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

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.