Book Review: Ishmael

Some people are visual learners. They’ll pick up calculus most easily by seeing lots of graphs of curves with the slopes and areas drawn in. Others are auditory learners: they’d rather listen to a professor lecture about how to compute an integral. Likewise, some people prefer to learn about how all modern culture, technology, and institutions owe their origins to some particularity of the Neolithic Revolution by reading a respectable-looking tome by someone like Jared Diamond, while others prefer to learn from a pedantic telepathic fictional gorilla. If you’re in the second group, Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael is the book for you.

Ishmael is technically a work of fiction, but basically it’s a manifesto with a frame story wrapped around it for fun and metaphor. The narrator is a disillusioned man – we don’t learn much else about his background, not even his name – who answers an ad in the paper (the book was published in 1992): “TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.” The narrator hates this. “That was rich indeed,” he says. “An earnest desire to save the world—yes, that was splendid. By noon, two hundred mooncalfs, softheads, boobies, ninnyhammers, noodleheads, gawkies, and assorted oafs and thickwits would doubtless be lined up at the address given, ready to turn over all their worldlies for the rare privilege of sitting at the feet of some guru pregnant with the news that all will be well if everyone will just turn around and give his neighbor a big hug.” So naturally he throws out the paper and continues with his day – no, of course he doesn’t, he explains to us that he takes this ad so personally because fifteen years ago he went all over the place looking for such a guru, didn’t find one, and got jaded and sad instead. And then he goes and meets the placer of the ad, who, what do you know, is a gorilla who can communicate full sentences to him by gazing into his eyes. The gorilla spends his days caged inside an office pacing around in front of a sign that reads, “WITH MAN GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR GORILLA?” He goes by Ishmael.

Most of the rest of the book is written as a Socratic dialogue between teacher and pupil. The dialogue itself leaves something to be desired: for all his desire to find the answers to life’s persistent questions, the narrator doesn’t seem to enjoy thinking very much, so he doesn’t even really try to formulate reasonable guesses to his teacher’s questions. Instead, he alternates between saying “I have no idea,” haltingly summarizing Ishmael’s answers, and acting as a credulous strawman. For instance:

“And what would you expect the beginning of the story to be?”

“I have no idea.”

“Of course you do. You’re just playing dumb.”

I sat there for a minute, trying to figure out how to stop playing dumb. “Okay,” I said at last. “I guess I’d expect it to be their creation myth.”

“Of course.”

“But I don’t see how that helps me.”

“Then I’ll spell it out. You’re looking for your own culture’s creation myth.”

I stared at him balefully. “We have no creation myth,” I said. “That’s a certainty.”

I almost stopped reading fifty pages in because I could see it was never going to occur to the narrator to ask, “hey, isn’t that just, like, your opinion, man?”. Fortunately Ishmael’s dialogue gets more interesting and we can treat the narrator’s lines as paragraph breaks and mostly ignore the frame story (what plot there is isn’t bad, anyway – Quinn deserves credit for punctuating his long manifesto with some primate mystery action where the protagonist chases Ishmael around town).

Through the Socratic dialogue, Quinn – sorry, I mean the gorilla – makes the following claims:

1. There are fundamentally two types of human cultures, call them Takers and Leavers. Taker culture takes as axiomatic that the world was made for humans, that humans have a reasonable knowledge of good and evil, and that their civilization must expand (the example Quinn often uses is agricultural overproduction, but you could think of colonizing or economic growth too). Leaver culture assumes that all beings have basically the same claim on resources and that human societies, like animals and plants, are supposed to just take what they need.

2. There is a universal law of ecology that says, “You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.” If a species breaks this law, that species will destroy the earth in the end. Almost every species follows this law: “The lion that comes across a herd of gazelles doesn’t massacre them, as an enemy would. It kills one, not to satisfy its hatred of gazelles but to satisfy its hunger, and once it has made its kill the gazelles are perfectly content to go on grazing with the lion right in their midst.” The one exception is human Takers: “[T]hey built a civilization that flouts the law at every point, and within five hundred generations—in an eye–blink in the scale of biological time—this branch of the family of Homo sapiens sapiens saw that they had brought the entire world to the point of death. ”

3. The story of Genesis predates the Hebrews to their Semite ancestors, who were the herder tribes originally victimized by the first Fertile Crescent agriculturists breaking the above law.

4. The fruit of the tree of knowledge represents knowledge of who is to live and to die; this knowledge is only actually accessible to gods (metaphorically; more literally this might mean “humans can’t simulate a decentralized ecosystem, only the ecosystem itself can stay balanced via its generating rules of natural selection”), so if humans “eat” its “fruit” they will think they have this knowledge but in fact will not.

5. The story of Cain and Abel was told by the Semites to explain the agriculturists’ violation of the ecological law from (2). (God accepts Abel’s sacrifice of livestock, rejects Cain’s sacrifice of harvest, then Cain kills Abel.)

6. If human Taker cultures don’t convert to being Leavers, or otherwise figure out some solution, they will destroy the world soon by means of a Malthusian overpopulation trap.

At the end, the gorilla dies, obviously. Also, obviously, the narrator stumbles upon one last message Ishmael left behind. It reads:

INVESTIGATE WILD ANIMAL SUFFERING AS A HIGH-POTENTIAL CAUSE AREA

–no, sorry, it reads:

WITH GORILLA GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR MAN?

We’ll unpack that in a minute, but first things first: are these claims literally true? There are a couple of more-or-less falsifiable assertions in here, which I dutifully tried to investigate.

a. Did the Genesis creation myth really originate with the pre-Hebrew Semites?

b. Did the Hebrews actually displace the Semites the way the book says?

c. More broadly, is the surplus food -> overpopulation -> conquering pipeline a roughly accurate story of how agriculture spread?

d. Is it true that only humans consistently break the ecological law?

e. Is the species on a collision course with overpopulation and/or famine?

The tl;dr of a) through c) is “a medium amount of googling proved inconclusive, but I don’t think it really matters.” Quinn, as far as I know, doesn’t have any formal training in ecology or history (he was a Catholic-school English major who took time off college to train as a monk, then either left or got sent away from the monastery, then quit Catholicism and went into publishing). If you convinced me that none of these three claims is literally factual, I wouldn’t be shocked – I read them as speculative. But mythologies don’t really derive their value from historical accuracy, and it doesn’t make a huge difference to the theory how much agriculturalists expanded by violently conquering versus peacefully assimilating, or just outcompeting, hunter-gatherers – either way it seems fair to say that they “waged war” on nonhuman animals in the ecological-law sense.

I’m not a biologist, but d) seems reasonably true, if only because to my knowledge other animals don’t have the capacity to carry out such an aggressive growth strategy. And empirically, even if there’s some species of bird I don’t know about that genocides the insects that eat its favorite flower, humans have been doing it by far the most noticeably and on the largest scale (think for instance of how American settlers slaughtered the buffalo en masse to make it easier for their cattle to graze and to cut off the Plains Indians’ food supply).

Really, the most awkward problem for Ishmael is that, contrary to e), the population actually hasn’t spun out of control after all (again, the book is from 1992), and in fact Western countries do send contraception overseas, and even if they hadn’t the global fertility rate probably still would have declined. This casts enough of a dated nineties-environmentalism patina over the book that it doesn’t feel particularly worthwhile to keep trying to nail down stuff like whether the Hebrews actually displaced the earlier Semites or just spread their farming knowledge.

As the saying goes: women are judged on their looks, men are judged on their ability to forecast global events decades in advance. However. It also (presumably) isn’t literally factually true that the first man was a specific guy named Adam and the first woman was made from his rib and they ate a literal fruit that brought sin into the world. And yet people are always going around interpreting and reinterpreting Genesis anyway, because something about that story has enough memetic fitness to outcompete almost all the other possible stories, and everyone knows that, and so what they’re doing isn’t debating literal events but a performing a sort of dream psychoanalysis on Western culture.

In 1991, before it was even formally published, Ishmael won a fiction prize for “​​offering creative and positive solutions to global problems” sponsored by Ted Turner, the CNN guy, for $500,000, which is more than anybody else has ever won for a single work of literature. In 2010, a gunman held the Discovery Channel headquarters hostage with a demand that the channel air “daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's 'My Ishmael' pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas.” (My Ishmael is the sequel.) Morgan Freeman read the book and got inspired to narrate a nature documentary called Island of Lemurs: Madagascar. It’s 2023 and Ishmael is still in the cultural consciousness enough for me to have come across it, even though nobody is really worried about overpopulation. I’m really tempted to steelman against Quinn/Ishmael’s narrative, since the protagonist clearly can’t seem to, but considering the book as a myth – a story that’s empirically achieved memetic success, the reasons for which are left as an exercise – I think it’s actually more interesting to make the case for it, to salvage something from Quinn’s framing.

And by “salvage something” I mean “wrest control of the reins and steer the tale entirely into my own headcanon.”

HARRY JAMES SCOTT-DIAMOND-QUINN, HEADCANON PROTAGONIST: Show me the way, wise master.

ME SWEATING INSIDE A BIG FURRY APE SUIT: Okay, so, what is a story?

HJSDQ (quoting Ishmael): A story is a scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods. Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

ME: Well, if we get to make up our own definitions, I’m going to say a “myth” is a story told by a god.

HJSDQ: Just to make sure we’re talking about the same thing: a god is referring to one of the deities invented by some human culture?

ME: Did you think I was going to stop at one unilaterally made-up definition? Here’s the thing. At the end of Ishmael, the gods from the adapted Genesis story don’t get any more dialogue. There’s this vague implorement from the gorilla to reject the Taker ideology that humans know who should live and who should die, and then to go around teaching everybody that that’s what humanity has to do. But that’s all we get by way of concrete proposals.

HJSDQ: What’s wrong with that?

ME: Something’s missing. You can’t just decide on behalf of a whole culture to reject an ideology. Otherwise it would be trivially easy to win elections. And “humanity” isn’t a coherent agent. Otherwise we wouldn't have coordination problems.

HJSDQ: What do you propose instead?

ME: As you know, all our problems could be solved if we just had one more ontology. I propose this one. A god is a reward function plus a means of iteration. A mortal is an individual that’s born and dies under a god’s conditions. So for instance: an animal, human or otherwise, is a mortal whose god is the biological law of evolution – the reward is living long and healthily enough to have offspring, the iteration comes from passing on your genes to those offspring with some random mutations. A piece of media is a mortal whose god is human attention – the reward is getting shown to more people, the iteration happens when a person who consumes the message gets it lodged in their brain and outputs it somewhere else in some slightly altered way.  A corporation is a mortal whose god is capitalism. A cultural practice is a mortal whose god is one that looks like the evolutionary god governing humans, but on the level of the group rather than the individual. A neural network with particular weights is a mortal whose god is machine learning.

HJSDQ: Okay, sure. So how does that map into the gods as portrayed in Ishmael?

ME (popping a whole banana into my mouth, skin and all): You’re a figment of my imagination, you can work it out while I chew.

HJSDQ: Right, so, the gods have the knowledge of life and death, which means that they’re in charge of the iteration – if humans take control of who’s born and who lives for how long, that’s basically replacing a tried-and-true decentralized optimization process with a central planner.

ME (garbled): So what does Taker culture mean in this context?

HJSDQ: It tells you to try to achieve your objectives by eliminating the competition, instead of just by trying to succeed on your individual merits. Survival of the fittest versus survival of the only ones left.

ME: Right.

HJSDQ: So in this case, that’s doing agriculture at scale and then conquering to support your increased population.

ME: Yeah. The question is, is that legitimate?

HJSDQ: What does legitimate even mean here? If there’s an evolutionary law governing your survival, and you manage to outsmart it and do something else, there’s no court telling you whether that’s allowed or not, right? Like, if you’re a human and want to have a maximally successful career instead of having children, you could use hormonal birth control, and it’s not like evolution has any more right than you to say whether you get to.

ME: Yeah, but it’s not lindy, so there’s other load-bearing stuff entangled that evolution knows about but you might not anticipate. Like with the birth control example, there are some unpredictable side effects that give lots of people a really bad time, and the concept of being intentionally childfree hasn’t been around long enough for us to have a good sense of whether people regret it in their old age or not. Which Ishmael seems on board with – it talks a bunch about modern humans being depressed nihilists, relative to their ancestors, and not knowing quite why.

HJSDQ: Okay, but you could imagine pretty old practices that mortals have basically worked out the kinks of, but that still don’t align with the gods, right? I mean, I think Taker agriculture is an example. It works for us pretty well, in terms of feeding us and giving us stability and letting us do technology and literature and science. The question is just whether it will ultimately lead to collapse down the road.

ME: So what if we look at the other examples of gods and mortals? What kind of idea tries to eliminate its competition?

HJSDQ:  An idea that endorses censorship.

ME: What kind of corporation tries to eliminate its competition?

HJSDQ: Uh, maybe one that pursues regulatory capture? Or one that does a bunch of mergers and acquisitions until it’s got a monopoly.

ME: So I think we might be onto a more solid justification for why this strategy might be bad for both god and mortal. It’s not overpopulation – empirically we don’t end up with too many people or corporations or ideas. But censorship kills off intellectual discourse, which makes it harder to come up with good new ideas. Market consolidation kills off competition, which I guess is good for the individual corporations, but if everyone is allowed to do it, then the whole society is worse off, including shareholders. Humans conquering in the name of farmland kills off ecosystems and creates this whole monocropping system that’s probably bad for our nutrition. I don’t have a perfectly neat story for how all of these are isomorphic, but it seems like every time mortals figure out how to do it, it ends badly for them.

HJSDQ: Do you think there’s a way to get humans back on track? Like to convert back to a god-compliant Leaver culture?

ME: I actually don’t think so, because we’ve already created new gods – but not gods who govern us directly. Capitalism is one of them, I think. Its mortals aren’t even people, they’re corporations. But they’re running on a substrate which is us. So we’re doing their dirty work, but we’re also their reward function: they live or die by selling to consumers.

HJSDQ: Apes can’t buy products, though?

ME (in my best growly voice): Sorry, I meant, humans are their reward function. So capitalism has its own objectives, which have some basis in what humans want, which has some basis in what biological evolution is trying to select for, but ultimately, they’re two different gods, and people’s behavior can’t be fully optimized for both. And I think the capitalist god, not humans, was what killed off the biological evolution god for good, because now there’s an evolutionary system more powerful than any individual human that ensures very few starve.

HJSDQ: What was the other new god you were thinking of?

ME: I’m glad you asked.

HJSDQ: Oh no.

ME: Oh yes. See, humans get to handpick the reward functions of neural –

HJSDQ: You mean to tell me. That you’re reviewing a book advancing a weird little theory about hunter-gatherers and cooperation and religion for the Astral Codex Ten contest.¹ And, and don’t try to hide that look on your face, you’re going to try and shoehorn in AI alignment.

ME: One of our greatest works of memetic fitness yet.

HJSDQ: *turns and sprints off down a corridor of my mind palace*

ME: WITH MAN GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR READER?

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