"The Dialectic of Civilization"
Michael Becker
California State University, Fresno
Abstract: Civilization is rooted in lies, at both a simple, prosaic and complex, philosophical level. Ideas
of a "fall from a golden age" in western political theory, from Plato to Rousseau, serve as cover for
large scale crimes by which civilization extends itself and eliminates primitive cultures. But these lies
do more. They distort the image of the primitive in such a way that attainment of the highest civilized
aspirations seems to redeem civilization and recuperate lost, allegedly primitive values in a higher
form. In fact, these aspirations are unattainable. The result is a "double-bind" that engenders
widespread social pathologies. Anarcho-primitivism rejects the terms of civilization and seeks
wholeness through a "future primitive."
"Deception is a state of mind, and the mind of the state." James Angleton
This essay concerns the relationship between the civilized and the primitive. Primitive cultures are
rooted in myths; civilizations are based on lies. The lies that concern us disguise the relentless violence
by which civilization displaces and then eradicates the primitive. These lies are of two sorts, both
dialectical in form. The more prosaic, political dialectic constitutes an erasure of the primitive. This
suffices for a basic political or historical account of the civilized world. But it does not suffice for
generating the necessary frenzied pace with civilization, especially modern, western civilization, drives
itself forward.
A second, more refined dialectic incorporates a distorted depiction of primitives and an equally
distorted depiction of civilization, a contradiction that appears to be resolved through "higher culture."
Civilization wants it all; mostly it wants to redeem something that it has to destroy in order to exist, the
primitive. Necessarily then it must deceive itself both about the primitive and its own highest
meanings. Such deception is a key constituent in civilization's furious violence. Genocidal destruction
threatens to betray civilized man's idea of himself. A higher-order dialectic must be created, one which,
in a moment of ostensible transcendence, can re-inscribe what was allegedly lost. But redemption never
actually arrives. The attendant despair of irredeemable loss and the (non)recognition of irresolvable
contradictions are motive forces of a conquest that founds civilization and never ceases (at least until
civilization implodes).
Needless to say, the dialectic of civilization resists disclosure, hence the difficulty of what is set out
here. A "negative dialectics of civilization" might be a more appropriate title for this endeavor. Adorno
claims that "whatever truth concepts cover beyond their abstract range can have no other stage than
what the concepts suppress, disparage and discard." Moreover, the sublimation of concepts
gives unconscious sway to the ideology that the not-I, l'autrui, and finally all that reminds us of
natures is inferior, so the unity of the self-devouring thought may devour it without misgivings.
This justifies the the principle of the thought as much as it increases the appetite. The system is
1
the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism.1
What better exemplifies a dialectics of hidden rage than the deceptions in western political theory?
Gone is the violence that wipes out the only sustainable cultures the world has seen. In its place arises
the mendacious notion of a "fall" from the golden age, as if it is is those who commit the crime that are
to be mourned. Moreover, the conditions in this alleged primordial state of nature are only reflections
of the civilized mind misrepresented to itself. To be sure, by that noblest of instruments, civilized
reason, we will reintroduce, at a higher level, the lost harmony of the golden era. In reality, those
committed to civilization are barred from a return to the primitive, and the promise of its return in a
conscious and complete form is void.
What is intended here, then, is a brief analysis of both the prosaic and the philosophical instances of
dialectical reason. The place to begin is at home, a violent crime scene wherever you live.
The Dialectic of Erasure
Where I live, in the heart of the Great Central Valley of California, there is a plaque in front of the
County Courthouse dedicated to the valley's first settlers. It reads: "they made the desert bloom." The
plaque is both historical and relates to law, hence the courthouse locale. The dialectic it conceals is,
obviously, temporal in its divisions. First, there is a desert; it is devoid of life, a barren place. In and of
itself it cannot be thought of as first in a sequence because, until it is discovered, it exists outside of
time. Only upon discovery does its potentiality avail itself to the discoverer and thus become an initial
moment. Until then it is a desert, not just of unused land, but of any conceivable purpose or meaning.
The tabula rasa of the desert cannot become a moment dialectically until it shows itself as potentially
meaningful, i.e., economically valuable as a source of commodities.
The past tense "made" encompasses the relentless work of the settlers who, through their labor,
challenge the desert to release its potentiality into actual productivity.2 This work constitutes the
antithesis to the fallow nature of the desert as such. As opposed to the meaningfulness of work, the
desert strikes one as almost perverse in its inert meaninglessness.3 The desert as mere presence
provokes its opposite, the furious action of transformative laboring. The introduction of labor makes
the desert "real" in the sense that it creates a moment in time. Civilized rationality can only exist in
rationally measured time, and the desert in its opposition to labor becomes rational and real. This is the
compulsion of the dialectic; it rules in all science and technology. First nature is a provocation.
1 Theodore W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashtom, (New York: Continuum, 1973), pp. 22-23. The totality of
this mania is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in Pascal's, Penseé 347: “if the universe were to crush him, man
would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the
universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must
elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor, then, to think well; this is the
principle of morality.” If primitive cultures teach us anything it is that thinking well and being moral are predicated
precisely on an awareness of our dependence on one another and on the natural world of which we are a part. It is on the
basis of the illusion of elevating ourselves above the entire universe, especially through thought, that humans commit
monstrous crimes.
2 See Heidegger's discussion of "challenging forth" and "standing reserve" in Martin Heidegger, "The Question
Concerning Technology," translated and with an introduction by William Lovitt, (New York: Harper Row Publishers,
1977)
3 It is common in settler accounts of the Central Valley to hear the Europeans marveling at the beauty and abundance of
the land and, simultaneously, to protest that the Indians are letting it all "go to waste."
2
But Now!, the plaque suggests, we are the recipients of the settlers' undaunted labor; we are living in
the luxurious blooming of the desert. The flowering of the desert constitutes the synthesis of the
potential fertility of the desert with the hard labor of the settlers who brought the desert to life. This
eternally fecund moment replicates the eternity of the desert but differently. Through the rationality of
the dialectic we come to know that the eternal moment of blooming occurs within the rationality of
successive historical stages. The desert can now be grasped as materials or resources ready to hand for
laboring. Laboring, in turn, must be constantly repeated to deliver the bloom, not to mention the fruits.
The timelessness of the synthesis, the perfected moment of scientific and technological productivity,
depends upon the constant repetition of transformative labor: the desert turns into product ceaselessly.
Now is utopia, always, this moment, and everywhere. As it is reality fulfilled, there is no possibility of
anything rational subsisting outside of the endless repetition of production and consumption; it is this
perfection that confirms one's identity as a legitimate recipient of a desert turned cornucopia.
This crude version of the dialectic of civilization provides a prosaic, if perverse, accounting of
European conquest in central California. It shows up in such mundane places as courthouse plaques and
presidential speeches.4 It is simultaneously more directly honest about the nature of civilization and, in
equal measure, less enlightening than the refined and ultimately more significant versions appearing in
philosophical and religious works. The plaque characterizes the place of the settlers' arrival as a
"desert." The phrase obliquely memorializes the erasure of the original people, plants, and animals of
the Great Central Valley. Simultaneously it inverts biological reality. This place, actually, once was
what might now be termed a "biodiversity hotspot." There were huge Tule Elk herds, pronghorn
antelope herds, deer herds, innumerable grizzly and black bears, and wolves. The largest freshwater
lake west of the Mississippi--Tulare Lake--supported countless migratory and native birds, shellfish,
and wild rice, while the rivers "teemed" (the word used so frequently in settler accounts) with salmon,
steelhead, and other fish. First settlers give accounts of miles wide swaths of different colored
wildflowers carpeting the valley in springtime. In, amongst, with, and around it all, the valley and
foothill Yokuts Indians "tended the wild," in M Kat Anderson's apt phrase.5 Their interactions in the
world of which they were a part were designed both to feed, shelter and clothe themselves and to
increase the abundance of the lifeworld. Archeologists indicate a continual human presence for onehundred thirty centuries. In ecological terms what once was a paradise of life has now become a
wasteland of agri-industrialism and suburban tracts. The dialectic of erasure is an inversion of reality.
Every political truth obscured within the prosaic mode of the dialectic of civilization (the plaque) is a
Titanic irrationality which proves itself, first, through the relentless slaughter of those to be subjugated.
The indigenous are constantly present to the civilized by their absence. Erasure is the means by which
the crime is to be denied and leveled off in a technocratic and utilitarian morality that exchanges the
civilized subjects' servility for a delivery of the material goods.
"Every society is founded on a crime committed collectively, but the deed (the anguish and
revulsion it provokes) is subsequently denied by those who most benefit from it. Complicity and
4 Perhaps a more common version acknowledges the existence of indigenous peoples as an obstacle to the inevitable and
undoubtedly preferable path of civilization. But the "philanthropist will rejoice" that an "unhappy" and "ill-fated" race
will be removed to new lands where "under the paternal care of the government" they will eventually "share in the
blessings of civilization." Erasure of the primitive occurs when the antagonism between savage and settler is resolved
through all sharing in civilization. Andrew Jackson, "Farewell Address,"
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=67087#axzz1p5s8yzKx
5 Anderson, M Kat, Tending the Wild, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2005).
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denial are constitutive of morality, whose concern for utility is merely there to suture the
wound."6
Analytically, disclosure of the erased violence in the prosaic dialectic is necessary as a reminder of the
systematic violence inherent in civilization. It reawakens "anguish and revulsion." During the gold
rush, towns across California paid for Indian scalps, and the state government reimbursed local
governments for the cost of hunting down Indians. The services of displaced, vagrant Indians could be
auctioned off. Whites were permitted to compel Indian children to work for them, and vigilantes
kidnapped Indian children to be sold them as "apprentices." Of course, there also occurred wholesale
slaughters of Indians as at Campbell Mountain near where I live and where hundreds of men, women
and children of the Choinumni band of Yokuts were murdered in cold blood.7 As Thomas Packenham
has noted "The attitude of...all Europe was tabula rasa, terra incognita, here was a place that was sort
of a no-man's land; in other words we can create our own states there and we're going to bring order
and civilize them; always the word 'civilize' was used whatever you were actually doing, whether you
were shooting them, you were civilizing them."8
To begin to grasp the seemingly irreconcilable contradiction between civilized, rational order and mass
murder it will be necessary to consider a higher order dialectic. On this level the primitive is also
erased but via a distortion. It seems as if the primitive serves as a kind of rebuke to the civilizing
mission. There is something about the primitive that must be exposed. It must be forced to reveal itself
to the civilized in a way that will allow the civilize to incorporate it by mastering it. Civilization must
prove to itself that whatever is primitive and alien is merely aberrant and will be corrected and
transformed into rational reality through the civilizing mission. This will to annihilate the other through
its incorporation can be seen in the non-human as well as the "sub-human." Consider Baudrillard in his
discussion of animals in Simulacra and Simulation. Regarding the various forms of animal use and
abuse, specifically in laboratories, he remarks
Animals must be made to say that they are not animals, that bestiality, savagery--with what
these terms imply of unintelligibility, radical strangeness to reason--do not exist, but on the
contrary the most bestial behaviors, the most singular, the most abnormal are resolved in
science, in physiological mechanisms, in cerebral connections, etc. Bestiality, and its principle
of uncertainty, must be killed in animals.9
The comparison of primitive peoples to animals, the longstanding claim that their languages were
indistinguishable from animal grunts and cries, is obviously familiar. But what are we to make of the
displaying of primitive peoples in zoos, like animals?10 It is possible that the mass killing of the
6 Sylvere Lotringer in George Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone, St Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1994), p.
xii.
7
The mountain is named after the officer who led the slaughter and who later became a prominent local citizen. Its
real name is Waitoki Mountain named for one of the last, prominent chiefs of the Choinumni.
8 Packenham, Thomas, Racism: A History, DVD, directed by Paul Tickell (London: BBC, 2007)
9 Jean Baudriallrd, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of
Michigan Press, 1994), p. 129.
10 Sixty African people were put on display in a mock African village in the "Palace of the Colonies," part of the 1897
International Exposition and later incorporated into the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tevuren, Brussels, Belgium.
Similarly, the "last wild California Indian," Ishii, who was the last remaining survivor of the Yana people of northern
California, was put on display on a regular basis at the University of California Berkeley Museum of Anthropology in
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primitive is related to a desperate bid to eliminate a strangeness that simultaneously cannot be, yet must
be, accounted for in the imperialistic bid. Premised, as civilization is, on certainty, the confrontation
with the irreconcilable in primitive culture, as in non-human animals, must result in annihilation of the
other. But this annihilation must be justified within the rational schema of the civilized.
The Paradox of the "Fortunate Fall"
Civilized people neither labor nor soldier under the banner of erasure. There obtains among civilized
people a peculiar and pervasive nervous energy and anxiety that drives its adherents forward in the
relentless, expansionary work of civilization. A different sort of dialectic is necessary for generating
this civilized anxiety, though this too centers on an opposition between the primitive and the civilized.
The trick of civilization is to establish an alleged fundamental separation from nature and then to argue
that the principles of civilization are nonetheless natural. Our separation is our salvation. Arthur
Lovejoy coined the apt phrase a "fortunate fall" to describe this phenomenon. In the Twelfth Book of
Paradise Lost Adam reflects on the fate of humankind as described to him by the archangel Michael.
Much of this history records the travails unfolding from the first sin. But in the end, with the second
coming and final judgment, the faithful inherit a paradise even greater than Eden.
"O Goodnesse infinite, Goodnesse immense, That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil
turn to good--more wonderful than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of
darkness! Full of doubt I stand, whether I should repent me now of sin by me done or
occasioned, or rejoice much more that much more good thereof shall spring--to God more glory,
more good will to men from God--and over wrath, grace shall abound."11
The paradox of the fall, as Lovejoy eloquently puts it, is that it "could never be sufficiently condemned
and lamented and, likewise, when all its consequences were considered, it could never be sufficiently
rejoiced over."12 But as "deception is the mind of the state" and as the prosaic version of the dialectic
illustrates, the "fall" involves no sort of choice. Those warped by civilization slaughter those who
aren't. The consequences are never fully considered, either in terms of the genocidal crime that wrought
the destruction or of what has actually been destroyed.13 The effect is not paradoxical but dialectical,
though the synthesis never occurs. The promise of deliverance from the first sin is a redemption that
always fails.
Among political theorists, the contradiction inherent in the fortunate fall was forcefully
presented in Rousseau's famous opening to the "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, "Man is born
free and everywhere is in chains." Rousseau makes the move back toward civilization by arguing, first,
San Francisco.
11 Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, (New York: Capricorn Books, 1960), p. 277.
12 Ibid., p. 278.
13 One is reminded here of the reflections of Black Elk on the heinous slaughter by the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment of
hundreds of Lakota camped at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890. "I did not know then how much was ended.
When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped
and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that
something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a
beautiful dream.... the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is
dead."Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks, edited y John Neihardt (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p.
241.
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that a return to primitive existence is impossible. The long development of civilization, especially in
the way property has corrupted innate self-concern and empathy, has allegedly so altered the nature of
man that the option of a return to simplicity is off the table. Second, Rousseau claims that rational man
can invent social institutions (the General Will) that reclaim and surpass the original, unconscious
freedom and social solidarity of savages. There is no going back, and who would want to? We will have
something superior. These are the two basic catechisms of life under the Law; they show up almost
without exception in the history of political ideas.
Like other noted social theorists Rousseau implants in his conception of the primitive certain
conventions which are actually facets of civilization. They falsify the natural side of the dialectic. In
Rousseau's case, he posits two allegedly innate traits that are, in fact, paradigmatic of modern
civilization: "a faculty of improvement" and an isolated, egoistic conception of the individual.14 In the
formation of the General Will, each participant must express his own views in an entirely direct and
unmitigated fashion and then accept without question the determinations of the public vote. The
primitive is allegedly surmounted, then, by raising up and completing a trait--atomistic individualism-that is not primitive at all. Plato, does this in his "Republic" by asserting that division of labor, an innate
desire for luxuries, and complex, monetized trade relations are part and parcel of every social group.
They are not. The schemes Plato develops for locking individuals into immutable social classes does
not refine and lift up original, unconscious harmony among separate classes. Class division is instead
integral to the extreme social stratification in civilized society. In the Second Treatise Locke
counterfeits natural existence by insisting that the labor theory of property acquisition is natural. It is
not. The conception of one's body as an instrument of labor power, owned by oneself and the idea that
intermingling one's labor with nature creates an exclusive, individual entitlement to private property
are quite at odds with primitive communalism. It is, instead, a necessary facet of a labor commodity
market under capitalism.
This falsehood of the dialectical opposition between city and nature in western political theory is
reinforced by sanctifying the move to civilization. Thus, the other side of the dialectic is similarly
distorted. In cases like those of Plato, Locke, and Rousseau, there is the same contrived and paradoxical
fall from primitive grace found in Milton (or, indeed, in the Eden story in "Genesis"). In Book II of The
Republic, while discussing the formation of communities, Glaucon chastises Socrates for his depiction
of humans in primitive villages, communities "fit for pigs." They lack luxuries--civilized people are
"accustomed to lie on sofas, dine off tables, and they should have sweets and sauces in the modern
style." "Yes," says Socrates,
now I understand: the question you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a
luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be
more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy
condition of the State is the one which I have described. But if you wish also to see a State at
fever-heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler
14 There are no instances that I know of, either from anthropology or archaeology, of humans living as isolated individuals.
As for a "faculty of improvement," consider Raymond Firth's Primitive Polynesian Economy. The Tikopia show no
particular inclination toward technological innovation. Their view oth of "natural resources" and of technique is
governed by longstanding social and ceremonial beliefs and practices. It is the maintenance of a stable social order and
world view which is paramount and which would, indeed, be threatened by technological development,. See chapter
three, "Knowledge, Technique, and Economic Lore" in Firth, Primitive Polynesian Economy, (New York: WW Norton,
1965).
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way of Life [emphasis added].15
It is Socrates' "opinion" that the primitive village is the "true and healthy" community. Plato's use of the
word doxa here cannot be accidental when the entire purpose of his dialectic is to move from the
uncertain ground of opinion to absolute knowledge. It is only through civilization that the possibility
of coming to know the Form of Justice and the ultimate Form of the Good can be realized. This is
precisely how the contradiction between simplicity and luxury, justice and injustice, is to be resolved
not to mention its paradoxical payoff. Since coming to know the Form of the Good is the pinnacle of
human existence, civilization must be a natural prerequisite. It seems obvious that Plato cannot regret
that which he depicts in a priori terms.
In comparison with other social theorists, Plato is uncharacteristically blunt about the immediate impact
of the transition to civilization: the disintegration of an originally harmonious community, a general
decline in people's health, and the need for a professional military to acquire more territory for the
fevered state. This heightens the tension between the primitive and the civilized and thus raises the
stakes for what civilized rationality must deliver. A new leadership class of philosopher kings will be
necessary whose aptitude for dialectical reason can grasp, intellectually, the sublime world of the
forms, its pinnacle the Form of the Good. Social harmony, in its purer abstract form, can be grasped
perfectly by the rational mind. Coupled with longstanding political practice the Guardians will devise
the necessary rules and political lies that will check the soldiers and workers and bring social harmony,
in its perfection, down to earth.
Plato's account is a fake anthropology inasmuch as the entire point is to see how a polis comes into
existence. There is no consideration of anything human outside of law and formal justice. In this sense,
Plato's too is a dialectic of erasure. But by confounding the development of the polis with an
anthropological tracing of any and all meaningful human development, Plato distorts the primitive. His
oracular account of the form of the Good merely reinforces the actual impossibility of attaining justice
in an inherently unjust social formation.
Perhaps Plato's mock-tragic sense of civilization as a fall from grace is also directed at those benighted
enough to believe that the primitive is actually preferable to civilization. This would almost certainly be
targeted at the anarcho-primitivists of his day, the Cynics. But Plato is wrong. Humans are not designed
by nature to fit a preordained system of division of labor and monetary trade; the shift to civilization is
not an inevitable characteristic of being human; and Plato's theory of forms, not to mention his theory
of Justice and the ideal state, does not even remotely recuperate the inherent social solidarity of the
original, "true and healthy" community.
The dialectical tension between the civitas and nature is deepened and strengthened through the
depiction of a paradoxical fall from natural grace. In the modern era this is achieved in the use made of
a state of nature, particularly with regard to property. The paradigmatic case is that of Locke's "Second
Treatise." The pseudo-anthropological rendering of the primitive involves the allegedly natural origins
of property. Nature is originally common to all. But since the body is self-owned property, the mixing
of one's bodily efforts with nature creates an individual and exclusive right of private property.
Acquisition of property is only limited by the degree of labor one can perform, the spoilage of that
15 Plato, The Republic, translated by Benjamin Jowett ( New York: Anchor Books, 1973), p. 57. A state at "fever heat" is
among the most honest depictions of civilization you will find in the western canon; it conveys the delirious intensity
and sickening pace of modernity. Only a student of Socrates could present such an ironic portrait of the polis.
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which is removed from nature, and the sufficiency of land and natural resources for others. The
invention of money and its tacit acceptance as a medium of exchange, Locke contends, is rational. It
facilitates trade and thus access to the conveniences of life. Yet, because it also allows for the
acquisition of unlimited amounts of property, money is simultaneously depicted by Locke in Biblical
terms of original sin. "This is certain, that in the beginning, before the desire of having more than one
needed had altered the intrinsic value of things, which depends only on their usefulness to the life of
man...each one of himself [had] as much of the things of nature as he could use [with] the same
plenty...left to those who would use the same industry."16 Life in a state of nature is initially marked by
"peace, good will, mutual assistance and preservation." With money comes greed and property
inequality; these create conflict and the need for a state to adjudicate property disputes.
As with Plato, remorse at the fall is fake. The achievements of civilization more than make up for the
loss of primitive innocence. Locke, again like Plato, erases the actual crimes that found civilizations
and depicts the Fall as a choice involving unintended consequences. In Locke's case the fall is
compensated for by the superabundance which investment of money in land allows. Money does not
spoil, allows for wage contracts to purchase others' labor, and increases productivity indefinitely. "In
the beginning" when all was America, people were few and land was plenty. There was unlimited
enjoyment in fulfilling simple needs and wants. Use value was the sole basis for judging worth. But
money ended the idyll of the original state. A state of original abundance soon came to entail a zerosum game.
Still, Hobbesian war is averted without a totalitarian state because an infinite variety of wants are
supplied by an infinitely expanding, rational and productive process. References to a transcendent Law
of Nature help to cover the gap between the primitive and those rights still retained under the state.
Moreover, they are useful in combating the primitivists of his era, the radical Levellers and Diggers of
the English Revolution who proclaimed the retaking of private landholdings as a natural birthright. But
in reality Locke's political thought is straightforwardly materialistic: for those who work hard, "the
rational and industrious," that is to say the directors and investors in joint stock corporations, the
abundance and variety of material pleasures in civilization more than make up for the loss of primitive
equality and freedom. The world is theirs by legal right, founded in a social contract among property
holders; state coercion and disqualification from political participation exist for the "covetous and
quarrelsome."
While Rousseau sees Locke's social contract as morally bankrupt, he does not, as noted, propose a
return to the primitive. The healthy self-love of the savage is irrevocably lost. Vainglorious self-love,
amour propre, develops in tandem with civilization and especially with property. But Rousseau too
sanctifies civilization by arguing that reason is sufficient to "find a form of association which may
defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate
and by means of which each, coalescing with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain as
free as before."17 Rousseau's revised social contract allegedly achieves this self-conscious act of
redemption. Traditional anarchism has always insisted on the plausibility of such a social arrangement
without considering that it is the very socioeconomic and political practices of civilization along with
16 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, edited with an introduction by C.B. McPherson (Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Co, 1980) 23.
17 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, edited with an introduction by
Lester G. Crocker (New York: Washington Square Press, 1976) 17-18.
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the fake dialectics supporting them that make such an arrangement impossible.
Utopia/Despair
The lies that underpin civilization serve to erase the crimes that found it and to distort the primitive so
that civilization's noblest promises seem to recreate and complete what was allegedly lost. Especially
for the rich and powerful, civilization has its compensatory pleasures. But we miss the significance of
the Fall if we look there. The search for meaning in the experience of material superabundance is not
primordial; it is not even superficial. The veil of civilization's compensatory power lies not in varied
material pleasures but in the equivalent impossibilities it engenders at the heart of our individual and
social lives. The founding lies of civilization are the promises that what was lost in the Fall can be more
than regained through mastery and control. Plato recognized this. It is why, out of his concern over the
civilizational curse of the demand for luxuries, he invented a newer, more psychologically profound
compensatory claim: contemplation of the form of the Good and the justice that it will ensure for the
polis.
The various, supposed redemptive promises are unattainable. They drive our alienation from Earth and
from our human and especially non-human companions on this Earth into the underground of the
psyche. Alienation, buried and suppressed, is substituted for by an allegedly attainable and sublime,
transcendent truth. Devotion to a civilizing mission fills the void left by the Fall. In the hope for
attainment of perfection through the mastery and control, the spiritual groundwork is laid for, at least,
the acceptance of the terms of civilization, and, at most, a devotion of oneself to those terms. The
alleged impossibility of turning back to live in freedom through identity with both human and nonhuman others engenders despair.18 A new (im)possibility must be created but one which is allegedly
within reach, via contemplation, faith, or technical rationality. It must have all the characteristics of the
primitive golden age which it claims to instantiate: social solidarity, spontaneous pleasure, identity
between subject and object, and natural fitness for assigned tasks, to name a few. In these fundamental
civilizational tropes, we discover two dishonest truth claims: the impossibility of returning to primitive
life and the ostensible availability of a great (but actually, equally impossible) basis for reuniting
ourselves with reality. Illusory hope in the face of hidden distress is the basic chemical ingredient of
psychic shock. It creates in civilization a sort of double helix of despair, one strand being the
submerged impossibility of returning to a golden age, and the more prominent strand, the impossibility
of attaining the promised redemption.
The essentially utopian character of western political theory is derived from this double helix. It can
never take its bearings from the present except as the present is understood in reference to a future in
which the civilizing promise has been obtained. The west is a non-place because it can never reach the
imagined future nor return to the banished past. It is precisely because there has never been a single
remedy for the inherent divisions, not to mention the founding crimes, of civilization that western
political thought must endlessly churn out a variety of utopian schemes. Utopianism is the bad
conscience of civilization. Those born to sweet delight, as Blake put it, go about their business
18 It is, perhaps, the poignant and persistent voicing of such despair that led the church to excise from the official version of
the Bible Eden stories that have the first humans committing suicide over the magnitude of the loss of being ejected
from paradise. Platt, Rutherford H., The Forgotten Books of Eden, (New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1980).
9
exploiting land and labor and occasionally ginning up public support for resource wars. They hold up
the idea that a redemptive social scheme will soon arrive while their daily practice confirms that it
never will.19 It is this fundamental indeterminacy which provides the psychic energy for civilization's
harried pace. Civilization constantly needs more resources; but expansion is also the psychic (and
psychotic) outlet for a nervous energy created from the double helix of utopian despair.
There obtains in the dialectic of civilization something closely resembling Bateson's notion of the
double-bind. Bateson locates the causes of schizophrenia in the social relations of the patient. Often
the schizophrenic is caught in a dilemma with no possible resolution. Being stuck becomes a
generalized system for interacting in the world. In the double bind a person is presented with
contradictory compulsions each of which, if it is fulfilled, leads to punishment. A child is chastised for
being dishonest but is also taught to win at all costs. A schizophrenic recovering from a psychotic
episode sees his mother and embraces her. She reflexively stiffens, and her body language leads the
patient to quickly remove his arms. Then she questions whether or not he loves her and admonishes
him for not showing his true feelings.
The double bind leads to a general and anxious sense of uncertainty and can lead a person to alternate
between patterns of behavior expected of the schizophrenic--the schizophrenic participates in the very
vicious circle of behavior that reproduces his pathology--or to outbursts of rage. In a sense the double
bind presented in the dialectic of civilization is more intense. Both the options of a return to the
primitive and its fulfillment in higher forms are attractive; they represent ideals of community
solidarity, freedom, and personal sense of fulfillment that are genuinely human impulses. But one is not
merely presented with punishment for seeking to actually attain either option; the options presented are
impossibilities. We will be punished for trying to reach ends that are our own best, exclusive and
unattainable options.
Girard sees as a result of the double bind the transference of the unresolved tension to a scapegoat. The
term itself comes form an ancient Jewish ceremony of atonement where a priest lays hands on a goat,
transferring all of the sins within the community to it; the goat is then cast into the wilderness thus
expiating the collective sins of the community. With the example of Jesus, "the lamb of God," the
transference to the sacrificial victim is deepened inasmuch as the victim is seen as an innocent recipient
of the community's collective transgressions. In modernity, where "violence is no longer subject to
ritual and is the object of strict prohibitions, anger and resentment cannot or dare not, as a rule, satisfy
their appetites on whatever object directly arouses them." The state, in Weber's all too telling
description, has a monopoly on violence. In such a situation, new outlets for expiatory violence must be
found.
19 In his Nuremberg Interviews, Nazi Gestapo founder, Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe, and Reichsmarshall Herman
Goering made some astute observations about war that help illuminate what we have in mind here. As he notes, people
have no interest in going to war. Unaffected by propaganda, the most some "poor slob" can hope for is "to get back to his
farm in one piece." It is up to the leaders to "drag them along." This is an easy matter: "All you have to do is tell them
they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the
same way in any country." In reality every "poor slob" knows that the best civilized life offers is to be left alone and in
one piece. But civilizations need war; war requires the invention of a threat, a sub-human menace, the primitive, alien
other. One hates that origin to which one cannot return. But there is also something to aspire to: "patriotism." It is the
feeling, implanted from the first moments of education, that one is part of an organic, national whole. But the most basic
conditions of civilization, especially division of labor, make social solidarity impossible. After all, it is the leaders who
must drag the citizens along through fraud and the bosses and economic imperatives that drag them to work.
10
Victims substituted for the real target are the equivalent of sacrificial victims in distant times. In
talking about this kind of phenomenon, we spontaneously utilize the expression "scapegoat."
The real source of victim substitutions is the appetite for violence that awakens in people when
anger seizes them and when the true object of their anger is untouchable. The range of objects
capable of satisfying the appetite for violence enlarges proportionally to the intensity of the
anger.20
Girard takes the boss as an example of the true object of violence. But the dialectic of civilization
creates a psychologically untenable situation with two impossibilities held out as the alpha and omega
of social existence. Harbored within these is an original act of violence. In creating "scapegoats,"
civilization always attributes to the sacrificial victim characteristics of the primitive. The enemy is subhuman, irrational, bare life, incapable of living in civilization, acting in contrast to all rules of
civilization, savage, etc. There is then a reduplication of the original act of unrelenting violence. But
the perpetrators are enacting violence upon themselves as well inasmuch as attributes of the primitive
are held up--whether or not in the transcendent form--as essentially human: innocence, social solidarity,
simplicity, truth-telling, communalism, and so on. Civilization is schizophrenic, divided within itself,
hearing voices that can never quite be understood or realized, and, periodically, lashing out in
paroxysms of violence .21
Conclusion: The Tragedy of the Unfortunate Fall
The domestication of grains, legumes and other plants must be the greatest tragic irony in human
experience. Domesticated grains serve a particularly important purpose in assuring a ready food
supply. Their wild relatives have ears or pods that are more brittle and naturally tend to shatter and
thereby scatter their seeds. By contrast, the domesticates are more pliable and remain encased within
the pod; they "wait" for the human harvester who must remove the grain through threshing. Obviously,
this variation (which depends on the mutation of just a single gene) allows for ready processing and
easier storage. Moreover, among wild plants, germination and ripening varies slightly, thus increasing
the likelihood of seed reproduction given varying times and amounts of rainfall. By contrast, among
domesticates, germination and ripening of the plants happens virtually at the same time, again allowing
the cultivator to know with relative precision when all the plants will be ready for harvesting. 22
The irony concerns the fact that it is precisely these qualities of domesticated plants that suit them to
the "ideal state space," one in which those who labor to produce large volumes of fungible plant crops
20 René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), see chapter twelve, "Scapegoat".
21 One might object that stories of the Fall have disappeared from popular culture. Technology, in its relentlessly forwardlooking and optimistic aspects has made history, in Ford's phrase, "bunk." A response might take two forms. First,
consider that one of the foremost social theorists of technology, Marshall McLuhan, noted that electronic technology
would create "a global village." Electronic media will recreate the immediate sense of communal experience found in
the ancient village. In this case the dialectic of civilization would have simply been extended in an appropriate
technological form. Alternatively, if we take seriously the idea that the Fall has, in fact, disappeared into the
simulacrum, we might expect that violence will become completely unmoored from whatever cultural constraints once
limited it. In this case we would expect to find the most random, senseless, and unpredictable acts of violence occurring
on a more regular basis.
22 See Steven Mithen, After the Ice, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
11
can be located in close proximity to the various artisanal, military, religious and political specialists
who comprise the state's core. In his remarkable book on "Zomia" George C. Scott notes that
domesticated plants are perfectly suited to the tax collector and the general. As compared with wild
plants or root crops, grain grows above ground and "predictably ripens roughly at the same time."
The tax collector can survey the crop in the field as it ripens and can calculate in advance the
probable yield.... if the army and/or the tax collector arrive on the scene when the crop is ripe,
they can confiscate as much of the crop as they wish. Grain then...is both legible to the state and
relatively appropriable.23
Scott further notes that grain is easily transported, has high nutritional and economic value per unit of
weight, and is easily stored. Taken together these aspects of domesticated grain mean that, for state
rulers, "large settled populations supported by abundant amounts of food were seen as the key to
authority and power."24 Just as humans domesticate plants so do they themselves become domesticated
within a political structure that will come to dominate them. The result is a tragic, unintended fall from
primitive freedom, social solidarity and identity with the natural world.
Domestication only happened incidentally and over a long period. Certainly, it was not a matter of
choice. Its roots probably preceded the Younger Dryas. But once dramatic temperature increases
occurred following this period, the possibilities for the success of plant selection and cultivation
intensified dramatically. As Mithen puts it, the hunter gatherers who began to cary particular seeds
around "must have noticed how much better their yields had become but they were surely quite
unaware that those seeds were cultural dynamite."25
The dynamite was self-destructive. Across the globe, those cultures which most strongly embraced
agriculture experienced rapid population growth and a need for territory. Hunter-gatherer cultures were
displaced. Environmental degradation followed. It is in the Jericho Valley that agriculture on a large
scale first occurs (7,500 BC at the latest) culminating in the appearance of sizable, relatively complex
villages. By 6,500 BC the effects of intensive agriculture are unmistakeable. Valley hillsides "are quite
barren--the soils exhausted by repeated cropping, and then washed away by winter rains after the
remaining vegetation had been cleared for firewood." The depletion of soil nutrients and erosion forced
farmers to go further afield for planting, for forage for their animals and for fuel. Streams ad rivers
were silted by erosion and polluted by waste. Agricultural yields fell; infant mortality increased to
catastrophic levels, and population collapsed. "Such is the story of all PPNB [Pre-pottery Neolithic B]
towns of the Jordan Valley--complete economic collapse."26
Aside from the effects of collapse, other long term, sometimes incidental factors probably contributed
to growing psychological distress. The increasing number of domesticated animals threatened carefully
cultivated fields. They would have soon been seen as a pest to cultivators who would have "needed to
impose a barrier between the domains of nature and human culture by fencing in their gardens. Such
physical barriers may have also created a mental barrier between hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists,
23
24
25
26
12
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governable, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 41.
Ibid., pp. 41-42.
Mithen, After the Ice, p. 54
Ibid., p 87
with people fencing themselves into one domain or the other."27
For Mithen the psycho-physical state to which neolithic farmers were ultimately brought is reflected in
the cultural motifs found in one of the largest neolithic villages, Catalhoyuk in present day southern
Turkey. A perimeter wall without gates or entrances (ladders were used for entrance and exit)
surrounded the entire village. Clay figurines representing bulls' heads were prominent. During
excavations stacks of them were found in certain residences, their faces covered in exotic designs.
There is a figure of a woman seated on a throne, her hands resting on two leopards' heads; the leopard's
tails wrap around the woman's body; she is seated next to a grain bin. Geometric designs are
accompanied by depictions of great black vultures attacking headless people. Tiny people represented
in a frenzy are surrounded by enormous deer and bulls. A sculpture of a woman's breasts with both
nipples split apart and skulls of vultures, foxes and weasels staring out depicts "motherhood itself,
violently defiled." To Mithen, "it seems as if every aspect of their lives had become ritualized, any
independence of thought and behavior crushed out of them by an oppressive ideology manifest in the
bulls, breasts, skulls, and vultures."28
Even in the earliest stages of domestication culture exhibits socio-pathological tendencies. If
civilization, even in its earliest origins, is marked by extreme alienation and despair then diagnosing its
elements is imperative. In the same way that Bateson discovered some of the basic patterns of social
interaction that generated and reinforced schizophrenia, anarcho-primitivist writers like John Zerzan
and Freddy Perlman have uncovered basic attributes of civilization that generate social pathologies and
individual alienation. In Elements of Refusal Zerzan isolates such factors as abstract measurement of
time and space, complex symbolism, number, specialization, and agriculture and shows how these have
thrust humans out of simpler, more solidary, and more sane primitive life-ways into a world of
relentless, alienating work and rule. In his "Against Leviathan" Perlman shows how state institutions
have reinforced this process of extreme separation from self and from nature. It is possible that
uncovering the elements of civilizational pathology will allow us to extricate ourselves from the double
bind.
In 1961, Bateson authored an introduction to a text called Perceval's Narrative. In Perceval's
autobiography, Bateson discovered an early rendering of his own diagnosis of the double-bind.
Perceval, who lived in the early 1800's, had experienced serious schizophrenic episodes throughout his
life. But he began to grasp the social and relational dead ends in which he was caught and discovered
ways to extricate himself from them.
As Bateson wrote, Perceval had angrily “begun to realize the nature of the system that
surrounded and controlled him” (1962b, p. xiii). And at the same time he painfully started to
grasp and hold firmly a distinct, crucial piece of information in the changing flow of the
delirium: the stabilizing role he had given himself, in syntony with the others, in the wider
system.29
Anarcho-primitivism similarly denounces the detrimental forces of civilization, showing how we
27 Ibid., p. 346.
28 Ibid., p. 95.
29
Manghi, Sergio, "Traps for Sacrifice: Bateson's Schizophrenic and Girard's Scapegoat," World Futures: The Journal
of General Evolution; Dec2006, Vol. 62 Issue 8, pp. 561-575.
13
ourselves reproduce the alienating effects of civilization when we identify with its claims. It insists that
we break with those forces, rediscovering within ourselves, with others, and through primitive norms
and values the means for re-establishing, as Zerzan calls it, a "future primitive."
Perhaps there is a parallel between Perceval and indigenous forerunners of anarcho-primitivism. The
latter similarly "self-diagnose" the social forces that hold them in a double bind and resist those forces
by identifying and reversing them. In the account of his life given to Richard Erdoes, John Fire Lame
Deer, takes the double bind into which Lakota traditionalists are thrust and turns it back against the
allegedly superior, civilized mind. Civilization repeatedly tells Lame Deer that there is nothing to be
gained and everything to lose in following traditional cultural beliefs. Anyway, say the experts, because
so much has been lost traditionalists cannot perform the ceremonies properly. Lame Deer turns the
tables with an impressive combination of humor, pathos, and philosophical acumen. In his first vision
quest Lame Deer recounts how his grandmother had cut forty small pieces of flesh from her arm using
a razor blade, the flesh to be dried and placed, along with certain, small, highly scared stones, within
his rattle as a sacrifice by her for his ceremony. "Such an ancient ceremony with a razor blade instead
of a flint knife," Lame Deer mockingly writes of the anthropologist's dismay. 30 But it is precisely
because of the presence of his relatives, living and dead, human and non-human, that Lame Deer
receives a vision that sets his life's proper course.
On domestication Lame Deer writes, "That's where you fooled yourselves. You have not only altered,
declawed and malformed your winged and four legged cousins; you have done it to yourselves. You
have changed men into chairmen of the boards, into office workers, into time clock punchers."31 While
"white men chase the dollar, Indians chase the vision." On each facet, Lame Deer mocks the idea of the
superiority of civilization:
Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals.
You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves....We
had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law,
no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We really were in a bad way before the
white men came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without these basic things
which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.32
In the end, it is only Indians who turn toward white ways who stand to lose everything. "Declawed and
malformed," white people have lost the most basic aspects of self-knowledge.
All creatures exist for a purpose. Even an ant knows what the purpose is--not with its brain, but
somehow it knows. Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why
they exist. They don’t use their brains and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their
bodies, their senses, or their dreams. They don’t use the knowledge the spirit has put into every
one of them; they are not even aware of this, so they stumble along blindly on the road to
nowhere--a paved highway which they, themselves, bulldoze and make smooth so that they can
get faster to the big, empty hole which they'll find at the end waiting to swallow them up. It’s a
quick comfortable super highway, but I know where it leads to. I have seen it. I’ve been there in
30 John Fire Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 3.
31 Ibid., p. 189
32 Ibid., p. 117
14
my vision, and it makes me shudder to think about it.33
The nihilism in civilization derives from the hollow character of its highest aspirations. It seems that,
by contrast, what is necessary in order to restore health is a dialectics of anti-civilization. Whether from
anthropological sources, from anarcho-primitivists, from traditional indigenous persons, or from within
oneself, simple good health requires new sources of valuation that are very old. The lies that conceal
what has been done to primitive culture and what has been lost as a result must be exposed and lost
knowledge resurrected.
The alienation in technological civilization is reflected both in the desire to synthesize knowledge and
spirituality and in the rampant signs of ill health, physically and psychologically, among masses of
civilized people.34 Constantly we are told that it is only through an extension of civilized, technical
means that the ills of civilization will be remedied. But in an apt illustration of the double-bind
Heidegger poignantly wrote "Everything depends on our manipulating technology... We will...get
technology 'spiritually in hand.' We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the
more technology threatens to slip form human control."35 A Nazi partisan, Heidegger looked for a "free
relationship to technology" in a special correspondence between ancient Greek and German languages,
especially German Romantic poetry. A dialectics of anti-civilization, by contrast, goes "all the way
down" as it were, seeking to uncover wisdom that civilization so blithely and viciously discards.
Ironically, the goal of such a dialectics is to do away with its own method as dialectics is thought
divided against itself, a refection of a culture riven by every sort of distance. Here too considering an
indigenous logic of simultaneity and cultural motifs that ward off socially disruptive innovation would
be instructive.
33 Ibid., pp. 190-191
34 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, (New York: Penguin Books, 2000)
35 Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," p. 5. Leading scientists' warnings of the impact of climate change
are instructive. James Hansen, for example, speaks of the danger of "passing tipping points that lead to disastrous
climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control." James Hansen "Global Warming Twenty Years
Later," in The Global Warming Reader, ed. Bill McKibben, (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), p. 276.
15
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