/books/Ishmael
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. A fairly complete copy existed on blog aggregators, but it may have lost formatting or links.
Daniel Quinn's Ishmael is good. As a piece of writing, it's mediocre; it feels like he wanted to wrap a philosophical treatise in a story, but the wrapping was too thin.
The book is about a student, the author, and a teacher. The teacher represents someone who has learned and understood our culture from the outside, from reading, but not from being raised in it. The teacher is embodied in a gorilla, intelligent and communicative through some means that we are supposed to suspend our disbelief about. It, like Lila, spends some time examining native north American culture, though primarily a subset of the "Leavers", roughly what we consider the hunter-gatherers and primitive peoples. It spends much time tackling the nature of "Takers", roughly the western cultures, though including India and generally those who have turned to agriculture. It examines what would be called our "consumerist" nature, though it avoids such po-mo terminology. (Po-mo is my favourite non-word.) The book uses clever analogies with the creation of flying machines and interesting re-interpretations of our creation folklore (both biblical and scientific) to construct a fresh philosophical framework for thinking about environmental, cultural and social problems. It is not a be-all-end-all, and I was very disappointed that the book spent so little time on the analogs to Bernoulli's principles -- laws about all living things that govern whether or not our systems will "fly". The end of the manifesto is cultish, and the end of the story is cliche, but the arguments and discussion in the book are insightful and sound. Only a few relatively small points irked me, one of which was discussions of overpopulation which I think were inadequate. After you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, read this.
