Ishmael

“A few years ago—you must have been a child at the time, so you may not remember it—many young people of this country had the same impression. They made an ingenuous and disorganized effort to escape from captivity but ultimately failed, because they were unable to find the bars of the cage. If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.”

Ishmael’s explanation for why the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s failed is that those in the opposition were unable to understand the nature of their enemy. This claim is that counterculture lacked efficacy, or the ability to understand and effect change in one’s situation. Ishmael’s broader lesson thus aligns with the narrator’s desires, and he is offering to help the narrator identify the nature of the problems in the world, thereby granting him efficacy to make change in the world.

“That’s because there’s no need to hear of it. There’s no need to name it or discuss it. Every one of you knows it by heart by the time you’re six or seven. Black and white, male and female, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, American and Russian, Norwegian and Chinese, you all hear it. And you hear it incessantly, because every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it out incessantly. And hearing it incessantly, you don’t listen to it. There’s no need to listen to it. It’s always there humming away in the background, so there’s no need to attend to it at all.”

Ishmael outlines, here, how culture indoctrinates those within it, granting them a specific series of understandings about the world and reality. Because these values are indoctrinated, as the narrator later demonstrates, they are viewed as facts rather than myths. Ishmael specifically uses words like “incessantly,” “propaganda,” and “background,” because these terms evoke the elusive nature of culture. Though the ideas Ishmael highlights are rarely stated explicitly, they are commonly understood by everyone within a culture.

“You call yourselves civilized and all the rest primitive. You are universally agreed on these terms; I mean the people of London and Paris and Baghdad and Seoul and Detroit and Buenos Aires and Toronto all know that—whatever else separates them—they are united in being civilized and distinct from Stone Age peoples scattered all over the world; you consider or recognize that, whatever their differences, these Stone Age people are likewise united in being primitive.”

Ishmael’s clarification, here, makes it clear that by “all other cultures,” he does not mean all cultures outside America, or even all cultures outside Eurocentric thought, but all cultures outside of what is commonly understood as civilization. The inclusion of countries like Iraq (Baghdad) are meant to highlight for the American reader that this is a broader category, as America has long held the common opinion that Iraq is not civilized or that Islam is not a civilized religion. The difference Ishmael points to, here, highlights the concept of the subaltern, coined by postcolonial theorist Antonio Gramsci, which indicates peoples that are entirely outside of contemporary global discourse by design.

“‘Then, I don’t know—maybe ten or fifteen million years ago—one branch of the primates left the trees and…’ I ran out of steam.

‘This isn’t a test,’ Ishmael said. ‘The broad outlines will do—just the story as it’s generally known, as it’s known by bus drivers and ranch hands and senators.’”

The narrative that Ishmael is trying to pull from the narrator is not a specific or detailed scientific narrative, but a common narrative that is assumed by all people in “civilized” society. The specifics are not relevant, and Ishmael’s examples of “bus driver” and “ranch hand” are meant to indicate professions that are assumed to be undereducated. The inclusion of “senator” in this list is meant to be a humorous association, implying that senators, too, are undereducated. In any case, the idea is that culture is so all-encompassing that everyone in that culture should know the basis of the narrative.

“‘It’s certainly not always unspoken. The religions of your culture aren’t reticent about it. Man is the end product of creation. Man is the creature for whom all the rest was made: this would, this solar system, this galaxy, the universe itself.’

‘True.’

‘Everyone in your culture knows that the world wasn’t created for jellyfish or salmon or iguanas or gorillas. It was created for man.’”

This passage is the premise of Ishmael’s ecological argument, which operates from the basic understanding that humanity has taken control of the world for its own purposes without regard for other forms of life. This assumption extends into the universe, but the primary goal of the example is the listing of other life forms, especially the gorilla. By agreeing with Ishmael, here, the narrator is implying that Ishmael is a lower lifeform, creating a situational irony in which the narrator, despite being part of the “chosen” species, is taking lessons from a “lower” species, implicitly undermining the assertion that humanity is special or superior.

“What man built up, the wind and rain tore down. The fields he cleared for his crops and his villages, the jungle fought to reclaim. The seeds he sowed, the birds snatched away. The shoots he nurtured, the insects nibbled. The harvest he stored, the mice plundered. The animals he bred and fed, the wolves and foxes stole away. The mountains, the rivers, and the oceans stood in their places and would not make way for him. The earthquake, the flood, the hurricane, the blizzard, and the drought would not disappear at his command.”

Ishmael is outlining the ways in which humanity has to fight against nature in order to sustain settlement. Essentially, this list is meant to illustrate how nature always appears to be working against the interests of humanity, but it is phrased to show a kind of futility. If all the animals, plants, and natural formations are actively stopping humanity from progressing in their current path of civilization, Ishmael is begging the question of how humanity might work with or alongside nature.

“But you realize, of course, that if you’d been telling this part of the story a hundred years ago—or even fifty years ago—you would have spoken only of the paradise to come. The idea that man’s conquest of the world could be anything but beneficial would have been unthinkable to you. Until the last three or four decades, the people of your culture had no doubt that things were just going to go on getting better and better and better forever. There was no conceivable end in sight.”

The narrator comes into his lessons with Ishmael thinking that he is already open-minded and enlightened on the struggles of humanity, but Ishmael, here, is encouraging him to take a broader view. When the narrator tries to assert that the contradiction of the Takers’ story is the destruction of the Earth, Ishmael notes that that conception of humanity’s flaw is relatively recent. Instead, Ishmael wants to look at how the Takers’ culture was always doomed to fail, not just why it is failing currently.

“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 like 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.”

The anaphora, or rhetorical repetition of a key phrase, of “Given a story to enact” in this passage shows Ishmael’s overarching argument regarding humanity as a malleable species. Culture is not fixed, but self-sustained, which makes it difficult, but not impossible, to alter. If the critical narrative of a culture shifts to favor certain behaviors, then those behaviors become dominant. This serves both to highlight how the narrative of the Takers is destructive, but also how it might be changed to avoid the impending disaster that Ishmael and the narrator agree is currently in motion.

“You’re skeptical, of course. According to the Takers, all sorts of useful information can be found in the universe, but none of it pertains to how people should live. By studying the universe, you’ve learned how to fly, split atoms, send messages to the stars at the speed of light, and so on, but there’s no way of studying the universe to acquire the most basic and needful knowledge of all: the knowledge of how you out to live.”

Though Ishmael seems to disregard fields of anthropology, psychology, zoology, philosophy, sociology, ontology, and many more, here his basic point is that the scientific method, the process of testing hypotheses in repeatable conditions, has not been applied, in his view, to morality and ethics, or how best to live as humans. His comparison is less between fields of study and more to point out how humanity measures progress predominantly in terms of scientific achievement, thus making splitting the atom a larger accomplishment than something like a reduction in carbon emissions through increased recycling or reduced transport use.

“Pessimists—or it may be that they’re realists—look down and say, ‘Well, the crash may be twenty years off or maybe as much as fifty years off. Actually it could happen anytime. There’s no way to be sure.’ But of course there are optimists as well, who say, ‘We must have faith in our craft. After all, it has brought us this far in safety. What’s ahead isn’t doom, it’s just a little hump that we can clear if we all just pedal a little harder.’”

The contrast between the pessimists and optimists, here, is underpinned by Ishmael’s statements regarding the doom of the hypothetical plane and the actual Taker culture. The optimists, then, are foolishly listening to the voices of their culture, which tells them to keep maintaining the culture at all costs, while the pessimists, like Kurt in the narrator’s story, or even like the narrator himself, see that something is wrong, but they lack the specificity and efficacy needed to effect any change in the course of the civilization.

“Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive almost anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.”

This passage explains biodiversity as a survival mechanism for all life on the planet, which serves to reframe the discussion of human life. Instead of looking at humanity as a single-species project, Ishmael is pushing for a view of humanity as one of many species that need to cooperate to ensure that life continues on Earth, even if each individual species cannot guarantee its own survival. This contrasts with Taker culture because Takers are predominantly focused on the survival of humans only, but Ishmael points out that humans alone are not likely to survive various disaster scenarios.

“You’re not listening. Settlement is a biological adaptation practiced to some degree by every species, including the human. And every adaptation supports itself in competition with the adaptations around it. In brief, human settlement isn’t against the laws of competition, it’s subject to the laws of competition.”

This critical clarification of the law of competition counters the narrator’s perception that humanity is in some way inherently flawed. Ishmael is essentially noting a middle ground, acknowledging that humans are suited to settlement, but that such settlement does not need to result in ecological disaster. In fact, many species form settlements of some kind, so Ishmael is outlining how these species that favor settlement simply need to do so without unnecessarily killing off other species or expanding beyond their means.

“‘That’s too big a leap. In Taker mythology, the world needed a ruler because the gods had made a mess of it. What they’d created was a jungle, a howling chaos, an anarchy. But was it that in fact?’

‘No, everything was in good order. It was the Takers who introduced disorder into the world.’

‘The rule of that law was and is sufficient. Mankind was not needed to bring order to the world.’”

Completing the reframing of humanity as just one species of many, Ishmael pulls the narrator back from his claim that humanity was not made to rule the world. Saying humanity is not meant to rule the world still maintains a focus on humanity and humanity’s purpose, while Ishmael’s reframing, that humanity is not needed to arrange the world, places the human species among all other species, as another cooperator in ensuring the continuity of life. If there is order without humans, then the attempts that humans make to “create” order inevitably disturb the existing system.

“Now it happened that one of the gods was away on an errand when the others were eating at the tree of knowledge, and when he returned and heard what the gods had done in the matter of the lion and the deer, he said, ‘In doing these two things you have surely committed a crime in one instance or the other, for these two things are opposed, and one must have been right to do and the other wrong. If it was good for the lion to go hungry on the first day, then it was evil to send it the deer on the second. Or if it was good to send it the deer on the second day, then it was evil to send it away hungry on the first.’”

The purpose of having one god return without the knowledge of good and evil is to show how the process looks without that knowledge. To the returning god, as before the gods ate from the tree, the idea of feeding the lion one day and saving the deer another seems contradictory. Though Ishmael does not explicitly state what this knowledge is that the gods are using, it seems that it is a knowledge of balance, revealing how some species will thrive at different times and others will fail at others. This is an extension of the law of competition framed in mythological terms, likely to allow the continued allegory of Genesis in the Bible.

“‘The disaster occurred when, ten thousand years ago, the people of your culture said, ‘We’re as wise as the gods and can rule the world as well as they.’ When they took onto their own hands the power of life and death over the world, their doom was assured.’

‘Yes. Because they are not in fact as wise as the gods.’

‘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.’”

This passage is essentially a rephrasing of an earlier conversation between the narrator and Ishmael regarding the Takers’ perspective as rulers of the world. By framing this assumed ownership as occurring under actual gods, Ishmael is showing how trivial the Takers’ claim to authority is, since the world under the Takers has suffered intense damages. Drawing this link is crucial in showing the narrator how the Takers’ culture is both founded in a distinct narrative and how that narrative inevitably, according to Ishmael, leads to destruction.

“Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they’re reenacting this scene beside the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They’re saying to themselves, ‘Of course it’s our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop at four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest—and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?’”

In his impression of a Taker couple, Ishmael addresses how the narrative of Taker culture, as with any culture, applies at all different levels of life. Though the couple is not likely to think the exact and specific thoughts that Ishmael thrusts on them, they are implicitly acknowledging how the world must be able to fit more humans in it, since they unconsciously believe that the world was made exclusively to support human life.

“When the people of your culture encountered the hunter-gatherers of Africa and America, it was thought that these were people who had degenerated from the natural, agricultural state, people who had lost the arts they’d been born with. The Takers had no idea that they were looking at what they themselves had been before they became agriculturalists. As far as the Takers knew, there was no ‘before.’ Creation had occurred just a few thousand years ago, and Man the Agriculturalist had immediately set about the task of building civilization.”

Though Ishmael’s assertion, here, as with many of his historical and theoretical assertions, is not entirely true, the idea is relevant in displaying the limits of human knowledge. When early explorers did come across people living without the advancements they possessed themselves, they considered the peoples they found to be “primitive” and “backward,” indicating how they valued their own lifestyle above that of the Leavers they encountered. Ishmael’s point is that the Leavers’ lifestyle is much older and more sustainable than that of the Takers, but the Takers are focused only on rapid increases in production and expansion, preventing them from appreciating the detail and complexity of seemingly monotonous Leaver culture.

“Now, you know that the knowledge of what works well for production is what’s valued in your culture. In the same way, the knowledge of what works well for people is what’s valued in Leaver cultures. And every time the Takers stamp out a Leaver culture, a wisdom ultimately tested since the birth of mankind disappears from the world beyond recall, just as every time they stamp out a species of life, a life form ultimately tested since the birth of life disappears from the world beyond recall.”

Ishmael’s reframing of human history, inclusive of the billions of years that precede the modern age, comes to a climax here as he notes how the extinction of cultures and species reflects the loss of thousands or even millions of years of development. Both the narrator and Ishmael call this “ugly,” meaning that the process of extinction and destruction is opposed to the “beauty” of nature after so many generations of development. More importantly, Ishmael is highlighting how the “wisdom” of Leavers, which contains the knowledge that Takers most desperately want and need, is paradoxically destroyed by the Takers’ endeavors to better control the world.

“You know very well that for hundreds of millions of you, things like central heating, universities, opera houses, and spaceships belong to a remote and unattainable world. Hundreds of millions of you live in conditions that most people in this country can only guess at. Even in this country, millions are homeless or live in squalor and despair in slums, in prisons, in public institutions that are little better than prisons. For these people, your facile justification for the agricultural revolution would be completely meaningless.”

Ishmael calls the narrator’s attention to the limitations of Taker culture. Ironically, while Ishmael and the narrator condemn Marxism and the Soviet Union, they then proceed to note the discrimination that exists between classes in what is essentially capitalist society. Here, Ishmael notes how the promise of innovation and prosperity in Taker culture, which is inherently capitalist in Ishmael’s description, very few members of the population actually reap the benefits of their labor. What Ishmael discusses in this passage is the Marxist conception of alienation, in which laborers are separated from the product of their labor, which leads to millions of people lacking a basic standard of living while a select few enjoy the benefits of “progress.”

“‘All the same, Bwana, what are we to do with this food if we don’t need it?’

‘You save it! You save it to thwart the gods when they decide it’s your turn to go hungry. You save it so that when they send a drought, you can say, “Not me, goddamn it! I’m not going hungry, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because my life is in my own hands now!”’”

The narrator’s summation of the Takers’ perspective is apt to the discussion Ishmael has fostered regarding the conceptual gods in the mythological view of culture. As the narrator frames this response, the premise of Takers’ urge for dominance is to eliminate the possibility of failure. The irony of the response, which the narrator notes later, is that the Takers are pushing themselves toward failure through their attempts to avoid their own destruction. For the Leavers, as voiced by Ishmael, there is no fear of failure so long as they do not disobey the laws of competition.

“It means that, right from the beginning, everything that ever lived belonged to the world—and that’s how things came to be this way. Those single-celled creatures that swam in the ancient oceans belonged to the world, and because they did, everything that followed came into being. Those club-finned fish offshore of the continents belonged to the world, and because they did, the amphibians eventually came into being.”

Combining the ideas of evolution and natural competition, Ishmael follows a series of species and creatures over time to illustrate how each one has always followed the laws of nature and competition, leading to a progression of species. This concept then leads the narrator to understand how other species, though different from man, might continue to develop in new and unforeseen ways. Likewise, the Leavers, who have never left the illustrated cycle, still “belong to the world,” and they are possibly evolving still to this day.

“Then here is a program: 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 that forbidden tree. You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.”

In this passage, Ishmael tries to translate the largely higher abstraction discussion into more concrete, actionable terms. Because the discussion has predominantly occurred through metaphor and comparison, creating these concrete links still leaves room to figure out how the narrator is meant to manage these tasks. The translation of Cain and Abel, as well as of the forbidden fruit, become conservation and culture changes. Though these are large changes to make in society, Ishmael seems to indicate that the narrator’s role is to continue teaching others, just as Ishmael taught him.

“‘You want to know what this has to do with anything,’ he said with a nod. ‘It has this to do with anything: The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison. During the last century every remaining Leaver people in North America was given a choice: to be exterminated or to accept imprisonment. Many chose imprisonment, but not many were actually capable of adjusting to prison life.”

This passage recalls the earlier discussion Ishmael and the narrator had about the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the failure of the counterculture was due to their inability to identify the nature of their imprisonment. Here, Ishmael explains how the whole world, with only a few exceptions, is a prison of the Takers’ design, meaning that people are not able to escape from the lifestyle of the Takers. Concretely, this means that Takers, and Leavers that try to adjust to Taker lifestyles, cannot decide to stop living as Takers without extensive deprograming. As Takers expanded their territory, those who could not or would not conform were killed, lest they persuade some Takers to try to abandon Taker culture.