Book review: "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn
I started this blog in April but got busy with school. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and after 3 months finally had some time to finish it. I look forward to your comments.
A friend loaned me “Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit” by Daniel Quinn. As a fellow environmentalist and progressive he said it was a “must read”.
The book sat on my “to read” pile for several months. I kept avoiding it. To be honest, I wasn’t that excited about it because I thought it was going to be a serious, preachy, dull and depressing book about how we humans are raping and pillaging the planet.
In March I finally picked the book up and I couldn’t put it down. “Ishmael” is surprising, funny, endearing and inspiring. It wasn’t just an environmental novel, but one with a spiritual and a historical bent. Although published in 1992, “Ishmael” remains current, even more so than when it originally came out.
Throughout the book, I found myself in the role of the pupil, trying to answer the questions that were being put forward by Ishmael, the teacher.
The crux of the book for me was found near the end.
“....people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them.”
“Stopping pollution is not inspiring. Sorting your trash is not inspring. Cutting down on fluorocarbons is not inspiring.” (Ishmael, p. 244).
Stopping things or owning less won’t change the world. Vision and inspiration will. Without it, people -including myself- feel overwhelmed and can become apathetic. There are glimmers of inspiration around the world. Earth friendly apartments being built in crowded English cities (Sierra Club Magazine). A fashion designer who creates her clothes with organic cotton. The Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org). Tooth brushes made from recycled yogurt containers (recycline.com). The resurgence of old arts, including knitting, and a growing number of farmers markets!
“Ishmael” asks “how did we get here?”, discusses it and then shows us that WE CAN GET THERE. As with any journey, you must pass through some dark to get there.
“...Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world? (Ishmael, p. 25).”
“Which want to destroy it? As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.”
“And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world.”
Ishmael doesn’t point the finger at the United States. Instead, this is a war between two global cultures. The Takers vs. the Leavers.
The Taker mentality is that the planet belongs to them. The takers exterminate their competition; for example, the bugs which hurt/damage the crops or the predators that kill their livestock and the people/countries that have what they want. Leavers live in a way that allows the rest of life to go on around them. They are hunter/gatherers who eat what they can find or what is available depending on the season and weather. Examples of leavers are: the Bushmen of Africa, the Alawa of Australia, the Kreen-Akrore of Brazil, and the Navajo of the United States. Takers tend to view Leavers as “uncivilized” and throughout history have conquered them or ministered to them, to bring them into the modern, civilized, or correct way of living.
“You {Takers} are captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live...You are captives and you have made a captive of the world itself.” (Ishmael, p. 25)
To most people, the idea of us being captive is hard to contemplate. They might say we are not captive - we have freewill; we are masters of our own destiny; we are God’s children; we choose; we demand what we consume and we can stop whenever we want.
Personally, I have at various times in my life felt captive, although I couldn’t have articulated it in that way. I was captive in a dysfunctional job that I was miserable in but couldn’t quit until I found another job. I am captive to bills I have run up and need to pay off. I have been captive to my emotions, both positive and negative. I am a captive to my consumeristic tendencies - what I want and when I want it. I may choose what I buy but I’ve been trained by Mother Culture to “buy, it’s good for the economy and the country”. I am captive to sugar cravings - I like chocolate and candy and I could eat an entire box of cookies in one sitting. I am captive to my TV and entertainment (When Ishmael compares TV to alcohol or drugs, it was a total ephiphany for me because it’s my drug of choice). I’ve said it before in my blog, but I’ll say it again, ENTERTAINMENT IS THE NEW OPIATE OF THE MASSES. I admit that I myself am an entertainment junkie.
In the US, how many people are “captive” to their cars? Most of us have to drive to work, to entertainment, to shopping and everywhere else. Our cities are designed that way. We can choose where we live and work to some degree. But we don’t necessarily choose how our cities and suburbs have been laid out in the past.
How many people - men or women, from any culture - are captive to the idea that to be happy, they must date or be married? How many others are captive to the idea that to be attractive they must be skinny or blond or whatever else is in vogue at the moment?
How many people are captive to addictions for alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, coffee or caffeine or sex?
Ishmael uses Nazi Germany as an example of human captivity. “...it was not only the Jews who were captives under Hitler. The entire nation was captive, including his enthusiastic supporters. Some detested what he was doing, some just shambled on as best as they could, and some postively thrived on it - but they were all his captives.” (Ishmael, p. 34-35)
How could Hitler, one man, captivate an entire nation? Ishmael’s answer is that Hitler told a story. “... A story in which the Aryan race and the people of Germany in particular had been deprived of their rightful place in the world, bound, spat upon, raped and ground into the dirt under the heals of the mongrel races, Communists and Jews. A story in which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the Aryan race would burst its bonds, wreak vengeance on its oppressors, purify mankind of its defilements, and assume its rightful place as the master of all races.”
If that one story had that much power over Germany, imagine what other sorts of stories have been or are being enacted in every other country. Each nation, religion and people has a story or stories that tell how and why; we call these stories culture. If the old saying “To the Victor Goes the spoils” is true then these cultural stories are written by the strong, the victorious, the powerful.
This “living mythology...which is recorded in the minds of the people of your culture, and being enacted all over the world even as we sit here and speak of it.”(Ishmael, p. 45).
Ishmael names this living mythology “Mother Culture”. So what story does “Mother Culture” tell Takers that has brought us to this point?
From both a religious and scientific standpoint, we are taught that the world was made for man, and man’s destiny is to conquer and rule the world. Under human rule it would become paradise. But man was born flawed and has screwed up paradise with war, brutality, poverty, injustice, corruption and tyranny.
“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, just the way Hitler’s mythology of Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe. But in the end this mythology is NOT DEEPLY SATISFYING. The takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it everywhere like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness.” (Ishmael, p. 146)
“Among the Leavers, crime, mental illness, suicide, and drug addiction are great rarities. How does Mother Culture account for this?”
“...Mother Culture says it’s because the Leavers are just too primitive to have these things.”
“In other words, crime, mental illness, suicide, and drug addiction are features of an advanced culture.”
Hmmm...Some believe that man is inherently evil or has a flaw. But if that’s true, why do we consider certain groups “Noble Savages” and why do some live in peace and tranquility? What is the first thing many people do when they are searching for meaning or looking to add meaning to their lives? Where do they go? Back to nature. Somehow nature is a balm to our mental health.
“...The story the Takers have been enacting here for the past ten thousand years is not only disastrous for mankind and for the world, it’s fundamentally unhealthy and unsatisfying. It’s a megalomaniac’s fantasy, and enacting it has given the Takers a culture riddled with greed, cruelty, mental illness, crime and drug addiction.” (Ishmael, p. 147)
On the other hand, “The story the Leavers have been enacting here for the past three million years isn’t a story of conquest and rule. Enacting it doesn’t give them power. Enacting it gives them lives that are satisfying and meaningful to them....They’re not seething with discontent and rebellion, not incessantly wrangling over what should be allowed and forbidden, not forever accusing each other of not living the right way, not living in terror of each other, not going crazy because their lives seem empty and pointless, not having to stupefy themselves with drugs to get through the days, not inventing a new religion every week to give them something to hold on to, not forever searching for something to do or something to believe in that will make their lives worth living. And - I repeat- this is not because they live close to nature or have no formal government or because they’re innately noble. This is simply because they’re enacting a story that works well for people - a story that worked well for three million years and that still works well where the Takers haven’t yet managed to stamp it out.” (Ishmael, p. 148)
The Takers mentality has led us to where we are now. A planet that is in serious need of repair. Resources that will run out any day now. Air that is making us sick. People looking for true meaning in their lives. As a fix to our problems, the Taker’s story says ”...Only one thing can save us. We have to increase our mastery of the world. All this damage has come about through our conquest of the world, but we have to go on conquering it until our rule is absolute. Then, when we’re in complete control, everything will be fine. We’ll have fusion power. No pollution. We’ll turn the rain on and off. We’ll grow a bushel of wheat in a square centimeter. We’ll turn the oceans into farms. We’ll control the weather - no more hurricanes, no more tornadoes, no more droughts, no more untimely frosts....” (Ishmael, p. 80-81)
“We have to carry the conquest forward. And carrying it forward is either going to destroy the world or turn it into a paradise - into the paradise it was meant to be under human rule.”
“And if we manage to do this, if we finally manage to make ourselves the absolute rulers of the world - then nothing can stop us. Then we move into the Star Trek era. Man moves out into space to conquer and rule the entire universse. And that may be the ultimate destiny of man: to conquer and rule the entire universe....”
Wait...Does this strike anyone else as an anti-God or human-centric way of thinking? According to this thinking, God made the world imperfect and chaotic but Man can fix it. Mankind wants to turn the rain off and on. Man wants to control the weather/natural disasters. Mankind gives life to some and death to others (bugs, animals and any other enemies who threaten us). That’s putting us on the same level as God; we are usurping the role and the power of God.
We save and stockpile food, as if “...to THWART the gods when they decide it’s your turn to go hungry. You save it so that when they send a drought, you can say, “not me, Goddamn it! I’m not going hungry, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because my life is in my own hands now!” (Ishmael, p. 227)
Jesus could have been warning us against such worries in Matthew 6:25. “”Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you - you of little faith?”
Back to the point I was making before...The point of man’s captivity to the conquest of the world. The author goes on to remind us, “...if you’d been telling this part of the story a hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - you’d have spoken only of the paradise to come. The idea that man’s conquest could be anything but beneficial would have been unthinkable to you. Until the last three to four decades, the people of your culture had no doubt that things were just going to get better and better forever...” (Ishmael, p. 81)
The industrial revolution was supposed to lead to people working less, getting more time with their family, and earning higher wages. The same was said about the rise of global-mega-corporations and global economies in the 1940s-1960s. In reality, real wages have declined with U.S. workers laboring longer hours for lower real wages (Case Against the Global Economy, p. 223). U.S. standards of living have been declining since 1980 (Case against the Global Economy, p. 223). In high school in the 1990s, I remember teachers telling us that we would have to work more than our parents to live at the same standard and we’d have more career changes. Today in the U.S. have less leisure time than our counterparts in the 1790s! Not to mention the constant lay-offs and corporate restructuring since the 1980s. Worldwide unemployment is at its highest level since the 1930s and the Great Depression (Case Against the Global Economy, p. 108). Corporations are relocating to third world countries where they can pay workers for pennies per day and have fewer environmental regulations. Meanwhile, the gap between the rich and the poor grows, with the middle class shrinking and fewer workers being able to afford basic health insurance.
As a Christian, Ishmael brings up some interesting points using books or text from the Bible. Quinn spends several chapters in Ishmael on chapters 3 and 4 of Genesis.
“But the people of your culture have never been able to understand the explanation, because they’ve always assumed that it was formulated by people just like them - people who took it for granted that the world was made for man and man was made to conquer and rule it, people for whom the sweetest knowledge in the world is the knowledge of good and evil, people who consider that tilling the soil is the only noble and human way to live. ...(Ishmael, p. 183).
“But when it’s read another way, the explanation makes perfectly good sense: man can never have the wisdom the gods use to rule the world, and if he tries to preempt that wisdom, the result won’t be enlightenment, it will be death.”
We have a choice. Will we choose to keep our nose to the grindstone during the day and at night stupefy ourselves with TV or drugs, to avoid thinking about the world our pride (one of the seven deadly sins) and arrogance has created?
Or, will we break out of our prison, escape captivity and learn to coexist with the world around us? Will we uproot our Taker mentality and replace it with something more meaningful? We will find our inspiration and vision?
Hope to the end. <1>
posted by eclecticlady @ 10:59 AM
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