Daniel Quinn (1935 to 2018) was an American writer whose novel Ishmael (1992), in which a gorilla teaches a human pupil, says that our culture is acting out a story that the world was made for humans to rule. Quinn called the peoples who live by that story ‘Takers’ and those who live as members of the community of life ‘Leavers’, and his terms Taker, Leaver, totalitarian agriculture, the Great ForgettingGreat Forgetting. Daniel Quinn’s term for the mass amnesia by which Taker culture erased the knowledge that humanity ever lived any other way, dismissing almost all of our story as ‘pre-history’. Read the full answer and the Great RememberingGreat Remembering. The counter-movement to the Great Forgetting: the recovery of the buried animist knowledge, already underway. Therapeutic Shamanism understands itself as part of it. Read the full answer are part of Therapeutic Shamanism’s core vocabulary.
Who was Daniel Quinn? #
A writer who came to fiction after a career in publishing. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1935, worked in publishing, and left it in 1975 to write freelance. Ishmael won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991, a prize for a novel offering creative and positive solutions to global problems, and was published the following year. It became his most widely read book and was followed by two companion novels, The Story of B (1996) and My Ishmael (1997), by Beyond Civilization, which turns the ideas to how people might live now, and by an autobiography, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest. He died in Houston, Texas, in 2018.1
What is Ishmael about? #
A conversation between a teacher and a pupil about the story our culture lives by. It opens with a newspaper advertisement: “TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world.” The teacher is Ishmael, a gorilla who has spent his life in captivity and who teaches not by lecturing but by asking questions. Through their talks the narrator comes to see that his culture is enacting a story, voiced constantly in the background by what Ishmael calls Mother Culture, so that it feels like plain fact. Its premise is “The world was made for man”, and its corollary is that man was made to rule it.2
Against this Ishmael sets a law that the rest of the community of life lives by, which he calls the law of limited competition. A species may compete for food to the full extent of its abilities, but may not hunt down its competitors, destroy their food or deny them access to it. A species that exempts itself from that law will go on expanding until it destroys the community that supports it, and itself with it. In the book this is not some flaw in human nature but the result of a story, and the answer is not to go back but to reach forward to a new story. The Leaver premise, as Ishmael puts it, is that “man belongs to the world”.3
Therapeutic Shamanism tells the turning point through a picture of its own. Lions do not come home after a day’s hunting and plan to spend the next day killing all the hyenas, so that the zebras will be theirs for ever. The first farmers did exactly that, and decided to wipe out the species that competed with them. Humans had the language and the cognitive ability to organise such a thing for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, and chose not to.4 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
What are Takers and Leavers? #
Quinn’s names for two ways of living with the Earth. Leaver culturesLeaver culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the animist tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers above all, who took only as much as they needed and left the rest, living in reciprocal right-relationship for the vast majority of human history. Read the full answer took what they needed at any given time, and left the rest; many had the idea of leaving a share for the other creatures. Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer, which began with the agriculture of the Neolithic and is ours today, is wholly orientated towards building up a surplus and takes everything it can.5 Quinn’s own Leavers include peoples who garden or grow a little as well as hunter-gatherers; Therapeutic Shamanism uses the word above all for the animist hunter-gatherers who lived this way for most of human history.
Two of the best-known terms, ‘totalitarian agriculture’ and ‘the Great Forgetting’, are Quinn’s, though by his own account they first appeared in The Story of B, not in Ishmael.6 The Great Forgetting is Taker culture’s erasure of the hundreds of thousands of years before it, so that the way we live now seems normal; the Great Remembering is recovering that knowledge.7 The fuller account is in its own answer. See What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
How does Ishmael connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
As one of the main sources of its account of what went wrong. Therapeutic Shamanism keeps Quinn’s terms as its own, and with them his conclusion that the answer is obvious, to look to societies that were healthy and learn from them, the people who knew how to live in right relationship with each other and with the natural world, in short, hunter-gatherer people.8 It also shares his point that outer changes, however good, such as laws to protect minorities and the environment, only last if they are planted in a soil of deep inner change. Hunter-gatherers did not damage their environment because laws forbade it, but because people in those societies simply would not.9
Where Therapeutic Shamanism goes further is into animism. Quinn’s argument is philosophical and anthropological. Ishmael never journeys, meets no GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this, and treats the law of limited competition as biology. Therapeutic Shamanism adds the living relationship with the Animal, Plant and Stone People, and the shamanic practice that grows from it. It also leans differently on one question. On whether hunter-gatherers lived largely peacefully, Quinn himself seems to have leant towards Lawrence Keeley’s view that prehistoric life was often violent, whilst Therapeutic Shamanism leans more towards the psychologist Steve Taylor’s view of a more peaceful past, accepting that some tribes would have been more aggressive than others.10 See Who is Steve Taylor, and what is his idea of the Fall? and What is the Fall?
Is any of Quinn’s thinking disputed? #
Yes, most of all his argument about population. Quinn held that human population grows and shrinks with the food available to it, and argued that sustained food aid makes famine worse in the long run. Critics such as the science writer Ronald Bailey answer that the best-fed countries have the lowest birth rates, and that world population is expected to peak and then fall. Some readers took Quinn’s view on food aid to mean leaving hungry people to starve, a reading he rejected in his answers to readers.
