*Naomi Alderman* # Progressive Summary Good follow-up to The Power. Page-turning satire about tech billionaires. It's a Thrutopian novel, a much lighter version of [[Reference Notes/Books/The Ministry for the Future|The Ministry for the Future]]. The re-telling of the story of Lot and Somon was hilarious, especially with the interjections. Best section in the whole book for me. Similar to Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, this book has some conjectures on how we got to our current predicament, using the metaphor of Foxes and Rabbits, which is basically hunter-gatherer vs farmers. Martha Einkorn is a great character. Both she and Lai Zhen are survivalits, but in the spirit of Lauren Olamina from Parable of the Sower. Not isolationist, but pro-social. Grapples with the idea that we are caught up in symbolic worlds of our making. It's important to know how to step away from it. # Definitions # Chapter Notes # Quotes ## The Future > The Future. This is the essential problem. We can imagine the future. And once we’ve imagined it, we can’t stop. The dicebox of evolution optimized us for brain and then let us get on with it. Our instincts were to hunt and gather, but our big brains knew the antelope might escape and we might find no fruit today. Our big brains chewed on it: what if, what if. For some Fox people, the anxiety was overwhelming. If the problem is “I don’t know what’s going to happen” it’s often easier to make sure you do know what’s going to happen even if that means it’s going to be bad. They preferred to look at a mud patch of crops and six scrawny goats and say “There, that’s what I’m going to eat” and be certain than deal with the uncertainty of the hunt every day. > There is, when it comes right down to it and as Martha had mentioned to Lenk many times, a trajectory to human affairs. It appears to be ruled by logic but the rhythm of it is the rhythm of fear. If you might do something to me, then it is only right for me to have the capacity to do the same to you. This is the pattern of the rule of salt. Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable. > Abraham had his doubts about the value of this new idea of ownership. So he drank his goat milk and thought carefully. What good had it done Lot to take the fertile lands west of the river? Abraham had the strong sense that there was something better than hoarding up goods. That his strength and security came not from specific objects in a stronghold or dug into a bunker against a day of reckoning. Abraham’s feeling was that his ability to rescue Lot had come from those three hundred men who trusted and respected him. A community and a reputation are stronger than gold bars and jars of grain and wine and oil. The only future we ever own resides in our trust in others, their trust in us. > > So Abraham said: “I don’t want a single thread of cloth or one strap from one sandal.” > > It wasn’t virtue that made Abraham say it, it was wisdom. He enjoyed riches—he was a wealthy man for those times with flocks of sheep and fine cloth and jewels and stores of food. > > What he knew was: more than greed causes wealth, wealth causes greed. > > The richer you are, the more you have to be careful about that. > Lenk drew breath and Zhen understood that sometimes you can know the future. You can know it in the inability of people to change. In their desire to have things over. If you can’t tolerate uncertainty, you will try to make things certain. Sometimes the only way to make them certain is to make them bad. > We are all falling, all the time, from the half-understood past to the unknowable future. The other name for falling without fear is flying. ## Symbols > “OK. Enoch used to say, ‘The city is a marked environment.’ Like a marked deck of cards. Fixed so we can read it easily. Filled with symbols. Paving slabs are for walking on—blacktop is for cars.” She pointed around the hall to the cup sign over the café, the signs for the restrooms. “Symbols for food, drink, empty your bladder. And look, the real world’s not like that. The world doesn’t exist for our convenience; it doesn’t talk in our language. The wilderness doesn’t have symbolic drawings to tell you where to find food or where it’s safe to take a piss. Where you find a sign in the real world, it’s a sign made by the thing itself: deer tracks are made by deer hooves. Do you see? It’s done something weird to us to live in this human-made, human-centric space all the time. It’s made us more selfish, but also more anxious, and more depressed because we think everything’s about us. I think Enoch was right about that.” > Zhen got on a train. She sat down at Seasons Time Station and stood up at Marina South Pier. She felt flattened into a series of symbol manipulations. Stand up here. Walk here. Pattern match the words on the signs with the name of the hotel you woke up in this morning. Find the box symbol with matchstick people inside it. Press the up arrow. Pattern match the number on the plastic card in your pocket with the number on the door of a room. Place the plastic card to the dark panel on the door. Wait for the clunk. > Fox loved to carve sacred symbols or make cave paintings with special meanings, to worship at a particular grove or spring and return there every year. So the theory is: a few Fox people loved their symbolic behavior so much they decided to stay at the sacred bend in the river when the tribe moved on. They had built shelters, even small villages, for the yearly visit from the nation. Once they decided to stay, they needed a way to eat. Capture wild goats two by two. Plant apple seeds and grain. Hope. Pray. When the babies die, dedicate them to the gods of the place and continue. > It was an illusion. A swarm of locusts and a murrain would wipe out the crops and the flocks. But Rabbit—drunk on symbols and sex and fermented barley—preferred the illusion to reality. Like I say, these things might all be true. These things probably are all true. This is probably how some Foxes became Rabbits. They liked art and novels and religious ecstasy and stories about gods or heroes and movies and video games—or the nearest local equivalents—and sex with strangers and booze and drugs and a nice hoard of gold to sit on. > We’re descended from Rabbit. From crafty Jacob and murderous Cain, from the grandiose sophisticate Joseph, and from the complicated man Lot. We hate Fox like our ancestors did, and that’s why we Rabbit people persecute and loathe and murder Native people and Indigenous people and traveling people and nomadic people and homeless people and anyone without a house and a nation-state as we understand it. When this nation tried over hundreds of years to annihilate all its Native and Indigenous people, that was the hatred of Rabbit people for Fox people, the violence of symbols against reality. > > We hate them to convince ourselves that we’re OK and safe. The story of Sodom is about urban people who had the illusion of a plan, and how they found out that there is no such thing as a plan. I’m not saying agriculture and settlement don’t have many benefits now. I’m saying we got involved in this whole “civilization” situation for reasons we might as well be aware of. > Listen: nothing in the world is truly owned. There is no tree or patch of soil or animal or mountain or river that grows a label naming its owner on its bark or on its flesh or through the strata of its rocks. Once upon a time, “owning” meant “having a special duty to care” for something, not that you alone could have it or use it. “Owning” is invented, it is a symbolic behavior. And by inventing owning, we invented Rabbit. That’s how Rabbit came into the world. When we say to each other: Just stay away from me, take your territory and stay there so I never have to see your stupid fucking face again. > This morning, she thought it through all over again. The point of civilization, the idea of cities, the reason for agriculture. All of this. Was there a point in knowing that we used to be Fox, given that now—apart from some small isolated groups, the Taiga dwellers, the North Sentinel Islanders, some people in Nunatsiavut—everyone was Rabbit? Was looking back just always a bad idea, like it was for Edo and for Orpheus? What was the point of berating ourselves for not being hunter-gatherers anymore? For liking symbolic behaviors like music and drawing and movies and games? > > In the stillness of the early dawn, Zhen lifted the visor. There were no more bright green names tracking the caterpillars and the ants and the budding flowers and the slime mold. The world was there. As it is. > > And in that moment there was no need for words. There were no more names for anything. She was there as you are there. > > Wherever you are, the richness and complexity and inexhaustible, unplumbable thereness of the whole rushes in through your eyes and your ears and your nose and across your skin. Every single thing around you is right there and so are you. The teeming world is right there, and all of it is neither good nor bad, it just is. > > It is not possible to express this with symbols. All that the symbols can ever be is a flag in the sand pointing at where to dig. You have found the treasure. It is the world as it is. > > Every part of the world pressed in on Zhen as present and as sure as the future had once seemed to her. The sight of crawling things and flying creatures, the sweet scents and the sour ones, the faint taste of cherries on her tongue, the atonal harmonies of the jungle screeches and howls, the intense and beautiful sensation of the suit’s interior softness on her skin, too strong and too real and too present for words. > > All the words went away. > But the sense that Zhen had in that moment of the whole world around her without names cannot be named. When you try to give it a word, when she thought “flag” and “sand,” she fell out of the world and back into symbols. There is no other way. The great evolutionary advantage of human beings is this brain that divides and sorts and names the world. You should not expect to escape it very often. Just remember that you can. # References