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Ishmael (Quinn novel)

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Ishmael is a novel by Daniel Quinn. It presents an alternative view of human history and proposes a different program for human lifestyle change. Ishmael was awarded the $500,000 Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award.

Summary

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The story begins with a newspaper ad: "Teacher seeks pupil, must have an earnest desire to save the world". A nameless character (who is identified in a later book as Alan Lomax) responds to the ad out of nostalgia. He seeks the teacher and finds himself in a room with a gorilla.

To the man's surprise he finds that the gorilla can communicate telepathically. At first baffled by this the man quickly learns the story of how the gorilla came to be this way and he accepts the gorilla, Ishmael, as his teacher. The novel continues from this point as a socratic dialogue between the man and Ishmael as they hash out what Ishmael refers to as "how things came to be this way" for mankind and the environment.

Ishmael begins by telling the man that his life, which began in the wild, was spent mostly in a zoo and a menagerie, and since had been spent in the gazebo of the man that extricated him from physical captivity. He tells his student that it was at the menagerie that he learned about human language and culture and began to think about things that he never would have pondered in the wild. Subsequently, Ishmael tells the man that his subject for this learning experience will be captivity, primarily the captivity of man under a civilizational system that forces him to exploit and destroy the world to live.

The narrator has a vague notion that he is living in some sort of captivity and being lied to in some way but he can not explain his feelings.

Ishmael uses the example of Nazi Germany as he attempts to show his student that the people of his culture are in much of the same situation. Either held captive with the mythology of being superior, or "like an animal swept up in the stampede" of the captivity of those around them.

Before proceeding Ishmael lays some ground definitions for his student so they can be on the same page as they continue to discuss. He defines:

  • "Takers" as people often referred to as "civilized." Particularly, the culture born in an Agricultural Revolution that began about 10,000 years ago; the culture of Ishmael's pupil
  • "Leavers" as people of all other cultures; sometimes referred to as "primitive."
  • A "story" as an interrelation between the gods, man, and the Earth, with a beginning, middle, and end.
  • To "enact" is to strive to make a story come true.
  • A "culture" as a people who are enacting a story

Ishmael proceeds to tease from his pupil the premises of the story being enacted by the Takers: that they are the pinnacle of evolution (or creation), that the world was made for man, and that man is here to conquer and rule the world. This rule is meant to bring about a paradise, as man increases his mastery of the world, however, he's always screwed it up because he is flawed. Man doesn't know how to live and never will becuase that knowlege is unobtainable. So, however hard he labors to save the world, he just going to go on screwing it up.

Ishmael points out to his student that when the Takers decided there is something fundementally wrong with humans, they took as evidence only their own culture's history- "They were looking at a half of one-percent of the evidence taken from a single culture-- Not a reasonable sample on which to base such a sweeping conclusion."

Ishmael says: "There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact, in which they are the lords of the world, they will act as the lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now."

Ishmael goes on to help his student discover that, contrary to what the Takers think, there are immutable laws life is subject to and that it is possible to discern them by studying the biological community. Together, Ishmael and his student identify a set of survival strategies which appear to be evolutionarily stable for all species (later dubbed the Law of Limited Competition): In short, "you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war." All species inevitably follow this law, or as a consequence go extinct. The Takers believe themselves to be exempt from this Law and flout it at every point.

Ishmael goes on to help his pupil discover just how the Takers rendered themselves above the laws governing all of life. As an example, he brings up the story of The Fall of Man and tells a tale which explains why the fruit was forbidden to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: Eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil provides the gods with with the knowledge they need to rule the world- the knowlege of who shall live and who shall die. The fruit nourishes only gods, however, the gods saw that if Adam ("man") were to eat from this tree, he might think that he gained the gods' wisdom and in his arrogance, destroy the world and himself. "And so they said to him, you may eat of every tree in the garden, save the Tree of the Knowldge of Good and Evil, for on the day you eat of that tree, you will certainly die."

Ishmael makes the point that this story of the Fall of Man, which the Takers have adopted as their own, was in fact developed by the Leavers to explain the origin of the Takers, because if it were of Taker origin, the story would be of liberating ascent, and instead of being forbidden to Adam, the fruit of the Tree would have been thrust upon him.

Ishmael and his student go on to discuss how, for the ancient Semetic herders among whom the tale originated, the story of Cain killing Abel symbolizes the Leavers being killed off and their lands taken so that it could be put under cultivation. These ancient herders realized that the Takers were acting as if they were gods themselves, with all the wisdom of what is good and evil and how to rule the world. And as a result the gods banished these people from the Garden and they were brought from a life of bounty in the hands of the gods to one of being the accursed tillers of the soil.

Ishmael brings together his synopsis on human culture by examining the story enacted by Leaver cultures, which provides a model of how to live- an alternative story for the Takers to enact.

To discern the Leaver's story Ishmael purposes to his student a hypothesis: the Takers' Agricultural Revolution was a revolution against the Leavers' story. The Leavers take what they need from the world and leave the rest alone. Living in this manner ("in the hands of the gods"), Leavers thrive in times of abundance and dwindle in times of scarcity. The Takers however, practicing their unique form of agriculture (dubbed by Quinn, Totalitarian Agriculture) produce enormous food surpluses, which allows them to thwart the gods when they decide it's the Takers time to go hungry. "When you have more food than you need, then the gods have no power over you." Thus, Ishmael points out that the Takers revolution was not just a technological change, but also serves a mythological function.

"So we have a new pair of names for you. The Takers are 'those who know good and evil' and the Leavers are 'those who live in the hands of the gods'."

The Leavers as a collective unit abide by the laws of the living community (the Law of Life), and therefore live in the hands of the gods. One of the main attributes of Leaver culture is that there is no one distinct way to live that is forced on all the differing people residing in the world - diversity reigns.

While the digression of the Taker culture has overwhelmed the Earth, in mere thousands of years, Leaver cultures have lived soundly for millions of years: "Each Leaver culture is an accumulation of knowledge that reaches back in an unbroken chain to the beginning of human life. This is why it's no great wonder that each of them has a way that works well. Each has been tested and refined over thousands of generations."

Ishmael finishes with a summary of how we can begin to end the environmental genocide began by the Takers 10,000 years ago:

"The story of Genesis must be reversed. First, Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is essential if you're to survive. The Leavers are the endangered species most critical to the world- not because they're humans but because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there is no one right way to live. And then, of course, you must spit out the fruit of the forbidden tree. You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet."

The student is left with the idea that he must help others see that in order to save the world we must follow the Leavers' mentality about letting the rest of the community live, but wonders how to go about it. Ishmael admonishes him to "Teach a hundred what I've taught you, and inspire each of them to teach a hundred."

Follow-ups to Ishmael by Daniel Quinn include The Story of B, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization. Quinn's autobiography is entitled Providence: The Story of a 50 Year Vision Quest and details how the author arrived at the ideas behind Ishmael.

Ishmael's interpretation of Genesis 2.4

Ishmael points out that the story was written by the Semites, and later adapted to work within Hebrew and Christian belief structures. Ishmael proposes that Abel and his extinction metaphorically represents the nomadic Semites and their losing conflict with agriculturalists. As they were driven further into the Arabian peninsula, the Semites became isolated from other herding cultures and, according to Ishmael, illustrated their plight through oral history, which was later adopted into the Hebrew book of Genesis.

Ishmael denies that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden of humans simply to test human's self-control. Instead, Ishmael proposes that the Tree represents the choice to bear the burden of responsibility of deciding which species may live and which should die. This is a necessary decision agricultural peoples must make when deciding which organisms to cultivate, which to displace, and which to kill in protection of the first.

Ishmael explains that the Fall of Adam represents the Semetic belief that once mankind usurps this responsibility--historically decided through natural ecology (i.e. food chains)-- that mankind will perish. He cites as fulfillment of this prophecy contemporary environmental crises such as endangered or extinct species, global warming, and modern mental illnesses.

Criticisms

Quinn's assertion that human population expands in proportion to food supply regardless of cultural or technological checks is common to some environmental claims, but it remains contentious. Recent population trends indicate a dropoff in fertility rates in most regions in the globe; many demographers claim that increased women's autonomy and access to reproductive technology is responsible for the decrease, and that such trends actually bring fertility below the " replacement rate" in many industrialized nations. Some argue that people in industrial societies have less of an "incentive" to "over-reproduce," as children are a net economic drain, unlike in agrarian societies. In this view, it is possible that population levels will become self-limiting if people -- in particular, women -- have access to contraception and are given control of their own bodies. Quinn asserts that overall, our global population continues to rise in proportion to the food supply even if fertility rates fall locally, but does not suggest a mechanism that would override those local trends; the export of increasing agricultural commodities from industrialized countries to the 'developing' world may have a part to play in this analysis. Additionally, Quinn has repeatedly stated that the lifestyle that contributes to the decline in population in industrialized countries puts an unsustainable pressure on the planet's biosphere as it requires the extinction of roughly 200 species a day to maintain. If those countries whose populations are currently still growing were to adopt the fully "Western" society that enables lower birth rates, it would present a catastrophic (and wholly unsupportable) addition to the human pressure on the environment.

See also

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