Ishmael II

I found Ishmael’s reading of Genesis to be extremely provocative. I think a crucial element to keep in mind when attempting to approach his reading of Genesis is to analyze it with the right methodology. Daniel Quinn does not advance his argument with the intention of uprooting decades of anthropological and historical analysis of Biblical texts. Rather, Quinn’s project should be analyzed in terms of how useful it is for establishing a counter-history of society. Ishmael acknowledges himself that “many of these people had their own tales to tell of this revolution, their own ways of explaining how these people from the Fertile Crescent came to be the way they were” (175). This seems to acknowledge the entirely subjective and arbitrary nature of the Old Testament texts, with their origins in the spoken word tradition of history. As a result, it would be foolish to assume that Ishmael strives for historical accuracy. Despite this different lens that I used to examine Ishmael’s re-reading of Genesis, I still have my apprehensions. It seems pretty self-evident that the elements of society that propagate the environmental exploitation that Ishmael is concerned with (Statist bureaucracies and profit-driven corporations) are largely secularized. Their rationality is hardly contingent on myths espoused millennia ago. They are informed by normalized discourses, many of which are the product of Western Enlightenment’s renunciation of any thought separate from Reason.

Adam and Eve

I also felt like the passage about ‘the crash’ was an extremely important section of the assigned reading. Ishmael is correct in pointing out the flawed logic of optimists who claim that “we must have faith in our craft” because “it has brought us this far in safety” (109). While these ideologues of the status quo utilize flawed logic, this does not necessarily suggest that a Malthusian world view is safe or productive. This paragraph becomes almost scary when Ishmael invokes fear-mongering rhetoric: “Five billion of you pedaling away—or ten billion or twenty billion—can’t make it fly. It’s been in free fall from the beginning, and that fall is about to end” (109). Ishmael’s invocation of Malthusian discourses still reinstates “the spatial code of modernization theory which draws a line between developed and underdeveloped regions” (323). Although this line-drawing may appear neutral, it has insidious implications for Western development policies. As a result of neo-Malthusian discourses, the motivation for development policy “is not so much the quest for food of hungry millions that demands the dismantling of traditional agriculture in the name of political stability, but rather the pressure of these faceless masses on more or less pristine ecosystems in remote areas” (330). It is evident how such discourses justify “discriminatory land policies and “coercive conservation”” being imposed upon the Third World by Western countries (331). The ability for Ishmael (and thereby Daniel Quinn’s philosophies) to be coopted by other neo-Malthusians becomes apparent as many of them publicly “maintain that “nothing less than the kind of commitments so recently invested in the Cold War” is needed to halt current trends” (331). I agree that both Ishmael and Daniel Quinn would oppose such coercive policies being imposed by the West. However, the discourses deployed by Ishmael have empirically been used to justify such neo-colonialist phenomena. Perhaps framing the problem in a less catastrophic context would avoid such repercussions for policymaking. After all, what empirical evidence does Ishmael possess to warrant his claim that the crash is coming? Scientific evidence is inconclusive about many aspects of the resource scarcity debate, with the likes of Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich unable to entirely refute arguments from books by Julian Simon and Bjørn Lomborg. Until there is more evidence that a real catastrophe is at hand, dangerous discourses must be interrogated in order to prevent the needless suffering of human beings.

Malthus is no match for Bjorn Lomborg's beautiful eyes/hair/face/body

Michael Flitner and Volker Heins. “Modernity and Life Politics: Conceptualizing the Biodiversity Crisis”. Political Geography: 21 (2002).