Book Review - Lined Paper

Book Review by
Ronald Scheurer

If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways
By Daniel Quinn
2007

... or maybe even turn the paper upside down. And if the paper is unlined? Well, it isn’t so much the paper as it is how you perceive the world around you, and you formulate your own thoughts about your place in it.

Most of the book is written as a series of dialogues between Elaine (pseudonym) and Daniel during a holiday weekend. In those talks Quinn discusses his former books and his wonder why readers did not seem to understand their message. In fact, it seemed to horrify some of them. Why?

The problem, obvious in retrospect, was Quinn’s different frame of reference: somehow “alien and mysterious.” Rather than seeing humanity from an earthbound view, he felt like a Martian anthropologist watching a supposedly rational species destroy the planet they live on. The point made is that many fairly well off  humans today view their history on the earth as a highly successful god given adventure.

Lined paper makes writing on them a normal assumption. Writing across those lines makes a different assumption.

One of Quinn’s across the lines views is that Nature never was in balance. The idea of restoring that balance is relatively new and seems prompted by the fact that humans are very close to if not passed the tipping point of a whole new scenario for the planet; one not conducive to their own survival as a species. He also notes that if nature were in perfect balance, evolution would never have occurred. Humans would not be here. There is, however, no suggestion that humans return to pre-industrial times.

Further discussion presents a more probable scenario to an even earlier age. Stone Age living. During the Stone Age, there were no starving millions. Those images of humanity have only have been appearing for the last 70 years, yet food production has been increasing all of that time. Why? Any Stone Age man could find food with a little hunting and gathering. No one starved because their village territory rarely outstripped nature’s capacity to sustain their population. When it did they migrated to hunt and gather elsewhere. They did not stand on street corner with a cardboard sign.

How would rational Martians choose to live on the earth? Conversely, how would humans choose to live on another planet if it could initially support them with found food, water, and shelter? Would they have learned anything about what they did to the earth?

Elaine asks Quinn if he believes in god? Belief or disbelief in something that may or may not exist is not a universal human activity, though cross culturally is fairly common. God is given a performance review, and it would seem that either god does act in mysterious ways or people simply behave stupidly. Suppose there is no god, and the myths that there is/are (one or many) are merely tales told over the centuries by religious hucksters and politicians to acquire power, control, and wealth over populations not sustainable by local territories?

If politicians were given the same performance review as god, how would they fair? Would they too not act in mysterious ways to preserve their presumed status as gods on earth. Do they lead wisely, or do spend most of their time bickering over legislative details until their own ten commandments no longer garner enough votes for re-election.

Today, who lives at the hands of the gods? Many people in the developed world; most in the rest of the world. Why? Because it is easier to follow than to think for themselves. Clerically revised religions have for centuries told their ecclesiastic members and congregations that god gave them dominion over just about everything on the planet. They seem to have taken that to heart, but without much soul.

One of Quinn’s readers raises the issue of population control, or more precisely, at what point
will it become impossible to supply food to the local human biomass let alone to the world when the resources now used to do that drop below availability? Quinn doubts that the planet’s ecological systems could survive a population level of nine billion.  He is not alone.


Appendix I - The New Renaissance - An address delivered by Dan Quinn at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, March 7, 2002, is printed at the end of the book. It is a concise reading of the ideas appearing in his earlier books.

Appendix II - Our Religions: Are They the Religions of Humanity Itself? delivered as a Fleming Lecture in Religion, Southwestern University, Georgetown Texas, October 18, 2002, is also included in the book. It’s a short look at how religions got humanity into its current cul-de-sac.

RAS - 7/16/11