Recounting Ishmael

I just finished Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and just wanted to excavate the main philosophical line of reasoning here to refer to later.

The Premise #

The book is about an unnamed writer that spent his life searching for greater meaning. When he sees an ad in the paper:

“TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.”

When the writer answers the ad by visiting a small office he find that the teacher is actually a gorilla named Ishmael who can inject thoughts into the writer’s mind. What follows from this absurd premise is a philosophical dialogue between teacher and pupil in the oldest sense of the tradition. This is the meat of Ishmael - I want to recount it here.

The Philosophy Condescend #

Humankind is separated into two distinct historical strains - the Takers and the Leavers. The Takers originated from the Fertile Crescent at the dawn of agriculture. Previous to this all of humankind (3 million years according to Ishmael) had been Leavers. Leavers live a nomadic life.

The character of Leavers is essentially harmonious with nature - their culture has evolved from their living within it. This means their culture is inherently tied to the land - it is the stuff of indigenous mythology of creation that emphasises a mystical understanding of the universe. This culture is why if you look at pre-colonial Australia or America the land was a patchwork of different tribes - culture enabled consistency within a tribe, held the tribe together. It also prevented a tribe from expanding into another’s territory because you could recognise a different culture and there were consequences for being outside your own territory. Such a configuration prevented population explosions - a tribe connected to a territory understood the number of people it could support and could not grow beyond that.

The characters of Takers on the other hand was inherently expansionist. By growing their own food they could cultivate more than they needed. This broke the connection of living within nature - and placed man as his own God. Thanks to agriculture there was no need to understand the inherent limits of land and nature could be dominated and manipulated according to man’s will. Furthermore the aggressively expansionist Takers expanded their homogeneous culture and pushed out the Leavers.

According to Ishmael this story is reflected in the bible in the story of Cain and Abel - Cain the farmer while Abel is a shepherd (lives with the herd). Cain kills Abel because God prefer’s Abel’s sacrifice.

There is also biblical resonance with the story of creation: when Adam ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil he was expelled from the Garden of Eden. Ishmael says that the only the Takers have an understanding of good and evil - this is the root of their expansionist nature. It enables them to label those Leavers as evil and justify their expansion. Leavers on the other hand only understand nature as a system of laws and consequences, other cultures are undecipherable.

Takers have baked within our culture certain preconceptions about the world that are passed on. Work is good. Progress and expansion are good. Leavers are savages and lead a miserable life. Ishmael says this last point is not true - Leavers actually had much leisure time, they were taller and better fed and when given the option they went back to a Leaver life rather than become Takers. This is the history of colonialism - aggressive expansion of the Takers to subjugate the Leavers.

Our present issues on the verge of ecological collapse is the logical conclusion of Takers marking themselves as gods and taking themselves outside of nature. What’s more humankind by taking itself outside of nature cannot evolve - because evolution reacts to terrain, to the environment - to take oneself out of nature is to break the link with the context in which evolution occurs.

Ishmael has a fascinating idea at this point. That mankind was only the first of many creatures to develop consciousness and culture. That all animals can eventually follow but they must be allowed. The Takers destructive expansionist character is ruining this opportunity and offering only the prospect of a ruined and homogeneous world. And that is the promise.