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The "Ishmael" books are aimed at encouraging radical social change — but their author says hostage-taking is definitely not the change he had in mind.
Daniel Quinn's story of Ishmael, a telepathic gorilla who tries to show humans where they're going wrong, has spawned a popular series of books, an eerie Hollywood movie and a movement that takes a critical look at our global industrial society. Unfortunately, it also spawned an escalating series of threats from James Lee, who resented the Discovery Channel so much that he took company employees hostage today.
The hours-long standoff in Maryland ended when police shot and killed the gunman. Authorities said an explosive device went off when Lee was shot, but the hostages were rescued unharmed.
In the hours leading up to the crisis' bloody conclusion, Quinn reflected on the meaning of "My Ishmael," the book that Lee repeatedly cited as his inspiration. Quinn wondered how that meaning could have been misinterpreted so badly.
"It's hard to imagine how he got from reading this book to his current behavior," Quinn told me via telephone from his Houston home. "It certainly puzzles me."
Quinn was even more disapproving on his website, Ishmael.org. He said Lee's actions gave "a bad name to the very ideas he's trying to put forward. So instead of putting them forward he's putting them back — making them unacceptable."
"My Ishmael" is actually a sequel to Quinn's first book, titled "Ishmael," which lays out his philosophy about slowing human population growth and encouraging innovative solutions to social and environmental problems ... all as seen from a gorilla's point of view.
"It is definitely the view of humanity from a non-human point of view, so that our perceived virtues are not necessarily virtues when they're perceived from the outside," Quinn explained. "The food race is a good example, the race between growing more food and birthing more people. We perceive generally that this race can be won by agriculture, so we cheer when we hear that agriculture has made some advance to support a growing population — whereas in fact the race is unwinnable. It's like the arms race of the '70s and the '80s. ... There's no winning of the arms race. There's no winning of the food race either."
In "My Ishmael," the gorilla explains his perspective to a schoolgirl in a series of dialogues, and urges her (and humanity) to "be inventive, not for machines but for yourselves." He calls for "a million small beginnings, a million great little ideas" that eventually will transform the world.
Lee worked that theme into a series of rants posted to his website and Internet chat rooms. He said the Discovery Channel and its sister TV networks, such as TLC and Discovery Health, had to "have daily television programs at prime-time slots" that were based on the ideas laid out in the book. He also said the networks had to stop airing shows "encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants" and instead broadcast programs encouraging sterilization and infertility.
Lee spoke out against immigration as well, calling it "the exportation of human filth."
Stemming population growth is indeed a theme in Quinn's books, but the author told me the books offered no specific prescriptions for solving the problem. "The solution has to come from a consensus of the majority of the humans in our planet, and say 'Yes, this is what we must do, painful as it will be, to ensure the survival of the race.' ... And it will be painful. There's not going to be any painless solution."
The ascent of 'Ishmael'
Quinn, who turns 75 this month, told me that he began his literary career as a caption writer for an encyclopedia in Chicago, then became an editor, and then turned to writing for educational publications.
"In the early '60s, I began to see that I had some questions about what made sense to us, and what did not make sense to us, and I began to search for answers," he said. "And these searches eventually led me to a point at which I thought I perhaps had grounds for writing a book."
Quinn said he "wrote version after version for 12 years" before finally coming up with the manuscript for "Ishmael" in the late 1980s. At about that same time, media mogul Ted Turner announced a contest for fiction that offered positive solutions to global problems. "Ishmael" was selected from about 2,500 entries submitted worldwide, earning Quinn the $500,000 Turner Tomorrow Fellowship and a guarantee that the book would be published.
"To everyone's great surprise, it was a success," Quinn said. "At the time, it looked to many people involved that a novel about a thinking gorilla was a most improbable proposition. The novel went on to acclaim in many other countries, publication in many other languages, and it's simply never stopped. It's No. 389 on Amazon today, which is quite remarkable for a book that is 20 years old."
"Ishmael" turned Quinn into a guru of sorts, complete with an appearance on "Oprah." The book inspired readers to set up unofficial fan sites such as The Friends of Ishmael Society, ReadIshmael.com, IshCon and New Tribal Ventures. It also inspired Hollywood to make a 1999 movie titled "Instinct," starring Anthony Hopkins as an anthropologist who joins a troop of Rwandan mountain gorillas and kills two poachers when the troop is attacked. It's left to an ambitious psychologist (Cuba Gooding Jr.) to figure out why the anthropologist turned murderous.
Quinn didn't stop with that first book. "I found that people were getting about 40 percent of what I was saying in 'Ishmael,'" he told me. The first follow-up was "The Story of B," a 1996 novel that presented dialogues between a Roman Catholic priest and a preacher suspected of being the Antichrist. (The preacher is no satanist, but serves instead as an advocate for Quinn's point of view and manages to convert the priest.)
"My Ishmael" came next, in 1997. Then Quinn wrote "Beyond Civilization," a nonfiction work that touts tribalism over globalization.
"Tribal humans were successful on this planet for three million years before our agricultural revolution, and they're no less successful today wherever they manage to survive untouched, but many people in our culture don't want to hear about it," he says in the book.
Quinn told me that "Beyond Civilization" seemed to answer the questions people had about his tribe-centric, post-industrial point of view.
"I was asked many, many times to have some kind of course for people," he recalled. "Finally I relented and decided to have a seminar here in Houston. One prerequisite was that they would have to read 'Beyond Civilization,' the last of the series, in manuscript. What happened was, that answered so many questions for them that they had no questions when they arrived. So the seminar was a bust."
Since "Beyond Civilization," Quinn has written more novels (such as "The Holy") and more inspirational works (such as "Tales of Adam"). But it's the "Ishmael" books that have been foremost in the spotlight, and not always for the right reasons.
Back in 2007, for example, Quinn's novels were mentioned when commentators tried to figure out the meaning of "Ismail-Ax," a phrase that Virginia Tech gunman Seung-hui Cho had written on his arm. Cho also used the name "A. Ishmael" on a package he sent to NBC News before the shootings. (To be fair, the same commentators noted that the references to Ishmael could have been inspired by other writings, ranging from the Bible to Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" to a beat poem titled "The Goat Ranchers.")
Today, Quinn is once more facing the fact that some poor soul failed to get the whole message.
"My point has always been that each of us has a circle of influence, and a set of talents, and that I can't give anyone a 12-step program," he told me. "Rather, I just say, start wherever you are, find out what you can do that no one else can do, and proceed from there. And that has been successful. People are inspired, and they're doing things you'd never dream they could do. This James Lee has been inspired, but in a destructive way. He's doing what he can do — which is a crazy stunt. I wish I could understand what he's trying to do, and what he's trying to say. It's hard to connect it with my book."
More about the Discovery hostage drama:
- Police kill Discovery building gunman
- Discovery gunman spoke to NBC News
- Suspect had long protested Discovery programming
- Hostage situation unfolds in real time on Twitter
- Is this a picture of the gunman? We don't know
Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto," which was No. 694,129 on Amazon the last time I checked.
Leave a Comment:
Seems like Quinn is assuming the old zero-sum game, in which the Earth can be filled up and then that's it, opportunity has run out. But that's silly: Earth is just one speck in an enormous, rich solar system, to say nothing of the rest of the galaxy. I think we're doing just fine, and will soon be spreading life and civilization throughout the cosmos. Tribal society successful? Try explaining that to the dinosaurs.
So true!
Wow, the well regulated militia is having a tough summer....they lost another one today....
Quinn should be laying out in my weeds with his do-good thoughts, which are nothing more than thoughts he thought would make him some money. He's an idiot who thinks he has an IQ higher than his body temperature.
Some interesting points here. Population control doesn't have to be painful. Two children per couple is more than enough. Six,eight,fourteen is ridiculous. The movie Instinct is a another good example. Poachers should be killed no questions asked. They are the scum of the earth. No conscious and no feelings what so ever. I myself see the earth faltering everyday and not a lot of people seem to care.
And who are you to be making the decision as to how many children is "enough?" You population control types sure love telling others how to live their lives. But that's the whole idea, isn't it?
I see the earth every day, it's still in one piece. To quote George Carlin, it can shake us off like a bad case of fleas anytime it wants to. So you're right, many of us don't care. Why should we? We couldn't destroy the earth if we tried. It's always going to be here. We, on the other hand, won't.
I'll get back to enjoying life now. You can get back to wallowing in your disdain for humanity. Have a nice weekend.
Someone writes a series of books arguing there are too many people in the world, and we need to return to a tribalist way of life. And then he's shocked, shocked when a reader takes him at his word. That's the trouble with woolly-headed leftists like Quinn. They don't really mean what they say. Because if they did, they'd be standing right next to James Lee. Lee was crazy, obviously. Mentally ill, of course, but also crazy for believing Quinn really meant what he wrote. Just like Al Gore (who also "inspired" Lee), who preaches carbon austerity for the rest of us, while zipping all over the world in private jets and SUVs. As for tribalism, I've been to Africa and the Middle East. I'll take the Western way of life any day.
I agree with the author........Lets start the population control with the Left Wing Eco Terrorists. Wonder how Quinn will feel with a few less family members. Also his theories might just be taken a tad racist. As minorities in the USA and those living on the African continent, Asia, South America and ect...
Tend to be those that have large families, wonder how they'll view him and his leftist buddies Loon views. As "they" propose "thinin'em out" .
Well, the gunman demanded reductions in human population... I hope he's satisfied that they started with him. Ever notice about those screaming so much about overpopulation never do us the favor of removing themselves from the Earth to do their "fair share"?
That's not militia. That's called a left wing eco terrorist. Get it right hippie.
Not one of you has read his books, and yet you spout off. Such generalizations. if it was that simple we would have fixed it all a long time ago.
How many negative commentors have actually read the books? How many have read the books and actually understand what Quinn was getting at? We're at the top of the bell curve, and that long drop down is in sight. Quinn was also not the first to postulate these ideas. Malthus, anyone? Stop your whining, take your blinders off, and educate yourselves.
Yeah but Malthus was dead wrong, and so is Quinn. The population bomb has as much validity as religious predictions of apocalypse; they're always wrong.
Put some fish in a tank. Feed them and breed them. Feed them some more. Keep breeding them in the same tank. Feed them a little more. See how many of them are still alive after a prescribed period. Comes a time that the environment won't support them all, and feeding the growing population does more harm than good for all the fish. That's basically what Malthus, Quinn, et al have been saying all along. Get it?
And more and more research shows that we aren't anywhere near the strict limit of global population. Food production is still the limiting factor (not, say, oxygen), and that's a region where technology and techniques can vastly change the 'limits'.
I heard on local news that Al Gore's book was also inspiration for this a&&clown. Any mention of that by MSNBC?
I wonder if this guy posted on the vine? I get a chill when I recall some of the comments posted by a lot of the Left Wing Liberal/Progressive Environmentalist Wack Jobs on here. I wonder what the last straw was for this guy? I think we all should know so we can look out for the symptoms and take action to prevent this from happening again.
Al Gore scares me...
One can imagine the unintended consequences from those whom listen to telepathic apes, or the inconvenient and farsical story from a very rich pathological liar, former oil company investor and tobacco farmer. Some on the right want to give the inconvenient movie maker a pass, however, an August 12, 2010 article on wnd.com has some interesting audio of the climate change charlatan. One may listen and make up their own mind based on his words, voice inflection, etc. http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=190177. Maybe this environmentalist nutcase at the Discovery Channel was listening that day, and took what he heard too literally. "He betrayed his country", a hate-filled quote from the guy whom couldn't buy a vote in sunny Fla.
Liberals were quick to blame music or video games for violence. When are we going to hear them call for a ban on Al Gore's movie?
Was this guy a tea-party member? Oh wait, this is an eco-whacko... Al Gore style! Wonder why Bloomberg wasn't out there claiming tea-party member? What a joke the media and all these liberals are.
You know i'm a enviromentlist and in no way susport what this guy did he was wrong,and I don't feel that he repersent what being a envirmentlist is about,I've read one of this guys book awhile ago and thow I liked it ,I didn't rush out and buy everyone and think they've got thier good/bad points... I mean I stong beleave you shouldn't have more children than "you" can afford why should somebody have dozens of children but can't afford to educate,feed,clouth them? And I do agree humans should take some responsibilty for thier impact on our planet,but thiers much better ways to exsprece your oppions than taking people hostge at gun point and straping bombs too yourself.... Like cleaning up litter,recycleing,donating $$ extra,so stop thinking people jen repersent all one group? they don't. He was obvisly a very distrubed person.
People with obvious mental disorders like Mr. Lee are the only ones to blame when they "go postal". The same can be said for Timothy McVeigh, the NY mass murderer who heard his neighbors German Shepard talking to him, the Anti-Abortion murderer or Richard Ramirez listening to an AC/DC song. People, books, movies, etc. are not to blame. These psychopaths will eventually happen upon a cause to justify the rage they hold inside. Mr. Lee could have just as easily chosen Glenn Beck, Free Tibet, Christianity, Islamism, the Beatles White Album or even Al Gore and a telepathic gorilla to lead him to choose his twisted course of action. The full responsiblility of senseless acts lies fully with the Mr. Lee's of the world. There does not need to always be a deeper social reason or conspiracy theories to explain away this type of behavior! Though we can feel for the mental pain that Mr. Lee lived with and the pain he has now caused his family we can all be relieved that this man was taken out without any harm being done to the innocents going about their normal lives!
That is the trouble with "eco-terrorists," they are not Christian enough, and do not know how to kill and maim like the Timmy McVs of the world.
This was a man crying for help and little did he realize that if he would have invoked God, Jesus, or the Holy Ghost in some way, they would not have killed him so fast.
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Now we get it. The SWAT team sniper knew that this man was not a Christian. So when Mr. Lee pointed his weapon at a hostage with apparent intent of killing the hostage the sniper chose to take him out becasue Mr. Lee was a presumed liberal aethiest eco-terrorist and had Mr. Lee been a known Christian they would have let him kill the innocent hostage. Yeah, that sounds like the likely scenario???? If McVeigh had been trying to light a fuse and a sniper had him in his sights they would've taken him out too, Christian, conservative, liberal, black, white, whatever! Perhaps you've forgotten that we did execute McVeigh!
economykiller: 'Liberals were quick to blame music or video games for violence. When are we going to hear them call for a ban on Al Gore's movie?"
I haven't seen Gore's movie, but I'm pretty sure there isn't any glorification of violence or winning points for killing people. How could these possibly be related?
You can't blame this on anyone else unless there was actual incitement to violence. It is not the issues that do that but the rhetoric. Someone claiming that there are too many people for the Earth to support is not at fault if somebody decides that increasing the death rate is the best solution. There are other ways to fix the problem. It is not the talk show host that gets mad at the government who is responsible for violence, it is the one who yells hateful personal insults and uses metaphorical violent language like "taking people out" or "they must be stopped by any means."
Population control by murder has never been very effective. Just look at the 20th century mass murder of tens of millions of people at numerous places across the globe. Tiny blips in world population's exponential climb. The only hope is for the People to believe they must restrain their population. Are we not more than a bacterial culture in a petrie dish? Please help me find evidence that we are.
Joe Blow im sorry but i seriously cant understand your remark.. yes, spreading civilization like a certain sexual virus across the universe.. wouldnt that be grand. i would have to call it divine ignorance to say 'we're doing fine' when you have not even worn the slippers poor kids make out of your pet-bottles and car-tires. i think alot of sci-fi movies are based on your perspective of how this proud unknown alien lifeforce just moves on from planet to planet sucking all the resources dry to fuel their spacecraft to fly to the next one. i appreciate your lighthearted optimism but when the ssss really hits the fan im sure you would be the last person in line with your complaints.Â
and humor always works too.. 'thats one less person wasting our oxygen' remarks.. when will you see that all your contorted values being the 'rich solar system' of alienating others that amount only to war & hatred. utterly terrifying we wont have internet anymore if we decided to hamper down and hug the planet with all those tribal creeps.. who all have their weird female-circumcising ways. this man, Mr. Lee, somewhat of a 'freedomfightinghippiehero' now, just wanted you to respect thy planet as you would your very own creator.. whom is just as kind your mother of earth, and just as all seeing as your father of cosmos. a first goal as many state above is to really surface all those contradictions and resolve them.. the concept of 1million little truths turnin into 1million beautiful minds is a start.. and i assure you it wont come from a book.Â
i think i left a comment here a while ago about the crazy killer whale incident in SeaWorld.. then watchin all these bizarre episodes in Southpark where the Japanese kill whales and dolphins because Americans fooled them into thinking it was these mammals that A-bombed Japan.. in a way this broken loop in vicious cycle will never change.. but even a broken clock gives the right time twice a day.. cuckoo people dragging spirituality in the dirty filthy disgusting soiled mud.
Ziro Japan
It is natural for a species to favor itself and seek it's own betterment. With that in mind, population control theories make perfect sense IFF the goal is to improve the overall human condition through these measures. If the goal is to preserve some esoteric 'nature' or the ecosystem, through the destruction of a part of it (humans), the goal is self-defeating.
It is in the human interest to preserve the ecosystem, for our own benefit, our own survival, and our own enjoyment. Nothing more. Rationality based on something other than human interest is, at best, guesswork. By this I mean that all rationality must start with a goal. The only natural goal for any creature is to meet its needs and better its own condition. Through community, this can be expanded to the needs and conditions of it's species (i.e. human interests), but to move away from the species means to abandon one's own interests in favor of an arbitrary goal.