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Title: The Critique of Civilization Author: Ran Prieur Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: anti-civ, introductory Source: Retrieved on 29 January 2011 from http://www.ranprieur.com/essays/civFAQ.html
April 8, 2005 (revised October 2006)
What do you mean, “critique of civilization”?
Mostly I mean putting human civilization in context, seeing it from the
perspective of the world that surrounds it, instead of through the lens
of its own mythology. For example, we’re taught to think of human
prehistory as a temporary, transitional stage destined to “improve” into
a world like our own. In fact, we have lived as forager-hunters for at
least 100 times as long as we’ve been tilling the soil, and it’s our own
age that shows every sign of being temporary, unstable, and short. The
critique of civilization is a reframing, after which “primitive” people
seem like the human norm, and civilization seems like a brief failed
experiment.
Another example: suppose I broke into your house, killed your family,
locked you in a cage, threw out all your stuff, redecorated according to
my tastes, and called it “growth” because I used to have one house and
now have two, or called it “development” because I replaced your stuff
with my own. That’s exactly what civilization does, to nature, to
nonhumans, to nature-based humans, even to humans in other branches of
civilization.
It’s not really that bad, is it?
The deserts of central and southwest Asia and the Mediterranean used to
be forests. Ancient empires cut them down to burn the wood to smelt
metal for weapons, and to build ships, which they used to conquer their
neighbors. This has been the pattern of every “successful” civilization
in history: to transform the life of the Earth into larger human
populations that must conquer and deplete more land to survive,
spreading like a cancer over thousands of miles, destroying every
habitat and culture in their path, until they go totally mad, exhaust
their landbase, and crash.
Can you define “civilization”?
I don’t think it’s necessary or even helpful to make an airtight
definition. I follow William Kötke in using “civilization”
interchangeably with “empire.” I define it loosely as a self-reinforcing
societal pattern of depletion of the land, accumulation of wealth,
conquest, repression, central control, and insulation and disconnection
from life, with all of these habits allied to mental, cultural, and
physical artifacts.
For example, the plow is a physical artifact that enables the cultural
habit of grain farming to take biomass from the soil and convert it into
more humans and into stores of grain, which enable the cultural artifact
of “wealth,” which enables some people to tell others what to do and
build the cultural artifact of “command,” backed up by physical
artifacts like swords and guns and cultural roles like soldiers and
police, who reinforce the whole pattern by conquering and holding more
land for the plow and more people for the roles of farmer and owner and
soldier. Also, farming enables people to lose their awareness of wild
nature and still survive — in fact, it links their survival to viewing
wild nature as an enemy, which feeds back and supports their habit of
exterminating nature.
Or, the car is a physical artifact whose manufacture and use require the
land to be torn up for mining (after being conquered), polluted with
industrial waste products, and covered with pavement, and the car feeds
back into this system by insulating and disconnecting people behind its
metal walls and blurring speeds, so they lose touch with their neighbors
and with the world they’re destroying. Also cars enable us to put more
distance between the places we have to go, forcing us to have cars to
get there, and thus to do thousands of hours of commanded labor to be
permitted to own them.
Sure, everyone knows cars are bad. But what about all the good stuff in
civilization, like our medical advances?
Most of industrial medicine exists to treat diseases and injuries that
are caused by industrial civilization in the first place, like heart
disease and cancer and car crashes, which are rare or nonexistent in
nature. And mostly it fails to treat them, and only succeeds in
prolonging sickness to increase the power of the medical system and
allow it to more completely colonize our lives.
Didn’t primitive people live only 30 years, and have lots of health
problems?
Non-civilized people observed in historical times tend to be healthier
than civilized people, and quite long-lived. As for prehistoric people,
we can only look at their skeletons. Here’s what Jared Diamond wrote in
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race:
At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois
rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a
picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer
culture gave way to intensive maize farming around AD 1150... Compared
to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50
percent increase in [tooth] enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a
fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone
condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions
reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in
degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard
physical labor.
Still, on the whole, don’t we live better than primitive people? Didn’t
they constantly struggle for existence and fight each other a lot?
It’s true that people in emotionally healthy subcultures in elite
nations have it better in many ways than people in the nastiest tribes.
But some observed nature-based societies look like utopia compared to
civilization — the political structure is egalitarian and non-coercive,
fighting is rarely deadly, the people are strong and happy, and they
spend only a few hours a day in the meaningful activities of survival,
and the rest of their time playing and slacking off.
What about the Aztecs or the Mayans or the Incas, who had strict
hierarchy and human sacrifice and military conquest to support
increasing populations?
I classify them as civilizations because they had repressive centralized
systems linked to “growth” economies. It’s true that there’s not a clear
division between civilized and primitive. I suspect that some North
American tribes were well on their way to complex top-down government
and depletion of the land. But the point is, humans are capable of the
whole range, from killing nature to supporting it, from runaway increase
to balance, from repression to peaceful anarchy. Even if only one tribe
lived at the nice end of all those scales, it would be evidence that
something like that is possible for all of us. In fact many did, and
could again.
What about the really nasty tribes that are clearly primitive?
The orthodox primitivist position is that we have to live with it, that
despite the flaws, forager-hunter tribes are the best humans can do.
Personally I think we can do better. But even if we can’t, if you
consider everyone from best-off to worst-off, primitive life is still
preferable to industrial civilization.
I read that murder rates are higher among primitive people.
Sure, if you only count it as murder when one person hits another person
with an axe! Highly complex societies have the luxury of more powerful
and subtle murders. I consider all cancer deaths to be homicides — or
suicides if the victims are also willing participants in the crimes.
Cancer was rare in pre-industrial times and even rarer in pre-civilized
times. You get it from a combination of emotional distress and exposure
to toxic environmental factors, and the people who make and enable the
decisions to create those factors are the murderers. Heart disease is
suicide-homicide by the corporations that profit from trans fats and
other heart-disease-causing foods, and their stockholders. Lung cancer
is suicide-homicide by tobacco companies that standardize the nicotine
dose and add even more addictive substances to increase their profits.
Every car crash death is a homicide by the various interests that set us
up to have no choice but to drive around in cars all day.
If there are going to be murders, I’d rather have them out in the open
and honest. If you get killed in a tribal war, you’re probably suffering
less at your moment of death than industrialized people suffer every
day, because you can see the story that you’re part of.
Aren’t you romanticizing primitive people? They’re not perfect, you
know.
There’s no such thing as “perfection.” That’s a fantasy of
increase-based society that makes us think the world in front of us is
never good enough, so that we have to keep reaching for more wealth and
control. The nonexistent techno-utopia is “perfect.” I’m just observing
what’s been documented by civilization’s own anthropologists, and
noticing that, while imperfect, it’s preferable to “civilized” life.
But you seem happy to me. You should be thankful you live in America.
That’s like telling a serial killer he should be thankful he gets to
drink the blood of his victims, instead of telling him to quit killing.
People in elite nations are rewarded with cheap pleasures in exchange
for consenting to a system that kills and robs people in poorer nations
and nonhumans everywhere. And they’re still not satisfied. They chase
status and money and distract themselves with hedonism and toys to try
to cover up the emptiness of their existence. The only reason my
existence feels meaningful is I’ve begun to see through the whole sham
and I’m exploring ways to do something about it. I’ll feel thankful I
live in America when the American Empire has broken down into thousands
of autonomous nature-based communities and we can ride horses on the
ruined freeways.
So you want us all to go back to the stone age?
The word “back” is a trick. It implies a magical absolute direction of
change. Suppose you go to your job, and when you get ready to leave,
your boss says, “So you want to go back to your house? Don’t you know
you can never go back? You can only go forward, to working for me even
more, ha ha ha!” Really, all motion is forward, and forward motion can
go in any direction we choose, including to places we’ve been before.
So you want us all to go forward to the stone age?
The term “stone age” is another trick, if it’s interpreted as a
temporary stage in a progression that logically had to lead to the age
we’re in now. There’s no biological reason to suppose this. Sharks have
barely changed in the last 100 million years, and we consider them
successful for finding a place they fit and staying there. Humans fit
with nature for one to two million years, and then less than ten
thousand years ago some of us tried something different that’s obviously
not working. Ten thousand years out of a million is like 36 seconds out
of an hour.
OK, OK. So you want us to go forward to hunting and gathering, using
fire and stone tools and living in grass huts, and just stay there?
That would be a nice way to live, but I don’t think it’s going to
happen, at least not soon. I’m not asking any person raised in
civilization to switch to a forager-hunter lifestyle, and I’m not going
to do it myself. It’s too hard to learn as an adult, and right now
nature is too killed back for it to be easy for anyone. If civilization
crashes, and humans survive, then in a few generations it might be
practical for people to start living that way. But there will be plenty
of other options — at least until the scrap metal is gone. In the near
future, we’re going to have to live in a way that both feeds us in a
dead world, and rebuilds the life of that world. I think the
permaculture movement is on the right track.
So you’re against technology — you’re a technophobe.
I love technology! A fungophobe is someone who fears all mushrooms, who
assumes they’re all deadly poisonous and isn’t interested in learning
about them. A fungophile is someone who is intensely interested in
mushrooms, who reads about them, samples them, and learns which ones are
poisonous, which ones taste good, which ones are medicinal and for what,
which ones are allied to which trees or plants or animals. This is
precisely my attitude toward technology. I am a technophile!
Now, what would you call someone who runs through the woods
indiscriminately eating every mushroom, because they believe “mushrooms
are neutral,” so there are no bad ones and it’s OK to use any of them as
long as it’s for good uses like eating and not bad uses like conking
someone over the head? You would call this person dangerously stupid.
But this is almost the modern attitude toward “technology.” Actually
it’s even worse. Because of the core values of civilization, that
conquest and control and forceful transformation are good, because
civilization “grows” by dominating and exploiting and killing, and by
numbing its members to the perspectives of their victims, it has been
choosing and developing the most poisonous technologies, and ignoring or
excluding tools allied to awareness, aliveness, and equal participation
in power. It’s as if we’re in a world where the very definition of
“mushroom” has been twisted to include little other than death caps and
destroying angels and deadly galerinas, and we wonder why health care is
so expensive.
What are some technologies you like?
One of my favorites is the beaver dam, which could be built by humans
too, but it’s easier to just bring in some beaver “contractors” and let
them go to work. It creates a nice pond, raises ground water, buffers
runoff and prevents droughts and floods downstream, and after many years
of collecting organic material that would otherwise wash away, it
becomes a wetland or meadow that increases the diversity and abundance
of life. And if you say “that’s not a technology,” you confirm my point
that the definition of “technology” has been twisted to include only
poisonous ones, dead machines that enable the concentration of power in
an alienated detached perspective.
Another great technology is cob building, a mixture of sand, clay, and
dry grass that absorbs and radiates heat and can last hundreds of years.
Also, recent innovations in wood burning, like Ianto Evans’s rocket
stove, are almost perfectly clean and efficient while still being allied
to a bottom-up social order. Permaculturists are rediscovering
techniques mastered by rain forest people, arranging fruit and nut
trees, berry bushes, and perennial or self-seeding ground covers so that
they work together harmoniously and produce abundant food with little
maintenance while actually increasing soil fertility.
A good mechanical technology is the bicycle, which is cheap and simple
enough to be compatible with autonomy, and moves more efficiently than
any land animal, though it remains to be seen whether bicycles can be
manufactured by a sustainable and non-coercive society. I don’t see any
problem with telescopes, stone buildings, sailing ships, unpaved roads,
sophisticated ceramics, or hand tools fashioned from scavenged metal.
Of course, almost all “primitive” technologies are great, not for
romantic reasons but for hard practical reasons: They keep us close to
the Earth where we remain aware of the needs and perspectives of other
life. They do not require the importation of energy or resources from
distant places where we’re not intimate with the life and would tolerate
its destruction. And they are allied to non-coercive human societies: If
the tools on which people depend are all within reach of everyone, if
anyone can build a shelter, make a fire, weave a basket, dig up tubers,
kill a deer, tan a hide and make clothing, then a dominating power has
no leverage to make us obey.
But don’t people in undeveloped countries want more development?
Some of them do. It doesn’t mean they’re right. If I take away your food
and give you a bit of heroin, you might want more heroin. People who
have been separated from a nature-based way of living, and are shown no
way out of their meaningless poverty except meaningless affluence,
images of first-worlders enjoying their shiny toys, will tend to believe
those toys will make them happy. They’re wrong. This is proven by the
fact that suicide rates are higher in “developed” countries.
And many of them don’t want our toys — they want equal participation in
power, and land reform, and the overthrow of the colonial government
that extracts wealth from their nation to send it to the imperial
centers. They understand that “development” means loans on terrible
terms that enrich the local elites and force people out of
self-sufficient local economies into corporate enslavement.
Truly “undeveloped” people, who have not been separated from a
nature-based way of living, are never envious of civilization. They
think it’s silly and choose it only under extreme pressure. In fact,
without coercion, people go the other way. Benjamin Franklin wrote:
When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language
and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and
makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to
return. And ... when white persons of either sex have been taken
prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’
ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to
prevail with them to stay among the English, yet within a Short time
they become disgusted with our manner of Life, and the care and pains
that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of
escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.
But civilized also means polite, considerate, peaceful, broad-minded,
cultured, learned, and so on. Are you against all that?
That use of the word “civilized” is a trick. To destroy life, to
conquer, to imprison, to torture, are typical behaviors of civilization
and less common in other societies. The Arawaks brought gifts to
Columbus and he hacked up their children to feed to dogs. Which culture
was “civilized”? The behavior that we call “civilized” is common only at
the centers of civilization, among the sheltered elite. And even our
greatest thinkers can barely match the typical forager-hunter, who has
knowledge and understanding of thousands of plant and animal species,
where they grow, how they interrelate, what they’re good for. The native
view of the spirit world behind the physical world, whether or not you
think it’s true, is more deep and complex than the cold doctrines and
abstractions of western religion.
Every primitive human knows how to improvise a shelter and find wild
edibles. Not only do civilized people lack primitive skills, we even
lack civilized skills — most of us can’t even program a VCR or change
the oil in a car. We are the most pathetic and powerless humans who have
ever lived. This is good news! As wonderful as you think your apartment
and your TV shows are, that world is a padded cell compared to the rest
of the universe.
If primitive people are so much better than civilized people, why do
they always lose?
That’s like saying if I can beat you up I must be better than you. A
nation that puts its attention into warfare and conquest will always
defeat a nation that puts its energy into relaxation and play. People
who have lived densely for millennia will have developed epidemic
diseases, and partial immunity to them, while people who have lived in
isolated tribes will have no immunity and will be killed off at contact.
Sure, but if they’re so susceptible to invasion, and epidemics, and
conversion by missionaries, and alcoholism, and TV addiction, then
doesn’t it follow that if we all lived like that again, we would just
slide into civilization the first time someone invented the wrong
technology and started conquering people, just like last time?
That won’t happen right away, because the fuels that fed civilization —
topsoil, forests, easily extracted metal and oil — are mostly gone. But
soil and forests will come back, so in the long term, that’s a strong
argument against simple primitivism. Civilization is an emotional
plague, and those who have been exposed to it are more resistant to it.
Either we can evolve permanent resistance, in which case we will be
different from any previous natural humans, or we can’t, and we’re
doomed to keep cycling through ages of health and destructive sickness
until we go extinct.
Isn’t civilization part of evolution?
Biological evolution moves toward greater complexity, diversity, and
abundance of life. What determines “fitness” to survive is how well a
creature fits with the whole, how well it maintains the ecosystem on
which its survival depends. Civilization moves in the opposite
direction, toward uniformity and deadness, replacing all human cultures
with one, replacing all habitats with monoculture farms and pavement.
The civilized myth of “survival of the fittest” is about exterminating
competitors and depleting the ecosystem to generate large numbers of
identical things. The “progress” of civilization is anti-evolution. The
only thing in the evolutionary process that it resembles is a
catastrophe, something that wipes out all but the most adaptable species
and forces evolution to start over.
But isn’t human civilization at least a continuation of human evolution,
in which we came down from the trees, invented fire and stone tools,
developed larger brains, more sophisticated tools, and so on to where we
are now?
No. This series of human changes switched, at some point, from
co-evolution with other life to anti-evolution against it. The most
common story goes like this: One or two million years ago we became
“human” and made ourselves a niche, where we could have stayed forever,
or continued our evolution on other paths that kept us in balance with
the whole. But with the invention of grain agriculture, some humans made
a terrible wrong turn and dragged the rest of the world with them.
In other stories we made the wrong turn farther back, possibly with
symbolic language, or division of labor, or even with the taming of
fire; and at that point, something like this was bound to happen sooner
or later. In any case, the next question is whether we can evolve out of
this hellhole, into a species that can keep itself in balance.
Are humans inherently bad?
I’d say we’re inherently dangerous. Because so much of our behavior is
determined by culture, we’re much more malleable than any other animal —
we have the power to create very good behavior patterns or very bad
ones.
Couldn’t we build a good civilization, one that had a lot of modern
technologies but was peaceful and environmentally sustainable?
Maybe. But our familiar “technologies” were developed in the context of
conquest and central control and runaway exploitation and the numbness
to make it all tolerable. We have the ones we have because they fed back
into these habits, and they would continue to do so. Even if we had cars
powered by fusion plants, they would still daze us with their speed and
enable us to live far apart, when we need to slow to a walking pace to
know nature, and live close together to know our neighbors. We need
tools allied to sharing, not isolation, and energy sources that do not
require central administration, and energy in small enough quantities
that we have to get our hands dirty and be intimate with what we’re
doing.
Tom Brown once asked Stalking Wolf why the cold didn’t bother him.
Stalking Wolf answered, “Because it’s real.” The same things that make
primitive life uncomfortable make it more alive. In a society that
protects us from that aliveness, and that also denies us the thrill of
escalating “progress,” how will we enjoy life enough to keep that
society going?
Civilization keeps billions of people alive. If you’re against it,
doesn’t that mean you want all those people to die?
It’s civilization that wants all those people to die, by setting them up
so their lives depend on practices that must end in famine and
ecological disaster. I’m just the messenger. I’m not making anyone die
by believing that civilization was a mistake, just as you can’t save
anyone by believing that it can keep going. I’m actually trying to save
lives, by breaking people out of a style of thinking that is tied to a
style of living that is not sustainable, so they can learn ways of
living that will get them through the crash.
You’re against civilization, but what are you for? You’ll never get
anywhere without a positive vision of the future.
What makes you think I want to get anywhere? Only people under the spell
of civilization need an exciting vision of a nonexistent future to
motivate them. Cultures that live in balance feel no need for a “vision
of the future” because they have a present that is acceptable. Instead,
they focus on their ancestors. They would say, “You’ll make terrible
mistakes without being grounded in the ways of your ancestors,” and
they’d be right.
Our visions of the future have all turned out to be wrong. From
techno-utopia to Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich to the Age of Aquarius to
Bush’s crusade to bring “freedom” to Asia, they’re a mixture of wishful
thinking and lies that serve to motivate people to march toward
something that turns out to be quite different.
Visions of the future are lies, and a culture that needs to be lied to
cannot stand. If people will choose a comforting fantasy over a call for
responsibility, as Americans did when they chose Reagan over Carter,
then those people are already doomed.
But I’m a creature of civilization. I’ve lost touch with all my
indigenous ancestors, and I do have visions of the future, plenty of
them, which if I am “successful” will inspire my followers to make total
asses of themselves while the world goes a direction no one expected. I
envision stone age, medieval, modern, and “magical” technologies all
dancing together in a world of wilderness and ruins.
Could civilization just be an awkward stage in human evolution, a
necessary bridge to a higher level of humanity?
It’s possible that we will emerge from civilization in a new form that
is better adapted to work with the whole. But there is no reason to
believe the whole thing was necessary, except that it’s easier to take
than the idea that it was not necessary.
And there would be no reason to call the new form “higher,” to apply a
vertical metaphor to harmony, other than attachment to the myth of
straight-line, open-ended, absolute-value “progress,” which is purely an
artifact of civilization. We create fantasy sub-worlds in which it’s
true: going from fifth grade to sixth grade, or raising the level of a
game character, or getting promoted to vice president or full professor.
But nothing in reality moves like this.
In reality, things move in circles — the seasons, the sun, the planets,
the migrations of birds — or like a coyote they wander from one place to
the next, playfully, without any number line attached. If we’re like the
former, we’re going to keep cycling through complexity and collapse,
like a forest that grows for a while and then burns. If we’re like the
latter, then this is just an ugly place we wandered into, and soon we’ll
wander out of it to a new place we like better, and after that...
April 15, 2005
Now everything’s a little upside down.
As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped.
What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good.
You’ll find out when you reach the top,
You’re on the bottom.
— Bob Dylan, “Idiot Wind”
Conservatism. Conservatives believe in a lost “golden age” that they
want to return to. But if you actually look at the ages they name, and
not their romantic myths of those ages, you see that they were just as
bad as this age by the conservatives’ own standards: In 1950, or 1800,
or even ancient Greece, they had taxes, irreverent young people, and
loads of extramarital sex. That’s a liberal critique of conservatism,
but the critique of civilization goes farther, and explains more:
Most of the “traditions” glorified by conservatives are neither old,
wise, stable, nor tested by time. They are short-lived, new, and
radical. The nuclear family was invented to break down the extended
family, which itself is a recent bastardization of the tribe. For that
matter, so is the “nation.” The modern concept of “ownership” is more
aggressive than ancient and prehistoric concepts, and it mostly serves
to concentrate power in banks and corporations, amoral institutions with
radical effects on society. “Business” is a secular command structure
with a psychopathic agenda that tramples the families, farms, and towns
that conservatives idealize. Even tilling the soil, even monotheism, are
relatively new “traditions,” allied to an odd social experiment that is
failing badly.
The real golden age that conservatives are yearning for emotionally, but
not permitted to grasp intellectually, is our multi-million year
heritage of living as part of nature.
Progressive Humanism. I use “progressive” in the sense of believing in
“progress,” change that goes in a straight line and makes the world
better and better with no theoretical limit. Because humans are the only
creatures on Earth that make any pretense of changing this way,
progressivism implies humanism, the attitude that humans are the
subjects of this world and all other creatures are objects. Progressive
humanism is the religion of civilization, so dominant that even
conservatives are progressive humanists, just a little slow: in every
age, they think changes were good until recently, but that these new
changes are terrible.
Viewed from the larger context of all life on Earth, all the major
changes have been terrible since the invention of grain agriculture,
possibly farther back. The only way to change in a one-direction
straight line is to lose your balance and fall.
Liberalism. I don’t mean “liberal” in the classic sense, or in the sense
of favoring change, but in the contemporary sense, where a liberal is
someone who thinks people are basically good and we should all be able
to live together in harmony. Why do they think this? For the same reason
conservatives think there was a golden age in the past — because it’s
true. We all have a biological memory of living in harmony for more than
a million years as humans and countless millions before that as other
animals. But just as conservatives are blocked from this knowledge by
romanticized images of the recent past, which stop them from looking
farther back, liberals are blocked by negative images of the recent
past: English factories of the 1800’s, or the medieval church. (Never
mind that the medieval church had a same-sex marriage ceremony, or that
medieval peasants worked less than modern people, or that medieval
serfdom was less financially oppressive than modern rent and mortgage.)
Liberals look a short ways back, see stuff they don’t like, and assume
it just gets worse the farther you go.
Also, many aspects of tribal and natural life are offensive to civilized
liberal values. Of tribes observed in historical times, some are
peaceful, but others are violent, and there’s evidence that the
paleolithic was worse. Even in the nice tribes there is very little
religious or ethnic diversity, and someone with a bumper sticker that
says “Love animals, don’t eat them” will find it hard to understand the
morality of wild nature, where you love other species and eat them.
The critique of civilization explains why liberals always lose to
fascists: because both exist in the context of civilization, which is
fascist through and through. You can’t make a round building on a square
foundation. In a system built and maintained by the systematic murder
and exploitation of other species, there is no stopping the systematic
murder and exploitation of other humans. In a system ruled by a central
authority that uses a monopoly on physical force to compel behavior, it
is pathetic and half-assed to try to use this authority to force people
to be nice and tolerant and take care of each other. If we’re all going
to get along, we have to do so from the bottom up.
Libertarianism. Libertarians understand the above argument, but they are
willfully blind to systems of central control that are only slightly
less obvious than government. Like conservatives, they take for granted
very recent and radical techniques of domination, unaware of them the
same way a fish is unaware of water.
The core libertarian value is not liberty but private “property” — just
ask them if you have the liberty to set up a camp on their lawn. But the
only known societies where nobody is forced to do anything they don’t
want to, are tribes where the concept of “property” extends only to
small hand-made items. The “owning” of land is only a few hundred years
old. Even in feudal times, when the lord could extort wealth from a
certain territory, most of the actual land was considered wide open for
anyone to cross, occupy, or use (though of course this “use” meant
draining the life of the land to benefit the elite). Then with the
enclosure movement, the more civilized elite declared every inch of land
“owned” by someone, driving self-sufficient farmers from land their
ancestors had occupied for centuries, and forcing them into the cities
to labor in the dawning industrial age.
Libertarians should be smart enough to see that their idea of the
political effect of land ownership is a fantasy. Both in practice and in
theory, it does not lead to a utopia of small landholders freely farming
and trading. Because land ownership channels wealth to those who already
have wealth, it is politically destabilizing. Whoever owns land will use
it to get more money, more land, and more political power, leading as
sure as water running downhill to a system where one giant
multi-tentacled concentration of wealth/power commands almost all the
land and all the people.
The only way to maintain liberty is to maintain equality of
participation in power, which requires maintaining rough equality of
wealth, and the only way to do that, without having a government using a
monopoly on force to confiscate wealth, is to have economic equality
built into the very foundation of the system. There are only two ways
that’s ever been done: to have a very close-knit community where social
pressure alone is strong enough to prevent anyone from accumulating
wealth, or to have a style of technology where your personal wealth is
limited to useful items you can carry through the wilderness.
Anarchism. The anarchist ideal of a sustainable non-coercive society has
been achieved by many nature-based peoples. Still, some anarchists
embrace the critique of civilization (green anarchists or
anarcho-primitivists) and some reject it (anarcho-syndicalists,
anarcho-communists, and extropians). The difference is pretty much in
their view of technological “progress.” This is a tough nut to crack.
It’s easier to convert your mom to green anarchism than to convert a red
anarchist. It requires a difficult reframing of our whole world-view,
which I attempt below in the techno-utopia section.
The Bush Cult. The movement fronted by G.W. Bush is not conservative,
though it uses a lot of gullible conservatives as foot soldiers. It is a
coalition of at least two movements. One is extreme progressive
humanism, an attempt to use overwhelming force to establish a global
high-tech security state where corporate pseudo-capitalism can turn the
whole planet into the Mall of America. This kind of insane vision should
be expected in the detachment from reality that exists in the terminal
stages of civilization. The other movement is apocalyptic nihilism.
Apocalyptic Nihilism. Nihilism is the urge to destroy everything because
life sucks so bad. In civilization the human condition is so inadequate
that nihilism makes its way into religion in the form of apocalyptic
prophecies, comforting assurances that this nightmare can’t go on
forever, that it’s all going to blow up or some merciful god will sweep
it away. And it makes its way into politics in the form of the lust for
destructive war. In advanced civilization, when alienation and distress
are overwhelming, the apocalyptic subplots come to the front as powerful
movements that attempt murder-suicide on a national or even global
scale.
The anti-civilization movement is like an apocalyptic religion that has
awakened: unlike the others, it can explain and justify its emotional
motivation for seeking the end of the world, it can precisely define the
“world” that it wants to end, it can explain in verifiable terms why
that world cannot and must not survive, and it can point to a world that
it wants to preserve, a foundation for post-apocalypse living that is
grounded in the documented reality of nature-based human cultures.
War / Violence. Why do young men always get excited about going off to
war? They think it’s going to be fun and thrillingly dangerous, and then
it turns out to be intensely uncomfortable and boring, punctuated by
horrific pointless killing and maiming, and they return cynical and
traumatized for life, and then 20 years later, young men again get
excited about going off to war. What’s going on here?
Tribal warfare among nature-based people is very much like the warfare
that young men idealize. It’s consensual, civilians are rarely harmed,
it’s fun and meaningful, and deadly force is constrained by ritual, so
that serious injury and death are just common enough to make it
interesting. Also the economic function of this warfare is not to build
an empire, but to maintain balance between tribes, either by settling
territorial disputes or by raiding supplies to redistribute wealth. (For
more on this, look for Stanley Diamond’s book In Search of the
Primitive)
In civilization, our biological memories of what it means to go to war,
and what it means to “support the troops,” are hijacked and twisted to
make us feel good about wars where old women and babies are
machine-gunned and cities are firebombed to enable an empire to turn the
world into a desert and feed the control-lust of its elites.
Likewise, among dissidents, our natural urge to fight the system
physically is channeled into bombings and assassinations, which feed the
kind of deadly violence that strengthens the patterns of Empire, and
then the pacifists use this mistake to condemn all “violence” and limit
dissent to protest marches and other symbolic expressions that are
feeble and pathetic if they’re not backed up by action.
If we understand this, we are neither for nor against “violence” or
“war.” We feel good about a certain kind of fighting and we refuse to be
tricked into supporting another kind.
Greed. Everyone says the Bush gang, and the elite in general, are
motivated by greed. But then some people look closer and say, “Wait, why
to they keep seeking money when they already have so much that more will
not improve their lives?”
When you look at the accumulation of capital in its ecological and
spiritual context, from the first farmer storing grain up to
Halliburton, you see that money is just a dream, a symbolic place-holder
for detachment and control, the drugs of civilization, which make you
feel strong and happy but then you need more and more just to feel
normal. Under the mask, the corporate executive’s desire for profit is
the same thing as the serial killer’s desire for a new victim, or the
suburbanite’s desire for a more powerful lawn mower, or the
eco-humanist’s desire for clean fusion power.
Techno-Utopia. Jerry Mander, in his book In the Absence of the Sacred,
offers a surprising metaphor for the technological “progress” of
civilization. All known beings, other than civilized humans, adapt and
co-evolve with an environment made up of other beings with whom they
interact on equal terms. Civilized humans alone replace this living,
dynamic, unpredictable environment with a controlled, self-constructed
environment modeled on visions in our heads. Everywhere we replace what
we have found with what we have made. Look around right now — how many
things can you see that were not made by humans? It follows that our
evolution is no longer with others but only with ourselves — we are
inbreeding!
From the perspective of all other life, human civilization is a cancer,
but from the perspective of humans, civilization is a blow-up doll, a
dead synthetic membrane that we play with for shallow pleasure, in a
mockery of real procreation, because we are too frightened and
incompetent to deal with the complexity and aliveness of reality.
Instead of walking on the forest floor and scanning it for the stems of
edible roots, we walk on chemically-sterilized linoleum and scan it for
dirty spots to clean. Instead of listening to the birds to know what
other animals are around, we listen to mass-duplicated recorded music
with lyrics typically about infantile fixations on other humans. Instead
of watching the sky to know the coming weather, we watch mass-duplicated
recorded TV shows that offer an idealized view of the tedious and
meaningless dramas of our enclosed little world.
What keeps all this going is energy — specifically, energy in excess of
what we would have through living in balance with other life, eating and
using our muscles. Energy is the pump for the blow-up doll, or it’s the
physical drug that feeds the mental drugs of detachment and control,
which we crave in greater and greater quantities, leading us
compulsively toward genocide and ecocide.
We need less of this kind of “technology,” not more. We need to get off
our drug and come down before we kill everything that moves. The worst
thing that could possibly happen to humans and the Earth would be
unlimited, free, clean energy. We would use it the way we have always
used it, but more: to cut down filthy dangerous trees and replace them
with clean safe artificial trees, to flatten useless mountains and put
up engineered climbing rocks and ski slopes, to tame the weather into
blue skies with puffy clouds that never rain, and don’t need to rain
because we have rivers of Dasani™ circulated through pumps. We would
turn the Earth into 200 million square miles of Disneyland, with the few
remaining wild animals in NatureDomes where every flea would be
computer-tagged. And when this system finally crashed, through sheer
incompatibility with the cosmos, nothing would survive bigger than
bacteria.
Intelligent Life in Space. When civilized people say “intelligent life,”
they mean civilized life, creatures on other planets that kill or
control other creatures on those planets to produce “resources” and
machines of domination, which eventually get so “advanced” that they can
fly through space and monopolize and exploit the life of more and more
planets... But then our scientists get puzzled: Why, with a hundred
billion stars in our galaxy, many of which must have planets suitable
for life, haven’t we found any evidence of extraterrestrial
civilizations, beaming their modulated electromagnetic communications
through the galaxy, warping around in metal ships like we see in our own
culture’s mythology of the future, landing on our planet and trading
their more advanced distracting/dominating gadgets for our submission to
the Interstellar Monetary Fund which stealthily enslaves the Earth’s
people and accelerates its transformation into a lifeless desert while
temporarily enriching human elites?
What we’re really looking for in space is other stupid life, other life
that has gone mad the same way we have, and we haven’t found it because
our madness is a violently unsustainable deviation from reality, and if
creatures on other planets have done it, they burned out and crashed in
a galactic microsecond the same way we’re doing, and their sitcoms and
commercials and nationalist talk radio blew by us for only 50 years when
we were lounging in grass huts eating mangoes, or will blow by us in the
future when we’re doing so again.
The Economy. What we call the “economy” is only one particular economy,
characterized by: 1) command by “corporations,” artificial superhumans
defined as having no compassion, only the drive to increase their own
ability to dominate. 2) “growth,” or the escalating transformation of
the life of the Earth into dead artifacts and the tokens of
ability-to-dominate, or “wealth.” 3) “employment,” a radically
disempowering social arrangement in which humans do commanded
hyper-specialized labor all day in exchange for tokens which they trade
for necessities and entertainment, neither of which they know how to
provide for themselves, but which are provided by other commanded
laborers who they don’t even know.
It’s hard to imagine a more satanic system, and in its absence we would
build different economies, almost any of which would be better. Also,
when you understand what the tokens of wealth are based on, the whole
system looks like a bunch of kids making play money with which they buy
and sell back, at higher and higher prices, a bar of chocolate that
they’re almost done eating, and that was stolen in the first place.
Instead of trying to save that system, or even trying to destroy it, we
should just get the hell out.
Science. What we call “science” is only one particular science, a style
of filtering experience that has been designed by and for a culture of
uniformity and central control. It accepts only experiences that can be
translated into numbers, that are available to everyone, and that can be
reproduced on command. This is what scientists mean when they demand
“proof.” But this is only a tiny thread of all possible experiences,
most of which are unique, not quantifiable, not reproducible, and not
the same for all observers. Basically, the science of Empire deals only
with fully domesticated data and not wild data, because a science that
accepted wild data would feed a culture that would quickly diversify
into a chaos that would make central control impossible.
The critique of civilization, when you think it through, leads us
directly into the so-called “paranormal,” into the expansion of our
curious attention through new sciences that can accept and navigate
diverse realities.
Biblical Literalism. The belief that the Bible (or any other religious
document) is simply literally true, is not conservatism but extreme
modernism. The deeper people shrink into the tightly controlled mind
space of civilization, the less they are able to deal with complexity,
ambiguity, mutability, or aliveness. They don’t know how to admit
they’re wrong, change their minds, or do any real spiritual wrestling —
they just want someone to tell them how it is, period, forever. So they
choose to take whatever collection of translations of old writings was
put in front of them by some authority, and accept it as true in the
simplest way. Whatever religion they think they are, they are
Cartesians, believing in the reducibility of all experience to
machine-like mental models, and they are worshippers of Empire,
insisting on a spiritual system that forces universal uniformity of
perspective and enables central control.
Western Religion. The stories of Christianity (which overlap the stories
of Judaism and Islam) make a lot more sense when they’re interpreted in
the context of the critique of civilization. (For more on this subject,
check out Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael.) The Garden of Eden represents
the original human condition, a life of ease and plenty, staying in our
place and taking what God/Nature gives us. The Fall is our choice to
reject this way of living, to take food by force by domesticating plants
and animals and storing great surpluses, so that we’re no longer
dependent on God/Nature, but have made ourselves into gods. When Jesus
told people to abandon material wealth, and imitate the birds and the
flowers, he was telling us to abandon civilization and return to living
as part of nature. Even the Beast of Revelations resembles advanced
civilization, a many-headed entity that destroys the world and forces us
into submission.
Eastern Religion. There are a lot of Eastern religions and philosophies,
and this argument does not apply to all of them. But the most popular
ones seem to contain two key myths of civilization. One is humanism,
which appears as the idea that humans are on a “higher” spiritual
“level” than all other animals. And the other, underlying this, is the
idea of spiritual “progress,” that different states of being can be put
in order from worse to better, and that we are supposed to travel in the
correct direction toward some ideal state at the top. To defend these
beliefs, you have to hold that progress and human superiority are
universal truths, even though they have only ever appeared in a
short-lived and deviant culture which is using them to drive the
greatest mass-extinction in 60 million years.
Now, an Eastern-style belief system could avoid this criticism if it
were willing to strip off value, to declare that humans and other beings
are merely in different places, none better or worse, and if I want to
go hang out as a three-toed sloth for a billion lifetimes, that is
exactly as commendable as seeking “enlightenment.” I’m sure the actual
religions have more subtle ways to answer the criticism, but to my
knowledge, none of them are willing to accept the possibility that the
last several thousand years of human changes have been a spiritual
mistake.
Gnosticism. Gnosticism is one of the few civilized belief systems that
is not overturned by the critique of civilization, but just gets its
hair blown a little, and then can hang around and have a dialogue. I’m
dealing here with the simplified popular “gnosticism” found in movies
like The Matrix and The Truman Show: that we are in an artificial
reality, a prison for the mind and body, that we are kept here by a
sinister architect and agents who seem to be people like us, that we can
escape from the prison or even destroy it, and that someone on the
outside is trying to help us.
The key question is: Is wild nature part of the prison? Anyone who has
spent ten minutes watching swallows at sunset will not accept a belief
system that declares a need for swallows to awaken. As Edward Abbey
said:
In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that’s on it is a mental
construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms.
It is an indoor philosophy. In fact, most interpretations of Gnosticism
are far more sophisticated than that. They’re also more sophisticated
than the simple anti-civ position, that nature is the more-real outside
world and civilization (both its mental and physical aspects) is the
prison. They might say that the prison includes a certain view of
nature, and to get outside it we have to see beyond that, to a spiritual
nature that lies deeper, as the ocean underlies its surface. (Here’s a
discussion of gnosticism and nature on fantastic planet.)
The critique of civilization can enrich gnosticism by contributing
powerful stories with hard details about a particular prison, how it was
constructed, and how to get out of it. And gnosticism can give something
back: a metaphysical explanation for what civilization means and where
it came from, a deep story of the origin of this hell-world that speaks
of intelligence and intention and not just blind chance. I’ve read (and
written) plenty of speculations about how civilization got started, and
the hypothesis that humans have been possessed by life-hating occult
entities is not only the most meaningful, but one of the more plausible.
The Meaning of Life. When we ask about “the meaning of life,” we are
asking for the larger story in which our life fits. Inside civilization,
the larger story is “progress.” Progress and its corollaries, “growth”
and “wealth” and “education” and “upward” social mobility, tell us what
makes a meaningful and successful life: a college degree, a professional
certification, a clean house in the suburbs, a stock portfolio for
retirement, and some personal contribution to humans going somewhere
new.
From outside civilization, these are all the vaporous conceits of a
pathological culture on the verge of collapse. Of course there are other
philosophies that make our accustomed reality seem trivial — there’s
Cartesian nihilism, that we are just a bunch of dead bouncing particles
and waves, and there’s the astronomy cliche that we’re just parasites on
a speck of dust in the vastness of the cosmos, and there’s the religious
doctrine that our life on Earth is nothing compared to an eternity in
heaven or hell. But none of these provides a real alternative — by which
I mean an alternative that we can explore with our senses. Thus they all
lead to greater disconnection, and often despair.
The critique of civilization (which could more precisely be called the
nature-based critique of civilization) does provide a real alternative.
That’s why it’s so dangerous. The meaning of life doesn’t require
theologians or philosophers. It doesn’t even require language. You can
find it under a rock, in a weedy vacant lot, off the shoulder of the
freeway: the larger story in which your life fits, not to go somewhere,
but to be home.