Daniel Clarence Quinn | |
|---|---|
 Quinn in 2016 | |
| Born | (1935-10-11)October 11, 1935[1] Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. |
| Died | February 17, 2018(2018-02-17) (aged 82) Houston, Texas, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Website | |
| ishmael | |
Daniel Clarence Quinn (October 11, 1935 – February 17, 2018) was an American author (primarily,novelist andfabulist),[2]cultural critic,[3] and publisher ofeducational texts, best known for his novelIshmael, which won theTurner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated withenvironmentalism, though he criticized this term for portraying the environment as separate from human life, thus creating afalse dichotomy, and the environmental movement as misguided and ultimately ineffective.[4] Instead, Quinn referred to his philosophy as "newtribalism".[5]
Daniel Quinn was born inOmaha, Nebraska, where he graduated fromCreighton Preparatory School. He went on to study atSaint Louis University, at theUniversity of Vienna,Austria, throughIES Abroad, and atLoyola University, receiving a bachelor's degree in Englishcum laude in 1957. He delayed part of this university education, however, while apostulant at theAbbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani inBardstown, Kentucky, where he hoped to become aTrappistmonk;[6] however his spiritual director,Thomas Merton, prematurely ended Quinn's postulancy. Quinn went into publishing, abandoned hisCatholic faith, and married twice unsuccessfully,[7] before marrying Rennie MacKay Quinn, his third and final wife of 42 years.[8]
In 1975, Quinn left his career as a publisher to become afreelance writer. He is best known for his bookIshmael (1992), which won theTurner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991. Several judges disputed giving the entire $500,000 award to Quinn forIshmael, rather than dividing the money among several authors, though judgeRay Bradbury, for one, supported the decision.[9]Ishmael became the first of a loose trilogy of novels by Quinn, includingThe Story of B andMy Ishmael, all of which brought increasing fame to Quinn throughout the 1990s. He became a well-known author to followers of theenvironmental,simple living, andanarchist movements, although he did not strongly self-identify with any of these.[10]
Quinn traveled widely to lecture and discuss his books. While response toIshmael was mostly very positive, Quinn's ideas have inspired the most controversy with a claim mentioned inIshmael but made much more forcefully inThe Story of B's Appendix that thetotal human population grows and shrinks according to food availability and with the catastrophic real-world conclusions he draws from this.[11]
In 1998, Quinn collaborated with environmental biologist Alan D. Thornhill in producingFood Production and Population Growth, a video elaborating in-depth the science behind the ideas he describes in his fiction.[12]
Quinn's bookTales of Adam was released in 2005 after a long bankruptcy scuffle with its initial publisher. It is designed to be a look through theanimist's eyes in seven short tales; Quinn first explores the idea ofanimism as the original worldwide religion and as his own dogma-free belief system inThe Story of B and his autobiography,Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest.[6]
In February 2018, Quinn died ofaspiration pneumonia inhospice care.[8]
Daniel Quinn was largely afiction writer who explored theculturally-biasedworld-view ("mythology", in his terms) drivingmodern civilization and the destruction of thenatural world.[13] He sought to recognize and criticize some of civilization's most unchallenged "myths" ormemes, which he considered to include the following: that the Earth was made especially for humans, so humans are destined to conquer and rule it; that humans are innately and inevitably flawed;[10][14] that humans are separate from and superior to nature (which Quinn called "the most dangerous idea in existence");[15] and that all humans must be made to live according to someone right way.[16]
Other common themes includedecology,environmental ethics,culture, and an in-depth look at humanpopulation dynamics. Although Quinn himself regarded the following associations as coincidental, his philosophy is sometimes compared withdeep ecology,dark-green environmentalism, oranarcho-primitivism.[10][15][17]
Quinn notably claimed that the total population of humans, like all living things, grows and shrinks according to a basic ecological law: an increase in food availability for any populationyields an accompanying increase in thepopulation's overall size.[18] Quinn worried thatpopular cultural thinking ignores this reality, instead regarding civilized humans as separate from and above any such law.[10] He identified theNeolithic Revolution as the start ofhuman overpopulation, when civilized peoples began to practice animperialistic world-view that denigrates nature and that relies entirely upon expansionist farming ("totalitarian agriculture"),[19] the human population growing in proportion to the decline of the rest of the world'sbiomass.[10]
Quinn's warnings about population, especially in relation to food availability, have often been compared to thewarnings of 19th-century economistThomas Robert Malthus.[20] However, while Malthus warned that excess human population precariously motivates an excess of food production in order to sustain that population, Quinn considered the priorities of this assessment backwards. He instead warned that excess population is the inevitableresult of access to excess food for the human organismen masse just as surely as it is for any other species, a concept which he described as one of the "ABCs" of well-established ecology, professing that no ecologist argues with the law (inevitable growth in the face of food availability)except in the case of the human, which he stated was universally regarded anexceptionalism despite "10,000 years of evidence" to the contrary in the form of the history of human population growth coincident with the rise of agriculture and the mass production of foodstuffs in excess to the needs for survival.
According to Quinn, the success of this totalitarian style of agriculture is unsustainable because we "kill all of our competitors for food" and even kill our "competitors once-removed" by attacking all of ourfavorite food species' competitors or predators, which he described as "practically holy work for our farmers: kill everything that you can't eat. Kill everything that eats what you eat.", and so on, which he claimed is causing the catastrophicloss of biodiversity planetwide, and, just as directly, anovershoot towards an eventual population crash, of which the civilizedmainstream shows very little anticipation or interest.[21][22]
Quinn's conclusions on population also imply the controversial notion that sustained food aid to starving nations is merely delaying and dramatically worsening massive starvation crises, rather than resolving such crises, as is commonly assumed. Quinn claimed that reconnecting people to the food made available through their local habitats is a proven way to avoid famines and accompanying starvation. Some have interpreted this to mean that Quinn was resolving to let starving people in impoverished nations continue starving.[23][24]
Quinn described civilization as primarily a singleglobal economy andculture, whose total dependence on agriculture requires ever-more expansion, in turn generating ever-more population growth[25] (an escalatingvicious cycle he identifies as the "food race").[11] As a result, he viewed modern civilization, by definition, as unsustainable.[25] He commonly analyzed and defended the effectiveness of traditionalindigenoustribal societies—regarded by anthropological research as fairlyegalitarian, ecologically well-adapted, and socially secure[26] —as role models for developing a new diversity of workable human social structures in the future.[27]
Quinn self-admittedly avoided presenting simplistic or universal solutions,[28] though he strongly encouraged a worldwide paradigm shift away from the self-destructivememes of civilization and towards the values and organizational structures of a "new tribalism". He clarified that this did not refer to the old style of ethnic tribalism so much as new groupings of individuals as equals trying to make a living communally, while still subject toevolution by natural selection.[29] He eventually named this hypothetical, gradual shift the "New Tribal Revolution". Quinn cautioned that his admiration for the sustainable lifestyles of indigenous tribes is not intended to encourage a massive "return" tohunting and gathering. Rather, he intended merely to acknowledge the enormous history of relative ecological harmony between humans and the rest of the environment (from which humans are never separate) and embrace the basic unit of a tribe as an effective model for human societies (just as the pack works for wolves, the hive for bees, etc.).[26][28]
Quinn was influential in developing a vocabulary for his philosophy; he coined or popularized a variety of terms, including the following:
Quinn coined the termfood race (byanalogy to theCold War's "nuclear arms race") to describe his concept of a perpetually escalating crisis ofgrowing human population due to growing food production, of which the former is fueled by the latter. Quinn argues that as the worldwide human population increases, the typical international response is to produce and distribute more food to feed these greater numbers of people. However, assuming thatpopulation increases according to increased food availability, Quinn argues that this response only ends up leading to an even larger population and thus greater starvation in the end. Quinn's solution to the food race—to stop producing so much food—is not generally acommon-sense or intuitive response; instead he claims he iscounter-intuitive or"outside-the-box" thinking.[37][38][39]
Russell Hopfenberg has written at least two papers attempting to prove Quinn's ideas, one paper withDavid Pimentel titledHuman Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply[40] andHuman Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability.[41] Hopfenberg has also made a narrated slide show titledWorld Food and Human Population Growth.
Quinn bases the food race on the premise that the total human population, like that of other animals, is influenced by food supply. Thus, larger populations are the result of more abundant food supplies, andintensification of food cultivation in response to population growth merely leads to still more population growth. Quinn compared this to thearms race in the Cold War. LikeGarrett Hardin, Quinn believes any development to addressfood security will only lead to catastrophe.[citation needed]
The similarities between this concept and aMalthusian catastrophe are obvious, but Quinn states there are certain key differences. The primary problem in a Malthusian catastrophe is a population growing faster than the growth in food supply. Quinn states that population is a function of food supply, and not merely some independent variable. Quinn considers that problem is not a scarcity of food, but, rather, overpopulation. Quinn characterizes the Malthusian problem as "how are we going toFEED all these people?", and characterizes the "Quinnian problem" as "how are we going to stopPRODUCING all these people?"[42]
Ishmael directly inspired the 1998Pearl Jam albumYield (and particularly the song "Do the Evolution"),[43] and theChicano Batman song "The Taker Story" on their 2017 albumFreedom is Free.[44] In 2019The Mammals, a folk band including Mike Merenda & Ruth Ungar, releasedNonet with many of the songs on it inspired byIshmael and other Quinn books, most especiallyBeyond Civilization.[45] North Carolina's vegan hardcore band Undying has been heavily influenced by the work of Daniel Quinn.[46]
Quinn's writings have also influenced the filmmakerTom Shadyac (who featured Quinn in the documentaryI Am); the entrepreneurRay C. Anderson, founder ofInterface, Inc. (the world's largest manufacturer of modular carpet), who began transforming Interface with more green initiatives;[47] as well as some of the ideology behind the 1999 drama filmInstinct,[2] and the 2007 documentary filmWhat A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. PlaywrightDerek Ahonen has cited Quinn as the foremost influence on his play,The Pied Pipers of The Lower East Side, which attempts to dramatize the philosophies of New Tribalism.[48]
ActorMorgan Freeman's interest in theIshmael trilogy inspired his involvement withnature documentaries, such asIsland of Lemurs: Madagascar andBorn to Be Wild, both of which he narrated, while adopting from Quinn the phrase "the tyranny of agriculture".[49][50] Punk rock bandRise Against includesIshmael on their albumThe Sufferer & the Witness' reading list,[51] and its sequel,My Ishmael, inspired the name of the bandAnimals as Leaders.[52]
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Recently I was introduced to an audience as a cultural critic, and I think this probably says it best.
