Answer to Gillis
by Jason GodeskyWilliam 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.
Given the nature of Gillis’ project, and the importance of this distinction, I feel his work deserves a detailed response. Since his own site does not appear to support comments, I will have to make that response here.
#1: Biology’s constructs and dichotomies are not useful.
In his first essay, Gillis falls into something of a trap; though he makes statements dismissing biology, the evidence he marshals does not deny biology, but taxonomy. In fact, biology has undermined taxonomy far more effectively than Gillis’ reasoning. The taxonomic background of biology is a pre-Darwinian legacy that has come under assault as biologists have begun to explore the full ramifications of evolution. The fact that Gillis highlights—that taxonomies are artificial and not useful—is well taken, but primarily because it underlines the fact that a proper understanding of human society must be rooted in a proper understanding and appreciation of biology. That our knowledge of biology is always imperfect does little to change the fact that we are biological creatures, and all of our intellectual, social, and spiritual capacity stems from that basis. To deny that basis is to deny ourselves and what we truly are—to establish an idealism that is deeply dehumanizing precisely because we cannot ever live up to it.
#2: The biosphere is not inherently good or superior, just very dynamic.
Gillis’ primary claim here is basically true, and echoes my own thesis #5. The tone, of course, is deeply troubling: life is presented as little more than an information storage device, rather than the capacity for storing information existing to perpetuate life. There is a distinctly anthropocentric viewpoint to Gillis’ argument in this section, but I essentially agree with most of this article’s explicit points, if not its implicit undercurrents. Particularly true is his final point that primitivism, though it greatly increases our chances of survival, does not guarantee it; it merely avoids a guarantee that we will not survive.
#3: Humans can choose their dynamics.
Here we part ways significantly. This statement is one of faith, and one that has little evidence to back it up. Though often claimed, humans have never acted with any kind of conscious choice on a societal level. Materialism remains perfectly predictive of human behavior. The agency we exercise on a personal level is, in fact, the very thing that guarantees this effect. Such agency gives us each, individually, the capacity to make our own decisions. Some of us will act in strange ways, but most will congregate around a basic, behavioral norm. A bell curve of human behavior emerges, which leaves it to material resources to set the mean and standard deviation. It provides the behaviorial diversity for natural selection to work on. The end result is that humans cannot choose their own dynamics, any more than any other animal; our dynamics choose us.
To support this statement—one that Gillis simply presents by saying that “there’s no denying” it—Gillis acknowledges that the systems evolution has bequeathed us are, to quote Daniel Quinn, “damnably hard to improve upon.” He acknowledges that “in the short term, it’s certainly amenable to assume that enough of the overarching patterns of equilibrium involved in our upkeep will be maintained for a few dozen more millennia. … Provided we continue to participate in roughly the same manner.” But, while acknolwedging the disastrous implications it is likely to produce, Gillis still holds that technology—by which Gillis means any abstraction or mental model—provides us with the means of departing from evolution and setting our own course.
The ancient Greeks called this “hubris”: the assumption that we could account for all the various factors and problems that the gods (or, in our case, evolution) had already solved. It is precisely the scenario that Daniel Quinn equated with eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and the mistaken assumption that we have the intelligence to rule the world. We often congratulate ourselves for the power of our intelligence, but the evidence is lacking.
#4: Role-filling is moral nihilism.
It is with this essay that Gillis begins to take a hard line that is fundamentally irreconcilable with reality. Beginning with the dismissal of the Nazis’ defense at Nuremburg of “following orders,” Gillis proceeds to an illogical crescendo with statements like, “Externalities of any sort, by definition, are fundamentally unknowable and thus arbitrary.”
Externalities are only unknowable under the most radical Humean skepticism, and they are anything but arbitrary. Gillis supposes that becoming part of one’s ecology and engaging in the living community is “moral nihilism” because it surrenders our responsibility. This kind of extreme abstraction misses the fact that the oppression of the state is an abstracted sleight of hand, whereby the very real externalities of ecology are shifted to the imaginary externalities of the state and hierarchical systems. This is why Gillis is correct in his dismissal of the state’s external pressures, but descends into absurdity when he tries to extend that argument to the ecology: the ecology, unlike the state, is real.
Gillis makes the claim that acknowledging external elements must always lead to oppression: “And over many iterations, though such externalities may have been first broadly interpreted into producing anti-authoritarian behavior, without an internally emergent moral fire, they will justify anything.” History betrays this argument. People lived in precisely this way for over a million years, and yet it was only with the innovation of agriculture that oppression began. Like so many criticisms of primitivism, Gillis’ cannot overcome the basic fact that unlike other types of anarchist theory, primitivism is not merely theory; it can work, it has worked, and to date, it is the only mode of social organization that has been proven to work. Any other system is speculation, but primitivists do not need to deal with speculation like this; we can turn to a million years of successful history for actual evidence.
#5: Individuals flourish with increase of dynamic connections.
This essay begins with the common confusion of liberty and prosperity (one can be perfectly liberated and still incredibly poor, after all), but more importantly, Gillis ignores all evidence to the contrary and states, “There is no fundamental limit to this contact.”
Of course, the evidence suggests otherwise. There are limits. Dunbar’s Number is the neurological limit of our immediate society, beyond which the “shortcuts” of prejudice and hierarchy become necessary; humans have no sense of emergent properties or exponential growth, so our intuitive senses of scale, morality and importance go completely haywire, as we’ve often explored on this site. Humans are biological creatures, and our social and intellectual capacities are confined by biological constraints. There are fundamental limits, beyond which we must sacrifice our humanity to continue.
For Gillis, such restraint is oppression, but of course the long record of primitive societies did not see it as such. But such societies also provided ample opportunity for the exploration that Gillis so enshrines: “We like to reach out and explore.” But ultimately, what we see when we compare ourselves to healthier societies, is that the urge to explore is the domain of the young and the unhappy. We like to explore because we are so deeply unhappy. In healthy societies, the young have ample opportunity to explore. Primitive societies have often had continent-crossing trade routes, and individuals from primitive societies would explore far and wide, both the material world and the shamanic world of perception and spirits, and all of it with a far deeper view to the social bonds and living communities that make each place special, alive and unique.
But ultimately, youngsters from healthy societies find a place in a community of their own, and they lose the taste for exploration—preferring instead to make a community to call home. In our own society, the deep alienation we feel from one another and from the living world we’re rooted in keeps us listless and rootless, sometimes forever, without ever finding a community to call our own. Gillis’ desire to explore is a symptom of our shared civilized pathology, and one that he unfairly projects to the whole species. As Daniel Quinn reminded us, “We are not humanity.”
Gillis makes a fairly radical claim about technology in this essay that once again flies in the face of all evidence: “Rather than from a drive to rigidly control and master, technology has always been, at root, formed by the desire for greater dynamic contact. Not the divorced-from-the-world laziness that sometimes emerges from later abdications once the tools have been acquired. But from the desire to touch, feel and explore.” In fact, most tools were developed precisely to minimize our contact: a digging stick instead of our own hands, an IM chat instead of a conversation, and so on. The divorced-from-the-world laziness that Gillis decries is not an unintended consequence but the very reason we invent these tools in the first place. The fact that this is precisely what very nearly every tool accomplishes for us, and almost no tool has ever turned back, should be evidence enough.
#6: Understanding is not dependent on process but capacity to experience.
On this essay, Gillis and I are almost entirely agreed, except for his unabashed enthusiasm for technology. He writes, “Technology is not understanding. But here’s the trick. Technology can facilitate the capacity to experience.” As a possibility, this is still perfectly correct, but technology can just as often deny us our ability to experience, and put us into contact with less and less. David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous provides an excellent case in point (see my review); writing is, as Abram writes, “an intensely concentrated form of animism.” Yet it is a form of magic so strong that it blinds us to all other kinds. It’s not that technology, or in this case writing, is in itself a “bad” thing, but rather that all too often the effect it has is to put us in touch with the abstraction, rather than the thing itself. That capacity to experience is more often restricted by technology. Nor is this a matter of technology being “bad,” but rather, that complexity is subject to diminishing returns, and that humans in particular are not well adapted to very complex societies. The possibility Gillis looks forward to might be theoretically possible, but the actual history of technological progress does not support that contention. It is, at best, baseless speculation. Gillis waxes poetic with what he no doubt considers counter-evidence to this claim:
Today we can actually feel individual molecules with our hands. We can caress the fringe star clusters of distant galaxies with our eyes. We can see the insides of our own bodies and recognize the pheromones dripping off our shoulders. See sound waves. Pick apart flavors and the patterned buzzing of our own nerves.
But of course, this contact is mediated, not direct. By the same token, shamans offered similarly mediated experiences of the same phenomena, so how much has technology gained us that we did not already have?
#7: Physical limitation inspires social oppression.
With this essay, Gillis unfortunately descends into the kind of baseless speculation one also finds in Hobbes’ Leviathan. Rather than engage the actual evidence we have about primitive life, Gillis speculates on thought experiments that regionalization must mean a greater degree of want—something that technology could alleviate. The evidence, of course, shows us the true story: it is complex societies that suffer from want, and regional, less complex cultures that are the “original affluent society.” Gillis’ thought experiment highlights the dangerous hubris that comes along with the belief that we can successfully account for all the factors involved in creating a successful human society. He has neglected to examine the energy and complexity foundation of technology, and blindly accepts the silly notion that technological progress is an independent variable. He fails to examine the ways in which regional societies are better able to become part of their regional ecology, with a much more diverse, and thus, much more resilient, source of sustenance than the handful of staples that more complex societies rely on because they can be easily exported from region to region. Most absurd of all, Gillis imagines that accepting physical limitations—being part of a specific ecology, accepting the cycle of life and death, etc.—is the basis of social oppression, rather than the ability to accumulate and centralize energy, provided by greater complexity and technology.
If the realm of thought experiment was not sufficient to dispel these notions in itself, did not the vast historical record betray the absurdity of such claims?
We can argue about degree, but the point is there will be some non-insignificant degree of this.
This is where interdependency exits the realm of mutual aid and develops the potential for serious nastiness. Where there is social want and where the fulfillment of individual want is deeply dependent upon others, there is much greater temptation on the part of the individual to drastically simplify their operating processes. To become machines in pursuit of survival. And, perhaps most importantly, to simplify away the presence of other individuals. To reinterpret them as machines as well.
Is it not telling that this attitude develops only in the latest sliver of our history, when we develop greater complexity and more technology? If this is an ever-present facet of forager life, why is there no evidence of it among foragers? Once again, primitivism is unique among anarchist dreams in that it, and it alone, has actually been realized. We need not speculate on thought experiments; there is a million year record that we can turn to. That record lays waste to the thought experiments posed by Hobbes, just as it does to those posed here by Gillis. Previously, Gillis had proposed that our models could allow us to escape evolution and make our own path, but this model shows us clearly that we rarely have the capacity to account for all the factors involved, and our models often go wildly afield from the actual processes going on around us. Evolution isn’t perfect, but it’s damnably hard to improve upon.
#8: Spatial limitation ingrains social hierarchy.
Gillis begins this essay stating, “It is said that, in a simple world, a single empire can only reach as far as a horse can ride. But of course the idea of empire knows no such restrictions. One border inspires another.” And of course, empires are not made simply out of ideas, but out of the concentration of energy that allows power to coerce others to obedience—such things do not exist in a simple world, save perhaps in the most isolated pockets.
Such a lack of respect for physical constraints and the notion that ideas manifest themselves simply where they are thought without any regard to whether they have the resources to be supported, suffuses this essay, and once again, he relies on thought experiments that quickly go awry. This is particularly noteworthy:
Because of scarcity, hunter-gatherer tribes naturally aggregate with a good deal of separation between them. When the psychoses of power take root in a tribe they are emboldened and strengthened by such spatial limitation.
Firstly, as already mentioned, and as Marshall Sahlins explored in depth in his classic “Original Affluent Society,” “scarcity” is a condition of the technological, complex societies Gillis is calling “free”; it is not found among foragers. Secondly, Gillis has actually touched upon one of the core reasons why forager bands don’t have leaders. If one emerges, the band splinters. The individuals all know people in other bands, and band composition changes frequently. There is no such thing as a forager leader because no leader can pin down a control of the resources foragers need. They cannot control the food supply anymore than modern political leaders can control sunlight. As such, coercion is simply not tolerated, and if all other means fail, there is always the option to go visit your brother-in-law, or your grandparents, or an old friend in a band a few miles over.
Of course, this is not possible in more technological, complex societies. Sedentism came before agriculture, and before the first evidence of hierarchy. It was the sunk costs of complexity into a specific place that made leaders more difficult to escape. Foragers are rooted in a specific ecology that they share a sacred bond with, but agriculturalists have homes. Foragers wander freely over a single large area, but agriculturalists are tied down to specific plots of land that they can never leave.
#9: Freedom of information is necessary for free societies.
If this were true, why is it that the only free societies we have actually seen are primitive societies, where “freedom of information” is impeded by the physical realities of long-distance travel, generally diffusing through trade routes and regular festivals? Gillis writes, “Look closely and all social power systems stem from impediments to communication.” In fact, all social power systems stem from monopolizing energy; as Daniel Quinn put it, “locking up the food.” There are many societies today with freedom of information, but they are anything but free.
#10: It’s impossible to speak of regional liberty.
Gillis begins this essay with a statement that is certainly touching emotionally, but devoid of any real content:
The idea that some parts of humanity can be free while others are not is conceptually incoherent. Insomuch as anyone anywhere is oppressed, I am oppressed. I mean that not as a trite greeting card summary of solidarity in liberty, but in recognition of a basic psychological principle. To speak of being personally “free� in any sense while others are not is to leave whatever remains of the “self� a laughably meaningless shell.
Gillis appeals to an ideal of “humanity” that is simply beyond our human ability to appreciate. Dunbar’s Number sets our neurological capacity for such appreciation near 150; with 6.5 billion people in the world, there’s only 0.000002% of “humanity” that we will ever be able to appreciate as people at any given time. In order to have such concern for “humanity,” Gillis must first, ironically enough, strip them of their humanity. They are not people, but part of a single stereotype, a single figure called “Humanity.” Now it has been scaled down to something we can feel for and appreciate; but in order to do so, we’ve reduced the notion to, in Gillis’ words, “a laughably meaningless shell.”
This breakdown of the human capacity for empathy and compassion is a critical ingredient in the creation of social oppression. People must be reduced to stereotypes simply for our brains to cope with a scale far beyond anything evolution has equipped us to handle. Hierarchy is one way we get around this—we developed social oppression precisely because of this problem. Bigotry and prejudice follow, as well.
If liberty means anything, it must also mean that we deal with one another as people, rather than as stereotypes or ranks. That means keeping society at a sufficiently small scale that the human brain can understand it. Gillis says it is impossible to speak of regional liberty. I contend it’s impossible to speak of anything else.
#11: Any society that embraces death will embrace oppression.
A few days ago, my brother asked why it is that it’s always the villains in literature that seek immortality. I replied that it’s the pursuit of immortality itself which makes one villainous. We are animals; we exist only because others die for us. When we eat meat, other animals die for us, but vegetarians can’t escape this basic fact, either, because plants die for them. Bacteria live and die for us by the millions at every moment. To be an animal is to live at the expense of others. This can only work because in the end, animals die. They give back all that they’ve taken. They become food to worms and bacteria, and their flesh becomes soil for plants.
There are immortals in the world—certain species of protozoa, mostly. But not animals, because an immortal animal would be the most terrible abomination: the ultimate taker that never gives back, that demands that all die for it, but refuses to ever die for anything else. This is why any animal pursuing immortality is a villain. Primitive religion is obsessed with the balance of life and death, because that’s the essential covenant that every animal makes with the living earth, with every bite of every meal, that one day, they will give it back. It’s what makes the animal kingdom viable. To pursue immortality is to try to break that most sacred covenant, to betray every plant and animal that ever gave its life for you.
Gillis suggests that because primitivism accepts death as part of the natural order, there’s no end to the oppression it will accept. Besides being a textbook example of a slippery slope hypothesis, the same logic damns the very transhumanists Gillis points to in his article. After all, how can one have “transhumanism,” without the implicit belief that simply being human isn’t enough? That humanity is fallen, degraded, or at the very least, insufficient? Doesn’t that view of humanity invite a belief in control and domination—isn’t that the very view used by Hobbes to justify Leviathan, or civilizations throughout history to justify their domination? If Gillis is willing to accept that humanity is insufficient in this regard, how much more is he willing to accept?
Gillis suggests that primitivism closes off our hope because it condemns us to remain human, but of course, one hope always closes off another. Some hopes are simply incompatible, and others require a leap before they even become conceivable. Primitivists take away the hope of so-called “transhumanists,” and their contempt for humanity, but only because it abolishes their contempt. But where is the hope for life beyond civilization? Where is the hope that we might be able to come home to the living world that nourishes us and enriches us? That’s the hope that Gillis’ arguments cut us off from.
#12: Technology can be applied dynamically.
I actually agreed with most of this. His critique of what some anarcho-primitivists have made of “technology” is spot on. I advocate moving back to primitive technology, and basically going through the civilized catalogue to see what works and what doesn’t. Then we can start seeing what kind of technology we really want, what really gives us the things we need, and start approaching it not as something that must be feverishly advanced for its own sake, but as a means by which we interact with the world. This is no mere avatism; it’s sankofa.
Unfortunately, Gillis then goes on to completely misunderstand the relationship of diminishing returns to technological innovation. Like so many others, he suggests that computers are somehow exhibiting a different behavior, yet we can still read Jules Verne and see the same giddy loss of perspective evidenced in “Moore’s Law” expressed a century ago for the inventions taking place then. As we invent more things, we invent the most obvious things first. That can be reset by a paradigm shift (change the way you at the world, so different things become obvious), but those are essentially random. But the more we invent, and the more ways we look at the world, the fewer remain to use again. Further inventions become more difficult. They might require a lot of specialized study, for instance. Not that they’ll generally provide more for that effort, of course, and that’s what makes for diminishing returns. The misunderstanding here is firmly on Gillis’ part. This doesn’t suggest that technology is useless or bad, but it does suggest that any order predicated upon ever-increasing technological complexity will be doomed to fail.
#13: We do not live in a closed system.
In this one, Gillis suggests that solar power makes collapse something we can avoid. Others, of course, prefer biofuels, nuclear, or even coal. Most sensible of all, of course, would be a combination of those and other renewable energy sources. An eclectic mix, but as we’ve already discussed elsewhere, it just doesn’t add up.
Gillis adds mining asteroids, telling us to, “Stop doing your fucking around in an infinitely complex non-linear dynamic system you don’t yet understand. In 2020 there’s an asteroid that’s going to swing by the Earth’s doorstep carrying Twenty Trillion Dollars worth (today’s market) of precious metals vital to our advanced electric circuitry based technology.”
Of course, mining asteroids is an expensive proposition. Yes, the benefits are enormous, too, but what’s the balance of cost to benefit? And more importantly, is it a cost we can afford? The technologies necessary remain science fiction, and there’s no indication that this will change any time soon. That’s generally an excellent indication that when the full ROI is taken into account, asteroids simply aren’t a very effective solution. Whether the universe as a whole is a closed system or not, we live effectively in a closed system with stable energy inputs. The energy that we can’t reach won’t change things for us if we can’t reach it. When Great Cahokia collapsed from “peak wood,” it wasn’t because every forest in the world was gone—just the ones around Cahokia. They could still walk out to those forests and back, but that walk had become so long it just wasn’t worth it anymore. The question is not whether the energy exists, but how much it takes to get it, and whether, when it’s all said and done, it’s worth it anymore.
In his characterization of the crash, Gillis proposes post-apocalyptic fiction as if it were proven scientific fact. The medieval model requires agriculture, which requires healthy soil, which no longer exists. His notion of the “perpetual iron age” ignores the importance of ore quality, and how rust degrades metal. Even a few centuries out, bog iron will be the most abundant source of iron. His faith that the topsoil (already 85% depleted in North America) will remain viable flies in the face of the evidence, and completely ignores the catastrophic end of the Holocene that made agriculture possible already under way.
Of course, he’s right on one count: “the crash will suck.” But this varies considerably depending on whether it’s something you do, or something done to you. If your way of life depends on others who decided they’ve had enough, then it can be every bit as violent and desperate as the worst post-apocalyptic visions. But if you’re the one abandoning an unsustainable way of life, that’s a very different thing. That’s why collapses happen: precisely because they offer a better life to those willing to jump ship.
Of course, in Gillis’ rhetoric, “the crash” is entirely unprecedented. Past examples of collape have no bearing on his predictions, and it’s simply anathema to suggest that civilization is nothing more than a human case of overshoot, just like an algae bloom or St. Matthew’s Island’s reindeer herd. Humans are adaptable, and there are plenty of us already considering life beyond civilization. When civilization finally eats itself, why do we expect it to defy all the biological rules of such an event, and even historical precedent, the way Gillis describes? And what is it that will wipe out those humans who don’t need civilization to survive? The Vengeful Ghost of Random Chance? Collapse is not a game of Russian roulette.
At the same time, Gillis simply asserts that galactic empires will be impossible, even in the space-faring, limitless future. Settlers in the New World once credited the vastness of the Atlantic with similarly innate liberating powers, but if technology and social complexity also continue to grow, then they will reach as far as humans can go, invariably. Despite Gillis’ naked assertion otherwise, it is a postponement of the inevitable. When civilizations stop growing, they collapse, and the bigger they are, the more terrible the collapse is. He shows the same fundamental misunderstanding of exponential growth that we are all subject to.
Take a petri dish with some bacteria at 11:00 AM. The population doubles every minute, and it fills up at noon. When is the petri dish half full?
11:59 AM.
If those bacteria had a means of expanding to a new petri dish, how long would it take to fill up two petri dishes?
12:01 PM.
It’s doubling every minute, remember. At 12:02, they’ll need four petri dishes; at 12:03, eight. Just five minutes after noon, they’ll be taking up 32 petri dishes.
The human population was 3 billion in 1960. It reached 6 billion in 1999—a doubling period of just forty years. This is not a pattern that can go on, but if it stops, we’ll collapse—that’s the nature of civilization, it requires constant growth. If we want to avoid collapse, we’ll need two more planets in forty years. We’ll need four in eighty. Eight in 120. Sixteen in 160. Thirty-two in just two centuries. Can we find and colonize our entire solar system, and three more just like it, in the same time that the United States has existed? But even if we can, do we want to? I swear I saw a movie about a group like this…
They’re like locusts. They travel from planet to planet, their whole civilization. After they’ve consumed every natural resource they move on. And we’re next.
That’s the best case scenario that the non-primitivists world can offer. Primitivists, we’re told, have no “hope,” because we won’t get on board with the agenda of immortality and galactic conquest; we just want to come home and re-establish our relationship with the living world that nourishes us and enriches us. Hopeless, indeed.
If there’s a way to make a more gradual, peaceful transition to a “future primitive,” then it lies in primitivism: in simpler societies, in truly sustainable technology and patterns of life, in hunting and gathering and permaculture. It’s a long shot, but it’s the best one we currently have.
#14: Hard though the struggle may be, the ease of partial victories will always cost us more.
Where before Gillis tried to extol the pursuit of personal immortality, in this essay, we’re told that primitivists don’t care about the future of humanity because it precludes the attainment of our species’ immortality, escaping the earth when the earth inevitably becomes uninhabitable. Of course, humans are enriched by the earth. It gives us more than just our food and water; it gives us our experience of life, it teaches us its sounds and seasons, we breathe in our intelligence and imagination like air, and breathe it out again. Being human is irrevocably tied to a particular soil, rooted in a living community that gives us life, and the promise that one day we’ll give our life for it in turn. Separated from the earth that made us, we’re not human anymore. We’re something less, something diminished. Without it, we’re already dead.
The rest of this essay relies on nanotechnology, unbound technological progress, and other common tropes of science fiction. They remain as fantastic as dragons and elves, at least for now. Unless and until there’s some indication that they might actually happen, considering their ramifications is pointless.
#15: The new is possible.
…but bloody unlikely.
It’s true: “The past has no monopoly on the possibilities of the future.” That’s, strictly speaking, true. But here, Gillis is simply making a statement of faith, echoing civilization’s faith, which Daniel Quinn expressed in Beyond Civilization:
Every year we spend more money on our schools, hoping to “fix” whatever’s wrong with them, and every year the schools remain stubbornly unfixed. Spending money didn’t work last year or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that, but you can be sure we’ll try it again this year, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it won’t work this year either.
That’s civilization’s usual attitude, because after all, this could be the year! We apply it across the board, and for Gillis, that’s what negates primitivism, too. Giving up and trying something different is a fundamental betrayal; after all, this could be the year it finally works! And then, won’t it be all our fault when it doesn’t? Of course, that brings to mind another quote, this one from Pakistan’s U.N. envoy, Munir Akram:
One of the definitions of madness is you keep doing the same thing but you expect different results.
Conclusion
The world needs more people like William Gillis. He’s passionate, uncompromising, deeply analytical, and eminently idealistic. I, however, am not an idealist. I am more interested in what works, rather than in what’s ideal. This may be why Gillis is so eager to pin his hope to fantastic, unproven plans for mining asteroids, “transhumanist” schemes to achieve immortality, and a space-faring, universal, anarchist mass society. I only see a mass of contradictions in those ideals (as ideals so often are so very contradictory; just take any good discussion of Utopia!).
Civilization is an unproven experiment quickly proving itself untenable. The ideas Gillis proposes are even more fantastic, and even more unproven. It’s important to remember in this discussion that so far, the only proven mode of human society for long-term success, are all primitive societies.
Primitivism isn’t the end that Gillis seems to imply, but rather, a new beginning. The lesson of the sankofa bird is that sometimes you reach a point where you can’t go any further, because you lost something along the way. At that point, the sankofa bird reminds you to ignore all the people deriding you for “going backwards” and claiming that you have to press on, because pressing on for its own sake is sheer madness. It’s all right to go back and fetch what you forgot, or what you lost. Once you have it, you’ll be able to move forward again.
We’re at such a point now. We have it in our heads that greater complexity is good in and of itself. This is madness. Complexity is good when it helps people, and bad when it subjugates them. It’s good when it increases life and prosperity for all; bad when it gives it to a few at the expense of many. Somewhere along the way in this mad pursuit, we lost our knowledge of how to operate in a functioning human society. If we keep pressing ahead without it, we’ll only destroy ourselves. If we go back and get it, we’ll be able to find a good way forward, rather than this precipitous road to self-destruction we’re on now.
Maybe one day Gillis’ dreams will become possibilities, but I can guarantee this much: they won’t be possibilities on the road we’re on. They won’t be possibilities until we come home, re-establish our relationship with the living earth and learn again how to relate to one another. After that, who knows where our destiny might lie? Maybe it will end up in the stars after all—but this is not something that we can use, as we are now, without terrible results. Once we’ve learned how to live on this planet, perhaps we’ll be able to look outwards and think of others. Or, perhaps we’ll find that there’s no reason for that at all; that this is our home, and separation from it is already death. Who can say? Certainly not us, today. If such dreams are our destiny, then they will have to wait until we’ve rediscovered our place on our own world, or even the most idealistic dream will quickly turn into a nightmare.
I actually found Gillis’ project just a few hours after he posted his first essay, and this draft has been sitting in my folder ever since. I wrote most of this article the day after he posted his last essay, but then some real-world traumas put us into an unexpected hiatus. During that time, Gillis was kind enough to get in touch with me personally about his project, and gave me a chance to respond before sending it on to others. I’m grateful for that consideration, and would just like to say again, philosophical differences aside, I have great respect for William Gillis and his forthright, passionate and uncompromising viewpoint. We could use a lot more people like that. Of course, at the end of the day, you also need something that works, and I think that’s where primitivism comes in.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 April 2007 @ 10:14 AM
Hey J –
Fabulous. I think…. over all this time you and I are continuing to move closer together in our thoughts. Go figure
I especially like the section on immortality. Well done!
Janene
Comment by janene — 18 April 2007 @ 11:24 AM
Dude. I was waiting for your response to that shit. Fucking rad! Nice work. This is great.
Comment by Urban Scout — 18 April 2007 @ 12:50 PM
I also have noticed that those who would defend civilization must of necessity cleave to many a fallacious notion in order to mount their defense. But what it comes down to is that in order for civilization to be a sustainable proposition, agriculture has to be sustainable in a way that doesn’t suck the life right out of the soil. It seems unlikely that such a development is at all possible. Many early civilizations farmed their soil practically down to the bedrock!
Of course, when one is dealing with civilization’s more sophomoric defenders such as one finds on LiveJournal communities, one finds that one is dealing with willfully simple minds that refuse to comprehend the difference between agriculture and horticulture and that civilization has an inherent problem known as the Law of Diminishing Returns. It is because I have so far seen only fallacy and denial in defenses of civilization against primitivism that I remain partial to the primitivist critique of human history.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 18 April 2007 @ 1:41 PM
“Maybe one day Gillis’ dreams will become possibilities, but I can guarantee this much: they won’t be possibilities on the road we’re on. They won’t be possibilities until we come home, re-establish our relationship with the living earth and learn again how to relate to one another.”
And that, my friend, is my whole fucking point.
Comment by William Gillis — 18 April 2007 @ 6:33 PM
I’m a tad confused there, William. If that’s the point, then you recognize the importance of sankofa, that we simply can’t move forward with these dreams until we’ve created a working, sustainable, primitive society. Then, of course, we may find our desire for these things evaporates as a consequence; or we might find that we still have those dreams, and set off to pursue them. Either way, we’ve lost something vital, and we can’t move forward until we’ve gone back to get it. So, if that’s the point, then why did you write so much about what an awful idea it would be to do just that? If your point is that we can’t do any of these things until we’ve re-established our relationship with the living earth, and learned again how to relate to one another from the living earth, then why do you write so much about “transhumanism” and galactic colonization? If that’s the point, then what are the “Anti-Primitivist Theses” for?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 12:04 PM
Heh. You see this as an all or nothing binary. I don’t.
One can go back in many areas but still go forward in others. (Or, more to the point, start off in a completely different direction–since the stuff I’m talking about is in no way “more of the same” but an embrace of a very small vector in the development of “technology”/”science.” I want a more _dynamic_ integration with the natural world. Primitivism is a hell of a lot further down that road than the atrocious shit we’ve got right now. But even now, from our vantage point it’s easy to see how we can improve on the dynamicism available in primitivism.
I spent tons of space on how the only way we’re going to get the progress we need in terms of dynamic, fluid technology is if we tear up much of the industrial system we’ve got now and regain our groundings in primitivism. But we can learn from primitivism and radically change up our society based on those insights without destroying the whole world in the process and starting from scratch on everything.
“Civilization” isn’t the whole package deal that you’d write it off as. And your absolutist response to turn back the clock on EVERYTHING is just bullheaded and irrational. Making the world a better place is going to–in some places–require something a little more nuanced than a sledgehammer.
Establishing more fluid technologies IS coming home and re-establishing our relationship with the living earth. Primitivism is a set of fluid technologies (physical and mental structures/processes) that have worked for us in the past and allow us greater connection to the natural world. I want precisely that.
But I don’t want to permanently close the door to MORE FLUID technologies… Which, by your own account, an all out crash might damn well incur.
Damning our future generations because it was the easiest path to a better life for us is not acceptable for me. And that’s precisely what primitivism threatens.
Part and parcel of fixing the world with new technological frontiers (like asteroid harvesting / moving our industries off earth so that they stop fucking with the biosphere) is simultaneously going back to our roots and shedding off all the crap “civilization” has almost become synonymous with.
We can do both, in fact the only way the good high-tech stuff is going to succeed is if we start reconnecting with the natural world.
Also. Dude. “Galactic colonization” is a bit of a misrepresentation.
Please. Huntergatherers between the stars and then liquefying the stars into smartmatter. (Hunter-gathering is the ONLY possible form of society on relativistic distances. You. Can’t. Break. Relativity. And planetary gravity wells are icky, wasteful and totally subject to diminishing returns. There’s no reason to fuck around with them when smaller bodies are so available.)
Comment by William Gillis — 19 April 2007 @ 4:42 PM
Put another way:
Primitivism is the only way transhumanism is going to work and transhumanism is the only way primitivism is going to work.
Oh and by the way, to tide you over until I get a response up, primitivism has NEVER worked and oppression is far older than civilization. Your entire case hinges on the oppression in primitivist societies being less showy than that in modern civilization. Certainly true. But interpersonal expressions of the power psychosis are inherent to primitivism. And that’s my beef. The sloppy edicts and horrors of kings are far less importance than the oppression between mother and daughter, husband and wife, between one group of friends and another. Those diffuse powerstructures ultimately vastly outnumber the more explicit and formalized forms of rulership, and they have a more intense hold over people’s lives.
Anthropologists suck at recognizing–and are rarely inclined to call out–the roots of sociological power.
Oh and signs of greater happiness are hardly grounds for idealization: anyone can choose to restructure themselves to be happy in any social environment.
Comment by William Gillis — 19 April 2007 @ 5:01 PM
On the contrary; first, we need to have a sustainable way to live. The simple fact of the matter is that agriculture requires more calories of work than it gives back in food. That simple fact leads you by a steel chain to most of the things that make our current way of life so utterly unsustainable. Without an elite to provide for, almost any other means of subsistence becomes far more effective, so automatically, you need rulers, the very moment you start farming. You need those with food, and those without it. You can use miltiaries, priesthoods, and any number of other systems to shift the imbalance around, but the one thing you can’t do is undo the imbalance, because that would mean giving up agriculture. It means you need a “cheat” from somewhere else to make it; it could be draft animals or petrochemicals or anything else, but you need something else pouring energy in to make up for the gap.
So before anything else can happen, you need to lose agriculture. That means civilization in any recognizable form, and in fact, the mass society that only agriculture can maintain. All the sustainable ways of making a living—be they permaculture or any of a thousand different kinds of hunting & gathering—require smaller, human-sized communities. It’s not an all-or-nothing thing it all, but it does mean dealing with the full consequences of how we live.
Actually, I wonder how much of this is a misunderstanding, and I wonder how much of this might’ve been assuaged if The Fifth World were already out. Anyway, are you familiar with Michael Green’s Afterculture? Take a look at this village. Is this something you’d be happy to see in humanity’s short term (next few centuries) future? If so, we might be more on the same page than we might have initially suspected.
Can we? Do we have a choice in the matter? I’m not so sure. I’d like to think so, and the best way to do that, I think, would be by example: create tribes now, reconcile ourselves with a given ecology and become part of it, start using permaculture and hunting and gathering right now to whatever extent we can. That’s what we’re doing, and what we’ve been advocating. But I’m not sure to what extent it will succeed on its own terms; I think it’s rather more likely to be the best chance for survival. If humans were to take the initiative now for a better world, it would be an unprecedented event in the world’s history. I don’t know if we have free will, but I act like we do anyway. Maybe I’m really just fated to believe in free will, after all. But there’s a bit of a Prisoner’s Dilemna here, isn’t there? Whoever tries to scale down will just be crushed by those who decide differently. We’re reconciling ourselves with the Allegheny Forest, one that the U.S. claims as a “National Forest.” It’s one of the most heavily logged forests in the world. It was completely ripped out 80 years ago, and now they’re back to rip out the second-growth forest that’s regenerated. It’s right down the road from Drake’s Well, the very first oil well, and it remains a productive region. That forest produces more oil and natural gas than all the other “national forests” combined. Put simply, I’m betting my future on the idea that civilization is going to contract, because if it doesn’t, we will almost certainly die with our forest.
Clinging to the hope that we might avoid suffering the consequences of our actions is commendable, but what’s the best way to do that? As it happens, I think the best way to avoid that fate is also the best way to survive if you fail, so whether it’s possible or not, the next step remains the same: build tribes and rewild.
Sure it is—it’s a particular type of society, defined by its need for ever-increasing complexity. It isn’t art or science or philosophy or technology. All those things are at least four times older than civilization, and universal to all human cultures. Civilization is a package deal. The package consists of elite domination, agriculture, urban life, and mass society. You can’t have any of those things without the rest following quickly (thesis #13). You can’t get the density of food needed for a city without agriculture, and that requires an elite. Maybe you can keep the farmers in charge with all the food, but somebody has to be in charge if you’re farming.
That’s not my response, though. I’m very excited about the syncretic cultures we can create. My tribe’s going to have hot solar showers, and a windmill. I’m not one saying we turn the clock back on everything. On the other hand, I have said that many seemingly innocent inventions may actually be incredibly pernicious, and we’ll need to consider everything carefully before we just go ahead and carry it on. Basically, everything in our society needs to be considered guilty until proven innocent. Even something as seemingly beneficial as writing can be disastrous (see David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous).
OK, I can see that, and in those terms, I can agree; I want to see more fluid technology, too.
I agree here, too; I see that as part of that principle of sankofa I mentioned. I don’t see primitivism as an endpoint, but as a new beginning. But I don’t see how a crash precludes the development of more fluid technologies in the future. I think we absolutely need to divorce ourselves from the notion that we must invent new technologies. The “arms race” of escalating technology just leads to diminishing marginal returns. It’s elegance, not complexity, that should be the measure of a technology’s success. A crash would wipe out most of our current technologies, and it would wipe out our access to most metals and fossil fuels for geological time. But that says nothing about our ability to build more fluid technologies. It changes the materials available to us to complete that task, sure, from materials that have historically goaded us onto fairly destructive paths with our technology, to materials that have generally encouraged us down much more benign paths, but really, I’m quite excited to see what direction a neo-primitive culture might take fluid technologies. What tasks would a feral human put them to? What is it that we’ll want, once we’ve been so vastly transformed? I don’t think they’ll necessarily be interested in the same ends we’re interested in.
I fail to see how. Primitivism is not a cause for collapse; civilization’s internal contradictions did that all by themselves. Primitivists no more cause collapse than climate scientists cause global warming. All we do is try to encourage and pick up the ways of life that worked for us for a million years, and prepare for this brief blip in human history to end, so we can get back to whatever destiny our species has after this brief but disastrous detour. It’s not the easiest way out, but it is looking increasingly like the unavoidable consequence of our actions. If it can be avoided, our best hope is in voluntary powerdown—precisely in primitivism, and tribalism, and rewilding. If it’s something we choose, then we can do it relatively peacefully, and leave whatever doors open for the future that we like. If it’s something that happens to us, we won’t have those luxuries. I’d like to believe we can choose the former course, and I’m doing everything I know that might help lead to that, but I fear that it may already be a few decades too late for that.
Those are simply incompatible goals. You can’t expand the scope and power of civilizaiton, and then ask it to please leave us some room to be human in. You’re essentially setting up a cartel: you have people with the power to do it, but you ask them not to. The thing about cartels is, they always break, because the temptation to cheat is too great. Whoever cheats first, wins out over everyone else.
I believe that also has a fictional precedent….
Ummmmmm … yeah, I don’t see that.
What were we doing for the first million years of our evolution, then? I suppose this is literally true, it’s primitive societies that have always worked. Primitivism—the advocacy of a primitive society—is something that only makes sense in a non-primitive culture, so yes, in that sense, it’s never worked. Nor has any society ever become primitive of its own volition. Primitive societies emerge from more complex ones all over the world, but always as the survivors of the civilization’s violent collapse.
Not far older. You might be able to trace it back to horticultural societies, and I’m somewhat skeptical of them myself, but horticulture is only a little older than agriculture. There are signs of extremely limited oppressive societies, like at Sungir, or the Kwakiutl, but these were the products of geographical flukes. They were anomolies in an otherwise free world. And there wasn’t a one of them that you couldn’t leave behind forever after a good week’s walk. And despite your statement otherwise, while the idea of oppression certainly went with such victims, it found terribly poor conditions for taking root.
Then you should study primitive societies more closely. One classic example is Richard Lee’s “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari.” [PDF] Nearly all primitive societies employ ingenious methods of controlling for personal power dynamics. There are variations in esteem, and some people are more respected than others in certain areas, but no one’s the best at everything, and that means that when you take a look across the board, everyone has more or less the same overall influence as everyone else. Even children have the full autonomy our culture only gives to adults.
Absolutely. Ju/’hoansi parents don’t tell their children what to do. Ever. Go visit and try to do it yourself, you’ll be in for a world of trouble. No one has the right to tell anyone what to do. You keep finding this among primitive societies all around the world, wherever you go. Even the most revered elder still has to cajole and convince.
They are, which is one reason why we have so much to learn from primitive societies and the elegant, brilliant means they have for blocking and destroying structures like that, not through direct confrontations, but what John Robb might call “a judo move.”
I don’t think that’s true; I’ve read whole library shelves of anthropological discussions of the very types of power you’re talking about here.
There’s still a bit of a bell curve involved: some people are better at that kind of restructuring than others. So greater happiness means that it’s easier to be happy there. And ultimately, what is it that makes domination so bad if it’s not the intense misery of the dominated, and the dehumanization of the dominator?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 5:28 PM
Hey –
Oh my…. at this point you’re not really talking about power and control, you are talking about basic socialization. Humans are social animals… if you choose, you can always go live as a hermit in the woods, but for the rest of us that want to be around other people there will (and *should be*) a need engage in interactions with the people we love. And sometimes we will be bullies. Sometimes they will be bullies. And every other ‘imperfection’ that humans have! You’re not talking about living as a human, you’re talking about living as some sort of idealized godhead.
Phooey, William. Just Phooey!
Janene
Comment by janene — 19 April 2007 @ 5:43 PM
Actually, Janene, I think he raises an important point about “soft power.” He probably knows about Jo Freeman’s classic “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” The question is whether patterns of bullying are allowed to continue, and whether “soft power” is allowed to become more domineering than any despot.
Of course, humanity didn’t go a million years without figuring out a good way around that, and that’s where I think William goes wrong. It’s an easy enough assumption to make, but the evidence is pretty clear that primitive societies engaged that problem, and did so with incredibly effectiveness.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 5:49 PM
Hey –
Maybe, Jason, I just got a really strong sense of idealism in action — and I have always found that quite distasteful (particularly recently….)
Janene
Comment by janene — 19 April 2007 @ 6:12 PM
I know what you mean, but let’s assume the best possible interpretation, at least until we can’t.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 6:18 PM
Consider me upbraided
J
Comment by janene — 19 April 2007 @ 6:43 PM
Some very quick responses during class:
“The simple fact of the matter is that agriculture requires more calories of work than it gives back in food.”
I agree. Agriculture is not a permanent solution, it is a/the problem.
However. De-agriculture-izing ourselves should be ideally done with nuance and adaptive fluidity, not blunt, rigid methods. The very problem with our civilization is its blunt rigidity in structure and instinctive behavior. embracing something as blunt as the crash is not a rejection of this pattern but a continuation of it.
…And seriously, although it’s unsustainable, in many ways it’s not THAT unsustainable. That is to say we can afford to wean ourselves off it gradually.
“Is this something you’d be happy to see in humanity’s short term (next few centuries) future? If so, we might be more on the same page than we might have initially suspected.”
Add in mesh WiFi networks, satellites, low-effect means of long-distance transportation and a jumble of cultural affections that I doubt will disappear (like a basketball court)… and I’d be absolutely delighted.
My real issue is with killing:
1) The hard sciences. (I am unable to accept the notion of losing even a day in the pursuit of a unified physics. If there’s going to be but one redeeming aspect to pull out of the long clusterfuck of a road we’ve wasted so much time on it’s this.)
2) Tech that allows freedom of information (and also physical interrelation… ie transport). Because it’s so absolutely vital to any feasible advance in our anarchism.
3) The capacity to have choice in our future. And that means staving off peak metal and keeping some kind of industry system until we secure a foothold on space.
“If humans were to take the initiative now for a better world, it would be an unprecedented event in the world’s history.”
Yes. It would be absolutely unprecedented. And all probability says it aint going to happen. But could you really look yourself in the mirror without trying?
“I don’t know if we have free will, but I act like we do anyway. Maybe I’m really just fated to believe in free will, after all.”
I’ve tried very hard to avoid directly leaning on Free Will in the 15, but it really is the core of our differences. I don’t “believe” in Free Will. I know it absolutely. A priori and all that junk descartes was grasping at. At this point I can’t even conceive of a universe without it, physics would collapse. But let’s leave the subject as an aside for now. It is after all, impossible to “prove” anti-causality from something as causal as language. But check out the work of Penrose and Bohm if you’re interested in a legit grounding in the quantum.
” But there’s a bit of a Prisoner’s Dilemna here, isn’t there? Whoever tries to scale down will just be crushed by those who decide differently.”
That’s a mere tactical problem. (Although pretty much the only one there’s ever been for Anarchists.) Perhaps it should be postponed for a later conversation or part of this one. I’d like to tie down the ideals first so that we have something to stand on in such an attempt to move the world. But there is SOME non-negligible hope there.
“Sure it is—it’s a particular type of society, defined by its need for ever-increasing complexity.”
Complexity is a buzz term in this context devoid of meaning. (The use of “Complexity” and “Diversity” are the two ugly holes in your original 30.) A flower is a complex system. So’s the metal structure of a Space Shuttle. “Complexity” is not a valid term in understanding the sort of systems we’re dealing with.
Rather, PARTS of our “civilization” display heinous degrees of rigidity that become brittle in contact with the more non-linear fluid dynamics of the biosphere.
“Urban” life isn’t inherently rigid across the board. And Mass Society is the opposite. Mass Society is GOOD. It’s more dynamic, more adaptable, more sustainable than fragmented society.
You’re misassociating the structures and psychoses of dominance and structural interaction holding us back from Mass Society AS Mass Society.
“You can’t get the density of food needed for a city without agriculture, and that requires an elite.”
To the contrary, it just FACILITATES the development of an elite. Remember that 6000 BC city they found in Turkey without social hierarchies or gender roles.
“I’m very excited about the syncretic cultures we can create. My tribe’s going to have hot solar showers, and a windmill.”
Comment by William Gillis — 19 April 2007 @ 8:27 PM
That may be true, but I haven’t heard anyone talking about implementing collapse as if it were something for us to choose. Rather, it’s something that happens to us if we can’t take control of how we organize our society. The promise is there, but it’s never been fulfilled, and there are very real systemic reasons to believe that our free will may not exist, at least not at this level.
200 species go extinct every day. We’re in the midst of the fastest mass extinction in this planet’s history. We’re talking about lifeless oceans, 50% of all life on the planet gone, in the next century. It’s that unsustainable. It’s downright catastrophic. We don’t have time.
We’re largely on the same page, then. I’d like to see some kind of neo-primitivist WiFi myself. Not sure how it’d work, but I’d love to see it, nonetheless. And I’m sure there will be things akin to basketball courts, too.
Others have debated the value of science, but I’m not one of them. I see a lot of potential for a post-civilized science.
Are you familiar with the fission and fusion of hunter-gatherer bands, the long-distance trade networks that hunter-gatherers employed across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, and the giant fairs of the Mesolithic (being, essentially, the “Flash Mob” approach to cities)? I think there’s already a good start towards that in the existing ethnographic and archaeological record.
Hmmm, this seems odd to me. You’re bent on preserving metals, even though it’s not necessary for technology, and has shown that it generally leads us to the more exploitative end of the technological spectrum. If your concern is with choice, then it seems to me that you’re taking a fairly narrow view here, because while the loss of metals closes off the choices we have now, it also opens up the choices that we don’t have now, choices we may not even know about. There’s always choice, and anything you preserve, or give away, will entail losing some choices and gaining others.
No, I couldn’t. But what does it mean to try at this? What does trying look like? I think the best shot we have at stopping this, and it’s a long shot, is rewilding. And lucky us, if we fail, that puts us in the best position for surviving, too. So I hope it’s possible, I fear it isn’t, but either way, the next step is the same: rewild.
No, it’s not, it’s a very specific term with a very specific meaning. This is the definition Tainter provided:
Complexity is quantifiable. In anthropology, a cultural item consists of every kind of object or artifact, title or position, ceremony, ritual, and belief system—basically, anything in a culture that has its own name. You count these, and you have a number for a culture’s complexity. Some Native Americans cultures have been rated with between 3,000 and 6,000 such cultural elements. Our own civilization, of course, has millions, and perhaps even billions. During World War II, we landed over 500,000 different types of equipment at Casablanca.
It’s not a buzz term. You may hear people using it improperly or imprecisely, and that’s something of a problem, but it’s a very solid and clearly defined measure of societies in anthropology.
I don’t know if that’s really true; your example of the complexity of flowers and the space shuttle plays somewhat fast and loose with the notion of complexity, after all. But let’s say it is. Even if that’s true, the fact remains that humans are not adapted to mass society. We cannot function properly in it. We have evolved a certain neurological capacity for the number of people we can deal with. It is mass society itself which requires rulers, laws, stereotypes and hierarchies in order to break mass society down into sufficiently small portions that we can deal with. Our hierarchies break us down into groups of no more than 150; militaries throughout history have structured their units about 150; villages and neighborhoods break down into multiples of 150, so on and so forth. Robin Dunbar showed that group size in primates is a function of neocortex size, that we have a given neurological capacity for the scale of the society we can deal with. Beyond that, we need ways of breaking society down that way. Hierarchy is the primary means of doing that, by arranging groups of 150 or less into dominating roles. Laws, also, exist not to preserve justice, but for expediency, because in mass society, conflicts cannot simply be resolved on the basis of ongoing relationships, since you can’t have a relationship with everyone in a society that large. Instead, laws compromise justice by ignoring circumstances and applying a carpet ruling. We can try to mitigate this all we like, but in the end, that’s the essential nature of law.
A society can’t be free unless it’s built on the relationships between free people, and a mass society cannot be built on relationships at all. That’s why a free, mass society is a contradiction in terms.
Ummm … no, I don’t. If you could dig up the name, I’d love to do some more research on it. Sounds like it could pose a serious counter-example to a lot of my thinking, if it holds up.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 9:19 PM
Just to be sure: did you get that example from The Chalice and the Blade?
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 19 April 2007 @ 9:51 PM
“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.”
This is inherently based in arbitrary taxonomy. What makes a single society? What makes “parts”? What are specialized roles? What makes a distinct personality? What qualifies as a mechanism?
Completely arbitrary. The universe is one complex system and such subdivision is ludicrous when you’re trying to prove universal fundamentals, even when it comes to historical imperative. Everything is complex from a certain point of view. The information you can identify and process is irrelevant. 6,000 or so preserved artifacts mean nothing, it’s the information density being daily processed on the social level that you’re really interested in. And yes, our brains are receiving and tapping into a lot more information per day, that is to say they’re dealing with a starked increase in the amount of internal dynamics necessary to fully deal with things. Which can lead to more internal fluidity or more internal rigidity: where a mountain of superficial fluff– of minutely changing informational structures– is pumped through a created shallow section of our neurology allowing the rest of it to rot.
“Complexity” alone is a meaningless term, you have to analyze the interplay of the information structures at hand. Because the definition is so wide you’ve overused it and over simplified the internal dynamics of human societies.
“We have evolved a certain neurological capacity for the number of people we can deal with.”
No, we’ve evolved a certain neurological capacity for the number of RELATIONSHIPS we can deal with. There’s a rather sharp difference there. We can still accept and handle the existence of strangers.
“It is mass society itself which requires rulers, laws, stereotypes and hierarchies in order to break mass society down into sufficiently small portions that we can deal with.”
No. If it’s broken down then it ceases being Mass Society. We can still freely associate ad hoc fluid relationships with 150 people on the basis of arbitrary proximity. There ain’t nothing wrong with that.
Secondly, neurological limitations are a cop-out. The definition of fascism/nihilism is neurological limitation. The psychoses behind power structures stem from abdicating from the choice to think and instead reducing the amount of fluidity taking place. The point is to do away with all of such restrictions.
“because in mass society, conflicts cannot simply be resolved on the basis of ongoing relationships, since you can’t have a relationship with everyone in a society that large.”
Social credit systems. Whuffie. The stranger who steals from me or the rapist who strikes from the forest is instantly known in a mass society with Free Information tech. Free Association is thus possible and the free market quickly heals cancers without anyone being jailed or coerced. (You forfeit privacy whenever you engage with another person socially.)
“If you could dig up the name, I’d love to do some more research on it.”
Although I’ve seen that one specifically since I specifically remember a Scientific American feature story somewhere between 2001 and 2005. Sorry I can’t be more precise. My archives are in Portland.
Also. I’d love to hear your opinion on Gaviotas.
Comment by William Gillis — 19 April 2007 @ 9:56 PM
Hey Boys –
May I make a suggestion here?
I’ve been giving this some thought over the last few days — this whole issue of ‘complexity’ and the absurd number of arguments it has led to. My conclusions run something like this:
Anthropologists talk about complexity as shear number of artifacts. That’s wonderful from a scientific perspective because it is so easily quantifiable. But at the end of the day it IS hard to determine where the boundaries lie (and they are, as a result, quite arbitrary).
On the flip, *no one* can deny that natural systems are complex. Incredibly so — far more than human designed systems.
So what *really defines* complexity? Elegance.
Between Jeff Vail and Dave Pollard, I think they have nailed this down. Complexity is based upon non-linear, elegant systems. Whereas the merely complicated describes things like ‘number of artifacts’ quite well. So Jason, however much you *hate* changing the verbage of established science, there may be some value in this case. Civilization is complicated, ie, we add lots of levels of *stuff*. Nature, by comparison is *complex*: being as it is comprised of millions of simple processes with non-linear interactions.
See what you think……….
Janene
Comment by janene — 19 April 2007 @ 10:47 PM
Great post Jason. I admire your patience with transhumanist arguments!
Mass Society is GOOD. It’s more dynamic, more adaptable, more sustainable than fragmented society.
People seem to presume that over-crowding is “connectedness”, that a lot of things in one place means adaptation etc, but that’s just not true.
What’s important is reciprocity. With localised tribes, each group is able to effectively integrate into its context, to deal with its problems, to experience the intricacies of its surrounding ecology.
Adaptation has to take place on a localised level — each element has a different place in the patchwork of life, and only by each element adapting to it’s particular place can there be ongoing reciprocity throughout the whole network.
Larger structures that operate hierarchally simply lack the means to “talk” with their context, because they cannot afford the attention to detail that localised groups utilise and require in all aspects of their existence.
Millions of human-scaled sustainable groups are a million times more sustainable, adaptable and dynamic than one mass society that is at the mercy of elite interests and relentless growth.
Comment by Dan — 20 April 2007 @ 12:02 AM
These aren’t nearly as arbitrary as you seem to think. A society is simply the group of people (if you like, you could define such a “group” in terms of graph theory, and thus mathematically, as a “clique” on a social relationships map) with a shared culture (the sum total of learned things). This will always be a gradient, but it will also always be non-uniform. It “clumps.” You and I share more in common, culturally, than either of us does with a kid in Somalia, for instance, who in turn is equally distant from a Saami reindeer herder. As for what constitutes a cultural element, if we want to take an emic view, we could take the culture’s language, and count all the words in it referring to elements of that culture (so, all the nouns, minus all the numbers, colors, plants, animals, and so forth).
Only with an imprecise definition of complexity. Sure, we could count the atoms and subatomic particles in a longbow versus a carburetor, but that will hold true across both, so at those levels, neither one is more complex than the other. When we zoom out to the macro level, only then will we see differences in complexity, as the carburetor is made up of several components, many more than the bow is made up of. Ergo, the carburetor is more complex, not in some arbitrary sense, but in a very real sense. By comparison, five yards is longer than three yards; the fact that both of them can be broken down into an infinity of smaller measurements does not change that fact. Not all infinities are equal, you may recall.
Well, that’s part of the cost of complexity. By the age of 12, most Native Americans knew everything they needed to survive on their own, including a catalogue of thousands of edible and medicinal plants. The fact that there were only 6,000 cultural elements for them to learn left them with plenty of time to spend on such things. In our culture, there’s such an enormous list of things that a child needs to be aware of simply to be conversant in our culture, that real education about the world generally can’t even begin until college. The information being processed is roughly the same, but you might think of it as the “overhead” of information processing. How much of your time is spent processing the information you need to process information, and how much is spent directly processing information? All cultures exist to provide an adaptation to the world; more complex societies require more time adapting to the culture, to adapt to the world, while less complex societies require less.
I disagree. It’s really quite precise. It’s only so wide if you misunderstand what it means.
Yes and no. We do so by essentially lumping them into a single imaginary “person” of “the stranger.” We can have a guarded sympathetic relationship with “the stranger,” but first, we must reduce every actual stranger we meet to this stereotype. “The Monkeysphere” explains this remarkably well.
And there’s the problem, because if you can’t have a relationship with someone, then you can’t really appreciate that person as a person. He has to become a stereotype. So we can’t have sympathy for all of our fellow men; first, we need to reduce them all to the stereotype of “our fellow men,” or, as you put it so well, “to leave whatever remains of the ’self’ a laughably meaningless shell.
That’s one of the chief ways we break mass society down into manageable bits.
I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s not the definition of fascism or nihilism, and neither one has much to do with neurological capacities whatsoever. Acknowledging and working within the context of human capacities and limits is the first necessary step to developing any system that can work for humans. Anything less, and we’re just doing more fantasy about “if men were angels.” A system that requires people to be better, stronger, smarter, kinder or wiser than they’ve ever been before quickly gets tossed into the waste bin of other failed utopias. The fact of the matter is, humans are perfectly fine in their proper context. Out of our context, we’re, well, fish out of water. You can’t expect any vision of humanity’s future to take root when you begin from the premise of such disdain for humanity that you won’t even consider what humans are capable of, and what they’re not capable of. You need to begin with human beings as they are, and consider what systems work for us, not what work we need to do for some idealized system.
You might as well rebel against gravity and time while you’re at it. The restrictions placed on humans by other humans are tyranny; the restrictions placed on us by biology and physics are the laws of life themselves.
And all relationships are thus premised on constant background checks? That’s kind of scary, there. And when does someone get the chance to make up for what they’ve done? Does their record show, “He’s really sorry about it and has changed his ways”? The people we know, we can come to forgive. If all we have is a print-out of their crimes, then there’s no chance for anyone to ever set their lives right again. They’ll be pariahs forever. This is just another shortcut from actually engaging the problem, and it seems to me that it suffers from all the same problems of the law, and could be even worse.
A great step in the right direction. The book’s on my shelf, and it’s one of my great inspirations.
It’s really not hard to determine where the boundaries lie. The only problem is that we have so many colloquial notions of complexity that are genuinely ambiguous, and we start mixing up the precise definition with the arbitrary ones, and out comes a jumbled mess.
*scratch*scratch*
Isn’t elegance the opposite of complexity?
I’ve got an article I was writing on elegance—maybe I need to bump up the priority on that.
*grumble* I smell unnecessary complexity in the air, stemming from ill-defined terms. Yes, a full-blown article is definitely in order.
Really? The patience to say, “Jesus Christ, that’s the most evil thing I’ve ever heard!”?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 April 2007 @ 10:30 AM
Hey –
I wrote an article today about what I was trying to express with complexity vs elegance last night…. here
J
Comment by janene — 20 April 2007 @ 10:44 AM
Aha, I found it, Janene. Consider my earlier question irrelevant.
Y’know, Jason was kicking ass until William piped up with “Making the world a better place is going to–in some places–require something a little more nuanced than a sledgehammer.” Not that I want to make the world a better place, fuck that, but man has he got you on the sledgehammer bit. My eyes, hell, my whole brain feels bludgeoned. I don’t really have any desire or place to argue, here, so I’ll stammer out this comment and call it a night — me like nuance. Me not like brainbludgeon.
Comment by Devin — 21 April 2007 @ 1:57 AM
These sociological “common sense” abstractions away from the underlying systems dynamics is really annoying.
You’re talking about large-scale, language-esque, symbolic-logic-territory abstractions of agglomerate memetic/informational structures in our neural nets.
“Tree limb” is one surface level abstraction whereas an “iPod” can involve a gazillion interwoven sub-layers of information structures that we contextualize it with. All the little “parts.” Thus the “bow” is less “complex” than the “iPod.” Have I got you right?
But this approach leads you into perspectives that are substanceless. You and I may be relatively similar in a cultural behavioristic analysis from the kid in Somalia, but that says absolutely nothing about the nature of the underlying systems dynamics in our neurologies.
The somali child and I might share a particularly rigid established system: our neural connections cemented into particular forms of thought/approach/programming that we follow through in all circumstances.
Now the precise identity of the resultant behavior may be superficially different to a vast degree, but it doesn’t really matter. I might follow a suburban life/identity involving working a 9-5, taking pride in my lawn and watching American Idol …and the Somali kid’s rigidity could be matched up with some rather extremely different lifestyles, thought patterns and identities. The cultural “differences” between us are irrelevant. Both of us are likely to mechanize our thoughts and behaviors and react unstably when those are shaken. The Somali kid could have very few cultural “complexities” surrounding/affecting him and yet still rigidify himself into a meaningless drudgery of, say, walking sheep around a valley. You, on the other hand, may work beside me, live beside me, watch the same movies, soak up the same contextual information and externally behave largely the same way as I, but nevertheless you may think and approach life radically different from I. Where I sit in my house watching television; simplifying and structuralizing the social complexities around me, you may revel in them, soak them up, wrap them around you and break them down.
Likewise, back in our theoretical nomadic Somali tribe, the same boy’s brother may run ahead, climb trees, splash in the water and count the stars.
Your concern is that the complexity of our cultural structures has grown beyond our comprehension and we’ve become enslaved by them. Certainly true in many ways today. But not necessarily true.
There are aspects of both the above “complex” and primitive societies that are fluid and there are aspects that are rigid and brittle.
The fact that there might be in some sense “LESS” quantifiable structures in the nomad’s life does in no way relate to the strength of those structures as neurological restrictions to that society’s individuals.
A few simple tasks/patterns/processes can turn a individual into a machine just as much as a terrabyte of fractal cultural can turn another individual into one.
RIGIDITY is the problem behind diminishing returns. Not complexity.
Chaos theory (properly named “complexity theory” because all the systems we’re dealing with are complex, but whatever, we’ll stick with your terminology) is a far better and complete method of analyzing the nature of the social structures we’re dealing with.
When either of us look at a puddle or a tree branch or feel the wind rustle across a plain we’re not doing something of “low complexity.” We’re instinctively shedding away the blunt, rigid, superficial abstractions of our cultural memesphere and grasping the system’s vastly complex interplay on a much deeper level.
Same thing can be found with one of the hacker/geek/boing-boing-esque/clulture-&-complexity-obsessives.
The human brain was built to process dynamic (complex) non-linear fluid systems. It’s when we start simplifying things (symbolic logic, language, agriculture, social hierarchies, etc) that things get really shitty.
Oh I agree fully. I’m all about complex, dynamic, fluid technologies that allow us to cut back on the overhead and regain autonomy. Plus, speaking as an educator, the vast majority of today’s education shit is just the instillation of hierarchies, of rigid simplifications, we could easily have those students who desired so, conversant in upper theoretical physics/mathematics/whathaveyou before the age of 12. But precious childhood innocence, precious ageist hierarchies…
Some of the smartest folks I’ve known were my elementary students. They hadn’t yet had the intelligence, the neurological dynamicism, beaten out of them.
Now that’s a very tricky statement there.
The societies that BEST adapt to the world are those that are most dynamic, and that usually means a higher number of points of contact with the world. Which can definitely translate over as higher cultural complexity.
What impedes our ability to adapt to the world is restrictions to our dynamicism. These restrictions come in two forms:
1) Psychological/neurological domestication/rigidity/alienation.
2) Pre-established biological operational limitations.
…The first requires rewilding, the second requires transhumanism. One vector without the other will be doomed to fail in gruesome evil ways.
No. Having and applying/imposing pre-established relational structures is a very, very bad thing and not inherent at all. Anarchy is the absence of structured relationships/identities. And Anarchy is possible. So there.
Think of it this way. Given that you, as a conscious individual, are more than the informational structures that comprise your “identity”, you have two approaches to forming an image of another individual:
One is to treat that person like a robot based upon the functional behavioral structures between the two of you. You can form a rough sketch of programming, of imperatives, goals and other quirks. But people are hugely complex so you’re limited to a finite number of people you can do this with any degree of functional success in your knowledge of them. (And of course, by treating Humanity or some subsection in a similar fashion you can establish prejudices about component individuals before you are able to gather individualized information about their precise structures/context.)
The second works instinctively by reflecting that part of you that can’t be structurally represented –your root consciousness– onto them. “If they are me.” This de-localization of self is called empathy. And it’s instinctive in anyone that’s developed enough to make the great cognitive leap of considering the possibility that other versions of yourself might exist in different structural context.
I can TOTALLY appreciate someone as a person without having a relationship with them. I just can’t appreciate the precise structural nature of their identity/imperatives/context/etc.
When I see a hurt person I’ve never met before in my life I naturally reach out to help them. IF they exist in any REAL sense other than cartesian machines than we are one and their suffering would be mine. (Solidarity in liberty / golden rule etc) If they in fact do not exist then I loose nothing from exploring the possibility that they do.
Just because we’re *currently* (and probably won’t be) not angels is no reason to avoid pursuing the angelic in ourselves. Accepting that we’re limited opens the door to everything. In going through the ACT OF ACCEPTING an innate identity, as the Christian legacy asserts, as flawed or limited in some way… then we open the door to redefining the degree of the structure we’ve just accepted. And that is the root of every evil that has ever been committed. It is self-alienation at its deepest root.
Human beings “ARE” nothing. We’re in a constant state of flux. We have no set structural identity. OBVIOUSLY there is context and curves to possibilities around us. Understanding and working with those is a vital part of our tactical/behavioral interaction with the world.
Physics has no ‘restrictions’ because there’s nothing beyond it to be reached for. Physics rather PROVIDES a playing field. Biology is where the arbitrary restrictions come in. Biology likewise facilitates the development of consciousness, but it doesn’t fulfill the full possibility allowed by physics.
Interaction and pariahhood is rarely ever a binary! Infotech just further facilitates the speed of the same natural relationship processes that happen in normal primitive/free societies. If I steal from a friend that friend has the right to write an angry livejournal post about it and spread it to their friends. When I start working side by side with someone else it’s a GOOD thing that that person can Google my name and, mixed in with the 3000 other things I’ve done, find that. Keeping such things secret through a lack of ability to communicate with others is essentially lying. An anarchist mesh wifi internet would just make the interrelation of people and these instances, ideals, histories, contexts and structures more efficiently connectible. Which would ultimately make them more dynamic and fluid. The incentive to throw stones at one another is far lower than the innate propensity to forgive. Communication makes understanding easier. Consider any social problem between well meaning people and its easy to explain how a *lack* of communication/contact between people is always to blame.
Sitcoms, as I love to say, are dystopian.
Comment by William Gillis — 21 April 2007 @ 2:50 AM
I tend to take the “overwhelming force” approach when I get into an argument, I’ll grant that, but what I’m arguing I don’t think is much of a “sledgehammer.” If that’s what you’re talking about, I’d like to hear an elaboration on why—my argument is that one, specific way of life out of the thousands we’ve tried as a species leads to disaster in many different ways because it’s fundamentally unworkable, but thousands of other ways remain. I fail to see how this is insufficiently nuanced.
Rigidity versus plasticity is an entirely different question from that of complexity, though; it’s like trying to deny the role of heat by pointing out that it tells you nothing about the color something has. These are two different measures. You can have a complex society that is rigid (Confuscian China) or plastic (Pre-Shogun Japan—particularly with regards to their cultural subsystems that allow them to integrate massive amounts of foreign cultures, while maintaining a unique identity of their own). Likewise, simple cultures can be either rigid or plastic. These are entirely different questions. In fact, most simple societies are fairly rigid, but provide a rigid structure that accounts for human diversity. So, for instance, Native American tribal cultures required fairly strict upholding of gender roles, but they also provided third gender roles, often defined in terms of a “Two-Spirit.” Rigid adherence to cultural norms was expected, but those norms already had places for the most common variations, which our more plastic society has a much harder time with.
Not quite. There are two problems with complexity. The first is diminishing returns, which defeats any strategy that depends on pursuing complexity for its own sake. Tied into this is the fact that complexity is essentially the “overhead cost” of a culture, so as a culture becomes more complex, it becomes less able to provide for human adaptation, which is what a culture is for. Finally, there’s the fact that humans evolved in a fairly simple cultural world, compared to our civilizations. The complexity of our civilizations overwhelms us. We do not have any intuitive grasp of exponential growth, so we can hear “7% growth per annum” and we won’t start screaming in terror, because we don’t really have a solid handle on what that means. It puts us into a trap where we can’t see what’s wrong until it’s much too late. It overwhelms our neurological capacities to relate to our fellow humans, and so we’re all reduced to stereotypes and two-dimensional roles by such an overwhelming majority of the world, that it becomes extremely difficult to break out of that mold. In complexity that so overwhelms human adaptation, being human becomes almost impossible. This is the root of the primitivist arguments about alienation and isolation. Even non-primitivists have recognized this, and the data continues to track the correlation of greater social complexity, with greater isolation.
I don’t think that’s true, and while we not only have a widely accepted theory, but significant amounts of data, to back up the assertion that complexity is subject to diminishing returns, I see neither for your claims about rigidity.
Perhaps we should pause a moment to review what these words mean, since you seem to be using them somewhat sloppily.
Diminishing returns means that at some point, the return on an investment begins to drop relative to the cost of that investment. This could be because the same investment costs more, or that the return drops, but what is important is not the absolute return, but the ROI. You could have diminishing returns even with increases in absolute production, but they would require increasing levels of investment.
Complexity is one I’m working on a new article for, but in general, complexity refers to a large number of distinct, but interrelated parts. A branch of a tree is not a tree in itself, but to be a tree, a tree must have branches. The importance of the elements being interrelated and not fractal is something glossed over in discussions of cultural complexity, because that’s always true of all cultural elements. A religion is not a culture; neither is a tool set. But change the tool set or the religion, and everything else in the culture will change to adapt. Anthropologists already knew that cultures reacted in such an “organic” manner to change, so this normally important element of the definition of complexity becomes redundant in the context of cultural complexity.
Now, increasing cultural complexity is an investment. It requires a certain amount of energy to research, invent, develop, implement, produce, or otherwise make some new element of cultural diversity, whether it’s some new process, new technology, or new form of administration. It also has a return: the new bureau will ease some government process and free up more money, or the new technology will increase efficiency and allow more energy throughput, and so forth. Thus, we can discuss the ROI of investments in complexity.
Complexity is subject to diminishing returns because in complex societies, the most obvious means of increasing complexity have already been implemented. Those that remain are, in one way or another, less obvious. They may require more specialized expertise, which is necessarily more limited and of a lower ROI than more general expertise. Quoting Tainter:
Learning to read English will always, necessarily, have a greater return than any of the things you learn by reading English. So, there’s no way to escape the fact that the more you learn, the less each new thing you learn gets you in return for the energy you invest learning it. It may still be quite worthwhile, but the ROI is dropping. Applied astrophysics has a much narrower scope of application than knowing how to speak, yet it costs much more to learn. The ROI is significantly lower. This has nothing whatsoever to do with rigidity; it’s the classic low-hanging fruit problem.
So, unless we invented rocket ships before we invented wheels, unless “higher” technologies aren’t actually built from “lower” ones, or unless you read about Einsteinian physics without first learning to read, then I think we can stop here, and say that’s it’s obviously proven that complexity is subject to diminishing returns.
Chaos theory and complexity are actually two entirely seperate fields of inquiry. But how do you defend the notion that societies are best understood in terms of chaos theory, which describes systems sensitive to initial conditions, when cultures implement so many negative feedback loops to eliminate the effects of initial conditions? Negative feedback loops, like homeostasis, have the effect of controlling for the essential chaos of more micro levels. The probabilistic world of sub-atomic particles would not allow the world to exist left to their own; that’s why your cells have chemical negative feedback loops to control for these things, to keep your body from spontaneously flying apart. Likewise, people might behave randomly on their own, which is why societies use negative feedback loops to control for human behavior, and to limit unpredictable behavior to a small tail of the population, to keep society from flying apart. This is why as unpredictable as people might be, societies are always eminently predictable.
I remember that full well. I always told my parents that my education was interrupted for eight hours every day for schooling. But looking back, I can see where a lot of those fundamentals were necessary, not for mathematics and such, but for general cultural fluency. They generally acted like I was an idiot, but things like reading Shakespeare, which is simply part of the cultural background necessary in our culture. It’s almost a part of learning how to speak the language. This leaves that much less time for learning the things a culture really needs to cover, like those thousands of plant species that our Native predecessors knew.
That’s not true, historically. The cultures that have best adapted to their ecology have often been fairly rigid, very simple, and with nearly constant contact with the living world.
Your argument is that what’s holding us back is, in part, that we’re “merely human,” and we need to be better than human. Beyond any logical arguments, that point of view sickens me deeply. I’m not terribly interested in what’s “ideal,” rather, I’m looking for a way of life that works. Our current one doesn’t. You say rewilding without transhumanism would lead to “evil.” Am I on solid ground assuming that the “evil” in question mainly involves an end to our “progress”? Progress is a myth. It’s simply not possible, because the universe isn’t one-dimensional, and you can’t maximize for two variables simultaneously. All there is, is change. Rewilded humans will continue to change, just like we changed before, not in any particular direction but what works. If you need to change humans to fit your ideal, then my opinion is that it’s your ideal that’s “evil,” not humans. At the end of the day, the question of the best society isn’t a matter of a philosophical ideal for humans to be fitted into, it’s the question of what works best for people.
And empathy lies at the root of all of our relationships. Even these words would be gibberish, if you couldn’t empathize enough to put yourself in my place, and think what you would be thinking and feeling if you were saying these words. But this is different from appreciating someone as a person. You can experience some measure of compassion and empathy this way, but only by robbing them of their personhood and breaking them down to nothing more than a reflection of yourself. You can’t appreciate them as a person, as an individual with their own unique personality and relationships, because you don’t have that kind of room in your head. So you do the next best thing, they’re “the stranger,” and you relate and empathize with “the stranger” the way you would any other person, but you’re not empathizing with a given individual as a person, you’re empathizing with a construct in your mind that you’ve put him and every other stranger in your life into. It’s unavoidable. Every philanthrope in history, however much their heart may bleed for the innocent, could never truly appreciate the innocent as people. They could understand that each of them are people, they could empathize with the plight of “the poor” and “the downtrodden,” but they could never care about Fred, or Tom, or Carla, the way they could about the people they actually knew.
Of course; any decent person would. But this is not the same as an appreciation for them as a person. They’re still not a true person to you; a human being in distress, but they cannot have the full depth of a person in your world.
Who said it was flawed or limited? It’s good to know your limits; doesn’t mean you shouldn’t push them from time to time, though. But is it a flaw to have a limited neurological capacity for real social connection? I don’t think so, I think it merely defines the context of healthy human society. These are “flaws” only if you’re projecting some image of what humans “should” be. Without that ideal to compare against, “flaw” makes no sense.
I think you’re taking this to a ridiculous extreme. There’s variability, but you’re not as likely to grow a third arm as not. I’m a big fan of e-Prime, and while I’m not using it here, I am in other projects, and so in that sense, no, we are nothing. But we do have a web of relationships, and that does define us. We have a place that we fit, and yes, our nature, and that place, are always being renegotiated, but that constant shifting doesn’t mean we’re left as some nebulous, undefined cloud. There are some things that change only rarely, and very slowly.
Your distinction of biology and physics seems a little silly to me. I know you wrote about biology in your 15, but what you attacked was the study of biology, not the biology being studied. That’s what I’m referring to. Taxonomies and species have very little to do with biology-as-it-is, however prevelent it is in biology-as-it-is-studied. Rather, taxonomy imperfectly reflects the grand family tree of evolution; not hard-and-fast divisions, but rather, who’s more closely related to whom. But biology-as-it-is is nothing more than physics at a slightly higher level. Chemisty is nothing more than physics at a higher level, and biology is nothing more than chemistry at a slightly higher level. So if it’s nonsense to talk about reaching beyond physics, in what way is it not nonsense to talk about reaching beyond biology?
No, there is a massive and fundamental difference. In primitive societies, everything is couched in a social context. You know what someone has done, but it’s also in the context of an ongoing personal relationship. We’ve already established that such relationships are not possible in mass society, so you’ve stripped out that fundamental context. Now all you have is a background check. You have no personal relationship in which to consider this information. It feeds judgment, and starves forgiveness. It’s a sure-fire way to turn us all into hated criminals, because it means every crime haunts us forever, without any possibility of ever putting it behind us. We’ll all be like Valjean with his yellow ticket.
Seems a bit melodramatic, but I think that such widespread knowledge without a social context damns us all.
For people you know, for people you have a relationship with. For people you don’t have a relationship with, well, history has a long case history of incidents where everyone knew somebody’s sins, and nobody knew him.
That’s essentially the problem, though, isn’t it? Increasing communication without increasing contact.
Technical note: To quote someone else, use the HTML <blockquote> tag. Comments asking about this have been deleted, and previous posts edited to make use of the blockquote tag, so as not to clutter up the thread with a technical tangent. That is all.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 April 2007 @ 3:27 PM
“Maybe one day Gillis’ dreams will become possibilities, but I can guarantee this much: they won’t be possibilities on the road we’re on. They won’t be possibilities until we come home, re-establish our relationship with the living earth and learn again how to relate to one another. After that, who knows where our destiny might lie? Maybe it will end up in the stars after all—but this is not something that we can use, as we are now, without terrible results. Once we’ve learned how to live on this planet, perhaps we’ll be able to look outwards and think of others”
I am curious, what do you mean by this? How might be possible for a sustainable, egalitarian society to build a spacecraft?
Comment by FC — 22 April 2007 @ 11:34 AM
Aside from the generic religious argument that we shouldn’t change our God-given nature, I’m confused as to why you are so strongly opposed to the idea of improving humanity.
Leaving aside the issue of the energy inputs required for agriculture, it seems (from my reading of this thread only, and as a first-time visitor), that one of the other main problems you identify with civilization is that we are simply neurologically incapable of making real interpersonal connections to more than ~150 people.
What if this could be changed just by flipping a block in our DNA? Now obviously this example isn’t currently possible, nor would it be this easy, but there are many improvements that could potentially be made now, or in the near future. If people are given the freedom to experiment in this area free of the constraints of religious “morality”, then they will be able to judge for themselves what constitute improvements, and accomplish changes that we can’t even imagine.
Mankind has evolved over time to accomodate our environment, and given the rapid pace of change in our civilization, it seems entirely appropriate to me that we should help evolution to “catch up”. Even if the changes are drastic (and it seems to me that the net effect might well be moderate if people have the freedom to choose to change themselves/their children) it is certainly no worse than loosing most of both the good and bad of human civilization.
Comment by Tierce — 23 April 2007 @ 1:17 PM
There’s nothing religious about it, at least not in the sense of “G-d-given nature.” Our natural evolved over millions of years. It’s the contempt for humanity implicit in any plan to shoe-horn humanity into some postulated “ideal.” “Improvements” are not possible, because you can’t maximize two variables at the same time. Changes happen all the time, but since a change always helps one thing at the expense of another, it’s impossible to call it an “improvement” or a “detriment,” unless you have some ideal you’d like to shove humanity into whether it suits us or not.
I reject the notion that Homo sapiens is the only animal on the planet that has no good place in this world. I reject this myth that we’re “broken” or “fallen,” and need some utopian scheme to “fix” us.
Are you familiar with Robin Dunbar’s work on the relationship between group size and neocortex in primates? He discovered “Dunbar’s number,” which plots Homo sapiens‘ group size to 150. This is due to the size of our neocortex. This takes more than a simple gene switch—to increase our group size to billions, which is what would be necessary for a non-hierarchical mass society, we would need brains bigger than buildings. You may also be aware of the various medical problems that afflict so many of the people that have held the title of “world’s tallest man,” and why they are all so short-lived. Human bodies have a difficult time scaling; prehistoric giantism was permitted only because the air had more oxygen then. So, we’d have a very difficult time growing gigantic bodies to match our monumental heads. We’d all be essentially crippled, with our bodies little more than writhing appendages on our massive skulls.
Then there’s the fact that the human brain is the most energy-intensive organ we have. It makes up about 3% of our body mass, but consumes 20% of our energy. Increasing the brain to such monumental sizes would bring with it not linear, but exponentially higher energy needs per capita. You think we face ecological problems now? Try giving people such massive brains, and the ecological toll of India and China will seem quaint.
The transhumanist agenda remains science fiction, and I see no real evidence suggesting that it’s suddenly going to become realistic any time soon. Our pace of invention is slowing down, not speeding up. More importantly, the contempt for humanity implicit in this drive to “improve” humanity lies at the very root of so much of civilization’s psycho-social damage. Civilizations teach that humans are too “fallen” to appreciate the lofty ideals civilization offers, and tells us that humans must be made better, smarter, stronger, or nicer than they’ve ever been before. We repeat this, year after year, for thousands of years, in whatever verbage is most pious at the moment. We used to talk about salvation. Adams said government was necessary because men aren’t angels. Marx said the state would just be a transition, until people are ready for the stateless, classless society. And now we have transhumaists, telling us that we just need to wait for technology to make us smarter and more compassionate, then we can achieve our divine destiny and rule from the stars as immortal gods.
There’s a reason that only the villains in literature pursue immortality.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 April 2007 @ 1:40 PM
Regarding “complexity,” its definition, and to what degree it is “arbitrary”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 24 April 2007 @ 10:38 AM
“this contact is mediated, not direct. By the same token, shamans offered similarly mediated experiences of the same phenomena, so how much has technology gained us that we did not already have?”
More of the structure and function of the thing comes across, and we have a wider variety available. Smelling the food in your bowl is a direct experience of flavors, of molecules, and one particular galaxy. But the mediated experiences available from a specialist can sometimes offer us a better view, thanks to a shift in perspective.
And while I appreciate the benefits of a customized experience, I think some of Gillis’s enthusiasm is justified: a personal shaman is still available, but they can only access so much in a lifetime, if all they build from is their own direct experience. For hundreds of years now, many of the people with the broadest, most interesting, or most useful visions have had their experiences preserved, duplicated, built upon, and re-combined. I think this body of knowledge has something to add. I sure enjoy it, and I’ve found that it has allowed some direct experiences as well; when my nephew asked why the flame in the stove was blue, I was able, not only to explain it somewhat, but to turn it yellow for him, and then green.
Comment by Joel — 3 May 2007 @ 11:25 PM
Try reading Wolff’s Original Wisdom; this is not so true.
The “contact” via technology that Gillis is talking about is nothing like smelling the food in your bowl, no matter how much a poetic metaphor might try to say otherwise. When I see something through an electronic microscope, I’m no closer to it than when I read a description or see a picture.
Ah, you misunderstand my comparison to shamans. Yes, in some cultures shamans were specialists, but not all. In some, most everyone had a taste of the shamanic experience. Some did it more easily or more often, but everyone had some experience with it. Much more universal than the benefits offered by technology.
That has nothing to do with shamanism, though. Shamans build upon the discoveries of other shamans. Weaving together the discoveries of others is what they really do best.
That’s certainly what shamans have done, but I don’t see it in civilized cultures. They generally write down their experiences—so they can’t be re-combined. It’s literate, it can no longer change or adapt. That’s how you get fundamentalism. “Oral fundamentalism” is a contradiction in terms.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 May 2007 @ 11:43 PM
Sorry to post again. I love this article, but I had to comment on this: “we don’t have an intuitive grasp of exponential growth”
Well, those of us who have studied differential equations, sometimes do.
Not to be snide or anything, but it’s been decades since global population has followed a path of exponential growth.
Similarly, your petri dish analogy is built on faulty assumptions: bacteria deviate from exponentiality as soon as they form a dense colony. At that point, their growth becomes quadratic, since they’re just expanding the diameter of of the colony, and it dips below quadratic once they hit an edge of the dish.
Humanity reached the inflection point of our logistic growth curve in 1989, and our growth rate has actually declined ever since. We’re on pace for a natural limit of 8 billion (math).
If, as you’ve said, civilization is doomed to collapse once the growth stops, the real worry won’t be peak oil, but peak infant.
I would humbly offer China as a counterexample to the need for growth, however.
Comment by Joel — 4 May 2007 @ 12:24 AM
“I don’t see it in civilized cultures. They generally write down their experiences—so they can’t be re-combined.”
The written experiences of the first scientist to do a flame test didn’t prevent me from showing my nephew how to color fire. Quite the contrary. And I think that, though the tradition is young, more and more people each generation are actually experiencing the things Enlightenment (and later) thinkers wrote about.
The clunky old prototype laser from 1969 has remained in the basement of my college, and mine are among many hands that have played with it, turning it from an empty optical resonator to a working, wood-burning terror, year after year. And the writings of those early laser pioneers have been the reason we’ve been able to do so.
Have you ever actually used an electron microscope, first hand? You can move things around in there, you know. And more important, you can zoom out to a level similar to the naked eye, so that when the object comes out of vacuum, the higher magnification is still in your memory, as you hold it close to your eye. I’m guessing that your only access to SEMs thus far has been through pictures and descriptions, which is a pity.
You’re probably not interested, but know that SEMs are available for home use now. TEMs make me feel even more connected: you can watch rows of atoms slide past, like trees in an orchard. Using one was among the most amazing experiences of my life, up there with looking out over the Yosemite valley.
Comment by Joel — 4 May 2007 @ 12:44 AM
To respond do some other answers: I was able to read some of Original Wisdom online, and it was good. I might read the rest some day.
But what I’ve read so far seems to be a tale of a partly industrial society, with ties to a variety of agrarian traditions. It’s true that we’ve lost a lot, and it’s also true that only a tiny fraction of the world can fit into a scientific theory at one time. But when I said “more”, I meant “additional”, rather than “better”. I see mediated experience as a supplement to direct experience, and science as a supplement to mysticism. They aren’t mutually exclusive. Hopefully my other comments have made that clear.
I’m also guessing the authors’ training has shaped his opinion of science. Psychology is best understood from the perstpective of a human, socializing, rather than a dispassionate observer. Wolff was trained in one of the disciplines that has benefitted the least from a scientific approach. There may be many simple, general patterns to humanity, but psychologists have yet to agree upon them. I think, in this special case, the structurea and functions claimed by the literature are more often peculiar to the individual authors, and the reader has to do more violence to their experiences to make them fit the recieved pattern than with physical science.
Comment by Joel — 4 May 2007 @ 1:14 AM
You understand it, but not intuitively. As evidenced by your very next sentence:
In 1960, the world’s population was at 3 billion. We hit 6 billion in 1999, and they’re talking about 12 billion by 2025. That means the doubling period was first forty years, and now twenty-five. That’s exponential growth.
Yes, nothing in nature can actually follow a progression of exponential growth for very long. The example had to use some pretty exceptional bacteria, ones that could actually grow exponentially, in order to match the technophilic view of what humans are capable of. But there’s a very important lesson in that—we’re not actually going to be able to follow an exponential growth curve like that. And what’s the consequences for our civilization when we fail to grow?
And you can actually look at a world with two billion more people and not scream in terror? Though 8 billion’s the lowest estimate I’ve heard, and really, that’s all rather dependent on the complete fantasy that the Third World can ever reach First World complexity, without a Third World to externalize their costs to. That’s how we do it, after all.
China’s been growing by leaps and bounds. They’ve implemented draconian laws to try to limit their growth because it’s going too quickly.
But of course, the very same thing occurs in oral cultures. With things that don’t change—like the color of flame—the oral tradition likewise stays the same. Were you able to show your nephew how different species of plant produce different types and flavors of smoke when they burn? That’s something forager children learn from an extremely young age. What oral tradition allows, though, is for knowledge to be updated with new discoveries. Today, we still have people reading Enlightenment philosophers. People are reading Hobbes’ Leviathan, and walking away as if this “classic” were really on-target, completely unaware that Hobbes’ picture of the “state of nature” has been completely shattered by actual ethnographic observation. Because it’s written down, it’s preserved, unchanging, unadapting, continuing to poison minds with lies long ago overturned. In an oral tradition, the stories are updated, the old inaccuracies are bled out, and the whole thing adapts and changes with ancient continuity and adaptive change.
Not at all. But civilization has no monopoly on knowledge. You can have animistic sciences, and oral traditions can record knowledge as accurately as writing, so there’s no reason to accept the ways in which writing alienates us from the living world, or to continue living in such a dehumanizing fashion, just to have the knowledge we also had before we submitted to such indignities. It’s not worthwhile to live in a manner that destroys the world to get such things, because we already had them before.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 May 2007 @ 10:45 AM
Gee, sounds like a wiki.
Comment by Anonymous — 18 May 2007 @ 4:08 AM
You’ll never get an answer to this from Jason, FC. When he doesn’t actually ignore the point that the Earth is a deathtrap ticking down to some inevitable planet-scouring cataclysm, he conjures up images of either a) hunter-gatherers building the infrastructure to transport a sizable portion of the biosphere into space at such time as an escape route is needed, or b) a bizarre spiritual migration in which shamans lead us into the Dreamtime just ahead of the big dinosaur-killing asteroid or supernova shockwave.
Comment by Anonymous — 18 May 2007 @ 4:58 AM
Ong referred to electronic communication as a “new orality” because of similarities like that (and this was in the 1980s). I’m somewhat less impressed. Wikis are certainly a step up from paper-bound encyclopedias, but with a social context that’s so much more diluted, I doubt a wiki can ever do more than approximate the impact of a rich oral tradition. It’s certainly a step in the right direction, though.
Well it’s not as if I know all possibilities of technology. Who knows what we might be able to invent? I certainly don’t. What I do know is that if we are going to spread to other planets in a sustainable manner, we’ll need to first become sustainable here on earth; otherwise, we’re simply spreading our unsustainable pattern across the cosmos.
You rather thoroughly missed my point; it sounds like you’re trying to cram what I’ve said into your own hopes of species immortality. One day, one way or another, life on earth will end. And one day, the universe will either grow too expansive and cold to sustain life anymore, or it will crunch in on itself. There’s no escaping death; everything in our universe has an end. That’s the way our universe works. Trying to deny that is strictly the domain of madmen, lunatics and arch-villains. I suggested the possibilities of shamanism to answer the curiosity of exploration, not to find some way to live forever. There’s no way to live forever, not in our universe. Animism and shamanism are very much at their core about balancing life and death, acknowledging and honoring them both. But trying to live forever is simply insane, whether as an individual or as a species.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 May 2007 @ 11:20 AM
Comment by locke — 27 May 2007 @ 6:36 PM
I apologize for starting this aside and then breaking it off without warning for a couple months while I (at least supposedly) focused on composing an actual response to your theoretical structures. Of course it was more like hanging with friends and climbing trees. Well, it sorta makes me look bad, leaving you with the last words–even if they are ridiculous words. But eh, what can I say, the internet is boring.
However it looks like I actually saved the last rejoinder in this thread and didn’t post it. Perhaps this will help?
“I’d like to hear an elaboration on why—my argument is that one, specific way of life out of the thousands we’ve tried as a species leads to disaster in many different ways because it’s fundamentally unworkable, but thousands of other ways remain. I fail to see how this is insufficiently nuanced.”
Um, because of that “one specific way of life” bit? Civilization is no such thing.
“Rigidity versus plasticity is an entirely different question from that of complexity.”
To the contrary, even your Social “Science” model of ‘complexity’ requires the presence of non-linear dynamics.
‘Plasticity’ is a term I have rather deliberately avoided using because it would completely water down (pun!) what I’m getting at.
“Rigid adherence to cultural norms was expected, but those norms already had places for the most common variations, which our more plastic society has a much harder time with.”
So the great variety of our “norms” are less rigid these days. So what? Maybe you haven’t gotten it yet: I’m AGAINST all forms of culture/society/identity/social-structure (or at least their having value in themselves; they should be inconsequential splashes under our feet, not ruling causal structures over us). Those information structures’ persistance in the face of mild fluxuations in human nature is not a good thing! Our “society”’s inability to sustain norms is one of its greatest assets (from the perspective of an individual obviously). What we label Anarchy cannot coexist with memes that control people, culture has to be ad hoc rather than something given lasting strength in itself. So their culture can deal with certain uncontrolled fluid remains/elements by shoving them off into a corner. That’s PRECISELY the problem with our civilization. Instead of fully engaging with the complexities around us we retreat behind a wall and deal with it superficially.
“We do not have any intuitive grasp of exponential growth, so we can hear “7% growth per annum” and we won’t start screaming in terror, because we don’t really have a solid handle on what that means. It puts us into a trap where we can’t see what’s wrong until it’s much too late. It overwhelms our neurological capacities to relate to our fellow humans, and so we’re all reduced to stereotypes and two-dimensional roles by such an overwhelming majority of the world, that it becomes extremely difficult to break out of that mold.”
We are taught, coerced into not being able to comprehend the civilization around us. That’s a product of the rigidity in the system, not that there is a system in the first place. Those stereotypes/structures/rigidities we use in dealing with the world/humanity are a bad thing, obviously, but you misidentify their cause. Rigidity causes rigidity. THAT’s the most important characteristic of our society.
Comment by William — 2 July 2007 @ 12:06 AM
Anyway thank you for your patience in all of this. Anthropik is a wonderful blog, it just tends to get ridiculous when you go for teh grandiose theory. My canonical response (to this, the thirty and your complexity article):
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Why & How Jason Godesky Is So Wrong His Ancestors Are Wrong
http://williamgillis.blogspot.com/2007/06/why-how-jason-godesky-is-so-wrong-his.html
=============================
Comment by William — 2 July 2007 @ 12:11 AM
Wow, Jason, it’s amazing your head doesn’t explode.
I think mine would, if I was so regularly, and vehemently, misunderstood.
Comment by jhereg — 2 July 2007 @ 8:59 AM
I saw your piece (as well as the variations that some spam-blogs put on it, including my favorite, “So (Why Gillis: How Jason Is & His William Wrong Godesky)”), and it’s in my writing queue. There’s a lot of common objections that you’ve stated quite well, so it definitely deserves a detailed response. I don’t want to promise anything in the immediate future, but it’s forthcoming.
There’s a few points in your comment that I think illustrate some of our underlying differences, like this:
Oh, but it is! Let’s look at two civilizations that are ostenisbly very different: our own, versus feudal Japan. Nearly the entirety of the modern American diet is made from corn in one form or another, though we rarely eat corn in its natural state, all by itself. “Bread and water” is a meal for the deprived, and yet, go to most decent restaurants, and they’ll give you some bread rolls, and a glass of water is the only beverage that’s free. Because our culture sees these things as the “basics.” In feudal Japan, it was a different plant, but still an annual, catastrophe-adapted cereal grain, in their case, rice. Which puts it in the same, narrow niche as corn and wheat. Nutritionally, it’s almost identical: massive amounts of carbohydrates, a little bit of protein, and a plethora of neurotoxins, lectins and other chemicals that granivores have evolved the capacity to block, but we, as non-granivores, have not.
Feudal Japan allowed the elites to live in luxury, thanks to the grueling labor of the serfs. Today’s Americans are allowed to live in luxury, thanks to the grueling labor of the Third World. Even the codes of loyalty and honor upheld by the samurai class can find close parallels in our own “Protestant Work Ethic.” There are differences, of course, but they are mostly cosmetic. For further evidence, look at the problem of translating the titles of people in feudal Japanese society into English. A 大å?? (daimyÅ?) can translate as “lord” and lose very little of its meaning, because there’s essentially no difference between them, because there’s essentially no difference between our cultures. Even the titles of minor bureaucrats translate with relative ease, because our cultures are, in essence, identical. Where we differ is primarily a question of superficial aesthetics.
If you’ve never studied anthropology, you may think that’s a substantial difference, and fall into the trap that Daniel Quinn highlighted: “we are not humanity.” There’s enormous diversity outside of civilization, while nearly all civilizations are the same. Compare the ease of translating 大å?? (daimyÅ?) or 天皇 (tennÅ?) to the problems surrounding a title like “Big Man” or “shaman.” Many anthropologists want to use these as general terms, because they can see very general similarities in a cross-cultural human behavior, but others point out how problematic this is. A “shaman” in one culture is fundamentally different from a “shaman” in another. How do you compare the traditional Tungus shaman with a secret medicine society like the False Face Society of the Haudenosaunee, for example?
So, civilizations throughout time and around the world have all been virtually identical, differing in little more than superficial details. Their social structures, their religions, and even their diets are all basically the same. A Kalahari Bushman eats more species of plants and animals in a day than most of us will eat in our lifetimes. Essentially all of the cultural diversity of Homo sapiens is accounted for by the uncivilized cultures that civilization is driving to extinction. This is why, as Jack Weatherford illustrated in Savages & Civilization, civilization needs contact with uncivilized cultures in order to bring in new ideas; else, it ossifies and dies. Yet civilization is compelled, systemically, to wipe out all alternative ways of life. This is just one more way in which it destroys its own foundation, and thus proves itself fundamentally unsustainable.
I have gotten that, and I think it’s an overreaction into extremism that’s very easy in our culture. Legitimizing their fundamentally unjustifiable rule has always been one of civilization’s most pressing needs. A large part of that has been invested in conflating natural rules with human laws. It’s no accident that we have no way to talk about “the way things work in the universe” seperate from “arbitrary commands given by so-called ‘authority figures.’” From god-kings to the unification of Constantine’s empire under a single throne and a single god, civilizations have always based their “right to rule” on the concept that they are extensions of natural laws.
But there’s a world of difference between those two, and recognizing that is where you and I part ways. You have seen how awful human laws are, but you don’t see through the deliberate obfuscation, so you end up trying to defy gravity and the speed of light while you’re at it. This, to my mind, is nonsense. A world of true, perfect freedom is hell. Natural laws ground us, root us, and nourish us. This is very much the opposite of human laws, which bind us and restrict us. That’s why rulers try to legitimize themselves by conflating their commands with natural laws. Without natural laws, we wither and die. If you’ve ever watched the last two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, that illustrated this line of thinking rather well. If you’ve read much of ecopsychology, then you’ve probably understood it much more directly than that.
An ad hoc culture is self-destructive. We’ve been cut off from the relationships with each other and with the rest of the living world that nourish us for so long, that such insane fantasies seem viable, even desirable. But that just pushes us even further into psychosis than we already are. We’ve already lost so much of our humanity; pushing us even further in that direction would force us to lose even what we have left.
No, not shoved into a corner at all. That’s what we do; our culture has no place for differences, so they’re pushed off into a corner. Primitive societies plan for differences, and incorporate them into the structure. A homosexual in our society is an abberation that must be denied and shoved into a corner. In nearly all the American Indian cultures, homosexuality makes a person Two-Spirited. Having two spirits made them powerful; they were honored precisely because they were different, had a different perspective and held a different view of the world. Animism simply ceases to be miserly with personhood, and acknolwedges personhood in everything that acts like a person. Everything can be related to; friends, enemies, predator and prey, father and son, whatever the relationship might be, it extends not just to human persons, but also other-than-human persons. Thus, what animists revere most are those other perspectives on the world. That’s what shape-shifting is all about: gaining another perspective on the world. What we call mental illness in our culture could make someone a revered shaman in theirs; homosexuals and others who differ from the mainstream all bring different perspectives, and it’s understood that different perspectives are to be treasured, because few things can enrich the whole of society more than that. They’re not shoved in a corner. We’ve both apparently been in civilization for far too long if having a place in society makes us think first of being shoved in a corner.
In this particular case, it has nothing to do with teaching or rigidity. The human brain is fundamentally, neurologically incapable of truly understanding exponential growth. We’re actually taught about it, but we never really have a gut feeling for it. And it’s not civilization’s rigidity that makes it constantly grow faster and faster, but its foundation in catastrophic agriculture. It’s not even a matter of humans being “flawed” by not understanding exponential growth. It’s something so far removed from our natural state that it “breaks” our intuition and our natural sense of what works, and what is completely insane.
Human Nature Works.
Get over it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 July 2007 @ 10:13 AM
Ah, you misunderstand me. I do not quibble the point that there are really any inherent differences between such supposedly discrete civilizations as say kingdoms in Egypt and Burma. They’re all rather obviously part of a whole.
But the global culture of “Civilization” is no single specific thing, but rather an agglomerate of different cultural, sociological, and technological vectors and peculiarities. The only thing that ultimately binds them is globalization. They’re the combined ecosystem that has survived. But there are very different parts of that ecosystem and they can function independently. Furthermore our “industrial society” and more specifically our Information Society is of a rather intensely different context than what’s come before.
Last time I checked it was you who was questioning the solidity of the speed of light, not I.
(See your predictions of civilization in post-earth humanity.) I think it’s disingenuous in the worst way to conflate Anthropological theories about the “innate” innerworkings of incredibly complex Biological systems with Physical laws.
Forgive me, but what you’re really saying here is: “without the Natural Laws regarding the was you should live and behave–that I, Jason Godesky, have discovered and enumerated–we wither and die.”
OMG. Oh, the geekness.
For the betterment of everyone involved let’s just avoid mentioning that show, muchless pretending like it had anything of value to say aside from boring garden-variety psychosis.
To what self? What are you trying to preserve? It certainly doesn’t smack of humanity to me.
All I can really say is maybe you don’t.
Well… a part of civilization. It certainly plays a role. But you keep on retreating to these all or nothing simple reductions of complex context.
“Natural state.” Hah. I think that language really betrays the horrors of what you’re talking about. You’re worshiping at the alter of maintaining structure. Of preservation for it’s own sake. (And primitive societies are best able at preserving their structures, thus they must be best.) …It’s *THAT* type of thinking that encapsulates the mad villainy seeking immortality for some structural identity.
Comment by William — 2 July 2007 @ 7:04 PM
Globalization is no ephemeral thing; it’s the only end the positive feedback loop could ever have, the position where a single civilization emerges and it controls the entire world.
“Civilization” is a very specific thing: a culture based around cities. Cities are settlements too large to support themselves. It isn’t some absolutist statement to say that because of this, all civilizations must have a violence-based hierarchy, anymore than it’s an absolutist statement to say that if you go swimming, you’ll get wet. These are nothing more than the consequences of the actions taken. If you’re going to build a culture that has cities, then those cities need to be fed, because they’re fundamentally and by definition incapable of supporting themselves. They can never give back more than they take, because they will always need more than they produce. So as soon as you have cities, you’ve created a situation where hierarchy becomes necessary to create the surpluses, steal the surpluses, and ensure that the surpluses go to the right people, despite the fact that the right people never actually pay for it in any fair way. You can shift that elite around many different ways, but you cannot abolish the basic relationship, you can only rearrange it.
So civilization is a very specific thing. It makes much more sense to speak of “civilization” as a single phenomenon than to try to humor the various states inside of it as independent “civilizations.” They’re really not. They’re all identical, and interrelated anyway.
I know of none. What are they?
It is not. The so-called “information society” is a First World illusion, nothing more than a self-absorbed delusion. Industrial society intensified many of the trends that began with the Agricultural Revolution, but it didn’t start any of them. It was an escalation in scale, but it changed nothing in kind, the way the Agricultural Revolution did. In fact, given the pattern of exponential growth begun with the Neolithic, the Industrial Revolution was really the only way the enterprise could continue. It’s an extension of the Agricultural Revolution, not any significant departure from it.
I’d agree. I don’t do that. Anthropology reveals what has worked, but it doesn’t reveal any “rules” of human society. In fact, it reveals again and again how much startling diversity there is in how we can approach different situations. What I’m talking about are natural laws, ecological principles like succession.
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is that we live in an ecology, however much we try to deny that. When we try to ignore the basic natural laws, the ecological principles of our context, we cut ourselves off from the rest of the living world. Alienation, isolation and psychosis follow. We go insane. Ecopsychology has followed this up quite a bit, and provides some very good reading on how humans removed from their ecological niche fundamentally break down. I touched on this subject in my recent article on bioregionalism, but browsing some of the articles online from Gatherings, the journal of the International Community for Ecopsychology, will give you a much better idea.
I am a lvl 26 blackguard of Tainter. But to disrespect Eva like that is an intolerable affront, sir!
It wouldn’t, would it? Why would you recognize it? You and everyone around you has always been rootless. Your culture celebrates it as a virtue and calls it “freedom,” even.
In their proper context, I’m not even sure most of our culture’s traditions were necessarily “bad.” They just have no business trying to be global. But we deeply, fundamentally need tradition. It’s the only thing that can really allow us to relate to the ecology we inhabit and to the rest of the living world. It’s fundamentally the lack of tradition that gives us so many problems now. There’s a reason why others refer to “traditional” societies first and foremost, because tradition holds such importance for them. An ad hoc culture cannot have any tradition. It can have no link to the living landscape; it can’t understand bird calls, or feel what an animal felt by following its tracks. It can’t even follow the line back to their own ancestors. A truly ad hoc society is insane, sealed off in a bubble, believing itself the only thing in the world. It’s … well, us, frankly. David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous will give you a better idea of what I’m talking about here; he addresses this notion at book length.
And neither do you. I know because you’re a human person, and so you have a Homo sapiens brain. If your brain could truly understand exponential growth, it would be so different, neurologically, that you’d never be able to speak to another human person in your life. If you haven’t seen it before, watching this video will probably be one of the best investments of 30 minutes you ever make.
These aren’t “all or nothing simple reductions of complex context.” Everything that we call “civilization” is nothing more than the cultural and psychological consequences of catastrophic agriculture. That should hardly be surprising; evolution creates working systems, so it’s not normally a widespread number of interlocking problems we face, but a single problem with myriad consequences. Disease operates the same way. You don’t have one thing giving you a cough, and something else stuffs up your nose, and a third thing gives you a fever. These are all symptoms of a single infection. Likewise, we don’t have one thing giving us hierarchy, and something else causing environmental destruction, and some third thing driving us into deeper isolation and alienation. There’s just agriculture; all the rest comes from just following the consequences of agriculture, and what that means to us as a society, as individuals, and as part of a living world.
I don’t know too many people who see structure as a self-evident evil, so you’ll have to expand on the mad villainy for me. I don’t think structure is necessarily a bad thing. Structures can be too rigid (our civilization specializes in those), but they can also be too loose. You can see examples of structure all over the natural world. Structure is not the problem. The problem is that some structures are fundamentally dehumanizing, while others—the ones we evolved in—complement us. We evolved in them, and they evolved with us. We can never be really human without them.
My concern isn’t with abolishing structure; I do not see the abscence of structure as virtue. Rather, I suppose I would say that virtue is a human expressing human-ness, just like virtue for a pig would be expressing pig-ness, or a daisy expressing daisy-ness. I don’t see civilization as bad because it’s a structure; I see it as bad because it imposes civilization-ness on everything, forbidding anything from expressing itself in its own way.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 July 2007 @ 8:12 PM
Globalization, as I was referring to it, was simply the global interconnectedness of cultures and societies. A “single” culture, as you phrase it, emerged and took root across the world, leaving agriculture and city states behind.
The “city” is a symptom of various underlying motivations. The expression of the social desire for greater contact AND/OR the concentration of social control. These, though antagonistic, are often expressed in a wide variety of complementary manners.
You assume quite a bit in the premises of this old argument. You assume boundaries to the identity expressed in this social concentration, but there’s no innate reason for such insides and outsides to develop. You further assume the centrality and supremacy of material food in this ecosystem. Cities often function as centers of development for art and science and other informational foods for a society. Which is the reason people endlessly voyage to such concentrations of social interaction and are more than willing to exchange material food for conceptual food.
Cultures that promote “heavy concentrations of social convergence” (cities) do not inherently have violence-based hierarchies.
But yes, they do historically facilitate a certain ease when it comes to defaulting on insider/outsider identities. But that’s a result of their stability and local limitation as structures. An increase of non-linear social interaction is slowly destroying this city culture by making EVERYWHERE (and nowhere) a ‘heavy concentration of social convergence.’ Increase of information and transportation tech turn cities into jelly and wash away hierarchies.
For example, just because art is deeply connected to mass society (an increase of social interaction and integration makes for an increase of complexity in artistic expression) doesn’t mean that art is inseparable from the hierarchies of Pharaoh and Pope.
The grandiose self-satisfaction of the 90s deserves some calling out, but nevertheless the ability to communicate instantaneously over great distances has fundamentally changed the very basic landscape of our civilization. The Zapatistas.
But you’re trying to apply them through anthropological analyses. Social constructs don’t inherently match up with underlying systems dynamics, but you’re defaulting time and time again on making that jump whenever it looks appetizing.
I do not disagree that contact with the world is a wonderful and indeed deeply desirable component of what it means to exist, much less exist as “homo sapiens”. But there’s all the world of difference between contact and role-filling. We are not simply cogs that need to behave better as cogs. Our “role” is just as stable and consistent as this biosphere. And whatever hoopla you may try to make out of some of its feedback loops, the Earth’s biosphere is a sudden, violently changing and utterly fleeting thing. Come on, I mean really only a few billion years? Who the fuck wants to think that small?
Some truth, abused and misshapen by faddish hogwash into overly full of themselves universal proclamations and limited thinking.
Bah! Think that’s bad, I’ll go so far as to throw down the glove on Anime in general! (But never remind me that my precious Firefly and the Matrix are essentially live action renditions of Anime.)
I find your portrayal of participation in cultural structures as being “rooted” to be a deeply egregious and outright misrepresentation. The roots are what’s underneath such arbitrary frameworks and senseless stimuli. To truly be rooted one must grasp after the core of our material reality and social relations, not the frilly constructs that obscure it. Being rooted means doing away with arbitrary abstractions and seeing and participating with reality on a deeper level. If that precludes participation in hierarchical jumbles of our civilization’s (and also the mini-Civilizations that you anthropologists delude yourselves into thinking separate) social machinery, so what?
That sentence sends shudders of horror into my gut. I feel like puking at the sheer gibbering Lovecraftian visage.
That’s just utterly not true. All that characterizes an ad hoc culture is the refusal to maintain participation structures for no other reason than to maintain them. The utilization of such tools as you give are a good thing, insofar as those tools are useful given the context. Our problem today (whether we be hunter-gatherers in the Amazon or Suburban Soccer Moms) is that we refuse to adapt fluidly. We refuse to give up the solidity of some contextual structure. We worship our constructs, our cultures and set them above ourselves in the global ecosystem. This is a problem. Not because it changes the global ecosystem–because EVERYTHING does that and who are we to assert that the homo sapiens information structure is better than the Fascist Robot information structure–but because it destroys what we clumsily consider life. The embrace of structure for structure’s sake destroys consciousness, destroys the spontaneity, creativity and ingenuity of our very existence. We become cogs, gears, robots in the greater machine and eradicate everything else.
That’s an almost criminal approach to neurology. You’re just so wrong here I don’t think my brain is able to fully comprehend the magnitude of your wrongness.
I bet you would argue that those people who think intuitively regarding spatial relations in higher dimensions are just faking it despite mounds of mathematical proof to the contrary. Furthermore, what the crap’s up with you so deeply connecting neurological structure to language? Language, for me at least, isn’t in any way related to how I think, but a tool, a compiler that I’ve grudgingly created and put together in a corner of my mind. Sometimes I misplace it entirely.
I say you’re being blunt and willfully shoving the world into way too simple constructs, you say you’re not. Repeat.
Agriculture isn’t a thing unto itself. There’s an entire set of causal relations that first created it and then promoted it through the ages. The term can be found centrally, but in returning to it the way that you do you neglect important complexities.]
You talk of the immortality complex and how it’s always considered evil. (Although, frankly, not always, there is plenty of media and mythology that idealizes it. Happily ever after. Heaven and the perpetual “after-lives.”) And I agree with you.
Immortality always refers to the immortality of a construct, of a structural identity. America forever more. The identity, memes and body of David Clarkson in perpetuity. We recoil from such things because they mean death. Ours usually, at leas how these things turn out, but death in general. The absence of fluid change and interrelation.
My ideal is the maximization of fluid change and interrelation. To take the core force of “life” per se and expand it, to fulfill it, across the dead empty cosmos. To chew up constructs and leave behind dynamic ever changing ecosystems. I’m not seeking immortality for any THING. Not for Homo Sapiens, or DNA or any of our constructs, but to simply make sure that change, touch and interrelation continues. To that end I support abolishing rigid industries and hierarchies, and also increasingly fostering technologies of free association. But also this means not leaving rocks unchewn. “Life” from the beginning has progressively acted to chew up and dissolve the material structures around us. Being “alive” I can’t help but want to continue that. To spread “life” everywhere.
Part of that means not wanting to keep persisting my own rigidities and structures past their usefulness to that effect.
You, however, want to embrace actual death in order to keep certain structures (some current negative feedback loops in our biosphere, traditions of interaction with nature and each other) “alive.” Yes, you throw in the caveat that you don’t care if they last literally forever. But you still value their persistence over fluid change. Rather than see our society zip off some singularity of mass society (regardless of possibility or sustainability on this point you’ve repeatedly stated your gut dislike for ANY singularity workable or not) you want to force us to stick to certain structures as an end unto itself. Participation in the “living earth” according to set traditions as most important. Etc. In rejecting fluidity so starkly you’re pursuing immortality for a set of things at the cost of life. (6.5 Billion of them to be precise.) You are the villain.
Yuck. You see humanity as a set of structures ideally filling a role like a cog in the greater system. I see the fire of creativity behind our eyes as an ends unto itself.
And you would impose primitive “human-ness” upon us, forbidding us from expressing ourselves any other way.
Comment by William — 2 July 2007 @ 11:10 PM
William, I’m afraid your responses seem to be losing touch with reality. Take this for example:
This is in the present tense, but in the present, we’re farming 40% of the earth’s surface, and despoiling the rest to increase yields via the “Green Revolution. Cities and states abound.
That’s patently false; there’s really no two ways about it. There is no city that’s ever been formed without hierarchy and control. You can talk about desires all you like, but without the material resources to express those desires, they’re meaningless. Of course, there were the large, regional fairs of hunter-gatherers that fulfilled the needs you’re talking about, and then dispersed before any permanent damage was done, but those are not cities. Cities only could form with agriculture, regardless of anyone’s desires.
This is an urban fantasy espoused by someone who’s lived in cities his whole life. The art, science and “other informational foods” (whatever that jaggerwocky means) produced by cities are no greater than those produced outside of them. Civilized art, knowledge and medicine has not yet exceeded that of our pre-civilized ancestors. This is a common delusion peddled by urban elites in order to legitimize the pattern of exploitation. It’s the heart of the classic urban-rural dichotomy. City-dwellers end up seeing non-city-dwellers as “hicks,” “rednecks” and “hillbillies” lacking in artistic or scientific achievement as part of the constant propaganda that cities are worthwhile for the art and science they produce. For their part, non-city-dwellers quickly pick up on the fact that they can produce art and knowledge on par with anything from the cities, and far more immediate in its usefulness, and thus develop a disdain for city-dwellers thanks to their dismissive attitudes.
Historically, people have moved into cities when other alternatives were removed, and not before. You might as well talk of all the advantages that convinced the Indians to move to the reservations.
Yes, they do. Reading your detailed response, it became evident that you don’t know what “Dunbar’s Number” is. It is precisely our neurological capacity for human relationship. Here is a pre-publication version of the original paper; I heavily recommend, for your own sake, that you familiarize yourself with the concept before bringing it up again.
But, because mass society fundamentally exceeds our neurological capacity for relationship, we need “shortcuts,” such as stereotypes (rather than relate to every Italian, you can simply relate to “the Dago”), and more importantly, hierarchy. Hierarchy is simply the result of removing the social context from daily interaction. In primitive societies, every encounter is fundamentally couched in a social exchange. The point of the market economy is to make exchanges impersonal; the point of law is to make the adjudication of norms impersonal; the point of hierarchy is to simplify society into “inferiors” and “superiors.” Without hierarchy, mass society is not possible with a human brain. Ergo, mass society requires hierarchy as long as we remain human. If we reach a point where we have brains the size of skyscrapers, this might change, but I don’t think evolutionary developments on that scale are really germane to this discussion, do you?
Those information technologies are still rooted in a fundamentally hierarchical basis. You’re fiddling while Rome burns. You can’t feed 6.5 billion people without industrial agriculture, and you can’t keep industrial agriculture sustainably. Even if you managed to feed everyone on fairy dust and happy thoughts, you have to face the inescapable fact that humans cannot relate to so many people. Even if you can pull up all their bio-data instantaneously from the intertubes, you’re not relating to a person any more than my insurance company is relating to me when they pull up my records. There’s no social context, so you’ll still need a market economy to keep us from having to relate to one another; you’ll still need laws since we can’t consider each case individually; you’ll still need stereotypes and hierarchy for those times when we are forced into a situation of relating someone, we’ll have a handy pigeon-hole to put them in.
Thus, mass society is fundamentally dehumanizing.
Absolutely; art flourished for 40,000 years before the first civilization ever appeared. But what does art have to do with civilization? Art is four times older than civilization, and to this day, uncivilized tribes make art easily as good as civilization. Art as good as anything any civilized painter ever created were already gracing the walls of Lasceaux, millennia before the first civilization. You said there were parts of civilization that could function independently. Pointing to something that has nothing to do with civilization hardly proves your point. I might as well prove that oil extraction is sustainable because seeds sprout.
It’s quickened a pace that was already quickening, but I see no fundamental changes. The Zapatistas have many older parallels.
For example?
I’m not suggesting anything nearly so static as the “cog” or “role-filling” you keep getting hung up on. Humans need a relationship with the living world. Part of a relationship is the fact that relationships constantly change and evolve, and sometimes they break down. Our relationships have broken down, and we’re suffering because of that, and because of our suffering, we’re inflicting great suffering on the rest of the living world as well. That will not last. If humanity has a future, it must first lie in rekindling the relationships that broke down and entering the community of life again, being part of that community like any other. Our current way of doing things won’t last, and if all humanity dies in the process, then the world won’t shed any tears. Primitivism didn’t create this situation, civilization did. Primitivism merely recognizes this fact, and points out that if we do not reconcile our communities to the living landscape and renew the relationships of family and land, we will die.
I think much the same of most mainstream anarchist theory, actually.
Ironically enough, that paragraph is so abstract I’m not entirely sure what you were trying to say.
I’m sure. Coming from a culture with such sick and perverse traditions, that reaction is understandable. But an exploration of healthy, working societies reveals that it isn’t our traditions that have enslaved us, but our lack of them.
This is fundamentally human nature. We’re ethnocentric creatures. We always will believe the way we do things is the best way. Under most circumstances, an evolutionarily-adapted culture remains plastic enough to change, and this impulse just keeps people from wandering off and dying alone. Of course, when your culture goes insane, it becomes the “Mother Culture” Daniel Quinn wrote about that enslaves us, and I’m sure that’s your experience as it is mine. But it’s not a “problem.” It can be an asset—as part of a healthy culture. But if you decide that it’s a “problem,” then you doom yourself to failure, because that means humans are a “problem.” That’s how people end up opining silly things like, “If men were angels….”
And if we go to the opposite extreme, where there is no structure at all, then we lose all context and freedom becomes meaningless. These are not “good” or “bad,” but elements that must be balanced. In a structure-obsessed culture it can be all too easy to think that structure must be fundamentally bad, but that’s reactionary thinking that makes you as wrong as your oppressors.
You’re lying to yourself, then. Or haven’t learned any other languages. It’s quite well-established that languages does go very deep into the brain and shapes how we think. Even the most ardent skeptics are at least willing to grudgingly accept a weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Not at all; all those complexities share very important things in common. But I’ve elaborated this at length before, so a link will have to suffice: “Agriculture or Permaculture: Why Words Matter.”
Fluidity is not the “core force” of life. Life is also structured. I’m sure you’ve encountered ideas about life as an attempt to counter entropy—which would be the extreme of fluidity, since no structure can be maintained. Life is very fluid, but life is also structured. It balances the two organically. Perfect fluidity would be as anti-life as perfect structure. Neither one allows for life.
You learn that a massive storm is heading for where you live, and you know that the levees will break. You try to warn as many as you can to get out, and they scoff at you. You begin building lifeboats, hoping to help as many as you can, and you ask others to help you.
“Will we be able to save everyone?” someone asks you.
You answer honestly, “Probably not, but we’ll do the best we can, and the more people help, the better we’ll be able to do.”
The other recoils in horror. “You macabre ghoul! How can you embrace the death of so many? I will have nothing to do with you, sir! Instead, I will go have a lollipop.”
My “embrace of death” is simple realism. Most people will never be persuaded to give up their way of life. They’d rather die than change. I do what I can, but ultimately, it probably won’t be enough. What’s coming is not of my making, and none of us have the capacity to stop it. All we can do is our best. That’s what I’m doing. I’m not embracing death to preserve structure. Death is coming. I’m looking for the best way to save as much as I can.
Yes, I want to remain human. I don’t want to lose my humanity. I don’t want to become the aliens from Independence Day. I don’t think that would be a good thing. I don’t want to become the harbinger of death to the universe. This is all true.
Relationships change. That’s why you trace a genealogy, and don’t live exactly like your great-grandfather. Tradition is your umbilical cord to the past, your inheritance. It doesn’t mean you don’t change. It’s an organic balance of structure and fluidity, like life itself. It adapts as the world changes around you.
That’s human-ness, though.
I’m flattered that you think I have that kind of power, but I’m not in a position to forbid anyone from anything. That’s what natural selection is going to do, not me. Just because I recognize it and adapt to it doesn’t mean it’s me.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 July 2007 @ 4:24 PM
I think you’ve skipped past most everything I’ve argued. Take this for example:
How does that contradict in anyway anything about the paragraph you were quoting?
In much the same way as there’s never been any society anywhere, ever without hierarchy and control. So what? There have been plenty of large scale social concentrations that have done pretty well without power structures.
…And now you trend towards *defining* cities as the bad types of heavy social concentration, thus they’re bad. As large primitive regional gatherings, remember that I’ve been arguing for such fluidity. I don’t want individual cities to persist simply to persist (a sign post of going bad). But what we’ve been debating is Mass Societies.
That’s simply not true. You’re blatantly ignoring the subjective theory of value in your treatment of city creation. People are memetic structures just as much as biological structures, and they require memetic nutrition just as much as actual proteins. Large social concentrations create and provide informational constructs on a faster and richer level then diffuse societies. That’s just basic fucking mathematics.
That the majority of historical cases involving the movement of people into cities has involved coercion has NO BEARING WHATSOEVER on the fact that people can form mass societies without initiating coercion.
What the crap? When did I ever assert the opposite?
What I specifically asserted, if you bothered to read it, was that THE RELATIONSHIPS (as measurable or containable by the realities being studied) ARE A BAD THING.
Here, I’ll quote Dunbar:
STABLE. Remember that word. The limitation is on structural rigidities in social matters that we can carry in our heads. But the stability of such structural rigidities IS A BAD THING. If you read my detailed breakdown of your theoretical structures I expand on this at length.
Um. I got it the first time around. Go read the response again. We only need those shortcuts if we’re trying to frame them within a structure. The point is to not depend on relationship structures which will inevitably be poorly composed abstractions but to instead depend on the act of empathy (which is not subject to scaling restraints).
Prove this. I would love to hear how a distributed mesh WiFi network is inherently hierarchical. I would also love to hear how bicycles and gliders (transport tech) are inherently hierarchical.
Cuz they’re not.
That’s just utterly not true. There’s so much here to be covered it’s like you’ve never read any Market Anarchist, transhumanist or even that much Red Anarchist material.
Social context = information, no matter how you cut it. So when I run into you at a campfire I simultaneously to our conversation pull up a window and skim stuff you’ve written on Anthropik and what friends have said about you publically. That’s not an instantaneous relationship but it facilitates making one deeper a whole lot faster and consequently it allows us to dissolve them faster.
Market economies are about the maximization of free association. And that means closer relation.
Laws, stereotypes and hierarchies only emerge in the absense of contact. Like say peoples or tribes in low tech who don’t see each other very often but are suddenly forced into close proximity.
Art is tied to the concentration of society. More society = more nuanced and complicated art. I would never deny that art doesn’t exist outside of mass societies. Simply that art gets richer as the artist has more contact with the world and with other people. (That’s sometimes not a direct relation to civilization because our civ often popularly obscures contact with the world, but because of its tech it can and sometimes does open far greater and deeper contact with the world. Thus richer art.)
At least primitivism at it’s very best. With plenty of public relations specialists at hand. And both mainstream Anarchism and a good portion of transhumanism (as well as most of the world these days) agree that we need to reconcile and integrate our societies with the ecosystems around us. What makes primitivism stand out is the rabidness by which it turns to such rigid structures of family and land. (Rigid, at least, for all their talk of rewilding.)
As do most anarchists.
Rather, coming from a sick and perverse culture of traditions, I can see why you have a similar response to the thought of mass society and singularitarian thought.
Don’t have to be.
Not as deeply as you’re suggesting. Again, consider mathematics and the ways we move our minds outside the structures of language.
Well I know a few linguists unwilling to go that far. But, yeah, obviously spending time locked in language frameworks can bias us and seep rigidities into our mind, but my assertion is that though it can be influenced by language structures thought itself is not based in language structures. Which breaks a lot of your arguments regarding complexity and diminishing returns.
That’s actually a really wrong and annoying definition of entropy. Even if it is commonly spread even by physicists when we get lazy. “Structure” per se doesn’t dissolve ultimately so much as matter and energy do.
Entropy can make a system more fluid or more rigid. Chemical entropy can create elaborate latices for example. (But if Free Will exists in opposition to entropy then fluidity is it’s only possible avenue of beating entropy.)
That sentence is meaningless hogwash.
I object not that you’re spreading and working on useful information, but rather how often you express yourself as voraciously pitted against steps to minimize the physical damage done.
Yes the population needs to be radically decreased. Yes we need to go to permaculture rather than agriculture. But part of decreasing the damage will come from utilizing our industrial industries even as we dissolve them. Your blunt rejection of civilization’s structures will further the catastrophic damage.
Don’t put it past humanity to NOT be a product of our food supply. We don’t have to buggering one another and then suddenly die off. We can slow down, make positive progressive choices. We can stop having children for one.
Roving tribes occasionally harvesting asteroids = locust civilization decending down ridiculously expensive gravity wells. Yup. Definitely.
If we are creativity then we cannot be a balance of creativity and death, cute as that always sounds. If we are fluidity then we cannot be some halfway point between fluidity and rigidity.
Exporting your immoral actions unto some inevitable machine is pretty much the hallmark of Primitivism (and a bunch of dirty awful parallel strands of thought like some social darwinists). If civilization is falling, grapple with it, get your hands dirty. Help prevent falling debris from smashing billions.
No. They wouldn’t. A select few people do not equate humanity.
Comment by William — 3 July 2007 @ 6:22 PM
Blatantly untrue. Most societies have operated without hierarchy or control. Such societies can only be found in the most recent 0.16% of human history, all of which featured societies, and even for most of that time, they were the minorities, usually in population, and even today by number of societies.
I don’t know of a single one.
You’re the one trying to shoe-horn “city” to mean any kind of social concentration, not me. My definition of “city” remains the same—the same definition used by anthropologists, archaeologists, and pretty much everyone else in the world: a permanent settlement of sufficient density to require the import of resources. This is a fairly basic, non-controversial definition. If you have to redefine words to make your point, doesn’t that suggest that your point is an illusion of semantics?
Well then you’re not talking about cities. A concentration of people that doesn’t even last a full year is not a city. Prerequisite to the city, or even the village, is sendentism.
It’s not basic mathematics, because you’re glossing over lots of untrue assumptions, largely the result of your false analogy comparing food to art. A song is not diminished by sharing, the way a pizza is. It is enriched by transmission, rather than degraded. That’s how you end up with the teeming cities of Europe taking 14 centuries to catch up to the polyphonic complexity of Pygmy songs, and why modern painters still struggle to fully replicate the artistic genius on display in the caverns of Lasceaux. That’s why cities have never lived up to their promise of providing greater knowledge, art, medicine, or any other useful thing, and why civilization can’t even claim to have advanced these over so-called “primitive societies.”
That’s just inane. A stable relationship simply means ongoing, not unchanging. My relationship with my wife is stable, not because things never change—they constantly change—but because our relationship is maintained.
When you get to the point where you’re telling us that stable relationships are bad, doesn’t that raise a big red flag that you’ve gotten yourself into the realm of simple, complete insanity?
Or an ongoing relationship. If I’m not going to remember who you are, or any previous interaction we’ve had, then yes, we can get around Dunbar’s Number. But I should tell you, they made that movie, and it was awful.
In your terms, it is empathy that is restrained. A stable relationship is a prerequisite for true empathy. You need to know enough about a person to actually empathize with him, and that’s what the rest of us mean by “stable relationship.” Now, falling back on role-filling is actually one of the means Dunbar discusses of getting around this. You don’t need to know anything about Garbage Man, because he’s just Garbage Man. As I said, you obviously don’t actually understand what Dunbar’s Number is all about, and it’s getting a little embarrassing. You really should familiarize yourself with the concept before commenting further.
I’d hate to think that you actually have read it, because that would mean that you’re systemically misunderstanding it as you try to force it through your own perspective of structure vs. fluidity, and that would certainly suggest a very, well, structured outlook.
I didn’t say that the technologies themselves are inherently hierarchical. I said that they are still rooted in a fundamentally hierarchical basis. I’m talking about things as they are. How they might be, I don’t know; neither do you. But as they exist, they are rooted in a fundamentally hierarchical basis. Maybe they can be reinvented such that they could be freed from that basis. Then again, maybe they can’t.
That’s not true at all. Social context is always emotionally-colored information. What happened is rarely as important as the feelings around it. Human memory is deeply rooted in our emotions. Having a complete print-out of our interactions is not a social context. Social context is not just information; it is an ongoing, stable relationship. The view that a social context is nothing more than information likewise reduces making love to an exchange of fluids.
Perhaps—unless you mistake that information for a social context, and start thinking you know me just because you’ve read a lot about me. Those two are nothing alike. It’s not a relationship, it’s just data. Without the emotional memory of our ongoing, stable relationship, you have no basis for empathy but your own experience, since you’ve never had any real relationship in which to observe the emotions of others. Your empathy sickens and dies, though you continue believing that it hasn’t. It’s just that all you ever see around you are projections of your own self, because you’re the only person you ever got to know. You think you have relationships with all kinds of people, but you’re really completely isolated, subject to a kind of emotional inbreeding where the only emotional experience you’ll ever observe is your own.
Market economies are about removing social context from exchange, by replacing relationship with role-filling. You don’t deal with your friend at the bookstore, you deal with Cashier. It’s the only way such a mass society could operate; we don’t have the capacity to have a relationship with every person we need to interact with economically. So the market economy dispenses with the social context, and gives us roles instead.
And yet such people don’t have laws, stereotypes or hierarchies in their day-to-day lives. It’s those high-contact, mass societies that have those things. The facts give the lie to your theory, because contact is not the same as a relationship. It’s some measure of stability that makes a relationship out of a particular contact, an ongoing series of contacts that allows for more than just information, but emotionally-charged memory, the observation of another person’s emotional reactions, and thus, the enrichment of your own empathy by the example of someone else’s experience.
Except that that isn’t even remotely true. Civilization has no monopoly on art. Pleistocene cave paintings and Pygmy songs stand up to anything our civilization has produced in nuance and complexity, yet they were produced by hunter-gatherer bands.
Except it doesn’t. Our civilization’s art still struggles to attain the richness painted on the walls of Pleistocene caves. They weren’t just incredible paintings; they made use of the textures of the living rock, its shape and even its texture. And I have yet to hear any civilized cosmology as nuanced or rich as the Australian Dreaming.
It’s a theory I’ve heard often enough before, but it’s simply not true. You’ll need to somehow amend your theory to compensate for the fact that cities have not produced cultural, artistic or intellectual goods to offset their physical consumption. At best, I’ll cede that their intellectual goods are no worse than those produced by hunter-gatherers (though I, personally, think they definitely are, but I’ll concede that such a thing may be subjective).
We really do. Ethnocentrism is written into our DNA. To cease being ethnocentric would be to cease being human, to lose our sense of community. It’s the flipside; you can’t have a strong sense of community without a bit of ethnocentrism. Eliminate our need for community, and you’ve created a very different animal, even if it still coincidentally looks human.
Does that mean human nature is “flawed”? No–it means the life you’re trying to stick humans into doesn’t fit humans. Humans are just fine; if you find yourself needing to change what it means to be human, that means it’s your plan that has a problem.
Even if thought is possible without language, that has no bearing on complexity’s susceptibility to diminishing marginal returns. You develop the easiest forms of complexity first, and further complexity builds on earlier complexity. That alone implies diminishing marginal returns. Show me a society that built an Apollo rocket before it developed rocket fuel, and you’ll have a case.
On the contrary, it’s your zealotry for “structure” that’s hogwash. Look at how often the Fibonacci sequence occurs in nature. That’s a structure. Cell walls are structure. The tissues in your lungs are a structure. What I’m implying is that you could very well define “organic” as the dynamic balance of fluidity and structure. Too much structure and you ossify; but by the same token, too much fluidity and you’re just a pile of goo, and soon, not even that.
(Like in Eva….)
I couldn’t disagree more. The longer we cling to our industrial technology out of such misguided “hope,” the greater the catastrophe becomes. 200 species a day are going extinct, and the longer we cling to industrial technology, the more days that goes on. The population continues increasing; the longer this goes on, the greater cost of human life will be involved. Every day that industrial civilization continues is an atrocity, and every day that it endures makes its inevitable end that much more catastrophic.
Why? That’s what we’ve always been, and so long as people behave differently from one another, that’s the way they always will. What other basic biological laws should I not put past humanity? This is simple, unfounded exceptionalism. Don’t you think it’s a little late in the game to pin our hopes on the possibility that we’ll suddenly live up to our delusions of grandeur, and actually begin ignoring all the basic biological laws we kept telling ourselves don’t apply to us? I think that’s very much at the root of our problem. We think of ourselves as gods. We need a reality check. We need to remember that we’re animals, and all that goes with that.
That’s right. That’s why we’re not just creativity and fluidity. Such perfected extremes cannot exist.
That’s pretty much impossible. You couldn’t have saved the reindeer of St. Matthew’s Island, and you can’t stop an algae bloom from dying off. What we’re doing is pretty much everything that can be done. If collapse is going to be mitigated, it’s going to be through the efforts people like us are undertaking now.
By the same token, have you ever taken stock of the atrocity of today? 200 species are wiped out every single day. Most of the world has already collapsed, but they’re propped up to eternal war and suffering through neocolonialism, the IMF and the World Bank. Collapse will kill billions of human beings, but billions have already died, and unlike the atrocity that is a single day on earth while civilization remains, collapse ends.
I’m not talking about a few select people, I’m talking about most human beings. The Norse in Greenland starved to death before they would try fishing like their Inuit neighbors, or even their Icelandic kin. It was part of their culture. It probably never even came up as a possibility, because they had all chosen, on a level so deep that it never needs to be discussed at all, that dying was preferable to giving up their culture, their view of who they were. Most of us are like that. That’s why people starve to death. It’s almost impossible to find a place on earth where food is legitimately that scarce. Starvation is almost always a cultural thing.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 July 2007 @ 5:04 PM
Can you explain to me how we can move from apes, with definite hierarchical structures, through a middle ground of non-hierarchical “freedom” thence back to hierarchical social structures?
I would think that we have always had dominant members of any social grouping, and dominant members imply subordinate members, which therefore implies a hierarchy. It may not be the blatant control and explicitly denoted hierarchies of modern society, but it was still there all the same.
Comment by Geoff — 10 July 2007 @ 7:25 PM
Goodall’s Bananas
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 10 July 2007 @ 9:34 PM
Sure: by projecting our hierarchy onto primates thanks to a systemic culture bias that blinds us to the ramifications of sloppy research methods.
How then do you explain the observed phenomenon of egalitarian band and tribe societies, as well as the complete lack of archaeological evidence for hierarchy, which suddenly becomes apparent whenever and wherever there are resources to be controlled—a situation that pops up in the rare geological fluke in the Pleistocene, and suddenly becomes systemic with the Neolithic? How do you account for that sudden transformation, with no evidence, and then, overnight, abundant evidence everywhere you look? I could see an argument from ignorance, if it weren’t for the fact that the evidence becomes so plainly abundant immediately and cross-culturally after the introduction of agriculture.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 July 2007 @ 9:44 PM
Never mind that the bloody fucking facts don’t support this primitivist wet dream at all, and never have, better men than me have cataloged the systematic denial of reality and jump from one disproven claim to another in primitivism. I won’t bother pointing out the many ways that psychological control exists unspoken in almost every group and society ever in history, just go to any activist meeting or hang out with indigenous folks. This assertion contradicts another one you give later wherein you claim that
When the creation of insides and outsides is fundamentally hierarchical.
You’re getting utterly preposterous. Maintaining a complete memory of “who they are” and “any previous interaction had with” all 6.5 billion people on the planet in your head is impossible. So export it. Don’t maintain those structures and keep them stable. Dissolve them.
Simply not true.
Kid on the side of the road has a skinned knee.
That’s the most ridiculously flippant non-argument I’ve seen this week.
Emotion is ultimately a matter of information just as everything else, or have you completely lost it?
Whereas a certain emotional complexity is lost today in say reading people’s blogs as opposed to having a beer with them, it’s just a matter of bandwidth.
The construction of the “cashier” role within our familiar structured market is most decidedly a result of non-free-market realities.
Rich, complex social structure is traded in today’s world for shallow, simple social structure. But the roles themselves are restrictions on the market and market efficiency. Consider one of those “Really, Really Free Markets” run by the gift economy folks. Random strangers merge and meet freely, folks check out items and other folks discuss stuff with them. No roles whatsoever.
Then you must be blind, sir. Subtle power structures and shared psychoses are rife in day-to-day interactions, regardless of culture.
The facts are utterly aligned against you. High-contact segments of our Mass Society function without such things, while the rest that turns instead to empty stimuli (like television) and finds ways to cut off contact languish in the worst of them. You can’t beat the basic praxeological argument I’ve presented earlier.
Uh, no.
(Social complexities are a result of non-linear contact, small societies are fundamentally incapable of the non-linearity possible in mass societies. I do not disagree that beauty can be found and complimented in nature, but social art is tied to social contact.)
On the whole? It’s certainly debatable. Cities have historically been dominated by forces that try to stop contact. But where large amounts of social inter-contact has occurred, art has flourished. Which is the reason free people voluntarily move to cities even when they’re not forced by hardstuffs economic realities. It’s the reason free people form cities in the first place.
Even were that true. Fuck our DNA. I mean seriously, who cares about that level of informational interplay. It’s not core or even relevant to our existence. Fucking worship of Biology.
Blatantly untrue. Togetherness does not necessitate the creation of communal self opposed by otherness. But yet again, I can see why our society would skew you towards such insanity.
I guess evolution has its naysayers.
Complexity is not something “built upon.” A hurricane is complex. See language again. You’ve this weird preoccupation with houses of cards; layers built on other layers. “Complexity” is no such thing, nor has it ever been. You’re thinking of rigid extension in dynamic environments. Which, I agree, is subject to diminishing returns.
What you’re doing is creating a spectrum between rigidity and desolation (which you’re equating with fluidity) and setting biology at the center. To the contrary our biology is set closer towards the third point of fluidity.
What differentiates the goo from the “not even that” is the strong degree of relative motion. Neither desolate or rigid systems demonstrate a strong degree of internal relative motion.
I would very much like a society to be closer in form to a puddle of goo than a structured organism with cell walls and the like. States are precisely such structured organisms.
This is idealism at its worst. When it starts to limit tactics. You broadly and bluntly reject a vast array of strategy and action refusing to acknowledge inner complexities in the structures you are attacking. Surely there are different possible ways the system could collapse back to fluidity. Surely there are internal details that can save millions of lives. Yet you cannot and will not even approach the internal workings of our industrial civ.
Since when is something as abstract as the way we relate to food supplies a matter of biological law? You speak as though a God, laying down these absolute judgments on complex matters.
Your argument goes like this: History has been filled with this awful thing that impedes human agency ….so we should write off the possibility of humans asserting their agency over the awful thing. And what’s more aggressively deny agency.
So fucking work to fight it. Proactivity is possible.
In other words humanity is all meme-zombies and we should respect their choice. Fuck that.
Though it’s bad, it aint all that deep. People aren’t fucking robots, a part of every human being on the planet despises the machinery around their hearts.
Comment by William — 11 July 2007 @ 5:31 AM
To clarify,
I’ve no immediate problem with the maintenance of 150-ish stable-ish plastic relationships.
Por ejemplo: As long as you’ve got the space, fuck if I care if you keep copies of some websites permanently archived on your harddrive, but such local memory restrictions shouldn’t stop you from functionally interacting with the rest of the fucking net as necessary.
Comment by William — 11 July 2007 @ 5:40 AM
For example?
Comment by jhereg — 11 July 2007 @ 6:20 AM
Tactics to drastically decrease the birthrate, sustain those who are alive, and generally minimize the violence and suffering of a spontaneous collapse generated by outside conditions.
That’s an important distinction because I’ve no problem, and in fact encourage a “collapse” so to speak generated and enacted by humanity itself. We need to drastically and dynamically change the industrial/agricultural systems of our global culture but more importantly we need to change the way we think and associate with one another, otherwise that same shit is going to create some very nasty and lengthy (I’d argue permanent) horrors afterwards.
Agriculture as we know it (a very limited form) is nasty business, but it actually won’t be the end of the world if we spend five centuries converting from farms to some final mix of “urban”/”rural” horticulture permaculture.
But of course wrestling with what currently exists is outlawed by Godesky’s frame of mind. Because those things are inherently evil and any use of them will lead to evil. We need to completely wipe our hands of it in elite little Randian survivalism.
I favor a Malatesta/Market Anarchist-ish approach towards more and more social and technological fluidity. But even if Godesky wants to cling to his ridiculous hodgepodge denial of Mass Society and the liberatory potential (and actuality) of technological development, he could still be talking of ways to ease the transition, of choices we could make as a society, actions that can be taken to strike at certain parts of the machine or momentarily build up other parts to make the transition smooth. But writing off the workings of large scale society as beyond influence is just atrocious. Community gardens in urban areas, more sustainable vectors of improving our current agricultural system, spread of contraceptives and knowledge thereof, recognition of movements and struggles to help unify and strengthen communities to deal with things ahead.
Of course personally though I too want to tear up the concrete, switch to horticulture and get rid of most industrial behemoths, I’m also egging on those ingenuous cads taking the next step and wiping out any possibility of peak metal by looking out to the black. So that we can keep “cities” of a form and communications and transportation tech.
Comment by William — 11 July 2007 @ 7:49 AM
I hope that you agree that in order to do this, we would need to understand what’s driving gobal birthrates…?
Are you aware of the strong evidence that food production in the form of agriculture is driving global population growth?
I would love to do this, but I haven’t found very many methods that have even the slimmest chance. Of those that do (various forms of horticulture), I don’t see any clear way to effectively overcome the numerous economic and political obstacles.
I’m not sure I follow what you mean by “Agriculture as we know it (a very limited form)”. Could you elaborate?
As for five centuries, how do you see global human populations declining over the course of five centuries and what implications do you envision this having on food production (agriculture and horticulture), species extinction rates, habitat destruction, and hierarchical human societies?
Okay, I’m translating this as the rough equivalent of “grass roots” or “lead by example”. If this is grossly off base, please clarify.
I don’t want to be accused of being disingenous by not commenting on this, so let me take this opportunity to say that I rather strongly agree with Jason on this point.
But, since that comment isn’t really important to the thrust of your sentiment here, let’s move along….
Hmm, well, I suppose it may be atrocious, but I don’t really think so. It kind of depends on what you mean, I guess. But, in the end, I think atrocious or not, it’s justifiable. Perhaps it’s from lack of vision or lack of imagination or some other lack, but I’m having difficulty grasping how such a thing is possible.
These are all good things, but, how do you see them linking together? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be stupid, but you’re regularly implying some overarching structure or context that I’m not well versed in.
Comment by jhereg — 11 July 2007 @ 8:26 AM
Food production has a role, but it’s not the only one or even the central one. Cultural and social aspects are more important on this issue. People with a surplus of possible food don’t have to try to reproduce to fully utilize that surplus. There are many factors here.
But they are just obstacles. And just because you may not have a clear or easy road towards something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to blaze one.
Of course. There’s ultimately no clear line between Agriculture and Horticulture. Agriculture as we currently know it involves particularly blunt and damaging cookie-cutter approaches to the mass generation of food. But there are plenty of farms that are diversifying and taking a deeper look at the way they interrelate with the ecosystem around them. We can continue to mass-produce food just with agriculture in a more and more horticulture-ish form.
Like many things here that’s books and books and books to cover. Grassroots and “lead by example” are two very different vectors. Maletesta saw conventional anarchist struggles as important, but he saw activism as a slower long-term struggle to change the conditions and change people’s mental ways of dealing with the world rather than shooting for some immediate gratification.
Market Anarchism shows ways that individual participation in society can increase that society’s fluidity. Black or grey markets for instance allow us to divest from the overarching structures in a viral way.
It’s about active, fluid engagement with the world around you rather than blunt rejection or formulaic action.
I keep assuming everyone present has a deep grounding in anarchism and all the myriad strains. There’s a lot there, and more than a dozen ways have already been written to solve a given problem.
I really have no fundamental response to this other than furrowing my eyebrows. I just don’t know how to cover this. I think it’s the core of the difference between survivalism and anarchism. (A split that is continued within primitivism itself these days.) Our corrupt society denies that we have any real agency in the world. The survivalists accept this but then try to build justifications for why society will change to their benefit. Anarchists refuse to accept this. We try to maximize human agency by fighting society. It’s not a clear-cut formulaic battle. There is no single Marx-like shining path from which we can see an end point. But it’s about engagement at all costs.
I have lots to say as to strategy and useful tactics and vectors of engagement, but that’ll have to be a separate article. But then I also think the possibility of “victory” should be completely irrelevant to moral issues. We should do the best we can. And if we’re having trouble imagining ways to improve the world, we should work on our imagination.
I guess I would have to know what you’re searching for by “link together.”
Comment by William — 11 July 2007 @ 5:06 PM
Sure: by projecting our hierarchy onto primates thanks to a systemic culture bias that blinds us to the ramifications of sloppy research methods.
That’s a pretty tenuous link and conclusion. The behaviours must be innate in order to be evidenced in times of stress. Creatures under stress don’t suddenly change a lifetime (or species-lifetime) of habits, on the contrary they will revert to more primitive forms of action/response. Witness the human fight/flight response. We don’t suddenly evince more “evolved” (meaning more complex rather than a qualitative analysis) behaviours, we actually generally resort to more primitive behaviours.
Another problem with this line of argument is that you’re succumbing to the argument that humans are better than animals (even if you believe the opposite personally, you’re still buying the generally philosophy). Because Humans have a social structure, we must be projecting it onto animals, because they could never be special/complex enough to have such things. Rubbish IMO.
Add to this the mating habits of these creatures. Only the dominant male generally gets a go, all the others have to fight for a chance to propagate. If that isn’t evidence enough of a hierarchy? Egalitarianism is great when there are enough resources to go around, it’s probably the best way to flourish, but if these creatures get a bit precious about their procreational rights then there is still an underlying hierarchical relationship there. There might be enough food, but there is never enough procreation to go around, and even if there was the members of most species wouldn’t be sharing it anyway.
If you look into it you’ll find every herd/pack (social) species has some form of hierarchy, wolves, birds, goats, bovine and horses to name a few. Even the chooks in my yard have a “pecking order”. I find it extremely unlikely that this has just come about because they’re domestic. On the contrary, domesticated animals will generally look at the humans as a part of their own social hierarchy, rather than the opposite idea of the animal taking on the human’s particular social order. To think that an animal can readily overcome millenia of programmed lifestyle habits just because a human comes on the scene seems a little egocentric on the part of the observing human. All creatures react to their surroundings from the context of their own understanding of the world.
The observed phenomena could well be a result of the observer projecting their own desires and prejudices onto the observed creatures? It would be quite easy to overlook subtle hierarchical structures if you don’t want to see them. Regardless, as I said above, egalitarianism works well enough when conditions are right, but when they aren’t…
A lack of archaeological evidence says very little. Is there any archaeological evidence of the fact that wolves have hierarchies, or wild mountain goats, or chooks? If a species produces nothing of permanence that would last beyond their own lifespan then of course there will be little evidence of anything they got up to. Drawing any conclusions is therefore suspect, but most especially drawing conclusions that fly in the face of the habits of nearly every other creature on Earth.
Comment by Geoff — 11 July 2007 @ 8:22 PM
Think about what you’re claiming there, Geoff. That’d mean that a prison gang would be a great example of “natural” human behavior. In captivity, most animals turn psychotic. Does that make psychosis the normal state of an animal? No, it means that under duress, animals start doing strange things. Now obviously humans have the capacity for hierarchy. That’s not the question. The question is, is this a normal human behavior, or is this something on par with chewing your own hand off because you’ve gone completely bonkers as a domesticated animal?
Not necessarily. Very often they go crazy and start doing things that are completely insane. Zoo keepers often have to keep the animals from hurting themselves, for instance.
As any psychologist will tell you, there’s a world of difference between a response to a momentary stress, versus an adaptation to a continuing problem.
How so? I didn’t say humans are better because we’re egalitarian; rather, I’m saying that humans are egalitarian. The “goodness” of egalitarianism thus derives from being better for humans, not because egalitarianism is better than hierarchy. So, subjecting humans to hierarchy is wrong, just as breaking down bees’ hierarchy and making them live in an egalitarian fashion would be wrong. Moreover, humans are not the only egalitarian animals; off the top of my head, there’s also wolves and chimpanzees.
That would be rubbish. Good thing I never said that. I said we’re projecting our social systems onto animals, not because they don’t have social systems of their own (they do!), but because we’re failing to recognize those systems in their own terms. By the same token, early anthropologists did the exact same thing to tribal peoples. That’s why we’re still burdened with notions like Seneca “chiefs” or animist “spirits.”
If that were true, it would be, but this is another example of our projections. Take a look at an actual wolf pack. Not in captivity, where they’re easier to study, but out in the wild. As famed wolf research Dr. David Mech wrote:
So, by the same token, you’re generally not allowed to fuck your mom. If that isn’t evidence enough of a hierarchy? The “non-dominant” members of a wolf pack are also called “children,” and they don’t spend their whole lives being “non-dominant.” They move out, form their own packs with their own mates, and become the “dominant” wolf of their own pack, or if we want to stop the blatant projection of power dynamics for one moment, they father their own families.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t genuinely hierarchical animals—there no doubt are. I’m not saying that hierarchy doesn’t exist in the animal kingdom. But some species have evolved egalitarianism as a strategy for survival, and those species have typically done very well for themselves. For such species, egalitarianism is a defining trait. Homo sapiens is one such species.
In the human experience, it’s hierarchy that requires more resources to go around. When times are tight, you can’t afford the luxury of squabbling about leadership and command structures. That’s when egalitarian models come to the fore most of all—because humans are egalitarian creatures, and when everything else is stripped away, that’s what we turn to first and naturally. That’s why we consider egalitarianism an ideal, because evolution has designed us to expect it.
They certainly have had hierarchies projected onto them. It’s good that you picked wolves, specifically; the link above goes to an article I wrote some time ago about how the latest wolf research shows that we’ve been projecting our notions of hierarchy onto them based solely on captive behavior….
Now, as I said, there is no doubt hierarchy in the animal kingdom—but there’s also no doubt that it’s nowhere near as widespread or common as we’ve described it. We’ve mostly observed domesticated, captive, or otherwise human-influenced social groups that have developed hierarchy to one extent or another by being subjected to the human hierarchy first. Do the chooks in your yard actually have a pecking order, and how much does that actually say about hierarchy? In wolves, a similar precedence of who eats first has been read into quite a bit in the past, but it’s becoming more clear that this has more to do with making sure that the adults who need more energy get more food. I don’t think it’s necessarily hierarchical to make sure a pregnant woman gets the food she needs before anyone else eats, do you?
OK, so why the sudden, huge houses that pop up with the Agricultural Revolution? I can buy that hierarchy might not leave a lot of evidence behind, but why does it suddenly start leaving loads of evidence everywhere as soon as agriculture comes onto the scene?
And why is it that modern foragers are so good at defusing even informal and subtle power structures? Why don’t they have even the subtle hierarchies of influence?
So why did egalitarianism do so well in almost every set of conditions, on every continent, for some three million years, through ice ages and interglacials and even some major extinctions—and why did it take such a specific set of circumstances for hierarchy to appear? And why has it done so badly in such an amazingly short period of time? Your assessment is almost completely opposite of the pattern formed by the actual facts—hierarchy can kinda-sorta work when the conditions are just so, but if they’re not, then you need egalitarianism.
As I said, it’s the combination that’s telling. If there was hierarchy before, why does the evidence suddenly become so abundant? That doesn’t make any sense.
I double dog dare you to go to Lasceaux and say nice and loud so it echoes through the cave, “Your culture produced nothing of permanence that would last beyond your own lifetimes.” The very fact that you can say something like that earnestly really underlines Daniel Quinn’s notion of “the Great Forgetting.” Egalitarian cultures have produced things of permenance that would make the Mona Lisa, rotting in its carefully climate-controlled vault as we speak, green with envy.
But as we’ve seen, it doesn’t fly in the face of the habits of nearly every other creature at all. In fact, in the two cases where we’ve peeled back the research and examined the methods—wolves and chimps—we’ve seen serious methodological flaws protected by deep cultural biases that blinded us to the ramifications. Both have been considered very hierarchical; in fact, both are remarkably egalitarian.
Some animals are hierarchical, but not all. Many animals are egalitarian—like wolves, chimpanzees, and humans. That’s not flying in the face of the habits of nearly every other creature on the planet; that’s living up to your evolutionary heritage. That’s what makes us human.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 July 2007 @ 9:46 PM
Please explain how we are to recognize these systems in their own terms? Are we all to suddenly adopt the thinking processes of monkeys or wolves? I’d like to know how that could be achieved.
The idea that they are egalitarian is a projection onto them, one that goes so far as to presuppose to know their minds and the underlying motivations for their reactions to their environment. At least the projection of hierarchies of power stopped at an analysis of their interactions with others (whether there were flaws in the analysis or not), their external activities and qualities.
So the wolf thinks “I’ll go first because your chance of survival will be better if I eat more. Trust me, it’s for your own good”? The simpler explanation would be that the strongest eats first, which is good for the group because they are best able to hunt and fight. They eat first because they are strongest, not because everyone took a vote and decided who would fulfill that role. In the same vein the runt of the litter doesn’t die because it feels it’s best for the group. The runt dies because the others further deprive it and it doesn’t have the strength to make it’s own place.
As for the rest about wolves, just because the other members of the pack willingly subordinate themselves still doesn’t rule out a hierarchy. Structures within family units are the first level of hierarchy in any social group. Are the parents in charge for compassionate reasons? Because of a vote by the infants? Drawing of straws? No, they are in charge because they are the strongest, smartest and typically eldest. They don’t ask for the position, they assume it, take it by virtue of their strength, and they do have to work to maintain that position in the face of rebellious teenagers for example, who then leave to form their own packs. They usually don’t physically fight, but there is a battle of wills.
For the very reason you have often pointed out yourself. Pre-agriculture people had little in the way of possessions, they weren’t tied to such things. With agriculture came the permanence of habitation that would support the accumulation of goods, and the accumulation of goods would then begin the whole “keeping up with the joneses” game that would quickly lead to the powerful having enough possessions of more permanent nature to ensure that at least some would survive for future peoples to hypothesise over. Permanence in habitation leads the human mind to consider permanence of self, “How can I, as eternal-grand-supreme-chief be remembered forever? Build me a Pyramid!”
My statement was intended in the context of other hierarchical species as an illustration of how we could possibly have no evidence today. Sure primitive peoples have produced many wonderful things of permanence, but just perhaps most of the things that indicated position within hierarchies were as ephemeral as an organic headdress that was burned at the time of death, for instance. Or perhaps it was no more than a look or an implicit understanding, or some scars to prove a few battles won. You’re expecting monuments to hierarchical power, neglecting that hierarchical structures can exist quite well without physical artifacts to denote such relationships. Just because the CEO needs a plaque on his door to soothe his ego today doesn’t mean the head-hunter needed something to signify his importance in previous times.
Projecting egalitarianism onto other species is just as flawed as falsely projecting our hierarchical structures onto them, if not more so as I’ve said above, because you are projecting patterns of thinking onto them that go beyond outward physical evidence. How can anyone say with a straight face that they know what a wolf is thinking when it acts, when going beyond the realm of primitive instincts?
Comment by Geoff — 12 July 2007 @ 6:01 AM
See, right here, this is what I call a fundamental difference of opinion. Jason’s already covered this is more than sufficient depth, I’m not going to go over it again, suffice to say that I completely disagree with you on this.
That’s true, it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean I [b]should[/b] either.
See above: fundamental difference of opinion.
So, either I’m still understanding you, or I don’t see what your beef w/ Anthropik is on this point. They’ve been encouraging local action w/ communities and their economies. Is it just that you don’t think greater fluidity starts local….? Again, can you elaborate on how mass society can become more fluid without turning our backs on what passes for “Global Culture”? Or, if you agree that globalization is a wrong turn to take, how do you reconcile an emphasis on local action to the large/mass societies you’re discussing?
Of course I have agency in the world. Neither do I think it’s trivial. Certain actions [b]are[/b] trivial, and I generally try to bypass those in favor of more useful and effective action.
I think we just ran into another irreconcilable difference, because I can’t think of how possibilities and methods of “victory” are anything [b]but[/b] essential to moral issues.
But then, I’m a pragmatist, not an idealist.
Comment by jhereg — 12 July 2007 @ 8:27 AM
It’s not that hard. Look at the work of David Mech. All it takes is an awareness of our projections, and a recognition that if you alter the way animals behave in order to observe them, your observations are systemically slanted. In wolves, we got the idea of this dominance hierarchy by only observing wolves in captivity. Mech observed them in the wild, and his observations overthrew the prevailing “dominance” paradigm. Goodall concentrated the food supply in order to bring the chimps to her, and lo and behold, found a hierarchy formed to distribute the concentrated food supply. In both cases, sloppy research methods led to skewed results. The methods were sloppy because of ethnocentrism and cultural blinders; we’re so used to imprisonment and concentrated food supplies, we don’t even think that such things could alter animal behavor, although we know in no uncertain terms that they absolutely do.
Hardly. Egalitarianism isn’t something going on in the mind, it’s a pattern of behavior. I don’t need to know what people are thinking to know if they’re acting in an egalitarian manner or not; I can just observe them. Same goes for any other animal.
So does the observation of egalitarianism.
We don’t really know what the wolves are thinking, just like I don’t really know what you’re thinking, or what anyone is thinking besides myself. We can just infer from behavior. Your simpler explanation falls apart because it isn’t the strongest that eats first. The “alpha male” is stronger than the “alpha female,” but the “alpha female” generally eats first. So how does your simpler explanation hold? When we see this behavior among humans, we don’t see any problem with this; a pregnant woman needs more food. Why is it suddenly a demonstration of dominance when wolves do the exact same thing?
That doesn’t happen in wild wolf packs, though. Everyone gets a share. Wolves actually have some fairly sophisticated and egalitarian food-sharing practices. See Schleidt & Shalter’s “Co-evolution of Humans and Canids.” [PDF]
If your family is hierarchical, then that’s a pretty dysfunctional family. Looking at a family and seeing a power structure is pretty sick, IMO. There are families like that, but those are abusive families. It’s one of the key, defining characteristics of an abusive family that the abuser forms a hierarchy with himself at top. There’s no subordination, willful or otherwise, in my family, or any healthy family. Everyone has respect, everyone is listened to, and everyone’s view is taken into consideration.
And if the teenager wins, he becomes the new alpha and gets to sleep with his mother? No? You’re still drawing on observations of captive wolf packs. That’s like trying to understand human society solely by observing a prison population. That kind of analysis would lead you to believe that shanking is a natural human reaction to most stressors. In wild wolf packs, those contests don’t occur. Teenagers move out and start their own packs. Even in traditional human societies, “teenage angst” doesn’t happen. That only happens when the biological urge that tells a teenager, “You’re an adult now, go strike out on your own,” is frustrated—in the case of wolves by a fence, in the case of civilized humans, by a society that treats a biological adult as a social child.
But the villages came first, before agriculture. And in the early villages, all the houses are the same size. Then agriculture starts, and immediately, you have huge houses attached to the granaries. This happens all over the world wherever agriculture starts.
And even before that, while pre-agricultural peoples didn’t share our preoccupation with material goods (since they had to be hauled and could be easily replaced later), they did produce plenty of lasting evidence. Where are the cave paintings of glorious chiefs and rulers? Why is it so easy to find artistic evidence of rulers in agricultural murals, and so difficult to find it in pre-agricultural cave paintings? Again, why is there no evidence before agriculture, and so much after? You keep throwing out these hypotheticals that are completely contradicted by the known facts—it’s enough to make me suspect that you’ve never really studied Neolithic archaeology.
That’s true. Of course, existing tribes are very good at fending off such subtle forms of power. I’m sure you’ve read “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari.” [PDF] That’s just one example; others abound. Existing foragers don’t even tolerate most bragging, because that might eventually lead to some subtle form of hierarchy.
But it still doesn’t explain the sudden change. So before the Agricultural Revolution, hierarchy was everywhere, but they were careful to never express it in ay of the many, many permanent artifacts they left behind. Even though in the few places where hierarchy did work out, like Sungir, they suddenly did leave permanent evidence behind. But everywhere else, it was there, they just hid it meticulously. They settled villages, and everyone lived in houses of the same size, including the great, glorious leader. Then agriculture came, and the leader suddenly moved into his big house, and the people started showing their leaders in their art for the first time ever, and all of a sudden, evidence of hierarchy is everywhere you look. Meanwhile, for the foragers that survived, about a week and a half before the first anthropologists got there, they all got together and said, “Hey, you know how we’ve always had these leaders? Let’s get rid of them, and develop some really effective and elegant means for keeping anyone from even gaining subtle, unofficial power.”
This, of course, based on absolutely no evidence and ultimately, nothing more than the conviction that hierarchy must be natural because that’s the way our culture operates.
Am I wrong for finding this a little far-fetched? Like, throw in some space aliens so it’ll be a little more believable kind of far-fetched?
Egalitarianism isn’t a thought pattern any more than hierarchy is; it’s a pattern of behavior and relationship. And I’m not projecting egalitarianism onto wolves or chimpanzees. I’m just stripping away the projections of hierarchy. Egalitarianism is simply the pattern they show by themselves, when you simply observe them, rather than project your hierarchy onto them.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 July 2007 @ 10:37 AM
I think this is indicative of where the debate lies. Community gardens in urban areas will exacerbate the population problem. By creating more food we create more people.
This is how it works: I stop buying at the supermarket and use my local community garden. Economics says that this reduction in demand should reduce supply. So, the supermarket orders slightly less product every week and the wholesaler orders slightly less product every month and the processor orders slightly fewer ingredients every month, and the farmer grows…more food. Why? Because the reduction in demand lowers the price, but the farmers expenses go up. The farmer has to grow (and sell) more food to break even. The farmer then has to sell that food, and his only market is now the “developing” world (I love euphemisms) . So, he sells food to an area that can already not support its own population and that population goes up. The total amount of food in the system goes up and the total population increases. That is the way it works. The farmer cannot afford to to grow less food and he cannot afford to not sell the food he grows.
As for contraception:
But they will. Even if half the population decides to not reproduce that will just allow the other half to reproduce more.
Jason:
You can’t go to Lasceaux anymore, (though they have replicated it as Lasceaux II), go to Font du Gaume instead, it’s the last polychromatic cave paintings open to the public in France(Europe?). And seriously, I was at the Louvre, saw la Jiaconde and the Venus de Milo; and a few days later at Font du Gaume and Font du Gaume was seriously impressive. There is this fabulous tableau at an intersection that you have to stand back to see a fully perspective scene of deer and buffalo where the main animal watches you as you travel the hallway from any direction. Wish we could have gone to Lasceaux, though.
On the other hand, seeing the paintings in their place as opposed to in a museum probably has something to do with my impressions of them.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 12 July 2007 @ 11:07 AM
On the other hand, community permaculture gardens also allow for survival when the ordinary channels break down.
Yeah, I know, but that would’ve ruined my poetic license.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 July 2007 @ 11:19 AM
Yeah, that’s a big reason I don’t see moving to local as an endpoint as much as a step in the right direction. This is also why I just can’t figure out how specialization of roles can really work out. As individuals, I don’t think we should be pretty close to our (not geographically
).
Comment by jhereg — 12 July 2007 @ 11:19 AM
Sorry, this should read:
Comment by jhereg — 12 July 2007 @ 11:20 AM
gods! it’s just not my day….
Comment by jhereg — 12 July 2007 @ 11:22 AM
True but that is irrelevant to Geoff’s idea of saving civilization using urban gardening. It may provide a life raft but it doesn’t save the ship.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 12 July 2007 @ 11:25 AM
Very true.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 July 2007 @ 11:27 AM
A increase in the difficulty posed by feeding 6.5 billion people does not equate an immediate die-out through starvation (or equivalent processes like violence). The key is that on a slow collapse we still CAN feed the whole 6.5, it just is rather harder, leading to a decrease in birthrate because the population has other concerns.
My ideal global population is around 2 billion and I want to accomplish that by further deepening Globalization and Mass Society until there aren’t anymore anti-contraceptive cultures/individuals/memes on the periphery filling the holes left by those of us who choose to abstain. But hey, even if Godesky wanted something like 2 million in a couple centuries, we’d still be able to accomplish that by focusing on sustaining those that are alive.
“
Or they stop being farmers? As is happening. (And corporations diversify.) They don’t have to respond rigidly.
Of course. What you’re objecting to our “Global Culture” has to do with its rigidity not its globalization. Globalization in the sense of increased connectivity worldwide opens the door to hella increased non-linearity, which is the same thing as fluidity. The problem with breaking down into ‘local cultural autonomy’ is that it creates net rigidities (when compared to a globalized anarchy). Personal relationship structures are more ingrained, societies are less capable of reforming around a social cancer because they have less society at hand to act as antibodies, there’s less room for spontaneous creation/adaptation/evolution because regional clusters have less resources, etc, etc… Basic systems dynamics. It’s pretty easy to see.
“Local action” is somewhat misleading, what I support is the creation of connections outside the hierarchical systematic framework we have. That can mean community gardens and local struggles towards greater sustainability as well as hacker struggles, P2P, indymedia, web 2.0 stuff etc.
My focus on local sustainability with Godesky has to do with the importance I see (either way, come progress or regression) in making our global infrastructure optimized to the point where it doesn’t collapse in a more or less single violent moment and kill 6.5 billion people. But Godesky can’t stand anything smacking of a slow, managed collapse because even if the endpoint is the same it’ll mean compromise and engagement with the system instead of instant personal gratification. Plus people tend to like technology and if given time to prepare or weather through they might salvage more tech than he would like and maybe even continue the progression to more fluid tech.
But a sudden and violent collapse would almost certainly hurt the biosphere worse than a slow and more managed collapse.
Is that explanatory enough? I can elaborate on any of that.
Perhaps you could explain to me why traditional anarchist struggles, actions and pursuits are trivial compared with Anthropik’s survivalism.
It’s the utilitarianism. I suppose I could do to cover this point in depth, I’ll make a note to put together a rigorous deconstruction of utilitarianism and how it’s utterly incoherent.
It’s really weird the way that framing of the debate Godesky used has split people. I mean I could argue that your stance is in fact subject to all the negative connotations you have with “idealism.” But truth is I think there’s a sharp cultural element. Most of my folks see that self-acknowledged split and they think you’ve just given up the debate in a particularly drastic and catastrophic crash. “I mean pragmatism? How much more depraved, inane and despicable can you get?” Godesky’s readers see that split and they get all comfortable and smug. “Fucking idealists. Off in their own little world, willfully divorced from reality.”
Without really delving into it I get the impression there’s some seriously complex things going on with all the roots of this split. It’d make for a wonderful investigation…
Bill Gates can share his material wealth to create a surplus of social wuffie. If his intentions were the shrewd acquisition of social power/standing and the psychological vectors of control that come with it we would hardly call the situation egalitarian. His intention matters. Psychologies matter. Power is and has always been ultimately about psychology not the allocation of material stuffs.
Kids aren’t bossed around? I highly doubt that. Because of constraints on information children are fundamentally put in a position where their will is going to be intermittently overruled by those stronger and with supposedly (and mostly) greater knowledge. Because parents don’t have perfect knowledge this is going to be misused. Furthermore, because it’s a reality maintained over time it generates roles and default assumptions. Power structures become instinctive (albeit not at the level of black hawks and riot cops).
This much is true. At least not in the institutionalized drawn out form we know today. I was actually going to qualify Geoff’s original statement to point that out. But nevertheless the fundamental tensions that he recognizes do take place and have effects, particularly in tribal structures.
Power structures DO exist and even physical coercion does take ‎place, even in the
“healthiest” of primitive societies.
Not true. That is to say, there was the generic house-form that was most cost-effective to reproduce. But I can see half-a-dozen counter-examples in my mind. Pre-agriculture Scotland had drastically varyingly sized living structures.
Well, the best forager cultures don’t. Free societies heal wounds and institute aggressive anti-bodies to psychoses of power. But enough fail (in consequence of their physical and social limitations) to be a problem and eventually morph into Civ-esque cultures repeatedly.
Comment by William — 12 July 2007 @ 7:38 PM
William’s response to this covers my thoughts on the matter perfectly:
To better illustrate the rift:
The two of us are standing in the forest watching some wolves around a carcass. One wolf eats before the others, or even with certain other members, but other members are driven away until these first eaters have had their fill.
I would take this to be a scenario that is devoid of any interpretive elements, so far, would you agree?
I look at this scene and see some wolves that are ascendant over other wolves, so they go first. Simplest explanation from the available data.
You look at this scene and want to draw the conclusion that the first-eating wolves are being magnanimous to their fellows by eating first, because they need to be strong to ensure the survival of their fellows.
Which is the simpler of the two explanations? Which projects the greatest assumptions onto wolves? One of them requires a convolution of reasoning on the part of the wolves in order to make the simpler assumption wrong.
The male may be stronger physically, but the female has control over the mating, therefore dominance in the relationship. That should be obvious
You seem to be considering hierarchy as an “evil force” and only looking at the most negative aspects of it. A wise elder and the young fool is an hierarchy of knowledge, one that I’m sure you’d readily acknowledge exists in many cultures. Just as egalitarianism can exist distinctly across many social factors so can hierarchy.
Hopefully this is you only seeing negative hierarchies as qualifying for the term “hierarchy”. I am disinclined to consider the alternatives.
You can have respect and yet still have an hierarchy. Your esteemed mentors and professors at your college were your superiors in terms of knowledge and social standing, so higher up in the hierarchy, yet you still had respect for them didn’t you?
In the same way you can have benign power structures in families. I don’t respect the decisions of my children to run onto busy streets, I assert my superior knowledge and wisdom to restrain them by using my position of authority within the family. If that makes me a sicko then so be it, better to be a sicko than a fool with dead children.
As for taking everyones view into consideration, do you let three year old children dictate how the budget is to be set? Ever find yourself with a cupboard full of “froot loops” and not a bit of good food in sight? Allowing members of a group to dictate beyond their knowledge & wisdom would seem to be the swift path to dysfunctionality and destruction.
The fundamental tensions or fundamental hierarchical shifts are what we’re looking at aren’t they, not the current method teenagers use today, or at any particular time. Rather that there is an age where a child begins to feel they have outgrown their position in any hierarchy and for whatever reason other members of the group aren’t ready to shift structure.
Here you are projecting your current notions of this negative hierarchy onto all possible hierarchies. The Australian aboriginies have had tribal elders for quite a while IIRC, but they don’t appear in their paintings and there are no monuments to these people. They have their authority and they aren’t driven by the ego considerations that you would project onto them as “necessary” to qualify as hierarchical.
To set the record straight I’m not a degreed student of archaeology. I’m a systems analyst, and as such I draw conclusions based on the knowledge I have gained in the subject, with the proviso that the further back in time we go the more uncertainty there is about any conclusions we can draw. The more uncertainty there is the more things we can potentially hypothesise. Some conclusions that have been drawn about prehistory have enough evidence to support them, others are rather more nebulous and rely more on a perceived consensus between those who would discuss the matter.
Take for instance your conclusion that with the advent of agriculture we see larger houses attached to granaries, pointing to some form of hierarchy. This is a possible conclusion, but not the only one. It is equally possible that these were egalitarian societies that communually built houses, the size of which depended on the size of the family they were intended to house. Then again, maybe the people in the smaller house were higher up the social ladder and for this reason didn’t have to put up with their inlaws?
I think this neglects a couple of factors.
The entire world can only produce a certain amount of food (which will be declining with the decline in fuels) and farmers are already seeing more profit to be made in organic fuels than food. Given a choice between food with minimal profitability sent to developing countries and grains for ethanol, for example, at a much higher margin, the farmer is going to move to the profitable activity, not keep on producing food just because that’s what he’s always done.
On top of this, community gardens probably wont be capable of supplying grains and meats on the scale that larger communities will desire, so, combined with a shift to farmers markets, farmers will be in a better position to supply the commodities that are needed.
There is also the fact that a farmers expenses are generally tied directly to the amount of land under cultivation. The only real expense that isn’t tied to this is servicing loans. As cost of inputs go up the farmer could hope to sell more for higher prices, but then again he could also choose to only put half his land under cultivation, choosing to fallow the other paddocks for example.
Primary costs are fuel, seed, fertilisers and sprays, on top of labour. If fertiliser doubles in price he could either fork out the extra, put on half the fertiliser rate, or put the fertiliser he can afford on half the ground. In the first case he is probably going further into debt, but in either of the other cases he will be reducing the amount produced.
This of course doesn’t rule out the possibility of a flow-on effect to the developing world resulting in an increase in population, but I’d imagine that as transport of such food becomes prohibitively expensive regions will become isolated in terms of food production and they will stabilise with populations that can be supported from the local area.
Comment by Geoff — 12 July 2007 @ 11:23 PM
What is globalization?
As far as I am aware, these are the 3 “expected” defintions of globalization. You may want to take that into consideration in the future. Most notable in these definitions is a lack of the concetps: “rigidity”, “fluidity”, or “connection”. Now, implicity in these definitions is a lack of fluidity, increased rigidity, and abusive or dominance-based relationships/connections.
I understand that there is [b]some[/b] correlation between nonlinearity & fluidity, however, there is no required causation (per current mathematical thought). At this point, it falls on you to prove:
1) the nonlinearity of which you speak exists or will/can exist
2) the nonlinearity of which you speak will produce more fluidity
Neither of these should be accepted at face value, as there no safe assumption between nonlinearity & fluidity.
Honestly, this just damn near struck me speechless. I think my most articulate response is:
…….
wtf?
…….
You’re making an awful lot of personal judgements here, aren’t you? You don’t think it’s possible that Jason believes it isn’t an option because he can’t see a way thru the assorted physical, technical & systemic? Interesting.
I would think by now, it would be pretty obvious that I’m “not up to snuff” on “traditional anarchist struggles, actions and pursuits”. Trying to not speak out my ass, I did a quick google search. So, I’m going assume that you’re refering to some mixture of the following:
or
or
I wouldn’t call any of these trivial (at least, not necessarily, some of them like strikes & demonstrations can be situational, speaking of which….).
I came across this bit:
Doesn’t this mean that globalization (by my definition(s) above) works against anarchy by allowing the reigning corporations to relocate their workers to countries more amenable to the corporations’ needs?
Anyway, it’s a little difficult for me to say why any of these activities are necessarily more (or less) trivial compared to Anthropik’s statements. But that’s primarily because there isn’t really any mutual exclusivity. In fact, it seems like much of it is exactly what Anthropik has been encouraging: community building, sustainable (or at least much, much more sustainable) permaculture/gardening/etc, providing support for potentially culture-changing media….
I hope you can see where I’m having difficulty in understanding why you keep complaining about Anthropik and then turn around and say we should be doing things….that Anthropik has been encouraging. It’s a little perplexing.
Don’t misunderstand me to think I’m talking about utilitarianism. I’m talking about limits.
You could, but it would be a mistake, as I don’t have an enourmous amount of negative baggage for idealism. Nevertheless, I accept that I have limits. I don’t accept them uncritically, but I do accept them.
Now, those are fighting words. That’s not an exageration, and it’s not meant to be funny. I’m very serious about that. I’ve cooled down a lot since first reading it (benefits of having this discussion over the ‘net). But, yeah, them’s fightin’ words.
You seem to be willfully indulging in wild speculation and making baseless value judgements left & right. It’s very frustrating.
Of course there are complex things going on with this split. But, I’m inclined to think that when you say that, you’re implying that the “pragmatism” side has “issues”.
Okay, so, talk to me more about this. What do you see as the critical difference in systems between “Free societies” and those that morph into “Civ-esque cultures”? (and don’t say freedom or lack of hierarchy w/o a lengthy explanation of what leads to the divergence, that’s a cop out)
Also, do you have any concrete examples of each society?
If you already have urls (by yourself or others) that you feel explain these points sufficiently, feel free to post those. I don’t want you to feel you have to tread old ground.
Comment by jhereg — 13 July 2007 @ 9:41 AM
Yes it does. That’s what every famine or war in history has been about.
That’s the best case scenario. I’d like that to happen, but I’m not sure it’s possible. More likely, it will be a little from column A, and a little from column B. Some amount of tribal formation and permaculture will rise up to meet the cataclysmic failure of civilization as collapse accelerates on itself. But that’s academic. Whether you want to survive the collapse or improve the chances of escaping massive die-off, the next step is the same: form tribes, remove our dependence on civilization, take up permaculture, get off industrialism. If we could do enough of that, maybe we could escape die-off. I doubt it, but I’m going everything I can to reach that anyway.
Two billion is twice William Catton’s estimate of a sustainable human population. I don’t know what that number might be, but two billion sounds very high to me. But I can guarantee that clinging to mass society and globalization is a guarantee for the suicide of the human species. If we’re going to avoid die-off (and it’s not at all clear that that’s still an option), then it will only be by abandoning globalization and mass society in favor of localized, bioregional, human-scale society.
Well that’s precisely our point. If they stop being farmers, then they’re abandoning civilization and rewilding.
Not even a little bit. There’s really no behavior that isn’t destructive when everyone does it. Flushing your toilet at 9:26 AM is not a problem. If everyone flushes their toilet at 9:26 AM, then we’re all in deep shit. Literally. Which is why I reject Kant’s categorical imperative—everything is bad if everyone does it. And that’s the problem with globalization, not the rigidity of the global culture that’s happened to form, but the fact that any global homogeneity is destructive. It undermines the diversity that is the essential source of all resilience and strength: biological, ecological, sociological, you name it, it’s diversity that makes us strong. Homogeneity is death. And that’s what globalization is: homogeneity. The post-Alexander Hellenistc world was far more homogeneous than the pre-Alexander pre-Hellenistic world. And today, the world is far more homogeneous than it once was. Nearly half the world’s languages are in danger of dying out: half of the world’s diversity of thought, feeling and relationship, ways of relating to particular ecosystems, will soon be gone. Half of all our strength, gone. We’ll be half-dead.
Yeeeeeeah, that’s it. It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I haven’t heard a single idea yet that would slow down collapse that didn’t come down to unicorns, fairy dust and happy thoughts. Nor would it have anything to do with the fact that a slower collapse means more suffering, more loss of human life, more destruction of the ecosystem, and diminished prospects for human survival or for the rest of the more-than-human world. Gotta be the personal gratification thing.
People don’t tend to like technology; I think the Lower Paleolithic would be enough to prove that. As they say, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” That civilized folk seem to like technology really just shows how needy civilized folk are. Humans who have their needs fulfilled show remarkably little interest in advancing technology.
But you seem to think this is about what I want. I’d actually like to see some technology make it. I’d like the internet to still be around. I’d like to have some electricity for things. But if it doesn’t work out that way, I’m also OK with letting those things go, because getting to be a human being is a lot more important than the toys. The question isn’t what technology I “like,” but what technology works.
Incorrect. Sudden and violent collapse would hurt First Worlders most of all. Most of the world would be better off, since they’re already in collapse. The rest of the non-human world would begin immediately to heal itself. Really, humans in the First World are the only ones that would really suffer from a sudden and violent collapse. Everything else—including most humans—would range from “slightly worse than the status quo, and then much better than anything we’ve ever dreamed” to “finally the long nightmare is over.”
A long, protracted collapse will mean more nuclear power plants that will haunt the post-civilized world for millions of years; it will mean more global warming, more poisoned air and water. It will mean 200 species dying out every day for a much longer time. It will mean dead and acidic oceans, and what E.O. Wilson called “the death of birth.” It will also mean more suffering for humans: a few more decades to spend in collapse for most of the world, and an even bigger First World population to suffer collapse when it finally does happen. It will mean more people with bigger footprints creating more damage, leaving less of a world behind them as collapse becomes bigger, scarier, and more bloody with each passing day.
The sooner and the quicker collapse happens, the less destruction it will entail. The longer it takes, the more destruction it will entail, for humans and for everything else.
Because traditional anarchist struggles are in pursuit of utopian thought experiments. We’re building off the only tried-and-true social principles humanity has.
Absolutely. And you know what? No anthropologist calls a Big Man society egalitarian. They figure prominently in anthropological discussions on the rise of hierarchy. So you have a lot of catching up to do to get to the level the conversation’s at. When we call the Bushmen egalitarian, we don’t just mean that they lack political offices. They also lack the “Big Men,” the people who wield what’s called in anthropological jargon attained authority (it’s a lot easier to say than all of what you just said, and since we’ve discussed it so much, that helps a lot; as I mentioned, you’ve got some catching up to do). When we say they’re egalitarian, that’s what we mean. The “softer” kinds of hierarchy have been noted and we’re talking about those, too. The means by which hunter-gatherers defuse even the most subtle forms of hierarchy are truly amazing in their elegance. By simply “cursing the meat,” they eliminate the possibility of concentrating “social capital.” The very act itself destroys any “social capital” you might have built up!
Then you need to read more about hunter-gatherers. I suspected you didn’t really know what you’re talking about. No, Bushmen kids are not bossed around. Nobody has the right to tell anyone what to do, not even kids. Parents can cajole, entreat, bargain, or persuade, but they can’t command.
You would think that, wouldn’t you? Well, being civilized and all, anyway. Have you ever read Sorenson’s “Preconquest Consciousness“? I highly recommend that you do. It very effectively shows why this isn’t necessarily the case, and a few other things, besides.
Yes, the civilized family hierarchy does become the basis of civilization’s overall hierarchy. The Roman Emperor was the Pater Patriae, and we typically understand the State through the family metaphor. Tribes are also families, but they’re not hierarchical in nature. That, too, goes down to the nuclear family level.
Name one among the Kalahari Bushmen.
This has not been observed in any forest, ever. Only in captivity, with regular feeding schedules.
Absolutely. You can plainly see in that scenario that there’s a hierarchy, and had it ever been actually observed in the wild, it would be good evidence.
No, I’m talking about a very different scene: the one that’s actually been observed in the wild. Had you read the article I linked to and recommended earlier, you would have read this, for instance:
That’s what’s actually been observed. That, to me, suggests that the wolf pack is essentially egalitarian, and that it has developed an egalitarian strategy because it works so well. If there’s any idealism to it, we’d never know. It certainly looks pragmatic.
This isn’t a matter of me projecting egalitarianism where it doesn’t fit; this is a matter of sloppy research methods. You’re observing hierarchical relationships in a hierarchical, captive wolf pack. The problem is, you’re projecting it into the wild. You set that scene in the woods. That scene has never been observed in the woods. In the woods, the scene that’s been observed is much different. So it’s not a question of my projection, but of your ignorance.
That’s a fine projection, but no. I think hierarchy as inhuman. It’s very bee-like, though, and works great for bees. But humans, like wolves, evolved in an egalitarian context. For such an animal, hierarchy is maladaptive. It’s not prima facie evil, but it is taking a fish out of water.
You probably don’t realize this, but this is one of the most tired old arguments around here, so I hope you won’t mind if I copy and paste from an older article, rather than type up this same argument yet again:
So yes, the wise old man vs. the young fool presents a hierarchy. So does the swift young man vs. the crippled old man. Who’s on top of that society’s hierarchy? You might say they take turns being on top, or you might more accurately say that neither is on top. It’s egalitarian, but egalitarianism does not require unique personal strengths to be ignored. In fact, when we value others—when societies are small enough to value others—egalitarianism follows naturally, because we recognize that while some are better at some things, in the ultimate analysis, we all balance out about the same.
Certainly not as “superiors,” but I did respect their knowledge and learning. Yet that respect had to be maintained in spite of the inherent animosity of the hierarchical relationship.
As I pointed out to Gillis above, this is not the only way to raise your kids. There are ways to respect your children’s autonomy and raise them in a healthy manner. You should also read “Preconquest Consciousness,” or Jean Liedloff’s Continuum Concept, or observe how Kalahari Bushmen raise their children. The perverse and dysfunctional nature of most civilized families, rooted in hierarchical power-relationships, is the ultimate root of civilization’s perverse and dysfunctional power dynamic. It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way. Unfortunately, most people just assume that it has always been this way, and it can’t be any other way. That assumption shuts down the question of how it could be otherwise. I’ll bet it never even occured to you that it could be otherwise, much less that it has been, is now, and in fact is the far more common way, am I right? It’s utterly pathological, but don’t take it too hard; all of us have been driven more than a little psychotic by the way we live.
It would seem like that if you’ve spent your whole life being told that mom & dad/teacher/the professor/your boss/the president/insert your favorite authority figure here knows best, wouldn’t it? But have you ever put that assumption to the test? Have you ever bothered to go and try to find out? Obviously not. Most people never do, and that’s rather the goal. But now your unexamined assumptions are staring you right in the eye. Read Sorenson, and even Liedloff. It doesn’t work the way you’ve been told.
This doesn’t happen in most societies. They recognize when a child’s role in society has shifted; not their role in the hierarchy, but their role in society. Being a child or an adult in a tribe means something, but it’s not a change in social power. Rather, it’s more often about taking on responsibilities, and perhaps recieving some special initiations that mark the onset of those responsibilities. But there isn’t a greater say, or even a greater respect, that comes along with that, just a different role.
The Australian aboriginal elders also aren’t anything like a hierarchy. They have nothing we would recognize as “authority.” Words don’t mean more just because they come from an elder. They have a different role, with different responsibilities, but a tribe’s decision making can be influenced as much by an infant as by an elder. The only greater influence they wield is if they can make a convincing argument. The only thing they can convince people to do is what they already want to do. They actually are depicted in aboriginal rock art, but not as hierarchs, because they’re not. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of aboriginal society, a typical projection of European dynamics on aboriginal society.
I just have a bachelor in anthropology and computer science, not archaeology specifically, but here we are talking about the origins of hierarchy and agriculture. It’s something I’ve read up on. From your responses, I’m getting the creeping suspicion that you have no idea what you’re talking about in this area. Is that correct?
Yeah, except that’s not true. If you knew what you’re talking about, you’d know we actually have a great deal of very solid evidence that points to some fairly clear conclusions. It’s statements like this that make me suspect you have no idea what you’re talking about.
From the summary description I gave, those would be possible interpretations. But the archaeological evidence shows that these are clearly personal residences for a single family and servants. I mentioned this as short-hand because everyone in this discussion with some familiarity with the subject manner should be well-acquainted with the evidence I’m referring to. You obviously are not. So again, do you have any idea what you’re talking about?
That would make it much more disastrous, yes. Even more land put to monocropped cereal grains will make agriculture even more of a catastrophe.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 July 2007 @ 12:40 PM
Actually, small farmers, family farmers, DO grow food because that’s what they’ve always done. They certainly aren’t in it for the money.
Corporate farms on the other hand might decide to pull out of food production completely due to the disparity in market price between fuel and food. And that sounds like a really good way to start a war of revolution, not avoid one.
If our cars start seriously competing with our stomachs there will be starvation in the streets of the first world.
Who was it that said that any society is three meals away from revolution?
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 13 July 2007 @ 3:35 PM
Oh not at all.
More integration = “increased connectivity worldwide” as I said.
Obviously the virulently anti-free-market policies of the IMF, WTO, US, EU, and World Bank have applied statist and economic power to raise cost-of-entry, centralize global control… blah, blah, blah.
The globalizing process that is currently underway brings to attention the extreme rigidities already ingrained in places of power. But ultimately globalization is always a good thing, because “globalization” only means greater connectivity. That’s why the vast majority of those of us in the “anti-globalization” movement were really fucking pissed when we were started being called that. We’re not against globalization, we’re against THEIR limited “globalization” wherein the rich get connections and the poor get locked in place. But such wouldn’t be a full globalization because it operates on restrictions to global integration (national borders, corporatism, etc) To go all Wittgenstein and analyze our word use, what would you call a Mass Society spread across the entire planet? Globalization. I’m aware of the connotations, but for god’s sake, let me use the word as it really means lest I be made incapable of using any word at all to refer to conceptual vectors rather than present cultural context.
Sigh. Increased degrees of possible interrelation between subjects, increasing interaction and increasing mobility makes for non-linearity. A cell phone in Peking can set off a Flash Mob in Boston.
What do you call a bunch of particles closely interacting relative one another in a non-linear fashion?
Heh. Think it through. Or just read the 15 and my response to Godesky.
Well, is the WTO/IMF/US/etc bad for workers and against Anarchism? Most decidedly yes. But that’s not the point.
Is *Globalization* set against Anarchy? Hell no. We want to break down borders and make trade freer (Anarchy, according to a friend of mine, is simply Free Association). Think about that example you’ve given. What’s inherently wrong about a business (very different from a corporation) relocating to be more efficient? Nothing. The problem in this example is that there are local inequalities that are reinforced by external rigid structures. There are borders. Corporations are allowed to cross them with impunity, but workers are not. Of course, even so, Thomas Freidman’s ramblings about rising tides would still be right (the relocation means that *on the whole* things would be better for workers globally even if American workers dipped in living standards a bit) were there not other particularly closed, non-integrated and anti-connection systems at work with one another. Power always functions by cutting off connections. Globalization is simply the vector of increasing connections globally.
Some yes. But consider the factory workers struggle to regain control of their industry and change the way it functions to a more fluid social structure. Ultimately a positive thing that one could say is both a collapse and a staving off of collapse. There’s a bunch of complexities there, but Godesky’s hardline is the complete rejection of the industry rather than struggling with and inside of it.
In these sorts of complex matters there’s no absolute bar or limit at a certain point (and how could there be? it’s not science it’s abstract aggregate statistics) there’s just a long petering out. But there’s always a way. Finding it can be more “difficult” than just accepting the broadest paths, but it’s still there to be found. To be trite with the Mr. Rogers Anarchism, you can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it.
Of course you probably won’t. But the paths are still there.
I was just idly musing as to the delicious complexities involved on both sides. Not making underhanded attacks. As an aside I think it would be worth looking into why our society has a split between some who associate only/mostly negative things with “pragmatism” and some who associate only/mostly negative things with idealism.
For instance only a few days ago I was in an academic debate between a pile of Marxists and Anarchists. The Marxists kept claiming *they* were pragmatists, and that claim only served to reinforce the divisions and hostilities of both sides.
No critical difference (at least with primitive societies). It’s just statistics. Freedom tends to reinforce freedom, but mistakes can be made and become endemic. Physical rigidities beget social rigidities.
See in particular:
5. Individuals flourish with increase of dynamic connections.
6. Understanding is not dependent on process but capacity to experience.
7. Physical limitation inspires social oppression.
8. Spatial limitation ingrains social hierarchy.
As well as my further summary of “the mistake” that historically demolishes empathy in my response to Godesky.
??
Um. Romans and the Kalahari? Corporate PhDs and Hackers?
…If you’re asking me whether Anthropologists have definitive evidence regarding the initial differences between those societies that then took up agriculture and the bad civ hierarchies (along with the good tech fluidities) and those that didn’t feel the need to. Well there’s ultimately no real surviving evidence anywhich way. But basic praxeology and psychology makes the logic pretty clear.
That’s all I’ve been doing in this thread. Again and again. Even the 15 were just summaries.
Sigh.
You would agree that there are times in which a farming society has to work harder but can still feed its people? Sometimes there is violence due to cultural and psychological rigidities. Sometimes not. Sometimes they just end up fucking less and that ends up taking care of things.
That shit does happen. In which case No, increased difficulties do not fucking equate violent die-out.
Remove our dependence upon civilization is pretty much the core of where you and I skip arm and arm together down the yellow brick road. But parts of “industrialism” can be useful if not more effective in this process. Solar panels are still increasing in effectiveness past all predicted limits, wind and the like are still viable. Some factories and the like can still lower costs and ease the process. The ways in which we dissolve the industrial system we’ve got are absolutely critical. Simple rejectionism isn’t enough.
And fuck tribes. Such insularity is the last thing we need during a time of collapse. Small group identity and competition will lead to so more goddamn much violence. We should be looking for global unity rather than idolizing our immediate relationships.
And I think Catton’s estimate is high. But there’s different degrees and types of “sustainability”. Long, long, long term… I want no more than 3 million on the Earth, living without industrialization or agriculture. But, and here’s the key, I don’t want Humanity’s population to fall below 2 billion. What’s that they say, ‘primitive socialism on Earth and a free market in the heavens’? Space is a great big dead playground to expand into and fuck up our own millions of mini-biospheres as we like. Evolve and move on. Leave the Earth behind as a save-game.
I agree that if someone stops being a farmer, moves to the “city,” plants a garden, works in a factory building solar panels and becomes a hacker they’re re-wilding. I disagree as to whether they’d be abandoning civilization.
Since when is “globalization” fundamentally about homogeneity?! Haha!
Interconnection does not equate the emerging dominance of a single rigid informational structure.
Yup.
I utterly fail to see how you can blame opt-in WiFi modems for what was done by coercion and genocide. Two fucking different things. Connected tenuously by some context, yes, but different fucking vectors and different motivations.
Furthermore our interconnection is generating and dissolving culture faster than ever before. A greater diversity of possibilities is being explored. We’re evolving faster.
We should archive and remember those cultures that are dissolving away, and we should work to fight the unfair, non-free-market, coercive aspects sometimes behind their destruction, but cultural preservation for its own sake is not a good thing.
Diversity is meaningless without context. Likewise it’s worthless without use. It’s just a means to an ends of effective integration.
You can understand why your ridiculous stubbornness to see very real engineering realities as infeasible leads me to suspect ulterior psychological motives.
Whereas a fast collapse would mean a greater prospect for human survival?!! Yeah, let’s just start with the smashing of shit today and go bust up some bioweapons lab in the haste.
Our needs aren’t just water, food and air. And there’s always room for improvement with regards to contact with society and the material world. Wild feral human beings desire these. Even if cultural structures can somewhat domesticate them.
Extraction isn’t really an issue with such material, we’ve got pretty much the same amount harvested today as we’ll have then. It’s where we’ll put it. Longer term we have a better chance seeing it somewhat contained. Short term it’s just all over the fucking place.
True. But not by so much. The gasoline we’ve got will be seeping all over the fucking surface. The poisons we’ve already harvested will be released one way or another. Sure we’re going to make more, but the percentages will be small compared to what’s already on the surface (that is to say, ready to enter the biosphere upon collapse).
Those 200 are dependent upon the current virulent expansion of humanity. A slow collapse will necessarily mean a slowing if not reversing of the onslaught while we build our permaculture cities and the like.
Tried-and-insufficient.
Well I’m glad you’ve made a complete reversal of your original statement that egalitarianism is entirely about behavior rather than psychology! That was quite a preposterous statement and I’m glad to see you’ve learned from it!
We’re making good progress here.
Forgive me if I simply cannot believe, given the Anthropologists I’ve interacted with and the papers I’ve read that the full breadth of studies you’re relying on have a full anarchist’s recognition of subtle power structures. Particularly when you, as a fundamental outsider and however you may protest deeply tied to our civ’s context, are cataloging behavioral characteristics. Psychological rigidities and social controls between individuals are very fucking sneaky things.
Let me state this as clearly as I can:
There are hunter-gatherer societies that boss around their kids. Fact.
There are also some rather idealic fucking awesome hunter-gatherer societies that kick so much ass you can see it from LEO. Fact.
So fucking what? I was with the primitivist surge in the ninties, I’m all about learning from that shit and enacting it in the modern world.
But such awesomeness is not inherent to their situation.
And because they tend to survive in isolated pockets today from all those other societies that have embraced the variety of the civ mistake and endeavor I am strongly inclined to conclude that they are the outliers. The societies that held it together instead of taking advantage of this particularly facilitative glacial age and blundering their way through an interworking hodgepodge of technological progress and social regression.
They’re great. But despite the decades of primitivist lies, half-truths and wistful interpretations, that’s not the inevitable state of humanity minus our recent tech.
And the other tribes, the ones who started fucking around with metallurgy and rows of carrots? They weren’t so fucking stupid, evil or wrong afterall. They were grasping at something important. And despite their mistakes they’ve given us hope, they’ve put us on a road that fucks with our social rigidities. A road that, so long as we remember the lessons and realities of the other tribes before this great endeavor, will ultimately have no conclusion but the permanent eradication the demons that have bothered us for eternity.
Now on this I don’t have good authority or research, but seriously. I’ve seen that shit on nature documentaries in the wild. Now maybe they set it up or lied to us, but I never got that impression.
It is
There aren’t any other aspects.
Not where consciousness is involved.
Some small hierarchies are very “human,” in the biological sense, very core to our species identity and survival. But we can dissolve them.
“Hierarchies” of passive data or passive matter don’t really matter. When hierarchies (or better phrased) rigidities are applied to consciousness, a part of us turns into machines and shit gets awful for everyone. When a wise elder tries to impose roles and structures between him and the young fool, that’s bad. But giving advice or offering a helping hand? That’s “hierarchy” the same way a painted rainbow with purple above red is “hierarchy.” That is to say, not really (in this social context).
There’s some of the awesome you’re trying to get across, but a multiplicity of power (although “egalitarian” by some definitions) is not an ideal thing in the least. Consider the husband/wife structure pretty common in our society whereby the wife and the husband both have a whole bunch of psychological avenues of power over one another. Now in a lot of the relationships we might know these chains of control are more or less equal, but they’re still chains.
The old adage: “anarchy is not equalizing things out to five milli-Hitlers of power each.”
Comment by William — 13 July 2007 @ 6:45 PM
The discussion has reached a whole new level now, I can see. Once people pull out the special kind of knowledge that “those in the know” know about, with the secret handshake and the exclusive club and all.
Still, that doesn’t invalidate what I said. I said nothing about more than one family living in a home, simply that the homes might be built based on the size of the family that was to inhabit them:
It was carefully enough phrased that it would be difficult to find evidence that would invalidate the alternate conclusion. I must admit that the conclusion of “difficult to find evidence” would of course be limited by my fundamentally lower intellect, as you have pointed out. Still, I would love for you to educate me on the evidence that would distinguish between the two.
Yet again you can educate me. Why is it that the aboriginal elders are responsible for the law, and dealing out justice? This would, to me, seem to be a form of “authority”.
And one final opportunity to pass on your wisdom, for I doubt I could take too much more educating in one day:
How do I prevent my children from running on busy roads, whilst “respecting their autonomy”, and also whilst not using my power as an adult?
The boundaries of your potential solution must incorporate the facts we are discussing creatures that have only a superficial grasp of language and little if no grasp on consequences.
Comment by Geoff — 14 July 2007 @ 1:42 AM