So maybe there is something viral about the particular belief systems propelling the expansion out of the Fertile Crescent. On the other hand, some civilizations (Maya, Hohokam, e.g.) appear to have ended their agricultural experiments, and these same people tended not to proselytize their “best” way of life to surrounding neighbors. I think of it more as a nearly inevitable “game theory” result of the possibly inevitable choice to adopt grain agriculture as the primary means of feeding ourselves (see the Ride of Our Lives post). A Few Caveatsīefore diving into the good stuff, I’ll point out a few areas where I have reservations about the book.įirst, I don’t see our flawed model for how to live on this planet as the result of one inexplicably viral seed that spread from the Fertile Crescent to infect the planet. Perhaps the quickest route runs through your library, rather then FedEx. My best recommendation is to set this post aside until you’ve had a chance to read it yourself. I want to encourage others to read the book, so will only relay a sense of the content here. In this post, I synthesize a set of ten principles that capture my current thinking, unambiguously fortified and sharpened by the teachings in Ishmael. But the novel framed these realizations in an elegant way that I never could have done, added a healthy dose of ideas I had not considered, and on the whole brought me to a state of newfound clarity. What he said… I think I was particularly struck by the resonance with many of the conclusions I had reached on my own, as was sketched in the last post. I finally read the book last summer (2022), and…wow yeah. A few friends over the years recommended the book to me, but not having much bandwidth for books at the time, the recommendations failed to percolate up the priority list for a while. To me and to a cadre of others, Ishmael is a wise teacher in the form of a gorilla.Ī 1992 novel by Daniel Quinn, titled Ishmael, burst out of the gate already graced with a half-million-dollar prize. To others, Ishmael is the eldest son of Abraham-of biblical fame-cast aside for the favored son Isaac. To many, the name Ishmael brings to mind the narrator of the classic novel Moby Dick.
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