Modern Visionaries Part I - Daniel Quinn

But such simple answers aren’t enough to reassure the people of your culture nowadays. Everyone is looking down, and it is obvious that the ground is rushing up towards, you-and rushing up faster every year. - Daniel QuinnIn a world where a pedigree in academia has been the de facto standard of acceptance for information provided to the world, a few remarkable un-credentialed people have come to the forefront of our social collective to provide earthshaking philosophical, technological, sociological, and just plain humanistic revelations that could very well have a major impact on the future of mankind.  

These people often come from backgrounds that have nothing to do with the insights and predictions for which they are well-known.  These people have been incredibly accurate in their predictions and in the application of many of their theories. They have been disregarded by their academic counterparts and brushed off as fantastical by much of academia.

One of these people is Daniel Quinn.  For this post, I would like to investigate the question: Is Daniel Quinn a sociologist?

Sociology is defined as:

the science of society, social institutions, and social relationships; specifically: the systematic study of the development, structure, interaction, and collective behavior of organized groups of human beings.

A person who is in the academic discipline of sociology is referred to as a sociologist or often a “social scientist”. Princeton’s online definition search provides this description for a social scientist:

someone who is an expert in the study of human society and its personal relationships.  

Concerning the non-academic Daniel Quinn, digging deeper into what really defines a sociologist becomes a little more complex than a simple yes or no answer.

Quinn was born in 1935 and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.  He graduated from Creighton Prep in 1953. He also studied at St. Louis University, the University of Vienna, and Loyola University of Chicago, receiving a bachelor's degree in English, cum laude, in 1957.  Quinn continued on into a 20 year career in educational and consumer publishing in Chicago; he served as Biography and Fine Arts Editor at the American Peoples Encyclopedia, Managing Editor of the Greater Cleveland Mathematics Program (Science Research Associates), head of the mathematics department at Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation, Executive Editor of Fuller & Dees Publishing (a division of the Times Mirror Corporation) and Editorial Director of the Society for Visual Education (a division of the Singer Corporation).

An HR manager looking at the above on a resume wouldn’t exactly start thinking of social and anthropological culture and the current state of humanity.  And yet many see Quinn as an enlightened genius seeing both the wrongs and rights of human action in the historical past and present.  For many people, Daniel Quinn provides a rational framework to turn around the ecological disaster the human race has created for itself.  Those of us who have read Quinn’s work Ishmael know that Quinn as an author dives into both sociological and anthropological issues and packs his prose full of observations both insightful and believable.  Ishmael is Quinn’s most recognized work and, undoubtedly, his legacy.

I’m telling you this because the people of your culture are in much of the same situation, like the people of Nazi Germany, they are the captives of a story.

Sociologists are natural social critics, and Daniel Quinn’s criticism of our society is that the cultural solution of the “Takers” in Ishmael will result in destruction.  Quinn’s main message and observation in Ishmael is that humans are actively and continually destroying the natural world because we are captives of a cultural system that leads us to do so.  This sounds like the language and ideas of an educated sociologist.  While this piece is not a book review of Quinn’s most famous work, Ishmael, it is important to realize that that particular work is the foundation of Quinn’s insights and theories regarding our world and society.

It was this first work regarding the state of nature, man today, and what may be in store for the human race in the not so distant future (as well as two other similar works that followed) that cemented Daniel Quinn’s fame and even garnered him a fair amount of respect from some academics.  Quinn is brilliant in how he is able to get us to think about the way we live our lives and how our society functions.  His observations concerning the Aborigines, American Indians, and Inuit are compelling, as is his argument that the ecological disaster that is today’s Earth is humankind's fault.

Quinn’s espoused ideas provide us with a step-by-step path through the fundamental mythology of our culture to explain how problematic things have gotten on Earth and how they could be better; more succinctly, Quinn writes about the preservation of our planet and what this means for the human race. This entails a re-analysis of the Genesis stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel (cultural religion). Quinn’s analyses are right on the money and often frighteningly logical and accurate within the framework of the sociological/anthropological concepts put forth in Ishmael and the works that follow, The Story of B and My Ishmael.  This makes it hard to deny him some sociological authority, despite his lack of credentials.

Quinn is an advocate of a concept called “new tribalism”.  From Webster's Online Dictionary:

In the past 50 years, anthropologists have greatly revised our understanding of the tribe. Franz Boas removed the idea of unilineal cultural evolution from the realm of serious anthropological research as too simplistic, allowing tribes to be studied in their own right, rather than stepping stones to civilization or "living fossils." Anthropologists such as Richard Borshay Lee and Marshall Sahlins began publishing studies that showed tribal life as an easy, safe life, the opposite of the traditional theoretical supposition. In the title to his book, Sahlins referred to these tribal cultures as "the Original Affluent Society," not for their material wealth, but for their combination of leisure and lack of want.

Ultimately Daniel Quinn is an observer of the failure of modern civilization and an advocate of a return to tribal values like egalitarianism and cooperation.  Not only is he a sociologist by description, but a credible philosopher, anthropologist, and futurist as well.  While Daniel Quinn may not be referred to as a sociologist because he lacks an academic pedigree, due to his accuracy and knowledge when it comes to societal culture, Quinn comfortably assumes the roll of sociologist.