Daniel Quinn

Philosophy and themes

Daniel Quinn was largely a fiction writer who explored the culturally-biased world-view ("mythology", in his terms) driving modern civilization and the destruction of the natural world. He sought to recognize and criticize some of civilization's most unchallenged "myths" or memes, which he considered to include the following: that the Earth was made especially for humans, so humans are destined to conquer and rule it; that humans are innately and inevitably flawed; that humans are separate from and superior to nature (which Quinn called "the most dangerous idea in existence"); and that all humans must be made to live according to some one right way.

Other common themes included ecology, environmental ethics, culture, and an in-depth look at human population dynamics. Although Quinn himself regarded the following associations as coincidental, his philosophy is sometimes compared with deep ecology, dark-green environmentalism, or anarcho-primitivism.

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. Quinn worried that popular cultural thinking ignores this reality, instead regarding civilized humans as separate from and above any such law. He identified the Neolithic Revolution as the start of human overpopulation, when civilized peoples began to practice an imperialistic world-view that denigrates nature and that relies entirely upon expansionist farming ("totalitarian agriculture"), the human population growing in proportion to the decline of the rest of the world's biomass.

Quinn's warnings about population, especially in relation to food availability, have often been compared to the warnings of 19th-century economist Thomas Robert Malthus. However, while Malthus warned that excess human population precariously motivates an excess of food production in order to sustain that population, Quinn considered the priorities of this assessment backwards. He instead warned that excess population is the inevitable result of access to excess food for the human organism en masse just as surely as it is for any other species, a concept which he described as one of the "ABCs" of well-established ecology, professing that no ecologist argues with the law (inevitable growth in the face of food availability) except in the case of the human, which he stated was universally regarded an exceptionalism despite "10,000 years of evidence" to the contrary in the form of the history of human population growth coincident with the rise of agriculture and the mass production of foodstuffs in excess to the needs for survival.

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, which he claimed is causing the catastrophic loss of biodiversity planetwide, and, just as directly, an overshoot towards an eventual population crash, of which the civilized mainstream 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.

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 a result, he viewed modern civilization, by definition, as unsustainable. He commonly analyzed and defended the effectiveness of traditional indigenous tribal societies—regarded by anthropological research as fairly egalitarian, ecologically well-adapted, and socially secure —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 memes 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 unit of a tribe as an effective model for human societies (just as the pack works for wolves, the hive for bees, etc.).

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 globalized civilization and its culture, while "Leavers" refers to members of the countless other non-civilized cultures existing both in the past and currently. Quinn later regretted these terms, supposing that "hierarchical" and "tribal," respectively, may be better alternatives.
• Mother Culture – a personification of any culture's inherently biased influences 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
• The Great Forgetting – widespread historical ignorance regarding "the fact that we [humans] are a biological species in a community of biological species and are not exempt or exemptible from the forces that shape all life on this planet; this also includes our forgetting of the fact that most of human history has been based on an ecologically sound way of life (largely hunting and gathering)"
• 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

Food race

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, of which the former is fueled by the latter. Quinn argues that as the worldwide human population increases, the typical international response is to produce and distribute more food to feed these greater numbers of people. However, assuming that population increases according to increased food availability, Quinn argues that this response only ends up leading to an even larger population and thus greater starvation in the end. Quinn's solution to the food race—to stop producing so much food—is not generally a common-sense or intuitive response; instead he claims he is 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.

Basis

Quinn bases the food race on the premise that the total human population, like that of other animals, is influenced by food supply. Thus, larger populations are the result of more abundant food supplies, and intensification of food cultivation in response to population growth merely leads to still more population growth. Quinn compared this to the arms race in the Cold War. Like Garrett Hardin, Quinn believes any development to address food security will only lead to catastrophe.

Comparison to Malthusian catastrophe

The similarities between this concept and a Malthusian catastrophe are obvious, but Quinn states there are certain key differences. The primary problem in a Malthusian catastrophe is a population growing faster than the growth in food supply. Quinn states that population is a function of food supply, and not merely some independent variable. Quinn considers that problem is not a scarcity of food, but, rather, overpopulation. Quinn characterizes the Malthusian problem as "how are we going to FEED all these people?", and characterizes the "Quinnian problem" as "how are we going to stop PRODUCING all these people?"

Criticism

The idea that human population is tied to food supply is contentious, however. Many biologists disagree with Quinn's assessment. While food supply certainly imposes an upper limit on population growth, they point out that culture, living standards, human intelligence, and free will can impose lower, secondary limits to population growth. Critics also point out that the most significant population growth is occurring in the developing world, where regional food production is lowest. Meanwhile, the First World, where food is most plentiful, is undergoing a decline in birth rates. Quinn has suggested this results from international food distribution, claiming that the farms of the First World fuel population growth elsewhere. United Nations projections that the world population will level off sometime in the near future also contradict Quinn's statements. In 1998 Daniel Quinn and Alan D. Thornhill then of the Society for Conservation Biology made a video exploring these topics titled Food Production And Population Growth.

Influence

Ishmael directly inspired the 1998 Pearl Jam album Yield (and particularly the song "Do the Evolution"), 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, and the 2007 documentary film What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. Playwright Derek Ahonen has cited Quinn as the foremost influence on his play, The Pied Pipers of The Lower East Side, which attempts to dramatize the philosophies of New Tribalism.

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.