Peripheral Visions

of irrigation and the rise of empires and great cities. One man’s loss came to be another man’s gain. The myth of Jacob suggests that he understood this and used it to his profit.
    The life of hunter-gatherers like the San does not generally fit this pattern. These are societies in which property is scant and easily portable, the sharing of food is obligatory and enforced by social pressure, and competition is not emphasized. No group is without conflict, but a number of hunting-gathering peoples lack the institution of warfare. Even where warfare is present, it is striking how often warfare among preliterate peoples is not organized around territory or sustained dominance but around ideas like honor. Modern warfare, however, behind its complex ideological overlays, has been very greatly concerned with territory and control of resources, oil reserves or deepwater harbors. The end of the cold war removed an ideological polarization but unleashed the rivalries within the Soviet empire, the enmities between brothers when the father’s control is removed.
    When Europeans spilled out of their intensively farmed enclave in Europe, they found their way to lands where subsistence patterns spread people farther and densities were lower. Most of Australia and Oceania, parts of the rain forest areas of Southeast Asia, much of sub-Saharan Africa and the new world depended on hunting and gathering or on shifting horticulture, in which a household could increase its food supply by opening up new fields. In all these places, zerosum economics was introduced as a benefit of civilization, for often new ideas of salvation and new attitudes toward land have come in the same package.
    A change in the distribution of humans on the land was well under way when Europeans got their first toehold at the southern tip of Africa. Farther north, a number of peoples speaking languages of the Bantu family had been gradually shifting their herds and farms southward, bringing new areas under cultivation and displacing hunter-gatherers. Both the Boers and the English came to Africa bringing European ideas of ownership and competition, and the Boers especially brought imaginations dominated by Old Testament imagery of a chosen people and a promised land. In Africa as in North America, resources that once seemed limitless were made finite, boundaries were drawn and fences built. Eventually apartheid laws were passed, limiting the access of black Africans to land and later segregating them in pseudostates, the national homelands, with desperately inadequate resources for growing populations. A few generations of European colonization ground in the lesson of limited good and ground down the ethos of sharing, so that the abolition of apartheid immediately posed the question of succession, of larger slices of the newly available pie. Today, the fault lines in South Africa recapitulate global problems, the interface within a single country of the developing and the industrialized world.
    Land and water are not the only kinds of benefits that people came to imagine as divided in fixed shares so that more for one meant less for the other. Isaac’s paternal blessing is as much a matter of envy as his wealth. The rivalry of two brothers vying for a father’s love is prefigured in the rivalry of Cain and Abel for God’s favor, which seems to echo a time very early in the history of the Jewish people when the life of nomadic herdsmen still seemed morally superior to that of farmers. One brother offered God meat while the other offered fruit and vegetables and grain. God favored the offering of Abel over that of Cain, who in his jealousy committed the first murder, killing Abel. Modern readers tend to be disconcerted by the fact that Cain, the murderer, was the farmer, the one who offered veggies to a God who preferred meat. The hostility between Jews and Arabs is traced to another pair of brothers, Ishmael and Isaac, when Sarah decided that marriage was a zero-sum game and Ishmael, with his mother, Abraham’s concubine Hagar, was abandoned to God’s care.
    In such a worldview, blessings are limited. Love is limited. Not only are all goods limited but they are all fungible and all transitive, so that it is easy to pit different values against each other, as if they belonged to the same kind of arithmetic, spotted owls versus full employment. For many doctrines, salvation is limited and there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Listening to a Native