Daniel Quinn’s 1992 novel Ishmael eluded me for a while yet managed to stay in the back of my mind until I recently remembered its unique premise. I was first introduced to the book when picking it up off my uncle’s bookshelf. He told me that it was one of his favorite books and described its story to me. Ishmael, an intelligent gorilla, can telepathically communicate with his student, an unnamed character seeking guidance in his life. This character meets Ishmael after seeing his ad in the newspaper looking for a pupil with an “earnest desire to save the world”. Most of the novel is a Socratic dialogue between the two, as the protagonist learns more about the world and the relationship humans have had with it, according to Ishmael’s lessons. I borrowed the book from my uncle for a little while but never read far into it. At the age I was at the time, reading wasn’t an activity I took much pleasure in. In the past weeks, I’ve finally read Ishmael and enjoyed the book’s thought-provoking perspective on issues larger than any one of us.
Their conversation begins with Ishmael’s backstory, explaining how he ended up in this apartment building alone. Afterward, he describes human culture’s influence on the student, forcing him to enact its harmful goals on the Earth. Ishmael’s objective is to show him the errors in this story’s way of life by identifying two distinct groups: Takers and Leavers. The Takers would be the agriculturalists who created civilization with the Leavers being those who remained hunter-gatherers. These Taker populations began to grow as Leaver groups became diminished, marginalized and sometimes attacked for their choice of lifestyle. Ishmael convinces his student that the Takers’ belief in human superiority is unrealistic. Their story is flawed and continually results in a culture of discontent, destruction, and death. Ishmael’s philosophy focuses on the principle of life that all species follow where no species wages war on another. His example is of a lion not killing an entire herd of gazelles but rather killing and eating the only one that it needs. Takers continually waging war on Earth’s plants and animals is a greedy violation of this principle, which will in time lead to the demise of humanity. The book depicts our world currently as in a slow free fall, before reaching the end of its flight in the future. There is only hope for humans to learn and experiment with new and creative survival methods in accordance with the environment.
The way the book is structured enhances its convincing nature, as Ishmael presents ideas and allows the student to grapple with them before accepting them. It makes the reader question what they believe in and think critically about the ideas presented. Quinn opts not to fearmonger to the reader about the end of our existence but rather make sense of how things got this way, and through that, the flaws and need for change emerge. Humans have stepped outside of their natural order, giving themselves the power to decide what is right and wrong for all life on Earth. Before this, we belonged to the Earth like all other life. Now the Earth belongs to us, leading to the problems we face like mass species extinctions, food shortages, and overpopulation. I can’t fully convey its ideas here, so I encourage everyone to read Ishmael. Its relatively short length and methodical pace are still able to convey worthwhile ideas and be easily understood. In short, the book functions as a new outlook on humanity and its place on Earth and a call to action for change. More than anything else, as humans, we must live harmoniously with our environment instead of manipulating and controlling it for ourselves.
