I don’t normally do such simple link posts, but Steve alerted me to a very interesting article by Carl Estabrook titled “The Subversive Commandments.” I think Estabrook’s taken the point a little far–to call the ten commandments atheistic seems almost absurd–but he’s more right than wrong. In fact, I touched on this progressive nature of the Torah in a paper I wrote in 2002, titled “Asceticism as Political Resistance in Roman Judea, 6–66 CE,” [PDF]. G-d’s opposition to kingship is certainly telling; in fact, the remainder of the historical books can be read as the long playing out of G-d’s warning that becoming a civilization was a bad idea. However, the society described in the Torah is very much a Bronze Age society–an incredibly liberal and progressive one, but unmistakably Bronze Age. For the kind of anarchy Estabrook discusses, I think you have to wait for the Second Temple period, and the rise of Essenism with very deep, subversive rejections of authority embodied in the life of the ascetic.

It’s Good Friday. Like every Good Friday for the past five years, I made my pilgrimage and partook of one of the few religious traditions I have left to me: going to Burger King and getting a Whopper.

As a Catholic, I never ate meat on Good Friday. In fact, my family had fish every Friday and Wednesday. Several Lents, I even went so far as to fast all 40 days (in the Ramadan fashion, only eating when the sun went down). Now, I mark Good Friday every year by eating a Whopper, but it isn’t simply for childish blasphemy–there is a genuine religious belief to it.

How the Agricultural Revolution happened is well understood. It is perhaps best explained by David Rindos‘ Selectionist Hypothesis, which Jared Diamond explained succinctly in Guns, Germs and Steel as a specific case of co-evolution. We could domesticate large herd mammals by identifying the leader; we could domesticate cereal grains because they were prone to harvesting. In the wild, a pea pod that doesn’t explode will simply die off, but to a human gatherer, such a pod filled with delicious peas is much more desirable than picking individual peas off the ground. Even without management, simply dropping a few peas by accident will leave even more of the mutant non-exploding pea plants near the traditional camp site when the band returns next year. Followed over centuries, this process will eventually create non-toxic almonds, turn aurochs into cows, and give rise to domesticated forms of wild organisms bred to better serve human interests. How this all happened is not the question. The question is why.

Two months ago, the world was subjected to yet another scandal involving the British royal family. The tabloids reported the story with their usual outrage, coupled with their usual assumption that a family of spoiled rich figureheads with no real power is expected to behave more respectably than the general population. This time, Prince Harry (the “Party Prince�) made an idiot out of himself by attending a costume party dressed as a Nazi soldier. It remains unknown – and unreported – exactly how many people attended the same party dressed as Satan.

In my previous article, I glossed over a number of significant points, which I now must go back and revisit in greater detail. The most glaring of these glosses is probably my assertion that agriculture is a risky, marginal and difficult means of acquiring food. While I have previously covered the gross inefficiency of agriculture, I am sure many readers would object that agriculture provides a stable, secure and reliable source of food. After all, it was the bounty of agriculture that allowed us to give up hunting and gathering, constantly wandering and wondering where our next meal would come from, giving us the time to build civilization, right? That is the common picture we’ve all been told, but it is also the opposite of truth. In fact, the Neolithic Revolution was, to use Jared Diamond’s turn of phrase, the worst mistake in the history of the human race.

Finally, I can show people what I’ve been working on for nearly a month. Isn’t she beautiful? But this is a big update, and there’s more to it than just the obvious graphical improvements courtesy of yours truly. The big news for this push includes the Gov tab, originally conceived as a showcase for our government demos, like the 9/11 Report that was featured on the New York Times website. Quickly, though, the Gov tab ballooned into a significant project in its own right, with our Gov+ search: a metasearch of political news, FirstGov and MSN confined to the “.gov” domain, with what just might be our coolest collection yet–a metasearch of several major Washington think tanks. Add to that the Congressional keymatch (try typing in your ZIP code, or the name of your state–or even just the postal abbreviation), and it’s hard to deny the just straight-up coolness of Clusty.

The Anthropik Cyclopaedia is up. Built on the same software as Wikipedia, the Cyclopaedia is meant to be an online reference for primitivists, deep ecologists, eco-anarchists, and other radicals in a similar vein. Ideally, it will combine not only philosophical entries (and biographical entries on various philosophers, thinkers, writers, activists and leaders), but also practical information and ethnographic information. For example, I’d love to have entries on things like how to build a yurt or other such crafts. An entry on deer would not only break down the various species and other scientific information, but also photographs of deer, tracks and signs of deer, how to track and hunt deer, how to dress a deer, and possible uses of various parts of a deer. Ideally, it would also include the internet’s largest repository of ethnographic information. Once it has matured, the Cyclopaedia should be a massive codex of information on tribes, tribalism, and humanity’s ability to live beyond the confines of civilization, from the theories and philosophies of civilized authors to the nitty-gritty details of how to do it, and rife with examples of functional tribes.

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:

1. Settlement of cities of 5,000 or more people.
2. Full-time labor specialization.
3. Concentration of surplus.
4. Class structure.
5. 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:

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?

Steve’s Note: This piece was originally written for a Pittsburgh audience.

Februus was the Etruscan god of death, which is why he’s given reign over this time of year.
(I know that, as you’re reading this, the month is calling itself March. No matter. Februus’ reign extends backward into the last weeks of January and through March all the way to the Equinox. He is a greedy god.)

Think about it. Or rather, feel about it. He’s everywhere, now, in this miserable year of our lord, 2005. Look out your window into the sunless streets of Oakland and see him.