“Bear with me. This language—the mother tongue—is a vestige of an earlier phase of human social development. Primitive societies were controlled by verbal rules called me. The me were like little programs for humans. They were a necessary part of the transition from caveman society to an organized, agricultural society. For example, there was a program for plowing a furrow in the ground and planting grain. There was a program for baking bread and another one for making a house. There were also me for higher-level functions such as war, diplomacy, and religious ritual. All the skills required to operate a self-sustaining culture were contained in these me, which were written down on tablets or passed around in an oral tradition. In any case, the repository for the me was the local temple, which was a database of me, controlled by a priest/king called an en. When someone needed bread, they would go to the en or one of his underlings and download the bread-making me from the temple. Then they would carry out the instructions—run the program—and when they were finished, they’d have a loaf of bread.
“A central database was necessary, among other reasons, because some of the me had to be properly timed. If people carried out the plowing-and-planting me at the wrong time of year, the harvest would fail and everyone would starve. The only way to make sure that the me were properly timed was to build astronomical observatories to watch the skies for the changes of season. So the Sumerians built towers ‘with their tops with the heavens’—topped with astronomical diagrams. The en would watch the skies and dispense the agricultural me at the proper times of year to keep the economy running.”
“I think you have a chicken-and-egg problem,” Uncle Enzo says. “How did such a society first come to be organized?”
“There is an informational entity known as the metavirus, which causes information systems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may be just a basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and radio waves—I’m not sure. In any case, what it comes down to is this: Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses—viruses generated from within itself.
“At some point in the distant past, the metavirus infected the human race and has been with us ever since. The first thing it did was to spawn a whole Pandora’s box of DNA viruses—smallpox, influenza, and so on. Health and longevity became a thing of the past. A distant memory of this event is preserved in legends of the Fall from Paradise, in which mankind was ejected from a life of ease into a world infested with disease and pain.
“That plague eventually reached some kind of a plateau. We still see new DNA viruses from time to time, but it seems that our bodies have developed a resistance to DNA viruses in general.”
“Perhaps,” Ng says, “there are only so many viruses that will work in the human DNA, and the metavirus has created all of them.”
“Could be. Anyway, Sumerian culture—the society based on me—was another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a linguistic form rather than DNA.”
“Excuse me,” Mr. Lee says. “You are saying that civilization started out as an infection?”
“Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It’s a simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don’t know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian culture—with its temples full of me—was just a collection of successful viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ring binders.
“The Sumerian word for ‘mind,’ or ‘wisdom,’ is identical to the word for ‘ear.’ That’s all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me—he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us.
“At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the few—perhaps the only—conscious human being in the world. He realized that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of this viral civilization.
“So he created the namshub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked.”
“Why didn’t everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-making me?” Uncle Enzo says.
“Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it out. So you might say that the namshub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness—when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That’s where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means ‘Gate of God.’ It was the gate that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was opened by the namshub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us the ability to think—moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world—a binary world—with both a physical and a spiritual component.
“There was probably chaos and upheaval. Enki, or his son Marduk, tried to reimpose order on society by supplanting the old system of me with a code of laws—The Code of Hammurabi. It was partially successful. Asherah worship continued in many places, though. It was an incredibly tenacious cult, a throwback to Sumer, that spread itself both verbally and through the exchange of bodily fluids—they had cult prostitutes, and they also adopted orphans and spread the virus to them via breast milk.”