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.

Chapter THIRTEEN contains no more lessons, focusing instead on a failed rescue attempt. Its brevity allows room for my own overall assessment at the end. This chapter is presented in four numbered subsections, beginning on page 255 of the original printing and page 275 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. Clumsy Rescue Plan

Alan sets out to rescue Ishmael, scraping together all his meager savings. His car has radiator-fan trouble and goes to the shop. He admits to having no real plan for what to do if he succeeds in rescuing Ishmael, or for that matter how to get an unwilling gorilla into his car.

2. Empty Van, Empty Cage

The car is hopeless, so Alan rents a van. He finds the carnival lot empty, but spots a few of Ishmael’s belongings: books, maps, and the rolled-up poster Alan saw on his first day in Room 105.

Alan is shocked to learn from the guy doing post-carnival clean-up that Ishmael died earlier that morning of pneumonia [as did Daniel Quinn, ultimately]. Only then did Alan connect the fatigue, coldness, and sneezing of the selfless gorilla. But, he was never much good at being anything other than self-absorbed.

When Alan asked what happened to Ishmael’s body, the clean-up guy could only speculate that the county dealt with the situation in much the same way they do roadkill: cremating the remains.

Alan asked permission to take the belongings (except the blankets), which were few enough to carry easily. Of course, the guy could not care any less what this nut-job did.

3. Alone in Grief

Not knowing what else to do, Alan returns home. He has no one else with whom to share his grief. Eventually, he remembers that one person might wish to hear the news, so he called the Sokolow house’s butler, Partridge.

Partridge expressed sorrow to learn of Ishmael’s death. Alan scolded Partridge that they might have saved him had he been more forthcoming with information. After a moment’s thought, Partridge asked: “Are you sure he would have let us?” See, the guy knew Ishmael well after all.

4. Flip Side

Alan took the poster to be framed, only then noticing upon rolling it out that it had two sides. The side he had seen before (whose purposeful ambiguity initially annoyed him) said:

WITH MAN GONE,
WILL THERE
BE HOPE
FOR GORILLA?

The flip side asked:

WITH GORILLA GONE,
WILL THERE
BE HOPE
FOR MAN?

Sadly, gorilla gone.

The End

Thus concludes the novel Ishmael. Many are shocked and even angry at the “unfair” ending. I’ll just say that any objections you might make could easily be rendered moot by reading My Ishmael, the third novel in the loose trilogy. Before writing the second book, The Story of B, Daniel Quinn produced a book describing his nearly-life-long journey to writing Ishmael. It’s called Providence: The story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest, and I found it to be well worth reading. The ishmael.org website has loads of additional content and FAQs. I also highly recommend Alex Leff’s entertaining and well-produced podcast called Human Nature Odyssey, inspired by the teachings of Ishmael.

A Brief Take

I don’t know of any other modern book that as many people (myself included) report having transformed the way they think about the world. It is truly special in this regard.

Now, when I first read Ishmael in the summer of 2022, I had already made related key connections myself. Luckily, I kept the receipts (Do the Math posts; chronologically):

1. Biodiversity is the ultimate treasure;
2. Ultimate success is defined in ecological terms, on long timescales [a later revisit];
3. We are in breach of contract, in terms of evolution;
4. What is modernity all about, and is its collapse probable?
5. Our tendency to ignore the big picture;
6. Human supremacy as a fundamental driver of our disastrous path.

So, I was definitely primed to resonate with a book that made many of the same points. For me, Ishmael brought the swirling cauldron of thoughts in my head into much sharper focus. It provided a clear scaffolding upon which to hang the pieces. I think the main revelation for me was that humanity is not modernity. Modernity’s inevitable failure need not be humanity’s ultimate failure. Modernity never could have worked in the long term, and represents only a small sliver of human existence. After reading Ishmael, it became far easier to spot practices rooted in ultimate failure vs. those compatible with long-term success. Most of what our eyes land on in our modern lives reflect dazzling failure. Life is success.

For the first time in decades, I was excited for what might emerge from the ashes of modernity. It wasn’t important for me to know what came next: just that something would, and it may be pretty amazing—but in a way that Takers are unequipped to appreciate. I’m excited by frontier: the unimaginable. The universe is far more interesting than our mental models typically accommodate or foresee. The amazing future probably won’t be like anything any science fiction or dystopian writer has ever conjured. Not Star Trek, but also not Mad Max, or Clan of the Cave Bear. Meat-brains just aren’t up to it, and that’s okay: why would they be?

Despite the common (angry) misconception that this book advocates a return to the Stone Age, we won’t just go back. Nothing works that way in a complex, interactive, adaptive system. But anything that does work in the long term is far more likely to start with the Leaver premise that we belong to the world, and are not as gods. I can expect successful cultures to have a basis in humility, in community (with other life), and the mature acceptance that to live in accord with this world means not always getting everything we want. It’s a matter of getting past our adolescence (or toddler phase, really—we’ve really regressed under the infantilizing influence of modernity: Tantrums are Us).

Another door Ishmael opened for me was a newfound appreciation, awe, and respect for Indigenous cultures. The Leavers who have survived to this day are a treasure unto themselves. Our culture has a tendency to dismiss their stories as childish, but that’s only how they appear to a literal, pedantic (left-dominated) brain. I got so much more out of books like Braiding Sweetgrass, We are the Middle of Forever, and Hospicing Modernity once prepared by Ishmael to put such cultures in a broader context. The stories are not silly: they carry deep wisdom about how ecological communities work.

Nitpicks

Some people really don’t like Ishmael, and can select from a menu of nitpicks over which to ground their argument. I don’t go in for that sort of approach, which I liken to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Do I find elements that I don’t buy? Sure! Do these imperfections falsify the bigger-picture insights? No! But if I were allergic to the overall message, might I lean on the imperfections to argue my case? I cringe to think I would be so dishonest, but that’s how (many) people work. In any case, I’m cool with big-picture wisdom even if accompanied by a few warts—the beauty within, and all. It is worth reflecting that modernity tends to offer the reverse situation: accounts that are factually tight, but utterly fail in big-picture interpretation: a vapid model.

Below, I raise a few points of potential contention.

Dichotomy

I can appreciate the reaction that a Taker/Leaver dichotomy is artificially simplified. True enough. As is often the case, a spectrum exists. For instance, agriculture is not strictly Boolean: various degrees of intensity and control can manifest (which Quinn acknowledges). So, what’s the point? Are the insights invalidated? This isn’t a “gotcha” logic puzzle, but a complex set of interrelated considerations that will never be fully and accurately captured in any mental model. It is still incredibly useful to sketch the consequences of living at different ends of a spectrum (and modernity is hard-over on one end!). Rejecting the lessons of Ishmael on the basis of an artificial dichotomy is similar to claiming that because people can’t be cleanly split into “smart” and “dumb” (since the reality is a spectrum) it is invalid to posit any meaningful difference between smart and dumb people. Seems dumb to me.

Noble Savages

A common objection is the charge of romanticizing Leavers, calling to mind the Noble Savage meme. Quinn addresses this directly in 8.10 by clarifying that Leaver culture is simply based on a premise that is less destructive. They’re not intrinsically better people, but a people whose inherited culture is better-aligned to the natural world. I suspect that many “Noble Savage” objections are rooted in a sort of supremacism (maybe the term is even adored for its inclusion of the dismissive label “savage,” re-asserting our superiority—note the adjective/noun pairing: it’s not “savage nobles;” the noun carries the chief identity).

One element I admired in Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (despite my overall dislike; an example of factually rich but interpretively poor) was the account of Kondiaronk, who could debate circles around European intellectuals. Indeed, it appeared that the average Native American youth could out-deduce European adults. Failure to understand the simple concepts of money and property rights was not for lack of brain power: it was an excess of (right) brain power that could not make out how such schemes could work in the long term in an ecological context. Guess who was right?

One observation here: culture can do a lot of thinking for us, without explicit cognitive deliberation. An idea immediately fits or it doesn’t, due to how cultural exposure has literally wired our brains. While those like Kondiaronk were able to access and articulate the fundamental objections, I can believe most in Leaver cultures would reject money and property rights as “obviously” counter to their time-tested cultural beliefs and ecological sensibilities. It need not be algorithmically dissected or elegantly articulated in order to “not compute.”

Megafauna

Megafauna extinctions often come up in a form of “what-about-ism” that attempts to make the point that Leavers are/were no better than Takers: an egregious, shameful, and transparent false equivalency. I’ll pause to say that one is generally on safer ground differentiating cultures rather than members of the same species: set aside whether a Leaver is a better human than a Taker and instead focus on which inhabits a better-adapted culture. On the megafauna issue, I’ve probably said this a dozen times now, but the numbers are: 20 Mton dry carbon biomass in the form of wild land mammals 100,000 years ago; 15 Mton 10,000 years ago, 10 Mton in 1900, and 3 Mton today. The megafauna extinction during the great migrations of humans pared down wild land mammal biomass by 25% (5 Mton) over 90,000 years. Modernity has taken a 70% (7 Mton) cut in a mere century. You work out the orders-of-magnitude difference.

Secondly, when any species migrates to a territory where it did not co-evolve with the local flora and fauna, we can expect disruption and even extinctions as the whole ecology adjusts. Humans migrating out of Africa were no exception: still a “fair play” in evolutionary terms that happens all the time. The question is whether it’s a concerted war on the beasts (policy-driven elimination) or simply a matter of satisfying hunger, as any animal will do.

It is fascinating and revealing to me that the one place on Earth where (non-human) megafauna fared relatively well is, in fact, Africa. Surely it is not a coincidence that the cradle of humanity—where megafauna and humans co-evolved—is the one place where megafauna had ample time to develop the requisite adaptations to tolerate these dangerous hunters.

At the start of the agricultural revolution, the planet had 50,000 kg of wild land mammal biomass (“wet”) per human. Now it’s 2.5 kg; almost gone; and tanking fast. The megafauna extinction—unfortunate as it was—really just isn’t at all in the same league. So drop it! It’s just false-equivalency, what-about-ism, distracting, self-absolving BS.

Anthropological Quibbles

Daniel Quinn was not a professional anthropologist. He is bound to have some misconceptions. I can relate: as an astrophysicist, when I read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, I cringe at the raft of inaccurate statements in the section on cosmology. But does he get the big picture wrong? No. Baby, bathwater. I ask myself what major conclusion Quinn flubbed on account of a dubious factual detail. The main anthropological thrust is dispelling the myth of a miserable life, beset by hunger and danger. Anthropologists have shown us that the “original affluent society” spends far less time than we do “working” to secure food, and do not consider themselves to be miserable. My own brief analysis convinces me that life expectancy figures alone (constrained by mere survival of a long-to-mature-and-reproduce species) dispel the myth of daily danger.

Quinn also cannot have been wrong about the timescales that form a huge part of his thesis. That’s all pretty solid. Significantly, anthropologists have also documented deliberate practices specifically tuned to suppress hierarchy, tamp down narcissism, avoid ecological over-exploitation, and limit growth. Additionally, surviving Indigenous traditions tend to adjure humility and interconnectedness with the community of life—often in an animist framing. Languages also embody an attitude of belonging and active Life force. Those are not accidental and amusing quirks, but essential features of living in accord with the more-than-human world.

In Sum

I just have not run across any indisputable factoid that has the power to destroy any of the book’s key points. It does not mean that every take-away is right, but neither are they demonstrably wrong. Here is a partial list.

1. Our culture is obsessed with control over food, “things,” life, and death.
2. The timescales speak volumes: millions of years of cohabitation against a lightning-fast 10,000 year march directly toward a sixth mass extinction.
3. Using our power to privilege humans to the detriment of the rest of the community of life is to live as an outlaw, and against borrowed time before it crashes down (we are not capable of possessing the wisdom of “the gods”).
4. Our culture wrongly dismisses Leaver ways as being obsolete, primitive, dumb, miserable, and terrifying.
5. Modernity has plenty of mythology (unprovable declarations about who we are and how we relate to the planet).
6. The mythology of modernity almost guarantees ecological disaster: pitting us at war against the world as a superior species.
7. The stories (mythologies) we adopt and enact matter.
8. To dismiss Leaver stories as dumb or obsolete is about as dumb as it gets.

In short, Daniel Quinn has given us much of real substance to digest. On the whole, no one can say with any certainty that he’s just plain wrong in the main. I suspect most who object to the lessons in Ishmael are simply unwilling or emotionally unprepared to question the tenets of modernity and human supremacy. It would be shocking if such instances did not abound: our cultural antibodies are quick to shut down alien threats.

Perhaps what is most amazing is both that Quinn had the penetrating insight to peer beyond the prison bars, and that any of us readers are capable of appreciating the result without knee-jerk rejection on cultural grounds. Perhaps enough of us are immune-suppressed to be receptive. I believe that to be a good thing, in this case. We are able to flip the script, and recognize the culture of modernity (and its antibodies) as the real disease: the cancer glommed onto humanity. We wish to see a healthier future, back in the hands of the wise “gods” that got us here.

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

Views: 278