The story so far: Teenage Kit has spent years in the conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) community while constantly anxious about disappointing God (thanks, autism!). On my eternal quest to maximize the happiness of the authority figures in my life and the joy that praise from those figures brought, I was working towards earning an International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma, the most rigorous course of study available in my high school. As part of that curriculum, during my junior year I had to take "Theory of Knowledge" (TOK), a course in basic epistemology and critical thinking.

When I had the opportunity to choose which books I wanted to read for a class assignment, I was really excited. I enjoyed the other books we'd been reading for the class and always loved reading, so this was my favorite kind of assignment. I chose the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, which was published in 1992. 

I didn't have time to reread Ishmael before writing this newsletter, but, as it turns out, Tom Murphy wrote a very thorough overview in 2025. The story begins when a middle-aged man, whose name (we learn from a later book) is Alan, answers a classified ad in a newspaper from a telepathic, caged gorilla named Ishmael. (Bear with me.) Most of the rest of the book involves Ishmael teaching Alan how Alan, and most of humanity, is trapped in a destructive system. (Murphy calls this system "modernity" as an easy shorthand, although he acknowledges Quinn doesn't use that term directly.)  But the trap of modernity is so immersive and convincing that most of us can't tell that we're in a cage. Ishmael leads Alan through an analysis of modern culture--the stories that we have told ourselves about the relationship between people, the Earth, and the gods--the problems with that story, and ideas for making change.

Ishmael does this by talking about two groups of people, who he calls "Takers" and "Leavers" (as opposed to the more loaded/problematic terms "civilized" and "primitive"). The Takers and the Leavers each have a story that is being told in parallel, at the same time, on the same planet. I can't do justice either to the book or to Tom's summary in just a few bullet points, but I'll try to summarize some of the things that were eye-opening for teenage me:

• For the Takers, the story centers on humans. Everything in the history of the universe that has happened up until now has culminated in humans! As Murphy summarizes, "Our story’s premise: the world was made for us, and therefore belongs to us. We can do with it whatever we wish. We speak of our planet, our environment, and even our wildlife. That’s mythology." Humanity's progress required agriculture; it required building civilization; and all of this progress requires being at war with our planet and its ecosystems.
• Taker culture teaches us that while humans are destined to master the planet Earth, we are also fundamentally flawed. Takers tend to rely on prophets to tell us the one right way to live, since that isn't something we could learn by just observing the world around us.

And everything that Taker culture is telling us is just that: A story. It is one way of seeing the world, one way of understanding humans' relationship to the universe; but there are other stories and other ways of being. Ishmael and Alan continue on from there, deducing a "Law of Life" (which involves the necessity of biodiversity) and contrasting Taker culture (focused on making things) with Leaver culture (focused on what's good for people). 

The arguments that Quinn makes through these characters and the examples Quinn uses seemed very logical and reasonable to me at the time. (They still do, but they used to, too.) After finishing Ishmael, I understood that there was more than one way to think about humans' place in the world. Some cracks had begun to form, but my Lutheran faith was still intact.

Next time, I'll show you the story that blew it to pieces.