If you are close to my age, you might remember reading Ishmael when you were in your 30s or 40s.  The novel by Daniel Quinn won the Tomorrow Fellowship in 1992, a prize created by Ted Turner and awarded (only once) for fiction offering “creative and positive solutions to global problems.”  It is a readable book and lovely in its conception.

Ishmael is an elderly gorilla who communicates through telepathy and has a novel way of looking at human history and where “it all went wrong.”  He posits that mankind took a fatal turn when they turned into “Takers” rather than “Leavers,” several thousand years ago in the fertile crescent.  He retells the Genesis story as a prophecy of how humans started on a trajectory that would end up destroying humankind and much of the world around us.  He never mentions Faust, but it is definitely the story of a Faustian bargain – according to which we are granted the knowledge and mastery of our lives and of the earth.  Anything is permitted if it makes life easier for humans.  But, as in any Faustian bargain, there is a cost.

I was impressed with Ishmael in my 40s and am still intrigued and impressed in my 70s.  While you can argue with many of Quinn’s conclusions, Ishmael is a rare phenomenon – a totally fresh look at what humans call “progress.”  In these days of AI and a return to a nuclear arms race, I am thinking about this more and more.

The whole notion of progress is different when you are old.  At the time I first read Ishmael – still in my prime, raising kids, building a career, learning new technologies – my world was progressing and I was progressing too.  We all jogged, took up Pilates and yoga, ate yogurt, and were convinced that ours was the generation that would never age or turn into shrunken old people. In my 70s, I realize that – from a bodily standpoint and notwithstanding all our efforts to the contrary – progress is eventually replaced by regress. One hopes for plateaus rather than higher and higher levels of function – and one fears for the abyss. Whether or not the world around us is “progressing,” we are doing something else.

For the past few decades, we elders told ourselves that while we aren’t keeping up with technology (partly because we might not want to), we still had some basic skills and experience which had some worth – experience, verbal and mathematical literacy, a developed sense for human interaction.  Artificial intelligence seeks to replace those things, and while I still believe it cannot, there is some heavy betting that it can.

Our faith in the progress of the world around us has likewise been undermined by reality; “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”  That is what Quinn’s book is about.  And when I read Ishmael again, I saw his argument from a much different standpoint.  I had gotten old and the world had gotten damaged.

Here is his argument (but please read the book).  At some point (and Quinn places that point ten millennia ago), humanity took a step in the wrong direction, mostly through the growth of what he calls aggressive agriculturalism – which led to one culture replacing other more sustainable cultures through the seizure of lands and spectacular population growth.  (There is much more to the story, of course.) And now the greatest threat we have as a species is…ourselves.  I would hardly call that progress.

Even for us Sputnik kids, science no longer looks like a source of unqualified progress – is AI an achievement or a threat?  Ecological damage which, truthfully, we were pretty blind to in the 1950s and 60s, has become so obvious that it is amazing that so many people are still resisting the facts.  The world population has progressed in numbers – from about 2.5 billion when I was born to over 8.3 billion (think about it!), but this can hardly be called progress by the millions scrambling for sustenance on this planet. But every time the notion of progress (as we have defined it since the Enlightenment) is challenged, our culture just doubles down.  Think of the denial of climate change or the recent disagreement between the Pentagon and Anthropic over whether there should be any guardrails on AI.

Chesterton complained that “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”  Do we even have a vision? Is it a sustainable vision?  Are emotion and commerce (or more specifically commerce using the impetus of emotion) changing the goal to meet the product?  Spinoza said that progress happened when we went from being dominated by the emotions and were guided by the rational, by the thing that makes us human.  I have seen little sign of this lately.  And a couple of days ago we all woke up to the news of yet another war in the Middle East.  No matter how you define progress, it does not feel like this is it.

Early in Ishmael, there is this exchange between Ishmael (who speaks telepathically because, of course, gorillas can’t talk) and the unnamed narrator.  It is worth thinking about.

“Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?”
“As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.”
“And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. Why don’t you stop?”
I shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know how.”
“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

Our “civilization system” is looking rocky from the perch of old age.  Our generation is grappling with its deeply rooted faith in progress in ways that previous generations maybe did not.

Once we could console ourselves with the thought that we had left our progeny a better world, even though our personal world and body were falling apart.  Our generation has no such consolation.  And we cannot comfort ourselves that it will be better for our children.  Our children are not doing as well as we were at their age, and it looks even worse for our grandchildren.  In general, they are not as well educated – language and math scores are at their lowest point in two decades – and their prospects for good jobs, home ownership, debt relief, and eventually a comfortable retirement, seem dim indeed.

And it is made worse by our cultish attachment to the concept of “progress.”  The stock market goes up, Silicone Valley comes out with a new gadget, we can stream anything anytime – we follow the breadcrumbs and never think that we might end up at the witch’s house.

Anyway, these were all things I thought about when I reread Ishmael in my old age, and I am pretty sure they were more coherent thoughts than I had when I first read it in my forties.  So maybe I have made some kind of progress.