Ishmael: Cultures in Opposition

      

     In his environmental epic, Ishmael, Daniel Quinn investigates the ailing condition of our planet through the eyes of an unlikely teacher, a gorilla named Ishmael. Snatched from his home in the wild, Ishmael observed human nature from behind bars in a zoo and then in a circus. Gifted with the unique ability to communicate through his eyes, he eventually caught the attention of a wealthy businessman who discovered his special gift and decided to take him on as a pupil. While under his care, Ishmael studied our species and developed his theories on why we’ve become so destructive to our planet. After the passing of his master, Ishmael seeks a pupil of his own to rescue mankind and the world in tow. Through his eyes, Quinn reveals  the two opposing forces of man that influence our planet, and why if we don’t change now we may never be able to.

        Ishmael breaks humanity into two antithetical groups that he deems ‘Takers’ and ‘Leavers’. Both are enacting stories that have been in place for thousands of years. The Leavers were the first group of humans, the hunter gatherers that work with nature to take only what they need, leaving the earth largely untouched so that it can maintain them in the future. Leavers, Ishmael argues, have existed for millions of years and still do today as successfully as ever. The Leavers follow a basic structure set in place by Mother Nature. But we rarely hear about the Leavers, because we live in what Ishmael refers to as a Taker society.

       Takers came about during the agricultural revolution, when man realized that he could change the earth to better sustain him. Thus emerged a society structured around the basis of “Mother Culture.” A divisive shift in attitude occurred around that time. We stopped thinking of ourselves as a part of the world, but as purveyors of it, like we were the reason that the earth exists. Ishmael says that people began to believe that “the pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation. Everyone in your culture knows that the world wasn't created for jellyfish or salmon or iguanas or gorillas. It was created for man.” The Christian creation story found in Genesis supports this idea. Ishmael stresses to his pupil how it says God made man special and gave him dominion over the earth. But Genesis also offers a warning. When Adam and Eve turn their back on God, God turns His back on them, promising struggle, toil, and pain upon their race for eternity. Ishmael even suggests that this story was written by Leavers as a warning to the Takers, that if they were going to defy nature they should expect serious grievous consequences. These consequences, he argues, are what is plaguing the Earth today.

      The Taker story doesn’t only include man’s dominion over the Earth, but the idea that man is also fundamentally flawed. Prophets for hundreds of years have preached the inherent imperfection of men. What Ishmael contends is that this is only an aspect of Taker culture, and that nothing like it can be found among Leavers. Prophets have sprung up from the desperate need to understand the innate opposition with nature we seem to have come to. Ishmael claims, “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.”  He continues:

“We now have in place all the major elements of your culture's explanation of how things came to be this way. 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 that 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. With nothing but this wretched story to enact, it's no wonder so many of you spend your lives stoned on drugs or booze or television. It's no wonder so many of you go mad or become suicidal.”

    Ishmael, knowing a great deal about captivity, explains that we Takers are the prisoners of a system that puts us at odds with the world. “You're captives of a civilized system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live,” he states. For this reason, we cannot simply change our lives to save mankind. We must change our story. He talks about the efforts of the hippy movement of the 1960s to change our cultural system. The problem with them, he claimed is that, “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.” But ultimately we were still stuck. “In the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. 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,” he proclaims. What we need, is to stop the idea that the world belongs to man and proliferate the idea that man belongs to it. “That is, all sorts of creatures on this planet appear to be on the verge of attaining that self awareness and intelligence. So it's definitely not just humans that the gods are after. We were never meant to be the only players on this stage. Apparently the gods intend this planet to be a garden filled with creatures that are self aware and intelligent,” his pupil realizes.

       If man is to have any hope for survival, we must encourage diversity to flourish. We must stop our “totalitarian” rule over the earth and make room for other species to have a chance to thrive as we have. It will not be easy, but if we can change the story our culture is enacting than maybe someday, “In a billion years, whatever is around then, whoever is around then, says, "Man? Oh yes, man! What a wonderful creature he was! It was within his grasp to destroy the entire world and to trample all our futures into the dust but he saw the light before it was too late and pulled back. He pulled back and gave the rest of us our chance. He showed us all how it had to be done if the world was to go on being a garden forever. Man was the role model for us all!"

Grey: An Environmental Slam Poem

Once upon a time there was a thing called black and white,

Right and wrong,

Clear cut truths separated divisively into hemispheres of fact or fiction,

We all felt this once, the feeling that everything had  to be either concrete or non-existent,

When righteousness was so tangible we could reach out and hug it,

And it would kiss us and hold us and tuck us in to comfortable nights of sleep,

There is no such thing as comfort now.

In the days of our youths, we spent our time marveling at magic boxes that broadcasted images of lovable characters that won,

Good vanquished evil and virtue triumphed over corruption,

and we would root for the “good guy” and feel the serenity of vindication as every “happily ever after” secured us into rosy world views,

Then as we grew older, those characters began to fade,

Santa Claus and Care Bears disappeared into oblivion, and filled in with news networks and headlines,

And our rosy world view, once so filled with black and white,

Melted into a million shades of grey.

Grey, adjective,

An intermediate between black and white as in ashes or overcast sky,

Dull and non-descript, without character or interest,

Sunless, dreary, somber, bleak,

It has multiplied and infiltrated everything.

Grey concrete landscapes,

Grey industrial wastelands,

Grey hanging in our skies,

Flooding down our rivers,

Obscuring skylines,

And blocking out the sun.

Grey spewing from the pyres of capital gain,

Grey filling our lungs, our minds and our future,

Gushing from the mouths of our politicians,

Thickly coating our gospels in slippery falsehood.

We breath it in, drink it up, and consume it,

And because of it we are asthmatic, dehydrated and malnourished, 

And worst of all, we are complacent in being so,

Having been assured by endless hours of advertisement that grey is the new black and white,

The better truth, the clearer choice despite its obvious opacity.

Its time we woke up, because let me tell you something,

The matrix exists and we’re in it,

And our heads are being held under by the greed of people bigger than us,

Who would keep us in the dark to stuff their own pockets,

But I for one, will not succumb to grey,

I will not suffocate and drown in it, I will cease to remain silent and frozen,

I will stop letting the fear of dying make it a certainty,

I will trudge forward and find the surface,

Not accepting hopelessness,

Fighting the apathy to find answers,

Because I know that talking about the wrongs of the world isn’t enough,

We can sit around forever discussing how the world is going down in flames,

But ultimately it will change nothing and we will burn along with it,

There is no longer time for inaction,

If we are not part of the solution, we are just another faceless part of the overwhelming problem,

We must not lose faith that this evil can be vanquished,

That we can find truth again,

That the grey can again be separated into black and white,

Let us dare to be idealistic,

Dare to dream that there can progress in a world shrouded in retrogression,

Lorraine Hansbury once penned that it is easy to think of the world like “there is no progress, there is only one big circle that we all march in, around and around,

each of us with our own picture in front of us that we think is the future”

but it is important to remember that

 “it is not a circle, but merely a long line,

 as in geometry,

one that stretches into infinity,

and because we cannot see the end of it,

we can also not see how it changes.

And those that see the line, we call them idealists,

And the ones that can only see the circle,

We call them the realists,”

I’m calling for an end to “realism.”

An end to the idea that we cannot change,

Because to change the world we must first change our thinking,

Stop the cyclical pattern of hopelessness we get caught up in,

Stop the idea that we cannot overcome this,

Let’s come up with ideas no one has had yet,

Get out of this rut of human limitation,

Because dreams are bigger than we’ll ever be,

And solutions can arise out of the most unlikely of circumstances.

Let us stop moaning and groaning and focus on what we are going to do,

Action is the only solution worth taking seriously.

And the time to do so is right now,

Moving forward, overcoming,

Shaking the dust and finding the right and wrong in all the grey that has taken over,
that shall be allowed to exist no longer.