An imagined conversation with Daniel Quinn, who died in Houston in 2018 at eighty-two, having lived long enough to see the ecological arguments of Ishmael go from fringe to mainstream to, in some corners, obsolete — in the sense that we now know they were correct but have not, as a species, agreed to act on the knowledge. I get to ask the questions. He can answer however he wants.
Me: Mr. Quinn.
Quinn: Daniel, please. I spent too many years being ignored to stand on ceremony when someone is finally asking.
Me: Ishmael. 1992. A novel structured as a Socratic dialogue between a narrator and a telepathic gorilla named Ishmael who takes on human students one at a time to teach them the history of their civilization. It won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship — a half-million-dollar prize for fiction proposing solutions to global problems — and you used the prize to leave a publishing career and devote yourself to the ideas the novel contained. Thirty-four years later, the book is still in print, has sold several million copies, and is regularly cited by ecologists, climate activists, and primitivist philosophers as a formative text. Did you know, when you were writing it, that the book would do this.
Quinn: I knew I had been trying to write the book for ten years and had failed to write it four separate times in four different forms. Ishmael was the fifth attempt. I had finally figured out the structural trick, which was the gorilla. Every previous attempt had been an essay. Essays do not work for this material, because the reader resists the argument. The gorilla does not argue. The gorilla asks questions. The reader constructs the argument themselves, which means the reader cannot dismiss the argument, which means the argument enters where an essay would have bounced off. I knew the structural trick was right. I did not know what would happen with it. I hoped it would find readers. It found more than I dared hope, and fewer than the situation required.
Me: The core argument of the book, as Ishmael lays it out: there are two kinds of human cultures, which you call Takers and Leavers. Takers — the agricultural, civilized, industrial societies that have dominated the last ten thousand years — operate under the assumption that the world was made for humans and exists to be exploited. Leavers — the hunter-gatherer, tribal, and subsistence cultures that preceded and co-existed with the Takers — operated under the assumption that humans were made for the world and exist as one species among many. The Taker project is unsustainable and is currently destroying the biosphere. The Leaver project is sustainable and has been invalidated by the Takers through conquest and absorption, not through any failure of its own.
Quinn: That is the schematic version. The schematic version is what the book is usually summarized as, and the summary is accurate but insufficient. The full argument is that the Taker story is a story — a narrative that was invented by specific cultures at a specific moment and has been taught as if it were reality ever since. Ishmael spends most of the book un-teaching that story. Not by providing a new story, which would simply replace one cage with another, but by showing the reader that they have been living inside a story and did not know it. The un-teaching is the book. The Leaver alternative is a gesture toward what might be un-taught-into, not a program to be adopted.
Me: Critics have accused you of romanticizing pre-agricultural peoples. They have also accused you of endorsing a kind of green primitivism that would, if implemented, require the deaths of most of the current human population, since the earth cannot sustain eight billion hunter-gatherers.
Quinn: The first accusation is a misreading and the second is a bad-faith distortion. I did not say modern humans should become hunter-gatherers. I said modern humans should stop telling themselves the Taker story, and should begin constructing cultural forms that recognize the species is one among many. What those forms would look like, at eight billion, is not a question I had the answer to. I did not claim the answer. The critics who demanded I have one were asking me to be a different kind of writer than I was.
Me: The book is often categorized as environmental literature. You resisted this.
Quinn: I resisted it because environmental literature, as the category had formed by the 1990s, was a literature of lament — we are losing X, we have lost Y — and lament is not what the planet needs. What the planet needs is un-teaching. Ishmael is not a lament. Ishmael is a cultural critique at the deepest level I could reach, which is the level of the founding narrative. Lament leaves the narrative intact and just adds sorrow. Un-teaching is harder and rarer and the category of environmental literature has still not fully produced it.
Me: You wrote two sequels — The Story of B in 1996 and My Ishmael in 1997. Neither was as popular. Why.
Quinn: The first book found readers who were ready to be un-taught. The sequels were for the readers who wanted to know what came next, and there are always fewer of those. Ishmael works as a single provocation. The sequels are for the people who accepted the provocation and wanted more. Most of the book’s readership did not want more. They wanted the provocation and then wanted to feel they had encountered a complete argument. The provocation was sufficient for them. The sequels were for a smaller group.
Me: Final question. It is 2026. The climate trajectory you warned about in 1992 is now the working assumption of every serious scientific body. The Taker story you named is still the dominant story. Your book has sold millions of copies. The story has not budged. Does this depress you.
Quinn: It depresses me and it does not surprise me. Stories do not budge on the schedule of the humans who notice them. Stories budge on the schedule of the material conditions that produced them. The Taker story will budge when the Taker conditions can no longer support it, which is happening now, and which is happening at a pace that is not the pace I would have chosen. The book was not written to save the civilization. The book was written to give the people who were going to outlive the civilization a vocabulary. They have it. They are using it. I will not live to see what they build with it, and I am not sure you will either, but the vocabulary is in the world, and that is what a book can do. Sometimes that is all a book can do. Sometimes that is enough.
A related vagobond.com piece: A Question of Authority: Can There Be Authority in an Anarchist Society.
Readers and fans of Ishmael will really enjoy Rough Living: Tips and Tales of Vagobond — my field report from twenty years of trying to live at a tempo the Taker economy would rather I didn’t. Not a hunter-gatherer manifesto. A practical log of refusal. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
