    40

    a  series of holy feasts that peppered all four seasons.  The country's

    agricultural practices were controlled by the ritual demands of this

    elaborate holiday calendar.  But a few years ago, foreign experts

    persuaded Bali's farmers to free themselves from the dictates of super-

    stition.  Following the enlightened advice, cultivators planted and

    harvested according to modern schedules.  The result was a disaster.

    Crops began to rot in the fields.  Mice and insects got out of hand,

    eating away much of the harvest that did survive.  It turned out that

    the ornate cycle of holidays with which the Indonesian priests had

    pleased their gods served a secondary function.  It acted as a timing

    mechanism, mustering the farmers to open and close the sluices of the

    country's complex irrigation system and to do their planting on

    precisely the right days to maximize crop production and minimize

    rodents and pests.  In satisfying a set of arbitrary deities no one had

    ever seen, the priests had constructed a system more successful than

    any of Indonesia's up-to-date agricultural planners had yet been able to

    invent.65

    Building pictures of the invisible world is the human way of

    trying to deal with the world we see.  Each cosmology-making meme is

    a problem-solving device, allowing us to master dilemmas that a dog, a

    cat or a canary has a great deal more difficulty coping with.

    Animals and human beings are both up against a world where

    most of what determines their fate is invisible to them at the moment.

    To a monkey in a clearing, food is nowhere in view.  Often neither are

    the males he's competing with.  Or the females he's competing for.  The

    infants he's contending for the right to father do not, as yet, exist. The

    predators who could end his life are equally hidden from sight.  But he

    has to deal with all of these to send his genes into the next generation.

    To survive, a human has to deal with an even more complex

    invisible world.  For a man on his way to work, most of the things that

    affect him are completely out of sight.  Wife, children, boss,

    competitors at the office, stores that provide his food and clothing, or a

    natural disaster that could end his existence are all, for the moment,

    visible only in his imagination.  But he has to measure these factors

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