Civilization (Kultur)
http://www.answers.com/topic/civilization-kultur
Psychoanalysis: Civilization (Kultur)
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud defines civilization as follows: "The word
'civilization' [Kultur] describes the whole sum of the achievements and regulations which
distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely
to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations" (1930a, p. 89). In The Future
of an Illusion Freud provided a more extended definition of civilization: "Human civilization, by
which I mean all those respects in which human life has raised itself above its animal status and
differs from the life of the beasts—and I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization—
presents, as we know, two aspects to the observer. It includes, on the one hand, all the knowledge
and capacity that men have acquired in order to control the forces of nature and extract its wealth
for the satisfaction of human needs and, on the other hand, all the regulations necessary in order
to adjust the relations of men to one another and especially the distribution of the available
wealth" (1927c, p. 5-6).
These definitions, however, leave out many aspects of the concept of civilization that Freud had
mentioned in other works, including "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness"
(1908d). These themes include the relationship of civilization to the superego and to sublimation,
its consequences for neurosis, the origin of civilization, and the different attitudes of individuals
toward civilization, especially as a function of their sex.
Freud's conflation of civilization and culture here is surprising, especially when we consider that
the distinction is clearly present when he discusses the force deployed by civilization (Kultur),
on the one hand, and the "spiritual heritage of culture" used to "reconcile mankind" with that
civilization, on the other, namely, the "spiritual heritage of culture" (1927c). Le Rider (1993) has
pointed out that this opposition between culture and civilization had behind it a philosophical
tradition of which Freud was a part. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) saw civilization as a
ceremonial aspect of culture, and saw culture as achieved by means of a sustained effort
(Bildung) and as culminating in the great achievements of art and thought. In a more radical
perspective, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) saw civilization as subjugation and saw culture, in
contrast, as the artistic and intellectual flowering of intact natures. The period between 1920 and
1939 saw the rise and spread of the idea of popular culture and the notion that culture is a means
of fulfilling human life (Le Rider, 1993).
It is also arguable that Freud rejected this tradition and deliberately ignored the distinction
between culture and civilization because of his theory of the birth of civilization and its link with
sexuality. His theory might be considered an example of the cunning of civilization, in the
dialectical sense in which G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) speaks of the "cunning of Reason"
(Mijolla-Mellor, 1992). The cunning lies in the fact that humanity creates civilization by
transforming and sublimating individuals' instinctual aims and objects and sublimation
simultaneously enables individuals to realize those aims and attain those objects in another form.
Yet in doing this, humanity consolidates a cultural edifice that weighs upon individuals and
imposes restrictions on them by dint of suppression. "There will be brought home to you with
irresistible forces the many developments, repressions, sublimations, and reaction-formations by
means of which a child with a quite other innate endowment grows into what we call a normal
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man, the bearer, and in part the victim, of the civilization that has been so painfully acquired"
(Freud, 1910a, p. 36). Freud thus found himself once more in thrall to his concept of sublimation,
whose shortcomings led him to confuse the coercion of institutionalized education with the
process of individual learning (Bildung), a creative force and source of pleasure (intellectual
pleasure) for the subject. The dialectic in which the sublimation of one group can become the
source of suppression for another group that does not participate in the process of self-education
without doubt constitutes a cunning of civilization, whereby a devitalized culture dons the mantle
of civilizing norms.
Civilization appears as an entity in and of itself, a given for the subject on whom it is imposed:
"The development of civilization appears to us as a peculiar process which mankind undergoes,
and in which several things strike us as familiar. We may characterize this process with reference
to the changes which it brings about in the familiar instinctual dispositions of human beings, to
satisfy which is, after all, the economic task of our lives" (Freud, 1930a, p. 96).
As Freud pointed out in "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" (1908d),
civilization, by imposing sexual frustration, has a direct effect on the genesis of neuroses. Freud
repeatedly claimed that sublimation should not be a norm, since it is possible only for some
people: "Mastering it by sublimation, by deflecting the sexual instinctual forces away from their
sexual aim to higher cultural aims, can be achieved by a minority and then only intermittently,
and least easily during the period of ardent and vigorous youth" (1908d, p. 192). For the others,
submission, especially to sexual morality, has negative consequences ranging from neurosis to a
degradation of sexual objects (1908d). Of those who sublimate, some are heroes, like
Prometheus, whom Freud analyzes in "The Acquisition and Control of Fire" (1932a), or
Hercules, about whom he writes, "The prevention of erotic satisfaction calls up a piece of
aggressiveness against the person who has interfered with the satisfaction, and that this
aggressiveness has itself to be suppressed in turn. But if this is so, it is after all only the
aggressiveness which is transformed into a sense of guilt, by being suppressed and made over to
the superego" (1930a, p. 138).
The process of civilizing is divided among ideals: coercion from the superego, cultural creation,
and the resulting admiration from the ego ideal. "The satisfaction which the ideal offers to the
participants in the culture is thus of a narcissistic nature; it rests on their pride in what has
already been successfully achieved" (Freud, 1927c, p. 13). Here too the civilizing process reveals
its unstable nature, for by reinforcing nationalism, the "narcissism of minor differences," and the
cultural ideals of a people, it can become a pretext for a return to the most savage form of
struggle: war.
Civilization appears as a separate entity, albeit one produced by humankind. It is necessary,
though it is always excessive in its demands and premature in its anticipation: "It is an
ineradicable and innate defect of our and every other civilization, that it imposes on children,
who are driven by instinct and weak in intellect, decisions which only the mature intelligence of
adults can vindicate" (Freud, 1927c, p. 51-52).
Alongside the writings in which Freud directly addresses the question of civilization, there are a
number of anthropological texts in which, starting from the primitive horde and the murder of the
father, he retraces the genesis of the matriarchy, the band of brothers, and the return to
patriarchy. Yet these two perspectives are relatively dissociated in Freud's work to the extent that
his ideas on civilization, with a few digressions to discuss ancient Rome or Louis XIV, the Sun
King, in France, are for the most part related to the twentieth century. Abram Kardiner (1977)
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and Ruth Benedict (1935), writers on culture and psychoanalysis, would later make use of
Freud's interest in anthropology.
Freud's views on the genesis of matriarchy, however, are totally dissociated from his writings
about women. Women, Freud wrote, "come into opposition to civilization and display their
retarding and restraining influence" (1930a, p. 103). Here too the cunning of civilization is on
display: Women form the basis of civilization, "represent[ing] the interests of the family and
sexual life." They are betrayed, however, by the fact that men sublimate to their detriment. "The
woman," Freud concludes, "finds herself forced into the background by the claims of
civilization, and she adopts a hostile attitude toward it" (1930a, p. 104).
Bibliography
Benedict, Ruth. (1935). Patterns of culture. London: Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund. (1908d). Civilized sexual morality and modern nervous illness. SE, 9: 181-204.
——. (1910a). Five lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 11: 7-55.
——. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21: 5-56.
——. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21: 64-145.
——. (1932a). The acquisition and control of fire. SE, 22: 183-193.
Kardiner, Abram. (1977). My analysis with Freud. Reminiscences. New York: W. W. Norton.
Le Rider, Jacques. (1993). Kultur contre civilisation. Topique, 52, 273-287.
Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie de. (1992). Le plaisir de pensée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
Civilization and Its Discontents
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929, and first
published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ("The Uneasiness in Culture"), it
is one of Freud's most important and widely read works.
Contents
In this seminal book, Sigmund Freud enumerates the fundamental tensions between civilization
and the individual. The primary friction stems from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom
and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression. Many of
humankind's primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for
sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community. As a result,
civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe
punishments if such commandments are broken. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent
quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens.
Freud's theory is based on the notion that humans have certain characteristic instincts that are
immutable. Most notable are the desires for sex, and the predisposition to violent aggression
towards authoritative figures and towards sexual competitors, which both obstruct the
gratification of a person's instincts. Human beings are governed by the pleasure principle, and
the pleasure principle is satisfied by the instincts.
Freud begins by taking up where his previous work The Future of an Illusion left off, namely
that the concept of the oceanic feeling is the source of religious sentiment.[2] Freud himself
cannot experience this feeling of dissolution, but he acknowledges its existence and examines it
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as being a regression into an earlier state of consciousness before the ego had differentiated itself
from the world as object. He sticks to his conviction that religion arose out of 'the infant's
helplessness and the longing for the father', and 'imagine[s] that the oceanic feeling became
connected with religion later on'.
The next chapter delves into these childhood states of consciousness to explore how the world as
source of gratification of desires loses appeal once the infant becomes aware that the world can
also be a source of suffering and pain. The ego of the child forms over the oceanic feeling to
separate itself from the negative aspects of the world, and so that the infant will be better able to
act towards securing happiness in accordance with the Pleasure Principle. Freud claims that the
'purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle' and the rest of the chapter is
an exploration of various styles of human adaptation we use to secure happiness from the world
while also trying to avoid or limit the sufferings that come our way from our own mortality, from
the natural world, and from the realities of living with others in a society. Freud regards this last
source as 'perhaps more painful to us than any other'. Religion is just one more imposition of the
world that restricts our choice of adaptation and attempts at gratification of our instinctual
desires.
The third section of the book sets about defining civilization and its paradoxical nature of being
the tool we have created to protect ourselves from unhappiness but also our largest source of
unhappiness. People become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the frustration which society
imposes in the service of its cultural ideals. Freud points out that all of the contemporary
advances in science and medicine have not made people any happier, that at best technological
development has been a mixed blessing for human happiness. He asks what society is for if not
to satisfy the pleasure principle, and defines civilization as man achieving only a parody of his
ideals. Civilization is built out of human ideals of beauty, hygiene, and order; and especially for
the exercise of humanity's highest intellectual functions. Freud draws a key analogy between the
development of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual: the anal eroticism
that develops into a need for order and cleanliness, the sublimation of instincts into useful
actions, and the renunciation of instinct by suppression or repression. This final point Freud sees
as an implicit danger in civilization, one that if "not compensated for economically, one can be
certain than serious disorders will ensue." Thus civilization creates discontent and mental
pathology within its members.
Historical context
This work should be also understood in context of contemporary events: World War I
undoubtedly influenced Freud and had an impact on his central observation about the tension
between the individual and civilization. Amidst a nation still recovering from a brutally violent
war, Freud developed thoughts published two years earlier in The Future of an Illusion (1927),
wherein he criticized organized religion as a collective neurosis. Freud, an avowed atheist,
argued that religion has tamed asocial instincts and created a sense of community around a
shared set of beliefs, thus helping a civilization. Yet at the same time organized religion also
exacts an enormous psychological cost to the individual by making him perpetually subordinate
to the primal father figure embodied by God.
Quotations
"...admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological ... At the
height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all
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the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared
to behave as if it were a fact."
"Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by
weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a
garrison in a conquered city."
"One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan
of 'Creation'."
"Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the
economics of the individual's libido."
"The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never received
a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one."
"...readiness for a universal love of mankind and the world represents the highest standpoint
which man can reach. Even at this early stage of the discussion I should like to bring forward my
two main objections to this view. A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part
of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of
love."
"Man has become, so to speak, a God with artificial limbs." (29)
"Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger
than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The
power of this community is then set up as 'right' in opposition to the power of the individual,
which is condemned as brute force."
"The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their
cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the
human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the
present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to
such an extent that with their help they would no difficulty in exterminating one another to the
last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness
and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two 'Heavenly
Powers', eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally
immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents
Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud
(this excerpt is from Freud's work of the same title: pp. 33-35, 91)
We come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention
holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should
be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention
astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain
fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate
from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.
How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange attitude of hostility
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to civilization? I believe that the basis of it was a deep and long-standing dissatisfaction with the
then existing state of civilization and that on that basis a condemnation of it was built up,
occasioned by certain specific historical events. I think I know what the last and the last but one
of those occasions were. I am not learned enough to trace the chain of them far back enough in
the history of the human species; but a factor of this kind hostile to civilization must already
have been at work in the victory of Christendom over the heathen religions. For it was very
closely related to the low estimation put upon earthly life by the Christian doctrine. The last but
one of these occasions was when the progress of voyages of discovery led to contact with
primitive peoples and races. In consequence of insufficient observation and a mistaken view of
their manners and customs, they appeared to Europeans to be leading a simple, happy life with
few wants, a life such as was unattainable by their visitors with their superior civilization. Later
experience has corrected some of those judgements. In many cases the observers had wrongly
attributed to the absence of complicated cultural demands what was in fact due to the bounty of
nature and the ease with which the major human needs were satisfied. The last occasion is
especially familiar to us. It arose when people came to know about the mechanism of the
neuroses, which threaten to undermine the modicum of happiness enjoyed by civilized men. It
was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of
frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was inferred
from this that the abolition or reduction of those demands would result in a return to possibilities
of happiness.
There is also an added factor of disappointment. During the last few generations mankind has
made an extraordinary advance in the natural sciences and in their technical application and has
established his control over nature in a way never before imagined. The single steps of this
advance are common knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Men are proud of
those achievements, and have a right to be. But they seem to have observed that this newly-won
power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a
longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable
satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not made them feel happier.
If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the
individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis
that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization
possibly the whole of mankind have become 'neurotic'?
http://www.primitivism.com/discontents.htm
On Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents
[The following is the text of a short lecture delivered in Liberal Studies 402 by Ian Johnston in January 1993. This
document is in the public domain, released June 1999]
For comments or questions, please contact Ian Johnston
http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/freud.htm
In this lecture I want to offer a few remarks on Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, paying
particular attention to the connections between this book and other titles we have studied,
particularly the Greeks. I don't have an overall argumentative point to make about Freud, except to
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offer a crude analogy: that Freud here is playing Plato to Nietzsche's Homer. This is a very crude
analogy in some respects because, as I hope to point out, although Freud is very like Plato in some
respects, Nietzsche is only responding to a part of the Iliad and for his own purposes overlooks
some essential features. The main focus of my remarks is Chapter VII, that section of the text where
Freud raises the question of what means civilization employs to inhibit what he sees as the innate
instinctual aggressiveness of human beings.
You will recall that fundamental to Freud's view of civilization is the idea that human beings are
essentially biological creatures with strong instincts, among which is aggression, which Freud calls
"an original self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man . . . the greatest impediment to civilization."
The question then obviously arises: How does civilization channel, cope with, control, or suppress
this anti-social instinct? In Chapter VII Freud develops the theory of the super-ego, the
internalization of aggressiveness and redirecting of it back onto the ego and the consequent creation
in human beings of guilt, which expresses itself as a "need for punishment." And this primal guilt is,
according to Freud, the origin of civilization.
Now, I have always had some trouble understanding and accepting Freud's notion of guilt, largely
because, in spite of what other members of the team tell me, I don't suffer from it. So Freud's
theory, fascinating as it is, leaves me with a sense that it is, in some sense false or incomplete. To
explain what I mean, I'd like to return to Homer's Iliad for a moment. There, you will recall, we
witnessed a society which organized itself in complex ways without any apparent sense of guilt.
People in the Iliad function without this internalized authority, without a sense of sin, without
everything that Freud tells us is necessary for civilization. The warriors do not weigh the perils of sin
in their mental activity (which appears very different from our own), nor do they suffer internalized
punishment when they make a mistake (e.g., Agamemnon's folly).
They do not manifest these characteristics because, as we talked about, the group there is controlled
above all, not by some individual psychological process but rather by social conventions, above all
by the rules of status and shame. These provide the warriors with a shared sense of what they, as
individuals in a cohesive group must do from one moment to the next. The traditional conventions
enable each person to evaluate himself or herself in accordance, not with internalized authorities but
with social recognition or social disapproval. And these conventions are so strong, that they can
channel aggressiveness and, as in the case of Hector standing before the walls of Troy, counter the
strongest instincts.
In other words, Homer's world, it appears stands somewhat in contrast to Freud's views. And, in my
opinion, it offers in some ways a more persuasive and healthier morality than that developed by
Freud. It does so, in my view, because it stresses the social component of human identify,
motivation, deliberation, choice, and responsibility.
Homer, as we discussed at some length, thus sees the proper way to live as a matter of self-assertion
within the limits set by the group. There is no complex internal agonizing to be undergone: we attain
full humanity by seeking group recognition and by avoiding shame. Happiness is a matter of acting
in society in particular ways.
When we read Plato, we studied the great attack on this traditional system of social behaviour as the
basis of the best life. Plato takes issue with the social, conventional, traditional nature of the
Homeric sense of the self and of appropriate behaviour. He does this, above all, by seeking to
internalize our sense of ourselves, by offering an image of the psyche as a dynamic conflict between
the different levels and by stressing that a virtuous life depends, more than anything else, on
achieving a psychic harmony between the competing elements, in which there is a clear authority
over the destructive elements. In that sense, although his terminology is different from Freud's,
Plato is clearly initiating a project in some interesting ways very like Freud's.
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One might well ask, "Why is it that Plato is so determined to break down the traditional social ethic
of shame and status?" And I think the simple answer is that the traditions had become incapable of
holding society peacefully together. Plato witnessed the civil war in which the Greek states destroyed
each other, in which the controlling forces of the group had failed miserably to make men act in
civilized ways. He therefore launched a project seeking to ground moral behaviour in a different
sense of the self.
This is the aspect Nietzsche calls attention to when, in the Genealogy of Morals, he says the entire issue
boils down to Homer versus Plato. He sees Plato as the great problem precisely because of this
internalization of authority, of raising reason over spontaneous feelings, or seeking to harness what
Nietzsche most admired about the Homeric warriors, their heroic irrational assertiveness in the face
of terrible circumstances, what Nietzsche called the pessimism of the strong. For Nietzsche, this was
their essential quality, the aspect of their response that he wants modern Übermenschen to see as the
proper basis for their own full emancipation. Nietzsche is prepared to overlook the social
constraints upon the Homeric warrior (and thus one can hardly argue that he has a full appreciation
of the complexity of their conduct). Still, Nietzsche's emphasis on the difference between Homer
and Plato is a useful reminder of the central significance of Plato's attempt to reground Greek
behaviour: the internalization of authority and the metaphor of a self divided against itself.
Like, Freud, Plato is fairly pessimistic about his scheme having any long-term progressive effect. The
Republic may be a utopian vision, but it doesn't seem particularly optimistic about its chances of
being realized. But there's a sense that if we are to established civilized life properly, then the first
thing we must attend to is the individual's sense of his or her own psychological and therefore moral
makeup. In that sense, Plato and Freud are very similar.
However, one mustn't overstate the similarities. For Plato starts with a very different conception of
human beings than does Freud, and Plato is still concerned with a fairly rigid control of human
beings through social institutions. The understanding which Plato wants us to accept is, it seems,
available only to relatively few. The others will have to conduct themselves in accordance with the
dictates of those who do understand, and the law, education, and everything else must be so
organized as to make sure these social arrangements are put into place. In other words, Plato, unlike
Freud, is very alert to the particular ways in which human beings' social needs must be structured
and institutionalized so as to encourage the development of the proper harmony. Another way of
saying is to stress that Plato is not a liberal with a faith in individual freedom; whereas, Freud clearly
is. (More about that later).
In passing we might notice that Aristotle, as we saw, also follows Plato in basing the good life upon
a notion of the proper psychological disposition. The major difference between the two, of course,
is that Aristotle is a lot less nervous than Plato about human feelings and about human traditions.
Thus in Aristotle's Ethics, we get a sense that the good life is both a matter of psychological
adjustment and training with a generous helping of self-assertion in a particular group. For Aristotle,
following Homer, still sees human beings as most typically shaped by their political affiliations, social
identities, and relationships (in the widest sense of the term).
Now, what interests me about Chapter VII in Civilization and Its Discontents is the way in which Freud
briefly confronts what Homer is talking about, acknowledges its existence, and then essentially
forgets about it. For me this is a significant and potentially damaging fudging of an important issue:
namely the issue of the extent to which human beings are not just driven by biological instincts but
also by complex social needs.
In Chapter VII, Freud does pay attention to the effects of shame and shame culture, although in this
book he doesn't call it that. He refers (on p. 85) to the stage that a culture must go through in order
to achieve the fully developed super ego. According to Freud, the first stage is "social anxiety"
according to which people are controlled by what others think of their conduct. In Freud's view
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much of his own society is generally ruled in this way. But he also claims that civilization must
develop beyond that point to the internalization of authority, which is a "higher stage." In other
words, Freud's theory is directing us to see that behaviour controlled by social conventions is
somehow "cruder" or "more primitive" than behaviour in which each individual is controlled largely
by an authority working within his or her own psyche. He wants, to put the matter very simply, to
see morality less as a matter of shame (that is, socially determined) than of guilt (that is, individually
determined). In this project, Freud is following closely in Plato's footsteps, at least in intention, if
not in method.
There's a sense, too, of certain difficulties in Freud's notion of remorse, a feeling which arises before
the origin of guilt by the actions of sons in killing the father they love. This would seem to suggest a
type of moral feeling based, not on internal authority and self-punishment, but on a common
awareness of an injury to a member of the group and a sense of having done something injurious to
the group.
And so Freud doesn't really dwell on the importance of the shame and status. In fact having
established the stage of "social anxiety" as a path on the route to the development of guilt,
conscience, and the superego, he forgets about the distinction, later calling them both guilt. The
reason for this, I would suggest, is that Freud generally wishes to avoid having to explore any
possible social origins for unhappiness in order to avoid compromising his notion of the human
being as essentially a biological creature governed by instincts, in which in some fundamental way,
human beings are basically very aggressively hostile to each other by nature.
Given what Freud says about "social anxiety" and about my own sense of being much more strongly
motivated by shame than by guilt, I am naturally led to wonder why Freud is so determined to play
down the social component of human life--to stress animal instincts rather than social needs, to
make the dynamics of the individual psyche more fundamental than the dynamics of group
interaction, to see the crucial aspect in the best available life the development of a harsh internal
authority which punishes us, not only for incorrect actions, but also for sinful wishes and intentions.
Why, in other words, is Freud so un-Homeric.
I think there are a number of answers. Depending upon how persuasive one finds this book, any
one of these might be turned into a major criticism of this entire theory.
In the first place, Freud was a biological scientist, more interested in the working of individual
psychology than in group dynamics. Obviously what he has to say can be used and is used to make
many grand theories about social phenomena. But Freud wants to remain true to where all his
investigations started, inside the psyche of the individual.
This quality is what makes Freud a liberal in the best traditions of John Stuart Mill. Like Mill, Freud's
goal is to increase (even if only slightly) individual freedom. To do that, Freud believes, we have to
give human beings a better sense of how they function psychologically, of the dynamic problems
which exist within their own personalities. A better knowledge of these, Freud believes, will not only
make people more psychologically healthy, but it will, in the best traditions of Plato, make them
more psychically harmonious and therefore, within certain limits, happier, better people. For Freud,
as for Mill, emancipating the individual from the group conventions (for example, by internalizing
the authoritative judge of his actions) is much more important than stressing human social needs
(e.g. his remarks about work). But, unlike Nietzsche, Freud does not endorse unlimited self assertion
in contempt for the group, for those who are confident and spontaneous enough to carry out such a
project. For Freud that is clearly beyond the capacity of ordinary people and the unleashed
aggressions would destroy more than they would create.
Freud, like Plato, witnessed the sudden catastrophic break up of traditional social groupings and the
collapse of apparently stable social units which had functioned to organize people's sense of
themselves for several generations. In a world where so many millions become refugees, immigrants,
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displaced people, transients, and where many social groups are so large that we lose our sense of
belonging to anything manageable, what reliable and properly sized group is there in which we can
put our faith? In many respects, Civilization and Its Discontents is very much a post-World War I book,
facing up to the gloomy recognition that some of the most fundamental requirements of civilized
life seem to be beyond human beings much of the time and that the social environment offers no
hope for radical improvement.
The question however remains: To what extent is Freud's project here, his vision of civilized human
beings as permanently unhappy biological instinctual creatures capable of alleviating but never
removing the alienating pressures of communal life--to what extent is that a useful basis for
understanding human life as we live it, as individuals in a civilized group? I don't propose to answer
that here, but it is a question to which answers range all the way from no use at all (a manifestation
of the cover up of advanced capitalism), to important but in need of some major qualifications to
address the imposed alienating effects of the superego, and to an important advance in humanity's
understanding of itself.
What is Primitivism? (v .1)
John Filiss
http://www.primitivism.com/what-is-primitivism.htm
The following is my own attempt to define primitivism.
Primitivism is the pursuit of ways of life running counter to the development of technology, its
alienating antecedents, and the ensemble of changes wrought by both.
Technology is here defined as tool use based upon division of labor...that is, tool manufacture
and utilization that has become sufficiently complex to require specialization, implying both a
separation and eventual stratification among individuals in the community, along with the rise of
toil in the form of specialized, repetitive tasks.
The antecedents to technological development have been variously conjectured, but the answer
to the question remains open. The best known writings along these lines are those of John Zerzan
that question symbolic culture and its manifestation in number, language, religion, and ritual.
Poorly understood in the anarchist milieu in which they first appeared, these types of
explorations are especially important for their deductive value in developing new insights and
evolving solutions.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand primitivism is as a counterweight to the pull of
technology. Primitivism as a whole is the positioning of a counter-force to the thrust of
technological progress. Given the integrated nature of technological development, primitivism
may be the only human-oriented 1 response to technology that goes far enough not to be
subsumed by it.
The factors showing the necessity of primitivism are many, and may include
 an awareness that some societies in history and pre-history compare favorably with our
own in many respects. The best known example of this may be the relative leisure of
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nomadic hunter-gatherer societies in comparison with the omnipresence of work in
modern industrial society.
 a realization of the environmental destruction that appears as a necessary concomitant of
technological progress.
 a concern over the predictions of technological progress made by Kurzweil, Moravec, et
al, 2 describing the fast emergence of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and in
particular artificial intelligence systems that could subject biological humans to economic
and environmental pressures with which our species may be unable to cope.
In fact, an acknowledgement of the potential value of primitivist theory can result from any
deviation, however small, from a technological determinist viewpoint...a deviation that is almost
universal in our society, despite its considerable faith in technological progress.
Primitivism today is an inchoate tendency, particularly considering the enormity of its goal.
Within the context of an open society, the success of primitivism would require the apparent
superiority of a primitivist approach to a technological one in almost every area that is ultimately
germane to human well-being. Anything short of this accomplishment may involve a synthesis of
primitivist and technological approaches in our society, but not the ousting of the latter by the
former.
In contrast with many understandings of modern primitivism, the central issue presented here is
not primarily a political problem, but numerous technical ones. 3 And unlike most musings in
political theory, the kind of problem solving and awareness needed to push the primitivist project
forward--e.g., insights into improving health--can often serve personal ends apart from
intellectual hobbyism or even their widespread adoption in our society. For the individual,
primitivism as an area of exploration has the promise of a much more fulfilling pursuit than the
study of most political philosophies. Whether it can realize that promise will be crucial to the
question of its success on a social scale.
Does the trajectory of primitivism by itself reveal the most advantageous mode of existence for
human beings? That is a question that nobody can answer. Whether our path should be
primitivism, technology, or some synthesis between the two, it is time to think clearly about the
days ahead. What is important is the development of a range of options for bettering the human
condition, and it is in the expansion of those options that we can find our path to the best possible
way of life.
Footnotes
1. Deep ecology and similar extreme environmental viewpoints largely argue for an end to
industrial society as a sacrificial gesture arising from an awareness of environmental degradation
caused by technology. Few people would find this kind of argument compelling.
2. Ray Kurzweil is an accomplished inventor and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Hans Moravec is one of the world's leading roboticists, and the author of two books, notably
Mind Children, and numerous essays. Both are well worth reading for anyone with an interest
in the direction of future technologies. While both of them are technological optimists,
Moravec's projections in particular go well beyond even my own in their austerity... although I
don't question his overall awareness of the enormous pressures that humans will face from
Artificial Intelligences.
3. It is unfortunate that primitivism is viewed largely as a political perspective, when nearly the
entirety of its project falls outside the realm of specifically political solutions.
The Primitivist Critique of Civilization
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Richard Heinberg
http://www.primitivism.com/primitivist-critique.htm
A paper presented at the 24th annual meeting of the International Society for the Comparative
Study of Civilizations at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, June 15, 1995.
I. Prologue
Having been chosen--whether as devil's advocate or sacrificial lamb, I am not sure--to lead off
this discussion on the question, "Was Civilization a Mistake?", I would like to offer some
preliminary thoughts.
From the viewpoint of any non-civilized person, this consideration would appear to be steeped in
irony. Here we are, after all, some of the most civilized people on the planet, discussing in the
most civilized way imaginable whether civilization itself might be an error. Most of our fellow
civilians would likely find our discussion, in addition to being ironic, also disturbing and
pointless: after all, what person who has grown up with cars, electricity, and television would
relish the idea of living without a house, and of surviving only on wild foods?
Nevertheless, despite the possibility that at least some of our remarks may be ironic, disturbing,
and pointless, here we are. Why? I can only speak for myself. In my own intellectual
development I have found that a critique of civilization is virtually inescapable for two reasons.
The first has to do with certain deeply disturbing trends in the modern world. We are, it seems,
killing the planet. Revisionist "wise use" advocates tell us there is nothing to worry about;
dangers to the environment, they say, have been wildly exaggerated. To me this is the most
blatant form of wishful thinking. By most estimates, the oceans are dying, the human population
is expanding far beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the land, the ozone layer is
disappearing, and the global climate is showing worrisome signs of instability. Unless drastic
steps are taken, in fifty years the vast majority of the world's population will likely be existing in
conditions such that the lifestyle of virtually any undisturbed primitive tribe would be paradise
by comparison.
Now, it can be argued that civilization per se is not at fault, that the problems we face have to do
with unique economic and historical circumstances. But we should at least consider the
possibility that our modern industrial system represents the flowering of tendencies that go back
quite far. This, at any rate, is the implication of recent assessments of the ecological ruin left in
the wake of the Roman, Mesopotamian, Chinese, and other prior civilizations. Are we perhaps
repeating their errors on a gargantuan scale?
If my first reason for criticizing civilization has to do with its effects on the environment, the
second has to do with its impact on human beings. As civilized people, we are also domesticated.
We are to primitive peoples as cows and sheep are to bears and eagles. On the rental property
where I live in California my landlord keeps two white domesticated ducks. These ducks have
been bred to have wings so small as to prevent them from flying. This is a convenience for their
keepers, but compared to wild ducks these are pitiful creatures.
Many primal peoples tend to view us as pitiful creatures, too--though powerful and dangerous
because of our technology and sheer numbers. They regard civilization as a sort of social disease.
We civilized people appear to act as though we were addicted to a powerful drug--a drug that
comes in the forms of money, factory-made goods, oil, and electricity. We are helpless without
this drug, so we have come to see any threat to its supply as a threat to our very existence.
Therefore we are easily manipulated--by desire (for more) or fear (that what we have will be
taken away)--and powerful commercial and political interests have learned to orchestrate our
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desires and fears in order to achieve their own purposes of profit and control. If told that the
production of our drug involves slavery, stealing, and murder, or the ecological equivalents, we
try to ignore the news so as not to have to face an intolerable double bind.
Since our present civilization is patently ecologically unsustainable in its present form, it follows
that our descendants will be living very differently in a few decades, whether their new way of
life arises by conscious choice or by default. If humankind is to choose its path deliberately, I
believe that our deliberations should include a critique of civilization itself, such as we are
undertaking here. The question implicit in such a critique is, What have we done poorly or
thoughtlessly in the past that we can do better now? It is in this constructive spirit that I offer the
comments that follow.
II. Civilization and Primitivism
What Is Primitivism?
The image of a lost Golden Age of freedom and innocence is at the heart of all the world's
religions, is one of the most powerful themes in the history of human thought, and is the earliest
and most characteristic expression of primitivism--the perennial belief in the necessity of a return
to origins.
As a philosophical idea, primitivism has had as its proponents Lao Tze, Rousseau, and Thoreau,
as well as most of the pre-Socratics, the medieval Jewish and Christian theologians, and 19thand 20th-century anarchist social theorists, all of whom argued (on different bases and in
different ways) the superiority of a simple life close to nature. More recently, many
anthropologists have expressed admiration for the spiritual and material advantages of the ways
of life of the world's most "primitive" societies--the surviving gathering-and-hunting peoples
who now make up less than one hundredth of one percent of the world's population.
Meanwhile, as civilization approaches a crisis precipitated by overpopulation and the destruction
of the ecological integrity of the planet, primitivism has enjoyed a popular resurgence, by way of
increasing interest in shamanism, tribal customs, herbalism, radical environmentalism, and
natural foods. There is a widespread (though by no means universally shared) sentiment that
civilization has gone too far in its domination of nature, and that in order to survive--or, at least,
to live with satisfaction--we must regain some of the spontaneity and naturalness of our early
ancestors.
What Is Civilization?
There are many possible definitions of the word civilization. Its derivation--from civis, "town" or
"city"--suggests that a minimum definition would be, "urban culture." Civilization also seems to
imply writing, division of labor, agriculture, organized warfare, growth of population, and social
stratification.
Yet the latest evidence calls into question the idea that these traits always go together. For
example, Elizabeth Stone and Paul Zimansky's assessment of power relations in the
Mesopotamian city of Maskan-shapir (published in the April 1995 Scientific American) suggests
that urban culture need not imply class divisions. Their findings seem to show that civilization in
its earliest phase was free of these. Still, for the most part the history of civilization in the Near
East, the Far East, and Central America, is also the history of kingship, slavery, conquest,
agriculture, overpopulation, and environmental ruin. And these traits continue in civilization's
most recent phases--the industrial state and the global market--though now the state itself takes
the place of the king, and slavery becomes wage labor and de facto colonialism administered
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through multinational corporations. Meanwhile, the mechanization of production (which began
with agriculture) is overtaking nearly every avenue of human creativity, population is
skyrocketing, and organized warfare is resulting in unprecedented levels of bloodshed.
Perhaps, if some of these undesirable traits were absent from the very first cities, I should focus
my critique on "Empire Culture" instead of the broader target of "civilization." However, given
how little we still know about the earliest urban centers of the Neolithic era, it is difficult as yet
to draw a clear distinction between the two terms.
III. Primitivism Versus Civilization
Wild Self/Domesticated Self
People are shaped from birth by their cultural surroundings and by their interactions with the
people closest to them. Civilization manipulates these primary relationships in such a way as to
domesticate the infant--that is, so as to accustom it to life in a social structure one step removed
from nature. The actual process of domestication is describable as follows, using terms borrowed
from the object-relations school of psychology.
The infant lives entirely in the present moment in a state of pure trust and guilelessness, deeply
bonded with her mother. But as she grows, she discovers that her mother is a separate entity with
her own priorities and limits. The infant's experience of relationship changes from one of
spontaneous trust to one that is suffused with need and longing. This creates a gap between Self
and Other in the consciousness of the child, who tries to fill this deepening rift with transitional
objects--initially, perhaps a teddy bear; later, addictions and beliefs that serve to fill the psychic
gap and thus provide a sense of security. It is the powerful human need for transitional objects
that drives individuals in their search for property and power, and that generates bureaucracies
and technologies as people pool their efforts.
This process does not occur in the same way in the case of primitive childbearing, where the
infant is treated with indulgence, is in constant physical contact with a caregiver throughout
infancy, and later undergoes rites of passage. In primal cultures the need for transitional objects
appears to be minimized. Anthropological and psychological research converge to suggest that
many of civilized people's emotional ills come from our culture's abandonment of natural
childrearing methods and initiatory rites and its systematic substitution of alienating pedagogical
practices from crib through university.
Health: Natural or Artificial?
In terms of health and quality of life, civilization has been a mitigated disaster. S. Boyd Eaton,
M.D., et al., argued in The Paleolithic Prescription (1988) that pre agricultural peoples enjoyed a
generally healthy way of life, and that cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, emphysema,
hypertension, and cirrhosis--which together lead to 75 percent of all mortality in industrialized
nations--are caused by our civilized lifestyles. In terms of diet and exercise, preagricultural
lifestyles showed a clear superiority to those of agricultural and civilized peoples.
Much-vaunted increases in longevity in civilized populations have resulted not so much from
wonder drugs, as merely from better sanitation--a corrective for conditions created by the
overcrowding of cities; and from reductions in infant mortality. It is true that many lives have
been spared by modern antibiotics. Yet antibiotics also appear responsible for the evolution of
resistant strains of microbes, which health officials now fear could produce unprecedented
epidemics in the next century.
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The ancient practice of herbalism, evidence of which dates back at least 60,000 years, is
practiced in instinctive fashion by all higher animals. Herbal knowledge formed the basis of
modern medicine and remains in many ways superior to it. In countless instances, modern
synthetic drugs have replaced herbs not because they are more effective or safer, but because
they are more profitable to manufacture.
Other forms of "natural" healing--massage, the "placebo effect," the use of meditation and
visualization--are also being shown effective. Medical doctors Bernie Siegel and Deepak Chopra
are critical of mechanized medicine and say that the future of the healing professions lies in the
direction of attitudinal and natural therapies.
Spirituality: Raw or Cooked?
Spirituality means different things to different people--humility before a higher power or powers;
compassion for the suffering of others; obedience to a lineage or tradition; a felt connection with
the Earth or with Nature; evolution toward "higher" states of consciousness; or the mystical
experience of oneness with all life or with God. With regard to each of these fundamental ways
of defining or experiencing the sacred, spontaneous spirituality seems to become regimented,
dogmatized, even militarized, with the growth of civilization. While some of the founders of
world religions were intuitive primitivists (Jesus, Lao Tze, the Buddha), their followers have
often fostered the growth of dominance hierarchies.
The picture is not always simple, though. The thoroughly civilized Roman Catholic Church
produced two of the West's great primitivists--St. Francis and St. Clair; while the neo-shamanic,
vegetarian, and herbalist movements of early 20th century Germany attracted arch-authoritarians
Heinrich Himmler and Adolph Hitler. Of course, Nazism's militarism and rigid dominator
organization were completely alien to primitive life, while St. Francis's and St. Clair's voluntary
poverty and treatment of animals as sacred were reminiscent of the lifestyle and worldview of
most gathering-and-hunting peoples. If Nazism was atavistic, it was only highly selectively so.
A consideration of these historical ironies is useful in helping us isolate the essentials of true
primitivist spirituality--which include spontaneity, mutual aid, encouragement of natural
diversity, love of nature, and compassion for others. As spiritual teachers have always insisted, it
is the spirit (or state of consciousness) that is important, not the form (names, ideologies, and
techniques). While from the standpoint of Teilhard de Chardin's idea of spiritual evolutionism,
primitivist spirituality may initially appear anti-evolutionary or regressive, the essentials we have
cited are timeless and trans-evolutionary--they are available at all stages, at all times, for all
people. It is when we cease to see civilization in terms of theories of cultural evolution and see it
merely as one of several possible forms of social organization that we begin to understand why
religion can be liberating, enlightening, and empowering when it holds consistently to primitivist
ideals; or deadening and oppressive when it is co-opted to serve the interests of power.
Economics: Free or Unaffordable?
At its base, economics is about how people relate with the land and with one another in the
process of fulfilling their material wants and needs. In the most primitive societies, these
relations are direct and straightforward. Land, shelter, and food are free. Everything is shared,
there are no rich people or poor people, and happiness has little to do with accumulating material
possessions. The primitive lives in relative abundance (all needs and wants are easily met) and
has plenty of leisure time.
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Civilization, in contrast, straddles two economic pillars--technological innovation and the
marketplace. "Technology" here includes everything from the plow to the nuclear reactor--all are
means to more efficiently extract energy and resources from nature. But efficiency implies the
reification of time, and so civilization always brings with it a preoccupation with past and future;
eventually the present moment nearly vanishes from view. The elevation of efficiency over other
human values is epitomized in the factory--the automated workplace--in which the worker
becomes merely an appendage of the machine, a slave to clocks and wages.
The market is civilization's means of equating dissimilar things through a medium of exchange.
As we grow accustomed to valuing everything according to money, we tend to lose a sense of the
uniqueness of things. What, after all, is an animal worth, or a mountain, or a redwood tree, or an
hour of human life? The market gives us a numerical answer based on scarcity and demand. To
the degree that we believe that such values have meaning, we live in a world that is desacralized
and desensitized, without heart or spirit.
We can get some idea of ways out of our ecologically ruinous, humanly deadening economic
cage by examining not only primitive lifestyles, but the proposals of economist E. F.
Schumacher, the experiences of people in utopian communities in which technology and money
are marginalized, and the lives of individuals who have adopted an attitude of voluntary
simplicity.
Government: Bottom Up or Top Down?
In the most primitive human societies there are no leaders, bosses, politics, laws, crime, or taxes.
There is often little division of labor between women and men, and where such division exists
both gender's contributions are often valued more or less equally. Probably as a result, many
foraging peoples are relatively peaceful (anthropologist Richard Lee found that "the !Kung
[Bushmen of southern Africa] hate fighting, and think anybody who fought would be stupid").
With agriculture usually come division of labor, increased sexual inequality, and the beginnings
of social hierarchy. Priests, kings, and organized, impersonal warfare all seem to come together
in one package. Eventually, laws and borders define the creation of the fully fledged state. The
state as a focus of coercion and violence has reached its culmination in the 19th and 20th
centuries in colonialism, fascism, and Stalinism. Even the democratic industrial state functions
essentially as an instrument of multinational corporate-style colonial oppression and domestic
enslavement, its citizens merely being given the choice between selected professional
bureaucrats representing political parties with slightly varying agendas for the advancement of
corporate power.
Beginning with William Godwin in the early 19th century, anarchist social philosophers have
offered a critical counterpoint to the increasingly radical statism of most of the world's civilized
political leaders. The core idea of anarchism is that human beings are fundamentally sociable;
left to themselves, they tend to cooperate to their mutual benefit. There will always be
exceptions, but these are best dealt with informally and on an individual basis. Many anarchists
cite the Athenian polis, the "sections" in Paris during the French Revolution, the New England
town meetings of the 18th century, the popular assemblies in Barcelona in the late 1930s, and the
Paris general strike of 1968 as positive examples of anarchy in action. They point to the
possibility of a kind of social ecology, in which diversity and spontaneity are permitted to
flourish unhindered both in human affairs and in Nature.
While critics continue to describe anarchism as a practical failure, organizational and systems
theorists Tom Peters and Peter Senge are advocating the transformation of hierarchical,
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bureaucratized organizations into more decentralized, autonomous, spontaneous ones. This
transformation is presently underway in--of all places--the very multinational corporations that
form the backbone of industrial civilization.
Civilization and Nature
Civilized people are accustomed to an anthropocentric view of the world. Our interest in the
environment is utilitarian: it is of value because it is of use (or potential use) to human beings--if
only as a place for camping and recreation.
Primitive peoples, in contrast, tended to see nature as intrinsically meaningful. In many cultures
prohibitions surrounded the overhunting of animals or the felling of trees. The aboriginal peoples
of Australia believed that their primary purpose in the cosmic scheme of things was to take care
of the land, which meant performing ceremonies for the periodic renewal of plant and animal
species, and of the landscape itself.
The difference in effects between the anthropocentric and ecocentric worldviews is incalculable.
At present, we human beings--while considering ourselves the most intelligent species on the
planet--are engaged in the most unintelligent enterprise imaginable: the destruction of our own
natural life-support system. We need here only mention matters such as the standard treatment of
factory-farmed domesticated food animals, the destruction of soils, the pollution of air and water,
and the extinctions of wild species, as these horrors are well documented. It seems unlikely that
these could ever have arisen but for an entrenched and ever-deepening trend of thinking that
separates humanity from its natural context and denies inherent worth to non-human nature.
The origin and growth of this tendency to treat nature as an object separate from ourselves can be
traced to the Neolithic revolution, and through the various stages of civilization's intensification
and growth. One can also trace the countercurrent to this tendency from the primitivism of the
early Taoists to that of today's deep ecologists, ecofeminists, and bioregionalists.
How We Compensate for Our Loss of Nature
How do we make up for the loss of our primitive way of life? Psychotherapy, exercise and diet
programs, the vacation and entertainment industries, and social welfare programs are
necessitated by civilized, industrial lifestyles. The cumulative cost of these compensatory efforts
is vast; yet in many respects they are only palliative.
The medical community now tells us that our modern diet of low-fiber, high-fat processed foods
is disastrous to our health. But what exactly is the cost--in terms of hospital stays, surgeries,
premature deaths, etc.? A rough but conservative estimate runs into the tens of billions of dollars
per year in North America alone.
At the forefront of the "wellness" movement are advocates of natural foods, exercise programs
(including hiking and backpacking), herbalism, and other therapies that aim specifically to bring
overcivilized individuals back in touch with the innate source of health within their own stressed
and repressed bodies.
Current approaches in psychology aim to retrieve lost portions of the primitive psyche via "inner
child" work, through which adults compensate for alienated childhoods; or men's and women's
vision quests, through which civilized people seek to access the "wild man" or "wild woman"
within.
All of these physically, psychologically, and even spiritually-oriented efforts are helpful
antidotes for the distress of civilization. One must wonder, however, whether it wouldn't be
17
better simply to stop creating the problems that these programs and therapies are intended to
correct.
IV. Questions and Objections
Isn't civilization simply the inevitable expression of the evolutionary urge as it is translated
through human society? Isn't primitivism therefore regressive?
We are accustomed to thinking of the history of Western civilization as an inevitable
evolutionary progression. But this implies that all the world's peoples who didn't spontaneously
develop civilizations of their own were less highly evolved than ourselves, or simply
"backward." Not all anthropologists who have spent time with such peoples think this way.
Indeed, according to the cultural materialist school of thought, articulated primarily by Marvin
Harris, social change in the direction of technological innovation and social stratification is
fueled not so much by some innate evolutionary urge as by crises brought on by overpopulation
and resource exhaustion.
Wasn't primitive life terrible? Would we really want to go back to hunting and gathering, living
without modern comforts and conveniences?
Putting an urban person in the wilderness without comforts and conveniences would be as cruel
as abandoning a domesticated pet by the roadside. Even if the animal survived, it would be
miserable. And we would probably be miserable too, if the accouterments of civilization were
abruptly withdrawn from us. Yet the wild cousins of our hypothetical companion animal-whether a parrot, a canine, or a feline--live quite happily away from houses and packaged pet
food and resist our efforts to capture and domesticate them, just as primitive peoples live quite
happily without civilization and often resist its imposition. Clearly, animals (including people)
can adapt either to wild or domesticated ways of life over the course of several generations,
while adult individuals tend to be much less adaptable. In the view of many of its proponents,
primitivism implies a direction of social change over time, as opposed to an instantaneous, all-ornothing choice. We in the industrial world have gradually accustomed ourselves to a way of life
that appears to be leading toward a universal biological holocaust. The question is, shall we
choose to gradually accustom ourselves to another way of life--one that more successfully
integrates human purposes with ecological imperatives--or shall we cling to our present choices
to the bitter end?
Obviously, we cannot turn back the clock. But we are at a point in history where we not only
can, but must pick and choose among all the present and past elements of human culture to find
those that are most humane and sustainable. While the new culture we will create by doing so
will not likely represent simply an immediate return to wild food gathering, it could restore much
of the freedom, naturalness, and spontaneity that we have traded for civilization's artifices, and it
could include new versions of cultural forms with roots in humanity's remotest past. We need not
slavishly imitate the past; we might, rather, be inspired by the best examples of human
adaptation, past and present. Instead of "going back," we should think of this process as "getting
back on track."
Haven't we gained important knowledge and abilities through civilization? Wouldn't renouncing
these advances be stupid and short-sighted?
If human beings are inherently mostly good, sociable, and creative, it is inevitable that much of
what we have done in the course of the development of civilization should be worth keeping,
even if the enterprise as a whole was skewed. But how do we decide what to keep? Obviously,
we must agree upon criteria. I would suggest that our first criterion must be ecological
sustainability. What activities can be pursued across many generations with minimal
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environmental damage? A second criterion might be, What sorts of activities promote--rather
than degrade--human dignity and freedom?
If human beings are inherently good, then why did we make the "mistake" of creating
civilization? Aren't the two propositions (human beings are good, civilization is bad)
contradictory?
Only if taken as absolutes. Human nature is malleable, its qualities changing somewhat
according to the natural and social environment. Moreover, humankind is not a closed system.
We exist within a natural world that is, on the whole, "good," but that is subject to rare
catastrophes. Perhaps the initial phases of civilization were humanity's traumatized response to
overwhelming global cataclysms accompanying and following the end of the Pleistocene.
Kingship and warfare may have originated as survival strategies. Then, perhaps civilization itself
became a mechanism for re-traumatizing each new generation, thus preserving and regenerating
its own psycho-social basis.
What practical suggestions for the future stem from primitivism? We cannot all revert to
gathering and hunting today because there are just too many of us. Can primitivism offer a
practical design for living?
No philosophy or "-ism" is a magical formula for the solution of all human problems.
Primitivism doesn't offer easy answers, but it does suggest an alternative direction or set of
values. For many centuries, civilization has been traveling in the direction of artificiality, control,
and domination. Primitivism tells us that there is an inherent limit to our continued movement in
that direction, and that at some point we must begin to choose to readapt ourselves to nature. The
point of a primitivist critique of civilization is not necessarily to insist on an absolute rejection of
every aspect of modern life, but to assist in clarifying issues so that we can better understand the
tradeoffs we are making now, deepen the process of renegotiating our personal bargains with
nature, and thereby contribute to the reframing of our society's collective covenants.
V. Some Concluding Thoughts
In any discussion of primitivism we must keep in mind civilization's "good" face--the one
characterized (in Lewis Mumford's words) by
the invention and keeping of the written record, the growth of visual and musical arts, the
effort to widen the circle of communication and economic intercourse far beyond the
range of any local community: ultimately the purpose to make available to all [people]
the discoveries and inventions and creations, the works of art and thought, the values and
purposes that any single group has discovered.
Civilization brings not only comforts, but also the opportunity to think the thoughts of Plato or
Thoreau, to travel to distant places, and to live under the protection of a legal system that
guarantees certain rights. How could we deny the worth of these things?
Naturally, we would like to have it all; we would like to preserve civilization's perceived benefits
while restraining its destructiveness. But we haven't found a way to do that yet. And it is unlikely
that we will while we are in denial about what we have left behind, and about the likely
consequences of what we are doing now.
While I advocate taking a critical look at civilization, I am not suggesting that we are now in
position to render a final judgment on it. It is entirely possible that we are standing on the
threshold of a cultural transformation toward a way of life characterized by relatively higher
degrees of contentment, creativity, justice, and sustainability than have been known in any
human society heretofore. If we are able to follow this transformation through, and if we call the
result "civilization," then we will surely be entitled to declare civilization a resounding success.
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On the Transition: Postscript to Future Primitive
John Zerzan
http://www.primitivism.com/transition.htm
(this piece originally appeared in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. Subscriptions $16 for 4
issues. C.A.L. Press, P.O. Box 1313, Lawrence KS 66044)
"Yeah, the critique is impressive and everything, but just how might we actually get from this
ghastly world to some healed, whole existence?''
I think we should not doubt that such a journey is possible, nor that the explosion necessary to
begin it may be approaching.
The thought of the dominant culture has, of course, always told us that alienated life is
inescapable. In fact, culture or civilization itself expresses this essential dogma: the civilizing
process, as Freud noted, is the forcible trading of a free, natural life for one of unceasing
repression.
Today culture is in a dispirited, used-up state wherever one looks. More important than the
entropy afflicting the logic of culture, however, is what seems to be the active, if inchoate
resistance to it. This is the ray of hope that disturbs the otherwise all-too-depressing race we
witness to determine whether total alienation or the destruction of the biomass will happen first.
People are being stretched and beaten on the rack of everyday emptiness, and the spell of
civilization is fading. Lasch referred to a near-universal rage abroad in society, just under the
surface. It is growing and its symptoms are legion, amounting to a refusal to leave this earth
unsatisfied.
Adorno asked, "What would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at
what is?'' Certainly, the condition of life has become nightmarish enough to justify such a
question, and perhaps also to suggest that something started to go deeply wrong a very long time
back. At least it ought to be demonstrating, moving on toward specifics, that the means of
reproducing the prevailing Death Ship (e.g. its technology) cannot be used to fashion a liberated
world.
Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler wondered, "What is 'common' about the common life? What if some
genius were to do with 'common life' what Einstein did with `matter'? Finding its energetics,
uncovering its radiance.'' Of course, we must all be that 'Einstein', which is exactly what will
unleash a creative energy sufficient to utterly refashion the conditions of human existence. Ten
thousand years of captivity and darkness, to paraphrase Vaneigem, will not withstand ten days of
full-out revolution, which will include the simultaneous reconstruction of our inner selves. Who
doesn't hate modern life? Can what conditioning that remains survive such an explosion of life,
one that ruthlessly removes the sources of such conditioning?
We are obviously being held hostage by capital and its technology, made to feel dependent, even
helpless, by the sheer weight of it all, the massive inertia of centuries of alienated categories,
patterns, values. What could be dispensed with immediately? Borders, governments,
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hierarchy....What else? How fast could more deep-seated forms of authority and separation be
dissolved, such as that of division of labor? I assert, and not, I hope, in the spirit of wishing to
derive blueprints from abstract principle, that I can see no ultimate freedom or wholeness
without the dissolution of the inherent power of specialists of every kind.
Many say that millions would die if the present techno-global fealty to work and the commodity
were scrapped. But this overlooks many potentialities. For example, consider the vast numbers of
people who would be freed from manipulative, parasitic, destructive pursuits for those of
creativity, health, and liberty. At present, in fact, very few contribute in any way to satisfying
authentic needs.
Transporting food thousands of miles, not an atypical pursuit today, is an instance of pointless
activity, as is producing countless tons of herbicide and pesticide poisons. The picture of
humanity starving if a transformation were attempted may be brought into perspective by
reference to a few other agricultural specifics, of a more positive nature. It is perfectly feasible,
generally speaking, that we grow our own food. There are simple approaches, involving no
division of labor, to large yields in small spaces.
Agriculture itself must be overcome, as domestication, and because it removes more organic
matter from the soil than it puts back. Permaculture is a technique that seems to attempt an
agriculture that develops or reproduces itself and thus tends toward nature and away from
domestication. It is one example of promising interim ways to survive while moving away from
civilization. Cultivation within the cities is another aspect of practical transition, and a further
step toward superseding domestication would be a more or less random propagation of plants, a
la Johnny Appleseed.
Regarding urban life, any steps toward autonomy and self-help should be realized, beginning
now, so that cities may be all the more quickly abandoned later. Created out of capital's need to
centralize control of property transactions, religion, and political domination, cities remain as
extended life-destroying monuments to the same basic needs of capital. Something on the order
of what we know now as museums might be a good idea so that post-upheaval generations could
know how grotesque our species' existence became. Moveable celebration sites may be the
nearest configuration to cities that disalienated life will express.
Along with the movement out of cities, paralleling it, one might likely see a movement from
colder climes to warmer ones. The heating of living space in northern areas constitutes an absurd
effort of energy, resources, and time. When humans become once again intimate with the earth,
healthier and more robust, these zones would probably be peopled again, in altogether different
ways.
As for population itself, its growth is no more a natural or neutral phenomenon than its
technology. When life is fatally out of balance, the urge to reproduce appears as compensation
for impoverishment, as with the non-civilized gatherer-hunters surviving today, population levels
would be relatively quite low.
Enrico Guidoni pointed out that architectural structures necessarily reveal a great deal about their
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social context. Similarly, the isolation and sterility of shelter in class society is hardly accidental,
and deserves to be scrapped in toto. Rudofsky's Architecture Without Architects deals with some
examples of shelter produced not by specialists, but by spontaneous and evolving communal
activity. Imagine the inviting richness of dwellings, each unique not mass produced, and a part of
a serene mutuality that one might expect to emerge from the collapse of boundaries and artificial
scarcities, material and emotional.
Probably 'health' in a new world will be a matter even less recognizable than the question of
shelter The dehumanized industrial 'medicine' of today is totally complicitous with the overall
processes of society which rob us of life and vitality. Of countless examples of the criminality of
the present, direct profiting from human misery must rank near the top. Alternative healing
practices are already challenging the dominant mode, but the only real solution is the abolition of
a setup that by its very nature spawns an incredible range of physical and psychic immiseration.
From Reich to Mailer, for example, cancer is recognized as the growth of a general madness
blocked and denied. Before civilization disease was generally nonexistent. How could it have
been otherwise? Where else do degenerative and infectious diseases, emotional maladies, and all
the rest issue if not from work, toxicity, cities, estrangement, fear, unfulfilled lives - the whole
canvas of damaged, alienated reality? Destroying the sources will eradicate the suffering. Minor
exigencies would be treated by herbs and the like, not to mention a diet of pure, non-processed
food.
It seems evident that industrialization and the factories could not be gotten rid of instantly, but
equally clear that their liquidation must be pursued with all the vigor behind the rush of breakout. Such enslavement of people and nature must disappear forever, so that words like
production and economy will have no meaning. A graffito from the rising in France in '68 was
simply 'Quick!' Those partisans apparently realized the need to move rapidly forward all the way,
with no temporizing or compromise with the old world. Half a revolution would only preserve
domination and cement its hold over us.
A qualitatively different life would entail abolishing exchange, in every form, in favor of the gift
and the spirit of play. Instead of the coercion of work--and how much of the present could
continue without precisely that coercion? --an existence without constraints is an immediate,
central objective. Unfettered pleasure, creative endeavor along the lines of Fourier: according to
the passions of the individual and in a context of complete equality.
What would we keep? "Labor-saving devices?" Unless they involve no division of labor (e.g. a
lever or incline), this concept is a fiction; behind the "saving" is hidden the congealed drudgery
of many and the despoliation of the natural world. As the Parisian group Interrogations put it:
"Today's riches are not human riches; they are riches for capitalism which correspond to a need
to sell and stupefy. The products we manufacture, distribute, and administer are the material
expressions of our alienation.''
Every kind of fear and doubt is cultivated against the prospect or possibility of transforming life,
including the moment of its beginning. "Wouldn't revolt mean mayhem, hoarding, survivalist
violence, etc.?'' But popular uprisings seem to embody strong feelings of joy, unity, and
generosity. Considering the most recent U.S. examples, the urban insurrections of the '60s, New
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York City '77, and Los Angeles '92 -- one is struck overall by the spontaneous sharing, the sharp
drop in interracial violence and violence against women, and even a sense of festival.
Our biggest obstacle lies in forgetting the primacy of the negative. Hesitation, peaceful
coexistence -- this deficiency of desire will prove fatal if allowed to be ascendent. The truly
humanitarian and pacific impulse is that which is committed to relentlessly destroying the
malignant dynamic known as civilization, including its roots. Time is a stunting, confining
imposition of culture, naming is a domination, like counting, an aspect of the distancing of
language. In the horrible extremity of today we can see the need to return all the way to the earth,
to the multi-sensual intimacy of nature that obtained before symbolization made living a reified,
separated caricature of itself. Enchantment might be savored even more brightly this time, for
knowing what our ancestors didn't realize must be avoided.
Tearing up the concrete could begin immediately, as my late friend Bob Brubaker once
counseled. Literally, under the pavement, it's the beach!
====================================================
What is Civilization?
Civilization is a state of development in human society. It embraces intellectual, cultural and also
material development. This mainly includes progress in science and arts. This gives rise to many
political institutions and social organizations and stimulates record-keeoing nad writing. Thus,
civilization also means the culture or society that developed in a certain region or in an epoch.
Example: civilization of ancient Rome, Mayan civilization, Indus Valley Civilization.
The process of civilizing a region or obtaining a civilized state is known as civilization. This
word could also mean 'modern society along with its conveniences'. Other words that could be
used for 'civilization' are: culture or cultivation or refinement. The word is taken from the word
civil. In past, civil was used to mean politeness and propriety. But, today civilization is used for
any society. This society may be simple or complex dwelling.
What are the seven characteristics of
civilization?
In: Ancient History
Answer:
- Cities
- Government
- Religion
- Social Structure
- Writing
- Highly Developed Culture
- Technology
- The Arts
- Stable Food Supply
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1. An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society,
marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of record-keeping,
including writing, and the appearance of complex political and social institutions.
2. The type of culture and society developed by a particular nation or region or in a
particular epoch: Mayan civilization; the civilization of ancient Rome.
3. The act or process of civilizing or reaching a civilized state.
4. Cultural or intellectual refinement; good taste.
5. Modern society with its conveniences: returned to civilization after camping in the
mountains.
6. The total product of human creativity and intellect: culture.
7. Enlightenment and excellent taste resulting from intellectual development: cultivation,
culture, refinement.
TED:
My favorite neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the functions of mirror neurons.
Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of
which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.
http://derrenbrown.co.uk/blog/2010/01/vilayanur-ramachandran-neurons-shaped-civilization/
From Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/ownwords/civ1.html
Chapter II
In my Future of an Illusion [1927c] I was concerned much less with the deepest sources of the
religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion — with the system
of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with
enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over
his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The
common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously
exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be
softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so
patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is
painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of
life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living to-day, who
cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a
series of pitiful rearguard actions. One would like to mix among the ranks of the believers in
order to meet these philosophers, who think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing him
by an impersonal, shadowy and abstract principle, and to address them with the warning words:
'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord they God in vain!" And if some of the great men of the
past acted in the same way, no appeal can be made to their example: we know why they were
obliged to.
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Let us return to the common man and to his religion — the only religion which ought to bear that
name. The first thing that we think of is the well-known saying of one of our great poets and
thinkers concerning the relation of religion to art and science:
Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion; Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe
Religion!
[He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither of those two,
let him have religion! — Goethe, Zahme Xenien IX]
This saying on the one hand draws an antithesis between religion and the two highest
achievements of man, and on the other, asserts that, as regards their value in life, those
achievements and religion can represent or replace each other. If we also set out to deprive the
common man, [who has neither science nor art] of his religion, we shall clearly not have the
poet's authority on our side. We will choose a particular path to bring us nearer an appreciation
of his words. Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments
and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures. 'We cannot
do without auxiliary constructions' as Theodor Fontane tells us. There are perhaps three such
measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive
satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it.
Something of the kind is indispensable. Voltaire has deflections in mind when he ends Candide
with the advice to cultivate one's garden; and scientific activity is a deflection of this kind, too.
The substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with reality, but they are
none the less psychically effective, thanks to the role which phantasy has assumed in mental life.
The intoxicating substances influence our body and alter its chemistry. It is no simple matter to
see where religion has its place in this series. We must look further afield.
The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet
received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. Some of those who have asked
it have added that if it should turn out that life has no purpose, it would lose all value for them.
But this threat alters nothing. It looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the
question, for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations of
which are already familiar to us. Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of animals, unless,
perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man. But this view is not tenable either,
for there are many animals of which man can make nothing, except to describe, classify and
study them; and innumerable species of animals have escaped even this use, since they existed
and became extinct before man set eyes on them. Once again, only religion can answer the
question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life
having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.
We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their
behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to
achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to
become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It
aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the
experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the word 'happiness' only
relates to the last. In conformity with this dichotomy in his aims, man's activity develops in two
directions, according as it seeks to realize — in the main, or even exclusively — the one or the
other of these aims.
As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the program of the pleasure principle. This
principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt
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about its efficacy, and yet its program is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the
macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. There is no possibility at all of its being carried
through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it. One feels inclined to say that the
intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of 'Creation.' What we call
happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferable sudden) satisfaction of needs which
have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic
phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only
produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment
only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus our possibilities of happiness are
already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are
threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay
and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the
external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of
destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last
source is perhaps more painful to us than any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous
addition, although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from
elsewhere.
It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to
moderate their claims to happiness — just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the
influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle —, if a man
thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and
if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.
Reflection shows that the accomplishment of this task can be attempted along very different
paths; and all these paths have been recommended by the various schools of worldly wisdom and
put into practice by men. An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most
enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and
soon brings its own punishment. The other methods, in which avoidance of unpleasure is the
main purpose, are differentiated according to the source of unpleasure to which their attention is
chiefly turned. Some of these methods are extreme and some moderate; some are one-sided and
some attack the problem simultaneously at several points. Against the suffering which may come
upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself
aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the
happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some
kind turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself. There is, indeed, another
and better path: that of becoming a member of the human community, and, with the help of a
technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the
human will. Then one is working with all for the good of all. But the most interesting methods of
averting suffering are those which seek to influence our own organism. In the last analysis, all
suffering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in so far as we feel it, and we only feel it in
consequence of certain ways in which our organism is regulated.
The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one —
intoxication. I do not think that anyone completely understands its mechanism, but it is a fact that
there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us
pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we
become incapable of receiving unpleasurable impulses. The two effects not only occur
simultaneously, but seem to be intimately bound up with each other. But there must be
26
substances in the chemistry of our own bodies which have similar effects, for we know at least
one pathological state, mania, in which a condition similar to intoxication arises without the
administration of any intoxication drug. Besides this, our normal mental life exhibits oscillations
between a comparatively easy liberation of pleasure and a comparatively difficult one, parallel
with which there goes a diminished or an increased receptivity to unpleasure. It is greatly to be
regretted that this toxic side of mental processes has so far escaped scientific examination. The
service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a
distance is so highly prized as a benefit that individuals and peoples alike have given them an
established place in the economics of their libido. We owe to such media not merely the
immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external
world. For one knows that, with the help of this 'drowner of cares' one can at any time withdraw
from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of one's own with better conditions of
sensibility. As is well known, it is precisely this property of intoxicants which also determines
their danger and their injuriousness. They are responsible, in a certain circumstances, for the
useless waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement
of the human lot.
The complicated structure of our mental apparatus admits, however, of a whole number of other
influences. Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused
us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to
be freed from a part of one's sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses. This type of
defense against suffering is no longer brought to bear on the sensory apparatus; it seeks to master
the internal sources of our needs. The extreme form of this is brought about by killing off the
instincts, as is prescribed by the worldly wisdom of the East and practiced by Yoga. If it
succeeds, then the subject has, it is true, given up all other activities as well — he has sacrificed
his life; and, by another path, he has once more only achieved happiness of quietness. We follow
the same path when our aims are less extreme and we merely attempt to control our instinctual
life. In that case, the controlling elements are the higher psychical agencies, which have
subjected themselves to the reality principle. Here the aim of satisfaction is not by any means
relinquished; but a certain amount of protection against suffering is secured, in that nonsatisfaction is not so painfully felt in the case of instinct kept in dependence as in the case of
uninhibited ones. As against this, there is an undeniable diminution in the potentialities of
enjoyment. The feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse
untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that
has been tamed. The irresistibility of perverse instincts, and perhaps the attraction in general of
forbidden things, finds an economic explanation here.
Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido
which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in
flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot
come up against frustration from the external world. In this, sublimination of the instincts lends
its assistance. One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the
sources of psychical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one. A
satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist's joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a
scientist's in solving problems or discovering truths, has a special quality which we shall
certainly one day be able to characterize in metapsychological terms. At present we can only say
figuratively that such satisfactions seem 'finer and higher'. But their intensity is mild as compared
with that derived from the sating of crude and primary instinctual impulses; it does not convulse
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our physical being. And the weak point of this method is that it is not applicable generally: it is
accessible to only a few people. It presupposes the possession of special dispositions and gifts
which are far from being common to any practical degree. And even to the few who do possess
them, this method cannot give complete protection from suffering. It creates no impenetrable
armour against the arrows of fortune, and it habitually fails when the source of suffering is a
person's own body.
While this procedure already clearly shows an intention of making oneself independent of the
external world by seeking satisfaction in internal, psychical processes, the next procedure brings
out those features yet more strongly. In it, the connection with reality is still further loosened;
satisfaction is obtained from illusions, which are recognized as such without the discrepancy
between them and reality being allowed to interfere with enjoyment. The region from which
these illusions arise is the life of the imagination; at the time when the development of the sense
of reality took place, this region was expressly exempted from the demands of reality-testing and
was set apart for the purpose of fulfilling wishes which were difficult to carry out. At the head of
these satisfactions through phantasy stands the enjoyment of works of art — an enjoyment
which, by the agency of the artist, is made accessible even to those who are not themselves
creative. People who are receptive to the influence of art cannot set too high a value on it as a
source of pleasure and consolation in life. Nevertheless the mild narcosis induced in us by art can
do no more than bring about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs, and it is not
strong enough to make us forget real misery.
Another procedure operates more energetically and more thoroughly. It regards reality as the sole
enemy and as the source of all suffering, with which it is impossible to live, so that one must
break off all relations with it if one is to be in any way happy. The hermit turns his back on the
world and will have no truck with it. But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the
world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated
and replaced by others that are in conformity with one's own wishes. But whoever, in desperate
defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong
for him. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying
through his delusion. It is asserted, however, that each one of us behaves in some one respect like
a paranoic, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to the construction of a wish
and introduces this delusion into reality. A special importance attaches to the case in which this
attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a
delusional remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The
religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to
say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.
I do not think that I have made a complete enumeration of the methods by which men strive to
gain happiness and keep suffering away and I know, too, that the material might have been
differently arranged. One procedure I have not yet mentioned — not because I have forgotten it
but because it will concern us later in another connection. And how could one possibly forget, of
all others, this technique in the art of living? It is conspicuous for a most remarkable combination
of characteristic features. It, too, aims of course at making the subject independent of Fate (as it
is best to call it), and to that end it locates satisfaction in internal mental processes, making use,
in so doing, of the displaceability of the libido of which we have already spoken. But it does not
turn away from the external world; on the contrary, it clings to the objects belonging to that
world and obtains happiness from an emotional relationship to them. Nor is it content to aim at
an avoidance of unpleasure — a goal, as we might call it, of weary resignation; it passes this by
28
without heed and holds fast to the original, passionate striving or a positive fulfillment of
happiness. And perhaps it does in fact come nearer to this goal than any other method. I am, of
course, speaking of the way of life which makes love the center of everything, which looks for
all satisfaction in loving and being loved. A psychical attitude of this sort comes naturally
enough to all of us; one of the forms in which love manifests itself — sexual love — has given
us our most intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished
us with a pattern for our search for happiness. What is more natural than that we should persist in
looking for happiness along the path on which we first encountered it? The weak side of this
technique of living is easy to see; otherwise no human being would have thought of abandoning
this path to happiness for any other. It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as
when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.
But this does not dispose of the technique of living based on the value of love as a means to
happiness. There is much more to be said about it.
We may go on from here to consider the interesting case in which happiness in life is
predominantly sought in the enjoyment of beauty, wherever beauty presents itself to our senses
and our judgment — the beauty of human forms and gestures, of natural objects and landscapes
and of artistic and even scientific creations. This aesthetic attitude to the goal of life offers little
protection against the threat of suffering, but it can compensate for a great deal. The enjoyment
of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling. Beauty has no obvious use; nor is
there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it. The science of
aesthetics investigates the conditions under which things are felt as beautiful, but it has been
unable to give any explanation of the nature and origin of beauty, and, as usually happens, lack
of success is concealed beneath a flood of resounding and empty words. Psychoanalysis,
unfortunately, has scarcely anything to say about beauty either. All that seems certain is its
derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an
impulse inhibited in its aim. 'Beauty' and 'attraction' are originally attributes of the sexual object.
It is worth remarking that the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are
nevertheless hardly ever judged to be beautiful; the quality of beauty seems, instead, to attach to
certain secondary sexual characters.
In spite of the incompleteness, I will venture on a few remarks as a conclusion to our enquiry.
The program of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled;
yet we must not — indeed, we cannot — give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by
some means or other. Very different paths may be taken in that direction, and we may give
priority either to the positive aspect of the aim, that of gaining pleasure, or to its negative one,
that of avoiding unpleasure. By none of these paths can we attain all that we desire. Happiness,
in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the
individual's libido. There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out
for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved. All kinds of different factors will operate
to direct his choice. It is a question of how much real satisfaction he can expect to get from the
external world, how far he is led to make himself independent of it, and finally, how much
strength he feels he has for altering the world to suit his wishes. In this, his psychical constitution
will play a decisive part, irrespectively of the external circumstances. The man who is
predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships to other people; the
narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal
mental processes; the man of action will never give up the external world on which he can try out
his strength. As regards the second of these types, the nature of his talents and the amount of
29
instinctual sublimination open to him will decide where he shall locate his interests. Any choice
that is pushed to an extreme will be penalized by exposing the individual to the dangers which
arise if a technique of living that has been chosen as an exclusive one should prove inadequate.
Just as a cautious business-man avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps,
worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single
aspiration. Its success is never certain, for that depends on the convergence of many factors,
perhaps on none more than on the capacity of the psychical constitution to adapt its function to
the environment and then to exploit that environment for a yield of pleasure. A person who is
born with a specially unfavorable instinctual constitution, and who has not properly undergone
the transformation and rearrangement of his libidinal components which is indispensable for later
achievements, will find it hard to obtain happiness from his external situation, especially if he is
faced with tasks of some difficulty. As a last technique of living, which will at least bring him
substitutive satisfactions, he is offered that of a flight into neurotic illness — a flight which he
usually accomplishes when he is still young. The man who sees his pursuit of happiness come to
nothing in later years can still find consolation in the yield of pleasure of chronic intoxication; or
he can embark on the desperate attempt at rebellion seen in a psychosis.
Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own
path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in
depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner —
which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a
state of psychical infantilism, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by
drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual
neurosis. But hardly anything more. There are, as we have said, many paths which may lead to
such happiness as is attainable by men, but there is none which does so for certain. Even religion
cannot keep its promise. If the believer finally sees himself obliged to speak of God's 'inscrutable
decrees', he is admitting that all that is left to him as a last possible consolation and source of
pleasure in his suffering is an unconditional submission. And if he is prepared for that, he
probably could have spared himself the detour he has made.
----Thoughts on civilization:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0129472/
http://hubpages.com/hub/What-is-a-Civilization
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703399204574505170999959800.html
Should We Seek to Save Industrial Civilisation?
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/08/18/should-we-seek-to-save-industrial-civilisation/
This is civilisation - a spirit of futility?
http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/index.php?post/2007/11/26/791-this-iscivilisation
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents
Sustainable Aliens: A New Theory On Why E.T. Hasn't Arrived
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2009/12/sustainable_aliens_great_ideas.html
-----
30
Quotes:
http://www.knowledgebase-script.com/demo/article-849.html
The Evolution of Civilizations
http://chris.quietlife.net/2003/07/28/the-evolution-of-civilizations/
Filed under:books — Chris @ 12:07 am
Title: The Evolution of Civilizations - Author: Carroll Quigley, Harry J. Hogan
Publisher: Liberty Fund, Inc. - ISBN: 0913966568
Mentioning Carroll Quigley to someone these days will elicit a range of responses, ranging from
respect to apathy to wild-eyed paranoid rantings. Mostly, however, you get blank stares. Those
that have heard of him, though, tend to associate him mostly with his other books, namely
Tragedy & Hope and the Anglo-American Establishment. Evidently these books lay the
foundation for a lot of the right-wing paranoid “new world order” conspiracy theories. This was
news to me, and seemingly in odd contrast to the tone of this book, which is very
straightforward, scientific, and thoughtful. I can’t speak with any authority to this slightly
murkier and odd side to Quigley, but I enjoyed this book tremendously.
In the Evolution of Civilizations, Quigley begins by explaining his intentions in the book: to lay
out a scientific, analytical framework to apply to — you guessed it — the evolution of
civilizations. He aims to delineate clearly the line between knowledge and understanding —
something that he obviously sees as a problem with the field of History. He wants to create a
“vocabulary” for understanding history, social problems, and civilizations, and to create a
distinction between arguing ideas and semantics. This hits home for me, as I am perpetually
frustrated by arguments fueled only by an inability to recognize a disagreement as one of pure
semantics, but I digress.
He begins by dividing the interactions of people into three social aggregates: social groups,
societies, and civilizations. He defines a social group as persons that have long-standing
relationships and regard themselves as a unit, with exclusivity as a defining feature. An example
of this would be a football team, a chess club, etc. A society, on the other hand, is “a group
whose members have more relationships with one another than they do with outsiders.”
Civilizations, then, are the next level of social interaction and are the meat of this book.
Throughout the book, Quigley introduces many ideas that are useful not just in analyzing history,
but in critical thinking in general. One of these is the inclination of humans to polarize a
continuum — to divide what is really a smooth continuum into two separate poles. Black/white,
short/tall, good/evil, etc. He explains that while the framework he will subsequently attempt to
lay out is a useful guideline it’s critical to acknowledge that it’s simply the polarization of what
31
is in actuality a fluid continuum. There is, of course, no absolute date that delineates “The Dark
Ages” from “the Rennaissance”, but it is a useful framework for analysis.
He also introduces the idea of “instruments” and “institutions”. In Quigley’s field of sociology,
institutions are hardly a new idea, but Quigley’s definition is different in this context than in the
traditional definition. He talks about the requirement of every civilization to have an “instrument
of expansion.” This is the driving force for the civilization’s success. An institution, on the other
hand, is an instrument that has ceased to benefit or serve the civilization at a whole and instead
has become self-serving.
Quigley’s model civilization is subject to 7 distinct stages:
 Mixture
 Gestation
 Expansion
 Age of Conflict
 Universal Empire
 Decay
 Invasion
He then proceeds to subject various periods of history to this model, analyzing their beginnings,
growth, and decay according to these 7 stages. Let me just say that although Quigley’s goal in
writing the book was this analytical model, it’s also a remarkable tour of history that I found
particularly interesting. He covers the birth of the earliest civilizations, Mesopotamia, Canaanite
and Minoan civilizations, Classical civilization, and of course, Western civilization. For each, he
demonstrates how each civilization adheres roughly to these 7 stages, but elaborates on the
exceptions. He notes that you can actually go back and forth between several stages as new
instruments of expansion are discovered, using Western civilization as a prime example of this.
Quigley’s style is quirky and endearing. He takes his commitment to developing a “vocabulary
for understanding” to the literal level when he invents the word “clarid”, for lack of a better term.
He demonstrates an astounding wealth of knowledge, with digressions into the natural sciences,
as well as a comprehensive lesson in a wide spread of civilizations. I found his descriptions of
the Minoan civilzation, in particular, to be intriguing. It is a tremendously educational book, both
in matters of knowledge and of understanding. What I took away most from this book, however,
was the ability to properly distinguish between the two.
NOTE: I am interested in Quigley as a person, although I haven’t been able to find much in the
way of a biography, or really any information about him at all. A google search for “Carroll
Quigley” seems to turn up mostly reviews of his books, and many “new world order” references
and conspiracy theories. Evidently Clinton was a student of Quigley’s, so you find a lot of stuff
accusing Clinton of right-wing leanings and globalization conspiracies. I find it intriguing (and
laughable). If anyone knows anything more about this, or has any opinions on Quigley, let me
know!.
Comment by Sh0t
2004-08-08 00:02:08
Maybe instead of dismissing the “conspiracy theories” as paranoia, you should actually read the
other books.
32
Quigley himself acknowledges “The Conspiracy” but he views it favorably, while others like the
John Birch Society disagree with it, as do I and others who do not wish to be ruled by a self
serving group of elites.
Try to find articles and Quigley’s own statements about the supression of “Tragedy and Hope.”
What i find “laughable, to use your word, is how people respond in such a trained manner to the
hint of conspiracy. You have been condition to respond to the idea of conspiracies in exactly
such a way. “Right wing paranoia” “New world Order”.
Quigley himself even details that the “left versus right” game is a complete sham. It is not a left
versus right issues, it is a freedom versus tyranny issue.
If you want a sweeping introduction to the REAL world, I would suggest G. Edward Griffin’s
“The Creature from Jekyll Island.” The conspiracy is real, the question is whether or not you
enjoy having your blinders on and respond relexively and label it “right wing paranoia”
Reply to this comment
Comment by Frank
2004-08-18 23:42:01
Dr. Quigley was my advisor at Georgetown from 1971-1975. He was a brilliant lecturer. I can
still remember his guidance in learning to think critically and see beyond the facts.
Like many brilliant people, he was eccentric. His Plato lecture, in which he explained that Plato’s
ideas were not the work of one committed to democracy, was particularly compelling. His ideas
on weaponry and weapons systems as a determinant of democracy were equally fascinating.
What I remember most, however, was his insistence that there was no conspiracy to rule the
world. Rather, there were groups of people whose interests led the world in different directions.
People, he held, were neither intellengent nor well-organized enough to pull off a worldwide
conspiracy to rule. At the same time, interests of the rich, the media, and other interest groups
would pull the world in many possible directions. He impressed upon us that we had to choose
what we believed was the best future for all and take responsibility to create it.
That is why, today, I choose to teach.
Reply to this comment
Comment by Rahn
2004-09-13 00:21:35
The most disheartening aspect of the Quigley legacy appears to be that most remember him for
“Tragedy and Hope” rather than for “Evolution of Civilizations”. In and if itself that would not
be bad but they(most conspiricists) did not even read the former in entirety either.
33
As for me reading “Evolution of Civilizations” in 2003 has been one the most important events
of my life. After being a career history undergrad I was somewhat disillusioned by the minute
view of history that was being, quite frankly, forced on me at the schools I’d attended. It turns
out Quigley had been the mentor I had always been searching for.
His effect was so profound that I checked every available source on the net to see if he was a
legitimate scholar. Incredibly it turned out that he was an immensely famous proffessor in my
hometown. In lieu of this information I began to polish my resume to hopefully get a job at
Georgetown(a school I could never afford) with the hopes of continuing my education and
somehow touching or more likely keeping others in touch with his legacy.
p.s. If you ever want to discuss “Tragedy and Hope” or the “Anglo-American Establishment”
email me. They are not as fundamental as evolution but just as profound.
Reply to this comment
Comment by Laurent
2008-10-31 08:11:40
hello Ralph,
Reply to this comment
Comment by Steve Sadlov
2005-05-13 11:47:00
I have a question regarding a detail of Quigley’s bio that I’ve not been able to find just yet.
No doubt, his scholarship regarding Russian history is a matter of record.
However, does anyone know whether or not he was ever able to visit Russia?
I’d be much obliged.
Thanks!
Steve
Reply to this comment
Pingback by My Quiet Life » equality of what?
2006-03-13 23:49:25
[...] But it does make a foray into different arenas of social sciences perpetually challenging.
When reading Carroll Quigley, you have to learn what he means by “institution”, which as it
turns out is easy because he spends several chapters defining it. When you read Marx, you have
to understand what he means by “alienation” and the other countless German words he made up,
which is not so easy, because he didn’t define shit. Galbraith as well, I think, was fond of making
up words to match an idea that didn’t otherwise have one. These sorts of vocabularies, specific to
34
fields and even authors, can make it different to compare, contrast, and combine different
theories from different areas — especially when the vocabularies overlap and conflict. The
tortured use of the word “institution” in various aspects of social theory is probably the best
example of this, or at least one I’ve run into over and over. And then there’s the matter of
making sure your vocabulary hasn’t become so refined, nuanced, subjective and context-specific
as to be rendered meaningless — or conversely, that some jerk isn’t taking advantage of that and
making you look like a fool. [...]
Reply to this comment
Comment by judith lawson
2008-03-04 11:02:15
I was Quigley’s student in Dev Civ and Intellectual History of Western Civ in the mid-sixties.
During the past two decades
I’ve recalled much that he taught that has clearly influenced
us and our times. So kudos to our great prof, and a Big Question — how do we assemble a bright
new civilization from the detritus of greedy crumbling empire?
Reply to this comment
Comment by Laurent
2008-10-31 08:17:27
Hello Rahn,
I would be delighted to chat with you about C. W. Quigley’s works. Feel free to e-mail me :
d_ysrap1@hotmail.com
Reply to this comment
Comment by daniel
2009-07-08 17:59:08
Thank you, you articulate for everyone the frustration of even mentioning any topic that might
even hint at conspiracy. The conditioned response blabbered or the posturing uncomfortably by
people whenever any questioning of elitist power or possible behind the scene manipulation
might occur has really exhausted me. Im still open, just not as willing to have to defend what
seems obvious to anyone willing to look just a slight past the “official first story”, whatever it be.
Daniel
Reply to this comment
Comment by Anonymous
2009-07-08 18:13:11
I am about to read evolution of civs, and will eventually read tragedy and anglo-american…
i have to ask, what is your take on the fact that his evolution of civs book is so short, and has
hardly anything for sources and notes? my friend went to Georgetown had his class and holds
today that the guy is a fraud. I am already impressed by what I read of the man, and can see
35
already that he seems to have been one of the authors of the many books ive read in search of
understanding the power and position behind histories players.
Reply to this comment
Comment by daniel
2009-07-08 18:15:35
sorry, im the anonymous listed above…
thanks daniel
Reply to this comment
Comment by Brent
2009-11-19 15:09:28
Thought I would add to this, since it has been recently. I’m currently applying to grad school
Sociology programs, and I’m specifically interested in global transformations and the social
evolution.
Anyone know of any scholars currently doing research in the vein of Quigley – or on Quigley for
that matter? I found one very enlightening review (see link below) on Tragedy and Hope, a while
ago, but was hoping to find more, specifically on Evolution of Civilizations. Or maybe on that
subject Quigley is simply outmoded.
Review: http://www.johnreilly.info/trahop.htm
-----
March 2005
What is Civilization?
http://tobyspeople.com/anthropik/2005/03/what-is-civilization/
by Jason Godesky
I ended my last post in this series with an example of civilization as a bad thing. This doubtless
strikes many readers as a bizarre statement. We are used to “civilization” as the sum total of all
that is good and decent in the human heart; civilization is the better angel of our nature. It is
philosophy, literature, good music and fine food. Its opposite is barbarism or savagery–the
cruelest dispositions of our species. Torture is barbaric. Rape is savage. These are terrible things;
“uncivilized” things. This issue speaks to the very heart of a question I find myself having to
answer over and over again, so let me answer it here one last time in the fullness it deserves:
What, exactly, is civilization?
When asked this question directly, many people answer that a civilization is simply a synonym
for “society”–that a civilization is simply a group of people living together. This definition is
betrayed when you press the point with borderline examples. Are you comfortable with the
36
phrase “Inuit Civilization”? Or “!Kung Civilization?” Or “Australian Aborigine Civilization”?
Most people are not. There is no doubt as to whether the Inuit, !Kung or Aborigines constitute
societies, but we waver on the question of their civilization. Obviously, then, the two words are
not the synonyms some would claim.
WordNet provides four definitions for the word:
8. civilization, civilisation — (a society in an advanced state of social development (e.g.,
with complex legal and political and religious organizations); “the people slowly
progressed from barbarism to civilization”)
9. civilization, civilisation — (the social process whereby societies achieve civilization)
10. culture, civilization, civilisation — (a particular society at a particular time and place;
“early Mayan civilization”)
11. refinement, civilization, civilisation — (the quality of excellence in thought and manners
and taste; “a man of intellectual refinement”; “he is remembered for his generosity and
civilization”)
The third definition is the synonym of society discussed previously (are not all societies in some
particular time and place?). The other three all have a common root in nineteenth century ideas
of unilineal cultural evolution. Fundamental to this idea is the notion of a society’s progression
from savagery to civilization: “the people slowly progressed from barbarism to civilization.”
Progression, though, implies the reality of perfection. For societies to “progress,” there must be
some single goal to move towards. Every culture believes itself to be superior to all others, but
even after centuries of philosophical theorizing on the subject, we have yet to develop any
objective criteria that do not require us first to accept the superiority of our own culture. We can
prove our superiority only when it is taken as a premise, making the entire argument moot. Given
that such ethnocentrism is a universal among all human cultures, we should not count our own
for anything more than that. Ethnocentrism once had its place: a smug sense of superiority could
help keep people from wandering off by themselves and dying alone. Usefulness should not be
mistaken for truth.
So we see that none of the four definitions provided really give us any meaningful definition.
One fails to capture what we really mean by the word, and the other three are based on a deeply
flawed premise.
Etymologically, the origins of the word “civilization” lay in the Latin word civis, often translated
as “city,” but perhaps more accurately translated as “city-state.” The Roman Empire was a
patchwork of civitates, fulfilling a role not terribly far removed from states in the U.S. The
Roman Empire was, in fact, a hierarchy of smaller imperial dominions; the Pater familias was
emperor of his family, and the magistrate was the emperor of his civitas. Strictly speaking, a
civis was the “citizen” of such a civitas, but the word was also applied to the sense of “city-ness,”
as well as the city itself.
Etymology, then, gives us our first workable definition: “civilization” is a culture of cities.
Working more along these lines, and trying to identify a set of defining criteria among those
cultures we can comfortably call “civilized,” Vere Gordon Childe defined a set of criteria still
taught in introductory anthropology courses and widely accepted as the criteria for civilization:
Primary Criteria
1.
2.
3.
4.
Settlement of cities of 5,000 or more people.
Full-time labor specialization.
Concentration of surplus.
Class structure.
37
5. State-level political organization.
Secondary Criteria
6. Monumental architecture
7. Long-distance trade
8. Sophisticated art
9. Writing
10. Predictive sciences (math, astronomy, etc.)
The secondary criteria have a general correspondence with civilization, but are not definitive.
There are plenty of civilizations that lack one or more of them (Teotihuacan most likely lacked a
writing system), two out of five (predictive sciences and sophisticated art) are human universals,
and two of the remaining items (monumental architecture and long-distance trade) are known
among non-civilized societies.
The primary criteria, though, help us to begin to understand the true nature of civilization. It is
my supposition that these criteria form a reflexive set; that no one of these criteria can be met
without also fulfilling the other four. That these five primary criteria form a single cultural
“package,” best defined by the word “civilization.”
Comments
Hi, Jason,
Found you by way of IshCon. Very interesting.
Of course, Childe’s list effectively rules out places like ancient Catal Huyuk and Jericho despite
the fact that both of them were well-defined, organized population centers (I’m not sure they
exceeded 5,000, but they were pretty crowded) because they lacked a state-level organization.
Same’s true of the Anasazi and possibly the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Also, what if the
society were technologically advanced but dispersed in small, communicating villages? That
would be civilization to me, but not to him.
As Cohen & Stewart write in The Collapse of Chaos, “…most of the stories we teach our
children are myths, Just So stories, oversimplifications. They are teaching stories, not truths.”
That’s certainly true of the common image of civilization and one we need to outgrow if we ever
want to be truly “enlightened.” Personally, I’d add that our view of ourselves is decidedly
dissociative — we praise ourselves mightily for doing good & being advanced(sometimes
accurately), then justify behavior that even “uncivilized” peoples would consider barbaric
without trying to really understand where both sides of our culture come from.
Comment by Gus — 8 March 2005 @ 12:53 AM
You’ll notice I left off with a rather contentious claim: that Childe’s primary criteria form a
single set package. A cultural subspecies, if you will, where all traits occur together. I was going
to keep writing on that in this post, but decided it deserved a post of its own. Suffice to say for
now, I don’t take Childe quite so literally.
Admittedly, I haven’t spent a great deal of time studying Catal Huyuk, but I was under the
impression it was something of a theocracy. That, to my mind, qualifies as state-level
organization: a theocratic city-state, like Teotihuacan.
38
I usually think of the Anasazi and the tribes of the Pacific Northwest as chiefdoms, not
civilizations, so that exclusion doesn’t bother me too much. Keeley’s War Before Civilization
focuses primarily on such chiefdoms as “before civilization,” as well as Big Man societies.
A technologically advanced society dispersed into small, communicating villages can never arise
autochthonously, for reasons I’ll be exploring in-depth in my next post.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 March 2005 @ 10:55 AM
Hi,
3 would most likely occur AFTER a centralized civilization has evolved or collapsed provided
that the memes (i.e. educational background) and sufficient technology exist to continue without
state-level organization. Granted, that would be difficult — such a transition would essentially
have to be PLANNED rather than occur randomly, with planning made possible by a distributed
communications network akin to the Web. It is essentially a “post-civilization.”
Curiously, isn’t that what “true communism” AND “true democracy” call for? Maybe such a
society — and, therefore, a period of civilization before it — is one natural possibility of the
process of social development. Over a long time it looks like this: Egalitarian hunter-gatherers
gradually centralize under “redistributor” headmen/elites, population grows, the elites become
governments, governments promote public education that gradually broadens to include almost
everyone, thus essentially doing away with their own elite status and restoring a semblance of
egalitarianism. (This would explain why Christian conservatives and other religious selfidentified elites tend to strongly restrict educational opportunities: They KNOW it will ultimately
promote their downfall.)
As far as 2 goes, I was tossing those out to show that Childe’s list is somewhat arbitrary:
Wouldn’t the Anasazi communities probably have been seen as “Civilization” by the people of
the desert SW at that time?
Catal Huyuk did have a lot of what seem to be religious shrines, but that in itself isn’t proof of
theocracy. It could have been, but I’m not sure we’ll ever know. The Hopi towns of today have
numerous kivas that are used for similar religious gatherings, and their religion is a key element
woven into their lifestyle, but the tribe isn’t a theocracy. I suspect CH was something similar;
their community is even built along similar lines.
Comment by Gus — 8 March 2005 @ 4:58 PM
Oh, obviously just a number of shrines does not a theocracy make. I had heard other evidence
indicating a theocracy once upon a time, but again, I’ve never studied Catal Huyok very
closely….
The Anasazi seem to have been heavily influenced by the Aztecs and Toltecs. While they, like
all cultures, believed themselves superior to all others, I’m not sure this is a valid definition for
“civilization.” Such self-righteous ethnocentrism is a universal among all human societies; if
that’s our criterion, then we’re reduced once again to a synonym of “society.”
The third possibility in my list is an interesting possibility–but, for now, purely speculative. No
such thing has ever existed, and the jury’s out on whether it’s even possible.
39
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 March 2005 @ 5:16 PM
Hi,
Yeah, I know. I’m inclined to think option 3 might be the best one we have if we want to survive
the next century. We’ll never know if it’s possible until we try it.
Have you ever read Marge Piercy’s “Woman on the Edge of Time”? she postulates such a
society, with some features I like a lot — good science mixed with nature spirituality,
ecologically sound agriculture & transportation, shared wealth/literature/art of the old world (our
civilization) without money, etc — and a few I don’t (procreation via machine).
Comment by Gus — 9 March 2005 @ 10:55 PM
Catal Huyok is a civilization k.
Comment by Dude — 22 September 2005 @ 8:17 PM
Ehh … yes, yes it is. Are you going somewhere with this, Dude?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 September 2005 @ 9:31 PM
---------11 March 2005
The Meaning of Civilization
http://tobyspeople.com/anthropik/2005/03/the-meaning-of-civilization/index.html
by Jason Godesky
I left off my last post with a contentious claim: that Childe’s primary criteria for civilization
constituted a single cultural package, wherein all five criteria were symptomatic of a single,
underlying factor. To review, those criteria are:
12. Settlement of cities of 5,000 or more people.
13. Full-time labor specialization.
14. Concentration of surplus.
15. Class structure.
16. State-level political organization.
Elman Service’s work is fundamental to cultural materialism, the predominant paradigm in
modern anthropology. Of particular note here is Service’s break-down of various subsistence
strategies. Service noted the strong correlation between these subsistence strategies and other
elements of culture, such as political development. Most anthropologists today recognize five
such strategies:
Subsistence Strategy
First Appearance
Location
Organization
Industry
Industrial Revolution
Modern cities
State & Super-state
Agriculture
Neolithic Revolution
Cities & villages State
Pastoralism
Neolithic Revolution
Nomadic
Chiefdom
Horticulture
Neolithic Revolution
Villages
Chiefdom & tribes
Foraging
Beginning of life on earth
Nomadic
Bands & tribes
40
There are, of course, exceptions. The Kwakwaka’wakw (commonly known as the Kwakiutl)
were foragers, but maintained a chiefdom. However, the correlations are strong, and for good
reason. To a great extent, subsistence strategies cause the rest of a culture. And why not? The
primary purpose of a culture is to provide food and a sexual context for an animal. Any culture
will provide a sexual context, but the acquisition of food is by no means guaranteed. Also, unlike
reproduction, the acquisition of food is a daily activity. Nothing defines the day-to-day needs of
any culture more than simple metabolism.
However, it is also my contention that anthropologists’ own cultural background has biased their
assessment, by teasing out more categories from our own cultural type. The differences between
industry and agriculture are differences of scale, not kind. The Industrial Revolution did not
fundamentally change the nature of agricultural society, it merely accelerated it along previously
defined lines. Also, pastoralism is an extremely unusual option, confined almost entirely to the
Middle East and Africa. Moreover, such societies cannot exist independently of an agricultural
society. I tend to think of them more as an unusual case of symbiosis with agricultural societies:
a remora to agriculture’s shark, if you will.
That leaves us with a simplified model of just three subsistence strategies: agriculture,
horticulture and foraging. This can be simply explained by two, irrefutable bits. Either you grow
plants to eat, or you do not. If you do not, you are a forager. If you do, you either work above or
below the point of diminishing returns. If above, you are an agriculturalist; if below, you are a
horticulturalist. Consider the graph below, where “utility” is the ratio of calories obtained versus
calories spent, and “production” is simply the number of calories obtained:
The concept of diminishing returns was first developed in the context of agriculture. After a
certain point, simply applying more labor yielded less and less benefit. In fact, from a caloric
viewpoint, all agriculture is beyond the point of diminishing returns. Even in agrarian societies,
it takes more calories of work to farm a field, than is returned in calories of product. Among
simpler agrarian societies, this shortfall is made up with the use of tools and animals. The plow
uses the fundamental physics of a lever to lessen the workload. Animals can leverage energy
sources humans cannot–by grazing in lands too rocky or infertile to be cultivated. In modern
petroculture, fossil fuels make up the shortfall. Petroleum doesn’t just power tractors, it also
forms the basic ingredients for everything from fertilizer to packaging, and the fuel for
transportation. We now burn between 4 and 10 calories–mostly in fossil fuels–for every 1 calorie
of agricultural product we produce.
The slope becomes sharper as more labor is applied–the process becomes increasingly
inefficient–but the absolute number of calories yielded always goes up by some amount per unit
of labor. So, production can still be increased even past the point of diminishing returns by
applying more labor. It just becomes increasingly inefficient to do so.
Forager populations are very dispersed, because their food is very dispersed. Foragers gather
food from the wild, whether by hunting, fishing, gathering, or simple scavenging. These
resources are not collected in any one space, so every forager band requires a significant range of
territory. This makes forager society very sparsely populated.
41
By comparison, cultivation converts a specific area of biomass into human food, raising the
edible ratio of that area to 100%. In swidden (a.k.a., “slash-and-burn”) horticulture, for example,
an area of rain forest is cut down and burned, and a garden is planted in the ashes. This is the
only way to practice cultivation in the rain forest, as the ground is about as fertile as cement–all
of the nutrients are locked in the trees. This very clearly illustrates the conversion from biomass
into human food, as the biodiversity of some area of rain forest becomes fertilizer to grow a
horticultural garden. This is the essence of all cultivation.
With a denser food supply, cultures that depend on cultivation for their food can support much
denser populations. Horticultural societies typically live in villages, even complex networks of
villages. Agricultural societies practice even more intense cultivation, producing even more
calories–and thus, producing an even larger population.1 These populations are even larger, and
even denser–leading to cities, the first of Childe’s five primary criteria.
Foragers enjoy a naturalistic social arrangement. Their life is sufficiently comfortable and easy to
simply handle things naturally. Decisions are made by concensus. Infractions of social norms can
be handled on a case-by-case basis, by the community as a whole. Circumstances and
personalities can be fully considered, and rather than focusing on “punishment,” such societies
can instead address the harm done directly. Where most civilized societies simply ritualize a
sanctioned form of vengeance and mob rule, these “primitives” enjoy true justice.
The number of infractions of social norms–”crimes”–is always some fraction of the total number
of interactions between individuals. In a pairing of two individuals, there is only one interaction.
Add a third individual, and there are three possible interactions. A fourth raises the number to
six; five, to ten; six, to fifteen, and so on. As the number of individuals increases, the number of
interactions increases exponentially, and as that number increases, so, too, do the number of
infractions. Before long, the community is so large that individuals are no longer universally
known, circumstances are not appreciated by all members of the community, and the number of
such incidents is too great to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The essence of “law” is the
abridgement of justice–to resolve cases more quickly, by compromising fairness. Most legal
systems attempt to abrogate this essential fact, but it remains the basic truth of law. Justice is a
luxury only the sparsely populated can afford.
Thus, large populations require a legal body, and judges to execute that law. The nature of
agricultural production also demands defense. While ideas of property and ownership are
essential to an agricultural society, they are alien to the rest of the world. The gross inefficiency
of agricultural life puts the agricultural society in a very tenuous position. This is why only
agricultural societies suffer famine. When Richard Lee made his famous study of the !Kung and
calculated the famous figure of an average of three hours of work per day, the Kalahari was
suffering one of the worst draughts in living memory. The !Kung’s Bantu neighbors–
pastoralists–were dying of starvation, while the !Kung complained of having to work so hard–
three whole hours–to gather their food. Humans are omnivores, and it would take nothing less
than a mass extinction to threaten our survival as foragers. We risk starvation only when we
culturally redefine “food” to a small number of closely related, domesticated species.
Any agricultural society that does not protect its fields from animal predators–both human and
otherwise–will not last very long. Even worse, the inefficiencies of agriculture require constant
expansion in order to continue. By controlling their own food supply, agricultural societies are
able to constantly increase the amount of food available to provide for the poor, the hungry, and
42
the expansion of such a richly-fed society. This fuels a constant rise in population, which
agricultural production rises to match, creating what Daniel Quinn called a “Food Race.”
Faced with the need to expand, agricultural societies have two options. Either the caloric output
of their current fields can be increased, or new arable land can be procured. Occasional
technological advances make the first option possible, but this happens rarely and cannot be
counted on. The second option–procuring more land–is usually the more attractive option. This
can be done be clearing wilderness, reclaiming overgrown fields, or fertilizing previously
unarable land. However, each of these options also have their limits, forcing the agricultural
society to eventually turn to conquest. Here, the standing armies needed for defense become
pivotal again, this time to ensure the society’s continued survival by providing new lands to
farm.
The need of agricultural societies to defend, expand, and enforce law requires the formation of
state-level political organization. So far, we have seen two of Childe’s primary criteria–1 and 5–
as unavoidable consequences of agricultural production.
Of course, standing armies and state-level political organization already demand the second
criterion: full-time labor specialization. Soldiers in a standing army are, after all, specialists in
combat. Politicians and rulers are specialists in administration; judges specialists in law, etc.
Such complexity in labor division can easily be extended. Such specialists produce no food of
their own, and so are dependent on others for their subsistence. This builds an innate inequality
to all agricultural exchange, as one party posesses something needed, while the other merely
posesses something desired. That inequality can be shifted through threats and coercion–either of
physical violence on the part of a military-backed secular force, or of spiritual retribution on the
part of a religious organization. This brings us Childe’s third criterion–concentration of surplus–
and its consequence, class structure, Childe’s fourth criterion.
Now we have a workable definition of what civilization truly is. It has nothing to do with
philosophy, art, music, religion, math, science, or technology–all of which are many times older
than civilization. Rather, it is a complex of coercion, domination and terror that is the natural
consequence of a marginal agricultural existence locked in an eternal “food race” against itself.
Civilization is not about art; it is about control. It is not about philosophy; it is about obedience.
It is not about science; it is about terror. It is not about technology; it is about coercion. It is
inimical to human nature, and it is doomed from the start.
1
Russell Hopfenberg & David Pimentel, “Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food
Supply,” Environment, Development & Sustainability 3:1-15, 2001. [PDF] [Back]
Comments
Interesting. For the moment, I’ll just toss out a few immediate observations, and look at your
ideas in more depth after some sleep…
A good example of the intimate link between agriculture and pastoralism was seen in the
American Plains c. 1500-1900. Before the arrival of Spanish horses via Mexico, most of that area
was vacant, with the population largely concentrated in the river bottoms as farmers like the
Hidatsa and Arikara. there were also some foot-bound nomadic hunters, but not too many. As
horses went wild and multiplied, they attracted elements of numerous tribes from as far away as
Quebec who, for whatever reason, wanted a different lifestyle, and the horse-riding culture that
became the stereotypical “Indian” came into being.
43
According to Colin Renfrew’s Archaeology & Language, a similar dynamic may have fueled the
spread of IndoEuropean tongues on to the vast steppes of Eurasia long before the historical
civilizations flourished. He argues that this wasn’t due to conquest, but simply the gradual spread
of population sparked by agriculture.
I think it’s especially interesting to be talking about this in the light of the publicity that
surviving Andamanese hunter-gatherers got after the tsunami. Check out these sites:
In the Land of the Naked People
In The Land of Naked People, Madhusree Mukerjee explores the debilitating effects of
modernization and colonization on a group of isolated natives �?? perhaps the most secluded
humans on the planet �?? living in a prehistoric “time capsule” on the Andaman Islands, located
in the Bay of Bengal, off the coast of India. What the author observed firsthand brings to mind
the exploitation and cultural loss that has characterized the development of nearly all nations, but
for the Adamanese it is happening in the present.
In rare meeting, tribesmen tell officials of survival
Comment by Gus — 12 March 2005 @ 2:01 AM
Brilliant post. Simply brilliant.
Comment by Steve Thomas — 12 March 2005 @ 2:03 AM
The spread of horses occurred as the Europeans advanced. 99% of the population was wiped out
by smallpox continent-wide, the Spanish were wreaking havoc across Mesoamerica and South
America, and the trauma of first contact with the Europeans was causing massive changes all
around. Refugees and survivors from all across North America found a new life, and a new
culture, around European horses and European guns on the Plains. The stereotypical Indian–the
Plains Indian–was the direct result of the trauma of European contact on many simultaneous
levels.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 March 2005 @ 10:55 AM
Hi,
I agree with Steve; overall, a very strong, thought-provoking post, especially Justice is a luxury
only the sparsely populated can afford.
You wrote:
pastoralism is an extremely unusual option, confined almost entirely to the Middle East and
Africa.
That’s not quite true. If you mean pure pastoralism — horse- or camel-based herding — you’re
right, although the Navajo also do it now. Many peoples have practiced pastoralism in the form
of transhumance — seasonally-migratory herding, usually between mountains and lowlands/river
valleys or seashore and inland and often without riding animals. Numerous Siberian & circum-
44
polar tribes do this with reindeer, and I’d imagine the various Andean peoples who domesticated
llamas and alpacas were essentially transhumant.
In swidden (a.k.a., “slash-and-burn”) horticulture, for example, an area of rain forest is cut down
and burned, and a garden is planted in the ashes. This is the only way to practice cultivation in
the rain forest, as the ground is about as fertile as cement–all of the nutrients are locked in the
trees.
What’s interesting about swidden agriculture is that it’s slowly nomadic; they can only farm an
area for a short period before having to clear new field elsewhere — clearly a stepping stone
between truly nomadic foragers and settled agriculture. Just like most foragers, swidden-users
rove around their territory, they just do it over the course of several years rather than annually.
There are, however, some cases of foraging tribes that have more or less permanent settlements
— they’re often on/near fish-rich rivers or seacoasts. Several of the Pacific NW chiefdoms and
NE Algonquian tribes like the Abenaki were like that, as are most Inuit groups.
Comment by Gus — 12 March 2005 @ 1:30 PM
Hi Jason,
Great post, very educational.
Your explanation of a “naturalistic social arrangement” makes a lot of sense, yet I find myself a
little bit sceptical. What ultimately prevents infractions from getting out of hand and a central
authority becoming “necessary”? I.e., a power vacuum forming and someone trying to fill its
place?
In support of the question I submit that a part of human nature wants to dominate, also over other
humans. Many animal species in the wild contest who the strongest in the group is to have a
clear leader (crucial to their survival), so the simple idea of dominance is not too strange. It
further seems fairly easy to prove that with sophisticated technology and a large population
where (as you indicate) abstract tools such as law come into play, will favour the emergence of
power relations. How are foragers immune though?
Comment by marts — 14 March 2005 @ 2:15 PM
In a forager society, there is little incentive for antisocial behavior. Killing someone in your tribe
threatens your own survival. Why steal when you can just ask for it and nearly be guaranteed use
of the item in question? In most such societies, their greatest trial is the occasional case of
adultery.
By comparison, a large culture like ours encourages antisocial behavior. Murder and theft are
excellent ways to get ahead; their only downside is a probabilistic chance of being caught and
subjected to arbitrary punishment. There is nothing in and of the acts themselves that makes
them unattractive. Even worse, we are forced into antisocial behavior much of the time. Richard
Stallman writes about how intellectual property laws forbid us from sharing, for example.
45
So, where we systemically encourage infractions of social norms, these cultures systemically
discourage them. That’s what keeps them from getting out of hand and making a central
authority necessary.
In fact, in every known case, the necessity of central authority from such a rise in socially
unacceptable incidents was preceded by a rise in population, which was itself precipitated by
rising production levels, which were almost certainly fueled by the emergence of a central
authority in the form of a Melanesian-style Big Man.
While it is true that many other animals are hierarchical, the lack of such tendencies in the
human primate is remarkable. We have one of the lowest levels of sexual dimorphism in the
animal kingdom, for example. All indications of hierarchy can be traced directly to the Neolithic
Revolution, and no farther. I would go so far as to say that the adoption of this cooperative
strategy is the single most defining characteristic of our species: that hierarchy and domination
are inimical to human nature.
So, I disagree fully with your premise. While natural to other animals, it is the opposite of human
in my mind. Large populations not only favor, but require such hierarchy–but foragers cannot
bear such populations. Furthermore, everyone in a forager society must contribute to the
gathering of food equally, so the development of any kind of full-time specialist–like a leader–is
not possible. Many foragers have means of circumscribing and limiting the influence an
individual can gather. The practice of “cursing the meat” noted by Richard Lee, for example,
effectively eliminates the possibility of a !Kung Big Man ever arising.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 March 2005 @ 8:03 PM
Thanks. I had a look at some information regarding sexual dimophism
(http://ndnd.essortment.com/sexualdimorphis_rcgt.htm) and it’s like you say, very little in
humans. It explains as follows:
Less sexual dimorphism often indicates a species with mutual care of the young and monogamy,
such as birds, whereas greater sexual dimorphism is often demonstrated by species which
practice polygamy and have sharply defined gender roles regarding the rearing of offspring.
The biggest differences are in height and weight. Some male-male competition is mentioned
although I am not sure in what domain and to what end this would be manifested.
I would agree that the rise in numbers (because as people become removed from one another and
therefore impersonal, it is easier to slip between the cracks) facilitates the necessity of central
authority. It would be interesting to see a graph of known societies, population numbers on the x
axis, and the density and strength of power structures in operation on the y axis. From what I
gather power would start at 0 (as would population) and then around a few hundred people
“power” would suddenly increase, rising steadily as population increases. Of course, measuring
“power” is a somewhat relative matter.
Comment by marts — 14 March 2005 @ 10:06 PM
46
By comparison, a large culture like ours encourages antisocial behavior. Murder and theft are
excellent ways to get ahead; their only downside is a probabilistic chance of being caught and
subjected to arbitrary punishment.
Several psychologists have argued that what we now define as antisocial behavior is in fact a
distorted expression of behavior that was adaptive in pre-civilized times. Instead of stalking food
animals, for example, people stalk each other, and the tendency for people not to see things in
cities (even horrible things like the notorious Kitty Genovese case) is a natural adaptation to
overwhelming stimuli, which, I’d guess, would be partly rooted in the need for close-quarters
H&G people to actively ignore sexual and other private acts of their clanmates.
Kalman Glantz & John K. Pearce write, in Exiles from Eden, “…we convey to our clients that
their problems are due in part to the fact that they’re living in a changed environment, an
environment that’s difficult for human beings.” This short-circuits innate systems of reciprocity
best expressed in interpersonal relationships, which encourage various forms of cheating and
make it hard for people to understand what they have a right to expect from life, what they owe
to others and what others owe them. A good summary of this concept is Dr. Glabach’s
“Evolutionary Psychology and ‘Natural Morality.’”
By their understanding, achieving dominance is a good thing… but they don’t mean it in the
sense our society uses it, as equal to tyranny or controlling others. They write, “The dominant
man can make concessions, achieve compromise, and allow others to have their say and their
opinions. In the hunter-gatherer system, most if not all men managed to achieve dominance. We
shall argue that in our society, most men don’t, and thus may suffer psychological distress.” (p.
150)
On hierarchy: “Hierarchal societies are a reversion to a pre-human type of social organization.”
Such societies require the same cooperation as egalitarian societies without “the equality, mutual
respect and support.” Most people can do it, but many suffer to varying degrees b/c of it and
express that suffering in various psychological and behavioral ways, taking it out on themselves
and others. (154-5)
Comment by Gus — 20 March 2005 @ 6:45 PM
I certainly agree with the evolutionary framework of morality, but to my mind the term
“dominance” implies dominance over someone else. One cannot be dominant unless at least one
other person is recessive or subordinate. It seems Glantz and Pearce may be unnecessarily
complicating the issue with an unintuitive or at least novel use of the word.
There may well be something to hierarchy as a reversion to pre-human types of social
organization. Most of our primate relatives are hierarchical; the egalitarian nature of our species,
while well-supported, is also an unusual thing in the Order Primates. One of my primary
contentions has been that hierarchy is at odds with human nature, and that much of the stress of
our society can be traced back to so many people being forced into a situation fundamentally at
odds with their innate evolutionary disposition.
47
Incidentally, you linked to SystemsThinker.com. Do we perhaps have a mutual friend in
Howard?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 March 2005 @ 9:43 PM
Jason–
I’ve been reading Rousseau’s The Social Contract lately and in it he starts off - somewhat
contrary to, I understand, his other works, and anyway what one usually associates with him that society is, or at least could be, preferable to the state of nature:
And although in civil society man surrenders some of the advantages that belong to the state of
nature, he gains in return far greater ones … if the abuse of his new condition did not in many
cases lower him to something worse than he had left he should constantly bless the happy hour
that
lifted him for ever from the state of nature
I am still trying to suss this out, but I am thinking he may have argued like this to gain more
credibility for the rest of his argument, in which he tries to solve a problem that moving into
society has left us with, that is how a modern society can best operate politically. His answer,
democracy.
What I find interesting is that in the preconditions for his democracy everyone should know each
other, much like your description of foragers’ naturalistic social arrangement.
a very small state, where the people may be readily assembled and where each citizen may easily
know all the others
What makes his effort different, is that conceivably he means it should apply to the democracy
itself, that is to larger numbers of people (not too large - he makes this clear; for him monarchies
are more appropriate in very large states). Other criteria include a people of simple manners and
morality, not much social inequality, and no luxury.
He finds Rome exemplary and uses it as his model. There were frequent assemblies (notably for
voting) and these often succeeded to produce outcomes - the amount of people who assembled
were only the men, but must have counted in the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands.
On the one hand he lets slip later that he actually still thinks the natural state is better:
What? Is freedom to be maintained only with the support of slavery? Perhaps. The two extremes
meet. Everything outside nature has its disadvantages, civil society more than all the rest.
On the other hand his model is giving some support to an idea I’m thinking about, namely that
the route to a future society of equality and sharing may well be through the current instruments
of repression and power (in which, following Zerzan’s thinking, I’m not excluding technology
entirely). I am familiar with Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, also his major
48
contribution via the GPL. I imagine that such a shared ownership of all instruments of power and
repression may change the status quo. Then again, so did Marx …
In lieu of Rousseau’s observation that outside the state of nature freedom (to some) may only be
possible through some form of slavery (of others), I am wondering whether basic subsistence for
everyone on earth couldn’t eventually become a 99% automated process. The down side of this
idea, however … is that this is precisely the vague ideal that is keeping the current system in
place. And so the domination of nature continues.
Any thoughts on how a completely sharing society (losing coercion, domination, control) can
come into being (a) without a global catastrophe that cuts population numbers to a fraction and
(b) without giving up ongoing innovation of technology, and commerce? I’ve seen the comments
on horticulture and permaculture, but these seem to presuppose a vast reduction of numbers in
global population.
Comment by marts — 21 March 2005 @ 2:41 PM
Hi, Jason & marts,
Jason — Yeah, I noticed that twist on “dominance.” I think, being psychologists, they use it that
way but subtly alter its meaning with their clients b/c those clients are often used to a situation in
which dominance is expressed the more conventional way.
No, I don’t know Howard. I came across the site while seeking a decent summary of the concept
itself.
marts — I haven’t read Rousseau, but what you quote is interesting and a little confusing. He
seems to be saying, in oversimplification, “civilization is great if it doesn’t kill you first.” I don’t
call that a ringing endorsement.
You wrote: “the route to a future society of equality and sharing may well be through the current
instruments of repression and power.” I’ve thought that, too, to some degree. One great example
is the Internet — originally built by the DOD, it has become a crucial communication network
for people who oppose what the DOD represents. We need to keep some such form of interactive
global communication & expand on it for any “Leaver” civilization to develop and survive b/c
repression breeds under circumstances where information is unequally available.
Rousseau’s comment that monarchies are best for big groups shows that we need to break up the
big groups/nations into smaller independent entities, but we still need to maintain the cultural ties
between them for the sake of peace. Doing so ensures greater actual representation of people’s
wishes; personally, I think the ideal size is one small enough to be served by a town meeting
style government as most towns have here in New England.
Have you read Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time? That gives a great fictional image
of what a technological yet Leaver society could look like. I thumbed through several reviews
online such as this one, but didn’t find one that adequately discusses the technology-plus-ecology
element of her tale.
49
Comment by Gus — 21 March 2005 @ 3:41 PM
I think the problems we face are intrinsic to the very nature of agriculture. Simply producing the
number of calories required for such a population locks us into a Quinnian “food race” that can
only end in catastrophe. Whatever solution we stumble upon must belong to one of two camps:
either it will decrease our caloric output, or it won’t. If it doesn’t, then it has no effect on our
escalating consumption and does nothing to steer us away from a total collapse. If it does, then it
imposes a new barrier to growth and causes a collapse to begin immediately. Either way, the
collapse seems increasingly inevitable.
I wish you luck in trying to find a way out of this Catch 22, but I don’t think one exists. There
are many insoluble problems in the world, and this has all the hallmarks of one of them.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 March 2005 @ 6:38 PM
Gus–
Not a ringing endorsement, I agree - but he does spend an entire work on politics in society so it
would seem he has resigned himself to the fact that the best must be made of a sad situation, and
there are signs that he isn’t totally cynical about society either. For instance he rather praises the
Roman model (and sometimes the Spartan one) of society, and also mentions that he finds
something to be proud of in the French government (or actually more likely he means
Switzerland, because he says “my own country”). But yes, I’m pretty sure it’s not a resounding
Two Thumbs Up
I had a look at the description of Woman On The Edge Of Time - looks very interesting, very
human. The idea of people getting born only when others die may be more symbolic than
practical, but it reminds me of a short story I once read and whose writer I can’t remember - I
just know he was an anthropologist. Two space travellers represent a planet bent on conquering
the universe (say, Earth) - one is a veteran the other young. Their usual strategy is to lure natives
of new planets with the Earth’s technology, make them dependent and eventuallty “buy” the
planet. But these people are different from all others - nothing interests them ever, yet they are
the most peaceful, happy bunch you can imagine. They also have an occasional ritual in which
someone sacrifices him or herself, and soon a new person is born - the same soul but in a
younger body. It turns out these folk are supremely advanced - they’ve already been through
technology and all that, learned its harm, and simplified their lives to - yes - a future primitive. A
tribe of Lamas.
Jason–
The catch-22 you mention is interesting. From a view regarding the total movement of human
efforts on the globe, i.e. energy, in economics understood as surplus, I’ve once tried to argue that
a catastrophe is likely at some future point in time, but not necessarily inevitable, because the
increase in consumption needs an outlet (eg. wars), and if the entire globe continues to raise its
potential one could speculate that beyond the point where most humans (including those in the
3rd world) finally have basic subsistence the excess suddenly exponentially increases and causes
the grid of energy movement to frantically wreak havoc on its entire self, all at the same time 50
not because the energy wasn’t there before, but because it is for the first time a global excess
without a productive outlet. I don’t know if expanding to the moon or elsewhere might solve this
(hypothetical) problem - perhaps, if we can ever work out how to sustain ourselves on a barren
planet without an atmosphere.
Comment by marts — 22 March 2005 @ 5:26 PM
I’m really split on this: Part of me strongly wants to make sure we solve the problems here first
(if that’s possible); another part equally strongly believes we need an outlet in space exploration
for us to survive. (Ultimately, I think the latter is necessary either way; even if we solve the
former, a big asteroid can finish us off if we’re all still living on Earth.) I don’t want our
exploration to be modeled on the rapacious ways European society forced upon the Americas
and elsewhere, esp. if there’s other life out there.
marts — I think we’ve had the “global excess” you speak of for a long time, in terms of
population, food & destructive technology. Until recently, those three were semi-separate, with
tech & food concentrated in the West/North and pop. concentrated in the East/South, but now
they’re blending. What that will produce, we don’t yet know, but we’ve already seen some
indicators, good & bad: the world wars, but also the Internet, for example. I’m inclined to think
the results will be nasty if we do not spread out political/economic power at the same time these
elements blend globally, but I’m not sure if that’s possible without a global government that has
a lot more authority than the UN.
Such a gov’t doesn’t need to be authoritarian and could possibly become a kind of global council
of lots of independent tribes over time, but that would require a consciously engineered, peaceful
collapse of society as we know it. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure the powers-that-be won’t go
without a lot of kicking and screaming.
BTW, if you read Piercy, you migth also want to read Paul Theroux’s O-Zone: If Piercy is the
view from a “Leaver” society, Theroux could be seen as a similar future seen from the “Taker”
society (where the non-city folks are seen as backwards, scary & dirty).
Comment by Gus — 23 March 2005 @ 1:16 AM
On space exploration: Agriculture lets slip the natural barrier of carrying capacity, and we see the
implications of that. What would be the implications if we escaped our cosmic fate by colonizing
other worlds? Every species must eventually die out, and eventually our time will come. We’re
still a young species, and we should try to escape this doom of our own creation we set in motion
a mere 10,000 years ago, but to try to escape our destiny–extinction, the ultimate destiny of all
species–forever seems … misguided.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 March 2005 @ 8:06 AM
Jason — Extinction isn’t necessarily the “ultimate destiny” of every species, except maybe when
the Earth finally gets swallowed by the Sun or even when the universe finally runs out of energy.
A great example is the horseshoe crab; it’s been here virtually unchanged for 100s of millions of
years. For many others, an actual extinction can’t really be pinpointed because they simply
evolved into something else. The archeological definition of “species” is somewhat arbitrary
51
since we’ll never know if two ancient lifeforms we classify separately could interbreed when
they lived.
By colonizing other worlds, we aren’t evading any predestined fate, we’re giving evolution more
opportunity to act on our gene pool & those of fellow Earth lifeforms. By star-hopping, we’re
enabling Earth collectively to survive & reproduce. I’d say it’s equally possible that 1) we’d be
in competition with other kinds of life developing on other worlds, and 2)Earth life and other life
would be sufficiently different as to be not be much competition, allowing life side-by-side. (I
seriously doubt the rest of the galaxy is entirely uninhabited, but it is plausible we won’t find any
other technological life nearby. Still a LOT of worlds are probably lifeless — even considering
the probability of life existing in forms we don’t even approximate on Earth except in scifi —
and all lifeforms expand into unoccupied space if they can.)
Maybe that’s not possible, but we’ll never know without trying. Trying, however, doesn’t mean
we have to do it in a disrespectful, Taker manner.
Comment by Gus — 24 March 2005 @ 1:18 AM
Inside of time, everything has a beginning and an end, both individuals, and groups. No number
of species which have not yet gone extinct can prove that one day there will be no mroe
horseshoe crabs, no more cockroaches, and no more humans. When no more individuals of a
species exist, it is extinct–even if their descendants live on as something else. Yes, the definition
of a species is ambiguous, but all good things must come to an end.
My fear of space exploration is a fear of exporting our civilization–that we may let slip the bonds
of gravity, and instead of simply ending all life on earth, we may over the next 10,000 years wipe
out all life in the universe.
I don’t know if a tribal space program is possible, but I wouldn’t write it off. I don’t see time as a
bad thing, or even our ultimate, unavoidable demise. I want to avoid the suicide we’re currently
in the midst of, but if space travel isn’t possible, it won’t bother me. And if you do find some
way to explore space without destroying all life, then that won’t bother me either. I guess I just
don’t see it as much of a concern.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 March 2005 @ 10:35 AM
One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about, recently — Jason, you seem to “blame” a lot of the
problems on agriculture. I think this is quite valid, given what it facilitates. But I think therein
lies a misplacement of where the problem truly lies. Agriculture simply facilitated the population
growth and centralization required for the consumption of ever more resources. Perhaps
agriculture is not so inherently destructive as the centralization and population growth that it
facilitates? I know that as a determinist, perhaps you do not see these things as separate, but then
I think that memes contribute to the development as well.
I guess what I’m saying is that perhaps agriculture is not the root of the problem, it just
contributed to the expansion of the root of the problem — centralization and hierarchy (both
positive feedback loops, just like agriculture). I’m not sure that without the latter two, one would
see the intensification being taken to this level.
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In my thesis, I will be defining civilization primarily as a reinforcing feedback loop of multiple
other closely-linked reinforcing feedback loops — primarily hierarchy, centralization, and
division of labor. Childe’s criteria for civilization are either directly one of these three selfperpetuating and intensifying loops or are a subset of them. Division of labor accounts for two of
them (standing armies and full-time specialization), centralization accounts for most if not all of
them, and hierarchy accounts for centralization and the exceptionally insidious class structure.
One of my postulates is that agriculture is not necessarily the only means of food production that
can be centralized. As we have seen with the Kwakiutl, they maintained a chiefdom without
having “agriculture”, per se — and I would posit that this was due to the plentiful and easily
centralized source of fish nearby. A while ago, Engineer-Poet spoke of a means of food
production that was supposedly scalable to feed large numbers of people… after which you said
that the problem was not feeding these large numbers of people. This set me off thinking.
I’ve read the (excellent) article The Oil We Eat, which seems to be a significant source for a lot
of what you write. I won’t disagree that agriculture as described in this essay is not the easiest
way to facilitate centralization or constant expansion, but I do think that perhaps there might be a
few other ways to do this that we’ve not seen. Hydroponics, Seed balls (used destructively),
organic methods of farming, and other potential sources for food production can also be
centralized.
Now, what I suggest is this: that either agriculture be redefined as any method of food production
that is easily centralizable, or that agriculture as framed in anthropology and in traditional usage
is just one of the many possible means of centralized food production, one that was used for this
particular brand of civilization. I don’t think that all of the above methods of food production are
all past the point of diminishing returns, either — particularly seed balls, which is an innovation
that could be incredibly dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. No plowing, no irrigation, no
fertilization (when employed with Fukuoka’s natural farming techniques) and huge yields
(equivalent to or greater than industrial agriculture).
I think this is an important point to make about agriculture, and for a number of reasons. One, I
think it might shed light on a couple of the deeper problems with civilization, that of
centralization and hierarchy. Jeff Vail talks about these in his book A Theory of Power — and
makes a strong case that these are the “true evils”. Centralization (including a centralized form of
food production) allows and facilitates huge resource consumption, as does hierarchy. As we
discussed in Jeff Vail’s thread over at IshCon, agriculture is ONE of those huge resource
consumptions, and ONE of the means that hierarchy/centralization uses, but is far from the entire
picture. Leading to my second point: The earth’s ecosystems would not be nearly as degraded if
it were not for the OTHER resources we’ve consumed, in order to furnish the greed of the elite
in the hierarchy (pharaohs, kings, the merchant class — whomever it is, throughout history).
Computers, cars, pyramids, skyscrapers, large stadiums, and all of the items mass produced for
consumption that fill our huge waste dumps — these are not due to agriculture, they are due to
centralization and hierarchy-enforced mass production.
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Third, and perhaps the most crucial point, is a word on the practical side (which is seemingly
where many primitivists, anarchists, and Marxists get completely lost and ineffective). In the
transition to another system of living, we’re not going to be able to go back to a hunter-gatherer
like world. The Earth is too depleted and too overpopulated for this to be a practical solution for
anyone other than the elite — those who can purchase vast tracts of land in undeveloped areas,
who have the time and money to study primitive skills, and a number of other criteria that put
this option far out of the reach of the majority of humans on this planet. Now, it’s just common
sense that in order to solve the hierarchy-agriculture loop, we have to counter the loop. If we
cannot get rid of horticulture/agriculture due to the current geographic/monetary/ecological
restrictions, we must get rid of hierarchy. We must effectively make sure that our food
production does not lead to a gradual re-development of hierarchy. Conversely, if we want to get
rid of hierarchy, an effective way to do it would be to get rid of centralized food production of
any form — which, in this case, means decentralizing agriculture.
The bottom-line answer to civilization is that we must stop the centralization, the constant
expansion, and the hierarchy. Jeff Vail talks about a network of several small, independent nodes
in what he calls rhizome.
Rhizome acts as a web-like structure of connected but independent nodes, borrowing its name
from the structures of plants such as bamboo and other grasses. By its very nature, rhizome
exhibits incompatibility with such critical hierarchal structures as domestication, monocultureagriculture, division of labor and centralized government. Unlike hierarchy, rhizome cannot
suffer exploitation from within because its structure remains incompatible with centralization of
power. It provides a structural framework for our conscious organization of memes. Each node in
a rhizome stands autonomous from the larger structure, but the nodes work together in a larger
network that extends benefits to the node without creating dependence. The critical element of a
world that focuses power at the level of the individual, that can meet the demands of our genome
while providing the flexibility and potential to achieve greater goals, remains the small,
connected and relatively self-sufficient node of this rhizome structure. In human terms, such a
node represents an economic and a cultural unit at the size preferred by our genome: the
household and the tribe. Functionally self-sufficient but not isolated, cooperating but not
controlled, the rhizome economy, combined with a self-awareness of control structures, provides
the real-world foundation of stability and freedom.
What these nodes look like to me are small, egalitarian communities — ecovillages. To someone
else, they might look like a hunter-gatherer tribe; to another, a Temporary or a Permanent
Autonomous Zone. An important thing about rhizomal nodes is that they can all be different,
providing a strong and long-lasting network of diversity. I really feel like this vision reconciles
most, if not all, of the supposedly divided ideologies critiquing civilization.
The theories and the practicalities are edging ever closer, in my mind. As civilization as we know
it enters its final hour, it remains to be seen what the human race will be capable of. I have hope
and faith that we will be able to transform our present dark realities for a bright future.
Peace,
Devin
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Comment by Devin — 14 July 2005 @ 4:51 AM
Devin, you’re a writer after my own heart! I’m familiar with Fukuoka & eco-villages & trying to
establish one in Los Angeles. My goal is to build a rhizome network within L.A. & hopefully
link up with similar communities up the coast. Which means I’d better read the Jeff Vail thread.
Hmmm. Too much to do.
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 14 July 2005 @ 4:37 PM
Hey all,
I surfed in some time a few weeks from Wikipedia (I had to know who this “Jason Godesky”
was). I read several dozen articles here and was greatly impressed. It’s good to be among kindred
spirits. Now, down to business.
In the above post (which is extremely well written), agriculture seems to me to be married
unalienably to the idea of expansion. I cannot for the life of me figure out why living in an
agricultural society would absolutely require expansion and conquest. As far as I can tell, any
society - no matter what its method of putting food in its mouth - that believes that the world
belongs to them will by nature overrun the earth. As a corollary, any society - no matter what its
method of putting food in its mouth - that believes that they are only a small part of the world
and have no more claim to it thatn any other plant or creature will naturally remain in a balance
with the world.
The !Kung complained of the long working hours during the drought… yet, even during the
worst desert drought in human memory, nothing was stopping the !Kung from overrunning their
pastoral neighbors and slaughtering each and every one of them. Nothing was stopping them
from working 8 and 10 hours a day and exploding their population so as to ravage the tribes
around them and expand. What precluded this action was not that they were hunter/foragers, but
the knowledge that the world does not belong to them. It seems to me that if a society that was
agricultural had a deep understanding that they were not kings or gods, they could regulate
themselves perfectly, much like the !Kung (or indeed any hunter/forager group), who regulate
themselves by only obtaining the food that they require.
As far as I can see in my admittedly narrow world-view, it is not horticulture or pastoralism or
hunter/foraging or even agriculture that is killing the world. Rather, what is killing the world is
the idea that the world belongs to US, us being whatever group is raping our Home with no
regard for the sanctity of life.
I see no reason why a hunter/gatherer society could not decide that the world belonged to them
and “go on the rampage” by slaughtering their neighbors. They could just as easily reproduce
with the increased food intake from their dead neighbors’ land. They could just as easily form
armies and have class divisions and labor divisions. (You’re all hunters, you’re all weapons
makers, you’re all conquering warriors, the women will all be gatherers and breeding machines,
we’re all priests, and he’s the king etc.) What precludes them from following that course of
madness is that they do not have the peculiar and dangerous belief that the world belongs to
them.
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I am proud to be one who loves the agricultural farm life, but I am also one who would be
happiest being in balance with the Universe. Diminishing returns be damned, I’ll be in my fields,
growing the 3 sisters: pole beans, corn and squash. My other nine fields will lie fallow and
burgeon with life, the soil having a full decade to replenish itself after my plow has passed
through. My table will be graced with venison and fish and mushrooms gathered in the forest as
well as cornbread and beans. There is no one right way to live, but the ways that survive are
those that are in balance with the world. I seek nothing but peace and balance.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 17 July 2005 @ 7:19 AM
I cannot for the life of me figure out why living in an agricultural society would absolutely
require expansion and conquest.
Thanks, Chuck. My biggest problem has always been, at how basic a level do I start? And I’m
constantly forgetting to flesh out parts that, to me after all these years, seem obvious–but,
obviously, aren’t. This is one of them, and as I look around I see it’s a fundamental premise in a
lot of my writing that deserves a full treatment in and of itself. So that’s what I’m going to do.
This week, you’ll all be treated to an article on why constant growth is a necessary implication of
farming, as directly as things getting wet is a necessary implication of rain.
As far as I can tell, any society - no matter what its method of putting food in its mouth - that
believes that the world belongs to them will by nature overrun the earth. As a corollary, any
society - no matter what its method of putting food in its mouth - that believes that they are only
a small part of the world and have no more claim to it thatn any other plant or creature will
naturally remain in a balance with the world.
I would disagree, and I’ll elaborate on why in that promised article, but the gist of it comes down
to this. How you put food in your mouth determines a range of things you can believe. Very few
are such psychological supermen as to hold the kind of cognitive dissonance in their brains as to
live as an agriculturalists, and simultaneously believe that they are part of the rest of the world.
Perhaps enough to lead some kind of small innovation, but not enough to build an entire society
on.
What precluded this action was not that they were hunter/foragers, but the knowledge that the
world does not belong to them.
That’s certainly Daniel Quinn’s belief, but it turns out the !Kung do believe the world belongs to
them. We can debate how much of this story is aboriginal, and how much it is influenced by
Muslim and Christian missionaries, but from actually studying the beliefs of these various
“Leaver” cultures, I can’t say I’ve found much ideological difference to back Quinn’s assertion
up. Ethnocentrism is universal; every group believes itself superior to all others. All believe they
have a unique destiny in the world. So if it’s not ideology that divides us, what is it? I think it’s
opportunity. I don’t think any group–of any species–would hesitate to conquer the world if it
could. Natural selection itself seems to me to be a delicate balance of each species’ will to
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conquer against the others; evolution seems driven by everyone constantly trying to take over the
world, and always failing. The past ten thousand years are an object lesson in the horrors that
unfold when one actually succeeds in that. The will is important; the actual attainment of that
will is catastrophic.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2005 @ 9:32 AM
Very well; I will hold my objections and points until you have more thoroughly formulated your
own thoughts. I look forward to your essay on the implications of agriculture in the same way
that I always look forward to your other posts.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 18 July 2005 @ 11:09 AM
i need to know what “CILIZATION”means
Comment by Anonymous — 20 March 2007 @ 4:48 PM
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