Circular Cruises/Dont Call Me Ishmael

Don't Call Me, Ishmael

27 June 2001

I am not denying, you understand, that Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is a compelling book. I know it's compelling, because I opened it for the first time at two a.m. one night, intending only to read a few pages to help me sleep. Around two-thirty I started taking notes. Around three-thirty I started thinking I really should quit. It took me until about four to wind down enough to try to sleep, and even then I didn't sleep very well for what was left of the night.

There are a number of people who have spoken of Ishmael in terms I would never hear them use for any other book. People of my acquaintance - sane, sensible people who are not given to this sort of inflated, touchy-feely rhetoric - have spoken of it as a life-changing, mind-altering experience. We'll let the cover quote of the latest edition (from Jim Britell of the Whole Earth Review) be the character note for all the various praises: "From now on I will divide the books I have read into two categories - the ones I read before Ishmael and those read after."

Readers familiar with my own innate cynicism, and my tendency to pull in an opposite direction, with an equivalent force, to wherever I am being led, will probably assume that hearing all this buildup made me predisposed to dislike Ishmael before I ever opened it. This is not a bad assumption in most circumstances, but in fact for once the opposite was true. I believed the recommendations, because many of them came from voices I trusted. I wanted to read Ishmael and have a life-changing, mind-altering experience.

Instead, what I got was an enormous lie, all the more aggravating for being a very skillfully told one. A beautiful work of artifice, compelling and yet simultaneously hollow inside. I was only angry, I think - and I was livid about the book for twenty-four hours afterward - because I was so disappointed.

Ishmael is a Socratic dialogue between a man and a telepathic gorilla. This implausible-sounding device comes off without a hitch and is not one of the problems I have with the book, so please accept it. The reason Quinn has chosen a gorilla as a spokesbeing for the side of Truth and Beauty is because no human would be able to perform the task. Because, at its heart, the book is about What Mankind Is Doing Wrong.

Oh, the book is very careful to avoid casting it that way. Ishmael (the gorilla) uses the terms Takers and Leavers to try to avoid any bias, and the book makes it clear that there are some groups of humans in the Leavers category (read: good guys). But this defense, like so much about the book, is disingenuous.

(Look up "disingenuous" before proceeding, please. It means that one is pretending to be an ingenue, that one is affecting a naivete that one does not truly have. One can only accept some of Ishmael's defenses and ideas by being unaware of certain harsh truths. Quinn - and thereby Ishmael - must be aware of these harsh truths, because if the book has convinced me of anything, it is that neither Quinn nor his protagonist are stupid. Ergo, something is wrong with this picture.)

The fundamental principle of Ishmael is that the Takers - i.e. industrialized man, and particularly white man - are destroying the world in a way that no other life on earth threatens to do, and it is happening because the Takers are ignoring a fundamental law of the world - as immutable as a law of physics - that all other life on earth unconsciously or consciously obeys. That law can be summarized as "Compete, but do not make war." But you'll need to take it broadly. I'll come to that in a moment.

The main problem with the book is therefore a two-pronged difficulty with this premise: One, that it makes certain assumptions about Taker behavior that are not true, and two, that it simplifies or alters the facts about how Takers got where they are to suit itself.

Most of this is not going to be worthwhile to read unless you have read Ishmael or plan to. Unfortunately, because of the communities this book has propagated most heavily among, there's a better-than-average chance that you've read it or plan to. I'll come to that at the end. I will also discuss where the hopeful outcome of Ishmael goes wrong and why.

But before covering any of that, a comment or two about a separate lie, taking place on an entirely different level.

A Non-Prophet Organization

Ishmael disdains the Takers' dependence on prophets. He says that Takers use prophets to try to tell them how they should live, whereas Leavers don't need such things because they instinctively know how to live - by following the planet's unspoken laws.

Aside from the fact that this is a fairy-tale simplification, and the fact that some of us Takers who can't stand prophets and avoid them compulsively are a wee tad offended by this generalization ... the book itself is a work of prophecy. Quinn, via his spokesbeing Ishmael, is trying to tell us a better way to live. This is exactly the thing Ishmael blasts.

This book is a myth which claims to dispel mythology. It is a utopian novel which talks a dystopian game. Oh, yes, it's utopian. It holds out the promise of the Leaver utopia, says, "look, this is a better world and here is the pie-in-the-sky way to achieve it," which is what utopian novels all do, only with differing pie ratios. No one is seriously proposing we can have Shangri-La (on the high pie end), but the limited utopias of Walden Two have always struck me as eminently achievable (on the low end).

Alas, Ishmael's utopia - though the characters clearly believe in its achievability - is only possible through dramatic changes in human behavior, unattainable ones. Yes, I say unattainable. Some of that is, admittedly, my cynicism about human nature, apathy, and greed ... but some of it is because we can't: The reasons we got that way are not things we can control and change.

And so we come to Ishmael's biggest lies.

Lions and Gazelles, Chickens and Eggs

In its way Ishmael is even more cynical about human nature than I am. It assumes - fundamentally - that Takers got the way they are because they wanted to be that way.

In order to accept that assumption, one must accept a number of other generalizations about Takers which frankly rile me. One must assume that all Takers are conspicuous consumers (I try not to be); that all Takers believe that humanity is the be-all-end-all of evolution of life on this planet (I've never believed that for a second, although I do often wonder if we're going to wipe out the place before Whatever's Next has a chance to get here); and most importantly, that Takers dominate the earth just because they can, which is an outright lie. Takers dominate the earth because they are forced to. They are forced to by population pressure.

This develops into a chicken-and-egg problem which I believe Ishmael works the wrong way. Ishmael believes that the Takers suffered a population explosion because they systematically eliminated their "competition" - we'll get into that sticky word in a moment. I believe they eliminated their "competition" because their population exploded.

In other words, the agrarian peoples did not systematically displace and sometimes kill the nomadic peoples, back at the dawn of man, to clear out a space for more agriculture - their plants, their ways - so that they could have more babies. No. They were having too many babies, reproducing too successfully, and therefore had to expand, no matter what it cost.

This is borne out by the fact that all wars are caused by population pressure, no matter what the surface causes. Wars tend to look like they are caused by economics (or religion) on the surface, but there is always population lurking underneath. There are a few things I agree with Ishmael foursquare about, and one of them is that the systematic Taker failure to reduce birth rate will eventually do more to kill this planet than any other horrible thing we do, because as long as we fail to do it, all the other more immediate problems will not only never be eradicated, they will get worse.

But Ishmael blames the Takers for their expansion, which to me is aiming at the right target in the wrong place. Takers have to expand. They are not lions. Nor are they gazelles.

Ishmael goes on a lot about lions and gazelles, his canonical example of how to live by nature's laws. He talks about how lions don't kill more than the one gazelle they need for dinner, they don't go on a tear and try to kill off all the other lions to avoid food competition, or try to keep other lions from getting to the gazelles, or kill off gazelles in other lions' hunting ranges. All of these things are made spurious by population - to wit, if lions bred faster and more effectively, we might find that lion behavior is not what it once was. Hunger and space demands caused by too many lions would change everything. In fact, for a lion the margins would be considerably narrower, because they need more food per pound than a human and ideally a lot more space. If lions had longer lives and longer fertile period, Ishmael wouldn't be using them as examples.

(Certainly I would consider lions - or gazelles, for that matter - far more amoral than humans, for good or ill. I presume a lion acts only out of his body's self-interest and nothing higher; humans generally act this way too, but they're less honest about it. I could see a pride of lions, for example, guarding their hunting grounds to prevent other lions from getting to "their" gazelles - if they ever got hungry enough. [See rule #3 below.] Saying something like "The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers" is veriest bullshit. Just because the gazelle knows it's safe to go near the lion while the lion's feeding doesn't make them chums.)

Here are three fundamental Taker violations Ishmael makes his human student discover. These are key points of the book's philosophy, and all three are flawed:

1. Takers exterminate their competitors. Takers have no competitors. That's the problem. If they had a competitor then they might have a natural growth limit. (Internecine squabbles between Takers, in both Ishmael's arguments and mine, do not count. Taker vs. Taker is a side note. We are talking about Takers vs. the world.)

Ishmael's student notes, correctly, that exterminating one's competitors leads inevitably to a loss of diversity. "There would simply be one species at each level of competition: the strongest." True, and not desirable, but the catch here is in the phrase "level of competition." There is no other species on the planet capable of interacting with Takers at their level of competition. That's the problem, and it's a problem Ishmael completely ignores.

2. Takers systematically destroy their competitors' food to make room for their own. Ishmael's talking about the agrarians driving out the nomads, which I say was due to population pressure. Since that time, "competitors' food" has effectively been meaningless among humans.

3. Takers deny their competitors access to food. See above. What's a competitor? Here I honestly can't figure out what Ishmael's talking about, unless he's referring to the dawn of agriculture yet again. (He does go on about it quite a lot - for Ishmael this is the point where Takers started to go bad.)

Even taking into account internecine Taker squabbles, except during the excesses of wartime I can think of no case where one Taker population systematically denied a food supply to another, or through scorched-earth policies made it impossible for the other Taker population to cultivate its own supply ... so Ishmael must be talking about the dawn of agriculture again; there is no other idea that fits the terms.

Jam Yesterday and Jam Tomorrow

It's amazing how Ishmael manages to be simultaneously over-optimistic and over-pessimistic about Taker behavior. This passage from page 148, for example, makes my blood boil in its assumptions about what Takers feel and think. (Ishmael is describing Leavers, but doing so by talking about negative Taker traits they don't have.)

"They're not seething with discontent and rebellion, not incessantly wrangling over what should be allowed and what 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 that will make their lives worth living."

Um ... excuse me?

I find this passage tremendously offensive, as a Taker who has none of those traits, who believes it is a sin for the most part to try to tell other people how to live their lives, who is not dissatisfied with life on the whole, who is not forever searching for new things to give life meaning because my life has never struck me as being meaningless in the first place. I do not take drugs nor religions; I don't need them. I'm not going crazy. And while I suppose I could be the only one of my ilk, I doubt it. I believe there are plenty of other Takers like me.

(You may, at this point, propose the possibility that I am secretly a Leaver. This is laughable. But let's wait until the end to cover that.)

But - in the biggest Pollyanna reversal of the book - the sum and substance of the "inspirational" portion of the message is: Tell all your friends. If enough Takers catch on, things will change.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is such mile-high pie-in-the-sky that I am amazed Quinn could write it without breaking into giggling fits.

First off, as I've already explained, Takers can't change their behavior that easily without overcoming some very substantial obstacles in the way. Even assuming we could rework our whole culture - and that's a very big assumption - what about that birth rate? Gotta get that birth rate down first.

Second, I can't believe that a character can spend the better part of 260 pages dissing Takers and then turn around and say, "But I'm sure if enough of you tell everyone this story, you'll be able to turn it around."

Actually, to be completely honest, Ishmael hedges that a bit. What he actually says (he is specifically referring to population control here, the core problem) is "If the will is there, the method will be found." (p. 140) Both clauses of that sentence contain cop-outs.

Let Them

Ishmael uses the phrase "Mother Culture" to mean the collective set of false assumptions the Takers live by, that have led them astray. Ironically, when he speaks of Mother Culture's assumptions, these tend to be the times when I disagree with him the least; I agree the assumptions are there (though I often disagree about how they got there), and more often than not, I agree the assumptions are bad.

From p. 138:

"Famine isn't unique to humans. All species are subject to it everywhere in the world. When the population of any species outstrips its food resources, that population declines until it's once again in balance with its resources. Mother Culture says that humans should be exempt from that process, so when she finds a population that has outstripped its resources, she rushes in food from the outside, thus making it a certainty that there will be even more of them to starve in the next generation. Because the population is never allowed to decline to the point at which it can be supported by its own resources, famine becomes a chronic feature of their lives."

"Yes. A few years ago I read a story in the paper about an ecologist who made the same point at some conference on hunger. Boy, did he get jumped on. He was practically accused of being a murderer."

"Yes, I can imagine. His colleagues all over the world understood perfectly well what he was saying, but they have the good sense not to confront Mother Culture with it in the midst of her benevolence. If there are forty thousand people in an area that can only support thirty thousand, it's no kindness to bring in food from the outside to maintain them at forty thousand. That just guarantees that the famine will continue."

"True. But all the same, it's hard just to sit by and let them starve."

"This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler. 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.' It is the gods who LET these things, not you."

This, for me, is the most significant passage in the book, because it not only demonstrates my fullest agreement with Ishmael, but also the built-in flaws of his arguments - and thereby Quinn's.

(Am I making a mistake in assuming that Quinn's agenda is identical to his protagonist's? Normally, imputing a connection between author and character is a dangerous game, but here I'll take the risk. If this were more like a novel, I wouldn't dare. But this book is not a novel - even its fans admit that. It is a propaganda tract, or even a prophecy, disguised as a work of fiction. And why write propaganda espousing a viewpoint if that viewpoint is not yours? Unless forced to - and I presume no one was holding a gun to Quinn's head.)

I agree about the need to let the world inflict its own wounds, about the dangers of trying to overcontrol and overtame. But if Ishmael knows perfectly well about the forces preventing more Takers from just "letting them starve," then how on earth does he ever expect us to pull ourselves out of our hole and get as ruthless as we need to be?

Frankly, I have days where I am not sure that trying for a Taker solution is optimal for the future survival of the planet. Speaking coldly - taking the very long, post-human-evolution view - it might be better if we were allowed to ruin the place and kill ourselves in our own bile, so the planet could start recovering from us that much sooner. Assuming it can. After all, I agree with Ishmael when he says

"If they refuse to live under the law, they simply won't live." (p. 144)

Very well - then let us die.

The Memepool Has a Hard Bottom

Does that sound really horribly fatalistic?

I am frankly dismayed by the popularity of this book among smart, eco-conscious, free-thinking types - the type of people I have historically counted on to pull some new save-the-world rabbit out of their collective hats. I see now that no rabbit will be forthcoming, not if this book's philosophy is in any way representative.

This book is a spreading meme. I'm sorry I caught it; sorry because not only did the book cause me a day of anger which I could have done without, but also sorry to know that it has come so far and infected so many people. It is not a good meme. It only looks like one. And I am startled that so many people I thought knew better can't tell the difference.

What worries me most about Ishmael is that I have seen no other serious criticism of it from people whose viewpoints I trust. I haven't looked to see what the people in the other camp think of it - the people who revel in their Takerdom, the people who exploit because they genuinely do feel it is their divine right.

The way I feel, in short, is: If I can't expect the people with consciences and brains to see through this fluff, then I certainly can't expect anyone else to.

Therefore I officially abandon hope.

Fortunately, because I am a Taker, I can reluctantly abandon hope for the world - not from pessimism, but from sheer weight of evidence - and then say "oh, well" and blithely go about my life. I can lock bad ideas away and ignore them if I am incapable of fixing them. I have never seriously considered abandoning industrialized society - I try to change it in little ways, but I have never opted out of the game, nor have I wanted to. This, too, makes me a Taker.

I fear that some of the intelligentsia who read this book flatter themselves they are secretly Leavers in disguise. Memo to these deluded people: There is no such thing as a Leaver in disguise. If you believe that, you are a bigger liar than Ishmael ever was.

Which is saying something.

Copyright © June 2001. All rights reserved.