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Title: Beyond Civilized and Primitive
Author: Ran Prieur
Date: 2008
Language: en
Topics: coercion, hierarchy, post-civ, primitivism
Source: Retrieved on 1 Jan 2014 from http://ranprieur.com/essays/beyondciv.html
Notes: version 1.3, revised 15 November 2012

Ran Prieur

Beyond Civilized and Primitive

Western industrial society tells a story about itself that goes like

this: “A long time ago, our ancestors were ‘primitive’. They lived in

caves, were stupid, hit each other with clubs, and had short, stressful

lives in which they were constantly on the verge of starving or being

eaten by saber-toothed cats. Then we invented ‘civilization’, in which

we started growing food, being nice to each other, getting smarter,

inventing marvelous technologies, and everywhere replacing chaos with

order. It’s getting better all the time and will continue forever.”

Western industrial society is now in decline, and in declining societies

it’s normal for people to feel that their whole existence is empty and

meaningless, that the system is rotten to its roots and should all be

torn up and thrown out. It’s also normal for people to frame this

rejection in whatever terms their society has given them. So we reason:

“This world is hell, this world is civilization, so civilization is

hell, so maybe primitive life was heaven. Maybe the whole story is

upside-down!”

We examine the dominant story and find that although it contains some

truth, it depends on assumptions and distortions and omissions, and it

was not designed to reveal truth, but to influence the values and

behaviors of the people who heard it. Seeking balance, we create a

perfect mirror image:

“A long time ago, our ancestors were ‘primitive’. They were just as

smart as we would be if we didn’t watch television, and they lived in

cozy hand-made shelters, were generally peaceful and egalitarian, and

had long healthy lives in which food was plentiful because they kept

their populations well below the carrying capacity of their landbase.

Then someone invented ‘civilization’, in which we monopolized the land

and grew our population by eating grain. Grain is high in calories but

low in other nutrients, so we got sick, and we also began starving when

the population outgrew the landbase, so the farmers conquered land from

neighboring foragers and enslaved them to cut down more forests and grow

more grain, and to build sterile monuments while the elite developed

technologies of repression and disconnection and gluttonous consumption,

and everywhere life was replaced with control. It’s been getting worse

and worse, and soon we will abandon it and live the way we did before.”

Again, this story contains truth, but it depends on assumptions and

distortions and omissions, and it is designed to influence the values

and behaviors of the people who hear it. Certainly it’s extremely

compelling. As a guiding ideology, as a utopian vision, primitivism can

destroy Marxism or libertarianism because it digs deeper and overthrows

their foundations. It defeats the old religions on evidence. And best of

all, it presents a utopia that is not in the realm of imagination or

metaphysics, but has actually happened. We can look at archaeology and

anthropology and history and say: “Here’s a forager-hunter society where

people were strong and long-lived. Here’s a tribe where the ‘work’ is so

enjoyable that they don’t even have the concept of ‘freeloading’. Here

are European explorers writing that certain tribes showed no trace of

violence or meanness.”

But this strength is also a weakness, because reality cuts both ways. As

soon as you say, “We should live like these actual people,” every

competing ideologue will jump up with examples of those people living

dreadfully: “Here’s a tribe with murderous warfare, and one with ritual

abuse, and one with chronic disease from malnutrition, and one where

people are just mean and unhappy, and here are a bunch of species

extinctions right when primitive humans appeared.”

Most primitivists accept this evidence, and have worked out several ways

to deal with it. One move is to postulate something that has not been

observed, but if it were, would make the facts fit your theory.

Specifically, they say “The nasty tribes must have all been corrupted by

exposure to civilization.” Another move is to defend absolutely

everything on the grounds of cultural relativism: “Who are we to say

it’s wrong to hit another person in the head with an axe?” Another move

is to say, “Okay, some of that stuff is bad, but if you add up all the

bad and good, primitive life is still preferable to civilization.”

This is hardly inspiring, and it still has to be constantly defended,

and not from a strong position, because we know very little about

prehistoric life. We know what tools people used, and what they ate, but

we don’t know how many tribes were peaceful or warlike, how many were

permissive or repressive, how many were egalitarian or authoritarian,

and we have no idea what was going on in their heads. One of the

assumptions I mentioned above, made by both primitivism and the dominant

story, is that stone age people were the same as tribal forager-hunters

observed in historical times. After all, we call them both “primitive”.

But in terms of culture, and even consciousness, they might be

profoundly different.

A more reasonable move is to abandon primitive life as an ideal, or a

goal, and instead just set it up as a perspective: “Hey, if I stand

here, I can see that my own world, which I thought was normal, is

totally insane!” Or we can set it up as a source of learning: “Look at

this one thing these people did, so let’s see if we can do it too.” Then

it doesn’t matter how many flaws they had. And once we give up the

framework that shows a right way and a wrong way, and a clear line

between them, we can use perspectives and ideas from people formerly on

the “wrong” side: “Ancient Greeks went barefoot everywhere and treated

their slaves with more humanity than Wal-Mart treats its workers.

Medieval serfs worked fewer hours than modern Americans, and thought it

was degrading to work for wages. Slum-dwellers in Mumbai spend less time

and effort getting around on foot than Americans spend getting around in

cars. The online file sharing community is building a gift economy.”

Identifying with stone age people is like taking a big stretch. Then if

we relax, we find that a lot of smaller stretches are effortless, that

we can easily take all kinds of perspectives outside the assumptions of

our little bubble. We could even re-invent “primitivism” to ignore stone

age people and include only recent tribes who we have good information

about, and who still stack up pretty well against our own society. We

could call this historical primitivism, and a few primitivists have

taken this position. The reason most don’t is, first, our lack of

knowledge about prehistory forms a convenient blank screen on which

anyone can project visions to back up their ideology. And second, stone

age primitivism comes with an extremely powerful idea, which I call the

timeline argument.

The timeline argument convinces us that a better way of life is the

human default, that all the things we hate are like scratches in the

sand that will be washed away when the tide comes in. Often it’s phrased

as 99%; of human history has been that, and only 1%; has been this.”

Sometimes it’s illustrated with a basketball court metaphor: It’s 94

feet long, and if you call each foot ten thousand years, then we had

fire and stone tools for 93 feet, agriculture for one foot, and

industrial society for around a quarter of an inch.

The key word in this argument is “we”. Where do you draw the line

between “us” and “not us”? Why not go back a billion years, and say that

“we” were cell colonies in the primordial oceans? Call a billion years a

football field, and the age of agriculture can dance on the head of a

pin! This would seem to be a much stronger argument, and yet I’ve never

seen a primitivist draw the line even as far back as Homo habilis two

million years ago — or as recently as Homo sapiens sapiens 130,000 years

ago. Why not?

This is a difficult and important question, and it took me days to

puzzle it out. I think we’ve been confusing two separate issues. One is

a fact, that the present way we live is a deviation from the way of

other biological life. If this is our point, then a million year

timeline is much too short — we should go back at least a thousand times

farther!

The other issue is a question: Who are we? When you get below the level

of culture, down to the level of biology or spirit, what is normal for

us to do? What is possible? What is right?

If you’re talking about who we are, then the million year timeline is

much too long. The mistake happens like this: “We are human, and we can

plausibly call Homo erectus human. Therefore our nature is to live like

Homo erectus, and the way we live now is not our tendency, not our

normal behavior, but some kind of bizarre accident. What a relief! We

can just bring down civilization, and we’ll naturally go back to living

like Homo erectus, but since we don’t know exactly how they lived, we’ll

assume it’s like the best recent forager-hunter tribes.”

Now, I’m not disputing that many societies have lived close to the Earth

with a quality of life that we can’t imagine. Richard Sorenson mentions

several, and explores one in depth, in his essay on Preconquest

Consciousness.[1] What I’m disputing is: 1) that we have any evidence

that prehistoric people had that consciousness; 2) that that

consciousness is our default state; 3) that it is simple for us to get

back there; and 4) that large-scale technologically complex societies

are a deviation from who we are.

Who we are is changing all the time, and new genetic research has

revealed shockingly fast change in just the last few thousand years,

including malaria resistance, adult milk digestion, and blue eyes.

According to anthropologist John Hawks, “We are more different

genetically from people living 5000 years ago than they were from

Neanderthals.”[2]

Now, you could argue that some of these changes are not really who we

are, because they were caused by civilization: without domesticating

cows and goats, we would not have evolved milk digestion. By the same

logic, without inventing clothing, we would not have evolved hairless

bodies. Without crawling onto dry land, we would not have evolved legs.

My point is, there is no place you can stick a pin and say “this is our

nature”, because our nature is not a location — it is a journey. We

crawled onto dry land; we became warm-blooded and grew hair; we moved

from the forests to the plains; we walked upright; we tamed fire and

began cooking food; we invented symbolic language; our brains got

bigger; our tools got more complex; we invented grain agriculture and

empires and airplanes and ice cream and nuclear weapons.

This isn’t quite fair, because all of us adopted fire, but not all of us

adopted grain agriculture, and riding in airplanes is much easier to

reverse than walking upright. It’s more likely that some of our

descendants will be using fire and stone tools, than that some of them

will be using Prozac and silicon microprocessors. But I still don’t

think, as some primitivists do, that civilization is a dead end, or an

unlikely accident.

If civilization is a fluke, we would expect to see it begin only once,

and spread from there. But instead we see grain farming and explosions

of human social complexity in several places at about the same time:

along the Tigris and Euphrates, and also in Africa, India, and China.

You could still argue that those changes spread by travel, that there

was one accident and then some far-flung colonies — unless we found an

early civilization so remote that travel was out of the question.

That civilization has been found. Archaeologists call it the Norte

Chico, in present-day Peru. From 3000–1800 BC, they built at least 25

cities, and they had giant stone monuments earlier than anyone except

the Mesopotamians. Even more shocking, their system was not based on

grain! All previous models of civilization have put grain agriculture at

the very root: once you had grain farming, you had a denser, more

settled population, which led to a more complex society, and also you

had a storable commodity that enabled hierarchy.

The Norte Chicans ate only small amounts of grain, but they did have a

storable commodity that enabled hierarchy, something that allowed small

differences in wealth to feed back into large differences, and

ultimately entrenched elites commanding slaves to build monolithic

architcture. It was cotton! So we have people on opposite sides of the

world, in different geographies, using different materials, falling into

the same pattern, but that pattern is not about food. It seems to be

about economics, or more precisely, about human cognition. After

thousands of generations of slow change, human intelligence reached a

tipping point that permitted large complex societies to appear in

radically different circumstances.

Now it’s tempting to call “civilization” the new human default, but of

course, in many places, these societies did not appear. Also, they all

collapsed! And then new ones appeared, and those collapsed. I don’t

think it even makes sense to talk about a human default, any more than

it makes sense to talk about a default state for the weather. But the

range in which we move has widened.

My information on the Norte Chico comes from Charles C. Mann’s book

1491, a survey of recent findings about the Americas before the European

conquest. Mann is neither a primitivist nor an advocate for western

civilization, but an advocate for, well, far western civilization, which

was a lot more like western civilization than we thought. At its peak,

the Inca empire was the largest in the world, with exploited colonies,

massive forced resettling of workers, and bloody power struggles among

the elite just like in Europe and Asia. The Maya deforested the Yucatan

and depleted its topsoil only a few centuries after the Romans did the

same thing around the Mediterranean. Aztec “human sacrifice” was

surprisingly similar to English “public execution” that was happening at

exactly the same time. Even North America had a city, Cahokia, that in

1250 was roughly the size of London. In 1523, Giovanni da Verrazzano

recorded that the whole Atlantic coast from the Carolinas up was

“densely populated”. In the 1540’s, De Soto passed through what is now

eastern Arkansas and found it “thickly set with great towns”. Of course,

that population density is possible only with intensive agriculture.

Mann writes, “A traveler in 1669 reported that six square miles of maize

typically encircled Haudenosaunee villages.”

By the time the conquest really got going, all these societies had been

wiped out by smallpox and other diseases introduced by the first

Europeans. Explorers and conquerors found small tribes of

forager-hunters in an untamed wilderness, and assumed it had been that

way forever. In a blow to both primitivism and “progress”, it turns out

that most of these people were not living in the timeless ways of their

ancestors — the “Indians” of American myth were post-crash societies!

The incredible biological abundance of North America was also a

post-crash phenomenon. We’ve heard about the flocks of passenger pigeons

darkening the sky for days, the tens of millions of bison trampling the

great plains, the rivers so thick with spawning salmon that you could

barely row a boat, the seashores teeming with life, the deep forests on

which a squirrel could go from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without

touching the ground. We don’t know what North America would have looked

like with no humans at all, but we do know it didn’t look like that

under the Indians. Bone excavations show that passenger pigeons were not

even common in the 1400’s. Indians specifically targeted pregnant deer,

and wild turkeys before they laid eggs, to eliminate competition for

maize and tree nuts. They routinely burned forests to keep them

convenient for human use. And they kept salmon and shellfish populations

down by eating them, and thereby suppressed populations of other

creatures that ate them. When human populations crashed, nonhuman

populations exploded.

This fact drives a wedge between two value systems that are supposed to

be synonymous: love of nature and love of primitive humans. We seem to

have only two options. One is to say that native North Americans went

too far — of course they weren’t nearly as bad as Europeans, but we need

to return to even lower levels of population and domestication. I

respect this position morally, but strategically it’s absurd. How can

the future inhabitants of North America be held to a way of life that

the original inhabitants abandoned at least a thousand years ago?

The other option is to say that native North Americans did not go too

far. The subtext is usually something like this: “Moralistic ecologists

think it’s wrong that my society holds nature down and milks it for its

own benefit, but if the Native Americans did it, it must be okay!” This

conclusion is nearly universal in popular writing. Plenty of respectable

authors would never be caught idealizing simple foragers, but when they

find out these “primitives” hunted competitors and cleared forests to

plant grain, out comes the “wise Indian” card.

There is a third option, but it requires abandoning the whole

civilized-primitive framework. Suppose we say, “We can regrow the

spectacular fecundity that North America had in the 1700’s, not as a

temporary stage between the fall of one Earth-monopolizing society and

the rise of another, but as a permanent condition — and we will protect

this condition not by duplicating any way our ancestors lived, but by

inventing new ways. And these new ways will coexist with large complex

societies, rather than depending on their destruction.”

I admit this is a utopian pipe dream, something to aim for but not to

bet on. To grow biological abundance for its own sake, and not for human

utility, is still a fringe position. But my deeper point is that the

civilized-primitive framework forces us to divide things a certain way:

On one side are complexity, change, invention, unstable “growth”,

taking, control, and the future. On the other side are simplicity,

stasis, tradition, stability, giving, freedom, and the past. Once we

abandon that framework, which is itself an artifact of western

industrial society, we can integrate evidence that the framework

excludes, and we can try to match things up differently.

The combination that I’m suggesting is: complexity, change, invention,

stability, giving, freedom, and both the past and the future. This isn’t

the only combination that could be suggested, and I doubt it’s the

easiest to put into practice, but it’s surprisingly noncontroversial. Al

Gore would probably agree with every point. The catch is that Gore is

playing to a public consciousness in which “freedom” means a nice paint

job on control, and in which no one has any idea what’s really necessary

for stability.

Americans think freedom means no restraint. So I’m free to start a big

company and rule ten thousand wage laborers, and if they don’t like it

they’re free to go on strike, and I’m free to hire thugs to crack their

heads, and they’re free to quit, and I’m free to buy politicans to cut

off support for the unemployed, so now they’re free to either starve and

die, or accept the job on my terms and use their freedom of speech to

impotently complain.

A better definition of freedom is no coercion. I define “restraint” as

preventing someone from doing something, and “coercion” as forcing

someone to do something, usually by punishing them for not doing it.

Primitive societies tend to be very good at avoiding coercion. In The

Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff writes that among the Yequana, it is

forbidden to even ask another person to do something. It seems strange

to us, but to have a society where no one is forced to do what they

don’t want to do, you actually need a lot of restraints.

So there’s one place where we can learn more from looking backward than

looking forward. But there is more than one way for coercion to appear —

it’s like a disease with multiple vectors. Primitive cultures have

extraordinary resistance to the way coercion must have appeared over and

over in their history — among a group of people who all know each other,

an arrogant charismatic leader arises. But they have little or no

resistance to another way it’s been appearing more and more often over

the last few thousand years: as a hidden partner with seductive new

physical and social tools.

To understand what’s necessary for both freedom and stability, we need

to go deep into a close ally of the critique of civilization: the

critique of technology. Now, as soon as you say you’re against

technology, some nit-picker points out that even a stone axe is a

technology. We know what we mean, but we have trouble putting it into

words. Our first instinct is to try to draw a line, and say that

technologies on one side are bad, and on the other side are good. And at

this point, primitivism comes into the picture as a convenience.

It reminds me of the debate over abortion, which is ultimately about

drawing a line between when the potential child is part of the mother’s

body, and when it’s a separate person with full rights. Drawing the line

at the first breath would make the most sense on biblical grounds, but

no one wants to do that, and almost no one wants to draw it at passage

through the birth canal. But if you go farther back than that, you get

an unbroken grey area all the way to conception! Fundamentalists love to

draw the line at conception, not only because it gives them more control

over women, but because they hate grey areas.

In the same way, primitivism enters the debate over good technology with

a sharply drawn line a long way back. We don’t have to wrestle with how

to manufacture bicycles without exploitation, or how to make cities

sustainable, or what uses are appropriate for water wheels, or how to

avoid the atrocities of ancient empires, if we just draw the line

between settled grain farmers and nomadic forager-hunters.

To be fair to primitivists, they still have to wrestle with the grey

areas from foraging to horticulture to agriculture, and from camps to

villages to towns, and with arguments that we should go back even

farther. The real fundamentalists on this issue are the techno-utopians.

They say “technology is neutral,” which really means “Thou shalt not

ascribe built-in negative effects to any technology,” but of course they

ascribe built-in positive effects to technologies all the time. So it

ends up being not a statement of fact but a command to action: “Any

technology you can think of, do it!” This is like solving the abortion

debate by legalizing murder.

We must apply intelligent selection to technology, but we aren’t really

worried that the neighboring village will reinvent metalworking and

massacre our children with swords. We just want bulldozers to stop

turning grassy fields into dreadful suburbs, and we want urban spaces to

be made for people not cars, and we want to turn off the TV, and take

down the surveillance cameras, and do meaningful work instead of sitting

in windowless office dungeons rearranging abstractions to pay off loans

incurred getting our spirits broken.

We like hot baths and sailing ships and recorded music and the internet,

but we worry that we can’t have them without exterminating half the

species on Earth, or exploiting Asian sweatshop workers, or dumping so

many toxins that we all get cancer, or overextending our system so far

that it crashes and we get eaten by roving gangs.

But notice: primitive people don’t think this way! Of course, if you put

them on an assembly line or on the side of a freeway or in a modern war,

they would know they were in hell. But if you offered them an LED

lantern made on an assembly line, or a truck ride to their hunting

ground, or a gun, most of them would accept it without hesitation.

Primitive people tend to adopt any tool they find useful — not because

they’re wise, but because they’re ignorant, because their cultures have

not evolved defenses against tools that will lead them astray.

I think the root of civilization, and a major source of human evil, is

simply that we became clever enough to extend our power beyond our

empathy. It’s like the famous Twilight Zone episode where there’s a box

with a button, and if you push it, you get a million dollars and someone

you don’t know dies. We have countless “boxes” that do basically the

same thing. Some of them are physical, like cruise missiles or

ocean-killing fertilizers, or even junk food where your mouth gets a

million dollars and your heart dies. Others are social, like subsidies

that make junk food affordable, or the corporation, which by definition

does any harm it can get away with that will bring profit to the

shareholders. I’m guessing it all started when our mental and physical

tools combined to enable positive feedback in personal wealth. Anyway,

as soon as you have something that does more harm than good, but that

appears to the decision makers to do more good than harm, the decision

makers will decide to do more and more of it, and before long you have a

whole society built around obvious benefits that do hidden harm.

The kicker is, once we gain from extending our power beyond our seeing

and feeling, we have an incentive to repress our seeing and feeling. If

child slaves are making your clothing, and you want to keep getting

clothing, you either have to not know about them, or know about them and

feel good about it. You have to make yourself ignorant or evil.

But gradually we’re learning. Every time it comes out that some product

is made with more than the usual amount of exploitation, a few people

stop buying it. Every day, someone is in a supermarket deciding whether

to spend extra money to buy shade-grown coffee or fair trade chocolate.

It’s not making a big difference, but all mass changes have to start

with a few people, and my point is that we are stretching the human

conscience farther than it’s ever gone, making sacrifices to help

forests we will never see and people we will never meet. This is not

simple-minded or “idealistic”, but rational, sophisticated behavior. You

find it not at the trailing edge of civilization but at the leading

edge, among educated urbanites.

There are also growing movements to reduce energy consumption, to eat

locally-produced food, to give up high-paying jobs for better quality of

life, and to trade industrial-scale for human-scale tools. I would

prefer not to own a car, but my motivation is not to save the world —

it’s that cars are expensive and I hate driving. I’ll use a chainsaw

when I have a huge amount of wood to cut, but generally I avoid power

tools because they make me feel dependent on an industrial system that

gives me no participation in power, and I feel stronger working with my

own muscles.

When I look at the discourse around this kind of choice, it’s positively

satanic. People whose position is basically “Thundersaw cut fast, me

feel like god” present themselves as agents of enlightenment and

progress, while people with intelligent reasons for doing something

completely new — choosing weaker, slower tools when high-energy tools

are available — are seen as lizard-brained throwbacks. What’s even worse

is when they see themselves that way.

This movement is often called “voluntary simplicity”, but we should

distinguish between technological simplicity and mental simplicity.

Primitive people, even when they have complex cultures, use simple tools

for a simple reason — those are the only tools they have. In so-called

“civilization”, we’ve just been using more and more complex technologies

for simple-minded reasons — they give us brute power and shallow

pleasures. But as we learn to be more sophisticated in our thinking

about technology, we will be able to use complex tools for complex

reasons — or simple tools for complex reasons.

Primitivists, understandably, are impatient. They want us to go back to

using simple tools and they don’t care why we do it. It’s like our whole

species is an addict, and seductive advanced technologies are the drug,

and primitivism is the urge to throw our whole supply of drugs in the

garbage. Any experienced addict will tell you that doesn’t work. The

next day you dig it out of the garbage or the next week you buy more.

Of course there are arguments that this will be impossible. One goes

like this: “For civilization, you need agriculture, and for agriculture,

you need topsoil. But the topsoil is gone! Agriculture survives only by

dumping synthetic fertilizers on dead soil, and those fertilizers depend

on oil, and the easily extracted oil is also gone. If the industrial

system crashes just a little, we’ll have no oil, no fertilizer, no

agriculture, and therefore no choice but foraging and hunting.”

Agriculture, whether or not it’s a good idea, is in no danger. The

movement to switch the whole planet to synthetic fertilizers on dead

soil (ironically called “the Green Revolution”) had not even started yet

when another movement started to switch back: organic farming. Present

organic farmers are still using oil to run tractors and haul supplies

in, but in terms of getting the soil to produce a crop, organic farming

is agriculture without oil, and it’s the fastest growing segment of the

food economy. It is being held back by cultural intertia, by the

political power of industrial agribusiness, and by cheap oil. It is not

being held back by any lack of land suitable for conversion to organic

methods. No one says, “We bought this old farm, but since the soil is

dead, we’re just going to leave it as a wasteland, and go hunt elk.”

People find a way to bring the soil back.

Another argument is that “humanity has learned its lesson.” I think this

is on the right track, but too optimistic about how much we’ve learned,

and about what kind of learning is necessary. Mere rebellion is as old

as the first slave revolt in Ur, and you can find intellectual critiques

of civilization in the Old Testament: From Ecclesiastes 5:11, “When

goods increase, they are increased that eat them: and what good is there

to the owners thereof?” And from Isaiah 5:8, “Woe unto those who join

house to house, and field to field, until there is no place.” If this

level of learning were enough, we would have found utopia thousands of

years ago. Instead, people whose understanding was roughly the same as

ours, and whose courage was greater, kept making the same mistakes.

In Against His-story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman set out to

document the whole history of resistance to civilization, and

inadvertently undermined his conclusion, that this Leviathan will be the

last, by showing again and again that resistance movements become the

new dominators. The ancient Persian empire started when Cyrus was

inspired by Zoroastrianism to sweep away the machinery of previous

empires. The Roman empire started as a people’s movement to eradicate

the Etruscans. The modern nation-state began with the Moravians forming

a defensive alliance against the Franks, who fell into warlike habits

themselves after centuries of resisting the Romans. And we all know what

happened with Christianity.

I fear it’s going to happen again. Now, the simple desire to go

primitive is harmless and beneficial — I wish luck and success to anyone

who tries it, and I hope we always have some tribal forager-hunters

around, just to keep the human potential stretched. And I enjoy

occasional minor disasters like blackouts and snowstorms, which serve to

strip away illusions and remind people that they’re alive. I loved the

idea in Fight Club (the movie) of destroying the bank records to

equalize wealth. That’s right in line with the ancient Jubilee

tradition, where debts were canceled every few decades to stabilize the

economy.[3]

But to cause a global hard crash (if it’s even possible) would be a

terrible mistake, and the root of it is old-fashioned authoritarian

thinking: that if you force someone to do something, it’s the same as if

they do it on their own. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. The more we

are forced to abandon this system, the less we will learn, and the more

aggressively we will fight to rebuild something like it. And the more we

choose to abandon it, the more we will learn, and the less likely we

will make the same mistakes.

Of course we will not have another society based on oil, and per-capita

energy consumption will drop, but it’s unlikely that energy or

complexity will fall to preindustrial levels. Hydroelectric and atomic

fission plants are in no immediate danger, and every year there are new

innovations in energy from sun, wind, waves, and biofuels. Alternative

energy would be growing much faster with good funding, and in any case

it’s not necessary to convert the whole global infrastructure in the

next twenty years. Even in a general collapse, if just one region has a

surplus of sustainable energy, they can use it to colonize and

re-“develop” the collapsed areas at their own pace. Probably this will

be happening all over.

I don’t think there’s any escape from complex high-energy societies, so

instead of focusing on avoiding them, we should focus on making them

tolerable. This means, first, that our system is enjoyable for its

participants — that the activities necessary to keep it going are

experienced by the people who do them as meaningful and freely chosen.

Second, our system must be ethical toward the world around it. My

standards here are high — the totality of biological life on Earth must

be better off with us than without us. And third, our system must not be

inherently unstable. It might be destroyed by an asteroid or an ice age,

but it must not destabilize itself internally, by having an economy that

has to grow or die, or by depleting nonrenewable resources, or by having

any trend at all that ratchets, that easily goes one way but can’t go

the other way without a catastrophe.

These three standards seem to be separate. When Orwell wrote that the

future is “a boot stamping on a human face — forever”, he was imagining

a system that’s internally stable but not enjoyable. Techno-utopians

fantasize about a system that expands into space and lasts billions of

years while crushing any trace of biological wildness. And some

paranoids fear “ecofascism”, a system that is stable and serves nature,

but that represses most humans.

I think all these visions are impossible, for a reason that is

overlooked in our machine-worshipping culture: that collapse often

happens for psychological reasons. Erich Fromm said it best, in “What

Does It Mean to Be Human?”

Even if the social order can do everything to man — starve him, torture

him, imprison him, or over feed him — this cannot be done without

certain consequences which follow from the very conditions of human

existence. Man, if utterly deprived of all stimuli and pleasure, will be

incapable of performing work, certainly any skilled work. If he is not

that utterly destitute, he will tend to rebel if you make him a slave;

he will tend to be violent if life is too boring; he will tend to lose

all creativity if you make him into a machine. Man in this respect is

not different from animals or from inanimate matter. You can get certain

animals into the zoo, but they will not reproduce, and others will

become violent although they are not violent in freedom... If man were

infinitely malleable, there would have been no revolutions.

In 1491, Mann writes that on Pizarro’s march to conquer the Incas, he

was actively helped by local populations who were sick of the empire’s

oppression. Fredy Perlman’s book goes through the whole history of

western civilization arguing for the human dissatisfaction factor in

every failed society. And it’s clear to me and many other Americans that

our empire is falling because nobody believes in it — not the soldiers,

who quickly learn that war is bullshit, not the corporate executives,

who at best are focused on short term profits and at worst are just

thieves, not the politicians, who are cynically doing whatever it takes

to maximize campaign contributions, and not the people who actually do

the work, most of whom are just going through the motions.

Also, America (with other nations close behind) is getting more tightly

controlled, and thus more unbearable for its participants. This is a

general problem of top-down systems: for both technical and

psychological reasons, it’s easy to add control mechanisms and hard to

remove them, easy to squeeze tighter and hard to let go. As the

controllers get more selfish and insulated, and the controlled get more

frustrated and depressed, and more energy is wasted on forcing people to

do what they wouldn’t do without force, the whole system seizes up, and

can only be renewed by a surge of transforming energy from below. This

transformation could be peaceful, but often the ruling interests block

it until it builds up such pressure that it explodes violently.

The same way the ruling interests become corrupt through an exploitative

relationship with the people, we all become corrupt when we participate

in a society that exploits the life around it. When we talk about

“nature”, we don’t mean wheat fields or zoo animals — we mean plants

that scatter seeds to the wind and animals that roam at will. We mean

raw aliveness, and we can’t repress it outside ourselves without also

repressing it inside ourselves. The spirit that guides our shoe when it

crushes grass coming through cracks in the driveway, also guides us to

crush feelings and perceptions coming through cracks in our paved minds,

and we need these feelings and perceptions to make good decisions, to be

sane.

If primitive life seems better to us, it’s because it’s easier for

smaller and simpler societies to avoid falling into domination. In the

best tribes, the “chief” just tells people to do what they want to do

anyway, and a good chief will channel this energy into a harmonious

whole. But the bigger a system gets, and the longer a big system lasts,

the more challenging it is to maintain a bottom-up energy structure.

I have a wild speculation about the origin of complex societies. The

Great Pyramid of Giza is superior in every way to the two pyramids next

to it — yet the Great Pyramid was the first of the three to be built.

It’s like Egyptian civilization appeared out of nowhere at full

strength, and immediately began declining. My thought is: the first

pyramid was not built by slaves. It was built by an explosion of human

enthusiasm channeled into a massive cooperative effort. But then, as

we’ve seen in pretty much every large system in history, this pattern of

human action hardened, leaders became rulers, inspired actions became

chores, and workers became slaves.

To achieve stability, and freedom, and ecological responsibility, we

must learn to halt the slide from life into control, to maintain the

bottom-up energy structure permanently, even in large complex systems. I

don’t know how we’re going to do this. It’s even hard for individuals to

do it — look at all the creative people who make one masterpiece and

spend the rest of their life making crappy derivative works. The best

plan I can think of is to build our system out of cells of less than 150

people,[4] roughly the number at which cooperation tends to give way to

hierarchy, and even then to expect cells to go bad, and have built-in

pathways for dead cells to be broken down and new ones to form and

individuals to move from cell to cell. Basically, we’d be making a big

system that’s like a living body, where all past big systems have been

animated corpses.

Assuming that our descendants do achieve stability, what technological

level will they be at? I want to leave this one wide open. It’s possible

in theory for us to go even farther “back” than the stone age. I call

this the Land Dolphins scenario — that we somehow transform ourselves

into super-intelligent creatures who don’t use any physical tools at

all. At the other extreme, I’m not ruling out space colonies, although

the worst mistake we could make would be expanding into space before we

have learned stability on our home planet. I think physical travel to

other solar systems is out of the question — long before mechanistic

technology gets that far, we will have moved to new paradigms that offer

much easier ways to get to new worlds.

The “singularity” theory is also off the mark. Techies think machines

will surpass humans, because they think we’re nothing but machines

ourselves, so all we need to do is make better machines, which according

to the myth of “progress” is inevitable. I think if we do get a

technological transcendence, it’s going to involve machines changing

humans. My favorite scenario is time-contracted virtual reality: suppose

you can go into an artificial world, have the experience of spending a

week there, and come back and only a day has passed, or an hour, or a

minute. If we can do that, all bets are off!

The biggest weakness in my vision is that innovation can go with

stability, that we can continue exploring and trying new things without

repeatedly destabilizing ourselves by extending our power beyond our

understanding. Maybe we’re just going to keep making mistakes and

falling down forever, and in that case the best we can do is minimize

the severity of the falls. I think we’re doing a pretty good job so far

in the present collapse. Even in America, we might escape with no more

than a long depression, a mild fall in population, and a much-needed

shakeout of technology and economics. Life will get more painful but

also more meaningful, as billions of human-hours shift from processing

paperwork and watching TV to intensive learning of new skills to keep

ourselves alive. These skills will run the whole range, from tracking

deer to growing potatoes to fixing bicycles to building solar-powered

wi-fi networks — to new things we won’t even imagine until we have our

backs to the wall.

Humans are the most mentally adaptable species on Earth, and not bad at

physical adaptation. Our species can easily survive the worst-case

scenarios for climate change and industrial collapse. If we go extinct,

it will be through self-transformation. We might use biotech to

genetically change ourselves into something that’s not robust, or use

information technology to get so good at entertaining ourselves that

we’re no longer interested in reproduction. Or we might spin off many

cultures and subspecies that go extinct, while a few survive.

I think we can see the future in popular fiction, but not the fiction we

think. Most science fiction is either stuck in the recent past, in the

industrial age’s boundless optimism about machines, or it looks at the

present by exploring the unintended consequences of high tech. Cyberpunk

is better — if you put a 1950’s version of the year 2000 through a

cyberpunk filter, you would be close to the real 2000. The key insight

of cyberpunk is that more technology doesn’t make things cleaner — it

makes things dirtier.

Fantasy, while seeming to look at the past, might be seeing the future:

elves and wizards could represent the increasing diversity of

post-humans, and “magic” is what we in the industrial age dimly perceive

as the world outside our objective materialist philosophy. I think

steampunk does the best of all, if you factor out the Victorian

frippery. Like cyberpunk, it shows a human-made world that’s as messy

and alive as nature, but the technological system is a crazy hybrid of

everything from “stone age” to “space age” — rejecting the idea that we

are locked into ages.

Primitive people see time as a circle. Civilized people see it as a

line. We are about to see it as an open plain where we can wander at

will. History is broken. Go!

[1]

www.danbartlett.co.uk

[2]

www.smh.com.au

[3]

www.yesmagazine.org

[4]

en.wikipedia.org