"The Great Conversation" (part one)

"Did Hobbes read Locke's book?" Julia asked in our history review.

"Yeah!" I said. "Locke's book was an answer to Hobbes' book."

We were two hours into a history exam review that was supposed to only last one hour, so I resisted the temptation to tell Julia about what's called "The Great Conversation." We were all too tired and had too many pressures to just relax and talk about this amazing, beautiful thing.

So I want to talk about it now. Don't read this unless you're relaxed enough to enjoy the pleasure of thinking for pleasure.... (click "read more" for the rest)


What is "The Great Conversation"?

It's what I'm trying to help you discover--and participate in.

It started when writing started, in the earliest days of our species. And it has continued--with a few breaks during Dark Ages and Ages of Intolerance--for the 5,000 years between then and now. It's still going on today.

You have already heard one thread of this "great conversation"--more than one, really--in English class in the first semester. It went like this:

The Sumerians invented writing over 5,000 years ago, at about the same time they invented some of the very first cities. We can bet that writing was first used for practical things. Business, for example: buying and selling, listing inventories, verifying that you paid for that cow and I can't say it's mine any more. Writing down that you owe me money, so I can prove it if you don't pay me back. Stuff like that.

But at some point, we also have to imagine a different type of person--a dreamer, a seeker of god, of answers, of beauty, of wisdom--who realized that writing could be used to make records of things more important than business.

Writing could be used to record ideas. The highest ideas known to the people of his day (and, as we've seen in Gilgamesh, maybe her day as well, since women seemed to enjoy a lot of power in that civilization too).

"We cannot escape death, but our ideas and thoughts can--if we use writing to immortalize them." This must have gone through the mind of those earliest dreamers and seekers.

And they did immortalize their highest ideas and thoughts, as we've seen: Gilgamesh is alive and well in our classroom, while its original creators--those earliest dreamers--have long since become "food for worms," as Hamlet says, and returned to the earth from which they rose. They became dust. Their ideas, though, stayed alive. Alive in books.

And those ideas, like some virus of the spirit, passed into the minds of each new generation, time without end, for thousands of years. Sumer and Uruk fell to invasion and conquest, but the child of the Sumerian spirit--this book called Gilgamesh--survived. It passed into the minds, the beliefs, the cultures that replaced the Sumerians. First into the Akkadians, then the Hittites, and finally, 2,500 years after Gilgamesh lived and died, into the Babylonians.

Babylon built a powerful empire around 800 BCE. That empire still worshipped Ishtar, and Enlil, and Anu, and the other Sumerian gods (though the names changed, just as we no longer call the Judeo-Christian god "Yahweh" or "Elohim", though the early Hebrews did). And it still had conversations about The Epic of Gilgamesh. "Great" conversations--just as we occasionally did, about this same book, in 2006.

That conversation turns very interesting around the year 600 BCE. Because the Babylonians--the worshipers of Ishtar and all the other gods you met--conquered a small kingdom nearby. They destroyed that kingdom's capital city, destroyed its temple and built one to their own gods. And they took the most powerful inhabitants of that city captive--as almost all early empires did, since the elites could mount a counter-revolution--and brought them back to live in the great city of Babylon.

These captives lived in Babylon for the next 50 years. They observed the different culture of their conquerors all that time: saw its forms of worship, of family, of business, of government. Saw its wealth and luxury. They were not treated like slaves; they only had to live in a single area of Babylon so that the Babylonian government could keep an eye on them.

Apparently, many of these captives enjoyed the city. When they had the chance to return to their kingdom, many of them chose to stay. (Their descendants are still in Iraq today.) Apparently, they thought that Babylon was much more attractive, wealthy, and enjoyable than their old kingdom.

Others, though--especially the priests of the conquered people--despised Babylon. Its king had ordered the destruction of their temple. And these priests wrote many religious texts during this captivity.

One of those texts was The Book of Genesis. The story of Adam and Eve was written by priests being held captive by the hated believers in the goddess Ishtar.

And, in a sense, Genesis is an example of "The Great Conversation." Because the writers of Eve had heard the story of Gilgamesh. They had seen the temples to Ishtar, and its priestesses like Shamhat. And many scholars and historians of religion argue that Genesis--with its story of Eve--is those priests' "conversational" answer to the story of Gilgamesh.

Thus, in the Bible, "Babylon" is, like Humbaba, characterized as the highest evil by the writers of Genesis. It was an act of revenge for the Babylonian Empire's conquest of Jerusalem and Judea.

So this is our first example of "the Great Conversation." Two and a half millennia (2500 years) after it was written, Gilgamesh is "answered" in another book--Genesis.

700 years later, a Christian writer added a Christian voice to this conversation in another book: The Book of Revelation. In this last book of the Christian New Testament, which tells of the Christian belief in the end of the world, the final cosmic battle between "Good" and "Evil," and the divine judgment and salvation or damnation of every human soul, special attention is given to describing the ultimate "evil" as...."the whore of Babylon." None other than Ishtar.

It's not the only example of "the Great Conversation" we've seen this semester. But it's definitely one of the angriest ones.

So...Hebrew priests write Genesis in response to an older book, Gilgamesh. Locke writes a book that answers the one he read by Hobbes. (And Hobbes' book, Leviathan, takes its title from the Hebrew book 2,000 years earlier that...answered Gilgamesh. "Leviathan" is the "whale" that swallowed Jonah.)

You see the pattern, I hope?

"The Great Conversation" is one between old books and new readers, critical readers, who respond to the old books with new ideas--in new books; it's a conversation between the past and the present, the dead and the living. It's been going on since writing began 5,000 years ago. And it went on in our classroom last semester.

That conversation would be very, very boring if there were no good, original, independent, critical readers.

It would also be boring if those critical readers were not also good, stylish writers. Who would want to read their "answers" to the old books if their answers were badly written?

So. I spent semester one trying to make you original, "seeing" readers so that you could begin to participate in "the Great Conversation." I succeeded with some of you--toward the end, you began to hear it, and even add to it.

With others, I didn't succeed--yet. You're still treating the Conversation like children at the dinner table, afraid to say anything while the grown-ups converse, and thinking, "I'm a child; I can't have my own ideas."

Well, you have all of semester two to start acting like the growing young adults you're becoming in the body, if not yet the mind. For you, I'll repeat what I said at the beginning of the year--my "Ten Commandments of Reading and Writing":

1. "Thou shalt not summarize"--which means just "throwing up" what you've read, without digesting it and chewing on it first. Summary is just memorizing. It's not thinking. You're adding nothing to "the conversation" if you just summarize.
   
2. "Thou shalt read like an alien"--which means, read critically. Like the Hebrews answering "Shamhat as woman" with "Eve as woman," and like Locke answering Hobbes with his own ideas about how we know and whether we're good or savage in nature, good readers think about what they read, and they often disagree with the books. (And can explain why, by picking out the parts of the book they found problems with.)
   

Here's a good place to stop: like all great conversations, by returning to the beginning (here, of this school year), and thinking again about its ideas.

[End of Part I. To be continued.]