Ишмаил: Мәдениет, этика және болашақ туралы философиялық роман

1992 philosophical novel by Daniel Quinn

Ishmael is a 1992 philosophical novel by Daniel Quinn. The novel examines the hidden cultural biases driving modern civilization and explores themes of ethics, sustainability, and global catastrophe. Largely framed as a Socratic conversation between two characters, Ishmael aims to expose that several widely accepted assumptions of modern society, such as human supremacy, are actually cultural myths that produce catastrophic consequences for humankind and the environment. The novel was awarded the $500,000 Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991, a year before its formal publication. Ishmael is part of a loose trilogy that includes a 1996 spiritual sequel, The Story of B, and a 1997 "sidequel," My Ishmael. Quinn also details how he arrived at the ideas behind Ishmael in his 1994 autobiography, Providence: The Story of a Fifty Year Vision Quest. Yet another related book is Quinn's 1999 short treatise, Beyond Civilization.

Implicitly set in the early 1990s, Ishmael begins with a newspaper advertisement: "Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person". The nameless narrator and protagonist thus begins his story, telling how he first reacted to this ad with scorn because of the absurdity of "wanting to save the world", a notion he feels that he once naïvely embraced himself as an adolescent during the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Feeling he must discover the ad's publisher, he follows its address, surprisingly finding himself in a room with a live gorilla. On the wall is a sign with a double meaning: "With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?" Suddenly, the gorilla, calling himself Ishmael, begins communicating to the man telepathically. Humans (especially Takers) are the pinnacle of evolution. The world was made for humans, and humans are thus destined to conquer and rule the world. This conquest is meant to bring about a paradise, as humans increase their mastery over controlling nature. However, humans are always failing in this conquest because they are flawed beings, who are unable to ever obtain the knowledge of how to live best. Therefore, however hard humans labor to save the world, they are just going to go on defiling and destroying it. Even so, civilization—the great human project of trying to control the whole world—must continue, or else humans will go extinct. Ishmael points out to his student that when the Takers decided all of this, especially the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with humans, they took as evidence only their own particular culture's history: "They were looking at a half of one percent of the evidence taken from a single culture. Not a reasonable sample on which to base such a sweeping conclusion". On the contrary, Ishmael asserts that there is nothing inherently wrong with humans and that a story that places humans in harmony with the world will cause humans to enact this harmony, while a destructive story such as this will cause humans to destroy the world, as humans are doing now. To illustrate his philosophy, Ishmael proposes a revision to the Christian myth of the Fall of Man. Ishmael's version of why the fruit was forbidden to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is: eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil provides gods with the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die—knowledge which they need to rule the world. The fruit nourishes only the gods, though. If Adam ("humanity") were to eat from this tree, he might think that he gained the gods' wisdom (without this actually happening) and consequently destroy the world and himself through his arrogance. Ishmael makes the point that the myth of the Fall, which the Takers have adopted as their own, was in fact developed by Leavers to explain the origin of the Takers. If it were of Taker origin, the story would be of liberating progress instead of a sinful fall. Ishmael and his student go on to discuss how, for the ancient herders among whom the tale originated, the Biblical story of Cain killing Abel symbolizes the Leaver being killed off and their lands taken so that it could be put under cultivation. These ancient herders realized that the Takers were acting as if they were gods themselves, with all the wisdom of what is good and evil and how to rule the world: agriculture is, in fact, an attempt to more greatly create and control life, a power that only gods can hold, not humans. To begin discerning the Leavers' story, Ishmael proposes to his student a hypothesis: the Takers' Agricultural Revolution was a revolution in trying to strenuously and destructively live above the laws of nature, against the Leavers' more ecologically peaceful story of living by the laws of nature. The Takers, by practicing their uniquely envisioned form of agriculture (dubbed by Quinn "totalitarian agriculture" in a later book) produce enormous food surpluses, which consequently yields an ever increasing population, which itself is leading to ecological imbalances and catastrophes around the world. Ishmael finishes his education with the student by saying that, in order for humanity to survive, Takers must relinquish their arrogant vision in favor of the Leaver humility in knowing that they do not possess any god like knowledge of some "one right way to live". They can adopt an alternative story that has humans as the first, not the final, fully conscious creature. We can support evolution and diversity. Ishmael tells his student to teach a hundred people what he has learned, who can each pass this learning on to another hundred. The student becomes busy at work, later discovering that Ishmael has fallen ill and died of pneumonia. Returning to Ishmael's room one day, he collects Ishmael's belongings. Among them he discovers that the sign he saw before ("With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?") has a backside with another message: "With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?"

Ishmael proposes that the story of Genesis was written by the Semites and later adapted to work within Hebrew, Christian and Muslim belief structures. He proposes that Abel's extinction metaphorically represents the nomadic Semites' losing in their conflict with agriculturalists. As they were driven further into the Arabian peninsula, the Semites became isolated from other herding cultures and, according to Ishmael, illustrated their plight through oral history, which was later adopted into the Hebrew book of Genesis. Ishmael denies that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden to humans simply to test humans' self control. Instead, he proposes that eating of the Tree would not actually give humans divine knowledge but would only make humans believe they had been given it, and that the Tree represents the choice to bear the responsibility of deciding which species live and which die. This is a decision agricultural peoples (i. e. Takers) make when deciding which organisms to cultivate, which to displace, and which to kill in protection of the first. Ishmael explains that the Fall of Adam represents the belief that, once mankind usurps this responsibility—historically decided through natural ecology (i. e. food chains)—that humankind will perish. He cites as fulfillment of this prophecy contemporary environmental crises such as endangered or extinct species, global warming, and modern mental illnesses.

Ishmael is a gorilla, born in the 1930s, when he was captured from the West African wild and sent to an American zoo. After the zoo sold him to a menagerie, Walter Sokolow bought him and discovered that they could communicate telepathically. A few years after Sokolow died in 1985, Ishmael sets up an office and newspaper advertisements in search of pupils, with the help of Sokolow's daughter, in order to begin teaching the subject of "captivity". The narrator and Ishmael meet in 1991. The narrator and protagonist is a middle aged white American man who sought a teacher to show him how to save the world when he was younger, during the turbulent and idealistic 1960s. Now an adult, he finds Ishmael's ad looking for a pupil who wants to save the world. Intrigued because his childhood question may be answered, but skeptical because he has never found answers in the past, he goes and discovers this new teacher: Ishmael. The narrator never reveals his name in the novel, though it is revealed in the sequel My Ishmael to be Alan Lomax.

Walter Sokolow is a wealthy European Jewish merchant who is mentioned only in Ishmael's back story but has died by the time of the main story. His family was killed in the Holocaust, during which Sokolow fled to the United States. While visiting a menagerie during World War Two, he came across a gorilla called Goliath (Ishmael's given alias at the menagerie). After figuring out that he and Ishmael could mentally speak to each other, Sokolow renamed the gorilla "Ishmael" and bought him from the zoo. The two studied a vast array of subjects together and, after his death in 1985, Sokolow's adult daughter Rachel funds Ishmael's upkeep, though she herself dies from AIDS in 1991.

The opening credits for the 1999 film Instinct, starring Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding Jr., indicate that it is inspired by Ishmael. Daniel Quinn did not approve of the script or movie before transferring the rights, which were transferred as part of the Turner Award, though he may have had some minor input on the script, though to a degree he personally considered trivial. The movie and book share no common story elements, and the philosophical connection to the book is reduced to some pictorial format and a few seconds of on screen dialogue. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam has cited the book as an influence on their album, Yield. Quinn responds to the album's significance in relation to the book on his website. In Rise Against's album The Sufferer and The Witness, Ishmael is on the album notes' recommended reading list. The song "The Taker Story" on Chicano Batman's 2017 album Freedom is Free describes the global colonization of the "Taker" societies based on the use of the term in Ishmael. The name of prog metal band Animals as Leaders was inspired by the book.