I didn’t like this book. I don’t usually finish books that I don’t like, but this one I had to finish just to make sure the author didn’t make any last minute defenses against my criticisms.
My main problem with this book is that it claims to be a novel but falls short in terms of plot and character development. Other philosophical fiction authors who I enjoy—Hesse, Coelho, Rand—all do a masterful job of developing characters and plot that could stand on their own as a novel, even without the philosophy. Ishmael could not stand on its own as a novel without the philosophy. The plot is essentially this: a man goes to meet a gorilla and has a conversation. That conversation contains Quinn’s philosophy.
Other than not being the novel which it claims to be, this is problematic also because the format of the work does not allow for the full fleshing out of philosophical claims as would be more achievable in an academic paper. For example, Quinn claims that Mother Culture (the term he uses to refer to the culture of our modern civilized society) offers “an axiom stating that there is no way to obtain any certain knowledge about how people ought to live.” This is just blatantly false. While it is true for some schools of thought (e.g., moral nihilism), and these schools of thought might seem to be growing, it is far from unanimously accepted throughout our entire culture. There are plenty who still argue for objective ethics. To make such a flippant claim about the whole of modern ethics, as Quinn does in this way, is enough reason to not take his philosophy seriously.
From a logical perspective, this false premise is one that Quinn then uses to go on building his argument. But you cannot build an argument from a false premise. I found there to be more than one false premise which had me ready to throw out the book altogether, knowing that whatever conclusion Quinn would reach would not be able to stand on its own legs.
A redeeming argument from Quinn’s side could be that he purposely uses the format of a dialogue-intensive novel to achieve an understanding in the reader that is unattainable for a more academic philosophical paper. In the book, Ishmael actually explains this process to the narrator. He says, “The journey itself is going to change you.” Here is the full quote:
“And when we’re finished, you’ll have an entirely new perception of the world and of all that’s happened here. And it won’t matter in the least whether you remember how that perception was assembled. The journey itself is going to change you, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.”
If I had to guess, I would say Quinn was really talking to the reader when he spoke these words through Ishmael. In fact, Ishmael seems to function mostly as a device through which Quinn speaks his philosophy. The reader takes the viewpoint of the narrator, as a student of Ishmael.
Now having finished the book and having a clearer picture of what Quinn was trying to achieve, I can understand why Quinn chose this format. His claims across history, religion, anthropology, and philosophy would have required hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence and argumentation to be supported appropriately (in the academic sense). Quinn does not have time for this, because the claim which he wishes to make, is that the world is dying, and we need to change our ways in order to save it. Maybe such an argument doesn’t need to be completely logical, if it seeks to achieve its aim, which is to encourage action in a large percentage of the world population, especially when we consider that a great number of people are more motivated by emotion than logic. For this reason, an academic paper would not have achieved Quinn’s aim, and he couldn’t have contained all the proper argumentation and evidence in a novel which he hoped that many of the common population would be able to read.
All in all, I didn’t like this book, but it still achieved its purpose with me. The journey itself changed me, like Ishmael said it would. I do believe there is a way for man to live. And it seems we stopped living that way around 10,000 years ago, at the time of the agricultural revolution. “Mankind was not needed to bring order to the world.” The world was already in order before man.