Human Nature Odyssey: Episode 7. After ‘Ishmael’ by Daniel Quinn

You and I are on a quest of epic proportions. Our world is facing catastrophe on a planetary scale and in need of our help. Together we’ve answered the call to adventure and left the comforts of our peaceful village and set forth into the unknown. 

And that’s when we met Ishmael, a telepathic gorilla, who showed us how our civilization is held captive by a story and helped us cross over the treacherous Wall of Taker Mythology. We came into contact with the Leavers, traversed the Garden of Eden, studied the Law of Life, and traversed all the way to here - where we are today: the climactic culmination of our exploration into the ideas in the novel Ishmael - written by author Daniel Quinn. 

But first, I think it’s time we return to the place it all began: Ashbourne. 

Hold on, careful. Alright, let’s cross the intersection. Pass through the thickets - remember to watch for the thorns. Yeah just ignore the No Trespassing sign. [to self] No trespassing? How could my own home be off-limits? 

Here we are. Ashbourne country club. It’s been abandoned for years. Come on, let’s explore.

Check out those oak trees - they have to be, like, 200 years old! And look, can you still tell this was a golf course? The grass is as high as my waist at this point, it’s a real meadow now. And here, oh watch your step… you see that patch where the tall grass is matted down? That’s a deer bed - I’ve seen them. The deer made that. This is where they sleep at night. 

And some of the most amazing things can only be seen over time.

This was the old country club’s private pool. An artificial hole dug into the ground, lined with concrete, filled with chlorinated water. And then, when Ashbourne was abandoned, slowly but surely, the rain washed out the chemicals, algae formed at its edges, one day I noticed there were lily pads, the next year there were reeds, and eventually frogs. 

It’s funny, we live in a culture where it seems like nothing happens unless we force it to. The streets don’t pave themselves. Homes don’t heat themselves. Money doesn’t grow on trees. 

But look, this was a sand trap. I watched this everyday, the moss that took hold, the plants that grew up on the back of the lichen. This is life happening. All on its own. If we spend enough time here we’ll see hawks and herons and foxes and groundhogs. 

And at the bottom of that hill over there, that’s where I’d bring my friends - the ones who’d understand - and we’d sit around makeshift campfires.

My friend Mark and I learned how to identify different species and ate freely from the abundant wine berry bushes. 

And the most incredible thing is, the whole world is this. Buried under layers of asphalt, it’s there. 

In Ashbourne the soil shakes off the cracked asphalt like a bad dream. New life grows in those cracks. 

As a kid I was confused: why are we resisting this? 

Our culture calls this overgrown and undeveloped. Few people will just come out and say it but most times we really do believe nature is just a resource.

But Ashbourne shows that the whole world can be different, because here it already is. We know that there are cultures that live in balance with the rest of life. Our culture could be one of them.

But as long as we’re stuck in our mindset, It’s only a matter of time before the bulldozers will come to rip up the soil and bury it in asphalt all over again. 

Around the time I graduated high school, construction crews started mowing back the meadow, marked trees to be cut, even tore down one of the buildings that was the most fun to explore. Development like this would start and stop, in fits and spurts, until -luckily - it paused for a long time. Maybe someone in some boardroom somewhere had to wait for someone at some desk somewhere else to sign some form they were waiting on from some department downtown. Who knows? It would all get done eventually, I knew. Unless one day they changed their minds and joined us in celebrating the flowers breaking through the asphalt. 

Welcome to Episode 7 of Human Nature Odyssey: a podcast exploring… how our world is in trouble and what the heck we can possibly do about it

I’m Alex Leff. 

Daniel Quinn once wrote, “Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.”

Daniel Quinn was born in 1935 in Omaha, Nebraska. And as a young man, he stumbled upon many questions that truly puzzled him. Questions about human history, mythology, civilization, and its self-destructive path. His curiosity brought him into the hills of Kentucky to become a trappist monk, to Chicago to work in education publishing, and the deserts of New Mexico with his wife Rennie.

Along the way he had certain thoughts, which took form as interesting ideas, and eventually, he wrote, “it seemed to me I had something worth sharing. It would be a book devoted to explaining how things came to be this way.” And, one day, it would also be a book about how things could be different.

But it’s one thing to have an idea. Finding a way to share it - that would be much harder. 

In 1977 he wrote the first draft, but it wasn’t quite right. So he wrote another, and another. Sometimes entire manuscripts were dumped in the trash. But he kept at it. Eventually he had something that to him at least seemed publishable. But the renowned literary agent he sent it to did not think so. This is the 1980s, the agent told him, not the sixties. He sent Daniel Quinn back this response:

“There were days when love and peace… were very much the bywords of the times, but... Today’s audiences have reverted to conservatism to a good degree… The modern reader is far more likely to purchase a computer book or something that offers practical advice than a work which deals with more arcane subject matter… We simply can’t see marketing this script profitably in the contemporary publishing marketplace. Furthermore, it’s also my sad duty to have to inform you that no amount of revision could possibly turn this into a salable manuscript… The flaws in this script are intimately bound up in your central underlying conceptualizations and these make this material totally and completely unrevisable.” 

Well, shit, what do you do with a rejection like that? Maybe you take a break, work on some other stuff, sleep in a bit later than usual for a few days. But if you know this is really important, you’ll find a way to get back at it. And it probably helps to have the support of a loving partner like Daniel Quinn. So he got back at it, and re-wrote it again, and again. Years passed. Each time he kept what was working and cut what wasn’t - maybe this needed to be emphasized, this needed to be explained a different way. In this sense, the book wasn’t created - it evolved. But who would publish this thing?

Meanwhile, there was another young man named Ted who grew up in a wealthy family in Ohio. At the age of 24, his father committed suicide, leaving Ted devasted, and in charge of the family business: which happened to be a billboard company. Giant signs that get peoples’ attention, and spread information. It seems Ted had a genuine interest in this, or at least was good at it. Ted bought a local broadcast station and eventually launched the first 24-hour cable news channel. Ted called it the Cable News Network: or CNN. Ted Turner now owned a full-on media empire and amassed a great fortune. 

But like Daniel Quinn, Ted was concerned with the way civilization seemed to be heading. In fact, Ted had the producers of CNN create a special video that would air if the world happened to come to an end. He gathered a military marching band to play the same hymn they played aboard the Titanic as it was sinking. But that was just in case. Because Ted didn’t want the world to end - and wanted to do something about it. 

He wanted a framework on how to go about making the world better,  some kind of guide that would help make sense of the problems the world faces and what we could do about them. He wanted a vision. So he decided to pay for one. 

In 1991, he put together the Ted Turner Fellowship - a contest of sorts, offering half a million dollars to the author who could provide a new work of fiction that had such a vision. He assembled a team of judges, each a literary titan, like Wallace Stegner, Nadine Gordimer, and Ray Bradbury. Here’s how Ted put it: “The great minds of today need to focus on the problems of global significance if humanity is to see new tomorrows… These awards are designed to encourage writing by authors throughout the world and in all languages that create positive solutions to global problems." 

News of the contest spread all over the world. The Fellowship received 2,500 manuscripts from 58 countries. One of those submissions was from Daniel Quinn.

His wife Rennie had heard about the contest and encouraged him to apply. So he wrote one more version of the book he’d been working on for years and years. Each version had different characters, told from different angles. This time he made it a dialogue with a gorilla… a gorilla named Ishmael. As Daniel Quinn said in his autobiography “I didn’t expect to win. I figured I’d be eliminated in the first reading.” But sure enough, he won. And in 1992, Ishmael was published and shared worldwide.

And 18 years later, when I was graduating high school, while exploring Ashbourne, having already read Ishmael many times, I wondered what would it take for the world to change? 

In the book, Ishmael and the narrator share an ongoing conversation over many months. They’ll have a session about a specific idea, the narrator will go home, think it over, then they'll come back and build on where they left off. 

But one afternoon the narrator finds that Ishmael is gone… just totally vanished. The only thing left in Ishmael’s empty office is the smell of gorilla. Where the heck could he have gone? He can’t exactly saunter over to Chipotle without catching too much attention. He is a gorilla after all. 

The narrator's devastated. He has so many unanswered questions. [scoff] You can’t leave me hanging, we weren’t done, you told me all this stuff, but you didn’t tell me what to do about it. You might be wondering the same thing yourself. I mean here we are, seven episodes into the podcast, we’ve talked about our collective captivity and Takers and Leavers, and our cultural mythology, the Garden of Eden, the Law of Life. ‘Now what, Ishmael? What are you saying we do? You bring up all these things - what are we gonna do? Cuz if you don’t tell me I'm gonna be pissed.

The narrator is determined to find him. He remembers Ishmael once told him he came from a circus - could that be where he returned? Well there’s a carnival a few towns over and sure enough the narrator finds Ishmael there… back behind the bars of a cage. The narrator waits for the gawking children to leave, bribes the security guard, and finally can ask Ishmael what’s next.

But Ishmael doesn’t give us “the 10 simple steps to save the world” or how to apply for an official Leaver certificate. Ishmael is not that kind of gorilla, or that kind of book. 

Instead, Ishmael essentially gives us a map of the landscape, and a compass so that we may navigate this societal journey ourselves. 

But how do you transform an entire society?

Ishmael’s given us a lot of parables so far. But now, I wanna share one of my own, that’ll help us see how Ishmael will frame how to navigate this collective transformation.

There once was a young Prince, who inherited a vast kingdom. When he looked out beyond the palace walls he saw that his people were unhappy, there was much strife, turmoil, unrest. Crime was rampant, with theft, scams, extortion, even murder being commonplace. Nobody could trust their neighbor. It was far from ideal. The Prince was determined to do something about it. So he locked himself away in his library. For days he didn’t eat, he didn’t sleep. Finally, the Prince was struck by a vision of clarity. He wouldn’t just make things better, he would create the perfect society. You see, the Prince realized, the problem with his subjects was their behavior was incorrect. All the people needed were clear, detailed instructions on how to behave correctly. The prince scrawled away furiously and drafted up the perfect solution that would save his kingdom. At long last the Prince emerged from his chamber. 

“Peter!” The Prince called out to his trustworthy acolyte.

Peter dutifully and diligently entered the candlelit room, impressed by his lord’s carefully drawn out plans. “Yes sire?”

“Yes, hello, Peter, I have here written the most brilliantly conceived, foolproof commandment. You are to implement this perfect plan and soon we shall have created the ideal society.” 

“Fantastic idea, my liege. You always have the best ideas.”

“Thank you Peter.” 

“So what is the official decree?”

“No more lying.”

“No more lying?”

“That’s right. It is now forbidden.” 

“Oh wow, I didn’t realize we could just-” 

“Yes Peter, we can and we will.”

“Yes of course your highness. I shall have this new order proclaimed in every corner of your kingdom.”

“Very good.”

So Peter went out to execute his master’s orders. Trumpets were blown, scrolls were disseminated, and soon every last peasant and pauper in the whole land knew what the Prince had proclaimed. A few days later Peter returned to the Prince.

“Your highness?”

“Yes Peter?” 

“Well you see I have good news and bad news.” 

“Okay, what is the good news?”

“Well the good news is I used this new font on all the scrolls I handed out, it looks really good, really official, I was really quite pleased-”

“-and the bad news?”

“Oh, that. Well, not everyone is following the new law.”

“They’re not?”

“No. People are still lying. I guess the law didn’t work - got any others you want to try instead?” 

“Haha. No, Peter. In fact, I planned for this.”

“You planned for this?”

“Yes I did. This isn’t a problem at all. Peter, go tell the people that those who do not follow this law will be punished.”

“Punished, my lord?”


“Indeed. Those who lie, even though it is forbidden, will be sent to the dungeons.”

“The dungeons, your excellency?”

“The dungeons. For a whole year.”

Well Peter, as loyal as he was, announced the new decree. Soon hundreds, if not thousands, were taken by royal guards and locked away. Some estimated half of the entire kingdom was found guilty and punished. In fact, so many were imprisoned that dozens of new dungeons had to be constructed. A year passed and Peter went to update the Prince on his new policy.

“Greetings your majesty.”

“Hello Peter. What say you?”

“Welp, I’ve got good news and bad news.” 

“Let’s just skip to the bad news this time.”

“Yes certainly. The bad news is that the prisoners who have been released were found lying again.”

“Still lying, are they?”

“Yes. It seems even after prison they don’t stop.

“I see.”

“Don’t feel bad, your greatness. So the law didn’t work out - I’m sure you can conceive of an even better one.”

“Peter, you silly little man. The law is working fine.”

“It is?”

“Yes it is. It’s the people who aren’t working.”

“Ohhh right… So what shall we do with the liars if the dungeons for a year didn’t stop them?”

“The answer is simple. We shall send them to prison for life!”

And so it went until every last one of the Prince’s subjects were locked away and the whole kingdom became one great dungeon. The Prince never viewed this as a failure, however. Sure, people weren’t behaving how he told them to, but at least they were being punished for it. 

Now in many ways this ain’t too different from how Taker Civilization's criminal justice system has operated for thousands of years. Ishmael points out that even way back in the time of Hammurabi, the ancient Babylonian ruler, Takers have created laws that tell people how they must live and punish people for breaking them. Even if a law isn’t working, meaning that many, many people are constantly breaking it and being punished for it, like, oh I don’t know, the war on drugs in our era, Takers will enforce this law because it’s what people are supposed to do. 

On the other hand, Ishmael explains that generally speaking, Leavers aren’t making uncompromising laws based on hypothetical ideals. Adjustments are made, individual circumstances are taken into consideration. There’s flexibility.

Takers form their culture through declarations and inventions. Leavers evolve their culture over time based on what’s working well for people. 

And what works well for people is going to be different for different people, in different places, at different times and that’s important too. Ishmael is adamant that there is no “one right way to live.” A world full of Takers trends towards a monolithic culture. A world full of Leavers trends to diversity of thinking, being, behaving. 

But ultimately, Ishmael believes, if we want to change how people “behave toward the world” we need to “change the way they think about the world.” As Ishmael says “As long as the people of your culture are convinced that the world belongs to them… and their destiny is to conquer and rule it, then they are of course going to go on acting the way they’ve been acting for the past ten thousand years… You can’t change these things with laws. You must change people’s minds.”

The narrator can’t help but notice that Ishmael’s health seems to be rapidly deteriorating. He’s grown sick and weary. Ishmael is an elderly gorilla and feeling his age.
				
One night Ishmael tells him, “I’ve finished what I set out to do. As a teacher, I have nothing more to give you. Even so, I would be pleased to count you as a friend.” I like that Daniel Quinn included this detail. Ishmael is not trying to have the narrator follow and listen to him forever. The point is not following. Ishmael had a specific message to share and once it’s shared it ends the teacher / student dynamic. These end up being the final words the narrator ever hears from Ishmael.

The next time when he arrives to visit, to attempt to buy Ishmael’s freedom with all his withdrawn savings, he finds that the carnival’s gone. There’s a janitor cleaning up the trash who tells him just the night before, Ishmael died of pneumonia.

If we want to change how people “behave toward the world” we need to “change the way they think about the world.”
			
This is the part of the quest where our wise old mentor leaves us and we have to find our way on our way. That’s all we’re left with in Ishmael. What do we make of it? 

For several summers after high school, my friend Dan and I set up our own yard work business. My specialty was mowing lawns, and Dan had a way with those hedge trimmers. But our favorite task was gardening: helping things grow. Some plants grow at the expense of the others in the garden, they take up so much space that soon nothing else is able to live. 

When weeding, it does no good to simply snap off stems or cut back branches. To be most effective, you’ve got to pull it out by the root. That’s essentially what Ishmael does - help get at the source of our civilizational crisis.

With Ishmael’s help, I could see how the many crises we face are interconnected, part of the same gnarly vine that’s overtaken the rest of the garden. And the roots of our civilizational crisis are deep and planted long ago. 

So let’s consider one of our crises, like climate change. 

We can build higher seawalls and grow drought resistant crops but these are only bandaids. 

You could say the problem is burning fossil fuels, or overpopulation, maybe it’s capitalism. But Ishmael would view all these as symptoms of Taker Mythology: enacting the story that the world belongs to us.  

Oh no, I know where this is going. 

Taker Hat: Wassup boss? You rang? 

No, no, no, I uh… we were just talking about gardening. 
This is our Taker Mythology hat we’ve met in previous episodes - he speaks the subconscious cultural bias we’re all raised with. He can be a little…

Taker Hat: Gardening? Boring!

Yeah you probably wouldn’t be interested so uh-

Taker Hat: No there’s nothing wrong with a hobby. I can get down with that. What are we talking: a couple supple succulents? A few fine ficuses? 

No, um, actually, [sighs] it’s just a metaphor. We were talking about finding the root of our civilization’s crises - the thing we’ll have to try and remove if we’re to continue to exist. 

Taker Hat: Did the talking gorilla tell you that too? So what’s the root? 

Well, it’s Taker Mythology.

Taker Hat: Excuse me? 

It’s how we perceive the world, our relationship to it. Fundamentally, if we want to change, we’ve got to change our mindset.

Taker Hat: Oh that’s what you gotta do? “We gotta change our mindset” What a freakin’ luxury! There’s people starving. There’s wars all over the place. The seas are rising. Now those are problems to solve. You’re saying that instead you’ve got to focus on changing how you think?

No. That’s not the only thing we have to do. It’s not like we can only do one thing. The famines and wars and climate change, those are serious stems and branches we have to deal with.  In fact, when weeding, sometimes you’re gonna have to clip off some branches and stems to even get to the root. 

Let’s not think these big questions are meant to keep us in lofty places, seeing activism and politics beneath us - they’re still a part of a saving-the-world balanced breakfast. We still need to create better laws, elect better representatives, take direct action. 

We just have to recognize that in order to really solve these problems and heal these things we have to know where they come from as well. We need a fundamental transformation of our entire society.

Taker Hat: Naw c’mon that’s so lame! What are you - Mr. Rogers’ sweater? I say if you want real change - let this all burn to the ground. Start all over! I used to dabble in a little pyromania back in the day. 

No… I don’t know… look, if we’re on a plane not designed to fly, our task isn’t to wait for - or even speed up - its crash but figure out how to find a way to land safely and build a better design. 

But I think you’re right, some people kinda like the idea of a crash. It’s maybe similar to a drug addict seeking rock bottom to trigger an external intervention. But the crash isn’t a real transformation - we’d just start building this all over again. 

Taker Hat: I don’t know… you guys are falling kinda fast…

Okay, okay. If we do crash - and we might not, or it won’t happen everywhere at the same time - but if we do crash we need to make sure that the people on the other side say, “look kids you see all that rubble? That’s because we tried to think the world belonged to us. We’re not gonna do that again.” The worst case scenario is if after the crash, people of the future look at the rubble and say “kids you see that? We used to live like gods.We gotta do that again.” 

Taker Hat: So you want changed minds but you don’t want revolution? 

I just don’t see the revolution as one event. The revolution we need is not like the French revolution, a quick, violent moment. We need a revolution of the mind. That will take place over decades, centuries. 

The transformation our civilization needs to go through is somewhat similar to the Renaissance - which literally means a rebirth.- 

Taker Hat: Yeah no, I studied the classics-

Well at the beginning of the Renaissance, people weren’t like “okay the goal is to build a society that in 400 years looks like blah blah blah.” They just thought about themselves, the world, and their relation to it differently. When our whole society has different expectations about what we as a species should be doing here, we’re going to naturally follow those expectations. 

And our transformation needs to be even broader and deeper than the European Renaissance, which was just refining Taker Mythology. We need a complete overhaul. 

Taker Hat: Okay…

Let’s put it in Ishmaelian terms: At the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, when Taker Mythology was first being formed, and the lifestyle was first changing, the people couldn’t have possibly imagined the world we’d created down the line. When the first Takers were embarking on what became our global civilization, they didn’t know how to split the atom, alter the earth’s climate - and they didn’t need to. They just believed the world belonged to them and took it one step at a time. They started, in one sense quite literally, cultivating seeds that grew into something beyond their imagination and beyond their control. So metaphorically that’s the position we’re in. Fundamentally I think Ishmael’s right: changed minds create a changed world. 

Taker Hat: So you’re serious, then? You really think I’m the problem? You think Taker Mythology caused all this?

Well… yeah… 

Taker Hat: I.. I… I thought we were friends. Is it cuz I said you needed dandruff shampoo?

No, it’s not cuz of that.

Taker Hat: I don’t get it, when have I ever steered you wrong?

Um well, you told us we were at the center of the universe.

Taker Hat: So?

We’re not.

Taker Hat: Well yeah, I meant the center of the universe… in my heart.

You told us we were created separately and superior to all of life.

Taker Hat: What? You can’t take a compliment?

The community of life are our cousins.

Taker Hat: Okay, sure, so what?

You insisted the law of life doesn’t apply to us.

Taker Hat: Yeah… turns out that was my bad.

And most importantly, you convinced us the world was ours to conquer.

Taker Hat: So that’s it? You're gonna just throw me in the trash? A few thousand years of bad advice and boom - you’re done with me? After all we’ve been through? [getting a bit hysterical]
  
I’ll tell you what. All humans need a story to enact one way or another, Ishmael said “you can’t just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they’ve lost.” We’ll still need a story.

Taker Hat: Okay sure listen to the gorilla but not me!

Listen, Taker Hat, we can still be friends.

Taker Hat: We can? [high pitched and pathetic]

Yeah, but we need to change the mythology we’re enacting.

Taker Hat: I don’t like change.

Change is hard. But extinction is worse. So you can still be our imaginary hat, whispering words of encouragement, offering insight and advice, but it can’t be that the world belongs to us anymore. We need to enact a different story. It has to be that we belong to the world.

Taker Hat: You belong to the world?

Yeah. That’s what’s been true all along. Listen, this is a good thing. And you can be a part of it.

Taker Hat: Okay. You belong to the world.

That’s right. 

Taker Hat: You’re a part of the community of life.

There you go.

Taker Hat: Your existence depends on the ecological health and robust biodiversity of the planet. 

Now you’re getting the hang of it.

Taker Hat: I am?

Yeah this is a good place to start. Who knows? You keep spreading that message, the whole world could change.

Taker Hat: We could change the world?

We’ve done it before.

Taker Hat: You’ve got yourself a deal… and speaking of deals, there’s this new shampoo that’s half off, it could help with your dandruff…

Okay! Okay. Thank you. I’ll get some today.

Taker Hat: Whoo-hoo!

So what did Ishmael mean by belonging to the world?

Well it’s certainly not the inverse of the world belonging to us, in the sense that the world owns us. It’s a different kind of belonging. We’re at home here. We have a role to play. Like beaver dams, ant hills, bee hives, our presence on this earth isn’t meant to be destructive - it’s meant to be part of the ecosystem.

I think one way to think about it is we need to lean into, give in to, what’s already occurring. Because I have good news. The truth is, we already belong to the world. Poof. We did it. We are already intrinsically linked to the rest of existence, flowing and evolving with it. Every year western science is finding out more and more how true this is. Which it initially did not set out to prove.

Maybe another way of thinking about the question: “how do we belong to the world” is: How do you belong to a place? How do you feel at home there? How do you treat the rest of life as family? 

These are questions we all need to answer in our own way. It’s not about finding the one right answer. It’s finding the one that fits with where we are and who we are.

A couple years ago I got a text from my friend that said they were finally developing Ashbourne. Damn. I knew this day would come, but I guess part of me still hoped we’d wake up in time to find another way. 

I hadn’t lived in Philly since childhood and my parents had moved away too. But I knew I had to drive down, back to the land between the endless mountains and pine barrens and see it for myself. 

I tried to prepare myself but my heart still sank when I came to the intersection. The thickets and thorns were gone. The golf course turned meadow was now a desolate dirt pile stretching for half a mile. Giant cookie cutter houses were being installed. It was a weekend and it seemed empty so I walked like a ghost through the wasteland, recording videos on my phone as I went. 

Oh shoot, there’s a bulldozer here. And I think he sees me. 

The guy in the bulldozer turned off the engine and walked over. 

The kid in me felt caught red handed. I guess I never had been allowed to be here anyway. But this guy didn’t shoo me away - I think he was happy to take a break and talk.

“So what's the plan for this area?” 

“It's going to be a development, housing. These are all houses. Like everywhere. You see these blue signs? They're all promising with lots of housing. This goes all the way to the outside. It goes all the way over to the right.”

“That's where when I was a teenager and it was abandoned here, I would come down with my friends and we would explore. And it was like such a special place.”

“I grew up in, like, my house was on a dead end street. It was woods all the way back into the next industrial park, so it was probably half the size of this. It was great. And Industrial Park came in and bought it out. And so yeah, now you got trucks up and down the goddamn street and everybody in and out. It's crazy. I know how it is.”


Somehow talking to that guy helped a little. This was literally a dude destroying the place I loved but I knew he wasn’t my enemy. We’re all just stuck enacting the same old story. 

As I was leaving Ashbourne, I stopped on the old golf course asphalt path. It had fissured and cracked half my lifetime before and now a young pine tree grew in the cracks, its needles almost totally covered the pavement that it was slowly shaking off. 

There are cracks all around us - in the restrictive systems we’ve built and in the mythologies we tell. In those spots, new life grows.

I remembered that Ashbourne was not just the old country club, or what grew up once it was abandoned. Ashbourne was this - the crack in the concrete and what grows in that opening. And I realized - Ashbourne is everywhere. 

If we as a species are to continue our journey in the world, we must change the story we’re enacting, one that does not view us as the master species, but as a member of the community of life. It’s up to each of us to answer the question of how we enact this story in our lifetime. All our changed minds will lead to a changed world. It won't happen instantly. But give it time and it will grow. 

When I was a kid I felt alone thinking about these things, caring about this stuff. Being cool seemed synonymous with apathetic. But it turned out masses and masses of people really did care, and have cared for a long time. 

The very first time the narrator met with Ishmael, Ishmael gave him a disclaimer that he might feel alienated thinking about these things. But it’s been 30 years since Ishmael the book came out… and the world is changing. Our culture is catching up with a good amount of these ideas. The fact we’re facing imminent planetary catastrophe is widely accepted - even if not widely acted upon. The once radical notion that indigenous cultures have meaningful knowledge worth listening to, is more widely accepted. And the concept that people enact stories, that if you shape the narrative, you shape behavior, is expressed by many thinkers. 

So Daniel Quinn’s not the only person talking about this stuff. We have to get good at finding common ground with the others on this odyssey. The people getting into permaculture and sustainable farming, that’s great. The people redesigning urban infrastructure, heck yeah. The people blockading oil pipelines and halting the destruction of forests, yes please. And most importantly, we need to learn from the Leaver cultures that are still here, and the indigenous philosophers, scientists, and storytellers, that have knowledge to share. 

The civilizational transformation we need is already happening. Ishmael is just giving it a language, a way to define and understand it, see it not as disparate, but connected.

In a sense, Ishmael was just the beginning. He wrote new books, each delving deeper than the last, like The Story of B, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization. We’ll explore these as well further down the road. 

But in 2018, after struggling with his health for several years, Daniel Quinn passed away from pneumonia - the same fate he’d written for Ishmael all those years earlier. He was 82. He dedicated so much of life to sharing a vision for our journey. Where we go now is up to us. 

Thanks for listening. 

There’s one person out there who witnessed the ideas in Ishmael take form firsthand. Without her help they would have never been shared with the world. That’s Daniel Quinn’s wife of 50 years… Rennie. 

On the next episode of Human Nature Odyssey Rennie will join us, for her first ever interview, and we’ll get to hear her invaluable insight, perspective, and stories that have yet to be shared. I am very excited.

Until next time, where do you see the cracks in our mythology and the systems they’ve built? And what grows there?

Talk to you soon.

If you’d like to support Human Nature Odyssey, please share it with a friend, subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts, and check out our Patreon. If you are hungry for more on these topics - that’s where you’ll find it. We have interviews with bonus guests, additional writings, transcripts of episodes, and audio extras. If you believe in what we’re doing here and want to help keep it going in the future, your support helps make that possible.

Our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch. You can find a link in our show notes.

And thank you to Jessie, Steven, Michael, Gary, Koby, Fig, Dan, and of course our voice actors for this episode: Honan and Dylan.