Daniel Quinn

For other people with this name, see Daniel Quinn.

Daniel Quinn
Born	(1935-10-11) October 11, 1935 Omaha, Nebraska, US
Occupation	Writer
Website
ishmael.org

Daniel Quinn (born October 11, 1935) is an American writer (primarily, novelist and fabulist), cultural critic, and former publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticizes this term, claiming that it portrays the environment as somehow separate from human life and thus creates a false dichotomy. Quinn specifically identifies his philosophy as new tribalism.

Biography

Daniel Quinn was born in Omaha, Nebraska, where he graduated from Creighton Preparatory School. He went on to study at Saint Louis University, at University of Vienna, Austria, through IES Abroad, and at Loyola University, receiving a bachelor's degree in English, cum laude, in 1957. He delayed part of this university education, however, while a postulant at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky, where he hoped to become a Trappist monk; however his spiritual director, Thomas Merton, prematurely ended Quinn's postulancy. Quinn then went into publishing, abandoned his Catholic faith, and underwent two unsuccessful marriages.

In 1975, Quinn left his career as a publisher to become a freelance writer. He is best known for his book Ishmael (1992), which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991. This fellowship was established to encourage authors to seek "creative and positive solutions to global problems." Ishmael became the first of a loose trilogy of novels by Quinn, including The Story of B and My Ishmael. Ishmael and its follow-ups brought increasing fame to Quinn throughout the 1990s, and he became a very well-known author to segments of various social and political groups, including the environmental, simplicity, and anarchist movements, none of which he strongly self-identifies with. Nevertheless, his views are said to have "articulated the most prevalent cosmogony found within radical environmental subcultures."

Quinn has traveled widely to lecture and discuss his books. While response to Ishmael was mostly very positive, Quinn's ideas have inspired the most controversy, particularly in The Story of B's appendix, with his claim that human populations grow and shrink according to food availability and with the catastrophic real-world conclusions he draws from this.

In 1998, Quinn collaborated with environmental biologist Alan D. Thornhill in producing Food Production and Population Growth, a 2-hour, 40-minute-long video (later DVD) elaborating in depth the ideas presented in his books.

Quinn's book Tales of Adam was released in 2005 after a long bankruptcy scuffle with its initially scheduled publisher. It is designed to be a look through the animist's eyes in seven short tales; Quinn first explores the idea of animism as the original worldwide religion and as his own dogma-free belief system in The Story of B and his autobiographical Providence.

In 2010, James Jay Lee, the perpetrator of the Discovery Communications headquarters hostage crisis, cited My Ishmael in his manifesto of demands. Quinn characterized Lee as a "fanatic" who had distorted his ideas.

Quinn currently lives in Houston, Texas with his third wife, Rennie.

Philosophy and themes

Daniel Quinn writes primarily about a cultural bias and mythological world-view deeply ingrained in modern civilization, which, though not often consciously recognized, is destructively guiding the direction of civilization and the whole natural world. Some of modern civilization's most fundamental myths, or "memes," that Quinn exposes and criticizes include: that there must be some one right way for all humans to live; that Earth was made especially for humans, who are destined to conquer and dominate it; that humans are innately flawed; and that humans are separate from and superior to nature (which Quinn has called "the most dangerous idea in existence"). Quinn also argues that civilization is, by definition, based on ever-greater expansion and thus unsustainable. He commonly explores the idea of humanity abandoning civilization as the dominant social structure, while looking towards indigenous tribal societies throughout time—primarily regarded by recent anthropological research as fairly egalitarian, ecologically well-adapted, and socially secure—as models to develop a new diversity of social structures that are in better alignment with the Earth's natural systems.

Quinn also notably challenges popular thinking about ecology and human population dynamics, claiming that, in these contexts, humanity as a whole predictably behaves like all other biological species, despite the fact that popular cultural thinking regards humans as separate from and above the rest of the community of life, due to civilization's fundamental sense of separation from, rather than belongingness in, nature. Quinn argues that as the world human population grows, the rest of the living community's biomass is directly injured through extinctions and die-offs. Since the Neolithic Revolution, Quinn posits, an exclusively agricultural, imperialistic way of life that denigrates and devalues the natural environment has increasingly come to characterize human societies, most of which have now either been destroyed or merged into a single massive global economy and culture.

Quinn often focuses on a ruthlessly human-centered driving force in modern agricultural practice, "totalitarian agriculture," that has fueled overpopulation in accord with a fundamental law of ecology: an increase in food availability for any isolated population yields an accompanying increase in the population's overall size. This population growth then continually surpasses what the original food increases can support, which mistakenly encourages even further agricultural expansion to feed the growing masses. Quinn identifies this as a vicious cycle, or "food race," and so he warns about human food and population dangers in a way often compared to how Thomas Robert Malthus famously did, though the nature of Quinn's warning is markedly different. Unlike Malthus, who warned that a continued increase in total human bodies would outpace the food generated to feed them, Quinn considers this assessment backwards, instead warning that feeding and overproducing humans is in fact continuing too successfully: in other words, successfully towards an ever-worsening state of overpopulation. Namely, overpopulation implies the massive destruction of biodiversity and thus weakening of the global ecosystem for all organisms involved, and, even more directly, overshooting the Earth's human carrying capacity will inevitably set up the whole human species for a global population crash, of which the civilized mainstream shows very little awareness or interest.

Quinn's conclusions on population also suggest the controversial idea that sustained food aid to starving nations is merely delaying and dramatically worsening massive starvation crises, rather than resolving such crises, as is commonly assumed. Quinn claims that reconnecting people to the food made available through their local habitats is a proven way to avoid famines and accompanying starvation. Some have interpreted this to mean that Quinn is resolving to let starving people in impoverished nations continue starving, which he has repeatedly refuted.

Quinn self-admittedly presents a lack of simplistic or universal solutions, though he strongly encourages a worldwide paradigm shift away from self-destructive memes and towards the values and organizational structures of tribalism, but not in the old style of ethnic tribalism so much as new groupings of individuals as equals trying to make a living communally, while still subject to evolution by natural selection; he has sometimes referred to this gradual shift as the "New Tribal Revolution." Quinn has noted that his admiration for the sustainable lifestyles of indigenous tribes is not intended to encourage a massive "return" to hunting and gathering so much as his acknowledging an enormous history of relative ecological harmony between humans and the environment, attributable to the tribe as an effective model for human societies.

Although Quinn himself regards the following associations as coincidental, his philosophy is sometimes considered related to deep ecology, dark green environmentalism, or anarcho-primitivism.

Quinn has been influential in developing a vocabulary for his philosophy; he has coined or popularized a variety of terms, including the following:

• Takers and Leavers — "Takers" refers to members of the dominant globalized civilization and its culture, while "Leavers" refers to members of the countless other non-civilized cultures existing both in the past and currently
• Mother Culture – a personification of any culture's inherently biased influences that are not perceived as biased by its members
• Food Race – the phenomenon of ongoing human overpopulation and its accompanying global catastrophes, in which the giving of more food to starving, growing populations paradoxically yields only still greater population growth and starvation
• Law of limited competition – a biological law that "defines the limits of competition in the community of life," according to which "you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them... access to food in general," meaning across-the-board; species that violate this law end up extinct
• Law of Life – the universal collection of all evolutionarily stable strategies
• Totalitarian Agriculture – today's dominant form of agriculture that "subordinates all other life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food," unsustainable because it generates enormous food supplies that in turn generate ever-greater human population booms
• The Great Forgetting – widespread historical ignorance regarding "the fact that we [humans] are a biological species in a community of biological species and are not exempt or exemptible from the forces that shape all life on this planet; this also includes our forgetting of the fact that most of human history has been based on an ecologically sound way of life (largely hunting and gathering)"
• Boiling frog – "a metaphor for so many circumstances in life when people are unwilling or unable to react effectively to crises that occur very gradually or imperceptibly," used especially by Quinn to refer to creeping normality in terms of escalating environmental degradation
• New Tribal Revolution – a hypothetical, sociocultural period of global change that Quinn supports, in which civilization would gradually begin to transform into a collection of more sustainable, tribal societies

Influence

Ishmael directly inspired the 1998 Pearl Jam album Yield (and particularly the song "Do the Evolution"), the name of the band Animals as Leaders, the ideology behind the 1999 drama film Instinct, and the 2007 documentary film What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. Quinn's writings have also influenced the filmmaker Tom Shadyac (who featured Quinn in the documentary I Am), as well as the entrepreneur Ray C. Anderson, founder of Interface, Inc. (the world's largest manufacturer of modular carpet), who began transforming Interface with more "green" initiatives. Actor Morgan Freeman's interest in the Ishmael trilogy inspired his involvement with nature documentaries, such as Island of Lemurs: Madagascar and Born to Be Wild, both of which he narrated, while adopting from Quinn the phrase "the tyranny of agriculture." Punk rock band Rise Against includes Ishmael on their album The Sufferer & the Witness' reading list.

Bibliography

• (1988) Dreamer
• (1992) Ishmael, Bantam, ISBN 0553375407
• (1996) The Story of B, Bantam, ISBN 0553379011
• (1996) Providence: The Story of a 50 Year Vision Quest (autobiography), Bantam, ISBN 0553375490
• (1997) My Ishmael, Bantam, ISBN 0553379658
• (1997) A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife (with Tom Whalen), Bantam, ISBN 0553379798
• (1999) An Animist Testament (audio cassette of Quinn reading The Tales of Adam and The Book of the Damned)
• (2000) Beyond Civilization, Broadway Books, ISBn 0609805363
• (2001) The Man Who Grew Young (graphic novel with Tim Eldred), Context, ISBN 1893956172
• (2001) After Dachau, Steerforth, ISBN 1581952155
• (2002) The Holy, Steerforth, ISBN 1581952147
• (2005) Tales of Adam, Steerforth, ISBN 1586420747
• (2006) Work, Work, Work, Steerforth, ISBN
• (2007) If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways, Steerforth, ISBN 1586421263
• (2010) Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril. (chapter) Nelson, Michael P. and Kathleen Dean Moore (eds.). Trinity University Press, ISBN 9781595340665
• (2012) At Woomeroo, CreateSpace, ISBN 1477599975
• (2014) The Invisibility of Success, CreateSpace, ISBN 1494930935
• (2014)The Teachings, CreateSpace, ISBN 1502356155

External links

• Ishmael.org – The Ishmael community, Daniel Quinn's official website
• The Friends of Ishmael Society
• Read Ishmael – a website devoted to encouraging people to read Ishmael
• Ishthink.org – thinking about Ishmael
• Daniel Quinn at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database