your books.

  Daniel. Well, you remember that I did start with the bit of nonsense that got me started, the idea that a nuclear holocaust would throw us back to the Stone Age.

  Elaine. And what about Ishmael?

  Daniel. I talked about that some. The received wisdom that the true story of Man begins with the Agricultural Revolution — that the first three million years didn’t amount to anything worth talking about.

  Elaine. And what did they amount to?

  Daniel. You mean in terms of opera houses built and flying machines invented? Symphonies composed? The laws of physics described? Nothing, of course.

  Elaine. What then?

  Daniel. You don’t think you can answer this?

  Elaine. I wish I could. Don’t you think I’ve thought about it?

  Daniel. And came up with nothing?

  Elaine. Nothing but trivial things like fire, the bow and arrow, and maybe the wheel.

  Daniel. You know these things are trivial?

  Elaine. Of course.

  Daniel. Well, that’s something. What humanity came up with and held on to during its first three million years was a social organization that worked well for people. It didn’t work well for products, for motorboats and can openers and operettas. It didn’t work well for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power hungry. That’s what we have, a social organization that works beautifully for products — which just keep getting better and better every year — but very poorly for people, except for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power hungry. Our ancestors lived in societies that every anthropologist agrees were nonhierarchical and markedly egalitarian. They weren’t structured so that a few at the top lived lives of luxury, a few more lived in the middle in comfort, and the masses at the bottom lived in poverty or near poverty, just struggling to survive. They weren’t riddled with crime, depression, madness, suicide, and addiction. And when we came along with invitations to join our glorious civilization, they fought to the death to hold on to the life they had. You knew that.