at the moment, and even though he wasn’t actually driving, this seemed to confer on him a certain driverly authority.
“Oh, I don’t think that missionary-style activity would work very well on those people,” Enoch returned.
To the others this might have sounded like informed speculation, but to Sophia, who, earlier today, had seen the remains of two actual missionaries nailed to crosses, it came off as just about the driest possible witticism. Seated to Enoch’s left, she face-checked him just to see if he was fucking with her. But he couldn’t have been more unreadable. He had a red beard on a face with some history, and gray hair swept back from his forehead. “If you’re going to try to get people to change the way they think, you have to offer some kind of value proposition, and that’s hard with these people.”
“Why these people in particular?”
“Well, you know, let’s say, for example, you’re trying to sell a tribe of Bronze Age shepherds on monotheism . . . you begin with, ‘Okay, chaps, there’s lots of different gods, but if you go all in with this one particular god, you’re signing on to a winning squad, you’re going to defeat the other tribes and control more grazing land.’ Which works, because they have an orderly sheep-based economy in which the rules of the game are clear and everyone can agree on basic ideas such as ‘If our animals eat more grass we have a better time of it.’ But those people, the people across the river, are in a very unsettled state and nothing really makes sense to them, and so trying to get them to buy into a coherent worldview of any sort is a mug’s game.”
Julian translated: “Bronze Age shepherds may have been just one step above cavemen, but at least they were reality based.”
“Very much so,” Enoch agreed. “And that goes on being more or less true for quite a while. Now, theater, and later movies, eventually get us into the realm of shared hallucinations. But those are neatly boxed in both space and time, and there’s a bit of ceremony to them. You buy the ticket, you enter the theater, you sit down, the lights dim, everyone in the place shares the same hallucination at the same time, lights come back up, it’s over, you go outside. Even old-school TV had some of that.”
“The TV was this big piece of furniture in the living room,” said Anne-Solenne, getting into it. “You sat down at eight P.M. to watch I Love Lucy or whatever.”
“Yes. It’s really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed,” Enoch said, “and enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/seven in their own personalized hallucination stream. And if you are still tied to reality by family or by some kind of regularizing influence in your day-to-day life, like having a job, then you’ve got a fighting chance. But those people—” Since it was awkward to gesture using ice-packed mitts, he pointed out the side window with his chin. “My goodness. Religion as such—as it has existed and flourished for thousands of years—doesn’t stand a chance.”
“Why doesn’t it stand a chance?” Sophia asked. “Can you elaborate? Remember, my friends didn’t see . . . what I saw.”
“Well, most religions add a supernatural overlay, something fantastical and imaginative, to the physical reality that everyone sees. Everyone sees the lightning bolt; religion adds the Zeus, standing on a mountain and hurling it. And if you are a Bronze Age shepherd of low to middling intellect and little imagination, well, that is a mind blower right there—the charismatic priest who can tell you that story with panache is really onto something, career-wise. Mutatis mutandis, same goes for other religions. They had a monopoly on the fantastical. Science fiction and fantasy combined with a revenue model.”
“Revenue model?” Julian asked sharply.
“Sacrifices, tithes, donations to 501(c)(3)s.”
“Gotcha.”
“But each person out there”—Enoch did the thing with his chin again—“is getting their own personalized stream of algorithmically generated alternate reality that is locked in a feedback loop with their pulse, blink rate, and so on. You’re not going to get very far trying to get one of those people to tear his attention away from that so that you can relate a story about some guy two thousand years ago feeding a large number of people with a few loaves and fishes.”
“But they crucify people!” Phil protested.
“You don’t have to remind me,” Enoch said, greatly amused.
“That’s