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Tool Users Are Tool Users
Excellent point made by Bro. J. Puma on my post about Croatoan and primitivism. Puma writes:
First of all, the idea of some kind of dichotomy between “primitive” and “civilized” seems really weird when you think about it. I mean, all “civilization” really means is a society in which people try to live together, so if you talk about life after “the collapse of civilization,” you’re really talking about the replacement of one kind of civilization with another. Secondly, the idea that certain cultures are ‘primitive’ and others are ‘civilized’ is pretty much grounded in European Imperialist philosophy from the get-go– Noble Savages and whatnot. Really, when you think about it, the notion of “primitivism” is almost bigoted. All of the cultures in question, whether “primitive” or “civilized,” are *technical* cultures– tool users. No “collapse” of anything will ever erase that, and due to the nature of technique, which always expands to fill all of its possibilities, it’s very possible that within a hundred years or so after any kind of collapse many so-called primitivist communities will become reliant on technologies once again.
I think a far, far better descriptor for the differences in question might be sustainable versus nonsustainable. In other words, a transition not from “civilization” to “primitivism,” but from destructive civilization to holistic civilization. This could certainly be done even at our current population levels, and we could even keep a lot of our shiny toys.
Without even getting into Romanticism and traditional primitivism, a la Rousseau, I think he makes an extremely strong point about the use of technology. Many modern primitivist arguments tend to revolve around us abandoning technology, but at the same time we are allowed to keep certain types of technology - presumably the ones used by hunter-gatherers. But if technology is part of the problem, how could we be allowed to keep certain types of technology? Wouldn’t we need to root out the human connection to tools of all types in order to really rid ourselves of the “dangerous progress” caused by technology?
What I’m saying is: say you eliminate all technologies except for bows and arrows and like baskets or something. Over time, you are going to see people creating better versions of these acceptable tools, until you have a really good basket and a really good bow and arrow. Until suddenly, someone from the fringes is going to make something better than a bow and arrow and more powerful than a basket. And before you know it (although it may take a while) you are going to be smack dab in the middle of technological acceleration again.
So is getting rid of technology really the solution? It does not seem like it to me because technology is a function of the human mind, and a natural one to boot. Even if we had no tools, we would invent them as soon as possible.
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September 21st, 2006 at 3:02 pm
I agree with your main criticism, that the primitivist critique of technology is typically quite shallow. This is something I’ve often criticized among other primtivists myself. But the air of inevitability you give to high technology is certainly misplaced. Look at the progression of invention throughout the Paleolithic. People who are content do not invent. Necessity is the mother of invention, so if you don’t want for much, you don’t invent much, either. Technology is just one facet of complexity, and sustainable societies do not constantly advance any part of their complexity, including technology: they develop a comfortable, dynamic equilibrium.
But I thought we were past things like this by now:
Then why do people feel so unsettled if I say “the Inuit civilization” or “the !Kung civilization”? People living together is a society. Civilization is a very peculiar type of society–and one, frankly, where people living together is something of a weak point. All other types of societies handle that part much better. Civilization drives us towards isolation, simply because it’s so much work to keep it going that we have very little energy left over to spend on social interactions. Don’t believe me? Sociologists do studies on this kind of thing.
September 21st, 2006 at 5:05 pm
who feels unsettled? i’d posit that the inuit and !kung peoples are quite civilized. i think it’s a big mistake to think that ‘civilization’ can only fit into a rigid pigeonhole defined by post-efficiency-revolution westerners. all of these different definitions of ‘civilization’ i’m finding like to define it as an ‘advanced’ state or a ‘more complex’ state or a ‘different’ state, but it’s really none of these things– it’s a self-imposed definition, and although i certainly couldn’t prove it, i’d bet my bottom dollar that a lot of !kung and inuit people consider themselves perfectly civilized.
the more i look into it, the more i find reason to question standard definitions of such things, from all sides. another definition of ‘civilization’ is ‘a complex society’ as distinguished from a ’simple society.’ but then who gets to decide what border exists between complexity and simplicity? i mean, really, leading one’s nomadic tribe based on the planting seasons and movements of the sun and stars and ritual mythology seems pretty damned complex to your average reader, whereas driving a car to the corner market probably seems pretty simple.
sometimes these discussions remind me of what dave letterman once said about the oscars: a bunch of rich people giving awards to one another.
September 21st, 2006 at 5:21 pm
In this case, I have to agree with Jason. Puma’s argument misses the point.
Primitivists don’t use the word “civilization” in the way Puma suggests; for them it denotes a peculiarly rapacious and oppressive kind of society, rather than any society of any kind. The distinction between sustainable and unsustainable is crucial in understanding the primitivist critique.
Secondly, the point about so-called primitive technologies is that these are likely to be the only ones available after the inevitable collapse of civilization — because the rapaciousness of civilization will have severely depleted available resources (i.e., raw materials, energy supplies, soil fertility, etc).
“Primitive” is probably an unfortunate choice of words, since it does suggest the kind of Eurocentrism Puma rightfully deplores. But again, that isn’t what primitivists mean by it. For them, it’s about sustainability, and what attracts them to so-called primitive cultures is that these cultures contain patterns of sustainable lifestyles.
September 21st, 2006 at 5:26 pm
Technology did not evolve for hundreds of thousands of years due to low population densities kept so through natural causes. When separate tribes of people began to clash, after a “saturation point” was met through the expansion of migratory peoples into almost every habitat, technologies had to evolve in order to aid tribes in competition with each other for resources. There never really was a Rousseauean paradise; only a population kept naturally low through predation, starvation and disease. The “comfortable, dynamic equilibrium” would be better described in the words of Thomas Hobbes- “solitary [at least relative to modern communities], poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
We are, if you will, “doomed” to complexity. Then again, if it’s a doom, it’s certainly one I can live with.
September 21st, 2006 at 5:40 pm
In other words, I agree with Puma that sustainability is a better way to frame the discussion.
But whether we can continue to enjoy our “shiny toys” and current population levels, if only we switch from destructive to a holistic civilization, is highly debatable. If I understand them, the primitivists are saying that those shiny toys (and the population levels) are highly dependent upon the exploitative practices of our current civilization and will fall with it.
September 21st, 2006 at 6:01 pm
Certainly not in any meaningful sense. They think theirs is the best culture going, just like everyone else, but they don’t think they actually live in cities. Even people who otherwise understand ethnocentrism feel uncomfortable referring to a forager culture as a “civilization.” As well they should! The root of “civilization” is the Latin civis, or city. Civilizations are a very specific kind of culture, defined by a specific approach to complexity. Anything else renders the term utterly useless, which would be a shame, because such cultures are distinct, and we need a good word like “civilization” to denote them. Our ethnocentric attachments to it, turning it into a mere synonym for “good,” are something to be resisted, less we lose the ability to talk about this phenomenon, and in so doing, become powerless to do anything about it.
A good example of how rules of thumb and human intuition break down. Complexity is not vaguely defined here. You may have missed the very large comment I left here a few days ago, but I posted it to my own blog as “Reviewing the Basics.” Besides going over the fact that civilization really does have a definition, it also goes over what “complexity” means. It’s quite quantifiable, and your trip to the corner grocery is demonstrably more complex than any forager’s nomadic route.
This is so blatantly, completely untrue it makes my head spin. Disease was practically unknown prior to the domestication of animals: nearly all our epidemic diseases are zoonotics. All of humanity’s natural predators are in Africa, and there have been humans outside of Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. So for hundreds of thousands of years, human foragers have been living without any fear of predation whatsoever. Finally, foragers do not starve. Only farmers do. We have evidence of a massive mortality crisis with the onset of farming: the moment populations picked up farming, they started dying of starvation all around. See Dickson’s Mounds. Meanwhile, we cannot find any evidence, whether archaeological or ethnographic, of any forager living south of the Arctic circle starving to death, ever. That includes such uninhabitable wastes as the Kalahari, where the !Kung don’t just survive, they positively thrive–except for the predations of Bantu pastoralists and now civilized agriculturalists.
The scenario you posit is common mythology, though. Unfortunately, not a single syllable of it has the remotest relationship to truth.
I love that phrase. See, Hobbes lived when the Enlightenment was just getting underway. Another debate he got into was whether arguments should be based on evidence. He said no; he defended the position that all valid arguments should be pure thought experiments. And it shows, because while Leviathan might be a nice thought experiment, anthropology has proven his assumptions about primitive life to be utterly, utterly baseless. In fact, foragers are less solitary with tighter communities, utterly lacking in any kind of scarcity, quite refined and cultured, and they usually live significantly longer than farmers. So, who’s life is really solitary, nasty, brutish and short?
Really? Pick up some anthropology texts and check if those thought experiments of yours match up with the facts (they don’t). And you might want to take another look, to, at what that complexity costs you….
And also that a “sustainable civilization” is an oxymoron. To make it sustainable will require decreases of scale such that it will no longer be civilization.
September 21st, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Do any of you foresee the mainstream picking up the word “civilization” as the thing worth fighting against and moving on from? I cannot see it. For too many people, this term is synonymous with the things they cherish (community, security, comfort). All of these are important things — and probably more present in “primitive” cultures than our own — but I cannot see the mainstream forsaking “civilization.”
For you primitivists out there, what is your stance on this? Clinging to “civilization” (as the enemy) makes me think you’ll be on the “fringes” for quite a long time, never taken seriously. Is that the idea? Or is it to bring everyone within “civilization” together in unity of an agreed upon nightmare (to move away from)?
September 21st, 2006 at 6:30 pm
no wonder you dorks have nothing useful to say.
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”
- Alice in Wonderland
September 21st, 2006 at 6:40 pm
On the word “civilization”: Anthropik as a whole is very concerned about being precise in our language. That’s because we started out with Daniel Quinn, who made up words and phrases like “Taker,” “Leaver,” “totalitarian agriculture,” etc., while anthropologists already had terms for all those things. (”Civilization,” “forager band or tribe,” “agriculture,” etc.) It was impossible to look up these things in scholarly texts, and so it took a long time to connect what Quinn was talking about to what everybody else was talking about. So we’ve been careful to keep as close to the accepted terms for these things as we can, except in the case of precision. (Jason didn’t feel that Childe’s definition of civilization was precise enough, so he wrote a new article providing a new definition and explaining his reasoning.)
After reading The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, Jason briefly toyed with the idea of changing the words we used because the mainstream had a different idea of what the anthropologically precise words meant. So for instance, “tribe” would become “family” (as in, extended family, which is basically what tribes are). But I pointed out that if we did that, we’d be making the same mistake Quinn made: making it difficult for our readers to communicate with others without spending a while on vocab lessons. (Plus, denotation vs. connotation aside, it actually did give people a better idea of what we were after if we said we were planning on starting a tribe, compared to telling them we were planning on starting a family.)
Civilization isn’t bad by our definition; civilization is bad by implication. We haven’t defined it as “the enemy”; we’ve concluded that it’s not a good thing based on the various ways in which it differs from other, more sustainable cultures. That’s our opinion, which is separate from the definition. For instance, part of the definition of civilization is that it must always grow. Putting that together with the knowledge that this is a finite universe, you end up with the implication that it must, at some point, collapse.
As for being on the fringes, I think we’re pretty much doomed to that anyway.
September 21st, 2006 at 6:43 pm
In the Leviathan, Hobbes was defending the notion of sovereignty against the anarchism represented by the English Civil War. His characterization of life in the “state of nature” was a bit of propaganda, setting up a false dichotomy in order to make the State look more attractive.
FWIW, Fredy Perlman’s “Against Leviathan” provides a good counter-balance, and describes the monster of civilization in ways that many primitivists might find agreeable.
September 21st, 2006 at 7:06 pm
I sometimes like to think of it as hierarchical versus decentralized, external vertical power versus horizontal and local power. This external power of civilization is what makes it easy for those in power (or just those not local to some place) to be unaware of what is actually occuring in a certain place, allowing for the decimation of environments when resources are called for.
SNAFU. “It what I call the “snafu principal.” Communication only occurs between equals–real communication, that is–because when you are dealing with people above you in a hierarchy, you learn not to tell them anything they don’t want to hear. If you tell them anything they don’t want to hear, the response is, “One more word Bumstead and I’ll fire you!” Or in the military, “One more word and you’re court-martialed.” It’s throughout the whole system.” -Robert Anton Wilson
September 21st, 2006 at 7:21 pm
I’m not a primitivist myself, just a kibitzer using (or abusing) the comment facilities of this blog. Please don’t attribute anything I say to Jason or any other primitivist, unless he explicitly endorses it.
September 21st, 2006 at 8:04 pm
The Ancient Sumerians believed that Eden was not a garden, but a city.
For real.? Yes.
Lamanna, You say that part of the definition of civilization is that it must always grow.
That really is not true except in the dictionary in your mind. Technocracy is a non growth system , and it would bring us to the heights of a new type of civilization. It is a steady state system , that keeps whittling itself down as much as possible for the very reasons that you argue about , and make good points about.
Civilization you say is bad by implication.
Perhaps to you because you are unaware that a civilization has been thought up which removes the arguments against it you are making.
This Technate includes all of North America. Canada , the U.S. Mexico and Central America, and the very top of S. America.
That is our plan.
Why that area.? The resource base. The people living in that area would comprise the population of the Technate. After getting our house in order, we could assist the rest of the world with similar constructs.
There is no Politics involved.
None.
No Religious system.
None.
Why do this.? It is practical, and it will insure our survival for who knows how long , but for a long time , and it would also be a great joy to live in a good civilization that was not just about tricking the suckers, which our civilization specializes in .
No banking, No insurance, Free everything. No more rush hour, 90% of what people consider jobs would be eliminated almost immediately. These so called jobs are flimsy excuses to exploit people and keep the class system going. Capitalism is based on a scarcity system . A class caste system.
Why not get rid of it.?
Communism is about the same. It was a weird fascistic distribution system . That won`t work either.
How about Technocracy. ?
Sociologists do studies on this sort of thing.? Jason , If I believed half the stuff I hear and read my head would not be able to compute any reality. Sociology can be a bit like economics, a pseudoscience . In the mind of the beholder.
There are area`s in China that have been farmed for a couple of thousand years. The soil now is better than when they started. That fact shoots pretty much the civilization is bad by implication idea.
I do not think the people who have been fed by those plots of land would think that agriculture is bad by implication.
I do think it is comical that you glamorize hunter gatherers.
I live in Minnesota. Apparently you are unaware that it was not uncommon for people to starve to death here in the winter and also freeze to death. You may not want to believe that people suffered from starvation here , and I am talking about the native Americans , but that is a fact. It was not uncommon, despite what you claim.
Given a choice I would not like to be a member of a tribe. As Groucho said, I would not be a member of any tribe that would have me as a member , or something like that. The only tribe I want to belong to is Tribe.net
September 21st, 2006 at 8:20 pm
I agree, it could be a decisive datapoint, if true. Do you have any references for those of us who would like to follow this lead? Which areas of China do you mean? How was the soil improvement achieved?
September 21st, 2006 at 9:41 pm
By putting lots of nice organic material on it , and treating it like your life depended on it, not planting corn ten years in a row , and killing all the microorganisms , land does pretty well. Admittedly few people take care of the land now. Why.? Profit motive. Most of the farmland in America is sterile, almost.
One of greatest most fertile areas for farming in the world is in southern Minnesota and Iowa.
This is new land in the sense that It was created in the last 15,000 years after the glaciers left.
This land was thick prairie thatch until about 150 years ago.
At this time some people are predicting that we have about 20 years left of the type of farming we are doing now, before this land is destroyed.
Already the aquifer under it is receding quickly, so much so that it can not be recharged to a level where the water is available. This water is also filling up with nitrates and other things that are poisonous.
I am sorry I can not say where the field in China is. I read about that somewhere, sorry.
The point I was trying to make is that we do not value the land except to rape it for money.
Nature will avenge itself on us for that. We will be punished for being thoughtless.
September 21st, 2006 at 10:08 pm
Got it. Organic farming and stewardship of the land — as called for by Wendell Berry, among others.
I grew up in western Illinois, and remember that black prairie soil. I also remember when the farm fields were smaller and separated by windbreak trees. Last time I was back there I was shocked to see that all those trees were gone. I’m told that most of the farms have absentee owners (agribusiness and foreign investors) and that the farmers working the fields are just employees, paid to maximize annual yields and to hell with the long-term consequences. This is the result of farmers getting caught up in the indebtedness recommended to them by the agricultural “experts”. (Berry tells this story in many of his essays. Recommended reading.)
The question, I suppose, is whether old-style farming can (1) feed a population as large as we have today, and (2) restore depleted farmland in time to make a difference. I’m reminded of the story about that guy who planted trees in the barren parts of Spain, kick-starting an ecological recovery…it’s a story of patience, and hope. Dunno if it’s true or not, but it’s one that bears thinking about in the midst of present concerns.
September 22nd, 2006 at 8:31 am
The Sumerians also believed that humans existed to grow grain for the gods. They were probably the most fanatical civilized folk to ever live. What else would their “Eden” be but a city?
This isn’t some semantic game. Those playing semantic games are the ones who want to make “civilization” a synonym for “good,” or a synonym for “culture.” People are very good at noticing phenomena, but not so good at delineating the precise criteria of them. That’s all we’ve done. I’ve reiterated this argument a few times now, and if it’s still problematic, please see my thesis #13, where I address the question at length.
As for Technocracy, whatever you may believe about it, it is first and foremost hypothetical. Even if you’re 100% right, there’s no evidence that it could ever work. You might as well dismiss horse anatomy on the grounds of unicorns.
And if a civilization were capable of staying in the river valleys where that holds true, you might have a point. But to do that, it would have to be so fundamentally changed it wouldn’t be a civilization anymore.
I actually know a good bit about several of the tribes that once inhabited Minnesota. I know many modern survivalists who starve and freeze to death, but I’ve never found one Native. There’s no archaeological evidence. No anthropologist has ever seen one. I flat out don’t believe you. I believe you’re just plain making this up. I wanted desperately to find an example like that to prove my biases, once upon a time. I couldn’t find one.
You don’t want to have a family? You don’t want to have a community? That’s a very unique point of view.
And the Fertile Crescent wasn’t always a blasted desert. I suppose Mesopotamia had a booming commodities exchange in Ur that’s gone heretofore unnoticed?
Organic farming has been one of the most rapacious and destructive practices we’ve ever used, second only to industrial farming. Check out Richard Manning’s Against the Grain, or at least the summary he provides in “The Oil We Eat.” In both, he provides an excellent summary of the history of agriculture, and how little actually changed with the Green Revolution.
It can’t. The population grew to 3 billion in 1960 due to organic agriculture. Industrial agriculture has since brought that number to 6.5 billion. Remove industial agriculture, and half the human population dies. Continue with industrial agriculture, and we very possibly all die.
Absolutely not. Organic agriculture doesn’t restore any soil at all. It’s absolutely rapacious in its destruction. Now, in especially fertile areas, like the river valleys where agriculture began, annual flooding restores soil even faster than organic agriculture kills it off. That’s the case in China, though in the intervening centuries they’ve found that their appetite has grown so large that they began to outstrip even that, and have developed various methods to slow down the damage. I believe similar measures have been used in Ireland. It’s not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination, but it does slow the damage.
Permaculture actually can help rebuild soils–if everyone’s willing to wait something like 30-50 years for their next meal.
September 22nd, 2006 at 10:21 am
Granted we are in deep shit.
Any way you look at our present culture , we are in for some severe reality checks.
Technocracy sets aside vast areas as agriculture zones , and would use huge machines over large tracts to farm in the most state of the art, ecologically friendly manner that can be done. Within this area there would be wild areas set aside.
If a serious attempt to continue a civilization is to be made this would have to be done.
Technocracy is hard ass in the sense that we would pull the plug on the rest of the world.
No more food exporting. That may sound harsh , but technocracy is constructed also as a way to survive.
Selling food for profit destroys us now.
After a technate is established here, we could assist other land masses do the same in the future if they are interested. Europe and Africa, China and Australia perhaps , would make other constructs, then it may be possible to link eventually.
We have to get our own house in order first though.
That means shutting off imports from China.
Deconstructing globalism completely under the current price system.
If we start a technate do you think that other people would emulate us.?
As soon as they could.
Obviously the current system brings death and ruin for all.
There is no way out of that as Jason has pointed out and he is right.
So do we opt for a civilization, or live in a hole in the ground or a tee pee.?
I like a modern apt. with the option of maybe living in a hole in the ground on the weekend if I am in the mood.
Yes, the Sumerians believed that civilization existed to grow grain for the gods among other things. Its funny. They are our prototype civilization. We are a direct line that goes back to them in our thinking in modern America.
They are the first people that invented the idea of a unilateral contract that god made with them . That was fake and made by the humans of course. The Jews , Christians and Muslims later picked up this idea.
They fell for this falsehood also.
It was a lie that was created to make people fight wars and work.
They even say that it is a lie in their creation myth.
Oh really do they really. ?
Yes they do.
In case any of you do not know originally religion , of the middle east was a practical joke that was played on the people in an express way back in about 2200 BC.
Think I am kidding.?
No I am not.
You are brain washed friends with belief systems. Tricked to waste your life to make someone rich with money. A worthless thing. But you can control others that way , now can`t you. You also can be controled.
Are you sick of being humiliated. ? Could you wake up now to this fact.?
The time of the great brain washing should be over now.
Jason, the creation myth tells in great detail that it is all a lie constructed to control the ignorant people. ~! We still operate under that lie with our Judeo/Christian etc, heritage here.
In the creation myth it says that although alike revered, the gods would be divided into two groups. Mankind was created from the blood of a rebel god, that the other gods created to free themselves.
Now do you understand the dynamic.? That is where our common religions come from .
Humans devised a way to divide and conquer into class and caste systems and then control the behaviour of their fellows by some ingenious brainwashing techniques.~ ! I hope you all understand this now even though I am giving the thumbnail version.
We have been afflicted with the belief of a unilateral contract with god that was made up by a bunch of clever humans that wanted to take advantage of their own people, and also spread their lying ideas to suck in more people. It really is that simple.
P.T. Barnum in 2200 b.c. / That is religion. Then and now.
People are gullible.
We have been tricked with all of the fake belief systems to go against the nature that is more normal and natural for humans.
Fear and guilt works wonder to control people.
Lets throw off the brainwashing now and create a society that no longer does that. Lets learn from our mistakes .
Do you really want to repeat this process over and over again of being stupid gullible tricked humans.?
Technocracy gets us off the wheel.
With Jason’s system who knows what other idiotic gods will be found to enslave us again.?
Why throw away the knowledge we have about how we got here.?
It really is pretty interesting how we got here.
Lets learn our lesson as to our hate mongering bigoted belief systems.
Maybe in a strange way they got us here, but what do they have to offer us now.? Death, destruction, humiliation, being cut off from the natural world, suffering in pollution, all the things that Jason hates and I hate.
What say we reorient and try a system not based on belief, but based on freedom of belief , where belief might be considered for what it is.? Mostly comical.
Why do we have to believe in anything that requires belief.?
It is not required, and look at what it has done to us. It has destroyed us.
My book, Beyond the Cloak of Deception - Politics , Religion, & Economics in the Price System gets into all that , this is just an intimation.
If any care to actually read it , they can online at my web site its free as a download to anyones files who might like a copy.
Wake up humans.~!
You are victims, and have been for some time. Lets change that now. Lets try something different that is not based on the , every thing for me and nothing for you antecedents of our culture.
By the way when the concept of the unilateral contract with god first started to catch on in Babylon, it became a rage , and stormed throughout like a pop culture phenomena. It somehow penetrated and stuck in the brain of people.
As Jason would no doubt know that really was the beginning of the end for a lot of people.
This false and inhuman theory has taken over lots of the world.
We are pawns in a system like this.
Are we smart enough to change it now.? Jason I think it would be sweet to replant the forests in Lebanon, and the wild grain fields in the fertile crescent.
Even let the animals roam wild again there in places like they did 10,000 years ago.
There would be no chance of that happening under your system.
In your system we will make the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again.
Why not learn now and kick out our old Price System , and maybe we can restore large tracts of nature.?
Maybe we can whittle the population down to a sustainable level , where growth is limited , held in check , and not a good thing , but a known bad thing.
I am afraid with your system we learn nothing from the last 10,000 year experiment.
I would say your system means that we are utter failures and what we did was meaningless.
I hope we have a choice, we may not.
Then it will be a nightmare of death , starvation, privation, for most all. Technocracy is not perfect .
Nothing is perfect.
Humans deserve better than the crooked lying system that has been used to exploit and manipulate them , especially the last few thousands of years. Trouble ahead. Big trouble. Uh oh, we are doomed in the present system. Yikes. ~ ! ~
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:00 pm
skipping here the question of how to use the world “civilization”
and addressing the issue that the blog post raised:
“Until suddenly, someone from the fringes is going to make something better than a bow and arrow and more powerful than a basket.”
a certain amount of innovation may go on, but we have to ask “better” in what sense. If the new superbow will make it easier for us to get our food, then cool, lets invent it. If you’re talking about a really big bow which will inadvertently wipe out the deer population that we depend on for food, then its not actually better and free people would not want to invent it or use it.
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:21 pm
That’s baloney! It may be that things stop being manufactured on quite the scale of today, but we won’t be reduced to throwing rocks at one another and drinking out of puddles. What we will do is turn garbage and detritus and all the objects that have survived into our new natural resources!
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Okay, so the name of the game is refuting civilization, and in order to do that, we have to rely on anthropology which is not only a product of civilization, but more accurately a product of Western Imperialism in order to somehow “prove” that civilization is actually bad? But wait, didn’t we have to rely on civilization in order to even reach such points?
Further, if we want to know about people and how people live, wouldn’t it make sense of us to not read texts, but to go look at real people - or, even better, to go out and be one and to live life?
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:27 pm
I actually had a dream recently where I was watching network news on television, and they had a little blurb about after the commercial break. It featured a man in a blue shirt and tie, hair carefully parted and graying, and they said something like:
“And after the break, Skip talks about the ‘Crash’ of Civilization!”
And it was implied by their framing of it that it would be an opinion piece where “Skip” would refute it as a movement of no import. Future memory or wishful dream thinking?
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:33 pm
Yes, it is a semantic game, as others have pointed out above. You yourself are simply playing the semantic game where you want to make “civilization” mean “bad”
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:35 pm
I agree with Jason on this point Skip. And I have seen other would-be technocrats claim they don’t care about love or human contact or somesuch. It’s an absurdity and not much of a selling point for your system!
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Well, shouldn’t we be playing the long game here? Shouldn’t we be planning 300-500 to 5,000 years down the road?
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:39 pm
Hey Skip: have you ever read any Philip K. Dick? Part of your description of the Technate reminds me of the world he paints in The Penultimate Truth. He raises some important questions about what kind of story-system/mythology you would have to create and sustain to run a system which is (only loosely) similar to what you’re talking about. It’s kind of a shitty book with some interesting points. I fear his vision is more likely how a real Technate would turn out!
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Then how, may I ask, did we get where we are today?
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:55 pm
I hear you, but I think Jason’s point was that we might all starve before we get 30-50 years down the road.
But that presupposes some kind of cataclysm, forcing us to immediately switch off the current system of industrial agriculture — everywhere, all at the same time — and just as abruptly switch on permaculture, then wait hungrily for it to start producing results. I’m no expert in these matters, but my hunch is that a gradual phase-out and phase-in is still a viable option.
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:54 pm
Those were Jason`s words not mine. He was doing an unfair rhetorical polemic, You just didn`t firgure that out Tim , or want to believe it for some other reason.
I never remotely said anything even like that.
I have a cyber girl friend in China, belong to several online dating services, and chase around looking for love all the time in my local area on foot and horseback or skateboard .
Don`t care about love and human contact. ? Ya bullshit, where did you pull that out of.? Jasons lying comment, or your own mind.
Shame on you Jason, lying is not a good program when trying to get at the truth.
I see you also used another unfair rhetorical polemic Tim, Other loveless technocrats, Ya, Well bullshit. Calling you out .
That is what we call flapping the jaws , without saying much. That is an odd way to communicate. Pure disinformation. Think about what I just said.
When someone says , You don`t want to have a family, ? You don`t want to have a community.? that’s a very unique point of view.
Well I did not say those things Tim , Jason did.
He made me say them through his mouth.
Do you understand.?
Oldest trick in the book. Its the old , When did you stop beating your wife joke.? ~! ~ You were tricked by a very talented but very corrupted thinker , that is Jason. It isn`t good debate to lie or trick people. Jason did that in your case to you. Sharpen up man.
Jason was soundly beaten by me in a fair debate to the point that he resorted to lying to portray me as a kind of loveless person that he was exposing.
It isn`t true though, and Tim you are a gullible human.
Think about that also.
Jason`s arguments are not good, so he had to resort to casting me as a loveless person. Funny.
See ?
I hope so , but you will see what you please to see. I can tell you something but as the old joke goes only god can make you think. ~ ! ~
September 22nd, 2006 at 6:08 pm
Oh boy. I think everybody needs to take the weekend off!
September 22nd, 2006 at 6:46 pm
Haven`t read the Dick book . Its been years since I read science fiction. I used to love it. Some of my favorite stuff was the anthologies of award winning short stories. Some of those stories I read 40 years ago click in my mind every now and then , and I remember with sheer joy how creative they were.
September 22nd, 2006 at 6:53 pm
PS. Sorry I didn’t realize I was misinterpreting your quotes above. It’s been a long day reading through the comments everybody left on my site while I was at work this week and probably glossed over it accidentally.
I did in fact, however, have a conversation on the Technocracy.ca website, where a fellow said that he didn’t care for qualities of human closeness and initimacy and linked it to his philosophical platform, it seemed. So that was the context in which I framed my original quote. Apologies for the mistake!
September 22nd, 2006 at 7:15 pm
I understand. It was that ingenious website that made me aware of your interesting blog.
I am using ingenious in the old fashioned comic pejorative way. Of course that whole thing is another issue.
It does not surprise me at all that you had that experience , or any other possible negative experience there.
Our official technocracyinc.org site is partially up and running now from its post Kolzene experience. It is looking pretty good , you might click on it just to take a peak. It has a photo of our board and a couple of volunteers on its home page right now. A little written word on there explaining a few things also.
I would guess that it is one hell of a damn near impossible task to keep all this organized. I understand completely.
September 22nd, 2006 at 8:41 pm
Sure, and that will last for a while, but if you spend some critical thought on the subject, as I have, you’ll discover that that won’t last you terribly long.
And didn’t you just write about how stupid and ugly the grocery bag sandals were?
Anthropology’s the cure for civilization’s misrepresentation of primitive life. If not for civilization, we wouldn’t need anthropology. So the need for anthropology is simply to help, in part, undo the damage civilization had done.
But yes, it would be better to live among foragers one’s self. I’m assuming most people haven’t the time for that, so reading the account of someone who did is a good proxy. As for simply living life, that’s a fine idea … but how? We were taught one way (a cruelly destructive way), but if we’d like to try a different one, it might behoove us to learn how first.
Actually, I just want a definition that rises above mere ethnocentrism, something that’s not just a synonym for “good” or “bad.” Either civilization is defined by its relationship to complexity, as anthropologists use the term, or it is a meaningless synonym for “culture” or “society.” If we do that, we can discuss what it is, and what it means, and whether or not it’s good or bad. Otherwise, we’re just spewing ethnocentric claptrap and patting ourselves on the back for how great we are.
Yes, and that’s one of the things I like about permaculture, but you seem to have missed my main point–you can’t build soil and provide food for mass society at the same time. So if everyone’s going to take a 50 year break from eating (that’s me being flippant, see; I’m highlighting that this can’t happen because everyone would starve)….
That’s the million dollar question, and I think the most obvious answer is the same way people always submit to things they hate. Irrational fear. Its robs us of our reason, and convinces us to surrender the things that really matter for a passing, ephemeral illusion of safety. And as always, we just end up less safe than we started….
Indeed, that’s how it would have to happen. But to let enough land lie fallow as we would need, while also cutting yield per acre by abandoning Green Revolution techniques, would involve massive cuts in food supply all the same, which would mean massive mortality–50% being the lowest possible number. So either we keep running industrial agriculture as is until we completely use up every last resource, or we volunteer for die-off now. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
You didn’t say it, but it was hardly unfair. You said you don’t want a tribe. Well, what you’re failing to take account of is that a tribe is a family–a community. Any family or community you belong to is a tribe. I was challenging your misconception of what a “tribe” is by highlighting that it is simply community. Humans evolved in tribes the way bees did in hives or wolves in packs. When left to our own devices, all of our casual social groups take on the dynamics of tribes.
You were the one who said you didn’t want a tribe. What do you think a tribe is? It’s not a type of family or community. Any meaningful community is going to be a tribe. What else could it be? Tribes are the only social groups humans know how to make.
I asked you a question, I didn’t attribute those words to you. My assumption was that you DO want a community, so you DO want a tribe. Just like every other human being. I was pointing that out.
WTF? OK, so anyone asking you a question is putting words in your mouth? Damn.