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Title: Civilization: Can We Survive It?
Author: Anonymous
Date: 1987
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ
Notes: from Lookout! #29, November 1987

Anonymous

Civilization: Can We Survive It?

Nearly 2000 years ago, near the beginning of what some fondly call the

Christian era, an army came marching across the British Isles. Thousands

of soldiers, uniformed and armored in a manner never before seen in that

part of the world, sent the tribal peoples fleeing westward and set

about establishing fortresses and cities. Britain was now part of the

Roman Empire. Civilization had arrived.

It’s a pattern which has been repeated all over the world, as recently

as 100 years ago in parts of the American West. The tendency of people

to cluster together in great cities is hardly new and in many ways

understandable. What isn’t so clear is why the city-dwellers feel

compelled to make the whole planet over in their image.

Whether we look at Britain or the Americas or Australia, we see the same

phenomenon: people living a tribal, rural existence that changes slowly

if at all for thousands of years until the arrival of foreign

interlopers, who, usually with great violence, impose an entirely new

way of life within a matter of decades. The common denominator in all of

the above examples is that the invaders were white Europeans, but the

Chinese have done much the same thing, albeit more gradually, to large

parts of Asia.

So while it may seem that modern urban life is only a logical evolution

from the clans and villages of earlier times, that’s not really the

case. Villages came into being to serve the needs of the countryside, to

provide a central location for trading and social interaction. Cities

have reversed that equation; the countryside is seen as useful only

insofar as it makes possible the continued existence and expansion of

cities.

Without a drastic depopulation of the planet, it’s unlikely that we

could return to a pastoral way of life, and it’s probably desirable,

either. The division of labor that makes civilization possible has also

freed the poets and artists and crazy dreamers from the necessity of

tilling the fields, and it’s allowed millions of us who a century ago

would have been peasants bound to the land to travel about the planet

and gather in the accumulated knowledge of our species.

But it’s also left us dangerously detached from the earth, to the point

where it no longer even seems strange that in the name of progress we

are willing to poison, starve, and strangle the planet that makes life

possible, the planet that native peoples have almost without exception

revered as the mother of all life. Mother earth, mother nature, these

have in our time become no more than figures of speech; once they were

self-evident statements of truth.

To speak of the earth as being alive raises more than a few eyebrows and

leaves one open to charges of being a muddle-brained California

beansprout worshiper. But with the exception of recent centuries, it is

the way people have always seen things. If it is farfetched to thing of

the rocks and fields as living, breathing entities, how much more so to

construct parallel universes beyond the skies where supernatural beings

cavort and manipulate our destinies here on earth? Yet that is the

essence of all “modern” religions, from the Greco-Roman pantheon to

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc...

There is nothing mystical or metaphysical about attributing conscious

existence to the planet; simple science will explain it. Life comes from

life; rocks don’t breed. Or do they? A few billion years ago this planet

was a hunk of rock floating in the void. Take a look at it now; where

did all this come from? Either life was brought here from somewhere else

or it was here all along.

Either way, it’s here now, and even though we as a race are doing our

best to destroy it. And that is the biggest curse of civilization, the

sense of separation from the land, from each other, and from the

fundamental processes of life itself. If we never feel the earth under

our feet, how can we feel its heart beat? If we never see the sky

uncolored by the brown, soupy shadow of our own excrement, how can we

feel it breathe? If we have no idea of where our food comes from, of how

water finds its way from deep within the soil to mingle with our blood,

how the planet harbors everything we will ever need to live happy,

fruitful lives, and how it will give us everything we ever need when we

begin to understand its secrets, then we know nothing of ourselves.

In the closing years of the 20^(th) century there is a rekindling of

interest in tribal and pagan ways. There is a hunger for something real

that abstract philosophies, artificial moralities, and the aimless

manipulation of power can never satisfy. People remember. Somewhere

beneath the encrusted layers of knowledge, superstition, fear, and greed

they know where they came from. And where they’re going to return.

Civilization is dying, and none too soon. That doesn’t mean we have to

revert to barbarism, or even to give up the many tools and technologies

that have geometrically expanded our scope of possibilities. It does

mean we need to rediscover who, what, and where we are, and fast. It

means we means we have to rejoin our tribes, to learn what makes us

strong and wise and free, and to stop trying to remake reality in our

misshapen self-image. We need to listen with all our senses, we need to

trust our hearts.

The heart is the key. Civilization so far has been a triumph of the

human will run roughshod over nature. It is the individual ego gone

rampant and multiplied five billion times. In past times we were

prevented from fully indulging the basest of our impulses by the

limitless, we need our hearts to provide us with a vision worthy of our

capabilities.