If I were to describe this book in only two words they would be pretentious and preachy. Ishmael is a short novel in which the author attempts to educate the audience of the ecological horrors inflicted upon the world by industrialized nations. It offers a moral parable that describes the inevitable doom of all mankind because of the actions of a group the author calls “the takers” who are collectively responsible for taking earth's resources and corrupting them for selfish and unnecessary purposes. “The Takers” includes all people born to non-hunter-gatherer societies. Every reader is part of this perverse and cataclysmic population of ecological rapists and therefore should change their ways and stop taking from the benevolent Mother Earth that weeps at our insatiable greed.

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This story is told through the interactions between a normal American man who finds himself talking to a telepathic gorilla named Ishmael who is interested in saving the world. Ishmael put an ad in the newspaper to recruit potential saviors and has failed many times before to instill the history of the depravity of humans onto his students. Ishmael starts this education by examining the origin myths propagated by modern humans that justify their mastery over nature and their desire to put themselves above God. By thwarting death by engaging in excessive farming and energy usage humans have become so blind to the balance of nature that they fling themselves toward destruction as resources deplete beyond renewal.

Ishmael then juxtaposes the lifestyles of the hunter-gatherers also known as “The Leavers” and everyone else known as “The Takers”. “The Leavers” live as the animals do in that they only take what they need to survive and leave the rest which allows them to live in “harmony” with nature and retain the supposed balance built into the fabric of biological reality. These “Leavers” are venerated as somehow more morally righteous than “The Takers” as they never waste anything and do not kill for any other reason than for sustenance. They do not hoard their food, chop down too many trees, or pollute the world with their ridiculously wasteful technologies. Of course, this is all being pontificated by an extremely intelligent telepathic ape who has read all the books and has somehow stumbled upon the hidden sins of modern man and wishes to save the world by teaching one or two guys to spread the word like a Ghandi of the environment.

The idea that humans waste and pollute is certainly true but the idea that this is due to anything other than an evolutionarily derived adaptation to survive and prosper is to elevate humans to some malevolent and cunning demon who has made a conscious decision to work together to destroy something beautiful. Humans are just animals working with the adaptive tools they have to survive. Farming and other technologies, in fact, all technologies, fall into the same category of evolutionarily advantageous expressions of the biological instinct to mitigate risk and propagate the species. By building, farming, and burning fuel we bolster our defenses against hunger, weather, and predators in a way that has allowed humans to live in a way that has increased lifespan, health, and wellbeing, and ultimately for the continuation of the species. This species-centric prioritization is built into biology and the greed of humans to want to protect themselves and their kin is exactly what all animals have innately built into their genes. Genes want to expand and multiply and if their host generates strategies that promote this endeavor the genes are more than happy to accommodate this purpose.

The idea that people should stop building to increased levels of technological solutions to the risks of life on earth is to condemn them to the short-lived and brutal realities of those creatures without the ability to plan and innovate. We can improve upon our understanding and the natural world and innovate new ways to find and utilize resources so that we progress toward a better balance between the natural ecological boundaries of our environment and push against the impending doom of societal collapse, starvation, and population loss. We are no more capable of thwarting our instincts to dominate the environment for our prosperity than the lion is capable of sparing the doe no matter how cute the doe is. Ants hoard resources and build monuments for their prosperity and if they were large enough they would decimate the earth as humans do. Luckily, they remain so small.

Also, the idea that hunter-gatherers are somehow morally superior to any other group sets them apart from the shared human experience and suspends the fact that they too engage in wasteful and barbaric activities. Few groups of people or animals don’t engage in some kind of waste, killing, raping, or another form of corruption of the puritanical vision of what biological creatures should do. The idea that there is a pure form of anything is to engage in wishful thinking and holier-than-thou judgments that lead toward dogmatic and cult-like ideologies.

I don't like the narrow and self-righteous retrospective examination of humanity's struggle for survival and subsequent problem-solving that this book proffers as a refutation of human behavior as some kind of malevolent force. As if we are going against some higher order the author proclaims as morally superior. Compared to what? Compared to the immense extinction of species that did not adapt or were killed by an unforgiving and unguided environment no one chose to be born at the mercy of? Should we abandon our medicine, science, and farming to live in “harmony” with a universe that is no more harmonious than the auditory void of a black hole?

It's not that I don't recommend this book or that it doesn't offer a philosophical perspective that warrants review. It is worth reading but it fails to persuade as it offers only a simplified and narrow perspective of human behavior. It requires a wholesale acceptance of its premises and provides little in the way of relevant counterarguments. Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is written well and is narrated masterfully by Anthony Heald in the Audible version I listened to. When engaging with this book I recommend being aware of its rhetorical tactics and remaining skeptical of its biased perspective.

Book Review/Rebuttal: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

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