Book Review: "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, Part Two (Guns, Germs, and Steel)

Jared Diamond argues in his book "Guns, Germs, and Steel", that the locations where agriculture- and (by his assertions) civilization- arose is largely determined by geographic placement. Implicit in his argument is the assertion that those cultures that could become agriculturalists, did become agriculturalists. This assumption is ambient in the language that Diamond uses, even as he denies it directly in the text. his language screams of the idea that civilization is chapter two in the story of humanity.

This addresses one of the central arguments that Daniel Quinn makes in his novel "Ishmael"- which is that civilization is not chapter two in a story to which hunter-gatherer tribes were chapter one.

Diamond asks, several times in the text- what stopped cultures with the same intelligence as other cultures from developing agriculture. Diamond further feels the need to prove that these non-agricultural cultures were in fact intelligent. What Diamond does not ask, is whether these people were happy with their way of life as hunter-gatherers and tribalists. Implicit in the questions Diamond asks and the questions he does not ask is the assumption that hunter-gatherers must subconsciously want to become agriculturalists.

This assumption runs counter to the historical primary records. Virtually wherever tribal peoples were encountered by civilized people, the tribal people resisted to the last ditch against becoming assimilated/conquered into a civilized way of life. Even those that were agriculturalists to a lesser or greater extent resisted the way of life on offer by civilized people.

And in fact, civilized people found themselves having to fight a rear guard action against defectors from their ranks joining the ranks of the tribalists. This phenomenon became so common that a name for it entered popular culture- going native.

In his novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn points out that animals in captivity are naturally more inquisitive than those in the wild, because they can tell to a greater or lesser extent that something is wrong. And like a dog trying to scratch an itch, they begin to work at solving the problem. Quinn's argument is that progress is not some inevitable thing that humans should do or were meant to do, but something that the social inequality of civilization drove them to do, in an effort to ease the suffering their own way of life was causing them. Civilized cultures expanded and conquered the world using the tools their agriculture gave them in a desperate attempt to ease their own psychic suffering.

If you have not bought and read Ishmael yet, do so now.