Ishmael

belong to the world at this point? Obviously you’re not saying that only hunter–gatherers truly belong to the world.”

“I’m glad you see that. Though if the Bushmen of Africa or the Kalapalo of Brazil (if there are any left by now) want to go on living that way for the next ten million years, I can’t see how this can be anything less than beneficial for them and for the world.”

“True. But that doesn’t answer my question. How can civilized people belong to the world?”

Ishmael shook his head in what looked like a mixture of impatience and exasperation. “Civilized has nothing to do with it. How can tarantulas belong to the world? How can sharks belong to the world?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Look around you and you’ll see some creatures who act as though the world belongs to them and some creatures who act as though they belong to the world. Can you tell them apart?”

“Yes.”

“The creatures who act as though they belong to the world follow the peace–keeping law, and because they follow that law, they give the creatures around them a chance to grow toward whatever it’s possible for them to become. That’s how man came into being. The creatures around Australopithecus didn’t imagine that the world belonged to them, so they let him live and grow. How does being civilized come into it? Does being civilized mean that you have to destroy the world?”

“No.”

“Does being civilized make you incapable of giving the creatures around you a little space in which to live?”

“No.”

“Does it make you incapable of living as harmlessly as sharks and tarantulas and rattlesnakes?”

“No.”

“Does it make you incapable of following a law that even snails and earthworms manage to follow without any difficulty?”

“No.”

“As I pointed out some time ago, human settlement isn’t against the law, it’s subject to the law—and the same is true of civilization. So what exactly is your question?”

“I don’t know, now. Obviously belonging to the world means… belonging to the same club as everyone else. The club being the community of life. It means belonging to the club and following the same rules as everyone else.”

“And if being civilized means anything at all, it should mean that you’re leaders of the club, not its only criminals and destroyers.”

“True,” I said, then sat there blinking for a few moments. “Something you said a moment ago. We’ll never know what the Leavers of Europe or Asia were up to when the people of my culture arrived to plow them under.”

“Yes?”

“I think some information about that has been dug up in recent years.”

Ishmael nodded. “If it’s recent, then I might well not have heard of it.”

“An archeologist named Riane Eisler wrote about a widespread Leaver agricultural society that existed in Europe until it was overrun by the Takers five or six thousand years ago. Except she didn’t call them Leavers and Takers, of course. I don’t know a lot about it, but evidently the culture the Takers plowed under was based on goddess worship.”

Ishmael nodded. “One of my students was aware of the book you’re talking about but was unable to explain its significance as you’ve done. It’s called, I believe, The Chalice and the Blade.”

8

“Returning to the subject of inspiration, it seems to me that these days you have another promising source of it,” Ishmael said.

“What’s that?”

“All my other pupils, when they reached this point, said, ‘Yes, yes, this is wonderful—but people are not going to relinquish their hold on the world. It just can’t happen. Never. Not in a thousand years.’ And I had nothing I could point to as a hopeful example to the contrary. Now I do.”

It took me about ninety seconds to see it. “I assume you mean what’s been happening in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the past few years.”

“That’s right. Ten years ago, twenty years ago, anyone predicting that Marxism would soon be dismantled from the top would have been labeled a hopeless visionary, an utter fool.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“But once the people of these countries were inspired by the possibility of a new way of life, the dismantling took place almost overnight.”

“Yes, I see what you mean. Five years ago I would have said that no amount of inspiration could accomplish that—or this.”

“And now?”

“And now it’s just barely thinkable. Improbable as hell but not unimaginable.”

9

“But I do have another question,” I added.

“Proceed.”

“Your ad said, ‘Must earnestly desire to save the world.’ ”

“Yes?”

“What do I do if I earnestly desire to save the world?”

Ishmael frowned at me through the bars for a long moment. “You want a program?”

“Of course I want a program.”

“Then here is a program: The story of Genesis must be reversed. First, Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is essential if you’re to survive. The Leavers are the endangered species most critical to the world—not because they’re humans but because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there is no one right way to live. And then, of course, you must spit out the fruit of that forbidden tree. You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.”

“Yes, I see all that, but that’s a program for mankind, that’s not a program for me. What do I do?”

“What you do is to teach a hundred what I’ve taught you, and inspire each of them to teach a hundred. That’s how it’s always done.”

“Yes, but… is it enough?”

Ishmael frowned. “Of course it’s not enough. But if you begin anywhere else, there’s no hope at all. You can’t say, ‘We’re going to change the way people behave toward the world, but we’re not going to change the way they think about the world or the way they think about divine intentions in the world or the way they think about the destiny of man.’ As long as the people of your culture are convinced that the world belongs to them and that their divinely–appointed destiny is to conquer and rule it, then they are of course going to go on acting the way they’ve been acting for the past ten thousand years. They’re going to go on treating the world as if it were a piece of human property and they’re going to go on conquering it as if it were an adversary. You can’t change these things with laws. You must change people’s minds. And you can’t just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something that is as