Greetings Egg Nog fans. I was thinking about putting what I am about to write up on my blog, but then determined that its audience wasn’t ready for it. So I thought I’d test it out on you guys. Now, you all know that I’m pretty easily influenced and that my mind can be convinced of anything really if it’s told to me in the right fashion and at the right time. Case in point: Joe: “Ranz, you should join USG, you’d be GREAT.” Thanks, Joe, I owe you one. Kirk: “Ranz, you should join the Peace Corps, you’d be GREAT.” Just kidding of course friends, those were both very good choices for me, I’m just lucky enough I had you guys around to recognize it. Because for whatever reason when it comes to my life I’m dangerously blind to what will work for me. Either that or I just don’t want to make decisions. Too much time hanging out with GW, I suppose.
Anyway, the point is, I’ve been doing some reading lately that has really got my mind rolling about how we live in this world and what can be done to possibly help it out. We all want to save the world, right? Well, I think I’ve gotten a hold of some ideas that could potentially really shake things up. Or perhaps I’m being naïve and these ideas really just hit home for me but are pretty ludicrous to everyone else. I’m talking about an author named Daniel Quinn who wrote Ishmael and followed it up with The Story of B. I know I’ve harped a lot on Ishmael before but what I’ve recently realized is that The Story of B is where the real guts of the ideas are. Ishmael got me thinking in a way I’d never done before, and The Story of B took my mind to a whole new level and I can honestly say I don’t think I’ll be the same after having read it it. I had read them both before, but I just finished reading them back to back these past couple weeks (yeah, I’ve got free time) and it all started making more sense than it ever has. So please, I beg you, read these books. I want to see what you guys think…if you agree with me then sweet. If not, I guess I’ll have to save the world on my own.
I have never had any strong religious beliefs by any means and perhaps that is why these ideas sit so easily in my mind. I think to the lifelong Christian person (or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist), these ideas would be much harder to swallow. Not so much because it might mean admitting they were “wrong” (although that’s a part of it), but simply because there are things we’ve learned from the beginning of our lives that just seem absolutely true, and we’ve never questioned them because we’ve never seen the need. I think that people raised in deeply religious homes are sometimes not given the chance to believe anything else…I mean isn’t that kind of contradictory to what our religions teach us? They don’t say, “sure, go out and look around and see which religion fits you best,” it’s usually more like, “you’re this religion because your parents are, and here are your beliefs.” Now, I’m not here to dog on religion in particular, that’s an entirely different can of worms to be saved for a later date. For me, the most fundamental change in the way I think came when I realized I could learn things I thought I always understood or that simply because we are told something our entire life doesn’t necessarily make it true and that is sometimes hard to swallow. But let me reiterate that I think it might be easier for someone like me without a religious background to swallow some of the ideas Quinn puts forth. Mainly because it doesn’t draw into sharp contrast what my belief system is. These ideas, on the contrary, have more or lese become my belief system…something I have really never had before.
There’s no way I’d be able to articulate the things Quinn says…and I honestly think that if I try, I might actually turn you guys off from reading these books. But I’m going to try my best to give you a taste of what I’ve been eating up and processing here.
First of all, when do we all learn that human civilization began? My answer would be back in the Mesopotamia days…the days of the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates. This was where people first began farming and henceforth began being civilized, right? They put aside their hunter-gathering pasts and finally got smart and planted their food instead of just finding it. And to think, some day this “revolution” would lead to the greatness that is the FFA, with all of its blue corduroy and laser light shows. Where does the FFA get their funding anyway, Joe? Do you guys pay dues or what?
Anyway, I digress. The fact of the matter is that these people in the fertile crescent (around 5000BC) were NOT the first humans on earth. The agricultural revolution did NOT occur in an empty world. According to Quinn (and I have not researched this at all, so I could be completely off base believing this stuff), Paleontology has placed humanity at an age of about 3 million years old. Now, just think about that for a second. I was pretty much taught in 9th grade that these Fertile Crescent guys were pretty much the beginning of humanity, when in reality, it had been around for MILLIONS of years. Just take a second and think about the difference in age of what we generally accept as the first humans (7,000 years old) and the actual age of humanity (3,000,000 years old). That’s quite significant. And in that time period of 7,000 years following the agricultural revolution, we “revolutionized” humans have managed to take this planet to the brink of destruction. Seven thousand years is a mere blip on the geological time scale. Not even a freaking dot. Humans lived on this earth without destroying it for approximately 2, 993,000 years. And in a relative split second, we’ve gone from there to here.
Where is “here,” you ask? What exactly does that mean? “Here” is the world we live in today…a world with famine, war, genocide, seemingly unstoppable diseases like AIDS and cancer (keep working, George), among other things. Granted, we also have amazing things like Apple Computers, automobiles, cd players, indoor plumbing and all that as well (yes, I just put Apple Computers on the same level as indoor plumbing). And I suppose we have always just accepted it as “the price we pay” to live like this. Yeah, there’s a lot of crappy things going on in the world but there are a lot of good things as well. And I would agree, I’d be the first one to say that I don’t want to give up my laptop or my car…but I think it would be hard for anyone to deny that the world is being destroyed, and we continue to do nothing. We continue to consume it. I’m not suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers…we’re too far “along” to even dream of trying to do something like that.
Getting back to the agricultural thing…I’m not about to blame the downturn of humanity on agriculture, although Quinn does. I’m on the brink, but not quite confident enough to look Joe Shultz in the eye and say “your way of life has destroyed us all.” I like Joe too much to say that. But Quinn doesn’t know Joe and instead says things like, “Agriculture doesn’t cure famine – it promotes it. It creates the conditions in which famine occurs,” and “starving people don’t plant crops any more than drowning people build rafts.” Quinn likens the spread of agriculture to the immense population expansion that has taken place since the Fertile Crescent people. Before the agricultural revolution, their world consisted of about 10 million people (once again, I have done no research to back up these numbers). That’s 10 million after 3 million years. Then, that population doubled in a mere three thousand years (thanks to agriculture, according to Quinn), and then doubled AGAIN in 2,000 years. We went from 10 million after about 3 million years to forty million in about 3,005,000 years. Seven thousand years after the onset of agriculture, our population sits around 5 1/2 BILLION people, the last doubling of it taking only about 40 years. I find this mind blowing. And Quinn goes on to say that the only way to keep it from doubling again is to stop producing food surpluses. He argues that we produce enough food each year for 6 billion people, even though there are only 5 1/2 billion, and that if we keep producing enough food for 6 billion, then there will eventually be 6 billion. He says that our food surpluses don’t go to feed the starving people in Africa, they go to feed our population expansion. What if we only produced enough food for 5 1/2 billion people this year? Would population level off? Would all the starving people in Africa just pass on into history? I would say that those people who die in Africa would have died whether or not we produced food for 5 1/2 billion people or 6 billion people. Obviously Quinn articulates this much better than I ever could.
Enough about agriculture, on to religion. What is the highest level one can achieve in any of the religions I mentioned earlier? Is it salvation? Is that not really the point of all of those religions? That man is inherently flawed and needs to be saved? According to all of these religions, that is the case. Quinn says, “They tend to be much more aware of their differences than their similarities. It’s the same with your revealed religions. To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same…[They] all perceive human beings as flawed, wounded creatures in need of salvation and all rely fundamentally on revelations that spell out how salvation is to be attained, either by departing from this life or rising above it.” He says that there still exist “uncivilized” hunter-gatherer cultures that haven’t bought into the Agricultural Revolution yet. They are few and very far between, but they are there. He specifically references a few of them, but I can’t remember their names off the top of my head. These are the last few examples of what humans were like before agriculture arrived. In none of these cultures will you find a religion that even comes close to the widely accepted and practiced religions of today. After all, they existed for 3 million years without needing to be “saved,” but then all of the sudden we come to this conclusion that there is some inherent flaw in humans, from which we need to be saved? Personally, I don’t buy it. For example, Christians believe that God sent his only begotten son to earth to be sacrificed and that his death would somehow pay for all of our sins. I personally have never seen the connection, and no one has ever been able to explain it to me enough to my liking. If God had a son, why would sending him to earth to die mean that the people that believed that it happened got to come to heaven too? We all know that God is forever a forgiving God and that regardless of what we do we can ask for forgiveness and will get it. Where did sending his son to earth to be crucified get added into the mix? I don’t mean to pick on Christianity, but I don’t know enough about the other religions to dog them. God sent Jesus to save humans, because this world was made for humans and humans were made to rule and conquer it. So, it obviously makes sense that Jesus wasn’t sent to save the jellyfish or albino squirrels or tiny beetles. He was sent to save man, man and no other. Which begs the question, where do we get off thinking that the world was made for us? And if we don’t believe that, why wasn’t Jesus sent to save everything else and not just man? The fact of the matter is, humans lived for 3 million years without religions like the ones we have, mainly because they accepted their role as a member of the world and not the ruler of it.
Quinn talks about “gods” in his books. To quote: “Not God with a capital ‘G’ but rather one of the gods with a little ‘g.’ Not the creator of this universe, but the animator of this single place.” “A god is a strange force that makes every place a place – a place like no other in the world.” “The gods I’m talking about write in galaxies and star-systems and planets and oceans and forests and whales and birds and gnats.” For me, this spells out ideas I’ve had about the higher powers of our universe for a long time but was never able to articulate them in a very effective way. These ideas are much easier and much simpler for me to grasp than what I have learned about what Quinn calls the “revealed” religions. However, I respect that what makes those religions special is the faith. That simply having that faith was what made it special. Of course it makes no logical sense that Mary was a virgin and that Jesus walked on water or made water into wine or rose from the dead. You can’t deny that those things happening would be miracles. Hearing in your whole life, it may just be second nature to believe these things. But for someone like me, who began examining ideas like this perhaps when I was 14 or 15 years old, this stuff just doesn’t fly for me. I also believe that Jesus wasn’t just some schmuck off the street. He was obviously enlightened and I think everyone can learn something from him and his teachings, but I see him just as that, as a teacher. Someone I can learn something from. No more or less a teacher for me than any one of you guys or a teacher I had in high school.
One of the main things I’ve taken from Quinn’s work is that we need to stop living as if, “The world was made for man, and man was made to conquer and rule it,” but rather as if, “The world is a sacred place and a sacred process, and we are a part of it.” The other resounding idea is that, “The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will saved by new minds – with no programs.” We continually try to ease and reduce the effects of our consumption of the earth. But wouldn’t it make more sense to reduce the causes? “Isolation is supported by vision, so it takes care of itself, but community building isn’t, so it has to be supported by programs. Programs invariably run counter to vision and so have to be thrust on people – have to be “sold” to people. For example, if you want people to live simply, reduce consumption, reuse and recycle, you must create programs that encourage such behaviors. But if you want them to consume a lot and waste a lot, you don’t need to create programs of encouragement, because these behaviors are supported by our cultural vision.”
What does all this mean? Hell, I don’t know. I just know that my mind has been changed. And although he says that “the world won’t be saved by programs” and I am in fact participating in a big-time program right now, I understand that this is just a step along the way. There’s no doubt that being the Peace Corps will help mold my mind and make me a more well-rounded person, as well as give me some time to sort out exactly what it is I believe about the world. I am in search of the truth and nothing more.
Thanks for reading. Any thoughts? Am I crazy? Have I fallen off the left side of the spectrum?
