With Neo-Malthusian gorilla gone, is there hope for The Third Chimpanzee?

"Ishmael" is a political pamphlet written in the form of a novel. The main character is a defrocked hippie who answers a strange ad in a magazine, apparently an ad placed by yet another phoney guru. Much to his surprise, the "guru" turns out to be a gorilla with telepathic abilities. The gorilla is named Ishmael.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is essentially the entire plot!

The rest of the book consists of Ishmael's teachings, which are of course identical to those of Daniel Quinn, the author. Ishmael turns out to be a dark Green primitivist, who criticizes civilization and calls for a return to a tribal lifestyle of hunting and gathering. The root of our present troubles is the turn from hunting-gathering to sedentary agriculture and state-building, taking place around 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. This eventually led to overpopulation, resource depletion and the threat of imminent collapse so obvious today. Ishmael also attacks traditional religion and turns out to have a strong Neo-Malthusian bent. More food inevitably leads to more humans, and hence overpopulation. The solution? Less food.

Thus, despite its new agey-hippie flavour, "Ishmael" is actually a quite disturbing book. Essentially, the peaceful gorilla in the cage calls for genocide of Third World peoples. I didn't know gorillas were Neo-Malthusians! The book also contains a number of other oddities and absurdities. Societies based on agriculture were peaceful for millennia, while pastoralists were prone to violence. Also, Neolithic cultures were probably "matriarchal", while pastoralists virtually always are patriarchal. Yet, Quinn claims that the agriculturalists were the bad guys and the pastoralists the good guys. The author also seems to think that humans are like mice, unable to control their own reproduction except by naturally occurring or artificially induced "food control". His attempt to compare humans to jellyfish has to be read to be believed. And so on. I wonder what on earth made this book so popular? Are hippies Nazis?

And yet...

And yet, we cannot simply dismiss Ishmael in his circus cage. A few years ago I would have thrown away this book ASAP due to all the factual errors and the "reactionary" perspective. A psychological defence mechanism I presumably share with many other advanced primates of the genus Homo.

In reality, the problems mentioned by Quinn are real. We *can* end starvation and poverty by a world government sharing the available resources equally, but we are rapidly approaching a situation where not even this would put and end to environmental destruction. And in the future, the available resources will plummet, making it very problematic indeed to feed six or eight billion people. The only solution is to show that we are indeed not mice, and combine birth control with food availability way above subsistence level. How's that for a new "vision", to use Quinn's terminology? If humanity cannot begin a rapid transition to a sustainable economy, there will be a population crash exactly as described in "Ishmael".

Don't let the gorilla-guru have the last word. Show that we aren't jellyfish!

With Neo-Malthusian gorilla gone, is there hope for The Third Chimpanzee?