It sometimes seems as though the journey of man can be reduced to a single, continuous realization, that man is not as special, as interesting, or as central to the flow of events as he thinks he is. We exist at the center of the universe, until we realize that the Earth revolves around an unremarkable star. We believe that some god, somewhere, decided that this world, and this world alone, would be populated with his life, receive his special attention and oversight. Some of us even believe that a god created us in his image because, of course, we are superior to all other forms of life. Therefore, we must look as god does. Our planet, Our seas, Our lands, Our mountains.... We cannot help but position ourselves at the center of our own story and it is this conceit which Mr. Quinn savages in Ishmael, a story that is nothing short of the reconstruction of human hubris.
Disillusioned by the state of the world and the failure of the 1960s' revolutions to fix its systemic problems, our narrator scoffs when he sees, in the newspaper, an ad from a teacher seeking a pupil with an earnest desire to save the world. The narrator, who is never named, decides, somewhat vengefully, to answer the ad, but instead of the naive idealist he anticipated encountering, he is confronted by, in an otherwise unremarkable office, a gorilla named Ishmael. How does the narrator know the gorilla's name? Because the creature has taught himself how to communicate telepathically, a skill which he puts to lengthy use over the next few days as the astonished narrator agrees to become a student of this singular being.
Any prejudices the narrator may have had for the gorilla are soon dispelled when Ishmael intelligently and incisively disassembles, for his pupil, the mythology man has built up around himself. Through a series of question-and-answer style conversations, Ishmael tries to get the narrator to see that man, unlike any other creature on Earth, considers himself above the laws of nature, that the rules of the world do not apply to him, and that he may do with the world whatever he chooses because he considers the world his property. Stunned by what he is assimilating, the narrator is prodded along by Ishmael until, finally, in a manner he could have never expected, he realizes the revolution that had long eluded him, a coalescence of thought and ethics that will allow him to live a more satisfying life.
Ishmael is a powerful work of philosophical fiction. Through the eponymous Ishmael, the author relentlessly hammers away at human conceits of superiority, arguing that the moment, some ten-thousand years ago, when man put down the hunter's bow and took up the agriculturalist's plow, he became something Earth had never before seen, a being that considered itself subject to only its own laws. In that moment, man left the stability and sustainability of the animal kingdom to become a heartless devourer of planetary resources. Ignoring the consequences, man utilized agriculture's food surpluses to spread himself across the world, reproducing at faster and faster rates, never once slowing down long enough to consider the inevitable outcome of unchecked growth.
While Mr. Quinn presents a convincing case for the damage wrought by human arrogance, and while he argues compellingly for man to relinquish this devastating form of homo-centrism, the author fails to speak to the most obvious omission in his theory. Civilized humanity is infantile. We are at the beginning of our life's journey. We have only taken the first few, tentative steps towards enlightenment, towards becoming a healthy and wise civilization. I hold with those who say that humanity has done unimaginable harm to the planet that gave us life, but this damage may well be the natural and inescapable byproduct of an immature civilization thrashing its way through adolescence. Sadly, humans learn by making mistakes. And so, in order to be reasonable with our resources, to conserve our planet, and to allow the destinies of our fellow, terrestrial species to actualize without our interference, we have to learn a difficult lesson, the extinctionist consequences of being the destroyer. Only when we understand the grief we have caused, the destruction we have wrought, will we find the proper balance between exercising the full potential of our species without doing so at the expense of the life and the world around us. Surely no civilization can be fully realized without serious blunders along the way.
This is valuable and revelatory work, but Mr. Quinn's condemnatory pessimism is, at times, difficult to swallow. powerfully and commendably insightful, but not without its flaws. (3/5 Stars)
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