The book, entitled Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, had once been required reading at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The story amounts to a revealing dialogue between man and beast, the latter at the helm of a one-student classroom. After giving his own origin story, Ishmael, the telepathic gorilla, turns his attention toward humankind’s origin story or, at least, one version – the sort of civilizational system that compels humankind to destroy the world in order to live in it. Humankind, in other words, is in the grip of a story designed to tear down, not build up, and it is Mother Culture that perpetuates this story, convincing listeners that there is no other way. Those who live by this code, Ishmael calls Takers. They are who we might call civilized. Those who live according to a different origin story, a different way of existing on this planet, the gorilla calls Leavers. They are the uncivilized. A significant component of Taker culture is the belief that all of creation was made for humankind. It is taken as a given, and we can hear it in common language. Our oceans need to be pollution free. Our forests need to be managed. Our wildlife must be protected. Our sky should be free of smog. Taker culture claims the created world as its own because Takers believe that they are the pinnacle of evolution. As Ishmael says, “the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation.” What does this mean? From the beginning, two models for how to live emerge with one, by its very design, intent on destroying the other. It is the agrarian or Taker model that restricts access to food for every other creature, Leavers included. That is a message from Mother Culture, and it is one we still enact today. The expansion of Taker culture only heightens their claim to, in effect, own the world, even going so far as to actively prevent nature from taking its course. Say an impoverished community gets too big to be able to sustain itself. It grows even poorer. The suffering is intense. What is the ethical thing to do? Nature might restore balance in ways that only nature can, but the Taker response would certainly be different. The Taker response would be to rush resources into that community to save it. Understanding that population grows or shrinks depending on the resources it has access to, is it really the right thing to tip the scales upward, knowing that the infrastructure could not sustain a population growth? Is that what we want? It is here that a couple of facts about the author, Daniel Quinn, need to be said. First, he had been a postulant at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gesthemani where he wanted to be a Trappist monk, but, second, after his spiritual director prematurely ended his postulancy, Quinn entered publishing and abandoned his Catholic faith. This turn of events is no small detail when it comes to understanding the morality being presented in Ishmael. In effect, the Leaver ethic would be to let people die; the Taker ethic would be to step in to prevent it. Quinn’s case for how some human beings built a civilizational structure that is neither good for them nor for the created order around them is compelling. Where I find his argument to be problematic, though, is his deference to natural law over charitable human interaction. Yes, we may be a part of the natural world, but as humans, aren’t we endowed with the task of looking out for one another. We belong to each other, in other words. How does that stand up to a model asserting that famines are nature’s way of decreasing the population and, hence, mouths to feed? I will leave it up to you, dear listeners, to answer this question. Did Quinn’s break with faith have anything to do with his maligning of what is commonly called civilization? We can only wonder why it is a gorilla and not a man who possesses all the wisdom. Perhaps if we pull this string, the wrapping will come undone.
https://www.amazon.com/Ishmael-Novel-Daniel-Quinn/dp/0553375407
