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The So-Called “Critique” of Civilization
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” - Life of Brian
I have been thoroughly enjoying the conversations held here lately about the crash of civilization both as a fantasy and as a potential reality, along with the many strains of thinking about how best to live through such a thing. It may seem that I have been unfairly singling out certain individuals or groups within that discussion, but it has been with the sincere attempt at inspiring a heated, open, direct and challenging conversation. I hope it has been as successful for others’ purposes as it has been for mine. It has enabled me to think through many issues (both pro and con) which I had glossed over or misunderstood in the past. I’m sure I still have a ways to go but it is heartening to see people putting such seriousness into these subjects.
Which leads me to the actual critique of civilization itself. As an art school drop-out, to me the purpose of having a critique is so that you can collaboratively communicate with an artist about their work, so as to give them outside insight to make their work better, more successful or more aesthetically pleasing. Likely it won’t surprise you that I was often one to deliver very blunt (and often unwelcome critiques), but I did so (and still do so) under the belief that it challenges people to create better work.
My goal in telling that story of my personal history is twofold. One, it’s intended to sketch in details of me as a more fleshed-out character, and two, I’m hoping to open a conversation about the nature and purpose of criticism or critique.
Wikipedia reveals that the word “critic” comes down to us from the ancient Greeks (kritikós and krités), “meaning a person who offers reasoned judgement or analysis, value judgement, interpretation, or observation.” And it further explains that “critique” has a rich history in philosophy, meaning “a systematic inquiry into the conditions and consequences of a concept or set of concepts, and an attempt to understand its limitations.” As can be seen, the anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization fits very well into both meanings.
But at the same time, in my own usage of the term, you only critique something which you would like to make better. If you want to destroy a work of art, then you smash it on the floor or rip a whole through the canvas. You don’t sit the artist down and tell them in what ways their work failed and how they could improve it. In other words, I see the purpose of critique as being improvement rather than refutation. You attack in order to trigger a defense and cause something to strengthen itself (otherwise you would simply deal a destructive death blow and be done with it).
And this is ultimately the same light in which I have come to see the anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization: I see it not as a practical destruction or even a philosophical refutation of civilization, but as the ultimate fulfillment of modern civilization. If you look at the goals of the modern primitivists, you will see them say that tribalization and a return to hunter-gatherer societies will enable us to be healthier, live longer, be happier, more free, and to more fully experience the richness of human experience. Though the reputation of Western civilization (particularly the American variant of it) has grown very sullied over these past few years as we have come face to face with our failures and paradoxes, it is undeniable that the goals of the even the most radical anarcho-primitivist philosopher were cribbed almost whole cloth from the now-buried ideals of Western civilization: individual expression, freedom, health, happiness, fulfillment. Anarcho-primitivists are not working at cross-purposes here; they are keeping alive the dreams and ideals upon which all of our lives are in fact founded. Hell, they are really the American Dream writ-large, are they not? They are the settler who moves West to escape repression, live off the land and learn from the Indians. They do not diminish our ideals but elevate them to a new level and offer new insights and contexts for how to think about problems that have plagued us for a long time.
Furthermore, the anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization makes use of what tools? Philosophy, economics, history, anthropology, ecology, psychology, comparative analysis, scientific methodology. In short, these are the tools of civilization. These are the fruits of thousands upon thousands of lives and man-hours spent across generations and milennia. And that is without even speaking of how anarcho-primitivists make use of the physical technology of civilization: the computer, the internet, the printing press, the written language. Some primitivist philosophers, such as John Zerzan, have notably been criticized for this apparent contradiction, that they rely on the constructs of civilization to criticize it.
My point is in all this: in order to fully refute something, you must fully refuse it. You must unlearn the English language, forget all of history and culture and go live naked in the woods and never talk to anyone again. But then, you’re left wondering, how will my ideas spread? Precisely. They won’t - you will have removed yourself from the thoroughly imperialist notion that you need to colonize others with your viewpoints. However, if you’re more inclined to use the best of civilization to effect a change on the worst excesses of civilization, then by all means do so. Because that is exactly what civilization needs, not only to survive whatever comes next, but also to thrive, and even to progress (which I know is a four-letter word among primitivists). So, for those of you out there on the edges critiquing civilization, please continue. What you’re doing is very valuable and you’re raising a lot of extremely important and useful points about the paradoxes and unsustainable patterns of our current situation. And in so doing, you make all of us stronger.
God save the Queen!
- Core Human Values
- Ken Wilber Critique, Part 5
- Running Toward the Bomb
- Staying In Balance
- The Tame & The Wild
- Prev: “This Means War!”
- Next: As You Love Yourself
September 19th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
I can’t actually find any good info on it at the moment, but doesn’t McLuhan predict that technology will allow us to re-tribalize? Isn’t this perhaps more in line with what primitivists are doing online today, as opposed to actually breaking from civilization (or preparing to outlast it, as they like to argue)?
September 22nd, 2006 at 3:48 pm
The truth about the forbidden love afair is finally revealed! Terrific way to bring in the reins on everything that has been discussed here. As I’ve been eating up the work of Wade Davis recently, I cannot help but share the quote of his that this post brought to light:
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:06 pm
You’ve given the primitivist critique a pretty solid whacking, methinks. As far as I can see, primitivism is an ideology that believes that the oak tree is a sin against the acorn, and that an egg filled with waste will choke the chicken-fetus within to its death, when neither is the case.
Complexity and information technologies are improving at such a rate that it seems that the answer is not less, but more. 200 species a day are going extinct? Let’s start bioengineering hundreds of new species and build a new biosphere. Let’s modify man and blend him with machine. Let’s break out of this gravitational prison and conquer the universe. Let’s transform- let’s go beyond- let’s break the bounds of natural chaos and subject them to the rational order of spirit. Let’s evolve, and let the chips fall where they may. Let’s step up to the next level- the alternative is too grim to contemplate.
“You hold the code of life to be sacred, but I ask you: does the sacred brook no improvement?”- Shen-ji Yang, Alpha Centauri
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Thanks for this conclusion, Tim. I actually agree with you in spirit, though I find your lexicon clumsy. You keep switching between civilization and culture, and using the term “civilization” for both concepts, that it’s hard to keep up–and, I think, you wind up with something that seems like a brilliant insight that winds up little more than a trick of sophistry. This is precisely why I’m so picky about using these words precisely. If we use a term like “civilization” so loosely, we lose the ability to appreciate what’s going on here.
And civilization has a predisposition to obfuscate these issues for its own defense. Any culture develops memetic defenses, a complex of organic protections that Daniel Quinn anthropomorphized as “Mother Culture.” Every culture has one. Our ethnocentrism elevates “civilization” to a synonym for “good,” equating it with things universal to all cultures and more than four times older than civilization itself: art, music, philosophy, history, ecology, science, and so forth. This serves an important purpose: it makes it impossible for us to discuss the things that truly define civilization: stratification, hierarchy, domination, centralization of resources and power, and so forth. What we cannot discuss, we cannot defy. That’s why we cling to this ethnocentric connotation of civilization so feverishly: it’s our bulwark against the idea that we might have to change the way we live. Most of us would rather live our whole lives as slaves than change the way we live; we’d rather live in misery; we’d rather die.
If “civilization” merely means “culture,” perhaps, but then, we have no critique of civilization! But if by “civilization” you mean a complex society like our own, with things like cities (hence the word, from the Latin civis), then those are not the tools of civilization at all. Nothing you mention in that list is peculiar to civilization. They are shared by all human cultures. They are the common heritage of our entire species, and civilization has no more a monopoly on them than the !Kung, or the Pygmies, or the Inuit.
In your sense of the word, I have no critique of civilization–perhaps the better word would be indictment. But there’s also no going back. We can’t unlearn English; we can’t go back in time to be born to foragers. We were raised as domesticated humans, so we can never be wild. The process of rewilding creates feral humans, not wild humans. In trying to envison the future, the Fifth World mixes elements of our civilization and sustainable life in new ways. The future is not just a simple “return” to the past; it’s a syncretic fusion, a call to true ingenuity that values simplicity over complexity–it is what Daniel Quinn called “beyond civilization.”
Change is no threat to culture, but it’s not culture we have a problem with. It’s a specific type of culture: the culture that results from agriculture. Hierarchy, overpopulation, and eventually ecological suicide are the inevitable, systemic consequences once you push cultivation beyond the point of diminishing returns. What we’re facing is most fundamentally a change. Collapse is not the end of culture; it’s a specific type of change in culture: the change from a culture so complex that its participants can no longer bear its cost, to a culture much simpler, much smaller, and much closer to fulfilling the needs of people, rather than the hierarchies that aspire to dominate them.
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:13 pm
The rate of increase in our complexity has, by every measure, been leveling off or dropping since around the 1900s. See my thesis #15.
I find your vision far, far more grim than the alternative. Have you seen the implications of our hubris already? Our bioengineering has never matched evolution. What our complexity creates is a mockery of what it destroys. Most importantly, your raw worship of our own power is based on a thoroughly mistaken idea that complexity has no limits of its own. It most certainly does–limits we are already hitting. I would be terrified of your ideal, if it weren’t utterly impossible.
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:28 pm
“The rate of increase in our complexity has, by every measure, been leveling off or dropping since around the 1900s.”
Bullshit. Ray Kurzweil completely refutes this in “The Singularity is Near”.
“I find your vision far, far more grim than the alternative. Have you seen the implications of our hubris already?”
The doubling of human lifespans in a few centuries? The creation of vast cities and empires? Art the likes of which your vaunted primitives could never dream? A global mind connecting billions of people? Weapons harnessing forces once only posessed by stars? Landing men on the bottom of the sea, and on other worlds? Things that primitive shamans could have only dreamed of? Oh, I’ve seen it alright- hubris is a lie, created by religionists and primitivists to try to hold back the will to power.
“Our bioengineering has never matched evolution.”
Yet. But it will soon surpass it- conscious control is far more efficient than blind forces, even with a billion year head start.
“What our complexity creates is a mockery of what it destroys.”
Hah. See my previous point. I’ll take skyscrapers over rocks and trees any day of the week and sunday.
“Most importantly, your raw worship of our own power is based on a thoroughly mistaken idea that complexity has no limits of its own. It most certainly does–limits we are already hitting.”
There are no limits that cannot be overcome through the intellect. All resources were nothing until reason turned them into resources.
“I would be terrified of your ideal, if it weren’t utterly impossible.”
No, your ideal is impossible. The human spirit will not tolerate stagnation. Dr. Faustus will win in the end.
Why are you terrified? I’m terrified of the idea of living only 30 years, freezing half the year in hide tents, dining on gamey meat surrounded by my stinking, uncultured primitive fellows. That’s really what you want? I’d rather die.
“Unfortunately” for you, that’s not where were going. We’ve got a galaxy to conquer, immortality to be had, new worlds to build and untold beauty to be created. You can pull your head out of the cave and join us, if you dare, but it seems you’re afraid of the future. What’s to be afraid of?
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Kurzweil mistakes the beginning of a diminishing returns curve for an exponential growth function. The whole “Singularity” thing is a total non-starter. I refuted Kurzweil in thesis #16.
Wow, like you were plucked from the middle of a Greek tragedy.
Conscious control can also never account for all the factors that evolution deals with so elegantly. We’ll never surpass it, because we’re not as smart as we think we are. We always miss something crucial.
That says much more than I think you realize.
Woooooow. Ho-kay, if you say so.
And you certainly seem to relish the role of Mephistopheles.
That’s not what primitive life is like at all. You should read some anthropology. They ate a much more varied and rich diet, produced art we still have not matched, lived a life free of disease that lasted longer than the average civilized person lives today, never went hungry, and on top of all those material things we tend to value, enjoyed a freedom, security and community that we, isolated into our individual labor cells, can scarcely imagine.
Really, there’s no conversation to be had here. I see humanity as one part of a community of life. You see us as gods with unbounded, unlimited power. You certainly won’t be convinced by the evidence otherwise, so enjoy your cold, isolated throne, far away from all living things–as long as such delusions of grandeur can last.
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:56 pm
No, there is ALWAYS conversation to be had - everywhere. At all times and we owe it to ourselves to actively and constantly engage one another in it. Even if our lexicons are “clumsy!”
September 22nd, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Even if Jason was wrong in saying these are our common heritage (I’d agree that they are heritage), but even if, how do you expect one to outright refuse using a tool out of some sense of purity, particularly an idea purity imposed from another? The weapons are there, if they are the most effective means of achieving an end, to not use them would be folly.
A long while back some anonymous poster on Anthropik said “The ideal scenario is when ALL of civilization’s resources are used against it.” I’d agree.
This makes me think of when anarchists criticize primitivists for utilizing technology, yet fail to see that they’re working in a capitalist system which they themselves oppose. What’s wrong with a little paradox?
“I do not believe that human culture can ever reach a perfect synthesis of its diversified and incompatible components. Its very richness is supported by this very incompatibility of its ingredients. And it is the conflict of values, rather than their harmony, that keeps our culture alive.” -Leszek Kolakowski
I’d agree, but when the conversation has been had over and over again and over again and one continiously keeps their eyes closed, why spend more time on that instead of traversing new ground? If somebody sticks to Hobbesian ideas yet refuses to look at anthropological data can you blame a person for not bothering to more time on what has already been hashed out on numerous occasions?
September 22nd, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Sorry Tim, but if you think that you are going to achieve Gnosis by bashing other peoples beliefs (such as Christianity), through motives of a faux/pseudo discussion on primitivism, the rise and fall of civilisations, etc., then you are wrongly mistaken and might end up looking like a heavy fool in the process.
September 22nd, 2006 at 7:45 pm
I think our ability to analyze our own culture can also be considered as “second guessing” ourselves.
When traveling to an unfamiliar destination I often begin to lose my nerve if the terrain doesn’t seem to match my preconception of what I should be seeing along the route, if the landmarks I expect do not appear on time.
I have a terrible tendency to turn back and re-check recent forks in the road. Then, I tend to rule these out and isolate my original route as the best bet, and continuing beyond where I first was I discover the landmark I was looking for.
You might think this is caused by alack of confidence, but it could also be due to overconfidence in myself. When the terrain doesn’t match my mental map I doubt the terrain!
Yet, if I had unquestioningly carried on without questioning, I would have arrived at my destination all the sooner. I have adopted this practice when ‘lost’, I continue beyond the point which seems sensible - and found a very high success rate of arriving at my destination (75 - 80% I’d guess)
As a culture too, I think it is our over-confidence in our analytic abilites which suggests we turn back and check prior routes, if we actually did this we would find that we were on the right road initially and quite close to a major landmark which made sense of the journey and we were fools to retrace our steps.
Apologies for my allegorical nature!
September 22nd, 2006 at 8:15 pm
To follow your analogy, Angstrom, I’d say that primitivism started looking back at where we made a wrong turn only when we noticed the bridge out ahead and the speedometer stuck at 80.
September 22nd, 2006 at 8:53 pm
That’s cool. I totally get what you’re saying Mark and I agree. I actually have to say that I’m a way bigger fan of Christianity at this point than primitivism. And yet I don’t totally see what I’m doing as “bashing” belief systems, so much as talking and opening up points of contact between diverse groups of people. I don’t believe there is any such thing as a “pseudo-discussion” as you suggest either.
September 22nd, 2006 at 9:30 pm
I kind of like to think of civilization as like a NASA mission to outer space. There are seriously very few people on the Internet who are capable of realizing how extremely delicate and time consuming the process is and how the tiniest slip, or error can cause the whole thing tumbling down. So yeah, to me it seems easy to talk about the Decline of something, about falling down back to a more primitive degenerate state–that really doesn’t take much effort. But to actually talk about space missions to other planets, and stars, etc., that process requires a very different level of thinking. When I see conversations like this, and stupid shows like Survivor, it really just makes me feel sorry for those people at places like NASA who truly do and think unimaginable things. (I’m not trying to say they are better or worse than people here, they are human beings as well.)
And point taken, (the Christian Video and comment thing just seemed like such a radical jarring shift from the other interesting discussion that was happening.)
September 22nd, 2006 at 9:41 pm
So, what would a civilization look like if it succeeded? To me, civilization is self-defeating simply in terms of its goals. Would a successful civilization grow forever? Would it always increase its complexity? Would it put humans evolved for small, band-level societies into the large, mass society we have today, where all our sensibilities, intuitions about society or morality, or our ability to appreciate other people (see Dunbar’s number) all break down?
What is a successful civilization? Is it one with art, technology, philosophy, etc.? If so, why do we need civilization, since we had all those things all along? Is it about the exploration of other worlds, or the harnessing of incredible powers derived from our understanding of the nature of the world? Again, we had that long before civilization.
So, what makes a civilization successful?
The truth of the matter is–as Jack Weatherford illustrated so well in Savages and Civilization–that all the things we’re most proud of in our civilization came from those moments when we were least civilized. In other words, the good parts about civilization emerge in spite of civilization, not because of it.
September 22nd, 2006 at 10:17 pm
.
…
I’ll take skyscrapers over rocks and trees any day of the week and sunday.
Wow. Just wow. This says volumes. I’ve been a harsh critic of Jason in previous threads, but this kind of comment puts things into perspective.
September 22nd, 2006 at 10:23 pm
This is what’s known as an unstable equilibrium in dynamical systems theory. This is the opposite of homeostasis, which is a fundamental property of a living organism.
You’ve just described a situation that is unsustainable and at great risk of collapse. Because, in the long term, the probability of a destabilising event converges to unity, and therefore so does the probability of collapse.
September 22nd, 2006 at 11:35 pm
that`s why those at nasa are the most likely to know that thier position is fraudulent. likewise at seti………..they just simply like the billions of dollars in mad money they get for something or other…….like putting the radio shack toy on mars recently. same with the physicists who get money to fill an old mineshaft full of really expensive heavy water so they can detect neutrinos. what the fuck for? or to race smaller and smaller particles toward eachother in more and more expensive colliders in france somewhere for a few more billions of dollars. you could take all the money we give nasa in a year and by all the kids in america a new computer each year for life, or pay for thier college, or something more tangebly useful and productive than doing nothing with nothing over and over for the benifit of the fifteen people in the world who understand what the hell they`re talking about.
now, if you think i`m being insensitive or narrow-minded about science, i`ll tell you a little about my dad. he was a chemist who worked at aldermaston england in the sixties building nuclear weapons…………speaking of pissing billions of dollars,pounds, marks and such into the wind while people didn`t have hot water to have bath in the morning.
where is this rant going? pretty much where civilisation is going. round and round. we are well kept talking animals with sex and war on our minds pretty much 24/7 and business is good. and i don`t think it`s fragile at all, in fact it seems pretty much bullet-proof.
best defence is an offence, ya` dig?
September 22nd, 2006 at 11:40 pm
oh, yes and when the computer we`ve all merrily been helping build finally comes awake and realises we are a virus or something i hope i`m long gone……………….or talking to my mini-wheats.
September 23rd, 2006 at 1:10 am
Doesn’t this just represent a failing on our part? We can’t take care of these things ourselves so we need the “Romans” to provide it all for us?
September 23rd, 2006 at 2:00 am
Somebody probably already said this, but Primitivism can be argued down with one word: impossible. In other words, short of a nuclear exchange, you can’t turn back the clock on technology or culture or any of the other things that make up civilization. The artifacts of modernity offer too many advantages.
Even if by some miracle everyone on the planet could be convinced to return to hunter-gatherer existences, some joker would still try to raise a pig or a cow out in the woods somewhere. Or set up a radio station. Or build a road.
This may have been the secret message encoded in Gilligan’s Island.
September 23rd, 2006 at 2:01 am
Oh, and Jacob, we have to rely on the Romans because they have all the money.
September 23rd, 2006 at 2:06 am
I’m kind of in awe at this debate here, I’m officially abandoning all opinions I currently hold with regards to this discussion (or at least, I’m gonna try), and am going to restrict myself to asking questions.
September 23rd, 2006 at 9:16 am
Sorry, Tim, but there’s really no point discussing these issues with a drop-out.
September 23rd, 2006 at 9:45 am
This is an interesting discussion, besides some of the already smashing-my-head-against-a-brick-wall arguments about “primitives” and all that.
“Our ethnocentrism elevates “civilization” to a synonym for “good,” equating it with things universal to all cultures and more than four times older than civilization itself: art, music, philosophy, history, ecology, science, and so forth.”
Exactly. This is a nasty problem, because people do it without realising, and you get crossed wires before you even start speaking. On a deeper level, the critique of civilisation is an uncomfortable one, because in discussing it with others, you are threatening a part of their identity, which has unfortunately become grounded in their prison, instead of their spark.
“A long while back some anonymous poster on Anthropik said “The ideal scenario is when ALL of civilization’s resources are used against it.” I’d agree.”
This is what Kötke said - the best way to bring down civilisation is to use all its resources against itself. People all went loopy when that picture of the anti-globalisation protester kicking the Nike shop window whilst wearing a Nike shoe hit the papers, and the consensus was that it was generally hypocritical and all that. I completely disagree, it was an effective use of resources - bringing a system down by using its own resources against it.
The internet is a prime example of this - whilst being possible only through an inherently destructive system, it has served so many people, and has provided such value to us.
September 23rd, 2006 at 9:50 am
And of course, we did provide it all for ourselves. So, BTW, did the ancient Judeans prior to Roman invasion. Never liked that part of Life of Brian–one of those jokes based on ignorance, like, “if evolution’s true, why are there still monkeys? Didn’t they get the memo?” Groan.
Said, and refuted. Primitivism is primarily a matter of evolution, not revolution–it’s a response, rather than a cause, of collapse. The fact of the matter is, civilization is already rendering its future impossible. Primitivism is a response to that, a creation of something beyond civilization that can survive once civilization has finished destroying itself–a process it’s already well underway.
September 23rd, 2006 at 10:32 am
Yes, great article. Perhaps we observe that this strengthening effect is now in effect, at minimum in the example of the stock market going up after Cesar and Mahmoud did their clown act. They may have made an attack of words upon the USA on home soil, but that is making folks stronger and more united. Citgo gas will likely take the hit. And not even Democrats want to defend these knuckleheads; we may have a chance.
As other posts today on Liberating Propaganda reflect, it requires moral clarity and it is a long war. Gerbil attention span required for waging war on MSM won’t hack it.
Thank god for the blogs!
September 23rd, 2006 at 3:32 pm
So the best way to run Coke out of business is by buying all and only Coke products?
September 23rd, 2006 at 7:15 pm
I’ve been reading The Prince, yes … Machiavelli (another one who has been called the Devil). Reading it in context, that of the Italian 15th century, certainly it makes imminent sense. In fact, many of the points are still incontrovertible. Did it inspire the the cliches of “the end doesn’t justify the means” (in retaliation to the proposed observations by Machiavelli), and “nice guys finish last’? Those points are certainly well made there.
Yet, certainly things have changed, and much does remain the same in terms of the favor of a population and the necessity for the Prince (king, president, prime minister, whatever) to be perceived as a good guy at least. I’m wondering if there is an author who has taken on a more modern analysis, in the same straight talking and analytical mode as Machiavelli?
For anyone who hasn’t read it, it is a tidy and poignant series of essays, highly recommended. Obviously a classic, and impugned by later papal powers as evil — but I’d say it is simply very good observation. (And I, victim of the oxymoron called a California Education in the 1970’s, am just getting around to it.)
Great conversation here — seems that somewhere between knowledge of history, the demise of political correctness, (via?) the realization of something like Spiral Dynamic memes, and the emergence of some men and women of Will, with a great deal of beneficent occult overshadowing — we may be able to hold this nation-state called Earth. As a global entity, with the emerging value of cooperation and tolerance, there must be a new Prince in the wings.
I don’t think we are at a stage where the people ‘as a whole’ are the Prince, yet the watchdog and eager helpfulness, or coordinated attacks, by masses of populace are certainly stronger now than in Niccolo’s day — for good or ill.
Propaganda can be used to the good, (propigating goodwill — which could be another name for education of citizens on tolerance, etc.), rather than its usual sense of that sinister slant of a party-line in a dictator state. I have some yet-nebulous hope that We the People can take a more active role, in support of the Princes of Good — even when those temporary actions that must be taken to secure the survival of all, may seem cruel.
Machiavellian? Well, to my eye, he just reported on history.
September 23rd, 2006 at 8:14 pm
Well Slomo, I have no idea what you just said, however it does sound like a very fancy way of dismissing the obvious truth (intelligence; higher thinking). I have nothing really insightful to add on that, except it seems there was someone in here who once quoted Tom Robbins about Religion…That it should not be static (or in stasis) but should break free from the “Fish tank,” or some metaphor such as that. If you are a NASA scientist, then I guess that “Fish tank” could apply to earth (regardless of their religious beliefs), and breaking free from that would of course require Risk and intelligence (or an unstable equilibrium in dynamical systems…) Unless, I’m making a wrong comparison, or the person who quoted Tom Robbins as saying that is a complete idiot, or your an idiot, or maybe I was right all along that Tom Robbins is good material for black people to wipe their butts with.
*Oh yeah, I would say that I am the least racist person here, as a matter of fact there is a black guy sitting right next to me reading this and laughing his ass at this comment…
Note to Tim: It’s called a sense of humor
September 23rd, 2006 at 9:27 pm
Thank you for that, Tim. If we reach a point where as many of us as possible can be happy and healthy and not have our planet and the widdle aminals die and all that, then whether we live in what’s called “civilization” or not really doesn’t matter. It’s not a matter of hating this or that technological doohickie like it’s unclean.
However, to sound paradoxical, my feeling is that the debate should be on whether this or that doohickie or practice or whatever is, shall we say, unskillful — whether its use should be decreased or increased and to what extent. I kind of see a difference there. The difference, as I see it, is that we start with thinking of what our goals and values are and then evaluate what we do — include the shit we make and use — according to a rational cost-benefit analysis of how said thingy or practice helps or hampers our dreams of Utopia — technological, primitivist or otherwise. Make sense?
September 23rd, 2006 at 9:31 pm
I’m terrified of both. I don’t want to live only to 30 in a yak tent, and I also don’t want God to shove brimstone up my ass for trying to build some kind of demonic antichrist ego-machine Tower of Babel whatchamacallit — which doesn’t sound that fun even without the brimstone.
September 23rd, 2006 at 9:33 pm
By the way, my understanding of the consequences of hubris are not entirely (or even necessarily) metaphysical. I think being a Randian dickweed leads to its own punishment in the here and now.
September 23rd, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Note to Mark: you know I don’t like it, so please refrain from it in the future! Thanks!
September 24th, 2006 at 3:07 am
Where was the ‘against’ part?
September 24th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Actually, it’s something of a testament to it. A dynamically unstable system is not one that keeps itself together; rather, it’s more likely to tear itself apart. Such schemes can only work through the application of massive human intellect to try to counter-balance that tendency. And even then, it sometimes fails anyway–as NASA did with Challenger, Columbia, Apollo 11, and so forth.
There’s the difference between a society and a jet plane (among others). When a NASA mission goes wrong, you pick up the pieces and try again. When your society goes wrong, that’s it–your society is gone. Dynamically unstable systems can work for aircraft, but if you make your society as one, that’s a society doomed to failure. And if the only unique benefit you get from that unsustainability over a sustainable, self-reinforcing, self-organizing society, is that you get to have a huge population dominated by a tiny elite, well, I think it’s open to question as to whether or not the exertion of so much effort for that is really worthwhile.
I shudder at the thought of our civilization colonizing space. Earlier this month, I made a post of a video wherein a professor discusses the full implications of exponential growth (like our civilization relies on in order to avoid collapse). One example he used kind of highlights why I’m so unnerved by the idea of going to space. He asked, if we put bacteria in a petri dish at 11 AM, and the bacteria population doubles every minute, and the petri dish is filled at noon, when is the petri dish half full?
It doubles every minute, so, 11:59 AM. Just one minute before the dish is full, it’s still half-empty.
He expands the metaphor: let’s say our bacteria discovered three new petri dishes. At what time do they fill all four petri dishes?
At noon, they completely fill one petri dish.
At 12:01, they double. Two petri dishes.
At 12:02, they double. All four petri dishes are full. Four petri dishes in two minutes.
Now instead of bacteria, make it people; instead of petri dishes, planets.
If we’re still civilized when we go to the stars, then we’re just spreading our unsustainability across the galaxy. The best case scenario the progresivists can offer is to turn the human race into the villainous aliens from Independence Day–stripping every world of all its resources, and then moving on to the next. We’ll still collapse, of course, and collapse won’t be that much farther away, but maybe instead of taking all life on this planet with us, we’ll take everything in this solar system–or this galaxy. Who knows how far we’ll get before we die, leaving a cosmic wake of death and destruction, world upon ruined world, each one left as a dead rock in the cold of space? There’s your alternative; there’s the brightest vision the progressivist can offer.
Everybody’s afraid of change, but if you’re too afraid to live longer, healthier lives with more liesure time, more art, more knowledge, more philosophy, more freedom, more security, more community–if that terrifies you, then your alternative is to be a cosmic force of destruction before we all finally die, to see if we can take the better part of the galaxy with us in our collective suicide.
A positive feedback loop is one where each iteration intensifies the next. Such feedback loops create exponential growth functions. Civilization is a positive feedback loop of greater complexity. As Dr. Bartlett puts it in the video I linked to above, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” The petri dish is only half-full at 11:59 AM. Intuitively, we think there’s plenty of time left. Our intuition fails us, because this isn’t the world humans are adapted to. We’re Pleistocene animals. We don’t know how to operate in large scale societies, and we don’t have any intuitive sense of exponential growth. These things are alien to us. Our intuition–our sense of right and wrong–breaks down completely. We’re simply incapable of understanding these things on the gut level we so often rely on. It’s counter-intuitive to us. Because exponential growth is rare in this universe; it can’t go on for very long. Where positive feedback loops do exist, they always exist inside of negative feedback loops. These are loops in which each iteration weakens the next. These create asymptotes, rather than exponential growth functions.
These two phenomena give us the typical graph of population growth: exponential growth (positive feedback), that levels off at an asymptote called “carrying capacity” (negative feedback). Those negative feedback loops are the limits to growth, and they’re always encountered in this universe because that’s the only way our laws of physics can work.
Our intuition has betrayed us into thinking the current state of affairs can be continued, because our intuition is that of a Pleistocene animal with no intuitive sense of large-scale systems or exponential growth. As William Catton wrote in Overshoot:
We’ve seen in the responses to primitivsm this week, this exuberance–a mental relic of a specific ecological shift–reiterated over and over again, and accepted even when evidence was utterly lacking, simply because it is a comforting belief, the belief we are used to. But positive feedback loops always exist inside of negative feedback loops, and the Age of Exuberance must be balanced against the horrors of collapse. As Alfred Lotka wrote in 1925, when collapse was only beginning and still largely imperceptible:
This view of collapse resonates with me. If we could take the aloof perspective of gods, we might see collapse as not only just, but as the best possible outcome after the position the Age of Exuberance left us in. But we are not aloof gods; we are humans, and we are the ones that will have to pay for the sins of our fathers. Of course, there is one element I add to Lotka: hope and optimism for the human condition, because inside this superlative tragedy is also a superlative opportunity. For 10,000 years, it has been impossible to escape the unrelenting grind of civilization: any who attempt to do so are destroyed by it. But collapse also means that we have our first opportunity in all that time to live as human beings, and to enjoy the natural human condition.
Might I suggest not becoming a farmer, then. Only farmers regularly die at 30–in some parts of the world, that’s still the case even today. If a forager dies at 30, he’s almost certainly died a violent death, or become infected with some zoonotic disease released by farmers’ domestication of animals. Look at Dickson’s Mounds–clear archaeological evidence of the massive mortality crisis agriculture created. Even today, the !Kung live well into their 60’s, in the Kalahari desert–a place so bleak that their neighbors are old at 30. A forager living in a kind environment would live even longer. Fears of our complexity are well-founded and proven again and again by our history, but fears of simple, band-level society are the products of ethnocentric misinformation. I know Hobbes talked about primitive life as “nasty, brutish and short,” but he based that conclusion on nothing more than his own thought experiments. When we actually went out and found out how primitives live, we found out they live better than us. Primitivism is in large part a philosophical response to the fact that anthropology finally went out and asked if our assumptions were correct, and found out they were categorically wrong.
September 24th, 2006 at 8:13 pm
we aren`t breeding exponentnially. though.
September 24th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
Y’think?
September 26th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
A similar thread like in the other post. Then why did humanity create a society that, you assert, requires exponential growth and is full of people who are growing if we don’t have an intuitive sense to it. Societies are based on people, and people actually have to grow. As Andy Warhol said: “Time changes things but you must make the changes yourself.” People have to be the ones who are growing.
If large-scale societies are unsustainable because of our nature, then what about the chiefdoms of the Northwest Coast, and Sungir? Were those societies unsustainable because of our Pleistocene nature, even though they were supported by sustainable foraging? And if large-scale societies are not part of our nature, then why do we have evidence, like in Sungir, of humanity creating a hierarchal society when the energy is available to them, sustainably or not?
Wouldn’t human nature have stopped them? Because I feel to see how you can justify the absolute inherent unsustainability of hierarchy because of our human nature with examples like the Kwakiutl (as well as the entire Northwest coast and California coast) and Sungir, as well as other examples that Diamond talks about (in southeast Australia). This also does not explain why, in an area where hierarchy is possible due to a certain energy source, there is always a hierarchal society in that area or the ruins of an unsustainable hierarchal society that was possible for a short time, whereas societies that have always had egalitarian societies were not capped by ideology of human nature but means.
September 26th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
I was not referring to what you said, but what I had said in the “Core Family Values” response I had just made.
September 26th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
Since hierarchy is obviously not synonymous with civilization, and there have been uncivilized hierarchal societies.
September 26th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
People, like populations, grow, and then reach equilibrium, so your comparison is invalid. If civilization mirrored human development, it would stop growing once it achieved carrying capacity. When your body keeps growing poast equilibrium, it’s quite pathological: in fact, that’s exactly what we call cancer.
As for how we stumbled into exponential growth without an intuitive sense of it, that should be fairly obvious. We kicked off a positive feedback loop. We don’t have any intuitive understanding of it, but it started off slowly enough to catch us off guard. Now we’re swept up in it and there’s nothing we can do but let it run its catastrophic course.
You must know, since you picked those two specific examples, that I wrote a specific article on the Kwakiutl, and one on Sungir. They were sustainable for the same reason: they were geographically confined. They couldn’t take their migration routes or their salmon runs with them, so they couldn’t really expand. The problem is when your source is something you can export. Notice that the most virulent civilizations were Eurasian, as Jared Diamond explained in simple terms of geography and the ability to export their energy source in Guns, Germs adn Steel. American civilizations could export their energy source, but it was slower, and so, they could not grow as quickly.
The incompatibility of human nature with high levels of complexity is not what makes such high levels of complexity unsustainable; that’s what makes those levels miserable.
Because all it takes is one, and if it’s possible, somebody’s probably going to do it. It’s an easy escalation to get trapped in. The beginning is rarely so obviously horrific, so the fact that it violates our human nature doesn’t have much to do with it at that point.
September 26th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Actually, they are somewhat synonymous. If a hierarchical society has the means to do so, it will always escalate into a civilization.