The Story of B

The Story of B

Author	Daniel Quinn
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Bantam Dell
Publication date	December 1996
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	325 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-553-10053-X (hardback edition) & ISBN 0-553-37901-1 (paperback edition)
OCLC	34663431
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 20
LC Class	PS3567.U338 S76 1996
Preceded by	Ishmael
Followed by	My Ishmael

The Story of B is a 1996 novel written by Daniel Quinn and published by Bantam Publishing. It chronicles the teachings of a colleague of Ishmael, whose story is told in the book Ishmael, published in 1992.

The Story of B acts as a prequel to both the novels Ishmael and My Ishmael, also by Daniel Quinn. While referring to the gorilla Ishmael, Quinn's novel takes readers alongside Jared Osborne, a Laurentian priest. Jared is sent by his superiors to Europe to investigate an itinerant preacher who has been stirring up trouble. The preacher is known to his followers as "B", but his enemies say he's the "Antichrist". Pressed for a judgment, Osborne is driven to penetrate B's inner circle where he soon finds himself an anguished collaborator in the dismantling of his own religious foundations.

The teachings of B: The Great Forgetting

The teachings of B are documented in full at the end of the book. Although the book is written in first person point of view from Jared’s naïve perspective, the author's real-life perspective echoes that of B. The following teachings are Daniel Quinn’s historically-based ideas of the descent of man and the future of human history.

The Great Forgetting is the term B uses to describe an occurrence during the formative millennia of our civilization. What was forgotten is that there was a time when people lived without civilization and were sustained by hunting and gathering rather than by animal husbandry and agriculture. By the time history began to be written down, thousands of years had passed since abandoning the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and it had been assumed that people had come into existence farming. Quinn argues that our knowledge and worldview today would be greatly altered had the foundation thinkers of our culture known there was history beyond the beginning of civilization. When Paleontology uncovered 3 million years worth of human generations, making it untenable that humanity, agriculture, and civilization all began at roughly the same time, our worldview was still not affected. Instead, humanity used terms like “pre-history” and “The Agricultural Revolution” to label these events, rather than grafting their ramifications into our societal fabric.

Food and population control

A continual theme through B’s teachings is that population growth is dependent upon food production, with increases in food production leading to increases in population.

Quinn's thinking here should not to be confused with the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who made the prediction that population would outrun food supply. In Quinn's own words, "Malthus's warning was about the inevitable failure of totalitarian agriculture. My warning is about its continued success." Quinn characterizes the Malthusian problem as "How are we going to FEED all these people?" and contrasts this with his own: "How are we going to stop PRODUCING all these people?"[1]

ABCs of ecology

To better exemplify his ideas of food production and population control, Quinn introduces the ABCs of Ecology.

The first part of ecology (Part A) consists purely of food. Food is best described as all life forms.

The second part of ecology (Part B) consists of how populations are affected by the food supply. Quinn explains that population and food supply are in a delicate balance: "As food populations increase, feeder populations increase. As feeder populations increase, food populations decrease. As food populations decrease, feeder populations decrease. As feeder populations decrease, food populations increase."

History of humanity since the Great Forgetting

The people of our culture established a style of agriculture that Quinn labels as "Totalitarian Agriculture". Prehistoric hunters and gatherers hunted according to a worldview that promoted coexistence and competition between predator and prey. However, the totalitarian agriculturist, operates with the worldview that the world is theirs to control and all the food in the world is theirs to produce and eat. Totalitarian agriculturists, while originally representing a single society, eventually began to overrun other societies as their food supply and populations grew. World population began to double, first taking 2000 years; then taking 1600 years; and eventually only taking 200 years between 1700-1900 AD; then again between 1900-1960 AD; and yet again between 1960-1996 AD. Over the last 10,000 years, this single society has expanded to include 99.8% of the world’s population.

Quinn argues that this exponential growth of the human population is not sustainable. He points to several major problems in our society that he claims arose from over-produced food and an over-crowded population. He states that war, crime, famine, plague, an exploited labor force, drug abuse, slavery, rebellion, and genocide have resulted from Totalitarian Agriculturists' continual expansion. Quinn emphasises that to reverse the damage we have caused, humankind does not inherently need to change, but rather a single culture has to be changed.

Collapse of culture

Quinn uses the phrase “cultural collapse” to describe the point of history that we are living through today. He believes that circumstances have rendered the cultural mythology of the Takers meaningless to its people. When this happens to a culture, Quinn states, things fall apart. "Order and purpose are replaced by chaos and bewilderment. People lose the will to live, become listless, become violent, become suicidal, and take to drink, drugs, and crime... laws, customs and institutions fall into disuse and disrespect, especially among the young, who see that even their elders can no longer make sense of them."

The Great Remembering

During his lectures, B introduces The Great Remembering as this generation’s response to The Great Forgetting. He comments that, because we have already experienced a collapse of culture, our society is ready to abandon our totalitarian agriculture and industrial trends. Quinn uses the examples of tribal cultures as the basis for this new society.

Tribal societies

Quinn looks to tribal societies as models for future societies because they exhibited 3 million years of societal evolution before being overtaken by the totalitarian agriculturalist.

Quinn specifically looks at tribal law as a basis for law in the future. In hunter/gatherer tribes, there are no formal laws, only inherent practices that determine the identity of the tribe. Tribes do not write or invent their laws, but honor codes of conduct that arise from years of social evolution. Quinn rejects the modern idea that there is one set moral standard for people to live by. Instead, he argues that the laws and customs that arise from each tribe are sustainable and “right” in their own way because they work for the tribe.

Tribal societies offer a tested way for people to live and work today as well as they ever did.

Salvation

Quinn finally discusses the idea of salvation. He states that man only began to think that he needed saving from humanity because of the historical evolution of war, famine, etc., that resulted from totalitarian agriculture. The need for salvation by a Savior, he argues, like civilization and war, is not inherent to humanity but are conditions created by man.

External links

• Story of B at the Ishmael Community
• Ishthink, An online community discussing issues related to the subjects explored in "Ishmael" and "The Story of B"