So I just finished reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I can't believe it took me so long to read it. I think it was first recommended to me by this guy I made out with at some co-op party my freshmen year of college. I spent a lot of time back then getting drunk and making guys talk politics if they wanted to make out with me. That's how I ended up ditching one guy who said he voted for Bush, but that's an entirely different blog about my heterosexual years.



The way this guy talked about it made it sound like it was about population control, but he said it was right in line with the kind of stuff I was talking about at the time. The book is actually a conversation between the narrator and Ishmael, a gorilla who has the ability to communicate telepathically. You kind of have to read the book to get everything it's trying to say, and I don't want to write up a whole summary here, but it got me to thinking about humanity and its place in the world. According to Ishmael, humans (specifically a group of humans he calls the "Takers") have been living out lives based on the premise that the world was created for humans, and we get to decide what happens to it, what lives and what dies. And that premise is what's killing us, because the world wasn't created just for us, and we've spent thousands of years trying to control what we cannot control.

I was probably saying something similar to this when the book was first recommended to me 7 years ago, back when I was a vegetarian and blossoming vegan. My argument for veganism was that humans use our intelligence as evidence of our supremacy over other species, but it was humans who set intelligence as the criteria for supremacy. That's like bio men saying having a penis is the criteria for supremacy, or white people saying white skin is. Who says that intelligence makes a species superior? Why not define it by the ability to fly, or live in harmony with one's surroundings, or survive major environmental catastrophes? By that last criteria, the superior species might be cockroaches or beetles. Shouldn't our intelligence brand us the most inferior species, since we're using it to destroy the earth?

But as Ishmael would point out, it's just the "Takers" who have been leading us toward catastrophe, just the humans who live as though we were gods who can control the earth. Humans lived, and still live, for millions of years with the same intelligence, without bringing us to the brink of apocalypse. The point the human race has reached was by no means inevitable. The myth of capitalism is that capitalism was inevitable, that it's the only rational product of human nature. But capitalism has only been around for, what, a few hundred years? Humans lived for millions of years before it, we could live millions of years after it if we can only find a way to abandon what we've created and start again.



But what Ishmael doesn't give is a roadmap for how to get there. It barely gives you a starting point. And that's where I've been stuck at for the past few years. I went through a period of years when I was just starting out as an adult when the world was exploding with knowledge, where I began to see the world in ways I never thought possible. And out of that came a period of action, of taking over streets, buildings, meeting halls, minds. Of becoming little activist superheros with my friends, becoming voices of dissent and revolution in our town. But what came of it? After all that work, did we actually change anything other than ourselves? I've said to myself a hundred times that during the time that my life was being revolutionized, the rest of the country was devolving into something resembling fascism. Our activist scene in Lansing got more steam out of the anti-war movement than anything, but it's been 4 years and the war is still going on. And what's more, I never thought, even for a minute, that any of the organizing we were doing back then would actually end the war. So why was I even there? Why did I devote my life to it for so many years?

I guess the more meaningful question is, where do we go from here? How can you mobilize a catatonic population, create real change against larger-than-life foes? Just some stuff I've been thinking about the last few days.