Noah Ryan, Ishmael

If there is any book that I would recommend to everyone it would be Ishmael. The ideas in Ishmael, My Ishmael, The Story of B, and Beyond Civilization (as well as The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, many essays on environmental ethic, and the books we read in class) have deeply and profoundly changed the way that I view the world and the place of human beings (and all other beings as well) in it. Unfortunately there are ideas that I only believe intellectually, and I don't know how to understand then on a personal level, to live them. I couldn't get to all of it in an essay (perhaps in a book) but I want write down a couple of things.
The human race evolved in the same manner as all other species. We are have some possibly unique qualities, though many of the ones I've heard turn out to be false or not unique to humans, but in a very real and physical sense we are made of the same things, and we follow the same laws of life that are followed by all other living things. Also, civilization is not the destiny of human kind. Our way of life is one of many ways, and it seems it is a very destructive way, mentally, spiritually, and physically. I don't ever want to "be saved" by any religion, I do not need to be saved. My place is right here, a living being, not in heaven or hell, or removal from the cycle of life, Nirvana.
I no longer believe in progress, and I do not celebrate growth. I ask that we remember that technology is not magic, nor does it provide a meaningful life. It is not evil, nor is it new. It is simply a mode of human interaction, and to depend entirely on it, to act in the very narrow mode of operation for the particular type of technology practiced by our culture, is not the only thing that we can be doing, and it is not worth dieing for. I don't see human nature as particularly aggressive like so many do, but instead as no more aggressive then many mammals would be in a similar situation. Monkeys who's mothers are taken away become antisocial, when overcrowded many beings become less active and mobile. Paul Shepard believes us stunted in social ability. I believe that there may be something to this idea.
I reject the work of almost all of western philosophy. So many people have thought only within the narrow confines of western thought that they know nothing outside of it. They don't see that we are obsessed with the idea of work, that we made a distinction between work and leisure, that we take in and rarely question the things that have been force fed to us since childhood. I'm talking about realizing and describing the very most fundamental assumptions and ways of thinking. I wonder what the great philosophers would say if they realized that the peoples of the world that live in "primitive" cultures are fully mature and capable human beings, not ignorant nor noble, but simply humans living out a different life (in Quinn's term living out a different story) then our own. If they saw the huge breadth and depth of human experience, the vast range of possible minds, the staggering variety in all life. Dillard talks of people who gain sight after a lifetime of blindness, and how they minds work differently then the sighted. They don't assign the moving colors spacial dimensions. A man from the rainforest (crowded and lacking real planes) once thought that the first rhinoceros he saw was a bug because it was so far away. How can one be so arrogant and ignorant as to explain and judge human nature when considering these things? We know nothing of human nature, only the narrowest confines of our experience, and even these we judge only through the limited analytical tools passed to us, with their own limitations and narrow scope. This is one reason that I don't expect humans to ever "understand" the universe in any meaningful way. The idea of having an intelligence doesn't include having one that must be able to understand everything. You must know that communist countries came up with a science that made the world mirror communism. They explained evolution through this, just as we explain evolution through combativeness and competition. We are so narrow in our understanding of our own ideas and their origin that we allow ourselves to take a shallow and limited very of the operation of nature. When these thing are actually studied, it turns out that there is much going on that doesn't fit this view. Life on this earth cooperates, combats, and a great many other things to continue existing. It didn't start and it does not end with us.
Capitalism, materialism and so on are not the cause of the social and environmental problems we (our culture) now faces. These are the effects of much deeper things.
Circular time, mythological minds, animism.
Relation to work, making a living, evolution

I want to talk about things that take time to open up in peoples minds. These things are not even available to discuss with most people, because they do not realize the subjects exist. I've tried to enumerate some ideas here, but this barely even constitutes a beginning.