Books That Matter: Ishmael

The controversy surrounding Ishmael began even before its publication--it won the massive, one-time-only Turner Tomorrow Prize, and immediately the highly literary judges who chose it began to denounce the selection process. (They said it required them to give too much money to one book in a pool of titles they weren't over-the-top enthusiastic about.)

Personally, I remember my mom reading Ishmael as part of a book club when I was a little kid, but I didn't read it myself until college, when it was the chosen selection of a backpacking group I was involved in. I'm hesitant to include it on any list of "books that influenced me" because of its cultish appeal...it's one of those books, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or any Ayn Rand novel, that seems to pigeonhole you as a certain type the second you admit that it mattered to you.

Still, it did matter to me, because it was the first thing I read that really drove home the ethical implications of the idea that evolution is not directional. It wasn't until I read Ishmael, in other words, that I recognized that every time someone uses a phrase like "saves lives," they only mean "human lives"--and that, world as it is, saving human lives implies significant destruction of other forms of life, often at a permanent, species level that alters and destroys ecosystems.

This is where the "we can have it all" do-gooders jump in and say "We can save both! We can save human lives, and help the world, and if you save humans then, in the long run, environmental impacts decrease!" But that kind of optimism seems like an excuse not to confront the problem, so that while we wait for the (uncertain) effects of the environmental Kuznets curve to kick in, the world--the real world, not just the human world--disintegrates.

It made me realize that every "charitable" decision made to help another human being already contains a dangerously unexplored ethical decision, because it narrows charity to the species that needs it the least. Whatever you want to do in the face of that realization, I think it's important that people realize it. Unfortunately, most of today's philanthropists (a word that literally means, in Greek, "human lovers") cheerfully sweep it under the table.*

So I thank Ishmael for turning me into the kind of smart aleck who listens to your heartwarming description of some wonderful humanitarian, then raises a finger and says something like, "Excuse me, but it seems you're being anthropocentric. You only care about your own species, so even your idea of charity is secretly selfish." Then I smirk and walk away, because I'm even more self-righteously selfless than you are.

*See, for instance, this recent article by Peter Singer, who wonders whether people should stop reproducing...but only because he's worried about human suffering from climate change. (Any emphasis on suffering is a sign that the speaker is primarily worried about humans and human-like creatures, who suffer in ways recognizable to humans. Additionally, it seems like a minor tragedy that worrying about "climate change" has become almost synonymous with "environmentalism.") Or check out this profile of Melinda Gates and the Gates Foundation, where Bill Gates expresses concern about human overpopulation...only to forget about it at the first mention of a possible (and, I think, majorly inadequate) counterargument. Needless to say, both the Gates Foundation and Singer are considered revolutionary thinkers in the world of philanthropy--the Vogue profile notes that the Gates Foundation focuses on "problems that nobody else seems to care about"--and even they can't seem to get past a humans-only orientation. Sigh.