A review of my least favorite book and why you should read it

Sages and 'Socratic' dialogues

Last year, I read this book for a book club. As I often do when reading something I think will be consequential, I took notes. Fairly copious notes. 3400 words worth of notes.

Since I was dictating into my phone, the notes were filled with snark.

Phrases such as:

Hey dumb ass, it wasn’t about what they were growing.

I’m getting bored. I wish you would just got to the fucking point.

…still waiting for him to get to the fucking point.

Dear fucking gods. The dude’s still on over-population.

Getting bored again…

Were scattered throughout the document. Yet, I read the whole thing and you might want to as well. [Well, maybe skim it?] I read it because I wanted to understand why my old friend believed what she did. As much as I hated [loathed? despised?] Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, I got some insights. [Since I plan to reference this book in a future post, I’m writing this review first.]

Here’s the Wikipedia blurb on Quinn’s book.

The book has 6500 reviews on Amazon and 98,000 on Goodreads. Simply put, a lot of people just love it. LOVE it. Quinn followed up the ideas he explored in Ishmael with two more works of fiction, and two of non-fiction. Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, is where he expands on the ideas of the fictional Ishmael series. [I’m deciding if reading that one is necessary. If so, I’ll buy a used copy.] Wikipedia gives a pretty detailed - if uncritical - breakdown of the plot points, and the Amazon reviews are… um… gushy. The terms: Mind-expanding, Poignant arguments, Life-lesson, and Excellent Use of the Socratic Dialogue were prevalent. One reader had purchased the book for a college class [AAARGH!]

The first review includes “I'm impressed by the depth of Quinn's knowledge and thinking,” and is a full-on essay.

Dude? Really? [See? More snark. Can’t help it. Now I want to review the reviewer.][I won’t.]

I’m sure you’re getting by now that I didn’t care for it. But even though I think it’s good for TP [although my copy was audio, so not even good for that!] it was worth reading.

The Writing

Most of the reviews said the writing was great, and it won a Turner book award, [In the Forward, DQ describes Turner himself lauding the book in a personal communication,] As a writer of fiction, I found it both unbelievable and boring. [which you might have gotten from my above comments.]

I’ll get to the believability piece below.

However, my primary issue with the writing was that I didn’t like either of the main characters. The narrator - Alan Lomax [whose name is never mentioned in the book so I got it from Wikipedia] - is wholly lacking in meaning in his life. He believes improving his life is selfish and he should be saving the world. That’s what draws him to meet Ismael, the talking gorilla.

Lomax is drawn vividly enough that I expect the author was writing from his personal feelings. As a writer, that’s how you get depth. But Alan Lomax is whiny and mopey and… isolated. He doesn’t seem to have any friends or family, let alone responsibilities that might prevent him from spending hours with his teacher. Duh. No wonder he’s miserable. Tragic even.

Ishmael is the gorilla who instructs him using dialogue. I refuse to call this dialogue Socratic [it might be fair to call it that, but I’m no expert] as I think that would be an insult to Socrates. [Yes, I have read Plato, not all of it.] Quinn also uses mythology which he ‘interprets.’ Don’t get me wrong, engaging in hermeneutics - the interpretation of texts - is a worthy activity. I’ve been engaging with that here. Jordan Peterson will soon have a book out on how to think about Biblical stories.

But what Daniel Quinn does is something far more shallow. He takes biblical stories such as the Garden of Eden, and Cain and Abel, and forces them into his personal philosophy. He also takes the stories far too literally, as metaphors for historical events.

Dude, you’re doing it wrong.

Myths are stories that tell us how to live in the world as it is, not to force the world into a single vision. I’m not Christian [Pagan, here] and I found his ‘interpretations’ faintly nauseating, as if the world had tilted. He seems under the impression that most people don’t know these stories. Maybe he’s right.

The writing also says something about his audience. The main character is unable to find meaning in his life. He’s lost and drifting. A teacher is something he both desires and is skeptical of. Quinn’s audience is people who want to save the world and want someone with moral authority to tell them how to do it. It seems pretty clear in the mind of Daniel Quinn, that religion doesn’t exist. While he refers to the gods it’s clear he doesn’t believe in them. His main character knows nothing of something greater than himself. Lomax longs to, but he does not.

The author imbues Ishmael with moral authority by making him a gorilla [Ted Turner loved this] and thus outside the human sphere. However, for those who believe in something greater than human a gorilla as moral authority - no matter how magical - just isn’t believable.

But then neither is the message.

Why Quinn was - and is - wrong

Spoiler alert: His ideology is that we should celebrate global depopulation - since it will just happen naturally without anyone getting their hands dirty [plague, or starvation, or something] and return to the pastoral and tribal living of our ancestors.

Ishmael presents the idea of ‘takers’ and ‘leavers,’ while wholly failing to provide a definition for either. It’s easy to create polarities - and perhaps even instinctive - because we have to create distinctions in order to exist in the world.

Ishmael’s message was that pastoral humans [leavers] were non-violent, and mean agriculturists [takers] came in and ruined a perfect lifestyle. [Cain and Abel] A gorilla puts words in the mouths of humans who have been dead for 10,000 years and can’t speak for themselves. So those rotten agriculturists enslaved everyone to build cities and killed off the pastoralists. Ever since then they’ve [we’ve] been breeding like ants, or deer, eating everything in sight until the ground is barren, and polluting Eden.

While he’s never bold enough to explicitly state it, Ishmael/Quinn suggests that the correct moral course is to let starving people starve because that will reduce the human population. This is implied more than once.

I’m quite certain that Quinn doesn’t view himself as greedy. He is, however, laying out an argument for why other humans should feel guilty about our existence. He might as well be laying out an argument for why most of the human race should commit fucking suicide.

I’m pretty sure he’s not including himself in this. I’m sure everyone he knows is also exempt. Only people he doesn’t need to look in the eye are expendable.

For the good of the planet, of course.

But humans don’t endlessly reproduce, [we will peak out below 12 billion] and the predicted disasters haven’t materialized. The Club of Rome was wrong [although they’re happy to push back the timeline rather than admit it,] and Paul Erlich lost his notorious bet with Julian Simon which the media carefully ignored.

Ishmael cites the evils of human competition, [as if male gorillas don’t fight in the wild, and chimps didn’t tear strangers limb from limb] while ignoring the cooperative nature of all sorts of different interactions, both human and non-human. Darwin didn’t mean competition in the sense that living creatures were literally fighting it out. He meant finding a specific niche and filling a role. The more diversity there is the greater the number of niches and roles to fulfill.

Quinn also acts as if we deliberately went to war with nature. He doesn’t take into account our sheer, physical fragility and how much nature was actually trying to kill us for most of our existence. Really, this story could only be told by someone in the oh-so-comfortable Western world.

Nor did we take up agriculture all at once. There was no hard line between the two modes of living. Ancient humans could shift between them depending on the current conditions. We also built plenty of megalithic structures long before agriculture became evident in the archeological record.

This list is not exhaustive because this post is already longer than I wanted.

So why do I think you should read it? Because if we don’t start talking to each other, we’re all going down together. To do that we have to start with understanding the 98,000 people who loved this book. We have to understand why they loved it if we’re going to find solutions to the problems that plague our divided society.

But we can’t convince anyone of anything unless they like us first. This means we have to meet people where they are. You can’t gentle a horse by beating it into submission. So [maybe?] read the book and think about what alternatives would keep the planet healthy besides the deaths of a few billion people. One of the solutions can be found in permaculture which I’ve written about here. I’m also considering arguments about the benefits of CO2, and having more people.

People who loved this book have a particular viewpoint. But nothing changes if all we have to offer them is contempt, and a religion they weren’t raised with and have been taught to despise. So yeah, read the book.

Just… get a used copy…

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Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; four boyz and one cranky gurl. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, and the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition.