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I've just finished "Ishmael", and I'm a quarter of the way through "The Story of B". Tonight I was Googling around to see what others had written about the books, and I thought, "Oh yeah, there's that "Seekers" board on DU that I've checked in on once or twice. I'll go do a search over there and see if anybody's mentioned Quinn." And I open the page, and the very top thread says "Teacher seeks pupil..." I swear I heard distant laughter.
In finally discovering Quinn's work, I feel like I've picked up a pretty piece of rock, turned it over and found myself staring at the Rosetta stone.
I've had the feeling for the last 3 years that I've been putting together a jigsaw puzzle without having the picture on the box cover to help make sense of the pattern. I've spend my life as a dualist, reductionist materialist. Human ingenuity was the keystone of existence, and our civilization was its apotheosis. Then I finally accepted the truth about man-made climate change, and from there I discovered Peak Oil. That pretty much put an end to the "transcendent cleverness of man" conceit. From there it was a frictionless slide into the mouth of Hell. Pollution, fresh water depletion, desertification, droughts and extreme weather events, the death of the oceans, the loss of 200 species a day, looming food shortages and the impending collapse of the global economy. It didn't take a genius to realize that all these ravens of doom were coming home to roost simultaneously, and the consequences seemed both inevitable and catastrophic. What the fuck was going on?
I was finally pulled out of a two-year existential depression through a spiritual insight that I at first mistook for pantheism. Being a 57 year old third-generation atheist and humanist I was uncomfortable with the name, but the sense of the sacredness of unity and man's place as a part of it, rather than apart from it, resonated very strongly. Six months later I realized that I'd spontaneously discovered the principles of Deep Ecology. That was a relief - it got rid of the pesky "-theism" business and let me concentrate on the unity of humanity and nature. I found further hope in the idea that millions of small, independent, local environmental and social justice groups throughout the world formed "Gaia's antibodies" -- an idea that was set down by environmentalist Paul Hawken in his book "Blessed Unrest".
All that was pretty cold comfort though, because it still left the nagging question of human nature. How did things get this way? Are we in fact flawed creatures, genetically condemned by the malignant convergence of our evolved neuropsychology and a brain that's "twice too clever and not half wise enough" to rape, plunder and pillage until every corner of the planet is condemned through our activities? If that nature is truly encoded in our genes then we are doomed, and much of the planet's life along with us.
That was how I saw things for a long and bleak time. Then for Valentine's day my girlfriend (who apparently knows all this stuff already, for some mysterious gender-linked reason) bought me "Ishmael", "My Ishmael" and "The Story of B" as a gift. Reading "Ismael" was an indescribable experience. The hallmark of a particular kind of genius is that their ideas are so straight-forward that when you first read them you say, "Well of course. So?" That was how I felt. Until I realized that the ordinary-looking little key I'd just been handed actually fit the lock in the door that had been keeping me imprisoned for so long. One gentle turn and tug, and the light shone in.
As Quinn points out (in ways that made me want to smack my forehead like Homer Simpson, "D'oh!"), we are not genetically programmed to be hierarchical, competitive, expansionary, consumptive, over-individuated automata (whether you see such behaviour as a good thing or not). Our institutions -- from our economic and political systems, to our educational systems, our media, our childhood bedtime stories, right down to our very languages themselves -- express, shape and reinforce these values so thoroughly and unremittingly that they seem to be intrinsic to our very cells. Quinn showed me that this feeling of inevitability doesn't signify Truth, but only Culture -- 10,000 years worth of culture aimed at imprinting on every person alive the idea that Man Rules All.
And if our behaviour just comes from Culture, and not Truth, that means it can be changed. It means there is a possible future for us besides the end-states of extinction or gray goo. It even means that possible future could actually be pretty fine -- well, so long as you redefine "fine" a bit and accept the price we'll have to pay to get there. And that's good enough for me.
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