It was a peaceful autumn morning in 1996. The birds were chirping, the air was crisp. The leaves were just starting to change. It was on this fine morning. Oprah Winfrey. Yes. Oprah Winfrey. Once she opened her front door, she noticed something different, something unexpected. Lying right there on her front doorstep was a book. The book was Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Oprah had heard of Ishmael, which had just been published a few years before.
Isn't this that book about a gorilla she thought to herself when she first heard about it? She hadn't been interested in reading a book about a gorilla. But today, she later recalled, it felt like a sign. So Oprah picked up the anonymously gifted book from her front steps and read Ishmael for herself. When she later introduced Daniel Quinn, the author of Ishmael, as a guest on her show. And you can read the transcript of the episode online.
She introduced him by saying, When I mentioned I was reading Ishmael the story of a gorilla who was a teacher. A lot of my friends thought I was a little crazy. But the message in the book is very powerful, and there are thousands of other people who have read it and they say it's changing the way they see the world and also their lives. It certainly opened my eyes. Oprah had many questions for her guest, but the first one she asked was, How do you explain to people, what is this about?
And Daniel Quinn, who at this point was in his sixties with wisps of gray hair and a soft voice, was just for the first time in his whole life, gaining some recognition for his ideas. I mean, here he was sitting across from Oprah. And when Oprah asked him how to explain what Ishmael is about, he told her that rather than explaining what it's about, it's more helpful to know what it does. He told her that, like medicine, the first thing you want to know is what's the effect?
Welcome to Episode four of Human Nature Odyssey, a podcast exploring new ways to rethink what we take for granted about history and our society. I'm Alex. So what does Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael do? What's the effect? Quinn explained that he wrote it to quote, give people a new vision of our place on this planet, unquote. I like to think that the ideas in Ishmael are like a lens, like a pair of glasses. You can wear and see the world more clearly.
You might find some clarity in surprising and interesting places. This particular metaphorical prescription lens is going to help us examine the question that is the focus of Ishmael, the book, as well as this entire podcast. What is civilized nation? What exactly is going wrong here? And can it go right? And not just in modern civilization as it is today, but how it's evolved over time.
And while on the Human Nature Odyssey podcast will explore many ideas, thinkers and their works, the novel Ishmael is where our adventure has started. Now, Daniel Quinn is not speaking to us, the readers directly, but through the imaginary character Ishmael, a telepathic gorilla. If you're going to get an honest look at humanity, it helps to have an outside observer, in this case a well read, critically thinking gorilla to offer some insight.
And so far on this podcast, we've begun to outline a bit of Ismail's vision. In episode two, we talked about how we are destroying the world, not because we're too greedy or selfish, but because we're captives in society where our individual survival depends on our collective suicide. And Ishmael argues that what's holding us captive is a story. In episode three, we learned that Ishmael has a name for the people who are captives of this story. He calls them takers.
The takers argue among themselves about which language to speak the name of their gods, the color of their flag, the structure of their marketplace. But there's something fundamental. They all share taker mythology, a story they we are all captives enacting according to Take Your Mythology. The world belongs to humans and humans must concrete, but we'll probably screw it up because humans are innately flawed. That's the story.
Our civilization is acting out on a daily basis because take our civilization has colonized and expanded across much of the world. We might forget that there could be any other modes of existence, but there are. And Ishmael calls the cultures who don't participate and take your civilization levers. Now, just to add. Generally speaking, takers self-organize into what we traditionally call civilization city based societies.
Believers self-organize into what we sometimes referred to as tribes or kin based societies. Takers societies are built mainly on agriculture. Weavers usually practice hunting and gathering. Taker economies are based on extraction of resources and exponential growth, while Weaver economies are based on sustainable resource management and stability.
Well, in order to understand this taker Weaver dichotomy and why it's so significant, I think it's worth zooming out from the book for this episode and talk about the history and context. Daniel Quinn wrote his book in. My dad likes to say there are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't. My aunt usually then likes to make the joke that actually there are three kinds of people in the world, those who can count and those who can.
But anyway, as we now know, Ishmael is the kind of gorilla who likes to divide the world into two groups of people, the takers and the weavers. Now, the narrator, who, if you remember, is the reluctant pupil who first found Ishmael ad in the paper and has come to his private office to find out what this is all about. Essentially, he says, Hold up, hold up a minute. The takers and the Weavers. You're going to reduce the entire world into just two groups. Seems a bit too oversimplified to me.
Clearly, the narrator is one of the two kinds of people who doesn't like dividing the world into two kinds of people. But as Ishmael points out, dividing the world like this is something our culture already does, or least we did. But the words we used to use are civilized and primitive. We're going to look at the history of these words their use, their limitations, and what they've been replaced by since. Now, hearing these words might make your skin crawl a bit.
Oh, labeling people primitive, that does not sound good to my ears. Yeah, well, I don't think the word primitive was originally intended as a compliment. It was used as justification for a conquest. Genocide and forced assimilation of, quote unquote, primitive people by people who thought of themselves as, quote unquote, civilized. Now, in the grand scheme of civilization, the words civilized and primitive are actually relatively recent ways of labeling these two groups.
But the phenomenon of this dichotomy is as old and as widespread as civilization itself. The Romans and Greeks used to use the word barbarians. The show dynasty of Ancient China. Use the words Y and e y, meaning Chinese and civilized e meaning wild or uncivilized tribes and Malacca was the Sanskrit word in ancient India to describe foreigners or tribes outside their civilization. The exact meanings of these words vary a bit, but there is this general concept of other outside of civilization.
They're trying to label and more often than not, ponder and convert. Over the last 500 years, European colonization has most directly shaped the way we think about this dichotomy of these two groups today. And then Naquin wrote Ishmael commenting on this tradition.
So when people who saw themselves as civilized, like Christopher Columbus and Cortez, literally, and countless other khakis, stores, missionaries, fur trappers, pioneers and slavers left the continent called Europe to gain riches and power in the continents that eventually became known as North and South America. Not to mention many other parts of the world.
They believed that these other people, the people who were living in the lands they were attempting to conquer, were uncivilized, even subhuman. Like one in 1651, William Bradford, an English separatist and governor of the Plymouth Colony, wrote of Massachusetts as, quote, being devoid of all civil inhabits, where there are only savage and brutish men which range up and down little otherwise than the wild beasts of the state, unquote. So what does it even mean to be civilized here?
It kind of has two definitions. On one hand, it refers to members of the civilization, the kind of society with written laws and hierarchy, yada, yada. But on the other hand, the word civilized also means to be humane and polite. Which gets confusing when you consider how the Spanish conquistadors, American slaveholders and Nazi concentration camp guards. Sure, they were civilized in the sense that they lived within civilization.
But were they civilized in the sense that they were humane and highbrow? No, no, no. The answer is obviously no. They were not. But where did they get this concept of being civilized from? Many Western European colonizers felt they were carrying the proud tradition of this whole being civilized thing from the great Roman Empire, which they viewed as the OG, the creme de la creme of civilization.
As author Anthony Paglen puts it, quote, It was above all, Rome, which has provided the ideologues of the colonial systems of Spain, Britain and France with the language and political modes they required for the Imperium. Romana has always had a unique place in the political imagination of Western Europe, unquote.
Spanish philosopher Juan Inés disciple Vitor, who lived during Spain's 16th century invasion of the Americas, wrote a treatise justifying Spain's invasion based on the Roman, quote, right to conquer in order to civilize, unquote. He went on to write, quote, With these rights, the Romans are very civilized people and exalted in virtue subjected to their rule the barbarian nations. Unquote. In fact, the word civilized and civilization come from the Latin root.
Not to mention the words imperialism, empire, colonialism and colony also were handed down from ancient Rome. Now, the irony here is just the millennia. So before Western Europeans gleefully colonized the world and looked down on other cultures as being primitive. The Romans themselves looked down on Western Europeans, like the vandals and Gauls and Celts as primitive.
The Roman statesman Cassiodorus ridiculed these, quote, barbarians as those who, quote, did not live in cities making their abodes in the fields like wild animals, unquote. But after a few centuries, the descendants of the tribes, like the vandals and Gauls and Celts, the Western Europeans would view themselves more culturally aligned with their old colonizer, the Romans, than with their so-called primitive ancestors.
The Western European descendants even took it a step further from Rome and made up a new nickname to designate themselves as civilized, a.k.a. the Superior Group, and started calling themselves White a concept that had existed before the 1600s. These new white supremacists and colonizers believe that civilization itself originated with the Romans and the Greeks. But this is not the case. Ironically, civilization didn't even begin with the people they would consider white.
The Romans, after all, were only the latest to carry the torch of the empires that came before them. In the ancient Mediterranean world, it was the Greeks, the Persians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, all the way back to the Sumerians in modern day Iraq. So when in 2006, Tucker Carlson, former Fox News crisis actor, called the people of Iraq, quote, semi-literate primitive monkeys, unquote. Iraq, the place where a Western civilization can ultimately trace its roots back to.
Tucker wasn't just being incredibly racist. He was being to put it lightly, shall we say. Very incorrect. And of course, civilization didn't just originate in the Middle East, but long ago in China, India, Central America and South America. So white supremacy is not included. We all understand that no human has civilization, more or less in their DNA than others. As I mentioned earlier, primitive is a relatively recent way of describing societies.
Primitive only started being used in the mid to late 1800s, actually, after Darwin wrote Origins of the Species and the concept of evolution started being applied to human societies. The word used before that by Western Europeans was savage. The scientists who had been labeled as savage and barbarian were now being called primitive because it was thought that these forms of societies preceded the inevitable development of civilization.
In this context, primitive might sound a little kinder than savage, but it's essentially saying, Don't worry, guys, you're not stuck like this. You can become advanced like us. Okay, now actually that kind and primitive along with being used derogatorily is also a lousy way to describe the phenomenon of people living outside this entity we call civilization.
After all, there are many ways so-called primitive societies are far more sophisticated, complex, advanced than so-called civilized societies. It just depends on what you consider sophisticated, complex and advanced.
For example, David Graeber and David Wayne GROSS book The Dawn of Everything touches on how when many native North American societies with elaborate forms of government, intricate democracies and self-organizing councils first learned about European monarchies and their rigid hierarchies, lack of individual freedom and massive wealth inequality. The native societies were not very impressed. So if we're scrapping civilized and primitive, what do we replace them with?
Well, maybe we don't replace them. Maybe we shouldn't divide people into two categories in the first place. Maybe the narrator's right and we should view humanity as one big whole. But the danger of lumping all of humanity into one category is that we start to see the destructive behavior of our society as reflective of all humanity. People start to talk about the destruction of the world as a problem with our whole species. Comedian George Carlin called us pesky, troublesome species.
Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn described us as the species that went mad and destroyed the planet. Then there's biologist Julian Huxley, who took it a bit further saying that the human race will be the cancer of this planet. And if you're thinking, what, isn't that from The Matrix? Well, yes, Agent Smith also famously says human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. There's a lot of talk about how destructive our species has been, how destructive human nature is.
But are the horrors of World War, the threat of nuclear annihilation and ecological catastrophe? The failings of our entire species? Do they reflect our inevitable tragic human nature? Or are they the failings of just one way of life, one way of being? And what about the people who actually live a different way? The words civilized and primitive are not great words, but they are described in something worth looking at. So what words could we use instead?
Well, this is where Daniel Cohen comes in. He proposes that the labels takers and the levers could be helpful. In the last episode, we really got into taker mythology, which boils down to the world belongs to us. We're meant to rule. This is the story of all people living in Take Your Culture, are acting out and held captive. And it's resulting in the destruction of the world. But who does Ishmael really consider takers? It's not just one group or country.
At this point, the takers are an interconnected global culture. While each culture within it is unique, we're tied together more than just economically. We're all in this ongoing ideological conversation with each other. So this global macro culture includes the so-called developed countries and developing countries.
Which makes sense because it's like even though the wealthy people who live at the top of an apartment complex like to think they're separate from the people living on the street in front of the building. To an anthropologist, the people at the top and the people at the bottom are clearly part of the same society and culture.
It's just the culture that distributes the wealth very unequal, even the very different forms of governments like the Soviet Union's version of communism, democratic republics and fascist regimes are just different ways to organize the various nations within the macro culture that Ishmael calls takers.
Okay, so take your civilization includes Western civilization and Eastern civilization, and it includes the developed world and the developing world, the first world and the Third World, the full swaths of the political spectrum from right to left, both. And what the heck else is, Ishmael would say, believers. But before we can really figure out who Ishmael includes and the leaves are category, we've got to discuss a term that's replaced primitive in recent decades.
Depending on what country you live in, you'll hear the terms Aboriginal people or first nations. One of the most common is the word Indigenous, which a bit ironically is also quite civilized Latin a.k.a. Roman Empire. Word. But unlike the word primitive, the term indigenous has become a source of pride for many. It's become a collective identity to build solidarity around and demand rights that were taken away by colonization only as recently as the 2000s.
The word indigenous was adopted as an official term used by the United Nations. One way the UN defines indigenous is quote descendants of those who inhabited a country or a geographical region. At the time when people of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived, they have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live, unquote.
And while indigenous is mostly now used instead of the word primitive, it's not the same thing. For example, the word primitive is referring to one's way of life, and inherent in that is the idea that you're supposed to advance beyond where you are. Indigenous emphasizes nativity to a land the one that they are indigenous to the Northeast United States. The Aymara are indigenous to Bolivia. The Maori are indigenous to New Zealand. And it doesn't lock in your identity to a specific way of life.
If a person from an indigenous society moves to a city and doesn't speak their ancestral language, they wouldn't lose the title of Indigenous, which is critical for people trying to demand their rights and unique culture while navigating assimilation. In a way, it's almost somewhat of an ethnic group that is, it's an identity passed down through blood. But even though Western Europeans are also descendants of societies we'd call indigenous, we don't refer to Western Europeans as indigenous.
That's because the word indigenous is generally describing the post European colonization world we still live in. But what if we want to talk about history beyond the last 500 years? So we need another word for our purposes here. And just as the word indigenous brought in the conversation from using the word primitive, this new word could expand the conversation again. And this is where I think Ismael's term lever could really come in handy.
So while one can be indigenous, regardless of their cultural assimilation, the term lever, like the word primitive, doesn't refer to an individual identity, but a whole society. It's referring to an economic and cultural way of life. Primarily, leavers are hunter gatherers, but Ishmael makes the point that some weavers also participate in sustainable farming, pastoralism and animal husbandry.
And unlike what the word primitive implies, Ishmael doesn't believe Weaver cultures are in need of so-called advancement. It's a way of life that actually works well. Similarly to how the takers are a macro culture that is made up of many different groups and people. We can think of weavers as their own kind of macro culture. But unlike the takers today, Weaver cultures are often isolated from one another and are much more diverse in their rituals, customs and language.
Take your macro culture trends towards monolithic ways of being. Weaver Macro culture trends towards diversity. And in a sense, we can see the history of civilization as the conflict between these groups, according to the vision laid out in Ishmael. The takers are the newcomers. Before the agricultural revolution and the birth of Take Your Culture. All of humanity lived as different versions of being a weaver.
The lever way of life existed for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years, and continues to exist today. But even though takers are the historical newbies, they have become the overwhelmingly dominant culture and historically confident in their superiority over the weavers. But in the last half century, as take your civilization's overwhelming might, is leading to the clear destruction of the world.
Some in take your society began questioning whether their way of life really was superior after all. Daniel Quinn was one of them. Born in 1935, in a boarding house in Omaha, Nebraska. As a young child, Daniel Quinn would have heard the horrors of World War Two over the radio. Grew up as a young man during the Cold War with constant threat of nuclear annihilation.
And then Daniel Quinn settled into full adulthood as the growing environmental movement made clear that even without genocide and nuclear war, we were destroying the world. And Daniel Quinn became gravely concerned with the self-destructive trajectory. Take our civilization seem to be heading in, and so did a growing number of people, a bit younger than him, those in the counterculture of the 1960s and seventies.
So what do you do when you find yourself living in a culture you start to see as deeply flawed? Well, many within the counterculture look to cultures outside their own, like esoteric and occult traditions, their origins and spiritualities of Eastern cultures. And perhaps what would have shocked their Western ancestors the most. Was it new interest in the culture of the people their ancestors would have labeled as primitive believers? Plenty of this interest was surface level.
What we now call appropriation, just using tribal imagery and symbolism as a logos on tote bags or bongs. Sure, many pissed off your colonizer ancestors, but it doesn't really disrupt our way of life. Many indigenous people within take our society pushed back on this appropriation because in a way, by adopting tribal imagery, it's not actually rebelling against colonization. It's an extension of it.
Native American author and attorney of the Pawnee Nation, Walter Ecko Hock, wrote, quote, The theft of culture is part of the one way transfer of property from indigenous to non-indigenous hands, seen in colonies and settler states around the world, and includes not only the taking of land, natural resources and personal property, but even the heritage of indigenous peoples and their identities. Poking them is clean as a safe way. Chicken, unquote.
So for those in the Western taker tradition who felt genuinely their own culture was not satisfying their deep needs and was in fact leading to the world's destruction. The question remained. But what do we do? Some of these countercultural takers weren't just adopting the imagery of weavers or performing new versions of their religious ceremonies, but saw weavers as a source of wisdom and hope for how their own takers society could be to some countercultural takers.
It seemed civilization with its wars, poverty and pollution was actually far inferior to so-called primitive cultures who seemed to treat nature and their communities with much greater respect. This kind of reframing is usually referred to as the noble savage theory.
The noble savage theory is that instead of humanity's beginnings being nasty, brutish and short, until we were plucked out of the primordial muck by the glories of civilization, humanity actually originally lived as noble and good, close to nature, before being corrupted by the evils of civilization.
And while this kind of romanticization gained prominence as an idea, even forming an offshoot movement referred to as primitivism during the 1970s and eighties, this primitivist romanticism was actually not an entirely new phenomenon. It's usually traced back to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, in 1755, argued that humanity actually began in the egalitarian and free, quote, state of nature. Rousseau actually never used the term noble savage, but it's a similar idea.
But actually this romanticized version of the wild man, uncorrupted by civilization, goes back far deeper than that. Pretty much all the way to the beginning of Take Your Civilization and the epic of Gilgamesh, the first known, written epic in history, the great Sumerian king. Gilgamesh befriends a wild man named Enkidu, part man, part animal who lives in the step and eats grass. And though Gilgamesh is the embodiment of the power and glory of civilization, you can't help but see.
There's something admirable, even noble, about his new wild friend. So anyway, that's just to say, the noble, savage concept, while seemingly challenging to take, your mythology has existed within take your culture for a very long time. Maybe because it's not as challenging as we think. Yes. Noble, savage theory. And this kind of primitivism admires levers.
But in the sort of condescending way, sure, it's good that they don't destroy the world, but that's because they're too primitive or childlike, and rightly so. There's been push back to this kind of romanticization. Primitivism has been dismissed, especially after the nineties, as a form of Western exoticism and fetishizing of other cultures. The critique of primitivism also reminds us that so many so-called primitive societies practice behavior and norms we'd find appalling.
After all, every group of people is capable of causing harm. There are tribal societies that held their version of slaves. Yet if we stop at this critique, then we're back at the place where we're lumping all of humanity into the same category as being inherently screwed up. And the conversation comes to a grinding halt. But after writing and rewriting his ideas for 15 years, Daniel Quinn was finally ready to publish Ishmael. Sometimes I hear Ishmael getting lumped into the Primitivist movement.
The noble, savage side of the debate. There's a quote I've seen from Ishmael taken out of context that goes, quote, People living close to nature tend to be noble. It's seeing all those sunsets that does it. You can't watch a sunset and then go off and set fire to your neighbor's teepee, unquote. The irony is, is that if you actually read the book, the very next line in Ishmael is him telling the narrator, quote, You understand? And I'm not saying anything like this. So what is Ishmael saying?
Well, for one, Ishmael doesn't claim to speak for believers. The point of having a character of Ishmael be a gorilla is a thought experiment for Daniel Quinn to try and view humanity from the outside, which, of course, he can't really. Daniel Quinn isn't the gorilla. He's grown up inside this culture. He can't fully erases biases and blind spots. But Ishmael is his attempt to see the bigger picture beyond the mindset of these two groups.
So if Daniel Quinn is Exoticized and Weaver's, he's also exoticized. Takers as a way to question our own most basic assumptions and see the society we're most familiar with as what it truly is its own kind of weird culture. But the real significance of where Ishmael differs from other texts is what he sees as the real distinction between takers and levers, as a taker.
You have much more in common with a bartender in Tokyo and an accountant in Mexico City and a software engineer in New Delhi than you do with lever cultures and Ishmael asks, What do takers fundamentally share? That's different from what leavers fundamentally share. Part of the answer is technology. You could all hop on a Zoom call right now if you wanted to. You all use a form of currency and learn to read or write rather than share knowledge orally.
But Ishmael suggests the deeper fun of mental difference between takers and leavers is not technology, but their mindset. And they have a different mindset because they share a different mythology. They enact a different story.
As Ishmael puts it, quote, There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people giving a story to an act that puts them in accord with the world they will live in accord with the world given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer like a phone, and one day, inevitably their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet as the world is now, unquote.
And the reason why levers have not wrecked the same havoc on the world is not because they're more noble or more ignorant, but because, as Ishmael puts it, they are, quote, enacting a story that works well for people, unquote. Thanks for listening. Until next time. What could this story be and what does it mean to work? Well for people? How would we know and what it even be possible for us to enact it today? That's what we'll explore next, then talk with you in.
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