Ishmael (Book Review)

Recently someone tweeted at me that I should read Ishmael by David Quinn in response to a piece I posted about the need for unlimited growth in a finite world. Well I have read it and now find myself wondering if people endorsing it, including Jack Dorsey, have spend much time thinking about it. 

The book consists mostly of a dialogue between a teacher (an astute and telepathic gorilla) and a student (a somewhat befuddled human who slowly learns how to see the world as desired by his teacher). The short summary of the core insight is that humans have two cultural narratives: “takers” and “leavers.” Leavers are the (mostly) hunter gatherer cultures who believe that “man belongs to the world” and takers are the agrarian cultures that believe “the world belongs to man.” The book venerates leaver cultures and despises taker cultures.

Now before launching into a criticism, there are two arguments in Ishmael that I agree with. First, culture is an incredibly powerful force that deeply shapes our behavior, while simultaneously being essentially invisible to us. This is of course much like in the old joke where the wise fish meets the young fish and asks “how are you enjoying the water today” to which they reply “what is water?” Second, the current dominant cultural narrative, the one Quinn refers to as takers, is broken in important ways and needs to be replaced.

The idea though that leaver culture is a viable replacement is, however, just as deeply flawed. Ishmael is full of both internal contradictions as well as inconsistencies with what we can observe in the world. Ultimately the book is a combination of elegantly phrased ideas with a profound lack of intellectual rigor. As the author admits in the foreword, he had taken several prior cracks at the same material, often running at way more pages, before arriving at the current condensation. I believe the chosen format is no accident, as it allows kitting over the inconsistencies much more easily (hey, it’s just a novel).

So let me point out a few of the biggest problems. First, there is a claim that evolution is good per se or even the will of the gods and that takers are bad because they have removed themselves from evolution. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of some of the utter horrors that evolution has produced would likely disagree with this. Consider for example species that take over and zombify other species for reproduction. There is no morality built into evolution and it doesn’t somehow magically produce self sustaining outcomes or necessarily continue to ever higher complexity. It is also useful to point out that the humans of the taker cultures are themselves a product of evolution, which is an internal contradiction of the premise that evolution produces only longterm good outcomes.

Second, there is the parenthetical remark in the book that leaver cultures can go on forever subject to environmental conditions. It is extraordinary to me that this receives zero subsequent treatment in the book. Of course there have been multiple mass extinction events on Earth before the current human caused one. Should we simply ignore our knowledge of the deep history of Earth? This is particularly ironic in a book that makes the argument that taker culture is myopic because it only consider the time since the invention of agriculture to be history. Ishmael makes the same mistake by going back only to the beginning of humanity but ignoring all the history of our planet before that. 

Third, there is absolutely no comment at all on how we could broadly adopt a leaver culture, without killing off billions of people. There is a weak aside on how it is possible to have an agrarian leaver culture but that’s not pursued further — there are, however, several remarks on how leavers abandoned agriculture and went back to foraging. Instead, the comment that really stands out is how it is OK in leaver cultures for droughts to result in human starvation. In fact being OK with people starving due to insufficient food is held up as central to leaver culture (according to the book). So how many people are we prepared to let starve? To get to anything that would seem remotely sustainable with the type of mental and cultural model the book promotes, the answer would have to be in the billions. Anybody who seriously wants to argue for a return to leaver culture should spell out this number to at least be intellectually honest.

Now to be clear: I believe we are in fact on track to kill billions of humans because taker culture is so far vastly underinvesting in the fight against the climate crisis. So yes, we absolutely need an alternative narrative, to which end I propose a new humanism. We can act responsibly towards ourselves and toward other species in ways that don’t require killing or starving billions of humans. We can achieve peak population in a gentle fashion and then shrink from there. This is another big mistake in Ishmael which claims that more food will always lead to population growth, but this is not born out by the data. Ishmael tries to get around this by pointing to population growth in Africa. For that argument to make sense though it needs to assume that Africa will not be subject to the pattern of fertility decline that has taken place everywhere else where the standard of living has gone up, infant mortality has declined, and women’s educational attainment has increased.

With my book The World After Capital, I have started to develop this alternative humanist narrative that embraces the potential for progress, while also firmly insisting on human responsibility.

If you are interested in helping develop such a humanist narrative, I would love to hear from you.