With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla? With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man? Here are the fundamental questions posed by Ishmael, as expressed by the front and back of a poster belonging to a talking gorilla. Here, I want to explore the conversation on what the book calls “Takers” and “Leavers”, and what we would call, in loaded language, civilized and primitive cultures. In my view, these distinctions provide us with important insights into our relationships with the world, with our culture, and with one another. Beyond that, we can see what this has to do with disenfranchisement, both as individual, and as a culture. I don’t want this to sound like a book report, and beyond outlining the stories of the Takers and the Leavers, it shouldn’t.
This book has an interesting meta-context to it. The narrator takes the role of student to a gorilla. He is the voice of the reader, who is the moderately educated member of the Taker society. He talks in the beginning about his search for a teacher to show him how to live. This relates well to the premise of the philosophy the gorilla espouses, which is that the Taker culture, as ruler of the world, puts itself on the rest of the world, assimilating the world into its one way of living, asserting an extreme and violent will to power. The book also has some very interesting things to say on writing and the academy in general, but this isn’t the place for that, or at least I’m not interested in writing about it here.
Instead, I want to provide an outline of the way the book establishes the Leaver and Taker cultures. I’ll start with the Leaver culture. According to Ishmael’s (“Ishmael” being the name of both the book and the speaking gorilla that provides what we can take as the book’s argument in a form of midwifery, both because of the name and because of the compellingly simple and familiar structure of the writing) version of history, which is the living embodiment of a still unfolding story, the Leavers have been here as hunter gatherers with some mix of agriculturalists since the dawn of man, or the dawn of the homo sapiens sapiens, about three million years ago. They write and live out one of the two stories of man, which has stayed on the same plain all this time.
Their story is based on the premise that “man belongs to the world.” Because of this, they see themselves as no different from any other animals in the world, believing they are to live under the same laws of the “community of life”. These laws can be reduced to the maxim that “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 other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.” Ishmael assures his pupil that the people who enact this story are not any more at the whims of nature than we are, and do not run some great risk of starvation or spend their full day at work, but instead they are well fed and spend minimal time at what we would consider working.
On the other hand, the story of the Takers is based on the premise that “the world belongs to man”. The idea here, though, is that the Taker culture took up a story- one which it cannot fully understand- for itself first told about it by the Leavers. This consists of two parts: the story of Adam and the tree, and the story of Cane and Abel. Ishmael provides a slightly different story of Adam and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In this version, the gods debate allowing Adam to eat from the tree. They fear that Adam, endowed with the knowledge of good and evil, will not have the wisdom to handle it appropriately, and will conclude, “Whatever I can justify doing is good and whatever I cannot justify doing is evil.” They see that the day Adam eats the fruit of the tree will be the day of his death, as he will devour the entire world and ultimately devour himself. For this reason, they forbid him from the tree. It is that the gods forbid this knowledge from Adam rather than thrust it upon him that suggests to Ishmael that this story is not a story of the Taker culture’s making.
Another aspect of this story is that Adam is given the fruit by Eve. The names here are key, Adam meaning “man” and Eve meaning “life”. Thus, man is tempted to eat the fruit by life, or the ability to reproduce in larger numbers. In the community of life, though, when one species grows its numbers it must grow its food supply, which results in a lot of death and carnage and through a chain of events, the massacre of the ecological system as a whole. It is this destruction of his world, on which he is dependant, which is his own destruction.
The story of Cane and Abel, Ishmael insists, is a story inherited by the Hebrews which they also cannot fully understand. The assertion is that the story is of the rise and spread of the Taker civilization and its brutal destruction and assimilation of those Leaver Cultures that surround it. Its being told by a Leaver culture, specifically the Semites, explains why Cane’s gift is rejected. It is rejected in opposition to Abel’s gift – an affirmation of the Leaver way of life. In a sort of Gadamerian hermeneutic, Ishmael posits that this is a living story as a way of calling for responsibility, for reflection and for action. The call is to stop the brutal murder of Abel.
Ishmael goes on to espouse Foucault’s allegory for society as a prison, claiming that we are captive to the society, the bars of which we cannot find. He claims that what is at stake in this search is “[our] captivity and the captivity of the world”. This serves as a kind of updated version of the allegory of the cave. “If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in,” he says, “the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.” He sites as his example the pseudo-counter-culture revolution of the 60’s, claiming, “The revolt hadn’t been put down, it had just dwindled away into a fashion statement”. The interesting thing of this is that even the rich and powerful among society do not have the authority of warden or even guard in this prison. Rather, they are simply atop the inmate hierarchy, still subject to the rules and incarceration of their jail.
Having explained the two stories of man, we should again consider the premises on which they are founded. The Leaver story is founded on the premise that “man belongs to the world”. If man belongs to the world, then man is subject to the world, is “in the hands of the gods,” and must live under the laws of the gods and their world. He has no right - inherent, natural, or what have you – to rule over the world, and his place is not above but in the world, not first, but, according to Ishmael, also not last. He, like other animals, is an integral part of an evolving ecosystem that promotes life itself.
The Taker story has a very different sound to it. Built on the premise that “the world belongs to man,” it calls man to reign over the world, to play god; to decide what lives and what dies. There is another aspect of this story that relates well to the way man in Taker culture views himself. When he tells the story of evolution, it begins with the creation of the universe, moves to the earth, and on to the rise of life, which culminates and suddenly comes to an end with the arrival of man. This certainly does seem to suggest a formidable possibility of stagnation in the world, as it, like the rest of this worldview, fails to acknowledge the unequivocal importance of diversity in evolution and ecology. Without a wide range of species, life itself is at a much greater risk of extinction. The book, while never pushing it in the way one expects it to, suggests this mindset is responsible for the Holocaust. The themes are there: the view that man decides who lives and who dies, man’s self-defeating self-justification, and a critical disregard for the laws of the community of life.
Here I find myself something of an apologist for the Taker story, as I think it isn’t done proper justice in this account. The book fundamentally fails to acknowledge the very real and obvious distinctions between man and other animals. It also continuously refers to “the gods” as though we are made in their image, while I would posit the gods are made in our image. Making the gods in our image does numerous things that flush out what distinguishes us from other animals.
First, we have language. This allows us to communicate in a way that passes information from one generation to the next, which is an equiprimordial aspect of culture and society-building. It also allows us to communicate over vast distances. Indeed, we are able to spread ourselves over the world because of our ability to communicate, and because of the another thing language provides us; naming power.
Our ability to name things is what gives us reign over the beasts of the world. It is what makes “them” “beasts” and what makes “us” “us”. It is the authority of the gods. Adam – man – names the animals in paradise. It is his assigned task, assigned to him by the gods. The gods themselves we have named the gods. In our mythology, with its distinguished monotheistic God – an elder white man of great beard and phallic cane – we are in the image of God, but this can easily be seen as a metaphor for our fathers and the culture they bring us into and finally leave us to serve and to cultivate. We have mythologized ourselves with stories of very human gods who have our faults and our extraordinary power to mold the world in which we live. Even the gods in Ishmael’s story of Adam practice the uniquely human work of reason. With our mighty wealth of intellect, we are called – granted, by ourselves – to be stewards of the world.
This role, though, and the worldview that it at least appears to espouse, without doubt raises issues that ultimately provoke the possibility of a potent disenfranchisement, both for the individual and for all of his kind.
In Erikson’s terminology, this expresses a self-over-world psychology; a terminal illness leaving one in a hell of his own creation. However, it does not necessarily imply that end. If the Taker society takes up more of a Heideggerian approach he does not necessarily dig his own grave. While I feel the book and its advancement of the Leaver perception of the world underestimates man’s special place in the world, it does raise an exceptionally important point about man’s disregard for what it calls the law of the community of life (“You may compete but you may not wage war”). Man does have the power of the gods. He is, even, the creator of the gods. However, he is also in the world and with the world. He is deeply intertwined in the nexus of life that makes up his world. If he recognizes this – while he is still called to be the steward of the earth – he must acknowledge his colossal responsibility for and to the world. This would assemble a new kind of thinking for Taker society without completely disregarding and up heaving his history and what is possibly his nature, if we can speak to that at all.
What, though, is the relationship between all this and disenfranchisement? Assuming we take on the man-over-world mentality – Heidegger’s techno mind-set – in its full manifestation, we can return to the prison allegory. The relationship of the convict with disenfranchisement plays itself out very plainly in our laws. We must first recall that disenfranchisement is something more than a sense of a lack of control, but rather, is by definition a loss of one’s right to vote. While this loss of voting rights represents a loss of freedom itself, we can also recall that the only people of age in our society without voting rights are convicts. This is a very open playing out of a story that reads, “You can speak so long as you follow the rules. Once you act out of line, you are not allowed to speak anymore”. Of course, the story we do not show so obviously is that we are all imprisoned in a system of consumption which none of us control. We are, again, captive within imperceptible bars.
A culture of man with this posturing towards the world has the very real potential to obliterate the world, as well as him. But what about what it does for individuals in this society on a person-to-person basis? It leaves man bored with his work of consumption, anxious to act, and filled with vigorous desire for existence thwarted by an overbearing culture of inertia that isolates him from his cubicle mate. It is the anxiety of a man eight hours in front of a screen who has feet to dance and arms to flail. When this man takes up this self-over-world psychology towards his brother or sister he isolates himself not only from the surrounding community of life outside his species, but from mankind as well. He wraps himself in a separate world in which the good is what he can justify himself doing and he will stop at no end to rationalize his actions. He grows sick, moves underground, and excommunicates himself from society, from the world. Holderin, however, proclaims, “But where the danger is,/ Grows the saving power also”.
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