Beyond Civilization : Humanity's Next Great Adventure

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Summary: Excited, challenging, and disquieting
Review: Beyond Civilization (BC) I found filled with hope in a otherwise bleak situation. It forced me to examine my life's mythology and scenario and prepare to revise both for a new age. Excited, challenging, and disquieting are all emotion I felt while reading BC.

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Summary: A clear, empowering look at transforming our global culture.
Review: In his first full-scale non-fiction attempt to express and develop his views of our global culture, Daniel Quinn has taken a quantum leap forward. Expanding on ideas expressed in Ishmael, The Story of B, My Ishmael, ...and elsewhere, he finally provides what so many have asked for: ideas not just about how to look at things but about what to do.

The most incredible things about this book are two ways in which it succeeds through apparent paradoxes. First, it is so clear and simply written even as it provides a feast's worth of food for thought. Second, Quinn's thoughts about how to carve a new path simultaneously show vast transformative potential even as they, in a way, seem so mundane, accessible, doable, practical. The lesson is clear: what seems like paradox or impossibility to us only seems so because we are used to thinking in a particular way. Change your way of thought and paradoxes resolve, contradictions disappear, new opportunities present themselves, problems are solved.

Without being utopian in the slightest, without suggesting any sort of uprising, Quinn shows how personal emotional fulfillment and saving the world, economic health and ecological sustainability, are not only compatible but mutually supportive. Their realization is within our power as individuals: we do not have to wait for politicians, religious leaders, CEOs or movie stars to change the world for us - indeed, many of them are just spinning their wheels on a road to nowhere, despite their good intentions. Beyond Civilization gives hope to those of us who are frustrated with how things are without taking anything away from those who are already fulfilled. Instead of calling for the end of civilization, it simply calls forth another option.

This is recommended reading for anybody who doesn't like their job but doesn't see another option, who wishes there was no poverty or hunger but doesn't have the power to feed the world, who wishes there was no homelessness but doesn't have extra space to offer, who wants to save the rainforests but also wants to save people's jobs. In short, this is recommended reading for everybody.

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Summary: The way things are now is not how they will always be.
Review: Beyond Civilization is a bold step into unchartered territory. As he did so prolifically in Ishmael, Daniel Quinn illustrates how the successes of tribal life can be rediscovered and embraced within the confines of the modern world. This book continues Quinn's legacy of bringing hope into a seemingly hopeless future and by so doing, has marked the beginning of humanity's next great adventure.

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Summary: Mind-Boggling
Review: Every page of this book will knock your socks off--plus it's just a delight to read. In Beyond Civilization, Quinn comes out from behind the dark glass of Ishmael to reveal his own face and speak with his own voice. This is a keeper.

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Summary: Want the answer to "Yes, but what do I *do*?!"? Read this...
Review: 'Ishmael' made our heads spin... 'The Story of B' gave us some insight into how things could be different -- how VISION was the key... 'My Ishmael' made us question things we had always taken for granted... We began to understand how things got to be this way and where we are headed. Yet almost all of us still asked the question, "Yes, but what to I **DO**?"

In Beyond Civilization (BC), the teacher comes out from behind the glass partition and offers us some suggestions, and challenges us yet again, to "own" a new vision for our culture.

In this non-fiction approach to the issues raised in his other books, Quinn has gone where we have all begged him to go after reading his other thought provoking books. He has dealt with the question, "What do I do now?"

This is a MUST read for anyone who has read anything by Quinn, and should be required reading in all high schools. Thanks, Dan, for throwing us a meaty bone to chew on! With BC we are fortified to take on Humanity's Next Great Adventure!

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Summary: The book that ISHMAEL readers have been waiting for...
Review: Readers who have followed my career from book to book know that their response to my work plays a very significant role in what I write. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that each successive book is one that readers have ASKED for. When ISHMAEL came out in 1992, readers wrote to ask two questions: "Where did this extraordinary book come from?" and "What is your personal religious vision?" PROVIDENCE was written to answer the first of these questions and THE STORY OF B was written to answer the second. By 1995 I was hearing from more and more teenage and young adult readers struggling to make sense of a world that was becoming increasingly hostile to their present needs and future hopes, and this prompted me to rethink and re-present Ishmael's worldview for this audience of readers, which I did in MY ISHMAEL: A SEQUEL. But after all these books, one question remained to be answered. Of all the questions, this was the most persistent, the most frequently asked, and the most baffling for me to answer. Summarized from hundreds of queries, it goes this way, "I love what you're saying in your books, but what are we supposed to DO about it???" It took me six years of writing---three books, half a dozen essays, innumerable speeches, and thousands of letters---to see how to come to grips with this all-important question, which I've done at last in BEYOND CIVILIZATION: HUMANITY'S NEXT GREAT ADVENTURE. In this nonfiction work I challenge yet another key element of our firmly-fixed cultural mythology, the notion that the thing we call civilization is humanity's final destination--- somehow ordained for humanity from the beginning of time and representing an ultimate, unimprovable, and unsurpassable blessing. According to our cultural mythology, nothing can exist "beyond civilization" except catastrophe, dissolution, and despair. In my own look beyond civilization, I see something completely different---a way to go that does not spell ever-increasing globalization, uniformity, and isolation, with humans reduced more and more surely to the status of valueless, interchangeable parts in a gigantic, soulless money-making machine. The future I explore in BEYOND CIVILIZATION is one in which ordinary people can once again assert control over their future, while recovering the wealth of tribal support and the freedom to live at a scale and in a style of their own choosing. Visit the Ishmael website for a preview of BEYOND CIVILIZATION and book tour information,

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Summary: great author, disappointing book
Review: I love quinn's books. I love all that I have read (Ishmael, Story of B, after Dachau) He is most definitely one of the most important thinkers writing today. I love all his ideas (although sometimes I feel they are unrealized). My problem with this book was that it lacked something essential that I found in his other books. In parts it seemed that he was somewhat contradictory in his ideas. Also, I was waiting for something that connected some of his ideas that I though were very important, but instead I feel that the same few ideas got repeated. I guess Quinn may have read too much into himself, I'm not sure, but I left disappointed.

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Summary: Quite interesting
Review: I read this book because it's a Daniel Quinn's. I am not going to compare it with any of his trilogy novels; it is simply incomparable. This book makes interesting suggestions. I would definitely recommend it to Quinn's fans. Note: do not be disappointed if it doesn't turn out to be as 'brilliant' as Ishmael. It wasn't meant to be.

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Summary: REread.
Review: This book consists largely of brief reiterations of the ideas Quinn has presented in his first books. It is also designed as a "practical handbook", unlike his previous philosophical journeys. Beyond Civilization thus doesn't inspire the sense of profound and shocking revelation that Ishmael and the other books do in many of their readers. This in itself is a big disappointment to many.

Quinn writes in the first pages that the most common response he got to his first books was a feeling of, "I understand the problem we are facing now and its urgency, but I have NO idea what I can do." He wrote Beyond Civilization in response, as an attempt to take readers from an abstract thought level to a realistic approach. The book works very well as that response but doesn't stand on its own.

Quinn also, more than any author I've read, simplifies his ideas to no end and constantly uses the most basic analogies to communicate them. The apparent intent and result is to make the concepts widely and easily available to understand - to make them "obvious." Quinn is peerless in achieving this, and it it is the defining characteristic of his writing. In B.C., a common side-effect is frustration, when minds made hungry by the earlier books and expecting more of the same are instead offered further simplified reiterations. People new to Quinn's ideas see only the simplest premises with no explanation at all, leading to label the ideas and the book as tripe.

Upon rereading Ishmael I noticed that the unique ecological ideas in it about agriculture had taken precedence in my memory, and that the book was actually about human cultural philosophies, or "the story we are enacting." Quinn's ideas for practical solutions in Beyond Civilization are therefor not about ecology but about how to enact a different story within civilization. The proposed actions are definitely unlike widely accepted "environmental" solutions. Anyone expecting ideas that are similar to or advancements of already existing approaches could be disappointed. In reality the tribal business idea is quite revolutionary in it's effect on how people would live and think; certainly much more so than recycling is.

The most common thing that is done with Quinn's ideas is restating them inaccurately (and in the case of objections, then going on explain why he is wrong.) In almost all cases this is because some point Quinn made is forgotten and left out, which is probably a result of his writing style, since it is so common. I think it is necessary to reread the books and read the others to get all the ideas down before proposing a flaw in thinking or declaring some lack in realization. It might be something as simple as when Quinn states that third world population explosions can only be created by first world increases in food production. He repeatedly says that he doesn't propose reverting to hunter-gathering and primitive technology, which he says is impossible at thie point, but that the only way to save anything is to surpass the invention of civilization, to invent a better and more advanced social organization (not more complicated; further evolved). The Q and A section on his website is really useful for clarifying as well. As usual Quinn tries to anticipate the readers' questions and respond, clarifying differences between communes and tribal businesses and defining partial agriculture.

The other feature of most Quinn readers, that's noticed in supporters and dissenters alike, is their reluctance to be creative in applying his ideas. Maybe this is because almost no ecological thinkers demand this in their proposed solutions. Quinn has few examples of tribal businesses because few people in the world have consciously and actually ventured Beyond Civilization at this point. Quinn is also very careful never to suggest any "Programs" - doing would make him very popular, but would also mean failure in what he is working to achieve. Instead he only gives principles which can be applied in an endless possible number of ways.