Tag Archives: anthropology

relating to the study of non-modern people and lifeways

My Ishmael

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Photo of book cover by Tom Murphy.

Having first covered Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael in extensive fashion, then The Story of B in a mega-post, it was basically inevitable that I would finish the loose trilogy and offer a treatment of My Ishmael.

This third book in the series connects much more closely with the first book than did “B”—both in time and space. It follows the relationship between Ishmael, the wise gorilla teacher, and a precocious teenager named Julie who studies under Ishmael in overlap with an oblivious Alan Lomax (narrator/pupil from the first book).

As Ishmael customizes lessons to individual students, we see that Julie’s education is complementary to Alan’s—conveniently justifying a whole different book providing a new set of provocative insights.

Format

The book is arranged into 36 short, chronological chapters. Headings below reflect chapter titles and starting page numbers in parentheses (1998 printing). As I did for the other books, I mainly stay away from narrative elements—focusing instead on lessons. The exception in this case is in the setup. Part of my rationale is to encourage folks to read the original, treating this post as highlights of the “boring” portions—ideal for a refresher after having read the book.

All the chapter titles and page numbers are represented until the end of lessons, when the book shifts to more of a traditional novel. Note that the 20th Century Daniel Quinn often uses “man” to mean “humans” more broadly. As in the other treatments, I attempt to confine my own slant to [square brackets].

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Spare Capacity

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By BabelStone, from Wikimedia Commons.

Our prized cerebral capabilities at the level of awareness don’t stack up to very much when compared to the vastly-more-numerous-and-amazing capabilities of almost every other aspect of Life. The relatively meager mental capacity we tend to worship is in many ways the slightest addendum whose capabilities are comparatively rather modest. Yes, we have devised ways to lock in small gains and ratchet them into powerful forces, but the process is embarrassingly slow and limited compared to most processes carried out by Life.

The Impressive Base

The overwhelming share of what makes humans amazing operates far beyond mental awareness. Outside the sacred cerebrum, we breathe, circulate blood, digest a diverse menu of food, filter and clean internal fluids, eliminate wastes, heal wounds, coordinate movement, generate the cells for reproduction, build and rebuild ourselves from a cryptic blueprint, and perhaps most impressively solve very thorny open-ended problems of devising antibodies tailored to disable novel pathogens. For all their “massive” brain-power, the average living human would not have the first clue how to devise a functioning, fully-integrated replacement for any of these and thousands more tasks our bodies handle without a thought. Even the best teams in the world wouldn’t be able to pull it off (though would at least have “the first clue,” and in so doing would know it to be beyond their capability).

Now add the cerebrum and a whole suite of additional capabilities emerge—still beyond our awareness. Perhaps most stunning is visual processing. Among other attributes, it’s nearly instantaneous, seamlessly combines vision from two optical instruments, fills in gaps, enjoys excellent color representation, and has extraordinary dynamic range (putting our film/print or electronic cameras/displays to shame; it’s why total solar eclipses can neither be captured nor displayed adequately by technology). Add to this an incredible capacity for auditory processing able to differentiate subtle sounds and comprehend language. What’s easy for a two-year-old still stumps technological implementations. Our brains perform pattern recognition tasks that are light years ahead of what lots of investment and smart people have been able to cobble in crude technological form. Remember the self-driving car hype from about a decade ago? And the fact that captchas work at all is remarkable testimony.

Don’t ask us how we do it—we have no idea. We just know so many things that we can’t articulate or are not even aware of: we take them for granted—as must be the case when literally unaware of the underlying processes.

Unbidden, the Disney Jungle Book tune for “Bare Necessities” slid into my brain in connection to the “spare capacity” title and theme of this post. Maybe I should try a song version sometime…

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The Story of B

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Ammonite fossil, by Liez (H Zell), from Wikimedia Commons.

Oh No. Is Do the Math about to get hijacked for another long series about a Daniel Quinn book, like it was for Ishmael?

How about just a really long post?

The Story of B is the second in a series of three books associated with the wise gorilla, Ishmael, and his teachings. Some report “B” as a more powerful book than the first (Ishmael). For me, they sort-of run together, and I have trouble remembering which book focused on which point. That’s part of why I started the project of capturing the Ishmael content, and here do something similar for The Story of B. I figure if it helps me keep the books straight, it will help others, too.

In this post, I sketch the content of the book. I am not tracing much in the way of story elements. I’m not even fully fleshing out the key arguments, but making more of a map so that I or others can more quickly revisit key parts, or get a quick refresher on the entire book’s flow and content. For those who have not read the book, I hope it serves as encouragement to do so.

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Scramble and Cling

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Ivan Aivazovsky: La Nona Onda (from Wikimedia Commons)

The mental image is easy to form: it’s just after first light on a morning in 1800 and your wooden ship has sunk after a surprise attack by canon fire. Random bits of wood and spars bob here and there on the waves, and you’ve managed to scramble atop the largest one. The next thing you notice is a horde of rats desperately treading water and aiming for your floating safety—as if vacuuming them from the surface of the sea. Within minutes your haven is teeming with clinging rats. Aside from the rapidly-receding gunboat, the horizon is clear of any other escape from immersion. It’s just you and the rats.

Why bother to describe this scene? It will serve a dual purpose. First, it vaguely mirrors a false impression many have of modernity as the only safe way to live in a perilous world. Second, it serves as an instructive contrast to actual encounters between modernity and tribal people. Both highlight the severe misimpression we have been handed of life outside modernity.

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Ishmael Overview

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Have I mentioned how important I think Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael is? I reread it recently for the first time in a while, and was again impressed with how many important modernity-challenging ideas are packed into one novel.

I would dearly love everyone to read it. It’s not that I hold it to be flawless—to be treated as a divinely-inspired religious text. But it’s hard to think of a more powerful place to start for seeding incredibly important conversations and shifting awareness. It often transforms its readers, whether teenagers or retirees.

Options for reading the book include library access (also an audio version recently out), purchase (I recommend bookshop.org, where go to an independent book shop of your choice), or a few sites (1, 2, 3) that somehow make the text available. Being trapped behind a commercial “paywall” seems counter to the entire message of the book, which explicitly encourages sharing the message broadly.

I also suggest that you visit the site ishmael.org for more related content and FAQ answers from Daniel Quinn (who died in 2018). A recent podcast series called Human Nature Odyssey, by Alex Leff, does a fantastic job of presenting key ideas from the book.

As a poor substitute for the entire book, what I’ll do is create a series here on Do the Math that offers a relatively comprehensive version of the themes in the book. It won’t be as masterfully crafted as the actual book—but perhaps will be good enough to generate similar patterns of thought, and inspire greater readership of the original work.

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Nursery Rhymes

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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Image by Loren Elkin from Pixabay

We all appreciate that human individuals progress through stages of cognitive development on the way to adulthood. A toddler is simply not equipped to run a country (hold your quips): the brain hasn’t fully developed. Infants love the game of peek-a-boo precisely because they have not yet cemented the idea of object permanence. Language capability improves over many years—decades, actually. Brains are not “fully” developed until the late twenties (yet assert mastery starting in the teen years).

But, what does “fully” developed mean? It means significant further development in structure or capability is not to be expected. Does it mean that brains reach some theoretical ultimate capability—no more improvements possible—or do they maybe stop short of perfection? Why would evolution produce anything substantially better than what provides sufficient selective advantage in an ecological context, in simultaneous consideration of all other organism attributes and the biodiverse and social environments in which they operate? The tangled difficulty of that sentence barely hints at the immense contextual complexity involved.

So, every last one of us ceases brain development well short of some notional limit. Does that stopping point cross the threshold of being able to master all knowledge or understanding about Life, the Universe, and Everything? Of course not. Evidence abounds. So, we will never comprehend it all, given our limited meat-brains.

All this echoes things I’ve said before. What’s new in this post is what I hope will be a helpful analogy to how adults present ideas to children possessing less-developed brains—thus the Nursery Rhyme title. Since adult human brains also stop short of “full” development, how might we expect our imperfect brains to interact with what we can’t fully understand? We encounter this conundrum all the time in giving “sufficient” accounts to children that are effective, even if they must be over-simplified or distorted to get the point across. So, how would a hypothetical species possessing far more wisdom explain the incomprehensible to us, as if we were children to them?

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Life Expectations

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A while back, I came across a fascinating paper from 2007 by Gurven and Kaplan on longevity among hunter-gatherers that helped me understand aspects of what life was (and is) like outside of modernity. My interest is both a matter of pure curiosity, and to gain perspective on how desperate life feels—or doesn’t—to members of pre-agricultural (ecological) cultures.

I wrote last year about the perceived perils of early human life in Desperate Odds, in the context that to us members of modernity, having never been weened from the teat of agricultural output, it seems like life without agriculture (and supermarkets) would be a virtual death sentence. Add to this a perceived vulnerability to predation from lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), and the mental image that emerges—as depicted by Daniel Quinn in Ishmael—is of a stressed and starving hunter following the tracks of elusive prey as twilight darkens, while a predator is close on his trail, audibly breathing. It feels like a knife edge of survival: everything has to go just right, but teeters on all going horribly wrong.

The core argument from the Desperate Odds post was that surviving to reproductive age was obviously common, or our species would wink out. This simple fact makes daily survival a near-guarantee—enough so that fear of death is not top-of-mind most of the time, allowing most brain cycles to go toward less-troubled, routine activities.

It was either in preparing that post or in connection with A Lifetime Ago that I ran across the aforementioned paper. In this post, I dig in to see what insights can be gained from survival models for various human cultures.

The Attention-Grabber

Let’s start with the plot that caught my eye and drew me in, which is Figure 3 in the paper.

Figure 3 from motivating paper.

Let’s see if it draws you in as well.

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A Lifetime Ago

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Image by brfcs from Pixabay

Having just ticked over a new year, it’s a fitting moment to think about time.  I have often compared modernity to a fireworks show—dazzling, short, then over—and indeed we often celebrate the New Year with a fireworks display.  Perhaps lasting 10 minutes, the display occupies one fifty-thousandth of the year.  This is like the past 50 years of explosive impact relative to the 2.5–3 million years of humans on Earth, or our 10,000 year agricultural period compared to the time since a different explosion: the Cambrian.  Our current ways are indeed as transient as a fireworks show, also marking a sort of culmination of a long era.  But let’s approach temporal perspective from a different angle.

Growing up, I thought of World War II as ancient history: long before my time. But now, I have lived more than twice the span that separated WWII from my birth in 1970. Only 25 years elapsed between the end of WWII and 1970, while we’re presently 54 years away from 1970. 25 years, I now realize, is nothing! When I was born, WWII was still fresh in the minds of many who had lived through it.  Indeed, both my grandfathers fought in WWII, carrying the physical and psychological scars to prove it.  To my grandfathers at the time of my birth, WWII seemed like “only yesterday,” as 1999 seems to me now.

A related trick is to keep track of the date that was as distant from your birth as you are today. In other words, the year in which your anti-self who lives backward in time would find themselves. For instance, I was born at the beginning of 1970 (which also happens to be the start of Unix time), and therefore find myself about 54 years from my birth date. Thus 54 years prior to my birth date is 1916, smack into the middle of the first World War. I can probably expect my backward self to make it past the turn of the century, before the fireworks show of modern life really got underway: before airplanes, for instance.

But the main point of this post is that the past, and all “history” isn’t really that far back. We’ll play a game based on the question: who was the oldest person alive when the oldest person today was born, and likewise back to the more distant past.

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