"The Story of B" and other books by Daniel Quinn

My sister's ex-husband went from being a devout Christian theological student working on his doctorate, to some sort of athiest environmental activist bohemian something or other. We both share an interest in philosophy. Consequently, he recommends all these anti-humanistic, environmentally conscious pseudo-philosophy books to me. The latest in this series of recommendations was The Story of B.

Five seconds of "research" on amazon.com revealed that the book is the 2nd in a not-really-a-series, the first of which was Ishmael. I ordered all 3 books and went to work.

Unlike his other recommendations, these books are disguised as fiction. Ishmael wasn't disguised very well. It was short, and felt more like reading a long essay with fantastical elements than reading a piece of fiction. The Story of B, on the other hand, is actually a story, albeit a story in which all of the characters speak in essay, but whatever (not really, but close enough). It pretty much rehashes all the concepts from Ishmael, but in a more enjoyable (imo) format. My purpose here is to fail miserably at summarizing the philosophy therein.

The foundation is a challenge of our culture's view of humanity. In this case, "our culture" is not just American culture, or Western culture, but essentially "anyone who isn't an aborigine" culture, which is more or less 99.9% of the world's population.

The prevailing opinion in our culture is that humanity, for all intents and purposes, began in Mesopotamia with the agricultural revolution. Though we understand intellectually that humans have existed for 3,000,000 years or more, we assume everything before 8,000 BC to be "prehistory" and largely irrelevant. We look at humanity as if we spontaneously appeared, and started building villages and farms fresh out of the box, so to speak. We see this way of life as being natural, as being the product of evolution. Man was meant to build villages and farms. It's seen as our destiny. Before we learned to build villages and farms, we were just primitives. Once we learned how to cultivate the land, and how to build villages and cities, we became man.

We look at mankind as the pinnacle of evolution so far on Earth, as if everything in "prehistory" was simply leading up to this. Our religions state that Earth was created for man, and that man was destined to rule over it. It is so ingrained into our culture that we don't even talk about it. It's just assumed. The universe was created for the Earth, and the Earth was created for man.

The book, of course, cuts this worldview to ribbons.

It reinterprets the first few chapters of the book of Genesis as a myth created by the nomadic Semite herders of the Arabian peninsula to explain the theretofore inexplicable behavior of the murderous agriculturalist Caucasians expanding out of the Fertile Crescent into their lands. They had eaten the fruit of the gods' tree, the forbidden tree, and gained the knowledge of good and evil. This allowed them to decide who was to live and who was to die; knowledge that was only meant to be used by the gods.

It is an accurate description of their method - our method - of agriculture: anything that eats my food, or the food of my food, is evil and must be eradicated. It violates the natural law of the world, the law that all living beings (except our culture) follow in order to prevent their own extinction, which is something like "thou shalt not wage war". You may kill your competition, but you may not exterminate them. You may kill to eat, but you may not kill for the sake of killing. A lion will kill a single gazelle for food; it won't kill the whole herd.

And so Cain (the agriculturalists) slew Abel (the Semitic herders) because he was jealous of Abel's favor in God's eyes, and was cursed by God to toil for the rest of his days, working the land, sweat of his brow, yada yada. The Semites were eventually assimilated by the Caucasians, and the myth of the origin of their enemies became the story of their own origin. (This take on Genesis, which is not original to this book/author, but was nevertheless new to me, actually explains something I had always questioned and never received an adequate answer for: when Cain was evicted from his family's lands - presumably the lands containing the entirety of the human population - who did he take as his mate? How did he have children, if there were no other people anywhere on the face of the Earth?)

And so as the people of "totalitarian agriculture" spread - which is what they were bound to do, as a surplus of food creates a surplus of population which necessitates more food which is a neverending cycle of growth - the people soon forgot that life had ever been any other way than living in cities and building farms. We began to think that life could not possibly be any other way. The book calls this "The Great Forgetting". And so if this way of living is inherent in humanity, then all the ills that result from this lifestyle must also be inherent in humanity.

And so we began to see effects as causes. The problem with the world is our greed, our corrupt governments, our crime, our drug addiction, our famines and our plagues, and so on and so forth, which brings us to the premise of the book: the world's problems can only be solved by a completely new way of life. Overpopulation, environmental destruction, all of it. Nothing can be changed if we go on as we are, and our whole culture will eventually collapse, quite possibly resulting in the extinction (or near-extinction) of the human race. That's not really news to anyone. The news is that it can be changed, but not in any of the ways we are trying to change it with currently.

Of course, no real solution is offered... and obviously, reverting to a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle is pretty much out of the question at this point... but the book(s) are still worth reading. They at least attempt to make a start, by changing people's frame of mind.

One of the more interesting claims the book makes that I would like to see some proof of but am far too lazy to actually research the issue is this: in these so-called primitive cultures, people don't feel as if their life is meaningless. That is difficult to grasp, because it's such a prevalent problem in our society, and because it's just... I mean... their way of life... it seems so boring! To me, it seems people would feel even more lost, but I understand that's simply because of my cultural indoctrination. It would be interesting to me to see some sort of proof that these people feel that they lead meaningful lives, but such proof probably doesn't even exist. Not to say that it's not true, but I have a hard time picturing aboriginal people filling out surveys online, seeing as how they generally don't have computers... or electricity, for that matter.

Another claim is that our culture has to work harder to survive than any other culture, ever, which is of interest to me because I am so strongly opposed to work -_-

All this philosophy, or whatever you want to call it, is packaged as a story centered around a Catholic priest named Jared who is sent to investigate a prospective Antichrist figure named simply "B", who is obviously the one preaching all the stuff I detailed above. The two meet, and Jared becomes B's disciple, and then some other stuff happens that I won't get into because it would spoil what little story there is.

A good book, in my opinion, if you're interested in philosophy, or saving the world and stuff, or if you're just bored and want to expand your horizons a bit.