Daniel Quinn's Ishmael

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is an eye opening book that begins with the life story of a gorilla who has lost the sense of who he is until he is questioned about by a man who visits him at a zoo. Walter Sokolow, a man who visits him and declares he is not this “Goliath” everyone is calling him out to be renamed the gorilla, Ishmael and by doing so gives Ishmael the recognition he needed to believe that he himself is an individual person. As he is a captive trapped in a zoo, he realizes that humans are also living in a world that is trapped. He builds up a student and teacher relationship with the narrator in which he himself is completely unbiased. Ishmael as a teacher gives the knowledge of what he builds up as he was in captivity and explains

to him that there are two sets of people Takers and Leavers.
In taker ideology, humans have been put on this world to conquer it, but Ishmael assures that they have come to Earth, assuming they had one purpose to prevail but rather became the “enemy of the world”.

The author uses Mother Culture as a prophet of sorts that they look up too, because without her they would be lost and confused. Humans have followed a set of three laws which the narrator explains are; do not murder your rivals in order to gain food, do not terminate your rivals food supply in order to develop your own food supply and do not refuse entry for people to acquire food. If without the laws she had set up would not be followed, the world that humans have lived on for years would decline as a whole. The story of Adam and Eve is one of the biblical references the author uses to justify how the Gods set up a way of life for humans to live. They are not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil because it is banned according to the bible. Any biblical story has had no reason as to why it is banned but Ishmael gives a reason as to why this is so. The forbiddenness came from keeping any knowledge known to the Gods from ever going into the hands of humans, to keep a balance of humans from the

fallacy of a false sense of authority towards anyone. Through this story the two sides of both Takers and Leavers are revealed showing that Takers have only way of teaching and it is the only way there is. Whereas Leavers have a way of thinking, but other ways of thinking are respected as long as it doesn't affect others way of life. The bible story of Cain and Abel is also brought up in comparing the agriculture that the Takers are taking from the Leavers and justify it by using religion, Christianity. As the Takers take agriculture, they outshine the Leavers and make them see as less relevant. The way Taker took agriculture in their perspective was to expand it but did not think about the outcomes they would bring forward by doing so and this confuses Leavers in how they could continue to do such things.
When it comes down to the topic of culture both sides differ in having definitions of what their culture defines.

On the hand of the Leavers, they are traditional people who follow what generations and generations have done before them and their knowledge gets passed down. However Takers push away old ways and make way for new ways which is described as cultural amnesia. Takers are a culture who repress memories, fail to remember or renounce things that came from their

culture.
In my final analysis of the book I felt like Daniel Quinn did a remarkable job in forming together this figure, Ishmael, who enlightens the narrator and expands his small mindedness. He informs the reader of how we are damaging our world without the least bit of awareness that we are. For this purpose Ishmael is an example of how self aware we must be and on top of things from an unbiased standpoint. The idea of biodiversity to people is a technique that can be used to encourage people to change their lives to share a higher quality of living to others. The book gave no signs of reproaches towards humanity about global warming, excess population or statistics thrown, but given a reality check of how it came to be where we are today regarding our Earth. It specifies how the society we have constructed over millions of years has restrained us from re enacting our own story and have continued to, as the phrase says “we have always done it this way”. In addition, the world we live in cannot be rescued by recycling, conserving water, or saving electricity that people are carrying out in their daily lives. What we need is a new definition of our place in the world and that is what Ishmael provided me with.