Schooling

What follows is an effort to place schooling in the larger context of our cultural history and that of our species as well. I should begin by explaining what I mean by "our culture." Rather than burden you with a definition, I'll give you a simple test that you can use wherever you go in the world. If the food in that part of the world is under lock and key, and the people who live there have to work to get it, then you're among people of our culture. If you happen to be in a jungle in the interior of Brazil or New Guinea, however, you'll find that the food is not under lock and key. It's simply out there for the taking, and anyone who wants some can just go and get it. The people who live in these areas, often called aboriginals, stone-age peoples, or tribal peoples clearly belong to a culture radically different from our own.
Many people nowadays realize that human life may well be in jeopardy, but this jeopardy exists in some vaguely defined future, twenty or fifty or a hundred years hence. However, In the coldest days of the Cold War everyone lived with the realization that a nuclear holocaust could occur literally at any second, without warning. It was very realistically the touch of a button away.
Human life would not be entirely snuffed out in a holocaust of this kind. In a way, it would be even worse than that. In a matter of hours, we would be thrown back not just to the Stone Age but to a level of almost total helplessness. In the Stone Age, after all, people lived perfectly well without supermarkets, shopping malls, hardware stores, and all the elaborate systems that keep these places stocked with the things we need. Within hours our cities would disintegrate into chaos and anarchy, and the necessities of life would vanish from store shelves, never to be replaced. Within days famine would be widespread.
Skills that are taken for granted among Stone Age peoples would be unknown to the survivors, such as: the ability to differentiate between edible and inedible foods growing in their own environment, the ability to stalk, kill, dress, and preserve game animals, and most important the ability to make tools from available materials. How many people know how to cure a hide? How to make a rope from scratch? How to flake a stone tool? Much less how to smelt metal from raw ore. Commonplace skills of the Paleolithic, developed over thousands of years, would be lost arts.
All this is freely acknowledged by people who don't doubt for a moment that we are living the way humans were meant to live from the beginning of time, and who don't doubt for a moment that the things our children are learning in school are exactly the things they should be learning.
In their early grades, children spend most of their time learning things that no one growing up in our culture could possibly avoid learning. For example, they learn the names of the primary colors. Wow, just imagine missing school on the day when they were learning blue. You'd spend the rest of your life wondering what color the sky is. They learn to tell time, to count, and to add and subtract, as if anyone could possibly fail to learn these things in this culture. And of course they make the beginnings of learning how to read. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest an experiment. Two classes of 30 kids, taught identically and given the identical text materials throughout their school experience, but one class is given no instruction in reading at all and the other is given the usual instruction. Both classes will test the same on reading skills at the end of twelve years. I feel safe in making this conjecture because ultimately kids learn to read the same way they learn to speak, by hanging around people who read and by wanting to be able to do what these people do.
This of course begs the question: Instead of spending two or three years teaching children things they will inevitably learn anyway, why not teach them some things they will not inevitably learn and that they would actually enjoy learning at this age? How to navigate by the stars, for example. How to tan a hide. How to distinguish edible foods from inedible foods. How to build a shelter from scratch. How to make tools from scratch. How to make a canoe. How to track animals - all the forgotten but still valuable skills that our civilization is actually built on.
Of course you do not have to vocalize this idea to anyone to know how it would be received. Being thoroughly acculturated, we can explain why it is totally inane. The way we live is the way humans were meant to live from the beginning of time, and our children are being prepared to enter that life. Those who came before us were savages, little more than brutes. Those who continue to live the way our ancestors lived are savages, little more than brutes. The world is well rid of them, and we're well rid of every vestige of them, including their ludicrously primitive skills.
Our children are being prepared in school to step boldly into the only fully human life that has ever existed on this planet. The skills they are acquiring in school will bring them not only success but deep personal fulfillment on every level. What does it matter if they never do more than work in some mind-numbing factory job? They will be able to diagram a sentence! They will be able to explain to you the difference between a Petrarchan sonnet and a Shakespearean sonnet! They will be able to extract a square root! They will be able to show you why the square of the two sides of a right triangle are equal to the square of the hypotenuse! They will be able to analyze a poem! They will be able to explain to you how a bill passes congress! They will very possibly be able to trace for you the economic causes of the Civil War. They will have read Melville and Shakespeare, so why would they not now read Dostoevsky and Racine, Joyce and Beckett, Faulkner and O'Neill? But above all else, of course, the citizen's education - grades K to twelve - prepares children to be fully-functioning participants in this great civilization of ours. The day after their graduation exercises, they are ready to stride confidently toward any goal they might set for themselves.
Of course everyone has long known that the citizen's education is doing no such thing. It has been perceived that there is something strangely wrong with the schools. They are failing - and failing miserably - at delivering on these enticing promises. Ah well, teachers aren't being paid enough, so what can you expect? We’ve raised teachers' salaries - again and again and again - and still the schools fail. Well, what can you expect? The schools are physically decrepit, lightless, and uninspiring. We built new ones - tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them - and still the schools fail. Well, what can you expect? The curriculum is antiquated and irrelevant. We modernized the curriculum, did our damnedest to make it relevant - and still the schools fail. Every week you can read about some bright new idea that will surely "fix" whatever is wrong with our schools: the open classroom, team teaching, back to basics, more homework, less homework, no homework, etc. Hundreds of these bright ideas were implemented - thousands of them were implemented - and still the schools fail.
Within our cultural matrix, every medium tells us that the schools exist to prepare children for a successful and fulfilling life in our civilization (and are therefore failing). This is beyond argument, beyond doubt, beyond question. The voice of Mother Culture speaks to us from every newspaper and magazine article, every movie, every sermon, every book, every parent, every teacher, every school administrator, and what she has to say about the schools is that they exist to prepare children for a successful and fulfilling life in our civilization (and are therefore failing). Once we step outside our cultural matrix, this voice no longer fills our ears and we're free to ask some new questions. Suppose the schools aren't failing? Suppose they're doing exactly what we really want them to do - but don't wish to examine and acknowledge?
Granted that the schools do a poor job of preparing children for a successful and fulfilling life in our civilization, but what things do they do excellently well? Well, to begin with, they do a superb job of keeping young people out of the job market. Instead of becoming wage-earners at age twelve or fourteen, they remain consumers only - and they consume billions of dollars worth of merchandise, using money that their parents earn. Just imagine what would happen to our economy if overnight the high schools closed their doors. Instead of having fifty million active consumers out there, we would suddenly have fifty million unemployed youth. It would be nothing short of an economic catastrophe.
Of course the situation was very different two hundred years ago, when we were still a primarily agrarian society. Youngsters were expected and needed to become workers at age ten, eleven, and twelve. For the masses, a fourth, fifth, or sixth-grade education was deemed perfectly adequate. But as the character of our society changed, fewer youngsters were needed for farm work, and the enactment of child-labor laws soon made it impossible to put ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds to work in factories. It was necessary to keep them off the streets - and where better than in schools? Naturally, new material had to be inserted into the curriculum to fill up the time. It didn't much matter what it was. Have them memorize the capitals of every state. Have them memorize the principle products of every state. Have them learn the steps a bill takes in passing Congress. No one wondered or cared if these were things kids wanted to know or needed to know - or would ever need to know. No one wondered or ever troubled to find out if the material being added to the curriculum was retained. The educators didn't want to know, and really, what difference would it make? It didn't matter that, once learned, they were immediately forgotten. It filled up some time. The law decreed that an eighth-grade education was essential for every citizen, and so curriculum writers provided material needed for an eighth-grade education.
During the Great Depression it became urgently important to keep young people off the job market for as long as possible, and so it came to be understood that a twelfth-grade education was essential for every citizen. As before, it didn't much matter what was added to fill up the time, so long as it was marginally plausible. Let's have them learn how to analyze a poem, even if they never read another one in their whole adult life. Let's have them read a great classic novel, even if they never read another one in their whole adult life. Let's have them study world history, even if it all just goes in one ear and out the other. Let's have them study Euclidean geometry, even if two years later they couldn't prove a single theorem to save their lives. All these things and many, many more were of course justified on the basis that they would contribute to the success and rich fulfilment that these children would experience as adults. Except, of course, that it didn't. But no one wanted to know about that. No one would have dreamed of testing young people five years after graduation to find out how much of it they'd retained. No one would have dreamed of asking them how useful it had been to them in realistic terms or how much it had contributed to their success and fulfilment as humans. What would be the point of asking them to evaluate their education? What did they know about it, after all? They were just high-school graduates, not professional educators.
At the end of the Second World War, no one knew what the economic future was going to be like. With the disappearance of the war industries, would the country fall back into the pre-war depression slump? The word began to go out that the citizen's education should really include four years of college. Everyone should go to college. As the economy continued to grow, however, this injunction began to be softened. Four years of college would sure be good for you, but it wasn't part of the citizen's education, which ultimately remained a twelfth-grade education.
It was in the good years following the war, when there were often more jobs than workers to fill them, that our schools began to be perceived as failing. With ready workers in demand, it was apparent that kids were coming out of school without knowing much more than the sixth-grade graduates of a century ago. They'd "gone through" all the material that had been added to fill up the time - analyzed poetry, diagramed sentences, proved theorems, solved for x, plowed through thousands of pages of history and literature, written bushels of themes, but for the most part they retained almost none of it - and of how much use would it be to them if they had? From a business point of view, these high-school graduates were barely employable.
But of course by then the curriculum had achieved the status of scripture, and it was too late to acknowledge that the program had never been designed to be useful. The educators' response to the business community was, "We just have to give the kids more of the same - more poems to analyze, more sentences to diagram, more theorems to prove, more equations to solve, more pages of history and literature to read, more themes to write, and so on." No one was about to acknowledge that the program had been set up to keep young people off the job market - and that it had done a damn fine job of that at least.
But keeping young people off the job market is only half of what the schools do superbly well. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, children in aboriginal societies - tribal societies - have completed what we, from our point of view, would call their "education." They're ready to "graduate" and become adults. In these societies, what this means is that their survival value is 100%. All their elders could disappear overnight, and there wouldn't be chaos, anarchy, and famine among these new adults. They would be able to carry on without a hitch. None of the skills and technologies practiced by their parents would be lost. If they wanted to, they could live quite independently of the tribal structure in which they were reared.
But the last thing we want our children to be able to do is to live independently of our society. We don't want our graduates to have a survival value of 100%, because this would make them free to opt out of our carefully constructed economic system and do whatever they please. We don't want them to do whatever they please, we want them to have exactly two choices (assuming they're not independently wealthy). Get a job or go to college. Either choice is good for us, because we need a constant supply of entry-level workers and we also need doctors, lawyers, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, geologists, biologists, school teachers, and so on. The citizen's education accomplishes this almost without fail. Ninety-nine point nine percent of our high school graduates make one of these two choices.
And it should be noted that our high-school graduates are reliably entry-level workers. We want them to have to grab the lowest rung on the ladder. What sense would it make to give them skills that would make it possible for them to grab the second rung or the third rung? Those are the rungs their older brothers and sisters are reaching for. And if this year's graduates were reaching for the second or third rungs, who would be doing the work at the bottom? The business people who do the hiring constantly complain that graduates know absolutely nothing, have virtually no useful skills at all. But in truth how could it be otherwise?
So you see that our schools are not failing, they're just succeeding in ways we prefer not to see. Turning out graduates with no skills, with no survival value, and with no choice but to work or starve are not flaws of the system, they are features of the system. These are the things the system must do to keep things going on as they are.
The need for schooling is bolstered by two well-entrenched pieces of cultural mythology. The first and most pernicious of these is that children will not learn unless they're compelled to - in school. It is part of the mythology of childhood itself that children hate learning and will avoid it at all costs. Of course, anyone who has had a child knows what an absurd lie this is. From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world. If they grow up in a family in which four languages are spoken, they will be speaking four languages by the time they're three or four years old - without a day of schooling, just by hanging around the members of their family, because they desperately want to be able to do the things they do. Anyone who has had a child knows that they are tirelessly curious. As soon as they're able to ask questions, they ask questions incessantly, often driving their parents to distraction. Their curiosity extends to everything they can reach, which is why every parent soon learns to put anything breakable, anything dangerous, anything untouchable up high - and if possible behind lock and key. We all know the truth of the joke about those childproof bottle caps: those are the kind that only children can open.
People who imagine that children are resistant to learning have absolutely no understanding of how human culture developed in the first place. Culture is no more and no less than the totality of learned behavior and information that is passed from one generation to the next. The desire to eat is not transmitted by culture, but knowledge about how edible foods are found, collected, and processed is transmitted by culture. Before the invention of writing, whatever was not passed on from one generation to the next was simply lost, no matter what it was - a technique, a song, a detail of history. Among aboriginal peoples - those we haven't destroyed - the transmission between generations is remarkably complete, but of course not 100% complete. There will always be trivial details of personal history that the older generation takes to its grave. But the vital material is never lost.
This comes about because the desire to learn is hardwired into the human child just the way that the desire to reproduce is hardwired into the human adult. It's genetic. If there was ever a strain of humans whose children were not driven to learn, they're long gone, because they could not be culture-bearers.
Children don't have to be motivated to learn everything they can about the world they inhabit, they're absolutely driven to learn it. By the onset of puberty, children in aboriginal societies have unfailingly learned everything they need to function as adults.
Think of it this way. In the most general terms, the human biological clock is set for two alarms. When the first alarm goes off, at birth, the clock chimes learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. When the second alarm goes off, at the onset of puberty, the clock chimes mate, mate, mate, mate, mate. The chime that goes learn, learn, learn never disappears entirely, but it becomes relatively faint at the onset of puberty. At that point, children cease to want to follow their parents around in the learning dance. Instead, they want to follow each other around in the mating dance. We, of course, in our greater wisdom have decreed that the biological clock regulated by our genes must be ignored.
What sells most people on the idea of school is the fact that the unschooled child learns what it wants to learn when it wants to learn it. This is intolerable to them, because they're convinced that children don't want to learn anything at all - and they point to school children to prove it. What they fail to recognize is that the learning curve of preschool children swoops upward like a mountain - but quickly levels off when they enter school. By the third or fourth grade it's completely flat for most kids. Learning, such as it is, has become a boring, painful experience they'd love to be able to avoid if they could. But there's another reason why people abhor the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it. They won't all learn the same things! Some of them will never learn to analyze a poem! Some of them will never learn to diagram a sentence or write a theme! Some of them will never read Julius Caesar! Some will never learn geometry! Some will never dissect a frog! Some will never learn how a bill passes Congress! Well, of course, this is too horrible to imagine. It doesn't matter that 90% of these students will never read another poem or another play by Shakespeare in their lives. It doesn't matter that 90% of them will never have occasion to diagram another sentence or write another theme in their lives. It doesn't matter that 90% retain no functional knowledge of the geometry or algebra they studied. It doesn't matter that 90% never have any use for whatever knowledge they were supposed to gain from dissecting a frog. It doesn't matter that 90% graduate without having the vaguest idea how a bill passes Congress. All that matters is that they've gone through it!
The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age) remember the things that are important to them - the things they want to know - and forget the rest.
One final argument people advance to support the idea that children need all the schooling we give them is that there is vastly more material to be learned today than there was in prehistoric times or even a century ago. Well, there is of course vastly more material that can be learned, but we all know perfectly well that it isn't being taught in grades K to twelve. Whole vast new fields of knowledge exist today - things no one even heard of a century ago: astrophysics, biochemistry, paleobiology, aeronautics, particle physics, ethology, cytopathology, neurophysiology - I could list them for hours. But are these the things that we have jammed into the K-12 curriculum because everyone needs to know them? Certainly not. The idea is absurd. The idea that children need to be schooled for a long time because there is so much that can be learned is absurd. If the citizen's education were to be extended to include everything that can be learned, it wouldn't run to grade twelve, it would run to grade twelve thousand, and no one would be able to graduate in a single lifetime.
I hope that this has been able to add some philosophical, historical, anthropological, and biological foundation for the conviction that school ain't all it's cracked up to be.
Adapted from a lecture by Daniel Quinn.

Religion

Contrary to popular opinion, Charles Darwin did not originate the idea of evolution. By the middle of the 19th century, the mere fact of evolution had been around for a long time, and most thinkers of the time were perfectly content to leave it at that. The absence of a theory to explain evolutionary change didn't trouble them, wasn't experienced as a pressure, as it was by Darwin. He knew there had to be some intelligible mechanism or dynamic that would account for it, and this is what he went looking for, with well known results. In his Origin of Species, he wasn't announcing the fact of evolution, he was trying to make sense of the fact.
The beginning of our story isn't difficult to find. Every schoolchild learns that our story began about 10,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revolution. This isn't the beginning of the human story, but it's certainly the beginning of our story, for it was from this beginning that all the wonders and horrors of our civilization grew.
Everyone is vaguely aware that there have been two ways of looking at the Agricultural Revolution within our culture, two contradictory stories about its significance. According to the standard version - the version taught in our schools - humans had been around for a long time, three or four million years, living a miserable and shiftless sort of life for most of that time, accomplishing nothing and getting nowhere. But then about 10,000 years ago it finally dawned on folks living in the Fertile Crescent that they didn't have to live like other animals, making do with whatever food happened to come along; they could cultivate their own food and thus control their own destiny and well being. Agriculture made it possible for them to give up the nomadic life for the life of farming villagers. Village life encouraged occupational specialization and the advancement of technology on all fronts. Before long, villages became towns, and towns became cities, kingdoms, and empires. Trade connections, elaborate social and economic systems, and literacy soon followed, and there we went. All these advances were based on, and impossible without, agriculture, manifestly humanity's greatest blessing.
The other story, a much older one, is tucked away in a different corner of our cultural heritage. It too is set in the Fertile Crescent and tells a tale of the birth of agriculture, but in this telling agriculture isn't represented as a blessing but rather as a terrible punishment for a crime whose exact nature has always profoundly puzzled us. I'm referring, of course, to the story told in the third chapter of Genesis, the Fall of Adam.
Both these stories are known to virtually everyone who grows up in our culture, including every historian, philosopher, theologian, and anthropologist. But like most thinkers of the mid-19th century, who were content with the mere fact of evolution and felt no pressure to explain it, our historians, philosophers, theologians, and anthropologists seem perfectly content to live with these two contradictory stories. The conflict is obvious but, for them, demands no explanation. For me, it did. As evolution demanded of Darwin a theory that would make sense of it, the story in Genesis demanded of me a theory that would make sense of it.
There have traditionally been two approaches to Adam's crime and punishment. The text tells us Adam was invited to partake of every tree in the garden of Eden except one, mysteriously called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As we know, Adam succumbed to the temptation to sample this fruit. In one approach, the crime is viewed as simple disobedience, in which case the interdiction of the knowledge of good and evil seems entirely arbitrary. God might just as well have interdicted the knowledge of war and peace or the knowledge of pride and prejudice. The point was simply to forbid Adam something in order to test his loyalty. Under this approach, Adam's punishment (banishment from Eden to live by the sweat of his brow as a farmer) was just a spanking; it doesn't "fit the crime" in any particular way. He would have received this punishment no matter what test he had failed, so why a farmer?
The second approach tries to make some connection between Adam's crime and his punishment. Under this approach, Eden is viewed as a metaphor for the state of innocence, which is lost when Adam gains the knowledge of good and evil. This makes sense, but only if the knowledge of good and evil is understood as a metaphor for knowledge that destroys innocence. So, with roughly equivalent metaphors at either end, the story is reduced to a banal tautology: Adam lost his innocence by gaining knowledge that destroyed his innocence.
The story of the Fall is coupled with a second that is equally famous and equally baffling, that of Cain and Abel. As conventionally understood, these two brothers were literal individuals, the elder, Cain, a tiller of the soil, and the younger, Abel, a herder. The improbability that two members of the same family would embrace antithetical lifestyles should tip us off to the fact that these were not individuals but emblematic figures, just as Adam was (Adam merely being the Hebrew word for Man).
If we understand these as emblematic figures, then the story begins to make sense. The firstborn of agriculture was indeed the tiller of the soil, as Cain was said to be the firstborn of Adam. This is an undoubted historical fact. The domestication of plants is a process that begins the day you plant your first seed, but the domestication of animals takes generations. So the herder Abel was indeed the second-born, by centuries, if not millennia (another reason to be skeptical of the notion that Cain and Abel were literally second-generation brothers).
A further reason for skepticism on this point is the fact that the ancient farmers and herders of the Near East occupied adjacent but distinctly different regions. Farming was the occupation of the Caucasian inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent. Herding was the occupation of the Semitic inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula to the south.
Another piece of background that needs to be understood is that in very ancient times farmers and herders had radically different lifestyles. Farmers were by the very nature of their work settled villagers; but herders (by the very nature of their work) were nomads, just as many present-day herding peoples are. The herding lifestyle was in fact closer to the hunting-gathering lifestyle than it was to the farming lifestyle.
As the farming peoples of the north expanded, it was inevitable that they would confront their Semitic herding neighbors to the south, perhaps below what is now Iraq - with the predictable result. As they have done from the beginning to the present moment, the tillers of the soil needed more land to put to the plow, and as they've done from the beginning to the present moment, they took it. As the Semites saw it (and it is of course their version of the story that we have), the tiller of the soil Cain was watering his fields with the blood of Abel the herder.
The fact that the version we have is the Semitic version explains the central mystery of the story, which is why God rejected Cain's gift but accepted Abel's. Naturally, this is the way the Semites would see it. In essence, the story says, "God is on our side. God loves us and the way we live but hates the tillers of the soil and the way they live."
With these provisional understandings in place, we are ready to understand the first part of the story, the Fall of Adam. What the Semitic authors knew was only the present fact that their brothers from the north were encroaching on them in a murderous way. They hadn't been physically present in the Fertile Crescent to witness the actual birth of agriculture, and in fact this was an event that had occurred hundreds of years earlier. In their story of the Fall, they were reconstructing an ancient event, not reporting a recent one. All that was clear to them was that some strange development had saddled their brothers to the north with a laborious lifestyle (performing 70 hours of work per week as farmers verses 15 hours per week as a hunter-gatherers) and had turned them into murderers, and this had to be a moral or spiritual catastrophe of some kind.
What they observed about their brothers to the north was this peculiarity. They seemed to have the strange idea that they knew how to run the world as well as God. This is what marks them as our cultural ancestors. As we go about our business of running the world, we have no doubt that we're doing as good a job as God, if not better. Obviously God put a lot of creatures in the world that are quite superfluous and even pernicious, and we're quite at liberty to get rid of them. We know where the rivers should run, where the swamps should be drained, where the forests should be razed, where the mountains should be leveled, where the plains should be scoured, where the rain should fall. To us, it's perfectly obvious that we have this knowledge.
In fact, to the authors of the stories in Genesis, it looked as if their brothers to the north had the bizarre idea that they had eaten at God's own tree of wisdom and had gained the very knowledge God uses to rule the world. This knowledge is a knowledge that only God is competent to use, the knowledge that every single action God might take - no matter what it is, no matter how large or small - is good for one but evil for another. If a fox is stalking a pheasant, it is in the hands of God whether she will catch the pheasant or the pheasant will escape. If God gives the fox the pheasant, then this is good for the fox but evil for the pheasant. If God allows the pheasant to escape, then this is good for the pheasant but evil for the fox. There's no outcome that can be good for both. The same is true in every area of the world's governance.
Decisions of this kind are clearly at the very root of what it means to rule the world, and the wisdom to make them cannot possibly belong to any mere creature, for any creature making such decisions would inevitably say, "I will make every choice so that it's good for me but evil for all others." And of course this is precisely how the agriculturalist operates, saying, "If I scour this plain to plant food for myself, then this will be evil for all the creatures that inhabit the plain, but it'll be good for me. If I raze this forest to plant food for myself, then this will be evil for all the creatures that inhabit the forest, but it'll be good for me."
What the authors of the stories in Genesis perceived was that their brothers to the north had taken into their own hands the rule of the world; they had usurped the role of God. Those who let God run the world and take the food that he's planted for them have an easy life. But those who want to run the world themselves must necessarily plant their own food, must necessarily make their living by the sweat of the brow. As this makes plain, agriculture was not the crime itself but rather the result of the crime, the punishment that must inevitably follow such a crime. It was wielding the knowledge of good and evil that had turned their brothers in the north into farmers, and into murderers.
But these were not the only consequences to be expected from Adam's act. The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is harmless to God but poison to Man. It seemed to these authors that usurping God's role in the world would be the very death of Man.
And so it seemed to me when I finally read these words in my 40th year. This investigation of the stories in Genesis was not, for me, an exercise in biblical exegesis. I'd gone looking for a way to understand how in the world we'd brought ourselves face to face with death in such a relatively short period of time - 10,000 years, a mere eyeblink in the lifespan of our species - and had found it in an ancient story that we long ago adopted as our own and that remained stubbornly mysterious to us as long as we insisted on reading it as if it were our own. When examined from a point of view not our own, however, it ceased to be mysterious and delivered up a meaning that not only would have made sense to a beleaguered herding people 8,000 years ago but that would also make sense to the beleaguered people of the twenty-first century.
As far as I am concerned, the authors of this story had gotten it right. In spite of the terrible mess we've made of it, we do think we can run the world, and if we continue to think this, it is going to be the death of us.
In case it isn't evident, I should add that of course this reading of Genesis is only a theory. This is what creationists say of evolution, that it's "only a theory, it hasn't been proved," as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make sense of the evidence. So far, Darwin's theory remains the very best way we've found to make sense of the evidence, and this theory has to be evaluated in the same way.
But solving this particular riddle leads to the realization that the philosophical and theological foundations of our culture had been laid down by people who confidently believed that Man had been born an agriculturalist and civilization builder. These things were as instinctive to him as predation is to lions or hiving is to bees. This meant that, to find and date Man's birth, they had only to look for the beginnings of agriculture and civilization, which were obviously not that far back in time.
When in 1650 Irish theologian James Ussher announced the date of creation as October 23, 4004 B.C., no one laughed, or if they did, it was because of the absurd exactitude of the date, not because the date was absurdly recent. In fact, 4004 B.C. is quite a serviceable date for the beginning of what we would recognize as civilization. This being the case, it's hardly surprising that, for people who took it for granted that Man began building civilization as soon as he was created, 4004 B.C. would seem like a perfectly reasonable date for his creation.
But all this soon changed. By the middle of the 19th century the accumulated evidence of many new sciences had pushed almost all dates back by many orders of magnitude. The universe and the earth were not thousands of years old but billions. The human past extended millions of years back beyond the appearance of agriculture and civilization. Only those who clung to a very literal reading of the biblical creation story rejected the evidence; they saw it as a hoax perpetrated on us either by the devil (to confound us) or by God (to test our faith) - take your pick. The notion that Man had been born an agriculturalist and civilization builder had been rendered totally untenable. He had very definitely not been born either one.
This meant that the philosophical and theological foundations of our culture had been laid by people with a profoundly erroneous understanding of our origins and history. It is therefore urgently important to reexamine these foundations and if necessary to rebuild them from the ground up.
Except, of course, that almost no one at all thinks this is urgently important - or even slightly important. So human life began millions of years before the birth of agriculture. Who cares? Nothing of any importance happened during those millions of years. They were merely a fact, something to be accepted, just as the fact of evolution had been accepted by naturalists long before Darwin.
In the last century we'd gained an understanding of the human story that made nonsense of everything we'd been telling ourselves for 3,000 years, but our settled understandings remained completely unshaken. So what, that Man had not in fact been born an agriculturalist and a civilization builder? He was certainly born to become an agriculturalist and a civilization builder. It was beyond question that this was our foreordained destiny. The way we live is the way humans were meant to live from the beginning of time. And indeed we must go on living this way - even if it kills us.
Facts that were indisputable to all but biblical literalists had radically repositioned us not only in the physical universe but in the history of our own species. The fact that we had been repositioned was all but universally acknowledged, but no one felt any pressure to develop a theory that would make sense of the fact, the way Darwin had made sense of the fact of evolution.
The conflict between the emblematic figures Cain and Abel didn't end six or eight thousand years ago in the Near East. Cain the tiller of the soil has carried his knife with him to every corner of the world, watering his fields with the blood of tribal peoples wherever he found them. He arrived here in 1492 and over the next three centuries watered his fields with the blood of millions of Native Americans. Today, he's down there in Brazil, knife poised over the few remaining aboriginals in the heart of that country.
The tribe among aboriginal peoples is as universal as the flock among geese, and no anthropologist seriously doubts that it was humanity's original social organization. We didn't evolve in troops or hordes or pods. Rather, we evolved in a social organization that was peculiarly human, that was uniquely successful for culture-bearers. The tribe was successful for humans, which is why it was still universally in place throughout the world three million years later. The tribal organization was natural selection's gift to humanity in the same way that the flock was natural selection's gift to geese.
The elemental glue that holds any tribe together is tribal law. This is easy to say but less easy to understand, because the operation of tribal law is entirely different from the operation of our law. Prohibition is the essence of our law, but the essence of tribal law is remedy. Misbehavior isn't outlawed in any tribe. Rather, tribal law prescribes what must happen in order to minimize the effect of misbehavior and to produce a situation in which everyone feels that they've been made as whole again as it's possible to be.
Among the Alawa of Australia, if you have the misfortune to fall in love with another man's wife or another woman's husband, the law doesn't say, "This is prohibited and may not go forward." It says, "If you want your love to go forward, here's what you must do to make things right with all parties and to see to it that marriage isn't cheapened in the eyes of our children." It's a remarkably successful process. What makes it even more remarkable is the fact that it wasn't worked out in any legislature or by any committee. It's another gift of natural selection. Over countless generations of testing, no better way of handling adultery has been found or even conceivably could be found, because - it works! It does just what the Alawa want it to do, and absolutely no one tries to evade it. Even adulterers don't try to evade it - that is how well it works.
But this is just the law of the Alawa, and it would never occur to them to say, "Everyone in the world should do it this way." They know perfectly well that their tribal neighbors' laws work just as well for them - and for the same reason, that they've been tested from the beginning of time.
One of the virtues of tribal law is that it presupposes that people are just the way we know they are: generally wise, kind, generous, and well-intentioned but perfectly capable of being foolish, unruly, moody, cantankerous, selfish, greedy, violent, stupid, bad-tempered, sneaky, lustful, treacherous, careless, vindictive, neglectful, petty, and all sorts of other unpleasant things. Tribal law doesn't punish people for their shortcomings, as our law does. Rather, it makes the management of their shortcomings an easy and ordinary part of life.
But during the developmental period of our culture, all this changed very dramatically. Tribal peoples began to come together in larger and larger associations, and one of the casualties of this process was tribal law. If you take the Alawa of Australia and put them together with Gebusi of New Guinea, the Bushmen of the Kalahari, and the Yanomami of Brazil, they are very literally not going to know how to live. Not any of these tribes are going to embrace the laws of the others, which may not only be unknown to them but incomprehensible to them. How then are they going to handle mischief that occurs among them? The Gebusi way or the Yanomami way? The Alawa way or the Bushman way? Multiply this by a hundred, and you'll have a fair approximation of where people stood in the early millennia of our own cultural development in the Near East.
When you gather up a hundred tribes and expect them to work and live together, tribal law becomes inapplicable and useless. But of course the people in this amalgam are the same as they always were: capable of being foolish, moody, cantankerous, selfish, greedy, violent, stupid, bad-tempered, and all the rest. In the tribal situation, this was no problem, because tribal law was designed for people like this. But all the tribal ways of handling these ordinary human tendencies had been expunged in our burgeoning civilization. A new way of handling them had to be invented - and I stress the word invented. There was no received, tested way of handling the mischief people were capable of. Our cultural ancestors had to make something up, and what they made up were lists of prohibited behavior.
Very understandably, they began with the big ones. They weren't going to prohibit moodiness or selfishness. They prohibited things like murder, assault, and theft. Of course we don't know what the lists were like until the dawn of literacy, but you can be sure they were in place, because it's hardly plausible that we murdered, robbed, and thieved with impunity for five or six thousand years until Hammurabi finally noticed that these were rather disruptive activities.
When the Israelites escaped from Egypt in the 13th century B.C., they were literally a lawless horde, because they'd left the Egyptian list of prohibitions behind. They needed their own list of prohibitions, which “God” provided - the famous ten. But of course ten didn't do it. Hundreds more followed, but they didn't do it either.
No number has ever done it for us. Not a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Even millions don't do it, and so every single year we pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter how many prohibitions we come up with, they never do the trick, because no prohibited behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it. Every time someone is sent to prison or executed, this is said to be "sending a message" to miscreants, but for some strange reason the message never arrives, year after year, generation after generation, century after century.
Naturally, we consider this to be a very advanced system.
No tribal people has ever been found that claimed not to know how to live. On the contrary, they're all completely confident that they know how to live. But with the disappearance of tribal law among us, people began to be acutely aware of not knowing how to live. A new class of specialists came to be in demand, their specialty being the annunciation of how people are supposed to live. These specialists we call prophets.
Naturally it takes special qualifications to be a prophet. You must by definition appear to know something the rest of us don't know, something the rest of us are clearly unable to know. This means you must have a source of information that is beyond normal reach - or else what good would it be? A transcendent vision will do, as in the case of Siddhartha Gautama. A dream will do, provided it comes from God. But best of all, of course, is direct, personal, unmediated communication with God. The most persuasive and most highly valued prophets, the ones that are worth dying for and killing for, claim to have the word directly from God.
The appearance of religions based on prophetic revelations is unique to our culture. We alone in the history of all humanity needed such religions. We still need them (and new ones are being created every day), because we still profoundly feel that we don't know how to live. Our religions are the peculiar creation of a bereft people. Yet we don't doubt for a moment that they are the religions of humanity itself.
This belief was not an unreasonable one when it first took root among us. Having long since forgotten that humanity was here long before we came along, we assumed that we were humanity itself and that our history was human history itself. We imagined that humanity had been in existence for just a few thousand years - and that God had been talking to us from the beginning. So why wouldn't our religions be the religions of humanity itself?
When it became known that humanity was millions of years older than we, no one thought it odd that God had remained aloof from the thousands of generations that had come before us. Why would God bother to talk to Homo habilis or Homo erectus? Why would he bother to talk even to Homo sapiens - until we came along? God wanted to talk to civilized folks, not savages, so it's no wonder he remained disdainfully silent.
The philosophers and theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries weren't troubled by God's long silence. The fact alone was enough for them, and they felt no pressure to develop a theory to make sense of it. For Christians, it had long been accepted that Christianity was humanity's religion (which is why all of humanity had to be converted to it, of course). It was an effortless step for thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin and Matthew Fox to promote Christ from humanity's Christ to the Cosmic Christ.
Very strangely, only Daniel Quinn seems to have recognized that there once was a religion that could plausibly be called the religion of humanity. It was humanity's first religion and its only universal religion, found wherever humans were found, in place for tens of thousands of years. Christian missionaries encountered it wherever they went, and piously set about destroying it. By now it has been all but stamped out either by missionary efforts or more simply by exterminating its adherents. It has been in plain sight to us for hundreds of years.
Of course it isn't accounted a "real" religion, since it isn't one of ours. It's just a sort of half-baked "pre-religion." How could it be anything else, since it emerged long before God decided humans were worth talking to? It wasn't revealed by any accredited prophet, has no dogma, no evident theology or doctrine, no liturgy, and produces no interesting heresies or schisms. Worst of all, as far as I know, no one has ever killed for it or died for it - and what sort of religion is that? Considering all this, it's actually quite remarkable that we even have a name for it.
The religion I'm talking about is, of course, animism. This name was cut to fit the general missionary impression that these childlike savages believe that things like rocks, trees, and rivers have spirits in them, and it hasn't lost this coloration since the middle of the nineteenth century.
Needless to say this is a gross trivialization of a religion that flourished for tens of thousands of years among people exactly as smart as we are. After decades of trying to understand what these people were telling us about their lives and their vision of humanity's place in the world, it has been concluded that a very simple (but far from trivial) worldview was at the foundation of what they were saying: The world is a sacred place, and humanity belongs in such a world.
It is simple but also deceptively simple. This can best be seen if we contrast it with the worldview at the foundation of our own religions. In the worldview of our religions, the world is anything but a sacred place. For Christians, it's merely a place of testing and has no intrinsic value. For Buddhists it's a place where suffering is inevitable. If I oversimplify, my object is not to misrepresent but only to clarify the general difference between these two worldviews in the few minutes that are left to me.
For Christians, the world is not where humans belong; it's not our true home, it's just a sort of waiting room where we pass the time before moving on to our true home, which is heaven. For Buddhists, the world is another kind of waiting room, which we visit again and again in a repeating cycle of death and rebirth until we finally attain liberation in nirvana.
For Christians, if the world were a sacred place, we wouldn't belong in it, because we're all sinners; God didn't send his only-begotten son to make us worthy of living in a sacred world but to make us worthy of living with God in heaven. For Buddhists, if the world were a sacred place, then why would we hope to escape it? If the world were a sacred place, then would we not rather welcome the repeating cycle of death and rebirth?
From the animist point of view, humans belong in a sacred place because they themselves are sacred. Not sacred in a special way, not more sacred than anything else, but merely as sacred as anything else - as sacred as bison or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers.
This is by no means all there is to say about animism, this is just a beginning. I'm not an authority on animism. I doubt there could ever be such a thing as an authority on animism.
Simple ideas are not always easy to understand. And the simple ideas that I stumbled upon were: 1) “we” are not humanity and 2) there is no one right way for people to live, never has been and never will be. These ideas were at the foundation of tribal life everywhere. The Navajo never imagined that they had the right way to live (and that all others were wrong). All they had was a way that suited them. With tribal peoples on all sides of them - all living in different ways - it would have been ridiculous for them to imagine that theirs was the one right way for people to live. It would be like us imagining that there is one right way to orchestrate a Cole Porter song or one right way to make a bicycle.
In the tribal world, because there was complete agreement that no one had the right way to live, there was a staggering glory of cultural diversity, which the people of our culture have been tirelessly eradicating for 10,000 years. For us, it will be paradise when everyone on earth lives exactly the same way.
Almost no one blinks at the statements that we are not humanity and there is no one right way for people to live. In one of his denunciations of scribes and pharisees, Jesus said, "You gag on the gnat but swallow down the camel." People find many gnats to gag on, but this great hairy camel goes down as easily as a teaspoon of honey. May the forests be with you.
Adapted from a lecture by Daniel Quinn

To Zacheriah and Miranda

The desire to preserve my thoughts for you has overcome my inherent disdain for and distrust of this technological absurdity at last; thus, even though these pages may (and certainly will, should I linger on this plane of existence long enough) be found by you one day in my book(s) of life, in my own hand, I have undertaken this venture so that you will know me in the zeitgeist of the now, when you are living in the then. This enterprise, in the present electronic format, is then merely a vehicle to effectuate and act as a catylist for said purpose - a simple means to a noble end: Love.

I was born in the summer of my 40th year – not born again in a religious sense (though certainly in a spiritual sense) – perhaps awakened is closer to the mark. I finally became the gestalt that is Mark William Miller: a simple human from the sylvan mountains, a small mammalian hunter-gatherer adrift in a exceedingly and, so it always seemed to me, unnecessarily labyrinthine world and way of life.

Even in my earliest recollections, I perceived a series of colossal paradoxes and batant contradictions for which the answers or explainations that were provided me proved woefully inadequate – transparently false - mere platitudes. I surmised that the Truth was either being withheld from me, was unknown to all those I queried, or that the answers did not or could not exist. Although I rejected the last possibility, for not to do so seemed to undermine any purpose for being, I came to no conclusion, no resolution, although the compulsion or pressure to “know” was building even in those early years. The Truth I sought (I later learned) was that same Truth that humanity has always sought: to know “who” I was, what “it all” meant, where we go (or when we go) when we die, the logos of the universe and the very nature of God. Anything short of complete attainment of these answers was akin to failure. As I found many years later, the ponderous and circuitous journey to these understandings nearly cost me my life. More immediately, it led to a deeply seated distrust of and schism with all that is spiritual. This in turn caused me to live in a state of constant depression, anxiety, fear and despair.

Of course I invoke what may seem like hyperbole in the cause of expediency, but the affliction of the spirit from which I suffered, sometimes consciously most often not, was profound. Life happens with all of its slings and arrows and with its moments of perfect beauty; however, my disposition enabled me to attend primarily to the former and seldom to the later. In short, I was generally a largely unhappy camper. Early on I learned to distract myself, an effort to escape a reality that was at worst painful and at best pointless. I escaped into books, movies, pinball (and later video games), projects and hobbies. I daydreamed and slept excessively. The pressure that I experienced grew as I did; thus, the distractions necessarily grew as well. I embraced risk-taking, sex, violence and mind-altering substances.

I have most of my answers now or at least the broad outlines of the Truths that are still not complete, and it is the purpose of these writings to share what I have discovered. Some arrived as epiphanies; others were concealed in plain view the whole time but, appeared too simple to be the monumental Truths that they turned out to be. My dearest hope is that these pages will spare you the torment that I endured and allow you to share the remainder of the journey with me as my companions. Life is beautiful, precious and transient. It is a gift and a responsibility, an obligation to experience: to experience pain or to experience joy. Today I choose - I am able to choose - joy.

Most of what will follow are my original writings, however, others are drawn from various sources and have been modified by me (cobbled together really) to reflect my thinking and beliefs. I have tried to note the original sources wherever possible.