2 stars = 3 stars for exploring interesting ideas; 1 star for writing a really bad novel

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
Daniel Quinn
Bantam, 1995

I've been trying to encapsulate all my feelings about this book, and I have concluded that it is basically a written version of the film Mindwalk.

Let me explain. (And please don't comment that the written version of Mindwalk, or more accurately the book upon which the film was based, was Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point--I know that already. I'm speaking metaphorically.) While the ideas discussed in that film were oftentimes incredibly fascinating and very urgent, the film itself, as a film, sorta sucked. Not an idea picture you want to make most folks sit through more than once, if that, in other words. So it is with this book. The ideas that it explores, sort of like deep ecology for beginners, certainly put it in the 3-star ("good") category. As a novel, though, it just isn't that good. The two characters in the book are merely mouthpieces for the pseudo-dialogues comprising the bulk of the book, and one of the two, the narrator, isn't much of a mouthpiece at that. It is not a surprise to me that many publishers passed on this novel.

The story, such as it is, begins intriguingly enough with a classified ad advertising a teacher for those who earnestly want to save the world. Our narrator, being an earnest, spiritual "seeker"-type, applies in person, only to discover that the teacher, Ishmael, is a gorilla who can communicate telepathically--not exactly what we expect of a guru! The two enter into a series of pseudo-dialogues that go on for the majority of the book's 250+ pages and which are interspersed with a few rather pedestrian interludes whose sole purpose seems to be to make this book a work of fiction, rather than a series of nonfiction lectures.

Many reviewers have asserted that these dialogues echo a powerful and respected format used by philosophers from Plato to Hume, but I disagree; instead of being authentic dialogues, in which every position is examined from many angles and by many voices, what appear in this novel are frustrated (and frustrating) lectures on the part of an overbearing, know-it-all silverback. They reminded me of high school lectures by a bad teacher who asks overly general questions and then snaps at the students for not immediately intuiting the expected answer. In addition, because these aren't authentic dialogues, Ishmael basically outlines his thesis without any critical feedback or counter-theses from the narrator, and so the reader is left accepting or rejecting the gorilla's expositions on intuition.

So much for the book's failings. Its success is in its ability to articulate clearly both a deep ecological critique of "civilization" (i.e., the worldview that has come to dominate the globe since the Agricultural Revolution began) and a vision of an alternative cultural paradigm within which humans can live harmoniously with the rest of the world. Using the terms "Takers" and "Leavers" (derived from the phrase "take it or leave it") to describe the two general types of human culture, Ishmael explores a subject with which he, as a gorilla, is quite familiar: captivity. Takers, who now make up the majority of the human species, are captives to their culture, which Ishmael defines as the story that they enact every day. For Takers, this story "casts mankind as the enemy of the world" (p. 75) and makes absolute mastery over the planet (nay, the universe!) the overarching cultural imperative. Human uniqueness and dominion over creation is "the manifesto of the [agricultural] revolution on which your culture is based. It's the repository of all your revolutionary doctrine and the definitive expression of your revolutionary spirit. It explains why the revolution was necessary and why it must be carried forward at any cost whatever" (154). Ishmael's description of the barrenness of the Takers' inner landscape rings true to those who see the consumption and control don't bring happiness: "The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness" (146). Those who find the works of Morris Berman and Derrick Jensen, (among others) compelling will nod their heads in agreement with much of what Quinn, and Ishmael, have to say about "Taker" culture.

"Leaver" cultures, which Ishmael roughly equates with "primitive" or "indigenous" cultures, are those who engage in "limited competition" (which complements Piotr Kropotkin's idea of "mutual aid"). This means that they do not exterminate their competitors and they don't deny their competitors access to food, so that biological (and cultural) communities maintain a healthy diversity and sustainability. Ishmael's challenge to the narrator, and to the reader, is to find a way to infuse the Leaver mindset (i.e., the intuition that there is no one right way, no need to have total control, and no way that we can continue to determine who lives and who dies) into our 21st century civilization.

(This review was originally written on June 25, 2007.)

Are you ready for the red pill?

The Culture of Make Believe
Derrick Jensen
Chelsea Green, 2004

The Culture of Make Believe picks up where its predecessor, the powerful Language Older than Words, left off. After examining in that latter volume the objectification and systematic denial of that objectification that permeate Western culture, Jensen turns his attention to the related "relationships between hate and fear, hate and power, power and fear... What are the relationships between any of these and the desire or need to control? And what are the relationships between all of these and a desire or need to perceive others as objects? It seems obvious to me that enslaving another requires that the other be, at least to some degree, objectified: Does objectification imply hatred? I used to think so, but I'm beginning to think the relationship is more complex." (67)

The relationship is indeed more complex, and because of the complexly interpenetrating nature of the subject matter, the book itself is also complex while somehow remaining an engaging read. In order to adequately describe and analyze these complex relationships, Jensen's sprawling tome draws on vivid storytelling, graphic and painful historical accounts, potent metaphors drawn from our cultural heritage, powerful intuitions, postmodern reflexivity and critical insight into the author's own biases, lengthy interviews with relevant thinkers, and an underlying logic that deftly interweaves the seemingly disparate strands of racism, sexism, monotheism, hatred, power, exploitation, colonialism, ecocide, war, abstraction, objectification, production, and of civilization (particularly the civilization with roots in the Mediterranean and the Levant, aka "Western" civilization) itself. In the Biblical metaphor that he develops throughout the book, Jensen is Noah's son Ham, sharing his vision of the naked patriarch of civilization, especially industrial civilization, and calling the reader to see that the patriarch has no clothes, and having seen, to make a choice.

Jensen's book is filled with detailed accounts of atrocities that have been perpetrated against racial and ethnic minorities, women, and against the natural world itself, but he doesn't stop with relating the gory details. Instead he digs deeper into the accounts to show how the perpetrators were most often not barbaric and marginal, as we tend to assume, but were instead policemen, politicians, businessmen, economists, investors, CEOs, Rotarians, and other decent, respectable folks, the people that Ward Churchill has called "little Eichmanns." (In other words, the perpetrators were and are all of us who benefit from the system.) He describes how South African cultures were systematically destroyed, not through lawlessness but through the passing of laws, in order to get black laborers to mine diamonds for DeBeers; in effect, racist apartheid grew out of good old-fashioned market economics. He relates accounts of how everyday black Americans were lynched and burned for looking at white women, or for looking like black men who looked at white women, or for just being black. (He even tells the story of a woman whose fetus was cut out of her belly by a bunch of upstanding white citizens as punishment for her crime of hating them for burning her husband.) Again and again, we see that the perpetrators of these evils weren't inbred reprobates, but were upstanding members of their communities, and that these evil occasions weren't attended in shame, but in celebration. For example, at its height the KKK, contrary to popular belief, did not comprise backwater yokels but police chiefs, sheriffs, attorneys general, and state governors.

According to Jensen's analysis, hatred--whether aimed at blacks, at women, at religious minorities, at Iraqi civilians, or at the natural world itself--is a manifestation of our cultural vision of the world. In this vision, the Other is objectified, dealt with abstractly in terms of a class (so an innocent black man is burned just because he looks like the actual criminal or a 2,000 year old tree is rendered into two-by-fours just to make a quick buck), held in contempt, and viewed as a resource to be exploited instead of as another living being with which one may enter into relationship. Moreover, as Jensen teases out, the phenomenon of red-faced, spittle-flinging hatred is an aberration that typically appears only when the normal direction of power is subverted or challenged. At other times, hatred merely manifests as the status quo, innocent only to those who benefit from its privileges.

This book, while engaging, is not an easy read, precisely because it challenges the reader on EVERY level. It reveals the "embeddedness of all of us in a culture that perceives war in monstrously utilitarian terms" and our "immersion in a river of deceit, a river where we take as accepted that one hand may hold forth an olive branch while another makes final arrangements to thrust with a sword, a river where treaties are abrogated at convenience, a culture in which lying to achieve one's goals in not only acceptable and expected, but routine" (175). Making the choice to see one's embeddedness in the culture of make believe and to conceive of alternatives is irrevocable and has real consequences: "The difficulty comes--and here is the real beauty of the story of Noah and his sons---when, like Ham (or at least my vision of Ham), you find your way through these shifts in perception and see the patriarch naked and vulnerable. What do you do then? Do you, like Ham, talk about what you have seen? As the story makes clear, there are grave strictures against doing so, with severe consequences. Or do you follow the lead of Ham's brothers, and reap the privilege that comes from averting your eyes?" (62-3) Jensen's book challenges our need for happy, simple solutions and implies that this need for "feel-good" vibes is itself a loss created by the culture of make believe: "I need not fight despair...despair is a normal and reasonable response to a desperate situation.... my response--breaking into sobs over the killing of so much beauty--is normal, and expected, and that to not feel these losses manifests another type of loss, that of one's own humanity, one's own heart." (249)

I could write and quote more, but I won't. My guess is that you are here, reading these reviews, because you already have an idea of what Derrick Jensen has to say and agree with it to a greater or lesser extent. Readers seem to either hate Jensen's writing style-- with its tangential approach, long narrative arcs that connect loose ends over a span of 200 pages, and self-referential quality--or to love it, hearing it in a voice as refreshing as the truth it reveals in page after page. Give this book a read. Your view of the world and of your role in it won't be the same when you finish it.

(This review was originally written on June 22, 2007.)