Human Nature Odyssey: Episode 6. A Civilization That Flies

So a while back, before the invention of the airplane, there’s this guy whose greatest wish - no, desire - is to fly. He’s lived his whole life walking around on the boring ground. His feet are sore, his legs are tired, he’s had it - enough. He knows he’s destined for the freedom of the air. 

To be honest, he’s a bit full of himself and has too much disposable income. 

Ishmael doesn’t give him a name. Let’s call him Elon. Elon Bezos. It’s a terrible name but that’s never stopped him before.

So Elon assembles what he considers to be a flying contraption. Picture a bicycle with cardboard wings duct taped to his arms. For good measure he slaps on some fresh red paint and gives the beauty a daring name: the Taker Thunderbolt. 

And one sunny day, Elon walks his proud flying contraption to the edge of a very tall cliff. And near the edge of the highest cliff on the highest hill he could find, he starts pedaling the bike with all his might. He’s going, going, and whoosh - zooms off the cliff.

It’s hard to tell whether he’s a visionary or a bit delusional.

But now he’s out there, in the middle of the air, higher up than ever before in his whole life. And The view is incredible. For a moment surrounded only by sky, pedaling away, his cardboard wings a-flappin’. And at first he thinks to himself, things are looking pretty good. ‘I think I’m doing it - I’m actually flying! ‘

But poor, brave Elon isn’t flying. The Taker Thunderbolt is in free fall. 

At first, falling can feel a lot like flying. 

So when Elon looks down to the bottom of this great ravine he thinks he’s soaring over, the jagged rocks and boulders below, he can see other failed flying contraptions strewn across the valley floor, crash landed, dismembered, the discarded remains of contraptions that were not successful in their trial and error flying attempts. And he admits to himself, some of these wreckages look pretty brutal. He’s sure glad he’s not like the morons who met their fate in the valley below. 

But, at the same time, Elon notices he’s starting to descend just a little. No worries. That’s what these pedals are for. So Elon starts pedaling harder. 

Well, our brave hero is a persistent guy. And the farther the Taker Thunderbolt begins to fall, the harder Elon continues to peddle. 

Now, my friends, this is where our story gets a bit gruesome. Because you and I and any four year old knows there is no amount of harder pedaling that could save this doomed contraption. And soon it looks like the ground is starting to rush towards him at an ever increasing speed. 

What once felt like flying is very obviously falling. It’s hard to know if Elon ever realized that’s what was happening before it was too late.

Because very soon it becomes too late.

The ground gets closer, closer, closer… until… ooooh. Ouch. 

The Taker Thunderbolt was never flying because it was never designed to fly. 

In our own way, we too live in a society that wants to fly, to transcend its limits, but it’s not designed to. Up here on our Taker Thunderbolt, things can seem pretty promising. Sometimes it can feel like we’re flying - it can feel like the limits that restrain the rest of the community of life don’t apply to us, but as our Taker Thunderbolt falls closer to the ground, the crash becomes harder to ignore.

It’s too late for Elon Bezos, who now lies broken and defeated at the bottom of the deep ravine. But it’s not yet too late for us. Will we figure out how to safely bail out of our falling bicycle? Or can we maybe even learn how to stay in the air? 

Welcome to Episode 6 of Human Nature Odyssey: a podcast exploring how we might avoid complete and utter catastrophe and pass down a livable world to future generations. 

I’m Alex Leff. 

The Taker Thunderbolt story was inspired by a parable in the novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Today we continue our series on the book. 

If you enjoyed that opening scene and wouldn’t mind some more stories and characters and sound effects, then this is an episode for you. It’ll be kind of like a smorgasbord of parables. But first, let’s retrace our steps and see how we got to this point.

So far we followed the narrator into a strange office building where he met a telepathic gorilla named Ishmael who explains the world is being destroyed not because humans are inherently evil but because most of the world is held captive by a story called Taker Mythology. Ishmael calls those who live within this culture Takers.

Taker Civilization began with the Agricultural Revolution and built itself on what the author Daniel Quinn later calls totalitarian agriculture - vast fields of single crops, where all pests and weeds are removed, where total control of the environment is the goal. In the grand scheme of history, this is a relatively recent development. For hundreds of thousands of years of human history, we lived as hunter-gatherers, in smaller scale communities, living nomadically, foraging for food. Ishmael calls these kinds of societies: Leavers. 

One way to think about the difference between Takers and Leavers might be that Takers - with their vast cities and exponential population growth and technological expansion, are the ones, metaphorically, trying to fly. In the process of our attempted flight, we seem to be rapidly accelerating towards the ground, and bringing down the rest of the world with us in a looming mass extinction. 

The Leavers however are less focused on trying to fly but have mastered how to walk on the ground. 

Hold on, hold on, wait just one freakin’ minute here - is Ishmael about to tell me we’ve got to live in the wilderness and become hunter gatherers again? Is this gonna be some Primitivist noble-savage romantic idealist crap?  ‘Cause good luck trying to convince my great-aunt Bertrude to stop watching Let’s Make a Deal and go forage for berries instead.

Well, luckily for great-aunt Bertrude that’s not what Ishmael is suggesting we do. 

To Ishmael, the core difference between Takers and Leavers is not their lifestyle, but the mindsets that justify them. 

So when the narrator asks if he’s saying that we’re supposed to “go back to being hunter-gatherers” Ishmael - who is always just a little grumpy - responds “That of course is an inane idea… Your problem isn’t agriculture but rather your insane notion that all the food in the world belongs to you… The Leaver life-style isn’t about hunting and gathering, it’s about letting the rest of the community live–and agriculturalists can do that as well as hunter-gatherers. What I’ve been at pains to give you is a new paradigm of human history. The Leaver life is not an antiquated thing that is ‘back there’ somewhere. Your task is not to reach back but to reach forward.”

What Ishmael is saying is that we can’t start over. Taker Civilization is not going to go away overnight. In fact, it would be really catastrophic for the vast majority of people alive today (myself included) if it went away overnight. We have to start from where we are. And for better or worse we have inherited a massively complex civilization - where do we go from here?

So let’s think about Elon Besos, riding his bicycle with cardboard wings off the cliff. He was doomed to fail from the very start. But as we know, it’s not impossible to build something that flies - you just have to understand the laws of gravity and aerodynamics. 

Is it possible to build a human society, so to speak, that flies - without destroying the world and ourselves in the process?
 
Ishmael finds it very curious that Takers haven’t figured this out by now. As he says, “you know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes” but we haven’t figured out how to live without destroying the world.

How does one find out such a thing - how to live on the earth without destroying it? Well how do we learn to do anything properly? There seems to be a few ways we usually go about this. We can consult prophets and gurus. You know these guys: Confucius, the Buddha, Moses, Muhammed, Jesus, Joe Rogan.

Or we can follow the laws written by elected officials and constitutions crafted by founding fathers, there’s a lot of fine writing there - that'll go into great detail what to do and not do. 

But Ishmael is proposing, to learn how to live in balance with the natural world, we look… in the natural world. 

Now this is where our good ol’ Taker Mythology hat from a couple episodes ago comes in and says “Don’t even bother trying. You're not gonna find anything useful out there, stay inside, you’ll catch a cold.” Oh how I missed you, Taker Hat.

Ishmael proposes that this supposed flaw humanity has, according to Taker Mythology, isn’t that we don’t know how to live in balance - it’s that we think we can’t know. 

Let’s give a moment of silence to our long lost friend, Elon Bezos, who tragically thought his rickety bike with wings stood a chance to lift off the ground and fly through the air. He wanted so badly to fly, like the airplanes that soar over us today. 

The problem was, the only way he thought to try flying was simply by trial and error. 

But what would have helped make his process a bit more efficient is a particular kind of knowledge.

In the case of airplanes, aeronauts finally learned how to fly by noticing the patterns of nature around them - specifically the law of aerodynamics.

Two brothers / bicycle salesman finally figured it out in 1903. An article from Scientific American explains that the Wright Brothers did so by “reading wind conditions, maintaining speed and equilibrium, and using the aircraft’s controls to make subtle adjustments so that it traced graceful lines during flight and landing.”

Essentially they had to adjust their behavior to be in accord with noticeable natural patterns.

A baby discovers these patterns when they push things off their highchair to crash to the floor. They’re doing it again and again not because they’re idiots but because they’re, in part, testing to see if they can count on this.

It falls every time…

The law of gravity isn’t written as some divine law handed down from the gods - it’s expressed in the world around us. 

And just as we can observe the law of gravity by observing matter, Ishmael proposes we can find the laws of nature that will teach us how to live without destroying the world by observing… the community of life. 

Here’s a quick flashback to episode 2. 

What’s the tiniest living creature you can find where you are? If there’s a direct line going back from us all the way to the first form of life. That creature you’re seeing and us are cousins. We’re family. 

What was the little creature you found?

The billions of species that share the planet with us are part of what Ishmael refers to as the community of life. 

Taker Hat: Woah, woah, woah, sorry I was on a lunch break, what are we talking about now? What about the life community, or whatever?

The community of life?

Taker Hat: Yeah sure whatever - the community of life. Why are we talking about those imbeciles? 

Well because Ishmael suggests there might be some kind of law of nature that the community follows that Taker culture doesn’t. 

Taker Hat: Haha well hell yeah you don’t follow whatever dumb law they follow! You’re humans. You do whatever the hell you want. [breath] Even if there was some kind of law it wouldn’t be relevant for you. That kind of thing might apply to ants and elephants but, come on, have you seen your brain? 

Hey don’t touch my head - 

Taker Hat: Okay, okay, sheesh. Sensitive today. I’m gonna go back on my lunch break. You let me know when I’m needed.

Will do. Can’t seem to lose that thing. 

I’m not believing the Taker Hat here. It’s not like we’re exempt from the other laws of nature. Gravity still applies to us just like it does everything else. Just because we learned to fly doesn’t mean we’re exempt from the Law of Aerodynamics - exactly the opposite - it means we had to learn to go along with it.

Now, as Ishmael points out, the Law of Aerodynamics wasn’t always relevant for humans. It only became relevant when we wanted to learn how to fly. 

Ishmael says, “When you’re on the brink of extinction and want to live for a while longer, the laws governing life might conceivably become relevant."

Ishmael points out that when Sir Isaac Newton hypothesized the existence of the law of gravity, what was remarkable about this wasn’t that he pointed out things fall to the ground, everyone knows that. 

Here’s how Ishmael puts it: "Newton’s achievement was not in discovering the phenomenon of gravity, it was in formulating the phenomenon as a law."

So the interesting thing to us about finding a hypothetical law of life isn’t going to be the suggestion that uh yeah I think nature is actually organized - we all know that - the trick is going to be articulating it in a cohesive theory. 

So what would the Law of Life be about? 

Well, the law of aerodynamics isn’t about flight really, but as the narrator puts it in his conversation with Ishmael, the law of aerodynamics is “certainly relevant” to flight. It applies to birds just as it applies to airplanes.

So the Law of Life wouldn’t be about civilization, but it would be relevant to it.

I’d like to share with you my version of another parable from Ishmael: the story of the Three Dirty Tricks - as told from the perspective of Taker Mythology. 

As every Taker knows, the gods made the world for us humans. 

It has long been understood by many societies throughout Taker Civilization that the earth is at the very center of the universe. 

Humans, as any good Taker could tell you, were created separately from the rest of the filth and wild beasts that the gods made for us to do with what we please. 

And finally, what should be obvious to any civilized devotee of the Taker tradition, is that whatever silly rules the gods have for the plants and animals have absolutely nothing to do with us. 

These are things Takers could rest assured in, for hundreds, if not thousands of years. That is, until, relatively recently. You see, we thought that the Scientific Revolution would further our mastery over the environment and conquering of the planet. And in many ways it has. Science has helped us extract more oil, create deadly pesticides, and more precisely genetically engineer our food. But, um, it seems science has also recently uncovered some shall we say disturbing truths about the world that, truly, are quite uncomfortable. 

Actually it’s really quite amusing, if you’re inclined to have a sense of humor. 

It appears the gods, for some dastardly reason, have played three dirty tricks on us. 

For one, the world is apparently not at the center of the universe where we supposed it would be. In fact many of us were quite aghast to learn that the earth is a pale blue dot, one of billions among the stars.

The second trick is that humanity is not the pinnacle of creation, or the finishing touches of evolution. No, it appears humans evolved from the common slime like everything else and are evolving still. 

The third and final trick - and this one truly [speaking through clenched teeth] that pains me to even speak out loud - [sighs] the third trick is that… humanity is not exempt from the law of life.

I know. Horrifying. If you ask me, this is clearly the meanest trick of all. After all, if we really were made to be the rulers of the world, why would we have to follow its laws like any other creature? I can’t, I just can’t…

It’s one thing that we’re not at the center of the universe. Ok fine. Have it your way. And sure, perhaps we evolved from a common ancestor with the rest of the community of life. We can accept such bitter truths.

But to the third trick, I say, no acceptance is possible. Taker Civilization will never - can never -  believe we must live within the law of life. It is the very rejection of this fact that is the foundation of our dear and beloved Taker Mythology itself.

And… scene. 

As Ishmael says, “Every law has effects or it wouldn’t be discoverable as a law.”

So what would be its effects?

Well maybe the 6th mass extinction? 

Maybe we could describe the law as: species that live in accord with it continue to adapt and evolve. Species who do not go extinct.

To help us imagine what it would look like to live within the law of life, Ishmael shares another parable.

The story of the Houses of A, B, and C. As always I will be relaying this story in my own words and of course, adding my own little flairs. 

Imagine you’re an anthropologist from an esteemed university from some very sophisticated place. You’ve been given an exciting assignment to go study the mysterious people referred to as the House of A. Aside from being named for just one letter these people have another fascinating aspect which you hope to learn more about. 

Then you can return to university with a snazzy new paper fit for publication and an eye on that brand new faculty position the Dean has so far been unwilling to send your way.

But no matter. You are determined - and have traveled very far to get to the House of A. It was a long train ride through stunning mountain peaks and mist-covered valleys. And it’s been a long hot dusty walk since you got off the station. There wasn’t even anyone else to carry your bags. But finally you make it to the small encampment of the A people. 

A few children are running around giggling. Elders smile and wave to you. They are clearly an amicable and peaceful people. 

A representative comes out to greet you. 

“Hello,” she says. “This is our village. I am from the house of A. You are welcome here.”

You thank her and wipe the sweat off your sweaty brow and ask for a glass of lemonade. 

She frowns and tells you they have no lemonade. You nod and apologize, recognizing it was weird you assumed they would. You ask instead for a snack.

“Ah,” she says. “Yes there’s plenty of food here. Let me show you.” You walk some more, following close behind your guide, tired from a day's travels and tired to walk farther still.

Soon you come to the edge of the House of A and across a meadow you see another gathering of people. 

“Those people,” she informs you, “are from the House of B. This is where we get our snacks, meals, and feasts.” 

You decide to not ask about the similarly bland naming of these other people and instead ask about where the snack can be found in their village. You are quite hungry, you realize.

She laughs. “The B people are our snack. They are our food.” 

Now hold on one minute. Your studies didn’t prepare you for this.

“The B people... “ you stammer, barely managing to sound polite, “are your… food?” 

“Yes of course,” she answers, shamelessly. 

“Well then why aren’t they running and screaming in fear?” you ask. “They’re just casually living right next to you?” 

She laughs again, “Why run? There’s no need. Their own food, the people from the House of C live right over there,” and she points to indeed another gathering of people at the edge of the forest. They too seem to not be all that concerned that those who would devour them are right nearby. 

You are appalled, bewildered, and confused. 

You say to yourself, “c’mon Larryopolis” (oh yeah, by the way your last name is Larryopolis) “keep yourself together. Think of that faculty seat.” You know better than to isolate yourself from your gracious host but you just can’t put 1 and 2 together. “So,” you say to your guide, collecting yourself, “the House of A… consumes the House of B… and the House of B… uh, consumes the House of C?” 

“That is correct,” your guide patiently confirms.

“So is this some kind of a hierarchy thing? Do you control the B people and the B people control the C people?”

Your guide from the A people looks at you a bit pitifully. “That wouldn’t make much sense,” she says. “After all, we in the House of A are the food to the House of C.” 

Oh god, you realize what’s happening here - it’s some kind of cannibalistic human centipede. You are disgusted and can’t take it anymore.

“How can you accept this?” you blurt out, throwing away all those years of anthropologist training and exorbitant student loans out the window. “How can you live in such horror and lawlessness?” 

“Lawlessness?” she asks, seemingly not offended as if talking to an ignorant child. “We have a law and follow it strictly. The B’s follow it and so do the C’s. We all follow it.” 

Okay, stop the tape. Interesting… [pause a remote control to a tv screen]

We’re going to say goodbye to the people from the Houses of A, B, and C, along with our goofy anthropologist and return to the real world.

I remember being a kid in my backyard watching this hawk swoop down and eat a mouse. My older neighbor saw it too and remarked, “how terrible. The animal world is so cruel.” 

I thought to myself, well what the hell was the hawk supposed to do? “Are you a vegetarian?” I asked my neighbor. She said “no.” 

Sometimes the natural world’s food web is described as, as Ishmael puts it, “lawless chaos and savage, relentless competition.” 

The Christian version of Taker Mythology idolizes when the lion lays down with the lamb. Now that would be heaven, not all this ‘I eat you, you eat me’ nonsense. 

However, contrary to Taker belief, the natural world is not at war, just as the A, B, C people were not at war. 

The lions and the lambs are only enemies in Taker Mythology’s imagination. 

The lion doesn’t massacre a flock of sheep. As Ishmael explains, it kills one to satisfy its hunger, not its hatred. 

Because the lion, as well as the lamb, follow the law of life. But what would it look like if they broke it? 

Ishmael describes a hypothetical scenario out on the east African savannah and I’ll take you there now - Nature Documentary style. 

Imagine that you are a hyena out on the savannah. You live in packs, have soft and rather cute fur, but unlike a typical hyena, you possess an absolutely insatiable appetite. . 

Now, there are plenty of gazelles for you to eat. But as a hyena you are not the only species who fancies gazelles. You must contend with the lions. 

But you’ve grown tired of sharing these tasty gazelles. And you realize, there would be so many more gazelles around if there weren’t all those lions gobbling them up. So you decide to eliminate the lions. Let’s observe the effect of this decision. 

Soon there aren’t any more lions eating what could have been yours. You no longer have to share. But as your population increases, your food supply decreases, which eventually decreases your population. Here we can see that The Law of Life trends towards balance.

But you and your hyena friends no longer want to live by this law. Why should you? 

Sure, your food supply has decreased, but there must be a fix to this problem. You’ve already killed off your competitors, the lions. But now you hyenas have done so well for yourselves there’s not enough gazelles to go around. Clearly, there needs to be more gazelles. 

Though there's another problem, the gazelles share their food with the zebras and the wildebeests. These are your food’s competitors. You don’t eat zebra and wildebeest so they’re worthless to you. Therefore they must be eliminated as well so there can be more gazelles.

Your rule becomes: if you don’t eat it, you kill it - to make more room for your food.

Goodbye Zebras. Goodbye Wildebeests. The Gazelles no longer have to compete with them. Which means there are now a lot more gazelles. 

But a new problem arises. There are so many gazelles there’s no longer enough grass from them to eat. 

The Law of Life continues to trend towards balance. 

But you and the other hyenas have exempted yourself from the Law of Life so you don’t have to stop there. You’ve already killed off your competitors. You’ve killed off your food’s competitors. Now you just have to kill the food of your food’s food competitors. 

Unfortunately for the gazelles, the savannah is covered with many types of grasses they cannot eat. Which means any plant the gazelles do not eat are now your competitors twice removed. 

Pretty soon, you and your fellow hyenas will find themselves in a sort of constant war with the world. To maintain this behavior you will find it necessary to labor intensely to constantly increase you food production, innovate new ways to grow what you eat and kill what you do not. Every plant which your prey does not eat will now become a weed you must eradicate at the first sign.

It will be a tiring affair, attempting to live outside the Law of Life. Ambitious hyenas will insist on this grueling labor but sooner or later, they will find it an impossible task. The Law of Life trends towards balance.

Ishmael says, “Once you exempt yourself from the Law of Life, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated." To exempt ourselves from the Law of Life is to declare war on the world. 

So like those hypothetical hyenas, Takers are attempting to live outside the Law of Life. This is the guiding manifesto of our civilization. 

In fact, as Ishmael puts it, Takers have incorporated “as a fundamental policy” “every single thing that is prohibited under the law.” 

Here’s how Ishmael attempts to put the law of life into words:

There is competition in nature, but it’s limited.  

Ishmael says, “You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors, destroy their food or deny them access to food."

A succinct way of putting it is: “You may compete but you may not wage war."

This is a “peace-keeping” law that promotes biodiversity.

And biodiversity isn’t a luxury, it’s a matter of survival itself. The greater the diversity of an ecosystem, the more resilient it will be to unexpected changes. 

Okay so there are three fundamental ways Taker Civilization goes against this Law of Limited Competition:

Taker Civilization eliminates competitors simply because they are competitors. We kill wolves, lions, and other predators when they aren’t even attacking us just because they prey on our food. 

Taker Civilization denies our competitors, like wolves and lions, access to food. We pen up livestock, sheep, cows, goats, and fiercely defend them from being eaten by anyone but us.

And finally, Taker Civilization destroys the competitors of our food’s food. So if there’s a plant that sheep don’t eat and it takes up space from the plants and grasses that sheep do eat, we consider that plant a weed and remove it - regardless of who else would eat it.

The benefits of breaking this law are obvious. It has have given us seemingly unlimited growth.

But what are the consequences? We are finding there are limits after all. 

As Ishmael summarizes, it seems there is a law of nature that informs how all species, Homo sapiens included, can live in balance with the rest of the world.

This law won’t inform us on every aspect of culture, like traffic violations, tax brackets, or the logistics of copyright infringement - it’s not that specific. But it will inform us on how we ought to live if we hope to continue to exist. 

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, one species exempting itself from the Law of Life is as destructive as every species doing so. The result is the same: biodiversity is devastated and reduced for the sake of one species.

All the destruction we see around us, it’s the consequences of trying to live outside this law. Even If we haven’t formulated this Law of Life fully, it still works. 

Elon Bezos, our brave and foolish Taker Thunderbolt flyer didn’t understand the laws of aerodynamics but he still fell off the cliff.

To follow the law of life means only external circumstances (like meteors and ice ages) can make you extinct, but you’ll never destroy yourself. 

Therefore, Ishmael posits that humanity must have evolved by following the law of life. 

Now this doesn’t mean we go out and stand in the middle of a field and shout, “okay hawks and lions, take me now!” (laugh) “I’m ready!” Living to the best of our ability is a good thing. The point is - when our lives are set up at the expense of the rest of life on this planet - we’re dooming ourselves in the long run.


So if we want to continue existing, and not join Elon Besos’ wreckage at the bottom of the valley floor, if we want even want to learn how to fly… we have to learn how to live within the law of life. 

Thanks for listening. 

On the next episode of Human Nature Odyssey… we’ll approach the end of the Ishmael part of our journey. Ishmael is an old gorilla, after all, and he can’t be with us forever. That means that it’ll be up to us to figure out: now what? How do we create a livable future?
 
Until next time, what can you notice about the law of life around you? Where can you see Taker Civilization breaking this law and trying to live beyond its limits? And what might it mean for us to end our war with the world and live within the law of life?

Talk to you soon.

If you’d like to support the Human Nature Odyssey, please share it with a friend, subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts, and check out our Patreon. We had our first bonus interview this month with author J. Snodgrass about his book Genesis and the Rise of Civilization. You can listen to the full hour conversation at patreon.com/humannatureodyssey. There you’ll find a bunch of other writings, transcripts of episodes, audio extras, and soon many more interviews with bonus guests. Thank you to everyone who’s given their support so far. 

Our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch. You can find a link in our show notes.

And thank you to Maddy and Austin for their voice acting contributions to the House of A scene. 

Maddy is also a very talented musician, you can find music in the show notes.