My Ishmael

by Daniel Quinn

  “No, I didn’t, not really. But I thought I did.”

  “But now you really understand. You fell apart when you finally realized that I would actually listen to your demands, that I actually wanted to hear your demands—that you even deserved to have your demands met.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “That’s how we’ll design a world for you, Julie. By listening to your demands. What is it you want? What would you die to have?”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s quite a question. I want a place to be where I’m not always saying, I’ve gotta get out of here, I’ve gotta get out of here, I’ve gotta get out of here, I’ve gotta get out of here.”

  “You and the Jeffreys of the world need a cultural space of your own.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Cultural space isn’t necessarily geographic space. The kids who live on the streets of Seattle and places like that aren’t looking for a thousand acres of their own. They’re perfectly happy to share your domain and in fact would probably starve to death if they had to live in a separate domain of their own. They’re saying, ‘Look, we’re content to live on what the rest of you throw away. Why can’t you just let us do that? Just give us enough room to be scavengers. We’ll be the tribe of Crow. You don’t kill the crows that are taking care of your roadkills, do you? If you kill the crows, then you have to scrape off the roadkills yourselves. Let the crows do it. They’re not taking anything you want, so what’s the problem with crows? We’re not taking anything you want either, so what’s the problem with us?’ ”

  “That actually sounds pretty neat—not that it will ever happen.”

  “But what about you, Julie? Would you like to belong to the tribe of Crow?”

  “Not especially, to be honest.”

  “Well, why should you? There’s no one right way for people to live. But suppose the people of Seattle actually said, ‘Let’s try this. instead of fighting these kids and trying to change these kids and making life hell for these kids, let’s give them a hand. Let’s give them a hand to become the tribe of Crow. What’s the worst that could happen?’ ”

  “That would be terrific.”

  “And if you knew there were people like that in Seattle—people willing to take a risk like that—where would you want to live if you were looking around for a place to live?”

  “I’d want to live in Seattle.”

  “Could be an interesting place, Julie. A place where people try things.” Ishmael fell silent for several minutes, and I had the feeling he’d sort of lost his place. Finally he went on. “No matter how thorough I think I’ve been, at this stage students say to me, ‘Yes, but what are we actually supposed to do?’ And I say to them, ‘You Takers pride yourselves on being inventive, don’t you? Well, be inventive.’ But this doesn’t seem to do much good, does it?”

  I didn’t know whether he was talking to himself or to me, but I just went on sitting there and listening.

  “Tell me about being inventive, Julie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When was your greatest period of inventiveness? The greatest period of inventiveness in human history.”

  “I’d have to say this was. Is. This is it.”

  “The period of the Industrial Revolution.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How did it work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your greatest task in the decades ahead is to be inventive—not for machines but for yourselves. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then maybe there are some things we can learn about inventiveness from the greatest outpouring of inventiveness in human history. Does that sound plausible?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “So, once again, how did it work?”

  “The Industrial Revolution? God, I don’t know.”

  “Did an Industrial Revolutionary Army move into the capital and seize the reins of power? Did it round up the royal family and guillotine them?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did it work?”

  “God … Are you asking me about cartels and monopolies?”

  “No, nothing of the sort. I’m not looking into money, I’m looking into inventiveness. Try it this way, Julie. How did the Industrial Revolution start?”

  “Oh. Okay. I remember that. It’s all I do remember. James Watt. The steam engine. Seventeen hundred and something.”

  “Excellent, Julie. James Watt, the steam engine, seventeen hundred and something. James Watt is often credited with inventing the steam engine that started it all, but this is a misleading simplification that misses the whole point of this revolution. James Watt in 1763 merely improved on an engine designed in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen, who had merely improved on an engine designed in 1702 by Thomas Savery, who doubtless knew the engine described in 1663 by Edward Somerset, which was only a variation of Salomon de Caus’s 1615 steam fountain, which was in fact very like a device described thirteen years earlier by Giambattista della Porta, who was the first to make any significant use of steam power since the time of Hero of Alexander in the first century of the Christian era. This is an excellent demonstration of how the Industrial Revolution worked. But I don’t imagine you see it quite yet, so I’ll give you another example.

  “Steam engines wouldn’t have had much utility without coked coal, which is flameless and smokeless. The coking of coal produces coal gas, which originally was simply vented as worthless. But by the 1790s it was beginning to be burned in factories, both to run equipment and to produce light. But coking coal to produce coal gas generated another waste product, coal tar, a nasty, smelly sludge that was especially difficult to get rid of. German chemists reasoned that it was foolish to work to get rid of it when there might be something useful to do with it. Distilling coal tar, they produced kerosene, a new fuel, and creosote, a tarry substance that was found to be a wonderful wood preservative. Since creosote kept wood from rotting, it seemed reasonable to suppose that similar results might be obtained from other coal-tar derivatives. In one such experiment, carbolic acid was used to inhibit putrefaction in sewage. Hearing of this effect of the material in 1865, the English surgeon Joseph Lister wondered if it might prevent putrefaction in human flesh wounds (which at that time made all surgery life-threatening). It did. Still another derivative was carbon black, the residue left by the smoke of burned coal tar. This found one use in a kind of carbon paper invented by Cyrus Dalkin in 1823. It found another use when Thomas Edison discovered that he could amplify telephonic sound by inserting a pellet of carbon black in the receiver.”

  Ishmael looked at me hopefully. I told him coal tar was a lot more useful than I’d imagined. “I’m sorry,” I added. “I know I’m missing the point.”

  “You’ve asked me what to do, Julie, and I’ve given one blanket directive: Be inventive. Now I’m trying to show you what it means to be inventive. I’m trying to show you how the greatest period of human inventiveness worked: The Industrial Revolution was the product of a million small beginnings, a million great little ideas, a million modest innovations and improvements over previous inventions. These millions aren’t exaggerations, I think. Over a period of three hundred years, hundreds of thousands of you, acting almost exclusively from motives of self-interest, have transformed the human world by broadcasting ideas and discoveries and furthering these ideas and discoveries by taking them step-by-step to new ideas and discoveries.

  “I know that there are Luddite puritans among you who think of the Industrial Revolution as the work of the devil, but I’m certainly not one of them, Julie. Partly because it didn’t proceed according to any theoretical design, the Industrial Revolution was not a utopian undertaking—unlike things like your schools, your prisons, your courts, your governmental structures. It didn’t depend on people being better than they are. In fact, it depended on people being just what they’ve always been. Give them gaslight and they’ll abandon candles. Give them electri
c light and they’ll abandon gaslight. Offer them shoes that are attractive and comfortable and they’ll abandon shoes that are ugly and uncomfortable. Offer them electric sewing machines and they’ll abandon foot-driven sewing machines. Offer them color television and they’ll abandon black-and-white television.

  “It’s tremendously important to notice that the wealth of human inventiveness that was generated by the Industrial Revolution was broadcast and not concentrated into the hands of a privileged few. I’m not referring to the products that were turned out but rather to the intellectual wealth that was generated. No one could lock up either the inventive process itself or the discoveries it produced. Every time some new device or process came out, everyone was free to say, ‘I can do something with that.’ Everyone was free to say, ‘I can take this idea and build on it.’ Everyone was free to say, ‘I can use this idea in a way its inventor never dreamed of.’ ”

  “Well,” I told him, “it certainly never occurred to me to think of the Industrial Revolution this way.”

  “It’s important to note that I’m not proposing it as a candidate for sanctification. I’m not recommending its goals or its shameful features—its relentless materialism, its appalling wastefulness, its enormous appetite for irreplaceable resources, its readiness to flow wherever greed took it. I’m recommending only its mode of operation, which released the greatest and most democratic outpouring of human creativity in human history. Far from thinking about ‘giving up’ things, you’ve got to be thinking now about releasing just such another outpouring of human creativity—one that is not directed toward turning out product wealth but rather turning out the kind of wealth you threw away to make yourselves the rulers of the world and now so desperately crave.”

  “Give me an example, Ishmael. Give me an example.”

  “The Seattle project that we just discussed is an example. This would be the equivalent of Salomon de Caus’s 1615 steam fountain, Julie. Not a last word, just a beginning. People in Los Angeles would look at their experiment and say, ‘Yes, that’s not bad, but we can do something better here.’ And people in Detroit would look at the Los Angeles effort and find a different angle of attack to use in their own city.”

  “Give me another example.”

  “The people of Peoria, Illinois, say, ‘Look, maybe we could head toward the tribal model by building on the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts. We could pension off our teachers, close the schools, and open up the city to our children. Let them learn anything they want. We could take that risk. We believe in our kids to that extent.’ This is an experiment that would draw national attention. Everyone would be watching to see how well it worked. I personally have no doubt that it would be a tremendous success—provided they really let the kids follow their noses instead of subverting the project with curricula. But of course the Peoria model would just be the beginning. Other cities would see ways to enrich it, surpass it.”

  “Okay. One more example, please.”

  “You know, Julie, health-care workers aren’t universally overjoyed to be part of the moneymaking machine that health care has become in this country. Many actually went into health care for entirely different reasons than to get rich. Maybe in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they could get together and take the system in a whole new direction. Maybe it will occur to them that there’s already a sort of James Watt in this field, a physician by the name of Patch Adams, who started the Gesundheit Institute, a hospital in Virginia where people are treated free of charge. But maybe they need the additional inspiration of seeing similar things happening elsewhere—things like the Seattle project and the Peoria project. This is how the Industrial Revolution worked, Julie. People saw other people figuring out how to make things work and were inspired to try it themselves.”

  “I think the biggest obstacle to all these things would be the government.”

  “Of course, Julie. That’s what governments are there for, to keep good things from happening. But I’m afraid I have to say that if you can’t even manage to force your own presumably democratic governments to allow you to do good things for yourselves, then you probably deserve to become extinct.”

  “I agree.”

  “I’ve opened the tribal treasury for you, Julie. I’ve shown you the things you threw away for the sake of making yourselves rulers of the world. A system of wealth based on an exchange of energy that is inexhaustible and completely renewable. A system of laws that actually helped people live instead of just punishing them for doing things that people have always done and always will do. An educational system that cost nothing, worked perfectly, and drew people together generationally. There are many other systems worthy of your study there, but you’ll find none that encourages people to build creatively off each other’s ideas the way you’ve done during your Industrial Revolution. There was no prohibition against such creativity in the tribal life—but there was also no demand or reward for it.”

  He fell silent for a moment. I opened my mouth to speak, and he held up a hand to stop me.

  “I know I haven’t yet given you what you asked for. I’m getting there. You’ll just have to be patient and let me get there my own way.”

  I batted my eyelashes and held my peace.

  A Look Into The Future

  For you, it’s just another bit of ancient history, like Reconstruction or the Korean War, but twenty-five years ago many thousands of children your age knew that the Taker way is a way of death. They didn’t really know much more than that, but they knew that they didn’t want to do what their parents had done—get married, get jobs, get old, retire, and die. They wanted to live a new way, but the only real values they had were love, good fellowship, emotional honesty, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll—not bad things by any means, but not enough to found a revolution on, and a revolution was what they wanted. Just as they had no revolutionary theory, they had no revolutionary program. What they had was a slogan—‘Tune in, turn on, drop out’—and they imagined that if everyone would just tune in, turn on, and drop out, then there’d be dancing in the streets and a new human era would begin. I tell you this because it’s as important to know why a thing fails as why a thing succeeds. The children’s revolt of the sixties and seventies failed because it had neither a theory nor a program. But they were certainly right about one thing: It’s time for something new for you people.

  “You must have a revolution if you’re going to survive, Julie. If you go on the way you’re presently going, it’s hard to imagine your living through another century. But you can’t have a negative revolution. Any revolution that thinks of ‘going back’ to some good old days’ of imagined simplicity when men tipped their hats, women stayed home and cooked, and no one got divorced or questioned authority is founded on dreams. Any revolution that depends on people voluntarily giving up things they want for things they don’t want is mere utopianism and will fail. You must have a positive revolution, a revolution that brings people more of what they really want, not less of what they don’t really want. They don’t really want sixteen-bit electronic games, but if that’s the best they can get, they’ll take it. You won’t get far in your revolution by asking them to give up their sixteen-bit electronic games. If you want them to lose interest in toys, then you must give them something even better than toys.

  “That must be the watchword of your revolution, Julie—not voluntary poverty, but rather voluntary wealth. But real wealth this time. Not toys, not gadgets, not ‘amenities.’ Not stuff you can put in bank vaults. Real wealth of the kind that humans were born with. Real wealth of the kind that humans enjoyed here for hundreds of thousands of years—and continue to enjoy wherever the Leaver life is still intact. And this is wealth you can enjoy without feeling guilty, Julie, because it isn’t something stolen from the world. It’s wealth that is entirely the product of your own energy. Are you with me?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “Now let’s see if we can find a reasonably plausible way of looking at the fut
ure of your revolution. Back around 1816 the Baron Karl von Draise of Karlsruhe, Germany, thought he’d try his hand at inventing (the Industrial Revolution really has reached into every class, high and low, for its talent). What he had in mind was a self-propelled wheeled vehicle, and what he came up with was a pretty good design for a first try: a bicycle propelled by pushing on the ground with your feet. Now if he’d been able to look seventy years into the future, he could have seen a bicycle that worked really well—the one built by the Englishman James Starley, which, except for refinements, is still in use today, a century later.

  “Just like the Baron, you and I can’t look into the future to see a global human social system that works really well. Such a system may well come into being—but we can no more imagine it than the Baron could imagine James Starley’s bicycle. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “I think so.”

  “All the same, we’re better off than the Baron. The Baron not only couldn’t look into the future for guidance (because no one can), he couldn’t look into the past either, because there were no bicycles there to look at. We’re better off than he was, because, while we can’t look forward to see a global human social system that works really well, we can look back to one that worked really well. It worked so well that we can say with some confidence that it was a final, unimprovable system for tribal peoples. There was no complex organization. What you had was just independent tribes playing the Erratic Retaliator strategy: ‘Give as good as you get, but don’t be too predictable.’ ”

  “Right.”

  “Now what principle or law did the Erratic Retaliator strategy enforce or protect for tribal peoples?”

  “Well … it protected tribal independence and identity.”

  “Yes, that’s true, but those are things, not principles or laws.”

  I worked on it some but in the end had to admit I didn’t see it.