If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (11 page)

Daniel
. By contrast, the argument over the famous cold-fusion results of the late 1980s (Allegedly
produced by chemists Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of the University
of Southampton) was eventually settled, because both sides of the argument accept the scientific method
as a final authority. The results of that particular experiment couldn't be reproduced, and that was that.

Elaine
[
after some thought
]. I'm feeling a bit lost. Where are we here?

Daniel
. We're still looking at assumptions in the question "Do you support the idea of extending human rights to primates?" What have we concluded so far?

Elaine
. I'd say that we've concluded that "human rights" is another cultural construct.

Daniel
. By implication, the author of the article in
Key Ideas in Human Thought
seems to agree with us, since he says that these are rights that people
should
have, not that they
do
have.

Elaine
. He also indicates that it's not at all universally agreed that such things exist.

Daniel
. While you're at it, look up the entry on
rights
.

Elaine
[
after finding her place in the book
]. There isn't one.

Daniel
. Odd, isn't it? The concept of rights seems even more fundamental than the concept of human
rights, and has a longer history. What is a right, anyway?

Elaine
. I'd say it's an entitlement. An entitlement to have or do something.

Daniel
. I've searched many dictionaries of aboriginal languages, and very few of them seem to have a word for
right
in this sense. In all the reading I've done about aboriginal peoples, I've never come across any instance of them arguing about rights or asserting a right to do the things they do.

Elaine
. It would surprise me if you had. But that's just an intuitive reaction.

Daniel
. Why do we have to assert rights to do the things we want to do?

Elaine
. That's an interesting question.

Daniel
. A hundred years ago homosexual acts were almost universally outlawed in the West, France and Poland being two exceptions I know of. The situation is entirely different today.

Elaine
. And you're going to ask why.

Daniel
. Of course.

Elaine
. It's different because homosexuals asserted their right to have sex with people of the same gender and eventually gained enough support to win it.

Daniel
. Obviously. A whole lot of people think they have the right to decide what people can and can't do in their bedrooms. This was the only tool they had to use against them. The asserting of rights has
become an important tool for the people of our culture, but my point is... ?

Elaine
. That it's only the people of our culture who need to use it.

Daniel
. To us, having to assert a right in order to have the things we want or want to do is taken to be a sort of human norm. It seems to make perfect sense — to be not in the least bizarre. One of my tasks has
been to pull people far enough away from our culture to see how very bizarre it really is. I don't mean
that it's uniquely bizarre. I just mean that, seen from a distance — from the point of view of a Martian
anthropologist — our culture is no less bizarre than cultures whose customs seem to us outlandishly
grotesque. Our way of doing things would seem as bizarre to the Gebusi of New Guinea as the Gebusi's
way of doing things seems to us.

Daniel
[
after a half-hour break
]. In
Beyond Civilization
and elsewhere I presented an important observation made by Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Elaine
. Yes, I remember.

Daniel
. This is a "hard saying," and I'm glad to have Bucky Fuller to blame for it.

Elaine
[
after some thought
]. People have a lot of faith in the utility of fighting the existing reality.

Daniel
. For most people, or at least a great many people, fighting is all they can see to do — or, practically speaking, all they
can
do — even if it doesn't "change things." I had this question from a reader: "Do we never resort to battle? I mean, if the last two ibex are standing in the last unplowed field and are about to be shot, and all attempts at mind change have failed, what do we do?" How would you
answer this?

Elaine
. Well... battle? I'd have to say yes.

Daniel
. Who do you suppose is about to shoot these last two ibex?

Elaine
. I don't know. Poachers, I'd assume.

Daniel
. So you drive off these poachers or kill them outright. The problem's solved.

Elaine
. No... The poachers can always come back, or other poachers can come.

Daniel
. So?

Elaine
. So you'd have to post an armed guard. Five or ten men.

Daniel
. For how long?

Elaine
. I don't know... Until the ibex multiplied.

Daniel
. Then you could withdraw the armed guards.

Elaine
shakes her head.

Daniel
. No? What then?

Elaine
. If poachers — or hunters or whoever — killed off all but two ibex in the first place, there's nothing stopping them from doing the same thing again.

Daniel
. So you'd need to maintain the guards, even increase their number, since they'd have more ibex to protect. For how long?

Elaine
[
sighing
]. Indefinitely. Forever.

Daniel
lets her think about it.

Elaine
. Fighting the existing reality certainly doesn't change things in this case.

Daniel
. In all my writings I stress the fact that if people go on thinking the way they generally do now, we're doomed. Nothing can save us but changing the minds of the people around us. Lots of readers
don't like to hear this, because they want
action
, and this doesn't seem like action to them.

Elaine
. Battling the poachers is
action
.

Daniel
. Yes, exactly. The fact is, however, that if most of the people who live around those two ibex don't care whether they live or die, then those ibex are doomed. But if the people who live around those
ibex see the world in a different way, then it's the
poachers
who are doomed. There's just no shortcut.
The present existing reality is that people in general fail to see that systematically attacking the diversity of the living community is going to be fatal to
us
. Until that changes, no amount of fighting is going to save us.

Elaine
. That makes our situation look hopeless.

Daniel
. Not at all. The intellectual climate has changed dramatically in the past fifteen years. The number of mind-changing books that are being published climbs every year. What we're looking for is
what Malcolm Gladwell called the "tipping point," the point where an accumulation of very small things
— often quite suddenly and unexpectedly — produces an enormous change. The collapse of the Soviet
Union is an excellent example. No intelligence service in the world predicted it or had the slightest clue that it was about to happen. The chance that significant change could occur there also "looked hopeless"
— until it suddenly happened.

Elaine
. What things do you think contributed to that tipping point?

Daniel
[
laughing
]. A few years ago, in some speech or other, I suggested (not very forcefully) that rock music played an important role in it. I would never have dared to put such an outrageous idea in print
until Andras Simonyi, Hungary's ambassador to the United States, said the same thing, very forthrightly,
last year. He spent an hour talking about it at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I remember that Western
music was described as "an open window of fresh air in a very repressive society." That window stayed open for decades and clearly affected the way young people saw their world.

Elaine
. I was wondering... Someplace you once said that politicians would be the last to "get it." Why is that?

Daniel
. You can figure that out.

Elaine
. Oh. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder why I've got a head.

Daniel
. Don't be too hard on yourself. I've been asked the same question by other people who couldn't figure it out either.

Elaine
. We're used to thinking of politicians as leaders. Or that they're
supposed
to be leaders, want to be
perceived
as leaders.

Daniel
. Uh-huh.

Elaine
. Whatever you may think about it, George Bush certainly did lead us — or mislead us — into the war against Iraq.

Daniel
. No argument there.

Elaine
. What am I missing here?

Daniel
. What do I keep telling you to do when you get stuck?

Elaine
. Pull back. Look at it from a higher angle.

Daniel
offers no help.

Elaine
. Okay... I've been fixating on their role or supposed role, once elected. I need to look at how they
get
elected... Or rather,
who
elects them. The public is not going to elect a president who says... "Look, we can't just think about the next four years. We've got to think about the whole human future — that's what's at risk."

Daniel
. Why couldn't such a candidate get elected?

Elaine
. Because the segment of the public that would vote for him is too small at this point.

Daniel
. Go on. You still haven't explained why I say that politicians will be the last to get it.

Elaine
. They won't get it till they
have
to get it. In other words, they won't have to change until the electorate changes. When a majority of the electorate gets it, then only the candidates who get it will get elected.

Daniel
. Good. Now see if you can wrap it up.

Elaine
. Wrap it up?

Daniel
. In a neat little package.

Elaine
[
after some thought
]. Politicians don't educate the electorate. The electorate educates politicians, with their votes.

Daniel
. For good or ill.

Elaine
. Yes.

Daniel
. Excellent.

Daniel.
Here's a tricky little question that came in recently "What biological mechanisms would allow us to keep our population at a level compatible with our food supply?"

Elaine
. What does he mean by "biological mechanisms"?

Daniel
. I doubt if he knows himself. I think what he means are mechanisms that are not political — for example, government limitations on food production that are not legalistic, like limiting family size by law, and that don't depend on self-restraint, like birth control.

Elaine
. That still doesn't tell me what a biological mechanism is.

Daniel
[
after some consideration
]. I'm beginning to see this as a tendency of yours: to pick out one element of a question and fixate on it. You're not thinking about the question as a whole.

Elaine
. I guess you're right. How does it go again?

Daniel
repeats the question.

Elaine
. Okay... Well, I can see one assumption he's making: that there are biological mechanisms that would allow us to keep our population at a level compatible with our food supply.

Daniel
. Uh-huh.

Elaine
[
after a long silence
]. What else can I say? You've never said there are biological mechanisms that would allow humans to keep their populations at levels compatible with our food supply, have you?

Daniel
. No, I've never said anything like that.

Elaine
. So he's making an unwarranted assumption and asking you to verify it.

Daniel
[
sighing
]. Elaine, this person is fundamentally confused, and you've bought into his confusion. In effect, you're saying, "Okay, I'll accept without question that what you're saying makes sense." He didn't really
look
at what he was saying, and if
you
don't really look at it, then you're no better off than he is. You did the same thing with the person who suggested that the one right way for people to live is
to let everyone live the way they want to live. You've got to stop meeting every challenge with
acquiescence.

Elaine
. Well, this is discouraging.

Daniel
. You shouldn't think of it that way at all. I have to assume that the person who wrote the q
uestion, being a reader of serious books, is of above-average intelligence, and the question itself isn't a dumb one, despite its fundamental confusion. And... you know it's my intention to publish a transcript of
this conversation we're having.

Elaine
. Yes... ?

Daniel
. I'll wager that, at this point, among the readers who are following the discussion of this
particular question, 99.99 percent of them will be just as stumped as you are.

Elaine
laughs.
I suppose that's reassuring.

Daniel
. The answers I give to people's questions — and the conclusions I reach in general — seem to astonish my readers, seem to be unexpected... alien. And the whole purpose of what we're doing here is
to shed some light on how I produce these answers and conclusions. The process seems unexceptional to
me, but it obviously doesn't seem so to my readers — or to you.