bcpart7

Beyond Civilization

Liberation

During a period when millions were being liquidated as “enemies of the people,” there was a certain “dangerous” poet who was famous for his uncanny ability to avoid Stalin's displeasure. A French journalist sought him out to ask if he'd been silenced under the latest reign of terror.

“Silenced!” the poet cried indignantly. “I declaim my poetry from the stage of the ________ Theater every Monday night!”

The journalist made a point of being there the following Monday, only to find the theater dark and locked. He hung around indecisively for a hour, then, as he was about to leave, a side door opened and the poet slipped out into the night.

“What happened?” the journalist asked him. “I thought you were going to read here tonight.”

“I did read here tonight,” the poet declared emphatically. “It just so happens that I'm at my best when reading before an empty house.”

When people say my books have inspired them to “go someplace and start a commune,” I have to wish them the best of luck—and bite back the impulse to tell them this is very far from anything I had in mind. If you can only be free living on a mountaintop or a desert island, then clearly you're something less than free.

Listening to the children

Whether by intention or not, suicides often reveal themselves in their choice of means. The guilty hang themselves. Sacrificial victims slash their throats. The discarded throw themselves off buildings or bridges. Tormented minds blow their brains out. Jeffrey in My Ishmael walked into a lake, telling us he'd failed to find his true element. He just couldn't get into his lungs the air others seem to breathe so easily.

I've talked about Jeffrey (or his real-life prototype, Paul Eppinger) to many audiences, always with the feeling that I haven't made my point, which is that he wasn't extraordinary. He's to be found everywhere among our children—if only we'll start listening. I don't just mean listening to their words—they may not have the words. Listen to the stories they tell with their gestures of profound alienation and despair, the stories of pandemic suicide, of drug use among younger and younger children every year, of mind-boggling acts of violence committed by round-faced teens against their families and friends. Listen to their words as well, of course, but never forget that they've been schooled to say what people want to hear; the mass murderers among them are almost always remembered as nice, polite youngsters.

I know I've failed to make myself understood when people tell me Jeffrey “should have gone to a commune.” This idea represents a profound misunderstanding of where the space of our freedom is to be discovered.

The Littleton bloodbath

The previous page was written half a year before the mindboggling act of violence committed on “Free Cookie Day,” April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where fifteen died in half as many minutes. Even though the perpetrators of this massacre were two intensely unpopular boys, one classmate afterward managed to remember at least one of them as nice.

I was unpopular at my own high school—not quite as unpopular as those two, but I dealt with it the same way, by flouting it and even perversely cultivating it. I too had an accomplice, achieving some “solidarity in exclusion.” Both of us resorted to violence on occasion, but of course we didn't dream of assassinating hundreds, dynamiting the school, and crashing an airplane into a city block.

Things were different then, almost half a century ago—not that they were “good old days.” We were never allowed to forget that one wrong word or one insane moment could trigger a nuclear holocaust that would leave our world a smoking ruin. But if that didn't happen, we two faced a future of literally unlimited promise. No one had as yet realized we were in the process of making the earth uninhabitable. No one had as yet doubted that we could go on living exactly this way forever. So we had hope—bushels, acres, and tons of hope. We had a way to go that we knew would work. We had choices. We didn't doubt for a moment that we could do anything we really wanted to do, because everything was just going to go on exactly this way, getting better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better and better … forever.

Listening to the monsters

Would Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have become “the monsters next door” (as Time magazine dubbed them) if they'd had another way to go? At school they were harassed as “dirtbags” and “faggots” and pummeled with bottles and rocks thrown from classmates' passing cars. Did they go there because they wanted this abuse? No, we understand perfectly well why they went there: they had no choice in the matter. They “had” to go, compelled by law and social pressure. If they'd had another way to go, they would have disappeared from Columbine long before their only dream became a dream of vengeance and suicide.

Would brain scans have revealed they were “genetically inclined to violence?” Perhaps so, and so what? A brain scan might reveal the same about me. Remind me to tell you about the time I came within a split second of killing a man with my bare hands, a catastrophe only averted by the narrowest margin of good luck for us both. Being “genetically inclined to violence” doesn't doom you to becoming a mass murderer—but having no hope may do just that. Frankenstein's creature only became a monster when he saw he could never be anything else.

It's estimated that, since the days of my youth, depression among children has increased by 1000% and teen suicide by 300%. Since 1997, classroom-assassins have killed two in Mississippi, three in Kentucky, five in Arkansas, and thirteen in Colorado. Make a graph of these numbers and watch them go exponential in years to come—unless we start giving our kids a new way to go and some real hope for the future.

A cultural space of our own

People who are reluctant to spend their lives building some pharaoh's pyramid all have a common need, but the need is felt most acutely by the young, who are the real pack-animals of the operation. Sixty years ago raw graduates took jobs in factories, where they could at least expect to climb the same ladder of advancement as their parents. In the postindustrial age young people (as James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar point out) are becoming increasingly ghettoized in retail and service sectors, where they endlessly lift and carry, stock shelves, push brooms, bag groceries, and flip burgers, gaining no skills and seeing no path of advancement ahead of them.

For them and for us, it isn't geographical space we want, it's cultural space. Carlos, who made his home under a grate in Riverside Park, knew that a certain kind of freedom comes with living in a hole. But he also knew it isn't “real freedom” if you have to live in a hole to get it. He wanted the kind of freedom people have when they live where they please and don't have to resort to a hole, even in “the scenic Ozarks” or “the foothills of Kentucky.” He wanted a whole world's worth of freedom—and so do most of us, I think. To get that, we'll have to take the world back from the pharaohs. It won't be hard. They're not expecting it—but even if they were, they'd be helpless to stop it.

Why things didn't end up a-changin'

Lots of songs about revolution came out during the hippie era of the 1960s and 1970s, but the revolution itself never materialized, because it didn't occur to the revolutionaries that they had to come up with a revolutionary way of making a living. Their signature contribution was starting communes—a hot new idea from the same folks who gave us powdered wigs.

When the money ran out and parents got fed up, the kids looked around and saw nothing to do but line up for jobs at the quarries. Before long, they were dragging stones up to the same pyramids their parents and grandparents and greatgrandparents had been working on for centuries.

This time it'll be different. It'd better be.

Another story to be in

As developed in Ishmael, the “story” we're enacting in our culture is this: The world was made for Man to conquer and rule, and Man was made to conquer and rule it; and under Man's rule, the world might have become a paradise except for the fact that he's fundamentally and irremediably flawed. This story— itself mythology—is the foundation for all our cultural mythology, and I said in Ishmael that it isn't possible for people simply to give up living in such a story. They must have another story to be in.

It didn't occur to me when I wrote these words that people might imagine this “other” story to be a brand-new fabrication that I or some panel of mythologists was going to sit down and conjure up out of nothing, but of course a few did. But oddly enough, when challenged to articulate this other story, which I'd described as having been enacted here during the first three million years of human life, I found I couldn't do it in any very convincing fashion. This was because I was trying to formulate it in a way that was parallel to ours, point by point. I failed to realize for a good long time that the other story was much simpler (much more “primitive”) than ours—and that I'd already articulated it. To my mind it's the most beautiful story ever told.

There is no one right way for people to live.

No one right way

Once you recognize it, it's perfectly clear that this is the story that was enacted here during the first three or four million years of human life. Of course, there's a clear sense in which ours is just a special case of a much wider story, written in the living community itself from the beginning, some five billion years ago: There is no one right way for ANYTHING to live.

No one right way to hinge a jaw.
No one right way to build a nest.
No one right way to design an eye.
No one right way to move underwater.
No one right way to breed.
No one right way to bear young.
No one right way to shape a wing.
No one right way to attack your prey.
No one right way to defend yourself against attack.

This is how we humans got from there to here, by enacting this story, and it worked sensationally well until about ten thousand years ago, when one very odd culture sprang into being obsessed with the notion that there must be a single right way for people to live—and indeed a single right way to do almost anything.

Gotcha this way!

But these words will hardly be taken in before some wiseacre thinks to ask: “But aren't you saying, Mr. Quinn, that the tribal way is the right way for people to live?”

I'm saying nothing of the kind. As I noted above, the gifts of natural selection aren't perfect (much less “right”), but they're damned hard to improve on. The tribal way isn't the right way, it's just a way that worked for millions of years, in contrast to the hierarchal way, which has brought us face to face with extinction after a mere ten thousand years.

For all I know, the tribal way may in the future be superceded by some other way that works better for us in circumstances that are obviously going to be very different from those of the past. In fact, isn't that exactly what I'm proposing in these pages? After all, I'm not suggesting we return to the tribal way as it was known here during the first three million years of human life—or as it's still known among surviving aboriginal peoples. Old-style ethnic tribalism is, for the foreseeable future, utterly out of reach for us.

The tribalism of the New Tribal Revolution isn't proposed as an end—as something right and to be clung to at any cost—it's proposed as a beginning, at a time when we must either make a new beginning or reconcile ourselves to joining the dinosaurs in the very near future.

Gotcha that way!

Someone else will try this: “But aren't you in fact saying, Mr. Quinn, that having no one right way to live is the one right way to live?”

No, I'm not saying that, because that's just meaningless babble. Having no one right way to live is not a way to live, any more than having no one right way to cook an egg is a way to cook an egg.

Knowing that there's no one right way to live won't tell you how to live, any more than knowing that there's no one right time to go to bed will tell you when to go to bed.

The beginning is not the end

Beyond civilization isn't a geographical space up in the mountains or on some remote desert isle. It's a cultural space that opens up among people with new minds.

As you discuss the ideas found in this book with your friends, you'll be able to spot the old minds easily. They're the ones who are always “playing the devil's advocate,” always proposing and concentrating on difficulties, always nailing the progress of your dialogue down to problems. Focus instead on what you want to happen and how to make it happen, rather than on all the things that might keep it from happening.

Believe it or not, a real person once said to me, “Yes, but won't we still have to pay taxes?” Yes, and you'll still have to curb your dog and observe the speed limit and shovel your sidewalks when it snows. And it will still be a good idea to get to the airport a few minutes before your flight leaves.

What, no miracles?

Jack and Jill spent some days with their friend Simon on his small sailboat. One morning they woke up to find the boat was sinking.

“What in the world are we going to do?” Jill asked.

“Don't worry,” said Jack, “Simon's very ingenious.”

Simon called to them, “Come on, we've got to abandon ship.”

Jill was alarmed, but Jack reassured her that Simon wouldn't let them down.

“We're only a hundred yards from shore,” Simon said. “Let's go!”

“But how are we going to save ourselves?” the couple wanted to know.

“We're going to swim for it, of course!” Seeing Jack's look of disappointment, Simon asked him what was wrong.

Jack said, “l was hoping you could find a way of translating us directly ashore, without our having to get wet.”

An early reader expressed the same disappointment with me. He was hoping I'd be able to find a way of translating us directly to our new economic homeland without our having to “get wet” in the Taker economy that surrounds us. The ultimate New Tribal economy (which at best I can only dimly imagine) is the dry land ahead. To reach it while holding ourselves disdainfully aloof from the economy around us would make walking on water seem like a very minor miracle indeed.

140 words of advice

You don't have to have all the answers. Certainly I don't have them. It's always better to say “I don't know” than to fake it and get into hot water.

Make people formulate their own questions. Don't take on the responsibility of figuring out what their difficulty is.

Never try to answer a question you don't understand. Make the askers explain it; keep on insisting until it's clear, and nine times out of ten they'll supply the answer themselves.

People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren't ready to listen. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them.

Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.

A dynamite ending

Like any author, I figured that, when the time came, I'd have a dynamite ending for this book—a great clash of cymbals, a ray of pure sunshine knifing through the clouds (you know), but nothing like that presented itself. I mentioned this to Rennie yesterday afternoon, just as a matter of interest. I wasn't expecting her to work on the problem, because it didn't occur to me it was a problem. All the same, at three in the morning, she woke me up to explain why no terrific ending had presented itself and why no terrific ending was going to present itself. While she was at it, she told me I should include Hap and C.J. in the dedication and that this was the first of my books she actually wanted to have dedicated to her (the other dedications she more or less just put up with).

There's no ending in this book at all, she told me, because it's all one hundred percent beginning, and of course she's right.

But this just means no dynamite ending is going to turn up here. The dynamite ending is on the other side of this page and on out past the cover, where the actual revolution is going to take place.

The dynamite ending is for you to write.