Last time, on Kit's Lost and Found: As part of my Theory of Knowledge course my junior year in high school, I chose to read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Ishmael introduced me to a number of big ideas, most notably that some of the biggest foundations of modern "Taker" culture (the idea that humans are the pinnacle of creation, that humans thus own/should control all other life on Earth, that humans need prophets or other divine guidance to know the one right way to live) are all stories that we have told ourselves. But there are other ways of relating to the world and other stories we can tell.

I honestly don't remember how many books I was supposed to read for this particular assignment. What I do remember is as soon as I finished Ishmael, I started reading Daniel Quinn's next book, The Story of B (1996). Once again, huge thanks to Tom Murphy for his summary of the entire book (focusing mostly on the philosophical content as opposed to the story beats).

Instead of hanging out with a telepathic gorilla, our narrator Jared Osborne is a Catholic priest who must investigate with whether or not the public lecturer known as "B" is actually the Antichrist. Once again, it's kind of an odd setup, but the fact that Jared is a clergy member is part of why this story hit me so hard.

The Story of B includes some of the same lessons Ishmael does, but it expands on them as well. B explains to Jared that he is trying to create a "mosaic" of many small ideas: it's only after many small pieces are in place that you can step back and see the whole image. I remember sitting on my bedroom floor, gathering piece after piece. I don't have the space here to cover each of them (please read the book or check out Murphy's summary!), but in terms of the history of humankind:

• By the time recorded history begins, around 5000 B.C.E., post-agricultural humans (the "Takers", as Quinn dubs them in Ishmael) have completely forgotten their hunter-gatherer origins and have lost 3 million years' worth of knowledge and culture ("The Great Forgetting"). We, the Takers, tell ourselves we have always been agriculturalists and civilization-builders and that these are the things humans are meant to do.

• The Taker system of "totalitarian agriculture," as Quinn writes, "subordinates all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food." This system leads to increased food production which, unsurprisingly, leads to an increase in population. The population surge creates all kinds of problems, including overcrowding; wars for resources; plagues; crime; and slavery; at a scale that's unprecedented in humankind's previous 3 million years on Earth.

• From about 1400 B.C.E. through 1200 C.E., human population growth continues to accelerate, and with it, our problems. Salvation-based religions emerge as an answer to this suffering: first Judaism, Brahmanism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and Buddhism, followed later by Christianity. By 1700, Christianity, with its focus on salvation as individual and deeply personal, has expanded across the globe.

• With advent of the Industrial Revolution, we now have consumerism and things to save us from (or at least distract us from) our problems, which have expanded to include labor exploitation, geopolitical domination, environmental destruction, genocide, and more.

• By the time we reach the mid 1990's, there are six billion people on Earth and we Takers have almost entirely decimated the few remaining Leaver cultures. We don't remember any other way to live, so, as Murphy summarizes, "the mounting threats to modernity seem like existential threats to humanity itself, leading to panic, disillusionment, escapism, and the general sense that it’s every person for themself." (Sound familiar?)

My teenage self took all of this in because it made logical sense. Quinn was referring to events I already knew; it was the same history of conflict and suffering that I'd been studying in school for years. Ishmael and The Story of B also offered me a new way to make sense of the suffering I saw on TV growing up, including ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and genocide in Rwanda.

Next time: The Story of B illustrates the role of religion in post-agricultural human culture, and the mosaic snaps into focus.