Daniel Quinn, Anyone?

I don't recall exactly how I stumbled onto reading Daniel Quinn recently. Earlier this summer, I think I was doing some research on the web about something and I came across Quinn's books, and I must have gotten my curiosity piqued enough that I ordered 3, all used, through Amazon.com. I wish right now that I remembered the link or the trigger that sparked my initial interest. It's one of those things that bugs you and it's likely that I will never locate the specific impetus. I'm not sure that it matters, but still, I'm curious.

I should say that I was introduced to Quinn's ideas--rather loosely--about five years ago, by two students, Justin Kay, and Tonia Klein. Klein had read "Ishmael" in one night and claimed that it revolutionized her thinking. Justin had been a total Quinn convert and focused his written and visual thesis on Quinn's ideas. Actually, Justin's transformation, as I recall, had accompanied some prettty serious life transitions. I do recall that Justin's thinking possessed some rare maturity and originality, steeped in integrity. Now he is a designer living in NYC

Back to Quinn.

So as I noted, I bought 3 of Quinn's books. I brought "Ishmael" to Bard this July and thought I might be able to read it there and on the plane. I think I started it, found the first few pages of mild interest, and then put it down once the gorilla (or ape, I don't recaall) was introduced. It just did not possess any compelling quality to it. It felt as if I could see and feel the fingerprints of artifice.

So, 3 months later, on a whim and desperate for something to read on our overnight stay in the Dells, I picked up "Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure," and started reading it in the Waterworks room of The Polynesian while Martha swam.

The book caught my attention through its opening argument. Like all books, I found that the opening triggered some rich thinking--this time, I was seeing clear connections between the ideas that Quinn presents on cultural change and the discussion we had had in the Call to Service course just the day before. We had been talking about the ideas of Marion Wright Edelman, and her proposed legislation to provide our neediest children with the educational and nutrional and medical support they need to ensure an early success in school. I was bothered by what a few of the students were suggesting, that they were dismissing her plans and her thinking without really engaging them. Their rejection did not bother me. What bothered me was their apparent cavalier rejection of her proposal before they really thought it through. The students who were seemingly rejecting her thinking were some of my brightest students. When I was reading Quinn's ideas of change, of how programmatic efforts are only reeds stemming the tide of a river, my mind buzzed. THAT was the students' complaint: that her proposal wouldn't solve all of the problems. They suggested--off the topic--that many of our problems were a result of overpopulation, an assessment, it seemed to me, that was wholly cynical and removed from any responsible action or any attempt to really understand the compelxity of the issues.

The students' response to Edelman caught me off guard, as this summer's students' response to her thinking caught me off guard. This summer, students couldn't get past her Christian ideology. Now they were simply dismissing her ideas because they were oversimplifying the problem, unwilling as they were to accept the scope of the problems Edelman is trying to address.

This recent group wanted a comprehensive package that covered everything. All or nothing.

I tried to explain how Edelman was an advocate, that she had a lifelong commitment to speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves. That she was an advocate for a particular group, and that by being an advocate she was making a conscious decision about what to target. She was speaking for those with no voice, who are invisible, who are disenfranchised.

The students did not seem to hear anything I was saying or suggesting.

Their response bothered me. I understood their thinking, but I did not get that they weren't swayed or sympathetic by Edelman's advocacy--that the whole idea of advocacy seemed to elude them, or was considered ineffective or unimportant.

So reading the initial ideas in Quinn's book triggered some ideas. I wrote up a response to the students on the course moodle.

Back to my original purpose, I have been reading "Beyond Civilization" in chunks, and finished the last 80 pages today. Actually, I scanned at least half of those 80 pages--something I do not like to do, especially when I have committed myself to a careful reading--because the second half of the book was so disappointing. Quinn sets up an interesting critique of civilization, one that allows him to offer up working in tribes as a solution. But when it comes to demonstrating how working in tribes could be revolutionary, he really flounders. He has no compelling examples, and his treatment of his examples is wholly surface-level. His apology for this, which simply seems a clever dodge, is that the book "has" no ending, that it is simply proffering a beginning! Also, that he doesn't want to provide too specific of examples of tribal life--the life we choose once we reject or leave behind civilization--because he wants us to discover that.

But really! C'mon! You have an idea, it's supposed to revolutionize our thinking, invite us to fundamentally reestructure or challenge our guiding assumptions, and then he says you take the wheel?

I need something more to sustain me. Not a map, but a hint of the richness of the territory that I am presumably about to explore. A challenge.

I was hugely disappointed. His ideas, which at first seemed provocative, now seem only mildly enthralling. As if there are light weights, in need of some serious thinking, that they need to be grounded in a mind that can offer a new way of thinking. Give me a glimmer of what the new world could be. I'll create the world, I promise, but show me what's at stake, give me some thinking with integrity, something I can chew on, brood on, carry with me.

i promise to make it mine and make it new.