Ishmael

I read this book last year called Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn.  Before you bring it up, I know that this book has been around for a couple of decades, but you haven’t seen my reading list backlog. 

Let me begin by saying that this is a cult book.  What I mean by that is that, like Atlas Shrugged, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or the Alchemist, this is one of those books that have an awful lot of people proselytizing it as “the book that will change your life”.  I’m almost reflexively suspicious of these, because like Senate Appropriations Bills or institutional religion, there’s a tendency to take what is at the core an excellent and noble idea and slip in a bunch of unrelated nonsense (“…while we’re on the subject of funding the Social Security program, how about opening the Arctic National Preserve for drilling…”.  To quote Eddie Izzard: “Quois?”

Fortunately for us all, this is not going to be a diatribe on either the line item veto or religious ritual, but rather a (hopefully) conversation on the fundamental underpinnings of our relationship to the world. 

Ishmael-fanatics, please forgive this overly brief summarization.  The book is told from the perspective of an earnest young man who wants to change the world and tells the story of his intellectual apprenticeship to a telepathic gorilla.  Work with me people.  It turns out that the telepathic gorilla thing isn’t the weird part – Quinn just needed a voice from outside the void of society.  He could have used an aboriginal pygmy, but who would have believed something that crazy.  So logically, he went with the telepathic gorilla, who by the way, is Ishmael.  The book says that when human beings went from being hunter gatherers living off the land (i.e. belonging to the earth, part of the system) to being  farmers (i.e. dominion over the earth, above the system) we screwed everything up.  In his terms, we went from being “Leavers” to being “Takers”.  He spends a lot of time talking about what takers have done to the world and how they see themselves as above the world.  He says that Takers have become the enemy of the world.  Basically, it’s not enough to have enough.  It’s a low-tech version of one of the Matrix arguments.

Now, if I were that young man, I would want to take the conversation with Ismael in a different direction.  My questions aren’t around all the harm and doomsday surrounding the agrarian culture, but rather the underpinnings. Given that I don’t know any telepathic gorilla sages at all, I’m going to pose a few questions and ideas to the blog ether, see if any of them survive.

We live under an economic system that assumes, literally relies on an assumption of, perpetual economic growth.  Perpetual.  And don’t assume that by saying “economic system” I’m limiting this to spending patterns or multinational banks.  I’m saying that fundamentally, everything we do, from how we eat, to our jobs, to our consumption patterns, to our reproductive choices, to our tax system is based at its core on an assumption of perpetual growth.  Look what’s happening right now, when the specter of two quarters – six lousy months – of declining GDP in the U.S. is sending us into a frenzy.

We also live in a world where, like it or not, there are finite resources.  Of course we can be more efficient, more renewable, more thoughtful, but still, after all of that, we will continue to live in a world of finite resources.

So, let’s do a little math, shall we?  Infinite growth.  Finite resources.  Hmmmm.

If you believe just those two simple little assertions – system based on perpetual growth, finite resources – you come to an inevitable conclusion.  Then come the rats.

I read a summary of a study about rats that really wasn’t all that surprising.  As the scientists deprived the rats of resources (food, water) they began to fight more and more.  Seems like we could have saved a lot of unnecessary stress on the rats if the scientists had just looked around.  The parallels, though, are pretty obvious.

So, what are we going to do about it?  Wrong blog, you guys.  Search the web, there are about a million people out there that would love nothing more than to tell you exactly what YOU should be doing to make this and all the other problems of the world better.  All I can offer is one simple practice that I use.

I use an informal version of a practice called Naikan Therapy.  Take a look at the link, plus the “How to Practice Naikan Theray” link within.  I read about it in Sun Magazine (sorry for all the links, I really do try to keep them to a minimum) four or five years ago and was entranced.  You’ll see that Naikan is based on asking three questions, and specifically NOT asking the fourth.  I will write a post in detail on Naikan sometime later, but for now, let me just say that it is a gratitude practice and in my personal experience, it helps to pull me back from the 10,000 draws of industrialized need and craving.  You cannot fight against the onslaught of marketing messages by saying “I don’t need that, I don’t need that”.  Negatives never beat positives in the medium-to-long term (Just ask Newt Gingrich).  You can only detach yourself from that cycle by replacing that need with something else.  In my opinion, the best thing to replace it with is gratitude.  Gratitude costs nothing, and nourishes you in a way that craving satisfaction never does. 

I don’t live simply.  I’m not carbon neutral.  I waste.  My trash can is very full at the end of the week with unnecessary packaging and half-eaten food.  I work long hours, struggle to fit in all I want to do and still maintain the quality and depth of my relationships (plus hang out with Meera).  BUT, I live more simply now than I did when I was 30, and I’m happier.  I’m also trending in the right direction, I think.

I had an interesting debate once with a friend who said that this cult of simplicity was really just a way to make the losers feel better about losing.  He compared it to putting a veil of nobility on poverty to make the poor feel better about their plight.  The guy was a very “successful” investment banker who first of all didn’t know any poor people, nor did he know anyone as far as I could tell who was attempting to live more simply.  I wonder about the trade-offs we make and our ability to justify them though. 

So what do you think?  Was Mr. Smith right?  Are we a virus, consuming resources and multiplying at an unsustainable rate?  Is the free-rider problem going to mean that it’s impossible to turn the tide?  Or will civilization overcome even this obstacle, as it has overcome some many before?