Ishmael is a 1992 philosophical novel by Daniel Quinn. It examines mythology, its effect on ethics, and how that relates to sustainability. The novel uses a style of Socratic dialogue to deconstruct the notion that humans are the end product, the pinnacle of biological evolution. It posits that human supremacy is a cultural myth, and asserts that modern civilization is "enacting" that myth.
Ishmael was awarded the $500,000 Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award. The book is the first of a trilogy including The Story of B and My Ishmael.
The story begins with a newspaper ad: "Teacher seeks pupil, must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person." The narrator responds at first with disgust because of the absurdity of "wanting to save the world", but decides to answer the ad out of nostalgia for his adolescence during the 1960s children's revolts. Upon arriving at the address, he finds himself in a room with a gorilla. He notices a sign that reads "With man gone will there be hope for gorilla?"
To the man's surprise he finds that the gorilla, Ishmael, can communicate telepathically. At first baffled by this, the man learns the story of how the gorilla came to be this way and he accepts Ishmael as his teacher. The novel continues from this point as a Socratic dialogue between Ishmael and his student as they hash out what Ishmael refers to as "how things came to be this way" for mankind.
Ishmael's life, which began in the African wilderness, was spent mostly in a zoo and a menagerie, and since had been spent in the gazebo of a man that extricated him from physical captivity. He tells his student that it was at the menagerie that he learned about human language and culture and began to think about things that he never would have pondered in the wild. Subsequently, Ishmael tells his student that the subject for this learning experience will be captivity, primarily the captivity of man under a distorted civilizational system. The narrator has a vague notion that he is living in some sort of captivity and being lied to in some way but he can not explain his feelings.
Ishmael uses the example of Nazi Germany to show that men are either held captive with the mythology of being superior, or "an animal swept up in the stampede" of the captivity of those around them.
Before proceeding Ishmael lays some ground definitions for his student. He defines:
* Takers as people often referred to as "civilized." Particularly, the culture born in an Agricultural Revolution that began about 10,000 years ago in the Near East; the culture of Ishmael's pupil.
* Leavers as people of all other cultures; sometimes referred to as "primitive."
* A story as an interrelation between the gods, man, and the Earth, with a beginning, middle, and end.
* To enact is to strive to make a story come true.
* A culture as a people who are enacting a story.
Ishmael proceeds to tease from his pupil the premises of the story being enacted by the Takers: that they are the pinnacle of evolution, that the world was made for man, and that man is here to conquer and rule the world. This rule is meant to bring about a paradise, as man increases his mastery of the world, however, he is always failing because he is flawed. Man doesn't know how to live and never will because that knowledge is unobtainable. So, however hard he labors to save the world, he is just going to go on defiling and spoiling it.
Ishmael points out to his student that when the Takers decided there is something fundamentally wrong with humans, they took as evidence only their own culture's history- "They were looking at a half of one-percent of the evidence taken from a single culture-- Not a reasonable sample on which to base such a sweeping conclusion."
Ishmael says:
"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act as the lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now."
Ishmael goes on to help his student discover that, contrary to what the Takers think, there are immutable laws that life is subject to and it is possible to discern them by studying the biological community. Together, Ishmael and his student identify one set of survival strategies which appear to be evolutionarily stable for all species (later dubbed the Law of Limited Competition): In short, "you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war." All species inevitably follow this law, or as a consequence go extinct. The Takers believe themselves to be exempt from this Law and flout it at every point.
Ishmael goes on to help his pupil discover just how the Takers rendered themselves above the laws governing all of life.....
Daniel Quinn's book "Ishmael"
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