Mother Culture In Daniel Quinn's Ishmael

Culture is people enacting a story. In the book, Ishmael, written by Daniel Quinn, a story of a young man, who is looking for something in life and comes upon an advertisement in a newspaper that there’s a teacher seeking a pupil to save the world. The world was not made for Man, thus the world does not belong to us and we can’t do whatever we want to because we do not own the world. Mother Culture is the place of "unquestioned influences" that the members of a culture just take for granted and that largely decides how members of that culture view the world. “Mother Culture, whose voice has been in your ear since the day of your birth, has given you an explanation of how things came to be this way.” (Quinn 40) He states that “everyone knows it

“Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be. Except for a thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. This is the story man was born to enact, and to departn from it is to resign from the human race itself, is to venture into oblivion. Your place is here, participating in this story, putting your shoulder to the wheel, and as a reward, being fed. There is no ‘something else.’ To step out of this story is to fall off the edge of the world. There’s no way out of it except through death.” (Quinn 37) People weren’t able to be free and do whatever because they had to live a story, and if they didn’t follow they wouldn’t get a reward and would be sent to oblivion or death. “This history of civilization is not simply the triumphal story of progress, the creation of a better world. Even in areas in which we can see development- such as agriculture, technology, communications, and social complexity- change is not always for the better.” (The Idea of Civilization #3) The developments in areas are due to people helping the civilization instead of doing other things that might harm the