Oh No. Is Do the Math about to get hijacked for another long series about a Daniel Quinn book, like it was for Ishmael?

How about just a really long post?

The Story of B is the second in a series of three books associated with the wise gorilla, Ishmael, and his teachings. Some report “B” as a more powerful book than the first (Ishmael). For me, they sort-of run together, and I have trouble remembering which book focused on which point. That’s part of why I started the project of capturing the Ishmael content, and here do something similar for The Story of B. I figure if it helps me keep the books straight, it will help others, too.

In this post, I sketch the content of the book. I am not tracing much in the way of story elements. I’m not even fully fleshing out the key arguments, but making more of a map so that I or others can more quickly revisit key parts, or get a quick refresher on the entire book’s flow and content. For those who have not read the book, I hope it serves as encouragement to do so.

Format

The Story of B is formatted somewhat oddly (and unfortunately, in my view). A former student of Ishmael’s is touring Europe giving countercultural lectures somewhat under the radar. He has acquired the nickname of B for unclear reasons (could be Blasphemer, Beelzebub, the Beast, etc.). Anyway, the book is chopped into a chronological diary of sorts, with five lengthy lecture transcripts interjected as footnotes that point to appendices in the book.

It is not made explicitly clear how one should read the book. Should the lectures be ignored, to be picked up someday when bored and having nothing else to do? Or should they be read instantly upon reference in the main text? Daniel Quinn recommended the latter, and I can’t muster any compelling argument to do otherwise. I mean, the lectures provide crucial context for the rest of the book, frequently referenced within the main story. Personally, I think it would have worked better if the lectures had been placed in the main text, and not displaced to the back. Because, really: jockeying two bookmarks is asking a bit much! The lectures are like spinach to a kid, when the rest of the plate has pizza, fried chicken strips, and a hot dog. I, too, would rather continue reading the enjoyable story part—experiencing an internal groan when asked to leave it for a lecture. Compared to the main story, the lectures are not interactive, are more intellectually taxing, and require some discipline to “eat” when other temptations beckon.

But here’s a quantitative argument. I took notes in a small notebook as I read the book. I wrote 184 lines of material. Of these, 67 come from the main story, and 117 from the lectures. In terms of page count, 235 pages comprise the main story, while 89 cover the lectures. That means 64% of the noteworthy content was concentrated into 27% of the pages, so that the nutritious density of the lectures is 4.3 times that of the main book. Though it may be more difficult to digest, the bulk of the meal is in the lectures. Skipping them misses an awful lot.

In this post, I will intersperse the two, reflecting the (chronologically-correct) order in which I read the material. The overall flow is as follows (each entry has page numbers and an indication in parentheses of how many lines of notes each generated for me).

• pp. 1–17 (0): We meet the narrator, Jared Osborne, who embarks on a mission.
• pp. 239–257 (33); L1: The Great Forgetting: agriculture; Takers and Leavers
• pp. 17–27 (0): Jared tracks down the city of the next lecture
• pp. 258–275 (19); L2: The Boiling Frog: accelerating doublings and signs of distress
• pp. 27–44 (0): Jared meets B over drinks
• pp. 276–286 (11); L3: The Collapse of Values: what went wrong, and the good news
• pp. 45–103 (24): Jared meets a suspicious inner circle, reveals his identity, and begins receiving lessons from B
• pp. 287–306 (19); L4: Population: A Systems Approach
• pp. 104–200 (41): Circumstances force a switch to plan B; lessons intensify—in the dirt
• pp. 307–325 (35); L5: The Great Remembering: tribal disintegration; origins of law; suffering; saving the world
• pp. 200–235 (2): Jared picks up the pieces, committing to a new life

In the sections that follow, I use the titles of named sections within the book to help readers locate the source material, but skip those sections that did not move my pen in the notebook. I also try to confine my own slant to [square brackets].

Introductions (1–17)

The narrator, Jared Osborne, is a Catholic priest in an order whose secret duty is to maintain vigilance for the Antichrist. He is sent to Germany to check out this Charles Atterley character, who is giving subversive lectures. Jared has difficulty finding any clues leading him to Atterley or his lectures, but is pointed to another lecture that might be of interest. It was instantly clear that this lecturer could be none other than the Atterley character.

L1: The Great Forgetting (239–257)

As Jared’s luck [or author’s contrivance] would have it, this lecture was the first in a repeating series, so he came in at the beginning. Much of it echoes lessons from Ishmael, to get us up to speed. The message is so alien to people in the culture of modernity that it is a tough climb.

The Great Forgetting refers to the process by which post-agricultural humans completely forgot their hunter-gatherer origins, losing ancient knowledge and traditions. By the time recorded history began, about 5 millennia ago, it was assumed that humans had always lived as agriculturalists and builders of civilization. These were imagined to be innate qualities of humans.

The Great Remembering

When science finally caught up to the fact that agriculture represented only 0.3% of human history on Earth, this awareness should have changed everything about how we perceive ourselves. Yet, it changed very little. We’ll just call that embarrassing period “prehistory,” proclaim it to be obsolete, and point out that nothing important happened in all that time—no need to rock the boat and reexamine the foundations of all our scholarly disciplines. Nothing to see, here.

The Myth of the Agricultural Revolution

Our telling of the agricultural revolution—that we abandoned foraging for agriculture—serves to limit our understanding of the process. Atterley offers a characterization of totalitarian agriculture that “subordinates all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food.” Food surpluses fueled population explosion and expansion, which “obliterated all other lifestyles in its path.”

Similar to the fallacy that humans were always agriculturalists, the modern tendency is to believe that everybody (who is of any significance) began agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago.

East and West

Despite the ease with which we note cultural differences around the world—especially between East and West—Atterley stresses that they are twins. Both practice totalitarian agriculture, and both are driven by the notion that people need to be saved (methods vary).

The Nothingness of Prehistory

Pre-agricultural humans were nobodies. When confronted with the uncomfortable fact that humans had not always been agriculturalists, the reaction was: “Man may not have been born an agriculturalist and a civilization-builder, but he was nonetheless born to become an agriculturalist.”

The denigrating term “Stone Age People” from technology-obsessed modernists implies that these “very, very slow starters” were reliant on stones. But an anthropologist can tell you that in hunter-gatherer cultures, stones are used here and there—yes—but so is glue used here and there in our culture. This fact does not make us “Glue Age People.”

The Myth of the Agricultural Revolution (cont.)

The usual sloppy thinking is of a lineage leading from primitive hunter-gatherers to civilized “us.” Even recognizing the error of The Great Forgetting did not change this perception. Yet, the true story is a splitting into two cultures, the Forgetting happening only on our split-off lineage.

The Law of Limited Competition

This section is a recap of Ishmael, Chapter 8: “you may compete [to the best of your ability] but you may not wage war on your competitors.” A single culture began violating this law, hunting down competitors, destroying their food, and denying them access to food (totalitarian agriculture).

Leavers and Takers

We learned these labels in Ishmael. Leavers “leave the rule of the world in the hands of the gods,” while Takers reject the law of limited competition and “take the rule of the world into their own hands.” Admittedly, these labels are not problem-free, but what are you gonna do?

The catch is that this law (of limited competition) had nurtured and protected our species into being. Flouting it flirts with extinction [of many species, in our case]. We live as outlaws, and crime does not pay.

Good News and Bad News

Atterley makes the astute point that if all he were doing was proclaiming “that we’re all doomed and damned,” he would not be seen as a threat: nothing new. It is his message of hope that has people nervous. We are inured to messages that humans are villains of Earth, causing its destruction. We seldom hear that humans lived at peace with the world for millions of years—not as saints, but “as harmlessly as a hyena or a shark or a rattlesnake.” The message, then, is:

We don’t have to change HUMANKIND in order to survive.
We only have to change a single culture.

Not to diminish the difficulty, but this simple statement at least makes clear that we’re not dealing with an impossible change.

Q & A

In addressing questions from the audience, Atterley briefly connects the agricultural revolution to The Fall in Genesis (same time and place; see Chapter 9 in Ishmael), then moves to megafauna extinctions, and finally the role of famine. On megafauna extinctions, these were run-of-the-mill evolutionary events connected to migration of one megafauna species into new ecological contexts—rather than a matter of policy to wipe out mammoths. [See my comments at the end of Ishmael‘s Chapter 13 for more.] As to famines, the causality does not work. Developing agriculture is not a response to famine, but if anything opened the door to famine (more dependent on fickle crop yields: all eggs in one basket, so to speak—more on this later).

Tracking B (17–27)

In trying to track down the next lecture location, Jared learns that the person he knows as Charles Atterley is known as “B” for unknown reasons. He gets a clue as to a possible next location, and finds protesters whose signs offer a variety of possible origins for the “B” title: “blasphemer, bastard, bunghole, bigmouth, blowhard, bonehead,” some French and German variants, and also “Beelzebub, the Beast, Belial, and Barabbas.” Got a favorite?

From here on, I will just use B instead of Atterley, as the book also tends to do.

L2: The Boiling Frog (258–275)

B compares the spread of Taker culture to a boiling frog [yes: I know this is both apocryphal and cruel]. The format of this lecture follows the progress of our accelerating predicament. We are first reminded of the totalitarian style of agriculture: at war with the world, “ruthless toward all other life forms,” and “based on the premise that all the food in the world belongs to us,” refusing to acknowledge any limits to our entitlements.

Food Availability and Population Growth

This is a recurrent topic in the book, as it was in Ishmael also. B makes the simple and non-controversial observation that providing mice with enough daily food for 100 mice will result in a roughly stable population in the neighborhood of 100. Increasing the population to 200 will not require mood music, but simply doubling food availability. Easy. It works for any species.

People absolutely “bridle at the idea that humans might be” subject to the same math. [What’s that about, huh? Might want to have that looked at.] Yet, let’s consult the record. After three million years of humans on the planet, population was at perhaps 10 million prior to the agricultural revolution. Then in a relative blink of an eye, population doubled in something like 3,000 years. Thus, around 5000 B.C.E., Earth hosted about 25 million humans, most of which were now agriculturalists—and by amazing coincidence right where agriculture kicked off [yes; the full story is more nuanced as multiple independent starts cropped up in the Holocene]. “The water in the cauldron was getting warm, and signs of distress were beginning to appear.”

Signs of Distress: 5000–3000 B.C.E.

It did not take long to experience overcrowded settlements/cities, as well as overgrazed and overproduced lands that degraded as a result. When things got tight, warfare of a type never seen in the world erupted. Suddenly city-states, armies, and kings emerged. Technology in service of war was exciting, not taken as a sign of a bad turn. Of course, such things are bound to accompany totalitarian agriculture [see my River post].

Signs of Distress: 3000–1400 B.C.E.

Each of these periods represents another doubling of human population, this one starting at 50 million humans (80% Takers).

The distresses of the previous era just scaled up: bigger, more epic wars—now with Bronze-Age swords! But hidden by the dazzle of gleaming armor are slums, slavery, and crime. Crime was new to the world. Sure, people committed rotten acts since the beginning, but crime requires a state and written law. Leaver tribes had (effective) ways of dealing with transgressions against their time-tested norms, but did not have to deal with chronic crime, as we know it. Again: this is not cyclical, but new to the world.

Signs of Distress: 1400–0 B.C.E.

This period starts at 100 million people; 90% Takers. Earth now experienced great military conquests and powerful rulers. Revolts, coups, and assassinations became a new normal. Money facilitated all kinds of manipulations, instability, and abuses. Crowded cities with poor sanitation introduced plagues. Slavery was an enormous industry.

Amidst all this suffering and turmoil, a few bright lights sensed that something wasn’t quite right about all this. The flaws in life were readily apparent, and demanded attention. It was in this time that salvation-based religions arose. “Judaism, Brahmanism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and Buddhism all came into being in this period, and had no existence before it.” Following 6,000 years of totalitarian agriculture, it seemed as if humans (recall that The Great Forgetting wiped out 3 million years of memory) were fundamentally flawed—miserable and suffering since the dawn of time, it was believed—and needed to be saved.

Signs of Distress: 0–1200 C.E.

We start this period at 200 million people; 95% Takers. Salvation took center stage as the answer to life’s ills. In contrast to a world-gone-wrong, it was very attractive to fantasize about a better world waiting for the dutiful adherent. All the suffering couldn’t be normal (they were correct!).

This set up two nasty tendencies. First, Earth becomes rubbish: an ugly, visceral, complicated, mean, and temporary hell-hole on the way to eternal gleaming salvation. Trashing it is no worse than it deserves. Boil the frog all you want: something better awaits. Second, salvation is deeply personal. No one can achieve it for you, you can’t share it or do it for anyone else. Personal salvation became all that mattered, fostering selfishness and narcissism. Gone was the sense of tribal unity: that group success was the best route to personal success. Screw it. Capitalists take note.

Signs of Distress: 1200–1700

Now starting at 400 million people; 98% Takers. More revolts, ugliness, disease, and famine. Christianity penetrates the East and New World.

Signs of Distress: 1700–1900

Entering this period are 800 million people; 99% Takers. Civilized pathogens wipe out an unbelievable number of Indigenous people. Opium went global. Mega-famines from crop failures visited one region after another. Increased urbanization brought human anguish to new levels. Slums and crime were ubiquitous. Economic instability threw societies into chaos. Uprisings claimed millions upon millions of human lives. Far more lives were extinguished by extermination efforts of “pest” animals and plants.

Amidst all this was an Industrial Revolution made possible by fossil fuels (coal). Dirty, hard work introduced a new type of serfdom and suffering.

Wars shifted from religious to economic and material concerns. Consumerism became a new sort of salvation: make life better now, dammit, with stuff!

Signs of Distress: 1900–1960

The twentieth century began with 1.5 billion people; almost all Takers. A global economic collapse and two world wars might look a bit like distress. Seems like the water is on the verge of boiling over, now.

Signs of Distress: 1960–1996

In 1960, human population growth was around 2% [about 500 times higher than pre-agricultural numbers and about 10,000 times bigger in scale]. Earth hosted 3 billion people; what Leavers? B describes the progression up to now as a growing chorus, adding new unpleasant voices at each stage. War was the only grating voice for a few thousand years, later joined by crime, corruption, slavery, revolt, famine, plague, labor exploitation, drugs, economic mayhem, geopolitical domination, genocide, and ecocide. A lovely disharmony!

What voice does this last period add to the cacophony? B suggests: cultural collapse. Having forgotten any other way to live, the mounting threats to modernity seem like existential threats to humanity itself, leading to panic, disillusionment, escapism, and the general sense that it’s every person for themself.

We end this period at 6 billion people, Leaver cultures all but eliminated. [The following 29 years add 2 billion more people, but starts showing cracks—including a slowing of the population explosion. More people are finding modernity to be bankrupt and no way to live, while its adherents become ever more frantic about saving it at all costs.]

Meeting B (27–44)

During the second lecture, Jared got the impression that B signaled to him, so followed him after the show on a long march to a funky bar, where they sat together for drinks and conversation. In the meantime B’s close colleague, Shirin, did some sleuthing and learned of Jared’s priestly identity. Relaying this intelligence to B, Jared was recognized as a potential danger—or opportunity.

L3: The Collapse of Values (276–286)

B explains mythology as “…the organizing principle of all our activities. It explains to us the meaning of everything we do.” Sometimes developments might force a reckoning of cultural mythology, rendering it meaningless. So central is our (implicit) mythology that the threat of its removal leads to despair, nihilism, bafflement, together with various forms of escapism, disorder, and unrest.

In a fantastic passage that deserves a full quote, he describes the prevailing attitudes of the mid-twentieth-century decades as ones in which

…the people of our culture still knew where they were going, were still confident that a glorious future lay just ahead of us. All we had to do was to hold on to the vision and keep doing all the things that got us here in the first place…universities and opera houses, central heating and elevators, Mozart and Shakespeare, ocean liners and motion pictures.
What’s more—and you must mark this—the things that got us here were good things. In 1950 there wasn’t the slightest whisper of a doubt about this anywhere in our culture, East or West, capitalist or communist. In 1950 this was something everyone could agree on: Exploiting the world was our God-given right. The world was created for us to exploit. Exploiting the world actually improved it! There was no limit to what we could do. Cut as much down as you like, dig up as much as you like. Scrape away the forests, fill in the wetlands, dam the rivers, dump poisons anywhere you want, as much as you want. None of this was regarded as wicked or dangerous. Good heavens, why would it be? The earth was created specifically to be used in this way. It was a limitless, indestructible playroom for humans. You simply didn’t have to consider the possibility of running out of something or of damaging something. The earth was designed to take any punishment, to absorb and sweeten any toxin, in any quantity. Explode nuclear weapons? Good heavens, yes—as many as you want! Thousands, if you like. Radioactive material generated while trying to achieve our God-given destiny can’t harm us.
Wipe out whole species? Absolutely! Why ever not? If people don’t [register that they] need these creatures, then obviously they’re superfluous! To exercise such control over the world is to humanize it, is to take us a step closer to our destiny.

In Quinn’s telling, this manifesto was not doubted by almost any historical figure, and is only now being doubted by a growing minority—especially the young. The lie of an ever-better life is no longer credible. In fairness, a few radical thinkers throughout history challenged the premise of modernity. But the overall cultural vibe Quinn captures here was essentially universal.

Silent Spring and Beyond

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, in 1962, was a wake-up call that we were capable of inflicting great harm to life on Earth. It shattered the self-aggrandizing view that God was on our side in doing whatever we wished as conquerors and rulers of the planet. We were “having a lethal impact on the world,” traceable via an accelerating rate of permanent extinctions.

Theories: What’s Gone Wrong, Here?

As conditions deteriorate, we at least excel at finger-pointing: heaps of blame to go around. The root cause is attributed to human nature; capitalist greed; technology; parenting; schools; subversive music; injustice; corruption. Proposed remedies are characteristically simple: “All we have to do is…” [This is a window into our meat-brain mental models: necessarily limited and unequal to the task.]

In any case, Takers are now getting the first bitter taste of what Leavers know all too well (but for vastly different reasons): your world can be turned upside down; the dream turned to nonsense. “For both of us, the song we’d been singing from the beginning of time died in our throats.” Now things are teetering and will soon fall apart.

At Last, Good News

All this doom and gloom! We can’t take any more! But B is here to share some good news. In a nutshell:

We are not humanity.

It never occurs to us that this is true. But it changes everything. We must forget The Great Forgetting, which told us that our culture was all of humanity. The big deal is that if our culture defines humanity, and our culture is doomed [e.g., by initiating a sixth mass extinction], then nothing can be done. The flaws run down to immutable DNA. No hope. Nothing for it. Nihilism, hedonism, consumerism…why not!

Recognizing the flaw to be in our cultural—rather than genetic—foundations, we might hope to abandon the sinking ship for safer ground, and yes: other ground really does exist: ground to which we are exceptionally well-adapted—by no coincidence!

It is this version of “good news” that the church cannot abide. [As an aside, Quinn describes his journey to Ishmael in a book called Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest, part of which covers his young-adult intent to become a Trappist monk—shedding light on his many Christian touch-points.]

Educating Jared (45–103)

Finally, some lessons worth reporting appear in the main body of the novel.

Into the Underworld

After this third lecture, Jared wanders into the bowels of the theater to find B surrounded by an inner circle gathered in discussion about programs vs. visions. Our normal reaction to a perceived problem is a solution, often in the form of a program. B says: “If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision”—not “by people with old minds and new programs.”

Visions don’t need programs: they just unfold of their own accord. The Industrial Revolution is offered as an example. Programs are invoked to address something undesirable emerging from the shared vision—to mitigate its negative consequences—but often to little avail. The current vision presents a raging flow toward catastrophe that no programs can reverse. A few sticks erected in a river (a program) won’t divert the river, but may impede it a bit. Only an entirely new vision has the power to set a new course, and is something only the river itself can accomplish. It has to want to change course.

If a new vision emerges in due time, it will have been “completely unpredictable by us.” Otherwise it would be a version of our own vision. It has to be essentially unthinkable [to modernity-conditioned people] to really count. [Our job is not to generate the new vision—as we can’t—but detach from the old and make space for something new to emerge.]

A Mosaic

Jared is grilled by members of the inner circle, who on the whole are very suspicious of an emissary from the Roman Catholic Church. Among all of them, B seems to be the most tolerant and curious. In the “interrogation” process, Jared is pushed into revealing his quest to determine if B is the Antichrist, which seems to only amuse B while deeply troubling the others. In the end, B sees value in giving Jared a proper training.

Just as Ishmael described his approach with Alan, B explains that he aims to create a mosaic: lots of pieces to be added before the whole might start to come into focus. The order of tile placement is less important than the emerging image—which cannot be delivered all at once.

A New Horizon

To absorb a fuller perspective, one must see far past the usual horizon of Mesopotamia as the start of history. Extending the horizon is accomplished by seeking a view from a higher vantage. For our purposes, a 3-million-year horizon will do, encompassing the full history of humans on Earth. Even this is tiny on the scale of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Climbing the Ladder

From a greater height, the agricultural revolution does not signal the beginning of history, but a mind shift among one culture. It signaled The Great Forgetting, replacing ancient visions [that worked well for a long time] with a new vision of our place in the world [how’s that going?].

B dismisses the notion that the agricultural revolution was in response to famine. Famished people are desperate, barely able to operate. It’s not the time to invent. Drowning people don’t invent boats, either. [As a related digression, I, too, reject the pithy phrase that “necessity is the mother of invention.” The Industrial Revolution exposes the lie. It happened in the same place and time as fossil fuels burst onto the scene. Surplus energy is the mother of invention. The places in the world where need and suffering are highest are not hot-beds of innovation: affluent places are.] Agriculture—which by the way was invented in fertile river valleys and not in hard-scrabble deserts—introduced famine as a consequence of inevitable crop failure for people living outside an evolved ecological context wherein the diversity of local flora/fauna supported human life for eons. Put all your eggs in one basket and trouble should not be surprising.

Somewhat perplexing is the fact that agriculture is more labor-intensive than hunter-gatherer life. B represents that by this metric (alone) it is a baffling miracle that agriculture caught on, but he returns to this theme shortly.

The Peace-Loving Killers of New Guinea

B describes the Gebusi of New Guinea, whose practices seem insane to our culture. But “every culture’s lunacy seems like sanity to the members of that culture.” Assuredly, it works both ways.

If we tried to imagine Gebusi culture as a global norm, it would seem obscene to us. B points out that “Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong.” Ironically, any such culture will interpret its domination as validating evidence of its superiority and righteousness. [Cancer must likewise feel pretty smug about its success in metastasizing: clearly doing something right to have become so powerful and ubiquitous.]

We see evolution through this ecologically-illiterate lens as well: “survival of the fittest,” we tell our conquest-oriented selves. Witness the fact that evolution has a strong tendency to increase biodiversity (between cataclysms). It firmly counters the “one right way to live” mindset. Evolution radiates out in abundance, rather than converging inwards via competitive elimination. Our culture, on the other hand, is obliterating biological and cultural diversity in an ugly, cancerous process—”devouring all cultures on this planet and turning them into a single culture:” ours.

The recipe for Taker culture involves three interacting ingredients: totalitarian agriculture; the sense that ours is the one right way to live; and the Great Forgetting (eliminating competing ideas for how one might live).

The Wired Monkey

The agricultural revolution wasn’t just a technological change, it involved a tremendous mental shift in how we view ourselves in relation to the rest of life. We must realize that we possess those same changed minds. From our narrow perspective, the agricultural revolution makes complete sense. Nothing could be more natural. It’s what humans were meant to do. We were born to be civilization-builders. B assures us that it is not at all obvious to those looking at us from the outside [and no: not because they are dumb].

Coming back to the notion that agriculture requires far more labor, what makes it attractive is increased power and control. Those things tend to concentrate in an increasingly hierarchical system of divided labor.

B tells of an experiment wherein an electrode was inserted into the pleasure center of a monkey’s brain. Given access to the activation button, the monkey would forgo all essentials of life and would pleasure itself to death if allowed. So, was the monkey intrinsically flawed? No: just as humans are not fundamentally flawed for succumbing to addiction and “pleasuring ourselves to death with unending jolts of power.” [Evolution prepares us only for situations that have some precedent. Moths aren’t flawed because they are attracted to recently-introduced electric lights that had zero relevance for millions of years prior. This is the danger of introducing big changes to the ecologically-vetted conditions for Life.]

Getting out of the trap requires a new vision. We need to chuck the magic button as a most unfortunate discovery, not bargain to somehow keep it and minimize its harm. Yet, our cultural vision recoils at the suggestion: we are too deeply ensnared under its devastating, addictive influence.

The Tak

Labeling the original Taker culture The Tak, B briefly recounts the way their actions would look to Leaver neighbors: as if they had gone mad and assumed “godly” powers over who lives and who dies (see Chapter 9 in Ishmael). He represents that Genesis itself emphasized “The Fall” not as an event of technology, but as an event of changed minds—having eaten the forbidden fruit and now seeing the world in a whole different light (OMG—we’re naked!). The mental shift was that obvious to the neighbors, at the time. It’s far less obvious to us now: we have forgotten because our impoverished brains have never known another way.

Fun with Marxists and Others

Jared accompanied B, Shirin (B’s most valued/advanced comrade), and this nice bloke named Michael to Stuttgart, where B was to deliver a dreaded lecture on population to a group of ultra-liberal academics by special invitation. The thoroughly-steeped Taker elites were very resistant to the message, afterwards leading an exhausted B to declare it “mighty hard ground.”

L4: Population: A Systems Approach (287–306)

Starting the clock roughly 200,000 years ago, B guesses—reasonably—that the population of our species may have been at ten-thousand. Fast forward to 10,000 years ago and it was closer to ten-million. That thousand-fold increase represents about 10 doublings, so that on average the growth rate was a doubling every 20,000 years, approximately. That’s 0.0035% per year: “glacially slow.” By the year zero, 200 million people were on the planet, working out to a ten-fold increase in rate. Smoking gun: agriculture accelerated population growth by an order-of-magnitude!

Blessing: A Fable About Population

B offers a tale from an Earth-like planet, where a minority culture stumbles onto a breakthrough pain relief drug that made its users feel so good that the slogan became: “Works on pain you didn’t even know you had.” They called the drug Blessing. The only side effect was making the user exude a foul odor when on the drug. Feeling friskier on account of zero aches or pains, birthrate notched upward. Labeled Stinkards by the majority population on the planet, their minority status didn’t last long. In addition to the sheer growth in number driven by increased fertility, and associated encroachments, Blessing made inroads into the majority population, so that before long, virtually the whole planet was Stinkard. As population pressures mounted and famines became more frequent, increased food production became the order of the day. Programs in birth control and education had immeasurably little effect.

A biohistorian named Spry noted the connection to Blessing (and the associated mechanism), but no one could accept a connection. People were indignant at the absurd suggestion that they should give up Blessing and live with minor pain. It did not matter that prior to Blessing people lived fulfilled lives and didn’t consider themselves to exist in misery of constant pain. It was easy to dismiss the connection on the basis that any purported connection was indirect, tenuous, and surely under their control. Any reminder that every controlled experiment on any species showed the same effect (Blessing increased birth rates) was met with howls that humans can’t be compared to animals, for gods’ sake! Spry was ridiculed and forever-more ignored. Conferences on the population crisis centered on the word “control,” but never Blessing.

Growth and the ABCs of Ecology

Population stability in an ecological context is all about negative feedback. That may sound bad, but positive feedback is the killer: more begets more in exponential runaway. Positive feedback leads to catastrophe; negative feedback leads to stability.

Defeating the System’s Controls

The agricultural revolution was about side-stepping the usual negative feedback mechanisms (food availability) that operated to keep the Community of Life in the approximate (slowly-changing) balance in which all its relationships were baked. Having control over food production, the knob was dialed to “more” and never (deliberately) to “less.”

The cycle is obvious: more food allows more people. More people demand more food. It’s like having a defective thermostat that responds to “too hot” by turning up the heat, ad infinitum. That’s positive feedback, and is usually not what we want. It gets out of hand.

The Experiment Run 10,000 Times

Inefficiencies, inequities, geographical challenges, etc. translate to people going hungry even when enough total food is produced. Every year people starve. The response: we clearly need more food. Every year.

Three Demonstrations

If you launch an experiment of two young, healthy mice in ample space and give them 2 kg of food each day (removing uneaten food at the end of each day), eventually you’ll have around 300 mice, eating all 2 kg every day. Population will gently fluctuate around a stable point—indefinitely if holding this food profile [and maintaining a clean environment].

In the next experiment, 50% more food is provided than what was eaten the previous day. The mice thus always have a sizable food surplus: more food than they can eat every day. The result is predictable: given enough physical space, the population grows exponentially and will continue to do so as long as the regimen is upheld. Let’s say 60,000 mice ate 500 kg of food one day. Instead of providing 50% more the next day (of which they may only eat 510 kg), what if we hold it at 500 kg? Day after day, the experiment continues and no riots, famine, or other drama unfolds. The population just holds at around 60,000. The knob totally works!

In the final demonstration, food is tapered by 0.25 kg each day: slowly enough to avoid calamity. One-thousand days later the food supply is half what it was, and guess what: now just 30,000 mice. No drama: just a slow adjustment to a slowly changing food reality via natural births and deaths.

Objections

B notes:

I’ve been surprised by how challenging people find these ideas. They feel menaced by them. They get angry. They feel I’m attacking the foundation of their lives. They feel I’m calling into question the blessedness of the great blessing of civilized life. They somehow feel I’m questioning the sacredness of human life itself.

True: humans are not mice. But essentially the second experiment has been carried out for 10,000 years and has an astoundingly convincing track record. People believe that we can increase food production without a concomitant increase in people, despite lack of evidence. [Since the book was written, it has become more apparent that a host of negative feedback effects are finally overcoming positive feedback and beginning to lower fertility rates, as must happen at some point. This development does not invalidate the positive feedback mechanism, but just overpowers it. Next week’s post will address the “food makes babies” formula.]

The biophysically inarguable point is that people are made from food: not aluminum, concrete, steel, sand, etc. [Actually, we are 97% made of atoms from water and air: H, O, C, N; the last two pulled out of air by plants.] Obviously a population explosion cannot happen without a food explosion. The reverse needn’t be logically true, but has been true in practice: more food has resulted in more population.

When it comes to the notion of increasing food to feed the starving millions, the temptation is to think that the extra food goes to the hungry. If the result is more population, it must be their fault—which seems off, somehow. No: some of the extra food might make it into hungry bellies, but the largesse is spread a million different ways from all the fields in the world. More likely, places that are neither affluent nor starving take advantage of greater food availability to expand: times are good! People are still hungry, and we’ve added almost a hundred-million mouths? Then there’s nothing for it but to produce more food. The result has been utterly predictable, demonstrated virtually every year for thousands of years.

Whether or not people would ever tolerate limits on food production is beside the biophysical point. It doesn’t matter whether we accept the rule of gravity when stepping off a cliff.

Questions and Answers

I made notes on two of the eight (generally incredulous) questions. The first notes that Malthus said the same (failed) stuff a century ago. B clarifies that Mathus worried about failure of agriculture. B’s warning is about the implications of its unfettered success. [Both can manifest, in different phases. B comes before M.]

The other relates to food shell games. Growth need not transpire in the place producing surplus. If population growth happens, the necessary food came from somewhere in a global distribution system.

Intense Lessons from B (104–200)

With the dreaded lecture done, we get back to the story…

Between Stuttgart and Frankfurt

On the train back from the population talk, B helps Jared see that it is easy for us to know what “ancient” Taker people had in mind when they built the pyramids or the Great Wall of China—because we share similar minds. Yet, when contemplating pre-agricultural Leavers, we don’t tend to know what they had in mind. They had no money, commerce, cities, or even hamlets: no accomplishments to speak of. We take this to mean they had nothing in mind: nothing for us to even try to understand [nothing worth writing down, apparently].

Now the Parable is This

After hearing a parable about weavers, Jared is still stuck on the lack of any accomplishments from pre-agricultural people. Without accomplishments, one can assume that they had no motivating ideas. [I know what impressive feat they accomplished and that we have not: do you?]

Defending the Gap

After various elements of drama, the education continues—mostly outdoors in a park. Leaning on Jared’s Christian vocation, they define Christ’s mission: “To save souls.” Not whales, forests, or wetlands. By contrast, B’s ministry is about saving the world.

Borders

B tries to get Jared to understand the momentous mental shift associated with the origin of Takers by starting with our origins embedded in the Community of Life. The Taker delusion is that humans were meant to become Takers. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that the universe aimed to make humans. Because of this self-flattering bias, our imaginations are limited to the notion that prehistoric Leavers “were trying to be us but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed.” We similarly imagine that religious beliefs emerged somewhat recently, when evidence for burials began appearing. B compares this to believing that language began around the time that clay tablets appeared. We know better.

Bricolage

Jared and B begin an exercise of bricolage: building something of meaning out of random elements close at hand. Echoing a bit of right-brain wisdom, B indicates that bricolage is not an exact science, but all the same can stimulate ideas and represent deep truths. It’s metaphorical. Scrounging around the park, B picked up various discarded bits of junk: a fuse, a film canister, a comb. Adding to this from Jared’s pockets was a pen and an ancient ammonite fossil B had given him some days before. B chose the fossil to anchor the work of bricolage, associating it with the Community of Life.

Animism

Long before monotheism and paganism—which never really achieved universal status—animism was essentially a universal “religion” among humans on the planet. It amounts to an awareness that Life is sacred: far beyond our reckoning. B selected the film canister to represent animism, and bound it to the Community of Life (ammonite fossil).

Regarding the Number of the Gods

Animism is not concerned with counting how many gods there are: it’s inconsequential. Indicating comb with its many teeth, B asks if it is one thing or many. Toss it aside and move on.

Where the Gods Write What they Write

Speaking to Jared about his Christian belief, B says:

Your God writes in words. The gods I’m talking about write in galaxies and star systems and planets and oceans and forests and whales and birds and gnats.

What a stunning language it is, too! The pen comes to represent the Law of Life—more on what this is in a bit. It is wedged between the Community of Life (fossil) and animism (film canister) .

Science vs. Religion

Unlike the often-dicey relationship between religion and science (squabbling over who has authority to decide Truth), animism is completely at home with science. That’s because both look for truth as it is written in the universe: not in words from books or prophets. The cartridge fuse comes to represent science, which nestles comfortably next to animism in the bricolage amalgam.

The Law of Life: The Hologram

The Law of Life is written all across the Community of Life. Animism tries to read this law and represent it in ways our brains can handle. The Law is not as absolute as the speed of light. A species may live outside the law, but in so doing they guarantee they will not be around for long. The Law of Life is essentially written by the long-duration survivors: how to live in ways that do not lead to extinction.

The Law of Life: A Mouse Burial

B describes a scene they find in the park “wilds”—a dead mouse is being buried by beetles for use by their larvae. Tiny mites that live on the beetles’ legs eat fly eggs and help clear the mouse carcass for the beetle larvae to succeed.

The Law of Life is about mutual abundance. Each mite “is a work of so much delicacy, perfection, and complexity that it makes a digital computer look like a pair of pliers.” Yet, no two in the entire universe are the same. The genetic abundance of mites interacts with the genetic abundance of other organisms in such a way as to ensure adequate abundance for these organisms to carry on. The Law is written only by long survivors who necessarily benefit from sufficiently reliable abundance.

One of the Bad Ones

B’s efforts are self-described as motivating “the first animist missionaries” to the world of salvation-based religions.

The Two Visions

Animism really isn’t a religion as we use the term. It’s so different from today’s religions that they all look essentially the same from an animist perspective: East or West. Animism is more about a way of looking at the world. Until recently, humans lived in accordance with the Law of Life for millions of years—because they survived. They may not have been able to articulate the Law of Life [any more than a random person can articulate the machinations of a single transistor at the heart of modern life], but their animist viewpoint was able to guide them. They knew truths about life, based on repeatable patterns: babies require care to survive; lions defend their prey; one need not outrun a deer to catch it; being upwind is a sure way to ruin a hunt. These are known because they are written in the community, and animists read these truths into their worldviews, woven into memorable stories.

While Jared is not able to name the animist vision yet, he has less trouble pinpointing the Taker vision. The world was made for us. We can do with it as we please. God is only concerned with humans (for whom he made the world). We were meant to subdue and rule the world, turning it into the paradise it was meant to be. Whole chapters in Ishmael were distilled into a few short paragraphs.

Strategies: Stable and Otherwise

This section covers material from Chapter 8 of Ishmael: what happens if a species starts violating the Law of Life. Instability results. Very importantly, the consequences are not immediate, but eventually catch up. We are currently in the process of delayed self-elimination—taking many others down with us.

The Eyes Begin to Open

Jared begins to recognize that his religion teaches that God “will make an exception for us […] let us behave in a way that would be fatal for any other species.” It is compared to the belief that God will allow us to violate the laws of physics if we wish. Jared wonders why the counter-perspective is not widely known and taught. B suggests that the Balkanization of disciplines plays a huge role in removing this big-picture perspective. Which department would teach it?

B makes the important point that the flawed vision of Takers arose out of a lifestyle rather than the reverse. Generations of “totalitarian agriculture” served to impress upon Takers that the world was a resource to be conquered, ruled, and transformed. It’s what they were busy doing, after all. [A bit of chicken–egg paradox arises here—resolved by appreciating their arriving and evolving together as one bundle.]

The Web

In many religions, the god or gods are remote; removed; detached. They may be in the heavens or on Mt. Olympus. Animist gods are very much present locally, and are a different mix from one place to another simply because the Community of Life is different from one place to another. The gods animate each place. They are “the fire that burns in this place.”

Animist gods, while impressive and able to do what we ourselves never could, are not omnipotent. They “can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb—silenced, driven away, enfeebled.” It is possible for us to destroy their works, even if impossible for us to build them. A concrete jungle, as we call urban areas, has almost no animating force left. But given the opportunity (e.g., Chernobyl), the gods will re-enter and breathe the fire of life back in a place. They won’t be the same set of gods as before: it’s never the same. But Life finds a way, and is poised to spring back.

As mentioned above, no two mites—as lowly as we might think them to be—”have ever been made alike in all the mighty universe” [I relish the phonetic pun]. “The brain in that precious human head of yours is not more wonderful than one of those mites.” [It seems to have taken a few years for that concept to silently percolate in my own precious meat-brain.]

All living beings within a Community of Life are made from atoms drawn from that community, and are in a sense an expression of that community.

Nothing in the community lives in isolation from the rest, not even the queens of the social insects. Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. […] Every life is on loan from the community from birth and without fail paid back to the community in death.

Life is a great recycling gig [using air, water, and ground as temporary storage media]. Always some forms are mining and distributing new raw materials, but largely it feeds on itself, exchanging substances from one life to the next—frequently via death.

In the Center of the Web

Humans came into being, differentiating themselves from their primate ancestors, in part by being excellent hunters. Their techniques were unique to them: not mimicking lions or dragonflies or angler fish. Their particular talent was reading stories written in tracks in the dirt. We became human not by “banging rocks together” but by being keen, intelligent observers of the living world around us and building effective stories to tie it together.

B proceeds to read a story written in the dirt of a beetle ambushed by a mouse, the ensuing scuffle, and the mouse carrying the beetle off.

The First Thing: Reading the Signs

Plenty of animals use tools. That’s not the defining feature of humans. We became human primarily based on our approach to hunting—enabled of course by our more complex mental machinery. Every living being exploits some trick (or set of tricks) to succeed, and the human trick is unquestionably linked to our large brains. Not only could we read stories in the dirt, but we could communicate them as well in a rich language.

The “Hunting Gene”

Violence is not at all unique to humans, or even to predators. Most violence not associated with predation is intra-species (mating rights, territory, etc.). It is not a propensity toward violence that makes humans successful hunters, but other attributes. This finds expression in one of the primary activities we are impelled to carry out.

The “Storytelling Gene”

We can teach a gorilla to use words in sign language, but find that they will never be able to assemble events into a coherent, enduring story [sincerest apology to Ishmael!]. The saga of the fight between the mouse and the beetle as witnessed and told by the gorilla becomes “Bug bug mouse bug run fight mouse run bug” and a short time later will have eroded to a report of having seen mouse and bug. Stories have universal appeal for humans—evident from a very early age. The structure of beginning, middle, and end is ubiquitous. How else could we account for its universality unless we were genetically coded to work in stories—in some complex, untraceable way?

Reading the Future

Of particular value in interpreting animal tracks as stories is a firm handle on the temporal landscape: past, present, and future. In contrast, dogs tracking a scent are always responding to “now” signals. Part of our power lies in appreciating evidence from the past, but the real value stems from what the tracks can tell us about the future. The tracks lead off this way, and are fresh, so if we go in that direction, we might encounter their creator within a couple of hours. Humans are obsessed with wanting to know the future. History is seen not as a pile of bygone curiosities, but as a tool kit for assembling a sense of the future (and a hope to avoid repeating mistakes). Religions tend to focus on what comes next for us if we follow certain paths. Science derives its chief value from its predictive ability. Medicine is about manipulating future outcomes. [Hmmm: Law is re-litigating the past?]

Dynamiting “Nature”

The term “Nature” is problematic, in that it erects an artificial (imagined) wall between humans and the non-human world, as if separable. Many stories are framed as “Man against Nature.” The Taker way is a war against Nature. It’s an act of alienation. We can no more separate ourselves and live against Nature as we can against entropy or gravity. The notion of getting “closer to Nature” is nonsensical—like saying we need to be closer to atoms.

Through the Eyes of Deer

Our animist forebears were not “close to Nature” so much as they were Nature: members of the Community of Life along with all the other plants and animals. It is as pointless to angelize Leaver ancestors as to demonize them. They were just people, but people living a lifestyle in better accord with long-term health of the Community of Life. They found that it worked well for them, and tended to want to hang on to it as long as circumstances allowed.

Taker children believe that “life comes to us from our human parents and that food is just another product we manufacture, like paint or plastic or glass.” Leavers are in better contact with the Community of Life, intimately understanding life, death, and food origins.

In the Sea of Grass

Picturing a pre-agricultural prairie, all the varied life—grasses, grasshoppers, fungi, mice, sparrows, foxes, bison, vultures, rabbits, microbes, humans—all trace to grass. Each life is an expression of the same set of substances, endlessly redistributed: “indistinguishable from one another, intermingling in the flow of fire, and the fire is god […] the animator of this single place.”

The Secrets

Finally, B believes that Jared may be able to articulate the Leaver vision, which he does admirably:

The world is a sacred place and a sacred process, and we’re part of it.

It’s a stark contrast to the “dominion” vision of Taker culture.

L5: The Great Remembering (307–325)

Shortly after this intense session in the park, B delivered the last of the public lectures in the book, titled The Great Remembering. In case you forgot, The Great Forgetting is when Takers lost touch with their origins as Leaver people, assuming humans came onto Earth as farmers and builders of cities. Just as PCP (angel dust) “blinds its users to the fact that they’re flesh and bone,” it…

…blinds us to the fact that we are a biological species in a community of biological species and are not exempt or exemptible from the forces that shape all life on this planet.

It’s as if we are not of this Earth, but delivered from on high to rule it and transform it according to recent brain-derived notions. Like being on PCP, this blind spot leads us to commit dangerous and utterly stupid acts. But do not mistake the user for the drug. Living without it is possible.

The Obliteration of Tribalism

Fabricated laws (as opposed to the emergent Law of Life) appear to have popped up about a thousand years after writing was established. The Code of Hammurabi, from 2100 BCE, is the first known example. For clarity, Leaver cultures all had their own unique laws for many tens of thousands of years—slowly crafted and honed to work for them and in accord with the Law of Life. One might even say that such proven laws and norms were aspects of the Law of Life.

We then get a story of how one certain people, called the Tak for our purposes, once existed in a patchwork of other Leaver cultures, each having their own distinct customs that worked for them. The Tak had the misfortune of inventing totalitarian agriculture, and the further misfortune of believing this to be the one right way for all humans to live.

As neighboring tribes were assimilated or exterminated by the expansionist Tak, the previously-distinct cultural identities faded. The process continued so that even the original cultural distinctiveness of the Tak was washed away—no longer relevant to a non-Leaver people. We are left with an amalgam of former tribes, all of whom have lost their original customs and laws, creating something of a blank slate: a void yearning to be filled. A world rich in diverse, tuned laws became a lawless desert.

On the Nature of Received Laws

Takers had no choice but to invent their laws, possessing no relevant qualifications or experience. It may seem obvious that this is how laws are supposed to come into being. But Leavers inherited laws from time immemorial. Tribal laws are received as a well-tuned collection—tested over many generations and proven to work well for the tribe in the context of a Community of Life. [Oral transmission also allowed greater adaptability to changing situations as each generation could tweak according to experience rather than slavishly following the “letter of the law.”]

The book then offers a fascinating account of how the Alawa of Australia handle adultery. The motivations are understandable, and the result effective. Each tribe will have its own custom for dealing with crises, and no one but patient evolution can pass judgment on what works for them, in the long run. Notably, the written/fabricated laws of “the most murderous and destructive culture that history has ever produced” ought not be held as a standard by which to judge others. So, be careful there!

The World of the Detribalized

Ever since the Great Forgetting, we have witnessed a recurring story of one highly successful Leaver lifestyle after another being smashed to pieces, followed by a grossly-imperfect attempt to fabricate a flimsy replacement lacking any deep heritage.

Tribal lifestyles are not amazing because they’re superior or cuddly or “natural.” “Tribal life is precious because it tested out” over millions of years. It’s a question of stability; viability.

Just as the irreplaceable gods are not invulnerable, the long-lived success of the Leaver lifestyle does not make it resistant to obliteration. We ought to be clear that tribalism need not be the only way for humans to live successfully on this planet, but it is a proven way, and starkly different from the demonstrably destructive Taker way that isn’t working and never could have worked in the long run. The Taker criteria were never about whether a lifestyle worked well for people and for the rest of the Community of Life.

If it Doesn’t Work, Suffer

Tribal life is so explicitly cohesive that “no one suffers unless everyone suffers.” That’s egalitarianism: no suffering classes. Chiefs are not rulers in the way we understand the term, but influencers and sacrificers. [Success of the tribe is everything: individuals succeed only when the tribe as a whole succeeds.]

We are never surprised that evolution prepared any other species to live a lifestyle that works well for them—however alien to our own. It should not be surprising that Leaver life reflects a lifestyle that evolved to work well for people.

…conversely, why should you be surprised that the founders of our culture, having obliterated a lifestyle tested over a period of three million years, were unable to slap together a replacement that was just as good? [my emphasis]

Part of the Great Forgetting is losing sight of the fact that people once lived well, without suffering masses. It makes sense that a newly concocted and woefully imperfect system that produced suffering masses would lead to a sense that the world was an evil place, and that humans were intrinsically flawed—were fated to be damned and doomed. Humans needed saving. Is it much wonder that salvationist religions sprung up around the time that Taker life had produced egregious hierarchies and intolerable suffering?

Suffering—and how to shake it off—became the preoccupation of Taker culture around the world: “Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” Attribution of the cause of suffering differed among them, as well as how to escape it. In all cases, personal salvation became the obsession: the best achievement one could seek. As an intrinsically selfish pursuit, any degree of selfishness was justified in the name of salvation. It took priority over family, friends, community, and the Community of Life. Especially dangerous is salvation that manifests in a realm detached from Earthly existence.

Is B the Antichrist?

The last two pages of this lecture are packed with noteworthy points. In answer to the question as to whether B is the Antichrist, the answer is yes: The goal of B is to prioritize the living world over any sense of eternal salvation. “The world must live!”

We are not related to angels, but to lightning bugs, marmosets, newts, chickadees, bananas, and amoebas. We need no longer buy into the rumor that humans are flawed creations in need of saving. How would it even make sense that every other living being is made well, but we’re botched? [Hmmm: maybe modernity is the botch!]

We need to shed the premise that nothing matters but us (either individually or as a species). We need to shed the twisted belief that our purpose is to suffer. We need to shed the sense that death is the doorway to something glorious and eternal.

So, yes, B advocates abandoning the salvation route. Contrary to the imagined role of the Antichrist, B does not advocate a life of hedonism and evil. B wants people to remember that we belong to this world, and have been content in that role for eons. The motivation is not sin and evil, but tremendous love of the world and its inhabitants. That’s dangerous talk!

The New Testament explicitly shames love of the world over the Father, immediately followed by a warning of the Antichrist. Indeed, the coming of B might mark the final hour—but for that belief system rather than for Earth.

I’ll comment that positioning this message as running counter to the Bible and associating it with the Antichrist has the unfortunate effect that it can instantly alienate an enormous number of people. Ideally, one might recognize that most religious followers already exercise selective acceptance of what the Bible says, and might work to merge/reconcile ideas rather than polarize into oppositional camps.

Post-Explosion Commitment (200–235)

The only notes I wrote for the final section of the book’s narrative were from pages 217–219, where Jared was asked to account for patterns of war that existed even among Leaver people. Doesn’t this destroy the notion that Leaver and Taker cultures are at complete odds? The resolution comes in the realization that warriors in Leaver cultures had the goal of protecting their territory, occasionally displaying their strength via raids. The point was not domination, subjugation, or territorial expansion, as we understand modern motivations of war.

The result is protection of cultural diversity, which itself protects longevity. Homogeneity invites vulnerability. The pattern of skirmishes that emerged did so because that’s what worked in the best interests of all the people in the long term.

Conclusion

I had no idea when I started this post that it would swell to over 10,000 words. But, that still represents a substantial distillation of a whole book, and roughly a third as extensive as my multi-part Ishmael coverage. I intentionally left many of the dramatic plot twists out as encouragement to read the original. When you read the book, you’ll probably have some double takes and think I misrepresented key elements, but I was careful. As often happens, it’s our assumptions that get in the way.

I thank Alex Leff for previewing this post, offering valuable suggestions.

Ammonite fossil, by Liez (H Zell), from Wikimedia Commons.