On ‘Babel,’ ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ and violence.

In the beginning, the world was quiet. There was no language.

According to The Popul Vuh, as translated by Michael Bazzett,

“Then came the word.”

The gods arrived “in the dark of the only night.”

The gods broke the silence.

“They talked together then. They pondered and wondered.”

And, together, the gods decided to make new creatures to join their conversation. A motivation we well understand – we’ve pored so much effort into the design of chatbots, and even though most language-generating A.I. will be used to inundate the internet with new venues for advertising, sometimes we just want to talk to someone. The first chatbot, ELIZA from the 1960s, rephrased an interlocutor’s statements as questions. But even people who fully understood the inner workings of ELIZA were often comforted when they conversed with her.

The gods made the first people, “human in form, speaking human tongues.”

But the first people displeased the gods. They did not worship their creators correctly. “They held no memory of who had made them.”

And so the gods decided to murder their creations with a flood.

“The face of the earth went black:

a black rain fell all day, all night,

and animals both large and small

began to slink into their homes –

their faces were crushed

by trees and stones –

…

So the first people were undone.

They were demolished, overthrown.”

Yahweh, too, spoke the world into being. He said, “Let there be light: and there was light.”

Yahweh, too, made creatures after his own image: humans who could talk. He conversed with his creations. When he was alone, he called out to his creations, “Where art thou?”

And Yahweh, too, grew disappointed. He “saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

“And he said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.”

Of the creatures who could speak, only Noah and his family would be spared; Yahweh had judged Noah to be the best of his (terrible!) generation. Noah was instructed to build a boat. After it was built, the rains began to fall.

“Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man.”

Noah watched his god murder everyone he had known. And Noah was traumatized. Noah planted a vineyard, fermented the grapes, and drank himself to sleep at night. Otherwise the dreams would come.

While Noah lay insensate, his son crept into his tent.

This scene is based upon an old Babylonian folktale. A son believes that his father has sired too many children, and so the son, fearing that his inheritance will shrink further as it is divided between ever more heirs, castrates his father. No new children will stake claims upon the father’s holdings. But when the father wakes in his bloodied bed, he curses his son: “You have done this evil to preserve your inheritance, so you will inherit nothing!”

“And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.”

Noah yanked away the son’s inheritance, and more: his son’s heirs would not only fail to inherit the lands, they would become slaves.

Noah’s curse was the beginning of human inequality. When self-professed Christians living in the American regime of abduction & torture (roughly 1600 to 1900, although the era by no means ended crisply) wanted to offer a biblical justification for their abhorrent practices, they claimed that the people whom they’d abducted & tortured were descended from Noah’s cursed son.

Yahweh had claimed that he would not murder the people with another flood, but the humans felt that Yahweh had broken promises before. The people did not believe themselves to be safe. In the first flood, even mountains were covered. (Fifteen cubits would make for a very small mountain – about as tall as a two-story house – but most ancient myths were created over centuries, so we needn’t quibble over a little math.)

To be safe, the people would have to create their own high ground. An even higher ground. They would build a tower into the sky. Not from hubris, but from fear, “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

High above the earth, they would be safe from divine violence.

Without the power to wrench away their lives, Yahweh’s power over them would wane.

This was unacceptable. And so Yahweh inflicted upon them the very calamity that they feared. He “scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth.”

And Yahweh ensured that his creations could not attempt again to build their own high ground, their own realm of safety away from his violence. He had noticed that his creations “have all one language” and so “nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” To maintain their subservience, he said “let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

Yahweh spoke this curse in the Edenic language. Yahweh cursed his creations to make them weaker. And yet, he made them better. Before, they were all of one mind. There was a single culture, a single mode of thought for all, a single set of words to describe the world.

After Babel, there were many.

A cursing, a blessing: our diversity of languages is both.

In the scientific telling, our diversity of languages – a blessing – came from separation. In the beginning, all humans lived within a small region of the globe. Fossils representing the first four million years of human evolution have been found only in east Africa. Only in the last two hundred thousand years did small populations of human ancestors begin to live elsewhere: in Europe, Asia, and the Polynesian Islands.

The mass migrations of Homo sapiens that led directly to our diversity of languages did not begin until about forty thousand years ago.

This was long before anyone told stories like the Popul Vuh or Genesis, which are rooted in agricultural traditions. But this was when our languages were “confounded,” when our ancestors developed a diversity of ways to think of and describe the world.

Yet our separation also wrought a curse. After our ancestors dispersed, creating millions of ways to speak, they also began to foster select pockets of disease. Each isolated community experienced their own zoogenic epidemics; time and time again, their civilizations nearly collapsed, but survivors gained immunity.

Local immunity. After centuries in which influenza had spread through European communities, this virus could typically kill only the very young and old. But when European travelers brought influenza to the Americas, the virus obliterated immunologically naive communities. Upwards of ninety percent of people died. Imagine: a pandemic 300 times more deadly than Covid-19. Influenza was (and still is!) a nightmarish virus.

Our separation also led to our diversity of appearances. And these small differences – lighter or darker skin; straighter or curlier hair; broader or pointier noses – were enough to spur hatred and bigotry.

Guided by these trivial differences in appearance, our ancestors made real Noah’s curse of inequality. Those who happened to have more ancestral exposure to disease and more ancestral access to nutritious foodstuffs were able to conquer their fellow humans. People were enslaved. Resources were plundered. Our diversity of languages has dwindled. Is dwindling now.

Separation – which let our ancestors develop distinct languages, distinct ways of seeing and speaking about the world – also led to hierarchy.

In the fantasy novel Babel, R. F. Kuang reimagines history to consider opposition to Noah’s curse. How might we topple the hierarchies? How might we create a world in which all children are born equal and free?

Babel is a lovely book, but it’s vision is pessimistic and bleak. Babel is subtitled The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. This is the protagonists’ conclusion: violence is their only option. Only violence will stop the empire.

Like gods, they will murder and destroy.

Yet even in Babel – with its anticolonial, anticapitalist leanings – the heroes oppress. In their moral framework, only human life has value. Our species can speak. The other creatures – who either have no verbal language, or whose spoken words we’ve failed to comprehend – are ours to enslave, kill, and devour.

In the film The Matrix, only violence can set people free.** With a plethora of armaments, the heroes assault government offices and murder the hapless rule-followers who stand in their way.

Everything Everywhere All at Once reimagines The Matrix without its preponderance of violence. Everything Everywhere All at Once is based upon a similar premise – the world that we experience is an illusion, and huge quantities of information exist just outside our perception – but asks what it would mean to find a peaceful way to set things right.

Hugs instead of handguns: could such a revolution ever succeed?

Midway through the film, Everything Everywhere All at Once re-enacts Genesis 22. The hero is handed a knife and commanded by a father figure to sacrifice her child for reasons that she cannot understand. But where Abraham would have said yes – abetting the sort of god who preferred Abel’s sacrifice to Cain’s, celebrating the first murder and thereby setting into motion a long chain of suffering – in Everything Everywhere All at Once the hero rejects violence and sets her child free.

In Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, the knight of infinite resignation should have been described as more heroic than the knight of faith – to know that there is suffering, to confront a mystery that your mind cannot possibly comprehend, and to reject the demands of a murderous authority.

For a 1963 psychology experiment conducted at Yale University, Stanley Milgram tested how often people would attempt murder when commanded by an authority figure. 40 men were tested; 26 made the same choice as Abraham. “Take now thy son … and offer him there for a burnt offering.”

Abraham raised a knife to slay his son.

Abraham lived within a world of hierarchies and violence. A world of gods who have no respect for the fruits of the ground, preferring instead slain creatures and the fat thereof.

In Babel, the heroes seek to overturn that world, but cannot imagine any means other than by perpetuating its violence.

In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the heroes consider love.

** Also, a friend recently shared with me their belief that The Matrix would be a better film if Trinity’s prophecy — that she’d love the hero who saved human-kind — meant Trinity learning to love herself before assuming the savior’s mantle. But there’s no way the Wachowski sisters could have made a movie like that in 1999, given their (very reasonable!) reluctance to publicly display their real identities.

Image of a person chatting with ELIZA by Kevin Trotman on flickr.

Painting of the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel, 1563.

On the value of religious misinterpretation.

David Kishik begins his lovely theological meditation The Book of Shem by pondering the inverted grammar that opens Genesis. Instead of a typical subject verb direct object construction, the first sentence of the original Hebrew text is arranged adverb verb subject direct object.

Wrote Kishik, “This is an odd grammatical construction, not only in English (compare ‘Yesterday walked Joseph’) but also in Hebrew.” Odd, although not totally outlandish.

Kishik questions whether the grammar was actually strange, however. What if the book of Genesis opens with a perfectly normal sentence that is intended to convey a bizarre idea, instead. The first word, which everyone presumes to be an adverb, might instead refer to a power above even Yahweh himself (“Bereshit” in Hebrew, commonly rendered as “In the beginning” in English).

We would have something like:

InTheBeginning created (a) god, the heavens and the earth.

It seems implausible that Kishik, or anyone, would consider this translation to be what the original authors of Genesis intended. Even if the translation itself were more plausible, this interpretation is divorced from the actual religious practices that treat Genesis as a foundational text. Religions use the book, but no religion is defined by a text alone.

It might seem bizarre for InTheBeginning, the mysterious pre-civilized force, to be mentioned only once, at the moment when he creates our Lord. But Kishik pursues this idea through an entire arc of environmentally-conscious speculation. If InTheBeginning created Yahweh, then Yahweh’s formidable jealousy becomes comprehensible. We can understand why Yahweh might compulsively, almost tic-ishly, appraise the quality of his own creations: … and God saw that it was good.

Kishik begins by misinterpreting Genesis, but this allows him to make interesting discoveries along the way. He concludes that, just as InTheBeginning was a pre-human, pre-lingual force able to create God, there must be a symmetrical post-human, post-textual void for the world to return to. Although God made a covenant (Genesis 9:11) promising not to destroy the planet, He does not possess total control.

God will not kill us. But he may not be able to save us. We humans might destroy this world ourselves.

Indeed, we’re well on our way.

I was raised in a mostly secular household, and I’m still wary of mysticism (despite my own belief in free will). I’m quite obviously an outsider to every religious tradition. But religions shape the way most humans approach the world, so it behooves all people, myself included, to learn and think deeply about them.

Even outsiders must occasionally appropriate the right to critique these texts.

It’s important to understand their standard interpretations. But, even from the perspective of an outsider, a lot of nuance can be revealed through assiduous misinterpretation.

Kishik’s The Book of Shem, although obviously nonstandard, is an enlightening, pleasurable read.

Or consider John-Michael Bloomquist’s “The Prodigal’s Return,” a poem about teaching in jail, which includes the line:

… I think Christ died for us

to forgive his father, who until he became a man

and dwelt among us had no way of knowing

what it was like to be Job …

In the standard interpretation, Jesus was sacrificed so that God would forgive us humans. This is a very traditional myth, with variants told by many human cultures across the globe. Wrathful deities must be appeased through the intentional, unwarranted sacrifice of something good.

In The Iliad, the Acheans praise Zeus by slitting the throats of a whole row of young men kneeling in the sand. Abraham bound his son on the mountaintop; the boy survived that day, but a lot of the story’s power comes from the original audience knowing that this sort of sacrifice was common. They would have realized how close Abraham came to plunging down the knife. There are numerous stories about the need to murder beautiful virgins to appease volcanoes, or to ensure good harvests, or to bring back rain.

Even though Jesus’s sacrifice makes sense within the framework of traditional mythology, it seems jarring within the context of Christianity, which purports to worship a kind, merciful god.

Within Christianity, it actually makes more sense for God to incarnate himself and suffer greatly so that we humans would forgive Him. He created this world, and this world causes us to hurt. Until He feels some of the hurt that He has subjected us to, his apologies would seem insincere.

Loneliness, hopelessness – God subjected Job to these in order to win a bet. He subjects nearly all humans to these travails as a matter of universal design. He needs to know the cost that we pay.

After hanging from the cross, He could look to Job and say, I understand how you might have felt.

This is not what the original authors wanted the Bible to convey. But we’d have a better world if it were.

John-Michael soon learned that being inside a jail – even as a visitor, there to read poetry for ninety minutes and then leave – was miserable. But he kept going for an entire year. The people in jail are suffering on behalf of all U.S. citizens – which meant, on his behalf – so he needed to suffer too.

Psychiatry students were once encouraged to ingest many different medications, so that they would understand what the compounds they’d prescribe felt like.

Shared experience – especially painful experience – can bring us together.

The author(s) of the Ramayana intended for Rama to be the greatest possible man. Within their philosophical framework, Rama is unambiguously good. The story is a triumph of the hero.

But it’s helpful to look at the myth with modern eyes and willfully misinterpret it. When we read the story now, Rama seems flawed because his world was flawed.

Near the end of Rama’s saga his path is blocked by the ocean. His wife is held captive on an island kingdom; Rama feels helpless, trapped on the shore. And so he threatens violence against the very waters:

Now, launching a powerful assault, I shall with my arrows dry up the ocean together with its fish and sea monsters and its masses of conch and oyster shells.

This lord of the ocean, abode of sea monsters, thinks that, because I am endowed with forbearance, I am weak. To hell with forbearance for people like this!

Fetch my bow and my arrows, which are like venomous serpents, for now in my fury I shall convulse the imperturbable ocean.

This passage was translated collaboratively by Robert Goldman, Sally Sutherland Goldman, & Barend Nooten. And it is troubling to see Rama, the ideal man, threaten physical violence to ensure that the world conforms to his desires. Goldman and Goldman include the following footnote:

This episode, in its rendition by Tulsi Das, is the setting for his famous verse about how certain things and creatures, including sudras and women, only perform when beaten. This verse has been the subject of critique and controversy among members of the women’s movement and Dalit advocacy groups in contemporary India.

If we castigate Rama for his words, we are clearly misinterpreting the text. Rama is good within the text, because this behavior was good within his world. A man, head of the household, was allowed to beat his wife or servants if they did not meet his expectations.

Most people would find it difficult to read Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” with a straight face now. But, in another revealing misinterpretation, proponents of the Dravidar Kazhagam movement have found parallels between the Ramayana itself and a Kipling-esque tale of colonial conquest and oppression. In the Ramayana, light-skinned north Indians execute a south Indian king, subjugate the local populace, and install their own ruler. (I’ve written about this interpretation previously, here.)

Hinduism itself, along with the oppressions of the caste system, seems to have reached south India in this way. The original conquest probably occurred around the time that the Ramayana was composed, although the spread of Hinduism was not yet complete even many centuries of years later, when Kipling’s British white men arrived to make matters even worse.

In Ants Among Elephants, Sujatha Gidla writes that:

When I asked my mother and my uncle about our ancestors, they started with their grandparents’ generation, the earliest one they’d known.

Their grandfather and grandmother were born in the late 1800s in the Khammam district, within what later became the state of Andhra Pradesh, where they lived as part of a nomadic clan. Their clan did not practice agriculture. They subsisted on fruits, on roots, on honey, on whatever they could catch or snare. They were not Hindus. They worshiped their own tribal goddesses and had little to do with society outside the forest where they lived.

When the British cleared the forests for teak plantations, my great-grandparents’ clan was driven out onto the plains, where the civilized people, the settled ones, the ones who owned land and knew how to cultivate it – in a word, the Hindus – lived. The little clan, wandering outside the forest, found a great lake and settled around it. There was no sign of human life for miles and miles. They took up farming. The land around the lake was fertile and gave them more than they needed. They called their new settlement Sankarapadu, after one of their gods.

But soon the civilized people took notice of them. They were discovered by an agent of the local zamindar – the great landlord appointed by the British to collect revenue in that area – who saw the rice growing in their fields and levied taxes, keeping the bulk of what he extracted for himself.

But that was not enough for this agent. He and his family and his caste people moved nearby and set about stealing the land by force and by cunning. They loaned the clansmen trivial sums at usurious rates to buy small necessities such as salt, seeds, or new clothes for a wedding. Unable to pay off these debts, the villagers gave up their land acre by acre. My ancestors, who had cleared and settled the area, were reduced to working on their old fields as laborers.

This is what has happened to tribal peoples in India who try to settle down and cultivate land since time immemorial. It still happens to this day. What set Sankarapadu apart was that the Hindus who usurped all the fields around it did not settle there themselves. That’s because the village is surrounded by fetid swamps filled with poisonous snakes, scorpions, and thick swarms of mosquitoes. The landlords settled on safe and elevated ground several miles away in a village called Polukonda.

In the forest, my great-grandfather’s clan had had no caste. But in Hindu society everyone is assigned a place in the caste system. Certain castes traditionally own land, and others have to work for those who do. For those who must work, the caste you are born into determines the kind of work you do. There are priestly castes, carpenter castes, potter castes, barber castes. The more impure a caste’s traditional occupation in terms of ritual law, the lower its status.

When the people of Sankarapadu entered Hindu society with no caste of their own and the most impure occupation of all, that of landless laborers, there was no question where their place would be: at the bottom, as despised outcastes. Outcastes are also called untouchables because they are supposed to be so ritually unclean that the slightest contact with them will defile even low-caste Hindus. Untouchables cannot share meals with others, much less intermarry with them, and are made to live apart from the rest of the village in a segregated colony on its outskirts. Sankarapadu became the untouchable colony of Polukonda, albeit an unusually remote on.

The Ramayana was not meant to be a story of oppression. But this misinterpretation has value, because it helps us understand the widespread biases of the author’s world — biases that persist to this day and still cause horrific suffering and violence.

Anachronistic critique will invariably lead us to misinterpret religious texts. That shouldn’t stop us. I’m curious to know what the old stories would mean if the world were as good as it could be.

On explaining religion to my child, part one.

One day at nap time, my two-year-old daughter riveted awake and said: “I’m worried about ghosts.”

I know, I know. The fact that she wouldn’t sleep is normal. Hundreds of children books have been written about children refusing their naps or failing to settle down at night and go the ____ to sleep. But I felt that this worry was fixable.

The day before, I’d read a book to her that had a ghost. I thought she was old enough! And I made silly noises! She laughed and seemed unperturbed!

But then she worried. That dark, dark chest had a ghost inside? Where else might ghosts be lurking?

“There was a ghost in that story,” I said, “but it was only a story. Ghosts are only ever in stories. They’re not real.”

She eyed me warily, but, still, she lay down and slept.

Two hours later, she lurched awake and announced that she’d made a song.

“Yeah?”

“Do you want to hear it, Father?”

“Of course I want to hear it!”

“Ghosts are pretend,” she intoned, over and over to no discernable tune. I smiled, and she hopped off the mattress and began to march around the house, still singing. I heard that song many times over the next few months.

Because she seemed to understand ghosts so well, I used that same language the next year when she asked me about Christmas.

“Some people tell stories about big sky ghosts above the clouds, watching us. There’s a story about one of the sky ghosts, a sky ghost named Yahweh, who had a human kid. So Christmas is a festival when people celebrate the sky ghost kid. Like your birthday, kind of.”

“Ohhh,” she said, nodding. She likes birthdays.

In my first explanation of Christmas, I didn’t include anything about penance. She was only three years old, after all. That’s a little young for the canonical version – Jesus, the sky ghost kid, has to suffer as a human in order for the rest of us humans to be forgiven.

And it’s certainly too young for John-Michael Bloomquist’s beautiful (and far more logical) re-imagining, in which Jesus, a human incarnation of God, has to suffer in this form in order for us humans to forgive God. In “The Prodigal’s Lament” Bloomquist writes that:

I think Christ died for us

to forgive his father, who until he became a man

and dwelt among us had no way of knowing

what it was like to be Job …

Now my daughter is four. And she’s still interested in religion. One day after dinner recently, she asked, “Can you tell me more sky ghost stories?”

“Sure … which one do you want?”

“All of them!”

“Naw, dude, I can’t tell you all of them. There are so many that … even though I don’t know them all … even though I only know a small, small bit of all the stories … I’d be talking for days!”

“Then tell me the sky ghost story about the snake again.”

I’d previously told her about Siddhartha meditating beneath the bodhi tree, sheltered by Mucalinda. She heard that story just before bedtime, and promptly wrapped herself with a blanket like a cobra hood and scampered around the house chanting, “I’m Buddha! I’m Buddha!”

“How about this, I’ll tell you four short sky ghost stories about snakes. Does that sound fair?”

“Okay.”

“So, this first one is from Sumeria. It’s hot there, a desert now. And in their sky ghost story, a prince named Gilgamesh … “

12013863663_8989445d41_z — Image by Ash Cole on Flickr.

Yes, I know, Gilgamesh would be more accurately described as a king. But countless Disney films have trained American children to think that princes and princesses are the ones who romp off for adventure. Even though our daughter has only seen Moana, she knows all the other characters from talking to her friends.

“… had a best friend named Enkidu. But then Enkidu died. They couldn’t play together anymore, so Gilgamesh felt sad. He wanted to find a way for people to never die, so he went on a long journey and found a potion, a special drink that would make people live forever. But then he took a nap, and a snake drank the potion.”

“A snake did??”

“It’s just a story potion, it’s not real, but people told that story because they saw snakes shed their skins and thought that meant they lived forever. But really it’s because snakes, when they’re growing, shed their skins all at once. Humans shed our skin bit by bit all the time.”

She glanced down at her arm. It didn’t look like it was shedding.

“And the next story you know, about Buddha. Because there was a prince named Siddhartha Gotama living in a fancy palace, and things were pretty nice inside the palace. But one day Siddhartha took a walk outside and saw that other people weren’t happy, they were sick or hungry or sad. So instead of going back inside the palace, Siddhartha wanted to think about ways for people to be less sad. He sat for a long time under a tree, just thinking. He sat so long that a real person would need to stop to eat, or sleep, or drink water, or use the bathroom …”

She is learning that even when you’re doing something really important, you still have to take breaks to use the bathroom. Otherwise you wind up needing new pants. Every week we have so many loads of laundry to put away.

“… and some other sky ghosts saw him sitting there, thinking. And they realized that he was going to learn their special sky ghost secrets. These sky ghosts weren’t very friendly. They thought that if they shared their things with other people, they’d have less.”

She shook her head. Silly sky ghosts! If only they’d sung Malvina Reynolds’s “Magic Penny” in school!

It’s just like a magic penny,

Hold it tight and you won’t have any.

Lend it, spend it, and you’ll have so many

They’ll roll all over the floor.

“The sky ghosts decided to make a big storm so that Siddhartha would have to stop thinking. He’d get all wet, or need an umbrella, or have to go inside. But a snake, a naga sky ghost, Mucalinda, saw the storm coming and decided to help. The snake wrapped his big, big hood around Siddhartha to make a bubble, like a tent, so that he could still sit and think as though the storm wasn’t even there.”

I didn’t mention my dissatisfaction with the ideas Buddha eventually came up with.

“And in the next story, from the Hebrews, a sky ghost named Yahweh made a human out of dirt, and then …”

I stopped for a moment. No, I decided, it’s not worth telling my daughter a story in which boys get made from mud and girls get made from boys.

“ … or, no, better the version from the Quran, where Yahweh made two people out of dirt, a mother and a father, and let them live in a garden where there were so many fruit trees, fruits with such a perfect mix of amino acids that humans wouldn’t need to eat anything else. And there were two super special trees, one that would let anybody who ate it have knowledge and one that would make people live forever. Yahweh thought that those two were the best trees, but he was a jealous ghost, he didn’t want to share. So he told the humans not to eat any fruits from those special trees.”

We have plenty of rules in our house, but I’ve promised my daughter that if she asks why there’s a certain rule, I have to explain it to her as soon as there’s a safe chance to do so. And I’d be remiss in my parenting duties if I told her that in the day that thou eatest Oreos before dinner thou shalt surely die.

“Then a snake came and explained to the humans that Yahweh was being mean and making up a story, that if they ate the fruit from those special trees they wouldn’t actually get sick. So the humans ate fruit from the knowledge tree, but then Yahweh saw them and locked them out of his special garden before they could share his live forever tree.”

She frowned. Two of her grandparents have died; even though we tried to make passing seem normal, she probably understands why so many of the sky ghost stories are about wanting to live forever.

“And then your last sky ghost story for tonight … this one is from a place that’s often really cold, up north where nights are long in wintertime. In that story there’s a sky ghost named Loki, a trickster ghost like Maui from Moana, and he was always making mean jokes.”

“But why was Loki mean?”

“Well, sometimes people told stories to show what not to do. Loki made mean jokes and in the end bad things happened to him, to help teach kids not to make mean jokes anymore.”

“Oh.”

“But one time, early in the story, before he’d done too many mean things, Loki had some kids. But the Loki kids weren’t humans, one was a skeleton and one was a big wolf and one was a big, big, big snake. And, well, you know that our planet is like a ball, right, but back then they didn’t know for sure, and they thought it might look more like a swimming pool. So they thought something had to be around the edges, and they figured it was a big, big snake who circled around the world and held in all the water.”

“And then what did the snake do?”

Um … I didn’t want to answer that one. The Midgard Serpent doesn’t actually do much. Thor mistakenly tries to pick him up during a bet in a giant’s castle once, and then tries to pick him up again when he’s out fishing, and then finally bops him on the head during Ragnarok … and that time gets poisoned and dies.

“We’ll borrow some more sky ghost books from the library and find out,” I told her. “But now it’s bath time!”

On Buddhism, suffering, and Deadpool.

Siddhartha was born into luxury. Wealth wasn’t enough to banish a nagging sense of emptiness, but if Siddhartha hadn’t left the palace, he never would’ve known deprivation.

Instead, he walked. He met people afflicted with worse ills than his own lack of purpose – bedraggled souls who were poor, and sick, and miserable. He was horrified by the world we humans have been given.

Seeking a way to improve people’s lives, Siddhartha began to meditate. He sat beneath a tree and cleared his mind until it effervesced with psychedelic hallucination.

The local gods feared that Siddhartha would gain enlightenment. Like Yahweh in the Old Testament, these gods believed that knowledge should be the exclusive province of the divine; like white supremacists in the Jim Crow era, they believed that shared access to the fountain would tarnish their own privilege. And so they sent a storm to disrupt Siddhartha’s concentration.

Like Satan in the Old Testament, a snake came to help. Mucalinda, a cobra-like naga king, believed in equality – humans too should have access to knowledge. The cobra’s hood formed a protective bubble around Siddhartha, protecting him from the storm.

Siddhartha gained knowledge. He now knew that non-attachment would free humans from suffering. Everything in this world is impermanent – in the very end, each speck of matter will be so far from every other that the entire universe will be dark, empty, and cold – and so our attachments can only bring us pain. We must recognize that our transitory world will always leave us unsatisfied. Even our moments of joy will fade – those fleeting bursts of dopamine aren’t enough to sustain lasting happiness.

To be free of suffering, we have to let go.

But I’m an assistant coach for the local cross country team. I run with the kids. We suffer – that’s kind of the point.

Attachment brings suffering, but, again – that’s kind of the point.

My favorite superhero right now is Deadpool. Most heroes have powers that keep them safe from harm – spider sense, super strength, telepathy. Deadpool’s power is simply the willingness to endure harm. As though tattooed with the word THOLE down his neck, Deadpool knows that life will hurt and sardonically accepts it.

He briefly considers non-attachment. When he learns that he has a daughter, he plans to stay away from her. Distance might keep her safe from Deadpool’s enemies – and would keep him safe from emotional turmoil.

Instead, he lets himself become attached. He will suffer; so will she. But he’s decided that the pain is part of life.

When Deadpool meets a young woman who’s so depressed that she’s contemplating suicide, he doesn’t advocate non-attachment. It’s true that her torments will be temporary, but that’s a Buddhist consolation. Instead, he tells a joke (he justifies his levity by claiming that his powers came when he was “bitten by a sad radioactive clown”) and takes her to experience more pain and suffering.

Find the full story in Deadpool (2015) #21.

My own depression has seemed more manageable for similar reasons. Since I’ve been working with people entrapped in the criminal justice system, I experience more pain. More horrors are shared with me now. But that very sharing connects me more clearly to the world.

Those connections – attachment – will bring suffering, but that’s the very stuff of life. All you can do is endure. As the chemist Primo Levi wrote in If This Is a Man, his account of time spent in a Holocaust concentration camp (translated by Stuart Woolf), as long as you can resist becoming too absorbed in your tiny experience of the present moment, there is always cause for hope:

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy, and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

You could always kill yourself later, Levi says, so why not see how much more you can bear?

And, yes, Deadpool takes the young woman to the hospital. When one of my acquaintances needed to go, I took her in as well. (I was on the phone with my father: “Just lie to her, tell her anything, but get her in.” I keep the volume on my phone loud enough that she heard everything he said. At least it was something to laugh about.)

Hang in there. The suffering won’t change. But you might.

On prayer, diversity among deities, and ADHD.

My new favorite computer game begins each round as a real-time strategy game like Starcraft. You command your little empire to build temples and offer up various sorts of psalms – will you praise your deity’s ever-gathering hands, its watchful vigilance, its fiery vengeance?

After you feel that you’ve done enough to celebrate your deity, you can command your priests to summon it – at which point the gameplay switches to a third-person adventure mode vaguely reminiscent of the old arcade classic Rampage. You must attempt to destroy opposing civilizations with your deity … but there’s a twist. The attributes of your deity reflect the way it was prayed to. With too much emphasis on its “ever-gathering hands,” your god’s hands become massive. Those unwieldy appendages drag behind you as you walk, plowing deep furrows into the ground.

In this phase of the game, the controls can seem laggy and loose. It turns out that this is intentional; as in the game Octodad, an inability to control your creation is an essential part of the game. Certain types of prayer might make your deity more powerful but also more difficult to manage.

Presumably you’d avoid this sort of self-destructive excess – like praising wrath to the extent that your god destroys your own kingdom promptly after being summoned – but opposing players can infiltrate your civilization with heretics, and the way they pray will affect your god as well.

Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas ends with the idea that “everyone gets the devil he deserves.” This is the underlying concept of the game, but for gods instead of demons.

First Coming includes elements of both real-time strategy and arcade smash-em-up. And the idea of human prayer sculpting physically-manifest deities is intriguing. I’d go so far as to argue that it’s the greatest game, flawed only in that it doesn’t live up to the Ontological Argument for the existence of God.

We live in a culture that reveres vengeance. The majority of the U.S. worships a deity who was praised for his violence.

Sometime around 600 BCE, a kingdom that worshiped a local deity called Yahweh was conquered by Nebuchadnezzer, whose people worshiped the storm god Marduk. After the surrender, many of the conquered people were deported to Babylon, where they would help make that city the most splendid in the world.

But some of the conquered Hebrews were allowed to remain in Jerusalem, where they still worshiped Yahweh in traditional ways – mostly by ritually killing animals – until they attempted to regain their independence. Then the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzer sent an army to circle the city. The people began to starve. The uprising was crushed.

The Hebrew leader was captured. He was held, struggling, a soldier on either side restraining his arms. One by one the Babylonian conquerors brought Zedekiah’s children. The leader surely screamed, begging to die. The soldiers gripped his arms more tightly. And (2 Kings 25) they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out the eyes of Zedekiah. Those murders were his last sights, lingering in his blinded mind. His sons bodies spilling blood from their slit necks into the dust.

Many more of the remaining Hebrews were then deported to Babylon, to slave for the greatness of that city. They carted stones to build monuments to Marduk. This god’s temples soared into the sky, one some seven stories high.

And the Hebrews saw the ceremonies held to celebrate Marduk. On the fourth day of the New Year’s festival, priests read from a sacred text, the Enuma Elish, describing the origin of the world. The old gods had sex; they were murdered by their children; the flesh of their bodies was used to construct heaven and earth. Other sacred texts included the Atrahasis – which describes the flood that nearly destroyed humanity when we became too noisy and disturbed the gods’ rest – and Gilgamesh – which celebrates fraternal love.

In The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Stephen Greenblat writes that “These works feature gods – a whole pantheon of them – but Yahweh is nowhere among them, let alone their lord and master.”

The Hebrew people were crushed, their god so insignificant that he appeared in none of the victors’ stories. And so the Hebrews fought back … with words. They wrote a sacred text of their own, one in which Yahweh reigned supreme and the Babylonian tales were mockingly tweaked. The glorious temples gave rise to “The Tower of Babel,” symbol of mankind’s unwarranted arrogance. In the Hebrew flood story, humans were killed because the city people – and none were more urbane than the Babylonians – were corrupt. Sex did not mark the origin of the world, but rather began after the fall.

And they sang psalms to a deity patiently waiting to enact murderous revenge:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

… and, in answer of their own question, the conquered people begin to sing …

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Raze it, raze it, even to the foundation thereof.

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hath served us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

After the siege, Hebrew sons were murdered, daughters were raped, those of able body were made slaves. They asked of their god revenge. They prayed to a lord who would kill, and abet their killing, to restore their kingdom.

And … several millennia later … our philosophical traditions are rooted in their prayers. Our nation is embroiled in retributive wars. Our punitive prisons are overflowing, with those unfortunate enough to land inside often made worse by their time there.

Yahweh was praised for his patient pursuit of vengeance. And we celebrate those qualities – in school, especially, we praise those able to dispassionately sit for hours, ingesting knowledge. Those with difficulty sitting still, we drug.

Which is sad – there are many ways of being smart, even if our culture celebrates only one of them.

Indeed, many cultures have told myths with ADHD heros. In the Apache myth of the origin of fire, Fox joined a flock of geese in flight … but then forgot the rules for staying in the air. But that was okay – it was only after he tumbled to earth that he had a chance to steal fire from a tribe of fireflies and bring it to mankind.

In many Polynesian myths of the origin of fire, it was brought by Maui … whose impulsiveness would almost surely lead to an ADHD diagnosis in the contemporary United States. Each time he received a gift of fire from his ancestor in the underworld – she was pulling off burning finger- or toe-nails and giving them to him – he intentionally quenched them in a nearby stream, just to see what she’d do next. His curiosity was nearly the death of him. Irked, she lit the world on fire.

In the Norse pantheon, Loki sometimes plans … but more often pursues whatever rebellious notion pops into his head. The mutant children he sired will destroy the world. His penchant for vicious barroom taunting (and impromptu murder) angered all other gods and led to his repeated exile from their kingdom.

But his exploits were still celebrated.

Or there’s Annabeth in Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, a daughter of Athena who helps the protagonist recover after a battle with a minotaur:

“And the ADHD – you’re impulsive, can’t sit still in the classroom. That’s your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they’d keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that’s because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal’s. Of course the teachers want you medicated. Most of them are monsters. They don’t want you seeing them for what they are.”

On the Tower of Babel and beneficial curses.

In Jack Vance’s The Eyes of the Overworld, a bumbling anti-hero named Cugel the Clever is beset by one misfortune after another. He attempts to burglarize a wizard’s palace but is caught in the act. The wizard Iucounu forces Cugel to retrieve an ancient artifact – a seemingly suicidal quest. To ensure that Cugel does not shirk his duties, Iucounu subjects him to the torments of Firx, a subcutaneous parasite who entwines searingly with nerve endings in Cugel’s abdomen, and whose desire to reuinte with his mate in Iucounu’s palace will spur Cugel ever onward.

Early in his journey, Cugel is chased by a gang of bandits. He escapes into a crumbling fortress – only to find that the fortress is haunted.

The ghost spoke: “Demolish this fort. While stone joins stone I must stay, even while Earth grows cold and swings through darkness.”

“Willingly,” croaked Cugel, “if it were not for those outside who seek my life.”

“To the back of the hall is a passage. Use stealth and strength, then do my behest.”

“The fort is as good as razed,” declared Cugel fervently. “But what circumstances bound you to so unremitting a post?”

“They are forgotten; I remain. Perform my charge, or I curse you with an everlasting tedium like my own!”

“Everlasting tedium” sounds like a raw deal, so Cugel figures he’d better slay his assailants and get to wrecking this haunted edifice. He kills three bandits and mortally wounds the fourth with a boulder to the head:

Cugel came cautiously forward. “Since you face death, tell me what you know of hidden treasure.”

“I know of none,” said the bandit. “Were there such you would be the last to learn, for you have killed me.”

“This is no fault of mine,” said Cugel. “You pursued me, not I you. Why did you do so?”

“To eat, to survive, though life and death are equally barren and I despise both equally.”

Cugel reflected. “In this case you need not resent my part in the transition which you now face. The question regarding hidden valuables again becomes relevant. Perhaps you have a final word on this matter?”

“I have a final word. I display my single treasure.” The creature groped in its pouch and withdrew a round white pebble. “This is the skull-stone of a grue, and at this moment trembles with force. I use this force to curse you, to bring upon you the immediate onset of cankerous death.”

“Immediate onset of cankerous death” sounds grim. Dude’s day has gone from bad to worse.

Cugel hastily killed the bandit, then heaved a dismal sigh. The night had brought only difficulty. “Iucounu, if I survive, there shall be a reckoning indeed!”

Cugel turned to examine the fort. Certain of the stones would fall at a touch; others would require much more effort. He might well not survive to perform the task. What were the terms of the bandit’s curse? “ – immediate onset of cankerous death.” Sheer viciousness. The ghost-king’s curse was no less oppressive: how had it gone? “ – everlasting tedium.”

Cugel rubbed his chin and nodded gravely. Raising his voice, he called, “Lord ghost, I may not stay to do your bidding: I have killed the bandits and now I depart. Farewell and may the eons pass with dispatch.”

From the depths of the fort came a moan, and Cugel felt the pressure of the unknown. “I activate my curse!” came a whisper to Cugel’s brain.

Cugel strode quickly away to the southeast. “Excellent; all is well. The ‘everlasting tedium’ exactly countervenes the ‘immediate onset of death’ and I am left only with the ‘canker’ which, in the person of Firx, already afflicts me. One must use his wits in dealing with maledictions.”

At times, one curse can save us from another.

In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, humans are cursed for building a bridge to heaven. Implicit in this story is the idea that humans nearly succeeded: our edifice of bricks and stone was threatening God.

In part, this story was written to disparage other religious beliefs. In the beginning, Yahweh was worshiped by a small tribe of relatively powerless people, and so the Old Testament seems to be riddled with rebuttals (some of which I’ve discussed previously, here). In From Gods to God (translated by Valerie Zakovitch), Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch write that:

The derivation of “Babel” from b-l-l seems to have originated as a response to the widely accepted Babylonian explanation of that place’s name, Bab-ilu, “God’s Gate,” or Bab I-lani, “Gate of the Gods” – a meaning that, we’ll soon see, was known in Israel. Indeed, the story of the Tower of Babel in its entirety polemicizes against a Babylonian tradition according to which the tower-temple in Babylon, which was dedicated to the god Marduk, was built as a tribute both to him and to the belief that Babylon was the earthly passageway between heaven and earth. According to ancient Babylonian belief, the tower in Babylon – Babel – was Heaven’s Gate.

…

It seems that the biblical writer, unwilling to accept that Babylon – a pagan city – was the entryway to heaven, found various ways to counter this Babylonian tradition that was well known in Israel. First, he converted the story of the building into one of ultimate failure and human conceit. At the same time, though, he introduced an alternative story about the gate to heaven. This time the gate’s location was in Israel, the Land of One God. This replacement story is found in Genesis 28: the story of Jacob’s dream.

The Bible succeeded in its propaganda campaign: by now the standard interpretation of the Tower of Babel is that humans approached the world with insufficient humility, we began a technological campaign that ultimately ended in failure, and Yahweh cursed us such that we could not cooperate well enough to attempt a similar project in the future. Babel – Babylon – was not a passageway to heaven. The gateway was never finished. Because we’ve lost the ability to communicate with each other, it never will be finished.

The story of the Tower of Babel implies that all humans shared a single language before our brash undertaking. The world’s current multitude of tongues were spawned by Yahweh’s curse. But… what if languages are good? What if we need diversity?

In 1940, Benjamin Lee Whorf speculated that the language we speak shapes the way we think. His idea was egregiously overstated – creatures with no spoken language seem to be perfectly capable of thought, so there’s no reason to assume that humans who speak a language that lacks a certain word or verb tense can’t understand the underlying concepts.

But Whorf’s basic idea is reasonable. It is probably easier to have thoughts that can be expressed in your language.

For example, the best language we’ve developed to discuss quantum mechanics is linear algebra; because Werner Heisenberg had only passing familiarity with this language, he had some misconceptions about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Or there’s the case of my first Ph.D. advisor, who told me that he spent time working construction in Germany after high school. He said that he spoke extremely poor German… but still, after he’d been in the country long enough, this was the language he reflexively thought in. He said that he could feel his impoverished language lulling him into impoverished thought.

His language was probably more like a headwind than a cage – we constantly invent words as we struggle to express ourselves, so it’s clear that the lack of a word can’t prevent a thought – but he felt his mind to be steered all the same.

Whorf’s theory of language is also a major motif in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, in which the characters’ English-language miscommunication is partly attributed to their different linguistic upbringings. The narrator is perpetually tentative: did her years speaking Turkish instill this in her?

I wrote a research paper about the Turkish suffix –mis. I learned from a book about comparative linguistics that it was called the inferential or evidential tense, and that similar structures existed in the languages of Estonia and Tibet. The Turkish inferential tense, I read, was used in various forms associated with oral transmission and hearsay: fairy tales, epics, jokes, and gossip.

…

… [-mis] was a curse, condemning you to the awareness that everything you said was potentially encroaching on someone else’s experience, that your own subjectivity was booby-trapped and set you up to have conflicting stories with others. … There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making only factual statements about direct observations. You were forced to use -mis, just by the human condition – just by existing in relation to other people.

She felt cursed by the need to constantly consider why she held her beliefs. And yet. Wouldn’t we all be better off if more people considered the provenance of their beliefs?

Most languages have good features and bad. English has its flaws – I wish it had a subjunctive tense – but I like that it isn’t as gendered as most European languages – which treat every object as either masculine or feminine – or Thai – in which men and women are expected to use different words to say a simple “thank you.” Although Thai culture is in many ways more accepting of those who were born with the wrong genitalia than we are in the U.S., I imagine every “thank you” would be fraught for a kid striving to establish his or her authentic identity.

And, Turkish? I know nothing about the language except what I learned from Batuman’s novel. So I’d never argue that speaking Turkish gives people a better view of the world.

But I think that our world as a whole is made better by hosting a diversity of perspectives. Perhaps no language is better than any other … but, if different languages allow for different ways of thinking … then a world with several languages seems better than a world with only one.

This is the central idea explored by Abdelfattah Kilito in his recent essay, The Tongue of Adam (translated by Robyn Creswell). After an acquaintance was dismissive of the Moroccan Kilito after he composed an academic text in Arabic instead of French, he meditated on the value of different languages and the benefits of living in a world with many.

Here is Kilito’s description of the curse Yahweh used to stop humans from completing the Tower of Babel:

After Babel, men cannot seek to rival God as they seemed to do when they began building the tower. They cannot, because they’ve lost the original language. God’s confusion of tongues ensures his supremacy. The idea may seem odd, but consider the story of Babel as we find it in Genesis: “And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” [11:4]. A tower whose top would touch the heavens: taken literally, the expression suggests a desire to reach the sky, to become like gods. A rather worrisome project: “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded” [11:5]. Man’s attempt to rise up is answered by the Lord’s descent: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” [11:7]. God does not destroy the work. He punishes men by confounding their language, the only language, the one that unites them. For Yahweh, the root of the menace is this tongue, which gives men tremendous power in their striving toward a single goal, an assault on the heavens. The confusion of tongues brings this work to a stop; it is a symbolic demolition, the end of mankind’s hopes and dreams. Deprived of its original language, mankind breaks into groups and scatters across the surface of the earth. With its route to the heavens cut off, mankind turns its eyes to the horizon.

And here is Kilito’s description of this same dispersal as a blessing:

The expression, “the diversity of your languages,” in [Genesis 30:22, which states that “Among His wonders is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and colors. In these are signs for mankind”], means not only the diversity of spoken tongues, but also, according to some commentators, the diversity of articulated sounds and pronunciation of words. Voice, like the color of the skin, varies from one individual to the next. This is a divine gift. Otherwise, ambiguity, disorder, and misunderstanding would reign. … Plurality and heterogeneity are the conditions of knowledge.

Kilito endorses Whorf’s theory of language. Here is his analysis of the birth of Arabic as told in the Quran:

According to Jumahi, “Ismael is the first to have forgotten the language of his father.” … This rupture in language must have been brutal: in a blinding instant, one language is erased and cedes its place to another. According to Jahiz, Ismael acquired Arabic without having to learn it. And because the ancient language disappeared without a trace, he had no trouble expressing himself in the new one. This alteration, due to divine intervention, also affected his character and his nature, in such a way that his whole personality changed.

His personality is changed because his language is changed: new words meant a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing the world. If humans had not built the Tower of Babel – if we had never been cursed – we would share a single perspective… an ideological monoculture like a whole world paved over with strip mall after strip mall … the same four buildings, over and over … Starbucks, McDonalds, Walmart, CAFO … Starbucks, McDonalds …

The current occupancy of the White House … and congress … and the U.S. Supreme Court … seems a curse. The health care proposals will allow outrageous medical debt to wreck a lot of people’s lives, and each of us has only a single life to live. Those who complete their educations in the midst of the impending recession will have lifelong earnings far lower than those who chance to graduate during boom years. Our vitriolic attorney general will devastate entire communities by demanding that children and parents and neighbors and friends be buried alive for low-level, non-violent criminal offenses. Innocent kids whose parents are needlessly yanked away will suffer for the entirety of their lives.

I can’t blithely compare this plague to fantasy tales in the Bible. Real people are going to suffer egregiously.

At the same time, I do think that kind-hearted citizens of the United States needed to be saved from our own complacency. Two political parties dominate discourse in this country – since the Clinton years, these parties have espoused very similar economic and punitive policies. I have real sympathy for voters who couldn’t bear to vote for another Clinton in the last election because they’d seen their families steadily decline in a nation helmed by smug elitists.

Worse, all through the Obama years, huge numbers of people deplored our world’s problems – widespread ignorance, mediocre public education, ever-more-precarious climate destabilization, an unfair mental toll exacted on marginalized communities – without doing anything about it. Some gave money, but few people – or so it seemed to me – saw those flaws as a demand to change their lives.

Anyone who cares deeply about climate change can choose to eat plants, drive less, drive a smaller car, buy used, and simply buy less. Anyone embarrassed by the quality of education available in this country… can teach. We can find those who need care, and care for them.

After the 45^th stepped into office – or so it has seemed to me – more people realized that change, and hope, and whatnot … falls to us. Our choices, as individuals, make the world. I’ve seen more people choosing to be better, and for that I am grateful.

Obviously, I wish it hadn’t come to this. But complacency is a curse. Sometimes we need new curses to countervene another.

On storytelling.

When an amoeba needs to eat, it hugs food. This process is called “phagocytosis.” The amoeba reaches out and merges again behind its meal – creating a bubble of the outer world inside itself. And here, enswathed, its food is digested. Like ourselves, amoeba are soft machines converting food into heat, exhaled carbon dioxide, and excrement.

Indeed, our whole planet can be viewed as a whirling machine converting low numbers of inbound high-frequency, low-wavelength photons from the sun into a much larger number of low-frequency, high-wavelength photons. Our Earth’s carpet of green sucks sunlight; roving animal life grazes and respires, sloughing infrared.

Those animals come in two forms: tubes and bags. Jellyfish have one opening, a mouth from which they also drool excrement. Jellyfish are bags. Most land animals have two openings, a mouth and an anus. Tubes.

No matter the form, for animals to carry on, they must engulf other life.

But, sometimes, the engulfed live on.

The “power stations” of our cells are called “mitochondria.” These look like small bacteria, but they have been tamed. Mitochondria carry some DNA, a fraction of the genes they need, but the rest of their genes are inside our cells’ central nuclei. Mitochondria were almost surely swimming freely once: now their ancestral selves can be known only by studying the organelles (little organs) inside our cells.

Mitochondria,_mammalian_lung_-_TEM_(2) — Mitochondria from a mammalian cell.

Stories, too, swallow each other. At times, we can learn our own history only from stray remnants that linger in the engulfing tales.

From the King James translation of Genesis,

… God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

The Hebrew scholar Umberto Cassuto argued that these lines reveal the presence of another, older myth. The phrase translated as “great whales” in King James, in the original, might be better rendered into English as “great sea-monsters” or “great sea dragons.” Which is startling – that dragons, alongside humans and cows, would be one of only three types of animals specifically named in Genesis. Humans told the story. Cows were their wealth and livelihood. Why do dragons merit such importance?

From Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch’s From Gods to God (translated by Valerie Zakovitch):

Cassuto argued that the particular identification of the sea dragons in the context of the Creation was polemical in nature. It was meant, he proposed, to remind the reader that these enormous creatures were created beings like all others: they were not divine, nor were they mythical creatures with powers to challenge God, the Creator.

In other myths that were widespread at the time Genesis was written, Earth began as a water planet. Gods lived in the sky, and other gods lived beneath the waves, but there was no land for humans. Only after an inverse gotterdammerung – a great war between sea & sky gods that marked an end to the deluge – did continents form. The soil we walk upon is a perhaps a corpse (Marduk, god of heaven, slew Tiamat, goddess of the sea, and made our world by scattering her flesh over the surface of the deep), perhaps a demilitarized zone (after Baal, god of heaven, squelched the uprising of the Prince of the Sea and his dragons, the oceans retreated – shamed, waters allowed themselves to be confined by shores).

Elsewhere in the Bible, Yahweh himself is praised for creating the world by pushing back the waters, as in the Babylonian and Ugaritic myths: Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it which hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?

This old myth has nearly faded away, but some fragment of it pulses on within the Bible… like the mitochondria preserved by our cells.

415343655_3aa0e7a54f_o — Image by bies on Flickr.

In Islam, Jesus son of Mary is incorporated into the tale – he is a prophet, preparing the way for Muhammad. He ascended bodily into heaven, but will return with armaments for the judgement. If all Christian texts were lost, we would still have these traces with which to reconstruct the beliefs of Christians. Although it’s not clear how close we’d come to the New Testament from lines like:

And when Jesus, the son of Mary, said “O children of Israel, indeed I am the messenger of Allah to you confirming what came before me of the Torah and bringing good tidings of a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad.” But when he came to them with clear evidences, they said, “This is obvious magic.”

Jesus wrought miracles, and for these was persecuted – that much of the story would remain.

Even now, our stories strive to ingest one another. It’s like watching a pair of amoeba battle, each struggling to form the outer bubble. The theory of evolution is uncontroversial when applied to crystals or stars – the idea that what we see now will be those structures that simultaneously optimized persistence and replication in the environments they were presented with is simply thermodynamics and math.

But when applied to animals – to humans, especially – the theory of evolution is seen as an origin myth in competition with all the others: the slain dragons, the sculpted clay, Yahweh conjuring with words. And so a Christian interpretation proffers that God created humans through evolution – a teleological misconception that’s often touted as “compromise.”

Tree_of_life_by_Haeckel — Evolution is not a ‘tree’ growing upward toward ourselves… more like a shrubbery, with everything that has survived to the present on roughly equal footing.

(Teleological misconception: the idea that evolution has a purpose, that humans are “higher” life forms. Evolution is a random drift, with success defined only by persistence. Life forms have either made it to the present – in which case, bully for you – or they’ve gone extinct. They were well-suited for the environs or not, but there isn’t an absolute metric to judge them by. A variant form of humanity that was less innately bloodthirsty would be, to my eyes, superior to ourselves; if such creatures ever arose, they were surely slaughtered by our own forebears. Many of our worst traits seem to have helped human ancestors survive and sire children, which is all evolution “wants.”)

And, similarly, scientists attempt to engulf the old
myths within their story. Evolutionary psychologists pontificate as to the reasons why humans are compelled to invent gods and believe self-sacrificingly in them. I’ve discussed some of these previously, such as the theory that a belief in watchful gods improves human behavior, boosting interpersonal trust. People who trust one another can collaborate more easily, which might make a society more successful.

I’m a scientist, but I see no need for the theory of evolution to swallow our myth-making tendencies. A major virtue of many religious stories is their insistence on behavior that goes against the directives of the natural world.

Though shalt not kill.

For a creature striving to pass along its genes at all costs, this is foolish advice. Murder provides more to eat, more space to gather berries from, more resources of all kinds. Many species kill their own kind, to say nothing of the murder of other species. They have good reason to, from an evolutionary perspective. Yet, many religions include a prohibition against killing. In the Bible, humanity’s paradisaical form – to which we’ll return when we have returned the Earth to a state of grace – was vegetarian.

Or, the story of the Tower of Babel? As a factual account, this is absurd – ancient builders would never reach heaven. But as a way to communicate an moral precept – that our hubris can be deadly, and that because we can is insufficient rationale to attempt some goals – the story is beautiful. With sufficient biomedical and / or computational understanding, some day we might be able to live forever… but should we?

To be good stewards of this Earth, at time we must restrain our grand designs. We could gird the whole planet in steel and concrete. We could hack down the few remaining forests for farmland.

Robert Bellah gives a lovely summary of these prohibitions in his Religion in Human Evolution:

The gods had to dig out the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as well as the irrigation canals, and they found it all too much. They decided to revolt against Enlil, and having burned their work tools they surrounded his house. Enlil, frightened and barricaded at home, called on Anu and Enki for advice as to what to do. He felt like abandoning earth altogether and joining his father in the sky. But Enki, always the clever one, had a suggestion: why not create men to do the work the lesser gods found so tiresome? He killed one of the lesser gods, We-e, perhaps the ringleader of the rebellion (could we call it a strike?), and, mixing his blood with clay, fashioned the first human beings.

Enki’s plan worked almost too well: men took over the work of the gods, but greatly prospered in doing so. Their growing population became so noisy (“the land bellowed like a bull”), that Enlil could get no sleep. He sent a plague to wipe the people out, but the wise man Atrahasis consulted Enki who told him to keep the people quieter and give more offerings to the gods, and the plague ceased. Again the people increased and the noise level rose. This time Enlil sent a drought, but again Atrahasis persuaded Enki to intervene. The third time was really too much and Enlil sent a great flood to kill every human being. Enki, however, was one ahead of him and had Atrahasis construct an unsinkable boat, load it with every kind of animal, and last out the flood. When Enlil discovered what Enki had done he was furious, but meantime the decimation of the people had left the gods with no offerings, and they were beginning to starve. Enlil finally realized that humans were indispensable to the gods, and, having arranged several methods of birth control, allowed Atrahasis and his people to resettle the earth.

One might think, says [Thorkild] Jacobsen, that Enlil cut a rather poor figure with his fear, impulsiveness, and insensitivity, but to the ancients the story illustrates Enlil’s ultimate power, his stunning capacity to create a flood that could potentially destroy every living thing. Jacobsen concludes: “All the same it is clear that the myth views absolute power as selfish, ruthless, and unsubtle. But what is, is. Man’s existence is precarious, his usefulness to the gods will not protect him unless he takes care not to be a nuisance to them, however innocently. There are, he should know, limits set for his self-expression.”

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: Old Testament