Peripheral Visions

others partially, much more cheaply than by conventional methods, but this may not be enough. What is interesting (and makes engineers nervous) is that no one knows how to choose all the organisms to participate in such systems, so John gathers samples from swamps and rivers and puts them together, allowing them to organize their own communities. They are too complex to plan, just as no available process of deliberate planning could generate the cultural diversity of a great city.
    The preference for uniformity has deep roots. Agribusiness still prefers to work with monocultures, thousands of acres of uniform planting requiring heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers. Contemporary anxiety about multiculturalism may echo recurrent attempts to root out heresy and maintain spiritual monocultures. Yet oddly, once we accept the presence of diversity, it becomes possible to find it in new forms, while at the same time subtle echoes become discernible in what once seemed entirely disparate. Internally as well, diversity and congruity can combine in the liberation of unimagined potentials.

Limited Good
    W HEN STRANGERS MEET AND TRY TO FIND WAYS of fitting together, the outcome may depend on the assumptions they bring to all interactions, even before the first new cue is available. In the societies I have studied, some of the ways of seeing the world go back to common sources thousands of years old, for in each of these societies related religions provide recurrent metaphors. Fathers and the authority of fathers. Sacrifice and law. The divine right to dominion over children, women, other species, other nations, the planet itself.
    Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been shaped by a recurrent solution to encounters with other ways of seeing the world: whether in the family or in the universe, authority has a single source and so does truth. Abraham’s God is a jealous god, and truth is exclusive. Each community believes that its understanding is not simply good, not even better, but best. We cannot all be right, so whatever is different is wrong. Here, identity precludes adaptation. Heresy is another of the themes of this tradition, carried over in some of its nontheist offshoots, like psychoanalysis and Marxism.
    These ideas are still being acted out in the Middle East, reemerging in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, inspiring civil wars in Africa. They were expressed in the human constellation joined to sacrifice a sheep in that Persian garden and in the Islamic revolution less than a decade later. In the Philippines they are filtered through generations of missionizing and syncretism, but they still cause friction between different kinds of Christians and between Christians and Muslims, and scorn for the pre-Christian beliefs that survive in the mountains.
    The same symbols turn up in different traditions. There is an egg on the Seder table, and eggs are part of Easter celebrations from Washington, DC, to Manila to Madrid. The eggs on the festive tables celebrating the vernal equinox in Iran are pre-Islamic, going back before Zoroaster, suggesting that the common symbol is even more ancient. An egg appears to be dead, like a stone, but brings forth life.
    Many of the same basic ideas about human use of the natural world also turn up in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In all three, men (in the old ambiguous sense with its hidden preference) stand in a special relationship to God that separates them from the rest of creation and makes them lords over it. Ideas of what that creation is like—knowable, divisible, subject to use and domination—also turn up again and again. The wooden Christ on my desk with its nose sliced off reflects the perception by Filipinos, a Malayo-Polynesian people, that there was a connection between Spanish domination and the imagery of Christianity.
    The Book of Genesis is a compendium of origin myths including the first incest and the first refugee as well as the creation and the fall and the first murder; running through it there are echoes of other ways of seeing the world and the gradual assertion of a new point of view about both ideas and real estate. Abraham’s grandson Jacob appears as one of those culture heroes, like Raven or Coyote or Odysseus, celebrated for subtlety and guile. I like to think of him, when he cheats his brother, as the inventor of the world of zero-sum economics: the world where every success is at the expense of someone else.
    Old as the story is, it is