I have read a number of books over winter break and would like to take some time to review them and hopefully give my readers some more reading!
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Humans are actively destroying the natural world because we are captives of a cultural system that compels us to do so.
- Takers as people often referred to as “civilized.” Particularly, the culture born in an Agricultural Revolution that began about 10,000 years ago in the Near East; the culture of Ishmael’s pupil.
- Leavers as people of all other cultures; sometimes referred to as “primitive.”
- A story as an interrelation between the gods, man, and the Earth, with a beginning, middle, and end.
- To enact is to strive to make a story come true.
- A culture as a people who are enacting a story.
Our creation stories, be they Creationism or the Big Bang theory, all make the claim that man is the end product of creation; man is the creature for whom everything came to be. However, we are not the culmination of evolution! The universe went on as before. Our ultimate evolution did not change much of anything. The premise of this story, however, is that the world was made for man. And we do whatever we please to this world because of this assumption: man was made to rule the savage world. To do this, he had to conquer the world. Under human rule, the world should have become a paradise, but we wound up slowly destroying it.
We say that it is our nature to do so, but I believe differently. There are still people who live in peace with the natural world and they are no different than us. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with humans. Instead, given a story to enact that puts them in struggle against the world and they will do so. We were fed a story in which the Earth was a foe to be conquered (we are conquering the oceans, we are conquering mountains, etc) and now, we have very nearly conquered it, but at what cost?
How does one achieve flight? One must understand, or at least abide by, the laws of aerodynamics; it could be through trial and error, but you must abide by the law. The people of our culture are learning to live by trial and error and we are not knowledgeable about the laws of life. Imagine an early flier: one with a crankshaft atop his craft. He takes off from a cliff and for a moment, he stays in the air. He sees the ground approaching and says, “I just need to pedal a bit harder and will make it.” He sees dozens of crafts just like his scattered, broken on the ground. ”What fools. They simply did not pedal hard enough.” Unfortunately he crashes because his craft did not abide by the laws of aerodynamics. Ten thousand years ago, we too began on a path to flight. We have tried and failed many times with civilization before (ie the Mayans, Aztecs, Romans, etc), but fell each time. We believe ourselves to be flying, but we are only falling because we are not living in accordance to one of the great laws of life…
Takers destroy their competitors to make room for their own. In nature, the rule is take what you need, and leave the rest alone. Takers will deny their competitors access to food; to life. In nature, you may deny competitors what you eat, but not food in general. Takers think everything on this planet belongs to them. In nature, you are a part of this planet, not its owner. All of this points to a law: “You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.” All species inevitably follow this law, or as a consequence go extinct. The Takers believe themselves to be exempt from this Law. Any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition will destroy the community to expand itself. Since we do not believe in this law, we believe that we can grow without bound. Some new scientific breakthrough will save us in the future; we will enter the Star Trek age. Unfortunately, like those early pilots learned, we are not exempt.
Now, let me say, civilization as we know it, in and of itself is not against the laws of competition outlined above, but it is subject to the laws. In fact, one need not return to hunter gather society to make right the wrongs we have perpetrated on the environment. We just need to throw away the veil our culture: one of mastery, oppression, and exploitation to see how to fix the system we have. We must relinquish the idea that we know best about everything and that we have the knowledge, power, and right to bend everything to our wills.
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"With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?"
Above I have outlined the main premises of the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Ishmael is a gorilla. And Ishmael is a teacher who communicates with humans telepathically. I know it sounds insane, but instead of a goofy SciFi novel, you take a philosophical journey as a pupil who looks at humanity from a different perspective. I loved every minute of this book and it is definitely an interesting, thought-provoking read.
Grade: A
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