If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.

by Daniel Quinn

  Elaine. Okay.

  Daniel. But I don’t think you’ve carried this as far as it’ll go.

  Elaine. I was afraid you’d say that.

  Daniel. You’ve reached the middle of a profound subject.

  Elaine. Which you’re not going to name.

  Daniel. Well, I’d rather not.

  Elaine [after a minute]. I don’t think it could be called the problem of evil.

  Daniel. Maybe not, though it’s certainly related to the problem of evil.

  Elaine [after some thought]. Disappointment with God … I guess I thought of that because my roommate was reading a book with that title.

  Daniel. You didn’t read it yourself?

  Elaine. No …

  Daniel. Okay. Disappointment with God.

  Elaine. “Why did God let my loved one die of ____?”

  Daniel. Uh-huh. And what’s the answer?

  Elaine. There’s more than one. “God’s knowledge is superior to ours. You assume that what was best for your loved one was to go on living, but you can’t know that. God does. Though you naturally can’t think such a thing, it’s entirely possible that your loved one was spared an even worse fate — and we all know there are fates worse than death.”

  Daniel. True.

  Elaine. Here’s another: “The death of your loved one has made you doubt God. Perhaps this is exactly the point. God is testing your faith. God tests all of us at some point in our lives, and some receive harder tests than others. Receiving a hard test is not a mark of God’s disfavor but rather the opposite. It is, after all, the champions who are given the hardest tests — to swim faster, jump higher, run farther. By giving you this hardest of tests, God is giving you an opportunity to become a champion of faith.”

  Daniel. I spoke earlier of lined paper. What you’re doing is providing the lines on the sheet titled “Disappointment with God.”

  Elaine. I’m not sure what you mean by “providing the lines.”

  Daniel. Providing the answers that go on the lines.

  Elaine. I see, yes.

  Daniel. There are assumptions you need to be looking at for these answers.

  Elaine. God … I’m sure there are dozens.

  Daniel. You want to break here for lunch to think about it? It’s been a long morning.

  Elaine. Yes, it has been.

  *Georgetown, Texas. See appendix 2.

  Sunday: Afternoon

  Daniel. So. You’ve supplied two lines on the sheet of paper headed “Why did God let my loved one die?” Now we’re looking for things beneath the surface of the paper.

  Elaine. There are two obvious assumptions: “God exists” and “God is good.”

  Daniel. Yes, those are the basics. There are other assumptions that aren’t so easily seen. Can you bring them up and make them visible?

  Elaine. I think so — at least some of them. “God is aware of everything that happens on earth.” If this weren’t so, he couldn’t be held accountable for the loved one’s death.

  Daniel. That makes sense.

  Elaine. And “God knows what causes us pain.”

  Daniel. Uh-huh.

  Elaine. “God has a special care for us and invites us to invoke this special care when we’re in trouble.”

  Daniel. Certainly.

  Elaine. Here’s where things start to get sticky. “Because God has a special care for us, he’s ready to help us — to take our side — if we’re attacked by a lion, a shark, a spider, a bacterium, a fungus, or a virus.”

  Daniel. Uh-huh.

  Elaine. “He was aware that my loved one was being attacked, but ignored my pleas for help and declined to take my loved one’s side against the attacker. He let me down, and so I have good reason to be disappointed in him.”

  Daniel. Yes, this is where things get sticky. So what do you do?

  Elaine. I’m not sure what you mean.

  Daniel. This is where you turn the paper around and write sideways against the lines provided.

  Elaine. Hmm.

  Daniel. What’s written on the lines so far assumes that God has a special care for us and is “on our side” against all the thousands of species of life that can harm us. What do you write if you turn the paper sideways?

  Elaine. Oh, I see. I think. Instead of supposing that he has a special care for us and is on our side against all others, we can suppose that he has a care for all living things and is not on any side.

  Daniel. Which in fact appears to be the case, since sometimes “they” win and sometimes “we” win.

  Elaine. Okay. And this brings to mind something you pointed out in Ishmael: Everything that happens in the living community is good for one but evil for another — and it can’t be otherwise. If an owl snatches a mouse, then this is good for the owl but evil for the mouse. If the owl fails to snatch the mouse, then this is good for the mouse but evil for the owl.

  Daniel. If there is a God, and he cares for everything that lives, then it would be absurd for him to be on the mouse’s side or the owl’s side.

  Elaine. Exactly.

  Daniel. See if you can carry on from here.

  Elaine [after a few minutes of thought]. On the basis of observation alone, it seems unnecessary to imagine that every contest for life is decided by divine intervention. If the mouse is in the wrong place at the wrong time, the owl’s going to win. If the mouse is alert and swift, and can reach shelter in time, then the mouse is going to win.

  Daniel. Yes.

  Elaine. During a flu epidemic, the virus is going to win in some cases and lose in others. Again, it seems stupid to imagine that each contest is decided by God. If the infected person is old and weak, the virus is probably going to win — but not always. If the infected person is young and healthy, the virus is probably going to lose — but not always.

  Daniel [after a minute, when she doesn’t continue]. Well done. You’ve just explained why I’m never disappointed with the gods that I prefer to people the universe with. I never expect them to take my side against others. If I come down with pneumonia, I don’t expect the gods to take my side against the virus or bacterium that is pursuing its life in my body. If I travel to Indonesia, I don’t expect the gods to strike dead a mosquito that is about to dine on my neck — and incidentally give me a case of malaria. If a mountain lion attacks me in the Andes, I don’t expect the gods to help me kill it. If I’m swimming off the coast of Florida, I don’t expect the gods to shoo away the sharks.

  Elaine. That universe makes more sense to me, personally.

  Daniel. Having reached this point, do you want to take on the problem of evil?

  Elaine. How do you define that?

  Daniel [after some thought]. If God is willing to prevent evil but unable to do so, then he’s impotent. If he’s able to prevent evil but not willing to, then he’s corrupt. And so, since evil certainly exists, God is either impotent or corrupt and therefore cannot be God. I’d have to do some research to be sure that this is the classical definition.

  Elaine. How do you define evil?

  Daniel. How do you define it?

  Elaine. Well, it obviously goes beyond disease. It would have to include natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes, as well as all the evil that humans are capable of.

  Daniel. Uh-huh.

  Elaine [after some thought]. I’m having a hard time seeing … No, the problem is in the definition itself. In the terms of the definition. In effect … If you take this definition of the problem of evil … In effect, according to this definition, a good God couldn’t have made the world at all or peopled it with humans. To be honest, I’m not sure what the hell I’m saying.

  Daniel. Always a good sign.

  Elaine [laughs and spends a few minutes thinking]. The god of the definition is a particular kind of god, one who is both omnipotent and “good” — and here that good is in quotes. Or one who must be both omnipotent and good — or he fails to qualify as God. But it seems possible to challenge that definition �
�

  Daniel. Uh-huh.

  Elaine. Why not a god who is just supremely competent? A god who has created a world that functions independently of his relentless scrutiny and control.

  Daniel. Why not, indeed.

  Elaine. A competent parent produces children who don’t need second-by-second supervision. A competent engineer designs machines that operate without his constant oversight.

  Daniel. Where does this leave the problem of evil?

  Elaine. This is what I would say: The problem of evil only arises if you posit a god who is a supreme puppeteer, controlling the movement of everything he creates, down to the atomic level. This kind of god supervises the fall of every leaf, the rise and fall of every wave in the ocean. For me — and I expect for you — the problem of evil doesn’t exist.

  Daniel. You’re right about that.

  Elaine [after a couple of minutes]. I’m thinking about those golfers against cancer.

  Daniel. And?

  Elaine. I’m not sure what conclusion I should be drawing about them after all this.

  Daniel. Who said you should be drawing some conclusion about them? They represent a cultural phenomenon that gave us something to think about. That led us to some interesting insights.

  Elaine. Was your train of thought the same as mine?

  Daniel. Actually, you dug up something I didn’t, the point that the problem of evil only arises if you’re talking about a particular kind of god.

  Elaine. So I get a passing grade on the final?

  Daniel. You get an A plus.

  Elaine. So do you think the effort paid off? In terms of the book you hope to produce.

  Daniel. I wish I had more questions of the same quality to explore.

  Elaine. I don’t suppose you can just make them up.

  Daniel [laughs]. No, I couldn’t manage that. But what about you? Did you get what you came for?

  Elaine [thinks about that for a while]. Not exactly, but I got something better. What’s the proverb? Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. I guess I have to say that I came looking for some fish and you taught me how to fish.

  Appendix I

  The New Renaissance

  Address delivered at the University of Texas

  Health Science Center at Houston, March 7, 2002

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, when I began working on a book that would someday become a novel called Ishmael, very few people thought humanity was in much trouble, provided the Cold War didn’t turn into a nuclear war. Everything looked fine, to most people. That’s changed around very drastically in the last ten years — perhaps not completely around.

  Back in 1995, when I was visiting a school in Albuquerque that had used Ishmael as the year’s focus book, I was asked to meet with a very high-level group of health care professionals — the assembled department heads of Presbyterian Health Care Services, which functions as a regional hospital system. I accepted the invitation but wondered what I might have to say that was relevant to their professional concerns. I know nothing about hospitals or health care or the medical profession. I don’t even watch ER.

  It was clear when I sat down with them — perhaps twenty men and women — that they’d all been deeply moved by my book. But none of them could quite explain why it was relevant to them in their profession. I think what it really came down to was that, as a result of reading Ishmael, they themselves had changed, simply as human beings, and they were trying to figure out how this change would or could or should change them as health care professionals.

  I’m afraid I wasn’t much help, but I don’t think I need to apologize for this. I had no way of knowing how their professional lives needed to change; only they could know that.

  I had a similar experience a year later when I was asked to address an annual conference of high-level executives involved in the design and manufacture of commercial floor-covering systems. Don’t laugh. This is a multibillion-dollar global industry — and an industry that at that time was highly pollutive, a huge contributor to landfills, and totally dependent on and extremely wasteful of nonrenewable resources (petroleum, mainly).

  They, too, had been profoundly changed by my work, but thereafter the similarity between the two groups ended. These people weren’t in any doubt about how to translate this change into a change in their professional lives. Which is a good thing, because of course I wouldn’t have had a clue. They knew what they had to change, and they’d already put into place a set of long-range goals that not only transformed their industry but compelled associated industries to change as well. In order to retain their position in this industry, giants like DuPont were literally forced to start thinking a different way themselves.

  If I were asked to address a group of investment counselors or chemical engineers or airline executives — and none of these are out of the question — it’d be the same. My task would not be to tell them what changes to make in their professional lives, because I know nothing about investments or chemical engineering or airline management.

  With every group, no matter what principle or profession draws it together, my task is the same: to send people home with a new and deeper insight into the central problem that draws us all together as humans, regardless of our occupations — and that problem is nothing less than the survival of our species.

  People often ask me if I have any hope for our survival. What they really want to know, of course, is whether I can provide them with some grounds for hope.

  I am hopeful, because I feel sure that something extraordinary is going to happen in your lifetime — in the lifetime of those of you who are three or four decades younger than I am. I’m talking about something much more extraordinary than has happened in my lifetime, which has included the birth of television, the splitting of the atom, space travel, and instant, global communication via the Internet. I mean something really extraordinary.

  During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet — or they’re not. Either way, it’s certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then humanity will be able to see something it can’t see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don’t figure this out, then I’m afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we’re driving into extinction here every day — as many as two hundred every day.

  As people like to say nowadays, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. The people who keep track of these things and make it their business to predict such things agree that the human population is going to increase to nine billion by the middle of the century. It isn’t just the doomsayers who say this. This is a very conservative estimate, recently endorsed by the UN. Unfortunately, most of the people who make this estimate seem to have the idea that this is workable and okay.

  Here’s why it isn’t.

  It’s obvious that it costs a lot of money and energy to produce all the food we need to maintain our population at six billion. But there is an additional, hidden cost that has to be counted in life-forms. Put plainly, in order to maintain the biomass that is tied up in the six billion of us, we have to gobble up two hundred species a day — in addition to all the food we produce in the ordinary way. We need the biomass of those two hundred species to maintain this biomass, the biomass that is in us. And when we’ve gobbled up those species, they’re gone. Extinct. Vanished forever.

  In other words, maintaining a population of six billion humans costs the world two hundred species a day. If this were something that was going to stop next week or next month, that would be okay. But the unfortunate fact is that it’s not. It’s something that’s going to go on happening every day, day after day after day — and that’s what makes it unsustainable, by definition. That kind of cataclysmic destruction cannot be sustained.

  The extraordinary thing that is going to happen in the next two or three deca
des is not that the human race is going to become extinct. The extraordinary thing that’s going to happen in the next two or three decades is that a great second renaissance is going to occur. A great and astounding renaissance.

  Nothing less than that is going to save us.

  THE FIRST RENAISSANCE, the one you met in your history textbooks, was understood to be a rebirth of classical awareness and sensibility. It could hardly have been understood to be what it actually was, which was the necessary preface to an entirely new historical era.

  A few key medieval ideas were jettisoned during the Renaissance, but they weren’t replaced by ideas that would have made sense to classical thinkers. Rather, they were replaced by ideas that were entirely new — ideas that would not have made sense to classical thinkers. These were ideas that would make sense to us. In fact, these ideas still make sense to us.

  The Renaissance (and indeed the modern world) came into being because during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries an interrelated complex of medieval ideas came under challenge. The centerpiece of the complex related to the means of gaining certain knowledge. During the Middle Ages it was understood that reason and authority were the chief means of gaining certain knowledge. For example, it seemed perfectly reasonable to suppose that the earth was a stationary object around which the rest of the universe revolved. It was reasonable — and it was affirmed by a towering authority, the great second-century astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus, Ptolemy. Similarly, it seemed perfectly reasonable to suppose that heavy objects fall to earth faster than light objects — and this was affirmed by another towering authority, the polymath genius Aristotle.

  But during the Renaissance, reason and authority were toppled as reliable guides to knowledge and replaced by … observation and experimentation. Without this change, science as we know it would not have come into being and the Industrial Revolution would not have occurred.

  During the Middle Ages it was taken for granted that our relationship with God was a collective thing that only the Roman Catholic Church was empowered to negotiate. During the Renaissance this dispensation was challenged by a completely new one, in which our relationship with God was seen as an individual thing that each of us could negotiate independently with God. In this new dispensation was born the magnification and sanctification of the individual that we take for granted in modern times. We all see ourselves as individually valuable and quite fantastically empowered — literally bristling with rights — in a way that would have been astonishing to the people of the Middle Ages.