Culture and Nature in The Epic of Gilgamesh
By Kamran Nayeri
Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism
November 22, 2018
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Gilgamesh: Courtesy of LeWeb Francis
1. Introduction
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first known long literary writing from the earliest
civilization. It is a series of Mesopotamian epic poems, woven together over time, that
recount the adventures of Gilgamesh, the ruler of Uruk, who lived about 2,600 BCE
(endnote 1). Uruk was where the town of Warka is located in today’s Iraq, about 250
miles south of Baghdad, and dates back to about five thousand years ago. There is no
set of well-preserved cuneiform tablets for The Epic of Gilgamesh. Since the nineteenthcentury scholars have located and deciphered several partial texts and painstakingly
cobbled them together to offer a coherent narrative. (see, “Introduction,” in Ziolkowski,
2012, and, George, 2003, for a detailed discussion)
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The epic has drawn the attention of scholars from many fields of inquiry (e.g., Maier,
ed., 1997) as well as the general public. In this essay, I will examine the epic from a new
perspective informed by my own argument that the transition to farming from foraging
that began about 10,000 years ago required alienation from nature marked by the rise of
an anthropocentric worldview (human-centeredness) basic to farming, which relies on
domestication of plants and animals, and domination and control of nature. The
transition to anthropocentrism marked a world-historic change because our forager
ancestors held a variety of ecocentric worldviews for the past 290,000 years (see,
section 3, for a discussion).
If my argument is valid, we must see this transition reflected in fable, mythology, and
folklore in the cultural history of the early civilizations and consolidation of the
anthropocentrism in the subsequent civilizations. The Epic of Gilgamesh provides an
ideal case study. In section 2, I will outline a summary of the epic itself. Section 3 will
discuss the relationship between culture and nature in the epic. In section 4, I will recall
folklore and fables related to me as a child by my grandmother in Tehran in the 1950s
and discuss whether and how thousands of years of civilization might have advanced
their anthropocentrism. However, the decisive domination of anthropocentrism in
human culture occurs with the emergence, consolidation, and development of the
industrial capitalist civilization and how it has uprooted almost all reservoir of forager
societies and why it is vital to revive such worldviews in order to save the world. I will
discuss these in section 5.
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The Deluge tablet of the Gilgamesh epic in Akkadian, written 2,100 years ago.
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2. A summary of the epic
Gilgamesh, the protagonist of the epic, is the king of Uruk, a city of Sumer (and later
of Babylonia), situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates river, on the dried-up,
ancient channel of the Euphrates. Uruk played a leading role in the early urbanization of
Sumer in the mid-4th millennium BCE. At its height c. 2900 BCE, Uruk probably had
50,000–80,000 residents living in 6 km2 (2.32 square miles) of a walled area; making it
the largest city in the world at the time.
Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third man, making him the wisest and strongest
ruler of all mortals. Yet, he is an oppressive ruler. He holds “the right to the first night”
with any bride and rules mercilessly so that the people of Uruk appeal to the gods for
relief. The god Anu hears their plea and calls on the goddess of fertility Aruru to create
another demigod in order to keep Gilgamesh in check and bring peace to Uruk. Aruru
creates the warrior Enkidu out of clay and sends him to live among the animals of the
hills. Enkidu lives like other animals, eats with other animals, and drinks with other
animals. He also becomes a problem for the citizens of Uruk who trapped and hunted
animals. One such hunter goes to Gilgamesh for help to get rid of Enkidu. Gilgamesh
orders the trapper to enlist his temple’s “holy harlot” to bring Enkidu out of wildness
into Uruk. The task falls on Shamhat, a “priestess prostitute,” who disrobes and lays on
the grass on Enkidu’s path. Enkidu, who like a wild animal smells Shamhat, is turned
on by her, and the two engage into a week-long orgy of sex. After that, Enkidu is tamed
and Shambat covers his middle body with a piece of her dress and lures him to Uruk to
battle Gilgamesh.
Meanwhile, Gilgamesh has had two unsettling dreams which his mother,
goddess Ninsun, interprets as finding a life-long friend. So, when Enkidu arrives in
Uruk and they engage in battle after Gilgamesh gets the upper hand, he embraces
Enkidu and the two become close friends.
Soon after, Gilgamesh decides on the conquest of the famed Cedar Forest to cut down its
trees for the glory of Uruk. But to do so, he must overcome the guardian of the forest, a
monster named Humbaba. Enkidu tries to dissuade Gilgamesh, as Humbaba serves on
behest of Enlil, the god of the Earth and the wind. But Gilgamesh sets out on his quest
anyway. When they finally arrive at the forest the birds and the animals alert Humbaba.
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A fight breaks out in which Humbaba easily humbles Gilgamesh and Enkidu. At the last
minute, however, Gilgamesh appeals to the sun god Shamash who sends eight whirling
winds that blind Humbaba. Given this opportunity, the two heroes severely disable
Humaba who appeals for his life. Yet, Endiku urges Gilgamesh to kill him, which he
does. They return to Uruk on a boat with lumber for Gilgamesh’s palace and Humbaba’s
head as a trophy.
Fresh from his conquest, Gilgamesh finds that Ishtar, goddess of sexual love and war,
fancies him. But he rejects her advances because no previous lover of hers had fared
well. Enraged, Ishtar plots to take revenge and pleads with Anu for the Bull of Heaven to
unleash his force against Gilgamesh. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven
in battle and Gilgamesh cuts off its horn as a trophy to hang in his palace. Meanwhile,
Anu, Enlil, and Ea (god of water), the triad of deities, hold a meeting in which they
decide either Gilgamesh or Enkidu must die because they have killed Humbaba and the
Bull of Heaven. Anu asks: “Now which one stripped the cedars?” It was Gilgamesh. But
Enlil intercedes: “Enkidu must die! Gilgamesh shall not!” Shamash, the sun god, tries to
intercede but to no avail. Enkidu falls ill and has a wicked dream which begins with him
cursing all who caused him to leave his wild birthplace for Uruk, and ends with him
being taken by Anzû, a lion-headed eagle, to Ereshkigal, the Queen of Underworld.
When Enkidu wakes up, Gilgamesh is on his side and tries to comfort him. But Enkidu
says: “In my dream, the heavens moaned, and the earth groaned back, and I stood in
between. You know what that portends.” Soon Enkidu falls into a deep sleep and his
flesh turns white like the sheets. By the twelfth day, he dies.
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Gilgamesh holding Endiku's body after his death
The second part of the epic centers on the wandering of Gilgamesh who cannot make
peace with the death of Enkidu. He orders a golden statue of him erected in Uruk. He
then embarks on a journey to find eternal life. In this journey, he encounters many wild
animals and fantastical monsters. He reverts into a wild man who wears a lion skin for
clothing. Finally, he finds Utnapishtim, the only man who together with his wife were
deified and given eternal life by the god Enlil after he preserved human and animal life
in a great ship he built to escape the Great Flood. Gilgamesh asks Utnapishtim for
eternal life but fails to achieve it by defying sleep for an extended time. On his wife
urging, Utnapishtim offers Gilgamesh a chance for rejuvenation by directing him to the
plant of youth but a snake eats the plant. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk a mortal man. In
the closing of the story, Gilgamesh dreams of Endiku’s return to tell him about the
afterlife. He wakes up with an intense fear of his mortality. The epic ends with these
words: “He who saw everything, saw his tablet completed.”
3. Culture and nature in the epic of Gilgamesh
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As some scholars have argued, it is possible that the modern renderings of the epic are
somewhat colored by contemporary and professional concerns. Be that as it may, there
are certainly generally agreed upon key elements of the epic that address my focus of the
relationship between culture and nature and are confirmed by other sources about life
in the Sumerian civilization, especially if we correct for the longstanding view of
civilization as progressive in line with the more recent scholarship (see, Scott, 2017;
Nayeri 2018).
The Sumerian natural landscape
Until recently, archeologists and anthropologists who tried to figure out why some
hunter-gatherers took up farming which then became the basis of civilization assumed
that the natural landscape of the Fertile Crescent was similar to what it is today, largely
barren. Yet, in the epic, we find a much lusher landscape, including the Cedar Forest,
teeming with wildlife. Recent research has confirmed this representation and rejects the
assumption of a largely arid landscape which gave rise to the hypothesis that early
farming settlement “made the desert bloom.” (Scott, 2017, pp. 43-55).
Ecocentrism of our forager ancestors
To discuss culture and nature in The Epic of Gilgamesh, one needs to provide a sense of
the ecocentric worldviews of our forager ancestors to discern continuity and change in
the early civilizations, as reflected in the epic. I do not think I can offer a better
summary than what is provided by the Cambridge University archeologist Graeme
Barker who has studied the problem of the rise of early farmers. He writes:
“…[I]t is clear from modern ethnographic research that most foragers conceptualize
relations between humans and their world in ways very different from our own
Cartesian model. Commonly, the environment is regarded as a benign spiritual home
‘embracing all manifold beings that dwell therein.’ (Ingold, 1996, p. 128) Relations with
it are modeled on the same principle of sharing that applies within the human
community: it is the source of all good things, a ‘giving environment.’ (Bird-David, 1990,
1993) Many foragers do not distinguish between their own fortune and the character of
the world around them, using metaphors such as procreation, parenthood, and kinship
to describe their relations to the environment. Land needed for living in is appropriated
not by fences and boundaries, in the way of farmers, but by moving through its paths.
Thus a forager’s territory is something to be related to and associated with, not owned,
and tracks and paths are symbolic of the process of life itself: ‘who one is becomes a
record of where one has come from and where one has been’. (Ingold, 1996, p. 138)
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“In contrast with the Western concept of naturalism, most foragers are characterized by
‘animism’ or (less commonly) ‘totemic’ belief systems. In the former, non-human
animals are not just like humans, they are persons. Their environment is a treasure
house of ‘personages’ each with language, reason, intellect, moral conscience, and
knowledge, regardless of whether the outer shape is human, animal, reptile, or plant.
Thus, the Jivaroan people of eastern Ecuador and Peru consider humans, animals, and
plants as ‘persons’ (aents), linked by blood ties and common ancestry. (Descola, 1996)
Foragers with animistic belief systems commonly do not have words for distinguishing
between people, animals, and plants as separate categories, using instead classification
systems based on terms of equality rather than hierarchies of our own Linnaean
taxonomies. (Howell, 1996) The totemic systems of Australian Aborigines use
ceremonies and rituals to stress an abstract linear continuity between the human and
non-human communities. Animals are the most common totems, signifying a person’s
or group’s identity or distinctiveness, but though they may be good to eat or food for
thought, they are not considered social partners as in the animistic belief systems.
“The forger world is animated with moral, mystical, and mythological significance.
(Carmichael et.al., 1994) It is constructed and reconstructed through the telling of
myths, which commonly include all kinds of animals as humans, changing shape
between one and the other. In addition to the present world inhabited by humans and
non-human beings, there is a supernatural world. In many forager societies, shamans
mediate between the lived and supernatural worlds, entering and conceptualizing the
latter, commonly through ecstatic experiences. One of the mythological beings featured
in forager cosmology the world over is the Trickster: part god, part culture hero,
transforming from the mythic past in morally ambiguous ways. (Gunter, 1999, p. 427)
As the whole world is self, killing a plant or animal is not murder but transformation.
Finding food is taken for granted, reinforced by myths telling the hunter to be the
animal before presuming to kill and eat it. ‘They are being heard by a sentient universe
—a gallery of intelligent beings who, if offended by injudicious words (ridicule, bragging,
undue familiarity, profanity, etc.) can take reprisal, usually by steadfast refusal to be
taken as food or by inflicting disease or doing other violence.’ (C. L. Martin, 1993, p. 14)”
(Barker, 2006, pp. 59-60, all emphases in original)
Continuity and change
Lingering ecocentrism
The polytheism that dominates the epic is certainly an outgrowth of the animism that
has been prevalent among foragers, except the natural forces and states have been
humanized as gods. Thus, Anu is the personification of the sky, Enlil is associated with
the earth and wind, and Ea (also known as Enki) is the personification of water. In the
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epic, Anu, Enlil, and Ea constitute the triad of deities acting as arbitrators and overseers
of other gods and goddesses. Also, in the epic, each person can have her own private
god for guidance and for support. One can hypothesize that the tendency to increasingly
associate natural powers and states with humanized gods represents a gradual
development of anthropocentrism from the midst of universal ecocentrist worldviews.
But this tendency is far less pronounced among the gods in the epic than it is for citizens
of Uruk (more on this in a moment).
In the epic, reality and magic are intertwined. Future is foretold, as Shamhat tells
Enkidu what will happen once they arrive in Uruk, and dreams foretell, as in the two
dreams of Gilgamesh, as interpreted by his mother, before Enkidu arrives in Uruk.
We also know that Enkidu was created out of clay and placed in wildness to live like a
wild man. He not only was but also saw himself as part of wildlife. Thus, he freed
trapped animals and chased out hunters. He protected his fellow animal species against
civilized humans. Even the gods themselves felt the need to protect nature against
civilized humans by creating supernatural beings. Enlil created Humbaba to protect the
Cedar Forest and its wildlife. In all affairs of life, one could appeal to the gods for help
and receive it. Thus, Gilgamesh had to appeal to Shamash, the sun god, for help to slay
Humbaba. But later Anu, Enlil, and Ea, the supreme gods' council, are outraged and
plan to punish Gilgamesh and Enkidu for killing Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven.
A developing anthropocentrism
Despite such continuity with the ecocentrism of foragers, there is already key elements
of a class society as well as a pronounced anthropocentrism in the epic.
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Social stratification. In the epic, Uruk is portrayed as a stratified society. Its
citizens include farmers, herders, artisans, hunters and trappers, traders, and
they are subject to an absolute ruler, Gilgamesh, who exploits them at will and
claims the “right to the first night” with all virgins. This oppression and
exploitation are bad enough for the population to appeal to the gods for help.
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Patriarchy. In the epic, Uruk is already a patriarchic society. To seduce and tame
the wild man, Enkidu, Gilgamesh suggests enlisting a “holy harlot.” However,
Shamhat, who agrees to lure Enkidu by engaging him in sex is also noted as a
priestess, showing the ambivalence towards her social role. But whatever that
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role is, it is certainly a subordinate role for a woman in the patriarchal society
where nuclear family relations are in evidence among the citizens of Uruk.
Ishtar’s pursuit of Gilgamesh and his recalling of how she had betrayed all her
previous lovers also smacks of the patriarchal view of women’s betrayal of their
male lovers.
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Religious views and hierarchy. Although there is no explicit mention of a temple
in Uruk in the epic, we know Shamhat is a priestess, thus there must have been
priests and temple when this part of the story was written. We do know that in
the town of Eridu built near Uruk a little later, there was a temple. Further, in
the epic, there are two places where the afterlife becomes a preoccupation of the
protagonists: When Endiku is in his deathbed and in the twelfth and last
cuneiform which tells of what Endiku experiences in the afterlife. In each case,
the afterlife is in the Underworld and portrayed as an unpleasant existence. Some
renderings of the epic interpret this last cuneiform as a final dream of Gilgamesh
after he fails to secure an eternal life. Thinking about afterlife has been a
preoccupation of humans since our forager ancestors became aware of their
mortality and what may ensue after that. However, with the rise of civilization
religious ideas of afterlife became institutionalized and a caste of priesthood
created to oversee the religious life of the citizens.
Attitude towards nature
It is difficult to differentiate Gilgamesh’s attitude towards nature from modern-day
hunters, in particular, trophy hunters. He set out to conquer the Cedar Forest and slay
Humbaba, its protector, largely for the thrill and glory of it. After he slays Humbaba, he
set out on a boat to Uruk carrying lumber from the forest for his palace and Humbaba’s
head as a trophy. When he slays the Bull of Heaven, he cuts off its horn and hangs it in
his palace. Enkidu, who was born a wild man, becomes even more hostile to wildness
after he is tamed by Shamhat. It is he who urges Gilgamesh to kill Humbaba after he is
blinded by the whirling winds and pleads for his life. Ordinary citizens of Uruk include
farmers and herders who live off domesticated animals and hunters and trappers who
live off wildlife. Their attitude towards the rest of nature is radically different from
hunter-gatherers, who constituted the bulk of the 50 million humans who lived on the
planet at that time and who surrounded the early outposts of civilization. In the epic,
Gilgamesh is credited with building a strong wall around Uruk which separates its
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citizens from the wildness that surrounds it. Archeologists consider walled cities such as
Uruk as defensive structures in the face of warfare although it is not clear who the other
side of the conflict might have been. More recently, scholars view such walls as more to
keep in the bonded population of the early city-states than to repel “barbarian” invaders.
When Utnapishtim directed Gilgamesh to the plant of rejuvenation of life, a snake stole
it from him (he would have achieved eternal youth if that damned snake was not
around). When the Great Flood came, it was Utnapishtim who saved all of the animals
by building a boat and boarding a pair of each species, thereby underscoring the
preeminence of humans.
4. Childhood memories: echoes from Gilgamesh epic?
It would be prudent and preferable to see how the pre-modern Middle Eastern folklore
and fables show continuity and change with The Epic of Gilgamesh. But that would
make this essay much longer. Thus, I will suffice with telling of my own childhood
remembrances. As a child raised in the outskirts of Tehran, Iran, in the 1950s
(population at that time was about 500,000), I experienced life where there were no
nearby neighbors, no running water, no electricity, and no central heating. This allowed
me, a curious little boy who had no playmate, to explore the outdoors, climb trees, eat
from their fruits, follow insects as they went about their business, watch the birds and
listen to their songs, observe the patterns of the seasons, the clouds, the sun, the moon,
and the stars, and let my imagination go wild at night whether cuddled under the covers
in the freezing room at night in winter or laying in my bed on the roof, gazing at the
starry dome above in summer. My paternal grandmother, who lived with us liked to tell
me stories at night. Some of these included fantastical imageries similar to those that
appear in The Epic of Gilgamesh filtered through the anthropocentrism of the Iranian
culture, largely dominated by monarchies and Islam for well over a thousand years. The
first monotheist religion we know of, Zoroastrianism, was in Persia (a vast empire that
was centered in today’s Iran) five millennium BCE. The protagonists of my
grandmother’s stories were princes and kings, not demigods, and in place of the colorful
polytheism of epic of Gilgamesh, there was a grey monotheism of an abstract,
impersonal God. While the powers vested in the human-like gods of the Gilgamesh epic
were representing natural states and powers, the monotheist God has none of the
fallibilities of humans or human-like gods, and is instead all-knowing and all-powerful,
and merciful (which I quickly discovered as a child not to be true; why was there be so
much misery?) Thus, the imaginary creatures of my grandmother’s stories—which
included div (ogre, giant), ghoul (that lived in graveyards and consumed human
flesh), jinn ( spirits or demons depending on occasion), pari (winged female
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angel), simurgh (a large mythical bird that could speak)—were vested with powers that
either we humans aspired to have or feared. A div although very large and heavy and
without wings could fly. A jinn or a pari could appear and disappear at will. The
protagonists—princes and kings—were either after breaking a spell cast by a witch or
wizard, or finding a treasure, or finding a maiden unmatched in beauty. Again, the link
to nature so evident in Gilgamesh epic was nowhere to be found. Even the landscape
was barren (as it had become so after repeated ecological crises). Instead of the Cedar
Forest and the wildlife that surrounded Uruk in the epic, in my grandmother’s stories,
the lushness of landscape was reserved either for the king’s palace which was
surrounded by high walls for his protection, or in fantastical castles in the sky (usually
on top of the clouds), or a wondrously immense palace that the hero of the story would
find at the bottom of a deep and dry well in the middle of desert.
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My grandmother Monavar Noori (birth ?--death spring
1979)
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Some of the stories my grandmother told me betrayed her own fear of dying (although
she must have been only in her late forties at the time). Thus, she would tell me about
what will happen on the first night after being buried in the grave, which is surprisingly
similar to Enkidu’s accounting of his experience in the Underworld when he appears in
Gilgamesh’s dream (worms were eating his flesh). Both tellings assume that the dead
can see and feel like a living person except in the Underworld. Even though some wild
animals, especially lions, appeared in my grandmother stories, there were no lions in
Iran. Yet, the imperial flag had a lion with a sword in its front paw and there are
carvings of lions in battle with the ancient kings in thePersepolis. Of course, all of these
were the faint memory of those days thousands of years earlier when there were, in fact,
lions in the region, but they went extinct perhaps due to population growth, hunting,
and ecological degradation. In the 1950s, there were few wild species of megafauna left
in Iran. Those that existed in the Shah’s hunting reserve close to our house were
imported for his hunting pleasure. The area was walled off to ensure his Majesty's safety
and his ease of cornering and killing an animal as a trophy. Still, the Gilgamesh epic
lived on in one particular case. After the 1979 revolution, the activists of Jahād-e
Sāzandegī (Jihad for Construction) reported in their magazine that the Arab chiefs
in Khuzestan province, not far from the present day Warka in Iraq, which is located
where Uruk once stood, still practiced the “right of the first night,” which I presume was
stopped. In recent years, there was much excitement with a sighting a cheetah and her
two cubs captured by a video camera stationed in the central desert (Dasht-e Kavir).
Unfortunately, with the massive loss of habitat due to human population growth and
habitat loss (more than a doubling of the population in 40 years since the 1979
revolution, to over 80 million today), industrialization and pollution, and a deepening
ecological crisis, the future of wildlife in Iran is bleak, short of a sudden reversal of these
trends.
5. From anthropocentrism to the Anthropocene
Since the beginning of the millennium, a growing number of scientists have warned that
the planet is entering the Anthropocene (The Age of Man). Although the causes and the
date of the onset of the Anthropocene have differed mostly due to the specialists' focus,
they all share a common concern with how the Earth systems have been altered by
humanity in ways that may be detrimental to much of life on Earth (endnote 2). Thus,
the Anthropocene implies the destructive domination of culture over nature which much
of life, including humanity, crucially depends on.
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But what has brought humanity from the anthropocentrism of early civilizations to the
Anthropocene? The short answer is the deepening of alienation from nature which has
manifested itself in the relentless quest for domination and control of nature in order to
extract ever more wealth from it (for a discussion, see, Nayeri 2018). This quest has
rested upon the development of forces of production which are often also forces of
destruction (endnote 3), that is the development of technology and science, as well as
ecosocial relations of production that include subordination, oppression, and
exploitation of the majority of humanity as well as domesticated species and wildlife.
Technology and science have developed due to human curiosity and institutional
arrangements articulated by the dominant mode of production.
The development of forces of production accelerated as part of the historical processes
that resulted in the emergence, consolidation, and eventual dominance of the capitalist
mode of production, a process that began in Western Europe in the sixteenth century in
the aftermath of the dissolution of serfdom.
Until the rise of capitalist modernity, agrarian societies remained largely dependent on
the non-human animals and humans to do farming, and the pace of change was slow.
Thus, the population grew slowly and their way of life was less destructive to
biodiversity. When earlier modes of production were ecologically disastrously
destructive, they contributed to the collapse of some civilizations like the first agrarian
civilization in Sumer. Yet the scope of the disaster was geographically limited. Eric
Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982) reminds us that in 1,400 the
majority of the world was still not incorporated in regions of agrarian civilizations. In
fact, in 1,000 CE less than 15 percent of the world was under the control of civilization
who called people living outside of it “barbarians.” They included foragers, pastoralists,
horticulturalists, and small-scale farmers who often used semi-nomadic forms of
swidden agriculture and still hunted, and gathered some of their produce.
With the gradual emergence of the capitalist world economy and the spread of
modernity, these all changed. While for medieval philosophers the natural order was
part of a larger divine order, Enlightenment humanism bred the experimental science of
Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Galileo and the mathematical investigations of
René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Sir Isaac Newton which developed an
all-pervasive anthropocentrism that not only subordinated nature to culture but also left
open the question of independence of society from nature. This almost complete
alienation from nature is the hallmark of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist
civilization that has underpinned Western notions of philosophy, rationality, and
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science ever since (endnote 4). In our own time, it is characterized by bourgeois
ecomodernist worldview backed by new fields of science and technology such as
synthetic biology, material science, geoengineering, and artificial intelligence. The quest
to "colonize space," in particular, Mars, which has become of interest to venture
capitalists, which had appeared in science fiction before, more recently has become
normalized by scientists like Carl Sagan who proclaimed humans as a multi-planet
species!
Of course, the realm of ideas and scientific and technical development ultimately
depend on the dynamics of the dominant mode of production. By replacing demigods of
polytheism and the God of monotheism with the capitalist market and the pursuit of
profit, the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization has unleashed a dynamic that
young Marx and Engels succinctly captured in their own call for socialism:
“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the
immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian,
nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with
which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely
obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction,
to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls
civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates
a world after its own image.
“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created
enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural,
and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and
semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on
nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
“The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the
population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated
population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few
hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or
but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and
systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one
code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.”(endnote
5) (Marx and Engels, 1848)
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Of course, Marx and Engels never expected that their vision of socialism will remain
unfulfilled into the twenty-first century, and the capitalist mode of production would
expand as far as it has, creating the combined social and ecological crisis today that may
result in the extinction of humanity and much of life on Earth.
Uruk at its peak had at most a population of 80,000. The human population of the
entire planet at that time was about 50 million, the great majority of whom were
foragers. In 2008, the world population had reached 6.7 billion, evenly split between
urban and rural areas, and the number of cities with 1 million or more was 400. As of
this writing, the world population has reached 7.7 billion and is expected to reach close
to 10 billion by 2050. There are 46 megacities and metropolitan areas with population
sizes between 10 and 38 million people. According to the World Bank, Gross World
Product was around US$78.28 trillion in nominal terms or approximately US$107.5
trillion in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). The per capita PPP GWP in 2017 was
approximately US$17,300. (Wikipedia) “By virtually any measure—household
expenditures, number of consumers, extraction of raw materials—consumption of goods
and services has risen steadily in industrial nations for decades, and it is growing rapidly
in many developing countries.” (Worldwatch Institute, “The State of Consumption
Today”). By one calculation, there are now more than 1.7 billion members of “the
consumer class”—nearly half of them in the developing world. A lifestyle and culture
that became common in Europe, North America, Japan, and a few other pockets of the
world in the twentieth century are going global in the twenty-first. China alone has
added 300 million to the world “middle class.” Worldwide, private consumption
expenditures—the amount spent on goods and services at the household level—topped
$20 trillion in 2000, a four-fold increase over 1960 (in 1995 dollars). Of course, this
over-the-top rise in consumption by the “consumer class” as numerous as it still leaves
71% of the world population with $10 or less to spend in a day. No matter how this
unequal distribution of income changes, if this trend in production and consumption is
not reversed, there cannot be any doubt of an ecological collapse.
Although hunting and gathering practices have persisted in many societies—such as
the Okiek of Kenya, some Australian Aborigines, and Torres Strait Islanders of
Australia, and many North American Arctic Inuit groups—by the early 21st-century
hunting and gathering as a way of life had largely disappeared. Still, ecocentric
worldviews continue to exist in some cultures and rediscovered by others who resist the
anthropocentrism of the capitalist modernity. Only through a genuine love of the
natural world and its wonders can humanity hope to overcome widespread alienation
from nature and work toward undoing social alienation to avoid possible extinction. I
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call this future human society concentric socialism, one free of alienation from nature
and social alienation. I also call the revolutionary process that would get us there
ecocentric socialism, which will help combine the working people’s struggles against all
manifestations of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist system to create a new
humanity with an ecocentric socialist culture which will use the best of the unintended
fruits of the civilization consistent for human development as well as harmony with the
rest of nature.
Dedication: I finished and published this essay on the evening of Thanksgiving day
2018. A year ago, on Thanksgiving day, I lost Sunny who was with me since Christmas
2011 when I found her under the blackberry bushes on Darby Road near where I live. I
did not realize how much I loved her until she was gone. I would like to dedicate this
essay to her memory. Why is it that a human can find a deeper friendship with a cat
than other human beings? Here is my farewell to Sunny written a year ago with a
slideshow of her photos.
Acknowledgment. I am grateful to Julie Callahan who read an earlier draft and
corrected my grammatical errors and in two places helped me rewrite the text. All
remaining errors and ideas presented in this essay are mine.
Endnotes:
1. My principal text for the epic is the translation by Kent H. Dixon as illustrated by
Kevin H. Dixon (2018) which emphasizes the “sensory world” presented in the epic
while maintaining “literary accuracy.”
2. It is well-known that humanity now is staring at three existential threats: catastrophic
climate change, the Sixth Extinction, and a possible nuclear holocaust. It is also wellknown that these existential threats are embedded in an interlocking set of social and
ecological crises (Rockström, et.al. 2009; Stephen, et.al. 2015a, 2015b). In August 2016,
even the Working Group on the Anthropocene of the International Geological Congress
proposed declaring a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene (Carrington, 2016). The
arrival of the Anthropocene entails the end of Holocene, the geological epoch hospitable
to the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago on the basis of which civilizations have
been erected.
3. A few examples should suffice:
According to the 2016 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife•
Associated Recreation, there were 35.8 million anglers and 11.5 million hunters in
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the United States spending 643 million days of fishing and hunting. Fishing and
hunting is a big business with a total revenue of $81.0 billion in 2016.
•
The Bagger 293 Bucket Wheel Excavator holds the record for the largest land
vehicle in the history of the world. At 310 feet tall and 721 feet long, the 4-yearold German machine can move 100,000 cubic yards of dirt per day with the use
of its 20 rotating buckets.
•
At 144 meters long and weighing 14,055 tonnes, the Annelies Ilena is Europe’s
largest fishing vessel. The Super trawler can hold 7,000 tonnes of fish, allowing it
to fish continuously for weeks.
•
The world largest diesel engine used in ocean-going container ships generates
109,000 horsepower.
•
The Giant Bucket-Wheel excavator can move 240,000 m (8.475 million ft) of
earth per day, which means that it can dig a hole the length of a football field to
over 25 meters deep in a single day.
•
The Ponsse ScorpionKing is a full, enormous vehicle which quickly shreds
through trees.
4. Horigan illustrates how political philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries argued for the independence of culture from nature. Thomas Hobbs held that
the state of nature is “the natural condition of mankind” which precludes “industry,”
“culture,” “navigation,” “time,”, “arts,” and “society,” and “worse of all, [it means]
continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man; solitary, poore, nasty,
brutish, and short.” (Hobbs, Leviathan, 1615, chapter XIII) “Similarly, John Locke used
a state of nature and a social contract as analytical devices for specifying the basic rules
of political obligation.” (Horigan, 1988, p. 3) “The great and chief end, therefore, of
men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the
preservation of their property: to which in the state of nature there are many things
wanting.” (Locke, The Two Treatises of Civil Government, 1764, Hollis ed., chapter IX)
“For Rousseau the passage from nature to culture functions as a means for
understanding the true nature of humanity; and in Condillac’s An Essay on the Origin of
Human Knowledge the oppositions between nature and culture and human and animal
were used to demarcate the field of the social, marking out a specific field of study for
human sciences. The concept of the state of nature was not intended to represent an
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actual historical state, but a conjectural one, a philosophical device used for specifying
the attributes f humanity.” (Horigan, 1988, p. 3)
Descartes advocated a hierarchy of mind over matter and dualism of culture and nature.
The material world was a machine subject to mechanical laws subject to human reason.
This view not only separated culture from nature but also privileged the former. For
Descartes, there was no question that humans were superior to the non-human animals
who were just a mechanical part of the rest of the universe, without any agency. “The
idea of man’s control over animality (including his own and that of women) is part and
parcel of a more inclusive ideology of the human mastery or appropriation of nature,
whose roots lie deep in the tradition of Western thought.” (Ingold, 1994, p. 11) Horigan
writes: “These conceptions, of culture as opposed to nature and the human as distinct
from animals, have been handed down from the Enlightenment to the contemporary
human sciences, and remains a central part of modern social theories.” (Horigan, 1988,
pp. 3-4)
5. Marx and Engels were historical revolutionary socialist intellectuals of the highest
caliber. The views expressed here on “civilization,” “barbarians,” “barbarian nations,”
and the backwardness of the countryside are in large measure due to their uncritical
adoption of the Western European bourgeois intellectual society of their time which
much later justly have been characterized as “Eurocentric.” To their credit, as critical
thinkers, Marx’s and Engels’ views evolved and there are corrections made to some of
the views expressed here, albeit without a discussion of the problems associated with
them. Thus, sections of the socialist movement remained Eurocentric for some time.
The Russian revolutions of 1917 made a radical break with such views as did some of its
leaders. The detour of the world revolution to the periphery of world capitalism also
forced a correction. However, the attitude towards modernism itself remained largely
uncritical, except, of course, its capitalist framework. At any rate, these issues regarding
Marx’s and Engels’ views and those of the subsequent socialist movement while
important and interesting lay outside of the concerns of this essay.
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