I know that
Here is a quote from "The Story of B", another book by Daniel Quinn, dealing with the same stuff :



People say : we were the smartest of all 10000 cultures, now our culture of power over nature is all over the world. Natural selection at work !
It is not so, nature always promotes diversity, and we managed to almost wipe out all the other cultures, we are more like a mutant organism, transforming everything into itself

I read the trilogy and was a member of IshCon and a lot of the resultant discussions, I've read everything at Anthropik, and so on --

but I still am not a big fan of Quinn. The novels are boring, quite simply, and I got really annoyed at the dialogue. Ishmael says something, Alan agrees, rinse and repeat. Also, he may not have intended this but his books to appeal to people with grandiosity/inferiority complexes who want to "save the world", something that makes me want to vomit.

He does have his moments of brilliance - telling this culture's "creation myth", reinterpreting the Garden of Eden story, talking about the food race, and so on -- but these are better suited to essays and speeches than to novels. I feel a little silly recommending Ishmael to people because these sort of ideas coming from a telepathic gorilla strains their credulity quite a bit.
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As far as Anthropik goes, Jason has done an excellent job of laying out the arguments for primitivism, consolidating a large amount of research into his essays. He does tend to take a fairly absolutist position on things, far moreso than I can support, but this hardly makes the bulk of his arguments invalid.

The accusations of this being an ideology, a religion so to speak, are unfounded. While a few people are interested in learning how to live like hunter-gatherers, myself included, no one in the circles I interact with thinks it's a viable solution for everyone. That's as silly as the arguments that say hunting and gathering couldn't feed everyone, therefore people who advocate hunting and gathering are advocating massive die-off. Such atrocious logic is more common than you might think.

To be clear: I don't LIKE civilization, I don't want to live in such a crowded world, and I would greatly prefer there being a small percentage of the current population. But I no more advocate for die-off than I do for civilization and civilization's tendency to overshoot, since they are one and the same feedback loop. All people like Daniel Quinn and Jason Godesky are saying is that we're in a predicament as a result of living the way we do, and it's important to 1. understand the reasons why and 2. look at alternative ways to live -- or in Quinn's terms, "other stories to be in".

Personally, I think this is a very sensible way to look at the predicament we're in, which people are in varying stages of denial about. I have a pet theory that the extent to which people vilify this kind of approach (or, more comfortably, the people who take it) is the extent to which they deny there is a predicament in the first place. Applying this theory, the people who get so angry at those looking at alternative methods of subsistence (such as hunting and gathering) and say "BUT THAT DOES NOT FEED EVERYONE!!1one" are the very same ones who will staunchly deny that we are in overshoot in the first place.
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These discussions are really predictable by the way, I have to have said something similar at least 50 times now. An amazing number of people have very similar perspectives, almost like they were a part of the same culture or something. Crazy.

DQ is not a very good writer of fiction. I prefer his essays and speeches. Apparently he wrote fiction because it was the only way to get his ideas published in a mainstream format.

BTW, the movie inspired by "Ishmael" - "instinct" starring Anthony Hopkins, sucks, in my opinion.

I like Devin. Young, un-rutted thinker.

I read Ishmael.

I liked it.

The Gorilla device was okay with me. You've got to have some kind of narrator, and that's as good as any if it needs to be someone who is not a human.

The reinterpretation of The Garden of Eden story was worth reading the book by itself. Those ideas are very good and stimulate a lot of thought even if you disagree with parts of his analysis or theory.

Overall, I think the book has a lot of good stuff to say, and I think Quinn packages it in terms of a potential alternative paradigm to the one we sometimes see as "truth".

There is a certain underlying contempt about our civilization that peeks out from time to time, and that is a thorny issue to deal with. Even if you feel contempt for where we're at and what we've done, it's no good to telegraph that contempt before you fully develop your alternative theory. The risk is that you turn off the audience before you have had a chance to completely make your case.

It's not a perfect book, but it's good, and I liked it.

I'm not ready to run out and buy a Daniel Quinn lunchbox and pajamas, but I'm looking forward to reading "The Story of B."

Glad that you didn't find it boring.

The following essays may be relevant to this discussion.
The Morality of Survival, by Michael W. Masters.
Reducing Population in Step with Oil Depletion, by William Stanton.
The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin.
A General Statement of the Tragedy of the Commons, by Herschel Elliott.