BEYOND CIVILIZATION

A cultish recipe for the salvation of the human race, which is being poisoned by the “genetic” structure of its own civilization. Quinn returns to the theme of “Taker” and “Leaver” societies that he expounded in his prizewinning novel Ishmael (1992) and the sequel, My Ishmael (1997). In a typical simplistic reduction, he constantly asserts that the solutions to mankind’s problems are easy, but no one else has thought about them correctly. His naive answer is to understand culture as consisting of what are called memes, the cultural equivalent of genes in the body. Once we are able to isolate the pathological memes that have allowed civilization (bad) to triumph over more successful tribal societies (good), we can initiate a new tribalism in which we all work together as equals to obtain the necessities of human life. Revolution against the current economic system will not be necessary; we can just opt not to participate in the prevalent, hierarchically structured, exploitative “Taker” society. Evidence of his crackpot theory is drawn haphazardly from Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (the origin of the term meme and an extremely controversial book in its own right), a stunningly shallow analysis of Meso-American prehistory, and the plot of the movie The Sting (it turns out con men are also members of the ancient tribal fraternity). He anticipates his argument will be criticized by social theorists as an utter romanticization of tribalism and tribal society, but rather than offering a more sophisticated analysis, he merely attacks social theorists for being prejudiced. His justification for choosing tribal society over hierarchical society, premised upon the control of food crops by an armed elite, is explained in a section entitled “Circus people are tribal people.” Quinn is the sociological equivalent of Ross Perot—all vision and anecdote, with neither depth of thought nor workable solutions. (Author tour)