Original: 3/19/2002 Revised: 4/28/2002

Ensuring Survival

Author Daniel Quinn illustrates that all of modern humanity is united through their belief of being superior to the rest of the world. This belief has long been the core of humanity’s culture; from the Garden of Eden to the cities of today, all of humanity agrees to this fundamental, seemingly self-evident truth, and seeing the world as a “…human life-support system, a machine designed to produce and sustain human life,” (Quinn 71) and seeing themselves as its rulers. Quinn however, illustrates that this view is seriously flawed, and will bring about the destruction of humanity. Mankind’s belief in his own superiority over the world must be changed to ensure the survival of the Earth.

Quinn supports his view by showing the reader the effects of man’s disassociation with nature. Since the birth of human culture, man began to distance himself from the natural world—to escape the grip of nature’s own balance; the biggest and foremost example being the farms that mankind builds to support his ever-growing population. As more food becomes available, the human population will to continue to expand. If this were any other species, the population would have reached equilibrium with the amount of food naturally available, however since humans grow their own food, this natural balancing mechanism doesn’t apply. The truth is blatantly obvious: the continued “growth” of humans is upsetting the balance of the world and threatening its stability.

Quinn illustrates that the core of the problem is not that humanity is fundamentally flawed (as the narrator claims at first), but that the basic belief since the dawn of culture is that “The world belongs to man” (63). With this belief in mind, mankind began to take the world out of the hands of the gods. Though this belief, mankind has caused much damage to the world, and though he knows it, he only sees one sad solution, and that “we have to go on about conquering the world until our rule is absolute.” (82) His view is that when the Earth is in the hands of the gods, it cannot become a paradise. In the view of the narrator, it is man’s divine right to turn the planet into a paradise. “All the power will be in our hands and we will be free at last.” (230) Throughout the book, Quinn uses the opposing, contradictory views to quietly bring in more support for his own. In reality, Quinn sees that mankind must obtain a new premise. In the current culture, humanity is no longer in conditions where advancement and evolution can take place. He illustrates very vividly that man became man, not by thinking the world as something to be conquered, but “by living in the hands of the gods.” (241) And now, now that humans have rebelled from the general community of life, he is no longer in a position to evolve, and if this role of man were to continue, there would be no successor to man, or any other living creature. In effect, creation will have come to an end with Homo sapiens. That is, as long as humans continue to believe that the world belongs to man.

Quinn sees a different possibility. In contrast to the above premise, there is another premise where “man belongs to the world”, and in this view, creation would continue forever. As evolution continued within the world, there would be a steady growth toward complexity, and towards self-awareness and intelligence. Even now, “all sorts of creatures on this plant appear to be on the verge of attaining [these traits]” (246). Quinn illustrates that in this story humanity would have a different divine destiny, not to be a ruler of the world, but to be the “trailblazer and the pathfinder… to give the rest a chance—the whales and the dolphins and the chimps… he becomes in some sense their progenitor” (246). In that sense, mankind would become the pioneer that would bring all the rest into being. And to make this a reality, mankind needs to realize that he is not above the world, but a part of it, the leaders of the club.