Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit Paperback – May 1, 1995

I've read several reviews of this book and found that, despite Quinn's careful attempts to get his message across clearly and unequivocally, many readers misunderstand the finer points of Ishmael's arguments and end up praising or condemning Ishmael for the wrong reasons. Here is a short list of common misunderstandings you're likely to encounter in the course of reading reviews of this book:

(1) The central message is a hackneyed statement about saving the planet: All we have to do is this or that. We need to treat the earth better, or treat each other better, etc....

No, the author has no such message. He is not even concerned with saving the planet. He merely points out that, in the past, there were many ways a human could make a living in the world that did not threaten to render the planet uninhabitable. As George Carlin once said: "The planet isn't going anywhere. We are!" The author recommends that if we are concerned about our future, then we should find out as much as we can about these other ways of living in the world and what made them sustainable.

(2) This is communism.

No, this is tribalism, the cultural traits of which have been found to be conducive to sutainable ways of living.

So-called communist countries operate the same unsustainable lifestyle as so-called democratic countries and are just as hierarchical and corrupt. Nothing new, except the academic devaluation of the individual. In "democratic" countries, the devaluation is not openly professed, only practiced and theoretically implied. Progress means the same thing in both societies: the technological displacement of people.

(3) The ape is omniscient; skeptics beware.

Skeptics always beware. Ishmael is the ultimate skeptic. He takes nothing for granted. His arguments are based on information available to any human being with a library card. You'll remember that when the student enters Ishmael's room, he notices dozens of books on history and anthropology piled up on the shelf. You don't have to take Ishmael's word for granted. If you're skeptical, go look it up. The ape is not omniscient. He's well informed.

(4) The book proclaims: "There is something unnatural about the way we live."

I agree. There is nothing natural about the way we live. But there's nothing natural about the way any human has ever lived.

There's never been an all-natural people. We are and have always been all-cultural. Nature supplies us with the urges to satisfy certain life imperatives (i.e. nutritional, procreative, protective, etc...). But culture determines the way we go about responding to these urges; that is to say, there is nothing natural about the way we satisfy these natural desires. We may be at a loss to change our nature and the urges we feel, but we are capable of constructing a better, more sustainable way of responding to nature's edicts.

(5) Based on the arguments of the book, one could conclude that "we, as a species, are...."

Quinn has nothing conclusive to say about humanity or "we as a species," except that every human is dependent on culture and that the bulk of the information that constitutes human cultures is mythological. His main concern here is with the general evolution of two distinct ways of living on this planet. One is sustainable, the other is not. We as a species have not messed things up. One culture out of tens of thousands has managed to make a mess of things. By engaging in unsustainable behavior that threatens to destroy the ecosystems upon which humans everywhere depend (i.e., totalitarian agriculture), we - the people of a single culture - are precipitating the extinction of humankind.

Some quotes that have caused me pause:

"The earth is on the brink of environmental collapse because the evil white people have forgotten that the world does not belong to them."

"Its central tenet - that human beings, through their total disregard for the world around them, are destroying the Earth"

Way to miss the boat.

First of all, in no way is Quinn saying humans are a disease, that white people in particular are a disease, or that "Western Civ." is responsible. Quinn is saying that for millions of years humans existed on this planet without conquering it, and that that they did so sustainably. It is not "human beings" that are responsible, it is the "produce or die" culture that's responsible.

Jean Jacques Rousseau posited that the greatest crime in the history of humanity was when one person fenced off an area and said "this is mine." The rest is, unfortunately, history. It is not that we're human, it is how we are living. We are under the delusion that there is no other way to live - but we have 3 million years of shared "non-history" to point to to show that before our culture, humans lived just fine, thank you. Since our culture's inception, we have been on the track to disaster - War, Famine, Slavery, Plague - all fruits of this cultural tree. And with no one even considering the possibility of changing course (and frankly, why would they when the rewards are "comfort" and "wealth"), there is nothing but a great brick wall at the end of this tunnel to look forward to.

This book is not meant to do anything more than wake us up from the mind-numbing hum of the culture that tells us there is no other way to live. It is not meant to offer solutions - how we choose to act upon waking up is not Quinn's responsibility. He's not a guru - he's a thinker, and while his prose may be muddy (God - some of that dialogue can be interminable) his ultimate goal is achieved. We cannot, having read this book, say that we are unaware that for millions of years, people did not live as we lived - and they thrived. Of course, the definition of "thrived" has changed under the "one right way to live."

As it stands, we have maybe another 30-50 years before we (and by WE I don't mean "Americans" or "Africans" or "Asians" or anything of the sort - I mean "Participants in the "produce or die" lifestyle) hit the wall at the end of the tunnel. We produce more than we can consume, because to do so affords us "wealth" and "comfort." As a result, our population climbs steadily, and keeps climbing, though it's dangerously high right now. Quinn is saying that in the other story we enacted for millions of years, wealth was not measured by digits in a bank account, and comfort was not measured by the number of products we could buy after slaving on this cultural pyramid.

The message is - "Look around you and ask: - is there another story that we could be enacting? What kind of damage are we doing to ourselves and this world by enacting this one? Can we enact another before it is too late?"

Other authors have gone further and offered solutions. Skinner (Walden Two), Callenbach (Ecotopia), Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) are some good examples.

It's a wake up call. And in that, I must say it is an unmitigated succcess.