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elijah1370 's review for:
Ishmael
by Daniel Quinn
I really wanted to love this book. It came recommended highly to me by someone I respected and most of the research I did on it considered it a modern classic. However, I found this is a really disappointing read. "Ishmael" is a great concept with extremely important themes, but I also found it deeply flawed.
"Ishmael" is basically a vessel for Daniel Quinn expressing his worldview, which is that modern society has developed a toxic and destructive culture that consumes nature and ignores other ways of living, which humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. And, at a broad level, Quinn's arguments are true. Maybe this is why so many people swear by this book and consider it their gateway into environmentalism. However, Quinn's arguments are riddled with psuedo-intellectualism, historical inaccuracies, and logical fallacies. Reading this book is like having a conversation with a high-iq stoner who drifted through a few college degrees and developed a theory of everything.
Quinn puts his own arguments into the mouth of Ishmael, a wise old gorilla who speaks for the natural world and preagricultural peoples. Already, I found this contrived. The didactic format is novel, and admittedly, I am a fan. But, the protagonist brings no substance to the story besides being an everyman, who says 'what?' and 'why?' at the right time.
I think the biggest criticism I have of "Ishmael" is the way it propagates false ideas about the worldviews of preagricultural peoples. Quinn dichotomizes the 'takers' and the 'leavers' - those who only consume nature and those who live in harmony with nature's law. I do agree with him that hunter-gatherers have a fundamentally different and fundamentally superior way of seeing nature than do modern, urban people, but I think Quinn's portrayal of the 'leavers' is naive and untrue. Hunter-gatherers drove large mammal species to extinction on every continent before the dawn of agriculture. Hunter-gatherers and premodern peoples have a natural worldview, epistemology, and spirituality that we have utterly lost, but they are not self-denying or naive. They are certainly 'takers' in their own way, as all humans are. I also think that the switch from 'leaver' to 'taker' was a drawn-out, gradual, and nuanced process over thousands of years of culture, not one that happened over a generation in the fertile crescent.
The biggest justification that I can come up with for this book was the time it was written. I've learned about most of the subjects covered in this book, such as environmentalism, ecology, anthropology, hunter-gatherer culture, and religion. I know that the discourse around all of these subjects has shifted significantly over the last 30 years, not the least of which is the discourse around environmentalism. Perhaps Quinn's arguments really were prescient in 1992, despite his logical errors.
I certainly think the spirit of this book holds true today, but its ethos seems to be grounded in an idealistic environmentalism of the cultural revolution that is totally dated. Personally, I think "Ishmael" needs to be permanently retired. Its enlightening message is not worth the misinformation that it propagates. I'd hope that a new generation can capture what is special about this book while not repeating its persistent flaws.
"Ishmael" is basically a vessel for Daniel Quinn expressing his worldview, which is that modern society has developed a toxic and destructive culture that consumes nature and ignores other ways of living, which humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. And, at a broad level, Quinn's arguments are true. Maybe this is why so many people swear by this book and consider it their gateway into environmentalism. However, Quinn's arguments are riddled with psuedo-intellectualism, historical inaccuracies, and logical fallacies. Reading this book is like having a conversation with a high-iq stoner who drifted through a few college degrees and developed a theory of everything.
Quinn puts his own arguments into the mouth of Ishmael, a wise old gorilla who speaks for the natural world and preagricultural peoples. Already, I found this contrived. The didactic format is novel, and admittedly, I am a fan. But, the protagonist brings no substance to the story besides being an everyman, who says 'what?' and 'why?' at the right time.
I think the biggest criticism I have of "Ishmael" is the way it propagates false ideas about the worldviews of preagricultural peoples. Quinn dichotomizes the 'takers' and the 'leavers' - those who only consume nature and those who live in harmony with nature's law. I do agree with him that hunter-gatherers have a fundamentally different and fundamentally superior way of seeing nature than do modern, urban people, but I think Quinn's portrayal of the 'leavers' is naive and untrue. Hunter-gatherers drove large mammal species to extinction on every continent before the dawn of agriculture. Hunter-gatherers and premodern peoples have a natural worldview, epistemology, and spirituality that we have utterly lost, but they are not self-denying or naive. They are certainly 'takers' in their own way, as all humans are. I also think that the switch from 'leaver' to 'taker' was a drawn-out, gradual, and nuanced process over thousands of years of culture, not one that happened over a generation in the fertile crescent.
The biggest justification that I can come up with for this book was the time it was written. I've learned about most of the subjects covered in this book, such as environmentalism, ecology, anthropology, hunter-gatherer culture, and religion. I know that the discourse around all of these subjects has shifted significantly over the last 30 years, not the least of which is the discourse around environmentalism. Perhaps Quinn's arguments really were prescient in 1992, despite his logical errors.
I certainly think the spirit of this book holds true today, but its ethos seems to be grounded in an idealistic environmentalism of the cultural revolution that is totally dated. Personally, I think "Ishmael" needs to be permanently retired. Its enlightening message is not worth the misinformation that it propagates. I'd hope that a new generation can capture what is special about this book while not repeating its persistent flaws.