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That Slimy Underbelly
Interesting point made by Jason Godesky about anarcho-primitivism on the comments to my recent post:
As this episode highlighted, there is a definite slimy underbelly to it, an inevitably misanthropic connotation that can be derived. So what do we do? Ignore the facts? Pretend that growth can continue indefinitely in a finite universe? Or do we face the fact that we’re just as subject to physical limits as reindeer in the Bering Sea, and try to find some way to cope with the implications of that? I think that primitivism can be the most life-affirming, humanistic view possible, but you’re absolutely right that there is a danger there, as well. That’s one of the ongoing issues we try to navigate at Anthropik: how to come to terms with what we’ve done, and the implications of that.
On the one hand, Jason’s arguments against civilization seem to be predicated entirely on the “slimy underbelly” misanthropic aspects of civilization. Based on those alone, primitivists seem all too content to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yet, at the same time they openly recognize that their own philosophy also carries extremely dangerous baggage. One would think that they would apply the same critical zeal they used against civilization in constructing their arguments to also toss out as unworthy any subsequent replacement philosophy which had such negative effects as well. And yet they do not. Why?
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September 17th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
Because they’re already right, silly.
September 17th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
Wow, end of story, our good friends at Anthropik have already discovered all the reasons behind the world’s ills and how to solve them. Thanks for reminding us of that fact, chutney.
September 17th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
I didn’t actually post this to make fun of them so much as I hoped to open a conversation about perceived logical inconsistencies within philosophical platforms. They are certainly not exclusive in having them, as I know I am certainly rife with them myself. I think it is actually at these points of perceived paradox and weakness that our hidden strengths and solutions probably lie, if we can bear to look at them closely!
September 18th, 2006 at 12:24 am
the human condition is rife with paradox. we life at the bottom of a well with crap poured in on us constantly from the time we are born. then when our hormones are at thier most virulent, we are cut free to fend for ourselves with our ill-concieved ideas about how things really work, in an environment bent on cutting our balls off. the amazing thing is that our parents did the same thing, by the seat of thier pants, and thier parents before them………..it`s a sort of running generational joke to see if the progeny will be deprived of thier genitalia before bringing the next version to bear.
and what do you tell your kids?
September 18th, 2006 at 11:09 am
I was going to post this in the “flame war” thread, but I see it’s much more needed here.
What is the “baby” we should be careful to not throw out here? Is it art? Medicine? These are universals, shared by all human cultures. As I argued in thesis #22, Western medicine is simply our own ethnomedicine. We, like the people of any culture, believe our medicine to be the most effective and all others to be mere superstition, but this is mere ethnocentrism. The simple fact of the matter is that a shaman in the jungles of Peru has the same sort of success rate with his patients as a modern doctor in a good hospital. In thesis #24 I discussed the profundity of “primitive” art, easily on par with our own. For example, though unwritten, Pygmy songs have for millennia maintained a polyphonic complexity that Europe was unable to rival until the 14th century. Or is it knowledge? Surely, civilization has given us knowledge we would not otherwise have…? Again, not really; in thesis #23, I touched on some of the immense indigenous knowledge we dispensed with at the beginning of the civilized project. We’ve gradually worked our way back to about where we started, so the whole thing’s something of a wash. Robert Wolff’s Original Wisdom is the type of book I’d think Pop Occulture readers could appreciate, though I personally prefer David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous.
So what is the “baby” here? Philosophy? Theology? Religion? See Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher, but I would stack the Australian Dreamtime against Augustine’s Civitas Dei for theological or philosophical depth any day of the week. These are the things we usually mean if we say “civilization,” in any kind of positive sense. But these are human universals. Of course, we hold our own as superior to all others, whether in medicine or art or philosophy, but this is simple ethnocentrism. Is there any meaningful sense in which we can use “civilization”?
Some people have tried to make “civilization” a mere synonym for “culture,” but I don’t think this works. Do we feel comfortable talking about an “Inuit civilization” or a “Pygmy civilization”? Perhaps the most open-minded of us, but I think in general most of us find a certain discomfort with those phrases. In thesis #13, I explored the issue of what civilization is, and I wrote:
I then went through the primary criteria of civilization defined by anthropologist Vere Gordon Childe, and argued that they actually caused one another. In other words, they’re a package deal; it takes very exceptional circumstances to have just one or two of the five criteria, without the rest following. So we’re talking about a very special kind of culture when we refer to a civilization: it’s a culture with cities, and all that comes with that. Hierarchy. Specialization. Wealth and poverty. Social classes. The state.
Have I redefined “civilization” here arbitrarily? Is this merely a game of semantics? I don’t think so. We use the word without much thought, but we still feel uncomfortable calling some societies “civilizations,” even though they clearly have cultures. I don’t think this is a semantic game or a redefinition at all; rather, I think this is trying to pin down this elusive phrase to something more precise. This has a great deal of value, because we are talking about a discernable system, and we must understand what it is that defines that system–what makes it uniquely itself, what makes it different from the rest.
So, where is the “baby” we’re in danger of throwing out with the “bathwater”? The “slimy underbelly” is all the civilization is. It doesn’t have any redeeming part. There is no baby. What’s worth saving–art, music, philosophy, medicine, knowledge, etc.–are things universal to all human cultures. The only things unique to civilizations–the things that make them, civilizations–are the patterns of control and domination. That’s all they are.
That’s the first thing we need to understand, that all the good things we associate with civilization are uiversal, shared by all cultures, civilized and uncivilized alike. They’re all far, far older than civilization. They belong to humanity, not to civilization.
The second thing we need to understand is what a bizarre aberration civilization truly is. The Agricultural Revolution was a mere 10,000 years ago, but the genus Homo has been around for some two million years. So, civilization has only existed for the last 0.5% of our time on this planet. To use the analogy Jared Diamond drew in his famous “Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” (agriculture):
And for most of the time that civilization has existed, it has not been the dominant system. Foragers continue to survive even today, flourishing in ecologies where our agriculture is utterly useless. The spread of civilization has never been voluntary. We do not have one example of any forager culture willingly adopting agriculture–ever. Yet we have example after example after example of foragers who fought to the death against it, who would rather die that to submit to civilization. As J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in his Letters from an American Farmer:
Or, as Benjamin Franklin put more succinctly:
Sitting Bull could easily see why, of course:
Or, as Daniel Quinn put it so well:
In other words, civilization has been experienced as so deeply dehumanizing by everyone at all times in all places that in 10,000 years, no one has ever gone to it voluntarily. Indeed, civilization has expanded to new cultures only on pain of death. That’s how much it was hated by those who knew what another way of life was like. This is where primitivism comes from: an appreciation for uncivilized life. In truth, most primitivists do not spend much time on collapse. Authors like Daniel Quinn, John Zerzan or Derrick Jensen see civilization in primarily ideological terms, as a system of belief. Jensen and Zerzan see civilization as something that must be violently toppled; Quinn sees it as a mindset that needs to be out-taught so that it will slowly fade away (his concept of “Beyond Civilization” is, like Richard Heinberg’s “Powerdown,” our most optimistic possibilities, I think).
In many ways, I was one of the first primitivists to bring collapse into the picture. The foregoing facts were first brought to my attention by Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Inspired by his optimistic vision, I pushed further, asking how large groups become swayed to new ideas. That line of inquiry deflated any hope I once held for Quinn’s scenario.
Because culture is anything but arbitrary. It’s the means by which we adapt to a given environment, the way that a computer’s operating system adapts software for a given set of hardware. The human brain is ready-made for culture: our disgust reaction, for example, is felt very deeply and strongly (as it has to be), but what disgusts us is very cultural. We absorb our cultures in an incredibly deep and profound way. There are cultures that see different colors, and cultures that cannot connect photographs to their three-dimensional subjects. That’s how deep and powerful culture is.
Every culture has some amount of complexity. As Joseph Tainter writes in Collapse of Complex Societies:
But Tainter also pops the notion that there is a natural tendency towards greater complexity.
Tainter takes this farther: complexity is a function of energy.
This leads to Tainter’s central thesis, that complexity is subject to diminishing returns, and that it is this course of diminishing returns which is the ultimate cause of all collapse, regardless of the proximate cause. He reinforces his idea with examples of collapse from the archaeological record, as well as the modern Ik in Uganda. I have summarized his arguments in my own thesis #14. Tainter argues that collapse is an economizing process that happens when the alternative is no longer tolerable. But Tainter believes we cannot collapse, because we are enmeshed in a peer polity system. Of course, peer polity systems have collapsed before–see the Maya–but the only difference is, they do not collapse as individual states, but as a peer polity system. Either they all collapse at once, or no one does. In thesis #15, I break with Tainter by applying his own model to our current situation, and concluding that we are past the point of diminishing returns for our complexity–and thus, poised for collapse.
What does it mean to be beyond the point of diminishing returns for complexity? It means inventions come more slowly, and when they do come, they’re less revolutionary. It means that a new bureaucracy is more likely to create red tape than actually accomplish something. It means that our means of solving problems are diminished, even as the pace and severity of our problems–exacerbated by the high energy needs of our complexity–is increasing. I know it’s tempting to pin the blame for what happened to New Orleans last year on Bush’s incompetence, but the fact of the matter is that we cannot expect to handle the situation as well as Galveston did in 1900. In 1900, we were not yet past the point of diminishing returns. Today, we are. That is the difference between Galveston and New Orleans–that’s what it means to be beyond the point of diminishing returns for complexity. It means you can no longer solve some of the problems you used to be able to solve. It means solutions become harder and more expensive, while the energy demands rise higher and higher.
Eventually, people begin to realize that they can get the same effect, for less energy, by living in a simpler manner. But complexity is a unified phenomenon. Tainter again:
In growth, complexity takes on a life of its own: more complexity yields still more complexity. In collapse, the same happens in reverse. In “thesis #20, I compared collapse to a run on an over-evaluated stock.
With complexity, we get to a more precise understanding of “civilization” than the mere “city culture” we left with before. Civilization is a culture with a unique problem-solving strategy. Its answer to every problem is to increase complexity. To invent something, or appoint someone, or establish a committee, or research something, or run some tests. We are caught in a growth cycle of ever-increasing complexity requiring ever-increasing energy, and creating an ever-larger scale society. We are already far beyond any reasonable human scale society. This is the root of that alienation that has been universally feared and hated in civilization since its very beginning. And by its very nature, civilization can only get worse.
So we see why civilization is inherently unsustainable: it is, at its most basic root, a culture in growth. It is among cultures what a cancer is among cells. It grows without limit, without regard to the other systems it is enmeshed in and coexists with, largely–I understand you’re familiar with David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous and have mentioned it here before?–because we no longer recognize ourselves as part of it. In the very same manner, cancer cells grow without limit because they have begun to unravel their telomeres–they can no longer recognize healthy cells as part of the same body. As Kenneth Boulding put it:
If growth ever stops, or even slows down, our civilization–which depends on exponential growth to survive–will collapse. Our civilization will collapse. How could it be otherwise? The alternative would be to believe that infinite growth is possible in a finite world. “Sustainable growth” is an oxymoron, and there’s one thing all unsustainable systems have in common: they’re never sustained. I’m laying the tautologies on heavy here to make a point: the collapse of our civilization is not in question. It is tautological. Just the same as the reindeer of St. Matthew’s Island had no choice about whether their population would crash, so, too, are we well beyond the point where anything can be done to change our fate. I don’t know if people have free will or not (we’ve certainly never shown any evidence of that in our past), but I do believe in cause and effect. If we did have a chance to go a different way and avoid this, it was not in any of our lifetimes: it was 10,000 years ago, when we decided to plant some wheat rather than follow the herds anymore. Since then, the only choice we’ve had is how, and when, we want to face the consequences of that.
For 10,000 years, we’ve consistently decided that “when” should be “later.” We’ve come to the brink of collapse a few times, enough to notice the pattern. Sometimes, a deus ex machina will come to save us at the last minute (though, more often, it doesn’t). All the previous collapses were staved off by technologies or possiblities that were already there, but considered too expensive or low-quality to bother with, until the crisis deepened. It’s unclear whether we have any such possibilities to save us ths time–solar might, but that’s questionable. We may have finally run out of delays. But the other thing we’ve learned from these near misses is that each reprieve gives us more time to grow, and that growth puts us in an even worse position the next time collapse looms. Had we collapsed in the Bronze Age, it would have killed millions, and devastated the Mediterranean. Now there are billions of us, and we’ve devastated the whole world. What will happen if we miss this, too? Trillions, and the extinction of all life on this planet? We’re in the midst of the worst mass extinction the earth has ever seen, and it’s being driven entirely by us–or, more accurately, because such an intensely complex civilization as ours, and still growing, cannot afford to share the world with much of anything else.
This is why I have so little optimism for plans like Quinn’s or Heinberg’s. Either they will be too little, too late, and have no effect, or they will have an effect, which will be to make a significant dent on our constant growth. After all, logically, any system is either growing or not growing–there is no third, intermediate option. Either such gradual schemes will do nothing to stop our growth and be useless, or they will be effective in slowing our growth, which will then escalate into more and more withdrawal. Such plans have a choice between being completely ineffective, or causing the collapse they seek to avoid.
Of course, I doubt they’ll do that. Humans are good at making up stories, and we make up stories that make us feel better all the time, to justify things we know can’t be sustained. We won’t want to pass up the possibilities to have more energy and more things, so we’re more likely to run into collapse at a full tilt.
So, what are the implications of all this? Is this misanthropic? I think it is not misanthropic at all. After all, to explain why humans have so many problems in civilizaton, we need to invent stories like original sin: humans are innately bad, and that’s why we always feel so ill at ease in the civilization G-d destined us to build. That’s why we chafe under our rightful leaders. That’s why we feel vaguely unfulfilled and alienated by our glorious complexity. How is this not misanthropic? Rather, primitivism says that it isn’t humans who are the problem, but civilization, and one of the worst problems with it, is that it is so deeply dehumanizing. Primtiivism suggests that freedom and equality are the natural human condition–human nature. It suggests that we chafe under leaders because humans don’t want or need leaders; that we feel alienated in large-scale society, because large-scale society doesn’t serve human needs. It turns humans into cogs; primitivism builds communities for people.
The violent elements of primitivism are not the ones who embrace collapse, but those who don’t, those like Zerzan or Jensen who believe that ideology exists independent of physical reality, and that civilization must be violently destroyed or it will perpetuate itself forever.
So what do we do?
Collapse is inevitable. It’s actually the best thing that can happen to us now (which tells us just how terrible a situation we’re really in). One way or another, voluntarily or not, with our awarness or not, this brief experiment is coming to a quick and catastrophic end. How do we deal with that?
That’s the really big question. How do we deal with that? How do we cope with that?
You say that understanding this provides a place for true misanthropes to air a disturbing lack of compassion, and as we’ve seen, that’s absolutely true. My question is … so what? Darwin provided the same, didn’t he? The Nazi party owed much of its foundation to certain philosophical notions of race and society derived, ultimately, from the theory of evolution. Should the possibility that some people will cope with an unpleasant truth poorly convince us not to believe what the facts so clearly indicate? Should we reject natural selection and evolution for the same reason?
Primitivism brings with it a truth as unpleasant as evolution, but just as undeniably true. People will react poorly to it, but that says nothing as to whether or not it is true. Rather than “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” and rejecting the basic fact that civilization is unsustainable simply because some might be led to misanthropic implications, I think we should instead fight against those implications, and argue all the more forcefully for the preservation of our humanity in the last death throes of such a dehumanizing, murderous force. Civilization cannot be sustained; no system based on infinite growth ever can be. We cannot afford to allow the road beyond civilization to lay in the hands of misanthropes and terrorists. For the sake of our species, we cannot.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
What is the “baby” we should be careful to not throw out [with the bathwater] here? Is it art? Medicine? These are universals, shared by all human cultures. As I argued in thesis #22, Western medicine is simply our own ethnomedicine. We, like the people of any culture, believe our medicine to be the most effective and all others to be mere superstition, but this is mere ethnocentrism. The simple fact of the matter is that a shaman in the jungles of Peru has the same sort of success rate with his patients as a modern doctor in a good hospital. In thesis #24 I discussed the profundity of “primitive” art, easily on par with our own. For example, though unwritten, Pygmy songs have for millennia maintained a polyphonic complexity that Europe was unable to rival until the 14th century. Or is it knowledge? Surely, civilization has given us knowledge we would not otherwise have…? Again, not really; in thesis #23, I touched on some of the immense indigenous knowledge we dispensed with at the beginning of the civilized project. We’ve gradually worked our way back to about where we started, so the whole thing’s something of a wash. Robert Wolff’s Original Wisdom is the type of book I’d think Pop Occulture readers could appreciate, though I personally prefer David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous.
So what is the “baby” here? Philosophy? Theology? Religion? See Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher, but I would stack the Australian Dreamtime against Augustine’s Civitas Dei for theological or philosophical depth any day of the week. These are the things we usually mean if we say “civilization,” in any kind of positive sense. But these are human universals. Of course, we hold our own as superior to all others, whether in medicine or art or philosophy, but this is simple ethnocentrism. Is there any meaningful sense in which we can use “civilization”?
Some people have tried to make “civilization” a mere synonym for “culture,” but I don’t think this works. Do we feel comfortable talking about an “Inuit civilization” or a “Pygmy civilization”? Perhaps the most open-minded of us, but I think in general most of us find a certain discomfort with those phrases. In thesis #13, I explored the issue of what civilization is, and I wrote:
I then went through the primary criteria of civilization defined by anthropologist Vere Gordon Childe, and argued that they actually caused one another. In other words, they’re a package deal; it takes very exceptional circumstances to have just one or two of the five criteria, without the rest following. So we’re talking about a very special kind of culture when we refer to a civilization: it’s a culture with cities, and all that comes with that. Hierarchy. Specialization. Wealth and poverty. Social classes. The state.
Have I redefined “civilization” here arbitrarily? Is this merely a game of semantics? I don’t think so. We use the word without much thought, but we still feel uncomfortable calling some societies “civilizations,” even though they clearly have cultures. I don’t think this is a semantic game or a redefinition at all; rather, I think this is trying to pin down this elusive phrase to something more precise. This has a great deal of value, because we are talking about a discernable system, and we must understand what it is that defines that system—what makes it uniquely itself, what makes it different from the rest.
So, where is the “baby” we’re in danger of throwing out with the “bathwater”? The “slimy underbelly” is all that civilization is. It doesn’t have any redeeming part. There is no baby. What’s worth saving—art, music, philosophy, medicine, knowledge, etc.—are things universal to all human cultures. The only things unique to civilizations—the things that make them civilizations—are the patterns of control and domination. That’s all they are.
That’s the first thing we need to understand, that all the good things we associate with civilization are uiversal, shared by all cultures, civilized and uncivilized alike. They’re all far, far older than civilization. They belong to humanity, not to civilization.
The second thing we need to understand is what a bizarre aberration civilization truly is. The Agricultural Revolution was a mere 10,000 years ago, but the genus Homo has been around for some two million years. So, civilization has only existed for the last 0.5% of our time on this planet. To use the analogy Jared Diamond drew in his famous “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” (agriculture):
And for most of the time that civilization has existed, it has not been the dominant system. Foragers continue to survive even today, flourishing in ecologies where our agriculture is utterly useless. The spread of civilization has never been voluntary. We do not have one example of any forager culture willingly adopting agriculture—ever. Yet we have example after example after example of foragers who fought to the death against it, who would rather die that to submit to civilization. As J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in his Letters from an American Farmer:
Or, as Benjamin Franklin put more succinctly:
Sitting Bull could easily see why, of course:
Or, as Daniel Quinn put it so well:
In other words, civilization has been experienced as so deeply dehumanizing by everyone at all times in all places that in 10,000 years, no one has ever gone to it voluntarily. Indeed, civilization has expanded to new cultures only on pain of death. That’s how much it was hated by those who knew what another way of life was like. This is where primitivism comes from: an appreciation for uncivilized life. In truth, most primitivists do not spend much time on collapse. Authors like Daniel Quinn, John Zerzan or Derrick Jensen see civilization in primarily ideological terms, as a system of belief. Jensen and Zerzan see civilization as something that must be violently toppled; Quinn sees it as a mindset that needs to be out-taught so that it will slowly fade away (his concept of “Beyond Civilization” is, like Richard Heinberg’s “Powerdown,” one of our most optimistic possibilities, I think).
In many ways, I was one of the first primitivists to bring collapse into the picture. The foregoing facts were first brought to my attention by Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Inspired by his optimistic vision, I pushed further, asking how large groups become swayed to new ideas. That line of inquiry deflated any hope I once held for Quinn’s scenario.
Because culture is anything but arbitrary. It’s the means by which we adapt to a given environment, the way that a computer’s operating system adapts software for a given set of hardware. The human brain is ready-made for culture: our disgust reaction, for example, is felt very deeply and strongly (as it has to be), but what disgusts us is very cultural. We absorb our cultures in an incredibly deep and profound way. There are cultures that see different colors, and cultures that cannot connect photographs to their three-dimensional subjects. That’s how deep and powerful culture is.
Every culture has some amount of complexity. As Joseph Tainter writes in Collapse of Complex Societies:
But Tainter also pops the notion that there is a natural tendency towards greater complexity.
Tainter takes this farther: complexity is a function of energy.
This leads to Tainter’s central thesis, that complexity is subject to diminishing returns, and that it is this course of diminishing returns which is the ultimate cause of all collapse, regardless of the proximate cause. He reinforces his idea with examples of collapse from the archaeological record, as well as the modern Ik in Uganda. I have summarized his arguments in my own thesis #14. Tainter argues that collapse is an economizing process that happens when the alternative is no longer tolerable. But Tainter believes we cannot collapse, because we are enmeshed in a peer polity system. Of course, peer polity systems have collapsed before—see the Maya—but the only difference is, they do not collapse as individual states, but as a peer polity system. Either they all collapse at once, or no one does. In thesis #15, I break with Tainter by applying his own model to our current situation, and concluding that we are past the point of diminishing returns for our complexity—and thus, poised for collapse.
What does it mean to be beyond the point of diminishing returns for complexity? It means inventions come more slowly, and when they do come, they’re less revolutionary. It means that a new bureaucracy is more likely to create red tape than actually accomplish something. It means that our means of solving problems are diminished, even as the pace and severity of our problems—exacerbated by the high energy needs of our complexity—is increasing. I know it’s tempting to pin the blame for what happened to New Orleans last year on Bush’s incompetence, but the fact of the matter is that we cannot expect to handle the situation as well as Galveston did in 1900. In 1900, we were not yet past the point of diminishing returns. Today, we are. That is the difference between Galveston and New Orleans—that’s what it means to be beyond the point of diminishing returns for complexity. It means you can no longer solve some of the problems you used to be able to solve. It means solutions become harder and more expensive, while the energy demands rise higher and higher.
Eventually, people begin to realize that they can get the same effect, for less energy, by living in a simpler manner. But complexity is a unified phenomenon. Tainter again:
In growth, complexity takes on a life of its own: more complexity yields still more complexity. In collapse, the same happens in reverse. In “thesis #20, I compared collapse to a run on an over-evaluated stock.
With complexity, we get to a more precise understanding of “civilization” than the mere “city culture” we left with before. Civilization is a culture with a unique problem-solving strategy. Its answer to every problem is to increase complexity. To invent something, or appoint someone, or establish a committee, or research something, or run some tests. We are caught in a growth cycle of ever-increasing complexity requiring ever-increasing energy, and creating an ever-larger scale society. We are already far beyond any reasonable human scale society. This is the root of that alienation that has been universally feared and hated in civilization since its very beginning. And by its very nature, civilization can only get worse.
So we see why civilization is inherently unsustainable: it is, at its most basic root, a culture in growth. It is among cultures what a cancer is among cells. It grows without limit, without regard to the other systems it is enmeshed in and coexists with, largely—I understand you’re familiar with David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous and have mentioned it here before?—because we no longer recognize ourselves as part of it. In the very same manner, cancer cells grow without limit because they have begun to unravel their telomeres—they can no longer recognize healthy cells as part of the same body. As Kenneth Boulding put it:
If growth ever stops, or even slows down, our civilization—which depends on exponential growth to survive—will collapse. How could it be otherwise? The alternative would be to believe that infinite growth is possible in a finite world. “Sustainable growth” is an oxymoron, and there’s one thing all unsustainable systems have in common: they’re never sustained. I’m laying the tautologies on heavy here to make a point: the collapse of our civilization is not in question. It is tautological. Just the same as the reindeer of St. Matthew’s Island had no choice about whether their population would crash, so, too, are we well beyond the point where anything can be done to change our fate. I don’t know if people have free will or not (we’ve certainly never shown any evidence of that in our past), but I do believe in cause and effect. If we did have a chance to go a different way and avoid this, it was not in any of our lifetimes: it was 10,000 years ago, when we decided to plant some wheat rather than continue following the herds. Since then, the only choice we’ve had is how, and when, we want to face the consequences of that.
For 10,000 years, we’ve consistently decided that “when” should be “later.” We’ve come to the brink of collapse a few times, enough to notice the pattern. Sometimes, a deus ex machina will come to save us at the last minute (though, more often, it doesn’t). All the previous collapses were staved off by technologies or possiblities that were already there, but considered too expensive or low-quality to bother with, until the crisis deepened. It’s unclear whether we have any such possibilities to save us this time—solar might, but that’s questionable. We may have finally run out of delays. But the other thing we’ve learned from these near misses is that each reprieve gives us more time to grow, and that growth puts us in an even worse position the next time collapse looms. Had we collapsed in the Bronze Age, it would have killed millions, and devastated the Mediterranean. Now there are billions of us, and we’ve devastated the whole world. What will happen if we miss this, too? Trillions, and the extinction of all life on this planet? We’re in the midst of the worst mass extinction the earth has ever seen, and it’s being driven entirely by us—or, more accurately, because such an intensely complex civilization as ours, and still growing, cannot afford to share the world with much of anything else.
This is why I have so little optimism for plans like Quinn’s or Heinberg’s. Either they will be too little, too late, and have no effect, or they will have an effect, which will be to make a significant dent on our constant growth. After all, logically, any system is either growing or not growing—there is no third, intermediate option. Either such gradual schemes will do nothing to stop our growth and be useless, or they will be effective in slowing our growth, which will then escalate into more and more withdrawal. Such plans have a choice between being completely ineffective, or causing the collapse they seek to avoid.
Of course, I doubt they’ll do that. Humans are good at making up stories, and we make up stories that make us feel better all the time, to justify things we know can’t be sustained. We won’t want to pass up the possibilities to have more energy and more things, so we’re more likely to run into collapse at a full tilt.
So, what are the implications of all this? Is this misanthropic? I think it is not misanthropic at all. After all, to explain why humans have so many problems in civilizaton, we need to invent stories like original sin: humans are innately bad, and that’s why we always feel so ill at ease in the civilization G-d destined us to build. That’s why we chafe under our rightful leaders. That’s why we feel vaguely unfulfilled and alienated by our glorious complexity. How is this not misanthropic? Rather, primitivism says that it isn’t humans who are the problem, but civilization, and one of the worst problems with it is that it is so deeply dehumanizing. Primitivism suggests that freedom and equality are the natural human condition—human nature. It suggests that we chafe under leaders because humans don’t want or need leaders; that we feel alienated in large-scale society, because large-scale society doesn’t serve human needs. Civilization turns humans into cogs; primitivism builds communities for people.
The violent elements of primitivism are not the ones who embrace collapse, but those who don’t, those like Zerzan or Jensen who believe that ideology exists independent of physical reality, and that civilization must be violently destroyed or it will perpetuate itself forever.
So what do we do?
Collapse is inevitable. It’s actually the best thing that can happen to us now (which tells us just how terrible a situation we’re really in). One way or another, voluntarily or not, with our awarness or not, this brief experiment is coming to a quick and catastrophic end. How do we deal with that?
That’s the really big question. How do we deal with that? How do we cope with that?
You say that understanding this provides a place for true misanthropes to air a disturbing lack of compassion, and as we’ve seen, that’s absolutely true. My question is … so what? Darwin provided the same, didn’t he? The Nazi party owed much of its foundation to certain philosophical notions of race and society derived, ultimately, from the theory of evolution. Should the possibility that some people will cope with an unpleasant truth poorly convince us not to believe what the facts so clearly indicate? Should we reject natural selection and evolution for the same reason?
Primitivism brings with it a truth as unpleasant as evolution, but just as undeniably true. People will react poorly to it, but that says nothing as to whether or not it is true. Rather than “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” and rejecting the basic fact that civilization is unsustainable simply because some might be led to misanthropic implications, I think we should instead fight against those implications, and argue all the more forcefully for the preservation of our humanity in the last death throes of such a dehumanizing, murderous force. Civilization cannot be sustained; no system based on infinite growth ever can be. We cannot afford to allow the road beyond civilization to lay in the hands of misanthropes and terrorists. For the sake of our species, we cannot.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
What is the “baby” we should be careful to not throw out [with the bathwater] here? Is it art? Medicine? These are universals, shared by all human cultures. As I argued in thesis #22, Western medicine is simply our own ethnomedicine. We, like the people of any culture, believe our medicine to be the most effective and all others to be mere superstition, but this is mere ethnocentrism. The simple fact of the matter is that a shaman in the jungles of Peru has the same sort of success rate with his patients as a modern doctor in a good hospital. In thesis #24 I discussed the profundity of “primitive” art, easily on par with our own. For example, though unwritten, Pygmy songs have for millennia maintained a polyphonic complexity that Europe was unable to rival until the 14th century. Or is it knowledge? Surely, civilization has given us knowledge we would not otherwise have…? Again, not really; in thesis #23, I touched on some of the immense indigenous knowledge we dispensed with at the beginning of the civilized project. We’ve gradually worked our way back to about where we started, so the whole thing’s something of a wash. Robert Wolff’s Original Wisdom is the type of book I’d think Pop Occulture readers could appreciate, though I personally prefer David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous.
So what is the “baby” here? Philosophy? Theology? Religion? See Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher, but I would stack the Australian Dreamtime against Augustine’s Civitas Dei for theological or philosophical depth any day of the week. These are the things we usually mean if we say “civilization,” in any kind of positive sense. But these are human universals. Of course, we hold our own as superior to all others, whether in medicine or art or philosophy, but this is simple ethnocentrism. Is there any meaningful sense in which we can use “civilization”?
Some people have tried to make “civilization” a mere synonym for “culture,” but I don’t think this works. Do we feel comfortable talking about an “Inuit civilization” or a “Pygmy civilization”? Perhaps the most open-minded of us, but I think in general most of us find a certain discomfort with those phrases. In thesis #13, I explored the issue of what civilization is, and I wrote:
I then went through the primary criteria of civilization defined by anthropologist Vere Gordon Childe, and argued that they actually caused one another. In other words, they’re a package deal; it takes very exceptional circumstances to have just one or two of the five criteria, without the rest following. So we’re talking about a very special kind of culture when we refer to a civilization: it’s a culture with cities, and all that comes with that. Hierarchy. Specialization. Wealth and poverty. Social classes. The state.
Have I redefined “civilization” here arbitrarily? Is this merely a game of semantics? I don’t think so. We use the word without much thought, but we still feel uncomfortable calling some societies “civilizations,” even though they clearly have cultures. I don’t think this is a semantic game or a redefinition at all; rather, I think this is trying to pin down this elusive phrase to something more precise. This has a great deal of value, because we are talking about a discernable system, and we must understand what it is that defines that system—what makes it uniquely itself, what makes it different from the rest.
So, where is the “baby” we’re in danger of throwing out with the “bathwater”? The “slimy underbelly” is all that civilization is. It doesn’t have any redeeming part. There is no baby. What’s worth saving—art, music, philosophy, medicine, knowledge, etc.—are things universal to all human cultures. The only things unique to civilizations—the things that make them civilizations—are the patterns of control and domination. That’s all they are.
That’s the first thing we need to understand, that all the good things we associate with civilization are uiversal, shared by all cultures, civilized and uncivilized alike. They’re all far, far older than civilization. They belong to humanity, not to civilization.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
The second thing we need to understand is what a bizarre aberration civilization truly is. The Agricultural Revolution was a mere 10,000 years ago, but the genus Homo has been around for some two million years. So, civilization has only existed for the last 0.5% of our time on this planet. To use the analogy Jared Diamond drew in his famous “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” (agriculture):
And for most of the time that civilization has existed, it has not been the dominant system. Foragers continue to survive even today, flourishing in ecologies where our agriculture is utterly useless. The spread of civilization has never been voluntary. We do not have one example of any forager culture willingly adopting agriculture—ever. Yet we have example after example after example of foragers who fought to the death against it, who would rather die that to submit to civilization. As J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in his Letters from an American Farmer:
Or, as Benjamin Franklin put more succinctly:
Sitting Bull could easily see why, of course:
Or, as Daniel Quinn put it so well:
In other words, civilization has been experienced as so deeply dehumanizing by everyone at all times in all places that in 10,000 years, no one has ever gone to it voluntarily. Indeed, civilization has expanded to new cultures only on pain of death. That’s how much it was hated by those who knew what another way of life was like. This is where primitivism comes from: an appreciation for uncivilized life. In truth, most primitivists do not spend much time on collapse. Authors like Daniel Quinn, John Zerzan or Derrick Jensen see civilization in primarily ideological terms, as a system of belief. Jensen and Zerzan see civilization as something that must be violently toppled; Quinn sees it as a mindset that needs to be out-taught so that it will slowly fade away (his concept of “Beyond Civilization” is, like Richard Heinberg’s “Powerdown,” one of our most optimistic possibilities, I think).
In many ways, I was one of the first primitivists to bring collapse into the picture. The foregoing facts were first brought to my attention by Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Inspired by his optimistic vision, I pushed further, asking how large groups become swayed to new ideas. That line of inquiry deflated any hope I once held for Quinn’s scenario.
Because culture is anything but arbitrary. It’s the means by which we adapt to a given environment, the way that a computer’s operating system adapts software for a given set of hardware. The human brain is ready-made for culture: our disgust reaction, for example, is felt very deeply and strongly (as it has to be), but what disgusts us is very cultural. We absorb our cultures in an incredibly deep and profound way. There are cultures that see different colors, and cultures that cannot connect photographs to their three-dimensional subjects. That’s how deep and powerful culture is.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Every culture has some amount of complexity. As Joseph Tainter writes in Collapse of Complex Societies:
But Tainter also pops the notion that there is a natural tendency towards greater complexity.
Tainter takes this farther: complexity is a function of energy.
This leads to Tainter’s central thesis, that complexity is subject to diminishing returns, and that it is this course of diminishing returns which is the ultimate cause of all collapse, regardless of the proximate cause. He reinforces his idea with examples of collapse from the archaeological record, as well as the modern Ik in Uganda. I have summarized his arguments in my own thesis #14. Tainter argues that collapse is an economizing process that happens when the alternative is no longer tolerable. But Tainter believes we cannot collapse, because we are enmeshed in a peer polity system. Of course, peer polity systems have collapsed before—see the Maya—but the only difference is, they do not collapse as individual states, but as a peer polity system. Either they all collapse at once, or no one does. In thesis #15, I break with Tainter by applying his own model to our current situation, and concluding that we are past the point of diminishing returns for our complexity—and thus, poised for collapse.
What does it mean to be beyond the point of diminishing returns for complexity? It means inventions come more slowly, and when they do come, they’re less revolutionary. It means that a new bureaucracy is more likely to create red tape than actually accomplish something. It means that our means of solving problems are diminished, even as the pace and severity of our problems—exacerbated by the high energy needs of our complexity—is increasing. I know it’s tempting to pin the blame for what happened to New Orleans last year on Bush’s incompetence, but the fact of the matter is that we cannot expect to handle the situation as well as Galveston did in 1900. In 1900, we were not yet past the point of diminishing returns. Today, we are. That is the difference between Galveston and New Orleans—that’s what it means to be beyond the point of diminishing returns for complexity. It means you can no longer solve some of the problems you used to be able to solve. It means solutions become harder and more expensive, while the energy demands rise higher and higher.
Eventually, people begin to realize that they can get the same effect, for less energy, by living in a simpler manner. But complexity is a unified phenomenon. Tainter again:
In growth, complexity takes on a life of its own: more complexity yields still more complexity. In collapse, the same happens in reverse. In “thesis #20, I compared collapse to a run on an over-evaluated stock.
With complexity, we get to a more precise understanding of “civilization” than the mere “city culture” we left with before. Civilization is a culture with a unique problem-solving strategy. Its answer to every problem is to increase complexity. To invent something, or appoint someone, or establish a committee, or research something, or run some tests. We are caught in a growth cycle of ever-increasing complexity requiring ever-increasing energy, and creating an ever-larger scale society. We are already far beyond any reasonable human scale society. This is the root of that alienation that has been universally feared and hated in civilization since its very beginning. And by its very nature, civilization can only get worse.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
So we see why civilization is inherently unsustainable: it is, at its most basic root, a culture in growth. It is among cultures what a cancer is among cells. It grows without limit, without regard to the other systems it is enmeshed in and coexists with, largely—I understand you’re familiar with David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous and have mentioned it here before?—because we no longer recognize ourselves as part of it. In the very same manner, cancer cells grow without limit because they have begun to unravel their telomeres—they can no longer recognize healthy cells as part of the same body. As Kenneth Boulding put it:
If growth ever stops, or even slows down, our civilization—which depends on exponential growth to survive—will collapse. How could it be otherwise? The alternative would be to believe that infinite growth is possible in a finite world. “Sustainable growth” is an oxymoron, and there’s one thing all unsustainable systems have in common: they’re never sustained. I’m laying the tautologies on heavy here to make a point: the collapse of our civilization is not in question. It is tautological. Just the same as the reindeer of St. Matthew’s Island had no choice about whether their population would crash, so, too, are we well beyond the point where anything can be done to change our fate. I don’t know if people have free will or not (we’ve certainly never shown any evidence of that in our past), but I do believe in cause and effect. If we did have a chance to go a different way and avoid this, it was not in any of our lifetimes: it was 10,000 years ago, when we decided to plant some wheat rather than continue following the herds. Since then, the only choice we’ve had is how, and when, we want to face the consequences of that.
For 10,000 years, we’ve consistently decided that “when” should be “later.” We’ve come to the brink of collapse a few times, enough to notice the pattern. Sometimes, a deus ex machina will come to save us at the last minute (though, more often, it doesn’t). All the previous collapses were staved off by technologies or possiblities that were already there, but considered too expensive or low-quality to bother with, until the crisis deepened. It’s unclear whether we have any such possibilities to save us this time—solar might, but that’s questionable. We may have finally run out of delays. But the other thing we’ve learned from these near misses is that each reprieve gives us more time to grow, and that growth puts us in an even worse position the next time collapse looms. Had we collapsed in the Bronze Age, it would have killed millions, and devastated the Mediterranean. Now there are billions of us, and we’ve devastated the whole world. What will happen if we miss this, too? Trillions, and the extinction of all life on this planet? We’re in the midst of the worst mass extinction the earth has ever seen, and it’s being driven entirely by us—or, more accurately, because such an intensely complex civilization as ours, and still growing, cannot afford to share the world with much of anything else.
This is why I have so little optimism for plans like Quinn’s or Heinberg’s. Either they will be too little, too late, and have no effect, or they will have an effect, which will be to make a significant dent on our constant growth. After all, logically, any system is either growing or not growing—there is no third, intermediate option. Either such gradual schemes will do nothing to stop our growth and be useless, or they will be effective in slowing our growth, which will then escalate into more and more withdrawal. Such plans have a choice between being completely ineffective, or causing the collapse they seek to avoid.
Of course, I doubt they’ll do that. Humans are good at making up stories, and we make up stories that make us feel better all the time, to justify things we know can’t be sustained. We won’t want to pass up the possibilities to have more energy and more things, so we’re more likely to run into collapse at a full tilt.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
So, what are the implications of all this? Is this misanthropic? I think it is not misanthropic at all. After all, to explain why humans have so many problems in civilizaton, we need to invent stories like original sin: humans are innately bad, and that’s why we always feel so ill at ease in the civilization G-d destined us to build. That’s why we chafe under our rightful leaders. That’s why we feel vaguely unfulfilled and alienated by our glorious complexity. How is this not misanthropic? Rather, primitivism says that it isn’t humans who are the problem, but civilization, and one of the worst problems with it is that it is so deeply dehumanizing. Primitivism suggests that freedom and equality are the natural human condition—human nature. It suggests that we chafe under leaders because humans don’t want or need leaders; that we feel alienated in large-scale society, because large-scale society doesn’t serve human needs. Civilization turns humans into cogs; primitivism builds communities for people.
The violent elements of primitivism are not the ones who embrace collapse, but those who don’t, those like Zerzan or Jensen who believe that ideology exists independent of physical reality, and that civilization must be violently destroyed or it will perpetuate itself forever.
So what do we do?
Collapse is inevitable. It’s actually the best thing that can happen to us now (which tells us just how terrible a situation we’re really in). One way or another, voluntarily or not, with our awarness or not, this brief experiment is coming to a quick and catastrophic end. How do we deal with that?
That’s the really big question. How do we deal with that? How do we cope with that?
You say that understanding this provides a place for true misanthropes to air a disturbing lack of compassion, and as we’ve seen, that’s absolutely true. My question is … so what? Darwin provided the same, didn’t he? The Nazi party owed much of its foundation to certain philosophical notions of race and society derived, ultimately, from the theory of evolution. Should the possibility that some people will cope with an unpleasant truth poorly convince us not to believe what the facts so clearly indicate? Should we reject natural selection and evolution for the same reason?
Primitivism brings with it a truth as unpleasant as evolution, but just as undeniably true. People will react poorly to it, but that says nothing as to whether or not it is true. Rather than “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” and rejecting the basic fact that civilization is unsustainable simply because some might be led to misanthropic implications, I think we should instead fight against those implications, and argue all the more forcefully for the preservation of our humanity in the last death throes of such a dehumanizing, murderous force. Civilization cannot be sustained; no system based on infinite growth ever can be. We cannot afford to allow the road beyond civilization to lay in the hands of misanthropes and terrorists. For the sake of our species, we cannot.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
Sorry for the flurry of comments; I figured out it would only post in sections.
September 21st, 2006 at 8:09 am
I have always found both sides of the “primitivists are misanthropic” to be equally hilarious.
On one hand, you have the anti-primitivists(for lack of a better term) who ascribe all the sociopathic axe-murdering evils to the primitivists. Their arguements as to why primtivists are evil are all the same. “you don’t care about humanity, you want to see 6B humans die, you’re a cannibal” etc etc.
On the other hand, you have the two camps of primitivists. Rooughly Jason and Anthropik represent one, and Shender and Miranda represent the other. BAsically it comes down to “see I care” and “i don’t give a crap” positions.
What none of the three sides will admit is the basic facts of life and death. I have seen some try, but they generally get their dander up and their emotions get away from them.
Leaving aside collapse, all humans currently alive are going to die. all humans ever born died. all humans yet to be born die. what niether side will state is that, very simply, everyone ends up dead.
My amusement at the matter stems from the unreality that permeates both sides. Really, those 6B are going to die horrible deaths with or without collpase, from cancer, car wrecks, dysentery, aids, murder, etc etc etc. Pretty much every person who ever reads this is going to go down in a manner that is going to suck. I love cigarettes, but I am not looking forward to lung cancer.
It would be refreshing to see both sides get off their high horses and admit that the 6B deaths are out of their control. and nothing they could do will ever change the simple facts of life and death.
As far as the slimy underbelly is concerned, lets take a look a body counts. in the last century civlization killed an easy 300 million people, just in wars and politcal upheavals. i doubt seriously that, even if the 6b in question were all tribes, that they would have the philosophical and technological wherewithal to kill that many people.
every philospohy has room within for psychos. Anthropik can drop, or philosophically undermine the parts of pritivism that “allow” for the slimy underbelly, but they don’t “lead the faithful”. even if they did, you would have those, like derrick jensen and his ilk, that would think they didn’t go far enough.
this really should have gone in primitivsm flame war, but it was closed.
That said, I like both sides, if only for their hilarity.