Human Nature Odyssey: Episode 4. Takers and Leavers

It was a peaceful Autumn morning in 1996. The birds were chirping, the air was crisp, the leaves were just starting to change. It was on this fine morning that Oprah Winfrey opened her front door. Yes, Oprah Winfrey. And when she opened her front door she noticed something different. Something unexpected. Lying right there on her front doorstep was a book. The book was Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. 

Oprah had heard of Ishmael which had just been published a few years before. ‘Isn’t this that book about a gorilla?’ she thought to herself. When she first heard about it she hadn’t been interested in reading a book about a gorilla but today, she later recalled, it felt like a sign. 

So Oprah picked up the anonymously gifted book from her front steps and read Ishmael for herself. When she later introduced Daniel Quinn, the author of Ishmael, as a guest on her show - and you can read the transcript of the episode online - she introduced him by saying, “When I mentioned I was reading 'Ishmael,' the story of a gorilla who was a teacher, a lot of my friends thought I was a little crazy, but the message in the book is very powerful. And there are thousands of other people who have read it, and they say that it's changing the way they see the world and also live their lives. It certainly opened my eyes.”

Oprah had many questions for her guest but the first one she asked was, “How do you explain to people what is this about?”

What is Ishmael about? 

It’s a fair question. I don’t always know how to answer it myself. It’s about a lot of things. Human history, mythology, civilization…

And Daniel Quinn, sitting across from Oprah, who at this point was in his sixties, with wisps of gray hair, and a soft voice, was just for the first time in his whole life gaining some recognition for his ideas. I mean, here he was on Oprah. 

And when Oprah asked him how to explain what Ishmael is about, he told her that rather than explain what it’s about, it’s more helpful to know what it does. He told her that like medicine, the first thing you want to know is what’s the effect. 

Welcome to Episode 4 of Civilization and You: a podcast exploring new ways to rethink what we take for granted about history and our society. 

I’m Alex Leff. 

So what does Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael do? What’s the effect?

Quinn explained that he wrote it “to give people a new vision of our place on this planet.”

I like to think that the ideas in Ishmael are like a lens, like a pair of glasses you can wear and see the world more clearly. Some new things may come into focus. You might find some clarity in unexpected and interesting places.

And remember, you can always take a pair of glasses off. This is just one way to see the world. 

This metaphorical prescription lens is going to help us examine the question that is the focus of Ishmael the book, as well as this entire podcast: what is civilization? And not just what it is, but what exactly is going wrong here… and can it go right? 

And not just modern civilization - as it is today - but how it’s evolved over time. 

Despite “civilization” referring to something that encapsulates almost our entire social, cultural, economic, and political lives, it’s one of those words that has many meanings without a shared understanding. If that’s the entity we’re trying to create a self-help guide for, like we talked about at the beginning of episode 1, then it’s worth understanding what the heck it is.

And while on the Civilization & You podcast we’ll explore many ideas, thinkers, and their works - the novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is where our adventure has started. 

Daniel Quinn is not speaking to us, the readers, directly but through the imaginary character Ishmael - a telepathetic gorilla. If you’re gonna get an honest look at humanity, it helps to have an outside observer, in this case a well-read, critically thinking gorilla, to offer some insight. 

And so far, on this podcast, we’ve begun to outline a bit of Ishmael’s vision. 

In episode 2 we talked about how we are destroying the world not because we’re too greedy or selfish but because we’re captives in a society where our individual survival depends on our collective suicide. And Ishmael argues that what’s holding us captive… is a story. 

In episode 3 we learned that Ishmael has a name for the people who are captives of this story. He calls them Takers. The Takers argue amongst themselves about which language to speak, the name of their gods, the color of their flag, the structure of their marketplace, but there’s something fundamental they all share: Taker Mythology - a story they - we - are all captives enacting. 

And what we talked about last time is that the story we’re playing out is that the world belongs to humans, humans must conquer it, but they’ll probably screw it up because humans are innately flawed. That’s Taker Mythology. 

The Takers, despite their incredible technological powers, knowledge, and material wealth, can’t seem to stop destroying the world. 

Because Taker Civilization has colonized and expanded across much of the world, we might forget that there could be anyone living any differently. But there is. And Ishmael calls this second group: Leavers. Just very simply, we can think of Takers’ M.O. being “Take all you can” - they see the world as something for the endless taking (which is not a great strategy in a finite world) and Leavers M.O. could be “use what you need and leave what’s not for you.” Something like that.

Takers and Leavers are not referring to individual personality traits, but entire cultures. What cultures? Who is considered a Taker and who is considered a Leaver? 

In this episode we’re trying to really carefully define this dichotomy of Takers and Leavers that’s so crucial to the Ishmael lens.

Now whether you’re already very familiar with the ideas in Ishmael, read it long ago, or have never read it, I think it’s worth to zoom out from the book a bit, just for this episode. In order to understand this Taker / Leaver dichotomy and why it’s so significant, we’re gonna talk about the history and context Daniel Quinn wrote his book in.

I feel there’s a missing piece to Ishmael, in that Daniel Quinn kind of explained these ideas in a vacuum. He didn’t explicitly connect the dots between his ideas and other schools of thought. Whereas more academic texts are more explicitly commenting on an existing conversation, including footnotes, responding and critiquing other authors, Quinn wrote Ishmael without that. The advantage of that is, a 14 year old kid like myself could come to the book entirely fresh and take in these ideas. 

What I’d like to do in this podcast, and what my high school English teacher did for me (thank you, Mr. Wilman), is not only to present you the ideas in the book but fill in what Daniel Quinn left out, and that’s to provide some context into the hundreds of years old conversation Ishmael is engaging with / adding to. 

So once we’ve given some context we’ll spend some time really parsing out who Ishmael means by Takers and then finally we’ll explore who Ishmael is referring to when he talks about Leavers.

My Dad likes to say that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. My aunt usually then likes to make the joke that actually there are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count and those who can’t. 

But anyway, as we now know Ishmael is the kind of gorilla who likes to divide the world into two groups of people: The Takers and the Leavers.

Now the narrator, who if you remember is the reluctant pupil who first found Ishmael’s ad in the paper and has come to his private office to find out what this is all about, essentially says ‘hold up a minute, the Takers and the Leavers? You’re gonna reduce the entire world into just two groups? Ehhh - seems a bit too over simplified to me.’ Clearly, the narrator is one of the two kinds of people who doesn’t like dividing the world into two kinds of people.

But as Ishmael points out:  dividing the world like this is already something our culture already does - or at least we did. But the words we used to use are ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’. 

How we understand civilization has been completely tied up in the words “civilized” and “primitive” so first we need to untangle them. 

We’re going to look at the history of these words, their use, their limitations, and what they’ve been replaced by.

Now, hearing these words might make your skin crawl. Oooh… labeling people “primitive?” that does not sound good to my ears. 

Yeah well the people originally using them did not intend the word “primitive” as a compliment. It was used as justification for conquest, genocide, and forced assimilation of “primitive” people by people who thought of themselves as “civilized.” Sometimes, confusingly, colonizers romanticized these people even during their campaigns of genocide and forced assimilation. But we’ll get into that.

Now, in the grand scheme of civilization, the words “civilized” and “primitive” are relatively recent ways of labeling these two groups but the phenomenon of this dichotomy is as old and widespread as civilization itself. 

The Romans and Greeks used the word ‘barbarian’. The Roman statesman Cassiodorus defined barbarians as those who “did not live in cities, making their abodes in the fields like wild animals”

The Zhou Dynasty of Ancient China used the words Huà and Yí - Huà meaning Chinese and civilized - Yi meaning "wild” or "uncivilised tribes"

Mleccha was the sanskrit word for barbarian in Ancient India to describe foreigners or tribes outside their civilization.

The exact meaning of these words vary a bit but there is a general concept of ‘other outside of civilization’ they are trying to label, and more often than not, plunder and convert. 

Over the last 500 years, European colonization, the most recent version of genocide and forced assimilation, has most directly shaped the way we think about the dichotomy of these two groups today and Daniel Quinn wrote Ishmael commenting on this tradition. 

So when Christopher Columbus, Hernan Cortez, Walter Raleigh, and countless other conquistadors, missionaries, fur trappers, pioneers, and slavers - all people who saw themselves as civilized - left the continent called Europe to gain riches and power in the continents that eventually became known as North and South America, not to mention many other parts of the world, they were convinced that they were civilized. These other people, the people who were living in the lands they were attempting to conquer were uncivilized. even subhuman.. 

For example, In 1651, a few decades after sailing on the Mayflower, William Bradford, English separatists and Governor of the Plymouth colony wrote of Massachusetts as being “being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men which range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same.”

To be civilized - what does that even mean? 

It kind of has two definitions. On one hand it refers to the “civilization” kind of society, the kind with written laws, and hierarchy, yada yada, and on the other hand the word “civilized” also means to be humane and polite, you know, high brow. 

Which gets confusing when you consider the spanish conquistadors, american slaveholders, and nazi concentration camp guards - sure they were civilized in the sense that they lived within civilization, but were they civilized in the sense that they were humane and high brow- no, no, the answer is obviously no. They were not.  

But where did they get this concept of being “civilized” from? 

Many western European colonizers felt they were carrying the proud tradition of this whole being civilized thing from the great Roman Empire, which they viewed as the OG, the creme de la creme of civilization. 

As author Anthony Pagden put it, “It was, above all, Rome which provided the ideologues of the colonial systems of Spain, Britain and France with the language and political models they required, for the Imperium romanum has always had a unique place in the political imagination of western Europe.” 

Spanish philosopher Juan Gines de Sepulveda who lived during Spain’s 16th century invasion of the Americas, wrote a treatise justifying Spain’s invasion of the Americas based on the Roman “right to conquer in order to civilize… He went on to write, “With these rights, the Romans, a very civilized people and exalted in virtue, subjected to their rule the barbarian nations.' 

 In fact the words “civilized” and “civilization” come from the Latin root civilis. Not to mention the words “imperialism, empire, colonialism, and colony” also were handed down from ancient Rome.			
			
Some of the western European colonizers and their descendants even took it a step further. They made up a fun new nickname that even the Romans didn’t use to designate they were the civilized, aka superior group, they started calling themselves “white” - a concept that hadn’t existed before the 1600s.

Now the irony here is that only a little over a millenia before, the Romans were very familiar with the ancestors of the “white” western Europeans who considered themselves the epitome of civilization, but the Romans had a very different word to describe them: they called them Barbarians. That’s right, just a millenia or so before western Europeans gleefully colonized the world and looked down other cultures as being primitive, they were living in small land-based cultures quite similar to the people they were now colonizing. A millennia before western Europeans committed genocides against native people and erased their culture, the Romans were doing a similar same thing to them. 

And lest we think that the Romans were the inventors of this imperial legacy they were only a couple of empires in a handful of going back to the the Greeks, the Perians, the Assyrians, Babylonians, all the way back to the Sumerians in modern day Iraq. So the form of civilization that the Romans and eventually the western Europeans adopted after them, originated in the Middle East and was innovated by people who today would not be considered white. 

So when Tucker Carlson, Fox News… crisis actor… in 2006 called the people of Iraq “semi-literate primitive monkeys” – Iraq, the place that literally invented the form of civilization Tucker Carlson and other white supremacists pretend to be the originators of, Tucker wasn’t just being incredibly insulting, he was being - to put it lightly, shall we say… very incorrect? 

White supremacists not included, the rest of us understand that no human has civilization more or less in their DNA than others. Just for an example of a people who we’d usually call “white and European” who would have been classified as “uncivilized” see the Sammi who still live in Scandinavia today. 

So in the mid to late 1800s after Darwin wrote Origins of the Species the concept of evolution started being applied to human societies. The societies who had been labeled as “savage” and “barbarian” were now being called “primitive” because it was thought that these forms of societies preceded the inevitable development of civilization. 

So the word “primitive” might sound a little kinder than “savage” but it’s essentially saying: don't worry guys, you’re not stuck like this, you can become advanced like us… yikes. Okay not actually that kind.

And primitive, along with being used derogatorily, also is a lousy way to describe the phenomenon of people living outside this entity we call “civilization.” 

After all, there are many ways so-called “primitive” people are far more sophisticated, complex, advanced than so-called “civilized” people. It just depends on what you consider sophisticated, complex, and advanced. For example, many native North American societies meeting European settlers for the first time, were not very impressed. 

So if we’re scrapping “civilized” and “primitive” what do we replace them with? Well maybe we don’t replace them. 

Maybe we shouldn’t divide people into two different categories in the first place. Maybe the narrator’s right and we should view humanity as one big whole. 

But the danger of lumping all of humanity into one category is that we start to see the destructive behavior of our society as reflective of all humanity. So people start to talk about the destruction of the world as a problem with our whole species. 		

Here are some examples:

Comedian George Carlin called us a “pesky troublesome species” 

Actor and Playwright Wallace Shawn described us as “the species that went mad and destroyed the planet.”

Then there’s the more dramatic quote from biologist Julian Huxley: “The human race will be the cancer of the planet.”

And if you’re thinking wait isn’t that from the Matrix well yes, Agent Smith, also famously says “Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.

That’s a lot of talk about how destructive our species has been, how destructive human nature is…

But are the horrors of world war, threat of nuclear annihilation, and ecological catastrophe the failings of our entire species? Do they reflect our inevitable, tragic human nature… or are they the failings of just one way of life - just one way of being? And what about the people who actually live a different way?

Is the destruction of the planet reflective of, for example, the societies who used to be referred to as “primitive” still alive today?

What if the words “civilized” and “primitive” were attempts at describing something that’s worth looking at.

So given that, let’s try and tease out how to talk about the differences between these kinds of societies. 

Whatever category we create, those people within that category are going to be immensely different from one another but importantly they’re immensely different from us in some very particular, very important ways. Given that, how do we discuss these groups? 

What words should we use? 

All humans live in societies and participate in a culture. 

The word “civilization” is sometimes used to refer not just to one kind of culture but just human societies in general. But in that case, there’s still this thing that needs defining, the kind of society of expansion and exploitation that’s been passed down from societies like the Sumerians, Egyptians, the Zhou dynasty, the Persian empire, the Romans, etc.. . If we don’t use the word “civilization” to describe it - what is it? How do we describe the specific society and culture that currently dominates the world and isn’t just the one inevitable way of life?

This is where the vision Daniel Quinn eventually outlined in Ishmael finally comes in handy. 

Okay, now that we’ve untangled the words “civilized” and “primitive” but suspect there’s still use in seeing humanity as two broad categories, we’re ready to discuss the significance of how Ishmael uses the terms Takers and Leavers to introduce important nuance. 

In the last episode we really got into Taker Mythology, which we could essentially boil down into being that ‘the world belongs to us and we are meant to rule it’. This is the story all people living in the dominant culture - or Taker culture - are held captive enacting and are resulting in the destruction of the world. We could possibly boil down But now we’re really going to figure out who the Takers are, the current dominant culture. So first, who does Ishmael consider Takers? 

Hmmm, a dominant culture destroying the world? Sounds like America to me! 

But of course, Ishmael’s not just talking about America here. Americans have a tendency to imagine we’re the only country that matters - that it’s exceptional. Even some of us Americans who protest the United States’ injustices and inequalities sometimes think of its injustices and inequalities as exceptional. 

But to find the dominant culture we’ll have to expand our scope. We’re talking about something that certainly includes the United States but is much broader. After all, we live in a time of unprecedented global connectivity.

Like what about other so-called technologically advanced countries - Japan, South Korea, China? 

And if we’re talking about those that contribute to the destruction of the world, we’ve also gotta add the largest emitters of greenhouse gasses to the list, along with China and the US: like India, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia.

But we can’t just go on listing countries like this.

If we’re talking about a global situation we need to zoom out and find a broader category. 

We already have different terms for talking about this: there’s western and non-western, first world, third world, developed countries, developing countries, and so on. 

But these terms are just differentiating components of an interconnected global culture. The word I’d like to suggest we use is “macroculture”. Yes there are many different cultures within it but at this point, they are not just economically tied together, we’re all in ideological conversation with each other. 

So this global macroculture would include the so-called developed countries and developing countries. Which makes sense ‘cause it’s like even though the wealthy people who live at the top of an apartment complex might like to think they are separate from the people living on the street in front of the building, to an anthropologist, the people at the top and the people at the bottom are clearly part of the same society and culture - it’s just not a culture that distributes wealth very equally. 

Even the very different forms of government: Soviet Union’s version of Communism, Democratic Republics, fascist regimes are just different ways to organize the various nations within the macroculture.

And Ishmael calls this macroculture: the Takers. 

And you’ll hear Ishmael refer to Takers sometimes as “Civilization” but maybe imagine this as a capital C Civilization, a specific kind of civilization, that now dominates the world. 

Okay, so Taker Civilization includes western civilization and eastern civilization, it includes the developed world and the developing world, the first world and the third world, the full swath of the political spectrum from right to left… well then who the hell else is there?

This brings us to the second group of people Ishmael talks about: the Leavers. 

Who does Ishmael consider Leavers? And why is this label not just a different way of saying the same thing as “primitive” but creating a more nuanced category altogether? 

So we’ve talked about why the word “primitive” is not worth using seriously, but we’ve already talked about how we’re missing something worth looking at the societal phenomenon the word “primitive” was describing. 

What is the phenomenon it’s describing? Well if the word “civilized” or what Ishmael calls Taker is referring to a large scale, usually sedentary, agriculturally based society of cities, hierarchies, and written laws, then the word “primitive” was vaguely referring to a land-based society, usually participating in some form of hunter-gatherers, with a long history in the lands they live in, organized in a tribal system. 

Today we use different words to describe this kind of society.

Depending on what country you live in, you’ll hear the terms “aboriginal people” or “first nations.” One of the most common is the word “indigenous.” 

Unlike the word “primitive” the term “indigenous” isn’t an insult but for many a source of pride. It’s become a collective identity to build solidarity around and demand rights that were taken away by colonization. 

Ironically, for a word that used to describe the non-colonial societies the word itself comes from the legacy of the Roman Empire. The word “indigenous” comes from the Latin word for “native” and the earliest record we have of the word “indigenous” being written in English was in 1646 in the wake of European colonization and used to describe the the new plants, animals, and people they were encountering on the continents they were invading. 

Only as recently as the 2000s “indigenous” was adopted as an official term used by the United Nations.

One way the UN defines indigenous is: “Descendants… of those who inhabited a country or a geographical region at the time when people of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived.” “They have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live.”

We can see how this somewhat refers to the societal phenomenon the word “primitive” was referring to but it’s not quite the same. It changes the meaning and also how we talk about these societies. 

For example, the word “primitive” is referring to one’s way of life. And inherent in the word “primitive” is the idea that you’re supposed to advance beyond that.

Indigenous doesn’t imply that. It more emphasizes nativity to a land. The Lenape are indigenous to the Northeast United States. The Aymara are indigenous to Bolivia. The Maori are indigenous to New Zealand. 

And it doesn’t lock in your identity to a specific way of life. If a person from an indigenous society moves to a far off city and does not speak their ancestral language - they wouldn’t lose the title of indigenous. - which is critical for people trying to demand their rights and unique culture while navigating assimilation into the dominant culture. 

In this way, it’s almost somewhat of an ethnic group: that is, it’s an identity passed down through blood. 

And as we talked about before, the western Europeans colonizing the world were descendants of societies we would now call indigenous but we don’t generally refer to western Europeans of indigenous.

The term “indigenous” helps describe the post-European colonization world we still live in. But what if we want to talk about a history broader than the last 500 years?

So the word “primitive” isn’t a helpful way of describing the societal phenomenon we’re trying to look at. And the word “indigenous” is referring to something real and important but not quite exactly the same thing we’re trying to look at. 

So we need a new word, and just as the word “indigenous” broadened the conversation from using the word “primitive” - this new word will expand the conversation again. 

The word Daniel Quinn uses in Ishmael, as we know, is Leaver. Going forward, this is the word we’re going to primarily use. But what does it mean? Who is it referring to?

Similarly to how the term “indigenous” refers to one category but holy cow are the cultures within it varied - Leaver to a very diverse macro-culture. Now unlike the Takers, which is an interconnected global civilization, today various Leaver cultures are often isolated from one another and are much more varied and diverse in their rituals, customs, and language than those cultures within Taker Macroculture. Taker macro-culture trends monolithic ways of being, Leaver macro-culture trends towards diversity.

How else are Leavers different from the Takers?

Let’s look for a moment at a very broad timescale. According to the vision laid out in the Ishmael, the Takers are the newcomers. Before the Agricultural Revolution and the birth of Taker culture all of humanity lived as different versions of being a Leaver. Some hunted and gathered, some were shepherds, others permaculturists - all different ways of being a Leaver. While the Leaver way of live existed for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years, and continues to exist today in isolated pockets - Taker Civilization, in contrast, has existed for only about 10,000 years, spread across the entire planet, and has led to the 6th mass extinction of life on earth. 

But even though Takers are the historical newbees they have become the overwhelmingly dominant culture on the planet and historically confident in their superiority over the Leavers. But more and more lately an important shift has been within Taker Civilization that’s starting to question this superiority - and it’s in that tradition Ishmael was written.

Now maybe in the 1500s and 1600s while Takers were colonizing most of the world they were getting pretty cocky about how since their way of life dominated it must inherently be superior. But in the centuries that followed, and especially the last 100 years, it’s become increasingly clear to a growing number of people within Taker society that we are not living in the best possible society - in fact, it seems there’s something quite wrong with it. 

Daniel Quinn was one of those people. Born in 1935 in a boarding house in Omaha, Nebraska, as a young child he would have heard the horrors of World War II over the radio. He grew up as a young man during the Cold War and constant threat of nuclear annihilation. And then Daniel Quinn settled into full adulthood as the growing environmental movement made clear even without genocide or nuclear war, we were destroying the world.

So it’s not necessarily surprising Daniel Quinn was among those in 20th century Taker society who became gravely concerned with the self-destructive trajectory Taker Civilization seemed to be heading in. And it was his concerns and ideas about all this that led him to eventually sit down and share them with Oprah.

But 15 years before Ishmael was eventually published, Quinn started working on it in the 1970s during a time when, there was a major reframing happening in the culture around him, among those who also shared a concern with their society’s destructive momentum, in the lands of so-called western Civilization .

Now as a quick aside - how does what we call “western civilization” fit into Taker Civilization? Because as we’ve talked about, western civilization is not the only form of Taker Civilization. The historic and modern empires and countries outside of western civilization have enacted and enact the Taker Mythology story that the world belongs to them. It’s just that in the last 500 years, maybe what we can call the “western sect of Taker Civilization” has been the most, shall we say, enthusiastically pushing the most extreme aspects of Taker Mythology and forcing this upon the world. 

So in the lands occupied and influenced by western civilization, most famously during the 1960s and 70s, a counterculture among the most privileged Takers’ young people began questioning the value of the culture their ancestors had so viriently, often violently, worked to spread. To many of these young people, the western tradition they had inherited felt lacking. This disappointed many of their parents but it would have absolutely shocked their ancestors. For several centuries western Europeans believed their culture was superior and now many of their descendants not only were questioning the value of that western culture, but looking for value and meaning in cultures outside of it. 

Daniel Quinn notes this significance in Ishmael and he’s referenced the profound influence it had on himself as well. 

So what do you do when you find yourself living in a culture you start to see as deeply flawed? Well many within the counterculture looked to cultures outside their own: like esoteric and occult traditions, the religions and spiritualities of so-called eastern civilizations, and perhaps what would have shocked their ancestors the most, was the new interest in the culture of the people their ancestors would have labeled as primitive. Leavers. The Leaver macroculture and ways of life these young peoples’ Taker ancestors had so actively tried to erase were now being looked at as a study of fascination among their descendants. 

Plenty of this interest was surface level, what we now call “appropriation” - just using tribal imagery and symbolism as logos on tote bags or bongs might have pissed off the colonizer ancestors but it doesn’t really disrupt their way of life. Some were more interested in indigenous ceremonies and vision quests. 

Many indigenous people within Taker society pushed back on this adoption or appropriation because it’s not actually engaging in it, and in a way it’s not actually rebelling against their ancestors’ colonization, it’s an extension of it.

Native American author and attorney of the Pawnee Nation, Walter Echo-Hawk wrote, “The theft of culture is part of the one-way transfer of property from indigenous to non-indigenous hands seen in colonies and settler states around the world—it includes not only the taking of land, natural resources, [and] personal property, but even the heritage of indigenous peoples and their identities, plucking them as clean as a Safeway chicken.”

So for those in the western Taker tradition who felt strongly this culture was not satisfying their deep needs and was in fact leading to the world’s destruction, the question remained: but what do we do? 

Some of these Takers weren’t just trying to adopt the imagery of Leavers, or perform new versions of their religious ceremonies, but see Leavers as a source of wisdom and hope for how their society could be.

The descendants of the people who called themselves to be “civilized” looked at the old civilized / primitive dichotomy and thought that their ancestors had gotten it completely reversed. I mean look at the wars, the poverty and squalor, the ever-piling pollution and collapsing ecosystems - if this is what civilization was, clearly civilization is terrible. And the people their ancestors called primitive, who managed to not destroy the world, and seemingly treat those in their communities with much greater mutual support and respect - these “primitive” people were obviously far more noble than any so-called civilized person. 

This kind of reframing of Leavers is usually referred to as the Noble Savage theory - and it’s seemingly the inverse of the Taker Mythology version of the story we went over last time. 

Instead of humanity’s beginnings being “nasty, brutish, and short” (as Thomas Hobbes put it in in 1651) and being pulled out of the primordial muck by the glories of civilization, in the Noble Savage version of the story humanity lived as noble and good, close to nature, before being corrupted by the evils of civilization. 

And a new myth began to set in. Where primitive people used to be thought of as inferior, these philosophies thought of them as noble. Think of the 1970s anti-littering commercial where the cliche Native American (who was not actually Native American) stood by a crowded highway covered in trash and shed one single sad tear. 

And while this kind of romanticization gained prominence as an idea, even forming an offshoot movement referred to as Primitivism, during the decades Daniel Quinn was formulating his ideas and writing Ishmael, this actually was not an entirely new conception among the people Daniel Quinn would call Takers. 

It’s often traced back to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, often seen as the Enlightenment’s counterpart to Thomas Hobbes, who argued 100 years years after Hobbes in 1755, that humanity began in a egalitarian and free “state of nature” - Rousseau actually never used the term “noble savage” but it’s a similar idea. 

But actually this romanticization of the wild man uncorrupted by civilization goes back far longer than that, pretty much all the way to the beginning of Taker Civilization. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first known written epic in history, the great Sumerian king Gilgamesh befriends a wild man named Enkidu, part man, part animal, who lives in the steppe and eats grass. And though Gilgamesh is the embodiment of the power and glory of civilization, he can’t help but see there’s something admirable, even noble, about his new wild friend. 

So anyway that’s just to say the Noble Savage concept, while seemingly challenging Taker Mythology, has existed within Taker culture for a very long time. Why is that? Well maybe because it’s not as challenging as we think. 

Yes, Noble Savage theory and this kind of Primitivism admires Leavers but in a condescending way. 

Sure, it’s good that they don’t destroy the world but that’s because they’re too primitive, or childlike. 

And rightly so there’s been pushback to this kind of romanticization. 

Primitivism has been dismissed, especially after the 90s, as a form of western exoticism and fetishizing of other cultures. This romanticization of primitive people isn’t just condescending, it’s not even reflective of the reality of these people. The critique point out to the appalling behavior and norms of many so-called primitive societies - not to prove their inferiority - but as a way to show that we’re all fucked up each in our own special way. Maybe we are. 

After all, every group of people is capable of causing great harm, even structural systems of harm as a collective to others in other groups or even member within their own group - as in tribal societies that held their version of slaves. Yet if we stop at this critique then we’re back at the place where we’re lumping all of humanity into the same category as being inherently fucked up and the conversation comes to a grinding halt.

Sometimes I hear Ishmael getting lumped into the Primitivism movement - the “Noble Savage” side of the debate. I remember years ago meeting a fellow teenager on a bus who was inspired by Ishmael to go off and live like a hunter gatherer in the wilderness.

Ironically, that’s actually not what Daniel Quinn is advocating and he specifically pushes against this in the book as well as his other writings after that.

There’s a quote I’ve seen from Ishmael taken out of context that goes, “...people living close to nature tend to be noble. It's seeing all those sunsets that does it. You can't watch a sunset and then go off and set fire to your neighbor's tepee.” The irony is that if you actually read the book, the very next line is Ishmael telling the narrator, “you understand that I’m not saying anything like this.”

So what is Ishmael saying? What is the nuance? 

But before we get to that nuance, there’s one last thing to untangle. It’s worth acknowledging that Daniel Quinn comes from a tradition of white or western authors speaking either for or about Leaver cultures. There are plenty of books in this tradition that feature authors visiting remote tribes and telling us about what they learned. The perspective of those they are visiting, told by the people whose perspective it actually is, is largely missing. 

One of the issues with this is that if discussing Leaver people becomes just a projection of our fantasies then we’re missing the full picture. And while the writing of Ishmael was influenced by books written by Leavers or Takers in conversation with Leavers, it seems Daniel Quinn didn’t discuss these things with an actual person from what he’d call Leaver culture himself. 

But partly what I think is unique about Ishmael is it’s not claiming to speak for Leavers. If anything it’s claiming to speak for gorillas, at least one gorilla. Ishmael isn’t a Taker or a Leaver. Quinn is using this as a way to try and explore beyond the mindset of these two groups and see a bigger picture. 

The point of having a character of Ishmael be a gorilla is a thought experiment for Daniel Quinn to try and view humanity from the outside. Which of course, he can’t really, Daniel Qunn isn’t a gorilla, and he’s grown up inside this culture, he can’t fully erase his biases and blindspots, but I agree that it’s a thought experiment with interesting results.

So if Daniel Quinn is exoticizing Leavers, he’s also exoticizing Takers as a way to question our most basic assumptions and see the society we’re most familiar with as what it truly is: it’s own kind of weird culture. 

So how does Daniel Quinn propose a way out of the debate deadlock of “are Leavers more noble or just as messed up as us?” is by offering an important nuance I think we still generally have trouble with today.

The significance and uniqueness of Daniel Quinn’s vision is where he sees the distinction between Takers and Leavers, these two macrocultures we’re trying to see from an outsider’s perspective?  

What is the distinction? 

As a Taker, you have much more in common with a bartender in Tokyo, an accountant in Mexico City, and a software engineer in New Delhi, than you do Leaver hunter-gathers who once lived in Japan, permaculture agriculturists in Mexico, and pastoral nomads in India. 

What do Takers fundamentally share that’s different from what Leavers fundamentally share? 

Sure, part of the answer is technology. You could all hop on a Zoom call right now if you wanted to. You’ve all driven in cars, had access to “modern” medicine, used a form of currency, learned to read or write rather than share knowledge orally, but Daniel Quinn suggests the deep, fundamental difference between Takers and Leavers is not technology, which the old word “primitive” might suggest. It isn’t because there’s anything inherently more noble about Leavers. 

The real difference, Daniel Quinn proposes, is that these groups have a fundamentally different mindset, about themselves and their relation to the world. And they have a different mindset because they share a different mythology. They enact a different story.

As Daniel Quinn puts it: “There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world… given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.” 

And the reason why Leavers have not wreaked the same havoc on the world is not because they’re more noble or more ignorant but because, as Daniel Quinn puts it, they are “enacting a story that works well for people." 

But what could this story be and what does it mean to “work well for people?” How would we know? And would it even be possible for us to enact it today?

That’s what we’ll explore next time.