Jane Goodall turned our understanding of chimpanzees upside down. From her unprecedented observations, we’ve taken the view of chimpanzees as violent and domineering, a view that’s been used to proffer up the perspective that humans, too, are by nature violent, and that dominance hierarchies are natural to us. But how did Goodall get such unprecedented access? By giving them food. I’ve not read The Egalitarians—Human and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological View of Social Organization, but I do think that Theodore Kemper’s review in The American Journal of Sociology (Vol. 97, No. 6 (May, 1992), pp. 1757-1759) is in need of a handy URL for future reference.

See also Curtis White’s two-part series in Orion:

1. The Idols of Environmentalism
2. The Ecology of Work

Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies offers the most widely-accepted view of why civilizations collapse in archaeological discussion; already summarized in greater detail elsewhere, for now, it is sufficient to recall that Tainter’s primary argument rests on the idea that social complexity is subject to diminishing returns, beyond which further investments in complexity become less economical, leading to collapse. This is a powerful explanatory framework, and while social complexity is a well-defined and even quantifiable criteria, “complexity,” as a whole, is often muddled and weighed down by more colloquial understandings. If we are to compare social complexity to other forms of complexity, then we must investigate further the broader definition of complexity in general, and its counter-balance, elegance.

Apparently, between the first shooting at Virginia Tech, but before his main rampage, Seung-Hui Cho mailed a box to NBC Studios in New York, filled with photos, 27 videos, and an 1,800 word manifesto that various news outlets have dismissed as “rambling,” “hate-filled” and a “diatribe.” It may well, of course, be all those things, but the mainstream media also has a track record of employing such words for propaganda of its own. The package had a return address of “A. Ishmael.” Later, Seung-Hui was found with the words “Ax Ishmael” written on his arm in red ink. The news is rife with speculation about what it means, and despite Seung-Hui’s religious Christian upbringing and his comparisons of himself to Jesus and Moses in his videos, or even Genesis 16:12 (”He [Ishmael] will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.”), many of the reports continue to bring up Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael.

William Gillis is a true anarchist. I use the term for myself only of convenience, a shorthand if you will, when the person I’m talking to is unlikely to have much patience to hear a full explanation of my position. I’m flattered that it was in reading my own Thirty Theses that Gillis decided that he “couldn’t really ignore ‘the primitivist problem’ any longer,” and began work on his own “Fifteen Anti-Primitivist Theses.” He noted from the outset, “Though I mean this similarly named project in response, I do so not to his specific prose or logic but in engagement with the broader movement.” I’ve been reading his essays as they’ve been published, and as I have, the point at which we part ways has become increasingly clear to me. Gillis is a true anarchist. He is an idealist who dreams of an anarchist utopia, and will accept nothing less. I’m merely a realist; I’m just looking for what works.

It’s estimated that, since the days of my youth, depression among children has increased by 1000% and teen suicide by 300%. Since 1997, classroom-assassins have killed two in Mississippi, three in Kentucky, five in Arkansas, and thirteen in Colorado. Make a graph of these numbers and watch them go exponential in years to come—unless we start giving our kids a new way to go and some real hope for the future.
—Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization

The twentieth century, in popular imagination, was a time of unprecedented growth and achievement: the end of imperialism, the triumph of democracy, and unparalleled achievements like the lunar landing are supposed to mark the high points of civilization. But to what extent does this view really capture the dynamics of the twentieth century? This article introduces a new series in which we’ll take a look at the twentieth century through the lens of energy and social complexity, viewpoints which seem to suggest that rather than representing our civilization’s greatest heights, that our civilization actually peaked almost a hundred years ago—and that we’re now already a century into collapse.