Daniel Quinn

Daniel Clarence Quinn (October 11, 1935 – February 17, 2018) was an American author (primarily, novelist and fabulist), cultural critic, and 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 criticized this term for portraying the environment as separate from human life, thus creating a false dichotomy, and the mainstream environmental movement as misguided and ultimately ineffective. Instead, Quinn referred to 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 the University of Vienna, through IES Abroad, and at Loyola University Chicago, receiving a bachelor's degree in English 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 went into publishing, abandoned his Catholic faith, and married twice unsuccessfully, before marrying Rennie MacKay Quinn, his third and final wife of 42 years.

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. Several judges disputed giving the entire $500,000 award to Quinn for Ishmael, rather than dividing the money among several authors, though judge Ray Bradbury, for one, supported the decision. Ishmael became the first of a loose trilogy of novels by Quinn, including The Story of B and My Ishmael, all of which brought increasing fame to Quinn throughout the 1990s. He became a well-known author to followers of the environmental, simple living, and anarchist movements, although he did not strongly self-identify with any of these.

Quinn traveled widely to lecture and discuss his books. While response to Ishmael was mostly very positive, Quinn's ideas have inspired the most controversy with a claim mentioned in Ishmael but made much more forcefully in The Story of Bs Appendix that the total human population grows and shrinks 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 video elaborating in-depth the science behind the ideas he describes in his fiction.

Quinn's book Tales of Adam was released in 2005 after a long bankruptcy scuffle with its initial 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 autobiography, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest. that humans are separate from and superior to nature (which Quinn called "the most dangerous idea in existence");

Quinn described civilization as primarily a single global economy and culture, whose total dependence on agriculture requires ever-more expansion, in turn generating ever-more population growth (an escalating vicious cycle he identifies as the "food race"). —as role models for developing a new diversity of workable human social structures in the future.

Quinn self-admittedly avoided presenting simplistic or universal solutions, though he strongly encouraged a worldwide paradigm shift away from the self-destructive myths of civilization and towards the values and organizational structures of a "new tribalism". He clarified that this did not refer to 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 eventually named this hypothetical, gradual shift the "New Tribal Revolution". Quinn cautioned that his admiration for the sustainable lifestyles of indigenous tribes is not intended to encourage a massive "return" to hunting and gathering. Rather, he intended merely to acknowledge the enormous history of relative ecological harmony between humans and the rest of the environment (from which humans are never separate) and embrace the basic natural unit of a tribe as an effective model for human societies (just as the pack works for wolves, the hive works for bees, etc.).

Population and food

Quinn notably claimed that the total population of humans, like all living things, grows and shrinks according to a basic ecological law: an increase in food availability for any population yields an accompanying increase in the population's overall size. Thus, growing more food to stave off a starvation crisis only leads to more people and thus an expectation to grow even more food. Quinn worried that popular cultural thinking ignores this reality, instead regarding civilized humans as separate from and above any such law. the human population growing in proportion to the decline of the rest of the world's biomass.

According to Quinn, the success of this totalitarian style of agriculture is unsustainable because we "kill all of our competitors for food" and even kill our "competitors once-removed" by attacking all of our favorite food species' competitors or predators, which he described as "practically holy work for our farmers: kill everything that you can't eat. Kill everything that eats what you eat", and so on, yielding a catastrophic loss of biodiversity and, just as directly, overshoot towards an eventual human population crash, of which the dominant culture worldwide shows very little anticipation or interest.

Quinn's conclusions on population also imply the controversial notion 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 claimed 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 was resolving to let starving people in impoverished nations continue starving, an interpretation that Quinn repeatedly refuted.

Quinn coined the term food race (by analogy to the Cold War's nuclear arms race) to describe his concept of a perpetually escalating crisis of growing human population due to growing food production, which fuels an ever-escalating population. Quinn's solution to the food race—to stop producing so much food—is not generally a common-sense or intuitive response; instead he recommends counter-intuitive or "outside-the-box" thinking.

Russell Hopfenberg has written at least two papers attempting to prove Quinn's ideas, one paper with David Pimentel titled Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply and Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability. Hopfenberg has also made a narrated slide show titled World Food and Human Population Growth.

Terminology

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

Takers and Leavers: "Takers" refers to members of the dominant, modern, globalized civilization and its culture, while "Leavers" refers to members of countless other cultures, without civilizational elements, existing both in the past and currently (for instance, indigenous foraging band societies and partly pastoral societies). Quinn later regretted these terms, supposing that "hierarchical" and "tribal," respectively, may be better alternatives.
Mother Culture: the personification of any culture's inherently biased elements and internalized stories 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
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, tribally-organized societies and the Chicano Batman song "The Taker Story" on their 2017 album Freedom is Free. In 2019 The Mammals, a folk band including Mike Merenda & Ruth Ungar, released Nonet with many of the songs on it inspired by Ishmael and other Quinn books, most especially Beyond Civilization. North Carolina's vegan hardcore band Undying has been heavily influenced by the work of Daniel Quinn.

Quinn's writings have also influenced the filmmaker Tom Shadyac (who featured Quinn in the documentary I Am); 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; as well as some of the ideology behind the 1999 drama film Instinct,

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, and its sequel, My Ishmael, inspired the name of the band Animals as Leaders.

Bibliography

(1982) The Book of the Damned Part One, Part Two and Part Three Hard Rain Press, PO Box 5495, Santa Fe, NM 87502
(1988) Dreamer CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
(1992) Ishmael, Bantam,
(1996) The Story of B, Bantam,
(1996) Providence: The Story of a 50 Year Vision Quest (autobiography), Bantam,
(1997) My Ishmael, Bantam,
(1997) A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife (with Tom Whalen), Bantam,
(1999) An Animist Testament (audio cassette of Quinn reading The Tales of Adam and The Book of the Damned)
(2000) Beyond Civilization, Broadway Books,
(2001) The Man Who Grew Young (graphic novel with Tim Eldred), Context,
(2001) After Dachau, Steerforth,
(2002) The Holy, Steerforth,
(2005) Tales of Adam, Steerforth,
(2006) Work, Work, Work, Steerforth, ISBN
(2007) If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways, Steerforth,
(2010) Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril. (chapter) Nelson, Michael P. and Kathleen Dean Moore (eds.). Trinity University Press,
(2012) At Woomeroo, CreateSpace,
(2014) The Invisibility of Success, CreateSpace,
(2014) The Teachings, CreateSpace,

Notes

Works cited

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
Archived videos on YouTube