NOTE: I am creating this page largely for my own education. I have found that there is no better way to internalize (really thoroughly learn) something than trying to teach it to someone else. I am going to put that principle into play here by summarizing this book in my own words. But please understand - the power of Ishmael isn't just in the ideas. It's in the brilliance of Quinn's presentation of them.
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Vocabulary to make things easier:
The Map:
Definitions:
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If you rely on my summary to understand this book, you will miss out on the effect of Quinn's unique Super Power - the ability to bring you to an idea so that by the end of the book it is truly and completely yours: The ability to change you at a fundamental level.
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The What, Why and the How - An Introduction
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(With a book this life changing, there is great value in understanding how the book itself came to be. Quinn begins writing a Forward which explains this. I often skip Forwards, as I like to take books on their own merits and not clutter up the experience with the author's thoughts outside of the manuscript. But in this case, I found his explanation of how this book came about not only interesting, but useful in organizing my understanding of what the book says. Thus, I suggest you read it to.)
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Throughout his life, Quinn found himself puzzled by two questions about our society:
Quinn began looking for an explanation of these two oddities early in his life, and along the way he found that the questions - and the answers - were related. He spent 20 years trying to work out the details of what the answers to these questions revealed to him, and how to show what he had learned to others. The result of those years is Ishmael.
The Plot
The importance of the book, Ishmael, is not in the story or the plot or the characters. It's in the ideas Quinn presents. But to fully understand the ideas, you need to walk with Quinn through the plot of the story he has written.
In the first chapter he introduces the main character - a disillusioned man who comes across an ad in the newspaper reading: "TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world." At first he is angry because it is exactly this kind of teacher he desperately needed as he came of age in the aftermath of the 60's and watched the children's revolt of the 60's "dwindle away into a fashion statement." Never having found any way to reconcile his awareness that something was very wrong with the world or channel his earnest desire to do something about it, he had settled into bitterness. Now, when a teacher claims to present himself, he is cynical and resentful.
SPOILER ALERT: This paragraph tells you how the story ends. Skip it if you want! None-the-less, he goes to meet the teacher and he finds, not a man, but a gorilla, with the ability to speak telepathically with humans. This gorilla begins teaching him and the rest of the story is a record of their conversation - the actual meat of the book. At the end of the book, the gorilla, unable to control his own destiny after his erstwhile "owner" dies, is sold to a traveling circus. The man searches him out and attempts to buy him but is too late: by the time he finally gets the money together, the gorilla has died of pneumonia and the story ends.
A Summary of The Ideas
Again, let me reiterate that you cannot understand these ideas by reading my summary of them. Read the book. You need to hear Quinn's words, not mine, to fully understand what is being said. You certainly need to hear them from him if you are to believe them - Quinn presents these ideas in such a way as to address all of your doubts and questions beautifully and very completely.
The Teachings of Ishmael
Ishmael claims to be an expert in captivity. From there he goes on to analyze and explain the culture we all live in and why so many of us feel unhappy, discontent and at odds with the world.
Ishmael claims to be an expert in captivity and thus, uniquely qualified to teach members of our society.
(Part Three of the Book)
The Beginning of the Taker's Story
"It all started a long tie ago, ten or fifteen billion years ago...the universe began...about six or seven billion years ago - our own solar system was born...planets...over the next couple billion years cooled and solidified. ...Life appeared in the chemical broth of our ancient oceans about...five billion years ago....Bacteria, microorganisms evolved into higher forms more complex forms, which evolved into still more complex forms. Life gradually spread to land. ...amphibians moved inland, evolved into reptiles. The reptiles evolved into mammals about 250,000,000 years ago....Mammals evolved...from critters in trees came the primates. Then...maybe ten or 15 million years ago - one of branch of the primates left the trees and one thing led to another and eventually man appeared about three million ears ago." pg 54-55
This is what happened at the start of Taker culture 10,000 years ago. We started doing what we pleased with the world.
The Beginning of the Taker's Story: God made the world for man.
(Part Four of the Book)
The Middle of the Taker's Story
This is the middle of the Taker's cultural story: But in order to take his rightful place in the wold, man had to discover agriculture so that he could build societies which controlled their environment. Until that happen, man's history was mostly aimless, but once it happened, man began to become what he was always meant to be and to turn the world into the thing it was always meant to be as well. Man began to rule the earth. OR, in short: "The world was made for man and man was made to rule it." pg 76
(Part Five of the Book)
The End of the Taker's Story
This is the end of the Taker story: But man screwed up ruling the world because he was fundamentally flawed. He didn't know the best way for people to live, and he never will because knowledge about this is unobtainable through scientific means. Thus, however hard he tries, he is going to keep screwing the world up.
- Humans have been living on this earth for over 3 million years, but when studying "human" history, we only focuses on the last 10,000 years. We seem to have a an unspoken agreement that nothing important happened during the first 99.7% of human history. Why is that? (click here for more discussion of this point)
- The three beginning stories in the book of Genesis don't make sense. Not as in, scientifically: Quinn is happy to look at these stories as mythology - a metaphor or an origin story, representing essential things about our cultural world view. But what he saw - and after him pointing it out I realized I have always seen it too, but just unconsciously assumed I must be wrong - is that these stories don't make sense in those ways either. They don't represent our cultural world view (or the cultural world view of our ancestors: the original culture whose story is told in the Bible). They actually contradict it. Why is that? (click here for more discussion of this point)
Quinn began looking for an explanation of these two oddities early in his life, and along the way he found that the questions - and the answers - were related. He spent 20 years trying to work out the details of what the answers to these questions revealed to him, and how to show what he had learned to others. The result of those years is Ishmael.
The Plot
The importance of the book, Ishmael, is not in the story or the plot or the characters. It's in the ideas Quinn presents. But to fully understand the ideas, you need to walk with Quinn through the plot of the story he has written.
In the first chapter he introduces the main character - a disillusioned man who comes across an ad in the newspaper reading: "TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world." At first he is angry because it is exactly this kind of teacher he desperately needed as he came of age in the aftermath of the 60's and watched the children's revolt of the 60's "dwindle away into a fashion statement." Never having found any way to reconcile his awareness that something was very wrong with the world or channel his earnest desire to do something about it, he had settled into bitterness. Now, when a teacher claims to present himself, he is cynical and resentful.
SPOILER ALERT: This paragraph tells you how the story ends. Skip it if you want! None-the-less, he goes to meet the teacher and he finds, not a man, but a gorilla, with the ability to speak telepathically with humans. This gorilla begins teaching him and the rest of the story is a record of their conversation - the actual meat of the book. At the end of the book, the gorilla, unable to control his own destiny after his erstwhile "owner" dies, is sold to a traveling circus. The man searches him out and attempts to buy him but is too late: by the time he finally gets the money together, the gorilla has died of pneumonia and the story ends.
A Summary of The Ideas
Again, let me reiterate that you cannot understand these ideas by reading my summary of them. Read the book. You need to hear Quinn's words, not mine, to fully understand what is being said. You certainly need to hear them from him if you are to believe them - Quinn presents these ideas in such a way as to address all of your doubts and questions beautifully and very completely.
The Teachings of Ishmael
Ishmael claims to be an expert in captivity. From there he goes on to analyze and explain the culture we all live in and why so many of us feel unhappy, discontent and at odds with the world.
Ishmael claims to be an expert in captivity and thus, uniquely qualified to teach members of our society.
- We are captives of a civilizational system that compels us to go on destroying the world in order to live and we have made the world our captive as well. (pg28)
- If you can't discover what is keeping you captive the will to get free eventually becomes confused and ineffectual. (This is what happened to the flowerchild movement of the 60's.)
- Many people long to stop the destruction of the world but don't know how. They "can't find the bars of the cage."
- Many of us feel like somehow we are being lied to about something but can't figure out exactly what.
- The lie is the story our civilization is built around. We are being held captive by a story which our culture is enacting about what is good and what is bad and how we should live and who is important. This story permeates every aspect of our culture at every moment so much so that we don't even realize it exists.
- Each of us is pressured to take our place in our culture's story. If we don't take a place in this story, we don't get fed.
- Mother Culture teaches that this is "the story man was born to enact, and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself...To step out of this story is to fall off the edge of the world. There is no way out of it except through death." pg 39
- In order to understand what this story is, we have to pick up a few concepts first, like packing a bag before we go on a journey. Here are those concepts...
- "two fundamentally different stories have been enacted here during the lifetime of man. One began to be enacted here sometime two or three million years ago by the ...Leavers and is still being enacted by them today, as successfully as ever. The other began to be enacted here some ten or twelve thousand years ago by the Takers, and is apparently about to end in catastrophe." pg 44
- If mother culture were to tell the story of human history, it would go something like this... "The Leavers were chapter one of human history - a long and uneventful chapter. Their chapter ...ended about 10,000 years ago with the birth of agriculture in the Near East. This event marked the beginning of chapter two, the chapter of the Takers. Its true there are Leavers living in the world, but these are anachronisms, fossils - people living in the past, people who just don't realize that their chapter of history is over." pg.44 This is basically the history that all of us are taught and which all of us accept.
- But in fact, Ishmael teaches that the Leavers are not chapter one of the Taker's story - they are enacting two completely different stories.
- The story a culture enacts is always "about the meaning of the world, about divine intentions in the world, and about human destiny." pg 46. It explains How Things Came To Be This Way.
- This story is our culture's creation myth, which most of us do not believe exists.
(Part Three of the Book)
The Beginning of the Taker's Story
- "No creation story is a myth to the people who tell it. Its just the story." pg 54 Here is a basic version of our culture's creation myth...
"It all started a long tie ago, ten or fifteen billion years ago...the universe began...about six or seven billion years ago - our own solar system was born...planets...over the next couple billion years cooled and solidified. ...Life appeared in the chemical broth of our ancient oceans about...five billion years ago....Bacteria, microorganisms evolved into higher forms more complex forms, which evolved into still more complex forms. Life gradually spread to land. ...amphibians moved inland, evolved into reptiles. The reptiles evolved into mammals about 250,000,000 years ago....Mammals evolved...from critters in trees came the primates. Then...maybe ten or 15 million years ago - one of branch of the primates left the trees and one thing led to another and eventually man appeared about three million ears ago." pg 54-55
- So what makes this story a myth instead of a factual account of history? "Its full of facts, of course, but their arrangement is purely mythical." pg 57
- The part of this which is a myth is the part where we say, "and then man appeared" as though everything in creation for billions of years was leading up to the appearance of man and man was the last thing to be created - the purpose of it all. Tell this same story above, but substitute the word "man" for the word "jellyfish" and you will get a glimpse of how absurd that is.
- "everyone in your culture knows this. The pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation." pg. 61
- The story the people of our culture are enacting is a story about the meaning of the world, divine intentions in the world, and about human destiny. According to our story, the meaning of the world (and all of creation) is to enable the creation of man.
- "Takers regard the world as a sort of human life-support system." pg 64 The entire universe was made so that man could be made." pg 65
- Every story has a premise which the story is acting out. The premise of our cultural story is "The world was made for man." pg. 66. There are consequences of taking that premise as truth.
- if the world was made for us then it belongs to us and we can (and should) do with it as we please
This is what happened at the start of Taker culture 10,000 years ago. We started doing what we pleased with the world.
The Beginning of the Taker's Story: God made the world for man.
(Part Four of the Book)
The Middle of the Taker's Story
- It took man nearly 3 million years to figure out that the world had been made for him. Until then, he lived at the mercy of the wild, just as any any other creature does, with no control over his environment and his life. In order to take control as he was meant to, he had to figure a few key things out.
- He had to settle down in one place where he could really get to the work of mastering his environment.
- In order to do that, he had to have a source of food which could be mass produced and stored up and which wouldn't be used up if he stayed in one place for too long. In short: he needed to learn to manipulate his environment so that it produced more human food.
- He had to settle down in one place where he could really get to the work of mastering his environment.
- Once this problem was solved with the discovery of agriculture, "his rise was meteoric. Settlement gave rise to division of labor. Division of labor gave rise to technology. ..with trade and commerce came mathematics and literacy and science and all the rest..." pg 73
- "Without man, the world was unfinished, was just nature, red in tooth and claw. It was in chaos, in a state of primeval anarchy." pg76
This is the middle of the Taker's cultural story: But in order to take his rightful place in the wold, man had to discover agriculture so that he could build societies which controlled their environment. Until that happen, man's history was mostly aimless, but once it happened, man began to become what he was always meant to be and to turn the world into the thing it was always meant to be as well. Man began to rule the earth. OR, in short: "The world was made for man and man was made to rule it." pg 76
(Part Five of the Book)
The End of the Taker's Story
- But the world did not meekly submit to being ruled, so man had to conquer it.
- The destruction we see in the world is all too bad, but "As the Taker's see it, all this is simply the price of becoming human." pg 80 It is what God intended, so what else could we have done?
- The destruction and misery in the world is not the inevitable price of man achieving his God-given destiny. It is the inevitable price of "enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world." pg80
- "The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world - or to repair the devastation we've already wrought....Only one thing can save us. We have to increase our mastery of the world." pg 84
- "We have to carry the conquest forward. And carrying it forward is either going to destroy the world or turn it into a paradise - int he paradise it was meant to be under human rule." pg 85
- "So far we have this much [of our story]: The world was made for man to conquer and rule, and under human rule it was meant to become a paradise. This clearly has to be followed by a 'but.' It has always been followed by a 'but.' This is because the Takers have always perceived that the world was far short of the paradise it was meant to be." pg 86
- "Man was born to turn the world into a paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled..." pg 87
- In order to conclude that human beings are flawed we look back at the history of the human race, starting about 10,000 years ago. This is the history of the beginning of our culture alone. We ignore the 3 million years of history that went before which produced no world wars or vast environmental destruction. We don't even notice that we are ignoring it, that we are only looking at one culture's history. Because we don't see those previous 3 million years as being relevant because we were not truly human during that time.
- "among the people of your culture, it was assumed that he whole of human history was your history." pg. 88
- "So when the people of your culture concluded that there was something fundamentally wrong with humans...they were looking at the evidence of their own history." pg 88
- In order to conclude that human beings are flawed we look back at the history of the human race, starting about 10,000 years ago. This is the history of the beginning of our culture alone. We ignore the 3 million years of history that went before which produced no world wars or vast environmental destruction. We don't even notice that we are ignoring it, that we are only looking at one culture's history. Because we don't see those previous 3 million years as being relevant because we were not truly human during that time.
- "One of the most striking features of Taker culture is its passionate and unwavering dependence on profits...What makes it so striking is that there is absolutely nothing like it in Leaver culture unless it occurs in reaction to some devastating contact with Taker culture." pg 89 -90
- The general feeling is that God didn't really take an interest in humanity until they got important enough. That is why no profits were sent to Leaver cultures.
- The purpose of profits is to tell people how to live - to change them from how they are presently living. In Taker culture, this is always a religious question. "We need profits to tell us how to live because otherwise we wouldn't know." pg.91
- This is a phenomenon unique to Taker culture. No Leaver culture would ever imagine that a) people don't know the best way for themselves to live or b) one way to live could be the right way for everyone in the world.
- Taker culture teaches that "certain knowledge about how to live is...unobtainable in any of the ways we derive knowledge. ..It just isn't out there." pg. 92 and so the only way we can get it is to rely on profits or God to reveal it to us.
- Ishmael challenges this point. Who says that it is not possible to get certain knowledge about how to live the same way we get knowledge about gravity and mathematics and animal husbandry?
This is the end of the Taker story: But man screwed up ruling the world because he was fundamentally flawed. He didn't know the best way for people to live, and he never will because knowledge about this is unobtainable through scientific means. Thus, however hard he tries, he is going to keep screwing the world up.
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This is the story Taker Culture is enacting in the world:
"The world was given to man to turn into a paradise, but he's always screwed it up, because he's fundamentally flawed. He might be able to do something about this if he knew how he ought to live, but he doesn't - and he never will, because no knowledge about this is obtainable. So, however hard man might labor to turn the world into a paradise, he's probably just going to go on screwing it up." pg. 94 |
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