Neal Stephenson Quote

Sumerian culture -- the society based on me -- was anothermanifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in alinguistic form rather than DNA.Excuse me, Mr. Lee says. You are saying that civilization started out as aninfection?Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kickedout by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Oncethat me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It's asimple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread willlive 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-replicatingpiece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian culture -- with itstemples full of me -- was just a collection of successful viruses that hadaccumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it hadziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ringbinders.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 ofinformation. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to beespecially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me -- hewas a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious humanbeing, just like us.At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People werecarrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, notthinking 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 inorder for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip ofthis viral civilization.So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the sameroutes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of thebrain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerianlanguage, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our commondeep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in commonwith each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write newme. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked.Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-makingme? Uncle Enzo says.Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure itout. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of humanconsciousness -- when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginningof rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think aboutabstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the name Babel comesfrom. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate that allowed God toreach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that wasopened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave usthe ability to think -- moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world-- a binary world -- with both a physical and a spiritual component.