Quinn's Old Invention in Argument

While Quinn's Socratic dialogue led by an idealistic mentalist gorilla is new, Quinn's invented rhetorical argument is quite old. That is, the concepts that Ishmael espouses, namely those of sustainability, questioning of paradigm and man's superiority, have been advocated before by intellectuals since at least the 19th century, when Jeremy Bentham, the British jurist, advocated animal rights and utilitarianism. Ishmael, in questioning (and, more importantly, getting the narrator to question) humankind's attitude of superiority and toward domination of the earth and land, channel's Bentham's argument that animals have been both enslaved and viewed with prejudiced inequality, as well as more modern theorists' ideas, like that of philosopher Peter Singer. Singer advocates animal rights, against what he perceives as speciesism on the part of humanity toward animals of a perceived lower caste (that is, lacking sentience or self-awareness). To this end, Singer is in favor of humane treatment of animals (note the parallels between the treatment of Ishmael in the carnival and zoo) and vegetarianism in order to promote the equality of creatures, and revert to a sustainable, moral "gatherer" (as in hunter-gatherer) diet, a view Ishmael would likely thoroughly support via the release of man from his captivity from

What, exactly, is Quinn's invention, then? It is, at least in part, the contemporary, post-counter culture application of egalitarianism, anarchistic (read: terrestrial) utilitarianism, and sustainability. It is Quinn's application of these ideas in the logical discourse of Socratic dialogue that enables the reader and narrator to question the dubious societal paradigm manufactured in the Industrial Revolution, namely that everything was commodified, humanity is necessarily the superior being (compare to, say, pre-enclosure rhetoric and dialogue in the open field system, i.e. that land and animal should be held as a commons, etc.), and that profit or advantage should supersede sustainability and equality. This is what Quinn argues against through Ishmael, hoping that through gradual change (as was the case to bring society into this paradigm), ideas like Singer's and Bentham's, as well as Quinn's own, will supplant the unsustainable, illogical rules of now.