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 One
From Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
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.
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