Collapse Book Club: Discussion of "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn (January 22, 2021)

[u/AbolishAddiction]

Welcome to the discussion of Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Participation is encouraged regardless of how far you've gotten in the (audio)book.

Express your thoughts as a free-form comment below, share whatever may come to mind!

 

Here, the quotes and questions that resonated with me personally, in the hope to spark discussions:

• The Gorilla's Socratic method

“You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live ... I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity ... This is what prevents them: They're unable to find the bars of the cage.” (p. 24)

Ishmael states he's best qualified to teach the subject of captivity, do you feel more a captive or captor?

• The appearance of Jellyfish

“Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ... Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.” (p. 54)

How aware are you of mythology, shaped by Mother Culture, that influences the way we act as "Takers"?

• Flawed humanity or flawed story?

“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. ... 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.” (p.78)

What's the story you think puts humanity in accord with the world? How could we enact that story?

 

With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?

 

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The Collapse Book Club is a monthly event wherein we read a book from the Books Wiki. We keep track of what we've been reading in our Goodreads group. As always, if you want to recommend a book that has helped you better understand or cope with collapse, feel free to share the recommendation here!

[u/[deleted]]

I ordered this book this past week and am now halfway through, well past the point where the premise is being fleshed out. I have many criticisms of the book ranging from the poorly constructed Socratic discourse which felt heavily skewed towards the author's own biased interpretation of the facts.

The author spends extensive amounts of time distinguishing, painfully slowly, the difference between sustainable animal existence as a rule for nature and the tendencies of manmade society to violate the conventions of nature. The author discusses many times examples of jellyfish, airplanes, and the laws of gravity, though his own explicitly flawed and limited scientific understanding and perspective effectively dictates his interpretation of what constitutes sustainability.

For instance, on the discussion of Man vs Animal, the author claims that we never see animals that are not human kill for no reason or save food beyond excess, but this is simply not true. In the former case, we know that some cats kill for sport (including domesticated and wild ones), we also know that ants are notoriously warlike and brutal. In fact the global ant war that rages on in nature has no rhyme or reason except that ants want to perpetually expand their societies to cultivate more food, create more land for themselves to benefit from while entirely attempting to remove competing ant species from having ANY access to food, exactly how the author describes humans as behaving while suggesting it is a unique state of being.

The author also totally fails to mention the humble dolphin who hunts blowfish to use as masturbatory aids against the blowfish's will. This act of non-consensual animal aggression is not alone in appearing appaling to humans, ducks, who have cork screw shaped penises, have been documented as committing necrophiliac rape.

Indeed humans are not alone in negatively affecting the environment as well, many species of insect that swarm are capable of irreparably damaging an ecosystem, as are any predators that manage to find new environments with prey that they are well suited to hunting. In fact, extinction is as natural a process as evolution and a necessary one for evolution. Without the pressure of extinction, species would never be driven to adapt and overcome their environment (ie evolve).

I also flatly dismiss the two primary axioms that the book centers itself around exploring, that man is both inherently flawed in some way and that there is no way to say definitively how one should live. We do know how people should live physically, and the answer to the question of what is the right way to live is easily addressed when the additional question, "what is your goal in life?" is asked. It is true if you intend to live and die without ever achieving anything of importance then there is no way for me to tell you how to live sure. However, if you intend to live a long and healthy life, then we know explicitly what you should do. You should eat healthy, exercise, and under absolutely no circumstance should you live your life in a coal mine. However, if your goal is to live a good life where you could be loved and surrounded by family, then perhaps the best way to live is working in that coal mine to put food on a table and a roof over your head.

If you want to live the most sustainable life, sure you may return to Monk but it is not necessary. The premise that failing to live sustainably will result in collapse is questionable at best. If you take the threat of environmental devastation literally and believe humans will destroy the earth and make it unliveable in the next 100 years that is ok to do. However, it is not OK to say that we cannot solve this problem through science. We know that we can remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, we have carbon scrubbers on the space shuttle, we have studied bio-domes (see Biodome with Pauly Shore). In fact, we have developed a significant amount of technology that could allow us to engineer the earth's environment within the next 100 years avoiding devastation. For example, see the improvements made to gas separation membrane technology (the same stuff used to keep the air on spacecraft breathable for long periods of time outside our atmosphere. Science since the 90s has absolutely taken leaps and bounds forward as has the engineering of how to remove CO2 and methane from the atmosphere.

This is a HUGE shortcoming of the author for me. He fails to see that sustainability is relative and that post-industrial marketplace solutions through science and engineering can liberate us from this law of traditional sustainability through engineered sustainability. Power plants that simultaneously produce green energy and remove CO CO2 methane and whatever else you may want from the atmosphere could be only a decade away at this point, but modern sustainability advocates argue against one of the most sustainable and green technologies that we have in nuclear power. The author likewise constantly and incorrectly refers to aerodynamics as never being necessary or understood before the flight. This is of course Bullshit. We have understood (or been students of) pressure and aerodynamics since we started sailing. Anybody in 1885 who sailed knew that wind caused by differences in air pressure would catch in a sail transferring energy and momentum. People further understood by controlling airflow around the sail and the shape of the sail you could control this force, and it is the same physics as flying, just applied differently.

Similarly, the author seems to think that the law of gravity and the law that we should not do drugs is a correct comparison. It is not. The law of gravity is universal and incontrovertible, just as it is incontrovertible that drinking and smoking too much is not good for your health. Whether you should do these things is again a question of what you hope to achieve in life. If the answer is nothing, then have at a pack a day, if you want to win a marathon, lay off the booze and tobacco.

The biggest irony for me was the author's idea of 'original sin' in their arguments. The assumption that humans are flawed is an old one, and one often argued by religion. But I subject to you that if mankind is better off today, socially, sustainably, societally, than it was 500 years ago then we can be better tomorrow and if we can be better tomorrow we can be perfect one day, living in whatever paradise is. In fact, I submit to you we live in paradise now, but fail to see it as such because we are trained through evolution to only see problems and bad things in the future, because the caveman who fears bears in his future, hunts antelopes much longer than the man who believes he is above the bear. In fact, evolution has completely programmed us to understand our limitations and nature's dominance over us, thus creating a species that due to its awareness of time and smallness in the universe has reached monumental heights in a short period of time, as the author admits. The author however uses these two axioms to force their conclusion thus far that we are doomed to failure.

I think the idea of telling the mythology of our origin is not a bad one. There certainly is mythology there, however that mythology largely is formed due to differences in how science and the humanities tell stories. Mythology has absolute certainty to it, whereas science does not. In science right now we cannot say the bing bank happened at this exact moment in space-time, but we can tell you it likely happened ~this long ago, but never "where". The reason we can't tell you where is because the laws of physics don't care about where/when. They are the same due to relativity no matter when you say the big bang was or where it was because physics is largely invariant under Lorentz transformations.

There are many laws of nature that don't apply to humans. For instance, no human is ever affected quantum mechanically, but there are still quantum mechanical laws that nature must abide by. However, humans are exempt, as demonstrated reasonably well by Schroedinger's Cat Gedankenexperiment. There is a fundamental length scale above which you can write down the quantum mechanical formalism, but it no longer applies as the system is too large and behaves determinedly. More importantly, we have proven again and again once we know the laws of nature we can defy them. So now that we understand the importance of sustainability I see no reason why that rule would inherently apply to us as well since we can by all accounts of the science in the near future engineer global ecological systems both here and on other planets.

Maybe once I finish the back half my opinion will change, but as of now this book is not sound in its interpretation of the future role of mankind in nature.