Thesis #13: Civilization always pursues complexity.
by Jason GodeskyWhat 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 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:
- 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”)
- civilization, civilisation — (the social process whereby societies achieve civilization)
- culture, civilization, civilisation — (a particular society at a particular time and place; “early Mayan civilization”)
- 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 are really meaningful. 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., though the Roman Empire was less influenced by notions of Cartesian space and more interested in spheres of influence. The Roman Empire was, in fact, a hierarchy of such 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
- Settlement of cities of 5,000 or more people.
- Full-time labor specialization.
- Concentration of surplus.
- Class structure.
- State-level political organization.
Secondary Criteria
- Monumental architecture
- Long-distance trade
- Sophisticated art
- Writing
- 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. These five criteria are, however, bound to one another through causation. Thus, they always appear together, and never without the others–forming a clearly defined cultural package that we can call “civilization.” This should not be terribly surprising, because culture is a reflexive system, and changes to one part of that system will cascade throughout the whole. In thesis #8, we saw how formative subsistence strategy is for a culture, and how the precarious nature of food production limited cultivating societies to a very narrow range of possible diversity. We saw that Service’s traditional breakdown may be somewhat biased to tease out greater distinction among those societies more like ourselves, while lumping together far greater diversity among foragers not like ourselves. 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.
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, because human population is a function of food supply (see thesis #4). 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 their average work per day to be three hours, 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. Because of this, 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 (see thesis #12).
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 sufficiently intensive 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.
So we see that all five of Childe’s primary criterion–cities, full-time specialization, concentration of surplus, class and the state–are all necessary consequences of sufficiently intensive food production. This kind of escalation is, itself, an example of a much more basic phenomenon: increasing complexity.
In his 1983 paper, “Breaking down cultural complexity: inequality and heterogeneity,” (in Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, vol 6), McGuire provides this definiton of complexity:
Complexity is generally understood to refer to such things as the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organizing these into a coherent, functioning whole. Augmenting any of these dimensions increases the complexity of a society. Hunter-gatherer societies (by way of illustrating one contrast in complexity) contain no more than a few dozen distinct social personalities, while modern European censuses recognize 10,000 to 20,000 unique occupational roles, and industrial societies may contain overall more than 1,000,000 different kinds of social personalities.
In “Complexity, Problem-Solving, and Sustanable Societies,” Joseph Tainter reiterates a point he makes in greater detail in his 1988 classic study, The Collapse of Complex Societies:
As a simple illustration of differences in complexity, Julian Steward pointed out the contrast between the native peoples of western North America, among whom early ethnographers documented 3,000 to 6,000 cultural elements, and the U.S. Army, which landed 500,000+ artifact types at Casablanca in World War 11 (Steward 1955). Complexity is quantifiable.
…
The conventional view has been that human societies have a latent tendency towards greater complexity. Complexity was assumed to be a desirable thing, and the logical result of surplus food, leisure time, and human creativity. Although this scenario is popular, it is inadequate to explain the evolution of complexity. In the world of cultural complexity there is, to use a colloquial expression, no free lunch. More complex societies are costlier to maintain than simpler ones and require higher support levels per capita. A society that is more complex has more sub-groups and social roles, more networks among groups and individuals, more horizontal and vertical controls, higher flow of information, greater centralization of information, more specialization, and greater interdependence of parts. Increasing any of these dimensions requires biological, mechanical, or chemical energy. In the days before fossil fuel subsidies, increasing the complexity of a society usually meant that the majority of its population had to work harder.
Tainter recognizes five primary subcategories of a culture’s complexity: subsistence methods, technology, conflict, sociopoltical organization, and research and development. Each area can be made more complex by an investment of energy; each can open up access to greater sources of energy by becoming more complex. Complexity is an investment that requires a given input, and makes a given return.
Civilization is a culture which adopts some key element of complexity for which more energy can be gained simply by intensifying input. Agriculture is the classic example: more intensive cultivation will yield more food. This is not necessarily true of foraging, which includes much more of a gamble. This creates a positive feedback loop by kicking off a game of Prisoner’s Dilemna. Failing to intensify production puts one at risk from those who choose to do so. Thus, all civilizations become compelled to grow at all costs (see thesis #12). Because of this, civilizations are forced to constantly increase their complexity whenever possible, whether by refining bureaucratic or administrative functions, increasing agricultural yields, using miltiary force to secure new energy resources (whether this is expressed in Roman conquests explicitly made to acquire new farmland, or contemporary U.S. military involvement in the Middle East), inventing new technology, or any other form of complexity.
So, at last, we have a working definition of civilization. A civilization is any society which chooses to answer all stresses with an increase in complexity. As such, the seeds of collapse are sown in civilization’s very nature, because complexity itself is subject to diminishing returns, and pursuing any one strategy as the response to every stress will suffer the same fate.
You know, it’s interesting but having a psych background, I liken complexity to the increasingly convoluted logic processes of a schizophrenic.
Taking out the possible shamanistic element, it seems that the mind’s reaction to stress is to seek multiple ways out of the stress — to complicate things.
And here we are living in an increasingly complex world.
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 27 October 2005 @ 12:33 PM
Alright — so if we’re not building a civilization (which we’re not), what do we call it? (at least temporarily for the sake of discussion).
After all, we’re discussing the creation of a society based off of forager bands and human-sized (150 or less) villages.
What do you think?
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 27 October 2005 @ 12:35 PM
Hmmm, might I humbly suggest the word “tribe” to refer to each group of 150 or fewer humans living in egalitarian societies with foraging as their main source of food?
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 27 October 2005 @ 12:57 PM
A society is any group of people.
A culture is (1) the whole set of learned behaviors, and (2) the society that learns the same behaviors.
A civilization is a culture that pursues complexity as its response to all pressures.
So, civilizations are a subset of cultures. There are lots of cultures that aren’t civilizations. So might I suggest simply referring to a “culture” or “society”?
Tribe might be good, but it’s got some baggage. Band would work for many foragers. Rhizome is precise, but relatively esoteric. But ultimately a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 October 2005 @ 1:04 PM
We’re growing [i]Rhizome[/i].
Comment by JCamasto — 27 October 2005 @ 1:11 PM
On swidden horticulture and the fertility of the rain forest — Beyond Wilderness
Their conclusion is also interesting:
Food for thought.
Comment by Devin — 27 October 2005 @ 3:50 PM
I don’t think the Earth needs planetary land managers–gentle and sensitive or not. Did just fine without us, after all.
Everything’s sustainable over a certain amount of time. The question is whether it’s indefinitely sustainable. Foraging’s been around long enough to prove itself; horticulture’s no older than agriculture. It may be just as unsustainable, only over a slightly longer time scale. So I remain suspicious.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 October 2005 @ 3:53 PM
Quinn said it best:
“We have as much business being stewards of the world as infants have being stewards of the nursery. It’s we who are dependant on the world, not the other way round.”
Comment by Raku — 27 October 2005 @ 4:11 PM
What are the chances of any member of the current generation to make it to the promised land of egalitarian forager bands living more or less peacefully and sustainably?
If foragers require so much land to gather food, any widespread acceptance of this lifestyle (even with 2-3% of current population) will cause intense territorial clashes for several generations.
The presence of huge number of civilization artefacts after collapse will create a very interesting dynamic in these clashes, as groups with better artefacts and better technical knowledge as well as better forager life skills will gain initial advantage.
Hiding from civilization’s derelicts turned cannibals was mentioned as a great challenge for emerging forager tribes, but there is no mention of likely territorial fights between the emerging forager tribes if they are squeezed too tight in not enough land.
Whatever happens, if too many people become good primitives, they are likely in for a life of strife lasting several generations
Comment by Anonymous — 27 October 2005 @ 4:26 PM
You can still read the article, sheesh, lol. I think we might be getting a little too fundamentalist about all this. “Terra preta” sounds pretty amazing to me.
Do you plan on buying land in the wilderness and starting from there? How much wilderness is left?
What about all the other land that has been damaged — do we restore it? Do we stop spraying chemicals everywhere, do we tear up the concrete and the asphalt, do we remove invasive species? If so, why? How arrogant of us to think that we are the stewards of the land…
Except that we’ve been living this arrogance for thousands of years now. Where do we draw a line on what is “good” interference and what is “bad” interference? Sustainability to me is a really poor way of measuring, because quite simply we aren’t able to tell. Who could tell hundreds of years ago that the Earth wasn’t flat? Who knew that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe? That the Earth was even finite? Who knew that there wasn’t a God interfering daily, one with the power to restore it or destroy it all with a flick of a finger?
Similarly — what effect is climate change going to have on the next 100 years? 1000? 1 million? How long does sustainability last? What if humans go extinct? So what if humans go extinct?
Whose story is this anyway?
Comment by Devin — 27 October 2005 @ 4:26 PM
I kinda figured ‘rhizome’ worked pretty well.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 27 October 2005 @ 4:35 PM
I utterly reject the concept of being the kings of life on Earth, and find the idea of being the stewards of life on Earth rather silly. I rather suggest embracing the ideal of being servants of life. As with the Terra Preta spoken of above, made by humans, what’s to stop us from causing life to bloom in ways it never has before?
After all the pain and destruction we’ve caused, don’t we owe it to the world, at least in some small way, to not only heal the damage we’ve done, but to repay with interest? After all the extinctions we’ve caused, why shouldn’t we give speciation a jump start?
Why not create a world so full of life that it makes a rainforest look like a parking lot? Does this seem like a vision many could share, or am I alone?
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 27 October 2005 @ 4:51 PM
Chuck,
You’re definitely not alone in the idea of re-wilding the places we’ve screwed up.
And yes, Jason, this could lead to a lot of grief in terms of where we should ‘interfere’ and where we shouldn’t but consider two things: (1) a number of tribes offered ‘gifts’ to the Green Nation that turned out to be damned good insecticides, so even foragers ‘manage’ the land a little.
And (2) perhaps the key to it all is being a part of the story of life. What if we are no more stewards of the planet than the buffalo which drops a load of fertilizer? What if it’s just returning the love to the world that the world has shown us (in happy, goofy terms, let’s give the world a hug!)
Best
Bill
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 27 October 2005 @ 5:16 PM
Who could tell hundreds of years ago that the Earth wasn’t flat? Who knew that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe? That the Earth was even finite? Who knew that there wasn’t a God interfering daily, one with the power to restore it or destroy it all with a flick of a finger?
Um, tribal peoples? Sorry, Devin.
Just taking potshots at your expense. The Terra preta info was really interesting, thanks! 
I rather suggest embracing the ideal of being servants of life.
Nope. I don’t want to be a servant. I just want to belong.
After all the pain and destruction we’ve caused, don’t we owe it to the world, at least in some small way, to not only heal the damage we’ve done, but to repay with interest? After all the extinctions we’ve caused, why shouldn’t we give speciation a jump start?
Why not create a world so full of life that it makes a rainforest look like a parking lot? Does this seem like a vision many could share, or am I alone?
The damage will be healed, without any interference from us. And giving speciation a head start and creating worlds implies that we have some kind of control over it, which is the kind of thinking that got us into trouble in the first place. All we can do is find what works best for us, and leave the rest to itself.
Comment by Raku — 27 October 2005 @ 5:16 PM
After reading the article, I can’t help but think these people recognized the story of life and then inserted themselves into it as active characters. Nothing more, nothing less.
Isn’t that something wonderful to strive for?
Also, re: our responsibility to the world, I understand that the idea of control got us into this mess, but there are several NA myth cycles that talk about how we messed up the previous ‘world’ and now need to work harder, follow the rules, and keep the balance.
I believe the same type of myth should go to our children so we never try this madness again. (barring of course, the ability to do it)
Best
Bill
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 27 October 2005 @ 6:00 PM
No fundamentalism, Devin, just a general suspicion of all cultivation because it has yet to prove itself. I’ve heard of terra preta before, but surely you’re not one of those people saying that the rain forest is somehow suitable for non-swidden cultivation simply because 10% of its soil is fertile? Remember, that means that 90% is cement.
But, the argument raised here is the one argument for permaculture that puts me on the fence about maybe it being OK. If permaculture is being used to try to accelerate the healing process for all the damage we’ve caused … then maybe it won’t be sowing the seeds of doom for all mankind.
Maybe.
I’m still suspicious, though….
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 October 2005 @ 7:31 PM
No, I wasn’t saying that the other parts of the rainforest were suitable for non-swidden cultivation. That would be stupid.
I was simply saying that permaculture practices helped build lush soil. Which, in my mind, goes to show that not all cultivation has to cause ecological destruction — a pretty important point to be made.
I’ve now heard of a number of different practices of cultivation that are enriching rather than consuming. Permaculture practices, swidden horticulture, Masanobu Fukuoka’s Natural Way of Farming, and so on. It’s a pretty farsighted claim to say that these things will cause the doom of all humankind.
As it is, about any form of food gathering/production is better than industrial agriculture. Denigrating potential tools for the transition out of some adherence to an ideal seems to be a strange reversal of policy for you. See your answer to question #1 on “5 Common Objections to Primitivism”.
Comment by Devin — 27 October 2005 @ 8:06 PM
Jason;
Let’s use your very own Thesis #1, that diversity is the greatest good. Now, you use this to show that anything that combats that diversity and decreases it is bad for the whole. In other words, civilization. Don’t tell me you can’t push it through to the other side and say that if diversity is indeed the greatest good, then anything that actively increases diversity is also good. And if you can take it a step further, the faster diversity increases, the better (provided it is still dynamically stable). Which, incidentally, humans could accomplish.
I do not, and never will suggest that humans should act as if in control the world; if anyone takes that idea out of my words, they brought the idea. Rather, I suggest that humans could act as a sort of “pressure cooker.” While we wouldn’t want to (and couldn’t!) replace the process of creation or speciation or evolution, we could speed things up quite a bit, to “replace” the species we’d destroyed and beyond. I’m talking about a planet-wide climax ecosystem, which has never before occured. Humans can do it.
Does the world NEED us to do this? Well, of course not! The world doesn’t NEED us any more than we NEED any one type of food when there’s so much out there. We have plenty of other nourishment, and so does the Earth.
So what’s my point?
A vision where humans have assumed the mantle of the friend and protector of life? A vision where humans are the willing agents of creation who have taken on the task of fostering life? It sounds like a very constructive, inspiring, rewarding (and safe) vision to me.
If there should ever come a time when there is the possibility of civilization regaining its former strength, I would much rather the world be populated by humans with the mentality of ‘Elves with the means to create’ than by humans with the mentality of ‘Orcs who have lost the means to destroy’. The idea that “we don’t have to worry about it because it’s impossible” has never sat well with me, because humans are an inventive bunch. Is the absolute best way to stop humans from rebuilding civilization to make it physically impossible? Yes. But what if a way is found? Your choice; a world populated by Elves, or by Orcs.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 27 October 2005 @ 8:21 PM
I realizes what I was really trying to get at about four minutes after I hit “submit.” Pretty common.
Scrap the Elf/Orc thing… it’s an incorrect analogy. I won’t use an analogy at all. I’ll tell a story.
Two thousand years from now, in a lush and beautiful redwood forest in what is today called the Pacific Northwest, two young humans are having a discussion while they take a break from their hunt:
“It doesn’t explain why so many of the Elder Brother’s cultures took so long to fight back against the spread of the Structure.”
“Argh, are you on this again? More wild theories, I bet. I don’t know, I suppose that the Elder Brothers were taken by surprise, Jaren. Not much one can do about it.”
“No, Davver, They weren’t taken by surprise. At least our histories say so. Many of them saw the Structure coming, centuries in advance. Many even understood parts of it… but because it was merely incompatible, merely different, they couldn’t comprehend the whole. They never fought to destroy it, merely to protect themselves when the Structure loomed large.”
“And that can’t happen to us?” Davver went back to greasing his bowstring.
“Well, could it? If I told you that only three days walk from here, there were people who were gardening in massive fields with only one type of plant per field, and returning nothing to the soil, what would you say?”
Davven furrowed his brow. “I would say that to do such a thing would be in direct opposition to everything I hold sacred. Only one plant in the field? Disturbing. Unsustainable, and even worse, degrading to the soil.”
“So you understand what happens, because your worldview is the exact opposite.”
“Well, yeah, Jaren. I understand that what they’re doing destroys what Life has created. It’s not just wrong, it’s… dangerous. Incredibly dangerous.”
“What if you knew that these people were interested in expanding their lands?”
“Hmm, well, they’d sort of have to, wouldn’t they? Once they depleted their soil, if they’re as crazy as you say, they won’t just start gardening or foraging. They’ll have to get more land.”
“You understand this, then, Davver.”
“Yes. And furthermore, I would get together with hunters and fighters from nearby villages and tribes and make a preemptive stike to destroy these people before they got out of hand.”
“So you see? It couldn’t happen to us.”
Having a starkly opposing vision to agriculture and civilization as opposed to a merely incompatible vision would allow humans to act as a sort of immune system for civilization, naturally supressing any civilizations or agricultural societies before they could become a threat.
Or at least, that’s one of the practicalities.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 27 October 2005 @ 8:56 PM
I am of the opinion that civilisation would HAVE to be made physically impossible in order to stop it from popping back up. This would be difficult to accomplish.
After a crash, recovery may indeed take many milennia, but if we still have domesticable plants and animals knocking about, as well as rejuvenated forests and local concentrations of metals (scrapyards and cities) I don’t see anything to prevent civilisations of a 17th century European (eg Spanish) level from eventually appearing. This kind of level of civilisation is capable of extreme expansionism and nastiness. The only difference in the future would be that civilisation would stop right there, not having any fossil fuels to take advantage of. The civilisation would crash, then a new one would pop up somewhere else. It will keep on happening, with irritating frequency, for any hunter-gatherers who happen to be nearby.
If our present civilisation crashes, it won’t mean the end of all civilisation for ever. It’ll just mark a high point in the cycle.
Comment by Clive — 27 October 2005 @ 9:03 PM
Historical problem with destroying entire cultures: if you don’t kill everyone to the last man, woman, and child you would have only made a group of pissed off refuges that will rebound with the ralying cry “kill the tribal bastards!” So don’t start it if you aren’t willing to finish it then and there.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 27 October 2005 @ 10:01 PM
Chuck,
It is precisely because permaculture has the potential to engender more diversity that I think it might be worthwhile. But similar bills of goods have been sold before, and they have often produced less, not more, diversity. If the promise of permaculture turns out to be a lie, and it instead degrades diversity, then it is a problem. This is why I’m skeptical; we’ve been lied to before, and I’m not yet entirely convinced that permaculture can deliver on its promises.
As for engendering an anti-civilization ideal, well, idealism follows from praxis. Live like a primitive, and you’ll start to think like one, too. Trying to think primitively while still maintaining your 9-to-5, though, that’s … difficult at best.
Clive,
Civilization will be impossible to rebuild, regardless of what we do. The metals in cities and scrapyards will oxidize in a generation, which will make most of the useful metals there unusable and unworkable. The thing to worry about is probably mining the junkyards, but even that would be a vastly inferior resource to naturally mined ore. So the cap isn’t the 17th century; it’s the Neolithic.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 October 2005 @ 8:51 AM
Hey –
The thing that intrigues me about permaculture — especially ‘rewilding permaculture’ (as far as I know, MY OWN version…
) — is the potential to change the whole way people look at food production. IF it works then what you are fundamentally ‘telling’ people is that mother nature does it BETTER, so stop trying to control your food source.
Hopefully in two or three years(eight to ten???) I will be able to answer that IF
Janene
Comment by Janene — 28 October 2005 @ 9:28 AM
It’s one thing to live as primitives, and when the next door neighbors start practicing agriculture, think, “Hm, that’s unusual.” This is pretty much what our genetic (not cultural) ancestors did, for the most part.
It’s quite another to live as primitives, and when the next door neighbors start practicing agriculture, gasp in shock and horror and proclaim, “Look at what they’re doing to life and diversity! They’re evil incarnate! Suppress them!”
I got to thinking that no matter how difficult it is to restart civilization, someone’s gonna try anyway, and it’ll cause a lot of suffering. No one’s going to go to war to stop this embryonic civilization just on the word of the oral histories. (”And then Vail and Godesky, who were great orators, told the people, ‘Civilization blows. Trust us.’”) Now, if there’s a general mindset that any human behavior that decreases diversity is eeeevil, well, when a small civilization gets going, it’s not going to last long.
The best controls on civilization are of course physical; that’s basic technocratic principle: “The best way to inhibit a behavior is to make that behavior physically impossible.” But the second best controls are social controls and should not be ruled out.
Ran Prieur wrote something that I’ve taken to heart:
Of course, there’re a lot of things wrong with the “purely factual” parts of this bit, but the spirit is what I’m going after. The “new primitives” will be better off than the originals because we will understand civilization, and hopefully will design our societies around never allowing it to surface again, in whatever form, for however brief a time.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 28 October 2005 @ 1:42 PM
Chuck,
One of the things I addressed with a story on the forum was that the cultural meme that made up our civ was just close enough to the First Nations to make them pause. After all, what if those strange folks who tore up the land were right? They certainly seemed to have a lot of powerful stuff. Maybe the Creator was on their side.
By the time they learned they were wrong, it was way too late.
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 28 October 2005 @ 1:47 PM
Hmm…it seems that the conquering of the Americas occured either because 1)They had never seen civilization and had no idea how it operated, so were willing enough to help it along at first, then had no defense strategy against it 2)Their existing methods of warfare did not involve enough inter-tribal cooperation to defend against invaders 3)Germs 4) In the case of places where civ already existed (like the Aztecs), germs plus a string of bizzare coincidences? I mean, white gods? Unarmed soldiers? Insulting the Bible?
Do I dare bring up the case of the Greenland Norse again?
Look at what happened to them. Did the Inuit help them at all or just watch them starve, shaking their heads at the absurdity? What if there had been no deadly germs in the American invasion? The Indians initially had quite the advantage in their dealings with the colonists. They knew the land, the plant and animal life; they could survive anywhere. My guess is that foreknowledge of the danger of civilization, combined with extensive knowledge of the land, defense of one’s own territory and good intertribal communication might prove strong enough. It seems to be working for Al-Qaeda, even against maximum strength civilization. We won’t have the germ factor, at least not immediately. And if Jason’s assertion about there not being the resources for more than scattered pockets of Neolithic-level civilization ends up being correct, then its spread is going to be pretty limited.
Comment by Raku — 28 October 2005 @ 3:14 PM
Bill,
Great insight! As we know, the Six Nations weren’t exactly that far off of us… we were simply dissimilar to them.
Now, if civilization had shown up in N’Am, and every tribe thought that it wasn’t just wierd, or abnormal, or strange, but just plain evil… maybe it would have taken much longer for the white man to spread accross the Western Hemisphere.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 28 October 2005 @ 3:16 PM
I think, on some level, it will be unavoidable. We’re polluted with these memes now, and we can’t help but know the things we know. And that will be passed on to our children–it’s not something we can help. And thus, it will perpetuate itself.
Trying to “build in” some genocidal exterminator meme not only is an idea of questionable merit (kill those who are evil, like Takers — but isn’t the next tribe over that looks at me funny just like Takers?), it’s also of highly questionable effectiveness. It would, essentially, be a religious idea–and no one dies for religion. Even with that meme, they won’t go to war unless their interests are threatened.
At the same time, it seems foolish to think that our rhizomatic relationships will suddenly disappear, forgotten. And we’ll know precisely the threat we face. When one of the tribes comes to the festival with tales of the abomination lurking in the West, I think our legacy will be sufficient to call up a great war party that would limit their growth against that particular league, like Hermann Arminius limited the growth of Rome.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 October 2005 @ 6:12 PM
And an imminent invasion followed by the destruction of their way of life isn’t of interest?
The “religious” aspect you mention exists only to provide a framework for the understanding of what increases diversity, and what decreases it. Thusly, under such a framework (understood in whatever way), anyone who saw the looming threat of the artificial destruction of diversity would be able to recognize it.
Unless I am wrong, people are reading the concept of “permaculture” into what I say, but I’ve never mentioned it. The understanding that comes from such a mental framework would allow hunter-foragers - or whoever - to understand the way that soil is created - and destroyed.
This understanding is the goal; being a “servant of life” with the task of “increasing diversity” only provides the framework necessary for all walks of life to be have the necessary knowledge to see a civilization coming down the pipes, and be able to react to the menace of reborn civilizations.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 28 October 2005 @ 7:34 PM
It has to be really imminent to work that way–just, “hey, they’ll invade us in a century or two,” usually translates as, “OK, so we can ignore this for about a century or two.”
The permaculture thing was in response to a totally different discussion up-thread.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 October 2005 @ 8:35 PM
> I don’t think the Earth needs planetary land managers–gentle and sensitive or not. Did just fine without us, after all.
There were older “versions”: ants and bees. Less “intelligent” (or so we want to claim) yet…
1. Settlement of cities of 5,000 or more people: ant hill can contain over million of “citizens”.
2. Full-time labor specialization: sure. Soldier ant can not even eat without help!
3. Concentration of surplus: of course. A lot of surplus is concentarted in ant hill.
4. Class structure: pretty flat, but yes.
5. State-level political organization: yup. No long debates, but drones are killed
> Foraging’s been around long enough to prove itself; horticulture’s no older than agriculture.
Hmm… In my calculations 100 millions of years are somewhat more then 100′000 years, don’t you think.
Conclusion: there are nothing wrong with civilization per se. TODAY’S civilization is other story - somewhere invisible border was passed. Perhaps ants are too primitive to pass this border. Perhaps ants who passed it in the past are not long extinct and “sane ones” survived. Who knows ? But the fact is fact: bees and ants are “civilized” (by this definition) and yet live happily for millions of years.
Comment by Vorfeed Canal — 29 October 2005 @ 4:11 AM
Like I said, civilization might be a wonderful system–for some species other than humans. Ants and bees are not humans; ants and bees are adapted to that kind of society. Humans are not. It is that maladaptation–the fact that we’re taking creatures uniquely adapted to egalitarianism, and shoving them into a hierarchy–that makes civilizations of humans so destructive. Square peg, round hole; ultimately, that’s the problem.
Horticulture hasn’t been around for hundreds of millions of years; horticulture is also 10,000 years old, just like agriculture.
If you don’t think there’s anything wrong with civilization per se, I’d invite you to read the rest of the Thirty Theses so far written … there is not a single problem with today’s civilization that is not present in all other civilizations. The only difference between industrialism and agriculture is scale, not kind.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 October 2005 @ 10:23 AM
Jason,
I think what Chuck & I are talking about is creating a meme that acts like an adaptive immune system. We’ve been infected by civilization before and by creating the proper myths can empower rhizome networks to react and destroy civ cells before they overwhelm the system again.
(You know, as I write this, I’ve got Quinn’s writing going through my head where he says “do not equate civilization to a sickness” but, hey, sometimes you got to go where the metaphor takes you)
Funny, after looking at the wiki stuff on immune systems, there’s nothing innately that prevents civilization but perhaps adaptively, we can do something about it.
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 29 October 2005 @ 12:17 PM
Damn, it Bill! I spend almost a thousand words trying to get at my point. I write a frickin’ story, make references to LOTR, bounce hither and thither, and then you come and say,
AAAAAARGH!
God, that’s so eloquently said!
Certain peoples of the future California coast, at least, will have an adaptive cultural immune system.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 29 October 2005 @ 11:00 PM
Complexity began with the development of tools. Civilization could be said to