Lesson Three
Guardian Book Review of Sapiens
Sapiens with Ishmael
Summary of Sapiens by Terry Ortlieb
Cognitive Revolution Part I by Terry Ortlieb
Agricultural Revolution Part I by Terry Ortlieb
AR Part II by Terry Ortlieb
Harari Theory on Unification by Terry Ortlieb
Addressing charges of superficiality in Harari by Terry Ortlieb
Teacher critiques Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (with brilliance)
Lesson Three of Sapiens Using Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael
One. What was the consequence of Sapiens’ evolution to tools, social ties, making fire, and ascent to top of the food chain?
We became, in the words of Daniel Quinn, “Takers,” wreaking havoc on the ecological system.
There were just about a million of us in East Africa in the beginning. Today, we’ve eclipsed 7 billion, and we’re so overpopulated it’s hard, for example, to find housing in Los Angeles.
Sapiens’ brain power and social bonding apparently made them more cunning warriors than their different populations, such as Neanderthals, and this resulted in genocide or interbreeding or both.
Over 70,000 years Sapiens “have conquered the globe.”
From Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
And Examine Counterarguments
One. We are in captivity to mythologies and stories that shape our identity, purpose, and behavior.
Two. Fictions, as Yuval Noah Harari tells us, separate Sapiens from other creatures.
Three. We absorb these stories from “Mother Culture” from our youth so that we embrace their systems and rules without questioning it.
Four. Takers are post-Agriculture. Leavers are foragers (41). Their lives are governed by radically different fictions.
Five. “Culture is people enacting a story” (43).
Six. What is the “creation myth” that is destroying the world? That the world was created for man. Man is entitled to use the planet as a vast resource for his pleasure.
Seven. Agriculture made man the dominant species.
Eight. Agriculture gave birth to culture, to the story that that Earth is for mankind to take (73).
This story “casts mankind as the enemy of the world” (80).
Nine. Agriculture Gives Us Unbridled Man Hellbent on Destruction of the Earth
In Ishmael we read:
“Man was at last free of all those restraints that . . . The limitations of the hunting-gathering life had kept man in check for three million years. With agriculture, those limitations vanished, and his rise was meteoric. Settlement gave rise to division of labor. Division of labor gave rise to technology. With the rise of technology came trade and commerce. With trade and commerce came mathematics and literacy and science, and all the rest. The whole was under way at last, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
But in spite of man’s mastery, he cannot restrain himself in ways that will save the planet from his own ruin and self-destruction.
His blindness to his defects combined with his unbridled appetites, greed, and rapacity combine to make his own undoing.
Rebuttal:
Can we blame agriculture then? Or should we blame man’s own hubris, pride, and irrational passions?
Counterargument to Rebuttal:
Daniel Quinn and Harari might answer that though the above is true agriculture provides man the juggernaut, the rapidly-moving vehicle to accelerate his self-destructive tendencies.
Ten. Taker culture relies on the stories of religious prophets to propel its worldview and its narrative; in contrast, Leavers don’t rely on prophets.
The prophet stories tend to be hopeless in terms of life on this world: They give a “story of hopelessness and futility, a story in which there is literally nothing to be done. Man is flawed, so he keeps on screwing up what should be paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t know how to live so as to stop screwing up paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about that. So there you are, rushing headlong toward catastrophe, and all you can do is watch it come” (95).
Eleven. Taker Culture is Narcissistic
Takers believe they are exceptions to Laws of Nature because they are the “end product” and center of creations. All their religious writings say so. In this regard, their religious writings reinforce their childish, narcissistic view of the world and themselves. This is the view that both Daniel Quinn and Yuval Noah Harari have of religion.
Could it be that they are taking the worst of Taker society and asking us to see it as the generalization that fails to address the complexities of post-Agricultural society?
Ten things I hated about the first half of Ishmael
by Allen B. Downey
I have a standard deal with my students that if they recommend a book to me, I will read it. One of my students recommended Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, which turned out to be my least favorite book ever.
After the first half, I jotted down some of the reasons why. Here is a list of problems I have with the book, most of which are either logical fallacies or just rhetorical stunts that annoy me.
- replacing the progress fallacy with the doomsday fallacy
Quinn argues against the assumption that things are necessarily getting better, but he commits the opposite error, the assumption that things are necessarily getting worse.
It is almost certain that some things are getting better and some worse. If Quinn wants to make the argument that we are headed for an environmental doomsday, he has to make the argument empirically.
- poisoning the well
Pointing out the influence of culture on our thinking, Quinn sets up a ready answer for anyone who disagrees with him: the opponent is blinded by culture!
Of course it is important to be skeptical of conventional wisdom, but we are no better off rejecting blindly what "Mother Culture" tells us than we would be accepting it blindly.
- the meta fallacy
When someone produces a meta-x, they often pretend it is not, itself, an x. For example, when a news story gets hyped out of proportion, some reporters start covering the hype as if it were a story. They think their meta-hype is better than the hype, but it's not.
Similarly, Quinn tries to place himself outside culture in order to create meta-culture, but he can't. He is just as much a victim of "Mother Culture" as the rest of us, and his book is just another piece of it.
In fact, this kind of work has become a genre! Another book in the category is "Mutant Message from Down Under," in which the author uses the rhetorical device of being kidnapped by Australian aborigines to give herself a voice apparently outside the culture of civilization. Quinn uses a telepathic gorilla, but its the same device with the same deceptive intent.
- the naturalist fallacy
There aren't many ideas in philosophy that are universally accepted. The one that comes the closest is the maxim that you can't get "ought" from "is." In other words, you can't derive an ethical system from empirical observation.
Historically, there have been lots of people that tried, and the results have been universally disastrous.
Quinn attacks this view straight on, arguing that there is a law that all species (except humans) follow, and that we can figure out what this law is empirically.
He fails on two fronts: the law he presents is empirically false, and even if it were true, it still wouldn't make it possible to know what we should do. At best, it would help us predict the consequences of our actions, but that is not sufficient to derive an ethical system.
Why do I say his law is empirically false? Well, one counterexample is trees. Trees are engaged in a internecine competition for sunlight in which they squander resources on preposterously long trunks, deprive other species of their food source, and poison their environments to eliminate competitors. Ever look at the floor of a dense pine forest? Nothing but pine needles.
- the Lorax fallacy
Quoth the Lorax, "I am the Lorax, and I speak for the trees!" To which I reply (1) what makes you think you know what the trees want, and (2) what makes the trees so special?
It is probably wrong to assume that nature has intent, but in any case it is ridiculous to presume that we know what its intent is. To see how ridiculous this is, consider the unpublished first draft of "The Lorax," in which another irritating troll appears and shouts, "I am the Borax, and I speak for the grass, and I say, chop down those trees -- they're blocking all the sun."
Then, "Wait! I am the Snorax, and I speak for the dung beetles, and I say, please breed enormous numbers of cattle."
Then, "I am the Thorax, and I speak for the slime molds, and I say, please make big piles of decaying organic matter."
And so on. You can see why it wasn't a big hit.
- the biocentrism fallacy
Quinn argues against anthrocentrism, the view that the universe was made for humans and that we have the right to do what we want with it.
The alternative is biocentrism, an ethical system in which animals and other parts of nature have rights as well. It is often (wrongly) assumed that an ethical system that extends rights to more entities is morally superior to one that is more stingy.
Of course, we already extend some rights to some animals, and we could extend more rights to more animals, but that does not change the fact that (a) we're still the ones extending the rights and it's still our choice, and (b) we would still be in the position of trying to figure out the intent of nature, if there is one.
Anthrocentrism may seem self-centered, but there is no sensible alternative.
- inconsistency regarding the role of humans
Sometimes Quinn considers humans part of the natural world, sometimes not, as it serves him.
Where this error hurts his argument the most is his claim that all species that follow the law live forever, environmental conditions permitting. What "environmental conditions" is he talking about? He seems to mean the abiotic environment, but that's absurd. For every species, "the environment" includes every other species. I am not sure, but I would guess that of all the species that have become extinct (for reasons that have nothing to do with humans) the vast majority have been wiped out because of other species (too many competitors, too little prey) rather than the abiotic environment.
Humans are part of the environment, and every species that has been wiped out by human activity has been wiped out by "environmental conditions." Quinn's distinction in this case between natural causes and human activities is contrary to his argument in the rest of the book that humans are part of nature.
- identification of science as a form of mythology
Quinn stamps the current scientific understanding of the origin of the universe as mythology. He pulls this stunt with a bit of rhetorical slight-of-hand.
He offers an anthrocentric story of creation and then rejects it because it is anthrocentric. In fact, the narrator was invited to offer an explanation of "how things came to be this way" in an environment that was completely surrounded by human artifacts. It was perfectly reasonable to explain such an environment by focusing on the human activity that led this to be "this way."
In any case, telling and rejecting an antrocentric version of the origin of the universe does not undermine the claim that our scientific understanding is qualitatively different from the stories we usually label mythology. Specifically, if representatives from two culures with different creation myths met, there is nothing one could say or do to persuade the other to adopt a new myth (at least not rationally).
By contrast, there is a lot we can do to convince someone to adopt the scientific view --- in fact, millions of people, raised to believe some version of Genesis, have come to adopt the scientific view on the basis of evidence and reason.
- ignorance of evidence
When Quinn bothers to present empirical evidence for his position, it is almost always false. I already mentioned one biological error, the claim that no other species competes with other species the way humans do. I'm not a biologist, but I thought of 10 counter-examples before I turned the page. I already mentioned trees. What about the mold that produces penicillin? Simians that kill members of other species for sport, and members of their own species for social standing or mating priviledge? Beavers that wreak environmental havok to build safe housing?
Species evolve mechanisms and behaviors that allow them to survive (more precisely, the ones that didn't aren't around). Quinn observes, rightly, that most of these mechanisms are peaceful, but that's because non-violence is generally a good survival strategy, not because the species are following laws. There are exceptions throughout nature, including some aspects of human behavior.
As for the economic relationship between population and food supply, Quinn gives a half-hearted voice to some 19th century ideas, but seems oblivious to a century of subsequent work. His model is absurdly simple and provably false.
I don't know as much about anthropology, but many of Quinn's claims are contrary to what little I know. Judging by his track record, I am hardly inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt
- ugly misanthropy
The population crisis is a serious and difficult problem. Its central questions are
(a) if we keep doing what we're doing, will the population grow to a level that is either unsupportable or supportable only with an unacceptable quality of life?
(b) if so, is there something different we can do that will lead to a smaller population and a better quality of life?
The first is an empirical question. The only way to answer it is by using evidence and reason as best we can. Quinn has no interest in evidence or reason -- he just assumes that he knows the answer.
The second is an ethical question. Obviously there are a lot of things we can do to reduce the population. The hard part is finding one that actually makes things better.
To do that, we have to think about ethics. If there is, in fact, a population crisis, then it makes a lot of traditional ethical problems harder. For example, saving a life becomes an alloyed victory.
The problem, of course, is that once the sanctity of human life is off the table, the table becomes slippery and steep in every direction. Finding an acceptable ethical system in that context is a hard problem.
Quinn's misanthropy is a lazy, ugly solution. We can do better.
Books That I Hate: Ishmael
Do you remember that Celestine Prophecy nonsense of 10 years ago? This is fairly similar, except where "Celestine" is now widely regarded as new-age bullshit, "Ishmael" still holds on to some level of philosophical credibility.
Let's deal with the credibility thing first. "Ishmael" has maintained a certain progressive following largely because it deals with protecting the environment. While I am all for protecting the environment (in fact I'm more in favor of it than Daniel Quinn, we'll get to that later) "Ishmael" takes a fairly hard line stance on the subject. But over-the-top environmentalism is not what makes "Ishmael" so stupid, so ridiculous, so amazingly inept. After all, you could at least make the case that an enormous conservation effort should be pursued based on available environmental science. I would not make this case, but someone could plausibly do so.
What makes "Ishmael" such a bad book is that it relies not on logic, but on argument from authority. And who is this authority, you ask? Newton? Einstein?
Nope.
It's a psychic gorilla. Named Ishmael. He rented out an apartment and posted an ad in the paper looking for someone who "wants to save the world."
My friends tell me that this is simply a plot device, but it can't be. There is no other reason to pay attention to the ramblings of Mr. Quinn, except for the fact that they are being spewed forth from the mind of a psychic gorilla.
Ishmael makes the following analogy in order to impress upon his student the necessity of changing our evil, selfish ways: (Paraphrased. I'm not touching this book again.)
Mankind is like someone who is falling from a very high cliff. From this person's perspective everything looks fine. The scenery changes only slightly, that is until you get a few thousand feet from the ground at which point it becomes glaringly obvious that there is a problem, and you can't do anything about it.
That's it. No evidence that this reflects our current situation is offered, Quinn simply makes the assertion. He also praises the "natural world" method of distributing scarce resources. This method involves a lot of fighting, starvation, a serious decline in population, and a complete abandonment of technology. He discusses a predator and its prey, and says that in the natural world, sometimes the prey will escape, sometimes the predator will eat, but it is up to the gods to decide who wins on a given day. This is good. No one gets too much and no one wastes resources.
And of course, the student in the book believes every word from the psychic gorilla without question, because it's tough to argue with the 400 pound gorilla in the room. Especially if he happens to be psychic.
It is shocking how many people are taken in by this book. The worldview that Quinn advocates is despicable. It is filled with death and suffering, and brings progress to a standstill. It is nothing more than the typical leftist romanticism of the state of nature. Quinn wants to protect all of nature except for humanity. He is a self-loathing human.
There is also ample evidence available to indicate that Ishmael himself isn't too bright. When we meet him his living conditions are lackluster. Rather than utilizing his talents to better his own situation, which would allow him to spread his message with greater efficiency, he is content to live in hiding and in poor health. Assuming he does have something worthwhile to say, he chooses a very poor method for saying it. A method that all but ensures that no one will hear it.
So, don't read Ishmael under any circumstances. It's truly terrible. I ran into someone reading it on the train the other day while I was reading Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness (on Danny's recommendation). He told me that reading "Ishmael" would do more to make me happy than any self-help book (note that Gilbert's book is anything but a self-help book). This happens to me with some regularity on the train. For some reason people like to tell me about Ishmael. I asked him why it made him happy and he replied that he now had a better understanding of how people are affecting things. I told him that I had read Ishmael and that I didn't believe that Quinn had any understanding of how people are affecting things and that if he did he wouldn't need to use a psychic gorilla as a proxy.
(Note: I should mention that when discussing "Ishmael" you should always say "psychic gorilla" and never "psychic monkey." Even though "psychic monkey" sounds funnier, "Ishmael" defenders will quickly and snottily correct you on this point, as if it matters.)
He then advised me to "look at the world around me and see what's going on."
He then disembarked from an electrical train in one of the nation's largest cities amidst skyscrapers and magnificent works of public art,where coffee and giant burritos are plentiful, violence is minimal, and modern forced air heating is keeping hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise be miserable or dead at a balmy 74 degrees.
As usual, the world looks pretty nice to me. And best of all, no psychic gorillas.
I wish that Julian Simon would have answered Ishmael's advertisement and put an end to this nonsense.
Labels: Books I Hate
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