Ishmael = awesome book

[artanaro]

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Deals with how the world is the way it is today and deals with primarily two opposing philosophies the Leavers (examples : native cultures, Elven cultures) and the Takers (examples : our present culture, judaic culture or any that insist upon dominating Arda, in short the philosophy advocated by Morgoth, Sauron,and Saruman amongst others)
A very interesting read and I believe all will relate to it...

"Ishmael is a half ton silverback gorilla. He is a student of ecology, life, freedom, and the human condition. He is also a teacher. He teaches that which all humans need to learn -- must learn -- if our species, and the rest of life on Earth as we know it, is to survive.
In 1989 Ted Turner created a fellowship to be awarded to a work of fiction offering positive solutions to global problems. The winner, chosen from 2500 entries worldwide, was a work of startling clarity and depth: Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, a Socratic journey that explores the most challenging problem humankind has ever faced: How to save the world from ourselves.

The book opens with a deceptively ordinary personals ad: "Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world." Seeking a direction for his life, a young man answers the ad and is startled to find that the teacher is a lowland gorilla named Ishmael, a creature uniquely placed to vision anew the human story.

Ishmael's paradigm of history is startlingly different from the one wired into our cultural consciousness. For Ishmael, our agricultural revolution was not a technological event but a moral one, a rebellion against an ethical structure inherent in the community of life since its foundation four billion years ago. Having escaped the restraints of this ethical structure, humankind made itself a global tyrant, wielding deadly force over all other species while lacking the wisdom to make its tyranny a beneficial one or even a sustainable one.

That tyranny is now hurtling us toward a planetary disaster of pollution and overpopulation. If we want to avoid that catastrophe, we need to work our way back to some fundamental truths: that we weren't born a menace to the world and that no irresistible fate compels us to go on being a menace to the world.

Since Bantam first published Daniel Quinn's utterly unique novel Ishmael in 1992, the novel has grown into a bestseller. Ishmael has garnered rave reviews and has been adopted for classroom use in schools coast-to-coast, including Dartmouth, the Naval Academy and Stanford University. Along the way, Ishmael gathered a devoted following as thousands upon thousands of readers have written to Quinn to express how the book has changed their lives.

Quinn's first version of the award-winning novel was written in 1977 and was followed by seven more complete and distinct versions. The character Ishmael appeared only in the eighth, and final, version. This is also the only version written as a novel. "I was ready to admit defeat when Ted Turner announced his plans for the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship. I felt, if I read him right, he was looking for exactly the sort of book I was struggling to write, and this encouraged me to give it one more try. I'm certainly glad I did."

Quinn says Ishmael is a story about hope. "I think we have a much finer and more exciting destiny than conquering and ruling the world," he says. "This book shows that we can learn about what that destiny is from the life around us -- and in Ishmael it just happens that life speaks with the voice of a lowland gorilla.""

that was from the site www.ishmael.org/welcome.cfm
check it out it has essays dealing with the subject matter and a whole lot of info
enjoy....

Namarie
Artanaro

[artanaro]

" Ishmael: Textbook For Life?




What would you do for a quarter of a million dollars??? Since I’m not sure what a teacher’s salary is, I can’t be too sure of how desperate your circumstances are. However, I’ll assume that you could use the money, and that writing a book would sound like a reasonable request. Well there’s just one catch. You have to solve society’s problems and save the world while doing so. Welcome to the life of Daniel Quinn. This author not only completed such a task, but also did such an excellent job that the novel became a very large success. So what was it that made it so popular? What makes any book popular? A book is just a form of communication. The sender, Quinn, delivers a message to the audience, the readers. The best books just require a message that is best suited for the desired audience. If it is that simple, why specifically has Ishmael been received so well? It is in part that the message is sent in a very well constructed package, and also in part that the message is different, drastic and especially desired by its audience.

The success of this story is not due to the plot. It’s no surprise that Hollywood hasn’t bought the script and the big screen version of Ishmael wasn’t this summer’s blockbuster hit. Who would want to sit through multiple shots of a gorilla sitting there while some voice is supposedly him speaking to your mind? Quinn never intended the books to be read for entertainment. It is a teaching device. Ishmael could be the textbook for a new way of life. Not many people sit down and read textbooks for enjoyment, at least not as many people that Quinn wanted to target as his audience. He wanted this book to be read by everyone. He wanted the everyday people to pick it up, receive the message, and pass on the book to others. In his mind, that’s the only way to save the world. The new way of thinking must reach the masses of people if a difference is to be made. Toward the end of the book, Ishmael instructs his student to tell one hundred people and that they would have to tell one hundred people about what they had learned. We should assume that Ishmael is telling us the same thing. Throughout the story the man is not the only pupil. We are also students sitting there with Ishmael trying to come to an understanding. We get the sense that he is asking us the question, and we have to figure out what he means. It makes you think.

If we are Ishmael’s students, what is it about the lesson we are being taught that keeps us from skipping the class by putting the book down? One thing is that we are hearing things we have NEVER heard before. In fact, most of it goes against what we have been taught all our life. Mother Culture, who has been our teacher up to this point, is being challenged. Which means that WE are being challenged as well. Everything about us, from what we do to what we think is standing on the edge of a Revolution, being organized by a telepathic gorilla! What does not sound intriguing about that?

The entire crux of the story is realizing that we are captive. It seems amusing to me that a novel found so captivating by many, in its essence, is about escaping captivity. We are captives of something that we can’t identify. People can’t break free if they can’t find the bars, argues Ishmael in the beginning of the story. Mother Culture entraps us, but makes sure that we don’t even know it. Makes sure that we don’t see the other ways that could save us, but destroy her.

How she keeps us away from those alternatives is by telling us myths. Ishmael brings to light many myths and lies that Mother Culture likes to whisper to us. One that really gives us a new way of thinking about our society is the information about Leaver societies. Leaver societies are one of our alternatives. Before the Agricultural Revolution around 8000BC, all people were leavers. At this time, people were not living in hellish conditions, as many of us have somehow come to believe. They probably only worked a few hours a day, and had none of the problems we associate with modern society or that we excuse as being side effects of growth. They were no more in danger of extinction than any other species that lives in accordance to natural law today. (p. 120). Of course human action now greatly threatens the survival of all species. Those prehistoric people were probably safer than anyone else. If you think about it, there are so many other things that people take as true even when there is no evidence to prove it.

Before he starts to explain the Leaver culture, he starts by explaining our Taker culture. Our way of life is another thing we seem not to question, at least not in the way Ishmael does. He makes a great point when he says that we are trying to live by the "one right way" (p.205). Obviously it isn’t the perfect way. But we still support it as if it were. We have invested everything we have into this way of life and we are just realizing that it may be failing. But Mother Culture reassures us that it still is the best way. "Mother Culture must be finished off if you’re going to survive…"(p.144). We need a new way, but no one really knows any other alternatives.

He attempts to get us to see our culture as a trial and error test. This opens our minds to the idea that this could not be the "one right way," it is just a way. This is the first thing that would need to be realized if change was going to occur. Our society hasn’t existed long enough to say it has survived the test on time, it hasn’t been proven by natural selection. We stopped natural selection when we decided to take power into our own hands of who will survive (p.238).

By now it would make sense to wonder why if life was so good when we were all Leavers, and if our Taker society isn’t perfect, why did we make the change? In the middle of the story (Ch. 9), he explains that the Fall of Man was actually the agricultural revolution. And from that point on, people had the power of the gods, and believed that they knew good from evil, and therefore what was good for them could not be evil, so they neglected all the laws of nature that they could and grew and multiplied and made the world serve themselves, and it was good. That is the story we currently live in. So we changed because we could, and we thought it was the right way.

Ishmael defends all of these new revolutionary ideas very well. For example, he says that all this time we have been looking at the problems that people face such as hunger, crime, poverty, drug use… and we have been treating them as separate problems. But Ishmael tells us that they are not problems, but the symptoms of a single problem. That problem is the difference between the Taker and Leaver cultures. That difference is displayed in the use of agriculture, but is specifically the fact that we have tried to free ourselves from the laws of nature. No leaver cultures have those "problems" that we have always thought of as side effects of progress (p. 146). With arguments like these, he gradually builds up support for re-evaluating what we think about our ways, and the natural ways that all the other communities of the planet live by. By looking at the Leaver cultures, we may find a better way of living, which could sustain our species and all other species for an indefinite time.

The fact that Quinn’s message is desired is one of the components to the book’s success. I believe that it is the largest component. Taker activities have cast our way of life into a downward spiral. We strive to increase our happiness by making life easier. In order to live easy lives, we need to buy the things we want. So in order to get things that make life easier, we have to work harder. To do this many of us have to live in cities, where there is crime, pollution, and stress. Our population growth is increasing the problems, but we won’t let people die. We try to cure all natural illnesses, and ban physician assisted suicide. We are stuck in this situation and we think that it is "the right way." But more and more people are unhappy.

Obviously Quinn is making an important assumption. It is that we believe that the world is running out of time. However, no one can do anything because like Ishmael says, on page 214, you can’t just stop being in one story. You have to be in another story, and since we don’t know any other story, we have no choice. But as we learn that our myths about Leavers are false, we realize that their ways are another possible option.

Most people have never been told that their way is not the right way. It is because we a captive. We are trapped in a society that tells us everything is fine the way it is. It says that things will always work out in the end; that people were made to rule the world, and the world was made to serve people; that money is power; consumption is a sign of success. "Get a job, make some money, work till you’re sixty, then move to Florida and die. (p. 5)." It says we don’t need to change because we are flying (maybe we just haven’t hit the ground yet) (p.109). All of these ideas are our bars. They keep us inside of our culture. They keep us from finding a reason to abandon it, to get out of it.

Quinn’s book was a success because it is the first time many of us have heard about any other story that exists. It is the first time we heard that we are captives. And since people overall are becoming less and less satisfied with their lives, the idea of change and revolution intrigues us. Quinn’s ideas are different and extreme, but the success of the book implies that it is something people want. Society has given us all a part of has been made tough, but it is sore and dead. (p. 6). Many people believe that thing could be better off. However, there are many people out there who don’t try to find better ways because they don’t know where to find them, or if they even exist. Maybe Quinn’s story isn’t the right way, but it could be. He proves that people are becoming willing to accept a new way of thinking. Hopefully this is the first step to end Mother Culture.

This all applies to my experience while reading Ishmael. I personally appreciated the book. I found it very compelling and mind opening for the reasons that it was different and desired. The part I found the most interesting was the section that explained the way our Biblical stories actually came to be, and the true meaning behind them. I liked this part because it was different than anything I had heard before, but it made sense. I don’t know if it is true, if it could even be true, but it sounds right to me. It is just a very specific example of how there are so many things we value as truth, but never really look into them. Everyone believes it so why question it? That is the best thing this book did for me, it gave me a reason to question what has always been taken as true.

The part about religion where Ishmael says that it exists only because we needed prophets also makes perfect sense. We wanted someone to tell us how to live because we had forgotten. I think this speaks specifically to me because I question my Roman Catholic religion quite often. Some things seem like such nonsense that I don’t know how everyone buys into it. It is because we don’t know anything else. My search for a religion that fits me could be an impossible journey to complete, because religion is just a thing that tells us all how to live the one right way and maybe no religion exists that can tell us that way because they are all just guesses and trial and error attempts. But because I am realizing this now, it shows that I am developing the strengths to change. The first step in change is asking questions. Then finding out that "the way things are" may not be the "one right way." I hope that I can take the next step, which would be to find "a right way" that works for me. The "religion" that Ishmael puts forth may be the next place to check.

Maybe we will never be given that chance to earn a quarter of a million dollars, but if we all were to embark on spiritual journeys similar to the one taken by Quinn as he discovered the "right way" for himself and possibly for many others, we would find the outcome to be priceless."

from webpub.alleg.edu/employee/m/mmaniate/textbook.htm

Elven culture is essentially a Leaver culture. Tolkien's depiction of our beliefs and mythology is essentially a bit inaccurate becuase he was presenting the Leaver people from a Taker perspective. The principle example of this influence is the notion that the Earth was created FOR Elves and Men and the story of creation conveniently stops at the creation of the Eruhini. This belief then escalates into this : God or the gods created the world FOR Eruhini, and so the destiny of Eruhini is to rule the world.
These kinds of ideas are alien to the Elven mind, and to the original Ainulindale which was quite different (I will re-create was it was really like in a future post). Sure we did have a Creator belief : that of Eru Iluvatar, but it was more akin to the concept of Great Spirit among the Native Americans, than the concept of God which was a little different. But we also held that everything is sacred, everything had a spirit, a voice. The trees, the animals, the plants, the rocks, the waters, EVERYTHING. We heard the song of creation in everything : that is simply another way of saying it, though that statement doesnt quite capture the concept.
My unlearning of conditioning is simply beginning. I believe this a good begnning for our tradition.

Namarie
Artanaro

[artanaro]

Summary
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The story begins with a newspaper ad: "Teacher seeks pupil, must have an earnest desire to save the world". A nameless character (who is identified in a later book as Alan Lomax) responds to the ad out of nostalgia. He seeks the teacher and finds himself in a room with a gorilla.

To the man's surprise he finds that the gorilla can communicate telepathically. At first baffled by this the man quickly learns the story of how the gorilla came to be this way and he accepts the gorilla, Ishmael, as his teacher. The novel continues from this point as a socratic dialogue between the man and Ishmael as they hash out what Ishmael refers to as "how things came to be this way" for mankind and the environment.

Ishmael begins by telling the man that his life, which began in the wild, was spent mostly in a zoo and a menagerie, and since had been spent in the gazebo of the 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 the man that his subject for this learning experience will be captivity, primarily the captivity of man under a civilizational system that forces him to exploit and destroy the world to live.

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 as he attempts to show his student that the people of his culture are in much of the same situation. Either held captive with the mythology of being superior, or "like an animal swept up in the stampede" of the captivity of those around them.

Before proceeding Ishmael lays some ground definitions for his student so they can be on the same page as they continue to discuss. He defines:

"Takers" as the people we often refer to as "civilized."
"Leavers" as the people we often refer 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 tells his student that the Leavers' story began three million years ago and was going along fine until the addition of the Takers mentality to the human race around ten thousand years ago. The Taker's story is built on the premise that man is the pinnacle of evolution (or creation), that the world was made for man, that man is here to conquer and rule the world, and that human rule was meant to bring about a paradise. These premises are put into the form of a story that the Takers enact due to constant regurgitation of them by "Mother Culture". In addition, the Takers' culture is built on the premise that there is something fundamentally wrong with humans, and it is only this flaw that has created the pit of destruction we are falling ever faster into. However, 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 what physical law the Takers have rejected as applicable to them and thus not lived in accord with. This law is grounded in the fact that "man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely." This being the Community of Life. The law which he is referring to is the Law of Limited Competition, or the Law of Life, which is 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."

Ishmael explains that all species inevitably follow this law, or as a consequence go extinct. As a culture the Takers believe it is their right to take as much as they desire from the earth and its living community, while the rule of the Law is that you can take what you need, but must leave the rest alone. As a consequence of the Taker's refusal to abide by the Law of Life, the diversity needed to sustain life on the planet is severely threatened, and the balance between food populations and feeder populations destroyed.

As a means of extracting all that is possible from the Earth and settling in one distinct area the Takers develop the universality of agriculture as their ideal. Yet, unlike the Leavers', the Takers' view on agriculture incorporates more than the concept of settlement; it is designed to support growth, unlimited growth. This unlimited growth comes in the form of a constantly increasing food supply that inevitably leads to an increased population.

"The Taker population has been proving this for ten thousand years. For ten thousand years they've been steadily increasing food production to feed an increased population, and every time they've done this they've increased it even more."
Daniel Quinn dubs this harmful form of agriculture, which is unique to the Takers, "Totalitarian Agriculture".

Ishmael makes the point that as we have attempted to render ourselves exempt from the Law of Limited competition, we have created a huge imbalance in the Community of Life. But the earth is ultimately self-balancing, and our flouting of the law will ultimately be checked - in the form of our extinction.

Ishmael goes on to help his pupil discover just how the Takers rendered themselves above the laws governing all of life. As an example, he brings to light the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit. He tells his student that this story was one developed by the Leavers about the origin of the Takers. In the Garden of Eden there are two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The first being that for mankind - and ultimately all species who abide by the Law of Life - and the second bearing the forbidden fruit, hence the one for the gods and the gods alone, for "the knowledge of good and evil is fundamentally the knowledge the rulers of the world must exercise... and the gods ruled the world for billions of years, and it was doing just fine. After just a few thousand years of human rule, the world is at the point of death."

Ishmael makes the point that it was the Leavers that developed this story because if it were of Taker origin, the knowledge of good and evil would be considered a liberating ascent, instead of being forbidden to Adam and foreshadowing doom for the species. He goes on to discuss how, for the ancient Semetic herders among whom the tale originated, the story of Cain killing Abel symbolizes the Leavers being killed off and their lands taken so that it could be put under cultivation. These ancient herders realized that the Takers were acting as if they were gods themselves, with all the wisdom of what is good and evil and how to rule the world. And as a result the gods banished these people from the Garden and they were brought from a life of bounty in the hands of the gods to one of being the accursed tillers of the soil.

Ishmael brings together his synopsis on human culture by telling his student about the way in which the Leavers lived in accordance with the Law of Life and presents him with a model for living in a fashion that is in accord with the laws of the biotic community.

First, "each Leaver culture is an accumulation of knowledge that reaches back in an unbroken chain to the beginning of human life. This is why it's no great wonder that each of them is a way that works well. Each has been tested and refined over thousands of generations." This is one of the main attributes of Leaver culture- there is no one distinct way to live that is forced on all the differing people residing over the world - diversity reigns. Furthermore, the Leavers as a collective unit abide by the laws of the living community, and therefore live in the hands of the gods, and lived soundly for three million years, while the digression of the Taker culture overwhelmed the Earth.

Ishmael finishes with a summary of how we can begin to end the environmental genocide began by the Takers 10,000 years ago:

"The story of Genesis must be reversed. First, Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is essential if you're to survive. The Leavers are the endangered species most critical to the world- not because they're humans but because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there is no one right way to live. And then, of course, you must spit out the fruit of the forbidden tree. You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet."
The student is left with the idea that he must help others see that in order to save the world we must follow the Leavers' mentality about letting the rest of the community live, but wonders how to go about it. Ishmael admonishes him to "Teach a hundred what I've taught you, and inspire each of them to teach a hundred."

Follow-ups to Ishmael by Daniel Quinn include The Story of B, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization. Quinn's autobiography is entitled Providence: The Story of a 50 Year Vision Quest and details how the author arrived at the ideas behind Ishmael.

[edit]
Ishmael's interpretation of Genesis 2.4
Ishmael points out that the story was written by the Semites, and later adapted to work within Hebrew and Christian belief structures. Ishmael proposes that Abel and his extinction metaphorically represents the nomadic Semites and their losing conflict with agriculturalists. As they were driven further into the Arabian peninsula, the Semites became isolated from other herding cultures and, according to Ishmael, illustrated their plight through oral history, which was later adopted into the Hebrew book of Genesis.

Ishmael denies that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden of humans simply to test human's self-control. Instead, Ishmael proposes that the Tree represents the choice to bear the burden of responsibility of deciding which species may live and which should die. This is a necessary decision agricultural peoples must make when deciding which organisms to cultivate, which to displace, and which to kill in protection of the first.

Ishmael explains that the Fall of Adam represents the Semetic belief that once mankind usurps this responsibility--historically decided through natural ecology (i.e. food chains)-- that mankind will perish. He cites as fulfillment of this prophecy contemporary environmental crises such as endangered or extinct species, global warming, and modern mental illnesses.