One of the most common objections people pose against the anarcho-primitivist world view is that to adopt a hunter-gatherer way of life is to somehow “go back” to an inferior evolutionary stage that humans were supposed to have already gone through. This argument presupposes a number of inaccurate ideas about evolution in general and cultural evolution in particular. Biological evolution consists of adaptation to a given environment. When that environment changes, those best adapted to it die off. A popular example is the Neandertals, whose short, stout forms were extraordinarily well adapted to Ice Age Europe, but died off once the world began to warm. Neandertals were both physically more powerful than Homo sapiens sapiens and, despite popular belief, showed no signs of being any less intelligent. There is no evidence that this shows any kind of evolutionary “progress”; if anything, it might have been the opposite. Species do not “improve,” becoming more and more perfect over time. A successful adaptation to any environment can still kill a species off when that environment changes.

Furthermore, civilization cannot exist without agriculture. As Jared Diamond demonstrated in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, the exact right combination of latitude, domesticable plants, domesticable herd animals, and continental axis which enables civilization is hard to come by. Agriculture could happen only as many times as it did, and only in the places it did. Notice how civilization only arose in tropical flood plains between the latitudes of 30 north and 30 south degrees. Those to whom we referred in the past as “savages” would certainly have planted crops if they could. (Note: that’s not a good thing.) It’s just that very few environments allow it. So why consider civilized culture superior to tribal culture merely because of the climate, flora, and fauna each group happened to end up with?

Worse, the linear cultural evolution argument contains racist overtones which even the people discussing it may not recognize. For instance, if cultural evolution really is linear, and we’re in the midst of an unbroken progression from the barbaric savage to the near-perfect divine, (we obviously haven’t reached that part yet, but we will… we just need more technology!) that raises the question: what’s the matter with the !Kung? Or the Inuit? Or any number of tribal peoples that maintain - or maintained, until recently - their cultures and traditions even in spite of the evolutionary time limit? Are they just too stupid to know what’s good for them? After all, when they were finally exposed to the wonders of civilization, many of them fiercely fought their grand destiny - which was, of course, to become just like us.

Most people who still subscribe to the outdated notion of social evolutionism aren’t familiar with that particular aspect of it. You know, the racist part. They mindlessly parrot ancient and Enlightenment philosophers - but only up to the point at which it becomes politically incorrect. As much as we’d like to ignore it, racism does still exist - in overt and more insidious forms - and the patterns bear an eerie resemblance to stereotypical images in play since the Middle Ages. In Gustav Jahoda’s fascinating book, Images of Savages, B.V. Street is quoted as having written:

When I was doing research in the 1970s for a thesis on [racism], I was constantly amazed by the similarity between the popular symbols and myths of race that I would encounter in pubs, etc., and the representations of race in the obscure nineteenth-century anthropology journals that I was consulting in academic libraries.

Jahoda takes his readers through a history of racial prejudice, from the Middle Ages to the modern day. He focuses on the recurring traits historically associated with “savages,” namely cannibalism, hyper-violence, hyper-sexuality, dimwittedness, child-likeness, and animality. These stereotypes say more about the hidden fears and desires of Europeans than they ever did about the people they were supposedly discussing. Every culture defines its own worth by denigrating its neighbors; this keeps people from leaving the society. Civilized cultures in particular contain a strong undercurrent of fear and hatred of nature. We’re ashamed of our sexuality and of our violent urges, so we cloak these primal emotions in noble, other-worldly jargon such as “holy matrimony” and “holy war.” Naturally, we choose to define our worth by our disgust with humanity. We are something higher and nobler than simply another animal. We transcend nature. We are superior to the savages because we have not only abandoned everything that makes us human, but struggled to crush almost every instinct.

For millennia, civilized people knew that somewhere out there, there were human beings who allowed themselves to act as human beings. Their repressed minds grossly exaggerated this natural behavior, attributing the worst behavior to these people - and oftentimes simply making things up - in order to buttress the distinction between the highly refined upper-class civilized and everyone else.

It’s illuminating to find out that the very same labels were slapped on every “savage” culture Europeans encountered, from the Irish and the Scots to sub-Saharan Africans and the “Indians” of the New World. Particular images - namely cannibalism and hyper-sexuality - were also attributed to so-called “witches” in past centuries. Even today, when rumors of Satanic rituals circulate, the same themes emerge. In many cases, Europeans took ancient folklore about creatures half-man and half-beast and directly attributed those features to newfound savages. Well into the nineteenth century, respected scientists genuinely believed that men with tails prowled the deep jungles of Africa. Legend or reality, the Other had already been defined, and Europeans built their ideas of cultural worth on the distinction between themselves and this mysterious, barbaric Other. The savages they would later encounter could never be accepted on their own terms, as that would explode the Europeans’ notion of their value and themselves. It could never succeed in making their perceptions reality; it could only lend comfort that the terrible sacrifices of their repression were not suffered in vain.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard wrote the following passage in regards to the Azande, but it may more accurately describe an entirely different culture:

Their blindness is not due to stupidity, for they display great ingenuity in explaining away the failures and inequalities of the poison oracle and experimental keenness in testing it. It is due rather to the fact that their intellectual ingenuity and experimental keenness are conditioned by patterns of ritual behavior and mystical belief. Within the limits set by these patterns they show great intelligence, but it cannot operate beyond these limits. Or, to put it another way: they reason excellently in the idiom of their beliefs, but they cannot reason outside, or against their beliefs because they have no other idiom in which to express their thoughts.