Sometimes one's friends can be more difficult to deal with than one's enemies. Over the years, since I first read it, I have come upon various admiring references to Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael." Always by people who tend to believe, as I do, that there is something fundamentally awry with the way modern industrial civilization is wreaking its havoc. I hesitate to express my annoyance with his analysis, therefore, because I agree with some of the basic ideas he expresses. But, I have to admit, I was deeply unsettled after I put the book down many years ago. So unsettled that I did some research and wrote up a more than 10,000 word critique of all the basic facts he got wrong. My conclusion was that he created a false dichotomy between two strawmen - the "Leavers" and the "Takers." I was going to leave it alone. The damn thing is far too long and angry. But then I thought I had some kind of responsibility to my own critique of civilization to try and cram that wordy diatribe into a diary that wasn't tediously long. You can be the judge of that in what follows.
According to Mr. Quinn, what is wrong with the world is that it is being dominated by a "Taker" culture whose tenets are insanely contradictory. "Takers" are
captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels [them] to go on destroying the world in order to live.
No "Takers" specifically want to destroy the world yet they continue to do so as "captives" because if they do not do so they will not be fed. Many people do live lives of such "captivity" and while living these lives, which contribute to the destruction of the planet, they consider themselves good people who have no desire whatsoever to destroy the world. And these people have some vague sense that there is something wrong but "Mother Culture" lulls them to sleep with an incessant propaganda that everyone, according to Mr. Quinn, learns by heart by the time they are six or seven. It is this propaganda which makes "Taker" society so dangerous and destructive. The essence of this propaganda is,
The world was given to man to turn into a paradise, but he's always screwed it up, because he's fundamentally flawed. He might be able to do something about this if he knew how he ought to live, but he doesn't - and he never will, because no knowledge about that is obtainable. So, however hard man might labor to turn the world into a paradise, he's probably just going to go on screwing it up.
So all he can do is to pump harder and harder on the pedals of a flying machine that is rushing inevitably to the ground because it is fundamentally disobeying the laws of aerodynamics.
The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world - or to repair the devastation we've already wrought. We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit - and we go on pouring our poisons into the world. We've gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out - and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it... "Only one thing can save us. We have to increase our mastery of the world. All this damage has come about through our conquest of the world, but we have to go on conquering it until our rule is absolute. Then, when we're in complete control, everything will be fine. We'll have fusion power. No pollution. We'll turn the rain on and off. We'll grow a bushel of wheat in a square centimeter...And that's where it stands right now. We have to carry the conquest forward. And carrying it forward is either going to destroy the world or turn it into a paradise.
This is a good description of a certain mindset that is very active, and very powerful, in modern industrial civilization. It is, however, only one of many schools of thought about humanity's place in the world. To claim that it is a universal story arising from the agricultural revolution is to severely condense thousands of years of human history which have seen, at many times and in many places, a vast array of "stories" many of which resemble "Taker" stories and many of which resemble "Leaver" stories and none of which have become a monolithic world mythology. And it is here, with his postulation of a unified "Taker" mythology, that Mr. Quinn goes astray. Ishmael uncovers a "law" that "organizes things on a biological level just the way the law of gravity organizes things on the macroscopic level.” This law, which all of modern biology has failed to understand as a law, is the "law of limited competition" which is a "peace-keeping" law that promotes diversity. It says,
you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food.
Real biological laws - the law of evolution and the process of natural selection, which are the foundational keystones of the biological sciences, give no support to this "law" of his. Under these real biological laws the activities of "Takers" are not illegal but can be seen as the natural activities of a species which happened to develop big brains and opposable thumbs and used those big brains and opposable thumbs to create tools to more effectively exploit their environment and achieve increased reproductive success. These evolutionary advantages were developed over millennia and lead to increased success in the competitive processes that rule all living organisms. What really differentiates "Takers" is their success at following real biological laws; rather than their mythical rebellion against those laws. To give a concrete example from biology we have the "competitive exclusion principle" which states,
two species so similar that they compete for the same limiting resources cannot coexist in the same place.
Experiments testing this principle have determined that one of the two species is invariable driven to extinction because it is denied access by the other more successful species to the resources it needs to survive, such as food. But is this just “Mother Culture” propaganda, which has concealed from the thousands of great thinkers and scientists who have studied it, the peaceful nature of the natural world? Is it nothing but a patronizing Taker conception of
a place of lawless chaos and savage, relentless competition, where every creature goes in terror of its life?
Or is it a cartoon version of biology attacking the straw man of Taker society as an "outlaw" in order to falsely elevate the other half of the dichotomy, the "Leavers." The Takers cartoon “policy” is
to deny our competitors access to all the food in the world, and that's obviously something no other species does,
While it may not be an intentional "policy" of species, if any one species succeeded in maintaining a 100% survival rate for its offspring, and all species can be said to "want" all their offspring to survive, it would only take a few generations until "all the food in the world" would have been consumed by them - to be followed, of course, by a disastrous crash. And then he takes on Biblical archaeologists and historians. Ishmael, recounting "an event of exquisite irony," spins a tale of "Semitic war propaganda" told in the face of an invasion by the "Chalcolithic Culture" of Caucasian agriculturalists and recorded in the story of Cain and Abel. This tale has no support in any reputable scholarly analysis in the areas of Biblical research, archaeology, anthropology and ancient history. (We are still assuming, remember, that Mr. Quinn is expecting the teachings of Ishmael to be taken seriously; he is not, presumably, writing a character story of how a telepathic gorilla might be confused in his thinking.) Genesis is not, as Mr. Quinn seems to imagine, a single monolithic tale that "has always been an impenetrable mystery to" Takers. It is a confusing tale because the editors who wrote it down were struggling to integrate flatly contradictory but equally important sources. Biblical scholars have agreed to name these sources "J" or "Yahwist," source of the material in Genesis that Mr. Quinn chooses to discuss, "E" or "Elohist," the source of the first Creation story in Genesis 1 - 2:4 and "P" or "Priestly" source, responsible for much of the genealogy and legal material. Mr. Quinn's selection was composed around 900 BC by the "J" source writing in the Southern part of Palestine sometime, perhaps even centuries, after the "E" source. The oral material that is thought to be the basis of this story probably originated in the period of the Judges as a product of the growing sense of national identity among the Israelite tribes. The story of Cain and Abel itself contains contradictory material that represents at least two different traditions; only one of which can be said to "fit" into Mr. Quinn's scheme. According to Mr. Quinn the story of Cain and Abel records a time around 4500 BC when
The tillers of the soil were watering their fields with the blood of Semitic herders.
But, in fact, in Genesis 4:12, God punishes Cain, the farmer, for the murder of his brother Abel, the pastoralist,
if you till the soil, it shall no longer give you its produce. You shall become a restless wanderer on the earth.
These verses, 4:12 -16 are generally agreed by scholars to present Cain as the father and founder of the hard lives of nomadic people, not farmers. The "land of Nod" where Cain ends up serving his punishment "East of Eden" means, literally, "the land of nomads" and the "mark" is probably a tattoo as has been commonly used among nomads of the region's deserts. Mr. Quinn makes just the opposite interpretation: this story is supposed to represent "propaganda" against farmers who are painted as a murderous and evil lot in contrast to the noble and virtuous nomads who Mr. Quinn imagines originally told this tale. Why then has the punishment meted out upon Cain, an evil guy, been to be forced to become a wandering nomad? If Ishmael had read further into his "stack of bibles" he would have found the book of Joshua wherein the invading Hebrew nomadic pastoralists engaged in what one author calls "pious genocide" against the older and original agricultural settlements of the Land of Canaan; just the opposite of the "war" our biblical scholar Ishmael has supposedly divined from its pages. Not only that but real biblical scholars, relying upon the work of archaeologists, have realized that there is no record of any kind of warlike conquest of these lands that might support the story in the book of Joshua. But there is archaeological evidence that, during the early Iron Age (about 1100 BC), a new type of pastoral settlement sprang up across the entire region that gradually and relatively peacefully became the dominant type and replaced the older agricultural communities. This scholars believe, during a time of rising national identity, could have found its way into the bombastic and righteous mythmaking of the book of Joshua. So, instead of a 4500 BC war of "Taker" agriculturalists against peaceful "Leaver" pastoralists, we have a much later, 1100BC, peaceful infiltration of a semi-nomadic people, among whom were the Hebrews, into the land of Canaan where they settled among the Canaanites and spun out their tale of tension between the pagan idolatry of the original settlers and the pious monotheism they were developing. It is curious that Ishmael who possesses a "stack of Bibles" and has his pupil read three different versions of the story can be so uninformed about it. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that Mr. Quinn is less interested in real evidence and, instead, is creating a misinterpretation of it that fits only with his already mistaken interpretations of biology. Not only this but he dismisses the work of countless scholars in the fields he abuses,
I cannot say, of course, that not a single scholar has ever understood this. But most read the story as if it were set in an historical never-never land, like one of Aesop's fables.
The only person creating "historical never-never lands" is Mr. Quinn himself. It is a courageous position he takes; standing alone, with no supporting evidence whatsoever, making outrageously false claims while dismissing a mountain of well-established research that contradicts him. This dismissal, of course, is accomplished by the convenient strategem of "Mother Culture." Like German citizens under Nazi dictatorship all of these archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have been deluded by the propaganda of Mother Culture. If, as it seems he is, Mr. Quinn is using the strategem of Mother Culture to dismiss the work of countless researchers then he is behaving very much like the Creationists who claim that Satan put all the fossil evidence of dinosaurs in the rocks to lead people away from God. And he forges on. The origins of "Taker" culture are inextricable tied to the origins of agriculture. By about 4500 BC
along the borders of Taker expansion the Leavers were being killed off so more land could be put under cultivation.
The latest credible evidence has agriculture beginning around 9000 BC in the Karacadag mountains of southeast Turkey where remains of both cultivated and wild einkorn wheat have been found side by side. The process of conversion to agriculture then began gradually as hunter-gatherers learned to cultivate an already utilized wild plant. Was this conversion a result of the warlike actions of aggressive Caucasian farmers who either murdered or forcibly converted to agriculture the peaceful Semitic herders? The process of conversion from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies has been extensively researched. Research indicates that this process was a gradual and primarily peaceful occurrence (as peaceful as can be imagined when many differing groups of differing levels of aggression are gradually converted) and which happened at differing rates and at different times in all the regions of the world. In the Mid-East this process took about 3000 years as hunter-gatherers began to learn to cultivate wild crops and domesticate wild animals. Is there anything salvageable in the "Leaver/Taker" dichotomy? Not really. Perhaps we can look at things from the "Leaver" side and find some supporting evidence that the "Leaver" way of life is as Mr. Quinn understands it. The first thing that becomes apparent about his idea of "Leaver" culture is that it is monolithic in its adherence to its story:
The gods made man for the world, the same way they made salmon and sparrows and rabbits for the world.
Apparently, then, we can travel the whole world over and find every "Leaver" culture adhering to this story. So, if we could find indigenous, hunter-gatherer people who did not adhere to this story it would force us to conclude that his analysis is unsalvageable from this side as well. This is not hard to do:
The destruction of the island's animals was as extreme as that of the forest: without exception, every species of native land bird became extinct; even shellfish were overexploited, until people had to settle for small sea snails...Porpoise bones disappeared abruptly from the garbage heaps around 1500; no one could harpoon porpoises anymore, since the trees used for constructing the big seagoing canoes no longer existed... Eventually, the islanders turned to the largest remaining meat source available: humans, whose bones became common in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral traditions of the islanders are rife with cannibalism. (Jared Diamond, "Discover")
While one example does not constitute a valid argument, it would be tedious to list the many, many instances of environmentally destructive activities done by indigenous cultures who appear to be living clearly as if "the world belongs to man" rather than "man belongs to the world" as "Leavers" should. A more productive approach would be to look at why "Leaver" cultures do not seem to be able to hold their own in the face of a worldwide, and very destructive "Taker" culture. However, at this point the terms "Taker" and "Leaver" have no real validity or meaning so I will abandon them in favor of the more widely used, and useful, distinction between indigenous hunter-gatherers and industrial civilization. Ishmael tells us
Far from scrabbling endlessly and desperately for food, hunter-gatherers are among the best-fed people on earth, and they manage this with only two or three hours a day of what you would call work - which makes them among the most leisured people on earth...
There is disagreement among anthropologists on this point but, to Mr. Quinn's credit, some actually agree with him regarding certain specific groups; but none would make such a blanket generalization about all hunter-gatherer groups. Kenneth Good in an article in Natural History magazine, "The Yanomami Keep on Trekking" (4/95), examines the practice of this Amazonian hunter-gatherer group of abandoning their communal shelters 40% of the time and going on "treks" in which they rely upon hunting and wild foods. By the way, the word "Yanomami" means: "The People." They believe that they are the only "People" on the planet and all other cultures are "subhuman," and act these beliefs out in raids on various enemies. Hardly the kind of “Leaver” behavior Ishmael would assume they would follow. The Yanomami do maintain garden plots of plantains and manioc but the
men, who do all of the garden work, spend an average of less than two hours per day preparing the gardens. They could easily double that time without significantly changing their other activities. But they don't.
The reasons behind this are not because they are virtuous "Leavers" and live in an "affluent society" but because their crops are rich in vitamins and minerals but have very little protein. Trekking is a decision based upon survival following the law of natural selection,
when a village stays in one place for a long period of time, the local animals are quickly depleted.
There are then two alternatives: the Yanomami men could go off on long hunts by themselves or they could choose to take their families with them. Wisely they choose to keep their family units together and go trekking - during which treks the women are laden down like beasts of burden, while the men walk along carrying only their hunting weapons. And then a study of an American indigenous group and their interactions with the invading Caucasians. James F. Downs in "The Two Worlds of the Washo" describes a tribe that lived around Lake Tahoe.
In large part, Washo society and Washo social behavior were shaped by the environment. One might say that the Washo, in the absence of a complex technology, used their social structure as a tool in exploiting their environment... In the Basin, no matter how plentiful any given source of food might be, it would not support a population for an entire year. Therefore, the movement of the Washo people and even the organization of the family life were at least partially shaped by the exploitive possibilities of the environment.
When the white man arrived the Washo did not see it as a final and deadly attack upon their way of life, which it was. They treated it as another environmental opportunity to exploit:
The greatest new resource was the white man himself...The traditional cycle had to be altered only slightly in order to adjust to a new resource. In addition to earning food or money the Washo found the habitation of the whites a treasure trove. The whites soon accumulated refuse piles and garbage heaps. What was waste to the newcomers was a bonanza to the Washo. The slaughtering of a steer or hog left entrails, heads, hooves, and tails, all edible...Although the white man might be contemptuous, the Washo was too overwhelmed by his new riches to notice.
Over a period of ninety years this opportunistic attitude of the Washo led them slowly to adopt the "riches" of the white man: firearms instead of bows and arrows, fishing lines and steel hooks instead of pronged spears and fishtraps, gunny sacks instead of baskets, paid employment instead of subsistence hunting and gathering. Until finally,
The old skills of the hunter and gatherer were replaced or supplemented by those of a suppressed caste engaged in the hard manual labor and low paying activities of an agricultural community.
This is a sad and tragic story. It is not at all unlike many similar stories of indigenous tribal cultures who abandon their old ways for the increased survival benefits of modern industrial society. So, while Mr. Quinn's dichotomy is not at all helpful, he is bothered by something very real. Modern industrial society has, indeed, taken over the world. But not because it has become a biological outlaw. The reasons for its world domination must be examined in a non-prejudicial way based upon accurate information. "Leaver" and "Taker" strawmen may actually be hindering the cause. It is important to have one's actions grounded in reality; to have the things one says be grounded in physical evidence. Otherwise one ends up being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution; becoming aroused and focusing one's energy in futile charges at windmills rather than at real enemies. The problems presented by modern industrial civilization are tremendous, deeply disturbing and incredibly complex; attempting to reduce them to simple formulaic black and white dichotomies accomplishes nothing constructive. But Mr. Quinn offers more than just a flawed and formulaic pseudo-scientific analysis; he is proposing a "revolution;" a fundamental and profound change in the social order. His "solution" or "vision" is one in which Man
pulled back and gave the rest of us [other species] our chance. He showed us all how it had to be done if the world was to go on being a garden forever. Man was the role model for us all!
Somehow we are to be "inspired" by all this straw flying around to turn our culture from its evil "Taker" ways and undertake a "New Tribal Revolution." It is very possible that his prescription may be worse than the problem. His follow-up book, "My Ishmael" speaks with admiration of Jonestown and the idea of tribal suicide.