Ishmael will change how you view the world.

Or, if you’ve already shifted your view of the world, this may be the kind of book you give to a friend or family member when you get exasperated trying to explain the why’s and what-not’s of your world-view.

I’m being obtuse. Ishmael is about the story Western culture tells about how the world came to be the way it is. The book is structured primarily as a conversation between the narrator and a teacher in a modern-day type of Socratic dialogue. There is also a plot, but it’s a bit flimsy and very much secondary to the philosophical track of the conversation itself. To that end, the teacher is a gorilla- and this gorilla communicates with the narrator through telepathic conversation.

A little willful suspension of disbelief and you’re past that part. It may even serve to give the message of the book more credence because it’s not coming from the mouth of a human you can judge or put in a box. It may just be distracting and comical, as it has been to many of the students I taught this book to and some of the friends I’ve pushed it on.

The book begins with the narrator answering an ad for a Teacher seeking a Pupil with an “earnest desire to save the world”. If that already has your hippie-dreamer antennae going crazy, don’t worry, that’s exactly what the narrator is thinking. He ends up in an apartment in New York answering pointed questions as part of a journey into “mother culture” with Ishmael.

Along the way Ishmael manages to divide humans into “Takers,” cultures based on taking more than they need or exploiting the Earth, and “Leavers,” those who use what they need from nature and leave the rest. At this point in the history of the Earth, most everyone is a Taker and the voice of “mother culture” tells the Taker stories and myths.

In Ishmael’s story of the world, we have deluded ourselves into thinking that humans are the ultimate creation of evolution/ god, that the Earth is here to serve human desires and needs, and that we can just keep on going as we are forever without any consequences. He even digs into the Bible and various other Western culture cornerstones and tweaks their purpose and importance with historical and cultural context that we don’t hear much about.

So, is it a simple damning of modern capitalism or material culture? No. That’s in there, though. Is it a retelling of the “beautiful savage” view of the world? Again, not really, but there is plenty of that sentiment in there.

The real purpose of the book is to get you to realize that we are all caught up in a destructive cultural myth about how things came to be the way they are and why we should live the way we are living. It’s strength is illuminating these alternate perspectives, giving the reader a life-changing infusion of perspective. You’ll never think of the world the same way again. And that’s a good thing.

As it says on the cover: “An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit.”

Take the adventure.

Photo Credit: Dana Durell (via Flickr under CCL)