Ishmael

The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicately on a slender branch. "You are the teacher?" he asks incredulously. "I am the teacher," the gorilla replies. Ishmael is a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story to tell, one that no other human being has ever heard. It is a story that extends backward and forward over the lifespan of the earth from the birth of time to a future there is still time save. Like all great teachers, Ishmael refuses to make the lesson easy; he demands the final illumination to come from within ourselves. show more Is it man's destiny to rule the world? Or is it a higher destiny possible for him-- one more wonderful than he has ever imagined? show less

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2012/02/book-6-of-52-ishmael.html

I actually finished Daniel Quinn's Ishmael about two weeks ago.
I've spent the intervening time trying to decide what to say about it. I've been trying to find something positive to say because it came to me on the recommendation of a friend, and because a quick Google search turns up positive review after positive review.

I hated it. I kept trying not to, but I hate it the way I hated the Star Wars prequels: a good idea that so wildly misses the mark from development to realization that a project I should support becomes one I oppose.

Let's start at the start: Ishmael is a novel/ philosophical tract in a hybrid dialogue-diary form a la Plato's dialogues, following the show more unnamed narrator (perhaps Daniel Quinn, the narrator is a writer; perhaps an Everyman) as he meets and learns from the gorilla Ishmael, who communicates via telepathy.

That's not the tough to swallow part.

Ishmael teaches the narrator about the sins of the human kind, about how our lifestyle is destroying the planet, about another way of interacting with the universe.

Ishmael divides the human race into two categories of people: Takers and Leavers, a play on the expression "take it or leave it." The "it" in question is agricultural society. Already, I have alarm bells going off. Any time we view a world through dichotomy (black or white, male or female, liberal or conservative) we limit our vision, and we exclude an array of alternatives (shades of gray, transgender, a political science class worth of political middle grounds).

The Takers destroy the planet because they want to control it. Their fear of the unknown compels them to seize their destiny away from "the gods" (nebulous forces I'll talk more about in a minute). Leavers live as one with the planet because they are more accepting of the limits of nature's bounty, never demanding more than the earth can provide.

Quinn's Leavers are utopian: they work very little; they suffer from no crime, no depression, no fear; they do not destroy the planet as they take from it what they need but only what they need. We Takers are aggressive, violent, and intolerant of anyone who does not accept our lifestyle. Quinn spins the story of Cain and Abel into his Leaver-Taker mythology, as the Taker/agriculturist (Cain) kills and drives of Leaver/hunter-gatherer. Quinn never mentions any of the history of warfare between hunter-gatherer societies, since that would introduce some counterpoint into his argument, and he isn't interested in nuance. Just because the hunter-gatherers Quinn views as our guiding stars are hunter-gatherers, doesn't mean that they are exempt from the feeling of materialism, of greed, of desire that motivates so much of the Taker lifestyle.

Quinn blames our consumerism on a thing he calls Mother Culture, but which I recognize as social assumptions.

There are four kinds of knowledge:
things we know we know,
things we know we don't know,
things we don't know we know,
things we don't know we don't know.

The things we know we know and the things we know we don't know are the obvious. Everything we are aware of falls into one of these two categories. I know how to tie my shows, I know that pi is the constant of a circle, I know the distances down both foul lines at Yankee Stadium. I don't know the density of wood, or the stages of mitosis, or how to program a computer.

Mother Culture is wrapped up in the things we don't know we know. Gender roles, racial biases, the limits of our vocabulary, assumptions about how the world works; all of these happen subconsciously and influence the way we interact with the world. I know that the word "definite" means certain, clear, solid. I didn't look it up, and I don't remember ever learning it at school. I've always known the meaning of the word. Until I meet someone who challenges my knowledge of the word and its limits, it might never move from the category of a thing I don't know I know to a thing I know I know (or a thing I don't know I know!).

When Quinn writes about Mother Culture, she is an enemy. She tricks us into accepting as certain facts about the world we would do well to question: what are the limits of the earth's ability to sustain human life? what responsibilities to we have to keep the earth from that limit? how can we do this?

I like this part of Ishmael. For all my dislike of the book before and after the introduction of Mother Culture, this is the section I come back to (over and over again) in my effort to find something to like. In confronting Mother Culture, Quinn finds traces of another way to live that doesn't involve the materialism that threatens to absorb and destroy the world.

It seems to me that a pursuit of "the well examined life" may be our highest purpose. If we question ourselves deeply on what we know, why we know it, and what more we need to know, then I see no way we could not because fuller human beings, capable of ever greater acts of empathy and compassion to the world around us. In chapter 2 of Genesis, God gives Adam stewardship of all world, of all the plants and animals, of his wife and (eventually) his children. This rings true to me, that our greatest responsibility is to each other.

This responsibility to each other is not what Quinn draws out of his examination of Mother Culture. His examination of Mother Culture ends with the conclusion that the agricultural lifestyle is the wrong one, and that it must be abandoned at all costs. Even if it means allowing the majority of the population of the planet to starve to death whenever population outstrips the limits of the uncultivated earth's production. It's easy to imagine how simple life would be if we were a race of 1 million instead of 7 billion, but Quinn actually advocates it. Let 'em die off. He says it explicitly, repeatedly, and remorselessly. Let 'em die off until our numbers are reduced to manageable levels, and if drought comes, more shall die. It is unconscionable, and it overshadows and diminishes every part of Quinn's treatise.

In this section the of Ishmael, Quinn writes quite a bit about "the gods" and their will. These are not a pantheon or a stand in for any divinity that I recognize, but seem to be the capriciousness of the climate and weather and soil composition anthropomorphized. Quinn has built an entire logical argument that ends with a shrug that says, "if the gods will."

Ultimately, Quinn's argument falls apart for me when he attributes perfection to the Leavers and assigns blame for all the world's woes to the Takers. Quinn argues that the Leavers, as evidenced by their lifestyle, live in greater harmony with the world; we can see clearly that this lifestyle and that lifestyle are different, but I am unconvinced that the manifest differences are born from intrinsic differences, rather than the social differences of opportunity, education, and experience. The fact that the hunter-gatherers haven't built a city doesn't tell me that none of them might want to. show less

I had been hearing about the Ishmael books for a while before finally deciding to read Ishmael and My Ishmael. I certainly didn't expect a novel involving a telepathic gorilla who teaches about how civilization has become so destructive. Sometimes the structure or dialogue is a little clunky, but the message comes through and is the important part. Through his two characters--Ishmael and an unnamed narrator--Quinn offers a dissection of the underlying ideology of western/agricultural societies compared to older, aboriginal cultures. Very eye-opening/mind-altering to see such ideas laid bare. The main question is what can we do to reverse or alter our course before we destroy ourselves? Quinn believes that motivated and aware people must show more come up with their own solutions. If the problem is hierarchical domination, then the solutions must be decentralized and adapted to local needs and concerns. show less

I recently discovered Ishmael in my e-book collection, and the only thing that I remembered about it was that it had something to do with history. In retrospect I think that I had stumbled upon it in the bibliography section of some anti-civilization book[s], and had just stored it for a later time. I expected something complex and somewhat elegant, form-wise, though content-wise the book was shrouded in a fog. A fog easily dispersed after the first few pages, where the book is revealed as a passionate attack on contemporary Civilization (and all that led up to it, from the agricultural revolution onward) in a dialog format. Ishmael is certainly militant in its view of the concept of man as it has been developed and crystallized in the show more dominant paradigm.

Prose aesthetics are not the main focus here – the language is simple and extremely easy to follow. The two main protagonists, a human and a gorilla, tend to be a bit predictable and caricature-like in their dialogue, yet I can see the necessity of it in an educational text, as Ishmael strives (and ends up) being. What matters for the author first and foremost is the ideas nesting inside these numerous small chapters and their propagation. Very easy and immersive to read, it kind of reminded me of Efrem Levitan’s “Astronomy for children”, a Soviet children’s book about astronomy.

There are certain shortcomings, idea-wise: From the supposition that people 5000 years ago had more or less the same way of thinking as contemporary humans, to the assertion that agriculture is ecologically viable (though it is implied throughout much of the text that it is not, especially since it leads to surpluses, the management of which leads to power structures) if done a certain way (which it does not elaborate). There are also here traces of the embrace of a cultural materialism akin to Marvin Harris’ (“Cannibals & Kings”) one, and the book definitely has a certain logistical vibe (the implications of the male/female population proportion are not good). Lastly, the effects of modern culture and the concept of man upon the psyche are almost not discussed at all.

The book is however excellent in tracing many of the mythologies that permeate our culture (from the supposed inherent flawed nature of man to the world as a thing to be conquered by humans). It showcases how deeply and totally the imperialism of culture has integrated across the globe. Some ideas that intrigued me more than most follow:

1. “Leaver [humans outside the dominant cultural paradigm – isolated tribal hunter-gatherers for the most part] peoples are always conscious of having a tradition that goes back to very ancient times. We have no such consciousness. For the most part, we’re a very ‘new’ people. Every generation is somehow new, more thoroughly cut off from the past than the one that came before.”

2. I like the idea of Leavers succumbing to and accepting the will and whims of the Gods, though my understanding is that the author uses it as a sort of metaphor for nature. Either way, of essence here is is the humility, the recognition that human is not the crown of creation, the battering down of human arrogance. The arrogance that is responsible for believing that the whole world works in harmony with our dominant paradigm: “According to Taker mythology, every civilization anywhere in the universe must be a Taker civilization, a civilization in which people have taken the life of the world into their own hands.”

3. The implication that there is a natural law concerning living, which is as global and unescapable as the law of gravity (at least for the long-term survival of a species) is intriguing. On the one hand as with any law and any seemingly insurmountable restriction, I view it as something to strive towards overcoming (and here imagination is the key factor). Yet, the existence of these laws and their immutability by anything human reinforces the human race’s insignificance, and that is a much needed thing. A return to a scale where human is not the crown of creation not the master of the planet, but an imaginary aggregate of entities that have no qualitative difference from any other other entities. I especially like the part where the 2 protagonists enact an imaginary dialog between a leaver and taker (Takers being the majority of contemporary people, the ones living inside the prison of Civilization): the leaver cannot understand why a person should always satisfy a whimsical craving for a particular food (say he woke up and wanted to eat venison on a particular day), and even why it would be evil for some persons to die if they do not find food – is death something to be ashamed of? [No it is not, it is completely normal for population numbers to fluctuate, and here I remember Duerr's Dreamtime and the idea of moving the consciousness focus from individual to a larger, multi-organism scale.]

This is a book that I would be ecstatic to have discovered 10 or 15 years ago – not that its integral value is diminished now, but I had stumbled upon the majority of the expressed ideas in books that I’ve read in recent years. Definitely recommended. show less

When I was in HS, my Chemistry teacher gave me this book because he thought I would appreciate it. While everyone else was concerned with having fun, social status, and impressing the teachers and peers- I was just looking for the next book to impress me. He was absolutely right.
Socially urgent (not exactly forward and blunt in presentation, but definitely profound and strong in delivery), thought-provoking and makes you have a conversation with yourself. It covers a lot of deep topics like ethics, sustainability, evolution, global crisis, and where modern civilization went wrong in general.
If all of that sounds painfully dry or boring to you- I want you to consider this. Imagine a telepathic gorilla that caused a mutiny and show more disagreement amongst a judge's table that eventually awarded it $500,000 dollars and an ecological prize. (That's not the plot, but quite literally this book caused this little uproar in real life)

Because that's what happened with this book. It gives me chills. This book was published in the early 90s, and it aged so well. So many of its topics are still relevant, perhaps even more shockingly to this day. It sort of predicted the future. Let Ishmael teach you something.

“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”
~ quote from the book that I think is a good summary in one sentence show less

This isn't really fiction. It's more of a didactic philosophical diatribe against western civilization with the hippie sensibilities of the 70s (despite being written in the new age 90s), written in a dialogue between a man and a gorilla. Does a telepathic gorilla matter at all as far as the story is concerned? Nope. It's just an avatar for nature, and a gimmick that the target audience loved. As was rewording attacking western civilization as "takers vs leavers" (a bit transparent as the verbal boot is given explicitly to "whites", while glossing over or ignoring outright the many civilizations that did not start in the middle east or evolve in Europe).

Very much a product of its time, much of the details presented are just factually show more wrong. It's an eco warrior's understanding of history, combined with some noble savage mythology. You get classics such as "only man kills indiscriminately" which the average housecat disproves (the impact of cats on bird populations alone should be an eco warrior talking point but isn't because they're cuddly), let alone the evidence for chimpanzee warfare and wanton killing which would have been thematically appropriate with the gorilla.

The big thrust of the whole book is a malthusian understanding of food supply and population growth. As we're now entering a time of incredible excess coupled to population decline, even the central point is wrong. There are some ideas that dovetail with sustainability, but as far as the ecological debate goes it's left this 70s view in the dust. The author also acknowledges that it doesn't have anything to say about what to do about it, as that is left for the sequel. show less

When we study the intelligence of our ape cousins, we usually take the role of the teacher, or the expert. What if we reversed the relationship? What could our cousins teach us?

That’s what happens here. A man, the narrator, answers a personals ad, “Teacher seeks pupil.” It turns out that the “teacher” is a captive gorilla, behind a thick glass window in a bare room.

But the gorilla is able to communicate, telepathically. It also turns out that the gorilla has been doing a lot of observing, thinking, and learning, having been on exhibit and in other situations with ample opportunities to observe humans, listen to and learn their speech, and reach conclusions of his own. His name is Ishmael.

The great bulk of the story is the show more dialogue that follows, session after session, between the narrator and Ishmael. Ishmael volunteers that what he has to teach is something he knows very well — captivity. He has lived almost his entire life in captivity.

But the captivity he teaches isn’t physical captivity, it’s cultural captivity. He asks one question to frame his teaching. He asks what our (members of the narrator’s culture) explanation is “for how things came to be this way.” A creation story, the story that gives our culture meaning, goals, the basis for our intentions and actions.

Why captivity? As Ishmael explains, we are captives of this story. In fact, it takes considerable reflection and effort to see the story at all. And escaping it would be even harder.

The story that holds us captive is one in which humans are the crown and endpoint of creation, of evolution. Everything that has come before us has happened for the sake of our emergence. And the entire world around us is here for our use, to make something of for our purposes.

I’m cutting things very short here. The value of reading the book is experiencing the development of the story, in dialogue with Ishmael. By following the dialogue, we can see the extent and the pervasiveness of that cultural story, how inescapable it is in the tiniest details of everyday life.

The story, like I said, is told through dialogue. And the dialogue does at times mimic (uncomfortably and pedantically) a Socratic dialogue, with Ishmael standing in as Socrates (or the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues). The same disassembling and reassembling of arguments and assertions.

But you can’t get lost in the style. The point is there — the cultural story that holds us captive. Ishmael distinguishes a different story, one in which cultures other than our own live, so-called “primitive” or “uncivilized” cultures in which the world has not become resources for our manipulations and productions.

Those other cultures are, as Ishmael calls them, “Leaver” cultures. They leave the world as they find it, as for example a gorilla in the wild feeds, mates, sleeps, and lives his entire life, leaving everything as he found it. Our own culture, a “Taker” culture, possesses, transforms, dominates what it finds. It tames the soil in agriculture, it tames the forests, turning wood to lumber, . . .

The problem for Takers of course is the consequence of their “taking” — the destruction, the throwing out of balance of everything that life, their own and the lives of every other living thing, depends upon. A crisis, and we’ve hit it.

The book was written in the wake of the demise of the sixties counter-culture. And, as Ishmael explains, the counter-culture failed in part because it had no positive story to displace the current one that holds us captive.

So what is the positive story? What would you do if you recognized the story for what it is? That’s the crux, and, in the dialogue, an answer starts to surface — one that seeks to incorporate “leaving” into the civilized, technological life we are bound into. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

There is also a framing story for the book. Ishmael is, after all, a captive, physically. His condition is obviously the consequence of our cultural story. His own fate matters in that context. That’s something to think about after you’ve read the book. show less