If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (8 page)

Daniel
. It's early days yet. You said it was like learning how to ride a bike. Just knowing how to stay upright is only the beginning. It takes some practice to get to a point where you can pedal with no hands.

Elaine
. True.

Daniel
. Here's a question one of my readers couldn't unravel, but I'll bet that by now you won't find it much of a challenge. He wrote that, when the six billionth person was born back in 1999, a writer for the
National Review
tried to put it into perspective by pointing out that if all six billion of us lived in Texas, each of us would have an eighth of an acre to ourselves. My correspondent asked, "This doesn't seem
like that much of a problem to me, does it to you?"

Elaine
. Uh-huh.

Daniel
. Just "uh-huh"?

Elaine
. Well, I assume the arithmetic is correct.

Daniel
. I assume so, too. Though I suspect the author of the article was working with Texas's total area, not with its total
living
area, which wouldn't include rivers, lakes, streets, and highways.

Elaine
. I'm a little vague about how big an acre really is.

Daniel
. I anticipated the question. An acre is 43,560 square feet. An eighth of an acre is 5,445 square feet, about the size of an ordinary city building lot. A family of four would have half an acre, a common
size for suburban lots.

Elaine
. Okay.

Daniel
. Plenty of room.

Elaine
. Yes.

Daniel
. So now you have our population situation in perspective.

Elaine
says nothing.

Daniel
. Come on, Elaine. What's the unvoiced assumption behind this "perspective"?

Elaine
. Obviously it's about space.

Daniel
. Work it through. This is an easy one.

Elaine
[
after thinking about it
]. A family of four has no trouble living on half an acre. Millions of Americans do it.

Daniel
. I'm not going to help you with this one. Think about what you're saying, word by word.

Elaine
[
after thinking some more
]. All right. They're living
on
half an acre, but they're not living
off
half an acre.

Daniel
. Of course not. What would happen if they
tried
to live off half an acre?

Elaine
. My guess is, they couldn't.

Daniel
. Of course they couldn't. So now put the idea of six billion people living in Texas into
perspective.

Elaine
. They would have to be importing vast amounts of food.

Daniel
says nothing.

Elaine
[
after a couple of minutes of thought
]. There'd be no one out there to import any food
from
. All the farms in the rest of the world would be untenanted. Nobody outside Texas would be growing food,
harvesting it, processing and packaging it, transporting it.

Daniel
. Bravo... I did a little research during our break. Roughly speaking, a square mile of farmland will feed about a thousand people. If all the land in Texas were completely deforested and put under
cultivation, it would feed about 262 million people. So... ?

Elaine
. So the six billion people in Texas wouldn't be
living
there, they'd be
starving
there.

Daniel
. But they'd have plenty of room for houses, patios, swing sets, and swimming pools.

Elaine
. Yes. That's what the writer in the
National Review
had in mind.

Daniel
. To be honest, I was surprised that you were initially so ready to accept this vision as plausible.

Elaine
. Why? It must have been plausible to everyone at the
National Review
— and to its readers.

Daniel
. True, but consider the original question I presented you with. The questioner said, "This makes sense to me, doesn't it make sense to you?" You must have known my answer was going to be "No, it doesn't make sense to me."

Elaine
. I suppose I did. [
Thinks for a bit.
] But that doesn't change the fact that it did make sense to
me
.
At that point.

Daniel
. If you're going to learn to think like a Martian anthropologist, you're going to have to become far more suspicious of the reasonable-sounding propositions that we're constantly being presented with. Like this one, pointing out that there's enough land in Texas to accommodate the whole world's
population in comfort. I'm sure that tens of thousands accepted this statement without blinking an eye,
and that millions more would accept it the same way if it were presented to them.

Elaine
. I'm sure you're right.

Daniel
. In effect, I'm trying to break you of the habit of automatically saying, "Yes, this makes sense. I'll accept it." I'm trying to train you to pause and say, "Yes, this
seems
to make sense. But does it?"

Elaine
[
after some thought
]. I can say that I understand what you're saying, but I'm not really sure I do. I mean... we're trained to pause when something
doesn't
make sense. But when something
does
make sense... ? You surely don't pause every single time something makes sense.

Daniel
. You're right, of course.

Elaine
. So it's a matter of knowing
when
to pause, isn't it? How do you know when to pause?

Daniel
. That's a very valid question. A very useful and helpful one, in fact.

Elaine
. Why helpful?

Daniel
. It points me in a direction I hadn't seen, hadn't prepared myself to explore with you. Let me see if I can explain... If you were to follow an aboriginal hunter through the forest, he'd see things that were literally invisible to you. He'd see and recognize marks in the dirt that you'd have to concentrate to see at all. He'd notice disturbances in the grass that would be imperceptible to you.

Elaine
. I'm sure that's true.

Daniel
. The same would be true for the hunter if he were to follow you through the women's section of a department store. You'd immediately distinguish between the really good clothes and the cheap ones,
which he certainly wouldn't. You'd notice a clerk having a personal conversation on the phone. Without
even thinking about it, you'd be aware of the subtle differences between a personal telephone
conversation and a business conversation, and the hunter wouldn't.

Elaine
. True.

Daniel
. What we see are the things our circumstances have trained us to pay attention to. Your
circumstances don't require you to notice slight marks in the dust. The hunter's circumstances don't
require him to notice the difference between beautifully made garments and poorly made ones.

Elaine
. True.

Daniel
. I've trained myself to recognize the voice of Mother Culture in the things I read and hear. You know what I mean by Mother Culture.

Elaine
. Yes. Mother Culture is... the
personification
of all the collective wisdom that comes to us from our parents, our schoolteachers, our textbooks, our movies, our television commentators...

Daniel
. And our magazines, including
Scientific American
and the
National Review
.

Elaine
. Right.

Daniel
. I recognized Mother Culture's voice immediately in the
National Review
observation that the whole world's population could be accommodated comfortably within the boundaries of Texas. Do you
see why?

Elaine
. I'm not sure.

Daniel
. Take a stab at it.

Elaine
[
after some thought
]. Mother Culture wants to reassure us that everything we're doing is okay.
Reaching a population of six billion is nothing to be worried about.

Daniel
. Because, look, you could fit all six billion of us inside Texas with room to spare. I recognized it instantly as the kind of reassurance Mother Culture wants us to have. That's what made me pause to
examine it. And once I started examining it, it took me only a few moments to identify its absurdity.

Elaine
. Okay. But I can't really say that this does me much good. You say that you've trained yourself to recognize the voice of Mother Culture in the things you read or hear, but how does this help
me
?

Daniel
[
after thinking about this for a minute
]. I guess you could say that what the hunter is looking for as he moves through the forest are tip-offs, things that signal what's going on around him. When you
examine a shirt or a dress, there are probably things that tip you off as to its quality.

Elaine
. Yes, I guess so.

Daniel
. I'm looking for tip-offs as well. Or, as I say, I've trained myself to notice them. I don't have to look for them, they leap out at me.

Elaine
. But what are they?

Daniel
. I can't give you a list — it's never occurred to me to make one. Maybe we'll be able to compile one as we go along.

Elaine
. What was the tip-off in this case?

Daniel
[
after some thought
]. Its obvious tendentiousness. I mean by this that the statement clearly
contains an implicit argument. If someone says that if you lined up all the cars in the world on a single
highway, it would encircle the globe twice, there is no implicit argument. He's just presenting you with
an interesting fact. He's not saying that this is something that could actually be done. He's not making
any special point about cars, highways, or the circumference of the earth. He's just using his
computational skills to give us a visual image of how many cars we have. The writer who says Texas
could comfortably accommodate six billion people
does
have a point, and he
is
saying that it could be done.

Elaine
. Okay. But I'm not sure I'd recognize a tendentious statement if I saw one.

Daniel
. Of course you would. Let me see if I can think of a couple... Here's one from, I believe, a French military man of the seventeenth century: "God is generally on the side of the big battalions
against the small ones."

Elaine
. Uh-huh.

Daniel
. I'm sure you can see what implicit point of view this statement expresses.

Elaine
. Yes. He's saying that, on the battlefield, God has nothing to do with who wins and who loses.

Daniel
. Of course. Let me think for a bit... Pope John Paul the Second said, "Vast sections of society are confused about what is right and what is wrong." Implicit in this statement is... ?

Elaine
. That
he
isn't confused about it.

Daniel
. Of course... From the beginning, I've been saying that our job is to look behind the words people give us in order to understand the implicit notions that are generating them.

Elaine
. Yes, I see that — now. What are some other tip-offs?

Daniel
. Things to look for are elements of the received wisdom of our culture — received without
acknowledgment or examination. For example, it's received wisdom that everyone knows the difference
between right and wrong. We imagine that this knowledge arises from the structure of the human mind
itself. In fact, we use this as a measure of sanity in our courts. And by this measure, I would be
considered insane.

Elaine
laughs.

Daniel
. In one of my early books — I think it was probably
Ishmael
— I made the point that
missionaries were astonished to find that the aboriginal peoples they worked among didn't know right
from wrong, and I said the missionaries were quite correct in their observation. I received several
indignant letters about this from people who thought I was denigrating aboriginal peoples, implying that
they were somehow subhuman. Whatever the missionaries thought,
of course
these peoples knew right
from wrong!

Elaine
. I'm not sure why you say you yourself don't know right from wrong.

Daniel
. To me — as to the aborigines being evangelized — these are quite arbitrary categories that can be switched back and forth at will. For example, you know very well that abortion was very seriously
wrong before
Roe v. Wade
. After
Roe v. Wade
it became right, though naturally there are still people who think it's wrong. Which is it, right or wrong?

Elaine
. I think a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion.

Daniel
. You mean she has the right to do something that's wrong?

Elaine
. No. It isn't something wrong.

Daniel
. Are you hesitant to call it right?

Elaine
. No.

Daniel
. But I'm sure you're aware that tens of millions of Americans would like to see
Roe v. Wade
reversed, would like to see abortion outlawed again.

Elaine
. Yes.

Daniel
. And if they succeeded in having the present law overturned, would abortion then be right or wrong?

Elaine
has no answer.

Daniel
. If you'd like to know how wrong abortion seemed to people fifty years ago, you should see a movie called
Detective Story
, based on a very successful Broadway play by Sidney Kingsley. The action takes place in a station house, where a detective played by Kirk Douglas is interrogating one of the most
loathsome criminals he's ever encountered, an abortionist. Unfortunately, his zeal leads him to a
horrendous discovery — his own wife was once one of the abortionist's clients. Now he sees his wife as
almost as loathsome as the abortionist himself — and this revelation all but tears him apart. This was not a picture directed toward a bigoted, minority audience. It was nominated for four Academy Awards and
won one.