This is part of a series of posts representing ideas from the book, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I view the ideas explored in Ishmael to be so important to the world that it seems everyone should have a chance to be exposed. I hope this treatment inspires you to read the original.

In Chapter EIGHT, Alan finally works out the Law of Life and explores its implications. This chapter is presented in 10 numbered subsections, beginning on page 123 of the original printing and page 129 of the 25th anniversary printing. The sections below mirror this arrangement in the book. See the launch post for notes on conventions I have adopted for this series.

1. The Law of Life

After a day of procrastination and three days actually working it out, Alan was ready to present his Law of Life to Ishmael—appreciating the value in having done the work himself rather than imperfectly absorbing it as a passive listener. Alan presents four defining Taker actions not to be found outside Taker culture:

1. Deliberate elimination of competitors;
2. Deliberate elimination of the food of their competitors to make more room for their own;
3. Prevent competitors from accessing food designated for Takers;
4. Store a glut of collected food [tentative].

On the first, an important clarification is that animals will defend their lives, territories, and their kills—and occasionally treat competitors as prey. But they do not seek out competitors—or their own predators—for the explicit aim of killing them (for reasons other than food). The evidence is that if extermination for its own sake (war) were a common theme, biodiversity would tank—possibly leaving no viable ecology at all.

On the second, the usual rule is to take only what’s needed and leave the rest for others.

On the third, it works to say “This gazelle is mine,” but not to proclaim ownership of all gazelles. Others may take whatever circumstances allow. This is also important in terms of cultivated crops. Takers decree full ownership: insects, birds, mice have no “right” to any of it, under punishment of death. Those living by the Law of Life, on the other hand, will defend their gatherings, but not the sources of the food they gathered.

Ishmael pushes back on the fourth point. Plenty of animals make food caches to get them through winter, for instance. Heck, almost every plant or animal stores chemical energy from food somewhere in their cells and bodies. In fact, the entire biomass on the planet is a type of storage [a solar-charged battery], available to all the rest to partake in the ways that they do. Everybody gotta eat.

2. The Law of Competition

The Law may be restated:

You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war. [emphasis mine]

This law keeps the peace. As noted before, in the absence of this law, “winners” would emerge at each trophic level, having successfully eliminated competition. Thus, the law serves to protect and promote biodiversity. In return, biodiversity protects the entire ecological community by virtue of its inherent resilience in the face of inevitable variations over almost all timescales.

It is not too great a stretch to believe that a fragile community of life lacking biodiversity would get wiped out, so that the only way to have enduring life is to have biodiversity. And the only way to have biodiversity is if the Law of Life/Competition is followed. It is a mandatory feature of a successful community of life.

Alan correctly observes that biodiversity is exactly what modernity is destroying the fastest. We are not killing the planet because we’re hapless and clumsy: we’re doing so because our cultural attitude pits us against the living world in a state of war.

3. Recipe for Disaster

Ishmael explores with Alan the consequences and ripple-effects of a single species adopting a policy of behavior in violation of the Law. Using hyenas as an example, they walk through how the hyenas set out to eliminate the lions. Since more prey is available to the hyenas, their population swells. A limit looms as the gazelle population is no longer sufficient to support the glut of hyenas. Solution: eliminate the gazelles’ competition for the grasses they eat, to get more gazelles. The next step is to kill off the plants that compete with the grasses gazelles eat.

Alan has a realization: “Funny…This is considered almost holy work by farmers and ranchers.” Indeed, for Takers it is a sacred duty to kill and destroy whatever gets in the way of supporting more humans. Nothing but Takers and their immediate dependencies matter [in the puny, ecologically-ignorant, narrow mental model of the Taker meat-brain].

4. Food Fuels Population

Increased food production/availability leads to a population explosion, but we tell ourselves that humans are exempt from such laws, despite a towering mountain of evidence to the contrary.

5. Violation vs. Subjectivity

Given the framing—that the emergence of a rogue Taker culture accompanied the agricultural revolution—Alan wonders if agriculture is fundamentally contrary to the law. Ishmael responds that the Taker approach to agriculture (which Quinn labels Totalitarian Agriculture in subsequent works) certainly is incompatible, but that other forms of agriculture may be practiced [by ants, even].

Alan ties agriculture to settlement as a necessary accompaniment, but Ishmael is not so sure. The Taker flavor leads to a preponderance of settlements via growth, but lots of animals [and certainly plants] settle into territories, dens, nests, etc.—and to varying degrees or durations. Leaver cultures also run a spectrum of more or less dependence on growing or favoring plants (horticulture) without violating the Law of Life (not engaging in a war on competition).

The main point is that agriculture and settlement are not necessarily in violation of the Law of Life/Competition, but certainly are subject to it, ultimately.

6. Food Makes Babies

Alan accepts the conclusion that any species violating the Law of Life—and able to execute such a plan—will destroy the community of life in the process. It is not tied to some particular wickedness of humans [except perhaps our attributes make us the first/only able to pull it off]. But he pushes back—or at least represents that Mother Culture pushes back—on the premise that an expanding food supply necessitates an expanding population. Takers believe themselves to be exempt from such primitive math.

The standard story is that “it’s within our power to increase food production without increasing our population.” The purported purpose of the increase is to feed millions of the most hungry humans. But a contract is not signed that those millions will not reproduce more if better fed. The result is as predictable as clockwork, and has been witnessed basically every year for the last 10,000 years.

Birth control is said to be the answer to this phenomenon. We still believe that someday it might kick in, as we continue to climb. For all the talk, increased food production and the resultant population increase is an annual event, while population control remains a theoretical get-out-of-jail-free card that has yet to be produced. [Update: 30 years later a global fertility decline appears to be underway.]

It is important to recognize that as long as our culture enacts the story that the world was made for humans, we will continue prioritizing the feeding and (unwitting) expansion of the human population. It’s a positive-feedback cycle, in that increased population demands increased food production, ad infinitum [until something big breaks, as may be starting].

Starvation and the resulting population haircut is not alien to the community of life, and in fact is a key mechanism for maintaining a healthy community for all species—even the starving ones. Takers intervene, though, distributing food around the globe to counter the cull of nature [I thought I just made that term up, but no such luck], and thus thwart the ecologically “healthy” response. Because the human population is never allowed to falter, pressures persist and famine sets up as a permanent feature of modernity, priming the pump for another round of food increase and thus maintaining positive feedback. This food–population connection is very unpopular among cheerleaders of modernity.

When Alan notes that it is hard to stand by and “let them starve,” Ishmael pounces on the word “let” as language normally reserved for the gods.

Voicing another common reaction to the proposal that food makes babies, Alan points out that states or countries that produce boatloads of food are not the ones with soaring populations, which seems to destroy this whole theory. Ishmael shakes his head, reminding Alan about global shipping capability. Population growth need not happen in the same cornfield where the grain was grown, or even in the same hemisphere. The “first-world” countries feed the growth in the “third-world”—no two ways about it; the food comes from somewhere.

“Prudent” overproduction of food creates the chronic condition of surplus, as Taker-gods are dead-set against allowing hunger anywhere. Inevitable imperfections in distribution (not all—or even most—surplus makes it to the starving), the necessary result is population increase in proportion to the surplus. The only way to effect a controlled stop is to terminate the practice of increasing food production and letting it settle out [yeah, right—like that would ever happen in our culture].

7. Embodied Limits

Ishmael presented Alan with a map of Native American tribal geography, showing numerous tribes confined to finite regions. Ishmael asks Alan what limits their growth, as inferred from the map.

Alan is unsure how a map would help. He gets a hint: it was not an empty country; expansion was not an option; thus population control was a necessity.

It is easy for us to get confused, because if someone is tired of winters in the Northeast, they can move from New Hampshire to Arizona. The imaginary lines that constitute state boundaries have little significance in terms of limiting mobility. For the Leaver tribes, these boundaries were not imaginary: they had consequences. Straying onto another tribe’s territory with an eye toward resettlement would probably result in death. Cultural differences also created insurmountable barriers. A Creek could not decide to be a Cherokee—much less a Sioux; a Hopi could not decide to be a Seminole, or even an Apache. These restrictions erected a powerful influence on population control: your tribe could only grow to what your territory could support, in the usual ecological sense.

It was easier to accept population limits than to go to war with fierce neighbors. The ferocity was also a necessary part of stability. So, we’re not talking about an idealized peaceful utopia. It was as fierce as it had to be to work. Cultural diversity also played an important role in species-level resilience, as the practices of one tribe might excel due to the same conditions that hurt another. Homogeneity is a killer. [The global homogeneity of Taker culture is itself a part of why it will fail.]

8. Unsustainable: Guaranteed Failure

Just as a flying contraption not built with respect to aerodynamic laws will not be able to remain airborne for any substantial length of time, a way of life not built to obey the law of limited competition will not be able to avoid a crash. Modernity—being such a violating construct; an enactment of the Taker premise—will die.

Alan correctly predicts that Takers will not accept this Law. At least they would never accept that it applies to humans the way it does to any other species. This is the third Dirty Trick (from Chapter 6). To accept this would finish Taker culture: it’s fundamentally incompatible. But, Taker culture must be terminated in order for us (all) to survive. Because culture is generated out of brains, we do have the option to stop following a toxic cultural premise.

Whether or not we accept this fact is irrelevant: the result is guaranteed. Similarly, a person stepping off the edge of a cliff need not accept the role of gravity for it to exert its indifferent, fatal pull. Ishmael expresses his belief that plenty of people perceive our approach as being bankrupt and are ready to entertain new ideas for how to live.

9. Get Over Yourselves

In a desire to consolidate the three (surviving) laws emerging from Section 1, Ishmael offers a root form:

No one species shall make the life of the world its own.

Alternatively:

The world was not made for any one species.

Life worked on this planet for billions of years before Taker culture emerged. It wasn’t a world of chaos yearning to be tamed by humans. It already had a Law that worked rather well. No new rulers were required [and in fact, are not being well-received].

10. Supreme Ailments

The final section of the chapter begins by whistling a tune familiar to my ears:

The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world…

Many uncomfortable parallels connect to Hitler’s efforts based on a story of Aryan supremacy. Such a misguided foundation sets Takers up to be a rather lonely species, engulfed in enemy territory. Alertness must remain high for attacks on any number of fronts. [No wonder we imagine the world before human rule to be a chaotic and dangerous hellscape.]

Many of the afflictions of modernity (like crime, mental illness, drug addiction) are absent in Leaver cultures. Mother Culture explains that Leavers are “too primitive to have these things.” They are part-and-parcel of modernity: “the price of advancement.”

Some attribute the lack of these ailments in Leaver culture to a Noble Savage story: that living in communion with nature cleanses the soul, inoculating against mental illness and the like. Ishmael wants to be very clear that this is not what he’s suggesting—as many in our culture reflexively conclude when someone says anything charitable about Leavers in contrast to Takers: not allowed!

No matter where you go in the world, the dominant culture is decidedly the Taker sort. Story details may vary, but they enact the same basic story following the same basic premise. Likewise, Leavers across the globe will have a diverse set of origin stories, but all enact a similar overall story. The Taker story is that of a madman bent on domination: the concomitant greed, cruelty, and supremacism lead to the afflictions of modernity that are absent in Leaver cultures: it’s no surprise.

The Leaver story does not bestow power on its enactors. It affords lives that work well for them. It’s not an existence dominated by striving and angst; by confusion and adversaries. These cultures do not constantly seek novelty that makes the past obsolete: they embrace and treasure ancient tradition. These features are not due to some inherent nobility or a life of beautiful sunsets. Rather, they result from “enacting a story that works well for people,” and has done so for millions of years. It continues to provide satisfying lives for those still able to practice the old ways in the tiny corners not yet overrun by modernity.

Before breaking for the day and preparing for the next installment, Alan raises some discontentment over the gendered term “Mother Culture” and its implication of a female villain. Ishmael explains that any nurturer might acquire a female identity, for better or for worse. The nurturer of Taker culture will have a much different character than that of a Leaver culture.

Next Time

In the next installment, Chapter 9 delves into an alternative interpretation of the story of Genesis, cast into Taker and Leaver terms. You can take it or leave it, but I find it pretty compelling.

I thank Alex Leff for looking over a draft of this post and offering valuable comments and suggestions.

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